[xi] The decision to write a history of the kingdom of León-Castilla during the period of Alfonso VI requires no explanation and little illustration. The years between 1065 and 1109 saw the political amalgamation of a kingdom that included not only León and Castilla, but Asturias, Galicia, the Rioja, the Basque country, the trans-Duero, the half of the old Muslim kingdom of Toledo that lay north of the Río Tajo, and the northern half of Portugal as well. The active and successful statecraft of its royal master thus carne to direct a political leviathan of roughly 200,000 square kilometers or half again the size of the kingdom of England. From its new position of hegemony of the meseta León-Castilla was to dominate the states of the peripheral lowlands unless and until they could secure assistance from without the peninsula.

As the future was also to reveal, Spain was destined to emerge from the dream of León-Castilla. We are assuredly still too much the captives of a nineteenth-century political naturalism that regarded the modern nations of Europe as grounded in eternal, particular characteristics that needed only the growth of our rational perception to find realization in simple, preordained states. To the contrary! Spain had to be imagined before it could be created, and one simply cannot credit that the tiny Pyrenean states of Navarra, Aragón, or Catalonia could have conceived such an imperial future of themselves. Even Castilla had, willy-nilly, to be inducted by León into the fantasy of the restoration of the old Visigothic imperium in Iberia. But through the union of the two, and their aggrandizement, precisely during the reign of Alfonso VI such material power was achieved as to permit the translation of that wish into a realistic program for its fulfillment.

That imperial agenda was to prove itself at once too archaic and too ambitious. But the ambition so expressed was to survive the almost three-quarters of a centurys division of León and Castilla and to reemerge with their final unification in the thirteenth century. Better than two centuries later it was to triumph, if in a very different form, in the policy of the Catholic Kings.

The reign of Alfonso VI was also to be the setting within which León-Castilla joined in the emergence of a new western Europe and itself also assimilated the new norms and structures that were being erected everywhere there. Such a process was not inexorably ordained [xii] by geography for the Straits of Gibraltar had usually, in the past millennium, been less of a barrier than had the Pyrenees. Christianity, we are prone to forget, did not reinforce a European orientation until a triumphant Islam had not only conquered but gradually sapped and absorbed the formers North African adherents. The trade routes of the peninsula had always run from northeast to southwest: from Barcelona and Zaragoza to Toledo, Córdoba, Sevilla, and Cádiz.

But in the second half of the eleventh century Santiago was remaking León-Castilla. Along the pilgrimage road that led to the city of his shrine what had been little more than a Roman system of frontier posts, or less, Astorga, León, and Burgos were becoming the centers of the realm and of its society. Not until the almost complete collapse of Islam in Andalucía in the late thirteenth century would the old north-south axis begin to reemerge, and by then it would both begin and end in the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean.

The pious and the adventurous, the despairing and the desperate faceless multitudes who flowed back and forth along the "Camino de Santiago" were Provençals and Burgundians, Poitevins and Normans, but Flemings, English, Germans and Italians as well. With them, we are not sure quite how, traveled the tastes, the dreams, and the revolutionary ambitions of a new Europe taking shape beyond the mountains. More perhaps than the persons of the pilgrims themselves, these intangibles were to grow and fructify in the new world of León-Castilla. Their plastic impressions are still obvious in the Iberian contributions to the monuments of the first great age of the Romanesque and in the spread of the Caroline script as it became the hallmark of the European intellect. It still moves to wonder that the first king of León-Castilla to take a wife from beyond the Pyrenees in fact took five of his wives therefrom.

Still, that Alfonso VI's grandson should have been half-Burgundian by birth, and thereby related distantly to the Capetian kings of France, is rather less important than that by the reign of Alfonso VII (1126-1157) the monasteries of Spain had already joined themselves in spirit, and sometimes in law, to the great fraternity of Saint Benedict presided over by the house of Cluny. When Alfonso VII welcomed the dour, bustling Cistercian genius to Spain he was following the tradition of his dynasty. Fernando I, Alfonso VI, Urraca; great-grandfather, grandfather, and mother: all had found in the monks of Cluny collaborators and pioneers for their aspirations of a renewed and purer worship in the cloisters of the peninsula.

