Plenty of Fish in the Sea: The Satires of Juvenal in a Late Fifteenth-Century Analysis of Spanish Court Education

Abstract

In 1492, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, the future author of “De Orbe Novo,” sent a letter to Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, the primate of Spain, describing the state of Spanish education as Martyr took up a post as court tutor. This study argues that Martyr's letter was a satire that relied upon a close intertextual relationship with Juvenal's “Satires.” This framework allowed Martyr to offer layered analyses of Spanish Latinity, the dynamics between Spanish and Italian humanists, patronage, and the role of arms and letters in noble life. Martyr's letter revealed a complex, and sometimes contradictory, assessment of court education, as well as an active reception of Juvenal.

INTRODUCTION

Navigating the treacherous waters of late fifteenth-century Spanish court life demanded careful maneuvering, the approval of powerful patrons, and an agile sense of humor, as Peter Martyr d'Anghiera (ca. 1457–1526) demonstrated in the spring of 1492. In April of that year, Martyr, the future author of De Orbe Novo (On the New World, first full edition 1530), one of the first European chronicles of the Americas, wrote a letter to Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza (1428–95), the primate of Spain and uncle of Íñigo López de Mendoza (1442–1515), the second Count of Tendilla and one of Martyr's main patrons. In this letter, Martyr describes his entrance into the Spanish courts as a tutor to young nobles. He outlines the difficulties of teaching Spanish youth, the importance of proper support in doing so, and the tension between arms and letters that he noted in his charges.¹

Rather than a direct expression of Martyr's thoughts, however, this piece was an epistolary satire that drew upon a complex intertextual relationship with the Satires of Juvenal to simultaneously critique the court and the state of Spanish learning and solidify Martyr's position within both. Situating his letter as a satire enabled Martyr to present a wide-ranging commentary on the patronage of the powerful Mendoza family, the ongoing jostling of arms and letters in contemporary discourse, and the internal tensions between virtue and ambition that guided the actions of both the court and the individual within it. Martyr's 1492 letter to Cardinal Mendoza provides a microcosmic look at the intellectual and social environs of an Italian humanist in the Spanish courts, as well as an example of a dynamic late fifteenth-century reception of Juvenal.

Martyr arrived in Spain in 1487, during a period of active expansion for Spanish court education. Queen Isabel (1451–1504), who was herself said to pursue Latin learning with tutors including Beatriz Galindo, “La Latina,” founded multiple schools and provided for the education of men and women by seeking Spanish and Italian tutors.² Martyr had a resume that fit Isabel's criteria. Having been educated in Lombardy and Rome, Martyr's early employment included tutoring Italian bishops in Latin and teaching in the town of Rieti. The results of Martyr's Italian teaching positions were mixed. His early students formed some of the longer-lasting connections in his letter network, and they were among the first recipients of his reports on transatlantic voyages.³ In Rieti, however, his influence was more fleeting: Martyr was first passed over for the position of preceptor publicus in 1481, held the post in 1482, and was then voted out in 1483, despite positive reviews of his teaching, in favor of another teacher who would accept a simpler salary structure.⁴

Despite this early failure to maintain a government-funded teaching post, or perhaps because of it, teaching at court still held an allure. Obtaining a position of court tutor was often seen as a well-compensated avenue to prestige.⁵ Accordingly, Martyr used his work as a teacher in Spain as a springboard for his ambitious career trajectory. Martyr's growing reputation and court connections led to a position as ambassador to Venice and Egypt from 1501 to 1502, his account of which was published in 1511 as the Legatio Babylonica (The Babylonian embassy), and later roles on the Royal Council and the Consejo de Indias.⁶ These appointments, his frequent presence in the courts, and the network of contacts that he steadily built throughout his time in Spain provided Martyr with a high level of access to information regarding Spain's activities overseas, which Martyr, in turn, used to compose the eight decades of De Orbe Novo.⁷

In addition to De Orbe Novo, the Legatio Babylonica, and other works (including poetry), Martyr's publications included the Opus Epistolarum (Book of letters), a collection of over eight hundred letters published posthumously, in 1530. Dated from 1488 to 1525, the collection displays Martyr's wide correspondence with recipients including nobles, scholars, popes, and rulers. Although the Opus Epistolarum must be analyzed carefully due to issues with backdated letters and potential interventions by someone other than Martyr, it remains an invaluable resource for information on Martyr's life, his social network, and a variety of topics connected to early modern Italy, Spain, and the Americas.⁸ The early letters discussed here, for example, demonstrate the manner in which Martyr employed his epistolary energies toward navigating his new social sphere and establishing himself following his arrival in Spain.

Although he received an invitation from Isabel to teach in 1488, Martyr diverged from his path as an educator by taking up arms and travelling with the Spanish monarchs in their wars against the Nasrid kingdom of Granada.⁹ Even as he cited Isabel as a particular subject of his loyalty and service during this period, Martyr did not neglect his other patrons, the Mendoza family, who had facilitated his 1487 arrival in Spain as the companion of the Count of Tendilla.¹⁰ Between 1488 and 1492, Martyr sent a series of letters to multiple members of the family, including the Count of Tendilla; Gabriel de Mendoza, “a relative of the Count”; Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (d.1502), eventual archbishop of Seville and brother of the count; and Cardinal Mendoza.¹¹ Cardinal Mendoza, as Martyr described in a letter from May 1488, had offered the newly arrived Italian his protection and aid, and he received in exchange Martyr's professions of devotion.¹²

Martyr also established an early correspondence with Diego de Muros (d. 1525), Cardinal Mendoza's secretary and the eventual bishop of Mondoñedo and Oviedo.¹³ Martyr's initial letters to de Muros simultaneously expressed delight in the secretary's professions of interest in him—at the direction of Cardinal Mendoza—and dismay, based upon a persona of false humility, that Martyr had attracted such attention when, as he described it, he had so little to offer, having neither status in Spain nor wealth, nor as much learning as his friends proclaimed him to have.¹⁴ Such professions of humility and active outreach to Cardinal Mendoza, his family, and his inner circle paid off. When the war ended in early 1492, and Martyr found himself growing bored in his ecclesiastical post as canon of Granada, he complained to the cardinal that he desired a greater sea in which to swim.¹⁵ Around the same time, he was recalled to court as a teacher.

As he prepared to rejoin the queen's court in May, Martyr began teaching young nobles in his current city, Granada, and contemplated the nature of his looming assignment. In early April, he wrote a letter to Cardinal Mendoza that addressed a number of aspects related to teaching and the courts and shaped them into a play upon Juvenalian satire that explored some of the key social and intellectual concerns of his day, particularly those of an Italian making his way through the Spanish courts. See appendix 1 for the English translation of this letter and appendix 2 for a Latin transcription.

