Literary Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550-1850)

Edited by Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez (2020)

“Spain has been a fruitful locus for the European imagination for centuries, and it has been most often perceived in black-and-white oppositions — either as a tyrannical and fanatical force in the early modern period or as an imaginary geography of a ‘Romantic’ Spain in later centuries. However, the image of Spain, its culture and its inhabitants did not evolve inexorably from negative to positive. From the early modern period onwards, it responded to an ambiguous matrix of conflicting Hispanophobic and Hispanophilic representations. Just as in the nineteenth century latent negative stereotypes continued to resurface, even in the Romantic heyday, in the early modern period appreciation for Spain was equally undeniable. When Spain was a political and military superpower, it also enjoyed cultural hegemony with a literary Golden Age producing internationally hailed masterpieces. Literary Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550-1850) explores the protracted interest in Spain and its culture, and it exposes the co-existent ambiguity between scorn and fascination that characterizes Western historical perceptions, in particular in Britain and the Low Countries, two geographical spaces with a shared sense of historical connectedness and an overlapping, sometimes complicated, history with Spain.”

The case studies presented in this edited volume presents a broader historical and theoretical context. It exposes the triangular literary, cultural and political relationship between Britain, the Low Countries and Spain in two very different – though strongly interconnected – historical periods, the early modern period and the nineteenth century. It contends that to fully understand how cultural representations of Spain and its cultural legacy have been forged, it is essential to expose the intricate historical dynamics of Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia. Furthermore, it exposes and problematizes certain historiographical biases regarding the cultural role of Spain and the historical asymmetry in the representation of Spain.

Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez and Antonio Sánchez Jiménez have earlier explored the paths of the Black Legend within the NWO project (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, 2013-2015) ‘The Black Legend and the Spanish Identity in Golden Age Spanish Theatre (1580-1665)’

The Black Legend is the perception/theory that Spaniards are especially tyrannical, cruel, intolerant, lustful, and greedy people. These powerful stereotypes prevent an accurate understanding of Early-Modern, and even contemporary Spain. This NWO project studied the Black Legend as an Early-Modern cultural dialogue, one in which Spanish intellectuals saw foreign prejudices as challenges that they needed to answer. It approach the Black Legend from an interdisciplinary angle by combining literary studies with theory on nation building, propaganda, and identity forming. In particular, it examines how the Black Legend influenced the Spanish self-conception during the Golden Age: how Golden Age Spanish writers received those ideas and how they used theater to respond to them, how commercial and court plays contributed to a nation-building process, and how even a nation already previously constructed, such as Spain, adopted foreign perceptions to reshape its own self-image.

Read online this book and download.

The Printing of the Second Part of Don Quijote

John O’Neill

The Printing of the Second Part of Don Quijote and Ocho comedias: Evidence of a Late Change in Cervantes’s Attitude to Print and of Concurrent Production as Practised by both Author and Printers

The Library, Volume 16, Issue 1, March 2015, Pages 3–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/16.1.3

Published: 26 March 2015

THE TITLE OF CERVANTES’S Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados (‘Eight New Plays and Interludes, Never Performed’) provides us with an ironic reminder of his failure as a playwright in his later years.1 In the prologue he elaborates on the reasons for his inability to find an audience for his plays, telling us that, although he had enjoyed some success with the works for the stage that he wrote in the 1580s, his later plays, completed in the early part of the seventeenth century—by which time the new style of theatre championed by Lope de Vega and his followers held sway—did not arouse any interest amongst the autores, the all-powerful actor-managers who determined the repertoire of the theatre companies:

I did not find an actor-manager who wanted them, even though they knew I had them; and so I threw them into a chest, consigning and condemning them to perpetual silence. At the time a bookseller informed me that he would have bought them, had an actor-manager of some note not told him that much could be expected of my prose, but of my verse nothing.2

For much of the period of four hundred years that has passed since their publication, Cervantes’s plays have continued to attract much less attention than his prose fiction, although in recent years there have been signs that the originality of his theatre is gradually becoming more widely acknowledged. Jonathan Thacker, for example, states that Cervantes is ‘a far more important dramatic voice than has habitually been recognized’, and Pedro, The Great Pretender, Phillip Osment’s translation of Pedro de Urdemalas, was included in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Golden Age season of 2004.3 Most critics, however, still consider Cervantes to be a much less significant dramatist than the famous triumvirate of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca, and that opinion is reflected in the fact that many of the full-length plays have yet to be either translated or performed.

The first edition of Ocho comedias, like the plays themselves, has generated little interest, yet the preliminares, or front matter, of this volume reveal a connection with the second part of Don Quijote that is of interest both to students of Cervantes and to bibliographers in general.4 The purpose of this study is to investigate the significance of that connection—a process that has involved looking at the difficult conditions under which Cervantes wrote and his changing attitude to print, and analyzing data relating to books produced at two different Madrid print-shops during a period of four years from the beginning of 1612 to the end of 1615. The results of the research provide new insights into the working practices both of Cervantes and of his printers, challenging assumptions that have been made about modes of production in Spanish printing-houses during the early-modern period, and thereby supplying an answer to a question that has been raised about the length of time it took to print the second part of the Quijote.

The items usually included in the preliminares were the privilegio or licencia, the fe de erratas, the tasa, and the aprobación. There might also be a prologue and a dedication to the author’s patron, as was the case with both of Cervantes’s books. A licencia was simply a licence to print the work, whereas the privilegio gave exclusive rights of publication to the author for a limited period—twenty years for the second part of the Quijote and ten years for Ocho comedias. The author could—and usually did—sell the privilegio to a bookseller, who would then make a contract with a printer.5 The fe de erratas was not, as one might perhaps expect, a list of typographical errors, but an official testimony that the printed work was a faithful copy of the original de imprenta, a transcription of the author’s manuscript prepared for the printer by a scribe, which had to be submitted to the censor for approval (the aprobación). The date of the fe de erratas therefore indicates when the printing of the body of the work was finished.6 The process of production was not, however, quite complete, since the fe de erratas was usually followed, in most cases just a few days later, by the tasa— the setting of the selling price of the book—although in some cases the order is reversed and the tasa precedes the fe de erratas. In certain books other material from the front matter may also carry a later date than the tasa. For example, in the second part of Don Quijote the dedication was signed by Cervantes on 31 October, ten days after the tasa and fe de erratas, and the final date in the preliminares is 5 November, when Gutierre de Cetina signed the third aprobación.

Printing normally began only after the privilegio had been granted.7 It would have been in the interests of all parties—author, bookseller, and printer—that this should be as soon as possible, but the precise date on which production began may have depended on other factors, such as the other work that the printer had on hand. Since printing was generally completed—with the possible exception of certain other items in the preliminares—by the date of the fe de erratas, the period between the dates of the privilegio and the fe de erratas can be described as the production window— the period during which production must have occurred. In the case of the second part of Don Quijote almost seven months elapsed from the granting of the privilegio, on 30 March 1615, to the signing of the fe de erratas, on 21 October.8 That was more than twice the length of time it took to produce the first part—a significantly bigger book financed by the same bookseller, Francisco de Robles, and produced at the same print-shop, the one that bore the name of Juan de la Cuesta, but was actually owned by María Rodríguez de Ribalde.9

Returning to the preliminares of Ocho comedias, one finds that the privilegio for that volume was granted on 25 July 1615 and that the fe de erratas is dated 13 September, which means that, while the second part of Don Quijote was in production, the printing of the collection of plays, financed by a different bookseller, Juan de Villarroel, was completed at another print-shop, that of ‘La viuda de Alonso Martín’ (the widow of Alonso Martín), in just two months.10 Ocho comedias consists of sixty-five sheets of quarto, five fewer than the second part of Don Quijote, but it would have been a far more complex project for a printer to set the volume of eight plays and interludes, especially since the full-length plays were written in a number of different verse forms.

If the unnamed bookseller mentioned in the prologue to Ocho comedias as having rejected the plays were Robles, that would provide us with a neat rationale for Cervantes’s placing them with another publisher and printer. However, the full explanation, it will be argued here, is more complex, and the key to understanding it, and also the delay in the production of the second part of Don Quijote, is provided by evidence that Spanish printers of this period had in place a system of concurrent production similar to the one described by McKenzie in his famous study of a Cambridge print-shop, operating over eighty years later.11 There is also strong evidence to suggest that Cervantes, who had a keen understanding of the way the printing business worked, had his own system of concurrent production in place, designed to expedite the publication of his late works. However, in order to appreciate fully the significance of the events surrounding the production of Cervantes’s works in Madrid in 1615 it is necessary first to place them in the context of his publishing history, which is characterized by a strangely uneven chronology and an uneasy relationship with print.

Few of Cervantes’s writings were published in the first sixty-five years of his life. His first novel, La Galatea, appeared in 1585, when he was thirty-seven years old.12 This pastoral romance was well received at the time, running to seven editions by 1618.13 In his aprobación to the second part of Don Quijote Francisco Márquez Torres recounts having met some French noblemen, one of whom ‘had almost managed to memorize it’.14 Even Cervantes’s rival Lope de Vega voiced his approval, through a character in La viuda valenciana (‘The Widow of Valencia’), who declares: ‘This is Galatea, if you want a good book then look no further’.15 Despite this success, twenty years passed before the publication of the first part of Don Quijote in 1605, a period that he refers to in the prologue of that work as ‘the silence of oblivion’ (‘el silencio del olvido’), and another eight years followed before the appearance of the Novelas ejemplares (‘Exemplary Stories’) in 1613.16 However, this trickle was followed by a deluge, with four more works printed in the last eighteen months of his life: Viaje del Parnaso (‘Journey to Parnassus’, November 1614), Ocho comedias (September 1615), the second part of Don Quijote (October 1615), and Persiles y Sigismunda, which he finished writing in April 1616, just before he died, and which was published posthumously early in 1617.17 Moreover, according to what Cervantes tells us in the various prol ogues and dedications of these late works, he was preparing three more works for publication when he died: the second part of La Galatea, Semanas del jardín (‘Weeks in the Garden’), and Bernardo. This late flurry of activity becomes even more remarkable when we consider that Cervantes was not only in his mid to late sixties but suffering from chronic ill-health with oedema.

The story of the printing of Cervantes’s works is, therefore, a curious one: sixty-five years of relative inactivity followed by a frenetic three years in which he seemed determined to publish as much as possible. The long gap between La Galatea and Don Quijote can, at least in part, be explained by the circumstances of his life, for during much of this period, from 1587 until 1597 or later, he was working as a government civil servant in Andalusia, first as a commissary for supplies for the Armada and then as a tax collector. These were demanding and stressful jobs, involving a lot of traveling and a considerable amount of paperwork, which would have left him with less time for writing. The period of eight years between Don Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares is, however, more difficult to account for. Why did Cervantes not seek to build on the extraordinary success of the Quijote, which had made him the most famous writer of prose fiction in Europe? The answer probably lies in the reservations he felt about the medium of print, which he expresses on two different points in the second part of Don Quijote: in the conversation between Don Quixote and Sansón Carrasco in Chapter 3, which I will return to later, and during Don Quixote’s visit to the Barcelona Print-shop in Chapter 62.

Don Quixote’s visit to a Barcelona print-shop in Chapter 62 indicates that Cervantes was very familiar not only with the technical aspect of printing but also with the way the business worked.18 Don Quixote witnesses the key activities that take place—composition of the formes by the typesetters, the operation of the presses, and correction of the proofs—and then strikes up a conversation with a man who is having his translation of an Italian work called Le Bagatele (sic) printed there. The translator, who is determined to have his book printed at his own expense, responds as follows to Don Quixote’s warning that he may end up with a lot of unsold copies on his hands, as a result of the shenanigans of printers: ‘“Well what would you have me do?”, said the author. “Do you want me to sell the rights to a bookseller, who’ll give me three maravedís for them and think he’s doing me a favour?”’19 It is a complaint that is echoed in Chapter 1 of the Fourth Book of Persiles y Sigismunda, by a Spanish pilgrim, whom Periandro and Auristela encounter in an inn near Rome, who is writing a book of aphorisms:

I won’t give up the rights to my book to any bookseller in Madrid even if he pays two thousand ducados for them. There isn’t a single one of them there who doesn’t want the rights for free, or for such a low price that it doesn’t benefit the author of the book.20

The translator’s experience probably reflects that of Cervantes, who had recently financed the printing of Viaje del Parnaso out of his own pocket, and who had ample experience of how little money could be made from writing novels and how the odds were stacked in favour of the bookseller when it came to selling the privilegio. In June 1584 Blas de Robles agreed to pay him 1336 reales for the rights to La Galatea, yet just eighteen months later he was in such dire straits that he needed to borrow more than four times that amount—204,000 maravedís, or 6,000 reales—in order to settle a debt.21 The success of Don Quijote had brought fame, but not riches, for even that bestseller, which ran to two editions in the first year, had earned him very little. He had sold the rights to the bookseller Francisco de Robles for 1500 reales, which, bearing in mind the rampant inflation that the Spanish economy was experiencing at the time, was probably an even worse deal than the one he had struck for Galatea.22 While the fact that he had not published anything for twenty years might explain his failing to profit from selling the privilegio of Don Quijote, it does not account for the similarly unfavourable arrangement regarding the rights to the Novelas ejemplares, which were sold on 9 September 1613 for just 1600 reales, at a time when Cervantes was famous throughout Europe.23 A playwright could make money from having their work performed on stage, but there was little profit in writing novels, even for an author as celebrated as Cervantes. In the aforementioned aprobación of the second part of Don Quijote Francisco Márquez Torres relates how, when asked by the French noblemen who were aficionados of Cervantes’s writing about the author’s ‘age, profession, status and wealth’, he replied, to their surprise, ‘old, a soldier, low-ranking nobility, and poor’ (‘viejo, soldado, hidalgo y pobre’).24 That picture of hardship is confirmed by Cervantes himself in the dedication to his patron, the Count of Lemos, in which he describes himself as ‘extremely hard-up’ (‘muy sin dineros’).25 These words, and those of Márquez Torres, who was a chaplain employed by the Archbishop of Toledo, one of Cervantes’s benefactors, are an ironic reminder that, while patronage may have eased his financial situation somewhat, it certainly did not make him comfortable.

Since the vast majority of the profits from printed books went to the bookseller, and since Cervantes, for most of his life, received little or no benefit from patronage, he had no great financial incentive to have his writings printed. The possibility of achieving celebrity was, of course, another motive, as Cervantes indicates in the prologue to the second part of Don Quijote:

I know only too well the temptations of the devil, and one of the greatest is to put the idea in a man’s mind that he can write and print a book that will earn him as much fame as money and as much money as fame.26

Here, and in the conversation between Don Quixote and the translator in the print-shop, Cervantes seems to be suggesting that the writer needs to choose between fame or profit. The translator makes it clear that his motives are purely mercenary: ‘I do not have my books printed to attain fame in the world, for I am already known for my work. I want profit. Without it, fame is not worth a farthing’.27 Choosing literary celebrity, however, as Cervantes had done, also involved risks, as we are reminded by the fact that the remarks in the prologue to the second part of Don Quijote are directed at an unknown writer going by the pseudonym of Alonso Fernández Avellaneda, who, in the autumn of 1614, had published a hostile sequel to the first part, in the prologue of which he had launched a vitriolic attack on Cervantes.28 The hijacking of his literary creation outraged Cervantes to such an extent that he changed the timetable that he had planned for the publication of his works, suspending work on Persiles to bring forward the completion of the Quijote. He expressed his contempt for Avellaneda at various points throughout the text, for example in the episode in the print-shop, which ends with the knight storming out, piqued by his discovery that one of the works being produced there is Avellaneda’s Quijote.

Don Quixote thinks Avellaneda’s book should have been ‘burned to cinders for its impertinence’ (‘quemado y hecho polvos por impertinente’), and goes on to stress the importance of truth in fiction.29 However, the book-trade does not make a distinction between works of fiction that are true and those which are false, and that lack of discrimination clearly infuriated Cervantes. It also irritated him that it was the publication of Don Quijote that had given rise to Avellaneda’s apocryphal sequel, as is clear from one of the items in Don Quixote’s last will and testament:

Item: I beseech the aforementioned gentlemen my executors that if by chance they should meet the author who is said to have composed a story that goes by the name of The Second Part of the Adventures of Don Quixote of La Mancha, they should, on my behalf, ask him, as insistently as possible, to pardon me for unthinkingly having given him the opportunity to write such a load of claptrap, because I leave this life with pangs of conscience for having given him the motive for writing it.30

That print could have negative consequences, and expose one to criticism or ridicule, was something that Cervantes had realized several years previously, when the first part of Don Quijote was published. It is a theme that emerges in Chapter 3 of the second part, in a conversation between Don Quixote and Sansón Carrasco, who, as the reader learns in the previous chapter, has brought news from Salamanca that Sancho and Don Quixote have become literary celebrities through the publication of the first book:

‘It often happens that those who have cultivated and achieved great fame through their writings either lose it completely or see it somewhat diminished when they hand them over to be printed.’

‘The reason for that’, said Sansón, ‘is that, as printed works are viewed at one’s leisure, it is easy to see their faults, and, the more famous the person who wrote them, the more they are subject to scrutiny.’31

Cervantes, in the Adjunta al Parnaso, the prose postscript to his narrative poem Viaje del Parnaso, is keen to stress an advantage, where plays are concerned, of the medium of print, which allows the reader to appreciate at his or her leisure what passes quickly in performance:

I am considering handing over the plays to be printed, so that one might see at one’s leisure what happens quickly, or is disguised or misunderstood when they are performed. Moreover, plays, like songs, have their seasons and their times.32

However, in the conversation between Don Quixote and Sansón, and again in the following chapter, Cervantes dwells on a major disadvantage of publication. Errors, once fixed in print, can be difficult to erase, both from the book and from the memory of the reader.

The most infamous of the faults in the first part of Don Quijote that Sansón Carrasco mentions is the narrative of the theft of Sancho’s donkey. In the first edition of Juan de la Cuesta reference is made to its having gone missing, but with no explanation as to how, between Chapters 25 and 29. In Chapter 42 the donkey reappears, again with no explanation. In the second Cuesta edition of 1605 an attempt was made to resolve the problem by inserting an episode in Chapter 23 in which Ginés de Pasamonte steals the animal, but the donkey is referred to six times, as if the theft had not occurred, before its recapture is described in Chapter 30.33 These discrepancies were all corrected in the Brussels edition of 1607, printed by Roger Velpius, but, astonishingly, only two of those corrections found their way into the third Cuesta edition of 1608.34 Cervantes decided to make light of the issue by incorporating these botched attempts at repairing the original error into the metafictional fun and games that characterize the second part of Don Quijote. When Sansón remarks that ‘before the ass reappeared the author states that Sancho was riding it’, Sancho retorts that ‘either the chronicler was mistaken, or it was carelessness on the part of the printer’, thus laying the blame on the fictional narrator, Cide Hamete Benengeli, or the actual print-shop of Juan de la Cuesta.35 That Cervantes felt the need to address the issue ten years after the error had first appeared in print demonstrates how much it bothered him. However, if he thought that his authorial sleight of hand would spare him further embarrassment, he was mistaken. Lope de Vega, who had been angered by some disparaging comments that Cervantes made in Chapter 42 of the first part, concerning his commercial attitude to the theatre, was certainly not inclined to let his rival off the hook. In Act III of Amar sin saber a quién (‘Loving, Without Knowing Who’) he refers not just to the original mistake, but to Cervantes’s attempts at exculpating himself, when the gracioso Limón, regarding the loss of an ass, says: ‘Tell us its colour, shape and name, for there is a man who is still waiting to find out what happened to a brownish grey mule. If you don’t, they will say it was “forgetfulness on the writer’s part”.’36 For Chartier the textual inconsistencies in the narration of the theft of Sancho’s donkey ‘point up the similarities that exist between Cervantes’s writing and certain practices of orality’.37 However, while such errors may have been part and parcel of the episodic, oral approach to storytelling in which Cervantes excelled, once fixed in print they laid him open to ridicule.

Cervantes therefore had good reason to develop ambivalent feelings about the medium of print, for although it made him famous, it also exposed him to criticism, some of it vicious, gave Avellaneda the opportunity to kidnap his hero, and made him very little money. However, in the period leading up to the publication of the Novelas ejemplares in 1613 any reservations that he felt about print probably began to be outweighed by a growing awareness, as a result of his age and ill health, of his own mortality, and the knowledge that the printed book was the only means whereby he could ensure that his writings would be preserved for posterity. Everything that he writes in the prologues and dedications of his late works is indicative of an author who is striving to complete, and have printed, as much of his work as possible. In the prologue to the Novelas he refers to Viaje del Parnaso as already having been written, even though the narrative poem was not printed until over a year later, at the end of 1614.38 He also announces that the volume of stories will be followed by Persiles, the continuation of Don Quijote and Semanas del jardín, a work that was never completed, the title of which suggests that it may have been conceived as another book of novelas.39 In the dedication to Ocho comedias he informs the Count of Lemos that ‘Don Quijote de la Mancha has put his spurs on, in his Second Part, in order to go and kiss Your Excellency’s feet’ and that Persiles, Semanas del jardín, and the second part of La Galatea will follow.40 In the prologue to the second part of Don Quijote and the dedication that follows it, dated 31 October 1615, he tells his readers to expect both Persiles, which he is ‘in the process of finishing’ and ‘will complete, God willing, within four months’, and the sequel to La Galatea, while in the dedication to Persiles, written just three days before he died, he indicates his intention to complete, if his health allows, not only Semanas del jardín and the second part of La Galatea but also Bernardo.41 Since that is the first mention of the latter work, whose title suggests a chivalric theme, it may have only existed in embryonic form.42 However, the consistency with which Cervantes refers to Semanas del jardín and the continuation of La Galatea from 1613 onwards makes it likely that these works were, indeed, at an advanced stage.

Taking into account what Cervantes himself tells us, and other information garnered from the front matter of the books written in the last few years of his life, it is possible to construct the following timetable for the production of his late works:

Links to notes 43 and 44

The schedule that Cervantes set for himself in the final four years of his life would have been demanding for any writer, but it is particularly remarkable when we consider that he was a man in his late sixties in poor health. In all but two months of the period of approximately fourteen months between mid September 1614 and early November 1615 Cervantes had at least one work at the printers. From 1612 he was not only writing continuously, but also making plans for the completion of as many as four other projects at the same time. This feverish activity reached its peak in the late summer of 1615, for, during August and September of that year, while he was writing Persiles, both the second part of Don Quijote and Ocho comedias were in production, with two different printers. Cervantes, who, as he indicates in Chapter 62 of the second part, was familiar with the ‘ins and outs of the printing business’ (‘las entradas y salidas de los impresores’), knew that printers had a system of concurrent production in place, which could produce lengthy delays.45 He had, accordingly, devised his own method of concurrent production, in order to ensure that as much of his writing as possible would be printed.

Garza Merino has stated that Spanish print-shops were organized around one major project at a time: ‘We know from surviving printing contracts that generally, once an edition had been agreed, it was a requirement that no other work would be accepted until the new one had been finished, which, barring exceptional circumstances, implied that the print-shop would organize itself around one project, apart from any small jobs that might be taken on’.46

Garza Merino is not specific about her sources, but her remarks would, at first blush, appear to be supported by a sixteenth-century document by Juan Vásquez de Mármol, the corrector at the Royal Printing-House (Imprenta de Su Majestad), listing thirteen conditions that an author could require a printer to meet before entering into a contract.47 The first of these stated that the printer was obliged to begin printing within a certain period, and not to abandon the process once begun.48 It is possible, however, to interpret that condition in different ways. An author or bookseller keen to see their book produced quickly might hope that it meant that the print-shop would focus exclusively on their job, whereas the printer could argue that dividing time between two or three jobs did not mean that the process of printing any one of them had been abandoned.49 In any case, Garza Merino’s views are clearly at odds with those of McKenzie, who, in his essay Printers of the Mind, which considered the records of the Cambridge University Press between 1696 and 1712 and of the London printing-house of Bowyer and Son between 1730 and 1739, found that ‘the Cambridge and Bowyer presses, like any other printing-house today or any other printing-house before them, followed the principle of concurrent production’, and that there was no evidence to suggest that any printing-houses of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not habitually print several books concurrently.50 McKenzie’s findings are supported by what happens in the episode in the print-shop, for there Don Quixote witnesses three books being produced concurrently. The aforementioned translation of Le Bagateleis being set by a compositor, while two other books are being proofed and corrected: a work entitled Luz del alma (‘Light of the Soul’) and—much to the knight’s displeasure—Avellaneda’s Segunda parte del ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha.

Analysis of information contained in the preliminares of sixty-five books produced at the print-shops of Juan de la Cuesta and La viuda de Alonso Martín between 1612 and 1615, obtained from Pérez Pastor’s Bibliografía madrileña, shows that printers in Madrid, like their English counterparts at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, and like those in the Barcelona printing-house described in the Quijote, did indeed operate a system of concurrent production. Table 1 shows part of the data that was collated: the key dates that indicate the production windows of seven other books printed at the Cuesta and Martín shops between 30 March 1615 and 5 November 1615, while Ocho comedias and the second part of Don Quijote were also in production. 

Production windows of seven other books printed at the Cuesta and Martín shops between 30 March 1615 and 5 November 1615

The table helps to explain a question raised by Rico, who, in his study of the printing of the two parts of the Quijote, was puzzled by the fact that the second volume took so much longer to produce than the first one. The privilegio for the first part was granted on 26 September 1604, while the testimonio de las erratas is dated 1 December, which means that printing was completed in a little over two months.51 The corresponding period for the second part ran from 30 March to 21 October 1615—nearly seven months, even though the second volume is significantly shorter, at 280 folios, than the first one (316 fols.).52 Since there are more errors—almost double the number—in the second part, Rico thought it unlikely that the delay in the printing of the second part could be ascribed to a slower rate of production, and was unable to find any other explanation than bad luck, going on to say that the standard of printing in Spain at this time was incredibly low, and that print-shops were poorly equipped, undermanned, and lacking typesetters and correctors who were sufficiently qualified.53 That explanation is, however, thrown into question by Moll’s assertion that the Spanish printing industry of this period, despite facing technical problems, had a number of well equipped shops, with skilled workers who had an in-depth knowledge of their business and were capable of producing books of quality.54

It seems that Rico did not take into account concurrent production and must have assumed, like Garza Merino, that work in the print-shop would have been organized around one project. If one takes into account the other jobs with which the Cuesta shop was occupied, the real reason for the delay becomes clear. The production window of the second part of Don Quijote overlapped with that of four other works: parts V—VIII of Herrera’s Historia general; a new edition of Nebrija’s Dictionarium; Murcia de la Llana’s Compendio;and the second edition of Salas Barbadillo’s El Cavallero puntual (‘The Punctilious Knight’).55 The first two of these books were very large projects—319 and 213 sheets respectively, in folio format. Indeed, it is quite conceivable that, even though the privilegio for the second part of the Quijote was granted on 30 March, production did not get fully up to speed until the beginning of August, when work on the books by Herrera and Nebrija was completed. It would then have shared production time with the Compendio, another work in quarto, whose fe de erratas precedes that of the Quijote by only eight days, and El Cavallero puntual, a work in the comparatively rare duodecimo format, the erratas of which is dated 9 November, just four days after the final date in the front matter of the Segunda parte— the aprobación of Gutierre de Cetina.56

That the second part of the Quijote took longer to produce than the first part was therefore nothing to do with bad luck, poor equipment or insufficient manpower, but rather can be attributed to the fact that the book was printed concurrently with at least two others, and possibly as many as four. This was normal practice in the Cuesta shop during the period in question, and it was also the case in the printing-house of La viuda de Alonso Martín, where Ocho comedias was produced. As Table 1 shows, the volume of plays, comprising sixty-five sheets in quarto, was printed concurrently with three others: a book of sermons of one hundred and twelve sheets, also in quarto, and two works in octavo, the Rhetoricae Compendium ex scriptis patris Ioannis Baptistae and Ledesma’s Romancero, comprising twenty-five and twenty-four sheets respectively.57  The fact that these books were not printed serially is demonstrated by the fact that printing of the body of the four works was completed in quick succession: Ocho comedias on 13 September, the Sermones on 22 September, the Rhetoricae Compendium on 5 October, and the Romancero on 13 October.

Gaskell has summarized the reasons for concurrent production as follows: ‘Books varied so much in size that a balance between composition and presswork could not have been kept if they had been printed serially… for, depending on the relative magnitude of their tasks and on accident, either pressmen or compositors would constantly have been waiting for the others to catch up. Printers therefore had several books in production at once… so that when a man came to the end of a stage in the work, he would be in a position to take up something else’.58

This meant that an individual book took longer to print than it might have done if all the workmen had concentrated on it alone; but also that, by using plant and labour less wastefully, all the books could be printed in less time altogether, and at less cost, than they would have been by serial production.

In most cases production would not, therefore, as Garza Merino suggests, have involved two typesetters working in synchronized fashion on one book in order to supply one or two pressmen, thus ensuring that by the end of the day one sheet of a run of 1,000 or 1,500 copies had been printed.59 The organization of work would instead, as McKenzie argues, have been far more complex and varied, with typesetters and pressmen taking up whatever work was to hand, in order that they should not stand idle. What McKenzie discovered in the records of the Cambridge University Press was that each compositor would work on two or three books simultaneously, and that, even when two compositors worked on one book, the usual practice was that one would take over where the other left off. Like the compositors, a press-crew would usually be working on several books simultaneously, and the most efficient system was not to try to maintain a relationship between a particular compositor and crew.60 If the method of production in Madrid at the beginning of the seventeenth century were similar, as the evidence presented here suggests, then any study of the printing of a Spanish book from this period cannot view the production of that volume as an isolated event, but also needs to take into account other works that were printed concurrently in the same shop.

Since it was based on efficiency, the system of concurrent production worked to the advantage of both printer and author. However, writers keen to see their work published as quickly as possible would not necessarily have seen it that way. Cervantes had already experienced the frustrating delays that this mode of production involved during the printing of the Novelas ejemplares. The privilegio for that work, which was printed concurrently with Aranda’s Lugares comunes (Commonplaces) and the second part of Illescas’s Historia Pontifical y Catholica, was granted on 22 November 1612, yet the fe de erratas was not signed until 7 August 1613, over eight months later.61 By 1615 the ailing author, now sixty-seven years old, had probably realized that, if he were to achieve his ambition of publishing as much of his work as possible before he died, and, in particular, to have his beloved plays printed, he was going to need the services of more than one printer. It may well have been the case, as Cervantes hints in the prologue to Ocho comedias, that Robles, the bookseller who financed both parts of the Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares, was decidedly unenthusiastic about the idea of publishing the plays, but, even if that had not been so, Cervantes, for whom time was running out, would have been keen for him to find another printer, since the Cuesta shop was already occupied with the second part of the Quijote and the other works which were printed concurrently with it.

In the event, Cervantes managed to interest a newcomer to the book trade, the twenty-five year old Juan de Villarroel, in Ocho comedias. His shortlived career in publishing began in 1614, when he financed an edition of Juan Pérez de Moya’s Arithmetica Practica.62 He also acquired the rights to a new edition of Fernando de Mena’s translation of Heliodorus’s Historia etiopica de los amores de Teogenes y Cariclea, which appeared in the summer of 1615, just before Ocho comedias, although the title page of that volume indicates that it was financed by Pedro de Bogia.63 All of these books were printed at the print-shop of La viuda de Alonso Martín, which had been run by Francisca Medina since her husband’s death in 1613.64 Villaroel clearly ran into financial difficulties, for on 6 November 1615 there is a record of his owing 1,500 reales to Medina for the cost of printing both the Arithmetica and Ocho comedias.65 In the prologue to Ocho comedias, Cervantes mentions, with scarcely veiled irony, having been paid ‘a reasonable sum’ for the volume of plays; but he was never actually paid in full, for in 1626, nine years after his death, his widow, Catalina Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, mentioned in her last will and testament an amount of 400 reales that Villarroel still owed.66

Medina’s print-shop was an obvious choice for the volume of plays. It was situated in Calle de los Preciados, a little further away than the Cuesta shop in Calle de Atocha, but still just a ten-minute walk from where Cervantes was living at the time, on the corner of Calle de León and Calle de Francos (now known as Calle de Cervantes), and even closer to Villarroel, whose address on the title page of Ocho comedias is given as ‘plaçuela del Angel’ (now known as Plaza del Ángel).67 The Medina shop, which printed many classic works of the Spanish Golden Age, had already produced Cervantes’s Viaje del Parnaso, and had just recently, on 3 April, completed printing of the Sexta parte (sixth part) of the plays of Lope de Vega, Spain’s most celebrated dramatist.68 Moreover, while the Cuesta shop specialized in the folio format, the printing-house of Medina was noted for working in octavo—the format in which Viaje del Parnaso appeared—and quarto, which was the usual format for plays. In 1615 it produced eight works in quarto, comprising 568 sheets, as opposed to Cuesta’s three (113 sheets). Ocho comedias, a work of sixty-five sheets, was produced in just eight weeks, with the result that although the privilegio for the plays was granted a month later than that of the Sermones and over two months later than that of Ledesma’s Romancero—the two books with which it was printed concurrently—Ocho comedias was the first of the three works to be completed. The privilegio for the plays was granted four months later than that of the second part of Don Quijote, yet the production of the plays was completed six weeks before the printing of the novel was finished. The efficiency of the Medina print-shop was such that, on 24 September, just two days after completing work on Ocho comedias, it finished the printing of the Sermones, a work of almost double the size in the same quarto format, the privilegio of which had been granted just three months previously; and by 5 October it had managed to produce the twenty-five sheets of octavo of the Rhetoricae Compendium, having only started work after 12 September. These are impressive rates of productivity for three books that were printed concurrently, and are an indication that the Medina shop probably had four presses at its disposal. It may also have been able to distribute work to other shops, for, as Moll points out, this often happened when a book needed to be produced quickly, as, for example, in the case of the second Madrid edition of the first part of Don Quijote.69 Time was certainly of the essence where Ocho comedias was concerned, for Cervantes must have been anxious to see his plays printed before he died, and one imagines he would have conveyed his concerns to both Villarroel and Francisca Medina.

