160 ROMANCE BALLADS

(pastorcico), who prophesied to the King just before the murder
of Queen Blanche, belonged to the ballad (66) rather than the
chronicle. It leads up to the murder, but the murder is not of
history but of balladry. The 'pastorcico', furthermore, is a super-
natural figure; he makes his appearance out of a 'black mass' which
the royal huntsmen saw approaching from the direction of
Medina Sidonia, and he easily escapes arrest. In rationalizing the
episode the chronicler falls into contradictions.

The ballad of Don Pedro's death at Montiel is savage, but
pedestrian. In the preceding year the royalists had made a
military promenade through the Guadalquivir valley, during which
they had momentarily appeared before the gates of Baeza. The
readiness of the governor, Ruy Fernandez, scared them off after
a brief skirmish. This event was celebrated in a ballad, a few lines
of which were gathered by Argote de Molina in the year of th~
Armada (ix, p. 196). It is remarkable in two ways. Referring a
it does to one of the fortresses of the Guadalquivir valley, it i
virtually a frontier ballad (romance fronterizo), and was readib
confused with the oldest piece of that kind, which was also a Siegi
of Baeza (1407) (71). Thus the civil wars merged into the borde
wars, and the series of ballads is unbroken. The other featun
is that the ballad is assuredly the work of an eyewitness. Th<
skirmish was of too little consequence to be mentioned by th<
historians; but the ballad gives precise information as to persons
and places, and by calling the king Pedro Gil it gives tongue to the
contemporary slander that he was not son of his father but of Dor
Juan Gil de Alburquerque, his mother's faithful supporter. Sucr
a slander was in the interest of the Trastamaran bastard only sc
long as the claims of Pedro's house were not united to those of tk
usurping dynasty; as they were by the marriage of Enrique III and
Catherine of Lancaster in terms of the treaty of 1390. A jolly ballad
of The Prior of St. John (69) represents Pedro as a baffled tyrant,
and has not the bitterness of the contemporary pieces. It must have
existed by 1455, when a note concerning the alleged event was
inserted in the Fourth General Chronicle of Spain.

The siege of Baeza, attacked this time by Vanegas and defended
by Pedro Diaz, opens a long series of ballads which extends from
the year 1407 to the date of Don Alonso de Aguilar's death (1501).
They are divided into two series. The earlier is of isolated forays,
triumphs and disasters (71-83), without any co-ordinating design.