Representations of violence in 15th-century Spanish literature

This image of a population cowering like rats from an all-encompassing violence is backed up by many contemporary eye-witness accounts. Accompanying the Bohemian pilgrim Lev z Rožmitála through Spain that same year, Václav Šašek and Gabriel Tetzel recorded a Castile denuded of inns, food, and fodder. In the towns they fell prey to violent assaults and robberies – Tetzel does not hesitate to call their hosts ‘ein mordisch bos volk’, heathen from whom ‘wir uns leibs und lebens muosten weren’ (Schmeller 1844: 167, 173); out in the countryside, where men lived ‘worse than gypsies do in other lands’, they were harried by bandits (Letts 1957: 78–79, 90–92/82–85, 96). In Galicia the hollow-eyed peasants lived in caves, starving on a diet of grass gleaned amid the ruins of burnt-out villages and castles. The Bohemians were again attacked and plundered, this time by ministers of the law, the fearsome Santa Hermandad. In Santiago they found the cathedral turned into a barracks (Letts 1957: 100–03/107–08, 115). The most vivid chronicle of the age, Palencia’s Gesta Hispaniensia, contributes countless further vignettes of casual horror. The king finds it amusing while hunting in the forest of El Pardo, to have his caballerizo Barrasa point out places where, in his former life as henchman of the outlaw Alfonso Prieto ‘el Negro’, he committed blood-curdling crimes: