posted 04-07-2001 10:18 AM               

A Bohemian visitor to the court of Henry IV of Castile at Olmedo in 1466 found the king seated on the floor surrounded by pretty young boys and dressed in Saracen clothes and a turban. The bishop of Salamanca entertained his guests with bullfights. Twenty years later in 1485 - when Renaissance humanism enjoyed enthusiastic patronage at the Castilian courts German traveler was again struck by the "Moorish vices" of the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. The women went veiled in mantillas "in the Saracen manner", the royal officials were "mostly baptized Jews or unbaptized Saracens whom the king makes no attempt to convert", and the head courtiers refer to Ferdinand and Isabella as "those offspring of aconvert Jewess". The priests spoke no Latin, thebishop of Seville was a Jew, and the Grand Cardinal spent his nights in a "harem". Another German complained that "Christianity was more mocked in Spain than in Turkey".

These observations show how hard it was for northern Europeans to comprehend the unfamiliar society of the five kingdoms of medieval Iberia: Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Portugal and Granada. For over seven centuries since the Moorish conquest in AD 711, large parts of the peninsula had been under Muslim rule. Andalucia, as the Arabs called Islamic Spain, was governed first by the caliphs of Cordoba and then, as the Christian reconquest advanced gradually south, by the princes of Granada. Muslim religious tolerance had also made Sepharad, as the Jews called Spain, the chief haven of medieval Hebrew culture. Medieval Iberian society and art were penetrated through and through with oriental influences. It was little wonder that our 15th-centurv travelers portrayed Spain as a land of mysterious eastern customs and marvels.

In 1469, however, Princess Isabella of Castile married Prince Ferdinand of Aragon. Their accession to their respective thrones led in 1479 to the union of the two most powerful Christian confederations in Iberia. In 1492 their armies conquered Granada and drove the last Moorish king from Spanish soil. The sovereigns were acclaimed throughout Europe as crusaders for the Faith and granted the special title "Catholic Monarchs" by the pope. Within months they decreed the expulsion of the Jews from their kingdoms. In the same year Christopher Columbus set out from the Canary Islands (which had been conquered by Castile in the 1480s) to make the Atlantic voyage that ended with his momentous landfall in the Americas. Columbus promptly claimed these vast territories as the property of the Castilian crown, and justified the "conquest" as another crusade to convert the heathen.

Portugal had been no less enterprising. The capture of the north African stronghold of Ceuta in 1415 marked the beginning of Portuguese overseas expansion. Soon the caravels of Prince Henry the Navigator were skirting the west coast of Africa beyond the equator in search of gold, slaves and converts. Under John II (1481-95) of Portugal and Manuel I o] Portugal (1495-1521), Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and Vasco da Gama reached the western shores of India (1498). In 1494 a papal bull was
issued dividing Asia, Africa and the American Indies between Spain and Portugal.

Within an astoundingly short time the old image of Iberia cut off from the rest of Christian Europe had been overturned. Spain was poised to embark upon a century of imperial expansion, religious fervor and artistic creativity. Ferdinand's patrimony included the Aragonese seaborne empire of the Balearic islands, Sardinia, Sicily and Naples; by the Treaty of Barcelona in 1493 he regained Roussillon from France. In 1512 all of Navarre
south of the Pyrenees was annexed, fixing the borders of the Spanish crown where they have remained ever since. In 1516 Ferdinand was succeeded by his grandson Charles I of Spain, who became Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519, and so added to the Spanish crown his family's dominions in Flanders and the Low Countries, the Franche Comte, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, the Tyrol and various principalities in Germany; in 1535 he acquired Milan. By the time Charles's son Philip II came to the throne in 1555, Habsburg Spain was the dominant European power, ruling over large
parts of the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific worlds.

The century from 1480 to 1580 was also distinguished by an extraordinary flowering in the cultural and artistic life of the Iberian kingdoms that became known even within the lifetime of Ferdinand and Isabella as the Golden Age. The most magnificent manifestations of this cultural expansion are to be found in architecture and sculpture, in literature and in learning.

Spanish scholars and Italy in the 15th century

As in the rest of Europe, the chief cultural impulse for the early Spanish and Portuguese Renaissance came from Italy. Classical humanism, the scholarly study and revival of ancient Roman and Greek literature, philosophy and science, first began to influence Iberian culture during the reigns of John II of Castile (1406-54) and his cousins Alfonso V of Aragon (1416-58) and John II of Navarre and Aragon (1425/58-79). Similar developments occurred in the Portugal of Edward I (1433-38) and Alfonso V (1438-81). During this period Castilian and Portuguese scholars who had studied at the Spanish College of Bologna, in Padua, or in Florence.

