[253] Alfonso Raimúndez's boyhood was spent in Galicia. His guardians were bishop Diego Gelmírez and count Pedro Froílaz de Traba. He may have retained some affection for the land of his childhood, troubled though that childhood had been; years later he founded a monastic house, Tojos Outos, in Galicia. But the young Galician prince is scarcely visible in the Leonese-Castilian emperor that Alfonso later became. His panegyrist could say of him, with some exaggeration, that his kingdom stretched from the Atlantic to the Rhône. Christian kings and Muslim princes were his vassals. He was the conqueror of Calatrava and Almería; as one his last charters put it, the pius, felix, inclitus triumphator ac semper invictus, totius Hispaniae divina clementia famosissimus imperator.⁽¹⁾ It was a long way from Galicia that Alfonso VII finally met his end, far to the south, in the pass of Despeñaperros in the wastes of the Sierra Morena. And though he had once promised to be buried beside his father beneath the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, it was in Toledo that he found his final resting-place. That was in 1157, when Diego Gelmírez had himself been dead for seventeen years. But the development of Alfonso VII's career, as hinted at in these contrasts, was a matter of the keenest concern to Diego and the clergy of Compostela.

As the heir apparent to his mother queen Urraca, Alfonso Raimúndez would one day rule the whole of León-Castile. So much was clear at latest from the breakdown of the Aragonese marriage in 1110-12. In other words, a time would come when Alfonso's tutelage could no longer be exclusively Galician. That time seems to have come in the years after 1116, when the young man was serving his apprenticeship as a ruler in Extremadura under the guidance [254] of archbishop Bernardo of Toledo. The indications of his movement into a Castilian 'orbit' are plain to see: the ceremony (a crown-wearing?) at Toledo on 16 November 1117; the confirmation of Toledo's fueros, perhaps about the same time; the capture of Alcalá in 1118 and its subsequent grant to the see of Toledo; the grants to Castiian beneficiaries from 1118 onwards; the restoration of the bishoprics of the southern and eastern frontiers, Avila, Segovia, Sigüenza, in the early 1120s. However, a Castilian, or more narrowly Toledan interest was not the only one to be playing about the young prince. In the last few years of Urraca's reign, and especially after the death of the old archbishop of Toledo in 1124, we can detect Leonese and Asturian claimants upon his notice and patronage. When the queen died in the spring of 1126 Alfonso VII succeeded her at the behest of Leonese and Asturian as well as Castilian notables, and their influence on him was to be marked during the first few years of his reign.⁽²⁾

The most important official in the royal household was the mayordomo. Of the three men who held this office between 1126 and 1130 two were certainly Leonese (Pedro Díaz and Rodrigo Bermúndez) and the third (Pelayo Suárez) very probably Leonese or Asturian. The other principal household officer was the alférez.Of Alfonso VII's alfereces during the same period, Lope López was a native of Carrión de los Condes on the frontiers of León and Castile, García Garcés was Castilian, count Rodrigo a native of the Asturias, and Pedro Alfonso was Leonese. In the early years of the reign the king's most prominent adviser was probably count Suero Bermúdez, whose landholdings lay in the Asturias and the extreme north of León; he was the uncle of Pedro Alfonso the alférez and related (we do not know exactly how) to Rodrigo Bermúdez the mayordomo. Another prominent counsellor was count Rodrigo Martínez, also Leonese; a third was Ramiro Froílaz, again Leonese; and a fourth [255] Rodrigo Vélaz, who as we have already seen was a Galician, but from the east of the region, the mountainous zone where Galicia merged into León. The bishops who figured most prominently in the witness-lists of Alfonso VII's early charters were likewise predominantly Leonese or Castiian: Alo of Astorga and Diego of León; Pedro of Palencia and his namesake (and uncle) of Segovia; archbishop Raimundo of Toledo. Another official who was prominent among the king's servants was the merino of León, Albertino, to whose dealings with Diego Gelmírez we shall have to return shortly.

For the first five years of Alfonso VII's reign, then, his court had a mainly Asturian-Leonese-Castiian complexion. This is hardly surprising. It was the entourage of a ruler whose main concerns were with the meseta. As far as the external affairs of the kingdom were concerned, the most pressing need was for a settlement with the king of Aragon. This was achieved at Támara in July 1127, and except for a short campaign round Almazán in the autumn of 1129 it proved definitive until the death of Alfonso el Batallador in 1134. Only a little less urgent was the need for some definition of relations between the new king and his aunt Teresa of Portugal. A meeting took place at Ricobayo, west of Zamora, in April 1126, and an accord was made; but as we shall see it proved far from lasting. The southern frontier was peaceful at the time of Alfonso VII's accession under the terms of a treaty made in 1121. Almoravide hostilities were resumed on a small scale in 1128 and 1129, and then far more dangerously in 1130 and 1131. From 1130 onwards the king's energies would be directed ever more vigorously to defensive and, later, offensive operations on the southern frontier.

Within his kingdom, Alfonso busied himself much during these early years with efforts to heal the scars left by the upheavals of his mother's reign. He put down rebellions, made amends to those who had suffered, re-established authority and routine. It was a process which culminated in the holding of a council at Palencia in March 1129 where decrees were enacted 'for the well-being of holy church and the prosperity of the whole kingdom'.⁽³⁾ His itinerary [256] for these years, in so far as it can be traced, reveals him at Sahagún, Burgos, Palencia, Carrión, Segovia, Zamora, but most frequently of all at the urbs regia of León.

It is time to turn to Galicia. Queen Urraca's death on 8 March 1126 was evidently sudden and unexpected. It is a minor point, but one not devoid of interest, that the new king seems to have been in no hurry to tell his Galician subjects of his accession. His messengers, among them bishop Nuño of Mondoñedo, did not reach Compostela until about three weeks later; they cannot have been told to make haste. Archbishop Diego could not believe his ears. But with his usual decision he swung into frenzied activity. Leaving Compostela on Friday 2 April, he was at León by the 10^th -- effectively within a week, when allowance is made for no travel on Palm Sunday (the 4^th) and Good Friday (the 9^th) -- only to find that the king had already left for Zamora. On the Tuesday in Easter week, 13 April, he left León and hastened to the royal court at Zamora.⁽⁴⁾ The Historia makes much of the reception and privileged treatment he received from the king, but it is hard to think that Diego was himself so elated. He was being cold-shouldered by Alfonso VII in much the same way as he was simultaneously being cold-shouldered by pope Honorius II. It is likely that Diego felt not a little dismayed.

Alfonso VII did not visit Galicia until the autumn of 1127. What took him there then was a Portuguese invasion of southern Galicia and capture of Tuy -- events which signalled the breakdown of the accord reached at Ricobayo in April 1126. After chasing the Portuguese back across the Miño Alfonso spent some time at Compostela in November. Two years later he again visited Galicia for a five-week stay in the winter of 1129-30. After that the king was not seen in Galicia until Portuguese affairs once more brought him back in the summer of 1137. His old guardian Pedro Froílaz de Traba died in 1128: he had subscribed no royal charters for some years before his death, and though loss of influence could have been precipitated by age or illness, it [257] is quite possible that the Portuguese exploits of his two eldest sons had caused the family to fall from royal favour.⁽⁵⁾ Donations by Alfonso VII to Galician beneficiaries are exceedingly rare in the early years of the reign. It is indeed difficult to identify with certainty any native of Galicia who achieved prominence in Alfonso VII's kingdom during these years. The only name which comes readily to mind is that of the famous frontiersman Munio Alfonso, and his celebrity was achieved by his own efforts, unaided by royal patronage.⁽⁶⁾

The Historia Compostellana has some harsh words for Alfonso VII during this period. 'He never stopped persecuting the church of Compostela -- just like his mother.'⁽⁷⁾ (And we know what the authors of the Historia thought of her!) As usual, it is fair to suppose that this was Diego's own attitude. What was going wrong? It may simply have been that after the experiences of his boyhood and youth Alfonso Raimúndez no longer trusted Diego. The bishop had been entrusted with at least some degree of responsibility for Alfonso's upbringing; the boy had been encouraged to look towards his guardian as standing in the place of the father who had died when he was only two years old. Diego's actions during the reign of Urraca, whether we characterize them as displaying adroit capacity for survival or ruthless pursuit of self-interest, may not have fostered in his ward that trust and confidence which the relationship had been intended by Alfonso VI to engender. Furthermore, between the age of eleven and nineteen the prince had been subject to the influence of the clergy of Toledo; and he would hardly have learned to love Diego from them.

This is necessarily, perhaps distastefully, speculative. Let us consider instead what occurred on the occasion of Alfonso VII's first visit to Compostela after his accession, in November 1127.⁽⁸⁾ Like his mother, Alfonso was short of money during the early years of his reign. We are repeatedly told in the Historia that he could not afford to pay his [258] troops, and other evidence bears this out.⁽⁹⁾ While he was at Compostela after the Portuguese campaign he was approached by Diego's enemies with the proposal that he should arrest the archbishop and deprive him of his temporalities. This the king was unwilling to do, but he was prepared to accede to the more moderate suggestion that he should contrive to exact a large amount of money from the archbishop. At an interview between the two men in the cathedral treasury Alfonso made his demand and Diego offered him 300 silver marks. On the advice of his intimate counsellors (secretarii) the king pressed for 600 marks and the arrest of three prominent members of the cathedral community, presumably as hostages or sureties for payment. Diego refused point blank. At this the king flew into a rage and demanded 1,000 marks or the surrender of temporalities. Diego called together his clergy, who urged him to give in to the lesser of two evils; that is, to find the 1,000 marks rather than risk the loss of the temporalities. While discussion was going on messengers from the king entered the meeting, demanding that Diego give an answer to the royal requests under threat that the king's officers would at once take over the city. Diego agreed to pay 1,000 marks, on condition that no arrests were made. The king consented to this -- though Diego's enemies thought that he could have got a great deal more -- and the money was raised (with some difficulty) and paid over. But this was not the end of the incident. Before the king departed, Diego delivered a riposte. Alfonso was invited to attend a chapter meeting at which Diego upbraided him deferentially but firmly for his rapacity and suggested pointedly that the insult offered to St. James could best be offset by some gift or benefit (munus aut beneficium). Would Alfonso promise to be buried in the church of St. James like his father count Raymond? At the king's request he ran over the services of remembrance and prayer offered by his clergy on the count's behalf. Alfonso was willing. But he made one further stipulation, that he should be enrolled among the number of the canons, this was done. The king then restored two properties to the church of Compostela.⁽¹⁰⁾ Finally, Diego reminded [259] Alfonso of a conversation they had had shortly before the Portuguese campaign, when the king had promised to expel Diego's enemies from the royal household, particularly from the royal chapel and chancery, and to replace them with Diego's nominees. Alfonso publicly confirmed his undertaking. Diego accordingly chose to keep control of the royal chapel in his own hands, but delegated the chancery to Bernardo, the treasurer of Compostela.