Of all his house, Alfonso VI had been the most active and determined in maintaining that alliance. He it was, also, who made terms [xiii] with the spirit of reform at Rome which was to allow a veritable reconstitution of the Iberian secular church, worked out in close cooperation. In all of this the king was but forestalling and thus largely controlling an impulse that marked the clergy and nobility of his own realm as well as the other kingdoms of the West, for the reformation of the church had its adherents everywhere, and Rome was bound to be the instrument seized upon for that desires realization.

Whereas Alfonso found it politic to bow to an imperious and narrow rashness at Rome in the substitution of the Roman for the Mozarabic liturgy, elsewhere he proved more than able to mediate himself between local enthusiasts and doctrinaire pretensions. Not only did his own confidant become the flrst archbishop of a restored, Christian Toledo, primate of the peninsula, and eventually papal legate; Bernard of Toledo and that monarch working together were able before the latters death to secure Roman recognition of Oviedo, Burgos, León, and Santiago de Compostela as episcopal sees. That acceptance changed forever the ancient constitution of the peninsular church but it brought it into consonance with the political and social realities shaped by the Reconquista.

What is to be wondered, then, is that Alfonso VI has had no historian in modern times. Surely that curious circumstance is to be explained in part by the marvelous career of Ramón Menéndez Pidals La España del Cid, which has been printed again and again over the last half century. That spirited and learned amalgam of history and literature seemed to have explicated definitively the events and currents of the period. Moreover, as the tale emerged from the pen of that giant ofliterary and linguistic scholarship, Alfonso VI seemed properly and irrevocably to be "El Emperador, oscurecido por el Cid."⁽¹⁾ There seemed to be no reason for another recounting of the central events of the second half of the eleventh century much less a recasting of them.

Then too the documents of Alfonso VI lay scattered, forgotten, and unedited, like those of the other members of his dynasty. Of the first four members of that family only the characters of the last, Alfonso VII, have even today found a partial, but critical, editor.⁽²⁾ For the most part, such documents of his grandfather as have been printed followed the old and honorable pattern of the venerable España Sagrada. That is, [xiv] they have appeared in the separate, modern studies or diplomatic collections of the religious institutions to which they were flrst granted. Dom Luciano Serrano in the first half of the twentieth century, a ventable Flórez of his own times, has been followed by a long and honorable list of fellow laborers in the vineyard. With their inspiration and guidance I have been able to assemble some 220 documents of Alfonso VI which form the fundamental support of this history. In addition, some twenty years in the archives and libraries of Spain have familiarized me with better than another thousand private documents that relate, in one manner or the other, to the history I am here trying to reconstruct. Those years have also left me massively in the debt of dozens of archivists and librarians.

Diplomatic collections continue to appear, and my own researches owe the most thanks to those originating in the Centro de Estudios e Investigación "San Isidoro" but also to studies resulting from the work of the universities of Salamanca, Santiago de Compostela, and Valladolid. In fact so much labor of this sort has been done that it now appears to me to be unlikely that we can expect further major documents to be discovered in the area of eleventh-century León-Castilla. Barring finds resulting from the continuing progress of publication of the Inventano of the Biblioteca Nacional, or the utilization of the documentation of the Congregación de San Benito de Valladolid housed at Silos,⁽³⁾ or the discovery of substantial private collections unknown at present, the documentation upon which this history is based is likely to remain definitive. Of course, all of the documents I have employed may be subsequently used for economic, social and regional history, in fashions not comprehended within my present purposes.

