(This article appeared originally in Cuadernos de Historia de España 47 (1968), 31-135 and 48 (1969), 30-116 and appears in LIBRO with the kind permission of Dna. María Estela González de Fauvre, editor of the journal.)
 
 

[1] Was the Leonese-Castilian kingdom in the 11^th and 12^th centuries a vassal state of Cluny? Did the heraldic lion sculptured on the pediment of the first edifice Abbot Hugh the Great built with Spanish gold symbolize a tamed Leonese Empire in the service of the monks?⁽¹⁾ Few phenomena in the history of Leon and Castile between 1050 and 1150 are better attested yet less studied or understood than the intimate friendship existing between the rulers of the Navarro-Basque dynasty -- Fernando I, Alfonso VI, Urraca, Alfonso VII, Fernando II, Alfonso VIII-- and the Burgundian abbey. ⁽²⁾ That the connection ranged far beyond the strictly ecclesiastical sphere--royal donation of monasteries, churches and lands, the installation of Cluniac monks at Toledo and other episcopal sees--is perfectly clear from the contemporary sources which, especially for Alfonso VI and Urraca, emphasize repeatedly Cluny's political or para-political activities below the Pyrenees.

In 1072 we hear of Abbot Hugh's achieving the liberation of the defeated, deposed Alfonso VI from imprisonment at Burgos, after his brother Sancho II's victory at Golpejera. ⁽³⁾ In 1073 the same abbot's influence apparently blocks, as adverse to Leonese-Castilian interests, the Spanish crusade planned by Popes Alexander II and Gregory VII.⁽⁴⁾ The Cluniac hand can presumably be detected again in Alfonso's marriage to Constance of Burgundy, Hugh's niece, in 1078, ⁽⁵⁾ and in the appearance of Burgundian knights in Spain after the disaster of Zallaca (1086).⁽⁶⁾ One abbatial emissary to the Leonese-Castilian court, the monk Robert, in conjunction with Queen Constance, defends the Hispanic Empire during the years 1077 to 1080 against Gregory VII's claims to papal suzerainty over the Peninsula;⁽⁷⁾ another, Dalmace Geret, in 1105 or 1106 negotiates the pact partitioning Alfonso VI's realms between his sons-in-law Counts Raymond of Galicia and Henry of Portugal.⁽⁸⁾ The aged Alfonso himself, facing in 1109 the ultimate, most acute succession crisis of his long reign, arranges for his chosen successor D. Urraca an immediate personal bond with Cluny through the Infanta's cession of her Gallegan monasterio propio of San Vicente de Pombeiro. ⁽⁹⁾ And in 1113, after the Queen-Empress's unhappy marriage to Alfonso I el Batallador of Aragon had dissolved amid widespread civil war, it is Abbot Ponce of Cluny, travelling from Burgundy to the remote tomb of the Apostle at Compostela, who reconciles Urraca with her estranged son Alfonso Raimúndez the future Alfonso VII, and with his most powerful supporters, Count Pedro Froilaz de Traba and Bishop (as he then was) Diego Gelmírez of Santiago. ⁽¹⁰⁾

In the light of these repeated Cluniac interventions of unmistakably dynastic and national import, Leonese-Castilian ties with the Burgundian congregation take on the characteristic features of an [2] authentic alliance, a union which ca. 1120 one Cluniac writer, Gilo, styles conjunctio.⁽¹¹⁾ Yet modern treatments of Hispano-Cluniac history have done little to examine as a whole the origins, purpose and at least potentially feudal character of this partnership, in part because of the false assumption that it represents no more than a pious Navarro-Basque familial attachment to Cluny dating from the epoch of Sancho el Mayor and dutifully perpetuated by all his descendants on the thrones of Aragon, Navarre and Leon-Castile. ⁽¹²⁾ In part, also, this is because objective appraisal of the connection is still hampered by national prejudices that, according to the standpoint of the observer, often depict it as either an inspired instrument for the reform and aggiornamento of a backward Iberian civilization ⁽¹³⁾ or, conversely, a gross betrayal into foreign hands of Spanish national, ecclesiastical and economic interests. ⁽¹⁴⁾

The subject is however much too central to both Iberian and Cluniac history in the 11th and 12th centuries to be left at this primitive level of understanding, particularly if we are ever to achieve an adequate assessment of the first two Leonese-Castilian sovereigns of the Navarro-Basque house, the King-Emperors Fernando I and Alfonso VI; and to dispel--especially for the latter, whose reign in most fundamental respects appears to continue domestic and foreign policies first laid down by his father -- the traditional smokescreen of bias, error and misunderstanding emitted by francophils, xenophobes and Cidolaters. The paramount need is to clarify the obscure origins of the conjunctio under Fernando el Magno, despite the fragmentary and dispersed character of the documentation; here we must lament that Alfonso Sánchez Candeira's death deprived us of his projected edition of the Fernandine reales privilegios as well as of a badly needed comprehensive treatise on this crucial reign. Nevertheless, tentative as conclusions may be at many points, the attempt must be made.

From the Cluniac angle, it is the story of the first Burgundian penetration beyond Catalonia and the domains of Sancho el Mayor into the broad territories of the Leonese Empire, stretching all the way from the Tierra de Campos and the originally Leonese Reichsland of the Rioja to Galicia and Portugal, the future heartland of the Burgundian establishment in medieval Iberia. A fateful step, since Cluny's material prosperity, through alliance with the Leonese imperialism of Fernando I and his heirs, thus became linked to the fortunes of the southward frontier advance of the Reconquest and to the unstable system of the parias, the annual stipendiary tribute payments in gold coin which were exacted from the Taifa princes of al-Andalus in the decades before and just after the North African Almoravid irruption into Spain.

On the other hand, for Spanish history, it is the forging of a trans-Pyrenean connection that for a hundred years after the battle of Atapuerca in 1054 functions as an integral element in Navarro-Basque Grosse Politik: the attempted unification under imperial Leonese hegemony of a Hispanic confederation which was intended to include the Leonese lands, the old realm of Sancho el Mayor in Navarre, Aragon and Castile, and the affluent principalities of the Taifas. It is the question, finally, whether we should recognize a subjection to Cluny, commencing with Fernando I, of the Leonese-Castilian [3] state paralleling Aragon's acceptance of papal suzerainty under Sancho Ramírez from 1068.
 
 

To understand the originality of Fernando I's relations with Cluny it is imperative first to define as precisely as possible the nature and true limits of the policy followed towards the abbey by his father Sancho el Mayor and royal brothers Garcia of Navarre and Ramiro I of Aragon. At present this is made difficult by the defects of the standard accounts.⁽¹⁵⁾ These tend to exaggerate grossly the extent of Cluniac reformist influence upon Navarro-Aragonese-Castilian monasticism, and even while acknowledging that el Mayor did not actually turn over a single peninsular house for conversion into a Burgundian priory, often assume that certain communities -- notably San Juan de la Peña but also others like San Salvador de Leire or San Salvador de Oña -- became permanent centers of Cluniac spirituality in continuing contact with the mother abbey. They commonly fail, with the partial exception of Pérez de Urbel, to relate Sancho's use of the Burgundian monks to his attempted re-structuring of cathedral churches around chapters of monks or regular canons under abbot-bishops, a pattern adopted more directly from Catalonia than from the usually cited Southern French precedents. Again, they uncritically accept a documentation which scholars increasingly attack as false, interpolated or misinterpreted; Pérez de Urbel now rejects the famous real privilegio of 1033, long regarded as proving that el Mayor established Oña as a Cluniac outpost in Castile, and Durán Gudiol fiercely (but surely captiously) discards Peña as the original Aragonese base. ⁽¹⁶⁾ And the whole picture of Hispano-Cluniac beginnings under Sancho has often been thoroughly distorted by identifying Cluny as the spearhead of papal intervention in Spain, by confusing its deeply monastic and strongly conservative, royalist and pro-feudal outlook with the doctrines of the Gregorian Reform, or by depicting it as a hotbed of exalted propaganda for an international crusade against Spanish Islam. ⁽¹⁷⁾

The truth, if we may attempt to summarize it rapidly, is quite different. What we encounter in Sancho el Mayor's domains between1020 and 1035 is deliberate royal acceleration of ecclesiastical reforms of a type already long familiar in Catalonia; on the monastic side these included a post-Carolingian Benedictinism, as regards customs and spirituality, of perceptible but neither total nor necessarily direct Cluniac inspiration. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Seeking to strengthen his kingdom's religious links with the more fully developed Catalan East, and doubtless guided in this by his friendship with the great Oliba, abbot of Cuixá and Ripoll and bishop of Vich (and with Oliba's able disciple and envoy to Navarre, Abbot Poncio of San Saturnine de Tabèrnoles), the Navarrese monarch turned to Cluny ca. 1025 and persuaded Abbot Odilo to send certain of his monks to Spain. ⁽¹⁹⁾ These were clearly few in number, under the leadership of one Paternus, and of the class Radulfus Glaber calls Hispani, i.e., Catalans or other Eastern Spaniards who had become familiar, through long residence at [4] Cluny, with Burgundian observances. ⁽²⁰⁾ This little band, established at San Juan de la Peña where Paternus becomes abbot, undoubtedly influenced this house but whether, as so often claimed, this influence extended beyond Peña to Oña or to the great houses of the then Navarrese Rioja such as Leire, San Martín de Albelda, San Millán de la Cogolla and San Sebastián (later Santo Domingo) de Silos, is at present quite uncertain. At best only a few large royal abbeys are likely to have been involved; none of these were actually ceded to the alien reformers; and no signs appear of hostility towards royal, aristocratic or episcopal appropriation of monasteries or towards episcopal jurisdiction over monks under the formulas of Chalcedon and the Fourth Toletan Council.

In this context, Sancho el Mayor's direct relations with Abbot Odilo, conducted through exchange of letters, embassies and munificent royal benefactions, tend to center above all about the Spanish sovereign's personal ties with the abbot and about his entry as a lay member into the ranks of the Burgundian congregation -- in Odilo's own technical phraseology, as a socius and familiaris. ⁽²¹⁾ Such confraternal affiliation with the foremost European center of monastic piety and intercessional prayer assured el Mayor of participation in the spiritual merits of the monks and in their daily liturgical supplications for all the abbey's socii, in life and death, and of perpetual commemoration of his obit. It is this precious spiritual privilege as much as, or perhaps even more than, his reformist and 'Europeanizing' aims, that explains Sancho's gifts to Cluny. That these royal charities -- described by Jotsaldus in his Vita s. Odilonis as beneficia et copiosa munera ⁽²²⁾ -- were substantial is patent; but they must be seen as purely occasional benefactions, bestowed from time to time at the monarch's pleasure, and thus unlike the later annual census of his son Fernando or even the pretiosa munera which, according to Adhemar of Chabannes, Sancho exchanged every year with Duke William of Aquitaine. ⁽²³⁾ The munera to Cluny included at least one gift of silver from the king's share of the spoils of the Gascon-Catalan expedition (in which Sancho took no known part) against the Taifa king al-Mujahid of Denia and Mallorca, perhaps ca. 1025-1030.⁽²⁴⁾ For we hear of silver being sent by el Mayor to Cluny in the custody of Bishop Sancho of Pamplona, and there being divided by Odilo between alms for the poor and funds for constructing a ciborium over the high altar of the abbey-church.⁽²⁵⁾

The gift of Muslim spoils does not however establish, as some have thought, the collaboration of Navarrese monarch and Burgundian abbot in a deliberate campaign to advance the Reconquista in the guise of holy war, nor does it prove that enlistment of Cluniac support in propaganda and recruitment of warriors was a central motif of the friendship. Whatever the precise significance of Radulfus Glaber's celebrated passages depicting Catalan monks in arms against the Moors or citing the vow of Count Sancho Guillermo of Gascony and his warriors to bestow upon Cluny the spoils of their hoped-for victory over al-Mujahid, ⁽²⁶⁾ these exceptional occasions cannot be taken to prove Sancho himself an active crusader or Cluny his collaborator in war against the infidel. El Mayor indeed throughout his long reign shows surprisingly little interest in the characteristically Catalan [5] and Leonese ideal of the Reconquista; his powerful military efforts rather were directed towards enhancing his power in Southern France, in the Pyrenees beyond Aragon, and to the West in Castile and Leon. In Sánchez Albornoz' apt phrase, he was conducting not "una guerra 'divinal' sino una política 'feudal'". ⁽²⁷⁾ As for the abbey's alleged championship of a Spanish crusade, here again extreme caution, if not skepticism, is in order. Eleventh-century Cluny was renowned for its ascetic sanctity and as the peerless center of intercessional prayer, so that the propriety of enriching Saint Peter's monks out of the spoils of the Egyptians offers the most natural explanation for the bestowal of Muslim booty by the pious royal socius.