The goings-on of 1127 embody some themes which echo those of Urraca's reign: the penury of the crown, the fragility of Diego's hold over his honor, the machinations of domestic enemies, the almost ritual quality of the hard bargaining that took place -- all these are familiar. There are some new features, however, but before turning to them it will be useful to glance quickly at the somewhat similar events of 1129.⁽¹¹⁾ Towards the end of that year Alfonso VII paid another visit to Compostela. Diego was seriously ill at the time, his capacity to resist the royal demands perhaps weakened. These demands were made on the king's behalf by two prominent royal servants, Albertino of León, described as Alfonso's secretarius, and the mayordomo Rodrigo Bermúdez.⁽¹²⁾ Diego started off by offering 70 marks to the king, but this was not enough. He was compelled to agree to make an annual render of 100 marks, the royal envoys promising that when the pacification of the kingdom was complete the king would repay in money or in land all that he had taken. We may think it unlikely that Diego was very sanguine about the prospects of the king's fulfilling this part of the bargain. Albertino was made responsible for the annual collection of the money on the king's behalf.⁽¹³⁾ This was not quite all. Alfonso also tried to deprive Diego of his control of the mint of Compostela. Diego managed to head him off by producing Alfonso VI's charter of 1107 which had conceded this to him. Alfonso VII confirmed it -- possibly, though we are not told this, for a price.

[260] This chilling of relations between Diego and his king during the early years of the reign made necessary new initiatives by the archbishop and clergy of Compostela to recapture, so to say, their ruler: to re-engage his interest and to re-focus his devotion upon St. James and his church. It is in this light that Diego's activities during these years may most fruitfully be considered. Diego was dutiful towards -- if we are to believe his panegyrists, indispensable to -- the king during the Portuguese campaign of 1127. At a time when this could not be said of all the higher clergy of Galicia, he was conspicuously, ostentatiously loyal. Alfonso VII had been knighted at Compostela in May 1124;⁽¹⁴⁾ in 1127, as we have seen, he promised to be buried there, and was made a canon of the cathedral: honours and undertakings which were intended to reassert a special relationship between the king and Santiago.⁽¹⁵⁾ When he came to Compostela to extort money in 1127 Alfonso claimed that he came as a pilgrim (causa orationis), and the clergy of Compostela prayed 'that he might defeat his enemies and subdue barbarian peoples'.⁽¹⁶⁾ The façade behind which the king's secretarii went about their business was reassuringly traditional. Diego held up to the young king the example of earlier rulers, 'your predecessors, devout and God fearing men, who loved this shrine and this church above all others in Spain'.⁽¹⁷⁾

On the practical level of the day-to-day affairs of the kingdom Diego's most significant initiative was his reassertion of control over the royal chancery and the royal chapel. Despite some excellent scholarly work over the last sixty years or so there is still much that remains mysterious about the secretarial arrangements of the rulers of León-Castile.⁽¹⁸⁾ It is difficult to fix on even an approximate date for the [261] emergence of an organized chancery, to say anything with confidence about how it was staffed, to describe with any precision how and even for what purposes official documents were drawn up. One thing, however, is clear, that for at least a generation before 1127 the clergy of Compostela had been closely associated with the writing-office of the Leonese royal house. Diego Gelmírez himself had started his career as notary to count Raymond. Pelayo Bodán had served as one of the notaries of Alfonso VI for at least ten years, between 1097 and 1107. Nearly all the men who served queen Urraca in the same capacity may be connected with the church of Compostela. Some of them, like Martín Peláez and Fernando Pérez, went on to serve her son. Others who worked in Alfonso VII's chancery in the 1120s may also be linked to the church of Compostela, such as Ciprián Pérez, active in the chancery between 1125 and 1130 and a canon of Compostela. If St. James's clergy had so firm a grip on the royal chancery, why was Diego so anxious to reassert his control in 1127? Who were the adversarii whom he wanted to see expelled? It would seem sensible to seek them among the Leonese and Castilian advisers of the king whose influence he so much distrusted. One name suggests itself. Two royal charters of 1123 were drawn up by the recently appointed bishop of Sigüenza, Bernardo: in one of them he subscribed himself regis notarius, in the other regis capellanus.⁽¹⁹⁾ Now Bernardo was a man of the Toledan connection.

He had been brought from his native Agenais by archbishop Bernardo of Toledo, been made a canon and then precentor of Toledo, and afterwards promoted to the newly restored bishopric of Sigüenza. His uncle was bishop of Segovia and his brother was bishop of Palencia; both of them loyal suffragans of Toledo and as we have seen closely associated with Alfonso VII during the 1120s. Two charters from four years before the 1127 concession may not seem much to go on, but the paucity of royal charters from the 1120s means that we must grasp at what straws we can. I would suggest that when Diego referred to 'enemies' and 'traitors' the [262] bishop of Sigüenza was one of the men he had in mind. One wonders how he would have reacted could he have known that Bernardo would one day be archbishop of Compostela.

If our knowledge of the royal chancery is less precise than we might wish, we know next to nothing about the royal chapel. Several charters have survived which bear the subscriptions of men who described themselves as royal capellani; such as Bernardo of Sigüenza in 1123, or Diego's protégé bishop Nuño Alfonso of Mondoñedo in 1126. It is particularly noteworthy that the church of Soria was 'attached to the royal chapel',⁽²⁰⁾ for this suggests an established institution provided with endowments. How many royal chaplains there were at any one time and what duties they carried out, we do not know. By analogy -- possibly a hazardous one, but it deserves to be explored -- with royal chaplains elsewhere, in Germany or in the Anglo-Norman kingdom, we might expect the office to have been a responsible and influential one. Diego's anxiety to retain control of it would therefore be intelligible.

The man whom Diego appointed to the office of royal chancellor, Bernardo, the treasurer of Compostela, we have already encountered. It was he who had designed the fountain outside the north transept of the cathedral and planned the watercourses which fed it. He had held the office of treasurer from at least 1118. He held office as royal chancellor from 1127 until 1133, with a hiatus between January 1129 and March 1131 when the chancellorship was delegated to his brother Pedro. His temporary resignation was occasioned, we are told, by his desire to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.⁽²¹⁾ Diego dissuaded him from this: aims could easily be sent to the Holy Places through intermediaries, he briskly urged, and the money that Bernardo would have spent on the journey could be devoted to Santiago. Bernardo bought a golden chalice from the king and presented it to the cathedral. (The king's broker was the indispensable Albertino. Diego's pleasure in the acquisition must have been sharpened by the thought that the chalice had previously [263] belonged to the archbishop of Toledo, who had had to sell it to the king because he was so hard up.) What the Historia does not tell us is that Diego settled Bernardo on a very important task during these two years: the preparation of the cathedral cartulary.

Bernardo's plan was nothing if not ambitious. He proposed to bring together a comprehensive collection of the muniments of Santiago de Compostela in five volumes. The first would contain royal diplomas, the second grants by the higher nobility (consularia testamenta), and the third the charters of archbishops and bishops; the fourth would consist of donations from laymen of lesser rank (minorum potestatum et aliorum hominum qui potestates non fuerunt) and the fifth of documents associated with the cathedral community (ecclesiastica familia). All that has survived -- and I suspect all that was ever completed -- is the first volume, now known as Tumbo A.⁽²²⁾ A passage on the first folio attributes it to Bernardo, sketches the plan outlined above, and dates the beginning of the work to 1129. The first forty folios, copied in a single hand, contain copies of very nearly all the early royal charters of the see from the spurious grant of Alfonso II in 829 down to and including Alfonso VII's diploma of 13 November 1127 recording his promise to be buried at Compostela. (The later continuations after fo. 40 do not concern us here.)

Cathedral and monastic cartularies of this period were rarely if ever prepared simply on the promptings of orderly archival instincts. Such instincts are the creation of later and more innocent ages. This is not to imply that Tumbo A is not an orderly production. On the contrary, it is an extremely efficient piece of work, and a handsome example of the scribe's and miniaturist's art. But it is not innocent. We should see it as part and parcel of Diego's design to buttress the rights and pretensions of the church of St. James at a moment when he judged that they needed precisely this kind of buttressing. The documents copied into Tumbo A were the archival counterpart to Diego's lecture to the king in the autumn of 1127. The cartulary was therefore not [264] simply a muniment; it was also in some sense a manifesto.⁽²³⁾ There, neatly recorded for all who might consult it to see, was the record of royal generosity towards the church of St. James, the grateful recognition by successive kings of their special relationship with their apostolic patron and his servants, the bishops and clergy who were entrusted with his shrine. It was a witness in parchment and ink to an armoury of wealth, privilege and spiritual power; it was also a reminder to kings of where their duty lay. Diego was urging this duty upon Alfonso VII throughout the early years of the reign.

