Amadis in France: a timeline

Although the translation was not faithful, Amadis of Gaul and its sequels were a smash hit in France in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.

[Lujanes Tower and House, Plaza de la Villa, Madrid. The tower was built in the early 1400s and the house in the late 1400s for the Luján family. Photo by Sue Burke.]

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1525 - After his defeat by Emperor Charles V (King Carlos I of Spain) at the battle of Pavia, King Francis I of France is brought as a prisoner to Madrid. Legend says he is held for a while in Lujanes Tower, where, to help pass the time, his sister Margarita reads him Amadís de Gaula; when he returns to France, he asks Nicolas de Herberay des Essarts to translate it.

Herberay, besides being an artillery officer, is a man of letters with a large library that includes many Spanish works.

1540 - His translation of Book I is published and enjoys such great success that it is reprinted three times in that year alone.

1541, 1542, 1543 - His translations of Books II, III, and IV are printed and meet with equal success.

1544 - Herberay translates Las Sergas de Esplandían by Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo, the story of Amadis's son.

1545 to 1548 - Herberay translates Lisuarte de Grecia, and Amadis de Grecia Book I and Book II by Feliciano de Silva. He either skips or does not know about Florisando by Ruy Páez de Ribera, an austere and moralizing book, and Lisuarte de Grecia by Juan Díaz, another moralizing book in which Amadis dies and which had failed commercially in Spain.

Herberay writes with a fluid and elegant style that wins him lasting acclaim, and his versions of the Amadis series are reprinted until the 17th century, some volumes as many as fifteen times. However, he and subsequent translators also adapt Amadis to French courtesan tastes by suppressing the moral and didactic elements and increasing the erotic content, even introducing new incidents.

1546 to 1626 - Six other Spanish novels of chivalry outside the Amadis series are published in France, as are works of the matter of Britain (King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and related stories).

1551 to 1574 - Six more books in the Spanish Amadis series are translated into French, three of them by Jacques Gohory, who adds allegorical and occult elements to the texts.

1559 - Thresor des douze livres d'Amadis de Gaule by Étienne Groulleau is published in Paris. It collects extracts from letters, discourses, and declarations and lamentations of love from the twelve Amadis books as models of urbanity and eloquence for those "who wish to learn the rules of good taste" in self-expression. It is reprinted twenty times by 1606.

1577 to 1581 - The first seven of the Italian continuations of Amadis are translated to French.

~1589 - Anthony Munday translates Amadis of Gaul Books I to IV into English from the French, and it enjoys success in Great Britain.

1594 to 1615 - Three more books are translated into French from the German continuation of Amadis. In all, twenty-four books are published in French about Amadis and his descendants, compared to thirteen in Spain.

1612 - Don Quixote de la Mancha is translated into French.

1684 - The opera Amadis by Jean-Baptiste Lully opens in the Paris Opéra, and is later performed at Versailles. King Louis XIV had asked poet Philippe Quinault to compose the libretto. It is a success, tours Europe, and remains in the repertory until the 18th century. Amadis's still-popular monologue "Bois épais" ("Deep woods") is here on YouTube.

1737 to 1781 - Amadis and other chivalric novels are re-edited. They inspire poets and painters in the 1800s, including Eugène Delacroix.
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An approach to novels of chivalry, by José Miguel Pallarés

A Spanish author sets a few myths straight about the history of Spanish literature.

You can find quite a few talented fantasy and science fiction authors in Spain besides José Miguel Pallarés, author of El tejido de la espada (The Weaving of the Sword), but they all face the same roadblock to success. The literary establishment considers speculative fiction inferior, foreign, or at least juvenile, nothing that serious readers might want to consider: it just isn't Spanish, and never has been. José Miguel knows better, as ye shall now see.

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The imaginary in Spanish literature

The claim that realism has absolutely dominated Spanish literature is true only starting with the Siglo de Oro, the "Golden Age" in the 16th to 17th centuries. Until the Renaissance, the real and the imaginary coexisted in both literary and popular works, and, contrary to what some people think, many fantastic elements appeared in our literature.

We also shouldn't accept the claim that chivalric novels suffered "death by satire" at the hands of Don Quixote. There were religious, historic, and cultural causes — many causes — for the genre's decline, but they lie outside the central thesis of this article: Amadis of Gaul and chivalric novels. We'll take it as a given that a drastic change in our literature resulted in the dictatorship of rationality and the absolute domination of realism.

