While on a mission to the Holy Roman Empire, he was addressed in a letter by Nicholas of Cusa setting forth the latter's theory of explicatio Petri, the unfolding of the Church from Peter.
[1] After the elevation of Calixtus III, he remained at Rome, became Bishop of Oviedo in Spain, and later commander of the papal fortress, the Castel Sant'Angelo, under Paul II, who transferred him successively to the Spanish sees of Zamora, Calahorra, and Palencia.
Rodrigo was the jailer of Julius Pomponius Laetus (Giulio Pomponio Leto), Bartolomeo Platina and other members of the Academia Romana (Roman Academy) suspected of conspiracy by Pope Paul.
One of these treatises, Suma de la política, demonstrates the influence that Renaissance Humanism was beginning to have on the political and literary works in the kingdom of Castile in the fifteenth century.
His bold reproofs of certain ecclesiastical dignitaries caused Matthias Flacius to put him down as a forerunner of Martin Luther, but quite unjustly, as Nicolás Antonio has shown in his Bibliotheca Hispanica Vetus (II, 397, 608, 614).