While Ocho comedias and the second part of the Quijote were at the printers, Cervantes was working hard to complete Persiles. He had long been aware that printers in Madrid worked on many jobs at the same time, with the result that authors could experience lengthy delays in the printing of their works, and had therefore developed his own method of concurrent production, which proved to be particularly important in preserving his plays for posterity. For much of his life he had felt ambivalent about print, and with good reason, for it had made him little money and had exposed him both to ridicule and literary piracy. Now, however, with his health failing, he worked feverishly to ensure that as much of his work as possible would be passed on to future generations. The printed book, whatever its shortcomings, was the storage medium that would ensure that his writing survived. The dedication to Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Count of Lemos, dated 19 April 1616, just three days before his death, is a moving testament to his determination to keep writing as long as he still has the strength to hold his pen:

I still retain in my soul the vestiges and traces of Weeks in the Garden and the famous Bernardo. If, by chance, by good fortune (though it would not be fortune, but a miracle), heaven allows me to live, you will see them, and also the final part of Galatea.70

In presenting his last work, Cervantes, who knows he is dying, also offers his patron and his readers, present and future, the ghosts of unfinished projects, those that neither the print-shop nor the wider world would ever see.

Notes

1 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Ocho comedias, y ocho entremeses nuevos, Nunca representados (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Martín, 1615). In references to early editions, including titles and quotations, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and accentuation is reproduced as found in the source consulted, with the following exceptions, all of which have been regularized: the long ‘s’; where ‘u’ stands for ‘v’ (e.g. ‘auenturas’) and vice-versa (e.g. ‘Don Qvixote’); and where ‘i’ stands for ‘j’ (e.g. ‘trabaios’).

2 ‘No hallé autor que me las pidiese, puesto que sabían que las tenía; y así las arrinconé en un cofre y las consagré y condené al perpetuo silencio. En esta sazón me dijo un librero que él me las comprara si un autor de título no le hubiera dicho que de mi prosa se podía esperar mucho, pero que del verso nada.’ La entretenida, ed. by John O’Neill (London: King’s College, 2014), published online at http://entretenida.outofthewings.org. All translations are my own.

3 Jonathan Thacker, A Companion to Golden Age Theatre (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007), p. 59. Miguel Cervantes, Pedro, The Great Pretender, trans. by Philip Osment (London: Oberon Books, 2004).

4 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Segunda parte del ingenioso cavallero Don Quixote de la Mancha (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1615 ).

5 Fermín de los Reyes Gómez, ‘La censura del libro: legislación y consecuencias. La impresión del Quijote’, in Imprenta, libros y lectura en la España del Quijote, ed. by José Manuel Lucía Megías (Madrid: Imprenta Artesanal, 2006), pp. 159—80 (p. 163).

6 Gómez, ‘La censura del libro’, p. 165.

7 ibid. pp. 164—65.

8 Cervantes, Segunda parte, fols. [ii]r—[v]v.

9 When Cuesta joined the printing-house of Pedro Madrigal in 1599, it was jointly owned by Madrigal’s widow María Rodríguez de Ribalde (who had married Juan Iñiguez de Lequerica, and been widowed again), and their son, also called Pedro Madrigal. In 1604, after the younger Pedro died, his widow, María Quiñones, married Cuesta, who took over the running of the shop. Books produced there continued to bear his name until Ribalde’s death in 1626, even though Cuesta moved to Sevilla in 1607, abandoning his pregnant wife. Juan Delgado Casado, Diccionario de impresores españoles (siglos XV—XVII), 2 vols (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 1996), I, 175; Jaime Moll, ‘Juan de la Cuesta’, in Gran enciclopedia cervantina, ed. by Carlos Alvar, 10 vols (Madrid: Castalia, 2005— ), III(2006), 3020.[Note from Spanish Classic Books: more correct information at this link]

10 Cervantes, Ocho comedias, fol. [ii]r.

11 D. F. McKenzie, ‘Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices’, in Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. by Peter D. McDonald and Michael Felix Suarez (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 13—85.

12 Miguel de Cervantes, Primera parte de La Galatea, dividida en seys libros (Alcalá: Juan Gracián, 1585).

13 The other six editions were produced in Lisbon (1590), Paris (1611), Baeza (1617), Valladolid (1617), Lisbon (1618), and Barcelona (1618). See La Galatea, ed. by Francisco López Estrada and María Teresa López García-Berdoy (Madrid: Cátedra, 1999), pp. 124—25.

14 ‘Que alguno dellos tiene casi de memoria, la primera parte desta’; Don Quijote de La Mancha, ed. by the Instituto Cervantes, dir. by Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores; Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2004), I, 669. References to this edition are by part, chapter (where applicable), and page.

15 ‘Aquesta es La Galatea | que, si buen libro desea | no tiene más que pedir’; cited in La Galatea, ed. Estrada & García-Berdoy, p. 99.

16 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1605). For the quotation see Don Quijote, I, Prólogo; ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 11. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Novelas exemplares (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1613).

17 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Viage del Parnaso (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Martín, 1614); Los trabajos de Persiles, y Sigismunda, historia Setentrional (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1617).

18 Don Quijote, II. 62; ed. Instituto Cervantes, pp. 1247—51.

19 ‘—Pues ¿qué? —dijo el autor—. ^Quiere vuesa merced que se lo dé a un librero que me dé por el privilegio tres maravedís, y aun piensa que me hace merced en dármelos?’; Don Quijote, II. 62; ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 1250. The basic units of currency when Cervantes was writing were the copper maravedí, the silver real (royal), equivalent to 34 maravedís, and the gold escudo (shield), the value of which fluctuated, from 350 maravedíswhen it was introduced in 1535, to 400 maravedís in 1566, to 440 maravedís in 1609. The gold ducado, worth 375 maravedís or 11 reales, was an older coin, which was replaced by the escudo during the reign of Charles V, but still functioned as a unit of account in Cervantes’s time. See Bernat Hernández, ‘Monedas, pesos y medidas’, in Don Quijote, ed. Instituto Cervantes, pp. 941—47 (pp. 941—42)

20 ‘-No daré el privilegio de este mi libro a ningún librero de Madrid, si me da por él dos mil ducados; que allí no hay ninguno que no quiera los privilegios de balde, o, a lo menos, por tan poco precio que no le luzga al autor del libro’; Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. by Carlos Romero Muñoz (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002), p. 635.

21 Krzysztof Sliwa, ‘Documentación’, in Gran enciclopedia cervantina,IV (2007), 3570—3646 (p22p. 3589—90).

22 Gómez, ‘La censura del libro’, p. 171.

23 Cristobál Pérez Pastor, Bibliografía madrileña, ó descripción de las obras impresas en Madrid, 3 vols (Madrid: Tipografía de los Huérfanos/Tipografía de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1891—1907), II, 250.

24 Don Quijote, II, ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 670.

25 Don Quijote, II, ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 679.

26 ‘Bien sé lo que son tentaciones del demonio, y que una de las mayores es ponerle a un hombre en el entendimiento que puede componer y imprimir un libro con que gane tanta fama como dineros y tantos dineros cuanta fama.’ Don Quijote, II, ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 675.

27 ‘Yo no imprimo mis libros para alcanzar fama en el mundo, que ya en él soy conocido por mis obras: provecho quiero, que sin él no vale un cuatrín la buena fama.’ Don Quijote, II. 62; ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 1250.

28 Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, que contiene su tercera salida : y es la quinta parte de sus aventuras (Tarragona: Felipe Roberto, 1614).

29 Don Quijote, II. 62; ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 1251.

30 ‘Iten, suplico a los dichos señores mis albaceas que si la buena suerte les trujere a conocer al autor que dicen que compuso una historia que anda por ahí con el título de Segunda parte de las hazañas de don Quijote de la Mancha, de mi parte le pidan, cuan encarecidamente ser pueda, perdone la ocasión que sin yo pensarlo le di de haber escrito tantos y tan grandes disparates como en ella escribe, porque parto desta vida con escrúpulo de haberle dado motivo para escribirlos’; Don Quijote, II. 74; ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 1334.

31 ‘Muchas veces acontece que los que tenían méritamente granjeada y alcanzada gran fama por sus escritos, en dándolos a la estampa la perdieron del todo o la menoscabaron en algo. —La causa deso es —dijo Sansón— que, como las obras impresas se miran despacio, fácilmente se veen sus faltas, y tanto más se escudriñan cuanto es mayor la fama del que las compuso’; Don Quijote, II. 3; ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 713.

32 ‘Pero yo pienso darlas a la estampa, para que se vea despacio lo que pasa apriesa, y se disimula, o no se entiende cuando las representan. Y las comedias tienen sus sazones y tiempos, como los cantares.’ Viaje del Parnaso, ed. by Miguel Herrero García (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Miguel de Cervantes, 1983), p. 314.

33 El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, 2nd edn (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1605). The six occasions on which reference is made to the donkey can be found on fols. 109r, IIIV, 112r, 120V; 121r and 122r.

34 El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Brussels: Roger Velpius, 1607). The six corrections are located on fols. 210r, 215r, 216r, 232r, 233r and 235r. El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1608). The two corrections can be found on fols. 96r and 98v.

35 ‘—No está en eso el yerro —replicó Sansón—, sino en que antes de haber parecido el jumento dice el autor que iba a caballo Sancho en el mesmo rucio. —A eso —dijo Sancho— no sé qué responder, sino que el historiador se engañó, o ya sería descuido del impresor.’ Don Quijote, II. 4; ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 716.

36 ‘Dezidnos della, que ay hombre | que hasta de una mula parda | saber el sucesso aguarda, | la color, el talle, y nombre: | O si no dirán que fue | olvido del escritor’. Lope de Vega Carpio, Ventidos parte perfeta de las comedias(Madrid: La viuda de Juan Gonzalez, 1635), fol. 166r.

37 Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 34.

38 Miguel de Cervantes, ed. by Jorge García López, Novelas ejemplares (Barcelona: Circulo de Lectores/Galaxia Gutenberg, 2005), p. 16.

39 Novelas ejemplares, ed. García López, pp. 19—20.

40 ‘Don Quijote de la Mancha queda calzadas las espuelas en su segunda parte, para ir a besar los pies a V. E. […] Luego irá el gran Persiles, y luego Las semanas del jardín, y luego la segunda parte de La Galatea’; La entretenida,ed. O’Neill.

41 See Don Quijote, II; ed. Instituto Cervantes, pp. 677 and 679, and Persiles, ed. Romero Muñoz, pp. 117—18.

42 The title of Bernardo could be a reference to the legendary Spanish hero Bernardo del Carpio, who appears as a character in Cervantes’s play La casa de los celos, and is mentioned in El gallardo español and (several times) in Don Quijote.

43 The preliminares of Avellaneda’s Quijote do not include a privilegio, fe de erratas or tasa. The last date in the front matter is 4 July, which is when the second aprobacián was signed (fol. [ii]r). It is unlikely that a work of this size (sixty-eight sheets of quarto) could have been printed in less than two months, so the earliest date that it could have been published is September, which is the date that Canavaggio gives (Don Quijote, ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. CCCI). However, it is difficult to imagine that Cervantes, had he known about Avellaneda’s Quijote,would not have found a way of inserting some reference to it in the preliminares to Viaje del Parnaso, just as he did in the dedication to Ocho comedias and the prologue to the second part of Don Quijote. Such a reference could even have been added after the fe de erratas (11 November) and tasa (17 November), as was the case with the dedication of the Segunda parte. It therefore seems unlikely that Cervantes found out about Avellaneda’s Quijote until late November or December 1614.

44 Since Cervantes mentions having only six plays and interludes ready for publication in the Adjunta al Parnaso(see Viaje del Parnaso, ed. Herrero García, p. 314), he probably wrote the new material in the period of approximately five months between finishing Don Quijote and handing over the manuscript of Ocho comedias to the printers.

45 Don Quijote, II. 62; ed. Instituto Cervantes, p. 1250.

46 ‘Sabemos por los contratos de impresión conservados que, por lo general, cuando se acordaba una edición, se exigía que no se aceptara otro trabajo hasta que se acabara el recién admitido, lo cual, descartando las salidas de la norma que hubiera, implicaba la organización de la empresa en torno a un proyecto, al margen de los pequeños encargos que se aceptaran’; Sonia Garza Merino, ‘La cuenta del original’, in Imprenta y crítica textual en el siglo de oro, ed. by Francisco Rico, Pablo Andrés, and Sonia Garza (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2000), pp. 65—95 (p. 73).

47 Juan Vázquez de Mármol, Condiciones que se pueden poner cuando se da a imprimir un libro (Madrid: El Crotalón, 1983). The Condiciones are part of an autograph miscellany preserved at the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (sig. Mss/9226, fol. 243r—v).

48 ‘Que el impressor se obligue a començar a imprimirlo dentro de tanto tiempo y despues de comenzado no dexe de proseguir en el so cierta pena.’

49 Neither the Dictionarium nor El cavallero puntual required a privilegio, since they were new editions, so estimates have been provided. If the speed of printing of the Dictionarium matched that of the Historia general,which was 319 sheets of folio and in production for nine months, then this work, which was almost exactly two thirds as long at 213 sheets of folio, would have been in production for six months. If, on the other hand, one assumes that production was at the average rate of 4. 5 sheets a week for folio at the la Cuesta shop between 1612 and 1615, printing of the Dictionarium would not have started until late September 1614. The only other work in duodecimo format, apart from El cavallero puntual, produced by Juan de la Cuesta in the period in question was the 1614 edition of Jorge Manrique’s Coplas (see Pérez Pastor, Bibliografía madrileña, p. 297). The production window of that book, which comprised 17 sheets, spanned seven months, from 21 June 1613 until 17 January 1614. If the 13 sheets of El cavallero puntual were printed at a similar rate, production would have started sometime around the beginning of June 1615. However, none of these estimates should be regarded as reliable, since, as this study shows, it is very difficult to calculate rates of production for works that are printed concurrently.

50 McKenzie, ‘Printers of the Mind’, pp. 25—26.

51 El ingenioso hidalgo, fols. [ii]rand [iii]v.

52 Segunda parte, fols. [ii]rand [v]v.

53 Francisco Rico, El texto del ‘Quijote’: preliminares a una ecdótica del siglo de oro (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 2005), p. 210.

54 Jaime Moll, Problemas bibliográficos del libro del siglo de oro (Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2011), pp. 118—19.

55 Antonio de Herrera, Historia General de los Hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Oceano [General History of the Deeds of the Castilian People in the Islands and Mainlands of the Oceans], pt. V—VIII, 2 vols (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1615); Antonio Nebrija, Dictionarium (repr. Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1615); Francisco Murcia de la Llana, Compendio de los Metheoros del Principe de los Filosofos Griegos y Latinos Aristoteles[‘Compendium of the Meteorological Observations of the Prince of Greek and Latin Philosophers Aristoteles’] (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1615); Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, El Cavallero puntual, pt. 1, 2nd edn (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1615).

56 Segunda parte, fol. [ii]v.

57 Sermones predicados en la Beatificacion de La B. M. Teresa de Jesus Virgen (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Martín, 1615); Rhetoricae Compendium ex scriptis Patris Ioannis Baptistae Poza (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Martín, 1615); Alonso de Ledesma, Romancero y Monstro imaginado (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Martín, 1615). A romancero is a collection of romances (ballads).

58 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 164.

59 ‘La práctica más común fue el reparto de la composición de un cuaderno entre cajistas que, trabajando sincronizadamente, fueran suministrando las formas a uno o dos tiradores diferentes, de manera que al cabo del día pudieran tener impreso un pliego, por lo menos, de una tirada corriente de mil o mil quinientos ejemplares’; Garza Merino, ‘La cuenta del original’, p. 73.

60 McKenzie ‘Printers of the Mind’, pp. 28—30.

61 Juan de Aranda, Lugares comunes de Conceptos, Dichos y Sentencias en diversas materias, 2nd edn (Madrid: Juan de La Cuesta, 1613); Gonzalo de Illescas, Segunda parte de la Historia Pontifical y Catholica (repr. Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1613). See Pérez Pastor, Bibliografía madrileña, pp. 246—47, 26524.

62 Arithmetica Practica y Speculativa (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Martín, 1615). Villaroel was granted a licencia on 4 December 1614 (see Pérez Pastor, Bibliografía madrileña, p. 351).

63 Historia etiopica de los amores de Teogenes y Cariclea (Madrid: La viuda de Alonso Martín, 1615). The licenciawas granted on 10 February 1615, and the last date in the front matter is 13 June, which is when the dedication was signed (see Pérez Pastor, Bibliografía madrileña, p. 334).

64 The only other work with which Villarroel was associated was Persiles y Sigismunda, but that was printed by Juan de la Cuesta, although Medina’s shop did produce an edition, in 1619 (see Pérez Pastor, Bibliografía madrileña, p. 481).

65 K. Sliwa, Documentos de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, S.A., 1999), p. 369.

66 ‘Él me las pagó razonablemente’; La entretenida, ed. O’Neill. Regarding the debt, see Sliwa, Documentos, pp. 371—72.

67 Jaime Moll, ‘Viuda de Alonso Martín’, in Gran Enciclopedia Cervantina, VIII (2011), p. 7639.

68 Lope de Vega, Sexta parte de sus Comedias (Madrid: la viuda de Alonso Martín, 1615). Other important works produced at the Medina shop included editions of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (1622), Montemayor’s La Diana(1622), and Rojas’s Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (1632).

69 Moll, Problemas bibliográficos, p. 120.

70 ‘Todavía me quedan en el alma ciertas reliquias y asomos de Las semanas del jardín, y del famoso Bernardo. Si, a dicha, por buena ventura mía (que ya no sería ventura, sino milagro), me diese el cielo vida, las verá, y, con ellas, fin de La Galatea’; Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Romero Muñoz, pp. 117—18.

© The Author 2015; all rights reserved

Baroque Culture as a Concept of Epoch

Jose Antonio Maravall was born in Spain in 1911. He was professor at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, and associate professor at the University of Paris. He was a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History and a visiting professor at many universities in the United States and Europe. He is the author of more than 30 books and articles. 

This article is the Introduction to his book La cultura del Barroco, first published in 1975, that is also available in English.

Among the different approaches valid for arriving at an interpretation of baroque culture —whose results, precisely because of its diversity, will always be incomplete —I have focused my inquiry on the meaning and range of the characteristics making up this culture, so that its nexus, with its social relations, will stand out from those relations on which it depends and to whose slow transformation it, in turn, contributes. Perhaps this point of view will give us a broader and more systematic panorama, but we also must accept an accompanying limitation: the baroque is no longer a concept of style that can be repeated and that is assumed to have been repeated in many phases of human history; it has come to be, in frank contradiction with baroque as a style, a mere concept of epoch. My examination presents the baroque as a delimited epoch in the history of certain European countries whose historical situation maintained, at a specific moment, a close relation, whatever the differences between them. By way of derivation, the culture of a baroque epoch can manifest itself (and has become manifest) in the American countries indirectly affected by the European cultural conditions of that time.

But my approach certainly does not define the baroque as a European epoch situated between two perfectly defined dates. Historical epochs are not snipped away and isolated from one another by the dividing line of one year or one date; rather, by means of the arbitrary intervention of the human mind contemplating them, they are separated from one another along a broad zone of dates throughout which they mature and afterwards disappear, being transformed into others, passing their inheritance on to others in a way that it cannot be refused. The baroque, then, runs approximately from 1600 (without discarding the possibility that certain advanced phenomena of baroque significance appeared some years previously, in the later times of Michelangelesque Mannerism and, in Spain, with the construction of the Escorial) to 1670-80 (a time of economic change and the first echoes of modern science in Spain; cultural, political, and economic Colbertism in France; the unimpeded emergence of the Industrial Revolution in England). One may discover baroque manifestations counting among the most outlandish and extreme until well into the eighteenth century, but the sense of the epoch is different. In Spain, the years of Philip III’s reign (1598-1621) encompass the period of transformation; those of Philip IV (1621-65) the period of its peak; and those of Charles II, at least in the first two decades, the final phase of decadence and degeneration, until a time of restoration toward a new epoch begins before the end of the century.{1}

The baroque, then, is a historical concept. It encompasses, approximately, the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, having its center of greater intensity and fuller significance between 1605 and 1650. If this zone of dates refers specifically to Spanish history, it is also valid (with slight adjustments) for other European countries. In Italy, however, with such names as Botero and Tasso, its beginning could be set earlier, at least in some aspects of art, politics, and literature.

I do not, therefore, use the term baroque to designate morphological or stylistic concepts, repeatable in culture, that are chronologically and geographically disparate. One may certainly establish certain relations between external, purely formal elements of the baroque in seventeenth-century Europe and elements present in very different historical epochs in unrelated cultural areas. A culture always has borrowings and legacies from previous and distant cultures. Let us recall the considerable and curious harvest of iconographic terms that Southeast Asia contributed to the European Middle Ages, as some of Baltrusaitis’ ingenious studies have revealed.{2} But these antecedents and influences do not define a culture. They tell us, at most, that a culture of a given period is open to exotic currents that are geographically mobile. Examples include the introduction of the cupola in pre-Roman Catalan art{3} or the title basileus that was used for some Asturian or British kings.{4} Perhaps we are required, in characterizing a culture, to point out the dependence on a distant tradition (as with Mozarabic art, which has a Visigothic base with Islamic elements;{5} or the Brahmanic metaphors that until the eighteenth century were used to express the European estatist conception of society).{6} But tnese cases do not represent intracultural kinship so much as isolated contributions that are integrated into different complexes. Neither the mere coincidence in the utilization of separate elements nor the repetition of formal elements whose connection occurs in very different systems can serve as a basis for defining cultures spanning centuries and geographic regions of very diverse characteristics. These morphological correlations, established in abstraction from many other aspects that one needs in order to define a cultural moment, say little or nothing to the historian. The seeking out and formulation of such morphologies are no more than a play of wit that ordinarily becomes limited to a pleasant arbitrariness. Nevertheless, in recognizing these correlations through space and time we are able to ground some generalizations whose application in other fields of knowledge is indisputable.

But we situate ourselves in the realm of social history, which is first and foremost history: its object is not to limit what is conceived in consideration of its observable data, so that their observation —and every possible resulting induction —is maintained only on the superficial level of aspects recurring throughout distinct phases of the human past. Rather, its purpose is to attain the most systematic knowledge possible about each of the periods it submits to study, without discarding the possibility that they will afterward be compared with great precision. Its orientation is to supplement concretely the best knowledge of each epoch, not to establish abstract generalizations, and its method takes into account the greatest quantity and most varied data obtainable from what an epoch might offer and then interprets them in the complex in which they are integrated. These data include some that reveal similarities or congruences with other epochs. All this effort is not directed toward discovering baroque periods all the way from ancient Egypt to present America, but to completing the panorama of connections between facts of a multiple nature that may lead us to a better knowledge of what the baroque was as a unique period of European culture during the seventeenth century.

In the following pages I will refer to phenomena from various fields, but I have no expectation of running across similarities or morphological kinships that from outside bring the facts together, nor across manifestations of a style that from within inspires economic, political, religious, artistic, or literary phenomena. Yet I believe that one can speak of a baroque at a given time, in any field of human endeavor. In 1944, I noted in my book about Spanish political thought in the seventeenth century that I could just as well have substituted the phrase “in the epoch of the baroque.”{7} Because such an expression would have still been unusual at that time, I decided not to use it in the book’s title. Some years later, in 1953, a specialist in the history of painting, who was speaking about the baroque as the epoch concept of the seventeenth century, expressed the need for a study on baroque political thought.{8} By this time, my book had already been written and would soon be published in French, with a preface by Mesnard wherein he stressed the basic formulation that the work was advancing. Some German authors have spoken, in another realm, of baroque theology, an expression —untenable today —that was easy to elaborate because the appearance and development of baroque culture were for a long time closely related to its religious element.{9} Today it has even become common to speak about baroque science, the baroque’s art of war, baroque economy, baroque politics, and soforth. Clearly in this one must proceed carefully. There can be a certain correspondence among external or formal characteristics occurring in one field or another. Undoubtedly certain aspects of the epoch’s architecture or pictorial depiction can be (by way of example) especially apt for containing a reference to the majestic condition of the baroque’s absolute kings. But, contrary to the arbitrary connection between cupola and monarchy proposed by Eugenio d’Ors,{10} Mousnier led me to observe that there is no seventeenth-century royal palace with a cupola crowning it at its center. I don’t know whether it would be possible to establish similarities between navigation technology and Gongora’s Soledades or between Quevedo’s Sueños and the economy of fleece. I am sure that attempts of this type would be entertaining to read, but I fear that they do little to add to our historical knowledge of the epoch.

My thesis is that all these fields of culture coincide as factors of a historical situation and have repercussions in it, some more than others. In their transformation, proper to the situation of each time, they come to be what they are by the combined and reciprocal action of all the other factors. That is to say, it is not that baroque painting, baroque economy, and the baroque art of war have similarities among themselves (or, at least, their similarity is not what counts, without discarding the possibility that some formal comparison might emerge). Instead, given that they develop in the same situation, as a result of the same conditions, responding to the same vital necessities, undergoing an undeniable modifying influence on the part of the other factors, each factor thus ends up being altered, dependent on the epoch as a complex to which all the observed changes must be referred. In these terms, it is possible to attribute determining characteristics of the epoch —in this case, its baroque character —to theology, painting, the warring arts, physics, economy, politics, and so on. It is in this way that the crisis economy, monetary upheavals, credit insecurity, economic wars, and (along with this) the strengthening of seignorial agrarian landholdings and the growing impoverishment of the masses foster a feeling of being threatened and of instability in one’s personal and social life, a feeling that is held in control by the imposing forces of repression that underlie the dramatic gesticulation of the baroque human being and permit us the use of such a name.

So the baroque is a concept of epoch that in principle extends to all the manifestations making up this epoch’s culture.{11} The new concept of epoch came to be identified by means of art in Italian culture; Burckhardt noticed that, after the Renaissance period and continuing for a specific number of years, the works he contemplated in Rome had, in their deformations and corruptions of previous models, characteristics appearing to belong to a time that was somehow different. Around 1887, in the churches he was studying, Gurlitt, a historian of Roman architecture, observed forms of Renaissance classicism that were lacking in order. At first glance these forms differed among themselves, certainly, but they were dislocated by the same whirlwind of a disordered expression, and all of its products could also be framed between specific dates. Thus resulted the first observations about the baroque, and the vacillating estimations regarding it emerged already in reference to a more or less defined epoch: the epoch following the classicist Renaissance. Wolfflin ventured to extend the new category to the more extensive area of literature. When the characteristics pointed out in this series of works were broadened to other fields, the concept of epoch defining this new post-Renaissance culture was already prepared and, with it, its extension to the diverse sectors of a culture and to the group of countries where it had spread.

As interest in the baroque continued to grow and research on it became more productive, the estimation of its works changed in turn and its interpretation became more complicated and better adapted. The investigative work and the positive valorization of the baroque stage in European culture had its starting point in Germany, from there passing rapidly to Italy, then Spain and England, and finally to France. There the weight of tradition, specifically of classicism— considered only a few years ago to be incompatible with the baroque — made comprehension of the baroque more difficult, at least until recent times (always with some exceptions that must stand as precedents, such as M. Raymond). At present, however, some of the most suggestive works proceed from French scholars. The change in the historical formulation of baroque interpretation can be illustrated with one of its most extreme expressions, taken from the sociohistorian Lewis Mumford, for whom the Renaissance comes to be the initial phase of a new epoch that reaches its fullest meaning in the baroque. According to his thesis, we can characterize the Renaissance, with all its purity of precepts, as the first manifestation of the subsequent baroque.{12} It is worthwhile to underscore this definitive recognition of a conditioning link between both periods and the appraisal of a highly positive value that one must attribute to the baroque in European culture. Certainly, I do not refer here to subjective personal appraisals regarding the works of artists, politicians, thinkers, or writers of the baroque epoch, which would be similar to attributing them with qualities of good or bad taste according to the preferences of each historian. In the eighteenth century, when the wordbaroque first emerged to qualify specific products of the creative activity of poets, dramatists, and the plastic arts, it was already tinted with a pejorative meaning. Inversely, in other circumstances —such as in Spain during the second quarter of this century —a heated enthusiasm arose around the gongorine movement for baroque creations. Here we have to dispense with such appraisals. Appealing to personal taste disrupts the perception of a cultural phenomenon; although its study takes into account appraisals of such a nature, we are ultimately liable for not seeing things with clarity. In a book that contains validcontributions but also serious limitations, V. L. Tapie, studying the baroque in comparison with classicism counterposes the permanent admiration produced (according to him) by a work of a classical character, such as Versailles, to the repulsion that contemporary good taste experiences before a baroque production.{13} But during the very years when Tapie was writing, the young reseacher J.G. Simpson considered Versailles to be saturated with baroqueness, despite its classicist details, and simultaneously tells us that its lack of restraint and proportion makes us lose ourselves there: “the grandeur turns into megalomania.”{14}

The participation of scholars from different countries in baroque studies has enriched and helped give a more precise direction to its interpretation. Although the Germans (Wolfflin, Riegl, Weisbach) insisted (more the first than the last) on formal aspects, they already brought out the connection with historical circumstances: the counterreformist renewal of the Church, the strengthening of papal authority, the expansion of the Society of Jesus —all of which led ultimately to the systematic positing of the baroque as the “art of the Counter-Reformation.” This interpretation, which was so influential for several years, gave maximum emphasis to the role of Italy, above all in art, and compensated by reserving for Germany the greater part of the literary baroque. Because of the recognition of Italy’s predominant role, it was possible better to appreciate something that we have pointed out: the nexus between classicism and the baroque, whose affirmation led H. Hatzfeld to say that “wherever the problem of the baroque emerges, the existence of Classicism remains implicit.”{15} Hatzfeld observed that keeping the Greco-Latin ideal and accepting Aristotle’s Poetics go together at the baroque’s origin (let us recall the role that Robortello’s Aristotelian poetics played in Lope). The panorama that Hatzfeld outlined regarding the evolution of the baroque movement is of interest:

With inevitable differences from generation to generation and with more or less ability, the theorizing Italy, Spain, which experimented with the Italian forms, and France, which, in slow maturation, came to its creations with a fully theoretical consciousness, harmonized their particular national literary and linguistic traditions in a baroque style. This is the same as saying that certain forms of the Italian Renaissance had become common to all of Europe, thanks to the mediation and modifying activity of Spain, and paradoxically culminated in French classicism.{16}

In granting the Mediterranean and Latin countries such a preponderant role in the appearance and development of baroque culture, we cannot forget the significance of such central-European figures as Comenius, whose work as a pedagogue and moralist is decisive in any attempt to define the baroque, nor, on the other hand, English literature and the art and thought of the Low Countries. From this new perspective, the baroque, while in force in Europe, covered more ground than it did in those already outmoded explanations that presented it as a complex of literary or pseudoartistic aberrations saturated with the bad taste that counterreformist Catholicism had cultivated in countries subject to Rome. At the same time, the period was accompanied by a complexity of resources and results that made it one of those most in need of study in order to understand the history of modern Europe. In any case, it can no longer be seen as a consequence following from a single factor, nor even from the varied consequences it provoked on the cultural plane; instead, it became manifest in connection with an extremely varied repertory of factors that together determined the moment’s historical situation and imbued all its manifestations with those interdependent and related characteristics that permit us to speak, in a general sense, of the culture of the baroque.

The transformations of sensibility that in recent times came to be tied to new social conditions —whose first phase of maximum critical tension was reached in the 1920s —awakened a new interest in certain productions of Spanish culture. Until then, under pressure of a pedagogical classicism, many of these productions had been cast aside; the recently awakening interest has resulted in the incorporation of the rich area of seventeenth-century Spain into the study of the European baroque. The rediscovery of El Greco, the growing admiration for Velazquez, Zurbaran, and Ribera, the appreciation of the theater, of the picaresque novel and even of the more trivial lyric poetry, and, finally, of economic and political thought have prepared the way for a more developed study of the Spanish baroque. Admittedly, the rise of Spanish baroque studies was favored by the tendency, vigorously followed in the diffusion of seventeenth-century studies, to link baroque creations with Tridentine Catholicism, civil monarchy, pontifical absolutism, and Jesuit instruction, factors that were widely developed in Spain. Even in Tapie’s book on the baroque, which dealt with France, Italy, central Europe, and Brazil, there was no mention made of Spain, although the fact would have proven unjustifiable from any point of view even at the time when the work was published. Francastel advanced the harsh objection that for this simple reason the work represented an improper development of the theme:

Tapie takes the Italian origin of the baroque as an absolute given; personally I believe that the baroque is not born in Italy but as a consequence of the forceful penetration of certain religious forms that arrived from Spain and also, undoubtedly, through the penetration of certain modalities of a taste that, without being Spanish, perhaps was linked to the social order imposed by Hispanicization.{17}

Previously, S. Sitwell had maintained that one must study Spanish examples to find the characteristics that define the baroque with greater clarity and a more general validity; hence the advantage of also making use of the Portuguese and Spanish-American examples that are related to them.{18} This author as well as another English author, Watkin,{19} in accentuating the Hispanic factor in the baroque, link it to a dependency upon Catholic and Hispanic religiosity. What is certain is that the Spanish component in the baroque has tended to be more and more amplified. For reasons similar to those of the English writers I have cited, Weisbach also utilized Spanish data to a great extent in making the baroque an art of the Counter-Reformation. But perhaps no one has taken this position to as much of an extreme as H. Hatzfeld: for him, the baroque is linked to far-removed and constant ingredients of the Spanish genius —certain aspects could already be discovered in Hispano-Latin writers (Lucan, Seneca, Prudentius); the forms of religiosity that make the Spanish spirit unique (in St. John of the Cross, St. Ignatius) had a strong influence on its development; and, finally, one must take into account the presence of certain elements occurring in the Hispanic tradition (i.e., Islamic and North African elements). According to Hatzfeld, since the second half of the sixteenth century, Spain —penetrated with Italian culture in the sixteenth century, saturated with Italianism, present in Italy and influential there to a great degree —provoked an alteration in the circumstances in which the Italian Renaissance was developing and compelled writers and artists to seek new forms that led to the baroque. In the formation of the baroque it would be impossible to deny the circumstances of Hispanicization in Rome, Naples, and indirectly at other points on the Italian peninsula. Spain, which contributed so effectively to the breakdown and removal of the Renaissance order, rapidly assimilated the incipient baroque forms of Italy, carried them to maturity, and diffused them into France, Flanders, Italy itself, and also into the Protestant milieu of England and Germany.{20} Counterreform, absolutism, and baroque went together, betokened by their Spanish base, and even the baroque art produced in Protestant countries was found to have a relation to the Hispanic influence —a thesis that others had already stated without playing down (contrary to what Hatzfeld does) the creative value of the Protestant baroque.{21}

Baroque culture thus extended to the most varied manifestations of social life and human works, although different manifestations predominated in different places; the geographic zone to which this culture extended —without making distinction between original and derived production —encompassed all western European countries, from where it is exported to the American colonies or had repercussions in eastern Europe. Finally, given the multiplicity of human resources participating in it, no less than the extremely varied attributes of the groups where it developed, the baroque depended upon similar or connected circumstances of a historical situation and not on other factors —for example, on its popular characteristics or on the particular causes of an ethnic group.

