ANTONIO, NICHOLAS, knight of the order of St
James, and canon of Seville, was born at Seville in 1617, being the son of a gentleman whom King Philip IV. made president of the admiralty established in that city in 1626. After having gone through a course of philosophy and divinity in his own country, he went to study law at Salamanca, where he closely attended the lectures of Francisco Ramos del Manzano, afterwards counsellor to the king and preceptor to Charles II. Upon his return to Seville, after he had finished his law studies at Salamanca, he shut himself up in the royal monastery of Benedictines, where he employed himself several years in writing his Bibliotheca Hispanica, having the use of the books of Bennet de la Sana, abbot of that monastery, and dean of the faculty of divinity at Salamanca. In the year 1659 he was sent to Rome by King Philip IV. in the character of agent general from the prince: he had also particular commissions from the inquisition of Spain, the viceroys of Naples and Sicily, and the governor of Milan, to negotiate their affairs at Rome. The cardinal of Arragon procured him, from Pope Alexander VII., a canonry in the church of Seville, the income whereof he employed in charity and the purchasing of books: he had above 30,000 volumes in his library. By this help, joined to continual labour and indefatigable application, he was at last enabled to finish his Bibliotheca Hispanica, in four volumes folio, two of which he published at Rome in the year 1672. The work consists of two parts: the one containing the Spanish writers who flourished before the 15th century, and the other those since the end of that century. After the publication of these two volumes, he was recalled to Madrid by King Charles II. He left nothing at his death, which took place in 1684, but his vast library; and his two brothers and nephews being unable to publish the remaining volumes of his Bibliotheca, sent them to Cardinal d'Aguisne, who paid the expence of the impression, and committed the superintendence of it to M. Martin, his librarian, who added notes in the name of the cardinal. These two volumes were published in 1696. Improved editions of both these works, by F. P. Bayer, were published at Madrid in 4 vols. folio, in 1783-8. A work by Antonio was published for the first time at Valencia in 1742, entitled Censura de Historias Fabulas, obra postuma, folio.