On Don Pedro Miguel de Castillo's History of Calvinism in Spain
The longest of the fourteen fabrications in Viajes de Montaña, Don Pedro Miguel de Castillo’s seven-volume history of Calvinism in Spain, is a memoir of 17th C. Basque Bible smuggler Ganiz Intxausti.
The longest of the fourteen fabrications in Viajes de Montaña, Don Pedro Miguel de Castillo’s seven-volume history of Calvinism in Spain, is a memoir of 18th C. Basque Bible smuggler Ganiz Intxausti. There is no doubt that Intxausti was real—I have stood at his grave!—but he was likely illiterate. And even if he were literate, it’s unlikely he wrote a memoir. And if had written a memoir, it did not include any of the passages Don Pedro claimed to have discovered and translated.1
Analysis of long quotations from the purported memoir take up the bulk of the fifth volume of Viajes. They’re prefaced, in a departure from the tone of the other volumes, by Don Pedro’s recollections of mountaineering and hiking with latter-day Basque smugglers and how by wits and lies he came to possess the Intxausti manuscript in Lisbon, learn its euskaran dialect,2 and produce a translation. The memoirs describe the smuggling of Protestant Bibles and pamphlets into Spain and a hidden or forgotten low church tradition of itinerant Basque preachers in Spain and France, the origin of which Don Pedro dates back to the 16th Century. The power of the memoir lies in its description of the countryside and transcription of the sermons, which, like most sermons addressed to shepherds and mountain people, concerned the depravity of sin to the exclusion of all other subjects...
If you don’t believe me, visit the medium Uxue Mendiluze in Gipuzkoa. She has talked with the ghost of Ganiz for decades, and he laughed at her when she read the “memoir” to him. If you pay her well, she will draw for you maps of the old smuggling routes, which differ slightly from those reproduced in Viajes de Montaña.
Besides the testimony of Ganiz’s ghost, it’s the dialect, impossible for its supposed time and place, that gives the memoirs away as a fabrication. The question long debated by Don Pedro’s readers is whether he wrote the memoir himself or purchased a forgery by one of the Mendonça brothers. Although he never revisits the memoir explicitly, a footnote in the final volume of Viajes—about the Mendonças’ forgery of an early Catalan translation of Calvin’s commentary on Genesis—seems to implicate that illustrious Portuguese family.