Iberia (63 page)

He left Spain bankrupt, so that many of the failures which
finally engulfed Felipe were not of his making and were, by that
time, inescapable. But he could have avoided others had he
comprehended the changes overtaking Europe. Again and again,
in his bitter and narrow way, he turned his back on the present
and tried to maintain in Spain a type of life and government that
should have been allowed to vanish. Industry, the prerogatives
of a middle class, a rationalized army, a Church responsive to
modern trends and an educational system based on merit he
ignored, and in doing so, sealed the ruin of his country. Solely
because of the headstrong policies pursued by Carlos and Felipe,
the cost-of-living index rose as follows: 1500—100; 1521—140;
1550—200; 1590—315, reflecting the fact that supplies of
foodstuffs and manufactures were declining. If ever the principle
of divine right of kings aborted, it was in the case of Felipe II, for
he may have had the divine right to rule Spain, but he did not
have the right to ruin it.

It is for this reason that I find El Escorial so moving; it is a
fitting monument to Felipe, a vast, dark building to commemorate
his monolithic soul. He caused it to be built. He selected the
architect and approved the design. In the hills back of the building
you can still see the seat carved in rock where he used to sit and
watch the progress of the construction, and it was he who
conceived the happy idea for the two groups of bronze statuary
in the church. There is a small room in El Escorial where Felipe
used to sit, his foot propped up to relieve the unbroken agony of
his gout, and here he spent his last days surrounded by deepening
woe. He had survived the death of his insane grandmother Juana,
his father, his mother, his first three wives, his heir Don Carlos,
his half brother Don Juan and many of the advisors who had been
close to him. From the loneliness of this room he could peer down
into the church through a little window and eavesdrop on the
progress of the Mass. Here also he met his couriers and studied
by candlelight the reports they brought him from all parts of the
world. I suppose no other king in history applied himself so
diligently to his paper work as Felipe, for the margins of his
documents are cluttered with his minute and often pertinent
observations: ‘He should be hung.’‘The ships should be sent
south.’‘The governor must be changed.’ Energy, dedication,
devotion, constancy and courage Felipe had, but sympathetic
intelligence he did not, and in the end it was this lack that undid
him.

From El Escorial I traveled over the mountains to Alcalá de
Henares, the ancient city known to the Romans as Complutum,
where Cardinal Cisneros had built his famous university. It had
long since been abandoned, for reasons we shall inspect in the
next chapter, but I wanted to see what buildings remained, and
I was directed by a policeman to a former residence hall now
converted to a public hostel. The doorman said, ‘You are welcome
to see the ruins of the university,’ but this was hardly what I was
looking for. The guard understood. ‘You want to see the building
of Cisneros! Ah, it’s on the other side of the square.’

There, shaded by trees and set back from the road, I found the
stately building which had formed the core of the university. From
the outside it was dignified, with a façade of carefully balanced
items; from the inside it offered as noble a cloister as I was to see
in Spain, three-tiered and marked off by thirty-two half-columns.
In the park facing the building stood a statue of Cisneros, showing
his intense, small face, his high cheekbones and his penetrating
eyes. His military adventures behind him, the burning of Islamic
treasures forgotten, he stands as a churchman with a book and
stave in his left hand, a heavily knotted cord in his right. Nearby,
in an old chapel, rests his modest tomb, so different from the
bombastic one of Cardinal Mendoza in the cathedral at Toledo.

In Cisneros’ university great things had been accomplished.
The cardinal had insisted that his students be trained in the most
advanced theories of their day, and Alcalá became a center of
liberalism. In one stroke Cisneros established thirty-three full
professorships, ‘according to the number of years of Our Lord,’
including some in subjects new to Spain, such as recondite ancient
languages, new concepts of philosophy and a chair for that
abstruse intellect, Pedro Ciruelo, who claimed that theology could
be understood only if studied in conjunction with mathematics.
Three of the professors personally selected by Cisneros had been
born Jews, even though he was at the time head of the Inquisition;
when suspicious Catholics protested, Cisneros defended his
nominations and said the men were needed for a major task which
only they could fulfill.

In 1513, when King Fernando inspected the university to see
if there was truth in the condemnatory rumors which had reached
him, Cisneros said calmly, ‘Sire, it is your job to gain kingdoms
and make generals. It is mine to build those men who will honor
Spain and serve the Church.’ The roster of great men who
acquired their education here has seldom been equaled: Lope de
Vega and Calderón, to name two of the writers; Tomás de
Villanueva and Ignacio Loyola, to name two who attained
sainthood.

As we saw earlier, Alcalá was famed internationally for its

Biblia
Poliglota Complutense
, a particular brainchild of Cisneros. It
provided the first printing of the Hebrew text ever to have been
compiled by Christians and the first Greek text to have been
printed anywhere. Both remained standard till well into the
nineteenth century; the compilation as a whole has been termed
‘the first scientific work of the modern world.’ Books were being
printed in Spain at least three years and probably nine before
William Caxton published his first work in England, but the
Poliglota
was long delayed because Cisneros had to encourage his
Spanish paper makers to produce pages of the size and thickness
he required and his imported French and German type founders
to cast Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek type faces. In an edition of
six hundred copies, Volume Six appeared first, in May of 1514,
followed by Volume Five a month later. The first four volumes
appeared at intervals, the last on July 10, 1517, four months before
the death of Cisneros. The completed volumes were not put on
sale till 1520, for the Spanish government was apprehensive about
distributing them prior to their having been approved by the
Pope. In the interim the university generously allowed scholars
from other countries to consult the finished volumes, and in this
way much of the original work was published elsewhere before it
appeared in Spain. Cisneros would not have minded, for his
memorial existed not in printed books but in ideas.

Forty-five years after his death an event occurred in his
university which has ever since preoccupied historians. To Alcalá
for their education had been sent three young men: Don Carlos,
son of King Felipe II; Don Juan, the bastard brother of the king
and therefore half uncle to Don Carlos; and Alexander Farnese,
nephew of the king and thereby cousin to Don Carlos. They were
not regular students at the university, for they had private tutors,
but they did attend classes and participate in university life.

Their regimen, as laid down by King Felipe, was strict, but on
the night of April 19, 1562, young Carlos slipped out of his room
to visit the attractive daughter of a porter, and in creeping down
the darkened stairs he failed to see that the fifth step was broken
and pitched headlong downward, so that his forehead struck a
closed door. He was found stretched out unconscious and the
matter was reported to the king.

Fortunately, young Carlos made an easy recovery and the
escapade was forgiven, but on the tenth day alarming symptoms
suddenly appeared and it looked as if he were going to die,
presumably from pressure on the brain. Nine specialists were
summoned, among them the Fleming Andreas Vesalius, skilled
in performing trepanations of the skull. Fifty separate
consultations were held, for the stricken boy was heir to the crown,
and while the doctors were trying to decide what to do, help came
from two unexpected quarters. From Valencia a quack arrived,
a Moor bearing two jars of ointment. ‘The black one,’ he
explained, ‘has a repercussive action, but the white one is a strong
unguent to attenuate it. Black, white. Black, white. It is the warring
of the ointments that saves the life.’ At the same time a strange
troupe appeared from a nearby community, a group of peasants
attending several Franciscan friars who bore the cadaver of one
Diego (1400-1463), a Franciscan who had died a century before
but whose body had not been contaminated by the grave. Standing
before the doctors, they pulled back a cloth and displayed Fray
Diego’s face, and the sunken eyes seemed to be alive. The peasants
explained that the cadaver had already worked miracles in their
community and they believed it could save Don Carlos.

So three alternatives were laid before the doctors and the king’s
representatives: Dr. Vesalius could trepan the skull and thus let
out the diseased blood that was pressing on the brain and causing
the damage; or the Moor could apply his alternating unguents;
or the cadaver of Fray Diego could be placed in bed with the
unconscious prince in hopes that it might work one more miracle.