PISCINE VIRTUE

As Martyr's first sentence makes clear, the main theme of letter 102 is virtue. This sentence also reveals that the letter will not be an open exploration of virtue in a broad philosophical sense, nor will it provide forthright answers as to how virtue can be achieved. Instead, by opening with a statement about his conscious attempts to cover up the lack of virtue inherent in his decision to teach in the Spanish courts, Martyr emphasizes both the satirical intent of the letter and the fact that any explorations or answers related to virtue will emerge from interpreting that satire. Martyr's cover-up begins in his tricky establishment of a baseline definition of virtue: “It is clear that refusing to be content with the mastery of ten lizards in a pleasant, secluded place is to be drawn into error, seeing that our Aquino [Juvenal] sings that it is something of worth to be content with the mastery of one.” This line references Juvenal's Satire 3—“It's something, wherever you are, however remote, to make yourself the master of a single lizard”—but expands upon Juvenal's definition of a virtuous simple life.¹⁶ Rather than Juvenal's single lizard, or even two or three, seeking beyond ten lizards is where virtue begins to crumble, Martyr argues. This implies that ambition and the acquisition of more accomplishments or property are not inherently unvirtuous, but that eventually there will be some limit to how far the virtues of ambition can be stretched.

Martyr then shifts his metaphors from lizards to fish in order to dive deeper into the question of the limits of virtuous ambition. Why gather more fish on the larger oceans if a fisherman can get enough for himself by fishing a safer river? he wonders. “So that he may make himself useful to men by seeking rhombuses and the crests of red mullets?” the fisherman asks. These two fish, as a savvy early modern reader would recall, are the foci of Juvenal's Satire 4. In this Satire, Juvenal mocks the purchase of a mullet by a foreigner, Crispinus, who paid an exorbitant amount for the fish and bought it only for himself.¹⁷ Maintaining this piscine theme, Juvenal then presents a pseudo-epic in which a fisherman catches a massive Adriatic rhombus (or turbot) in his nets. According to the interpretation that “anything in the entire ocean that is rare and fine belongs to the imperial treasury, wherever it swims,” the rhombus is rushed to the palace of Emperor Domitian.¹⁸ Astounded by the rhombus's size, Domitian gathers all of his counselors, and they discuss what the rhombus might mean as an omen and how to prepare it to be eaten. Satire 4 concludes with Juvenal's interjected wish that Domitian had called such councils for more important matters.¹⁹

By continuing his use of Juvenal and moving from Satire 3 to Satire 4, Martyr draws a complex net of interpretations into his letter. Osman Umurhan argues that Juvenal's use of fish critiques luxurious appetites that pushed geographical and societal limits in a manner that eroded Roman identity.²⁰ Crispinus was a key example of this, as a foreigner who “achieve[d] economic and social status reserved for the Roman citizen,” as demonstrated in his purchase of a mullet.²¹ In Roman culture and literature, mullets were symbols of excess. Wealthy Romans paid high amounts for the fish, and their prices were often noted critically in the works of Pliny, Horace, Martial, and Seneca, in addition to Juvenal.²² As “a pure manifestation of luxury,” mullets were prized for their size, their rarity, and the location where they were caught.²³ The idea of excess also applies to Juvenal's employment of the rhombus. Umurhan highlights how Juvenal's description of the massive rhombus—“physically bloated and of foreign origin”—represents the overreach of Domitian's ideas of rightful dominion in his claim of a rhombus from the Mediterranean as if it came from his own fishpond and exemplifies the degradation of Roman institutions implicit in Domitian's use of a military and civic council to discuss how to cook a fish.²⁴ Along these lines, Susanna Braund interprets Satire 4 as a treatment of “the misuse of power and the complicity of those surrounding the source of power.”²⁵

Martyr's application of Satire 4 and its themes of excess, civic duty, and foreignness to his consideration of virtue center on another key question: that of identity. Martyr does not position himself as a single figure within his aquatic reference; instead, he shifts his persona throughout the passage. In one sense, Martyr could be identified as the fisherman, questioning the value of extending himself beyond safer and more familiar waters—the courts of Granada or Italy itself, perhaps—to enter the choppier social seas of the royal court. Like the fisherman, Martyr ultimately seems tempted by the argument that entering the sea might make him “useful to men” through the mullets of his knowledge. At the same time, Martyr appears to be the rhombus or red mullet caught on the rhetorical hook—namely, the arguments that Martyr should teach in the courts—dangled before him by Cardinal Mendoza. The Count of Tendilla and Cardinal Mendoza did, after all, “hook” Martyr in the seas of Mediterranean learning (i.e., Italy) and bring him to Spain to feed the intellectual appetites of its nobles. Finally, although Crispinus himself is not directly invoked in Martyr's Satire 4 reference, to a knowledgeable reader he is an obvious counterpart to Martyr's own status as a foreigner seeking legitimacy and an important role in Spanish society, and one perhaps made all the more conspicuous through his absence.

The ambiguity of Martyr's piscine metaphor mirrors the ambiguity of his status as an Italian in the Spanish courts at a time when tensions existed over the employment of Italian intellectuals versus Spanish intellectuals and over the quality of their respective Latinity. A well-cited microcosm of these tensions can be found in the relationship between Martyr, his fellow Italian humanist and court tutor, Lucio Marineo Siculo (d. 1533), and the noted Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija (d. 1522), who had also spent time in Italy. All three men moved within intellectual, political, and humanist spheres, and the dynamics between them and their respective approaches to teaching and to the Latin language itself provide useful background for parsing Martyr's approach to foreignness and identity in letter 102.

Nebrija and Marineo, both of whom taught in Salamanca and wrote grammars and histories, took very different stances on the question of Spanish versus Italian Latinity. Nebrija dedicated a significant portion of his work to combatting what he saw as the barbarity of linguistic errors that he believed had overtaken Latin and to putting forth a Spanish Latinity that would, in his view, overcome both Italian attacks on Spanish learning and the errors that Italian scholars perpetuated in their own Latin works.²⁶ While Marineo initially appeared to have aided Nebrija in his reforms—one of his students described how Marineo worked in Salamanca with Nebrija in order to improve the study of Latin because “over the course of many centuries the Latin language had been corrupted in Spain and had deteriorated into barbarism”—he later openly asserted his preference for Italian Latin and lamented that contact with Spanish Latin had negatively impacted his own writing.²⁷ Their personal relationship deteriorated to the point of personal recriminations by 1488, and, as Erika Rummel notes, “professional jealousies” both contributed to this break and were further reflected in their competition over a chair in rhetoric at Salamanca, which ultimately went to Nebrija.²⁸

Martyr sought to cultivate relationships with both men and generally seemed to seek a middle path between the two with regard to their stances on Latin learning.²⁹ In “De Barbaria fugata” (On the flight of Barbary), a poem first published in 1498, Martyr appears to support Nebrija's portrayal of himself as a linguistic reformer by depicting him as a heroic figure driving Barbaria, the anthropomorphized barbarism of poor Latin, out of Spain.³⁰ Later in his life, Martyr took a slightly more Marineo-like position by noting that his own Latin had been altered by his time living in Spain, but, unlike Marineo, he used this acknowledgement not as an indictment of Spanish Latinity, per se, but as part of a defense against those who might critique the quality of his writing.³¹

Additionally, Martyr's mediation between Marineo and Nebrija during their 1488 period of conflict demonstrated Martyr's awareness that one's status in Spanish society was of crucial importance in determining what should and should not be expressed openly. In an oft-quoted letter, Martyr responds to Marineo, who had complained about Nebrija's alleged insults against him, that it is in Marineo's best interest to set aside his pride and to forgive and forget.³² Following a series of metaphors demonstrating that smaller and weaker actors—a child, a bee, a glass—often fail when facing larger obstacles, Martyr summarizes Nebrija's and Marineo's respective chances for positive outcomes by telling Marineo that “he is a native, you a foreigner.”³³ Martyr, having only recently arrived in Spain, already appeared to consider the tenuous status that an Italian in Spain might hold, even one who, like Marineo, had already acquired academic appointments and built up Spanish connections.³⁴

