Family of Alfonso I and Urraca + of LEON AND CASTILE

Husband:	Alfonso I (1073-1134)
Wife:	Urraca + of LEON AND CASTILE (1082-1126)
Status:	Divorced

Husband: Alfonso I

Wife: Urraca + of LEON AND CASTILE

Note on Marriage

by Papal decree in 1110

Note on Husband: Alfonso I

Alfonso I (1073/1074[1] – 8 September 1134), called the Battler or the Warrior (Spanish: el Batallador), was the king of Aragon and Navarre from 1104 until his death in 1134. He was the second son of King Sancho Ramírez and successor of his brother Peter I. With his marriage to Urraca, queen regnant of Castile and León, in 1109, he began to use, with some justification, the grandiose title Emperor of Spain, formerly employed by his father-in-law, Alfonso VI. Alfonso the Battler earned his sobriquet in the Reconquista. He won his greatest military successes in the middle Ebro, where he conquered Zaragoza in 1118 and took Egea, Tudela, Calatayud, Borja, Tarazona, Daroca, and Monreal del Campo. He died in September 1134 after an unsuccessful battle with the Muslims at the Battle of Fraga

 

His earliest years were passed in the monastery of Siresa, learning to read and write and to practice the military arts until the tuition of Lope Garcés the Pilgrim, who was repaid for his services by his former charge with the county of Pedrola when Alfonso came to the throne.

 

During his brother's reign, he participated in the taking of Huesca (the Battle of Alcoraz, 1096), which became the largest city in the kingdom and the new capital. He also joined El Cid's expeditions in Valencia. His father gave him the lordships of Biel, Luna, Ardenes, and Bailo.

 

A series of deaths put Alfonso directly in line for the throne. His brother's children, Isabella and Peter (who married María Rodríguez, daughter of El Cid), died in 1103 and 1104 respectively.

[edit] Matrimonial conflicts

 

A passionate fighting-man (he fought twenty-nine battles against Christian or Moor), he was married (when well over 30 years and a habitual bachelor) in 1109 to the ambitious Queen Urraca of León, widow of Raymond of Burgundy, a passionate woman unsuited for a subordinate role. The marriage had been arranged by her father Alfonso VI of León in 1106 to unite the two chief Christian states against the Almoravides, and to supply them with a capable military leader. But Urraca was tenacious of her right as queen regnant and had not learnt chastity in the polygamous household of her father. Husband and wife quarrelled with the brutality of the age and came to open war. Alfonso had the support of one section of the nobles who found their account in the confusion. Being a much better soldier than any of his opponents he won the Battle of Candespina and the Battle of Viadangos, but his only trustworthy supporters were his Aragonese, who were not numerous enough to keep Castile and León subjugated. The marriage of Alfonso and Urraca was declared null by the Pope, as they were second cousins, in 1110, but he ignored the papal nuncio and clung to his liaison with Urraca until 1114. During his marriage, he had called himself "King and Emperor of Castile, Toledo, Aragón, Pamplona, Sobrarbe, and Ribagorza" in recognition of his rights as Urraca's husband; of his inheritance of the lands of his father, including the kingdom of his great-uncle Gonzalo; and his prerogative to conquer Andalusia from the Muslims. He inserted the title of imperator on the basis that he had three kingdoms under his rule.

 

Alfonso's late marriage and his failure to remarry and produce the essential legitimate heir that should have been a dynastic linchpin of his aggressive territorial policies have been adduced as a lack of interest in women. Ibn al-Athir (1166–1234) describes Alfonso as a tireless soldier who would sleep in his armor without benefit of cover, who responded when asked why he did not take his pleasure from one of the captives of Muslim chiefs, responded that the man devoted to war needs the companionship of men not women.[2]

[edit] Church relations

 

The king quarrelled with the church, and particularly the Cistercians, almost as violently as with his wife. As he defeated her,[citation needed] so he drove Archbishop Bernard into exile and expelled the monks of Sahagún[citation needed]. He was finally compelled to give way in Castile and León to his stepson, Alfonso VII of Castile, son of Urraca and her first husband. The intervention of Pope Calixtus II brought about an arrangement between the old man and his young namesake.

 

In 1122 in Belchite, he founded a confraternity of knights to fight against the Almoravids. It was the start of the military orders in Aragon. Years later, he organised a branch of the Militia Christi of the Holy Land at Monreal del Campo.

[edit] Military expansion

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A denarius of Alfonso's, minted at Jaca, bearing his effigy and the inscription ANFUS-REX ARA-GON (Anfusus rex Aragonensium, King Alfonso of Aragon).

