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de Columna’s Mare Historiarum whose objectivity influenced a greater part of his work, he
refers the reader to a tradition that openly mixes “fictional” narration with veridical history—the
story of Troy: 229 “Yo tome esta imbençion de Guido de Colupna, aquel que traslado la Estoria
Troyana de griego en latin.” ‘I took this invention from Guido of Colonne, he who translated the
Troyan story from Greek into Latin.’ 230 Unlike Johannes’s Mare, Guido de Colonne’s Historiae
Troiae paints the lives of Trojan nobles from a fictional tradition, adapting Benoît de Sainte
Maure’s poetic epic Le Roman de Troie as a history. 231 Although the Middle Ages believed the
stories of Troy to be veridical, they were still recognized as possibly fabulous—as narratives that
were true because they were sensational and not because they really happened. 232 Guzmán
crediting of Guido, as an accurate historian, therefore introduces a seeming conflict of interests.
In citing Guido as his source, Guzmán tells us true stories through the fictional style of
“maravillas” ‘wonders,’ although he initially condemns this style because it appeals to an
audience’s belief that sensational stories could be true simply because they are just as vivid as
lived reality. 233
229 For a discussion of de Columna’s influence on Guzmán, see J. Domínguez Bordona, “Introducción,”
Generaciones y Semblanzas, by Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, ed. J. Domínguez Bordona (Madrid: La Lectura, 1924)
xxii and Andrea Zinato, “Introduzione,” Mar de Historias, Mar de historias, by Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, ed.
Andrea Zinato (Padova: Unipress, 1999) 18-31.
230 Pérez de Guzmán Generaciones 9.
231 In her “Introduction” to Guido’s Historia Destructionis Troiae, Mary Elizabeth Meek particularly draws out the
logic of this tradition of historiography: “If one accepts Guido’s own explanation of what happens when an
historical work is transcribed poetically, i.e., that it appears to be fiction, we can apply the same kind of reasoning in
reverse…if a work of fiction which embodies historical truth, like the Roman de Troie…is transcribed historically,
then it will appear to be history” (“Introduction,” Historia Desructionis Troiae, by Guido delle Colonne, trans. Mary
Elizabeth Meek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974) xviii-xix).
232 Guido admits the fictionality of the tradition in his own introduction to the Historia: “Certain persons, indeed,
have already transcribed the truth of this very history, dealing with it lightly as poets do, in fanciful inventions by
means of certain fictions, so that what they wrote seemed to their audiences to have recorded not the true things, but
the fictitious ones instead” (Ibid. 1, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek).
233 I disagree with Andrea Zinato’s argument that Guzmán reads “maravillas” ‘wonders’ as unnatural events as
Guido himself does not excise these completely from his Historia, and even Zinato argues how Guzmán, following
Christian doctrine, attributes a verisimilitude to certain miracles (25). In a basic sense, however, Zinato ignores the
etymology of “maravilla” from the Latin “mirabilia” ‘witnessed things’ that Guzmán is obviously alluding to in
deriding sensationalistic stories and which is present in the Spanish “mirar” ‘to look.’
142