[1] I do not have to do anything which might prejudice my loyalty or that to which I am committed, nor anything different from what my ancestors did.⁽¹⁾

In 1917, Elías Tormo realized the significance of this inscription and investigated all the inscriptions composed by Tendilla, as well as each of the buildings he commissioned. Tormo found that Tendilla and his uncle, cardinal Mendoza, first introduced the architectural and monumental styles of the Italian Renaissance into Spain and, with great excitement, he concluded that "to the Mendozas of the fifteenth century [2] and, more specifically, to the Tendillas, so unjustly obscured and forgotten, we are indebted for the beginning of the Renaissance in Spanish monuments."⁽³⁾ This conclusion fitted neatly into the traditional interpretation that humanism was brought into Castile by Italian humanists during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs (1474-1504), in particular by Pietro Martire d'Anghiera (1457-1526) -- a Milanese humanist whom Tendilla brought from Italy in 1487 on his return from an embassy to the papacy.⁽⁴⁾ On the basis of this evidence, Tendilla has borne for more than fifty years the distinction of being the "importer of the Renaissance" into Castile.

More recently, José Cepeda Adán has noted a more conservative side of Tendilla's character, characterizing him as a transitional figure who bridged the medieval world of fifteenth-century Castile and the Renaissance world of the sixteenth-century "new monarchies."⁽⁵⁾ Politically, Cepeda sees in Tendilla a continual vacillation between "a yesterday which he makes resound with chivalrous deeds and a today which makes him think in the political rigidity of a state construed along new Renaissance lines." According to Cepeda, this vacillation stemmed from Tendilla's conflicting loyalties -- to his own rebellious noble class, on the one hand, and to king Fernando (the archetypal Machiavellian Renaissance monarch), on the other. Tendilla's rhetoric and personality therefore demonstrate ambivalence, even vacillation, between the medieval and the Renaissance -- between "this proud and vigorous Mendoza who dismisses an opponent with a peremptory and unequivocal phrase and the astute Renaissance politician who calculates and waits, and who knows the 'virtù' of manipulating men." These Renaissance contradictions in a medieval man Cepeda attributes to "the transcendental voyage to Italy." To Cepeda, Tendilla is the symbol of a Spain torn between the values of a native, medieval, and agrarian tradition and those of foreign, modern, and urban origin -- a view of Spanish intellectual history first expressed in the fifteenth century and still universally accepted by Spanish historians.

Were we to accept the assumption that there was no Renaissance in Castile before the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, Tendilla would indeed deserve his reputation as the introducer of the Renaissance into Spain. To make such a sharp break with the past, however, would have been a revolutionary move, and (as Cepeda has indicated) Tendilla was most conservative. Nevertheless, he did not feel torn between a medieval past and a Renaissance future. Tendilla's loyalty lay only to one part of the past: what his ancestors had done and, specifically, what his grandfather and great-grandfathers had accomplished at the beginning of the [3] fifteenth century in raising the Mendoza family to the social, political, and intellectual leadership of Castile. These accomplishments were recorded in the histories and poetry written by the Mendoza themselves as early as 1395 and over the generations formed a family tradition. Between this tradition and the demands of the Catholic Monarchs, Tendilla did face conflicting loyalties: during the reign of Fernando and Isabel, the royal government increasingly rejected the Renaissance values Tendilla proudly and with good reason identified with his own family. To accept the new values of the royal court, the Mendoza of the sixteenth century would have had to reject the Renaissance political, religious, and esthetic values they found in their ancestors' prose and poetry. Tendilla's refusal to deviate "from what [his] ancestors did" actually represented his commitment to the Mendoza family's Renaissance past.

Tendilla and the other Mendoza of the Trastámara period (1369-1516) both revered the ancestors who had created the family's power and fortune and immortalized the ancestral memory by repeating the family's glorious names for generation after generation. But the family had few illusions about its true origins or the nature of its power. When Tendilla spoke of his ancestors, he spoke of the five outstanding figures of the previous four generations: his father, Iñigo López de Mendoza, first count of Tendilla (d. 1479); his uncle, Pedro González de Mendoza, cardinal of Santa Croce (d. 1495); his grandfather, Iñigo López de Mendoza, marquis of Santillana (d. 1458); his great-grandfather, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, admiral of Castile (d. 1404); and his great-great-grandfather, Pedro González de Mendoza (d. 1385), mayordomo mayor (high steward) to king Juan I (1379-1390). The Mendoza viewed the family in a historical perspective typical of the Renaissance: they did not push the family's Castilian and aristocratic origins back to a time before the founder of the family's fortunes -- Pedro González de Mendoza (d. 1385) -- became active in Castilian military and administrative affairs. Nor did they attribute the family's spectacular rise in Castilian society to loyalty to the crown or to some other lofty principle. The Mendoza recognized that their aristocratic status was no older than the Trastámara dynasty itself and that it was the product of their ancestors' political agility in serving -- with both sword and pen -- that revolutionary and illegitimate dynasty. At the same time, they admired the ancient Romans' ability to combine worldly careers with artistic sensibilities, and they consciously cast themselves and their ancestors as the spiritual heirs of the ancient Romans in Spain -- men of arms and letters.