 

Alfonso spent his first four years in near-constant war with the Muslims. In 1105, he conquered Ejea and Tauste and refortified Castellar and Juslibol. In 1106, he defeated Ahmad II al-Musta'in of Zaragoza at Valtierra. In 1107, he took Tamarite de Litera and Esteban de la Litera. Then followed a period dominated by his relations with Castile and León through his wife, Urraca. He resumed his conquest in 1117 by conquering Fitero, Corella, Cintruénigo, Murchante, Monteagudo, and Cascante.

 

In 1118, the Council of Toulouse declared a crusade to assist in the conquest of Zaragoza. Many Frenchmen consequently joined Alfonso at Ayerbe. They took Almudévar, Gurrea de Gállego, and Zuera, besieging Zaragoza itself by the end of May. The city fell on 18 December, and the forces of Alfonso occupied the Azuda, the government tower. The great palace of the city was given to the monks of Bernard. Promptly, the city was made Alfonso's capital. Two years later, in 1120, he defeated a Muslim army intent on reconquering his new capital at the Battle of Cutanda. He promulgated the fuero of tortum per tortum, facilitating taking the law into one's own hands, which among others reassumed the Muslim right to dwell in the city and their right to keep their properties and practice their religion under their own jurisdiction as long as they maintained tax payment and relocated to the suburbs.

 

In 1119, he retook Cervera, Tudejen, Castellón, Tarazona, Ágreda, Magallón, Borja, Alagón, Novillas, Mallén, Rueda, Épila and populated the region of Soria. He began the siege of Calatayud, but left to defeat the army at Cutanda trying to retake Zaragoza. When Calatayud fell, he took Bubierca, Alhama de Aragón, Ariza, and Daroca (1120). In 1123, he besieged and took Lleida, which was in the hands of the count of Barcelona. From the winter of 1124 to September 1125, he was on a risky expedition to Peña Cadiella deep in Andalusia.

 

In the great raid of 1125, he carried away a large part of the subject Christians from Granada, and in the south-west of France, he had claims as usurper-king of Navarre. From 1125 to 1126, he was on campaign against Granada, where he was trying to install a Christian prince, and Córdoba, where got only as far as Motril. In 1127, he reconquered Longares, but simultaneously lost all his Castilian possessions to Alfonso VII. He confirmed a treaty with Castile the next year (1128) with the Peace of Támara, which fixed the boundaries of the two realms.

 

He conquered Molina de Aragón and populated Monzón in 1129, before besieging Valencia, which had fallen again upon the Cid's death.

 

He went north of the Pyrenees in October 1130 to protect the Val d'Aran. Early in 1131, he besieged Bayonne. It is said he ruled "from Belorado to Pallars and from Bayonne to Monreal."

 

At the Siege of Bayonne in October 1131, three years before his death, he published a will leaving his kingdom to three autonomous religious orders based in Palestine and politically largely independent on the pope, the Knights Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, whose influences might have been expected to cancel one another out. The will has greatly puzzled historians, who have read it as a bizarre gesture of extreme piety uncharacteristic of Alfonso's character, one that effectively undid his life's work. Elena Lourie (1975) suggested instead that it was Alfonso's attempt to neutralize the papacy's interest in a disputed succession— Aragon had been a fief of the Papacy since 1068— and to fend off Urraca's son from her first marriage, Alfonso VII of Castile, for the Papacy would be bound to press the terms of such a pious testament.[3] Generous bequests to important churches and abbeys in Castile had the effect of making the noble churchmen there beneficiaries who would be encouraged by the will to act as a brake on Alfonso VII's ambitions to break it— and yet among the magnates witnessing the will in 1131 there is not a single cleric. In the event it was a will that his nobles refused to carry out— instead bringing his brother Ramiro from the monastery to assume royal powers— an eventuality that Lourie suggests was Alfonso's hidden intent.

 

His final campaigns were against Mequinenza (1133) and Fraga (1134), where García Ramírez, the future king of Navarre, and a mere 500 other knights fought with him. It fell on 17 July. He was dead by September. Alfonso was a fierce, violent man, a soldier and nothing else, whose piety was wholly militant. His tomb is in the monastery of San Pedro in Huesca.

[edit] Death

[edit] Will and testament

A box (reliquary) containing the bones (relics) of Alfonso the Battler, with the skull centre, facing the viewer. Photograph by Enrique Capella (May 1920).