If Sancho's bond with the Cluniacs thus appears primarily personal and pietistic as much as reformist, are we to believe that he envisaged the relationship as continuing after his death and even bound his heirs to maintain it? Many scholars answer this question in the affirmative and indeed employ the hypothesis of an inherited familial friendship between the Navarro-Basque dynasty and the abbey to explain the whole future course of Hispano-Cluniac history; and in this they would seem to have on their side Abbot Odilo himself, who speaks in his extant letter to King Garcia of Navarre of Sancho's indissolubilis familiaritas et societas . ⁽²⁸⁾ Yet if we turn to the reigns of el Mayor's sons and successors, precisely the opposite conclusion emerges. For Gonzalo in Sobrarbe and Ribagorza nothing can be discovered in this connection; he disappears too rapidly, perhaps in1037, possibly -- if we follow Ubieto Arteta - -not until 1043, when his two counties are annexed to Aragon. ⁽²⁹⁾ For Ramiro I in Aragon and Garcia el de Najera in Navarre, we have the well-known epistles of Odilo, one addressed to Paternus in Aragon, the other directly to the king of Navarre.⁽³⁰⁾ Both texts are frequently cited as proof of how faithfully Sancho's sons maintained the paternal sentiments towards Cluny, but their content fails to support this interpretation; furthermore, although the pair manifestly fall between Sancho's death in January 1035 and that of Odilo in December 1048, and contain allusions to contemporary events, their chronology has never been fixed with any precision. Analysis of these two epistles is therefore desirable.

The letter to Paternus can be accepted as the earlier of the two. This is partly by reason of its historical content, partly because the abbot of Cluny might be expected to look first to Aragon, where San Juan de la Peña was the principal if not sole Burgundian base under el Mayor, even though García of Navarre, as the eldest son and head of the family, might seem to merit prior attention. ⁽³¹⁾ The epistle divides naturally into two sections. In the second portion Odilo requests Paternus, obviously not then residing at Peña, to escort to that monastery certain messengers sent to Spain by himself and the former bishop of Pamplona, Sancho; the latter, we know, had been living at Cluny since 1025-1027.⁽³²⁾ These messengers were to bring back from Peña to Burgundy liturgical vessels and silver money which the bishop had stored in the Aragonese abbey; it is stated that this money is to be used for completion of an altar at Cluny memorializing the two Sanchos, king and bishop, who were its donors. In contrast, in the letter's initial section, roughly two-thirds of the text, manifests a quite different purpose. Here Odilo expresses deep concern [6] -- which he evidently intends Paternus to convey to King Ramiro -- over the grave political and military perils threatening the son of Sancho el Mayor. He declares that he is praying night and day for the restoration of peace among the warring brothers but especially for Ramiro's welfare, having learned from Bishop Sancho of the monarch's benevolence, uprightness and - -so flattering a compliment to a bastard! -- likeness in character to his father. So mindful is the abbot of the binding him to Ramiro's familiaritas and fidelitas , that he has ordered all his monks to pray daily for his safety from enemies, and to recite on his behalf at matins the psalm Quid multiplicamini Domine and at the other canonical hours the psalm Leuaui oculos meos. ⁽³³⁾

These lines, full of nostalgic references to the deceased el Mayor, must have been composed when Cluny's Hispanic focus was still, as under Sancho, upon Aragon; even the one-time bishop of Pamplona still houses his wealth at Peña and eulogizes to the abbot not his own king but the ruler of Jaca. Together with the allusion to menacing danger ab incursione paganorum et a persecutione falsorum Christianorum , the prayers for divine protection against enemies, and the choice of psalms in the same vein, this points to a date not long before the battle of Tafalla in 1043, when Garcia and Fernando were to inflict a severe defeat upon their eastern half-brother. ⁽³⁴⁾ It is to be observed that while Odilo favors Ramiro's cause in the approaching crisis and places his abbey publicly on record to this effect, he does not possess a direct line of communication with the king, for knowledge of whose qualities he depends upon the Pamplonese prelate. Ramiro can be styled conventionally carissimus noster but not, like his father, socius or even benefactor. No less manifestly the prayers for Ramiro, of extraordinary character and not those normal for a familiaris , have been instituted motu proprio by the abbot, not in response to petition from Jaca. In short, the whole letter attests that Odilo, eager as he was to cultivate Ramiro's friendship, could appeal only to his father's example, not to any existing bond of paternal compulsion or personal affection; so far from proving, as Pérez de Urbel believes, that at Cluny Ramiro "el perjuro, el adúltero, el hombre que se unía a los moros para combatir a sus hermanos" passed as "el tipo perfecto de monarca", it actually reveals Ramiro himself without a connection with the Cluniacs: what we have on the abbot's part is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. ⁽³⁵⁾

With this conclusion Aragonese history stands in complete agreement.⁽³⁶⁾ The revealing departure of Abbot Paternus from San Juan dela Peña, as attested by Odilo's epistle, finds confirmation in the appearance there, as early as 1036, of an almost certainly non-Cluniac abbot, Blasco. ⁽³⁷⁾ The Peña diplomas of this epoch, like those of San Victorián, Loarre and Montearagón, fail to display Cluniac traces in content or subscriptions; and the same is true of the reales privilegios contained in Ibarra's collection for the reign as a whole.⁽³⁸⁾ If it were possible to accept as authentic Ramiro's supposed charter of 1044 to San Victorián, where he allegedly introduces Benedictine reformers headed by an abbot "Johannes de Campania"; and if, contrary to the usual ascription of this obscure figure to the [7] Italian Campagna, he could be associated with the County of Champagne in France, it might be possible to suspect French influence of some kind. But this dubious pergamino hardly justifies any such inference. ⁽³⁹⁾ The fact is that throughout Hispano-Cluniac history the Burgundian abbey never comes to possess a single dependency in all Aragon, or receives a royal donation of patrimonies, although Ramiro's grandson, Pedro I (1094-1104) must have been generous to the Cluniacs since they came to offer daily prayer for him in their Masses.⁽⁴⁰⁾

Odilo's other Hispanic epistle, that to King Garcia of Najera, discloses a similar situation in Navarre. This text, obviously initiating, not continuing, a correspondence, is addressed to the monarch himself. The abbot first expresses pleasure over the reports reaching him of García's triumphs and growing fame and power; he assures him of Cluny's devoted friendship deriving from the indissoluble bonds of his father's familiaritas and societas; and three times wishes him success in war over all foes, an end to which both he and his monks are directing their prayers.⁽⁴¹⁾ Lastly and, as he says, non sine rubore, Odilo asks Garcia, out of his sublimis munificentia, to relieve the abbey from the suffering caused in Burgundy by a severe famine of over two years' duration. Radulfus Glaber's Historiae notices a major Burgundian famine lasting through 1045 and 1046, the first such calamity the chronicler records after 1033, which can safely be taken as the one that in its second year drove the abbot of Cluny to press García for Spanish financial aid. ⁽⁴²⁾ The date 1046 accords with the reference to García's expanding potestas, three years after his victory at Tafalla and one year after his capture of the Muslim Riojan stronghold of Calahorra, an event that might well have stirred hopes of charity across the Pyrenees. ⁽⁴³⁾ Odilo makes no allusion to specifically infidel enemies, and his wishes for royal success point to a date when war was still in progress; but we shall not be far wrong if we assign this letter to 1045-1046. On this basis we can deduce that Odilo, having made no progress in his overtures to Ramiro, looked after Tafalla to the brightly gleaming star of the Pamplonese sovereign, Sancho el Mayor's successful heir and true dynastic chief. Perhaps the abbatial rubor is merely conventional decorum; but in view of Cluny's earlier prayers for Ramiro I against his Muslim and Christian antagonists -- García was, after all, one of the latter -- Odilo may have felt a certain embarrassment that finds further expression in the heavily fulsome tone of the letter as a whole.

Whether or not the appeal to García was favorably received at the time,⁽⁴⁴⁾ what is pertinent is that, about a decade after his father's death, no bond of previous friendship or benevolence, no confraternal attachment, existed between the Navarrese king and the Cluniacs; the call for help rests solely on the example set by Sancho, one not yet emulated by his son. Once again, as in the Aragonese case, subsequent literary and diplomatic evidence shows a pattern of Navarrese indifference towards the Burgundian congregation, whether above the Ebro around Pamplona or in García's favored region of the Rioja. Despite frequent statements to the contrary, the monarch's extravagantly endowed new monastic foundation in 1052 of Santa María de Nájera has no Cluniac connection until in 1079, after his conquest the Rioja, Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile cedes the abbey to Cluny. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ [8] In the dynastic crisis of 1054, leading to civil war between García and his brother Fernando of Castile and the climactic battle of Atapuerca, neither the king of Pamplona nor the two sainted Benedictine abbots who sought to avert the tragedy -- Iñigo of Oña, Domingo of Silos -- turned to Cluny as peacemaker. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

This leaves us with Fernando I, by his father's will king of Castile and from 1037 conqueror of Leon, who was to become the most powerful, most affluent, historically the most significant of the sons of Sancho el Mayor. Surely, he at least dutifully continued the paternal ties of amity and charity, as witness his generous concession to the Burgundian monks of the famous annual census of a thousand gold pieces? Here, however, the crucial problems are whether he did so on the basis of his father's precedent, and at what point in his reign this friendship commences. Current opinion answers the first of these questions in the affirmative, and generally holds that the policy dates from the very beginning of Fernando's rule. Pérez de Urbel, for example, posits a kind of simultaneous circular appeal by Odilo to all the sons soon after el Mayor's death, but thinks that in Fernando's case the epistle has been lost. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ The two extant letters, as we have seen, must have been written seriatim in ca. 1042 and ca. 1045-1046; and while a possible lost message to Fernando cannot altogether be ruled out, both its loss and its timing remain purely speculative as far as actual succor is concerned, Fernando could not have given Cluny the census in these earlier years, since it is not until after 1055, as we shall demonstrate below, that he possessed a regular revenue in tributary dinars from vassal Taifa states that would permit him to confer so large an annual stipend upon a foreign monastic community.

Equally inadmissible is the argument that San Zoil de Carrión de los Condes was a Cluniac house when in 1047 Count Gómez Diaz of Carrión and Saldaña ceded it his monasterio propio of San Facundo de Arconada. ⁽⁴⁸⁾ The Arconada charter, which Pérez de Urbel and others cite in support of this thesis,⁽⁴⁹⁾ is known only through a copy of the late 12th or 13th century, ⁽⁵⁰⁾ and its reference to Cluny is a palpable interpolation, since San Zoil, as its donation acts prove, did not pass into Burgundian hands before the years 1076 and 1077 in the reign of Alfonso VI. ⁽⁵¹⁾ No doubt the altered text we have dates from a time when the monks of Carrión were hard pressed to defend their patrimonies against lay and episcopal encroachment.

But the real test for Fernando's first twenty years, between 1045 and 1054, when he was ruling primarily as a Castilian successor of his father, is the monastic documentation of the Burgalese comarca. The relatively full published diplomatic collections of the Castilian monasteries of this period, including Oña, preserve no trace of the activities or even of the presence of Cluniacs in the kingdom, a silence presaging the very limited success Cluny was ever to achieve there, even with the support of Alfonso VI and his successors. ⁽⁵²⁾

To conclude, then, Sancho el Mayor's confraternal, reformist and benefactorial ties with Cluny were not continued by his sons in any of the three kingdoms carved in 1035 from the great Navarrese state; ⁽⁵³⁾ and this is as true of Fernando I in his first decades as of his Navarrese and Aragonese compeers. This means that the abbey's true, [9] historic entry into 11th-century Spain must have occurred not by way of Sancho's much trumpeted but clearly ephemeral experiment, but rather through passage directly from France into the westernmost Iberian state, the kingdom of Leon, over which el Mayor had at best a very brief and partial control at the very end of his life, but which came to be the center of Hispano-Cluniac expansion, to explain Cluny's advent and the belated conversion of Fernando I in to a powerful and generous ally of the Burgundian abbey, we must therefore look not to Pamplona or even to San Juan de la Peña, but to Leon and to the Franco-Catalan influences that by the middle of the century were penetrating Leonese society and preparing for the Cluniacs the hospitable reception they failed to receive in Aragon, Navarre or Castile.
 
