Nicolas Antonio, Censura de historias fabulosas (Valencia, 1742)
The book in which a Spanish canon and royal fiscal took apart the most successful forgeries in Spanish history - the chronicles fathered on Flavio Dextro, Marco Maximo, Luitprando and Julian Perez - by tracing their provenance to one man, weighing testimony by quality rather than number, and catching them contradicting each other on dates. Begun in 1652 and never finished, it was printed in 1742, fifty-eight years after his death.
Why this wins its question: The falsos cronicones are usually told in English, when they are told at all, as an anecdote about Spanish credulity. The book that ended them is a Spanish book, and its argument is the opposite of credulous: testimony is weighed by quality and not number, a chain of citations adds nothing when every link derives from one fabrication, and forged glory is a gift to the nation's critics. This object quotes that argument from the 1742 Valencia sheets - the opening declaration, the proposition naming Roman de la Higuera, the rule on witnesses, the chronological contradiction that convicts Dextro and Julian out of their own dates - and prints beside it the cost the same volume records: thirty-one years of work, an unfinished manuscript, fifty-eight years between the author's death and the press, a section on the primacy of Toledo missing from an otherwise complete text, and the roll of learned men who had defended the forgeries in good faith.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The title page names the author, the editor and the delay in one view: "CENSURA DE HISTORIAS FABULOSAS, obra posthuma de Don Nicolas Antonio, cavallero de la Orden de Santiago, canonigo de la Santa Iglesia de Sevilla, del Consejo del Señor Don Carlos Segundo, i su Fiscal en el Real Consejo de la Cruzada. Van añadidas algunas cartas del mismo autor, i de otros eruditos. Publica estas obras Don Gregorio Mayans i Siscar", printed at Valencia by Antonio Bordazar de Artazu, printer to the Holy Office and to the city, in 1742.
The opening sentence puts patriotism on the side of source criticism rather than against it. "Escrivo en defensa de la Verdad, de la Patria, del Honor de nuestra Nacion", the first chapter begins; the intent is to light a lamp for the eyes of the political nations of Europe so that they may clearly see the deceptions introduced into Spanish history by "la nueva invencion de los Chronicos de Flavio Dextro, i Marco Maximo, i los de Luitprando, i Julian Perez, con lo demàs que se les atribuye, fingidos en el todo, o en la mayor parte, con sacrilega temeridad".
He states the operation as a restitution, not a demolition. His desire is "restituir en su possession a la Verdad, i alimpiar las Historias de España de la torpeza, i fealdad que las desacredita en el juicio de aquellos que saben pesar quanto mas infaman, que ennoblecen, honores falsamente atribuidos, i algunos a sus propios i legitimos dueños injustamente usurpados": reducing the glories of Spain to their ancient limits, "que no son cortos, sino de admirable grandeza", is presented as the way to make them believable.
The core historical claim is stated as a proposition to be proved and then proved. Chapter XII of book I sets down: "Los Chronicos, i Fragmentos de Chronicos de Flavio Dextro, Marco Maximo, Luitprando, i Juliano, salieron en nuestros tiempos de mano del Padre Geronimo Roman de la Higuera, i no se les conoce otro origen." The chapter then reconstructs the rival provenance stories told by the chronicles' defenders - the copies said to have been taken from the library of the abbey of Fulda by the future archbishop of Braga, and the codex said to have been found at Worms and sent to Higuera by letter in 1594 - and shows that every account leads back to the same hand.
He names the evidentiary rule he is applying, in a sentence that is the point of the whole book. Against the objection that so many authorities cite these chronicles, he answers that for those who would judge a case "por el numero, i no la calidad de los testigos", the truth needs no more defence than to show plainly "la suposicion, i falsedad de todos" - a chain of citations adds nothing when every link derives from the same fabrication. He also concedes what his own censure rests on: "Dextro, i Juliano tachados estan con su nombre, pues todo el peso desta Censura carga sobre apoyar su mala fe."
The method is worked in public on a dated example. On the martyrs of Libisosa, Dextro puts the building of their temple in 353 and Julian Perez its consecration in 340, while the emperor Constantine, said to have contributed to the fabric, died in 337; Julian, writing of events a century after Dextro places them, gives such circumstantial detail "que parece se hallò presente en profecia al mismo hecho". The forgeries are convicted out of their own chronology rather than by appeal to authority.
His argument about why the forgeries matter is the reverse of the defensive one. Introducing fabulous matter into the credit and the place of true history, he writes, gives the enemies of the Church occasion "para que burlen con algun fundamento, de nuestras Historias"; and since falsehood in human affairs is so grave and so hated, "què serà en lo sagrado?" Whoever mixes invented circumstances into ecclesiastical tradition, he adds, remains strongly suspect in religion, however good his intention. Inflated national history is treated as a gift to the nation's critics.
He is willing to be funny about it, which is rare in the genre. Of the ten thousand martyrs crucified on Mount Ararat, whose master and fellow martyr the chronicles make Hermolao, archbishop of Toledo, who had converted and baptised most of them "en España de donde eran naturales", he observes that the lie lacks nothing for its qualification, "pues deponen todos los quatro complices de la falsedad, por ella", and quotes a wit of his own age who, seeing a group of men of very little truth, said that a lie decreed by all of them would be a lie of faith.
The book was thirty-one years in the writing and was never finished. Mayans records in his Vida that Nicolas Antonio began the work in 1652 and died in 1684: "Estuvo pues trabajandola mas de treinta i un años. No le diò la mano ultima, ni aun pudo acabarla. Por falta de tiempo, i de lima ha quedado èsta Censura con algunas imperfecciones dignas de perdon" - chapters sketched and not worked, and blanks left unfilled. The same Vida places his death in the early spring of 1684, carried off by a violent epilepsy at sixty-seven.
One gap in the manuscript is recorded as possibly not accidental, and the editor says so carefully. The section on the primacy of the church of Toledo, referred to in the work's own index, is the one section missing while all the others are worked; Mayans writes that "aunque aya esta falta, que no seria temeridad atribuir a alguna ocultacion", what Nicolas Antonio judged on the matter is clear from the context of the whole work. This object states the suspicion as Mayans states it, a suspicion and not a finding.
The counter-case is printed inside the same book, and it is the strongest one available. The chronicles were believed for a century by learned and pious men, defended in print by Francisco de Vivar and Rodrigo Caro, adopted by the count of Mora in his new history of Toledo and by Juan Tamayo de Salazar in his martyrology; the copies were authorised in public form and one was offered to Philip II. The Censura does not treat its opponents as fools: it reconstructs why the forgery worked - it flattered particular churches with saints, primacies and relics they wanted - before showing that it was a forgery.
What the volume establishes and what it does not should be kept separate. It establishes what Nicolas Antonio argued and on what grounds, and it establishes the 1742 Valencia imprint and Mayans's account of the manuscript's history. It does not establish that the false chronicles ceased to be cited after 1742, nor that Higuera acted alone or with the motive attributed to him; those are questions the book raises and later scholarship has continued to argue, and no claim here settles them.