[203] Alfonso died in 1284; Peter the Great in 1285, less than a decade after his father James the Conqueror; Abû Yûsuf, the founder of Marinid Morocco, in 1286; and Muhammad I, the founder of the realm of Granada, in 1273. Their passing marks the end of an era. The torrent of events, apocalyptic and galvanizing, which had transformed the face of Spain, Occitania, North Africa, Italy with its Hohenstaufen empire, and the western Mediterranean generally, now settled into a broader, more predictable flow. The trajectories through which Spain had moved under Alfonso and James, and which they had significantly altered, would continue -- literary, military, legal, social, religious, administrative, economic, and international, still with the interplay of innovation and tradition. Alfonso remained the father of Castilian culture, as James remained the founder of Catalan-Aragonese greatness. However much the newer times owed to the long reigns of our founding kings, of course, everything would be very different in texture and circumstance, as well as darker with crises and the closing of possibilities. But the two kings' Romanist legal programs continued to spread their roots; the protonationalist consciousness of their respective peoples intensified, with widening expression in art and letters; the conquered regions settled more integrally into each country's life; the urban-commercial elements increasingly prevailed; and both countries remained central to the international affairs of Christendom. The confrontation of basic models within each society also continued, as in some ways it still does everywhere today -- the outer military-commercial and the inner [204] academic-cultural, the activist for justice and pragmatic expansions facing the creative philosopher-king.

The posthumous fate of each monarch was ironic. James, man of blood and indefatigable womanizer into extreme old age, became immediately transmogrified into a saint. The troubadour Matieu de Carsin (Quercy) in his interminable funeral plaint put James, "loved more than all other kings," at the side of St. James as exalter of the cross and Christ "beyond all kings here or overseas," another "Arthur" of Camelot. The chronicler Muntaner, who as a boy had known King James, now decorated the biography of "the Good King" with miracle and providence; James had "loved and feared God above all things," and his neighbor "with justice and truth and mercy." Pious tradition had James cofounding the Mercedarian religious order, after receiving a nocturnal apparition from the Virgin Mary, a visit soon enshrined in art and prayer. The royal Cròniques dels reis d'Aragó, diffused in Latin, Catalan, and Aragonese versions less than a century after James's death, glorified "the virtuous King James" as "father of orphans, defense of widows, support of propertyless barons," who "for the exaltation of the divine name built two thousand churches in the lands he wrested from the Saracens" (not counting monasteries and priories), laying the cornerstones "with his own hand." This excited view culminated later in a project to canonize the old rascal. Rome was not persuaded. An iconography of heroic poses, from Marçal de Sax's spirited battle scene in the fifteenth century to the multiplied Romantic genre paintings of James's more bellicose moments, reinforced through the ages the literary propaganda depicting James as the noble defender of Christendom. ⁽¹⁾

[205] King Alfonso's posthumous prestige also continued high. As Castilian spread, to become the fourth most common maternal or native language in the world, the glory of its most potent "founder" also traveled the globe. As lawgiver, patron of art and music, scientist, literary man, and troubadour, he became and remained a near-legendary figure. A strange shadow, however, soon fell over his person and mighty works. As evidenced in public judgments from Examenis to Mariana, the uneasy suspicion of hubris and impracticality clung to his memory. In the sixteenth century the reasonable Zurita looked away from his archival sources, to savage Alfonso for "arrogance and blasphemy" in pride over his learning, and to pass on the story of how a Byzantine witch had foretold to Alfonso's mother his fall and the loss of his throne. ⁽²⁾  Whatever dark thoughts followed Alfonso into his two tombs, he never suffered the indignity visited upon the corpse of James. During the antimonastic riots of the Carlist wars, a looting mob sacked the royal tombs at Poblet and hauled the mummy of James to the church door to prop it up with rifle and cartridge belt, a mock guard. His people rescued him, and for a long time thereafter kept him in a massive sepulcher in the cathedral at Tarragona, returning him only recently to Poblet.

Kings and their governance are not easily distinguished; the biography of a king becomes a history of his reign. This is reasonable, because a ruler responds to the flow of challenge, [206] crisis, and opportunity; and he must conceal his private persona for better public effect. Each of our kings, however, has also left a portrait of his private self. James's autobiography has already appeared in our account, with its self-image of a warrior Roland, its endearing candor and vanities, its occasional repulsive cruelty, its relentless and childlike pieties, its delight in food and fighting, its manic courage, its greed for each small conquest, its touchy honor and tedious self-exculpation, and its vigorous love of life.

