Y la mortal belleza de la gloria

The one who ended up being Captain Francisco de Cuéllar (Navahermosa -Toledo, 1558 - Madrid, 1615) experienced a succession of tragedies that forged his personality. His Jewish origin soon confronted him with cruel reality, and an Inquisition that violated his family environment and his childhood. Because of this, as a child he had to start an early struggle to assert himself in a ruthless world, a brutal society in which the powerful ruthlessly crushed the weak and the different. This book covers twenty years of Cuéllar's tribulations, his broken childhood, from 1568, in a small village of Realengo de la Sagra Toledo, going through his later enlistment in the Tercios in Madrid, his training as a warrior and his trips through the ocean. until the year 1588, the date of the Great Armada disaster, in which Cuéllar participated as captain of a company of the embarked infantry, with his faithful friend Anacleto the Endemoniac, a Homeric-inspired character rescued from the abyssal dream of History. The ship of the Invincible in which they both sailed was wrecked off the coast of Ireland. Cuéllar managed to survive for months in the inhospitable enemy lands, spurred on by the desire to find his friend alive and thus be able to return together to Spain. Beautiful and heartbreaking parable of human existence, historical tapestry of epic brilliance that only literature and imagination know how to weave, And the deadly beauty of glory tells us about friendship, love, freedom, will, sacrifice and justice but also on loneliness, war, cruelty, fanaticism, arbitrariness; In short, it tells us about every man and his destiny... It is also a deep reflection on the annihilation of the loved one and the vain effort to recover it. And, in addition, it wants to be a tribute to the historical and adventure novel. In its pages resound the voices of countless authors who endured, and perhaps will endure, for generations, forming part of that white legend that should configure the History of Spain.