WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

But this is precisely my point: how is it possible to expect political events to be
remembered (or forgotten) without a regard to their real impact? How could a king who did not
deliver on his promises for symbolic unification, a king who had to bribe most of the nobility
into supporting his cause with favors that never materialized, be able to secure not only his
ascent to the throne but the continuation of his lineage in it? How could Enrique, not once but
twice, muster noble support to end Pedro’s reign and ward off another dispute to his authority
from outside pretenders? 298 If Castilian kings simply appropriated moral and religious narratives
for their purposes, if this was just the order of business, up to what extent was a moral crusade
really ever believable by the Castilian nobility in the fourteenth century or legible by its posterity
in the fifteenth, and what gave them any assurances that Enrique II was not simply another tyrant
lauded by historians of his era but vilified by those that came after him? 299
I suggest that these questions did not occur to Guzmán’s readers because the success of
Enrique’s revolution in the minds of the Castilian nobility was also a success of apathy to
authority in the fullest sense of the word: a lack of immediate affect to the events associated with
authority or to the pathos of its dominant symbolic expectations. In short, Castilian culture had
internalized that the symbols of authority did not need to be backed up by the actions of the
authority that they represented. Despite all the propaganda, the secular and clerical audiences,
whose posterity would remember the Trastamaran Revolution, knew that the unprecedented
change in monarchs was the working of politics as usual.
Still if the accession of Enrique II to the throne happened in a culture that could be
described as apathetic, we may wonder why this “revolution” would be so hidden in Guzmán’s
298 Valdeon Baruque 247.
299 These questions require a further look at the political history of Castile, and, in particular, its parallel in England
in the reign of Henry IV who managed to deploy a similar rhetoric of apathy to legitimate his authority. See Paul
Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998).
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