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at the time in which Ayala was writing his chronicles. 323 In Ayala’s eyes, the prophecy—long
divorced from its historical origins in Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae—only represents
a traditional narrative frame to history, a way of depicting the fall of a monarch in line with a
temporal unfolding of events and not with any real likenesses to them. 324
As a result, Benaharin’s prophecy, unlike his speculum, ideally intersects the theoretical
prescriptions of a narrative genre to the specific demands of a historical moment towards an
audience. In its pages, Ayala’s readers can find an implicit justification for their actions, and if
they choose to believe it, even a historical blunder in part of Pedro’s ability to read. The
speculum contained in Benaharin’s first letter, however, is not so successful coming a little too
late, or a little too early to allow Pedro to approach its message and any of the audience to derive
an “I told you so” mentality towards the fallen king’s inability to follow counsel. On the other
hand, the prophecy, which arrives just in time, ties Pedro’s final defeat by associating his
blunders with the continuity of time and even legitimates his actions in bringing about his fall.
This distancing of personal narration is a way of assuring the verisimilitude of the
narrative. For example, by removing a personal authorial intervention at the moment of
Enrique’s defeat by Pedro’s forces in Nájera—at the very moment in which a Trastamaran
historian would have to admit a non-providence in his liege’s ascendancy and yet have to portray
his own witnessing of the event—Ayala not only saves face as a noble but as a historian. He
shows how a prophecy, a speculation of time, explicitly projects an ideology and how a
speculum, a description outside of time, only narrates the events as they happened, or rather, the
feeling of events as they were. In Nájera, Ayala’s refuses to use his first-hand witnessing to
shape Enrique’s temporary defeat as a providential victory of the good later confirmed at
323 Ibid. 85-86.
324 William Entwistle, “Geoffrey of Monmouth and Spanish Literature,” The Modern Language Review, 17.4
(October, 1922): 390.
200