ABSTRACT
The Historia pontifical y catholica is a lengthy work, by a Spanish cleric Gonzalo de Illescas (1521–1574/1575), 2 which attempts to document all historical events connected with the popes and Spanish kings. Much to its author’s credit, as Winston A. Reynolds points out, 3 Illescas’s work is one of the first histories of the popes to have been written in a language other than Latin, and certainly the first such work in Spanish. The chronicle has two parts. Part I, which consists of five books, covers a long stretch of time, from Saint Peter up to Benedict XI (d. 1304)—194 popes in all. Each of the five books ends in a chapter dedicated to the kings of Spain. This first part of the work was first published in 1565, in Dueñas—a small town near Palencia—to which Illescas was attached by birth and work.
