The world could have been better made (by Alfonso X)

Since King Alfonso X was born on 23 November 1221, today we are celebrating his eight hundredth birthday, which is why a few days ago we dedicated an entry here to the famous Alfonsine Tables, and today we will dedicate another to an interesting anecdote about the king’s astronomical sleepless nights that would explain, no more and no less, the reason for the rebellion led by his son Sancho against Alfonso X at the end of his reign.

The anecdote began to spread around the middle of the 14th century, and tells that the wise king used to say that if God had asked him for his opinion on how to make the world, he would have had some advice to give him to make the world work better. Naturally, this was considered blasphemous; in fact, it is said that the mother of Alfonso X was warned by a Greek fortune-teller that her son would become king, but would lose his kingdom because of this blasphemy. It seems that the king used to repeat it assiduously, to such an extent that an angel visited a close friend of the king’s to make him rectify it; without much success, as Alfonso X insisted that the world could have been better made. By the time he decided to rectify the situation, it was too late and his son Sancho was up in arms.

According to later documents, the curse of blasphemy continued even after the death of Alfonso X, and was the cause of the assassination of Pedro I the Cruel, and the replacement of the dynasty of Alfonso X by the Trastamaras. Thus, in a chronicle of the late 14th century, it is said that an angel visited the wise king, telling him: “Because you have censured the wisdom of God, you will die within twenty days and lose the kingdom before the fourth generation”.

Although it is not clear what, if anything, Alfonso X might have been referring to when he claimed to have advice to give to God to create a better functioning world, it is quite possible that he was at least partly referring to the many irregularities that already in his time existed between Ptolemaic astronomy – based on a geocentric model with circular and uniform motions of the planets – and what was observed in the sky. In fact, this is how the royal “blasphemy” came to be interpreted, especially after the triumph of the Copernican revolution.