Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula

Jeremy N. H. Lawrance

In 1415, Europeans perceived the five independent Crowns of Hispania (Portugal, Navarre, Castile, Aragon, and Moorish Granada) as a land of Saracens, bearded Jewish magicians, and uncouth frontiersmen, culturally more akin to Barbary than Latin Christendom. During the course of the ensuing century, Iberia embarked upon a golden century of political unification, expansion, and artistic creativity. By 1563, Habsburg Spain was the dominant European and global power, wielding imperial sway over large parts of the Italian peninsula, and exporting its languages and art all over the known world. With political ascendancy went cultural ascendancy. The Spaniards and Portuguese who began as outsiders picking crumbs from the rich banquet of Renaissance culture soon came to regard the newfangled Italian scholarship with peevish rivalry; by 1550 they looked down on it. The pride and confidence of the native tradition was to shape the destiny of humanism in Iberia.

We see the worm turning in a funeral eulogy, The Marquis's Triumph, written by his secretary Diego de Burgos on the death of Íñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana (1398-1458), the chief patron of letters in the Iberia of his day. Diego portrayed Santillana as the man who 'liberated these Spains of ours from blind ignorance, illuminating them with light', and then went on:

By a typical twist, Diego de Burgos's anti-Italian anecdote, like his topical references to reawakening, had an Italian source. His allusion to Apollonius Rhodius turned on its head a passage from a key text of Florentine humanism, Leonardo Bruni's Cicero Anew (c. 1416), which set Cicero up as the model of 'civil life', defender of Republican liberty, and father of 'our (i. e. Italian)' literature². In source, style, and even in its chauvinistic envy, Diego's passage stands as a fitting epigraph to the period, running from 1415 to the 1480s, of the first powerful wave of Italian influence in Castilian literature. He was not the only writer to proclaim Santillana the renewer of Spanish letters. Several other poetic plaints on the marquis's death (including the Latin elegiacs by the Italian humanists Pier Candido Decembrio and Tommaso da Rieti) made similar points. The marquis's nephew Gómez Manrique (1412?-90) described him as 'the first man of our times to conjoin science and chivalry, the breastplate and the toga', thus 'rooting out' from the patria all prejudice against letters³. For the next two centuries, Santillana and the king's poet-chronicler and secretary of Latin letters Juan de Mena (1411-56) were to be seen as harbingers of a new era. Both were considerable poets in the new Latinate style. The marquis's magnificent library of Florentine MSS epitomized the heavy subservience to Italian influence of a circle of contemporary patrons, writers, and men of letters. The Florentine bookseller and biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci noted in the 1480s that Santillana, though unable to construe Latin, had been a competent reader of Tuscan, and had collected his Italian books for a library 'which he made available to all who were interested'. It was this circle of pioneers which, during the reign of John II of Castile (1406-54), initiated the shift away from French models towards Italian ones in Castilian literary and intellectual life. Santillana's apology for the new poetry balanced admiration for the 'crafty versification' of the French with enchantment at the 'inventive genius' of the Italians⁴.

The period was characterized also by a vast activity in the field of 'vernacular humanism' -that is, the translation and adaptation of classical works for the entertainment and instruction of noble and unprofessional readers. In these works the contributions of Italian humanists often played an important part. The Castilian translations of Greek works by Procopius, Basil, Plato, Lucian, Homer, Aristotle, Plutarch, Hermes Trismegistus, and Appian were made from Latin or Italian intermediary versions, adaptations, and falsifications by the humanists Leonardo Bruni, Cencio de' Rustici, Pier Candido Decembrio, Giovanni Aurispa, Marsilio Ficino, and others. Kristeller has noted the striking propensity of Santillana and other Spanish patrons to commission Tuscan translations of the classics⁵.

For these reasons, and above all because contemporaries such as Diego de Burgos consciously expressed the sense of new direction in metaphors of 'reawakening' or 'dawning', this period marked the start of a literary renaissance in Spain. None of the activities of Mena and Santillana, however -not even the latter's four dozen sonnets al itálico modo which are one of the earliest essays in the Petrarchist manner outside Italy- would have been recognized by contemporary Italians as 'dispelling blind ignorance', or 'restoring letters'. The translations ushered in, but were not themselves, the advent of humanist philology; they represented a different facet of the Renaissance, a revival based on an idealized late-medieval vision of antiquity. Vernacular humanism thrived unabated for the next century and a half, unaffected by the rise and fall of the professional Latin humanism which is the chief subject of these pages.

For a first encounter with the real aims of the humanists at the court of John II, we must turn to Alonso García de Santa María, bishop of Burgos (Alfonso de Cartagena; Alfonsus Garsiae Burgensis, 1384-1456). Cartagena was a converso (descendant of a converted Jew); trained at the university of Salamanca as a lawyer and theologian, he entered the service of the Castilian crown at an early age, and had a distinguished career as civil servant and prelate. Amongst his earliest works were translations of Cicero's Offices, On Old Age, For Marcellus, and On Friendship (1422-3), and of the On Invention (completed 1428). Cicero, declared Cartagena, with his solid and useful maxims 'set like precious stones in a mount of persuasive eloquence', offered a via media between the dry logic-chopping of scientific scholasticism and the fatuous swank of pagan rhetoric (elocuencia sin conclusiones)⁶. In the Retórica de Tulio he asserted that rhetoric was not an art 'for twisting words about in fancy order and pretty phrases', but rather, as Cicero and Aristotle taught, a weapon 'for moving men's hearts to anger, or pity, or any other emotion which, like any weapon of steel, can be used either for the good or harm of the república'⁷. Such views betray the impact of certain fundamental ideas of contemporary Florentine humanists. During a mission to the Portuguese court in 1427, Cartagena met some jurists and rhetoricians recently returned from the Spanish College in Bologna, one of whom showed him Leonardo Bruni's Latin translations of Aeschines' Against Ctesiphon and Demosthenes' De corona, and of Basil's On Reading the Classics. He duly recorded his delight at Bruni's revival of 'Attic eloquence and Greek scholarship, whose streams so long ago ran dry'⁸.

Cartagena's enthusiasm for Ciceronian and Brunian rhetoric was tempered, however, by his professional desire to harness ancient learning in the service of the establishment. This point emerged three years later, in his Declinationes, or Evening Lectures on a New Translation of Aristotle's Ethics (1430 or 1431). Their 'publication' at the Council of Basel (1436) caused a furore in Italian humanist circles⁹. The work's dedicatee was Fernán Díaz de Toledo, the converso head of the Castilian royal bureaucracy; its occasion, a tertulia, or erudite evening chat, between the dons of Salamanca and the civil servants of the king's household, to which Díaz de Toledo's nephew Pero (c. 1418-66) brought a copy of Bruni's 'new translation' of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (1417). Both addressee and setting were significant. Bruni's lambasting of the medieval vetus interpres of Aristotle represented a controversial humanist attack, from within the ranks of the professional secretaries to which both Bruni and Díaz de Toledo belonged, on traditional scholastic method, of which Salamanca was a leading centre. Only philologists and Grecians, Bruni proclaimed, could speak with authority on the interpretation of Aristotelian texts. To this debatable point, Bruni added an indefensible one: that any translation of Aristotle must be couched in pure, sweet Ciceronian Latin, not in the rebarbative jargon of those 'barbarian asses', the scholastic translators and commentators. The discussion between Díaz de Toledo's secretaries and the professors must have been heated, inflamed as it was by these professional rivalries.

Cartagena's response, the first serious brush with humanism in Iberian letters, has been represented as knee-jerk obscurantism. It is true that Cartagena's clinching argument -that a real translation of Aristotle must be based, not on what a humanist scholar supposed Cicero might have done with it, but on what Aristotle was actually trying to say- was vitiated by the unexamined assumption that Aristotle's thought is always rational, and can therefore be reconstructed by reason alone, unaided by philology. Nevertheless, Cartagena's Ciceronian versions had already shown that he was no friend to the hispid technicalities of late-medieval scholastic sophistae. In insisting that the basic tool for any translation must be a philosopher's mastery of Aristotelian thought, Cartagena had put his finger on a real blind spot in the early quattrocento humanists' programme: their contempt for technical subjects, and especially logic. 'Let us hack off at the root the error of those who think that philosophical meaning is less important than eloquence', wrote Cartagena, 'for on the contrary it is the higher of the two. Cicero himself did not deny this; he claimed oratory as his by right, but left philosophy to others'¹⁰. The Italian humanists who leapt to the defence of Bruni in 1436 brushed this point aside; they also failed to notice that Cartagena's apology for his ignorance of Greek, which they gleefully held up as proof of his barbarity and incompetence, contained an explicit recognition of the validity of at least one of Bruni's terms of reference. The Declinationes are taken up with discussions on the meaning and usage of particular Latin terms, the province of the humanist grammaticus. Cartagena noted, for example, that Cicero himself approved the use of neologisms and Greek loan-words for technical terms, a point met with suspicious evasiveness in Bruni's replies¹¹. The Declinationes were, therefore, a more sophisticated response to Bruni's humanist challenge than is often supposed. As we shall see, they set the agenda for the whole subsequent history of humanist scholarship in Iberia.