Alfonso too lets the mask slip. His Espéculo and its more evolved later version (including postmortem additions), the Siete partidas, offer quaint essays on such items as "the king as husband" and "the king as father," his "duty toward his relatives" and toward "his people." It elaborates the job requirements for a king, from circumspection (including avoidance of "improper words," and "temperance in eating") to demeanor while walking, standing, sitting, or riding ("he should not stand long, except in church," nor "change his seat frequently," nor "appear very straight or very bent"). It counsels him to "dress with great elegance," "practice patience," desire only the possible, "be eager to learn to read," and (even if he doesn't like it) "be skillful in hunting." Whatever their conventional character, the selection and tone convey Alfonso's personal ideals. Alfonso's enthusiasm for science, especially astronomy, may be a special key to his character; Anthony Cárdenas notes that he devoted more volume of production to this than to any other of his learned avocations. ⁽³⁾

The Cantigas particularly offers glimpses of his appearance and personality. Joseph Snow has studied the "self-conscious references" in the organic pattern of this work, concluding that "the Cantigas of Alfonso may be said to predate the more perfect 'autobiographies' of Dante's Vita nuova and the Canzoniere of Petrarca." ⁽⁴⁾ More obviously, too, Alfonso sat for [207] several portraits among the paintings there, showing himself at different ages. John Keller reckons that of some four hundred of its poems, "twenty-eight are concerned with the king himself or with members of his family," an uncommon phenomenon of personal participation for medieval times. One sequence particularly, which appears only in the Florence codex, is a case of "autobiographical writing," recounting "how King Alfonso fell ill in Victoria" and almost died, until he was cured by imposition of a copy of his Marian Cantigas. The six paintings in that panel show him at stages of his ailment, lying abed but fully crowned and at one point waving away the hot cloths proffered by his physicians. ⁽⁵⁾ "The troubadour king" in visual or less direct form lurks in many episodes of the Cantigas, waiting our discovery.

The chronicle of Alfonso, written after his death but telling most of what we know about his life, has a touching episode from the king's last days. Hurrying back from the interview with the pope at Beaucaire, which had left in ruins his dreams of becoming Holy Roman Emperor, and harassed by news of North African armies sweeping over his realms and recovering his conquests, Alfonso took time to visit the tomb of King James. "Because King James had died a short time before, he [Alfonso] came through Catalonia, and reached the monastery of Santes Creus, where King James lay buried, and he had a Mass of remembrance said for him." ⁽⁶⁾ There are many things wrong with this story: James was not yet dead when Alfonso came by; when James did finally die, he had to be interred provisionally at Valencia because of the Muslim revolt; when he was finally translated to the monastery-pantheon in 1278, the monastery was and is Poblet. Whatever its failed details, the legend of Alfonso's visit holds a central truth. He may even have paid some hurried visit later, or sent a representative to the ceremonious reburial, or at least have founded a [208] requiem of remembrance at Poblet. (His own affections lay in conquered Seville in the south, where his body soon went and in conquered Murcia in the east, where his heart and viscera were installed.) The essential truth of the chronicle's story, however, lies in the closeness between these two men during the last decade of their lives together. The affectionate and respectful memories about Alfonso recorded by James in his memoirs and the incorporation of James in Alfonso's Cantigas paintings both reveal this rapport. The bitter early days were long gone, when James had briefly titled himself "King of Murcia," and when Alfonso had driven his armies toward confrontation at Játiva. The seal of this cordiality had come during Alfonso's two triumphal tours of the frontier kingdom of Valencia in the 12705, as guest of James -- a high old time of tournaments, battles of oranges, theatricals, foreign knights-errant in sporting contests, banquets, pageantry, and parades. These visits were still lively in the memories of James's people a lifetime later, when Muntaner collected them in great detail into his own memoirs.

