We are going to display information on famous people from Toledo. We are going to get to know them in depth and we are going to know the legacy they left in our city. In this space we are going to dedicate to them, from our modest point of view, a small tribute.
«Marañón belonged to five Royal Academies: Medicine, Language, History, Sciences and Fine Arts. One alone is enough to cement the intellectual prestige of a man; so multiply by five. He was also a member of the French Academy and the Royal Society of Medicine of England, an essential springboard to reach the Nobel, which was perhaps the only award he lacked »
Of all the very respectable residents of this Toledo street in Santo Tomé, there are two that stand out above the rest; and I am sure that I will not offend anyone with these words if I clarify that one is the wooden image of Christ, and the other is the bronze effigy of Don Gregorio Marañón.
Limiting myself to the field of the human – that for the divine, the Church has doctors – and being, as in so many other subjects, also a layman in Medicine, I am not going to highlight the importance of Marañón as a doctor and as a researcher. These lines are going to address only some of his personal aspects, no less relevant than the strictly scientific ones.
Although born in Madrid in 1887, Marañón became, like El Greco, like Juanelo, a native of Toledo. In his cigarral “Los Dolores” he spent all the time that his many occupations allowed him, and his splendid book Elogio y nostalgia de Toledo is written from the evocation, in the absence, of Toledo beings and places very loved by him. In the Cigarral de Menores, “in his peace full of past and thought ,” he lived very fruitful hours; and according to his own phrase, in Toledo he felt many times, for long years, that ineffable fullness that is called happiness.
Marañón was, above all, a great worker. Einstein said that genius is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration, that is, sweat; For Marañón, inspiration was also “a consequence of work”, and he affirmed that to rest is to begin to die. And consistent with this idea, he wrote 95 books and 1,615 diverse works including monographs, conferences and conference papers. And always (because Marañón handled our language like few others) with that fluid, clear and simple language that everyone understands and assimilates.
If he was indefatigable as a worker, he was not tired as a traveler either. As a traveler, not as a tourist. «In the trip there is a desire (aesthetic or scientific) but always a desire, and this deep curiosity is lacking in tourism, which is only fleeting to pass and see.» He defined himself as a traveler without a guide and without a watch, who never went through things without a notebook, a camera, and glasses colored with love. «If I love Spain -he wrote- it is not only because I was born in it, but because I have used the hours of most noble desire of my life to go through it inch by inch. Going out on the paths of God, very early in the morning, with dear friends, to see what the day holds… »
And it was not only Spain: «Tomorrow I leave for America: I will be two months in Lima, one in Buenos Aires, two in Costa Rica…» And one of his books bears this dedication: «To Lolita, my companion in my life of travels and on the journey of my life.”
Marañón belonged to five Royal Academies: Medicine, Language, History, Sciences and Fine Arts. One alone is enough to cement the intellectual prestige of a man; so multiply by five. He was also a member of the French Academy and the Royal Society of Medicine in England, an essential springboard to reach the Nobel, which was perhaps the only award he lacked.
In politics he made a short foray out of pure patriotism. After the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, and seeing that King Alfonso XIII intended to continue the error with the soft dictatorship of Berenguer, Ortega y Gasset wrote in El Sol, at the end of 1930, a devastating article in which he stated: «The Monarchy must be destroyed» .
He said it in Latin, as many centuries before he had said Rome from Carthage; but everyone got it.
Shortly after, a group of renowned intellectuals founded the Agrupación al Servicio de la República.
There, together with Ortega, Pérez de Ayala and Machado, was Marañón. And when the Republic was proclaimed, Marañón was a deputy in Cortes. An idea of his work in them is given by a little book that was published under the title of Discursos integras del doctor Marañón en las Cortes Constituyentes de 1931‑1932. It consisted of one hundred pages, all of them blank, except for the last five with a Yes or No on each page: they were Marañón’s responses to the votes he attended. To this malevolent criticism, Marañón responded:
«I have written twenty-two volumes and none makes me as proud as the one that is still unwritten, but which already has a title: Patriotism is knowing how to be in your place» . His place was Medicine and, as Lincoln said, the best thing that can be done at some moments in political life is not to open your mouth…
And in May 1933, the man who had refused an Embassy, the position of Minister and even the offer to form and preside over a Government, the man in whose office the transfer of powers from the Monarchy to the Republic had taken place, resigned from his act of deputy. The disappointment separated him from politics.
Like Ortega, with his famous “It’s not that, it’s not that” , Marañón launched his “No, no, no! (Enough, enough, enough!” Did he renege on his ideas? Some accused him of that, because the trunk carried by the current believes that the tree that remains firm on the bank is going backwards; but he did change his political ideas (” What beautiful was the Republic in times of the Monarchy!”) did not change his moral conduct.
«He only knows the straight paths -he affirmed- who once erred on the crooked ones, and the best execution is perhaps not that of the spotless man, but that of the one who has the scars of rectifications on his soul.»
And he arrived on Saturday, March 26, 1960. That day, Marañón asked his son Gregorio to take him to a place in El Pardo to watch the sunset in Guadarrama from there. On their return they passed by the church of some friars whom he attended, and he asked to stop there. He heard mass and received communion. Then he came to his house and went to bed. And that night, a cerebral thrombosis ended his life.
He rested precisely on a Sunday: the seventh day, like the Creator. And surely he thanked him with this simple prayer from his intimate personal repertoire: «Lord: my wife has been fertile without knowing pain, and I have earned my bread with the sweat of my brow; but work was my greatest joy.»
An illustrious doctor, with whose friendship I honored myself until his death and whose doctoral thesis was directed and sponsored by Dr. Marañón, once wrote to me: «It occurs to me to think that, when Diogenes many centuries ago was looking for the perfect man with a lamp, he did not find him. found for the simple reason that he had not yet been born. That complete man, that fabulous human archetype, was Doctor Marañón.»
«He built the Planetarium for the Emperor, a mechanism that reproduced the movements of the sun, the moon and the planets then known with their conjunctions and orbits… And in this clockwork prodigy Juanelo engraved the famous inscription: Qui sim scies si par opus facere conaberis . ‘You will know who I am if you try to do a similar work’…»
Talking about Juanelo and not using more than one page is a difficult task. You have to abbreviate. But it is necessary to say that his name was Giovanni Torriani and that he was born in Cremona (Italy) the same year that his great protector, Carlos I of Spain, was born. The unclear origin of him has given rise to fantasy to make him the son of two lovers, he a Torriani and she a Visconti.
Two noble Milanese families, but irreconcilable enemies for defending one the cause of the Guelphs, supporters of the Pope, and the other that of the Ghibellines, supporters of the Emperor of Germany, in the harsh struggles that the Pontificate and the Empire sustained in the Middle Ages . Exactly the same as, in Verona, the Capulet and the Montagues from Romeo and Juliet.
Carlos I met him on the occasion of his trip to Bologna to be crowned Emperor; and if the one concentrated in his hand the greatest political power the world has ever known, the other was a watchmaker already famous for his ingenuity and skill. So, fulfilling the biblical phrase that “If you see a skilled man in his profession, he will enter the service of Kings” (Proverbs, 22, 29) Carlos brought him to Spain. Antonia, his wife, stayed in Italy. It is not surprising, then, what the Venetian ambassador said about him: molti disordine con donne.
Juanelo (the name in which the Italian relative Giovannello was given Spanish) built the Planetarium for the Emperor, a mechanism that reproduced the movements of the sun, the moon and the planets then known with their conjunctions and orbits, including the eccentric of Mercury, and that adjusted exactly the orbit of the Earth to its annual journey and to their respective times the others, up to 29 years and 167 days of that of Saturn.
And in this clockwork prodigy Juanelo engraved the famous inscription: Qui sim scies si par opus facere conaberis. “You will know who I am if you try to do a similar work.” Juanelo accompanied César until the end of Yuste, and then went to the service of Felipe II. For this he built the famous Cristalino, a clock with its 180 cogwheels carved in rock crystal. And in 1565 Juanelo was commissioned to bring the water up to the Alcazar of Toledo, to be distributed from there to the entire city.
A city with centuries-old water supply problems, which the Romans solved with an aqueduct, the Arabs with cisterns (and they say with a gigantic waterwheel) and the Christians by dint of water carriers. Of whose abundance, by the way, Gracíán echoes speaking of vulgar trades in Crisis V of El Criticón: “there are more water carriers here than in Toledo…” And Juanelo, of course, raised the water to Toledo.
It took four years. In 1569 the artifice began to work, raising 1,700 pitchers of 4 azumbres daily, much more than what was stipulated. But Juanelo, who had done the work at his expense and on the condition that he would only get paid if his device worked, did not get paid when the artifice worked either. The City Council claimed that the water was kept for the consumption of the Alcázar de Toledo and did not reach the neighborhood.
So it was the King who had to pay. But the King, in a matter of money, was even worse than the City Council. Finally, six years later, Juanelo received only a part, on the condition of signing a new agreement by which he had to build another mill, with the same characteristics as the first, for the exclusive use of the city. The second artifice began to work in 1581, but the City Council did not fulfill its promise. And during that time, the loans and the interest raised the ruin of Juanelo to the category of complete.
