‘¿Rei otro sobre mí?’: The Exile of the True King in Thirteenth-Century Castilian Literature

Summary

Introduction

The dramatic power of the contrast between the true and rightful king and the usurper who exiles him runs through many works of medieval Castilian literature. That power derives from the theme’s part in Biblical narrative, in folklore, and in the political life of the Middle Ages. It fits into a wide tradition of the divided nature of monarchy, which manifests itself in diverse ways. The division may be conceptual, most notably in the idea of the king’s two bodies – one physical and mortal, the other political and continuous – studied by Ernst Kantorowicz (1957). It may flow from the incompatibility between two kinds of authority; the obvious case in the Middle Ages is the recurring tension between sacred and secular authority, the pope’s against the king’s, a tension that is heightened because both claimed to derive their power from God (this is clearly seen in the title of Holy Roman Emperor), and that makes Thomas Becket its most notable victim. Another kind of division may be embodied in the machinery of state, when the nominal power is vested in the king, the real power in a palace official: the Mayors of the Palace and the Merovingian kings in eighth-century France (a duality that ended when the Mayors of the Palace took power), or the Shoguns and the emperors in Japan from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century (here the duality reached the opposite conclusion when the Emperor retook power). It was just such a duality that, the nobles alleged, threatened the social fabric of Juan II’s Castile when much of the real power was exercised by Álvaro de Luna, ‘the greatest man uncrowned’. Luna’s fall, brilliantly analysed by Nicholas Round (1986), prevented the division ofpower from being institutionalized, but although Santillana and his allies probably knew nothing of Mayors of the Palace, and could not have foreseen the Shoguns, it was such an institutionalization that they feared. Finally, the crown could be claimed by two members of a dynasty, one relying on primogeniture or legitimate birth, the other on assertions of incapacity or monstrous conduct by the monarch, assertions accompanied by powerful support within the ruling elite.