On the other hand, after the valid criticism of A. Castro and others, it is today impossible to take seriously the reference to similarities of style in Latin writers of peninsular origin, the attempt to find Hispanic characteristics “from their most remote origins” (as it was postulated by M. Pelayo), or the belief of finding echoes of Lucan or Seneca in Spanish writers when they are deemed of high quality. The thesis is no more tenable that aims to recognize Islamic components, in an attempt to show a Hispanic predisposition toward the baroque; the same arguments militate against this as against the former, although not all of the many who have spoken about the subject — arbitrarily to a certain degree —are disposed to recognize it. Besides, in what North African or Islamic country has the baroque taken place, if this concept is endowed with a meaning somewhat more consistent than a certain tendency to decorative outlandishness that is so common to so many peoples in so many epochs and civilizations, and which plays a secondary role in the historical structure of the baroque?{22}

There remains the question of appealing to the Spanish character itself, which in this case refers to religious attitudes and more particularly to mystical ones. Frequently —and this is what Hatzfeld does —the baroque is combined with mysticism and both are linked to the Spanish character and spirituality. In Spain, however, mysticism was an imported form of religiousness that arrived from Flanders and Germany before passing, in turn, to Germany and France —leaving aside at each moment the case of Italy. Spanish mysticism was a shortlived and delimited phenomenon, and nothing remained of it in the seventeenth century when, inversely, French and above all German mysticism were thriving magnificently. There did exist forms of magical thought that cannot be merely equated with mysticism; on the other hand, they could be found in all of Europe in this same epoch. Finally, the aspects characterizing mysticism, at least as it occurred in Spain (with St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross) were straightforwardly different from those of the baroque; they were rather anti-Baroque, without being divorced from the common ground of scholastic philosophy that was present in both.{23} Of course, I am not including St. Ignatius here as a mystic. The Ignatian mentality was disseminated and came to fruition in almost all European countries. To discuss the correspondences of Ignatian mentality with baroque propositions — which occurred more in his followers than in St. Ignatius —we have to appreciate the results of the coinciding dependency with respect to the same historical situation.

The reader of the voluminous collection of Cartas dejesuitas — which spanned the lengthy Baroque — encounters abundant materials that reveal the mentality of the time. I shall make use of some of them in the following chapters. But although there were baroque writers who proved susceptible to Jesuit culture (Tirso de Molina, Salas Barbadillo, Diaz Rengifo, etc.), another body of opinion disagreed with what they were proposing as a new mode of acting and feeling. Barrionuevo tells us that for many it was an error to admit such writers in any republic at all.{24} In several of the first group of the Cartas (those dated from January to July, 1634), there is talk of numerous writings from diverse sources against the Society: one of them (February 23) says that “it was raining papers against the Society.” But we know that the king, in a harsh decision, gave the order to gather up the papers and condemn their authors, and he charged the Spanish Inquisition with carrying out the order.{25} These references continue to be valuable as an index: not everything remained in line with the Jesuits in the mentality of their contemporaries.

The baroque epoch was, certainly, a time of the faithful (which is not very significantly Jesuit, either, though it may not be entirely estranged), but of a faith that not only retained but reinforced its kinship with magical forms, which were frequently inclined toward superstitious manifestations—Volpe, Buisson, Granjel, and Caro Baroja have studied them in Italy, France, Spain, and elsewhere. The baroque mind was familiar with exalted and irrational forms of religious, political and even physical beliefs, and to a certain extent baroque culture displayed itself in support of these feelings. This doesn’t have anything to do with Spanish mysticism directly: not Spanish, because it was a phenomenon taking place extensively and vigorously everywhere; and not mysticism, because its ground of belief was saturated with the current of rationalization that sustained scholasticism. The Church, the monarchy, and other privileged groups that had to draw to themselves sectors of opinion exerted all possible pressure to strengthen these extrarational aspects so they could make use of them. This process had also taken place in other epochs, but in the seventeenth century both within and outside of Spain the question had become much more difficult. And that greater difficulty is explained by the quantitative increase in the population affected, by the individualist energies that had become more intense, by a comparatively richer information disseminated in the media of the city, and by the very complexity of the media available. It no longer sufficed to sculpt an exemplary “history” in the capital of a column, to paint it on stained glass, or to recount it with the innocuous simplicity of a hagiographic legend.{26} For the new time in which the European societies were living, one had to find the most adequate — we might even say the most rational —mode for utilizing every extrarational resource, and one had to possess the technology for its most efficient application.

But the preceding leaves much unsaid. Although religious life and the Church played a decisive role in the formation and development of the baroque —religion occupied a central position for Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth century and was incorporated by political interests —the manifestations of that culture did not always or everywhere correspond with those of religious life, nor did the problems it poses for our knowledge of it derive from a religious spirit. In the entire Spanish baroque, the greatest weight must perhaps be attributed to the monarchy and the composite of monarchical-seignorial interests that it enveloped. When E. Male tried to link the art of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to counterreformist influences (already pointed out by Dejob),{27} he scarcely mentioned Velazquez, and even this was in reference to the apocryphal portrait of St. Teresa.

The baroque, as an epoch of interesting contrasts and perhaps many times one of bad taste (individualism and traditionalism, inquisitive authority and unsteadying freedom, mysticism and sensualism, theology and superstition, war and commerce, geometry and capriciousness), was not the result of multisecular influences on a country whose character they shaped, nor did it result frominfluences that irradiated from one country that was supposedly endowed with such characteristics upon others related to it. Baroque culture emerged not from influences or character but from the historical situation. Consequently, whoever was connected with the historical situation participated in that culture, although in each case it varied according to the social position of the individuals in question. The baroque depended, then, on a certain state of society by virtue of which, and because of its breadth, all the societies of western Europe exhibited connected aspects. Within this framework personal and singular influences can be studied, such as those of Tintoretto or Veronese in Spain, of Bernini in France, of Botero or Suarez in the western monarchies. But what explains the characteristics of baroque culture is the condition of the societies in the general and particular circumstances as present in seventeenth-century European countries; within those circumstances, we must take into account the relation of religious and political power with the mass of subjects. Therefore, rather than a question of religion, the baroque was a question of the Church, and especially the Catholic Church because of its status as an absolute monarchical power. It is not any less connected with the other monarchies and inevitably with nearby republics that were related to countries of monarchical absolutism, such as Venice or the Low Countries.

When I speak of the baroque, I do so always in general terms; the national connotation that is present in this work serves only to introduce the nuances that vary the panoramic view when the vantage point shifts, although without losing sight of the whole. Saying Spanish baroque is equivalent to saying European baroque seen from Spain. Nowadays, it is possible and perhaps even appropriate to speak of the baroque in one country, while securing the theme within a general context. This geographic and historical consideration is parallel to another of a cultural type. The baroque cannot be abstracted as a period of art, nor even as a period of the history of ideas. It affected and belonged to the total ambit of social history, and every study of the subject matter, although legitimately becoming specialized, must unfold by projecting itself into the entire sphere of culture.

I intend this interpretation of the baroque, which will surely be debated, to be recognized nonetheless as applicable to those European countries in which that culture developed. The materials largely come from Spanish sources, and here I try to relate them to one another, placing them in the perspective of the history of Spain. But I take into account, when possible, diverse data from other countries, especially those most closely related with Spanish history. P. Vilar has written that “the drama of 1600 moves beyond the Spanish ambit and announces that seventeenth century, a severe one for Europe, which is today recognized as the time of a general crisis of society.”{28} Later I shall return to this concept of “general crisis.” The formation and development of baroque culture must be referred to that crisis, which offers a basis for explaining how it affects the whole of Europe. If only because of its peculiar situation and, consequently, the gravity of the characteristics of this crisis, Spain’s part in the history of the baroque and its weight in relation to other countries is manifestly considerable. Therefore I believe that it is important to situate ourselves along the perspective of Spanish history. In few occasions has Spain’s participation in European life played a role as decisive as in the seventeenth century. Its role was negative —using this word conventionally and, in this case, in a nonpejorative sense —because of the particular seriousness that this century’s economic and social crisis reached in Spain, and its role was positive —using this word not in its affirmative sense —because of the efficacy with which baroque expedients [resortes] were manipulated, with the early techniques of mass social operation in the ambit of the Spanish monarchy, in achieving the social and political effects of a conservative character.

I recognize, however, that mass society cannot be spoken of in rigorously socioeconomic terms except within the framework of industrial society. Even at the end of the seventeenth century, nowhere —not even in France after Colbert — is there scarcely a statistical change from the previous phase (except for the initial takeoff of England). In Spain there is not even this, despite the pathetic recommendations of Sancho de Moncada, Martinez de Mata, and Alvarez de Ossorio; economically, this previous stage, corresponding to the conditions that prepare for the takeoff (in Rostow’s terms, which are easily comprehensible today) can barely begin to be recognized during the century. The frequent use of the words manufacture and factory in an industrial sense and not merely traditionally would be a weak indication of what we are saying.{29} Soon we will have to emphasize this point from another perspective. Nevertheless, I have no doubts about applying the expression mass society. Why? The historian has to be aware that between traditional society and mass society, with its increase in population, there is an intermediate position in which society no longer exhibits the signs of its traditional period and offers others that will make possible the later concentration of manual labor and the modern world’s division of labor. Perhaps few things have changed economically, above all in the order of the modes of production; socially, however, changes of greater import can be discerned, changes that may have their origin in the early economic transformations but that far exceed them. It is a society of spreading anonymity. The bonds of neighborhood, kinship, and friendship don’t disappear, but they grow pale and are frequently lacking between those living nearby in the same locality (this is one of the most distinctly reflected phenomena in the picaresque novel). To a great extent, relations exhibit the character of a contract: in terms of houses (rent), workday (salary), clothes (buying and selling), and so forth; and to a considerable degree displacements of population occur (it suffices to think about the growth of cities and the rural exodus, which means that a considerable part of the population does not live and die in their place of birth).{30}

In such a way there appear social connections that are not interindividual, that are not between people known to one another. This alters the modes of behavior: a mass of people who know themselves to be unknown to one another behaves in a different way than a group of individuals who know they can be easily identified. Hence socially this is already a mass society, and at its core it produces that depersonalization that turns humankind into a totality of manual laborers within a mechanical and anonymous svstem of production.

NOTES

{1} See Lopez Piñero, Introducción de la ciencia moderna en España (Barcelona, 1969); he distinguished periods for the crisis of Spanish historical thought that are close to those established here.
{2} J. Baltrusaitis, Le Moyen Age fantastique (Paris, 1955).
{3} See J. Puig y Cadalfach, Le premier art roman (Paris, 1928).
{4} See my Concepto de España en la Edad Media (Madrid, 1954); examples cited are on pp. 403ff.
{5} See Gomez Moreno, Las iglesias mozárabes, vol. I (Madrid, 1919).
{6} Ossowski, Estructura de clases y consciencia social (Madrid, 1944).
{7} See my Teoria española del Estado en el siglo XVII (Madrid, 1944).
{8} R. Huyghe, “Classicisme et baroque dans la peinture française du XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe Siècle, no. 20 (Paris, 1953).
{9} From Weisbach, Gothein, and many others, to the French translator of my work cited in note 7, who attempted to introduce the thought studied there “dans ses rapports avec l’esprit de la Contre-Reforme.” On the theme of baroque metaphysics and theology, see L. Legaz, Horizontes del pensamiento jurídico (Barcelona, 1947), pp. 93ff.
{10}  Las ideas y las formas (Madrid, n.d.).
{11} Sánchez Cantón, who did not think it inappropriate to broaden the concept to the liberal arts, instead asked for the closest chronological delimitation possible in “El barroco español: Antecedentes y empleo hispánicos de barroco,” in Manierismo, Barocco, Rococo [Convegno Internazionale, Rome, 1960], (Rome, 1962).
{12}  The City in History (New York, 1961), p. 351. Referring to the new epoch, L. Mumford makes this characterization: “The new pattern of existence sprang out of a new economy, that of mercantilist capitalism; a new political framework, mainly that of a centralized despotism or oligarchy, usually embodied in a national state; and a new ideological form, that derived from mechanistic physics, whose underlying postulates had been laid down, long before, in the army and the monastery” (p. 345). This is without a doubt an essential aspect of the question: the utilization of rational and mechanical elements that scientific thought and modern technology allocate for accomplishing magical, extrarational objectives, which in the Baroque was formulated with calculation. This is the epoch’s double perspective that I have been insisting on for many years.
{13}  Baroque et classicisme (Paris, 1957), p. 26.
{14} Joyce G. Simpson, Le Tasse et la littérature et I’art baroques en France (Paris, 1962),p. 112.
{15}  Estudios sobre el barroco (Madrid, 1964), p. 62. The passage comes from the study on “Los estilos generacionales de la epoca: manierismo, barroco, barroquismo.”
{16} Ibid., 106.
{17} P. Francastel, “Baroque et classicisme: histoire ou typologie des civilisations,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 14, no. 1 (January-May 1951), p. 146. Tapie’s response in the same journal recognizes the large part played by Spain, whose shadow, according to his own words, was cast over the entire book. His subsequent monograph, Le baroque (Paris, 1961), corrected to a certain extent the previous absence, but it didn’t prove satisfactory in terms of his general posing of the question. One can see that Tapie is insufficiently acquainted with Spanish sources.
{18}  Southern Baroque Art (London, 1924) and Spanish Baroque Art (London, 1931).
{19} E. I. Watkin, Catholic Art and Culture (London, 1942).
{20} Hatzfeld, Estudios sobre el barroco. See in particular the article “La misión europea de la España barroca.”
{21} See Gerhardt, “Rembrandt y Spinoza,” Revista de Occidents 23, 1929.
{22} Hatzfeld, Estudios sobre el barroco, pp. 467-68.
{23} On Scholasticism in Spanish mysticism, see A. A. Ortega, Razón teológica y experiencia mística (Madrid, 1944); and Garrigou-Lagrange, “Saint Jean de la Croix,” La Vie Spirituelle, supplement, 1930. For a formulation in terms of the baroque, A. A. Parker, “Calderón, el dramaturgo de la escolástica,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, nos. 3-4 (1935), 273-85, 393-420.
{24}  Avisos de don Jerónimo de Barrionuevo (see the correspondence on 2 October 1655), BAE, 221, vol. I, p. 199.
{25} Cartas de jesuitas, in MHE, vols. 13-19, published by Gayangos. The quote comes from vol. 13, p. 24.
{26} In chapter 3, we note a curious statement contained in La Pícara Justina that shows that the taste for hagiographies was not as common as has been supposed. The very fact that many of the stories and comedies of saints contain such a great percentage of grotesque realism —think about Santo y sastre, the title of one of Tirso’s comedies, in which hagiography made its appearance at the theater with St. Homobono ascending to the sky with his cross —reveals an undebatable realist erosion of supernatural elements.
{27}  De l’influence du Concile du Trente sur la litterature et les beaux-arts chez les peuples catholiques (Paris, 1884).
{28}  Crescimiento y desarrollo (Barcelona, 1964), p. 438.
{29} González de Celleorigo’s declaration that “every kind of manufacture necessary to the realm” was lacking because the increase in population already represented an incipient consciousness of it (Manual de la política necesaria y útil Restauracion a la República de España [Madrid, 1600]. fols. 12, 2).
{30} I am utilizing Tönnies’ categories, though only approximately.

Don Quixote Virtual Printing

[Based on DIY Quarto: Printing quartos in Shakespeare’s time  https://www.folger.edu/publishing-shakespeare/diy-quarto]

Virtually Printing Don Quixote

CLOSE

Welcome to the Virtual Printing House

 

Try arranging pages into your own quarto edition of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha.

We base this example on digital images of the BNE’s copy of the first printed edition of Don Quijote, in Madrid, 1605. One of our goals is to heighten the sense that you are viewing a freshly printed sheet.

First a brief introduction to hand printing. Western books are constructed of groups of folded paper sheets. The folded sections are called quires, signatures, or gatherings. With books printed on paper, the entire sheet of paper is printed at once, one side at a time, and then folded up to form the signature. A quarto format is created by folding a sheet twice. A conjugated quarto is a gathering of two folded sheets inserted one into the other to produce 16 pages.

In hand printing, the type is set by a compositor, line by line, who will then impose the set type within a chase, which is a metal frame holding the type. Then, four pages are mounted in a matrix or forme, applied ink and then transferred to paper sheet in the printing press. After that, the forme is returned to the compositor, who then distributes the type back onto the type-cases. In other words, all four pages are taken apart and no longer exist. If the workshop later decided to print more copies of this sheet, they would repeat the entire process of type-setting, imposing and printing. To reset and reprint an entire forme from scratch is to create a new edition. It may be a new edition of the whole book – every single forme is reset – or it may be a new setting of a specific forme.

Eight pages per sheet of paper

Take a single sheet of paper, print eight pages out of sequence, then with folding, create a readable text in what’s known as a gathering in quarto format. That is what the printers of Don Quijote did. To see how, drag and drop the text of four pages onto one side of a sheet of paper. Note the change in orientation for some of the pages. Then flip the sheet to “print” four additional pages. Fold to create one quarto gathering with the first eight pages of the play.

1r | [p. 1]
1v [p. 2]
2r [p. 3]
2v [p. 4]
3r [p. 5]
3v [p. 6]
4r [p. 7]
4v [p. 8]
Reset ↺

2r

3v

1v

4r

3r

2v

4v

1r

For Don Quijote, the printers followed this process for eighty-two more sheets, to create a total of eighty-three regular gatherings, with eight pages each. To keep these sheets in order, each gathering was given an identifying letter of the alphabet as a “signature” by the printers. The text of Don Quijote started here with the letter A. Unlike England, where texts often started with the signature B, as printers left the A for materials like title pages, which were often printed last. In comparison, Hamlet has 12 sheets

The sequence of regular gatherings in Don Quijote runs from A through Z, then Aa through Az, Bb etc.

After the printing was finished, the sheets were folded and assembled in alphabetic order to be ready for sale.

The first edition of Don Quixote as a whole is a volume of six hundred and sixty-four pages, in eighty-three quarto sheets (conjugated, except for the first and last two, in two-sheet gatherings). See the interactive online version of the first edition of Don Quixote.

See also Printing quartos in Shakespeare’s time and the video Chancery Papermaking at the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book.

And The Manufacture of Early Printed Books in Europe

Comic poetry in Golden Age Spain

In Golden Age Spain, most major “serious” poets also wrote superb and exuberant comic verse. Cervantes, Quevedo and Góngora are but three examples.

1. Cervantes

In his book Cervantes and the Burlesque Sonnet, author Adrienne Laskier Martín seeks ‘to contribute to a new understanding and reappraisal of Cervantes as both an accomplished poet and a comic genius. Indeed, these poems reveal the model of comicity that Cervantes utilizes in his masterpiece of humor, Don Quixote.’

by Adrienne Laskier Martín
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4870069m;brand=ucpress

This book is a revised version of author’s doctoral dissertation, written at Harvard University under the direction of Francisco Márquez Villanueva:

Cervantes, recognized as Spain’s greatest humorist, is especially alluring as a humorous poet since his festive corpus stands as a barely sampled treat waiting to be savored. It exemplifies his humor, the touchstone of all Cervantine literature, and at the same time confirms his substantial poetic gifts.

The purpose in this book is to provide an artistic analysis of Cervantes’s burlesque sonnets, a genre of which he was particularly fond and in which he excelled.

‘The burlesque sonnet is a rich vein within the comic verse tradition in Europe. And Cervantes was an excellent burlesque sonneteer. But what does “burlesque” actually mean? Although the origin of the word “burla” is unknown, it is apparently a Spanish creation whose later derivation, “burlesco” nevertheless derives from the Italian. The term means both a trick—”la acción que se hace con alguno, o la palabra que se le dice, con la cual se le procura engañar [an action or words used to deceive someone]” and mockery: “la acción, ademán, o palabras con que se hace irrisión y mofa de alguno, o de alguna cosa [an action, gesture, or words used to deride and ridicule someone or something]” (Autoridades, s.v. “burla “). The acceptations combine in burlesque poetry, whose purpose is to mock and ridicule someone or something, often itself. Burlesque can mock a literary style or movement or a specific work. It can also mock a person, a society, an institution, or even a nation. Burlesque is not specifically limited to literature, yet its richest expression is achieved through this medium. Burlesque is a certain attitude toward life and toward the object of the burla . Rather than criticize and censure bitterly as satire does, burlesque is festive and comic in spirit and in style. It does not imply satire’s superior stance with regard to its object. While satire tends to portray life as tragically flawed and vice-ridden, burlesque depicts life as ridiculous and, therefore, worthy of being ridiculed. This element of burla —of mockery and ridicule and of pulling a trick on someone or something—is essential to the aesthetic category of the burlesque. It must be allowed, however, that burlesque and satire cannot be rigidly separated and often overlap in practice.

Indispensible to a proper appreciation of the burlesque is the realization that it has its own aesthetic standards and conventions. Unfortunately, in the late twentieth century we still operate to an extent under the often prudish nineteenth-century canons of literary “good taste.” But the burlesque deliberately turns its back on “the beautiful” in its search for the festive image, the quick joke, the laugh. It does not seek harmonious, melodic language but one designed to ridicule and provoke laughter, to debase, and to shock our ears and even our sensibilities. Its concerns are not the intricacies of the soul, of love, or of metaphysics, but the parodic inversion of such sublime themes. This is not to say, however, that the burlesque is without its own profound philosophical “meaning.”

Paradoxically, through exaggeration, burlesque is a call to truth and antidogmatism. It bids us to cast aside the prevailing deadly serious world view so that we might see and enjoy ourselves in all our complexity: imperfect, illogical, and irrational, yet vital and irresistibly comical creatures.

2. Quevedo y Góngora

Along with his lifelong rival, Luis de Góngora, Quevedo was one of the most prominent Spanish poets of the age. His style is characterized by what was called conceptismo. This style existed in stark contrast to Góngora’s culteranismo.

Alix Ingber, Professor Emerita of Spanish at Sweet Briar College, USA, developed a web site with 115 translations of Golden Age Spanish sonnets to English: http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu

http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu

Quevedo: http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu/Quevedo.html
Góngora: http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu/Gongora.html

And more poets translated: http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu/Poets.html

http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu/Poets.html

Cantigas de Santa Maria

The following text is from the Introduction to the book The Notation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Diplomatic Edition, Manuel Pedro Ferreira (Dir.).

Online: http://cesem.fcsh.unl.pt/en/a-notacao-das-cantigas-de-santa-maria-edicao-diplomatica/

The Notation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Diplomatic Edition, dir. Manuel Pedro Ferreira, musicography by Rui Araújo, collaboration of Ana Gaunt and Mariana Lima. Lisboa: CESEM, 2017 [e-book], 3 volumes (2 tomes each):

The Cantigas de Santa Maria (CSM) is one of the major monuments of European medieval culture. It consists of a vast, carefully organized collection of devotional songs in Galician-Portuguese (419 songs), in praise of the Virgin Mary or narrating miracles attributed to her. The poetry was written and the music composed or transcribed at the royal court of Castile and León, centered in Seville, under the direction of King Alfonso X, called el Sabio (the Learned). Staves with musical notation, provided for hundreds of songs written in three books between approximately 1270 and 1285, offer an enormous amount of information on musical practice, in a well-defined spatial and temporal context.

The repertoire of the Cantigas de Santa Maria is impressive not only on account of the sheer number—more melodies survive for them than for all the lyrics of the southern troubadours — but also because of their variety and vitality. Musicologists, however, have paid surprisingly little attention to this repertoire (Higinio Anglés in the second quarter of the 20th century, and Gerardo Huseby and David Wulstan two generations later, were notable exceptions). Late and inadequate access to the sources, the language used, and the fact that this repertoire does not easily fit French theoretical models (the current yardstick for 13th-century music), among other reasons, caused a certain estrangement.

Higinio Anglés published the first complete musical edition in 1943, with an introduction of more than one hundred pages, followed in 1958 by two substantial commentary volumes. This was not only a formidable, but also an original and enduring musicological achievement (Higinio ANGLÉS, La Música de las Cantigas de Santa María del Rey Alfonso El Sabio, Barcelona, Biblioteca Central, vols. II-III, 1943-1958.). The monumental presentation of the edition certainly led many to believe that most musicological issues had been satisfactorily confronted and resolved. Nowadays, however, many of these issues deserve a fresh look, amongst them being the examination and evaluation of the manuscript sources.

Refs.

Historia de la conquista de la Nueva España, de Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1585)

On the fifth centenary of the arrival of Hernán Cortés to the Aztec empire, it is worth remembering one of the key books that tells the events that changed the world forever. And this one from the aztec point of view: the book of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) entitled History of the conquest of New Spain or Book XII of the General History of the things of New Spain.

Book XII

This General History was the result of a long compilation process carried out between 1547 and 1585, initiated shortly after the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. It is also known as the Florentine Codex, since a version is in the Medicea Laurenziana Library of Florence, Italy. The complete codex can be consulted online at the World Digital Library (WDL)

But approaching this work requires first knowing the process of its elaboration and understanding how it has reached us, since it is about a complex document which offers a variety of information about Mexica culture in Náhuatl, Spanish, and Latin. It also contains pictographical images and ornaments which unite elements of precolonial writing with glyphs and European paintings. It is considered the result of a complicated transculturation process.

The Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España or General history of the things of New Spain is an encyclopedic work about the people and culture of the Aztec empire compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan missionary who arrived in Mexico in 1529, eight years after the Spanish conquest by Hernán Cortés.

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, circa 1499

The General history went through several stages between 1535 and 1585, and between Tlatelolco, Tepepulco, and Mexico City. The communicative interactions between Sahagún and the nahua elders he decided to interrogate were always mediated by a group of literate nahua, proud heirs of the legacy of their own people and proficient participants in the cultural tradition inculcated into them by the Franciscans fathers at the College of the Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, established by the Spaniards in 1536.

Although Sahagún compiled two substantial náhuatl texts (which became Book VI ‘Rhetorical and moral philosophy’ and Book XII ‘History of the Conquest’ of the Florentine Codex) some years earlier, it was not until 1558 that he was officially commissioned by the Provincial of his order, Fray Francisco de Toral, to undertake a systematic investigation of the native culture by compiling in náhuatl what would be “useful for the indoctrination, the propagation and perpetuation of the Christianization of these natives of this New Spain, and as a help to the workers and ministers who indoctrinate them”

Thus, in 1558 Fray Bernardino settled in the convent of Tepepulco, today Tepeapulco in the state of Hidalgo, where with informants of the indigenous nobility he produced, between 1558 and 1561, his first handwritten works of the General History of the things of New Spain.

General History of the things of New Spain

Tepepulco materials, Náhuatl texts and paintings, were called by the great Mexican scholar Francisco del Paso y Troncoso First memorials. There are 88 folios that Paso y Troncoso selected and ordered from the so-called Códices matritenses (because there are in Madrid, at the Royal Palace Library and the Royal Academy of History) for its 1905 edition, with such a good feel that they are still being edited in the same way.

Between 1565 and 1569, already in the convent of San Francisco de México, Sahagún completes his General history in nine books and four volumes. The following years, 1569-1570, will be the most bitter in the life of Sahagun. The Provincial Chapter of his Order, to which he submits his writings, decides that they are “highly esteemed and should be favored” but, at the same time, he takes away his scribes. He himself, over seventy years old, can no longer write because of the trembling of his hands. And shortly after, the provincial Fray Alonso de Escalona (1570-3) disperses the writings of Fray Bernardino through the Franciscan convents of the Province of Mexico. Despite these obstacles, Sahagun managed, to continue his work.

By 1575 Sahagún recovers his manuscripts and, thanks to the interest shown by Juan de Ovando, president of the Council of the Indies, the new commissioner of the Order, Fray Rodrigo de Sequera, again provides Sahagún with scribes who are compiling the texts in Náhuatl and which dictates the Spanish text of its General history of the things of New Spain, which extracts and comments on the materials provided by the Indian informants.

However, from the year 1577, Philip II and with it the Council of the Indies, already dead Ovando, changed their position regarding the research on indigenous cultures: they were considered dangerous as they spread pagan ideas and encouraged rebel and independence spirit. This change in the treatment of indigenous cultures motivated the order of Philip II to confiscate the book of Sahagún.

It then was taken to Spain by Fray Rodrigo de Sequera. The work was bound in four volumes but later rebound into three. Each volume is arranged in two columns: on the right is the original Náhuatl text, on the left is Sahagún’s Spanish translation. The 2,468 magnificent illustrations, made by the students, are mostly in the left-hand column, where the text is shorter. The illustrations combine the syntactic and symbolic traits of the ancient Nahua tradition of painting-writing with the formal qualities of European Renaissance painting.

Later, the manuscript could have been gifted to Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici by Philip II or just escaped confiscation and were transported to a safe haven in Rome, in the library of this Cardinal, collector of exotic plants, precious stones, and wondrous objects from America, including feather paintings such as are described in detail in the manuscript. When Ferdinando renounced the red hat to succeed his late brother, Francesco I, as Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1587, he took the manuscript with him to Florence. Although he generally kept the existence of the book secret, he allowed it to be consulted for the ceiling frescoes painted by Ludovico Buti in the armory in the Uffizi in 1588. Retained in the Medici guardarobba for most of the grand-ducal period, the book entered the Medicea Laurenziana Library in 1783, and thenceforth has generally been known as the Codex Florentinus, Codice fiorentino, or Florentine Codex.

Therefore, what is commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex is a manuscript that consists of 12 books devoted to different topics, firstly completed around 1579, archived in the Medicea Laurenziana Library of Florence, Italy. Sahagún followed the typology of earlier medieval works in organizing his research into “the divine, human, and natural things” of New Spain and addressing these topics in order.

Book I ‘The Gods’ thus deals with the gods. It describes the principal deities in the Aztec pantheon, listing their distinctive physical features, attire, main functions, and the festivals dedicated to them. To make these gods more comprehensible to European readers, Sahagún sometimes likens them to figures from Greek and Roman mythology. Huitzilopochtli (“Uitzilobuchtli” in the codex) is called “another Hercules,” Tezcatlipoca “another Jupiter.” Huitzilopochtli was the patron god of the Aztecs, who guided them on their pilgrimage from Aztlán, the mythical “white land” of their origins, to the “promised land,” where in 1325 they founded the city of Tenochtitlan. He was the god of war and of the sun, huge, immensely strong, and warlike, and to him was dedicated one of the two shrines of the Templo Mayor (Great Pyramid) of Tenochtitlan. The other shrine was dedicated to Tlaloc, the lord of rain, who lived on the highest mountains where clouds form and was associated with the agricultural world and the fertility of the land. Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc, and two other major gods are depicted on folio 10r. For Sahagún, religion was the key to Aztec civilization. As he wrote in the prologue to Book I, “in religion and the adoration of their gods, I do not believe that there have ever been idolaters more devoted to their gods, nor at such great cost to themselves as these [people] of New Spain.”

Book II ‘The Ceremonies’ deals with the feasts and sacrifices to the gods, made in accordance with the 20-day ritual calendar. It includes the 20 sacred canticles or hymns to the gods, which Sahagún gathered from oral testimony at an early stage in his research. This book also describes ceremonies involving human sacrifice, which so shocked the Spaniards when they arrived in Mexico. Sacrifices were offered so that the cosmic cycle might continue and the sun rise every morning. In a perennial process of regeneration, it was thought that Aztec gods died and then returned to life stronger than before, and it was their death that was “relived” in the sacrifice. The gods were embodied in the sacrificial victims—their ixiptla (images) or representatives—and received sustenance from human hearts and blood. The illustration at folio 84v depicts the sacrifice of the ixiptla of Tezcatlipoca, god of the night sky and of memory. The victim was to be a fit young man, without physical imperfections, who was granted a year to live at leisure, learning to play the flute and to carry “smoking tubes” in the manner of the chiefs and nobles. He was then carefully dressed and adorned and, after various ceremonies, taken to the foot of the pyramid where he was killed. The sacrificial victims were generally soldiers captured in battle, but they also could be slaves, men found guilty of some crime, or young women or children (offered to the deities of the rain and the waters). In battle, the goal was not to kill the enemy, but to take prisoners, who were grabbed by the hair and destined to be sacrificed. Warfare for the purpose of securing sacrificial victims is depicted in the illustrations on folio 74r and folio 74v of this book.

