ABSTRACT
In 1575, near the zenith of Spain’s imperial fortunes, the Spanish royal chronicler Ambrosio de Morales (1513–91) published a curious work entitled The Antiquities of the Cities of Spain. He described it as a supplement to his General Chronicle of Castile (1574–87), but unlike the Chronicle, the Antiquities was not a narrative history. Organized topographically rather than chronologically, it elucidated the origins of over 60 Castilian cities and settlements, drawing on classical sources such as Pliny’s Natural History; the geographers Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pomponius Mela; and the Itinerary of Antoninus Pius (a Roman emperor who had traveled through Spain in the second century). Most notably, the Antiquities contained transcriptions of more than 170 Latin inscriptions from Roman altars, gravestones, arches, mile markers, and other monuments across Castile. Some of these were derived from earlier written sources, like the Travels of fifteenth-century epigrapher Cyriaco d’Ancona, but most came either from Morales’ own field observations or from students and colleagues who did similar fieldwork on his behalf. The monuments of Morales’ native province of Córdoba were particularly well represented. Finally, the Antiquities contained a 200-page methodological “Discourse” on how to evaluate these various types of ancient texts and artefacts. This survey of Castile’s Roman antiquities belonged to a genre that had blossomed in Renaissance Italy over a century earlier, with such works as the Roma instaurata of Flavio Biondo (d. 1463). It had roots in Petrarch’s fourteenth-century investigations of Rome’s ancient ruins and inscriptions, and indeed in the explorations that the Roman antiquarian Varro had recorded in the first century BC. It was, however, the first work of this nature to be published in Spain (Figure 12.1).
