Garcilaso de la Vega

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For the writer and historian of Hispanic-Inca descent, see Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.
Garcilaso de la Vega
Anonymous Spanish artist, c. 1550, Portrait of a Man with the Cross of a Knight of Alcántara, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel.[1][2][3]

Garcilaso de la Vega (Toledo, 1491/1503[4][5] – Nice, October 14, 1536)[6] was a Spanish poet and soldier of the Golden Age, considered one of the most influential figures of Spanish literature of the Renaissance.

A member of a noble Toledan family and a courtier of Emperor Charles V, he took an active part in military campaigns in Italy, France and Tunis. His life experience and his contact with Italian culture left a deep mark on his literary work, in which he introduced the metrical forms of Petrarchism (such as the sonnet and the eclogue) and a classicist ideal of harmony inspired by Italian Renaissance poetry.[7]

His brief but decisive poetic output, consisting of forty sonnets, three eclogues, two elegies and several canciones and epistles, brought about a renewal of Castilian poetic language and became a model for later generations of authors, from Fernando de Herrera to Luis de Góngora.[8] His figure embodies the humanist ideal of the courtier-soldier and poet, and his influence extended throughout all of Spanish Golden Age poetry.[9]

Biography

Born in Toledo between 1491 and 1503,[4][10] Garcilaso de la Vega was the third son of Garcilaso de la Vega (who died on September 8, 1512, three days after executing his codicil), Lord of Arcos and Grand Commander of León in the Order of Santiago, and of Sancha de Guzmán, Lady of Batres and Cuerva. His paternal grandparents were Pedro Suárez de Figueroa, son of Gómez I Suárez de Figueroa and Elvira Lasso de Mendoza, sister of the first Marquis of Santillana, and Blanca de Sotomayor (daughter of Fernando de Sotomayor and Mencía Vázquez de Goes, through whom he inherited the Lordship of Arcos). His mother, Sancha de Guzmán, was the daughter of Pedro de Guzmán, Lord of Batres (son of the chronicler Fernán Pérez de Guzmán), and of María de Rivera.[11]

He lost his father while still young and received a careful education at the Court, where in 1519 he met his great friend, the gentleman Juan Boscán. It was probably to him that the Toledan owed his great esteem for the lyric poetry of the Valencian Ausiàs March,[12] which left some trace in his work.[13]

In 1520 Garcilaso entered the service of King Charles I as a royal contino.[14] He learned Greek, Latin, Italian and French, as well as the art of fencing and how to play the cittern, the harp and the lute.

He was part of the retinue of Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo y Enríquez, 2nd Duke of Alba de Tormes, when Charles I landed at Santander in 1522. The following year he again received royal favor when he was appointed a member of the Order of Santiago and a gentleman of the House of Burgundy,[15] an organization in the service of the Crown which, together with the House of Castile, grouped together those who worked most closely with the Monarch.

Garcilaso did not neglect to strengthen his relations with the House of Alba, and in 1523 he took part, together with Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, the future Grand Duke of Alba, in the campaign of Fuenterrabía. This was the origin of a friendship that was later put to the test when Fernando interceded on Garcilaso's behalf before the Emperor himself on several occasions.[15]

In the following years, Garcilaso fought in the War of the Communities of Castile and was wounded in the action at Olías del Rey;[16] he also took part in the siege of his native city (1522). At the end of that same year he embarked, in the company of Juan Boscán and Pedro de Toledo, future Viceroy of Naples, on a relief expedition that sought (and failed) to prevent the fall of Rhodes to the Turks; he was again wounded, this time seriously. Some authors, however, dispute the possibility that Garcilaso took part in the expedition to Rhodes, since at the end of 1522 and part of 1523 he was accompanying the Emperor through the lands of Burgos, Logroño, Pamplona and Fuenterrabía.[17]

Plaque on the façade of San Agustín in Pamplona, recalling that Garcilaso was dubbed a knight of Santiago there on November 11, 1523

Back in Spain, he was dubbed a knight of the Order of Santiago on November 11, 1523, in the church of San Agustín in Pamplona,[18] and in 1524 he fought against the French at the siege of Fuenterrabía.

