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amphibian, spent as much time in the water as on land. As early as the twelfth century, he was alluded to in troubadour poetry and identified with St. Nicolas of Bari.

3 Probably Pedro Liñán de Riaza (1558?–1607), a poet praised by Cervantes.

4 The meter of Spanish poetry is essentially determined by the number of syllables in a line; the short line (arte menor) has eight syllables or less; the long line (arte mayor) has nine or more syllables. Here the long line is the hendecasyllable—the eleven-syllable line, perfected by Petrarch, which influenced all of European poetry in the Renaissance and is generally associated with the sonnet. Garcilaso de la Vega naturalized this meter in Spanish early in the sixteenth century.

1 University students and clerics wore the same kind of clothing.

2 People from Sayago (in the modern province of Zamora) spoke with a rustic accent that was often used in the theater for comic effect; natives of Toledo were thought to speak an extremely correct and pure Spanish.

4 The dispute between the bachelor and the licentiate is based on the latter’s adherence to the elaborately theoretical handbooks on the art and science of fencing that were extremely popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

1 A figure who appears in traditional ballads.

2 As indicated earlier, an arroba is a dry weight of twenty-five pounds and a variable liquid measure of 2.6 to 3.6 gallons.

3 Money bags were made of cat skin; Roman cats had a black-and-gray-striped fur.

4 A phrase used to indicate which contender the speaker favored in a cockfight or in any other kind of contest.

1 When they married, peasant women usually wore a medallion with religious images on it.

2 Sancho exaggerates to indicate the luxuriousness of the cloth: the warp of velvet normally was two-and-a-half pile.

3 Martín de Riquer explains the reference as follows: Sancho’s wordplay alludes to at least three different meanings for the phrase. The first refers to shifting sand banks, making the phrase equivalent to “passing safely between Scylla and Charybdis.” The second alludes to the great Flemish banking houses. The third suggests the banks, or benches, made of a wood called Flanders pine, which the poor used as beds in central and southern Spain. Sancho, then, is saying that Quiteria is beautiful enough to pass through any danger, that she is going to marry a very wealthy man, and that she will soon come to her nuptial bed.

1 A proverb that extols the joys of liberty.

3 The cave is near one of the Lakes of Ruidera, the source of the Guadiana River.

4 The weathervane on the tower of the Church of the Magdalena in Salamanca was in the shape of an angel.

5 A pipe that carried Córdoba’s sewage into the Guadalquivir River.

6 The first two were in the Prado de San Jerónimo and the third in the Plaza de Oriente, in Madrid.

7 The book of the Italian humanist Polidoro Vergilio (1470–1550), De inventoribus rerum, which deals with the origin of inventions, was widely read; it was translated into Spanish in 1550.

8 A Spanish term for syphilis.

9 Don Quixote paraphrases the words of a ballad.

10 The phrase means that matters are being handled by someone competent.

11 A Dominican monastery between Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca.

1 A unit of measurement, roughly seven feet, used to determine height or depth.

2 This was worn by the holders of doctoral degrees.

3 Round caps that were stiffened by metal bands.

4 Montesinos, an important character in the Spanish ballads that recount the legend of Charlemagne, does not appear in French literature; Don Quixote’s adventure is based on the tradition that has Montesinos marrying Rosaflorida, mistress of the castle of Rocafrida that was identified in the popular imagination with certain ruins near the Cave of Montesinos.

5 Durandarte, a name originally given to the sword of Roland, became a hero of the Spanish (though not the French) Carolingian ballad tradition. He was the cousin and