By inclination and by the ideology of his converso class, Cartagena was both a king's man and ostentatiously orthodox. In the struggle for power between the Crown and the noble factions which was the chief political issue of John II's reign, it is clear that Cartagena (though he perforce used a more traditional vocabulary) regarded both the education of the nobility and religious orthodoxy as powerful weapons in the centralist and regalist cause. His approach to humanism was thus eclectic. It is a striking fact that, after the dust of the Declinationes debate had settled, he corresponded on friendly terms with Bruni, as well as with Pier Candido Decembrio and Poggio, commissioning translations of parts of the Iliad and Plato's Republic, and trying to secure the humanists' services as panegyrists for the Castilian crown. In an epistle to Santillana on the chivalric code (1444), Cartagena used Bruni's researches into the origins of Roman militia to emphasize the knight's obligation to the state -even though he was perfectly well aware (as Bruni affected not to be) that Latin miles did not mean 'knight'. On the other hand, in his Recapitulation of the Kings of Spain Cartagena resurrected the old thirteenth-century myth of the Castilian monarchy's unbroken descent from the Gothic kings of Hispania -a claim which would have sent a shiver up Bruni's back, as 'Gothic' to him was already synonymous with medieval barbarism¹²- in order to justify Castilian royal doctrines of pan-Hispanic absolutism, and to provide an historic sense of mission in the crusade against the Moorish kingdom of Granada¹³.

Typical of this eclecticism was Cartagena's decision to write many of his works in Castilian, epitomized in his translation of Seneca's On Providence (1431). The Libro primero de la providencia de Dios, part of John II's project to have the complete works of the Cordovan philosopher done into Castilian, became one of the most widely-read and influential works of the age, surviving in at least thirty MSS and numerous printed editions from 1491 to 1551¹⁴. Its prologue revealed the motives, overtly political and nationalist, behind the project to reclaim the Roman Stoic philosopher for Hispania. By an agile sleight of hand, Seneca's birth in Cordova was turned to account in two ways: first, to make him 'a native of this kingdom and natural subject of the King' (thus emphasizing the 'Gothic succession' of the kings of Castile)¹⁵; and second, to claim him as the grand classical representative of Hispanic culture, on whom an alternative Spanish revival of letters, contrary in spirit to Italian national bias and frivolity, might be founded: 'though the Latins give the palm of eloquence to Cicero, his writings are more worldly, and his style slower and more pompous; whereas Seneca puts down the rules of virtue minutely and pithily, as if he were embroidering a silver filigree on the pretty cloth of eloquence'¹⁶.

Subsequent writers, many of them Cartagena's own protégés, were content to follow the bishop's lead, devoting themselves to the national and vernacular Renaissance without too nice a regard for Italian humanist philology. Even the anti-Italian bias of Diego de Burgos can be traced back to Cartagena, who admitted Italy's cultural preeminence but could not resist a sly swipe at Italian scholars 'who torment the world with heaps of books as soon as they are old enough to hold a pen'¹⁷. Diego made the point about the Spanish revival crystal clear when, in the course of his eulogy of Santillana as restorer of letters, he remarked:

By Diego's time, lionization of Seneca and these other Spanish-born classical authors had become the order of the day. In 1439, Juan de Mena announced the discovery, dredged up from a medieval Castilian chronicle, that, along with Seneca, Lucan, Trogus Pompeius, Orosius, Averroes, Quintilian, Avicenna, and 'all the philosophers, or almost all', Aristotle had been born in Cordova¹⁹. The poet and historian Fernán Pérez de Guzmán (1377?-c. 1460), who in his elegy on Cartagena's death referred to him as 'that Seneca to whom I played Lucilius', proudly set the solid worth of Seneca, Lucan, and Quintilian against the 'fool's gold, vain and useless trifles' of the Italian heroes Virgil, Cicero, and Ovid, capping the comparison with the aphorism, 'Spain never gives flowers, only sound and healthy fruit'²⁰.

It is interesting to set against these trends the dedication to the Cordovan traveller and bibliophile Nuño de Guzmán (c. 1405-after 1467) of a Latin apology for Seneca's style and Stoicism against the critiques of Quintilian, Aulus Gellius, and other classical writers. The Life of Seneca (1440) was one of a number of humanist works commissioned by Guzmán in Florence from his friend Giannozzo Manetti. Manetti's Senecan biography was a serious effort of scholarship, based on ancient sources and illuminated by a real feeling for ancient thought and history; Guzmán's contribution was to inform Manetti of a local tradition which identified a certain house in Cordova as Seneca's. This is the first indication we have of an active antiquarian interest in the classical sites of Iberia. In another Manettian work, a Latin laudatio of Guzmán's mother Doña Inés de Torres (1440), the hand of Nuño is again evident in the long excursus -almost half of the complete work- on the traditional identification (erroneous, as it turns out) of Doña Inés's birthplace Zamora with the famous Celtiberian town of Numantia, sacked by Scipio Africanus in 137 B. C.²¹

Guzmán's openly-stated respect for, and even trust of, an Italian made him a loner, at odds with the chauvinistic bias of his contemporaries. But he was on the friendliest of terms with Cartagena, Santillana, and Alfonso de Palencia, whom we shall encounter shortly. In the 1460s, when the ancient geography and history of Hispania became a topic of interest to kingly propaganda, and especially after the Union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon by the Catholic Monarchs (1479), antiquarian investigations on the sites of Roman Hispania, of the kind pioneered by Guzmán, became the object of some of the first endeavours of native Iberian scholars to play the Italians at their own game.

The catalyst for this development was the Congress of Mantua (1459-61), where Pius II's ineffectual plan for an international Crusade in response to the fall of Constantinople brought together a remarkable group of Spanish envoys and inspired them to undertake the study and publicizing of their own country's antiquities. The Castilian embassy was headed by Íñigo López de Mendoza, the second son of Santillana and later count of Tendilla (d. 1479), whose family were to become the greatest noble patrons of Renaissance architecture and humanist scholarship in the Iberian peninsula. In his retinue was the Sevillian Alfonso de Palencia, an old protégé of Cartagena; with the Papal chancery came another of Cartagena's friends, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo; and with the representatives of John II of Aragon, Joan Margarit.

Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo (Rodericus Zamorensis or Palentinus, 1404-70), bishop of Palencia and referendarius in the Curia of Popes Pius II and Paul II, was the first of the three to publish: his Compendious Hispanic History was written in Rome and printed there (the first work of Spanish humanism to appear in print) with a dedication to Henry IV of Castile in 1470. Its purpose was twofold: first, to trumpet to a Europe reeling from the Turkish victories the Neo-Gothic myth of the kings of Hispania (that is, Castile) and their crusade against the Moors of Granada; and second, to reply to Italian jibes about Spanish barbarism which he had encountered at the Congress²². Arévalo's Compendious History derived its whole ideology and arrangement from the Recapitulation of his revered mentor Cartagena, with one significant exception: whereas Cartagena had been content to stress the Romano-Gothic heritage of Hispania, and only to mention in passing the Pre-Roman legends about Hercules' foundation of the 'Spanish' (Castilian) monarchy, Arévalo's furious anti-Italian bias now induced him to comb humanist texts available to him in Rome of sources such as Pomponius Mela, Justin, Strabo, Polybius, and Herodotus, in search of corroboration for his conviction that prisca Hispania was a more ancient, more glorious, and more cultured civilization than Rome -and one which was undergoing a renaissance of its own under those descendants of the pre-Trojan Hispanic kings, the monarchs of Castile. He summed up with a ringing quotation from Jerome: 'Nunc in Occidente sol justitiae oritur'. Arévalo's voluminous controversial works confirm that he was no friend to the Italian humanists, but his history was provoked and shaped by the impact of humanism to a greater extent than any previous Spanish book²³.

