Alfonso Carrillo y Acuña and His Attempts to Reform the Toledan Church within the Context of the Castilian Succession Conflict (1465–1479)

Abstract

Abstract This article studies the attempts of Archbishop Alfonso Carrillo y Acuña to reform the Archdiocese of Toledo. In particular, I will focus on the Provincial Council of Aranda (1473), which addressed issues like priestly concubinage, absenteeism of priests from their parishes and the level of education of the clergy. Though the Council’s constitutions certainly contain reformative exhortations, it is not so clear that Carrillo convened the Council out of pastoral concerns exclusively. Contrarily, there are reasons to believe the Archbishop mainly sought to assure his political position in the midst of the conflict for the Castilian succession. Overall, scholarship has greatly studied Carrillo’s political deeds, but usually not in relation to the pastoral and reformative enterprises simultaneously undertaken by the Archbishop. This article aims to start filling this gap, linking those two aspects and demonstrating to what extent the latter was dependent on the former. Moreover, this article will bring more clarity on the pastoral turn of the Archbishops of Toledo in the Late Middle Ages. Though Cisneros is recognized for his pastoral leadership and acknowledged as the great promoter of Church reform in Castile, all this already started before. I intend to clarify when and how it happened.