It would be imprecise to apply the term "fantasy" to many of the chivalric books that existed before Cervantes. The characters in these works lived objectively within their own reality, that is, with their passions, desires, thoughts, and deeds; and subjectively with the rest, the "otherness," that miscellaneous category that includes the ineffable, nightmares, faith, and imagination.

Mario Vargas Llosa made this basic point: "Chivalric novels are not unreal. They are realistic, but their concept of realty is wider and more complex than the strict notion of reality that Renaissance rationalism established. (...) Its reality generously reunites objective reality and imaginary reality in an indivisible totality in which flesh-and-bone men, beings from fantasy and dreams, right and wrong, and the possible and the impossible all coexist without discrimination and division."

Another direction

In the 15th century, two great literary tendencies were refined. One was the sentimental romance, which dealt with ideal love, such as Grisel y Maravella or Cárcel de Amor (Prison of Love) by Diego de San Pedro. This was the fashionable literature in palaces, castles, and towns, and it is also the most meritorious and least known genre in Castilian literature. As Usoz put it in a famous quote, they became "the Werther of the 15th century."

The second literary tendency of that century was the chivalric adventure novel.

Spain was one of the least feudal countries during the Middle Ages because its eight centuries of repopulation and reconquest considerably altered feudal power. The nobility was militarized and accustomed to wield the sword, and the milicias concejiles or "militia councils," the plebeian cavalries, were always on horseback, making war against the Moors for God and king, and lining their pockets. War generated immediate benefits, and so ours was a society at war.

With the end of the Reconquest came the explosion of the concept of the "state" in which the will of a monarch reigned ever more powerfully, and which turned the noble warrior into a courtesan and altered the taste of the bourgeois.

Novels of chivalry enjoyed their heyday while that dual societal change was taking place: on one hand, the wealthy bourgeois were eager for any wonder to free them from their day-to-day boredom; on the other hand, the nobility were losing their crude, tough, warlike character.

The chivalric novel inherited some formal elements from old-fashioned heroic poetry, but the genre itself grew as it began to be denatured.

It replaced its elemental, rough style with a greater relish for ostentation. Physical orientation waned; scene-setting mattered only to tell the adventure, but its jumbled locations got the same treatment whether they were a fictitious island or London, a city that the author had never seen. The love element was considerably increased; we can't forget the boom in gallant and courtly love. Above all, the protagonist changed his goal.

Earlier European epic narratives profiled a hero tough as flint and yet at the service of a superior noble cause: a family alliance, a country, religion. The new knight errant was a hymn to the hero, defending justice and the oppressed and courtly love, but the crux of the question was rooted in his search for adventure as a mere personal satisfaction or as the height of service to his beloved.

The hero of olde served his country, his family, and God. The newer-style paladin fought for glory, for his beloved, or for money, expressed in terms of income from land.

This more modern concept found acceptance in different social classes, and if it was united with a certain sense of wonder and was an easy read, with a less high-brow, smug style — that is, more accessible — we can understand why readers found it so delightful.

About its origins

No other country cultivated novels of chivalry like Spain, where Amadis was written, the only novel worth the qualification of "perfect." However, the genre was a French creation.

What has come to be called the "courtly novel" was popularized in the French court, a work in verse that successfully recreated all the landmarks of the Arthurian cycle and some elements of the Greek epics, especially those involving Troy and Alexander the Great, all that seasoned with some loans from Nordic literature.

The concept changed radically when it arrived at Iberian Peninsula kingdoms, which, for its part, already possessed two superb precedents. One was La gran conquista del Ultramar (The Great Conquest of Overseas Lands), written around 1293, an epic story about the Crusades. The other was El libro del caballero Zifar (The Book of the Knight Zifar), an anonymous work (the putative authorship of the Archdeacon of Madrid, Ferrán Martinez, has not been proven) published around the beginning of the 14th century and which, as Juan Luis Alborg put it well, is "halfway between the traditional moralizing exemplary tale and the pure chivalric novel."

The century of the knight errant, 1490 to 1602

Without a doubt, any dates are arbitrary, but this approach offers an interesting orientation: the genre enjoyed slightly more than a century of original production despite the fact that the most noteworthy chivalric novels were still being re-edited throughout the entire 16th century with relative frequency.

Nonetheless, the dates have not been chosen at random. Juan Martorell wrote Tirante el Blanco in 1490 in Valencian, a novel praised by Cervantes himself; a translation in Castilian was published in Valladolid in 1511. Don Juan de Silva y Toledo, lord of Cañadahermosa, published Policisne de Boecia in 1602, a work whose only merits were being the last novel of a genre in its fading glory, and generously plagiarizing Amadis.

