Virtue, Virility, and History in Fifteenth-Century Castile

Abstract

A great deal of recent work has focused on the ways in which early-modern Spaniards viewed putative invaders—both past and present—of their peninsula. David Lupher, Barbara Fuchs, and Stuart Schwartz, for instance, have carefully examined the complex and often contradictory attitudes that sixteenth-century authors expressed toward the role played by Romans, Visigoths, and Muslims in Iberian society and history. Although all of these scholars have recognized the medieval origins of such discourses, the nature of their topics precluded in-depth discussions of those antecedents. Yet the Golden Age debates at the heart of these books were conditioned by late-medieval efforts to relate past Romans to contemporary Muslims in response to specific political and social concerns. Fifteenth-century chroniclers used Romans as exemplars of virtuous behavior even while defining them as effete and tyrannical foreigners whose presence in Iberia had tarnished an uncompromisingly masculine native temperament. This dichotomy was closely related to contemporary visions of Islam, and I argue that these representations of the Romans were attempts to create a usable past. By drawing parallels between the Visigoths, who had expelled the Romans, and fifteenth-century Castilians, whose perceived duty was to do the same with the Muslims, fifteenth-century historians contended that the only way to successfully complete the project of Reconquista was to expunge all foreign cultural influences—Roman, Muslim, and also Jewish—from Castilian society.

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