Chronicle of Alfonso X. Translated by Shelby Thacker and José Escobar. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. ISBN: 0-8131-2218-X.  $36.00.

For a scholar of England or northern Europe, a review of the translation of a medieval chronicle normally focuses on how the translator’s work differs from that of the long line of academic interlocutors who have dealt with the selfsame work over the years. This is seldom the case with Spanish chronicles of the medieval centuries which are infrequently translated into English. It is with great pleasure, then, that I note the publication of the first such translation of the extremely important, fourteenth-century work, the Chronicle of Alfonso X. Though the reign of the great polymath/sovereign of Castile-León, Alfonso X “el Sabio” (1252-1282)has been extremely well explored during the last three decades in the works of John Keller [Alfonso X, el Sabio. New York, 1967], Robert I. Burns, S.J., [Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance. Philadelphia, 1990], and Joseph O’Callaghan [The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X. Philadelphia, 1993], the Chronicle of Alfonso X has been largely ignored except from a literary point-of-view.

Professors Thacker and Escobar are to be commended for transforming the nascent Castilian of the fourteenth-century into a readable English version which follows faithfully the meaning and arrangement of the original text. To firmly place the Chronicle in its proper historical context, this edition relies on Joseph O’Callaghan’s well-documented and organized discussion of Alfonso X’s life and the mechanisms of the Chronicle’s formation. Almost all the text notes are beholden to Dr. O’Callaghan’s encyclopedic knowledge of the era. Despite these efforts to round out the background of the Chronicle, the translators have failed to provide an adequate index for either the historical or literary investigator.

In some ways, Professors Thacker and Escobar have unnecessarily narrowed their presentation of the Castilian monarch by not including a contemporary assessment of him by the great, eastern Spanish king, Jaume I (1213-1276). As his father-in-law, rival, and fellow warrior against the Peninsula’s Muslim principalities, Jaume, in his great chronicle/autobiography, the “Book of Deeds” (Liber dels Feyts) often remembers the history he shares with his son-in-law very differently than Alfonso did. For example, while Alfonso, in Chapter 10 of the Chronicle, describes his campaigns in Murcia of 1265-1266 as a strictly Castilian operation, Jaume, in Chapters 382-454 of the Liber dels Feyts, describes in great detail how he put family honor above that of his own lands to aid his daughter and son-in-law in successfully completing the Murcian war and turning all the territories it gained to Alfonso.  Additionally, in Chapter 18 of the Chroncle, Alfonso talks of the 1269 marriage of his son Fernando to the French princess, Blanche, and includes the entire eminent wedding-list except for his father-in-law. For his part, Jaume, in Chapters 495-499 of the Liber dels Feyts, gives a very full account of the lavish wedding and even recalls some of the Polonius-like advice he gave to his son-in-law in the midst of the ceremonies.

Despite the above reservations, de rigueur for the scholar of the Crown of Aragon, I hail this new translation as a vehicle for opening up to English-speaking audiences many of the forgotten or misunderstood political and military aspects of Alfonso X’s tumultuous reign. 

 

Donald Kagay

Albany State University