That the Mendoza developed an important intellectual tradition is not an entirely new idea in Hispanic studies. For more than a century, [4] the coincidence that many of Castile's greatest poets and historians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries -- including Garcilaso de la Vega, Gómez and Jorge Manrique, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, and the marquis of Santillana -- were members of the extended family descended from Pedro López de Ayala's father has intrigued scholars.⁽⁶⁾ But this melding of family and literary tradition has inspired neither studies of the Mendoza's role in a Castilian Renaissance nor investigations of family history in Castile. Scholars have concentrated instead on more glamorous or more sensational figures -- Isabel the Catholic or the conversos -- as mobilizers of an Italianate Renaissance in Castile. The intellectual distance between Italian culture and the Castilian mind seemed so great that only the power of enlightened kings or the desperation of a persecuted minority appeared capable of bridging the gap. Thus the chronological inconsistencies, self-contradictions, and insularity of these traditional analyses have not prevented them from becoming the established interpretation, even among serious scholars -- largely because there seemed to be no other alternative.

Traditional histories repeat the generally accepted position that the Renaissance came to Spain from Italy in the wake of the political reforms of the Catholic Monarchs, who brought peace, enlightened government, and justice to Castile and so ended Hispanic isolation from Europe and an endemic civil warfare which had prevented indigenous cultural development. According to this theory, Isabel's father, Juan II, did encourage literature but failed to control the rebellious nobility; and her half-brother, Enrique IV (1454-1474), allowed the political situation to degenerate further so that Castilian civilization fell to the level of a corrupt, rebellious, and anti-intellectual aristocracy. Once the Catholic Monarchs had established civil peace in the kingdom in 1492, however, they were able to introduce the Italian Renaissance into Spain. Isabel, especially eager to raise the intellectual level of her kingdom, and cardinal Cisneros inspired a new age of cultural activity and provided a foundation for it by introducing educational reforms: Isabel established a school at the royal court and hired Italian humanists to teach not only her own children, who were tutored by the Geraldini brothers, but the sons of the nobility as well; Cisneros founded the University of Alcalá where his Polyglot Bible, edited by Italian-trained humanists, set the model for the development of Renaissance scholarship. The theory has further claimed that although the fruits of this endeavor did not -- and could not -- fully ripen until well into the sixteenth century, when Castilian fanaticism gave way to a more European openness, the political and educational reforms of the Catholic Monarchs laid the foundations for the Golden [5] Age of Spanish literature and culture -- the true intellectual Renaissance of the reign of Charles V (1518-1555).

Perhaps the most eloquent statement of this historical tradition appeared as recently as 1961:

The age of Ferdinand and Isabella was Spain's springtime, a spacious time of heroic deeds, of creative ardor, of cascading national energies. Under these talented and energetic monarchs Spain emerged from her medieval isolation to assume the first place among the powers of Europe. The turbulent Castilian nobility was tamed, the Moors were expelled, the Spanish kingdoms united in the pursuit of common goals. Industry and trade were encouraged, and Spanish literature and art were launched on a glorious course.⁽⁷⁾

Unfortunately, this traditional interpretation has never worked. It is based largely on the self-serving claims of the Italians themselves -- Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, Lucio Marineo Sículo, and Francesco Guicciardini -- and on the assumption that the Italian Renaissance flourished late in the fifteenth century. Not only did the Italian Renaissance originate much earlier, but it is difficult (if not impossible) to discover any society or group of scholars active in late-fifteenth-century Europe who could have provided the inspiration for a renaissance in the Spain of the Catholic Monarchs. Certainly it would be difficult to find a more pedantic -- or more pompous -- scholar than Pietro Martire, the Catholic Monarchs' Italian humanist-in-residence; and scholars have not been able to discover any sixteenth-century writer -- humanist or otherwise -- whom he [6] educated or substantially influenced.⁽⁹⁾ Lucio Marineo had the talent to inspire a renaissance, but his views on rhetoric were so opposed to those of Spanish humanists trained at Bologna and his connections with Castilian society so slight that he had little effect on the intellectual life of Castile. Indeed, his famous "humanist" history may have been plagiarized from a Spanish vernacular chronicle.⁽¹⁰⁾ Nor do Guicciardini's superficial knowledge of Castile and anti-Spanish prejudices commend him as a source of information on Castile.⁽¹¹⁾ The Geraldini brothers came to Spain as children and received their education in Castile; they could not have imported humanism from Italy.⁽¹²⁾