The tensions over both Italian teachers and the quality of their teaching seen in the dynamics between Nebrija, Marineo, and Martyr were reflected in the complex space that Italian intellectuals occupied in the Spanish courts. While Italian humanists were actively pursued by the courts not only as tutors but also as royal propagandists,³⁵ their individual fortunes were not assured. Some, such as Antonio (d. 1488) and Alessandro Geraldino (d. 1525), acquired positions as royal tutors and gained multiple honors, while others had to scramble for students.³⁶ Nebrija himself later declared that Spanish history should not be written by non-Spaniards, particularly Italians.³⁷ In his will, King Fernando (1452–1516), to whose service Martyr would more closely attend in later years, instructed Carlos V (1500–58) not to put foreigners on royal councils.³⁸ Yet Martyr and Nebrija maintained a close working relationship, with Nebrija editing several of Martyr's works for publication, and Martyr successfully obtained positions on the Royal Council and the Consejo de Indias. Rojinsky argues, regarding Nebrija's editing of Martyr's work concurrently with his condemnation of foreign historians, that “Castilian attitudes towards Italian humanism were hence not apparently exempt from contradiction,” and the same could be said for attitudes toward Italian humanists themselves as they moved through the Spanish courts.³⁹

For Martyr to enter the Spanish royal courts as a tutor in 1492 was therefore to step into an environment that was and would continue to be a nebulous space for an Italian humanist. The shifting identities that open letter 102 allow Martyr to explore how he might portray the role he would play in the courts and how that role might reflect upon those around him. By choosing Satire 4 as his framing device for the beginning of the letter, Martyr deliberately engages with its themes of foreignness and luxury. Yet he omits Crispinus, perhaps the most obvious focal point for those themes in the Satire. Whether this omission was a conscious one and whether Crispinus was in the back of Martyr's mind as he composed letter 102 are impossible questions to answer. However, two readings of Crispinus's absence may offer hints as to an interpretation. On the one hand, leaving out Crispinus from the opening section of the letter could be read as a defensive act, an attempt to dodge the possibility that the Spanish might accuse Martyr of being another Crispinus by partaking in the luxuries of a court in a land not his own and not sufficiently sharing his gains. On the other hand, if the omission of Crispinus is read through a more Juvenalian satirical-aggressive lens, Martyr's choice to draw upon Satire 4 while cutting out Crispinus acquires a semi-challenging air, as if Martyr was well aware that a reader might naturally think of the foreigner as a comparison point, but that the author did not deign to invoke Crispinus as an apt comparison for himself.

Martyr's more overt use of the fisherman and the fish as bases for his shifting identity within the passage allows him to position himself in a passive role, with Cardinal Mendoza as the figure who is in a position to share his wealth (i.e., Martyr). Martyr asserts that it is Cardinal Mendoza who sought to lure Martyr “with this bait on this hook,” making Martyr simultaneously the fisherman who might be lured to fish more widely and the baited fish itself. By taking up these passive roles, Martyr is not the one pushing the boundaries of luxury and identity, which could create issues related to his foreignness; rather, it is the powerful Mendoza family who are responsible for doing so. With the Mendozas as the responsible party, Martyr's entrance into the courts is portrayed as an act of civic duty, that he might fish for the benefit of “all people, in their rank.” Such duty, in keeping with the opening sentence of the letter, is not a reward in itself but an “honest covering,” as it renders the one performing that duty deserving of “more as a due reward.” Reflecting the manner in which he alters the parameters of virtuous ambition seen in Juvenal's lizard metaphor, Martyr positions the seeking of more rewards as virtuous if it arises from the passive acceptance of an outside offer. In this framing, Martyr is not a foreigner seeking achievements through his own agency but, instead, a hooked fish or a noble fisherman, either being offered up to the courts or being driven by others to offer whatever he can provide.

These dual identities position Martyr as a contradictorily ambitious innocent who is drawn against his obviously feigned protestations to an environment that offers the potential of a great reward.⁴⁰ Martyr provides a fuller presentation of this passivity in an earlier letter from 1492, which offers further context for the social risks embedded in his decision to join the courts or, at the very least, for the way in which he portrays those risks to others (the Latin transcription for this letter can be found in appendix 3):

I know and I have learned through long experience that the royal courts, most filled with immoderate troubles, are vexed as if by storms and constant gales. I know all the courtiers, that everything can be changed at any moment, that nothing remains long in the same state, just like on the Wheel of Fortune, as the poets say. I see that the favors of the Monarchs, which men pursue above all else, are hollow and more changeable than the wind. . . .  Nevertheless, I aim for the Court, although it is a camp of troubles, parched of good things (whatever good things exist), which all faults surround in a combined troop, to which, out of envy, fear and pain are constant companions. If any joy should appear among the courts, it is brief, feigned, and is drunk up mixed with bile. . . . But poor me; nevertheless I am dragged off to the Court. I am called by friends, I admit. You should not believe that the ordinary friendship of men is of such great size that anyone would plunge themselves into an obvious chasm. We are all spurred on by a certain secret inevitability of fate, as I see it. Madness, numbness, stupidity, and dizziness swirl around us. We are deceived, we are entangled, we perish just like foolish small birds who pursue horned owls and night owls.⁴¹

In this letter, the royal courts are a place of constantly shifting circumstances, with excesses so great that they cross back from repulsiveness to something almost alluring. Drawing upon tropes of the court as a place of vice and inconsistency, Martyr establishes himself as passive figure whose entrance into the courts could only have come about through external request.⁴² As a “foolish small bird” in this letter or a sustenance-providing fish or fisherman in letter 102, Martyr cloaks his pursuits of rewards in the virtue of providing benefit to others at their behest, and therefore avoids the critiques that might be aimed at him, a foreigner, as another Crispinus.

SATIRE, SELF, SUPPORT

Martyr's use of the mutable identities of fisherman and fish established his satirical persona in letter 102, as well as the manner in which he interacted with his Roman textual model. Juvenal's Satires have been argued to demonstrate a “dual personality” that allowed him to move between identities as someone inside the system and an observer of it, to be both villain and victim, and to create a constant sense of uncertainty as arguments were simultaneously made and undermined.⁴³ The overall effect, Braund argues, is one of “a tension between his first person approach, which tends to draw the audience into sympathy with the opinions expressed, and the audience's realization that the things they are assenting to are morally dubious or even reprehensible.”⁴⁴ Martyr's multiple personas and the quick shifts between them indicate that Martyr as writer and Martyr as textual figure are not necessarily one and the same.⁴⁵

Adding to this ambiguity between Martyr as writer and Martyr as textual figure was the fact that Martyr did not simply draw upon the Satires as reference points but, instead, turned Juvenal's satirical methodology back upon the Satires. Martyr begins letter 102 by expanding Juvenal's definition of virtue and simple contentment from one lizard to ten, only to muddle even this definition through a series of quick persona shifts that ultimately put the reader in a position to agree with the argument of Cardinal Mendoza (as a character within the letter) that joining the royal courts and seeking rewards there is more virtuous than seeking simplicity. In doing so, Martyr offers a miniature satire of the Satires. Juvenal is not presented as an untouchable reference point but as a text that itself is to be turned upside down. Martyr also brings his own approach to the tone of his critiques by modifying Juvenal's persona of “an angry young man,” whose words drip with disdain and vitriol, to something more jocular.⁴⁶ This textual playfulness, as will be discussed later, both drew in Martyr's noble readers and allowed him to express ideas he might not have been able to express otherwise.

