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imprisonment. 276 In other words, Ayala’s age and service reveal his closeness and growing
maturity to the service of one monarch via an implicit change, and yet we never learn when or
what impelled him to grow closer to Enrique’s cause.
In effect, Guzmán removes the details of Ayala’s life, which could relate to the
experiences of the reader despite using these details to make a point about the Chancellor’s life.
Ayala’s life is therefore timed through silence, hidden away between his “moçedad” ‘youth’ and
his political career as a member of the king’s “conseio” ‘council.’ This silence is significant at
least for a reader who saw the love of the two kings as important to the verisimilitude of Ayala’s
character. For the event which Guzmán’s portrait glosses over implicitly is not only an important
part of the Chancellor’s life but also an important event in the history of Castile: the first
deposition of a king by a “popular” movement, namely the Trastamaran Revolution of 1369.
In order to understand how the Trastamaran Revolution registered for readers and how it
affected the writing of “true” stories, we need to go into some detail about the cultural discourses
which the Trastamaran ascendancy, which Ayala was clearly a part of, put into place. The
Revolution receives its name from the Castilian nobility’s successful supplanting of Pedro I with
the eldest son of his father’s mistress—Enrique Trastamara. Although historians disagree on its
causes, they all agree that Enrique’s success had no ideological or legal precedent in Castile
given that Pedro had legitimately held power for close to twenty years and Enrique himself was
not the closest kin to the crown. Consequently, removing Pedro from the throne required more
than a refashioning of the power structure in Castile; it required a re-conceptualization of the
legitimacy of sovereign authority. Because of this, historians have argued that the Trastamaran
cause represented a “revolution” in the fullest sense of the term, not only in supplanting one
276 Constance Wilkins and Heanon Wilkins, “Estudio Preliminar,” Corónica de Pedro I, eds. Constance L. Wilkins
and Heanon Wilkins (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1985) vii-viii.
168