A real official’s appearance validates a pirate’s otherwise dubious confession

Evidence

Another side of this same murky affair involves a senior law officer in the service of the Spanish government, Gregorio L´opez Madera, the man who had Contreras arrested. Now thus far it is possible to dismiss the Contreras narrative as part of a novel. But this official, far from being a fictional personage, was a well-known judge (and, incidentally, the author of a book on the Granadan lead tablets, Discursos de la certidumbre de las reliquias descubiertas en Granada desde el a˜no 1588 hasta el de 1598 [see chapter 8]). Given his extremely distinguished career (alcalde de Casa y Corte, knight of the Order of Santiago, corregidor of Toledo), one might assume L´opez Madera to be a much more trustworthy witness than Captain Contreras, but we will see that there are good reasons for not necessarily accepting all he says without question, either. Nevertheless, the fact that the name L´opez Madera should crop up in the Contreras account tends to confirm that it contains some truthful elements. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1710

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: An official confession of corruption can itself mark a turning point — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1574