In the pages that follow, my citation of the documents is accompanied by a reference to the critical edition where one exists. If I am aware of additional existing copies of the document unknown to the editor, these are cited as well. Where no edition exists, my references are first to the archives that contain the document and then to such printed texts as are known to me. The confirmation of documents by a person ordinarily is regarded as reliable evidence of his or her physical presence at the scene of its issuance. Some few of the reviewers of my earlier book on Queen Urraca expressed doubts about the validity of such a methodology. Long acquaintance with the documents leaves me with no such doubts, but I would refer those who have to an earlier article of mine for a formal argument of the methods validity.⁽⁴⁾

[xv] Narrative sources for the reign of Alfonso VI are few indeed. The most authoritative is that contained in the dozen briefpages of Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, a contemporary and a court figure.⁽⁵⁾ The monk of Sahagún who set out to write an account of the reign of Alfonso but managed to produce only the most extended introduction to it and a few laconic paragraphs about its inception was also a contemporary, and Sahagún was the favorite residence of the court.⁽⁶⁾ Yet another monk of Sahagún, and contemporary in all probability, set out to do a history of that monastery but also produced some seven pages retailing events that touch the king as well.⁽⁷⁾ Finally, the eighty-one pages of the "Historia Compostelana" that deal with events in the reign of Alfonso VI were written by a variety of contemporaries.⁽⁸⁾ Unfortunately, very large portions of the account deal with strictly local matters.

Of the chronicles produced in the middle and late twelfth century very little is known. Only the Crónica Najerense, which closes with the reign of Alfonso VI, survives independently,⁽⁹⁾ and it has already begun to draw on contemporary literary materials as well as earlier chronicles. The great historical works of the thirteenth century enshrine some of the otherwise unknown products of the preceding century. Lucas of Túy in particular gives almost a transcript of the earlier works upon which he relied.⁽¹⁰⁾ That is especially important, for the later products of [xvi] this school depend almost slavishly upon Lucas for the historical materials of the reign of Alfonso VI.⁽¹¹⁾ Even the change into the vernacular in the court of Alfonso X did not markedly alter that practice, although it saw the beginning of the utilization of Muslim sources as well.⁽¹²⁾

Use of these Muslim works must be quite judicious not only because Alfonso VI was necessarily the central villain of their accounts but also because the very character of Muslim historical writing as essentially historical biography allowed much greater play to literary convention and dramatic license that was the case in the medieval Latin tradition. For the same reason one must be wary of too great a credulity with regard to the materials furnished by the literary products of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century which began to be incorporated already by the Crónica Najerense and whose employment was common in the thirteenth-century historians. Menéndez Pidal exaggerated both the literal historicity of the Spanish epics and the early dates of their origins.⁽¹³⁾

Of the Muslim narratives the most valuable is the contemporary autobiography of Abd Allah of Granada.⁽¹⁴⁾ The work of the later twelfth-century al-Kardabus also exists independently.⁽¹⁵⁾ The seventeenth-century historian al-Maqqarí is also important because of his habit of incorporating portions of early writers into his own composition.⁽¹⁶⁾

The contributions of modern historians are, of course, too large to be even briefly surveyed here. They figure prominently in my footnotes, where my debt to them is clearly displayed. Nonetheless, no one of them has essayed a full history of the reign of Alfonso VI so that this volume may hope to make a substantial contribution in terms of both complementing their research and synthesizing it with my own findings. [xvii] If I have erred seriously in the process, the errors remain peculiarly my own.

Because the documents upon which this study is based are scattered and sometimes difficult of access, when citing a document for the first time I have tried to include references to every copy and printing currently known to me unless it has been properly edited. Subsequent references are to the original or the most reliable copy where the original does not exist. Proper names of Spanish persons or places are given in Spanish in the interest of consistency.

To thank everyone who has contributed to the composition of this volume would be impossible. Above all, however, I am indebted to Villanova University for its regular and continuing provision of released time and sabbatical leaves without which this volume would hardly have been possible.

1. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Madrid, 1947) 1:409.

