Historic Coat of Arms of Aragon Angel Supporter Version

Gualberto Fabricio de Vagad was an

Aragon Aragon ( , ; Spanish and an, Aragón ; ca, Aragó ) is an autonomous community in Spain, coextensive with the medieval Kingdom of Aragon. In northeastern Spain, the Aragonese autonomous community comprises three provinces (from north to sou ...

ese

Cistercian The Cistercians, () officially the Order of Cistercians ( la, (Sacer) Ordo Cisterciensis, abbreviated as OCist or SOCist), are a Catholic religious order of monks and nuns that branched off from the Benedictines and follow the Rule of Saint ...

Benedictine monk and the first historian of the

Kingdom of Aragon The Kingdom of Aragon ( an, Reino d'Aragón, ca, Regne d'Aragó, la, Regnum Aragoniae, es, Reino de Aragón) was a medieval and early modern kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, corresponding to the modern-day autonomous community of Aragon, ...

. He was born in

Zaragoza Zaragoza, also known in English as Saragossa,''Encyclopædia Britannica'"Zaragoza (conventional Saragossa)" is the capital city of the Zaragoza Province and of the autonomous community of Aragon, Spain. It lies by the Ebro river and its tributari ...

in the first third of the fifteenth century and straddles the line between the

Late Middle Ages The Late Middle Ages or Late Medieval Period was the Periodization, period of European history lasting from AD 1300 to 1500. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period (and in much of Eur ...

and the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

. He lived most of his life at the monastery of Santa María de Santa Fe, though he also spent some time at San Juan de la Peña. According to Félix de Latassa y Ortín, besides history he wrote various treatises on

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

and a compendium of verse. Vagad's ''magnum opus'', the ''Crónica de Aragón'', a vernacular Romance history of Aragon from the mythical

Kingdom of Sobrarbe The Kingdom of Sobrarbe was the legendary predecessor to the Kingdom of Aragon and the modern region of Sobrarbe (from Latin ''super Arbem'', on mount Arbe). According to the late medieval legend, the kingdom, with its capital at Aínsa, was a pro ...

(founded 724) up to the death of Alfonso V (1458), was published in Zaragoza in 1499; its

incunabula In the history of printing, an incunable or incunabulum (plural incunables or incunabula, respectively), is a book, pamphlet, or broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. Incunabula were pro ...

survive. It was commissioned by the deputies of

Ferdinand II of Aragon Ferdinand II ( an, Ferrando; ca, Ferran; eu, Errando; it, Ferdinando; la, Ferdinandus; es, Fernando; 10 March 1452 – 23 January 1516), also called Ferdinand the Catholic (Spanish: ''el Católico''), was King of Aragon and Sardinia from ...

, who named Vagad ''cronista mayor'' (senior chronicler), though the office of ''cronista'' was not formally instituted until the ''

Cortes Cortes, Cortés, Cortês, Corts, or Cortès may refer to: People * Cortes (surname), including a list of people with the name ** Hernán Cortés (1485–1547), a Spanish conquistador Places * Cortes, Navarre, a village in the South border of N ...

'' of

Monzón Monzón is a small city and municipality in the autonomous community of Aragon, Spain. Its population was 17,176 as of 2014. It is in the northeast (specifically the Cinca Medio district of the province of Huesca) and adjoins the rivers Cinca and ...

in 1547. For the work Vagad consulted the archives of San Juan de la Peña, San Victorián,

Poblet Poblet Abbey, otherwise the Royal Abbey of Santa Maria de Poblet ( ca, Reial Monestir de Santa Maria de Poblet), is a Cistercian monastery, founded in 1151, located at the foot of the Prades Mountains, in the comarca of Conca de Barberà, in C ...

, Montearagón, and

Barcelona Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ci ...

among other archives of the

Crown of Aragon The Crown of Aragon ( , ) an, Corona d'Aragón ; ca, Corona d'Aragó, , , ; es, Corona de Aragón ; la, Corona Aragonum . was a composite monarchy ruled by one king, originated by the dynastic union of the Kingdom of Aragon and the County of B ...

. In international matters he was a Spanish partisan and this bias enters into his history: he considered the Emperor Maximilian I a Spaniard and made the legendary Count Julian an Italian. In peninsular matters his Aragonese bias is evident, as when he devalues the conquest of

Valencia Valencia ( va, València) is the capital of the Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Valencian Community, Valencia and the Municipalities of Spain, third-most populated municipality in Spain, with 791,413 inhabitants. It is ...

by the Castilian folk hero

El Cid Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1043 – 10 July 1099) was a Castilian knight and warlord in medieval Spain. Fighting with both Christian and Muslim armies during his lifetime, he earned the Arabic honorific ''al-sīd'', which would evolve into El ...

(1094) relative to the conquest of the same city by James I of Aragon (1236). The work contains three prologues. In the first Vagad heaps praise on Spain in the tradition of Isidore's '' Laus Spaniae''; in the second he argues from history for the preeminence of Aragon amongst the kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula; and in the third he defends the importance of Zaragoza as the chief city of Spain. Preoccupied with style, his narrative is frequently interrupted by lengthy and banal arguments. Eduard Fueter, the Swiss historian of universal historiography, writes that Vagad's ''Crónica'' contains the "timid critical germs of the medieval tradition" (''tímidos gérmenes de crítica de la tradición medieval'').

Sources

Gualberto Fabricio de Vagad
at the Gran Enciclopedia Aragonesa {{authority control 15th-century Spanish historians Spanish Benedictines 15th-century people from the Kingdom of Aragon ca:Crónica de Aragón