 

Here we must discard, at least for ecclesiastical history, the currently popular practice of attributing to 'progressive' Castile a monopoly of innovation and creativity in Western Iberia as against an allegedly ultra-conservative Gothicist Leon.⁽⁵⁴⁾ There are good grounds for believing that, far more than particularist Castile, imperial Leon responded to those new Europeanizing forces from Catalonia and Southern France which can be seen in Sancho el Mayor's renewal of the Navarrese Church, and which came to play a comparable role in the Leonese lands well before the establishment of ties with the Gregorian Papacy. These forces can be discerned in at least four different quarters: (i) the diffusion of the cult of the martyr-saint Antoninus, commonly known hispanice as San Antolin; (ii) the Catalan ecclesiastical [10] centers in the Tierra de Campos at Palencia and San Isidrode Dueñas; (iii) the Europeanizing faction at the Leonese court; and (iv) the Queen-Empress Sancha, consort of Fernando I.

(i) The Cult of San Antolín in 11th-century Spain. The neglected story of the propagation below the Pyrenees of this Southern French devotion merits examination here for both its peculiar regional pattern and its connection with families later prominent in the Leonese reception of Cluny.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Whatever the precise link between the fourth-century martyr of Apamea in Syria and the relics of the Saint Antoninus preserved from the 9th century in the abbey of Fredèlas, to the south of Toulouse -- the site which by the 12th century was known as Pamiers and in 1295-1296 became the seat of a bishopric -- it is certain from Adhemar of Chabannes that by ca. 1010-1015 the cult center had entered a phase of great celebrity, with numerous miracles and throngs of pilgrims.⁽⁵⁶⁾ If we can trust the citation by Moret and Pulgar of a charter of Sancho II Abarca of 968, a church of San Antonino de Aclunate existed in Navarre before the end of the 10^th century. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ There can however be little doubt that the effective implanatation of the cult in Spain commences in the reign of Sancho el Mayor and shows very marked regional diversity.

Few if any traces survive from the Catalan counties, despite the activity of the Urgellian abbot-bishop Poncio, a strong partisan of el Mayor, who can be found at the Leonese court ca. 1023/1025-1025/1028, served as bishop of Oviedo, and directed the restoration in1034-1035 of the church of Palencia where San Antolín became a patron. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ Poncio's old abbey of San Saturnine de Tabèrnoles, although readily accessible to Pamiers and in visible contact with nearby Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, displays no known interest in the cult, nor do the Seo d'Urgel, Ripoll or other ecclesiastical centers in Urgel, so far as I can discover from published sources.⁽⁵⁹⁾ As for eastern Catalonia, although the Count Roger the Young of Foix who ca. 1060 tried to give Cluny the abbey at Frèdelas was the brother of the Countess Ermesinda who married Ramón Berenguer I, and of Bishop Pedro of Gerona, no traces of mid-eleventh-century observance of the devotion to San Antolín have yet been found at Barcelona, Gerona or Vich. ⁽⁶⁰⁾

So too for Aragon and Castile dedications of churches or monasteries to the saint, or other symptoms of familiarity, are lacking.⁽⁶¹⁾ As for Navarre, aside from the church of 968 just cited, the evidence is exclusively liturgical and confined to the Rioja. The Feast of San Antolín was completely unknown to the traditional Hispanic sanctorale, so that the chronology of its introduction into peninsular liturgical calendars is revealing, although, since this coincides with the advent of numerous other Gallican and Roman saints moving across the Pyrenees, it throws more light on official acceptance than on popular interest. ⁽⁶²⁾ Of the nine extant Hispanic calendars, which have been carefully studied by Vives and Fábrega, two from the Rioja provide for celebration of San Antolín's anniversary on 2 September. The first of these (I de Silos; S4; Vives-Fábrega, no. 4) may go back to the late 10th century but on one folio the manuscript bears the date 1039; in any case the text contains numerous interpolations of [11] the 11th century. ⁽⁶³⁾ The other calendar (II de Silos; S3; Vives-Fábrega, no. 5) comes from the magnificent codex of the Liber Ordinum that served Férotin as the basis of his classic edition; this manuscript was completed in 1052 at San Prudencio de Laturce, a dependency of San Martín de Albelda. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ On the other hand, the two Silos codices of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Vives-Fábrega, nos. 8-9), copied in the Rioja before 1067 and in 1072, respectively, do not list the Antoninian observance. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Thus by the middle of the 11th century, possibly as early as 1039 but certainly by 1052, the feast was being celebrated in the Rioja. Its limited popularity, however, is underscored by the absence of monasteries or churches under San Antolín's patronage from the hagiotoponymy of the diplomatic collections of San Millán de la Cogolla, San Martín de Albelda, San Salvador de Leire, Santa María de Nájera, Santo Domingo de Silos and other houses of the region.

In striking contrast with this sparse dissemination of the devotion all the way from Barcelona to Burgos are the abundant notices discoverable in the territories of the Leonese Empire. The earliest known case, the appearance of San Antolín on 17 February 1035 as titular in the restoration charter for the Church of Palencia promulgated by Vermudo III and Queen Jimena of Leon, will be discussed below. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ Three years later, on 30 August 1038 -- just three months after Fernando I's imperial coronation in the city of Leon -- we encounter a pergamino of the Countess Sancha Muñoz which informs us that this lady, having previously sent her vassal Rodrigo Galfídez to Aquitaine to procure relics of the martyr, was now placing these in her monasterio propio of San Antolín, founded on behalf of her husband's soul and located on the back of the River Esla near Coyanza, to the south of the Leonese capital. In addition, clearly as a fervent devotee of the cult, she bestows upon the house jewelry, Moorish slaves, and three villas (Castro Gonzalo, Fontes de Rupero, and Villaseca) which Alfonso V had once given her husband. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ The same year saw an even more exalted figure, the Leonese Infanta Sancha, daughter of Vermudo II and sister of Alfonso V, appear in some sort of association with the abbey of San Antolín de Fingoy, in the diocese of Lugo.⁽⁶⁸⁾ A monastery of San Antolín de Toques also existed in this district, although the history of this royal house cannot be documented before a donation act of 1067 of the ill-fated King García of Galicia. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ Still another Gallegan abbey, San Antonino or San Antolín de Baiñas, occurs in the diocese of Santiago, but nothing is known of its origin.⁽⁷⁰⁾

At some point between 1039 and 1045 the tide of popularity surged all the way to the County of Portugal, for on 13 October in the latter year the "ancilla Dei Eleuva cognomento Matre Du(l)ce" and her son Pelagio Vermudiz in a grant of properties to the abbey at Moure (north of Braga, in the concelho of Vila Verde) that came to be known as Santo Antonino de Barbudo, included the martyr of Pamiers among its patrons, whereas an earlier charter of 1039 mentions only Saints Bartholomew, Matthew, Stephen and Euphemia. ⁽⁷¹⁾ second Minhotan house of Santo Antonino is known to have existed near Guimaraes in the freguesia of Mesao Frio, but unfortunately cannot be dated.⁽⁷²⁾ During these same years the devotion also reached [12] the Vierzo, for in 1044 a certain Diego gives lands in the valley of the Bueza, a northern tributary of the Sil, to a monastery dedicated to the saint, San Antolín de Ribera.⁽⁷³⁾   In Asturias also in 1044 Count Piniolo Jimenez and his wife Aldonza, along with other monasteries and lands forming the endowment of their large new foundation of San Juande Corias, include an abbey of San Antolín de Villanueva. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ About the same time another Asturian magnate, Count Munio Rodríguez, appears in possession of the house of San Antolín de Bedón near Llanes.⁽⁷⁵⁾

There is also Leonese liturgical evidence of prime interest. The Calendar of Compostela (C; Vives-Fabrega, no. 6) contained in the celebrated Liber Diurnus or Diurno preserved at the University of Santiago, was copied in 1055. It is commonly said that the codex was written for King Fernando I but the scribe Peter declares he worked at the express order of Queen Sancha, and an inscription on fol. 6 makes it clear that the book was intended for the daily devotions of both sovereigns: "Fredinandi regis sum liber necnon et Sancia regina". Since this calendar provides for the celebration on 2 September of the feast "sce antonini", both D. Sancha and her husband must have been familiar with its observance. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ The so-called Calendario de Leon (L; Vives-Fábrega no. 7), often assigned to 1059 but basically of 10th-century origin with numerous interpolations of 1060, 1067-1058, etc., also commemorates "S. antonini martir" on 2 September.⁽⁷⁷⁾ Finally, there is the feast's inclusion in the missal of Mateus, which, David has shown, represents a manuscript tradition in four layers, commencing in the second half of the 10th or early 11^th century and acquiring various interpolations of French and Roman saints before it was ultimately copied ca. 1130-1150 by a scribe of the Church of Toledo and transmitted to the Church of Braga.⁽⁷⁸⁾

Thus, from the decade 1035-1045 on, churches and, above all, monasteries under the patronage of San Antolín, and commemoration of his anniversary, can be found all across the Leonese Empire from the Tierra de Campos and Asturias to Galicia and Portugal. ⁽⁷⁹⁾ These testimonies, for the most part capable of precise chronological assignment, can be supplemented by toponymic evidence from both Spain and Portugal of additional sites named for the martyr, the majority of which almost certainly date from this same epoch. Simply from such standard chorographical guides as those of Miñano, Kadoz, the Enciclopedia Universal , the official Spanish Nomenclátor, the recent Diccionario geográfico de España and, for Portugal, Castro's Dicioñario corogáfico, ⁽⁸⁰⁾ it is possible to assemble some two dozen entries, including villas, aldeas, barrios, despoblados, and the like. These place names, if classified according to modern province, yield the following statistics: Lerida, 1; Vizcaya, 3; Oviedo, 8; Lugo, 6; La Coruña, 1; Pontevedra, 2; Orense, 1; Minho, 3; Estremadura, 1; Ribatejo, 1. ⁽⁸¹⁾ The distribution pattern here emphasizes Asturias (8), Galicia (10), and Northern Portugal (3); omits Leon and the Tierra de Campos altogether; and, except for San Antolí de Vilanova near Cervera, offers nothing for Catalonia, or Navarre, Aragon, Castile -- the old territories of Sancho el Mayor. Obviously not too much should be made of haphazard toponymic survivals, but the Asturian and Gallegan concentration at least coincides with the impression gained from the charters of 1035-1045 of local enthusiasm for [13] the cult.

There are then good grounds for believing that from at least 1035 a wave of enthusiasm for the Antoninian devotion swept through the upper classes of the Leonese Empire, affecting religious life on ecclesiastical and aristocratic levels. But did this movement reach Fernando I's kingdom through the work of Cluniac evangelists, as Serrano holds? ⁽⁸²⁾ There is little reason to think so. The Cluniac literary works and cartularies of this era reflect no concern whatever for the Apamean martyr, with one exception, the charter of Count Roger of Foix giving the abbey the locum Sancti Antonini.⁽⁸³⁾ This act, however, the circumstances and motivation of which are obscure, and which perhaps belongs ca. 1060, must never have come into effect, for nothing in the subsequent history of the cult center attaches it to Cluny nor does its name again appear in the Cluniac cartularies. Especially conclusive for Spain is the lack of any mention of San Antolín in the entire corpus of Hispano-Cluniac pergaminos so far discovered; nor do any of the peninsular monasteries under his patronage ever turn up as Burgundian priories or sub-priories.

The Antoninian diffusion, in short, is thus not itself a Cluniac phenomenon; but its value is great as proof of Leon's spiritual connection with France by at least the first decade of Fernando I, and as a guide to the geographical and social lines along which this penetration operated. Pérez de Urbel and others believe the cult spread westward by way of Navarre, commencing with Sancho el Mayor's restoration of Palencia in late 1034 or January 1035 and his deposit there of major relics brought from France; and this can be reconciled with the story Rodericus Toledanus tells of the king's discovering, while out hunting, a ruined chapel with an altar to San Antolín on the site of the future cathedral. ⁽⁸⁴⁾ Alternatively, it can be argued that Poncio of Tabernoles, el Mayor's agent in the Palencian restoration, first established the new foreign devotion at that see, whence it spread to other parts of Spain. ⁽⁸⁵⁾ To both these hypotheses there are formidable objections. Nowhere else in his privilegios does el Mayor disclose any interest in San Antolín; together with the paucity of Navarrese testimonies as observed above, this makes it difficult to understand why he should take the unusual step of associating a minor Southern French titular with the customary dedication of a cathedral church to the Virgin. Poncio's responsibility seems more plausible, but counter-indicated by the negative evidence of his Catalan background. To be sure, the concentration of Antoninian entitlatures and place names in Asturias might be ascribed to his influence but there are no signs of this at Oviedo. The Vizcayan and Gallegan sites however, make it more natural to deduce general Southern French line of penetration affecting all northwestern  Iberia even if we follow Lacarra in rejecting Menéndez Pidal's notion that, before the reorientation to the Rioja by Sancho el Mayor of the Compostelan route, trans-Pyrenean pilgrams journeyed across Asturias by way of Irún and per deuia Alauae. ⁽⁸⁶⁾

More attention needs to be paid in this matter to the difference between the patronal dedications of the Church of Palencia in the two reales privilegos restoring that see. That of el Mayor, bearing the date 21 January 1035 and despite certain interpolations manifestly [14] preserving the original list of patrons, names in conventional fashion the Trinity and the Virgin. ⁽⁸⁷⁾ Vermudo III's shorter, uninterpolated diploma of 17 February 1035, alters the dedication to include the martyr of Frédelas-Pamiers: "in hunc locum prenominatum sancti Saluatoris seu sancte Marie atque sancti Antonini martyris".⁽⁸⁸⁾ Poncio appears in both charters; we cannot tell whether, in the second case, this means reconciliation with Vermudo III or simply conventional notice of his undoubted services in organizing the diocese under the former regime. Certainly more is involved than an arrival of relics in the short interval between the two diplomas, for the Palencian Church celebrated the translation on 18 May;⁽⁸⁹⁾ and the Leonese king-emperor could have secured a major portion of the saint's body for the new cathedral as readily as Sancho, since, as Rodrigo Galíndez' mission proves, the monks of Frédelas were willing to share their treasure with petitioners from Leon.

