[1] In the course of the years which elapsed between about 1050 and about 1200 western Spain entered upon the fullness of a European inheritance in which she had shared but faintly and uncertainly during the preceding three centuries. The process was long and not without pain. No historian has yet attempted to describe it; too many have been seduced by the flashy glamour of the Reconquista into a neglect of what went on behind its lines, into the mischievous error that the history of the Reconquista is the history of medieval Spain. If and when this different history comes to be written it will be less spectacular than the story of the Reconquista, but no less harsh, no less sad and no less squalid. For the peoples of western Spain did not enter rejoicing upon their new inheritance. Changes were forced upon them, often brutally, and by men who were lacking in scruple; much that had answered well -- wayward, peculiar, as it may have been -- had ruthlessly to be destroyed; and the bewilderment and resentment that were generated have proved in the centuries which followed to be forces complex, unyielding, intractable. The time is not yet at hand for a systematic account of what occurred; too many facets remain unworked. Yet something of what was involved in this process of change may, it is hoped, be gauged from the essay which follows. Its scope is narrow, being restricted to the doings of the bishops of the north-western quarter of the Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of León, in the course of the twelfth century.

The kingdom of León originated early in the tenth century, when the Christian rulers of the little Asturian kingdom moved their principal residence south from Oviedo, between the Cantabrian mountains and the Bay of Biscay, down to León, on the meseta of central Spain. They regarded themselves as the heirs of the Visigothic kings who had once ruled all Spain from Toledo, and during the tenth century they began to call themselves emperors; claims and pretensions which sat oddly upon the realities of their puny monarchy. [2] The kingdom was fissile. The county of Castile emancipated itself from Leonese rule during the first half of the century; on occasion the north-west threatened to go the same way. Wrangling between Castilians and Leonese was the most obvious feature of the confused political history of the later tenth and early eleventh century, and it exposed the two principalities to predatory intervention from without. Sancho the Great of the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre (1004-35) absorbed Castile in the 1020s, and León -- though not Galicia -- in the last year of his life. In the division of lands which followed his death his son Fernando succeeded to the county of Castile. Two years later, in 1037, he conquered León and Galicia. For nearly thirty years, until his death in 1065, he ruled over a combined kingdom of León-Castile.

No one who is conversant with the history of Spain at any period will be surprised to learn that the kings' main task in the tenth century had been to make their kingdom cohere. Neither will he be surprised to learn that they failed in it. It was only partly their fault. True, they never displayed that creative power of shaping institutions to their purposes which their contemporaries of the house of Wessex possessed in so high a degree. They lacked the wealth the task demanded. They lacked -- despite their high claims -- traditions of government, access to an intellectual culture which could be harnessed to practical ends. Above all, the facts of geography were against them. A line drawn between León and Burgos marks the northern frontier of the Tierra de Campos, the high, rich, dreary arable land of northern Spain; its southern boundary would be marked by a line drawn from Salamanca to Segovia. This table-land, the meseta, is as it were the pit of an amphitheatre formed by a gigantic ring of mountains. The Cordillera Cantábrica, in the north, divides the Asturias from the meseta. The range is continued towards the southwest by the Montes de León, the Sierra de la Cabrera, the mountains of what is now the province of Tras os Montes in northern Portugal, and finally the Serra da Estrêla, before it petres out in the basin of the lower Tagus. This formidable barrier shuts off Galicia and northern Portugal, the whole Atlantic littoral, from the plain of León. To the east the plain is closed by the Sierra de la Demanda and its associated ranges; [3] it was here, to the east of Burgos, the area of Belorado, Salas de los Infantes, Covarrubias and Silos, that the county of Castile was born. To the south, the huge slanting barrier of the Sierra de Guadarrama and the Sierra de Gredos close the square. The areas to the north and west of the mountain chain, the Asturias, Galicia and northern Portugal, differ from the meseta in their relief, climate and vegetation. They differed in the early Middle Ages, as to a great degree they still do, in their agrarian practice and their social institutions. Communication between the two halves of the kingdom of León was difficult and slow, owing to the height and extent of the ranges which divide them. Nature here placed more blunt obstacles in the way of the wielders of authority, whether secular or ecclesiastical, than she placed anywhere else in western Christendom.

The society of the north-west has been aptly characterized by Claudio Sánchez Albornoz:⁽¹⁾

'Galica was the region of the old Asturian and Leonese kingdom where large landed estates were first formed, where big episcopal, abbatial and lay lordships emerged earlier than anywhere else, and where the peasants became more quickly and more completely subject than they did elsewhere. From an early date the cities of Galicia were under the lordship of the bishops, and the countryside was shared out between the cathedrals, the abbeys and the secular aristocracy'.

These were not wealthy societies. The armies which the kings of León could put into the field were small. The churches which their clergy served were modest. The wills of their aristocracy display no great bulk of movable posessions. We have few references to any industry apart from agriculture, and those tell only of activities, like salt-making and iron-smelting, closely tied to the primary needs of rural communities. Exchange seems to have been sluggish; the kings issued no coinage; and the only town worthy the name was León itself. Our sources are too meagre to allow of any exercise more disciplined than the forming of impressions. But poverty is a relative term, and we can say with confidence that early Leonese society was poor by comparison with its neighbour to the south, the society of Moslem Spain, of al-Andalus.

The caliphate of Córdoba embodied in the tenth century the richest economy, the most sophisticated civilization and the most imposing political system in the western world. It reached its apogee in the tenth century under three great rulers: the first Caliph, Abd-al-Rahman III (912-61), his son al-Hakam II (961-76) and Ibn Abi Amir, more familiar under the name Almanzor (al-Mansur, 'the Victorious') the adventurer who ruled the caliphate in all but name from 981 to 1002. Contemporaries were flabbergasted by it. The geographer Ibn Hawkal, who visited al-Andalus in 948, became positively lyrical when he described its flourishing cities, its great variety of exotic crops, the amount of money in circulation, the many mineral industries, the wondrous textiles, the great range and bulk of commerce. The society of al-Andalus has been superlatively described by Lévi-Provençal,⁽²⁾ and we need not linger over it here. Before we leave it, however, a few comparisons will drive home the contrast with the Christian north. The town of León had a population of perhaps 8-10,000 in the mid-tenth century; Córdoba's population probably approached a quarter of a million. Leonese rulers were pleased to be able to get together an army of a [5] few hundred men; Abd-al-Rahman III had a standing army of about 30,000 men, which was increased under Almanzor to some 60,000-70,000. The caliphs had at their disposal a large and efficient bureaucracy; the kings of León, a handful of household officials and priests.

