[77] Ayala's chronicles became a book of martyrs for the descendants of the Enriquista captains who fought at Nájera. In his history, they found the story of their ancestors' sacrifices for the Trastámara dynasty; and bound together by the past, as well as their own success, they formed the powerful, self-conscious new nobility of the fifteenth century. Their glorious past became inextricably bound up with Ayala's Renaissance attitudes and humanist rhetoric. As a result, the Castilian nobles -- military aristocrats in a monarchical, agrarian society -- became the principal spokesmen of the Renaissance in Castile. The most innovative features of the Italian Renaissance -- the historical approach, the admiration for the ancient Romans, the optimism about human will with its concomitant reliance upon rhetoric, the pessimism about the capabilities of the human intellect with its concomitant rejection of scholasticism -- also came to be identified most closely with the caballeros. The Mendoza family in Guadalajara became the focal point of this Renaissance. First associated with the Mendoza in Ayala's chronicles, it was refined and handed on from generation to generation through a system of education centered on the family household. The Renaissance reached its fullest development in the mid-fifteenth century when the Mendoza as patrons and artists dominated Castilian cultural life to the same degree they dominated its political life.

Several sequences occur so consistently in the lives of the Mendoza that they may be considered the formative factors in their intellectual and religious attitudes. There appears to have been a single curriculum of primary education common to all educated caballeros. From the age [78] of about five until puberty, children were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, and Latin. The texts for these subjects included versions of Aesop's Fables, Papias's Latin vocabulary, and Latin grammars by Juan de Pastrana and Alejandro de Villadedios. These texts would hardly meet the approval of a modern classics teacher, and they were bitterly attacked by professional humanists like Antonio de Nebrija and Luis Vives, for they were minor works chosen for their religious and moral lessons rather than their style.⁽¹⁾ Although Latin was valued highly, it was the last subject introduced into a student's primary curriculum; aud since this phase of a caballero's education ended at the age of twelve or fourteen, Latin instruction on the primary level probably did not last more than three or four years, even under optimal conditions. For most educated caballeros, these few years of rather mediocre primary education were their last formal instruction in writing and in Latin.

After a primary education in his parents' household, a boy was sent to the household of a close relative whose position in a center of power offered the boy the greatest exposure to the practice of statecraft and diplomacy and the most effective patronage for his intended career. Education in a noble patron's household concentrated on the martial arts and public administration taught through informal methods rather than lectures or reading. In the household of his patron, a young man accustomed his body to armor and physical hardships and learned to handle arms, to hunt, to speak persuasively, to arbitrate disputes, to supervise the building of fortifications, to serve at table, and to sing. He learned these skills by practicing and by following the example of his patron. He acquired the theoretical knowledge necessary for his profession, but be probably saw it as the wisdom of the patron rather than as part of a systematic body of theory.

At first sight, the noble household as a system of humanist education looks like all weakness and no strengths. Students were chosen for their relationship to the patron rather than any intellectual ability; they did no systematic reading or writing and forgot what Latin they had learned; and the patron himself might be completely uninterested in matters intellectual but still considered a master of the profession.

But the students in the aristocratic household did learn to compose an important type of literature -- lyric poetry -- and they were trained in rhetoric -- the skill most highly prized by the Italian humanists. Poetry, in the form of song, was one of the martial arts -- a favorite form of relaxation in military encampments. Along with jousting, it was the principal entertainment of the noble court. When the young marquis of [79] Santillana left the household of the Aragonese crown prince, Alfonso the Magnanimous, at the age of eighteen, he received the tools of the caballero profession as a parting gift: a German crossbow, a shield covered in silk, an ax, a double-edged sword, and a harp.⁽²⁾

The highest attainment of Castilian political life was to achieve a position in the consejo del rey, which entitled a man to speak directly to the king without intermediaries, either through letters or through attendance at the consejo real, and so to participate in the debates through which royal policy was formulated. To be an effective counselor to the king, the caballero needed oratorical and persuasive eloquence; and careful attention was paid to the development of rhetorical skills, from the basic elements of volume and quality of the voice, clarity of pronunciation, pace, and gestures to the more difficult problems of content and ordering of the material. Some of the rhetorical works of Quintillian and Cicero were available in fifteenth-century Castile; and a sophisticated treatise on rhetorical theory emphasizing the need to shape the style to the audience was written by a Spaniard, Martin of Córdoba, probably in Avignon about 1374.⁽³⁾ Although this work was known in Castile by the end of the fourteenth century, the texts used to teach rhetoric continued to be the Gramática of Pedro Elias and the Graecismus of Evrard de Béthune. In an important innovation, noble patrons began to order translations of speeches from the Latin classics that could serve as models for the young caballeros being trained in their households. Here, too, students learned more from example than from theory.

Gómez Manrique's education was probably typical for a caballero of a distinguished family. He spent his teenage years in the household of his much older brother, Rodrigo Manrique, master of Santiago. Rodrigo was one of the great military figures of the day -- his son, Jorge Manrique, immortalized his father's military fame in the Coplas por la muerte de su padre -- and Gómez gives full credit to his brother for the best military training possible. The fact that Rodrigo educated both Gómez and Jorge -- two of the great warrior-poets of the century -- casts credit on his household as an institution of military education. In his later years, Gómez like many caballeros turned to grave moral and political questions that required forms other than lyric poetry; and he apologizes that his education did not prepare him for a career in letters. He is too modest, of course: his many references to Livy reflect an intimate and profound knowledge of the first three books, which had been translated by Ayala.⁽⁴⁾ As adults, both Gómez Manrique and Santillana felt apologetic about their lack of expertise in Latin, yet both were able not only [80] to read the classics in translation (or in Latin with the help of a translation) but also to imitate and build upon the classics in their own creative works.

In this respect, the Mendoza were luckier than most nobles because they were educated in households with intellectual resources, where the patrons were bibliophiles and sponsors of translations, as well as del consejo del rey. Ayala was educated in the household of his great-uncle, Pedro Gómez Barroso; Guzmán in the household of his uncle, Ayala; Santillana in the households of his great-uncle, Gutierre de Toledo, archdeacon of Guadalajara, and of Alfonso the Magnanimous; and Santillana's sons and grandsons in his own household in Guadalajara.

After a young man spent several years in his patron's household, he obtained public office through the efforts of his patron. A caballero's life after his assumption of civic responsibility alternated between the extremes of intense activity as a warrior, politician, and administrator and detachment from public life while in prison, captivity, banishment, or retirement. During the periods of public activity, a caballero was repeatedly faced with conflicts that forced him to choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to monarch or between rival claimants to the throne. During the periods of respite, he often reflected upon the strains and conflicts be endured in his career and sought to explain his actions. Such periods of respite often mark a shift in the caballero's literary interests from poetry largely concerned with sentiment and piety to prose characterized by introspection, polemics, and didactics. Among men who lived to be very old, the shift to polemical prose is marked, particularly in cases where a writer's retirement was involuntary.

The two most important factors in the formation of the Mendoza were their education as caballeros in a vernacular and secular tradition and their involvement in public affairs. The caballero education prepared them to take advantage of both Castilian intellectual traditions and Renaissance humanism, for the distinguishing characteristics of Castilian intellectual life in the Middle Ages were the early use of the vernacular and the absence of scholasticism. Throughout the peninsula -- in Aragon, Portugal, and Castile -- the vernaculars became the official languages of administration and judiciary in the thirteenth century.⁽⁵⁾ In Castile, Fernando III (1230-1252) declared Castilian the official language of the royal chancery and decreed that all public documents and laws be redacted in Castilian. His son, Alfonso X el Sabio, ordered that in judicial decisions the usage of Toledo was to prevail in cases of dubious or disputed meanings. The importance of this shift lay in its effect on later generations of public administrators, who would not need Latin in order [81] to administer justice. Deliberations in the royal council, legal proceedings in courts of first and last instance, communications between the crown and its subjects were all in the vernacular. Latin was limited to the church, the universities, and the crown's correspondence with foreign countries. Most educated Castilians, especially those engaged in the administration of the res publica, continued to have at least a passive knowledge of Latin, but Latin was not necessary for the conduct of the secular affairs of the kingdom.

