Founding Fictions, Creating Castile: The Crónica de Veinte Reyes

Abstract

The Cronica de feinte reyes1 is an enthralling piece of early Castilian historiography, rich in the epic legends and founding narratives that inform the emerging identity of Castile. Although an independent and idiosyncratic work, the Cronica has a close relationship with Alfonso X’s Estoria de Espana and may even share in its spirit and intentions. The matter of this relationship has been subject to much critical attention, often focusing on which of the two works came first. Ramon Menendez Pidal first suggested that the compilers of this chronicle, which he dated c.1360, had access to the Alfonsine material but adapted this in a highly personal way in freely resuming, translating, and correcting matters of chronology (1898). Henry Lang (1926), Theodore Babbitt (1936), and Jose Gomez Perez (1965) all thought that the Cronica predated the Alfonsine project. Luis F. Lindley Cintra, in his introduction to his edition of the Cronica Cerai de 1344, dated the Cronica to the end of the thirteenth century, rendering it contemporaneous with the reign of Alfonso X, or shortly thereafter, by showing that it was used as a source for the Cronica de 1344. Diego Catalan took Pidal and Cintra’s work further by proposing that the Cronica de veinte reyes was a reworking of the Estoria de Espana by an individual with a critical eye who sought to correct and perfect the Alfonsine work (1962, 188). In subsequent articles, he proposed that the Cronica was connected to the Cronica general vulgata (Tenera cronica general), and that both derived from a Version critica of the Estoria de Espana (1963a, 1963b).