Before these events, we left King Pedro of Castile in Seville, capturing and killing as he pleased, and we related the deaths of a number of people whom he killed later, as well as certain events which took place in Portugal in the year 1360.

After the ignoble exchange of knights between the two kingdoms, of which you have already heard, King Pedro of Castile ordered the cruel death of one of them, namely Don Pedro Núñez de Guzmán, the Chief Provincial Governor of León. Next he ordered the killing of Gutierre Fernández de Toledo, his keeper of the great wardrobe, whose head was brought to him, and of Gómez Carrillo, the son of Pero Rodríguez Carrillo who had sailed off happily aboard a galley on which the king had dispatched him under the pretence that he was to be handed the town of Algeciras to act as its officer of the marches. Instead, the patron of the galley cut off his head, which he delivered to the king, and cast his body into the sea. The wife and sons of the said Gómez Carrillo were taken prisoner.

The king also ordered the killing of a Castilian knight named Diego Gutiérrez de Závalos and expelled from his kingdom Don Vasco, the Archbishop of Toledo, after killing his brother Gutierre Fernández. He commanded the confiscation of all the archbishop's belongings, so that he was unable to take a single book with him and took only the clothes which he was wearing at the time. The archbishop fled to Portugal and died in Coimbra. On a single day the king ordered the arrest of Don Samuel Leví, his chief treasurer and a prominent member of his Royal Council, as well as of all the latter's relatives throughout the kingdom. He confiscated from him, as from all the others, whatever belongings he found them to possess, subjected him to cruel torture and cast him as a prisoner into the dockyard of Seville, where he died.

That year, King Pedro decided to wage war on the Red Emir of Granada, who was said to have sided with the King of Aragon. The Red Emir had expelled Emir Mohammed from his realm but quickly arrived at an agreement with King Pedro whereby he should not interfere in his hostilities against his own enemy, the Emir Mohammed.