Six months after taking office as royal chancellor Bernardo presided over the drawing-up of a very important diploma in favour of the church of Compostela, at Segovia, on 25 May 1128.⁽²⁴⁾ It cost Diego a gigantic sum of money (incomputabilem pecuniam)and was acquired only after a good deal of lecturing of the king on his special obligations towards the church of Santiago. It is likely that Bernardo had had a hand in the negotiations which led up to it; at the royal court in constant attendance on the king, he would have been well-placed to act as Diego's agent in these preliminaries. We may see it as both further evidence of Alfonso VII's shortage of money and also as an instance of Diego's success in recapturing the king's goodwill. What was granted to the church of Santiago was a privilege of exemption from the exercise of regalian right which had played such havoc with the temporalities of the see during the vacancies of the 1090s. Alfonso VII promised

that when the present archbishop Diego, or any successor of his, should meet his end, neither I, nor any of my successors, nor any secular [265] person, shall exercise any right or any power over the whole church of St. James, or over its castles and the temporalities belonging to it . . . but the church and its temporalities shall remain quit and free of any interference, according to the disposal and judgement of the canons of the same church; until the fitting, holy and religious election of an archbishop shall be made by those canons themselves.

It was not the only gain of these years. We have already seen that in the autumn of 1127 Alfonso VII had restored two properties to the church of Compostela. Significantly, they had been lost during the 1090s, when the honor of the see had been in the hands of the royal villicus Pedro Vimara. One was an estate at Montaos, to the north-east of Compostela, which had been in the church's possession since 924, and the other was the castle (castellum) of San Jorge to the north-west, looking across the Ría de Corcubion towards Cape Finisterre, originally granted in 1028. Each was the hub upon which depended ancillary territories -- multiple estates -- whose inhabitants owed dues and services to the central place. They were, in short, valuable properties which Diego did well to bring back under the control -- though not the undisputed control -- of his own church.⁽²⁵⁾ A further concession was gained, albeit a shadowy one, in 1129, when the king granted Diego possession of the city of Mérida at such time when it should have been conquered.⁽²⁶⁾ Of course, it is easy for a king to give away what he does not yet possess. But the prospective grant of Mérida usefully [266] matched Diego's ecclesiastical ambitions in the Extremaduran region.

The diploma of 25 May 1128 was granted jointly by Alfonso VII and his queen Berengaria. The marriage had taken place about Christmas 1127, probably at León. From 1128 until her death in 1149 the queen was usually associated with her husband in his beneficial charters. Berengaria was the daughter of Ramón Berenguer III, count of Barcelona (1097-1131). Unfortunately for the royal couple, they were distantly related to one another; their great-great-grandmothers, who had lived in the early part of the eleventh century, had been sisters. This remote consanguinity was to cause the king the gravest anxiety when, two years after the marriage, a papal legate visited his kingdom. Diego, characteristically, was not slow to turn these circumstances to his advantage.

Cardinal Humbert reached the kingdom of León-Castile towards the end of the year 1129. We have already seen that part of his brief was to acquaint himself with the doings of the archbishop of Compostela, then labouring under ill-concealed papal displeasure. He had also been charged to look into the business of Alfonso VII's consanguineous marriage. The marriage had been diplomatically advantageous, for an alliance with the house of Barcelona was a counterweight to his old enemies the Aragonese. It may also -- though this is guesswork -- have been financially advantageous too: the count of Barcelona ruled one of the most prosperous areas of the Mediterranean seaboard, and Berengaria's dowry is likely to have been a handsome one. It is likely that Berengaria had already given birth to a son, later Sancho III of Castile (1157-8), before Humbert's arrival, so that the succession was assured -- a matter on which Alfonso VII is likely to have been even more sensitive than other twelfth-century rulers. The possibility that a papal legate might attempt to annul the marriage was alarming.

The cardinal's visit culminated in the ecclesiastical council held in the Cluniac priory of San Zoil de Carrión early in February 1130. Diego attended the council, despite his recent illness, at the pressing insistence of both cardinal and king. After crossing the mountains which separate [267] Galicia from the Spanish meseta he was met at León by Alfonso VII. The two men held secret discussions and 'talked of many things' as the author of the Historia Compostellana darkly puts it. Happily he tells us that one of them was the question of the royal marriage. The king enlisted Diego's help in the event that the matter should be brought up at the council. It undoubtedly was.⁽²⁷⁾ Whatever the arguments employed by the king's friends, they evidently impressed the cardinal. The marriage survived Humbert's scrutiny and Berengaria remained Alfonso's queen. Diego's reward was ample. The king granted privileges of immunity to two estates of the church of Santiago, at Cacabelos between Villafranca del Bierzo and León, and at Lédigos between Sahagún and Carrión. He also made a grant of olive groves near Talavera: Diego wanted oil for lighting his cathedral in winter.⁽²⁸⁾

These were not the only benefits which Diego managed to reap from his advocacy of the king's case at the council of Carrión. At the same meeting there were deposed the abbot of Samos and the three bishops of León, Oviedo and Salamanca. These depositions have always puzzled historians. They have never been satisfactorily explained, and unless new evidence should come to light further speculation is fruitless. But if the causes are obscure the results are clear, and of the greatest interest to us. The new bishop of Salamanca, Alfonso Pérez, was (as we have already seen) a canon of Compostela; so too the new bishop of León, Arias.⁽²⁹⁾ (The antecedents of the new bishop of Oviedo, another Alfonso, are unknown.) These appointments were a triumph for Diego. Not only had he contrived to reassert control over his distant and troublesome suffragan see of Salamanca, but he had also managed to insert his own candidate into the important bishopric of León.

[268] In April 1130 Diego consecrated the bishop-elect of Salamanca and held a council at Compostela for the dissemination of the decrees of Carrión -- of which no text survives -- in Galicia. He could probably congratulate himself on a successful climb back into royal favour. It had been achieved at no little cost in anxiety, effort and hard cash. Yet the prospect for the future was rosy. Diego had helped and instructed his king, taken steps to strengthen the claims of his church, recovered old properties and gained new ones, acquired important privileges, inserted his dependants into positions of influence at the royal court and into vacant bishoprics, and patched up his relations with the papal curia. Could he maintain himself in this advantageous position? He was now in his mid-sixties; the answer would depend partly on his state of health. It would depend also on the continued smooth functioning of his network of friendship and patronage. It would depend most of all on the actions and attitudes of the king.

During the decade which began in 1130 -- the last of Diego's life -- the scope of Alfonso VII's ambitions and the theatre of his actions grew wider. In the first place, the affairs of the southern frontier and of Andalusia generally came to bulk ever larger in his vision.⁽³⁰⁾ In 1121 the city of Córdoba had risen against Almoravide rule. The Almoravide caliph Ali ben Yusuf returned from Morocco to suppress this rebellion, at the same time sending ambassadors to queen Urraca; peace with the kingdom of León-Castile would give him a free hand for putting his own house in order. The envoys were in Galicia in July,⁽³¹⁾ and it is to be presumed that a truce for several years was agreed since no further fighting apart from sporadic frontier 'incidents' is recorded until 1128. In that year the governor of Córdoba raided the Toledo region, and in 1129 (probably) there was a raid on Talavera, a little further down the valley of the Tagus. In December 1129 the caliph's son Teshufin ben Ali became [269] governor of Granada, in itself an indication that some new offensive was being planned. The first blow was delivered in 1130. Teshufin led an army towards Toledo, veered off up the Tagus to sack the fortress of Aceca, raided Bargas, and attacked the monastery of San Servando just outside the walls of Toledo before escaping back to the south. Aceca was utterly destroyed. Its castellan Tello Fernández was captured and spent the rest of his life imprisoned in Morocco. At least 250 Christians were killed; they could ill be spared from the sparsely-populated frontier territories where manpower was in such short supply. In 1131 another Almoravide army, commanded this time by the governor of Calatrava, was sent to the Tagus valley. The governor of Toledo, Gutierre Armíldez, was absent near Escalona; he was captured by a ruse and killed. The castellan of Mora, the Galician Munio Alfonso, was captured and carried off to Córdoba; he was ransomed later and returned to his command. Later in the year there seem to have been further operations, this time at Oreja, where the Christian forces were defeated and their leader killed.

Vigorous countermeasures were called for. Towards the ends of 1131 Alfonso VII entered into alliance with the Muslim prince usually referred to in the Christian sources as Zafadola. His true name was Ibn Hud al-Mustansir Sayf-al-Dawla and he was a member of the family who had ruled Zaragoza as taifa kings between 1039 and 1110. (He was the son of al-Musta'in whose silver intremissa came into the possession of Diego Gelmírez and was used by him in 1120 for bribing cardinals.) At this time Zafadola was governing a small principality, the rump of his ancestors' kingdom, based at Rueda del Jalón to the west of Zaragoza. By the terms of the alliance he became Alfonso's vassal and was entrusted with a string of castles along the exposed southern frontier of León-Castile.⁽³²⁾ Also before the end of 1131 the king appointed a new alcaide of Toledo to take the place of Gutierre Armíldez. Rodrigo González de Lara was a member of the greatest of Castilian noble families and a man of proven military skill. His task was to re-animate the flagging spirits of the frontiersmen.

[270] The year 1132 started auspiciously. In the early spring the towns of Avila and Segovia sent a raid to Lucena, south of Córdoba, where Teshufin had concentrated his army prior to the summer campaign. In a daring surprise attack Teshufin himself was wounded and much booty taken. No serious harm had been inflicted on the Almoravide forces but Castilian morale had received a much-needed fillip. In June Rodrigo González de Lara led a larger army on an even more ambitious expedition down the valley of the Guadalquivir as far south as Seville: the land was devastated, captives and plunder taken, and the governor of Seville defeated and killed. Teshufin dared not counter-attack. Instead he turned upon a raiding-party from Salamanca which was operating near Badajoz and defeated that. A little later in the summer he intercepted another Toledan contingent near Calatrava and defeated it too. So in 1132 the honours were about equal.

