Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain
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Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain
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Overview
In this fascinating study, Katrina B. Olds explores the history, author, and legacy of one of the world’s most compelling and consequential frauds. The book examines how a relatively obscure Jesuit priest so successfully fabricated a set of supposedly historical documents that they were accepted as authentic for generation after generation. The chronicles’ influence was so powerful, in fact, that they continued to shape scholarly discourse, religious practice, and local heritage throughout Spain well into the twentieth century, despite having been debunked as forgeries in the eighteenth. Olds’s fascinating analysis brings together intellectual, cultural, religious, and political history while reinvigorating an ongoing debate on the uses and abuses of history and the nature of historical and religious truth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300186062 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/25/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 440 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Forging the Past
Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain
By Katrina B. Olds
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18606-2
CHAPTER 1
The Forger between Friends and Enemies in Toledo
No one is to be considered a liar who says something which is false, but which he believes to be true, because, as far as he himself is concerned, he does not deceive but is the victim of deception. So the person who, without exercising sufficient caution, trusts false statements and regards them as true, should not be accused of lying but sometimes of rashness. — St. Augustine, Enchiridion
Well before the false chronicles propelled Jerónimo Román de la Higuera into infamy, the intrepid Jesuit was already known in his native Toledo for using his historical expertise to make controversial claims about Spain's sacred past. Higuera's complex role as a respected yet divisive man of learning and religion is well illustrated by a little-known debate that erupted over two discoveries in Toledo, one bibliographic, and the other archaeological, at the end of the sixteenth century. The first find had been unremarkable: sometime in the 1580s, as Higuera was poring through the rich trove of manuscripts in Toledo's cathedral library, he came across an eighth-century letter from King Silo of Asturias that described an early medieval church dedicated to an early Christian martyr named Saint Thyrsus (San Tirso). The significance of the letter would not become clear to Higuera until the second discovery, which occurred in August, 1594, when workers excavating a site in the Plaza Mayor alongside the cathedral uncovered a cluster of ruins and archaeological artifacts. Suddenly it was clear: the letter, Higuera claimed, made it plain that the Plaza Mayor ruins belonged to the early medieval chapel erected for the Christians living under Islamic rule — known as Mozarabs — in honor of Tirso. The city should immediately adopt Tirso as a patron saint and reconstruct his chapel on that very site.
To modern ears, this might sound like an unremarkable gesture of Counter-Reformation piety. After all, in early modern Spain, the veneration of early Christian martyrs was standard fare. Yet in the powder keg of Toledan religious and intellectual politics, this seemingly anodyne suggestion was an explosive provocation. In the days after Higuera aired his claims, a veritable maelstrom arose among learned Toledans, as the members of the local civic and ecclesiastical elite fought bitterly about the alleged ruins of the church of San Tirso, the letter from King Silo, and Higuera's reliability. The controversy soon divided Toledo's elite, just as the false chronicles would later divide Spain's men of letters. Like that latter debate, the discussion of San Tirso would focus primarily on questions of historical research, including, but not limited to, the authenticity of Higuera's historical sources.
In this sense, the conflagration over San Tirso among the members of Toledo's civic and religious elite parallels the long-term controversy over the cronicones. On one side were Higuera's supporters, who admired his scholarship in spite of its flaws and shared Higuera's vision of the past. On the other end of the spectrum were the doubters, those who regarded the Jesuit's texts and promotion of certain religious and historical causes as inherently untrustworthy and who accused him of scholarly malfeasance and forgery. For generations, this divergence of opinions was easy to explain: early doubters were exceptional minds, men of uncommon perspicacity who could see through Higuera's pious pretenses. Believers, unsurprisingly, came out somewhat worse for the wear, as credulous patriots and religious enthusiasts who were more concerned about their own pet religious causes — such as the ecclesiastical primacy of Toledo, the Santiago creed, or the lead books of Granada — than with historical truth and scholarly integrity.
Yet the virulent reactions that Higuera and his texts prompted among his contemporaries in Toledo and beyond cannot simply be equated with the defense of truth against falsehood; as a closer examination of questions of urban renewal, historical erudition, and Mozarabic history in late sixteenth-century Toledo will reveal, at question was not so much the integrity of Higuera's scholarship as his vision of Toledo's past, present, and future. As Higuera knew quite well, to make claims about the history of a single saint was, in essence, to make a claim about the early history of Christianity in Toledo, of its families, and of the nature of its religious identity. In attempting to bring the Mozarabic cult of this saint back to life, Higuera intervened aggressively in ongoing discussions about the nature of Toledo's sacred history and squared off with many of Toledo's other learned men, who, like Higuera, took the city's history quite seriously. His superiors in the Society of Jesus were quite irritated by the ignominy of being dragged into the ensuing public debate which, they feared, might threaten the Society's interests. The intrigue, in which Higuera was accused of forging the letter of Silo, eventually would extend all the way to the royal palace in Madrid and to the head of the entire Jesuit order in Rome, Claudio Acquaviva, thus jeopardizing Higuera's already tenuous standing in his own religious order.
