Alfonso VI of León and Castile

Life

Birth and early years

The son of Ferdinand I, King of León and Count of Castile and his wife, Queen Sancha, Alfonso was a "Leonese infante [prince] with Navarrese and Castilian blood". His paternal grandparents were Sancho Garcés III, king of Pamplona and his wife Muniadona of Castile, and his maternal grandparents were Alfonso V of León (after whom he was probably named) and his first wife Elvira Menéndez.

The year of Alfonso's birth is not recorded in the medieval documentation. According to one of the authors of the Anonymous Chronicle of Sahagún, who met the monarch and was present at his death, he died at age 62 after reigning 44 years. This indicates that he was born in the second half of 1047 or in the first half of 1048. Pelagius of Oviedo wrote that Alfonso was 79 when he died, but that would place his birth around 1030, before his parents' marriage.

According to the Historia silense, the eldest child of Ferdinand I and Sancha, a daughter called Urraca, was born when her parents were still Count and Countess of Castile, so her birth could be placed in 1033–34. The second child and eldest son, Sancho, must have been born in the second half of 1038 or in 1039. The third child and second daughter, Elvira, may have been born in 1039–40, followed by Alfonso in 1040–41, and finally the youngest of the siblings, García, sometime between 1041 and 24 April 1043, the date on which King Ferdinand I, in a donation to the Abbey of San Andrés de Espinareda, mentions his five children. All of them except Elvira signed a document in the monastery of San Juan Bautista de Corias on 26 April 1046.

All the children of King Ferdinand I, according to the Historia silense, were educated in the liberal arts, and the sons were also trained in arms, the "art of running horses in the Spanish usage", and hunting. The cleric Raimundo was in charge of Alfonso's early education. Once king, Alfonso appointed him Bishop of Palencia and referred to him as magistro nostro, viro nobile et Deum timenti ("our master, a noble man who fears God"). Alfonso probably spent long periods in Tierra de Campos, where, along with Pedro Ansúrez, the son of Ansur Díaz and nephew of Count Gómez Díaz de Saldaña (both members of the Banu Gómez lineage), he learned the art of war and what was expected of a knight.

Ascension to the throne

As the second son of the king of León and count of Castile, Alfonso would not have been entitled to inherit the throne. At the end of 1063, probably on 22 December, taking advantage of the fact that numerous magnates had gathered in León, capital of the kingdom, for the consecration of the Basílica of San Isidoro, Ferdinand I summoned a Curia Regia to make known his testamentary dispositions, under which he decided to distribute his patrimony among his children, a distribution that would not become effective until the death of the monarch in order to prevent any disputes arising after his death:

Alfonso inherited the Kingdom of León, "the most extensive, valuable and emblematic part: the one that contained the cities of Oviedo and León, cradles of the Asturian-Leonese monarchy", which included Asturias, León, Astorga, El Bierzo, Zamora with Tierra de Campos as well as the parias of the Taifa of Toledo.

His elder brother, Sancho, was given the Kingdom of Castile, created by his father for him, and the parias of the Taifa of Zaragoza.

His younger brother, García, received the entire region of Galicia, "elevated to the rank of kingdom" that extended south to the Mondego River in Portugal with the parias of the Taifa of Badajoz and Seville.

Their sisters, Urraca and Elvira, both received the Infantazgo, that is, "the patronage and income of all the monasteries belonging to the royal patrimony" on the condition that they remained unmarried.

The historian Alfonso Sánchez Candeira suggests that the reasons leading King Ferdinand I to divide the kingdom (with Alfonso VI inheriting the royal title) are unknown, but the distribution was probably made because the king considered it proper that each son should inherit the region where he had been educated and spent his early years.

