[365] A final attempt to summarize and evaluate the achievement of Alfonso VI of León-Castilla must be based primarily upon the public record of his reign as we have come to know it in the preceding chapters. That is, it must take the form of an examination of his policies precisely as a monarch of a growing, vibrant north Spanish political entity. To what extent those political choices, once they have been determined more or less precisely, permit us to infer the private and personal motives and desires of the king is a secondary concern. A biography in the modern sense cannot be written for no personal papers of Alfonso exist nor did he find a Boswell to chronicle his private moments. Such contemporaries as recorded his actions did not dream of distinguishing between the monarch and the man.

Nor have I here attempted a social and economic history of his reign or even an institutional history in the modest sense in which I undertook the latter in my earlier book on the reign of his daughter and successor, Urraca. It is my current view that such a survey would require, in the first instance, a much more comprehensive knowledge of the society of León-Castilla in the first half of the eleventh century than is available at present. Not knowing the points of departure, we cannot form an adequate idea either of the novelties effected or of the direction sought. In the second place, as the preceding chapters may have demonstrated, a large amount of critical paleographical, diplomatic, and interpretative work has had to be essayed simply to establish initially the essential political facts of the reign. It is hoped that that framework, so supplied, will facilitate future, more comprehensive, undertakings.

Yet even the more pedestrian task here attempted finally poses the question of the extent of the particular contribution of Alfonso VI to the evolution of León-Castilla in the latter part of the eleventh century. In the end, one cannot avoid at least an attempt at such an assessment. The puzzle as to whether the age produces the great man or whether the man produces the great age is perhaps insoluble, but the struggle with it enhances our appreciation and understanding of both. Dividing our final considerations then into three great compartments, the progress [366] of the Reconquista, the governance of the kingdom, and the reception and mediation of western European influences, let us address it.

Clearly Alfonso VI was the beneficiary of the collapse of the caliphate at Córdoba after 1008 and the continuing political disarray of Spanish Islam. For reasons that are quite obscure at any but the most superficial levels, and will probably continue to be so, Muslim Spain never staged a sustained recovery from that crisis even at the price of subjection politically to the Murâbit and to North African Islam.⁽¹⁾ Even so, just as obviously, Spanish Islam was materially and economically far more advanced than the adversary to which it was to fall prey, could it have found the organization to harness and direct those resources.

It was at the military level that León-Castilla enjoyed the great advantages that Alfonso VI exploited so well. Tactically it seems clear that the Muslim never developed an adequate answer to the superiority of the Christian heavy, shock cavalry in the open field. In both major battles of which we have some account, albeit sketchy, the Christian forces obviously enjoyed the initiative and the Muslims won by employing rather the techniques of a numerically superior force, envelopment from the flanks and rear. Despite the fact that both Zalaca in 1086 and Uclés in 1108 resulted in clear victories for Islam, the cumulative record of more than two decades of warfare seems to indicate that the northern forces ordinarily enjoyed tactical control in the open field. Time and time again they struck deep into Islamic territories, but no such initiative is recorded for the latter after the first decade of the century.

Strategic realities also militated in favor of León-Castilla. Interior lines of communication and attack belonged to the northern kingdom. While the former taifa of Toledo was indeed an isolated southern appendage for almost a century after 1085, the powerful Muslim centers of Andalucía in the south found it much more difficult to coordinate and communicate with their allies and coreligionists at Valencia and Zaragoza after that date. Toledo regained became the shield of León-[367] Castilla but also the crucial strong point that blocked a combined military retort on the part of its enemies.

To the extent to which the record allows a conclusion, it appears to me that Alfonso VI grasped these essential military realities. Even in the face of defeat he rarely surrendered the initiative. He appreciated the fundamental strategic importance of Toledo both before and after 1085. He also subordinated his political objectives to the possibilities of his available military capabilities. Alfonso could supervise the abandonment of Valencia in 1102 as untenable but respond with the capture of Medinaceli in 1104 to limit the effect of the former. In other words, he did not dissipate his advantages in pursuit of political or military chimeras.⁽²⁾ On balance, if not a great field general, he proved to be a superior strategist. If he did not create the military advantages of León-Castilla, he understood and utilized them to achieve brilliant and lasting results.

