Gualberto Fabricio de Vagad

Gualberto Fabricio de Vagad was an Aragonese Cistercian Benedictine monk and the first historian of the Kingdom of Aragon.

He was born in Zaragoza in the first third of the fifteenth century and straddles the line between the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

According to Félix de Latassa y Ortín, besides history he wrote various treatises on poetry and a compendium of verse.

Vagad's magnum opus, the Crónica de Aragón, a vernacular Romance history of Aragon from the mythical Kingdom of Sobrarbe (founded 724) up to the death of Alfonso V (1458), was published in Zaragoza in 1499; its incunabula survive.

In international matters he was a Spanish partisan and this bias enters into his history: he considered the Emperor Maximilian I a Spaniard and made the legendary Count Julian an Italian.

Frontispiece of the Crónica de Aragón (1499) showing the earliest illustration of the Aragonese coat-of-arms.