Alfonso X of Castile-León: Royal Patronage, Self-Promotion and Manuscripts in Thirteenth-century Spain 9789048541386

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Abbreviations
Introduction: ‘the king makes a book’
1. Alfonso X, his Literary Patronage, and the Verdict of Historians
2. Alfonso in his Texts: literary models and royal authorship
3. Reality, Politics, and Precedent in Images of Alfonso
4. Codices Laid Out for a King : the appearance and production of Alfonsine manuscripts
5. The Circulation of Alfonsine Texts: astrological works and chronicles
Concluding Remarks
Manuscript Sources
Index

Citation preview

Alfonso X of Castile-León

Church, Faith and Culture in the Medieval West The essential aim of this series is to present high quality, original and international scholarship covering all aspects of the Medieval Church and its relationship with the secular world in an accessible form. Publications have covered such topics as The Medieval Papacy, Monastic and Religious Orders for both men and women, Canon Law, Liturgy and Ceremonial, Art, Architecture and Material Culture, Ecclesiastical Administration and Government, Clerical Life, Councils and so on. Our authors are encouraged to challenge existing orthodoxies on the basis of the thorough examination of sources. These books are not intended to be simple text books but to engage scholars worldwide. The series, originally published by Ashgate, has been published by Amsterdam University Press since 2018. Series editors: Brenda Bolton, Anne J. Duggan and Damian J. Smith

Alfonso X of Castile-León Royal Patronage, Self-Promotion, and Manuscripts in Thirteenth-Century Spain

Kirstin Kennedy

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Alfonso as the planet-god Jupiter, with disciples. Libro de las formas & ymagenes, Escorial MS h.I.16, fol. 1r. ©Patrimonio Nacional Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 897 2 e-isbn 978 90 4854 138 6 doi 10.5117/9789462988972 nur 684 © K. Kennedy / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

To Ana Domínguez Rodríguez for her generosity – intellectual and material – and her kindness. To Anne J. Duggan, without whose encouragement and advice this book would never have been published.

Contents Acknowledgements 9 List of Figures

11

Abbreviations 13 Introduction: ‘the king makes a book’

15

1. Alfonso X, his Literary Patronage, and the Verdict of Historians

45

2. Alfonso in his Texts: literary models and royal authorship

89

3. Reality, Politics, and Precedent in Images of Alfonso

111

4. Codices Laid Out for a King: the appearance and production of Alfonsine manuscripts

153

5. The Circulation of Alfonsine Texts: astrological works and chronicles 185 Concluding Remarks

215

Manuscript Sources

221

Index 225

Acknowledgements An author who has taken twenty years to complete her manuscript will have incurred many intellectual debts along the way, and the list that follows records my gratitude to those who have helped and inspired me. At every stage, I have been fortunate to work in well-stocked libraries with friendly, knowledgeable librarians. In Oxford, I would like to thank in particular the staff of the Modern Languages Faculty Library (especially Roger Shilcock), the staff of the Taylorian Library (particularly Jill Hughes, David Thomas, and John Wainwright), and the staff of the Bodleian Library. In Spain I was most grateful for the assistance of librarians in the Archivo Capitular, Seville, the Biblioteca Menéndez y Pelayo, Santander, and the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona. It was also a pleasure to examine two Alfonsine manuscripts in the Vatican Library. Most codices copied for Alfonso are now in Madrid or in the palace and monastery founded by Philip II at the nearby town of El Escorial. I am grateful to Cristina Guillén, rare books librarian at the Biblioteca Nacional, and Elena Luxán, of the Museo del Libro (now the Museo de la Biblioteca Nacional), for allowing me to study some of the library’s most precious manuscripts. Manuel Sánchez Mariana and his small team at the Complutensian University library, the Biblioteca Histórica Marqués de Valdecilla, kindly brought me the Alfonsine Libros del saber de astrología to examine on numerous mornings. I would also like to extend my warmest thanks to the director of the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, Padre José Luis del Valle Merino, and to his colleague Padre Teodoro† for welcoming me and supporting me during my many visits to study the Alfonsine treasures in their collection. The origin of this book is a doctoral thesis supervised by Stephen Parkinson and submitted to the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford, in Hilary Term 1999. The gathering of evidence for the arguments presented here would not have been possible without the generous support of the British Academy (at both doctoral and post-doctoral level), the Trustees of the Lady Allen Scholarship, the Trustees of the de Osma Studentship, the Curators of the Taylor Institution, and the fellows of The Queen’s College, Oxford. I am extremely grateful for their largesse, without which I could not have carried out the crucial task of repeatedly examining the manuscripts. Alan Deyermond†, Tom Earle, Jeremy Lawrance, Ian Macpherson†, Ian Michael, Malcolm Parkes†, Stephen Parkinson, David Rundle, Peter Russell†, and Ronald Truman were instrumental in steering the book in its early days as a thesis. I would also like to thank Simon Doubleday for

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his measured comments and suggestions at book manuscript stage, and Erika Gaffney and Chantal Nicolaes of aup for their patience and advice. I must also extend my gratitude to those responsible for photography and image rights at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, and at Spain’s Patrimonio Nacional (in particular to María Belén Dotú Montes). There would have been no manuscript at all, though, were it not for the conversation and encouragement of my friends and colleagues over the years. I have particularly appreciated the constant friendship and support of: Simon Barton†, Antony and Marieta Coleridge, Marian Campbell, Paloma Castellanos Mira, Richard Edgcumbe, Ken Emond, Laura Fernández Fernández, Manuel Pedro Ferreira, Francisca Figueira, Christine Finn, Irene Frazão, Melanie Florence, Alejandro García Avilés, Nigel Griffin, Thomas Heneage, Martin Henig, David Hook, Ma Jesús Iglesias, Deirdre Jackson, Kris Kalinski, Kenneth, Christine and Claire Kennedy, Teresa Laguna Paúl, Ma Jesús López de Lerma Lázaro, Santiago López Ríos, John Lowden, Mark P. MacDonald, Giles Mandelbrote, Elizabeth Miller, Lesley Miller, Jesús Montoya Martínez†, Manuel Moreno, Peta Motture, Garry Mullender, Bernadette Nelson, Tom Nickson, Joanna Norman, Ma José Pérez Garrido, Carlos Rocha, Xon de Ros, Mariam Rosser-Owen, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Joseph T. Snow, Eric Southworth, Nigel Tattersfield, Barry Taylor, Holly Trusted, Rose Walker, Rowan Watson, Jane Whetnall, and Tom Windross. All errors are, naturally, my own. Alfonso X was devoted to the Virgin Mary, but I must declare my allegiance to her mother, St Anne. Two scholars who bear her name, Ana Domínguez Rodríguez and Anne J. Duggan, have been instrumental in bringing this book to press, and it is to them that I dedicate this work, with enormous gratitude and affection.



List of Figures

Figure 1: Alfonso, wearing the livery of the royal Order of Santa María de la Estrella, with scribes, singers, and musicians. Cantigas, códice rico, Escorial MS T.I.1, fol. 5r. © Patrimonio Nacional Figure 2: Type and anti-type: the early years of Nebuchadnezzar (below), whose life prefigures that of Alfonso (above). General estoria IV, BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 2v. Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved. ©2018 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Figure 3: A scribe writes out a treatise on games played with dice on the orders of Alfonso and supervised by his agent. Libro de los juegos (Libro de los dados), Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 65r. © Patrimonio Nacional Figure 4: Book rubric framed by a roundel and square at the start of the General estoria IV, BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 1r. Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved. ©2018 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Figure 5: Imperfect circles and untidy layout in the Libro delas cruzes, Madrid MS 9294, fol. 136v. ©Biblioteca Nacional de España Figure 6: Marginal note citing the opinion of ‘the translators and the emendator’, with underdotting in the main text. Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, Madrid, MS 3065, fol. 142v. ©Biblioteca Nacional de España Figure 7: Marginal note in a reader’s hand that refers to ‘the translators’. Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, Madrid, MS 3065, fol. 46r. ©Biblioteca Nacional de España Figure 8: Rubric announcing book number and contents, framed in a roundel. General estoria I, Madrid MS 816, fol. 231v. ©Biblioteca Nacional de España

121

127

132

154 189

199

207 213

Abbreviations BAV BL c. Cantigas, Códice rico (2011) CCCM EHR Emperor of Culture Escorial HRJ JWCI Madrid MGH Murcia 2009 PL Sevilla 1248

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City British Library, London chapter Alfonso X, Las Cantigas de Santa María, Códice rico, MS T.I.1 Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, ed. L. Fernández Fernández and J.C. Ruiz Souza, 2 vols, (Madrid, 2011) Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio medievalis English Historical Review Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and his thirteenth-century renaissance, ed. R.I. Burns (Pennsylvania, 1990) Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, El Escorial Hispanic Research Journal Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid Monumenta Germaniae historica Alfonso X el Sabio, ed. I.G. Bango Torviso. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Sala San Estebán, Murcia (Murcia, 2009) Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina (Patrologia latina), 221 vols, ed. J.P.Migne (Paris, 1841–1864) Congreso internacional conmemorativo del 750 aniversario de la conquista de la ciudad de Sevilla por Fernando III, Rey de Castilla y León, Sevilla, Real Alcázar, 23–27 de noviembre de 1998, ed. M. González Jiménez (Madrid, 2000)



Introduction: ‘the king makes a book’

From the vantage point of today, the literary patronage of Alfonso X (reigned 1252–1284) ‘the Learned’ (el Sabio) –, ruler of Castile and León (united in 1230 under his father Fernando) and of Islamic kingdoms recently incorporated into Christian ones such as Murcia, Seville, and Niebla – seems extraordinary for its time, in the context not only of Spain but also of the whole of thirteenth-century Europe.1 Praised by a contemporary for studying ‘worldly and heavenly kinds of knowledge’,2 he initiated what appears to have been a coherent programme of scholarship in Castilian, commissioning translations from the Arabic of astronomical works, sponsoring legal and historical compilations, as well as composing devotional poetry in praise of the Virgin Mary. His decision to promote the Castilian language was not a casual one. It was the principal language of his chancery and of the Christian population in the largest of his kingdoms, Castile, a kingdom which from the 1230s until the 1260s had undergone a period of further expansion as it absorbed the Islamic states which had submitted to his father Fernando and to Alfonso himself while still a prince and later when he became king.3 Alfonso’s consistent patronage of works in the vernacular, at a date when Latin was the language of European scholarship, was remarkable, although the immediate consequence was that the works bearing his name, even the scientific ones, enjoyed limited circulation beyond his kingdoms. Despite this, some historians have argued that his decision was due to his desire to unite a kingdom of disparate languages (principally Arabic and Castilian) and faiths (Christian, Muslim, and Jewish) in a language and culture that would be common to all. 4 More recently, however, the utopian ideal that this analysis implies has yielded to more hard-headed reassessments of his literary patronage. In the words of one historian, ‘The Alphonsine cultural project should not, perhaps, be understood as an abstract reflection of 1 For the extent of Alfonso’s kingdoms, see J.F. O’Callaghan, The Learned King: the reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia, 1993), 11–15. 2 ‘Animum suum transtulit ad investigandas et perscrutandas mundanas scientias et divinas’: F. Fita, ‘Biografías de San Fernando y de Alfonso el Sabio por Gil de Zamora’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 5 (1884), 308–28, at 321.21. 3 For an assessment of Alfonso’s cultural achievements in the context of those of his contemporaries, see R.I. Burns, ‘Stupor Mundi: Alfonso X of Castile, the Learned’, in Emperor of Culture, 1–13, at 5. For the increasing dominance of Castile in the Peninsula, see H. Kamen, Imagining Spain: historical myth and national identity (New Haven and London, 2008), 17. 4 A. Castro, España en su historia. Cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires, 1948), but cf. Burns, ‘Stupor Mundi’, 8–12.

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enlightened toleration; rather the king’s interest in translation was […] an instrument of proto-absolutist, colonial control.’5 The ambitious scope of his literary legacy – or campaign for cultural dominance – is apparent in the fifteen manuscripts which survive today that have been attributed to his patronage and which are dated or dateable to his reign.6 Among these are a magnificently illuminated compilation on astronomical and horological instruments, the Libros del saber de astrología, and the Lapidario, a translation of three treatises on the virtues that precious and semi-precious stones receive from the movements of the constellations throughout the year. Alfonso is also credited with the patronage of legal compilations, two chronicles (unfinished at his death), and works on astrological prediction and magical talismans. Despite this emphasis on the Castilian language, the compilations of poems which narrate miracles of the Virgin Mary, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, follow poetic conventions of the time and are composed in Galician-Portuguese. The text in two of the four surviving thirteenth-century copies of the Cantigas is illustrated with full folio panels of six and twelve miniatures. Alfonso was not the only European ruler of the period to have a scholarly reputation, and his contemporaries, who were his relations as well, also commissioned translations of scientific works and compilations of chronicles and legal treatises. However, modern assessments of the scope of their patronage and the depth of their intellectual engagement suggest their achievements lagged behind those of the king of Castile. Frederick II, king of Naples and emperor of the Romans (ruled as emperor 1220–1250), who died just two years before Alfonso became king, was praised by the English chronicler Matthew Paris as a ‘wonder of the world’ (‘stupor mundi’)7 – a sobriquet prompted by his correspondence with the leading foreign scholars of his day, his patronage of philosophers and astronomers, and even his reputation as the father of Italian lyric poetry. However, Frederick’s modern biographer, David Abulafia, has questioned such an uncritical assessment, and reinterpreted familiar evidence to argue that his scholarly interests were unexceptional for the period and inferior to the cultural activities taking

5 S.R. Doubleday, ‘“Criminal Non-Intervention”: Hispanism, medievalism, and the pursuit of neutrality’, in In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past, ed. S.R. Doubleday and D. Coleman (New York, 2008), 1–31, at 16. 6 C. Álvar, ‘Alfonso X’, in Diccionario filológico de literatura medieval española. Textos y transmisión, ed. C. Álvar and J.M. Lucía Megías (Madrid, 2002), 3. 7 M. Parisiensis, Chronica Majora, ed. H. Richards Luard, 7 vols (London, 1872–1883), v (1880), 196 (for the year of Frederick’s death, 1250).

Introduc tion: ‘ the king makes a book’

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place in contemporary Castile.8 Nor does the patronage of the French kings who were Alfonso’s contemporaries appear to match the Alfonsine cultural output – although arguably they provided him with a model to imitate and expand upon. Alfonso’s first cousin, Louis IX of France (reigned 1226–1270), sought the company of learned men. According to Jean de Joinville, Seneschal of Champagne, Louis’s fellow crusader, and his biographer, Louis regularly dined with the Parisian theologian Robert de Sorbonne, a man who Joinville described as a ‘prud’homme’, or a pious man of the world rather than a priest or member of a religious order.9 Moreover, on his return from crusade in 1254, Louis established a royal library in the same room as the royal archives. His decision to do so was inspired by stories he had heard in the Holy Land about a great Saracen sultan who had founded a magnificent library to encourage the work of scholars and philosophers. Louis stocked his library with especially commissioned copies of devotional works and theological treatises.10 His appetite for religious self-instruction was the subject of particular comment by his contemporary biographers, but, as Louis’s modern biographer Jacques Le Goff noted recently, this did not distinguish him as a theologian or intellectual.11 Within the Iberian Peninsula itself, Jaume I of Aragon (reigned 1213–1276), Alfonso’s father-in-law, was a patron of troubadours and wrote an autobiography in vernacular Catalan, the Llibre del rei En Jaume (re-titled Crònica and Llibre dels fets by much later historians).12 Despite this, Jaume does not appear to have wished to promote his association with letters, and never seems to have referred to himself as author of any work.13 8 D. Abulafia, Frederick II: a medieval emperor (London, 1988; repr. 1992), chapter 8, especially 270. 9 J. de Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. J. Monfrin (Paris, 1995), 15, paragraph 31. On his use of the term ‘prud’homme’, see Joinville, Vie, ed. Monfrin, cxviii–cxix, and M. Kauffmann, ‘The Image of St Louis’, in Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. A.J. Duggan (London, 1993), 265–86 and plates 1–17 (271). Robert founded the Maison de Sorbonne, the hostel for poor students in Paris, which came in time to be the most distinguished college in the University of Paris: see A.L. Gabriel, The Paris Studium: Robert of Sorbonne and his legacy (Notre Dame, in/Frankfurt am Main, 1992). 10 The account of the origin of Louis’s library is given in the Vita written by his Dominican confessor Geoffrey of Beaulieu: see J. Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996), 755–6; on Louis’s library, see R. Branner, ‘Saint Louis et l’enluminure parisienne au troisième siècle’, in Septième centenaire de la mort de Saint Louis. Actes des colloques de Royaumont et de Paris (21–27 mai 1970) (Paris, 1976), 69–84, at 71. 11 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 754. 12 J.M. Pujol, ‘The Llibre del rei En Jaume: a matter of style’, in Historical Literature in Medieval Iberia, ed. A. Deyermond (London, 1996), 35–65, at 40, n. 8. For an English translation, see The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon: a translation of the medieval Catalan Llibre dels Fets, trans. D.J. Smith and H. Buffery (Farnham, 2003). 13 Pujol, ‘The Llibre del rei En Jaume’, 35.

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The distinctiveness of Alfonso’s patronage lies not only in the range of works which bear his name, but also in the fact that he was apparently personally involved in writing some texts, and closely supervised the composition of others. The ostensibly documentary aspect of the miniatures and prologues to the works he commissioned, which show him dictating to scribes and which thereby stress his participation in the process of composition, appears to be corroborated posthumously by his nephew Juan Manuel in his Crónica abreviada (c. 1324), itself derived in part from a contemporary variant of the Alfonsine chronicles.14 In the prologue to the work, Juan Manuel describes Alfonso as a benign patron with wide-ranging interests: In all branches of knowledge he made many books and all of them very good, and also because he had much leisure to study the topics on which he wished to compose some books, because he lived in some places for a year, and two and longer still, according to those who lived by his patronage, so that whoever wished it spoke with him and when he wished it. And thus he had leisure to look into things he wanted for himself, as well as [time to] see and determine the elements of branches of knowledge which he had ordered the teachers and learned men to find out, whom he kept for this purpose at his court.15

Juan Manuel’s description of Alfonso presiding over scholarly research and debate as he travelled in a leisurely fashion around his kingdoms was doubtless intended to present readers with a favourable context for his own work. However, like the images of Alfonso in his royal manuscripts, it also suggests that the king’s relationship with the scholars he patronized was an active one, in which the king pursued his own research as well.16 Crucially, in Juan Manuel’s account, Alfonso’s court was not perpetually peripatetic, 14 C. Benito-Vessels, Juan Manuel. Escritura y recreación de la historia (Madison, wi, 1994), 13. 15 ‘En todas las ciencias f izo muchos libros e todos muy buenos. E lo al, por que auia muy grant espacio para estudiar en las materias de que queria conponer algunos libros. Ca morava en algunos logares vn anno e dos e mas, avn, segunt dizen los que viuian a·la su merced, que fablauan con·el los que querian e quando el queria, e ansi auia espacio de estudiar en·lo que el queria fazer para si mismo, e avn para veer e esterminar las cosas de·los saberes quel mandaua ordenar a·los maestros e a·los sabios que traya para esto en su corte’: J. Manuel, Crónica abreviada, in Obras completas, ed. J.M. Blecua, 2 vols (Madrid, 1983), ii, 575–6. My translation. 16 See M. Álvar, ‘Alfonso X contemplado por Don Juan Manuel’, in La literatura de Sancho IV (Actas del congreso internacional, Alcalá de Henares, 21–24 de febrero de 1994), ed. C. Álvar and J.M. Lucía Megías, (Alcalá de Henares, 1996), 98–100; see also F. Márquez Villanueva, El concepto cultural alfonsí (Madrid, 1992), 22. This is the edition to which I will refer throughout, except when I cite the additional essay included in the 2004 reprint.

Introduc tion: ‘ the king makes a book’

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and he implies that Alfonso’s royal residences included areas where access to the king was more restricted, and where he would have been able to consult books for reference and study purposes instead of listening to them read aloud in a public setting.17 One of Alfonso’s principal residences was the Seville alcázar, which during the second half of his reign he completely remodelled in the latest European gothic style (eliminating, in the process, almost all the pre-existing palace buildings of his Muslim predecessors).18 There is scant evidence for the floorplan, however. The few surviving contemporary documents that refer to Alfonso’s gothic palace concern the logistics of water supply, and stipulate the masses to be celebrated in ‘our chapel of St Elizabeth’ and in ‘our chapel of St Clement in the alcázar’.19 References to secular spaces in the building, however, are practically non-existent, although as might be expected, there is some evidence that these included a large hall for public gatherings. The fourteenth-century Crónica de Alfonso XI described the alcázar as the ‘palace which is under the [sign of the] snail’ (‘[el] palaçio que es so el caracol’), and recorded how Alfonso XI summoned all his subjects to assemble there in September 1340.20 Presumably, though, Alfonso X’s rebuilt royal residence would have included spaces appropriate for study and scholarly discussion, as this distinction between public and more restricted areas of the royal household was beginning to emerge in the architecture of the castles and palaces built and adapted by his English and French contemporaries. Henry III of England had remodelled the royal apartments at Windsor on at least two occasions, and the final renovation of 1257 included privy chambers that had ‘a turret with a certain oriel’ for his queen, Eleanor of Provence.21 Kings also needed privacy beyond the confines of the palace. In 1298, local officials ordered the streets of York to be cleaned and pigsties removed in advance of Edward I’s visit there because, as the bailiff observed, ‘great people began to need more privacy […] because repugnance overtakes the king’s ministers staying in that town and also there dwelling and passing 17 On books read aloud at Charles V’s court in 1370s France, see M.-H. Tesnière, ‘Les manuscrits de la librairie de Charles V ont-ils été lus? L’enseignement des tables’, in Les manuscrits médiévaux, témoins de lectures, ed. C. Croizy-Naquet, L. Harf-Lancner, and M. Szkilnik (Paris, 2015), 47–63, at 48. 18 M.A. Tabales Rodríguez, ‘La transformación palatina del alcázar de Sevilla’, Anales de Arqueología Cordobesa, 12 (2001), 195–213 (207–9). 19 R. Cómez Ramos, Arquitectura alfonsí (Barcelona, 1974), 28 and 138–9. 20 Gran crónica de Alfonso XI, ed. D. Catalán, 2 vols (Madrid, 1976), ii, 350, c.296. 21 V. Jansen, ‘Henry III’s Windsor: castle-building and residences’, in Windsor: medieval archaeology, art and architecture of the Thames Valley, ed. L. Keen and E. Scarff (Leeds, 2002), 95–109 (102).

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through’.22 Alfonso in particular may have experienced the need for more secluded spaces because of the decline in his health as his reign progressed, and paradoxically this may also have favoured his activities as a patron of letters. The serious bouts of illness that increasingly afflicted him from the 1270s would have been followed by periods of convalescence away from public life, and these periods arguably provided further opportunities for study.23 In recent decades, scholars have shown how themes and passages in the texts he patronized reflect his personal reactions to the events of his reign,24 and have sought to identify his hand in particular passages or poetic compositions. The devotional theme of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which lends itself to personal, confessional subject-matter, has proved more fertile ground for this approach than analysis of chronicles, scientific works, and legal texts. That said, the passage cited most frequently to prove Alfonso’s personal intervention in his works is in fact found in the account of the Book of Genesis included in the first part of the General estoria.25 Paradoxically, no evidence of Alfonso’s handwriting survives. He did not add his signature (or sign-manual, as opposed to a seal) to the subscription on documents: it was his successor, Sancho IV, who was the first Castilian monarch to do this.26 A modern suggestion that marginal annotations in an astrological manuscript (Madrid MS 3065) are in his hand is unlikely.27 Few contemporary accounts and documents survive to offer a broader perspective on how Alfonso organized his cultural endeavours. It is ironic 22 D. Shaw, ‘The Construction of the Private in Medieval London’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 26 (1996), 447–77, at 453. 23 H. Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned: a biography, trans. O. Cisneros (Leiden, 2010), in particular c.7, ‘Illness and Intellectual Pursuits’, 213–50. 24 For example J.F. O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’: a poetic biography (Leiden/Boston/Cologne, 1998); S.R. Doubleday, The Wise King: a Christian prince, Muslim Spain, and the birth of the Renaissance (New York, 2015). 25 General estoria i.16, c.14: Alfonso X, el Sabio, General estoria, ed. P. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, Biblioteca Castro, 10 vols (Madrid, 2009), ii, 393. 26 The charter signed by Sancho is dated 18 January 1285: see F.J. Hernández, ‘Two Weddings and a Funeral: Alfonso X’s monuments in Burgos’, in Picturing Kingship in Medieval Castile, ed. K. Donahue-Wallace and T. Nickson, Special Issue, HRJ, 13, no. 5 (2012), 407–33, at 431, n. 47. Edward III was the first English king to add his sign-manual to a document of June 1362 – in imitation of Pedro I of Castile, to whom the letter was addressed. See P.D.A. Harvey and A. McGuinness, A Guide to British Medieval Seals (London, 1996), 2. On the importance of signatures generally, see D. Ganz, ‘“Mind in Character”: ancient and medieval ideas about the status of the autograph as an expression of personality’, in Of the Making of Books: medieval manuscripts, their scribes and readers, ed. P.R. Robinson and R. Zim (Aldershot, 1997), 280–99. 27 A. Galmés de Fuentes, Influencias sintácticas y estilísticas del árabe en la prosa medieval castellana (Madrid, 1956), 7–8 (but cf. Chapter five below).

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that while he instigated the practice of compiling registers of chancery documents, none from his reign survive. Of the nearly 2000 extant documents that were issued by his chancery, only a handful refer to his support of cultural institutions (such as universities) or to artists and craftsmen in royal employ. Key among these are a 1254 charter in which he founded a ‘studium and general schools of Latin and Arabic’ at Seville, and a snippet from a 1260 document that refers to foreign physicians brought to the city at the king’s behest. Both these texts are frequently associated in modern narratives of Alfonsine patronage,28 although in reality the foundation of the studium and the visit of the physicians were probably quite separate events, albeit both prompted by royal interest in learning. Therefore, just as recent research on the workings of the Alfonsine chancery has focused on a close reading of the documents themselves in order to understand how duties were apportioned and how the institution functioned,29 so too a close study of the codicological and palaeographical features of the manuscripts themselves can reveal something of the circumstances under which they were assembled. Perhaps what is most striking about the codices produced for Alfonso is that nearly all reveal an extraordinary number of changes to layout, miniatures, content, and order of contents at a late stage in the copying process. These multiple alterations suggest a constant reworking and reconfiguring of the scribes’ exemplars, which in turn implies a high level of supervision and control at the stage of manuscript production.30 The physical evidence of the books themselves, then, confirms the personal involvement of the king implied by the texts and images they contain. The rare surviving contemporary accounts and the testimony of the manuscripts themselves reveal Alfonso’s exceptionally close involvement in the preparation of the works he commissioned. Yet while this distinguishes him from other contemporary royal patrons, the aims of his patronage and the way in which it is presented echo the cultural ambitions and depictions of princely patrons elsewhere in Europe. The richly produced codices that 28 For example, M. González Jiménez, Alfonso X el Sabio (Barcelona, 2004), 424–5. 29 E.S. Procter, ‘The Castillian Chancery during the Reign of Alfonso X, 1252–1284’, in Oxford Essays in Medieval History Presented to H.E. Salter, introduced by F.M. Powicke (Oxford, 1934), 104–21 (116 and 120). The close readings by Marina Kleine of Alfonsine documents have revealed how chancery practice differed from the theory recorded in Alfonsine legal writings: La cancillería real de Alfonso X. Actores y prácticas en la producción documental (Puerto de Santa María/Seville, 2015), for example at 118, on the division of the tasks of scribes. 30 E. Ruiz García, ‘Rex scribens. Discursos de la conflictividad en Castilla (1230–1350)’, in La monarquía como conflicto en la corona castellano-leonesa (c. 1230–1504), ed. J.M. Nieto Soria (Madrid, 2006), 359–422, at 375.

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Alfonso commissioned and the illuminated chronicles, Bibles, and Psalters copied for the thirteenth-century kings of France all aimed to convey at the most basic level the same messages – that is to say, they were symbols which reinforced the royal and imperial status of their patrons.31 Closer to Alfonso’s home, the Liber feudorum maior, a cartulary compiled in the course of the late twelfth century by the counts of Barcelona, conveyed complex statements of comital and royal power by a combination of splendid illuminations and the careful selection, juxtaposition, and rubrication of documents.32 Alfonso’s aggressive promotion of Castilian also had echoes in the linguistic policy of his thirteenth-century Capetian contemporaries, who equally sought to unite their linguistically diverse territories under the banner of the French language.33 The ways in which Alfonso’s learned activities were presented, therefore, owe much to literary and iconographical precedent. Juan Manuel’s evocation of Alfonso’s scholarly court also evoked the bygone worlds of Caesar and Charlemagne, two emperors who similarly embraced learning. Readers of the Crónica abreviada might have recalled the description in Alfonso’s own Estoria de Espanna, derived from Suetonius’s biographies of the Roman emperors, of Julius Caesar’s remarkable ability to find moments day and night in which to study and read, even while on military campaign.34 Alternatively, Alfonso may have reminded them of Charlemagne, who ruled as the Roman emperor Charles I (800–814) and whose biographer, Einhard, described how the emperor ‘paid the greatest attention to the liberal arts’ and commissioned copies of chronicles and also ‘began a grammar of his native tongue’.35 (A century later, when Charles V of France’s chaplain Pierre Bohier praised his master’s enthusiasm for having literary texts read aloud to him, even on days when he was about to join battle, it was with Charlemagne and not with Caesar that he drew his comparison.36) Tellingly 31 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 580. 32 A.J. Kosto, ‘The Liber feudorum maior of the Counts of Barcelona: the cartulary as an expression of power’, Journal of Medieval History, 27 (2001), 1–22. 33 A. Blanc, La langue du roi est le français. Essai sur la construction juridique d’un principe d’unicité de la langue de l’État royal (Paris, 2010), 200–206. 34 Primera crónica general de España, ed. R. Menéndez Pidal and D. Catalán, 2 vols, 3 rd edn (Madrid, 1977), i, 94 (c.117); Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Twelve Caesars, trans. R. Graves, rev. M. Grant, 3rd edn (London, 2003), 28–9 (i.56). I am grateful to Mary Beard for this reference. 35 Einhard, ‘The Life of Charlemagne’, in Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, trans. L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1969), book iii: ‘The Emperor’s Private Life’, at 82. For Charlemagne as a model for Alfonso, see Doubleday, The Wise King, at 163. 36 C. Daniel, ‘Le livre et l’exercice du pouvoir: culture livresque du monarque et symbole politique de la bibliothèque royale’, in L’Univers du livre médiéval. Substance, lettre, signe, ed. K. Ueltschi (Paris, 2014), 73–92, at 85.

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in the context of Alfonso’s own political ambitions, which in the Cantigas merge with his Marian devotion, the Estoria de Espanna does not refer to Charlemagne’s learning, but instead records how he had been devoted to the Virgin Mary since childhood and ‘was called “the Great” because he performed great and illustrious deeds, both in the expansion of his kingdom and in the organization of the affairs of the holy church’.37 The imperial echoes in Juan Manuel’s description of Alfonso’s active participation in the work of the scholars he patronized at court were made explicit in several of the works the king himself commissioned. Alfonso’s reign was marked by his repeated attempts to be elected and acknowledged as Rex Romanorum (‘King of the Romans’). It was a title he believed to be rightfully his because his mother, Beatriz, was the granddaughter of the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (d. 1190), and the daughter of Philip of Swabia (assassinated 1208), duke of Swabia and king of Germany, who had unsuccessfully sought election as emperor himself. For almost two decades – between 1257, the date of his disputed election, and 1275, when Pope Gregory X forced him to renounce his claims to the imperial crown – Alfonso maintained an imperial chancery that issued documents in Latin designating him Rex Romanorum semper Augustus (indicative of his status as emperor-in-waiting), and which were authenticated with a seal that was closely modelled on the one that had been used by Frederick II.38 In the context of Alfonso’s Castilian chancery, meanwhile, the seal appended with threads of blue silk to a 1262 letter patent on the consecration of the bishops-elect of Osma and Cuenca in Seville cathedral includes the impressions of eight intaglios.39 This may also have been intended to have

37 Primera crónica general, c.597 (ii, 340) on his devotion to the Virgin, and c.623 (ii, 357): ‘Este Carlos fue llamado el Grant por que fizo grandes fechos et granados, asi en ensanchamiento de su reyno commo en ordenamiento del estado de la sancta eglesia.’ On the negative and positive images of Charlemagne presented in the Alfonsine chronicle, see C.F. Fraker, ‘Alfonso X, the Empire and the Primera crónica’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 55 (1978), 95–102. 38 On the imperial chancery, see E.S. Procter, Alfonso X of Castile: patron of literature and learning (Oxford, 1951), 129–30, and O’Callaghan, Learned King, at 202. For Alfonso’s imperial seal in 1266, see J.M. de F. Olmos, ‘El sello diplomático real en los reinos de Castilla y León en el siglo XIII’, in Murcia 2009, 62–75, at 73; see also 68. A depiction of Frederick’s seal bearing the inscription ‘FRIDERICVS D[E]I GRA[TIA] IMPERATOR ROMANORV[M] SEMP[ER] AVGVST[VS]’ forms the frontispiece for the Historia diplomatica Friderici secundi, ed. J.L.A. Huillard-Bréholles, 6 vols (Paris, 1852–1861), ii (1852). 39 Madrid: Archivo Historico Nacional, Sigilografía-Impronta no. 31; Murcia 2009, 73; A. Guglieri Navarro, Catálogo de sellos de la sección de sigilografía del Archivo Historico Nacional. I: sellos reales (Madrid, 1974), no. 88.

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imperial resonance: Charlemagne had used antique gems as seal matrices.40 Even after Pope Gregory had definitively quashed his imperial ambitions, Alfonso styled himself ‘by the grace of God king of the Romans’ in documents issued in connection with the weddings of two of his sons at Burgos in 1281. 41 His choice of title on this particular occasion was motivated by the fact that his third son, Juan, was marrying Juana, daughter of William, seventh marquis of Montferrat (in the northern Italian region of Lombardy). William had been a staunch supporter of Alfonso’s imperial pretensions since the late 1260s, an allegiance which was formally cemented when he married Alfonso’s (legitimate) daughter, Beatriz, at Murcia in 1271. 42 While the miniatures in the manuscripts that bear his name do not depict him wearing an imperial crown (he was never formally crowned as such), the images of him do include elements of imperial symbolism, and Alfonso’s imperial destiny is a thread that runs through the narrative fabric of the Estoria de Espanna. The high, backless thrones draped with rich red, blue, or black cloths striped with gold on which he sits in the miniatures that introduce the manuscripts he commissioned recall the backless throne on his imperial seal.However, it falls short of the splendour of the actual imperial throne which, gilded and studded with gems and cameos, was captured by Charles I d’Anjou from the Hohenstaufen emperor’s army in February 1266.43 This may have provided the model for the king’s throne – described as a chair plated with gold and silver, and set with many precious stones – in the Castigos e documentos, a mirror for princes attributed to the patronage of Alfonso’s son Sancho. 44 The depiction of Alfonso’s throne in his manuscripts is also unlike contemporary painted images of the thrones of the kings of France, though 40 P. Worm, ‘From Subscription to Seal: the growing importance of seals as signs of authenticity in early medieval royal charters’, in Strategies of Writing: studies on text and trust in the Middle Ages. Papers from ‘Trust in Writing in the Middle Ages’ (Utrecht, 28–29 November, 2002), ed. P. Schulte, M. Mostert, and I. van Renswoude (Turnhout, 2008), 63–83 (at 66). Cameos and intaglios, ancient and medieval, were highly prized in the thirteenth century: H. Wentzel, ʻ“Portraits à l’antiqueˮ on French Mediaeval Gems and Seals’, JWCI, 16 (1953), 342–50 (at 342-3). 41 O’Callaghan, Learned King, 252. 42 Crónica de Alfonso X Según el Ms. 11/2777 de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real (Madrid), ed. M. González Jiménez with an index by Ma A. Carmona Ruiz (Murcia, 1998), 212, n. 315 (c.75); O’Callaghan, Learned King, 252 and 211; González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 233–4. 43 J. Gardner, ‘Likeness and/or Representation in English and French Royal Portraits c.1250– c.1300’, in Das Porträt vor der Erfindung des Porträts, ed. M. Buchsel and P. Schmidt (Mainz, 2003), 141–52, at 146. 44 Cited in I.G. Bango Torviso, ‘Las señas de identidad del monarca y su linaje’, in Murcia 2009, 42–53, at 48.

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these too were intended to reinforce French imperial pretensions. From the mid twelfth century onwards, French monarchs were shown seated on an x-frame chair, a form which had originated in the Ancient world and which came to symbolize the authority and imperial ambitions of the Capetian monarchy. 45 Within the folios of the Alfonsine manuscripts themselves, imperial heraldry occasionally appears on the robes Alfonso wears, and in the borders of the miniatures in the códice rico of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. Eagles and fleurs-de-lis, symbols of the Staufen dynasty, decorate Alfonso’s robe in one of the miniatures which accompanies cantiga 90, a poem that praises the power of the Virgin’s virtue to defeat the devil. 46 References in royal documents to tailors and dressmakers employed by the royal household suggest the importance of clothes to promote Alfonso’s vision of kingship and dynasty at court; and the archaeological evidence of the textiles recovered from royal tombs demonstrates the prominent role of heraldry on the garments Alfonso and his family actually wore. 47 The use of heraldry, incorporated into clothing or applied to buildings, monuments and tombs, in order to proclaim identity and lineage, was a device that Alfonso’s royal and noble European contemporaries also drew upon. Pierre Flote (d. 1302), chancellor to Philip IV, ‘the Fair’, of France (r. 1285-1314), commissioned an heraldic frieze to decorate the great hall of his château in Ravel (in the Auvergne region of southern-central France), while the image of a late thirteenth-century English noblewoman which prefaces a devotional miscellany made for her shows her dressed in garments coloured to reflect the heraldry of her family and that of her husband. 48 By contrast, from the 1240s onwards Louis IX of France had increasingly and 45 C. Lagane, ‘Les sièges en “x” au Moyen Âge. De la sella castrensis au faldistorium’, Cahiers LandArc 17 (2016), 1–11, at 8. Available at www.landarc.fr [accessed 24 September 2017]. 46 Escorial MS T.I.1, fol. 132r (panel 5): see L. Fernández Fernández, ‘“Este Livro, com’ achei, fez á onr’ e a loor da Virgen Santa Maria”. El proyecto de las Cantigas de Santa María en el marco del escritorio regio. Estado de la cuestión y nuevas reflexiones’, in Cantigas, Códice rico (2011), ii, 45–78 (74). 47 Hernández, ‘Two Weddings and a Funeral’, at 427–8. On the importance of colour and (heraldic) signs as a way of providing a coherent identity for a medieval household, see C.M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven/London, 1999), 170–1. For the enthusiastic adoption of heraldry by the ruling classes in Spain, see L. Grant, ‘The Castle of Castile. An Image of Power, or the Power of an Image?’, in Images, pouvoirs et norms. Exégèse visuelle de la fin du Moyen Âge (XIIIe-XVe siècle), ed. F. Collard, F. Lachaud and L. Scordia (Paris, 2017), 215–35 (especially 219–20). 48 S. Berger, ‘La mise en scène du pouvoir par les arts. Commandes artistiques et grands programmes édilitaires des conseillers des derniers Capétiens autour de 1300’, in Images, pouvoirs et norms, ed. Collard, et al., 25–45 (at 37). A. Bennett, ‘A Book Designed for a Noblewoman: an illustrated Manuel des Péchés of the thirteenth century’, in Medieval Book Production: assessing

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deliberately dressed in robes of blue, and as a consequence the colour came to symbolize his government and the Capetian dynasty. 49 The dynastic and political messages contained in the depictions of Alfonso as patron and author in the manuscripts he commissioned demonstrate that his intellectual curiosity went hand in hand with a practical desire to exploit this curiosity as a vehicle for the promotion of himself and his kingship. This double purpose, which underpins all the works which bear his name, is widely acknowledged by scholars. However, their analysis of the ways in which he presents himself in the manuscripts he commissioned often assumes that the primary purpose of these images is to offer an accurate reflection of his role as patron and of the process by which these codices were produced. In fact, the main function of the prologues and miniatures to these Alfonsine works is to present a message about his kingship to a particular audience, and the ways in which Alfonso is depicted to convey that message are determined by the type of text in question. In other words, Alfonso may have been more involved in the composition of the works bearing his name than other patrons of his day; but his involvement is stressed in the works themselves only insofar as it offers a useful means of conveying a particular political message. A similar caveat applies to attempts to elucidate the process of copying the manuscripts with reference to the manuscript miniatures. And while codicology crucially supports arguments that Alfonso maintained close contact with his translators, compilers, scribes, and artists, it also suggests that the king remained distant from the mechanical process of coping and assembling the manuscripts. Moreover, aspects of the materials and layout of three codices widely held to have been made for the king (Madrid, MS 816, General estoria I; Madrid, MS 3065, Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, and Madrid, MS 9294, Libro de las cruzes) suggest that they were in fact commissioned for other readers, albeit ones close to court circles. The first part of this book assesses the evidence for royal authorship in the manuscripts themselves. This subject has been tackled before, but with the assumption that these representations of Alfonso constitute a unique documentary record of the extent of his personal involvement in each work. If, however, these representations are considered in terms of their intended audience, it becomes clear that every text offered writers and artists the opportunity to frame Alfonso’s kingship in a new and specific way. The fact the evidence. Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1988, ed. L.L. Brownrigg (Los Altos Hills, ca, 1990), 163–81. 49 Le Goff, Saint Louis, 139 and 631.

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they do precisely that suggests the works being produced were meticulously planned for an audience that would appreciate the carefully presented text.50 This does not diminish Alfonso’s involvement in the process of composition; but it does suggest that the differences in the depictions of him as patron and author in the manuscripts he commissioned are not primarily intended to document his role as author or coordinator of a work, but are designed to show how he projects the vision of his kingship onto a given text for the benefit of a particular readership.51 The juxtaposition of miniatures at the beginning of the Vatican manuscript of Part IV of the General estoria, for example, shows him not only as the guardian of the history of his people, but also as a king whose right to rule is established by Nebuchadnezzar’s biblical precedent (see Figure 2).The pairing of these two images recalls the system of types and anti-types in biblical scholarship whereby events in the Old Testament are shown to prefigure those in the New. In this case, the New Testament event is substituted by an idealized depiction of Alfonso surrounded by courtiers. On the other hand, the only surviving image of Alfonso to preface a compilation of astrological works – the historiated initial which opens the two extant quires of the Libro de las formas & ymagenes – depicts him clad in purple garments (see the image on the cover of this book), a clear allusion to Jupiter, the planet-god, law-maker, and scholar-king. The two images of Alfonso that accompany the prologues in two of the manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria – the códice rico (Escorial, MS T.I.1, fol. 5r, and see Figure 1) and the códice de los músicos (Escorial, MS b.I.2, fol. 29r) – are at once emblematic of his role as patron and author,52 and a statement of his intention to usurp the traditional role of the clergy and present himself as mediator between the divine and the earthly.53 50 In this respect, see the comments by R.M. Rodríguez Porto, ‘Inscribed/effaced: the Estoria de Espanna after 1275’, in Picturing Kingship in Medieval Castile, HRJ, 13, no. 5 (2012), 387–406, at 393. 51 Cf A. Liuzzo Scorpo, ‘The King as Subject, Master and Model of Authority: the case of Alfonso X of Castile’, in Every Inch a King: comparative studies on kings and kingship in the ancient and medieval worlds, ed. L. Mitchell and C. Melville (Leiden, 2013), 269–84, on Alfonso’s legal and literary works as vehicles to consolidate different aspects of his kingship. 52 On the Cantigas miniatures as evidence of royal authorship and manuscript production, see G. Menéndez Pidal, ‘Los manuscritos de las Cantigas. Cómo se elaboró la miniatura alfonsí’, Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia, 150 (1962), 25–51, at 28 and 49; G. Menéndez Pidal, ‘Cómo trabajaron las escuelas alfonsíes’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 5 (1951), 363–80, repr. in Varia Medievalia II (Madrid, 2003), 13–41; and more recently, with colour plates, see I.G. Bango Torviso, ‘“Nós, Don Alfonso, mandamos fazer”’, in Murcia 2009, 202–7, at 204–5. 53 A. García Avilés, ‘“Este rey tenno que enos ídolos cree”. Imágenes milagrosas en las Cantigas de Santa María’, in Cantigas, Códice rico (2011), ii, 523–59, at 559.

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Despite the similarity in the presentation of Alfonso in the two miniatures, the colours of the clothes which the king and his entourage wear differ markedly, suggesting the images were not aimed at the same audience. In the códice rico the king and his musicians wear the black and red livery of the confraternity-cum-military Order of Santa María de la Estrella (or ‘of Cartagena’, as it was also known initially, because it was attached to the monastery at Cartagena), which the king had established in around 1272.54 In the códice de los músicos, the king’s red cloak and blue tunic covered in gold stars distinguish him as Mary’s troubadour, and anticipate the way he will be depicted later in the manuscript. Of the magnates, tonsured clerics, and musicians grouped around him, only the musicians wear black and red. These differences suggest that the códice rico, with its depiction of scribes and musicians dressed in the colours of the Order of Santa María, could have been destined for a chapel restricted to members of the Order, whereas the códice de los músicos, which depicts nobles gathered behind the king as he dictates to a group of scribes, was aimed at a wider, courtly audience. The close working relationship which these changing representations imply between Alfonso X, the scholars responsible for translating, compiling, and composing the texts, and those who produced them in lavish manuscript form is explored further in the second part of this book. Codicological evidence aside, theories about where and how the Alfonsine scriptorium functioned have been influenced by close textual readings of the Alfonsine works themselves, which reveal a remarkably consistent and carefully constructed image of Alfonso as the fundamental source of all legal, historical, and scientific knowledge in his kingdoms.55 The frequent erasures, alterations, and additions in many of the codices associated with Alfonso support this impression of a carefully constructed royal persona; but while it seems the king exercised close control over the content of a work, he probably did not direct the copying process as well. Instead, there is evidence in the manuscripts associated with him, and in other thirteenth-century documents, to suggest that he was not involved in the physical production of the codices that bear his name. This work was probably coordinated by a scribe or agent appointed to act on his behalf, who recruited scribes and artists as required. On at least one occasion, moreover, this agent relied on 54 C. de Ayala Martínez, Las órdenes militares hispánicas en la Edad Media (siglos XII–XV) (Madrid, 2003), 108–12. 55 J. Rodríguez-Velasco, ‘Theorizing the Language of Law’, Diacritics, 36, nos 3–4 (2006), 64–86 analyses how Alfonso’s compilers rework their sources and suppress reference to other authors, past and present, to present the king as the sole authority of learning in his kingdom.

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the work of professional scribes working outside the court. This seems to have been the case for the (now fragmentary) work on angels and talismanic magic, the Astromagia (BAV, MS Reg. Lat. 1283a). Alfonso’s willingness to delegate his authority to different trusted representatives is echoed in the way his chancery functioned, as Marina Kleine has recently shown. Her study of the dating clauses in Alfonsine charters identified a group of fifty-three people who drew up documents in the king’s name, of whom twenty-three did not meet the professional requirements stipulated for their role by Alfonso in his legal codes, as they were neither notaries nor ‘alcaldes’ (judges responsible for ordinary judicial business).56 The scattered evidence for book production in the Iberian Peninsula suggests that it would have been possible for Alfonso and his circle to draw on the work of lay and ecclesiastical scriptoria to produce the manuscripts that bear his name. Certainly the scribes responsible for the copies of the chronicles were familiar with earlier legal manuscripts copied in the Peninsula, as the layout they adopt contains echoes of the layout of the Visigothic lawcode. Long before Alfonso’s reign, moreover, there had been centres of monastic and secular book production in the Christian territories of the Peninsula. In Lorvão, northern Portugal, the Benedictine monastery of S. Mamede, perhaps founded by Ordoño I of León (r. 850–866), had become an important centre of manuscript production by the mid twelfth century. Surviving codices copied in the Lorvão scriptorium include the magnificent Livro das aves (dated 1184), an illustrated summary of De bestiis et aliis rebus by Hugues de Fouilloy, and a copy of Beatus of Liébana’s commentary on the Apocalypse made by the scribe Egas in 1189.57 As a centre for book production in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Lorvão was second only to the Augustinian monastery of Santa Cruz de Coimbra, which had been founded in 1131 with royal support, while the Cistercian monastery established at Alcobaça in the 1150s equally became an important centre of learning and book production.58 56 Kleine, La cancillería real, 50, 58–9, and 87. 57 Both manuscripts are now in Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, MSS Lorvão 5 and Lorvão 43 respectively. For an edition and Portuguese translation of the Livro das aves, see: Livro das aves, ed. M.I. Rebelo Gonçalves (Lisbon, 1999). For the commentary on the Apocalypse, see A. De Egry, O Apocalipse de Lorvão e a sua relação com as ilustrações medievais do apocalipse (Lisbon, 1972). 58 M.A. Miranda, A iluminura de Santa Cruz no tempo de Santo António (Lisbon, 1996); M.A. Miranda, ‘A iluminura românica em Portugal’, in A iluminura em Portugal. Identidade e influências, ed. A.A. Nascimento. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon (Lisbon, 1999), 127–235; A. Duggan, ‘The Lorvão Transcription of Benedict of Peterborough’s

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Late thirteenth-century artisans in Portugal could produce sophisticated manuscripts, as evinced by the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (so-called after the royal library at the Ajuda Palace in Lisbon, where it has been kept since 1832), but this is a unique survival and as such cannot be attributed to a particular workshop.59 Meanwhile, a rare surviving library inventory from the same period provides evidence for the crucial role played by the Lisbon monastery of São Vicente de Fora in the copying and circulation of manuscripts, while the prestige of French universities in the thirteenth century meant scholars and books travelled to and fro across borders from Portugal to Paris.60 The medieval kingdom of Aragon was also home to a flourishing culture of letters in secular and ecclesiastical, royal and non-royal contexts.61 In general, the surviving manuscripts dateable to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries suggest that methods of Castilian book production followed the same models as those of the rest of Europe.62 Palaeographic and stylistic uniformity coupled with the comparative paucity of documentary sources make study of the location and process of book production and the book trade in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian kingdoms of Castile and León difficult.63 However there was a scriptorium in Toledo associated with the figure of the town’s archbishop, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, in the first half of the thirteenth century; and the existence of scriptoria can be Liber Miraculorum Beati Thome: Lisbon, Cod. Alcobaça CCXC/143’, Scriptorium 51, no. 1 (1997), 51–67. 59 P. Nabais et al., ‘Singing with Light: an interdisciplinary study on the medieval Ajuda Songbook’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 8, no. 2 (2016), 283–312 (307). 60 A.A. Nascimento, ‘Livros e claustro no século XIII em Portugal. O inventário da Livraria de S. Vicente de Fora em Lisboa’, Didaskalia, 15 (1985), 229–42; M.A. Bilotta, ‘Un manuscrit des Décrétales de Grégoire IX à l’usage de l’université de Toulouse conservé dans les archives nationales de la Torre do Tombo à Lisbonne: quelques aspects iconographiques’, in Portuguese Studies on Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. M.A. Miranda and A. Miguélez Cavero (Barcelona/Madrid, 2014), 81–103. 61 F.M. Gimeno Blay, ‘Produir llibres manuscrits catalans (segles XII–XV)’, in Literatura i cultura a la corona d’Aragó (segles XIII–XV). Actes del III colloqui ‘Problems i mètodes de la literatura catalana antiga’, Universitat de Girona, 5–8 juliol de 2000, ed. L. Badia, M. Cabré, and S. Martí (Barcelona, 2002), 117–49. 62 See the opening comments in E.E. Rodríguez Díaz, ‘La factura del códice gótico castellano. Un avance de resultados’, Gazette du livre médiéval, 47 (Autumn 2005), 1–13, at 3. For a Latin poem on manuscript production at Calahorra cathedral, see J. Leclercq, ‘Textos y manuscritos de algunas bibliotecas de España’, Hispania Sacra, 2 (1949), 106–7. 63 See the comments in J. Fernández Valverde and P. Ostos Salcedo, ‘El MS. 131 de la Biblioteca Pública de Córdoba’, Scriptorium, 52 (1998), 37– 65 and plates 16 and 17, at 64–5; Rodríguez Díaz, ‘La factura del códice gótico’, 8, and Rodríguez Díaz, ‘La manufactura del libro en la Castilla cristiana: artesanos judíos y conversos (ss.XIII–XV)’, Gazette du Livre Médiéval, 33 (Autumn 1998), 29–34, at 29–30.

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inferred from the foundation of universities such as Salamanca, established by Alfonso IX of León at an unspecified date during his reign (1188–1229) and modelled on the earlier university at Palencia.64 University tutors and scholars required books, and Alfonso X included the position of ‘stationarius’, or ‘book-seller’, in the statutes he granted Salamanca in 1254 in response to a petition by the masters and students there. Alfonso’s original charter has been lost, although a copy from the late thirteenth century, made in Salamanca, survives in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.65 Unfortunately, no surviving documents record the names or activities of the thirteenth-century Salamanca stationers,66 but it is likely that they operated in a manner not unlike that of fellow professionals in the kingdom of Aragon, where the evidence for university stationers and scribal activity does survive. The Liber constitutionum et statutorum generalis studii Illerdensis (1300) records that Andrea de Espenso was beadle and stationer for the university of Lleida (Lérida), while documents show that in late twelfth- and thirteenth-century Barcelona scribes skilled in diplomatic and book hands copied school textbooks and legal works, and wrote out formal documents.67 The demand for books would also have encouraged the book-making industry more generally. In Castile, for example, the scholars who had flocked to Toledo during the 1160s and 1170s to make or to obtain translations of Arabic works on science, philosophy, and medicine must have required the services of parchment or paper sellers, scribes, and bookbinders, although evidence for the organization of these trades in the city is scant. What little survives suggests that although these translations were commissioned by clerics, the church itself did not have a monopoly on book production. The cathedral chapter in Toledo used commercial scriptoria in the city to supply the books it needed. Such commercial scribal activity was not exceptional in the wider European context: the many secular workshops that flourished 64 For Jiménez de Rada and a manuscript copied for him, see A. Claret García Martínez and E.E. Rodríguez Díaz, ‘Un códice de la biblioteca de Alfonso X en la catedral de Sevilla. Estudio codicológico y paleográfico de la Biblia de Pedro de Pamplona’, in Sevilla 1248, 919–28. On Salamanca, see C.Ma . Ajo G. y Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas. Orígenes y desarrollo desde su aparición a nuestros días, 6 vols (Madrid, 1957–1967), i: Medioevo y renacimiento universitario, 199–201. 65 G. Murano, ‘Alfonso il Savi, l’Università di Salamanca e l’ufficio dello stazionario’, Codices Manuscripti & Impressi, 44–5 (2003), 1–2. I am grateful to Rowan Watson for this reference. See also G. Murano, Opere diffuse per exemplar e pecia (Turnhout, 2005), 67. 66 Rodríguez Díaz, ‘La manufactura del libro’, 30. 67 J. Alturo, ‘Le statut du scripteur en Catalogne (XIIe–XIIIe siècles)’, in Le statut du scripteur au moyen âge. Actes du XIIe colloque scientifique du comité internationale de paléographie latine, ed. M.-C. Hubert et al. (Paris, 2000), 41–56, at 46–7.

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in thirteenth-century Paris were a magnet for miniaturists and manuscript illuminators. The multiple copies of identical books which they produced relied on collaboration between workshops, a system inspired by the book production methods of Dominican friars.68 Books were also copied for individuals on an ad hoc basis, and it seems scribes worked wherever the exemplar was available. Indeed, such work did not even have to be carried out by adult professionals. A contract drawn up in Seville in July 1295 between the parents of ‘Jacomo’ and the chaplain of the convent of San Clemente, acting on behalf of Teresa, a nun, established that over a period of eight months Jacomo would copy a breviary for Teresa in ‘good script’. The chaplain undertook to provide the exemplar and ruled parchment. Jacomo would carry out his work either in the convent or in the nearby buildings of the military order of Calatrava (referred to in the document as the ‘casa de Calatrava’).69 The mendicant orders which established themselves in the Peninsula as the thirteenth century progressed also required books. A 1270 charter issued by Alfonso at Burgos exempted Dominican friars from paying duty either on their books or on the parchment for these.70 The evidence for the bookish activities of the non-Christian communities in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Iberia, and their relationship with Christian readers, is even more fragmentary and tantalizing. In Burgos, the royal monastery of Las Huelgas called upon the services of Jewish binders, and three documents from the 1260s and 1270s refer to Jewish sellers of parchment or paper who traded in Salamanca (the Spanish word pergaminero is ambiguous because the term pergamino was used in conjunction with both skins and rag paper). Their activities, however, are not connected explicitly 68 R. Gonzálvez Ruiz, Hombres y libros de Toledo (1086–1300) (Madrid, 1997), at 111 and 143–4. For the translating activity, see F. Márquez Villanueva, ‘In lingua tholetana’, in Márquez Villanueva, El concepto cultural alfonsí, 2nd edn, expanded (Barcelona, 2004), 283–302. For Paris, see R.H. Rouse and M.A. Rouse, Illiterati et Uxorati. Manuscripts and their Makers: commercial book producers in medieval Paris 1200–1500, 2 vols (Turnhout, 2000); G. Bevilacqua, D. Catalunya and N. Torres, ‘The Production of Polyphonic Manuscripts in Thirteenth-century Paris: new evidence for standardised procedures’, Early Music History 37 (2018), 91-139 (at 132-4). 69 R. Menéndez Pidal, Documentos lingüísticos de España, I: reino de Castilla (Madrid, 1966), 470–1 (no. 356). The convent was in the district of San Lorenzo and the ‘casa de Calatrava’ was in the neighbouring one of Omnium Sanctorum: see the map ‘Esquema del espacio urbano de Sevilla’ in M.Á. Ladero Quesada, Historia de Sevilla. La ciudad medieval (1248–1492), Colección del Bolsillo 49, 3rd edn (Seville, 1989). The convent of San Clemente was important in a city where there were few nunneries; it was founded by Remondo, first archbishop of Seville after Fernando’s conquest, and confidant of Alfonso. 70 M. González Jiménez and M.A. Carmona Ruiz, Documentación de Alfonso X el Sabio (Seville, 2012), 418 (no. 2235).

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with the university, and they probably supplied the town at large.71 Jewish involvement in the book trade at Salamanca echoes not just wider Jewish concerns in the skin and fur trades, but also reflects the importance of books for the Jewish religion. The earliest surviving Sephardic decorated Bible dates from 1232, and the evidence of surviving manuscripts points to at least two Jewish scriptoria active in Toledo in the second half of the thirteenth century. Although no pre-thirteenth-century illustrated Jewish books copied in areas of the Peninsula under Islamic control have survived,72 the layout and decoration of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Hebrew Bibles copied in Andalusia seem to derive mostly from Islamic models (although there is some evidence that specific motifs, such as the depiction of Noah’s Ark, were inspired by the imagery in early Latin copies of the Old Testament).73 Indeed, the intricate monochrome geometric designs, calligraphic decoration, and foliage motifs employed by the Andalusian scribes and artists arguably suggest they deliberately revived earlier Islamic models of book art in order to define their art against a Christian culture that was increasingly dominant.74 It is difficult to pinpoint the influence of Jewish books on the appearance of Alfonsine manuscripts, but the Jewish scholars who played such a crucial role in the translation and composition of the works he commissioned may have made exemplars available, as appropriate, to scribes and artists. Concrete evidence for book production in al-Andalus when it was under Muslim rule, and among the Mudejars (Muslims subject to a Christian ruler) after the Christian conquest, is also practically non-existent but can be inferred from accounts of book-loving rulers and from the circulation of Islamic artistic models which found their way into Hebrew and Christian manuscripts.75 Certainly the rulers of tenth- and eleventh-century Islamic Spain used books and libraries to further their political ambitions, and the private libraries of the 71 Rodríguez Díaz, ‘La manufactura del libro’, 31–2. 72 K. Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: the decoration of Hebrew Bibles in medieval Spain, trans. J. Davidson (Leiden, 2004), 5. 73 Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art, at 61, 87, and 95; A. Contessa, ‘Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant in Spanish and Sephardic Medieval Manuscripts’, in Between Judaism and Christianity: art historical essays in honor of Elisheva (Elizabeth) Revel-Neher, ed. K. Kogman-Appel and M. Meyer (Leiden/Boston, 2009), 171–89, at 181–5. 74 L.U. Afonso, T. Moita, and D. Matos, ‘La Biblia de Coimbra y la “Escuela andaluza” de iluminación hebraica’, Archivo Español de Arte, 88 (January–March 2015), 53–68 (62–5); E. Frojmovic, ‘Jewish Mudejarismo and the Invention of Tradition’, in Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and beyond, ed. C. Caballero-Navas and E. Alfonso (New York, 2010), 233–58 (237–8). 75 On the cultural and historical pitfalls of the terms ‘Muslim Spain’ and ‘Christian Spain’, see R. Hitchcock, ‘Christian-Muslim Understanding(s) in Medieval Spain’, HRJ 9, no. 4 (2008), 314–25, at 315. For the term ‘Mudejar’, see L.P. Harvey, Islamic Spain 1250 to 1500 (Chicago/London, 1994), 3–4.

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wealthy supported the scholarly activities of librarians and scribes.76 Even as Christian forces advanced down the Peninsula, this patronage and intellectual activity continued. Ja‘far Aḥmad III Sayf al-Dawla, the last ruler of the Banū Hūd dynasty of Zaragoza, transferred his library to Rueda Jalón after his kingdom fell to the Christians in 1118, and made some of the works available to his neighbour, Bishop Michael of Tarazona.77 In 1140 Ja‘far exchanged his property in Rueda Jalón for part of the city of Toledo, and texts from his library began to circulate there, too. The works on mathematics, astronomy, astrology, and magic which the prolific translator and Toledo cathedral cleric Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187) chose to translate into Latin belong to the same family of texts as those which derive from late eleventh-century versions in the royal Banū Hūd library; and it was to Gerard of Cremona’s version of Al-Fargānī’s work on astronomy, the Liber de aggregationibus scientie stellarum, that Pedro Gallego, the Franciscan bishop of Cartagena, turned when he compiled his own Summa astronomica in the thirteenth century.78 The early twelfth century had seen the development of a distinctive style of North African-Andalusí script, and the increasing use of paper rather than parchment helped reduce the cost of books and widened their circulation.79 Once again, however, few books survive to bear material witness to the intensity of book production which such a development implies. A sixteen-volume Koran copied at Seville in 1234, fourteen years before the kingdom surrendered to Christian besiegers led by Fernando III, is preserved in the Ibn Yūsuf Library, Marrakesh, but only three Western Islamic manuscripts with pictures survive today.80 Despite these losses, the number of visual and textual exemplars that the artists and authors working 76 D. Wasserstein, ‘The Library of al-Hakam II al-Mustansir and the Culture of Islamic Spain’, Manuscripts of the Middle East, 5 (1990–1991), 99–105; E.R. Hoffman, ‘The Beginnings of the Illustrated Arab Book: an intersection between art and scholarship’, Muqarnas, 17 (2000), 37–52, at 45–6; R. Collins, ‘Literacy and the laity in early medieval Spain’, in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1990), 109–133. 77 C. Burnett, ‘The Translating Activity in Medieval Spain’, in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. S. Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden, 1992), 1036–58, at 1041–3. 78 On Gerard, see C. Burnett, ‘The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelfth Century’, Science in Context, 14, nos 1–2 (2001), 249–88, at 251 and n. 5; J. Martínez Gázquez, ‘La Summa de astronomía de Pedro Gallego y el Liber de Aggregationibus Scientie Stellarum de al-Fargānī’, in De Astronomia Alphonsi Regis. Actas del simposio sobre astronomía alfonsí celebrado en Berkeley (agosto 1985) y otros trabajos sobre el mismo tema, ed. M. Comes et al. (Barcelona, 1987), 153–79. 79 Hoffman, ‘Beginnings of the Illustrated Arab Book’, 45–6. 80 S. Khemir, ‘The Arts of the Book’, in Al-Andalus: the art of Islamic Spain, ed. J.D. Dodds Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Alhambra, Granada, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York. (New York, 1992), 115-22.

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for Alfonso drew upon when they compiled the Cantigas, treatises on board games, chronicles, and astrological works for the king testifies to the wealth of literary and artistic sources, Muslim and Christian (and presumably also Jewish), available in the Iberian Peninsula during the thirteenth century.81 The halo which marks the status of the king of India, the black and red chess pieces, and the Arabic inscriptions incorporated into the miniatures of the Libros de los juegos suggest that the artists working for Alfonso drew on visual sources from the Arab world, sources which may have included depictions and inscriptions on objects and architecture, as well as any manuscripts which remained in the libraries of Cordoba and Seville post-conquest.82 There is more evidence for the scholars involved in the compilation and composition of the works patronized by Alfonso (as distinct from those who copied, illustrated, or bound them up) because their names are cited in the prologues and colophons to some of the manuscripts themselves, particularly those included in the translations of scientific and astrological works, and in contemporary documents as well. The naming of scholars and translators in these works reflects literary convention, in this case the need to establish the intellectual authority of a particular genre of text. Nonetheless, this identification provides evidence for the pivotal role played by Jewish scholars in Alfonso’s cultural patronage, and the notable absence of Muslim involvement in the translation of Arabic texts.83 ‘Bernardo the Arab’ (‘el arauigo’), identified as one of the translators in the compilation of treatises on astronomy and astronomical instruments, was almost certainly a Christian convert from Islam, as his Christian forename 81 For Seville as a centre for Arab texts and, consequently, for its importance as a centre of Alfonsine cultural patronage, see J. Samsó, ‘Sevilla y la obra científica de Alfonso X’, in Sevilla 1248, 567–77, at 571. On the wealth of visual exemplars in Seville, see the comments in G. Menéndez Pidal, La España del siglo XIII leída en imágenes (Madrid, 1986), 104. On contact between the three cultures of Spain more generally, see J.D. Dodds, M.R. Menocal, and A. Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the making of castilian culture (New Haven/ London, 2008), especially c.6, ‘Adab’, 191–239. 82 K. Kennedy, ‘Influence and Power: Islamic iconography in Alfonso X’s Book of Chess’, in Under the Influence: the concept of influence and the study of illuminated manuscripts, ed. J. Lowden and A. Bovey (Turnhout, 2007), 89–96, at 91–2; D.J. Roxburgh, ‘Los libros árabes y el scriptorium de Alfonso X’, in Murcia 2009, 258–65, at 264; J. Samsó, ‘Sevilla y la obra científica de Alfonso X’, in Sevilla 1248, 567–77, at 573–6. 83 Burnett, ‘Translating Activity in Medieval Spain’, at 1047. For Jewish scholars patronized by Alfonso, see G. Hilty, ‘El Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas’, Al-Andalus, 20 (1955), 1–74; D. Romano, ‘El papel judío en la transmisión de la cultura’, Hispania Sacra, 40 (1988), 972–3; N. Roth, ‘Jewish Collaborators in Alfonso’s Scientific Work’, in Emperor of Culture, 59–71; D. Romano, La ciencia hispanojudía (Madrid, 1992); J. Samsó, ‘Dos colaboradores científicos musulmanes de Alfonso X’, Llull, 4 (1981), 171–9.