Spanish literature provides even less evidence for the impact of the Italian Renaissance during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, for this period is one of the most conservative in the history of Spanish literature. Only two works stand out from the general mediocrity of the time -- Manrique's Coplas por la muerte de su padre (1476) and Rojas's La Celestina (c. 1499) -- as brilliant syntheses of themes and attitudes that were commonplaces of fifteenth-century Castile. Nothing produced at the court of the Catholic Monarchs fits any modern definition of Renaissance poetry or prose. Thus maintaining the traditional theory in the face of such uncooperative evidence necessitates some curious chronological juggling: humanist works written in the first half of the fifteenth century are labeled "proto-Renaissance"; or being recognized as humanist, they are pronounced to belong to the last years of the century so they can, by chronological association, be attributed to the influence of the Catholic Monarchs.⁽¹³⁾ Even the advent of printing came inconveniently for the traditional interpretation: because the first book printed in Castile appeared during the reign of the despised Enrique IV, the 1472 Segovian edition has to be "considered as a most exemplary anticipation" of the cultural and religious activity of the Catholic Monarchy.⁽¹⁴⁾

The evidence for a Renaissance in Castile in the early sixteenth century is slightly better. Garcilaso de la Vega (1501-1536) wrote the first successful Petrarchan sonnets in Castilian.⁽¹⁵⁾ Although no one would deny the genius and lyric beauty of Garcilaso's poetry, forty sonnets make a rather puny Renaissance. Moreover, scholars now dispute whether his model was the work of the Catalan poet Ausías March or the Italian sonnet tradition he encountered while fighting in Italy. Thus, the importation of Italian humanists into Castile during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs does not explain any Italianate Castilian Renaissance of the fifteenth century; it does not even demonstrate the existence of such an intellectual movement. In short, the Renaissance of [7] the Catholic Monarchs has been constructed by so labeling any respectable work of literature written during their reign (regardless of whether or not the work is in fact Renaissance in character) and by taking materials from other periods and attributing them to the period of the Catholic Monarchs through "anticipation" or "delayed inspiration."⁽¹⁶⁾

When historians of the Italian Renaissance want to comment about the Spanish Renaissance and depend for their information upon Hispanists devoted to the proposition that there could not have been a Renaissance in Castile before the reign of Fernando and Isabel, and when these same scholars examine the literary works of the reign of Fernando and Isabel and find nothing during or after the period that could be defined as Renaissance, it is no wonder that they conclude that there was no Renaissance in Castile or that it arrived late or that it had only a superficial importance.⁽¹⁷⁾ Thus the traditional interpretation of the Renaissance in Castile, by focusing attention on the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and perpetuating a series of gratuitous assumptions about the early fifteenth century, has become one of the greatest obstacles to the study of the Castilian Renaissance by scholars trained in the modern discipline of Renaissance studies. The result has been belief in an ever-widening gap between the brilliant accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance and the purported backwardness of fifteenth-century Castile -- a gap which reflects the present state of scholarship rather than the true differences between Spain and northern Italy. While the present analysis may detract from the tradition that considers Fernando and Isabel the transcendental figures of Spanish intellectual history, it has the advantage of offering an approach and a perspective that make sense of otherwise contradictory and dissonant materials. This is particularly true of the problem which has most seriously plagued studies of fifteenth-century Castilian intellectual history: the need to explain the creation of Renaissance humanist literature by a society that did not fit any modern stereotype of a Renaissance society. Previous attempts to explain away this contradiction by attributing the Castilian Renaissance to Italianate influences have foundered on the problem of chronology, for the proven borrowings from Renaissance Italy occurred after the appearance of Renaissance literature in Castile. The present study, by focusing on the Mendoza family in its most innovative and prolific periods, presents both a new chronology of the Spanish Renaissance and a new interpretation of not only its social and intellectual origins but also its development in relation to the wider European Renaissance.

Throughout this book, Spanish culture will be compared with the Italian Renaissance -- a Renaissance, however, that Jacob Burckhardt [8] would hardly recognize. It is a Renaissance fervently religious, anti-scholastic, and voluntarist. It is a Renaissance in which the republican city-states, rather than Burckhardt's despotisms, look to classical antiquity for legitimacy. And it is a Renaissance of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries rather than Burckhardt's sprawling fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this Renaissance, the old heroes of the Burckhardtian interpretation -- Machiavelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Castiglione -- are replaced by a much earlier group -- Petrarch, Salutati, Bruni, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Masaccio -- a group in many ways more interesting because it comprises the innovators, the instigators, the creators of the historiographical, artistic, and rhetorical tradition upon which the more famous geniuses of the High Renaissance capitalized.

This more recent view of the Italian Renaissance, developed largely by historians in the United States under the influence of Hans Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance,⁽¹⁸⁾ has been the product of many of the same methods used by the Renaissance humanists themselves. Historians have focused their attention on the prose writings (especially religious and historical) of the humanist tradition. Modern scholars have examined the content, structure, style, and rhetorical effect of each work in its entirety and placed each in its own cultural and social ambience. This "American school" of Renaissance historiography has hardly penetrated the scholarship of other countries; and this book, as far as I know, is the first attempt to apply its definitions and methods to Spanish intellectual history.

