Royal bastards tend to excite scholarly and popular imaginations, as do portraits of nefarious clergy manipulating their religious positions to jockey for power. It stands as no surprise, then, that the subtitle of Jaime Elipe’s 2022 volume, which translates out as “a prince with a miter,” should betray a similarly exciting subject for serious historical investigation. Far from being the stuff of historical fiction, however, Elipe’s work is meticulously researched, builds a broad historical context, and makes clear how much scholars can still learn in the deep archives preserving the medieval and early modern Iberian past. His work deserves the thanks of Iberianists, the consultation of scholars of the early modern clergy, and not a little praise for the methodical monograph published as an outgrowth of his doctoral project.
Don Alonso de Aragón, by its title and focus on a singular historical subject, appears prima facie to be a biography, but it cannot rightly be called as such. While the whole volume does concentrate on crafting a kind of personal microhistory of the illegitimate son of Fernando II of Aragón, the project is not organized in a chronological or biographical fashion. Instead, Elipe organizes the volume in three major parts that betray a much more complicated historical project: the first major section examines the broad familial context of Alonso, both as a member of the blood royal and as a member of the clerical elite of one-half of a soon-to-be-united Spain; the second section attempts to trace what can be known about Alonso as a person, sketching his character and his career as a member of the ruling elites of the kingdom; the third presents his work as a political agente majeure, or, as Elipe has it, a “zoon politikon.” In these three phases his notation from the volume’s introduction – “this book does not present a biography as we understand it ‘for use’ but instead develops a thematic analysis and does not follow a strict chronological line” (“este libro no se trata de una biografía como podríamos entender ‘al uso’ ya que se desarrolla un análisis temático y no se sigue una línea cronológica estricta.” p. 23) – is especially apt, since a reader looking for sequences of events, their causes, and effects would not find a volume fitting that purpose. Instead, the project plays out more like a kind of “microhistory of an individual” examining Alonso in three separate contexts.
The first section is the longest in the monograph and has six subsections that are thereafter sub-subdivided into seventeen additional sub-subsections. Listing them would be, here, quite unhelpful, but a broad pattern emerges. Elipe offers a kind of narrative prosopography of the close family of the archbishop of Zaragoza, including his half-siblings, mistresses, children, cousins of a similar (and often confusing) name, and the members of his inner circle (that is his archiepiscopal familiares). On page after page of this first major division of the book, Elipe demonstrates his deep knowledge of early modern Iberian historiography and the exhaustive nature of his research. This first section demonstrates both Elipe’s mastery of the sources and the extent of the interpersonal networks that can be traced around the archbishop of Zaragoza’s person.
The second major division of the work attempts to provide a more humanized portrait of a royal bastard turned archbishop than would appear from the data presented in the prosopographical treatment that precedes it. Although it is shorter than the first subsection, Elipe’s mastery of the sources and ability to carefully sketch the world of Alonso de Aragón is at its height in this section. Especially impactful is Elipe’s demonstration that, while perhaps not the great patron of arts and culture that some more panegyrically-minded historians may have suggested he was, Alonso de Aragón was nevertheless a cultural patron and not uneducated. This kind of careful and nuanced correction is typical of the whole of the book and demonstrates how rooted in a wider survey of the primary sources Elipe’s project is.
The final subsection of the monograph calls Alonso de Aragón a “zoon politikon,” echoing, of course, Aristotle’s famous dictum. Problematically, this is exactly the reputation that many expect to have confirmed for the illegitimate son of an early modern monarch placed in a clerical position. Again and again, however, Elipe demonstrates that the archbishop of Zaragoza, who held the governorship of that archdiocese for more than four decades and held various high-ranking posts in the kingdom of Aragón generally, was less interested in playing a kind of Cesare di Borgia role than in securing more broadly the fortunes and security of his intimates. Whether in response to the wider parliamentary impetuses of the era or as a kind of viceroy for his father and patron of his children, Alonso emerges from the archival sources as “not the most pious man of his age, but a person with great political skills” (“Don Alonso de Aragón no fue el hombre más piadosa de su época, pero fue una persona con unas grandes habilidades políticas,” p. 233) and as one of the key power-brokers of the early sixteenth century in the eastern half of the kingdom of the Catholic monarchs.
It is unreasonable to judge this book by the standards of biography, but there are, perhaps, a few gentle warnings for the reader that take up this 2022 volume. First, Elipe’s work is not chronological overall, and readers without a general familiarity with the period would do well to consult one of those tidy reference volumes that sketch the macro-historical development of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Iberian history. Second, the sections of the volume, while they do work well together, might be best encountered individually, treating them as three separate micro-books within a larger whole – indeed, Elipe himself notes the impossibility of a single-volume project like his, saying that the book “has gone about showing only a fraction of the human beehive in which Alonso was inserted from his youth.” (“A lo largo del presente libro ha ido mostrándose una facción de la colmena humana en la que el arzobispo don Alonso se vio inserto desde su infancia.” p. 309.) Yet, for these two brief advisories, the whole volume stands apart as a real achievement in the scholarship that studies the early modern Iberian church, the Spain of the “Catholic Monarchs” and indeed the early sixteenth century as a whole. This is a good book and a valuable book, but it is also a very detailed one that deserves careful study and even more careful attention to the detail it presents.
