Alfonso VI of León

“ In 1010, Alfonso was imprudent enough to confer the hand of his sister on Muhammed, king of Toledo—a prince who was subsequently raised to the throne of Cordova, but was soon deposed and put to death by Hisham. As the king of Leon grew in years, he endeavoured to repair the disasters which had been occasioned by the hostile inroads of the Arabs: he rebuilt and repeopled his capital, whither the seat of government was again transferred from Oviedo. His good intentions, however, were not a little thwarted by the rebellion of Count Sancho Garces of Castile. ”

“ Besides the revolt against Doña Theresa which is to be attributed rather to the nobles than to an inexperienced youth, the breaking of the truce with the emperor in 1137, the cruelties practised upon the Saracens, and finally his conduct towards the king of Leon, his son-in-law, whose noble and generous character cannot fail to cast a reflection upon that of Alfonso I, are actions which, taken separately, are worthy of condemnation, at least until records reveal some circumstances still unknown to us, which may absolve them. ”

“ For of Alfonso of León they stood in mighty dread.
Watch o'er their arms they kept that night. And prayers to God
they said.
At last has night passed over, and breaketh now the dawn,
And many worthy nobles there to the place have drawn,
For to behold that combat, wherefore their mirth was high.
Moreover King Alfonso above all men is by,
Since he desireth justice and that no wrong should be done.
The men of the good Campeador, they get their armour on.
All three are in agreement for one lord's men are they.
The Heirs of Carrión elsewhere have armed them for the fray. ”

“ The new monarch proved to be a wise ruler for the kingdoms of Leon, Castile, Gallicia, and Portugal. He was not without his troubles, however, for shortly after his succession the Cid quarrelled with one of his nobles. Next the Moorish kings became disunited and Alfonso's former host summoned him to his aid. Not only did Alfonso assist this king of Toledo, but invited him into his camp, where he forced him to release him from the promise made on leaving his city. ”

“ The queen, Leonora of Castile, at whose instigation the alienation had been made, cherished a deep resentment against her stepson. Pedro despised her anger; and, to incense her the more, seized on Jativa, which had been assigned to her on her marriage with his father, and loudly proclaimed his intention of revoking every grant made by the king, whenever he should succeed to the sovereignty. It was not in Alfonso’s power to stifle these dissensions, which not only imbittered his peace but aggravated the hydropsical disease under which he had long suffered. He died at Barcelona, in 1336. ”

“ XII. After this was King Don Alfonso crowned King of Castille, and Leon, and Galicia, and Portugal; and he called himself King and Emperor of all Spain, even as his father had done before him. And in the beginning of his reign he did in all things according to the counsel of the Infanta Doña Urraca his sister; and he was a good King, and kept his kingdom so well, that rich and poor alike dwelt in peace and security, neither did one man take arms against another, nor dare to do it, if he valued the eyes in his head. And if the King was noble and high of lineage, much more was he of heart ”

“ No sooner had Pedro IV ascended the throne, than Queen Leonora, apprehensive of the consequences of her late quarrel with him, fled to Fraga, whence she implored the protection of her brother Alfonso, king of Castile. Alfonso naturally espoused his sister’s cause. The pope despatched a legate to exhort the two kings to settle their dispute by negotiations, and to insist on justice being done to Queen Leonora. Their deliberations ended in nothing, beyond a suspension of actual hostilities. ”

“ The nature of the authority conferred on the new count has been a matter of much controversy between the Castilian and Portuguese writers. While the latter maintain that the concession of Alfonso was full and entire,—a surrender of all feudal claims over the country, which the count was to govern in full sovereignty,—the former no less zealously contend that the government was to be held as a fief, hereditary indeed, but no less dependent on the crown of Leon. In the absence of documentary evidence, probability only can guide us. ”

“ If, however, the severe and impartial historian must perceive blemishes in the character of Alfonso I as a man, justice must, in his favour, throw into the scale the difficulties which beset him in bequeathing to the next generation a well-cemented political existence, and a nationality, as we may say, sufficiently compact to withstand the storms which shook the peninsula. He had to attend to the internal organisation of society and externally to secure it an advantageous position in relation to the various nations of Spain, Christian and Mussulman. ”