The values on which the Renaissance was built were laid out in the fourteenth century by intellectuals who regarded the problems then besetting Christians as manifestations of a widespread moral malaise. To Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), "the first Renaissance man," the most pressing needs were to bring men to a lively personal awareness of Christian truth and to find practical moral guidelines for daily Christian life. He believed that by the cultivation of the will -- by appealing more to man's emotional and arational nature than to reason -- this malaise could be healed. In the beauty of the Latin classics, Petrarch and his fellow humanists found a sensual experience that filled them with the joy of God. They hoped to give the same joyous experience to others by presenting the familiar classics in their purest and thus most beautiful form, by finding new texts, and by writing imitations of the classics. These intellectuals assumed that the person who could be led to the love of God through such an esthetic experience would naturally be inspired to conduct his life in an ethical fashion; and to this end, they set out to present guidelines taken from the Latin classics: Seneca's letters with [9] their homey, practical morality; the histories of Livy and Valerius Maximus with their edifying examples from the hives of the ancient Romans; and pagan poetry, such as the "Labors of Hercules," with its vivid exposition of ethical dilemmas. The humanists' passionate approach to Christian living through the rhetoric of the classics brought them simultaneously to reject many of the highest intellectual values of the medieval universities and adopt a historical perspective in which the Middle Ages appeared as a break with rather than a continuation of the ancient world. To Petrarch, the university professors with their scholastic methods not only were unfit to solve the practical moral and religious problems of the day but also were unaware of them. The very premises of scholasticism -- ordering knowledge into rational and hierarchical categories and building arguments from premise through logical steps to rationally incontrovertible conclusion -- were irrelevant to everyday living. Even if the scholastics did arrive at a correct substantive point, Petrarch believed, they could never inspire that feeling of awe and admiration for the truth necessary to generate an act of will because they presented their arguments in inelegant and corrupt Latin. Petrarch therefore dismissed the greatest intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages as inappropriate and ugly. The only portions of the university's curriculum the humanists considered useful to their objectives were moral philosophy and the esthetic disciplines of grammar and rhetoric. For Petrarch and others, the best examples of even these disciplines were to be found not in the works of the medieval scholastics but in the Latin works of antiquity. Petrarch did not need to discover lost or previously unknown classics to arrive at this conclusion: his models of persuasion and beauty were well known in the Middle Ages. By seeking moral and esthetic examples in these familiar works, however, Petrarch shed new light on the classics and gave them new life. Whereas the scholastics had mined the classics for rational definitions and logical methods, Petrarch and his fellow humanists looked to them for historical examples in the lives of illustrious men and for a rhetoric that would appeal to the irrational or arational elements in man's character. Thus the favorite classical authors of the early Renaissance were not the philosophical giants -- Plato and Aristotle -- but the rhetorical geniuses -- Livy, Cicero, and St. Augustine. Although Petrarch owed more to medieval scholasticism than he was willing to admit, he inspired generations of humanists who accepted his radical shift in values from the rational to the emotional, from logic to rhetoric.

Petrarch wrote as a private citizen driven to seek new answers to questions raised by the institutional and religious collapse of the fourteenth-century [10] church. His most innovative disciples, however, were employees of a public body -- the Florentine Republic. Faced with the need to find solutions to serious political problems -- a collapsing war against Milan, weakening political connections with Naples, the stress of relations with a non-Roman and divided papacy, and the collapse of the republican form of government -- and to make these solutions palatable to the public, Petrarch's followers also turned to the classics. In his younger years, Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) received religious inspiration from Ovid's imagery, just as Petrarch was inspired by Cicero's eloquence. During the most desperate hours of the Florentine war against Milan, Coluccio, as chancellor, was responsible for drafting the city's official propaganda. He realized that Cicero's speeches against monarchy contained arguments that could inspire the Florentines, in the name of republicanism, to endure the sacrifices necessary to carry on the struggle against a despotic adversary. By drawing a parallel between republican Rome and republican Florence, Coluccio himself inspired his disciple and successor, Leonardo Bruni Aretino (c. 1370-1444), to carry the parallel even further. In his History of Florence, Bruni described Florence as the heir of the ancient Roman Republic and suggested that other forms of government were derivative of a medieval -- and therefore corrupt -- tradition.

In thus responding to a variety of immediate practical problems, the humanists came to write history from a new perspective. In their efforts to emulate classical antiquity -- the living faith of early Christianity, the ethical conduct of the ancient Romans, the persuasive eloquence of classical Latin -- they studied classical works intensely and in their entirety and recognized each work as the product of a single person, in a particular society, at a specific time. This relativistic and particularistic approach shaped the humanists' views of both history and society. Rather than seeing the past as a record of God's judgment on men, or as a cycle, or as a decline from an ideal state, they regarded each historical period as unique and of interest for precisely this reason. Instead of defining a single political and social order as ideal and measuring the world against this standard, the humanists judged each society according to how well it suited its own time, place, and circumstances.

In changing content and perspective, the humanists also changed the form in which they presented their ideas. In the Middle Ages, the greatest minds generally wrote philosophical treatises, each of which might require several volumes to explicate a single, unified yet complex argument. The Renaissance humanists preferred the types of writing they found in classical Latin -- history, speeches, letters, poetry, biography, and autobiography. That these were the forms in which the Bible was [11] written only served to enhance their attractiveness to the humanists from the early fourteenth century onward.

