Juan Latino

Juan Latino
Born	1518 (1518) Sub-Saharan Africa
Died	1596 (aged 77–78) Granada
Resting place	Church of Santa Ana Ver
Other name	Juan de Sessa
Education	University of Granada
Occupations	Writer, humanist, musician, university professor
Employer	University of Granada
Spouse	Ana Carleval

Juan Latino (Sub-Saharan Africa, c. 1518 – 1596, Granada) was a Black writer, humanist, musician and university professor who held the Chair of Grammar and Latin Language at the University of Granada in the 16th century, during the period known as the European Renaissance.

Biography

Although León Roque de Santiago, his bitterest enemy in both the literary and the personal sphere, always strove to spread the falsehood that Juan Latino had been born in Baena from the union of a Black slave woman and the Duke of Sessa, there is sufficient documentary evidence attesting that he was in fact born in Sub-Saharan Africa, as he himself always stated ("Aethiopum terris venit") (it should be remembered that at that time the place name "Ethiopia" referred in a general way to Sub-Saharan Africa).

Captured by Portuguese slave traders in 1518 together with his parents while he was still a child, he was transported to the Portuguese Algarve. From there he was taken to Moguer, and then to the Convent of San Francisco of Seville, where he was baptized and learned to read and write, after which he finally ended up in the service of the family of the fourth Count of Cabra, Luis Fernández de Córdoba, heir of the Great Captain.

In this way Juan Latino grew up in Baena, initially assigned to work in the stables, and later to the care of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, a boy of almost the same age and heir to the Duchy of Sessa. Together with him he received instruction in Latin, which he expanded on his own by reading treatises on etymology and the works of classical authors such as Ovid, Propertius and Tibullus, to the point of becoming able to read and translate the Latin Bible perfectly by himself.

In the second decade of the 16th century the family moved to Granada after the death of Don Luis Fernández de Córdova, and there, now under the name of Juan de Sessa, he studied for the Bachelor's degree and the Licentiate in liberal arts, progressing rapidly in every discipline he undertook. He attended the chair of the famous grammarian Pedro de Mota, where he stood out among the other students, especially for his mastery of the classical languages, a skill for which he began to be known by the nickname "Latino", and was regarded as a "rara avis in terra corbo simillima nigro". He also distinguished himself as a writer of musical scores, a player of the monochord and a skilled performer on the vihuela, organ, lute and harp, as well as a singer.

During those early years he was invited to the gatherings of poets and musicians held in the Cuadra Dorada of the Mansion of the Granada Venegas, where he read his epigrams and mingled with distinguished figures such as Luis Barahona de Soto, Gaspar de Baeza, Pedro de Padilla, Hernando de Acuña and Hurtado de Mendoza.

Courtyard of the University of Granada (1536).

The University of Granada had just been born in 1526, five months after the arrival of the Emperor in the city, and, after the Papal Bull was granted, it began to graduate bachelors in the year 1533. On February 4, 1546, before the Archbishop, the Oidor of the Real Chancillería, the Count of Tendilla, and many other gentlemen, Juan Latino received the degree of Bachelor together with thirty-eight other fellow students. He was then twenty-eight years old.

At the age of thirty he was finally manumitted, which was the name given to the process of officially freeing a slave, although in reality he had already lived to all intents and purposes as a free man for quite some time. From that moment he began to give private lessons, and among the houses he visited to impart his learned and varied literary and artistic teachings was that of the Duke's administrator, the Licentiate Carleval, whose daughter, the young Ana Carleval, became his pupil and his lover. Ana was famous throughout the city for her extraordinary beauty and had initially been promised by her father to Hernando de Válor y Córdoba, who would later become known as Abén Humeya, leader of the Rebellion of the Alpujarras. However, it was Juan Latino who succeeded in winning the heart of the beautiful young woman, and despite all the obstacles, this most unusual relationship came to fruition. The marriage took place in 1548, perhaps prompted by some fait accompli, as was insinuated by the Sevillian playwright Diego Ximénez del Enciso, who composed a comedy called "Juan Latino", based on his love affair with his pupil and future wife, who came from Granada's high society.

