16 - Spain in the twelfth century

Summary

the death of Alfonso VI of León on the last day of June 1109 brought a woman to the throne of ‘all Spain’ for the first time in its history. Or so three weeks later Queen Urraca described the extent of her authority. ‘All Spain’ in that summer comprised the area from the Atlantic in the west to the Ebro in the east and to the north of a line running from Coimbra by way of Toledo to Medinaceli and the border of the kingdom of Saragossa (the northernmost of the formally independent taifa kingdoms into which the caliphate of Córdoba had disintegrated in the previous century), beyond which lay the kingdom of Aragón and the county of Barcelona. Yet within ten years this description of the area between the Pyrenees and the sierras of the centre would no longer apply, and within sixty it would be unrecognizable. By then the north of the peninsula would be occupied by the five kingdoms of Portugal, León, Castile, Navarre and Aragón which endured until the end of the century and beyond, and by the end of this chapter further kaleidoscopic transformations will have occurred. The history of twelfth-century Spain was enacted on constantly shifting foundations.

This was the case with the reign of Urraca herself (1109–26), one of whose first acts after her father’s death was to marry Alfonso I, the Battler, of Aragon (1104–34). This she did ‘during the vintage time‘, according to the chronicle of Sahagün, in fulfilment of arrangements made by Alfonso VI in the last year of his life. But as well as being uncanonical, the match was unsuitable. Too nearly related for the pope’s liking, in all other respects the couple were remote.