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suggests.84 Although some historians have argued that Alfonso called upon the scholarly services of the sage Muhammed Ibn Abu Bakr al-Riquti (known in the West as al-Ricotí), who lived in Murcia, there is also evidence to suggest he abandoned Christian Spain in disgust at efforts to convert him.85 The references to rabbinical and Arabic sources in the Estoria de Espanna and the General estoria strongly suggest that there were Jewish masters among the anonymous groups of scholars responsible for translating and compiling these two Alfonsine chronicles.86 Such key involvement of Jewish scholars in Alfonso’s cultural patronage reflects the historic prominence enjoyed by the Jewish community among the intellectual élite of the Peninsula, a prominence they had also enjoyed during the caliphate, for example at the court of the tenth-century caliph of Cordoba, al-Ḥakam II al-Mutanṣir.87 The directives of the Christian church, expressed in decrees drawn up by Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215),88 imposed restrictive laws on Jewish dress, and on the ability of Jews to hold public office. These directives were echoed and magnified in thirteenth-century royal legal codes such as Alfonso’s Siete Partidas;89 but in fact Christian monarchs in the Peninsula valued their Jewish subjects not only for their learning but also, more practically, for their wealth, linguistic skills, and the diplomatic role they could play in negotiations between Christians and Muslims.90 Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the ambitious archbishop of Toledo 84 Márquez Villanueva, Concepto cultural, 127, n. 1. 85 For al-Ricotí as a scholar who worked for Alfonso, see J. Torres Fontes, ‘La cultura murciana en el reinado de Alfonso X’, Murgetana, 14 (1960), 57–89, and Márquez Villanueva, Concepto cultural, 164–5. For a different view, see F. de la Granja, ‘Una polémica religiosa en Murcia’, Al-Andalus 31 (1966), 47–72. 86 E.C. Francomano, ‘Castilian Vernacular Bibles in Iberia, c. 1250–1500’, in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: production, reception and performance in Western Christianity, ed. S. Boynton and D.J. Reilly (New York, 2011), 315–37, at 323. 87 Wasserstein, ‘The Library of al-Hakam II’, at 103. 88 Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis una cum comentariis glossatum, ed. A. García y García, Monumenta Iuris Canonici, ser. A, vol. 2 (Vatican City, 1981), c.67–c.70. For an English translation, see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. and trans. N.P. Tanner, 2 vols (Washington, dc, 1990), i, Nicea to Lateran V, 265–7. 89 H. Salvador Martínez, La convivencia en la España del siglo XIII. Perspectivas alfonsíes (Madrid, 2006), 165 and 355; M. Ratcliffe, ‘Judíos y musulmanes en la jurisprudencia medieval española’, in Homenaje a Alfonso X, el Sabio (1284-1984), Special Issue, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 9, no. 3 (1985), 423-38; D.E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: an edition of and commentary on ‘Siete Partidas’ 7.24 ‘De los Judíos’ (Berkeley, 1986); C. Devia, Disidentes y minorías religiosas en las Partidas de Alfonso X el Sabio (Vigo, 2009). 90 See the comments in M. González Jiménez, ‘Alfonso X, rey de Castilla y León (1252–1284)’, in El Scriptorium alfonsí. De los Libros de Astrología a las ‘Cantigas de Santa María’, ed. J. Montoya Martínez and A. Domínguez Rodríguez (Madrid, 1999), 1–15, at 11–13.

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(who drowned in the Rhône in June 1247 en route to the Council of Lyon to defend the primacy of his See) had exempted the local Jewish community from ecclesiastical strictures, such as regulations on dress, and cultivated its wealthy members in order to consolidate and extend the territory under his control.91 The short section in the Alfonsine Partidas on relations between Christians and Jews which stressed that contact between them should be strictly limited (to avoid the danger of Christian apostasy) nevertheless reflected economic and political necessity by allowing Jewish landowners to employ Christian agricultural labourers and bodyguards, and by permitting Christians to consult Jewish physicians.92 Both Jaume I of Aragon and Alfonso X employed a Jewish physician, although Alfonso retained a Christian one as well; Fernando III sent Jewish ambassadors to negotiate with the Almohad caliph of Morocco and was rebuked for doing so by Pope Honorius III (1216–1227), who feared that Jews could not be trusted to keep the secrets of Christians.93 In the cultural sphere, Jewish scholars had always played a key role in the transfer of Arab learning to the Latin world. It was a role which became increasingly prominent in the twelfth century as Christian clerics from Northern Europe and from within Spain itself gravitated to Toledo in order to discover the works of Ancient Greek authors, such as Ptolemy’s second-century treatise on astronomy, the Almagest, which had been preserved in Arabic translation. They included Hermann of Carinthia ( fl. 1138–1143) and, among the second generation of scholars, Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187).94 Like their Christian counterparts, known as ‘mozarabs’, who lived under Muslim rule, Jewish scholars were fluent in both Arabic and in the vernacular, and so could prepare a vernacular translation of an Arabic text, which a Christian scholar could then translate into Latin.95 This two-step process of translation 91 L.K. Pick, ‘Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and the Jews: pragmatism and patronage in thirteenthcentury Toledo’, Viator, 28 (1997), 203–22, at 221. For Rodrigo’s death, see P. Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford, 1994), 410. 92 D.E. Carpenter, ‘Jewish-Christian Social Relations in Alphonsine Spain: a commentary on Book VII, Title xxiv, Law 8 of the Siete Partidas’, in Florilegium Hispanicum: medieval and Golden Age studies presented to Dorothy Clotelle Clarke, ed. J.S. Geary (Madison, wi, 1983), 61–70, at 67; R.I. Burns, ‘Jews and Moors in the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X the Learned: a background perspective’, in Medieval Spain: culture, conflict and coexistence. Studies in Honour of Angus MacKay, ed. R. Collins and A. Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), 46–62. 93 Salvador Martínez, La convivencia, 165 and 358 n. 8. 94 Burnett, ‘Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program’, 254. 95 See Romano, ‘El papel judío’, for an overview of the Jewish contribution to translations produced in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain.

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is documented in around 1170 by the English cleric Daniel of Morley, who explained how the vernacular served as the bridge between Arabic and Latin scholarship, and cited as an example his own conversations with ‘Galippus’, a mozarab scholar and translator who had worked with Gerard of Cremona.96 The translation activity in twelfth-century Toledo was described by the French historian and Oriental scholar Amable Jourdain in his posthumously published 1819 study of Latin translations of Aristotle as the work of a ‘school of translators’, and his attribution has proved as enduring as it is misleading.97 In fact, there was no formal, institutional framework for the translators’ work, although successive archbishops and canons of Toledo cathedral were significant patrons of, as well as participants in, this scholarly labour. The absence of formal, institutional, approval was to be expected, as much of the demand for translations came from visiting foreign scholars, who did not know Arabic and who wished to expand their intellectual horizons beyond the subjects offered by the traditional Western university curriculum.98 This situation changed in the thirteenth century as the balance of power in the Peninsula began to shift from Muslim to Christian rulers. The choice of language for a text became a more overtly political one, and the etymology of a word could be used to question the religious orthodoxy of a section of the population: Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada derived ‘mozarab’ (Arabic-speaking Christians who had lived under Muslim rule) from the Latin ‘mixti Arabes’ (‘part Arab’).99 It is not a coincidence that the linguistic goal of translators working for Alfonso was to produce a finished text not in Latin but in the vernacular, the language which in the previous century had served as the bridge to the final, Latin, version. Alfonso’s continuous promotion of the Castilian language gave the works bearing his name a nationalistic feel, and may also have suggested to his subjects that his revised legal codes were simply the natural evolution of established traditions.100 The political 96 C. Burnett, ‘A Group of Arabic-Latin Translators Working in Northern Spain in the Mid-12th Century’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1977), 62–108; Burnett, ‘Translating Activity in Medieval Spain’, 1045; Márquez Villanueva, ‘In lingua tholetana’, 299. 97 Márquez Villanueva, ‘In lingua tholetana’, 284; P. Racine, ‘Y a-t-il eu une “école de Tolède”?’ in Tolède (1085–1095). Des traductions médiévales au mythe littéraire. Colloque de Mulhouse, Decembre 1985, ed. J. Huré, Special Issue, Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres de Mulhouse, 16 (Paris, 1989), 31–40. 98 Márquez Villanueva, ‘In lingua tholetana’, 285; Burnett, ‘Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program’, 250–4. 99 F.J. Hernández, ‘Language and Cultural Identity: the Mozarabs of Toledo’, Boletín Burriel, 1 (1989), 29–48, cited in Hitchcock, ‘Christian-Muslim Understanding(s)’, at 320. 100 See the comments in Burnett, ‘The Translating Activity in Medieval Spain’, 1047; Liuzzo Scorpo, ‘The King as Subject’, 272.

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undertones of language are evident in other decisions made by his translators. Sometimes they preferred a neologism to a more familiar Spanish word, as is the case in their treatment of the title of al-Zarqālī’s treatise on a type of astrolabe, ‘al-Ṣafīḥa’ (from the Arabic ‘Ṣafīḥa’ or ‘table’). Instead of translating the title using the familiar (and accurate) Castilian word ‘lamina’, the Alfonsine scholars chose instead to make the Arabic word sound Spanish, and transformed it into ‘açafea’.101 Alfonsine translators also devised a Latin equivalent for the name of Maslama al-Majrīţī, the famous Arabic author whose name had been attached to the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, a widely circulated handbook of magic. On one level this can be read as a linguistic joke, but on another their decision effectively turned a Muslim scholar into a Spanish – and by implication a Christian – one.102 Christian scholars also took part in this learned activity during Alfonso’s reign, although they are named less frequently in prologues.103 The ‘king’s cleric’ Juan d’Aspa assisted Yehuda, Alfonso’s Jewish physician, in the 1259 translation of the Libro de las cruzes, reorganized the divisions of the work, and, according to the prologue and colophon of the work, composed new rubrics. Earlier, during the 1240s, Yehuda had worked to translate treatises on the virtues of stones (the Lapidario) with another cleric in royal service, Garci Pérez (a man ‘very learned in the art of astrology’, according to the translation prologue).104 Other courtiers linked directly to the composition of works patronized by Alfonso include the Franciscan Bernardo de Brihuega, whose five-volume compilation of saints’ lives in their historical context made at Alfonso’s request survives incomplete in later manuscripts, and ‘Maestro Roldán’, named in the prologue to the legal code on gamblers and gambling, the Libro de las tahurerías, drawn up on the orders of Alfonso and probably completed by October 1276.105 The Franciscan friar Gil de Zamora 101 L.P. Harvey, ‘The Alphonsine School of Translators: translation from Arabic into Castilian produced under the patronage of Alfonso the Wise of Castile’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1977), 109–17, at 112; and for its Arabic sense of ‘table’, see Roth, ‘Jewish Collaborators’, 61 and 68. For ‘lamina’, see J. Samsó, ‘Las traducciones astronómicas alfonsíes y la aparición de una prosa científica castellana’, Alcanate, 6 (2008–2009), 39–51, at 46. 102 Burnett, ‘Translating Activity in Medieval Spain’, 1047; J. Thomann, ‘The Name Picatrix: transcription or translation?’ JWCI, 53 (1990), 289–96. 103 E.S. Procter, ‘The Scientific Works of the Court of Alfonso X of Castille: the king and his collaborators’, Modern Language Review, 40 (1945), 12–29, at 22. 104 Procter, ‘Scientific Works’, 23–4; L. Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia en el scriptorium de Alfonso X el Sabio (Seville, 2013), 77–8 and 142. 105 M.C. Díaz y Díaz, ‘La obra de Bernardo de Brihuega’, in Strenae. Estudios de filología e historia dedicados al Profesor Manuel García Blanco (Salamanca, 1962), 145–61; idem, ‘Tres compiladores latinos en el ambiente de Sancho IV’, in La literatura en la época de Sancho IV, ed. Álvar and

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was tutor to Alfonso’s son Sancho, to whom he dedicated a short chronicle in Latin on the reigns of Sancho’s grandfather and father. He also wrote a treatise on music and another one in defence of the virginity of the Virgin Mary; and the range of his literary activity and closeness to royalty suggest he was probably involved in the preparation of texts for Alfonso, particularly the chronicles and the Cantigas de Santa Maria.106 The participation of other figures in the king’s circle in the cultural activities he patronized remains obscure for lack of specific evidence, although it seems likely that the clerics employed by Alfonso as royal administrators could have applied their intellectual training to his scholarly endeavours as well.107 Pedro Gallego, Alfonso’s confessor and the first Bishop of Cartagena (1250–1267), compiled a work on astronomy drawn principally from Gerard of Cremona’s translation of al-Fargānī’s Liber de aggregationibus scientie stellarum, but which also included translations by Pedro himself of Arabic sources.108 Despite sharing Alfonso’s interest in astronomy, Pedro Gallego’s name does not appear in surviving royal documents in connection with the king’s cultural activities; however that of another cleric in Alfonso’s confidence, Fernán García ( fl. 1260–after 1285), does. Fernán García played a key role in the ecclesiastical reforms which gradually followed the conquest of Seville from the Moors in 1248. In 1261 he was appointed doctor of decrees (doctor decretorum) in the city’s new cathedral school founded by Archbishop Remondo Losana, one of the king’s closest advisers. While bishop of Segovia in the early 1250s, Remondo had acted as the key figure in Fernando III’s chancery, in the role of notarius regis or ‘king’s notary’, and he was also Fernando’s confessor.109 Shortly before he was appointed archbishop of Seville (around 1259, to replace Alfonso’s brother and archbishop-elect Felipe, who had married Christina of Norway), Remondo seems to have acted as Lucía Megías, 37–41; Libro de las Tahurerías: a special code of law, concerning gambling, drawn up by Maestro Roldán at the command of Alfonso X of Castile, ed. R.A. MacDonald (Madison, wi, 1995), 15–16. 106 Díaz y Díaz, ‘Tres compiladores’, 46–9. 107 On ecclesiastics as administrators at Alfonso’s court, see González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 406–7. 108 Martínez Gázquez, ‘La Summa de Astronomia’, 153–79. See also A. Pelzer, ‘Un traducteur inconnu. Pierre Gallego, franciscain et premier évêque de Carthagène (1250–67)’, in Miscellanea F. Ehrle. Histoire de la théologie et de la philosophie. Scritti di storia e paleografia, pubblicati […] in occasione dell’ottantesimo natalizio dell’ Emo Cardinale F. Ehrle, Studi e Testi, 37–42, 5 vols (Rome, 1924), i, Histoire de la théologie et de la philosophie, 407–56; J. Torres Fontes, ‘El obispado de Cartagena en el siglo XIII’, Hispania, 13, no. 52 (1953), 339–401 and Hispania 13, no. 53 (1953), 515–80. 109 Kleine, Cancillería real, 47–8.

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Alfonso’s ambassador (and guardian of the interests of the diocese of Seville) in Rome.110 In his Constitutions for the cathedral chapter, which included the foundation of the cathedral school, Remondo had lamented the intellectual poverty of the church in Seville, an institution which, he observed, had only recently been returned to the Christian religion and which he compared to a delicate seedling that required nurture by a literate clergy.111 As doctor decretorum, Fernán García’s role in this new organization was to lecture on Gratian’s Decretum, the twelfth-century compilation of ancient canons completed in Bologna in around 1145, the study of which formed the foundation course of canon law in the medieval schools.112 In 1261 Fernán García also became archdeacon of Niebla, a formerly independent Muslim kingdom of strategic importance which had come under Castilian rule earlier in that year thanks to a combination of siege warfare and negotiated surrender (Archbishop Remondo had been the first to rush towards its walls after the inhabitants capitulated). He was closely involved in organizing the redistribution of lands following the Christian occupation, although unusually the terms of the surrender also permitted the Muslim residents to remain there.113 Documents issued by Alfonso’s chancery demonstrate that Fernán enjoyed a high level of royal trust: he is referred to as a ‘clérigo del rey’, and between 1263 and 1274 he issued 27 documents on the king’s behalf.114 In 1275, while Alfonso travelled abroad to meet Pope Gregory X at 110 The earliest significant source for the life and career of this important yet shadowy archbishop – who sought pardon from the pope because he poked out his brother’s eye, and who outlived two royal masters (he died in 1286) – is D. Ortíz de Zúñiga, Annales eclesiasticos y seculares de la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla (Madrid, 1677), 88.a. For his visit to Rome, see I. Montes Romero-Camacho, ‘La iglesia de Sevilla en tiempos de Alfonso X’, in Sevilla en tiempos de Alfonso X, ed. M. González Jiménez, M. Borrero Fernández, and I. Montes Romero-Camacho (Seville, 1987), 158–221, at 194. See P. Linehan, ‘La conquista de Sevilla y los historiadores’, in Sevilla 1248, 229–44, at 235 n. 39 for recent, inaccurate, assessments of Losana’s literary activities. 111 For the Seville cathedral school, see E. Costa y Belda, ‘Las constituciones de Don Raimundo de Losaña para el cabildo de Sevilla (1261)’, Historia. Instituciones. Documentos, 5 (1978), 219–33, esp. 224 for the state of the Seville church. Extensive corrections to Belda’s article in M. González Jiménez, ‘Los ritmos de repoblación. El reino de Sevilla en vísperas de la conquista de Niebla’, Estudios de historia medieval en homenaje a Luís Suárez Fernández, ed. V.Á. Álvarez Palenzuela et al. (Valladolid, 1991), 215–27. The foundation of the cathedral school is sometimes mistakenly related to the 1254 royal charter establishing ‘schools of Latin and Arabic’ in Seville (see below, Chapter 1); on Remondo himself, see A. Ballesteros Beretta, Sevilla en el siglo XIII (Seville, 1913), 89–99. 112 Gratian, Decretum Gratiani, Corpus Iuris Canonici, i, ed. E. Friedberg, 2nd edn (Graz, 1959). 113 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 146–50; Ballesteros Beretta, Sevilla en el siglo XIII, 92. 114 For a list and summary of the contents of the documents, see Kleine, Cancillería real, CD-ROM: Apéndice: catálogo prosopográfico, 114–20 (no. 38: ‘Fernán García’).

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Beaucaire, Fernán García remained behind to act as a key member of the chancery run by Alfonso’s son and heir, Fernando de la Cerda.115 In July 1269 he was one of two representatives chosen to accompany the prince’s future wife Blanche from France to Burgos for their wedding, which took place on 30 November.116 Fernán García’s involvement in the king’s foreign affairs was not unusual. The Franciscan Lope Fernández, first bishop of Morocco, had played a key role in plans made by Alfonso early in his reign to form an alliance with England and mount a joint crusade against Northern Africa.117 Despite his closeness to the king, however, Fernán García did not share Alfonso’s support of the mendicant orders. The latter part of his career was spent as archdeacon of Burgos cathedral (1272–1285), during which time he worked energetically to promote the interests of the cathedral chapter over those of the local Dominican friars, who had established themselves in the city in the 1240s. His tactics included the use of provocation and threats to prevent the friars settling on land near the cathedral which had been granted to them by royal decree.118 Nevertheless, he did not forget his loyalty to the king, and in 1282 he witnessed a document drawn up by the bishops of Burgos and Palencia in which they alleged they had been forced to take part in an assembly summoned by his rebellious son Sancho at Valladolid.119 There is some evidence that Fernán García’s court duties extended to working with Alfonso in the cultural sphere as well. Although many of the documents he issued on the king’s behalf related to Andalusia, and were concerned with matters such as exemptions from duty payments or grazing rights,120 in February 1270 he issued two letters patent (in Castilian, cartas) on Alfonso’s behalf which listed books lent to the king by the town council of Albelda and the monastery of Santa María de Nájera.121 The letters solemnly recorded that Alfonso was bound to return these books once he had ordered

115 Kleine, Cancillería real, 87–90, 271. For his role in land distribution, see González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 97, n. 75. 116 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 216–17. 117 O.C. Méndez González, ‘Lope Fernández, Bishop of Morocco: his diplomatic role in the planning of an Anglo-Castilian crusade into Northern Africa’, in Thirteenth Century England XIV: proceedings of the Aberystwyth and Lampeter conference, 2011, ed. J. Burton et al. (Woodbridge, 2013), 101–13. 118 P. Linehan, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: capitular Burgos and mendicant Burgos in the thirteenth century’, in Church and City 1000–1500: essays in honour of Christopher Brooke, ed. D. Abulafia, M. Franklin, and M. Rubin (Cambridge, 1992), 81–110, at 93 and 98. 119 Kleine, Cancillería real, ‘Apéndice’ (CD-ROM), no. 38. 120 Kleine, Cancillería real, ‘Apéndice: catálogo prosopográfico’, no. 38. 121 Procter, ‘The Castillian Chancery’, 108.

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copies to be made of the texts.122 It is tempting to wonder whether this trusted doctor decretorum, whose title ‘maestre’ (magister) reflected his university training, was involved in selecting the royal requests for the loan of books, since they comprised standard works of the medieval academic repertoire, such as the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.123 Given Fernán’s legal specialism, it is also tempting to interpret the book of Canones which heads the first request list as a legal work; but in fact textual analysis shows this was the comparative chronology of biblical and contemporary history by Eusebius of Caesarea (†c. 340) in Jerome’s late fourth-century translation.124 It would not be surprising that Alfonso should have taken men such as Remondo and Fernán García into his confidence; but although their association with books and education is suggestive, the lack of evidence for their specific participation in the king’s literary projects in documentary sources or within the works themselves (a silence which surely reflects Alfonso’s deliberate promotion of himself as the principal intellectual authority for many of his works) means that their role must remain speculation.125 Nevertheless, intellectuals such as these men would also have constituted a receptive audience for the works commissioned by Alfonso, and the final section of this monograph will argue that three manuscripts which have been identified as books made for the king in fact are copies made for other people and reflect wider thirteenth-century interest in the works he commissioned. Two manuscripts, Madrid MS 3065 and Madrid MS 9294, are fair copies of draft translations of astrological works that were in the process of being prepared for the king. Another manuscript, Madrid MS 816, is an early copy of the first part of a universal chronicle, the General estoria, 122 ‘Maestro Fernán García, Arcediano de Niebla la mandó facer por mandado del Rey. Pero Alvarez la fizo escrivir.’ Both documents are published in Memorial Histórico Español. Colección de documentos, opúsculos y antigüedades (Madrid, 1851), i, docs CXVII and CXVIII, dated 22 and 25 February, both issued at Santo Domingo de la Calzada. On the division of authority in the dating clause between the person who draws up the document on the king’s behalf and the person who writes it out, see Kleine, Cancillería real, 58–9. 123 On the term maestre, see Kleine, Cancillería real, 74, n. 117 and A. de Iglesia Ferreirós, ‘Escuela, estudio y maestros’, Historia. Instituciones. Documentos, 25 (1998), 313–26. The popularity of Isidore’s text is suggested by the number of surviving twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts listed in J.M. Fernández Catón, Las Etimologías en la tradición manuscrita medieval estudiada por el Prof. Dr. Anspach (San Isidoro, 1966). For Boethius, see The Medieval Boethius: studies in the vernacular translations of De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. A.J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1987). 124 Ballesteros Beretta, Alfonso X (1963), 498, suggested that the Canones was a legal text; for Eusebius in the Alfonsine chronicles, see I. Fernández-Ordóñez, Las ‘estorias’ de Alfonso el Sabio (Madrid, 1992). 125 Rodríguez-Velasco, ‘Theorizing’, 83.

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and the subject-matter highlighted in the rubrics and the content of tiny marginal pen trials suggest that it was made for an ecclesiastical readers. The existence of these copies suggests significant interest by contemporaries in the compilations and translations patronized by the king, such that even unfinished versions of works quickly circulated beyond the immediate confines of the court. The manuscripts of the works translated, compiled, and composed for Alfonso X are the principal source of evidence for his modern reputation as author and engaged patron, and for him as a king who channelled legal, historical, and scientific learning to his subjects. Although it has been argued that the two surviving depictions of him in the scientific works show him simply as promotor of the work, while the literary and legal texts depict him as a scholar actively involved in the composition process, in fact this distinction is misleading.126 Close study of elements in every representation of Alfonso – from the colour symbolism of his robes to the late adjustments to the composition of a miniature or text – show that the images of the king in all his manuscripts were aimed at specific audiences who would be able to appreciate the different messages about his kingship. In other words, these are works that present royal ideology to a literate, élite section of society, not to the wider population.127 The carefully controlled royal agenda which these alterations and features imply supports arguments for Alfonso’s personal interest and guiding role in the preparation of these manuscripts, while at the same time the changes also conjure up a circle of intellectuals who advised him on the presentation of his role, and the teams of scribes and illuminators who collaborated closely with them to realize this vision. Careful study of the iconography, text, and codicology of the manuscripts Alfonso commissioned, then, brings into focus the qualities that distinguished him as a patron, while at the same time providing evidence for a more nuanced view of that patronage.

126 Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 170. 127 Cf. the depiction of the Tower of David in the Toledo moralized Bible copied for Louis IX, which offers a literal and political illustration of Song of Songs 4: 4. See Grant, ‘The Castle of Castile’, 227.

1.

Alfonso X, his Literary Patronage, and the Verdict of Historians

The future Alfonso X was born in Toledo on St Clement’s day, 23 November 1221. He was the eldest son of the twenty-year-old Fernando III, king of Castile, and his twenty-three-year-old wife Beatriz, daughter of the late emperor-elect Philip of Swabia and granddaughter of the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. His mother’s ancestry was to underpin his candidature to the imperial throne, a candidature which he defended while still a prince against his younger brother Fadrique, who had been named after the emperor Fredrick, and which he pursued for almost his entire reign.1 When he was just four months old, on 21 March 1222, representatives from all parts of Castile and León recognized him as their feudal lord at Burgos.2 Aged nineteen in 1240, he was promised in marriage to the three-year-old Violante, daughter of Jaume I of Aragon. The couple f inally married at Valladolid on 29 January 1249.3 His love of learning, meanwhile, may have begun at an early age and was arguably remarked upon even before he acceded to the throne. In 1250, Guillermo Pérez de la Calzada, the former abbot of Sahagún, described him as the ‘first-born of the king [Fernando], skilful Alfonso, | virtuous father of his country, learned in everything,| modest in his habits’ (‘Regis primogenitus, Alfonsus peritus, | Probus pater patriae, cunctis eruditus, | modestus in moribus’). 4 The context of this praise was Alfonso’s triumphant entry into Seville with his father 1 Fadrique attempted to secure the right to inherit the duchy of Swabia by residing for an extended period at the court of Frederick II, between 1240 and 1245. His efforts failed, and instead Alfonso managed to persuade the pope to recognize his own right to the title. See L. Molina López, ‘La entrada de un modelo arquitectónico federiciano en el Reino de Castilla. La Torre de don Fadrique’, in Actas del I Encuentro Complutense de Jóvenes Investigadores de Historia del Arte, mayo de 2009, Special Issue, Anales de Historia del Arte (2010), 185–200, at 186–8; G. Martínez Díez, Fernando III, 1217–1252, Serie Corona de España, 1, Reyes de Castilla y León (Palencia, 1993), 242–3; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 199; González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 114 and n. 29. 2 González Jiménez and Carmona Ruiz, Documentación, 3–4. 3 Surprisingly little documentation survives in connection with their betrothal and wedding: see F. de Moxó y Montoliu, ‘El enlace de Alfonso de Castilla con Violante de Aragón’, Hispania: Revista Española de Historia, 171 (1989), 69–110 (and see 96 for the date of the marriage). 4 Rithmi de Iulia Romula, stanza 71, my translation. The poem is preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Holkham Misc. 26, beginning at fol. 163r. The most recent edition is R. Carande Herrero, ‘El Poema de Julia Rómula’, in Crónicas hispanas del siglo XIII, ed. L. Charlo Brea, J.A. Estévez Sola, and R. Carande Herrero, Corpvs Christianorvm in Translation (Turnhout, 2010), 249–64.

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Fernando, which had surrendered to Christian forces (and to those of their Nasrid allies from Granada) after a long campaign of harassment and a siege that lasted over a year.5 In his dedicatory prose prologue, Pérez de la Calzada hoped that his flattering account of the victory would be included in official chronicles.6 It is tempting to read this hope, and the deposed abbot’s description of Alfonso as ‘eruditus’, as evidence for Alfonsine literary activities that predate his accession to the throne: the poem arguably presents a new model of kingship characterized by learning. It is surely significant in the light of Alfonso’s later patronage that Pérez de la Calzada identifies the prince and not his father the king as a potential patron interested in historical writings.7 However, the churchman’s pairing of ‘peritus’ and ‘eruditus’ in his description of Alfonso suggests that practical skill was as important as bookish learning; and, ultimately, the poem was composed in the wake of a significant military victory by a marginalized churchman attempting to win patronage and favour at court. The former abbot of Sahagún was just as careful to state that, should Alfonso include his work in a chronicle compilation, he should not omit the opening prose letter which records Pérez de la Calzada himself as author and loyal royal servant. Just over three years later, on 30 May 1252, Fernando died at Seville.The following day, Alfonso was proclaimed king as he stood over his father’s grave before the high altar in Seville cathedral. The cathedral was in fact the city’s principal mosque that had been consecrated and dedicated to the Virgin Mary.8 The magnates (ricos omnes), summoned from across the land by the new king to witness his accession, would probably still have been able to see the mihrab, or niche, of the former mosque, which pointed 5 For an excellent account of the tactics used to force the surrender of Seville, see F. García Fitz, ‘El cerco de Sevilla. Reflexiones sobre la guerra de asedio en la Edad Media’, in Sevilla 1248, 115–54. 6 ‘Precipiat ergo Regia celsitudo, si placet, predictos rithmos cum hac epistola in cronicis annotari, ob memorie perpetue nutrimentum’ (‘Grant, therefore, your Royal majesty, if it pleases you, that the aforementioned verses, together with this letter, be included in chronicles, to nourish perpetual remembrance’). 7 M.A. Rodríguez de la Peña, ‘“Alfonsus peritus, cunctis eruditus”. La imagen sapiencial de Alfonso X de Castilla y los Rithmi de Iulia Romula (1250)’, in Proceedings of the Thirteenth Colloquium, ed. J. Whetnall and A. Deyermond, Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, 35 (London, 2006), 47–58 (54 and 56–7); and see also Linehan, History and the Historians, 426. 8 Prior to Arab rule, the early Christian basilica had stood nearby, on the site which became the royal palace (alcázar). See F. Fernández Gómez, ‘Mi voz es su lengua. Los orígenes del cristianismo’, in Magna hispalensis. El universo de una iglesia. Published in conjunction with the exhibition held at the Metropolitan Cathedral, Seville (Seville, 1992), 52–73 (at 56–7).

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the direction to Mecca behind the new altar dedicated to the Virgin Mary.9 The new king soon gained a reputation for liberally distributing jewels and gifts at court, which meant that, according to the chronicler Jofré de Loaysa, he was loved faithfully by foreigners and by people from the most remote corners of the world.10 Loaysa, abbot of Santander and archdeacon of Toledo, moved in royal circles. His cousin, also called Jofré de Loaysa, was tutor and guardian to Violante of Aragon, daughter of Jaume I and Alfonso’s future queen, and would have been well placed to observe the consequences of royal largesse.11 Certainly Alfonso and Violante welcomed an international selection of visitors to their court. The future Edward I of England was knighted at the royal monastery of Las Huelgas, Burgos, by Alfonso in 1254 (and married Alfonso’s step-sister Eleanor); and in 1256 a delegation from the Republic of Pisa, which claimed to represent the Commune of Pisa and the rest of the Romano-German Empire, visited to ‘elect, receive, promote and call upon’ Alfonso to take up the imperial crown. In fact, this was mere flattering rhetoric. While it was true that bitter disputes between the pope and the Hohenstaufen family had meant no emperor had yet been elected to replace Frederick II since his death in 1250, the Pisan ambassadors were powerless to place Alfonso on the throne as his substitute.12 On the contrary, this could only be achieved after election as rex Romanorum by the seven princeelectors of Germany, followed by acceptance and coronation by the pope as imperator Romanorum, that is, ruler of the Romano-German empire.13 9 For Fernando’s death and burial, see Martínez Díez, Fernando III, 238–41. For the circumstances surrounding Alfonso’s proclamation as king, see González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), at 45; T. Laguna Paúl, ‘La Capilla de los Reyes de la primitiva catedral de Santa María de Sevilla y las relaciones de la corona castellana con el cabildo hispalense en su etapa fundacional (1248–1285)’, in Maravillas de la España medieval. Tesoro sagrado y monarquía, ed. I.G. Bango Torviso, 2 vols (León, 2000), i, 235–49, at 237 and 241. In the 1270s, Alfonso transferred his parents’ remains to the cathedral royal chapel: see R. Alonso Álvarez, ‘De Carlomagno al Cid. La memoria de Fernando III en la Capilla Real de Sevilla’, in Fernando III y su tiempo (1201–1252). Actas del VIII congreso de estudios medievales celebrado en León del 1 al 14 de octubre 2001 (Ávila, 2003), 471–88. 10 J. de Loaysa, Crónica de los Reyes de Castilla. Fernando III, Alfonso X, Sancho IV y Fernando IV (1248–1305), ed. A. García Martínez, 2nd edn (Murcia, 1982), 80 (Latin text); 81 (Spanish translation). 11 For Jofré’s identity, see Loaysa, Crónica, ‘Introduction’, 53–6; for his cousin, see 28–32. 12 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 112–3. 13 Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, 148–50. This title was held by the emperor elect from the time of Henry II (1014–1024) onwards; Frederick II (d. 1250) was rex Romanorum before his confirmation as emperor and coronation by the pope. His title thereafter was imperator Romanorum semper augustus. See the address Frederico, Romanorum imperatori semper augusto et regi Sicilie in a letter of Pope Honorius III on 14 May 1221: MGH, Epistolae saeculi XIII e regestis pontificum Romanorum selectae per G.H. Pertz, ed. C. Rodenberg, 3 vols (Berlin, 1883–1894), i,

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Christina of Norway arrived in 1258 to marry Alfonso’s brother Felipe (who resigned his post as archbishop-elect of Seville), a marriage which represented the culmination of a political alliance between Haakon IV (1217–1263) and Alfonso which Haakon’s ambassadors to Castile had begun to negotiate in late 1255.14 A delegation from the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Baybars I, presented Alfonso with a crocodile and a zebra in the early 1260s, two remarkable gifts among many, and the memory of which impressed at least one later Christian chronicler, but which went unrecorded in contemporary Egyptian sources.15 (According to Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga, writing in the seventeenth century, the animals soon died from the change of climate, and Alfonso ordered them to be stuffed and suspended in the cloister of Seville cathedral. By the 1670s only the taxidermied crocodile remained, and a wooden replica hangs there today.16) Alfonso was among an illustrious group of Christian rulers, among them the Emperors Charlemagne and Frederick II, who had received gifts of animals from Muslim leaders, and he was presumably not unaware of these parallels in the context of his own imperial ambitions.17 In addition, Alfonso’s first cousin, Louis IX, had obtained an elephant from the Holy Land while on crusade, which he presented to Henry III of England in 1254.18 Baybars’s decision to send his embassy to Alfonso’s court seems to have been determined by his status of emperor-elect of Christendom. Alfonso would have appeared a powerful potential supporter against the expansionist ambitions of the Mongols, and

120, no. 173. In the early sixteenth century the form of the title changed slightly to ‘Holy Roman Emperor’: see G. Mölich, ‘Beharren und Aufbruch. Kaiser, Reich und Territorien’, in Renaissance am Rhein. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Landesmuseum Bonn (Bonn, 2010), 173. I am grateful to Norbert Jopek for this last reference. 14 B. Gelsinger, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Norwegian-Castilian Alliance’, Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 10 (1981), 55–80; González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 126–8. 15 Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, 28, n. 29 (c.9); P. Martínez Montávez, ‘Relaciones de Alfonso X de Castilla con el sultán mameluco Baybars y sus sucesores’, Al-Andalus, 27, no. 2 (1962), 343–76, at 344. 16 D. Ortíz de Zúñiga, Annales eclesiasticos y seculares de la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla (Madrid, 1677), 233–4 (year 1260, section 3); Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, 28, n. 29 (c.ix). For an image of the replica crocodile in situ, see F. Prado-Vilar, ‘Arte y diplomacia. El discurso del regalo en las relaciones con Oriente’, Murcia 2009, 186–9, at 187. 17 Prado-Vilar, ‘Arte y diplomacia’, 186–7; Doubleday, The Wise King, 102. 18 The St Albans monk, chronicler, and artist Matthew Paris drew the elephantine gift in his Liber additamentorum (‘Book of Additions’), compiled 1250–1259: see London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D. I, fol. 169v; facsimile online at www.bl.uk/manuscripts [accessed 6 October 2018]. See also Chronicles of the Age of Chivalry, ed. E. Hallam (Godalming, 1998), 80 (for an English translation of the passage in Matthew’s chronicle) and 81 (on English royal menageries).

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diplomatic relations with him would have considerably strengthened the fragile legitimacy of Baybars’s own rule.19 For his part Alfonso, who was related to the imperial Staufen dynasty on his mother’s side and had a first cousin, Maria, on his father’s side who was married to Baldwin II, emperor of Constantinople, attempted by every diplomatic means possible to persuade the seven princely electors of the German empire that he should be chosen as the next emperor of the Romans.20 So anxious was he to achieve this that at least one modern historian has identified this quest as the driving aim that shaped his kingship.21 Various factors conspired against him. The circumstances of the 1257 imperial election to appoint a successor to Frederick II (who had been deposed in 1245) were acrimonious and inconclusive. Four of the seven electors who supported Alfonso (Arnold, archbishop of Trier, Albert, duke of Saxony, and representatives of King Ottakar of Bohemia and the margrave of Brandenburg) met at Frankfurt in January 1257 to agree a future date for the election. However, they physically excluded a f ifth elector from the city, namely Conrad, archbishop of Cologne. Undeterred, Conrad declared Richard of Cornwall king of the Romans, and also claimed that his decision was supported by Gerhard, archbishop of Mainz, and Ludwig of Bavaria, the count palatine, the two remaining electors who had not been present in Frankfurt. Ottakar of Bohemia allegedly supported Richard’s candidature as well.22 Richard, unlike Alfonso, was swift to act in this uncertain situation. On 17 May, Archbishop Conrad crowned him emperor at Aachen. Alfonso’s failure to travel in person to Germany at this crucial juncture meant that his future attempts to secure the crown were doomed to failure. He would only abandon his official efforts to claim the imperial title almost twenty years later at the southern French town of Beaucaire, near Avignon. It was here, in May 1275, that Pope Gregory X reminded him that no one could claim to be emperor unless he had been crowned at Aachen; and that, in any case, by 1274 Rudolph of Austria had been elected and crowned emperor.23 19 O’Callaghan, Learned King, at 207; Martínez Montávez, ‘Relaciones de Alfonso X de Castilla con el Sultán’; C. de Ayala Martínez, Directrices fundamentales de la política peninsular de Alfonso X (relaciones castellano-aragonesas de 1252 a 1263) (Madrid, 1986), 291–3. 20 For Alfonso’s family connections, see A. Liuzzo Scorpo, Friendship in Medieval Iberia: historical, legal and literary perspectives (Farnham, 2014), 41. 21 Most recently González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 9, who, like Ayala Martínez, Directrices, 18, sees Alfonso’s quest for the imperial crown in the context of his desire to establish Castile as the dominant power in the Iberian Peninsula. 22 O’Callaghan, Learned King, 200–1; González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 116–7. 23 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 283–6 and 279; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 231–3.

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Even so, Alfonso took his imperial pretensions with him to the grave. The Seville historian Alonso Morgado recorded that when Alfonso’s corpse was moved to a new resting place in the restored and reconfigured royal chapel at Seville cathedral in June 1579, his coffin was opened and found to contain ‘a buckled sword, a sceptre, and a crown, and certain other insignia of an Emperor’.24 When Alfonso’s tomb was opened in 1948, all that remained of these symbols of imperial status were the eagles, emblems of the house of Swabia, woven on the covers of two of the three pillows under his head.25 The nobility, which had resisted royal attempts to constrain their power and whose discontent bordered on outright rebellion in 1272, were deeply implicated in the violence that characterized the final years of Alfonso’s reign.26 The death in 1275 of his eldest son and heir, Fernando de la Cerda (who owed his sobriquet cerda, or ‘tuft of hair’, to a hairy birthmark on his back) brought about a crisis of succession.27 The established customs of Castile dictated that Fernando’s younger brother Sancho should inherit the crown.28 However, a clause in the second volume of Alfonso’s law code, the Partidas, stated that on the premature death of the king’s eldest son and heir the throne should pass to the deceased heir’s son or daughter.29 In this case, Fernando’s eldest son was a five-year old child called Alfonso. In addition there was, according to some later chroniclers, a clause in the marriage contract between Fernando de la Cerda and Blanche of France which stipulated that Fernando’s sons should succeed him. Although the contract, concluded on 28 September 1266, did not in fact stipulate this,

24 A. Morgado, Historia de Sevilla (Seville, 1587), 108 (iv.7). 25 Eagles are also woven into the pillow coverings found in the tombs of Alfonso’s mother Beatriz and his son, Fernando de la Cerda: E. Fernández González, ‘“Que los reyes vestiesen paños de seda, con oro, e con piedras preciosas,”’ in Indumentarias ricas en los reinos León y Castilla (1180–1300). Entre la tradición islámica y el Occidente cristiano. Simposio internacional ‘El legado de al-Andalus. El arte andalusí en los reinos de León y Castilla durante la Edad Media’, ed. M. Valdés Fernández (Valladolid, 2007), 365–408, at 389. 26 For Alfonso’s difficulties in controlling the magnates during the 1270s, see O’Callaghan, Learned King, 214–29 and González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 242–72. 27 J. Craddock, ‘Dynasty in Dispute: Alfonso X el Sabio and the succession to the throne of Castile and Leon in history and legend’, Viator, 17 (1986), 197–219, at 198. The sobriquet also had a possibly unintended imperial echo: see Primera crónica general, i, c.113, at 90, where the origin of Julius Caesar’s name is derived from the hairy tuft, ‘cerda’ or ‘cesaries’, that stood out from the rest of his hair. 28 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 306–8. 29 Partida II, xv.2, in Partida segunda de Alfonso X el Sabio. Manuscrito 12794 de la Biblioteca Nacional. Edición y estudios, ed. A. Juárez Blanquer et al., Colección Romania 3 (Granada, 1991), 135.

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Philip III of France (r. 1270-1285) was anxious to press the point with Alfonso in the final years of the Castilian king’s reign.30 Fernando died while Alfonso was in France engaged in his final, futile, attempt to persuade the pope to recognize him as Roman emperor, and so it fell to the seventeen-year-old Sancho to lead the defence of Andalusia against an unexpected invasion by the Marinids (or Benimerines as medieval Castilian writers referred to them) who, with the help of Muhammad II of Granada, had swept across from Morocco in May 1275.31 Sancho had demonstrated his capacity for leadership, and enjoyed the support of a significant section of the Castilian nobility, so Alfonso was obliged to recognize him as his heir. From 1278, in the words of Gil de Zamora, Sancho began to reign together with his father (‘incipit coregnare’).32 The succession crisis also appears to have sparked events which culminated in violently repressive measures taken by Alfonso and Sancho against members of their own family. In 1277 Alfonso had Fadrique, the eldest of his brothers, and the magnate Simón Ruiz de los Cameros seized and executed because, according to contemporary and near-contemporary accounts, he knew ‘certain things’ about them.33 Yet these sources offer no explanation of what these ‘things’ were. The intensity of Alfonso’s violently decisive actions, however, has suggested to modern historians that he was almost certainly reacting to an attempt by Fadrique to depose him and install himself as regent for Sancho.34 Although he was nearly twenty at the time, Sancho could have been considered a minor as some versions of the Alfonsine Partidas defined minority as someone below the age of twenty-five.35 Fadrique was tried and executed: strangled, according to the Crónica de Alfonso X, but dying ‘in a chest that was full of sharp iron spikes’, according to later annals of Alfonso’s reign.36 Meanwhile, it was the Infante Sancho who took Simón de los Cameros prisoner at Logroño, and who gave the order for him to be burned alive.37 A veiled allusion to 30 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 308–9; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 237. 31 O’Callaghan, Learned King, 234–5. 32 Cited in González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 327. 33 Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, 194 (c.lxviii): ‘E porque el rey sopo algunas cosas del infante don Fadrique’; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 241. 34 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 320. 35 Sancho was born in May 1258; on his debateable status as a minor in 1277 see O’Callaghan, Learned King, 237. 36 Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, 194 (c.lxviii): ‘El rey mandó afogar a don Fadrique’; Anales del reinado de Alfonso X, cited in González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 317: ‘presó el rey don alfonso a don Fadrique, su hermano, en Burgos e mandólo le meter en el castillo e meterlo en vna arca que estava llena de fierros agudos e allí murió’. 37 Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, 194 (c.68).

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the incident in cantiga 235, a poem about how the Virgin miraculously cured Alfonso of a grave illness, suggests that in the wake of the executions the king felt the need to persuade members of his circle of the justness of the royal actions.38 Two stanzas in the poem refer to a ‘great vengeance’ (‘gran vingança’) that Alfonso wreaked on his enemies, and explain that the king’s actions were necessary to carry out God’s will. The reference that ties this vengeance specifically to the shadowy events of 1277 lies in the statement that Alfonso had the greatest of these enemies burned. The poet also characterizes these egregious foes as people who ‘did not love woman’, which has led some historians to speculate that Fadrique and Simón de los Cameros were engaged in a homosexual relationship, since the penalty for this at the time was death by fire. Yet the characterization may simply have been chosen to emphasize the men’s un-natural behaviour in plotting against their God and king, and to underline the threat to Alfonso’s rule. The dangers that homosexuality posed to a kingdom were outlined in Partida VII, which defined it as an activity which went against divine order and which, if tolerated, would upend the legitimate rule of a king and spell disaster for his kingdom.39 In late 1277 or early 1278, Alfonso’s wife Violante fled abruptly to Aragon, taking with her Blanche, Fernando de la Cerda’s widow, and her two children, Alfonso and Fernando, both of them under ten years old. She returned to Castile the following year, leaving her grandchildren in the hands of the Aragonese king, Pere III (1276–1285). 40 She does not appear to have sought permission from Alfonso, and it is possible that she was attempting to protect the little Cerda princes from Sancho and the machinations of the king of France. 41 Contemporary assessments of the situation are few, but a thirteenth-century Catalan chronicler did observe that Violante had left

38 Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María, ed. W. Mettmann, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Madrid, 1986–1989), ii, no. 235, v. 75. Alfonso also used the Cantigas to condemn Simon de Montfort’s rebellion against Henry III: D. Kim, ‘Simon de Montfort, the Cantigas de Santa María, and Acoustic Propaganda’, The Medieval Chronicle 12 (2019), 94-115. 39 Partida vii.21.1-2. J. O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria: a poetic biography (Leiden, 1998), 144–51, and R.P. Kinkade, ‘Alfonso X, Cantiga 235, and the Events of 1269–1278’, Speculum, 67 (1992), 284–323, at 313–18). J. Montoya Martínez argued the plotters who did not desire women were Cathar heretics: ‘La “gran vingança” de Dios y Alfonso X’, Bulletin of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, 3 (1990), 53–9. Reprinted in Montoya Martínez, Composición, estructura y contenido del cancionero marial de Alfonso X (Murcia, 1999), 361–80. 40 The Infantes Alfonso (1270–1327) and Fernando (whose exact dates are unknown: 127?–13??) finally renounced their claims to the throne in 1304: Craddock, ‘Dynasty in Dispute’, 204. 41 Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, 408.

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because Alfonso had failed to ‘treat [her] with royal and proper honour’. 42 The statement has been interpreted as a sign of Alfonso’s erratic mental state, brought on by severe ill-health, but, given the marital connotations of the term ‘honour’, this is perhaps unlikely. 43 In the second Partida, Alfonso explains how a king must ‘love, and honour and look after his wife’ because she is one with him and to honour her is to honour himself as well.44 It is more probable that the chronicle alludes to a rift between the couple prompted by Alfonso’s numerous affairs. Documentary references to Alfonso’s illegitimate children throughout his reign suggest that he took many mistresses. Before his marriage, he had begun a relationship with Mayor Guillén de Guzmán, and they remained close until her death in 1262. 45 Their liaison resulted in at least one daughter, Beatriz, born in 1244. Betrothed to Afonso III of Portugal in 1253 as part of the settlement between Castile and Portugal at the close of a civil war in which Afonso had displaced his brother Sancho, in 1261 Beatriz gave birth to Dinis, who would be renowned among Portuguese rulers for his long rule, steady government, and patronage of the arts.46 After he ascended the throne in 1279, however, Beatriz, now a widow, returned to Castile to be with her father. 47 Three years earlier, in July 1276, she had instructed her chaplain to commission a wooden tomb effigy of her mother from Juan González, ‘painter of images of Burgos’ (‘pintor de las imágenes de Burgos’), a craftsman whose title probably referred to his skill as a sculptor as well. 48 Despite his illnesses and increasingly disfigured appearance, Alfonso continued to have extramarital relationships until the end of his life. The codicil to his will, dated 10 January 1284, grants a sum of money to 42 Crònica general de Pere III el Ceremoniòs, dita comunament Crònica de Sant Joan de la Penya, ed. A.L. Soberanas Lleó (Barcelona, 1961), xxxvi, 130–1, cited in González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 326–7. 43 O’Callaghan, Learned King, 244–5. 44 Partida ii.6.2, in A.G. Solalinde, Antología de Alfonso X el Sabio (Madrid, 1984), 156–7. 45 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 28 and nn. 66, 68, and 69 for Mayor Guillén and the names of other women who bore the king illegitimate children; 156–7 for her death. Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, 81–2, 94–5, and n. 19 for Alfonso’s lovers; 290 for Alfonso’s promiscuity as a reflection of his immaturity. 46 O’Callaghan, Learned King, 157–8; Alfonso had supported Sancho in the struggle, and contemporary poets found material for satire in the conflict: see L. Jefferson, ‘Use of Canon Law, Abuse of Canon Lawyers in Two Cantigas Concerning the Deposition of D. Sancho II of Portugal’, Portuguese Studies 9 (1993), 1–22. 47 Doubleday, The Wise King, 166–7. 48 González Jiménez and Carmona Ruiz, Documentación, 722 (3867); F. Gutiérrez Baños, ‘Una nota sobre escultura castellana del siglo XIII. Juan González, el pintor de las imágenes de Burgos, y el sepulcro de Doña Mayor Guillén de Guzmán en el convento de Santa Clara de Alcocer (Guadalajara)’, Archivo Español de Arte, 88 (January–March 2015), 37–52 (46–7).

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a certain Inés, who is described as ‘Hercules’s mother’, a description which suggests she was not only a royal servant but also the king’s lover. 49 Whatever the reason for Violante’s departure, she does appear to have had the support of her second son Sancho, who later diverted funds from his father’s treasury to pay her debts during her residence in Aragon.50 Sancho’s unauthorized appropriation of crown money, it seems, is what opened the irreconcilable rift between them, since the lack of funds disastrously compromised Alfonso’s siege of the southern coastal port of Algeciras in February 1279, when he had attempted to put an end to the constant attacks on Andalusia by the Marinids.51 Philip III continued to press the claims of the Infantes de la Cerda upon Spanish territories, and Alfonso’s attempts in 1280 to divide his kingdom between them and Sancho in order to settle the dispute with the French king prompted Sancho’s definitive break with his father at the Cortes of Seville in 1281. (They were never, it seems, reconciled, and the letter of 23 March 1284 which survives in the English royal archives addressed to Pope Martin IV, in which Alfonso pardons Sancho, is almost certainly a later copy of a document that was originally forged.52) At the gathering in April 1282, however, it was Alfonso’s execution of Fadrique that headed the list of grievances read out by Alfonso’s youngest brother, Manuel, presented as evidence of Alfonso’s inability to administer justice correctly and hence justification for their de facto deposition of him.53 The split between father and son degenerated into a civil war in which, initially, it seemed that Sancho’s forces had the upper hand. However, the political tide was beginning to turn in Alfonso’s favour when he died just short of his sixty-third birthday, on 4 April 1284, at the alcázar in Seville, the only 49 González Jiménez, ‘The Bible of Saint Louis in the Testament of Alfonso X the Wise of Castile (1284)’, in The Bible of Saint Louis, ii: commentary volume, ed. R. Gonzálvez Ruiz (Barcelona, 2004), 41–58, at 54; González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 368. Recent research has revealed that James of Spain (c. 1267–1332), who travelled to England and wrote the early fourteenth-century Speculum musicae, was the illegitimate son not of Alfonso but of his younger brother Enrique (1230–1303): M. Bent, Magister Jacobus de Ispania, Author of the Speculum Musicae (Farnham/ Burlington, vt, 2015), 82–4 and 93. 50 Crònica general de Pere III el Ceremoniòs, cited in González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 326; see also his comments on Sancho, 327. 51 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 337–8; F. Gutiérrez Baños, Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV el Bravo, Estudios de Arte 8 (Burgos, 1997), 22. 52 P. Linehan, ‘La conquista de Sevilla y los historiadores’, in Sevilla 1248, 229–44, at 238 and n. 51. The alleged original has been missing since the early fourteenth century. 53 Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, 218–19 (c.75) and M. Rodríguez Gil, ‘Para un estudio de la sentencia de deposición de Alfonso X’, Revista de la Facultad de Derecho, Universidad Complutense, 9 (1985), 103–13; González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 345–7.

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city that remained loyal to him during his final, turbulent years on the throne.54 Alfonso’s life has been extensively studied in the centuries since his death. Apart from the hostile fourteenth-century chronicle, the Crónica de Alfonso X – written by an anonymous sympathizer of Sancho’s cause who was almost certainly a member of the court circle of Alfonso XI – Alfonso’s close links with Seville meant that local historians tended to devote many pages to his reign in their accounts of the city. The entire second book of Alonso Morgado’s 1587 Historia de Sevilla is a detailed study of the impact of Alfonso’s prolonged spells of residency there, while almost a century later Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga returned to the archives to bring together documents and facts about Seville during the Alfonsine era for his Annales eclesiasticos y seculares dela muy noble y muy leal civdad de Sevilla (1677). In Rome, meanwhile, his contemporary, the priest and scholar Nicolás Antonio (1617–1684), included a long chapter about Alfonso’s literary and scientific works in his bibliographical dictionary of Spanish writers before 1500, a work finally published twelve years after his death, in 1696.55 Antonio’s detailed accounts of Alfonsine works and their fortuna remain an important bibliographical research tool. Gáspar Ibáñez de Segovia, marquis of Mondéjar (1628–1708), produced a glowing account of Alfonso’s reign and patronage in his biography of Alfonso, Memorias historicas del Rei D. Alonso el Sabio, but did not live to see it finally published in 1777.56 The cultural milieu of Seville in the Middle Ages, and the role Alfonso’s patronage played in its development, continued to attract the attention of historians in the late nineteenth century. José Gestoso y Pérez published numerous early documents that shed light on the artistic and cultural world of the city; Antonio Ballesteros Beretta expanded this work in his 1913 volume, Sevilla en el siglo XIII.57 54 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 356–7. The struggle between Alfonso and Sancho was part of a wider pattern of contested rule in Western Europe from the twelfth to the mid-fourteenth centuries: G. Lecuppre, ‘Images de la competition royale à la f in du Moyen Âge’, in Images, pouvoirs et normes, ed. Collard et al, 131–60, at 132. 55 N. Antonio, Bibliothecae veteris Hispaniae sive Hispani scriptores que ab Octaviani Augusti aevo ad annum Christi MD floruerunt, 2 vols (Madrid, 1788), ii, viii.5. For a modern Spanish translation, see Biblioteca hispana antigua, traducción de la edición que hizo don Francisco Pérez Bayer en 1788, y que fue impresa en Madrid en la imprenta de la Viuda y Herederos de Don Joaquín Ibarra, Impresor Real, ed. and trans. G. de Andrés Martínez, 2 vols (Madrid, 1998). For the life of Nicolás Antonio, see the introduction by Andrés Martínez, i, xxii–xxiii. 56 G.I. de Segovia, Peralta y Mendoza, Marqués de Mondéjar, Memorias historicas del Rei D. Alonso el Sabio i observaciones a su chronica (Madrid, 1777). 57 J. Gestoso y Pérez, Sevilla monumental y artística, 3 vols. (Seville, 1889–1901; repr. Seville, 1984). See also his Ensayo de un diccionario de los artífices que florecieron en Sevilla, desde el siglo

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In the twentieth century, the English historian Evelyn S. Procter made a significant contribution to this ever-growing body of scholarship in 1951 with a series of essays which considered different aspects of Alfonsine literary patronage (and which in 2002 was published in Spanish translation);58 but it was in 1963, with the publication of Ballesteros Beretta’s monumental biography of Alfonso (which had been left unfinished at his death in 1949), that the literary sources and documents relating to his whole reign were brought together in a chronological account of the king’s life.59 Although some of his interpretations of the documentary evidence have been questioned recently, Ballesteros Beretta’s study remains an invaluable research tool thanks to his extensive use of primary sources.60 John Esten Keller offered a characteristically enthusiastic introduction to Alfonso’s reign in 1967, and asserted that ‘dreamer or not, Alfonso el Sabio is now remembered with reverence, when his detractors and enemies have sunken into darkest oblivion’.61 It was not until 1993, however, that a detailed biography of the king to rival that by Ballesteros Beretta appeared, this time in English by the historian Joseph F. O’Callaghan.62 This he followed in 1998 with another biography which attempted to convey something of Alfonso’s own perspective by examining the events of his reign through the references and accounts preserved in the Cantigas de Santa Maria.63 The new millennium witnessed the arrival of two Alfonsine biographies within a year of one another by two scholars on different sides of the Atlantic, respectively H. Salvador Martínez and Manuel González Jiménez. Most recently, a biography by Simon R. Doubleday developed Salvador XIII al XVIII, 3 vols (Seville, 1899–1901; repr. Colección de bibliografía hispánica 1, Pamplona, 2001). A. Ballesteros Beretta, Sevilla en el siglo XIII (Madrid, 1913). 58 E.S. Procter, Alfonso X of Castile: patron of literature and learning (Oxford, 1951); E.S. Procter, Alfonso X de Castilla. Patrono de las letras y del saber, trans. M. González Jiménez and M. O’Sullivan (Murcia, 2002). 59 Alfonso X el Sabio (Barcelona and Madrid, 1963; reprinted with an index by M. Rodríguez Llopis, Barcelona, 1984). Page references here are to the 1963 edition. 60 For example, González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 325–6 on the flight of Alfonso’s wife Violante to Aragon; P. Linehan, ‘The Politics of Piety: aspects of the Castilian monarchy from Alfonso X to Alfonso XI’, in Homenaje a Alfonso X el Sabio (1284–1984), Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 9, no. 3 (1985), 385–404 (especially 388–91 on the ritual of Alfonso’s coronation); also Linehan, History and the Historians, at 241. Linehan’s interpretation is questioned in turn in a review article by M.Á. Ladero Quesada, ‘Sobre la historia y los historiadores de la España medieval’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 192, no. 1 (1995), 103–17, at 107–8 and 112–14. On Ballesteros Beretta’s muddled reference to Catalan chronicles, see Kinkade, ‘Alfonso X, Cantiga 235’, at 289, n. 17. 61 J. Esten Keller, Alfonso X, el Sabio (New York, 1967), 37. 62 O’Callaghan, The Learned King. 63 O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’.

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Martínez’s psychological readings of documentary evidence by marshalling the literature Alfonso commissioned to place the decisions and actions of his reign in a wider context of cultural and emotional value systems.64 Alfonso’s posthumous reputation on the European stage was influenced by various aspects of his reign. His attempts to win the imperial crown, for example, met with a mixed reception. A pageant organized in London to welcome the Emperor Charles V in 1522 depicted Alfonso as a new Jesse, from whom Charles’s host, Henry VIII of England, and Charles himself both were shown to descend.65 On the other hand, in his 1544 gloss on Dante’s Divina comedia, one of the most widely read works of the late Middle Ages, Alessandro Vellutello identified the slothful and lecherous king of Spain summarily condemned in the Paradiso with Alfonso ‘who,’ he stated incorrectly, ‘then acceded to the Empire’.66 Just a few years later, though, another writer turned Alfonso’s imperial failure into a conscious and laudable decision to dedicate himself to the greater glory of scientific patronage. In an undated letter of around 1610 to the Emperor Rudolph II, Francis Gansneb Tengnagel, brother-in-law of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, observed that Rudolph would ‘enjoy everlasting glory’ if he were to patronize a set of astronomical tables, and cited Alfonso who, Tengnagel alleged, abandoned his quest for the Roman empire in order to build a greater empire (of learning).67 Tengnagel’s observation suggests the high renown that particular works associated with Alfonso enjoyed in the context of European intellectual life. Although the range of works he commissioned was wide, the impact of Alfonso’s patronage on the culture of the Western world has varied according to the type of work and the language in which it circulated. At a European level, Alfonso’s fame as a learned king rests on the translations of Arabic astronomical and astrological texts which circulated widely in Latin translation, first as manuscripts and later in printed form. The set of tables to which Tengnagel referred in his letter were based on astronomical calculations made by Alfonsine scholars, and copies had reached Paris by the 1320s, although 64 Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned; González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004); Doubleday, The Wise King. 65 S. Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (Guildford, 1992), 33–4. 66 La ‘Comedia’ di Dante Aligieri con la nova esposizione, with a commentary by A. Vellutello (Venice, 1544; repr. and ed. D. Pirovano, 3 vols, Rome, 2006), iii, 1549, Canto xix.124–5. 67 H. Zimerman, ‘Urkunden, Acten und Regesten aus dem Archiv des k. k. Ministeriums des Innern’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen de Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 7, no. 2 (1888), xv–lxxxiv (actual 325–94), no. 4712, at lxv/375: ‘Alphonsus, Aragonum et Castellae rex nunquam satis laudatus, Romanum imperium – rem prius inauditam – maius imperium se moliri asserens repudiasse legitur.’

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it would be another decade before they were widely known in England.68 In Paris, the readings on the tables were adapted to suit a French context and were often copied together with the astronomical canons of John of Saxony.69 Despite these changes, Alfonso’s name continued to supply the intellectual authority for the work, and when the tables were published in Venice in 1483, it was with the title Alfontii regis Castellae illustri celestium motuum tabule. The popularity of the work is attested by numerous printed editions, and by the survival of seventy-five medieval manuscript copies in libraries across Europe.70 Alfonso’s role in the preparation of Latin translations of some of the astrological works that bear his name is not unequivocal, however. Two Italians, Petrus de Regio and Aegidius de Tebaldis, notaries in the imperial chancery maintained by Alfonso during the many years he sought to be elected emperor, made a Latin translation of El libro conplido en los iudicios de las estrellas on what appears to have been their own initiative.71 The Italians’ translation soon made its way across Europe: by 1298 it was being copied in Paris; and the enduring popularity of its subject-matter (how to divine future events from the movement of the planets) meant that it was among the earliest books to appear in print. In 1485, it was published in Venice.72 Alfonso’s reputation as a patron of scientific learning at an international level may explain why later writers cited his name in connection with obscure works on alchemy and magic. The seventeenth-century ecclesiastical historian Gil González Dávila claimed that Alfonso was author of an unpublished poem on the secrets of the philosopher’s stone called Del tesoro.73 The content and the extremely limited circulation of this book (Dávila is the only person to cite it and no other copy has surfaced) suggest that it is a seventeenthcentury piece of fakery. However, Nicolás Antonio tentatively attributed it 68 See J.D. North, ‘The Alfonsine Tables in England’, in idem, Stars, Mind and Fate: essays in ancient and medieval cosmology (London, 1989), 327–59, at 331. 69 Procter, ‘The Scientific Works’, 13. 70 C.H. Haskins, Studies in the History of Medieval Science (Cambridge, ma, 1924), 17. For modern editions of the tables, see Les tables alphonsines avec les canons de Jean de Saxe, ed. E. Poulle (Paris, 1984), and more recently, Las tablas alfonsíes de Toledo, ed. J. Chabás and B.R. Goldstein (Toledo, 2008). 71 Procter, ‘The Scientific Works’, 24–6. 72 Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm.IV.43, fols 1r–217r; for a description of the manuscript, see A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, 6 vols (Cambridge, 1856–1867; facsimile edition Munich and Hildesheim, 1979–1980), iv (1980), 300–302; Ibn abī Riŷāl (Aly Aben Ragel), Praeclarissimus liber completus in iudiciis astrorum, quem edidit Albohacen haly filius Abenragel (Venice, 1485). 73 Teatro eclesiastico de las iglesias metropolitanas, y catedrales de los reynos de las dos Castillas, 4 vols (Madrid, 1645–1650), ii (1647), 5–7.

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to the king (or, as he put it, to one of his equally eloquent contemporaries) on the grounds that the language used in the extensive passage cited by Dávila reflected thirteenth-century usage.74 The subject of this work, and its mixture of prose, verse, and magical symbols, recall a late fifteenth-century tract with a similar title, written in code and for a time linked to Alfonso: the Libro del tesoro.75 Alfonso’s name was also used to legitimize an equally spurious literary text, the Libro de las querellas. Supposedly a compilation of poems in which Alfonso laments the fact that his son’s rebellion has left him all alone, and published only as a fragment, the complete work never existed and was exposed in the nineteenth century by Emilio Cotarelo y Mori as a literary hoax by the seventeenth-century writer José de Pellicer.76 The libraries of Europe may still preserve undiscovered Alfonsine manuscripts, however. As recently as the early decades of the twentieth century, astrological treatises bearing his name surfaced in Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional and in the Vatican Library, and have been shown to be genuine reflections of his patronage because of their date, the nature of their contents, and, in two cases, because of their explicit reference to Alfonso. All three are in Castilian. The two manuscripts in Madrid are works on astrology and prediction.77 The third, in the Vatican Library, is on astral magic and the power of angels.78 As the century progressed, literary scholars and art historians uncovered more texts that could be linked to Alfonso, this time on the construction of automata, on agriculture, zoology, and (once again) on the powers of angels.79 On the other hand, sometimes Alfonso’s 74 Antonio, Bibliothecae veteris Hispaniae, ii, 80 (viii, 5, section 190). 75 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS Res. 20. See B. Taylor, ‘Juan Manuel’s Cipher in the Libro de los estados’, La corónica, 12 (1983), 32–45, at 43 n. 20. 76 E. Cotarelo y Mori, El supuesto Libro de las Querellas del rey don Alfonso el Sabio (Madrid, 1898). 77 Madrid, MS 9294 and 3065. For Madrid MS 9294 see J.A. Sánchez Pérez, ‘El Libro de las cruces’, Isis, 14 (1930), 77–132; for Madrid MS 3065 see J. Domínguez Bordona, ‘El “Libro de los juicios de las estrellas” traducido para Alfonso el Sabio’, Revista de la Biblioteca, Archivo y Museo del Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 8 (1931), 171–6. 78 A.G. Solalinde, ‘Alfonso X astrólogo. Notícia del Ms Vat. Reg. Lat. 1283’, Revista de Filología Española, 13 (1925–1926), 350–6. 79 J. Vernet, ‘Un texto árabe de la corte de Alfonso X el Sabio. Un tratado de autómatas’, AlAndalus, 43 (1978), 405–21; E. García Gómez, ‘Traducciones alfonsíes de agricultura árabe’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 181 (1984), 387–97; V.C. Dehmer, Aristoteles Hispanus. Eine altspanische Übersetzung seiner Zoologie aus dem Arabischen und dem Lateinischen (Tübingen, 2007). For the treatise on angels, or Liber Razielis, see the introduction in Alfonso X el Sabio, Astromagia (Ms. Reg. lat. 1283a), ed. A. D’Agostino (Naples, 1992), 39–45 and A. García Avilés, ‘Alfonso X y el Liber Razielis. Imágenes de la magia astral judía en el scriptorium alfonsí’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Glasgow), 74 (1997), 21–39, at 26–7.

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name was retained to lend authority to translations that had not been specifically commissioned by him. Such is the case of an Old French version of the Book of Muhammad’s Ladder, which survives in a single manuscript dateable to the late thirteenth, or early fourteenth century. The work, an account of a miraculous night-time journey to heaven and hell made by Muhammad in the company of the Angel Gabriel, was originally written in Arabic. No Arabic version survives today, however, and the Castilian translation commissioned by Alfonso from his Jewish physician Abraham, and mentioned in the Old French translation, has also been lost. However, the text of the Latin translation patronized by Alfonso and carried out by an Italian notary, Bonaventura of Siena, does survive in two fourteenth century manuscripts. Textual collation between the versions suggests that despite what the prologue states, the French translation was made from the Latin one by an anonymous scholar with no connection with the Spanish court.80 The attribution of one work to the king, though, remains unresolved. The Clavis sapientie is a short treatise in three parts on aspects of cosmogony, or the generation of the universe. The first part discusses the Aristotelian elements or qualities of things, the second the generation of minerals, and the third the generation of plants from minerals and animals from plants. The Clavis itself was written by ‘Artephius’, but a short prologue attached to a manuscript copy and also found in some published versions of the text explains that Alfonso carefully commissioned a Castilian translation of this Arabic work from ‘a certain squire (‘scutiferum’) of his’ in order to recover scholarship scorned by his predecessors and to perpetuate his own fame.81 Sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Spanish bibliographers and historians knew the work from the early seventeenth-century editions published by Pierre Borel and Lazarus Zetzner in compilations of alchemical treatises.82 Nicolás Antonio cautiously wondered whether this was the same as a work titled Thesaurum, which he had not seen but which Juan de Mariana had cited in his list of writers who believed 80 R. Hyatte, The Prophet of Islam in Old French. The Romance of Muhammed (1258) and The Book of Muhammad’s Ladder (1264) (Leiden, 1997), ‘Introduction’, 19–21. 81 J. Ferguson, Bibliotheca chemica, 2 vols (Glasgow, 1906; photographic repr. London, 1954), i, 24 (for Alfonso and the Clavis sapientie) and i, 51 (on Artephius); D. Waley Singer, Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical Manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland Dating from before the Sixteenth Century, 3 vols (Brussels, 1928–1931), i, no. 145 (at 128–30), ‘Artefius or Alfidius’; G. Levi della Vida, ‘Something More about Artefius and His Clavis Sapientiae’, Speculum, 13 (1938), 80–85. 82 Petrus Borellius, Bibliotheca chimica sev Catalogvs librorum philosophicorum hermeticorvm (Paris, 1654), 9. Theatrum chemicum, 6 vols (Strasbourg, 1659–1661): for the treatise without the prologue that refers to Alfonso, see iv (1659), 198–213; for the treatise with the prologue that refers to him, see v (1660), 766–86. There is a modern facsimile reprint in 7 vols (Turin, 1981), with an introductory volume by M. Barracano.