Alfonso VII had as yet taken no hand in the fighting on the southern frontier. In 1131 he had been occupied throughout the campaigning season with the siege of one of the last Aragonese strongholds in Castile, at Castrogeriz. In 1132 he had been engaged in suppressing the rebellion in the Asturias of count Gonzalo Peláez. But in 1133 he took the field himself. Accompanied by Zafadola he set out from Toledo at the end of May. The route followed was that pioneered by Rodrigo González in the preceding year. The country about Seville was laid waste and the army pushed on even further south down the Guadalquivir valley. Jerez was sacked and the area round Cadiz devastated. A vast horde of livestock -- camels, horses, cattle, sheep and goats -- accompanied the triumphant royal army back to the safety of the Tagus valley later in the summer. The reverses of 1130 and 1131 had been avenged.

In the year 1134 the king's attention was diverted eastwards by a series of events of the first importance in the kingdom of Aragon.⁽³³⁾ On 17 July the Almoravide forces [271] inflicted a shattering defeat on the Aragonese army at Fraga, in the valley of the Ebro to the east of Zaragoza. It was Alfonso el Batallador's last battle: old, wounded, humiliated, he died near Huesca on 8 September 1134. His death precipitated a political crisis. Apart from the disastrous marriage to Urraca, the king of Aragon had never taken a wife and left no children legitimate or illegitimate. But he had taken steps to make provision for the succession. In 1131 he had made a will which he confirmed just before his death leaving all his dominions to the Orders of the Temple, the Hospital and the Holy Sepulchre. This extraordinary decision has never satisfactorily been explained. All that matters for our purposes is that the will was set aside. The younger brother of the dead king, Ramiro, was proclaimed king of Aragon; in Navarre, which had formed a part of the kingdom of Aragon since 1076, a member of the old Navarrese dynasty, García Ramírez, was proclaimed king. Ramiro's elevation occurred very soon after El Batallador's death and by the end of September he had established himself in Zaragoza. It was in all probability in the same month that García Ramírez was proclaimed king of Navarre.

Alfonso VII's decision to intervene was prompted by straightforward territorial ambition. For many years the rulers of León-Castile had harboured designs upon southern Navarre and the Aragonese territories in the valley of the Ebro -- especially the city of Zaragoza, which had nearly fallen to Alfonso VI in 1086. Presented with this opportunity in the summer of 1134, his grandson was not slow to act. Alfonso VII was in the Rioja by the middle of November, by Christmas he was in control of Zaragoza. He had been formally welcomed into the city by clergy and people led by the bishop, García; his lordship had been recognized [272] by Ramiro II and the leading men of Aragon; and he had performed royal acts there, confirming by charter the customs (fueros et usaticos)  of the Aragonese and the privileges of the church of Zaragoza.

But the crisis had only just begun. The fortunes of Navarre are the easiest to follow. In January 1135 García Ramírez was recognized as king in return for doing homage to Ramiro II of Aragon. Alfonso VII was quick to move against this combination and by May had managed to detach Navarre from Aragon. García Ramírez did homage to the king of Castile, whose imperial coronation in León at the end of May he dutifully attended. Later in the same year Alfonso VII granted him Zaragoza and its territory -- the regnum Caesaraugustanum -- as a fief. But García of Navarre proved a restive vassel. In 1136 he attacked his overlord, and for the next four years sporadic warfare between the kingdoms of Navarre and León-Castile dragged on until peace was made in 1140.

García's rebellion against Alfonso VII in 1136 led to his forfeiture of the regnum Caesaraugustanum. In the summer of that year Alfonso VII gave the regnum back to Ramiro II, presumably to win him over from possible alliance with the Navarrese against León-Castile. The treaty that was made between the two rulers at this time is likely to have contained further provisions. Pope Innocent II had been pressing for a settlement of the Aragonese succession for over a year. Before the end of 1135 the elderly Ramiro II had been hastily married off to Agnes of Poitou, the daughter of William IX of Aquitaine and a widow of proven fecundity. She bore him a daughter in July 1136 and then, her duty done, returned to France to live out the remaining twenty-four years of her life in the congenial surroundings of the impeccably aristocratic nunnery of Fontevrault. The baby girl, Petronilla, was the heiress to the kingdom of Aragon. It is possible, though not demonstrable, that decisions about her future were taken at the time of the settlement between Alfonso VII and Ramiro II soon after her birth. What is certain is that a year later, in August 1137, Petronilla was married to Ramón Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona. Ramiro II ceded his kingdom to his daughter and new son-in-law, though [273] retaining the title of king during his long retirement at Huesca until his death in 1157. The union of Aragon and Catalonia in 1137 was one of the most important stages in the formation of the federation of territories later to be known as the Corona de Aragón.

This was not quite the end of the Aragonese succession crisis. Compensation for the military orders in respect of their claims under the terms of Alfonso I's will was not finally arranged until 1140 (for the Hospital and the Holy Sepulchre) and 1143 (for the Temple). As for the regnum of Zaragoza, we have seen that Alfonso VII gave it back to Ramiro II in 1136, though it was agreed that he was to hold it for life from the Aragonese king. After the cession of the kingdom of Aragon to the count of Barcelona in 1137, Alfonso VII became Ramón Berenguer's vassal for Zaragoza. But the count was already his vassal. This awkwardness was resolved, probably towards the end of 1137, by a further deal involving a reversal of roles. Ramón Berenguer IV consented to hold the regnum of Zaragoza as Alfonso VII's vassal. As events turned out, Alfonso VII's actual power over the regnum was almost non-existent. In the last resort the Aragonese adventure of 1134-7 profited him little or nothing.

Alfonso VII turned his attention towards his southern frontier again in 1138. In May he led a raid to the Guadalquivir valley and laid waste the country round Andújar, Ubeda, Baeza and Jaén; in July he laid abortive siege to Coria, south of Salamanca. In the following year he took the important strong point of Oreja, on the Tagus some miles upstream of Toledo, after a siege that lasted from April to October. These two directions of assault upon Muslim Andalusia -- south-westward into Extremadura, and south beyond the Tagus towards Calatrava and the Guadalquivir -- were to be the guiding principles of the emperor's strategy during the following decade of the 1140s.

Of the intense and complicated diplomatic and military manúuvres on the eastern and southern frontiers of the kingdom of León-Castile during the 1130s the Historia Compostellana tells us nothing, beyond a stray reference to Alfonso VII's Andalusian foray of 1133. There is no word [274] of the Aragonese succession crisis; no mention of the imperial coronation in 1135; no interest shown in the southern campaigns. This silence is instructive. Diego Gelmírez had no part in the high politics of these years.⁽³⁴⁾ There remained one area of the kingdom which occasioned anxiety and trouble for Alfonso VII, and of this the Historia does tell us something; small wonder, for it is not far from Compostela to the Portuguese frontier in the basin of the river Miño.

In the summer of 1128 there had been a revolution in Portugal.⁽³⁵⁾ On 24 June, at São Mamede near Guimarães, the army of the young Afonso Henriques had defeated the forces of his mother the countess Teresa and her paramour Fernando Pérez de Traba. Afonso was thenceforth count of Portugal until he assumed the title of king eleven years later. Teresa retired to France, to end her days as a nun in the Cluniac priory of Marcigny. Fernando Pérez returned to his estates in Galicia, to assume the headship of the Traba family on his father's death. Afonso Henriques was in effect an independent ruler, and probably looked upon himself in that light. Alfonso VII, in his more optimistic moments, is likely to have regarded him as simply a contumacious vassal. There was, in short, a grumbling hostility between these cousins. The river Miño, at least in its lower reaches, had long been recognized as the frontier between Galicia and Portugal. It was as little satisfactory as, at the same period, the rivers Esk and Tweed as frontiers between England and Scotland. The diocese of Tuy extended south of the river. Galician monastic houses owned estates in northern Portugal; their Portuguese counterparts, lands in southern Galicia. The [275] prominent families of the Minhotan flood plain on both banks of the river were connected by marriage, by regional ecclesiastical loyalties, by dialect, by shared economic concerns, by common social arrangements; and by less tangible bonds such as a mutual fear of intrusion (whether from north or south) by hostile seafarers along the Atlantic coastline. It was much the same in the hinterland, up the valley of the Limia for example, or in the mountainous country east of Chaves towards Bragança, and beyond in the basin of the Duero.

During the years that followed the revolution of 1128 this frontier region was greatly disturbed. In 1130, probably, Afonso Henriques raided southern Galicia for the first time.⁽³⁶⁾ These forays were to be repeated often in the next few years. They evidently disrupted the day-to-day life of the region. Monks of Celanova travelling to the coast to get fish were glad to do so under armed escort. We hear of the murder of an archdeacon in the diocese of Orense. A prominent rebel against Alfonso VII, Gonzalo Peláez, when exiled in about 1134, sought asylum at the court of Afonso Henriques.⁽³⁷⁾ Subscriptions to charters tell us something of Teresa's and then Afonso's attempts to find friends among -- the leading clergy of southern Galicia.⁽³⁸⁾ Teresa had founded a monthly market at Orense in 1122; in 1125 she had granted churches and privileges to the bishopric of Tuy. The 1122 charter was subscribed by the abbots of Celanova and Ribas del Sil; in one of the 1125 charters bishop Alfonso of Tuy referred to Teresa as his domina ac regina. A grant to the see of Coimbra in 1122 was subscribed by the bishops of Tuy and Orense and by the abbot of Celanova. In 1130 bishop Diego of Orense and abbot Pelayo of Celanova subscribed Afonso's charter issued at Villaza referred to above, and in 1134 bishop Pelayo of Tuy subscribed another such charter.

