He was born in Toledo to a family of the lower nobility, although this part of his life is obscure, with propositions about his exact birth date going wildly from 1487 to 1503. In any case, and despite being ruled out of succession for being a second son, he received an extensive education in five languages and many fields, including fencing, music and literature, making him a veritable Renaissance Man. He formed part of the court of King Charles V, eventually joining his royal guard, and was also part of the entourage of Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo y Enríquez, Duke of Alba, for which Garcilaso became close friends with the next duke in line, the future famous Fernando Álvarez de Toledo. Garcilaso and Fernando served together in the Italian Wars against the French and multiple military campaigns against the Ottomans.
Garcilaso was a known ladies man. He had a stable marriage in lady Elena de Zúñiga, but there were a very long list of women in his love life, some of which he immortalized in his poetry. This included his first love, Guiomar Carrillo, as well as Magdalena de Guzmán, Beatriz de Sá, and at least two more.
He started writing poetry by suggestion of his friend Juan Boscán, who published his works after Garcilaso's death. Although he acknowledged he was not an Instant Expert, he eventually came to handle quite well the classicist and Petrarchian styles coming from the Italian Reinaissance, and was the first to introduce several lyrical conventions to Spanish language. He is best known for his tragic love poetry, abundant in allusions to Greco-Roman mythology, great musicality and absence of traditional religion, as well as his pastoral work, which went to influence, as said above, from the poets of his own time to the Nobel Prize-winning Seamus Heaney in the very 20th century.
He traveled extensively throughout Europe and served as a spy during the truce with France after the Battle of Pavia. Despite his political success, however, Garcilaso suffered a brief banishment after participating an a marriage disfavored by King Charles, during which he was an exile in the court of castellan György Cseszneky in Hungary, but he was recalled to Spain when his experience against the Turk was needed again. He later joined yet another war against France, even being named general of a tercio, but his pen was left orphan when he was killed in action while acting as a Frontline General in Provence. His death was very deeply felt, enraging King Charles to the point he had the entire enemy garrison executed.
His nephew Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega was a conquistador during the Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire, where he married the Inca aristocrat Isabel Suárez Yupanqui and had a mestizo son, Gómez Suárez, who would eventually become the father of Hispanic American literature under the pen name of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.
Tropes found in his work:
- Arcadia: His specialty, as he wrote a lot about idealized, dreamy pastoral scenes inspired by ancient Greek literature.
- Boring, but Practical: Contrary to the popular image of him in modern times, probably caused by the uninformed idea that the best poet of all must be the most verbose and incomprehensible to the unlearned, Garcilaso actually spoused the belief that it was better to write in a simple style than to indulging in Purple Prose.
- Love Hurts: A staple of his poetry, which often focuses on unrequited love and related sufferings.
- Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: With a tend towards the first.
