INTRODUCTION

The literary achievements of the lord of Villena Juan Manuel (1282-1348) have been the source of considerable scholarly interest over the years, as the briefest perusal of Danicl Dcvoto's bibliography Introducción al estudio de don Juan Manuel will confirm. Scant critical attention, however, has been paid to his eventful political career. Perhaps this is because the period in which he lived, one of royal minorities and internecine struggles, is less immediately appealing to the student of Spanish history than those which it bridges (the paucity of books and articles treating the history of the reigns of Fernando IV and Alfonso XI certainly lends credence to this hypothesis). Or perhaps it is because there are no surviving chancery registers for the Castilian kings that reigned during his lifetime. Whatever the reasons, it is certainly an oddity that only one serious examination of the life of this colourful and controversial character exists.

That work is Andrés Giménez Soler's 1932 publication Don Juan Manuel: biografía y estudio crítico, which, as the title suggests, deals with both the life and the literature of Juan Manuel. The biography, one hundred and eighteen pages long, has much to recommend it: it is colourful, insightful, and prefers chancery evidence over narrative testimony for source material. But it also has its failings. There are no notes accompanying the main text, which means that what is written cannot be checked against its source material. Many important facts and events are omitted. And there are numerous – mostly careless – errors.

The primary purpose of this new work is to deliver a fuller and more thoroughgoing account of the political career of Juan Manuel. It is based principally on the chancery material that was available to Giménez Soler, yet not fully exploited, and on other documentary evidence that has since come to light or been personally excavated from Castilian archives. The royal chronicles of Fernán Sánchez, spanning the years 1252-1350, play only a supporting role. Yes, the temptation to rely heavily on these fertile sources was naturally great; but it would have been negligent to so do since they are strongly biased against the contemporary aristocracy in general, and Juan Manuel in particular.

The biography follows a chronological trajectory, allowing the deeds of this prince to be understood in their immediate context. It deals only with the facts and facets of his life which are central to Castilian diplomacy. Consequently, this work should serve not just as a guide to the career of Juan Manuel but also as a resource for those with a wider interest in the politics of early fourteenth-century Castile. An overview of this period is currently lacking: reference accounts of the reigns of Fernando IV and Alfonso XI are available (written by Cesar González Mínguez and José Sánchez-Arcilla Bernal respectively), but both works are based on the unreliable royal narratives and are too detailed for most.

The underpinning approach to the writing of this work was to concentrate on what can be known for sure about Juan Manuel – the facts of his life. A conscious decision was made to avoid lengthy speculation about his motives, ambitions, and worldview, chiefly because the surviving historical evidence relating to this nobleman is insufficient for a fair evaluation of the workings of his mind. History is, at the best of times, epistemologically fragile and incorrigibly interpretive. Historians routinely disagree on the motivations and ambitions of contemporary political figures – so what chance then for the historian of medieval Iberia? Armed with a set of values which cannot be anything like that possessed by a fourteenth-century Castilian aristocrat, I have done my best to make (some) sense of what Juan Manuel achieved in the political sphere during his lifetime. If the reader finds his or her understanding of the man, and his period also, furthered by the present work, I will have achieved something.