Early Leonese society was isolated as well as poor. The inhabitants of the north-west did not venture upon the Atlantic -- the dark ocean, as Idrisi called it in the twelfth century, where navigation was hindered by the huge waves, the frequent storms, the violent winds, the all-pervading darkness and the variety of sea-monsters. The Vikings braved it; but their raids, recorded from time to time in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, can only have given the Asturians and Galicians further inducement to stay at home. When the archbishop of Santiago de Compostela wanted to build a fleet early in the twelfth century it was to Genoese shipwrights that he turned. Neither was there much, if any, contact between León-Castile and the outside world overland. The eighth-century Asturian princes had had relations with the court of Charlemagne, but their tenth-century successors indulged in no such far-flung diplomatic exchanges. Otto I sent embassies to Córdoba, but none to León: why should he ever have thought to do so? The churchmen of León had no contact (as we shall see) with the popes, nor with the churches of southern France, nor even, before the reign of Sancho the Great, with those of eastern Spain. The movement of monastic revival associated with the name of St. Rosendo (d. 977) occurred in complete independence of similar contemporary movements in France, Germany and England. The books which were copied in Leonese scriptoria (in the peculiar Visigothic script) form a particularly revealing index of the intellectual isolation and conservatism of these churchmen; the learning is there, but it is the learning of an earlier day, the Fathers, the great luminaries of the seventh century, Isidore, Braulio, Ildefonso, Julian, untouched, unfertilized by the movement of thought we call the Carolingian renaissance. Leonese merchants did not trade beyond the Pyrenees. Some foreign traders did come to Spain -- the slavers of Verdun, for example, of whom Liudprand tells -- but their business was with Córdoba, and we may think it more probable that their [6] route lay through the Spanish March and eastern Spain than through the Basque country of the western Pyrenees, about whose savage people with their incomprehensible tongue Aimery Picaud had such chilling stories to tell two centuries later. Leonese chroniclers showed no interest in what was happening beyond the Pyrenees. A very few French chroniclers had something to say about Spain -- Adémar of Chabannes had seen captive Moors at Limoges, and he knew something of Sancho the Great -- but in general they displayed no interest in Spanish affairs.

This Christian society of the north-west, so poor in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, suddenly became rich beyond the dreams of avarice in the period after about 1050. This development, so strange, so unexpected, brought far-reaching consequences in its train, which underlay much of the history of the twelfth century; so we should seek to examine it rather carefully. It sprang essentially from the political troubles of the caliphate. During the latter part of the reign of Abd-al-Rahman III and throughout most of the reign of his son al-Hakam II the rulers of León had been, in effect, the tributaries of the caliphs. In the last twenty years of the tenth century Almanzor had subjected the whole of Christian Spain to a series of raids and had inflicted upon its rulers a number of severe military defeats. But early in the eleventh century the tables were turned. A political malaise whose causes are still not wholly understood afflicted the caliphate; the whole imposing structure crumbled and fell apart; and in its place emerged during the 1020s and 1030s a number of successor states, known to historians as the reinos de taifas. The number of such kingdoms fluctuated. At first there were at least twenty of them, but by the middle of the century, after a good deal of intricate diplomatic and military manoeuvring, this had been reduced to a smaller number, of which the most important were the taifa principalities of Seville, Badajoz, Toledo, Zaragoza, Albarracín, Valencia, Almería and Granada. Heirs to the wealth of the caliphate, they were rich; a prey to internal political instability and in a state of endemic hostility with their neighbours, they were vulnerable.

If the Christian princes of Spain had had before their eyes [7] the ideal of a Christian Spain, wrought out of a military Reconquista, this was the time for them to have acted. Wisely perhaps -- or simply because they did not have such an ideal -- they chose instead to turn the taifas into a source of profit for themselves. The Moslem princes became the clients of the Christians. Their clientage was expressed in the payment of tributes known as parias; and it was the payment of parias which formed the most characteristic mode of relations between Christian and Moslem between about 1050 and 1100. The rulers of eastern Spain, the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Aragon, may have been the first to exact parias in any systematic way. In western Spain Fernando I of León-Castile was the first ruler to do so. Our sources leave much to be desired, but there is some reason to suppose that during the last five years of his reign -- perhaps during the last ten -- Fernando I was regularly receiving parias from the taifas of Zaragoza, Toledo and Seville, possibly also from Valencia and Badajoz. When he died in 1065 he divided his empire -- the territories and the income from parias -- between his three sons Sancho, García and Alfonso. After a period of confused fratricidal strife, Alfonso re-united the inheritance and ruled the undivided kingdom of León-Castile from 1072 until his death in 1109. To the income from parias enjoyed by his father he added a further paria from Granada.

Gigantic sums were involved. The tributes were paid in the gold coins (dinars or mithqals) which were current in al-Andalus. The vetus paria paid by Zaragoza to the king of Aragon, which Fernando I succeeded in diverting to himself in about 1060, stood probably at 10,000 aurei per annum. When in his turn the king of Navarre managed to divert the payment to himself, at a slightly later date, he stipulated for 12,000 numos de auro per annum. Alfonso VI raised 30,000 mithqals from the ruler of Granada in about 1075. This amount, which was reached only after a good deal of haggling, included arrears for probably two years, so it would seem that Granada was paying at something like the same rate as Zaragoza. The most skilful operator in this field was Alfonso's most famous subject, Rodrigo Díaz, El Cid. He contrived to pick up for himself from the taifas of eastern Spain in the years 1089-91 the astounding sum of 146,000 dinars. We [8] should remember, too, that payment of cash was usually accompanied by the giving of presents of carpets, silks, ivories, plate, etc. What do these figures mean? We are so ill-informed about the value of money in Spain at this date that we cannot answer this question with any precision. Noblemen could be ransomed for sums in the range of 500-1,000 aurei at this period. In Córdoba in the 1060s 10,000 mithqals would have bought 400 horses or about 70 slaves. We can only say helplessly that the parias made their recipients extraordinarily wealthy.

Where did the money go to? In the first instance it went to the Christian kings. From being among the poorest rulers in Europe they quickly became among the richest. Some of it was passed on to the cathedral churches and monasteries of León-Castile, some of it to the aristocracy. Some of it went -- and this is most significant for our purposes -- to destinations outside Spain. The most famous such instance is to be found in the annual census paid to the monastery of Cluny, established by Fernando I at an unknown date between 1053 and 1065, re-established by Alfonso VI in 1077, and confirmed by him in 1090. The sum was fixed at 1,000 aurei by Fernando I, and doubled by Alfonso VI in 1090. For Cluny, the sum was clearly enormous; it was 'the biggest donation that Cluny ever received from king or layman, and it was never to be surpassed';⁽³⁾ Henry I of England's annual grant of 100 marks -- silver, of course, not gold -- from 1131 looks puny in comparison. The Alfonsine census enabled Abbot Hugh to undertake the building of the huge third abbey church of Cluny; and when, later on, payment lapsed, this was among the most important factors in bringing about the financial difficulties, deepening into crisis, which crippled the Cluniacs during the abbacies of Pons and Peter the Venerable. But that is another story. What is important for us is that the export of gold from Spain publicized the new-found riches of the Spanish Christians. The kingdom of León-Castile, in particular, acquired a reputation for inexhaustible wealth during the second half of the eleventh century. What Mexico was to the [9] Europeans of the sixteenth century, Spain was to their ancestors of the eleventh and early twelfth; especially to those nearest at hand, the French. They wanted to join in and share it, and they were none too scrupulous about how they did so.

