THEY PISS ON US AND WE HAVE TO SAY IT'S RAINING. A hilarious and embarrassing incident that took place at a papal mass in Seville between a bishop and an acting archbishop who were apparently rivals. ONE OF THEM CLIMBED THE PUTTLE, PUT ON A CAP AND PISSED ON THE HEAD OF HIS OPPONENT WHO WAS BELOW. HISTORY FACT CHRONICLES OF PALENCIA

ALONSO OF PALENCIA

The Chronicler of Palencia

Realizing that we live in dangerous times, similar to those of the last years of the 20th century, XV I delve into the somewhat garbled Latin of the chronicler Alonso de Palencia and find the following gem: While Archbishop Mondoñedo was presiding over a ceremony in the Cathedral of Seville, he saw the Bishop of Coria approaching, dressed in a white cassock, he ordered the choir to stop and the acolytes to stop censing the censer and began to say in a loud voice:

- Where is this madman going?

And with these words she rolled up her ornaments and from the top of the altar urinated on his head. Apparently the rivalry between the two prelates had reached such an extreme because of each of their claims to the throne of Seville. All the sixes who danced, the singers who sang, the censer bearers who carried the candle, were described with laughter. This event took place in the huge and beautiful Seville Cathedral and is a reflection of how liberal the customs of the time were. This is why Menéndez y Pelayo believes that the chronicler ridiculed such events in the language of Latium, in order to mislead and avoid scandal. From a Christian point of view, this would be too outrageous, and he describes the Latin of Palencia, where he was also a priest, as vulgar, careless and pretentious. His language is difficult, and despite his claims to be the Spanish Titus Livy, whom he tries to imitate, he does not master the sequence of tenses, he polishes the syntax. The chronology is also truncated, as events pile up one on top of another, and the reader loses the thread of the narrative, although he admires the ardor, bordering on violence, with which the writer beats up the good Henry IV, the last of the Trastamara family.

He has a tic that all writers who write quickly have, namely the repetition of the refrain quemadmodum (so that), and I thought it was a vice of the scholastics, they are all very logical and consistent, and it reminds me of that prison of the Cathedral of Segovia, which taught us morals and always had words on the tip of the tongue. That is why they called him Don Democ. Palencia did not polish the text or punish his paragraphs with the incursare sentence, which the rhetoric masters of Rome recommended; incursare comes from "inc u s" or anvil. Writing is like forging iron in a forge.

However, the diabolical prose of this historian gives us an idea of ​​the cruelty of those times, of the wars between the Lusitanians and the Castilians, between the Moors and the Taifas, sometimes in alliance and sometimes with arms against the Christians. The descriptions of the siege of Utrera, the storming of Ecija and the unsuccessful capture of Santarém (Santa Inés) by the troops of Enrique IV are very picturesque. It seems that one can hear the noise of the Seville plebs, exhausted by hunger. The indictments of the incompetence of General Juan Guillén are read out. We see the appearance of the famous bandit of that time, Diego Mexia, called Largo, a kind of Andalusian Robin Hood, who robbed the rich and distributed the loot to the poor. Finally, he describes the excellent relations that existed between Ferdinand the Catholic and his father, Juan II of Aragon, whom he describes as brave in war and victorious with women. In the last years of this Juan's life, a certain Rosa, a native of Lerida, hastened his death without fear in his bed. His death occurred on December 19, 1479, 6676 by the Hebrew calendar, 2227 from the foundation of Rome and 904 by the Hijra, at the age of 83 years, six months and twenty days. As an Englishman would say: "His Majesty died at work." Indefatigable. Alonso de Palencia, who never tires of alluding to the impotence of his Castilian colleague, gives such precise and circumspect information about his Aragonese colleague, perhaps with bad intentions, although in my city they say that comparisons are disgusting.

. But the sexual abilities of Father Ferdinand the Catholic were undoubtedly epochal. The same cannot be said of the Austrians, but that is another topic, which we will consider in another chapter.