Don Juan Manuel

Don Juan Manuel (Escalona, May 5, 1282-Córdoba, 1348), grandson of Fernando III and therefore a member of the royal household, was a notable writer in the Spanish language and one of the main representatives of medieval prose fiction, especially thanks to his work El conde Lucanor, a set of moralizing tales (exempla) that are intermingled with various types of literature sapiential.

He held the simultaneous titles of Lord, Duke and Prince of Villena, being Lord of Escalona, Peñafiel, Cuéllar, Elche, Cartagena, Lorca, Cifuentes, Alcocer, Salmerón, Valdeolivas and Almenara. He was also major-domo of the kings Ferdinand IV and Alfonso XI, adelantado mayor of Andalusia and adelantado mayor of Murcia.

During the last stage of the minority of his nephew, Alfonso XI of Castile, he was tutor to the king together with the infant Felipe of Castilla and the Lord of Vizcaya Juan el Tuerto.

Biography

Don Juan Manuel was born in the Castle of Escalona, located in the current province of Toledo. His father, Manuel de Castilla, was the brother of King Alfonso X the Wise and the youngest son of Ferdinand III the Saint, from whom he inherited the famous Lobera sword from Count Fernán González, which the writer would also inherit and is now kept in the cathedral. of Seville. He was orphaned by his father in 1283 and by his mother, Beatriz de Saboya, daughter of Amadeo IV of Savoy, in 1290, when he was only eight years old, for which King Sancho IV of Castile was his tutor. Don Juan Manuel inherited from his father the great lordship of Villena, and that of Escalona; Peñafiel was a donation from Sancho IV on the occasion of his birth. Later, in 1330, he received the life title of Prince of Villena thanks to Alfonso IV of Aragon.

He belonged to a royal family that was very concerned about culture and the use of Spanish (his grandfather Fernando III el Santo ordered the use of Spanish in the documents of the Chancery and founded the School of Translators of Toledo, his uncle Alfonso X the Sabio promoted it and initiated numerous projects, and his uncle Enrique de Castilla el Senador is credited with authoring the first version of Amadís de Gaula; furthermore, another uncle of his, Fadrique de Castilla, ordered the translation into Spanish the Arabic book Sendebar). He was educated as a nobleman, in arts such as horsemanship, hunting, or fencing, but his tutors made sure that he also learned Latin, history, law, and theology; There are memories of this very complete education in chapter LXVII of his Book of States. Although on some occasions he proclaimed himself a layman in his works, such a statement was conventional and obeyed the topos humilitatis or topic of humility, to share the ignorance of his public out of pedagogical courtesy; in reality he was a wise man of encyclopedic knowledge, who was fluent in Latin and Italian, although not Greek.

His religiosity was Thomistic, linked to the order of Santo Domingo. Literally, his training included reading various poems from the mester de clerecía (Book of Alexandre, Book of Apolonio...), the treatises of Raymond Lulio, the work of Alfonso X (especially the Estoria de España), various doctrinal books such as the Disciplina clericalis of Pedro Alfonso, and collections of sentences, proverbs and sayings of wise men translated from oriental languages or from Latin into Spanish (Calila e Dimna, Sendebar...), etc. His conception of his world was quite gloomy, as can be seen in the fifth part of El conde Lucanor :

Our Lord God wanted all creatures to do three things naturally or instinctively: to cry, shake and tighten their fists

He was a great fan of hunting, a discipline to which he dedicates the entire Libro de la Caça. It describes the fauna of a large part of his domains, since he knew it from his hunting experiences, especially hunting with falcons. In said book he also makes geographical descriptions of the municipalities that he mentions.

At the age of eight he lost his parents and was able to dispose of his family's vast patrimony; at the age of twelve he participated in the war to repel the attack of the Moors from Granada to Murcia. In the dynastic struggle that arose in Castile following the death of Fernando de la Cerda, the eldest son of Alfonso X the Wise, Don Juan Manuel always sided with Sancho IV, as had his father, and the King reciprocated this loyalty granting him his protection.

Atalaya Castle in Villena (Alicante)

He married three times, choosing his wives for political and economic expediency, and when he had children, he strove to match them up with royalty. The first of his wives was Isabel, daughter of Jaime II of Majorca, whom he married in 1299; however, she passed away two years later. When Sancho IV died, he breached his promise to protect the regent queen María de Molina in the minority of the future Fernando IV: he overwhelmed them with all kinds of demands and was not very faithful, seeking the alliance of Jaime II of Aragon, to for which he asked him in 1303 for the hand of his daughter Constanza, who was still six years old, for which he would remain confined in the castle of Villena for another six years, until he married her in 1311, when he turned twelve. During Alfonso XI's minority, he was co-regent of the kingdom until the monarch himself forced him to leave office.

