Alfonso de Valdés

Who was Alfonso de Valdés?

Alfonso de Valdés was Spanish humanist, who became chancellor of the Emperor Charles V. He was the twin brother of Juan de Valdés.

Alfonso de Valdés was born c. 1490 in Cuenca, Castile, Spain. His talents gave him early advancement and he accompanied Charles V in 1520 on the journey from Spain to the coronation at Aachen, and in 1521 to the Diet of Worms. From 1522 he was a secretary of the imperial chancellery and as secretary wrote a number of important state papers: in 1525, he drew up the report of the battle of Pavia; in 1526 the energetic, graphic, and at times deliberately sarcastic state paper addressed to Pope Clement VII, in which the faithlessness of the pope is stigmatized, and an appeal is made for the convoking of an Ecumenical Council.

After the capture and sack of Rome in 1527, Valdés wrote the dialogue Lactantius in which he violently attacked the pope as a disturber of the public peace, an instigator of war, and a perfidious deceiver, declared the fate of Rome the judgment of God, and called the Papal States the worst governed dominion in the world. The dialogue was printed in 1529 and was widely read.