Another set of celebrations took place throughout Spain precisely seven hundred years after Alfonso's death, in 1984 -- the last, longest, and most elaborate of the exercises in many countries marking this seventh centennial. Seven major cities over Spain, in a great triangle from Madrid to Murcia to Cádiz, coadministered the affair (notably excluding the former realms of Aragon, where James the Conqueror had been thoroughly feted in his own centennial year 1976). Each city and its region serially played host to a traveling international congress of scholars, as a core around which local notables also presented papers. Each provincial and municipal government in turn presented receptions, concerts, and other appropriate events. Near the start of this tour, Ciudad Real (of Alfonsine foundation) offered "Alfonso X trophies" in tennis, riding, and chess, as well as tournaments, street theater, formal plays, a program of major addresses spaced over two months, and a marathon to the battlefield of Alarcos. During the session at Murcia, Alfonso's heart and other intimate organs were formally reinstalled in an improved resting place at [209] the cathedral; and in Seville his Cantigas were sung to an overflow crowd at his tomb.

Unlike other congresses in Alfonso's honor, this did not concentrate on his cultural contributions alone, but gave equal space to the historical side. The sponsors, under the national and regional governments, were a roll call of the cultural and academic entities of Spain. Room was even found on the program for King James. ⁽⁷⁾

It made a fitting close to the series of celebrations our own congress at UCLA had begun. Both kings, who loved pageantry and a party, must have looked down with gratification. After all, they had set patterns and foundations not only for the country hosting the occasion but for the cultures of the visiting participants from the rest of Europe and the New World.

1. Matieu's nine-stanza song is reproduced with comment in Martí de Riquer, Los trovadores: historia literaria i textos, 3 vols. (Barcelona 1975), vol. 1, pp. 1540-44: "quar yll era francx, humils, de paucx motz"; "anc princeps negus melher no fo del nostre temps de sa ni de la mar . . . ni tant aya eyssausada la crotz on Jhesus Cristz fon pauzatz"; "dol aver cum per Artus agron silh de Bretanha"; "ylh era vaysselhs complitz de totz bos ayps"; "e Dieus al-l mes ab Sant Jacme'en companha"; "del rey qu'amava mays que totz les altres reys, e que totz horn s-en planha." Muntaner, Crónica, chaps. 6, 7: "fo nat a ops de crestians"; "gran miracle"; "se dirà 'lo bon rei en Jacme' "; "amà e temé Deus sobre totes coses ... sí ama justícia e veritat e misericòrdia." Cròniques, as Crònica general de Pen III el Cerimoniós, ed. A. J. Soberanas Lleo (Barcelona 1961), and in the contemporary Latin and Aragonese versions as Historia de la Corona de Aragón or Crónica de San Juan de la Peña (Zaragoza 1876), chap. 35; the Latin has "iste virtuosus rex ... pius et mirabilis preliator, pater orphanorum, defensio viduarum, sustentator baronorum exheredatorum"; "construxit iste virtuosus rex bismille ecclesias in terris quas abstulit sarracenis ... in quorum fundamentis propria manu primos posuit lapides."

2. Jerónimo Zurita, Anales de la Corona de Aragón, ed. Angel Canellas López, 8 vols. to date (Zaragoza 1967ff.), lib. 4, chap. 47: "arrogancia y blasfemia"; "tan insolente y arrogante"; "una griega gran hechicera." Mariana's judgment is above in chap, 1, and Examenis's in chap. 4 (see also Craddock there, in n. 41).

3. Siete partidas, in the second partida, various titles through title 15. Cárdenas, "A survey of Scholarship on the Scientific Treatises of Alfonso X, el Sabio," Corónica 11 (1983), p. 231. Alfonso sponsored "at least nineteen such treatises."

4. Snow, "Self-Conscious References and the Organic Narrative Pattern of the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X," in Medieval, Renaissance and Folklore Studies in Honor of John Esten Keller, ed. J. R. Jones (Newark 1980), p. 66.

5. Keller, "Iconography and Literature: Alfonso Himself in Cantiga 209," Hispania 66 (1983), pp. 348-52, with color reproduction of Florentine panel.

6. Crónica de Alfonso X, chap. 66.

7. On both the Alfonsine congress of 1984 and the Jacobine congress of 1976 see my Bibliographical Essay below. Papers involving James in the Alfonsine acta soon to be published include my own on Alfonso and Valencia, and Federico Udina Martorell's on the interaction and friendship between the two men.