“All Things to All Men”: Political Messianism in Late-Medieval and Early Modern Spain

In the 1470’s, encubertismo, the legend of a ‘hidden’ Spanish king and Last World Emperor who would purify the Church, rule justly, and destroy the power of Islam, came to be associated with Prince Ferdinand of Aragon.  By the time of the final campaign against Granada in the 1480s, many people connected to Ferdinand and Isabella’s court were using those messianic expectations to help legitimize their regime.  Though he conquered Granada in 1492, Ferdinand died in 1516 without accomplishing the more consequential eschatological goal of re-capturing Jerusalem, as he himself expected.  Encubertismo did not die with Ferdinand, however.   It reappeared a few years later during the revolutionary Germanías of Valencia in 1519-1521 with a more radical, self-proclaimed ‘Hidden One’ who preached the destruction of the clergy and nobility.  The Germanías were soon suppressed by force, but in the 1520’s, several people connected to the new Habsburg regime supported Emperor Charles V, the grandson of Ferdinand, as the encubierto.  Unlike Ferdinand or his paternal grandfather, Maximilian I, who also held messianic views of himself, Charles never embraced that role or those claims and, after his reign, fewer and fewer Spaniards saw the Habsburg kings as candidates to be the ‘Hidden One’.  I will demonstrate that the legend of the encubierto, while often used to legitimize extant power structures, was, in fact, so polyvalent and so independent that it could also be used as a source of legitimization to critique contemporary rulers and hierarchies.