in the picaresque novel Historía de la vida del Buscón (c. 1604), the great master of satire, Francisco Quevedo, offers a critical portrait of an arbitrista who is derided as effectively insane precisely because of his concern with the question of crusade: I was going along keeping myself busy thinking about these things when, having passed Torote, I came upon a man on a saddled mule who was talking to himself with such speed, and so absorbed, that even being next to him, he didn’t see me. I greeted him and he greeted me; I asked him where he was a going, and after we had exchanged responses, we started to talk about whether the Turk was coming down, and about the King’s forces. He started to talk about how the Holy Land could be won, and how Algiers would be won; in which discourses I figured out that he was a Republic and governance crazy-person. Compare: Edited by Ken Tully, Chad Leahy,Jerusalem Afflicted
Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade, [1]
