Historian and flag bearer, born in the tower house of San Martín de Muñatones, located in the council of San Julián de Muskiz, in the Somorrostro valley (Bizkaia), in 1399 or 1400, and died in tragic circumstances in a prison in the same tower house in mid-1476.
His father was Ochoa de Salazar, who in 1430 served King John II of Castile in the war in Navarre at the head of the noble knights of Las Encartaciones, and the following year in the plains of Granada against the Moors; his mother was Teresa de Muñatones.
On his father's side, our writer was the great-grandson of Juan López de Salazar, chief moneylender of the Lordship of Vizcaya and Encartaciones, the first to establish said house in Somorrostro and also the first of the 120 illegitimate children that Lope García de Salazar, who was also chief moneylender of the Lordship of Vizcaya and lord of the original house of this surname, had in addition to his legitimate children. Lope García de Salazar died in the conquest of Algeciras in 1344. With the country in turmoil due to terrible factional fighting, our future historian soon became involved in the disputes of the time, taking part at the age of sixteen in the battle of Santullán against the Marroquines de Samano and their supporters, who had challenged his father Ochoa and those of his lineage (1416). From that date onwards, there was hardly a battle in the country in which our biographee did not take an active part.
Married in 1425 to Doña Juana de Butrón y Múgica, he had six sons and three daughters, some of whom would become famous in the history of the country. When his father Ochoa died in 1439, he inherited the house as the eldest son, and King John II ordered him to enter 20,900 maravedis in his books as an annual allowance, with one lancer and three crossbowmen, whom he had to take into his service whenever war was d. In 1447, the king raised this figure to 160,700 maravedis, with the obligation to serve him with several lancers and crossbowmen. He also granted him, in a charter dated 16 February 1439, the anti-foral authorisation to supply the ironworks of Gascony and Lapurdi with ore from his mines, a permit ratified by the RRCC but challenged by the Lordship, which succeeded in having it withdrawn in 1503. In addition to all this, the excesses of the factional struggles reached such extremes that King Henry IV was forced to come personally to the Basque provinces, determined to nip them in the bud with the most energetic measures. Among these was the order of exile against the Parientes Mayores and their respective allies from the Oñaz and Gamboa factions, which included our Lope García, who was exiled for four years in 1457 to the town of Jimena in the countryside of Gibraltar. Having fallen seriously ill, his sentence of exile was pardoned, and he was thus able to fully restore his broken health in his native lands.
The silencing of the struggles lineages and factions did not, however, mean peace for our Lope García, who was now approaching sixty years of age. The second of his sons, Lope, died in 1462 in the presence of King Henry IV in battle in the lands of Aragon; his eldest son, Ochoa, also fell in 1467 in Elorrio, in an attack organised against his father's wishes. This led to bitter disagreements Lope García and his wife Juana de Butrón y Múgica over the succession of the house and property. While the elderly Lope believed that the estate should pass to his grandchildren, the children of the late Ochoa, Juana de Butrón favoured another of her living sons, Juan de Salazar, known as ‘el Moro’ (the Moor). Doña Juana de Butrón died in 1469, and shortly afterwards, the situation became complicated for other reasons and reached such a point of tension that the elderly father was forced to expel Juan de Salazar ‘el Moro’ from his house. According to documents unearthed by Darío de Areitio in the archives of the Royal Chancery of Valladolid, old Lope, who during his wife's lifetime was far from adhering to the norms of Christian marital morality, took Catalina de Guinea and Mencia de Avellaneda as mistresses to his home in Somorrostro after her death. His son Juan, ed no respect for his father's grey hair and did not shy away from treating them carnasially.
Once expelled from home, he sought an opportunity to seize power from his father, which he did in July 1470, besieging him and confining him to his tower house in San Martín de Muñatones, with the help of traitors within the compound. The old Lope still had five long years of confinement in the tower house of San Martín de Muñatones ahead of him, during which he was given ‘almost no maintenance of the things necessary according to his manner and status’ and was treated harshly and cruelly as if he were a Moor, victim, moreover, of all kinds of coercion. His misfortunes did not end there, as he eventually died from poison administered, it seems, on the orders of his ungrateful son. Apart from waging war, Lope García de Salazar was also involved in notable economic activity, mainly, it seems, in the exploitation of the rich iron deposits in his native valleys and their subsequent shipment by sea to European markets. We must not forget that the days of our biographee coincide fundamentally with the years of maximum splendour of Basque maritime trade, which managed to introduce its iron and its ships into the most difficult European markets (cf. José Angel García de Cortázar: Vizcaya en el siglo XV. Aspectos económicos y sociales, Bilbao 1966).
