Children of Spain was born and grew over many years. It took more than a quarter of a century to become what has emerged now, although some offshoots had already been left along the way.
The seed was sown in my mind, during one of those expeditions in which I had the privilege of accompanying him, my much-missed master, Miguel de la Quadra. In every place, both in the Americas and in the Spanish worlds, he introduced me to characters and stories filled with emotion and adventure.
Many times he did it in the very place that had been the scene of his feats, his glories, or his tragedies. Let us imagine, for instance, that I speak of Hernando de Soto astride his horse before the Inca Atahualpa in his vast camp at Cajamarca (Peru), of a boy who would later be called Juan de Austria brought before the Emperor Charles in his retreat at Yuste, unaware that he was his son and even less that one day he would defeat the seemingly unstoppable and invincible Ottoman empire at Lepanto, of a very beautiful one-eyed woman strolling through the gardens of the Escorial, a neighbor, who had ill-fated loves with a namesake who even shares my own first surname, or of the gallant Balboa arriving at the Pacific without imagining that not long afterwards it would leave him headless.
Reading their lives and following their steps, trying to understand them in their time, moment, and values, is how I learned to love our history, of which we are children and heirs. In short, attempting to study the pending subject that Spaniards should finally manage to pass.
It was, therefore, only a matter of time before the need arose to dress it all up and adorn it with the finery of a book, which is, in the end, what has come to pass now. And here you have this first volume, which I warn will not stay alone for long. Because surely many readers will miss protagonists who should be present and do not appear. But they are not forgotten; they are waiting for their turn to come on stage, for they have their own space, given their personality and deeds, and in their own corner of the comic theater. If I leave Garcilaso’s saying here—“ora con la pluma, ora con la espada” (sometimes with the pen, sometimes with the sword)—perhaps I will give you a hint.
Since I began collecting and sorting them, they all respond, and I will not hide it, to a goal connected with that collective suspense I mentioned earlier. Even more so because in these past years there have been stubborn and governmental efforts to prevent us from studying it at all, to keep us ignorant of it, or at best to view it through an ideological bias that vilifies and condemns it, or simply to deny and cancel it. Because what they essentially aim for is to sink us into the deepest ignorance, to induce us to despise it, to feel ashamed of it, and, almost, to have to beg forgiveness for being its heirs.
Nevertheless, the effort is not proving easy for them. On the contrary, the response has been very strong, and I would even say that the battle has turned against them, and, if I join in, we are winning it. I would say that the more they try to hide and distort it, the more we yearn to know it. After all, what they systematically do is nothing other than insult our grandparents. And the grandparents, even if distant, are greatly loved by ordinary people.
That is what it is really about. That we learn, by getting to know it, to feel it as our own and to consider it as something to which we belong and that belongs to us. To embrace it in its grandeur and in its miseries, without dark legends or rosy tales, without fanfare or scourges. Like its children. Which is what we are.
For this reason I named the book Hijos de España and, with all humility, set out to open windows to know our roots, our branches, our flowers and fruits, some sweet and some bitter. Humans, in the end, all of us.
And to this end I decided to weave in that vast and deep stage a gallery of characters, a total of 58 in this volume, who roamed and starred in it, from the most remote prehistoric past of Miguelón de Atapuerca, through the Sénecas and Trajanos of Roman Hispania and Hispana Rome, through invasions and reconquests, discoveries and empires, the highs and the lows, to reach now only a hundred years ago and the seven charges of the Alcántara, a limit that historians set to consider that the “memory,” not infrequently naive and partial, leans toward History.
There is no claim here to the wisdom I lack nor to offer scoops and revelations that overturn the most momentous moments of our History. But even less will you find traces of what cultivates and fattens a highly recognizable crop: those whose sole and essential goal is to deny it and erase it against all evidence, testimony, or document, and to conclude that we were never anything, or at best very bad. The plague of the World, in their sectarian judgment.
My proposal is simple and humble: to take a journey through our history hand in hand with the men and women who, in one way or another, forged it.
I have chosen to gloss and highlight those whom I consider deserving, though some may have fallen into unjust oblivion or distorted notes. There is a palpable predilection for those whose peripecies have moved me personally, and with whom I would have liked to share a moment, stroll through their cities, sail on their ships, walk their roads, and have someone lead me to Santiago, warming myself by one of their fires the night before the battle, approaching their palaces when Toledo or Valladolid were the capitals of the world, or even enjoying an evening with one of those ladies and feeling the jester’s grace that heaven did not grant me.
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Author: Antonio Pérez Henares. Title: Children of Spain. Publisher: Roca. Sales: Todostuslibros.