For Alfonso VII a new stage of danger was reached in [276] 1136 when Portugal and Navarre came together in an alliance directed against him. We have already seen that the king of Navarre attacked Alfonso VII's eastern frontier in 1136. His ally in Portugal invaded southern Galicia in the early summer of 1137. Several castles were taken and, more seriously, the town of Tuy.⁽³⁹⁾ Alfonso VII was in eastern Castile at the time. He at once hastened over to Galicia. Peace was made between the cousins at Tuy early in July.⁽⁴⁰⁾ After the negotiations were over Alfonso VII spent about two weeks at Santiago de Compostela.⁽⁴¹⁾ The peace made at Tuy endured for some years. Alfonso VII made one more visit to Galicia during archbishop Diego's lifetime -- he can be traced at Compostela in December 1138 -- but it was probably not Portuguese business that brought him there.⁽⁴²⁾ Renewed diplomatic strain between Portugal and León-Castile did not develop until after Afonso Henriques's great victory over the Moors at Aulic on 25 July -- St. James's day -- 1139, for it was as a result of this battle that he assumed the title of king.⁽⁴³⁾ The first surviving charter which bears this title is dated 10 April 1140 (four days after the death of Diego Geimírez).⁽⁴⁴⁾ The friction to which this gave rise endured until the legation of cardinal Guido in 1143, when Alfonso VII was brought to recognize the independent Portuguese monarchy.

Diego's loyalty to his monarch had never wavered throughout the period of strained relations with Portugal between 1128 and 1137. We may imagine that Alfonso VII was duly grateful for this. But loyalty in itself did not do much to enhance Diego's influence with the king. The two men rarely met. In the last decade of Diego's life Alfonso VII was at Compostela only thrice (December 1129-January 1130, July 1137, December 1138). Diego's visits to the royal court were equally rare. He attended the ecclesiastical councils of Carrión in February 1130 and Burgos in October 1136, at both of which the king was present. He can be traced at the [277] royal court in the spring of 1133 (as we shall see shortly), and he probably paid it another visit in May 1138. And that is all.

The court itself was one in which the elderly Diego would have found few intimates in the 1130s. Peripatetic and thereby unstable in composition though it was, it displayed nevertheless a certain consistency of character, as it had in the late 1120s, which reflected the king's will. It was cosmopolitan. The queen will have brought some Catalans in her household. There were troubadours from Aquitaine and from Galicia. The king's cousin Alphonse Jourdain, count of Toulouse, was a frequent visitor. The alliance with Zafadola in 1131 injected a Moorish presence. The king had a Jewish astronomer, and some other Jews rose very high in his service, like Judah ibn-Ezra to whom the town of Calatrava was entrusted after its conquest in 1147. But the nucleus of the royal court, the inner circle of the king's advisers, is to be sought in his household and among the witness-lists of surviving royal charters. The office of mayordomo was held during these years successively by Lope López (1131-5), Gutierre Fernández (1135-8) and Diego Múñoz (1138-44). Lope López, as we have seen, came from Carrión. Gutierre Fernández belonged to the Castro family whose landholdings were concentrated in eastern Castile. Diego Múñoz's family originated from Saldaña, to the north of Carrión. During the same period the office of alférez was held by Pedro Garcés (1131), Gonzalo Peláez (1131-2), Ramiro Froílaz (1132-3), Manrique de Lara (1134-7) and Diego Froílaz (1137-40). The connections of the first of these men are unknown. Gonzalo Peláez belonged to one of the leading families of the Asturias. Ramiro Froílaz came from the region of Astorga and León; Diego Froílaz was his brother. The Lara family to which Manrique belonged was the greatest noble family of north-eastern Castile. During the 1130s the household of Alfonso VII continued to have a distinctly Leonese and Castilian flavour. So did the witness lists of his diplomas, though the point needs no detailed demonstration here. Not surprisingly, it was to a Castilian environment that Alfonso VII entrusted his eldest son for his upbringing. This flavour of the meseta is explained by and [278] and in turn helps to explain the king's central preoccupations during these years.

Diego Gelmírez could have made little headway among a group of king's friends so constituted. His trump card was of course his control of the royal chancery, publicly confirmed by Alfonso VII in 1127. But here matters went badly wrong for Diego. Between February 1130 and March 1133 he had had no contact that we know of with the royal court. Following Bernardo's resumption of his duties as chancellor in March 1131 we may think it probable that he and Diego saw little of each other for the next two years. Diego seems to have been afraid that Bernardo and the department of state which he controlled were slipping away from. his influence. This is the background to the quarrel which broke out when Diego next visited the royal court at Carrión in March 1133.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Diego demanded that Bernardo surrender the office of chancellor to him, presumably with a view to replacing him with a more pliant nominee. Bernardo refused to do so, claiming that he held the chancery from the king and not from Diego. Alfonso VII supported him, sending his agents -- who included Albertino of León -- to intercede with Diego on Bernardo's behalf. A meeting was held at the Cluniac priory of San Zoil de Carrión, its prior presumably acting as a neutral intermediary, and matters were for the moment resolved. As the Historia tells it, Bernardo was brought to admit his dependence on the archbishop and surrendered the chancellorship to him. Diego granted the office back to him for a time (ad tempus). On 15 March Alfonso VII confirmed Diego's control of both chapel and chancery. But Bernardo's reinstatement was short. The last royal diploma drawn up under his aegis is dated 29 March 1133.⁽⁴⁶⁾ He accompanied Diego back to Compostela. By 11 April the chancery was headed by Martín Peláez, a canon of Compostela and presumably a nominee of Diego's. The king then departed on his Andalusian [279] campaign. So far the story reads as a triumphant vindication by Diego of the rights granted to him by the king in 1127.

But there was a sequel, and one that is by no means easy to understand. During or after (deinde) the Andalusian campaign the king decided to imprison Bernardo and strip him of his possessions. He sent messengers -- on no less than five different occasions according to the Historia -- to Compostela ordering Diego to place Bernardo in custody. This Diego consistently refused to do until the king's menaces became serious. Then, reluctantly, he imprisoned Bernardo. Shortly after this -- and we have probably reached the winter of 1133-4 -- a papal legate, cardinal Guido, visited Compostela in the course of a legatine journey to Spain and upbraided Diego for holding Bernardo a prisoner. Diego exculpated himself by showing that he was doing so only on the express orders of the king. When Alfonso was approached with a request for Bernardo's release, he angrily transferred him from Diego's custody to that of bishop Nuño of Mondoñedo. Soon afterwards (non longe post) cardinal Guido held a council at León at which Diego, who apparently did not attend it, was ordered to restore to Bernardo all he had lost during his captivity and to reinstate him as a canon of Compostela. Diego complied.⁽⁴⁷⁾ There the controversy appeared to end. However, after his release Bernardo went off to the Tierra de Campos and once more began to intrigue against Diego. But as the Historia puts it 'God's judgement took a hand' (divino interveniente iudicio) and Bernardo died before he could do any further damage, at Burgos, at some point in 1134.

What are we to make of this strange story? As always we must beware of accepting the testimony of the Historia Compostellana uncritically. Where much will forever remain obscure, some things are tolerably clear. In the first place, it is obvious that Diego and Bernardo were divided by bitter hostility, which their long previous association can have served only to sharpen. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the [280] matter, Diego was wounded and enraged by betrayal at the hands of a trusted protégé.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Second -- and this is of great importance -- it is clear that cardinal Guido, an outsider and a churchman of the highest repute, considered that Diego and not the king was the guilty party in the hounding of Bernardo. Third, although the Historia insists -- perhaps protesting a little too much (the king's five messages) -- that Alfonso forced Diego to imprison Bernardo, it is hard to believe that a ruler who wanted to ensure the custody of the latter should entrust him to the bishop of Mondoñedo. But an archbishop of Compostela so desirous well might, for if Nuño of Mondoñedo was anyone's man he was Diego's. Fourth, the doings at the council of León reveal that Bernardo had been deprived of his canonry at Compostela: but this was a degradation which could be inflicted only by the archbishop and chapter, not by the king. Fifth, the council of León witnessed a striking rebuff to Diego in the matter of the controversial election to the see of Salamanca (of which more presently): it is very hard to believe that in the case of Bernardo he won there what the Historia presents as a qualified victory. Finally, if Bernardo had indeed been persecuted by the king, why was it that he went straight back to the royal court after his release?

In the light of these considerations, perhaps it is permissible to make out a train of events somewhat different. Diego succeeded in depriving Bernardo of the chancellorship and escorted him back to Galicia. There if was on Diego's orders that he was imprisoned and at Diego's instance that he was transferred to Mondoñedo -- away from his consanguinei in Compostela. Cardinal Guido identified Diego as Bernardo's persecutor, and at León insisted that Diego should set him free.

Be this as it may, by far the most significant result of this quarrel was the loss of Diego's undisputed control of the royal chancery. Martín Peláez cannot be traced as a royal notary later than May 1133.⁽⁴⁹⁾ For over a year thenceforward [281] very few royal charters survive, and those few diplomatically suspect. (This paucity may in itself be an indication of the struggle for power within the chancery.) But then, on 1 June 1134, a diploma was drawn up for the king by one Berengar. In two other charters of the same year Berengar identifies himself as archidiaconus. He accompanied Alfonso VII to Zaragoza at the end of the year and there, at the foot of the confirmation charter for the church of Zaragoza referred to above, he further identifies himself as archdeacon of Toledo (archidiaconus Toletanus).⁽⁵⁰⁾ If the course of the struggle is obscure, its outcome is clear. The archbishop of Toledo had managed to insert his own candidate into the chancery and supplant the influence of his rival at Santiago de Compostela.

Berengar remained in control of the royal chancery until July or possibly August 1135. He was succeeded by a partnership which was to direct Alfonso VII's chancery for the next sixteen years -- master Hugo the chancellor and the scribe Geraldo. Nothing is known of Hugo's antecedents, but we may be sure that he had no connections with the church of Compostela. The Historia has nothing whatsoever to say about the chancery after the death of Bernardo in 1134, and in the abundant documentation of the church of Compostela no Hugo is mentioned who might be identified with master Hugo the royal chancellor.⁽⁵¹⁾ Hugo had a French name. It is reasonable to guess that like his predecessor Berengar he came from the circle of the French archbishop of Toledo, Raimundo. Geraldo is more problematical. His name, like Hugo's, was French but it was not all that uncommon in mid-twelfth-century Spain. It is just possible that he is to be identified with Gerald of Beauvais, canon of Compostela and the author of much of the Historia Compostellana.⁽⁵²⁾ If this were so, Compostelan influence might have been maintained in the chancery during the period 1135-51 -- but in a subordinate position. In short, [282] never again after 1133 could Diego Gelmírez feel confident in unrivalled domination of the most important office, beneath the monarchy itself, in the kingdom of León-Castile.

