THE end of the medieval period in Spain brought the discovery of America, the expulsion of the Jews, and, after their forced conversion, that of the Moriscos. But Charlemagne and his legendary exploits did not vanish from memory. Indeed, the Carolingian literary legacy expanded and flourished unabated in the romances, the Spanish ballads that first began to appear in print in the early sixteenth century. These reached their creative apotheosis in the Golden Age plays of luminaries such as Juan de la Cueva, Lope de Vega, and Guillén de Castro, after which they persisted in a fairly static yet diminished form well into the twentieth century.

The ballads also recreated episodes from the major Spanish epics, including those examined in this volume, Bernardo del Carpio and Mocedades de Rodrigo, and from a range of the Old French epic poems, all of which are much too numerous to cite here. Modern collections are readily available, and for our purposes Colin Smith's Spanish Ballads will serve as a source for a general introduction to the genre and a sampling of relevant texts. The earliest ballads were based on memorable fragments of epic texts, and later made their way into court circles where skilled poets appropriated and expanded them in more ornate and elaborate ways, including setting them to music. They became part of the late fifteenth-century courtly song collections known as cancioneros, and are represented by some thirty-eight texts in the Cancionero general, an anthology compiled from 1490 onwards and published in 1511, among which the Carolingian ballads were some of the most favored by the Catholic Monarchs (Smith 18). Ballads were the most printed of all poetic texts in the sixteenth century, due in no small measure to their printing as broadsheets, or pliegos sueltos, and sold in the streets of Spanish towns and at local fairs and markets (Smith 19).

Ballads fueled the imagination of Spaniards from all walks of life, including the highly cultured Miguel de Cervantes, whose Don Quijote invokes ballads throughout as cultural references understood by characters and readers alike.