The forces which dragged western Spain out of her isolation were compounded of strands of both piety and self-seeking. The piety found expression in the pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela. At some point (which cannot be exactly established) in the early ninth century a tomb which was believed to be that of St. James the Greater -- Sant 'Iago, Santiago -- was discovered in the diocese of Iria in the extreme north-west of the Asturian kingdom. What was actually found we shall never know, and perhaps it does not matter. What we should very much like to know, but which our sources are too meagre, discreet or untrustworthy to tell us, is something of the means by which the local cult of the saint which grew up in Galicia was transformed into an international cult drawing pilgrims from distant parts of Christendom. The earliest recorded pilgrims from beyond the Pyrenees visited the shrine in the middle of the tenth century, but it would seem that it was not until a century later that pilgrims from abroad were journeying there regularly and in large numbers. (The first recorded pilgrims from England, we may note in passing, made the journey between 1092 and 1105). By the early twelfth century the pilgrimage was a highly organized affair. Four established pilgrim-roads ran from starting-points in France and converged in the western Pyrenees, thence to run through northern Spain -- by Burgos, Carrión, Sahagún, León, Astorga and Lugo -- to their goal. The diverse needs of the pilgrims were met by a series of caravanserais along the way; by royal protection of so potentially lucrative a source of revenue; by the evolution of a type of ecclesiastical architecture designed to cope with large parties of the devout; by sellers of badges and souvenirs; by the remarkable guide-book put together in about 1140; in short by the usual paraphernalia of tourism. The most important social effect of the pilgrimage lay in the opening-up of western Spain to outside influences, and in particular to the influence of France, whence the great majority of pilgrims always came. Its most striking manifestation was the settlement [10] of Frenchmen in the towns which lay along the pilgrimage route, towns whose size, appearance and economic concerns were transformed by the settlers.

If devotion brought such men to Spain, self-interest kept them there. There were opportunities to hand, which were grasped eagerly. Some came to Spain avowedly to make their fortunes. Warriors came to fight. Two such were Raymond of Burgundy and his cousin Henry. They belonged to the comital house of Burgundy and were thereby highly-placed among the feudal aristocracy of France. Their family had links with the monastery of Cluny and distinguished connections in the secular church, for Raymond's brother was Guy, archbishop of Vienne, who later became pope as Calixtus II. There were already dynastic connections between Burgundy and León-Castile, for Henry's aunt Constance had married Alfonso VI in about 1079. It was some years later that the cousins followed her to Spain. They did very well for themselves. Raymond married the king's legitimate daughter Urraca, probably in 1092, Henry an illegitimate daughter Teresa in 1096. Raymond received a vast Luso-Galician-Leonese honour from the king perhaps as early as 1087, and a county of Portugal was carved out of this for Henry in 1095.⁽⁴⁾ Raymond predeceased his father-in-law in 1107; his widow reigned over León-Castile from 1109 to 1126, and their son Alfonso VII, the last of the emperors, from 1126 to 1157. Henry died in 1112; his son, Afonso Henriques, was the first king of independent Portugal. (The pedigree (p. 11) which is much simplified -- is intended to make clear some of the relationships mentioned in this chapter.)

Not all who came were of such exalted rank, neither could all hope to be so successful. Some left an unsavoury reputation behind them. Such a one was William 'the Carpenter', viscount of Melun, who led a contingent to fight for Alfonso VI in 1087; his conduct in Spain was alluded to by the author of the Gesta Francorum when recounting his attempt to [11] desert from the army of the First Crusade in 1098.⁽⁵⁾ Others came to Spain with different qualifications, for different tasks. Settlers were needed to colonise the sparsely-populated land. Clergy were needed to supervise the spiritual life of the colonists. We shall have more to say of the clergy later, so let one example suffice for the moment -- Bernardo of Toledo. Born near Auch, he entered the nearby Cluniac priory of St. Orens and later moved to Cluny itself; in 1080 or 1081 he was Sent by Abbot Hugh to replace Robert -- another Frenchman -- abbot of the Cluniac house of Sahagún. After a short [12] but active abbacy Bernardo was appointed by Alfonso VI to the archiepiscopal see of newly-conquered Toledo, being consecrated late in 1086. In 1088 he visited the papal curia, where Pope Urban II -- an old acquaintance from his days at Cluny -- confirmed his appointment, granted him his pallium and constituted him primate of all the Spains. Bernardo's long tenure of office -- he survived until 1124 -- was to be of fundamental importance for the organization of the secular church within the Leonese-Castilian kingdom, and we shall see that his chosen servants were ecclesiastics drawn from southwestern France, all of whom rose to high office in Spain.⁽⁶⁾ Throughout this period, French monastic houses were acquiring dependencies in Spain.⁽⁷⁾

Colonists, whether secular or ecclesiastical, were needed because the kingdom of León was becoming bigger. Expansion provoked (as we shall presently see) new enmities; hence the need for fighting men. This territorial expansion occurred at the expense of the taifa kingdoms whom Christian rulers had hitherto been content to leave unmolested, provided they paid their parias. But it would seem that a shift took place in Alfonso VI's designs about the middle of his reign. This is one of the most delicate problems of this period, and it is unfortunate that it cannot be discussed here at the length which it deserves. Crudely put, it may be suggested that Alfonso moved from being the patron of his client Moslem neighbours, the patron who exploited even as he 'protected' them, to being the enemy whose aim was to conquer them and to incorporate their dominions in his own. With this shift a new mood came into being. The Reconquista as it is normally understood began in the latter part of the reign of Alfonso VI. The change of emphasis was partly the result of circumstance. Compelled to intervene in the disturbed internal politics of the client kingdom of Toledo, he was finally compelled to conquer its capital city, which surrendered to him on 6 May 1085; Toledo conquered, the territories depending on it had to be settled and defended; a Christian establishment [13] had to be introduced. A certain course of action -- a novel one -- was forced upon the king. But there were ideas as well as circumstances at work. Alfonso seems gradually to have arrived at a new view of what a Christian ruler faced by Moslems ought to be doing. In the nature of the case we cannot trace these vague, unformulated notions to their obscure roots, but that these lay outside Spain is certain. The aristocratic circles (lay and clerical) of northern and eastern France, the papal curia of Humbert and Gregory VII, conceivably the Cluny of St. Hugh, were the communities wherein crusading ideals took shape in the generation before the council of Clermont. Influences from each of these quarters can be shown to have played upon the court of Alfonso VI of León-Castile.

