WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

government with another but in changing the cultural discourses surrounding the idea of
authority itself. 277
How this change of political authority also affected the general discourse on authority can
be surmised from the ways in which Enrique’s supporters convinced the Church and the nobility
to topple the sitting king. 278 Trastamaran propaganda portrayed Pedro as both a tyrant—an
enemy of the people—and an evil king—an enemy of the faith. 279 This synthesis may seem an
inevitable form of vilification, but in the medieval mind, particularly in the Castilian notion of
kingship, such joint accusations were uncommon to justify rebellion. For example, a ruler’s
political failures were often excused as divine providence. In the same manner, his “amoral”
actions would be justified as necessary for the state’s political well being.
Before Enrique’s ascendancy, there simply was no precedent in Castile to think of the
sovereign as individually bound to maintain the common good and so able to be deposed if he
violated it. 280 For example, the fourteenth-century famed Castilian writer Juan Manuel, although
being in open rebellion to Alfonse XI, tells his own son: “Et si por aventura entendiere…que [el
rey] es de la manera de los tirannos, comoquier que el rey sea tal, pues el rey es señor natural,
dével servir quanto pudiere” ‘And if by chance [a subject] understands that [the king] is of the
manner of tyrants, nevertheless because the king is a natural lord, [a subject] should serve him in
as much as he can.’ 281 The Castilian translation of De Regimine given to Pedro I as a crown
277
For a short of these arguments, see Luis Suárez Fernández, Monarquía Hispana y Revolución Trastamara
(Madrid: Taravilla, 1994).
278
Julio Valdeon Baruque, Enrique II de Castilla: La Guerra Civil y La Consolidacion del Regimen (1366-1371)
(Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1966) 90.
279
Ibid. 98-99 and Nieto Soria 44-45.
280
In Castile, there was no precedent for limiting the power of the sovereign under the auspices of his tyranny as in
England or France, particularly because the king derived authority from himself. This is reflected in the coronation
of all Castilian kings by their own hands, and more importantly, in the Castilian adaptation of Aristotelian political
theory into the vernacular, which unlike England, France, or Italy, used it to justify a more central form of
government.
281
Juan Manuel 141.
169