Alfonso VI of León

Alfonso VI of León
King of León, of Galicia, of Castile Imperator totius Hispaniae
Alfonso VI in a 12th-century miniature in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
King of León
Reign	1065–1072
Predecessor	Ferdinand I
Successor	Sancho II
King of León
Reign	1072–1109
Predecessor	Sancho II
Successor	Urraca I
King of Galicia
Reign	1071–1072 alongside Sancho II (1071–1072)
Predecessor	García
Successor	Sancho II
King of Galicia
Reign	1072–1109
Predecessor	Sancho II
Successor	Urraca I
King of Castile
Reign	1072–1109
Predecessor	Sancho II
Successor	Urraca I
Born	1040/41
Died	July 1, 1109 Toledo, Kingdom of León
Burial	Royal Monastery of San Benito (Sahagún)
Spouse	Agnes of Aquitaine Constance of Burgundy Bertha Zaida/Isabel, or only Isabel as wife Beatrice
Issue	See issue
House	Jiménez
Father	Ferdinand I
Mother	Sancha of León

Alfonso VI of León, called "the Brave" (1040/1041 – Toledo, July 1, 1109), son of Ferdinand I of León and his wife, Queen Sancha, was King of León from 1065 to 1072 in a first reign and from 1072 to 1109 in a second, of Galicia from 1071 to 1072 and also from 1072 to 1109, and of Castile from 1072 to 1109.

During his reign, the conquest of Toledo (1085) took place, as did the battles of Sagrajas and Uclés, both of which were defeats for the Leonese and Castilian hosts. In the second, the King's heir, the Infante Sancho Alfónsez, was killed.

Family origins and childhood

Son of King Ferdinand I and his wife, Queen Sancha of León, Alfonso was a "Leonese infante with Navarrese and Castilian blood". His paternal grandparents were Sancho Garcés III, King of Pamplona, and his wife Queen Muniadona—daughter of Sancho García, Count of Castile—and his maternal grandparents were King Alfonso V of León and his wife Queen Elvira Menéndez.

The year of his birth is not recorded in medieval documentation. A contemporary text by the anonymous chronicler of Sahagún, who knew the Monarch and was present when he died, relates that he died at 62 years of age and in the 44th year of his reign; he would therefore have been born in the second half of 1047 or in the first half of 1048.

According to the Silense, the firstborn, Urraca, came into the world when her parents were still Counts of Castile, before they reigned, so she would have been born in 1036/37. The second-born, Sancho, would have been born in the second half of 1038 or in 1039. The Infanta Elvira may have been born in 1039/40, Alfonso in 1040/41, and the youngest of the siblings, García, between 1041 and April 24, 1043, when King Ferdinand, in a donation to the Abbey of San Andrés de Espinareda, mentions his five children. All of them, except Elvira, confirm a document at the Monastery of San Juan Bautista de Corias on April 26, 1046.

All of King Ferdinand's children, according to the Silense, were educated in the liberal arts, and the boys also in arms, in the "art of running horses in the Spanish manner" and in hunting. The cleric Raimundo was in charge of Alfonso's instruction in letters. Once King, Alfonso appointed him Bishop of Palencia and referred to him as magistro nostro, viro nobile et Deum timenti. Alfonso possibly spent long periods in Tierra de Campos, where he learned the art of war and what was expected of a knight together with Pedro Ansúrez, son of Ansur Díaz and nephew of Count Gómez Díaz de Saldaña, all of the lineage of the Banu Gómez.

Accession to the throne

As the second son of the King of León and Count of Castile, Ferdinand I, and of Queen Sancha of León, Alfonso would not have been in line to inherit. At the end of 1063, probably on December 22, taking advantage of the fact that numerous magnates had gathered in the capital of the kingdom for the consecration of the Basilica of San Isidoro of León, Ferdinand I convened a Curia Regia to make known his testamentary dispositions, in which he decided to divide his patrimony among his children, a division that would not take effect until the Monarch's death, with the aim of preventing discord from arising after his death.

• Alfonso received the Kingdom of León, "the most extensive, valuable and emblematic part: the one containing the cities of Oviedo and León, cradles of the Astur-Leonese monarchy", which comprised Asturias, León, Astorga, El Bierzo, Zamora with Tierra de Campos, as well as the parias of the Toledan taifa.
• His elder brother, Sancho, received the Kingdom of Castile, created by his father for him, and the parias over the taifa kingdom of Zaragoza.
• His younger brother, García, received the whole Region of Galicia, "raised to the rank of kingdom", which extended south to the Mondego River in Portugal, plus the parias of the taifa king of Badajoz and Seville.
• His sisters Urraca and Elvira received the infantazgo, that is, "the patronage and revenues of all the monasteries belonging to the royal patrimony", on condition that they could not marry.

The historian Alfonso Sánchez Candeira suggests that, although the reasons that led King Ferdinand to divide the kingdoms are not known, with Alfonso inheriting that of León, which implicitly carried the imperial title, the division may have been due to his considering it advisable to give each son as his inheritance the region where he had been educated and had spent his early years. In any case, the main consequence of the paternal decision was the outbreak of fratricidal struggles for power that lasted seven years.

