Certain authors who have written historical accounts before us state therein that King Enrique, when he left Medina del Campo for Seville (as you have already heard), learned on the way to that city and before his arrival there, that the Master of Santiago, Don Gonzalo Mejía, and the Master of Alcántara, Don Pedro Muñiz, had reached a truce with the Emir of Granada. They report that he was greatly pleased at this, but do not tell us for how long the truce was due to last, nor what its conditions were.

Our view is that this runs very much counter to the truth and for a number of reasons. Leaving aside the first one, which they ought to have mentioned, namely the grounds for reaching the truce, the nature of the negotiations and the intended duration, let us pass to the second one, according to which the Moorish Emir, pressed by King Enrique at the very beginning of this war to reach a truce with him, vehemently refused to do so for the reason that the king was unworthily occupying the realms of Castile, which by rightful descent belonged to the daughters of King Pedro his brother, namely Princess Beatriz, who had passed away in Bayonne in Gascony, and Princess Constanza, who was married to the Duke of Lancaster; that was the reason why he had then gone on to sign a truce with King Fernando and not with King Enrique. One of the clauses in that truce, as you have already heard, required that the Emir of Granada should not enter into any peace agreement or truce with King Enrique but, rather, that he should carry on waging war against him.

If anybody claims that, nevertheless, the Moor was in a position to renounce the truce and break the oath which he had taken in accordance with his religious beliefs and become an ally of King Enrique, the answer is that this does not seem plausible, for, if it were, the truce was not something which could be kept secret, owing to the frequent incursions which the Moors were making into Castile.