Calle de Juan de Mariana

Behind the plaque is a priest born in Talavera de la Reina in 1536 who became one of the most respected and feared minds of his time. Juan de Mariana studied at Alcalá, joined the Society of Jesus young, and taught theology in Rome, Sicily and Paris before settling in Toledo to write. His great work was a Historia general de España, first published in Latin in 1592 and later rendered into Spanish by himself. For more than two centuries it was the standard account of the country’s past. His uncomfortable fame came from another book: in De rege et regis institutione (1599) he argued that a people could depose, and even kill, a king turned tyrant. When Henry IV of France was assassinated in 1610, the treatise was burned in Paris by the executioner’s hand. The street is a modern one, in the southern expansion built from the late nineteenth century. It runs from Ramírez de Prado to near Méndez Álvaro, among warehouses and rail lines.