The reign of Juan II. is one of the longest and most troubled in the history of Castile. In his second year he succeeded his father, Enrique el Doliente, at the end of 1406, and for almost half a century he was the sport of fortune. Enrique III.’s frail body was tenanted by a masterful spirit: his son was a puppet in the hands of favourites or of factions. Juan II.’s uncle Fernando de Antequera (so called from his brilliant campaign against the Moors in 1410, celebrated in the popular romances) acted as regent of Castile till he was called to the throne of AragÓn in 1412, when the regency was assumed by the Queen-Mother, Catherine of Lancaster. The generosity of contemporaries and the gallantry of elderly historians lead them to judge Queen-Mothers with indulgence; but Catherine is admitted to have been a grotesque and incapable figurehead, controlled by FernÁn Alonso de Robles, a clever upstart. Declared of age in 1419, Juan II. soon fell under the dominion of Álvaro de Luna, a young Aragonese who had come to court in 1408, and had therefore known the king from childhood. Raised to the high post of Constable of Castile, Álvaro de Luna resolved to crush the seditious nobles, and to make his master a sovereign in fact as well as in name. But the king was a weakling who could be bullied out of any resolution. Factious revolts were met with alternate savagery and weakness. Opportunities were thrown away. The victory over the Moors at La Higuera in 1431, and the rout 56 of the rebel nobles at Olmedo in 1445, failed to strengthen the royal authority. At a critical moment, when he seemed in a fair way to triumph, Álvaro de Luna made an irremediable mistake. In 1447 he promoted the marriage of Juan II. with Isabel of Portugal: she was ‘the knife with which he cut his own throat.’ At her suggestion the unstable Juan took a step which has earned for him a prominent place among the traitor-kings who have deserted their ministers in a moment of danger. Álvaro de Luna had fought a hard fight for thirty years. In 1453 he was suddenly thrown over, condemned, and beheaded amid the indecent mockery of his enemies:—

So even the courtly MarquÉs de Santillana holds up his foe to derision, unconscious that his own death was not far off. In 1454 Juan II. died, and during the scandalous reign of Enrique IV. it might well seem that the great Constable had lived in vain. But his policy was destined to be carried out by ‘the Catholic Kings,’ Ferdinand and Isabel.

Contrary to reasonable expectation, the court of Juan II. remained a centre of culture during all the storm of civil war. Educated by the converted Rabbi Sh’lomoh Hallevi—better known to orthodox Spaniards as Pablo de Santa MarÍa, Chancellor of Castile,—Juan II. had something more than a tincture of artistic taste. So stern a judge as PÉrez de GuzmÁn, who had no reason to treat him tenderly, describes him as a wit, an excellent musician, an assiduous reader, an amateur of literature, a lover and sound critic of poetry. Juan II. had in fact all the qualities which are useless to a king, and none of those which are indispensable. He himself wrote minor poetry, a luxury in which no monarch less eminently successful than Frederic the Great can afford to indulge. From his youth he was surrounded by such representatives of the old school of poetry as Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino. Castile might go to ruin, but there was always time to hear the compositions of this persistent mendicant, or those of Juan Alfonso de Baena, with the replies and rebutters of versifiers like Ferrant Manuel de Lando and Juan de GuzmÁn. It was no good training for either a poet or a king. In the few poems by Juan II. which have come down to us there is an occasional touch of laborious accomplishment: there is no depth of feeling, no momentary sincerity. Poetry had become the handmaid of luxury. Poetical tournaments and knightly jousts were both forms of court-pageantry. Nature was out of fashion; life was infected by artificiality, and literature by bookish conceits. ‘Mesure est precioux tesmoing de san et de courtoisie,’ according to the author of the thirteenth-century Doctrinal, and mesura and cortesÍa predominate in the courtly verse of Juan II.’s reign. The Galician trovadores brought into Castile the bad tradition which they had borrowed from Provence, and the emphatic genius of Castile accentuated rather than refined the verbal audacities of conventional gallantry. Macias o Namorado, the typical Galician trovador who died about 1390, had dared to introduce the words of Christ Crucified as the tag of an amatory lyric:—