Martyr's choice of Juvenal as his main framework for letter 102 not only reflects the utility of the text itself for his arguments but also acts as a canny bit of self-promotion. First, Martyr's active reworking of the Satires demonstrates his humanist bonafides. Juvenal received a great deal of attention in various circles throughout the fifteenth century. His work was a regular part of school curricula, and Pope Pius II (1405–64), with whom the Mendoza family had personal contact, proclaimed Juvenal to be “a poet of high genius.”⁴⁷ Martyr himself would have encountered the scholarly and popular atmosphere surrounding Juvenal during his time in Rome in the 1470s. During this period, a number of lectures on Juvenal were held—although it cannot be said for certain whether Martyr was present at them—and the fierce rivalries that broke out among Italian humanists over their interpretations contributed to an active interest in the Satires.⁴⁸ Humanists published commentaries on Juvenal as one method of displaying their learned credentials, and although this slowed around 1475 and Juvenal faded a bit from more formal analysis, his work remained a core piece of humanist education.⁴⁹

Second, Martyr's use of Juvenal in letter 102 drew attention to one of the highlights of his resume, which was specifically connected to his previous correspondence with the Mendozas. In September 1488, Martyr accepted an invitation to lecture in Salamanca. Besides renewing his acquaintance with Marineo—although unfortunately missing Nebrija, who was out of the city—Martyr described the highlight of his visit as the rapturous reception of his explication of Juvenal's Satire 2.⁵⁰ In a letter addressed to the Count of Tendilla, Martyr describes how the crowd that gathered to hear his lecture was so great that “innumerable shoes and not a few caps were lost.”⁵¹ Martyr pretends that his lecture was extemporaneous, although he did indeed know in advance that he would be lecturing on Juvenal.⁵² When he asked for the audience to suggest a topic so that he might lecture quid velint (about what they want), Marineo called out, “The second Satire of Juvenal.” Martyr gave his lecture, speaking for about an hour, and afterward he was carried to his home by a wave of companions “just like a victor from Olympus.”⁵³

This letter to the Count of Tendilla established Martyr's image as an expert on Juvenal, as well as a bit of a humorist when it came to corresponding with the Mendozas. Martyr's use of recognizable textual references to underline his points in this 1488 letter demonstrate his facility with Roman satire. To summarize the lecture, Martyr quotes from Juvenal's Satire 2: “I send them to collect snow beyond the Sarmatas.”⁵⁴ In another textual borrowing, this time from Persius, Martyr mocks his own trumpeting of success by instructing Tendilla not to tell anyone of his boasting and how “today I am a white-robed flatterer.”⁵⁵ This tone of mockery also extends to others, as Martyr includes a joke at the expense of Pedro Ponce, vice-scholastico of the Universidad de Salamanca. Martyr describes how Ponce had been so worried about Martyr's (sham) plan to deliver his lecture extemporaneously that even after it had successfully concluded, he was still not able to calm himself. Martyr, who did not let Ponce in on the joke after his lecture, expresses his deep amusement to Tendilla: “It is the reward of this labor, Illustrious Count, to see your Ponteus still trembling although he rejoices.”⁵⁶

Taken together, this letter from 1488 and letter 102 demonstrate Martyr's development of the strategy he used to appeal to his patron family. The tone of humor, even mockery, that Martyr took in 1488 when writing to Tendilla and its continuation into the satire of letter 102, indicated a belief that appealing to the erudite qualities of the Mendozas, which included “charm, courage, boundless pride, lively intelligence, sparkling wit, shrewdness, and prudence,” would be effective.⁵⁷ Embedding references to multiple Satires and other classical authors in his letters drew attention to both Martyr's own expertise on the texts and his expectation that the Mendozas would recognize them. Finally, the 1488 letter to Tendilla closes with a tongue-in-cheek claim that Martyr has become so successful through his lecture that Tendilla owes him great praise and a reception befitting a Triumph if he wants to continue to benefit from Martyr's company. Using Juvenal as his framework in letter 102 therefore recalls an internal history of the Mendozas’ successful patronage of Martyr, continues his history of requesting things from them, and demonstrates his hope for an ongoing relationship that might be mutually beneficial.

Martyr emphasizes the importance of such patronage when it comes to his career as a court tutor in the next section of letter 102 by highlighting the difficulties of his new role. The route to rendering himself “useful to men” and thereby achieving rewards and virtue is via teaching the nobles, “who, undistinguished and far from every cultivation of virtue, spend their life entangled in empty loves, to the greatest annoyance of the Queen.” While it would ultimately be worth the effort, as Isabel herself would provide compensation in the form of “rewards, whatever kinds will be fitting,” this is not an easy path. Martyr notes that the young nobles are in “the unruly years of a boisterous time of life, especially of those who, brought up liberally and shamelessly, reluctantly tolerate obeying what they were least accustomed to and changing their way of life,” and they occupy “a vast and broad chasm” between themselves and the hallowed students of the equally hallowed teachers of antiquity.

To teach in such conditions is “harsh and tiresome,” Martyr argues. This marks a decay from the idealized pedagogical dynamics of the past, as Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato had taught students who “held their teachers in the place of parents.” Martyr here again mirrors Juvenal in the form of his complaint by drawing upon Satire 7. In Satire 7, Juvenal described how, whereas in the past “they thought that the teacher should have the role of a revered parent,” Roman students do not listen to their teachers.⁵⁸ The teacher is still expected to “shape their tender characters as if he were moulding a face from wax with his thumb,” but he does so with boisterous students and for too little money.⁵⁹ Instead, the teachers themselves are under the thumb not only of their own students but also of the parents who employ them and demand great things while restricting payment.⁶⁰

Martyr's use of Satire 7 draws upon Juvenal's discussion of what a patron owes to a client and how this is fulfilled or, more often, not fulfilled by the patron.⁶¹ In contrast to Juvenal's stingy, negligent patrons, Martyr emphasizes that the queen and Cardinal Mendoza had promised him suitable remonstration of “whatever kinds will be fitting.” This emphasis does two things. First, it pressures his patrons to fulfill their promise by setting it in writing and recalling a classical example of the negative figures they would come to mimic if they did not properly reward Martyr for his teaching. Surely Isabel and Mendoza would want to be better than the bad patrons seen throughout Juvenal, letter 102 implies.

Second, just as Martyr's 1488 letter to the Count of Tendilla about his lecture on Juvenal suggests that his success reflects well both upon Martyr and upon Tendilla as his patron, letter 102 sets up a reciprocal relationship in which Martyr's quality as a teacher calls for proper recompense, receiving such rewards reasserts his quality as a teacher, and the act of paying such a deserving educator reflects well upon the queen, the cardinal, and Martyr himself. This constitutes another example of Martyr's use of Juvenal as a foil, as well as a model. As Braund argues, “by undermining the value of their skills and expertise, Juvenal hints that these intellectuals [teachers, historians, etc.] may not deserve patronage.”⁶² By highlighting how he had been promised appropriate payment, Martyr demonstrates how he is set apart from the potentially undeserving. In recognizing Martyr's worth, Mendoza, as the “purest Patron of all things that you judge to be good,” and Isabel, as “the patroness of all virtue,” demonstrate the ability to discern quality and reaffirm Martyr's status as one of these good and virtuous things.

