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‘Est Iste Liber Maximi Secreti’: Alfonso X’s Liber Razielis and the Secrets of Kingship

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Abstract

This article explores the relationship of the discourse of secrets and courtly politics during Alfonso X's rule in Castile and León (1252–1284). This piece argues that Alfonso's imperial aspirations may be the key to better understand the reasons encouraging the complilation of the Liber Razielis at the Alfonsine court. In this work, we can find three main elements that were useful to legitimize Alfonso's project: the discourse of secrets and its relationship to the royal institution, the identification between the wise Solomon and Alfonso, and, finally, the use of natural philosophy as a means to portray the figure of the eagle as a defining element of the empire. Finally, this essay concludes that the figure of the eagle and the strategic meaning of Solomon also appear in several later works of the Alfonsine corpus in similar political terms.

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Notes

  1. See Dialogus 110–111; García Avilés (1993, 36–38).

  2. See Kieckhefer (1998); Page (2012).

  3. The Liber Razielis’s prologue says that King Alfonso “posuit juxta se libros philosophorum et homines sapientes…Et ipsi transferebant semper propter suum preceptum libros meliores et perfectiores…Et ego magister Johannes Clericus existens sub reverencia et mercede predicti nomini regis transtuli istos libro qui libro Razielis sunt conjuncti de latino in ydioma castellanum” (Secret 1969, 230). Recently, Damaris Gehr has contested the Alfonsine origin of the Liber Razielis. She posits that the Alfonsine attribution in the prologue is a late fourteenth-century pseudographical strategy in order for Johannes Clericus to obtain recognition (193–207). Sebastià Giralt, in turn, puts into question Gehr’s arguments based on García Avilés’s findings regarding the relationship between the Liber Razielis and the Libro de las formas et ymágenes (García Avilés 1997, 31–36).

  4. François Secret (1969, 226–240), Alejandro García Avilés (1997, 28–31), and Alfonso D’Agostino (1992, 40–42) have published the Liber Razielis’s prologue according to the testimony of MS Vat. Reg. Lat. 1300. Damaris Gehr has published the one preserved in MS Halle 14 B.36 (208–211).

  5. Liber clavis; Liber Ala; Thymiama; Liber temporum or De iii. temporibus anni et diei et noctis; Liber mundicie et abstinentie or De mundacia; Liber Sameyn (quod vult dicere Liber celorum) or Symayn; Liber magice or De virtutibus. For critical details on these seven books, see García Avilés 1997, 27; Leicht 2006, 264–275; Page 2012, 96–105; Secret 1969, 226–227.

  6. Liber Semiphoras; Glosae Semiphoras of Zadok of Fez; Verba in operibus Razielis of Abraham of Alexandria; Flores of Mercurius of Babilonia; Capitulum generale sapientium Aegypti pro operibus magicae; Tabulae et karacteres et nomina angelorum gradium; Liber super perfection operis Razielis of the Greek Theyzolius; Liber ymaginum sapientium antiquorum; Ymagines super septem dies ebdomade et sigilla planetarum (Page 2007, 41–42 n 3).

  7. For a detailed treatment of this aspect, see Rodríguez de la Peña (1997), 15–19; idem (2014) 112, 113–121 and 121–134; Rucquoi (1993, 79–81).

  8. Rex illiteratus est quasi asinus coronatus (Policraticus 251).

  9. This relationship is even more transparent when we reflect on the fact that the secret itself represents not only a symbolic dimension but also a particular device used by the king and his closest collaborators. The sello de la poridad or puritatis sigillum was used in the Castilian chancery to sign a variety of confidential documents addressed to officials or military authorities at least from the reign of Alfonso up to that of Pedro I in the fourteenth century (Procter 1940, 196–208).

  10. For a detailed treatment of the human being as microcosmos in the Iberian Peninsula, see Rico (2005).

  11. In John of Salisbury’s influential treatise we can find the basic ideas that the Alfonsine writers compiled: “In quo quidem optimam uiuendi ducem naturam sequimur, quae microcosmi sui, id est mundi minoris, hominis scilicet, sensus uniuersos in capite collocauit, et ei sic uniuersa membra subiecit ut omnia recte moueantur, dum sani capitis sequuntur arbitrium” (Policraticus 232). In the following centuries, the concept developed by the bishop becomes more complex and derived in two distinct ideas: symbolically the king possesses two bodies, that is, the “body politic” and the “body natural” that are inseparable. Ernst Kantorowicz (1997) studies these ideas in his The King’s Two Bodies (3–7).

  12. The eagle-motif and its relationship to the empire have had a notorious fortune in the Iberian Peninsula until the seventeenth-century, as showed in Calderón’s La vida es sueño (De Armas 1986, 123–138).

  13. Alfonso D’Agostino was the first who noticed the resemblance between the Liber Ala and the Libro de la ochava espera but he does not set forth any argument regarding the political and, in particular, imperial meaning of these passages (1993, 296 n25).

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    Fernando Riva

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Riva, F. ‘Est Iste Liber Maximi Secreti’: Alfonso X’s Liber Razielis and the Secrets of Kingship. Neophilologus 104, 485–502 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09646-6

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