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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 in the first third of the fifteenth century and straddles the line between the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 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 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'' of Monzón 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 among other archives of the Crown of Aragon. 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 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 The ''Historia de regibus Gothorum, Vandalorum et Suevorum'' ("History of the Kings of the Goths, Vandals and Suevi") is a Latin history of the Goths from 265 to 624, written by Isidore of Seville. It is a condensed account and, due to its diver ...

''; 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 Eduard Model Accessories is a Czech manufacturer of plastic models and finescale model accessories. Formed in 1989 in the city of Most, Eduard began in a rented cellar as a manufacturer of photoetched brass model components. Following the su ...

, 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