[56] The Mendoza's political behavior during the Trastámara revolution and immediately afterwards was an improvised response to a series of exceptional situations. Later generations of the family, by adapting to changing conditions, matched the success of their ancestors; but they began to see their own actions as part of a consistent pattern of behavior and values, a family tradition that could be traced back to the foundations of the Trastámara dynasty. The fifteenth-century Mendoza imbibed this family tradition principally from the historical works of their ancestor, Pedro López de Ayala (d. 1407), canciller mayor of Castile and the pivotal intellectual figure of early Trastámara Castile. Ayala utilized the literary and rhetorical skills he learned as a boy in Avignon to write the political propaganda of the triumphant Trastámara revolution; and in the process, he wrote the first Renaissance history in Castile, the Crónica del rey don Pedro. Ayala's lifelong contacts with Avignon; his political involvement in the illegitimate Trastámara monarchy; his study, translation, and imitation of classical and modern models, all prepared him for the writing of Renaissance historical propaganda. Like his Italian contemporaries, Petrarch and Salutati, Ayala, through his genius shaped the esthetics and opinions of generations of his descendants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Pedro López de Ayala was educated under the influence of two men: his father, Fernán Pérez de Ayala (d. 1385), and his great-uncle, cardinal Pedro Gómez Barroso (d. 1348). Pedro López was exceptionally close to his father -- Fernán Pérez says that his son's attentions and obedience to [57] his parents far exceeded the ordinary bonds of filial duty -- who was a man of exceptional political and intellectual abilities.⁽¹⁾ Fernán Pérez's grandfather and his oldest brother were both killed in ambushes in Alava; and his father (d. c. 1330) moved to Castile and became the adelantado mayor of Murcia, first for don Juan Manuel and then for Alfonso XI. As a young man, Fernán Pérez served in the household of Leonor de Castilla; and in 1346, Alfonso XI sent him to Aragon to negotiate a marriage settlement between Leonor and the Aragonese king. After successfully arranging the marriage terms, Fernán Pérez went on to Avignon to negotiate the necessary papal dispensation. There he visited his uncle, cardinal Pedro Gómez, and his son, who was being educated in the cardinal's household.

In 1349, at the siege of Gibraltar, Fernán Pérez bought from the king's mistress, Leonor de Guzmán, most of the lands, fortresses, and seigneurial jurisdiction in several valleys of Alava, thus becoming the largest landlord and most powerful señor of the area.⁽²⁾ Soon afterward, king Pedro named him alguacil mayor (chief constable) of the city of Toledo; and Fernán Pérez began to form marriage alliances between his numerous children and those of Fernán Gómez de Toledo, one of the most influential (and prolific) members of the city government. Although Fernán Pérez's political interests were focused on Toledo, he tried to maintain some kind of rational authority over his Alavese territories by drawing up a fuero defining the judicial structure of the lands of Ayala. This Fuero de Ayala -- a valuable example of seigneurial legislative activity -- and a genealogical history of his family that he probably wrote in imitation of don Juan Manuel's history of his own royal lineage are the only known writings of Fernán Pérez de Ayala. Both the Fuero and the genealogy were read, copied, added to, and commented upon by generations of Fernán Pérez's descendants, even those who had no seigneurial jurisdiction in Alava.⁽³⁾ In addition to his political role in forming the biological and political Mendoza family in the wake of the Trastámara wars, Fernán Pérez through his writings exercised an intellectual influence in forming the family's sense of itself as an ancestral reference group associated with the province of Alava.

Fernán Pérez intended Pedro López de Ayala for a career in the church, and to this end he sent his son to Avignon to be educated and advanced in his career by cardinal Pedro Gómez Barroso. Fernán Pérez was the legal heir and favorite nephew of the cardinal; and the boy immediately benefited from the patronage of his great-uncle by receiving a benefice in the cathedral of Toledo. Pedro López's tutelage under the cardinal did not last long, for the cardinal died in the plague of 1348, [58] when Pedro López was sixteen years old; but the youth was deeply influenced both by his education in the cardinal's household and by the cultural and intellectual ambience of Avignon at midcentury.

In the fourteenth century, Avignon was a focal point of the European world. When Clement V (1305-1314) fled Rome and settled in Avignon with his curia and chancery, Avignon replaced Rome as the center of an international bureaucracy. Almost overnight the city attracted some of the best minds in Europe -- and their libraries. In the next twenty years, it became one of those massive concentrations of population, activity, and resources so conducive to intellectual and artistic ferment. Francesco Petrarch was the most brilliant product of this milieu, but he was not alone. If we read between the lines of Petrarch's correspondence, it seems as if the whole city had filled up with enthusiastic lovers of the Roman classics. By 1348, Seneca's tragedies had all been presented on stage there; Petrarch and his fellow university students read not only law but also Cicero, Vergil, and Ovid. The most eagerly read Fathers were Jerome and Augustine, who would become the favorites of the Florentine Renaissance because of their reputation as rhetoricians; and the many manuscripts of Livy that Urban V (1362-1370) added to the papal library show that even the jurists in the papal court were enthusiastic students of classics other than the law.

Petrarch and his friends in Avignon set out to imitate and translate the classics; and two of these friends, Pierre de Berçuire and Giovanni Colonna, were to provide the models for Spanish translations and imitations of the classics. Prior of the Benedictine house of St. Hilarion in Paris, Berçuire lived in Avignon from 1320 to 1340; and his French translation of Livy inspired and guided Ayala's later translation of Livy into Castilian. Colonna (d. 1348) devoted himself to imitating the classics with a Liber de Viris Illustribus and a Mare Historiarum, both of which served as literary models for Ayala's nephew, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán.⁽⁴⁾

Modern historians tend to assume that the Pyrenees were a serious barrier to travel between Spain and the rest of Europe; but fourteenth-century Spaniards evidently did not find them particularly difficult to cross. Throughout the Avignon papacy, there was a steady flow of Castilians to the papal court, seeking patronage, political refuge, and education. In 1394, when Ayala made his embassy to Avignon, there were about two hundred Spaniards, including sixty-one Castilians, studying law there. For educated Spaniards, Avignon became more than a place of study and a papal court, it was a preoccupation.

The ecclesiological problems posed by the papacy's transfer from [59] Rome to Avignon and the even more difficult problem of the Great Schism after 1378 occupied an important place in the writing and policymaking of both Castilians and Aragonese.⁽⁵⁾ Spaniards traveled to Avignon to form alliances or negotiate settlements, and many remained to make their careers in Avignon. But the traffic went both ways. Most Spaniards returned to Spain after completing their studies or diplomatic missions, and each might bring back with him a new treatise on rhetoric, a translation of Livy, a new appreciation of Seneca's tragedies, or a determination to match the Roman historians with a history of Castile or Aragon. By the end of the fourteenth century, Spaniards were among the most important figures at the papal court; and Castilians who had resided in Avignon were the political leaders of Castile, including Enrique de Trastámara himself, who had sought refuge and assistance in Avignon during the most desperate moments of his career.

