Note 180 — Chapter VI

The authority for this is sufficient, though the fact itself of a man being named from the sort of poetry he composed is a singular one. It is found in Diego Ortiz de Zuñiga, “Anales Ecclesiasticos y Seglares de Sevilla,” (Sevilla, 1677, fol., pp. 14, 90, 815, etc.). He took it, he says, from the original documents of the repartimientos, which he describes minutely as having been used by Argote de Molina, (Preface and p. 815,) and from documents in the archives of the Cathedral. The repartimiento, or distribution of lands and other spoils in a city, from which, as Mariana tells us, a hundred thousand Moors emigrated or were expelled, was a serious matter, and the documents in relation to it seem to have been ample and exact. (Zuñiga, Preface, and pp. 31, 62, 66, etc.) The meaning of the word Romance in this place is a more doubtful matter. But if any kind of popular poetry is meant by it, what was it likely to be, at so early a period, but ballad poetry? The verses, however, which Ortiz de Zuñiga, on the authority of Argote de Molina, attributes (p. 815) to Domingo Abad de los Romances, are not his; they are by the Arcipreste de Hita. See Sanchez, Tom. IV. p. 166.