The marriage had the unconditional support of the Duke and his wife María de Mendoza, who was moreover godmother to their first daughter, the mulatta Juana, at the baptism that took place on June 30, 1549. Such a picturesque union in the Spain of the time, even with the support mentioned, was not very frequent, and it would have been entirely forbidden in other European societies of that same period, or even much more modern ones, where a legal union between a Black slave and a young lady of high society would have been intolerable. This marriage constitutes irrefutable testimony to the open-mindedness of Spanish society at that time, which in later centuries would engage throughout the world in uninhibited and unprejudiced racial mixing, in many cases encouraged by the Government and the Church themselves, something that was nevertheless not imitated by other European powers in their own colonies.

On April 4, 1552, his second child, Bernardino, was born, followed on July 22, 1556, by Ana, and finally on March 5, 1559, by Juan, all in the family home located on Calle de Santa Ana, between the Church of the same name and the small square of the Cabrera bridge, next to the Darro River. The family's material well-being was assured, as Ana Carleval had inherited part of her father's property. In addition, Juan Latino had the salary from the Chair of Grammar and Latin Language at the University of Granada, which he had obtained after it fell vacant in 1556 on the death of the eminent Pedro Mota. Archbishop Pedro Guerrero, a great friend and defender of Juan Latino, interceded on his behalf on that occasion, and the chair was finally granted to him on August 8, 1556. That same year, on December 31, he was awarded the Licentiate, so that from then on he could attend the university faculty meetings with full rights, setting a new and unprecedented milestone in Europe among Black scholars.

In addition to his learning, Juan Latino also stood out for his extreme shrewdness, which allowed him to mix with the highest personalities of the age, winning the favor of powerful benefactors and keeping his enemies at bay. His cunning earned him the following allusion from Miguel de Cervantes himself, in the prologue of Don Quixote:

"For since it did not please Heaven / that you should turn out as crafty (ladino) / as the Black man Juan Latino".

Lope de Vega also dedicated some verses to him:

"Not so white in Granada / was Juan Latino, who taught the daughter / of a veinticuatro; / and though he was Black and a slave / because his mother was a slave / of the illustrious Duke of Sessa, / honor of Spain and of Italy, / he came to marry her / who was studying grammar, / and he taught her to conjugate / upon reaching amo, amas".

When John of Austria settled in Granada with all his arms and baggage to put down the Rebellion of the Alpujarras, which took place in 1568, Juan Latino composed for him a poem about that stay. That work led to Juan Latino being commissioned to write a great poem entitled "Austriada", an epic composition in Latin hexameters that sang of the great feat of the victory of Lepanto, for which it is supposed that, in order to gather first-hand information, he would have held several interviews in person with the illustrious military commander.

In 1578 his protector and, to all intents and purposes, stepbrother, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, died, and Juan Latino dedicated a heartfelt elegy to him. In it he recalled how much he owed him for having overcome prejudice, treating him as a brother and, in short, allowing him to be a free and educated man. In this regard he remarked to the new Archbishop, Juan Méndez de Salvatierra, who was also of humble birth, that "so great is the power of letters that, had we lacked them, neither would you have left the fields behind a plow, nor I a stable currying horses".

Juan Latino fell seriously ill during 1586 and stopped attending the university faculty meetings for almost the whole of that year. His attendance is recorded again on March 12, 1587, by then with greatly diminished sight, which degenerated into total blindness, though this did not prevent him from continuing to teach with the help or substitution of his favorite pupil, Melchor Navarro. Already blind, he must have met Saint John of the Cross, who at that time was in Granada founding the convent and church of Los Mártires.