These very apparent military advantages and successes rested, however, on a more fundamental discrepancy between the two societies. The Christian north was experiencing a vigorous population growth in the eleventh century which seems to have had no counterpart in the south.⁽³⁾ Between the two opposed powers about A.D. 1000 lay the virtually deserted lands south of the Duero and north of the Guadarramas, and only on the part of León-Castilla was there any recorded effort to settle and exploit them. The same phenomenon was reflected in the steady and successful aggression of Aragón against the taifa of Zaragoza more to the east.

Now a rapid rise in population can have destructive as well as constructive [368] effects if the society in which it occurs offers no opportunities for its progressive integration into normal economic life or lacks a stable political structure to mediate that process. The former danger seems to have been present particularly in León-Castilla. The towns there were tiny, scarcely more than market centers for the surrounding countryside, with little in the way of trade or manufacturers to absorb the demographic increase of the countryside.

On the land itself profound changes were in train which aggravated precisely that situation. If as has been argued recently, in Asturias it was precisely in the eleventh century that a massive shift began from a predominantly hoe culture to a plow culture, the net effect would have been the displacement of even existing small proprietors as the ability of each farmer to work more land increased dramatically. The same shift may have been simultaneously occurring in the whole mountain world of the north from Galicia in the west to Aragón in the east. At the same time the propagation of water mills, by shifting the labor of milling grain from human to mechanical power, would also have acted to enlarge the acreage feasible to be worked economically by a single farmer.

Both the foregoing changes would have contributed mightily to increase the size of the individual holding and of the estates of the churches, monasteries, and the nobility since they both required extant capital to initiate and then simplified the task directing the use of ever larger tracts of land, their inevitable effect was to concentrate rather than disperse landholding. They thus tended to aggravate the natural land-hunger of an agricultural society experiencing a rapid growth in population simultaneously.⁽⁴⁾

Some of the pressure on available land so generated could be relieved by the clearing of empty lands, defrichement, in the north as it was contemporaneously in other parts of western Europe. Nevertheless, the prime source of attractive, unutilized land lay to the south of the Duero. The increase in noble incomes, consequent upon the growth of their estates, could finance mounted warriors in larger numbers for that [369] purpose. The buying out of small peasants or brothers or heirs by the more fortunate created an army of a more modest kind, possessed of the one-time mobility of a little capital and the hope of becoming themselves proprietors of the newer sort in the lands of the south.

To profit from this widespread phenomenon, as he manifestly did, Alfonso VI had but to assume its leadership. That was a role for which the imperial and legal tradition of León had prepared him so that perhaps he deserves little credit for innovation. Nevertheless, three qualities were necessary to direct it successfully. One was the predominantly soldierly ability to gauge correctly the military and strategic necessities that would permit a successful occupation of the trans-Duero. The second was a personal preference for the active life of the camp rather than the indulgences of the court. The third was the political skill to reconcile and channel the energies and ambitions of the kingdom he already ruled so as to allow the concentration of its resources for the conquest of a new one. All of these qualities, it seems reasonable to infer from the record, he possessed in more than ordinary measure.

Passing from a consideration of the Alfonsine Reconquista to the mechanisms of his government that made the former possible, an initial caveat is in order. As was true of the monarchy elsewhere in western Europe in the eleventh century, government must be understood in a quite restricted and largely passive sense. The king was the head of a family, a dynasty identified with the kingdom, whose affairs he was to regulate and for whose future he was to provide. He was the king because he was, in the first instance, pater familias. In the most intimate relationship with that role, he was also the greatest estate manager of the realm. The dynastic or fisc lands of the realengo ordinarily furnished the sinews of government. A strong and capable landlord was a strong king.

Beyond the management of the royal household, a king was also the chief justiciar of the realm, responsible for maintaining the public peace and a rough justice. Ordinarily this seems to have meant that he mediated between those segments of it that threatened to come to actual hostilities at any given moment. At least this role extended to the greatest and almost the only structured institution of the realm, the church. The general religious aura that enveloped the person of the king made him, if not a spiritual leader in the proper sense, the first churchman of the kingdom for practical purposes. Perhaps only in his role as war chief do we find the eleventh-century king exercising the power of government in a thoroughly modern and familiar sense.