Reign

First stage (1065–1072): consolidation of the throne

After his coronation in the City of León in January 1066, Alfonso had to confront the expansionist ambitions of his brother Sancho, who, as firstborn, considered himself the sole legitimate heir to all of his father's kingdoms. The conflicts began when Queen Sancha died on November 7, 1067, an event that would open a seven-year period of war among the three brothers, the first act of which took place on July 19, 1068, when Alfonso and Sancho clashed at Llantada, in a judgment of God in which both brothers agreed that whoever emerged victorious would obtain the kingdom of the defeated one. Although Sancho won, Alfonso did not abide by the agreement; despite this, relations between the two were maintained, as shown by the fact that on May 26, 1069, Alfonso attended Sancho's wedding to an English noblewoman named Alberta, where both decided to join forces to divide between themselves the kingdom of Galicia, which had fallen to García, the youngest of Ferdinand I's sons.

With Alfonso's complicity, his brother Sancho entered Galicia in 1071 and, after defeating their brother García, captured him at Santarém and imprisoned him in Burgos until he was exiled to the Taifa of Seville, ruled by Al-Mu'tamid. Having eliminated their brother, Alfonso and Sancho styled themselves kings of Galicia and signed a truce.

The Oath of Santa Gadea, by Marcos Hiráldez Acosta. 1864. (Palace of the Senate of Spain, Madrid).

The truce was broken with the Battle of Golpejera in 1072. Sancho's troops were victorious, but he decided not to pursue his brother. Alfonso was taken prisoner and imprisoned in Burgos. He was later moved to the Monastery of Sahagún, where his head was shaved and he was forced to take the chasuble. Thanks to the intercession of their sister Urraca, Sancho and Alfonso reached an agreement for Alfonso to leave and take refuge in the Taifa of Toledo under the protection of his vassal, King Al-Ma'mun, accompanied by the loyal Pedro Ansúrez, his childhood friend, and Pedro's two brothers Gonzalo and Fernando.

From his exile in Toledo, Alfonso secured the support both of his sister Urraca and of the Leonese nobility, who entrenched themselves in the City of Zamora, a lordship Alfonso had previously granted her, forcing Sancho, in 1072, to besiege the city to subdue it after Urraca refused to exchange it for other strongholds Sancho had offered her, he being eager to control the stronghold of Zamora, "key to future expansion south of the Duero". In the course of the siege King Sancho met his death in October of that year. Tradition or legend recounts the episode with the detail that during the siege a Zamoran or Galician noble named Vellido Dolfos presented himself to the King as a deserter and, on the pretext of showing him the weak points of the walls, separated him from his guard and managed to kill him with a lance thrust. Although there is no record whatsoever that Sancho's death was due to treachery rather than to a ruse, since Dolfos was Sancho's enemy, his killing was the result of a military encounter typical of the siege situation and did not take place at the walls but in a nearby wood, to which Dolfos led the Castilian King, drawing him away from his armed protection. The violent death of his brother Sancho, who left no issue, allowed Alfonso to recover his throne and claim Castile and Galicia for himself.

Although Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, King Sancho's trusted man and standard-bearer, was present at the siege of Zamora, there is no record of what his role was. Nor can the death of his brother be attributed to Alfonso, who was in exile and far from the events, "but the minstrels and the romancero filled this void with beautiful literary creations devoid of any historical reality".

At this point, the Legend of Cardeña about the Cid (13th century) places the exculpatory oath concerning Alfonso's possible participation in his brother's murder, which El Cid administered in the Church of Santa Gadea in Burgos (the Oath of Santa Gadea), and which supposedly gave rise to a relationship of mutual distrust between the two, although Alfonso attempted a rapprochement by offering him his niece Jimena Díaz in marriage together with immunity for his estates. These events and their consequences would in time come to be regarded as historical by a multitude of chroniclers and historians, although today most of them reject the historicity of the episode.

Sancho's death was also exploited by García to recover his own throne, but the following year, on February 13, 1073, he was summoned by Alfonso to a meeting, and was seized and imprisoned for life in the Castle of Luna, where he would finally die on March 22, 1090. With both brothers eliminated, Alfonso had no trouble obtaining the loyalty of both the high clergy and the nobility of his territories; to confirm it, he spent the following two years visiting them.

In 1087 or 1088, a revolt broke out in Galicia against the grant of this region to Alfonso's son-in-law. The uprising was put down and served Alfonso to reorganize the episcopate of the west of the kingdom; the Bishop of Santiago was deposed, along with two others of the seven in the area.

Second stage (1072–1086): territorial expansion

Consolidated on the Leonese throne, and with the title of emperor he inherited from the Leonese Neo-Gothicist tradition, Alfonso VI devoted the next fourteen years of his reign to enlarging his territories through conquests such as that of Uclés and the territories of the Banu Di-l-Nun. From 1072 he also styled himself rex Spanie.

General view of the city of Toledo, conquered by Alfonso VI the Brave in 1085.

Alfonso relied on a group of nobles who supported him throughout his reign. In addition to the loyal Ansúrez, this group was made up of his brother-in-law Martín Alfonso, lord of Simancas and Tordesillas and brother of Eylo Alfonso, the royal standard-bearer Pedro González de Lara, and Fernando Díaz. Other figures such as Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar or the King's son-in-law, Count Raymond of Burgundy, had a secondary influence in the circle of Alfonso's court.

