Note 562 — THE VISION OF JUDGMENT. BY QUEVEDO REDIVIVUS.
Reading edition
{523} King Alfonso, speaking of the Ptolomean system, said, that "had he been consulted at the creation of the world, he would have spared the Maker some absurdities. [Alphonso X., King of Castile (1221-1284), surnamed the Wise and the Astronomer, "gave no small encouragement to the Jewish rabbis." Under his patronage Judah de Toledo translated the works of Avicenna, and improved them by a new division of the stars. Moreover, "he sent for about 50 learned men from Gascony, Paris, and other places, to translate the tables of Ptolemy, and to compile a more correct set of them (i.e. the famous Tabulæ Alphonsinæ) ... The king himself presided over the assembly."—Mod. Univ. Hist., xiii. 304, 305, note(U).
Alfonso has left behind him the reputation of a Castilian Hamlet—"infinite in faculty," but "unpregnant of his cause." "He was more fit," says Mariana (Hist., lib. xiii. c. 20), "for letters than for the government of his subjects; he studied the heavens and watched the stars, but forgot the earth and lost his kingdom." Nevertheless his works do follow him. "He is to be remembered for his poetry ('Cántigas', chants in honour of the Virgin, and 'Tesoro' a treatise on the philosopher's stone), for his astronomical tables, which all the progress of science have not deprived of their value, and for his great work on legislation, which is at this moment an authority in both hemispheres."—Hist. of Spanish Literature, by G. Ticknor, 1888, i. 7.
Byron got the quip about Alfonso and "the absurdities of creation" from Bayle (Dict., 1735, art. "Castile"), who devotes a long note (H) to a somewhat mischievous apology for the king's apparent profanity. Bayle's immediate authority is Le Bovier de Fontenelle, in his Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, 1686, p. 38, "L'embaras de tous ces cercles estoit si grand, que dans un temps où l'on ne connoissoit encore rien de meilleur, un roy d'Aragon (sic) grand mathematicien mais apparemment peu devot, disoit que si Dieu l'eust appellé à son conseil quand il fit le Monde, il luy eust donné de bons avis."]