A census of the titles would yield a list of more than one hundred books and would be as useless as the recital of the names of the Gothic kings that we were obliged to memorize in the Franco-era schools.

It's enough to say that great cycles arise as a function of a genre's popularity. Books mushroom during the height of a cycle, but at its low point we get only occasional works and translations — and I mean real translations, of course, since it had been common for an author to present himself to the readers as a mere translator of a work originally written in another language.

There was one masterpiece, Amadís de Gaula, three or four superb novels, and a few others that weren't bad, like the Palmerín cycle by Miguel Ferrer — and the rest, speaking plainly, were a pile of crap, as happens in any fertile genre.

Still, readers who want to enjoy themselves will find guaranteed quality in those novels of chivalry, and all the worthy people who consider themselves above the genre, who want to blow out a fart over their butt, as they say in Aragón, my native land, ought to abandon their resistance for one reason: their beloved Don Quixote cannot be understood or even read unless the reader is acquainted with these other novels.
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Translated by Sue Burke.
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Yesterday was five centuries ago, by José Miguel Pallarés

How a boy in found a dusty copy of Amadis de Gaula in his family home in a medieval mountain town in Spain, and how it changed his life.

[Nublos Tower, originally part of the Knights Templar castle, now part of the town hall of Iglesuela del Cid.]

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Today's commentary is by José Miguel Pallarés (Zaragoza, 1966), author of the novel El Tejido de la espada (The Weaving of the Sword), a tale of war and sorcery set in the early Middle Ages in Aragón, Spain. He is also a translator and author of other novels, short stories, and comics. You can read an interview of him discussing the novel here, in Spanish.

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Several stories circulate about why the great-great-grandfather of the great-great-grandfather of the great-great-grandfather of the great-great-grandfather of my great-great-grandfather left Catalonia "at horse-hoof," as they say in the ancient chronicles: at top speed. In some versions, he was working as a tax collector for a count and fled, taking all the money, of course. In others, there was some sort of offense to the honor of the daughter of his feudal lord. (An illicit affair, what else?)

Honestly, we'll probably never know for sure after five centuries, and probably both stories are more false than Judas, but what is true is that this ancestor settled in Iglesuela del Cid, a town that had been founded by the Knights Templar many years earlier in the mountains on the border between the ancient kingdoms of Aragón and Valencia. Little remains of the Templar buildings, but medieval streets are still there, along with the Neapolitan-style palaces of the ambassadors and the mansions of the great families.

I was born in a big city and I'm a child of the asphalt, but I didn't live cut off from my family's past for long, because about 37 or 38 years ago, my father announced that we were going to spend the summer in the mountains.

As a result of that summer, I made a promise, and I discovered the past and a certain book of chivalry. But one thing at a time.

The trip turned into holy hell when we left the wide, well-paved road and entered the mountains. My father drove along calmly, but I was scared stiff. The road resembled a goat path, and when you looked beyond the shoulder, the view was hardly relaxing: a cliff with sharp rocks at the bottom of sheer drop of two thousand meters. I kept saying: "Go slower, go slower."

Occasionally — only occasionally — we passed through flat zones studded with rocks that had fallen from the crags on the mountains. What rocks! Back then, they seemed enormous, and now I know that they weighed tons. My dad tried to calm the family by saying that those rocks only fell during the springtime. I answered, "Go faster, go faster," and looked up, afraid that one of those "little stones" was about to crash down on us, even though we were in the middle of July.

I forgot about all my troubles when I saw Iglesuela del Cid for the first time, a town that had just left the 14th century, and the family home on Main Street, a building from the age of catapults. If they had told me it had already existed when Noah's ark reached land, I would have believed it. I remember it as if it were yesterday, that house with sturdy walls, sagging stairways, and dozens of rooms located in four floors. (It was perfect for playing hide and seek.) It had been closed up for years, almost since the Civil War, and so that day we ate dust until we were sick of it, but I was in seventh heaven. There were toys from the 19th century, although they weren't really toys, but I used them as if they were (I broke a few, oops), and the adults were too busy to keep me on a short leash.

I could do whatever I wanted for five days while my uncles and parents straightened out the house, from sunup to sundown.

Now for what I promised.

The first night a huge thunderstorm blew up, and lightning set fire to a stable. I heard shouting in the street, the rumble of people with buckets of water, and the hunger of a growing fire.

It was all getting better and better.

Within a week, I was enthralled by the Puig workshops, where they wove wool the old-fashioned way, and by that place, that town, without running water or modern improvements, but with palaces, streets fresh from the Middle Ages, and the Nublos Tower, which had been built by the Knights Templar.