The official action adopting Castilian in place of Latin did not mark a great transformation from Latin to vernacular culture: Castile had not produced an indigenous tradition of Latin scholarship since the Arab invasion in the eighth century. The great Latin works of Castile in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were written by Castilians educated outside Spain, and their example did not inspire any flourishing of Latin letters in the later Middle Ages. Caballeros, as well as clergy and letrados, placed a high value on Latin as a sign of erudition and means of knowing the classics firsthand. For all practical purposes, however, Latin was not part of Castilian secular culture; and the general ignorance of Latin did not cut Castilians off from an indigenous intellectual tradition. Although this Castilian insistence upon the vernacular probably had much to do with the vigor and elegance of the vernacular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries -- a language modern readers still read with relative ease -- it also created obstacles to Castilian absorption of medieval Latin literature written in other countries.

The caballeros participated in some of the most bewildering political events of Castilian history, and it is no coincidence that the greatest burst of literary activity among them occurred during the period of the early Trastámara. Caballero attitudes were the product of and response to the political and religious conflicts of the early fifteenth century. The prose works of the caballeros provide a record of the anxieties and doubts, the hope and pessimism they felt as they tried to balance and reconcile their commitments to family and monarch, to king and pretender, to pope and antipope.

In trying to find a way through the thicket of moral dilemmas surrounding them, the caballeros did not resort to the solutions offered by medieval scholasticism. Cut off from scholastic arguments in favor of monarchy by their own commitment to a dynasty illegitimate by any standard of medieval political theory, ignorant of scholastic methodology, and generally prejudiced against it because of its failures during their own lifetimes, they welcomed the alternative offered by the ethical and religious lessons the humanists were drawing from the classics. But the [82] very caballeros most receptive to humanist attitudes and assumptions because they lacked the scholastic discipline also lacked fluency in Latin. This defect in their education -- as well as their patriotic preference for Seneca -- cut them off from the Ciceronian style popular among Italian humanists. The caballeros' skill in composing poetry and their rhetorical experience in the consejo real nevertheless gave them an unequaled mastery of imagery and eloquence in Castilian. They thus acquired orally and in the vernacular the rhetorical skills that characterized Italian humanists writing in Latin. One consequence of this paradox is that in fifteenth-century Castile humanist ideas were expressed almost exclusively in the vernacular by a military aristocracy responding to the problems of public life.

Although their inspiration and audience were Castilian, the Mendoza freely borrowed literary and rhetorical devices from their French and Italian contemporaries. Castilians carne into contact with the literature of other countries almost exclusively at the international papal court, first in Avignon and then at the councils. As the means whereby the Mendoza discovered the classics, the papal court had its deepest intellectual influence upon Castile. We have seen that Pedro López de Ayala was educated in Avignon while Petrarch and his fellow humanists were active there. During Ayala's career in Castile, he maintained close contact with Avignon through his cousin, the second cardinal Pedro Gómez Barroso, and through the Aragonese cardinal and future antipope, Pedro de Luna. An early and important ally of Enrique de Trastámara, Luna had persuaded Juan I of Castile to support the Avignon papacy.⁽⁶⁾

During Ayala's embassy to Avignon (1394-1395), be worked with Juan Fernández de Heredia (c. 1310-1396), grand master of Rhodes in the Order of St. John, who negotiated Aragonese support for Enrique de Trastámara.⁽⁷⁾ After the Catalan companies conquered and occupied the duchy of Athens early in the fourteenth century, the Aragonese monarchs began collecting Greek manuscripts, especially histories of the eastern Mediterranean since classical times. While leading an expedition against the Morea, Heredia became interested in the history of the area and began buying manuscripts and commissioning their translation from Greek into Latin. When be returned to Avignon, be maintained a team of scholars in his household to edit, transcribe, and translate his collection of Greek, Latin, and vernacular histories. Heredia used these sources to write his own histories of Aragon and its possessions in the eastern Mediterranean. His library was an important source of books and translations for the entire peninsula in the early [83] part of the century. The Aragonese kings exchanged manuscripts -- and hunting dogs -- with him;⁽⁸⁾ and king Martin, by special agreement with the Order of St. John, inherited several historical works from his estate that were eventually acquired by the marquis of Santillana. Even Renaissance Florence benefitted from Heredia's book collecting: the first copy of Plutarch's Lives there was copied from the translation Heredia commissioned while in the eastern Mediterranean -- perhaps the copy that the Florentine chancellor, Coluccio Salutati, requested from him in a series of flattering letters.⁽⁹⁾

The Mendoza enthusiastically embraced the attitudes of the humanists at Avignon and followed the Italians' lead in rediscovering the glory of ancient Rome; but as Castilians, they thought of it as the product of all the Roman Empire, not just of Italy. For the Mendoza, the rediscovery of Rome meant the rediscovery of their own Roman past; and they proceeded to become amateur etymologists -- reading inscriptions, tracing Castilian placenames to their Latin origins, and convincing themselves that Castilian was the language most purely descended from Latin. They were proud of the "Spanish" Romans, and the works of Seneca, Lucan, and Quintillian were among the first classics translated into Castilian. They modeled their prose on that of Seneca, actively cultivated stoic philosophy, and without exception wrote exclusively in Castilian.

In their eagerness to exalt the Spanish contribution to the classics, the Mendoza disregarded the two most common features of the Renaissance in Italy -- the Ciceronian model and the use of Latin. But far from indicating a rejection of the Renaissance, their use of the vernacular is evidence of their total absorption of one of the crucial assumptions of the Renaissance -- that they were the legitimate heirs of the ancient Romans by virtue of both Spain's historical membership in the Roman Empire and their own artistic and intellectual tastes. Gómez Manrique argued that it was appropriate for caballeros to devote themselves to moderate study of Roman histories in order to benefit from the theory behind their practice of war and government -- citing the examples of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Quintus Fabius, and the marquis of Santillana -- for it would be just as shameful for a caballero to ask a letrado how he ought to respond to or make a request or how to organize a campaign or invest a fortress as for one silversmith to ask another how to burnish a plate.⁽¹⁰⁾ Using the Romans as a model placed their own intellectual and stylistic achievements in a historical perspective that considered the Middle Ages irrelevant and looked to the ancient world for guidance.

[84] All these characteristics of the Spanish Renaissance are evident in the historical works of the two most innovative prose authors of the period, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán (1377?-1460?) and the marquis of Santillana (1398-1458). Much of their work combines esthetics with politics and private pleasure with public propaganda. Writing during periods of either harsh captivity or retirement, Pedro López de Ayala claimed that reading and writing were as necessary to the well-being of the soul as physical exercise to that of the body.⁽¹¹⁾ Guzmán, in exile on his estate at Batres, complained that he was cut off from all enlightened and excellent works and forced to live among rustics and laborers; but be continued to read, write, and translate and consoled himself as best he could by corresponding with other writers and translators.⁽¹²⁾ Santillana claimed that the classics offered a singularly effective antidote to the vexations and travail of Castilian political life.⁽¹³⁾

These explicit statements, as well as the sheer volume of these men's work, indicate the importance of literary activity to them as a source of consolation and pleasure. It is even more significant that they used those same literary talents to explain and justify their political careers to the public and to future generations. In defending their political actions and attacking those of their opponents, Guzmán and Santillana echoed their uncle, Ayala, in using the classical and rhetorical devices of Renaissance humanism.

Guzmán traveled to Avignon with Ayala in 1394-1395; and be first appears in the chronicles as a participant in the incident at Tordesillas in 1420 when be joined the alliance of his cousins, Santillana, Alba, Velasco, and Gutierre de Toledo. He acted as a negotiator between the infante Enrique and Juan II of Castile, and the chronicles depict him performing heroic deeds in the wars against the Muslims. Guzmán never succeeded in adding to his inherited estate, acquiring public office, or building a private army. As a result of his opposition to don Alvaro de Luna, he was imprisoned on charges of treason in 1431 along with his allies, Alba, Velasco, and Gutierre de Toledo. After their release, the rest of the allies returned to their positions of power; but Guzmán retired to his estate at Batres -- whether voluntarily or not we do not know -- where he collected a library, wrote poetry, exchanged books and letters with other erudites, commissioned the first Castilian translations of some of Seneca's epistles, translated Giovanni Colonna's Mare Historiarum, and wrote his prose masterpiece, Generaciones y semblanzas.⁽¹⁴⁾

In Generaciones y semblanzas, Guzmán displays many of Ayala's historical methods and attitudes, but he made important innovations [85] by casting his history in the form of biographical sketches and including a prologue, considered to be the first Castilian treatise on the nature of history and duties of the historian. Generaciones consists of thirty-four biographies of kings, knights, prelates, and courtiers active during the reigns of Enrique III and Juan II and personally known to Guzmán. The material anticipates the pattern used a generation later by the Florentine biographer, Vespasiano da Bisticci: each sketch includes the subject's genealogy; his appearance, manners, and habits; his deeds and fortune; his virtues and vices; and his age at death.⁽¹⁵⁾ Guzmán often departs from this pattern to puzzle over contradictions in character, trace the origins of a war with Portugal, castigate weak rulers and praise strong ones, urge the writing of histories, describe (with a touch of envy) the good fortune of an otherwise undistinguished man, defend the faith and nobility of conversos, lament the condition of Castile, and narrate the history of the conflicts in which be had been involved -- the struggle to limit the power of don Alvaro de Luna and the wars between Juan II and the infantes of Aragon.

These digressions are not the work of an absent-minded or undisciplined amateur. Guzmán inserts them knowing that they depart from his stated form but justifies them on the grounds that they are "necessary and the material requires them." He often makes the transition from a long digression back to the biography with the words, "returning to the subject."⁽¹⁶⁾ Extracted from the framework of the biographies, these digressions comprise a collection of essays revealing Guzmán's doubts, questions, and opinions on some of the most controversial subjects of his day. On political matters, for example, be reveals his loyalty to his relatives, especially the Ayala-Mendoza-Stúñiga alliance that triumphed in the regency struggles of Enrique III's minority; his partiality for Fernando de Antequera and the infante Enrique; and his hostility toward Juan II and don Alvaro de Luna. These opinions, and the political activity stemming from them, were the "treason" for which Guzmán was imprisoned. He acknowledges that writing a history of the reign of Juan II from this point of view was dangerous, but be was determined that posterity should know the truth and that the events of his lifetime should be preserved in a "simple and truthful manner."⁽¹⁷⁾ In order to write and circulate his apology safely while his enemies were still powerful, Guzmán wrote each biographical sketch only after its subject died. By using the biographical form unprecedented in Castilian historiography, he was able to bury his arguments in the surrounding narrative.

Biography as a literary form was of course nothing new to the fifteenth [86] century, and Guzmán's models are fairly obvious. He may have seen Heredia's copy of Plutarch in Avignon, but his direct model for organizing the material is clearly De Viris Illustribus by Petrarch's friend Giovanni Colonna (d. 1343). Another of Guzmán's works, Mar de Istorias, is largely a paraphrase of Colonna's Mare Historiarum; and there are strong similarities between Colonna and Guzmán in their organization of biographical material into origins, physical and moral characteristics, public career, and written works. Both men used the biographical sketches of Sallust, Tacitus, Valerius Maximus, and the derivative saints lives of the Middle Ages as models.

There are interesting and significant differences between Guzmán's Generaciones and its model. Giovanni Colonna's biographies were impressive works of scholarship -- employing careful research to pull together many bits of information scattered through ancient literature. His biography of Seneca, for example, is a superb synthesis of data culled from disparate sources. Despite their fidelity to the facts and to classical forms, Colonna's sketches remain works of scholarship based on second-hand information. Guzmán, with less scholarship but with a personal knowledge of his subjects, transforms the biographical sketch into a work of art by adding impressionistic details that could have come only from first-hand knowledge.

Guzmán's precision is most notable in his description of the rhetorical abilities of his subjects. Colonna's comments on this topic are conscientious but vague: he tells us, for example, that Julius Caesar was eloquent.⁽¹⁸⁾ Guzmán occasionally uses such general terms to describe the speaking manner of a prelate -- don Pedro Tenorio, archbishop of Toledo, had a powerful voice that well reflected the courage and strength of his spirit -- but rhetoric was too important to be dismissed so lightly when speaking of the caballeros; for to Guzmán and his colleagues rhetoric was second only to arms in the manly arts.

In describing the people be knew most intimately -- the royal family and his own relatives in the party formed after Nájera -- Guzmán provides vivid details: Fernando de Antequera's speech was wandering and weak; the conversation of Enrique III was harsh; admiral Diego Hurtado de Mendoza argued well and humorously, but he was so bold and outspoken that Enrique III complained of his taking liberties and of his temerity; admiral Alfonso Enríquez was brief and succinct in his arguments but discreet and prudent, and spoke with humor; and Guzmán's ally, Diego López de Stúñiga, was distant in his conversation and a man of few words, but according to those who used to engage in discussion with him, he was a man of good sense who drew profound conclusions [87] in a few words. In describing his formidable enemy, don Alvaro de Luna, Guzmán had to admit that "in the discussions and debates of the palace, which are another, second type of valor, be showed himself to be quite a man."⁽¹⁹⁾

Guzmán's most notable innovation lies in his use of biography as a vehicle for contemporary history. The inspiration for this innovation was probably Guzmán's complex blending of traditional Castilian attitudes toward the Bible as history with his perception of the Gospels as both history and biography. The Old Testament, which was traditionally regarded as a group of chronicles, is repeatedly cited in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a model in preserving the memory of notable men and events.⁽²⁰⁾ Guzmán has the same attitude toward the Gospels, which be perceives as biographies. In the prologue to Generaciones, be justifies the use of reliable second-hand accounts by citing the Gospels:

For there never was and never will be events of such magnificence and sanctity as the birth, life, passion and resurrection of Our Lord Saviour Jesus Christ; but of its four historians, two were not present at it but wrote from the accounts of others.⁽²¹⁾

Another innovation Guzmán includes in his prologue is a set of rules for writing good history.⁽²³⁾ He believes that three conditions must be met: first, a historian must be "discreet and wise and have a good rhetoric in order to put the history in a high and beautiful style, for good form honors and enhances the material"; second, the historian should be present at the "principal and notable acts of war and peace and since it would be impossible for him to be at ah the events, be should at least be discreet in accepting information only from persons who were present at the events"; and third, "the history should not be published in the lifetime of the king or prince in whose reign or jurisdiction it was ordered, so that the historian may be free to write the truth without fear."