Alfonso de Palencia (Alfonsus Palentinus, 1423-90) was not a churchman or lawyer like Cartagena, Arévalo, and Margarit, but a professional man of letters, like the Italian humanists themselves. Like Arévalo, he served his apprenticeship under Cartagena in the early 1440s, after which he travelled to Florence (1447?-1453), where he met Cardinal Bessarion, George of Trebizond, and other humanists. Later he made several official visits to Rome, leading up to the fateful encounter with Arévalo and Margarit in 1459 at Mantua²⁴. Besides the ten lost books of his Antiquities of Hispania, and his Little Compendium of the Ancient Sites of Hispania (in which he referred to Margarit, and refuted his friend Nuño de Guzmán's identification of Zamora as Numantia)²⁵, the variety and scope of Palencia's works was wider and more unusual than any of the writers I have so far mentioned, ranging from witty Latin epistles to vernacular translations of Plutarch and Josephus, and from Lucianic satires and allegories in both Spanish and Latin to a Latin-Spanish dictionary dedicated to Isabel I. His greatest work, the Decades of the Deeds of Hispania, a merciless history of his own times, was never printed²⁶. Palencia's Latin style was idiosyncratic but recognizably classical in inspiration, particularly in its indebtedness to the Latin comedians. A MS of Donatus' scholia on Terence (discovered by Aurispa in 1433) with what appear to be Palencia's handwritten annotations (Salamanca University MS 78) shows his interest in Latin style and diction, and suggests (if the marginalia are his) that he had learnt humanist littera antiqua script during his Florentine days.

Like Palencia, our third Mantuan delegate, the Catalan cardinal-bishop of Gerona Joan Margarit (Johannes Gerundensis, c. 1421-84), knew Italy well before arriving in Mantua. Educated at the Spanish College in Bologna (1447-53), he spent many years at the Curia in the service of Alfonso V of Aragon and his successor John II (1458-79). On a trip to his diocese in Spain in 1461, Margarit began research for his Lost Chronicles of Hispania, about the pre-Gothic period he called the 'forgotten' age²⁷. The work remained unfinished on his final return to Rome (1481-84); he intended at the last to dedicate it to the Catholic Monarchs. Margarit's motives paralleled the publicist aims of Arévalo; like him, Margarit saw in the aboriginal virtues of the prisci Hispani a powerful charter-myth for the crusading greatness of a reborn and united Spain; but his outlook was that of Mediterranean-oriented Aragon. As his title declared, he had no interest in the Gothic theory, which had been appropriated by the Castilians, and turned by preference to the Ibero-Roman period. Nevertheless, during the shattering civil war of the Catalan revolt (to which he never refers), Margarit remained free of regionalist bias because he was loyal to the Castilian-born John II of Aragon-Navarre, the enemy of the Catalan oligarchs of Barcelona who declared Margarit a 'traitor' in 1471. Perhaps this was why he approached his subject in a more scholarly and dispassionate way than Arévalo, or Arévalo's Italian successor Giovanni Nanni (Annius Viterbensis), whose work on the antiquities of Spain, produced in Rome at the behest of the Spanish cardinal Bernardino Carvajal and dedicated to the Catholic Monarchs in 1498, was to push brazen humanist fabrication in the service of this line of historical propaganda beyond the limits of absurdity²⁸. Margarit used the latest Latin translations of Strabo, Ptolemy, Diodorus Siculus, Appian and Plutarch, as well as Pomponius Mela, Solinus, and the Antonine Itinerary for his researches into the ancient geography and anthropology of the Peninsula. He also visited the ancient sites and ruins himself, and in the five extant revisions of his work took care constantly to replace less reliable medieval sources by antique ones as they came to his notice. Margarit was aided by Aragon's first Hellenist, his fellow in the Curia Jeroni Pau (Hieronymus Paulus Barcinonensis, died 1497), who was already writing to friends in Barcelona for information about the ancient epigraphy of the city in 1475. Pau's own works on ancient Iberian toponymy were written for Italian friends who knew nothing about Spain except what they had read in the classics, and therefore wanted to know about such marvels as the Pillars of Hercules, rock-dissolving springs, and horses impregnated by the wind²⁹.

In general, the role played by court interests in promoting the impact of humanism in the Crown of Aragon was no less preponderant than we have seen it to be in Castile. In the chanceries of John I (1387-95) and Martin I (1395-1410), a circle of Catalan bureaucrats, zealous followers of Petrarch and Boccaccio, began to write each other Latin epistles in which they strove for a purer style³⁰. The stage seemed set for an efflorescence of humanist endeavour in Catalonia; the classicizing movement enjoyed the emphatic prestige of royal favour, and the support of the religious. But the death of Martin I, last of the line of the house of Barcelona, was a blow to Catalan culture. His Castilian successors for a time continued the tradition of royal support of arts and letters, but in 1432 Alfonso V (1416-58) left Catalonia for Italy, never to set foot in Spain again. Once king of Naples (1442), Alfonso pursued that policy of relentless self-aggrandizement which included his well-known maintenance of a menagerie of Italian humanists³¹. The result of this emigration was a lull in the fortunes of humanism, Latin and vernacular, at the provincial courts of Barcelona, Valencia, and Majorca, for a time overshadowed by the activities of Crown Prince Charles of Viana, patron of Theodore Gaza and Angelo Decembrio, in neighbouring Navarre³².

Typical of the modest figures concerned was the Majorcan jurist and civil servant Ferran Valentí (Ferdinandus Valentinus, c. 1400-76), translator of Cicero's Paradoxa (c. 1450). In Florence in the early 1440s Valentí came under the tutelage of Bruni, whom he eulogized as 'my father and preceptor, glory and honour of the Tuscan language'; back in Majorca, he baptized his children with such names as Theseus, Hippolyta, Phaedra, Polyxena, and Lucretia, wrote Latin epistles and Horatian odes to his colleagues, and read classical texts with a circle of like-minded friends in the Majorcan palazzo of councillor Ramon Gual³³. After Alfonso V's death and the return of the court to the Spanish mainland, there was a rapid revival of Aragonese participation in the new learning. Before long the new presses of Barcelona and Valencia were printing Joan Esteve's adaptation of Valla's Elegantiae, Joan Ramon Ferrer's work on pronouns, Italian humanist grammars such as Perotti's Rudimenta (Barcelona, 1475), and even classical texts to compete with the Italian industry³⁴. Such books catered for the tastes of circles of humanistically-inclined secretaries in Saragossa and Barcelona, notably the one whose members -Valentí's son Teseu, Jeroni Pau, Joan Peyró (the patron of the edition of Perotti), and the Italian brothers Geraldini (Alexander, 1455-85, and Antonio, 1457-1525)- are brought alive for us in their Latin epigrams and epistles, collected by the inveterate scribbler, antiquary, and bibliophile Pere Miquel Carbonell (Petrus Michael Barcinonensis, 1434-1517)³⁵.

The visit to Barcelona in 1432 of Guiniforte Barzizza, the son of the educationalist Gasparino, offering to celebrate the deeds of the kings of Aragon in humanist Latin, came to nothing because Alfonso left the city a few months later³⁶. The task was subsequently entrusted to Italian scholars: Lorenzo Valla wrote the life of Alfonso's father (1445), while Antonio Becadelli il Panormita (c. 1450) and Bartolomeo Fazio (1455) celebrated the deeds and quips of Alfonso himself with true Neapolitan unction. Such works set up the model for the role which humanists were to play in celebrating the deeds of Alfonso's successors, his brother John II (1458-79) and nephew Ferdinand II (1479-1516); their imperialist and Caesarist tone was taken over into the mainstream of Spanish historiography when Ferdinand joined his fortunes to those of Isabel I of Castile in 1469. The subtlest native fruit of this tradition was the Sallustian Life of John II of Aragon (1514) commissioned in 1501 by Ferdinand from a distant relative of Cartagena, the Saragossan converso jurist Gonzalo García de Santa María (Gundisalvus Garsia de Sancta Maria, 1447-1521)³⁷.

Another characteristic product of the Aragonese-Italian connection were the Latin comedies and poems celebrating important events such as the capture of Granada from the Moors in 1492. The poems were imitations of classical epics, panegyrical odes, and epithalamia, such as Baptista Mantuanus's Alfonsus and Zuppardi's Alfonseidos. The comedies were humanist adaptations of the Italian farse and allegorical masques performed at the Aragonese court in Naples during the royal entries and pageants so beloved of Alfonso and his heirs, whose most enduring monument is the Triumphal Arch constructed on Roman models for Alfonso's entry into Naples in 1443, commemorated in Porcellio de' Pandoni's Latin Triumph of Alfonso of Aragon on the Fall of Naples. Sannazaro's Italian Trionfo della fama (on the fall of Granada) and Girolamo Morlini's curious pastoral Parthenopea (on the French expedition against Naples), were thus paralleled by the more strictly humanistic Latin comedies of Carlo and Marcellino Verardi, Ferdinand Preserved (in verse, on the attempted assassination of Ferdinand in Barcelona, 1492) and Andalusian Story (in prose, set against the capture of Granada), performed in Cardinal Carvajal's household in Rome in 1493 and printed there, in Salamanca, and in Basel a number of times before 1500. However, it was the pageant element, rather than the humanistic one, which was uppermost in Iberian imitations, which continued the masques (momos) and revels (entremeses) which had characterized Iberian courts since the early fifteenth century. There was, nevertheless, one aspect of these mummeries which lent itself to specifically humanist treatment. It was customary for the court revels to include scenes played by the shepherd-buffoons of Nativity plays; these rustic yokels were transmogrified, by humanist poets, into the swains and shepherdesses of classical pastoral, giving rise on one side to humanist contrafacta such as Antonio Geraldini's religious Bucolica sacra, written in Saragossa in 1484, and on the other to the hybrid vernacular Eclogues of the musician Juan del Encina (1468-1529), a pupil of Nebrija at Salamanca who later visited Italy where some of his plays were written and performed, and the farsas, autos, and comédias of the Portuguese court playwright Gil Vicente (1465?-1536?). The plays of Bartolomé de Torres Naharro (c. 1485-1520?), performed in the Roman household of Cardinal Carvajal and published there in 1517, introduced still further humanist elements such as the five-act structure into the eclogue-pageant tradition³⁸.

