JUAN DE MARIANA (1574)

Historian who is famous for his Historia general de España (1601) a history of Spain from the earliest time to the accession of Philip IV.

After studying in Alcalá he entered the Jesuit order and was ordained in 1561.

For the next fourteen years he taught in Rome, Flanders and in Paris where his discussions of the 13th-century neo-Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas attracted large crowds.

Returning to Spain in 1574 he spent the rest of his life in Toledo studying and writing.

A man of liberal mind Mariana infuriated his superiors with his defense of the heretic Arioso Montano and with his De Rege et Regis Institutione (1598) a treatise of government that argued that the assassination of a king was legal under certain conditions.

When his Tractus VII a series of seven treatises on political and moral subjects was published (1607) it was banned by the Inquisition and Mariana was imprisioned for a year and forced to do penance.

Although he remained a Jesuit throughout his life, his criticism of the order, Discurso de los Grandes Defectos que hay en la Forma del Govierno de lo Jesuitas (1626), severely censured the Jesuits for many injustices and inequities.

His Historia generale de Espana, originally published in Latin as Historiae de Rebus Hispaniae Libri XXX (1592-1605) and translated into Spanish by himself is less a great history than a work of art, combining history, anecdote and legend in a fluid and readable prose that makes it a work of sustained interest.