In August 1325, Don Juan Manuel acted as Toledo's spokesman in the Cortes of Valladolid where he renounced the king's tutelage (together with Juan el Tuerto and the infante Felipe de Castilla), and where pre-eminence between Burgos was debated and Toledo, arguing that Toledo "was and is the head of Spain." King Alfonso XI of Castile resolved the conflict in an almost Solomonic way: Burgos would have the first seat and vote, while the attorneys of Toledo would occupy a place next to the King, since "I will speak for Toledo and what I order will be done." ».

In October 1325 he was appointed by Alfonso XI as adelantado mayor of Andalusia, and on August 29, 1326 he defeated the Granadans and the Merinid general Abu Saíd Uthmán ben Abi l-Ula, better known among the Castilians as Ozmín, in the battle of Guadalhorce, where some 3,000 Muslims died.

During the reign of Alfonso XI he showed signs of his restless and rebellious character, for example when he got angry because the king did not want to marry his daughter Constanza and declared war on her with the help of the king of Granada; peace having been made, he regained the post of adelantado mayor of Murcia that he had lost with that situation and, now a widower, he remarried, for his third nuptials, to Blanca Núñez de Lara; then he had another confrontation with King Alfonso XI, to whom he did not want to contribute his retinues to surround Gibraltar; after a new reconciliation, he again found a laboriously invented grievance and accused the king of not allowing his daughter Constanza to marry the infant Pedro, future king under the name of Pedro I; he recovered royal grace in time to participate in the important battle of Salado against the Benimerines and in the subsequent conquest of Algeciras.

Extension of the lordship of Villena in times of don Juan Manuel, around 1340.

Don Juan Manuel became one of the richest and most powerful men of his time: in addition to maintaining an army of a thousand knights by himself, he came to mint his own currency for a time, just as kings did, to which was arranged by a mint or coinage factory in his village of El Cañavate (Cuenca). This activity annoyed both Alfonso XI and the kings of Aragon. The surviving coins bear the legend "SANTA ORSA" and on the reverse & # 34; A DEPICTA VIA WITH & # 34;, which refers to his daughter Constanza.

The author of El conde Lucanor combined his activities as a writer and as a nobleman throughout his life, but in his environment there were criticisms of his literary vocation, since it was thought that a nobleman of such high rank and prestige should not engage in such activities. But the pleasure he found in writing and the usefulness he saw in it for others led him to continue his literary activity.

In his time the throne of Castile was occupied by two monarchs who even came to draw up plans to kill him: Fernando IV and Alfonso XI; However, the latter asked for the hand of his daughter Constanza only as a mere political maneuver to preserve his fidelity, since he later delayed the marriage and repudiated it when it was already arranged, confining the young woman in the Castillo de Toro; that the king not only disowned his daughter, but also did not return her or grant her permission to travel to Portugal and marry the infant Pedro of Portugal, future king under the name of Pedro I. These discords between king and vassal They lasted at least a decade and on at least two occasions Don Juan Manuel ran the risk of being imprisoned by the monarch; However, the king's need to ensure internal peace to be able to confront the Benimerin sultan, and the mediation of Juana Núñez, don Juan's mother-in-law by her third marriage, managed to get the king to return to don Juan Manuel his seized assets and the rest honors in 1337, putting an end to this enmity, which was finally consolidated with the authorization for Constanza's wedding, and around 1340 both allied themselves against the Muslims in the battle of Salado and seized the city of Algeciras from them after a prolonged siege.

He participated in the courts of Alcalá, where he intervened in the protocol incident that gave rise to the famous phrase, attributed to Alfonso XI, I will speak for Castilla.

After these events, the infant Don Juan Manuel left political life and retired to the Castle of Garcimuñoz, where he spent his last years devoted to literature. Proud of his works, he decided to gather them all in a single volume, which he left in the convent of San Pablo in Peñafiel so that they would not be altered by copyists.

For a long time it has been maintained that Don Juan Manuel died in the spring of 1348, on May 5 or June 13, possibly in Córdoba, according to Herrera Casado. However, other authors consider him alive in October of 1348, date in which in a document signed in Castillo de Garcimuñoz he grants Doña Elvira, widow of the one who was his governor in Cuéllar, some properties in this town, on the 12th or 14th day of said month.

Burial

Stone urn where the remains of Don Juan Manuel rest. Convent of Saint Paul of Peñafiel.

After his death in the city of Córdoba, the corpse of Don Juan Manuel was transferred to the town of Peñafiel, where he was buried in the convent of San Pablo that the writer himself had founded in 1318 with the intention that his death his remains will rest in the main chapel of the conventual church.

However, in 1955 a wooden box was found on the side of the Epistle of the church of the convent of San Pablo in which some human remains appeared, which were identified by various historians as the remains of Don Juan Manuel, Well, when cleaning the stone wall, the following inscription appeared, hidden under a thick layer of plaster, which was also recorded in past centuries by other historians:

Here lies the illustrious lord Juan Manuel, son of the very illustrious Lord Infante Don Manuel and of the very enlightened Mrs. Beatriz de Saboya, Duke of Peñafiel, Marquis de Villena, grandfather of the very powerful king and lord of Castile and Leon don Juan I, of this name. It ended in the city of Córdoba the year of the birth of Our Savior of 1362.

Fortunato Escribano de la Torre also assured that the remains of the magnate appeared in 1955 in the convent of San Pablo de Peñafiel, and currently those remains rest in a small stone chest adorned with the shield of Don Juan Manuel and placed in the same place where they appeared and under the epitaph mentioned above.

Marriages and offspring

He was married three times. His first wife was Isabel de Mallorca, daughter of King Jaime II of Mallorca, from whom he was widowed at the age of nineteen without having left any offspring from this marriage.

After being widowed, he contracted a second marriage with Constanza de Aragón, who died in Garcimuñoz Castle in 1327 and daughter of King James II of Aragon and Blanca de Anjou, with whom he had three children:

• Constanza Manuel de Villena (1323-1349). He married Peter I of Portugal, and was the mother of King Ferdinand I of Portugal.
• Beatriz Manuel de Villena, who died young.
• Manuel de Villena, who died young and according to Jaime II of Aragon for having been raised according to the criteria of the Jewish doctors.

His third wife was Blanca Núñez de Lara, daughter of Fernando de la Cerda and Juana Núñez de Lara, with whom he had two other children:

• Fernando Manuel de Villena (1332-1350), I duke de Villena and III lord of Escalona and of Peñafiel. He married Juana de Ampurias in 1346, daughter of Ramon Berenguer I of Ampurias;
• Juana Manuel de Villena (1339-1381). He married Enrique de Trastámara, the illegitimate son of King Alfonso XI of Castile and Leonor de Guzmán who would become Enrique II of Castile. His son was King John I of Castile. It was III duchess of Villena and V Sra de Escalona and Peñafiel from 1360 to 1366. But the lordship of Villena was handed over to Don Alfonso de Aragón who had served Enrique de Trastamara during the fratricidal war.

Don Juan Manuel also had two illegitimate children with Inés de Castañeda, daughter of Diego Gómez de Castañeda, 1st Lord of Las Hormazas, and Juana de Guzmán:

• Sancho Manuel de Villena (1320-1347), head of Murcia, alcaide de Lorca, Mister of Carcelén and Montealegre and rich man of Castile.
• Enrique Manuel de Villena (1337-Peñafiel, 1390). He accompanied his sister to Portugal and married Beatriz de Sousa. It was the I count of Seia, I lord of Cascais, IV lord of Montealegre, III of Belmonte and Meneses.

His descendants would end up owning various titles of nobility, such as the County of Vía Manuel, the Marquisate of Rafal or the Duchy of Arévalo del Rey, among others.

Literature

Incipit of Book of the three reasons. MSS/6376 of the Spanish National Library, fob. 25r.

Eight works by Don Juan Manuel have been preserved, and it is also known that five have been lost. The preserved works are the following:

• Abbreviated chroniclebefore 1325.
• Book of huntingbetween 1325 and 1326.
• Book of the cavallero et del escuderobetween 1326 and 1328.
• Book of states1330.
• Book of Count Lucanor1335.
• Treaty of the Assumption of the Virgin Maryafter 1335.
• Infinite bookbetween 1336 and 1337.
• Book of the three reasonsBefore called Book of arms1345.

Add, also, although it was not conceived as an independent work, the set of his letters, collected as Epistolario by Andrés Giménez Soler and covering from 1298 to 1347.

Conventionally, the production of Don Juan Manuel is classified into three stages:

• In a first stage, his work is clearly influenced by the works produced by the collective work carried out by his uncle Alfonso X. For example, the abbreviated Chronicle is precisely a summary of the Estoria de España. Therefore, don Juan Manuel at this stage follows the generic alphonsis models: historiography, kinegetic affairs, legal provisions on cavalry; etc.

In the following stages, his creation becomes more personal, in an attempt to use it as a claim to the personal and social status that his problems with the king have undermined. However, this political and historical function diminishes over time and ends up being almost fully replaced by his desire for literary authorship, regardless of other considerations.

• With him Book of the cavallero et del escudero, a second stage begins, in which didactism, almost always expressed through a dialogueal structure, of its works is the most remarkable feature. Their most recognized works, among them, correspond to this phase. Count Lucanor.
• Finally, since 1337 his didactism was expressed with a different orientation, leaving excessively exemplary attitudes aside.