Here we have to reckon with the political as well as specifically religious factors affecting the reconstruction of the Palencian bishopric, a subject we shall more closely examine below. The point is, that Sancho el Mayor's ecclesiastical policy in the Tierra de Campos was designed to complement his secular purpose of subtracting this entire region from Leon by removing it from the authority of the bishop of León. The ambitious Navarrese monarch had seized the Campos in 1029-1030; ostensibly legitimized his conquest by marrying his son Fernando to the Leonese Infanta Sancha, for whom the region served as dowry; and intended Palencia's restoration to tighten the bonds with Castile and the Navarrese state. ⁽⁹⁰⁾ When, following el Mayor's sudden demise in early 1035, Vermudo III unexpectedly recovered the Campos and reincorporated them into Leon, he must have been tempted to abandon altogether his enemy's plans for Palencia, which the Leonese real privilegio significantly describes as in suburbio Legionensi . What he did in fact was to accept the new bishopric, with its Catalan prelate Bernard I and Catalan canons, but he faced it about towards Leon, and sought to assure this Leonese orientation by linking the church to the cult then becoming so popular in the Leonese lands in contrast with Castile or Navarre. Such a conclusion implies that, even before the earliest extra-Campestrian-notices of 1038 and after, the devotion was already fashionable at the Leonese court. But this deduction is far more strongly indicated than the usual assumption that the cult would have spread all the way to Portugal by 1044 after Leon's most dreaded enemy introduced it at Palencia in 1035.

To conclude this part of our inquiry: by 1035, and probably at least a decade before, there already existed an effective channel for the transmission of the new religious currents moving from Southern France across the Pyrenees directly into Leon, without the mediation of Castile, Navarre or Aragon, a channel that could in time serve to bring reports of Cluny's sanctity to the Leonese court and prepare the way for the first Cluniacs to reach the western sectors of the kingdom of Fernando I.
 

(ii) Palencia and Dueñas: Catalan Ecclesiastical Outposts in the Tierra de Campos. A second Leonese line of connection with religious [15] revival in the first half of the eleventh century, this time running from Catalonia, can be found in the strategic borderland lying between the two kingdoms of Leon and Castile, the Campi Gothorum or Campi Gothici, the modern Tierra de Campos. ⁽⁹¹⁾ This fertile region of grain and pasture lands between the rivers Cea and Pisuerga, comprising today much of the provinces of Palencia and Valladolid, was destined to become the true center of all Cluny's trans-Pyrenean expansion. Here in 1072 Alfonso VI gave the Burgundians their first genuine peninsular dependency, the house of San Isidro de Dueñas, and subsequently Santiago de Astudillo and San Juan de Hérmedes de Cerrato (to say nothing of his attempted transfer of the venerable abbey of Sahagún); here lay the great monasterio propio of San Zoil de Carrión de los Condes ceded in 1076-1077 by Countess Teresa and the Beni Gómez; here also, as priories and patrimonies multiplied in the late 11th and 12th centuries, Cluny located the headquarters of her chamberlain sent to govern the vast province of Hispania that stretched from the Rioja to the Luso-Gallegan West. ⁽⁹²⁾ This concentration in the Cea-Pisuerga mesopotamia requires to be seen, moreover, as far more than the result of a random selection of Dueñas to be Cluny's initial monastic acquisition, or of the region's undoubted attraction to foreign monks, with its 'European' countryside of flourishing peasant villages, cereal agriculture, viticulture and livestock economy. There are distinct signs that the Alfonsine choice of San Isidro was no accident and that, under Fernando I and probably even earlier, circumstances were preparing the Campos zone for the central place it would retain throughout most of Hispano-Cluniac history.

This whole subject is inseparable from the peculiar political and military position the ancient Campi Gothorum had come, by the10th century, to occupy as a strategic and economically desirable frontier zone between Leon and Castile.⁽⁹³⁾ It was Alfonso III el Magno (866-910) who first colonized on a major scale this long-empty despoblado north of the Duero, bringing in nobles, peasants, townsmen, clerics, monks and Mozarabs to create a population firmly attached in loyalty and civilization to the Leonese throne. ⁽⁹⁴⁾ Later in the century, however, the rise of the Counts of Castile and their repeated attempts, through war, marriage, intrigue, and subornation of the local aristocracy, to wrest the area from Leon and extend their western boundary to the Cea, converted the Campos into a strife-torn land of interstate conflict. During Alfonso V's minority, Count Sancho García succeeded ca. 1010 in annexing the area;⁽⁹⁵⁾ but by 1018, when Castile in turn was under a regency for the young Infante García, Alfonso expelled the Castilians and re-established Leonese control all the way to the Pisuerga.⁽⁹⁶⁾ It is after Alfonso's death in 1028 that we hear of the scheme, celebrated in the Castilian epopeya, to wed his sister Sancha to the Infante, with the Campos as her dowry, the scheme that foundered with the hapless García's murder in the city of Leon on 13 May 1029 at the hands of members of the Navarrese Party in Leon.⁽⁹⁷⁾ Then in 1029-1030 the ambitious Sancho el Mayor of Navarre, presenting himself as the heir of the Castilian comitalline, took over not only all Castile but the Cea-Pisuerga mesopotamia as well. ⁽⁹⁸⁾ The marriage of Sancho's son Fernando to the Leonese Infanta [16] Sancha late in 1032, with the latter's dowry once again the now Navarrese-controlled Tierra de Campos, served to legitimize annexation of the borderland. ⁽⁹⁹⁾ As soon as el Mayor's death in January 1035 became known, however, Vermudo III of Leon speedily moved to recover the lost territory, but two years later, at Tamarón, Fernando I's victory over the Leonese and extension of his rule over the western kingdom closes the military but clearly not the cultural struggle.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ It is noteworthy that in the partition of his domains, which Fernando proclaimed in December 1064 or January 1065, the king revealed his by then heavily Leonese predilections in assigning the Campos not to Sancho el Fuerte, his intended successor in Castile, but to Alfonso VI, along with all Leon and the imperial title.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Thus under Alfonso, Urraca and Alfonso VII the land remains officially Leonese, with far-reaching consequences for Cluny's success in western Iberia. Not until the very end of Alfonso VII's reign, in 1157, will a new royal partition of the Leonese-Castilian state assign the Tierra de Campos to the eastern kingdom and give much of the region its henceforth permanently Castilian alignment and character.⁽¹⁰²⁾

For the background of Cluniac penetration into Leon, the continuing repoblación of the Tierra de Campos in the middle decades of the 11th century is vital. At this time, when Leonese-Castilian and Leonese-Navarrese conflicts were at their height, both sides sought to strengthen their position by securing the support of the turbulent, politically unstable but in large part pro-Navarrese local aristocracy, and of the monasteries and churches; and by introducing new, presumably loyal, colonists, lay and religious, into the country-side ravaged by incessant raiding and chronic major invasion. Especially does this seem to be true of the half-dozen or so years before el Mayor's death, when the Navarrese monarch's settlement of Catalan and perhaps other immigrants from eastern Spain was designed to cement the Campos more firmly to Pamplonese domination. The largely unstudied lay aspects of this repoblación can be passed overhere; but in the realm of ecclesiastical colonization it is necessary to examine two centers, the cathedral Church of Palencia and the Benedictine abbey of San Isidro de Dueñas, that stand out as major agencies in the praeparatio Cluniacensis .

We have spoken of the royal Navarrese and Leonese revival of the Palencian see. In the orderly plan carried through at el Mayor's command by Poncio of Tabernoles, at the time a refugee from Oviedo, the boundaries of the new diocese are carefully demarcated; a bishop, Bernard, installed; and provision made for a chapter or canóniga of monk-canons.⁽¹⁰³⁾ It is evident from the names of the first and succeeding bishops, and from subscriptions of members of the cabildo indiplomas of the next few decades, that Poncio brought in Catalans -- men ab eois partibus , as Fernando I's real privilegio of 1059 declares; ⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ very likely they came from Urgel. An episcopal church in the hands of a monk-bishop, with a cabildo composed of monks living as regular canons, was a familiar enough element in the ecclesiastical reformation then in progress in Southern France and Catalonia, nor was this type of diocesan organization altogether unknown in the Leonese-Castilian Church. ⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ But to establish such a foundation at Palencia, with bishops and monks brought in from outside the kingdom who were [17] steeped in the new foreign spirituality and the use of the Roman Rite and other alien customs, was in effect revolutionary: it introduced into the native Church, in so central an area as the Tierra de Campos, a powerful outpost of anti-traditionalist sentiments, an enclave of Franco-Catalan reformism that can in perspective be seen as the forerunner of Alfonso VI's much touted ecclesiastical afrancesamiento. For Fernando I after Tamarón there was no reason whatever to alter Palencia's Catalan structure. In his reign all three bishops -- Bernardo or Bernat I (1034-1047), Miro or Mir (1047-1062), and Bernardo or Bernat II (1062- ca. 1085)--are Catalans; ⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ and the last of these, who in one pergamino suggests his full name may have been Ramón Bernat, seems to have cherished the hope -- years before Alfonso VI's conquest of Toledo and installation there in 1086 of the Cluniac Bernard of Sedirac -- of making Palencia the metropolitical capital of the Leonese-Castilian Church.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾

A similar Catalan pattern is indicated for the royal monastery of San Isidro de Dueñas, located south of Palencia at the confluence of the Carrión with the Pisuerga. This was an Old Leonese house of much the same origin and tradition as the better known Sahagún, both communities tracing their foundation to Alfonso III's monastic colonization of the Tierra de Campos at the beginning of the 10 ^th century. San Isidro benefited greatly from the generosity of the kings of Leon and the nobles of what became the Beni Gómez clan, but like the area in general seems to have suffered severely from the Castilian-Leonese warfare. The surviving excerpts from its lost Becerro show it being pulled away from its old moorings towards the last Castilian counts and eventually Sancho el Mayor. As far as Sancho is concerned, his attention to Dueñas dates from his annexation of the Campos in 1029-1030, for we find him giving the abbey the church of San Pedro de Avellano, perhaps in 1031, ⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ and again in1033 the church of San Miguel de Baltanás and other properties.⁽¹¹⁰⁾ What is particularly suggestive is that both these real privilegios name San Isidro's abbot as Durandus, i.e., the Catalan Durán, which points to a Catalanization of the community, very possibly through replacement of its Leonese monks by Catalans some years before the installation of the Catalan canons at Palencia. Furthermore, a diploma of 1053 by which the priest Endura and his wife María at Fernando I's express order gave San Isidro "nostra domo sancti Andreeque est juxta sancti Pela(g)ii martiris in Ualle de Muliere Mortua", contains various confirmants with foreign names: the priest Ricolfus (a name common enough in Catalonia but rare in the West); a mysterious Guillelmus abba(s), not the head of Dueñas, who in this year was named John; a layman Petro Roger, and possibly others. ⁽¹¹¹⁾ Whether or not the introduction of Eastern monks under Sancho el Mayor should be accredited to Poncio of Tabèrnoles, we cannot say, but the probability that the reputation, if not the actual customs, of Cluny was known in this monastery of the Campos is very strong.