And shortly after the death of Macias another literary force came into play. As Professor Henry R. Lang observes in a note to his invaluable Cancioneiro gallego-castelhano, ‘the Italian Renaissance had taught the poet to combine myth and miracle and to pay homage to the fair lady in the language of religion as well as in that of feudal life.’ The conventions of chivalry were combined with the expressions of sacrilegious passion. So eminent a man as Álvaro de Luna set a lamentable example of impious preciosity. In one of his extant poems he belauds his mistress, declares that the Saviour’s choice would light on her if He were subject to mortal passions, and defiantly announces his readiness to contend with God in the lists—to break a lance with the Almighty—for so incomparable a prize:—

This is not an isolated instance of profanity in high places, for Álvaro de Luna’s repugnant performance was equalled in the LetanÍa de Amor by the grave chronicler Diego de Valera, and was approached in innumerable copies of verse by many professed believers. The abundance of versifiers during the reign of Juan II. is embarrassing. In the Ilustraciones to the sixth volume of his Historia de la literatura espaÑola, JosÉ Amador de los RÍos gives two lists of poets who flourished at this period, and (allowing for the accidental inclusion of three names in both lists) he arrives at a total of two hundred and fifteen. Even so, it seems that the catalogue is incomplete; but we should thank RÍos for his good taste, forbearance, or negligence in not making it exhaustive. It is extremely doubtful whether two hundred and fifteen poets of superlative distinction can be found in all the literatures of Europe put together; it is certain that no such number of distinguished poets has ever existed at one time in any one country, and many of the entries in RÍos’s lists are the names of mediocrities, not to say poetasters. We may exclude them from our breathless review this afternoon, just as we must pass hurriedly over the names of minor prose-writers. There is merit in Álvaro de Luna’s Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres in which the Constable replies to Boccaccio’s Corbaccio and takes up the cudgels for women; there is uncommon merit in a venomous and amusing treatise, branding the entire sex, by Juan II.’s chaplain, Alfonso MartÍnez de Toledo—a work which he wished to be called (after himself) the Arcipreste de Talavera, but to which a mischievous posterity has attached the title of El Corbacho or the ReprobaciÓn del amor mundano. There is merit also in the allegorical VisiÓn delectable of Alfonso de la Torre, and in the animated (though perhaps too imaginative) narrative of adventures given by Gutierre DÍez de Games in the CrÓnica del Conde de Buelna, Don Pero NiÑo. And no account of the writers of Juan II.’s reign would be complete without some mention of the celebrated Bishop of Ávila, Alfonso de Madrigal, best known as El Tostado. But El Tostado wrote mostly in Latin, and, apart from this, his incredible productivity weighs upon him.

We must be satisfied to quote this epitaph written on 60 El Tostado by Suero del Águila, and hurry on as we may, blinder than the blind. When all is said, the importance of El Tostado and the rest is purely relative. We need only concern ourselves with the more significant figures of the time, and this select company will occupy the time at our disposal.

One of the most striking personalities of Juan II.’s reign was Enrique de Villena, wrongly known as the MarquÉs de Villena. Born in 1384, he owes much of his posthumous renown to his reputation as a wizard, and to the burning of part of his library by the king’s confessor, the Dominican Fray Lope Barrientos, afterwards successively Bishop of Segovia (1438), Ávila (1442), and Cuenca (1445). Barrientos has been roughly handled ever since Juan de Mena, without naming him, first applied the branding-iron in El Laberinto de Fortuna:—