There was another sector of public life in which Diego would have expected to continue to exert influence, as he had done successfully in the past-episcopal elections. But here too the appointments made in the 1130s bear witness to a waning of Compostelan influence.⁽⁵³⁾ The episcopal elections of this period, in Spain as elsewhere, were the outcome of the interplay of diverse forces. The king, the archbishops, the cathedral chapter, the local monastic or aristocratic or urban élites, and very occasionally the popes or other prominent ecclesiastical outsiders all jostled for influence. Only rarely do our sources permit us to see something of the conflicts which lay behind the promotion of any one candidate to the bench of bishops. But we may be reasonably certain that most elections were complicated and hard-fought affairs.

One area was now closed to Diego's influence. The nascent state of Portugal would prove impervious to Compostelan pressure. Appointments to Braga he could have had no hope of ever influencing. At Coimbra Bernardo was promoted in 1128 as the choice of Afonso Henriques and the archbishop of Braga. He survived Diego to die in 1146. At Porto, Diego had managed to slip his candidate in back in 1112. Bishop Hugo died in 1136. His successor João Peculiar had previously been a canon and magister scolarum of Coimbra. In 1138 he was translated to the metropolitan see of Braga where he was to enjoy a long and distinguished tenure, notable for the closeness of relations between archbishop and king. He was succeeded at Porto by his nephew Pedro Rabaldis.

Diego had tried consistently and by no means unsuccessfully to influence the appointments to the Galician suffragans of Braga. In the 1130s these bishoprics tended to fall to local men of no discernible connections either with Santiago de Compostela or with Braga. Roberto of Astorga (1131-8) [283] had previously been archdeacon there; so too his successor Jimeno Eriz (1138-41), a member of a prominent local family. Pelayo Menéndez of Tuy (1131-55) was likewise drawn from the local nobility. Guido of Lugo (1134?-52) was an outsider in that he was French by birth, but he had previously been prior (i.e. dean) of the cathedral chapter of Lugo. At Mondoñedo Diego's faithful protégé Nuño Alfonso resigned his see in 1136. His successor was very much a local man, Pelayo, abbot of the monastery of Lorenzana. We may suspect some royal influence at Astorga and Lugo. Tuy and Mondoñedo seem to have gone their own way. Compostelan influence is conspicuously lacking; and so too, of course, is that of Braga.

The see of Orense might at first sight seem untypical. Bishop Martín (1133-56) had very probably been previously connected with the church of Compostela -- if it is correct to identify him with the canon and cardinal Martín Pérez who visited the papal curia on Diego's behalf in 1129 and 1130.⁽⁵⁴⁾ But the significant thing about Martín of Orense was his connection not with Diego but with the king. Four royal charters refer to him as a king's chaplain, and we know that he visited the papal curia on the king's business in 1135-6.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Given the state of relations between Alfonso VII and his cousin of Portugal, given too the disturbed conditions in the diocese of Orense in the early 1130s, it is plausible to suppose that Alfonso VII took steps to insert a strong loyalist at Orense in 1133. To judge only by the frequency of his subscriptions to royal charters, Martín was certainly that.

Diego's achievement in getting his candidate into the see of León in 1130 was, as we have seen, a triumph. When Arias died towards the end of 1135 he was succeeded by Pedro Anáyaz, who held the bishopric of León until 1139. Pedro [284] was another man from the circle of clergy at Compostela -- and a most distinguished one, successively canon, treasurer and dean of the cathedral chapter. It is most surprising that the Historia Compostellana says nothing whatsoever of his promotion to León, nor of his episcopate there. Given the compilers' habit of saying nothing about what displeased them or their master the archbishop, it is fair to suppose that the promotion of Pedro Anáyaz gave no pleasure at Compostela. Why this should have been so we cannot tell. At any rate, it would seem that Diego's personal influence at the see of León was not maintained after 1135. The successor of Pedro Anáyaz, bishop Juan (1139-81) was without doubt a king's man. He was the son of Albertino, the faithful servant of Alfonso VII with whom Diego had crossed swords several times in the 1120s.

The suffragans of Compostela in the kingdom of León-Castile were Avila and Salamanca (if we leave aside the insubstantial claims over Zamora). During the 1130s, two appointments occurred about which we are rather well-informed owing to the survival of correspondence relating to them which was copied into the Historia Compostellana. Bishop Sancho of Avila died in the early months of 1133. He was succeeded by his brother Iñigo, previously the archdeacon of Avila. The letters make it clear that Diego Gelmírez, as metropolitan, had no say in the matter. Iñigo seems to have been chosen by the clergy and people of Avila, and then presented to the king for his approval.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Alfonso VII -- at that time, we should remember, embroiled in conflict with Diego over the control of the chancery -- confined himself to notifying the archbishop of Compostela of the election in a curt letter and requesting that the bishop-elect be consecrated without delay. Diego complied. Iñigo was consecrated at Compostela on 25 July 1133. He held the see of Avila until 1158.

The most controversial episcopal election of the last decade of Diego's life was that of Berengar to the see of Salamanca. It proved a signal defeat for Diego.⁽⁵⁷⁾ We saw [285] bishop Nuño of Salamanca was deposed at Carrión in 1130, and that his successor Alfonso Pérez was a canon Compostela and almost certainly Diego's nominee. But new bishop was short-lived: he died at Cluny in November 1131 after attending Innocent II's council of Rheims. Nuño had retired to Idanha in Portugal after his deposition and returned to Salamanca in an attempt to regain the bishopric after Alfonso Pérez's death. (This was a surprising course of action but it can be paralleled: Pelayo of Oviedo, deposed like Nuño at Carrión in 1130, had a second spell as bishop of Oviedo in 1142-3, after his successor Alfonso's death.) His return precipitated a schism at Salamanca. Nuño's strategy seems to have been to ingratiate himself with Diego Gelmírez. To this end he went to Compostela and came back to Salamanca claiming -- with what justice we do not know -- that Diego had recognized him as the rightful bishop. Some among the clergy of Salamanca were content with this: a charter of 21 January 1133 issued by an archdeacon of Salamanca, Hugo, (and subscribed by another archdeacon, the prior of the chapter and at least three of the canons) Nuño is referred to in the dating-clause as bishop. However, Nuño evidently considered that he needed the sanction of an even higher authority to regularize his position, for he took his case to the papal curia. When he returned he boasted that the pope had confirmed him in his episcopal title. But this was very far from the truth, as one of St. Bernard's letters makes clear. Innocent II, a man of unbending canonical rectitude and one, moreover, likely to be acutely sensitive on the subject of irregular episcopal elections, had disallowed Nuño's claims and imposed a sentence (of excommunication?) upon him. Nuño had enlisted the interest of St. Bernard, and also it seems that of Peter the Venerable of Cluny, in an attempt to have the sentence lifted (but not, be it noted, the principal judgement reversed). Whether or not he was successful we do not know. What we do know is that [286] on his return to Salamanca he not only claimed to be the rightful bishop but also started to reward his supporters with the endowments of the bishopric.⁽⁵⁸⁾ When his opponents there protested at his action he flew into a rage and continued yet more recklessly in his alienations not only of lands but of churches too.

At this point -- perhaps somewhere in 1133 -- the enterprising Nuño disappears from the surviving records. But it is obvious that Diego had been placed in a highly embarrassing situation. A man whose deposition from episcopal office he had been instrumental in securing had managed to impose upon him in such a way as to make it seem that Diego was prepared to countenance proceedings utterly at variance with the canon law of the church. Diego had, unwittingly perhaps, furnished his opponents with a handle which they could not fail to grasp.

Diego's arch-enemy was Raimundo of Toledo; and Raimundo, abetted by a powerful team of allies -- the king, the papal legate Guido, and the loyal 'Toledan' bishops of Segovia and Zamora -- succeeded in inserting his candidate into the see of Salamanca. This candidate was Berengar, to whom we must now turn. Berengar had been a member of the Toledan ecclesiastical circle since, at latest, 1121.⁽⁵⁹⁾ By 1133 he had become archdeacon of Toledo.⁽⁶⁰⁾ As we have seen, he was in control of the royal chancery probably by the summer, certainly by the autumn of 1134. It was at the mysterious council of León in 1134, at which Diego's faction suffered such serious reverses, that Berengar was appointed to the bishopric of Salamanca. He did not, however, style himself bishop elect until the summer of 1135; and the earliest time by which we can be sure that he had been consecrated (by his metropolitan, Diego) does not occur until [287] March 1136.⁽⁶¹⁾ This is as firm a chronology as we can get and it instantly prompts one to ask why there was so long a delay between Berengar's appointment and his consecration. It must have been because there was opposition to his appointment, partly at Salamanca, partly at Compostela: we can be sure of the former, but have to guess at the latter. But the guess is a plausible one; and if we care to make it we may further care to consider whether these two sources of hostility to Berengar might not have been in collusion.

Berengar's own attitude to Diego was gratuitously provocative. After his election he wrote to Diego reporting it, dwelling on the fact that he had been chosen in the presence of the archbishop of Toledo and the bishops of Segovia and Zamora. It only remains, he went on, for me to come to you for consecration -- there was no question of requesting it! -- unless you should happen to be coming in this direction, in which case let me know. Berengar's letter was an extraordinarily, and surely deliberately, tactless document. He had just broken Diego's control of the royal chancery. We might think that a more gracious approach would have been appropriate. Instead Berengar chose the most arrogant disregard for Compostelan sensibilities.

