Libro 5. Rubric: “Because the words of these romances are well known, there are only the first four verses of each given here, because four by four feet need to be sung. This second one is in mode 4. the f clef is on the fifth course at the third fret; the c-clef is on the third at the first fret.” This indication implies a vihuela in A, The tablature has the melody of the song printed in red tablature.

The song “relates events surrounding the Christian capture ofthe Muslim town of Alhama in 1482. On the night of 28 February of that year, Christians, led by the Marques de Cadiz, Don Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, took the town's fortress in a surprise” (gilbert2005, 1000).

Narváez here makes a setting of a romance that he acknowledges to be highly popular, only giving the first stanza, presumably because readers would either know the song or be able to access it from other well known sources. According to sixteenth-century poet Ginés Pérez de Hita, the conde de Tendilla banned the singing of the song in Granada because it overly excited the people of the city: “el conde Tendilla se vio precisado a prohibir [la canción] en Granada, porque exitaba los ánimos hasta llegar a perturbar el orden público y hacer necesario acudir a las armas para sofacar los motines de los moriscos.” [The count of Tendilla was forced to ban the song in Granada, because it got people so worked up as to disturb civic order and it became necessary to resort to arms in order to extinguish the mutiny of the Moriscos]. This refers to the civil unrest in Granada after its recapture in 1492 after which Iñigo López de Mendoza, 1st Marquis of Mondéjar and 2nd Count of Tendilla, was named governor. It fell on him to subdue the first Moorishing uprising in the city in 1500-1502.

There are three identifiable early versions of the romance. Narváez’s text, albeit only the first quatrain, is drawn from the earliest of these versions, as the later versions add new glossed lines as the second half of the first stanza. This later version it the one given in Binkley Spanish Romances (with English translation), 108.

The piece is mainly in three voices with a couple of four voice chords near the end. The earliest version is published in the so-called Cancionero sin año (cr48) (fols. 183v--184) and reprinted in subsequent broadsheets, and Timoneda’s Rosa. Later versions are glossed and extended.

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• Phalèse, Des chansons reduictz en Tablature, fol. h1 (Brown 1546-18, nº 31)