“On November 23, 1221, when the nights were the longest, when the Toledo autumn is usually more humid, sad and cold, as if with a bad omen, a child of royal lineage was born, who would be called Alfonso, in some room of the Royal Palaces of Toledo, located next to the great panorama of the Tagus valley, which lapped at its foundations as it entered the outline of the city where the great ravine that surrounds it begins. Thus begins the eloquent x-ray of the figure of Alfonso X 'El Sabio' drawn in 1984 by the doctor Rafael Sancho de San Román, director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Historical Sciences of Toledo in those years.
This article, published in the newspaper Ya de Toledo in April 1984, was written on the occasion of the VII Centenary of his death by the eminent Toledo psychiatrist and researcher, which was celebrated in 2018.
In it he makes a diagnosis of the monarch's life, with its lights and shadows, under the title "Wise King and Unfortunate Man" and highlights that his "greatest greatness and his greatest misfortune was in having to perform a series of tasks that he had never wanted”, like “war”, weighs on his peaceful nature. The wisest king, but the most unhappy and who, in the twilight of his life, "found himself alone, abandoned, failed, betrayed, and dethroned by his own son." Also, the comprehensive article published on April 1, 1984:
"Wise King and Unhappy Man"
On November 23, 1221, when the longest nights, when the Toledo autumn is usually more humid, sad and cold, as if with a bad omen, a child of royal lineage, who would be called Alfonso, was born in some room of the Palacios Reales de Toledo, located in front of the great panoramic view of the Vega del Tajo, which lapped at its foundations as it entered the outline of the city where the great ravine that surrounds it begins. It is his mother, Beatriz de Suavia, daughter of Felipe, emperor of Germany, and his father, Fernando III of Castile from 1217 and of Castile and León from 1230. the future will hold for this newborn Spanish-German, whom time and history will become the X of the Alfonso and who will be known as the "Wise King" by the following generations.
I would have liked to make only a few brief reflections on his merely human nature, on the most intimate aspects of his person, but be aware of the impossibility of making this abstraction, this detachment from the condition of king with imperial ambitions, as a warrior, as a politician. , as a poet, as a statesman, as a scientist, as a jurist, because all this and much more came to be assumed in his complex personality by the Castilian monarch. Who had the clever and magical scalpel that could dissect, demarcate and delimit the various qualities and attributes of King Alfonso, in order to discover the last structure, naked, of his spirit, of his very truth!
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Some of his biographers have tried to find in his German roots the reason for some of his character traits, but this is clearly insufficient. Alfonso X, it has been said with justice and retreat, constitutes an exceptional figure, for many reasons, far superior to his time, without possible comparison, he is an unrepeatable singularity.
It is probable that, in addition to his brilliant innate genius, the explanation must be sought in the teaching received hanging from his childhood and adolescence: in them, his father, San Fernando, with the soul of a poet, lover of culture and promoter of cathedrals, It was necessary to provide him, without a doubt, with a careful intellectual and artistic education. There are very early and eloquent references that denote his great aesthetic and humanistic sensitivity, such as when he prevented the demolition of the Giralda in Seville or when he promoted the restoration of the Mosque of Córdoba.
A peaceful, educated and sensitive man, he was nonetheless forced to fight, even successfully, especially in the early days of his reign. Forced to be violent in a time of violence, we suppose the intimate drama that this would entail in his delicate and transcendent spirit: inclined to handle the pen, he had to wield the sword; the study of scrolls was replaced by battlefields; music and poetry become imprecations and screams of horror and death, blows of sand; his fondness for entertainment games, like chess, turned into real and bloody contests; lover of telling the story, he had to make it, unmake it and suffer it himself, in the most inexorable present; jurist insignia, he had to star in the unjust law of war; his eyes, accustomed to looking at the heavenly vaults, had to descend to the enemy walls and towers; central figure of the School of Translators of Toledo, in its third and last stage (the late Toledo or third Toledo of Schipperges), he had to exchange, in short, the company and the, without a doubt, tasty colloquium with the wise men gathered in Toledo , for difficult and committed meetings and interviews, with interlocutors who are experts in tricks, tricks and deceit, who will probably surprise his usual good faith as a truth-loving scientist on more than one occasion. King Alfonso was, then, a man whose greatest greatness and whose greatest misfortune was in having to carry out, during almost his entire life, as diverse as it was fruitful, an endless number of tasks to which his historical responsibility forced him and which, surely, , never wanted.
Family Wounds
But particularly painful could be the hostility coming from your own family environment; and thus, he had to suffer the insult, the ingratitude and the lack of understanding, in the first place from his brothers, mainly from the infante don Enrique; of his wife, Doña Violante, who also leaves him with her grandchildren, angry about dynastic issues; but, above all, it will be his son, his Sancho -the future Sancho IV- from whom he will receive the most lacerating wounds that undermined the last years of his life.
In 1275, Alfonso returned from Beaucaire, to meet with Pope Gregory X; He returns sick and hopeless from the imperial dream that animated almost his entire existence; his kingdoms were invaded by Muslims and his eldest son, Don Fernando de la Cerca, died in Villarreal, thus opening himself up to a serious succession problem that culminated in 1282, when in Valladolid, a Board made up of nobles and prelates, made the decision to depose the King Alfonso in favor of his son Don Sancho, more determined and violent. The 'Wise King' in the twilight of his life finds himself alone, abandoned, failed, betrayed, and dethroned by his own son. In accordance, then, with this permanent paradox and contradiction that was the life of Alfonso X, full of lights and shadows, of glory and sorrow, we can agree that along with the wisest, he was also the most unfortunate of the Castilian monarchs.
But, once again, don Alfonso surprises us with a last gesture of energy and authority, and on November 8, 1282, in the Alcázar of Seville, he dictates a sentence dispossessing don Sancho of all his rights, counting on the loyalty of the kingdom of Murcia, part of Extremadura and many cities of Castile. In his will, drawn up during his last illness, apparently cardiosclerosis, he names as his successor his grandson Don Alfonso de la Cerda, son of his eldest son Don Fernando.
Finally, on April 4, 1284, when Seville was filled with flowers, a new and eternal spring dawned for the great king of Toledo, Alfonso X: that of an immortality of his genius and wisdom, for all future generations.