The decision to turn to the way of violence, to military re-conquest, was disastrous in its effects. It drove the taifa kings into the arms of a dangerous ally, whose help proved mortal to them -- Yûsuf ibn-Tâshufin, Almoravide ruler of Morocco. The Almoravide movement originated in the teaching of a Malikite jurist, Ibn-Yâsin, among the tribes of the basins of the Senegal and upper Niger rivers; the name of the movement is derived from the ribat which he founded about 1040. Militant expansion among the neighbouring tribes began shortly afterwards, and the Almoravide interpretation of the Islamic faith was imposed at the point of the sword. 'If (the tribes) persist in their errors and infidelity, let us invoke the aid of God against them and make war upon them until God decides the issue between us'.⁽⁸⁾ It appeared that God favoured the Almoravides, for the movement was successfully diffused up and down the African coast. After Ibn-Yâsin's death in 1059, the leadership passed into the hands of Abû Bakr ibn-Ûmar. Shortly afterwards the need for simultaneous military expansion on two fronts led him to share his authority, and he delegated a northern command to his kinsman Yûsuf ibn-Tâshufin. Abû Bakr moved south and conquered the kingdom of Gâna in 1076. Yûsuf overran Morocco and founded a northern capital for himself at Marrakesh in 1062.

Yûsuf was a bold leader and his troops were good fighters. [14] His progress was watched with interest tinged with apprehension by the taifa kings of al-Andalus. After Alfonso VI's conquest of Toledo the rulers of Seville, Badajoz and Granada decided with some misgivings to seek his aid against the Christians. Yûsuf accepted their invitation, crossed the straits with an army, and inflicted a shattering defeat upon the forces of Alfonso VI at Sagrajas, a little to the north of Badajoz, in October 1086. In 1088 and 1090 he carried out further operations against the Christians. But this was not all. After an unsuccessful attack upon Toledo, probably in July of 1090, he turned upon his employers, accusing them of failing to give him adequate support and of playing him false: he alleged, apparently with some truth, that they had opened negotiations behind his back with Alfonso VI. In revenge, he occupied the taifa kingdom of Granada in September 1090.

Deeper issues were at stake than a squabble between a mercenary captain and his paymasters. The Almoravide version of Islam was exclusive. Orthodox and fundamentalist, they were fiercely conscious of their 'purity' as a 'chosen people', whose mission was to restore the simplicity and the fervour of the early days of Islam, and to extend the range of the faith by jihâd.⁽⁹⁾ Moreover, they professed political loyalty to the rightful caliphs, the Abbasids of Baghdad. Yûsuf and his followers were shocked by what they found in al-Andalus and considered that the taifa kings had betrayed the Prophet's ideals. Observance of the precepts of the Law was slack; nothing was being done to extend the frontiers of the Faith; the caliph's authority was not acknowledged. Yûsuf told them what he thought of them. Unfortunately, they paid him back in the same coin. To these cultivated men Yûsuf was a fanatic from the desert; he dressed in skins, smelt of camels and could not speak Arabic. Incomprehension deepened into distrust and distrust became hostility. The seizure of Granada was only a beginning. By the time of Yûsuf's death in 1106 most of al-Andalus had fallen into his hands; his son Ali (1106-43) finished the job with the conquest of the last taifa kingdom, Zaragoza, in 1110.

Almoravide expansion had far-reaching consequences. It [15] united al-Andalus once more, as in the great days of the caliphate of Córdoba, but now under an intolerant, a fighting faith. It inspired terror among the Spanish Christians, leading them to appeal for help from beyond the Pyrenees, which brought Raymond and Henry of Burgundy, among others, to Spain, and which caused Popes Urban II and Paschal II to look on Spain as a battleground upon which Christianity was being tried by ordeal. It injected a new strain of religious hatred into relations between Christian and Moslem. Above all, it cut off the supply of parias. The flood of gold to the north had dwindled to a trickle by the year 1100; shortly afterwards it dried up altogether. The Cluniacs experienced an abrupt decline in their income, from which they were never to recover. The rulers of León-Castile lost what had been the major part of their revenues for fifty years. It is not too much to say that this crippled their actions throughout the twelfth century.

The economic crisis which faced the rulers of León-Castile in the early twelfth century was combined with a political crisis. In May 1108 a Christian army had been defeated by the Almoravides at Uclés. The infante Sancho, Alfonso VI's only son and heir, was killed. The king was an old man and had already been stricken in November 1107 with the illness which was to prove his last. He decided to make his daughter Urraca his heir. As we have seen, Urraca had married Raymond of Burgundy. Raymond had died late in 1107, leaving his widow with a young son, Alfonso Raimúndez, later to be Alfonso VII of León-Castile. In 1108 the latter was an infant three years old. Alfonso VI conceived the plan of marrying Urraca to his namesake Alfonso I of Aragon (1104-34), known to history as Alfonso el Batallador. By this marriage the defence of the kingdom would be secured in this moment of military crisis -- for the king of Aragón was already known as a highly successful general -- and the Leonese-Castilian kingdom would not be left under the rule of a woman, for which there existed no precedent. The time-factor was all-important for clearly Alfonso VI had not long to live. From the sources at our disposal we cannot reconstruct the hectic negotiations which must have taken place in the year which elapsed between the battle of Uclés and the death of Alfonso VI on [16] 1 July 1109: but we do know that the king had his way; Urraca and Alfonso of Aragon were married either just before or, perhaps more probably, shortly after his death. But the succession problem was not to be solved so easily. In the first place the Aragonese were the traditional enemies of the Castilians, Alfonso I was personally disliked in León-Castile, and he and his new wife were temperamentally unsuited to one another. Secondly, the royal couple were related by their common descent from Sancho the Great of Navarre; the marriage was condemned as incestuous by Pope Paschal II and by the bishops of León-Castile under Archbishop Bernardo of Toledo (who seems to have led opposition to it before it took place). Thirdly, there existed a rival claimant who was determined to draw a profit for himself from Urraca's difficulties. Henry of Burgundy, count of Portugal, had married Alfonso VI's illegitimate daughter Teresa. In circumstances that still remain obscure he had intrigued with his cousin Raymond to share out the kingdom after the old king's death. He was unwilling to accept the solution to the succession-question engineered by Alfonso VI, and was astute enough to take initiatives which left him in a position of de facto independence. He died in 1112, but his widow Teresa inherited his ambitions and prosecuted them with energy until her death in 1128. Their son Afonso Henriques was soon to style himself king of Portugal -- a title which his cousin Alfonso VII was to be forced to recognize.

