Dawn of a Dynasty by Kinkade Richard;

Author:Kinkade, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Epilogue

Many years ago, when I was first contemplating the need to place the life and times of Infante Manuel in proper perspective within the reign of his brother Alphonse the Wise, the major obstacle at that time seemed to be the very real lack of concrete historical evidence to fill the informational void surrounding this enigmatic figure, who appeared to have played an important though largely undefinable role during the reign of his older brother. Today, however, the major obstacle is not a dearth of evidence but a surfeit of facts and figures that attest to the dominant role he played in the government of Castile-León for over thirty years, one that very nearly points to him as the monarch’s alter ego. In fact, we may state with some assurance that Manuel was successful precisely because he was the polar opposite of his older sibling. Alfonso X was an idealistic leader, a creative genius, eminent scholar, and patron of the arts though often impetuous, unrealistic, and capricious. Manuel was perhaps the perfect complement to his brother. He was essentially the consummate bureaucrat, a talented and level-headed diplomat with a pragmatic perspective and the ability to put into practice the grandiose and often unrealistic schemes of his brilliant, erratic, and more creative brother. Infante Manuel was not an intellectual or patron of the arts, not a lawmaker, historian, scientist, or musician, but a materialistic, rational, disciplined, and well-organized administrator capable of effectively managing the everyday affairs of the realm as the king’s alférez, majordomo, and closest advisor, maintaining a reliable sense of equilibrium and balance at court that often seemed to elude the temperamental and impulsive sovereign. Where Alfonso was generous, trusting, often ingenuous and loyal to a fault, Manuel was acquisitive, practical, and prudent, a keen student of realpolitik, often dispassionate, shrewd, and calculating, inherently cautious, and invariably discreet. Unfortunately, however, Alfonso’s excesses far too often exceeded Manuel’s ability to contain or moderate them, and when the king became increasingly incapacitated by a series of acute ailments, Manuel ultimately realized he could no longer control his brother’s erratic behaviour and that the prudent course at this crucial juncture could only be an alliance with his nephew Infante Sancho to preserve the fiscal solvency and political integrity of the kingdom. Our task at this point is to place all of the evidence into proper perspective while arriving at several key conclusions with regard to the influence Infante Manuel exercised over his brother and generations of Castilian monarchs over the next three hundred years.

Born in Carrión de los Condes in 1234, the youngest of seven surviving children of Fernando III and Beatrice of Swabia, Infante Manuel was raised in Pampliega and Villalmuño by his ayo Pedro López de Ayala, a scion of the House of Haro, the most distinguished noble family of Vizcaya and intimately related to the royal house of Castile. Infante Manuel’s closest childhood companion was Alfonso García, the son of García Fernández, Queen Mother Berenguela’s majordomo and a descendant

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