Felipe II’s trans soldier who admitted to mutilating his genitals: ‘There was nothing left’

And don’t think that obscurantism is a cliché; Rather, it’s a grim reality, similar to that of many other historical figures, that the books ignore. Because there is hardly any information about the first years of his life, wow. More recently, it was the Rey Juan Carlos University professor, Ignacio Ruiz Rodríguez, who compiled the few documents that exist on the Céspedes estate in order to prepare a biographical article for the estate Royal Academy of History. Among the few certainties that exist is that it was born in Granada in 1545, when the ancient Spanish land had already been ‘reconquered’ – in terms that confuse more than one today.

mysterious youth

From here live the uncertainty. “Born in the body of a woman, a slave, in the house of Benito Medina“His biological father was also a master”, reveals the expert in his writings. The name with which he was born is unknown. All that is known is that she was released around the age of eight and baptized Elena de Céspedes “in homage to her father’s late wife.” There was also evidence through documents that he had married Christopher Lombardo, a mason from Jaén, with whom he had a son; sufficient testimony to confirm her femininity. Although you would never hear from the little one again.

Then our Elena began her pilgrimage through the lands of Andalusia as a dressmaker and hosiery maker. The number of cities through which he traveled is in the dozens. Among them Arcos de la Frontera, where “he joined the troops offered by the Duke of Felipe II to appease the Moorish rebellion in the Alpujarras”. Logic suggests that’s when she started dressing up as a boy—how on earth else could she have enlisted? – and changed her name to Eleno. It is currently not possible to say whether this was done out of conviction or out of interest.

Not much is known about his stage with guns either, and that’s not surprising either. Undocumented, she moved to the capital and befriended a Valencian surgeon who let her live in his house and showed her the secrets of his craft. Elena, or Eleno, walked the rocky road to such a complex profession as field medicine. “She soon became an excellent professional and served in her new post at the Court Hospital for about three years, from where she began serving the Court Sierra de Madrid», adds the historian. Although happiness was once again elusive.

Their initial successes sparked envy among themselves, so eventually they were denounced for working without a title. But desperation could not affect his mood; Rather, it gave him the push he needed to get through college. Elena returned from the mountains in the weeks that followed, earned two titles—Bleeder and Purger—and, now at peace with the law, returned to practice her profession. In the meantime, he personally sought out and caught a good lady who would please his heart and bedroom. And boy did he get it?

Hunted by the Holy Office

If his life was controversial professionally, it was not calmer in the marital sphere either. Elena has had sexual relations with a myriad of women; He didn’t care if they were single, married, or widowed. However, when he returned to Madrid, the seeds of love germinated. In the capital he met a young woman named Maria del Cano, who would become his light and guide. “The idea that Céspedes expressed more than once was to detach from a previous, dissolute life,” says the expert. The idea of ​​marriage then arose in the head of this wild virgin; Settle through the church.

The wedding was planned in the city of Yepes in 1585 and was not easy to organize. If discovered, Elena could be charged with a thousand evils by the authorities; including lesbianism. “He resisted the reprimands of the local priest because of his beardless skin color, otherwise no marriage could be contracted, the purpose of which was nothing other than procreation, and was charged with ‘beardlessness or capon,'” adds Ruiz Rodríguez in his article for the Royal Academy of History. The pantomime did well for the first few weeks, but was blown away by her former comrades-in-arms. Find out why.

Justice knew no mercy. Elena was captured and taken to Toledo Detention Center where she awaited trial. Lo and behold, the excitement is there, which still fuels the historical debate years later. In her defense, written between 1587 and 1589 before the court of the Holy Office of Toledo, the “granaína” argued that indeed she was hermaphrodite and that she was born with male sex organs. A strange way of escaping justice for some; a plausible reality, but improbable for others. His testimony before the judge is collected at the factory by Nicolás Bersihand “Erotic letters. The most intimate and passionate letter jewels of history’s great figures.:

“With the devil’s express and tacit consent, I have never posed as a man to marry a woman, as is alleged; What happens is that, just as there have often been people in this world who are androgynous, who are called by another name, hermaphrodites, who have both sexes, I was one of them too. At the time I tried to get married the male gender was still predominant and of course I was a man and I have everything a man needs to be able to get married. And what it was I put in it information and eye-proofs from doctors and surgeons before whom they saw and tried me and testified with an oath that he was such a man and could marry a woman. And after said proof was brought in court, I got married by Mann and with the permission of the competent judge.

Elena defended her status as a hermaphrodite throughout the process, of which there are countless pages in the archives. He didn’t take a step back. She even argued that when she married her first husband “as a woman” she did so because the feminine gender was predominant in her body. However, she also decided that after the death of her husband, the male reproductive organs in her would emerge. The last part of his argument was devoted to explaining why he lacked a penis; of course:

“If now my male sex and member do not come out, it is because I had a sickness in it that was consuming me, and I, being the surgeon that I was, cured it and gradually cut it, until…” there was no more left. Nothing from him. And when they took me to that Holy Office, I brought with them some sores that the doctors who came to me saw and said when the scabs came out, everything was healed. […] For this reason I was left with only the female gender.

Elena de Céspedes had no use for all these arguments. In 1589, after two years of legal back-and-forth, she was sentenced to receive two hundred lashes and to work in a hospital for a decade without receiving a coin. The Spanish professor says that the woman from Granada chose that Royal Hospital of Toledo, but that over the months there was no choice but to move because the place was filled with onlookers yearning to meet this woman. Later, traces of him are lost in the chronicles. “It is curious that Eleno de Céspedes became a Cervantin character by being included by the immortal author in his work Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, where he played the witch Cenotia,” adds the author.