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c h a p t e r t w o Historia pro Persona Emperor Charles V Animo! Get on with your work. It is shameful that the deeds, so glorious , of our kings are forgotten. History is partly to blame; also the neglect of our historians. —Ramiro Núñez de Guzmán (1533) Kings and great princes should have not just one, but many historians. —Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1555) In June 1550, traveling aboard ship on the River Rhine, the emperor Charles V began writing his memoirs with help of his aide-de-camp, Guillaume van Mâle. It was unusual for a sixteenth-century monarch to engage in this kind of autobiographical writing, but by no means unprecedented. Before him, Charles had the example of several Roman emperors’ writings, notably Julius Caesar’s Commentaries , the Res gestae of Augustus, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. From the Spanish Middle Ages there was also the thirteenth-century Aragonese monarch Jaume I (1213–1276), otherwise known as ‘‘the Conquerer,’’ whose partly autobiographical Llibre dels fets narrated his many deeds and achievements. Charles also knew that his own paternal grandfather, Emperor Maxmilian I, in addition to dictating his autobiography, Historia Frederici et Maximiliani, to one of his aides, had written two semiautobiographical romances, the Theuerdank, in verse, and the Weisskunig, in prose.∞ Even so, Charles embarked upon his memEpigraphs : Ramiro Núñez de Guzmán to Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, 19 October 1533, in Epistolario de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, 106; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, ‘‘Batalla I, Quinquágena III, díalogo XIX,’’ as cited in Carrillo Castillo, Naturaleza e imperio, 50. 1. Maximilian’s autobiographical writings represented an exercise in what German literary scholars have called Selbstilisierung. See Wade, ‘‘The Education of the Prince.’’ 58 Clio and the Crown oirs with considerable misgivings, as he indicated two years later in a letter to his son Philip II: This history is the one I wrote in romance, when we were traveling on the Rhine and which I finished in Augsburg. It is not written in the way I would wish, and God knows that I did not do it out of vanity, and if anyone should take o√ense at it, my excuse is that it was done more out of ignorance than out of maliciousness. God is accustomed to get angry for similar reasons, but I hope that he would not turn against me for what I have done. I would understand it if he did; Heaven knows, I have given reason to do so on other occasions. But I pray to Him to temper his anger, and release me from punishment even though he sees me at work. I was ready to burn everything, but if God is pleased to give me life, I swear that I will write [my history] in a manner that will not do him a disservice, and in order to avoid all danger of losing it, I send it to you, so that you can keep it locked up, and not opened until . . .≤ Why Charles ended this letter in midsentence remains a mystery, but his decision to keep his memoirs a secret speaks directly to the emperor’s reservations about the writing project in which he was engaged. Memoirs represented a form of autobiography, and in the sixteenth century autobiography was a literary genre still regarded, especially by churchmen, with considerable suspicion.≥ For many, it smacked of vanity, a deadly sin, and for this reason Teresa de Jesús and other divines, both male and female, were frequently reluctant to write their autobiographies, even when urged to do so by their spiritual advisers. Charles, it seems, harbored similar doubts about writing memoirs. Still working on them in his retirement retreat at the Jeronymite monastery at Yuste, in Extremadura, he evidently felt the need to justify his actions when he granted an audience to the famed Jesuit father Francisco de Borja. As later reported by another Jesuit, Charles asked Borja: ‘‘Do you think any hint of vanity is involved when a man sets out to write about his deeds?’’ Borja’s answer is not known, but Charles, anxious to avoid all suspicion of vanity, added that ‘‘when he began writing his history, he was motivated neither by glory nor vanity but simply the idea of knowing the truth because the historians of our times that he had read had managed to obscure it, either out of ignorance or as...

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