Rodríguez Sanchez de Arévalo

A learned Spanish bishop. b. 1404, in the diocese of Segovia; d. 4 October, 1470. After studying law at Salamanca for ten years and there graduating as Doctor, he became secretary to John II and Henry IV, Kings of Castile. They employed him as envoy on various missions, notably to the Holy See apropos of the Council of Basle, whose parliamentary theories he opposed. After the elevation of Calixtus III, he remained at Rome, became Bishop of Oviedo in Spain, and later commander of the papal fortress, the Castle of St. Angelo, under Paul II, who transferred him successively to the Spanish sees of Zamora, Calahorra, and Palencia. His writings, mostly unedited, are in the Vatican and at Padua, and deal with ecclesiastical and political matters. The following have been printed: “Speculum Vitae Humanae” (Rome, 1468), a popular work, frequently reprinted in the next two centuries; it treats of the lights and shadows of the various estates of life; “Historia Hispanica,” from the earliest times to 1469 (Rome, 1470), reprinted in the first volume of A. Schott’s “Hispania Illustrata”; “De Monarchia Orbis et de origine et differentiâ principatus imperialis et regalis” (Rome, 1521), in which he asserts for the Pope the sole right to punish kings. His bold reproofs of certain ecclesiastical dignitaries caused Matthaeus Flaccus to put him down as a forerunner of Luther, but quite unjustly, as Niccolo Antonio has shown in his “Bibliotheca Hispanica Vetus” (II, 397, 608, 614).