Bernardo del Carpio
Plaza Mayor de Salamanca
Bernardo del Carpio was a character from the Middle Ages, an illegitimate child, according to legend, some chronicles and a Cantar de Bernardo del Carpio lost and proseminated in the General Estoria, of an infanta and sister of the King of Asturias Alfonso II named Doña Jimena, and of the Count of Saldaña, Sancho Díaz de Saldaña. He would have defeated Charlemagne at the Battle of Roncesvalles (808).
Its historicity is defended by the Asturian historian and priest Vicente José González García, who argues that the denial of its existence is based solely on the confusion of the first battle of Roncesvalles (778), with a later one in 808 and Bernardo's involvement in this battle, in which he had nothing to do.
Life
The German Hispanist Theodor Heinermann stated in 1927 that there were most likely two sources for the legend of Bernardo del Carpio:
- A family drama with tragic outcome, in which Bernardo, son of Ximena, sister of Alfonso II, can only meet his father Sancho Díaz two days after his death.
- Bernard's story in Roncesvalles, inspired by French epic traditions; in this version his mother is called Timbor.
The two traditions would have been intermingled before the writing of the Estoria de España and perhaps before the Crónica by Lucas de Tuy. feat in the X century at the latest about a certain Bernardo de Ribagorza; but the fact is that there is not a word in Hispano-Latin historiography about Bernardo until 1236, which indicates that around 1200 some poems about the hero must have been composed.
The fact is that, born in the Saldaña Castle, Bernardo del Carpio is the protagonist of a long series of romances. His story consists mainly of getting King Alfonso the Chaste to release his father, imprisoned in the castle of Luna because of having dishonored the infanta, from which the hero was born. For this, Bernardo, like another Hercules, must solve the different warrior tasks that the monarch entrusts to him.
Bernardo del Carpio is credited with numerous feats, including the defeat of the Franks at Roncesvalles. During the Golden Age, he served as inspiration for plays, chivalrous prose works, and epic poems, both in Spanish and Portuguese. Miguel de Cervantes, after partially dealing with the subject by mixing it with ariostesque material in his comedy La casa de los celos y selva de Ardenia, had among his unfinished projects a realistic chivalric novel about the hero, the Bernardo, as he wrote in the dedication of his Persiles.
The hero's tomb was visited in 1522 by Charles V in the Palencia town of Aguilar de Campoo. Apparently, after being elected emperor in 1517, Charles V, returning from one of his trips to Germany, in which he disembarked in Laredo (Cantabria), visited Aguilar de Campoo in July 1522, returning on another occasion and visiting Bernardo's tomb. del Carpio, located inside a cave, provided with an ancient inscription, under what is known as Peña Longa, very close to the Monastery of Santa María la Real, and took the alleged sword of the hero, which is currently in the Royal Armory of Madrid.
Literary works
Ramón Menéndez Pidal mentions a Deed of Bernardo from the XIII century whose content in detail only it is known from a prosification of the First General Chronicle. He also compiled and edited his ballads with the help of his disciples; The oldest, detached from the epic song, is With letters and messengers .
This song of deed was still being heard at the end of the XIV century: Foreign Minister Pero López de Ayala tells in his History of the house of Ayala (1398) that:
- This don Bernal Sánchez went through great fechos, maguer the jugulars tell them in their way and otherwise they were.
It was a fairly common opinion, as the canon of Don Quixote reiterates it: «There is no doubt about what Cid had, and Bernardo del Carpio was even less so; but, that they did the feats that they say, I think there is a very big one» In other places of Cervantes' work, the credulity of the people about the story of Bernardo del Carpio appears attacked, especially due to the fact that he killed Roldán separating him from the earth, as in the Greek myth of Antaeus and Hercules (in addition, Hercules had to overcome the impossible tasks imposed on him by another king, Eurystheus, like Bernardo, a parallel that was not hidden from the cults). For this reason, two heroic poems from the 16th century about Bernardo ended up in the fire in the Donoso scrutinio of Cervantes.