He made his first move in 1076, when, upon the assassination of the Navarrese Monarch Sancho Garcés IV, the Navarrese nobility decided that the throne should not pass to his underage son, but to one of the grandsons of Sancho III of Pamplona: Alfonso VI or Sancho Ramírez of Aragon, who invaded the Navarrese kingdom. After reaching an agreement, Sancho Ramírez was recognized as King of Navarre and Alfonso annexed the territories of Álava, Biscay, part of Gipuzkoa, La Rioja and La Bureba, adopting in 1077 the title of Imperator totius Hispaniae ('Emperor of all Spain').

But his great territorial expansion would come at the expense of the Muslim taifa kingdoms, for which Alfonso continued the practice of economic exploitation through the system of parias, succeeding in making most of the taifa kingdoms of Muslim Spain his tributaries, a practice to which he added military pressure. In 1074 he probably recovered the payment of the parias of Toledo, and that same year, aided by troops from that city, he laid waste the lands of the Granadan taifa, which as a consequence also began to pay tribute to Alfonso. In 1076, the emir of Zaragoza, who wished to seize Valencia without hindrance from Alfonso, agreed to resume the payment of parias. In 1079, he took possession of Coria.

Alfonso VI conquers Toledo on May 25, 1085. Bench in the Plaza de España in Seville

One of the initiatives of these years, which has gone down in history as the Betrayal of Rueda, would end in failure. It took place in 1083 at the castle of Rueda de Jalón, when Alfonso received news that the governor of that fortress, which belonged to the Taifa Kingdom of Zaragoza, intended to surrender it to the Leonese King. The troops Alfonso sent were ambushed upon entering the castle, and several of his principal magnates died.

In 1074 his vassal and friend, the King of the Taifa of Toledo Al-Ma'mun, had died of poisoning in Córdoba; he was succeeded by his grandson Al-Qadir, who in 1084 requested Alfonso's help for the second time in the face of an uprising that sought to overthrow him. Alfonso took advantage of the taifa King's call for help to besiege Toledo, a city that would fall on May 25, 1085, and al-Qadir was sent as King to Valencia under the protection of Álvar Fáñez. To facilitate this operation and to recover the payment of the parias of the city, which had stopped paying them the previous year, Alfonso besieged Zaragoza in the spring of 1086. In early March, Valencia accepted al-Qadir; Játiva tried to resist by requesting help from the petty king of Tortosa and Lleida, who made a failed incursion into the region before withdrawing, harassed by the hosts of Fáñez.

After this important conquest, the Monarch styled himself Emperor of the two religions and, as a gesture toward the city's large Muslim population, he pledged, in addition to respecting their properties, to reserve the great mosque for their worship. This decision would be revoked by the newly appointed Archbishop of Toledo, Bernard of Sédirac, taking advantage of an absence of the Monarch from Toledo and relying for this on the support of Queen Constance of Burgundy. The Archbishop transformed the mosque into a cathedral.

The occupation of Toledo, which allowed Alfonso VI to add the title of King of Toledo to those he already held (victoriosissimo rege in Toleto, et in Hispania et Gallecia), led to the capture of cities such as Talavera and of fortresses such as the castle of Aledo. He also occupied the then city of Maŷriṭ in 1085 without resistance, probably by capitulation. The incorporation of the territory between the Sistema Central and the Tagus would serve as a base of operations for the Leonese crown, from which it could undertake greater harassment of the taifas of Córdoba, Seville, Badajoz and Granada.

Third stage (1086–1109): the Almoravid invasion

The conquest of the extensive and strategic Toledan taifa, the control of Valencia and the possession of Aledo, which isolated Murcia from the rest of al-Andalus, worried the Muslim sovereigns of the peninsula. The military and economic pressure on the taifa kingdoms led the kings of the taifas of Seville, Granada, Badajoz and Almería to decide to ask for help from the Almoravids, who, at the end of July 1086, under the command of the emir Yusuf ibn Tashfin, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and landed at Algeciras.

In Seville, the Almoravid army joined the troops of the taifa kingdoms, and together they headed for the lands of Extremadura where, on October 23, 1086, they faced, in the Battle of Zalaca, the troops of Alfonso VI, who had been forced to abandon the siege he was laying to the City of Zaragoza. He was also joined by Álvar Fáñez, who had been called from Valencia to join the King's forces. The battle ended in the defeat of the Christian troops, who returned to Toledo to defend themselves, but the emir did not know how to exploit the victory, as he hastily returned to Africa because of the death of his son. The clash marked the beginning of a new stage in the peninsula lasting some three decades, in which the military initiative passed to the Almoravids and Alfonso's Kingdom had to remain on the defensive; it nonetheless managed to retain Toledo, the main objective of the Almoravid assaults. These did not cease during the last two decades of Alfonso's reign and halted the Leonese expansion across the peninsula that had occurred in the time of his father Ferdinand and during the first part of his own rule.

Alfonso asked the Christian kingdoms of Europe to organize a crusade against the Almoravids, who had recovered almost all the territories Alfonso had conquered, with the exception of Toledo, a city in which Alfonso held firm. To strengthen his position, he was reconciled with the Cid, who came to Toledo at the end of 1086 or the beginning of 1087. As a consequence of the serious defeat, the Andalusi taifas stopped paying him parias; this represented a serious loss of military funds for the Leonese Crown. As a consequence of this lack of funds, the King had to entrust the defense of the frontier increasingly to great lords: the Cid in the east, Álvar Fáñez between Valencia and Toledo, and in the latter, Pedro Ansúrez. Farther west, the same task was left in the hands of Count Raymond, the Monarch's son-in-law. The Cid managed to bring the Levantine taifas back into submission to Alfonso over the following two years.

