ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an invaluable insight into the prince’s passion for music, and into Juan de Anchieta’s working environment in the mid-1490s. Anchieta’s professional status as a musician could hardly have been higher, but he appears to have made little impact on the international musical stage, which gives rise to important questions about the European integration of musicians born in Spain and the distinctive qualities of the music they composed. On a personal level, Anchieta owned property, fathered an illegitimate son even though he was a priest, and strove to secure eternal salvation through the endowment of various masses. The structure and etiquette of Prince Juan’s household, in which Anchieta played no small part, is brought to life in detail and with extraordinary vividness by Fernandez de Oviedo, who served the prince as a page from about 1491 until the prince’s untimely death in 1497.