The true third part of the history of Carlos-Magno
Portuguese book of chivalry, whose author was the priest Alexandre Caetano Gomes Flaviense. It was printed in Lisbon in 1745 and was presented as a continuation of the Segunda parte da Historia do Imperador Carlos-Magno e dos doce Pares de Franca, by Jerónimo Moreira de Carvalho, published in Lisbon in 1737.
This work relates in its first pages the legendary history of Spain and then it is dedicated to narrating the fabulous exploits of Bernardo del Carpio, extramarital son of the sister of Alfonso II the Chaste, King of Asturias, and his subject Sancho, Count of Saldana. To him is attributed the defeat of Roldán and his companions in the Pyrenees and a varied series of chivalrous adventures such as the conquest of Catalonia from the Moors. His exploits extend to the reign of Alfonso III the Great, King of Asturias, well into the IX century. Upon his death he was buried with his sword "Durandarte" (snatched from Roldán in Roncesvalles) in the outskirts of the monastery of Santa María la Real de Aguilar de Campoo, in the vicinity of which is the grotto where a legend states that the knight was buried, with an allusive ancient inscription.
Bernardo del Carpio or The Victory of Roncesvalles
Long and highly complex poem of learned epic, the work of Bernardo de Balbuena, the Bernardo or The Victory of Roncesvalles, praised by Voltaire and Chateaubriand, consisting of 40,000 verses of polished workmanship in real and flooded octaves of an exuberant imagination, a kind of book of chivalry in verse that is inspired only in part by the legend of Bernardo del Carpio and contaminates it with all kinds of surrounding materials: allegories, moralities, chronologies, real and invented genealogies and mythological, fantastic episodes. and wonderful, amid dazzling imagery and a veritable descriptive frenzy. The verse is carved in search of the utmost perfection, as the author himself declares in his prologue, and as such it must be considered the culmination of the Spanish baroque cultured epic, in the same way that the Araucana is the culmination of the Renaissance cultured epic.
Other versions of his story
Bernardo del Carpio was a moral example of honor and filial piety, and served to vindicate the patient merit of bastards of noble origin.
- Ramón Menéndez Pidal compiled and studied his Romancero
- Baroque writer Juan de la Cueva wrote a comedy, Bernardo del Carpio (ed. by Anthony Watson, Exeter: University of Exeter, 1974)
- There is an epic of Francisco Núñez de Oria in Latin hexameters, Lyrae heroycae (Salamanca: Matías Gast, 1581) divided into 14 books, with a humanist prologue Juan López de Hoyos, the master of Cervantes.
- There is another epopeya in Castilian by Agustín Alonso (History of the feats and facts of the invincible knight Bernardo del Carpio composed in octaves, 1585)
- Various theatrical pieces by Lope de Vega (The Mocedades of Bernardo del Carpio, Marriage in deathand Acts of Bernard of Carpio): Lope was very interested in his legend because he himself had taken the name Carpio and his novel The Arcadia He had engraved his blazon of nineteen towers.
- Two comedies of Alvaro Cubillo de Aragón (The Earl of Saldaña and Acts of Bernardo del Carpio, part two)
- Another comedy of Lope de Liaño, Bernardo del Carpio in France1739.
In the 18th century, Hilario Santos Alonso and Manuel José Martín (Historia fiel, Historia fiel, and true of the brave Bernardo del Carpio: drawn with all fidelity from the famous historians of Spain, Father Mariana, Morales, Berganza, and many other true and serious authors, 1779); Jorge Mira y Perzebal composed a melologist, Bernardo del Carpio in Luna Castle (1760), and the legend caught the attention of the Portuguese Alexandre Caetano Gomes Flaviense, a secular priest, who dedicated his True second part of the History of Charles the Great, in which the glorious actions and victories of Bernardo del Carpio are recorded, and how he defeated the twelve Peers of France in battle (1746); the 19th century became a romantic hero thanks to George Washington Montgomery, Manuel Fernández y González (1858), Francisco Macarro (1876), Ambrosi Carrión...