"Natural History" by Pliny the Elder as a possible source of "History of Spain" by Alfonso X the Wise (about a historiographic myth)[«Естественная История» Плиния Старшего Как Возможный Источник «Истории Испании» Альфонсо Х Мудрого (Об Одном Историографическом Мифе)]

The article focuses on overcoming the historiographic myth that the “Natural History” (NH) written by Pliny the Elder (c. 23-79) was used as one of the sources in the process of the medieval chronicle “Estoria de Espanna” (EE) composing. The EE was written in the vernacular (Castilian) language after 1270 at the court of Alfonso X the Wise, king of Castile and Leon (1252–1284). Manuscript materials of the period do not contain any direct evidence of Pliny’s book using in the royal scriptorium. Spanish manuscript collections have no medieval copies of the NH dated by the period of the end of the 13th century or before. Manuscript catalogs and descriptions of the greatest Castilian medieval libraries (including the famous Capitular library of the Toledo cathedral) composed from the 13th to 15th centuries don’t contain any information about any manuscript copy of NH belonged to any kind of public/ecclesiastical institution or any private person (lay magnate or prelate). The earliest copy of the NH in Toledo (and may be the earliest in all the kingdom of Castile and Leon) was the manuscript MSS/10042 (now in the National Library of Spain, Madrid). This manuscript belonged to Gil Alvárez de Albornoz y Luna (1303-1367), who was the archbishop of Toledo and then cardinal and pontifical legate in Italy; in the paper this fact is proved firstly in world historiography (before it seemed doubtful). The analysis of the EE text demonstrates that the direct and indirect allusions to the text of the NH were not taken directly from this source. But the great prestige of Pliny ́s text in Castile and Leon of the 13th century is obvious; it was one of the consequences of the “long 12th century” culture. Vivid interest to the Natural History explains why Alfonso the Wise and his co-authors who had no physical possibility to use the NH directly, but who were sure that this text must be citated in the chronicles, had to “construct” the fragment of the NH, taken from the works written by other medieval authorities. This forced falsification was a prelude for the active use of NH since the middle of the 14th century, when the Capitular Library of Toledo received some manuscripts of NH (MSS/10042 (National Library of Spain), Ms. Q-I-4 and R-I-5 (Royal Library of El Escorial) and some others) during a very short period. This interest concurs with the time, when the Primitive Version of the EE (which contained some falsified citations of Pliny’s work) was already finished.