Reign

After his coronation in the city of León in January 1066, Alfonso VI had to confront the expansionist desires (although Alfonso would prove himself as having the same or more so) of his brother Sancho II, who, as the eldest son, considered himself the sole legitimate heir of all the kingdoms of their father. The conflicts began after the death of their mother Queen Sancha on 7 November 1067, leading to seven years of war among the three brothers. The first skirmish was the Battle of Llantada, a trial by ordeal in which both brothers agreed that the one who was victorious would obtain the kingdom of the defeated brother. Although Sancho II was the winner, Alfonso VI did not comply with the agreement; even so, relations between them remained cordial as evidenced by the fact that Alfonso was present at the wedding of Sancho II to an English noblewoman named Alberta on 26 May 1069. This was the same event where both decided to join forces to divide between themselves the Kingdom of Galicia that had been assigned to their younger brother García II. In the wake of the fratricidal war waged between the successors of al-Muzaffar, ruler of the taifa of Badajoz, upon the latter's death in 1068, Alfonso managed to exploit the situation in order to extract economic profit, even though the taifa nominally fell under García's sphere of influence.

With the complicity of Alfonso VI, Sancho II invaded Galicia in 1071, defeating their brother García II who was arrested in Santarém and imprisoned in Burgos until he was exiled to the Taifa of Seville, then under the rule of Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad. After eliminating their brother, Alfonso VI and Sancho II titled themselves kings of Galicia and signed a truce.

The truce was broken with the Battle of Golpejera on 12 January 1072. Although Sancho II's troops were victorious, he decided not to persecute his brother Alfonso, who was imprisoned in Burgos and later transferred to the monastery of Sahagún, where his head was shaved and he was forced to wear a chasuble. Thanks to the intercession of their sister Urraca, Sancho and Alfonso reached an agreement under which Alfonso VI was able to take refuge in the Taifa of Toledo under the protection of his vassal Al-Mamun, accompanied by his childhood friend, the faithful Pedro Ansúrez and his two brothers Gonzalo and Fernando.

Alfonso VI, from his exile in Toledo, obtained the support of the Leonese nobility and his sister Urraca, who remained strong in the city of Zamora, a lordship that Ferdinand I had granted her previously. When Urraca refused to exchange Zamora for other cities that Sancho had offered her in an effort to control the fortress of Zamora, "key to the future expansion south of the Duero", Sancho besieged the city. However, during the siege, Sancho II was murdered. According to tradition, during the siege a nobleman named Vellido Dolfos appeared before the king, claiming to have changed his loyalty from Urraca to Sancho. Under the pretense of showing him the weak parts of the city's walls, Dolfos separated the king from his guard and killed him with a spear. Although there is no clear evidence that Sancho II's death was due to treason rather than deceit, since Dolfos was Sancho II's enemy, his murder occurred in a warlike attack during the siege, not near the city walls, but rather in a nearby forest where Dolfos lured the Castilian king away from his armed protection. The violent death of Sancho II, who had no descendants, allowed Alfonso VI to reclaim his throne as well as Sancho's and Garcia's original inheritances of Castile and Galicia, respectively.

Succession crisis

Alfonso VI, already old, had to deal with the problem of his succession. Berta had died without giving him an heir at the end of 1099; shortly after, Alfonso married Isabel who gave him two daughters, but no sons. To further complicate the situation, in March 1105 his grandson Alfonso Raimúndez, son of Urraca and Raymond of Burgundy, was born, a possible contender to the throne in detriment to Sancho Alfónsez, the king's son with Zaida. Montenegro thinks that Alfonso VI legitimized Sancho probably coinciding with the meeting of a council in Carrión de los Condes in January 1103 because from that date onwards, Sancho began to confirm royal charters before his brothers-in-law Raymond and Henry of Burgundy. In May 1107, Alfonso imposed the recognition of Sancho as heir, despite the probable opposition of his daughters and sons-in-law, in the course of a Curia Regia held in León. The situation improved for the king with the death of Raymond of Burgundy in September and the agreement with Urraca so that she remained as sovereign Lady of Galicia, except in the case of remarrying since, in that case, Galicia would pass to her son.

The death of Sancho in the Battle of Uclés on 29 May 1108 left Alfonso VI without his only male heir. He then chose his eldest legitimate daughter Urraca as his successor, but decided to marry her to his rival and famous warrior King Alfonso I of Aragon and Navarre in the autumn of 1108. Although the marriage was celebrated at the end of the following year, it did not lead to the expected stability, but to a long civil war that lasted eight years.