On his return to Toledo, he married Elena de Zúñiga in 1525,[19] a lady-in-waiting of Eleanor, sister of Charles I of Spain; for this reason Garcilaso became part of her retinue. Everything suggests that her marriage to Garcilaso was one of many aristocratic unions based on an agreement of interests. Two and a half years after their wedding, the couple were still living in the maternal home of the Laso de la Vega family on the present-day Calle de Esteban Illán, because of the housing shortage caused by the presence of the Court in the city, but on March 11, 1528 they were finally able to acquire some houses at nos. 2–4 calle de los Aljibes, a short distance from the family mansion. The couple could not spend much time together in this domestic space, for a year after its acquisition the gentleman began to travel in his capacity as a courtier of Charles I of Spain; Elena, however, continued to live in this house until her death in 1563, twenty-seven years after her husband.[20] In addition to the five children Garcilaso had with Elena de Zúñiga, before his marriage he also had a son with a Toledan Comunera lady, Guiomar Carrillo,[21] whom he recognized posthumously, Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa,[22] born around 1521.[23] In this regard, the most recent, best-documented and most complete biography of the poet[24] states that, apart from fleeting love affairs with Elvira, a peasant woman from Extremadura, and with a Neapolitan lady, three loves marked the poet's life: 1) Magdalena de Guzmán, a cousin who was a nun and the illegitimate daughter of his aunt María de Ribera, who becomes the Camila of Eclogue II; 2) Guiomar Carrillo, who is rendered as the Galatea of Eclogue I; and 3) Beatriz de Sá, second wife of Pedro Laso and Garcilaso's sister-in-law, known as «a mais fermosa molher que se achou em Portugal» (p. 599), although she can only very problematically be identified with the Elisa of Garcilaso's verses.

Around that time he began to write his first poems in accordance with the aesthetics of cancionero lyric, which he would soon discard; he also served for a time as regidor of his native city. The turning point in his lyric poetry came one day in 1526 in Granada, in the gardens of the Generalife and near the palace of the emperor, as Juan Boscán relates:

Being one day in Granada with Navagero, discussing with him matters of wit and letters, he asked me why I did not try in the Castilian language sonnets and other forms of verse used by the good authors of Italy: and not only did he say this to me lightly, but he even begged me to do it... Thus I began to attempt this kind of verse, in which I found some difficulty because it is very artful and has many peculiarities different from ours. But little by little I threw myself into it with ardor. Yet this would not have been enough to make me go very far, had Garcilaso, with his judgment—which, not only in my opinion, but in that of the whole world, has been held as a certain thing—not confirmed me in this my endeavor. And so, praising this purpose to me many times and finally winning me over with his example, for he too wished to follow this path, in the end he made me devote my spare time to it more seriously.

In that same year of 1526, on the occasion of the wedding of Charles I to Isabella of Portugal, he accompanied the Court on a journey through several Spanish cities and fell platonically in love with a Portuguese lady-in-waiting of the Queen, Isabel Freyre, whom he celebrated under the anagram of Elisa in his verses, which are dedicated to her. This lady was also the recipient of verses by his friend, the Portuguese poet and diplomat Francisco Sa de Miranda, under the name of Celia. A theory put forward by the Garcilaso scholar María del Carmen Vaquero suggests, however, that this Elisa may in fact have been the second wife of his brother Pedro Laso, the exceedingly beautiful Beatriz de Sá, a descendant of the French nobleman Maciot de Bettencourt and of a Guanche Princess, celebrated by numerous Portuguese poets.[25]

In 1528 he dictated his will in Barcelona, in which he acknowledged the paternity of his illegitimate son and assigned a small sum of money for his education; shortly afterwards he gave a collection of his works to Boscán for him to revise, and then left for Rome in 1529. He took part in the campaign against Florence[26] and attended the investiture of the King of Spain as Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, held in Bologna in February 1530, afterwards accompanying him to Mantua. From that city, on April 17, Charles authorized Garcilaso to return to Spain and granted him 80,000 maravedís a year for life as a reward for the services rendered, «without obligation to serve or reside at our court».[27]