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established personal contacts with the foremost Florentine and north Italian humanists and booksellers of the day, notably Leonardo Bruni, Piercandido and Angelo Decembrio, Poggio Bracciolini, and the Greeks George of Trebizond, and Bessarion. Meanwhile the Aragonese conquest of Naples in 1442 opened another channel of communication with Roman, Sicilianand Neapolitanscholars such as Lorenzo Valla, Bartolomeo Fazio and Antonio Becadelli.

In Castile the torchhearer of this first wave of Italian influence was Inigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana (1398-1458). A fluent reader of Italian, he amassed a magnificent library of manuscripts in his palace at Guadalajara and commissioned treatises and classical translations from numerous scholars. As a keen amateur of letters and a talented poet who experimented with the first Petrarchan sonnets in Castilian, Santillana headed a circle of writers and noble patrons who promoted the study of Italian and classical letters at the court of John II of Castile.

Santillana's direct descendants, the grandees of the Mendoza family, were to be the chief noble patrons of Spanish arts and letters in the early Renaissance. The palace at Guadalajara of his eldest son, the Count of Infantado, is a jewel of the "plateresque" style, the architectural transition from late Gothic to Renaissance. Another son, the Count of Tendilla, a trusted lieutenant of Ferdinand and Isabella, invited the distinguished Italian humanist Pietro Martire d'Anghiera to Spain. Another, the bibliophile archbishop of Toledo, Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, the mastermind behind Ferdinand and Isabella's early political success, was a patron of printing and learning, and founder of the College of Vera Cruz in Valladolid with its plateresque facade and patio.

The Portuguese royal house of Avis also established contacts through its bureaucrats and prelates with Florentine scholars and booksellers, as can be seen from the biographies of Portuguese clients in the Lives written by the famous Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci in the 1480s. The most intriguing of these was Vasco Fernandez de Lucena (c.1410-95). Vespasiano vdescribes Lucena's student pranks in Bologna, where he pawned his law books to devote himself to the poetry of Petrarch. Lucena served under three Portuguese kings as classical translator, chronicler and Latin orator. He corresponded with the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini in the 1430s about the voyages of exploration of Prince Henry the Navigator, served as Portuguese spokesman at the Church Councils of Basel and Florence, and later made the of ficial announcement to Pope Innocent VIII of the news that Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope.

The Aragonese king Alfonso V the Magnanimous (1416-58) spent almost the whole of his reign in Italy. Once installed as king of Naples (1442), Alfonso established a vast library of precious manuscripts and a humanist academy within his palace in the Castel Nuovo. A host of Italian and Spanish scholars and poets contributed their talents to the glorification of the Aragonese monarchy: Lorenzo Valla, for example, the most famous Latin scholar in 15th-century Italy, wrote the life of Alfonso's father. In Navarre humanist activity was centered on the court of the bibliophile Prince Charles of Viana, patron of the Greek scholar Theodore Gaza and the Italian scholar Angelo Decembrio, who amused himself by translating the works of Aristotle into Aragonese.

Royal patronage, printing presses and the new learning

The regional centers of the new arts and learning in 15th-century Iberia acquired a marked local character. In the Crown of Aragon, for example,
there were separate circles of humanists in the provincial courts of Saragossa, Barcelona, Valencia, Majorca, Sicily and Naples. In Catalonia the humanist group led by Jeroni Pau, Joan Peyro and Pere Miquel Carbonnell was influenced by the ethos of Barcelona's chancery, the most sopisticated administrative bureaucracy in Europe. In Majorca, on the other hand, the jurist Ferran Vallet, who studied in Florence in the early 1440s under Leonardo Bruni, baptized his children with classical names such as Theseus, Hippolyta, Phaedra, Polyxena and Lucretia, translated Cicero's Paradoxes into Catalan, and composed frivolous Horatian odes for his friends. In Aragonese Saragossa, by contrast, the humanists congregated at the archbishop's palace and pursued a more regalist and spiritual range of interests. Similarly the grandiose cosmopolitan courts of Valencia, Sicily and Naples each stamped their own local character on the style of humanism practiced there.