Turning to the far west of the Peninsula we find a similar tale to the one we have traced for Castile and Aragon. When Alfonso de Cartagena visited the Portuguese court in the 1420s, the contacts of Lusitanian bureaucrats and lawyer's with Florentine and Bolognese scholarship and booksellers were not far behind those of Castilians at the same date³⁹. But there was no nobleman of the stature of Santillana willing to indulge a dilettante taste for Italian books, and the products of Portuguese vernacular humanism were shadows of the work going forward in neighbouring Castile⁴⁰. The whole responsibility for fostering the new scholarship thus devolved upon the monarchs and secretaries of the house of Avis. The court maintained good contacts with Italian scholarship through its diplomats and prelates, as we see from the biographies of Portuguese clients in the Vite of Vespasiano da Bisticci⁴¹. The most intriguing of these is 'messer Velasco di Portogallo' -student madcap, devotee of Petrarch, and avid bibliophile, he must be the Velascus Portugalensis, 'orator of the King', addressed in three epistles of the indefatigable leech Poggio, one of them (1436) on the importance of ancient rhetoric; and it was probably he who arranged Poggio's panegyric of Prince Henry the Navigator, discussed below. Poggio's accusation that Velascus's niggardliness in providing emolument for services rendered was due to crypto-Judaism ('neither Jew nor Christian, you care not a fig for either faith') proves that this Velascus was Vasco Fernández de Lucena (1410?-95), a Castilian converso jurist who served as Portuguese spokesman at the Councils of Basel and Florence, and later as translator, chronicler, and secretary under three Portuguese kings. His name crops up in connection with almost every humanist initiative in fifteenth-century Portugal⁴².

There was one respect in which Portugal outpaced her easterly neighbours. Dom Pedro of Coimbra (Regent, 1439-47), who visited Florence in the late 1420s⁴³, and his ward Alfonso V (1438-81) realized the important role which humanism and the revival of letters might play, not merely in giving the sheen of elegance to princely life, but more particularly in broadcasting the overseas explorations of Portuguese navigators, which began to astound Europe in the 1430s. This was one Iberian interest which was eagerly reciprocated by the Italian humanists themselves. We have noted that Poggio wrote to Henry the Navigator on his exploits (c. 1439), angling for an invitation to become official chronicler. He was not employed -to employ Poggio was to risk extortion and blackmail- but his India Revealed, in a version adapted by Pius II, is supposed to have influenced Columbus. The significance of the letter for us is that Poggio for the first time applied the concept of 'discovery' to the Portuguese explorations. The notion was a humanist one; what Poggio meant was not that the newly-charted lands and seas were uninhabited, but that they had been terra incognita to classical geographers. Comparing Henry to Alexander the Great (a comparison taken up by Gomes Eanes de Zurara in his Chronicle of the Affairs of Guinea, and by many subsequent writers), Poggio stated that, whereas the ancient hero had only conquered the known world, the Portuguese prince had ventured into the unknown⁴⁴.

The celebrated Bull Romanus Pontifex, issued in 1455 by Nicholas V in recognition of Portuguese rights to discoveries in Africa (the Portuguese orator in these negotiations was the ubiquitous Vasco Fernández de Lucena), initiated a series of politico-legal debates on the conquests -debates which were to become acute with the Spanish conquest of the New World. From the first, humanist scholars had a vital role to play in these debates, as propagandists and later (as we shall see) as participants. It was an important moment, therefore, when in 1460 Alfonso V commanded his tutor and secretary, the Italian Matteo Pisano (d. 1466), to translate the Chronicle of the Siege of Ceuta (1450) of Gomes Eanes de Zurara (c. 1420-73/4) into Latin: the capture of the North African stronghold in 1415 had marked the beginning of Portuguese overseas expansion⁴⁵. Bigger fish soon began to bite: in 1461, Flavio Biondo wrote to the monarch, probably as an official representative of the Pope, offering his services as historian of the Moroccan conquests⁴⁶. Alfonso declined, giving the job instead to the recently-appointed Italian bishop of Ceuta, Fra Giusto Baldino, who was carried off by beri-beri before putting pen to paper.

In 1489, a similar offer was made to Alfonso's successor John II (1481-95) by Politian, who by that time counted amongst his distinguished Portuguese pupils in Florence the sons of John's chancellor João Teixeira. Politian once again rehearsed the notion of 'discoveries of new lands, new seas, new worlds, and even new stars'. The humanist perspective implied in this statement was made even clearer when Politian described the explorations, in a metaphor familiar from other contexts, as 'bringing forth the new from the shadows of ancient Chaos'. This time the king accepted the offer, in a letter which makes it quite clear that what he wanted from the Florentine scholar was the epic grandeur conferred by the polish of his humanist Latin; but Politian, too, died before beginning his task (1494)⁴⁷. By that time the king was looking to native Latinists such as Vasco Fernández de Lucena, Fernando de Almeida, and Diogo Pacheco to publicize the glories of Portuguese overseas expansion in the speeches of fealty to the Roman pontiff which were used to announce the pretensions of the Portuguese Crown⁴⁸. Meanwhile the Arcitinge (c. 1490), a Latin poem on the capture of Arzila and Tangier (1471) by a resident Sicilian humanist, Cataldo Parisio, took the first step towards raising the Portuguese exploits to the level of epic, a path which was continued in the humanist chronicles of Damião de Góis and João de Barros, and ended in the greatest literary triumph of the Portuguese Renaissance, Camoens's Lusiads.

Humanist orators of the 1480s were fond of proclaiming themselves the torchbearers of a 'new epoch'. What lay behind this bombastic claim, apart from the advent of printing, was the migration of the humanists from the courts and chanceries of princes to stipendiary posts in the universities -summed up in the 1490s by the coining in Italian academic circles of the opprobrious term umanista to describe the new class of professional classicists (the word was a witty cross-formation of the term studia humanitatis and the titles of the humanists' arch-rivals, the canonists, jurists, and legists). Modern historians consequently treat the years 1480-1530 as the heyday of humanist activity. But we must beware of applying the neat periodization too crudely. Confidently to date 'the beginning of the Renaissance' in Portugal to the year 1485 and the arrival in Lisbon of Cataldo (Cataldus Parisius Siculus, c. 1453-after 1516?) is an unconvincing ploy. It is less absurd to make an epoch of the publication, at Salamanca in 1481, of Antonio de Nebrija's Latin Introductions; but even in Iberia, as I have tried to show in the preceding section, Renaissance humanism was not invented overnight by a couple of enlightened individuals. Cataldo, for example, made all the expected noises, describing himself as the Hercules who wrestled single-handed with the many-headed Hydra of Portuguese barbarism⁴⁹; in reality he was a wandering scrounger who accepted a lucrative invitation to the Portuguese court as tutor to John II's bastard, and thereafter devoted himself to grooming the sons of various noble houses. That he should have found employment and an enthusiastic welcome for his indecent epigrams and well-turned compliments at the dinner-tables of the mighty implies that a taste for humanism had wormed its way into Portuguese society before he arrived.

Meanwhile many of the native Portuguese who were to effect the business of expelling barbarism during the reigns of Manuel I (1495-1521) and John III (1521-57) were in Italy, studying at the Spanish College at Bologna, at Padua, or in Florence under Politian himself⁵⁰. In the 1490s Lisbon grammarians were still teaching Latin with the arte velha ('old grammar') of the fifteenth-century Castilian barbarian Juan de Pastrana, albeit in their own updated versions (artes novas). Before long, however, a convert to the school of Nebrija, Estêvão Cavaleiro (Stephanus Eques Lusitanus), proposed a wholesale reform, in the spirited prologue to his New Art of Grammar (1493, revised 1516), which he dedicated 'to expelling pertinacious barbarism from Lusitania, and also to the honour and glory of God and the Virgin Mary'. He attacked Pastrana and all previous tinkerings with Pastrana as muddy cesspools of corruption and fields of wild oats. Cavaleiro's spite was directed at the older readers at Lisbon university, who preferred their own methods to his. As examples of civilized Latinists, Cavaleiro listed his friends Diogo Pacheco, Luís Teixeira, Francisco Cardoso, and Cataldo Parisio. The latter crucified Pedro Rombo, the last professor who favoured Pastrana's arte (in an edition published by himself in 1497), as 'that long-earned donkey with his ugly tonsure and his knotty Rod' -an obscene pun on the title of Rombo's grammar, Stick for the Blind. This did not deter Rombo, who became rector of the university; it was his demise in 1533, and the impact of the novel weapon of printing, introduced in Portugal and Spain with powerful royal subventions⁵¹, which at last assured the tardy triumph of the humanist method. Outside the university walls, humanist classicism was already flourishing. Manuel I invited the Flemish scholars Clenardus, Vasaeus, and Fabricius to Portugal to teach the ancient languages. In the 1530s, John III put in motion the reforms which led to the removal of Lisbon university to Coimbra (1537), where in 1543 was inaugurated the celebrated Colégio das Artes. This, staffed in 1548 by a series of distinguished humanists brought in from Bordeaux including the Gouveia brothers, Diogo de Teive, and the Scot George Buchanan, was intended to be the nucleus and powerhouse of Portuguese humanist scholarship⁵².

