Martín de Tapia

Martín de Tapia, also known as Numantino because he came from the province of Soria, where the ancient Iberian city of Numantia once stood, was a Spanish music theorist active between the late 1550s and the early 1570s. His best-known work is the treatise Vergel de música spiritual, speculativa y activa, del qual muchas, diversas y suaves flores se pueden coger, completed in 1559 and published in Burgo de Osma in 1570, eleven years later.

It is possibly believed that he was a bachelor of the University of Salamanca and a musician at the cathedral of Burgo de Osma, although these details are not documented with certainty. For a long time, both later Spanish theorists and modern historians valued the Vergel for its erudition and originality, which gave Tapia a good reputation.

That reputation, however, proved to be unfounded. The researchers Stevenson and León Tello independently demonstrated that Tapia copied Juan Bermudo's work in its entirety, including the dedication and the prologue, taking it from his Libro primero de la declaración de instrumentos (1549). The few changes he introduced, mainly sentences added at the beginning and end of chapters, seem to have served to disguise the plagiarism.