Besides that, there were some crazy German scientists looking for a cure for the escurzones (local rattlesnakes with venom for which modern medicine has no antidote), and the big attraction: the priest's garden, the finest in town with the biggest variety of the best fruits, and the hardest-to-climb garden wall. Although it's a fact that the priest fired a shotgun loaded with rock salt, you wouldn't believe his aim.

I made friends there and discovered a new life, where men were men and the land made the rules. Each summer I lived among magnificent people. Tough. Demanding. Honorable. All the joys of modern life seemed tawdry to me starting then, and I didn't grow up to be a snob or a jerk because, thanks to them, I had the luck to learn what things were really worth.

The contact with nature in its pure state seduced me, and that was one constant during the next ten years. There was nothing like summer. It was a breath of life in the boredom that filled provincial living in the 1970s.

I learned to feel in harmony with this world and its code of ethics, but this rural world was fading away. Every summer its way of life and its morals born from the earth itself grew a little more diluted. I promised to write a book that would do justice to a centuries-old world that was disappearing, but at that moment I lacked the emotional and technical skills to begin the work.

I have to admit that I forgot that promise, but years later — many years later, unfortunately — I remembered Hemingway's advice: "Write what you know," and I got to work to tell an epic of a man in search of his freedom set in the late Middle Ages. And I wrote a book called El tejido de la espada.

I've written other works and I'm buried under new books, but none of them hold a place of honor in my house besides that one. Those who know me understand why, but they usually ask why it shares its privileged location with Amadís de Gaula.

Now we return to that magic summer when I was six years old and my uncles met with my dad to execute a will and decide what to do about things. We return to that stormy night, to those hundreds of steps lit by a candle, since the electric lights went out whenever there was a storm, to that 80-meter-square bedroom of mine where Dracula would have felt young, to the door at the end, the one to the falsa, a regionalism (many languages are spoken in Spain besides Castilian, Catalan, Basque, and Galician) that means "large attic," and to the words of my father:

"Don't go into this room."

Obviously, I focused all my attention in finding out where that damn key was to get into the falsa. What else is a kid going to do with that kind of provocation? I was going to get in there even if I had to open the door with an ax. It didn't come to that, but the house had all the tools of rural life, and it would take more than a door to stop me.

It took me two days to get the key and enter the kingdom of spiders.

There was dust, spider webs, old furniture, fine china, rusty cookware, ledger books, half a set of tools for cabinetmaking, yellowed yearbooks from long-gone centuries, even more yellowed family photographs, valuable antiques from antediluvian times (this explains the cloud of antique dealers who appeared days later and the speed at which my father and two uncles divided things up) and books: good, bad, and ordinary. This falsa could have been a room in Gormenghast Castle.

I've left the best for the end: a big book with relatively new leather covers. I took off the paper it was wrapped in and got covered in dust from head to foot, and my knees trembled when I opened it. There were loose illustrations of knights charging at a gallop and a tome with very strange typeface. I could make out the writing, but not well, although eventually I read the title: Los cuatro libros del virtuoso caballero Amadís de Gaula. I went crazy when I saw the blurred date: 1817. Napoleon Bonaparte must have been alive when that pile of dusty pages was printed! Later, reality came and ruined the fun: an expert cleaned the numbers before assessing it and its date was 1837.

Things are only perfect in movies, and the book was missing a lot of pages at the beginning, and it began in the middle of what eventually (that is, ten years later) I would identify as Chapter 8. More or less it said, and this may not be exact, but I'd rather quote it just as I remember it: "He turned his head and saw the knight whom he had just jousted, and another knight with him. Taking up his arms, he charged at them. They had their lances lowered and their horses were going at full speed. And the people at the tents saw him going so well seated in his saddle that they were amazed."

I was a professional nitpicker in those days and I began to see spelling errors and strange things: they had to explain to me that Castilian was very different when that book was written, including the use of the "b" and the "v" and what it took me a little longer to realize was a cedilla (ç).

My parents discovered right away that I'd entered the falsa, and oh, no matter how much I denied it, I was covered in dirt. The rest of the house sparkled, and the falsa was the only room that they still had to clean. No, not at all.

I would have let it go and I would have forgotten the book, I swear, but my father said:

"Don't go in that room and don't you dare touch that book, because it's very old and you'll damage it."

It's the adults who ask for trouble.

