6 - Blood wedding

Summary

In 1543, as the New Year opened, a scandal erupted in Granada involving two of the city's most powerful families, the Zafra, lords of Castril, and the Pisa, sons of a judge in the high court, who had founded a great landed estate not long before in 1535. It was a tense time in Spain as a whole, with the news of the discomfiture of the Emperor Charles V's attack on Algiers the year before still fresh in people's minds. But what occupied the gossips in the Andalusian city around the Feast of the Epiphany 1543 was the ill-starred love of Leonor, the fifteen or sixteen-year old daughter of Hernando de Zafra, and Diego, younger son of Judge Juan Rodríguez de Pisa, which had nearly caused a feud between two of the most powerful families of the time. Zafra was the grandson of the famous secretary of the Catholic kings, who had played a key role in negotiations for the surrender of Granada in 1492. A very wealthy man, with estates rumoured to be worth 4,000 ducats a year, he was married to Catalina de los Cobos, niece of Charles V's secretary Francisco de los Cobos, who had started his career in Granada under Zafra patronage and now virtually ran the domestic affairs of Castile. The Pisa were not quite so powerful, but they were growing in influence. Judge Pisa had become one of the first veinticuatros of the city in 1516, representing it in the Cortes of 1523.