Although the crusade was ultimately never organized, it did bring a significant number of crusaders into the peninsula, among whom Raymond of Burgundy and Henry of Burgundy stood out; they married two of Alfonso's daughters, Urraca (1090) and Teresa (1094), which gave rise to the establishment of the Burgundian dynasty in the peninsular kingdoms. Some of the crusaders unsuccessfully besieged Tudela in the winter of 1087 before withdrawing. That same year, the King crushed a revolt in Galicia that sought to free his brother García.

In 1088 Yusuf ibn Tashfin crossed the strait for the second time, but was defeated at the Siege of Aledo and suffered the desertion of many of the kings of the Muslim taifas, which led the emir, on his next coming, to arrive determined to depose them all and to remain himself as sole King of all al-Andalus. Alfonso used that castle as a base for raids into the eastern lands of the Sevillian taifa, an activity he continued from 1087 to 1090. Thanks to the Muslim failure before Aledo, Alfonso had been able to resume the collection of parias, through threats to lay waste Granadan territory in the case of that city's sovereign, and by raiding Sevillian territory to recover the submission of the City of the Guadalquivir. With Abd Allah ibn Buluggin of Granada definitively at odds with Ibn Tashfin, Alfonso pledged to come to his aid in exchange for his submission. Like Granada, Zaragoza and other Muslim territories of the east of the peninsula resumed the payment of parias to the Leonese King. During the following five years, Alfonso presented himself as the defender of the independence of the peninsular taifas against the Almoravids, although the imposition of parias complicated pacts with the Andalusi emirs. These tributes, however, were essential to guarantee royal income, the basis of the royal munificence that partly sustained the power and prestige of the Monarch. The attempts to impose them again on the Sevillian taifa by means of an incursion into its territory proved not only a failure but counterproductive: the Sevillian emir refused to pay them and called the Almoravids to his aid. It seems that Alfonso did not take part personally in this campaign.

In June 1090, the Almoravids made a third landing: they deposed the King of Granada, defeated al-Ma'mun, governor of Córdoba, and after the battle of Almodóvar del Río, entered Seville, sending its king al-Mu'tamid into exile. Their siege of Toledo proved fruitless and, upon Alfonso's belated arrival to relieve the city in August, they abandoned it. In the second half of the year and the first half of the next, they seized all the southern taifas; Alfonso, who had pledged to help the sovereign of Seville, failed in this purpose. The King suffered setbacks on every front: in the east he failed to seize Tortosa because of the late arrival of the Genoese fleet that was to take part in its capture; farther south, al-Qadir was deposed in a revolt; in the south, his relationship with Zaida, daughter-in-law of the Sevillian emir, did nothing to favor his image as champion of peninsular Islam against the Almoravids; finally, in the west, the alliance with the emir of Badajoz was not enough to spare the latter the conquest of his territory by the Maghrebis. As the price of the pact, Alfonso had obtained Lisbon, Sintra and Santarém, but he lost them in November 1094, when his son-in-law Raymond, charged with their defense, was defeated by the Almoravid army that had taken Badajoz shortly before. Alfonso had easily seized all three at the end of April and the beginning of May 1093 and, with them, had become master of all of Portugal north of the Tagus. The only good news for Alfonso was provided by the Cid, who managed to recover Valencia in June 1094 and defeat the Almoravid army that advanced against him in October at the Battle of Cuarte; this victory fixed the eastern frontier for approximately a decade.

In 1093 Raymond had received the government of vast territories: the entire Galician and Portuguese Atlantic coast north of the Tagus. However, the birth of Sancho Alfónsez that year—perhaps on September 13—and the death of Queen Constance were serious setbacks for the Count's ambitions, as they distanced him from power and diminished his influence at court. To cap it all, Alfonso decided at Christmas 1094 to marry a Lombard woman, Bertha, instead of again choosing a French woman, a measure he must have taken to reduce Burgundian influence in León. In August and September 1095, the royal couple toured Raymond's lands. Next, the King cunningly thwarted a conspiracy against him by his sons-in-law Raymond and Henry, who wished to divide the kingdom between themselves upon his death. To set them against each other, Alfonso married his daughter Teresa to Henry in 1096, and granted the couple the government of the County of Portugal, until then dominated by Raymond, which comprised the lands from the Miño to Santarém, while Raymond's government was limited to Galicia. The measure deprived Raymond of half his lands and made Henry a new rival for the Leonese throne.

Another factor that allowed Alfonso to maintain his authority in the kingdom was the good relations he kept with the papacy. The difficulties of Pope Urban II arising from his conflicts with the German Emperor Henry IV and the French King Philip I favored an understanding between the pontiff and the Leonese sovereign, who, as his predecessors on the throne had been, was interested in controlling the church of the kingdom and its abundant resources.

In this way the two cousins, instead of allies, became rivals with opposing interests; their succession pact was blown apart, and from then on each of them would try to win Alfonso's favor.

Statue of Alfonso VI in the Sabatini Gardens in Madrid (F. Corral, 1753).