Proper patronage is all the more important, Martyr asserts, because while the past great names of teaching taught students who were themselves great, the students in Martyr's own day are as far from Alexander the Great as Martyr from Aristotle. In light of such a gulf, Martyr argues that even a low standard for progress is indeed progress. “I will then declare it was done to my satisfaction, Most Venerable Courtier, when you will have shown me that I have accomplished some small thing in improving the characters of such youths,” he declares with pseudo-humility. Such a portrayal of the quality of his students is not necessarily an indictment of the current court schools themselves, as they underwent a process of reform, but, rather, an entry point into contemporary discourse around what education should be and how various parties should act within it. Focusing his critique on the ever-nebulous question of virtuous study, emphasizing that any educational failures of the unnamed nobles would be part of their lack of “every cultivation of virtue” that was “the greatest annoyance of the Queen,” and contextualizing the difficulties of current teaching within a broader history of Spanish learning meant that Martyr's criticisms were not of the queen, as reformer of court education, or Cardinal Mendoza and others who contributed students and teachers, but of a more general process of pedagogical deterioration that had occurred due to generations of the neglect of letters.⁶³

Additionally, in the context of his reference to Satire 7, Martyr's method of engaging with Juvenal emphasizes the heights of his own potential success within this process. Juvenal makes frequent comparisons between past and present and the role of the writer between them, ultimately asserting that there is more room for becoming a figure of note in a deteriorating age.⁶⁴ For Martyr to improve his lackluster students during a period when letters had become devalued, as he goes on to describe, is to accomplish something even greater than when such improvements are easily won in great students by their great teachers.

ARMS VERSUS LETTERS

The great battle that Martyr would face in his virtuous quest to reform the young nobles of the court was, as the final section of letter 102 outlines, that of convincing them of the value of letters amid the pervasive allure of arms. The greatest fault of recent court youth, he writes, is their belief that the study of letters “are an impediment to arms, which they think are the only thing that it is honorable to pay attention to.” Such a belief was not new; it was intergenerational, spanning the lives of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. For the court youth to achieve virtue, for Martyr to reach his goal as a teacher, they must “be led . . . to a love of letters, the taste of which is the sweetest” and recover the respect for letters held by their great-great-grandfathers.

The questions of whether arms or letters should be more highly prized by the Spanish nobility and where honor was to be found in each were frequent themes in medieval and early modern writing, and debate continues as to how to consider them.⁶⁵ Although there is not room in this study to present a full exploration of these areas within Martyr's intellectual and social environment, viewing them through the lenses of his use of classical references, aspects of his life experience, and his patronage ties reveals key pieces of Martyr's engagement with them.⁶⁶ First, addressing the topic of arms versus letters in letter 102 continued Martyr's usage of classical thought to explore issues currently pertinent to him, as the nature of balance between knowledge and strength—sapientia et fortitudo—was a literary trope.⁶⁷ One of Martyr's own likely points of transmission for the debate came from Cicero, whose famous “Cedant arma togae” (Let arms yield to the toga) was taken up by Martyr in multiple letters and with ongoing variations, including extended discussions of exchanging togas for arms, arms for togas, and, most directly, in an early plea, “I beg you, forgive that for a short time the toga yields to arms.”⁶⁸

Classical reference points also appear in the second crucial aspect of Martyr's engagement with arms versus letters. Rather than approaching the subject from a theoretical standpoint alone, Martyr personally lived both sides of the debate through his experience in the Spanish military and his pre- and post-military work as a tutor. Although Richard L. Kagan's description of Martyr as “a living embodiment of the ‘arms and letters’ ideal” must be tempered by the fact that much of what is known of Martyr's military career comes from Martyr's own writings, the fact remains that he did have a wider swath of experience than a soldier who did not teach or a teacher who did not fight.⁶⁹ Martyr's epistolary defense of his decision to fight exemplifies the combination of these roles, as he deploys his literary background to develop his martial argument. In a 1488 letter, Martyr points out that Plato himself had been a soldier and argues that military action requires strength of mind as well as body. “The sharp edge of a sword and the discipline of letters are correlatives, not opposites,” he concludes.⁷⁰ In another letter from the same year to Pedro Ponce at Salamanca, Martyr reiterates this argument, clothed in even more classical garb. The doings of Mars added spice to the Muses, Martyr argues, and Venus and Mars were also interrelated.⁷¹ Creativity, writing, and beauty, Martyr asserts, require the events and sometimes the harshness of war to reach their full potential. Indeed, writing is the true harsh labor, he wrote later: “As you see, to furrow paper is sometimes harder and more troublesome for me than to brandish a lance.”⁷²

Martyr's assertion that arms and letters were mutually beneficial typifies some of the arguments of his day, which include the ideas that “knowledge is proper to man; there are many examples of military leaders combining the ‘ornament of letters with prowess of arms’; and, indeed, a soldier may find his greatest inspiration in the record of past deeds of greatness,” all of which would be later solidified in Baldassare Castiglione's (1478–1529) Book of the Courtier.⁷³ Martyr's approach also follows Pope Pius II's earlier assertions that “both mind and body, the two elements of which we are constituted must be developed side by side.”⁷⁴ Martyr's particular background as a soldier and tutor is one of the factors that made his use of these preexisting and continuing ideas distinctive. Also of note is the fact that he chose to deliver letter 102's satirical take on the debate over arms versus letters to Cardinal Mendoza, whose family had an extensive history with the topic.

While modern analysis is divided regarding whether interest in letters among the Spanish nobility grew from within or was imposed from without by Italian tutors like Martyr, sources from multiple perspectives point to the Mendozas, particularly Íñigo López de Mendoza (1398–1458), the first Marqués de Santillana and Cardinal Mendoza's father, as a key example of a family that merged arms with letters.⁷⁵ The Mendoza family had long been active in martial affairs as noble military caballeros, while also pursuing intellectual projects such as translations and poetry in the time of Santillana and beyond. In doing so, “they consciously cast themselves and their ancestors as the spiritual heirs of the ancient Romans in Spain—men of arms and letters.”⁷⁶ Martyr's argument in letter 102 that “a love of letters” could and indeed should be joined to concepts of military glory likely appealed to Cardinal Mendoza, who continued his family's legacy by sponsoring intellectuals such as Diego de Muros and the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar (ca. 1436–92).⁷⁷

Letter 102 also echoes Martyr's other missives to the Cardinal's family members and inner circle. In a letter to Gabriel de Mendoza, for example, Martyr praises the nobility, longevity, and virtue of the house of Mendoza, as well as Gabriel's dedication to letters.⁷⁸ Similarly, when someone sent a letter to the Count of Tendilla and Martyr—to “you [the Count] who pursue letters and I who supply them”—criticizing the ability of men of letters to carry out business in the world, Martyr urged the count not to take the critique to heart and to instead focus on the legacy of his own letters-promoting caballero family and his own actions. “Would you who cultivates letters think yourself less apt for the hardest business?” Martyr queried.⁷⁹

Martyr wrote these letters during a period that Nader characterizes as one of decline for the caballeros, as Fernando and Isabel expanded the ranks of the letrados, who often held university degrees and worked in legal spheres.⁸⁰ Martyr's argument in letter 102 that joining letters to arms was a key part of education because it would restore a past glory and tradition to contemporary generations therefore carried a particular weight when aimed at a Mendoza recipient. His general emphasis on the Mendozas as a family of both letters and action is revealed in letter 102 to be not only a matter of the past and the present but also of the future. In his missive to Cardinal Mendoza, Martyr persuasively presents himself as intent upon expanding the legacy of the Mendozas by creating more nobles like them, providing a path forward at a time when their status as a lettered caballero family may have seemed to be in flux.