Taken as a ruler in the sense that his age understood and permitted, Alfonso VI was remarkably successful. Once the kingdom had been [370] successfully reconstituted in 1072 only one brief armed revolt against his rule occurred, in Galicia in 1087-88, and that was quickly snuffed out despite the weakening of his power and reputation which must have resulted by his defeat at the hands of the Murâbit at Zalaca in 1086. The conspiracy of the Burgundian counts Raymond and Henry in 1095, which contained the potential for civil war, was aborted by political maneuver.

Indeed his management of dynastic matters was judicious to the point of brilliance. Avoiding the error of his brother, Sancho, his sisters were associated regularly with Alfonso in the governinent of the royal household down to their deaths at the turn of the century. He was remarkably successful in negotiating marriages with well-born ladies from beyond the Pyrenees, which both bolstered his prestige domestically and avoided overly restrictive ties to any noble house at home. When one of those marriages brought in its train two ambitious Burgundian noblemen these latter were harnessed to the government of the realm by marriage to his daughters and made vicegerents of the kingdom for Galicia and Portugal. In that fashion their pride was satisfied while their ambitions were deferred. Despite his long quest for a direct male heir and its final frustration at Uclés, this greatest handicap of medieval kingship was so managed as to prevent serious disturbance to the peace of the realm. Only in response to the death of Sancho Alfónsez in 1108 did the political judgment of the king finally fail him.

In the royal court that surrounded the dynasty Alfonso VI found his chief instrument of government. In its and his constant travel from its ordinary winter residence at Sahagún to the varied centers of the kingdom, as already described, his government performed its prime function of mediating and coordinating an enormously swollen realm. Count Raymond until his death in 1107 and Count Henry until 1109 were figures of the court, and their own processions through Galicia and Portugal were essentially extensions of the royal ones and subordinated to the latter's purposes. One cannot imagine that Alfonso invented the device of an itinerant court although he may have utilized it more intensely and extended its range. But we simply cannot follow his predecessors closely enough to judge. The resort to a sort of vicegerency in the more remote provinces by members of the court is more striking, but again a lack of knowledge limits our ability to define it as an absolute novelty.

The same barrier hinders our evaluation of other features of Alfonso's government. The most visible organ of the court, after the king himself, is the chancery. One may certainly say that it develops and defines itself more sharply through his long reign, but the charters of his [371] father, Fernando I, have scarcely been touched and so comparison is difficult. Nevertheless the Alfonsine chancery did not become a structured department of government in the modern sense.⁽⁵⁾

Court offices such as that of majordomo and alférez seem to have been used as regular steppingstones to the comital dignity, but there seem to be rough precedents for that in the prior reign. So too, not just the award of those honors, but their virtual monopoly by the scions of the nobility of León and Castilla respectively to the exclusion of the magnate houses of Asturias and Galicia have some earlier reflections in practice. We can only say that Alfonso, more clearly than his father, reacted to the growing importance of the central provinces of the kingdom as against those of its periphery.

The same recognition of the new importance of the Leonese-Castilian heartland is displayed in the Alfonsine charters of donation. In the period between 1072 and 1107 the church of the royal city of León received some fourteen different charters, Burgos ten and the monastery of San Millán de La Cogolla nine. Toledo was the object of eight. The old royal city of Oviedo did not fare so badly with seven charters, but Santiago de Compostela was the recipient of only three, Coimbra had but two, and Braga registered none that have survived.

Overall the sources are not adequate to determine whether or not the fisc lands were growing or shrinking. The royal majordomo may have had some general oversight of them but certainly nothing regular enough to have been reflected in the creation of a department dedicated to such a task. Such a process would have been inhibited by the obvious sharing of the control of dynastic lands with the two infantas and later with the counts Raymond and Henry as well as the use of the office of majordomo to reward the sons of noble houses. The 123 known charters and the 61 confirmations of charters speak to a fairly high level of activity, roughly equivalent to the output of the contemporary Philip I of France (1060-1108). We do hear of the confiscations of the lands of counts Fernando Laíñez and Pedro Ansúrez as well as of the more modest Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, which lead one to suspect that alienations and acquisitions were in rough balance. The likelihood is that the crown shared, and that disproportionately, in the rising prosperity and expansion common to all great landholders of the period. Again we are left with the not precisely measurable impression of a strong and active king whose administration, in the loose sense of that term, energetically [372] utilizes and directs advantages arising from a generally favorable economy.