[88] Guzmán claims that be took this prologue from Guido delle Colonne's Historia Troiana, and he does seem to have taken his idea about the superiority of eyewitness accounts from Guido's statement that Dares and Dictys were more reliable than Homer because they were eyewitnesses to the events they described.⁽²⁴⁾ The rest of the prologue is mostly made up of traditions familiar in the classics and in the Castilian chronicles. The final injunction, to delay publication until after the king's death, is the logical extension of his contempt for Pedro del Corral, a contemporary chronicler whom Guzmán accuses of lying to flatter the powerful. It may also reflect his anger at don Alvaro de Luna for taking the official chronicle out of the hands of Alvar García de Santa María and placing it in the hands of a less capable and less honest writer. The prologue, like the biographical sketches themselves, combines Castilian tradition, classical themes, and Guzmán's response to his political situation.

In spite of the severe limitations imposed by his literary form, Guzmán's account of political events is cohesive and clear, in contrast to the other chronicles of the reign of Juan II -- confusing jumbles of detail without unifying points of view and without literary distinction. It is the measure of Guzmán's talent that Generaciones, justly famous as a work of art, is also the most coherent history of the period. Thirty-four biographical sketches, all overlapping chronologically, are not conducive to a cohesive, sequential presentation of historical events, but Guzmán keeps confusion to a minimum by exercising considerable control over the material.

The major political events of the reign are described and presented in chronological order, and no event appears twice, although each one could logically have appeared in several biographies.

Guzmán also controls the material so as to place his own party in the best possible light. His descriptions of Juan II and of don Alvaro de Luna are superbly executed character assassinations. In his account of Fernando de Antequera, he goes to great lengths to explain away Fernando's cupidity, while he harshly condemns the cupidity of don Alvaro de Luna.⁽²⁵⁾

Guzmán's great admiration for Fernando de Antequera is implicit in his observation that although regencies are usually marked by chaos and injustice, during Fernando's Castile enjoyed a government of justice, integrity, and gallantry that gave way to chaos and injustice when the king himself ruled. The only explanation of this paradox could be found in the contrasting characters of Fernando de Antequera and Juan II. Guzmán could never explain to his own satisfaction why the king was [89] so weak or why, after years of meekly submitting to the will of don Alvaro, he suddenly, uncharacteristically, and unjustly turned on the favorite and had him executed.⁽²⁶⁾ On the other hand, Guzmán did not doubt that Fernando de Antequera had been the ideal ruler because of his fine character: Fernando's integrity led him to treat the infant king with respect and love; his wisdom enabled him to handle the affairs of government with justice; and most important of all, his courage and gallantry as a knight led him to campaign against the Muslims and besiege the city of Antequera. The regent abandoned this war simply because his high sense of duty -- in contrast to his inclinations as a Christian knight -- forced him to exchange the war against the Muslims for the burdens of the kingdom of Aragon.

Guzmán even tries to justify the one egregious fault in Fernando's character he could not ignore -- his greed. Guzmán admits that Fernando's sons, the infantes of Aragon, were able to keep Castile in a state of constant disruption and civil war because their father had given much of the Castilian royal patrimony and income to them while he was regent. Guzmán nevertheless absolves Fernando of the charge of greed by explaining that he acted according to the example set by every other grandee: as his power and privilege mounted, he took for himself as much as he could of honors, offices, and vassals. This weak argument may have seemed convincing to Guzmán because he and his allies regarded society as a free enterprise system in which wealth and power were the material evidence of ability and sagacity. Guzmán also believed that Fernando's ambition was directed toward a wortby goal -- the unification of the peninsula under the leadership of the Trastámara dynasty -- and that such a worthy end justifled the means.⁽²⁷⁾ Guzmán considered Fernando de Antequera the ideal Christian knight. His acquisition of the crown of Aragon was clear proof of his great character and high ideals, and Guzmán looked back upon the period of the regency as the golden age of the Trastámara dynasty.

In contrast to his idealistic view of the past, his judgments upon the political leaders of the reign of Juan II were harsh and disillusioned:

These lord princes and the great cavaliers who followed or counseled them I would certainly absolve of disloyalty or tyranny towards the king's person and his crown, believing that they never held hm in disrespect. But I would not dare to excuse the mistaken manner and incorrect intent by which I believe they failed in all ways, not only not completing their undertakings, but even losing and suffering in them, [as did] innocent and blameless people because of them. Nor will I ignore nor consent to the opinion which some hold in ignorance [90] and simplicity, and some preach and publicize in their own favor, saying that they followed the king solely out of their zeal for loyalty and love. I am not saying, nor would it please God for me to say it in injury to such noble and great men, that they were not loyal and very respectful towards the king, but I do say that this loyalty was alternated and mixed with great interests... and so I conclude that in regard to the truth, although some were more plausibly and attractively right than others, still the principal intention of each was to profit, to such a degree that one could say that in regard to the pure truth, in this case none of the parties was correct.⁽²⁸⁾

Like his uncle, Ayala, Guzmán rested his apology on the irrational and the personal. He does not argue political principles, structures, or theories. In his view, Castilian society was so particularistic that even deudo hardly served to bind men together, and every man acted for his own profit. Guzmán believed that it was natural for a caballero to accumulate property, vassals, and income and that the degree to which he succeeded in self-enrichment indicated the degree to which he would attract more clients and allies and therefore exercise greater influence in national affairs -- which in turn increased the chances of accumulating wealth. Although Guzmán saw nothing inherently wrong with such a society, he did believe that an accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of an unscrupulous man could have evil consequences because such a man would use his influence in the royal government for unwise purposes. Rather than criticizing the system, Guzmán criticized individuals like don Alvaro de Luna, who abused it.

Guzmán assumes that the object of political action is to maintain an equilibrium among the various groups who already share sovereignty -- each must exercise it responsibly and act as the guarantor of the sovereignty of others. He ascribes failure in fulfilling this political duty to faulty character and faulty relationships. The gist of his attack on Juan II is that the king, because of his indolent nature, failed to assume the responsibilities of his office. Don Alvaro de Luna, to satisfy his cupidity, [91] exceeded the proper bounds of his office and infringed upon the sovereignty of the king. Conversely, the gist of Guzmán's defense of his allies is that they were men of good character who therefore fulfilled their responsibilities and respected the rights of others.

Although both Ayala and Guzmán place great emphasis on personality, they explain the relationship between personality and political behavior in different ways. For Ayala, political behavior seems to be an accumulation of responses between individuals -- a never-ending sequence of action, reaction, and counteraction. These responses are usually motivated by emotion -- fear, jealousy, or revenge -- and always determined by personality. For Guzmán, personality shapes political behavior, but individuals respond not to one another directly but to the way each fulfills his role, which is in turn determined by personality. Guzmán uses this standard as his basis for judging political success, first describing a subject's personality, then recounting his performance, and finally presenting an assessment of the two. Because Guzmán never defines his standards and because he obviously has a different standard for each office, he is usually considered to be lacking all standards except his own advancement.⁽²⁹⁾ In fact, Guzmán's standards are very high: they are based on a total acceptance of the status quo -- an acceptance precluding any attempt to systematize, question, or explain the historical development of political offices. Guzmán's rigid adherence to this nonsystem of standards and his constant juxtaposition of irrational human nature with rational moral expectations makes Generaciones appear both extremely chaotic and completely static.

To a great degree, Generaciones reflects Guzmán's political life. Both Guzmán and Ayala struggled through periods of serious political and moral conflict; but whereas Ayala wrote to defend the resolution of his conflicts, Guzmán was never able to resolve his to his own satisfaction. He and his cousin, Santillana, spent their adult lives torn between the Castilian and Aragonese branches of the Trastámara dynasty. These forty years of unresolved conflict color every aspect of Guzmán's work. His interest in personalities, his alternations between claims and counterclaims, his puzzlement at the inexplicable turns of fortune, his failure to judge the efficacy of any political policies -- all seem to arise from the irresolution of his own dilemma. He was never able to give his loyalty wholly to a single political leader; he suffered the disadvantages of a political career without any of the rewards; and he died before the conflicts that consumed most of his energy as a statesman and writer for forty years had been resolved. Achieving no success in his [92] lifetime, Guzmán sought consolation in stoicism and in the hope for favorable judgment from posterity, a judgment he attempted to influence through the Generaciones.

As an apologist, Guzmán uses methods and attitudes similar to Ayala's: first-hand or reliable second-hand accounts; a literary form unprecedented as a vehicle for history; a talent for displaying his own party to the best advantage by controlling the form, sequence, and juxtaposition of events; and reliance upon irrational factors, such as character, emotions, and Fortuna, to explain political bebavior.

Guzmán's approach to the distant past, however, is strikingly different from Ayala's. When Ayala could not find reliable documents for such periods, he said so and declined to write about them. Guzmán writes about them but states his doubts about the reliability of the sources.⁽³⁰⁾ He is both more outspoken in his criticism of the sources and more uncritical in his use of them.

Guzmán's attitude toward the distant past reflects his attitude toward contemporary history. He was enamored of the Romans, admiring both their devotion to duty and their integrity; and the one institutional reform he proposes was modeled on a Roman institution. He suggests that the Castilians should detect and punish false historians by creating an office of censor modeled on the Roman censorship.⁽³¹⁾ Guzmán never doubts that contemporary Castilians were equal to the ancient Romans as warriors, but he thinks the Romans far superior as historians. His preference for Roman historians was proverbial, and his imitator during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, Hernando del Pulgar, said: "The noble caballero Fernán Pérez de Guzmán was right when be said that in order for writing to be good and true, the knights should be Castilians and those who describe their deeds should be Romans."⁽³²⁾ He regarded his own age as a period of decline from the Roman past just as he regarded the reign of Juan II as a decline from the golden age of Fernando de Antequera. He has little sense of anachronism and makes no attempt to place Roman institutions in their historical context.

In his approach to literature and to the past, he presents two apparently contradictory attitudes: he uses literature historiographically, and he uses the distant past ahistorically. This paradox is just one source of the many tensions in Generaciones. Guzmán's tolerance of paradox and ability to sustain unresolved tension are his most interesting characteristics as a political figure; and his apology, with all its contradictions and ambiguities in form, style, and content, is a uniquely apt reflection of his political career.

In politics and literature, Guzmán was overshadowed by his younger [93] cousin, the marquis of Santillana (1398-1458).⁽³³⁾ Santillana absorbed many of the interests and attitudes of Ayala and Guzmán, but his contact with the literature of other countries carne through Florence as well as Avignon. His education, in his grandmother's household in Carrión de los Condes (Burgos), appears to have been unusually provincial. Much of his reading seems to have been in the Galician-Portuguese cancioneros and in even more parochial traditions, such as the Proverbs of Sem Tob de Carrión and popular poetry.

His interest in the classics and in Florentine letters was awakened in 1414 when, at the age of sixteen, he participated in the poetry readings at the coronation of Fernando de Antequera as king of Aragon. There he came to admire the erudition of Enrique de Villena, and soon afterward be asked Villena to translate Dante's Divine Comedy into Castilian. Villena obliged, also writing a treatise on the art of poetry; and these two works had a lifelong influence on Santillana's literary production.⁽³⁴⁾

Santillana's literary interests were further encouraged by his close political associations with Guzmán and with don Alfonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos, who gained a great reputation for erudition both as a participant at the Council of Basle and as a correspondent of Leonardo Bruni.⁽³⁵⁾ Santillana surrounded himself with men trained in Italy, employing them in his household as translators, researchers, secretaries, and chaplains. He proudly commissioned the flrst Castilian translations of Vergil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Seneca's tragedies. He admired Giotto and Bruni, read and annotated Dante throughout his life, and wrote the first Castilian sonnets in imitation of Petrarch. His cousin, Gómez Manrique, in fact, compared him to the Florentines:

Por cierto no fué Boecio
ni Leonardo de Arecio
en prosa mas elegante;
pues en los metros el Dante
ant'él se mostrara necio.⁽³⁶⁾

[94] Like Guzmán, Santillana reacted to the political chaos of his own time by idealizing the past -- especially the period of the regency and the earliest Trastámara. Urging a return to the integrity and good customs of the past, he became preoccupied with his family's past glories and tried to perpetuate their memory in many small but significant ways. He named all his children after heroic ancestors; and his military actions exhibited an anachronistic and quixotic gallantry, as though he were deliberately imitating the heroes of Nájera, Aljubarrota, and Antequera.

Santillana was more optimistic about human potential than Guzmán and placed greater emphasis on the direct responses between individuals. These attitudes can probably be attributed to the fact that Santillana's political career was successful. The conflicts he experienced were resolved to his material advantage if not to his intellectual or ethical satisfaction.

Whereas Guzmán's innovation lay in adapting literary forms to history, Santillana's lay in applying history to literary forms. Shortly before 1449 at the request of the constable of Portugal, Santillana collected the poetry he had written throughout his life in one volume.⁽³⁷⁾ The letter that serves as a preface to this collection is the first major example of Spanish literary history and criticism. In it Santillana describes not only the various forms of poetry but also the dissemination of poetry from one language to another and its historical development over a long period of time. He suggests that the tercio rimo, for example, was spread from Italy to southern France thence into the Iberian peninsula during the fourteenth century. In tracing the development of Latin poetry, he jumps from the ancient Romans to Petrarch, explaining only: "Let us leave behind ancient histories and come closer to our own times." He is at a loss to describe the poetry of the early Middle Ages, ascribing to that period the transferral of poetic development from Latin to the Romance languages but claiming that it would be too difficult to trace the stages by which this transformation took place.

He knows of the poetry of Alfonso el Sabio only by hearsay but knows at first hand a number of poems from the fourteenth cerntury and distinguishes between the forms popular then and those most commonly used in his own day. Santillana was proud of his family's rule in developing contemporary poetic forms. He describes the work of about fifteen Castilian poets, of whom five are his relatives: Pedro González de Mendoza, "my grandfather"; Pero Vélez de Guevara, "my uncle"; Fernán Pérez de Guzmán "my uncle"; and the duke of Arjona, don Fadrique, "my lord and my brother." Santillana's admiration for [95] the classical authors was as great as Guzmán's, but he had a more profound sense of the historical distance between the ancient and modern worlds. He attempted imitations of foreign contemporaries rather than of the ancients, but he saw himself and his family as part of a Castilian achievement that in its sophistication and beauty could be compared to classical poetry.

Santillana's innovation lies in his historical perspective. His letter for the edification of a young prince is of special significance because he assumed that an art forrn is best understood through a study of its historical development. He also believed that in pursuing the historical approach he was following the example of the ancient Stoics.⁽³⁸⁾ In this approach, in his attempt to model his methods on those of the ancients, and in his sense of the distance separating the ancient and modern worlds, Santillana resembles both his contemporaries in Renaissance Italy and his predecessors in the Castilian Renaissance: his great-uncle, Ayala, and his cousin, Guzmán.

Ayala, Guzmán, and Santillana took the same historical and rhetorical approaches both to describe their secular careers as politicians and poets and to accommodate religion. Ayala and Guzmán were directly, if unsuccessfully, involved in Castilian efforts to resolve the Schism. Guzmán and Santillana were intimately bound to the career of the converso bishop Alfonso de Cartagena, Castile's principal spokesman at the Council of Basle. One of their relatives, Nuño de Guzmán, was present at the Council of Florence. All three men were deeply involved in and troubled by the ecclesiological problems of the Schism and the councils. They were also drawn by inclination and family ties to the Jeronimite Order and its emphasis on the Devotio Moderna.

The religious attitudes of the Mendoza family show marked similarities and contrasts to those of the Florentine humanists. The art commissioned by the Mendoza does not reflect that emotional involvement with the Nativity and the Passion characteristic of early Italian Renaissance painting. The famous retablo painted by Jorge el Inglés for Santillana and his wife depicts the donors at prayer within their own household with a group of angels singing above. Instead of the popular saints or scenes from the life of Christ, the base of the retablo contains the portraits of four fathers of the church.⁽³⁹⁾

The libraries of Guzmán and Santillana also indicate an admiration for patristic erudition and pious devotion. Guzmán's library contained a copy of Sallust (dedicated to him by the translator, his cousin Vasco de Guzmán) as well as the usual Castilian range of selections from the classics -- Lucan, Valerius Maximus, Pliny, Seneca, Livy, the "Phaedo of [96] Plato," and Vegetius's De Re Veterinaria -- and Castilian chronicles and customary law.⁽⁴⁰⁾ The only religious work in Guzmán's library was a devotional treatise on the Ten Commandments attributed to his ancestor, cardinal Pedro Gómez Barroso.

Santillana's library was much richer than Guzmán's not only in quantity but also in works by contemporary authors, both Castilian and Italian.⁽⁴¹⁾ For a few years, Santillana had a young relative in Florence, Nuño de Guzmán, who had run afoul of his father and fled Castile to make his fortune in Italy.⁽⁴²⁾ On Santilliana's orders, Nuño bought books, commissioned copies and translations, and kept Santillana informed of Florentine intellectual affairs. He was in a particularly good position to do all of these, being on friendly terms with Gianozzo Manetti, Pier Candido Decembri, and Leonardo Bruni. Santillana wanted specific classical and contemporary works, and his taste in contemporary Italian authors was impeccably Renaissance: Petrarch, Salutati, and Bruni were his favorites.

Perhaps Santillana's greatest departure from Castilian tradition lay in his collection of church fathers, a new enthusiasm in Florence after the council there. He had copies of Augustine, Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Basil, Ambrose, Gregory, and Jerome, in translations by George of Trebizond, cardinal Bessarion, and Ambrogio Traversari. There is no evidence that Ayala, Guzmán, or Santillana read the apocryphal stories of Christ's childhood that were popular elsewhere; and neither Guzmán nor Santillana possessed a single work of medieval theology.

There is, as we would expect, a great contrast between these libraries and those of the letrados, for both were shaped to some extent by the professions of their owners. Apart from the usual pious works and selections from the classics common to fifteenth-century libraries, letrado collections were made up of canon and civil law and occasionally of works on theology. The libraries of the military aristocracy contain redactions of customary law and manuals of hunting, agriculture, horse breeding, chess, war, and other caballero concerns.⁽⁴³⁾ The libraries of Guzmán and Santillana also reveal the great gulf in taste that separated them from other aristocratic families personally affected neither by the events at Nájera nor by Ayala's Crónica del Rey don Pedro.

One of the most famous libraries of the century, that of the counts of Benavente, was inventoried about 1455.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Perhaps the Benavente should not be considered typical of the Castilian nobility. They were a Portuguese family, the Pimentel, who supported Castilian claims to the Portuguese throne during the reign of Juan I and immigrated to Castile where they were granted their noble title by Enrique III. The [97] counts of Benavente, however, quickly adapted to Castilian culture and became famous in fifteenth-century Castile as poets and men of letters. Part of their reputation rested on their library, which reflects the taste of both the counts of Benavente and their Castilian admirers, educated but not particularly aware of the Renaissance. The collection, some 120 titles, is made up of the usual pious works, manuals, chronicles, and excerpts from the classics. The most elaborately bound item -- and obviously the pride of the collection -- was a copy of Seneca that the count commissioned from a manuscript lent him by the king. The several medieval encyclopedias and most of the Latin classics could have originated in Spain or Avignon. There are two works by Boccaccio but none by Petrarch. Only one book can reasonably be attributed to fifteenth-century Florence: a "book by Leonardo" was probably Leonardo Bruni's treatise on nobility. The Benavente taste in religious books reflected popular taste in northern Europe rather than the religious enthusiasms of Florence. There are no selections from the church fathers, but two copies of the Vita Christi. The greatest number of works by a single author are those of the thirteenth-century religious philosopher, Ramón Llull.

Perhaps the greatest contrast between Benavente's taste and Santillana's can be seen in their selections from medieval encyclopedic works. The counts of Benavente had a copy of the massive medieval encyclopedia, Proprietatibus Rerum, compiled by Bartholomeus Anglicus. Santillana had the moralization of this work by Berçuire, Reductorium Moralis, and of this only the volume devoted to Ovid. Although the two libraries were collected during the same period, Santillana's makes Benavente's look provincial and medieval. Santillana did not order books from Italy or Avignon by the pound: he did not passively receive books that happened to be renaissance because of the taste of Florentine booksellers and merchants. Santillana was predisposed to Florentine humanism by his family's tradition, and his collection reflects a deliberate and well-informed selection.

Most of the Mendoza's writing about religious subjects consists of poetry on the lives of saints or the miracles of the Virgin. There are long moralizing poems on such themes as the seven mortal sins and short lyric poems dedicated to the Virgin. They do not write about the Nativity or the life of Christ, and they do not engage in theological speculation. Ayala, in fact, was noted for his active opposition to theological speculation. Sometime before 1404, the poet, Ferrán Sánchez Calavera, posed the question of Free Will as the subject of a poetic debate to Ayala and several other "very learned scholars of this kingdom."⁽⁴⁵⁾[98] Of the seven poets who responded, four accepted its validity entirely and arrived at conclusions by citing authorities or presenting theological arguments. The Muslim physician to Santillana's father replied that although the question had a reasonable and just solution it was beyond the comprehension of man. Gonzalo Martínez de Medina, a supporter of the Jeronimite Order and the Devotio Moderna, expressed a distrust of speculation in confronting the mystery of predestination, appealing to the authority of the Bible but not to the decretals or theologians. Ayala rejected the validity of the inquiry entirely on the grounds that man is incapable of understanding the mysteries of revelation and must humbly surrender to God's will without daring to speculate upon it. He cites no authorities except his own earlier poetry, and be offers no arguments. Like Petrarch, his fellow student in Avignon, Ayala had developed a sense "of the immensity and inscrutable power and mercy of God" and a concomitant skepticism about man's ability to understand God and His works through manmade systems such as theology or natural philosophy.⁽⁴⁶⁾