We may well be justified in going further and positing a more tangible relation with Cluny, both at the cathedral church of Palencia and at San Isidro de Dueñas, than mere awareness of its piety and repute. Presumably neither canons nor monks included Cluniac Hispani. On the other hand, Poncio, like his master Abbot-Bishop Oliba of [18] Ripoll-Cuxá-Vich, was certainly familiar with the spirituality and customs of Cluny which were penetrating into Catalonia in this epoch; ⁽¹¹²⁾ no doubt the same was true of the early bishops and canons of the restored see. For Bishops Bernardo and Miro nothing definite is discoverable, but Bernard II, who was named by Fernando I to the post in 1062 and drawn from the canóniga,⁽¹¹³⁾ can be found confirming Alfonso VI's transfers of Leonese royal monasteries to the Cluniacs, although three of the four involved exemption from his own episcopal authority. San Isidro de Dueñas (1073), Santiago de Astudillo (1077)and San Juan de Hérmedes de Cerrato (1077) were all in the Palencian diocese; San Salvador de Palaz del Rey (1075-1076) in that of León. ⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Bernardo also supported Alfonso's abortive effort in 1079 to impose the Cluniac monk Robert as abbot upon Sahagún against the bitter opposition of Abbot Julian and the congregation of this stoutly Old Leonese house. ⁽¹¹⁵⁾ He likewise subscribed both the charters converting San Zoil de Carrión into a Burgundian priory.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ All these pro-Cluniac indications come from the reign of Fernando's son ,but they harmonize with everything we can learn regarding the sympathies of the Palencian cabildo.

At San Isidro de Dueñas, with its probably close contacts with the Church of Palencia, a similar attitude can be inferred. This appears most visibly in the Endura charter of 1053 mentioned above, where among the subscriptions -- and we shall return to this crucial entry -- there occurs the name of the first Cluniac monk known to have reached Leon and the Campos, Frater Galindus or Fray Galindo. ⁽¹¹⁷⁾ His inclusion in the list of witnesses hints at the monastery's respect for this distinguished visitor.

In this setting San Isidro's connections with Fernando I take on special significance. This involves much more than the fact that the king-emperor made at least one donation to the abbey and confirmed various of its 10th and 11th-century privilegios. ⁽¹¹⁸⁾ There is also the link implied by Alfonso VI's choice of this house in 1073 as his first cession of a Leonese real monasterio to Cluny. The strongly Fernandine background of this benefaction has escaped notice, partly because in Bruel's edition of the donation act, reproduced from the Cluniac Cartulary B (Bibliothèque de la Ville de Cluny, MS 3), the date reads "IIII kalendas junii, millesimo CXI" or 29 May 1073. ⁽¹¹⁹⁾ The month here is, however, wrong. Still unpublished Spanish copies of this privilegio, to be found in the remains of the Becerro of Dueñas, which though incomplete preserve superior readings at several points, fix the correct date as "III kals januarias era. M.CXI", or 29 December 1073. ⁽¹²⁰⁾ The day, 29 December, is the exact anniversary of Fernando's death eight years before.⁽¹²¹⁾ In addition to this precise timing, there are the charter's provision for intercession on behalf of Fernando, and its citation, in the dispositive, of a verse from the same canticle of the Hispanic Breviary which Fernando is known from the Historia Silense to have recited in the basilica of San Isidro de Leon during his last dramatic days at the end of 1065. ⁽¹²²⁾ All this can only mean that in Alfonso VI's mind there was a peculiar fitness in choosing this anniversary date and this Catalan house of the Campos for Cluny's first Leonese dependency
 

[19] (iii) Religious Europeanizers in Leon, 1020-1050. A third factor in the Leonese context of Fernando I's turn to Cluny is the appearance in that kingdom from ca. 1020 on of persons in the royal family, at the court, and in the high nobility, who are drawn towards the religious innovations represented by the Campestrian Catalans and the Antoninian cult. In part, these persons can be identified with families politically affiliated with the so-called Navarrese Party which existed under Alfonso V and Vermudo III. Ever since Menéndez Pidal's classic study of the historical basis and prosopography of the Romanz del Infant García , first published in 1911, ⁽¹²³⁾ we have known that a small but extremely influential group of partisans and agents of Sancho el Mayor within the Leonese royal family and aristocracy actively opposed every effort to align the kingdom with Castile against Pamplona and was deeply involved in the Navarrese ruler's labyrinthine intrigues to establish his domination over Burgos. This collaboration brought about the assassination of the Castilian Infante García in 1029 on the very eve of his politically decisive marriage to Alfonso V's daughter Sancha; and its further fruits can be seen in el Mayor's occupation of Leon ca. January 1034 and Fernando I's definitive annexation after Tamarón in 1037. Ménendez Pidal and Pérez de Urbel have done much to clarify the membership and political machinations of this pro-Sanchan faction in the Leonese state; ⁽¹²⁴⁾ but what of its religious proclivities? Did Navarrese political sympathy also mean attraction to the new Franco-Catalan elements of el Mayor's ecclesiastical policies?

There is a fair amount of affirmative evidence on this head. From 1020/1021, when Poncio of Tabèrnoles arrived in the Leonese capital in the train of the Infanta Urraca of Navarre, at the time of her marriage to Alfonso V,⁽¹²⁵⁾ this known agent of Sancho el Mayor was at work as the Queen's chaplain, as bishop of Oviedo from 1023/1025,and as the key figure in the eastern ecclesiastical orientation of the Tierra de Campos. ⁽¹²⁶⁾ To the presence within the Leonese Church of this champion of Navarro-Catalan reformism it may be possible to add that of two prelates of Astorga. The Diego of the Tumbo Negro of Astorga who, as noted above, in 1044 gave lands to the Vierzan monastery of San Antolín de Ribera, may be the later Astorgan bishop of this name who was ruling the see by 1051 ; ⁽¹²⁷⁾ and that Astorga was a Europeanizing center finds support in the fact that a predecessor of Bishop Diego, the chronicler Sampiro, was the only Leonese bishop to subscribe his name to Sancho el Mayor's act restoring the Church of Palencia, and apparently to welcome the Navarrese conquest. ⁽¹²⁸⁾ In lay circles, we may note first that Poncio's close association with the royal household put him in a position to exercise Europeanizing influence upon the two leading feminine members of the Navarrese Party, Queen Urraca -- Sancho el Mayor's sister -- and her Mother, the dowager Queen Jimeno of Navarre, by birth a Leonese lady who evidently returned to her native land to spend her last years with her royal daughter. ⁽¹²⁹⁾ Then there are the Leonese aristocratic families in whose ranks can be found devotees of San Antolín in the 1030's and 1040's and, in the next generation, admirers and benefactors of Cluny. The Countess Sancha Muñoz, founder in 1038 of San de Coyanza, can be linked to the Navarrese Party through her [20] vassal, Rodrigo Galíndez, whom she sent to Aquitaine for relics; Galíndez turns up in Leon by 1034 and is perhaps the Riojan noble of this name who in 1037 - -in the course of his trans-Pyrenean journey? -- bestows various properties upon the abbey of San Millán de la Cogolla. ⁽¹³⁰⁾ Sancha's father, Count Munio Fernández, and husband, Count Pedro Fernandez, seem to have been loyal adherents of Alfonso V, but Pedro's nephew was the notorious Fernan Laínez, royal governor of the Leonese capital, a foremost leader of the Navarrese Party, and a participant in the murder plot against the Castilian Infante in 1029. ⁽¹³¹⁾ In Galicia, the connection of San Antolín de Fingoy and San Antolín de Toques with the royal family, and in the former case specifically with the Infanta Sancha Vermúdez, reminds us that this lady appears in the diplomas in the company of Queens Urraca and Jimena of the Navarrese camarilla.⁽¹³²⁾ Both Count Piniolo Jiménez, who in 1044 owned the monastery of San Antolín de Villanueva, and Count Munio Rodríguez, in whose hands was the house of San Antolín de Bedon, have Navarrese ties. In Piniolo's case, direct testimony fails, but his wife Aldonza was a kinswoman of Count Munio, and the latter great Asturian noble was a notorious member of the pro-Sanchan faction, participating actively in García's murder and later rebelling against Vermudo III.⁽¹³³⁾

These cases establish that individuals and families in Leon adhering to the Navarro-Basque political cause were often drawn into acceptance of such novel religious movements as the fashionable veneration of San Antolín and thus predisposed towards other innovations of Franco-Catalan origin. On the other hand, it is possible to list various members of the Navarrese faction who cannot be connected with the Antoninian cult -- the Castilian Velas, Gonzalo Muñoz, Muño Gustioz, Fernán Laínez, and other leaders of the Party -- but this is at least partly due to our scant documentation. So too el Mayor's foremost lieutenants and their numerous progeny in the Tierra de Campos, Counts Fernán Gutiérrez of Monzón and Gómez Diaz of Saldaña and Carrión -- this last the ancestor of the Beni Gomez, the leading pro-Cluniac aristocratic clan under Alfonso VI -- cannot be linked with the martyr-saint of Pamiers or other foreign religious practices. It is imperative also to remember, in view of what we have emphasized regarding direct Asturoleonese-Gallegan contacts with Gascony and Aquitaine, that Navarre is not the only, or even most successful, channel of Europeanizing elements..

Nevertheless, the roots of Cluny in Leon go back in unmistakable part to families connected with the Navarrese Party. For example, the Countess Teresa Peláez who with her sons and daughters gave Cluny the familial monastery of San Zoil de Carrión in 1076 and 1077 was the widow of Gómez Díaz, el Mayor's old partisan. ⁽¹³⁴⁾ Doña Justa, the second wife and widow of Gómez Díaz's brother Ansur Díaz, fits the same pattern. She was the stepmother of the famous Count Pedro Ansúrez, later so generous a benefactor of Cluny, and sometime before 1085 she traveled all the way to Burgundy to become a nun in Cluny's principal convent of Marcigny-sur-Loire. ⁽¹³⁵⁾ There is the case also of the noble lady Doña Fronildi Gutiérrez, who similarly became a Cluniac religious, although this time apparently in the aristocratic house of San Salvador de Palaz del Rey which Alfonso VI had given the Burgundians; [21] Fronildi was the widow (before 1059) of the Leonese noble Fernando Ordonniz and -- more to the point -- daughter of Count Gutier Alfonso of Liebana, the Asturian magnate who warmly supported Sancho el Mayor's designs, subsequently made his peace with Vermudo III, and appears in privilegios of the epoch of Fernando I. ⁽¹³⁶⁾ We must then allow for the ferment created after 1020 in that narrow but powerful segment of the Leonese upper classes which was affected by the revolutionary religious forces at work in Eastern Spain and Southern France as a consequence of its pro-Navarrese political ties. And at this point, perhaps, Sancho el Mayor's true contribution to Hispano-Cluniac history becomes visible: not the transmission to his heirs of an obligatory dynastic friendship with the Burgundian abbey; but the indirect encouragement in the Leonese Church and Leonese society of currents of spiritual change that, along with those from directly across the Pyrenees, prepare the kingdom, in contrast with Castile, Aragon and el Mayor's own Navarre, for the eventual intimate alliance with the monks of Cluny.
 

(iv) The Queen-Empress D. Sancha . Should we include among the Leonese religious Europeanizers of the second quarter of the 11^th century Fernando's able consort from 1032, the sister of Vermudo III, D. Sancha? It will not have escaped notice that in the diffusion of the Antoninian devotion as well as in the early annals of Cluny in Leon the women of the royal family and high aristocracy are especially prominent; and since Sancha is thought to have taken decisive part in her husband's program of ca. 1054 to Leonicize the entire Leonese-Castilian state, her relations with the Europeanizing Navarrese Party during her girlhood and her later interest in Cluny may well be connected. Again, as so often, the evidence is circumstantial. The young nobilissima puella must have been much thrown into the company of her stepmother, Queen Urraca, the dowager Jimena, and other feminine stalwarts of the Party; the Infanta Sancha Vermúdez whom we have seen associated in 1038 with San Antolín de Fingoy was her aunt; and between 1032 and 1037 she must have spent some time in Navarrese circles at Pamplona and Burgos until her husband's defeat of Vermudo III in the latter year restored her links with her homeland. ⁽¹³⁷⁾ The fact that the Liber Diurnus, copied at Sancha's express order to be used in the devotions of Fernando and herself, includes not only the Feast of San Antolín but also other non-Hispanic material such as four cantici romenses, discloses the Queen-Empress was no strict traditionalist but willing to accept Gallican and Roman interpolations passing into peninsular liturgical codices.⁽¹³⁸⁾

Highly suggestive, too, are Sancha's long-standing ties with the Terra de Campos, the terra predilecta of Cluniac expansion in Spain. Twice the Campos served as her dowry, first in the ill-fated betrothal of 1029 to the Infante García, again in late 1032 when she married Fernando I.⁽¹³⁹⁾ This connection seems more than formal and political. Her name appears alongside her husband's in his extensive privilegio of 1059 confirming the rights and patrimonies of the Church of Palencia, with its Catalán Bishop Miro, cabildo of Catalan canons and dedication to San Antolín. ⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ A more conclusive document is the only one discoverable in which the queen-empress acts without the [22] collaboration of Fernando and in her own right as regina serenissimi Fredinandi uxor , to make a donation to San Isidro de Dueñas sometime between November 1054 and December 1065.⁽¹⁴¹⁾ This as yet unpublished text shows Sancha possessed property of her own in the Campos; her charter grants Dueñas her villa of Santa Cecilia 'de Valderaaces' nearby, with all its temporal.

