The rebellion of the moriscos of Granada in 1568–70 was a turning point in their history. It led initially to their dispersal throughout Castile, and eventually to the decision in 1609 to expel all the moriscos from Spain. These events have been studied by Trevor Dadson in a series of remarkable articles and books that have changed how we understand them. The present chapter, written in his honour, concerns a poem of Fray Luis de León (Ode XXII: La cana y alta cumbre) that takes the Granada uprising as its subject. Fray Luis observed the rebellion at a distance, from his teaching post in the University of Salamanca, but it engaged him closely nonetheless because of its impact on the life of his friend and patron, Don Pedro Portocarrero, who was at the time a canon in the cathedral of Seville. The Portocarrero family had long-standing connections with the region, and Don Pedro's brother, Alfonso, took part with distinction in the military defeat of the rebels, under the leadership of Don Juan of Austria. This chapter considers how the ode of Fray Luis presents the uprising, its suppression, and its implications for Portocarrero and his family. It examines in particular how its themes are mediated not only by direct statement, but by Classical and biblical allusions, symbolic images and the poem's overall structure.

Ode XXII

The studies of La cana y alta cumbre that have appeared in print have raised several questions about its interpretation that remain unresolved. One of them has to do with its tone. The poem has been called a skilled but formal exercise in rhetoric (‘pese a ciertas virtudes, es un hábil y brillante ejercicio retórico’), written dutifully in honour of a friend, but lacking passion, and in this respect it has been likened to another ode of Fray Luis, Virtud, hija del cielo (Ode II), also dedicated to Pedro Portocarrero: ‘para los gustos actuales […] parecen un poco frías y de encargo […] puesto que en su origen y fundamento son […] meros elogios, si bien sinceros, del destinatario’. It is true that the poem is in one sense conventional: praise of an absent friend, already present in the odes of Horace, was cultivated in neo-Latin poetry of the time.