Death and burial

Alfonso VI died in Toledo on 1 July 1109. The king had come to the city to try to defend it from an imminent Almoravid attack. His body was taken to the locality of Sahagún, and was buried in the Royal Monastery of San Benito, thus fulfilling the wishes of the monarch. The mortal remains of the king were deposited in a stone sepulchre, which was placed at the feet of the church of the Royal Monastery, until the reign of Sancho IV, who deemed it unseemly that his ancestor was buried at the foot of the temple and ordered the tomb to be moved inside and placed in the church's transept, near the tomb of Beatriz, Dowager Lady of Los Cameros and daughter of Infante Frederick of Castile who had been executed by orders of his brother, King Alfonso X the Wise in 1277.

The sepulchre that contained the remains of the king, now having disappeared, was supported on alabaster lions, and was a large ark of white marble, eight feet long and four wide and tall, being covered by a smooth black lid. The tomb was usually covered by a silk tapestry, woven in Flanders, bearing the image of the king crowned and armed, with the representation of the arms of Castile and León on the sides, and a crucifix at the head of the tomb.

The tomb that contained the remains of Alfonso VI was destroyed in 1810, during the fire at the Royal Monastery of San Benito. The mortal remains of the king and those of several of his wives were collected and preserved in the abbey chamber until 1821, when the monks were expelled, and were then deposited by the abbot Ramón Alegrías in a box, which was placed in the southern wall of the chapel of the Crucifix until January 1835, when the remains were collected again and placed in another box and taken to the archive where the remains of the wives of the sovereign were at that time. The purpose was to place all the royal remains in a new sanctuary that was being built at that time. However, when the Royal Monastery of San Benito was dissolved in 1835, the monks delivered the two boxes with the royal remains to a relative of one of them, who kept it hidden until 1902, when these were discovered by Rodrigo Fernández Núñez, a professor at the Institute of Zamora Rodrigo.

The mortal remains of Alfonso VI are now in the Monastery of the Benedictine nuns of Sahagún, at the foot of the temple, in a smooth stone ark and with a cover of modern marble, and in a nearby sepulchre, equally smooth, lie the remains of several of the king's wives.

Wives, concubines and issue

According to Bishop Pelagius of Oviedo, contemporary of the king, in his Chronicon regum Legionensium ("Chronicle of the Kings of León"), Alfonso VI had five wives and two concubines nobilissimas (most noble). The wives were, according to the bishop, Agnes, Constance, Berta, Isabel, and Beatrice and the concubines Jimena Muñoz and Zaida. Some chroniclers from north of the Pyrenees report an earlier espousal, to a daughter of William the Conqueror, King of England and Duke of Normandy named Agatha.

Agatha of Normandy (?)

Several northern sources report that Alfonso was affianced to Agatha, the daughter of William the Conqueror, King of England and Duke of Normandy, an arrangement negotiated in 1067. She is said to have been sent to Iberia, but to have died before the marriage could take place. There is scholarly dispute over whether Alfonso was the Iberian king involved, and if so, whether the daughter of William involved was Agatha or a different daughter, Adelaide.

Agnes of Aquitaine

In 1069, the betrothal with Agnes, daughter of Duke William VIII of Aquitaine, was signed. At the time, she was barely 10 years old and so it was necessary to wait until she reached age 14 for the official wedding, which took place in late 1073 or early 1074. She appears in royal diplomas until 22 May 1077; from that date, the king appears alone in the documentation.

Agnes is said to have died on 6 June 1078, On the other hand, Orderic Vitalis, an English chronicler of the 12th century, said that the marriage of Agnes and Alfonso VI had been annulled in 1080 for reasons of consanguinity, and that Agnes was remarried in 1109 to Count Elias I of Maine.

Reilly suggests that the marriage had been annulled in 1077, probably because of the lack of children. However, Gambra disagrees and believes that there are no reliable sources to support this assertion. In addition to being implied by Orderic, the alleged repudiation appears only in a volume of L'art de vérifier les dates and, according to Gambra, "it is impossible, in the absence of better references, to grant credit to the assertion of Agnes' repudiation". In addition, he indicates that Lucas de Tuy, in his Chronicon mundi, indicates that the Queen was buried in Sahagún. Finally, he points out that "If such an important event had taken place, it would not make much sense [...] that Alfonso VI immediately married another princess who was a member of Agnes' family". Agnes and the king's next wife, Constance, were cousins in the third degree, both of them descendants of William III, Duke of Aquitaine. Salazar y Acha concludes that Orderic is in error, and that it was Beatrice, the last wife of Alfonso VI, who as his widow married the Count of Maine.

