The Cantigas de Santa Maria, four hundred…
1283 CE
The Cantigas de Santa Maria, four hundred and twenty poems with musical notation, written in the Galician variant of Galician-Portuguese during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile, are often attributed to him.
It is one of the largest collections of monophonic (solo) songs from the Middle Ages and is characterized by the mention of the Virgin Mary in every song, while every tenth song is a hymn.
The Cantigas are written in Galician-Portuguese, fashionable as a lyrical language in Castile at the time.
The authors are unknown, even if several studies indicate that Galician poet Airas Nunes might well have been the author of a large part of them.
King Alfonso X—named as Affonso in the Cantigas—is also believed to be an author of some of them as he refers himself in first person.
Support for this theory can be found in the prologue of the Cantigas.
Also, many sources credit Alfonso owing to his influence on other works within the poetic tradition, including his introduction on religious song.
Although King Alfonso X's authorship is debatable, his influence is not.
While the other major works that came out of Alfonso's workshops, including histories and other prose texts, were in Castilian, the Cantigas are in Galician-Portuguese, and reflect the popularity in the Castilian court of other poetic corpuses such as the cantigas d'amigo and cantigas d'amor.
The Libro de los juegos, an early European treatise on board games (including chess, dice, and a version of backgammon), has been commissioned by King Alfonso X between 1251 and 1283.