Juan Latino died as an old man, over 80 years of age, in 1596, and was buried in the crypt of the high altar of the Church of Santa Ana in Granada together with his wife, Doña Ana de Carvajal. The Latin epitaph placed over their tombs read as follows:

"The wise man of Granada, teacher of the brilliant youth and a pious orator, excellent in doctrine and in morals, son of Ethiopian parents of Black lineage, having left childhood behind began the studies of salvation and sang the deeds of the august House of Austria; Latino lies in this tomb. He will rise again with his faithful wife."

Works

The main surviving poetic output of Juan Latino is contained in three volumes:

• Epigramas (Ad catholicum pariter... Philippum, Deque Sanctissimi Pii Quinti... y Austrias Carmen.), (1573), compositions dedicated to the presumptive heir to the crown, Fernando, son of Philip II and his second wife, Doña María of Portugal, born in the year 1571, compositions dedicated to Pope Pius V, and his longest poetic composition, Austriadis Carmen, the first poetic work, with a verified date, that refers to the Battle of Lepanto (which took place on October 7, 1571). He composed it in less than a year, since the printing privilege is dated October 1572, and it uses the difficult humanistic Latin of the period, full of evocations of Virgil and of a grand rhetorical style.
• De translatione corporum regalium (1576), a meticulous and detailed account of the transfer, by order of Philip II, of the royal bodies deposited in Granada to the pantheon of the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial: that of his mother the Empress Isabella, his first wife María of Portugal and his two brothers Fernando and Juan. Published together with the account is the set of epigrams that decorated the catafalques.
• Ad Excellentissimum et Invictissimum D. D. Gonzalum Ferdinandez a Corduba, (1585), a heartfelt elegy to his friend and protector.

Bibliography

• Juan Naveros Sánchez and María Eugenia Santos Flores, El negro Juan Latino, gloria de España y de su raza".
• MARÍN OCETE, A.: "El negro Juan Latino. Ensayo de un estudio biográfico y crítico", Revista del Centro de Estudios Históricos de Granada y su Reino, 1923 and 1924, pp. 97 102 and 25 82
• LA AUSTRIADA DE JUAN LATINO, introduction, translation and notes by JOSÉ A. SÁNCHEZ MARÍN, Editorial Universidad de Granada, 1981.
• José Antonio Sánchez Marín, María Nieves Muñoz Martín: Las elegías de Juan Latino, in Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico: actas del I Simposio sobre Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico, (Alcañiz, May 8 to 11, 1990) / José María Maestre Maestre, Joaquín Pascual Barea (coordinators) Vol. 2, 1993, pp. 1003-1020, includes the contents presented at: Simposio Sobre Humanismo y Pervivencia del Mundo Clásico (1990, Alcañiz)
• José González Vázquez: Juan Latino, imitador de Virgilio, Estudios de filología latina, No. 3, 1983 (issue dedicated to: Bimilenario de Virgilio), pp. 129-138
• J.A. SÁNCHEZ MARIN-Mª.N. MUÑOZ MARTIN, "La Austriada de Juan Latino: teoría y creación literaria épicas" Estudios de Filología Latina (1980) 211-216
• SÁNCHEZ MARÍN, J.A., "Una visión contrarreformista del papado: De rebus et affectibus Papae Pii Quinti de Juan Latino" in Actas. Congresso Internacional Damiâo de Góis na Europa do Renascimento, Braga, 2003, pp. 119-134.
• J.A. SÁNCHEZ MARIN and Mª NIEVES MUÑOZ MARTÍN "Apuntes sobre los epigramas del humanista Juan Latino" Florentia Iliberritana 1990, pp. 327-333.
• J.A. SÁNCHEZ MARÍN - Mª NIEVES MUÑOZ MARTÍN, "El Maestro Juan Latino en la Granada renacentista. Su ciudad, su vida, sus protectores", "Florentia Iliberritana" 20 (2009) 231-264.

External links

• Biography of Juan Latino on the Dimensión Hispana blog
• Tesis program, broadcast by Canal Sur 2
• Book by José Vicente Pascual