IN CASTILE A Study of the Comunero Movement of BY HENRY LATIMER SEAVER, A.M. COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY HENRY L. SEAVER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS My most considerable obligations are to Professor R. B. Merriman, of Harvard College, with whom I began Spanish studies, and who has been constantly friendly and helpful; to Professor H. G. Pearson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been interested and practically helpful; to the late Enrique Pacheco y de Leyva, of the Spanish Royal Academy of History; to Señor Rafael Altamira, and to Señor J. Florit, of the Armería Real; and to the public spirit of George Ticknor, whose books in the Boston Public Library make the home of W. H. Prescott still a rich field for Hispanic studies. Professor Merriman's chapter about the Comuneros in the third volume of his Rise of the Spanish Empire renders superfluous another treatment of the Comunero movement in its bearing on the empire and the foreign policy of Spain. Before I had seen this chapter, however, I had restricted my consideration to the internal history of the rebellion, of which an outstanding feature is its self-centeredness: so far as the record shows, few Castilians in 1520 had any interest in, or knowledge of, affairs in the other parts of Spain still less of the world outside. In regard to proper names I have observed no rigid consistency. Personal names I have preferred to use in the forms of the language to which they are native, except those most wholly Anglicised, such as Columbus. The provinces of Spain I mention in their English forms, since so many of these have been Anglicised; city names, of which many are unfamiliar in English, I use in their Spanish forms, though this involves the absurdity of writing León for the city and Leon for the province. In rendering the documentary Spanish of the sixteenth century I have constantly simplified sentence structure. In the original, and and that are used almost as marks of punctuation, like a period or semicolon. The sentence division is commonly conjectural, for the documents often use no periods or capitals, or use them quite capriciously. Many letters of above a thousand words have neither period nor |