How was the artifice? Unfortunately, the plans were lost. We know something from the somewhat confusing description of the chronicler Ambrosio de Morales. Two systems (whose analysis is not from this place) have been formulated by scholars: the one with vertical towers, by the American Ladislao Retti, and the one with the inclined plane, by our neighbor (not only from the city, but also from the neighborhood) Juan Luis Peces, who in 1969 built a model of his system.
But the artifice must have been so ingenious and perfect that it astonished all who saw it, “and even after seeing it it was difficult to understand the smoothness, concert and calm of the movement.” It also amazed Gracián (let’s go back to him), who speaks in his Criticón of the Fountain of Thirst, “famous for its artifice, envy of Juanelo’s” (Crisi VII) and “of the famous artificer who gave court to the Tagus River itself. ” of crystalline waters» (Crisi VIII)
A famous treatise, “The twenty-one books of Juanelo’s mills and machines” , collects all his scientific contributions to hydraulic engineering, from wells, dams, mills and pipelines to boat bridges and fortification works to protect ports from enemy attacks.
Juanelo, with his great mathematical and astronomical knowledge, collaborated in the reform of the calendar made by Gregory XIII. He also collaborated with Juan de Herrera on the project to make the Tagus River navigable from Toledo to Lisbon, and another rooster would sing to us if that work had been carried out. He was the author of many mechanical devices, and soon his fame became a legend, sometimes crazy.
A poorly documented author, whose name I prefer to cover with the pious cloak of silence, says things as bizarre as these: «The inventor had built a wooden android for him to do his errands. Every morning he would wind up his servant and ask her to go with a basket to the Archbishop’s Palace to pick up a loaf of bread and some meat there. » An automaton, then, that not only went up and down slopes, turned corners and walked in different directions, but was also endowed with artificial intelligence to understand orders and execute them. Lord, Lord, what fantasies! Because, really, what was that “stick man” ?
«In the middle of the 17th century -says Julio Porres in his Historia de las Calles de Toledo-, people begin to talk about a Stick Man whose exact location is not specified, without a doubt as an object known by all and so famous that it is not necessary describe it.” According to some, it was a stafermo, a wooden man with crossed arms that was used in certain popular festivals. In one arm he held a shield, in the other a fair-sized sack of earth. He revolved around a mast, so that if he hit his shield and didn’t walk out alive, the bag of dirt would shake the unskilled player’s back.
Finally – Porrres continues -, Ramírez de Arellano clarified through documentation that it was a human figure (it goes without saying that it was made of wood) with a piggy bank to collect the alms destined for the Hospital del Nuncio Viejo. We see that the Legend of the Automaton who walked the street named after him daily to collect food from the artisan at the Archbishop’s Palace -who say that he lived on that street, which is not accurate either- lacks foundation.
But the fame of the genius watchmaker endured, and if the doll was striking or had any movement, it is not surprising that its authorship was attributed to him. For the rest, Juanelo died at the end of the 16th century; People began to talk about the Stick Man in the middle of the 17th century. They weren’t even contemporaries.
Of the mill, today, nothing remains. Four large granite columns over eleven meters high, which were to form part of it, remained in the Orgaz quarries. If you go to the Valley of the Fallen, you will see them at the entrance. And it is said, as an anecdote, that it was necessary to pay 2,500 pesetas of the time to “convince” the drivers of the gigantic trucks that transported them. They feared that the Alcántara Bridge would collapse when passing over it with such a load.
The artifice worked for seventy years: until 1639. Its author died on Thursday, June 13, 1585, at six in the morning, alone, poor and forgotten. Like Cervantes, like Columbus, like so many other geniuses, from our land or from others, to whom Spain paid late, badly or never, if not with disdain or ingratitude, the fame they added to its history.
«According to Unamuno in his Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, ‘the first wrong righted by our knight, and like all the others he straightened, remains crooked’. Because poor Tolosa would continue on her way to Seville in the company of the muleteers, and she would also continue, to her misfortune, subjected to the humiliating condition of sinking the lust of others ».
I believe that after four centuries, everything has already been said about Don Quixote. I read the other day that the famous bullfighter Francisco Montes Paquiro (1805-1851) had the holy patience to count, while he was convalescing from being shot, the times the names of Don Quixote and Sancho appeared in the work. The result, according to Paquiro, was amazing: exactly 2,168 times each. 2,168 times “Don Quixote” , 2,168 times “Sancho” (1).
After this, finding unexplored aspects or unpublished observations seems to me to be a task that exceeds the serious limitations of my limited knowledge, and an undertaking that, at least for my part, seems inevitably doomed to failure.
Thus, and rejecting all attempts at novelties, I would like to comment on some passages from Don Quixote related to Toledo or the people of Toledo. For example, that of chapter III (in which Don Quixote is knighted) when a woman from Toledo, La Tolosa, “daughter of a cobbler from Toledo who lived in the shops of Sancho Bienaya” and “a young woman of the so-called party » , he girdles his sword and asks God to give him good luck in battles, and Don Quixote begs him to put himself on Don Quixote and henceforth call himself Doña Tolosa.
And this was, according to Unamuno in his Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, “the first wrong righted by our knight, and like all the others he straightened, it remains crooked.” Because poor Tolosa would continue on her way to Seville in the company of the muleteers, and she would also continue, to her misfortune, subjected to the humiliating condition of a sinkhole for the lust of others.
Or the one in Chapter IV, when Don Quixote stumbles across some Toledo merchants who were going to buy silk from Murcia, silk that would be woven on the 5,500 looms that were in Toledo at that time (1620). A 1663 census brought the number up to 9,561, but damage caused by Archduke Charles’s troops in the War of Succession reduced that number to 70 in 1715.
To remedy these ills, they thought of rebuilding the textile industry, and in order to avoid having to buy silk in Murcia, a picturesque project of planting mulberry trees was devised: 100 here, 150 there, 50 a little further, until completing, one by one, the amount of 1,286,150 mulberry trees that were considered necessary for the recovery of the silk industry. Project that turned out to be unrealizable because it was crazy, and that can be seen in detail in the work of Martín Gamero… Los cigarrales de Toledo.
Or the very famous chapter IX, when Cervantes finds in the Toledo Alcaná the folder with the History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian. El Alcaná was (according to Covarrubias in his Treasure of the Castilian Language of 1611) “a Street in Toledo, all of dealers’ shops” , which occupied at that time what is now Calle de las Cordonerías, from the Ropería to Cuatro Streets (Julio Porres: History of the Streets of Toledo); And such was Cervantes’s delight at the find, that he looked for a Moorish to translate it from Arabic to Spanish, and to facilitate the business “I brought him to my house, where in little more than a month and a half he translated it all for me.” Obviously, the Moorish is pure fiction; but not the house.
What could that be? Possibly one of his mother-in-law. When Cervantes was married to Doña Catalina Salazar, a neighbor of Esquivias, it did not take long for her mother to give him a general power of attorney to “request, receive and collect whatever amounts are owed to me for the income of the goods that belong to me in said place of Esquivias and in the city of Toledo» .
And among these assets was -documentally known- a house that, with the number 35, existed on Calle del Barco. Cervantes was the administrator of those assets and he would come to collect his rents, and perhaps (even having rented it) he would reserve in it -as his deceased father-in-law did- ” a bed to settle in when he went to said city to negotiate what he fulfilled.”
More memories of Toledo? Yes. For example, on the return trip to his village (First Part, Chapter LXVIII) the caged Don Quixote meets a Toledo canon, who cites, among other famous names for his bravery, a Garcilaso from Toledo; In Chapter I of the Second Part, the Priest and the Barber go to visit his friend and find him “sitting on the bed, dressed in a green baize robe, with a red Toledo bonnet…”
Covarrubias speaks of the wool and needle caps that were made in Toledo and sold in large quantities outside of Spain, and from Toledo would be the greasy red bonnet, property of the innkeeper, which is mentioned in Chapter XXXV of the First Part. in the battle of the wine skins. In a Memorial that was presented to King Felipe IV around the year 1617, a very sad picture was made of the state the city was in, and among many other ruins there was: «a thick treatment of bone shop that was in it, that it was provided all of Africa and in which a large number of people were entertained and sustained, is almost lost and ruined.»
The Galiana Palace, the Hospital del Nuncio, ” the canons of Toledo who spoke with the caged Don Quixote, the Toledo apothecary who spoke like a goldfinch” … Men and places in our city, and others that space limitations leave in the inkwell, but not forgotten.
And above all, I wanted to talk about Chapter XIX of the Second Part, when Don Quixote calls Sancho a prevaricator of good language and the latter answers him that “there is no reason to force the Sayagués to speak like a Toledan, and there may be Toledans who do not cut them in the air in this polished speaking.»
Sayago is a region of Zamora, close to the border with Portugal, whose speech, in the time of Cervantes, was the prototype of the coarse, rude and coarse language, because, according to Covarrubias, “those from Sayago were very rude “ ; and even today, the Dictionary defines the term sayagués as “coarse, uncultivated and rustic” , although it points out that it is an obsolete word. On the contrary, the speech of Toledo, the imperial language, was held as a model of correctness and purity.