Book III ‘The Origin of the Gods’ deals with the origin of the gods, in particular Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, and includes appendices on the afterlife and on education. Aztec religion was permeated with stories about the birth, death, and return to life of the gods. This perennial process of regeneration was reflected in ceremonies involving human and other sacrifice and in the architecture of Tenochtitlan. The Templo Mayor (Great Pyramid) was dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc and had separate shrines to each of these gods. This dual construction had great significance in Mesoamerican cosmology, symbolizing the two sacred mountains, Tonacatepetl (the Hill of Sustenance), and Coatepec (the Hill of the Snake). The shrine dedicated to Tlaloc, the god of rain, represented the mountain housing maize and other things that Quetzalcoatl stole from the gods to give to mankind. The shrine dedicated to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and of the sun, represented the mountain on which the god was born, already an adult and dressed as a warrior, his mother Coatlicue having generated him after she placed a feather ball in her lap. On the mountain the god defeated his sister Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess, and his 400 brothers who were jealous of his birth. Once dead, they went to form the Milky Way. Among the noteworthy illustrations in Book III is the depiction, on folio 232v, in the appendix on education, of parents taking children to school. The nobles sent their children to the calmecac (row of houses), an extremely strict school reserved for the elite, where they received instructions on how to become “those who command, chiefs and senators and nobles, … those who have military posts.”

Book IV ‘The Art of Divination’ deals with the art of divination, or judicial astrology as practiced by the Aztecs, and in particular with the Tonalpohualli (ritual calendar). The Mesoamericans used two calendars, one solar and the other ritual. The Xiuhpohualli (solar calendar) had a cycle of 365 days divided into 18 months of 20 days each, plus five days considered inauspicious. The ritual calendar consisted of 260 days and was formed by associating the numbers from 1 to 13 with 20 different signs. A table that was principally used by priests in divination is reproduced in striking detail on folios 329r and 329v. Among the other illustrations in Book IV is a gruesome depiction of anthropophagy, or ritual cannibalism, which often was practiced as part of the rite of human sacrifice. Sahagún describes the sacrifice in relation to the festivals of Xipe Tótec, the god of spring and regeneration, and of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and of the sun (folio 268r). Prisoners were taken to the temple of Huitzilopochtli, killed, and their flesh consumed by the notables. By means of this practice, the strength of the enemy was consumed and assumed by their captors, in a kind of communion with the dead person and with the gods.

Book V ‘Omens and Superstitions’ deals with omens, auguries, and superstitions. As in Book IV, on divination, Sahagún cites ancient native traditions gleaned from questionnaires and interactions with Nahua elders. Sahagún’s enduring interest in this subject was scholarly and ethnographic, but fundamentally religious in its motivation. He believed that many of the conversions to Christianity claimed by Catholic priests in Mexico were superficial, and masked lingering adherence to pagan beliefs. As he wrote in the prologue to his work, the “sins of idolatry and idolatrous rites, superstitions and omens, and superstitions and idolatrous ceremonies have not disappeared altogether. In order to preach against these things or even to be aware of their existence, we must be familiar with how they were practiced in pagan times, [because] through our ignorance, they [the Indians] do many idolatrous things without our understanding it.”

Book VI ‘Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy’ is concerned with rhetoric and moral philosophy. It contains texts that Sahagún collected around 1547, in the earliest stage of his research into indigenous culture, from oral recitations by Nahua elders. Known as Huehuetlahtolli (Ancient word), these texts embodied, according to Sahagún, “the rhetoric, moral philosophy, and theology of the Mexican people, in which there are many curious things exhibiting the beauties of the language and very delicate things relating to the moral virtues.” Although he was repelled by Aztec religion, Sahagún was deeply impressed by the wisdom and beauty of the ancient texts, and he quotes at length, for example, a talk delivered by a Nahua father to a daughter who has reached the age of reason. An illustration of parents exhorting their children is at folio 80r. In the original binding, Book VI was the beginning of the second volume. It thus opens with a dedication to Rodrigo de Sequera, commissary general of the Franciscan Order and a great admirer of Sahagún’s work. A similar dedication originally was placed at the beginning of Book I, but it subsequently was torn out and survives only in a later copy of the codex.

Book VII ‘The Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Binding of the Years’ is about the sun, the moon, and the stars. It contains an account of the creation of the sun and the moon in what the Aztecs called the “fifth age of the world,” which Sahagún drew from ancient poems and legends shared with him by the elders. The illustration at folio 228v depicts the rabbit in the moon. The ancient Mesoamericans claimed that the outline of a rabbit could be seen in a full moon, a visual effect that results from the combination of dark spots caused by the alteration of rises and craters on the moon’s surface, but which they explained mythologically. In the Aztec account, before the creation of the day the gods met at Teotihuacán to create the sun so that it might illuminate the world. For this to happen, someone had to sacrifice himself. The god Tezcuciztecatl (also seen as Tecciztecatl) volunteered, but another god was also required. Everyone else was afraid and no one stepped forward, so they turned to Nanahuatzin, who was covered with pustules, and he accepted gracefully. Both gods prepared themselves for sacrifice by doing penance for four days. Tezcuciztecatl performed self-sacrifice using feathers, gold, and sharp fragments of precious stones and coral, while Nanahuatzin used humble materials and offered up his blood and pus. A large fire was lit and all the gods gathered around it at midnight, but when the moment came for Tezcuciztecatl to throw himself into the fire to be transformed into the sun, he hung back. Nanahuatzin, in contrast, bravely threw himself into the fire and began to shine. Only then did Tezcuciztecatl, who was envious, follow suit to be transformed into a second sun. The gods had not reckoned on there being two lights of equal brightness in the sky, so one of them took a rabbit and hurled it into the second sun to diminish its brightness, which is how it came to be the moon, with the shape of a rabbit visible on its face.

Book VIII ‘Kings and Lords’ is concerned with kings and nobles, forms of government, elections of rulers, and the customs and pastimes of the nobility. In addition to being interested in these topics for their own sake, Sahagún was motivated by linguistic considerations to describe as many aspects of Aztec life as he could. It was only by doing so, he explained, that he could bring “to light all the words of this language with their literal and metaphoric meanings and all their manners of speech and the greater part of their antiquities, good and evil.” Book VIII is rich in illustrations relating to the Aztec way of life. The paintings at folios 219, 261, and 280–81 relate to clothing. They show the loom, how clothing was made, and textile patterns worn by the nobility. The majority of the Aztec population could only wear clothes made from agave yarn, undyed and without adornment, but the nobles wore colored cotton clothes decorated with shell or bone-and-feather patches. The illustration on folio 269r shows the game patolli, described by Sahagún as similar to dice, in which the players gambled jewels and other possessions by letting fall three large beans onto a large cross painted on a mat. The illustration on folio 292v depicts tlachtli, a ball game originally linked to the Mesoamerican view of the cosmos as the product of a clash between opposing but complementary forces, such as life and death, day and night, fertility and barrenness, and light and darkness. The struggle was reproduced in the game, as two teams representing opposing cosmic forces faced each other on a court, striving to bounce a heavy rubber ball as many times as possible against the side walls of the court. According to Sahagún, the game was a diversion of the nobility that had lost its earlier religious significance.

Book IX ‘The merchants’ is about merchants, officials responsible for gold and precious stones, and feather working. The pochteca (merchants) were an important group in Aztec society. They undertook long journeys in search of precious commodities and goods, and they were valued for the information they gathered in the lands they visited, which the Aztecs often used to plan wars of conquest. Pack animals and the wheel were unknown in Mesoamerica, so goods were carried on foot by tlameme (porters), who placed their loads in a cacaxtli (wooden frame), which was supported by a cord that went around the porter’s shoulders and forehead. Folio 316r contains an illustration showing porters with their loads. Arte plumario (feather art) was one of the minor arts practiced in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Feather-art products were reserved for the Aztec elite—the king, nobles, priests, and warriors—who wore items such as cloaks, fans, and headdresses principally for ceremonies. Folio 370r has an illustration showing artisans at work on a headdress. Also discussed in Book IX is smoking, which the Mesoamericans did during banquets and religious ceremonies, using both pipes that were filled with herbs and grasses or by smoking cigars made by rolling up tobacco leaves. Smoking is depicted on folio 336r.

Book X ‘The People, Their Virtues and Vices, and Other Nations’ is about Aztec society and covers such subjects as the virtues and vices of the people, food and drink, the parts of the human body, and illnesses and remedies. In this book, Sahagún describes the process of making chocolate from cacao beans, which is also depicted on folio 71v. The beverage made from pure cacao and spices was considered the greatest delicacy, and was reserved only for the nobles. Book X also discusses agriculture and food preparation. The Aztec economy was based mainly on agriculture. Farming was the responsibility of the commoners, who cultivated land assigned to them and the land of the nobles and rulers. The staple crop was corn, from which the Aztecs made a kind of bread. Preparing food was the task of women, and is depicted on folio 315r. While the commoners had a very simple diet, the elite ate richer and more abundant fare. Sahagún includes a long list of dishes flavored with different sauces. The last chapter in Book X, on “the nations who have come to inhabit this land,” includes two lengthy texts, derived from Sahagún’s questioning of Nahua elders, on the history of Mesoamerica. One tells of Quetzalcoatl and the Toltecs; the other gives an overview of the cultural evolution of the Nahua peoples.

Book XI ‘Natural Things’ the longest in the codex, is a treatise on natural history. Following the traditional division of knowledge common to many European encyclopedic works, the Florentine Codex deals with “all things divine (or rather idolatrous), human and natural of New Spain.” Thus, having dealt with higher beings and humans, Sahagún turns to animals, plants, and all types of minerals. For the discussion of medicinal herbs and minerals, Sahagún drew upon the knowledge of indigenous physicians, creating what the scholar Miguel León-Portilla has called a kind of pre-Hispanic pharmacology. The discussion of animals draws upon Aztec legends about various animals, both real and mythical. The book is an especially important source for understanding how the Mesoamericans used natural resources before the arrival of the Europeans. Many animals raised in Europe, such as cows, pigs, chickens, and horses, were unknown to Mesoamerican peoples. Instead they raised rabbits, xoloitzcuintli (a breed of hairless dog), birds, and, in particular, turkeys. They supplemented their diet with wild boars, deer, tapirs, birds, frogs, ants, crickets, and snakes. Other animals were hunted chiefly for their skins, such as the jaguar and other felines, or for their feathers. Book XI contains numerous illustrations of animals, including mammals (jaguar and armadillo), birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects.

Book XII ‘The conquest of Mexico’ recounts the Spanish conquest of Mexico, which took place between 1519, when Cortés landed on the coast with just over 100 men and a few horses, and 1521, when Tenochtitlan was taken and the Aztecs subjugated. The story is told from the perspective of indigenous elders who were living in Tenochtitlan at the time of the conquest and witnessed firsthand the events described. Sahagún gathered these accounts around 1553–55, when he was working at the College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. The Náhuatl narrative begins with an evocation of the “signs and omens” that were said to have appeared before the arrival of the Spanish and concludes with the surrender of Tenochtitlan after an 80-day siege. By drawing upon primary accounts, Sahagún was able to capture the astonishment felt by the Aztecs and the trauma that followed their defeat at the hands of the Spanish. Among the key factors that determined the Spanish victory were the ruthlessness of the Spanish soldiers and of Cortés in particular, the use of horses and firearms, which the Mesoamericans had never seen, and Cortés’s intuition that the peoples of the Aztec Empire were prepared to join forces with him to shake off Aztec rule. Book XII contains numerous illustrations depicting scenes from the conquest, including the arrival of Cortés, an image of the Templo Mayor (Great Pyramid) in Tenochtitlan, battles between the indigenous people and the Spanish, and destruction of Aztec temples by the Spanish.

Book XII therefore contains the History of the conquest of New Spain, which can be read online in English, Spanish and Náhuatl, in the Early Nahuatl Library of the University of Oregon.

It can be said that there are at least four versions of this Book XII. The first version, with texts in Spanish and Náhuatl, was completed around 1579 and was delivered to Sequera as part of the twelve books later known as the Florentine Codex.

The second version of Book XII was done by Sahagún when, reviewing what he kept of his papers in 1585, he set out to correct and enrich his ancient nahua testimonies about the conquest. At the beginning of what was his new version he wrote down the following:

“When this writing [about the Conquest] was written, which has been over thirty years ago, it was all written in the Mexican language. Those who helped me in this scripture were old principal and very knowledgeable […] who were present in the war when this city was conquered.

In book XII, where it is about this Conquest, several defects were made, and it was that some things were put into the narration of this Conquest that were misplaced, and others were silent, that were poorly silenced. For this cause, this year of one thousand five hundred and eighty-five, I amended this book ”

So we have two editions of Sahagun from this book XII, one from 1579 and another from 1585. There is a third version of this book, only in Spanish, known by the end of the 18th century and named Tolosa Manuscript for having been stored in the Franciscan convent of Tolosa (Navarra). This copy, made around 1580, basically coincides with the Spanish text of Book XII of the Florentine Codex.

In addition, we can even consider a fourth version in Spanish. This is the complete translation of the original Nahuatl text, since Fray Bernardino’s Spanish translations are partial, adding and removing paragraphs throughout the book.

When in 1829 Bustamante began the editions of General history, he included the text of the Tolosa Manuscript as History of the conquest of New Spain, in Spanish, without illustrations and without the corrections made by Sahagún in 1585.

1829 Bustamante

Bustamante himself published in 1840 for the first time the version corrected by Fray Bernardino in 1585, although with a strange title: The Apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe de Mexico (full title in Spanish: La aparición de Ntra. Señora de Guadalupe de México. Comprobada con la refutación del argumento negativo que presenta D. Juan Bautista Muñoz, fundándose en el testimonio del P. Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún; o sea, Historial Original de este escritor que altera la publicada en 1829 en el equivocado concepto de ser la única y original de dicho autor).

In later editions various editorial solutions have been given to the existence of different versions of the same work:

So far there are no satisfactory critical editions of the History of the conquest of New Spain, although at least we have the possibility to check online the different versions and get an idea of the evolution of this peculiar book:

  1. General history of the things of New Spain, or Florentine Codex, Book XII, circa 1579 (https://www.wdl.org/es/item/10096/view/3/823/) Text in Spanish and Náhuatl, two columns, with illustrations. The Spanish text does not correspond to a complete translation of the Nahuatl text. (References: CN1, CS1)
  2. History of the Conquest of Mexico, published by Carlos María de Bustamante in Mexico, 1829, separated from the General history of the things of New Spain. It bears the title: “Twelve book of how the Spaniards conquered the city of Mexico”(https://archive.org/details/historiadelaconq00sahaiala/page/viii) Spanish text taken from the Tolosa Manuscript, copy of the 1579 text made around 1580. No illustrations. (Reference: CS2)
  3. The appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe of Mexico. Proven with the refutation of the negative argument presented by Juan Bautista Muñoz, based on the testimony of Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún; that is, Original History of this writer that alters the one published in 1829 in the wrong concept of being the only and original of said author, Mexico, 1840 (http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000123164&page=1) Contains the Spanish text of the latest version of Sahagún, written in 1585, of the History of the Conquest of Mexico. (Reference: CS3)
  4. General history of the things of New Spain, prepared by Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas, with a preliminary study by Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, in five volumes, Mexico, 1938. Volume IV contains Book XII that deals with the Conquest of Mexico (https://archive.org/details/b29827620_0004/page/14) Includes the Spanish text of the Tolosa Manuscript and, in notes, the variants of the Sahagún text of 1585. It also includes a full Spanish translation of the Náhuatl text in the Florentine Codex. No illustrations. (References: CS1, CS2, CS3, CS4)
  5. History of the conquest of New Spain (Book XII of General history), which can be read in the online version in English, Spanish and Náhuatl of the Early Nahuatl Library of the University of Oregon, 2000-2018 (https://enl.uoregon.edu/fcbk12ch01/elements/fcbk12ch01f01r/00) Contains the illustrations of the Florentine Codex and the texts in Spanish, Náhuatl, with the Spanish text translated into English, and the Náhuatl text translated into English. (References: CN1, CS1, CS4, CE1, CE2)

Other references:

Wolf, Gerhard, Joseph Connors, and Louis A Waldman, ed. 2012. Colors Between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún. Florence: Villa I Tatti.

 

Cortés, Velázquez and Charles V, by J. H. Elliott

Introductory Essay by J. H. Elliott to Letters from Mexico. Translated, edited, and with a new introduction by Anthony Pagden. Revised edition published by Yale University Press in 1986.

Cortés, Velázquez and Charles V{1}

When Cortés landed on the coast of Mexico on April 22, 1519, he was on the point of committing himself to an enterprise of un­known proportions against an enemy of unknown character and strength. After the meeting with the Totonac chief Tentlil on Eas­ter Sunday he knew at least that, somewhere in the interior, there lived a powerful ruler called Motecuçoma, whose dominion in­cluded the peoples of the coastal plain. But this fact of Motecuçoma’s existence was the fact he most needed to know. From Easter Sunday, 1519, a single, supreme objective established itself clearly in his mind. He must reach Motecuçoma and somehow induce him to acknowledge the supreme overlordship of Juana and her son Charles, the sovereign rulers of Castile.

Although everything else was surrounded by innumerable uncertainties, the central objective of Cortés’s Mexican strategy was therefore clearly defined, and he pursued it undeviatingly until it was triumphantly attained. The march into the interior, the entry down the causeway into Tenochtitlan on November 8, the taking of Motecuçoma into custody on the fourteenth, and the “volun­tary” donation of Motecuçoma’s empire to Charles—these repre­sented the critical moments in an exceptionally hazardous but care­ fully calculated military and political exercise, which worked with greater precision than even Cortés himself could have dared to hope. Within nine months of landing, he had made himself master of Motecuçoma’s empire in the name of the sovereigns of Castile.

The magnitude and the brilliance of this achievement can all too easily obscure the fact that Motecuçoma was in some respects the least dangerous of the enemies whom Cortés had to face, and that he had more to fear from some of his own countrymen than from the emperor of the Mexica. From the moment of his hasty departure from Santiago, in Cuba, he found himself in a highly equivocal position, both in relation to his immediate superiors and to the Spanish Crown.

Technically, Cortés was commanding an expedition on be­half of the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, who himself was merely the deputy of the hereditary admiral of the Indies, Diego Colón (Columbus). Velázquez, however, was an ambitious man, eager to conquer new lands in his own right. To do this, he must somehow break free from Colón’s jurisdiction, and obtain from the Crown his own license to explore, conquer and colonize. In the two or three years before the dispatch of Cortés, he had made a number of moves directed toward this end. In 1517 and 1518 he had sent out the exploring and trading expeditions of Hernández de Córdoba and Juan de Grijalva; and for the second of these expedi­tions he had taken care to obtain authorization from the Hieronymite governors of Hispaniola, who were the Crown’s direct repre­sentatives in the Indies, and were independent of Diego Colón. He had also dispatched, in succession, two personal agents to the Span­ish Court—Gónzalo de Guzmán, and his chaplain, Benito Martín —to urge the Crown to grant him the title of adelantado of Yuca­tán, with the right to conquer and settle the newly discovered lands.

Apart from some further lucrative trading, Velázquez’s principal purpose in dispatching Cortés in the wake of the two pre­vious expeditions of Hernández de Córdoba and Grijalva seems to have been to keep his claims alive during the period when he was impatiently awaiting the outcome of his initiative at Court. This would explain the nature of his instructions for Cortés, dated Octo­ ber 23, 1518.{2} The purpose of Cortés’s expedition, according to these instructions, was to go in search of Grijalva’s fleet (of whose return to Cuba Velázquez was still unaware) and of any Christians held captive in Yucatán. Cortés was also authorized to explore and to trade, but had no permission to colonize. The reason for this was that Velázquez himself was still awaiting such authorization from Spain, and had no legal authority to confer a right that was not yet his.

Recent changes in Spain, however, made it reasonably cer­tain that Velázquez would soon secure his title of adelantado, and the rights of conquest and jurisdiction for which he was petition­ing. Ferdinand the Catholic had died in 1516, and in September, 1517, Charles of Ghent arrived in Castile from Flanders to take up his Spanish inheritance. Charles’s arrival in the peninsula was fol­lowed by a purge of the officials who had governed Spain and the Indies during the regency of Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros. Among the councilors and officials who acquired, or returned to, favor with the coming of the new regime was the formidable figure of the bishop of Burgos, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, the councilor prin­cipally responsible for the affairs of the Indies during the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella. Fonseca had always had fierce enemies and devoted partisans; and among the latter was Diego Velázquez, who was married to Fonseca’s niece.{3} There was every reason, then, to assume that he would use all his newly recovered influence to sup­port the pretensions of Velázquez.

Cortés, who kept himself well informed of what went on at Court, must have been well aware that, with the return to power of Fonseca, the tide of events in Spain was moving in Velázquez’s favor. If he were ever to be a great conqueror in his own right, it was therefore essential for him to act with speed, and to obtain as much freedom for maneuver as possible. Cortés, who had been quick to learn the tragic lessons of the Spanish Caribbean, had grasped the crucial fact that the key to empire was settlement. It was exactly this which Velázquez’s instructions denied him. But Cortés was skillful enough to secure the insertion of a clause which gave him a certain amount of latitude. Velázquez admitted that it was impossible to foresee all eventualities; and he authorized Cortés, in the event of unexpected emergencies, to take such meas­ures as would conform most closely to “the service of God and their highnesses.”{4} Clearly, Velázquez did not know his man. Cortés had his own ideas about God’s service, and Their High­nesses’, and they were not quite the same as those of the governor of Cuba. Thanks to Article 27, he was now empowered to take such measures as he might consider necessary, and which were not specifically covered by his instructions. But this useful legal weapon, which he had devised to justify an unauthorized act of settlement, would be rendered useless if Velázquez should receive permission to conquer and settle while Cortés was still in Cuba. Hence the indecent haste of his departure from Santiago. On no account must he still be accessible when Velázquez’s warrant arrived from Spain.

In sailing so precipitately from Santiago, Cortés had there­fore defied his own immediate superior, Velázquez, and had poten­tially antagonized Velázquez’s powerful friends at Court. He knew well enough the grave risks he was running. But to Cortés and his friends—Puertocarrero, the Alvarado brothers, Gonzalo de Sandoval—the risks paled before the attractions of the anticipated prize. Nothing could more quickly obliterate the stigma of treachery and rebellion than a brilliant military success and the acquisition of fab­ulous riches. If new peoples were won for the Faith, and rich new lands won for the Crown, there was reason to hope that the original defiance of Velázquez would be regarded as no more than a pecca­dillo, and that Velázquez’s friends and protectors would be silenced by a fait accompli.

The king was the fountainhead of justice. It rested with him to punish the wicked, reward the good, and forgive the occasional act of insubordination—especially when the act was committed, as it would be this time, in the king’s own interest and for the greater glory of God. It was well known that God had specifically en­trusted the sovereigns of Castile with the task of winning for the Church the peoples of the newly discovered Indies, and that this divine mission had been confirmed by decision of the papacy. Cortés, therefore, would from the first act in the name of the king, in order to further this providential mission; and then, insofar as he had offended against the letter of the law, would throw himself on his mercy. This meant that, from the moment of his departure from Cuba, Cortés totally ignored any claims to jurisdiction of Veláz­quez or Colón and behaved as if he were directly subordinate to the Crown alone. Any Indians he met as he cruised along the Mexican coast were regarded as being already the vassals of the Crown of Castile,{5} by virtue of the papal donation. Similarly, he took formal possession of the land at the Tabasco River in the name of the Crown, in spite of—or, more accurately, precisely because of—the inconvenient fact that Grijalva had already taken formal possession at the same spot, on behalf of the governor of Cuba.

That Cortés and his close associates were banking on even­tual vindication by the Crown is further suggested by the jocular exchange on board ship just before the landing at San Juan de Ulúa, as reported by Bernal Diaz.{6} Alonso Hernández de Puertocarrero came up to Cortés, quoting a snatch from one of the romances in the Castilian romancero general:

Look on France, Montesinos,
Look on Paris, the city,
Look on the waters of the Duero,
Flowing down into the sea.

The lines came from the ballad of Montesinos, who was exiled from court because of a false accusation by his mortal enemy, Tomillas. Montesinos, the innocent exile, was seeking permission from his fa­ther to return to court in disguise and take service with the king, in order to avenge his wrong. If Montesinos was Cortés, then Tomil­las, his enemy, was Velázquez; and Cortés could hope to resolve his difficulties, as Montesinos resolved his, by taking service under the king. “He who takes the king’s pay,” continued the ballad, “can avenge himself of everything.” Cortés promptly responded in kind, with a quotation from another ballad about another exile: “God give us the same good fortune in fighting as he gave to the Paladin Roland.”

Success in arms, and resort to the highest authority of all, that of the king himself—these were the aims of Cortés and his fel­low conspirators as they prepared in April, 1519, to compound their defiance of Velázquez by a landing which would mark the real beginning of their attempt to conquer an empire. They were concerned, like all conquistadors, with fame, riches and honor. But behind the willful defiance of the governor of Cuba there existed, at least in Cortés’s mind, a philosophy of conquest and colonization which made his action something more than an attempt at self- aggrandizement at the expense of Velázquez. He entertained, like so many Castilians of his generation, an exalted view of the royal serv­ice, and of Castile’s divinely appointed mission. Both the divine and the royal favor would shine on those who cast down idols, extir­ pated pagan superstitions, and won new lands and peoples for God and Castile. But there was a wrong way, as well as a right way, of going about this great work. In the Antilles, the Castilians had gone about it the wrong way, with disastrous consequences. Cortés had seen with his own eyes how captains and soldiers whose sole con­cern was the quest for gold and the capture of slaves and booty had destroyed the islands and peoples discovered by Columbus only a generation ago. The extension to the New World of a style of war­ fare reminiscent of the war against the Moors in medieval Spain had made a desert of a paradise and had left even the Spaniards them­ selves shiftless and discontented. The failure of Grijalva’s expedi­tion had only served to drive home the lesson already learned by Cortés—that conquest, to achieve any long-term success, required intelligent colonization. Whether Velázquez had learned the same lesson seems doubtful; and Cortés could always point to the ab­sence from his instructions of any order to colonize, to prove that he had not. But in any event Velázquez would be given no oppor­tunity to put the question to the test. Cortés would conquer Mex­ico, and not only conquer it but settle it as well.

It was, then, with the intention of establishing a permanent settlement that Cortés dropped anchor in the harbor of San Juan de Ulúa on April 21, 1519. But some careful preliminary maneuvers were needed before he could openly flout Velázquez’s orders by formally founding a town. There was a strong faction of Veláz­quez’s partisans in the expedition, headed by Francisco de Montejo and Juan Velázquez de Leon. This faction had first to be neutral­ized, and the rank and file of the army be induced to support Cortés. The first months on Mexican soil were therefore taken up, not only with reconnaissance surveys designed to discover the na­ture of Motecuçoma’s empire and the extent of his power, but also with attempts to detach the soldiers from their adherence to Veláz­quez’s men. This was done with considerable skill, by playing on their desire for gold and land. Bernal Díaz’s account{7} suggests how cleverly Cortés forced the Velázquez faction into the open with a demand that the expedition should return to Cuba—a demand with which Cortés seemed ready to comply. At this point the troops, whose expectations had been aroused and now looked like being dashed, came out with what seemed to be a spontaneous demand that the expedition should continue.

Cortés had been given his cue, and the Velázquez faction had been outmaneuvered. But although the practical difficulties in the way of settlement had been overcome, there still remained the problem of finding some legal justification for disregard of Veláz­quez’s orders. It was at this point that Cortés’s knowledge of Castilian law came into its own. That great medieval compilation, the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X, dating from 1256-1263, presented a cogent picture of the organic unity that should naturally prevail between the king and his subjects, bound together in mutual concern for the upholding of the commonweal against selfish private interest. In the context of events in the New World in 1519, Veláz­quez and his friends could be depicted as self-interested officials, moved by greed and ambition, while Cortés and his army repre­sented the true community, motivated by concern for the com­monweal and the desire to serve God and the king. Whereas the private interest of Velázquez busied itself solely with trade and barter, which would fill his own capacious pockets, the common­ weal demanded an expedition of conquest and colonization, which would promote the true interests of the realm.

It was in pursuance of this simple but time-honored political philosophy that the remarkable events of June and July, 1519, were enacted. According to the Siete Partidas, the laws could only be set aside by the demand of all the good men of the land. On the soil of Mexico, these were clearly the rank and file of Cortés’s army, and it was in deference to their demand that he now set aside his instruc­tions. They were united in agreeing that the expedition should not return to Cuba but should remain to attempt the conquest of Motecuçoma’s empire; and they formally constituted themselves a com­munity—the Villa Rica de Vera Cruz—in order to ensure that the king’s interests were upheld. As a municipality, they then proceeded to appoint the usual municipal officials, the alcaldes and regidores. From this point, Velázquez’s instructions were regarded as inoperative, and the authority conferred by them on Cortés was deemed to have lapsed. Supreme jurisdiction in Mexico now resided in the municipality of Vera Cruz, and the charade was duly com­pleted when the municipality, acting on behalf of Charles and Juana, appointed Cortés alcalde mayor and justicia of Vera Cruz, and captain of the royal army.

The effect of this brilliant legalistic maneuver was to free Cortés from his obligations to his immediate superior, Velázquez, and to make him directly dependent on the king. But what seemed plausible enough in Mexico was bound to seem highly implausible in Cuba and at the Spanish Court. Clearly it was essential to win support in Spain for an action which Fonseca and his friends would certainly represent to the king as an act of open rebellion; and this became all the more urgent with the arrival at San Juan de Ulúa on July 1 of a ship commanded by Francisco de Saucedo bearing the not unexpected news that Velázquez, by royal decree of Novem­ber 13, 1518, had been appointed adelantado of Yucatán, and had been granted the right to conquer and settle. Now that Velázquez had obtained his authorization, Cortés’s action seemed to lack even the shadow of legality.

Everything now depended on the successful presentation of his case at Court, where the Fonseca group would certainly do all in its power to destroy him. If possible, Charles and his advisers must be reached and won over before they had time to learn from Velázquez himself of Cortés’s act of rebellion. For this purpose, Puertocarrero and Montejo, who had been detached from the Ve­lázquez faction, were appointed procuradores, or representatives, of Vera Cruz, with full powers to present the municipality’s case to the king in person. To assist them in their mission, they were to take with them, as a gift for the king, all the gold and jewels brought to Cortés by Motecuçoma’s envoys, together with the tra­ditional royal fifth of all the booty so far acquired. They took with them, too, such documentation as was needed to justify their cause. This documentation included the “lost” First Letter of Relation of Cortés—unless, as is perfectly conceivable, he never wrote such a letter, for it would necessarily have involved a number of personal explanations which could well have offered embarrassing hostages to fortune.

The most important document carried to Spain by Puertocarrero and Montejo was the letter from the new municipality of Vera Cruz, addressed to Charles and Juana. This letter, which customarily replaces Cortés’s “missing” First Letter, bears all the stamp of his personality, and was no doubt written largely to his dictation. It should therefore be read, as it was written, not as an accurate historical narrative but as a brilliant piece of special pleading, designed to justify an act of rebellion and to press the claims of Cortés against those of the governor of Cuba.

For all Cortés’s eager insistence that he was providing a “true” relation,{8} he displayed a masterly capacity for suppression of evidence and ingenious distortion. Great care was taken to play down the expeditions of Hernández de Córdoba and Grijalva, and the awkward fact that the latter had taken formal possession of the land was quietly ignored. The letter also missed no opportunity to blacken the reputation of Velázquez—”moved more by cupidity than any other passion” {9} —and to suggest that his financial contribution to the expedition was insignificant. The persistent denigration of Velázquez only served to emphasize, by contrast, the loyalty and the high ideals of Cortés himself, as a man passionately determined to serve God and the king by extirpating idolatry, converting the heathen and conquering rich new lands for the Crown of Castile. At the same time, Cortés was careful to imply that he broke with Velázquez’s instructions only under pressure from the popular will, as represented by the army. It was the soldiers, eager to convert a trading expedition into a military and colonizing enterprise, who had demanded a change of plan; and Cortés, after due deliberation, had accepted their demand as conducive to the royal interest.

Having offered this tendentious explanation of the founding of Vera Cruz, the letter then dwelt at some length on the alleged riches of the country and on the abominable customs of its inhabitants. The object of this was to appeal both to Charles’s cupidity— an appeal skillfully reinforced by the gift of Motecuçoma’s treasures—and to his sense of religious obligation, as a ruler specially entrusted by God and the Pope with the duty of winning new peoples to the Faith. But the letter’s real climax came only after the description of Mexico and the Mexicans, and consisted of a direct appeal to Charles and Juana “on no account to give or grant concessions to Diego Velázquez … or judicial powers; and if any shall have been given him, that they be revoked.” {10} Since the arrival of Saucedo, Cortés was perfectly well aware that Velázquez’s commission had in fact already arrived. Ignorance, however, was the better policy; and Cortés drove home his request with a final denunciation of the governor of Cuba as a man of such patent wickedness as to make him totally unfitted to receive the least token of royal favor.

The first letter from Mexico, then, was essentially a political document, speaking for Cortés in the name of his army, and designed to appeal directly to the Crown over the heads of Velázquez and his friends in the Council of the Indies. Cortés was now involved in a desperate race against time. Montejo and Puertocarrero left for Spain on July 26, 1519, with their bundle of letters and the gold; and unless, or until, they could persuade Charles to sanction retrospectively the behavior of Cortés and his men, Cortés was technically a traitor, liable to arrest and persecution at the hands of an irate governor of Cuba, fully empowered to act in the royal name. The danger was acute, and the blow could fall at any time, perhaps even from within Mexico itself. For there was still a strong group of Velázquez partisans in the expedition, and these men would do all they could to sabotage Cortés’s plans. But Cortés, who had his spies posted, was well aware of the dangers. The friends of the governor of Cuba appear to have been plotting to send him warning of the mission of Montejo and Puertocarrero, so that he could intercept their ship. The plot was discovered, the conspirators arrested, and two of them, Juan Escudero and Diego Cermeño, put to death.{11}

This abortive conspiracy seems to have convinced Cortés that it was not enough simply to cut the bonds of legality that tied him to Cuba. He must also cut the physical links. This was probably the major consideration in his famous decision to scuttle or beach his ships, although their destruction would have the added advantage of enabling him to add their crews to his tiny army. Once the ships were destroyed, all contact with Cuba was broken. A garrison was left at Vera Cruz under the command of Juan de Escalante, and the army began its march from Cempoal into the interior on August 16, knowing that it had openly defied the governor of Cuba and that there could be no turning back.