Ayala's extreme distrust of rationality in religion was complemented by the devotionalism of Guzmán's religious essays. As usual, Guzmán's standards are nonsystematic but very high. His essay on the ideal bishop favors the exemplary life over theological knowledge. He expects the bishop to

illustrate and elucidate the office and, like a star, enlighten his region and province, and thus, as it is written in the law, wherever be may go, purify and cleanse with the purity and integrity of his life... and have more authority with the virtue of his heart than with the power of the staff.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Almsgiving is very meritorious, as your grace knows, but some use it and practice it because they are of a naturally free and liberal condition; others fasting, because they are naturally abstemious; some chastity, because they are by nature cold; many silence, either because they do not know how to speak well, or because they are silenced from speaking; others pilgrimages, out of a desire to see foreign lands and nations; and some even listening to sermons, more for the sweetness of the eloquence than for the devotion or edification contained in them. Likewise for other good works, which your grace will understand and [99] perceive better. But to very attentive prayer, I believe that there is no motive or inclination except faith and devotion.⁽⁴⁸⁾

Santillana is noted for his abundant use of classical allusion to express his faith. His references to the classics seem self-conscious and strained, but be seems unaware of his own assumption that poetic allegory serves to bridge the gap between mythology and revelation. He often unselfconsciously identifies classical erudition with poetic inspiration and both of these with Christian faith.⁽⁴⁹⁾

Ayala's rejection of a theological approach to religious questions, Guzmán's extreme devotionalism, and Santillana's eclecticism are all used in the same way the Florentine humanists used them -- to enconrage a willful surrender to the divine mysteries. They do this by emphasizing the will rather than the intellect, devotional practices rather than rational understanding, and esthetic impact rather than theological purity.

Since we do not know what the religious attitudes of Castile had been in previous centuries, it is impossible to determine the degree to which the Mendoza's attitudes in the fifteenth century were a departure from earlier norms. As we shall see, don Alfonso de Cartagena and his students were becoming interested in theology in the fifteenth century, but the Mendoza remained either oblivious or hostile to it. Like their Florentine contemporaries, they looked to the ancient church rather than to medieval theologians for religious erudition.

Their attitudes towards Jews, Muslims, and conversos were shaped by a common assumption that standards of behavior, knowledge, and esthetics are universal and independent of religion. Throughout his four chronicles, Ayala uses the Jewish and Muslim calendars as consistently and comfortably as the Christian. He often places his own views in the mouths of Muslims, to whom he attributes a high degree of political and moral wisdom. He also presents an extensive account of a Jewish financier, who successfully reformed the tax collection system of king Pedro and increased the royal treasury, but was accused of abuses arising frorn cupidity and executed. Ayala uses this incident to draw a parallel with king Pedro, whom be also accuses of cupidity and whose fortune be describes in terms parallel to that of the Jew. Ayala here applies a single standard to the two men despite their different religions. Santillana displays this same attitude, though more self-consciously, when he [100] praises and quotes the poetic proverbs of Sem Tob de Carrión: "Proverbs are not less good because they are said by a Jew."⁽⁵⁰⁾

Despite popular attacks on conversos that became increasingly frequent during their lifetimes, Guzmán and Santillana remained completely accepting toward them. Both considered themselves close friends, political allies, and intellectual colleagues of don Alfonso de Cartagena. In a lengthy digression from his laudatory sketch of don Alfonso's father, don Pablo de Santa María, Guzmán passionately defends the good faith and nobility of conversos, using historical and contemporary examples to support his cause and criticizing the rigidity and lack of discrimination of those who attacked the good faith of all conversos on racial grounds.⁽⁵¹⁾

In their approach to religious matters, these three authors neglect or reject the efficacy of the intellectual or authoritative approaches. They are concerned with piety and faith rather than theology or works, attempting to stimulate both through an appeal to the will and arousing emotions through esthetic and rhetorical devices; and they emphasize the achievement of the desired results rather than the correctness of the means or source.

In both intellectual and religious matters, Ayala, Guzmán, and Santillana used a historical, eclectic, and rhetorical method distinctive to their extended family and to the period from 1390 to 1450. The coincidence of their active involvement in political and religious affairs in a period of civil war, regicide, prolonged dynastic conflict, schism, and conciliarism was probably of the greatest significance in the formation of their attitudes. The number of poets and historians in this extended family, the consistency of their career patterns, the high level of their political and literary activity, and the reappearance of Enriquista names among them over generation after generation all suggest that their intellectual and religious attitudes were formed in the military and political conflicts of the Trastámara civil war and owed their subsequent development to the successful maintenance of the family as both a cultural and social unit.

1. Félix González Olmedo, Diego Ramírez de Villaescusa (1459-1537), fundador del Colegio de Cuenca y autor de los Cuatro diálogos sobre la muerte del príncipe Don Juan, Madrid, 1944, pp. 9-10; Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, Luis Vives y la filosofía del Renacimiento, Madrid, 1903, pp. 376-379, 674-675; Schiff, La Bibliothéque, pp. 143-144, 194-195.

2. Rafael Lapesa, La obra literaria del marqués de Santillana, Madrid, 1957, p. 1.

3. Martinus Cordubensis, "Breve Compendiura Artis Rethorice," Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS. 9309. For an overview of rhetorical texts in Spain, see Faulhaber, Latin Rhetorical Theory.

4. "Demás de lo [el oficio de armas] aver mamado en la leche y desde mi mocedad en la escuela de uno de los mas famosos maestros que como vuestra merced bien sabe ovo en nuestros tiempos que fue mi señor e mi hermano don Rodrigo Manrique maestre de Santiago digno de loable memoria. Alli aprendi a sofrer peligros e trabajos e nescesidades juntamente.... Y esto no podre decir que aya fecho en el estudio de las sciencias ni del arte de la poesia, porque yo estas nunca aprendi nin tove maestro que me las mostrase de lo qual las obras mias dan verdadero testimonio y aun no valgo mas por ello." Gómez Manrique, Cancionero, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia, Madrid, 1885, I, 1-2.

5. Werner Bahner, La linguistíca española del siglo de oro, Madrid, 1966, p. 29.

6. On Castilian diplomatic relations with Avignon, see Suárez Fernández, Castilla, el cisma, y el crisis conciliar, 1378-1440. Other famous Spaniards in Avignon during this period were the Dominican, Nicholas Eymeric (c. 1320-1399), who wrote the Directorium Inquisitorum in Avignon in 1376, and don Pedro Tenorio, who studied under Pietro Baldo in Bologna, became archbishop of Toledo in 1375, and was one of the regents whom Ayala and his allies would outmaneuver during the minority of Enrique III.

7. On Heredia, see Juan Fernández de Heredia, La grant cronica de Espanya, libros 1-111, ed. Regina af Geijerstam, Uppsala, 1964; M. Serrano y Sanz, Vida y escritos de d. Juan Fernández de Heredia, gran maestre de la Orden de San Juan de Jerusalén, Saragosa, 1913; José Vives, Juan Fernández de Heredia, gran maestre de Rodas, Barcelona, 1928; Anthony Luttrell, "Juan Fernández de Heredia at Avignon: 1351-1367," in El Cardenal Albornoz y el Colegio de España, ed. Evelio Verdera y Tuelís, I, 287-316.

8. "El Rey. Castella: pues en cara no sodes con nuestro primogenito el duch, al qual deviades ir segunt sabedes, rogamos vos affectuosament que, todos otros afferes dexados, vengades encontinent a nos, e aquesto por res, si a nos deseades fazer servicio e plazer, no tardedes ne mudedes como nos por grandes e cuytados afferes vos hayamos menester. Dada en Tortosa, dius nuestro siello secreto, a V dias de janero del anyo mccclxx. Otrossi vos rogamos que trayades los libros de Paulus Europius e de Isidorus maior e menor e la suma de las istorias en ffrances, e no res menos los sihuesos e otros canes que hayades por caza de puerco e de ciervo e los munteros vuestros, en manera que vengan cunvos, porque nos queremos fazer la dita caza en estes partes don ha grant avinenteza." Cited by Serrano, Vida, p. 48.