Already in the time of the Catholic Monarchs -according to the doctor Francisco López de Villalobos- those of Toledo boasted of the perfection of their speech, and doctor Francisco Pisa, a Toledo native and contemporary of Cervantes, recounts that King Alfonso X ordered that “if there were difference in the understanding of some Castilian word, that they resort to Toledo as a guide to the Castilian language, because our language has more perfection in it than elsewhere.» Lope also echoed this in Amar without knowing who:
“They say that a law establishes
that if by any chance it is raised
on a word porfia
of the Spanish language,
the one who is from Toledo will judge it”
Toledo was then “civitas regia, head of Spain and center and heart of them” , according to the response given by Luis Hurtado de Mendoza, priest of the parish of San Vicente, to the survey ordered by
Felipe II (the famous Relations). that affected all the populations of the Kingdom. And Luis Hurtado adds:
«It is happiness to be a well-born man, of pleasant proportions, of perfect composition, of free parents, of noble family and of true religion; live in a safe town, among loyal people, a peaceful crowd and a discreet congregation; and finally, under a just and charitable king . Well, all these conditions have the blessed children of this city of Toledo, thus verifying the proverb or sentence of the old philosophy that says: ” To whom God wanted well, in Toledo he gave him to eat . ” They are their natives of delicate understanding, discreet language, honest dress, noble countenance, and for the constancy of the men and the beauty and majesty of the women, wherever they go they are respected.
«And his language is the most cut and polished that is spoken in Castilian, and his pronunciation is very clear and sonorous with integrity and compliance with letters, so that what he speaks writes, and what he writes speaks.»
This was also the opinion of the brilliant Baltasar Gracián (who was also among us in 1617, studying Letters and Philosophy) when in Crisis X of Part I of El Criticón he speaks of that exalted Queen, Isabella the Catholic, who confessed « that she never felt foolish except in Toledo» and calls our city «workshop of discretion, school of good speech; that in other places they have their wits in their hands, and here in their beaks, and where a woman says more in a word than in Athens a philosopher in a whole book», or when in Crisis XIII of Part II he sends « the good men to Castile, the brave to Extremadura and La Mancha, the beautiful women to Granada, the discreet to Toledo…»
«Toledo -says Clemencín in his Commentaries-, has conserved, and rightly so, until our days (the days of Clemencín, who lived between 1755 and 1834) the credit of good language, and in my childhood I have heard talk of foreigners who they had preferred to come to Toledo to learn Spanish.»
And Marañón, in his Elogio y nostalgia de Toledo, says, speaking of Garcilaso, that «the great poet also had clean and noisy speech about Toledo. Even today -he writes in 1940- the talk of the people of Toledo who have not been harmed by the unfortunate proximity of Madrid sounds like water between stones… »
But alas! that after reading so many beautiful words a disturbing doubt assails me. What remains of all that? The answer, bleak and sad with few exceptions, is found in our streets, in our gatherings, in our fields, schools, markets and workshops….
Does this have a remedy? Don’t know. I don’t think there is any Fierabrás balm that will solve it overnight; but I think something would be advanced if people watched less television and read more. And perhaps a good occasion to start doing so would be this IV Centenary of Don Quixote, and perhaps the best tribute that we could pay to Cervantes in it is to read his immortal work, whose philosophical scope equals, if not exceeds, the charm of the invention and style.
In the laughter of Dickens, in that of Eça de Queiroz, the ancient laughter of Cervantes resonates, just like his tenderness and melancholy in the novels of Pérez Galdós and in the poems of exile by Luis Cernuda. Faulkner says that he read Don Quixote every year. On the ship that took him from the horrible Europe of Nazism to his exile in the United States, Thomas Mann consoled himself by reading Don Quixote…
Among six billion human beings – I say this many times – there are forty million privileged people who can read Don Quixote in its original language, without translations that, no matter how faithful they are, will never capture all the subtleties and ironies of our language.
«Other masterpieces -says the academic Antonio Muñoz Molina- intimidate us. Reading Don Quixote seems to provoke us only gratitude: in a deep and subtle way it makes us better, and it always accompanies us even if we don’t realize it.”
So, from today, let’s start to be better. And more cults. Now that it has been in the world for four hundred years, let’s begin today to read or reread Don Quixote.
(1).- The figures are true only as far as Sancho is concerned, not so with regard to the hidalgo from La Mancha who surpasses him in forty-two nominations, that is, he appears 2,210 times. These data belong to the edition of Don Quixote by Clemencín, without taking into account the prologues or the additions to the first part of 1605. If we count the edition that is considered definitive today, that of the Cervantes Institute, Don Quixote appears named in the entire work 2,240 times and Sancho 2,187.
«And here he held, in 1480, the most important Cortes of his reign. Because? Because the Queen loved Toledo, and she had such a good opinion of the people of Toledo that she said, according to Gracián in Crisi X of El Criticón ‘that she was never foolish except in this office of people’… »
The state of Castile in the times of Isabella’s half-brother, Henry IV the Impotent, was pitiful: rebellious nobles, who mocked the king; the Reconquista, practically paralyzed since San Fernando; Juana la Beltraneja, daughter of the queen and Don Beltrán de la Cueva, as heir to the crown; the royal treasury, in the last… “All of Castile suffers full of much greed and robbery, and many wars and factions and partialities, and many thieves and robbers and ruffians and matadors and gamblers…” says the chronicler Andrés Bernáldez .
The evil came from afar: in 1325, the royal chronicle of Alfonso XI recounted that «all the rich men and the knights lived off the robberies they committed on earth; and in no part of the kingdom was justice done with the right; and things got to such a state, that even if they found dead men along the roads, they did not find it strange…»
A meticulous researcher, following the detailed royal chronicles, has counted the days of Elizabeth’s stay, being queen, in different places: Córdoba, her residence during the war in Granada, 835 days; Medina, 811; Grenada, 747; Madrid, 657; Seville, 589; Segovia, 267… The list does not include Toledo; and yet, the Queen chose our city to build the temple of San Juan de los Reyes in thanksgiving for the victory of Toro against the Portuguese (1476) that definitively gave him the crown of Castile.
The first project, by Mendo Jahenet, was not to his liking: “Have you done this nothing to me here?” and he entrusted the work to Juan Guas.
And here he celebrated, in 1480, the most important Cortes of his reign. Because? Because the Queen loved Toledo, and she had such a good opinion of the people of Toledo that she said, according to Gracián in Crisis X of El Criticón ” That she was never foolish except in this office of people . ”
And for the prestige of Cardinal Mendoza, Archbishop of Toledo and determined supporter of his, to incline in favor of the Kings dubious wills of the attorneys; and for the desire to tie the new monarchy that would be born in Toledo with the old Visigothic tradition. The Italian Baltasar de Castiglione, author of El Cortesano, was in Toledo as ambassador and points out that «unless all the Spaniards have agreed to lie, Queen Isabella invented a divine way of governing in the Cortes of Toledo. »
What was Queen Elizabeth like? «She had blue eyes, very happy long eyelashes, about great honesty and measure; teeth small and white, laughter of which she was very temperate, and seldom and seldom was she seen to laugh as youthful age is wont to do.” Lucio Marineo Sículo, one of the best humanists of his time (whom she brought with her from Sicily) describes her as “upright in justice and inseparable from her, obsequious, splendid, liberal and magnanimous”, although for Fernando del Pulgar her only fault it was that “she paid little for her services, and for this reason they said that she was not very generous.”
The Milanese Pedro Martire d’Anghiera, who in Spain we call Pedro Mártir de Anglería, author of the Decades of the New World, described her as “a stronger woman than a strong man, more constant than any human soul, a wonderful example of honesty and modesty, similar to which Nature never made another woman” (epistle 6) and declared herself “so imprisoned in the serenity of her face, that I do not feel the slightest nostalgia for my homeland” (epistle 14). The compliments are countless.
He has also had some critics for the establishment of the Inquisition; but the historical facts must be situated in their time. Elizabeth established the Inquisition at the time when the head of Thomas More, one of the most brilliant in England, rolled under the ax of its King Henry VIII or the Calvinists burned Michael Servetus in Geneva. As for the American colonization, the relentless defender of the Indians, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, was amazed at “the holy zeal, intense care, continuous sigh of the said lady, very high Queen, in favor of these people and for the conservation and salvation of them.” » . There are the Laws of the Indies. Regarding the religious orders.
«It was an old thought of the monarchs -writes Luys Santa Marina-, to bring to the cloisters the spirit of order and justice that they had instilled in the kingdom, and they requested authorization from the Pope to reform all the monasteries of friars and nuns in their States». The relaxation of customs was such that “there was a lack of good males in the cloisters, if not of good females.”
A bastard son of Fernando V was Archbishop of Zaragoza, and in the chairs of Toledo, Santiago and others, sat Prelates who were accompanied by their natural children. And this even in the tomb: the Archbishop of Toledo, Alonso Carrillo, ordered that he be buried in the presbytery of San Diego de Alcalá next to his son, Don Troilo. Depravity was almost general in some convents whose inhabitants were anything but religious. “I don’t want to specify more,” says a historian, “because it is ungrateful material and nothing edifying.”