Behind this chronology and these definitions of the Renaissance in Italy lie assumptions about fourteenth- and fifteenth-century cultural history that would have been unthinkable to Burckhardt and his contemporaries and are still foreign to students of Spanish history. Hispanists continue to work along the lines laid out by the great interpreters of Spanish intellectual history -- Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Marcel Bataillon, and Américo Castro -- without questioning their premises. These interpreters consistently assume that fifteenth-century Spanish Christianity was monolithic and that any diversity of belief, even into the sixteenth century, was the product of borrowing from or reacting to other cultures -- themselves monolithic. Spanish scholars have defined this unified fifteenth-century Catholicism in terms of the late nineteenth century as the narrow, Thomistic, and almost puritanical Catholicism in which they themselves were raised. Instead of regarding the "heterodoxies" of the fifteenth century as a new norm common to all of Europe, these Hispanic scholars see such diversities as departures from an objective "Catholic" norm fixed in the thirteenth century and attribute them to the influence of Judaism, Islam, Erasmianism, or Lutheranism. Such an anachronistic approach to Catholicism is not new -- one need only read a few paragraphs of Ludwig von Pastor's History of the Popes to see how the mentality of Vatican I pervaded nineteenth-century historical interpretations of the church. But Renaissance and Reformation scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, for both Italy and transalpine Europe have long abandoned such anachronism.⁽¹⁹⁾

It is time to do the same for Spain, to look anew at the Iberian experience without the cloudy cataracts of time-honored interpretation, and to employ the assumptions of modern Renaissance scholarship: that there is -- and was -- no objective definition of Catholicism, that the diversity of the fifteenth century was a new norm rather than a falling away from a pure state, and that this diversity was common not only to all of Western Europe but also to the two "oriental" cultures resident in Spain at the time. Neither Judaism nor Islam was ever monolithic, certainly not in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; yet Hispanists still treat them as coherent, even immutable, bodies of thought in which the Castilians encountered ideas foreign to Western civilization. But cultural exchange usually operates in a different way, and Arabic scholars now believe that the West either reborrowed what the Islamic world originally derived or adapted from the West anyway or took over what was [12] compatible with Western culture, particularly in the "neutral sphere" of technological advance.⁽²⁰⁾

Linked to these general assumptions about Spain's participation in Europe-wide phenomena in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are a separate series of assumptions about Castilian intellectuals and intellectual life that also merit reconsideration. Were fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Castilian authors the passive recipients of literary devices and attitudes they used without self-consciousness or discretion? Literary style is generally purposive: the Castilian humanists were as aware of what they were doing as the Italians and chose and shaped their structures, whether traditional or innovative, to achieve specific effects.⁽²¹⁾ Thus the prose authors of early Trastámara Castile were aware of the literary and political implications of imitating the classics; and their Renaissance works need to be labeled as such.

The debate over arms versus letters in fifteenth-century Castile, moreover, does not necessarily reflect a conflict between military and literary values. The conclusion of modern Hispanists⁽²²⁾ -- that Castilians rejected Renaissance intellectual values because these had been rejected by the hidalgos, the leaders of Castilian society, who felt a conflict between their profession of arms and the Renaissance value of letters -- ignores the participation of two quite different professional groups, the caballeros and the letrados, in the controversy. Both of these groups were hidalgos, but close study reveals that the caballeros defended the compatibility of arms and letters, while the letrados argued that letters were not appropriate to the military profession and should be left to those most fluent in Latin -- that is, to them. The caballeros supported their position by their actions: the overwhelming majority of poets, historians, bibliophiles, and translators of the classics in fifteenth-century Castile were caballeros. This conjunction of the military profession with literary productivity, furthermore, had been characteristic of Castilian society for several centuries, yet arms versus letters was not one of the traditional debates (such as water versus wine or age versus youth) of medieval Castilian literature.⁽²³⁾ Nor does the controversy appear until the 1420s, after don Alfonso de Cartagena had made the first translations of Cicero into Castilian. Don Alfonso was in fact the most frequent participant in the debate and the principal spokesman for incompatibility of arms and letters. And both the timing and the person suggest that in Castile the topic was regarded as a classical topos, not only a manifestation of the bitter professional rivalry between caballeros and letrados but also a rather naive attempt to show that both groups knew their Cicero.

If we approach Spanish intellectual history with these assumptions of [13] modern Renaissance scholarship, it is possible to place the Mendoza in their own historical context. By focusing on a single extended family, moreover, we can sufficiently limit the study to provide a depth of analysis and richness of texture while still permitting breadth of perspective and examination of the fundamental problems the Renaissance historian must somehow place in their social milieu. To use family history as an approach to the Renaissance in Spain -- to propose that a single extended family neither royal nor converso could produce a Renaissance -- is a radical departure from the traditional approach to Spanish intellectual history. But the abundant material for the Mendoza permits the historian to study them and, through them, the sociocultural history of Renaissance Castile.