“ The next following reigns had their share of internal strife and one important event in the course of the Moslem wars,—the defence of Calatrava in 1158 by two Cistercian monks, who procured an army by proclaiming a crusade. Out of this event there came the founding in 1164 of the important military order of Calatrava. Alfonso VIII (1158-1214) inherited the throne of Castile while still a child. War and disorder followed until 1180, for the kings of León and Navarre and various nobles endeavored as usual to profit for themselves at the expense of the newly enthroned monarch. ”

“ Alfonso X., the Wise, or the Astronomer, king of Castile and Leon, celebrated as an astronomer and a philosopher; after various successes over the Moors, first one son and then another rose against him and drove him from the throne; died of chagrin at Seville two years later. His fame connects itself with the preparation of the Alfonsine Tables, and the remark that “the universe seemed a crank machine, and it was a pity the Creator had not taken advice.” ”

“ Aragonese with hempen sandals, the heavy-mantled Castilian who dreads the cold, and the men of Leon who till the fields.
At the roll of the drum the troops march forward, the colours are lowered, and a solemn Mass is celebrated by the Archbishop of Toledo before the sham king, while martial bands thrill the souls of men.
Then to the blare of trumpets the young Infante{285} Don Alfonso (only eleven years of age) is borne in—a tall, slender boy of the delicate type of his family, brother of Doña Isabel, who declines to appear. ”

“ Alfonso V, the eldest son of Duarte, being only six years of age on his father’s death, the regency devolved, in conformity with the last will of her husband, on the queen-mother, Leonora, a princess of excellent disposition, but not exempted from the fickleness of her sex, and ill qualified to rule a fierce people. To such a people, the sway even of a native woman could scarcely have been agreeable; as a foreigner (a princess of Aragon) , she was peculiarly obnoxious. Seeing this general discontent, some of the nobles, with three uncles of the king, resolved to profit by it. ”

“ Civilisation and morals declined, and vice and crime throve to such an extent as to bring the Castilian people everywhere into contempt. From the court itself all sentiment of honour and justice had disappeared. The king neglected his Portuguese wife in the most insulting manner, and treated his mistress, Leonora de Guzman, as queen. Garcilasso de la Vega, Alfonso’s favourite, made himself notorious by perfidy, trickery, and murder till he and his son were slain by the indignant nobles ”

“ Alfonso was far-seeing enough to know the possibilities ahead, and it is easy to understand and sympathize with his rage at the mere thought of the dapper, silken Candespina. So the rebellious Urraca, with her heart full of love for Count Gomez, was married, and just before her father's death in 1109, to King Alfonso I., called el batallador [the battler] , and known as the Emperor of Aragon. This union of Castile, Leon, and Aragon would have promised much for the future, if the rulers of this united kingdom could have lived in peace and harmony together. ”

“ National policies and projects of reform on the part of those in power get little beyond the stage of rhetoric, while government is too largely given over to the interplay of personal ambitions. To many the young king, Alfonso XIII, has seemed the most liberal-minded of the higher officers of the Spanish state, and in both word and deed he has appeared, until recently at least, to merit the characterization. Attaining to his majority at the age of sixteen, in 1902, he married the granddaughter of the English Queen Victoria in 1906,—an augury in itself of liberal views. ”

“ The second known author in Castilian literature bears a name much more distinguished than the first. It is Alfonso the Tenth, who, from his great advancement in various branches of human knowledge, has been called Alfonso the Wise, or the Learned. He was the son of Ferdinand the Third, a saint in the Roman calendar, who, uniting anew the crowns of Castile and Leon, and enlarging the limits of his power by important conquests from the Moors, settled more firmly than they had before been settled the foundations of a Christian empire in the Peninsula. ”