 

His testament was not honored: Aragon took his aged brother abbot-bishop Ramiro out of a monastery and made him king, marrying him without papal dispensation to Agnes, sister of the Duke of Aquitaine; the Navarrese lords, perhaps irked at the personal union of Aragon and Navarre signalled their independence by putting García Ramírez, Lord of Monzón, descendant of an illegitimate son of García Sánchez III, to the throne in Pamplona. "The result of the crisis produced by the result of Alfonso I's will was a major reorientation of the peninsula's kingdoms: the separation of Aragon and Navarre, the union of Aragon and Catalonia and— a moot point but stressed particularly by some Castilian historians— the affirmation of 'Castilian hegemony' in Spain"[4] by the rendering of homage for Zaragoza by Alfonso's eventual heir, Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona.

[edit] Pseudo-Alfonso the Battler

 

Sometime during the reign of Alfonso II of Aragon, the Battler's grandnephew, a man came forward claiming to be Alfonso the Battler. The only contemporary references to this event are two letters of Alfonso II addressed to Louis VII of France; they were carried to Louis by Berengar, the Bishop of Lleida, but are not dated.[5] According to the second of these, the pretender was then living in Louis's domains, meaning the Principality of Catalonia, which was ruled by Alfonso under Louis's suzerainty. This pretender was an old man (appropriately, since the Battler had died some decades earlier) and Alfonso II expressed confidence that Louis would arrest him at the earliest possible moment and bring him to justice. The first letter supplies sufficient information to date it approximately, since the Bishop sojourned at the court of Louis on his way to Rome. It is known from other sources that Berengar attended the Third Lateran Council in March 1179. The letters were probably written towards the end of 1178 or in January 1179 at the latest.[6] According to an annalist source for the years 1089–1196, the pretender was received with honour and pomp in Zaragoza, Calatayud, and Daroca, which the Battler had conquered, but after it was found out that he was false he was executed before the city of Barcelona in 1181.[7] Modern historian Antonio Ubieto Arteta, has hypothesised that the Aragonese lords of the tenencies of Zaragoza, Calatayud, and Daroca—Pedro de Luesia, Loferrench de Luna, Pedro de Castillazuelo (lord of Calatayud), Pedro Cornel (lord of Murillo de Gállego), and the majordomo Jimeno de Artusilla, all of whom disappear between 1177 and 1181 in the documentation of their tenencies—perhaps support, at least inititally, the pretender.[8] These lords also appear in the later legend of the Bell of Huesca, which has no historical basis, as the victims Ramiro II (1136). Since, historically, they were not active in the 1130s, it is possible that the historically-based legend of the pseudo-Alfonso had some influence on the genesis of the Bell of Huesca.

 

The earliest chronicle source for the imposture is Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, writing in the middle of the thirteenth century, who records that there were several legends then current about the death of Alfonso the Battler: some believed he perished in the battle of Fraga, some that his body had never been recovered, others that he was buried in the monastery of Montearagón, and still others that he had fled from Fraga in shame after his defeat and became a pilgrim as an act of penance. Some years later, Rodrigo writes, though he does not give a year, an impostor arose and was received by many as the Battler, though Alfonso II had him arrested and hanged. This is the earliest reference to the impostor's end.[9] The legend was amplified in later years. According to the fourteenth-century Crónica de los Estados Peninsulares, the Battler went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he lived for many years.[10] The Crónica de San Juan de la Peña also recounts the incident, but it depends entirely on Rodrigo and the Estados Peninsulares. It is not until the seventeenth-century historian Jerónimo Zurita penned his Anales de la Corona de Aragón that new details were added to the legend.[11] Zurita's dates the impostor's appearance to the death of Raymond Berengar IV of Barcelona, who had been exercising power in Aragon, and the succession of the child Alfonso II in 1162. The death of the impostor, by hanging, must have occurred in 1163.

Note on Wife: Urraca + of LEON AND CASTILE

Urraca (April 1079 – 8 March 1126) was Queen regnant of León, Castile, and Galicia, and claimed the imperial title as suo jure Empress of All the Spains[1] from 1109 until her death in childbirth, as well as Empress of All Galicia.[2]

Urraca was the eldest surviving child of Alfonso VI of León with his second wife Constance of Burgundy, and as eldest legitimate child of her father was heiress presumptive from her birth until 1107, when Alfonso recognized his illegitimate son Sancho as his heir. Urraca became heiress presumptive again after Sancho’s death the following year, when he was killed after the Battle of Uclés.

[edit] First marriage and widowhood

 

Urraca’s place in the line of succession made her the focus of dynastic politics, and she became a child bride at age eight to Raymond of Burgundy, a mercenary adventurer.[3] Author Bernard F. Reilly suggest that rather than a betrothal, the eight-year-old Urraca was fully wedded to Raymond of Burgundy as he almost immediately appears in protocol documents as Alfonso VI's son-in-law, a distinction that would not have been made without the marriage. Reilly doubts that the marriage was consummated until Urraca was 13, as she was placed under the protective guardianship of a trusted magnate. However, Urraca's pregnancy and stillbirth at age 14 suggests the marriage was consummated when she was 13 or 14 years old.

