WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

words of Moisés ha-Cohen “Nuestras vidas y bienestar dependen de la prosperidad del estado
bajo cuyo gobierno vivimos…¿cómo puede un régimen tal ser llamado malo y no un regimen de
merced y comprensión?” ‘Our lives and welfare depend on the prosperity of the state under
whose government we live…How can such a rule be called evil and not a rule of mercy and
understanding?’ 293
From this we can gather that, despite tying an idea of Castile to “Christian” and more
“democratic” policies, the discourse which Enrique II was able to disseminate (more than any
monarch before him) was a divorcing of the everyday realities of politics from the idealized
image of the State’s operation. Despite all his propaganda, the Jew, Moor, Church, and nobility
continued to serve as pawns in the king’s attempt to control the State, being the helping friend at
one time and the infidel enemy at the other. 294 Whereas prior monarchs had constantly been
forced to play a balancing act between Christians and infidels or between the centralizing forces
of the State and the feudal nobility, by claiming a type of unified Christian ideal and then failing
to deliver on it, Enrique turned necessity into virtue; his rhetoric channeled the increasing
resentment of economic and military oppression as symbolic hatred towards the non-Christian
Other while his policies, for the most part, continued the status quo in the everyday reality of
most Castilians, including that of his closest advisors. 295
The separation of an ideal of what the king should be and what he could really
accomplish decidedly changed the way politics was done in Castile. For instance, the anti-
Semitism and anti-tyrannical ideology that Enrique deployed sparked populist movements
against the perceived oppression of the Jews as citizens, like their beloved deliverer, took justice
293 Qtd. in José María Monsalvo Antón, Teoría y evolución de un conflicto social. El antisemitismo en la Corona de
Castilla en la Baja Edad Media (Madrid: Siglo xxi, 1985) 243.
294 Ibid. 248.
295 Ibid. 235.
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