Bernardino de Mendoza
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Bernardino de Mendoza (c. 1540 – 3 August 1604) was a Spanish military commander, diplomat, and writer on military history and politics.
Biography
Bernardino de Mendoza was born in Guadalajara, Spain around 1540, to Don Alonso Suarez de Mendoza, third Count of Coruña and Viscount of Torija, and Doña Juana Jimenez de Cisneros. In 1560, he joined the army of
In 1578,
For the next six years, Bernardino de Mendoza served as Spanish ambassador to the
In 1591, with the Catholic League in disarray after the assassination of Henry I, Duke of Guise, he resigned due to ill health. His eyesight had been deteriorating for years, and by the time of his return to Spain, he had become completely blind. His last years were spent in his house in Madrid.
Many of his dispatches to Madrid were first deciphered only in the Simancas archives by De Lamar Jensen;[2] they revealed, for the first time, Mendoza's role in organising and co-ordinating the Paris riots led by the Duke of Guise, known as the Day of the Barricades (12 May 1588), which had been presented as a spontaneous rising of the people and timed to coincide with the sailing of the Spanish Armada. Among Mendoza's public writings is a famous account of the war in the Low Countries that is entitled Comentario de lo sucecido en los Paises Bajos desde el año 1567 hasta el de 1577. Bernardino also published a book on the art of warfare, under the title Theórica y práctica de la guerra and a Spanish translation of the Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex of the Flemish philosopher Justus Lipsius.
Notes
References
- Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio, & Á. Gómez Moreno. Bernardino de Mendoza. Comentario de lo sucecido en las Guerras de los Países Bajos. Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 2008.
- Miguel Cabañas Agrela (ed.), Bernardino de Mendoza, un escritor soldado al servicio de la monarquía católica (1540-1604), Diputación de Guadalajara: 2001.
- De Lamar Jensen. "Diplomacy and Dogmatism: Bernardino de Mendoza and the French Catholic League," Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1964.
- For a translation into modern English of his Theórica y prática de guerra (Madrid: Pedro Madigal, 1595), Beatrice Heuser: The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz (Santa Monica, CA: Greenwood/Praeger, 2010), pp. 87–102.
External links
- (in Spanish) Biography of Bernardino de Mendoza by Prof. Dr. Antonio Herrera Casado.