In 1097 a fourth Almoravid landing took place. Alfonso VI received the news when he was probably on his way to Zaragoza to help his vassal King al-Musta'in II in his conflict with the newly crowned Peter I of Aragon. The Almoravid objective was once again Toledo, on the way to which lay the Castle of Consuegra, where, on August 15, they met the Christian troops, who were once again defeated in the battle of the same name. Shortly afterward, the Almoravids also defeated Álvar Fáñez in the Region of Cuenca, the other end of the Leonese defensive line. Soon after, and without managing to take Consuegra, where the remnants of the royal army had taken refuge, the Almoravids withdrew. The defeats did not entail territorial losses or enemy incursions, and the King returned to Sahagún somewhat later, in September or October. It is believed that the court spent Christmas in Santiago and not in León or Sahagún, as was customary. The following summer, Alfonso devoted himself to reinforcing the southeastern frontier of the kingdom, between the Muslim strongholds of Atienza, Sigüenza and Medinaceli, his own stronghold of San Esteban de Gormaz and the Sierra de Guadarrama, to hinder the enemy's communications between the south and Zaragoza.

In 1099, the Almoravids conquered a large part of the castles that defended the Toledo area—Consuegra fell in June— and the following year they tried, unsuccessfully, to seize Toledo. The campaign of 1099 meant the loss for the Leonese of the southern half of the Toledan taifa conquered the previous decade, the fixing of the frontier approximately on the Tagus and, consequently, that Toledo was left in a vulnerable position, as a frontier stronghold. Alfonso, who is believed to have directed the defense of the southern frontier in the campaign of 1099, soon withdrew to Sahagún, in October; he spent Christmas there, and Queen Bertha died shortly afterward, at the beginning of 1100. The Queen must have been ill for some time, because the King was quick to choose a new consort.

The defense of Toledo in 1100 was directed by Henry, Alfonso's son-in-law, since the King had gone to Valencia to inspect its defenses; the Cid had died the previous year and the government of the city then fell to his widow, Jimena. The loss of Valencia also foreshadowed the Almoravid conquest of Zaragoza and, with it, the loss of the last source of parias for the Leonese and a new threat to the eastern frontier of the kingdom.

At the beginning of 1101 Urraca died, the last of the King's siblings still alive, who had been a close adviser to the sovereign. Alfonso must have remained in Sahagún at least until Easter, which that year fell at the end of April. The main military task of the year was the reinforcement of Salamanca and Ávila as bastions against the possible loss of Toledo; the two towns were to serve as western protection for the area south of the Duero, still being assimilated. The first was to watch over the ancient Vía de la Plata, which connected Mérida with Zamora, and the second, the access to the region through the pass of Arrebatacapas in the Sierra de Guadarrama. The task was entrusted to Count Raymond.

In 1102, Alfonso sent troops to aid Valencia against the Almoravid threat. The battle between Leonese and Almoravids took place at Cullera and ended without a clear victor, although Valencia fell into Almoravid hands given how costly it was for Alfonso to defend this stronghold. Alfonso supervised the evacuation of the city in March and April, and set it on fire before leaving; in May, the Almoravids took possession of it. The loss of Valencia foreshadowed the fall of Zaragoza into Almoravid hands and, with it, the emergence of a serious threat to the eastern frontier of the kingdom. The emir of Zaragoza, in view of the turn events were taking, sent his son to negotiate with Ibn Tashfin and stopped paying parias to Alfonso. To protect the area south of the Duero on the east, the Leonese King appointed a Bishop for Osma in 1102 and besieged and took Medinaceli (in July 1104, after a long siege), a key stronghold that allowed attacks on the Toledo region from the east along the valley of the Jalón, in 1104. The town, moreover, lay on the road that connected Zaragoza with Toledo and, beyond the Tagus, with Córdoba and Seville. In 1104, 1105 and 1106, he made several incursions into Andalusi territory; in the last he reached Málaga and was able to escort on his return Mozarabs who settled in his kingdom as repopulators. In the autumn of 1106, he was in eastern Castile and then returned to León, as was customary. In 1107 there was no notable fighting. The King spent Christmas of that year in Sahagún and in May proclaimed Sancho Alfónsez heir in León.

In 1108 the troops of the Almoravid Tamim, governor of Córdoba and son of Yusuf ibn Tashfin, again moved against the Christian territories, but the stronghold chosen was not Toledo but Uclés. Alfonso was in Sahagún, recently married, elderly and with an old wound that prevented him from riding a horse. Álvar Fáñez, governor of the lands of the Banu Di-l-Nun, took command of the army, accompanied by the heir, the Infante Sancho Alfónsez. The armies clashed at the Battle of Uclés, where the Christian troops suffered another heavy defeat and in which, moreover, the Infante heir to the throne perished, which resulted in a thirty-year halt in the reconquest and the independence of the Portuguese county. The military situation was also serious, as the Almoravids almost immediately seized the entire defensive strip of the Tagus from Aranjuez to Zorita, and uprisings of the Muslim population of the region broke out. Alfonso hastened south to defend the frontier lands, although by September, in the absence of the expected enemy assault on Toledo, he had already returned to Sahagún.

Wives, concubines and issue

In 1067 his marriage to Agatha of Normandy, daughter of King William I of England and Matilda of Flanders, was negotiated, but her premature death frustrated the plan.