2. Peter Rassow, "Die Urkunden Kaiser Alfons VII von Spanien" Archiv für Urkundenforschung 10(1928): 327-468, and II (1930): 66-137. For the limitations of Rassows study see my own "The Chancery of Alfonso VII of León-Castilla: The Period 1116-1135 Reconsidered," Speculum 51 (1976): 243-61. I hope shortly to return to the study of the charters and of this reign

3. In this connection, see the useful introduction by Ernesto Zaragoza Pascual, "Catálogo del fondo monástico leonés del archivo de Silos," León y su historia 3(1975): 263-91.

4. Bernard F. Reilly, "The Court Bishops of Alfonso VII of León-Castilla, 1147-1157," Medieval Studies 36 (1974): 67-75.

5. Benito Sánchez Alonso, ed., Crónica del Obispo Don Pelayo (Madrid, 1924), pp. 77-88.

6. Justo Pérez de Urbel and Atilano González Ruiz-Zorrilla, eds., Historia Silense (Madrid, 1959), pp. 118-25. There is an earlier edition by Francisco Santos Coco, ed., Historia Silense (Madrid, 1921). That the author was a monk of Sahagún has been established by José M. Canal Sánchez-Pagín "¿Crónica Silense o Crónica Domnis Sanctis?" CHE 63-64 (1980): 94-103.

7. Julio Puyol y Alonso, ed., "Las crónicas anónimas de Sahagún," BRAH 76 (1920): 114-21. The chronicle survives only in sixteenth-century Spanish translations.

8. ES 20:15-96. For the various authors, see Bernard F. Reilly, "The 'Historia Compostelana: The Genesis and Composition of a Twelfth-Century Spanish 'Gesta, "Speculum 44 (1969): 78-85. The purpose and circumstances of its composition have been more massively examined recently by Ludwig Vones, Die 'Historia Compostelana und die Kirchenpolitik des nordwestspanischen Raumes (Cologne, 1980). Emma Falque, "The Manuscript Transmission of the 'Historia Compostellana, " Manuscripta (1985): 80-90, and "¿El ultimo manuscrito de la Historia Compostelana?" Compostellanum 30 (1985): 317-22, has brought the manuscript tradition up to date in connection with the critical edition she has prepared and hopes to publish.

9. Antonio Ubieto Arteta, ed., Crónica Najerense (Valencia, 1966), pp. 109-19. Derek Lomax, "La fecha de la Crónica Najerense," AEM 9 (1974-79): 405-406, has established the date of production as the late twelfth century.

10. "Chronicon Mundi ab Origine Mundi usque ad Eram MCCLXXIV," Hispaniae Illustratae, ed. Andreas Schottus, vol. 4 (Frankfurt, 1608), pp. 1-116. For a detailed enumeration, see Bernard F. Reilly, "Sources of the Fourth Book of Lucas of Túys 'Chronicon Mundi, " Classical Folia 30 (1976): 127-37.

11. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, "De rebus Hispaniae," in Opera, ed. María Desamparados Cabanes Pecourt, vol. 1 (Valencia, 1968), pp. 5-208, still needs a critical edition. I have done a study of his treatment of the reign of Alfonso VI, which should appear in one of the Homenaje volumes to the late Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz. It does draw on an otherwise unknown vita of Archbishop Bernard of Toledo, which was likely done by a contemporary.

12. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, ed., Primera crónica general de España, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1955), uses no new Latin historical sources insofar as I have been able to determine.

13. Antonio Ubieto Arteta, El 'Cantar de mio Cid y algunos problemas históricas (Valencia, 1973), provides a salutary antidote.

14. El Siglo XI en 1^a persona, trans. and ed. Evariste Lévi-Provençal and Emilio García Gómez (Madrid, 1980).

15. "Kitab al-Iqtifa," in The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, vol. 2 (1843; reprint, New York, 1964), trans. Pascual de Gayangos, appendix C, pp. xxii-xlvii.

16. The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, trans. Pascual de Gayangos, 2 vols., 1840-43 (New York, 1964).