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that the early inhabitants of Spain had been converted to Christianity by the apostle St James himself.83 Antonio did, however, dismiss as absurd Zetzner’s description of Alfonso as ‘the wisest philosopher among the Arabs’ (‘Alphonsus Rex Castellae, sapientissimus Arabum philosophus’).84 On the other hand, the marquis of Mondéjar, in his seventeenth-century biography of Alfonso, utterly rejected any Alfonsine connection to the work, and his opinion was repeated in the nineteenth century in a short article by José Ramón de Luanco, who described the treatise as ‘confused and mysterious’.85 However, the origins of the work and the sources for it that are cited in the surviving Latin translations suggest the connection with Alfonso cannot be immediately dismissed. Artefius’s original work, the Clavis maioris sapientiae, survives in a muchexpanded Arabic translation, the Miftāḥ al-ḥikma, by an otherwise unknown scholar, Abū Aḥmad Ibn‘Abbās al-Andalusī. Two fragmentary copies of the text survive, both now in the Vatican Library. The late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century manuscript fragment which preserves the opening of the work names al-Andalusī as the author; the section of the work which survives in a manuscript from the seventh century of the hijra (the date of the exile of the Prophet Muhammed from Mecca to Medina), which coincides with the late thirteenth-century in the Christian calendar, was made in North Africa.86 What little context there is for the work, then, is Western Islamic in origin, and so it is not impossible that it should have come to the attention of Alfonsine translators. There is an early fourteenth-century Latin version of the Clavis, written by an English scribe and now in the library of Trinity College Cambridge, which also includes the prologue that refers to Alfonso:87 Because the always most honoured and most fortunate King lord Alfonso by the grace of God King of Castile and León, son of lord King Fernando and lady Queen Beatriz, wished to entrust his name to perpetual remembrance, for this reason, because many branches of learning in the time of his predecessors 83 I. Marianae, Tractatus VII: I. De adventu B. Jacobi Apostoli in Hispaniam (Cologne, 1609), vii, at 12.b. 84 Antonio, Bibliothecae veteris Hispaniae, 78 (viii.5). 85 Marqués de Mondéjar, Memorias historicas, 455; J.R. de Luanco, ‘Clavis Sapientiæ Alphonsi, Regis Castellæ’, in Homenaje a Menéndez y Pelayo en el año vigésimo de su profesorado, ed. J. Valera, 2 vols (Madrid, 1899), i, 63–7. 86 G. Levi della Vida, Elenco dei manoscritti arabi islamici della Biblioteca Vaticana. Vaticani, Barberiniani, Borgiani, Rossani, Studi e Testi 67 (Vatican City, 1935), 236–7 for BAV Barb. Or. 92 and Vaticani Arabi 1485. 87 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.2.18, fols 115r–121r (actual foliation; folios numbered 129–35): see M.R. James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: a descriptive catalogue, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1900–1904), iii (1902), no. 1122.

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were entirely scorned, he studied to restore them to the memory of his successors, among them indeed many books and this one which is called ‘the key of wisdom’, which he had carefully translated from the Arabic language into his own language of Castilian by a certain squire of his.88

The image of Alfonso as a king who works to restore forgotten learning, specifically Arabic learning, by commissioning translations into Castilian is one which is also found in the prologues to works securely attributable to his patronage. On the other hand, the identification of the translator as a squire is unique in the context of surviving Alfonsine works, although there is evidence for bookish squires in the wider circles of Alfonso’s family. Records show that Alfonso’s half-sister, Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I of England, purchased books from one of Edward’s squires, Hugh de Vere, in 1290, as well as receiving manuscripts from Alfonso and patronizing her own scriptorium.89 Another reason to link the Clavis to Alfonso’s patronage lies within the body of the text itself, which cites the authority of ‘magister noster Beleniuz philosophus’ (‘our master [the] philosopher Beleniuz’), or Apolonius of Tyre, whose learning buttresses the contents of another work known to be Alfonsine, the now-fragmentary Libro de las formas & ymagenes.90 It may be that one day other copies are found – perhaps of the Latin translation, or perhaps a Castilian version copied in Spain – which will elucidate the links between one of the earliest texts on cosmogony to circulate in Christian Europe and the patronage of Spain’s ‘Learned King’.91 88 My translation and transcription, abbreviations silently expanded. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.II.18, fol. 115r (actual foliation): ‘Quia semper honoratissimus et fortunatissimus Rex dominus Alfonsus dei gracia Rex Castelle et Legionis filius domini fernandi Regis et domine Beatricis Regine nomen suum voluit perpetue memorie comendare. Hinc est quod diuersas sciencias antecessorum suorum temporibus omnino contemptas, ad sucessorum suorum memoriam studuit renovare inter alia vero quam plurima librum et istum qui clauis sapiencie numcupatur de lingua arabica per quemdam suum scutiferum in linguam propriam castellanam videlicit transferri fecit diligenter’. 89 J. Carmi Parsons, The Court and Household of Eleanor of Castile in 1290: an edition of British Library, Additional Manuscript 35294 (Toronto, 1977), at 87 and 13, n. 39; R.Walker, ‘Leonor of England and Eleanor of Castile: Anglo-Iberian marriage and cultural exchange in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’, in England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, ed. M. Bullón-Fernández (New York, 2007), 67-88 (69). 90 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.II.18, fol. 115r; for the identification of ‘Beleniuz’, see J. Vernet, Lo que Europa debe al Islam de España, Acantilado 2 (Barcelona, 1999), 237; Alfonso X, Lapidario and Libro de las formas & ymagenes, ed. R.C. Diman and L.W. Winget (Madison, wi, 1980), 151 for ‘Belyenus’. 91 The text has also been linked to the introduction of alchemy to the medieval West: see G. Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols (Baltimore, 1927–1948), 2.i (1931), From Rabbi Ben Ezra to Roger Bacon, at 219.

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While Alfonso’s literary legacy slowly grows as more works attributable to his patronage are discovered, scholars continue to debate the relevance of this patronage to his kingship and its impact on thirteenth-century culture in Spain more generally. Attitudes have varied down the centuries. In a brief biography of Alfonso composed before 1278, Gil de Zamora marvelled at how his king ‘directed his intellect to the end of discovering and examining in depth all worldly and divine knowledge, so much so that he caused to be translated into his maternal language nearly all the writings of the trivium and the quadrivium, ecclesiastical, and secular, as well as theological and sacred texts’.92 In other words, he credited Alfonso with authorizing the translation of works that were the basis of the medieval university curriculum. The ‘trivium’, which dealt with techniques of discussion, comprised the study of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric; the ‘quadrivium’ summarized the principles of order in the physical world and involved the study of music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.93 Gil’s praise for the encyclopaedic nature of Alfonso’s knowledge was in keeping with wider thirteenth-century attitudes towards royal learning which expected kings to be educated in a broad range of subjects, not simply in the Latin and theology of clerics.94 His early justification of Alfonso’s patronage as a grand programme to open up to his Spanish subjects areas of learning (in the sense of learning fundamental to a medieval university education) that were obscured by the (rhetorical) ornaments of the Latin language did not include translations of astrological and magical works from Arabic in this project. In the early fourteenth century, Alfonso’s nephew, Don Juan Manuel, praised his promotion of scholarship in similarly general terms in his Libro de la caza. For Juan Manuel, who harboured his own literary 92 My translation, Fita, ‘Biografías’, at 321.21; see also J.A. Zamorensis, De preconiis Hispanie o Educación del príncipe, trans. and ed. J.-L. Martín and J. Costas (Zamora, 1996). Gil’s thirteenthcentury account is preserved in two later manuscript copies: Madrid MS 1348, s.XVIex–s.XVIIin, Liber de Regibus, fols 132r–136v; and Madrid MS 2763, s.XVIII, Liber illustrium personarum, qui est liber de historia canonica et civili, fols 74v–78v. On Gil de Zamora himself, see the introduction to the edition of his De preconiis hispanie, ed. M. de Castro y Castro (Madrid, 1955). Gil’s closeness to Alfonso has been questioned recently, and currents of criticism towards his royal superiors detected: see F. Tang, ‘Royal Misdemeanour: princely virtues and criticism of the ruler in medieval Castile (Juan Gil de Zamora and Álvaro Pelayo)’, in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages 1200–1500, ed. I.P. Bejczy and C.J. Nederman (Turnhout, 2007), 99–121, at 103 and 106–7. 93 M. Haren, Medieval Thought: the Western intellectual tradition from Antiquity to the thirteenth century, 2nd edn (London, 1992), 67–8. 94 Cf. the comments on Louis IX and later French kings in C. Daniel, ‘Le livre et l’exercice du pouvoir. Culture livresque du monarque et symbole politique de la bibliothèque royale’, in L’Univers du livre médiéval. Substance, lettre, signe, ed. K. Ueltschi (Paris, 2014), 73–92, at 77.

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ambitions, Alfonso was a ruler with a God-given desire ‘to increase learning as much as he could’.95 However, this was not necessarily unalloyed praise. As the son of Alfonso’s youngest brother, Manuel, who had inherited only a sword from his dying father Fernando III because he had arrived last at his bedside, Juan Manuel also had reason to feel animosity towards Alfonso and his memory. Consequently, he took care in his account of his forebears to refer to a damaging legend associated with Alfonso that had originated precisely because of his scholarly interests: When Queen Beatriz, my grandmother, was pregnant with my father [Prince Manuel], she dreamed that by that child and by his descendants, the death of Jesus Christ would be avenged. And she told this to King Fernando, her husband. And I heard it said that the king had replied that this dream seemed very different from the one she had dreamed when she was pregnant with King Alfonso, his son, who was later king of Castile and father of king Sancho.96

The ‘very different’ dream that Beatriz dreamed probably alludes to a legend that may have been invented by Manuel himself in 1280–1281, when he joined Sancho’s rebellion.97 According to this legend, Alfonso said that had he been present at the time of the Creation, certain things would have been done in a better way. Although Gil de Zamora had presented Alfonso as a king grateful for God’s mercy and who accepted His will,98 it was this malicious story, which initially circulated to support the claims to the throne of the future Sancho IV, that was taken up with variants by later chroniclers and subsequently used to discredit not only Alfonso but all his descendants as well. The earliest of these retellings to survive appears in 95 ‘Dios […] puso en el su talante de acresçentar el saber cuanto pudo’, cited in Álvar, ‘Alfonso X contemplado por don Juan Manuel’, 104. 96 ‘Quando la rreyna donna Beatriz, mi abuela, era ençinta de mío padre, que sonnara que, por aquella criatura et por su linage, avía a ser vengada la muerte de Jhesu Christo. Et ella díxolo al rrey don Ferando, su marido. Et oý dezir que dixera el rrey quel pareçía este suenno muy contrario del que ella sonnara quando estava ençinta del rrey don alfonso, su fijo, que fue después rrey de Castiella, padre del rrey don Sancho.’ J. Manuel, Libro de las tres razones. Cinco tratados, ed. R. Ayerbe-Chaux (Madison, wi, 1989), 92. 97 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 451. 98 ‘[Alfonso] raised his eyes to the heavens and recognized that the deeds of all creatures are in the hand of God, and are directed to the same place whither the will of the governor is directed’ (‘oculus ad celum levaret et recognosceret quod in manu Domini est opera cujuslibet creature, et ad illum locum dirigitur quo voluntas dirigitur gubernantis’), cited in Fita, ‘Biografías’, at 323.23.

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the 1344 chronicle by Pedro, Count of Barcelos, who was in fact related to Alfonso. The reason he included this unflattering account of his forebear may have been prompted by contemporary politics, namely the humiliating treatment that Alfonso’s great grandson, Alfonso XI, inflicted upon his queen, Maria of Portugal. Twenty years or so later, supporters of the Trastamara branch of the House of Burgundy also found it convenient to recall the legend of Alfonso’s blasphemy in order to present the overthrow of Pedro I, Alfonso’s last legitimate descendant in the Burgundian line, as God’s just punishment for his predecessor’s overtopping pride.99 On the other hand, Alfonso’s legislative efforts won him praise because they were regarded as a sign of his prudent kingship. In 1269 Lorenzo, bishop of Badajoz, granted the residents of Campomayor the book of legal customs and judgments (‘libro del fuero e de los juicios’) of the glorious and wise and victorious King Alfonso.100 Perhaps surprisingly, given the confused information it frequently contains, the Crónica de Alfonso X summarizes Alfonso’s literary activities relatively accurately as a series of translations and compilations on biblical, legal, and astrological subjects.101 The chronicler is at particular pains to emphasize his legislative works, however, and it is this aspect of his patronage which the chapter rubric highlights: ‘How King Alfonso made the Legal Code, and of the messengers who came to him from Egypt’. The marginalia left by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers beside this chapter suggest they, too, were principally interested in information about Alfonso’s patronage of legal works. A fifteenth-century reader of a copy of the Crónica, now in the library of Seville cathedral, made a connection with his own time when he noted that this was the ‘Legal code drawn up which is used today in Castile and León’.102 Other early readers of 99 On the origin and increasingly political overtones of the legend, see J.R. de Obregón Retortillo, ‘Alfonso X el Emplazado. Una leyenda’, Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 32 (1915), 420–49; L. Funes, ‘La blasfemia del Rey Sabio. Itinerario narrativo de una leyenda (primera parte)’, Incipit, 13 (1993), 51–70 (and pt. 2, Incipit, 14 (1994), 69–101, which traces the variants of the legend in the sixteenth century); M. González Jiménez, ‘Unos anales del reinado de Alfonso X’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, 192, no. 3 (1995), 461–91 and his observations in Alfonso X (2004), at 448–54. 100 Cited in J.R. Craddock, ‘How Many Partidas in the Siete Partidas?’, in Hispanic Studies in Honor of A.D. Deyermond: a North American tribute, ed. J.S. Miletich (Madison, wi, 1986), 83–92, at 86 and n. 8. 101 Chronicle of Alfonso X, trans. S. Thacker and J. Escobar, Studies in Romance Languages 47 (Lexington, ky, 2002), 46 (c.9). For the Spanish original, see Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, 26, ‘Introducción’ xiii–xiv for the possible author, and xx–xxi for the generally confused presentation of facts in this particular section. 102 Seville, Biblioteca Capitular, MS 84/7/34, fol. 4r: ‘Fuero delas leyes hecho el qual oy dia se vsa en Castilla y Leon.’

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manuscript copies now in Madrid, Santander, Catalunya, and Manchester observed that Alfonso’s law codes completed work that his father Fernando had begun.103 Unusually, the owner of a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript of the chronicle now in the Escorial Library drew attention in the margin not just to information about the date of the legal codes and their author, but also observed that Alfonso’s wide-ranging patronage of translations was ‘an act worthy of a king’.104 The illustration on the title-page of the 1554 printed edition of the Crónica de Alfonso X also stressed Alfonso’s role as law-giver. In an echo of depictions of the Emperor Justinian, whose image often prefaced copies of his law codes, the Digest and Institutes, Alfonso is presented as a Roman emperor, wearing the imperial crown, and identified as ‘the very illustrious Prince and King don Alonso who was equal to an Emperor and who made the book of the Siete partidas’.105 The Partidas was a seven-part compendium of thirteenth-century law commissioned by Alfonso, intended perhaps more as a source of reference than as a code to be applied in the practical administration of justice, although there is evidence in manuscript variants that passages were altered to reflect contemporary legislative requirements, particularly in the matter of the royal succession.106 The first part had been completed by 1265, but sources included in the compilation of the other sections suggests this was still a work in progress in the 1270s; and indeed successive drafts of the first Partida show Alfonso changing from a king who believed a law-giver was bound to obey the laws he formulates, to one who considered himself to be above them.107 Ironically, the first printed edition of the Partidas was not based on Alfonso’s text but on the revised version prepared in 1348 for his great grandson, Alfonso XI, who was also 103 Madrid 829, fol. 12v; Santander, Biblioteca Menéndez y Pelayo, MS 317, verso of the folio numbered ‘v’; Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 1159; Manchester, John Rylands Library, Spanish MS 1, fol. 486r. 104 Escorial MS N.III.12, fol. 5r, ‘Nota digno acto de Rey’. 105 Valladolid, 1554: ‘El muy esclarecido principe y rey don Alonso el qual fue par de Emperador & hizo el libro delas siete partidas.’ On the relationship between images of Justinian and depictions of kings in medieval legal manuscripts, see A. Musson, ‘Ruling “Virtually”? Royal Images in Medieval English Law Books’, in Every Inch a King, ed. Mitchell and Melville, 151–71, at 153. 106 O’Callaghan, Learned King, 237; R.A. MacDonald, ‘Alfonso the Learned and Succession: a father’s dilemma’, Speculum, 40 (1965), 647–53, at 651, n. 11; for the Partidas as a work of reference that could be emended by thirteenth-century jurists to reflect the legal reality of the kingdom, see J. Sánchez-Arcilla Bernal, ‘La obra legislativa de Alfonso X el Sabio. Historia de una polémica’, in El Scriptorium alfonsí, ed. Montoya Martínez and Domínguez Rodríguez, 17–81, at 78. 107 Sánchez-Arcilla Bernal, ‘La obra legislativa’, 40 and 78–9; Alfonso X el Sabio, Primera partida según el manuscrito Add. 20.787 del British Museum ed. J.A. Arias Bonet (Valladolid, 1975); J.R. Craddock, ‘Must the King Obey His Laws?’, in Studies Presented to Dorothy Clotelle Clarke, 71–9.

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responsible for giving the seven volumes their now-familiar title of the Siete partidas.108 Yet despite these changes, it was Alfonso’s legal legacy which earned him the sobriquet of ‘sabio’, or ‘learned’ that would be consistently appended to his name from the sixteenth century onwards. It was a title that emphasized his efforts as a king to explain and codify principles of law and the relationship between a ruler and his subjects, and not one that primarily celebrated his activities as a scholar and patron of letters more generally. The importance of Alfonso in the f ield of Castilian political theory continues to be acknowledged publically today. The steps of Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional are set with statues commemorating the great men of Spanish literature, among them Alfonso.109 His statue, in white marble, was erected in 1892. The sculptor, José Alcoverro, shows him enthroned on a chair that perhaps owes more to Merovingian French models than to thirteenth-century Castilian ones.110 He grasps the hilt of a sword in his left hand, while his right offers the library visitor a scroll on which the words ‘Código de las Siete Partidas’ are faintly visible. A large book is propped against the throne, just behind his left foot. Yet Spanish historians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who cited Alfonso’s astrological works and the law codes and chronicles compiled at his behest in their accounts of his rule, were ultimately cautious in their assessments of his cultural legacy and its role in his kingship.111 Some flattered him with the sobriquet ‘learned’, while others labelled him an ‘astrologer’ or ‘astronomer’. During the medieval period these terms were generally considered complementary aspects of the same discipline and used interchangeably, since the modern distinction between the two did not pertain.112 . Astronomy was the science that measured the dimensions, 108 Partidas, ed. Gregorio López (Valladolid, 1554; facsimile edn Madrid, 1974); Sánchez-Arcilla Bernal, ‘La obra legislativa’, 76–77. On the title, see Liuzzo Scorpo, ‘The King as Subject’, 271. 109 E. Ponce de León Freyre, Guía del lector en la Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid, 1942), 44. In 1967, Alfonso was alone on the staircase: see Keller, Alfonso X, 173. 110 The form of the chair recalls the much-altered throne of Dagobert, king of the Franks (r. 629–634), now in the Bibliothèque National, Paris. See Lagane, ‘Les sièges’, 8, fig. 15. 111 See J.-P. Jardin, ‘La figure du roi Alphonse X chez quelques chroniqueurs du xve siècle’, Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médièvale, 20 (1995), 75–96 and D.J. Viera, ‘Alfonsine Legends and References in Eastern Iberia’, La corónica, 14, no. 2 (1986), 280–84. 112 J.-P. Boudet, ‘Astrology’, in Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine: an encyclopedia, ed. T. Glick, S.J. Livesey, and F. Wallis (London/New York, 2005), 61–4, at 61; E. Grant, ‘Astronomy, Cosmology and Cosmography’, in Medieval Latin: an introduction and bibliographical guide, ed. F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg (Washington, dc, 1996), 363–8, at 363. On the use of the word astrología in the thirteenth century to refer to ‘astronomy’ in the modern sense, see A.J. Cárdenas, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Astronomy of Alfonso X, el Sabio’, Indiana Social Studies Quarterly, 31, no. 3 (1978–1979), 81–90.

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trajectories, and relationships between celestial orbs and bodies, which in turn enabled scholars to engage in the science of astrology. Astrology was the study of the celestial powers that influenced events and conditions on earth. Writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were critical of Alfonso’s interest in the study of the stars because it implied an arrogance that threatened the business of good government. Thus Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, writing in the fifteenth century, praised Alfonso’s law-making activities and emphasized the similarity between his work and that of the Romans, ‘who according to Augustine, received Solon’s laws from the Athenians and strove to make them better and more appropriate; in the same way as they did with the laws of Lycurgus of Sparta (although Lycurgus himself pretended that he had established them by the authority of Apollo, which the Romans were unwilling to believe)’.113 However, in a subsequent chapter he also felt obliged to try and explain ‘why this Alfonso X is called [an] astrologer’. The reason, he stated, was because Alfonso ‘delighted in astronomy’ (‘astronomia delectabatur’), but Arévalo was unsure whether this was due to arrogance or simply because of the unbridled impulses of Alfonso’s character.114 Diego Rodríguez de Almela, in his Valerio de las estorias escolásticas e de España, published at Murcia in 1487, included the legend of Alfonso’s blasphemy in his account of the reign, and combined both positive and negative strands of his reputation when he described him as the king ‘who made the Partidas called the astrologer’.115 Writers at the end of the sixteenth century were less indulgent towards Alfonso’s range of interests, and compared him implicitly with Thales of Miletus, the Ancient Greek astronomer (active around 585 BC) who, absorbed

113 Historia Hispanica ([Rome?], [1470?]), Part IV, c.1 (fols lxxxxiiiiv–lxxxxxv r): ‘Sic hic Alfonsus legibus condendis deditissimus fuit. Nam conspiciens per diuersa volumina plurimorum principum & populorum leges dispersas fore: eadem curiositate qua olim romani usus est. Illi enim Augustino teste post Romam conditam ab Atheniensibus leges Solonis receperunt: quas tamen postquam accepere meliores ac comodiores facere conati sunt. Idque ut de legibus Lycurgi Lacedemonii ferunt: quamuis Lycurgus ipse ex Appollinis auctoritate leges illas se instituisse finxerit quod romani credere noluerunt.’ 114 Historia Hispanica, Part IV, c.5 (fols cr and v): ‘Nec solum hic Alfonsus .x. nominis sui gloriam in legibus condendis in effundendis diuitiis ceterisque magnificis gestis ampliare contentus est: sed aut arroganter aut quia natura ad id eum impellebat. Astronomia delectabatur. Quare & astrologus appellatus est.’ 115 See the facsimile edition, ed. J. Torres Fontes (Murcia, 1994), 316: ‘Capitulo .v. [De]l rey don Alfonso .x. que fizo las partidas llamado el astrologo’.

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in the study of the heavens, had stumbled into a ditch.116 Juan de Torres, author of the Filosofía moral de príncipes, para su buena criança y gouerno, y para personas de todos estados, explained that Alfonso’s love of letters, and in particular his interest in astronomy, made him ‘heedless of what mattered most’, namely good government.117 Juan de Mariana, a Jesuit father and author of the Historia de rebus Hispaniae published in 1605, summed up in balanced Latin prose what he considered to be the king’s failings. ‘Alfonso’, he wrote, ‘was possessed of sublime wit, but imprudent, of arrogant bearing and with petulant tongue, preferring to instruct himself in letters rather than in the art of government. While he gazed at the heavens and observed the stars, he lost the earth.’118 The severity of Mariana’s judgement on what he evidently regarded as frivolous pursuits not worthy of a king may reflect his dissatisfaction with the politics of his own time, an age characterized by a weak king, a profligate court, dwindling revenues from the Americas, ruinous fiscal policies, and foreign wars.119 Eighteenth-century writers, on the other hand, preferred to present Alfonso’s literary and scientific patronage as evidence of the uniqueness of Spain’s past and as an example to reinforce their dislike of everything foreign (particularly French). The biography by Gáspar Ibáñez de Segovia, Marquis of Mondéjar, is in this vein.120 His work was published posthumously by Francisco Cerdá y Rico, who fittingly was a disciple of the equally antiFrench scholar Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar.121 Five years after Mondéjar’s work appeared in print, a young naval officer, José de Vargas y Ponce, declaimed his Elogio del Rey don Alonso el Sabio before the Real Academia Española. In it, he argued for Alfonso’s crucial role in the development of Spanish 116 I thank Matthew Steggle for pointing out the allusion. For Thales, see D. Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library (London/New York, 1925), i, 35 (i.34). 117 Burgos, 1602, at 307 (vi.b). I am grateful to R.W. Truman for supplying me with this reference. 118 Mainz, 1605, at 575 (Book xiii, c.20, col. a): ‘Erat Alfonso sublime ingenium, sed incautum, superbae aures, lingua petulans, litteris potius, quam ciuilibus artibus instructus: dumque caelum considerat, obseruat astra, terram amisit.’ For a similar account by an Arab writer of an astrologer at the court of Alexander the Great who looks at the sky and falls down a well, see M. Ansín Palacios, ‘El juicio del Padre Mariana sobre Alfonso el Sabio’, Al-Andalus, 7 (1942), 479. 119 J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London, 1963; repr. 1990), c.8: ‘Splendour and Misery’. 120 See P. Linehan, ‘The Accession of Alfonso X (1252) and the Origins of the War of the Spanish Succession’, in God and Man in Medieval Spain: essays in honour of J. R. L. Highfield, ed. D.E. Lomax and D. Mackenzie (Warminster, 1989), 59–79, at 69 for Mondéjar. On the topic more generally, see P.E. Russell, ‘The Nessus-Shirt of Spanish History’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 36 (1959), 219–25, at 220. 121 D.C. Buck, ‘Alfonso X as Role Model for the Eighteenth-Century Ilustrados’, Romance Quarterly, 33 (1986), 263–8, at 264. I am grateful to Andrew Ginger for this reference.

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culture and presented him as a national role model for eighteenth-century Spanish intellectuals.122 Recent assessments of Alfonso’s cultural legacy have been increasingly facilitated by modern published editions and full-colour facsimiles of manuscripts associated with his patronage. Yet splendid reproductions of Alfonsine works are not a recent phenomenon. The earliest to survive (not counting a fragmentary Italian translation of the first book of the Libros del saber de astrología) dates back to the sixteenth century. In 1562, Diego de Valencia and Juan de Herrera made a copy of the Libros del saber de astrología for Philip II’s son, Don Carlos, and it was around that date too that one of the dukes of Alba – probably Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Grand Duke and Majordomo to Philip – commissioned a copy of the first treatise in the same compilation, the Libro de las estrellas fijas. Another manuscript, the Lapidario (as the title suggests, a work on the properties of stones), was also painstakingly copied in the second half of the sixteenth century.123 Advances in the technology of image reproduction in the nineteenth century enabled a Madrid publishing house to produce a photo-chromolithographic facsimile of the Lapidario, and in 1913 a black and white photographic facsimile of the Libro de los juegos appeared.124 The nineteenth century also saw the publication of Manuel Rico y Sinobas’s unreliable transcription of the Libros del saber de astrología, a work which he rechristened Libros del saber de astronomía, to stave off accusations that Alfonso had dabbled in astrology.125 Anthony Cárdenas’s 1974 transcription and edition of the manuscript for his doctoral thesis offers

122 J. de Vargas y Ponce, Elogio del Rey don Alonso el Sabio premiado por la Real Academia Española, en junta que celebró el día 15 de octubre de 1782 (Madrid, 1782), 16; see also Buck, ‘Alfonso X as Role Model’, 265–8. 123 See catalogue entries by L. Fernández Fernández in Murcia 2009: ‘Libro del saber de astrología’, 434 and ‘Libro de la Octava Esfera y Lapidario’, 466. The sixteenth-century copies of the treatises on astrology and the lapidary are bound together as MS 1197 of Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional. See A. Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Un ejemplo de “revival” de la astrología alfonsí en el Renacimiento. Dibujos inéditos de Alonso Berrugete en una copia del Lapidario que incluye un posible retrato de don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza conservado como la reliquia de un gran autor’, Boletín del Instituto Camón Aznar, 18 (1984), 95–119. 124 Alfonso X, Lapidario, ed. J. Fernández Montaña (Madrid, 1881); Alfonso the Sage, The Spanish Treatise on Chess-Play […] Manuscript in the Royal Library of the Escorial ( j.T.6 fol.), 2 vols (Leipzig, 1913). 125 M. Rico y Sinobas, Los libros del saber de astronomía, 5 vols (Madrid, 1863–1867). On the title, see A.J. Cárdenas, ‘A New Title for the Alfonsine Omnibus on Astronomical Instruments’, La corónica, 8, no. 2 (1980), 172–8.

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a reliable alternative, but remains unpublished.126 The editors of the 2004 facsimile of the Alfonsine manuscript of the Libros del saber de astrología chose to reprint Rico y Sinobas’s transcription (with minor corrections) on the grounds that this version is still easier to consult than the one in Cárdenas’s thesis.127 Alfonso’s religious poetry also received the attention of scholars: in 1889, Leopoldo Augusto Cueto, Marquis of Valmar, published his two-volume transcription and study of the Cantigas de Santa Maria; and around fifty years later Higinio Anglés included a facsimile of the Cantigas manuscript, Escorial MS b.I.2, in his three-volume study of the music of the poems (an undertaking which took him twenty-one years to complete).128 The last thirty years or so have seen the publication of full-size, full-colour facsimiles of these and other Alfonsine manuscripts. The first to appear was the códice rico of the Cantigas in 1979, then the first of the three treatises in the Lapidario manuscript. Colour facsimiles of the Libro de los juegos (republished with a revised introduction in 2010), the ‘Florence’ codex of the Cantigas, the Cantigas manuscript formerly in Toledo cathedral library and now in Madrid, and facsimiles of the Astromagia and the Libros del saber de astrología all followed.129 The second half of the twentieth century also witnessed a steady stream of published editions of Alfonsine texts, both in book form and electronically.130 After nearly a thousand years, it is finally 126 A.J. Cárdenas, ‘A Study and Edition of the Royal Scriptorium Manuscript of “El Libro del Saber de Astrología” by Alfonso X, el Sabio’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1974). See also the comments in Fernández Fernández, Arte y Ciencia, at 214–15. 127 M. Sánchez Mariana, ‘El códice alfonsí’, in Alfonso X, Rey de Castilla, Libros del saber de astronomía del Rey Alfonso X. Reproducción del ms. original conservado en la Biblioteca de la Universidad Complutense, sign. 156, 2 vols (Barcelona, 2004), ii, Estudios y transcripción, 11–16, at 16. 128 Alfonso el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María, ed. L.A. Cueto, Marqués de Valmar, 2 vols (Madrid, 1889; facsimile edn Madrid, 1990); H. Anglés, La música de las Cantigas de Santa María del Rey Alfonso el Sabio. Facsímil, transcripción y estudio crítico, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1942–1964); and see the bibliographical descriptions in J.T. Snow, The Poetry of Alfonso X: an annotated critical bibliography (1278–2010) (Woodbridge, 2012), nos 323, 443, and 479. 129 Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María. Edición facsímil del Códice Rico T.I.1 de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial, Siglo XIII, 2 vols (Madrid, 1979); Alfonso X, Primer Lapidario del Rey Alfonso X el Sabio, 2 vols (Madrid, 1982); Alfonso X el Sabio, Libros del ajedrez, dados y tablas, 2 vols (Valencia, 1987); Alfonso X, Libro de los juegos de ajedrez, dados y tablas, 2 vols (Valencia, 2010); Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María. Edición facsímil del Códice B.R. 20 de la Biblioteca Nazionale de Florencia, Siglo XIII, 2 vols (Madrid, 1989); Afonso X o Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María. Edición facsímile do Códice de Toledo (To). Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (MS 10.069) (Santiago de Compostela, 2003); Tratado de Astrología y Magia de Alfonso X el Sabio, 2 vols (Valencia, 2000); Libros del saber de astronomía del Rey Alfonso X, 2 vols (Barcelona, 2004). 130 What follows is a selection of publications over the last fifty years: Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María, ed. W. Mettmann, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Madrid, 1986–1989); Alfonso X el Sabio, Las

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possible to read the General estoria without visiting all the libraries which hold medieval manuscript copies of the six parts of this chronicle. A modern transcription and edition of the complete text was published in 2009, after a decade of editorial labour.131 The 700th anniversary of Alfonso’s death was marked by a number of conferences, publications, and at least one major exhibition, but this intense and multi-layered interest is exceptional.132 Even so, Alfonso’s appeal as a medieval example of a learned, tolerant patron and the sense that his reign remains relevant to modern Spanish identity continues: one publication traced the links between his cultural legacy and the European Union, while a magnificent show of manuscripts, textiles, sculpture, jewellery, and coins held in Murcia to celebrate the king’s close ties to the town during his reign Cantigas de Santa María, Códice rico, MS T.I.1. Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 2 vols, i: Edición crítica, ed. E. Fidalgo Francisco, ii: Estudios, ed. L. Fernández Fernández and J.C. Ruiz Souza (Madrid, 2011); Alfonso X, the Learned, Cantigas de Santa Maria: an anthology, ed. S. Parkinson (Cambridge, 2015); Aly Aben Ragel, El Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas. Traducción hecha en la corte de Alfonso el Sabio, ed. G. Hilty (Madrid, 1954); Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Abi al-Rigal, El libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, partes 6 a 8. Traducción hecha en la corte de Alfonso el Sabio, ed. G. Hilty with the assistance of L.M.V. García (Zaragoza, 2005); Libro de las cruzes, ed. L.A. Kasten and L.B. Kiddle (Madrid, 1961); Alfonso X, ‘Lapidario’ (según el manuscrito Escurialense H.I.15), ed. S. Rodríguez M. Montalvo (Madrid, 1981); Las tablas alfonsíes de Toledo, ed. J. Chabás and B. Goldstein; Alfonso X el Sabio, Primera partida, ed. J.A. Arias Bonet; Partida segunda de Alfonso X el Sabio, ed. A. Juárez Blanquer; Espéculo. Texto jurídico atribuído al Rey de Castilla, Don Alfonso X, el Sabio, ed. R.A. MacDonald (Madison, wi, 1990); Alfonso el Sabio, General estoria. Primera parte, ed. A.G. Solalinde (Madrid, 1930); Alfonso X, Rey de Castilla, General estoria. Segunda parte, ed. A.G. Solalinde, L.A. Kasten, and V.R.B. Oelschläger, 2 vols (Madrid, 1957–1961); Alfonso X el Sabio, Primera crónica general. Estoria de España que mandó componer Alfonso el Sabio y se continuaba bajo Sancho IV en 1289, ed. R. Menéndez Pidal, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1955) and 3rd edn, 2 vols (Madrid, 1977). The study on textual sources and chronicle drafts by Diego Catalán that was to accompany the third edition appeared independently: D. Catalán, De la silva textual al taller historiográfico alfonsí. Códices, crónicas, versiones y cuadernos de trabajo (Madrid, 1997). Sections of the Estoria de España have received particular attention: Versión crítica de la Estoria de España. Estudio y edición (desde Pelayo hasta Ordoño II), ed. I. Fernández-Ordóñez (Madrid, 1993); La ‘Estoria de España’ de Alfonso X: estudio y edición de la “Versión Crítica” desde Fruela II hasta la muerte de Fernando II, ed. M. de la Campa Gutiérrez (Malaga, 2009). All Alfonsine prose works in Castilian also exist in digital form: The Electronic Texts and Concordances of the Prose Works of Alfonso X el Sabio [computer file], transcribed L.A. Kasten, J.J. Nitti, and W. Jonxis-Henkemans, CD-ROM Series 1 (Madison, wi, 1997). 131 Alfonso X, el Sabio, General estoria, ed. Sánchez-Prieto Borja. See his comments on the project in i: General estoria. Primera parte, ‘Introducción’, xvii–xviii. 132 Alfonso X: Toledo 1984. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo (Madrid, 1984); for conferences and publications inspired by the anniversary of his death, see A.J. Cárdenas, ‘In Search of a King: an Alfonsine bibliology’, in Emperor of Culture, 198–208.

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presented the range of his cultural achievements in the wider context of the province and the period.133 Given the available evidence, then, it is unsurprising that instead of condemning Alfonso as a king whose love of letters nearly lost him his throne, modern historians tend to stress how the range of works with which he was associated played a key role in the cultural development of his kingdom.134 Central to this assessment is Alfonso’s choice of Castilian, not Latin, as the language of the works he commissioned. In this he joined a wider tradition of European monarchs who, to a greater or lesser extent, used language as a tool to assert national identity. The Anglo-Saxon law codes of the English king Alfred are a distant example of the vernacular displacing Latin as the language of royal patronage (although Latin was still the official language of government in England in the mid-thirteenth century, even if legislation had to be circulated to the country in English versions as well).135 Of more immediate relevance, however, were the French Chroniques de France, a history of French kings from the fall of Troy to the reign of Philip Augustus commissioned by a member of the court circle in Paris for royal and noble readers. The unified presentation of history in support of an unequivocally political agenda (in this case, France’s special role as defender of the Church) has parallels in the Alfonsine use of vernacular history as royal propaganda.136 Across the border in Aragon, on the other hand, the status of the vernacular was more ambiguous. Alfonso’s father-in-law, Jaume I, decreed in 1264 that trials in Valencia should be heard in Romance, not Latin, but his decision did not result in a new dominance for the language, and Latin remained the language of the Aragonese chancery, of crown institutions, and of the universities until the fifteenth century.137 Jaume composed his autobiography in Catalan, the Llibre del rei En Jaume (or the Llibre dels fets as it now more commonly known). But, unlike Alfonso, Jaume does not appear to have promoted his literary activities in relation to his political persona. Until the late fifteenth century the Llibre 133 Alfonso X. Aportaciones de un rey castellano a la construcción de Europa, ed. M. Rodríguez Llopis (Murcia, 1997); Murcia 2009. 134 See for example R.I. Burns’s comment that Juan de Mariana’s judgement must be modified because Alfonso’s cultural patronage was intended to reshape society: ‘Stupor mundi: Alfonso X of Castile, The Learned’, in Emperor of Culture, 4–5. 135 On Alfred, see Alfred the Wise: studies in honour of Janet Bately on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday, ed. J. Roberts et al. (Cambridge, 1997); M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1994), 222–3. 136 A.D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: illustrations of the Grandes Chroniques de France 1274–1422 (Los Angeles, 1991), 1–5; Blanc, Le langue du roi. 137 A.F. Francés and M.N. Amorós, Història de la llengua catalana (Nova ediciò revisada i ampliada) (Barcelona, 2011), 106.

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del rei En Jaume circulated only in court circles, where the manuscript copy prepared for Jaume himself (rather than the text it contained) came to be considered a valuable dynastic heirloom by his successors.138 Scholars have differed over the emphasis to be placed on the political overtones of Alfonso’s decision to promote the vernacular over the Latin language. The marquis of Mondéjar highlighted the importance of Alfonsine translations and compilations for the development of the Castilian language which, in his words, ‘was until that time so rudimentary’ (‘que hasta entonces se hallaba tan aspera’);139 but in more recent years scholars have wondered whether the translators of the scientific works were in fact consciously engaged in the task of creating a style of prose that was clear and unambiguous to all.140 Alfonso’s accession to the throne coincided with the period when chancery documents reveal a wider perception that Latin and Castilian were in fact separate languages, and not simply alternative ways of writing the same language.141 The translation commissioned by Fernando III between 1241 and 1251 of the Forum (or Liber) iudicum, the Visigothic law code, as the Fuero juzgo, paved the way for Alfonso’s own efforts to replace local customary laws with a single legal code in Castilian. The Partidas were a logical continuation of Crown attempts to centralize the monarchy and diminish the power of an overmighty nobility.142 Nevertheless, while the compilers of the Alfonsine General estoria were aware of the differences between Latin and Castilian, when glossing they consciously used the term ‘nuestro latín’ (‘our Latin’) to describe Castilian words that retained the same spelling and meaning as their Latin source.143 This occasional blurring of linguistic identity in a chronicle which structured historical narrative on the basis of imperial rule was another device to 138 Pujol, ‘The Llibre del rei En Jaume’, 35 and 38; The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon, trans. Smith and Buffery. 139 Marqués de Mondéjar, Memorias historicas, ‘Al Lector’, xxiii. 140 A.J. Cárdenas, ‘Alfonso X nunca escribió castellano drecho’, in Actas del X congreso de la asociación internacional de hispanistas, 21–26 agosto, ed. A. Vilanova, 4 vols (Barcelona, 1992), i, 151–9. 141 R. Wright, ‘A Sociophilological Study of the Change to Official Documentation in Castile’, in Spoken and Written Language: relations between Latin and the vernacular languages in the earlier Middle Ages, ed. M. Garrison, A.P. Orbán, and M. Mostert (Turnhout, 2013), 133–47. 142 Wright, ‘A Sociophilological Study’, 146–7; D. Rojinsky, ‘The Rule of Law and the Written Word in Alfonsine Castile: demystifying a consecrated vernacular’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), 80, no. 3 (2003), 287–305 (290–91). 143 A.G. Solalinde, ‘La expresión “nuestro latín” en la “General estoria” de Alfonso el Sabio’, in Homenatge a Antoni Rvbió i Llvch. Miscel·lània d’estvdis literaris històrics i lingüístics, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1936), i, 133–40.

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connect Alfonso’s own imperial aspirations with the Roman and Visigothic empires of the past in the minds of listeners and readers.144 In the wider context of Alfonsine prose, the frequent glossing of words and passages, even if these were not especially obscure, was as much a device to add nuance to a passage in ways favourable to the king as it was a reflection of the compilers’ sources.145 Accuracy could also be overlooked in favour of explanations that placed Arab words in a Christian context. Those responsible for formulating a definition of the word ‘alfaqueque’ (the person responsible for redeeming captives) in the Segunda partida derive the noun from the Arabic word for ‘truth’ and not from the correct root, the Arabic verb ‘to release’, because the reference to moral qualities enables them to link the Arab etymology with classical and Christian sources.146 The subtleties of the text aside, historians have also examined the wider political agenda inherent in the choice of Castilian as the language of nearly all Alfonsine texts (the Cantigas are composed in Galician-Portuguese), a choice which arguably arose from the very particular socio-linguistic conditions of the Iberian Peninsula. Fernando Gómez Redondo observed in 1993 that ‘the vast body of literature attributed to Alfonso X cannot be separated from his principal obsession as king: to establish an identity for Castile and León that would guarantee their social cohesion’.147 For Américo Castro, writing in 1948, Alfonso’s linguistic policy was partly driven by the ambitions of his Jewish scholars, who took advantage of their king’s enthusiasm and linguistic limitations (in Latin, according to Castro, as well as in Arabic) to become key figures in the transmission of Islamic and Jewish scientific learning. In Castro’s view, ‘The living culture of Castile was at once Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, and the common denominator of that culture had to be the language that belonged to those who were 144 The structure of the General estoria according to particular empires or sennoríos is discussed in the first chapter of Fernández-Ordóñez, Las estorias, at 19–40. 145 J.R. Lodares, ‘El mundo en palabras. Sobre las motivaciones del escritorio alfonsí en la def inición, etimología, glosa e interpretación de voces’, Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médièvale, 21 (1996–1997), 105–18. For the derivative nature of many of the Alfonsine etymological glosses in the chronicles and the legal works, see A. Blum, Etymologische Erklärungen in alfonsinischen Texten (Tübingen, 2007). 146 L.P. Harvey, ‘Alfaqueque: a mistaken etymology in the Siete Partidas of Alfonso the Wise’, in Homenaje a Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, ed. D. Alonso et al., 3 vols (Madrid, 1985), i, 635–7. For the gloss, see Segunda partida, xxx.1, and the English translation in Alfonso X, Las Siete partidas, trans. S. Parsons Scott, 5 vols (Chicago, 1931; repr. and ed. R.I. Burns, Philadelphia, 2001), ii: Medieval Government: the world of kings and warriors, at 524. 147 ‘Alfonso X’, in Diccionario de literatura española e hispanoamericana, ed. R. Gullón, 2 vols (Madrid, 1993), i, 41–4, at 41 (my translation).

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part of such a strange mixture.’148 Francisco Márquez Villanueva, who had been taught by Castro, developed these ideas in a 1994 study, El concepto cultural alfonsí, and reached similar conclusions about the striking rise of the vernacular in thirteenth-century Spain.149 For others, however, Castilian was not a language that could unite the scholarly worlds of different religions equally in Alfonso’s kingdom. Castilian translations of Islamic texts in fact reflected an unequal intellectual exchange, one in which the Christian desire for learning was combined with a sense of superiority over a conquered people.150 Alfonso’s appropriation of Islamic culture as a means to promote the Christian religion and legitimize his rule over the peoples of different faiths in his kingdom has also come under scrutiny.151 Others have continued to untangle the process of compilation and textual revision of the historical works and their sources, and there is a growing bibliography of studies on the palaeography of the Alfonsine manuscripts and the miniatures included in many of them.152 At the heart of all this cultural activity lies the key figure of the king himself. Patron of the works that bear his name, he has been shown to be an author in the modern sense as well: a number of studies have identified, with varying

148 Castro, España en su historia, 484–5 (my translation). For a critique of his ideas on Christian–Muslim relations in the Peninsula, see E. Asensio, La España imaginada de Américo Castro (Barcelona, 1976). 149 Márquez Villanueva, Concepto cultural, 127 (my translation). His ideas are summarized in ‘The Alfonsine Cultural Concept’, in Alfonso X of Castile, the Learned King (1221–1284): an international symposium, Harvard University, 17 November 1984, ed. Márquez Villanueva and C.A. Vega (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 76–109. 150 For translations from the Arabic which imply Christian prejudice, see J. García González, ‘Los arabismos militares y los referentes a lo árabe’, Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médièvale, 21 (1996–1997), 127–44. 151 On the manipulation of Arabic source texts to promote Alfonsine rule see the comments by Ana Echevarría on the Livre l’eschiele Mahomet: ‘Eschatology or Biography? Muhammad’s Ladder and a Jewish Go-Between’, in Under the Influence: questioning the comparative in medieval Castile, ed. C. Robinson and L. Rouhi (Leiden, 2005), 133–52 (esp. 143–4); more generally, see J. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European imagination (New York, 2002), 186–9. 152 For example, G. Menéndez Pidal, La España del siglo XIII leída en imágenes; El Scriptorium alfonsí, ed. Montoya Martínez and Domínguez Rodríguez; ‘Cobras e Son’: papers on the text, music and manuscripts of the ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’, ed. S. Parkinson (Oxford, 2000); D. Catalán, De la silva textual al taller historiográfico alfonsí. Códices, crónicas, versiones y cuadernos de trabajo (Madrid, 1997); I. Fernández Ordóñez, Las estorias de Alfonso el Sabio, and Alfonso X el Sabio y las crónicas de España, ed. I. Fernández Ordóñez (Valladolid, 2000); A. García Avilés, ‘Mercurio en el Libro de astromagia. Una iconografía de origen indio en el scriptorium de Alfonso X el Sabio’, in Imágenes y promotores en el arte medieval. Miscelánea en homenaje a Joaquín Yarza Luaces, ed. M.L. Melero Moneo et al. (Bellaterra, 2001), 391–406.

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degrees of persuasiveness, the royal hand in passages of the chronicles, in prologues, and in the words and music of the Cantigas.153 Alfonso’s image as lettered patron looms large over the cultural history of the Iberian Peninsula, partly because of the large body of work associated with him that survives, and partly because these works present him as a cultural colossus. It is thanks to this that the legend of his boast to God could gain such currency; and his patronage and self-presentation are also no doubt the reason scholars still debate the extent of his personal participation in the works he commissioned. It is clear that Alfonso encouraged the work of scholars (particularly Jewish scholars, or so it seems from the names which have been preserved), scribes, and artists, and the image of the king in the manuscripts he commissioned convincingly evokes his active role as patron and author. However, Alfonso’s concern to absorb the learning of different cultures, to present himself as the conduit for that learning, and to repackage it in Castilian for an élite Christian audience does not appear to have extended to a desire to personally promote this learning to his subjects at large in the form of institutions. By making the crown, not universities, the focus of book culture in his kingdoms, Alfonso was unusual in the context of his French and Italian peers.154 Although a single surviving document shows he founded a ‘studium and general schools of Latin and Arabic’ (‘estudio e escuelas Generales de latino e de aráuigo’) at Seville early in his reign, he did not endow these with any monies from his treasury (though he exempted tutors and students from paying taxes on their books and other materials required for study), and his attitude towards other, existing, studia in his kingdom was reactive rather than active. The privilegio rodado or ‘wheeled charter’ which records Alfonso’s foundation of a ‘studium and general schools of Latin and Arabic’ at Seville was issued on the orders of the king himself at Burgos on 28 December 1254.155 153 A.G. Solalinde, ‘Intervención de Alfonso X en la redacción de sus obras’, Revista de Filología Española, 2 (1915), 283–8; J. Montoya Martínez, ‘El concepto de “autor” en Alfonso X’, in Estudios sobre literatura y arte dedicados al Professor Emilio Orozco Díaz, ed. A. Gallego Morell, A. Soria, and N. Marín, 3 vols (Granada, 1979), ii, 455–62; R. Cano Aguilar, ‘Los prólogos alfonsíes’, Cahiers de Littérature Hispanique Médiévale, 14–15 (1989–1990), 79–90; M.E. Schaffer, ‘Questions of Authorship: the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, in Proceedings of the Eighth Colloquium, ed. A.M. Beresford and A. Deyermond, Publications of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 5 (London, 1997), 17–30; O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas; M.P. Ferreira, ‘Alfonso X, compositor’, Alcanate: Revista de Estudios Alfonsíes, 5 (2006–7), 117–37 (also available online at www.dialnet. unirioja.es [accessed 26 August 2018]). 154 G. Martin, ‘Le livre dans les prologues des oeuvres composées sous l’autorité d’Alphonse X de Castille’, TIGRE (Hors série) (1992), 21–32, at 28. 155 Seville, Archivo Capitular, Caja 4, no. 10; Diplomatario andaluz, 152–4 (doc. no. 142).

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The privilegio rodado was the most solemn form of document available to the royal chancery. As the name suggests, it was characterized by the royal signum in the form of a circle or wheel at the foot of the text, which was probably an imitation of the rota used in papal bulls, and which had first appeared in Leonese royal documents of the late 1150s.156 The model for the foundation is that of the studium generale, an institution that was still in the process of being defined in the thirteenth century but which in broad terms was somewhere not where all subjects were taught, but a place to which students from all areas and countries could travel and receive instruction.157 Alfonso himself explained the principle in the second Partida: ‘We consider it a right that tutors and students may do this [i.e. come together] in a studium generale, that they come together with the intention of doing good, and that they be foreign and from different places.’158 In the wider context of the history of universities in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond, however, the foundation is unusual for two reasons. Firstly, its intellectual focus was unique because it offered clear evidence of royal support for the learning of both the Christian and Muslim communities in the recently conquered Andalusian territory. That said, however, the charter does not elaborate on the precise nature of this learning, and Alfonso’s silence on the matter has led modern historians to very different conclusions. For the literary historian Colin Smith, among others, the foundation was simply a language school for clerks and administrators involved in the running of the civic institutions of Seville; for others, notably Francisco Márquez Villanueva, it was another aspect of the cultural programme sponsored by Alfonso which aimed to explore Arabic learning in depth.159 Secondly, the charter was also unusual because it offered a statement of 156 For the type of document, see Procter, ‘Castilian Chancery’, 106 and 108, who equates it to the French diplôme; Kleine, Cancillería real, 45. 157 On the evolving def inition of the term studium generale in a secular context, see M.M. Mulchahey, ‘The Dominican Studium System and the Universities of Europe in the Thirteenth Century: a relationship redefined’, in Manuels, programmes de cours et techniques d’enseignement dans les universités médiévales. Actes du colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve (9–11 septembre 1989), ed. J. Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1994), 277–324, at 287. 158 Alfonso X, Partida segunda, ed. Juárez Blanquer, ii.30.6 (277); see also H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. F.M. Powicke and A.B. Emden, 5th edn, 3 vols (Oxford, 1958), i, 6. 159 C. Smith, ‘Convivencia in the Estoria de España of Alfonso X’, Hispanic Medieval Studies in Honor of Samuel G. Armistead, ed. E.M. Gerli and H.L. Scharrer (Madison, wi, 1992), 291–301, at 293. A. Jiménez, Historia de la universidad española (Madrid, 1971), 60, and the comments in J. Sánchez Herrero, ‘Centros de enseñanza y estudiantes de Sevilla durante los siglos XIII al XV’, in Estudios dedicados al profesor D. Ángel Ferrari Núñez, Special Issue, En la España Medieval, 4 (1984), 875–98 (876); Márquez Villanueva, Concepto cultural, 158 and n. 19.

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Alfonso’s political ambitions on the international stage. The assumption that the creation of studia generalia was a papal or imperial prerogative steadily gained acceptance as the thirteenth century progressed. By establishing the foundation in his own name, without appeal to another authority, Alfonso made clear his imperial pretentions. Shortly afterwards, he confirmed his political autonomy in the matter when, in the second Partida, he clearly stated that kings (as well as emperors and popes) had the authority to found a studium.160 Yet a 1260 papal bull, issued at Anagni on 21 June, shows that Alfonso did seek retrospective endorsement of its status from Pope Alexander IV, which suggests not only that he had decided to conform to generally accepted practice, but also that the foundation could not have been considered unorthodox at the time.161 The bull also reveals why Alfonso did not feel the need to endow it financially: by granting official recognition to the studium at Seville, Alexander IV’s 1260 bull confirmed the right of the ‘doctors and students in the city of Seville’ to continue receiving the revenues from their prebends and benefices while they studied in the city, just as other students in other studia of this nature did, as long as their duties did not involve the care of souls. The reference to Alfonso as the original founder also shows that Alexander was not referring to the cathedral school; this was established by Archbishop Remondo Losana in the following year in order to train future members of the clergy.162 Bishop Alexander […] to [his] beloved sons the doctors and scholars present in the city of Seville, greetings and apostolic blessing. Since, at the intercession of our most beloved son in Christ the illustrious King of Castile and León, we have deemed it proper to grant to our venerable brother the Archbishop and our beloved sons the chapter and people of the city of Seville, that in this city there should be a studium generale of letters which, as we understand, the same King arranged to set up there, by the authority of these present letters we allow that priests teaching and studying in the aforementioned city may receive the incomes from their prebends and benefices which do not have the cure of souls attached, for as long as they apply themselves to this kind of study in the same city, just 160 Mulchahey, ‘The Dominican Studium’, 282; Partida segunda, ed. Juárez Blanquer, ii.30.6 (277). 161 For the text of the bull, see Sainz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas, i, 442, 12; Spanish summary in Ortíz de Zúñiga, Anales, 90.a, and colour facsimile of the bull in Alfonso X: Toledo 1984, 39, fig. 194; Mulchahey, ‘The Dominican Studium’, 287. 162 E. Costa y Belda, ‘Las Constituciones de Don Raimundo de Losaña’, 169–233 and Montes Romero-Camacho, ‘La iglesia’, 199–200.

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as priests elsewhere, who reside in other studia generalia to teach and study, receive incomes from their prebends and benefices.163

Alexander makes no reference to the ‘Arabic’ element in the studium’s founding charter, and evidence that the institution continued to develop in a Christian context appears in the reign of Alfonso’s successor. In 1284, at the behest of the archbishop and town council of Seville, Sancho confirmed all the privileges granted to Seville cathedral by his father. The document survives in a later copy now in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, and the 1254 foundation charter for the estudio y escuelas generales is among the privileges cited.164 However, there is no further evidence for the activities of a studium in Seville until the early sixteenth century, when another papal bull of 1505 established the University of Seville which exists today. When the text of the charter as a whole is taken into account, the encouragement of scholarship in a formal setting was only a part of Alfonso’s motivation for founding the institution. A desire to show the extent of his royal power by claiming a prerogative usually ascribed only to popes and emperors, while at the same time consolidating that power by stimulating repopulation of the region,165 were equally powerful motives. Moreover, his means of financing his new studium – by relying on church subsidies to encourage masters and students, as was the case for other studia – implies 163 ‘Alexander episcopus, servus servorum Dei. Dilectis filiis doctoribus et scolaribus existentibus in civitate hyspalense […]. Cum obtentu carissimi in Xpo. filii nostri, Regis Castelle ac Legionis illustris, venerabili fratri nostro Archiepiscopo et dilectis filiis, capitulo et populo civitatis hyspalensis, ut in civitate ipsa generale litterarum studium quod idem Rex, sicut accepimus, in ea ordinare disponit existat, per nostras litteras duxerimus concedendum auctoritate vobis presentim indulgemus, ut clerici docentes et studentes in civitate predicta, dum huiusmodi studio institerint in eadem, prebendarum et beneficiorum suorum non habentium curam animarum proventus ita percipiant, sicut percipiunt clerici suarum prebendarum et beneficiorum proventus qui docendo et studento aliis studiis generalibus immorantur’, in Sainz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas, i, 442, 12; my translation, with thanks to Barry Taylor and Anne Duggan. The document is preserved in Seville: Archivo Capitular, Fondo Historico General, Legajo 110, doc. 4. 164 Madrid, MS 13075, fol. 72v. For the document, see Márquez Villanueva, Concepto cultural, 167 and n. 18. Alexander’s 1260 bull is not cited in any surviving documents, although the bull itself aroused the interest of a cathedral archivist, who underlined the section which refers to the receipt of monies from benefices in dark brown ink, and added a summary of the contents in Spanish in a late fifteenth-century hand on the back of the document: ‘bull from Pope Alexander which grants a studium generale at Seville and that those who lecture or study there who have a benefice may receive the income from their benefices as they do in other studia generalia’ (‘bulla del papa alexandre que concede aya estudio general en Sevilla y que los beneficiados que leyeren o estudiaren ganen sus beneficios como se ganan en los otros studios generales’); my translation. 165 Ballesteros Beretta, Alfonso X, 104.

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only Christian settlers would be financially encouraged to attend. In the preamble, Alfonso stressed his fervent wish [To] do good and advance the noble city of Seville and to enrich it and ennoble it further because it is one of the most honourable and the best cities of Spain, and because the very honourable king Don Ferrando, my father, lies buried there, who won it from the Moors and populated it with Christians to the very great glory and great service of God and to the benefit and honour of all Christendom, and because I went with him to win it and to populate it.166

This suggests he considered the institution to be, like his father’s tomb, a monument to the Christian reconquest of territories in Muslim al-Andalus, and a ploy to encourage resettlement and discourage clerics already resident in the area from leaving.167 Documents relating to studia founded elsewhere in the Peninsula during this period also connect education with conquest, settlement, and religion – and their royal founders provide equally feeble financial backing. Innocent IV’s bull of July 1246, confirming Jaume I of Aragon’s studium at Valencia, stresses the importance of the Christian education system to maintain the Christian faith in areas recently conquered from Islam and expresses the hope that Jaume’s foundation will cause Christianity to spread to neighbouring territories. Despite this, the studium received no further support until 1374.168 King Dinis of Portugal (r. 1279–1325), son of Alfonso’s natural daughter Beatriz, opened the 1290 charter in which he established a university at Lisbon with a meditation on how learning benefited his kingdom because it strengthened the Catholic faith and encouraged order and social justice. He omitted to mention, however, that he was only acting at the behest of the Portuguese bishops.169

166 My translation: ‘Fazer bien e de leuar adelante a la noble çibdat de Seuilla e de enriquecerla e ennoblecerla más, porque es de las más ondradas e de las meiores cipdades de Espanna, e porque iaze hy enterrado el muy ondrado rey don Ferrando, mío padre, que la ganó de moros e la pobló de cristianos a muy grand loor e a grant seruicio de Dios e a pro e a onrra de todo Cristianismo, e porque yo fuy con él en ganarla e en poblarla’: Diplomatario andaluz, 152–4 (142). 167 The importance of royal sites of burial in the military and political agenda of Spanish kings is explored in R. Alonso Álvarez, ‘Los enterramientos de los reyes de León y Castilla hasta Sancho IV’, e-Spania 3 (June 2007), www.e-spania.revues.org/109 [accessed 6 November 2015]. 168 Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas, i, 437, 5; for the history of the Valencia studium, see Rashdall, Universities of Europe, ii, 107. 169 Transcription in Fontes medievais da história de Portugal, I: anais e crónicas, ed. A. Pimenta (Lisbon, 1948), 196–7.

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The same ideas and expectations are linked in royal chronicles. In his Chronicon mundi, composed for Alfonso’s grandmother, Berenguela of León, Lucas of Tuy makes the foundation of studia contingent upon military victories and territorial gains. After a successful campaign in the Basque Country against Alfonso IX of León (r. 1188–1230), Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214) returned to Castile, where he summoned ‘teachers in theology and the other liberal arts’ (i.e. grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music) and founded schools at Palencia, placing Tello, the local bishop, at their head.170 Lucas justifies Alfonso’s foundation on the grounds that ‘the Ancients’ state that scholastic learning and warfare thrive together.171 He then further demonstrates the truth of his statement by citing the foundation of the studium at Salamanca by Alfonso IX of León after he had lain waste to the area around the Muslim kingdom of Caceres. Alfonso’s support for Christian scholarship was rewarded with further victories, not only against Islam, but against the Portuguese king as well.172 Chroniclers also projected the idea of the university as a key element in the repopulation of a conquered territory back onto ancient history. In the first part of Alfonso’s General estoria, composed around 1270, the compilers interrupt their account of the Book of Genesis to describe the foundation of Athens. Apparently, no sooner had wise men and the nobility arrived than They thought of how they could make there a city more noble than all the others in all Greece, and even in other lands. […] and they made all the schools of all disciplines come there. And those wise men who came to this settlement caused such a noble city as the princes wished to be made there to be populated even more.173 170 For the Liberal Arts in the medieval university curriculum, see Haren, Medieval Thought, 67–8. 171 Lucas of Tuy, Opera omnia, I: Chronicon mundi, ed. E. Falque. CCCM, 74 (Turnhout, 2003), iv.86.43: ‘Eo tempore rex Alfonsus euocauit magistros teologichos et aliarum arcium liberalium et Palencie scolas constituit […]. Quia ut antiquitas refert, semper ubi uiguit solastica sapiencia, uiguit et milicia.’ 172 Lucas of Tuy, Chronicon mundi, iv.84.56–61: Alfonso IX of León ‘congregato exercitu magno contra Sarracenos arma mouit, et cuncta que erant in circuitu de Caceres […] ferro et flamma uastauit et ad propria reuersus est. Hic salutari consilio euocauit magistros peritissimos in sacris scripturis et constituit scolas fieri Salamantice et ab illa die magis directa et victorie salus in manu eius.’ 173 My translation: ‘asmaron cómo podrién fazer allí cibdad más noble que todas las otras de toda Grecia, e aún dotras tierras. […] e fizieron y venir todas las escuelas de todos los saberes. E aquellos sabios que a esta puebla vinieron guisaron ques poblasse aún más tan noble ciudad como los príncipes allí querién fazer’: Alfonso X, General estoria, ed. Sánchez-Prieto Borja,

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Considered in this context, Alfonso’s motive for issuing a charter to found a ‘studium and general schools of Latin and Arabic’ in post-conquest Seville seems to have been to use learning to encourage settlement, and to rely on the f inancial support that the church extended to members of the clergy in order to provide the new institution with tutors and students. The reference to Arabic in the same sentence as Latin scholarship may have reflected his personal intellectual interests; but in this context it could equally have been another sign of Alfonsine appropriation of Arabic culture to present his rule over the conquered Muslim kingdom as both superior and legitimate.174 The 1254 charter is unusual in the context of the other surviving documents that Alfonso issued in connection with learned institutions during his reign because here he initiates activity rather than responds to a petition. By contrast, his attitude towards Salamanca, the most important studium in his kingdom, while not unsympathetic, was distant. Although he referred to it in a 1267 document as ‘mio estudio’, the Salamanca studium had been founded by his grandfather, Alfonso IX of León, and it was his father, Fernando, who had been responsible for its restoration.175 Between 1252 and 1276, the masters there petitioned Alfonso on five occasions. Four of the petitions were requests to the king to enforce their rights and privileges in the face of illegal taxation or other abuses by the town council.176 The fifth was a plea, made during a period of famine, that members of the university should be allowed to bring foodstuffs into Salamanca untaxed.177 Given this, perhaps it is unsurprising that when Fernando, bishop of Palencia and royal notary, attempted to revive the studium generale at Palencia he should have addressed his petition to the pope, and he appears not to have approached Alfonso for financial support. Urban IV’s reply in a document

i, 375–6 (vii.34). For a chronology of the composition of the work, see I. Fernández Ordóñez, ‘Alfonso X y la historiografía’, in Murcia 2009, 376–85, at 381. 174 See Echevarría, ‘Eschatology or Biography?’ and C. Robinson, ‘Preliminary Considerations on the Illustrations of Qiṣṣat Bayāḍ wa Riyāḍ [Vat. Ar. Ris. 368]: checkmate with Alfonso X?’ in Al-Andalus und Europa: zwischen Orient und Okzident, ed. M. Müller et al. (Petersberg, 2004), 284–96, especially 290. For Muslim reluctance to share scholarship with their Christian contemporaries, see Harvey, ‘The Alfonsine School of Translators’. 175 Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas, i, 444 (16), 438 (7), and 438 (8): in which Alfonso orders the Salamanca town council to respect the privileges granted to the university by his father and grandfather. 176 Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas, i, 438 (7), 438–40 (9), 444 (16), and 447–8 (21). 177 Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas, i, 446 (19).

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of 1263 granted scholars at the Palencia studium the same rights as those enjoyed by students at the University of Paris.178 The impact which the ‘studium and general schools of Latin and Arabic’ had on the intellectual life of Seville, however, appears to have been modest, although any meaningful assessment is impossible because of the silence of documentary sources and lack of other evidence to suggest the type of bookish activity that it would have generated. Its limited impact, though, may be explained by the disruption that intellectual life for Christians and Muslims in the city had suffered in the century or so before Seville returned to Christian control under Fernando III. In the late twelfth century the Christian population had been driven out in the wake of the crushing defeat inflicted by Muslim troops led by the Almohad caliph Ya‘qūb (1184–1199) on Alfonso VIII of Castile’s forces at Alarcos in July 1195. Among the exiles were the archbishop and cathedral clergy, the principal representatives of the Christian intellectual community, who fled to Toledo.179 Conversely, the decades immediately prior to Fernando’s victory were not peaceful ones for the Muslim population, either. Seville had been the centre of Almohad power, but the departure of Al Mamum for Marrakesh in 1226 to assume the role of caliph unleashed a series of coups, rebellions, and assassinations. Seville came under the control of three different rulers in the short period between 1228 and 1232, and Ibn Yadd, who in 1246 had replaced the governor of Tunis as ruler of Seville, was assassinated for his attempt to calm matters by placing the kingdom under the protection of Fernando III.180 Several Muslim sources estimate the siege by Christian forces which followed this period of violent instability lasted two years, but evidence from Christian documents and texts suggest a slightly shorter period, as they date the start of Fenando’s campaign to July 1247 (although the isolation of the city was probably only absolute after May 1248, when Fernando’s naval commander Ramón Bonifaz succeeded in cutting off river traffic).181 178 Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas, i, 442–3 (13): issued at Orvieto, 14 May 1263: ‘Et quia per hoc non solum Palentia sed tota solebat Ispania spiritualis et temporalis percipere comoditatis augmentum supplicastis humiliter ut ad reformationem predicti studii […] tuis, frater episcope, supplicationibus inclinati omnibus et singulis doctoribus et scolaribus quos in eadem civitate in quacumque facultate studere contigerit, quod illis privilegiis, indulgentiis, libertatibus et immunitatibus gaudeant quibus magistri et scolares gaudent Parisiis.’ 179 Salvador Martínez, La convivencia, 118. 180 M. Benaboud, ‘La conquista de Andalucía y de Sevilla en las fuentes árabes’, in Seville 1248, 73–83, at 76; also García Fitz, ‘El cerco de Sevilla’, 153–4. 181 Benaboud, ‘Las fuentes árabes’, 78–9; García Fitz, ‘El cerco de Sevilla’, 147–8.

