elections.  In the heat of conflict, the very best of men seem able to persuade themselves that the most extravagant assertions are true.  No one but the candidates can have taken these amenities seriously.  When the battle was ended on August 14, 1578, Luis de Leon, who received 301 votes, was in a majority of seventy-nine.[205] This check appears to have rankled in Zumel’s mind.  Luis de Leon celebrated his success by taking the degree of Master of Arts on October 11.  Why?  It is hard to say.  He cannot well have thought that the possession of a Master’s degree would strengthen his position as one of the members representing the University of Salamanca on the Committee appointed to report on the projected reform of the calendar.[206] Normally this Committee, of which Medina and Domingo Banez were also members, would have absorbed much of Luis de Leon’s attention.  His energies were to be otherwise exercised in the immediate future.  The death of Gregorio Gallo, Bishop of Segovia, on September 25, 1579, caused a vacancy in the Biblical chair at Salamanca.  The late bishop had viewed with no very friendly eyes some of Luis de Leon’s proceedings before the Valladolid trial,[207] and it might have troubled him to think that Luis de Leon was destined to follow him at Salamanca.  That, however, was what happened.  The position was not carried without a stiff fight.  At Valladolid, Salinas had said it was commonly thought by some of Luis de Leon’s admirers that he could carry any University chair—­especially a chair of Scripture—­against all comers.[208] It was now to be seen whether this opinion was, or was not, well founded.  A formidable competitor appeared in the person of Fray Domingo de Guzman, the third son of Garcilasso de la Vega.  Though Guzman had not inherited his father’s poetic gift, he had a turn for versifying, and his burlesque glosa of Luis de Leon’s celebrated quintillas—­

    Aqui la envidia y mentira
    me tuvieron encerrado—­

is not wholly forgotten, since four lines of it find a resounding echo in Cervantes’ preliminary verses at the beginning of Don Quixote to Urganda la Desconocida.[209] But the relative merits of the two candidates for the vacant chair were not the point at issue.  More relevant was the fact that Guzman was a Dominican with all the strength of the massed Dominican vote at his back.  Whatever may have been the case at other times and places, at this period there was no love lost between Dominicans and Augustinians in Salamanca.  Medina represented with distinction the more rigid teaching of the Dominican school; with at least equal distinction Luis de Leon represented the freer tendencies of the Augustinians.  He was almost imprudently loyal to his own order.  He publicly championed Augustinian candidates whenever a suitable chair became vacant at the University of Salamanca, and, despite the secrecy enjoined by the Inquisition, it had probably leaked out that, at his