It will be obvious that this study, while it may answer some questions about Spain, raises many questions about the Italian Renaissance. The fact that the Castilian Renaissance can be described in terms of a family tradition and that this tradition can clearly be attributed to the social and political circumstances of agrarian and monarchical Castile in the late fourteenth century -- without reference to Italy -- should, I think, raise some serious questions about what we have recently regarded as the necessary relationship between urban republicanism and the Renaissance in Italy. The history of the Mendoza family suggests that a Renaissance may develop under conditions different from those found in Italy and that the appearance of Renaissance attitudes in the rest of Europe may not necessarily result from a diffusion of the Italian Renaissance. The Castilian chancellor Ayala, for example, was writing history of a Renaissance form and substance in 1395. Both this early date and Ayala's ignorance of things Florentine suggest that the origins of the Renaissance in Castile were contemporaneous with and independent of the Italian Renaissance.

The subsequent history of the Castilian Renaissance offers suggestive parallels with that of Florence. From 1395 until about 1460, a small group of the most politically active and intellectually prestigious men in Castile wrote innovative Renaissance works under the influence of their ancestor, Ayala. After 1460, a group of writers more dependent upon the state than its partners became the intellectual leaders of the kingdom; and their work marks an important shift to a type of professional humanism. During the sixteenth century, several of Ayala's descendants revived his attitudes; but their political careers were failures and they were unable to exercise intellectual leadership. Chronologically, the Castilian Renaissance seems to have followed much the same course as the Florentine, at about the same time.

[14] To those who believe that the Florentine Renaissance was the product of a particular political situation, it has seemed that the Florentines wrote in the heat of the political crises that inspired them. In contrast, Ayala wrote thirty years after the events that inspired him; but Ayala's political milieu seems to meet one of Burckhardt's requirements for the development of the Renaissance in the Italian city-states: he served an illegitimate government. Ayala wrote to justify his adherence to a monarchy, but none of the arguments developed by the medieval scholastics could be used to support Ayala's king, for Enrique II was illegitimate in every sense of the word. Barred by this fact from using the traditional moral, theological, and theoretical arguments, Ayala had to make a complete break with traditional Castilian historiography. Instead of taking his model from the medieval historians and theorists, he turned to the ancient Romans and to rhetoric. Thus Ayala, writing in defense of a monarchy, arrived at the same political and rhetorical models as Salutati, writing in defense of a republic.

For historians of the Florentine Renaissance, the fifteenth-century histories written as political propaganda have been among the most fruitful sources for the study of changing styles and attitudes. The fifteenth century had no parallel in Spain in the production of propagandistic chronicles, for it was an age of so much innovation, intellectual as well as political, that it was difficult for the participants in political affairs to depend on traditional theoretical or moral explanations of their behavior. In this situation, political events spawned political propaganda, each side trying to justify its behavior to both contemporaries and future generations. The sheer number of Castilian chronicles from the fifteenth century is impressive, but equally impressive is their variety -- the styles and contents range from confused patchworks of earlier political chronicles mixed with rudimentary moralizing, through imitations of Froissart's courtly idealizations of war, to histories designed as political propaganda utilizing subtle rhetorical and classical devices to manipulate the reader's feelings. The chronicles of this latter type, with their full-fledged sense of historical perspective, their secularism and relativism, were written in an emotional atmosphere for a Castilian audience constantly bombarded with competing tracts and chronicles. By embedding speeches and letters into these histories, the fifteenth-century chroniclers left us a record of their most valued intellectual accomplishment -- their rhetorical abilities -- just as the Florentine city council minutes have provided us with a record of changing rhetorical values in the shifting political climate of that city.

[15] Another aspect of Renaissance politics that has seemed to distinguish the Italian city-republics from monarchies was the opportunity for their citizens to participate in government directly and thus develop rhetorical skills. It is nevertheless possible that the differences between the Florentine and Castilian forms of government did not produce different attitudes toward rhetoric. The Trastámara monarchy was neither a monolithic nor a hierarchical organization that could make decisions quickly or without considering different points of view. Enrique II was able to take and keep the throne because be had the support of the most powerful military lords of Castile during the civil war and because he afterwards shared political, financial, and judicial power with his supporters. The Trastámara monarchy began as a revolutionary government with a regicidal king who ruled with the consent of powerful interest groups, many of whom were as powerful as he. Because conflicting groups had equally valid claims on the favors of the throne, decisions were reached only after extensive discussion; and in this situation, rhetorical skills were as highly valued by the citizens of the Castilian monarchy as they were by the citizens of the Italian republics.

The give-and-take of debates in the assemblies of the city-republics apparently provided the forum where rhetorical skills were developed. In Castile, this forum was the king's council: to be an active citizen in the Trastámara monarchy, one had to be a counsellor to the king -- "del consejo del rey" -- and this right to speak directly to the king distinguished the ricoshombres or aristocracy from other wealthy citizens in the early Trastámara period. During the reign of Fernando and Isabel, when the king's council was filled by letrados, intellectual leadership shifted to these new counsellors. Throughout the Castilian Renaissance, the intellectual leadership of the kingdom was held by men privileged to debate before the king, who attempted to influence royal policy through their rhetorical skills.