Cavaleiro's admiration for Antonio of Lebrixa (known as Nebrija, Aelius Antonius Nebrissensis, 1444-1522) reflects the intellectual influence which Castile, the dominant political and cultural power in the Peninsula, now exercised over her neighbours east and west. Like Cataldo Parisio, Nebrija arrogated to himself the title 'conqueror of barbarism' (debelador de la barbarie). Nebrija, however, had in him the stuff of a genuine culture hero. A native Spaniard educated at the Spanish College in Bologna, he was the intellectual match of any Italian; his pioneering work on the pronunciation of Greek is held in esteem by classical scholars⁵³. Besides, Nebrija played a real role in the institutional reform of Spanish university education. Nevertheless, as in the case of Cataldo, we must not forget the part which rhetorical self-fashioning, as well as a considerable dash of wit, played in Nebrija's assiduous creation of his own legend. This started with the substitution of his humble Spanish name, Antonio Martínez, by the impressive-sounding Aelius Antonius Nebrissensis, concocted by identifying his Andalusian village Lebrija with the Nebrissa Veneria mentioned in a poem by Silius Italicus (Punica, III, 393-5), and from some ancient lapidary inscriptions to unknown Aelii and Aeliani found in the fields near his birthplace -archaeological evidence, as Nebrija affected to believe, that he was related to his fellow-Spaniards the emperors Aelius Hadrian and Aelius Trajan.

It was part of Nebrija's carefully-nurtured image never to acknowledge predecessors. Yet his affinity to the native tradition going back to Cartagena is striking. He must have known Palencia, who was a familiar of Nebrija's first patron Archbishop Fonseca of Seville; and been acquainted with Margarit's Lost Chronicles and Cartagena's Recapitulation, both of which were printed in 1545, presumably from copies among Nebrija's personal papers, by his son Sancho (Xanthus Nebrissensis). Nevertheless, Nebrija omitted to mention any of these in his own Sample of a History of Spanish Antiquities (Burgos, 1499), a short Castilian foretaste for Isabel I of a promised five-volume Latin work. The Sample began with a list of sources suspiciously reminiscent of a similar list in Margarit's book, with the difference that Nebrija named sixteen new sources -three of them genuine. In a later reference to the still forthcoming Antiquitates, he blustered that his five tomes would soon disprove 'the theories of all those who have ever written anything whatever on this subject'⁵⁴. The pugnacious boast was intended to damn to outer darkness not only Cartagena, Margarit, and Palencia, but also a living rival, the Spanish-domiciled Sicilian scholar Luca di Marinis (Lucius Marineus Siculus, c. 1444-1533), whose On the Glories of Spain had appeared in Salamanca in 1496⁵⁵. Despite this contempt for his uncouth rivals, Nebrija shared with them a tendency to glorify pre-Roman Spain at the expense of Roman (and hence Italian) civilization, and an allegiance to royal ideology. When invited to become one of the royal historians by King Ferdinand (1509), Nebrija did not hesitate to begin his Decades of the Deeds of Ferdinand and Isabel of the Spains with the forged classical documents of Giovanni Nanni's gloriously irresponsible rifacimento (1498) of the introduction to Arévalo's Compendious History. He applauded the king's choice of a native historian (himself) rather than the expected Italian with a quotation from Cato about the influence on Rome of effeminate Hellenes, 'which we may apply to the Italians: "as soon as these fellows teach us letters, we shall be utterly corrupted"'. Notorious republicans ('sectarians of some sham of liberty'), Italians would very likely belittle Spain's imperial greatness out of envy⁵⁶. As we have seen, this parallel between cowardly Italians and mendacious Greeks had occurred to Diego de Burgos as long ago as 1460. In the prologue to his Spanish-Latin dictionary of 1494, Nebrija's boast that his aim in travelling to Italy had been, 'by the law of retribution (por la ley de la tornada), to restore their lost homelands to the Latin authors who have so long been exiled from Spain' was merely a variation on the hoary anti-Italian topic of the translatio studii.

Soon after his return from Bologna in 1470, Nebrija set out for Salamanca with the intention, as he tells us in a celebrated passage, of 'bearding barbarism in its den'; and in 1481, he published his Latin Introductions, a textbook on Latin grammar which was designed to replace the medieval manuals then in use in the Salamancan lecture halls. The success of the Introductions was phenomenal; they were immediately reprinted (1482), issued in a bilingual edition for Queen Isabel (c. 1487), revised and expanded several times (notably in the recognitio of 1496), again reprinted, and exported all over Iberia and Europe. The second edition was republished, for example, in Venice in 1491, and the most extensive version, of over 400 pages, appeared in Lyon in 1524; the book was much used in England. At a stroke, the Introductions overshadowed all the other efforts of humanistically-inclined Iberian pedagogues⁵⁷.

To open the definitive recognitio of this famous book is a strange experience for the modern reader, indoctrinated by centuries of adulation and by Nebrija's own fanfares into expecting a wholly innovative work. What he finds are hundreds of closely printed columns of Gothic black-letter text, in which bare grammatical rules, some of them couched in traditional doggerel verses for memorization, are surrounded by a sprawling gloss. The obsolete features of Nebrija's book were indeed pointed out by some dissident contemporaries. Lucio Marineo found the Introductions so unwieldy to use in his classes for the sons of the nobility (by 1495, they had reached over three hundred pages) that he wrote his own counterblast, A Brief and Handy Grammar (dedicated to Isabel I c. 1496; printed 1532), a primer of some sixty-seven leaves which taught the rudiments by short examples from classical authors. Marineo summed up his purpose in a sentence: 'I beseech you, grammarians all, not to spread over five years what can be taught in as many months'. By the 1530s, the Erasmian Cristóbal de Villalón was to suggest ironically that Nebrija's arte was itself the serpent responsible for 'the original sin of barbarism' in Spain⁵⁸.

Villalón, however, was writing in a Spain which had already had fifty years to absorb the impact of Nebrija's teaching. Back in the 1480s, as Nebrija explained in the prologue to the recognitio, the old-fashioned verses, which were not used in the first version, had to be reintroduced in the second in order to smooth ruffled feathers within the bastions of traditional institutional pedagogy⁵⁹. It was the incidental remarks in the prefaces and ever-expanding gloss of the successive editions of the Introductions, and above all his steadfast refusal to countenance the speculative linguistic theories of scholastic modistae who derived grammatical rules not from classical usage but from logic, which encapsulated Nebrija's findings on the phonology and accidence of the classical language. The dynamite of his ideological position was declared in a brilliant series of repetitiones (Latin orations traditionally delivered by a professor on St Luke's Day at the opening of the academic year at Salamanca) on points of humanist scholarship. The most famous is the Repetitio secunda, delivered and published in 1486, subtitled On the Corrupt Pronunciation of Certain Letters by Ignorant Spaniards (reprinted in an expanded version as On the Force and Power of the Alphabet, 1503), in which, in the course of various disquisitions on the digamma, Nebrija fustigated the medieval barbarism of Spanish scholarship, and outlined the ideal of the humanist grammaticus as a polymath whose deep knowledge of Latin language and letters made him the arbiter of all the academic disciplines. This predated Politian's celebrated statement of the same idea, the Praelectio 'Lamia' (1492), by a decade⁶⁰. All sciences, Nebrija argued, are based on language, which only the humanist grammarian is -capable of purifying and systematizing; ergo, the humanist is the expert of final recourse in all sciences. To borrow the vocabulary of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Nebrija's grammaticus -now fancifully transformed from the despised medieval choir-school dominie into the torchbearer of a whole culture- corresponded not to the grammairien, but to the philosopher encyclopédiste.