As long as Cortés could command the loyalties of his army —and this would ultimately depend on his ability to capture and distribute the fabulous riches of Motecuçoma’s empire—he was now reasonably safe from subversion within the ranks. But he was a good deal less safe in the rear than he had anticipated. Montejo and Puertocarrero had received strict instructions to avoid Cuba and make straight for Spain, but Montejo had other ideas. Needing provisions—or perhaps prudently hedging his bets—he chose to put in on the west of the island to make a brief visit to his estate. He arrived on August 23, left letters for a friend, and, on his last night, displayed the Mexican treasures to his major-domo before sailing again on the twenty-sixth. The major-domo duly informed Velázquez, who immediately dispatched two ships in pursuit of the procuradores. But their pilot, Alaminos, took the ship by a new route through the Bahamas Straits, and Montejo and Puertocarrero made their escape into the Atlantic and thence to Seville.

Thwarted of his prey, Velázquez made two moves which were to be crucial for the future course of events. Gonzalo de Guzmán, who had already acted on his behalf at the Spanish Court, was sent back to Spain again in mid-October to counter the activities of the Vera Cruz procuradores, and to convince the Crown and the Council of the Indies that Cortés was a traitor and should be treated as such. Simultaneously, Velázquez began to organize an army to be sent to Mexico against Cortés. News of these preparations greatly alarmed the judges of the highest tribunal in the Indies, the Audiencia of Santo Domingo. Conflicts among rival bands of conquistadors were all too common an occurrence, and the Audiencia was anxious to prevent still more shedding of blood. It therefore sent the licenciado Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon to halt the preparations, but Velázquez was in no mood to listen to the Audiencia, and the expedition was already preparing to sail by the time of the licenciado’s arrival.

At a time when a smallpox epidemic was raging in Cuba, Velázquez felt unable to lead his army in person, and handed over the command to one of his more reliable but less intelligent friends, Pánfilo de Narváez. The army, twice the size of that of Cortés, set sail from Cuba on March 5, 1520, accompanied by Vázquez de Ayllón, who clearly felt that, having failed to prevent it from sailing, the least he could do was to act as a witness and perhaps as an umpire. He was rewarded for his pains by being placed under arrest when Narváez landed at San Juan de Ulúa on April 20.

During the autumn and winter of 1519, therefore, at the time when Cortés was securing the submission of Motecuçoma and had established himself precariously in Tenochtitlan, he was faced with the prospect of a military confrontation with his immediate superior, the governor of Cuba, who himself was acting in defiance of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo. The outcome was likely to be determined on the battlefield, in an internecine struggle of Spaniard against Spaniard, which could well jeopardize and even destroy Cortés’s uncertain hold over the Aztec empire. But in the Spanish monarchy of the sixteenth century a military solution could never be final. Legality was paramount, and the key to legality lay with the king.

Everything therefore turned on the success of Montejo and Puertocarrero in Spain. They duly reached Seville at the beginning of November, 1519, only to find their country on the verge of revolt. Charles had been elected Holy Roman Emperor on June 28. Once elected, his immediate aim was to extract the largest possible subsidies from the Cortés of the various Spanish kingdoms, and then to leave for Germany. When the procuradores arrived in Seville, the emperor was still in Barcelona, heavily preoccupied with plans for his departure; and the Castilian cities were beginning to voice their dissatisfaction at the prospect of heavy new fiscal demands and an absentee king.

At this particular moment the chances of winning the emperor’s support for a still-unknown adventurer on the other side of the world hardly looked very promising. It was also unfortunate for the procuradores that Velázquez’s chaplain, Benito Martín, happened to be in Seville at the time of their arrival. Martín persuaded the officials of the Casa de la Contratación to embargo their ships, together with the Mexican treasure, and so deprived them of their most powerful argument, gold. In spite of this, Montejo and Puertocarrero set out for Barcelona, accompanied by the most faithful of Cortés’s agents in Spain, his own father, Martín Cortés de Monroy. They reached Barcelona near the end of January, 1520, only to find that the emperor had already left for Burgos. But their visit to Barcelona at least enabled them to make a number of influential contacts, and they were lucky to find there Francisco Nuñez, a royal official and a cousin of Cortés, who agreed to act as his legal representative. From Barcelona they moved across Spain in the tracks of the emperor, finally catching up with him at Tordesillas, near Valladolid, early in March. Here, seven months after leaving Vera Cruz, they could at last petition the emperor in person to confirm Cortés in his position as captain general and justicia mayor.

Their petition was fiercely contested, not only by Velázquez’s agent, Gonzalo de Guzmán, but also by his patron, the bishop of Burgos. Fonseca’s position, however, was not quite as strong as it had been. Charles’s Flemish advisers were falling out with Fonseca and his friends, whose collective reputation in the affairs of the Indies had been tarnished by the denunciations made before the emperor in December by that zealous apostle of Indian liberty, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Above all, there was Motecuçoma’s treasure to speak on behalf of Cortés. The precious gold objects and the delicate featherwork had created a sensation in Seville, and such treasures could hardly be left indefinitely impounded in the hands of the officials of the House of Trade. On the emperor’s orders, the treasure was dispatched from Seville and reached him early in April, although Cortés’s friends were able to allege that not everything was there, and that Fonseca had deliberately held some of it back. As was to be expected, the treasure powerfully reinforced the arguments of Montejo and Puertocarrero, who put their case again at Coruña, just before Charles was due to sail. The emperor deferred his decision, but declined to follow Fonseca’s advice and declare Cortés a rebel. This at least was an encouraging start, and the procuradores gained another victory when a royal decree, dated May 10, 1520, ordered the officials in Seville to return their confiscated funds.

When Charles sailed for Germany on May 20, therefore, Cortés’s friends could claim at least a partial success. Their gold, too, would now come into its own. But there was still a very long way to go, and the political climate was menacing. Castile was now in open revolt. Fonseca remained a highly influential figure, and his brother was the royalist army commander. In these circumstances, it was easy enough to tar Cortés with the same brush of rebellion as the Comuneros of Castile. Both in the Indies and in Castile, the emperor was faced with treason and revolt. Could the rebellions be crushed, and the emperor’s authority be preserved? As far as Mexico was concerned, Fonseca pinned his hopes on the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. But in fact, a few days after Charles left for Germany, the fate of Narváez had been decided. Cortés, marching back to the coast from Tenochtitlan, outmaneuvered, defeated and captured him on May 27.

Narváez’s defeat left the governor of Cuba a ruined and broken man. Cortés had defeated Velázquez—geographically his nearest enemy—but he was still without news from the Spanish Court. Moreover, his march to the coast to defeat Narváez had fatally weakened the Spanish position in Tenochtitlan. When Cortés got back to the capital on June 25 it was already too late. The behavior of Alvarado and his men in Tenochtitlan during Cortés’s absence had precipitated an Indian uprising, and neither Cortés’s troops, nor the diminished authority of Motecuçoma, proved sufficient to quell the revolt. Motecuçoma, rejected by his own subjects, died his strange death on June 30. During the course of the same night, the noche triste, the Spaniards made their famous retreat from Tenochtitlan. Cortés might have defeated the governor of Cuba, but he had also lost the empire he had promised to Charles.

It was during the autumn months of 1520, while Cortés was preparing for the siege and reconquest of Tenochtitlan, that he wrote the Second Letter. This letter, like its predecessor from Vera Cruz, is both more and less than a straightforward narrative of events, for it, too, has an essentially political purpose. Cortés, when writing it, was influenced by three major considerations. In the first place, he still did not know what decision, if any, had been reached in Spain on his plea for retrospective authorization of his unconventional proceedings. In the second place, he had by now heard the news of Charles’s election to the imperial throne. Finally, he had won a new empire for Charles and had proceeded to lose it. His letter, therefore, had to be so angled as to suggest that, at the most, he had suffered no more than a temporary setback (attributable to other men’s crimes), and that he would soon be in a position to render the most signal new services to a king who had now become the mightiest monarch in the world.

With these considerations in mind, Cortés carefully contrived his letter to convey a predominantly “imperial” theme. Its opening paragraph contained a graceful allusion to Charles’s new empire in Germany, which was skillfully coupled with a reference to a second empire across the Atlantic, to which he could claim an equal title.{12} This reference set the tone for the document as a whole. The fact that Cortés was no longer at this moment the effective master of the Mexican empire was no doubt inconvenient, but could be played down as far as possible. For the thesis of the letter was that Charles was already the legal emperor of this great new empire, and that Cortés would soon recover for him what was rightfully his.

The entire story of the march to Tenochtitlan and the imprisonment of Motecuçoma was related in such a way as to support this general thesis. Motecuçoma, by his speeches and his actions, was portrayed as a man who voluntarily recognized the sovereignty of Charles V, and voluntarily surrendered his empire into his hands. Whether Motecuçoma did indeed speak anything like the words which Cortés attributes to him will probably never be known for certain. Some passages in his two speeches contain so many Christian overtones as to be unbelievable coming from a pagan Aztec. Others, and in particular the identification of the Spaniards with the former rulers of Mexico wrongly banished from their land, may be an ingenious fabrication by Cortés, or may conceivably reflect certain beliefs and legends, which Motecuçoma himself may or may not have accepted. Whatever its origins, the story of the expected return of lords from the east was essential to Cortés’s grand design, for it enabled him to allege and explain a “voluntary” submission of Motecuçoma, and the “legal” transfer of his empire—an empire far removed from the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo and from the Caribbean world of Diego Colón and Velázquez—to its rightful ruler, Charles V .

Motecuçoma’s death at the hands of his own subjects left Charles the undisputed master of the field. It was unfortunate that the Mexicans were now in open rebellion—a situation which could only be ascribed to the nefarious activities of the governor of Cuba, acting through his agent Pánfilo de Narváez. But although Narváez’s invasion had nearly brought disaster, the tide had now been turned, because God was on the emperor’s side. With divine help, and through the agency of that most loyal of lieutenants, Hernan Cortés, the land would soon be recovered; and what better name could be bestowed upon it than that of New Spain?{13}

It is clear that this entire letter was superbly designed to appeal directly to Charles over the heads of Fonseca and his friends in the Council of the Indies and the imperial entourage. But Fonseca was still far from ready to admit defeat. It was always possible that Cortés would suffer the fate of other conquistadors, and be unseated by conspirators among his own men. The abortive plot of Antonio de Villafaña during the siege of Tenochtitlan{14} showed that Velázquez still had his friends, and that this was by no means an unreasonable hope. There was a chance, too, that Fonseca could rid himself of Cortés by more subtle means. With Narváez’s defeat, military overthrow had become unlikely; but as long as Charles V declined to pronounce on Cortés’s status, he remained intensely vulnerable to legal action.

When news of Narváez’s defeat reached Spain, Fonseca persuaded Adrian of Utrecht, who headed the regency government during Charles’s absence in Germany, to appoint a royal official to intervene in Mexico. The chosen official was Cristóbal de Tapia, a royal inspector in Hispaniola. He received his commission in April, 1521—the month when the Castilian Comuneros were defeated and crushed at Villalar—and he was apparently ordered to take over the government of New Spain, and, if possible, to arrest Cortés and ship him home. Tapia landed at Vera Cruz on December 4, 1521, four months after Cortés’s army had captured Tenochtitlan. The Aztec empire had been destroyed; but, for all his success, Cortés was in a delicate position. To defy Tapia, who had come to New Spain as the legally appointed representative of the royal authority, would be the height of imprudence, and yet to surrender the empire into his hands would be intolerable.

Once again, however, as the Third Letter makes clear, Cortés showed himself equal to the occasion. Carefully avoiding a personal meeting with Tapia, who would at once have presented him with a royal warrant, he sent a Franciscan, Fray Pedro de Melgarejo, to greet Tapia, and no doubt to pass him an appropriate bribe. At the same time, he had recourse to the device which he had already employed at the beginning of the conquest, and arranged another “spontaneous” assertion of the popular will. The representatives of the various municipalities of New Spain, usefully reinforced for the occasion by the rapid founding of the new town of Medellin, met Tapia at Cempoal on December 24, 1521, and went through the time-honored Castilian procedure followed by those who were prepared to obey but not to comply. With honor thus satisfied on both sides, Tapia took the next ship back to Hispaniola, a wiser, and no doubt a richer, man.

Tapia’s intervention provided Cortés, in his Third Letter of May 15, 1522, with a diabolus ex machina, equivalent to Narváez in the Second Letter. While the letter related in great detail the siege and capture of Tenochtitlan, it also enabled him to smear by implication all those royal officials who placed their own interest before the emperor’s. It was scarcely necessary to contrast their conduct with that of Cortés, who had not only conquered an empire for Charles, but was now offering him yet another vision of fabulous riches—a vision, this time, of the Spice Islands of the Pacific and the world of Cathay.{15}

It must have been bitterly frustrating for Cortés that, in spite of all these services, no word of royal approval had yet been received. This could only be explained, he concluded, by the machinations of his enemies, who were concealing the truth from the emperor. Nor could there any longer be real doubt that the chief among these enemies was Fonseca, the bishop of Burgos. It was Fonseca who had been responsible for the unwelcome intervention of Tapia. It was Fonseca, too, who was responsible in 1523 for a further challenge to Cortés’s position—the intervention of Juan de Garay.

In 1521 Garay, the governor of Jamaica, obtained from Fonseca a warrant authorizing him to conquer and colonize the Panuco region, to the north of Vera Cruz. He landed at Panuco in July, 1523, with an army of four hundred infantry and 120 cavalry. This could easily have been another Narváez affair, and Cortés at once recalled his captains, now dispersed over Mexico, to meet the new challenge to his authority. It was this challenge which he described in the opening pages of his Fourth Letter of October 15, 1524, where for the first time Fonseca is mentioned by name.{16} Tapia and Garay, like Narváez in the Second Letter, are portrayed as self-interested men whose ill-chosen and ill-timed intervention in the affairs of New Spain placed the imperial authority and the achievements of Cortés at risk. Cortés himself emerges, not for the first time, as the loyalist, confronted by a quartet of enemies—Fonseca, Diego Colón, Velázquez and Garay—united in their sinister machinations to accomplish his ruin.

By the time this letter was written, however, Cortés’s battle for recognition had long since been won. During the course of 1521 the balance of power in the emperor’s councils had perceptibly shifted. This year, which saw the defeat of the Comuneros, saw also the siege and capture of Tenochtitlan. If Fonseca’s brother had emerged victorious in Castile, Fonseca’s enemy had emerged victorious in New Spain; and as more and more wealth flowed in from Mexico, something of the significance of Cortés’s achievement began to be realized. His agents were lobbying hard in the regency council of Adrian of Utrecht, and duly convinced the regent that the bishop of Burgos had done the emperor an ill service in persistently supporting the governor of Cuba. He therefore deprived Fonseca of jurisdiction in the suit between Cortés and Velázquez, instituted to determine which of the two could rightfully lay claim to the spoils of New Spain.

Charles V returned to Spain in July, 1522, and received Cortés’s representatives in audience the following month. After hearing their arguments, he confirmed Adrian’s decision, but appointed a new tribunal to receive representations from both parties and to reach a final verdict. This tribunal, which included among its members the grand chancellor Gattinara, eventually decided in Cortés’s favor. It was left open to Velázquez to sue Cortés for debts, but it was ruled that Velázquez’s financial contribution to the original expedition, even if it were larger than that of Cortés, did not entitle him to claim credit for the conquest of Mexico.

The tribunal’s recommendations were accepted by the emperor and embodied in a decree dated October 15, 1522, which named Cortés governor and captain general of New Spain.{17} At last, some three and a half years after his original act of insubordination, Cortés had received the vindication for which he and his agents had worked so hard. The original strategy, so tenaciously pursued, of appealing directly to the sovereign over the heads of his officials, had yielded its expected dividend. Cortés was no longer a rebel— another Comunero—but the emperor’s official governor of the newly conquered realm of New Spain.

The news, however, still had to reach Cortés. It was conveyed to Mexico by his brother-in-law Francisco de las Casas, and his cousin, Rodrigo de Paz, who in due course secured appointment as Cortés’s personal secretary and major-domo. When Garay landed in July, 1523, it had not yet come, but it arrived in September, just in time to give a decisive turn to events. Cortés at once had the contents of the emperor’s decree publicly announced in Mexico City—now rising on the ruins of Tenochtitlan—along with those of another imperial decree forbidding Garay to interfere in the affairs of New Spain. Copies of the decrees were also dispatched to Garay, who saw that he was beaten and gave up without a fight. He duly traveled to Mexico City to visit Cortés, and died there suddenly on December 27.

One after another, then, Cortés’s opponents and rivals, from Velázquez to Garay, had been worsted in the intricate political game which Cortés had played with such skill since the moment he first took ship for Mexico. It was a game whose ground rules he had studied closely, and which he had fought with every weapon at his command. Events in Mexico itself were crucial, because success in Mexico was the prerequisite for success at Court. However skillful the maneuvers of Cortés’s relatives and agents at home in Spain, their chances of success ultimately turned on Cortés’s ability to conquer Motecuçoma’s empire and to replenish the imperial coffers with Mexican gold. But Cortés knew well enough that victory in Mexico would be nothing without victory at Court, and the entire presentation of his case through his letters to the emperor was most cunningly designed to bring this about.

He achieved what he intended to achieve; and yet, in the end, his very success proved his own undoing. By consistently emphasizing his own absolute loyalty to the emperor, he had delivered himself into the emperor’s hands. His acutely sensitive political antennae, which had told him that he must win at Court if he were to win at all, failed him at the very moment of success. For if the Court could make a man, it could also unmake him; and there were reasons enough for unmaking Cortés.

When Fonseca fought his protracted battle with Cortés, he may to some extent have been motivated by personal animosity, but at the same time he was profoundly conscious of his position as the Crown’s principal minister in the government of the Indies. It was the policy of the Castilian Crown, firmly laid down in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, that no subject should be permitted to grow overmighty, and that acts of insubordination should be promptly punished without fear or favor. In persecuting Cortés, Fonseca was doing his duty, even if he did it with some personal relish. But Cortés, in the end, proved too strong for him. The intuitive political genius outmaneuvered and outclassed the bureaucratic mind.

The bureaucratic mind, however, is distinguished by its tenacity; and even if Fonseca himself had failed, his successors in the government of the Indies could hardly afford to let Cortés get away with his success. If the Crown’s authority were to be effectively established on the far shores of the Atlantic, acts of private initiative must at all costs be curbed. It was symptomatic of the Court’s concern at the very magnitude of Cortés’s success that the decree of October 15, 1522, appointing him governor of New Spain, should be accompanied by another, appointing four royal officials to assist him in government.{18} Already the bureaucrats were preparing to wrest power from the military in New Spain.

The four officials—Alonso de Estrada, Gonzalo de Salazar, Rodrigo de Albornoz and Pedro Almíndez Chirinos—duly arrived in Mexico in 1524. In the course of this same year, Cortés’s two great enemies, Velázquez and Fonseca, both died: Velázquez in June and Fonseca in October. But each in his way secured a posthumous revenge.

Once central Mexico had been conquered, Cortés turned his attention to the west and the south. As part of the project for southward expansion, Pedro de Alvarado was dispatched in 1523 to conquer Guatemala, while another of Cortés’s captains, Cristóbal de Olid, was given the task of occupying Honduras. Olid, a former partisan of Velázquez, left Mexico for Havana in January, 1524, to collect reinforcements. In Cuba he met Velázquez, now approaching the end of his life, and was persuaded to defy Cortés, as Cortés himself had once defied the governor of Cuba. Once Olid reached Honduras and had taken possession, he disavowed Cortés’s authority. Velázquez had obtained his revenge at last.

The terrible news of Olid’s treachery helps to account for the bitterness of Cortés’s Fourth Letter. Having at last, after years of waiting, secured the authority that he regarded as rightfully his, he found himself betrayed by one of his own captains, at the prompting of his old enemy, Diego Velázquez. The irony of the situation rubbed salt in the wound. But his fresh denunciations of the archvillain, Velázquez, were this time accompanied by a highly imprudent threat to send a force to Cuba and arrest Velázquez for trial in Spain.{19} Nothing could have been better calculated to alarm the already nervous members of the Council of the Indies. Cortés’s proposal to take the law into his own hands, and pursue a personal vendetta in the royal name, could only be regarded as conclusive evidence of the dangers in leaving Cortés in untrammeled exercise of his powers. The emperor’s reaction was predictable enough. A special juez de residencia, Ponce de León, was appointed in November, 1525, to visit New Spain and conduct a full inquiry into Cortés’s activities.

The threat to arrest the governor of Cuba was not the only misjudgment made by Cortés after receiving the news of Olid’s treachery. Francisco de las Casas was sent to bargain with Olid, who promptly took him into custody. Cortés, in exasperation, then decided to lead a force to Honduras under his own command to deal with his insubordinate captain. The Honduras expedition, which provides the theme of the Fifth Letter, was an extraordinary saga of heroism and suffering. Cortés emerged from it alive, but a different, and in some ways a broken, man. A heightened religious intensity pervades the letter, as if Cortés had suddenly been made aware of man’s weakness in face of the inscrutable ways of a Providence that had seemed for so long to be on his side. The Cortés who staggered ashore at Vera Cruz on May 24, 1526, so thin and weak that people had difficulty in recognizing him, contrasted strangely with the arrogant royal governor who had set out as if on a triumphal procession a year and a half before.

Yet, from the moment of its conception, the Honduras expedition seemed such a wild undertaking that it is questionable whether Cortés had not already lost his touch. The long years of waiting for the emperor’s approval had imposed an intolerable strain upon him, perhaps sufficient in itself to affect his judgment. But it is just as likely that the unwelcome presence of royal officials also played a significant part. As soon as the bureaucrats began to arrive in any number, Cortés would cease to be the real ruler of New Spain. Already by the autumn of 1524 he was beginning to feel hemmed in, and the decision to leave for Honduras may well have been prompted by an impulsive desire to escape into a world where he could again enjoy the delights of supreme command.

Whatever the balance of motives, Cortés’s decision proved to be the most disastrous of his life. No one else in New Spain enjoyed even a shadow of his personal authority, and his departure was the signal for anarchy. As soon as his back was turned, his enemies came out into the open, and the old faction feuds reasserted themselves in a vicious quarrel over the spoils of conquest. The old Velázquez faction, which had felt cheated in the distribution of booty and land, turned for leadership to Gonzalo de Salazar. The followers of Cortés, for their part, grouped themselves around the person of his major-domo, Rodrigo de Paz. There was virtual civil war in Mexico in 1525, and Paz was captured, tortured and killed. But the unexpected news of Cortés’s survival, and of his imminent return to New Spain, encouraged his followers to launch a counter-offensive; and when Cortes made his triumphal entry into Mexico City in June, 1526, he returned to a capital once again controlled by his own partisans.

But the triumph of 1526 was ephemeral. The violent faction feuds in New Spain merely confirmed the determination of the Council of the Indies to bring it under the effective control of the Crown. A few days after Cortés’s return to the capital, Ponce de León arrived to conduct his residencia, and suspended him from his office of governor. The net was slowly closing on Cortés, and each new official pulled it a little tighter around him. Fonseca’s hand stretched beyond the grave.

Embittered by the apparent neglect of his services, Cortés de­cided to seek redress, as he had always attempted to seek it, with the emperor in person. He left Mexico for Spain in March, 1528, and was duly accorded a magnificent reception at Court. He was raised to the nobility with the title of Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, and the emperor confirmed him in the possession of numerous vassals and vast estates. But he did not reappoint him to the governorship of New Spain. When he returned to Mexico in 1530 he returned with no office or special authority, and he found that the royal offi­cials assiduously kept him at arm’s length. In the Spanish-style bureaucratic state that was being constructed on the ruins of Motecuçoma’s empire, there was no place for the conqueror of Mexico. In 1540 he retired to Spain, where he lived out the remaining seven years of his life, a disappointed and disillusioned man. He had played the game according to the rules, but these had been laid down by the Spanish Crown. And Cortés, who had devoted such time and thought to their study, had overlooked the most important fact of all: that those who devise the rules are likely, in the last round, to win the match.

J. H. Elliott

Notes:

In the following notes Cedulario refers to Cedulario Cortesiano, compilación de Beatriz Arteaga Garaz y Guadalupe Pérez San Vicente. Publicaciones de la Sociedad de Estudios Cortesianos No. I, Mexico, 1949.

Below, p. number refers to pages in the book Letters from Mexico. Translated, edited, and with a new introduction by Anthony Pagden. Revised edition published by Yale University Press in 1986.

{1} This brief survey has drawn heavily on the illuminating studies of Cortés and his ideas by Victor Frankl: “Hernán Cortés y la tradición de las Siete Partidas”; “Die Begriffe des Mexicanischen Kaisertums und der Weltmonarchie in den ‘Cartas de Relacion’ des Hernán Cortés”; “Imperio particular e imperio universal en las cartas de relacion de Hernán Cortés.” Frankl’s critical reassessment of Cortés as a reliable source for his own exploits is to some extent inspired by Eulalia Guzmán, Relaciones de Hernán Cortés a Carlos V sobre la invasión de Anáhuac, an annotated edition of the first two letters which is often shrewd and penetrating in its judgments but is vitiated by the author’s antipathy toward Cortés. The most interesting and suggestive attempt so far made to reconstruct the political scene in Spain and the Indies in the first decades of the sixteenth century is to be found in the massively ambitious biography of Las Casas by Manuel Giménez Fernández, to which his Hernán Cortés y su Revolución Comunera en la Nueva España may be regarded as a useful pendant. In addition to these works, I have also made use of the following: Robert S. Chamberlain, “La controversia entre Cortés y Velázquez sobre la gobernación de la Nueva España, 1519-1522,” and his “Two unpublished documents of Hernán Cortés and New Spain, 1519 and 1524”; Richard Konetzke, “Hernán Cortés como poblador de la Nueva España”; José Valero Silva, El Legalismo de Hernán Cortés como instrumento de su Conquista; H. R. Wagner, The Rise of Fernando Cortés.

{2} Cedulario, doc. 1.

{3} The relationship is reported by Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés, The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, p. 327. Giménez Fernández, Hernán Cortés, p. 53, suggests that the “niece” was a daughter.

{4} Clause 27, Cedulario, p. 30.

{5} Below, p. 452, n. 15.

{6} Chap. 36. Frankl, in “Hernán Cortés y la tradición de las Siete Partidas,” was the first to appreciate the cryptic references in the exchange.

{7} Chap. 41.

{8} Below, p. 18.

{9} Below, p. 5.

{10} Below, p. 37.

{11} Below, p. 51.

{12} Below, p. 48.

{13} Below, p. 158.

{14} Below, pp. 277-278.

{15} Below, pp. 267, 327, 444.

{16} Below, p. 289.

{17} Cedulario, doc. 2.

{18} Cedulario, doc. 3.

{19} Below, p. 332.

Charles V / Carlos V

2000 International Congress. Carlos V y la quiebra del humanismo político en Europa (1530-1558): Madrid, 3-6 July 2000

The idea of Empire and humanism / La idea del imperio y el humanismo 

VOLUME I 

Empire and political relationships / Imperio y relaciones políticas 

Charles V and the Low Countries / Carlos V y los Países Bajos 

Charles V and the moriscos / Carlos V y los moriscos 

VOLUME II 

Institutions and power elites / Instituciones y élites de poder 

VOLUME III 

Art and culture / Arte y cultura 

VOLUME IV 

The Indies during the reign of Charles V / Las Indias durante el reinado de Carlos V

Religiousness and Inquisition / Religiosidad e Inquisición

Economical and financial aspects / Aspectos económicos y financieros

Final – Don Quijote, espejo de la Nación Española

Dado el indudable interés de este libro del profesor Gustavo Bueno (España no es un mito. Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2005) que se encuentra actualmente descatalogado, proseguimos la edición digital de esta obra, con el último capítulo que lleva por título:

DON QUIJOTE, ESPEJO DE LA NACIÓN ESPAÑOLA

Contra la interpretación de Don Quijote como símbolo de la solidaridad universal, de la tolerancia y de la paz

Año 2005. Se celebra en toda España el cuarto centenario de la publicación de Don Quijote (cuya impresión ya estaba terminada en diciembre de 1604). Y esto corrobora, evidentemente, la tesis que hemos mantenido en el cuerpo de este libro, acerca del carácter transparente, a la cultura española, de todas las regiones y «culturas» de España. Centenares de conferencias, pronunciadas en todas las ciudades y capitales de las autonomías, «históricas» o «sin historia», concursos, nuevas ediciones, lecturas públicas (colectivas o individuales), exposiciones, talleres e interpretaciones de toda índole: psiquiátricas (Cervantes habría descrito admirablemente el «síndrome de Capgras»), éticas (Don Quijote es la fortaleza y la generosidad), morales (Don Quijote simboliza, en la época moderna, las virtudes del estamento caballeresco de la época feudal), o bien símbolo de valores estrictamente literarios (la novela moderna), o de valores con implicaciones políticas (¿valores europeos?) o, más aún, valores universales, que convierten a Don Quijote en un símbolo del Hombre, de los Derechos Humanos, de la Tolerancia y de la Paz: «Don Quijote es patrimonio de la Humanidad.»

A las interpretaciones políticas de Don Quijote pacifista y tolerante se han adherido especialmente las autoridades, a la sazón socialistas, del «lugar» en el que vivió Alonso Quijano, el «Caballero de la Mancha», como se le llama. A saber, un lugar transformado en Comunidad autónoma, denominada Castilla-La Mancha, con capacidad legal para promulgar una Ley 16/2002 «del IV centenario de la publicación de El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha», en la que, considerando que «Don Quijote es un símbolo de la humanidad y un mito cultural que la Mancha siente honrosamente como suyo», busca crear una «Red de Solidaridad que, apoyándose en el valor de una lengua común, trabaje en la consecución de la igualdad y el desarrollo de todos los pueblos, fundamentalmente a través de la educación y la cultura», para contribuir al «desarrollo social, cultural y económico de Castilla-La Mancha (…) a fin de fomentar y difundir los valores universales de justicia, libertad y solidaridad que el Quijote simboliza» (artículo 1).

José Bono, presidente de la comunidad autónoma de Castilla-La Mancha al promulgarse esta Ley, fue nombrado, después del 11-M, Ministro de Defensa. Un rótulo que traduce, en las democracias de ideología pacifista, los rótulos de los antiguos Ministerios de la Guerra, aunque el Ministro de Defensa actual y los Ministros de la Guerra no democráticos, entendieran de las mismas cosas: cañones, misiles, acorazados, helicópteros y, en general, en la sociedad industrial, armas de fuego (en modo alguno, lanzas, espadas y yelmos de Mambrino). Su pacifismo, tan poco quijotesco, le ha llevado a pedir en este 2005 que se retire la palabra «guerra» de la Constitución española de 1978: no ha llegado a pedir la disolución del Ejército, si bien, acaso para justificar la intervención del Ejército español en Afganistán, parece que el gobierno socialista pretende, después de la retirada de las tropas del Irak, transformarlo en una especie de Cuerpo de Bomberos sin Fronteras dispuesto a ir a Afganistán para vigilar los incendios que puedan producirse casualmente en el periodo electoral de esa nueva proyectada democracia.

Ahora bien, no tenemos por qué entrar aquí en el debate sobre el alcance político que puedan tener los proyectos de justicia, paz perpetua, diálogo, tolerancia y solidaridad de los gobiernos democráticos fundamentalistas que conmemoran a Don Quijote y lo representan a su imagen y semejanza. Pero sí nos parece necesario concluir que si pretenden seguir manteniendo su pacifismo y solidaridad universal, tendrán que retirar la «devoción» a Don Quijote. Porque Don Quijote no puede en modo alguno tomarse como símbolo de solidaridad, paz y tolerancia. Que sigan con su política pacifista y antimilitarista, pero que no utilicen el nombre de Don Quijote en vano y en falso.

Y si Don Quijote es símbolo de algo, no lo es de la «solidaridad universal», ni de la «tolerancia». ¿Qué solidaridad mantuvo Don Quijote con los guardias que llevaban encadenados a los galeotes? Su solidaridad con los galeotes no puede ser llamada universal, por cuanto implicaba la insolidaridad con los guardias. Si Don Quijote es símbolo de algo, lo es de las armas y de la intolerancia. Ni siquiera tolera Don Quijote que, en su presencia, Maese Pedro represente con sus títeres una historia, la de Melisendra, que está a punto de ser capturada por un rey moro: como esto es inadmisible, Don Quijote saca su espada, la emprende a mandobles con el teatrillo y destruye «toda la hacienda» del titiritero. ¿Y quién concibe a Don Quijote desarmado? En el último capítulo, es cierto, Don Quijote «cuelga sus armas», a la manera como el fraile «cuelga sus hábitos»; pero mientras que para el cura o el fraile colgar los hábitos suele significar el renacimiento hacia una nueva vida, en la que su barragana quedará elevada a la condición de esposa, para Don Quijote, colgar las armas significa el paso que le conduce inmediatamente a la muerte.

Don Quijote no es símbolo autogórico

Don Quijote es un símbolo o, por lo menos, puede ser interpretado como símbolo, al menos si admitimos la discutible distinción (procedente de Schelling) entre símbolos autogóricos y símbolos alegóricos.