One of the greatest differences between the Renaissance in Castile and that in Florence lies in the contrast between the social backgrounds of the authors of the two movements. Although the Renaissance attitudes we associate with men of "middle class" background in Florence were developed in Castile by aristocrats, in some ways the aristocratic authors of early Trastámara Castile did not fit our usual notions of the nobility. They were newly arrived in a society of great social mobility and wanted to enhance their status through marriage, titles, and political positions; they were obsessed with acquiring and increasing wealth; they organized themselves around the extended family for social, political, and educational [16] purposes; and they were proud of being as adept in letters as they were in arms. Their values, aspirations, and preoccupations were not as different from those of the Florentine humanists as we might expect.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Castilian Renaissance is its clear link with the papal court in Avignon. Although Ayala and his descendants were responding to political conflicts within Castile and addressing a Castilian audience, they drew heavily and skillfully upon the resources collected at Avignon during the fourteenth century. And the fact that both Petrarch and Ayala were educated at the papal court in Avignon may open some new avenues of speculation for those historians who believe that the classical erudition of the Florentine humanists may have had its roots in Avignon.

Renaissance Castile indicates how much historians of the Italian Renaissance have missed by ignoring the works of the Italian humanists' contemporaries. By leaving the analysis of these non-Italian works in the hands of scholars not trained in the Renaissance, we have allowed the many similarities between Italian and non-Italian intellectual history to go unnoticed. While Renaissance scholars continue to display ever more precisely the brilliant accomplishments of Italy, the Castilian accomplishment has been increasingly portrayed as obscurantist, anti-intellectual, and insular. Yet even this brief examination of the attitudes of the Mendoza family indicates that the Castilian Renaissance and the Florentine Renaissance are strikingly parallel in their chronology, values, and techniques, an observation which suggests that the two societies were more similar than historians have commonly assumed. The more we have been assured that agrarian, monarchical, rural Castile did not produce an indigenous Renaissance, the more we have been convinced that the mercantile, republican, urban milieu of the northern Italian city-states was a necessary condition for the development of the Renaissance. If, as I propose here, military aristocrats writing in defense of an illegitimate monarchy and drawing upon the intellectual resources of the papal court at Avignon formulated a Renaissance of their own, then the political, social, and cultural similarities between Castile and Florence assume much greater significance. It is not necessary to argue that the Castilian Renaissance achieved the greatness of the Florentine Renaissance to suggest that Castilian historical prose of the fifteenth century has been seriously underrated as Renaissance literature: fifteenth-century Castilian prose is worthy of study both as humanist literature in itself and because of its implications for our understanding of the Renaissance as a European-wide phenomenon.

1. No tengo de hacer cosa que perjudique a my lealtad y a lo que soy obligado ny que sea ajena de lo que hizieron mys pasados." Copiador, Tendilla to the marquesa de Priego, [4 July 1506].

2. "General of the kingdom of Granada, captain and first praefect of the acropolis of Illíberis." His Castilian title was "capitán general del reyno de Granada y alcaide del Alhambra." The inscription is on the tomb of Tendilla's brother, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, archbishop of Seville (d. 1502).

3. Elías Tormo, "El brote del renacimiento en los monumentos españoles y los Mendozas del siglo XV," Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Excursiones, 25 (1917), 51-65, 114-121; 26 (1918), 116-130.

4. W.H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, of Spain, 13th ed., Boston, 1857, II, 175-178.

5. José Cepeda Adán, "Andalucía en 1508: un aspecto de la correspondencia del virrey Tendilla," Hispania, Madrid, 22 (1962), 38-80; idem, "El Gran Tendilla, medieval y renacentista," Cuadernos de Historia, 1 (1967), 159-168.

6. William J. Entwistle, "Spanish Literature to 1681," in Spain: A Companion to Spanish Studies, ed. E. A. Peers, 5th ed., London, 1956, p. 113.

7. Benjamin Keen, Introduction to The Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, by J. H. Mariéjol, New Brunswick, N.J. [1961], p. v.

8. J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469-1715, New York, 1967, pp. 126, 256-257.

9. On Pietro Martire in Spain, see J. H. Mariéjol, Un Lettré italien a la cour d'Espagne, 1488-1526. Pierre Martyr d'Anghiera, sa vie et ses oeuvres, Paris, 1887; Antonio Marín Ocete, 'Pedro Mártir de Anglería y su Opus Epistolarum," Boletín de la Universidad de Granada, 73 (1943), 165-257. On the lack of evidence for his influence, see Angel González Palencia and Eugenio Mele, Vida y obras de don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Madrid, 1941-1943, I, 53.

10. On Lucio Marineo Sículo in Spain, see Caro Lynn, A College Professor of the Renaissance; Lucio Marineo Siculo among the Spanish Humanists, Chicago, 1937. For his use of a Spanish model and Spaniards' preference for the vernacular version, see Robert B. Tate, "A Humanistic Biography of John II of Aragon, a note," in Homenaje a Jaime Vicens Vives, Barcelona, 1965, I, 665-673.

