Peter Linehan

Religion, nationalism and national identity in medieval Spain and Portugal

A no ser por el Clero, y en especial por el Episcopado espanol’, declared Vicente de Lafuente a century ago, ‘Espana seria un pais sin historia, pues la historia sin escribir no es historia’. Lafuente himself was a layman—though it did not always show—with conventional views regarding the ‘democratic tyranny’ of his age which a spell as rector of Madrid university during the student and other troubles of the mid-1870s served only to reinforce. He found it odd that he rather than an ecclesiastic should have written the first ecclesiastical history of Spain. A committee of churchmen had been formed in Rome for the purpose in 1747, but it is too soon to report on the outcome of that venture. Lafuente’s history, though more than a century old, is still the only full-scale work of its kind by a Spaniard—’and since that time there is not a single chronicle that I can discover; though (like John of Salisbury in his day) I have found in church archives notes of memorable events which could be of help to any future writers who may appear’. In presenting some of these notes here, in the context of the theme of this conference, I find myself altogether less daunted by the notion of nationalism, which a self–respecting medievalist is expected fastidiously to eschew, than by the problem of how to evaluate the testimony of so many witnesses, clerical and lay, medieval and modern.