Nebrija's Repetitio secunda represented a return to the debate addressed in Cartagena's Declinationes, set in the Salamanca of half a century before. Cartagena argued against Bruni that Ciceronianism must be subject to philosophical rigour; Nebrija, in common with most humanists of his time, tacitly accepted the limitation upon Ciceronianism, but fell back on Bruni's stronger point, that philosophy must be subject to philological rigour⁶¹. The rest of Nebrija's many-sided career may be understood as a practical demonstration of the philosopher-grammarian's task, applied not only to the etymology, accentuation and pronunciation of the classical languages, and to his pioneering work on the grammar of the vernacular⁶², but also to the vocabulary of law, cosmography, astronomy, and -most important of all- Holy Scripture.

But Nebrija was only one of the men who contributed to the great project of biblical scholarship initiated by Cardinal Archbishop Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (formerly known in English as Ximenes, 1436-1517), which resulted in the foundation of the Trilingual College and university of Alcalá, and in the publication of the six volumes of the renowned Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1514-1517)⁶³. In Nebrija's lifetime, droves of Italians and Sicilians visited Spain, while Alcalá and Salamanca were endowed with more than their fair share of fine native scholars. The anti-Aristotelian Fernando Alonso de Herrera (1460-1527), editor of Valla's Elegantiae and Trapezuntius's Rhetoric and author of several treatises on tricky grammatical points, upheld the humanist against the scholastic approach to philosophy. His friend the Italian-trained Hellenist and textual critic Hernán Núñez de Toledo (El Comendador Griego, Ferdinandus Pincianus, 1475?-1553) and the Sicilian Lucio Flaminio were perfect types of the humanist philologist, explaining knotty passages in those knottiest of authors, Pliny the Elder and Pomponius Mela. Hernán Núñez was also a Greek scholar; with the brothers Vergara (Francisco's Greek grammar, the first written by a Spaniard, appeared at Alcalá in 1537), Politian's Portuguese student Aires Barbosa (Arius Barbossa Lusitanus, c. 1465-1540), and Aldus's Cretan friend Demetrios Dukas, he was responsible for the first ornaments of Iberian Hellenism⁶⁴. Though Nebrija was the leader of this circle, he did not bring it into existence; for that, and for the stunning impact of the new humanist pedagogy in Spain, the active economic and political patronage of the Crown and of powerful sections of the Church and nobility continued to be responsible, thereby ensuring that Iberian humanism kept its characteristic stamp as a creature of the ruling monarchist and aristocratic ideology.

A further indication of the spread of the new tastes in ambits beyond Nebrija's immediate circle is the impact of humanist genres on Castilian vernacular literature. This began before Nebrija's day, in the 1460s and 1470s, with close and rather formal adaptations. The subject matter of On the Happy Life, a dialogue written in Rome in 1463 and dedicated to Henry IV of Castile (printed 1483 and 1499) by the converso secretary Juan de Lucena (c. 1430-1506?), was taken bodily from Bartolomeo Fazio's Ciceronian dialogue On the Fortunate Life (1446), a Stoic attack on Valla's Epicurean Voluptuary. But Lucena replaced Becadelli, Guarino, and Lamola, the interlocutors of Fazio's work, and its setting in Guarino's house in Ferrara, with his own patrons and friends, the heroes of the first generation of the new learning in Castile ('our Petrarchs', as he called them), Santillana, Cartagena, and Mena; and set the scene in the Castilian royal court. Lucena's colourful prose, powers of characterization (praised by the Erasmian Juan de Valdés in 1535 as 'wonderfully accommodated to the dramatis personae'), and eye for local Castilian detail (including some savage anti-clerical satire) make this a more fascinating work than its Latin original. Lucena was also one of the earliest Spaniards to state, in his Epistle Encouraging Literary Study, the connection between the revival of letters and the spiritual reform of the inner man; in 1503, he became the first of the long and distinguished line of Iberian humanists to fall foul of the Inquisition⁶⁵. A few years later, we find in the Castilian Letters (printed 1486) of another converso secretary, Palencia's bosom-friend Hernando del Pulgar (c. 1425-1500?), a successful adaptation of another favourite humanist Latin genre, the familiar epistle⁶⁶.

However, the culmination of humanist influence in Castilian letters is the Comedy of Calisto and Melibea, an erotic comedy begun between 1492 and 1496 by an unknown author of whom all we can say is that he was a member of a humanist coterie at Salamanca at the height of Nebrija's popularity. As in Italian universities and courts, the custom of reading (and later performing) Latin comedies on feast-days such as Corpus Christi had probably been instituted among Salamancan students by humanist professors; the anonymous Comedy, at any rate, shows an easy familiarity with the latest fashions of this humanist commedia erudita of rogues and trollops⁶⁷. The Comedy was left incomplete; in 1498, the MS was discovered and the play completed by a converso law-student at the same university, Fernando de Rojas (c. 1475-1541), and shortly afterwards printed to great acclaim. The Tragicomedy, as Rojas renamed the work in a second and expanded version a year or two later, completely transcended its humanist models; it was not only the greatest book written in Spanish up to that time, but also the first to achieve European fame, being printed, translated, and adapted (under the humanist title Celestina) into Italian, French, German, English, and Latin from 1506 onwards⁶⁸.

By the second decade of the sixteenth century, therefore, the impact of humanism in Spain was no longer confined to a number of individuals in small literary circles around the court. Within a short time, in fact, the term 'humanist' itself became outdated. To be sure, a second generation of distinguished academic philologists followed the first, notably Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (El Brocense, Franciscus Sanctius Brocensis, 1523-1600) whose Minerva; or, The Elegance and Causes of the Latin Language (1562; revised 1587), widely read and printed throughout Europe, is now recognized as one of the most significant Renaissance contributions to theoretical linguistics; but this was not the all-embracing humanism which Nebrija had fought for⁶⁹. But most humanist-educated men chose a career in the bureaucracy, as they always had. By the mid-1520s, pure classical humanism on the Italian quattrocento model was in crisis, moved down the agenda to make way for more urgent affairs of society and government, in particular the spiritual reforms of Erasmianism and the equally impressive reform and revival of Catholic theology associated with the Thomist School of Salamanca led by the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1485?-1546) and his followers Domingo de Soto (1494-1560) and Melchor Cano (1509-60), which first clashed with the Erasmians at the celebrated junta of Valladolid in 1527. We must be careful to distinguish between the classical philologists and these men, who are sometimes called 'humanist lawyers' and 'humanist theologians' -they were, properly speaking, lawyers and theologians who had a training in humanist Latin and classical literature. The situation was summed up by a Complutensian professor of rhetoric of the next generation, Alfonso García Matamoros (Alphonsus Garsias Matamorus Hispalensis, 1510?-72) who, in his patriotic history of Spanish letters from Tubal and the Scipios to his own day, The Claims of Spanish Scholarship (Alcalá, 1553), remarked that whereas the age of Cartagena had been 'slightly more cultured (aetas paulo eruditior)', and the reign of the Catholic Monarchs the backdrop to Nebrija's 'fierce and bloody battle with the barbarians', a decade or two later the time had come 'when it was not so much an ornament to know Latin as a disgrace not to know it'. Matamoros then let the humanist side down by listing the Salamanca scholastics and jurists among his examples of this brave new Latinate world⁷⁰.

In Iberia, the transition from the humanism of the manuscript-seekers and grammarians to the hybrid style we call High Renaissance is clearly illustrated in vernacular literature. After the zenith of Rojas's Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, humanist influence on Castilian letters is represented by Fray Antonio de Guevara, bishop of Mondoñedo (1480?-1545). Guevara was educated, probably by Lucio Marineo, at the court of the Catholic Monarchs. His Familiar Epistles (1539; expanded 1541) are a gossipy sequel to Pulgar's Letters; his Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius (1518, printed 1528; expanded as Dial of Princes, 1539) crams sententious classical lore into a biography of Marcus Aurelius supposedly translated from a Greek MS discovered in the library of Cosimo de'Medici. But Guevara's florid style, immensely popular all over Europe, represented humanism in its putrescent state. His learning was entertaining, but bogus; much of it, such as the Roman emperor's racy letters to the Great Whores of Antiquity, invented by the worthy bishop himself. By Guevara's day the influence of the quattrocento revival on vernacular literature was being superseded, notably by the pastoral Eclogues and Horatian epistles of Garcilaso de la Vega (1501?-36), the great-nephew of Santillana, which were written not in Spain but at the viceregal court of Naples. Garcilaso was the Wyatt of Spanish letters, introducing the Petrarchist mode into Spanish poetry; the dominant influence on his verse was not humanism (though he did write Neo-Latin poetry), but the Italian sonneteers Bembo, Tansillo, Tasso, and Sannazaro. In 1532 Garcilaso's companion Joan Boscà published his translation of an Italian masterpiece by a visitor to the Spanish court, Baldassare Castiglione; Garcilaso declared that Boscà's El Cortesano (1534) was 'perhaps the first work written in Spanish worthy of a learned man's attention', implying that a work like the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, penetrated through and through by the grand outlook and style of quattrocento humanism, was to his delicate palate old-fashioned and medieval. For the next half century, the influence of humanism on literature in Iberia came to be filtered through the dark glass of Renaissance Italian poetry⁷¹.