The most measurable and indeed the most spectacular instance of the rapid development of the society of León-Castilla in this period can be found in the growth of its secular church. When Alfonso VI came to the throne his realm already boasted eleven bishoprics, but at the end of his reign it counted two archbishoprics and fifteen bishoprics. Here we may for once affirm without hesitation that the royal initiative was paramount. Some of the additions resulted directly from his career as a conqueror as in the cases of Nájera and Alava after he overran the western Rioja in 1076. Others were the result of the logical implications of that process as in the restoration of the archbishopric of Toledo after 1085 and of Salamanca as the repopulation of the trans-Duero progressed. Still others such as Coimbra and Osma represented his consolidation of the conquests of his father.

Within this rapid development, wherever the sources allow more particular knowledge, the direction of the king is obvious. The prelates of Toledo, León, Astorga, Burgos, and Palencia were virtual court bishops. The restoration of the archbishoprics at Toledo and at Braga occurred under his direction. Although Alfonso depended very heavily on his great lieutenant, Archbishop Bernard of Toledo, in church affairs there can be little doubt that the final decision on promotion to the bishoprics was his own.

If we turn to those secular and public spheres of government that the modern mind more easily identifies as its proper concern, correspondingly less activity can be detected or traced. Diplomacy certainly was practiced by Alfonso within the confines of the peninsula. That it had little practical issue with the Muslim south is not surprising, given the almost constant state of hostilities that existed. Relations with the Cid from the time he went into exile to the time he became a free agent in the east seem to have been good, and collaboration against the Muslim was sometimes obtained. Generally more cordial relations seemed to have been obtained with Aragón, albeit at the cost of ignoring that kingdom's continuing aggression against Zaragoza, which had the happy side effect of neutralizing that Islamic power in the peninsular struggle.

Beyond the Pyrenees Alfonso, as we have said, was able to secure brides of sufficient importance to enhance his prestige at home. To our present knowledge, however, he was only once, in 1087, able to secure measureable assistance for his own purposes from south French sources. What he might have paid for such help we simply do not know. Certainly, though, he must have borne some of the cost for the [373] aid of the Geonese and Pisan fleets against Valencia which he enjoyed in 1092. In neither case did such reinforcement effect any substantial success.

Whether or not Alfonso legislated in the modern sense is not clear. Certainly he made specific provisions, as pertained to the church especially, which had the force of at least administrative law. The same can be said of judicial decisions affecting both individual churchmen and individual nobles. But generalized, secular laws seem to be utterly lacking.

Probably we should understand that the court understood foros, local customs or privileges, but lacked any sense of fueros, that is, general laws. So far as I can determine the royal chancery of Alfonso never issued a fuero but had distinct diplomatic norms only for charters and judicial decisions. Confirm and alter specific bodies of local custom the crown certainly did, but such actions were embodied in charters and thus assimilated conceptually to the traditional practice of granting immunities of greater or lesser extent. Where newly established communities were concerned the crown also authorized the transfer to them of customs already extant in older ones. Yet none of these activities, it seems to me, either singly or cumulatively evidence a conscious and distinct legislative activity. Even the adoption of the Roman liturgy in 1080 and the fueros granted to the distinct elements of the population in Toledo after 1085 were likely understood as a return to the good old customs and emerged under the rubrics of traditional royal activity.⁽⁶⁾

If the crown did not legislate in an attempt to adapt government to, or direct, the new society emerging in eleventh-century León-Castilla, no more did it consciously innovate, it seems to me, to meet the changes emerging around it. One of the more remarkable of these was the emergence of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela as the greatest after Rome in western Europe. Alfonso would have been conscious of the increasing throngs of French and Germans crossing the northern meseta on their way to the church of the apostle and doubtless approved of it in a general way as an acceptable form of piety. There is, however, no reason to believe that he saw it as a phenomenon to be manipulated or even systematically encouraged.

[374] His charters to the church of Santiago itself are remarkable neither in their number or their content. When the pilgrim traffic created obvious difficulties he dealt with them by encouraging those more directly concerned institutions to respond. Some of his charters to churchmen or monasteries were designed to help them support hospices for the travelers. In a rare notice Bishop Pelayo informs us that he "studuit facere omnes pontes qui sunt a Locronio usque ad Sanctam Iacobum."⁽⁷⁾ Again we should understand not a royal building program but encouragement given to nobles, ecclesiastics, and royal merinos to repair or rebuild bridges within their territories.