Perhaps reflecting the complexity of the debate over arms versus letters and the parties that he addressed, Martyr's approach to this topic in letter 102 is his trickiest bit of satire yet. It exemplifies his Juvenalian method of flipping concepts upside down in order to make a point. Martyr expresses a hope that “because the Spanish are strong in character and are richly endowed by nature with a great spirit, they will be led—perhaps more easily than we suspect—to a love of letters, the taste of which is the sweetest.” The ability to be easily led to letters sounds on the surface to be praiseworthy, as well as a potential demonstration of Martyr's quality as a teacher and a victory for his purse. However, it follows Martyr's earlier praise for the noble great-great-grandfathers, whom he highlighted not only as valuing letters but as having done so “in their mothers’ wombs.”⁸¹ Constancy of opinion, not only proper opinion itself, is therefore the object of Martyr's praise. In that light, Martyr's detail that the Spanish youth might be swayed “more easily than we suspect” takes on a sardonic tone. If the Spanish were indeed so strong in character, how could they be led so easily? The ever-changing court caught on the Wheel of Fortune that Martyr described in a previous letter is recalled here. Even if the moral swaying of the court is toward virtue, the inconsistency implied in that swaying is troubling to Martyr. His description of his potential victory with the impressionable minds of the Spanish youth thus contains a satirical twist, as what might be considered to be praiseworthy is suddenly turned on its head and revealed to be problematic.

The final segments of letter 102 couch this twist within an even larger one by reemphasizing that the missive as a whole is intended to be taken with a grain of salt. “For indeed, you know, in the saying of Plato, that conferring the delight of virtue is a marvelous thing, if it could be seen,” Martyr writes. In Plato's Meno, the character of Socrates notes that he has not been able to find any teachers of virtue, and eventually concludes that virtue is not taught but divinely given.⁸² In referencing Plato's analysis of taught virtue, Martyr once again upends what he has just written concerning the potential for transforming the characters of the Spanish youth. If virtue cannot be taught, then Martyr cannot teach it, and any claim to the virtuous ambition that he portrays as driving him to rejoin the court is moot. The covering of virtue that he clothes himself with at the beginning of letter 102 is revealed to be a flimsy one, and the letter as a whole once again twists back upon itself.

Martyr reinforces the satirical tone of his missive by adding a final Juvenalian note to his letter's conclusion. “I will test what can be submitted against them,” he writes, in a direct quotation from the end of Juvenal's Satire 1.⁸³ In Satire 1, this is the last line of Juvenal's exploration of his critical methodology and his consideration of where he might direct his critique. Concluding, as he did, that he would not address the living and only direct his criticism towards the dead, was a joke, Braund argues, as Juvenal clearly had no intention of keeping his word.⁸⁴ By using this quote, Martyr echoes Juvenal's already broken promise, as he spent his entire preceding letter leveling critiques at his contemporary circumstances. This serves as a reminder that Martyr intended Cardinal Mendoza to read the whole of letter 102 as an extended in-joke, although one in which, as in the Satires of Juvenal, truths can also be found.

Concluding his letter, save for the usual formulaic vale, with the final line of Satire 1 also suggests that Martyr may have intended letter 102 to play a function similar to Satire 1's role as Juvenal's programmatic satire, which laid out his methodology and the themes that recur throughout his work.⁸⁵ Throughout letter 102, Martyr demonstrates how he might take up a topic such as the pursuit of virtue, explore and exploit its angles, and expand it through Juvenal's own themes of ambition, patronage, and intellectual pursuits. He deploys a satirical persona that both illuminates and obfuscates his presentation of self outside of the letter. Taking past, present, and future into consideration, he builds arguments only to subsequently undermine them. Although there is not room to consider it here in more depth, Martyr's choice of final Juvenalian reference perhaps indicates that he saw letter 102 as his own Satire 1.

SWIMMING IN DIFFERENT SEAS

Martyr's choice of Juvenal's Satires as his framing device for letter 102 makes this missive the satirical counterpart of his more straightforward presentations of court education, arms versus letters, virtue, and the topic of Italian and Spanish teaching elsewhere in his correspondence. The background for the discrepancies between letters and the interaction between his satirical approach here and his differing strategy elsewhere reveal much about the importance of audience for Martyr's compositional choices and the particular opportunities that a satirical format offered him. Just as Martyr found much to critique regarding court education in letter 102, he also found much to praise when praise suited him. Furthermore, Martyr's status as an Italian in the Spanish court inflected his portrayal of arms versus letters in different ways depending on his audience. Finally, satire allowed Martyr to embrace the contradictions he saw within his subject matter as well as his courtly and intellectual settings and to offer a portrayal that both highlighted their absurdities and underlined their importance.

Just as he did in letters 102 and 100, Martyr portrays himself as drawn to the court by outside forces in letter 103, which is dated to the same day as letter 102 and addressed to Diego de Muros, Cardinal Mendoza's secretary: “The writings of your patron [Cardinal Mendoza] roused me with one jab, one suggestion, whether it comes to pass by the compelling necessity of fate or because it is not at all permitted to hesitate and retreat from the order of such a prince.”⁸⁶ Also like letter 102, letter 103 addresses the topic of whether virtue can be taught, but, notably, it deviates from letter 102 in its conclusion. Rather than invoking a Platonic argument that virtue cannot be taught, Martyr argues that the teaching of virtue is not only possible but, indeed, is the only “solid and stable” path to glory. Such a path can be achieved by swaying Spanish youth toward accepting the study of letters, Martyr writes. As in letter 102, Martyr argues that this swaying can be easily achieved, but in letter 103 he puts this statement in de Muros's mouth, through interjections of “as you say” and “you hope, as you say,” rather than his own.⁸⁷

Letter 103's differing presentations of virtue as teachable and the changeability of Spanish youth as something to be sincerely desired were based upon a detail that did not appear in letter 102: “By order of his parents, the heir of the Kingdoms [Prince Juan], who has the eyes of everyone turned towards him, drills himself in letters, as you say; and therefore the rest [of the young nobles], by the example of their prince, will flee toward letters.”⁸⁸ The presence of Prince Juan (1478–97) as one of the Spanish youth being led toward letters completely shifted Martyr's analysis and tone between letters 102 and 103. In letter 103, Martyr transformed letter 102's contradictory assessment that Spanish youths, “brought up liberally and shamelessly,” were known to “reluctantly tolerate obeying what they were least accustomed to and changing their way of life,” yet were also easily led to letters, from a critique into a point of praise. That Prince Juan had shifted toward the study of letters—and, therefore, toward the study of virtue—and that in doing so he might lead others toward it made mutability a positive attribute, rather than a troubling feature of the courtly Wheel of Fortune. Martyr changed genres from satire to mini-panegyric between letters 102 and 103 as he employed the debate of arms versus letters in praising Prince Juan, the monarchs who directed the prince to the study of letters, and de Muros himself as an encouraging witness to this. The fact that Martyr's critiques of the environment of court education in letter 102 were here shifted into praises does not suggest that the previous letter lacked elements of genuine criticism; rather, it indicates that mutability was also a core feature of Martyr's methodology.