In all these works the predominant function is the didactic function. In this sense, Don Juan Manuel considers himself above all an educator: he had a great reference in his uncle Alfonso X and, determined to follow in his footsteps, he cultivated a formative literature in Spanish, which was a rarity at that time when all educated writers preferred Latin.

In the XIV century, don Juan Manuel decided to write books in the vernacular with the aim of facilitating their access to a greater number of readers. He almost exclusively directed his literature towards the people of the nobility.

In addition to spreading human knowledge, he used his work to portray himself in many cases. In general, his literature is a reflection of his character, his ambitions and his beliefs (he wrote in favor of spreading religion, as is evident in Treatise on the Assumption, exaltation of the Virgin, in which don Juan Manuel defends the dogma of the Immaculate Conception). He had an ideal style that he tried to stick to: clarity, accuracy, conciseness.

Works

His work, fundamentally didactic and narrative in nature, is generally driven by a great concern about the proper training in body, soul and intelligence of a perfect medieval knight, and is generally classified under the usual denomination of & #34;education of princes"; It consists of small booklets (Abridged Chronicle, Book of Hunting, Book of the Three Reasons, Treatise on the Assumption of the Virgin María and the Libro infinido or Book of punishments and advice to her son Don Fernando) and other works of more extensive ambition for which he is remembered Fundamentally, the Book of the Knight and the Squire, the Book of States and the Book of Patronio or Count Lucanor.

The Book of the Knight and the Squire has been transmitted to us with a large textual gap inside; tells the story of a young squire aspiring to be a courtier who has to go to a court summoned by the king and who receives the most diverse teachings in this regard from a hermit who has been a knight. He attends some fairs and returns to the hermitage to receive new teachings. The old ex-knight dies and his young disciple buries him. It is inspired by similar works by Raymond Lulio and by an unknown work by the Roman writer Vegetius.

The Book of States offers a glimpse of what an ideal society should look like in the XIV, although it is also a narrative with a didactic purpose (education of a prince) inspired by the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, a Christianized form in which the Buddha legend, although it seems that he used a version of this legend different from the one attributed to San Juan Damascene.

Incipit of Conde Lucanor. Manuscript of the centuryXIV-XV. Symbol: MSS/6376 of the National Library of Spain, foll. 126v.

His masterpiece is considered, however, the Libro de Patronio or Conde Lucanor, completed in 1335, a book consisting of some fifty short stories (actually, apologists, fables, allegories and even little novels) preceded by a prologue and followed by four brief treatises in prose in which a preliminary form of conceptism is tested, since, according to the author himself, he was required to use a less flat and explicit style to address people of higher education and pack more meaning into fewer words. But not only because of this is it a work of strange originality, but also because of the unheard-of variety of its sources (from oral accounts of his Jewish and Moorish servants to his own personal experience, the Disciplina clericalis of the Spanish converted Jew Pedro Alfonso and multiple and varied repertoires of moral short stories used for ecclesiastical sermons) and for being part of the first European collection of novels (Giovanni Boccaccio's Decamerone was composed from 1348). Likewise, an originality can be appreciated in its literary and stylistic treatment, which does not exclude shrewd reasoning about the multifaceted human nature from the first narrative. The thematic variety is vast, as is the origin of the sources. A large part of the work was written in Molina Seca, today Molina de Segura, fortress next to the capital Murcia and its north gate, a city with which he was at odds with the Fajardo family.

The structure of the stories, however, reflects orderliness and medieval hierarchy. In the first place, a young nobleman, Lucanor, exposes in an abstract tone a problem that requires prompt resolution from his old adviser and tutor Patronio; later, he tells him an apologist from which the young man extracts the solution to his conflict, which he applies and works out well for him; then Don Juan Manuel introduces some verses (of very interesting and varied metrics for the time) that condense the moral and finally an estoria or drawn vignette alluding to the exposed problem is exposed, drawings that unfortunately are not preserved and therefore they do not appear in editions of the work. This rigorous expository order responds to a clearly didactic intention, which goes from the most abstract to the most concrete, but where the art and genius of Don Juan Manuel really appears is in the internal structure of the merely narrative passages that constitute the stories and in the psychological penetration of the ultimate motives that move the characters.

The Book of the Three Reasons, formerly known as the Book of Weapons, written between 1342 and 1345, is the work of the infante most valued by current critics after El Conde Lucanor for its dissident interpretation of history, for being based on the author's personal experiences and for the quality of its prose. It is a short work that recreates historical episodes with a high fiction component. In this booklet Don Juan Manuel owns all his literary skills and resources.

Style

Don Juan Manuel's style is characterized by selection, sobriety and precision, and by a full awareness of literary artistic authorship. He defines it himself this way:

Know that all the reasons are said for very good words and for the most fervent latines that I never heard in a book that was fed in romance; and having declaredly fulfilled the reason that means, put it in the least words that can be.

Don Juan Manuel, Book of states.