The other three letters in the dossier on the Salamanca election reveal far more than does Berengar's about the state of affairs in the diocese. They were addressed to Diego by the clergy and people of Salamanca, by the archbishop of Toledo, and by the king. These letters make clear, what Berengar's contrives to conceal, that his election took place at León; and they make it pretty plain that the electors were given a strong directive from the king and archbishop as to whom they should choose. They also reveal that Berengar could not take up his new appointment at once because there was another candidate for the office, a certain Pedro, the nominee of count Pedro López. The count was a leading figure in the early years of Alfonso VII's reign. He was a brother of Lope López ( the king's alférez in 1126-2 and his mayordomo between 1131 and 1135), one of the earliest adherents of the king at his accession in 1126, and [288] prominent in the subscription-lists of royal diplomas between 1126 and 1135.⁽⁶²⁾ Between 1131 and 1135 he held office as count, on three occasions during these years he headed the subscription-lists,⁽⁶³⁾ and Salamanca was the centre of his operations.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Of his nominee to the bishopric, Pedro, we know only the following: first, that he had for a time enjoyed the support of a group of influential people in Salamanca who could describe themselves as the 'clergy and people' (clerici Salmanticenses et populus), that is, the electoral body -- in short that he had actually been elected bishop; second, that he was unacceptable to the archbishop of Toledo who described him as 'altogether unsuitable' (absolute simplex); third, that (like Nuño) he had -- or was accused of having -- rewarded his supporters with ecclesiastical endowments; fourth, that he was so strongly entrenched at Salamanca that not only could he exclude Berengar but also -- and very significantly -- he had to be removed by negotiation and compromise, not by force; and finally, that it was hinted that he enjoyed the support of Diego Gelmírez.

There are several points of interest here, but only the last is of special concern to us. Much depends on how we choose to interpret the longest letter in our dossier, that of the archbishop of Toledo -- both its general tone and one phrase in particular. The letter as a whole is a masterpiece of sarcasm and controlled invective. You will want to know, wrote Raimundo, what has been going on in your church of Salamanca; you will rejoice to hear that your own suffragan see has a pastor after her long and unhappy widowhood; words cannot express the shocking state of affairs which we found in your church when we went there. The reiterations pointed an accusing finger. It was all somehow Diego's fault. Archbishop Raimundo went on to say something of count Pedro López's nominee (whom he did not deign to name):

the electors and the municipality of Salamanca (totum Salmanticense concilium) received Berengar with honour and conducted him to the [289] altar -- except for a certain man of utter unsuitability whom we need not now describe to you, and a few of his hangers-on who had enthroned him as bishop under the shadow and illusion of an invasive and sacrilegious election.

The king's letter administered further twists of the knife in the wound. (It was drafted of course in the chancery controlled by Berengar.) The reference to Martha and Mary in the opening protocol implied criticism of Diego for neglecting his pastorial duties, and the king wound up with a sentence which must have cut Diego to the quick: 'When you consider who Berengar is and by whom he is sent you will receive him in charity and with honour, and send him back yet more honourably [i.e. after consecration]; you should rejoice not a little to welcome him as a colleague.' Alfonso VII's interests were deeply engaged in the business for reasons not confined to the cut-throat world of ecclesiastical politics. Salamanca was a booming frontier town.⁽⁶⁵⁾ It was a bastion in a network of defences against the Muslims of Extremadura and the Portuguese. It is important to remember that Salamanca's troops had suffered reverses at the hands of the Almoravides in the years 1132-4.⁽⁶⁶⁾ These troops had presumably been led by -- or at least under the responsibility of -- the local count, Pedro López. In view of the fact that the count's nominee to the bishopric was prepared to squander ecclesiastical endowments to reward his supporters, it is of interest to find that opinion at the royal court, as represented by the author of the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, regarded these reverses as a result of the Salamancans' reluctance to pay tithes and first-fruits [290] to their clergy. There is a fair amount of material in the Fuero de Salamanca, parts of which date from this period, to suggest that relations between clergy and laity were, in Salamanca as elsewhere on the frontier, a focus for conflict.⁽⁶⁷⁾ It would have been a matter of concern to the archbishop of Toledo that the schismatic bishop-elect Pedro and his patron the count were capricious in their attitude to ecclesiastical privilege. It would have been a matter of concern to Alfonso VII that count Pedro López was not satisfactorily fulfilling his military duties. (It is interesting to find that the count disappears from our records just about the time that Berengar got his hands on the bishopric; interesting too that his brother Lope lost the office of royal mayordomo at the same time.) It would have been a matter of the utmost concern to Diego Gelmírez that he had been manúuvred into a position where he appeared to be the patron of a dubious ecclesiastical adventurer and the associate of a man who had lost the favour of the king.

The Salamanca election has been treated at great length because it reveals so vividly the weaknesses in Diego's position in the mid-1130s. By 1133-4 he had lost control of the royal chancery. He could no longer influence episcopal elections; the attempt to do so at Salamanca in 1134-5 had proved a humiliating defeat. He was far from the counsels of a ruler who was surrounded by advisers much younger than Diego, unfamiliar and, some of them, actively hostile to him. The network of friendship and patronage on which he had relied in getting his way had dissolved. The world which Diego had known so intimately, bestridden so confidently, manipulated so deftly, was no longer there. He was old and isolated. The shadows were lengthening.

This is not to say that Diego had fallen from favour. It was rather that he and his Galicia had been relegated to the fringes of the Leonese-Castilian orbit whose hub was the peripatetic imperial court ceaselessly traversing the central Spanish meseta. Diego still attended it from time to time. In [291] October 1136 he took part in the council held at Burgos by cardinal Guido which was concerned among much else with the punishment to be meted out to the leaders of the insurrection at Compostela which had occurred in the summer.⁽⁶⁸⁾

In July 1137 the Portuguese war brought the court to Galicia, and Alfonso VII spent some time at Compostela after peace had been made at Tuy. In the spring of 1138 Diego jolted over the mountains for the last time, to attend the court at Carrión in May.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Each of these encounters was attended by unseemly wrangling over money between emperor and archbishop. At Burgos Diego was compelled to pay him 400 marks. At the time of the Portuguese campaign Diego's recorded payments to Alfonso amounted to 2,160 marks. At some point in 1138, possibly though not necessarily at Carrión in May, Diego was forced to make a further payment of 500 marks.⁽⁷⁰⁾ In the autumn of 1138 Alfonso excused him from attendance at the court at Palencia 'having regard to the coming cold of winter and the great labour of a long journey'. Instead, the emperor himself visited Compostela in December 1138.⁽⁷¹⁾ It was the last occasion on which the two men met. It is also our last glimpse of Diego. The Historia Compostellana breaks off at this point. We know nothing of his doings in 1139, and may guess that there were few of them. Bishop Guy of Lescar, visiting Compostela in October 1138 to summon Diego to the Lateran council in the following year, had evidently thought that there was little prospect that his state of health would permit him to attend. There could have been no question of his making his way to Rome in 1139.

Palm Sunday fell on 31 March in 1140. In the new cathedral, its bells muffled for Lent, its ornaments shrouded and its candles unlit, the laborious round of the Holy Week liturgy would have gone ahead as usual. The canons, haggard after their Lenten fast, would have gone about their offices in unaccustomed quiet, for work would have been suspended on the buildings, the scaffolding unpeopled, the carts and [292] pulleys silent. In the dimness of the apostle's church the servants would have been making discreet preparations for the vast congregation, the processions, the explosion of people, of noise and of light, that would occur on the following Sunday. There was a further reason for the unnatural calm. In his palace near by the old archbishop lay dying. Would he last until Easter Day? Would he be able to preside with dignity, would he be able to preside at all, for the fortieth time, at the central festival of the Christian year? So his physician, perhaps still that Robert of Salerno, medicus,whom we glimpse in his entourage at an earlier date,⁽⁷²⁾ must have anxiously worried. Diego kept his attendants in suspense until the last possible moment. Then, with that flair for timing and publicity which had stood by him all his life, he ensured that even the Risen Christ would take second place in the minds of those who celebrated Easter at Compostela that year. He died on Easter Eve, Saturday 6 April 1140.

1. R. 28 October 1156.

2. In general I keep references to a minimum in treating the reign of Alfonso VII, even though no satisfactory modem study of it exists. The most important source is the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris (CAI): the notes to the edition by L. Sánchez Belda (Madrid, 1950) are of great value. M. Recuero Astray, Alfonso VII, emperador: el imperio hispánico en el siglo XII (León, 1979) is the latest general treatment; but it has many shortcomings.

3. HC, p. 485.

4. HC, pp. 432-4. Alfonso VII's actions as recorded in other sources make it impossible to believe the Historia's story that he wanted Diego to crown him at León.

5. I cannot agree with Reilly, Urraca, pp. 175, 191-2, 310, that count Pedro was imprisoned during the last three years of Urraca's reign.

6. CAI, cc. 112, 141, 143-4, 162-74.

7. HC, p. 494.

8. For what follows, see HC, pp. 446-62.

9. e.g. R. 2 April 1127.

10. R. 13 November 1127.

11. For what follows, see HC, pp. 493-5.

12. Reading maiordomum for maiorinum. Rodrigo Bermúdez held the office of mayordomo between 1127 and 1130.

13. Could it have been for the purpose of carrying out this task that he acquired the property in Compostela referred to in a charter of 1149? See LFH IV, ap. xix, p. 51.

14. HC, p.396; R. 31 May 1124.

15. The king's sister Doña Sancha also promised to be buried there, as did his aunt Teresa of Portugal: HC, pp. 462-3.

16. R. 13 November 1127.

17. HC, p. 456.

18. The most important studies are by P. Rassow, 'Die Urkunden Kaiser Alfons' VII von Spanien', Archiv für Urkundenforschung 10 (1928), 328-467 and 11 (1930), 66-137; L. Sánchez Belda, 'La cancillería castellana durante el reinado de Doña Urraca', Estudios dedicados a Ramón Menéndez Pidal 4 (1953), 587-99; B. F. Reilly, 'The chancery of Alfonso VII of León-Castilla: the period 1116-1135 reconsidered', Speculum 51(1976), 243-61.