Such a shift in analysis can also be seen in Martyr's characterization of the state of Spanish versus Italian Latinity and its teaching between letter 102 and letter 113, which is addressed to an Italian recipient.⁸⁹ In the summer of 1492, Martyr sent letter 113 to Cardinal Ascanio Maria Sforza (1455–1505), one of his earlier patrons in Rome and the soon-to-be dedicatee of the first sections of De Orbe Novo. Portraying himself once again as drawn to the courts by undeniable requests, Martyr asserts that “many insisted, and of these not a few were powerful, that the Queen should order that I be summoned to the court. To reject the orders was not permitted. Therefore I am in the Court.”⁹⁰ He then notes that he opened his school and that, as he wrote in letter 102, he followed in the footsteps of far greater teachers such as Socrates and Plato, who themselves had far greater students. Regarding his own students, Martyr writes, “Indeed, they think that letters are an impediment to military service; to strive for that, they say, is the only glory.”⁹¹ However, even as letter 113 raises many of the same themes as letter 102, its tone is vastly different. No Juvenalian framework surrounds Martyr's statements on Spanish learning, and there are no overriding musings on virtue or ambition to cushion letter 113's more overt critique.

However, Martyr ends this depiction of Spanish learning with an interesting twist that shifts the subject of this criticism. While letter 103 makes no mention of the potential influence of Italian teaching upon Prince Juan's new love of letters and letter 102 only addresses Martyr's foreign origins obliquely, through the loud absence of Juvenal's Crispinus, letter 113 directly raises the issue of how Spanish students might react to Italian teachings: “The fields refuse these seeds of our country [Italy]. You know what kind of seed it is, Most Illustrious Prince—certainly weak and shriveled. It will be imagined, therefore, what harvests this husbandry may be about to bring forth.”⁹² In a rather bold statement, Martyr seemingly sets aside the arguments of Italians like Marineo for the superiority of Italian Latinity and raises the possibility that Italian teachings themselves are “weak and shriveled,” in a state of decay. Such analysis appears to move Martyr's opinion of Italian letters closer to that of Nebrija and his stance on Italian learning as having entered errors into Spanish Latinity.

This statement on the dire state of Italian letters perhaps arose from the humility topos that Martyr drew upon elsewhere in his work, arguing that when it came to certain important topics, “I would have preferred that it fell into Ciceronian or Livian hands, rather than my own.”⁹³ In this interpretation, Martyr's critique of Italian teaching was aimed specifically at himself and his own abilities. Additionally, while a more expansive analysis is outside the scope of this study, this pessimistic view of Italian learning can be placed within Martyr's overall treatment of the breakdown of Italian affairs in the late fifteenth century. Many of his letters saw Martyr lamenting the splintering effects of the Italian Wars upon the land of his birth, and a sense of decay hangs over many of his writings regarding Italy.⁹⁴ Both the personal and the societal interpretations reframe Martyr's critique of the Spanish lack of interest in letters from a fault of the Spanish to a consequence of fifteenth-century Latin itself. While Spanish students were weaker in their love of letters than students of the past, Martyr argued, what else could be expected when the letters themselves were weaker?

In combination, letters 102, 103, and 113 offer a muddled picture of Martyr's overall stances on Spanish and Italian learning and the debate over arms versus letters in court education. At times, as Nader argues, Martyr's critique of the Spanish lack of interest in letters emerged from a desire to accentuate his own role as an Italian teacher in the Spanish courts.⁹⁵ Elsewhere, Martyr employed the same critique to temper his foreign status and draw parallels between issues in both Italian and Spanish Latinity. His shifting arguments in various letters mirror the careful path he charted between the differing stances of Marineo and Nebrija, both of whom he praised and both of whom he carefully disputed.

Martyr's decision to frame letter 102 as satire demonstrates how he could employ these shifting stances, evidence of his own ever-shifting status within the Spanish courts. This was part of a strategy to address complex topics that bore directly on Martyr's ambitions, particularly when writing to Cardinal Mendoza, whose family was so actively part of the worlds of arms and letters. Martyr's choice of genre reinforces his humanist credentials by displaying his rhetorical skill and his ability not only to quote the lines of a well-known classical author but to also bend Juvenal's methodology to his own contemporary purposes. Martyr's opening arguments for the limits of virtuous ambition within the world of Spanish court education are as changeable by the end of letter 102 as at the beginning, but such changeability, as the missive demonstrates, is itself part of Martyr's satirical program and underlines his ultimate conclusion to letter 102: whether it is more virtuous for the fisherman and his mullets and rhombuses to resist the draw of the wider sea and the open net or to give in remains an open question; the only certainty is the allure of both options.

CONCLUSION

When Martyr left Italy for Spain in 1487, at the side of the Count of Tendilla, Ascanio Sforza apparently reacted with some dismay. “Who of sound mind takes himself away from an immense sea and large lakes to fish in unknown rivers and on isolated shores?” Martyr recorded him as having asked.⁹⁶ By 1492, Martyr had successfully turned Spain's “unknown rivers” and “isolated shores” into his own personal fishing grounds and had continued to adapt to his surroundings, even as he expressed the difficulties of doing so in varying forms to his Spanish and Italian correspondents. As he took up his teaching position in the courts, Martyr also took on a persona that resembled the paternal instructor idolized—perhaps satirically—in Juvenal's Satire 7, with his students cast as the recipients of his fatherly guidance.⁹⁷ Just as Juvenal's depiction of the students of antiquity portrays them as ones who “thought that the teacher should have the role of a revered parent,” Martyr describes his home as a familial place.⁹⁸ “Every day I have a home filled with the boisterous youth of the nobles,” he wrote in the fall of 1492; similarly, a year later, he noted that his charges, “listening to me although I speak in a croaking voice, fill my home from morning to evening.”⁹⁹

Martyr maintained this paternal persona in later depictions of his continuing relationships with students from the 1490s. “When you lived with me as a young man together with the rest of the Spanish nobles in the court of Castile,” Martyr begins a letter to Jaime I, Duke of Braganza (1479–1532), seeking to argue a point by transporting his former student back to the space he once shared with Martyr.¹⁰⁰ Just like a proud and influential parent, or a fatherly Socrates or Plato seeing their own successes in the accomplishments of their acolytes, Martyr noted that a former student was an accomplished intellectual because he had been “nurtured by my milk of letters.”¹⁰¹ In turn, the great deeds of other students were a “not insignificant ornament” for Martyr himself as their teacher.¹⁰² With his students numbering influential nobles, intellectuals, and doers of deeds, Martyr's assumption of credit cast his shadow over a wide swath of Spanish courtly society.