After his return to Toledo, in the summer of 1530 Charles, through the mediation of the Empress Isabella, entrusted him with the task of traveling to France to verify the treatment that King Francis I of France was giving to his sister Eleanor of Austria, whom he had married in fulfillment of the Peace of the Ladies, and, incidentally, to spy on possible troop movements on the border.[27]

The following year, Garcilaso was a witness at the wedding of his nephew, a son of his brother the Comunero Pedro Lasso. The Emperor was displeased by Garcilaso's participation in a marriage that did not have his approval and ordered his arrest. He was apprehended in Tolosa and it was decided to confine him on an island in the Danube near Regensburg, described by the poet in his Canción III. The intervention of Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, 3rd Duke of Alba de Tormes, on Garcilaso's behalf proved crucial: taking advantage of the fact that the Turks were beginning to threaten Vienna that year, he made the Emperor see that Garcilaso was needed, so that he was mobilized to assist the Duke of Alba. The poet thus left the Danube in 1532, where he had by then practically become the guest of Count György Cseszneky de Milvány, castellan of Győr, and settled in Naples.

He very soon became integrated into the intellectual life of the city, which at that time revolved around the Pontanian Academy, and struck up friendships with poets such as Bernardo Tasso and Luigi Tansillo, as well as with the humanists Antonio Silesio and the future cardinal Jerónimo Seripando, recipients of some of his texts, and with literary theorists such as Antonio Sebastiani Minturno and, in particular, Mario Galeota, a poet in love with a disdainful Neapolitan woman, Violante Sanseverino, «the flower of Gnido», for whom he wrote the liras of his fifth canción; there he also met the Erasmian writer Juan de Valdés, who seems to allude to him, together with other gentlemen, in one of the last passages of his Diálogo de la lengua. Furthermore, Luis Zapata de Chaves tells an anecdote in his Miscelánea (1592) that reveals how integrated he was in the courtly world of Naples:

There was all the elegance and all the ladies of Italy, among whom was Garcilaso, and it was already sunset, which is the hour when falcons and goshawks feed most eagerly, and twilight, the hour when ladies are most comfortably visited, when the jealous servants came very early with candles, at which all the ladies and gentlemen were greatly annoyed, and the lady herself, and she said: "Oh blind and deaf people!" Garcilaso at once answered with the end of that same verse of Petrarch (which fitted there) "...qui si fà notte inanzi sera".[28][29]

In 1533 he visited Barcelona and delivered to Juan Boscán a letter, A la muy manífica señora doña Jerónima Palova de Almogávar,[30] which appeared in 1534 as a prologue to his Spanish translation of Baldassare Castiglione's The Courtier.

The poetic innovations of Garcilaso and Boscán were imitated at Court, and supporters of the old Castilian meters such as Cristóbal de Castillejo, although also imbued with the same spirit of the Renaissance, respectfully complained about the novelties:

They may well be punished
as Anabaptists
since by a private law
they are baptized again
and call themselves Petrarchists.
They have renounced the faith
of Castilian verses,
and after the Italian ones
they lose themselves, saying that
they are richer and more vigorous [...]
May God grant His glory to Boscán
and to Garci Laso, poet,
who, with no small toil
and in gallant style
upheld this sect [...]
They showed themselves contented
and openly mocked
the Spanish verses:
canciones and villancicos,
romances and such things,
arte mayor and real
and broken and short feet
and all our wealth.
And in place of these manners
of words already known
in our homespun verses
they sing other foreign ones,
new to our ears:
sonnets of great esteem,
madrigals and canciones
of differing lines,
octave and third rhyme
and other new inventions.
They despise anything
from coplas composed before
as base in quality and wretched;
they now use a certain prose
measured without rhymes [...]

