ALFONSO X, El Sabio (The Wise), of Castile. - B. in 1221 and d. in 1284, he succeeded his father Ferdinand III the Saint in 1252. Military preoccupations and political struggles saddened his reign: his imperial aspirations, poorly tolerated at home (of his unfortunate candidacy nothing remained to him but a memory in that title of rex electus Romanorum with which he had the naive vanity to adorn himself) brought him bitter disappointments; internally its peace was disturbed by the insubordination of the nobility, excited by unbridled ambitions, which he vainly attempted to placate with ample concessions; he aspired in vain to carry the forces of the reconquista as far as Africa; he was embittered by the rebellion of his second-born son Sancho, who obtained the succession by trampling on the rights of the infante de la Cerda (heir of the first-born Ferdinand, who died prematurely in 1275 and was supported by the king of France). Finally deposed by the "cortes" of Valladolid, he ended by invoking the aid of the Sultan of Morocco.
A master of law and doctrine, uncertain and inept in practice with his unstable and dubious politics, he succeeded in realizing none of his dearest aspirations during his long reign, whose significance on the plane of culture is nonetheless very high. A man of vast knowledge and broad tolerance, he made use, without distinction of race, nationality or religion, of the work of learned collaborators whom he summoned to his court in order to carry out a vast enterprise of organizing culture on the basis of translations and compilations and commentaries of numerous juridical, historical and scientific works.
Fruitful and fecund, in fact, was his action aimed at unifying the manifold and incongruous legislation of the municipal fueros, which Ferdinand III had already vaguely envisioned and which was embodied in that formidable juridical corpus that is the book of the Siete Partidas, for centuries remaining the sole source of law, and in which Roman and canon law, Digest and Decretals, Justinian Code and Fuero Juogo are harmonized and interpenetrated. The Espéculo, the Fuero real and other minor collections are inspired by the same spirit of unification.
The same breadth of intent inspired in the field of historiography the drafting of the General Historia, which remained interrupted at the narrative of the ancestry of the Virgin Mary, in which are turned to account, with logical adherence to the universalistic principles of the Wise King, the Bible and the classics, the Arab historians no less than St. Augustine, and the major medieval writers and works from Orosius to John of Garland and Lucas of Tuy, from the Roman de Troie to the Libro de Alexandre.
An equal attempt at unitary organization underlies the Crónica general, in which the history of Castile is set within that of the entire peninsula.
Among the scientific works, alongside the Libros del saber de astronomía, to which belong those Tablas alfonsinas that were famous throughout Europe until the 16th century, the Lapidario must not be forgotten, while to the group of miscellaneous and pleasant works belong, among others, the translation of Calila e Dimna, the work entitled Poridad de los Poridades, the Libros de ajedrez, dados e tablas, the Bonium o Bocados de oro, the Libro de la Montería.
A protector of musicians and poets and a poet himself, he gathered around him poets of Spain and foreigners, welcoming G. Riquier as well as B. Calvo, vying with them in delicate and conventional love poems or in shameless satires and obscene "shield" poems: poetry, however, which he, contravening his attempt at linguistic unification (for which he had imposed Castilian as the official language), cultivated in that Galician-Portuguese language that was by then generally adopted in lyric poetry in all the regions of the peninsula. Far richer is his sacred songbook (over 400 compositions), composed in praise of the Virgin, from which he drew suggestions and motifs from Latin collections, Spanish traditions and vernacular poems, which unfold there in a rich variety of metrical forms, and from which the precise and picturesque realistic touches do not jar, which the atmosphere of naive devotion seems to soften and veil. In it he reveals himself as one of the most sincere and fervent singers of the Virgin, whom he exalted with accents and motifs that would later be repeatedly taken up and elaborated in poetry.
Bibliography7 works
A. García Solalinde has also edited an anthology of the works of the Wise King (A. X. Antología de sus obras, 2 vols., Madrid 1922).
Literature: A. F. G. Bell, The 'Cantigas de S. María' of A. X, in Mod. Lang. Rev., 10 (1915), pp. 338-48; A. G. Solalinde, Intervención de A. X en la redacción de sus obras, in Rev. de fil. esp., 2 (1915), pp. 283-88; J. Ribera, La música de las Cantigas, Madrid 1922; J. M. Dihigo, Las Siete Partidas. Estudio linguístico, in Rev. de la fac. de filos. y cisne., Havana 1923; E. F. Dexter, Sources of the Cantigas of Alfonso of Sabio, Wisconsin 1926; R. Rübecamp, Die Sprache der altgalizischen Cantigas de S. María von A. X el Sabio, Hamburg 1933; J. A. Sánchez Pérez, A. X. el Sabio, Madrid 1935 (comprising a study, an anthology and a bibliography); H. Arखंड, La música de las Cantigas de S. María del rey A. el Sabio, Barcelona 1943; S. Pellegrini, A. X re di Castiglia, in Glanco, 1 (1945).
Jole Scudieri Ruggieri