 

Urraca's marriage to Raymond was part of Alfonso VI's diplomatic strategy to attract cross-Pyrenees alliances, and in 1105 she gave birth to a son, who would become Alfonso VII. However, after Raymond died in 1107, Urraca’s father contracted with Alfonso I of Aragon, known as the Battler, for a dynastic marriage with Urraca, opening the opportunity for uniting León-Castile with Aragón.

[edit] Reign

 

Marriage negotiations were still underway when Alfonso VI died and Urraca became queen. Many of Alfonso VI’s advisers and leading magnates in the kingdom formed a “quiet opposition” to the marriage of the Queen to the King of Aragon. According to Bernard F. Reilly, these magnates feared the influence the King of Aragon might attempt to wield over Urraca and over Leonese politics.

 

Urraca protested against the marriage but honoured her late father’s wishes (and the Royal Council's advice) and continued with the marriage negotiations, though she and her father’s closest advisers were growing weary of Alfonso I's demands. Despite the advisers' initial opposition, the prospect of Count Henry of Portugal filling any power vacuum led them to go ahead with the marriage. As events would unfold, these advisers underestimated Urraca's political prowess, and later advised her to end the marriage.

[edit] Second marriage

Statue of Queen Urraca in Madrid, sculpted by Juan Pascual de Mena

 

The marriage of Urraca and Alfonso I almost immediately sparked rebellions in Galicia[4] and scheming by her illegitimate half-sister Theresa and brother-in-law Henry, the Countess and Count of Portugal.

 

As their relationship soured, Urraca accused Alfonso of physical abuse, and by May 1110 Urraca separated from Alfonso. In addition to her objections to Alfonso's handling of rebels, the couple had a falling-out over his execution of one of the rebels who had surrendered to the queen, to whom the queen was inclined to be merciful. Additionally, as Urraca was married to someone many in the kingdom objected to, the queen's son and heir became a rallying point for opponents to the marriage.

 

Estrangement between husband and wife escalated from discrete and simmering hostilities into open armed warfare between the Leonese-Castilians and the Aragonese. An alliance between Alfonso of Aragon and Henry of Portugal culminated in the 1111 Battle of Candespina in which Urraca's lover and chief supporter Gómez González was killed. He was soon replaced in both roles by another count, Pedro González de Lara, who took up the fight and would father of two of Urraca's children. By the fall of 1112 a truce was brokered between Urraca and Alfonso with their marriage annulled. Though Urraca recovered Asturias, Leon, and Galicia, Alfonso occupied a significant portion of Castile (where Urraca enjoyed large support), while her half-sister Theresa and her husband Count Henry of Portugal occupied Zamora and Extremadura. Recovering these regions and expanding into Muslim lands would occupy much of Urraca's foreign policy.

 

According to author Bernard F. Reilly, the measure of success for Urraca’s rule was her ability to restore and protect the integrity of her inheritance - that is, the kingdom of her father - and transmit that inheritance in full to her own heir. Policies and events pursued by Alfonso VI - namely legitimizing her brother and thereby providing an opportunity for her illegitimate half-sister to claim a portion of the patrimony, as well as the forced marriage with Alfonso I of Aragon - contributed in large part to the challenges Urraca faced upon her succession. Additionally, the circumstance of Urraca’s gender added a distinctive role-reversal dimension to diplomacy and politics, which Urraca used to her advantage.

[edit] Character

 

Urraca is characterized in the Historia Compostelana as prudent, modest, and with good sense. According to Reilly, the Historia Compostelana also attributes her "failings" to her gender, "the weakness and changeability of women, feminine perversity, and calls her a Jezebel" for her liaisons with her leading magnates, with at least one relationship producing an illegitimate son. These observations were hardly neutral or dispassionate, according to Reilly, who wrote: "[T]here is no question that the queen is in control, perhaps all too much in control, of events." Urraca's use of sex in politics should be viewed more as a strategy that provided the queen with allies but without any masters.

[edit] Death and legacy

 

As queen, Urraca rose to the challenges presented to her and her solutions were pragmatic ones, according to Reilly, and laid the foundation for the reign of her son Alfonso VII, who in spite of the opposition of Urraca's lover Pedro González de Lara succeeded to the throne of a kingdom whole and at peace at Urraca’s death in 1126.