Читать книгу The Codex Mendoza: new insights онлайн

50 страница из 150

Mendoza’s particular profile as the viceroy and a man of letters is underscored by contemporary authors including Friar Jerónimo de Alcalá and Juan de Matienzo. In his prologue to the Relación de Michoacán, Alcalá ([1540] 1980, 5–6) calls Mendoza “elected by God” to rule, and highlights Mendoza’s virtues of magnanimity, prudence, affability, severity, and zeal for the implementation of the Christian faith he embodied. These epithets appear to echo the style in which Juan de Matienzo speaks of Mendoza in his Gobierno del Perú, in which he describes him as a “light and mirror for all future viceroys” (Matienzo [1567] 1967, 207). In speaking of Mendoza in these terms, both authors implicitly refer to widely known and well-established ideas regarding the practical and symbolic role of the Castilian viceroy. Quoting legal treatises of the period by authors such as Rafael de Vilosa, Juan de Solórzano, Erasmus of Rotherdam, Mercurino Gattinara, and others, Alejandro Cañeque’s The King’s Living Image (2004, 25) and Manuel Rivero Rodríguez’s La edad de oro de los virreyes (2011) highlight several of the fundamental elements of the viceroyal ideology. For example, the viceroy was not only considered a high-ranking administrator, but also the king’s alter ego; the viceroy’s decrees, favors, and commissions were considered to be of the king himself. The attribution of the commission of the manuscript to the viceroy with the goal of elevating its value is a gesture that even Purchas seems to have intuitively understood, as is demonstrated by the well-known text in which he explains the way the manuscript reached Thevet, and which Clavijero deemed desirable when he included the manuscript as one of his sources. In attributing the manuscript to Mendoza over other viceroys, Clavijero endowed the manuscript not only with the reputation reserved for viceroyal commissions, but with that of Mendoza’s own reputation, whose excellence as a governor and an intellectual were unmatched by his successors.