A Land Without Laws: a Legende of Independence of Castile According to ms. 431 of the National Library (Madrid) and Its Interpretation

Abstract

The author analyses a legend of independence of Castile, which is inserted in the proemium of the “Collection of 20 fazañas” in the ms. 431 of the National Library (Madrid). He divides the article into three main sections. The first section is analysing the historiographic tradition precedent to this article, from Galo Sanchez to Javier Alvarado and Maximiliano Bistue. The author stresses that despite a rather significant quantity of mentions of the legend of independence of Castile in the literature, there are only few substantial researches of its genesis. A topic about the judges of Castile is more or less well-known, while a subject of the burning of the Liber Iudiciorum is almost unknown. Within the second part of the article the author examines the genesis of the legend of independence. He emphasises logically three principal points of the development of the legend, from the “Liber regum” of the late 12th century through the works of Lucas of Tuy and Rodrigo of Toledo to the Poem about Fernan Gonzalez and the “History of Spain” composed by Alphonse X the Wise. The last point was fixed in manuscript 431 mentioned above. In the last section of his article the author proposes his version of the legend of independence's interpretation. According to him, this legend could be created at the beginning of the 70th years of the XIIIth century, and its author was one of the highest nobles of the Kingdom of Castile. The author supposes the legend itself was a kind of the politic parable prepared especially for Alphonse X. The Castilian nobles invented it and much later, in the 60th of the XIVth century somebody fixed this legend as a prologue to the “Collection of the fazañas”.