Barrientos, however, seems to have been made a scapegoat in this matter. He asserts that he acted on the express order of Juan II., and, in any case, we may feel tolerably sure that he burned as few books as possible, for he kept what was saved for himself. However this may be, owing to his supposed dealings with the devil and the alleged destruction of his library after his death, Villena’s name meets us at almost every turn in Spanish literature: in Quevedo’s La Visita de los chistes, in Ruiz de AlarcÓn’s 61 La Cueva de Salamanca, in Rojas Zorrilla’s Lo que querÍa ver el MarquÉs de Villena, and in Hartzenbusch’s La Redoma encantada. These presentations of the imaginary necromancer are interesting in their way, but we have in Generaciones y Semblanzas a portrait of the real Villena done by the hand of a master. There we see him—‘short and podgy, with pink and white cheeks, a huge eater, and greatly addicted to lady-killing; some said derisively that he knew a vast deal of the heavens above, and little of the earth beneath; alien and remote from practical affairs, and in the management of his household and estate so incapable and helpless that it was a wonder manifold.’ Yet PÉrez de GuzmÁn is too keen-eyed to miss Villena’s intellectual gifts. From him we learn that, at an age when other lads are dragged reluctantly to school, Villena set himself to study without a master, and in direct opposition to the wishes of his grandfather and family, showing ‘such subtle and lofty talent that he speedily mastered whatever science or art to which he applied himself, so that it really seemed innate in him by nature.’ Here we have the man set before us—vaguely recalling the figure of Gibbon, but a Gibbon who has left behind him nothing to represent his rare abilities.

It must be confessed that Villena owes more of his celebrity to his legend than to his literary work. Perhaps the nearest parallel to him in our own history is Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. Both were fired by the enthusiasm of the Renaissance; both were patrons of literature; both were popularly supposed to practise the black art—Villena in person, and Gloucester through the intermediary of his wife, Eleanor Cobham. But, while Duke Humphrey was content to give copies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio to the University of Oxford, Villena took an active part in spreading the light that came from Italy. He was not the first Spaniard in the field. Francisco Imperial, in his Dezir de las siete virtudes, had already hailed Dante as his guide and master, and had borrowed phrases from the Divina Commedia. Thus when Dante writes—

Imperial transfers these lines from the Paradiso to his own page in this form:—

This is rather close translation; but students, more interested in matter than in form, asked for a complete rendering. Villena was already at work on the Æneid; at the suggestion of Santillana, he further undertook to translate the Divina Commedia into Castilian prose. His diligence was equal to his intrepidity. Begun on September 28, 1427, his translation of Virgil was finished on October 10, 1428, and before this date he had finished his translation of Dante. These prose versions are Villena’s most useful contributions to literature. With the exception of the Arte cisoria—a prose pÆan on eating which would have attracted Brillat-Savarin, and which confirms PÉrez de GuzmÁn’s report concerning the author’s gormandising habits—his extant original writings are of small value. PÉrez de GuzmÁn, Mena, and Santillana speak of him with respect as a poet, and, as Argote de Molina mentions his ‘coplas y canciones de muy gracioso donayre,’ it is evident that Villena’s verses were read with pleasure as late as 1575 when the Conde Lucanor was first printed. But they have not reached us, and perhaps the world is not much the poorer for the loss. Still, we cannot feel at all sure of this. Villena showed some promise in Los Trabajos de HÉrcules, and ended by becoming one of the clumsiest prose writers in the world; yet Mena exists to remind us that a man who writes detestable prose may have in him the breath of a true poet.

Judged by the vulgar test of success, Villena’s career was a failure, and a failure which involved him in dishonour. He did not obtain the marquessate of Villena, and, though inaccurate writers and the general public may insist on calling him the MarquÉs de Villena, the fact remains that he was nothing of the kind. He had set his heart on becoming Constable of Castile, and this ambition was also baulked. He winked at the adultery of his wife with Enrique III. and connived at her obtaining a decree of nullity on the ground that he was impotent—a statement ludicrously and notoriously untrue of one whom PÉrez de GuzmÁn describes as ‘muy inclinado al amor de las mugeres.’ Enrique el Doliente rewarded the complaisant husband by conferring on him the countship of Cangas de Tineo and the Grand Mastership of the Order of Calatrava; but he was unable to take possession of his countship, was chased from the Mastership by the Knights of the Order, and remained empty-handed and scorned as a pretentious scholar who had not even known how to secure the wages of sin. Meekly bowing under the burden of his shame, Villena retired to his estate of Iniesta or Torralba—two petty morsels of what had once been a rich patrimony—and there passed most of his last years working at his translations or miscellaneous treatises, and dabbling in alchemy. He had once hoped to reach some of the highest positions in the state; in his obscurity, his heart leapt up when he beheld a turkey or a partridge on his table, and he speaks of these toothsome birds with a glow of epicurean eloquence. But his ill luck pursued him even in his pleasures. His gluttony and sedentary habits brought on repeated attacks of gout, and he died prematurely at Madrid on December 15, 1434. As a man of letters he is remarkable rather for his industry than for his performance. But there is a certain picturesqueness about this enigmatic and rather futile personage which invests him with a singular interest. It is not often that a great noble who stands so near the throne cultivates learning with steadfast zeal. In collecting manuscripts and texts Villena set an example which was followed by Santillana, and by Luis de GuzmÁn, a later and more fortunate Master of the Order of Calatrava. We cannot doubt that, in his own undisciplined way, Villena loved literature and things of the mind, and that by personal effort and by patronage he helped a good cause which has never had too many friends.