The incident, with its mix of forgery, history, hagiography, and politics, is a fitting introduction to Higuera as a complicated character who prompted a range of reactions among his contemporaries. Higuera's determined advocacy for San Tirso exemplifies the complex methods, motives, and alliances that animated him in his various pursuits. It is thus a particularly revealing moment in Higuera's long career, one that allows us to view, among other things, the ways in which he drew upon archaeological, documentary, and hagiographical traditions in order to formulate a vision of the past that was as seductive to some as it was repellent to others. We also get a vivid sense of why and how Higuera's works created such an uproar, not only while he was alive, but also for centuries after his death. The San Tirso incident also helps underline the often ignored fact about the controversial Jesuit, namely, that he was a central figure in Toledan intellectual, religious, and cultural life of the late sixteenth century.
DISCOVERING SAN TIRSO
In itself, the discovery of human and architectural remains in Toledo was not particularly surprising. The densely settled city perched atop the high, rocky banks of the River Tajo had been populated continuously for over a millennium. As any Toledan would have known, a short stroll to the fields north of the city walls would bring one to the open-air ruins of a Roman circus. In the latter years of the sixteenth century, efforts to open Toledo's tight warren of crooked streets into a more "modern" cityscape led to many major excavations and thus, discoveries, in a ground larded with flagstones, coins, bones, and other relics of ancient and medieval populations. Higuera's intrigue had its roots in the fortuitous archaeological find by laborers digging several feet below street level behind the cathedral for a complex construction project. A royal hospital for the incurably ill was due to be erected upon the site, and workers had just started to excavate its foundations when they hit stone. They soon found that the stones were part of a larger complex of what seemed to be the ruins of a building. Along with several large building stones and the ruins of a vault, they unearthed a cache of archaeological treasures, including human bones, Roman and Castilian coins, and a copper disk (figures 1.1 and 1.2).
Yet this discovery was different. The cathedral's head architect (maestro de obras), Maestro Juan Bautista Monegro, soon noted that the stone slabs seemed to belong to the intact foundations of a significant building. He wondered about the presence of so many human remains, and, above all, about the curious copper disk. Monegro's field experience made him something of an expert on the physical remnants of Toledo's various stages of history, and he quickly identified the building stones as the foundations of a ruined chapel or temple, and the bones as the remains of an old Christian cemetery. Nonetheless, he was stumped by the medal, which after being cleaned by a coppersmith revealed a mysterious engraving upon its face: a crown above the letters C and S (figure 1.3).
What was this strange object, and what did it mean? For contemporaries with a keen interest in Toledo's history, the answer would be anything but trivial. In a place that many considered to be the oldest and most prestigious seat of Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, which nevertheless had been under Islamic dominion for nearly four hundred years in the Middle Ages, patron saints were an important part of the early modern period's program of recovery and re-Christianization. Thanks to Toledo's history as the capital of Visigothic Spain, whose rulers were unseated by the Islamic invaders in 711, the city and its saints also possessed special significance for the Hapsburg monarchy, whose court was nearby in Madrid. King Philip II himself sponsored the recovery and reenshrinement of the relics of two early Toledan saints in the latter half of the century. With royal patronage, the body of Eugenius, Toledo's legendary first bishop, was recovered from the monastery of Saint Denis of Paris in 1565. The relics of fourth-century Spanish martyr Santa Leocadia were translated with great fanfare by the Jesuit Miguel Hernández Hernández, from Flanders to Toledo, where they were received in 1587 by Don Pedro Carvajal Girón de Loaysa, dean of the cathedral chapter (cabildo) under whose stewardship her cult remained thereafter.
When Monegro realized that these were no ordinary ruins he appealed to Higuera, a Toledan native known for his encyclopedic knowledge of the history and archaeology of the city and its environs, where the vestiges of successive centuries of Roman, Visigothic, Islamic, and Castilian rule were literally piled atop each other — not neatly stratified, as in geological layers, but messily overlapping, in the ongoing cycle of architectural and cultural interaction that characterized many places in premodern Spain. Higuera made scrutinizing the physical and textual remnants of Toledo's previous lives his preferred hobby, like many aficionados of local history who, aside from a handful of secular men of learning, came mostly from the ranks of the clergy. Higuera's peers included cathedral canons, professors at the university, and members of the religious orders who dedicated themselves to disinterring every possible fragment of manuscript or material evidence in order to reconstruct Toledo's storied past, beginning with its legendary foundation by Hercules.