But if the pilgrims created problems they certainly also stimulated a provisioning trade and artisans along the route. Some of the travelers stayed to function as artisans and merchants themselves. Doubtless such growing economic activity increased the pressure on the supply of money in circulation. Now Alfonso is credited as the first of the Leonese kings to mint his own money rather than simply to rely on such Muslim coinage as found its way north. In his time mints existed at León, Palencia, Santiago de Compostela, Lugo, Oviedo, and perhaps Zamora. The mint of the former taifa of Toledo was also kept in operation. But here too it would be unwise to see the crown as innovating to meet a new need in society. Rather, I suspect, a traditional regalian right was being activated as a source of revenue. We need to recall that the mints of the age were a profit-making business and that the extraordinary activity of Alfonso VI's government generated extraordinary royal expenses. In fact in the one instance in which we can see a mint actually coming into existence, at Santiago de Compostela, the profit motive is very much to the fore and the initiative is a local one.⁽⁸⁾

The inauguration of mints aside, the sources of royal revenue, so far as we can tell, remained quite traditional. The household revenues proceeding from the fisc lands were the most regular. The parias paid by [375] the taifas were the largest single source of specie but they became increasingly uncollectible from 1085. Annual tributes by the king's Jewish subjects can be assumed to have been regular and also paid in specie. The documents mention tolls, market taxes, and fines, but these were frequently alienated and perhaps uncollectible when not levied actually within fisc lands and therefore assimilated to regalian proprietary revenues. The crucial income was that which supported royal military activities, and after the parias were lost that meant the fossata, which was the actual service owed, or the fossataria, which was the payment made in lieu of it. None of these sources is novel.⁽⁹⁾

On balance, then, if one may fairly say that Alfonso VI's government of the realm was largely traditional, there were particular areas in which his innovations were striking. These lay not so much in the realm of institutional change as in development, and above all in that sphere of personal or household government where even custom could not deny him the right to initiative. The latter are of course exemplified by his choice of foreign brides and the roles he assigned counts Raymond and Henry. The former are marked in the reconstruction of the church hierarchy and the elaboration of mints. All told they speak to a sovereign of great energy and an eye to the main chance. Pragmatic, and obviously able to command great loyalty, he dreamed practical rather than theoretical dreams.

Thus, it seems to me, the often repeated charge that he was "afrancesado" illustrates better the xenophobia of modern Spanish historians than the policy of the king. One has but to travel today the old pilgrim road of Santiago with even half an eye to its monuments to understand that the French Romanesque style was flooding west along it in the eleventh century. But the choice of a master mason by an abbot, a bishop, or a dean operated in complete independence of royal prescription. It responded to local tastes if not necessarily popular ones.

Nor were these bishops or abbots, for the most part, French clerics insinuated by royal favor. Archbishop Bernard's famous protégés went to fill up the new bishoprics of the south: Osma, Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca, Braga. Burgos, Oviedo, León, Santiago de Compostela, Lugo, Orense, and Túy remained in the possession of native-born clerics. Nájera and Palencia were exceptions to this dictum of course as, for a little while, was Sahagún under Bernard between 1080 and 1085 and [376] perhaps Astorga under Osmundo. Even more clearly the nobility of the region remained massively native, and there is virtually no detectable influx of French fighting men that would mirror the phenomenon in England after the Norman conquest of 1066. It was a native clergy and nobility, then, not simply the crown, that was opting for the new style and, one suspects, a new vision.

The premier vehicles of this new vision were precisely Cluny and Rome. In an eagerness to reform the present the two had rediscovered St. Benedict and St. Peter. Thus they had supplied an engine of great power for their work of innovation which was to create a new monasticism in a new church. In that age, and perhaps in any age, the legitimization of change required that it be presented as former norm rather than present novelty.

Cluny earlier than Rome had formulated its inspiration in a life and liturgy and organization of remarkable attractive power by the beginning of the eleventh century. When Fernando I sought to associate himself and his dynasty with Cluny he was but mirroring the actions of hundreds of other western Europeans of his epoch. When Alfonso VI continued and extended that relationship it was already traditional.