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Whatever the precise duration of the campaign, what is certain is that it took a brutal toll on the inhabitants. The historian Ibn Idhari, describing in the fourteenth century the hardships faced by the defenders, observed that a lack of wheat and other basic foodstuffs meant they were forced to choose between a diet of animal hides (‘comer cueros’) and starvation.182 The truce which Fernando III negotiated with Seville’s ruling military council, headed by General Šaqqâf (‘Axataf’ in contemporary accounts) prior to his triumphant entry on 23 November 1248 allowed the surviving inhabitants to abandon the city with their possessions, and many chose to leave for good.183 For a time, considerable pockets of Muslims continued to live in the extensive district (alfoz) that surrounded the city and which made up the kingdom of Seville, but they would have been occupied with agriculture rather than with culture.184 Moreover, many of them were forced to move elsewhere, or go into exile, during Alfonso’s reign as the king sought to reinforce his power by removing Muslims from all areas of military importance in Christian Andalusia.185 The distribution of the population in the city of Seville post-conquest is difficult to gauge. This is principally because the Libro de Repartimiento – which was the book that recorded grants of land made by Fernando to his supporters in the town itself, and which might have suggested where parchment-sellers, book binders, and members of an academic community lived and worked – has been lost.186 The scattered references to scholars in some royal charters and letters patent suggest that Muslims did not play a prominent role in the new intellectual communities that were forming 182 Cited in Benaboud, ‘Las fuentes árabes’, 80. 183 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 34–6. On the state of the city the conquering Christians entered, see A. Collantes de Terán Sánchez, ‘La ciudad: permanencias y transformaciones’, in Sevilla 1248, 551–66; M. González Jiménez, ‘Estudio histórico’, in Diplomatario andaluz, at xlv, and the map titled ‘Reino de Sevilla’ in Ladero Quesada, Historia de Sevilla. For a list of people and chronology of events leading up to, during, and after the siege, see R. Valencia, ‘La Sevilla almohade. El espacio humano’, in Sevilla 1248, 33–41. 184 H.L. Ecker, ‘Administradores mozárabes en Sevilla después de la conquista’, in Sevilla 1248, 821–38 on the departure of the Muslim intelligentsia and its impact on the administration of the city. For the crucial economic contribution of the Muslim population to the agricultural economy of the Christian territories in the thirteenth century, see Burns, ‘Jews and Moors in the Siete Partidas’, 55 and idem, ‘Immigrants from Islam: the Crusaders’ use of Muslims as settlers in thirteenth-century Spain’, American Historical Review, 80 (1975), 21–42. 185 González Jiménez, ‘Estudio histórico’, in Diplomatario andaluz, xlix–l; M.Á. Ladero Quesada, Los mudéjares de Castilla y otros estudios de historia medieval andaluza (Granada, 1989), 37, and Ladero Quesada, Historia de Sevilla, 151. 186 The record of lands granted in the wider kingdom of Seville has come down to us: Repartimiento de Sevilla, ed. J. González, 2 vols (Madrid, 1951).

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there, and the Christian framework for the ‘general schools of […] Arabic’ in the 1254 charter was not calculated to encourage them to do so. However, relations were different at a personal level. Even after the expulsion of the Muslim population from Murcia following the 1264 uprising, Alfonso continued to bestow privileges on Muslim individuals in royal service. A grant of land in Murcia dated 1272 shows the king had retained the services there of ‘Abrahem, […] Hamet and […] Mahomad, my goldsmiths’.187 Such a list of names of craftsmen in royal employ is in itself exceptional in any case, since more generally there are few references to individuals, Jewish or Muslim, in contemporary documents whose titles identify them as intellectuals. ‘Çah, el maestro’, who may have been a Muslim convert to Christianity, and ‘don Juçaf, alfaquim’ (‘physician’) both received land in the area around Seville from Alfonso in 1253.188 Yusuf, this time described as ‘rabí Yuçaf Çabaçay, mío judío’, was a beneficiary of property in the town of Seville two years later. The qualifying description ‘my Jew’ was probably a general reference to the status of Jews as the property of the king who had granted them residence, rather than a specific identification of Yuçaf as a member of the court circle.189 In 1255 Queen Violante’s chaplain lived next door to ‘maestro Martín Marroquí’, which suggests that at least one scholar of Muslim origin resided in post-conquest Seville, albeit one whose name and sobriquet suggested he was a convert to Christianity recently arrived from North Africa.190 On the rare occasions when textual evidence permits the activities of intellectuals in Seville to be defined, these are directly associated with the patronage of Alfonso. Documents suggest that Guillén Arremón, named as a translator in the prologue to the Libro de las estrellas fijas, and 187 Ballesteros Beretta, ‘Los joyeros moros de Alfonso el Sabio’, Al-Andalus, 7, no. 2 (1942), 475–7; C. Torres-Fontes Suárez, ‘Los orebçes del rey Alfonso X en Murcia’, in Estudios de platería San Eloy, ed. J. Rivas Carmona (Murcia, 2006), 695–707, at 697. See also M.L. Martín Ansón, ‘La orfebrería ajuar cortesano y ajuar litúrgico’, in Cantigas, Códice rico (2011), ii, 307–38, at 308. The Murcia Repartimiento also records the presence there of a Jewish goldsmith who rented lodgings in the city: Torres-Fontes Suárez, ‘Los orebçes’, 700. 188 Roth, ‘Jewish Collaborators’, 64, rejects the identification of ‘don Juçaf’ in this document with the translator ‘don Xosse’, named as a translator in the Libros del saber de astrología. 189 Diplomatario andaluz, ed. González Jiménez, 38–40 (42) and 175–6 (160). Further documentary evidence for Jewish intellectuals in Seville has been published by Samsó, ‘Sevilla y la obra científica de Alfonso X’, 568–9. On Jews as royal property, see Salvador Martínez, La convivencia, 120–21. The same relationship applied in the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon: J. Hinojosa Montalvo, ‘Jaume I i els Jueus’, in Jaume I i el seu temps 800 anys després. Encontres acadèmics de Castelló, Alacant i València: acts, ed. R. Narbona Vizcaíno (Valencia, 2012), 133–44, at 135. 190 Diplomatario andaluz, ed. González Jiménez, 175 (159).

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Garci Pérez, named in the prologue to the Lapidario, were both canons of Seville cathedral.191 Alfonso’s close relationship with Remondo Losana, the future archbishop of the cathedral, perhaps explains the involvement of these two churchmen in royal projects early in the reign; but evidence for other intellectual activity in the city a decade or so later is also connected exclusively with the figure of the king. Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga, in his 1677 history of Seville, cites lines from a document dated 25 August 1260 which records Alfonso’s request that the Seville cathedral chapter hand over the mosques which he had previously granted them because he wished to use the buildings ‘as quarters for the physicians who have come from North Africa, and so we may have them more closely by and so that they may carry out their teaching in them, to those to whom we have ordered, that they teach them with their great wisdom, because for this we have brought them here’.192 Ortíz de Zúñiga cited the document to demonstrate the continuity of intellectual life in Seville during the 1260s, but more recently scholars have specifically linked the arrival of the physicians with the development of the 1254 studium, and argued they may have been recruited to lecture on the Arabic aspects of the curriculum.193 Yet it is unlikely that these physicians were connected to the activities of the 1254 foundation. Alexander’s description of the institution as a general school for letters suggests that medicine was excluded. Moreover, a key feature of a studium generale was not that all subjects were taught, but that students from all areas and countries could travel there to receive instruction. Although the physicians mentioned in the 1260 document came ‘from North Africa’, they were only to teach a select group of people who had been chosen by Alfonso. That they were to reside, and teach, in deconsecrated mosques may also suggest they were not Muslims. It is also possible that Alfonso’s reputation as a patron of learning has been allowed to overshadow other readings of this snippet of text. 191 Samsó, ‘Sevilla y la obra científica de Alfonso X’, 569–70. 192 Ortíz de Zúñiga, Annales, 90.a.4: ‘dize que pidio el Rey al Arçobispo y Cabildo, unas Mezquitas, de las que les auia dado, para morada (son sus palabras) de los físicos que vinieron de allende, e para tenerlos de mas cerca (porque eran cercanos del Alcaçar) e que en ellas fagan la su enseñança, a los que les auemos mandado, que nos los anseñen con el su grand saber, ca para esso los auemos ende traído. &c.’ For ‘de allende’ as a reference to North Africa, see González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 110. 193 Rashdall, Universities of Europe, ii, 91; G. Menéndez Pidal, ‘Cómo trabajaron las escuelas alfonsíes’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 4 (1951), 363–80, at 367; Márquez Villanueva, Concepto cultural, 158, 167–8, and n. 20; M. González Jiménez, Alfonso X el Sabio 1252–1284, Colección Corona de España, II, Serie Reyes de Castilla y León (Palencia, 1993) 264; O’Callaghan, The Learned King, 133.

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The presence of foreign physicians in the city could also simply reflect the king’s concern for his health and that of his family, and consequently his desire to have access to the widest possible range of medical expertise. Although his reign just post-dates Alfonso’s, a comparison with Jaume II of Aragon (1291–1327) is instructive. Jaume was frequently in correspondence with physicians about his own health and that of those close to him, and throughout his reign constantly sought the supervision and opinion of a range of doctors. Unlike Alfonso, he also attempted to raise the level of medical knowledge in his kingdoms more generally by supporting institutional facilities for training physicians. The studium generale he founded at Lleida in 1300 included a chair of medicine.194 Although Alfonso’s biographers have noted and analysed his declining health from the early 1270s onwards, it is possible that the 1260 document preserved as a quotation in Ortíz de Zúñiga’s history of Seville reveals a long-standing personal interest in the patronage of physicians and medical science for private, family ends. The 1254 foundation of a ‘studium and general schools of Latin and Arabic’ and the 1260 reference to physician-tutors from abroad are evidence of Alfonso’s complex relationship with cultural and intellectual activity in his kingdoms, which he seems to have regarded with a mixture of profound interest and political opportunism. The surviving corpus of Alfonsine manuscripts shows he was intellectually curious, and anxious to expand his knowledge of the arts and sciences at a personal level and for personal reasons. At the same time, however, he used the translations and compilations he commissioned as vehicles to transmit messages about his political and dynastic power, which he aimed at a narrow audience of sophisticated courtly and ecclesiastical readers. In the long term, this choice was to prove partly responsible for a wider trend in thirteenth-century Iberian ideals of kingship which promoted learning as more desireable quality in a ruler than military heroics.195 In order to communicate these messages effectively, Alfonso identified himself firmly with the intellectual process of composition in the prologues to the works he commissioned. The ways in which he is represented in that role – whether as author, sponsor, or enlightened editor – are shaped as much by literary and iconographical conventions of the time as by the reality of his personal involvement. 194 M.R. McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague: practitioners and their patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285–1345 (Cambridge, 1993), c.1 (4–34). 195 M.A. Rodríguez de la Peña, ‘Rex strenuus valde litteratus: strength and wisdom as royal virtues in medieval Spain (1085–1284)’, in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, ed. Bejczy and Nederman, 33–50, at 50.

2.

Alfonso in his Texts: literary models and royal authorship

The importance of Alfonso’s literary patronage as a vehicle to convey his vision of kingship necessarily means he is presented as the central figure in the execution of these works. This raises the question of the extent to which he was personally involved as author in the works he commissioned. Certainly he would have known how to read since, as the second Partida explained, this was an essential royal skill that enabled a king to protect his privacy and increase his knowledge of the laws of God and the deeds of the great in history.1 There is, moreover, evidence to suggest that Alfonso (or those close to him) did use some of the books he commissioned for reference and study purposes. Among the now-lost documents quoted by Seville historian Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga in his Annales is a fragment from one which refers to ‘Suer Melendez, scribe to the king, who draws up tables [of contents] and adds numbers to his books’.2 Suer Melendez’s duties of adding reference apparatus and folio numbers to books would only have been required if the manuscripts were to be consulted for practical, scholarly, purposes.3 Gil de Zamora asserted that Alfonso himself had ‘composed many beautiful story-songs, [rhythmically] measured with agreeable sounds and musical proportions’ in praise of the Virgin, 4 and his assertion has been borne out by close study of the music. Manuel Pedro Ferreira argued recently, and persuasively, that the music and lyrics to at least four cantigas were composed by Alfonso himself.5 The subject-matter of the Cantigas and of some of the secular poems attributed to the king and preserved in fifteenth-century cancioneiros also 1 Partida segunda ii.5.16, in A.G. Solalinde, Antología de Alfonso X el Sabio (Madrid, 1984), 155–6. Cf. John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (c.1159), which stresses the importance of a king acquiring spiritual knowledge by reading or by having works read to him: see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 272. 2 ‘Suer melendez escritor de el rey, e que le faze las tablas, e numeranças de los sus libros’: Annales, 90.a.4. 3 Cf. Charles V’s use of his books in late fourteenth-century France: M.-H. Tesnière, ‘Les deux livres du roi Charles V’, in Une histoire pour un royaume XIIe–XVe siècle. Actes du colloque ‘Corpus Regni’ organisé en hommage à Colette Beaune à l’Université de Paris 10-Nanterre, 20–22 Septembre 2007 (Paris, 2010), 281–98. 4 Fita, ‘Biografías’, 321.21; translation in J.T. Snow, ‘Alfonso as Troubadour: the fact and the fiction’, in Emperor of Culture, 124-40 (127). 5 Ferreira, ‘Alfonso X, compositor’, at 129–30.

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seem to reflect Alfonso’s inner feelings and emotional states.6 But other passages which, at a remove of just over seven centuries, seem to reflect the king’s intimate self in fact reveal, on closer examination, the imprint of a literary exemplar. Such a debt is to be expected during a period when behind every book lurked an model for a scribe to copy.7 Joseph Snow has argued that a group of more than 300 cantigas written in the first person singular share so many stylistic features that they could not have been composed by the king, but instead must be the product of a team of royal collaborators who wrote according to a set of rhetorical guidelines (albeit ones established by the king himself).8 Another poem incorporates phrases from the preamble to the foundation charter of the recently conquered Puerto de Santa María.9 Elsewhere, apparently reliable accounts have been manipulated, as Connie Scarborough showed in the case of cantiga 169, which records a miracle that took place in the town of Murcia. In this poem, the chronology and participants in what the cantiga claims is an eye-witness account by Alfonso himself have in fact been carefully adapted to present the king as the future conqueror of Morocco.10 The challenge of disentangling personal reminiscence from a quotation is a difficult one. As scholars of Arabic literature have demonstrated in another context, anecdotes in Christian chronicles which seem vividly personal in fact derive from earlier sources. In his Llibre, Jaume I described how a swallow nested on top of his campaign tent, and how he refused to allow the tent to be dismantled until the bird had raised its young. Yet the incident has an exact parallel in the actions of ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, who conquered Egypt.11 The compilers of the Alfonsine chronicles drew on a wide range of sources, and the manuscripts that contained these would in turn have had their own 6 For example Scarborough’s comment that cantiga 209 ‘resonates with authenticity as the poet describes his affliction’: C.L. Scarborough, A Holy Alliance: Alfonso X’s political use of Marian poetry (Newark, de, 2009), 145; Doubleday, The Wise King, 178–9. 7 C. de Hamel, Medieval Craftsmen: scribes and illuminators (London, 1992), 34. 8 J.T. Snow, ‘El yo anónimo y las Cantigas de Santa Maria de Alfonso X’, Alcanate 6 (2008–2009), 309–22. 9 V. Beltrán, ‘Tipos y temas trovadorescos. V. Para la datación de las Cantigas alfonsíes: el ciclo del Puerto de Santa María’, Revista de Literatura Medieval, 2 (1990), 165–73; J. Montoya Martínez, ‘La carta fundacional del Puerto de Santa María y las Cantigas de Santa María’, Bulletin of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, 6 (1994), 99–114. 10 C.L. Scarborough, ‘La voz personal de Alfonso X en una Cantiga murciana’, Alcanate, 6 (2008–2009), 297–308. 11 S.G. Armistead, ‘An Anecdote of King Jaume I and its Arabic Congener’, in King’s College London Medieval Studies III. Cultures in Contact in Medieval Spain: historical and literary essays presented to L.P. Harvey, ed. D. Hook and B. Taylor (London, 1990), 1–8.

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marginal glosses and commentaries. As such, the task of attributing any phrase or observation to Alfonso himself becomes an uncertain one indeed.12 The myriad textual sources to which the Alfonsine compilers had access makes identification of a distinct royal voice even more difficult in the prose works that, unlike the Cantigas, are not obviously inspired by the king’s personal spirituality. However, a passage in the first part of the General estoria has seemed to scholars to offer an instance of Alfonso addressing his readers personally to define his role as someone who was at once involved as intellectual author and a more distant patron of the works which bear his name. The passage was first cited by Antonio García Solalinde as evidence that Alfonso was personally involved at two stages during the preparation of his works: he supervised their composition at the start, and corrected them when they were finished.13 Regarding the redaction of these words, you have heard in the beginning of this chapter how Our Lord stated that he would write them; and here he states in the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus that he ordered Moses to write them; and you also will have heard in the book called Deuteronomy […] that says Our Lord himself wrote them. And it seems that these statements are contradictory. Concerning this contradiction Master Peter speaks and explains thus: he says that all is correct, and that we can understand and say that Our Lord composed the content of the Commandments, and that he had authorship and credit therefrom, because he ordered them to be written, although Moses wrote them; thus we have said many times: a king makes a book, not because he wrote it with his own hands, but because he composes its arguments, and emends them, and makes them uniform, and rectifies them, and shows the way they should be done, and thus he whom he [the king] orders writes them, but we say for this reason that the king makes the book. Also, when we say the king makes a palace or some work, this is not said because he himself makes it with his hands, rather because he ordered it made and provided the things necessary for it. And he who does this, that person receives the credit for doing the work; and we thus, I see, are accustomed to speak.14 12 See the comments by the editor in General estoria, ed. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, ‘Introducción’, i, xliii, and P. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, ‘La General estoria como obra de traducción (a propósito de GE3 Sab.)’, in Actas del III congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval (Salamanca, 3 al 6 de octubre de 1989), ed. M.I. Toro Pascua, 2 vols (Salamanca, 1994), ii, 923–31. 13 Solalinde, ‘Intervención’, 287. 14 ‘Dell escriuir destas palabras auedes oydo enel començamiento deste capitulo, como dixo Nuestro Sennor que el las escriuirie; e aquí dize en el XXXIIIIo capitulo dell Exodo que las

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Scholars studying these lines after Solalinde have observed that the passage reflects a theory of authorship, widespread during this period and later, which distinguished the act of intellectual composition from the physical task of writing.15 The origins of the definition lay in attempts by exegetes to untangle the question of authorship in the Bible, although the separation between intellectual and physical labour was also made by Ancient Greek writers, who placed the role of the intellectual above that of the maker responsible for the material execution of a piece.16 Indeed, these lines in the General estoria are a gloss on a translation of an account and commentary in a work of biblical history, the Historia scholastica, compiled by Peter Comestor, chancellor of Notre-Dame, Paris between 1168 and 1178. The work was already in wide circulation by 1173 and it continued to be a much-copied text in the thirteenth century. The Comestor has briefly explained how God can be considered author of the Ten Commandments, even though Moses wrote them out: ‘It can be said that the authority for writing belonged mando escriuir a Moysen; e auredes otrossi enel libro que a nombre Deuteronomio […] que diz que Nuestro Sennor que el mismo las escriuio. E ssemeia que son contrallas estas razones. E sobresta contralla fabla maestre Pedro e departe desta guisa: Diz que todo es bien dicho, et que podemos entender e dezir que compuso Nuestro Sennor las razones delos mandados, e que ouo ell auctoridad e el nombre dend, por que las mando escriuir, mas que las escriuio Moysen; assi como dixiemos nos muchas uezes: el rey faze un libro non por quel él escriva con sus manos, mas porque compone las razones d’él e las emienda e yegua e endereça e muestra la manera de cómo se deven fazer, e desí escrívelas qui él manda, peró dezimos por esta razón que el rey faze el libro. Otrossi quando dezimos el rey faze un palacio o alguna obra, non es dicho por quelo el fiziesse con sus manos, mas por quel mando fazer e dio las cosas que fueron mester para ello. E qui esto cumple, aquel a nombre que faze la obra, e nos assi ueo que usamos de lo dezir’: General estoria, i.16.14, Madrid 816, fol. 215r, and General estoria, ed. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, ii, 393. English translation in Cárdenas, ‘Alfonso’s Scriptorium and Chancery’, 92; Solalinde, ‘Intervención’, 285–6. 15 See most notably Montoya Martínez, ‘El concepto de autor en Alfonso X’ (at 461–2) and idem, La norma retórica en tiempo de Alfonso X (estudio y antología de textos) (Granada, 1994), 124–5. Cf. Henry of Ghent’s definition of an author as the person who contributed intellectually to a work, rather than writing it out, in his 1279 Summa quaestionum ordinariam theologi (Paris, 1520), i.9.2, at fol. 71r; A.J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: scholastic literary attitudes in the later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Aldershot, 1988), 81–2. For writing as an activity that required no intellectual effort, see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, at 230. The view was still current in the f ifteenth century: K. Whinnom, ‘Autor and tratado in the Fifteenth Century: semantic latinism or etymological trap?’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 59 (1982), 211–18, at 214. 16 A.J. Minnis, ‘Discussions of “Authorial Role” and “Literary Form” in Late-Medieval Scriptural Exegesis’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 99 (1977), 37–65. Cf. C. Álvar, ‘Alfonso X: autoría, traductores y formas de trabajo’, in Murcia 2009, 216–20 (216–17), who suggests Alfonso’s name resembles a label or brand that stands for the numerous authors who worked at his behest.

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to the Lord, the execution to Moses’.17 The glosses on authorship offered at this juncture in the General estoria add a royal, secular dimension to this distinction between the intellectual author of a work and the person responsible for its material execution which would not have been startling to a medieval reader. The implied comparison between authorship and construction used by the Alfonsine compilers was also a familiar one in the medieval literary repertoire: the imagery of building was often associated with, or used as a metaphor for, the act of composing a text or embarking on intellectual activity.18 By glossing a discussion about the authorship of the Ten Commandments with a reference to Alfonso, the compilers draw a parallel between divine and royal authorship, and thereby imply the truth and authority of the whole royally sponsored chronicle.19 Yet while these glosses drew on familiar imagery to expand upon a standard division of intellectual and practical labour in the context of divine and royal authorship, it is the abrupt change from the use of the third person voice to first person in the final line of the section (‘and we thus, I see, are accustomed to speak’) which gives the impression that Alfonso has dictated the words himself.20 However, this use of the first person singular in the General estoria I is arguably an interpolation by a copyist who reflects on his own role in writing out Alfonso’s chronicle. The materials (parchment, ruling ink), certain palaeographical features (type of catchwords, ruling patterns, absence of significant erasures in the text), and choice of running titles suggest this manuscript was not copied for presentation to the king 17 ‘Potest dici quod auctoritas scribendi fuit in Domino, ministerium in Moyse’: PL, vol. 198, cols 1053–22 (1192). 18 For a similar description of the activities of Abbot Oliba (d. 1046), patron of Romanesque architecture at the monastery of Cuixà, see F. Rico, Alfonso X y la “General estoria”: tres lecciones, 2nd edn (Barcelona, 1984), at 202. For building metaphors and intellectual activity, see M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: a study of memory in medieval culture, 4th edn (Cambridge, 1994), 43; on the imagery of building more generally, see D. Cowling, Building the Text: architecture as metaphor in late medieval and early modern France (Oxford, 1998). 19 Rico, Alfonso X y la “General estoria”, 98 and n. 2, and see the comments on the moral judgements reflected in the glosses in Alfonsine works in Rodríguez-Velasco, ‘Theorizing’, 83. Cf. the Cantigas, where the presence of Alfonso the author-king is reinforced in the second poem of the compilation by a composition that features his author-saint namesake, Hildefonsus of Toledo: J.T. Snow, ‘Alfonso y/en sus Cantigas’, in Estudios alfonsíes. Lexicografía, lírica, estética y política de Alfonso el Sabio ed. J. Mondéjar and J. Montoya Martínez (Granada, 1995), 71–90. 20 Menéndez Pidal, ‘Cómo trabajaron las escuelas alfonsíes’; Montoya Martínez, ‘El concepto de “autor” en Alfonso X’; Rico, Alfonso X y la “General estoria”; Cano Aguilar, ‘Prólogos’, 79–90; A.J. Cárdenas, ‘Alfonso’s Scriptorium and Chancery: Role of the Prologue in Bonding the Translatio Studii to the Translatio Potestatis’, in Emperor of Culture, 90–108 (92); Schaffer, ‘Questions of Authorship’, 17–30.

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(see Chapter five). Scribes sometimes changed their exemplars to clarify their text in the light of their own understanding, or made changes when the information in the text no longer applied.21 They were also sensitive to the distinction between intellectual composition and the physical task of writing. Between 1236 and 1259, the St Albans monk and historian Matthew Paris was responsible for writing out most of the text of his Chronica Majora in what is now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 16, and in a passage in his hand he correctly identifies himself as ‘scriptor huius libri’. However, the anonymous thirteenth-century St Albans scribe who copied out the Chronica text in London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.v, changed Paris’s reference to himself as ‘the writer of this book’ (‘scriptor huius libri’) to ‘the compiler of this book’ (‘huius libri confector’).22 The change reflected the fact that while Matthew Paris was still the author, he was no longer the scribe as well. Similarly, the words ‘I see’ in the concluding line ‘we thus, I see, are accustomed to speak’ in the Alfonsine chronicle also suggest the intervention of a copyist who wished to stress a familiar difference between the person who physically writes out a text and the person who ‘makes’ (i.e. composes or sponsors) the work. The use of the first person singular within the chronicle here also seems anomalous when compared with a passage in the Estoria de Espanna that is likewise cited to argue for Alfonso’s personal intervention in the composition of his works. At one point in the Estoria de Espanna, the compilers interrupt their source text (Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada’s De rebus Hispanie) to include an observation about Alfonso’s ties with the emperors of Byzantium:

21 E. Kennedy, ‘The Scribe as Editor’, in Mélanges de langue et de littérature du moyen âge et de la Renaissance offerts à Jean Frappier, Publications Romanes et Françaises, 112 (Geneva, 1970), i, 523–31, at 529–31. 22 Cotton MS Nero D.v, fol. 384v. See R. Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge, 1958), 35, and idem, ‘The Handwriting of Matthew Paris’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1, no. 5 (1953), 376–94 (392 [entry 16]) for the passage in the Nero manuscript and its modern description. The change from ‘scriptor’ to ‘confector’ in Cotton MS Nero D.v was noted by the nineteenth-century editor of the work: M. Parisiensis, Historia anglorum, sive, ut vulgo dicitur, Historia minor, item ejusdem Abbreviatio chronicorum Angliae, ed. F. Madden, 3 vols (London, 1866–69), i, at lxiv. Vaughan states the scribe changes another phrase in the same manuscript from ‘huius paginae scriptori’ to ‘huius paginae compositori’ (Matthew Paris, 35) in an account of a 1257 speech to Matthew Paris by the bishop of Bangor, but I have been unable to locate this in Cotton MS Nero D.v. For a description of Cambridge Corpus Christi MS 16, see The Cambridge Illuminations: ten centuries of book production in the medieval west, ed. P. Binski and S. Panayotova. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (London/ Turnhout, 2005), no. 114.

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That Don Baldovín and his wife Doña María were acclaimed lords of the empire of Constantinople. And the archbishop [i.e. Jiménez de Rada] says here: ‘God keep their estate’, and we say: ‘amen’, for we are under obligation to do so.23

‘María’ was Marie de Brienne, daughter of Fernando III’s sister, Berenguela, and hence first cousin to Alfonso. Marie arrived at Alfonso’s court in 1266 to negotiate the marriage of her son Philip to Alfonso’s daughter Berenguela. (Pope Celestine IV refused to waive the laws of consanguinity and the marriage never took place, although Alfonso was still attempting to arrange the match in 1281, the year Berenguela died.) ‘Don Baldovín’ was Baldwin II, Emperor of Constantinople, forced into exile in 1261 by Michael Paleologus, the Emperor Michael VIII (r. 1259–1282).24 This use of the royal authorial voice at a specific point in the text to underline aspects of royal authority is unsurprising in a work which is, essentially, an instrument of royal propaganda. The passages quoted above fit perfectly within the ideological scheme of the chronicle, and surely reflect Alfonso’s personal beliefs. Significantly for a section which refers very specifically to the king’s dynastic and political affairs, however, the narrative voice remains in the third person plural. Scholars have also mined the prologues to Alfonsine works for information about royal authorship and the workings of his scriptorium, mindful however of the gap between the account which these offer of those involved in the composition of a text and the probable reality. On one occasion, this reality is exposed by marginal annotations in the manuscripts themselves. Gerold Hilty, editor of the Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, observed that although the prologue names only the Jewish scholar Yehuda as the translator, notes in the margin of the earliest copy of the translation refer to ‘translators’ and an ‘emendator’ as well.25 Exceptionally, two marginal notes in the Cantigas códice de los músicos (Escorial MS b.I.2) refer by name (rather than by role) to someone who must have been involved in the production of the work. 23 Primera Crónica General, ii, 677–8 (c.997, ‘Del regnado del noueno Don Alffonsso Rey de Leon, Nieto dell Emperador. Et Regno xxxi del Rey don Pelayo’). The first person to cite this passage as a sign of Alfonso’s personal intervention was Ballesteros Beretta, Alfonso X, 502; so too does Rico, Alfonso X, 114, n. 26. 24 For Marie de Brienne, see Crónica de Alfonso X, 48 and n. 56; E.B. Ruano, ‘Huéspedes del Imperio de Oriente en la corte de Alfonso X el Sabio’, in Estudios dedicados a Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1956), iv, 631–45; R.L. Wolff, ‘Mortgage and Redemption of an Emperor’s Son: Castile and the Latin Empire of Constantinople’, Speculum, 29, no. 1 (1954), 45–84. 25 El libro conplido, ed. Hilty, xxxix–xl.

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Frustratingly, however, the precise nature of his contribution may never be determined. The name ‘Arias nunez’ (or ‘Aras nunez’ as it appears the second time) in a small, semi-cursive, thirteenth-century hand appears beside the start of two different poems, 63 folios apart.26 Walter Mettmann, who between 1959 and 1972 published what is still the standard edition of the poems, associated the name in these notes with Arias Nunes, a cleric and cancionero poet of the period, and identified him as the overall composer and architect of the Cantigas.27 Thus, the marginalia would have been an instruction to the copyist to insert a poem by Nunes into the sequence. Others, though, have argued that ‘Arias nunez’ was a music scribe, since on both occasions the note is written beside the stave which accompanies the opening stanza of the poem.28 While the music has been copied at the first appearance of the name, the stave by the second remains blank. Suggestive though this is, the marginal instructions still visible elsewhere in the manuscript do not include names, but instead quote the opening words of a poem to be copied or, in one instance, the opening bar of music.29 No further evidence has emerged to clarify the purpose of these annotations since Mettmann noticed them more than forty years ago, however, and more recently scholars have been forced to conclude that further conjecture about their significance is vain.30 These glimpses of other contributors confirm that the prologues present carefully constructed images of the king as literary patron, each tailored to justify Alfonso’s association with different types of text that range from the legal to the astrological to the devotional. The accounts of the composition process, and reference to those who participate in it, differ significantly from prologue to prologue in the description of the scholars involved. While 26 Escorial MS b.I.2, fols 204r and 267r. 27 W. Mettmann, Alfonso X, o Sábio, Cantigas de Santa María, 4 vols (Coimbra, 1959-1972); Mettmann, ‘Arias Nunes, Mitautor der Cantigas de Santa María’, Ibero-romania 3 (1971), 8–10 and idem, ‘Algunas observaciones sobre la génesis de la colección de las Cantigas de Santa María y sobre el problema del autor’, in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa María: art, music, and poetry: proceedings of the international symposium on the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X, el Sabio (1221–1284) in commemoration of its 700th anniversary year – 1981 (New York, November 19–21), ed. I.J. Katz and J.E. Keller (Madison, wi, 1987), 355–66, at 365. For Arias Nunes the cancioneiro poet, see A lírica galego-portuguesa (textos escolhidos), ed. E. Gonçalves and M.A. Ramos, 3 rd edn (Lisbon, 1991), 309–12, at 311. 28 S. Parkinson, ‘Second Thoughts about Arias Nunez’, unpublished paper delivered to the Joint Spanish and Portuguese Graduate Seminar, Oxford, Hilary Term, 1995. 29 For example fol. 108v, in the margin by the binding, is the partly erased text of the poem incipit and, below, two parallel red lines which may have contained the opening bar of music. 30 M.E. Schaffer, ‘Questions of Authorship’, 23; Snow, ‘El yo anónimo’, 313 and n. 7.

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there is no reason to doubt the involvement of the translators and scholars who are named in the prologues to the translations of astronomical and astrological treatises, on the other hand literary texts such as the chronicles and the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which also required translators, compilers, editors and writers, name only the king as their author and sponsor. In the wider context of thirteenth-century literary conventions, this is to be expected; but it also anticipates the disappearance of most references to sources which is a characteristic of the Alfonsine prose works, a silence which represents a deliberate decision to present the king as the sole fount of authoritative knowledge in his kingdom.31 That said, Alfonso’s royal relations also engaged in literary patronage (though to a lesser extent), and a comparison of the prologues to all these works shows that the imagery and ideology of the Alfonsine ones share a number of tropes also present in works written by his contemporaries. There were various literary role models available to Alfonso in the circle of his own family. His father, Fernando III, ordered the compilation of a speculum regis, the Libro de los doze sabios (also known as the Tractado de la nobleza y lealtad), and encouraged Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo, to write his chronicle of Spain, De rebus Hispanie, which was to become an important source for many later chroniclers, including those who worked for Alfonso.32 The Emperor Frederick II, grandfather of Alfonso’s mother, compiled a series of laws in 1231, the Liber augustales or Constitutiones Regni Siciliae, tum Melfienses, and in 1241 he patronized a Latin translation of an Arabic treatise on the art of hunting. Frederick returned to this subject some years later with the compilation of De arte venandi cum avibus, the work for which he is most famous and which his son Manfred completed after his father’s death.33 Manfred also comissioned the translation from Hebrew to Latin of a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, the Liber de pomo, as well as translations of astronomical texts. Jaume I of Aragon, Alfonso’s father-in-law, is remarkable in that he wrote his own biography, the Llibre del Rei en Jaume, though this work arguably owes as much to contemporary 31 Rodríguez-Velasco, ‘Theorizing’, 83. 32 El “Libro de los doze sabios” o “Tractado de la nobleza y lealtad”, ed. J.K. Walsh, Supplement to the Boletín de la Real Academia Española, 29 (1975). For the composition of the De rebus Hispanie, see Linehan, History and the Historians, c.11–12. 33 There are no surviving manuscripts of the De arte venandi dateable to Fredrick’s reign. The earliest manuscript, from the mid-thirteenth century, is Vatican City, BAV, MS Pal. Lat. 1071, which contains only the first two books together with Manfred’s continuation. For the manuscript history of the work, see C.H. Haskins, ‘The De Arte Venandi cum Avibus of the Emperor Frederick II’, EHR, 36 (1921), 334–55.

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literary fashions for crusading literature as to a faithful record of personal history.34 Jaume may have penned a manual for princely behaviour as well, although there are also arguments to suggest that the Llibre de Doctrina was the work of his son, Jaume II.35 There are broad similarities in the ways in which these kings are presented.36 Frederick, James, Manfred, and Alfonso all recover forgotten knowledge, educate their subjects, and inspire learning. Alternatively, they are learned monarchs who read, re-read, and correct the works they commission.37 They are also rulers who explicitly remember the cultural labours of their predecessors. Manfred recalls the patronage of his father, Frederick; in the Estoria de Espanna, Alfonso acknowledges the debt his work owes to ‘the chronicle of Archbishop Don Rodrigo which he wrote by order of King Fernando our father’, and cites the archbishop’s work first in his list of sources.38 Strikingly, though, only three of these prologues draw a comparison between the learned thirteenth-century patron and Solomon, the wise king par excellence of the Old Testament. One of these comparisons appears in the Llibre de doctrina, which opens with a quotation from Ecclesiastes and the king’s promise to emulate Solomon’s quest for precious knowledge.39 This is a didactic treatise on princely conduct, written in Catalan, which despite its Christian framework incorporates translations of two Arabic works. 40 The other two references to Solomon are both in Alfonsine texts, and the comparison between the two rulers is more complex. The Libro de las cruzes, translated in 1259, is a treatise on astrology which focuses on the predictions which most affect a king and his kingdom that can be read in the stars. 41 It also includes an additional chapter (c.59) which refers particularly to astrological predictions relating 34 J. Aurell, Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (Chicago/London, 2012), 42. 35 For Jaume’s authorship, see Pujol, ‘Llibre del rei En Jaume’, 35–65. On Jaume’s supposed authorship of a manual for princes, see El ‘Llibre de doctrina’ del rei Jaume d’Aragó, ed. J.M. Solà-Solé (Barcelona, 1977), 12–17, but also the arguments for Jaume II as author in B. Taylor, ‘Old Spanish Wisdom Texts: some relationships’, La corónica, 14, no. 1 (1985), 71–85, at 74. 36 For a more detailed treatment of the subject, see K. Kennedy, ‘The Sabio-Topos: prologues of Alfonso X in the context of his thirteenth-century royal contemporaries’, in Proceedings of the Ninth Colloquium, ed. A.M. Beresford and A. Deyermond (London, 2000), 175–90. 37 For Frederick see Haskins, ‘De Arte Venandi’, 341; for Manfred see Aristotelis qui ferebatur ‘Liber de Pomo’: versio latina Manfredi, ed. M. Plezia (Warsaw, 1960), 22–3. 38 Primera crónica general, i, 2: ‘la cronica dell Arçobispo don Rodrigo que fizo por mandado del rey don Ffernando nuestro padre’. 39 Madrid, MS 921: El Llibre de doctrina, ed. Solà-Solé, 41–2. 40 For the Arabic sources, see El Llibre de doctrina, ed. Solà-Solé, 21. 41 See the comments in Libro de las cruzes, ed. Kasten and Kiddle, x.

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to Spain. The other Alfonsine text to mention Solomon is the Liber Razielis, a compilation of treatises on magic which has survived in two Latin copies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but which can be dated to around 1259 because of the identity of the translator, ‘Johannes clericus’. In all probability he is Juan d’Aspa, who helped translate the Libro de las cruzes. 42 The structure and content of both prologues evoke a tradition of Solomonic literature embodied in a compilation of magic texts known as the Ars notoria, in which Solomon receives a series of revelations from an angel. The Ars circulated widely in Europe from the twelfth century and dissemination of the work reached a peak in the fourteenth century, but not one of the 36 surviving manuscripts dateable to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries originated in Spain.43 The Alfonsine translators presumably had access to a now-lost copy of the work; however they were also at least partly inspired by the Bible. The Solomonic theme which underlies the prologue to the Libro de las cruzes derives, almost word for word, from verses in the Old Testament. In the Bible, Solomon is a king to whom ‘God gave wisdom […] and much wisdom without limit […]. And the wisdom of Solomon exceeded all the learning of the peoples of the Orient and of the Egyptians, and he was wiser than all men’. In the Libro de las cruzes, Alfonso is a king ‘in whom God placed learning, and understanding and knowledge above all the princes of his time’.44 And were this comparison not sufficiently clear, the author of the prologue also explains that ‘this our aforementioned Lord, […] resembling Solomon in seeking and explaining learning, […] found the Libro de las cruzes which the learned ancients made, which Oueydalla the sage made clear’. 45 A similar image of Alfonso appears in the prologue to the Liber Razielis, in which the grace of God enables the king of Castile to assume Solomon’s role of reuniting, preserving, and disseminating forgotten learning: When God was pleased that this book [Liber Razielis], so sacred, should be bestowed upon King Solomon, son of King David, who was in learning such a noble and perfect king […] and when this same [king] saw this book […] he made and compiled one volume from all seven [books]. And thus may His [i.e. God’s] sacred name be praised because he deigned to give us in our 42 See Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 44 and 40–2 for a partial transcription of the prologue to the Liber Razielis. For the Liber Razielis in the context of other Alfonsine translations, see García Avilés, ‘Alfonso X y el Liber Razielis’, 21–39. 43 J. Véronèse, L’Ars notoria au Moyen Âge. Introduction et édition critique (Florence, 2007), 21 and 16–17. 44 3 Kings 4: 29–31 (Latin Vulgate version); Libro de las cruzes, ed. Kasten and Kiddle, 1. 45 Libro de las cruzes, ed. Kasten and Kiddle, 1.

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time on earth a lord of justice, who knows goodness and moderation, and who is pious and a seeker of knowledge and a lover of philosophy and all the other sciences. And this is Lord Alfonso […]. Thus the abovementioned Lord our King, when such a noble and valuable book reached his hands as is the çeffer Raziel […] he ordered that this be translated and written in a worthy and perfect fashion in the Castilian language. 46

Significantly, Solomonic allusions are absent from the version of the Liber Razielis not associated with Alfonsine patronage, which also circulated in Europe during this period.47 Once more, it appears that Alfonso’s translators have adjusted the image of their patron to suit the text he commissioned. In the case of the Liber Razielis, they have also engaged in some literary recycling. Not only does the prologue contain echoes of the Bible, but a number of rhetorical elements also appear to derive from an earlier Alfonsine translation, the 1254 Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas. The exhortation in the Liber Razielis that the reader should praise the sacred name of God because He caused such a good and learned ruler to be placed on earth is very similar to the opening of the Libro conplido, in which the translator proclaims: Let us render praise and thanks to God the true, omnipotent, father, who in this our time deigned to give us a lord on earth who knows right and all good, a lover of the truth, student of learning, investigator of doctrines and of teachings. 48

There are other passages where the text of the Liber Razielis prologue and that of the Libro conplido coincide. In the Libro conplido, Alfonso is a king ‘who as long as he was in this world loved and brought to him the sciences and those learned in them, and illuminated and filled the great lack that there was among the Latins because of the disappearance of the books of good and tested philosophers’. The Alfonso of the Liber Razielis busied himself in a similar way with equal vigour: ‘He always worked to support justice and to exalt, illuminate and perfect, or remedy the great defects and ignorance of those things indicated by the learned men and prophets who appear in our time’. 49 According to the Libro conplido, Alfonso ‘loves 46 My translation; for the Latin text, see Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 41–2. 47 S. Page, ‘Magic and the Pursuit of Wisdom: the “familiar” spirit in the Liber Theysolius’, La corónica, 36, no. 1 (2007), 41–70, at 42–3. 48 El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 3. 49 Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 41.

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and gathers around him learned men and those whose business is learning, and he supports and patronizes them, so that each one of them works to clarify the learning in which he is versed, and to turn this into the Castilian language’. In the Liber Razielis, he ‘placed next to his side the books of the philosophers and of wise men who understood much about them, granting them favours and patronage. And they always translated on his orders the best and most complete books […] turning them into the Castilian language’.50 Perhaps it is unsurprising that a group of translators who shared the same patron should borrow phrases from one another when praising that patron. Interestingly, Alfonso is only presented as a new Solomon in texts that are astrological or magical. The compilers of the General estoria make no reference to their king when they describe Solomon as the first magician; nor do they allude to Alfonso when translating devotional verse attributed to Solomon, the Song of Songs.51 On the other hand, the prologues to other scientific works, in which the translators describe the progress of their work or in which Alfonso addresses the reader directly, have an immediacy which has suggested to some scholars that the information they contain reflects the way in which the work was actually composed. Yet these prologues also conform to the literary conventions of this type of text. Readers needed to be reassured of the intellectual value of an unfamiliar work on a scientific subject, and translators and compilers could provide that reassurance by stressing the care with which they had worked on their text or by detailing the work’s provenance. In the early twelfth century Petrus Alfonsi ( fl. 1106–1126) – scholar, translator, and Jewish convert to Christianity – expressed in his preface to a book of tables for chronological calculations his wish ‘to share in amenable Latin the work which with great effort and study I have translated from the Arabs, Persians, and Egyptians’.52 On the other hand, when the Alfonsine translators are obliged to supply the intellectual authority for a treatise, they stress not their own skills but the involvment of their royal patron. This occurs frequently in the 50 Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 3; Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 41. 51 General estoria. Primera parte, ed. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, “Introducción”, i, xliv. 52 Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 283, cited in Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science, 117–18 (my translation). On Petrus Alfonsi himself, see C. Burnett, ‘Alfonsi, Petrus (fl. 1106–1126)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004): www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/39101 [accessed 1 April 2017]. On the rhetorical strategies used in scientific prologues, see W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: books of secrets in medieval and early modern culture (Princeton, nj, 1994), 21; J.-P. Boudet and J. Véronèse, ‘Le secret dans la magie rituelle médiévale’, Il Segreto, Micrologus. Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali, 14 (2006), 101–50.

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Libros del saber de astrología, where treatises compiled from a patchwork of different sources and others which appear to have been composed from scratch all derive their intellectual authority from prologues couched in the royal voice.53 The prologue to the first treatise in the compilation, the Libro de las figuras de las estrellas fixas (‘The Book of the Constellations of Fixed Stars’), claims this was a work translated from ‘Chaldean and Arabic’ sources; but these are not identified, and instead the translators take pains to describe their own working methods.54 They include their own names, the dates on which they carried out the translation, and, in order to guarantee the reliability of their work, they present Alfonso himself as the editor of the finished text. They do so with good reason: two groups of Alfonsine translators, apparently working independently, have completely recast and expanded their original source (a work by the renowned tenth-century Persian astronomer al-Ṣūfī) so as to render it practically unrecognizeable.55 In the name of God, amen. This is the book of the constellations of the fixed stars which are in the eighth sky, which King Alfonso, son of the very noble King Fernando and the noble Queen Beatriz … ordered to be translated from Chaldean and Arabic into the Castilian language. And Yhuda el Coheneso, his physician, and Guillen Arremón d’Aspa, his cleric, 53 For the sources used in the Libros del saber de astrología, see: R. Martí and M. Viladrich, ‘En torno a los tratados hispánicos sobre construcción de astrolabio hasta el siglo XIII’, in Textos y estudios sobre astronomía española en el siglo XIII, ed. J. Vernet (Barcelona, 1981), 79–99; E. Calvo, ‘La lámina universal de Alī b. Jalaf (s. XI) en la versión alfonsí y su evolución en instrumentos posteriores’, in Ochaua espera y astrofísica. Textos y estudios sobre las fuentes árabes de la astronomía de Alfonso X, ed. M. Comes, H. Mielgo, and J. Samsó (Barcelona, 1990), 221–38; R. Puig Aguilar, Los tratados de construcción y uso de la azafea de Azarquiel (Madrid, 1987); M. Comes, ‘Los ecuatorios andalusíes’, in El legado científico andalusí. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid (Madrid, 1992), 75-87. 54 The treatise does not survive in the thirteenth-century Alfonsine manuscript but in an Italian translation dated 1341 and as a sixteenth-century copy of the Spanish original. See A.J. Cárdenas, ‘The Complete Libro del saber de astrología and Codex Vat. lat. 8174’, Manuscripta, 25 (1981), 14–22. For an edition of the Italian translation see P. Knecht, I Libri Astronomici di Alfonso X in una versione fiorentina del trecento. Tesi di laurea presentata alla facoltà di lettere dell’università di Zurigo (Zaragoza, 1965). The later Spanish copy is in Madrid, MS 1197: see Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 266–8. For the scattered sources of the ‘Libro de las figuras de las estrellas fixas que son en el ochavo cielo’ see M. Comes, ‘Al-Sufi como fuente del Libro de la Ochaua Espera de Alfonso X’, in Ochaua espera y astrofísica, 11–114; see also Comes, ‘El Libro de las estrellas de la ochaua espera alfonsí ¿traducción del Kitāb suwākib de al-Sūfī?’, in Congreso internacional del primer centenario de Taha Husayn (1889–1989), Special Issue, Revista del Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islámicos, 25 (1991–1992), 135–52. 55 J. Samsó, ‘Las traducciones astronómicas alfonsíes y la aparición de una prosa científica castellana’, Alcanate, 6 (2008–2009), 39–51 (43).

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translated it on his orders. And this was done in the fourth year that this aforementioned king reigned, one thousand and two hundred and ninety four years in the era of Cesar.  And then this above-mentioned King rectified it and ordered it to be brought together, and removed phrases which he understood were superfluous, and repetitive, and which were not in correct Spanish, and put in others which he understood were appropriate; and as for the language he corrected it himself. And regarding the other disciplines he had as compilers master Joan de Mesina, and master Joan de Cremona, and the above-mentioned Yhuda, and Samuel. And this was done in the xxx year of his reign, and the Era of Caesar was at m. and ccc. and xiii years, and that of our Lord Jesus Christ at m. and cc. and lxx, and vi years.56

This reference to Alfonso has occasioned much scholarly debate over his personal involvement in the work; but as this is a treatise which required 56 My translation. ‘En el nombre de Dios. amen. Este es el libro de las figuras de las estrellas f ixas que son en el ochauo cielo. que mando trasladar de caldeo et de arábigo en lenguaje castellano el Rey D. Alfonso. fijo del muy noble Rey Don Fernando. et de la noble Reyna Donna Beatryz … et trasladólo por su mandado Yhuda el Coheneso. su alphaquin. et Guillen Arremon Daspa so clérigo. Et fue fecho en el quarto anno que reynó este Rey sobredicho. que andaua la era de Cesar en mil dozientos et nouenta et quatro annos. Et despues lo endreço. et lo mandó componer este Rey sobredicho. et tolló las razones que entendió eran sobejanas, et dobladas et que non eran en castellano drecho, et puso las otras que entendió que complian. et quanto en el language endreçólo él por si. Et en los otros sabers ouo por ayuntadores á maestre Joan de Mesina et á maestre Joan de Cremona. et a Yhuda el sobredicho. et a Samuel; et esto fue fecho en el anno XXX de su reynado. et andaua la era de Cesar en M. et CCC. et CCC. et. XIIII. annos et la de nuestro Sennor Jesu Xpo. en M. et CC. et LXX. et. VI annos’. Transcription in Libros del saber de astronomía, i (1863), 7–8 and reprinted in Antología de Alfonso X el Sabio, ed. A.G. Solalinde, 8th edn (Madrid, 1984), 180. Isidore of Seville (Etymologiarum sive originvm, libri XX, ed. W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford, 1911), i, v.36.4) set the start of the ‘Era of Caesar’ at 38 BC, or the year Augustus carried out the first Roman census, though later historians have argued this in fact took place in 7 or 4 BC. A date given in Isidore’s definition of the ‘Era of Caesar’ can be easily converted to the Christian one by subtracting 38 years. From the sixth century onwards, Isidore’s ‘Era of Caesar’ was adopted as a peculiarly Hispanic form of dating in documents issued in the kingdom of Asturias, and it spread down the Peninsula to Castile and León. Its specific significance for Spain is obscure: it may have been connected to the date of the Roman conquest of the Peninsula; alternatively, it may have referred to the Emperor Diocletian’s restoration of dating by current consuls, which Christian writers adopted as a calendar of martyrs. The ‘Era’ as a system of dating persisted in Castile until the late f ifteenth century. See J. Domínguez Aparicio, ‘La datación cronológica’, in Introducción a la paleografía y la diplomática general, ed. Á. Riesco Terrero (Madrid, 2000), 285–301, at 291; R.I. Burns, Society and Documentation in Crusader Valencia. Diplomatarium of the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, the Registered Charters of its Conqueror Jaume I, 1257–1276, I: introduction (Princeton, nj, 1985), 93; J. Agustí y Casanovas and P. Voltes Bou, Manual de cronología española y universal (Madrid, 1952), 11.

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the translators to establish many new Castilian equivalents for the names of constellations in their sources, it seems likely their insistence on the king’s editorial role is simply a means to justify their choices.57 Where the translator-compilers are unable to cite any sources, Alfonso’s role in the composition becomes decisive as his royal status guarantees the intellectual authority of the treatise. In the prologue to the Libro primero del relogio del agua, the translators explain that the king ordered this treatise on the clepsydra (water clock) because he was dissatisfied with existing works on the subject. On the other hand, the contents of a work apparently without precedent, the Libro del relogio de la candela (on the use of candles as clocks), are couched as though spoken by Alfonso himself: We find another manner of clock which is very good […] & they call this instrument the clock of the candle, & by it they can know the hours which have passed in the day, or the night […]. And because we understood that it was a suitable thing and beneficial, We ordered Samuel el Leui of Toledo, our Jew, to make this book which talks about how this clock should be made […]. And in it there are .xiiij. chapters.58

A claim frequently made by medieval translators and editors of scientific works is that they are improving upon the work in hand. In the first half of the twelfth century, Hugh of Santalla (fl. c. 1135), a priest and translator from Tarazona, made a number of translations from the Arabic of astronomical works for his patron Michael, bishop of Tarazona. Hugh prefaced his translation of, and commentary upon, the works of the Arab astronomer al-Fargani with a lengthy prologue in which he justified his choice of work and accused al-Fargani’s Arab commentators of a lack of intellectual clarity which betrayed their ignorance and envy.59 He also explained that his translation would improve on the original because it would include treatises by other authors on topics that were complementary to al-Fargani’s work.

57 J.R. Lodares, ‘Las razones del “castellano derecho”’, Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médièvale, 18–19 (1993–1994), 313–34, at 332–4. 58 My translation. ‘Otra manera fallamos de relogio. que es muy buena … et dizen a este estrumente el relogio de la candela. et pueden saber por él las oras passadas del dia ó de la noche … Et porque entendiemos que era cosa apuesta e con pro. mandamos á Samuel el Leuí. de Toledo. nuestro iudío. que fiziesse este libro. en que fabla de cuemo se deue fazer este relogio… Et a en él XIIII. capitolos’: Libros del saber de astronomía, iv (1866), 77. 59 Tractatus Alfragani de motibus planetarum commentatus ab Hugoni Sanctaliensis, the prologue transcribed in Haskins, Studies in the History of Medieval Science, 73–5.

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Hugh’s critical approach to his sources is echoed by the Alfonsine translators. In the introduction to another section of the Libros del saber de astrología, the Libro de la açafeha, the translator tacitly compares the evolution of the Arabic tables of astronomical observations by al-Zarqāllah with the phases of translation and copying of the Spanish version throughout the 1270s. Nor does he hesitate to modify historical details to strengthen the association between Alfonso and the contents of the work. Thus the Castilian prologue changes the place where the Arab inventor of the scientific instrument carried out his most important work from Cordoba to Seville, presumably because this is where Alfonso spent most of the final decade of his reign.60 The prologue added to the translated text also stresses the continual refinement of the work, a refinement that culminates in the work of Alfonso’s Jewish scholars who bring this knowledge into the Christian canon of learning: Now we wish to speak of the ‘açafeha’ made by Azarquiel the learned astronomer of Toledo, in honour of King Almemun [al-Ma‘mūn of Toledo, r. 1037-1074] […]. And then he went to Seville and made this same ‘açafeha’ in another more perfect and more accomplished fashion, and he also wrote the book of how it was to be made […] in honour of King Almuhtamid aben a bet [Mu`tamid of Seville, r. 1068-1091]. […] And Master Fernando de Toledo translated this above-mentioned book from Arabic into Romance on the order of the most noble King don Alfonso […] in the fourth year that he reigned. And then he ordered it to be translated again in Burgos better and more perfectly by Master Bernaldo the Arab and by don Abraham his physician in the twenty-sixth year of his reign.61

The prologue does not specify the nature of this process of perfecting the work, but by the mid-thirteenth century perfection involved carefully 60 J.S. Gil, La escuela de traductores de Toledo y los colaboradores judíos (Toledo, 1985), 80. 61 My translation. ‘Mas agora queremos fablar dela açafeha que fizo azarquiel el sabio astrolomiano de Toledo. a onra del rey almemun … Et despues fue a Seuilla. & fizo esta açafeha misma en otra manera mas complida & mas acabada. Et fizo otrossi el libro de como se deue fazer … a onra del rey almuhtamid aben a bet … Et este libro sobredicho traslado de arabigo en romanço maestre fernando de Toledo por mandado del muy noble Rey don Alfonso … enel anno quarto que el regno. Et despues mandolo trasladar otra uez en Burgos meior & mas complidamientre a mestre Bernaldo el arabigo. & a don Abrahem su alfaqui en el .xxxvj0. anno del so regno’: The Electronic Texts and Concordances of the Prose Works of Alfonso X, el Sabio, ed. Kasten, Nitti, and Jonxis-Henkemans. Compare the looser transcription in Libros del saber de astronomía, iii (1864), 135. In fact, ‘don Abraham’ was not the skilled scientific translator the prologue suggests: see Echevarría, ‘Eschatology or Biography?’, 145 and n. 35.

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defining the presentation of a text in visual terms (by inserting running titles, rubrics, litterae notabiliores, and paragraph marks) and also creating divisions, subdivisions, and summaries for a text.62 These editorial interventions were standard thirteenth-century translation practice in Christian Western Europe,63 and also played an important part in the production of thirteenth-century academic texts.64 Hugh of Santalla had claimed to improve his original by recasting it as continuous prose rather than as a dialogue, and the Alfonsine translators of the Libro de las cruzes divided their text into chapters, with a table of contents at the head of the book, ‘as is customary in all books, in order to find the arguments and conclusions that are in the book more quickly’.65 The task of dividing up the text into chapters in this work fell to ‘Master John’, who, according to the colophon, is ‘Master Johan d’Aspa, priest [to Alfonso]’.66 A similar editorial intervention apparently occurs in the Alfonsine Libro de las formas & ymagenes, where the expectations of thirteenth-century scholarly readers are met by the promise in the prologue that: So that this our book should be clearer and can be better understood, and those who read it can learn more quickly the works which it contains, so they can use them when they need them and have them prepared, we put here at the start of this book its parts, and the works of each part are each indicated individually, according to what the learned ancients said and showed.67 62 For the organization of texts generally in the medieval West, see M.B. Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, in Parkes, Scribes, Scripts and Readers: studies in the communication, presentation and dissemination of Medieval texts (London/Rio Grande, 1991), 35–70, esp. at 52–3. first published in Medieval Learning and Literature: essays presented to R.W. Hunt, ed. J.J.G. Alexander and M.T. Gibson (Oxford, 1976), 115–40). 63 P.F. Dembowski, ‘Scientific Translation and Translator’s Glossing in Four Medieval French Translators’, in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Beer (Kalamazoo, MI, 1997), 113–34, at 113 and 116. 64 W. Jonxis-Henkemans, ‘En torno a los prólogos de la General estoria de Alfonso el Sabio’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 66 (1989), 343–50. See also R.H. and M.A. Rouse, ‘Statim Invenire: schools, preachers and new attitudes to the page’, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R.L. Benson and G. Constable (Oxford, 1982), 201–25. On Alfonsine manuscripts in particular, see the comments by E.E. Rodríguez Díaz, ‘La factura material de los códices alfonsíes’, in Murcia 2009, 240–45, at 242. 65 Libro de las cruzes, ed. Kasten and Kiddle, 1. 66 Libro de las cruzes, ed. Kasten and Kiddle, 168. 67 Lapidario and Libro de las formas, ed. Diman and Winget, 151: ‘Por que este nuestro libro sea mas paladino et se pueda meior entender et sepan los que leyeren mas ayna las obras que

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Arguably, these visual and structural reworkings helped legitimize an unfamiliar scientific work for a Christian readership. In fact, such divisions and summaries of contents were already present in the Arabic originals: the claims by the translators deliberately obscure this fact.68 Significantly for modern perceptions of Alfonso as a learned and involved patron, the degree of his alleged participation in the composition of a work depended not just on the translator’s need to endow that work with an intellectual pedigree, but also on the extent of the translator’s own intellectual ambitions. Sometimes the Alfonsine translators adapt the rhetoric which establishes the intellectual authority of their works in order to highlight their own learning and profession. In the prologue to the Lapidario, the account of the work’s origins praises Alfonso’s patronage while simultaneously proclaiming the intellectual abilities of the translators themselves. The account begins with a biography of the first person to translate the work, a learned Muslim by the name of ‘Abolays’.69 It then describes how the information in the treatise was lost through ignorance, and how the work fell into the hands of Alfonso: And once [Alfonso] had this book in his power he had it read by another Jew who was his physician and who was called Yhuda mosca ‘the less’ who was very learned in the art of astronomy and who knew and understood well Arabic and Latin. And once, from this Jew his physician, he had understood the goodness and great benefit that lay in it, he ordered it to be translated from Arabic into the Castilian language.70

The authors of the Castilian prologue emphasize the importance of the Lapidario and stress that whoever reads it must already be well versed in the subject-matter it covers. This introduction to the treatise not only establishes an intellectual pedigree for the work; it also implies that while Alfonso is an enthusiastic patron, he required instruction in the subject, as en el son pora ayudarse dellas quando las ouieren mester e lo touieren guisado, pusiemos aqui en el comienço deste libro sus partes et las obras de cada parte sennaladamente cada una por si segund que dixieron et prouaron los sabios antigos’. 68 C. Burnett, ‘Astrology’, in Medieval Latin. An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg (Washington, DC, 1996), 369–82, at 377–8. 69 See G. Darby, ‘The Mysterious Abolays’, Osiris, 1 (1936), 251–9. 70 My translation. Lapidario and Libro de las formas, ed. Diman and Winget, 3–4: ‘Et desque este libro touo en su poder, fizo lo leer a otro su judio que era su fisico et dizien le Yhuda mosca el menor que era mucho entendudo en la arte de astronomia et sabie et entendie bien el arauigo et el latin. Et desque por este iudio su fisico ouo entendido el bien et la grand pro que en el iazie, mando gelo trasladar de arauigo en lenguaie castellano’.

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the scholar and critic Eleazer Gutwirth perceptively observed. Despite the praise directed towards him by the translator Yhuda, the king only appreciated the importance of the work when Yhuda explained it to him.71 There is a similar presentation of patron and patronized in the prologue to the Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas. Although Alfonso commissioned the translation, he neither found the work nor grasped its importance. Instead, Yhuda son of Mosse Alcohen, his physician in [receipt of] his favour, on finding such a noble book and so thorough […] in all things which pertain to astronomy, as is the one which Aly son of Aben Ragel made, on the orders of our aforementioned lord, […] translated it from the Arabic language into the Castilian [language].72

These prologues suggest both Alfonso’s intellectual curiosity and the groups of (non-Christian) scholars he brought together to satisfy this curiosity. Yet, striking though the descriptions of his relationship with his scholars appear, Alfonso’s contact with them in the Lapidario and in the Libro conplido echoes the discussions of Louis IX at table with his ‘pious men’, or Charlemagne’s great respect for the scholars who lectured on the Liberal Arts.73 Alfonso’s learned interests and use of translations and compilations as a vehicle to promote his vision of kingship meant that his literary patronage surpassed the cultural activities of his predecessors and contemporaries; but the images of him which the prologues to his works construct are based on literary topoi that would have been familiar to a cultured audience of the thirteenth century. The depictions of Alfonso in the miniatures that illustrate the manuscripts he patronized also draw on symbols and visual motifs used elsewhere during this period to depict other rulers, actual and historical. Like the prologue texts examined above, it is reductive to consider these images solely as a record of Alfonso’s role as author of a work, especially since, like the prologue texts, they present reality selectively in order to convey their political message to maximum effect to a particular audience. Moreover, the contrast between his presentation in the miniatures and the 71 For the ambitions of the translators, see E. Gutwirth, ‘Entendudos: translation and representation in the Castile of Alfonso the Learned’, Modern Language Review, 93 (1998), 384–99. For Yhuda, see Roth, ‘Jewish Collaborators’, 60–5. 72 My translation. El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 3: ‘Yhuda fi de mosse alchoen su alfaqui et su merced fallando tan noble libro et tan acabado … en todas las cosas que pertenecen en astronomia como es el que fizo Aly fi de aben Ragel, por mandado del antedicho nuestro sennor … trasladolo de lengua arauiga en Castellana’. 73 See ‘Introduction’, above and Einhard, Life of Charlemagne, Book iii (79).

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reality of his appearance is heightened by written evidence that describes the illnesses that made his physical features increasingly repellent as his reign progressed. Given the correlation between physical appearance and moral virtue during this period, Alfonso’s declining health meant it was all the more important for him to be presented as healthy and politically capable in the manuscripts he patronized.

3.

Reality, Politics, and Precedent in Images of Alfonso

The number and variety of images of Alfonso in the manuscripts he commissioned is striking in the context of representations of other royal patrons of the period,1 and suggests Alfonso’s exceptional use of books to depict himself as a learned king divinely appointed to rule. The density of composition, prominence and frequency of these miniatures in the codices he patronized is in contrast with the single patron-images which accompany the colophon to the Bible copied around 1258 for Manfred of Sicily,2 or the colophon which concludes the moralized Bible commissioned by Louis IX (and which he presented to Alfonso).3 In other ways, however, Alfonso’s self-representations reflect a wider trend of the period, which saw kings increasingly use images and sequences of images to promote messages about power and good government. The colophon miniatures in the Bibles copied for Manfred and Louis both emphasize the hierarchical nature of the commission and the superior status of the monarch. On a grander scale, Henry III of England (r. 1216–1272), commissioned paintings that included a mappa mundi and a Tree of Jesse for his Painted Chamber at the palace of Westminster in 1236 and, after this burned down in 1263, he replaced them with allegorical depictions of the virtues and vices. His successor Edward I (r. 1272–1307) added biblical scenes from the Book of Kings. 4 The wider medieval public, meanwhile, would have been familiar with images of an enthroned king exercising power and dispensing justice: this was a familiar trope in religious contexts and it also served as an icon of royal government.5 . 1 J. Yarza, ‘“Despesas fazen los omnes de muchas guisas en soterrar los muertos”’, Fragmentos, 2 (1985), 4–19 (at 8), repr. Formas artísticas de lo imaginario (Barcelona, 1987), 260–92. Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Imágenes de presentación de la miniatura alfonsí’, Goya, 131 (1976), 287–91; R. Cómez Ramos, ‘El retrato de Alfonso X el Sabio en la primera Cantiga de Santa María’, in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria, ed. Katz and Keller 35–52. 2 Vatican City, BAV, MS Vat. Lat. 36, fol. 522v, reproduced in Graf zu Erbach-Fürstenau, ‘Die Manfredbibel’, Kunstgeschichtliche Forschungen, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1910–1912), i (1910), fig. 1 (opposite title page). 3 G.B. Guest, ‘Authorizing the Toledo Moralized Bible: exegesis and the gothic matrix’, Word & Image, 18, no. 3 (2002), 231–51 (232, fig. 1); H. Stahl, Picturing Kingship: history and painting in the Psalter of Saint Louis (Philadelphia, 2008), 19. 4 F. Lachaud and L. Scordia, ‘Introduction’, in Images, pouvoirs et normes, ed. Collard and Lachaud, 9-24 (12). 5 A. Musson, ‘Ruling “Virtually”?’, 153.

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The images of Alfonso as author and patron are, like the texts they accompany, primarily intended to establish and promote his kingship, rather than to document the intellectual and physical process of production of the work. To convey this, the images draw on visual allusions to biblical kings such as David and Solomon, and incorporate established markers of regal authority such as heraldry as well as imagery less familiar to modern eyes which depends on the astrological symbolism associated with colour. As in the prologue texts, the artists carefully tailor their depictions of Alfonso to the work and its audience, and present him in very specific ways that are intended to convey a political message. Again, the fact they were able to do this suggests the audience they anticipated was familiar with these visual conceits. However, these readers would not have recognized in the images a faithful reflection of the physical appearance of the man they knew. All the representations of Alfonso, like those of his royal contemporaries – and unlike depictions of Charles V of France (r. 1338–1380) in the works he patronized almost a century later – are idealized.6 They show a youthful king, on occasion with just a hint of a beard, his hair sometimes brown, sometimes reddish or blond. Most images also show him seated upright, in an appropriately regal posture.7 This visual shorthand for youth is used consistently, even in manuscripts commissioned when Alfonso would have been in his late fifties or early sixties. The contrast between the generic depictions of youth and age is clear in the panel of miniatures that accompany cantiga 169 of Escorial MS T.I.1 (fol. 226v). Frames three and four illustrate a delegation of Muslims resident in the Arrijaca district of Murcia who petition first Jaume I and then Alfonso for the removal of a church there dedicated to the Virgin. The presence of both monarchs in a poem about Murcia dates it to 1266 or shortly afterwards, since between 1264 and 1266 the area was the scene of a revolt against Christian rule that Jaume, acting on behalf of Alfonso, suppressed.8 Jaume, who at the time would have been in his late fifties, is depicted with grey hair and a grey beard. Alfonso, on the other hand, was in his mid-forties and the artists have emphasized the thirteen years between them by presenting Alfonso without a beard and with brownish hair.9 6 C. Richter Sherman, ‘Representations of Charles V of France (1338–1380) as a Wise Ruler’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 2, n.s. (1971), 83–96, at 83. 7 Cómez Ramos, ‘El retrato de Alfonso X’, at 49. 8 On the rebellion, see O’Callaghan, Learned King, 185–6. 9 The complete panel of miniatures is reproduced in black and white in Cantigas, ed. Mettmann, ii, opposite 173; for a detail of the image of Jaume in colour, see Murcia 2009, 134. This has been interpreted as a realistic portrait: R.I. Burns, ‘The Spiritual Life of James the Conqueror, King

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The consistently youthful representation of Alfonso is flattering, but it also had a serious political purpose: the images had to demonstrate that a monarch who suffered increasingly poor health was still fit to rule. Contemporary written sources and the material evidence of his remains provide a vivid picture of Alfonso’s physical decline and suggest the extent to which his image was manipulated in the representations of him in the manuscripts he commissioned. The earliest evidence for Alfonso’s appearance is a seal of 1266 issued by his imperial chancery which shows him with clean-shaven features and with short, straight hair that covers his ears. The seals from his royal chancery, on the other hand, identify him by heraldry, since they show him on horseback, sword in hand, his face protected and obscured by a helmet.10 An early written description of him in a short treatise in praise of Spain dates to around 1278, when Juan Gil de Zamora presented him as someone whose moral goodness was reinforced by his physical appearance and graceful deportment.11 According to Gil, Alfonso was a sharp-witted child, tireless in his studies, and gifted with a perfect memory. His appearance was elegant, his conversation discreet, his laughter moderate, and his gait measured.12 Jofré de Loaysa’s description of him in his continuation of the Latin chronicle De rebus Hispanie is similarly flattering: ‘Alfonso, ever since he was a child was very liberal, a lover and administrator of justice, of beautiful form and most gracious appearance’.13 Although both writers would have known Alfonso personally, their descriptions are carefully constructed to demonstrate that the king’s physical condition and temperament reflect his ability and suitability to rule. Contemporary and near-contemporary written sources which describe events later in his reign, however, undermine this wholesome image and of Aragó-Catalonia, 1208–1276: portrait and self-portrait’, Catholic Historical Review, 62 (1976), 1–35 (4), and Aurell, Authoring the Past, 43. 10 M. de Francisco Olmos, ‘El sello diplomático real en los reinos de Castilla y León en el siglo XIII’, in Murcia 2009, 62–75, at 73. On seals as realistic portraits in an English and French royal context, see Gardner, ‘Likeness and/or Representation’, 141–2. 11 For the equation between physical grace and moral behaviour, see J.-C. Schmitt, ‘The Ethics of Gesture’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. M. Feher with R. Naddaff and N. Tazi, 3 vols (New York, 1989), ii, 129–47. 12 Fita, ‘Biografías’, 319.16. The Catalan chronicler Bernat Desclot, writing between 1283 and 1295, attributed similarly idealized physical characteristics to Jaume I, whose build was characterized by ‘broad shoulders and a tall and shapely body’: Desclot, Chronicle of the Reign of King Pedro III of Aragon, c.12, cited in Aurell, Authoring the Past, 42. 13 ‘Hic ab ipso puericie sue tempore liberalis multum fuit ac justiciam diligens et exercens, speciosus quidem forma et in aspectu non modicum graciosus’: Loaysa, Crónica, 76 (and 77 for Spanish translation).

