Cecilia DEVIA

Original title: Pedro I y Enrique II de Castilla: la construcción de un rey monstruoso y la legitimación de un usurpador en la Crónica del canciller Ayala

Published in Relations between History and Literature in Ancient and Medieval World

Keywords: Castile, Chronicles, Enrique II of Castile, Late Middle Ages, Pedro I of Castile, Violence.

To justify the confrontation between Pedro I and Enrique II of Castile, culminating in the murder of an unquestionably legitimate king in hands of his usurper brother, the chronicler Pero Lopez de Ayala build gradually a negative and somehow monstrous of Pedro I. Meanwhile, he attempts to prove that the count of Trastámara does not dethrones Pedro because of a personal ambition and breaking the rules, instead, he seems to be prevented to carry out with the mission of saving the kingdom from the terrible ills caused by the monstrous actions of his stepbrother. We will analyze the dichotomy between the negative and irrational portrait that Chancellor Ayala, one of the biggest responsible for that Pedro will be remembered as “Rey Cruel”- builds with skill, and what the practices he reveals says themselves. A meticulous scrutiny of the documents reveals a policy of regional power building through practices in which different functions of violence. Ware involved: economic, socializing, with exchange, symbolic, of justice, foundational, cultural, etc. We present here what might be called a cross dichotomy, which would face two internally contradictories terms: a monstrous but legitimate king against a usurper who is a providence’s instrument. What the construction realized by the trastamarist propaganda would have made, which from the chancellor Ayala would be the most brilliant exponent, is the conversion of a legitimate king in a illegitimate one, by nature of its own monstrosity, and the conversion of a usurper who -as shows the definition itself, is illegitimate- in a legitimate king, in function of the realization of a divine mission.