Unfortunately we know little of Sancha's actual relations with Cluny, although these must have been close, for after her death on 7 November 1067 -- she survived Fernando by only two years -- Abbot Hugh assigned her extraordinary intercessional honors. ⁽¹⁴²⁾ From the Consuetudines cenobii Cluniacensis that the monk Bernard compiled at the abbey between 1078 and 1083, we know that she was included in the intention of one of the only three prebendae (or daily alms portions) assigned at Cluny to feeding the poor, the other two of which memorialized Abbot Odilo and the German Emperor Henry II: "pro Fredelano et eius uxore et regibus Hispaniarum" , ⁽¹⁴³⁾ Several years later, ca. 1085, another compiler of a major Cluniac custumal, Udalric, records that throughout the year, in all daily Masses celebrated at the abbey, the seventh collect was said "pro regina Hispaniarum et pro sororibus et aliis feminis familiaribus"; and there can be no doubt that this deceased Queen-Empress of the Spains was Fernando I's consort, D. Sancha. ⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ To be sure, both these great intercessional privileges can be linked to Alfonso VI's concession in 1077 of the census duplicatus , but more is involved than filial generosity, for, as the cases of the Holy Roman Empresses Adelaide and Agnes prove, Cluny did not automatically confer her prized commemorative honors upon the spouses of even imperial benefactors, but only in return for personal services and confraternal membership of the empress concerned. ⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ We know also that the abbey carefully observed the anniversary of Sancha's death both in Burgundy and in the far-flung dependencies throughout Europe, since her obit appears prominently under 7 November in the Necrologium of the Swiss Cluniac priory of Villars-les-Moines, which Wollasch has now shown to be in fact that of the foremost Cluniac nunnery, Marcigny-sur-Loire, and which thus preserves much of the content of the lost necrology of Cluny herself.⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ Like Fernando, Sancha must have been a socia or familiaris of the abbey. It would not be surprising if she shared her husband's decision to give the Burgundians the annual census of 1000 gold pieces, although pretty certainly, to judge from the reales pergaminos on this subsidy of Alfonso VI and Alfonso VII, as well as from the silence of Cluniac and peninsular writers on this point, she was not publicly associated with the benefaction.

Sancha's journey from interest in Franco-Catalan-Navarrese spiritual trends to admiration for Cluny we cannot trace: what is significant for her role in the future alliance is her intensely Leonese and imperial attachments, for, as we shall see, when Fernando I cements his friendship with the Burgundians, he does so not as king of Castile but as a Leonese king-emperor of Hispania.
 

The precise moment of Cluny's advent escapes our knowledge, but we can be confident that it occurred in the context of two new catalytic factors favoring establishment of contact between the abbey and the Leonese-Castilian monarchy. One of these is the succession at Cluny early in 1049 of the extraordinarily capable young abbot whom history remembers as St. Hugh the Great, not yet at the start of his long tenure of office prepared to launch the vast building program he was to finance largely from Spanish gold, but confronted like Odilo before him with the necessity of supplementing from outside the resources upon which the congregational life of some 200 monks depended.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ Hugh it must have been who decided to press beyond Jaca and Pamplona, the scenes of his predecessor Odilo's failures, to approach the last, most remote son of Sancho el Mayor in the hope of restoring once again the lucrative connection with Spain, for the Cluniacs, in Pérez de Urbel's phrase, "el país de los tesoros escondidos". ⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ The other decisive factor is the profound shift in the center of gravity of all Christian and, before long, Muslim Spain produced by the overthrow of hitherto dominant Navarre and the establishment of Leonese-Castilian paramountcy. This permanent transformation of the peninsular political scene culminates in Fernando's victory over García of Nájera on 15 September 1054; but it was evidently in preparation several years previous, to judge by what the Silense tells us of the growing estrangement between the two brothers that led to war and Garcia's death. ⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ For Fernando I Atapuerca is the supreme turning point of his reign from its primarily Castilian and royal phase to the dynamic decade of Leonese and Hispanic imperialism ending in 1065.

It is in the framework of this new conjuncture between 1049 and1054 that it is necessary to analyze the one explicit account that has come down to us of the actual inauguration of Fernandine-Cluniac friendship. This is the real privilegio issued by Alfonso VI at Burgos in 1090 for the purpose of re-affirming his 1077 grant to Cluny of the census duplicatus of 2000 gold dinars a year. ⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ It is, as we shall see, a document of strongly Cluniac inspiration, very likely composed by the abbatial chamberlain Seguin then in Spain, and this gives exceptional value to its description of Fernando's first approach to the abbey, since it must preserve Cluny's own tradition in the matter as well as the one accepted by Alfonso VI twenty-five years after his father's death. In the pertinent passage Alfonso, who represents himself as "heres paterne dignitatis ita quoque bone successor uoluntatis", declares:

Subiit itaque mihi regi Adefonso in mentem quid egregium inter cetera egerat pater meus rex Fredelandus pia recordatione semper commemorandus. Comperta namque coenobii Cluniacensis tam celebri tamm probata tam sancta religione diuino mox timore compunctus et amore, societatem fratrum Deo et sancto Petro ibidem militantium humiliter expetiit, deuotius [24] accepit, fidelissime quoad uixit retinuit, non inaniter credens se participem fore in eorum spiritalibus, si de sua temporali habundantia indigently seruorum Dei fuisset munificus.

The text continues with Fernando's bestowal of the census upon the monks, to which we shall return. What is immediately relevant is the information that relations with the abbey went through two stages; first, a compertio -- the monarch discovers or learns about the Burgundian congregation; subsequently, mox, he enters its confraternity and participates through benefactions in its spiritual merits. There is no suggestion of any inherited obligation from Sancho el Mayor or previous solicitation by Abbot Odilo. The move towards Cluny appears as something entirely novel, the result of the king-emperor's own personal response on hearing of the abbey's celebritas, probitas and sanctitas . We may guess a letter or envoy of Hugh lies back of this, as unquestionably does the influence of the Leonese Europeanizers around Fernando. Certainly without the latter, abbatial success would be inexplicable.

It can moreover be established that the compertio and thus the opening of contact between Fernando I and the Cluniacs took place by at least the early summer of 1053, quite possibly several years earlier, but at any rate some time between 1049 and 1053. For when, on 9 June 1053, the priest Endura with his wife María conveys to Abbot Juan and San Isidro de Dueñas his monasterio propio of San Andres in ualle de muliere mortua, in the Tierra de Campos, not far from Dueñas and Tariego, there appears in the list of confirmants the entry:"Ego Frater Galindus clunia(ac)ensis qui fuit presens". ⁽¹⁵¹⁾ This is the first notice of an authentic Cluniac monk in Leon, proof that the abbey was not in touch with the kingdom; but who was Frater Galindus or Fray Galindo and how explain his presence? The honorific prefix "frater", rarely if ever employed in the peninsular monastic vocabulary of this epoch, manifestly designates a senior member of the prestigious Burgundian community, someone entrusted with an official mission precisely like another envoy of Abbot Hugh, the Frater Henricus who in 1066 came to Urgel to negotiate with Viscount Arnau Mirde Tost the abortive cession of the church and viscounty of Ager.⁽¹⁵²⁾ The name "Galindus" is almost certainly Eastern Hispanic, probably not Catalan, but Aragonese or Riojan; thus we would seem to have here as abbatial legate an Hispanus, one of the old zealous peninsular breed whose ascetic idealism had taken him to Burgundy.

Conceivably, Fray Galindo could have been a survivor of Paternus' little band of Cluniacs at Peña who had returned to Burgundy after the accession of the unsympathetic Ramiro I; ⁽¹⁵³⁾ but if so, it seems very unlikely that under the political conditions prevailing a year before Atapuerca a Navarrese, even a Riojan, would have been persona grata at the Leonese-Castilian court. What is undeniable is some sort of close relationship with the king-emperor and the house of San Isidro.

Endura's charter of 1053 is a private document which, however, displays close association with the reyes Fernando and Sancha. In the dispositive the priest and his wife affirm that the text has been drawn up "per iussione serenissimi atque gloriossisimi fredenandi regis et gloriossisima sancia regina uxor eius". The act itself presumably [25] incorporates a judgment reached in a pleito attended by the local royal official whose attestation it bears: "Guter Goncaluez qui tenet Tariego et fuit conciliator confirmat". Other exalted personages also subscribe: two bishops, Ciprian of Leon and Pedro of Lugo; an abbot Guillelmus, probably a Catalan but patently not the abbot of San Isidro; Xemeno Belazquez de Luna, Xemeno Lopez and his wife Onega, Enego Semenez, all recognizable aristocratic figures. In addition, the pergamino bears Fernando I's own validation: "Ego Fredinandus nutu Dei rex in han(c) scripturam quam fieri iussi et relegendo cognoui manu mea confirmaui". This is an impressive array of confirmants, somewhat briefer than in the normal royal chancery act of the reign, but sufficiently striking in a private document to indicate it must have been written in the presence of the sovereign and members of his court, perhaps at Palencia, possibly at Dueñas itself, beyond question within the Tierra de Campos. ⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ We can then deduce that Galindo's visit brought him into close association with Fernando I and equally into some sort of friendly connection with San Isidro de Dueñas.

How should this be defined? We do not believe that by 1053 Fernando and Abbot Hugh had already negotiated the union under which the monarch became a Cluniac socius and paid the census of 1000 metcales for clothing the monks, or that Galindo had come to collect the annual installment. The census -- as we shall contend below -- is unlikely to have been promised or paid before the Fernandine fisc was receiving a steady flow of tributary dinars, a good fortune which it did not yet enjoy in 1053. Nor can we say how Hugh's approach to Fernando may be related to King García of Navarre's foundation of his new Riojan abbey of Santa María de Nájera, an event which immediately follows his successful acquisition of a paria from al-Muqtadir of Zaragoza and in which Cluny took no part, as the confirmants of the real privilegio of 2 December 1052 show. In all probability 1053, if not the very year of Fernando's compertio -- which in any case must fall before this point and after 1049, when Hugh became abbot -- belongs in the first of the two stages of the friendship: that of the royal enthusiasm initiating what the Cronica Najerense calls the mutuus amor, ⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ and Hildebert of Cluny the dilectio, ⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ between king-emperor and abbey. Doubtless Galindo took back to Cluny one of the early gifts by which Fernando, in Hildebert's words, "Cluniacense monasterium multo sibi astrinxerat beneficio", and which Hugh would one day gratefully include in his acknowledgement of the ruler's multa bona .⁽¹⁵⁷⁾

All that we know of Fernando I's personality and his strong attraction to the regular Church suggests that the phraseology of the diploma of 1090 regarding his admiration for Cluniac sanctity -- perhaps in this passage, at least, the very words of Abbot Hugh -- is no merely conventional statement. As is evident from the Silense, the king-emperor not only made generous grants to monasteries but took delight in seeking the company of monks, frequently visited their houses, and could join in the singing of the office, parts of which he seems to have known by heart. ⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ This distinctly monastic piety, deeply rooted as it was in Hispanic tradition, must have been much impressed by the reports of Cluny's austerity and fervor reaching the king through the Europeanizers in Leon and now personally exemplified in such a delegate [26] as fray Galindo. And unquestionably for Fernando, as later for Alfonso VI and Urraca, the abbey's supreme renown as a center of intercessional prayer must have been as powerful a motive as any in drawing him into close relations with its monks. No doubt also the abbey's lack of ties with Jaca or Pamplona played a part.