The secession of Portugal from León-Castile was occasioned by the circumstances of the early twelfth century (though it had its social roots in a distant Suevic and Luso-Roman past) but it was not the only feature which made the reign of Urraca so unhappy. War broke out between the queen and her husband, as a result of which parts of eastern Castile passed under Aragonese control. The partisans of the young Alfonso Raimúndez opposed her, and she was ultimately forced to partition her kingdom and hand over to him authority over Toledo, Extremadura and Galicia. The Almoravides were pressing hard at the southern frontier. And throughout this troubled time the government was desperately poor, for reasons already outlined, and compelled to turn to the only source of revenue left to hard-pressed rulers -- spoliation [17] of the church. Urraca's reputation among the clerical writers upon whom we depend for our knowledge of events was consequently low; and it is difficult to cut through the barrier of their vituperation or contempt and grasp what was really happening and what the queen was trying to do about it. Modern historians have been as unsympathetic as their medieval precursors. We still lack an authoritative account of the reign of Urraca, despite the fact that the sources are, by Spanish standards, abundant.

The reign of her son Alfonso VII, the last of the king-emperors of León-Castile, was superficially more successful and was later looked back upon as a golden age. That we still think of it in this way is largely because the chroniclers want us to. Ecclesiastical circles approved of Alfonso VII. His uncle Pope Calixtus II had watched over his early days with a kinsman's indulgence. He kept on good terms with most of his bishops. He and his pious sister Doña Sancha were famed as patrons of monasteries, especially of Cistercian monasteries. He promoted several monks to bishoprics. A contemporary panegyric, the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris,⁽¹⁰⁾ celebrated his wars in al-Andalus in language which recalled that of the Old Testament, so that Alfonso was made to look like an Israelite king leading a chosen people to the fulfilment of God's holy task. The wars provided him with an income too, which meant that he had no need to tap those sources of revenue near at hand, in the churches of his kingdom, to which his mother had had to resort.

The political affairs of al-Andalus underwent rapid change during the reign of Alfonso VII. The Almoravide conquerors had not been popular with their Hispano-Moslem subjects, who objected to being ruled harshly and taxed heavily as the colony of an empire based on Marrakesh. The Berbers who made up the Almoravide élite were riddled with inter-tribal rivalries. So the Almoravide grip on al-Andalus was, after the frantic successes of the first few years, only a shaky one. More importantly, however, al-Andalus succeeded, as so often before, in subduing her conquerors, and the Almoravides came to appreciate and to emulate the sophisticated culture which Yûsuf had so despised, and to introduce it to [18] Morocco. Once again there were those who were prepared to point this out and to act on their convictions.

In 1118 a Berber from Morocco named Ibn-Tûmart returned to the Maghrib from a long course of study in the east which had convinced him that he had a religious mission to perform. He believed that it was his task to reform the doctrine and mores of the corrupted Almoravides and to bring them back to the straight path of Islamic orthodoxy. In 1121 he was proclaimed Mahdi by his followers and began guerilla attacks upon the local Almoravide forces. Thus was the Almohade movement born. The similarities between Almoravide and Almohade sects are only superficial. The Almoravides were wild men from the desert: their ideas were crude and their energies were soon dissipated among the flesh-pots of Andalusia. The Almohades had a coherent and sophisticated religious philosophy deriving directly from the intellectual vitality of the heartlands of Islam. Theirs was not the fanaticism of the uncouth, but the zealous conviction of those who believed they had found a -- or rather the -- divinely inspired and guided leader, the Mahdi. The empire they founded had a far longer and more interesting life than the short-lived desert empire of the Almoravides whom they displaced. But its growth was slow at first. Ibn-Tûmart was killed in battle in 1130. His successor Abd al-Mû'min (1130-63) was to carry the movement across the straits to al-Andalus. The circumstances in which he did so bear some resemblance to those which had brought Yûsuf to Spain at the end of the previous century. In the years 1144-6 a series of rebellions against Almoravide rule broke out in al-Andalus. The rebels appealed for help to the Almohades, who came as allies and then turned into conquerors. At this time Abd al-Mû'min was less interested in conquest in Spain than in eastward expansion along the coast of north Africa. So although Almoravide authority had been shattered in Spain, it had not been replaced by Almohade rule, except in parts of the Algarve and the Guadalquivir valley. So, as in the early eleventh century, political authority disintegrated and a number of small principalities emerged -- known to historians as the second taifas -- which formed the political society of Moslem Spain for some twenty years after 1145. At the end of his life Abd al-Mû'min [19] turned from north Africa to Spain and prepared a large expedition in 1162-3 to conquer it. Death cut short his plans, but they were inherited by his son and successor Abu-Ya'qub Yûsuf (1163-84), who brought the whole of al-Andalus under Almohade authority in the years 1171-3.

The Christian rulers of Spain had profited from the Andalusian anarchy of the 1140s and the weakness of the little principalities which grew out of it. Alfonso VII had reconstituted the kingdom of León-Castile as it had been in his grandfather's day -- ultimately reconciling himself to the loss of Portugal -- and had had himself crowned emperor in 1135. His raids to the south took on the character of crusading wars of conquest, and by a combination of diplomacy and force he built up a large, sprawling 'empire' to the south of his patrimonial lands, beyond the barrier of the Sierra Morena. Córdoba he acquired by assisting the rebels against the Almoravides in 1146; Almería he conquered in 1147 with the help of troops from southern France and a Genoese navy; in 1151 he had designs on Seville. But his empire was short-lived. He had neither time nor resources for following up the conquests with the colonization -- repoblación -- of the conquered territories, and even before his death the ramshackle structure had begun to fall apart. He died, indeed, while on his way back to Toledo after vainly attempting to force an Almohade army to raise a siege of Almería which shortly afterwards achieved its end. The buoyant optimism of the middle years of the century withered into a mood of uncertainty and this, as Almohade power reached its zenith in the last quarter of the century, turned into panic.

On the death of Alfonso VII the kingdom of León-Castile was divided between his two sons Sancho and Fernando, to the former going Castile and to the latter León. The decision to divide the inheritance, seemingly so foolish, had not been a hasty one; it had certainly been made by 1143.⁽¹¹⁾ Its effect was to keep León and Castile apart, and frequently at war with one another, for some seventy years. They were finally reunited, this time for ever, by Fernando III in 1230.