The reform was so rigorous that it raised blisters, and complaints reached the Pope. He spoke to the General of the Franciscans, and the result was that a Commissioner of the Order, the Italian Gil Delfini, came to Castile to see what was true in the protests and expose them to the queen.
Father Luis Coloma relates that Fray Gil presented his complaints against the intruding reformer, and even against the queen herself, with such audacity and insolence that Isabel was tempted more than once to silence him and make him leave her presence. He restrained himself, however, out of respect for the priest, and when he finished speaking he told him measuredly:
Healthy was the warning for the friar. He abated his anger, and though bragging a little, he returned to Italy without doing anything of greater substance.
The figure of Isabel de Castilla is inseparably linked to that of Fernando de Aragón. After a romantic journey of the groom disguised as a muleteer, Fernando arrives incognito in Valladolid on October 14, 1469. On the 18th the civil wedding is celebrated; the 19th, the nun. «Each one of the two – Baltasar Gracián will say – was to make a century of gold and a most happy reign; the more we both enter together.” Politics will be governed by the motto of Tanto mounts, mounts both, Isabel and Fernando, about which I can’t resist telling a delicious anecdote.
The Queen used to listen to the chronicles of her reign that Andrés Bernáldez, the priest of Los Palacios, was writing, and one day, upon hearing that “Don Fernando’s troops defeated the Portuguese in the battle of Toro” , she corrected the chronicler.
Bernáldez was silent, but took note. And after a year, while the queen was embroidering in the Seville Alcázar next to the cradle of the newborn Prince Juan, the chronicler read the draft of the birth annotation very seriously: «And on June 30, 1478, an hour and a quarter before At noon, Don Fernando and Doña Isabel gave birth to a son in this Alcazar of Seville.»
They say that Doña Isabel bit her lips to hold back her laughter.
“Together thus united – the chronicles say – they reigned and governed for thirty years, and although in bodies two, in will and union they were only one.” «That time -says Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo- was golden and of justice, and whoever was right was worth it. I have seen that after God took away this holy queen, it is more difficult to negotiate with a secretary’s waiter than with her and her advice. »
The couple had five children: Isabel -buried in the convent of the saint bearing her name in Toledo- who first married Alfonso, son of Juan II, King of Portugal, and another Portuguese man, Manuel I the Fortunate, when she became the widow of the first husband; then the widower was Manuel, and he married María, the fourth daughter of the Catholic Monarchs. The second son was Juan, who married Margarita of Austria, daughter of Emperor Maximilian and sister of Felipe el Hermoso; Juana, the third (baptized in Toledo, they say in the Parish of El Salvador), married Felipe el Hermoso -brother and sister with sister and brother-.
Juan died from so much loving; Juana went mad from so much loving. And at last, Catherine, who first married Prince Arthur of England, and was widowed within a year, married Arthur’s brother, Henry VIII. Then came Anne Boleyn (in my town, the alligator and intriguing woman is still called Nabolena), and Catherine was imprisoned for life in Kimbolton Castle; but for a time, Spanish was spoken at the English court.
(If the traveler arriving at London Victoria Station walks down the broad avenue of Vauxhall Bridge Road, crosses the river and then continues along Kennington Lane, they will arrive at Elephant and Castle. Today it is a bustling London square; in 1501 it was a wasteland to which Prince Arthur came out to receive Catherine, and the place took the name of the Infanta of Castile due to the acclamations and cheers of the Castilian knights who accompanied her. But put the words, strange to them, of the Infanta and Castilla, and they will know why, over time, the name became phonetically corrupted and the place is called today, in English, Elefante y Castillo.)
In 1492, Granada conquered, America discovered, the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon united, Isabel’s political work is finished (Navarre is missing, but Fernando will take care of that) and the famous grammarian Nebrija dedicates these sentences to her: «For the Your Majesty’s industry, work and diligence, the members and pieces of Spain were reduced and adjusted into a body and unity of the kingdom, the form and interlock of which is so ordered that many centuries, injury or time will not be able to break or untie it. »
«In an old house in Toledo, renovated not long ago, we found a tombstone on its façade that says: ‘ The Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Historical Sciences commemorates the third centenary of the death of the great Toledo poet Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla by erecting this tombstone for him. . They killed him in this house on August 30, 1620′. And the questions arise immediately. Who was Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla? Who killed him? Because?”
Not far from this corner, and going down to San Juan de los Reyes along the slope of the Discalced Carmelites, the walker finds a tiny garden bordering the convent and an old house, not long renovated, with a tombstone on its façade:
«The Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Historical Sciences commemorates the third centenary of the death of the great Toledo poet Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla by erecting this tombstone. They killed him in this house on August 30, 1620.”
And the questions arise immediately. Who was Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla? Who killed him? Because?
Read any treatise on Spanish Literature: it will have to be eight or ten volumes in order for you to find in it any reference to the person and work of Medinilla. So take “great poet” with a certain reserve and let’s agree that this is the understandable enthusiasm of the centenary and not an impartial judgment.
All of Medinilla’s work consists of an extensive theological poem (Limpia concepción de la Virgen Nuestra Señora), a baroque and leaden descriptive poem (Description of Buenavista) and other minor compositions in which his sacred conceptism emerges in the form of Christmas carols, romances and glosses.
Our poet was born in Toledo on June 28, 1585. His parents had married on November 25 of the previous year, so you can do the math. His childhood passes between sadness. At five years old he loses his father; at ten, to his grandfather. The family situation was distressing. Collected in the Convent of Santa Úrsula (two hundred steps from here) her two sisters Gracia and Estefanía, the eldest professed when she was barely ten years old; the minor, somewhat later, in 1595. Baltasar was under the care of various tutors until.
Inclined to the cultivation of letters, he tried unsuccessfully to enter the literary court that surrounded the Count of Lemos and entered the service of the Count of Mora as a servant. The magnate must not have been very splendid, since we know that even paper was scarce: the drafts of some parts of the poem of the Clean Conception are written using the blank backs of the letters that his sister Gracia wrote to him from the convent. Convent that he could not have been Jauja either, because in one of them he asks for “a couple of partridges, or if not, they are chickens” .
Thus, in the calm tranquility of that life without horizons, but without surprises, Medinilla’s life passes. In the Toledo era of Lope de Vega, she made a certain friendship with him. Elisio’s panegyrists highlight that friendship as if it were a precious gift, when Lope’s moral baseness is known, his servility towards the powerful and his reprehensible behavior towards everyone.
Reading his correspondence with the Duke of Sessa illustrates what I am saying: in February 1616, Lope wrote to the Duke and sent him the poem La Limpia concepción: «That is the medicating poem, with its tenths as such, but with good wishes .” The tenths are such as, and the good desire their only merit.
Seven months later, he spoke to the Duke again about the same poem: “I have not finished reading Medinilla, due to being tired and impertinent scholastic.” Such judgments are poorly combined with that “admiration for the Toledo poet” of which the Toledo scholar Francisco de Borja San Román speaks. Lope was a great playwright, but a slave to his passions; Medinilla, a poet without relief who has only motivated the interest of scholars (as recognized by San Román himself) “For the tragic end of him.”
Medinilla’s death was surrounded by mystery for many years. A fantastic theory even attributed her death to an entanglement in skirts with the mother of the famous playwright Agustín de Moreto, and the crime to revenge by Moreto himself… (who was two years old in 1620).
The most probable thing – and I say “probable” because nothing was clear in this matter – is that the perpetrator of Medinilla’s death was a Toledo gentleman named Jerónimo de Andrada. Medinilla’s family and that of the alleged matador had had a certain friendship, and a great-uncle of Jerónimo was godfather to Baltasar’s pile. But neither Jerónimo nor his father, Martín de Andrada, were two little angels. The event occurred in the house with the tombstone, and here is how a nun from the neighboring Convent of the Carmelites tells it:
«I want to tell Your Reverence about a misfortune that happened on Sunday night in the house of Don Martín, our neighbor, after many others in which father and son were involved, who had blamed two deaths on them, and both were running away from home for a while. year or almost Don Jerónimo will now remember the hatred he has for her sister, Inés, for her father having given her her eldership; so that he goes to great lengths to kill her, and to this end he enters through the roofs at the wrong time, and through the door the same.
On Sunday he went for this purpose at dusk, and found there a great friend he had, all in a corridor; He went to look for Doña Inés, her sister, and her mother grabbed him, because she had a drawn sword under her cloak. The friend began to reason with him to stop him, and without looking any further, stick the sword through her body, and leave him there. He was a very well-liked gentleman, and a great poet; his name was Medinilla. Don Martín left a church to go to San Pedro Mártir, and in the church itself the Corregidor has arrested him, but the boy has not been arrested until now, and all of Toledo is in an uproar…»
Page 48 of the Book of the Dead of the Parish of San Andrés is very concise: “On August 30, they killed Medinilla, servant of the Count of Mora, and buried him in San Andrés.”
Later, Jerónimo de Andrade “was found” , that is, arrested, and a process began that could not clarify anything. Seven years later, he reached an agreement with Gracia and Estefanía, the religious sisters of the poet from Santa Úrsula, so that they would withdraw from the case against him and other defendants, in exchange for a chaplaincy for the soul of the deceased and the commitment to stay away from Toledo for four years.