Miniature from the 1513 manuscript of the National Library depicting a scene from the Chronicon regum legionensium of Bishop Pelayo

According to Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, a contemporary of the King, in his Chronicon regum legionensium, Alfonso VI had five wives and two nobilissimas concubines. The wives were, according to the Bishop, Agnes, Constance, Bertha, Isabel and Beatrice, and the concubines Jimena Muñoz and Zaida.

Agnes of Aquitaine

In 1069 the betrothal agreement was signed with Agnes of Aquitaine, daughter of Guy-William VIII, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitiers, and of Matilda de La Marche. Agnes was barely ten years old, and it was necessary to wait until she turned fourteen to celebrate the marriage, which took place at the end of 1073 or the beginning of 1074. She appears in royal diplomas until May 22, 1077, and from that date the King appears alone in the documentation. Agnes died on June 6, 1078.

Reilly suggests that the marriage had been annulled the previous year, probably because of the lack of children. However, Gambra disagrees and holds that there are no reliable sources supporting such an assertion. The information about the supposed repudiation appears only in one volume of L'art de vérifier les dates and, according to Gambra, "It becomes impossible, in the absence of better references, to give credence to the claim of Agnes's repudiation." In addition, he points out that the Tudense, in his Chronicon mundi, states that the queen was buried in Sahagún. Finally, he points out that "if an event of such magnitude had really taken place, it would make no sense [...] for Alfonso VI to marry immediately another princess of Agnes's family". Agnes and the King's next wife, Constance, were third cousins, both descendants of Duke William III of Aquitaine.

On the other hand, Orderic Vitalis, a 12th-century English chronicler, said that the marriage of Agnes and King Alfonso had been annulled in 1080 on grounds of consanguinity and that Agnes had remarried in 1109 to Elias of La Flèche, Count of Maine. According to Jaime de Salazar y Acha, the one who married the Count of Maine was Beatrice, Alfonso VI's last wife.

Jimena Muñoz

After Agnes's death, the King maintained a relationship with Jimena Muñoz, a nobilissima concubine according to Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, from which two daughters were born between 1078 and 1080.

• Elvira Alfónsez (c. 1079 – April 1157), married Raymond IV of Toulouse, Count of Toulouse, and after being widowed, Count Fernando Fernández de Carrión.
• Teresa Alfónsez. Countess of Portugal as part of her marriage dowry, she married Henry of Burgundy. Their son, Afonso I Henriques, was the first King of Portugal.

Constance of Burgundy

He married for the second time at the end of 1079 Constance of Burgundy, with whom he appears for the first time on May 8, 1080, the childless widow of Count Hugh II of Chalon-sur-Saône, and daughter of Robert the Old, Duke of Burgundy, and Hélie de Semur, and great-granddaughter of Hugh Capet, King of France. She was also the niece of Abbot Hugh of Cluny, and the aunt of Henry of Burgundy. It was precisely the King's desire to strengthen ties with the powerful Abbey of Cluny that motivated the marriage.

From this marriage, which lasted until the Queen's death in 1093, six children were born, five of whom died in childhood; the only one who survived was:

• Urraca I of León (1081–1126), who succeeded her father on the throne. She married twice: to Raymond of Burgundy and to Alfonso the Battler, King of Aragon. She also had two children from her relationship with Count Pedro González de Lara. She was succeeded by the son she had had with Raymond of Burgundy, Alfonso VII the Emperor.

Zaida

Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo mentions Zaida as one of the King's two concubines and says she was the daughter of Al-Mu'tamid, king of the Taifa of Seville. Zaida was in fact his daughter-in-law, married to his son Abu Nasr al-Fath al-Ma'mun, King of the Taifa of Córdoba. In March 1091 the Almoravids besieged the City of Córdoba. Zaida's husband, who died during the siege on the 26th/27th of that month, as a precautionary measure, sent his wife Zaida and their children to Almodóvar del Río. After being widowed, 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.

From this relationship there was born, between 1091 and 1095, possibly in 1094:

• Sancho Alfónsez (c. 1094–1108), his only son and heir to the throne. His premature death at the Battle of Uclés hastened his father's end.

In the chronicle De rebus Hispaniae, by the Archbishop of Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the Moorish woman 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 a wife of Alfonso VI..

According to Jaime de Salazar y Acha, followed by other authors, among them Gonzalo Martínez Díez, they married in 1100, whereby their son was legitimized and became crown prince of the Christian kingdom. For Salazar y Acha, Zaida and the King's fourth wife, Isabel, are the same person, "Despite the strenuous efforts of later historians to try to prove to us that she was not the Moorish Zaida", and she would also be the mother of Elvira and Sancha Alfónsez. Another reason the author puts forward is the fact that shortly after the King's wedding to Isabel, the Infante Sancho begins to confirm royal diplomas, and had the new Queen not been Zaida, she would not have consented to Sancho's new prominence to the detriment of her possible future children. He also cites a diploma in the cathedral of Astorga of April 14, 1107, in which the King grants certain fueros and acts cum uxore mea Elisabet et filio nostro Sancio. This is the only diploma in which he is referred to as "our son", since in others he appears only as the King's son, although Queen Isabel also appears.

Reilly accepts that there were two Isabels, the Moorish Zaida—baptized Isabel—and the other Isabel, but argues that, to strengthen Sancho Alfónsez's position, King Alfonso annulled the marriage with Isabel in March 1106 and married Zaida. The hypothesis that Alfonso VI had married Zaida had already been rejected by Menéndez Pidal and by Lévi-Provençal.