It so happens that the sources at the disposal of the historian, [20] never abundant in twelfth-century Spain, are specially meagre for this the last age of the independent kingdom of León. We have, for example, not a single contemporary Leonese chronicle from this period. The royal charters have been assembled and the reigns of the last two kings of León studied in their light;⁽¹²⁾ but it is hard satisfactorily to reconstruct the history of a reign from charter-evidence alone. It seems beyond doubt, however, that these were difficult years. Fernando II (1157-88) had to contend not only with a powerful Almohade state upon his southern marches but also with Christian enemies. To the east, his rash interventions in Castilian affairs during the minority of his nephew Alfonso VIII (1158-1214) made an enemy of that able ruler. In the west, territorial rivalries with Portugal, especially in Galicia and Extremadura, gave rise to a state of smouldering hostility, sometimes flaring into open warfare, between Fernando and the long-lived Afonso Henriques (1128-85). León could not afford wars. Fernando II himself was a man of reckless extravagance. His son Alfonso IX tactfully referred to his father's superabundans liberalitas and his immensa benignitas and laid the blame for what happened upon the unscrupulous familiares with whom he had surrounded himself: but he makes the consequences clear; by the end of the reign the government was virtually bankrupt.⁽¹³⁾

Alfonso IX (1188-1230) inherited other ills besides an empty treasury. He had a rival to the throne in the person of an illegitimate son of Fernando II whose claims were supported by the Haro family, the powerful noble house from which the mother had come. To gain resources and to rally support the king was led to make far-reaching constitutional concessions early in his reign, which weakened such authority as he might have hoped to wield. Caught between Portugal and Castile, he sought a truce with the Almohades to the south. It was a prudent step but it did him no good. The fall of Jerusalem in 1187 had served to alert western opinion to the vulnerability of the Christian states of Spain at the opposite end of the Mediterranean. The worst fears were confirmed [21] when at Alarcos in 1195 the Almohades inflicted a decisive defeat upon the Castilians. Clement III, Celestine III and finally Innocent III exerted themselves to the utmost to organize a crusade in Spain. Alfonso IX, by sticking obstinately to his Almohade alliance, seemed to be a traitor to Christendom. He was already in trouble over his marriages: two successive marriages, essential to the conduct of his diplomacy, were with brides to whom he was related within the prohibited degrees. When the crusade was finally launched in 1212 the king of León stood aside. When it was spectacularly successful at Las Navas de Tolosa he reaped no territorial harvest from the victory. He preserved his kingdom's integrity; he even enlarged its area slightly by the conquest of Cáceres in 1227. He was a more prudent husbandman of the royal resources than his father had been. But he never aimed high, and his achievements were correspondingly modest.

It is with the bishops who presided over the spiritual life of the kingdom of León that this book is concerned. There were twelve dioceses.⁽¹⁴⁾ Five lay in Galicia -- Santiago de Compostela, Mondoñedo, Lugo, Orense and Tuy. Oviedo was in the Asturias, tucked between the Cantabrian mountains and the sea, and to the south of it, on the meseta, were situated León and nearby Astorga. Zamora was further south again, on the Duero, and beyond the Duero, in Extremadura, were Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo and Coria. This pattern of ecclesiastical organization was very old. Few scholars would now believe that the origins of Christianity in western Spain are to be sought in the apostolic age. But there was certainly a patristic church there, and the lines of its organization were drawn upon the Roman administrative framework, inherited in the course of time by Suevi and Visigoths and then by the Mozarabs, the Christians who preserved their faith under Islamic rule. Of the twelve dioceses of the twelfth century, eight had existed in the Visigothic period -- Iria (the transfer of the seat of the bishopric to Santiago de Compostela was ratified only in 1095⁽¹⁵⁾), Lugo, Orense, Tuy, Astorga, Salamanca, Coria and possibly Ciudad Rodrigo. Mondoñedo originated [23] as a bishopric based upon the monastery of Bretoña (Britonia) for the Celtic migrants who had settled on the north coast of Spain during the sixth century. It was this ancient pattern which the authorities of the eleventh and twelfth centuries wished to revive.

'The ecclesiastical restoration which occurred in the course of the Reconquest had as its controlling notion the revival of the ecclesiastical organization of the Visigoths. For the Christian conquerors the land recovered from the Moors was as it were a palimpsest, whose earlier script -- faint, erased, sometimes quite invisible -- it was essential to restore.'⁽¹⁶⁾

It was a more serious matter that the provincial organization of the Romano-Visigothic church was unsuited to twelfth-century conditions.⁽¹⁷⁾ The five Galician sees of Iria-Compostela, Lugo, Mondoñedo, Orense and Tuy, together with the see of Astorga, had been in the metropolitan province of Bracara Augusta, the modern Braga. Salamanca, Coria and Caliabria had been in the province of Emerita, the modern Mérida. Braga had been in Christian hands from the ninth [24] century, while Mérida was not reconquered until 1234. There were several problems here. In the first place it was difficult to fit 'new' sees like Oviedo and León into the provincial structure. Second, an entirely new province was created in 1120, when Calixtus II raised the bishopric of Santiago de Compostela to archiepiscopal status -- suffragans had to be provided for this new metropolitanate. Third, the provincial geography of the Visigothic period ran counter to the political facts of the twelfth century.

The Spanish metropolitanates were re-established at much the same time; Toledo in 1086, Tarragona in 1089, Braga in 1099 or 1100.⁽¹⁸⁾ When Compostela was added to them in 1120 the pople allotted to it the metropolitan rights of Mérida until such time as that city should be reconquered and its see restored. The Leonese suffragans of Mérida -- Salamanca, Coria and Ciudad Rodrigo -- were situated a long distance from Santiago de Compostela; a further one, Avila, was in Castile; in addition there were several ancient suffragans of Emerita which were within the frontiers of the new kingdom of Portugal and were restored during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries -- Lamego, Viseu, Guarda, Ihanha, Coimbra and Lisbon. Conversely, the Galician suffragans of Braga were in the kingdom of León. It was natural for the archbishops of Compostela to want suffragans close at hand (the Galician satellites of Braga), for those of Braga to desire to incorporate in their province the Portuguese suffragans of Mérida-Compostela, and for the archbishops of Toledo to cast covetous eyes on the cluster of Extremaduran sees which owed loyalty to distant Compostela. This awkward situation gave rise to prolonged dispute between the three archbishoprics in the course of the twelfth century, and exacerbated the political uneasiness which existed between the rulers of León and their contumacious vassal, the count and later king of Portugal. Matters were made worse by the anomalous position of the 'new' sees. Whose suffragans were León and Oviedo? This thorny problem was tactfully resolved -- or sidestepped -- by exempting them in 1105, so that they came [25] under the direct authority of the pope.⁽¹⁹⁾ But whose suffragan was Zamora? In this case no such ingenious solution was proposed, with consequences that we shall have to examine later on.