What happened that day has since been the subject of much
speculation. Don Carlos’ two principal physicians each left behind
his own report; they agree in the main but are contradictory on
important points; foreign ambassadors then resident in Spain
collected rumors, which they sent home; and other participants
left diaries. From certain reports it seems clear that Dr. Vesalius
and his team prepared to do a trepanation and laid back the scalp
so that the white skull was well exposed, but when they had done
this they satisfied themselves that the blood oozing through the
bone of the skull was normal and that a complete trepanation
was not called for, so they sewed the scalp back together; other
reports indicate that the trepanation was completed and that it
saved the boy’s life.

We know that the Moor was allowed to apply his unguents,
first black, then white, but they seem to have been so powerful,
especially the black or repercussive one, that the dying youth grew
noticeably worse. The doctors grew frightened and packed the
Moor out of Alcalá; he went to Madrid with his jars and there
offered to cure the knight Hernando de Vega, but after a few
applications of the powerful stuff Hernando died.

We also know that when hope was almost gone, the century-old
cadaver of Fray Diego was placed in bed with Don Carlos while
the Franciscans prayed, and in the morning Don Carlos awakened,
with clear mind, and said that in the night he had seen a vision
of a friar in Franciscan habit lying beside him, and this had cured
him. At any rate, both he and his father petitioned Rome to
declare Fray Diego a saint, for this was but the latest of the
miracles this obscure friar had worked; three separate popes
delayed action on the matter, but King Felipe was so insistent that
a fourth pope, Sixtus V, speeded up the investigation and took
pleasure in announcing in 1588 the entry of San Diego into the
saintly brotherhood. His day was identified as November 13, and
in honor of his having saved the intended King of Spain, a pueblo
in the colony of California was some years later named after him.

The saving of Carlos’ life was a mixed blessing. In the six years
that followed, the young man degenerated pathetically; crippled,
hunchbacked, of wandering mind and evil habits, he became a
kind of incubus, and it was even rumored that he might have
been toying with the idea of becoming a Protestant. What seems
more likely is that he had initiated or had been caught up in some
kind of intrigue against his father, King Felipe. At any rate, there
can be no question about the fact that Felipe believed his son was
plotting treason and that the pathetic and even repulsive young
man was a danger to Spain. Therefore, at midnight on January
18, 1568, Felipe, accompanied by advisers, marched into the room
of Don Carlos, who looked at his father and asked, ‘Are you
planning to kill me?’ Felipe told him to calm himself and in this
manner placed him under arrest, without ever giving Carlos or
the world any substantive reason for having done so. ‘I have
reasons,’ Felipe said.

Almost immediately the young prisoner, twenty-three years
old, began to decline, and this time there was no Dr. Vesalius, no
Moor with repercussive unguent and certainly no cadaver of a
saint to cure him. What was his malady? No one knew. Was there
any specific or even probable cause? No one could say. It was a
general illness without seeming focus and on the evening of July
24 he died. King Felipe refused to give an explanation even to the
Pope, and when rumors of the most evil sort circulated, he did
not dignify them with notice, let alone an explanation. He spoke
of the matter only once, eighteen years after the event, when a
book appeared in France claiming that Don Carlos had been killed
because he was a secret Protestant. Then Felipe said to the
ambassador who reported this, ‘You are right in becoming
indignant over the false testimony that he was not a good Catholic.
It is not wise to allow such a great lie to run current.’ Ten years
after the death of Don Carlos, Felipe had a second son, by his
fourth wife, Ana of Austria, and it was this boy who grew up to
be Felipe III, never a great king, never approaching the quality of
his father Felipe II or his grandfather Carlos V, but certainly not
a degenerate like Don Carlos, who would have inherited the
throne had he not died so mysteriously.

In July, 1966, events occurred which were to make the city of
Cuenca an almost obligatory excursion from Madrid, and I had
the good fortune to make mine in the company of a talented
Filipino who had been centrally involved in those events, Don
Enrique Francisco Fernando Zobel de Ayala y Montojo
Torrontegui Zambrano, Havard 1949, sometimes bibliographical
expert in rare books at the Houghton Library in Cambridge, etcher
extraordinary and one of Spain’s major abstract artists.