On March 27, 1106, King Alfonso confirmed a donation to the Monastery of Lorenzana: (...) eiusdemque Helisabeth regina sub maritali copula legaliter aderente, an unusual formula that confirms a legitimate marriage. Salazar y Acha and Reilly interpret this quotation as proof that the King had married Zaida, thus legitimizing their son and the relationship of concubinage. Gambra, however, objects and says that it is "an extremely weak argument, beginning with the documentary reference, of scant significance. Its character is rather ornamental and literary". Montaner Frutos also says that the hypothesis is "hardly plausible and problematic", since it was not necessary for the King to marry Zaida to legitimize his son Alfonso and, moreover, Isabel the Frenchwoman died in 1107, as her epitaph states. Montaner Frutos also mentions a donation by Queen Urraca years later, in 1115, when she donated some properties to the cathedral of Toledo and mentions only one Isabel as the King's wife.

Bertha

According to Reilly, on November 25, 1093, he contracted a third marriage with Bertha, although she is not mentioned in a document of April 13, 1094, which "is strange because it falls in a period in which the inclusion of the royal consort in the diplomatic text is already customary". It seems that Alfonso's choice was due to his desire to limit Burgundian influence in the kingdom. The genealogist Szabolcs de Vajay, for onomastic reasons, suggests that Bertha was a member of the House of Savoy, daughter of Amadeus II of Savoy (d. 1180), brother of Peter I of Savoy, grandniece of Bertha of Savoy, great-granddaughter of Bertha d'Este and first cousin of another Bertha, who was Queen through her marriage to Peter I of Aragon. Her presence at court is recorded for the first time on April 28, 1095. She died between November 17, 1099, the date on which she confirms a royal diploma for the last time, and January 15, 1100, when the King appears alone in a donation to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. On January 25, 1100, the King made a donation to the Monastery of Sahagún in memory of his late wife, by whom he had no issue.

Isabel

His penultimate marriage was at the beginning of 1100 to Isabel, and "the controversy has for centuries centered on whether the latter was the Moorish Zaida or a different person". The two appear together for the first time on May 14, 1100, although the diploma is considered suspect, and a second time in that same year but without a date. The last mentions of Isabel in royal diplomas were on May 8 and 14, 1107, and she probably died in the middle of that year. This, according to Salazar y Acha, is Zaida, who after her baptism was called Isabel. Her origin is uncertain. Bishop Pelayo does not refer to her origin. Lucas of Tuy in the 13th century, basing himself on Isabel's epitaph, makes her the daughter of King Louis of France, who at that time would have had to be Louis VI, although there is no record that he had a daughter named Isabel and, moreover, if that were so, she would have been some five or six years old at the time of her marriage. Reilly considers that her origin was probably Burgundian, although this is not recorded in the documentation.

Two daughters were born of this marriage:

• Sancha Alfónsez (c. 1102 – c. 1125), was the first wife of Rodrigo González de Lara, Count of Liébana, with whom she had Elvira Rodríguez de Lara, wife of Count Ermengol VI of Urgell, Urraca and possibly Sancha Rodríguez.
• Elvira Alfónsez (c. September 1103 – February 6, 1135), married in 1117 Roger II, King of Sicily and Duke of Apulia (d. February 26, 1154).

Beatrice

King Alfonso contracted a fifth marriage, possibly in the first months of 1108, with Beatrice. The two appear together for the first time on May 28, 1108, in Astorga Cathedral and afterward in two other royal diplomas: on January 1, 1109, in the cathedral of León, and for the last time on April 25 of the same year in the cathedral of Oviedo, some three months before the King's death. According to Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, once widowed by the King, Beatrice returned to her homeland. Jaime de Salazar y Acha suggests that she was the daughter of William of Poitiers, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitiers, and of Hildegard of Burgundy, and that after being widowed she remarried Elias of La Flèche, Count of Maine. There was no issue from this marriage.

Succession crisis

Alfonso, by now elderly, had to deal with the problem of the succession. Bertha had died at the end of 1099 without giving him an heir; shortly afterward Alfonso married a Frenchwoman who gave him two daughters, but no son. To complicate the situation further, in March 1105 Alfonso Raimúndez was born, son of Urraca and Raymond and therefore Alfonso's grandson. Opposed to this possible claimant to the crown was the King's son with Zaida, Sancho. Montenegro believes that the King legitimized Sancho probably at the time of the meeting of a council at Carrión de los Condes in January 1103, because from that date Sancho begins to head the list of those confirming royal diplomas, ahead of his brothers-in-law Henry and Raymond of Burgundy. In May 1107 Alfonso imposed the recognition of Sancho as heir, despite the probable displeasure of his daughters and sons-in-law, in the course of a curia regia held in León. The situation improved for the King with Raymond's death in September and the agreement with Urraca whereby she would remain lady of Galicia for life, unless she remarried, in which case it would pass to her son. A few months later, at the beginning of 1108, Alfonso's wife also died; despite his age, he married again, to the Frenchwoman Beatrice, with whom he had no children and who survived him. The defeat at Uclés had revived the problem of Alfonso's succession when the heir, Sancho Alfónsez, died in the fighting.