His concession of several monasteries of the realm to Cluny has been presented as a practical solution to the problem of his inability to maintain the payment of the annual census pledged to the Burgundian house once the income from the parias began to dry up after 1086. It is also possible that the prospect of those cloisters and their considerable resources in the hands of monks more fully dependent on himself and independent of local magnates had its attraction as well. Additionally it is clear that the close relationship with the "black pope," Abbot Hugh the Great, was of considerable advantage to Alfonso in his dealings with Rome. Nevertheless it would be foolish to regard the king simply as a Machiavellian before Machiavelli. If, like all kings, he was of necessity a politician first and foremost, still he would likely have regarded the renewal of the religious life of important monastic houses of his kingdom as a good in itself.⁽¹⁰⁾

His collaboration with Rome, for it can scarcely be regarded as anything other, sprang from the same complex roots as his cooperation [377] with Cluny. Here, however, there was no extant tradition. There is no reliable evidence of contact between Fernando I and the papacy, and Alfonso's first encounters with the reform party there were marked by misunderstanding and potential conflict.

Bishop Pelayo's subsequent assertion that the initiative in the matter of the adoption of the Roman ritual was taken by Alfonso himself is not borne out by the documents. The latter indicate that Gregory VII's first interest in the peninsula and León-Castilla took the form of a claim to papal suzereignty there. That conception was entirely alien to the political tradition of the realm and was rejected and ignored, at least in the extant correspondence, by Alfonso VI. When the question of the substitution of the Roman for the Mozarabic liturgy subsequently arose the king was less concerned and willing to rely on the advice of Cluny in such a specialized matter. To the extent that the change did not seriously compromise his political objectives, he was willing to lend his powerful support to it.

That process coincided with other more practical concerns of Alfonso, and latent conflict threatened in the years between 1076 and 1080. During that period the Leonese monarch nevertheless discovered that the newly asserted authority of Rome had greater and lesser concerns of its own and that bargains could be struck on something like a mutuality of interests. An eminently practical cooperation thus began which resulted in the spectacular but quite successful restructuring of the church in the north of the peninsula. In that complicated business the king seems almost always to have secured papal approbation for his selections to the episcopacy. We do not know what canonical procedures were employed, and assuredly formal lay investiture was avoided. Nonetheless Alfonso usually had his way, and apparently complaints against him were ignored at Rome.

Even more important, the hierarchy of the church in León-Castilla was adjusted to the royal needs and desires as when the see of Oca was transferred to Burgos and the latter released from the jurisdiction of Tarragona or when the primate of Spain was made papal legate. The wishes of the king would seem also to have been respected when conflicts arose between prelates in this increasingly complex ecclesiastical body.

A concomitant to the partnership was the clear recognition of a regular Roman authority in the life of the Leonese church, especially manifested in an appellate jurisdiction over disputes among its bishops but its bishops and monasteries within their dioceses as well. In light of the subsequent medieval overcentralization of ecclesiastical authority the latter seems especially ominous. But given the real circumstances of the [378] time, isolation, ignorance, and the reign of local idiosyncracy were the problems of mutual concern to royal and papal authority alike. So long as the latter operated with a due concern for his own cares and interests, Alfonso had every reason to regard its authority as not only benign but beneficent. As a result his realm was untroubled by the raging disputes that crippled Henry IV in the Germanies and seriously disturbed England under William I and his successors. Given the even greater potential for conflict that inhered in the vastly more complex reconstitution of the ecclesiastical structures in León-Castilla, this policy of coordination with the reform papacy represented an instrument more apt for the purposes of both.

Above all we should avoid reading the subsequent history of church-state relations in the West back into the events of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. In the circumstances of the day the Leonese-Castilian example demonstrates that the conflict between the monarchy and the papacy was neither necessary nor desirable. In its light the policy of the German emperors may appear, more than ever, as unrealistic and archaic; that of the English kings, just stubbornly provincial. The more generous response of Alfonso VI was enlightened in view of the then best interests of his kingdom.⁽¹¹⁾