Jimena Muñoz

After the death of Agnes, the king had an extra-marital relationship with Jimena Muñoz, "most noble" (nobilissima) concubine "derived from royalty" (real generacion), according to Bishop Pelagius of Oviedo. They had two illegitimate daughters born between 1078 and 1080:

Elvira Alfónsez (c. 1079 – aft. April 1157), who was married first to Count Raymond IV of Toulouse and then to Count Fernando Fernández de Carrión.

Teresa Alfónsez (c. 1080 – 11 November 1130), who married Count Henry of Portugal; they received the right to rule the County of Portugal and their eldest son, Afonso Henriques, became the first king of Portugal.

Constance of Burgundy

At the end of 1079 Alfonso VI married Constance of Burgundy, with whom he appears for the first time in royal charters on 8 May 1080. She was the childless widow of Count Hugues III of Chalon-sur-Saône and daughter of Duke Robert I of Burgundy and his first wife, Hélie de Semur-en-Brionnais, and great-granddaughter of King Hugh Capet of France. She was also the niece of Abbot Hugh of Cluny and aunt of Henry of Burgundy. From this union, which lasted until Constance's death in 1093, six children were born, but only one reached adulthood:

Urraca (c. 1080 – 8 March 1126), successor of her father in the thrones of León and Castile, who married firstly Raymond of Burgundy and secondly King Alfonso I of Aragon. She also had two illegitimate children from her relationship with Count Pedro González de Lara. She was succeeded by her son with Raymond of Burgundy, Alfonso VII.

Zaida

Bishop Pelagius of Oviedo mentions Zaida as one of the king's two concubines and says that she was the daughter of Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad, ruler of the Taifa of Seville. In fact, she was his daughter-in-law, married to his son Abu Nasr Al-Fath al-Ma'mun, ruler of the Taifa of Córdoba. In March 1091, the Almoravid army besieged the city of Córdoba. Zaida's husband, who died during the siege on 26–27 March, sent his wife and children to Almodóvar del Río as a precautionary measure. After becoming a widow, Zaida sought protection at the court of the Leonese king and she and her children converted to Christianity; she was baptized with the name "Isabel" and became the king's concubine. They had one son:

Sancho Alfónsez (c. 1094 – 29 May 1108), Alfonso VI's only son and heir. His premature death in the Battle of Uclés so grieved his father that he too soon died.

In the chronicle De rebus Hispaniae, by the Archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Zaida is counted among the wives of Alfonso VI, but the Chronica Naierensis and the Chronicon mundi indicate that Zaida was a concubine and not the wife of Alfonso VI.

According to Jaime de Salazar y Acha, followed by other authors, among them, Gonzalo Martínez Diez, they married in 1100, and with this ceremony their son was legitimised and declared heir of the Kingdoms of León and Castile. For Salazar y Acha, Zaida and the fourth wife of Alfonso VI, Isabel, are the same person, "despite of the impotent efforts of later historians to try to prove that she was not the Moor Zaida", and, accordingly, she would also be the mother of Elvira and Sancha Alfónsez. He supports this based on several arguments, including the turnaround time between the last appearance of Bertha and Isabel's first charter as Alfonso's wife, much shorter than the interval preceding his other remarriages presumed to have involved international diplomacy, which Salazar y Acha argues indicates that Isabel was ready to hand rather than being a foreign princess. Likewise, he argues, shortly after the marriage of the king with Isabel his son Sancho begins to confirm royal charters and, if Isabel and Zaida were not the same person, the new queen would not have allowed the new protagonism of Sancho in detriment of her possible future sons. He also cites a charter from the cathedral of Astorga dated 14 April 1107 where Alfonso VI grants some fueros and acts cum uxore mea Elisabet et filio nostro Sancio (with my wife Isabel and our son Sancho). This is the only document where Sancho is referred to as "our son", since in others he only appears as the king's son even though Queen Isabel also confirms the charters.