Los símbolos autogóricos son los que «se representan a sí mismos» y Don Quijote ha sido representado, y aún sigue siéndolo muchas veces, aún sin llamarlo así, como un símbolo autogórico de su propia figura imaginaria. Como símbolo autogórico, o conjunto de símbolos autogóricos, interpretan el Quijote quienes lo ven como una obra estrictamente literaria, «inmanente», sin más referencias que sus propias figuras imaginarias. Figuras imaginarias que se agotarían poblando un «imaginario» social. Pero ese «imaginario» no está constituido por representaciones e «imágenes mentales» (que son los contenidos de esas «mentalidades» estudiadas por los «historiadores marxistas» que se acogieron hace unos años a la llamada Historia de las mentalidades) sino por «imágenes reales», físicas, por ejemplo las que dibujaron ya en los siglos XVII y XVIII, Antonio Carnicero, José del Castillo, Bernardo Barranco, José Brunete, Gerónimo Gil, Gregorio Ferro; o en el XIX, José Moreno Carbonero, Ramón Puiggarí, Gustavo Doré, Ricardo Balaca o Luis Pellicer; y en el XX Daniel Urrabieta Vierge, Joaquín Vaquero, Dalí o Saura, por no contar también a los innumerables dibujos de los Quijotes para adultos o para niños, comics, películas, representaciones teatrales.

Ampliando discretamente el campo de la «inmanencia literaria autogórica», cabría citar también, dentro de este campo de los símbolos autogóricos, a las habituales interpretaciones del Quijote como obra literaria dirigida contra otras obras literarias, los libros de caballerías. Es decir, contra los caballeros andantes de papel, y no contra los caballeros reales, como pudieron serlo Hernán Cortés, o Don Juan de Austria, bajo cuyas banderas militó el propio Cervantes.

Interpretaciones «autogóricas» que podrían apoyarse en las palabras que el ventero dirige contra el cura (I, 32), cuando arremete contra esos libros mentirosos, llenos de disparates y devaneos, que matan el interés por los relatos de héroes históricos reales, tales como Gonzalo Hernández de Córdoba o como Diego García de Paredes: «¡Dos higas para el Gran Capitán y para ese Diego García que dice!», exclama el ventero, por cuya boca creen algunos que está hablando el propio Cervantes.

No negamos sentido a estas interpretaciones literarias (inmanentes) del Quijote; lo que sí ponemos en tela de juicio es la legitimidad de considerar como símbolos a los símbolos autogóricos que, a lo sumo, constituyen un caso límite de la Idea de símbolo, límite en el que el símbolo cesa de serlo, como cesa de ser causa la causa sui. Porque un símbolo, en cuanto figura alotética, dice precisamente relación a referencias distintas del propio cuerpo del símbolo. Y ello porque las referencias del símbolo han de ser también corpóreas: cada parte del anillo fragmentado que se entrega a cada partícipe principal de la ceremonia, es símbolo de la otra parte; el Credo es «Símbolo de la Fe» porque cada grupo de fieles que recitan versículos suyos, remite a los fieles que recitan los sucesivos, y de este modo la comunidad de los fieles configura una comunidad viviente, que es una parte real de la Iglesia militante.

Desde luego Don Quijote no es un símbolo autogórico, en el sentido más literal en el que, según Clarín, era, para el Magistral de Pas el versículo «y el verbo se hizo carne». «¿Creía don Fermín en este versículo?» En rigor, en lo que don Fermín creía (decía Clarín) era en las letras rojas que estaban escritas en un tablero dispuesto en el altar y que decían: «Et verbum caro factum est.» Las figuras, interpretadas como símbolos estrictos, alegóricos, nos remiten a referencias extraliterarias, a figuras reales, a figuras de la historia civil, política o social.

Don Quijote, ¿es una historia clínica?

En esta línea, suponen algunos intérpretes que en la figura de Alonso Quijano, Cervantes querría haber representado algún individuo real, que él pudo conocer directamente, o a través de algún amigo o escritor.

La referencia real de Don Quijote, según esto, sería Alonso Quijano, es decir, algún individuo de carne y hueso, pero afectado de un tipo específico de locura que Cervantes pudo conocer e «identificar» intuitivamente, sin ser médico o psiquiatra. Menéndez Pidal descubrió, en 1943, la figura de Bartolo, del sainete de Entremeses de los Romances; Bartolo era un pobre labrador que enloqueció de tanto leer el Romancero, y en quien Cervantes pudo haberse inspirado. Se cita también a don Rodrigo Pacheco, un marqués de Argamasilla de Alba, que enloqueció leyendo libros de caballería.

Los psiquiatras han tendido, como es natural, a interpretar a Don Quijote desde las categorías propias de su oficio. Desde el doctor Esquirol, en el siglo XIX, que interpretó a Don Quijote como un modelo de «monomanía» –él fue el inventor de este término– hasta el doctor Francisco Alonso-Fernández, que acaba de publicar una interpretación de Don Quijote según la cual ésta obra podría considerarse como una suerte de «historia clínica» de un sujeto afectado de un síndrome que Cervantes habría logrado establecer, ajustándose asombrosamente al síndrome que hoy es identificado como «autometamorfosis delirante». Un síndrome emparentado con los síndromes delirantes de Capgras, Frégoli y otros. En consecuencia, propone se considere como auténtico protagonista de la novela, no tanto a Don Quijote, sino a Alonso Quijano. En efecto (argumenta), fue Alonso Quijano quien padeció el síndrome delirante de identificación con un imaginario Don Quijote, que sólo existió en su mente; es Alonso Quijano quien logra curarse de su locura, gracias a las atenciones del bachiller Carrasco, del cura y del barbero, y a «una calentura que le tuvo seis días en la cama» (II, 74). Alonso-Fernández subraya cómo este incidente no pasó desapercibido «al perspicaz ojo clínico del eximio doctor Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra».

Hay que agradecer al doctor Alonso, gran amigo mío, su demostración de que Alonso Quijano padeció un síndrome que Cervantes logró describir con asombrosa puntualidad; lo que sólo se explicaría si admitimos que Cervantes había conocido y diferenciado casos específicos de locura (como también habría conocido y descrito la locura del licenciado Vidriera). Y en todo caso, ni Don Quijote ni Vidriera son puras «creaciones literarias».

Pero, ¿quiere esto decir que Cervantes se propuso como objetivo literario la «descripción clínica» de un tipo de delirio específico?

No necesariamente, si es que Cervantes estaba utilizando o aprovechando su descripción de un tipo de locura real como símbolo de otra referencia, a saber, acaso, la realidad de unas gentes de España (no de España misma, como muchos dicen) en la que los hombres, según muchos, habían enloquecido, porque iban a América, dicen algunos, o porque dejaban de ir (decimos otros). Porque iban a América en busca de El Dorado, o porque allí, evocando un libro de caballerías (Las Sergas de Esplandián) daban el nombre de California a un imaginario reino de las amazonas; o, en su momento, daban el nombre de Patagonia a las tierras en las que vivían hombres que les recordaban las tribus de salvajes monstruosos descritas en la novela de caballerías, El Primaleón. Más aún: cabría extender el simbolismo de la locura de Don Quijote a lugares que habría que buscar en España, y no en América, en Italia o en Flandes, en cualquiera de los lugares de la Mancha o de cualquier otra parte de España o Portugal en la que los fieles cristianos, en las iglesias, en las transformaciones del pan y del vino eucarístico, veían la carne y la sangre de Jesucristo. Cuando Don Quijote, al acuchillar los cueros de la venta, cree ver sangre derramada donde sólo hay vino, ¿no está intentando describir un género de delirio similar al de quien, tras las palabras de la consagración, se dispone a beber del cáliz un vino que se ha transformado en sangre?

Una cosa es que Don Quijote despliegue una serie de delirios que, lejos de ser meramente literarios, tengan una consistencia clínica (lo que ya nos obligaría a considerar a Don Quijote como una figura no autogórica, sino alotética) y otra cosa es que Cervantes se hubiera propuesto hacer (finis operantis) y, sobre todo, hubiera hecho (finis operis) la descripción anticipada de un síndrome delirante, padecido por un tal Alonso Quijano. Porque, ¿acaso Alonso Quijano no es él mismo una figura literaria? Sobre todo, ¿acaso no es el propio delirio sistematizado de Don Quijote aquello que es utilizado por Cervantes como símbolo de otras figuras reales, que precisamente no se consideraron víctimas de síndromes de Capgras o de Frégoli? ¿Y acaso las propias calenturas de los últimos días de Don Quijote, sin perjuicio de haber sido recogidas por el ojo clínico de Cervantes, no pueden simbolizar también las calenturas de España en unos años de profunda crisis?

Los delirios de Don Quijote, interpretados como símbolos alegóricos, tendrán como referencia, no a «locos de atar», que el psiquiatra ve en el hospital o en su consulta, sino precisamente a figuras históricas reales, que acaso pasan por ser figuras extraordinarias y aún heroicas. Otra cosa es identificar esas figuras y determinar el alcance que pueda tener la utilización, por Cervantes, de síntomas delirantes, como símbolos de ellos mismos.

El individuo y la pareja de individuos

Ahora bien, una figura humana, como sin duda lo es la figura de Don Quijote, nunca existe en solitario: una persona implica siempre a otras personas que se involucran las unas a las otras en coexistencia pacífica o bélica. De otro modo: el individuo, en cuanto existente, es un sinsentido, es una entidad metafísica y, por tanto, es ya simple metafísica el intento de interpretar a Don Quijote como símbolo de algún individuo aislado, ya esté cuerdo, ya esté loco. Un individuo, por sí mismo, no puede existir, porque existir es co-existir.

El individuo ni siquiera existe como tal cuando alcanza la condición de Rey o de Emperador. Por ello, la célebre clasificación de las sociedades políticas, de Aristóteles, en los tres géneros consabidos: monarquías, aristocracias y repúblicas, ha de considerarse como una clasificación propia de una ciencia política-ficción, sin perjuicio de que siga siendo nuestra referencia actual. No pueden distinguirse las monarquías de las aristocracias o de las repúblicas según el criterio aristotélico: o bien manda uno, o varios, o todos (o la «mayoría»). Y esto por la sencilla razón de que «uno» no puede mandar, porque no puede existir en cuanto tal «uno»: el Rey más absoluto no manda solo, sino como cabeza de un grupo.

El mínimo numérico de las personas coexistentes es el de dos; y acaso por ello alcanza un grado casi máximo de consenso universal la interpretación de las relaciones humanas desde el esquema dualista de las parejas (en especial de las parejas constituidas por individuos opuestos, ya sea según el género gramatical –masculino o femenino– ya sea según otros criterios de oposición: alto/bajo, tonto/listo, viejo/joven, gordo/flaco). Las personas, según esto, jamás estarán solas, sino emparejadas, y según pares de individuos que habrán de oponerse entre sí por diferentes y opuestos tipos de atributos. Y si los elementos de una pareja se consideran «iguales», la oposición entre ellos surgiría de su propia coexistencia, como ocurre por ejemplo con las situaciones enantiomorfas, en las que aparecen opuestas figuras iguales pero incongruentes, como ocurre con la incongruencia entre dos manos iguales pero de sentido opuesto (derecha e izquierda). Adán y Eva es el prototipo de una primera pareja, con oposición de género, pero acompañada de un cortejo variado de otros pares de oposiciones. Los dióscuros (Castor y Polux) fueron vistos, en la batalla del lago Regilo, montando en sus caballos blancos y luchando entre sí.

Desde el esquema dualista de la coexistencia, Don Quijote se ha considerado desde siempre asociado o involucrado con Sancho. El par «Don Quijote y Sancho», y las oposiciones más peculiares de atributos que entre ellos se establecen (señor/vasallo, caballero/escudero, alto/bajo, delgado/gordo, idealista/realista…) se considerará muchas veces reproducida en otras famosas parejas literarias, desde el par Sherlock Holmes/Watson, hasta el par Asterix/Obelix (que rompe alguna de las oposiciones de atributos consideradas como características, como la oposición leptosomático –alto, delgado– / pícnico –bajo, grueso–).

Ahora bien, hay razones muy serias para concluir que los esquemas dualistas son sólo un fragmento de estructuras más complejas. Adán y Eva, por ejemplo, es sólo un fragmento de la sociedad formada por ambos con sus hijos, Abel, Caín y Set. Don Quijote y Sancho suelen ser concebidos en función de oposiciones abstractas, tales como idealismo/realismo, o utópico/pragmático. Pero estas oposiciones fracasan en seguida: pues suponen que el «idealismo» es una suerte de disposición personal orientada a trascender el horizonte inmediato de la prosa de la vida, impulsando a las personas hacia el altruismo o la gloria, entonces Sancho no se opone a Don Quijote, porque también Sancho, desde el principio (y no en la Segunda parte, como se dice) está quijotizado, y acompaña a Don Quijote aventurándose en toda clase de peligros, y no sólo para adquirir riquezas (lo que ya sería suficiente, puesto que quien quiere adquirir riquezas poniendo su vida en peligro ya no es un idealista pragmático, en el sentido convencional), sino para elevar a un rango social superior a su mujer Teresa Cascajo. Sancho no es el tipo de villano que han concebido tantos historiadores villanos que ponen, como única motivación de los españoles que se alistaban a los tercios o a los galeones, la satisfacción del hambre (recordemos la película de Antonio Landa, La marrana).

Tiene para nosotros la mayor importancia advertir la incompatibilidad de los esquemas dualistas con los principios del materialismo filosófico, en la medida en que estos implican el principio platónico de symploké. Platón, en efecto, en el Sofista, establece las dos premisas que han de considerarse presupuestas en todo proceso racional: 1) Un principio de conexión entre unas cosas y otras: «si todo estuviese desconectado de las demás cosas, el discurso racional sería imposible»; 2) un principio de desconexión entre las cosas: «si todo estuviese conectado con todo, el discurso racional sería imposible.» Es preciso, por tanto, si queremos aproximarnos racionalmente a la realidad, presuponer que cada cosa no está conectada (por ejemplo, causalmente) con todas las demás, ni tampoco que está desconectada de todas las demás: es decir, es preciso presuponer que las cosas se encuentran entretejidas (en symploké) con algunas cosas, pero no con todas.

Pero cuando aplicamos a un grupo social dado (por ejemplo, el círculo de los individuos humanos) el esquema dualista de conexión, entonces la realidad se nos presentará como una pluralidad de parejas desconectadas entre sí (pues suponemos que los términos de cada par se refieren íntegramente el uno al otro). La conexión de los términos de cada pareja, en efecto, será completa internamente, tanto si cada individuo se considera correlativo al otro, como si se considera conjugado con él. Cada «par aislado» introduce una tal dependencia recíproca entre sus términos, que permite sea tratado como una unidad «monista», como un dipolo, tanto si sus relaciones son armónicas como si son dioscúricas. Por tanto, la realidad global se nos ofrecería como una multiplicidad compuesta por infinitas parejas entre las cuales sólo cabría reconocer interacciones aleatorias. Y en el supuesto en el cual el esquema dual se aplicase a un único par, coextensivo con la «realidad misma» (Ormuz y Arihman, entre los maniqueos; la diada Byzos/Aletheia entre los gnósticos; o el Yin/Yan entre los chinos), entonces ese «dualismo cósmico» equivaldría prácticamente a un monismo, y ello sin necesidad de que se contemplase la posibilidad de que uno de los términos del dualismo acabase venciendo o reabsorbiendo al otro. Sería suficiente que permaneciesen eternamente diferentes, aunque complementándose el uno al otro, o separándose el uno del otro, hasta la muerte («una de las dos Españas ha de helarte el corazón»).

Las tríadas

La estructura más elemental, compatible con el principio de symploké del materialismo filosófico, es la estructura ternaria. En una triada (A, B, C) los miembros estarán involucrados los unos con los otros, pero, al mismo tiempo, será posible reconocer coaliciones binarias [(A, B) (A, C) (B, C)] en cada una de las cuales queda segregado el tercer miembro, que, sin embargo, tendrá que mantenerse asociado al otro. La estructuración en triadas de cualquier campo constituido por individuos encierra además la posibilidad de que cada triada esté a su vez involucrada, a través de alguna unidad común, a otras triadas, dando lugar a eneadas (3×3) o a docenas (3×4), &c. El principio de symploké, en resolución, se cumple muy bien en pluralidades estructuradas en triadas, eneadas, docenas, &c. De esta pluralidad podrá ya afirmarse tanto la conexión (no total) de unas cosas con otras, como la desconexión (o discontinuidad) de unas cosas con otras, que seguirán su propio ritmo.

Por lo demás, la concepción de la realidad o de sus regiones en cuanto organizadas según esquemas ternarios, son tan antiguas como las concepciones organizadas según los esquemas binarios o dualistas. Baste recordar las célebres trinidades de los dioses indoeuropeos que Dumèzil puso de manifiesto hace años (Zeus, Heracles, Plutón), (Júpiter, Marte, Quirino), la «tríada capitolina» (Júpiter, Minerva, Juno) o sus transformaciones germánicas (Odín, Thor, Freya).

En la tradición cristiana, y más concretamente católica, a la que pertenece sin duda Don Quijote, la triada fundamental está representada por el dogma de la Trinidad, Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo, «que del Padre y del Hijo procede» (en esto se diferencian los católicos romanos de los ortodoxos griegos, para quienes el Espíritu Santo viene a ser como una emanación del Padre, sin el concurso del Hijo). No es evidente que la trinidad católica sea un mero caso particular de las trinidades indoeuropeas.

En el cristianismo romano el dogma de la Trinidad fue constituyéndose paulatinamente, y probablemente la apelación al Espíritu Santo tuvo que ver con la misma constitución de una Iglesia universal, que no tenía parangón, según su estructura social, con las estructuras sociales conocidas por los griegos (como pudieran serlo la familia o el Estado). Sabelio sostuvo, bien que heréticamente, que el Espíritu Santo representaba a la Iglesia, como entidad femenina (la «Santa Madre Iglesia»); también es verdad que en algunas trinidades germánicas, uno de los miembros es femenino (Odín, Thor, Freya), aunque acaso por contaminación con el cristianismo, como lo probaría la fórmula litúrgica, calco de la cristiana: «En el nombre de Odín, de Thor y de Freya.» Pero sí es cierto que la trinidad de Gaeta, o la trinidad de la Peña de Francia (en Salamanca), a las que encomendaba Sancho a Don Quijote en el momento de descender a la cueva de Montesinos (II, 22) son manifestaciones de la Trinidad genuina del catolicismo (Padre, Hijo, Espíritu Santo).

Las tríadas del Quijote

Si nos decidimos a dejar de lado el esquema dualista de estructuración, que nos impone la asociación en pareja entre Don Quijote y Sancho, por fundamental que esta asociación sea (unas veces explicada por su complementariedad, otras veces por su conjugación: Don Quijote mantiene la unidad entre los distintos episodios de su carrera a través de Sancho; y Sancho mantiene la unidad entre los episodios de la suya a través de Don Quijote) entonces, la reestructuración trinitaria de las figuras del Quijote se nos manifiesta con fuerza, y esto independientemente de que Cervantes hubiera sido consciente de esta estructura: tanto más interesante sería el caso de una estructura objetiva que se impone «por encima» o independientemente de la voluntad del autor.

Lo cierto es que Don Quijote aparece siempre como un miembro de la trinidad (Don Quijote, Sancho, Dulcinea); lo que no quiere decir que los miembros de esta trinidad no estén a su vez involucrados en otras trinidades diferentes. Don Quijote, por ejemplo, forma también triángulo con su ama y su sobrina (II, 6). Sancho aparece siempre involucrado con su mujer, Teresa Cascajo, y con su hija; así también con el cura y el barbero (I, 26). Dulcinea, según su figura más real de labradora, se le aparece a Sancho montada en un asno junto con otras dos mujeres también labradoras. «Y sucedióle todo tan bien [a Sancho], que cuando se levantó para subir en el rucio vio que del Toboso hacia donde él estaba venían tres labradoras sobre tres pollinos, o pollinas, que el autor no lo declara…», y poco después, cuando Sancho anuncia a su señor que ha visto a Dulcinea, «salieron de la selva y descubrieron cerca a las tres aldeanas. Tendió Don Quijote los ojos por todo el camino de El Toboso, y como no vio sino a las tres labradoras, turbose todo, y preguntó a Sancho si les había dejado fuera de la ciudad» (II, 10).

En cualquier caso, la «trinidad básica» en torno a la cual Cervantes parece moverse a lo largo de toda su obra es la constituida por Don Quijote, Sancho y Dulcinea. Si confrontamos, como desde nuestras hipótesis estamos obligados a hacerlo, esta trinidad con la Trinidad católica, se concederá que a Don Quijote le corresponde el papel del Padre; Sancho es el Hijo (al menos, así le llama una y otra vez su señor); en cuanto a Dulcinea habría que ponerla en correspondencia con el Espíritu Santo, que Sabelio interpretaba como entidad femenina, como la Madre Iglesia. En efecto, ¿cómo no reconocer que Dulcinea, como figura ideal, procede a la vez del Padre (Don Quijote) y de su Hijo (Sancho)?

Don Quijote concibe, desde luego, a la figura de Dulcinea, porque aunque su nombre real fue el de Aldonza Lorenzo, una moza labradora, hija de Lorenzo Corchuelo y de Aldonza Nogales, y de muy buen parecer (I, 25), y de quien él un tiempo anduvo enamorado, sin embargo nació, en cuanto Dulcinea, «por decreto» de Don Quijote, cuando a este le pareció bien darle el título de «señora de sus pensamientos». Pero fue Sancho quien también contribuyó al nacimiento y fortificación de la figura de Dulcinea, un moza de chapa, hecha y derecha, nada melindrosa, y teniendo mucho de cortesana: «¡Qué rejo que tiene, y qué voz!», dice Sancho a Don Quijote. «Ahora digo, señor Caballero de la Triste Figura, que no solamente puede y debe vuestra merced hacer locuras por ella, sino que con justo título puede desesperarse y ahorcarse, que nadie habrá que lo sepa que no diga que hizo demasiado de bien, puesto que le lleve el diablo.»

Y esta figura así concebida hubiera permanecido como una sombra de recuerdo meramente imaginario, si no hubiera sido por la industria que Sancho tuvo para encontrar a la señora Dulcinea, es decir, para establecer el vínculo entre la figura del recuerdo y algún correlato real, el que necesita re-anudarse, aunque no sea con la gallarda Aldonza, sino con una labradora carirredonda y chata (II, 10). De este modo resulta ser Sancho (y no ya la mente enferma y delirante de Don Quijote) quien, arrodillado, finge saludar a Dulcinea en la figura de la labradora chata y carirredonda, que Don Quijote, puesto de hinojos junto a Sancho, miraba también con «ojos desencajados y vista turbada», es decir, miraba a la labradora, a la que Sancho llamaba reina y señora. Y entonces la labradora, que había hecho la figura de Dulcinea, pica a su borrica con un aguijón, que en un palo traía; la pollina dio en correr prado adelante, de forma que Dulcinea dio en el suelo; «lo cual visto por Don Quijote, acudió a levantarla, y Sancho a componer y cinchar el albarda, (…) y queriendo Don Quijote levantar a su encantada señora en los brazos sobre la jumenta, (…) le quitó de aquel trabajo, porque, haciéndose algún tanto atrás, tomó una corridica y, puestas ambas manos sobre las ancas de la pollina, dio con su cuerpo, más ligero que un halcón». Y dijo Sancho (a Don Quijote): «…es la señora nuestra ama más ligera que un alcotán y que puede enseñar a subir a la jineta al más diestro cordobés o mexicano!, (…) Y no le van en zaga sus doncellas, que todas corren como el viento.»

¿No es evidente que Cervantes, que ha querido demorarse en la descripción de la visión poética de la labradora que Sancho ofrece a Don Quijote, poniendo en primer lugar la agilidad de esta labradora que su señor estaba viendo, como para ocultar tras ella su cara carirredonda y chata que también Don Quijote había visto? En cualquier caso, la transfiguración de la figura de la labradora en Dulcinea no puede atribuirse a un proceso endógeno psicológico propio de un demente en pleno delirio alucinatorio. Don Quijote ve, no a Dulcinea, sino, reforzado por Sancho, a una labradora ágil (también chata y carirredonda). No padece, por tanto, en absoluto, alucinación alguna: ni siquiera esta labradora podría evocarle la Aldonza de su juventud. Y «te hago saber, Sancho, que cuando llegué a subir a Dulcinea sobre su hacanea, según tú dices, que a mí me pareció borrica, me dio un olor de ajos crudos, que me encalabrinó y atosigó el alma». Cervantes parece tener aquí buen cuidado en subrayar que si Don Quijote relaciona a esta labradora con Dulcinea es por culpa de Sancho. Dulcinea se nos muestra aquí como asunto de fe, no de alucinación; de fe en la «autoridad revelante», que en este caso es Sancho, en cuya palabra Don Quijote confía y cree, cuando al salir de la selva las tres aldeanas, anunciadas como Dulcinea y sus doncellas, el caballero de la Triste Figura dijo:

—Yo no veo, Sancho –dijo Don Quijote–, sino a tres labradoras sobre tres borricos.
Y Sancho replicó:
—¡Agora me libre Dios del diablo! –respondió Sancho–. ¿Y es posible que tres hacaneas, o como se llaman, blancas como el ampo de la nieve, le parezcan a vuesa merced borricos? ¡Vive el Señor que me pele estas barbas si tal fuese verdad!
—Pues yo te digo, Sancho amigo –dijo don Quijote–, que es tan verdad que son borricos, o borricas, como yo soy don Quijote y tú Sancho Panza; a lo menos, a mí tales me parecen.

Por lo demás, la resistencia a ver el milagro de la transfiguración de la labradora en Dulcinea, milagro en el que Don Quijote ha de creer por la fe que le merece la autoridad de Sancho (en otras ocasiones tan crítico de las alucinaciones de su señor, ante los molinos de viento, ante los rebaños de ovejas…) no deja de recibir una «explicación teológica»: «Si yo no veo a Dulcinea en la figura de esta labradora, no es porque no lo sea, sino porque el maligno encantador me persigue, y ha puesto nubes y cataratas en mis ojos, y para sólo ellos, y no para otros, ha mudado y transformado tu sin igual hermosura y rostro en el de una labradora pobre.» Si los psiquiatras se empecinan en ver aquí delirio, habrían de agregar que no se trata de un delirio alucinatorio (la percepción de un labradora como Dulcinea) sino de un delirio de «racionalización teológica», orientado a explicar por qué esta labradora que veo no es la Dulcinea que Sancho dice ver; un delirio de racionalización teológica que los psiquiatras deberían también reconocer en la operación de Santo Tomás cuando pretende explicar por qué el trozo de pan, y el trago de vino que el consagrante está manipulando en el altar, son en realidad la transmutación milagrosa del cuerpo de Cristo invisible e intangible. ¿Y qué psiquiatra se atrevería a diagnosticar de loco a Santo Tomás de Aquino?

La locura de Don Quijote, como se demuestra por su comportamiento ante Aldonza Lorenzo, y ante la labradora anónima; pero también sobre todo, por su comportamiento ante los duques, que son los responsables de todos los «delirios» (en realidad engaños) que Don Quijote y Sancho experimentan en su compañía –incluyendo aquí a las escenas de Clavileño o a las de la ínsula Barataria– no son solo un proceso psicológico que hubiera afectado Alonso Quijano; es también, y muy principalmente, un proceso social, inducido por otras personas que rodean a Don Quijote, y que actúan como «genios malignos» engañadores cartesianos, aún teniendo al parecer voluntad de ayudarle, o simplemente de entretenerle. Genios malignos que actúan sobre Don Quijote, pero como contrafiguras de aquellos que actúan a través de Mefistófeles cuando va a presentarse ante Fausto: «Yo soy el espíritu que buscando siempre el mal hace siempre el bien.» Y en todo caso es gratuito atribuir la locura y el delirio a Don Quijote, reservando para Sancho la prudencia y el sentido común. Si Don Quijote se dice loco, porque emprende aventuras descabelladas, tan loco está Sancho que lo acompaña, y no en la primera ni en la segunda salida, sino también en la tercera. «Mirad, Teresa, –respondió Sancho–, yo estoy alegre porque tengo determinado de volver a servir a mi amo don Quijote, el cual quiere la vez tercera salir a buscar las aventuras; y yo vuelvo a salir con él, porque lo quiere así mi necesidad.» (II, 5.)

El escenario del Quijote contiene tres tipos de referencias: unas «circulares», otras «radiales» y unas terceras «angulares»

Desde el presupuesto general de que la persona implica siempre pluralidad de personas, hemos tratado de delimitar la estructura de esta pluralidad de personas en la que se mueven los personajes del Quijote.

Y descartando, como metafísicas, las estructuras monistas (que atribuyen a la persona la situación originaria propia de una persona absoluta, solitaria, «sublime soledad», propia del Dios neoplatónico: «Sólo con el Solo»), así como también las estructuras binarias (dualistas, dioscúricas o maniqueas), hemos encontrado la conveniencia de operar, en el momento de interpretar a Don Quijote, con estructuras trinitarias entretejidas, de las cuales, en cualquier caso, podemos obtener estructuras más complejas, como puedan serlo, según hemos dicho, las eneadas o las docenas, también presentes en la novela, bajo la forma del recuerdo de los doce signos del Zodiaco, de los doce apóstoles o de los doce caballeros de la tabla redonda.

La disciplina hermenéutica que impone este postulado estructural es bien clara: evitar sistemáticamente el tratamiento de Don Quijote (o de cualquier otro personaje), incluso en su soliloquios, como si se tratase de un personaje ab-soluto, o incluso como si se tratase de un personaje ligado a su complementario, aunque fuera al modo maniqueo (el que inspiró los famosos versos de Antonio Machado –su caletre no daba para más– que «la izquierda española» tomó como divisa durante décadas: «Españolito que vienes al mundo, salveos Dios: una de las dos Españas ha de helarte el corazón»); estimular sistemáticamente la investigación de las conexiones de los personajes del Quijote con otros personajes de los que aparecen en el escenario de la novela, es decir, sin necesidad de salirnos fuera de su inmanencia, buscando referencias extraliterarias o extraescénicas (que, sin embargo, habrá que encontrar en el momento oportuno).

El Quijote, se ha dicho muchas veces, es una novela escrita desde una óptica teatral (Díaz Plaja observó que el Quijote es la única novela cuyo personaje central va siempre disfrazado). Y aquí radicaría su virtualidad para hacer de ella representaciones pictóricas o escultóricas, y después cinematográficas o televisivas. Cervantes nos ofrece ante todo a sus personajes en escenarios bien definidos. En los escenarios se mueven, en principio, varias personas (sólo excepcionalmente un único actor, en monólogos, o en diálogos). También el triángulo es la estructura elemental del teatro.

Ahora bien, un escenario teatral, como pueda serlo la gran novela de Cervantes, no puede circunscribirse a los límites de su estricto recinto. Un escenario teatral en el que los actores individuales, al ponerse la máscara (per-sonare, pros-opon) comienzan a actuar como personas, es siempre una parte de un círculo de personas humanas, una parte del espacio antropológico.

En consecuencia, al escenario, además de las dimensiones «circulares» (las relaciones de las personas humanas con otras personas humanas) en las que se mueven las personas humanas, que en él desarrollan el drama, la comedia o la tragedia, le corresponde también una dimensión cósmica, en la que quedan englobadas, desde luego, las referencias geográficas e históricas externas a la inmanencia del escenario, pero involucradas internamente en él (llamamos «radiales» a esta red de relaciones e interacciones que las personas humanas mantienen con las cosas impersonales que las rodean); y al margen de estas referencias sería imposible, como trataremos de demostrar en lo sucesivo, entender la filosofía de Don Quijote, que permanece oculta, o sepultada, en las imágenes literarias o cinematográficas. Por último, el escenario, además de referencias y de figuras contenidas en el círculo de las personas humanas, o en la región radial del espacio, contiene también figuras y referencias que desbordan aquel círculo y esta región, porque aún siendo personales (de condición muy semejante a la de las personas humanas, por tener o pretender tener apetitos, conocimientos y sentimientos), no son de naturaleza humana (llamamos a estas referencias «angulares», y entre ellas pondremos a ciertos animales numinosos, a demonios, ángeles, diablos…).

En el Quijote aparecen varias menciones «angulares» a diablos, a aves de mal agüero (como la infinidad de grandísimos cuervos y grajos que salieron de la maleza que cubría a la boca de la cueva de Montesinos) y algún mono que «habla con el estilo del diablo» (II, 25). También se hace referencia a gigantes, como el gigante Morgante (que era afable y bien criado), que en Amadís es uno de los tres con los que se enfrenta Roldán, o bien el gigante Caraculiambro, señor de la ínsula de Malindrania, a quien Don Quijote espera vencer en singular batalla a fin de enviarle presentado ante su dulce señora.

Y, por supuesto, entre estas personas no humanas, hemos de contar también a las personas de la Trinidad de Gaeta antes citada, o a las de la Peña de Francia, Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo, a las que Sancho encomienda a Don Quijote en el momento de ponerse a descender a la cueva de Montesinos. En cualquier caso, conviene siempre recordar que Cervantes insiste una y otra vez en que él no quiere entrometerse en los asuntos reservados a la fe de la Iglesia católica.

Traduciendo estas reservas a nuestro lenguaje: Cervantes afirma rotundamente que él desea mantenerse siempre en torno al escenario humano (circular) y cósmico (radial), y también religioso (angular), al que parece atribuir un ritmo propio, aunque finito e inmanente (que contrasta con el ritmo indefinido y trascendente que conviene a los asuntos de la fe católica).

El escenario del Quijote no se refiere al «espacio antropológico» en general, sino al Imperio español

Ahora bien, ¿cómo determinar las referencias personajes humanos, de los contenidos radiales, o de las entidades angulares que figuran en la «inmanencia» de este escenario?

Podría decirse que tales referencias no están definidas en el Quijote, lo que es un modo de afirmar que no existen, al menos como referenciales determinados. Según esto, las figuras de Don Quijote, Sancho o Dulcinea, por ejemplo, habría que «referirlas» a la Humanidad, en general (a figuras de la Humanidad que podríamos encontrar en cualquier lugar y tiempo). Y en ello cifrarían algunos la «universalidad» atribuida comúnmente a la obra de Cervantes. Asimismo, como referenciales «radiales» podrían tomarse cualquiera de los contenidos del mundo cósmico, geográfico o histórico. Y, por supuesto, como referencias angulares, valdrían todas aquellas que, en todo lugar y tiempo, reunieran las características adecuadas. Dicho de otro modo: las referencias de Don Quijote serían universales o, lo que es lo mismo, los personajes y el escenario de Don Quijote, tendría referencias, dicho de forma positiva, pancrónicasy pantópicas, lo que equivaldría a decir, en forma negativa, que es ucrónico y utópico, y que ahí reside la raíz de su universalidad.

