‘OFFICIAL HISTORY’ AT THE COURT OF PHILIP II OF

Richard L. Kagan

‘The road to truth is straight, never winding’ Maffeo Barberini, the future Urban VIII (1607)

On 13 September 1598, only hours after learning about the death of Philip II, Francesco Soranzo, Venetian ambassador at the Spanish court, wrote to inform the Doge and Senate of the momentous news. ‘The king is dead’, the dispatch began. ‘His expired at the Escorial this morning at day- break, after having received all of the sacraments of the church with every sign of devotion, piety, and religion’. Soranzo then proceeded to list Philip’s numerous accomplishments: his many victories – ‘He has acquired more by sitting still, by negotiations, by diplomacy, than his father did by armies and by war’ – as well as his many defeats. Soranzo also provided a short sketch of Philip’s character, specifically noting that ‘He [Philip] hated vanity, and therefore never allowed his life to be written’.1 The idea that Philip had refused to commission a biography is one that quickly entered the mythology of the deceased king. Baltasar Porreño, au- thor of the Dichos y hechos del rey Felipe II (Cuenca, 1621), one of the first biographies of the monarch ever published, made much the same point when he observed that ‘His modesty was such, that he never wanted to have a chronicler’.2 More recently, a best-selling biography of Philip has reiter- ated this idea with the assertion: ‘Philip II refused to let his life be written during his lifetime. He thereby saved himself from adulators, whom he hated. But he left the field wide open to his detractors’.3 But is this observation correct? Was Philip, out of modesty, as adverse to the writing of his biography as Soranzo, Porreño, and various historians

1 Great Britain. Public Record Office. Calendar of State Papers, vol. 9, pp. 342- 343. The original reads: non ha mai voluto, che si scriva la sua vita (Archivio di Stato di Venezia: Senato, Dispacci Spagna, filza 30, n. 58). 2 Porreño, Dichos y hechos, p. 110. The same idea appeared Juan Eusebio Nierem- berg, En la corona virtuosa (p. 259): [Felipe] no quería tener coronista. 3 Kamen, Philip,p.xi. 250 RICHARD L. KAGAN have alleged? Or was he more like his father, the Emperor Charles V, a monarch who, in a deliberate effort to set his own record straight, began writing (or at least dictating) his own memoirs at least seven years before his death?4 No easy answer to these questions exists, partly because of confusion concerning the meaning of biography, especially as it was understood by Soranzo, Porreño and other contemporaries of Philip II. A biography, known also in Spanish as a vida or life, emphasised what Plutarch, the Greek historian, in contemplating the life of Alexander the Great, referred to as ethos, a term that referred to individual character and personality. Bi- ography therefore supposed a retrospective assessment of Alexander as a moral being. Yet Plutarch also understood that biography could be history, the equivalent of praxis, the Greek word for action, and thus a term that, again with reference to Alexander, called for a narration of the Macedonian monarch’s deeds and accomplishments together with those of his associates and followers.5 Biography and history were therefore separate genres, each designed to illuminate different aspects of an individual’s life. This particu- lar distinction also obtained in the sixteenth century, and it is one that Soranzo seems implicitly to have understood when he wrote that Philip ‘re- fused to let his life be written’. On the other hand, the Venetian ambassador said nothing about history, a genre that Philip, especially towards the end of his , warmly embraced. To learn more about the king’s interest in history, and, more generally, about the place of history-writing at the court of Philip II, this essay will ex- amine Philip’s patronage of chroniclers and historians, in particular those of the scholars whom he honoured with the title of royal chronicler, or cronista del rey. The work of these chroniclers suggests that Philip was, as Soranzo correctly observed, suspicious of biography, but had many fewer qualms about history, especially ‘official’ or royal history designed to defend his policies and to highlight the deeds and accomplishments of his reign.

The King’s Chroniclers

Defined in this way, official history was neither the invention of Philip II nor even that of the sixteenth century. Classical precedents for this kind of historical writing abound, among them the Anabasis, Cyropedia, and other works that the Greek historian Xenophon drafted to burnish the image of the

4 See Morel-Fatio, L’historiographie, pp. 159-162; Fernández Alvarez, ‘Las Me- morias’, pp. 690-718. 5 My understanding of Plutarch on this point follows Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius, p. 8.