I did whatever it took to get myself a candle and a box of matches, and I sneaked in at night, when everyone else was in bed, to read those old, cracked pages that smelled like death. I sat down to devour the stories about Amadis in the chair of my great-grandfather Miguel, a big hulking man who they said could single-handedly stop a heifer, and to judge from the photographs and because they had to build a chair and a bed to measure, it might have been true. I might be thinking of my great-great-grandfather, but with our foolish custom of calling all the first-born sons Miguel, naturally there is a platoon of men called Miguel Pallarés, and I get them confused. "What century was he from?" I would ask when they mentioned yet another Miguel Pallarés.

Up in that chair the size of a burro, I read about the deeds of knights and princesses by the light of my candle. The story was new. The character was great. The tale was more addictive than a sinful woman who out-curved a Coca-Cola bottle, as Montero Glez would say.

And best of all, it had been banned.

Was it perfect?

Yes, it was, but perfection isn't made to last, and that didn't last either. The coming weeks brought new members of the family, and they brought the bad guys, the antique dealers who paid for stuff that was useless but valuable because it was old. The book disappeared.

I was left so shattered that my mother noticed and spoke to my father. When we got back to our apartment in Zaragoza, so clean, so modern, so boring, he searched through every bookstore until he got (by special order) a copy that I could read at my pleasure, complete from the beginning. It wasn't the same by electric light and without that air of danger, but Amadís de Gaula was still a terrific read, and it ranks among the best memories of my childhood.

According to the experts, the book must have been written in 1492, although it wasn't published until 1508 in my home town, Zaragoza¹, the same year as my ancestor went running out to find someplace new to live. A busy year. Those who say life runs in cycles are probably right: "Not many years after the passion of our Redeemer and Savior Jesus Christ, there was a Christian king in Little Brittany by the name of Garinter, who was of the true faith...."
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¹An earlier edition probably existed, since an edition published in 1511 in Seville was not based on the Zaragoza version.
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Translation by Sue Burke.
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The world's first bestseller

[Cover art of the 1508 edition. A knight on horseback became the standard cover art for chivalric novels.]

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Gutenberg's printing press became operational in about 1450, and in 1455 he published 180 copies of the Bible. Though these were expensive, about three years of wages for a middle-class salary, they were considerably cheaper than hand-copied books; it took about a year to copy one Bible by hand.

Soon, inexpensive paper replaced parchment, and printing spread. By 1500 there were 1,700 printing presses in over 250 locations; they had cumulatively published at least 15 million copies of thousands of titles. Almost half dealt with religion; many of the rest served scholarly or scientific uses, with topics like grammar or medicine, or were reprints of Classical texts. Three-fourths of the titles were in Latin. But books in the vernacular for entertainment sold well, too.

Education and a rising incomes had expanded literacy rates, and reading, sometimes even for pleasure, had become common among the nobility and the middle and upper classes. Those who could not read often heard books: reading out loud to groups became a popular pastime, sort of like going to movies today.

In Spain, 35 editions of chivalric novels were published in the 1530s; 49 in the 1540s; 20 in the 1550s; 29 in the 1560s; 7 in the 1570s (during an economic crisis); 31 in the 1580s; and 4 in the 1590s — this despite frequent censure of these books as "frivolities and proven lies." The print run of an edition might typically be 1000 copies. Amadís de Gaula itself was reprinted 20 times during the 16th century within Spain and had 8 sequels.

In addition, many copies were printed outside of Spain in Spanish. In Italy, Germany, France, England, and Portugal, Amadís and its sequels were translated into the local language, and the stories were continued by other writers — 24 volumes alone in France by various authors.

In those days, one copy did not equal one reader. Books were expensive, so they typically were lent, rented, and read in groups. So while the number of books may seem small by today's standards, each book was reread repeatedly over the years, and the overall population of Europe was smaller, too.

There's a theory that every best-seller is an accident. If publishers knew for sure how to create them, every book would be a best-seller. Why was Amadís the first to sell so well and launch a genre?

In 1500, the time was ripe for some book to become generally popular, simply because printing and reading had become widespread. Spain had also become the leading world power, and people wanted to learn Spanish. Reading literary works is still a good way to study a foreign language.

But of course, there's something else, something that excited readers. Brave knights, beloved damsels, and fantastic adventures captured the popular imagination during the Renaissance for some reason.

It may have been the deep cultural roots that chivalric stories had all across Europe. Or the novels may have reinforced the sense of individual possibility and personal achievement at the same time that renewed scholarship, exploration, and discoveries expanded the readers' real-life horizons. But the Renaissance was also a time of political and religious conflicts and frightening change, so readers may have appreciated a retreat to simpler times. Or maybe the novels seemed entertaining, and we all do things just because we enjoy them.
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