The Castilians at the papal court were greatly outnumbered by the French and Italians. Positions at the court depended upon patronage by the college of cardinals, and there were only five Castilian cardinals throughout the entire fourteenth century. The Spaniards at Avignon nevertheless played an administrative and intellectual role far greater than their insignificant numbers would lead us to expect. Most of what we know about the Avignon papacy we owe to French historians who regarded the Spanish as intruders, so the effectiveness of Spanish administrators and their influence on papal policy have not been appreciated by modern historians.

While Ayala was studying in Avignon, Barroso's household was both the focus of the Spanish community there and one of the political and cultural centers of the entire court. Pedro Gómez Barroso had been a favorite of Sancho IV and was named bishop of Cartagena by Alfonso XI. In Cartagena, Pedro Gómez and his brother-in-law, Pedro López de Ayala (d. c. 1330), adelantado of the kingdom of Murcia, tried to settle the differences between don Juan Manuel and his nephew the king. If the two brothers-in-law did not achieve the impossible in this task, they did accomplish something almost as difficult -- their own political survival in a situation that required a delicate balance between serving the king and serving the rebellious don Juan Manuel without incurring the enmity of either. In 1327, Pedro Gómez was named cardinal by John XXII, and he immediately established a household in Avignon. Barroso played an important role in the papal curia from the very beginning. To the astonishment of French historians, the French pope, Benedict XII (1334-1342), appointed this "étranger" to negotiate a truce between France and England in 1337. Barroso was also one of the inner circle of [60] six cardinals who effectively conducted the affairs of the papacy under another French pope, Clement VI (1342-1352).

As far as we know, Barroso was the only cardinal to maintain a painter in his household along with the usual complement of chaplains, chamberlain, physician, servants, legal aides, and relatives. One of the religious currents at Avignon was a pietism that emphasized the joys of good works, and Barroso appears to have been an enthusiastic participant. His good works included founding the Dominican convent at Sainte-Praxède. Barroso also acted as patron to Alvaro Pelayo, a Franciscan from Galicia who had studied with Duns Scotus in Paris. In 1327, Pelayo dedicated his major work, Super Statu et Planctu Ecclesiae, to Barroso.⁽⁶⁾ The most respected if not the only Castilian theologian of any note during the fourteenth century, Pelayo was a pioneer in grappling with the most pressing ecclesiological problem of the day, the legitimacy of a papacy not resident in Rome. The work dedicated to Barroso was the first treatise to deal with this topic in depth, and it became the cornerstone of the Avignon papacy's claims to legitimacy.

Ayala reacted to the theologians' disputes the way Petrarch did: he condemned them as irrelevant to the problems of Christian life.⁽⁷⁾ He was more favorably impressed by another Spaniard active in Avignon, Gil Alvarez de Albornoz, archbishop of Toledo, with whom he and his father later formed political alliances.⁽⁸⁾ Albornoz succeeded Pedro Gómez as the Spanish cardinal (1350-1367) and was in turn succeeded by Ayala's cousin, Pedro Gómez Barroso (1371-1374), who had also been educated by his great-uncle and namesake, the first cardinal Barroso. Through these intellectual and political connections, Avignon exercised a significant influence over the culture of early Trastámara Castile.

After cardinal Pedro Gómez died, Pedro López, finding himself without a patron at the age of sixteen, returned to Castile where he abandoned his clerical status and began a career as a caballero. Ayala served a military and political apprenticeship in his father's household, and in 1359 he outfitted a galley which he commanded in king Pedro's naval expedition against Valencia and Catalonia. As a reward for this service, Pedro appointed him alguacil mayor of the city of Toledo to replace his father, who had been elevated to the highest office of the city, alcalde mayor.

Among the difficulties of his new office, Pedro López encountered the task of executing the often unjust orders of king Pedro against his vassals in Toledo, many of them Ayala's relatives. In 1360, Pedro ordered Ayala to evict his own brother-in-law, Vasco the archbishop of Toledo, [61] and send him into exile. In the next few years, Pedro summarily executed several of Ayala's Toledo relatives, but he remained loyal to the king until his desertion of Burgos in 1366. Ayala was taken prisoner fighting against Pedro at Nájera and taken captive fighting against the Portuguese at Aljubarrota in 1385. He quickly rose to prominence under the Trastámara kings, for whom he led several embassies to France, Aragon, and Avignon, and became canciller mayor of Castile in 1398.⁽⁹⁾

During his long and active career and after his retirement to a Jeronimite monastery, Ayala was a prolific author and translator. During his year-long captivity in Lisbon after the battle of Aljubarrota, he wrote a manual of falconry, the Arte Cetreria, and most of the four hundred verses of his most famous work, the Rimado del Palacio. He later translated Livy, Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, Guido delle Colonne's Historia Troiana, and St. Gregory's Moralia in Job. He also added some sections to his father's genealogy of the Ayala family; and after his last visit to Avignon in 1396, he wrote chronicles of the reigns of the four kings he had served -- Pedro, Enrique II, Juan I, and Enrique III.

His translation of Moralia in Job is particularly interesting as an example of his humanist approach to the classics, for Ayala not only translated the work but also went back and made a second translation in order to correct some unintelligible passages.⁽¹⁰⁾ Instead of trying to rationalize these passages by discovering some obscure meaning in the apparently nonsensical or contradictory words, Ayala assumed that the Latin of the texts he was using was corrupt. By comparing different copies and guessing at how a copyist might have mistaken one word for another, he was able to produce a purified, elegant text. In this endeavor, he seems to have gone beyond his translation of Livy, in which he says he tried to clarify some obscure and difficult words. In his second translation of Moralia, Ayala worked on the humanist assumptions that the original Latin had been clear and elegant and that obscurities must be attributable to errors in the medieval texts.⁽¹¹⁾

Ayala's humanist skills and Renaissance attitudes reached their fullest expression in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, especially in the first of these, Crónica del rey don Pedro. As a work of art and as political propaganda, Crónica del rey don Pedro became both the rhetorical model and the political Bible of the Castilian Renaissance; but for the past four centuries it has been one of the most controversial works of Castilian literature. During the century after it was written, especially during the reign of Juan II, Ayala's history was accepted as an accurate account of the reign of Pedro the Cruel.⁽¹²⁾ Its popularity among the [62] reading public is attested by the fourteen manuscripts surviving from the fifteenth century and the early and frequent printings in Castile.⁽¹³⁾

In 1570, don Diego de Castilla, dean of the cathedral of Toledo and a descendant of Pedro the Cruel by way of an illegitimate son, claimed that Pedro had been a just and benevolent monarch and charged that Ayala had distorted the truth in order to excuse his own disloyalty to the king. Diego de Castilla had just met Gerónimo Zurita (1512-1580), royal chronicler of the crown of Aragon, while Zurita was traveling through Castile looking for manuscripts. When the dean tried to persuade Zurita to discredit and discard Ayala's version of events, Zurita thoroughly investigated the charges against Ayala. After examining a wealth of archival and manuscript evidence, he informed the dean -- in polite but firm language -- that Ayala's account was substantially correct. Zurita collated several manuscripts of Ayala's account and edited the chronicle for publication. In his critical notes, he amplified and clarified many details and pointed out several passages Ayala had redrafted to soften his vivid account of Pedro's cruelties -- probably, Zurita thought, after Pedro's granddaughter, Catherine of Lancaster, married Enrique III and it became politic to smooth over old antagonisms.⁽¹⁴⁾

Despite Zurita's careful analysis, Ayala's Crónica del rey don Pedro continues to be praised as impartial and vilified as self-serving. In the nineteenth century, Prosper Merimée romanticized Pedro and claimed that Ayala's chronicle was a tissue of lies.⁽¹⁵⁾ In the twentieth century, Ayala's most enthusiastic admirers consider him to be totally impartial,⁽¹⁶⁾ whereas his severest critics accuse him of "sinuosity."⁽¹⁷⁾ More moderate critics consider Ayala biased but generally reliable, attempting to "justify his own career while violating the historical truth as little as possible."⁽¹⁸⁾

Modern historians cannot check Ayala's account against external sources: there is no other Castilian chronicle of the reign of Pedro, and most of the archival documents available to Zurita in the sixteenth century have since disappeared. We also have little internal evidence to use in examining the charge of bias -- Ayala scrupulously avoids making any explicit statement condemning Pedro or his actions. Anyone who reads the chronicle must nevertheless come away from the work with a vague feeling of uneasiness -- of being manipulated into a critical judgment of Pedro without any evidence to support this condemnation.

To explain how Ayala achieves his effect without distorting the material, modern scholars have focused on the content of the chronicle. The dispute has centered on the extent to which Ayala omitted material damning to his own purposes while including material damning to [63] Pedro's reputation.⁽¹⁹⁾ Ayala's success as a propagandist, however, does not lie in anything so superficial. His genius lies rather in his rhetorical control over the material, which enables him to play upon the emotions of the reader so subtly that he is not aware of how he is being manipulated.

Historians have long recognized that Ayala imitated the ancient Roman historians -- especially Livy and Tacitus -- in his descriptions of military affairs, in his chapter organization, in his use of speeches, and in his brief character sketches.⁽²⁰⁾ Ayala's use of classical models is, however, much more extensive and sophisticated than scholars have recognized. In his chronicles -- as in Italian Renaissance historiography -- classical forms serve political purposes. This intimate association of classical models with Enriquista propaganda shaped the humanist and Renaissance attitudes of Ayala's descendants. Throughout the fifteenth century, they read the Crónica del rey don Pedro and absorbed Ayala's attitudes toward the classics, religion, and politics, along with his apologia for the family ancestors.

Ayala's chronicle begins with the death of Pedro's father, Alfonso XI, and ends with the death of Pedro himself. This is the only chronicle Ayala begins with the death of the previous king, and the device of beginning and ending with the two superficially similar scenes frames the chronicle and gives it dramatic symmetry. The contrasts between the two death scenes serve a political purpose -- suggesting a subtle and effective argument in defense of Ayala's desertion of Pedro. The death and funeral of Alfonso XI occupy five long chapters, describing the majesty of Alfonso's accomplishments and the nobility of his companions, the grief of both the Castilian knights and the Muslim enemy, and the respect and honor Alfonso commanded even in death. These chapters provide a great contrast to the last, which describes Pedro's death in a furtive escape attempt, betrayed by those he trusted, stabbed on the ground by his own half-brother while none of the spectators came to his aid, and dismissed by the chronicler unmourned and without mention of a funeral.

The death and funeral of Alfonso XI are also used to introduce the major personages and factions of Pedro's reign -- the new king; his mother, Maria; his illegitimate half-brothers and their mother, Leonor de Guzmán; and the principal military and political figures of the kingdom. In his description of the funeral cortege accompanying Alfonso's body from Gibraltar to Seville, Ayala displays the factions surrounding Leonor de Guzmán and her sons. The near-fatal illness of Pedro in Seville serves to introduce the factions surrounding Pedro's cousins and [64] favorite. In describing the first year, which appears superficially to be a slow-moving account of an irrelevant royal funeral, Ayala thus establishes a standard of kingship against which Pedro is to be judged, introduces the major characters, delineates the conflicts that will make up the tragedy of Pedro, and provides the dramatic framework in which the tragedy will be played.

In the next year of the chronicle, Ayala uses three historical digressions to present the historical, political, and religious background against which the king and his enemies will operate. The first is a short treatise on the calendars of Christians, Romans, Jews, and Muslims; a history of their usage in Spain; and instructions on how to compute the year in each calendar. The second is a capsule history of the lands under the system of jurisdiction known as behetrías, in which Ayala traces their origins, speculates on the etymology of the word, and describes changes in their tenure. The third is a history of the judicial, military, fiscal, and religious institutions of the city of Toledo.⁽²¹⁾ Ayala makes the point that many factors outside the chronological scope of his chronicle had a decisive effect on the events he is about to describe. He preserves the dramatic structure of the chronicle by compressing these chronological digressions into one year at the beginning of the work and by introducing each digression as the background for an event occurring in that year.

This digressive and slow-moving year at the beginning of the chronicle is balanced by the equally slow-moving and digressive eighteenth year near its end.⁽²²⁾ In this year, the rapid flow of the narrative shifts to a slow-paced series of chapters filled with speeches, dialogues, and an exchange of letters between Pedro and a wise Muslim. Here Ayala makes his fullest exposition of the political grievances, rationale, and ambitions of both the king and his enemies. Since this is the year of the battle of Nájera, this change of pace builds suspense by prolonging Pedro's greatest moment of military triumph. It also creates a strong parallel between Alfonso XI, struck down by the plague in his moment of military glory at Gibraltar, and Pedro, soon to be struck down by his bastard brother after the military victory of Nájera. By reintroducing themes from the first year -- the vanity of worldly glory, Muslim respect for a just king -- Ayala prepares the way for regicide in the twentieth year and reinforces the symmetry of the chronicle's overall structure.

