Alfonso X had a long, eventful, and violent reign. His repeated and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to become Romano-German emperor placed a heavy burden on his finances, while his attempts to use taxation and legislation to strengthen and centralize royal power at the expense of the Castilian and Leonese magnates provoked them to protest, temporary self-imposed exile, and open hostility. So, too, did his sporadic attempts to toy with established customs in relation to the royal succession. He had contemplated the possibility in some versions of his legal codes that the children of his eldest son and heir, Fernando, rather than his own second son, Sancho, should inherit the throne in the event of Fernando's death. In 1275 Fernando died unexpectedly, leaving a French widow, Blanche, and two young children, Alfonso and Fernando, the Infantes de la Cerda. This provoked a succession crisis which gave a hostile French king, Philip III, the right to argue that the crown of Castile should pass to the Infantes de la Cerda and through them to France, and a disaffected Castilian and Leonese nobility the opportunity to turn Sancho into a leader who would represent their cause against his father. Against this backdrop of political turbulence, Alfonso had to secure and repopulate the territories conquered by his father from the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus decades earlier, reassert his authority in the kingdom of Murcia after an uprising there in 1264, and ward off attacks and the threat of invasion from the king of Granada and from Marinid invaders based in North Africa.

These internal and external challenges to his throne would alone have been sufficient to ensure that Alfonso retained the interest of later historians, but assessments of his reign are also influenced by the brilliant court he maintained and the literary activity he encouraged there. Gil de Zamora described how ‘counts, marquises, princes and magnates, soldiers and townsmen’ from across the world flocked to him ‘in order to breathe in the sweet scent of his universal renown’, and to find ‘a refuge from enemies, advice against doubt and a generous and unlocked treasure-house against penury and poverty’

The importance of Alfonso's literary patronage as a vehicle to convey his vision of kingship necessarily means he is presented as the central figure in the execution of these works. This raises the question of the extent to which he was personally involved as author in the works he commissioned. Certainly he would have known how to read since, as the second Partida explained, this was an essential royal skill that enabled a king to protect his privacy and increase his knowledge of the laws of God and the deeds of the great in history. There is, moreover, evidence to suggest that Alfonso (or those close to him) did use some of the books he commissioned for reference and study purposes. Among the now-lost documents quoted by Seville historian Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga in his Annales is a fragment from one which refers to ‘Suer Melendez, scribe to the king, who draws up tables [of contents] and adds numbers to his books’. Suer Melendez's duties of adding reference apparatus and folio numbers to books would only have been required if the manuscripts were to be consulted for practical, scholarly, purposes. Gil de Zamora asserted that Alfonso himself had ‘composed many beautiful story-songs, [rhythmically] measured with agreeable sounds and musical proportions’ in praise of the Virgin, and his assertion has been borne out by close study of the music. Manuel Pedro Ferreira argued recently, and persuasively, that the music and lyrics to at least four cantigas were composed by Alfonso himself.

The subject-matter of the Cantigas and of some of the secular poems attributed to the king and preserved in fifteenth-century cancioneiros also seem to reflect Alfonso's inner feelings and emotional states. But other passages which, at a remove of just over seven centuries, seem to reflect the king's intimate self in fact reveal, on closer examination, the imprint of a literary exemplar. Such a debt is to be expected during a period when behind every book lurked an model for a scribe to copy. Joseph Snow has argued that a group of more than 300 cantigas written in the first person singular share so many stylistic features that they could not have been composed by the king, but instead must be the product of a team of royal collaborators who wrote according to a set of rhetorical guidelines (albeit ones established by the king himself).

The future Alfonso X was born in Toledo on St Clement's day, 23 November 1221. He was the eldest son of the twenty-year-old Fernando III, king of Castile, and his twenty-three-year-old wife Beatriz, daughter of the late emperor-elect Philip of Swabia and granddaughter of the emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. His mother's ancestry was to underpin his candidature to the imperial throne, a candidature which he defended while still a prince against his younger brother Fadrique, who had been named after the emperor Fredrick, and which he pursued for almost his entire reign. When he was just four months old, on 21 March 1222, representatives from all parts of Castile and León recognized him as their feudal lord at Burgos. Aged nineteen in 1240, he was promised in marriage to the three-year-old Violante, daughter of Jaume I of Aragon. The couple finally married at Valladolid on 29 January 1249. His love of learning, meanwhile, may have begun at an early age and was arguably remarked upon even before he acceded to the throne. In 1250, Guillermo Pérez de la Calzada, the former abbot of Sahagún, described him as the ‘first-born of the king [Fernando], skilful Alfonso, | virtuous father of his country, learned in everything,| modest in his habits’ (‘Regis primogenitus, Alfonsus peritus, | Probus pater patriae, cunctis eruditus, | modestus in moribus’). The context of this praise was Alfonso's triumphant entry into Seville with his father Fernando, which had surrendered to Christian forces (and to those of their Nasrid allies from Granada) after a long campaign of harassment and a siege that lasted over a year. In his dedicatory prose prologue, Pérez de la Calzada hoped that his flattering account of the victory would be included in official chronicles.

It is tempting to read this hope, and the deposed abbot's description of Alfonso as ‘eruditus’, as evidence for Alfonsine literary activities that predate his accession to the throne: the poem arguably presents a new model of kingship characterized by learning. It is surely significant in the light of Alfonso's later patronage that Pérez de la Calzada identifies the prince and not his father the king as a potential patron interested in historical writings.

