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surrounding Pedro’s fall on the hands of his advisors—in the hands of the nobility who, like the
infidel, were blind to God’s providential plan by supporting a tyrant king until the end.
Unfortunately for Pedro and unexpectedly for the prophetic trope which Ayala utilizes,
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and this time the image of death in the prophecy is just death
(and not a trope nor a symbol of his failure as a king)—something missed by all the nobles who
supported Pedro and by his Moorish advisor. This obvious mistake ultimately puts the
responsibility of his death not in the sin of rebellion by the Trastamaran usurpers, but in Pedro’s
character as king who did not keep “omnes justos e sabidores” ‘just and wise men’ in his counsel
and so confirms the Trastamaran propaganda which tied Pedro’s inefficacies as a ruler to his
spiritual failure.
This is not a way to typologize history. Ayala’s ending prophecy, which mimics those
found at the end of El Baladro del Sabio Merlin, does not as Isabelle Rousseau claims, “bien
évidemment reconnaître Henri dans cette figure providentielle” ‘very evidently recognize
Enrique II in this providential figure’ by contextualizing the details of Pedro’s fall with temporal
events. 321 In the Corónica, historical events need not merely be seen as providential to be
legitimated; they need only be equated with a form of temporal reading to be true. Accordingly,
Ayala does not think the eagle represents a real quality of Pedro’s reign, but borrows the image
from an exemplum in Saint Gregory’s Homilies in which Gregory likens an image in Micah 1:16
of a gluttonous eagle loosing its feathers as it falls from grace to the fall of the Roman Empire. 322
Enrique II’s life may have had providential qualities given the eschatological discourse of the
fifteenth century from which Guzmán reads Ayala’s history, but it certainly did not posses these
321 Rousseau 94.
322 Joaquín Gimeno Casalduero, “La profecía medieval en la literatura castellana y su relación con las corrientes
proféticas europeas,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispana 20.1 (1971): 83.
199