The rest of the chronicle consists of a roughly chronological history of internal conflicts, diplomatic relations, and wars against the Muslims, with accounts of fiscal policy and events in foreign countries added to the ends of most years. Throughout the chronicle, Ayala uses literary and rhetorical devices to argue his thesis that Pedro's political fate was [65] the consequence of unjust actions. Dialogue, speeches, and letters -- interspersed with narrative and placed in the mouths of the principal actors -- develop logically out of the action in a manner that enhances the impression of cause and effect. In only two instances does Ayala use extraneous material without integrating it into the action: in years eleven and twelve he inserts stories about a Dominican and a shepherd who prophesy disaster for Pedro if he does not change his ways.⁽²³⁾ These prophecies are a repetition of Ayala's thesis, but they do not arise out of the action: the prophets appear to inject a note of doom and foreboding, only to disappear into the oblivion from which they came.

The most memorable parts of the chronicle, and those which still arouse the most antagonism, are a half-dozen murder scenes in which suspense and pathos are skilfully combined for emotional effect. The classic example of this is the murder of Pedro's half-brother, Fadrique, master of Santiago.⁽²⁴⁾

Ayala builds the suspense by moving the action forward only to delay it, alternating the swift pace of the king's actions with the slow reactions of the other actors. The king's headlong rush into fratricide is interrupted by a maneuver intended to calm Fadrique's suspicions and isolate him from his companions; by a barred door; by the confusion of the chief guardsman over which master is to be arrested; by the hesitation of the other guardsmen in obeying the king's orders; by Fadrique's flight; and finally by his stubborn clinging to life even after he has been beaten. There is a strong similarity between the construction of this scene and that of the last scene, in which Pedro is murdered by Enrique, Fadrique's twin.⁽²⁵⁾

In both scenes, there is conflict between brother and brother; the victim is put off guard and separated from his companions; he becomes suspicious because of the behavior of those around him; there is confusion about his identity; and death is administered on the ground, by dagger, after a struggle. Through these parallels, Ayala links Pedro's death to that of Fadrique, minimizing the regicidal character of the final scene and emphasizing fratricidal revenge.

All these devices attest to Ayala's artistry and to the soundness of the classical education he received in Avignon. The speeches and letters he uses liberally in this chronicle are probably the fruit of his observations while translating the many speeches in Livy and in Guido delle Colonne's Historia Troiana. The rhetorical device that gives form to the entire work -- its overall structure as dramatic tragedy -- as well as the careful balancing of parallel scenes, the use of dialogue to heighten suspense, the prophecies of the ghostlike monk and shepherd, the [66] suspense of the murder scenes, and the careful attention to detail in these scenes, bear a strong resemblance to the Senecan tragedy he had seen on stage. There is also a classically humorous flavor to the chapters in which the noble ladies of Toledo, indignant over the king's treatment of the queen, mobilize their husbands in her defense.⁽²⁶⁾

Even more significant than his use of classical models is Ayala's skilful use of rhetorical and literary devices to arouse emotional reaction in the reader. This appeal to the will, typical of the humanist writers of Renaissance Italy, is most prominent in the Crónica del rey don Pedro. In the later Crónica del rey don Juan, Ayala characterizes the reign of Pedro the Cruel as beginning with expectations of peace and stability but degenerating into a series of civil disorders.⁽²⁷⁾ In contrast, the Crónica del rey don Pedro gives the impression that all the political disasters of the latter part of Pedro's reign were the inevitable consequence of the unjust acts committed at the beginning of the reign. Ayala states this thesis twice, once at the beginning of the chronicle and once at the end, but these are simply clarifications or summations, rather than attempts to convince.⁽²⁸⁾ The emotional truth of the thesis, the implacability for which Ayala is so famous, the impression that the final tragedy is the logical and inevitable result of the first chapters, is achieved through Ayala's use of irony and emphasis on emotion rather than reason.

In the scenes describing the murder of Gutier Ferrández de Toledo, Ayala uses his usual method of changing pace to build suspense, and then he adds an ironic twist to the event by inserting a flashback that repeats an important element of the murder scene:

When they arrived at the lodging of Gutier Ferrández they dismounted there and entered with him into a room, and arrested him, and took him prisoner to the lodging of the master of Santiago. And when they arrived there, Martín López de Córdoba told him that the king had ordered his death: and Gutier Ferrández said: "I have never done anything to deserve death." Then Martín López told him that the king had sent to command that he surrender the alcazar of Molina and the castles which he held in tenancy and that he was to send letters to those who held the said castles so that they would surrender them to whomever the king would send with the letters, which they would bring and present there. And Gutier Ferrández said that it would please him to surender all the castles which he held from the king: and he then ordered a secretary to write letters for the commanders of the alcazar and castles of Molina.... And this done, they made the said Gutier Ferrández enter a chamber, and there they cut off his head.... This day, the said Gutier Ferrández being [67] prisoner in the lodging of the master of Santiago, he told the masters of Santiago and Alcántara and Martín López de Córdoba that if it please them he would like to send a letter to the king. And they told him to go ahead, and then he dictated a letter to a secretary which said this, "Lord, I, Gutier Ferrández de Toledo, kiss your hands and take leave of your grace, and go to another Lord even greater than you. And lord, surely your grace knows that my mother and my brothers and I have always been in your service since the day you were born, and we incurred many evils and suffered great fear for the sake of your service in the days when doña Leonor de Guzmán had power in the kingdom. Lord, I have always served you; however, I believe that because of telling you some things which complied with your service you are ordering me killed, which, lord, I believe that you do to satisfy your will: for which God pardon you; for I never deserved it from you. And now, lord, I say to you so close to the point of my death (for this will be my last counsel) that if you do not put up your knife, and if you do not stop doing such killings as this one, you will lose your kingdom, and place your person in danger. And I ask you as a favor to guard yourself, for I speak loyally with you, for in such an hour as this I must say nothing but the truth." And this letter was given to the king, and he was very angry that they had let him write it.... And after this the king left Seville and went towards Almazán, and arriving at a village of Atienza which is called Rebollosa, he heard that Gutier Ferrández was dead, and they brought his head to him there, and he was very pleased by it.⁽²⁹⁾

Irony pervades the chronicle. In the slow-paced year eighteen, for example, Ayala contrasts Pedro's speeches with his behavior and his boasting with the wise Muslim's criticism. The irony stems not only from Pedro's exultation in military victory just when he is on the verge of political disaster but also from the contrast between Muslim respect for Alfonso XI in the first year of the chronicle and the wise Muslim's criticism of Pedro in this last year of his success. As a general rule, Ayala uses parallel construction to draw ironic comparisons; and only through [68] these ironic contrasts does he criticize Pedro. He does not argue political theory, he does not moralize, he does not condemn: he simply draws ironic contrasts. Ayala uses irony to reinforce the theme of the fall of great men -- a topos that allowed him to draw on biblical overtones, on the popular Libro de Alexandre -- with its story of Alexander the Great's fall through soberbia (pride) and cobdicia (lack of restraint) -- and on his own experience in translating Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum Illustrium.⁽³⁰⁾