To secure the succession, Alfonso then chose Urraca, but decided to marry her to his rival and famous warrior Alfonso I of Aragon in the autumn of 1108. Part of the nobility and the clergy suggested that the Infanta marry the foremost of the Castilian nobles, Gómez González, Count of Lara, but the King firmly opposed this and chose the Aragonese King. Although the marriage was celebrated at the end of the following year, it did not lead to the hoped-for stability, but to a long civil war that lasted eight years. The marriage proved childless and, after Alfonso's death, most of the nobility and bishops of the kingdom refused to submit to the Battler.

Death and burial

After probably spending the winter in Sahagún, he went at the end of May 1109, or shortly afterward, to Toledo to prepare to defend the frontier against the expected Almoravid assault resulting from the disaster at Uclés. In the spring, the enemy had seized Alcalá de Henares. Shortly before Alfonso's departure for the south, Teresa and Henry left the court and went to their lands, already on bad terms with the court. They attended neither the proclamation of Urraca as heir in Toledo, nor Alfonso's subsequent burial in Sahagún, nor Urraca's coronation at the end of July.

Alfonso VI died in the City of Toledo on July 1, 1109. The King had gone to the city to try to defend it from an imminent Almoravid assault and to proclaim Urraca heir in the City of the Tagus. His death occurred after the proclamation and upset the military plans. His body was taken to the Leonese town of Sahagún, and was buried in the Monastery of San Benito of Sahagún at the end of July or the beginning of August, thus fulfilling the Monarch's wishes. The King's mortal remains were placed in a stone sepulcher, which was set at the foot of the church of the Monastery of San Benito until, during the reign of Sancho IV, this king, finding it unseemly that his predecessor should be buried at the foot of the church, ordered the sepulcher moved to the interior of the church and placed in the transept, where the sepulcher containing the remains of Beatriz Fadrique lay; she was the daughter of the Infante Fadrique of Castile, who had been executed by order of his brother, Alfonso X of Castile, in 1277. On Alfonso's death, the Leonese throne passed to his daughter Urraca.

Facade of the Monastery of the Benedictine nuns of Sahagún, where the remains of Alfonso VI of León lie

The sepulcher that held the King's remains, now lost, rested on alabaster lions and was a large chest of white marble, eight feet long and four feet wide and high; the lid that covered it was smooth and of black slate, and the sepulcher was ordinarily covered by a silk tapestry, woven in Flanders, on which the King appeared crowned and armed, with the arms of Castile and León depicted on the sides, and a crucifix at the head of the sepulcher. The sepulcher containing the remains of Alfonso VI was destroyed in 1810, during the fire that struck the Monastery of San Benito. The mortal remains of the King and those of several of his wives were gathered and kept in the abbot's chamber until 1821, when the monks were expelled from the monastery; they were then placed by Abbot Ramón Alegrías in a box, which was set in the south wall of the Chapel of the Crucifix, until, in January 1835, the remains were gathered again and placed in another box and taken to the archive, where the remains of the sovereign's wives were at that time. The purpose was to place all the royal remains in a new sanctuary then under construction. However, when the Monastery of San Benito was disentailed in 1835, the monks handed over the two boxes with the royal remains to a relative of one of the monks, who hid them until, in 1902, they were found by Rodrigo Fernández Núñez, a professor at the Instituto de Zamora. Today, the mortal remains of Alfonso VI the Brave rest in the monastery of the Benedictine nuns of Sahagún, at the foot of the church, in a smooth stone chest with a modern marble cover, and in a nearby sepulcher, likewise plain, lie the remains of several of the King's wives.

Legacy

Statue of Alfonso VI in Toledo

In the cultural sphere, Alfonso VI promoted the safety of the Camino de Santiago and encouraged the introduction of the Cluniac reform in the monasteries of Galicia, León and Castile. In the spring of 1073, he made the first grant of a Leonese monastery to the Cluniacs.

The Monarch replaced the Mozarabic or Toledan liturgy with the Roman one. In this regard, popular tradition tells that Alfonso took a Mozarabic breviary and a Roman one and threw them into the fire. When only the Roman breviary burned, the King threw the Mozarabic one into the fire again, thus imposing the Roman rite. This legend may be the origin of the proverb that states "Laws go where kings wish" («Allá van las leyes, do quieran los reyes»).

Alfonso VI, the conqueror of Toledo, the great Europeanizing monarch, saw, in the last years of his reign, how the great political work he had accomplished cracked under the Almoravid onslaught and internal weaknesses. Alfonso VI had fully embraced the Leonese imperial idea, and his openness to European influence had made him acquainted with the feudal political practices that, in the France of his time, reached their most complete expression. In the conjunction of these two elements, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz sees the explanation for the grant iure hereditario (division of the kingdom among the two daughters and the son instead of bequeathing the whole kingdom to the only son)—more typical of the Navarrese-Aragonese tradition—of the governments of the counties of Galicia and Portugal to his two Burgundian sons-in-law, Raymond, first husband of Urraca, and Henry, married to Teresa. From that decision stemmed, a few years later, Portuguese independence and the prospect of an independent Galicia under Alfonso Raimúndez, which did not materialize when he became Alfonso VII of León.

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External links

• IX Centenario de Alfonso VI (1109–2009) (in Spanish)
• Autenticidad de los restos mortales de Alfonso VI y de sus cuatro mujeres. Centro Virtual Cervantes (in Spanish)
• Noticias sobre los restos mortales del Monarca Don Alfonso VI. Centro Virtual Cervantes (in Spanish)