— Cristóbal de Castillejo[31]

Garcilaso de la Vega, having been appointed alcaide of Ríjoles in 1534, took part in 1535 in the Tunis Campaign, and after the capture of La Goleta, in a cavalry engagement near the walls of Tunis, he was wounded by two lance thrusts, in the mouth and in the right arm.[32][33]

Tomb of Garcilaso de la Vega in the Convent of San Pedro Mártir, in Toledo.

Shortly afterwards, the Italian War of 1536–1538 broke out, the third war of Francis I of France against Charles V, and the 1536 expedition against France through Provence was Garcilaso's last military experience. The poet was appointed maestre de campo of an infantry tercio, embarking at Málaga in command of the 3,000 foot soldiers who made it up. During a reckless assault on a fortress at the end of September 1536, going into combat without defensive armor except for a rodela,[34] at Le Muy, near Fréjus, he was the first man to climb the scaling ladder, and, struck by a stone thrown by the defenders, he fell into the moat gravely wounded.[35][36] The Emperor, seized with rage at his impending and certain death, ordered the garrison to be hanged once the fortification had been taken. Moved to Nice, he died in that city a few days later, on October 14, attended by his friend Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandía and later canonized by the Catholic Church. Although he was initially buried in the monastery of Santo Domingo in Nice, his body was brought to Toledo at the order of his widow Elena two years later, in 1538, and placed in the Chapel of the Rosary of the Convent of San Pedro Mártir. There stands his kneeling alabaster statue alongside that of his son Íñigo de Guzmán, the only portrait of him that can be considered reliable. In 1869 the remains were exhumed to be taken to the Pantheon of Illustrious Men, and they were returned to the family chapel in 1900.[37]

Poetic career

Garcilaso de la Vega's poetry is divided by his stay in Naples (first in 1522–1523 and then in 1533). Before going to Naples his poetry was not marked by Petrarchan features; it was in Naples that he discovered the Italian authors. After his stay, his poetry abounded in features of Italian lyric poetry, influenced both by earlier authors, such as Francesco Petrarca, and by contemporary authors, such as Jacopo Sannazaro, who in 1504 was the author of Arcadia. Garcilaso made his own the world of Arcadia, in which sounds, colors, etc., invite reflection while accompanying the feelings. Garcilaso was also influenced by Ludovico Ariosto, from whom he took the theme of the madness of love.

In Italy Garcilaso strengthened his classicism, already learned from the Castilian humanists at Court, and rediscovered Virgil and his Bucolics, Ovid and his Metamorphoses, and Horace and his Odes, not forgetting other Greek authors whom he also studied.

File:Apolo y Dafne, soneto XIII, Garcilaso de la Vega.ogg

The poetic work of Garcilaso de la Vega, consisting of forty sonnets, five canciones, an ode in liras, two elegies, an epistle, three eclogues and eight Castilian coplas, as well as three odes and an epigram in Latin,[38] was first published in 1543, as an appendix to the Obras of Juan Boscán.[citation needed] The lyric output of Garcilaso de la Vega, the highest expression of the Renaissance in Castile, very soon became an indispensable reference for Spanish poets, who from then on could not ignore the metrical and aesthetic revolution he brought about in Spanish lyric poetry by introducing, together with Juan Boscán and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a series of stanza forms (tercet, sonnet, lira, octava real, blank hendecasyllables, canción in stanzas), the hendecasyllable verse and its tritonic rhythm, much more flexible than the rigid and monotonous one of the dodecasyllable, and the repertoire of themes, structures and stylistic devices of Petrarchism.

Garcilaso's language is clear and limpid, in keeping with the ideals of his friend Juan de Valdés: selection, precision and naturalness, and the spoken word rather than the «written» one; he prefers common and genuinely Castilian words to cultismos foreign to the language, seeking classical balance, the stylization of the Renaissance nobilitare of a vernacular language, and precision above all. As he states in his Third Eclogue:

But at times better heard are
pure wit and a tongue almost mute,
clean witnesses of an innocent spirit,
than the elaborateness of the eloquent.