“ For nearly two centuries after the death of Alfonso II, or until the fall of the Moslem caliphate, very little progress was made by the kings of Oviedo and León, which latter city had become the capital of the Christian kingdom in the northwest early in the tenth century. There was a marked opposition between the Asturian-Leonese and the Galician parts of the realm, and the Galician nobles maintained almost continuous war with the kings. Similarly the counts of the frontier often acted like petty sovereigns, or even joined with the Moslems against their own compatriots. ”

“ His reign had not been free from struggles with the nobility, and the latter were in no small degree responsible for the weak result of his foreign policy; only an exceptionally capable monarch, such as Pedro III had been, could handle successfully the grave foreign and domestic problems of the time. The nobles and towns of Aragon proper and Valencia had banded together in a league called the Union, and they used their combined influence to exact new privileges from Alfonso. ”

“ By suspending the execution of his great design until the following season, he allowed Alfonso time to prepare for the contest. The following June, the kings of Leon and Castile having assembled at Toledo, and been joined by a considerable number of foreign volunteers, the Christian army advanced toward the south. That of the infidels lay in the neighborhood of Baeza, and extended to the Sierra Morena. ”

“ In 1002 the announcement was made from every pulpit in free Spain, ‘Al Mansûr is dead and buried in Hell.’ Emerging once more from their retreat, the Leonese recovered their capital, which was henceforward to remain uninterruptedly in Christian hands.
Alfonso V., the Restorer of Leon, mindful of{5} the precedents set by Visigothic kings, held an ecclesiastical council at his capital in the year 1020. There was a great concourse of prelates and nobles from all parts of Christian Spain. The conference took place in the cathedral church of St. ”

“ Almost equally renowned was Jayme I, [75] the King of Aragon, who took the Balearic Isles from the Moors in 1229, Valencia in 1237, the province of Murcia in 1266, and who, before he died in 1276, had gained thirty pitched battles with the enemy, and had founded, some say, more than two thousand Christian churches. But he has the credit of having introduced into Spain the terrible Inquisition (in 1232) , and that goes far toward counterbalancing his meritorious work for the freedom of his country.
Alfonso X, called “the Wise,” because he was more a scholar than soldier, succeeded St. ”

“ The youth of the hero is, to a large extent, merged in myth; he first comes into historical documents in 1064, when, though scarcely more than twenty, he had already won his title of Challenger by a triumphant single combat with a knight of Navarre, and was soon afterwards appointed commander-in-chief of the forces of Castile. He helped Sancho of Castile to overcome his brother Alfonso of Leon, by a surprise which savoured strongly of treachery, but which passed for good strategy in those rough-and-ready times. ”

“ The fugitive Queen Isabella had with her in exile a young son Alfonso, seventeen years of age. Alfonso was invited to return upon the sole condition that his mother should be excluded from his kingdom. An insurrection which was being fomented by Don Carlos II. led to this action of the Cortes, which was perhaps the wisest possible under the circumstances. The young Prince of the legitimate Bourbon line was proclaimed King Alfonso XII. in 1874.
A romantic marriage with his cousin Mercedes, daughter of the Duke de Montpensier, to whom he was deeply attached, speedily took place. ”

“ Alfonso was born on November 23, 1221, according to the findings of his biographer, the Marqués de Mondéjar [13] (whose deductions have been confirmed by documents discovered later) and was named for his grandfather Alfonso IX of Leon and his great-grandfather Alfonso VIII of Castile. Practically nothing is known of his early childhood except that he was associated with certain of the nobility, viz., García Fernández and Doña Mayor Arias of the province of Burgos. Of his early training nothing is known. ”

“ Every town in the peninsula marks a forward step of the Christian, a backward step of the Moslem. Leon was outpost first, capital after. It seems to have been attacked and perhaps destroyed by the enemy during the ninth century, for we read that Ordoño I. rebuilt it. Under Alfonso III. the frontier of the nascent kingdom was carried forward to the Douro. At Leon men slept more peacefully. Alfonso, upon his abdication in 912, pursuing the policy afterwards so harmful to Spain, divided his dominions among his children. Leon was allotted to Garcia ”