That these issues of ecclesiastical organization were debated so urgently, so passionately, in the course of the twelfth century sprang from the fact that the Spanish churches, especially those of the western half of the Peninsula, had undergone a revolutionary assault from without in the latter part of the eleventh. The attack had been initiated by popes Alexander II and Gregory VII, their servants and their allies. The aim of the reformers had been to bring the Spanish churches into line with their conception of right ecclesiastical order, especially in matters of discipline and ritual. The series of events which has chiefly caught and held the attention of historians was the destruction of the so-called Mozarabic liturgy. But concentration on this alone, important though it was, has tended to obscure the fact that what took place was a radical assault upon a whole ecclesiastical way of life: that what was destroyed was a branch of the Christian church which was peculiar, perhaps, in its observances; errant, sluggish in the eyes of brisker men; certainly not conspicuously loyal among the children of Rome; but intimately bound up with the society it served, answering the aspirations of those over whose spiritual life it kept watch, self-regulating according to its own notions of what was seemly and expedient. The reformers brought with them a form of ecclesiastical organization which was Romano-Gallic -- the pattern of primate, metropolitan, territorial diocese, archdeaconry, archipresbyterate, and parish; of uniformly-organized cathedral chapter; of provincial council and diocesan synod. They brought with them a canon law which overrode local ecclesiastical custom: so that a seventh was added to the six degrees of relationship which constituted an impediment to marriage; so that the rank of Psalmist was dropped from the Minor Orders, reducing the eight orders of the Spanish church to the standard seven. They altered penitential customs, did away with a liturgy, and introduced a new script. They made Spanish [26] churchmen look towards the Roman curia, something they had not done before. In the monastic church they changed the form of tonsure, gave impetus to the process by which St. Benedict's Rule superseded the rules of earlier, local monastic founders, and introduced new monastic orders, especially the Augustinians and Cistercians. In human terms, reform brought an influx of French clergy -- and the foreigners got most of the jobs worth having.

These churches, then, became in some sense new recruits to the reformers' conception of Christian order. They were given a new uniform to wear and taught a new drill. They did not always like it. Our concern here is to see how the bishops variously faced up to the challenges, opportunities and humiliations of being reformed.

Unfortunately, we can know very little about these men. The historical literature produced in western Spain and Portugal during this period and surviving to our own day is extremely meagre.⁽²⁰⁾ Two chronicles only which were composed in the kingdom of León during the first half of the century have come down to us. One of these, the work of bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, contains no material later in date than the year 1109; the other, the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris already referred to, is an account of the first two-thirds of the reign of Alfonso VII. By comparison with the work of, say, Ordericus Vitalis or William of Malmesbury these works are bald and jejune; and their authors were not concerned with ecclesiastical affairs. Not a single chronicle seems to have been composed in the second half of the century, nor indeed until well on into the thirteenth century, when the tradition of historical writing was taken up again by Lucas of Tuy, Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada of Toledo, and the authors of the Primera Crónica General. For the ecclesiastical historian this is especially disappointing. We have no episcopal biographies and no cathedral annals. We have only a very little hagiographical material, only a single monastic chronicle.

One exception, however, must be made. For the history of the see of Santiago de Compostela during the pontificate of Diego Gelmírez (1100-40) the historian is fortunate indeed [27] in the survival of the so-called Historia Compostellana.⁽²¹⁾ This work was undertaken on the orders of Diego Gelmírez. The canons, of Compostela who were its authors several times described it as a registrum, a collection of documents. But it was also an account of the achievements, the gesta of Diego. Because it was put together at his instance, by his devoted followers and presumably under his supervision, it has also a persuasive purpose; it is Diego's account of himself as he wanted others to see him. No other such work survives. The Historia is very long and it is crammed with information. We can know more (in a crude sense) about the public life of Diego Gelmírez than about that of any other of his contemporary bishops in any part of Christendom. It is an oasis in the historiographical desert of twelfth-century León, and we shall have to have recourse to it time after time in the pages which follow. But this procedure is not without its dangers. The authors were not innocent of guile. More especially to our purposes, it is necessary to resist the temptation to generalize on the basis of the wealth of information it provides. What is true of Santiago de Compostela may not be true of León or Orense or Salamanca, still less of the Leonese church as a whole.

With the exception of Diego Gelmírez, these bishops are almost inarticulate. They do not tell us what ideals they held, nor how they tried to put them into practice. We have no collections of their letters. We have no treatises on the office of a bishop, no penitentials, no codes of ecclesiastical custom. We have no secular law-codes which might have told us something of the way in which kings and their advisers saw the place of the church in society at large. The acta of a very few church councils survive, but (as we shall see) they are generally uninformative about episcopal attitudes.

What we can perceive about episcopal thoughts and aspirations must be apprehended by the flickering light cast by the evidence of official documents. It is a hazardous business. [28] Yet if narrative and what might be called technical sources are in short supply, documents are abundant. For the century between 1126 and 1230 a large proportion of the royal charters of the kings of León is available in print (either the full texts or summaries in regesta form). Other documents have fared less well. Many monastic cartularies have never been printed; among those that have, the standards of editorial scholarship often leave much to be desired. Some 250 episcopal acta have survived; they have never been systematically studied. About 100 unprinted papal bulls have come to light.⁽²²⁾ Hundred upon hundred original private charters await publication and study. The pages that follow depend heavily upon the evidence of these classes of documents. That it has been possible to use them extensively is owing to one important peculiarity of Spanish documents of this period, namely the fact that they are dated. It is rare to find charters which bear no indication of date at all, and most of them -- perhaps, in rough terms, nine-tenths -- are dated by day, month and Spanish Era. Were it not for this diplomatic convention, the present study could not have been attempted. On the whole the documents present few pitfalls beyond the usual ones attaching to this kind of evidence. Two considerations, however, both palaeographical, should be mentioned here. The first is the 'x with tittle' or as Spanish palaeographers term it the 'x aspado' or 'x con rasguillo'. Spanish scribes of the twelfth century inherited a custom -- traceable in Spanish manuscripts from as early as c.800 -- of abbreviating the numerals XL or XXXX into the form X^e. This usage seems to have gone out of use in the thirteenth century and it puzzled the compilers of cartularies in the later middle ages, who often rendered X^e simply as X. It has sometimes misled modern historians as well. The second concerns the disappearance of Visigothic script. This ancient script was on the way out in the twelfth century, though in some areas -- notably Galicia and the Asturias, the strongholds of conservatism -- it was an unconscionable time a-dying. Visigothic script can be devilishly trying to read. One especially fertile source of error has been the open-ended Visigothic a, which looks to our [29] eyes uncommonly like a u: it is easy to read Iun. for Ian., for example, in dating-clauses. A good many mistakes of chronology can be traced to these sources.