The Union of Crowns under the Catholic Monarchs did not efface these regional centers, but their powerful royal patronage harnessed the diverse streams of the new learning in a common cause - the service of their own regime. In particular Ferdinand and Isabella gave their full support to the teaching and propagation of classical scholarship. In the late 1470s Antonio de Nebrija (1444-1522), an Andalusian scholarwho had been trained in Bologna, returned to teach at Salamanca, the premier university of Iberia. With Isabella's approval he proclaimed himself "the vanquisher of barbarism" and published his Latin Introductions (1481), a grammar designed to replace the medieval manuals then in use in Salamanca.

The success of Nebrija's Introductions was immediate; the book was expanded and issued in a bilingual edition dedicated to Queen Isabella, and subsequently exported all over Europe, being republished many times in Salamanca, Barcelona, Venice, Lyon and other cities. Nebrija's grammar was used to teach Latin to Henry Vlll of England and his children. The humanist message was soon taken up throughout Iberia, and Salamanca became one of the leading centers of humanist scholarship in Europe. Italian scholars accepted invitations to live at the Spanish court; Greek studies were introduced at
Salamanca and Valencia; and several new universities - such as the colleges of Vera Cruz and San Gregorio in Valladolid, and the various
colleges of the Complutensian University of Alcala de Henares - were founded to uphold the new learning, all housed in fine Renaissance buildings.

In Portugal Manuel I (1495 - 1521) followed a similar pattern, inviting Sicilian and Flemish scholars to Portugal to teach the ancient languages. His successor, John lll of Portugal (1521-57), transferred Lisbon university to Coimbra in 1537, where he inaugurated the humanist Colegio das Artes. It was staffed in 1548 by a group of distinguished scholars from Bordeaux that included the Scot George Buchanan.

Nebrija's celebrated opening oration to the university of Salamanca of 1486, in which he ridiculed his scholastic colleagues as barbarians unable to construe a sentence of Aristotle, started a revolution. However, though most of the humanists were middle-class civil servants, lawyers or teachers, their radical program reflected the political interests of their noble patrons. Indeed the humanists stressed that the new education in "liberal" or "humane" letters was particularly suited to aristocratics living the active or civil life.

Three factors made this claim tenable: the rapid spread of literacy among the lay nobility; the great growth in bureaucracy and modern state methods of administration that provided the market for their newly acquired educational skills; and the invention of printing. For the first time the sons of the gentry began to be sent to university, where they studied Nebrija's Introductions and the speeches of Cicero. The number of students matriculated at Salamanca rose from 600 in the early 15th century to over 3,000 by the beginning of the 16th century, and to over 7,000 by the latter
half of the century. Queen Isabella gave a powerful lead by ostentatiously taking up the study of Latin herself at the age of 31, and by instituting a grammar school for the young noblemen in her court. This publicly demonstrated that the humanist curriculum in classical culture and eloquence was considered a fitting training for any gentleman who aspired to high office and favor in the royal court.

The presses were introduced in Castile about 1472 and in Aragon by 1473. By 1500 printers were operating commercially in some 20 towns, and had published 856 known editions. A further 1,368 editions survive from the period 1501-20. Ferdinand and Isabella quickly grasped the cultural mportance of the invention. They personally invited German printer-booksellers to set up business in major towns such as Seville and granted them special financial privileges. When the royal lawyer Alvaro Dtaz de Montalvo compiled the Royal Ordinances of 1480, the sovereigns instructed him to print and distribute copies to "every city, town, or village in these our said realms" at a fixed price. State licensing of printed books started in the 1490s, and was made statutory by the celebrated Decree on Printed Books of 1502.

So, whereas the great works of Spanish medieval literature survive in two or three manuscripts, literary works could now be printed in thousands of copies, spreading their fame far and wide. Diego de San Pedro's popular sentimental romance Prison of Love (1492) was printed many times in Castilian, but also in Catalan, Italian, French, English and German. Even this popularity could not compete with that of the chivalric romance Amadis of Gaule (1508), which became Europe's first international "bestseller", being the most widely printed vernacular work of its age.

Excerpt from “Cultural Atlas of the Renaissance” Black, Greengrass, Howarth, Lawrance, Mackenney, Rady, Welch.
Prentice Hall
ISBN 0-671-86523-4

posted 04-09-2001 01:06 PM               

Marcus