An interesting personal narrative hides beneath the mask of the _Vida y Hazañas del gran Tamarlán_ (Life and Deeds of the Mighty Timour). First published in 1582, this work is nothing less than a report of the journey (1403-6) of Ruy González de Clavijo (d. 1412), who traversed all the space "from silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon," and more. Clavijo tells of his wanderings with a quaint mingling of credulity and scepticism; still, his witness is at least as trustworthy as Marco Polo's, and his recital is vastly more graphic than the Venetian's. A very similar motive informs the _Crónica del Conde de Buelna, Don Pero Niño_ (1375-1446), by Pero Niño's friend and pennon-bearer, Gutierre Díaz Gámez. An alternative title—the _Victorial_—discloses the author's intention of representing his leader as the hero of countless triumphs by sea and land. A well-read esquire, Díaz Gámez quotes from the _Libro de Alexandre_, flecks his pages with allusions, and—with a true traveller's lust for local colouring—comes pat with technical French terms: his _sanglieres_, _mestrieres_, _cursieres_, _destrieres_. These affectations apart, Díaz Gámez writes with sense and force; exalting his chief overmuch, but giving bright glimpses of a mad, adventurous life, and rising to altisonant eloquence in chivalresque outbursts, one of which Cervantes has borrowed, and not bettered, in Don Quixote's great discourse on letters and arms. Knight-errantry was, indeed, beginning to possess the land, and, as it chances, an account of the maddest, hugest tourney in the world's history is written for us by an eye-witness, Pero Rodríguez de Lena, in the _Libro del Paso Honroso_ (Book of the Passage of Honour). Lena tells how the demon of chivalry entered into Suero de Quiñones, who, seeking release from his pledge of wearing in his lady's honour an iron chain each Thursday, could hit on no better means than by offering, with nine knightly brethren, to hold the bridge of San Marcos at Órbigo against the paladins of Europe. The tilt lasted from July 10 to August 9, 1434, and is described with simple directness by Lena, who looks upon the six hundred single combats as the most natural thing in the world: but his story is important as a "human document," and as testimony that the extravagant incidents of the chivalrous romances had their counterparts in real life.