From the year 711, when invading Arab armies crossed Gibraltar, the Spanish peninsula lived a sometimes uneasy truce between its co-existing Christian, Moslem, and Jewish communities. In the thirteenth century, the local Spanish populations began to reclaim the peninsula in a Reconquista that continued until King Ferdinand's armies took the last Moorish Kingdom—Grenada—in 1492. (It was the same year Ferdinand also began the expulsion of the country's Jewish population.) The sword of Ferdinand had retaken the land, but it is said that the prayers of his Queen Isabella also reached out to the conquered Moors, in her pious hope that they could be converted to Christianity. Both approaches to the monumental year of 1492 appear in Juan del Encina's Romance Qu'es de ti, desconsolado?

Qu'es de ti, desconsolado? is one of no fewer than six Romances in the massive Cancionero Musical de Palacio to celebrate either the fall of Grenada or the complete Reconquista. The genre of the Spanish Romance seems to have no direct analogue in the better-known French and Italian Renaissance secular repertories. The Spanish genre, apparently arising from older improvised repertories, is a strophic poem (set to music) that narrates a story without any stylized refrain forms. The topic in this piece is King Boabdil, the Moorish ruler who lost Grenada. It tells of how both Ferdinand and Isabella—"she by her prayers and he with his great army"—had defeated him. The disconsolate Moor should not weep, however, but know that in his defeat is the freedom to convert, and to save his soul. Encina's music, set for three voices, simply ornaments this sympathetic story. Clear-cut phrases follow the poetic structure exactly, and yet the cadences more often than not adopt a plangent modal cast. The melody often moves in simple stepwise manner and inhabits a fairly narrow compass. The narrative will take precedence over any musical devices.

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