Sin embargo, y sin perjuicio de reconocer la posibilidad de estas interpretaciones «universalistas» (posibilidad a la que se orientan las interpretaciones éticas o psicológicas de los personajes del Quijote, de su idealismo o de su realismo, de su fortaleza o de su avaricia, y otras tantas características de la «condición humana») preferimos atenernos a las interpretaciones, y no son escasas, históricas y geográficas muy precisas de Don Quijote, como condición suficiente, por no decir necesaria, para penetrar en su significado.

En una palabra, nos parece (como también les parece a otros muchos intérpretes) que el escenario del Quijote, en cuanto símbolo, nos remite a referencias históricas y geográficas muy precisas. Referencias que podrán ser puestas entre paréntesis, sin duda, si se pretenden mantener las interpretaciones humanistas, éticas o psicológicas. Pero cuando reinterpretamos las referencias históricas y geográficas, entonces se nos imponen, en primer lugar, las interpretaciones políticas del Quijote, que han de girar, de un modo a otro, en torno al significado del Imperio español, del «fecho del Imperio», si utilizamos la fórmula de la que se sirvió cuatro siglos antes Alfonso X el Sabio.

Según estas interpretaciones políticas, Cervantes ofrece en su escenario una interpretación del Imperio español, como primer «Imperio generador» que alcanza su culmen a lo largo de los siglos XV y XVI (el Imperio inglés o el Imperio holandés se habrían levantado a partir del Imperio español, e inicialmente como sus depredadores). El Imperio español habría alcanzado sus cimas más altas a partir de 1521, con la conquista de México, y después, del Perú, o de Flandes; y sobre todo a partir de 1571, en Lepanto. En Lepanto fue detenido el Imperio otomano, que amenazaba seriamente a Europa. Cervantes intervino en la batalla de Lepanto a las órdenes de Don Juan de Austria, y allí perdió su brazo izquierdo, recuerdo permanente, durante toda su vida, de la realidad de la ofensiva musulmana; además fue hecho prisionero por los moros, permaneciendo preso cinco años en Argel, hasta que fue liberado mediante rescate económico.

(Una «ministra de cupo» del gobierno de Rodríguez Zapatero, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, pero cuya connatural ignorancia está empapada del irenismo pánfilo de su grupo, declara en El País de 19 de mayo de 2004 que: «También creo que es importante nuestra proyección en el Mediterráneo. Si muchos nos hemos negado a la barbaridad de esta guerra [la del Iraq], es porque todavía sigue viva una vieja relación con el mundo árabe. Cervantes, sin ir más lejos, estuvo en Argel, en Orán… Tenemos que estar atentos a nuestra historia para saber quiénes somos.»)

Pero en 1588, fecha del gran desastre de la Invencible (aunque no de su destrucción, ni menos aún de la potencia, aún temible, que España representaba para Inglaterra, Holanda y Francia), tiene lugar una inflexión en el curso de su historia. No puede decirse que haya entrado en situación decrépita, todavía se mantiene como gran Potencia dos siglos más, los siglos XVII y XVIII. Pero su curso ascendente ha sido frenado, principalmente por los otros Imperios que han surgido a su sombra. Este es el momento en el cual Cervantes habría comenzado su meditación sobre el Imperio católico, una meditación que le conducirá a escribir su gran obra, Don Quijote de la Mancha.

La meditación acerca del Imperio español la entendemos como una tarea cuya importancia filosófica tiene un alcance mucho mayor, desde luego, que la meditación humanística sobre «la condición humana», aparentemente más profunda, pero que en realidad es una uniforme monotonía abstracta y vacía. En efecto, la meditación sobre «el Hombre» (o sobre la «condición humana») se presenta como una meditación metafísica a todo aquel que sepa que «el Hombre» (el Género humano, la Humanidad, la Condición humana) no existe, al margen de los Imperios universales; y que sólo desde los Imperios universales (que son una parte de la humanidad, pero no el todo) es posible tomar contacto con esa «condición humana».

Porque el hombre, en general, es una mera formalidad cuya materia sólo puede adquirirla a partir de sus determinaciones, no ya históricas, cuanto histórico-universales, es decir, a partir de las determinaciones o «modos de hombre» que han ido conformándose en la sucesión de los grandes Imperios, desde el Imperio persa hasta el Imperio de Alejandro, desde el Imperio romano de Augusto hasta el Imperio romano de Constantino y de sus sucesores, entre ellos, principalmente, el Imperio Hispánico, el Imperio Inglés y el Imperio Soviético. Sólo desde la plataforma de estos Imperios universales cabe aproximarse al fondo de eso que llamamos «condición humana», en tanto que ella no es algo invariante (salvo en sus estructuras genéricas, comunes con los primates), sino cambiante y dada en el curso de la Historia. La plataforma de los Imperios universales es, desde nuestras coordenadas, el más preciso criterio positivo disponible para diferenciar los análisis antropológicos (etológicos, psicológicos) de la «condición humana» de los  análisis filosófico históricos de esta misma condición.

Dicho de otro modo, la interpretación de Don Quijote, como figura universal, en el sentido del Género humano (¿qué tienen que ver los llamados valores del Quijote con los valores de los hombres musulmanes, en cuanto tales?), es una meditación vacía que recae, de un modo u otro, en puro psicologismo.

Y cuando nos decidimos a cultivar, una vez más, el género de interpretaciones políticas histórico-filosóficas del Quijote, en el sentido expuesto, lo primero que tenemos que despejar es la cuestión de las referencias extraliterarias que nos ofrece el escenario de Don Quijote, por el cual transita constantemente la trinidad Don Quijote, Sancho y Dulcinea.

Las referencias de las personas de la trinidad fundamental quijotesca

Ante todo, ¿cómo determinar las referencias extraescénicas de las figuras que aparecen en el escenario del Quijote?

Tomaremos como criterio las palabras que pronuncia, desde la propia inmanencia literaria de la novela, uno de los personajes más significativos que rodearon al Caballero de la Triste Figura, a saber, el bachiller Sansón Carrasco, «socarrón famoso» que, abrazando a Don Quijote, y con voz levantada, le dijo (en el capítulo 7 de la segunda parte):

—¡Oh flor de la andante caballería! ¡Oh luz resplandeciente de las armas! ¡Oh honor y espejo de la nación española!

Don Quijote, según palabras del bachiller (a través de quien muy bien podría estar hablando Cervantes), tiene como referencia inequívoca a la «nación española». Lo que tiene para nosotros un significado político del mayor alcance, no sólo porque demuestra que la nación española está ya reconocida en el siglo XVI, mucho antes de que fuera reconocida la nación inglesa o la nación francesa –o, por supuesto, la nación catalana o la nación vasca– sino porque nos ofrece explícitamente la referencia extraliteraria que Cervantes atribuía a la figura de Don Quijote.

Cierto que la «nación española» que, según el bachiller Carrasco, se refleja en Don Quijote, no es una Nación política en el sentido en el que ésta puede ser constatada en la batalla de Valmy, que ya hemos citado. La nación española a la que se refiere el bachiller Carrasco no es la nación política que surgirá a partir de las ruinas del Antiguo Régimen; pero tampoco es una nación meramente étnica, que viviera en los márgenes de algún Imperio, o acaso integrada, junto con otras, en el Imperio español. La «nación española» del bachiller Carrasco es una nación histórica, cuya extensión se superpone con la extensión misma de la Península Ibérica (cuando el bachiller Carrasco pronuncia su imprecación, Portugal está integrado en esa nación española: el propio Cervantes intervino el 26 de julio de 1582 en el combate naval de la Isla de San Miguel de Azores, contra mercenarios franceses que apoyaban las pretensiones de Don Antonio por convertirse en Rey de Portugal). La unidad y consistencia de esta nación española había podido ser captada desde fuera del Imperio entonces hegemónico y visible, había podido ser captada desde Francia, desde Italia, desde Inglaterra, desde América.

¿Y cual es la referencia de Sancho? También nos es dada, acaso, desde el mismo «escenario»: Sancho es un labrador de la Mancha, cabeza de una familia compuesta por su mujer y dos hijos. Sancho representa así a cualquier labrador de los que viven en la Península Ibérica, y cuya vida está destinada, junto con su mujer, a sacar adelante a su familia; porque Sancho, dotado de gran inteligencia (y no sólo labradora, sino también verbal y aún literaria), se entiende a la perfección con los otros labradores y gentes de su rango. Y, como ellos (o como muchos de ellos), Sancho, que está bien alimentado (no es un paria de la India, condenado a mantener miserablemente su vida en su propio lugar, aunque sea en presencia «del Todo»), está dispuesto a salir de su lugar, sirviendo a un caballero que puede llevarle a descubrir horizontes más amplios, sin perjuicio de los riesgos que su aventura le ha de deparar.

¿Y Dulcinea? Según decía, ya va para el siglo, Ludwig Pfandl (Cultura y costumbres del pueblo español de los siglos XVI y XVII, Barcelona 1929), «Dulcinea no es otra cosa que la encarnación de la monarquía, de la nacionalidad, de la fe. Por ella se esfuerza el manco, luchando contra los molinos de viento.»

Pero, si aceptásemos la interpretación de Pfandl, la referencia de Dulcinea, ¿no se confundiría con la referencia que el bachiller Carrasco señala para Don Quijote, es decir, la «nación española»?

De algún modo sí, de un modo general, como también Sancho (tal como lo hemos presentado) hay que referirlo a esa misma nación española que parece ya consolidada o existente como tal nación histórica, sin perjuicio de la profunda crisis que está padeciendo tras el desastre de la Invencible. Pero la circunstancia de que la referencia de Don Quijote, de Sancho y de Dulcinea sea, en términos generales, la misma, es decir, España, no significa que las perspectivas desde las cuales cada uno de estos personajes de la trinidad se refiere a España no sean distintas.

Despliegue histórico de la trinidad quijotesca: pasado, presente y futuro

Acaso Don Quijote va referido a España desde la perspectiva del pretérito, Sancho va referido a España desde la perspectiva del presente, y Dulcinea desde la perspectiva del futuro (y, por ello, Dulcinea es asunto de fe, no de evidencia sensible).

Son tres perspectivas involucradas necesariamente entre sí, como involucradas están las personas de la trinidad quijotesca. Dicho de otro modo, si cada persona de esta trinidad escénica, Don Quijote, Sancho, Dulcinea, va referida a una España que ha entrado en una crisis profunda, es porque cada persona se refiere a ella a través o por mediación de las otras. Don Quijote, desde un pretérito que, aún en el tiempo escénico, está cercano (el tiempo en el cual los caballeros españoles usaban lanzas y espadas, en lugar de utilizar arcabuces y cañones); Sancho, desde el presente de un pueblo que vive gracias a los frutos que la tierra da tras el duro trabajo, y que ha se seguir produciendo en cada momento. Y Dulcinea representa el futuro, como símbolo de la madre-España, pero tomando esta referencia en sentido literal, que tiene poco que ver (la referencia) con el sentido de una «figura ideal» del «eterno femenino», si es que representa a la madre que puede parir a los hijos que, como labradores o soldados, podrán hacer posible el futuro de España.

Ahora bien, presente, pasado y futuro no son, en un tiempo histórico como el que corresponde a España, meros puntos de la línea que representa el tiempo astronómico. El tiempo histórico, el tiempo de España como Imperio emergente generador, que comienza a acusar las profundas heridas que le están infligiendo sus enemigos, los imperios depredadores europeos, es un conjunto fluyente de millones de personas en agitación e interacción constante, y que tienen la costumbre de «tener que comer todos los días». Este conjunto fluyente, este oceánico río de personas que hacen la historia y son arrastrados por ella, puede clasificarse en tres clases o círculos de personas teóricamente bien definidos:

En primer lugar, el círculo constituido por las personas que se influyen mutuamente, apoyándose o destruyéndose, durante los años de su vida; un círculo cuyo diámetro puede estimarse en cien años, los que corresponden a lo que llamamos el presente histórico (que no es, por supuesto, el presente instantáneo, adimensional, que corresponde al punto fluyente de la línea del tiempo).

En segundo lugar, el círculo (de diámetro finito, pero indeterminado) constituido por las personas que influyen, para bien o para mal, sobre las personas del presente, que tomamos como referencia, moldeándolas casi por completo; pero sin que quienes viven en el presente puedan influir en modo alguno, profunda o superficialmente, sobre aquellas, porque ya han muerto. Este es el círculo constitutivo de un pretérito histórico, el círculo de las personas muertas, aquellas que «cada vez mandan más sobre las vivas».

Y en tercer lugar el círculo (de diámetro indefinido) constituido por las personas en las cuales quienes viven en el presente influyen profundamente, hasta el punto de moldearlas casi por entero, marcando además sus caminos, pero sin que ellas puedan a su vez influir sobre aquellos que viven en el presente, porque todavía no existen. Es el círculo del futuro histórico.

Venimos suponiendo –si se prefiere, partimos de la suposición– que España es el lugar en el que hay que poner las referencias de los personajes simbólicos (alegóricos) que Cervantes nos ofrece en el escenario de su obra capital. Pero España es un proceso histórico. Afirmar que España es el lugar en el que hay que poner las referencias de los personajes escénicos –ante todo, Don Quijote, Sancho y Dulcinea– no es decir todavía mucho.

Hay que comenzar determinando los parámetros del presente, en el cual nuestro escenario está situado, como plataforma desde la cual podemos mirar también hacia su pretérito y hacia su futuro. Estos parámetros hay que obtenerlos, sin duda, siguiendo el método de análisis del propio escenario inmanente en el que actúan los personajes, es decir, de su inmanencia literaria. Y son varias, y concordantes, las que nos llevan a fijar las fechas en las que actúan los personajes en la época «del gran Filipo III». Más precisamente, la carta que Sancho, como gobernador de la Insula Barataria, escribe a su mujer Teresa Panza, está fechada el 20 de julio de 1614. Ha de concluirse, por tanto, que Don Quijote, cuando marchaba en busca de Dulcinea, también lo hacía en aquellos días.

Pero esto no significa que Cervantes haya querido ofrecer un escenario referido a la España de su presente, un presente que estará comprendido (si mantenemos nuestras hipótesis) en un círculo de cien años de diámetro que podrían ir desde 1616, año de su muerte a 1516, año en el que murió Fernando el Católico. El punto central de este diámetro se encuentra muy próximo a 1571, la fecha de la batalla de Lepanto, en la que Cervantes, con veinticuatro años de edad, estuvo gloriosamente presente.

Cervantes no se proponía hacer una crónica del presente, en el que suponemos ha situado su escenario. Desde su presente, por supuesto, Cervantes emplaza un escenario cuya referencia es España, pero no propiamente la España de la Edad Media (como pensó Hegel, cuando interpretaba a Don Quijote como símbolo de la transición de la época feudal a la época moderna). Don Quijote recorre una península ya unificada, sin fronteras interiores entre los reinos cristianos y, más aún, sin fronteras interiores con los reinos moros: la España que Don Quijote recorre es posterior a la toma de Granada en 1492, por los Reyes Católicos. Este es el «escenario literario» (no un escenario histórico) del Quijote.

Sin embargo Don Quijote no camina todavía a través de una España moderna (la del propio Cervantes, que ya sabe lo que es el olor y el ruido de la pólvora, los galeones que van y vienen a América, de la que no hay prácticamente referencia en su obra). Cervantes tiene buen cuidado de decirnos, en el primer capítulo de su obra, que lo primero que hizo Don Quijote, antes de salir de su casa, «fue limpiar unas armas que habían sido de sus bisabuelos, que, tomadas de orín y llenas de moho, luengos siglos había que estaban puestas y olvidadas en un rincón». Alonso Quijano (que vive en el presente) se disfraza por tanto de Don Quijote, un caballero del pretérito, pero de un pretérito que sigue influyendo, como es propio de todo pretérito histórico, de modo determinante en el presente, porque «los muertos cada vez mandan más que los vivos».

Sin embargo, como hemos dicho, Don Quijote y los suyos no se mueven en una época medieval, sino moderna. Ya no hay en España reyes moros. Incluso algunos de los moriscos que fueron expulsados vuelven a España, y se encuentran con Sancho:

—¿Cómo y es posible, Sancho Panza hermano, que no conoces a tu vecino Ricote el morisco, tendero de tu lugar? (II, 54.)

Parece evidente que Cervantes ha querido referirse, desde su escenario de 1614 (fecha de la carta de Sancho a su mujer) a la España de un siglo anterior, de 1514; una España que, aunque no es medieval, sigue siendo inmediatamente anterior a la llegada de Carlos I a España, y sobre todo a la entrada de Hernán Cortes en Nueva España, en México. Ocurre como si Cervantes hubiera deliberadamente querido regresar a una España ibérica anterior, si no al momento del descubrimiento de América, sí al momento de la «entrada» masiva de los españoles en el Nuevo Mundo (México, Perú, &c.) y a las repercusiones que de tal entrada hubieron de seguirse en la España de partida.

La España que Cervantes ve desde su escenario es una España que no aparece involucrada con el Nuevo Mundo, pero tampoco con el viejo continente (con Flandes, con Italia, con Constantinopla, ni con África). No es, por tanto, una España contemplada a escala de sociedad política coetánea, aunque el escenario esté emplazado en esa sociedad política que es su plataforma. Como si Cervantes hubiera querido iluminar las referencias que ve desde su escenario, que no es anacrónico políticamente hablando, sino sencillamente abstracto, como si estuviera siendo iluminado por una luz ultravioleta, capaz de desvelar una sociedad civil que seguía existiendo y moviéndose a su propio ritmo en el trasfondo de la sociedad política. Una sociedad civil con curas y barberos, duques y titiriteros, caballeros andantes arcaicos pero aún reconocibles, pero que aparecen, mediante los artificios de la iluminación, con un cierto aire intemporal.

El aire intemporal de una sociedad que, como la española, ya ha madurado, la primera, como nación histórica, pero que, aún abstraída de sus responsabilidades políticas perentorias (que obligan a movilizar ejércitos dotados de armas de fuego, hoy diríamos: de misiles con cabezas nucleares) necesita el cuidado de los caballeros armados con lanzas y espadas, porque la paz interior «intemporal» en la que se vive, la paz que los caballeros creen poder encontrar si se disfrazan de pastores, no tiene mucho que ver con la paz celestial, por cuanto siguen actuando los bandidos, los asesinos, los ladrones, los mentirosos, los engañadores, los desalmados, los canallas.

¿Cómo no tomar en serio, cuando queremos alcanzar alguna interpretación política del Quijote, esta «España intemporal» que artificiosamente habría iluminado Cervantes con esa luz ultravioleta de la que hablamos? ¿No parece imprescindible ver en esa «nación española», reconocida por Cervantes, y dispuesta para comenzar a flotar en esa atmósfera intemporal «ultravioleta» el artificio alegórico más significativo de la gran obra cervantina, cuando tratamos de interpretarla desde categorías políticas?

Así puestas las cosas, nos parece que cualquier intento de interpretación directa del escenario quijotesco mediante la referencia inmediata a las figuras históricas de su presente (como pudieran serlo Carlos I, Hernán Cortés, el Gran Capitán o Diego García de Paredes) habría que considerarla como primaria o ingenua («¡Dos higas para el Gran Capitán y para ese Diego García que dice!», replicó el ventero al cura).

El escenario del Quijote va referido a España, y a la España histórica, a su Imperio político; pero no de modo inmediato, sino por la mediación de una España intemporal, pero no irreal, sino simplemente vista a una luz ultravioleta, en la que una sociedad civil, dada en un tiempo histórico que habita la península ibérica, vive según su propio ritmo. Desde esta «mediación ultravioleta» tendremos que intentar interpretar los símbolos alegóricos de Don Quijote, que sólo a los lectores más bastos o primarios (aunque se hayan hecho eruditos) pueden parecer transparentes y sencillos.

Dos tipos de interpretaciones filosófico políticas del Quijote:
catastrofistas y revulsivas

Las dificultades aparecen ahora en el momento de la interpretación de las figuras del Quijote, aún en el supuesto de que se admita su condición de símbolos alegóricos con referencias ambiguas, tal como las hemos sugerido (referencias que juegan en el doble plano de la sociedad política y de la sociedad civil).

Hay muchas interpretaciones, formuladas a escalas muy diversas. Y lo primero que nos importa, desde la perspectiva histórico filosófica y política que mantenemos, es clasificar estas diversas interpretaciones en dos grandes grupos, el de las interpretaciones catastrofistas(o derrotistas,como pudiéramos llamarlas) y el de las interpretaciones no catastrofistas (o simplemente críticas, o revulsivas, en la medida en que interpretan al Quijote no tanto como la expresión de un derrotismo político irreversible, que sólo podría refugiarse en un pacifismo evangélico –propio de la izquierda extravagante– cuanto como ofrecimiento de un revulsivo que termina poniendo en las armas la condición necesaria –no suficiente– para remontar la decadencia o la derrota).

Interpretaciones catastrofistas del Quijote

Examinemos, aunque sea muy brevemente, algunas interpretaciones del significado de Don Quijote pertenecientes al grupo que hemos rotulado como «catastrofista», y en cuya reserva se encuentra el «panfilismo pacifista».

Según estas interpretaciones, Cervantes habría ofrecido en su obra fundamental la visión más despiadada y derrotista que de la España imperial podría haberse ofrecido jamás. Cervantes (dirán los agudos intérpretes psicologistas), resentido y decepcionado (escéptico, al borde del nihilismo) por los innumerables fracasos que su vida le deparó (mutilación, cautiverio, cárcel, fracasos, desaires, especialmente la denegación de su petición para trasladarse a América, a la que creía tener derecho como héroe de Lepanto), habría eliminado de su genial novela cualquier referencia a las Indias, así como también a Europa. Y las locuras de los caballeros reales españoles (Carlos I, Hernán Cortés, don Juan de Austria), que habrían acabado arruinando a su patria, estarían siendo aludidas alegóricamente por los héroes de los libros de caballerías que inspiraron a los conquistadores a ir a las Indias en busca de El Dorado, de California, o de Patagonia: «a las gentes de Hernán Cortés –dice Américo Castro– su entrada triunfal en México les pareció un episodio del Amadís o cosas de encantamiento», o ir a Inglaterra o a Flandes con una escuadra tan arcaica e «invencible» como pudiera serlo la propia lanza de Don Quijote, que se hizo añicos en el primer asalto.

Y si el bachiller Sansón Carrasco dijo a Don Quijote que era «el honor y espejo de la nación española», es fácil entender lo que quería decir. Pues, ¿qué es lo que reflejaba este espejo? Un caballero de esperpento, que acomete empresas delirantes y ridículas de las cuales sale continuamente derrotado. ¿No es este el reflejo de la nación española?

Y según esto, a Cervantes habría que ponerlo en la serie de aquellos hombres que, no ya desde el exterior, sino desde el interior de la nación española, más han colaborado (aunque de un modo más sutil y más cobarde) al entramado de la Leyenda Negra. En los lugares de salida de esta serie legendaria figuran Bartolomé de las Casa y Antonio Pérez; en los lugares terminales figura el último Premio Cervantes, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, que escribió, en 1992, un libro titulado Esas Yndias equivocadas y malditas (que mereció, en época de gobierno socialista, el Premio Nacional de Literatura). Pero como figura central de la serie habría que poner, si fueran coherentes los que mantienen esta interpretación catastrofista, al propio Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). Cervantes, con su Don Quijote, habría ofrecido el marco genial y oculto de la Leyenda Negra contra España, y habría contribuido a difundirla por Europa. Montesquieu ya lo habría advertido: «El más importante libro que tienen los españoles no es otra cosa sino una crítica a los demás libros españoles.»

En resolución, ningún español que mantenga un átomo de orgullo nacional podría sentirse reflejado en el espejo de Don Quijote. Sólo un pueblo como el español «inflado de orgullo» y «cargado de derechos» –decía un catalán, ya en 1898, Prat de la Riba– podría identificarse con algunas cualidades abstractas del Caballero de la Triste Figura. Folch y Torres, otro separatista que se regodeaba con los fracasos de Don Quijote (sin duda en la medida en que ellos representaban los fracasos de España) llegará a decir, también en ese año, en el que los «quijotes castellanos cometieron la locura de declarar la guerra a Estados Unidos» (en el curso de los conflictos con Cuba y Filipinas): «Quédense los castellanos con Don Quijote, y buen provecho les haga.»

Más aún: esta interpretación derrotista a partir de Don Quijote, por tanto, desde dentro del Imperio español, como obra de un delirio megalómano y cruel, no sólo habría dado el marco, sino que habría alimentado la Leyenda Negra promovida desde el exterior de las Potencias enemigas (Inglaterra, Francia, Holanda), Imperios depredadores y piratas carroñeros que se alimentaban, en su infancia y durante su juventud, de los despojos que iban arrancando a España. Y no falta quien sugiere (últimamente Javier Neira) que el mismo éxito extraordinario que el Quijote alcanzó muy pronto en Europa pudo ser debido, en gran medida, precisamente a su capacidad de servir de alimento para el odio y el desprecio que sus enemigos querían dirigir contra España.

¿Habría que avanzar, a partir de esta interpretación derrotista de Don Quijote, en la senda que ya inició el propio Ramiro de Maeztu, cuando aconsejaba atemperar el culto a Don Quijote, no sólo en la escuela, sino también en el ideario nacional español?

Si Don Quijote es un antihéroe español, loco y ridículo, mera parodia y contrafigura del verdadero hombre y caballero moderno, ¿por qué empeñarse en mantenerlo como emblema nacional, celebrando con pompa inusitada sus aniversarios y centenarios? Tan solo los enemigos de España –y sobre todo, los enemigos internos, los separatistas catalanes, vascos o gallegos– podrán regocijarse con las aventuras de Don Quijote de la Mancha.

Con todo, cabría intentar reivindicar un simbolismo de Don Quijote menos deprimente, aún reconociendo sus incesantes derrotas, si nos situásemos en las posiciones del pacifismo más extremado, ya fuera el pacifismo defendido por esa izquierda extravagante, tan próxima al pacifismo evangélico de los actuales Papas (cuyo «Reino –de ahí su extravagancia– no es de este Mundo») ya fuera el pacifismo defendido por la izquierda divagante, que proclama en la Tierra la Paz perpetua y la Alianza de las Civilizaciones. Para estos pacifistas radicales las aventuras de Don Quijote podrán servir como ilustración, por vía apagógica de hecho o de contraejemplo, de la inutilidad de la guerra, y de la estupidez de la violencia y del uso de las armas.

Los intérpretes más audaces de esta ralea, deseando salvar a Cervantes, acaso se atrevan a decir: la «lección ética» que Cervantes ha dado a España y al mundo en general con su Don Quijote nos enseña la inutilidad de las armas y de la violencia.

De este modo los pánfilos verán en Cervantes a un pacifista convencido, que intenta demostrar la importancia de la paz evangélica, de la tolerancia y del diálogo, por la vía apagógica de los contraejemplos, de las armas que resultan ser inútiles por esforzado que sea el ánimo de quien las empuña.

Sin embargo, quienes creen poder extraer semejantes conclusiones –«moralejas»– de los fracasos de Don Quijote con sus armas, cometen una imperdonable confusión entre las armas de Don Quijote y las armas en general. Una conclusión o moraleja sacada desde la petición de principio de que las armas de Don Quijote representan a las armas en general. Pero, ¿y si Don Quijote estuviera insistiendo, mediante su peculiar modo críptico de hablar, en la diferencia esencial entre las armas de fuego (con las cuales se obtuvo la victoria de Lepanto) y las armas blancas de los caballeros antiguos? En este supuesto, los fracasos de Don Quijote, con sus armas blancas, herrumbrosas, se convertirían inmediatamente en la apología de las armas de fuego con las que se abre la guerra moderna, a cuyas primeras batallas asistió Cervantes en varias ocasiones (Lepanto, Navarino, Túnez, La Goleta, San Miguel de las Azores).

Sin embargo, es preciso constatar que, en todo caso, las interpretaciones catastrofistas del Quijote, afectarían antes a Cervantes que a Don Quijote. Según la tesis de Unamuno, Cervantes, hombre resentido y escéptico, se habría comportado como un miserable con Don Quijote, intentando ponerle una y otra vez en ridículo. Pero no lo habría conseguido, y la mejor prueba sería la admiración universal que Don Quijote suscita, y no precisamente (salvo en los psiquiatras) como un loco paranoico. Porque, por más que Don Quijote cae y se descalabra, también se levanta y se recupera: representa de este modo la fortaleza, la firmeza y la generosidad del caballero, que vive, no en un mundo de fantasía, sino en el mundo real y miserable, pero sin rendirse ante las miserias.

Además, no es nada claro que Cervantes mantuviera ante el Imperio español la actitud nihilista del resentido que Unamuno le atribuye. Cervantes conservó siempre el orgullo de soldado combatiente en Lepanto, en donde la Liga impulsada por el Imperio español, detuvo las oleadas del Imperio otomano, «la mejor ocasión que vieron los siglos», dijo Cervantes. También nos consta, por el propio Quijote, que Cervantes aprobó la política española de expulsión de los moriscos, y que siempre se manifestó convencido súbdito de la Católica Monarquía Hispánica.

No dibujó Cervantes la figura de un héroe con los trazos groseros y primarios según los cuales fue dibujada a lo largo de los siglos la figura del rey Arturo, o la de Amadís de Gaula. El procedimiento de Cervantes fue más sutil y, sin duda por ello, sus resultados más ambiguos. Tanto como para dar pie a que los enemigos de España lo transformasen en motivo de escarnio para su historia y para sus hombres.

El Quijote como revulsivo

Examinemos ahora algunas interpretaciones críticas susceptibles de ser incluidas en el grupo de las interpretaciones revulsivas, pero no catastróficas, de Don Quijote.

En efecto, en el Quijote, podríamos ver, ante todo, la demoledora crítica dirigida contra todos aquellos españoles que, tras haber participado en las batallas más gloriosas, en aquellos hechos de armas a partir de los cuales se forjó el Imperio español, habían vuelto a sus lugares o a la corte, como hidalgos o caballeros satisfechos, dispuestos a vivir de sus rentas en un mundo intemporal, y de sus recuerdos de los tiempos gloriosos. Y olvidándose de que el Imperio, que protegía su bienestar –su felicidad–, es decir, su pacífica vida, más o menos apacible, estaba, después de la Invencible, siendo atacado por los cuatro costados, y comenzaba a presentar vías de agua alarmantes.

Esta masa de gentes satisfechas, tras el primer gran esfuerzo del Imperio, que está comenzando a desmoronarse, tiene el peligro de ser un lugar de cuyo seno podrá surgir el «quiero y no puedo» de algún caballero esforzado, a quien solo le queda esperar el ridículo, si intenta valerse de las armas herrumbrosas de sus bisabuelos, es decir, por ejemplo, de los barcos paralíticos de la Armada Invencible.

Las lanzas y espadas de los bisabuelos, o el baciyelmo que el propio Don Quijote se fabrica, podrán comenzar a ser vistos como alegorías a través de las cuales Cervantes, sin necesidad siquiera de ser muy consciente de ello, estaba intentando representar aquella España que él iluminaba con la luz ultravioleta de la que hemos hablado. Cervantes, según esto, con su Don Quijote, podría haber intentado, o al menos (si lo que había intentado hubiera sido dar suelta a su escepticismo casi lindante con el nihilismo) podría haber logrado ejercer el papel de agente de un revulsivo ante los gobiernos de los reyes sucesores de sus majestades católicas, de Carlos I y aún de Felipe II, de los tiempos de Lepanto.

Lo que Cervantes les estaría diciendo a sus compatriotas es que, con lanzas y espadas oxidadas, con barcos paralíticos, o con aventuras solitarias, menos aún, disfrazados de pastores bucólicos y pacíficos, los españoles estarían destinados al fracaso, porque su Imperio, que les protegía y en el que vivían, estaba seriamente amenazado por los Imperios vecinos. Cervantes estaría viendo también, sin embargo, aunque con escepticismo, que sería posible remontar la depresión, que afloraba sin duda en algunos de sus personajes, y entre ellos Alonso Quijano transformado en Don Quijote. Y por eso Cervantes parece querer subrayar en todo momento que sus personajes tienen efectivamente esa energía, aunque ella tuviera que expresarse en forma de locura.

Según esto, el mensaje de Don Quijote no sería un mensaje derrotista, sino un revulsivo destinado a remover de su ensueño a quienes, después de la batalla victoriosa, pensaban poder vivir satisfechos, paladeando la paz de la victoria, o simplemente disfrutando de su «estado de bienestar» (como los españoles dirán siglos más tarde).

Es decir, el nuevo orden que había logrado imponer a sus antiguos enemigos, olvidándose de que ese bienestar procedía del exterior de las fronteras, de esa América que el propio Cervantes elimina del Quijote. Estaría explicando el por qué en el Quijote no se dice nada de todo lo que rodea al recinto peninsular, con sus islas y territorios adyacentes, por qué no se dice nada de América, de Europa, de Asia o de África.

Por eso Don Quijote, al mismo tiempo que sus locuras, estaría ofreciendo algunos indicios de los caminos que sería preciso seguir. Ante todo recorrer y explorar todo el solar de la nación española: Cervantes se ha preocupado que Don Quijote de la Mancha salga de su lugar de los campos de Montiel, traspase Sierra Morena; incluso se ha preocupado de hacerle llegar hasta la playa de Barcelona (aquella misma, al parecer, en la que Cervantes vio cómo se hacía a la mar, sin que él, en una última oportunidad, pudiera ya alcanzarlo, el barco que llevaba a Italia a su protector, el Conde de Lemos).

Pero recorrer España peninsular no simplemente para solazarse en un «merecido descanso», o acaso para insultar en privado a sus gentes, sino para esforzarse, sin descanso («mis arreos son las armas, mi descanso el pelear»), interviniendo en sus vidas, en actitud de intolerancia ante lo intolerable (por ejemplo, el retablo de Maese Pedro). O induciendo a estas vidas a la fabricación de armas que no fueran baciyelmos, sino armas nuevas, armas de fuego (hoy diríamos, bombas de hidrógeno), necesarias para mantener la guerra que sin duda van a desatar las naciones que acosan a la nación española, si ésta no se les somete.

Porque Don Quijote no cree en la Armonía universal, ni en la Paz perpetua, ni en la Alianza de las civilizaciones. Don Quijote vive en un cosmos cuyo orden no es otra cosa sino la apariencia que cubre las convulsiones profundas que experimentan sus partes, que jamas ajustan las una a las otra: «Dios lo remedie [dice en el capítulo del barco encantado, II, 29], que todo este mundo es máquinas y trazas, contrarias unas de otras. Yo no puedo más.»

Por ello el Quijote ofrecerá no ya a los hombres (al «Hombre», en general), sino a los hombres españoles, un mensaje preciso: la apología de las armas, «que lo mismo es decir armas que guerra». Bien está que quienes se dirigen al Hombre en general, o bien al Género humano, o a la Humanidad, dirijan mensajes de esperanza en una paz perpetua; porque estos mensajes serán inofensivos si tenemos en cuenta que su destinatario (el Género humano, la Humanidad) no existe. Pero un mensaje de paz perpetua y de desarme dirigido a la «nación española» sería letal; sólo podría entenderse como un mensaje enviado a España por sus enemigos, esperando, una vez que España se hubiera desarmado, entrar en ella para repartírsela.

En cualquier caso no es necesario suponer que Cervantes se propuso deliberadamente, como finis operantis de su obra maestra, ofrecer una parodia que sirviera de revulsivo a aquellos validos de la monarquía, caballeros de Corte, duques, curas o barberos, a fin de hacerles ver, a través de las aventuras de un esperpéntico caballero, adonde podía conducir su complacencia, su bienestar, incluso sus aficiones literarias por la caballería andante o por la vida pastoril.

Es suficiente admitir la posibilidad de que Cervantes pudiera haber percibido de inmediato en ese hidalgo, loco por sus lecturas de libros de caballería, un hidalgo, al que llamó Alonso Quijano, y de quien tuvo sin duda noticias precisas, que le interesaron, tanto por su condición de loco como, sobre todo, por la naturaleza de su locura (poco tiene que ver la locura del licenciado Vidriera con la locura de Don Quijote, aunque las diferencias entre ambos quedan borradas groseramente cuando sólo se atiende a su común denominación de «locos»). Una locura que lo aproximaba en seguida a los caballeros de corte, caballeros entusiasmados, no ya sólo acaso por Amadís o por Palmerín, sino también por Hernán Cortés o por el Gran Capitán, aunque Cervantes habría querido separarlos, desviando la atención hacia aquellos, para no levantar sospechas incómodas o peligrosas, o desviar la dirección de su argumentación apagógica.

En suma, en el hidalgo loco por las caballerías, convertido en caballero, y «armado caballero por escarnio», podría Cervantes haber intuido la ridiculez de aquellos caballeros felices y complacientes que se alimentaban de aquellas historias. Más aún: puede concederse que esta alegoría, intuida desde el principio, pero en claroscuro, habría asumido como estímulo constante, que tomaba fuerzas al andar, sobre el autor, impulsado para entregarse, cada vez con mayor dedicación, al desarrollo de un personaje tan ambiguo y, por ello, inagotable; un personaje que tanto prometía, ya desde su simple definición inicial.

El febril desarrollo de su genial invención, es decir, el descubrimiento del «hidalgo loco de la Mancha por su afán de transformarse en caballero andante» pudo ser, desde luego, el cauce que recogiera la poderosa corriente que en Cervantes manaba, sin duda, desde hacía algunos años, y en la que iban disueltos tantos resentimientos, desencantos y desprecios hacia los caballeros, validos o duques satisfechos. Hacia esos próceres, que en pleno Estado de bienestar, se complacían con las memorias heroicas, propias o ajenas, que les acompañaban en las cacerías o en los salones, ya fueran los de Madrid, ya los de Valladolid, ya fueran los de Villanueva de los Infantes.

Podría haber sido en el curso de estos desarrollos de la ambigüedad de la figura inicial –ambigüedad que suponemos constitutiva de la figura de Don Quijote–, en la medida en que debe ir siendo desplegada tanto en función de las aventuras interesantes en el terreno psicológico psiquiátrico, como en función de los contenidos de tales aventuras, de interés ético o político. Sería a partir del desarrollo de esta figura ambigua, en su principio, como Cervantes habría ido advirtiendo, por el peso mismo de los contenidos específicos caballerescos de esta específica locura, el alcance alegórico, filosófico político de su ficción.

Alonso Quijano es un loco, pero Don Quijote canaliza su locura por cauces que generalmente son violentos, pero al mismo tiempo llenos de firmeza y generosidad. Además el héroe, un loco por sus hechos o hazañas, es héroe discreto e ingenioso en sus discursos, impropios de un loco; pero puesto que Cervantes piensa que los discursos son los que conforman y dan sentido a los hechos (hasta el punto de que estos puedan ser borrados o transformados por aquellos), Cervantes se habría visto obligado, por la fuerza objetiva del personaje con quien se enfrenta, Don Quijote, así como de las personas individuales involucradas en él, a ir atribuyendo los constantes fracasos de Don Quijote, más que a su locura a los instrumentos de los cuales esta locura se valía, tales como armas arcaicas, caballos famélicos, ridículos baciyelmos.

De este modo, el Quijote se habría ido transformando poco a poco en una obra que objetivamente (según su finis operis) iba asumiendo, simplemente por el filtro escéptico de Cervantes, la función de un revulsivo dirigido a los mismos caballeros cortesanos o villanos, a los duques y a los bachilleres que Cervantes conocía, y que eran aquellos que en la segunda parte ridiculizaban ellos mismos los trabajos de Don Quijote. Es como si Cervantes, desarrollando las virtualidades de su personaje, hubiera llegado a alcanzar una disposición de ánimo tal que le hubiera hecho capaz de decir a sus compatriotas: «Ved cómo del magma complaciente y satisfecho de los próceres, ociosos, caballeros, villanos, escribas y legistas, curas y barberos, han emergido las figuras de Don Quijote, Sancho y Dulcinea, cuyo rango los eleva inmediatamente por encima de la vulgar muchedumbre ambiente.»

¿Por qué entonces resultan risibles, sobre todo la figura de Don Quijote? No por su esfuerzo, fortaleza, firmeza o generosidad, sino porque utiliza instrumentos o se propone objetivos risibles: lanzas quebradas, baciyelmos, molinos de viento, rebaños de ovejas, incluso gobierno de una ínsula; pero manteniendo siempre aquella energía esforzada, firme y generosa, heredada de su estirpe.

Sustituyamos lanzas quebradas por cañones, caballos famélicos por naves artilladas y ligeras, caballeros andantes por compañías o batallones (la violencia individual no sirve para «desfacer entuertos» sino para encadenar otros nuevos), molinos de viento por gigantes ingleses o franceses que nos atacan; sustituyamos al escudero Sancho por millones de labradores que salen de sus lugares para acompañar a los caballeros en la lucha contra los enemigos reales, y a Dulcinea por millares de mujeres que arrojan al mundo nuevos labradores y soldados.

Cervantes pudo entrever esta alegoría a medida que su relato iba avanzando. Lo importante es que tal alegoría fuera entrevista por Cervantes, porque sólo entonces podría entenderse su disposición para llevar a Don Quijote, en un momento dado de su carrera, a colgar las armas y, al mismo tiempo, a decretar su muerte. Porque lo que no puede olvidarse es que la lección final y más profunda del Quijote, que Cervantes parece querer ofrecernos, es ésta: que aunque los proyectos esforzados de Don Quijote y de los caballeros armados que representa parezcan locuras, la disyuntiva es la muerte. Para renunciar a estas locuras, para curarse de ellas, tras la gran calentura, habrá que colgar las armas; pero con esto (que es lo que no ve el pánfilo pacifista) viene la muerte. La muerte física de Don Quijote, al recluirse, tras colgar las armas, en el cuerpo de Alonso Quijano, simboliza así la muerte de España, al colgar las suyas.

«Razones tan discretas que borran y deshacen sus hechos»

La facultad de hacer discursos discretos e ingeniosos, que es facultad propia de los letrados –que son ante todo quienes dominan las letras de las leyes–, es una facultad que Cervantes atribuye a Don Quijote, pero no en abstracto, sino poniendo en su boca los mismos discursos discretos e ingeniosos que acreditan esa facultad, que aparece en Don Quijote con tanta o más fuerza cuanto más débiles y quebradas nos parecen sus acciones, sus armas y sus hechos.

No puede afirmarse, por lo demás, desde luego, que Don Quijote, en su locura, careciera de discurso, como tampoco carece de armas. Pero tampoco puede afirmarse (con don Diego Miranda) que la «incongruencia» (locura o tontería) de Don Quijote se encuentre sólo en el terreno de la coordinación de los discursos y sus acciones. La incongruencia de Don Quijote se encuentra ya en su propio discurso, y es éste el que enferma o degenera. Aunque no es fácil determinar cual es la línea divisoria que separa el discurso sano y el discurso degenerado, que en Don Quijote toma la forma de locura, y según una figura ya conocida, si damos por buena la tesis de Menéndez Pidal sobre el entremés de Bartolo.

En el momento de tratar de establecer esta línea divisoria habría que tener en cuenta que la «parte sana» del discurso de Don Quijote tendría que ser compartida por el propio Cervantes; o, dicho de otro modo, que Cervantes estaría expresando su pensamiento a través del discurso sano de Don Quijote, y que un discurso no se opone solo, en globo, a las acciones –a los hechos, en cuanto acciones–, sino también al juicio sobre los hechos de experiencia, que no son tanto acciones cuanto percepciones, sin perjuicio de que, a su vez, estas percepciones estén «recortadas» por alguna acción previa o virtual, con tal de que esté integrada en el discurso.

Cervantes (si es que es Cervantes quien habla, en el capítulo XVIII de la segunda parte, por boca de Diego de Miranda) no parece diagnosticar quiebra alguna en el discurso de Don Quijote, y su locura la pone más bien en la incongruencia entre su discurso, en sí mismo sano, y sus acciones, entre sus «palabras» y sus «hechos», dirán otros. Cuando don Lorenzo, el hijo poeta de don Diego, pregunta a su padre su opinión sobre el caballero que ha invitado a su casa («el nombre, la figura y el decir que es caballero andante, a mí y a mi madre nos tiene suspensos»), don Diego responde:

—No sé lo que te diga, hijo; sólo te sabré decir que le he visto hacer cosas del mayor loco del mundo y decir razones tan discretas, que borran y deshacen sus hechos. (II, 18; cursiva nuestra.)

No es por tanto propiamente que los hechos deshagan las palabras; la situación es mucho más interesante: son las palabras las que, según don Diego, deshacen los hechos.

Don Diego, según este diagnóstico, parece desplazar la incongruencia de Don Quijote a un lugar distinto (aquel en el que se contraponen los discursos y las acciones), en el que su hijo don Lorenzo, el poeta, parecía ponerla inicialmente (el lugar en el que se contrapone el discurso y los hechos, sin distinción, por un lado, y por tanto el comportamiento global de Don Quijote, que será coherente en sí mismo, y la expresión personal, no solo verbal, de los mismos («que el nombre, la figura y el decir que es caballero andante…»).

Cabe, en resumen, ensayar diferentes criterios. El que nos parece más plausible se basa en una distinción entre el discurso doctrinal (necesariamente abstracto, político, filosófico) y el juicio de aplicación del discurso a las circunstancias concretas del momento, en el que ha de intervenir la prudencia, y la sindéresis, y no sólo la sabiduría de los principios o de la ciencia de las conclusiones (la coherencia) de la doctrina. Cabría poner en correspondencia el discurso doctrinal con el «registro representativo del lenguaje», mientras que el juicio preferiría el registro del lenguaje expresivo o apelativo, que se dirige a personas en concreto.

Por ejemplo, en el capítulo 29 de la segunda parte (en el que Cervantes expone la famosa aventura del barco encantado) se le supone a Don Quijote una ciencia sólida en su discurso sobre la Esfera, puesto que utiliza conceptos que Sancho no conoce: qué cosas sean coluros, líneas, paralelos, zodiacos, eclípticas, polos, solsticios, equinocios, planetas, signos, puntos, medidas… Pero el discurso se quiebra –como se quebraría la lanza– al aplicarlo a las circunstancias concretas, allí donde el buen juicio, o la facultad de juzgar, de subsumir lo particular en lo universal, o recíprocamente, ha de ejercitarse rectamente. Don Quijote comienza a calcular «cuantas paralelas» ha de atravesar el barco arrastrado por la corriente del Ebro; comienza a interpretar las aceñas como castillo en el que debe encontrarse alguna infanta o princesa malparada. El buen juicio lo mantiene aquí Sancho, pero también la «canalla malvada» y los molineros de las aceñas «que vieron venir aquel barco por el río, y que se iba a embocar por el raudal de las ruedas». «Los cuales [molineros], oyendo y no entendiendo aquellas sandeces [de Don Quijote], se pusieron con sus varas a detener el barco, que ya iba entrando en el raudal y canal de las ruedas.»

Lo que parece aquí imprescindible indicar es que la locura de Don Quijote, definida como quiebra del juicio, es tal que permite mantener intacto el discurso doctrinal «académico» (científico, filosófico, político). No es una locura común, propia del esquizofrénico que padece confusión y caos mental. La locura de Don Quijote es solo un caso particular de la misma quiebra de juicio que padecen los hombres más sabios, los políticos o los científicos, por ejemplo, que una vez que han construido firmemente su doctrina o su diagnóstico, tratan de aplicarlos al caso concreto, y si este se resiste, echarán la culpa al caso, y no a la doctrina («el cadáver miente»).

Otra cosa es el origen de ese desajuste entre la doctrina y el hecho. ¿Se debe simplemente al dogmático empecinamiento del político o del científico (que llega a proponer, pongamos por caso, como doctrina cierta, la teoría del big bang, sin perjuicio de los hechos en contra)? ¿Se trata de que los hechos son «trastocados» desde fuera (por ejemplo, desde el palacio de los duques), a fin de que aparezcan distintos a como deberían aparecer? Descartes, en días muy próximos a aquellos en los que Cervantes escribía el Quijote, cuando juzgaba que «acaso esta estufa sea una ilusión propiciada por un Genio Maligno engañador», se enfrentaba con el mismo encantador con el que se encuentra Don Quijote.

Porque también Don Quijote recurre al encantamiento de un Genio Maligno para explicar la falta de ajuste entre las doctrinas sanas y los hechos de experiencia. El propio Sancho llegaba a veces a «perder el juicio» como le ocurrió en el episodio de los cueros de vino acuchillados por Don Quijote (I, 35), que los tomó por gigantes, y al vino derramado por sangre. ¿Quién no asocia este «encantamiento» de la transformación del vino en sangre con los debates del siglo XVII, entre galileanos, gassendistas y cartesianos, a propósito de la presencia real de Cristo en la Eucaristía, y de la transubstanciación eucarística? Pero la doctrina de Santo Tomás, si la consideramos como un propotipo de discurso teológico racional, casi perfecto, dentro de los principios del hilemorfismo creacionista, ¿qué tiene que ver con esa locura de ver en el pan y el vino el cuerpo y la sangre de Cristo?

Nos permitimos advertir que la dificultad no aparece tanto en el terreno del discurso doctrinal teológico de Santo Tomás, cuanto en el juicio concreto acerca de si este pan de trigo, como hostia consagrada, es el cuerpo de Cristo, y si este vino de uva, consagrado, es la sangre de Cristo. Pero sólo puede asentirse a semejante juicio apelando a la acción divina, a un milagro, que es de algún modo obra de encantamiento. De un encantamiento que, como en el caso de Don Quijote, transforma el vino en sangre, y el pan en carne. (Cuando se cambiaba el discurso tomista, la doctrina, por ejemplo el hilemorfismo por el atomismo, el encantamiento se hacía mucho más difícil; y la defensa de la doctrina atomística sería el motivo por el cual, y no por su heliocentrismo, habría comenzado la persecución de Galileo.)

El discurso de las armas y las letras

Y entre los discursos más famosos, y también más racionales y sanos, atribuidos a Don Quijote por Cervantes (en cuya exposición, según hemos insinuado, estaría Cervantes manifestando su propio pensamiento), hay que contar, sin duda alguna, el «Curioso discurso de las armas y las letras» (Primera parte, final del capítulo 37 y 38).

Este Discurso, en sí mismo, no tiene quiebra, ni la tienen las armas a las cuales allí se aluden. Precisamente porque son «armas aludidas» (pintadas) y no armas utilizadas (vivas). La quiebra del discurso de las Armas y las Letras no aparece en alguna grieta o inconsistencia que en el mismo discurso podamos advertir, sino en el momento de su aplicación, pongamos por caso, en la falta de juicio que se manifiesta al tomar las aspas de los molinos por brazos armados de gigantes.

¿Y cual es la sustancia de este discurso perfecto de las armas y las letras? Es decir, ¿contra quien se dirige?

En nuestros días, en los cuales el «síndrome de pacifismo fundamentalista» (SPF)sacude intensamente a los ciudadanos y a los fieles (otros dirán, aún situados en «la izquierda», pero con reminiscencias clericales: sacude intensamente «a las conciencias»), quienes exaltan, en su cuarto centenario, a Don Quijote, esperarán poder levantar a su figura como un emblema más del pacifismo salvador. ¿No dice Don Quijote en su discurso que «las armas tienen por fin y objeto la paz»? ¿Acaso no recuerda Don Quijote en su discurso, aunque sin citarlo expresamente, a San Lucas, que en palabras de su Evangelio, con las que después se comenzará el cántico de la misa, dice: «Gloria sea en las alturas, y paz en la Tierra a los hombres de buena voluntad»?

Más aún, quienes, con Bataillon y tantos otros, ven a Cervantes como uno más de los españoles impregnados por Erasmo (¿qué escritor del siglo de oro español merecería ser citado por estos eruditos sectarios si no fuera porque en aquel discurso ven reproducida alguna idea de Erasmo?), leerán el curioso discurso de Don Quijote como una versión de la doctrina del pacifismo evangélico erasmista.

A fin de cuentas, Erasmo fue el gran abanderado del pacifismo de su época; la época en la que, en España, Vitoria y otros teólogos argumentaban a favor de la guerra, de la guerra que llamaban «justa». Pero a Erasmo no le gustaba España, porque era tierra en donde se toleraba con exceso a los judíos; aparte de ello el pacifismo de Erasmo no era tampoco un pacifismo puramente evangélico, porque estaba entretejido con intereses mundanos del siglo. Erasmo decía ser neutral: Francisco, rey de Francia, busca la paz, pero también Carlos la busca. Por eso diría Francisco: «Mi primo y yo estamos siempre de acuerdo, los dos queremos Milán.»

Pero el Discurso de las armas y de las letras de Don Quijote no es un discurso pacifista, ni, menos aún, es un discurso «erasmista». A lo sumo podría interpretarse como un discurso contra Erasmo (salvo que se suponga, y es mucho suponer, que Cervantes elogia la locura de Don Quijote cuando éste empuña sus armas). Y esto porque la doctrina que Don Quijote expone es, ni más ni menos, no la doctrina de Erasmo, sino la doctrina de Aristóteles.

Erasmo, en su Querella de la paz de cualesquiera pueblos, echada y derrotada, publicada en 1529, defiende, desde luego, la paz, atacando a las armas, en beneficio de las  letras y, sobre todo, de las letras divinas: la paz de Erasmo es la paz evangélica.

¿En qué se diferencia el hombre de los animales? En que el hombre, dice Erasmo, a pesar de tener inteligencia, se comporta de un modo más bestial del que las bestias acostumbran para relacionarse con las de su misma especie. Pero Erasmo, inventándose la etología, y sobre todo la etología humana, dice: «Entre las bestias más feroces encuentro yo más grata hospitalidad que entre los hombres.» Los animales viven en concordia cuasi civil. A menudo los elefantes se comportan entre sí como hermanos; los leones no se embravecen ante los leones; la víbora no muerde a la víbora. Debería bastar el vocablo «hombre» para establecer la avenencia entre los hombres. Y aunque la naturaleza los hubiera derribado o hecho caer, ¿no les bastaba Cristo? Cristo es el principio de la paz. A Cristo no le anuncian bélicas trompetas. ¿Por qué los hombres mueven guerras permanentes, a pesar de su inteligencia? Acaso por su pecado original. Pero Erasmo parece estar diciendo que si la inteligencia, o la razón, no hubiera sido menoscabada en el hombre por el pecado, como decía San Agustín, los hombres dejarían de cultivar las armas, precisamente en virtud de su racionalidad.

Se ha señalado una posible relación entre la Querela pacis de Erasmo, en que acusa la ambición de los príncipes belicosos, y el programa de Vitoria, De iuri belli. Manuel de Montoliu (Alma de España, págs. 632, 633) defiende esta relación. Pero semejante apreciación, a nuestro juicio, carece de todo fundamento, y es sólo fruto de la erasmomanía. Vitoria no es pacifista al modo de Erasmo; su posición sobre la guerra justa es precisamente la contraria a Erasmo.

Pero mientras que Erasmo afirmaba que los hombres deberían dejar de cultivar las armas, precisamente en virtud de su racionalidad, Don Quijote comienza reivindicando la condición racional de las armas. El hombre es animal racional, luego también han de serlo las armas, inventadas por el hombre. Tanto más importante es esta conclusión de Don Quijote cuando advertimos que sus armas no son armas-máquina (armas de disparar, como flechas, bolas, armas de fuego, granadas; menos aún armas automáticas, como cepos o misiles inteligentes) sino armas-instrumento (armas de blandir, como espadas o lanzas).

No imaginamos a Don Quijote manejando un arco o un arcabuz. Don Quijote sólo utiliza, como buen caballero andante, armas-instrumento, es decir, armas cuyo impulso lo reciben directamente del cuerpo del caballero, de forma que sea él quien directamente tome contacto con el cuerpo del enemigo, y en lucha «cuerpo a cuerpo» con él pueda percibir sus reacciones inmediatas. Los etólogos de hoy toman este criterio como base para distinguir la conducta agresiva animal (la conducta agresiva que actúa directamente sobre el cuerpo del enemigo) y la conducta agresiva humana, cuando ésta establece una desconexión cada vez mayor entre el agredido y el agresor. Lorenz habló de un «descarrilamiento del instinto de agresión», derivado de esta desconexión, cuyos primeros grados aparecerían ya en chimpancés, u otros animales que lanzan piedras, aunque propiamente no las disparan: la aceleración que experimenta la piedra lanzada con la mano –dejamos de lado la aceleración de la piedra lanzada con honda o la que es efecto de la gravedad– toma su fuerza de la mano que la lanza.

Pero no nos autorizaría esta distinción entre armas-instrumento (cuya energía procede del organismo, que utiliza los instrumentos como si fuesen órganos suyos: garras, colmillos, puños) y armas-máquina, a clasificar las armas instrumentales como armas animales irracionales. Las «armas orgánicas» no son, sencillamente, armas, sino órganos de ataque o defensa de un animal, o incluso a veces de una planta (espinas, venenos). Pero las armas instrumentales ya son armas estrictas, herramientas normadas, contenidos de la cultura humana, por lo tanto, como dice Don Quijote, racionales.

En consecuencia, ni las armas ni la guerra es propia de animales irracionales. La guerra no es cuestión de fuerza bruta, asentada en el cuerpo. La guerra supone el espíritu, el ingenio:

«Ahora no hay que dudar sino que esta arte y ejercicio [de las armas de la andante caballería] excede a todas aquellas y aquellos que los hombres inventaron, y tanto más se ha de tener en estima cuanto a más peligros está sujeto. Quítenseme delante los que dijeren que las letras [las letras de los letrados, de los legistas, del Estado de derecho] hacen ventaja a las armas, que les diré, y sean quienes se fueren, que no saben lo que dicen. Porque la razón que los tales suelen decir y a lo que ellos más se atienen es que los trabajos del espíritu exceden a los del cuerpo y que las armas solo con el cuerpo se ejercitan, como si fuese su ejercicio oficio de ganapanes, para el cual no es menester más de buenas fuerzas, o como si en esto que llamamos armas los que las profesamos no se encerrasen los actos de la fortaleza, los cuales piden para ejecutarlos mucho entendimiento, o como si no trabajase el ánimo del guerrero que tiene a su cargo un ejército o la defensa de una ciudad sitiada así con el espíritu como con el cuerpo.»

Y todavía dirá más: las armas tienen un fin superior a las letras («y no hablo ahora de las [letras] divinas, que tienen por blanco llevar y encaminar las almas al cielo»), porque mientras las letras [las que giran en torno a las normas éticas, morales, políticas o jurídicas] tienen como fin y paradero «entender y hacer que las buenas leyes se guarden», este fin no es digno de tanta alabanza como la que merece «aquel a que las armas atienden, las cuales tienen por objeto y fin la paz (…) Esta paz es el verdadero fin de la guerra, que lo mismo es decir armas que guerra.»

Ahora bien, esta famosa proposición («La paz es el fin de la guerra») procede, como es sabido, de Aristóteles (Política, 1334 a15). Pero hay dos modos principales de interpretarla:

(1) La Paz, universal y perpetua, es el fin de todas y cada una de las guerras; una paz que habría que entenderla, por tanto, como una reconciliación mutua y sempiterna de los contendientes.

(2) La Paz no es un fin universal e indiferenciado de todas las guerras, sino el fin particular y específico de cada guerra: quien está en guerra busca la Paz, pero esta paz es la Paz de su victoria. Quien entra en la guerra colabora a un desorden; y el fin de la guerra es restablecer el orden, pero tal como lo entiende el que quiere vencer. Por ello, el fin de la guerra es la Paz, la Paz de la victoria, del orden victorioso y estable que haya logrado establecer el vencedor.

La primera interpretación de la proposición de Aristóteles es claramente meta-histórica, por no decir metafísica. Si la Paz fuese la ley universal de los hombres, como animales racionales, la única manera de explicar históricamente las guerras sería suponer que los hombres, a lo largo de la historia, han entablado guerras por su irracionalidad; es decir, habría que suponer que toda la historia del hombre es la historia de la sinrazón.

Sólo la segunda interpretación puede recibir un significado histórico positivo, desde el supuesto de que la humanidad no tiene existencia como tal, sino que está originariamente distribuida en partes que no tienen por qué ser compatibles ni congruentes entre sí. La guerra habrá sido la forma extremada de la relación ordinaria entre esas partes.

Cuando, desde este supuesto, hablemos de paz, como fin de la guerra, nos referiremos a la guerra real, a cada guerra en particular; y entonces hablar de paz ya puede tener un sentido político e histórico, y no metafísico o metahistórico. Hablar de la paz como fin de la guerra es hablar de una paz política: bien sea de la Pax Romana, bien sea de la Pax Hispana, bien sea de la Pax Británica o bien sea de la Pax Soviética (de la que Stalin se proclamó abanderado en 1950). La paz es el fin al que aspira la guerra con el objetivo de instaurar el orden inestable que la misma guerra ha comprometido, reconstruyéndolo a medida del vencedor.

Que la proposición de Aristóteles entiende la paz como fin de la guerra, en este sentido positivo, se corrobora con otro pasaje suyo, un poco anterior al citado (Política, 1333), en donde Aristóteles pone en correspondencia la contraposición trabajo/ocio con la contraposición guerra/paz, y dice: «La guerra tiene como fin la paz, como el trabajo el ocio.»

Por eso la guerra, en cuanto actividad racional que tiene como fin la paz, o el orden justo obtenido tras la victoria, implica también racionalidad de este orden y de las operaciones que conducen a él. Por ello la guerra no puede tener como fin la esclavización de los hombres que no lo merecen, y menos aún su exterminio. La paz a la que aspira la guerra ha de tener como fin:

(a) O bien evitar ser esclavizados por otros: es el fin al que aspiran las guerras defensivas.

(b) O bien lograr obtener la hegemonía sobre otros, no para dominarlos simplemente, sino para proporcionarles bienes mejores de los que disfrutan. Se trata de lo que después se han llamado guerras de civilización, o también guerras de liberación.

(c) O bien la guerra tiene como fin gobernar a los que merecen ser gobernados, incluso como esclavos. Vitoria, incluso Sepúlveda, asumirán este tercer fin de la guerra como un título de guerra justa, si es que él se propone tutelar y educar a los pueblos incapaces de gobernarse a sí mismos, hasta lograr que desarrollen sus propias capacidades.

(Sobre estos asuntos véase nuestro libro La vuelta a la caverna. Terrorismo, guerra y globalización, I, 4: «La Paz como objetivo final de la Guerra». Para la polémica Sepúlveda, Vitoria, Las Casas, véase el análisis de Pedro Insua, «Quiasmo sobre ‘Salamanca y el Nuevo Mundo’», El Catoblepas, número 15, mayo de 2003 [http://nodulo.org/ec/2003/n015p12.htm].)

No parece, en conclusión, que pueda afirmarse que Don Quijote está predicando, en su famoso discurso, un pacifismo político y una requisitoria contra las armas a favor de las letras. Podrá estar dibujada en su horizonte una Edad de Oro, que por otra parte tampoco se identifica con la Paz evangélica, que él invoca en otras ocasiones. A lo sumo Don Quijote estaría defendiendo un orden –una paz– susceptible de ser mantenida a través de leyes justas, que a su vez sólo por la fuerza de las armas podrían ser efectivas. Este es el fundamento de la superioridad que, en su famoso discurso, Don Quijote (Cervantes) atribuye a las armas sobre las letras: sobre las letras humanas (de las letras divinas no quiere hablar), sobre las letras propias de los letrados, es decir, sobre las letras de las leyes.

Si utilizásemos el concepto que, dos siglos después, crearon algunos letrados alemanes (como Robert von Mohl), el concepto de Rechtsstaat, que nosotros traducimos como «Estado de Derecho», tendríamos que concluir que, para Don Quijote, el «Estado de Derecho» –el Estado de los letrados, el Estado de los legistas– carece de fuerza por sí mismo, y que la fuerza de obligar que él pueda tener la recibe de las armas capaces de hacer cumplir las sentencias de los jueces; así como también fueron las armas las que hicieron posible que el orden representado por esas leyes prevaleciera sobre otros órdenes distintos, contrapuestos o alternativos.

Don Quijote, por su parte, se considera siempre muy lejos de cualquier tribunal de justicia: «¿Y dónde has visto tú o leído jamás que caballero andante haya sido puesto ante la justicia, por más homicidios que hubiese cometido?» (I, 10.) Don Quijote, como caballero andante soberano, asume la posición tradicional de todo soberano, de la Iglesia, dotada de fuero propio, o del Rey de las monarquías absolutas, y residualmente de las constitucionales: «La persona del Rey es inviolable y no está sujeta a responsabilidad.» (artículo 56.3 de la Constitución española de 1978.) Pero también asume la posición que siempre corresponde a la soberanía política efectiva, la de un Imperio (como pueda serlo actualmente Estados Unidos de Norteamérica), a quien ningún Tribunal Internacional de Justicia (real y no de papel, como los que actualmente fingen serlo) puede juzgar, porque el cumplimiento de sus sentencias sólo es posible si es el Imperio mismo quien obliga a cumplirlas.

El orden representado en las leyes que pueda presidir a una Nación, tal como la Nación española, sólo puede mantenerse por la fuerza de las armas, que lo crearon y lo sostienen por debajo: las armas que lleva Don Quijote, pero no en solitario, sino asistido por Sancho y por Dulcinea, de la cual podrán salir los nuevos soldados y los nuevos legistas.

Una Nación desarmada o débil sólo podrá asumir el orden que le impongan otras Naciones o Imperios mejor armados. Y, por ello, las armas deben ser consideradas superiores y más racionales que las letras, que las leyes:

«Ahora no hay que dudar sino que esta arte y ejercicio [de las armas] excede a todas aquellos y aquellos que los hombres inventaron, y tanto más se ha de tener en estima cuanto a más peligros está sujeto. Quítenseme delante los que dijeren que las letras [la leyes del Estado de Derecho] hacen ventaja a las armas, que les diré, y sean quien se fueren, que no saben lo que dicen. Porque la razón que los tales suelen decir y a lo que ellos más se atienen es que los trabajos del espíritu exceden a los del cuerpo y que las armas solo con el cuerpo se ejercitan, como si fuese su ejercicio oficio de ganapanes, para el cual no es menester más de buenas fuerzas, o como si en esto que llamamos armas los que las profesamos no se encerrasen los actos de la fortaleza, los cuales piden para ejecutarlos mucho entendimiento, o como si no trabajase el ánimo del guerrero que tiene a su cargo un ejército o la defensa de una ciudad sitiada así con el espíritu como con el cuerpo.»

Las armas, en resolución, tienen un fin superior a las letras («y no hablo ahora de las letras divinas, que tienen por blanco llevar y encaminar las almas al cielo»), porque mientras las letras tienen por fin y paradero entender y hacer que las buenas leyes se guarden, este fin no es digno de tanta alabanza, como el que merece aquel al que las armas atienden, las cuales tienen por objeto y fin la paz. La paz es el verdadero fin de la guerra, puesto que lo mismo es decir armas que guerra.

Don Quijote nos obliga a afirmar –tal es nuestra interpretación– que si España existe, que si España puede resistir sus amenazas, que si España es una Nación y quiere seguir siéndolo, todo esto no pudo resultar ni podrá mantenerse solamente con las letras, con las leyes, con el Estado de derecho. Son necesarias las armas, es decir, es necesario estar preparados para la guerra, puesto que como afirma Don Quijote: «Lo mismo es decir armas que guerra.»