Ayala's use of these classical rhetorical devices for political purposes is unprecedented in Castilian historiography. His predecessor, the anonymous author of the chronicle of Alfonso XI, has no concept of history as a work of art. His chronicle has no dramatic structure: it recounts a series of events strung together by chronological proximity. There are no speeches or letters to focus issues or dramatize conflict -- no irony, no innuendo, no change of pace to highlight critical moments. The artistic differences between the two works are startling when we compare the murders of Garcilaso de la Vega father (d. 1326) and son (d. 1351). The murder of Garcilaso the elder has all the makings of a great dramatic scene, since the victim was killed while attending mass. But the anonymous chronicler dispenses with it in two sentences:

And Garcilaso was hearing mass in the monastery of San Francisco, with the caballeros and escuderos who had come with him from the king's household and many eminent people of the town; and they entered the monastery and there inside the church they killed Garcilaso, and Arias Pérez de Quiñones, and one of Garcilaso's sons, and most of the caballeros and escuderos who had come there with him, so that twenty-two infanzones and hidalgos died there with him. And the few who remained alive escaped disguised in monks' habits so that they could not be recognized. And now the history leaves this subject.⁽³¹⁾

Literary critics have long recognized Ayala's skill in character assassination through the accumulation of details. His ability to make Pedro look bad without ever explicitly stating this judgment is the basis of his reputation for "sinuosity." More important are the rhetorical devices Ayala uses to make this accumulation of details seem convincing and those he uses to excuse his own behavior. His objective as a propagandist, after all, was principally to excuse his own desertion of Pedro rather than to condemn Pedro himself. Ayala's principal achievement is his success in placing his narrative in a political context that makes his own actions look normal and Pedro's actions abnormal. Ayala had to deal with four major problems in writing his apology: he had to explain why he deserted the legitimate king Pedro; he had to explain why he loyally served the same king for sixteen years; he had to explain why he gave the oath of loyalty to the illegitimate pretender, Enrique de Trastámara; and he had to convince his intended audience that it was in their interest to accept his interpretation of the Trastámara revolution.

The context Ayala presents is one of deudo -- the bond of family, friendship, and vassalage that binds men together and obligates them to one another. For Ayala, deudo was the cement that bound society into a cohesive and peaceful state. Without it, there would be a state of predatory violence, and each man would be left to fend for himself. Although deudo within a nuclear family was legally imposed, the deudo that bound friend to friend and king to vassal had to be initiated by the persons involved and required a persistent mending of the relationship. Deudo was built upon love, loyalty, and gratitude -- fragile motives easily destroyed by a single act of cruelty, insult, or aggression. Without the assurance of deudo, a man would feel isolated, vulnerable, alone in the world.

For Ayala, the most pressing problem in writing his history of the reign of Pedro was explaining what drove him to break the oath of fealty to Pedro -- to rupture the bond of deudo that gave him his status as a vasallo del rey. The enormity of Ayala's act was such that he could offer only one excuse -- that in breaking with Pedro he was honoring a higher obligation to familial deudo. Ayala does not pretend that his desertion was not serious. Instead he argues that the alternative was even more serious -- to fail in his deudo to his family. Throughout the chronicle, Ayala shapes the material to show that his choice was not between right and wrong but between the lesser of two evils.

[70] A second problem Ayala faced was explaining why he waited sixteen years -- from Pedro's accession in 1350 to his desertion of Burgos in 1366 -- to break his oath. Ayala had to explain his loyalty as well as his disloyalty. If Pedro was a tyrant, or had no right to the throne, or did not fulfill the obligations of kingship, Ayala should not have waited sixteen years to do his duty as a citizen and oppose him. Throughout the chronicle, Ayala avoids attacking Pedro's right to the throne or his fulfillment of the office. He shows Pedro as an excellent military leader, an astute policymaker in foreign affairs, and a frugal manager of the kingdom's fiscal affairs. Ayala, in fact, so insists upon Pedro's abilities in most aspects of government that he has provided his detractors with the evidence used to accuse him of defaming the king's character. Writers who call Pedro a good king insist upon referring to him as Pedro the Just, using material from Ayala's chronicle to support their position.

Ayala's third major problem was accounting for his oath of loyalty to Enrique de Trastámara, a man who could never legally have inherited the throne. Enrique was illegitimate and not even the eldest brother. Ayala could neither espouse Enrique as a superior claimant by right of inheritance nor argue that Enrique was morally superior or politically or militarily more competent. On the basis of the evidence presented in his chronicle, Ayala did not think Enrique was much better than Pedro, if he was any better at all. Again, Ayala's solution was to show that the choice between Enrique and Pedro was a choice between the lesser of two evils, not between right and wrong.

Ayala had to take into account one final consideration in excusing his own behavior -- the audience to whom he addressed his apology. They were, in fact, his own descendants, the people who benefited most from Enrique de Trastámara's usurpation of the throne and Ayala's desertion of Pedro. In a sense, Ayala designed his tract to solidify his family's loyalties to the Trastámara dynasty. In order to do this, he tried to show that the very survival of the family had been at stake in the conflict between Pedro and Enrique. In the most horrifying and dramatic moments in the narrative, Pedro's murder victims are Ayala's relatives. Although this aspect of the chronicle is largely lost on modern readers who do not have a grasp of the family's genealogy, it must have been obvious to Ayala's descendants. Just in case they missed the point, Ayala spelled it out for them. At the end of the scene in which Pedro kills Fadrique, Ayala adds the following information:

After this was done, the king sat down to eat there near where the master lay dead. This master don Fadrique left the following children: [71] count Pedro, whose son is count Fadrique, son-in-law of the admiral Diego Hurtado [de Mendoza]; and Alfonso Enríquez, the one who died; and Alfonso Enríquez, admiral of Castile, son-in-law of Pedro González de Mendoza; and Leonor, wife of Diego Gómez, mother of Constanza wife of Carlos de Arellano, and of Diego Pérez son-in-law of Diego López de Stúñiga, and of Fernán Sánchez Sarmiento Dean, and of the wife of Pero Pérez de Ayala.⁽³³⁾