The obligations of such chaplaincies consisted, generally, of one mass a year on the day of the anniversary of the death; but the guarantees of fulfillment of the commitment were null. The distance consisted of living in Olías, where Jerónimo de Andrada already lived because he had a manor there. The agreement has been interpreted as an implicit admission of guilt on the part of Andrada, but I believe that it was nothing more than the way of shelving a process that, by the way, was already more than dead and only caused inconvenience to some already others.
The documents of the process have never been found, which must sleep their dusty sleep in the archives of the Royal Court of Valladolid, to which Toledo belonged at that time. ” May they keep their mystery, and may God keep us all.”
«Azarquiel dedicated his life to the observation of the stars and planets, and his studies gave rise to a series of theoretical, instrumental and astronomical works, among which his famous Toledo Tables stand out, used in the Latin world during the 12th centuries. and XIII»
Around the 11th century AD, astronomical theories were not accepted in Paris or Rome if they were not accepted by the Spanish Arabs, and the Córdoba meridian was as universal as the Greenwich meridian is today. Spain, Al-Andalus, was then the scientific and cultural outpost of Europe (more or less like now, without removing or adding) and there were in Toledo, at that time a Muslim, very wise men who made the city the main astronomical center of the world. medieval.
The most famous was undoubtedly the one known as the son of the chiseler, and with the nickname of Al-Zarquel or Azarquiel due to his zarcos (blue) eyes, something rare among Arabs.
Azarquiel was born around 1028 into a family of artisans, and soon became a skilled metal smith who made astronomical instruments for the wise men of Toledo; and these, in order to take better advantage of the ingenuity and skill of the young Azarquiel, did not take long to give him access to the works of ancient authors. The skilled craftsman began to study with such zeal and dedication that the student became a teacher, and ended up being unanimously recognized as the wisest in the science of the movement of the stars, enjoying universal prestige for his astronomical observations and for the usefulness of the instruments he created.
Azarquiel dedicated his life to the observation of the stars and planets, and his studies gave rise to a series of theoretical, instrumental and astronomical works, among which his famous Toledo Tables stand out, used in the Latin world during the 12th and 12th centuries. XIII and later replaced by those of Alfonso X el Sabio (based on those of Azarquiel), which due to their prodigious accuracy have been used for centuries until artificial satellites introduced very slight corrections.
He sensed the falsity of geocentric theories, rejected the circular trajectories of the stars and walked close to the target of elliptical movements, because he established an oval as a figure that, due to the diameter of its circles, was almost an ellipse. Five hundred years later, and in his studies on the orbits of the stars, Kepler tried the Azarquiel oval before the ellipse.
The wise man from Toledo invented the azafea, an astronomical observation instrument that allowed to know the time of a place by the position of the planets, and their longitude and latitude at a given moment. And not only an astronomer, but also an astrologer, he studied the supposed influence of the planets on people according to their zodiacal position on the day of their birth, and collected his observations in a book entitled Influence and figures of the planets. In other words, when you read your horoscope, remember Azarquiel.
But if Azarquiel’s investigations and astronomical instruments made him famous, his most famous work were the hourglasses (in Greek, something like “water thieves” ) or water clocks. A contemporary of his says of them: «What is wonderful and surprising in Toledo, so much so that we do not believe that there is any city in the whole world that is equal in this, are two water containers that the famous astronomer known by the name of Azarquiel.
They say that this Azarquiel, as he heard about a certain figure that exists in the city of Arín, in India, and of which they say that he indicated the hours by means of some blades, from the time the sun rose until it set, he decided to make an ingenuity or artifice, by means of which people knew what time of day or night it was. For this purpose, he made two large ponds in a house on the outskirts of Toledo, on the banks of the Tagus River, not far from the place called Bab al Dabagin (tanners’ gate), making it so that they filled with water or emptied completely according to the waxing and waning of the moon, so that Azarquiel’s apparatus surpassed in wonder that of the city of Arin.»
These clepsydras lasted until King Alfonso the Wise wanted to know how the water reached the ponds and how the movement was carried out. The person in charge of finding out was a Jewish astrologer who asked the king to let him disassemble one of the hourglasses in order to study his artifice in order to improve it, agreeing to install it later. The said astrologer, or sorcerer, or whatever, boasted of having brought to Toledo all the doves from Spain in a single day, and if that is true, the awnings of Corpus Christi are due to him, which some say are They were installed to protect the procession not from the sun, but from the pigeons, and you know what I mean.
But disassembling a mechanism is easier than reassembling it; the Jew did not know how to do it, and one of the watches was useless. And since it seems that they worked together, when one failed, the other failed.
When Almamún, the powerful ruler of the kingdoms of Toledo, Valencia and Seville and great protector of scholars and poets, died in 1076, Azarquiel went to Córdoba. There he continued his work, made new astronomical observations and imparted his teachings until his death on October 15, 1100.
There is no unanimity when establishing where Azarquiel died. In sevilla? In cordoba? Disregarding the infinite data that abounds on the Internet, many of them little more than academics, a study as seriously documented as that of José Mª Millás Vallicrosa points out that «as a result of great disagreements -probably the effect of the struggles that preceded the fall of the kingdom of Toledo in the hands of Alfonso VI in 1085- Azarquiel […] settles in Córdoba, under the protection of Al-Mutamid, the poet king of Seville, and for many years, surrounded by students, continues his astronomical observations and writes his latest works.
As Al-Mutamid was king of Seville, some associate this city with the final home of Azarquiel (Alfonso the Wise’s Libros del Saber de Astronomía seem to indicate so.) But this reference to Seville is not conclusive, and can be explained by the fact that Al-Mutamid reigned in Seville when Azarquiel (under the king’s protection) lived, studied and taught in Córdoba. And in the absence of death certificates, it seems very reasonable to say that he died in Córdoba. Minor question, by the way, and on which it is not worth extending more.
The international scientific community perpetuated the fame of the famous astronomer by giving his name to a 108 km crater. in diameter located in the central meridian of our satellite and thereby raising the glory of Toledo
-as Mariano Calvo says in a magnificent article about Toledo- “to the very horns of the moon.”
That is why our city can boast of being the only one in the world that has placed, not a man on the moon, like the Americans of the Apollo Project, but three; and furthermore, long before them.
Because Azarquiel is in good company: to his glorious name we must add those of El Greco and Alfonso X el Sabio, who also have their own lunar crater in recognition of their eternal fame. And next to them two, the exalted, the studious, the renowned, the great Abu Ishaq Ibrahim. Ben Yahya AI-Naqqas, the son of Yahya the chiseler. The blue-eyed Arab: Azarquiel.
I hope (may Allah) that he is, surrounded by houris, in the Paradise of the believers.
«For his homicides they arrest him and take him to Toledo: barbarically tortured and sentenced to death, he escapes from prison with the help of a nun who falls in love with him, and taking refuge in the tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, he lowers himself down the bell strings
In the middle of the 17th century, and due to the Thirty Years’ War, Spain was battling against France, against England, against the Netherlands, against Sweden, against half of Italy… But after the defeats of Lens and Rocroy and peace of Westphalia, which meant the resignation of Spain to any type of political or military role in Europe, the defeated army returns to the homeland and the country is filled with idle soldiers, full of glory and misery.
Arrogant, quarrelsome, rowdy types, «a genre -says Liñán y Verdugo- of people of reasonable habit, robust mustaches, terrible appearance, who walk along Calle Mayor as if in campaign; they know the news, they have notices of the attempts of the Turk, of the revolutions in the Low Countries and of the state of affairs in Italy; and although they have not gone beyond Cartagena to fire a company, they call themselves military men. At one in the day they eat, if they are given it; They are usually made to invite, they ask for a loan, trusting not to return it, and they eat at the expense of those they have to kill.» Courageous men to the point of recklessness, light of tongue and of hands, skillful swordsmen, long-suffering, haughty…
They suffer everything in any assault;
they just don’t suffer from being talked to loud.
Calderón will say about them in La rendición de Breda. Such were the Spanish soldiers at the beginning of the Modern Age, forced to deal with new firearms, sporadic pay and difficult promotions, and to whom is applicable what Baltasar Gracián says in El discreto: «All their feats things are the first in the world and all their actions feats; his life is all wonders, and his events miracles of fortune and affairs of fame; that there is nothing ordinary in them because they are all singularities of value, knowledge and happiness.»
To this species belongs Diego Duque de Estrada, from Toledo, whose autobiography (which he titled Comments on the disappointed self, proof of all states and choice of the best of them) is the most portentous story of life that can be imagined. Of noble parents, orphaned at the age of three, a great swordsman from a very young age, warrior and courtier, he soon leaves the routine by hastily killing his beloved and his best friend. Persecuted by justice, he flees to Andalusia, where he fights with famous bullies.