This largeness of vision, together with a great energy and a practical shrewdness, are reflected in contemporary and near contemporary assessments of Alfonso. The monk of Sahagún who was an eyewitness to at least the events of the later part of Alfonso's reign spoke of him as "varon por cierto en las cosas belicosas mui noble guerrero, en disponer bien su rreino proveido e discreto, en el juicio mui derecho, en los negocios seglares astuto e entendido, mas en las cosas eclesiasticas religioso e piadoso, en ensalçar y magnificar su reino mui singular."⁽¹²⁾ The same note is struck by another possible contemporary and monk of Sahagún, saying, "fuit magna vi et consilio et armis quod inter mortales vix invenitur."⁽¹³⁾ Slightly later and from the vantage point of the northwest of the peninsula one of the authors of the "Historia Compostelana" concurred as he wrote of Alfonso, "In regendis autem subditis, licet praepotentissimus esset, tantae discretionis, et sapientiae, et humilitatis [379] extitit, quantam si describere vellet humanum ingenium nequaquam posset."⁽¹⁴⁾

We may be moved to dismiss such estimates as the products of naïveté and sycophancy yet it is well to recall that all of them were written after Alfonso's death and at a time when the crown was weak and the realm in some disarray. Truly, then, nostalgia may have played some part in the attitudes expressed, but in their essentials I find their judgment just, now that I have completed my own close study of his reign. No one of them even considered passing from a consideration of Alfonso the king to a separate consideration of Alfonso the man. I am reluctant to do so myself for that process is hazardous and, to some extent, artificial.

Clearly Alfonso possessed a remarkable physical constitution to have withstood the years of constant travel and the rigors of campaigning and yet survived to the ripe age of seventy-two. Just as remarkable was his unflagging steadfastness of purpose, but did the latter derive from an exalted sense of duty or an overwhelming personal ambition? He could be ruthless, imprisoning his younger brother García for life and exiling in turn the Cid and the companion of his youth, Pedro Ansúrez. But does that calculated severity flow from personal vindictiveness and mean jealousy or rather from a clear conviction as to the political necessities of the realm? With respect to his relationship with his sister Urraca, his six wives, and his two concubines, shall we posit an almost pathological uxoriousness or a devotion to the safety of the dynasty that halted before no extreme?

The simple fact is that we have no information adequate to permit a decision in such matters. Inasmuch as Alfonso shared our own nature we may suspect that he was subject to the meaner motives as well as the nobler ones. The proportions of each remain a mystery.

In any event what matters most is the public record. By any measure of it Alfonso VI of León-Castilla was a great king. If, like ourselves, he was able only imperfectly to master the living forces of his times or to foresee fully even the effects of his own actions, that is the human condition after all. If, like ourselves, he found himself old finally, afflicted by the premature death of his only son, unsure of the future of the work to which he had devoted all of the years of his mature life, that too is the human condition. Like ourselves he worked in the hope but never the certainty that what he effected would perdure. In the last analysis, then, the ultimate measure of the man is that he died at the age of seventy-two, in the city he had reconquered, still pursuing his dream.

1. I am convinced that the problem is a lack of adequate sources. Despite heroic concentration on what remains or has been rediscovered, as reflected in the varied works of Ambrosio Huici Miranda used so often in this study, the latest student of the question, David Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings, still must depend essentially on the literary evidence. Yet an alternative methodology such as attempted by Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, 1979), does not respond convincingly to the questions put. The only comprehensive study of an individual taifa kingdom, Manuel Terrón Albarrán, El sólar de los Aftásidas, is merely a synthesis of older scholarship.

2. The debate over the exact range of the ambitions of Alfonso VI after his conquest of Toledo goes on. See Mackay and Benaboud, "Alfonso VI of León and Castile." It seems to me that the weakness of the case that portrays the Leonese monarch as intending an immediate overlordship of all of Spanish Islam is that it rests exclusively on the testimony of his enemies. Were these Muslim literary figures reporting their fears, or justifying the appeal to the Murâbit, or just engaging in the ever popular sport of villifying the enemy by caricaturing his positions? The military and political realities would have recommended a more limited policy, and my reading of the usual reactions of Alfonso is that he would have taken it. See chapter 9.

3. The fact of a demographic increase is overwhelmingly apparent. Its measurement is something else again. For some pertinent attempts see Lydia C. Kofman and María Inés Carzolio, "Acerca la demografia astur-leonesa y castellana en la Alta Edad Media," CHE 47-48 (1968): 136-70; García Alvarez, Galicia y los Gallegos en la Alta Edad Media, vol. 1; or Pallares Méndez and Portela Silva, El bajo valle del Miño. Although less detailed and less current work has been done on Muslim Spain, the current received opinion is that no such general increase is perceptible. See Manuel Nieto Cumplido, Historia de Córdoba (Córdoba, 1984), pp. 58-61; and Jacinto Bosch Vilá, Historia de Sevilla (Sevilla, 1984), pp. 301-307 and 339-42, for estimates, problems, and methods.