A man of stronger fibre, nobler character, and far greater achievement was FernÁn PÉrez de GuzmÁn, the nephew of the great Chancellor Pero LÓpez de Ayala, and the uncle of Santillana. From a worldly point of view, he, too, may be said to have wrecked his career; but the charge of obsequiousness is the last that can be brought against him. He was not of the stuff of which courtiers are made; his haughty temper brought him into collision with Álvaro de Luna, whom he detested; some of his relatives were in arms against Juan II., and this circumstance, together with his uncompromising spirit, threw suspicion on his personal loyalty to the throne. Such a man could not fail to make enemies, and amongst those who intrigued against him we may probably count that inventive busybody Pedro del Corral, whose CrÓnica Sarrazyna he afterwards described bluntly as a ‘mentira Ó trufa paladina.’ After a violent scene with Álvaro de Luna, PÉrez de GuzmÁn was arrested together with many of his sympathisers. On his release, though not much past middle life, he closed the gates of preferment on himself by withdrawing to his estate of Batres, and thenceforth, like Villena, he sought in literature some consolation for his disappointment. He had a most noble passion for fame, and he won it with his pen, when fate compelled him to sheathe his sword.

Any one who takes up the poem entitled Loores de los claros varones de EspaÑa and lights upon the unhappy passage in which Virgil is condemned for tricking out his wishy-washy stuff with verbose ornament—

is likely to be prejudiced against PÉrez de GuzmÁn, and is certain to think poorly of his judgment as a literary critic. It is not as a literary critic that PÉrez de GuzmÁn excels, nor is he a poet of any striking distinction; but as a painter of historical portraits he has rarely been surpassed. In the first place, he can see; in the second, he writes with a pen, and not with a stick. He is an excellent judge of character and motive, and he is no respecter of persons—a greater thing to say than you might think, for as a rule it is not till long after kings and statesmen are in their graves that the whole truth about them is set down. And it is the truthfulness of the record which makes PÉrez de GuzmÁn’s Generaciones y Semblanzas at once so impressive and entertaining. There is no touch of sentimentalism in his nature; rank and sex form no claim to his indulgence; he is naturally prone to crush the mighty and to spare the weak. If a queen is unseemly in her habits, he notes the fact laconically; if a Constable of Castile foolishly consults soothsayers, this weakness is recorded side by side with his good qualities; if an 66 Archbishop of Toledo favours his relatives in little matters of ecclesiastical preferment, this amiable family feeling is set off against other characteristics more congruous to his position; if an Adelantado Mayor has a bright bald head and pulls the long bow when he drops into anecdotage, these peculiarities are not forgotten when he comes up for sentence. There is no rhetoric, no waste: the person concerned is brought forward at the right moment, described in a few trenchant words, and discharged with a stain on his character. The Generaciones y Semblanzas is not the work of an ‘impersonal’ historian who is most often a sophist arguing, for the sake of argument, that black is not so unlike white as the plain man imagines. PÉrez de GuzmÁn goes with his party, has his prejudices, his likes and dislikes, and he makes no attempt to dissemble them; but he is never deliberately unfair. The worst you can say of him is that he is a hanging judge. He may be: but the phrase in which he sums up is always memorable for picturesque vigour.