They arrest him for his homicides and take him to Toledo: barbarically tortured and sentenced to death, he escapes from prison with the help of a nun who falls in love with him, and taking refuge in the tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, he hangs down the bell strings. He embarks for Italy and goes through all the scenes of the European wars of the time and the entire Mediterranean theater of the confrontations with the Turk, carrying out always striking feats. In this vortex of impossible summary, he will become private of the prince of Transylvania, will be a teacher of the Spanish language, a military expert, a fruitful writer, a witness to a thousand battles and, finally, a member of the Order of San Juan de Dios in Sardinia.
Here is the bare skeleton of an autobiography full of innumerable and varied adventures, which require direct reading “and which are read – says Benedetto Croce in Realidad y fantasía en las memoirs of Diego Duque de Estrada – like a novel, for the delight that they offer to the imagination and by the warmth and plasticity of the style. But is it also a novel because of the content of the facts? Or how much of it is history and how much of it is novel?»
Let’s see a summary of his life.
Orphaned at the age of three, he grows up under the tutelage of a nobleman from Toledo, on whose desk he finds some papers that the author transcribes in great detail. In them he tells us that he was born on August 15, 1589, and was baptized with the name of Justo Diego in the parish of San Andrés; but of this baptism, which according to Duque had as godparents a Bishop and an Imperial Marquise whose names he does not mention, nothing has been found in the parish archives.
There is no record of his participation (at the age of thirteen! in the military expedition to Mahometa, (Mammamet, in North Africa). Even such an expedition (not in 1602, but in 1605) would be doubtful if Alonso de Contreras did not mention it in Chapter VIII of his Life, Contreras places the action on August 14, 1605, Duque, in 1602. This discrepancy raises new doubts about the accuracy of Don Diego’s data.
His stay in Italy is true. Documents from the State Archives in Naples confirm that in 1614 he became a soldier. His wedding with Lucrecia Morelli took place on April 11, 1616, in the parish of Santa Ana de Palacio, in Naples, according to the Marriage Book of that parish, although he, both in the main story and in the Speech of his life for years from the end of the work, gives the date of April 5.
As it could not be less, Don Diego is preferred to two other gentlemen: a Neapolitan captain, noble and important, and a rich, but old, Calabrian gentleman. The young woman’s decision is blunt: “Either the Spaniard, or a convent.” For the union it is necessary to instruct the mandatory marriage file, which is kept in the archives of the Archbishopric of Naples.
On March 14, 1616, “Don Diego Duque de Estrada, Spanish and native of Toledo, twenty-three years old, residing in Naples…” declares under oath that “Don Juan Duque de Estrada and Doña Isabel Duque de Estrada, my parents -do not miss the equality of surnames: husband and wife were also uncle and niece-, they are alive and are in Toledo, and about two years ago I left my home and from there I came to Naples, and I have never been married …» Two witnesses confirm this statement: one, Diego Liscón, forty-six years old, Spanish and Toledo, a resident of Naples and a shoemaker by trade. According to his testimony, he knew the parents of Duque de Estrada, of whom he had been a neighbor, and Diego, born to them.
The other witness was called Bartolomé del Castillo, a Spaniard from Toledo, fifty years old, a soldier in the company of Juan de Paredes. He also knew Diego’s parents, and had gone to Naples with him two years before. Duque makes no mention of this marriage file. But the files speak. And they say that Diego, in 1616, declared under oath that he was twenty-three years old, not twenty-seven as he would have been if he had been born in 1589; that his parents lived, not that they died when he was three years old.
If the oath is not false, a very important part of his story falls to the ground: the relationship of his orphanage and tutoring and his expedition to Mohammed, impossible at nine years old. He, too, could not enter the Court of Madrid at that age and amaze her with his abilities.
The entire story of his youth becomes an invention, the death of his beloved in 1607 (he was fourteen years old) is not credible, and the story is filled with lies in such a way that he becomes infected with its falsehood. And it never ceases to surprise me that Diego being (according to him he says) a friend and comrade of very important nobles and gentlemen, who enjoys their favor and worth, who astonishes everyone due to his exploits and bravery and is known to everyone, has to resort to to attest to his name and country to a shoemaker and another soldier of fortune like him.
His participation in the journey of the Querquenes (the Karkenah Islands, in the Tunisian Gulf of Gabes) on September 28, 1611, also raises serious doubts. The date of the combat is accredited by numerous chroniclers of the time, and is recorded in a Relation of the victory that the Marquis of Santa Cruz obtained in Los Querquenes on September 28, 1611.
Don Diego tells us that he asked to take part in military action, being one of the first to ford a swampy lake to rescue the Duke of Nochera, wounded in battle. But… in September 1611, and according to his own testimony, Don Diego was recovering in Toledo from the executioner’s torture. And one of two: either he was not in the Querquenes, or he was not in jail. Duque de Estrada is emerging, then, as a vain man who, at times, almost convinces us of his courage with the sword because of his skill with the pen.
But let’s let time pass until we get to 1618.
Venice, the Lordship of the Adriatic, is the Chinese in the Mediterranean shoe of the House of Austria. Sometimes he allied himself with the French, other times with the Turk, but “always trying to damage and weaken the good name of Spain . ” For this reason, men like the Duke of Osuna, Viceroy of Naples, and the Marquis de Bédmar, Philip III’s ambassador to the Doge, are irreconcilable enemies of the Venetian Republic.
Astutely, she spreads the rumor that the Spanish have formed a conspiracy whose purpose is to burn the arsenal and loot the Casa de la Moneda, where the Republic’s money is kept, and points to the Duke of Osuna as its organizers. and the Marquis de Bédmar. The lie achieves its goal: Bédmar has to leave Venice, and Osuna, accused of wanting to proclaim himself King of Naples, ends up being dismissed and imprisoned.
All this is well known, as well as the fact that the alleged conspiracy never existed. “There is no need to return,” says Croce, “to the hackneyed question of the conspiracy, which modern critics totally reject . ” However, Duque refers to his participation in it at the command of four hundred soldiers to seize the arsenal… (in the second half of 1619, when the hoaxes had spread in May 1618).
Suspicion once again arises regarding the veracity of the Duque de Estrada’s story, which, by the way, silences this episode in the Summary of his life for years at the end of the work: there he confirms his stay in Calabrian lands, he repeats with accuracy of their income from payments and transits (per diems, we would say today) but nothing says about the event.
Duque de Estrada’s literary activity, apart from his Commentaries, produced comedies that, always according to their author, were highly celebrated. In total, some twenty works (whose titles he is citing throughout his autobiography) none of which, absolutely none, have reached our days.
Unfortunate coincidence, which has deprived us of its enjoyment. On the other hand, we have received a poem entitled nothing more and nothing less than -take a breath- Eighth rhymes to the distinguished victory that the Most Serene Highness of Prince Filiberto has had, achieved by His Excellency the Marquis of Santa Cruz, his Lieutenant and Captain General of the Sicilian galleys, with three galleons belonging to the famous corsair Alí Araez Ravazin, commanded by Diego Duque de Estrada. Addressed to the Highness of himself of him. It is a poem in 108 real octaves. I have not read it nor do I intend to, because Gayangos did and judged it of little merit; the first two octaves that he transcribes prove his opinion as good.
His life in Italy is intense and dissolute: «I found myself full of vices, deaths, injuries, cohabitations, bringing women from place to place, for whom the most destos cases happened to me, which I have not referred to because they are long, many and not very honest… ». «Our shamelessness reached the worst with courtly ladies and bullies from the underworld.» In one of these, he kills a gentleman in a tavern fight and flees again, this time with a Dona Francisca: «I left my poor wife and four male and two female children – that was in 1622: married in 1616, the accounts they come out fair- and taking my sin on my back I left.» His sin was Dona Francisca. But he still had time to return to his wife and father another daughter: Isabel, the only one he had left in the end.
Sometimes he tells that things are going well for him, and he is about to be appointed general of the galleys by Prince Filiberto, viceroy of Sicily; he causes astonishment by his courage to the Marquis of Santa Cruz; it is private of Don Pedro de Médicis, and with him is our protagonist “who ruled in Leghorn, and spared galleys and men’s lives, condemning or acquitting.”
Other times, the wheel of fortune turns and leaves him in Padua alone, robbed and without resources; but after two months “I came to behave in such a way in some moral disputes of which I was capable, that the whole University believed me to be an accomplished philosopher . ” However, both Cossío and Croce agree that his studies at the University of Padua are not accredited in the Archives of that school.
In Padua he meets the ambassador of Transylvania, who in order to obtain his services appoints him a gentleman of his chamber and teacher of languages. He spends two years at the court of Prince Bethlen Gabor, where he collects loving trophies and climbs to the highest ranks; but the death of the prince and his great privatization with the widowed princess raise rumors and he leaves for Vienna. There he gained the esteem of the illustrious Spanish general Don Baltasar Marradas, assisted with him in the battle of Lutzen (which dates from November 12, 1632, although it took place on the 16th); he witnesses the death of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden “Because the King came so close that he could portray him”…
«As a result of this so marked victory, I was appointed to the government of the province of Buduwaiz, and I entered as a comrade of Count Don Baltasar Marradas, my general.» In this regard, Henry Ettinghausen points out “The lack of his name in the correspondence of General Marradas, whose faithful confidant he claims to have been” . His relations with Transylvania and its King Bethlen Gabor -Cossío believes-, as well as his stay in that Court, seem like a novel. Of the same opinion is Croce.