Certainly neither reformism nor crusading fervor, although both are often mentioned, explain Fernando's attitude, at least in this stage of the relationship. The difficulty with the reformist thesis is that while the king-emperor exhibits from 1055 on a strong concern for renewal and modernization of the Leonese-Castilian Church, this is not for the most part directed towards monasticism or inspired by Cluny, but primarily towards the secular clergy and laity -- administration of cathedral chapters of regular canons, organization of rural churches, authority of the bishops, relations of clergy and laics, the ordering of cult and of the Christian-life. ⁽¹⁵⁹⁾

The principal narrative sources -- the Historia Silense, the Crónica Najerense, the Tudense, the Toledano, the Crónica Primera General -- are all silent regarding any Fernandine monastic reform, Cluniac or non-Cluniac in character. His numerous reales privilegios show Fernando generous towards the monasteries but these texts in content, style and subscriptions reveal no extra-Hispanic influences, their frequent allusion to observance of the Benedictine Rule being of course a commonplace of Leonese-Castilian royal diplomas from the time of Alfonso III (866-910). Monastic abuses and their correction do, however, receive attention from the two important councils of the reign: that of Coyanza, which was held, as García Gallo has proved, in 1055, and was an imperial synod, including on the morrow of Atapuerca the Navarrese bishops of Pamplona and Nájera along with those of Leon and Castile; ⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ and that of Compostela, a wholly Gallegan assembly, which Martínez Díez has now shown (contrary to the old Risco theory of the two councils of Santiago in 1061 and 1063) to be a single synod meeting in 1056. ⁽¹⁶¹⁾ Of Coyanza's fourteen canons, only two specifically relate to the monasteries: canon 2 orders observance of either the Benedictine or Isidorian Rule, forbids monks to hold property except by permission of their bishop or abbot, reaffirms subjection of abbots to their bishop, and warns monasteries not to receive an alien monk without his abbot's approval. ⁽¹⁶²⁾ Canon 5 regulates the training of monks for ordination, and the presence of religious at weddings.⁽¹⁶³⁾ Compostela deals succinctly with the qualifications and duties of abbots (canon 2); condemns the consortium of women with monks (canon 3); demands that monks abstain from involvement in lawsuits and other secular activities, and that abbots leaving their houses to live in the world be excommunicated until their return (canon 4). ⁽¹⁶⁴⁾

Benedictinism, poverty, stabilitas, training in Biblical religion, abstention from secular entanglements -- all Cluniac ideals surely, but to what degree due to Cluniac pressure? García Gallo and Martínez Díez see the acts of these Fernandine councils -- in their primitive redaction, free from later Gregorian-inspired interpolations - - as possessing a thoroughly nationalist, neo-Gothicist character, uncontaminated by foreign reformist currents from across the Pyrenees. ⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ This is open to question, particularly in view of what we have seen [27] of Leonese response over the preceding thirty years to Franco-Catalan religious infiltration. What García Gallo says of the "espíritu tradicional y restaurador" of Coyanza fails to take into account the interest both councils show in cathedral chapters of regular canons, one of the prime subjects of reformist zeal in Southern France and Catalonia, and represented in Fernando's own domains by the Church of Palencia. ⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ The alternatives of the Benedictine or Isidorian Rules offered at Coyanza may indeed express nationalist sentiment, but may not this strange choice of the latter have been evoked by foreign pressure to abolish all Rules except that of Monte Cassino?⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ As for García Gallo's denial of the Cluniac pressure in Leon in1055,⁽¹⁶⁸⁾ this is now refuted by what we know of Fray Galindo's arrival in Leon two years before Coyanza. But it would be unwise to ascribe the monastic canons of either Coyanza or Compostela to the monarch's new friendship with the Burgundians; where these are not fully in accord with traditional Hispanic practices, it is the influence of Bishop Miro of Palencia, who attended the synod of Coyanza, not that of the Cluniacs, for which allowance should be made.

As for the Crusade hypothesis, this can be firmly ruled out as in any sense a relevant motive. Fernando I, in the final decade of his reign, and in contrast with the policy of his father and his own first twenty years of rule, conducts an almost continuous series of large-scale campaigns against the muluk al-Tawa'if; but these are not holy wars incited by trans-Pyrenean propaganda. They involve no French warriors; their objective is not so much conquest of territory as imposition of political vassalage upon the Taifas and acquisition of the lucrative parias. ⁽¹⁶⁹⁾ We have noted the present tendency to minimize or deny Cluny's sponsorship of war against the infidel; and although the abbey's complete insulation is questionable in the light of her possible connection with the Barbastro crusade of 1064, the fact is Fernando I took no part in this operation. It is true Fernando's serial attacks upon al-Andalus commence when his friendship with Cluny was already in existence; and no doubt the Burgundian monks hailed Christian victories and gratefully received a share of the spoils, just as did the many churches and monasteries of the kingdom upon which, as the Silense tells us, Fernando piously delighted to bestow the booty of his Muslim wars. ⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ Nothing however warrants the assumption that his association with Cluny originated in the hope of securing Burgundian collaboration in an international crusade in Spain against Islam.
 
 

In the Alfonsine diploma of 1090 Fernando's compertio of Cluny's followed not long thereafter (mox) by his entry into confraternity and by the concession of the annual census. It is this second stage which represents the true alliance or conjunctio between monarch and abbey, which is henceforth so fundamental to the whole history of Hispano-Cluniac relations over the next two centuries as to make it imperative to dispel, if possible, the obscurity surrounding its formation. Since the extant notices deal almost exclusively with Fernando's [28] becoming a Cluniac socius and initiating his annual stipend of 1000 gold dinars for clothing the monks, the attempt to ascertain the terms, date and implications of the new relationship, with its political as well as the original religious overtones, must concentrate upon these twin phenomena, and first upon the grant of the census.

A formidable difficulty is that for this donation no charter is known to survive in the Spanish archives or in the Cluniac collections of Paris and Burgundy, which raises the question whether one ever existed. For Alfonso VI's pledge in 1077 and reaffirmation in 1090 of a census of twice his father's amount, the census duplicates of 2000 gold pieces, we possess not only the original privilegios, carefully treasured at the abbey down through the centuries, but also several copies included in the great Cartularies B and C now in the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Cluny.⁽¹⁷¹⁾ In addition, there survives for the charter of 1090 a peninsular copy, found among the various legal documents that in the late 12th century were collected in a cuaderno of 8 folia for use as the reference file of the provincial chamberlain of the Cluniac Province of Hispania, Prior Humbert of San Zoil de Carrión (1169- ca. 1190).⁽¹⁷²⁾ In contrast, despite crises over non-payment of the subsidy under Alfonso VI, Urraca and Alfonso VII, no peninsular or Burgundian authority mentions the existence of such a text for Fernando, with the important exception of the Burgalese diploma of 1090, the trustworthiness of which on this point may be open to question. Alfonso VI in 1077 twice describes his father's census as being customary (solitus erat dare ), ⁽¹⁷³⁾ which might suggest purely voluntary repetition of an annual charity differing only in its regularity from the gifts of treasure Fernando distributed to his kingdom's monasteries and churches.

It is however difficult to believe that the Fernandine census was not incorporated in a formal real privilegio, not only because of the two Alfonsine texts but because any regular payment -- and all the Spanish as well as Cluniac mentions describe the gift as a census -- would require formal notarized promulgation. Such is the case, for example, with this same ruler's bestowal in 1049 upon the Cathedral Church of Leon of an annual income of 500 solidi from the census Iudaeorum of that city, and with the tenth conceded in 1059 to the see of Palencia out of the royal revenues of that diocese. ⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ Hugo Monachus of Cluny in his Vita s. Hugonis of ca. 1122 uses the word instituit of Fernando's grant; ⁽¹⁷⁵⁾ the Historia Silense has statuit; ⁽¹⁷⁶⁾ and the same verb is employed by Alfonso VII in his privilegio of 29 July 1142 setting forth the terms of his agreement at Salamanca with Abbot Peter the Venerable on the refunding of the census. ⁽¹⁷⁷⁾ These terms clearly imply a juridical testament. Finally, there is the explicit statement of the diploma of 1090 instituit et firmauit , which unquestionably means formal issuance and royal subscription ( firmatio , confirmatio) of a pergamino drawn up by the Leonese-Castilian chancery, just as in this same document Alfonso VI's reference to having confirmed ( firmaui) his own earlier grant of the census duplicatus specifically refers to his still extant charter of 1077. ⁽¹⁷⁸⁾

For reconstructing the form and general content of such a lost pergamino, we are not entirely without data, particularly if we can assume that one or the other of Alfonso VI's censive charters is based [29] upon a missing Fernandine prototype. The diploma of 1090 can be ruled out for this purpose, even though its detailed information on Fernando's dealings with Cluny might seem to summarize the supposed text; for this act is patently of Cluniac composition and completely alien to the usages of Leonese-Castilian notaries.⁽¹⁷⁹⁾ Alfonso's earlier privilegio, of 10 July 1077, may however actually preserve the appearance of his father's donation act: it runs in the name of the rex Le(gi)onum, not the later more common rex Hispaniarum , as in 1090; the queen-empress is not mentioned; ⁽¹⁸⁰⁾ the dispositive is relatively brief; the episcopal and lay subscriptions few. It is possible both Alfonsine charters, like other Spanish citations of the Fernandine grant, echo or paraphrase an original wording. Alfonso in 1077 asserts his father's gift was made illo sanctissimo loco Cluniacensi and intended causa uestimentorum. In 1090 his words are: censum annualem mille uidelicet aureos quod uulgo mancales appellant conuentui Cluniacensi ad uesttarium proprie dedit. The Silense says the grant annually involved mille aureos ex proprio erario and was given pro uinculis peccatorum resoluendis. ⁽¹⁸¹⁾ Alfonso VII, in his privilegio of 1142, declares that both Fernando and Alfonso VI Cluniacensi ecclesie de redditibus sui regni censual iter singulis annis pro salute animarum suarum reddi statuerunt; ⁽¹⁸²⁾ while for Rodrigo of Toledo Fernando obtulit insuper Cluniacensi monasterio de regio fisco mille aureos annuatim perpetuo soluendos . ⁽¹⁸³⁾ All these allusions to the mille aurei from the monarch's own revenues, the assignment of the gift to clothing, and the pious intention, appear to reflect elements of the Fernandine diploma.

There is however one point upon which these and other relevant notices are in sharp disagreement. This is whether Fernando I promised to pay Cluny the gold pieces only during his own lifetime, or also bound his successors to continue the payment in perpetuity. This is really the question whether he envisaged his Cluniac tie as purely personal or as constituting a henceforth permanent alliance between the abbey and the Leonese-Castilian state. We have only to look at the Leonese-Castilian chroniclers of the 12th and 13th centuries to discover a double tradition concerning the intended duration of the Fernandine census. For the Castilian writers who mention it, the census was from its inception imposed upon Fernando's heirs: the Toledano uses the phrase annuatim perpetuo soluendos; the Primera Crónica General, pora siempre. ⁽¹⁸⁵⁾ But the Leonese authorities disagree, deliberately emphasizing the stipend's vitalicial character. For the Historia Silense, "statuit (Fredinandus) quoque per unumquemque annum uiuens . . . mille aureos ex proprio erario dari". ⁽¹⁸⁶⁾ in the Tudense this becomes dum uiueret, as if the Gallegan bishop, Perhaps reflecting 13th century episcopal hostility towards the then decadent Cluniacs, wished to give even greater force to his belief in the limited duration of the Fernandine census. ⁽¹⁸⁷⁾

These contradictory traditions, furthermore, find a parallel in Alfonso VI's censive diplomas of 1077 and 1090. For the latter text, drawn up at Burgos in Eastertide following Abbot Hugh's visit to Spain, there is no doubt whatever; speaking of Fernando I, it affirms: quem censum eodem modo per successores suos prefato loco annuatim reddendum instituit et firmauit".⁽¹⁸⁸⁾ We may have here the basis of [30] the Castilian perpetuity doctrine found in the Toledano and the Primera Crónica General. In contrast, Alfonso's earlier act of 10 July 1077, the first on the census duplicatus, not only makes no claim that Fernando imposed perpetual maintenance of the subsidy but manifests a certain deviousness in alluding to the hereditary aspect. The dispositive clauses relating to Fernando's gift and Alfonso's intention to double it say nothing of any obligation the latter has inherited, nor do they bind his future heirs. Only in the closing comminatory section, and thus by indirection, does Alfonso refer to the matter by invoking eternal punishment upon any of his successors who refuses to continue the payment: "Et si quis ex meo genere qui post me uenturus sit, quod minime credi potest, hunc votum mei testamenti infringere uoluerit et qualiscumque fuerit qui hoc regimen post me gubernauerit et si hunc censum ita duplicatum persoluere non quesierit, sicut supra dictum est, in primis suis a fronte careat lucernis, igne cremetur ardente cum opibus suis et cum Christi proditore permaneat cruciatus". ⁽¹⁸⁹⁾

Does this almost furtive provision for the future simply mean that Alfonso was avoiding confession of previous culpability on his part in not sending Cluny an annual gift of dinars? or do we have here, in confirmation of the contention of the Silense and Tudense that Fernando's promise was for himself alone, the appearance of anew, non-Fernandine principle of perpetuity that will find explicit expression thirteen years later in the diploma of Burgos? To advance towards any solution of this mystery -- which, we repeat, embraces the whole question of whether Fernando's Cluniac conjunctio was merely personal or intended to be a permanent feature of Leonese-Castilian foreign policy -- we need to explore at least two promising lines of inquiry: first, the story of what happened with regard to the maintenance of the census in the obscure decade between Fernando I's death at the end of 1065 and Alfonso VI's doubling of 1077; and, secondly, the reliability of the Burgalese real privilegio of 1090 as an historical source for the relations between Fernando I and Cluny.
 