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suggest that Alfonso suffered severe physical pain for much of his reign as a result of both accident and illness. In 1269, at the celebrations to mark the marriage of his eldest son, Fernando de la Cerda, to Blanche, daughter of Louis IX of France, a horse kicked Alfonso and severely fractured his leg.14 Poems in three of the four surviving manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria describe serious illnesses endured by the king in the 1270s. The written descriptions provide graphic accounts of his symptoms. In cantiga 279 he turns greener than a piece of cambric cloth, while in cantiga 367 his legs become red and swell to such an extent that he cannot fit into his boots, after which his skin splits open and yellow pus oozes out.15 (Equally repellent is the account in cantiga 221 of the enormous worms that wriggle out in large numbers from the body of the future Ferdinand III.16) Cantiga 209 offers a more restrained description of Alfonso’s suffering, noting only that he once endured a ‘great pain’ in his body which doctors were unable to relieve.17 The fourteenth-century Crónica de Alfonso X records that Alfonso suffered such pain in his eye in 1280 that he almost lost it.18 An inscription in the church of Santa Ana de Triana (Seville) also records the episode, with greater contextual detail, and specifies that his right eyeball was almost forced from its socket but miraculously remained in his head.19 The physical evidence of his skeleton confirms that Alfonso suffered some sort of deformity of the eye. His remains, moved three times within Seville cathedral since he was laid to rest in the Royal Chapel, were examined most recently in 1948.20 The Seville historian Alonso Morgado had described Alfonso’s skull as excessively large when his coffin was opened in 1579, and the medical assessment of his skeleton carried out by Juan Delgado Roig in the mid-twentieth century recorded that the orbit cavity of his left eye was deformed (an observation that contradicts the account of the 1280

14 Jaume I, Crònica o Llibre dels Feits, ed. F. Soldevila, 4th edn (Barcelona, 2000), c.499; The Book of Deeds, trans. Smith and Buffery, c.499; González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 216–18 and 222. 15 Alfonso X, Cantigas, ed. Mettmann, iii, nos 279 and 367. 16 Alfonso X, Cantigas, ed. Mettmann, ii, no. 221. 17 Alfonso X, Cantigas, ed. Mettmann, ii, no. 209. 18 Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, 208 and n. 306 (c.74). 19 For the inscription, see R.P. Kinkade, ‘Alfonso X, Cantiga 235, and the Events of 1269–78’, Speculum 67 (1992), 284–323, at 286, n. 3. The inscription in the church today is a much later copy painted on canvas. 20 M.J. Sanz, ‘Ajuares funerarios de Fernando III, Beatriz de Suabia y Alfonso X’, in Sevilla 1248, 419–47 (420–2).

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miracle).21 However, despite the literary and physical evidence available, recent attempts to establish the exact nature of Alfonso’s illness have not managed to settle the matter completely.22 H. Salvador Martínez, one of Alfonso’s most recent biographers, reviewed the evidence in consultation with a doctor and an artist, and concluded that Alfonso could have suffered from one or several conditions, among them a tumour, a chronic sinus infection, or a chronic granulomatosis in the maxillary region of the skull. He may also have experienced heart or kidney problems.23 What seems certain, though, is that by the end of his reign Alfonso’s facial features would have been visibly deformed, and so he would not have appeared youthful and healthy as he is depicted in the manuscripts that bear his name. Alfonso’s declining health did not go unremarked at the time, as illness posed a serious danger to his kingship both at a practical, physical level and in a moral sense too. In an age mindful of biblical precedent,sickness represented divine punishment, and therefore physical decline was a sign of sinfulness.24 In November 1282, Alfonso cursed and disinherited his son Sancho, and revealed how the rebels had justified their actions by framing them in the context of his failing health: In many places he vomited forth many unbecoming things against us, among other things he, and his representatives, often said [that] ‘the king is insane and leprous, and false and perjured in many things, killing men without cause as he killed Fadrique and Simón.’25 21 Morgado, Historia de Sevilla, 108. J. Delgado Roig, ‘Examen médico-legal de unos restos históricos. Los cadáveres de Alfonso X el Sabio y Doña Beatriz de Suabia’, Archivo Hispalense, 9 (1948), 135–53, and see Salvador Martínez, Alfonso the Learned, 285–6 for a summary of his conclusions. Delgado Roig also determined that Alfonso was relatively tall (around 1.72 metres, or 5 feet 7 inches). For the discrepancy between the Santa Ana inscription and the evidence of Alfonso’s skeleton, see Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X the Learned, 270–1. Elements of the physical description of Jaume I recorded by the chronicler Bernat Desclot appear to be borne out by the evidence of his skeleton, buried at the monastery of Poblet and identified by a skull wound: Aurell, Authoring the Past, 43. 22 M.E. Presilla, ‘The Image of Death and Political Ideology in the Cantigas de Santa María’, in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, 403–57, at 434–6; Kinkade, ‘Alfonso X, Cantiga 235’, 285. 23 Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, 287–9. 24 See the comments in P. McNiven, ‘The Problem of Henry IV’s Health, 1405–1413’, EHR, 100 (1985), 747–72, at 747–53. 25 ‘In multis locis multa indigna contra nos euomit: inter alia frequenter dicens tam ipse, quam sui nuntij: Rex insanvs est atque leprosvs: et in multis falsvs atque perivrvs homines interficiens sine cavsa qvemadmodvm Fredericvm et Simonem interfecit.’ J. Zurita, Indices rervm ab Aragoniae Regibus. Gestarum ab initiis regni ad annvm MCDX (Zaragoza, 1578), 171 (for Zurita’s

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Sancho’s ‘vomited’ description of his father as ‘insane’ and ‘leprous’ was freighted with biblical and political significance. The reference to leprosy suggests Alfonso’s skin was covered in pustules; the biblical undercurrent is the leprous Old Testament ruler Ozias in 2 Chronicles 26: 19–21 (Latin Vulgate version), who in a display of hubris had attempted to usurp the duties of priests and was immediately struck down with leprosy by the Lord.26 Alfonso’s appearance, coupled with his attempts to centralize royal power at the expense of the nobility and the church (in May 1279 a papal legate had presented him with a list of complaints from Spanish bishops), and his persistent demands for taxation, presumably suggested the biblical parallel to the rebels who, according to Alfonso, were promising town representatives that they would reinstate the law codes that pre-dated the king’s reforms.27 However, at the heart of their accusation made against Alfonso on 20 April 1282 was the charge that the execution of his brother and the magnate who was his brother’s supporter had been unjust, which implied not madness but tyranny.28 As the second Partida, citing Aristotle, observed, tyrants ‘prefer to act for their own advantage, although it may result in injury to the country, rather than for the common benefit of all … tyrants always endeavor to despoil the powerful’.29 Alfonso’s illness had turned him into a tyrant, and it was because he no longer abided by the just rule of law which prompted his brother Manuel, surrounded by Sancho and his supporters, to effectively strip him of all his powers except for his royal title. The little surviving documentary evidence, then, suggests that many of those in Alfonso’s immediate circle perceived his physical decline in entirely negative terms, and unsurprisingly the images of the king in his manuscripts comments on the document) and 172 (for the text). The modern Spanish translation renders ‘insanus’ as ‘demente’: J. Zurita, Gestas de los reyes de Aragón desde comienzos del reinado al año 1410, trans. and ed. Á. Canellas López, 2 vols (Zaragoza, 1984), i, 263. A Spanish translation of the document is also published in Diplomatario andaluz, ed. González Jiménez, 532–5 (503bis). On the document and the political situation subsequent to its proclamation, see González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 353–8, and G. Martin, ‘Alphonse X maudit son fils’, Atalaya, 5 (1994), 153–78. 26 For a discussion of the political significance of Sancho’s accusation of leprosy, see K. Kennedy, ‘In Sickness and in Health: Alfonso X of Castile and the Virgin Mary in Cantiga 235’, Galician Review, 1 (1997), 27–42, at 27–8. For speculation on the reasons for Alfonso’s leprous appearance, see Presilla, ‘The Image of Death’, 439. 27 P. Linehan, ‘The Spanish Church Revisited: the episcopal Gravamina of 1279’, in Authority and Power: studies on medieval law and government presented to Walter Ullmann on his seventieth birthday, ed. B. Tierney and P. Linehan (Cambridge, 1980), 127–47; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 259. 28 ‘Mató a don Fadrique su hermano e a don Ximón Ruyz señor de los Cameros e otros muchos fidalgos sin derecho commo non deuía’: cited in González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 345. 29 Partida ii.1.10: Las Siete Partidas, trans. S. Parsons Scott, ii, Medieval Government: the world of kings and warriors, 274, and Solalinde, Antología, 152–3.

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are designed to counteract this view. Recent scholarship has argued, however, that Alfonso’s ill-health had positive benefits for his literary patronage. The extended periods of convalescence which must have followed the bouts of illness that increasingly affected him from at least 1269 onwards would have enabled him to devote himself to intellectual pursuits, and the number of manuscripts that bear his name produced in the 1270s and early 1280s arguably suggests this was so.30 Seville, where at least one Alfonsine manuscript was copied and which modern scholars have identified as a centre of royal book production, was also considered by physicians of the time to be an excellent place for a king to convalesce from illness (Alfonso XI recovered there from a nasty fever contracted by the bad June airs of Badajoz).31 The royalist sympathies of the city aside, the combination of healthy air and a research centre (as it were) might neatly explain why Alfonso should have spent extended periods of time there. However, studying to convalesce, even in a healthy environment, would not have conformed to standard medical procedure of the day. Although medieval treatises on health recommended listening to tales of fiction on a regular basis in order to relieve the mind of troublesome thoughts and to promote a moderate amount of good cheer, an emotion considered essential for the maintenance of well-being,32 reading for the purposes of study was considered wearing on the intellect. Physicians counselled interspersing the mental toll that this implied with activities to reinvigorate the spirits, such as engaging in undemanding conversation with people of lower status.33 Those recovering from a specific illness, however, were advised to listen to music. In his Parabolae medicationis of around 1300 dedicated to Philip IV of France, the Catalan physician Arnau de Vilanova observed that ‘sweet melodies and pleasant surroundings revive the soul of the convalescent’.34 In any case, whatever the relationship between Alfonso’s declining health and his literary patronage, his illness and the violent political turmoil of the last fifteen years of his reign are the invisible background to the visual representations of him in the manuscripts he commissioned.35 30 Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, c.7, ‘Illness and Intellectual Pursuits’, esp. 216–17. 31 Gran crónica de Alfonso XI, ed. Catalán, ii,183, c.206. 32 G. Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca/London, 1982), 49–50 and 84–5. 33 Olson, Literature as Recreation, 114–17. 34 Cited in P. León-Sanz, ‘Evolution of the Concept of Emotion in Medicine: a music therapy approach’, in The Emotions and Cultural Analysis, ed. A.M. González (Farnham, 2013; repr. 2016), 69–98, at 78. 35 These manuscripts are the Lapidario (Escorial, MS h.I.15, 1270–1276: for the dating see Fernández Fernández, Arte y Ciencia, 155); the (now fragmentary) Libro de las formas & ymagenes (Escorial, MS h.I.16, copied between 1276 and 1279 according to the prologue); three of the

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The idealization of Alfonso’s image is particularly evident in depictions which show him suffering from illness in the Cantigas. The texts and images are highly personal to the king; but, as with the representations of Alfonso as author in his works, what is personal to the king goes hand in hand with a carefully wrought public persona.36 The intensely personal account of his suffering is necessary to guarantee his privileged relationship with the Virgin Mary to his audience and five poems in the collection describe Alfonso’s suffering and near-death in graphic terms. The panels of miniatures that illustrate two of these poems, however, depict him with no physical disfigurement whatsoever.37 Alfonso is clearly identified as king by his gold crown and by the heraldic border that hems the bedding on which he lies, but his ill-health must be inferred from the fact that he lies in bed, and from the doctors and despairing courtiers who surround him. Although his complexion is pale, so too are the complexions of those around him, and his body and limbs are not unduly contorted or twisted.38

manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Escorial, MS b.I.2, the códice de los músicos, begun around 1282; Escorial MS T.I.1, the códice rico, begun around 1280; and Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS Banco Rari 20, begun around 1282); the first volume of the Estoria de Espanna (Escorial, MS Y.I.2, after 1270), the fourth part of the General estoria (BAV, MS Urb. Lat. 539, dated in a colophon to 1280), and the Libro de los juegos (Escorial, MS T.I.6, dated in a colophon to 1283). For the dating of the Cantigas manuscripts, see Fernández Fernández, ‘“Este Livro, com’ achei”’, at 51-2, 73-4, and 77. 36 See for example O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas; Snow, ‘Alfonso as Troubadour, 124–40; Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, 229, who describes the Cantigas as ‘an invaluable historical source to learn about certain aspects of Alfonso’s personal life, such as the illnesses he suffered’. 37 Alfonso X, Cantigas, ed. Mettmann, ii, nos 209 and 235; iii, nos 279, 366 and 367. All are copied without an accompanying panel of illustrative miniatures in Escorial MS b.I.2, but sets of miniatures for the texts of cantigas 209 and 235 are preserved in Florence, Biblioteca Centrale Nazionale, MS Banco Rari 20, fols 119v (where Escorial MS b.I.2, 209 is numbered as cantiga 95, and lacks any accompanying text) and 92r (where Escorial MS b.I.2, cantiga 235 is copied beside cantiga 71). See J.E. Keller and R.P. Kinkade, ‘Iconography and Literature: Alfonso himself in Cantiga 209’, Hispania, 66 (1983), 348–52; R.P. Kinkade and J.E. Keller, ‘An Orphaned Miniature of Cantiga 235 from the Florentine Codex’, Bulletin of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, 10 (Spring 1998), 27–50. 38 Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X the Learned, 262–3, argues that the miniatures which depict Alfonso’s recovery from illness in cantiga 209 capture ‘the anxiety and pain of an ill man’, and may even show the swelling in his left leg which, he suggests, is the cause of his illness. This seems unlikely. The seat of the pain is not specified in the text, and although the miniatures sometimes present additional (or different) information, the physicians are not shown specifically directing their attentions towards the king’s leg.

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The miniatures and poems present Alfonso’s sickness as a sign of divine favour and his recovery a reaffirmation of his right to rule.39 Indeed, cantiga 235 in Escorial MS b.I.2 (but illustrated in the ‘Florence’ manuscript, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, MS B.R. 20) describes how the Virgin herself rules Spain while Alfonso is indisposed, and the series of ever-graver illnesses from which Alfonso suffers is presented as a sign of divine favour that culminates in his return to the throne when Mary finally restores him to perfect health. 40 Moreover, Alfonso is not the only member of his family whose illnesses are described in the Cantigas. Two other poems describe how, on different occasions, divine intervention cured both his father and mother of ‘great illness’.41 These miracles imply that the favoured relationship enjoyed by Alfonso with the mother of God is not only the result of the personal devotion he displays as her troubadour, but that it is a relationship which he enjoys by inheritance as well. It follows that Alfonso should be able to extend this relationship to his successors, and cantiga 209 (in the códice de los músicos, but illustrated in the ‘Florence’ manuscript) suggests how this might take place. The poem narrates how Alfonso is cured of an unspecified pain as soon as the copy of ‘her Book’, that is, a manuscript of the Cantigas, is placed on his chest.42 The book encapsulates the relationship between saint and king, and as a consequence is imbued with miraculous powers. The wider implication is that Alfonso can use the manuscripts he commissioned (and, to a certain extent, composed) to bequeath to his successors the support he enjoys from the Virgin Mary. 43 39 G.D. Greenia, ‘The Politics of Piety: manuscript illumination and narration in the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, Hispanic Review, 61 (1993), 325–44; A.J. Lappin, ‘The Thaumaturgy of Regal Piety: Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, Journal of Hispanic Research, 4 (1995–1996), 39–59. On the contemporary political context of the poems more generally, see O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas, 126–51. 40 For this poem and its historical context, see Kinkade, ‘Alfonso X, Cantiga 235’, 284–323, and more recently Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, 241–7; for aspects of ideology and self-promotion, see Kennedy, ‘In Sickness and in Health’, 27–42 and Scarborough, A Holy Alliance, 145–7, who argues that with the Virgin’s unwavering help, Alfonso can present himself as infallible. 41 Alfonso X, Cantigas, ed. Mettmann, ii, nos 221 and 256; for suggestions about the historical context of the poems, see O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas, 43–5 and 48–50; see also Scarborough, A Holy Alliance, 153–8. 42 Cantigas, ed. Mettmann, ii, no. 209; on the significance of the miracle for Alfonso’s image, see K. Kennedy, ‘Alfonso’s Miraculous Book: patronage, politics, and performance in the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, in The Appearances of Medieval Rituals: the play of construction and modification, ed. N.H. Petersen, M. Birkedal Bruun, J. Llewellyn, and E. Østrem (Turnhout, 2004), 199–212. 43 Although the 1284 codicil to Alfonso’s will of 1282 left the manuscripts of the cantigas to Seville cathedral, he allowed that a rightful heir could claim them if he offered the cathedral

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Dissemination of knowledge is also a key element in the presentation of Alfonso in the miniatures that accompany the prologues to the works he commissioned. While the images of him on his sickbed are unique in the context of depictions of his peers in royally commissioned manuscripts, elsewhere his self-presentation as the fount of spiritual and secular learning for his court and kingdom is conveyed with selective reference to generic and widespread images of kings in thirteenth-century Bibles or in contemporary legal works. The prominence of musical performance in the imagery of two miniatures which accompany prologues to the Cantigas (Figure 1) deliberately recalls images in thirteenth-century copies of the Book of Psalms, which shows David, King of Israel, as performer and author (although theologans debated David’s actual authorship of these songs). 44 Depictions of David playing a harp or a psaltery, or enthroned with an open book and listening to singers beside him, present him not only as an author but also illustrate the injunction of Psalm 80 to offer musical praise to God with a variety of instruments. 45 The singers and musicians grouped around Alfonso in both Cantigas miniatures are also an explicit visual echo of the singing clerics grouped around a lectern in the initial which often opens the text of thirteenth-century copies of Psalm 97, Cantate domino, which exhorts the faithful to praise the Lord with a new song and to celebrate something in exchange: see Fernández Fernández, ‘“Este Livro, com’ achei”’, ii, 51; on Seville cathedral as a beneficiary of Alfonso’s will, see González Jiménez, ‘The Bible of Saint Louis’, ii, 52. For the suggestion, based on the wording of the codicil to his will, that Alfonso attributed ‘a sacred quality’ to all books see Doubleday, The Wise King, 189–92. 44 Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 43–4, and S. Panayotova, ‘The Illustrated Psalter’, in The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. Boynton and Reilly, 247–71, at 247. 45 Panayotova, ‘The Illustrated Psalter’, 247 for representations of David; Psalms 80: 3 (Latin Vulgate version). For David playing a psaltery in the historiated initial to Psalm 80, see Oporto, Biblioteca Municipal, MS 623 (France, 1301–1325), fol. 102r, reproduced in A iluminura em Portugal, ed. A.A. Nascimento, 317 (cat. no. 067); for David pointing to an open book on a lectern beside him, see Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1525 (1210–1220), fol. 6r (the start of Psalm 2); see the image online at http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/detail/ ODLodl~1~1~31201~112545:Psalter-?sort=Shelfmark&qvq=w4s:/what/MS. Ashmole 1525;sort:S helfmark;lc:ODLodl~29~29,ODLodl~7~7,ODLodl~6~6,ODLodl~14~14,ODLodl~8~8,ODLodl~2 3~23,ODLodl~1~1,ODLodl~24~24&mi=2&trs=68 [accessed 10 September 2016]. See also Oxford, Bodleian, MS Laud Lat. 114 (fols 7–174, c. 1260), fol. 127v (Psalm 97, ‘Cantate Domino’), and compare other late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Psalters with historiated initials of monks grouped around a lectern with an open book in the Bodleian Library: http://bodley30.bodley. ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/search?QuickSearchA=QuickSearchA&q=psalm+97&sort=Sh elfmark%2CFolio_Page%2CRoll_%23%2CFrame_%23 [accessed 10 September 2016]; J.T. Snow, ‘“Cantando e con dança”: Alfonso X, King David, the Cantigas de Santa Maria and the Psalms’, La corónica, 27, no. 2 (1999), 61–73, at 72.

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Figure 1: Alfonso, wearing the livery of the royal Order of Santa María de la Estrella, with scribes, singers, and musicians. Cantigas, códice rico, Escorial MS T.I.1, fol. 5r. © Patrimonio Nacional

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Him with music as well. 46 Royal, noble, and ecclesiastical readers who saw these images of Alfonso in the Cantigas could not have failed to recognize the parallels between Alfonso and David. Indeed, Alfonso’s debt to his biblical predecessor was made explicit by Gil de Zamora, who described how the king had composed ‘in the manner of David, for the praise of the glorious Virgin […] many beautiful story-songs, [rhythmically] measured with agreeable sounds and musical proportions’.47 The Psalms were perhaps the most widely circulated of the books of the Bible in the thirteenth century and, since the 150 Psalms were often supplemented with prayers, the Psalter had become the principal text of private devotion in the Middle Ages. Alfonso’s second Partida stipulated that queens had a duty to teach their children to read so they could pray with their Psalter, and Psalters were also the primary text used to teach Latin during this period. 48 Not surprisingly, splendid copies circulated among European royalty. Louis IX was associated with several examples, and Alfonso’s half-sister, Eleanor of Castile, may have commissioned the ‘Alphonso Psalter’ around 1284 to commemorate the marriage of her son Alphonso to Margaret, daughter of Floris V, Count of Holland. 49 The allusions to David in the way in which Alfonso is presented as author and performer at the start of the Cantigas suggest that as well as presenting himself as David’s successor, he was deliberately attempting to compile a devotional text that would serve as an alternative to the Psalms. The stipulation in the codicil to his will that a copy of the Cantigas be kept at Seville cathedral and be used on the Virgin’s feast days recalls the use of the Psalter in the celebration of the divine office.50 As a new David, Alfonso represented himself as the chief source of spiritual guidance for his subjects; and the symbolism of scrolls and books in the miniatures that accompany 46 N. Morgan, ‘Patrons and their Devotions in the Historiated Initials and Full-Page Miniatures of Thirteenth-Century English Psalters’, in The Illuminated Psalter: studies in the content, purpose and placement of its images, ed. F.O. Büttner (Turnhout, 2004), 309–19, at 311; I. Fernández de la Cuesta, ‘La música de las Cantigas de Santa María. Salmos de alabanza, cantigas de loor’, in Sevilla 1248, 621–34, at 626–9. 47 Fita, ‘Biografías’, 321.21: ‘More quoque Davitico etiam, [ad] preconium Virginis gloriose multas et perpulchras composuit cantinelas, sonis convenientibus et proportionibus musicis modulatas’; translation in Snow, ‘Alfonso as Troubadour’, 127. 48 Partida ii.7, cited in F.J. Hernández, ‘The “Bible of Saint Louis” in the Chapels Royal of France and Castile’, in The Bible of Saint Louis, ed. Gonzálvez Ruiz, ii, 19–38, at 22; J. Lowden, ‘The Royal Manuscript as Idea and Object’, in Royal Manuscripts: the genius of illumination, ed. S. McKendrick, J. Lowden, and K. Doyle. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the British Library (London, 2011), 18–41, at 28–9. 49 Lowden, ‘The Royal Manuscript’, 32 and see also D. Jackson, ‘The Alphonso Psalter’, in Royal Manuscripts, ed. McKendrick et al., 130 (no. 17). 50 Fernández de la Cuesta, ‘La música de las Cantigas’, at 633.

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the author-prologues in the códice rico (Escorial MS T.I.1, fols 4v and 5r) and in the códice de los músicos (Escorial MS b.I.2, fol. 29r) demonstrates how he composed and disseminated a new devotional work to laymen and churchmen alike. The first, smaller, image on folio 4v of the códice rico depicts Alfonso holding up a scroll of text inscribed with the opening line of the poem below, courtiers at his feet with blank scrolls. The iconography is unusual in the context of Alfonsine manuscripts, as all the other surviving images of him as patron show him with a book in his hand. The scroll he holds anticipates most of the text of the opening four lines of the poem below the miniature, and is legibly written out in a late thirteenth-century cursive hand.51 The text states that song-writing requires ‘entendimento’ (‘understanding’) and that whoever writes songs must therefore possess this quality, an observation which suggests that for Alfonso, as indeed for David in the view of some exegetes, the art of versification was a human skill, not a divinely inspired one.52 The scrolls held by the courtiers, by contrast, are blank. While this depiction of king, courtiers, scribes, and scrolls reflects something of the actual physical process of compilation – since in the thirteenth century individual poems copied on rolls were often the source for verse anthologies copied out in a codex – the significance of the scrolls in this image lies arguably in their value as symbols of the transmission of knowledge.53 The scroll Alfonso holds suggests his devotion to the Virgin, which he transmits to his subjects by way of his intellectual skills (the 51 Introducción a la Paleografía y la Diplomática General, ed. A. Riesco Terrero (Madrid, 2000), 135. Pace E. Ruiz García, who concludes that the writing on the scroll is later and that the people around Alfonso are scribes holding the exemplars of the texts they would copy: ‘Escribir para el Rey. Estudio paleográfico del MS. T-I-1 de la RBME’, in Cantigas, Códice rico (2011), ii, 109–43, at 180 and n. 5. The miniature is reproduced in black and white in O’Callaghan, Learned King, fig. 8 (271). 52 Alfonso X, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X the Wise: a translation of the ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’, trans. K. Kulp-Hill (Tempe, az, 2000), 2: ‘Because composing songs is an art which requires great understanding’; R. Sánchez Amejeiras, ‘Rimando imágenes para Santa María. Sobre el género de la poseía visual en la edad media’, in Cantigas, Códice Rico (2011), ii, 447–71, at 447–8. 53 Ruiz García, ‘Rex scribens’, 370, and 368, n. 28. Fernández Fernández, ‘“Este Livro com’ achei”’, ii, 55–8. On rolls depicted as part of the writing process and not as speech scrolls, see the comments in M. Curschmann, ‘Levels of Meaning and Degrees of Viewer Participation: inscribed imagery in twelfth-century manuscripts’, in Qu’est-ce que nommer? L’image légendée entre monde monastique et pensée scolastique. Actes du colloque du RILMA, Institut Universitaire de France (Paris: INHA, 17–18 octobre 2008), ed. C. Heck (Turnhout, 2010), 91–2. Seven secular poems by the thirteenth-century Galician poet Martim Codax survive on a roll of parchment (known as the ‘Pergaminho Vindel’): A lírica galego-portuguesa, ed. E. Gonçalves and M.A. Ramos, 3rd edn (Lisbon, 1991), 31–2.

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entendimento which allows him to compose poems to praise her). The scrolls held by those around him suggest they will absorb his lesson and join their king in sung praise of the Virgin.54 The miniature opposite, on folio 5r of the códice rico, is larger and runs across the top of both columns of text on the page. It shows Alfonso pointing to a blank, open book which rests on a lectern. Two scribes write at his feet, and musicians and tonsured singers flank them to the left and right, performing the finished work (see Figure 1). The similarity of this image with the representation of Alfonso in the códice de los músicos (Escorial MS b.I.2, fol. 29r) seems to confirm these are depictions which also document the processes by which the codices were physically produced.55 In fact, however, and more importantly, they are both images of how – and to whom – a king disseminates a work ostensibly composed with the help of divine inspiration. The open, blank book to which Alfonso points and which rests on the throne beside him embodies the doctrine that reading (not hearing or seeing) stimulates the first stage of the devotional process.56 The image also reinforces the point that Alfonso is engaged in a formal reading of a work which he has composed (not copied from a pre-existing model), and which is the exemplar for the scribes at his feet who record his words on rolls.57 The text which Alfonso dictates onto these rolls becomes, in turn, the exemplar for another book of the Cantigas which both miniatures show in the hands of a cleric or group of clerics, and which musicians perform. In other Alfonsine works, depictions of him holding an open book and presiding over a scribe, scribes, or a group of people echo the miniatures which preface late thirteenth-century copies of the Old Testament Book of Proverbs (or Ecclesiastes). In these images King Solomon, the supposed author of the book, points down from his throne at a subject who holds open 54 For rolls as symbols of the transmission of knowledge in religious texts, see the comments in C. Heck, ‘Un nouveau statut de la parole? L’image légendée entre énoncé, commentaire, et parole émise’, in Qu’est-ce que nommer?, ed. Heck, 18–21; W. Noel, ‘The Utrecht Psalter in England: continuity and experiment’, in The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art: picturing the Psalms of David, ed. K. van der Horst et al. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht (‘t Goy, 1996), 159–60. 55 I.G. Bango Torviso, ‘“Nós, Don Alfonso, mandamos fazer”’, in Murcia 2009, 202–7, at 203–4. The image is reproduced in black and white in Márquez Villanueva, Concepto cultural, 108, and there is a colour detail on the dust jacket of Doubleday, The Wise King. 56 Morgan, ‘Patrons and their Devotions’, 311; for blank books as symbols of knowledge and truth, see M. Camille, ‘Visual Signs of the Sacred Page: books in the Bible Moralisée’, Word & Image, 5, no. 1 (1989), 111–30, at 117. 57 On formal reading vs reading for study, see the comments on Charles V of France by Tesnière, ‘Les manuscrits de la librairie de Charles V’, at 47.

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a blank book. This representation of power and hierarchy itself derives from late twelfth-century descriptions of the allegorical figure of Lady Grammar, one of the seven Artes of the trivium and quadrivium.58 Indeed, Solomon, like Lady Grammar herself, is sometimes shown in twelfth- and thirteenthcentury manuscripts brandishing a bunch of birch twigs over his pupils, as for example in the historiated initial that opens the Book of Proverbs in a late thirteenth-century Bible now in Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 1, fol. 237v.59 Images of kings dictating also appear in early manuscripts of one of the most widely circulated works of the period, Gratian’s compilation and commentary on canon law, the Concordia discordantium canonum (which soon became known as the Decretum). Between the rubric to the first distinctio (a medieval Latin term for the close analysis of the key words and concepts in a text) and Gratian’s account of the divine and earthly forces which guide the actions of mankind, manuscripts often included a miniature of an enthroned king pointing his index finger at a scribe writing at his feet.60 In an Alfonsine context, these visual models have been adapted to a greater or lesser extent, according to circumstance.61 For example, the image of the tutor-king in the historiated initial to the prologue of the Lapidario who, enthroned, points down towards two seated pupils, one of whom holds an open book (Escorial MS h.I.15, fol. 1r), owes much to depictions of Lady Grammar. While the depiction of the monarch here is generic and, in the context of other Alfonsine manuscripts, uncharacteristically small, it is presumably no coincidence that the king is represented within the letter ‘A’. This stands for ‘Aristotle’, whose name opens the text and who is shown lecturing to pupils in the large miniature above; but it is surely also meant to remind the reader of another learned man whose name begins with an ‘A’: ‘Alfonso’.62 58 For the allegorical figure of Lady Grammar see Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 11. 59 See also the image of Solomon in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. D.1.17, fol. 201r (France: s.xiii 2). 60 See for example a copy dated 1288 in Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 558, fol. 1r. For copies of Gratian’s compilation in medieval Castilian cathedral libraries, see S. Guijarro, ‘Libraries and Books Used by Cathedral Clergy in Castile during the Thirteenth Century’, Hispanic Research Journal, 2, no. 3 (2001), 191–210, at 195. For copies with late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century miniatures in Toledo cathedral library, see F. Miranda Vicente, ‘Manuscritos del Decreto de Gratiano en la Biblioteca de la Catedral de Toledo’, Revista Española del Derecho Canónico, 7, no. 2 (1952), 391–415. For the medieval literary term distinctio, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 63–4. 61 Fernández Fernández, ‘Transmisión del Saber’, 191. 62 See also Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘El libro de los juegos y la miniatura alfonsí’, in Alfonso el Sabio, Libros del ajedrez, dados y tablas, 2 vols (Madrid and Valencia, 1987), ii, 31–123, at 56; reprinted in Domínguez Rodríguez, Astrología y arte en el Lapidario de Alfonso X el Sabio (Murcia, 2007), at 22–4.

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A closed book could also symbolize the authority of a king as law-giver to his people. Together with his crown and sumptuous clothing, the closed book Alfonso holds in miniatures that preface a manuscript of the Primera partida and two chronicles functions as a symbol of his patronage and also, in an echo of an older visual tradition that depicted the Emperor Justinian holding a sword and a book, as a symbol of justice and law, which constitute his legal authority over his subjects.63 The miniatures which illustrate the prologue in the Primera partida (BL, Add. MS 20787) stress not only Alfonso’s royal authority but also the divine endorsement his rule receives. Although some have argued that this manuscript post-dates Alfonso’s reign, the images are entirely in keeping with the political message Alfonso espouses visually elsewhere.64 Thus the first image of Alfonso (on the first folio of the manuscript) shows him enthroned, holding a sword and a book, and surrounded by courtiers (fol. 1r). The second miniature, which accompanies the opening of the prologue, depicts Alfonso, two courtiers beside him, in the act of dictating to a scribe.65 The historiated initial which begins the text of the final introductory section shows Alfonso kneeling before an altar and offering the closed book of law to God, who looks down from above (fol. 1v). In the royal copies of the Estoria de Espanna and the General estoria IV, the depiction of books draws on different iconographic traditions and has a slightly different symbolic emphasis because of the difference in contents. The miniatures at the beginning of both manuscripts depict Alfonso enthroned, surrounded by nobles and clerics who are very clearly intended to be representatives from two of the three social groups or ‘estates’ of his kingdom. Alfonso holds a closed book in his left hand. In the Estoria de Espanna image, following standard conventions for royal iconography,

63 L. Fernández Fernández, ‘Transmisión del saber – transmisión del poder. La imagen de Alfonso X en la Estoria de España, (Ms. Y-I-2, RBME). Revisión y reflexión sobre su significado’, in ‘Actas del I Encuentro Complutense de Jóvenes Investigadores de Historia del Arte, mayo de 2009’, special issue, Anales de Historia del Arte (2010), 187–210, at 202–3. 64 For a summary of the arguments over the dating, see A. Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Primera Partida’, in Murcia 2009, 528, and at greater length in idem, ‘Retratos de Alfonso X el Sabio en la Primera Partida (British Library, Add. ms. 20.787). Iconografía y cronología’, Alcanate, 6 (2008–2009), 239–51. See also the comments in Fernández Fernández, ‘Transmisión del saber’, 203. 65 Black and white reproductions of these two miniatures are the first two plates in Primera Partida, ed. Arias Bonet. The manuscript is described, but with colour digital images of the miniatures from fol. 3r onwards only, at www.bl/uk [accessed 12 October 2018].

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Figure 2: Type and anti-type: the early years of Nebuchadnezzar (below), whose life prefigures that of Alfonso (above). General estoria IV, BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 2v. Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved. ©2018 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

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he holds a sword upright in his right hand as well (General estoria IV, BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 2v; Estoria de Espanna, Escorial MS Y.I.2, fol. 1v).66 These formal, hierarchical representations underline Alfonso’s royal authority and role as guardian of his kingdom’s laws. The St Albans monk Matthew Paris had used the same visual vocabulary to portray another royal law-maker, the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon king Alfred, in his Chronica majora, a history of the reigns of the kings of England which he had composed in the middle of the thirteenth century.67 Enthroned, the index finger of his right hand raised, Alfred presents a closed book to the representatives of his subjects with his left. Both Matthew Paris and the anonymous Alfonsine artists demonstrate in visual terms how the legal and intellectual authority of the text passed directly from the king down to the higher, and then to the lower, social echelons of his kingdom. Indeed, in the case of both estoria miniatures, it is likely that Alfonso is handing the book to a particular individual who would have been recognizable to contemporaries, although scholars have differed over the dating and the identification. A date of spring 1274 would make the prince receiving the book Fernando de la Cerda.68 Others have argued that the recipient is his son Sancho, which sets a terminus ante quem for the codex of late 1281, before their final split.69

66 The miniature is reproduced in colour in Rodríguez Porto, ‘Inscribed/Effaced’, at 389, fig. 1. 67 S. Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the ‘Chronica Majora’ (Aldershot, 1987), plate 77 and see also the commentary, 171. Matthew Paris’s illustrations are unusual in the context of English chronicle manuscripts, but although infrequent, miniatures do appear in some types of chronicle copied in late thirteenth century England: O. de Laborderie, ‘La représentation du pouvoir royal dans les manuscrits consacrés à l’histoire d’Angleterre du milieu du XIIIe siècle’, in Images, pouvoirs et normes, ed. Collard et al., 269-295. 68 Rodríguez Porto, ‘Inscribed/Effaced’, 395–7. 69 A. Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘General Estoria. IV Parte’, in Murcia 2009, 396; Fernández Fernández, ‘Transmisión del saber’, at 200–202. She also argues that the folio with the miniature in the Estoria de Espanna manuscript was, significantly, added as a singleton around 1280, after the rest of the manuscript had been copied (‘Transmisión del saber’, 197). My collation, on the other hand, suggests the ‘singleton’ in the Estoria de Espanna is in fact the verso of the f irst leaf of a bifolium that also contained the prologue text. Over time it separated into two leaves which were stitched back together with a new leaf of parchement which is now at the front of the manuscript. That said, if Fernández Fernández is correct in her collation, and the folio is in fact a singleton, this is not as telling about the relationship between Alfonso and Sancho as it may seem. The General estoria IV, BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 1, and the torn opening folio of the Libros del saber de astrología, Madrid Biblioteca Historica Marqués de Valdecilla, Universidad Complutense, MS 156, which contained an illuminated initial and perhaps also a miniature, are also both bound in as singletons.

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In the manuscript of the General estoria IV, the Alfonsine miniaturists reinforce the legitimacy of Alfonso’s kingship by pairing the miniature of the king with another image that illustrates a particular passage from the chronicle text on the next folio. The image of Alfonso again shows him enthroned and surrounded by courtiers as he hands a book to a richly dressed figure seated to his right in BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539 (see Figure 2). This image is set immediately above a narrative miniature of the same dimensions that depicts a baby, a leper, and a knight in a wooded, mountainous landscape. This is an illustration of the second of the two accounts of the life of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar that follow in the text. The account of the biblical king begins with his conception, birth, and childhood, and the compilers of the written account, in their aim to be exhaustive, present two versions of these events. The first draws on the work of the twelfth-century Italian chronicler Godfrey of Viterbo. According to Godfrey, Nebuchadnezzar was the son of a woman and an incubus, and was abandoned on a mountain by his mother at birth. He survived, however, protected beneath the wings of an owl and suckled by a goat. A leper, who happened to pass by, took him into his care and raised him. Once grown, Nebuchadnezzar became a tyrannical ruler. The second version of Nebuchadnezzar’s early years recorded by the Alfonsine compilers has a more positive ending. This account is taken from a shadowy Arabic source, identified as the ‘Estoria de Alguazif’, which may be the work of the ninthcentury Egyptian historian Ibrahim Ibn Wasif Shah al-Misri.70 Alguazif’s narrative is structured around portents and omens that foretell the baby’s glorious destiny despite predictions to the contrary. The account begins with the travels of Nebuchadnezzar’s magician-father Badiza, who attempts to avoid siring any children because he himself had prophesied that he would father a son who would ‘lay waste to all Egypt and many other lands’. That child is Nebuchadnezzar, and Badiza’s prediction is clearly a reference to the bellicose and repressive monarch depicted in the Old Testament, who persecutes the Israelites and burns down their Temple.71 Yet the Alfonsine compilers never refer to the biblical version, despite announcing at the start of their account that Nebuchadnezzar’s renown was such that he ‘was included in the Holy scriptures’.72 Instead they focus on the Arabic 70 See introduction to Alfonso X, General estoria. Primera parte, ed. Solalinde, xiii, n. 1, and General estoria. Cuarta parte, ed. I. Fernández-Ordóñez and R. Orellana, 2 vols (general editor P. Sánchez-Prieto Borja), Biblioteca Castro, 10 vols (Madrid, 2009), i, xxi and 15, c.3. 71 4 Kings 15: 1–23 (Latin Vulgate version). 72 General estoria. Cuarta parte, ed. Fernández-Ordóñez and Orellana, i, 13, c.1.

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source, in which Badiza finally becomes a father and abandons his child on a mountain. The baby is discovered by a leper, who wraps it in an owl skin and goes in search of a goat to provide the child with milk. Curious to know the fate of his son, Badiza returns to the mountain and observes how the boy grows into a strong and virtuous young man. His earlier fears, which stemmed from his own prophecy, vanish, and Badiza becomes convinced that his son will be a force for good in the world: He saw how he grew and how he would be well-built and beautiful […], he believed that this was by the order of heavenly power. And thus it was a certain and an immutable thing that could not be prevented.73

Visible erasures and overpainting in the image show the artists had not originally been directed to illustrate the second version, and had opted for an image of the more familiar narrative in the first version in which Nebuchadnezzar is presented as a tyrant.74 The area around the depiction of the baby shows signs of smudging and erasure, and close inspection reveals the faint outlines of a goat and an owl with outstretched wings. These key elements of Godfrey’s narrative have been removed at a late stage in order to present the positive version of Nebuchadnezzar’s life which comes second in the narrative. These last-minute alterations mean the reader is invited to compare the image of Alfonso as legal and intellectual authority over his people with the image of a baby destined, against exceptional odds, to become an exemplary ruler. This striking use in a royal context of a biblical figure whose actions are usually condemned by thirteenth-century commentators is not unique. The Psalter of Louis IX (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 1186), copied and illuminated during the French king’s lifetime (probably between c. 1254 and 1258), modifies the presentation of Saul from the anti-model of kingship to a ruler who forges a balanced relationship between the Lord and his people.75 In the case of the General estoria, the implicit comparison between Alfonso and Nebuchadnezzar appears to have been precipitated by contemporary political events. Later in the chronicle text, the compilers present the Egyptian king as a law-giving monarch who repopulates vast tracts of abandoned land using diplomatic methods that would have been 73 General estoria. Cuarta parte, ed. Fernández-Ordóñez and Orellana, i.21, c.6. 74 BAV, MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 3r: see the transcription in Alfonso X el Sabio, General estoria. Cuarta parte, ed. Fernández-Ordóñez and Orellana, i.13 (my translation). The miniature has been little studied: see Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘General Estoria. IV parte’, i, 396–7; Menéndez Pidal, La España del siglo XIII leída en imágenes, 19. 75 Guest, ‘The People Demand a King’, at 5.

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familiar to thirteenth-century readers.76 Perhaps the most surprising part of this account of Nebuchadnezzar’s kingship is the compilers’ reinterpretation of the episode in the Book of Daniel (4: 1–37, Latin Vulgate version) in which God castigates the Babylonian king’s arrogance by depriving him of his throne and forcing him to exist in a feral state until he worships him once more. In the Alfonsine version, Nebuchadnezzar is not overbearingly arrogant, but instead suffers a mental breakdown from which he eventually recovers. The reasons for this breakdown remain unexplained, but it is not related to any form of divine punishment. Moreover, the result of his breakdown is positive, as it exposes the treachery of Nebuchadnezzar’s most trusted adviser who had taken advantage of his mental weakness to organize a rebellion against him. The rebellion is put down by Nebuchadnezzar’s son, who returned the breakaway territories to his father’s rule.77 The implied parallels with Castilian politics in 1280, the year in which the manuscript was copied according to the colophon, are striking. Alfonso had entrusted diplomatic and military aspects of his government to his second son, Sancho; but by the time the scribes of this part of the General estoria had finished their work, the relationship between father and son was beginning to sour.78 The fourteen blank lines that follow the date in the colophon were probably intended to record notable events in Alfonso’s reign that year.79 As they survive today, in their unwritten state, they bear witness to cultural patronage which responded directly to the ebb and flow of politics in the kingdom, politics which had already prompted alterations to the opening miniature to point a tacit comparison with Alfonso’s government.80 The fact that the erasures in the miniature remain visible suggests the haste with which these changes were made; the blank lines suggest the compilers waited for a revised exemplar that never came. The Libro de los juegos (Escorial MS T.I.6), a treatise on board games, is unusual in that an image of Alfonso prefaces each of the three books in the manuscript. The iconography of the king at these points has been carefully sequenced. The images which open the first and last books – that is to say the ‘Book of Chess’ (fol. 1r) and the ‘Book of Board Games’ (fol. 72r) – establish Alfonso as patron of the work by depicting him to the far left of the scene (as the reader sees it), enthroned and pointing down at a scribe at his feet, who 76 General estoria: cuarta parte, ed. Fernández-Ordóñez and Orellana, 152 (c.85). 77 Ibid., 197 (c.118). 78 González Jiménez, Alfonso X (2004), 337. 79 BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 278r. 80 See the comments by Elisa Ruiz on the political and personal circumstances which forced changes on the manuscripts Alfonso commissioned: ‘Rex scribens’, at 375.

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Figure 3: A scribe writes out a treatise on games played with dice on the orders of Alfonso and supervised by his agent. Libro de los juegos (Libro de los dados), Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 65r (detail). © Patrimonio Nacional

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writes in a book.81 The miniature at the start of the ‘Book of Games Played with Dice’ (Figure 3), however, placed at the thematic centre of the work, emphasizes the authority of royal government rather than the authority of Alfonso as literary patron. In this image Alfonso, enthroned, sits at the centre of the miniature and faces the reader directly. This formal, hierarchical representation of him is unique in the surviving royal manuscripts he patronized, and recalls the image of him as King of the Romans on the seals issued by his imperial chancery.82 The legal echoes continue in the words taken down by the scribe at his feet, which do not reflect the text but instead stress the act of royal command: ‘que mando fazer el rey don’ (‘which the king don […] ordered to be made’). The words, which occupy the width of the scribe’s folio, are written in a script similar to that used for the words which the scribe writes on his bifolium in the miniature that prefaces the ‘Book of Board Games’ (which does cite the opening word of the text below). The incomplete phrase, which does not appear in the text below, is crudely written and laid out, but the deliberate use of two different coloured inks suggests that the words were added at the same time as the rest of the miniature was painted. The activity of the people depicted in the vicinity of the king also suggests a legal context: the semi-naked men can be interpreted as dice players ushered before the king by his proctor (or procurador, the king’s representative). Scholars have identified the proctor figure as Maestro Roldán, a lawyer who, on royal orders, drew up legislation on gambling in 1276.83 Yet the juxtaposition of the enthroned Alfonso with these victims of chance is not just an illustration of royal patronage of a treatise on dice games, but a more general image of the administration of royal power as well, one in which the underlying message is that only royal authority enshrined in a written code can harness and control the uncertainties of fortune in the exercise of the law.84 The ragged group to Alfonso’s left may be unfortunate dice players in 81 For the translation of tablas as ‘board games’, see O. Remie Constable, ‘Chess and Courtly Culture in Medieval Castile: the Libro de ajedrez of Alfonso X, el Sabio’, Speculum, 82, no. 2 (2007), 301–47, at 315, n. 39. 82 See above, ‘Introduction’, and Olmos, ‘El sello diplomático real’, 73. 83 Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Imágenes de presentación’, 291; Menéndez Pidal, La España del siglo XIII leída en imágenes, 47–8. The Libro de las tahurerías is the only Alfonsine code of law which identifies a particular jurist responsible for its compilation: see “Libro de las tahurerías”, ed. MacDonald. 84 A point also made in the iconography of the twelfth-century mosaic floor at San Savino, Piacenza, which depicts a scene of juidicial combat. See W.L. Tronzo, ‘Moral Hieroglyphs: chess and dice at San Savino in Piacenza’, Gesta, 16, no. 2 (1977), 15–26 and M. Vaccaro, ‘La scacchiera del mosaico di S. Savino. Due letture della virtù’, in Gli scacchi e il chiostro. Atti del convegno

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the immediate context of the image, but at a general level they also stand as the king’s subjects beyond the confines of his court, witnesses to his power and in need of his protection.85 There may also be a punning legal allusion in the pointing index fingers that Alfonso and his courtier direct towards the writing scribe. The Latin for this finger, ‘index’, could also be a read as a play on ‘iudex’, ‘judge’ – and so in this image, the source of the law is not only the king himself, but the books he produces to enshrine that law.86 The message could not have been more timely. By 1283, the date of the colophon to the last book in the codex, Alfonso had been deposed from his throne and his kingdom had descended into civil war. The clothes Alfonso wears in these miniatures are as important as the book he holds and the company he keeps. Colour plays a key role in conveying different messages about Alfonso’s royal identity and intellectual persona, messages which run from the overtly political to the astrological. Alfonso’s sensitivity to the importance of dress as a marker of royal status is clear from the account of the reign of the Visigothic king Leovigild (r. 569–586) in the Estoria de Espanna, which is at pains to point out that he was the first king to wear ‘royal clothes’ in order to distinguish himself from his noblemen.87 The second Partida states that ‘dress has much to do with causing men to be recognized either as noble, or servile’, and that kings should wear ‘garments of silk, adorned with gold and jewels’ which on important ceremonial occasions should be supplemented with a crown of gold set with precious stones.88 In the 1284 codicil to his will, Alfonso bequeathed his heir crowns set with stones and cameos, as well as rings, all of which he described as noble gifts appropriate to a king.89 nazionale di studi [Brescia, 10 febbraio 2006], Special Issue, Civilità Bresciana 16, nos. 1–2 (2007), 129–54. Combat as a means to determine the truth of accusations is described in the Partidas (vii.4.1–2), and more generally see R. Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: the medieval judicial ordeal (Oxford, 1986). On dice as a game solely of chance, see the prologue in Alfonso X el Sabio, Libro de los juegos: acedrex, dados e tablas; Ordenamiento de las tafurerías, ed. R. Orellana Calderón (Madrid, 2007), at 255. 85 On majestic depictions of kings in Anglo-Norman genealogical rolls which were designed to convey the power of the monarchy to readers beyond court circles, see de Laborderie, ‘La répresentation du pouvoir royal’, 282. 86 Musson, ‘Ruling “Virtually”?’, 165, for pointing fingers and ‘index/iudex’ pun. 87 Primera crónica general de España, ed. R. Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1955), i, 263 (c.470); on Leovigild see R. Collins, Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 400–1000, 2nd edn (Basingstoke/ London, 1995), 41–54 (and 49 on his adoption of royal regalia). 88 Partida ii.5.5: see Las Siete Partidas, trans. S. Parsons Scott, ii, Medieval Government: the world of kings and warriors, 288. For the Spanish text, see Solalinde, Antología, 153. 89 Diplomatario andaluz, ed. González Jiménez, 557–64, 559 (doc. 521).

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The clothes worn by Alfonso in his manuscripts, then, are carefully chosen markers of identity and status. In the Cantigas and in the Libro de los juegos, he is often depicted wearing robes bordered with, or covered by, castles and lions which were both dynastic emblems and canting symbols of the territories of Castile and León, over which he ruled.90 In the miniature for the ‘Book of Games Played with Dice’ (see Figure 3) the cloth used for his tunic and cloak is woven entirely in a red and white check pattern that replicates the quartering of the royal arms, and which the archaeological evidence from his tomb suggests is an accurate depiction of the pattern on the ceremonial robes he actually wore.91 By contrast, in the images which open the ‘Book of Chess’ and the ‘Book of Board Games’, the heraldry on Alfonso’s garments is less insistent. In the ‘Book of Chess’ the pattern of roundels that enclose heraldic lions and castles is less dense,92 while in the ‘Book of Board Games’ the heraldic decoration is incorporated only along the edge of his cloak and round the neck and sleeve-ends of his tunic. Establishing the appropriate choice of colour for royal garments had been a preoccupation for European rulers since the mid-thirteenth century. Contemporary English and French sources reveal that from the 1240s onwards, Henry III and, in particular, Louis IX had taken to wearing robes of blue to convey an image of humility, and as a consequence transformed the colour into a symbol of royalty.93 While in reality Alfonso may have ignored this trend and preferred to display his kingly status by wearing robes decorated with heraldic designs, in the manuscript depictions of him colour is also an important marker of his royal and intellectual persona. As with other elements of his representation, the choice of colour depends on the nature of the work in which he is depicted. In the Cantigas, he is particularly associated with blue, usually in combination with red, because these are colours worn by the Virgin, whose servant he proclaims himself to be. The white undergarment he wears in the miniatures which illustrate 90 See the comment in Hernández, ‘Two Weddings and a Funeral’, 411. 91 Menéndez Pidal, La España del s. XIII leída en imágenes, 38; images of Fernando de la Cerda’s robes in C. Herrero Carretero, Museo de Telas Medievales, Monasterio de Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas (Madrid, 1988), 38–41; for Alfonso’s shroud, see T. Laguna Paúl, ‘“Si el nuestro cuerpo fuere enterrado en Sevilla.” Alfonso X y la Capilla de los Reyes’, in Murcia 2009, 116–29, at 127. 92 At the time, this type of pattern was referred to as ‘with shields’ because the circular frames that enclosed the motifs recalled Islamic shields known as ‘adaragas’: General estoria, cited in Fernández González, ‘“Que los reyes vestiesen paños de seda”’, at 387. 93 M. Pastoureau, Blue: the history of a colour, trans. M.I. Cruse (Princeton, nj, and Oxford, 2001), 52, 62, and 89, n. 21. See also Le Goff, Saint Louis, 139 and 631, and Y. Deslandres, ‘Le costume du roi Saint Louis, étude iconographique et technique’, in Septième centenaire de la mort de Saint Louis. Actes des colloquies de Royaumont et de Paris (21–27 Mai 1970) (Paris, 1976), 105–14.

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two of the poems that record his illness becomes a red one, covered by a dark blue robe edged with gold, when he rises to proclaim his cure and to thank the Virgin.94 Elsewhere he wears a combination of red and blue, usually a tunic of a reddish-pink shade and a blue cloak hemmed with gold. The Virgin, by contrast, tends to be depicted with a red cloak and blue tunic, a colour reversal which emphasizes her royal status over that of Alfonso, since contemporary sumptuary laws restricted the wearing of a scarlet cloak to the king.95 Yet the concern of the Cantigas illuminators to stress the collective devotion of Alfonso’s court and subjects to the Virgin means the miniatures cannot be seen as a reliable reflection of Alfonsine legislation. Members of the king’s entourage in the Cantigas are also depicted wearing a combination of red and blue clothes (although tellingly without the gold detail), and so too are members of the wider population, a combination unthinkable according to the laws of the day.96 The colours worn by the king and his entourage in some of the miniatures also suggest the works were intended for different groups of readers. The miniatures that accompany the prologue poems in the códice rico and the códice de los músicos of the Cantigas both show the king reading from an open book and surrounded by scribes, courtiers, clerics, and musicians; but Alfonso’s dress and that of his entourage is depicted differently in each manuscript. In the códice rico, all those present wear the pinkish-red and black colours associated with the Order of Santa María de la Estrella, or of Cartagena.97 The Order, which differed from others of the period in that it was a royal foundation controlled by the king, was initially established as a military confraternity with particular responsibility for naval duties. Originally based at Cartagena and attached to the Cistercian Order, the 94 See the final miniature in the panel illustrating cantiga 235, Escorial MS b.I.2, fol. 92r, and the final two miniatures which accompany cantiga 95 in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale MS B.R. 20, fol. 119v (the corresponding text in the códice de los músicos, cantiga 209). 95 J.D. González Arce, Apariencia y poder. La legislación suntuaria castellana en los siglos XIII y XV (Jaen, 1998), 124. 96 As for example in Escorial MS T.I.1, fol. 35v (the Virgin has a blue robe and a red cloak, the ‘good woman’ of the miracle wears a blue cloak and red robe), or fol. 200r (in which the plebeian spectators gathered around a man saved from injury by a bull wear the same combination of black, blue, and red as the Virgin herself). For the range of people wearing this colour combination, see also the miniatures in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale MS B.R.20, fols 1r, 21v, 82r, 92r, and 120v. 97 Cf. Cantigas, ed. Mettmann, iii, no.299, about a friar from the Order who reluctantly presents ‘a king’ with a statue of the Virgin, and the miniatures which illustrate the miracle in Florence, MS B.R.20, fol. 100r. The friars wear scarlet cloaks with eight-pointed gold stars, and black tunics; the blue and reddish-pink colours of the courtiers’ clothes in the final frame echo Mary’s robes and those of Alfonso, but the red ribbons at their necks display their allegiance to the royal Order as well.

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foundation never received papal approval, although Alfonso may have been responding to papal pressure in 1277 when he appointed a master and transferred the Order’s headquarters to the monastery of Santa María la Real in Murcia. In 1280 it was dissolved, allegedly to reinforce the numbers of the much-depleted Order of Santiago after the disastrous battle of Moclín, but more probably because of its ineffectual contribution to the 1279 naval campaign against Algeciras.98 The scene of Alfonso and his musicians dressed in the colours of this royal Order advertises not only the political side to the king’s devotion, but may also evoke a particular setting connected with the Order, perhaps at Cartagena or (after 1277) the royal monastery at Murcia. Alternatively, the miniature may depict a space personal to the king, such as the royal chapel at Seville which Alfonso, almost certainly inspired by Louis IX’s creation of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, had begun to reconfigure from around 1261 onwards, although with significant differences in the execution of the royal tomb sculptures.99 Alfonso’s clothes in the miniature of the códice de los músicos, by contrast, emphasize his role as the Virgin’s troubadour and suggest how he is central to the celebration of her cult in his kingdom. The courtiers, clerics, and a scribe who bear witness to his devotion and who simultaneously represent his subjects beyond the court, wear garments of varying colours (blue, black, and orange).100 Alfonso, however, wears the same colours which are elsewhere used to depict the Virgin’s clothes (pinkish-red cloak and blue tunic). His devotion to her is given additional emphasis by the Marian star symbol, picked out in gold, emblazoned on his tunic.101 The pinkish-red and black colours of the clothes of the musicians allude to the royal Order 98 Ayala Martínez, Las órdenes militares hispánicas, at 108–12. 99 Yarza, ‘“Despesas fazen los omnes”’, 271–3; R. Branner, ‘The Sainte-Chapelle and the Capela Regis in the Thirteenth Century’, Gesta, 10.1 (1971), 19–22. T. Laguna Paúl, ‘La Capilla de los Reyes de la primitiva catedral de Santa María de Sevilla y las relaciones de la corona castellana con el cabildo hispalense en su etapa fundacional (1248–1285)’, in Maravillas de la España medieval. Tesoro sagrado y monarquía, ed. I.G. Bango Torviso, 2 vols. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Real Colegiata de San Isidoro, León (León, 2000), i, 235–49 (241 and 244), and T. Laguna Paúl, ‘“Si el nuestro cuerpo fuere enterrado en Sevilla”. Alfonso X y la Capilla de los Reyes’, in Murcia 2009, 116–29, at 119–20. On the códice de los músicos and Seville cathedral, see Fernández Fernández, ‘“Este Livro, com’ achei”’, 53. 100 On courtier-witnesses as representatives of a wider public, see A. Rathmann-Lutz, ‘Public Relations: eyewitnesses in fourteenth century French royal manuscripts’, in The Public in the Picture: involving the beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine and Western Medieval and Renaissance art, ed. B. Fricke and U. Krass (Zurich, 2015), 189-203 (203). 101 The miniature is reproduced in Murcia 2009, 204 and 369 (an image of the complete folio). The stars here have six points, whereas those which are the symbol of the Order of Santa María have eight.

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of Santa María. The imagery glosses the text below, which comprises the conclusion to a prologue poem in which Alfonso declares himself to be Mary’s troubador, and the start of the first lyrical cantiga in praise of the Virgin.102 In other manuscripts, the colours of Alfonso’s garments have been carefully chosen for their astrological significance. The 1279 Libro de las formas & ymagenes (Escorial MS h.I.16) is one of only two scientific works of Alfonsine patronage to survive with an opening miniature of the king (the other is the historiated initial in the Lapidario, discussed above).103 The treatise, ‘on the forms and images that are in the skies and on the virtues and the actions that emanate from them upon the bodies that are below the lunar orb’,104 is Aristotelian in its conception of a hierarchy of celestial influences which determine the activities of the terrestrial world below. Only the first two quires of the manuscript survive, and so modern scholars have been left with just the prologue and the table of contents.105 The prologue, which explains the rationale for the divisions of the work, opens with a large inhabited initial ‘P’ which, like the initial in the Lapidario, includes an image of a king (see the cover illustration). The compartment is twelve lines high, while the stem extends above and below it along the left edge of the column of text (Escorial MS h.I.16, fol. 1r). Alfonso, dressed entirely in robes of pale purple-blue, holds an open book and points to its folios; a man, dressed in deep purple robes and wearing a cap, kneels before him and holds one edge of the book. Behind him kneel four other figures, dressed in tunics of purple and blue. The scene depicted in the initial has been interpreted as one of presentation, in which Alfonso receives a work he commissioned from the compiler.106 However, given the emphasis in other miniatures on the act of royal dissemination of knowledge, and the fact that the other figures wear garments in similar shades to those of the king, the scene is more likely to depict Alfonso instructing a group of fellow 102 Escorial, MS b.I.2, fol. 29r; Mettmann, Cantigas, i, B and 1 (55–6). 103 The surviving astrological/scientific Alfonsine works which lack royal portraits are: Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 8322, Canones de Albateni (the opening folio is a fifteenth-century replacement on paper); a large section of the upper and lower parts of the first folio of Madrid, Biblioteca Historica Marqués de Valdecilla, Universidad Complutense, MS 156, Libros del saber de astrología, has been torn away; the first quire of the Astromagia, BAV, MS Reg. lat. 1283a, has been lost. 104 ‘Delas formas & delas ymagenes que son en los cielos & delas uertudes & de las obras que salen dellas en los cuerpos que son dyuso del cielo dela luna’: Lapidario and Libro de las formas, ed. Diman and Winget, 151 (my translation). 105 For a reconstruction of the rest of the manuscript, see A.J. Cárdenas, ‘Alfonso X’s Libro de las formas e de las ymagenes: facts and probabilities’, Romance Quarterly, 33 (1986), 269–74. 106 For example, Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 286.

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scholars.107 The prologue text claims that he ordered the work to be compiled from ‘the books of the ancient philosophers’,108 and Alfonso’s role in the transmission of this knowledge is symbolically underlined by the purple colour of his robes, which present him as both an earthly incarnation of Jupiter, the planet-god of learning, and as a Christ-like figure. As the authors of the Setenario, a treatise on kingship compiled for Alfonso between 1280 and 1284, explained:109 The Ancients attributed honesty, right, and truth to Jupiter, who had these in his nature in seven ways. And this was in imitation of Our Lord Jesus Christ; […] That he was honest; for, as the gentiles made purple garments the colour of the sky for the statue of Jupiter, so Jesus Christ was dressed in two types of most noble clothes: one, coloured purple and clear and heavenly, which he was given by his Father; the other, full of truth and very well made, which he received by the saintly goodness of his mother.110

The Greek god and the Castilian king are also linked in the first part of the General estoria, which describes how the emperors of Rome Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II are ultimately descended from Jupiter (Alfonso’s own part in this imperial lineage, as great-grandson of the one and nephew of the other, is tacitly implied). Elsewhere in the chronicle Jupiter is presented as a law-maker and as a scholar-king who civilized his people, attributes which Alfonso, in the prologues to different works he patronizes, is also said to share.111 Alfonso’s identification with the planet-god is reinforced by the unusual depiction of him with a light beard, a reflection of the allegorical figure of Jupiter who, in the section on astronomical chess in 107 The intensity of the shade of purple is unimportant: M. Pastoureau, ‘Le temps mis en couleurs. Des couleurs liturgiques aux modes vestimentaires (XIIe–XIIIe siècles)’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 157 (1999), 111–35, at 127. 108 Lapidario and Libro de las formas, ed. Diman and Winget, 151. 109 For the dating, see G. Martin, ‘Alphonse X ou la science politique. Séptenaire, 1–11’, Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médiévale, 18–19 (1994), 79–100 and 20 (1995), 7–33. 110 ‘Honestad e derecho e uerdat dauan los antigos a Jupiter, que auye por ssu natura en ssiete maneras. E esto ffué a ssemeiança de Nuestro Sennor Ihesu Cristo; […] Que ffué honesto; que assí commo los gentiles ffazíen a la ymajen de Jupiter uestiduras cárdenas de color de çielo, assí Ihesu Cristo ffué uestido de dos maneras de uestiduras muy nobles: la vna, de color cárdeno e claro e çelestial, que ouo de parte del Padre; la otra, conplida de honestat e muy bien ffecha, que ouo de la ssanta bondad de ssu madre’: Alfonso el Sabio, Setenario, ed. K.H. Vanderford (Buenos Aires, 1945), at 87 (ley 53). My translation. 111 See F. Rico, ‘Alfonso X y Júpiter’, in idem, Alfonso X y la “General estoria”. Tres lecciones (Barcelona, 1984), 97–120 (especially 113–17) and Fernández-Ordóñez, Las ‘estorias’, 34–9.

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Alfonso’s Libro de los juegos, is described as middle-aged.112 The astrological symbolism continues with the figures painted on the stem of the initial. In the section above the compartment of the ‘P’ are two roundels. One contains a centaur-like figure that holds a golden shield in its left hand while its right aims a lance towards the image of the king below. The centaur figure recalls the symbol for the constellation of Sagittarius (though the usual attribute for the star sign of an arrow is replaced here with a shield and lance), a constellation governed by Jupiter.113 The centaur-Sagittarius symbol is another reference to Alfonso as it alludes to the month of his birth and to his royal status. Alfonso was born on 23 November, the month when the Sun, the planet-symbol of fire and royalty, is in Sagittarius, the zodiac sign for November and a fire sign as well.114 Below the centaur, in the roundel closest to the compartment of the ‘P’, the figure of an angel in a white tunic emerges from between two leaves, one red and one green. The angel also points towards the king. This figure resembles depictions of the constellation Virgo in the Lapidario and the Astromagia, and the Setenario devotes a whole chapter to ‘the similarities between Saint Mary and [the sign of] Virgo’.115 The appearance of this particular constellation here may be an allusion to Alfonso’s Marian devotion cast in an astrological form to suit the accompanying text. This winged figure also refers to the substance of the treatise itself: the table of contents includes a section on angels and talismanic magic which was almost certainly taken from an earlier compilation on Jewish astral magic commissioned by Alfonso around 1259.116 The colour of the two leaves may also be symbolic: red for the fire of the sun, and green perhaps for Jupiter as well, since in the Libro de los juegos the compilers describe the allegorical figure of the planet dressed in green.117 The remain112 Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 95v; Libro de los juegos, ed. Orellana Calderón, 365. The colour symbolism associated with Jupiter is not consistent between the two manuscripts, however. In the Libro de los juegos he wears robes of green and a cap coloured ‘ultramarine’. 113 As Ramón Llull observed in 1297: see J. Gaya, with the assistance of L. Badía, ‘Ramón Llull, Tractat d’Astronomia (segons el ms. Add. 16.434 del British Museum)’, in Textos y astronomía española en el siglo XIII, ed. J. Vernet (Barcelona, 1981), 204–320, at 222. 114 I am most grateful to Sue Lewis for sharing her profound knowledge of astrology with me in an email exchange of 7 June 2007. 115 See Murcia 2009, at 490, and A. Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Iconografía de los signos del Zodiaco en seis libros de horas de la Biblioteca Nacional’, Revista de la Universidad Complutense, 22 (1973), 27–80, at 47–8. Setenario, ed. Vanderford, 100–101 (ley 60): ‘las ssemeianças que ouo Santa María con [el ssigno de] Virgo’. 116 García Avilés, ‘Alfonso X y el Liber Razielis’, 21–39 (particularly 29–33). 117 See below.

