Álvar García de Santa María

Origins and early life

Álvar García de Santa María was born at Burgos about 1380 into a Jewish family, the son of Simeón or Isaac ha-Levi and of a mother probably of the Benveniste family, and he was the younger brother of Solomon ha-Levi, the rabbi of Burgos.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that he did not remain Jewish: he was baptised with his brother on 21 July 1390, in the years of pressure and violence that preceded and followed the massacres of 1391, and his brother became Pablo de Santa María, bishop of Burgos; he is recorded here on the ground of his own Jewish birth. The Real Academia de la Historia describes the family without ambiguity as one of the converso lineages of Castile.

He entered the royal chancery, became secretary and councillor to Juan II of Castile, and was the king's official chronicler, writing the Crónica del reinado de Juan II, which covers the first decades of the reign and is a principal source for the politics of fifteenth-century Castile, including the rise and fall of the constable Álvaro de Luna. He was a member of the city council of Burgos and took part in the negotiations with Aragon and Portugal.

The reference work on his family, by Francisco Cantera Burgos, is titled Álvar García de Santa María and his family of converso Jews, and it reconstructs the whole lineage, which produced in three generations a bishop, a chronicler, a royal counsellor and the writer Teresa de Cartagena. He died at Burgos on 21 March 1460.