The collapse of Castilian royal authority in the 1460s challenged the wielders of power there to redefine in practice where, in relation to Enrique IV's much-weakened monarchy, their interests and allegiances now lay. It also called in question the ethically and juridically grounded models of royal rule as sanctioned by providence, promoted among them by the secular court culture of Enrique's father Juan ii. For most individuals, no doubt, this meant adjusting the theory to validate their newly identified interests – which was what happened collectively in the settlement eventually established by the Reyes Católicos. At the time, even so, the dilemma could be experienced as genuine and acute – an experience reflected in the sequence of Gomez Manrique's major political poems.

Very early in the decade, his Coplas para Diego Arias de Ávila commend virtue in office to Enrique's trusted converso head of finance, with some degree of anxiety, certainly, but with an underlying assurance that good government along these lines ought to be possible. In the Regimiento de príncipes, composed in 1469–70, Manrique sees a real prospect of it under Fernando and Isabel, whom he confidently expects to heed the good advice that he is providing. Both poems owe much of their eloquence – human and reflective in the one case; formal and ceremonious in the other – to their author's conviction that what he has to say is both relevant and true.