ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the political sympathies of the Habsburg royal chronicler, Florián de Ocampo. By reading his Coronica general de España (1543, 1553) within the context of humanists' search for ancient origins and Ocampo's life experience, it will argue that the chronicler can better be seen as a disgruntled critic of absolute monarchy and imperial expansion than as a committed Habsburg propagandist. Ocampo's Coronica general de España offered a detailed narrative of the two millennia before the coming of the Romans, a period that had never before received such focused attention in Spanish historical writing. Hispan's successor "Hercules the Egyptian," whom both Annius and Ocampo identify as the son of the Egyptian Osiris, is neither quasi-divine nor a Spanish monarch in Ocampo's Coronica. When King Espero, in turn, lost a civil war to his elder brother, Atlante Italo, Ocampo points out that the new king was accepted only by some españoles.