The close link the economic activities of Lope, and his lineage in general, with maritime trade is suggested by the following significant text found in Las Bienandanzas e Fortunas, relating to his great-grandfather Juan López de Salazar, the first of the lineage to establish his home in Somorrostro: his father Lope García having given him the plot of land in San Cristóbal
‘in which to live’, ‘not considering it a good place, he found a way to settle in Somorrostro on the advice of his father, who told him to go to sea as much as he could, for there he would always find a way to satisfy his appetite, and he built the House and Plot of San Martín (de Muñatones]’
(p. 118 of the edition by Angel Rodríguez Herrero, Bilbao 1955).
We find confirmation of Lope García's economic activities related to the exploitation of mineral deposits in a contemporary document transcribed by the aforementioned A. Rodríguez Herrero, according to which Lope García, together with his wife Juana de Butrón y Múgica,
"built the house of San Martín with all its buildings and demolished everything that was there before, and made the doors in the hall of the main tower to the exact height of the rooms where parties are held, so that those who come there may know how tall he was. He built the ironworks of the five years and the mills and the ironworks of Aturriaga of the new buildings and bought the ironworks of Urdan de Guielu and in Castro de Urdiales he built the towers of the portals, and bought the tower of Vitoria and the properties that belonged to Juan López de Salazar of Portugalete and bought [...] the mines of Lemona, Bayona, San Juan de Luz, San Pedro de Galdames, San Llorente de Baxilio, San Miguel de Ahedo de Carranza, the farmlands of the farmers of Carranza, and the Mortueros of Somorrostro, Galdames, and Sopuerta de Carranza [...]".
On the basis of this multifaceted activity, he came to hold the titles of lord of the ancestral homes of Salazar, San Martín de Somorrostro, Muñatones, Nograro, La Sierra and others, and of chief magistrate of Castro Urdiales. However, if the name of Lope García de Salazar has gone down in the history of the Basque Country, it is above all due to his historiographical work, which is of transcendental importance for the study of our social life in the late Middle Ages. Lope himself, in the prologue to Bienandanzas e Fortunas, tells us that
‘having a great desire to know and hear about such events, from my youth until now, I have worked hard to acquire books and stories about the events of the world, searching for them in the provinces and houses of Christian kings and princes from across the sea and from here, through my own means, with merchants and sailors, and by myself on this side.’
As a result of his historical interests, he left us two works, separated in time by some twenty years. The first in chronological order is commonly known as the Chronicle of Biscay, which, published in part under the title Chronicle of Seven Houses of Biscay and Castile, written in 1454 by Juan Carlos Guerra (Madrid 1914), has not yet been printed in its entirety. But his magnum opus is Bienandanzas e Fortunas, laboriously written during his endless years of imprisonment in the tower of San Martín, when he was already ‘devoid of the hope of those who are captive in Moorish lands, who wait to be redeemed by their possessions and by the alms of good people’.
He began work in July 1471 and persisted in his task until the eve of his death in 1476. In the first twelve books, he attempts to sketch out—in the style of the time—something of a history of the world, beginning with creation and continuing with the history of Israel, Greece, Rome, Constantinople, and the medieval European peoples. The following seven books (XIII-XIX) deal with the history of Spain, with the nineteenth book focusing on the kings of Navarre and Aragon. The last six books are of most interest to historians today, as they are the most original of all, recounting in part events experienced by the author himself. As for the sources he uses, the influence of the Castilian chronicles is evident, drawing mainly on the Grande Estoria by Alfonso el Sabio and the Crónica General of 1344. He also draws on information passed down to him by tradition, the genealogical records kept by the main lineages and, finally, his personal memories of events experienced by him or his contemporaries. Having to judge Lope's historiographical work in some way, we would say, first of all, that it would be futile to demand from our ardent partisan any refinement or display of criticism. Lope accepts and records with the utmost simplicity what is circulating in his time, whether it be truth or legend.
Apart from his legends in other historical , those he records relating to the history of the country are worth remembering: for example, on the battle of Arrigorriaga and the first lords of Vizcaya, on the origin of the factional struggles and on the origin of certain lineages, such as those of Salazar and Leguizamón; those derived from an arbitrary etymological interpretation of place names or people's names, etc. The value of Lope's historiographical work increases as it approaches his own time, dealing with events that he himself experienced. In this regard, it can be said that the pages of harsh and rough prose that Lope devotes to telling us about the rivalries and struggles of the lineages of his land
‘are a precious and irreplaceable source for historians who want to learn about Vizcaya at the end of the Middle Ages, with its bloody face framed by untold violence.’
[Andrés E. de Mañaricúa y Nuere: Historiography of Vizcaya (from Lope García de Salazar to Labayru), Bilbao 1971, pp. 39-65. The words in quotation marks are on p. 65).
We do not wish to conclude this biographical sketch without mentioning a singular feat of arms by our character, this time for the benefit of Vizcaya. Having been appointed by the king as corregidor in 1451, Mendoza, who was already the lender of the Lordship, opposed the contrafuero, on the basis that ‘the lender who is corregidor cannot be the utor who is also the judge’; and in order to effectively oppose this outrage, he marched with the accused on Gernika and caused the aforementioned corregidor Mendoza to flee.