19. R. 1123, 30 November 1123. The date of the reconquest of Sigüenza and the restoration of a bishopric there is disputed: see most recently Reilly, Urraca, pp. 177-80.

20. R. 1127: 'quia regie capallanie usque ad presens tempus fuisse cognoscitur'. This charter, incidentally, was subjecribed by yet another royal chaplain, Arias González, canon of Santiago.

21. HC, pp. 487-8.

22. In AC Santiago.

23. Of course, as a muniment the cartulary presents formidable problems to the student of diplomatic; in particular, of the extent to which the forged or interpolated charters (actually a very small proportion of the whole corpus) may be attributed to the agency, direct or indirect, of Diego and Bernardo. My concern here is with the impulse behind the making of the Tumbo and (so to say) with its function, not with the technical problems of its composition and construction (which deserve extended study.) I am inclined to think, however, that the charters of doubtful authenticity had been concocted before Diego's day.

24. For what follows see HC, pp. 464-8, and cf. 510-11 (=JL 7416). For a fuller treatment of regalian right see R. A. Fletcher, 'Regalian right in twelfth-century Spain: the case of archbishop Martin of Santiago de Compostela', Journal of Ecclestical History 27 (1977), 337-60.

25. For Montaos see R. 17 September 924, 31 May 1124; HC, pp. 18, 72, 200, 212, 396, 461, 504, 588; LFH IV, ap. xxix, pp. 76-7. For San Jorge see R. 30 December 1028, 13 November 1127; HC, pp. 18, 200, 460.

26. R. 25 March 1129 (whose wording implies that the king was planning an attempt on Mérida in the near future).

27. It is noteworthy that the queen was not associated with her husband in a diploma drawn up while the council was in session: R. 7 February 1130.

28. HC, pp. 498-9 and R. 22 February 1130. Lédigos had been in the possession of Santiago since 1028: see R. 26 September 1028. For Cacabelos see also HC, p. 69.

29. Arias is referred to as canon and cardinal of Compostela at HC, p. 498, a point which I overlooked in Episcopate, p. 70. It has been suggested that he is to be identified with Arias González the king's chaplain: this is possible though not certain.

30. Operations on the southern frontier have not yet been treated as amply as they deserve. What follows is only a sketch. In addition to the books cited at the beginning of this chapter I have found J. González, Repoblación de Castilla la Nueva (Madrid, 1975) useful: see especially vol. I, ch. 2.

31. HC, pp. 350-2.

32. CAI, cc. 27-9.

33. The Aragonese succession crisis has provoked an extensive scholarly literature. The most valuable recent contributions are: F. Balaguer, 'La Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris y la elevación de Ramiro II al trono aragonés', Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón 6 (1956), 7-40; A. Ubieto Arteta, 'Navarra-Aragón y la idea imperial de Alfonso VII de Castilla', ibid., pp. 41-82;

H. Grassotti, 'Homenaje de Garcia Ramírez a Alfonso VII. Dos documentos inéditos', Cuadernos de Historia de España 38 (1963), 318-29; S. de Vajay, 'Ramire II le Moine, roi d'Aragon, et Agnes de Poitou dans l'histoire et dans la légende', Mélanges offerts a René Crozet, ed. P. Gallais and Y.-J. Riou (Poitiers, 1966) II. 727-50; A. J. Forey, The Templars in the Corona de Aragón (London, 1973), pp. 17-20; E. Lourie, 'The will of Alfonso I el Batallador, king of Aragon and Navarre: a reassessment', Speculum 50 (1975), 635-51. Here again I confine myself to a summary treatment.

34. It has been suggested that Diego attended the imperial coronation, on the basis of the occurrence of his name in the subscription-lists of two royal diplomas issued at León just afterwards: R. 29 May 1135, 2 June 1135. The latter is probably a forgery. The former is not without suspicious features, but even if it is genuine Diego's subscription does not serve to establish his presence at the coronation. It is inconceivable that the Historia Compostellana could have failed to mention the ceremony had Diego attended it. The silence of our text is the best argument for Diego's absence. However, representatives of the clergy of Compostela certainly were there. The only name we can be sure about is that of Ciprián Pérez, iudex of Compostela: see R. 25 May 1135.

35. The most recent survey of the history of Portugal during this period, with full references to earlier literature, is that of P. Feige, 'Die Anfänge des portugiesischen Königtums und seiner Landeskirche', Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft 29 (1978), 85-436.

36. HC, pp. 517-18; CAI, cc. 75, 115; DMP, no. 113 shows him at Vilaza in September 1130.

37. Sancti Rudesindi Miracula III, c. 30, in Portugalliae Monumenta Historica, Scriptores, ed. A. Herculano (Lisbon, 1856), pp. 39-46; AC Orense, Obispo y Dignidades, no. 17; CAI, c. 46.

38. For what follows see DMP, nos. 60, 64, 70, 71, 113, 142.

39. HC, pp. 585-6; CAI, cc. 73-5; DMP, no. 164.

40. DMP, no. 160.

41. R. l7 July 1137, 20 July 1137, 28 July 1137.

42. R. 11 December 1138, 12 December 1138.

43. Aulic has never been identified with certainty.

44. DMP, no. 176.

45. For what follows see HC, pp. 531-2, 551-8, 561, and the discussion in B. F. Reilly, 'The chancery of Alfonso VII of León-Castilla: the period 1116-1135 reconsidered', Speculum 51 (1976), 243-61.

46. R. 20 December 1133 is subscribed by Bernardo, but as Reilly art. cit. p. 254 note 68, has shown the correct date is between 1127 and 1130.

47. This is our only reference to the León council. We cannot date it precisely. Given the developments sparked off by the death of the king of Aragon early in September, it is most unlikely to have met later than August 1134. See below, Appendix E.

48. See especially HC, pp. 551-2. It is of great interest to discover that Bernardo was a relative (consanguineus) of Pedro Helias the dean of Compostela, another man whom Diego no longer trusted. The quarrel had a local dimension whose precise contours cannot now be delineated.

49. His last subscription is of R. 13 May 1133.

50. R. 1134, 1 June 1134, 10 November 1134, 26 December 1134. Reilly, art. cit., p. 258, note 90, voices some doubts as to the authenticity of R. 1 June 1134.

51. The only Hugo who is at all prominent in the HC is Diego's protégé bishop Hugo of Porto who died in 1136.

52. This is a guess, though it has (I think) more plausibility than might immediately appear. But the case is too long a one to be argued here.

53. The best recent treatment is B. F. Reilly, 'On getting to be a bishop in León-Castilla: the emperor Alfonso VII and the post-Gregorian church', Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 1 (1978), 37-68.

54. HC, pp. 490, 509. HC, p. 511 (=JL 7415) shows that he also held an archdeaconry.

55. R. 15 May 1131, l8 January 1133, 3 February 1133 and l8August 1136: on the last of these see Reilly, art. cit., p 54, note 64. The visit to the papal curia is referred to in R. October 1136: Martín travelled in the company of another ex-royal chaplain, bishop Bernardo of Sigüenza. I know of no evidence that Martín was the brother of his predecessor at Orense, Diego, as asserted by Reilly, p. 46. It is surely unlikely on chronological grounds, since Diego became bishop in 1100 and Martín died in 1156.

56. HC, pp. 536-42. R. 11 April 1133 shows that the king was at Avila at the time. It is noteworthy that the staunchly royalist bishop Pedro of Segovia attended bishop Sancho's funeral.

57. The principal sources for what follows are the letters preserved in HC, pp. 542-3, 562-6; St. Bernard, ep. 212, in PL CLXXXII, col. 377; Documentos de los archivos catedralicio y diocesano de Salamanca (siglos XII-XIII), ed. J. L. Martín Martín (Salamanca, 1977), no. 7; and royal charters as cited below. The sequence of events is not easy to establish and I claim no more than plausibility for what follows. Others, notably Professor Reilly, have interpreted these materials rather differently.

58. We should bear in mind that alienations of this kind, a matter of perennial concern to churchmen, had recently been attracting an unusual degree of attention: see for example the conciliar legislation of Rheims (1119) c. 4, Lateran I (1123) c. 4, Rheims (1131) c. 10, and in Spain Burgos (1117) cc. 8 and 11, Sahagún (1121) c. 6, Palencia (1129) c. 5. Nuño's earlier failure to halt depredations should be remembered: HC, pp. 430-1 (=JL 7208) of 1 May 1125.

59. Assuming that he may be identified with the Berengar who features in a witness-list made up of Toledan clergy in a charter of that year, published by F. Fita in BRAH 14 (1889), 456-9.

60. R. 3 May 1133.

61. R. 18 August 1135, 9 March 1136.

62. CAI, c. 4.

63. R. 1 February 1132, 18 August 1132, 2 January 1133.

64. 'mandante Salamancha': Documentos de los archivos catedralicio y diocesano de Salamanca (siglos XII-XIII), ed. J. L. Martín Martín (Salamanca, 1977), n. 7.

65. J. González, 'Repoblación de la extremadura leonesa', Hispania 3 (1943), 195-273.

66. CAI, c. 122-4.

67. 'Fuero de Salamanca' in Fueros Leoneses, ed. A. Castro and F. de Onís (Madrid, 1916), pp. 77-207: c. 295-8 concern tithes, and c. 295 itself is attributed to count Raymond at the time of the settlement of Salamanca a generation before the events examined here.

68. HC, pp. 578-82; R. 2 October 1136, 4 October 1136.

69. R. 10 May 1138.

70. HC, pp. 579-81, 586-7, 595; R. 17 July 1137.

71. HC, p.597; R. 11 December 1138, 12 December 1138.

72. HC, pp. 269, 318.