Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (poet and diplomat)

Diego Hurtado de Mendoza y Pacheco (Granada, 1503 or 1504 - Madrid, August 14, 1575) was a Spanish poet and diplomat. Since the 17th century there have been theories that point to him as the possible author of Lazarillo de Tormes.

Not to be confused with the Castilian soldier and Viceroy of Valencia during the revolt of the Germanías of the Kingdom of Valencia (1519-1523), who was Diego Hurtado de Mendoza y Lemos, Count of Mélito.

Biography

Son of the Count of Tendilla, he studied in Granada and at the University of Salamanca. Diego had a privileged childhood greatly influenced by his father figure. His father, Íñigo López de Mendoza y Quiñones, better known as the Gran Tendilla , was Captain General of the kingdom of Granada at the time of Diego's birth and his residence was established in the Alhambra. His mother was Francisca Pacheco, daughter of Juan Pacheco, Marquis of Villena.

His father, following the Mendoza family tradition of uniting arms with letters, wanted to give his children a careful education, counting on the best tutors of the time and brought Pedro Mártir de Anglería from Italy to Granada. Thus the Moorish environment, on the one hand, and the cultivated and Renaissance spirit, on the other, marked the young man for life.

As regards his childhood and youth, it is likely that he remained in Granada until his father's death in 1515; and he participated together with two of his brothers in the La Goleta company, where it is said that he may have met Garcilaso de la Vega. Similarly, it is also presumed that he was part of the invasion of Provence in 1536, where he accompanied Garcilaso at the time of his death.

He went as ambassador to the court of Henry VIII, King of England in 1537, who had just become a widower and where he was entrusted with negotiating royal weddings that were frustrated. After that he was appointed ambassador in Venice (1539-1547) to also represent Carlos I at the Council of Trent.

It was specifically on April 19, 1539 when he received instructions from Carlos V about the embassy in Venice; city to which he would arrive on May 25 and would settle in a palace on the Grand Canal. This was the beginning of his long tenure in Italy, which would last for thirteen years, which ushered in the golden phase of his life. Once there, he came into contact with some authors of considerable reputation, such as Aretino, Bembo, Paolo Giovio, Varchi, Titian and Domenichi, among others.

Ambassador in Rome (1547), he was later governor of Siena, where he put down an uprising. He was accused of financial irregularities, and the process he requested to prove his innocence failed thirty years later with his acquittal (1578). Back in Spain, he was a supplier to the Navy of Laredo and in 1556 he received the habit of the Order of Alcántara. Three years later he is in Brussels; During the agony of Prince Don Carlos (1568), he had a violent dispute with Diego de Leiva that led to his exile to Medina del Campo by order of Felipe II, an exile that months later was transferred to Granada, where his nephew, the Marquis de Mondéjar, put him in charge of the army that had to fight the revolt of the Moors. In Granada he was until 1574, the year in which he was allowed access to the Court, although not to the Palace.

He died in 1575 after having a leg that had become gangrenous amputated.

He was a friend of Saint Teresa of Jesus.

Literary work

Diego Hurtado de Mendoza represents the military aristocrat and humanist of the XVI century, sorter of weapons and letters to the same height. He knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, as well as several European languages. He gathered a large library throughout his many trips throughout Europe, which he bequeathed to Felipe II and ended up in the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Along with Garcilaso de la Vega and Juan Boscán, he introduced the new themes, meters and stanzas of Italian poetry, although, unlike these authors, he leaned more towards malicious and spicy satire (the Fable of the Crab, for example), and was the first to cultivate the burlesque theme of the "sonnet of the sonnet". In any case, he did not stop using minor art and a fine melancholy shines through in his lyrical verses. His Epístola a Boscán and the mythological poem Fable of Hipómenes and Atalanta stand out.

Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, cover to his Works, Madrid 1770.

Several authors of the 17th century (the most important being the great bibliographer Tomás Tamayo, resident of Toledo, the city of youth and more loved by Don Diego), they attributed to this writer the authorship of Lazarillo de Tormes, the first modern Spanish novel, a theory that achieved some fame especially in the XIX. In March 2010, the prestigious paleographer Mercedes Agulló y Cobo discovered in an inventory the papers of Juan López de Velasco (author of the corrections to the censored joint edition of the Lazarillo and the Propalladia de Torres Naharro titled Propaladia de Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, y Lazarillo de Tormes) which alluded, according to this researcher, to the boxes of documentation belonging to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the phrase «A file of corrections made for the printing of Lazarillo and Propaladia", which led her to write the book entitled A vueltas con el autor del Lazarillo in which she postulates "a serious hypothesis about the authorship of Lazarillo, which strengthened by other facts and circumstances, it points solidly in the direction of Don Diego".

Lope de Vega praises him in his phrase «What thing excels a redondilla by don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza?».

He is also the author of a renowned history of the War of the Alpujarras based on his military and political experiences during the uprising of the Moors in 1568-1570, which was published posthumously in 1627 by Luis Tribaldos de Toledo under the title War of Granada waged by the King of Spain Don Philip II, our lord against the Moors of that kingdom, his rebels.

One of the most notable characteristics that we can extract from Mendoza's poetic production and what distinguishes him to a certain extent from other authors is his tendency to innovate and experiment, which leads him to cultivate some genres before anyone else or having copied for the first time from specific sources.

In this way, we could determine that Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was the first of the modern Spanish poets to develop the epigrams of the Greek Anthology; he was the first to compose a mythological fable in octaves and one of the first to write epistles (supposedly Horatian) in chained triplets. In addition, he was also the first to imitate Berni's burlesque poetry, among other successes.