Rodrigo de Cota

Origins and early life

Rodrigo de Cota, also recorded as Ruy Sánchez Cota, was born in Toledo about 1434 into one of the best known converso families of the city, descended from Jews who had been baptised under duress in the generations after 1391; the Jewish Encyclopedia states flatly that he came of a Marano family, and the Real Academia de la Historia describes the Cotas as one of the most famous lineages of Jewish origin in Toledo.

Work and career

His father Alonso Cota was a collector of royal revenues, an office typical of Toledan converso families, and the Jewish Encyclopedia names Francisco, López and Juan Fernández Cota among his relatives. The Cotas were attacked in the anti-converso riot of 1449 in Toledo, when Alonso's house was burned, and that violence marks the poet's world. His surviving work is small but influential: the Diálogo entre el Amor y un Viejo, a debate poem between Love and an old man who first rejects and then is undone by him, and the satirical Epitalamio burlesco aimed at another converso family.

Philologists from Menéndez y Pelayo onward have proposed him as the author of the first act of La Celestina, later completed by Fernando de Rojas, himself a converso; the attribution remains debated and unproven. A dedicated monograph, El poeta Ruy Sánchez Cota y su familia de judíos conversos, reconstructs the family from Toledan archives. He died around 1497.