9. B. L. Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati, p. 121. In one letter, Salutati wrote to Heredia, "Inter alia quibus delectaris, est copia cumulatioque librorum, in qua re tanto studio, tantaque cura vacasti, ut iam sit omnibus persuasum frustra librum quaeri quem apud te non contigerit reperiri. Sed inter alios te praecipue dilexisse semper historicos." Cited by Serrano, Vida, p. 48.

10. Ibid., pp. 3-6.

11. "Et otrosí así como el ocio, segund dicho avemos, traye estos dapnos et males al alma, así trae grand dapno al cuerpo, que quando el ome esté ocioso sin fazer exercicio et trabajar con el cuerpo et mudar el ayre, fatíganse los humores et al cuerpo dende le recrecen dolencias et enfermedades... et por esto acordé de trabajar por non estar ocioso de poner en este pequeño libro todo aquello que más cierto fallé." El libro de las aves de caça..., Madrid, 1869, pp. 3-5.

12.

Entre labradores vivo...
pues, entre rústica gente
me fizo vivir fortuna
donde no se trata alguna
obra clara y excelente

13. "A ruego e instancia mía, primero que de otro alguno, se han vulgarizado en este reyno algunos poemas, asy como la Eneyda de Virgilio, el libro mayor de las Transformaciones de Ovidio, las Tragedias de Lucio Aneo Seneca, e muchas otras cosas, en que yo me he deleytado fasta este tiempo e me deleyto, e son asy como on singular reposo a las vexaciones e trabajos que el mundo continuamente trabe, mayormente en esto nuestros reynos." Obras, p. 481.

14. Francisco López Estrada, "La retórica en las 'Generaciones y semblanzas' de Fernán Pérez de Guzmán," Revista de Filología Española, 30 (1946), 310-352; Tate, Prólogo to Generaciones, pp. xiii-xxiii. All page references are to the Tate edition, unless otherwise noted.

15. Ibid., p.4.

16. Ibid., pp. 10, 18, 38.

17. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

18. Ross, "Giovanni Colonna," p. 553.

19. Generaciones, pp. 4, 9, 14, 16, 17, 21, 45.

20. Alfonso X el Sabio, Primera crónica general, Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, Madrid, 1906, V, 3-4.

21. Generaciones, p. 2.

22. "The order of knowing or preaching is not the same as the order of writing down. Two were of the followers of the Lord in the flesh, they saw and heard him. But in the order of writing down these two became the first, i.e. Matthew, and the last, i.e. John. The other two were not of their number, yet are nevertheless followers of the Christ who spoke through them and they are embraced as sons by the first two." Augustine, De Consensu Evangelistarum, I. 2, 11, 11-23. I owe this reference and paraphrase to Professor G. Caspary.

23. Generaciones, pp. 2-3.

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

25. Ibid., pp. 12, 45

26. Ibid., pp. 43-44.

27. Ibid., pp. 12, 13.

28. Ibid., pp. 41-53.

29. Tate, Prólogo to Generaciones, pp. ix-x.

30. Generaciones, p. 15.

31. Ibid., pp. 1-2.

32. Ibid., pp. 10, 18; Tate, Prólogo to Generaciones, p. xvi.

33. "No Spanish poet of his own or of earlier times could compete with him in the vast sweep of his interests; none had given himself over so avidly to the Latin classics (in compendiums or translations) or to the great writers of Italy." Green, Spain and the Western Tradition, III, 9. For Santillana's literary career, see Rafael Lapesa, "La cultura literaria activa en la poesía juvenil de Santillana," Atlante, 2 (1954): 119-125; idem, La obra literaria del marqués de Santillana, Madrid, 1957.

34. Villena's mother, Juana de Castilla, was the sister of Santillana's stepmother, María de Castilla; so by the canonical standards of the time, they were stepbrothers. Villena had an enormous influence on both Aragonese and Castilian writers of the early fifteenth century, both as a translator of the classics and as an author and poet. Enrique de Villena, Arte de Trovar, ed. F. J. Sánchez Cantón, Madrid, 1923; Bahner, La linguística española, pp. 31-35.

35. In a letter requesting a clarification of a passage in Bruni's work on chivalry, Santillana described Alfonso de Cartagena as the greatest historiographer and researcher in Spain. Marqués de Santillana [Iñigo López de Mendoza], Obras, ed. José Amador de los Ríos. Madrid, 1852, p. 487.

36. Cited by Amador de los Ríos, in ibid., p. iii.

37. "Prohemio e carta quel marqués de Santillana envió al condestable de Portugal con las obras suyas," Obras, pp. 1-28.

38. "E asy faciendo la via de los stoycos, los quales con grand diligencia enquirieron el origine e cabsas de las cosas." Ibid., p. 4.

39. The retablo is reproduced in Suárez et al., Los Trastámaras de Castilla y Aragón en el siglo XV, p. 256. Details of the portraits of Santillana and his wife are facing pp. 176, 224.

40. Guzmán's library at Batres was inherited by his great-grandson, Garcilaso de la Vega, father of the poet. An inventory made at the time of Garcilaso's death in 1512 is printed in Tate's edition of the Generaciones, pp. 99-101.

41. See Schiff, La Bibliothèque.

42. See the biographical sketch of Nuño de Guzmán (Nugno Gusmano) in Vespasiano da Bisticci, Renaissance Princes, Popes and Prelates, New York, 1963, pp. 431-434; and Schiff, La Bibliothèque, pp. 449-459.

43. For the contents of several letrado libraries, see the following articles by Josep Rius Serra, reprinted in Miscelánea Mons. José Rius Serra, vol. I: "Bibliotecas medievales españolas," pp. 139-149; idem, "Subsidios para la historia de nuestra cultura," pp. 294-297; idem, "Inventaris episcopals," pp. 375-389; idem, "La llibretia d'un rector de Sovelles," pp. 105-117.

44. The inventory of the Benavente library was published in the eighteenth century by Liciniano Sáez, "Coste de los Libros," in Demostración histórica, pp. 368-379.

45. Juan Alfonso de Baena, Cancionero, ed. José María Azáceta, Madrid, 1966, pp. 1018-1048. See also Joaquín Gimeno Casalduero, "Pero López de Ayala y el cambio poético de Castilla a comienzos del XV," Hispanic Review, 33 (1965), 1-14; Charles F. Fraker, Jr., "Gonçalo Martínez de Medina, the Jerónimos and the Devotio Moderna," Hispanic Review, 34 (1966), 197-217.

46. Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, I, 60. The following generalizations about the religion of the Florentine humanists are based upon recent scholarship in the Italian Renaissance, of which Trinkaus' work is the most cohesive treatment.

47. It is significant that Guzmán took his argument here from Diego de Campos, one of the few medieval scholastics of Spain, but he chose to use Campos' work for a pietist argument rather than a theological one. Generaciones, ed. Domínguez Bordona, pp. 198-220.

48. Ibid., p. 220.

49. Green, citing Santillana's use of Boccaccio's definition of poetry, considers this electicism to be a form of Neoplatonism common to both Spain and Italy. Spain and the Western Tradition, 1, 87-91; III, 8-11. See also Melquíades Andrés Martín, "Evangelismo, humanismo, reforma y observancias en España (1450- 1525)," Missionalis Hispania, 67 (1966), 5-25. For a description of this eclecticism in Renaissance Florence, see Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, II, 683-688.

50. Crónica del rey don Pedro, I, 195-197, 323, 557; Santillana, Obras, p. 14.

51. Generaciones, pp. 29-31.