Berta

On 25 November 1093 Alfonso VI contracted a third marriage with Berta, although in a document dated 13 April 1094 she is not mentioned as would have been the custom at that time. For onomastic reasons, the genealogist Szabolcs de Vajay suggested that she was a member of the House of Savoy, daughter of Count Amadeus II of Savoy, niece of Bertha of Savoy (wife of Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor), great-granddaughter of Bertha of Milan and first-cousin of another Bertha (who married King Peter I of Aragon and Navarre). Her presence in court was first recorded on 28 April 1095. She died between 17 November 1099, when she confirms a royal diploma for the last time, and 15 January 1100 when the king appears alone in a donation to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. On 25 January 1100, the king made a donation to the monastery of Sahagún in memory of his deceased wife. There was no issue from this marriage.

Isabel

Alfonso VI's penultimate marriage was in early 1100 to Isabel and "the cause of controversy during centuries has been whether this Isabel was the same person as the Arab Muslim Princess Zaida or a different individual". Alfonso and Isabel appear together for the first time on 14 May 1100 although the diploma is considered suspicious, and the second time in that same year at an unspecified date. Isabel's last mention in royal diplomas was on 8 and 14 May 1107 and she probably died in the middle of that year. She is, according to Salazar y Acha, Zaida, who after her baptism was called Isabel. If not identical to Zaida, her origin is uncertain. Bishop Pelagius of Oviedo does not refer to her origin nor does he draw any link between mistress Zaida and wife Isabel. Lucas de Tuy in the 13th century, based on the epitaph of Isabel, makes her daughter of King Louis of France, who at that time would have to be Louis VI although this seems to be chronologically impossible. Reilly considers that she was probably of Burgundian origin, although this does not appear in the documentation. Two daughters were born from this union:

Sancha (c. 1102 – before 10 May 1125), first wife of Rodrigo González de Lara, Count of Liébana, with whom she had Elvira Rodríguez de Lara, wife of Ermengol VI, Count of Urgell.

Elvira (c. 1103 – 8 February 1135), wife of King Roger II of Sicily.

Beatrice

Alfonso VI married his fifth wife, Beatrice, probably in the first months of 1108. Both appear together for the first time on 28 May 1108 in Astorga Cathedral and then in two other royal charters: on 1 January 1109 in the Cathedral of León and for the last time on 25 April of the same year in Oviedo Cathedral, about three months before the death of the king. According to Bishop Pelagius of Oviedo, once a widow, Beatrice returned to her homeland. Salazar y Acha suggests that she was the daughter of William VIII, Duke of Aquitaine and his third wife Hildegarde of Burgundy, and that she remarried Elias I, Count of Maine.

Legacy

In the cultural field, Alfonso VI promoted the safety of the Camino de Santiago and promoted the Cluniac Reforms in the monasteries of Galicia, León and Castile. In the spring of 1073, he made the first concession of a Leonese monastery to the Order of Cluny.

The monarch replaced the Mozarabic or Toledan rite with the Roman one. In this respect it is a common legend that Alfonso VI took Mozarabic and Roman breviaries and threw them into the fire. When only the Roman breviary burned, the king threw the Mozarabic one into the fire, thus imposing the Roman rite.

Alfonso VI, the conqueror of Toledo, the great Europeanizing monarch, saw in the last years of his reign how the great political work that he had carried started to be dismantled due to Almoravid attacks and internal weaknesses. Alfonso VI had fully assumed the imperial idea of León and his openness to European influence had made him aware of the feudal political practices which, in the France of his time, reached their most complete expression. In the conjunction of these two elements, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz sees the explanation of the grant of the iure hereditario (sharing the kingdom between the two daughters and the son instead of bequeathing all to the only son, more typical of Navarrese-Aragonese tradition) of the Counties of Galicia and Portugal to her two Burgundian sons-in-law, Raymond and Henry. After a few years, that decision led to the independence of Portugal and the possibility of an independent Galicia under Alfonso Raimúndez, which ultimately did not materialize when the infante became King Alfonso VII of León.