Although the documentary evidence is abundant it yet remains true that there are far fewer sources available to the ecclesiastical historian of Spain during this period than to his counterpart in England, France or Germany. Charters are intractable and in many ways dreary materials. Those who use them depend necessarily upon dating-clauses and witness-lists, upon diplomatic and palaeographical analysis, upon the occasional scrap of information concealed in common form. Reliance upon them is not conducive to easy or pleasant reading. What is more, they are an uncertain foundation upon which to base the sort of enquiry we should like to make. Historians of a dark age -- such as, in terms of evidence, this is -- have to deal in the coin of speculation. Our evidence is tantalizingly ambiguous, inconclusive, when most we wish it plain and clear. Some will find this study too prone to guesswork; others will be maddened by the repeated expressions of doubt with which it is littered. But the very outlines of our territory are uncharted. Spain was largely untouched by the German revolution in historical scholarship of the last century. Ecclesiastical history has been curiously little cultivated in modern Spain. Many Spanish scholars of the last two centuries have been (one regrets to say) slipshod and credulous. The medieval copyists of cartularies in the kingdom of León can be shown, time and again, to have been wantonly ignorant and careless. Many ecclesiastical archives are unsorted; to some it is hard to gain entry; in many it is possible to work for only short periods of the day. The groundwork of the subject does not exist: even for Santiago de Compostela, the most important see in the kingdom, possessed of rich archives, exceptionally fortunate in its local historian Antonio López Ferreiro, even for Compostela the very succession of the archbishops during the twelfth century, their names and their dates, is still not yet certain. We do not even know the exact date of the death of the great Diego Gelmírez!

Given the present state of scholarship, our course is plain. The scene must first be surveyed. This laborious task is attempted in chapter 2, where information relating to the [30] different bishoprics and those who held them during the century is brought together, and some general remarks are hazarded. It is a clumsy but a necessary introduction to these Leonese churchmen. The bishops speak for themselves only through their acta. These documents are studied in chapter 3 -- the episcopal households and 'chanceries' which produced them, their external appearance and their diplomatic form. The contents of these and other documents are used in chapter 4 to shed light on the activities of bishops within their dioceses. In chapter 5 the relations between bishops and the papacy are subjected to analysis. The chronological scope of the enquiry is bounded by the approximate dates 1100 and 1215. Several of the bishoprics, as it happened, changed hands in about the year 1100, notably Compostela with the advent of Diego Gelmírez, and a new generation of bishops after the years of Gregorian upheaval emerged in the last decade of the reign of Alfonso VI. The year 1215 was marked by the Fourth Lateran Council, which was a landmark in the life of the western church.⁽²³⁾ But these terminal dates are approximate only, and they will sometimes be treated cavalierly.

1. C. Sánchez Albornoz, Estudios sobre las Instituciones Medievales Españolas (Mexico City, 1965), pp. 144-5 (my translation).

2. Especially in his Histoire de l'Espagne musulmane (Paris, 1950-5).

3. C. J. Bishko 'Fernando I y los orígenes de la alianza castellano-leonesa con Cluny', CHE xlvii-xlviii (1968), 107.

4. For a discussion of these difficult chronological problems, see B. F. Reilly, 'Santiago and Saint Denis: the French presence in eleventh-century Spain', Catholic Historical Review liv (1968), 467-83. On the whole question of French influence in Spain, see the fine study of M. Défourneaux, Les Français en Espagne aux XI^e et XII^e siècles (Paris, 1949).

5. Anonymi Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolymitanorum,ed. R. Hill (Edinburgh, 1962), pp. 33-4; Chronicon Sancti Maxentii Pictavensis s.a. 1087, in Chroniques des Eglises d'Anjou, ed. P. Marchegay and E. Mabille (Paris, 1869), p.411.

6. The best account of Bernardo is to be found in J. F. Rivera Recio, La Iglesia de Toledo en el siglo XII (Rome-Madrid, 1966), especially ch. 3.

7. See, for example, C. Higounet, 'Un mapa de las relaciones monásticas transpirenáicas', Pirineos vii (1951), 543-53; M. Cocheril, Etudes sur le monachisme en Espagne et au Portugal (Paris-Lisbon, 1966).

8. Quoted by J.S. Trimingham, A History of Islam in West Africa (Oxford, 1962), pp. 23-4.

9. This is usually translated 'Holy War': but see the comments of W. M. Watt, The Influence of Islam on Medieval Europe (Edinburgh, 1972), p. 6.

10. Ed. L. Sánchez Belda (Madrid, 1950); hereafter referred to as CAI.

11. A document from the Galician monastery of Sobrado dated 1 March 1143 shows that the dispositons had been made by that date: AHN 526/11.

12. J. González, Regesta de Fernando II (Madrid, 1943) and Alfonso IX de León (Madrid, 1944); hereafter referred to as respectively GRF and GAL.

13. GAL no. 5.

14. See the map on p. 22.

15. JL 5601.

16. Rivera Recio, La Iglesia de Toledo en el siglo XII, p. 247 (my translation).

17. For the background, see D. Mansilla, 'Orígenes de la organización metropolitana en la iglesia española', Hispania Sacra xii (1959), 25-91.

18. Bishop Pedro of Braga sought the metropolitan dignity uncanonically, from the antipope Clement III, in 1091, for which he was deposed in 1093. His successor Geraldo applied more prudently to Paschal II, and was successful.

19. But this was not the end of the story: see below, pp. 69, 71, 72-3, 75.

20. It is briefly surveyed by B. Sánchez Alonso, Historia de la historiografia española (Madrid, 1941), vol. I.

21. Ed. E. Flórez, España Sagrada (ES) vol. xx (Madrid, 1765); reptd. 1965). The Historia will hereafter be referred to as HC. The best discussion of authorship is contained in A.G. Biggs, Diego Gelmírez, First Archbishop of Compostela (Washington, 1949), pp. xiii-xxvi: see also B.F. Reilly, 'The Historia Composelana: the genesis and composition of a twelfth-century Spanish gesta', Speculum xliv (1969), 78-85.

22. Dr. Odilo Engels, of Munich, is preparing a collection of Papsturkunden in continuation of the work of Paul Kehr. Publication is expected shortly.

23. Dr. P. A. Linehan's study of The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1971) opens with the years immediately after Lateran IV, so it is the more appropriate that I should bring my essay to a close at that point.