That is, it is preferable to avoid pompous rhetoric and forced, learned expression so that poetry may appear sincere, genuine and spontaneous; the aim of poetry is to be heard, it is the communication of feelings, not the courtly arousal of admiration. Garcilaso, then, prefers an intimate, personal and confidential tone in poetry to the rhetoric and pomp of more martial tones or to the learned courtly display of wit, thereby laying the first stone of a Hispanic lyric current that still pulsed in the poetry of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Echoing the linguistic and stylistic ideal of his friend Juan de Valdés, he wrote in the prologue to his friend Juan Boscán's translation of The Courtier, by Baltasar de Castiglione:

He preserved one thing in the Castilian language that very few have achieved, which was to flee from affectation without falling into any dryness; and with great purity of style he used terms that are very courtly and very well accepted by good ears, and neither new nor seemingly unused by people.

Garcilaso's style is highly distinctive: he takes special care with the musicality of the verse through the use of alliteration and a rhythm built around the three main axes of the hendecasyllable. He makes frequent use of the epithet with the intention of creating an idealized world in which objects become archetypal and stylized in the manner of Platonism. On the other hand, he is very skilled at describing the fleeting and elusive; his poetry produces a vivid sense of time and is imbued with melancholy at the passing of life, what he called his «dolorido sentir» (aching feeling):

Title page of Las obras de Boscán y algunas de Garcilaso de la Vega repartidas en cuatro libros, Barcelona, Carlos Amorós, 1543.

They will not be able to take from me the aching
feeling, unless first
they take from me my senses.

The landscape is Arcadian, but set strictly in his estates of Toledo, on the bank of the Tagus river.[39] Mythological themes appear as an alternative to religious ones: Garcilaso did not write a single verse on a religious theme. Mythology aroused in him a great artistic emotion, and he identified fully with certain myths such as that of Apollo and Daphne. As Margot Arce Blanco points out,[40] his favorite themes are feelings of absence, the conflict between reason and passion, the passage of time, and the celebration of an idyllic nature that serves as a contrast to the poet's aching feelings. He believes in an afterworld that is not the Christian religious one, but the pagan one:

With you, hand in hand,
let us seek other meadows and other rivers,
other valleys, flowery and shady,
where I may rest, and forever see you
before my eyes,
without fear or dread of losing you.

— First Eclogue

Early editions

In March 1542, Boscán and his wife signed a contract for the publication of a volume entitled Las obras de Boscán y algunas de Garcilaso de la Vega. The following year, under the direction of the widow, the printing was completed [Barcelona: Carles Amorós, 1543], and the book was published. Two unauthorized reprints appeared immediately, one in Barcelona and the other in Lisbon. In 1544 two authorized reprints appeared, one in Medina del Campo and the other in Antwerp; over the following thirteen years at least one reprint appeared every year. After 1557 the joint edition no longer sold out so quickly. It is not surprising, then, that in 1569 a Salamanca bookseller had the happy idea of publishing Garcilaso's poetry alone in a separate volume. This printing is the starting point of the important annotated edition by El Brocense. In 1574 there appeared, with six previously unpublished sonnets and five coplas, the little volume of the «Obras del excelente Garci Lasso de la Vega, con anotaciones y enmiendas del licenciado Francisco Sánchez, catedrático de retórica en Salamanca». This corrected and annotated edition was to be the best and the most widely circulated and known of all, being reprinted in 1577 (revised), 1581, 1589 (revised), 1600, 1604 and 1612. In addition to the added texts (three more sonnets in 1577) and the concise and learned annotations, El Brocense's edition has the great value of preserving for us the most significant variants of a good manuscript that was later lost. In 1580 another annotated edition was published in Seville, with the much more extensive annotations of the learned poet Fernando de Herrera.

