Note 829 — Chapter XXVIII

A vast number of tributes were paid by contemporary men of letters to Don John of Austria; but among them none is more curious than a Latin poem in two books, containing seventeen or eighteen hundred hexameters and pentameters, the work of a negro, who had been brought as an infant from Africa, and who by his learning rose to be professor of Latin and Greek in the school attached to the cathedral of Granada. He is the same person noticed by Cervantes as “el negro Juan Latino,” in a poem prefixed to the Don Quixote. His volume of Latin verses on the birth of Ferdinand, the son of Philip II., on Pope Pius V., on Don John of Austria, and on the city of Granada, making above a hundred and sixty pages in small quarto, printed at Granada in 1573, is not only one of the rarest books in the world, but is one of the most remarkable illustrations of the intellectual faculties and possible accomplishments of the African race. The author himself says he was brought to Spain from Ethiopia, and was, until his emancipation, a slave to the grandson of the famous Gonsalvo de Córdova. His Latin verse is respectable, and, from his singular success as a scholar, he was commonly called Joannes Latinus, a sobriquet under which he is frequently mentioned, and which was made the title of a play, I presume about him, by Lopez de Enciso, called “Juan Latino.” He was respectably married to a lady of Granada, who fell in love with him, as Eloisa did with Abelard, while he was teaching her; and after his death, which occurred later than 1573, his wife and children erected a monument to his memory in the church of Sta. Ana, in that city, inscribing it with an epitaph, in which he is styled “Filius Æthiopum, prolesque nigerrima patrum.” Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 716. Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. I. p. lx., note.

It may not be amiss here to add, that another negro is celebrated in a play, written in tolerable Castilian, and claiming, at the end, to be founded in fact. It is called “El Valiente Negro en Flandes,” and is found in Tom. XXXI., 1638, of the collection of Comedias printed at Barcelona and Saragossa. The negro in question, however, was not, like Juan Latino, a native African, but was a slave born in Merida, and was distinguished only as a soldier, serving with great honor under the Duke of Alva, and enjoying the favor of that severe general.