By taking this credit, Martyr asserted the importance of his role in the debate over arms and letters that he explored in letter 102 and elsewhere, demonstrating how his (satirically) humble desire to have even the smallest amount of sway over the Spanish youth played out in practice. Martyr saw his success as a teacher exemplified in the ongoing interest in Latin displayed by his students. “I saw your letter written in Latin—I felt my heart leap with joy! For indeed it shows how much you accomplished under our shade not only in the elegance of customs and in education, with frequent reading of illustrious authors, but also in the Roman tongue,” he wrote to Pedro Fajardo (1478–1546), eventual first Marqués de los Vélez, in 1499.¹⁰³ At the same time, promoting a love of letters was still an ongoing process:

Truly, you both [Pedro Fajardo and a fellow student] gladden me, you who, so great, are seen to produce and display the fruit that you plucked from my orchards. Indeed, because it is most rare to see Latin letters and excellent customs in your position and we learn that you both openly esteem this dowry, it is not inconsistent with human nature that I take pleasure as a father in such a work, especially when in your native land of Spain until now no one could be found striving for letters at your level. Indeed, your ancestors falsely judged them to be obstacles to military discipline, which all desire.¹⁰⁴

The shift from arms to letters was slow going, as he noted in 1492 and 1493, as the nobles grew to understand the value of letters and to love them “little by little,” but it was a love he was able to cultivate nonetheless.¹⁰⁵

As he did so, Martyr also acquired the proper compensation that he raised as another Juvenalian issue in letter 102, in the form of monetary remuneration and social recognition. A cedula from October 1492 provided Martyr with a place at court as “contino de nuestra Casa [attendant / loyal man¹⁰⁶ of our House]” at an annual rate of 30,000 maravedis.¹⁰⁷ This role was further specified as that of “maestro de los caballeros de mi corte, en las artes liberales [teacher of the knights of my court, in the liberal arts]” in 1502, at the same rate of pay.¹⁰⁸ Martyr's salary would subsequently increase when he took up the position of chronicler under Carlos V, in 1520, at a rate of 80,000 maravedis a year.¹⁰⁹ Additionally, Marineo attested to his own experience of Martyr's successful acquisition of rewards in a letter to Pedro Fajardo. Martyr's home, Marineo wrote, contained elaborately dyed and silken fabrics and beautifully worked objects, not to mention a table that was laden with a spread that surpassed even that of “Roman Lucullus, the prince of all banqueters.”¹¹⁰

The less tangible evidence of Martyr's rewards appeared in descriptions of his educational process and legacy. Hieronymus Münzer (ca. 1437–1508), who toured Spain around 1494–95, described how Martyr invited him to sit in on one of his lessons while in Madrid. Münzer described Martyr as “a laureado and consummate poet” whose students numbered the elite of the nobles. Under Martyr's direction, these students were able to recite from Juvenal, Horace, and others, and “awaken in Spain the taste for letters.”¹¹¹ In a later missive to Carlos V, Marineo listed the great men of Spanish letters from the time of Isabel and Fernando onward. He included Pedro Fajardo, “a man illustrious in every respect—namely, in letters, arms, and every kind of virtue,” who was among “these learned men in Spain, who although they were illustrious in titles and nobility of birth, nevertheless they became much more illustrious and immortal in books of letters.”¹¹² Martyr's rewards thus continued through the confirmation of others that his students carried with them a love of letters due to his teachings.¹¹³

When it came to the wider seas of ambition that Martyr explored in letter 102, Martyr's role as a court tutor became a crucial piece of a larger whole. The year after Martyr sent letter 102 and took up his teaching post, Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) returned to the Spanish courts with reports on his voyages across the Atlantic. Martyr began writing the series of missives that formed the decades of De Orbe Novo shortly afterward. Martyr's teaching career was a pivotal element of his transatlantic writing. Teaching in the Spanish courts placed him in locations where he could receive news in a comparatively timely fashion, and his former students were among the earliest recipients of the extant letters that mention the voyages of Columbus and others. Additionally, portions of the first decade of De Orbe Novo were dedicated to Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona (1474–1519), whom Martyr described as “my student, when he lived in Spain.”¹¹⁴ The patronage of Martyr's teaching career likewise echoed in De Orbe Novo: an epilogue to the last book of the first decade was addressed to the Count of Tendilla.¹¹⁵

Although it is tempting to look for hints of Martyr's nascent transoceanic interests in letter 102, the unknowns surrounding Martyr's level of knowledge about Columbus's voyage in the spring of 1492 make it impossible to argue conclusively for such an interpretation. Columbus finally gained his long-sought funding in mid-April, after having petitioned the crown for years.¹¹⁶ While his presence in court was sporadic, it is possible that Martyr, writing his letter in early April, had some news of the process leading up to the decision to fund Columbus, as he was in contact with courtiers throughout the period and is thought to have known Columbus himself since the fall of Granada.¹¹⁷ Although the scope of the results of that first voyage was obviously not known at the time, the intent to sail into the Atlantic and seek fishponds beyond the Mediterranean could have sufficed to inflect Martyr's Juvenalian consideration of ambition.

Additionally, Cardinal Mendoza, as the recipient of letter 102, would have made a particularly knowledgeable and interested party for such a theme. He was one of Columbus's supporters in his earlier 1489 negotiations with the crown, and he has been cited as a key figure in Isabel and Fernando's decision to fund Columbus's first voyage.¹¹⁸ Martyr's use of Juvenal's Satire 4 and the manner in which he bends its critique of territorial expansion into a complex analysis of the virtues of patronizing a fisherman's wider reach might, in places, suggest a favorable position regarding Cardinal Mendoza's support of Columbus's ambitions. However, beyond the alluring connections between the time of the letter's composition, its recipient, and the themes of Satire 4, letter 102 does not contain further internal references to support such a global reading. Furthermore, the Opus Epistolarum did not explicitly mention Columbus until the spring of 1493, and De Orbe Novo itself offers little information on the lead-up to Columbus's first voyage.¹¹⁹ Without additional textual evidence, it is difficult to determine when and to what degree Martyr was aware of and actively engaged in analyzing Columbus's proposed voyage when letter 102 was written.

The world of letter 102 was nonetheless an expansive one. Martyr's satirical approach to virtuous ambition, arms versus letters, patronage, and court education spoke to the wider tensions inherent in those themes in his late fifteenth-century intellectual and social milieu. Read against the background of Martyr's particular position as an Italian in the Spanish courts, letter 102 revealed the careful maneuvering required by a foreigner who sought to enhance his status as a teacher and assert his position in contemporary pedagogical discourse without alienating other vocal supporters of Italian or Spanish Latinity, represented in Martyr's personal relationships with Marineo and Nebrija. His flexible and deep reading of Juvenal was evidence of a wider approach to classical models that he would further build upon in De Orbe Novo, where Pliny and Virgil framed his approach to global exploration.¹²⁰ Although neither Martyr nor Cardinal Mendoza could have realized it at the time, in cloaking his ambition “by means of honest coverings and some name of virtues,” Martyr justified, even as he satirized, his looming turn toward even larger intellectual and professional seas.

***

Sarah L. Reeser received a PhD in Medieval Studies from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 2020. Her research focuses on late medieval and early modern concepts of geography, vision, and materiality, particularly in the work of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera. She received a MSc in Geography from the University of Toronto in 2023 and currently works in geospatial data analysis.