And in the midst of such greatness and happiness, a friar with whom he confesses tells him that he must return to Italy, “because God wanted me for another state different from that one.” On the way back home, he receives the news of his wife’s death From him «from the shock of the joy of my coming. Six of my children had already died, and I only had Elizabeth, thirteen years old.»
This is the end of his mundane adventures.
His entry into the Hospitaller Order of San Juan de Dios under the name of Fray Justo de Santa María (February 18, 1636) and his life in it is the best documented part of his Commentaries. In the Spanish Chronicle of the Order it is read that «the province of Sardinia has had religious distinguished in science, in virtue and also in arms; because Fray Justo Duque de Estrada was the son of her; who, after having been Field Master General, took our habit.»
The annals of the Order are always complimentary of him. Of his life in the century, only favorable traits and very high positions that he never held are recorded: like that of Master General of the Field (?) that he did not even dream of (he did not go beyond a private, and in the Spanish militia he was never a captain but in promises); the studies of him in Padua and his writings on literature and philosophy, which do not exist… Did the chronicler write up his profile with the data that the Duke himself provided him, correcting and increasing what seemed to him and keeping silent what suited him?
«His figure -says Fr. Gabriele Russotto, of the Saint John of God Hospitaller Order, in his work I Fatebenefratelli in Sardegna-, has been portrayed by Benedetto Croce in a sometimes unflattering way and with perhaps preconceived criticism. More objective is the autobiography in which Fray Justo himself, with sincerity and simplicity, narrates surprising and disconcerting episodes of his life. »
What is disconcerting is that a chronicler judges an autobiography more objective than the vision of an impartial historian. Let us stay with the brief reference of Antonio Canales in the Invasion of the French army made on the city of Oristan: «For corporal of the ecclesiastical militia Fray Justo Duque de Estrada was named». Among those peaceful friars, “of which there were young men who still did not know what the cut of the knife was to cut bread” , he was the only one who knew a sword.
The writing of the Commentaries finished on October 18, 1646. The life of its author, on February 13, 1649. May God have given peace and rest to those who never, in this world, had either.
Let us return, to finish, to the question that Croce asked himself: how much of Duque’s narration is history and how much of it is a novel?
There is something that neither Cossío, nor Ettinghausen, nor Croce comment: Duque did not keep a diary, he did not write at night what had happened to him during the day. Sometimes -he says- he would spend a lot of time, even years, without touching his memories. That being the case, isn’t it amazing how clearly he remembers situations and circumstances from months or years ago down to the smallest detail, as if he had experienced them the day before? All the actors in any event, their names and surnames, their weapons and attire, the bands and feathers of the knights, the colorful harness of the horses, the disposition and order of the armies in a battle, with a total vision that could only be have a General from his command post…
Do you remember the ties of everyone who was at your table at the last wedding you attended? Well, Duke does remember, and all the weddings. Why did he have a prodigious memory? No: because there were no limits to his imagination. The apparent accuracy of the small memories, that astonishing memory for the trivial, is precisely the best basis for affirming that Duque did not story her life: he invented her, decorating her with the flowers that he did not have. Not as he was, but as he would have liked it to be.
The Spanish Golden Age, which gave the world with Don Quixote the best social novel ever written and with Lazarillo gave birth to the new genre of the picaresque novel, also had, with Diego Duque de Estrada, an advance: two hundred years before Walter Scott , the Toledo created the historical novel. A historical novel with so many battles, sets, fights, challenges, love, heroism and betrayal, that you laugh at Ivanhoe. So that nothing is missing, it also has its beautiful Jewish; only that instead of being called Rebeca, she is called Raquel.
Read the Comments: it is a good, very good, magnificent novel. Forget the historical rigor, do not object to his three F’s (fictions, fantasies and fables) and you will verify that the vital journey of Don Diego Duque de Estrada, with his imaginary adventures and his dream adventures, if not true, is benign. trovato.
«In 1591, Lope arrived in Toledo to serve here the eight years of exile from the Court that were imposed on him for his libels against Elena Osorio, and he rented a house on Calle de la Sierpe to live with Isabel de Urbina»
Lope de Vega has never been a saint of my devotion. As a playwright, and along with great works, there are many others born of vulgarity because, according to himself, ” since the vulgar pay for them, it is fair to speak foolishly to please them.”
As a man, his conduct is far from exemplary. His love affair with María de Aragón, unmarried; with Elena Osorio, married; Juana de Ribera, “woman in love with her friend” ; Isabel de Urbina, whom he married after kidnapping her; Micaela Luján, married; his trial for cohabitation with Antonia Trillo, widow; his wedding for his interest with Juana Guardo; and after his ordination as a priest, his relationship, intermittent but never extinguished, with Jerónima de Burgos, the most licentious actress of the time; with Lucía Salcedo, the crazy one, and finally with Marta de Nevares, married, they give the true portrait of a libertine without any moral restraint.
He had children with his wives Isabel and Juana, and with his lovers Micaela and Marta; perhaps also with Lucía: «I spoke with the crazy woman for twenty days, and I have paid it to my descendants, as an original sin» .
He seems to be referring to a son, perhaps with some defect, about whom we know little or nothing: his name could be Fernando Pellicer, whom we will see in 1616 as a Franciscan friar under the name of Fray Vicente.
He had no grandchildren: he, who knew so many beds, did not rock any cradle. As for dignity, his abjection reaches its limit when we see him living at the expense of the dishonest earnings of Jerónima de Burgos: « I, sir (he writes to the Duke of Sessa without any decorum), have had a good time with Jerónima; Here I have seen the lords haunt my house. Gallants come, but with less money than we needed…» The level of debasement to which Lope often descends blushes.
But let’s get to the point. Lopes in Toledo? How was that?
In 1591, Lope arrived in Toledo to serve here the eight years of exile from the Court that were imposed on him for his libels against Elena Osorio, and he rented a house on Calle de la Sierpe to live with Isabel de Urbina. The rent was for one year, from “the day of Our Lady of August . ” It was rented to Francisco de Barrientos, a merchant, for 300 reales a year, payable by the usual thirds: “Christmas Easter, Resurrection Easter, and August Santa Maria.”
Once his exile was over, he went to Madrid and, after the death of Isabel and the wedding with Juana de Guardo, Lope returned to Toledo and rented a house in the San Justo neighborhood, where he lived with his wife, and another for Micaela Luján, the season his lover, in the neighborhood of San Lorenzo. From here he writes to his friend Dr. Angulo: «Toledo is expensive, but famous; women talk, men treat; Justice seeks money.
They put on comedies, the people whistle; It is proclaimed in the patio that such a thing should not happen, and thus, the Toledoans pressed together so as not to whistle, they think, that for the Mayor it has been a great contempt, because he was sitting in the patio that day. Of poets I do not say; good century is this. Many are in the making for the coming year, but none as bad as Cervantes, nor as foolish as to praise Don Quixote» . Her pride and his envy dictate these verses:
And that trifling Don Quixote goes
from ass to ass around the world,
selling spices and Romí saffron,
and in the end he will end up in dunghills.
In other words, the pages of Don Quixote were only used to wrap spices and for even less noble uses. Bad thing, envy.
Marcela, daughter of Lope and Micaela, was born in Toledo, and she was baptized in the Church of La Magdalena as “daughter of unknown parents” . And in Toledo Carlos Félix, son of Lope and Juana, was born and baptized in the Church of San Justo. By the way, Lope will blame the sacristan of San Justo for his departure to Madrid, according to what he later says in another letter:
«If there were no sacristans in San Justo,
Madrid would never see me in its corner».
It is not hard to imagine a burly sacristan cutting Lope’s flutters around a garrida sacristan. Apart from his friendship with Baltasar de Medinilla (not as sincere as some think, and see the article dedicated to the Toledo poet), there is a poet quoted by Esteban Villegas in his work Las eróticas o amatorias:
«That although you consider, in Toledo,
there was a tailor who can do comedies»
and by Suárez de Figueroa in El pasajero: “This [tailor] was the one from Toledo: without knowing how to read or write, he went making songs down the street, asking apothecaries and others who had inkwells and pens to write them down on little pieces of paper…”
What tailor was this? What was his relationship with Lope?
His name was Agustin Castellanos. There is written evidence that he composed six plays, of which only one survives: While I prune the vineyards. The manuscript (not by the tailor, who has already said that he did not know how to write, but by a third party) is full of corrections in Lope’s own handwriting. So close was his relationship with him that he acted as a witness at Marcela’s baptism and as guarantor in the Fénix contracts: when Micaela Luján rents the house in the San Lorenzo neighborhood, Agustín Castellanos, a tailor, appears as guarantor.
The notary confirms the illiteracy of which Figueroa speaks: since the guarantor does not know how to write, a witness signs “at the request of Agustín Castellanos” . The contract was renewed a year later. The guarantor was also Castellanos, who said he did not know how to write, and this time the witness was Lope de Vega.
