Biography
Ruy González de Clavijo was a Castilian gentleman whose date of birth is unknown. According to the notices consulted, he was a native of Madrid and came from a noble family of the city. Nothing certain is known of his education, and one should beware of reconstructing it: he appears in the sources as camarero, that is, chamberlain, to King Henry III of Castile, whose court was then staying at Alcalá de Henares.
His career rested on this service. Chamberlain to Henry III, he was afterward chamberlain to John II as well, and he is among the witnesses to the king's will in 1406. He settled in Madrid, in the parish of San Andrés, where he had a large house built near the Plaza de la Paja, which later passed to the Vargas family.
His name owes everything to the embassy of 1403-1406. Henry III sent him to Tamerlane, with the guard Gómez de Salazar, who died at Nishapur in 1404, and the Dominican Alonso Páez de Santa María, a master of theology. It was the Castilian king's second mission to the conqueror, in the hope of an understanding against the Ottomans, then in the midst of an interregnum. The departure took place at the Puerto de Santa María on 22 May 1403, the arrival at Samarkand on 8 September 1404. The return went through Sanlúcar de Barrameda in early March 1406, then to the court, where the arrival is placed at the end of the same month. The account of the journey, known under the title Embajada a Tamorlán or Vida y hazañas del gran Tamorlán, was first published in Seville in 1582 by the scholar Gonzalo Argote de Molina, with a long preliminary discourse. A second edition, by Antonio de Sancha, appeared in Madrid in 1782 according to the title page, in 1783 according to some bibliographies.
The exact authorship of the text is debated. Francisco López Estrada attributes its composition to Alonso Páez de Santa María. Leoncio Cabrero holds that Clavijo composed it from data gathered in common. Joaquín Rubio Tovar raises the possibility of a third author, the poet Alfonso Fernández de Mesa. We also know that the account may have drawn on notes taken during the journey. The book speaks of the ambassadors in the third person, which feeds the doubt.
Clavijo died on 2 April 1412 in Madrid. He had had a burial place prepared for himself and his descendants in the convent of San Francisco, and had the chapel rebuilt at great expense. The tomb was later replaced by that of Queen Joanna, and the chapel was destroyed in 1784. A manuscript of the account is kept at the Biblioteca Nacional de España (MSS/9218). Among modern editions, that of Francisco López Estrada (Castalia, 1999) is the reference; in English, Clements Markham translated it in 1859 and Guy Le Strange in 1928.