In this endeavor, Higuera and other researchers spent many hours poring through the cathedral's rich manuscript collection, copying rare hagiographical and liturgical texts, medieval chronicles, royal privileges, and anything else they could find that would help illuminate the darker corners of Toledo's ancient and medieval past. They also relied upon contacts in the field, such as Maestro Monegro, to keep them apprised of notable discoveries. After all, according to the prevailing wisdom among early modern students of the past, material remains — coins, inscriptions, and other physical clues that could be found underneath the city's plazas, streets, and buildings — were as important as the written record, if not superior. Higuera and his peers were particularly interested in pivotal moments and figures in Toledo's history, such as its first settlers, evangelizers, and Christian reconquerors. Certain questions pertaining to these early centuries preoccupied learned Toledo. Where, for example, was the legendary cave where Hercules lived after he established his pillars at the Strait of Gibraltar? Had an apostle brought Christianity to Toledo and, if so, was it Santiago, or Saint Peter, or Saint Paul? Where was Saint Ildefonso born, and where was the lost monastery — known as El Agaliense — where he was abbot in the seventh century?
While Higuera and his peers drank from the same pool of historical sources, they often parted company in the answers to these questions, and publicly debated the reliability of each other's sources and interpretations, particularly in the decades around 1600. As among modern academics, many of their intellectual disagreements were also colored by factional politics, interpersonal conflicts, and, above all, the desire to defend one's intellectual territory. Not only were many of Higuera's interlocutors as well versed in history, hagiography, and antiquities as he; they were also just as invested, on a personal and professional level, in the past. For these men, Toledo's history and antiquities were a serious matter, with profound implications. The inextricable entanglement of Toledo's past with its present meant that new discoveries would be seized upon by the city's arbiters of historical matters in order to forward their particular visions of the past. Thus, when Higuera declared that the letter from Silo was the crucial piece of evidence that would explain the Plaza Mayor discovery, and more about Toledo's medieval history, he had to have known that he was entering dangerous and highly charged territory, the tense and productive space where Toledan politics intersected with religion and history. In this context, a completely new source or interpretation could prompt a volley of attacks on one's character, methods, and integrity.
This is precisely what happened when Higuera publicized his discovery. On its face, the letter was not particularly remarkable. It was addressed to Archbishop Cixila of Toledo from King Silo of Asturias and dated AD 777, which put it a little over fifty years after Visigothic rulers of Hispania were overthrown by North African forces under Arab command. Both the sender and recipient of the letter were actual historical figures: as the standard sources of medieval Castilian history confirmed, Silo presided over the northern Christian territory of Asturias in the eighth century, and Cixila occupied the See of Toledo at approximately the same time, at least as far as the sometimes incoherent chronologies of existing medieval histories would allow. The text opened with Silo's rather conventional lament for the ills that Toledo's Christians suffered under their Islamic masters:
It pains me that you are living so miserably there, and I have much pity on you, because you suffer so many ills under those Moors, who were born for a bad death; not content with swarming over you, they impose outrageous exactions, and everyday they strive for your deaths.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forging the Past by Katrina B. Olds. Copyright © 2015 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,A Note on Translations and Orthography, xiii,
Maps, xv,
An Introduction to History and Myth in Early Modern Spain, 1,
PART I CREATION,
ONE The Forger between Friends and Enemies in Toledo, 29,
TWO The Jesuits, the Inquisition, and History, 63,
THREE How to Forge a History: The Authentic Sources of the False Chronicles, 99,
FOUR Jews, Arabic-Speakers, and New Saints: The False Chronicles and Controversy, 126,
FIVE The Debut of the Chronicles: Higuera's Republic of Sacred Letters, 144,
SIX In Defense of Local Saints: Higuera versus Rome, 163,
PART II: RECEPTION,
SEVEN Flawed Texts and the Negotiation of Authenticity, 201,
EIGHT The Cronicones in Local Religion: Historia Sacra Writ Small, 234,
NINE The Politics of the Cronicones in Madrid and Rome, 260,
TEN From Apocrypha to Forgery, 286,
Conclusion: New Saints, New Histories in Modern Spain, 309,
List of Abbreviations, 315,
Notes, 317,
Bibliography, 361,
Index, 405,