Contrary to reasonable expectation, the court of Juan II. remained a centre of culture during all the storm of civil war. Educated by the converted Rabbi Sh’lomoh Hallevi—better known to orthodox Spaniards as Pablo de Santa María, Chancellor of Castile,—Juan II. had something more than a tincture of artistic taste. So stern a judge as Pérez de Guzmán, who had no reason to treat him tenderly, describes him as a wit, an excellent musician, an assiduous reader, an amateur of literature, a lover and sound critic of poetry. Juan II. had in fact all the qualities which are useless to a king, and none of those which are indispensable. He himself wrote minor poetry, a luxury in which no monarch less eminently successful than Frederic the Great can afford to indulge. From his youth he was surrounded by such representatives of the old school of poetry as Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino. Castile might go to ruin, but there was always time to hear the compositions of this persistent mendicant, or those of Juan Alfonso de Baena, with the replies and rebutters of versifiers like Ferrant Manuel de Lando and Juan de Guzmán. It was no good training for either a poet or a king. In the few poems by Juan II. which have come down to us there is an occasional touch of laborious accomplishment: there is no depth of feeling, no momentary sincerity. Poetry had become the handmaid of luxury. Poetical tournaments and knightly jousts were both forms of court-pageantry. Nature was out of fashion; life was infected by artificiality, and literature by bookish conceits. ‘Mesure est precioux tesmoing de san et de courtoisie,’ according to the author of the thirteenth-century _Doctrinal_, and _mesura_ and _cortesía_ predominate in the courtly verse of Juan II.’s reign. The Galician _trovadores_ brought into Castile the bad tradition which they had borrowed from Provence, and the emphatic genius of Castile accentuated rather than refined the verbal audacities of conventional gallantry. Macias o _Namorado_, the typical Galician _trovador_ who died about 1390, had dared to introduce the words of Christ Crucified as the tag of an amatory lyric:— Pois me faleceu ventura en o tempo de prazer, non espero aver folgura mas per sempre entristecer. Turmentado e con tristura chamarei ora por mi. _Deus meus, eli, eli,_ _eli lama sabac thani._