Item more: to celebrate the birth of the future Felipe IV, in April 1605 a literary fair is held in Toledo. The Toledo City Council begs Lope to take care of her “as a poet from Toledo, since he lived in this city at the time and recognized her as a mother.” The poet tailor competes and coincidentally wins first prize. And around 1611 the trace of him is lost.
Transferred the Court to Madrid in 1606, Lope moved to Madrid. Micaela Luján continued to live in Toledo, moving to Callejón de Córdoba. And in 1614, Lope embraced the priesthood: on March 12 he came to Toledo to be ordained. On the 15th he wrote to the Duke: «Here Jerónima de Burgos received me with many caresses. She is much less entertaining and more beautiful » . On the 23rd he ponders the orderliness of her life, but confesses: «I also have fun in my sadness with Jerónima» . This was the conduct of the newly ordained priest. As Américo Castro says, nothing forces us to think that he maintained pious relations with her.
Lope recounts in La Filomena the good reception that the people of Toledo gave him, and how much they favored him. How did the Phoenix thank you for the welcome and the favors? Perhaps (and I say perhaps because its authorship is not fully proven, although my suspicions are well founded) with an infamous sonnet, for whose author Toledo is a garbage dump full of effeminate young men, cuckolded husbands, matchmaker mothers of their own daughters, men who only They are brave if many come together, and other niceties that are easy to understand.
Little justice, many bailiffs,
cirineos of whores and thieves, (1)
six knights and six hundred gifts, (2)
silversmith of vile lineages; (3)
maidens standing out as subtle; (4)
owners, to be owners of intentions; (5)
fools in pairs and discreet odds, (6)
gallants with womanly adornments;
husbands to cornet exercised, (7)
mothers that accede daughters like wine; (8)
mighty in common, and in common fear; (9)
sworn against the people conspired; (10)
friends, like the weather, on the way; (11)
the streets dunghill… This is Toledo.
Some say that due to the ease and freedom of the phrases it could be attributed to Góngora or Quevedo. I am not aware that either of them spent long stays in Toledo (Quevedo came from time to time for administrative procedures that he completed in one or two days) and it does not seem reasonable, therefore, that they had well-founded reasons to speak badly or well. of our city. But without disdaining the possible authorship of the aforementioned poets, the sonnet may have been written by one of the numerous wits of the Spanish Golden Age fond of denigrating certain cities.
Why might Góngora have a grudge against Toledo? Inexplicable, like the one he showed against Galicia. «Góngora’s antipathy towards the Galician universe -says a scholar- lacks justification in principle, and perhaps it can only be interpreted as an unconscious opposition of opposites between the gloomy, humid and closed world of the north and the luminous, dry and open Andalusian horizon that he was used to breathing.» An argument that is also valid for Toledo: a contrast between the severe, austere and mourning city of clergymen, nuns and knights of El Greco and the cheerful and confident city that, due to its southern character, has always been Córdoba.
In 1609, commissioned by the Cabildo of the Cathedral of Córdoba, the canon Don Luis de Góngora y Argote made a long journey through the center and north of Spain.
He visits, among other places, Madrid, Alcalá, Álava and Pontevedra. From his trip to Galicia to visit the latter city we have this sonnet (also apocryphal):
TO GALICIA
Pale sun in an overcast sky,
plump girls with wide culiseos,
cow’s tits, post office legs, (1)
soil less swept than irrigated. (2)
All field of gorse tinged with
giant cabbage, Philistine turnips (3)
Cairo roosters, pygmy vases, (4)
coarse suit and poorly filed style.
Slopes that reach the burning sphere (5)
Guinea bread, smoked ceilings, (6)
resin candles with tericia; (7)
millet potatoes in wooden shells, (8)
deep caves, rough hills,
it is what they call the kingdom of Galicia.
1- Courier legs: unfeminine, solid and muscular legs, like those of the valijeros or foot couriers, formerly in charge of conducting correspondence between nearby towns.
2- More watered (due to continuous rains) than swept (due to lack of cleanliness).
3- Philistine turnips: huge, alluding to the Biblical Philistine giant Goliath.
4- Roosters: fish commonly consumed among humble people. I do not know what the expression “from Cairo” could refer to . Big, like the Egyptian pyramids?
5 – So steep that they reach the Sun.
6 – Black bread, like the people of Guinea. Sahumados means “perfumed” , but Góngora plays with the immediacy of the two S’s so that it is pronounced “smoked ceilings” (as a sign of dirt).
7 – Tall candles, yellowish like a jaundiced face.
8 – Millet (corn) cakes in wooden bowls, rough and poor.
If we have to pay attention to the attributions, Madrid does not get rid of Góngora either:
Four hundred thousand whores and cuckolds,
the unmarried lie many others, (1)
many hypocrites, few saints,
countless long-haired bald men; (2)
Bots of wit in the opinion of acute, (3)
girls who ask, aunts with charms, (4)
fake Virgos, and borrowed cloaks,
which make them jealous and mute husbands. (5)
Hopes in bloom, few virtues, (6)
fair promises, infernal works, (7)
bribes to the one who said and to the one who failed. (8)
Empty bags, hesitating mouths,
cars, friars, garbage and hospitals.
This is Madrid, and the rest I keep quiet about.
1- «The unmarried lie as many others» : singles, who do not have to cover up the dishonor of married men and women, double the number.
2- The aversion to dyes and hairpieces can be seen in Góngora, and even more so in Quevedo, the same in men as in women.
3- Góngora wrote with “v” (votes) what we write today with “b” (botos). Botos, blunt wits (blunt wits) considered acute.
4- That they ask for (money), that they are sold. Aunts (matchmakers) with charms (love potions, filters and aphrodisiacs).
5- Verse for me incomprehensible. Who are “they” ? The virgos, the cloaks? Dont have much sense. Obviously not the charms, too far in the sentence. Observe the use in almost all the verses of contrasting terms: hypocritons, saints; girls, aunts; hopes, realities; promises, works… Some verses refer to a single concept; but none refers to a previous one, as it seems to be the case in this one. In my opinion, it may be a reading error on the part of the printer, and in such a case a noun written similar to ” that they” would have to be found that would be suitable for “jealous” , as opposed to “mute husbands.” I have searched for it without success.
6- Hopes in bloom: not yet turned into fruit.
7- This verse, like the previous one, insists on good promises and bad works.
8- Attacks venal justice: bribes “to the one who said” , to the one who testifies, and to the one of the “ruling” , to the judge who sentences.
But… Góngora died in 1627 without having allowed his verses to be printed. The first edition of his writings was immediately published in Madrid, but the book was picked up five months later to be expunged due to a complaint that said ” that the author was Don Luis de Góngora, prebendary of the Cathedral of Córdoba, who did not allow that their works should be printed because their [religious] state is repugnant to the most indecent and filthy compositions, which go from mockery and gossip to lewdness and mischief. The book speaks ill of priests and nuns, maidens and married women, and against the fame of well-known people…»
The compositions suppressed by the expurgatory were printed later, between 1644 and 1648. They contain 29 sonnets, of which five are considered authentic, 19 attributable and two apocryphal, including the one from Toledo. Neither authentic nor attributable. Apocryphal (fabulous, supposed or feigned, according to the Academy Dictionary). In short, uncertain. It is true that Góngora wrote a romance, this one authentic, entitled “El Castillo de San Cervantes” (San Servando), which is expurgated from the 1627 edition as “Maldiciente contra Toledo y la casados de ella; lascivious too much.” But the cursed sonnet could be by Góngora… or by Lope.
The classical poets were unmerciful. Let us see, for example, what Don Juan de Tarsis y Peralta, Count of Villamediana, says of Córdoba:
Great square, narrow streets, many calluses,
rich bishop, poor merchants,
good horses to be women, (1)
good women to be horses.
Houses without statures, men like stems, (2)
rooms hung from pins, (3)
faded Bacchus, skinny Ceres, (4)
many Judas and Pedros, few roosters. (5)
Infinite needles and pins,
a bridge that no one can repair,
a vulgar fool, a discreet Góngora, (6)
a San Pablo among many sambenitos. (7)
That is Cordoba. The one who will find the most
, put this sonnet in the queue
1- This verse and the next one shamelessly allude to riding in its two senses.
2- Low and packed houses.
3- Córdoba at that time had a flourishing industry of needles and pins that is still preserved, although I don’t know if it still flourishes.
4- Bad wine, bad wheat.
5- Many traitors and renegades, few who knew how to speak loud and clear.
6- Villamediana was a great friend of Góngora. This verse is the best proof of who its author was.
7- The church of San Pablo and the convent of the same name, now disappeared. The sambenito was a badge that the Inquisition imposed on heretics and Jews reconciled with the Church. Many sambenitos is, then, synonymous with abundance of Protestants and Jews.
Lope differed little from those mentioned. And as for self-assurance and freedom, and procacity and insolence, Lope gave Quevedo, Góngora, Villamediana and the morning star a hundred and one line. And what had no reason to exist in Quevedo, nor in Góngora, nor in Villamediana, was perfectly explicable in Lope, who was not in Toledo because of his will, but in exile. Toledo was for Lope a hateful and hated city. Do you understand why Lope de Vega has never been a saint of my devotion?
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