The depictions of Alfonso in miniatures and initials were not the only visual means that artists and scribes used to persuade readers of his political ideology and the virtues of his kingship. The care taken to match his image to a particular text extended to the overall decoration and layout of the manuscripts themselves. The frames that enclose miniatures and tables in the códice rico and ‘Florence’ copies of the Cantigas, and in the astronomical tables in the Canones de Albateni, incorporate royal and imperial heraldry to reinforce Alfonso's connection with, and authority over, the work. The border around the pair of miniatures that open Part IV of the General estoria (BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539) may also have been intended to incorporate heraldry: six small blank squares interrupt the frame (see Figure 1). However, a striking feature of layout preserved in both the Estoria de Espanna (Escorial MS Y.I.2) and in the General estoria Part IV (BAV MS Urb. Lat. 539) suggests that Alfonso attempted to distinguish chronicles compiled under his patronage with a distinctive mise-en-page that could easily be reproduced in later copies and thereby perpetuate his authority. This consists in framing the rubrics that announce the major divisions of the text into books with a circle set within a square, and filling the space between circle and square with dense pen-flourishing (Figure 4).

This distinctive layout appears to have been characteristic of all parts of the chronicles copied for Alfonso, as some later manuscripts of the General estoria and the Estoria de Espanna preserve the device of encircling rubrics in roundels, albeit in a much simplified form. In these manuscripts, the roundels are barely decorated and are not placed within a square.

The use of roundels to frame rubrics that announce important divisions in texts, or which distinguish units of information, is found in other Western manuscripts of the period and is associated with specific types of text. The practice can be traced to the late Roman period, and in the Christian era it was adopted to indicate divisions in the books of the Bible, canon tables, and in any text which required complex lists to be set out clearly for ease of reference, such as diagrams to indicate degrees of consanguinity.

The fourteenth-century chronicle of Alfonso's reign explains that in the year 1260 he ordered translations of legal, biblical, and astrological works so that he ‘might have knowledge of all writings’. This suggests the range of the works that he commissioned, while at the same time implying that these enjoyed a certain amount of circulation in the years following his death. Gerold Hilty and Laura Fernández Fernández have traced and recorded the dissemination of the scientific treatises that went under Alfonso's name, and the holdings of Madrid's Biblioteca Nacional, the library at the Escorial monastery, and of other libraries across Spain include later copies of the Alfonsine chronicles and legal compilations. Some works associated with the king are known only from translations from the Spanish preserved in copies made in the decades after his reign (the Livre l’eschiele Mahomet and the Liber Razielis) or in fifteenth century manuscripts (the collection of fables known as Calila e Dimna). On the other hand, the Alfonsine provenance of manuscripts which state clearly they were patronized by him, and which are dated or dateable to his reign, has understandably not been questioned. However, this chapter will argue that aspects of the codicology of three such manuscripts, their materials and style of layout, suggest they are copies of Alfonsine translations and compilations made for other readers.

Three manuscripts generally considered to have been copied for Alfonso are characterized by a relatively modest appearance and have smaller overall folio dimensions than the richly illuminated Cantigas or Libro de los juegos, even when rebinding is taken into account. Two are astrological works, now in the Biblioteca Nacional: Madrid MS 3065, the Libro conplido en los iudizios de las estrellas; and Madrid MS 9294, the Libro de las cruzes. The third, also in Madrid's Biblioteca Nacional, is the earliest copy of the first part of the General estoria, Madrid MS 816. They contain no miniatures, no illuminated initials, and no heraldic decoration to link them to Alfonso's patronage, and there is no evidence to suggest such ornament was planned.

From the vantage point of today, the literary patronage of Alfonso X (reigned 1252–1284) ‘the Learned’ (el Sabio) –, ruler of Castile and León (united in 1230 under his father Fernando) and of Islamic kingdoms recently incorporated into Christian ones such as Murcia, Seville, and Niebla – seems extraordinary for its time, in the context not only of Spain but also of the whole of thirteenth-century Europe. Praised by a contemporary for studying ‘worldly and heavenly kinds of knowledge’, he initiated what appears to have been a coherent programme of scholarship in Castilian, commissioning translations from the Arabic of astronomical works, sponsoring legal and historical compilations, as well as composing devotional poetry in praise of the Virgin Mary. His decision to promote the Castilian language was not a casual one. It was the principal language of his chancery and of the Christian population in the largest of his kingdoms, Castile, a kingdom which from the 1230s until the 1260s had undergone a period of further expansion as it absorbed the Islamic states which had submitted to his father Fernando and to Alfonso himself while still a prince and later when he became king.

Alfonso's consistent patronage of works in the vernacular, at a date when Latin was the language of European scholarship, was remarkable, although the immediate consequence was that the works bearing his name, even the scientific ones, enjoyed limited circulation beyond his kingdoms. Despite this, some historians have argued that his decision was due to his desire to unite a kingdom of disparate languages (principally Arabic and Castilian) and faiths (Christian, Muslim, and Jewish) in a language and culture that would be common to all. More recently, however, the utopian ideal that this analysis implies has yielded to more hard-headed reassessments of his literary patronage. In the words of one historian, ‘The Alphonsine cultural project should not, perhaps, be understood as an abstract reflection of enlightened toleration; rather the king's interest in translation was […] an instrument of proto-absolutist, colonial control.’