To argue that the impact of humanist scholarship and the revival of antiquity were overtaken or overlaid by broader Renaissance influences in the 1530s is not to deny that Iberia would continue to produce distinguished scholars in the pure humanist tradition -Spain's greatest and most influential classical scholar, Antonio Agustín (1517-86), was barely walking when Nebrija died⁷². But, as intellectual leadership was taken over by the Thomist School of Salamanca, classical philology was put to pasture in the glades of academe. Nebrija had tried to claim for philology a position over all the arts and sciences; Francisco de Vitoria now stated drily that 'the office of the theologian is so wide that no argument, dispute, or subject is beyond his remit', and put down Erasmus with heavy-lidded irony as 'that grammarian who thinks himself a theologian'⁷³.

The crisis and decline of humanism is dramatically exhibited by the fate of Erasmianism⁷⁴. The tendency of many historians to suppose that humanism and Erasmianism were the same thing displays, it is true, a serious misunderstanding of both movements. The impact of Erasmianism in Iberia was due not to humanism but to the desire for religious reform, a desire which had its roots in antecedents very different from Renaissance philology. Devotio moderna, Franciscan mysticism, and the Observant movements are three forms of reforming zeal whose indifference towards humane letters springs to mind. But Spanish and Portuguese reformers were often led to Erasmus's brand of humanism by their reforming interest in Scripture and the Fathers. This was notably the case of Cisneros, whose foundation of the university of Alcalá was not a gesture of classical enthusiasm, but 'the installation of a complete organism for ecclesiastical education'⁷⁵. The episode of Nebrija's involvement with the publication of Cisneros's Complutensian Polyglot is therefore full of significance for our story.

From the early days of his professorship at Salamanca, Nebrija had been attracted by the example of his hero, Lorenzo Valla, to the question of the philological criticism of the Bible. Even before the famous declaration of his intention to dedicate himself exclusively to divine letters in 1495, he began to compile vast dossiers of lexical and textual notes on the Scriptures. This predated by many years Erasmus's publication of Valla's Annotations (1505); it was in line with the general tenor of humanist scholarship in Spain, where critical editions of religious writers such as Sedulius, Prudentius, Arator, and Baptista Mantuanus outnumbered those of classical authors, and where the old anti-Italian jibes about the 'frivolity' of pagan poetry still retained much force. The first sign of the likely reception of Nebrija's Biblical studies was the confiscation of his papers by the Inquisitor Diego de Deza in 1505/6 but in 1507 Deza was replaced by Cisneros. Nebrija was now actively encouraged by the cardinal to begin his Biblical studies again; and in 1507 he published in Logroño his Third Fifty (an ironical reference to Deza's two attempts to prevent their appearance) of essays on disputed words in Holy Scripture, together with an Apologia addressed to Cisneros defending the grammarian's duty to submit the text of Scripture to philological scrutiny. The Apologia shows Nebrija at his scintillating best, both in the side-splitting excoriation of his barbarous opponents, and in the brilliant demonstrations of critical acumen and solid scholarship with which he pinpoints errors and proposes emendations to celebrated Biblical loci conclamati⁷⁶.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the impact of the Third Fifty (reprinted in 1514, and again, in Paris, in 1520), Cisneros did not immediately involve Nebrija in the project for the publication of the Complutensian Polygot, which was then going forward amidst the building works in Alcalá. In 1513, however, as the moment for the final revision of the texts drew nearer, the Cardinal invited Nebrija, whose outspoken views had finally lost him his Salamancan chair, to apply for a post at Alcalá. The new professor was not required to lecture; his job was to cast an eye over the proofs of the Bible as they were brought in to his lodgings from Arnao Guillén de Brocar's printing-shop next door. From his own palace nearby, the cardinal could stroll each morning for a chat at Nebrija's downstairs window, and to check that Mrs Martínez was keeping the professor's addiction to the wine bottle under control. Within a short time, Nebrija discovered that Cisneros's editorial team, far from adopting his own radical critical principles, had on the cardinal's express instructions opted merely for a 'purified' text of the canonical Scriptures, based on the oldest MSS that could be found, but without textual emendations, even where the Vulgate offered plain mistranslations. Worst of all, the edition was to include glossaries based on precisely those medieval 'barbarian' grammarians whom it had been Nebrija's mission to drive from Spain. Nebrija refused to be associated with the Complutensian Polyglot unless the whole job was done afresh.

Cisneros did not give way to Nebrija's tantrum. In a delightfully civilized interview, he informed the recalcitrant professor that the Bible would be printed as it stood, though Nebrija was quite free to publish his philological researches elsewhere. True, the Bible had by this time been set up in type after twelve years of labour, but so footling an objection could never have weighed with the stern and mighty Cisneros. We must accept the less obvious explanation: that the cardinal considered Nebrija's intellectual arguments, and rejected them. In retrospect, this seems a decision of fateful significance to the story of humanism in Spain. The greatest monument of Spanish humanist scholarship would be published without the participation of Spain's greatest humanist scholar. Cisneros had shown, gently but firmly, that he accepted Nebrija's ideal of the humanist as the arbiter of all disciplines in theory, but not in fact. It was not a spiritual or theological objection which defeated Nebrija, but an intellectual one. Humanists might study the Scriptures, but they could not challenge the orthodoxy established by weightier disciplines. The circle was thus complete: Cisneros's position was essentially that of Cartagena in the Declinationes of 1431. Nebrija had failed to persuade the people who mattered that philology must be taken seriously.

The inevitable resignation of Nebrija from the Complutensian project, tendered in a letter of regretful self-justification which is one of his most convincing works, unwittingly presaged the way in which the Politianesque ideals of his youth would be overtaken (though no one could have foreseen this at the time) by the great tide which was to rack Europe with religious war in the coming decades. Significantly, the letter was written not in Latin, for the humanist market, but in Spanish, 'so that I may have more witnesses to the fact that I warned your Worship of this matter in good time'⁷⁷. The double defeat, personal and national, implied in these words was made concrete in 1516, when Erasmus published in Basel his Novum Instrumentum, a radical humanist translation of the New Testament conducted on just the lines Nebrija had proposed. Spain's bid to become the powerhouse of biblical humanism in Europe had suffered a major setback, irrespective of the fact that, with the arrival in Spain of the Flemish court of the first Habsburg king of Spain in 1516, Erasmianism was poised to embark on its meteoric Spanish adventure. The situation was revealed by the shrill and chauvinistic attack on the Novum Instrumentum presented in the Annotations against Erasmus (1520) of Diego López de Zúñiga (Didacus Lopidis Stunica), one of the editors of the Alcalá Polyglot. The only effect of Zúñiga's intemperate squib (whose publication Cisneros forbade as long as he lived) was to convince Erasmus and learned Europe that Spain would not, after all, join the humanist revolution. The episode deterred Erasmus from ever setting foot in Spain⁷⁸.

Though the calibre of scholarship in Iberia in the brilliant imperial period of Emperor Charles V (I of Castile and Aragon, 1516-58) remained high, the record of Spanish and Portuguese humanism was on the whole depressing. The best classicist, the Valencian converso Juan Luis Vives (Ludovicus Vives, 1492-1540), was forced into exile by the racist Inquisition. After the trauma of the comunero revolts, brutally put down in 1520-23, many brilliant minds went abroad, or compromised themselves deeply with the imperial machine, writing witty and elegant imitations of Erasmian and Lucianic dialogues, Livian histories, and Ciceronian epistles in defence of such glorious acts as the Sack of Rome (1527) and the massacre and deportation of Moorish insurgents in the kingdom of Granada (1568-70). This was because after the crisis of the Council of Valladolid (1527), the Erasmian majority of humanistically-inclined scholars saw that allegiance to Charles was the only guarantee of their spiritual ideals. The age-old dependence of Iberian humanism on the Crown, its uneasy inferiority to scholasticism in the universities, its narrow chauvinism -factors which had dogged it ever since Cartagena's day- were now coming home to roost. Consequently, when the backlash against Erasmus came with the Inquisition trials of the 1530s and the autos de fe of 1557-62, it had grave, and even desperate, consequences for humanism. In the recently founded College of Arts at Coimbra, the pride of Portuguese classicism was decimated by the anti-Erasmian purges of 1550; the inquisitorial Indices of prohibited books (1551 and following) completed the job. In Spain, Inquisitor Valdés's Index and Philip II's decree (1559) forbidding his subjects to study in foreign universities other than Bologna, Naples, Rome, and Coimbra set similar limits to the horizons of Spanish humanism⁷⁹. Henceforth, classical education in Iberia was to be controlled by the rising Jesuit order.