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ing decoration in the stem of the letter ‘P’ has mostly rubbed away because of friction and the distortion of the parchment. However, it is still possible to make out three smaller roundels beneath the angel, all framing golden heraldic castles, for the kingdom of Castile. These no doubt alternated with two roundels containing lions rampant, for the kingdom of León, thereby completing the royal arms of Alfonso. Had more images of him survived in the scientific and astrological manuscripts, the importance of astrological symbolism in the depictions of him may have become more apparent. As it is, the representations of Alfonso which accompany games in the Libro de los juegos suggest this was probably a significant element in strategies to present a flattering image of his kingship. The penultimate treatise of the Libro de los juegos comprises an illustrated description of the boards, counters, and rules of board games played according to the movements of the heavens. The prefatory text describes these games as ‘very noble’ and ‘very unusual’ (‘muy estraño’), and explains that they are particularly suitable for those who ‘know the art of astronomy’ (Orellana Calderón, 359).118 The structure of the games is based on the relationships between the planets, the twelve zodiac signs and other fixed stars, and the four elements. The seven-sided board on which the games are played is divided into seven concentric circles, while the border round the edge contains the signs of the zodiac in the eighth sphere. The folio miniatures that accompany two of the games include Alfonso and depict him using iconography inspired by astrological symbolism. In the first of the two images (fol. 96v), Alfonso, identified by the arms on his cap and along the border of his cloak, presides over the board on a lowbacked bench draped with textiles, and a circular cushion beside him is also decorated with the royal arms. The zodiac signs which correspond to him, faintly depicted in white on the outer rim of the board, are Aries and Pisces. These are the first and last signs cited in the list given in the description of the board on the previous folio, and so by implication the king in fact presides over all twelve signs. Alfonso is the only player depicted with an open and outstretched right hand, which suggests he is the first to have thrown the die, and that the players will take their turn in an anti-clockwise direction around the board, following the order of the zodiac signs depicted there and listed in the description on the previous folio: ‘Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces’ (Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 95r; Orellana Calderón, 362). The text of the treatise describes 118 ‘Tablero de los escaques e de las tablas que se juega por astronomía’: fols. 95r–96v, Libro de los juegos, ed. Orellana Calderón, 359.

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how the allegorical figure of the Sun, a ‘young king’, wears a golden crown and shining robes, and Alfonso is depicted here in a way that suggests he embodies the light and fire of this planet.119 The golden circular fan above his head underlines his identification with the Sun, while his bright red robes (his servant wears matching livery) suggest he represents the element fire, a representation appropriate to his birth sign.120 The detailed description of the games board that precedes the miniature explains that fire is the first of the four elements, and that all the astrological signs around the edge of the board are connected to the circle that represents the element of fire.121 By contrast, the garb of the other six players around the board, while varied in colour, does not particularly identify them with any of the remaining allegorical planet figures described in the text. The second (and final) folio miniature in the manuscript (fol. 97v) follows the colophon and illustrates the description of the ‘board for counters in the manner of a chess board which is played according to astronomy’.122 It depicts a board game played according to the movements of the planets and constellations and, once again, Alfonso presides over the board. He is identif ied by the heraldic lions and castles on his cap, and his royal status is conf irmed by the cushion and the low screen draped with a star-patterned cloth that surrounds him as he sits cross-legged beside the board. This time he wears green robes, the colour of the cloak worn by the allegorical figure of Jupiter according to the accompanying text, and the counters allocated to him on the board are yellow, for the Sun (see the text in Escorial MS T.1.6, fol. 97r; Orellana Calderón, 363). Again, Alfonso is the only player whose clothes clearly identify him with the allegorical representation of a planet. He points to his right with both hands, but his head is turned to look at the player on his left. These gestures suggest he 119 Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 97r; Libro de los juegos, ed. Orellana Calderón, at 363. The folio is reproduced in colour in P. García Morencos, Libro de ajedrez, dados y tablas de Alfonso X el Sabio (Madrid, 1977; 2nd edn 1987), illustration 20. 120 A. Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘El Officium Salomonis de Carlos V en el Monasterio de El Escorial: Alfonso X y el planeta Sol. Absolutismo monárquico y hermetismo’, Reales Sitios, 83 (1985), 11–28, at 13. For solar iconography in a near-contemporary French context, see P. Talmant, ‘Iconologie politique. Le soleil, le Christ et le roi très chrétien: une figure du pouvoir au XIVe siècle’, Histoire de l’Art, 37–38 (1997), 25–40, at 31. 121 Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 95v; Libro de los juegos, ed. Orellana Calderón, 362: ‘Et del comienço de cada signo sale una liña e taja los otros siete cercos e llega fata el cerco dell elemento del fuego […]. Et otrossí hay cuatro cercos redondos que son segundo los cuatro elementos que son de dentro d’estos ocho. El primero es uermejo que es por ell elemento del fuego.’ 122 ‘Tablero de las tablas segund la natura de los escaques que se iuega por astronomía’: fol. 97r; Libro de los juegos, ed. Orellana Calderón, 370–1.

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controls the direction of the game, since there are three dice in the section to his right that corresponds to Mercury (a planet of ‘many diverse colours’ according to the text, which is reflected in the stripey counters), and the hand of the player beside this section is raised and open, implying he has just cast them down. Images of Alfonso in two miniatures of the Libro de los juegos have proved puzzling to scholars, but the explanation for their iconography may also be astrological. The miniatures accompany successive accounts of the moves for chess games (fols 47v and 48r); and, in the overall structure of the section on chess, they open a short sequence of fifteen chess problems that, unlike all the other problems in the ‘Book of Chess’, do not derive from Islamic sources or take inspiration from them.123 In both images, Alfonso is identified by the royal heraldry on his cap and by the heraldic border on his tunic and cloak. On each occasion, he sits on the winning side of the board (black wins the first game, white the second).124 In the first miniature, he plays against a chastely dressed woman whose head is covered. She moves first while the king looks on.125 Both sit on cushions, and a curtain hangs behind Alfonso to indicate his royal status. In the second miniature, Alfonso does not play, but sits on a stool and watches two women play. The women, seated on stools and facing outwards towards the reader, wear patens and have hennaed hands. Their costly, diaphanous tunics, or ‘gilǡla’, mark them out as members of the upper stratum of Muslim society, and also reveal their naked bodies underneath.126 As such, they would seem to conform to contemporary Christian stereotypes of Muslim female lasciviousness, although the miniature illustrating a different game shows a Christian man with a tonsure in a robe made of the same fabric.127 Yet it is Alfonso’s behaviour that is lascivious: with his left hand he reaches over and covers the right breast of the woman closest to him. 123 Remie Constable, ‘Chess and Courtly Culture’, 311. 124 R. Calvo, ‘El Libro de los juegos de Alfonso X el Sabio’, in Alfonso el Sabio, Libros del ajedrez (Valencia, 1987), ii, 127–235, at 218–19. 125 Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 47v. The open book which one scholar sees in the miniature is in fact the fold of Alfonso’s cloak: H. Bamford, ‘El ajedrez, juego de espacio, personajes y alteridad: nuevas ideas respecto a las imágenes del Libro de ajedrez alfonsí’, Emblemata. Revista aragonesa de emblemática, 15 (2009), 15–28, at 24. Black and white reproductions of the miniatures and the text below in K. Kennedy, ‘On Chess, Chests and Kingship: two miniatures of Alfonso X of Castile in the Libros de acedrex, dados e tablas (1283)’, in Image and Word: reflections of art and literature from the Middle Ages to the present, ed. A. Braida and G. Pieri (Oxford, 2003), 51–75, figs 3.1 and 3.2. 126 Menéndez Pidal, La España del siglo XIII leída en imágenes, at 95. 127 J. Williams, ‘Generationes Abrahae: reconquest iconography in Leon’, Gesta 16, no. 2 (1977), 3–14, at 8. Escorial, MS T.I.6, fol. 33v.

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Later damage to the miniature, which has blurred this gesture, appears to be accidental rather than deliberate, as the painted initial on folio 47v, and the miniatures on some other folios have been affected in a similar way.128 This unusual scene, without obvious precedent in thirteenth-century Western European iconography, has been interpreted as both a portrait of Alfonso’s private life and as a very public representation of his desire to dominate and control the Islamic population in his kingdom.129 Most recently, the pair of images has been read as a satirical sequence which contrasts the demure, mature Alfonso X with the bold sexuality of his youthful son Sancho.130 While this is an intriguing possibility, the hostility between the two men in 1283, when the manuscript was copied, makes it unlikely that Sancho would be depicted in any form in a work patronized by his father at this date. Moreover, the royal figure in both miniatures sports a beard (albeit in the second miniature the beard more closely resembles stubble), which suggests an older man rather than a youthful prince. Although documentary and historical evidence suggests that age did not curtail Alfonso’s sexual activities (and nor did it those of his father-in-law, Jaume I),131 and Alfonso’s lovers apparently included a ‘doña Dalandra’ of possibly Muslim or Jewish descent, it seems unlikely that she should be represented in this way in a manuscript which elsewhere depicts Alfonso in a very formal, regal way.132 Instead, given the wider context of astrologial symbolism in representations of Alfonso in the Libro de los juegos, and in other manuscripts associated with him, this sequence of images may instead have held astrological significance. In the first of the two miniatures (fol. 47v), Alfonso wears red, the colour of the element fire and of the planet Mars, with which he will also be associated in the first of the two games of astronomical chess described at the close of the manuscript. In the second he is dressed in a pale purple tunic, the colour which in the Libro de las formas & ymagenes identified him with the planet-god Jupiter. The miniature which accompanies the 128 See fols 13v (the board and the face of one player have been rubbed away); 51r and 72r (the face of a player has been rubbed): Kennedy, ‘On Chess, Chests and Kingship’, 52–4. Domínguez Rodríguez argued that Alfonso merely points to the board: ‘El Libro de los juegos y la miniatura alfonsí’, in Alfonso X el Sabio, Libros del ajedrez, ii, 31–123, at 56. 129 J.T. Wollesen, ‘Sub specie ludi […] Text and Images in Alfonso el Sabio’s Libro de Acedrex, Dados e Tablas’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 53 (1990), 277–308 , at 295; and Márquez Villanueva, Concepto cultural, 271–2. For the gesture as a symbol of conquest, see Robinson, ‘Preliminary Considerations’, 291–2. 130 Remie Constable, ‘Chess and Courtly Culture’, 337–8. 131 See Chapter 1, above; M.C. Roca, ‘Jaume I. Història d’un rei seductor’, in Jaume I i el seu Temps, ed. Narbona Vizcaíno, 583–98. 132 Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, 82, for ‘doña Dalandra’.

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final treatise in the Libro de los juegos, on astronomical chess, also equates Alfonso with Jupiter. While the astrological iconography associated with the players who accompany Alfonso in the closing treatises is indifferent, here his female companion/opponents arguably embody two constellations of the zodiac, and Alfonso’s changing attitude towards them in successive games could be read as a representation of the astrological relationship between his own planetary signs and others in the zodiac. It is tempting to identify the modestly robed woman who loses to Alfonso in the first game as Virgo, even though elsewhere in Alfonsine astrological works she is represented as a winged figure in white robes. On the other hand, the two almost-identical Moorish ladies in transparent robes who face the reader in the following miniature may represent the constellation Gemini.133 Although classical and Arabic sources personified the sign as two naked boys, and the Alfonsine General estoria identifies Gemini as Castor and Pollux, the twin sons of Jupiter, the Libro de las estrellas fijas stipulates that Gemini should be depicted as ‘two women standing as though they wish to walk’. The Astromagia depicts Gemini as two naked women who stand and face the reader in the diagram which shows the constellation in relation to points on the ecliptic circle (the path the planets followed as they passed among the signs of the zodiac constellation).134 Alfonso’s gesture of placing his left hand over the woman’s right breast, meanwhile, is echoed in the breast-touching gesture made by the planet-god Mars in the illustration of the ‘wheel of Mars’, which accompanies the ‘Book of Mars’ in the Astromagia. In this image, the large figure of a naked Mars stands upright and holds in the palm of his right hand a small blonde woman clad in a long black robe. Directing his gaze towards her, he places his left hand across her breasts.135 The text explains that the planet-god ‘has his right hand on Venus’s neck and his left on her breasts, and looks her in the face’, and that the depiction of Mars in this particular way represents ‘great and many deeds’.136 The power of this depiction evidently interested the Alfonsine compilers, since the 133 The Alfonsine Setenario interprets the constellation Gemini as a symbol of the duality and union of Christ with God the Father (Domínguez Rodríguez, Astrología y Arte en el Lapidario, 110). However, it is ultimately difficult to read these two miniatures coherently in the context of Old Testament imagery and Christian doctrine: see Kennedy, ‘On Chess, Chests and Kingship’, 62–7. 134 Domínguez Rodríguez, Astrología y arte en el Lapidario, 118–21 (on Virgo); 110–13 (on Gemini). 135 For the image, see A. García Avilés, ‘Imágenes mágicas. La obra astromágica de Alfonso X y su fortuna en la Europa bajomedieval’, in Aportaciones de un rey castellano a la construcción de Europa, ed. Rodríguez Llopis, 136–72, at 143. 136 Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 242: ‘[textual loss] manceba virgen e ésta es la figura de Venus e está levantada en pie, e sus cabellos fechos crin echados atrás, e Mars poniendo su mano diestra en su pescueço de Venus e la mano siniestra en los pechos d’ella, e él catando e mirando su cara.

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description in the Astromagia refers the reader to the Libro de las formas & ymagenes for further discussion of the image and the great deeds it serves to conjure.137 While Alfonso’s gesture on fol. 48r seems purely lascivious to modern eyes, perhaps for those versed in astrology it was instead an image of a king who, like the planet-god Mars, performed many and great deeds. These deeds were presumably military feats of arms, and so the miniature acquires a subtext of conquest, presented through an astrological filter. Given the date of the manuscript, these feats were presumably as much a reference to Alfonso’s war against his own son as to campaigns of conquest against neighbouring kingdoms, Muslim or Christian. The Libro de los juegos is unusual in the wider context of Alfonsine iconography because the illustrations of the layout of games boards, particularly those in the section on chess, do not simply show courtiers and ecclesiastics from the king’s circle, but include depictions of players who represent a range of professions, dress, and ethnic origin. This may reflect the manuscript compilers’ understanding of the cultural context of the game itself; it also suggests that the artists were able to draw on a wide variety of exemplars. It has also been argued that the depictions of the players include an undercurrent of prejudice, since players of Christian origin are distinguished not only by their ethnic appearance but also by the bright colours of their clothes, sometimes trimmed with fur, which are colours and trims that thirteenth-century Castilian sumptuary laws forbade Muslims to wear.138 Yet while it is true that the Muslim players are almost always depicted in pale-coloured robes, the gauzy, flowing fabrics they wear would have been as much a marker of wealth and status as the fur-tipped garments of their Christian counterparts: thirteenth-century laws were concerned to regulate the use of colour in garments worn by members of different religions and social classes, but not their quality or the provenance of the fabrics.139 Moreover, one pair of Muslim players wears robes with a gold trim, while another turbanned figure plays chess in a green robe under a tent

E dize este sabio, [i.e. Hermes/Mercury or, in the Arabic source, ‘Utarid] que esta imagen d’esta manera ha grandes fechos e muchos’. 137 ‘E nós esto fablamos d’esta imagen en el nuestro Libro de las imágenes.’ The ultimate source for the ‘Book of Mars’ is the Arabic Ghāyat al-hḁkīm, although the Alfonsine compilers probably took their text for the Astromagia from the one they had prepared earlier in the Libro de las formas & ymagenes: see Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 37–8. 138 Robinson, ‘Preliminary Considerations’, 290–1. 139 See González Arce, Apariencia y poder, 131 and 172–3; J.V. García Marsilla, ‘Vestit i aparença en els regnes hispànics del segle XIII’, in Jaume I i el seu temps, 621–46.

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with a scarlet lining.140 Since sumptuary legislation drawn up at Seville in 1252 specifically forbade Muslims from wearing bright colours such as red and green, it seems clear that, as in the Cantigas miniatures, the colours of clothes worn by the different religious groups depicted in the Libro de los juegos does not necessarily reflect the thirteenth-century legal reality.141 Yet while the miniatures illustrate a sumptuous reality, designed to appeal to a courtly audience, it is also possible that among the many players depicted some of the winners or losers are references to actual people or allusions to topical events, and would have been recognized as such at the time.142 As in the Cantigas, the image of Alfonso punctuates the manuscript (he appears on seven occasions, as patron or chess player), which raises the question of his relationship with the other people depicted. Taken in the context of the regal images of Alfonso as patron which preface each section of the manuscript, the variety of peoples and professions represented among the players suggests at a general level not only Alfonso’s intellectual and legal authority over the different religious groups in his kingdom, but also his diplomatic relations with distant and far-flung kingdoms – relations which, according to the thirteenth-century chronicler Jofré de Loaysa, were the result of Alfonso’s exceptionally generous hospitality.143 Among the peoples of lands far from Castile represented in the manuscript are men who wear curious caps decorated with owl-like eyes, whose facial features suggest they are of Central Asian origin.144 They have been identified as Mongols, and their presence in a treatise on board games copied in 1283 Seville is not, perhaps, as unexpected as may at first seem, since by the late thirteenth century there had been several instances of diplomatic contact between the Mongols and some of the most important royal courts of Europe.145 Letters sent from the sultan to the English king in 1238 had appealed for a Muslim–Christian alliance to suppress the Mongol military threat.146 140 Escorial, MS T.I.6, fols 44r and 62v. 141 González Arce, Apariencia y poder, 171. 142 Remie Constable, ‘Chess and Courtly Culture’, 322. Cf. Bamford, ‘El ajedrez, juego de espacio’, at 28, who concludes that the depictions of architecture and clothing in the manuscript, at once recognizable and fantastic, suggest the miniatures are the product of court culture but not a reflection of court life. 143 Loaysa, Crónica de los reyes de Castilla, 80 and 81. 144 Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 20v. 145 G. Menéndez Pidal, La España del siglo XIII leída en imagenes, 103; Remie Constable, ‘Chess and Courtly Culture’, 313 and n. 30; B. Liu, ‘The Mongol in the Text’, in Under the Influence, ed. Robinson and Rouhi, 291–325, at 296. 146 S. Menache, ‘Written and Oral Testimonies in Medieval Chronicles: Matthew Paris and Giovanni Villani’, in The Medieval Chronicle VI, ed. E. Kooper (Amsterdam/New York, 2009), 1–30

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Paradoxically, the frequent contact between Mongols and Christians as the thirteenth century progressed was partly due to the check imposed on the rapid expansion of the Mongol empire in September 1260, when the Khan Hülegü was defeated at the battle of Ain Jālūd by the Egyptian Mamluk Sultan Kutuz. Shortly afterwards, Kutuz was assassinated and Baybars, formerly one of his commanders, succeeded him. As part of his campaign to establish himself, Baybars sent a group of captive Mongols (and some giraffes) to the court of Manfred of Sicily in 1261.147 After their defeat at the hands of the Egyptian Mamluks, Mongol rulers also began to seek allies against Islam among Christian princes. In 1262 Hülegü sent twenty-four of his nobles, accompanied by two Franciscan friars, to Louis IX in the hope that the French king would submit to his authority and join with him in battle to eradicate Islam.148 Louis declined, but he was not the only European monarch to receive such a request. In 1268, Jaume I of Aragon recorded a visit by messengers from the Great Khan (in fact his nephew, Abaqa) and the emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus, who offered support for Jaume’s proposed crusade to recover the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.149 For his part, Alfonso may have considered the Mongols as potential allies in his quest for empire. A document of 1278 records how he sent ‘Bonamic’ – described as ‘beloved, faithful and a member of our household’ (‘dilectum fidelem et familiarem nostrum’) – on an unspecified diplomatic mission to the land of the Tartars, accompanied by an Englishman, Henry Barleti.150 A later thirteenth-century Castilian chronicle, meanwhile, claimed falsely that Alfonso had willingly offered the hand of his daughter Berengela to the Khan in marriage.151 She refused, and later copies of the chronicle that (10). Matthew Paris also recorded an imaginary anti-Christian alliance of Jews and Mongols: Menache, ibid., 6–7. 147 Martínez Montávez, ‘Relaciones de Alfonso X’, 352. Baybars’s ambassadors may also have visited Alfonso’s court: see above, Chapter one, and O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas, at 96. 148 J. Richard, ‘Une ambassade mongole à Paris en 1262’, Journal des Savants, 4 (1979), 295–303, available at Persee, www.persee.fr . 149 Jaume I, Crònica, c.481; The Book of Deeds, trans. Smith and Buffery, c. 482 and nn. 39, 40. O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas, at 96. 150 Foedera, conventiones, litterae et cujuscunque generis acta publica inter reges Angliae, et alios quosvis imperatores, reges, pontifices … ab ingressu Gulielmi I in Angliam, A.D. 1066, ad nostra usque tempora, transcribed and ed. T. Rymer (London, 1726; repr. 1816-1869 as 4 vols in 7), i.2, at 564. 151 The story appears in the chronicle known today as the Historia hasta 1288 dialogada, which survives embedded in the Estoria del fecho de los godos. This is a translation and continuation (to the fifteenth century) of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada’s De rebus Hispaniae. See L. Funes, ‘Estorias nobiliarias del período 1272–1312. Fundación ficcional de una verdad histórica’, in Literatura

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include the anecdote report her reply in different ways. The manuscript that provided the base text for the 1893 published edition quoted her as saying that a ‘gran Can’ (‘great Khan’) should have a ‘gran cadena’ (‘great chain’).152 Other versions which include the anecdote, however, report that the princess refused by saying that the ‘gran can’ should be given a ‘gran candela’ (‘large candle’), or allege she played on the sense of ‘can’ as ‘dog’, and replied that ‘a great dog should be sent a great bitch (‘cadiella’)’.153 The proverbial tone of all these supposed answers was presumably intended to make the episode memorable to readers, and so it has proven in at least one instance. The account of the visit to the Castilian court of the embassy of the Sultan of Egypt in the Crónica de Alfonso X prompted a seventeenth-century reader to identify the Khan with the Egyptian ruler, and to add a marginal note that cited the princess’s refusal to marry the Khan, and her suggestion that he marry a ‘cadiella’ instead.154 The Libro de los juegos dates from 1283, when Alfonso’s authority was at its weakest and he was confined to Seville. The diverse ethnic origin of the players represented in the manuscript adds an international dimension to Alfonso’s kingship, which was gravely under threat at the time (he received little or no support against the rebels from his Christian neighbours and supposed allies).155 As with all the images of Alfonso in the manuscripts he commissioned, these offer a a commentary on an aspect of Alfonso’s kingship. The specific messages embedded in the iconography of these richly illuminated books beg the question of their intended readership. A recent study suggested that the increasing prominence of depictions of Alfonso in later works may have been motivated by his desire to imbue these images with a clear message about his role as patron in the wake of his failure to y ficción. ‘“Estorias”, aventuras y poesía en la Edad Media, ed. M. Haro Cortés, 2 vols (Valencia, 2015), i, 165–75, at 170. 152 Crónica de España del arzobispo don Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada. Tradújola en castellano y la continuó hasta su tiempo don Gonzalo de la Hinojosa, obispo de Burgos, y después un anónimo hasta el año de 1454, in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, ed. M. Fernández de Navarrete et al., 112 vols (Madrid, 1841–1895), cvi (ed. Marqués de la Fuensanta del Valle, 1893), 1–141 (at 13); and see Madrid MS 9559, fol. 199v. 153 ‘Can’/‘candela’ in Madrid MS 6441, fol. 226v and in Burriel’s 1755 copy of a fourteenth-century manuscript, Madrid MS 686, fol. 145v. ‘Can’/‘cadiella’ in Madrid MS 9563, fol. 96v and Madrid MS 6429, fol. 252r. 154 Madrid MS 13002, fol. 13v: ‘Este Rey de Aegypto embio al Rey don Alonso que le embiasse su fija por muger […] y la Infanta quando lo supo no consintio en ello, y dixo a su padre que al Can embiasse por muger vna Cadela que es vna perra’. O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas, 96 n. 48, links the anecdote to the visit of the Egyptian embassy to the court in the early 1260s. 155 González Jiménez, Alfonso el Sabio (2004), 360–1.

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persuade Gregory X to recognize him as emperor in 1274–1275.156 Codices with lavish illustrations were considered diplomatic gifts suitable for members of royalty and the nobility, and by commissioning such volumes, Alfonso might have been seen to subscribe to this particular form of gift-giving.157 It has, for example, been suggested that the códice rico and ‘Florence’ manuscripts of the Cantigas were compiled as a potential gift to Pope Gregory X as part of Alfonso’s attempts to be elected emperor.158 Alfonso himself received several manuscripts from Louis IX of France, which are specifically identified as such in the 1284 codicil to his will. These included a three-volume Bible ‘with miniatures inside, that king Louis of France gave us’, and ‘four books called the Speculum historiale that Louis of France ordered made’.159 The precise circumstances under which these books arrived in Castile are unknown, although it has been suggested that the gift of the three-volume Bible moralisée (now in the chapter library of Toledo cathedral) was linked to the diplomacy surrounding the 1269 marriage between Fernando de la Cerda and Louis’s daughter Blanche.160 There is also evidence for the circulation of texts between the French and Castilian courts in more subtle ways. The method of indicating contents and chapter divisions in a Christian chronicle text such as the General estoria, for example, owes much to Vincent of Beauvais’s 1260 Speculum historiale, which was completed only a decade before the Alfonsine scholars were to use it as a source text and model.161 On the other hand, the fact that the presentations of Alfonso are so narrowly specific and all the prose works are written in Castilian – the language of most Alfonsine chancery documents as well (the Cantigas follow poetic convention and are in Galician-Portuguese) – suggests that these codices were not destined for the courts of Europe but for the king’s own circle. The later history of their circulation also shows that nearly all the richly 156 Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 169–70. 157 Lowden, ‘The Royal Manuscript’, at 28–9. For an earlier period see J. Lowden, ‘The Luxury Book as Diplomatic Gift?’, in Byzantine Diplomacy: 24th symposium of Byzantine studies, Cambridge 1990, ed. J. Shepard and S. Franklin (London, 1992), 249–60. 158 Prado Vilar, ‘Arte y diplomacia’, 188; Lappin, ‘Thaumaturgy of Regal Piety’, 39–59. 159 ‘[La biblia] en tres libros, ystoriada de dentro, que nos dio el rey don Loys de Francia’ and ‘los quatro libros que llaman Espejo Ystorial que mandó fazer el rey don Loys de Francia’: Diplomatario andaluz, ed. González Jiménez, 557–64, doc. 521, at 559. 160 Hernández, ‘The “Bible of Saint Louis”’, ii, 31, and R. Gonzálvez Ruiz, ‘The “Bible of Saint Louis” of Toledo Cathedral’, in The Bible of Saint Louis, ed. Gonzálvez Ruiz, ii, 61–117, at 62. 161 B. Taylor, ‘Alfonso X y Vicente de Beauvais’, in Literatura y ficción, ed. Haro Cortés, i, 447–57, at 449–50. On the cultural and political ties between the French and Castilian courts and the role of books, see also Bevilacqua, et al., ‘Production of Polyphonic Manuscripts’, at 137-8.

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illuminated codices discussed above stayed in Spanish royal or ecclesiastical libraries.162 The codicil to Alfonso’s will establishes that ‘all the books of the Cantares de los Miraglos e de Loor de Sancta María be in the church where Our body should be buried, and they should be sung on the feast days of Mary and of Our Lord’, but otherwise there is no documentary evidence for their circulation in the thirteenth century.163 Instead, the evidence for readership comes from the manuscripts themselves. Fourteenth-century marginal notes in the Cantigas manuscript from Toledo cathedral (which does not include miniatures and which is arguably a later copy that reflects an early stage in the evolution of the compilation) do indeed suggest that at least some of the poems were performed in a liturgical context.164 The miniatures in the manuscripts themselves suggest that Alfonso’s intended readers were the courtiers and clerics who surrounded him, and that these images were designed to guide their relationship with the king. For example, the panels of miniatures which illustrate the cantigas that describe Alfonso’s near-fatal illnesses show courtiers lifting their robes to hide their faces in a gesture of extreme grief prompted by their belief that the king is dead.165 162 For early evidence of Alfonsine manuscripts in Seville cathedral, see M.C. Álvarez Márquez, ‘La formación de los fondos bibliográficos de la Catedral de Sevilla. El nacimiento de su “scriptorium”’, in El Libro Antiguo Español. Actas del Segundo Colóquio Internacional (Madrid), ed. M.L. López-Vidriero and P.M. Cátedra (Madrid, 1992), 17–47 (26–8); L. Fernández Fernández, ‘Cantigas de Santa María. Fortuna de sus manuscritos’, Alcanate, 6 (2008–2009), 323–48. Isabel I moved some Alfonsine manuscripts to the Royal Chapel, Granada, which Philip II subsequently transferred in 1591 to his new library at El Escorial. E. Ruiz García, Los libros de Isabel la Católica. Arqueología de un patrimonio escrito (Madrid, 2004), 56. For the minimal circulation and impact of the Cantigas, see M.P. Ferreira, ‘The Medieval Fate of the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Iberian politics meets song’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 69, no. 2 (2016), 295–353. 163 Diplomatario andaluz, 560, doc. 521: ‘mandamos que todos los libros de los Cantares de los Miraglos e de Loor de Sancta María sean todos en aquella eglesia ó el nuestro cuerpo fuere enterrado, e que los fagan cantar en las fiestas de Sancta María e de Nuestro Sennor’. 164 M.E. Schaffer, ‘Marginal Notes in the Toledo Manuscript of Alfonso el Sabio’s Cantigas de Santa Maria: observations on composition, correction, compilation, and performance’, Bulletin of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, 7 (1995), 65–84. For the dating of the códice de los músicos, Escorial, MS b.I.2, see Fernández Fernández, ‘“Este Livro com’ achei”’, 76; Alfonso X, the Learned, Cantigas de Santa Maria. An Anthology, ed. S. Parkinson (Cambridge, 2015), 6. 165 See plate 33 (a reproduction of the panel of miniatures in Florence, MS BR 20, which appear as cantiga 95 but with no accompanying text) and plate 34 (a detail from the panel in Florence, MS BR 20, included as cantiga 71 but with no accompanying text), in J.E. Keller and A. Grant Cash, Daily Life Depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria (Lexington, ky, 1998). The poems for both panels are in Escorial MS b.I.2 (códice de los músicos). For the underlying theological agenda which the miniatures in the cantigas promote, see K. Kennedy, ‘Seeing is Believing: the miniatures in the Cantigas de Santa Maria and medieval devotional practices,’ in In Medieval Mode: collected essays in honour of Stephen Parkinson on his retirement, ed. C. Pazos Alonso and C. Williams, Special Issue, Portuguese Studies, 31, no. 2 (2015), 169–82.

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Given the turbulent political circumstances in which these codices were produced, this is perhaps to be expected. Alfonso needed to persuade those closest to him that he was able rule as a just king, and it is highly probable that the intended readers of these manuscripts moved in Castilian royal circles and would have been able to decode the messages of royal power embedded in the eternally youthful depictions of their patron-king. In order to achieve this, the production of codices bearing the king’s name needed to be closely controlled not only for content, but also for appearance. The following chapter considers the importance of layout in these manuscripts and examines how they were constructed and copied out, and investigates who may have exercised that control during the mechanical stages of production – whether Alfonso himself or agents appointed to act on his behalf.

4. Codices Laid Out for a King: the appearance and production of Alfonsine manuscripts The depictions of Alfonso in miniatures and initials were not the only visual means that artists and scribes used to persuade readers of his political ideology and the virtues of his kingship. The care taken to match his image to a particular text extended to the overall decoration and layout of the manuscripts themselves. The frames that enclose miniatures and tables in the códice rico and ‘Florence’ copies of the Cantigas, and in the astronomical tables in the Canones de Albateni, incorporate royal and imperial heraldry to reinforce Alfonso’s connection with, and authority over, the work.1 The border around the pair of miniatures that open Part IV of the General estoria (BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539) may also have been intended to incorporate heraldry: six small blank squares interrupt the frame (see Figure 1). However, a striking feature of layout preserved in both the Estoria de Espanna (Escorial MS Y.I.2) and in the General estoria Part IV (BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539) suggests that Alfonso attempted to distinguish chronicles compiled under his patronage with a distinctive mise-en-page that could easily be reproduced in later copies and thereby perpetuate his authority. This consists in framing the rubrics that announce the major divisions of the text into books with a circle set within a square, and filling the space between circle and square with dense pen-flourishing (Figure 4). This distinctive layout appears to have been characteristic of all parts of the chronicles copied for Alfonso, as some later manuscripts of the General estoria and the Estoria de Espanna preserve the device of encircling rubrics in roundels, albeit in a much simplified form. In these manuscripts, the roundels are barely decorated and are not placed within a square.2 The use of roundels to frame rubrics that announce important divisions in texts, or which distinguish units of information, is found in other Western manuscripts of the period and is associated with specific types of text. The 1 Escorial MS T.I.1; Florence MS B.R. 20; Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 8322. On imperial heraldry in the borders of Cantigas miniatures and the implications for the dating of the manuscript, see Fernández Fernández, ‘“Este Livro com’ achei”’, at 74. 2 See for example the two roundels framing rubrics in a fourteenth-century copy of the General estoria II, Madrid MS 10237, fols 2r and 247r.

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Figure 4: Book rubric framed by a roundel and square at the start of the General estoria IV, BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 1r. Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved. ©2018 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

practice can be traced to the late Roman period, and in the Christian era it was adopted to indicate divisions in the books of the Bible,3 canon tables, 3 J.J.G. Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, 6th to the 9th Century, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 1 (London, 1978), fig. 1 and no. 8 for the classical origins of the roundels that

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and in any text which required complex lists to be set out clearly for ease of reference, such as diagrams to indicate degrees of consanguinity. 4 In the particular context of the Iberian Peninsula, roundels were also used in legal manuscripts from the late seventh century onwards. The Liber iudicum was a compilation of Visigothic laws promulgated in 654 and adapted by successive Visigothic rulers. Initially it seems that copies of the code were not distinguished by any particular style of layout, but in 681 Ervig (r. 680–687) established the division of the code into books and tituli (chapter headings), and inserted a clause in the Liber which established the maximum price for an officially sanctioned copy of the work. This he defined as one which replicated ‘the internal arrangement and external disposition of this exemplar’.5 Common features of layout shared by later manuscripts of the code made in different areas of the Peninsula suggest the appearance of an ‘official copy’ was distinguished by the use of roundels to identify

frame the opening lines of a fragmentary Gospel book of c. 800 copied in Northumberland. The Gospel book was subsequently added to another manuscript, now referred to as the Utrecht Psalter, on which see Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe in Originalformat der Handschrift 32 aus dem Besitz der Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht, 2 vols (Austria-Graz, 1984), i, fol. 101v. For early Iberian examples of rubrics in roundels, see J. Williams, Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination (New York, 1977), plate 2 and commentary at 42 (on the ‘La Cava’ Bible), and M. Mentré, El estilo mozárabe (Madrid, 1994), 112. In the Alfonsine context, see Kennedy, book review, Alfonso X el Sabio y las crónicas de España, ed. Inés Fernández Ordóñez, in Speculum, 80, no. 2 (2005), 568–70, at 570, and the observations by Fernández Fernández, catalogue entry: ‘General estoria (2 vols)’, in Murcia 2009, 400–401, at 400. 4 See the tables in Girona, Arxiu Capitular, MS 4, Collectio canonum hispana (c. 980), reproduced in J. Alturo i Perucho, El llibre manuscrit a Catalunya. Orígens i esplendor (Barcelona, 2000), 79. For lists of degrees of consanguinity, see Madrid MS Vitr. 17–10, Fuero Juzgo, s. XIII or XIV; for an example of the use of roundels to set out the elements in the liturgical calendar, see Mentré, El estilo mozárabe, 103 and plates 56 and 57 (for an image of circles used to organize a contents page), and 77–8. There are more images of circles in ninth-century Visigothic legal manuscripts in the French edition of Mentré’s study, La peinture mozarabe. Un art chrétien hispanique autour de l’an 1000 (Paris, 1995), 74–5 (plates 33 and 34). For the history and development of the motif, see C. Nordenfalk, Die Spätantiken Kanontafeln. Kunst-geschichtliche Studien über die eusebianische Evangelien-Konkordanz in den vier ersten Jahrhunderten ihrer Geschichte, 2 vols (Gothenburg, 1938), ii, 132 and n. 1. 5 M.C. Díaz y Díaz, ‘La Lex visigothorum y sus manuscritos: un ensayo de reinterpretación’, Anuario de la Historia del Derecho Español 46 (1976), 163–224, at 205, and 202 n. 101 for the price and appearance in the Liber, v.4.22: ‘Ut omnis de cetero et improbitas distrahentis et dispendium temperari possit emptoris, id praesenti sanctione decernitur legis, scilicet ut quicumque hunc codicem ad instar huius operis interioris exteriorisque editum constiterit vendumdari non amplius quam (CCCC) solidorum numerum accipere venditori vel dare licebit ementi. Si quis vero super hunc pretii numerum accipere vel dare praesumpserit, C flagellorum ictibus a iudice verberari se noverit.’

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tituli, both in the opening table of contents and within the text itself.6 This striking and efficient form of setting out the royal will was also a conscious assertion of royal power, as a prologue added to two fourteenth-century copies of the Liber explains in language borrowed from twelfth-century biblical scholarship. The use of the term defferencias is a Castilan translation of distinctiones, or summaries of particular points in a text:7 The ancient sages used to summarize the contents of their books at the start of their texts. This summary, in which they brought together all they wished to speak about and assembled it together so that nothing was left out, [they put] in a round circle made by a compass […]. The round circles are the divisions of the sections (‘padrones’) and [the circles] of the chapter headings (‘títulos’) are distinctiones (‘defferencias’), and each chapter heading announces its chapters on those judgements made by the Gothic kings […] and by these judgements their kingdom was held in check and they maintained their power.8

Early copies of the Liber iudicum still circulated in thirteenth-century Castile, although some thirteenth-century readers found the script hard to decipher. In a document of 1266 issued at the cathedral of San Isidoro in León, Bishop Rodrigo ‘ordered the Libro Juzgo to be copied out in Roman 6 Rectangular frames are occasionally used instead, but the overwhelming persistence of roundels suggests these were the off icial model: Díaz y Díaz, ‘Lex visigothorum’, 203. For an example of a roundel and a rectangle framing rubrics in the Liber, see P.K. Klein, Die ältere Beatus-Kodex Vitr. 14–1 der Biblioteca Nacional zu Madrid. Studien zur Beatus-Illustration und der spanischen Buchmalerei des 10. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols (Hildesheim/New York, 1976), ii, 908, plate 232 and 885, plate 197. 7 The manuscripts are Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Gl. kgls. Saml. 1942, 4o, fol. 20v (I am grateful to Erik Petersen, Senior Researcher of the Manuscripts Section at the Copenhagen Royal Library for his kindness in allowing me to consult this manuscript) and Madrid, MS. Vitr. 17–10, fols. 14v–15r. 8 My translation and transcription from the Copenhagen manuscript, abbreviations expanded and punctuation modernized: ‘Los antiguos sabios solien abreuiar las posiciones de sus libros en començamiento de sus scripturas. Atal abreuiamiento, en que ayuntan todo aquello que querien fablar atanto que lo ayuntauan de guisa que non ende fallecie nada, denntro en un cerco redondo fecho por conpasso […]. Los cerclos redondos son las partidas de los padrones et de los títulos son defferencias et cada un título a sus capítulos sabudos en estos iuyzios que fizieron los reyes godos […] et por estos iuyzios se contouo su regno et mantouieron su poder.’ The text is published, with significant variants, in Fuero Juzgo en latín y castellano cotejado con los más antiguos y preciosos códices por la Real Academia Española (Madrid: Ibarra, 1815), in the section on the ‘Fuero Juzgo o Libro de los Jueces’, at xvi. The Copenhagen manuscript is described by P. Högberg, ‘Notices et extraits des manuscrits espagnols de Copenhague’, Revue Hispanique, 46 (1919), 386–8; see also Mentré, Estilo mozárabe, 75.

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script, because before it had been in Toledan script [ie. the script derived from Visigothic models used by Christians in the Peninsula after the Arab conquest] and not all men could read it’.9 By the 1250s the Liber was being supplanted by the Castilian translation ordered by Fernando III, but the combination of a rubric and encircling roundel to frame major textual divisions continued to be used in other twelfth- and thirteenth-century law codes in Castilian that were based on the Visigothic Liber and promulgated by later rulers. For example, each new book in the 1296 romance version of the Fuero of Alcaraz (taken by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1213) is indicated by a rubric framed in a circle in the margin and, more conventionally for a late thirteenth-century manuscript, by a running title.10 Despite the associations of this device with Iberian legal codes, it is hard to tell from the surviving evidence whether Alfonsine scribes adopted it to characterize copies of the Partidas. Although absent from the copy dateable to the thirteenth century which was probably copied for Alfonso, BL Add. MS 20787, the Primera partida (where historiated miniatures mark the major divisions of the work), later manuscripts of other sections of this work suggest that the Alfonsine compilers had used this system of mise-en-page although not it seems consistently. Compass-drawn circles frame the list of rubrics for the contents of título 22 only in Book VII on the final folio of the table of contents in a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Segunda partida now in Madrid.11 Another fourteenth-century copy of the Segunda partida in the Escorial frames the entry for each chapter in the opening table of contents with a circle, but also adapts the model to add a visual gloss. The roundel which encloses the entry for título 31, the final one in the table, has been transformed into the bowl of a chalice with a baluster-shaped stem, painted gold with shading in red. In fact, there is nothing specifically connected with the Eucharist in this section of the text, ‘which speaks of 9 ‘Mando trasladar el Liuro Iudgo en letra ladina, ca enante yera en letra toledana, e no lo podia todo omne leer’. Colección documental del archivo de la Catedral de León, VIII: 1230–1269, ed. J.M. Ruiz Asencio, Colección Fuentes y Estudios de Historia Leonesa, 54 (León, 1993), 431–2 (doc. 2260). At the close of the twelfth century many Spanish monasteries re-copied the manuscripts in their libraries in new, gothic, script forms: see M.C. Díaz y Díaz, Libros y librerías en La Rioja altomedieval (Logroño, 1979), 106–7. 10 ‘Libro del Fuero que dio el muy noble Rey don Alfonso al conceio de Alcaraz’, Madrid, MS 17799. The colophon is on fol. 198v. See also the facsimile and study of this manuscript: El Fuero de Alcaraz romanceado de 1296, ed. R. Carrilero Martínez et al., 4 vols (Albacete, 2008). 11 Madrid, MS 12793, fol. 6v. For the textual history of this copy, see I. Fernández Ordóñez, ‘Variación en el modelo historiográfico alfonsí en el siglo XIII. Las versiones de la Estoria de España’, in La historia alfonsí. El modelo y sus destinos, ed. G. Martin (Madrid, 2000), 41–74, at 73, n. 88.

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studia where all branches of knowledge are learned and on teachers and on scholars’.12 Indeed, the Segunda partida as a whole has been characterized as a text in the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition, since it details the obligations rulers and their subjects have towards one another.13 The transformation of the roundel into a chalice implies the importance of religious faith in the quest for human knowledge as well, and suggests this manuscript was originally copied for an ecclesiastical readership. The use of roundels to frame the titles of books in thirteenth-century chronicle manuscripts, however, appears to be without precedent during this period. The exceptional appearance of this device, inspired by early copies of the Liber (or Forum) iudicum, in the Alfonsine chronicles may be explained as a way of giving visual emphasis to the stress placed in the Estoria de Espanna on the links between Alfonso’s kingship and that of his Visigothic predecessors.14 Moreover, there is documentary evidence to show that those responsible for producing the chronicles had access to at least one early copy of the Liber. Among the ‘fifteen books in old script’ (‘quince libros de letura antigua’) which the king borrowed in 1270 from the monastery of Santo Domingo de la Calzada is ‘the Catalogue of the Gothic Kings [and] their libro juzgo (law code)’ (‘el Catalogo de los Reyes Godos [y] el libro juzgo de ellos’).15 Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz has suggested that the (now lost) manuscript they borrowed derived from the same model used for the 1058 copy of the Liber now in Madrid, MS Vitr. 14-5, a copy which reflects the contents and layout of ‘official’ manuscripts.16 Yet if the layout of Visigothic legal texts provided inspiration for the compilers of Alfonsine chronicles, the roundels in their manuscripts are very different in appearance from the variable dimensions, bright colours, geometric patterns, and disposition on the page of the ‘round circles’ (‘cerclos redondos’) in the Liber iudicum. In the Liber, the roundels framing the chapter rubrics were always drawn to the left of the folio or to the left of the single column of text. The roundels that accompanied the table of contents were often more carefully executed and decorated than the smaller, cruder circles that appeared in the body of the text.17 By contrast, the roundels in the Alfonsine manuscripts occupy the 12 Escorial, MS Z.I.13, fol. 4r (my transcription and translation): ‘treynta et vno que fabla delos estudios enque se aprenden todos los saberes et de los maestros et delos escolares’. 13 Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, 77–80. 14 For Alfonso and the Goths, see Fernández Ordóñez, Las estorias de Alfonso el Sabio, 20–21, and the extensive bibliography on the subject she cites in n. 19. 15 Memorial Histórico Español, i, 238 (doc. cxviii). 16 Díaz y Díaz, ‘Lex visigothorum’, 181, 196–9 and 207. 17 Díaz y Díaz, ‘Lex visigothorum’, 206–7.

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width of a column, are carefully painted or drawn in ink, and are framed by dense pen-flourishing. Despite these differences, the Alfonsine chronicles presented their literary-historical text in a form that would have recalled for readers the authority of legal works of the Visigothic period – but in an updated form. Yet it is interesting to note that erasures and changes in the copy of the Estoria de Espanna, Escorial MS Y.I.2 made in the 1270s show some hesitation in the use of this device in the early stages of the manuscript. By contrast, the scribes responsible for the 1280 copy of the fourth part of the General estoria understood where to employ the layout of rubrics in circles when they began their task, which suggests that by the end of Alfonso’s reign this design had been established as the form to use for this type of royal text. The adjustments to the layout of Escorial MS Y.I.2 affect the opening of the estoria of the Romans. The manuscript is copied by two scribes, who for the sake of identification will be labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’. Hand A appears first in the manuscript, followed by hand B. In the sections on the estorias of the Greeks, Romans, and almujuces (from the Arabic al-maŷūs, or ‘peoples of the north’),18 both scribes were obliged to go back over their work and change the order of the text and its layout to incorporate circular frames for rubrics. The order of sections in quires two to four as it survives today is as follows: Quire 2 ( fols 3–8) Fol. 8r, col. [a]: the conclusion of the Estoria de los Griegos, copied by hand B. fourteen lines blank to the end of the column. Fol. 8r, col. [b]: opening of the Estoria de los almujuces, also copied by scribe B. The rubric introducing this section is framed by a circle within a square, and there are five blank lines below. However, the text of this framed rubric and the blank lines underneath which precede the rubric to the first chapter show traces of an earlier text which appears to have been washed (not scraped) away. Fol. 8v, col. [b]: opening of the estoria of African rule over Spain, copied by scribe B. The rubric announcing the start of this section is framed in a roundel within a square. Fol. 10v, col. [b]: opening of the estoria of the Romans in Spain, copied by scribe A. The text is written over an erasure that occupies the whole of column b. The rubric announcing this new section is enclosed in a roundel set within a square frame.

18 Fernández Ordóñez, Las estorias de Alfonso el Sabio, 20 and 198–200.

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Quire 3 ( fols 11–14) Fol. 11r: hand A continues to copy the table of contents for the estoria of the Romans in Spain, but the list is incomplete as it ends abruptly on folio 12r, col. [a]. The rest of folio 12 is ruled but blank; folios 13 and 14r are unruled and blank. Fol. 14v: scribe A begins to copy the first chapter of the Estoria de los romanos. Quire 4 ( fols 15–22) Fol. 15r, col. [a]: scribe A copies the last four lines of the first chapter over an erasure. The next 22 lines are blank, then scribe B resumes the text of the Estoria de los romanos.

The traces of words still visible beneath the Estoria de los almujuces on folio 8r (‘estorias’ on line 3; ‘que por tres cosas’ on line 4) show that scribe B had initially copied the start of the first chapter of the Estoria de los romanos (now on fol. 14v) much earlier in the manuscript.19 No sooner had he done this than he erased his text and copied the Estoria de los almujuces instead. This may have been carelessness, but it may also reflect an unexpected decision on the part of the compilers. The opening section of the Estoria de los romanos on folio 10v is similarly affected by changes to the manuscript layout which required hand A to erase and rewrite a section of his colleague’s work so as to frame the rubric to the new book in a roundel and square. As the manuscript survives today, the rubric enclosed in a roundel and square that introduces the Estoria de los romanos on folio 10v is copied over an erasure which extends from the final lines of column [a] all the way down column [b]. The scale of the erasure suggests the scribe was forced to remove a complete section of text. The remains of hairline pen-strokes in red ink at the start of the erased section indicate that this passage began with a rubric as well, although no other trace of the text can be discerned. Despite this, context suggests the passage erased was the start of the Estoria de los Romanos, as the concluding line before the erasure, written by hand B, states that ‘the chronicle […] returns to the account of how the rule of the Romans came to Spain’ (‘ell estoria […] torna a contar de cuemo el poder de los Romanos entro en espanna’). At a later stage, scribe A scraped away and recopied the same text that B had originally written out, with the difference that scribe A now framed the rubric for the section on the Romans within a roundel set in a square. This aesthetic change 19 The chapter introducing the Romans begins ‘Las estorias antiguas cuentan q por tres cosas fueron los romanos sennores de toda la tierra’: Primera crónica general, i, 18 (c.23).

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to the manuscript is interesting because it emphasizes the chronological thread of the text, which is arranged according to the sequence of dynasties that ruled Spain.20 Henceforth, rubrics that announce a new ruling family are framed by a circle in a square. The changes also indicate the importance placed by the scriptorium on making the manuscript conform to a particular style of layout. In the first part of the Estoria de Espanna, Escorial MS Y.I.2, numerous spaces have also been set aside for historiated initials or miniatures, although only six of the seventy-five planned have been completed. Unlike in other Alfonsine manuscripts, though, these spaces have been ruled, which suggests the scribe was not responsible for ruling the quires.21 These spaces reserved for miniatures preface the chapters they were to illustrate, and with the exception of a single quire in the Estoria de los romanos, appear consistently throughout the manuscript. The decision to include them may reflect a conscious imitation of the cycles of miniatures which accompanied the vernacular French chronicles commissioned by Louis IX and executed by his successors after his death in 1270 in a program of patronage that continued until the early fourteenth century.22 However, unlike the earliest copy of the French chronicle, copied around 1274, where the use of column-wide miniatures or smaller historiated initials clearly distinguishes the perceived interest and importance of the subject matter for Philip III, the intended reader of the manuscript,23 the size of the gaps left for miniatures in the Estoria de Espanna varies considerably, making it difficult to deduce the relationship between the dimensions of the miniature and the importance of the text. Most of the spaces reserved for miniatures are a column wide and 15–20 lines high, although in places some are only nine lines high and on three occasions (in the section on the Romans) a whole half folio has been left blank. The incomplete table of contents which prefaces the section on the kings of the Goths (fols 132v–133r) is followed by three unruled and blank folios (133v–134v), although these may have been reserved for additional text rather than for images since the text of the Estoria de los godos, which begins on folio 135r, also has a blank space left for a miniature. Two of the half folio gaps open chapters on the battles between Pompey and Caesar; the 20 Fernández Ordóñez, Las estorias de Alfonso el Sabio, 25. 21 Cf. the Libros del saber de astrología or the Astromagia, where the areas set aside for diagrams are unruled. On the careful ruling employed in Cantigas manuscripts, see Rodríguez Díaz, ‘La factura material de los códices alfonsíes’, at 243. 22 Hedeman, The Royal Image, 1–5. 23 Hedeman, The Royal Image, 11 and 16.

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third prefaces the account of Octavian’s imperial rule.24 Although this might suggest a desire on the part of the compilers to give visual prominence to Julius Caesar and his descendants, the previous quire (folios 41–48), which also discusses Caesar’s relationship with Pompey, does not include a single space reserved for a miniature. The five completed miniatures that accompany the text in Escorial MS Y.I.2 (the sixth is the portrait of Alfonso on the first folio, discussed in Chapter 3) are all in the second quire, where they preface five of the twelve chapters in the estoria of the Greeks and their role in the foundation of Spain.25 Although their size fluctuates between four and twelve lines, all occupy the width of a column and all illustrate the contents of the chapter highlighted in the rubric (that is to say, Noah’s Ark, Hercules strangling two lions, the ‘Tower of Hercules’ in Cadiz, the monument erected by Hercules to mark his foundation of the town that would later become Seville, and the arrival of the hunter Tharcus at King Rocas’s cave).26 The blank spaces in subsequent quires presumably also depicted the contents of the chapter summarized by the rubric, such as Hannibal’s battles against the Spaniards (c. 22, fol. 10r), the suicide of Queen Dido (c. 56, fol. 25v), or a list of ‘the consuls and […] other princes of Rome’ (los consules et […] los otros principes de Roma) (c. 112, fol. 55v). Given the close relationship between rubric and miniature that can be inferred from the evidence of the second quire, the change of emphasis in the rubric part way through the estoria of the Romans would presumably have affected the aesthetic of the manuscript as well. Until folio 58r the rubrics summarize the chapter contents, but from the account of the rule of the Emperor Octavian (fol. 61) to the conclusion of the short narrative about the Vandals in Spain (fol. 130v) the rubrics simply announce the start of a new emperor’s reign. The miniatures, presumably, were to reflect this

24 Fol. 50r, c.103: ‘De la primera batalla de Ponpeyo el grand e de Julio Cesar’; fol. 50v, c.104: ‘De la segunda batalla de Julio Cesar et de Ponpeyo et de la muerte de Ponpeyo’; fol. 61r, c.122: ‘Dell imperio de Octauiano, sobrino de Julio Cesar, et luego de los fechos que acaecieron en el primer anno’. For the text, see Primera crónica general de España, i, 79, 80, and 97. 25 There is probably a quire missing between fols 1 and 2, as the estoria of the Greeks which begins on fol. 2r lacks the individual prologue and list of chapters that preface the principal estorias in the rest of the manuscript. 26 For a detailed analysis of the miniatures and their dependence on the text, see A. Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Miniaturas alfonsíes poco conocidas de un códice escurialense. La Estoria de España o Primera Crónica General de España (Ms.Y.I.2 de la Biblioteca de El Escorial)’, in I Jornadas de estudio sobre la provincia de Madrid–Madrid 17, 18 y 19 de diciembre de 1979 (Madrid, 1980), 159–64, and R. Cómez Ramos, ‘La visión de la Antigüedad en las miniaturas de la Primera Crónica General’, in Homenaje al Dr Muro Orejón, 2 vols (Seville, 1979), i, 3–12.

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with a standardized image of an emperor.27 However, for the final section, which comprises the account of the Goths in Spain, the rubrics revert to a more descriptive style, identifying both the new ruler and a notable event in the first year of his rule. This suggests the planned miniatures would have depicted more than a standardized portrait, particularly since on occasion the rubric emphasizes the events of the reign over the identity of the monarch himself. So, for example, in Chapter 497 (fol. 172r), where fourteen blank lines are headed by a rubric which promises a chapter ‘On the council which King Suinthila (r. 621–631) convened in Toledo’ (‘Del concilio que fizo el rey Cintilla en Toledo’). The fuller contents of the rubrics in the estoria of the Goths suggests that the compilers deliberately intended to highlight this section of the chronicle to readers. This decision is made more apparent by a feature of the layout peculiar to this part of the text, namely the size of the initials that begin each chapter. Until the start of the Estoria de los godos, the height of the initials that open each chapter varies between five and seven lines (though six lines is most common). From the start of the account of the rule of the Gothic kings, however (c. 430, fol. 153r), the size of chapter initials increases to eight or nine lines. This would seem to reflect a clear concern on the part of the Alfonsine chroniclers to highlight the section of their text which concerned the Goths. This concern did not, however, extend to reinstating the painted decoration of the initials in the second quire, which are painted in red, pink, and blue, and are framed by a heavy black border.28 Yet this style of initial does not extend beyond the seventh folio, and from the third quire to the end of the manuscript, the initials are completed, but they are painted in red or blue ink, and decorated with pen-flourishing in contrasting blue, red, and purple ink. The artistic quality of the flourishing is high, and recalls the work of pen-flourishers in the Vatican manuscript of Part IV of the General estoria. Differences in the flourished motifs, however, suggest different artists were responsible for the different manuscripts. The person responsible for the initials in the General estoria sometimes incorporates palmettes and fleurs-de-lis in the

27 According to Ana Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘seguramente un gran número de los espacios destinados a las miniaturas de la Estoria de España se destinaban a alojar los retratos de los Reyes de España’: A. Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Hércules en la miniatura de Alfonso X el Sabio,’ Anales de Historia del Arte, 1 (1989), 91–103, at 96. See also Gutiérrez Baños on the series of royal portraits planned for the continuation of the chronicle under Sancho IV: Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV el Bravo, 218–21. 28 Escorial MS Y.I.2, fols 4r–7v.

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designs; the flourisher in the Estoria de Espanna eschews plant motifs but, on one occasion, incorporates a human face into the decoration.29 By contrast, no miniatures were planned for the Vatican manuscript of the General estoria IV, except for the opening pair which depicts Alfonso and Nebuchadnezzar. The decision perhaps reflects the fact that this manuscript was intended for a different type of reader, one who would consult its text and who did not require the additional appeal and gloss offered by images. Despite these differences, however, the care taken by those responsible for both manuscripts to develop and employ a distinctive style of layout that echoes earlier Visigothic legal codes demonstrates, once again, the deeply political agenda that underlay the production of these codices, and implies a readership close to the king that was sufficiently familiar with such works to appreciate the allusion. The striking similarities between the layout of these two manuscripts and the deliberate adjustments made to text and miniatures in order to reflect a particular image of the king in these and in other codices prepared under his patronage also suggest that the manuscripts copied for Alfonso were produced in a context of careful supervision, and were works-in-progress that reflected the shifting political circumstances in which he found himself during his reign.30 Scholars, beginning with Juan Manuel in the fourteenth century, have assumed that the ultimate overseer of the texts was the king himself; more recently, royal supervision has also been cited to argue for the existence of a royal scriptorium based at Seville (where Alfonso resided for the longest periods of time) that would have been responsible in the final years of his reign for copying and illuminating the books which bear his name.31 However, the only unambiguous piece of written evidence to support the existence of a scriptorium dedicated to producing manuscripts for the king suggests that, whatever the level of his intellectual involvement, Alfonso left the process of copying to others. The colophon in the fourth part of the General estoria (BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 278r) clearly refers to the post of a royal book scribe: Este libro fue acabado en era de mil & trezientos & diziocho annos. En este anno [thirteen blank lines] Yo Martin perez de Maqueda escriuano de los 29 BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, fol. 118r; Escorial MS Y.I.2, the recto of the folio numbered clxxxv. 30 Ruiz García, ‘Rex scribens’, 375. 31 A. Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Sevilla y el “scriptorium” alfonsí’, in Sevilla 1248, 635–59; Fernández Fernández, ‘“Este Livro, com’ achei”’, 67.

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libros de muy noble Rey don Alffonsso escriui este libro con otros mis escriuanos que tenia por su mandado.32

The contents of the colophon are formulaic, but its presence in the manuscript was clearly a matter of importance as it has been added as a single folio to the final quire of the manuscript (a bifolium in a codex primarily composed of eight-leaved quires). The multiple blank lines which interrupt the colophon text would presumably have detailed at length the noteworthy events of the year, thereby implicitly merging past history with the present. Martín Pérez de Maqueda evidently also wished to stress his part in the production of the work, although he never received the final lines of text to copy. Yet this is the only time his name appears in the Alfonsine manuscripts, and he is not named in surviving documentary sources. What little additional information can be inferred from the colophon in the General estoria shows that that he seems to have been a layman (he does not distinguish himself by any reference to an ecclesiastical post) and that he was in charge of an unspecified number of scribes (though only one other hand is distinguishable in the manuscript that bears his name). In turn, this suggests that the production of luxurious manuscripts in late thirteenth-century Spain, as in France, did not depend exclusively upon ecclesiastical scriptoria.33 The royal post of ‘escribano de libros’ occupied by Martín Pérez de Maqueda may have had precedents in the context of Alfonso’s royal Muslim predecessors. Abbasid patronage of translations of Greek scientific works and of treatises on science, medicine, and philosophy which began in eighth-century Baghdad, together with the emergence of the illustrated Arab book, perhaps provided a distant source of inspiration. Seville, too, had become an important centre for scholarship in the ninth century under the royal patronage of al-Mu‘taḍid and al-Mu‘tamid.34 The library amassed 32 My transcription, and see also Alfonso X el Sabio, General estoria IV, ed. Fernández-Ordóñez and Orellana, i, xliii. ‘This book was finished in the era of one thousand and three hundred and eighteen years [ie. 1280]. I Martin Perez de Maqueda scribe of the books of the very noble King don Alfonso wrote this book with other scribes of mine which I had on his orders.’ For the Era, see Chapter two above. On the colophon as a key piece of evidence for the existence of a royal scriptorium, see Ruiz García, ‘Rex scribens’, 374, n. 1. 33 Ruiz García, ‘Rex scribens’, 374, n. 41. 34 E.R. Hoffman, ‘Beginnings of the Illustrated Arab Book’; R. Valencia, ‘Islamic Seville: its political, social and cultural history’, in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Khadra Jayyusi, 136–48, at 139.

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by al-Ḥakam II al-Mustanṣir (r. 961–976) at Cordoba employed royal scribes, translators, and scholars who checked the textual accuracy of copies.35 It is possible that Muslim scribes and artists, skilled in the production of books for the ruling élite, remained in Seville after the Christian conquest. Although most of the town’s Muslim inhabitants who survived the siege departed on the orders of Fernando III, documents drawn up in the aftermath of the conquest record grants of land to a very few members of the Muslim aristocracy and intelligentsia, some of whom had never left Seville and others who had settled there from newly Christianized neighbouring areas.36 However, evidence for the mechanics of book production for the ruling élite, whether Muslim or Christian, is scant for twelfth- and thirteenth-century Andalusia, although the existence and organization of scribes and notaries in the sphere of municipal government is documented from the earliest days of the Christian conquest of Seville.37 On the other hand, Maqueda’s description of himself as a ‘royal book scribe’ is noteworthy in the context of other European royal courts of the time. The few documents about the production of books for Louis IX which survive suggest there was no royal scriptorium, but that instead Louis employed agents to commission codices from different scribes and illuminators, as convenient and as required.38 It is not until the mid-fourteenth century, when Charles V appointed an écrivain du roi, that a term to refer to a book scribe specifically employed by the king appears in France.39 Despite the differences of place and time, the snippets of information about the activities of Louis’s and Charles’s scribes which survive suggest the sort of duties that a Spanish escriuano such as Martín Pérez de Maqueda might have carried out in order to produce a manuscript for Alfonso. From this, it seems that the role of the royally appointed French écrivain went beyond copying text to overseeing the entire process of book production, from the writing out of the exemplar to commissioning the binding. 40 The French scribes were closely associated with the royal court, but neither in the thirteenth century 35 Wasserstein, ‘The Library of al-Ḥakam II’, 101. 36 I. Montes Romero-Camacho, ‘Mudéjares y judíos en la Sevilla del siglo XIII’, in Sevilla 1248, 467–98, at 470–1. 37 M.L. Pardo Rodríguez, ‘Las escribanías de Sevilla en el siglo XIII’, in Sevilla 1248, 369–87. 38 Branner, ‘Saint Louis et l’enluminure parisienne’, 84. 39 Rouse and Rouse, Illiterati et uxorati, i, 279-83. For Charles V of France’s library, see Richter Sherman, ‘Representations of Charles V’, 86–7. For his patronage of scientif ic translations, see L.A. Shore, ‘A Case Study in Medieval Non-literary Translation: scientific texts from Latin to French’, in Medieval Translators and their Craft, ed. J. Beer, Studies in Medieval Culture 25 (Kalamazoo, 1989), 297–327, at 310. 40 Rouse and Rouse, Illiterati et uxorati, i, 279–83.

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nor in the fourteenth did they work exclusively for the king. The very little surviving documentation for royal employees in thirteenth-century Spain suggests that Alfonsine book scribes, illuminators, and even Martín Pérez de Maqueda himself, may also have been employed as required rather than receiving a regular stipend from the crown. The earliest reference in a Castilian document to a ‘royal painter’ occurs in a September 1261 letter in which houses belonging to ‘Johan Pérez, el pintor del rey’ are mentioned in order to specify the location of some properties in Seville that a canon of the cathedral is selling to a fellow churchman. Although no royal accounts survive from Alfonso’s reign to establish whether Juan Pérez received monies regularly from the crown, similar references to painters ‘to the king’ in documents and accounts from Sancho IV’s chancery indicate artists were employed on an ad hoc basis and did not receive regular payments from the crown treasury, despite being identified as royal servants. 41 Another case in point is the miniature artist who is blessed with a miracle in cantiga 377. Pedro Lourenço is described in the poem rubric as the king’s ‘servant’ (‘criado’) and in the text of the poem itself as someone who was Alfonso’s ‘man’ (‘cuj’ om’el era’). 42 As a reward for painting a particularly beautiful series of images in a devotional book dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the king, at his request, grants him a shared position as scribe (‘a meya dūa sa escrivania’) in Ciudad Real.43 Clearly Pedro Lourenço, despite his role as illuminator of royal books, was not retained at court to work exclusively for Alfonso. The fluidity of the groups of people responsible for copying, illuminating, and binding up manuscripts for Alfonso which this documentary and literary context suggests means it is unlikely that Martín Pérez de Maqueda supervised manuscript production throughout the king’s reign, despite his title of ‘scribe of the king’s books’. However, the quantity and quality of each of the manuscripts prepared for Alfonso would have required someone to coordinate the different parties involved in providing the necessary materials and skills for completion of the project. References in prologues and colophons to Alfonsine works show the texts were copied at different ends of the country during periods when the court was in residence there. A colophon in the Libro de los juegos, dated 1283, states that ‘este libro fue 41 F. Gutiérrez Baños, ‘Pintura monumental en tiempos del códice rico de las Cantigas de Santa María’, in Cantigas, Códice rico (2011), ii, 377–408 (at 380–1) and Gutiérrez Baños, Las empresas artísticas de Sancho IV, at 106. 42 Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Mettmann, iii, 266–7; English translation in Kulp-Hill, Songs of Holy Mary, 459-60. 43 Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Sevilla y el “scriptorium” alfonsí’, in Sevilla 1248, 642 (n.20).

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començado e acabado en la cibdat de Sevilla’, and the prologue to the ‘Libro de la açafeha’ in the Libros del saber de astrología explains that Alfonso ordered the treatise to be retranslated in Burgos ‘meior & mas complidamientre’. 44 Another small but suggestive piece of documentary evidence to support the impression that Alfonsine book production was peripatetic are the two royal letters dated 1270 that show Alfonso borrowed several key texts for the General estoria and the Estoria de Espanna from monasteries in the area while the court was at Santo Domingo de la Calzada.45 A thirteenth-century inventory of books from the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, jotted down in an eleventh century manuscript now in Paris, includes two works (‘the chronicle’ and ‘Paulus Orosius’) on loan to ‘the king’, presumably Alfonso X.46 In borrowing works from ecclesiastical institutions that would serve as exemplars for his own compilations, Alfonso and his scholars were doing nothing exceptional, but were taking advantage of an established system for loans which enabled the circulation of texts across the Peninsula. A thirteenth-century inventory of the 116 books owned by the Lisbon monastery of São Vicente de Fora noted that nine were on loan to various ecclesiastical institutions across the country, including Viseu cathedral and the monastery of Santa Cruz at Coimbra. 47 Consequently, and whether or not he worked exclusively for the king, the escribano de los libros del rey must have travelled with the royal court to assemble sources and exemplars. Additional evidence for the involvement of a royal agent responsible for co-ordinating the production of royal manuscripts and his proximity to the court can be found in miniatures that preface sections of the Primera partida and the Libro de los juegos. All three show Alfonso dictating to a scribe, but 44 Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 97r, and published in Alfonso X el Sabio, Libro de los juegos, ed. Orellana Calderón, at 371. M.E. Schaffer suggested that the colophon may in fact refer to just one section of the manuscript: ‘Los códices de las “Cantigas de Santa Maria”: su problemática’, in El scriptorium alfonsí, ed. Montoya Martínez and Domínguez Rodríguez, 127–48, at 131–2. For the Libro de la açafeha, see Madrid, Biblioteca Histórica Marqués de Valdecilla, Universidad Complutense, MS 156, fol. 106v, cited in Schaffer, ‘Los códices de las “Cantigas”’, 131 and transcribed in Libros de astronomía, iii (1864), 135–237. 45 Memorial Histórico Español, i, 257 (doc. cxvii, dated 22 February 1270) and i, 238 (doc. cxviii, dated 25 February 1270). For the correlation between the texts borrowed and the composition of the Alfonsine chronicles, see D. Catalán Menéndez Pidal, De Alfonso X al Conde de Barcelos. Cuatro estudios sobre el nacimiento de la historiografía romance en Castilla y Portugal (Madrid, 1962), 19–23, and Fernández Ordóñez, Las ‘estorias’ de Alfonso X, 74–5. 46 M.C. Díaz y Díaz, ‘Notas de bibliotecas de Castilla en el siglo XIII’, in Livre et lecture en Espagne et en France sous l’Ancien Régime. Colloque de la Casa de Velázquez (Paris, 1981), 7–13, at 9 and n.17. 47 Nascimento, ‘Livros e claustro no século XIII em Portugal’, 240-1 (transcription); 242 (photograph of the inventory in Porto: Biblioteca Municipal, MS 707, fol. 92).