Later recognition

From the poets of the Golden Age to Rafael Alberti in his “Elegy to Garcilaso” (If Garcilaso were to return, / I would be his squire; / for he was a good knight…) or Miguel Hernández in his "Eclogue to Garcilaso" (A bright knight of dew, / a shepherd, a warrior of night mist, / he is eternal beneath the Tagus; beneath the river / of bronze, resolute and transparent…), and including the "Eclogue, Elegy, Ode" of Luis Cernuda, who devoted a profound essay to him, many writers have acknowledged Garcilaso's great work, contributing to his exaltation as the “prince of Castilian poets” and to his establishment as the paradigm of the poet-soldier, particularly in the postwar poetry grouped under the name of Garcilasismo.

Garcilaso himself was the first to describe himself as caught in this duality between the profession of arms and his literary vocation, a split visible throughout his entire work, but expressed in the verse “taking now the sword, now the pen.” Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer described him as “A complete type of the most brilliant century of our history” (“Enterramientos de Garcilaso de la Vega y su padre en Toledo”).[41] And Miguel de Cervantes considered him the perfect model of a poet, as he expresses in La Galatea and Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. In the latter he places in the mouth of the protagonist Periandro these words of praise for the never sufficiently praised poet Garcilaso de la Vega, stating that he had seen, read, looked upon and admired them, and as he saw the bright river, he said: "We shall not say: Here Salicio brought his song to an end, but: Here Salicio began his song; here in his eclogues he surpassed himself; here his pipe resounded, at whose sound the waters of this river stood still, the leaves of the trees did not stir, and the winds, ceasing, made way so that the admiration for his song might pass from tongue to tongue and from people to people throughout all those of the earth".[42]

