«On November 23, 1221, when the longest nights, when the autumn of Toledo tends to be more humid, sad and cold, as if with a bad omen, a child of royal lineage was born, whom they would call Alfonso, in some room of the Royal Palaces of Toledo, located in front of the great panoramic view of the Vega del Tajo, which licked its foundations as it entered the contour of the city where the great ravine that surrounds it begins. Thus begins the eloquent x-ray of the figure of Alfonso X ‘El Sabio’ drawn in 1984 by the doctor Rafael Sancho de San Román, director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Historical Sciences of Toledo in those years.
This article, published in the newspaper Ya de Toledo in April 1984, was written on the occasion of the VII Centenary of his death by the eminent psychiatrist and researcher from Toledo, who died in 2018.
In it he makes a diagnosis of the monarch’s life, with its lights and shadows, under the title “Wise King and Unfortunate Man” and highlights that his “greatest greatness and his greatest misfortune was in having to carry out a series of tasks that he had never wished”, as “war”, despite its peaceful nature. The wisest king, but the most unhappy and who, in the twilight of his life, “found himself alone, abandoned, failed, betrayed, and dethroned by his own son.” Here is the full article published on April 1, 1984:
