Miguel de Luna — Hoaxer, Heretic or Hero?

Abstract

In Miguel de Luna’s True History of King Roderick [Historia verdadera del Rey don Rodrigo], published in 1592, the narrator describes Granada as ‘a small city built in a high place, from which a very pleasant and delightful fertile plain could be seen, with a very beautiful, fast-flowing river running through it, the surrounding mountains full of groves of trees and fresh breezes, so that it seemed to be a paradise on earth’ [vna Ciudad pequena en el alto sitio fabricada, la cual descubria vna muy amena, y deleytosa vega à la vista, en medio de la quai atrauessaua vu muy hermoso rio caudaloso, los montes de su circuito estauan llenos de arboledas, y frescuras, que parecian vn Parayso en la tierra].¹ This paradisiacal vision of the city seems surely to reflect the author’s personal feelings about the place as an earthly garden of delights, yet less than ten years later, in February 1611, in a letter from Luna to the archbishop of Granada, paradise has turned into purgatory, as he describes ‘how the authorities entered my house to remove arms and exert other extortions, which has made me so furious that I can’t sleep at night for thinking about these offences’. In the same letter, he laments ‘the injustice of wanting to take away my property, lineage, honour and the value of services I have rendered’.² It was in this liminal space between joy and suffering that Miguel de Luna, the most fascinating, mysterious and complex of all the personages who take the stage in the drama of the Lead Books, lived his life.