(i) The Fernandine Census under Alfonso VI, 1066-1077. Since we have no direct data to establish whether in this period prior to the doubling Alfonso, as his father's imperial successor in Leon, actually paid Cluny the annual 1000 dinars, the problem must be approached by moving backward from the known fact of the census duplicatus . Here we first discover that between 1073, the year after his unexpected restoration to power by reason of his brother Sancho II's assassination at Zamora, and 22 May 1077, Alfonso VI transferred to Cluny, for conversion into priories, the first four reales monasteries the abbey acquired in the Leonese-Castilian state. All four were located in Leon proper; San Isidro de Dueñas, in the Tierra de Campos, 29 December 1073; San Salvador de Palaz del Rey, in the Leonese capital, 27 August 1075-1076; Santiago de Astudillo, in the Tierra de Campos, 31 January 1077; and San Juan de Hérmedes de Cerrato, also in the Campos, 22 May 1077.⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ These cessions do not terminate Alfonso's monastic donations to the Burgundians: he was still to give them in 1079 Santa María de Nájera, the abbey founded by his slain uncle King García of Navarre, and in 1081 Santa Coloma de Burgos;⁽¹⁹¹⁾ and perhaps, [31] if popular opposition had not prevented it, the venerable Leonese house of Sahagún, where in 1079 Robert of Cluny was made abbot.⁽¹⁹²⁾ Nevertheless, after the transfer of Hérmedes de Cerrato on 22 May and the institution of the doubled census seven weeks later on 10 July 1077, Alfonso did not in fact give Cluny another royal monastery in the kingdom of Leon during the entire remaining thirty-two years of his long reign. ⁽¹⁹³⁾

All this hints at some sort of equivalency in Alfonso VI's mind between the four Leonese cessions -- averaging about one a year from 1073 to 1077 - -and the 4000 dinars he would have had to contribute if he were continuing his father's census at the old rate of payment. But should we consider that these monasteries took the place of a single census which the king declined to pay, or that they represent the equivalent of the 4000 extra dinars required by an anticipated doubled census? It cannot be because of lack of funds that the king-emperor pursued this unpopular policy of alienating Leonese reales monasteries to Cluny, when the abbey herself clearly preferred metcales, for the imperial fisc in these years was presumably engorging huge amounts of tributary gold from the old Fernandine Taifa vassals of Zaragoza, Toledo, Sevilla and Badajoz. The inference is that before 10 July 1077 Alfonso, despite pressure from Cluny and his own willingness to accede to pleas for alms, was reluctant to undertake, for either a single or anticipatory doubled census, a monetary obligation which possessed quasi-vassalic connotations of dependency for himself and his Empire.

This forces us back still earlier in Alfonso VI's career, to the troubled years 1066-1072, the epoch of civil war among Fernando I's three sons, and to the precise circumstances under which in 1072 Abbot Hugh intervened in the Spanish conflict. ⁽¹⁹⁴⁾ Upon Alfonso, as the heir to Leon and thus to the imperial title and primacy, would unquestionably have fallen the filial responsibility -- assuming that one existed -- of continuing the census, so that Cluny's role in the struggle should throw some light upon whether he had done so. The decisive phase of the fratricidal strife occurs in early 1072 when, following García of Galicia's elimination, Sancho II's victory at Golpejera in January allows him to depose the defeated Alfonso as king-emperor and to imprison him at Burgos. At this point, as both Cluniac and Spanish sources agree, Abbot Hugh enters the picture. According to the oldest Vitae s. Hugonis, news of Alfonso's defeat and incarceration led the abbot to offer personal prayers for him, to order his monks to pray for the monarch's liberation, and to send the former Bishop Ximeno of Burgos, then a monk at Cluny, back to Castile, ostensibly to reassure the royal prisoner (but presumably also to intercede with the victor). ⁽¹⁹⁵⁾ When Sancho, whom the Cluniac texts consistently depict as tyrannus , proves recalcitrant about releasing his brother, St. Peter himself appears to him in a dream, threatening immediate death, so that the alarmed Castilian leaps from his bed and releases Alfonso, allowing him to go into exile at Muslim Toledo.⁽¹⁹⁶⁾ The Crónica Leonesa has a somewhat different account, in which, after vain efforts by the Leonese bishops, abbots and nobles to secure Alfonso's release, and their swearing that he would never again seek royal power, Alfonso addresses an appeal for help to the abbot of Cluny. Then come the [32] abbey's congregational prayers, the bishop's visit to Burgos, the Petrine dream, and the liberation. In this version, more detailed than that preserved at Cluny, it is important to observe that Abbot Hugh acts only after receiving a plea from the imperial prisoner, and that this is couched in terms of the former friendship with Fernando I: "ob recordationem mutui amoris quam cum patre ipsius rege .F. habuerant". ⁽¹⁹⁷⁾ The implication is that Cluny had previously remained aloof from the civil war and now responded because of previous ties not with Alfonso VI but with his father. It can therefore be concluded that between 1066 and 1072, i.e., from Fernando's death to Alfonso's restoration, no personal or benefactorial link, no mutuus amor or dilectio , existed between the Leonese ruler and Cluny. Fernando 's census can not have been paid, or the abbey would have been, from the very start of the civil war, Alfonso's active partisan.

This deduction agrees perfectly with Alfonso's own statement in the privilegio of 1090 that his societas with the Burgundians began only with his institution of the census duplicatus , i.e., in 1077. In the first ten years after Fernando I's death the census thus appears to have passed through three stages: (1) between 1066 and 1072, no payment whatever of dinars and complete breakdown of the conjunctio , recalling the rupture at the passing of Sancho el Mayor; (2) between 1073 and 1077, in the context of Alfonso VI's gratitude for his restoration, four grants of Leonese royal monasteries; and (3) on 10 July 1077, perhaps with a decade of non-payment brought forcibly to the royal mind by the urgings die hac nocte of the abbatial chamberlain Robert, at this time prior of Dueñas,⁽¹⁹⁸⁾ the revival of the Fernandine grant along with Alfonso's own counterpart of an additional 1000 dinars. This leaves still undetermined whether the break with the Fernandine subsidy after 1065 was due to Alfonso's refusal to respect a provision in his father's lost privilegio, or whether in1077, and even down to 1090, he honestly believed Fernando had made a strictly vitalicial promise. For this question, and for understanding the monarch's explicit espousal in 1090 of the doctrine of a census hereditary from its inception, the key lies in the diploma of Burgos.
 

(ii) The Imperial Pragmatica of Burgos, Easter 1090. Alfonso VI's real privilegio of Easter 1090 has been universally accepted by historians of Hispano-Cluniac affairs but without ever receiving the close scrutiny it needs.⁽¹⁹⁹⁾ It is apparent at first glance that although running in the name of the Hispaniarum rex, the document cannot be a product of the Leonese-Castilian chancery. The dating according to the Incarnational era, the sophisticated language and literary polish, and the absence of episcopal, comital and other subscriptions, all betray foreign notarial composition. The text designates itself a constitutio, and in two other places uses analogous verbal forms;⁽²⁰⁰⁾ three points it calls itself a preceptum. ⁽²⁰¹⁾ This terminology from the Roman public law, along with the un-Hispanic concept of a ruler establishing a fundamental constitutional provision by personal edict, gives it the appearance of an imperial pragmatica such as might have emanated from the chancery of the Holy Roman Empire but certainly not from its trans-Pyrenean counterpart in Leon and Castile. The application of preceptum to Hugh's order that all future abbots of Cluny [33] maintain in perpetuity the intercessional privileges being conceded to the family of Alfonso VI makes it plain that the author of this charter regarded the royal action as equivalent to an abbatial statutum . ⁽²⁰²⁾ The document in its essentials must have been formulated at the conference in Burgos between Alfonso and Hugh of which it speaks, and put into final form following the abbot's return to France and the king-emperor's convocation of his curia. Unquestionably this was done by a Cluniac monk familiar with imperial German diplomatic usage, very likely Seguin, the abbatial chamberlain in Spain in these years, who in 1088 or 1089 had negotiated Alfonso VI's huge delivery to the Burgundian monks of 10,000 talenta , i.e., dinars. ⁽²⁰³⁾ Since none of the episcopal or lay confirmations ordered in the course of the text has actually been attached, apparently what we have is a copy of the perfected draft sent back to Cluny, not the form actually promulgated in Spain.

The fact that in this unique pragmatica of the 12th-century Hispanic king-emperors the voice is Alfonso's but the hand Burgundian means that we possess here not only what Alfonso VI was willing in1090 to acknowledge concerning his father's Cluniac policy but also Cluny's own doctrine, as held at the highest level of authority, regarding the census and, indeed, the whole relationship with Fernando I. In addition to the four long sentences specifically devoted to Fernando, the diploma contains four other subdivisions: (i) a succinct historical sketch of Alfonso's doubling of 1077 which closely follows the lines of his real privilegio of 10 July; (ii) an account of Alfonso's consultation with Queen Constance and a convocation of bishops and magnates where Archbishop Bernard of Toledo (the ex-Cluniac formally installed two years before in his Tagan metropolis) led those present in expressing approval of the perpetuity of the census duplicatus ; (iii) pro remedio and penal clauses, with instructions for the diploma's confirmation by principes and fideles; (iv) announcement of Hugh's reciprocal preceptum commanding all future abbots to observe perpetual commemoratio uel obsequium of Fernando and Sancha, Alfonso's brothers, Alfonso himself, and his wife and children.

In the compact, informative opening passage stands the Burgundian version of the foundation and terms of the Leonese-Cluniac conjunctio, perhaps in Hugh's own words, possibly even a paraphrase of Fernando's lost privilegio or of the personal letter or petitio requesting societas that must have accompanied the donation of the census, to judge by the two Alfonsine texts we have for 1077. ⁽²⁰⁴⁾ In any event, this brief biographical account constitutes Cluny's panegyric of the dead king-emperor that recalls the tribute Hugh had paid the imperial benefactor over thirty years before when, on the news of his death, he had ordered commemoration of Fernando's obit in gratitude for his multum beneficium, even though Cluny customarily omitted the Officium pro defunctis throughout the Nativity octave. ⁽²⁰⁵⁾

As for the hereditary principle incorporated into the Burgalese diploma's passage on Fernando, it would surely be erroneous to regard this as historically false, as the fruit of Cluniac success in persuading Alfonso VI by 1090 to attribute to his father a stipulation of perpetuity Fernando never intended. No doubt the Cluniacs from the start believed the census was perpetual. Even under Sancho el Mayor, [34] Odilo's emphases on the indissolubilia uincula in his letters to Paterno and García reflect the belief that the monarchs of Jaca and Pamplona ought to recognize an inherited dynastic obligation; and, after all, any royal gift of an annual census -- and all our notices, including the Leonese, define Fernando's mancales as a census -- would normally be expected to continue after the donor's death unless explicitly otherwise stated. The diploma of 1090, however, summarizes so accurately the contents of Alfonso VI's censive letter and charter of 1077 and presents so close a parallel for both Fernando and Alfonso of three stages of approach to Cluny -- request for confraternity, promise of the census, confirmation of a real privilegio pledging the subsidy ⁽²⁰⁶⁾ --  that it is evident Hugh, as might be expected, came to the conference at Burgos armed with all the necessary documents to establish his abbey's claim to a census made hereditary from its inception. It seems likely that these pieces would have included not only Fernando's donation act but also, to judge by the two texts we have for Alfonso VI in 1077, the personal letter of petitio to Hugh in which the king-emperor would have expressed his personal affection for the abbot and his congregation, formally asked for admission to societas, and promised the annual stipend. ⁽²⁰⁷⁾ Both letter and privilegio may well have used the phraseology found in Alfonso's counterparts: "in diebus vite mee annuente Deo . . . dabo", words which along with Alfonso's de facto suspension of payment between 1066 and1077 may well lie behind the Leonese vitalicial tradition we have encountered. ⁽²⁰⁸⁾ Whether Fernando used the same indirect method of provision as his son's comminatory clause, there is no way of deciding