He is believed to have died in 1460 at about the age of eighty-four, and in any case he outlived his nephew ÍÑigo LÓpez de Mendoza, who is always spoken of as the MarquÉs de Santillana, a title conferred on him after the battle of Olmedo in 1445. In 1414, being then a boy of eighteen, Santillana first comes into sight at the jochs florals over which Villena presided when Fernando de Antequera was crowned King of AragÓn; and thenceforward, till his death in 1458, Santillana is a prominent figure on the stage of history. His father was Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Lord High Admiral of Castile; his mother was Leonor de la Vega, superior to most men of her time, or of any time, in ability, courage and determination. On both sides, he inherited position, wealth, and literary traditions, and he utilised to the utmost his advantages. He was no absent-minded dreamer: even in practical matters his success was striking. During his long minority, his mother’s crafty bravery had protected much of his estate from predatory relatives. Santillana increased it, timing his political variations with a perfect opportuneness. Beginning public life as a supporter of the Infantes of AragÓn, he deserted to Juan II. in 1429, and, when the property of the Infantes was confiscated some five years later, he shared in the spoil. Alienated by Álvaro de Luna’s methods, he veered round again in 1441, and took the field against Juan II.; once more he was reconciled, and his services at Olmedo were rewarded by a marquessate and further grants of land. Apparently his nearest approach to a political conviction was a hatred of Álvaro de Luna in whose ruin he was actively concerned; but Santillana was always on the safe side, and, before declaring openly against Luna, he provided against failure by marrying his eldest son to the Constable’s niece.

Baldly told, and without the extenuating pleas which partisanship can furnish, the story of those profitable manoeuvres leaves an unfavourable impression, which is deepened by Santillana’s vindictive exultation over Álvaro de Luna in the Doctrinal de privados. But we cannot expect generosity from a politician who has felt for years that his head was not safe upon his shoulders. Yet Santillana’s personality was engaging; he illustrated the old Spanish proverb which he himself records: ‘Lance never blunted pen, nor pen lance.’ He made comparatively few enemies while he lived, and all the world has combined to praise him since his death in 1458. The slippery intriguer is forgotten; the figure of the knight who appeared in the lists with Ave Maria on his shield has grown dim. But as a poet, as a patron of literature, as the friend of Mena, as a type of the lettered noble during the early Renaissance in Spain, Santillana is remembered as he deserves to be.

He had a taste for the dignity as well as for the pomps of life. If he entertained the King and arranged tourneys, he was careful to surround himself with men of letters. His chaplain, Pedro DÍaz de Toledo, translated the Phaedo; his secretary, Diego de Burgos, was a poet who imitated Santillana, and commemorated him in the Triunfo del MarquÉs. But Santillana was not a scholar, and made no pretension to be one. He knew no Greek, and he says that he never learned Latin. This is not mock-modesty, for his statement is corroborated by his contemporary, Juan de Lucena. He tried to make good his deficiencies, airs a Latin quotation now and then, and must have spelled his way through Horace, for he has left a pleasing version of the ode Beatus ille. Late in life, he is thought to have read part of Homer in a Spanish translation probably made (through a Latin rendering) by his son Pedro GonzÁlez de Mendoza, the ‘Gran Cardenal de EspaÑa,’ the Tertius Rex who ruled almost on terms of equality with Ferdinand and Isabel. Whatever his shortcomings, Santillana’s admiration for classic authors was complete. He caused translations to be made of Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, and records his view that the word ‘sublime’ should be applied solely to ‘those who wrote their works in Greek or Latin metres.’ His interest in learning and his wide general culture are beyond dispute. His library contained the Roman de la Rose, the works of Guillaume de Machault, of Oton de Granson, and of Alain Chartier whom he singles out for special praise as the author of La Belle dame sans merci and the Reveil Matin—‘por Çierto cosas assaz fermosas É plaÇientes de oyr.’ He appeals to the authority of Raimon Vidal, to JaufrÉ de FoixÁ’s continuation of Vidal, and to the rules laid down by the Consistory of the Gay Science; and, if we may believe the lively Coplas de la Panadera, he carried his liking for all things French so far as to appear on the battlefield of Olmedo

He had a still deeper admiration for the great Italian masters. In the preface to his Comedieta de Ponza, which describes the rout of the allied fleets of Castile and AragÓn by the Genoese in 1435, Boccaccio is one of the interlocutors. There is a patent resemblance between Santillana’s Triunphete de Amor and the Trionfi of Petrarch, who is mentioned in the first quatrain of the poem:—