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a layman is also seated next to the cross-legged scribe. This layman gazes towards the king and points to the writing scribe, gestures which suggest that he carries out orders on behalf of Alfonso. 48 The miniature at the start of the Primera partida depicts the pointing layman with a flat-crowned cap (‘capiello redondo’) of black cloth and a long black cloak, which identify him as a teacher or a member of the royal court. 49 The scribe he points to also wears a dark cloak, and his bare, untonsured head identifies him as a layman as well. The other two miniatures which appear to depict the escriuano del rey are in the Libro de los juegos, and accompany the prologues to the Libro de los dados (see Figure 3) and the Libro de las tablas. Here the pointing figure is also a layman, but in both images he is represented with strikingly blond hair and dressed in a scarlet tunic, a colour that sumptuary laws of 1258 had decreed could be worn only by royalty and the nobility.50 Given the inconsistent way these laws are reflected in Alfonsine miniatures, it is difficult to conclude whether or not the colour of his clothes is significant. On the other hand, the miniature of three scribes at work, each seated at a sloping desk, at the opening of the Libro de los juegos, which is often cited as an image of the royal scriptorium, in fact seems generic, and was probably included as a pendant to the image of artisans engaged in making gaming boards and dice two folios later (fol. 3r).51 The scribes depicted include a layman and two others who appear to be in holy orders, although the Benedictine monk’s scarlet tunic and hose contravene both monastic regulations and sumptuary laws. Scholars have linked scribes in Alfonso’s royal and imperial chanceries with the translation of astrological and scientific works, but this does not necessarily mean they were also employed in the copying of books.52 The fact that Martín Pérez de Maqueda is careful to qualify himself as a scribe ‘of the king’s books’ suggests the two were quite separate. The division 48 Compare the depiction of a king acting at the behest of a group of clerics in a slightly later French miniature: F. Garnier, Le langage de l’image, 2 vols (Tours, 1989), ii, La grammaire des gestes, at 49 and fig. 31. 49 BL Add. MS 20787, fol. 1v; miniature reproduced in Bango Torviso, ‘El rey como legislador y como juez’, in Murcia 2009, 502–5, at 502. For the social status of the figure who wears a ‘capiello redondo’, see Menéndez Pidal, La España del siglo XIII leída en imagenes, 83. 50 Escorial MS T.I.6, fols 65r and 72r, reproduced in Murcia 2009, 561 and 565; G. Menéndez Pidal and C. Bernís, Las Cantigas. La vida en el siglo XIII según la representación iconográfica (II): traje, aderezo, afeites, Special Issue, Cuadernos de la Alhambra, 15–17 (1979–1981), 93. 51 See Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 1v, colour reproduction in García Morencos, Libro de Ajedrez (1987), plate 1, and comments by Fernández Fernández, ‘La organización del scriptorium y sus recursos’, in Murcia 2009, 208–20, at 213. 52 Procter, ‘The Scientific Works’, 24–5; Cárdenas, ‘Alfonso’s Scriptorium and Chancery’, 102–3.

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is supported by a contemporary reference to another figure specifically associated with royal book production, ‘Suer Melendez’. He is described in a now-lost document as a ‘scribe to the king, who draws up tables [of contents] and adds numbers to his books’.53 The reference suggests the highly specialized roles performed by royal book scribes,54 and reflects the concern among the Alfonsine translators and compilers to structure their texts with chapter divisions, a concern they shared with their opposite numbers in France and which was new to Christian literary texts produced in the Iberian Peninsula at this date.55 This degree of scribal specialization is found in other centres of book production. Accounts for the French royal abbey of Saint-Denis reveal that different types of text (chronicles, books, charters, census records, and letters) were usually copied by different scribes. ‘Étienne Busset’, named as scribe of both letters (in 1290) and charters (1292), seems to be the exception that proves this rule.56 The scant but explicit evidence in Alfonsine manuscripts and in a short extract from a now lost document, then, to suggest that Alfonso employed scribes exclusively to copy and coordinate the production of the books which he commissioned. However, some annotations in manuscripts copied for Alfonso which seem to identify royal copyists can be misleading. Scholars have argued that a scribe called ‘Andres’ should be linked to the Alfonsine scriptorium on the evidence of a note embedded in a miniature that accompanies the text of cantiga 156 in the códice rico (Escorial MS T.I.1, fol. 212r).57 The miniature depicts a monk at a writing desk, a scroll in front of him. On the scroll, in black ink, are the words ‘Vitrix fortune pacientia, D. Andres’ (‘Patience conquers fortune, D. Andres’) written along the length of the scroll. The script is probably late sixteenth, or early seventeenth century (from the form of the letters ‘r’ and ‘p’), and its identification as a later addition is reinforced by inconsistencies when the note is compared with the other, few, occasions when scrolls or documents represented in the 53 Ortíz de Zúñiga, Annales, 90.a.4. 54 By contrast, the specialized division of labour in the royal chancery, outlined in the Alfonsine legal treatises, between those who wrote out documents and those who registered them did not pertain in practice: Kleine, La cancillería, at 118. 55 Taylor, ‘Alfonso X y Vicente de Beauvais’, 451–5; I. Fernández-Ordóñez, ‘Ordinatio y compilatio en la prosa de Alfonso X’, in Modelos latinos en la Castilla medieval, ed. M. Castillo Lluch and M. López Izquierdo (Madrid, 2010), 239–70. 56 T. de La Godelinais Martinot-Lagarde, ‘Aspects f inanciers de l’écriture au XIIIe siècle à travers les comptes de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis’, in Le statut du scripteur au Moyen Âge. Actes du XIIe colloque scientifique du comité international de paléographie latine (Cluny, 17–20 juillet 1998), ed. M.-C. Hubert, E. Poulle, and M.H. Smith (Paris, 2000), 167–74, at 170. 57 Menéndez Pidal, ‘Los manuscritos de las Cantigas’, 49–50.

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códice rico are also inscribed. The ‘Andres’ note is written along the roll so that it faces away from the reader, and does not refer to the contents of the cantiga it accompanies (the poem is about a monk who praises the Virgin, but he is never named). By contrast, the text of a scroll held before a bedridden nun in cantiga 71 (Escorial MS T.I.1, fol. 105v) is also in Latin, but it reinforces the assertion in the rubric that the nun praises Mary. Moreover, the words are written vertically in a neat cursive contemporary with the manuscript, in a fine-nibbed pen, and are clearly presented to the reader. Similarly, the depiction of a charter with a pendent seal that a knight presents to monks in cantiga 48 (Escorial MS T.I.1, fol. 71v) includes a minute inscription that, appropriately, refers to the date of the bequest. Tempting though it may be to speculate that an Alfonsine scribe called ‘Andres’ shared his name with the martyred monk of cantiga 156, the style and content of the annotation suggest it is by a later reader who added his own name to the manuscript.58 The constant presence of an overall coordinator, or coordinators, responsible for the production of manuscripts for Alfonso which the textual and iconographic evidence suggests is confirmed by the appearance and codicology of the codices themselves.59 At a general level, scholars have attributed a total of fifteen manuscripts to Alfonso’s patronage because of their large dimensions, fine parchment, generously spaced layout which includes illuminated miniatures and diagrams, and their even, gothic script.60 A comprehensive paleographical and codicological study of all 58 Pace E. Ruiz García, ‘Escribir para el Rey’, in Cantigas, Códice rico (2011), ii, 147–86, at 180 n. 35 and 182, and others before her, such as Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Sevilla y el “scriptorium” alfonsí’, in Sevilla 1248, 641 and fig. 3. 59 D. Gregorio, ‘Les oeuvres d’Alphonse X de Castille. Quelques questions sur la production scientifique’, in Du scriptorium à l’atelier. Copistes et enlumineurs dans la conception du livre manuscrit au Moyen Âge, ed. J.-L. Deuffic, Special Issue, Pecia, 13 (2010), 71–92; on the manuscripts of the Cantigas in particular, see the evolving conclusions in Menéndez Pidal, ‘Los manuscritos de las Cantigas’; S. Parkinson, ‘The First Reorganization of the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, Bulletin of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, 1 (1988), 91–7 and idem, ‘Layout in the Códices Ricos of the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, HRJ, 1 (2000), 243–74; M.E. Schaffer, ‘The “Evolution” of the Cantigas de Santa Maria: the relationships between manuscripts T, F and E’, in Cobras e Son, ed. Parkinson, 186–213. 60 For the number of manuscripts ascribed to Alfonso’s patronage, see ‘Alfonso X’, in Diccionario filológico de literatura medieval española, 3. Among the manuscripts once attributed to Alfonsine patronage using these criteria is a manuscript in the chapter library of Toledo cathedral, MS 47-15: see G.D. Greenia, ‘A New Manuscript Illuminated in the Alphonsine Scriptorium’, Bulletin of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, 2 (Fall–Spring 1988–1989), 31–42. The attribution was contested by Schaffer, ‘Los códices de las “Cantigas de Santa Maria”’, 133–4 and Domínguez Rodríguez, ‘Sevilla y el “scriptorium” alfonsí’, in Sevilla 1248, 635–59, esp. 637–8 and n. 10. On Alfonsine manuscripts in the context of thirteenth-century manuscript production in the Iberian Peninsula, see Rodríguez Díaz, ‘La factura material’.

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the Alfonsine manuscripts and their place in the context of manuscript production in the Iberian Peninsula more generally remains to be carried out, although recently scholars have begun to examine the similarities and differences between manuscripts of a particular type of text.61 However, dimensions and quality aside, the feature which defines nearly all manuscripts copied for Alfonso are the insertions and erasures which affect text and layout. These often seem not to be the result of carelessness, but a reflection of deliberate changes made at a late stage, and a sign of the close working relationship between scribes, illuminators, and the escribano del rey. The manuscript of the Estoria de Espanna incorporated such late-stage changes to adhere to a particular style of layout for political ends, and the Libro de los juegos, copied by a single scribe, underwent changes after it was copied to accommodate additions to the text.62 The compilation was probably drafted in two phases over a period of time: the prologue to the opening treatise makes no reference to the games played according to astronomical principles described in the final quires, although these refer back to the earlier sections.63 The structure of the codex, though, suggests a copying process interrupted by changes and additions to the exemplar. The prologue and first three treatises on chess, dice, and games with counters are copied across quires of eight and conclude on folio 80r, the last folio of quire ten. The verso of folio 80 is unruled and blank.64 61 The lack of comparative and contextual studies is lamented by Schaffer, ‘Los códices de las “Cantigas de Santa Maria”’, 140, and by Rodríguez Díaz, ‘La factura material’, 240. For the scientific manuscripts, see now Fernández Fernández, Arte y Ciencia en el scriptorium de Alfonso X el Sabio, based on her doctoral thesis, ‘Los manuscritos científicos del scriptorium de Alfonso X. Estudio codicológico y artístico’, 2 vols, Madrid, Universidad Complutense, 2010. 62 Pace Fernández Fernández, ‘Libro de axedrez, dados e tablas. Ms. T-I-6. Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial. Estudio codicológico’, in Alfonso X, Libro de los juegos de ajedrez, dados y tablas de Alfonso X el Sabio, 2 vols (Valencia, 2010), ii, 71–116, at 83, who states that ‘se aprecian mínimas correcciones de contenido en los manuscritos’. 63 P. Grandese, ‘Sulla composizione del Libro dei Giochi di Alfonso X el Sabio,’ Annali di Ca’Foscari. Rivista della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere dell’Università di Venezia, 27, nos 1–2 (1988), 171–81 and Alfonso X el Sabio, Il libro dei giochi. Il libro dei dadi, delle tavole, del grant acedrex e del gioco di scacchi con dieci caselle, degli scacchi delle quattro stagioni, del filetto, degli scacchi e delle tavole che si giocano con l’astrologia, ed. P. Canettieri, Scritture Romanze, 1 (Bologna, 1996), 8–43. Grandese and Canettieri differ in their analysis of how the work was expanded. For arguments that the sections on the game ‘del alquerque’ and games played by astronomy are additions, see also Libro de los juegos, ed. Orellana Calderón, xlix and Fernández Fernández, ‘Libro de axedrez’, ii, 90–2. 64 Fernández Fernández, ‘Libro de axedrez’, ii, 95, observes that folios are deliberately left blank in Alfonsine manuscripts to distinguish different sections of a compilation (although these do not, as she states, always coincide with the end of a quire: the third folio of the final quire of Escorial MS T.I.6 is unruled and blank on recto and verso).

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This implies these sections had been handed to the scribe as a single exemplar, but a drastic revision at a late stage is evident in the second quire of the treatise on chess (folios 9–16). The quire comprises eight folios, but the sixth one in the quire (what would have been folio 14) has been torn away and replaced by a singleton (the disposition of the parchment on the singleton, hair/skin, matches the disposition of the folios of the quire on either side).65 The recto side of the stub that remains of the original folio 14 has a marginal note that appears to be a note correcting the text, accompanied by a signe-de-renvoi of two parallel strokes.66 There is no loss of sense in the text as it survives now, but this change to the structure of the quire suggests that the scribe was required to recopy an entire folio at a very late stage. Furthermore, in the final two folios in the first quire, and in all the folios of the second quire, the opening four lines of each new game are erased and recopied, although the opening initial and rubric for the games are unaffected.67 Such consistency suggests a change of exemplar rather than scribal carelessness. Further on in the manuscript, towards the end of the treatise in a section on the game of Grant acedrex, the scribe has been obliged to add another sixteen lines to a text he had earlier considered complete. The section, on the type of dice needed for the games of Acedrex de las diez casas (‘Chess of the ten mansions’) and Dados de siete (‘Dice of seven’) concludes with the promise of a miniature to illustrate the dice: ‘this is the configuration of these dice, and this is their image’ (‘éste es el departimiento d’estos dados, e ésta es la su figura’). No miniature follows, however. Instead, the scribe copies sixteen lines of text which discuss similar types of dice that bear the hallmarks of an insertion: the ink used is slightly darker; the gaps left for paragraph markers remain unfilled.68 The three opening treatises on chess, dice, and board games which occupy most of the manuscript are followed by eight short accounts of variant versions of these games. The first four of these accounts are copied across a quire of eight leaves. The next two (a game of chess and one of counters played according to the seasons) are written out on two separate bifolia,69 and the description of the penultimate game to be described, the 65 Fernández Fernández, ‘Libro de axedrez’, ii, 97. 66 The letters are difficult to decipher and interpret: ‘ocullr (or ‘ubls’?) sa’. 67 Fols 6v–16v. On fol. 11r, col. a, lines 35 to 38 were recopied over the erasure and subsequently ruled out. 68 Escorial MS T.I.6, fol. 84r; Libro de los juegos, ed. Orellana Calderón, 325–6. 69 Pace Grandese, ‘Sulla composizione’, 172–3, who collated them as four singletons.

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Libro del alquerque, begins on the first folio of a quire of eight leaves.70 This arrangement suggests that at least some elements of the scribe’s exemplar were expanded during the copying process. Indeed, although the leaves of the codex containing the Libro de los juegos were trimmed when the work was rebound, the absence of catchwords or quire signatures is arguably not necessarily due to rebinding, but reflects the state of flux that affected the exemplar. Only the quires of the opening treatise on chess problems display catchwords and quire signatures. (The mixture of catchwords and quire signatures can be explained by the fact that many quires open with a miniature.71) Of these, quire two, which underwent changes at a late stage, has no catchwords or quire signature, and nor does quire eight, the final quire of the treatise on chess. There is no evidence of signatures in the remaining six quires of the manuscript that contain the Libro de los dados and the Libro de las tablas. The changes to the layout of the Estoria de Espanna and the alterations to the Libro de los juegos show that the relationship between those who prepared the exemplar and those who copied it for the king was a close one, whatever the genre of text or the number of scribes involved. However, the work of the copyists was rarely distributed evenly. In 1278, two scribes began to copy the text of what is now Madrid, Biblioteca Historica Marqués de Valdecilla, Universidad Complutense, MS 156 , a splendid codex that has suffered considerable mutilation, and which contains the Libros del saber de astrología. They used a script that has been labelled ‘gótica libraria’ by modern palaeographers.72 Scribe ‘A’, whose hand appears first in the 70 Cf. Fernández Fernández, ‘Libro de axedrez’, ii, 94–5, who argued that the treatise began on a singleton. My collation of the manuscript suggested a single quire of eight, and there are no obvious signs of erasure on folios 91 and 92 that would suggest the last-minute adjustments which the insertion of an extra folio would imply. 71 The distribution catchwords/quire signatures in Escorial MS T.I.6 is as follows: fol. 8v (end of first quire), catchword: ‘go dar la’; fol. 17r: ‘III’ in lower margin to indicate the start of quire three; fols 25r and 32v: quire signature ‘.IIII.’ to indicate the fourth quire; fols. 33r and 40v: ‘ủ’ [ie. Roman numeral ‘V’, here in abbreviated form as ‘quintus’] to mark the fifth quire; fols 41r and 48v: the lower margins have been cropped but traces of the Roman numeral ‘VI’ remain to indicate quire six; fol. 49r: the quire signature ‘VII’ is still visible at the start of the seventh quire, but has been trimmed away on fol. 56v, the last folio of the gathering. 72 Four of the prologues in the compilation are dated between 1276 and 1278: the Libro de las figuras de las estrellas fixas (1276); the Libro de la espera (1277); the Libro de la açafeha was f inished in the twenty-sixth year of Alfonso’s reign (1278); and the prologue to the Libro del quadrante dates the text to 1277. For descriptions of the script used to copy the work, see Ma del C. Álvarez Márquez, ‘Escritura latina en la plena y baja Edad Media: la llamada “gótica libraria”’, Historia. Instituciones. Documentos, 12 (1985), 377–400, and M. Sánchez Mariana, ‘El libro en la Baja Edad Media. Reino de Castilla’, in Historia ilustrada del libro español. Los manuscritos, ed.

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manuscript, writes with a slight slant to the left. His script is characterized by frequent use of hairline serifs (especially on the ascenders of minuscule ‘b’ and ‘l’, and from the minim-base and headstroke of the uncrossed Tironian ‘et’ symbol). The hairline serifs often link letters and sometimes even words. He forms the minuscule letters ‘z’ and ‘g’ in distinctive fashion. Scribe A writes the letter ‘z’ with a flat headstroke, and the long tail of the letter descends below the lower line and does not curve back upwards. He forms the letter ‘g’ with a flat-topped head, and does not make the tail into a closed compartment beneath the head. When copying the possessive forms ‘de la’, ‘de las’, ‘de los’, scribe A writes these as a single word. Scribe B, on the other hand, makes much less use of hairline serifs, and his script is characterized by two forms of the minuscule ‘z’. The tail sits on the lower line and curves upwards (though it never forms a closed compartment) in both versions, but sometimes he curves the headstroke down to the left of the tail, and sometimes the headstroke is long and slightly concave. Scribe B prefers to make the head of the ‘g’ rounded and to join the tail with the head to form a rounded, closed compartment below the line. He writes the possessive forms ‘de la’, ‘de las’, and ‘de los as two separate words. Scribes A and B copy across quires, and their labour is distributed in two ways. In general, each is responsible for copying a treatise in its entirety. In the manuscript as it survives today, scribe A copied five complete treatises (including the final three in the work), the supplementary text on the bifolium added to the Libro de la espera, and what can still be seen of the opening prologue and table of contents on the verso of the first folio.73 Scribe B copied eight of the surviving sixteen treatises in the manuscript.74 However, on the two occasions they copy a treatise together, and their labour is apportioned not according to divisions in the text, but according to the H. Escolar, Biblioteca del Libro 54 (Madrid, 1993), 165–222. For a description of the contents and chronology of the damage to Libros del saber de astrología see A.J. Cárdenas, ‘Hacia una edición crítica del Libro del saber de astrología de Alfonso X: estudio codicológico actual de la obra regia (mutilaciones, fechas y motivos)’, in Homenaje a Pedro Sáinz Rodríguez, ed. H. Santiago Otero, Publicaciones de la Fundación Universitaria Española, Monografías 44, 4 vols (Madrid, 1986), ii, 111–20 and, more recently, the description in Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 213–79. 73 The treatises are: Libro de la lámina universal, fols 83v–109r; Libro del reloj del argent vivo, fols 191r–195r; the Libro del reloj de la candela, fols 195r–201r, and both books on the ‘palacio de las horas’, fols 201r–202v, and the treatises on the ‘ataçir’, fols 207r–208r. 74 Thus the opening treatise devoted to constellations (fols 2r–25v), the f irst book of the astrolabe (fols 43r–55v), the treatise on the ‘azafea de Azarquiel’ (fols 109v–135v), the treatise on the ‘armellas’ (fols 135v–142r), the treatise on the ‘láminas de los siete planetas’ (fols 156r–169v), the mutilated treatise on the quadrant (fols 169v–174v), the treatise on the gnomon (fols 178r–183r), and the treatise on the clepsydra (fols 183r–190v).

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physical divisons of the codex (the recto or verso of a folio, or the start of a column).75 For reasons that are unclear, but which suggest a sudden urgency, this system breaks down in the Libro segundo del astrolabio redondo, and scribes A and B take turns to copy the text mid-column and mid-line.76 As in the Estoria de Espanna and the Libro de los juegos, the process of copying was subject to alterations and additions at an advanced stage, which is apparent from changes to some of the catchwords in the manuscript. Although the codex has been trimmed for later rebinding, catchwords are visible in the lower margin from the fourth quire (fol. 34v) through to the twenty-eighth (fol. 198v). When the compilers looked over the scribes’ work, they decided to supplement the treatise on the sphere with a short section on how to add rings to an armillary sphere (‘fazer armillas en la espera’). The original catchword, ‘este es’, written in the scribe’s hand at the end of the work on the sphere, corresponded to the start of the treatise on the astrolabe. Another hand has crossed it out and written in cursive, in a finer pen, the words ‘et por’, which correspond to the start of the inserted text on the armillary sphere, copied on a bifolium.77 The catchword here is written in the same cursive hand that corrected the catchword on the previous quire, which suggests the manuscript was already complete and ready to be bound up.78 The process of adjustment and addition occurs again in conjunction with the catchword for the 27th quire (fol. 190v). The treatise on the clepsydra, the Libro del relogio del agua, concludes at the end of this quire. The catchword written by the scribe has been erased and another,

75 So for example in the Libro de la espera, scribe B concludes his work at the end of the first column on fol. 39v, and scribe A takes over at the start of the second column on fol. 39v and continues until the conclusion of the section on fol. 40. 76 Scribe B copies the text of the Libro primero del astrolabio redondo (fols 43r–55v) and ceased copying mid-way through chapter xxx of the Libro segundo del astrolabio redondo (at the end of the second column on fol. 59v). Scribe A continued copying the chapter at the start of fol. 60r but stopped abruptly on the second line of the first column on fol. 62r. Scribe B took over, but began by mistakenly repeating a phrase already copied by scribe A in the previous line, and so was forced to underdot and cross out his opening words, ‘son en la setena casa’. B continued until the middle of c.lxxx (fol. 63v) and then he, too, ceased abruptly and A resumed. After this point, the scribes return to their regular distribution of labour. Cf. Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 240, who proposes a clearer division of labour: folios 1–109r are copied by a slightly archaizing hand, after which another scribe writes a script with more angular, ‘gothic’ features. For Sánchez Mariana, the manuscript was copied by a single hand: ‘El Códice alfonsí’, in Libros del saber de astronomía (Barcelona, 2004), ii, xi–xvi (at xii). 77 The Libro de la espera concludes on fol. 40v; fols. 41 and 42 contain the additional section of text; the Libro del astrolabio redondo begins on fol. 43r. 78 Fol. 42v: ‘Este es el p[ro]logo’.

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cursive hand has written in the opening words of the rubric of what is now the next treatise, the Libro del relogio del argent vivo.79 The scribes who copied the Escorial manuscript of the Estoria de Espanna (Escorial MS Y.I.2) and the fourth part of the General estoria (BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539) distributed their labour strictly according to the textual divisions of their exemplar. The relationship between the preparation of exemplars and the copying of text in Escorial MS Y.I.2 of the Estoria de Espanna has been extensively studied. The historian and textual scholar Diego Catalán observed in 1962 that this manuscript (referred to as ‘E1’ by its modern textual critics) had not been produced in a unified fashion, and in a subsequent study he argued that the thematic divisions in the work corresponded to changes of hand and to different quire structures. He concluded that Escorial MS Y.I.2 was copied in stages, and that up to eight scribes were involved in writing out the text.80 His conclusions were developed by the philologist Inés Fernández-Ordóñez, who delved deeper into the link between source material and the different phases of composition, and who disputed Catalán’s belief that the changes of hand in the manuscript necessarily reflected a change in the exemplar.81 I can identify only two hands in Escorial MS Y.I.2, and the differences between them are subtle.82 Both rest the tails of the minuscule letters ‘p’ and ‘q’ on the lines ruled for the text, so that the words are centred between the ruled lines. The first hand, A, writes a script with a rounded aspect; the second, B, writes a script with a narrower appearance. Scribe A tends to use the Tironian abbreviation for ‘et’, while scribe B prefers to write the Castilian ‘e’ or ‘y’. Scribe A copied most of the text in the manuscript: this hand wrote out the prologue on the opening bifolium and all the text on quires three, seven, and nine through to twenty-seven (the last quire in the manuscript as it survives today). Scribe B’s intervention is limited to quires six and eight, and also to quires two and four (where Scribe A also intervenes to recopy parts of scribe B’s work thanks to the changes in layout discussed above). In quire six, the change of hand from B to A takes place at a thematic break in the text which happens to fall in the middle of a line 79 Fol. 190v: ‘Aquí se copieça’. 80 Catalán, De la silva textual, 41–7. 81 Fernández-Ordóñez, Las estorias de Alfonso el Sabio, 205–20. 82 As Catalán observed in 1962, the final two quires of Escorial MS Y.I.2 were transferred to Escorial, MS X.I.4 in the late fourteenth century: De Alfonso X al Conde de Barcelos, 32–8. The chronicle text on the quires is copied by hand A and, as in Escorial MS Y.I.2, eight-line initials open chapters that introduce the reign of a new king, and gaps (most of them nineteen or twenty lines) separate the accounts of successive reigns.

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(‘Mas agora dexa la estoria de contar dello e torna a contar de’).83 Scribe A continues, but the first few words he writes are over an erasure, which suggests changes to the exemplar at a late stage rather than carelessness.84 This is corroborated by the note added to the catchword on this quire, which records that the following quire will be (unusually) a bifolium.85 The text on the bifolium is also copied by scribe A. In quire eight, scribe B’s intervention is extremely brief. He begins to copy an instalment in the history of Julius Caesar (fol. 41ra, line 47: ‘mas agora dexa aqui de fablar del, [i.e. Pompey] e torna a contar de cuemo auino a Julio Cesar’) but ceases abruptly a few lines into Chapter 13 (‘De cuemo se descubrio Julio Cesar al desamor que auie contra Ponpeyo’, on fol. 43rb).86 Scribe B does not participate further in the copying of the text in the manuscript as it survives today. The two anonymous scribes who copy Escorial MS Y.I.2, like the scribes of the Libro de los juegos and the Libros del saber de astrología, are not responsible for revising and checking the text they copy. This is done by others – it is not clear whether the same person is responsible for overseeing the amendments to both codices – who note corrections in the margin which the scribes then carry out.87 In the Estoria de Espanna the person responsible for revising the work writes a note for the binder as well, to alert him to the presence of quires that consist only of a bifolium. The scribes who copied the first part of the Estoria de Espanna did not copy the fourth part of the General estoria. Although the script in both codices is similar, a comparison between the hands in the two manuscripts reveals several important differences. The majuscule ‘E’ differs, as does the way in which all the scribes write the minuscule letters ‘z’ and ‘x’. Despite this, it has been argued that both manuscripts were copied by a group of scribes exclusively engaged in producing Alfonsine chronicles because the codices share a peculiar paleographic feature, namely the way in which the word ‘et’ is abbreviated when written as a majuscule.88 However, the 83 Primera Crónica General de España, ed. R. Menéndez Pidal, 3rd edn (1978), i, 52.a. 84 Escorial MS Y.I.2, fol. 34v, a, line 14: ‘los otros consules que uinieron en pos estos, cada uno cuemo ouo nombre’. Primera Crónica General, i, 52.a. 85 Fol. 38v: the note, in a small cursive hand, reads ‘vn plego’ (‘one bifolium’). For the bifolium (quire 7, fols 39–40), see Catalán, De la silva textual, 42–3 and Fernández-Ordóñez, Las estorias, 206 and n. 252. 86 See Primera Crónica General, i, 62.a and 66.a. 87 For example Escorial MS Y.I.2, fol. 166v, and in Biblioteca Historica MS 156, correct words or phrases missed noted in the margin on fols 69v and 70r. 88 Fernández Fernández, Los manuscritos científicos del scriptorium de Alfonso X, doctoral thesis, i, 34 and ii, 722, figs. 41 (Estoria de Espanna, Escorial MS Y.I.2) and 42 (General estoria IV, BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539).

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abbreviation is written in a slightly different style in the two manuscripts, where it also co-exists with the forms ‘E’ and ‘Et’. Nor is this feature found solely in copies of chronicles produced for Alfonso. It is also used by the scribe of the London manuscript of the Primera Partida (BL Add. MS 20787) and in a late thirteenth-century Latin liturgical manuscript copied at a remove from the Learned King but with royal associations.89 The manuscript is in the library of the royal Cistercian nunnery of Las Huelgas, Burgos, founded by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1187. Alfonso’s sister Berenguela (d. 1279) was abbess and Fernando de la Cerda was buried there in 1275.90 Two scribes copied BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, which contains the text of the fourth part of the General estoria and which survives complete. Their hands are diff icult to distinguish as both write small, even, carefully formed script. A subtle difference between them is the way they trace the descender of the minuscule ‘r’. Martín Pérez de Maqueda, who writes the colophon, uses a straight downward stroke with no serif at the base of the descender (see Figure 4 above); his anonymous companion (hand 2) forms the minuscule ‘r’ with a slight slant to the left, and with a serif at the foot of the descender.91 Like the two copyists responsible for the Escorial Estoria de Espanna manuscript, both scribes worked closely together and divided the text to be copied according to thematic divisions rather than by quire. The distribution of their labour is uneven. Martín Pérez de Maqueda alone copied twenty-seven of the thirty-eight quires in BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, while his colleague copied only ten. They copy only one quire together (quire seventeen), in which Maqueda, who had copied the first sixteen quires, hands over the task to his colleague at the end of a folio and the conclusion of a section of text.92 Hand 2 then continues uninterrupted until the end of quire 27, and leaves the final column of the quire blank.93 Maqueda resumes, with a new section of text (the account of the life of Alexander), at the start of the next quire and continues until the end of the work (fol. 277r). 89 For an example of the abbreviation in the London manuscript, see Murcia 2009, 529; for the Las Huelgas manuscript, see S. Herrero González, Códices miniados en el Real Monasterio de las Huelgas (Barcelona, 1988), 108. 90 On the foundation, see R. Walker, ‘Leonor of England, Plantagenet Queen of Alfonso VIII of Castile, and her Foundation of the Cistercian Abbey of Las Huelgas. In imitation of Fontevraud?’, Journal of Medieval History, 31 (2005), 346-368. 91 For a description of the type of script used by Martín Pérez de Maqueda as ‘textura precisus vel sine pedibus’, see the survey of gothic scripts in Introducción a la paleografía, ed. Riesco Terrero, 122–3. Hand 2 is closer to the script he classifies as ‘gótica rotunda’. 92 Maqueda, who has copied the text from the start of the work, ceases writing at the end of the second folio in the quire (fol. 117v), at the conclusion of the account of the reign of ‘rey cambises’. 93 Hand 2 concludes at fol. 205v, column a, with the history of the reign of King Arsamo.

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Despite the controlled way in which the sections of text were apportioned to the scribes of the General estoria IV, the lack of catchwords to introduce two quires in the manuscript suggests that Martín Pérez de Maqueda did not begin his task with a complete exemplar.94 The last folio of each of these quires without catchwords ends with blank lines which are not used for the start of the following text. When hand 2 finishes copying the account of Arsamo, King of Persia, at the end of quire twenty-seven, he does not write a catchword in the lower margin; his colleague begins the new text in quire twenty-eight. The uncertainty about the text to follow is more marked between quires thirty-four and thirty-five. Martín Pérez de Maqueda concludes the section on the deeds of King Ptolemy Euergetes on a bifolium, at folio 257v. He left half a column blank and did not write in a catchword. That he did not expect any further text is confirmed by the fact that the final lines of the account of Ptolemy have been erased and recopied with a sentence that announces the section that will begin on the next quire: ‘Onde aquí en este logar deue entrar ell ecclesiastico.’ The short, self-contained account of the Gentiles under the reign of King Çiro occupies a bifolium inserted between two quires of eight leaves and has a catchword, but the fact it is a bifolium suggests that it, too, was a later addition to the scribes’ exemplar.95 The codicological and paleographical analysis presented above shows how the escriuano de los libros de el Rey brought together compilers and scribes who worked closely together in the same place. Yet this model does not apply in the case of another manuscript prepared for Alfonso, now BAV MS Reg. Lat. 1283a, and known to modern scholars as the Astromagia. The Astromagia survives today in an extremely fragmentary condition, and inventories of the French royal library where the manuscript is recorded in the early fifteenth century suggest that it was incomplete even at this early date.96 What remains of this compilation of treatises on the powers of angels and the process of making talismans now occupies the first thirty-six folios of a miscellany of other texts concerned with religious subjects and the minutiae of Italian law.97 The manuscript, which on textual grounds can be dated to the end of the 1270s, was planned as a substantial compilation on magic associated with the planets and the zodiac constellations, but has since suffered significant losses.98 The extent of these losses is suggested by the fact that the only two 94 The quire that precedes the final singleton that contains the colophon also lacks a catchword. 95 The bifolium occupies fols 74 and 75, and is the eleventh quire in the manuscript. 96 A. García Avilés, ‘Two Astromagical Manuscripts of Alfonso X’, JWCI, 59 (1996), 14–23, at 20. 97 For an account of the manuscript and an edition of the text (with parallel Italian translation), see Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, at 52–3, where he argues for the present title. 98 For the dating see Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 24.

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catchwords still visible in the manuscript, on folios 8v and 26v, do not match the opening line of the next quire. Despite this, it is possible to draw some conclusions from this surviving fragment about how this was copied, and these reveal quite a different process from the other Alfonsine manuscripts. The three scribes who wrote out the text that survives divided their labour strictly according to quires, and not according to divisions in the text. Hand 1, responsible for the first and final quires of the manuscript as it survives today, writes a small, rounded gothic script. Characteristic letter-formations are an uncial ‘d’ with a short ascender and a minuscule ‘e’ which is often joined to the following letter with a hairline serif that extends from the upper compartment. Hand 2 copies quires two, three, and four, and writes a more angular form of gothic script characterized by hairline serifs applied to ascenders and descenders. Hand 2 is also anxious to lend a justified aspect to the text, and uses small symbols that resemble modern exclamation marks to fill gaps at the ends of lines as required. If necessary, he inserts two of these symbols together. The third scribe copied only one quire (quire five), and his handwriting is the smallest. He rarely adds serifs to his letters, and he forms the uncial, minuscule ‘d’ with a long ascender which stretches left towards the previous letter. Each scribe copied his own rubrics and corrected his own text (see for example the marginal notes and crossing-out by hand 2 on folios 16v and 23r). The scribes’ autonomous way of working is also apparent in the different number of lines they ruled for their text. The dimensions of the text area remain roughly the same throughout, varying only slightly from 24–24.5 cm high by 18–18.3 cm wide, but hand 1 rules forty-five lines to a folio, hand 2 rules forty-four lines, and hand 3 (who wrote the smallest script) rules forty-six lines per folio. These differences strongly suggest that the Astromagia was transcribed by professional scribes working simultaneously in different locations away from the compilers, and therefore at a remove from the court.99 The high number of corrections the scribes made to their text, suggested to one scholar that they were careless copyists of an imperfect exemplar,100 but the compartmentalized fashion in which the scribes worked suggests they were copying at speed an exemplar that was complete. As the modern editor of the surviving text, Alfonso D’Agostino, has shown, the 99 My argument here is inspired by analysis of the copying process of a later English manuscript in M.B Parkes and A.I. Doyle, ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in Parkes, Scribes, Scripts and Readers, 201–48, at 205. The article appeared earlier in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: essays presented to N.R. Ker, ed. M.B. Parkes and A.G. Watson (London, 1978), 163–210. 100 Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 301.

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work is a compilation of several different treatises, some of which derive from translations already made by Alfonsine scholars.101 The extent to which diagrams and miniatures in BAV MS Reg. Lat. 1283a have been completed varies from quire to quire, and there is no correlation between the degree of completeness of these and the hand responsible for copying the text. In the case of the two quires copied by hand 1, the miniatures, text, and rubrics for the large circular diagrams which the scribe also copied in the first quire are complete, but the red and blue initials lack flourishing (indeed, they may be later additions) and there is no line-filling, although there are red paragraph markers. On the other hand, the sixth and final quire (also copied by hand 1) is also the most complete as it includes not only miniatures but also flourished initials in red and blue, and flourished line-filling in red and purple. The diagrams, initials, and other decoration in the three quires copied by hand 2 also exhibit varying degrees of completeness. The diagrams in the second quire lack text, and while the red initials have red flourished infilling and flourishing in purple ink, the blue initials remain undecorated. There are no paragraph markers or line-filling. Quires three and four sometimes lack miniatures (e.g. fol. 21r), and sometimes diagrams are ruled and complete with miniatures but lack text (e.g. fol. 9v). All three quires written out by the second scribe have completed initials, paraphs in red and blue, and complex patterns of line-filling (e.g. fol. 23v). The level of completeness in quire five, copied by hand 3, is similar to the state of the quires copied by hand 2. What all this suggests is that the exemplar for the text of the large circular diagrams which run through the work was prepared separately from the text of the treatise, and was not handed to the scribes at the same time. It would seem, then, that when Alfonso’s scholars had an exemplar they considered definitive – as in the case of the Astromagia – they or, as is perhaps more likely, the escribano del rey contracted out the production of the manuscript to professional scribes who copied different sections simultaneously, in an echo of methods of university book production. Speed and convenience were presumably factors in this decision. The process of preparing most manuscripts for the king, though, required closer supervision because of the constant changes made to the text and, sometimes (as in the case of the General estoria IV), to the contents of the miniatures as well. Three of the four manuscripts examined in this chapter were copied by two scribes working in tandem, which implies there was no complete exemplar and so only one scribe could copy the text at a given time. Compilers, translators, 101 Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 24–5 and see Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 296–8.

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scribes, and artists effected alterations to the text as the writing out of the definitive codex progressed. Erasures and addenda seem as much a feature of Alfonsine manuscripts as their sumptuous appearance, aspects which also characterize the códice de los músicos, the códice rico, and the ‘Florence’ manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria.102 Consequently, copying must have taken place at or near the court. However, it seems that only those who commissioned and supervised the manuscripts on behalf of the king actually travelled with the court, since the little that can be inferred from the accounts of Alfonso’s successor Sancho suggests that the scribes and artists who actually produced the codices were not part of the king’s itinerant retinue.103 The spectacular appearance of these large manuscripts made with high-quality parchment and materials confirmed Alfonso’s role as a public figure and promoted his vision of kingship, while at the same time their detailed tables of contents, running titles, and diagrams made them suitable for private study, either by the king himself or by those close to him. Yet annotations in contemporary hands that would suggest evidence of reading are absent from these codices, which is perhaps unsurprising given that their most important function was to act as symbols of royal status and to promote Castilian as the language of learning and of government.104 Instead, the interest of those around the king in the texts he commissioned is reflected in three surviving thirteenth-century copies that were made of his works. Although these manuscripts are generally considered to have been copied for Alfonso himself, they exhibit physical qualities or features of layout that suggest they were made for scholars or clerics in contact with the court who were anxious for their own copy of the scientific and historical information they contained. Two are astrological treatises, the Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas and the Libro de las cruzes, which would have had the value of novelty as well as providing information for astrological predictions. The other, the first part of the General estoria, is a work that would have been of general interest because of its synthesis of biblical and other historical sources.

102 Ferreira, ‘The Medieval Fate of the Cantigas’, 296–98 and 305. 103 Gutiérrez Baños, ‘Pintura monumental en tiempos del códice rico’, at 380–1. 104 Cf. the comments about the role of books in Charles V of France’s late fourteenth-century library in Daniel, ‘Le livre et l’exercice du pouvoir’, at 85.

5.

The Circulation of Alfonsine Texts: astrological works and chronicles

The fourteenth-century chronicle of Alfonso’s reign explains that in the year 1260 he ordered translations of legal, biblical, and astrological works so that he ‘might have knowledge of all writings’.1 This suggests the range of the works that he commissioned, while at the same time implying that these enjoyed a certain amount of circulation in the years following his death. Gerold Hilty and Laura Fernández Fernández have traced and recorded the dissemination of the scientific treatises that went under Alfonso’s name, and the holdings of Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional, the library at the Escorial monastery, and of other libraries across Spain include later copies of the Alfonsine chronicles and legal compilations. Some works associated with the king are known only from translations from the Spanish preserved in copies made in the decades after his reign (the Livre l’eschiele Mahomet and the Liber Razielis) or in fifteenth century manuscripts (the collection of fables known as Calila e Dimna).2 On the other hand, the Alfonsine provenance of manuscripts which state clearly they were patronized by him, and which are dated or dateable to his reign, has understandably not been questioned. However, this chapter will argue that aspects of the codicology of three such manuscripts, their materials and style of layout, suggest they are copies of Alfonsine translations and compilations made for other readers. Three manuscripts generally considered to have been copied for Alfonso are characterized by a relatively modest appearance and have smaller overall folio dimensions than the richly illuminated Cantigas or Libro de los juegos, even when rebinding is taken into account. Two are astrological works, now in the Biblioteca Nacional: Madrid MS 3065, the Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas; and Madrid MS 9294, the Libro de las cruzes. The third, also in Madrid’s Biblioteca Nacional, is the earliest copy of the first part of the General estoria, Madrid MS 816. They contain no miniatures, no illuminated initials, and no heraldic decoration to link them to 1 Crónica de Alfonso X, ed. González Jiménez, 26, c.9, and Chronicle of Alfonso X, trans. Thacker and Escobar, at 46. Alfonso’s literary activity was not, of course, confined to the year 1260: the chronicler summarized his patronage here because he needed to expand the chapter to a suitable length. See M. González Jiménez, ‘Una nueva edición de la Crónica de Alfonso X’, Cahiers d’Études Hispaniques Médiévales, 23 (2000), 177–212, at 190. 2 Calila e Dimna, ed. J.M. Cacho Blecua and MaJ. Lacarra (Madrid, 1984), ‘Introducción’, 19 and 50–52.

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Alfonso’s patronage, and there is no evidence to suggest such ornament was planned. The appearance of all three suggests they were not copied primarily to act as symbols of royal status, but to function as volumes for personal use. Indeed, it has been suggested recently that the two astrological manuscripts were copied as reference volumes for the library attached to the studium founded by Alfonso at Seville.3 The patronage of Louis IX in France offers a contemporary parallel for such a distinction: the copies of the works of the Church Fathers made in the 1250s for his personal library are unadorned, whereas the volumes he commissioned for his royal chapel are richly ornamented. 4 Unlike Louis, however, there is no documentary evidence to suggest that Alfonso ever formally established a royal library, and Juan Manuel’s account of Alfonso’s learned activities at the start of his Crónica abreviada implies that the king gathered the information for his books orally, from the discussions he had with ‘teachers and learned men’ who he retained at court specifically for this purpose.5 Even so, the number of sources compiled and translated by scholars in order to produce the range of works that bear his name implies that some form of library must have existed, but what little evidence there is for the preparation of these texts suggests library arrangements were ad hoc rather than permanent. In 1270 secular and monastic libraries lent legal texts and works by the Church Fathers to royal agents who promised, in Alfonso’s name, to return them as soon as they had ordered them copied.6 From the evidence of the three manuscripts discussed here, it also seems that the king or his scholarly agents made available drafts and completed exemplars of the works he patronized to those wishing to make copies (although presumably these would have been individuals with some connection to the court). The awkward layout of the Libro de las cruzes and the poor version of the text in the Libro conplido suggest the appeal of these works of predictive astrology was so great that they had begun to circulate in this form even before the Alfonsine translators had established definitive versions. Meanwhile, there are codicological and textual reasons to believe that Madrid MS 816 represents a copy of a completed royal codex that was made for, and perhaps by, members of the clergy. The Libro de las cruzes and the Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas (this title includes a literal rendition of the Arabic phrase ‘judgements of 3 Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 97 and 116. 4 Branner, ‘Saint Louis et l’enluminure parisienne’, 71–3. 5 Manuel, Crónica abreviada, 575–6, and see above, ‘Introduction’. 6 Memorial Histórico Español, i, docs cxvii and cxviii.

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the stars’, equivalent to ‘astrology’) are two works on the art of predicting the future through the study of the movements of the planets.7 Madrid MS 9294, which contains the Libro de las cruzes, also has the distinction of being the earliest manuscript in the Castilian language to include a dated colophon, in this case for the year 1259. The text is a Castilian translation commissioned by Alfonso of an Arabic treatise on the significance of the movements of the constellations for predicting future events, a work attributed to a certain ‘Ouedaylla’ whose identity remains mysterious.8 Despite the potential interest of its astrological subject-matter, the treatise does not appear to have enjoyed a wide circulation. The whereabouts of the copy prepared for Alfonso’s library are unknown, if indeed it survives. A fragment of the text copied in a late fifteenth-century miscellany of astrological texts survives in the library of Segovia cathedral, while a summary of the work is preserved in a sixteenth-century manuscript in the library of the Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid.9 The Madrid MS 9294 copy of Cruzes was brought to the notice of scholars by José Antonio Sánchez Pérez in an article published in 1930. The following year, the Spanish art historian J. Domínguez Bordona published a description of another thirteenth-century astrological manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional, the Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, and noted the similarity of its script and pen-flourished decoration with those in the Libro de las cruzes.10 The two manuscripts have subsequently been referred to as ‘twin manuscripts’ from the Alfonsine scriptorium, because of the fine, white quality of their parchment, and the similar dimensions and pen-flourished decoration of their layout.11 The materials and standard of execution that characterize Madrid MSS 9294 and 3065 are of a very high quality, and the codices can be only be described as modest productions when compared with the large illuminated manuscripts copied for Alfonso such as the Libros del saber de astronomía or the Lapidario.12 7 See Burnett, ‘Astrology’, 372. 8 The latest attempt to identify him reinforces the likelihood that he was an astronomer based in eleventh-century Al-Andalus: see M. Castells, ‘Un nuevo dato sobre El Libro de las Cruces en Al-Zīŷ Al-Mustalah (obra astronómica egipcia del siglo XIII)’, Al-Qantara, 13, no. 2 (part 2) (1992), 367–78, at 372. A summary of current knowledge in Fernández Fernández, Arte y Ciencia, 75–6. 9 Libro de las cruzes, ed. Kasten and Kiddle, ‘Introducción’, xv; Fernández Fernández, Arte y Ciencia, 97–8. 10 Sánchez Pérez, ‘El Libro de las cruces’, at 78; Domínguez Bordona, ‘El “Libro de los juicios de las estrellas”’, at 173. 11 The phrase was coined by Gerold Hilty in his edition of El Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas: see ‘Introducción’, at lvii, n. 122. See also Sánchez Mariana, ‘El libro en la Baja Edad Media’, 197–8. 12 Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 116.

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By way of comparison, a French translation of Justinian’s Code, copied in Paris or Orléans between 1240 and 1250, slightly larger in dimensions but similar in appearance and quality to Madrid MS 3065, was among the books in Charles V’s royal library in the 1370s.13 Yet the lack of a prefatory miniature depicting the king in either manuscript suggests that whoever commissioned them was not interested in emphasizing the connection of the texts with Alfonso’s patronage, and in one important respect Madrid MSS 9294 and 3065 are quite different from the other astrological and astronomical texts written for the king, and from one another. Unlike the copyists who were supervised by scholars who worked for Alfonso, it seems that the two scribes responsible for writing out the Libro de las cruzes and the Libro conplido did not benefit from such supervisory guidance; nor were they familiar with copying this type of text. The scribe of Madrid MS 9294 did not manage to establish a satisfactory relationship between diagrams and text, while on the other hand the scribe responsible for writing Madrid MS 3065 appears to have been more familiar with the conventions of laying out legal manuscripts, as his way of combining and cross-referencing text and gloss indicates. Unlike the carefully prepared codices copied for Alfonso in which, despite unexpected changes to the scribes’ exemplar, the layout of the page remains clear and coherent, the layout of the Libro de las cruzes is often clumsy and confused because the scribe has not managed to resolve the placement of text and diagrams in relation to one another. In Chapter fifty, for example, a series of four circular diagrams runs along the foot of the two columns of text. However, this is only part of the diagram for the text above: the remainder continues on the verso of the folio.14 The layout of text and diagram is even more confusing in Chapter seventeen. Here the text of column [a] has its corresponding diagram in column [b], and the text in column [b] is illustrated by a diagram at the foot of column [a].15 Now and then the scribe traces a red line from one column to the next in order to divide the text into sections and to indicate a division between two different chapters.16 The fine, smooth quality of the parchment used for Madrid MS 9294, the well-formed and even script, and the green and blue pen-flourished infilling used to decorate initials are all splendid elements that disguise a disjointed and even careless process of layout and copying 13 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fr. 20120. See Tesnière, ‘Les manuscrits de la Librairie de Charles V’, 52–3, and online at https://gallica.bnf.fr [accessed 31 August 2018]. 14 See Madrid MS 9294, fol. 189. 15 Madrid MS 9294, fol. 93v. 16 For example fols 51r and 95v.

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which makes reference to the information in the work difficult. The text is interspersed with many circular diagrams; but instead of using a compass (there are no central prick-holes), the scribe has drawn these freehand and, as a result, the outlines of these circles are irregular and sometimes go beyond the rectangular border that frames them, spilling into the margin (Figure 5). On other folios these groups of circle diagrams have been completed, then crossed out.17 The lines of text often extend into the margins, which lends an unjustified, ragged appearance to the column edges, but the scribe has also tried to justify shorter lines of text by adding two dots to fill the blank space in the column width, attempts which are not wholly successful.18 The scribe’s confusion over the relationship between text and diagram may have been down to the exemplar, but it may also have been because he was unused to copying this type of text. It seems he began his task by mapping out the location of the diagrams and then copying the text around these spaces. Yet his calculations proved erroneous. He has tried always to make the text precede the diagram to which it was related, and to copy the text in double columns. However, at times there is more text than lines available, and so he is forced to copy the additional text in the margins. At other times the scribe is forced to interrupt the double-column arrangement of the text because a diagram has reduced the space available and forced him to corral the text into a single column.19 Until he read over his work he did not realize that some diagrams were unnecessary; these he crossed out but, having completed his text, he was not able to write over or otherwise reuse the space they occupied. The scribe of the Libro conplido did not have to contend with diagrams, but he did have to incorporate additional text and marginal glosses into the design of the page because, despite the fine parchment and careful script, the text of the treatise preserved in this thirteenth-century manuscript is poor. It represents a copy of a corrupted version of the work which was itself a corrupted copy of the original translation from the Arabic made for Alfonso by his Jewish scholar Yehuda Mose ha-Cohen.20 The distance from 17 See for example fols 145v (two circles struck through, two left unstruck) and fol. 137r. 18 See for example fol. 100v. 19 See for example fol. 160v (c.36), where the scribe has to copy text beneath a diagram as a single column in order to make it all f it on the folio because a diagram at the top of fol. 161r prevents him from continuing his task there. 20 G. Hilty, ‘La parte quinta del Libro conplido y la transmisión de obras alfonsíes’, in Lingüística romanica et indiana. Festschrift für Wolf Dietrich zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. B. Staib (Tübingen, 2000), 131–47. The conclusions I draw here about the manuscript represent a modified and developed version of my arguments in an earlier paper: K. Kennedy, ‘Un códice castellano del siglo XIII que no se copió para Alfonso X. El Ms. 3065 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid del Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas’, in La memoria de los libros. Estudios sobre la historia del escrito

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Figure 5: Imperfect circles and untidy layout in the Libro delas cruzes, Madrid MS 9294, fol. 136v. ©Biblioteca Nacional de España

y de la lectura en Europa y América, ed. P.M. Cátedra, M.L. López-Vidriero, and M.I. de Páiz Hernández, 2 vols. (Salamanca, 2004), i, 177–87. The late Gerold Hilty made several observations on this article, for which I am grateful. See his ‘Apéndice’ in El libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, partes 6 a 8, at 330–2.

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the original translated source which Madrid MS 3065 represents suggests an early but shaky dissemination of the translation prepared for Alfonso. Unlike the Libro de las cruzes, versions of this work circulated widely in different languages. Two Latin translations were also prepared during Alfonso’s reign. One of these was the work of Petrus de Regio and Aegidius de Tebaldis, two Italian notaries employed in Alfonso’s imperial chancery. Yehuda’s Castilian version provided their exemplar, as the prologue states; but this was a different text from the one preserved in Madrid 3065, since gaps in the copy preserved in the Madrid manuscript can be filled by reference to Petrus and Aegidius’s Latin translation. Yet their work may not have been carried out at Alfonso’s express command. Although the Italian notaries make clear their position at Alfonso’s imperial court, they are careful to avoid stating in the prologue that their work was undertaken on imperial orders.21 On the contrary, it is plausible they should have taken advantage of their position to translate Arabic texts unfamiliar to the Latin, Christian, world, and thereby promote their own scholarly reputations. Their translation soon reached Paris, one of the most important medieval centres of learning.22 The other Latin version was made by a certain ‘Alvarus’, who has been identified as the scientist, astrologer, and translator Alvarus of Toledo ( fl. 1267– post 1286).23 This translation does not derive from the text preserved in MS 3065, either. In his prologue, Alvarus explains that he carried out the translation on the orders of Alfonso, and textual analysis has shown that his model was closest to Yehuda’s original translation, and therefore the most accurate reflection of the treatise prepared for the king.24 Yet only two copies of Alvarus’s translation survive today, written out by fifteenthcentury scribes working within decades of one another. One copy, MS J.II.17 now in the library of the Escorial monastery, preserves the complete text of books I to VIII and has a colophon which states it was copied at Rome in 1460. The other, BAV, MS Pal. Lat. 1370, may have been copied in Germany during the 1470s, and contains just the prologue and the first four chapters of the first book. 21 Procter, ‘The Scientific Works’, 31. 22 See Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm.IV.43, fols. 1–217r dateable to 1295–1300. 23 For the identity of Alvarus, see C. Burnett, ‘Michael Scot and the Transmission of Scientific Culture from Toledo to Bologna via the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen’, Micrologus, 2 (1994), 101–26, at 110. 24 G. Hilty, ‘El prólogo del Libro conplido y su interpretación: un episodio en la historia de la investigación alfonsí’, in Lingua et Traditio. Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und der neueren Philologen: Festschrift für Hans Helmut Christmann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. R. Baum et al. (Tübingen, 1994), 3–14, at 6 and n. 3.

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The Latin translations aside, there is also a Portuguese version of books IV to VIII written in Hebrew characters and preserved in an early fifteenthcentury manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.25 There are another three surviving manuscripts of Castilian versions of the treatise, all of them incomplete and all of which preserve a different section of the work. Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 981, is an incomplete copy of the first two books made between 1390 and 1410, which slavishly follows the text and layout of Madrid MS 3065.26 MS 253 of the Biblioteca de Santa Cruz, Valladolid, is a fourteenth-century manuscript which contains books V and VI. The scribe’s exemplar does not follow the text found in book V of Madrid MS 3065, the only section where the contents of the two manuscripts overlap. Finally, the fragment of the work which survives in a fifteenth-century copy now in Segovia cathedral contains only books VI to VIII, so textual collation with Madrid MS 3065 is impossible.27 The Libro conplido is a work that during and after Alfonso’s reign circulated in different languages and versions, both as a complete text and in discrete sections.28 Although a tiny sixteenth-century note in Latin on the opening flyleaf of Madrid 3065 suggests the truncated form in which this particular copy survives is the result of later censorship by the Inquisition, inventories also show the work often did circulate only in parts.29 The list of books that belonged to Gonzalo Pérez Gudiel, archbishop of Toledo, drawn up in 1273, includes a Spanish translation of Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Arithmetica bound together with ‘cuatro quadernos de Ali Abenragel, trasladado de nuevo’. The qualification that the translation has been made ‘de nuevo’ (‘anew’) implies that Gudiel owned Alvarus’s version and not the more widely circulated one by Aegidius de Tebaldis and Petrus de Regio.30 Ibn abī Riŷāl’s treatise has been described as an unremarkable text in the wider context of eleventh-century Islamic scientific writings, and a derivative patchwork of

25 Oxford, Bodleian, MS Laud. Or. 310: see G. Hilty, ‘A versão portuguesa do “Livro cunprido”’, Biblos, 58 (1982), 207–67, at 234–43. 26 Alfonso X, El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, at lx. 27 Segovia, Archivo Capitular, MS B338. On the Valladolid manuscript see Hilty, ‘A versão portuguesa’, 217–19; on the Segovia manuscript, see L.M. de Vicente García, ‘La importancia del Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas en la astrología medieval. (Reflexiones sobre la selección de obras astrológicas del códice B338 del siglo xv del archivo catedralicio de Segovia)’, Revista de Literatura Medieval, 14, no. 2 (2002), 117–34. 28 Hilty, ‘La parte quinta del Libro conplido’, at 146. 29 Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 117 and 124–8. 30 F.J. Hernández and P. Linehan, The Mozarabic Cardinal: the life and times of Gonzalo Pérez Gudiel (Florence, 2004), Appendix I, at 482, no. 24.

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quotations.31 Despite this, its circulation extended to Christian Spain, which suggests not only a popularity greater than the number of surviving Arabic copies implies, but also a sense that the information the work contained was sufficiently innocuous to allow it to be passed to Christian scholars.32 The work of the Alfonsine translators formed part of a wider movement of translation during a period when scholars of all European nationalities, anxious to gain access to Islamic learning, were rendering Arabic treatises into languages accessible to Christians beyond the Iberian Peninsula. So, for example, in a long preface to his translation of the Quatripartitum, the Parma-born Aegidius de Tebaldis (also responsible for the Latin version of the Libro conplido) explains that Alfonso asked him to make a clear and straightforward Latin version of the Spanish translation the king had commissioned from the Arabic.33 Yet the translation by Aegidius for Alfonso was not the only Latin Quadripartitum to circulate during the mid-thirteenth century and there were, moreover, a number of translated texts available on another subject of interest to Alfonso’s scholars, namely the construction of the astrolabe.34 Surviving fragments of the Arabic version of the Libro de las cruzes now in the library of the Escorial monastery also suggest this work had a wide and varied textual history in its original language, despite the few copies of the Castilian translation that survive today.35 The marginal annotations in contemporary hands which supplement or collate the main text in different translations of these astronomical and astrological works also suggest the number of versions that circulated at this time. For example, Madrid MS 10053 is a compilation of astrological texts (including a Latin translation of the Castilian version of the Azafea commissioned by Alfonso) with numerous marginal notes by Alvarus of 31 D. Urvoy, Pensers d’Al-Andalus. La vie intellectuelle à Cordoue et Seville au temps des empires berberes ( fin xie siècle, début xiiie siècle) (Toulouse/Le Mirail, 1990), 144: ‘le manuel d’astrologie d’Ibn Abî Rijâl … le plus courant dans l’Islam d’Occident, et qui ne consiste qu’en une mosaïque de citations d’auteurs antérieurs’. 32 Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 102; Harvey, ‘The Alfonsine School of Translators’; Márquez Villanueva, ‘In lingua tholetana’, 288. 33 London, BL, Royal MS 12.F.VII, fol. 1r, copied in England, s. XIVin. A description of the manuscript by D. Juste, ‘MS London, British Library, Royal 12.F.VII’ (updated 1 March 2017), Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus. Manuscripts, http://ptolemaeus.badw.de/ms/63 [accessed 27 January 2019]. 34 L. Thorndike, ‘The A.D. 1234 Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Quadripartitum’, Manuscripta, 8, no. 2 (1964), 98–100; M. Viladrich and R. Martí, ‘En torno a los tratados hispánicos sobre la construcción del astrolabio hasta el siglo XIII’, in Textos y estudios sobre astronomía española en el siglo XIII, ed. J. Vernet (Barcelona, 1981), 79–99, at 98. 35 R. Muñoz, ‘Textos árabes del “Libro de las cruces” de Alfonso X’, in Textos y estudios, ed. Vernet, 175–204, at 179–80.

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Toledo,36 many of which reveal how he compared the text he copied with other translations of the same work. The same concern to collate is also evident in Madrid MS 10063. Among the works this manuscript contains is a copy of De intellectu humano, a commentary by Alvarus on Averroes’s work, De substantia orbis.37 The scribe has indicated variants to his text in the margin. The process of comparing words and phrases in different versions of the same scientific text, and adopting or discarding them, can also be observed in manuscripts from the previous century. For instance, John of Seville’s early Latin translation of the Introductorium in astronomiam by the astrologer Abū Ma’shar of Balkh (known in the West as ‘Albumasar’) circulated in variant copies which in turn were revised and emended by different translators who tried to establish a text as close to the original as possible by comparing John’s version with the Arabic original.38 Such was the richness and diversity of texts translated from the Arabic that Hermann of Carinthia (fl. 1138–1143) was able to cite specific passages from the work of his contemporaries when he prepared his own translation and compilation, De indagatione cordis, based on the works of Rashiq ibn ’Abdallah al-Hasib.39 The Castilian translation of the Libro conplido as it is preserved in Madrid MS 3065 reflects an exemplar that was a draft translation by Yehuda and other Alfonsine scholars with revisions they had made by comparing their text with another version. This draft Alfonsine translation, together with the translators’ revisions, is supplemented with comments and explanations from yet other sources, and this augmented exemplar is what was set before the scribe of Madrid MS 3065. To try and resolve the challenge of distinguishing between these different layers of text, the scribe of MS 3065 has adapted some of the conventions of layout in contemporary legal works. 40 This is apparent in his use of different sizes of script and the arrangement of supplementary passages of text in the shape of a triangle

36 J.M. Millás Vallicrosa, Las traducciones orientales en los manuscritos de la Biblioteca Catedral de Toledo (Madrid, 1942), 180–202 (no. XLI). 37 Millás Vallicrosa, Las traducciones orientales, 156–66 (no. XXXIX). 38 R. Lemay, ‘Fautes et contresens dans les traductions arabo-latines médiévales. L’Introductorium in astronomiam d’Abou Ma’shar de Balkh’, Revue de Synthèse. XIIe congrès international d’histoire des sciences: colloques-textes des rapports, 3rd ser., 89 (1968), 101–23, at 102. 39 C. Burnett, ‘Hermann of Carinthia’s Attitude towards his Arabic Sources, in Particular in Respect to Theories on the Human Soul’, in L’homme et son univers au moyen âge, ed. C. Wenin, 2 vols (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1986), i, 306–22, at 310. 40 Cf. the comments about the layout and careful correction of Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fr 20120 in Tesnière, ‘Les manuscrits de la Librarie de Charles V’, 52–3.

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with a decorated border. 41 The system of dots which the scribe consistently employs throughout the manuscript to indicate changes to the main text (two dots at a line-end signify a correction, three dots refer to text that must be added in the margin) recalls more elaborate sigla used in legal manuscripts to relate marginal glosses to the main text.42 The double dots added to draw attention to a line that needs to be corrected (see Figure 6) appear to be an idiosyncracy of this particular scribe, since the practice is not adopted in any other surviving manuscript associated with Alfonso and does not appear to have been common in manuscripts of this period more generally. The largest script on the page is reserved for the principal text and for the passages added after translators compared it with a version which derives from the text of the Latin translation by Aegidius de Tebaldis and Petrus de Regio. These additional passages appear frequently (seventy folios, or nearly a third of the manuscript as it survives, contain one or more marginal snippets), and the distinctive way in which they are copied recalls the way in which key words in the margins of legal manuscripts guide readers to summaries of arguments in the text. 43 Positioned in the lower margin – at a distance from the text to which they refer but linked to it by a siglum, or signe-de-renvoi, of three dots – these short passages are laid out in the form of a triangle and enclosed in J-borders of red and blue ink. It is a mise-en-page which suggests they are not simply lines that the scribe missed as he copied, but were present as marginal additions in his exemplar. So too were the other marginal annotations which are also written in script of the same size as the translated text but which lack dotted sigla, although they are sometimes framed by a simple border in blue ink. These do not represent text from another version of the translation, but instead draw attention to the structure or contents of the work. So, for example, beside the rubric to Chapter seventeen in the fourth book, the scribe adds in the margin: ‘Esta es la quinta parte del quarto libro e a en ella dos capitulos’ (‘This is the fifth part of the fourth book and in it there are two chapters’). 44 41 On legal manuscripts, see S. L’Engle, ‘Layout and Decoration’, in Illuminating the Law: legal manuscripts in Cambridge collections. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Turnhout/London, 2001), 54–73. 42 G.R. Dolezalek, ‘Les gloses des manuscrits de droit. Reflet des méthodes d’enseignement’, in Manuels, programmes de cours et techniques d’enseignement dans les universités médiévales: actes du colloque international de Louvain-la-Neuve (9–11 septembre 1989), ed. J. Hamesse (Louvain-laNeuve, 1994), 235–55, at 250; L’Engle, ‘Layout and Decoration’, 67. 43 For the position and arrangement of text in triangles in legal manuscripts, see Dolezalek, ‘Les gloses’, 249. 44 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 178r.