Ayala is at his best when he traces the excruciatingly slow development of this reversal. Throughout the chronicle, and with increasing frequency as events pile up near the end, he describes the fear and doubts that assailed the knights as the king's choice of murder victims became more unpredictable. Ayala does this with a few short sentences at the ends of murder scenes: "And some other knights of Toledo did not want to be in the plot, and remained loyal to the king. And the plot was very dangerous, as it later became clear."⁽³⁴⁾ The king "ordered that his aunt, queen Leonor of Aragon, be killed... and it was done... and all those who loved the service of the king were very grieved by this."⁽³⁵⁾ Pedro murdered his two teenage half-brothers, "and it saddened many of those who loved the king's service that they should die this way, for they were innocent and never harmed the king."⁽³⁶⁾ Pedro [72] captured don Pero Núñez de Guzmán and "had him killed very cruelly in Seville, and the manner of his death was too ugly and cruel to describe, and those who truly loved the king's service were very grieved by it and they were not pleased by such acts."⁽³⁷⁾ After Pedro exiled the archbishop of Toledo, "all those who were there in Toledo held this to be a very great insult, although they did not dare to say a single thing, so great was the fear that they had of the king."⁽³⁸⁾ Finally, when Pedro abandoned the city of Burgos in 1366, Ayala explains that "very few of the knights and squires of Castile went with him, while all the others remained in Burgos, for they did not like him, rather they were pleased by all of this for there were some whose relatives he had killed and they were always afraid of him."⁽³⁹⁾

If Ayala had wanted to defend his desertion of Pedro by showing that Pedro was a bad king, Pedro's desertion of Burgos was the perfect incident on which to build such a case. But Ayala does not attempt to justify his actions on a political or moral basis; he makes them understandable as acts of passion: the desertion was motivated by fear and the regicide by vengeance. The king killed the relatives of some of his vassals, and they were afraid of him. This action based on fear is convincing because the entire chronicle has been constructed to support it. Ayala dwells on the murders and shapes them into dramatic scenes because they were crucial incidents in alienating the vassals from the king by increasing their fear of him.

The regicide presented a different rhetorical problem, since Ayala did not participate in it and since it was committed after he had given his loyalty to Enrique. By constructing the regicide to echo the death of Fadrique, Ayala points out the personal nature of the conflict between Pedro and Enrique and implies that Enrique's vassals had nothing to fear from him. As revenge for Pedro's murder of his twin, Enrique's murder of Pedro seems understandable. But Ayala does not justify its regicidal aspect in any way; he detaches himself from the scene by depersonalizing his account of its climactic moments. In all the other murder scenes, Ayala introduces dialogue with the words, "he said"; but in the final moments of the regicide he uses the more distant "they say that he said." By placing a third person between himself and the action, Ayala dissociates himself from the event and minimizes the reader's involvement.

Using all these devices -- dramatic structure, ironic comparison, appeal to the emotions -- Ayala wrote a tightly constructed literary masterpiece which also serves as an apology for his own actions. Strong as their [73] emotional impact is upon the modern reader, these devices must have affected Ayala's fifteenth-century descendants even more strongly because Ayala used still another device to impress his ideas upon them. He always speaks of himself in the third person, and he speaks of his relatives without mentioning their relationship to him. He never mentions that Gutier Ferrández was his brother-in-law twice over, but this must have been as obvious to his descendants as the fact that except for Fadrique and Pedro the victims in the murder scenes Ayala described in detail were his own relatives. We can imagine Fernán Pérez de Guzmán or the marquis of Santillana reacting to the king's murder of Díaz Gutiérrez, Ayala's uncle;⁽⁴⁰⁾ or of Gutier Ferrández, Guzmán's uncle; or of Garcilaso de la Vega, Santillana's great-grandfather.⁽⁴¹⁾ Ayala relies heavily on the reader's knowledge of family relationships to increase the force of his thesis. Only with some awareness of these relationships can we understand the direct connecton between Gutier Ferrández's warning to Pedro that "if you do not stop doing such killings as this one, you will lose your kingdom, and place your person in danger," and Ayala's laconic statement that "there were some whose relatives he had killed and they were always afraid of him."

Ayala's use of the forms of dramatic tragedy was peculiar to his Crónica del rey don Pedro. His chronicles of kings Enrique II, Juan I, and Enrique III are written in the more usual narrative form, with little manipulation of the material into dramatic climaxes and without the irony that pervades the chronicle of Pedro. In all four of the chronicles, however, Ayala's critical approach to the sources of historical information and his concern with historical change remain consistent. For his few excursions into history before his own lifetime, Ayala relied on "what the ancient Chronicle tells us, and what is found in other ancient books which are authentic, and even what has survived by memory from generation to generation until today."⁽⁴²⁾ In writing the history of his own lifetime, he depended on his own observation and on reliable eyewitness accounts, which he claims to use with the greatest caution.⁽⁴³⁾ His skepticism toward even the most venerable historical works and his belief in the superiority of eyewitness accounts seem to have been taken directly from Guido delle Colonne's prologue to Historia Troiana.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Citation of sources is a common feature of Castilian chronicles since the thirteenth century, but Ayala's critical approach to the sources for ancient history and his insistence on reliable eyewitness accounts for contemporary history are important innovations.

Ayala's attitudes toward the Castilian past and toward historical [74] change were also innovations; they seem to have been shaped as much by his methods as by the political circumstances in which he wrote. His attitude toward the Visigothic period, for example, stands in sharp contrast to the attitudes of earlier chroniclers, who filled page after page with fabricated genealogies of Visigothic rulers and incredible stories of their reigns. Ayala dismisses the Visigothic period, apparently because he could not find reliable sources for it,⁽⁴⁵⁾ and he ridicules what was known of the Visigoths in an ironic summary of their history: "And you must know that from the first Gothic king in Spain who was a Christian, who was called Atanarico, until the king don Rodrigo, who was the last king of the Goths, there were thirty-five kings."⁽⁴⁶⁾ The chroniclers working under Alfonso X lamented the lack of written accounts for the pre-Roman period but accepted mythologies like Ovid's as reliable historical accounts.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Instead of relying on these, Ayala used Roman historians as sources for the Roman period and declined to write about pre-Roman Spain or the Visigoths. He did not attribute the origins of any Spanish institutions to the Visigothic period: he traced words, taxes, and calendars to the Roman period and political, military, and legal institutions to the Reconquest.⁽⁴⁸⁾ For Ayala, Spanish history began with the Romans; the Visigothic period, with its lack of written records, was a dark age; and the period of the Reconquest was the formative period for most Castilian institutions -- institutions shaped by the frontier society that still existed in Ayala's lifetime.

Ayala was not familiar with the historical writing of the Italian Renaissance, but he developed a historical perspective parallel to that of the Italian humanists. The centuries separating the Roman Empire from the fourteenth century did not link the present with the ancient past; they were a gulf separating Spain from its classical past.

Ayala also departed from the norm of earlier Castilian chronicles by urging institutional changes as a response to changing religious, political, and military conditions. In the Crónica del rey don Juan I, he urges the king to change the method of dealing with treasonable members of the royal family, describing how French kings called legists from the university to hear both sides of such a case and suggesting that Juan also call together a panel of letrados to hear the case of his half-brother, count Alfonso.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Ayala seems to be suggesting that Castilian justice was primitive compared to French justice and his speech concerning the incident of count Alfonso is typical of many urging kings to measure the benefits of an outmoded traditional institution against those possible under a new institution established through the king's initiative. It is significant that Ayala is not responding to abuses: he suggests that the need for change [75] arises not because of a falling-away from an ideal state but because old solutions become anachronistic in a society continually changing, and even improving.

