Garcilaso de la Vega was born in…
1536 CE
Garcilaso de la Vega was born in the Spanish city of Toledo in 1501 or 1503.
His father, Pedro Suárez de Figueroa, was a nobleman in the royal court of the Catholic Monarchs.
His mother's name was Sancha de Guzmán.
As the second son, Garcilaso did not receive the mayorazgo (entitlement) to his father's estate.
However, he spent his younger years receiving an extensive education, mastered five languages (Spanish, Greek, Latin, Italian and French), and learned how to play the zither, lute and the harp.
When his father died in 1509, Garcilaso received a sizeble inheritance from his father.
After his schooling, he joined the military in hopes of joining the royal guard.
He was named "contino" (imperial guard) of Charles V in 1520, and he was made a member of the Order of Santiago in 1523.
His first lover was Guiomar Carrillo, with whom he had an illegitimate child.
In 1525, Garcilaso married Elena de Zúñiga, who served as a lady-in-waiting for the King's favorite sister, Leonor.
Their marriage had been held in Garcilaso's hometown of Toledo in one of the family's estates.
He has six children: Lorenzo, an illegitimate child with Guiomar Carrillo, Garcilaso, Íñigo de Zúñiga, Pedro de Guzmán, Sancha, and Francisco.
Garcilaso's military duties have taken him to Italy, Germany, Tunisia and France.
In 1532 for a short period he was exiled to a Danube island where he was the guest of the Count György Cseszneky, royal court judge of Győr.
He fights his last battle in France, whose king desires to take control of Marseille and eventually control of the Mediterranean Sea, but this goal will not be realized.
Garcilaso de la Vega dies at thirty-five on October 14, 1536 in Nice, after suffering twenty-five days from an injury sustained in a battle at Le Muy.
Best known today for his tragic love poetry that contrasts the playful poetry of his predecessors, Garcilaso adapts to Spanish poetry such Italian lyrical forms as the sonnet, the eclogue, the eleven-syllable line, and the rhyming stanza that he calls the “lira.” Garcilaso's abiding passion for his lover informs much of his poetry, in which she appears as the shepherdess Galatea or Eliza.
He dies unpublished.
Commodities
Subjects
Regions
West Europe
View →Subregions
