Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Preface

p r e f a c e This book has been long, probably too long, in the making. I first started thinking about the uses, as opposed to the idea and practice, of history back in the 1980s, when I was working on the history of Toledo, Spain’s imperial city, in the era of its most famous artist, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, a.k.a. El Greco (1547–1614). My inquiries into this topic included reading histories by various Toledan scholars interested in documenting their city’s past. Upon further consideration, I came to the realization that the histories had purposes other than simply preserving Toledo’s historical record. I learned, for example, that the first of the histories, Pedro de Alcocer’s Historia o descripción de la imperial ciudad de Toledo (Toledo, 1554), was specifically intended to remind Prince Philip, the future Philip II (r. 1556–1598), about the city’s importance as Spain’s traditional capital and to persuade him that Toledo, the ‘‘cabeza de España’’ (or ‘‘head of Spain’’), was where he needed to establish his court. As it turned out, Alcocer’s arguments proved convincing. Philip, upon his return to Spain from the Netherlands in 1559, settled in the so-called Imperial City for a stay lasting almost two years. In 1561, however, apparently tired of climbing Toledo’s steep hills and maneuvering the city’s narrow streets, Philip moved both his capital and his court to Madrid, some forty miles to the north. The loss of the royal court prompted considerable soul-searching on the part of many Toledans. What went wrong? they asked. Some solace was provided by the repatriation of relics belonging to two of the city’s early martyrs, San Eugenio and Santa Leocodia, which reinforced Toledo’s traditional view of itself as Spain’s spiritual capital. Additional support came from several local scholars, especially Francisco de Pisa, who wrote accounts celebrating Toledo’s long and illustrious history and explaining why the imperial city still deserved to be the king’s permanent residence. In the first instance these histories were intended to placate a local audience that lamented the loss of the court. Secondarily, they targeted a x Preface somewhat larger audience in Madrid in the hope of persuading the monarchy to reverse its prior decision and make Toledo Spain’s capital once again. Toledo’s bid for renewed grandeur did not work, but Pisa’s history and a later and more elaborate one by Pedro de Rojas, count of Mora, endure as monuments commemorating, though with questionable accuracy, Toledo’s illustrious past. The two histories also prompted me to start thinking about the di√erent ways in which cities, and then princes, put history to work. These concerns led to my ‘‘Clio and the Crown: Writing History in Habsburg Spain,’’ which was published in 1995 in Spain, Europe, and the Atlantic World, a volume dedicated to John H. Elliott and one that I had the privilege of editing together with my colleague and friend Geo√rey Parker. Although I did not know it at the time, that essay served as the starting point for this book. In many ways, however, that essay and this book are worlds apart. In my ‘‘Clio and the Crown’’ essay, I was principally concerned with municipal history of the kind produced by Alcocer, Pisa, and other local scholars—eruditos in Spanish—who endeavored to insert the history of their city— it could also have been a small town, even a village—into the broader, national epic of Spain and its monarchy. In this volume, center stage goes to the royal chroniclers and the histories they wrought in honor of both country and king. This transition from city to court—think of it as my own version of Philip II’s decision to move from Toledo to Madrid—did not occur overnight. Partly it was thrust upon me by a pair of quincentennial celebrations organized by the Spanish government in honor of the death in 1598 of Philip II and the birth in 1500 of Philip’s father, Emperor Charles V, Spain’s first Habsburg monarch. The latter led to my essay ‘‘The Emperor and His Chroniclers,’’ which appeared in Carolus Imperator (Madrid, 1999). In much revised form, this essay metamorphosed into Chapter 2 of the present volume. As for the celebrations honoring Philip II, these led to two essays—‘‘Philip II, History, and the Cronistas del Rey,’’ in Philippus II Rex (Madrid...