This Renaissance assumption that institutions must be judged in their historical context is particularly striking in the three digressions in year two of the Crónica del rey don Pedro. In all three, Ayala is writing institutional history; and he describes the historical education of these institutions. In the treatise on calendars, he describes the origins of each dating system used in Castile; and although he is obviously proud that the Castilians have continued to use the era of Caesar in dating their official documents, he approves of the king's decision to discard this usage because it was meaningful only in the context of the Roman Empire.

This treatment is consistent with his handling of political history -- devoid of attempts to explain political action in terms of theory or of any other system of rational explanation. In the Crónica del rey don Pedro, Ayala frequently presents whole letters and speeches arguing political theory; but these are presented in pairs, so that an argument that Pedro has become a tyrant, for example, is inevitably followed by a parallel argument that Pedro is king by all legal standards.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Since every logical argument is nullified by an equally logical counterargument, all theories of political behavior are implicitly discredited as useful explanations of the course of events. Although Ayala offers an explanation of political behavior and historical causation, it appears only in his assumption that actions can best be judged by their consequences. Gutier Ferrández's letter to Pedro -- the only letter Ayala allows to stand unchallenged by a counterargument -- specifically argues that Pedro should change his behavior because it will lead to disaster. In the Crónica del rey don Juan, he warns the king against unjust executions by citing the evil consequences they have produced in the past.⁽⁵¹⁾

Much of the implacability of Ayala's chronicles arises from his assumption that the consequences of political actions are predictable because human behavior is predictable. In Ayala's view, all people, whether kings or vassals, want to behave in a loyal and dignified manner but consistently misinterpret other people's behavior and miscalculate the effects of their own words and actions, thus beginning to act out of fear and a desire for vengeance. Vengeance and fear are the only motives he suggests for Pedro's behavior, the only explanations he offers for the regicide and desertion. Ayala does not condemn action based on such emotional motives. In fact, the whole purpose of the Crónica del rey don Pedro is to show that the Enriquista party's fear and Eririque's desire for vengeance [76] were based on a realistic and correct assessment of Pedro's behavior. Ordinary emotions, indeed, appear to be virtues in Ayala's work. The most damning indictments of Pedro, for example, are scenes in which he fails to display any emotion at all -- calmly eating a meal in the presence of his brother's body -- or his response is perverted -- receiving Gutier Ferrández's letter with anger and his head with pleasure. In this, as in every aspect of his work, Ayala's approach to the writing of history is that of a Renaissance humanist: he uses a classical rhetorical device, amplificatio,⁽⁵²⁾ to present his case; he avoids explanations based on logic, theory, or morality, in favor of explanations based on historical context and emotional motivation. In Florence, only Francesco Guicciardini -- that most Renaissance of all Italian historians -- matched Ayala's freedom from the traditional schematizations of history and his penetrating psychological analyses. In Castile, Ayala's achievement was unique: none of his successors achieved his psychological insight or his rhetorical genius. Yet Ayala's descendants absorbed his most important innovations -- his historical perspective, his love of the classics, his distrust of theoretical systems of thought and his apologia for the family's political past. His intellectual inheritance shaped the caballero renaissance in the fifteenth century.

1. "Fundación del mayorazgo de Ayala," in Marqués de Lozoya [Juan de Contreras y López de Ayala], Introducción a la biografía del Canciller Ayala, Prov. de Vizcaya, 1950, p. 61. Amada López de Meneses, "Nuevos datos sobre el canciller Ayala," Cuadernos de Historia de España, 10 (1948), 111-128; idem, "El canciller Pero López de Ayala y los reyes de Aragón," Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón, 8 (1967), 189-264.

2. Uriarte, El fuero de Ayala, p. 39.

3. The genealogical history, with an appendix by Pedro López de Ayala, is printed in Lozoya, p. 147; the fuero in Uriarte, pp. 187-216. The fuero was revised and amplified in 1469 by García Lopez de Ayala. Uriarte, pp. 219-228.

4. Maurice Faucon, La Librairie des Papes d'Avignon, sa formation, sa composition, ses catalogues 1316-1420, Paris, 1886-1887, Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d'Athènes et de Rome, fasc. 43, pp. 23-48; W. Braxton Ross, Jr., "Giovanni Colonna, Historian at Avignon," Speculum, 45 (1970), 533-563; Anthony Luttrell, "The Aragonese Crown and the Knights Hospitallers of Rhodes, 1291-1350," English Historical Review, 76 (1961), 1-19; idem, "Fourteenth-Century Hospitaller Lawyers," Traditio, 21 (1965), 449-456; Mario Schiff, La Bibliotheque du marquis de Santillane, Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, fasc. 153, Paris, 1905, p. 87.

5. Josep Rius Serra, "Estudiants espanyols a Avinyò al segle XIV," Miscelánea Mons. José Rius Serra, I, 469-511 (first published in Analecta Sacra Terraconensis, 10 (1934), 87-112); Suárez Fernández, "Problemas políticos."

6. On Barroso, see Lozoya, Ayala, pp. 21, 27-30; Bernard Guillemain, La Cour Pontificale d'Avignon (1309-1376), Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises d'Athènes et de Rome, fasc., 201, Paris, 1962, pp. 190, 211, 229, 234, 256, 257, 269, 273, 275. On Alvaro Pelayo, see Faucon, Librairie, prol. pp. 22, 35, 36; Nicholas Iung, Un Franciscain théologien du pouvoir pontifical au XIV^e siècle: Alvaro Pelayo, Paris, 1931.

7.

Aquí estorvaron mucho algunos sabidores
Por se mostrar letrados e muy disputadores,
Fisieron sus questiones como grandes dotores
E por esto la eglesia de sangre fas sudores

8. On the educational and intellectual activities of Albornoz, see Charles Faulhaber, Latin Rhetorical Theory in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Castile, Berkeley, 1972, p. 34; Berthe M. Martí, The Spanish College at Bologna in the Fourteenth Century, Philadelphia, 1966, pp. 31-32; Josep Rius Sena, "Bibliotecas medievales españolas," Revista Eclesiástica, II (1930), 318-326 (Miscelánea, I, 139-149); Emilio Sáez and José Trenchs, "Juan Ruiz de Cisneros (1295/1296-1351/1352) autor del Buen Amor," in El Arcipreste de Hita: El libro, autor, la tierra, la época, ed. Manuel Criado de Val, Actas del I Congreso International sobre el Arcipreste de Hita, Barcelona, 1973, pp. 365-368; Evelio Verdera y Tuells, ed., El Cardenal Albornoz y el Colegio de España, 2 vols., Saragosa, 1972.