See also

References

  1. ↑ «Bildnis eines Mannes mit Kreuz des Alcántara-Ordens», Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Portraitgalerie.
  2. ↑ «El retrato de Garcilaso», in 500 años de Garcilaso. Biografía del poeta. Centro Virtual Cervantes.
  3. ↑ Gallego Morell, Antonio. «El Garcilaso de la Galería Kassel», p. 43. December 26, 1957. ABC.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 José Luis Pérez López, «La fecha de nacimiento de Garcilaso de la Vega a la luz de un nuevo documento biográfico», Criticón, no. 78, 2000, pp. 45-57.
  5. ↑ Biografía de Garcilaso de la Vega. 500 años de Garcilaso. Razones de una exposición. Centro Virtual Cervantes.
  6. ↑ Keniston, Hayward. Garcilaso de la Vega. A critical study of his life and works, New York, Hispanic Society of America, 1922, p. 158.
  7. ↑ Rivers, Elias L. (1972). Garcilaso de la Vega (in español). Gredos. pp. 15–23.
  8. ↑ Lapesa, Rafael (1985). La trayectoria poética de Garcilaso (in español). Gredos. pp. 9–12.
  9. ↑ Elliott, J. H. (2002). Imperial Spain, 1469–1716. Penguin Books. pp. 133–135.
  10. ↑ Calvo López, Mariano (1992). «Calle de Esteban Illán (la casa natal del poeta). Ruta de Garcilaso de a Vega», en Rutas literarias de Toledo (in español). Toledo: Cuarto Centenario. pp. 64–65. ISBN 978-84-940811-2-5. In all likelihood Garcilaso was born in his parents' houses in Toledo, which occupied almost the entire even-numbered side of the present-day Calle de Esteban Illán. The main house, located toward the middle of the street (nos. 6 and 8), was complemented by other ancillary houses on either side, and together they occupied practically the entire block that today houses the Faculty of Humanities. The poet lived in these houses until two and a half years after his wedding, when in 1528 he acquired his own home very nearby.
  11. ↑ El poeta Garcilaso no vistió el hábito de Alcántara. Errónea atribución de su retrato. Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, p. 532 ff. Laurencín, Francisco Rafael de Uhagón, Marqués de. Digital edition: Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2008. Digital edition based on Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, volume 65 (1914), pp. 532-556.
  12. ↑ McNerney, Kathleen (1979). "Ausiàs March and Juan Boscán". Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Retrieved July 14, 2014.
  13. ↑ Rivers, Elías L. "Garcilaso leído por Lapesa". 500 años de Garcilaso (in español). Centro Virtual Cervantes. Retrieved July 14, 2014.
  14. ↑ That is, a continuous servant of the King, as stated by Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, José Luis. "Garcilaso y Carlos V". 500 años de Garcilaso (in español). Centro Virtual Cervantes. Retrieved July 11, 2012.. Very probably, his post was that of contino hombre de armas, that is, a permanent member of the royal guard: see Montero Tejada, Rosa María (January–April 2001). "Los continos "hombres de armas" de la Casa Real castellana (1495-1516): una aproximación de conjunto". Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia (in español). 198 (cuaderno 1). Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia: 103–130. ISSN 0034-0626. Retrieved July 11, 2012.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Sánchez Molero, José Luis Gonzalo. "Garcilaso y Carlos V". 500 años de Garcilaso (in español). Centro Virtual Cervantes. Retrieved July 11, 2012.
  16. ↑ Calvo López, Mariano (1992). «La Guerra de las Comunidades (1520-1522), en Garcilaso de la Vega. Entre el verso y la espada (in español). Toledo: Servicio de Publicaciones, Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha. pp. 63–80. ISBN 84-7788-969-4. Both Garcilaso and his brother, Pedro Laso de la Vega, took an active part in the War of the Communities of Castile. The poet was on the side of Charles V, in his capacity as a courtier of the Emperor, while his elder brother held the leadership of the rebels. Pedro abandoned the Comunero cause as soon as the struggle took on the character of a popular demand, alien to his aristocratic interests, and fled to Portugal together with other nobles. For his part, Garcilaso, whose fate as a younger son directed him from a very early age toward royal service, would spend a large part of his life on the battlefield, much to his regret: the poet-soldier would describe himself as a “hired mercenary.” In the Battle of Olías, which took place on August 17, 1521, Garcilaso joined those loyal to the Emperor under the command of Juan de Ribera at the Castle of El Águila, and from there they devoted themselves to harassing the supply lines of the Toledan rebels. Among the conditions established in the armistice between the imperial besiegers and the besieged Toledans, María Pacheco requested that Garcilaso, among other imperial knights, not enter the city until the Emperor's return. Three days after María's flight to Portugal (February 3, 1522), Garcilaso would enter Toledo and hasten to restore the family patrimony and obtain a pardon for his brother.