11. Francesco Guicciardini, La Legazione di Spagna, in Opere medite, Florence, 1857-1866, vol. 6.

12. Tarsicio de Azcona, La elección y reforma del episcopado español en tiempo de los Reyes Católicos, Madrid, 1960, p. 147.

13. Entwistle, "Spanish Literature," p. 118, in Peers, Spain, discussing works which he dates c. 1440 and 1463.

14. "En tal sentido debe considerarse como ejemplarísimo anticipo de esta acción cultural y religiosa el documento que fue impreso en 1472 y que ahora conmemoramos." Carlos Romero de Lecea, El V centenario de la introducción de la imprenta en España, Segovia, 1472, antecedentes de la imprenta y circunstancias que favorecieron su introducción en España, Madrid, 1972, p. 163.

15. "With the poets of Ferdinand and Isabel's reign, the Middle Ages may be said to come to an end as concerns lyric poetry. Juan Boscán and Garcilaso of the sixteenth century will usher in the Renaissance." Richard E. Chandler and Kessel Schwartz, A New History of Spanish Literature, Baton Rouge, 1961, p. 283.

16. A. D. Deyermond enhances the impression that the Renaissance did not start until after the reign of Fernando and Isabel by removing the playwright, Juan del Encina, from consideration in his survey of fifteenth-century literature: "At the end of the Middle Ages, an arbitrary line has to be drawn: the plays of Juan del Encina and Lucas Fernández, the printed version of Amadís de Gaula, and the prose-works of the early humanists belong both to medieval and to Golden Age literature, and to avoid repetition they are treated not here but in the next volumes." A Literary History of Spain: The Middle Ages, New York, 1971, p. xv.

17. R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage, New York, 1964, p. 316; Lewis W. Spitz, The Renaissance and Reformation Movements, Chicago, 1971, I, 288-289; Mariéjol, Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, pp. 311-312. One student of Spanish literature has gone so far as to conclude that "in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Spain was too isolated from the rest of the world to feel the Renaissance deeply. Her history was therefore a continuation, in an expanded form, of the Middle Ages." Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, Cambridge, 1971, p. 225.

18. Hans Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, Princeton, 1966. See also idem, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, Chicago, 1968; Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols., London, 1970; William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, Berkeley, 1968; Marvin Becker, "lndividuahsm in the Early Italian Renaissance: Burden and Blessing," Studies in the Renaissance, 19 (1972), 273-297; Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past, New York, 1970; Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Princeton, 1965; Louis Green, Chronicle into History, Cambridge, 1972, Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance, New York, 1970; Nancy Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance, Princeton, 1970; B. L. Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati, Padua, 1963.

19. The diversity of Catholic traditions in Spanish literature has recently been exhaustively described by Otis H. Green, Spain and the Western Tradition, 4 vols., Madison, Wis., 1963-1966. The pioneer work in describing the diversity of fifteenth-century Catholicism was Lucien Febvre, "Une question mal posée," Au coeur religieux du 16^e siècle, Paris, 1957.

A modern account of the diversity of Catholic traditions in the fifteenth century by an official papal historian is Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. Ernest Graf, vol. 1, London, 1957. Ludwig von Pastor's views on this subject can best be seen in History of the Popes, vols. I-IV, trans. F. I. Antrobus, et al. 2nd ed., St. Louis Mo., 1901-1902.

20. H.A.R. Gibb, "The Influence of Islamic Culture on Medieval Europe," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 38 (1955-1956), p. 98. The diversity of fourteenth-century Judaism has been suggested by Joel H. Klausner, "Historic and Social Milieu of Santob's Proverbios Morales," Hispania, 48, New York, 1965; and, for the fifteenth century, Albert A. Sicroff, Les controverses des statuts de "pureté de sang" en espagne du XV^e au XVII^e siècle, Paris, 1960. A similar diversity in fourteenth-century Islam and the crises which engendered it are described by Muhsin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History, Chicago, 1964.

21. I know of only two works which treat Spanish literature of the period in this way: Anthony N. Zahareas, The Art of Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, Madrid, 1965; and Luis Beltrán, Razones de buen amor: Oposiciones y convergencias en el libro del Arcipreste de Hita, Madrid, 1977.

22. Nicholas G. Round, "Renaissance Culture and its Opponents in 15th Century Castile," Modern Language Review, 57 (1962), 204-215; Peter E. Russell, "Arms versus Letters," Aspects of the Renaissance, ed. Archibald R. Lewis, Austin, 1967; José Antonio Maravall, El humanismo de las armas en Don Quijote, [Madrid] 1948.

23. This combination of arms and letters is such a striking and important aspect of lyric poetry in fifteenth-century Castile that one of America's most eminent hispanists, Otis H. Green, has coined the term "warrior poet" to describe Garcilaso de la Vega and the long line of literary knights from whom he was descended, beginning with Fernán Pérez de Ayala and including Garcilaso's great. great-grandfather, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán. Spain and the Western Tradition, I, 128.