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In Books one and three, five marginal notes highlight the contents of the text. The first, on folio 3v, notes ‘el dicho de Tholomeo sobre esto’ (‘the dictum of Ptolemy on this’); the last, on folio 126v, draws attention to the ‘partes delos senorios’ (‘degrees of the rulers’). The gloss copied in a smaller script on especially ruled lines in the gutter margin by a passage in Book four is characterized by features that also suggest it was part of the earliest stage of the translation prepared by the Alfonsine scholars: it lacks any symbol to connect it to the words it explains in the main text, and is not obviously positioned beside the words it clarifies. 45 The nine interlinear annotations in the scribe’s hand that appear in Books one and three of the treatise as it survives today are also laid out in a way that recalls the conventions of layout in legal manuscripts. The annotations are in the same script as the main text but smaller in size, and comprise one or two words or a short phrase. They define a word or clarify the sense of a clause. They are always written immediately next to the passage that has prompted them, and never in the margin, even when they are added below the very last line in a column as in the case of the definition of ‘neubahar’ (a unit of nine in the twelve-part division, or ‘signum’, of the zodiac) on folio 39v. 46 Their location on the page recalls a practice in legal manuscripts whereby tutors and students added glosses to explain the sense of words between the lines of the text itself so that the term and its definition could be read simultaneously.47 There is, however, a third category of marginalia in MS 3065, all except for one note written in the scribe’s hand. Gerold Hilty, who prepared the modern edition of the text, believed these annotations preserved the opinions of the Alfonsine scholars who prepared the draft of the original Castilian translation. Thus, although Madrid MS 3065 is a corrupted copy of this text, the exemplar the scribe had in front of him retained annotations of a technical and linguistic nature from the original, uncorrupted, exemplar; and these notes, Hilty argued, offered a window onto the intellectual world of the Alfonsine translators.48 Yet consideration of the textual content of the annotations in conjunction with 45 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 153v. 46 For ‘neubahar’ or ‘neuhahar’, see Burnett, ‘Astrology’, 372. 47 Dolezalek, ‘Les gloses’, 251. 48 For transcriptions and an analysis of the annotations, see the following articles by G. Hilty: ‘El Libro Conplido en los Iudizios de las Estrellas’, Al-Andalus, 20 (1955), 1–74; ‘El plurilingüismo en la corte de Alfonso X el Sabio’, in Actas del V congreso internacional de historia de la lengua española – Valencia 31 de enero a 4 de febrero de 2002, ed. M.T. Echenique Elizondo and J. Sánchez Méndez, 2 vols (Madrid, 2002), i, 207–20, at 210. Hilty’s consistent analysis of these annotations over the years has proved influential in the field of translation studies, so for example M.-T. d’Alverny, ‘Les traductions à deux interprètes d’Arabe en langue vernaculaire et de langue vernaculaire en Latin’, in Traduction et traducteurs au Moyen Âge. Actes du colloque international

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the paleography of the manuscript shows that only two marginal annotations that explicitly cite the opinion of the translators and the emendator can derive from Yehuda’s translation as transmitted by the exemplar copied by the scribe of Madrid MS 3065. The other annotations, meanwhile, reflect observations or textual variants from other sources that were added to the copy of the Alfonsine translation that became the scribe’s exemplar.49 The marginal annotations not framed in blue and red borders gloss particular words or phrases in the text, or suggest alternative readings. The script used to copy them is a smaller version of that employed for the main text. Sometimes they are copied on especially ruled lines, sometimes not; and they are not always linked to the main text by a siglum. Their presence in the surviving manuscript is uneven. There are four in the first book, three in the second, just one in the third, and three in the fourth book. There are none in the fifth and last book preserved in the manuscript. Two of the notes cite the authority of an emendator and translators (‘el emendador & los trasladadores’) and reflect the thoughts of the Alfonsine scholars as they prepared their translation for the king. Both these notes seek to resolve inconsistencies within the text by referring to passages elsewhere in the same work, rather than by importing additional information from another source, and both notes are linked to the text they gloss by a signe-de-renvoi of three dots. The passage which prompts their opinion in the first note is as follows: E si fuere el sennor del ascendente infortuna e el sennor del medio cielo [signe-de-renvoi]infortuna, e amos se cataren de logares en que an dignidat.50

The marginal note explains that: [signe-de-renvoi]El emendador e los trasladadores todos se acuerdan que deue

dezir fortuna alli o dize infortuna, e qui quisiere esto prouar cate en el .xxv. capitulo adelante en esta misma casa.51

du CNRS organisé à Paris, Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes les 26–28 mai 1986, ed. G. Contamine (Paris, 1989), 193–206, at 200, and by Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 112–15. 49 Hilty, ‘Apéndice’, in El Libro conplido […] Partes 6 a 8, 330, n. 2, considers that all the annotations reflect the personal knowledge and critical skills of the Alfonsine translators working on the text. 50 ‘And if the lord of the ascendant is malefic and the lord of the midheaven :. malefic, and both face one another in positions in which they have dignities.’ For the terminology in this translation, see Burnett, ‘Astrology’, at 373. 51 ‘The emendator and the translators all agree that it should say “benefic” there where it says “malefic”, and whoever wishes to confirm this should look in the 25th chapter further on in this same house.’ iii.20: El Libro conplido, at 138 and n. 1; Madrid MS 3065, fol. 116v.

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It is indeed the case that the text of the later chapter cited in the note repeats the text in the form which the translators and emendators consider to be correct: ‘E se fuere el sennor del ascendente infortuna e el sennor del medio cielo fortuna e amos catando-se uno a otro’ (‘And if the ruler of the ascendant should be malefic and the ruler of the midheaven benefic, and both face one another’).52 The second time a marginal note cites the opinion of the translators and emendator is in the fifth chapter of Book four (Figure 6). Here they do not choose between conflicting statements in the text, but import information from elsewhere to correct a statement: E se fuere significador planeta diurno o fuere en la .viiia. casa o en la .ixa. e fuere en su exaltacion o en su casa oriental del Sol, e mayor miente si fuere subiendo al angulo dela .x. o al angulo dela .vii. maguer sea en otro signo.53

Underdotting is a standard scribal practice to indicate that a letter, word, or phrase is superfluous and should be ignored by a reader. In this instance, the scribe has placed underdotting beneath precisely the information that the emendator and translators agree is correct: Los trasladadores e el emendador tienen que meior dize al angulo dela .xa. que de la viia.54

Two things appear to have happened here. The scribe, perhaps distracted by the sequence of numbers in his exemplar three lines earlier, has introduced extra words to his text which happen to coincide with the correction proposed in the marginal note, which he also copies. When he revised his text to ensure that it was an exact copy of his exemplar, the scribe underdotted his own addition in order to show that it was not part of his original and should be ignored.55 52 Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 152; Madrid MS 3065, fol. 128v. 53 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 142v; El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 170 (but the transcription here, which retains the underdotted words, is mine). ‘And if the ‘significator’ [i.e. the planet with the most dignities] should be a daytime planet, or should be in the 8th house or in the 9th, and if it is in the sign of its exaltation or in its eastern house of the Sun, and especially if it is rising to the angular house of the 10th or to the angular house of the 7th even though it may be in another sign.’ For the terms ‘significator’, ‘exaltation’, and ‘angular house’, see Burnett, ‘Astrology’, 372–3. 54 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 142v; El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 171, n. 2. ‘The translators and the emendator believe that it says preferably “to the angular house of the 10th” than “of the 7th”.’ 55 Cf. Hilty, ‘Apéndice’, in El Libro conplido […] Partes 6 a 8, at 332, who assumes the scribe’s exemplar included reference to both the tenth and the seventh house, and that the scribe

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Figure 6: Marginal note citing the opinion of ‘the translators and the emendator’, with underdotting in the main text. Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, Madrid, MS 3065, fol. 142v (detail). ©Biblioteca Nacional de España

indicated the correct reading should be suppressed after he copied the marginal note because the note ‘rendered the reference to the tenth house in the body of the text superfluous’.

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The reference to ‘the emendator’ here is unique in the corpus of manuscripts associated with Alfonso.56 Although Alfonsine scientific translations sometimes refer to a conpilador (‘compiler’), glosador (‘glosser’), and esplanador (‘explainer’),57 these are not allusions to the royal scholarly team, but to the original author of the work and the references reflect the translators’ attempts to structure their text for readers used to the conventions of Latin scholarship.58 The explicit reference to someone who acted as an ‘emendator’, however, is also striking in the context of the marginalia of other contemporary texts. Manuscripts, particularly those prepared for a university readership, underwent rigorous correction, a process that was enshrined in legislation. Alfonso himself had stipulated in 1254 that the exemplars circulated to the students at Salamanca should be ‘todos […] buenos y corretos’ (‘all […] good and correct’).59 The two annotations in the Libro conplido that are in the scribe’s hand and which cite the opinion of particular figures must therefore reflect an early stage in the preparation of the translation that has been preserved in the exemplar used by the scribe of MS 3065, when such corrections were noted in the margin and not absorbed seamlessly into the text. By way of comparison, the opinion expressed by the translator of another Alfonsine work, the Astromagia, has been incorporated into the main text of the finished copy.60 The second chapter of this now-fragmentary work concludes with the observation that ‘dize el trasladador que este capitulo es todo corrupto segund el entiende que non puede seer mercurio en tauro

56 As Hilty observed, El Libro conplido, xl. 57 See for example Libro de las cruzes, ed. Kasten and Kiddle, 167. 58 Interpretation of these figures as Alfonsine scholars in Gil, La escuela de traductores de Toledo y sus colaboradores judíos, 58, and G. Martin, Les Juges de Castille. Mentalités et discours historique dans l’Espagne médiévale (Paris, 1992), 327. For the role of these terms in the structuring of text, see Dembowski, ‘Scientific Translation and Translator’s Glossing in Four Medieval French Translators’. 59 Murano, ‘Alfonso il Savi, l’Università di Salamanca e l’ufficio dello stazionario’, 1–2. For the correction of university texts in medieval Europe more generally, see J. Decorte, ‘Les indications explicites et implicites de pieces dans les manuscrits médièvaux’, in La production du livre universitaire au Moyen Âge: exemplar et pecia. Actes du symposium tenu au Collegio San Bonaventura de Grottaferrata, mai 1983, ed. L.J. Battaillon, B.G. Guyot, and R.H. Rouse (Paris, 1988), 276–84, at 282. 60 Compare the observations on the stages of transmission of a text and the incorporation of marginal notes by Lemay, ‘Fautes’, 103–4. He notes that a third of the manuscripts of the corrected and glossed version of the Introductorium in astronomiam incorporate the translators’ corrections and comments in a marginal or interlinear location, while another third of the copies that survive incorporate them directly into the main text.

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estando el sol en uirgo’ (‘the translator says that this chapter is completely corrupted as far as he understands, because Mercury cannot be in Taurus with the Sun in Virgo’). The comment is prefaced by a paraph (in blue ink) to distinguish it from the source text.61 A few folios further on, the translator’s opinion is cited again, this time in the middle of a chapter: ‘otrossí el aniello sea fecho en tal ascendente e degollarás un af que es dicha en arávigo oarsem – e dize el trasladador que tiene que es calandre – e untarás la yema con su sangre’ (‘Likewise the ring should be made during this ascendancy, and you will cut the throat of a bird which is called “oarsem” in Arabic – and the translator says he believes it to be a “calandre” – and you will spread its blood onto the gem’).62 Marginalia elsewhere in Madrid MS 3065 that was also in the scribe’s exemplar but which presumably did not derive from the Alfonsine translators since it is not attributed to them, offers definitions of particular terms. The words ‘accidia’, ‘adurugen’, and ‘partes’, are all given a gloss to explain their meaning, but the gloss is not linked to the text with a signum: Accidia es enoio que a omne del bien aieno.63 Adurugen es que partas el signo del ascendente en tres partes, e da la primera al sennor d’esta misma casa e la .iia. a la planeta quel sigue e assi de los otros por orden.64 Partes dize aqui por los grados de los signos.65

Gerold Hilty argued that the marginal definition of ‘accidia’ was incorrect, and in fact described the sin of envy.66 In fact, it defines the term ‘acedia’

61 BAV MS Reg. Lat. 1283a, fol. 31v. Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 274. 62 Fol. 34v: Astromagia, ed. D’Agostino, 288, and see also his comments in his ‘Introduzione’, 52. 63 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 5r; El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 8, n. 1. ‘Accidia is the vexation which a man feels at the happiness of another.’ 64 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 66v, El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 80, n. 1. ‘“Adurugen” is when you divide the “signum” [the twelve equal divisions of the zodiac] of the ascendant [i.e. where the ecliptic cuts the horizon] into three parts, and give the first to the ruler of this same house, and the second to the planet that follows it, and so on to the others in order.’ 65 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 7r; El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 10, n. 1. ‘“Partes” is used here for the degrees of the constellations.’ 66 Hilty, ‘El plurilingüismo’, 210. For the sin of accedia, see S. Wenzel, ‘Acedia, 700–1200’, Traditio, 22 (1966), 73–102.

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correctly in accordance with contemporary theology. Ramón Llull’s Doctrina pueril explains that ‘acedia’ is ‘tristícia de ànima agreujada del bé de son proïsma’ (‘a sadness of the soul aggravated by the happiness of his fellow man’), where ‘bé’ refers to well-being and not to material goods.67 That the term needed explanation suggests at least one of the people responsible for studying the treatise in this version of the translation was not an ecclesiastic. The gloss on the term ‘adurugen’ is correct, while the gloss on ‘partes’ reflects changing fashions in specialist vocabulary. The ‘partes’ or ‘parts’ are the divisions of thirty degrees within the ‘places’ or twelve equal divisions of the ecliptic circle (the ecliptic circle being the path through the signs of the zodiac which the seven planets identified at the time appeared to follow, and which Latin translations of astrological works referred to as ‘domus’, or ‘house’).68 ‘Pars’, or ‘partes’ is the term for the degrees into which the zodiac is divided that was current before the dissemination of Arabic scholarship on the subject, and was in frequent use until the late tenth century. The Latin term familiar to thirteenth-century scholars, however, would have been ‘gradus’.69 Consequently, at the beginning of the passage where the text refers to the ‘parts’ of star signs, the scribe has carefully erased ‘partes’ and substituted the word with the term ‘grados’ (‘degrees’).70 Yet the less-familiar term ‘partes’ occurs so frequently in this section that the scribe abandoned his original intention to erase and replace it, and instead inserted a marginal note with a definition that the reader should apply to all subsequent appearances of the word.71 An annotation in the second book – ‘Segund es dicho enla tercera parte del segundo capitulo de la .vi. casa’ (‘As it is said in the third part of the second chapter of the sixth house’)72 – refers the reader back to an earlier chapter which also details the relationship between astronomy and the human body.73 The detailed system of reference reflects thirteenth-century concerns 67 R. Llull, Doctrina pueril, ed. G. Schib (Barcelona, 1972), 148. 68 Burnett, ‘A Group of Arabic-Latin Translators’, at 65. 69 Burnett, ‘Astrology’, 372. 70 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 7r,b, line 17. 71 Compare a similar note in an early fourteenth-century English manuscript (also a scientific tract), BL, Harley MS 3631, fol. 71r,a, where the scribe observes that ‘Nota ubicumque auctor dicit romanos intelligit christianos’ (‘Note that wherever the author says Romans he means Christians’). 72 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 68r. Hilty does not transcribe the note in his edition. 73 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 51r,a; Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 63: ‘La tercera parte en saber enque parte del cuerpo es la enfermedat. Cata el almubtez’ (‘The third part on how to know in which part of the body the sickness lies. Look at the almubtez [i.e. the ‘significator’, or planet with the most dignities]’).

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with the organization of text, but it is also tempting to see in the note a reflection of the interests of the person responsible for the scribe’s exemplar. Certainly a later reader (perhaps of the fifteenth century) has consulted the text for this information: the start of the earlier chapter is highlighted by a crudely drawn pointing finger in light-brown ink.74 Another two glosses not attributed to the translators and emendator also suggest changes to the translation based on the logic of the immediate textual context. Thus, in Chapter thirty-four of Book two, the gloss suggests altering the definition the text provides of the Greek word ‘leuen’. According to the main text, Esta palabra ‘Leuen’ significa por su lenguage tres razones: adeuinar, caçar e linpiedat, e por esto significa claridat e linpiedat de la cosa e significa perdimiento de la cosa e significa descobrimiento de la cosa.75

The opinion of the anonymous commentator copied out by the scribe states that: ‘Alli o dize cosa creo que deue dezir caça E alli o dize descobrimiento creo que deue dezir deuinança’ (‘There where it says “thing” I think it should say “hunting” And there where it says “discovery” I think it should say “divination”).76 In fact, this is counter to the text found in surviving Arabic versions, which have the words ‘cosa’ (‘thing’) and ‘descubrimiento’ (‘discovery’).77 There is a similar difference of opinion between text and commentary in Book one, where a section of the text which repeatedly refers to the planet Saturn abruptly substitutes Saturn with Venus: E yo digo enel pleyto de Saturno e de Mars: Los mas de los antigos desacuerdan en este dicho […] e ponen Saturno maslo e Mars fembra, […] E dixo Tholomeo: […] para mientes al estado de Mars e de Venus; que si fueren orientales, son significadores de maslos, e si fueren occidentales, de fembras.78 74 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 51r,a. 75 ‘This word “Leuen” means by its language three things: “to guess”, “to hunt” and “cleanliness”, and because of this it means clarity and cleanliness of the thing, and loss of the thing and discovery of the thing.’ 76 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 78r; El libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 93 and n. 1. 77 Hilty, ‘A versão portuguesa’, 232 n. 71. 78 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 38v; El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 46 and n. 1. ‘And I say in the dispute between Saturn and Mars: Most of the ancients disagree on this assertion […] and make Saturn male and Mars female, […] And Ptolemy said: […] Look at the position of Mars and of Venus, for if they are in the east, they are signifiers of males, and if they are in the west, of females.’

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The unexpected reference to Venus may have been the result of the reluctance of the Alfonsine translators to deviate from their exemplar.79 In any case, it prompts the marginal comment that ‘En logar de Venus asmamos que deue dezir Saturno’ (‘Instead of Venus we think it should say Saturn’). The relationship between the two Latin translations of the work and the marginal comments in Madrid MS 3065 suggests the limited impact that the readings preserved in this copy of the Spanish translation had on the most widely circulated of the Latin versions. Only one of the marginal annotations from Yehuda’s original translation can be found in the various manuscript copies of the Latin translation and in the published edition by Aegidius de Tebaldis and Petrus de Regio. This is the note which corrects the value of the angle in the fifth chapter of Book four (‘meior dize al angulo de la .x. que de la .vii.’). However, in the context of the Latin the note is included in the text itself, in a number of variant manuscript readings, and attributed to an anonymous authorial ‘we’ rather than to ‘the emendator and the translators’. So, for example, in the late thirteenth-century manuscript now in Cambridge: Et si significator ille planeta diurnus & in .8. domo uel .9. & in exaltatione uel domo sua orientalis a sole maxime si ascendit ad angulum .10e. quod credimus esse melius ad angulum .7e licet sint in alio signo.80

This version of the note appears in several other manuscripts and in the edition published at Venice in 1485. 81 By contrast, the other correction proposed by the translators and emendator in Madrid MS 3065, the substitution of infortuna (‘malefic’) with fortuna (‘benefic’), does not appear in the Latin version prepared by Aegidius and Petrus.82 The other marginal annotations are absent from this Latin translation as well, with the exception of the definition of adurugen and, occasionally, the gloss on the terms 79 J.M. Millás Vallicrosa, ‘El literalismo de los traductores de la corte de Alfonso el Sabio’, Al-Andalus, 1 (1933), 155–62, and included in Millás Vallicrosa, Estudios sobre historia de la ciencia española (Barcelona, 1949; repr. Madrid, 1991), 349–58. 80 Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm.IV.43, fol. 82v: ‘And if the “significator” of that daytime planet and in the eighth house or in the ninth and in [the sign of its] exaltation or house to the east of the sun, especially if it rises to the tenth angular house, which we believe to be better than the seventh angular house, are in the other sign.’ 81 BL, Royal MS 12.F.XVII, fol. 83v; Oxford, Bodleian, MS Savile 15, fol. 41r; Oxford, MS Canon. misc. 443, fol. 59r; Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 151, fol. 73v; Haly Abenragel, Liber de iudiciis astrorum, fol. 59r. 82 See the 1485 published edition, fol. 48v, or BL, Royal MS 12.F.XVII, fol. 69r. An exception is the incomplete copy dated 1322 in BAV, MS Barb. Lat. 172, fol. 46v.

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conveniencia and buen estado. Where these annotations appear, they are always incorporated in the body of the main text. On the other hand, the Latin translation prepared by ‘Alvarus’, which remained unpublished and which survives in only two manuscript copies, includes in the body of its text more of the proposals made in the marginal annotations of Madrid MS 3065. In the account of the qualities associated with the planet Mars when it is in the first phase of Scorpio, both manuscripts have accidiarum, not insidiarum (although neither includes the gloss on the word in the main body of the text). 83 The complete copy of the translation preserved in the manuscript now in the Escorial Library also includes the correct sequence of degrees by which the diurnal planet rises, and chooses Saturn over Venus.84 Yet Alvarus’s translation ignores the definition of adurugen, the gloss on conveniencia and buen estado, and makes no comment on whether fortuna or infortuna is the more correct term.85 The opinions of the emendador and los traductores are included in the text of the Portuguese translation (written in Hebrew characters), and in the early fifteenth-century Castilian copy now in the Biblioteca de Catalunya.86 Of all the annotations in Madrid 3065, the fact that the ones attributed to ‘the emendator’ and ‘the translators’ are those which are preserved most frequently in copies of the Latin translations and in the Portuguese one suggests that these annotations derive from the earliest stages of the Castilian translation. But the fact that Madrid MS 3065 includes other marginal observations that have little or no echo in later copies and translations of the treatise suggests that the range of scientific translations which circulated in thirteenth-century Castile was much greater than the number associated with Alfonso that survive today and that translations associated with his patronage were not the only ones available in his kingdoms to scholars of the period.87 The third marginal annotation in Madrid MS 3065 to be attributed to translators offers a case in point. It cites simply the opinion of ‘los trasladadores’, who propose adding an extra sentence to the end of Chapter fifty-six in Book one: 83 Escorial, MS J.II.17, fol. 3v; BAV, MS Palat. Lat. 1370, fol. 68v. 84 Escorial MS J.II.17, fols 83r and 26v. 85 Escorial MS J.II.17, see fols 42r, 92v and 67v. 86 Hilty, ‘A versão portuguesa’, 250. 87 On the rich manuscript tradition of the Libro conplido, see Hilty, ‘A versão portuguesa’, 254–5, and recently Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 129–34. On the energetic activities of translators working in the Peninsula during the previous century, see Burnett, ‘The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program’.

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Asman los trasladadores: o ssi la Luna non catare al ascendente ni a su sennor, otrossi non uerna el messagero.88

The annotation is not in the scribe’s hand and the signe-de-renvoi, in the form of a cross, differs from the three dots used for the other marginal annotations (Figure 7). The writer of the note also underlines the words which identify the source of the information. These features suggest that the source of information for this annotation derives from a different translation of the work and was added by a reader after the manuscript was copied. That other versions of the translation were available is suggested by another note in the scribe’s exemplar which appears later in the manuscript. The reference to the constellation Scorpio in Book four prompts the gloss (‘E otros dizen en Cancer’ (‘And others say in Cancer’).89 The ‘others’ cited in the note are unlikely to be other scholars, but rather a reference to other books or written sources.90 Exceptionally, a fourteenth-century copy of the work by an English scribe also includes part of the text of this annotation: Et si dominus ascendentem fuerit mercurius et fuerit in scorpione et alii dicunt significat grandes fornicationes et perdiciones.91

What ‘the others’ (‘alii dicunt’) identify as the alternative to Scorpio was missing from the English scribe’s exemplar; however the presence of this incomplete phrase confirms ‘the others’ are written sources not people. Who, though, were the readers of Madrid MSS 9294 and 3065? The disorganized layout of Madrid MS 9294 suggests that the owner of the Libro delas cruzes was someone closely linked to the court who had obtained a rough draft and commissioned a fair copy for himself.92 The collated exemplar of a corrupted version of the Libro conplido preserved in Madrid MS 3065, on the 88 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 46r; El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 55, n. 1. ‘The translators think: or if the Moon does not face the ascendant or its ruler, likewise the messenger will not come.’ 89 Madrid MS 3065, fol. 162r; El Libro conplido, ed. Hilty, 193, n. 1. 90 Compare the annotation by Alvarus of Oviedo, ‘melior alio libro receptores’ in the margin of Hugh of Santalla’s translation of Ptolemy’s Centiloquium, in Madrid MS 10009, fol. 88. See the description in the Biblioteca Nacional online catalogue, http://catalogo.bne.es/uhtbin/cgisirsi/ DVSH6g0ByP/BNMADRID/222540058/9 [accessed 16 June 2012], and the description published in Millás Vallicrosa, Las traducciones orientales, 166–80 (no. XL). 91 BL Royal MS 12.F.XVII, fol. 94va: ‘And if the lord of the ascendant is Mercury and it were in Scorpio and others say it means great fornications and losses’. 92 Compare Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 96–7, who argues that the many changes suggest the manuscript was copied before the working practices of the Alfonsine scriptorium had been fully established.

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Figure 7: Marginal note in a reader’s hand that refers to ‘the translators’. Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, Madrid, 3065, fol. 46r (detail). ©Biblioteca Nacional de España

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other hand, suggests an exemplar prepared in an intellectual environment where the compiler had access to a library and could compare that particular version of the translation with other works. The way the manuscript has been copied, meanwhile, suggests that whoever commissioned it could employ scribes trained in the preparation of textbooks for university schools. This might have been Seville: the studium which functioned there from 1254 would have required scribes to supply textbooks to the masters and scholars. Therefore, even if the exemplar originated in the Alfonsine court, the court need not have provided the context for the copying of MS 3065. Thirteenthcentury inventories of clerical and church libraries in the Iberian Peninsula include evidence of astrological tracts among the expected religious and legal texts, and the clerics who attended the studium at Seville would have been among those who would no doubt have found the work of interest, as well as members of Alfonso’s wider entourage.93 Intriguingly, an ownership inscription on the opening folio of MS 3065 dated 1603 states that it belonged to a priest in Seville named Augustín Bernardo de Villada.94 Churchmen arguably patronized copies of other works associated with Alfonso. The unilluminated compilation of 100 cantigas in the manuscript now in Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS 10069 (known as ‘Toledo’ because it was transferred to Madrid in 1869 from Toledo cathedral library) has been recently re-dated on palaeographical grounds to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, and said to have been copied not for Alfonso but for the archbishop of Toledo, Gonzalo Pérez Gudiel.95 There are also material and codicological features to suggest that the manuscript that contains the first part of the General estoria, Madrid MS 816, was commissioned for a clerical readership. The codex is dateable to the 1270s or 1280s on the grounds of script, in part because it includes a form of minuscule ‘g’ where the upper compartment is closed by a low, straight stroke which makes the letter appear as though it has horns. This paleographical peculiarity crops up in the dated (1283) codex of the Libro de los juegos and in the Cantigas manuscripts (undated, but dateable to the 1270s and 1280s). Although now lacking its final quires, the manuscript contains most of the text of the first part of the Alfonsine General estoria. The prologue names him as patron of the work and the rubrics to books, the major textual divisions in this work, are framed using the same distinctive

93 Gonzálvez Ruiz, Hombres y libros de Toledo (1086–1300), 523, on the scientific treatises in the 1280 inventory of Pérez Gudiel; Guijarro, ‘Libraries and Books Used by Cathedral Clergy’. 94 Fernández Fernández, Arte y ciencia, 124. 95 Fernández Fernández, ‘Cantigas de Santa María. Fortuna de sus manuscritos’, 328–9.

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arrangement of roundels within squares as other codices which contain the texts of chronicles compiled on Alfonso’s orders (see Figure 8). Another feature which Madrid MS 816 shares with manuscript chronicles copied for Alfonso is the intricate pen-flourishing which decorates initials to chapters, and quires of eight leaves (although this is an arrangement common to other manuscripts produced in the Peninsula and in the rest of Europe during this period more generally). The decoration in Madrid MS 816 is carried out in red, blue, and purple inks and consists of puzzle initials framed in a square or rectangle and filled with dense pen-flourishing. The other two manuscripts, Escorial MS Y.I.2 and BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, are ornamented in a similar way; indeed, there is a particular similarity between Madrid MS 816, the first part of the General estoria, and BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539, the fourth, as both use blue and red J-borders along the left margin of the text columns, on occasion extending this ornament above and below the columns.96 Yet J-borders are a standard decorative motif in thirteenth-century manuscripts across Europe and, despite the apparent similarities between the manuscripts, there are differences. The flourishing in BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539 sometimes incorporates figurative motifs, such as the fleur-de-lis on folio 118r, while the flourishing in Madrid MS 816 remains abstract. Lastly, the identification of Madrid MS 816 as a codex made for presentation to Alfonso has also been suggested by later documentary evidence. The manuscript is arguably the ‘un libro de la General Estoria’ (‘a book of the General Estoria’) in a list of books distributed as gifts by Isabel I of Castile early in her reign. If so, this would confirm its Alfonsine provenance, as the Catholic queen transferred a number of the king’s manuscripts to her royal chapel in Granada.97 Yet a lavish copy of what may have been an Alfonsine copy of the General estoria surfaced in the London book trade in the late seventeenth century. A 1687 London auction catalogue records a ‘Spanish manuscript book containing the universal history of the creation of the world […] with countless most splendid images depicted on each page, 96 For the term ‘J-borders’, see M. Hülsman, ‘Decorative Penwork and Book Production: evidence for localizing Northern Netherlandish manuscripts’, in Making the Medieval Book: techniques of production. (Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1992), ed. L.L. Brownrigg (Los Altos Hills, CA, 1995), 93–110, at 110, n. 28. 97 Ruiz, Los libros de Isabel la Católica, at 56 (the list is preserved in Simancas: Archivo General, 1a ép., leg. 84, 27). Isabel presented this copy of the chronicle to Alfonso de Vallejo, a servant of the marquis of Moya. On Isabel’s pragmatic attitude to books as gifts, see I. Michael, ‘Medieval Spanish Royal Libraries and their Dispersal’, in Letters and Society in Fifteenth-Century Spain: studies presented to P.E. Russell on his 80th Birthday, ed. A. Deyermond and J. Lawrance (Llangrannog, 1993), 103–12, at 110–11.

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in parchment’.98 No trace of this codex is recorded today, but the reference remains tantalizing. However, there are fundamental differences in construction, layout, and projected audience or readers between Madrid MS 816 and the other Alfonsine chronicle manuscripts, Escorial MS Y.I.2 and BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539. The parchment used for the Madrid codex is stiff, thick, and yellowing – quite different from the fine, smooth, and white parchment used for the other two manuscripts. All the manuscripts are written in double columns, but the ruling patterns and dimensions of these differ markedly between Escorial MS Y.I.2 and BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539 on the one hand, and Madrid MS 816 on the other. In the first two manuscripts, pricking for the ruling has been carried out with a sharp knife and the slits penetrate all the folios in the quire.99 The ruling is executed in lead point and the number of lines per column in both manuscripts is usually limited to fifty-one.100 The text area of BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539 is fairly consistent: it oscillates between 29 and 29.5 cm high and 21 cm wide. The text area of Escorial MS Y.I.2, the Estoria de Espanna, is more variable, ranging between 28 and 30.7 cm high and 19.5–20.5 cm wide. The ruling in Madrid MS 816, on the other hand, is barely visible except on some folios, where it appears to have been carried out in ink. The dimensions of the text area in the Madrid manuscript are also larger: 32.5 cm high by 21 cm wide, dimensions which remain consistent despite a gradual increase in the number of lines ruled within the space. The manuscript opens with forty-nine lines per column; in the eighth quire this number increases to fifty-one and at the seventeenth quire it increases for the final time to fifty-two lines. This suggests that the scribes of Madrid MS 816 ruled their own quires, and adjusted the number of lines to accommodate text and save parchment. By contrast, the scribes responsible for manuscripts copied for Alfonso were concerned to achieve the most elegant and spacious layout, and were not concerned to conserve parchment. There are differences, too, in the style of catchwords between Escorial MS Y.I.2 and BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539 on the one hand, and Madrid MS 816 on the 98 Bibliotheca Massoviana sive Catalogus Variorum Librorum in quavis Linguâ […] quos Sibi Procuravit Doctissimus Massovius, Consiliarius Quondam Parliamenti Mont-peliensis: catalogue of the auction held at the Black Swan, St Paul’s London, 1 February 1687, 64, lot 34. I am grateful to David Rundle for this reference. 99 Visible for example in BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539 in quire 36 (fols 266–73) along the edge of the upper margin, and in Escorial MS Y.I.2 in quire 17 (fols 109–16) along the edge of the lower margin. 100 The ruling for BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539 is almost entirely 51 lines per column, except for one occasion when this is reduced to 50 lines. Escorial MS Y.I.2 has 50 or 51 lines per column, except in the case of quire 16 (fols. 101–8), which was added at a late stage in the copying process and has 52 lines ruled.

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other. In the Madrid copy of the first part of the General estoria these are written either vertically or horizontally in the centre of the lower margin, and on occasion are framed by simple ornamental pen-flourishes. They appear consistently and are not crossed out, erased, or rewritten, which suggests that the scribes who copied Madrid MS 816 had a stable exemplar before them. In the General estoria IV and in the Estoria de Espanna catchwords are always written vertically beside the gutter margin, in the bounding lines for the text block,101 but are sometimes altered or omitted in both manuscripts because of late changes to the scribes’ exemplar. The three manuscripts are each copied by two scribes, who write across quires. In each manuscript, the bulk of the text is written by one scribe, with the occasional intervention of another. A third hand adds marginal instructions for rubrics, or notes words to be corrected.102 The two scribes of Madrid MS 816 use a rounded gothic script with a somewhat archaic aspect, similar to the hands responsible for a Bible copied at the monastery of Uclés in 1298.103 In Madrid MS 816, the first scribe (hand 1) writes a rounded, compact script in which the compartments of the minuscule form of the round ‘s’ join to resemble the number ‘8’ and the tail of the minuscule ‘g’ is closed up so that the letter form comprises two closed compartments. Hand 1 copies the first six quires and part of the seventh, finishing his work at the end of the recto of the folio numbered 53 (actual folio 52). The second scribe continues on the verso and copies to the end of the manuscript as it survives today (see Figure 8). His script is characterized by a leftward slant and less compact forms. He does not close the tail of the minuscule ‘g’ and the horizontal cross-stroke that closes the upper compartment cuts across the downward strokes, giving the letter a curious, horned appearance. The form of minuscule round ‘s’ he uses is larger, and he tends not to slant the ascender of the uncial ‘d’ to the left. Hand 2 is also responsible for adding the rubrics. Yet what really distinguishes the copy of the General estoria in MS 816 from the other two thirteenth-century manuscripts of Alfonsine chronicles is the fact that the text of Madrid MS 816 has not been erased and reworked in any significant way at a late stage in the copying process. Tellingly, no catchwords have been altered. Unlike the Alfonsine scribes, 101 A position apparently peculiar to scribes of the Iberian Peninsula: E.E. Rodríguez Díaz, ‘El uso del reclamo en España. Reinos occidentales’, Scriptorium, 50 (1999), 3–33. 102 For Madrid 816, see fol. 21v, where the text of the rubric for chapter 29 is still visible in the gutter margin and where the emendator has also added the word ‘saber’, missing from the text, which the scribe then added in the margin. 103 Madrid, MS 924.

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the copyists of the General estoria manuscript preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional had an unchanging exemplar before them. To this, of course, it could be argued that the lack of erasures at the start or close of a section or quire simply means the copyist managed to incorporate changes in the exemplar into his blank folios in a seamless fashion. Yet there are other aspects of the layout which suggest that Alfonso was not the intended recipient of Madrid MS 816. The contents of this manuscript are not supplemented by miniatures or diagrams, even when these are referred to in the text. Chapter twelve in the fifth Book of Genesis – ‘Delas razones de la VIIIa espera e delas planetas segund acoreo por el nilo’ (‘On the movements of the eighth heaven and of the planets in relation to the Nile according to Acoreus’) – ends with a description of the trajectories of the seven planets. The text promises a diagram of these: ‘E los nombres d’ellas [ie. the planets] son éstos, e van ellos ordenados entre sí d’esta guisa. E los cercos de los sus cielos como seen en esta figura’ (‘And the names of them are these, and they are ordered among themselves in this fashion. And the circuits of their heavens are as in this diagram’).104 What follows, however, is simply a list of the names of the seven planets with the initial letter of each name separated from the remainder of the word by decorative infill the width of the line.105 The Madrid manuscript also differs from the other two thirteenth-century copies of Alfonsine chronicles in the way the text has been organized. All three codices have running titles in the upper margin, but these titles do not convey the same type of information. The General estoria IV and the Estoria de Espanna titles name the dominant people or ruler in a given period, thereby emphasizing the political aspect of the work. They do not include a book number. In the Estoria de Espanna these titles appear erratically, and not at all during the section on the ascendancy of the Roman people.106 Those responsible for Madrid MS 816, on the other hand – who copied a text based on a translation of the summary of biblical history compiled by ‘Maestre Pedro’ (Peter Comestor)– identify the different books of the Bible in the running titles, and number them with a Roman numeral placed between the two columns of text. The running titles and numerals appear throughout the manuscript, despite its increasingly untidy execution. The prominence of the numerals, a device to facilitate reference, suggests that 104 General estoria, ed. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, i, 223. 105 Madrid MS 816, fol. 88r. 106 For the Estoria de Espanna, see Catalán, De la silva textual, 47, n. 68, and Fernández-Ordóñez, Las estorias, 47–8.

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Figure 8: Rubric announcing book number and contents, framed in a roundel. General estoria I, Madrid MS 816, fol. 231v. ©Biblioteca Nacional de España

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Madrid 816 has also lost an opening quire which would have contained a table of contents. Within the text itself, the rubrics framed in a circle and square which begin each new, un-numbered, book in the Estoria de Espanna record the nationality of the people ruling Spain,107 while the ones in the General estoria IV alternate the names of rulers with the titles of books of the Bible.108 By contrast, those in MS 816, the first part of the General estoria, record only the number of the book, and not its title. There are, however, three exceptions to this. On two occasions in Madrid MS 816 the rubric also records the chronological age of the world.109 The third exception is more interesting, as it implies the intended readership of this manuscript. On folio 231v the rubric explains that ‘Aquí se comiença el xviiio libro d’esta estoria que fabla de las leis de los consagramientos delos obispos e del viejo testamiento:- Prologo’ (‘Here begins the eighteenth book of this chronicle which talks of the laws of consecration of bishops and of the Old Testament. Prologue’) (Figure 8).110 The text of the General estoria I would have been of general interest to clerics as it represents a compilation of translated biblical texts and ecclesiastical writings, and this rubric suggests it was copied for a clerical readership.111 There is another feature of the manuscript which reinforces the possibility that it was copied by, and for, churchmen. Words written as pen trials by the hand responsible for the flourishing and infill in the codex appear three times in the manuscript. The content of one, ‘biblia’ (lower margin, fol. 85v) is perhaps unsurprising given the nature of the text being copied. The other two reflect the rhythm of the ecclesiastical day: on the verso of folios numbered 104 (actual 103) and 114 (actual 113) the lower margin contains the words ‘audiuit angelus’ in an equally tiny hand, but in red ink.112 107 For example fol. 10v, ‘Aqui se comiença la estoria del sennorio que los Romanos ouieron en espanna’ (‘Here begins the history of the dominion that the Romans had over Spain’). 108 For example, fol. 177r, ‘Rey artaxerses’ (‘King Xerxes’); fol. 182r, ‘Libro de ester’ (‘Book of Esther’). 109 Fol. 10v: ‘Aquí se comiença la segunda edad e el segundo libro de la estoria’ (‘Here begins the second age and the second book of the history’), and fol. 34r: ‘Aquí se comença la tercera edad enel IIIIº libro d’esta estoria’ (‘Here begins the third age in the fourth book of this history’): see General estoria, ed. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, i, on the pages following 41 and 151. 110 General estoria, ed. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, ii, after 468. 111 See General estoria, ed. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, i, xciii. 112 The annotation ‘audiuit angelus’ is visible in the black and white photograph of folio 113v in General estoria: primera parte, ed. Solalinde, plate VI (following 248). On these pen trials, see the comments by Solalinde, General estoria: primera parte, ‘Introducción’, xxv–xxvi. On fol. 104v the phrase is abbreviated to ‘au angls’, and below the flourisher has drawn two tiny concentric squares.



Concluding Remarks

Alfonso X had a long, eventful, and violent reign. His repeated and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to become Romano-German emperor placed a heavy burden on his finances, while his attempts to use taxation and legislation to strengthen and centralize royal power at the expense of the Castilian and Leonese magnates provoked them to protest, temporary self-imposed exile, and open hostility. So, too, did his sporadic attempts to toy with established customs in relation to the royal succession. He had contemplated the possibility in some versions of his legal codes that the children of his eldest son and heir, Fernando, rather than his own second son, Sancho, should inherit the throne in the event of Fernando’s death. In 1275 Fernando died unexpectedly, leaving a French widow, Blanche, and two young children, Alfonso and Fernando, the Infantes de la Cerda. This provoked a succession crisis which gave a hostile French king, Philip III, the right to argue that the crown of Castile should pass to the Infantes de la Cerda and through them to France, and a disaffected Castilian and Leonese nobility the opportunity to turn Sancho into a leader who would represent their cause against his father. Against this backdrop of political turbulence, Alfonso had to secure and repopulate the territories conquered by his father from the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus decades earlier, reassert his authority in the kingdom of Murcia after an uprising there in 1264, and ward off attacks and the threat of invasion from the king of Granada and from Marinid invaders based in North Africa. These internal and external challenges to his throne would alone have been sufficient to ensure that Alfonso retained the interest of later historians, but assessments of his reign are also influenced by the brilliant court he maintained and the literary activity he encouraged there. Gil de Zamora described how ‘counts, marquises, princes and magnates, soldiers and townsmen’ from across the world flocked to him ‘in order to breathe in the sweet scent of his universal renown’, and to find ‘a refuge from enemies, advice against doubt and a generous and unlocked treasure-house against penury and poverty’.1 Jofré de Loaysa, also writing in the late thirteenth 1 Fita, Biografías, 321.21: ‘Ad ipsum quoque de universis fere mundi partibus confluebant Comites, Marchiones, Principes et Barones, milites et burgenses, propter ipsius fame fragantiam universaliter respirantem, habentes [ad] ipsum contra inimicos refugium, contra dubia consilium, contra desolationem solatium, contra penuriam et pauperiem thesaurum munificum, comunicatum liberaliter, non signatum.’

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century, similarly praised him for the appropriately regal hospitality that made his court a magnet for foreign dignitaries from far-flung corners of the earth. A more enduring manifestation of this courtly brilliance was Alfonso’s literary patronage, which, according to Gil de Zamora, consisted of a wide-ranging project to translate into Castilian all Latin secular and sacred texts. Alfonso’s motivation for this patronage was apparently part personal, part public. As Gil explained, the translations, compilations, and poetry were prompted by the king’s own intellectual curiosity and restlessness; but it was a curiosity he wished to share with his subjects so that everyone, even the wise, would be able to understand what had hitherto been hidden and secret beneath the armour of the Latin language.2 These early accounts of Alfonso’s intellectual curiosity and his personal investment in the works he commissioned are supported by the remarkable number of splendid thirteenth-century manuscripts that survive with his name, and often image, on them. Later historians have debated whether such patronage represented frivolous expenditure or a remarkable attempt by Alfonso to confirm and consolidate Castilian as the language of scholarship for cultural and political ends. His royal contemporaries, such as Louis IX of France, were equally engaged in promoting the vernacular through the translation and compilation of historical texts; they also commissioned splendid manuscripts as a means of demonstrating their royal status and authority. Alfonso’s patronage, then, echoed the activities of his contemporaries and reflected the broader trends of the age. The splendour of the codices that bear his name, then, is not what is remarkable about Alfonso’s patronage; nor is the wide range of texts he had translated and compiled. This, arguably, simply reflects a wider thirteenth-century fashion among literary patrons and writers to produce a body of work that was encyclopaedic in its scope. Instead, it is the constant alteration and adjustment to the texts and images of the Alfonsine manuscripts which makes them remarkable.3 These changes reflect the king’s high degree of personal investment in his cultural projects, and show how the appearance and contents of each manuscript became a barometer for the political circumstances of his 2 Fita, Biografías, 321.21: ‘Adeo quoque animum suum transtulit ad investigandas et perscrutandas mundanas scientias et divinas […] transferri fecit in linguam maternam; ita et omnes possent evidentissime intueri et intelligere quoquomodo illa, que sub lingue latine phaleris et figura tecta et secreta, etiam ipsis sapientibus, videbantur.’ 3 On the strikingly high number of changes to the text in the manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, see recently S.R. Parkinson, ‘The Construction of the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, unpublished paper delivered at the 26th Colloquium of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, Queen Mary College, University of London, 28 June 2017.

Concluding Remark s

217

reign. The codices match different, complimentary, visions of his kingship to particular texts that interested him, in order to aggressively promote his ideology of kingship. However, the very specific and often erudite nature of these presentations of Alfonso, which draw on astrological symbolism and biblical typology, as well as standard tropes of royal status, suggest these works were aimed at particular, courtly, audiences rather than at the broader population of the realm as Gil de Zamora implied. Alfonso stands out as patron among his royal contemporaries, then, because he himself was central to the process of creating the works which bear his name. However, the extent of his creative involvement as author has often been perceived as one which depended on the type of text he commissioned. Scholars have shown he composed texts (and music) for the Cantigas compilations, and he would understandably have been actively involved in shaping the legal works and, probably, the chronicles. On the other hand, his participation is thought to have been more limited in the scientific works that bear his name because of the technical, linguistic, and astronomical knowledge required. Yet he would surely have been closely involved in decisions about his self-presentation in the prologues and miniatures of all his manuscripts, and the complexity of the astrological symbolism associated with some depictions of him suggests he had a subtle grasp of astrological science. The numerous erasures, insertions, and last-minute changes to text and miniatures in these codices suggest those responsible for producing them worked in a closely supervised environment, and were sensitive to the requirements of a demanding patron. These emendations also imply the compiler or translator’s response to new ideas or circumstances; and indeed at least some of the alterations to images and text seem to have been motivated by a political agenda (for example, the opening miniature that depicts Nebuchadnezzar in the Vatican manuscript of the General estoria IV, or the changes to layout in the Escorial manuscript of the first part of the Estoria de Espanna). Alfonso clearly considered literary patronage a powerful vehicle to promote his particular vision of monarchy in which the king is the source of political, religious, and intellectual authority. This goes some way to explaining the verbal and visual insistence on his direct participation in the works, and it is arguably more fruitful to explore representations of Alfonso in this context rather than attempt a deconstruction of them as an indication of his role as author and scriptorium supervisor. If the question of authorship is set aside, it becomes apparent that the representations of Alfonso in the manuscripts he commissioned are very sophisticated pieces of self- and dynastic promotion indeed. The choice of the iconographic

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Alfonso X of Castile-León

traditions that lie behind the representations of Alfonso, the colour of the clothes in which he is depicted, the portrayal of the figures around him, and even the layout of the codex have all been carefully selected to match the type of text they accompany and promote his kingship. The same is true of the way in which Alfonso’s role is presented in the prologues to the works that bear his name. The splendour of the codices, their multiple layers of visual and verbal meaning, and the use of the vernacular suggest that his intended audience were members of his own court circle. While many later copies of the chronicles and of the legal texts survive because of the appeal they would have held for Alfonso’s royal successors and for a broader Spanish readership, the most widely circulated scientific works associated with Alfonso are those that were also translated into Latin: the Libro conplido and the Tablas. His decision to target a specific readership with his literary patronage is also evident in the context of his support of learning in his kingdoms more generally. Throughout his reign, he appears to have preferred to sponsor individuals who would instruct only certain people; the surviving evidence suggests he had little interest in promoting and influencing learning at an institutional level. The physicians ‘from overseas’ who arrived in Seville in 1260 at Alfonso’s invitation were only to instruct those selected by the king: it appears their ‘great wisdom’ was to be for the king’s benefit alone. The much-cited charter in which he established a ‘studium and general schools of Latin and Arabic’ at Seville in 1254 was arguably drawn up in large part as a gesture to encourage repopulation of an emptying city rather than a serious attempt to encourage multi-cultural scholarship. Although it received confirmation of its foundation and funding retrospectively from the church in 1260, that support was directed towards Christian clerics, not Muslim or Jewish scholars. However, the fact that students and masters continued to travel there in the 1260s suggests that Alfonso’s hard-headed and pragmatic marriage of culture and politics continued to meet the need for repopulation, even if its original parameters had changed and become more limited in scope. Yet if Alfonso’s vision of the uses to which literary culture could be put was a particular and exclusive one, the volume of texts and manuscripts he commissioned implies that to realize that vision he must have been able to draw upon a pre-existing body of scholars, scribes, and artists, and a flourishing culture of book production in his kingdoms. The written evidence of the colophon in the General estoria IV suggests Alfonso delegated the responsibility of organizing book production to others and that, as in the rest of Europe, the process was a highly specialized operation. This implies the existence of a scriptorium close to, or possibly attached

Concluding Remark s

219

to, the court as scholars have suspected; but there is also evidence to suggest the arrangement was ad hoc and that scribes, artists, and binders would have been recruited as their services were required and not retained indefinitely by the crown. There is codicological evidence to suggest one manuscript (BAV MS Reg. Lat. 1283a, Astromagia) was copied at a remove from the court. The quantity of manuscripts that scholars have argued were being produced for Alfonso in the 1270s, for example – and which included four scientific works, two chronicles, and at least one compilation of Cantigas4 – would certainly require tasks to be delegated or contracted out. At the very least, it is unlikely that Alfonso would have been unable to supervise every stage in the composition and production of all the manuscripts in person. Moreover, although it is evident that Alfonso, or his agents, exercised close control over the texts produced under his patronage, copies of some works did circulate beyond court circles and join this intellectual hinterland at an early stage in the production process. The compilation of 100 cantigas in a manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid has already been identified by scholars as a later copy of what may have been the original anthology of poems. There are also three other thirteenth-century manuscripts that bear the king’s name but which codicology suggests were probably copied for someone else. Perhaps unsurprisingly given their scientific and divinatory subject-matter, two of these works are translations of Arabic astrological works, the Libro de las cruzes and the Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas. It has been argued they were copied as reference books for Alfonso’s scholars, but this seems unlikely. Both are tidy copies on good-quality parchment of works originally prepared for Alfonso, but their text is either still in an imperfect, draft form (Libro conplido) or copied before the final layout has been definitively resolved (Libro de las cruzes). The third manuscript that bears Alfonso’s name, but which was probably copied for an ecclesiastical readership, is the thirteenth-century copy of the General estoria I. Alfonso’s personal involvement in the composition of the manuscripts that bear his name was considerable, but the works he commissioned do not document this involvement faithfully as that is not their purpose. The images of the king and the manuscripts which Alfonso has bequeathed to modern scholars offer a fascinating window onto thirteenth-century Iberian book culture, the relationship between royal learning and propaganda, and the connections between Spain and the literary and visual culture of the rest of Europe.

4

Fernández Fernández, ‘“Este Livro, com’ achei”’, 76.



Manuscript Sources

Barcelona Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 1159 Cambridge Trinity College, MS O.2.18 University Library, MS Mm.IV.43 Copenhagen Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Gl. kgls. Saml. 1942, 4o El Escorial Biblioteca del Real Monasterio MS b.I.2 MS J.II.17 MS N.III.12 MS T.1.1 MS T.I.6 MS Y.I.1 MS Y.I.2 MS Z.I.13 Florence Biblioteca Nazionale, MS Banco Rari 20 Girona Capítol Catedral, MS 4 London British Library Additional MS 20787 Harley MS 3631 Royal MS 12.F.VII Madrid Biblioteca Nacional MS Res. 20 MS Vitr. 14–5 (olim MS Res. 4–7)

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Alfonso X of Castile-León

MS Vitr. 17–10 MS 686 MS 816 MS 829 MS 921 MS 924 MS 9559 MS 1197 MS 3065 MS 6429 MS 6441 MS 9294 MS 9563 MS 10009 MS 10237 MS 12793 MS 13002 MS 1348 MS 17799 MS 2763 Biblioteca Historica Marqués de Valdecilla, Universidad Complutense, MS 156 Manchester John Rylands Library, Spanish MS 1 Oporto Biblioteca Municipal MS 623 MS 707 Oxford Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1525 MS Auct. D.1.17 MS Canon. misc. 443 MS Holkham Misc. 26 MS Laud Lat. 114 MS Laud. Or. 310 MS Laud. Misc. 537 MS Savile 15

Manuscript Sources

Corpus Christi College MS 151 MS 283 Paris Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 1186 MS 8322 Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fr. 20120 Santander Biblioteca Menéndez y Pelayo, MS 317 Segovia Archivo Capitular, MS B338 Seville Archivo Capitular, Caja 4, no. 10 Biblioteca Capitular, MS 84/7/34 Toledo Biblioteca Capitular, MS 47–15 Tours Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 558 Utrecht Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS 32 Vatican City Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Vat. Arab. 1485 MS Barb. Lat. 172 MS Barb. Or. 92 MS Pal. Lat. 1071 MS Reg. Lat. 1283a MS Urb. Lat. 539

223

Index Abraham, royal physician and translator, 60, 105 Aegidius de Tebaldis, imperial notary and translator, 58, 191–193, 195, 204 Afonso III, king of Portugal, 53 Alexander IV, pope, 79, 80, 87 al-Fargani, astronomer, 40, 104 Alfonsine Tables (Tablas alfonsíes), 57, 58, 218 Alfonso, son of Fernando de la Cerda, 52, 54, 215 Alfonso VIII, king of Castile, 82, 84, 157, 179 Alfonso IX, king of León, 31, 82, 83 Alfonso X, king of Castile and León and Aristotle, 116, 125 and authorship, 20, 26–28, 90, 93–95, 97, 101, 103, 104, 216, 217, 219 and Charlemagne, 22–24, 48, 108 and Christ, 139, 145 and David, 99, 112, 120–123 and imperial symbols, 22–25, 47, 48, 50, 66, 74, 79, 113, 133, 153 and Julius Caesar, 22, 162 and Jupiter, 27, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145 and Lady Grammar, 125 and Mars, 144–146 and Moses, 91, 93 and Nebuchadnezzar, 27, 129–131, 164, 217 and Ozias, 116 and planetary imagery, 140–142, 144–146 and Solomon, 98–101, 112, 124, 125 and his royal contemporaries, 17, 48, 73, 77, 81, 98, 111, 120, 148, 216, 217 and the royal succession, 50, 115, 215 and his son Sancho, 54, 128, 131, 144, 146 and Thales of Miletus, 68, 69 and universities (studia), 77–80 and the Virgin Mary, 15, 16, 23, 52, 89, 112, 118, 119, 122–124, 135–138, 140 and the Visigoths, 29, 74, 75, 134, 158, 159, 163, 164 as Jesse, 57 as law-giver, 65–67, 126, 128, 133, 134, 147 as troubadour, 28, 119, 137, 138 birth and early years, 45, 46, 140 chancery, 21 and n. 29, 23, 29, 74, 78, 113, 133, 167, 169 claim to the imperial throne, 23, 45, 49, 139 evidence for his physical appearance, 112, 113, 116, 135 facsimiles and editions of his works, 70–72 fortuna of works associated with him, 151 n.162, 185, 187, 191–193, 206, 207, 209, handwriting, 20 health, 20, 53, 88, 109, 114–117, 136 his alleged blasphemy, 64, 65 his clothes, 25, 27, 28, 134–138, 141

his imperial ambitions, 45, 47, 57, 74, 75, 150 his mistresses and natural offspring, 53, 54, 144 his will, 119 n. 43, 122, 134, 151 images of, 28, 123–125, 135–144, 149, 151, 164, 168, 217 international relations, 47, 48, 147–149, 216 kingdoms, 15, 54, 144, 149, 215 literary activity, 18, 58, 59, 89, 91–93, 117, 164, 168, 185, 216 love of learning, 45, 57, 63, 77, 83, 100, 101, 107, 216 modern reputation, 44, 70, 72–75, 216 residence in Seville, 19, 88 sobriquets, 67, 68 use of the vernacular, 15, 16, 73–76, 150, 183, 187, 216 works attributed to him, 58–62, 171, 183, 210 Alfonso XI, king of Castile and León, 19, 55, 65, 66, 117 Algeciras, 54, 137 al-Maʻmūm, king of Toledo, 105 Alonso Morgado, historian of Seville, 50, 55, 114, 115 and n. 21 al-Ṡūfī, astronomer, 102 Alvarus of Toledo, astrologer and translator, 191–193, 205 al-Zarqāllah, astronomer, 105 Andrés, reader of the Cantigas, 170, 171 Arias Nunez, poet and/or scribe, 96 Arnau de Vilanova, Catalan physician, 117 Astromagia, 29, 59, 71, 99–101, 138, 140, 145, 146, 161, 180–182, 200, 201, 219 Baldwin II, emperor of Constantinople, 49, 95 Baybars I, Mamluk sultan of Egypt, 48, 49, 148 Beatriz of Swabia, mother of Alfonso, 23, 45, 50, 61, 64, 102 Beatriz, legitimate daughter of Alfonso, 24 Beatriz, natural daughter of Alfonso and wife of Dinis of Portugal, 53, 81 Berenguela, Alfonso’s daughter, 95 offered in marriage to the Mongol Khan, 148, 149 Berenguela, Alfonso’s sister, 179 Bernardo ‘el arauigo’ (Bernard ‘the Arab’), Alfonsine translator, 35, 105 Bernardo de Brihuega, Franciscan friar and author, 39 Bible moralisée (Toledo: Biblioteca Capitular, MS 47-15), 44 n. 127, 111, 150 Blanche of France, wife of Fernando de la Cerda, 52, 114, 150, 215 Bonamic, a member of Alfonso’s household, 148 Book scribes

226  Jacomo, child scribe at Seville, 32 Étienne Busset, French scribe, 170 Martín Pérez de Maqueda, royal book scribe, 164–167, 169, 179, 180 Suer Melendez, royal scribe, 89, 170 Books as symbols, 123–126, 138, 139 Burgos and the Alfonsine scriptorium, 168 Edward I of England knighted there, 47 foundational charter for Seville studium, 77 monastery of Las Huelgas, 32, 179 Calila e Dimna, 185 Cantigas de Santa Maria artists associated with, 96, 167, 170, 171 and authorship, 93 n. 20, 95– 97 and miniatures of Alfonso, 28, 123, 124, 135–137 and performance, 151 and the Psalter, 120, 122 and royal illness, 114, 118, 119, 151 and royal propaganda, 52, 90, 136, 137, 150, 151 facsimiles and editions, 71 Cartagena, 136, 137 Celestine IV, pope, 95 Charlemagne, 22–24, 48, 108 Charles V, king of France and books, 19, n. 17; 89 n. 3, 112, 124 n. 57, 166, 183 n. 104, 188, 194 n.40 and Charlemagne, 22 Christina, daughter of Haakon IV of Norway, 48 Chronica majora, 16, 94, 128 Clavis sapientie, 60–62 Clothes and identity, 25, 26, 134–137, 146, 147, 169 Commune of Pisa, 47 Cordoba, 105, 166 Crónica abreviada, 18, 22, 186, Crónica de Alfonso X, 42, 48, 51, 54, 55, 65, 66, 95, 114, 149, 185 Daniel of Morley, 38 David, king of Israel, 44 n.127, 99, 112, 120, 122, 123 Decretum (Concordia discordantium canonum), 41, 125 Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga, historian of Seville, 41 n. 110, 48, 55, 79 n. 161, 87–89, 170 n.53 Dinis, king of Portugal, 53, 81 Edward I, king of England, 47, 62, 111 Eleanor of Castile, Alfonso’s half-sister, 47, 62, 122 ‘Era’ in Spanish dating, 103 n. 56 Ervig, king of the Visigoths, 155 Estoria de Espanna, 126, 128, 134, 153, 159–162, 168, 172, 174, 177, 178

Alfonso X of Castile-León

Fadrique, brother of Alfonso, 45 n. 1, 51, 52, 54, 115, 116 Felipe, brother of Alfonso, 48 Fernán García, royal servant, archdeacon of Niebla and Burgos, 40–43 Fernando, son of Fernando de la Cerda, 52, 215 Fernando III, king of Castile and León, 46, 47 n. 9, 97, 114 Fernando de la Cerda, eldest son and heir of Alfonso, 50, 114, 128, 150, 215 Fernando of Toledo, royal translator, 105 Frederick II, king of Naples and emperor of the Romans, 16, 47, 48, 49, 97, 98, 139 Frederick Barbarossa, 139 Garci Pérez, astrologer and translator, 39 General estoria, 91, 101, 126, 128–131, 145, 150, 153, 163, 164, 168, 177, 178, 180, 183, 185, 186 Madrid MS 816 (General estoria I) compared with Alfonsine manuscripts, 210–214, 219 Madrid MS 816 as a royal gift, 209 Gáspar Ibáñez de Segovia, marquis of Mondéjar, 55, 69 Gerard of Cremona, 34, 35, 37, 38 Gil de Zamora, Franciscan friar and royal servant, on Alfonso, 15, 51, 63, 64, 89, 113, 122, 215–217 literary works, 40 Godfrey of Viterbo, 129 Gonzalo Pérez Gudiel, archbishop of Toledo, 192, 208 Gregory X, pope, 24, 49, 150 Guillen Arremón d’Aspa, royal cleric and translator, 102 Guillermo Pérez de la Calzada, abbot of Sahagún, 45, 46 Henry III, king of England, 19, 48, 52 n.38, 111, 135 Henry Barleti, English diplomat, 148 Heraldry, 25, 112, 113, 118, 135, 141–143, 153, 185 Historia hasta 1288 dialogada, 148, 149 Hugh of Santalla, priest and translator, 104, 106, 206 n.90 Hülegü, khan of the Mongols, 148 Ibrahim Ibn Wasif Shah al-Misri, 129 Imperial electors, 49 Jaʻfar Aḥmad III Sayf al-Dawla, ruler of the Banū Hūd dynasty, 34 James of Spain, natural son of Enrique, brother to Alfonso, 54 n. 49 Jaume I, king of Aragon and father-in-law to Alfonso X, 17, 37, 47, 73, 74, 81, 90, 97, 98, 112, 114, 115 n. 21, 144, 148 Jaume II, king of Aragon, 88, 98 Jean de Joinville, biographer of Louis IX, 17

Index

Jerónimo Zurita, historian of Aragon, 115 n. 25 Jews and Alfonsine cultural patronage, 35 and the book trade, 32, 33 and scholarship, 37 legal status in the Iberian Peninsula, 36, 37 Jofré de Loaysa, abbot of Santander and chronicler, 47, 113, 147, 215, 216 Jofré de Loaysa, tutor to Violante of Aragon, 47 John of Salisbury, 89 n. 1 Juan d’Aspa, royal cleric and translator, 39, 99, 106 Joan (Juan) de Cremona, scholar and compiler, 103 Juan González of Burgos, painter and sculptor, 53 Joan (Juan) de Mesina, scholar and compiler, 103 Juan Manuel, nephew of Alfonso X, 18, 63, 64, 164, 186 Juan Pérez, royal painter, 167 Jupiter, 27, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145 Lapidario, 16, 70, 71, 117 n. 35, 140, 187 depiction of Alfonso, 125, 138 its translators, 39, 87, 107, 108 Leovigild, king of the Visigoths, 134 Liber feudorum maior, 22 Liber de iudiciis astrorum and Latin translations, 191, 204, 218 and the Castilian version in Madrid MS 3065, 204, 205 Liber (or Forum) iudicum (or Fuero juzgo), 74, 155–158 Liber Razielis, 99, 100, 140, 185 Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas, 100–104, 183, 185–187, 189, 219 Castilian copies, 191, 192, 205 the Arabic original, 193, 203 Madrid MS 3065 as a collated copy, 196–203, 206, 207 and the Latin versions, 204, 205 in Portuguese translation, 192, 205 Libro de las cruzes, 98, 99, 183, 185–189, 206, 219 the Arabic original, 193 Libro de las formas & ymagenes, 138, 144, 146 Libro de los juegos, 131, 132, 135, 140–146, 149, 167, 168, 169, 172–174 Libros del saber de astrología, 102, 168, 174–176 Livre l’eschiele Mahomet, 185 Louis IX, king of France, 114 his library and books, 17, 44 n. 127, 63, n. 94, 111, 122, 130, 150, 161, 166, 186, 216 his clothes, 25, 26, 135 receives an elephant, 48 receives a Mongol embassy, 148 discussions with learned men, 17, 108 and the Sainte Chapelle, 137 Lleida, studium, 31

227 Llibre del rei En Jaume (or Llibre dels fets), 17, 90, 97, 98, 148 Maestro Roldán, royal lawyer, 39, 133 Manfred, king of Sicily, 97, 98, 111, 148 Manuel, brother of Alfonso, 54, 63, 116 Manuscript layout and legal texts, 154–159, 194–196 and miniatures, 161–164 and royal authority, 153, 154, 156, 158, 163, 217, 218 and systems of reference, 89, 106, 150, 156, 170, 188, 195, 196, 212–214 as evidence of readers, 26, 44, 73, 88, 89, 107, 112, 122, 134 n.85, 136, 149–151, 158, 164, 183, 186, 188, 203, 206, 214 in the Libro de las cruzes, 188–190 in Madrid MS 3065, the Libro conplido, 194–197 Manuscript production and an Alfonsine scriptorium, 28, 29, 35, 44, 89, 119, 161, 164–172, 180, 181–183, 187, 208, 209, 218, 219 and circulation of, 29–31, 168, 186, 191, 192, 218 and commercial scriptoria, 31, 32, 181, 182 and distribution of hands in Alfonsine manuscripts, 172, 174–182, 211 and exemplars, 34, 35, 107, 158, 168, 173, 174, 180, 182, 186, 188, 194, 204, 206 and Jewish involvement, 32, 33 and reference to authors and scholars, 197–201, 206 and the role of the royal book scribe, 166–169, 171, 179, 180, 182, 218 and the ‘stationarius’, 31, 200 depicted in Alfonsine manuscripts, 123–126, 131–133, 138, 143 n. 125, 168, 169 at Paris, 32, 161, 166, 170 dating of manuscripts, 103, 117 n. 35, 126, 128, 139 n.109, 151 n.164, 153 n.1, 180, 208, 219 in Al-Andalus, 33, 34, 165, 166 in the Iberian Peninsula, 29–35, 155, 157 in Seville, 32, 35, 164, 165, 166 pen trials, 214 revisions and corrections, 130, 131, 159, 160, 171–174, 176, 178, 180–183, 188, 189, 194, 195, 211, 212, 216, 217 Marie de Brienne, first cousin to Alfonso, 95 Marginalia by readers, 65, 66, 91, 95, 149, 151, 158, 170, 171, 178, 183, 203, 205–208 by the scribe of Madrid MS 3065, 192–205 Martim Codax, poet, 123 n. 53 Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans, 16, 48, 94, 128, 147 n. 146 Mayor Guillén de Guzmán, mistress of Alfonso, 53

228  Mongols and their empire, 48, 147, 148 Michael Palaeologus, Emperor Michael VIII, 95 Michael, bishop of Tarazona, 34, 104 Military Order of Santa María de la Estrella, 28, 136–138 Muhammed Ibn Abu Bakr al-Riquti (al-Ricoti), 36 Murcia, 90, 112, 137, 215 Mu`tamid, king of Seville, 105 Nebuchadnezzar, 129–131, 164, 217 Nicolás Antonio, bibliographer, 55, 58, 59 n.74, 61 Palencia, studium, 31, 83, 84 Partidas, 66, 74, 78, 89, 116, 122, 126, 134, 157, 158, 179 Pedro Gallego, bishop of Cartagena, 34, 40 Pedro Lourenço, royal miniaturist and scribe, 167 Peter Comestor, chancellor of Notre-Dame, 92, 212 Petrus Alfonsi, scholar and translator, 101 Petrus de Regio, notary in Alfonso’s imperial chancery and translator, 58, 191–193, 195, 204 Philip of Courtenay, son of Marie de Brienne, 95 Philip III, king of France, 51, 54, 161, 215 Philip IV, king of France, 25, 117 Psalter, 120, 122, 130 Puerto de Santa María, 90 Quatripartitum, 193 Ramón Llull, 140 n. 113, 202 Remondo Losana, archbishop of Seville, 40, 41, 43, 79, 87 Richard of Cornwall, emperor of the Romans, 49 Rithmi de Iulia Romula, 45, 46 Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo, 37, 38, 97, 98 Royal privacy, 19, 20, 144 Saint-Denis, abbey of, 170 Salamanca Jews and the book trade, 32, 33 studium there, 31, 83, 200 Samuel, Alfonsine scholar and translator, 103, 104 Sancho III, king of Portugal, 53 Sancho, second son of Alfonso (later Sancho IV of Castile and León)

Alfonso X of Castile-León

in the General estoria IV, 128, 131 handwriting, 20 joint rule with Alfonso, 51, 54 rebellion against Alfonso, 115, 116, 215 patronage, 163 n. 27, 167, 183 Santo Domingo de la Calzada, monastery of, 168 Santo Domingo de Silos, monastery of, 168 São Vicente de Fora, monastery of, 168 Setenario, 139, 140, 145 n. 133 Settlement and scholarship, 81–83, 218 Seville and Alfonso’s health, 117 and artists, 167 alcázar as royal residence, 19, 55 arrival of physicians, 21, 87, 218 cathedral, 46–48, 81, 114, 119 n. 43, 122 cathedral school, 79 conquest and surrender, 45, 84, 85, 166 church of S. Ana de Triana, 114 intellectual life, 85, 86, 105, 164–166, 208, 218 royal chapel, 47 n.9, 137, 151 studium of ‘Latin and Arabic’, 21, 77–80, 84, 87, 186, 208, 218 Simón Ruiz de los Cameros, Castilian magnate, 51, 52, 115, 116 Solomon, son of king David, 98–101, 112, 124, 125 Speculum historiale, 150 Sumptuary laws, 136, 146, 147, 169 Toledo and book production, 31, 33 and the ‘school of translators’, 38 ‘Toledan script’, 157 Translation and Castilian nationalism, 38, 39, 74, 75, 88 and Arabic scientific texts, 193, 194, 202–205 Vincent of Beauvais, 150 Violante, daughter of Jaume I of Aragon and wife of Alfonso, 45, 47, 52–54 Windsor Castle, thirteenth-century renovations, 19 Yehuda b. Mosheh, royal translator and physician, 39, 95, 102, 103, 107, 108, 189, 191, 194, 197, 204 Zaragoza library of Jaʻfar Aḥmad III Sayf al-Dawla, ruler of the Banū Hūd dynasty, 34