  17. ↑ Cf. Mariano Calvo López, La leyenda de Rodas, in Garcilaso de la Vega. Entre el verso y la espada, pp. 94-96.
  18. ↑ Centro Virtual Cervantes. "Garcilaso, caballero de Santiago". 500 años de Garcilaso (in español). Retrieved May 19, 2012.
  19. ↑ Garcilaso had five children with Elena de Zúñiga, as recorded in his will, drawn up in Barcelona on July 25, 1529: Garcilaso, who died at an early age, in 1537; Íñigo de Zúñiga, who died in 1555 at the age of 25; Pedro de Guzmán, born in 1529; Sancha, married to Antonio de Puertocarrero; and Francisco, who also died while still a child.[1]
  20. ↑ Cf. Mariano Calvo López, «Calle de los Aljibes (la casa matrimonial). Ruta de Garcilaso de a Vega», in Rutas literarias de Toledo, pp. 68-69.
  21. ↑ "Las mujeres de Garcilaso". abc (in español). January 29, 2011. Retrieved August 13, 2021.
  22. ↑ Vaquero Serrano, María del Carmen; López de la Fuente, Juan José (2011). "El desdichado (poeta) Don Lorenzo Laso. Vida del primogénito de Garcilaso de la Vega" (PDF). Lemir (in español). 15: 59–134. Retrieved January 23, 2012.
  23. ↑ Also mentioned in his will: «Let Don Lorenzo, my son, be supported at some good university and learn the sciences of Humanity until he knows this faculty well; and afterwards, if he should be inclined to become a cleric, let him study Canon Law, and if not, let him devote himself to Laws; and let him always be supported until he has something of his own».
  24. ↑ Cf. María del Carmen Vaquero Serrano, Garcilaso, príncipe de poetas. Una biografía. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica and Marcial Pons Historia, 2013.
  25. ↑ Vaquero Serrano, María del Carmen. «La fecha de muerte de Beatriz de Sá, la más que posible Elisa de Garcilaso», in Lemir 15 (2011): pp. 235-244. Retrieved January 18, 2012.
  26. ↑ Fernández de Navarrete 1850, pp. 26–27.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Centro Virtual Cervantes. "Entre Illescas y Sevilla: dos bodas reales". 500 años de Garcilaso (in español). Retrieved October 24, 2014.
  28. ↑ It is a quotation from Petrarch's Trionfo della Morte: Io son colei che sì importuna e fera, / chiamata son da voi, e sorda e cieca / gente, a cui si fa notte innanzi sera.
  29. ↑ See Luis Zapata de Chaves, Miscelánea. Silva de curiosos casos. Selection and ed. by Antonio Rodríguez Moñino, Madrid: CIAP S. A. n. d., p. 71.
  30. ↑ Guillermo Suazo Pascual, ed. (2004). Garcilaso de la Vega: Obra completa (in español). Madrid: Edaf. p. 379. ISBN 84-414-1506-4. Retrieved April 22, 2014.
  31. ↑ Cristóbal de Castillejo, Obra completa, ed. by Rogelio Reyes Cano, Madrid: Turner, 1999, pp. 263-269.
  32. ↑ Fernández de Navarrete 1850, pp. 65–66.
  33. ↑ Centro Virtual Cervantes. "Garcilaso desterrado". 500 años de Garcilaso (in español). Retrieved October 24, 2014.
  34. ↑ Fernández de Navarrete 1850, pp. 83–85.
  35. ↑ Fernández de Navarrete 1850, pp. 177–180.
  36. ↑ Centro Virtual Cervantes. "La última batalla". 500 años de Garcilaso (in español). Retrieved October 24, 2014.
  37. ↑ Cf. Mariano Calvo López, « Epílogo. Más allá de la muerte», in Garcilaso de la Vega. Entre el verso y la espada, pp. 249-253.
  38. ↑ Pascual Barea, Joaquín (2002). "El epigrama latino de Garcilaso de la Vega a Hernando de Acuña: edición crítica y traducción, autoría y comentario literario". Humanismo y pervivencia del Mundo Clásico: homenaje al profesor Antonio Fontán (in español). 3. Alcañiz-Madrid: IEH-CSIC: 1049–1096.
  39. ↑ Cf. Mariano Calvo López, « Mural junto al río (las ninfas del Tajo). Ruta de Garcilaso de la Vega», in Rutas literarias de Toledo, pp. 76-77. In an elevated spot above the gorge of the Tagus, next to the San Martín Bridge (Toledo) and on a stretch of the old wall of the Jewish Quarter, there is a mural on which some octaves from Garcilaso's Eclogue III can be read: “Painted there the mighty river could be seen / which, confined to a harsh narrowness, / almost encircled a hill all around, / rushing with force and with noise; […] It was set upon the sublime summit / of the hill, and from there over the sown fields, that illustrious and bright mass / adorned with ancient buildings. […]”. The bucolic and mythological world of this eclogue would be evoked in Chapter VIII of the Second Part of Cervantes's Quixote, when Don Quixote contradicts Sancho's vision of Dulcinea as a peasant woman and not a noble lady: “Ill do you remember, oh Sancho, those verses of our poet in which he depicts for us the work done there in their crystal dwellings by those four nymphs who raised their heads from the beloved Tagus and sat down in the green meadow to work on those rich fabrics that the ingenious poet describes there, all of them of gold, silk and pearls, interwoven and woven.”
  40. ↑ Margot Arce Blanco, Garcilaso de la Vega, Madrid: Casa editorial Hernando, 1930.
  41. ↑ Cf. Mariano Calvo López, Prólogo. Entre el verso y la espada, p. 15
  42. ↑ "Toledo, Cervantes y Garcilaso". ABC, Artes &Letras Castilla La Mancha (in español). January 14, 2016. Retrieved September 24, 2021.

Bibliography

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