A parallel to the fall of Erasmian-tainted humanism is provided by the last great endeavour of Iberian humanist scholarship in the Fernandine and Caroline period: the description and justification of the Iberian empire in the New World. The role which classical philology may have played in stimulating the discoveries has been debated; a dispassionate view suggests that it was small, though not necessarily negligible⁸⁰. Be that as it may, we have seen how the Portuguese expansion and exploration in Africa and the Indian Ocean attracted the attention of Italian humanists in the mid-fifteenth century. The role which the discovery of the New World and circumnavigation of the globe played in stimulating humanist endeavour and discussion was, however, of a different order from that of the African and Asian explorations. America was not merely a region of the known world which had not been visited or conquered by Alexander, but a whole unknown world which had no right to exist at all if the ancients knew anything about cosmography, and which therefore demanded attention from classical scholars. Besides, the humanist profession was inescapably involved in early discussions of the American experience because classical science and rhetoric were amongst early modern Europe's chief intellectual resources for facing the challenge to imagination, reason, and political ideology posed by the New World⁸¹. Both of these factors are epitomized in the first major humanist work on the discoveries written in Spain, the Decades on the New World of Pietro Martire d'Anghiera (Petrus Martyr ab Angleria Mediolanensis, 1457-1526), who was appointed official chronicler of the newly-founded Council of the Indies in 1510⁸². Martyr, a sound classical scholar, was invited to Spain in the 1480s by Santillana's grandson Íñigo López de Mendoza III, count of Tendilla. He remained close to the Spanish court for the rest of his life, apart from a brief but significant sojourn in Cairo in 1501/2. He was thus in a unique position to interview many of the explorers on their return to Spain, and was later officially charged with examining the reports, artefacts, maps, and humans brought back by the caravels to the Council of the Indies's offices. It is he who is credited with the first use of the terms 'New World' and 'Western Hemisphere', in the letters in which he published the news of Columbus's landfall (1494). After these first fine careless raptures, Martyr began to slot the marvels into the schemes of his classical education; at the same time he managed to convey a sense of wonder, pride, and gratification at the novelty and grandeur of his subject-matter, beside which 'the exploits of Saturn or Hercules pale into insignificance'. He deduced, correctly, that the naked, disorganized, and backward cannibals of Columbus's Letter were distinct from the Moslem barbarians he had studied in Egypt; he therefore transformed them into a race of handsome, fair-skinned savages in a state of nature, inhabiting a lush paradise unencumbered with 'the evil curse of Mine and Thine', free of laws, clothes, war, and envy.

The vivid hues of Martyr's Utopian vision derived from the classical myth of the primeval Golden Age. Each new wonder was checked for classical parallels: coolly dismissive of Columbus's conjecture that the land he had stumbled across was the Biblical Ophir or part of Cathay, Martyr was more excited by the reports of tribes of cannibals and warlike virgin huntresses, since the testimony of the ancients made the existence of these anthropophagi and Amazons inherently probable (though Martyr eventually dismissed the Amazons as a fable). Accounts of huge fish or seamonsters were dutifully filed under references to Arion's dolphin and the Tritons. Even when Martyr's comparisons were purely rhetorical, they revealed a cast of thought; in his mind's eye, the native women in their nude beauty were nymphs and dryads, the Spanish sergeants were 'decurions', and the Indian who betrayed a plot to her Spanish lover was Fulvia, the Roman lady who betrayed Catiline.

Columbus's emphasis on the abject brutishness and cowardice of the natives he encountered was not disinterested scientific observation, but a gambit designed, like his exaggerations of the vegetable and mineral wealth of the islands, to persuade the Spanish Crown that the conquest and evangelization of these pathetic people was necessary, easy, and profitable. Martyr, on the other hand, idealized the Indians because he wished to glorify the Spanish achievement in discovering and conquering 'our New World', as he called it -an aim betrayed by his decision to omit all account of Spanish atrocities. This he masqueraded as a courteous deference to his addressee, Pope Leo X, who, though he might delight in the firm breasts and wanton protervity of Indian maidens, would surely recoil from the rehearsal of bloody horrors. But Martyr also regarded the Indians as worthy of scientific speculation and analysis, because he had access to the recently rediscovered perspectives of ancient ethnography. Though Martyr never doubted that Christianization was a prime objective in the Indies, his classical studies enabled him to recognize that a pagan society could function successfully, and even legitimately, on its own terms.

Martyr's enlightened approach had one drawback: it was out of tune with the conquistadors' assumption that Indians were fair game for rape, pillage, and enslavement. Even as Martyr and other humanist publicists poured forth their encomiums of the new-found lands, their words were being undermined by a grim reality. It was not their image of the noble Indian, but their image of the savage Spanish conquistadors which was seriously astray. When Fray Antonio de Montesinos's condemnation of the encomienda system came to attention in the homeland in 1512, there was an outcry. The junta of Burgos convened by Ferdinand to discuss the problem was not led, however, by humanists, but by the theologians and legists of the grand old scholastic faculties. It was a Scottish theologian at the Sorbonne, John Mair, who had brought Aristotle's Politics into the debate on the vexed question of whether the Indians, as barbarians, could be classified as 'natural slaves'. When the royalist lawyer Juan López de Palacios Rubios drew up his Brief on the Islands of the Ocean Sea in 1513, he portrayed the Indians much as Martyr had, as primitives. But he was not drawn to conclude that American society was a classical Golden Age; instead, his scholastic training led him to deduce from various shockingly unnatural features of this primitivism -communal living, nakedness, sexual promiscuity, matrilineal descent- that Indians were irrational, uncivil, and hence naturally slavish in Aristotle's sense. Palacios Rubios's brief was to provide a watertight case for exploiting the natives while retaining the fiction that they were, as the Papal donations and imperial policy declared, 'vassals' of the Spanish Crown⁸³.

With the discovery and conquest of Mexican, Mayan and Incan civilizations, the question of natural slavery assumed a new urgency. These were societies which could not easily be dismissed as primitive, and were indeed similar to the civilizations of the classical world. Nevertheless, Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria were moved to make their contributions on the ensuing 'question of the Indies' not by humanism, but by theology. Once the question of the Indies had become a matter of state, the humanists were forced to take a back seat. At most, they might be asked to formulate the classical authorities for a predetermined imperial policy. The position had significant parallels with that which Nebrija had run up against in the matter of the Complutensian Polyglot; the old disciplines and authorities were to have the last say.

We see this in the work of the last Spanish classical scholar to fall within the bounds of this chapter, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (Johannes Ginesius Sepulveda, 1490-1573), whose Second Democrates; or, on the Just Conquest of the Indians was submitted to the royal censors for its imprimatur in 1547. Sepúlveda had spent much of his life in Italy, first at the Spanish College at Bologna, where he is supposed to have met Pomponazzi, Paulo Giovio, and Manutius, and then in the customary bureaucratic post, as royal chaplain and chronicler. Admired as a Latinist by Erasmus, Antonio Agustín, and other competent authorities, his works included Aristotelian translations and treatises on history, ethics, and politics. But, even before the inquisitorial trials of Hellenists such as Juan de Vergara in the 1530s⁸⁴, Sepúlveda had sensed the danger in the connection between Greek studies and Lutheranism; one of his first works was an attack on Luther, On Fate and Free Will, where he mused whether it might not be the case that 'study of eloquence and humane letters brought this pernicious plague of heresy upon our heads'⁸⁵. Now he tried once again to sense which way the wind was blowing, and penned an attack on the ideas of the turbulent priest Bartolomé de las Casas, whose pamphlets on the Crown's neglect of the rights of its Indian vassals were giving the Emperor a headache. Sepúlveda's work marshalled classical authority and Aristotelian argument to prove that the enslavement of the Indians was just, holy, and politic. His pamphlet, from its hyperbolical rhetorical style to the jaunty dialogue format in which Democrates, the author's alter ego, is given all the good arguments against the villainous Lutheran stooge Leopoldo, was thoroughly humanist. The Second Democrates was thus sadly inappropriate to the stern level of technical scholastic discourse which had been set in these matters by Vitoria and his followers, who were convened to evaluate Sepúlveda's work in a junta of 1548, and who unanimously condemned it as the meddlesome work of a man who had 'studied more in languages than theology'⁸⁶. In the debates between Sepúlveda and Las Casas which ensued in Valladolid in 1550-51, the humanist was made to pay for having couched his work in the language of classical rhetoric; his arguments were picked over and submitted to a roasting as if they were the questions, propositions, and distinctions of a scholastic treatise, instead of the elegant commonplaces of an orator. Indeed, Sepúlveda's lack of theological expertise had led him into the trap of Lutheran heresy⁸⁷. The question rumbled on for a decade, doubtless because Sepúlveda's pretty arguments for condoning the atrocious behaviour of the Spanish colonists were too useful to dismiss out of hand. Intellectually, the theologians had swept the board⁸⁸.