4. A classic and nostalgic lament for the age of the small peasant proprietor was sounded by Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Sobre la libertad humana en el reino asturleonés hace mil años (Madrid, 1976). A description of the agricultural revolution that produced the new society was essayed by Santiago Aguadé, Ganadería y desarrollo agrario en Asturias durante la Edad Media, siglos IX-XIII (Barcelona, 1983). Studies of estate management which tend to reflect such changes are found in García de Cortazar, El dominio del monasterio de San Millán; Moreta Velayos, El monasterio de San Pedro de Cardeña; and Mercedes Durany Castrillo, San Pedro de Montes: El dominio de un monasterio benedictino de el Bierzo, siglos IX al XIII (León, 1976).

5. A more systematic treatment of the former exists in my "The Chancery of Alfonso VI of León-Castile."

6. For chancery activity and norms and their relationship to the controverted question of the fueros, see ibid., pp. 10-11. A more general consideration of the question is given in my León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, pp. 314-26. In the matter of legislation it is important to note that in the instances mentioned by Proctor, Curia and Cortes in León and Castile, pp. 27-28 and 31, all are embodied in a document formally styled a charter and are presented as a correction of abusive practice. All societies legislate, of course, but not all of them isolate the legislative function and understand it as such.

7. Sánchez-Alonso, ed., Crónica del Obispo Don Pelayo, p. 84. The classic treatment of the pilgrimage is Vázquez de Parga, Lacarra, and Uría Rúi, Las peregrinaciones a Santiago de Compostela. Fletcher, Saint James' Catapult, pp. 78-101, is an excellent introduction to the phenomenon in the eleventh century. Of course there is simply no way to gauge the absolute numbers involved.

8. "Historia Compostelana," ES 20:65-69. For a brief survey of mints in operation see my León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, pp. 271-74. Since that writing I have learned that there was indeed a mint at Oviedo. See Serrano Redonnet, "Ovetensis moflete," pp. 157-60. Such a network of royal mints is impressive to have begun and been elaborated within a single reign however long. The most recent summary, Fernando Alvarez Burgos, Vicente Ramón Benedito, and Vicente Ramón Pérez, eds., Catálogo general de la moneda medieval hispano-cristiana desde el siglo IX al XVI (Madrid, 1980), plate one, shows a coin attributed to Fernando I and minted at Palencia.

9. A somewhat more detailed survey of revenues is presented in my León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, pp. 260-77, for the reign immediately posterior. It needs to be extended both forward and backward. García de Valdeavellano, Historia de las instituciones españolas, is an indispensable survey but it of necessity tends to present institutional arrangements as static within spans of 300 or 400 years.

10. Defourneaux, Les français en Espagne, is a useful, if aging, reference work. Bishko, "Fernando I and the Origins of the Leonese-Castilian Alliance with Cluny," has superseded it in what pertains particularly to Cluny. Monasticism in León-Castilla in the eleventh century still needs a serious student as do so many other subjects. José Mattoso, Le Monachisme ibérique et Cluny. Les Monastères du diocese de Porto de l'an mille a 1200 (Louvain, 1968), unfortunately has not inspired similar work on other diocese. Cocheril, Etudes sur le monachisme en Espagne et au Portugal, is a resumé of older scholarship.

11. For Alfonso's purported early attitude in the question of the change of rites see Sánchez Alonso, ed., Crónica del Obispo Don Pelayo, p. 80. More detailed treatment can be found in Joseph F. O'Callaghan, "The Integration of Christian Spain into Europe," and Gonzálvez, "The Persistence of the Mozarabic Liturgy in Toledo." Many questions of relations between the papacy and León-Castile must wait on an edition of the papal bulls scattered in the ecclesiastical archives of its churches.

12. Puyol y Alonson, ed., "Las crónicas anónimas," p. 114. The text seems to survive only in a sixteenth-century translation.

13. Pérez de Urbel and González Ruiz-Zorilla, eds., Historia Silense, p. 119 The work was written within a decade of Alfonso's death.

14. ES 20:95.