9. López de Meneses, "Nuevos datos," pp. 112-116.

10. Las flores de los Morales de Job, ed. Francesco Branciforti. Ayala's translation of Livy was published anonymously in Salamanca, 1497, but was superseded by that of fr. Pedro de la Vega, Saragosa, 1520. Schiff, La Bibliothèque, p. 100.

11. For a different interpretation of Ayala's intentions in translation, see Robert B. Tate. "López de Ayala, Humanist Historian?" Hispanic Review, 25 (1957), 157-174.

12. Robert B. Tate, Ensayos sobre la historiografía peninsular del siglo XV, Madrid, 1970, pp. 46-47. In 1424, Alfonso V of Aragon, holding his younger brother, Juan of Navarre, responsible for a recent political incident, wrote to Juan reproaching him and advising him to read the Crónica del rey don Pedro. Cited by Suárez Fernández, Nobleza y monarquía, pp. 66-67.

13. The Crónica del rey don Pedro was published in Seville, 1495, 1542, 1549; and in Toledo, 1526. Francesco Branciforti, "Regesto delle opere di Pero Lopez de Ayala," in Saggi e ricerche in memoria di Ettore Li Gotti, Palermo, 1961, pp. 289-319.

14. Gerónimo Zurita y Castro, Emiendas y advertencias a la Crónica del rey don Pedro, ed. Diego Josef Dormer, Saragosa, 1683, n.p.

15. Prosper Mérimée, Histoire de don Pèdre 1^er Roi de Castille, Paris, 1961; François Piétri, Pierre le Cruel: Le vrai et le faux, Paris, 1961; Gonzalo Pintos Reino, El rey don Pedro de Castilla: Vindicación de su reinado, Santiago, 1929; N. Sanz y Ruiz de la Peña, Don Pedro I de Castilla: llamado el "Cruel," Madrid, 1943; Franco Meregalli, Pietro di Castiglia nella letteratura, Milan, [1951].

16. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, in Tate, "Lopez de Ayala," pp. 158, 160.

17. "Ya aludimos a la sinuosidad de espíritu del Canciller," in Angel Valbuena Prat, Historia de la literatura española, Barcelona, 1937, I, 190-191.

18. Russell, English Intervention, p. 18.

19. The best critique of Ayala's chronicles is still José Amador de los Ríos, "Protexta del sentimiento nacional contra la innovación alegórica," Historia critíca de la literatura española, Madrid, 1862-1865, V, 99-159.

20. See Entwistle, "Spanish Literature," p. 115.

21. Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, I, 31-35, 51-52 (the behetrías were lands whose tenants had the right to elect their seigneurial lords), 54-65.

22. Ibid., pp. 483-493.

23. Ibid., pp. 304-305; 329-330.

24. Ibid., pp. 239-242.

25. Ibid., pp. 554-557.

26. Ibid., pp. 140-144.

27. "Ca, señor, algunos Reyes vuestros antecesores en Castilla e en León ficieron algunas obras destas por las quales sus famas se dañaron e les vinieron grandes deservicios." Ibid., II, 207-208.

28. After Pedro's mother has murdered her rival, Leonor de Guzmán (the first murder in the chronicle), Ayala comments: "E desto pasó mucho a algunos del Regno; ca entendían que por tal fecho como este vernían grandes guerras e escándalos en el Regno, segund fueron despues, por quanto la dicha doña Leonor avía grandes fijos e muchos parientes. E en estos fechos tales, por poca venganza, recrescen despues muchos males e daños, que seria muy mejor escusarlos: ca mucho mal e mucha guerra nasció en Castilla por esta razón." Ibid., I, 36-37.

In the last paragraph of the chronicle, describing Pedro, he says: "E mató muchos en su Regno, por lo qual le vino todo el daño que avedes oido. Por ende diremos aqui lo que dito el Profeta David: Agora los Reyes aprended e sed castigados todos los que juzgades el mundo: ca grand juicio, e maravilloso fue este, e muy espantable." Ibid., p. 557.

29. Ibid., pp. 313-315, 317.

30. For the themes of soberbia and cobdicia in the Libro de Alexandre, see Deyermond, Literary History, p. 66; Ian Michael, The Treatment of Classical Material in the Libro de Alexandre, Manchester, 1970.

31. Crónica del rey don Alfonso Onceno, BAE, 66: 211.

32. Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, I, 414-415.

33. Ibid., p. 483, n.2.

34. Ibid., p. 143.

35. Ibid., p. 272.

36. Ibid., p. 293.

37. Ibid., p. 312.

38. Ibid., p. 321.

39. Ibid., p. 404.

40. Ibid., p. 144.

41. Ibid., pp. 38-43.

42. Ibid., p. 58.

43. "E por ende de aqui adelante yo Pero Lopez de Ayala con el ayuda de Dios, lo entiendo continuar así lo mas verdaderamente que pudiere de lo que bí, en lo qual non entiendo decir si non verdad: otrosi de lo que acaesce en mi edad e en mi tiempo en algunas partidas donde yo non he estado, e lo supiere por verdadera relacion de señores e Caballeros, e otros dignos de fe e de creer, de quienes lo oí, e me dieron dende testimonio, tomandolo con la mayor diligencia que yo pude." Ibid., p. xx.

44. Guido delle Colonne, Historia Troiana [Strassburg, 1486]. This edition is not paginated, but the reference is to a passage in the first column of the first page of text.

45. This reservation is stated in his addition to the genealogical history written by his father, Fernán Pérez de Ayala. Fernán Pérez traced the family and its position in Alava all the way back to the Visigothic period. Much of his material must be considered myth, but Fernán Pérez used it with no questions about its reliability. Pedro López de Ayala, treating the same period on his mother's side of the family, was extremely cautious about using this material and carried the genealogy back only seven generations to don Gonzalo Fernández, explaining that he could not find documents for earlier generations: "E todo esto fallé yo don Pero Lopez por escrituras del solar de Cevallos e de los demas solares. E non pude fallar el padre e la madre deste don Gonzalo Fernández mas de que venien de padre en padre del señor del solar de Cisneros desde mui luengo tiempos, e su divisa esta en la Iglesia de San Martín de Valdecayon." Lozoya, Introducción, p. 147.

46. Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, I, xxx.

47. Ibid., pp. 31-35.

48. Ibid., pp. 51-65.

49. Ibid., II, 206-213.

50. Ibid., I, 449-453

51. Ibid., II, 206-213.

52. Amplificatio is the device of dwelling on a minor detail in order to emphasize by implication the magnitude of the main object. Quintillian, Inst. 8.4.9 ff.