[29] In Galicia in the tenth century power was the preserve of a small clique of noble families, themselves closely linked to the royal family. So firmly entrenched was their power, and so intimate these links, that we may fairly say that it would have taken a change of dynasty to shift them. As it happened, this is precisely what did occur in the eleventh century. To understand how this came about we must shift our gaze away from Galicia and fasten it instead upon the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre.

The origins of Navarre are desperately obscure. As a distinct political entity it is first discernible in the early ninth century, by the early tenth it was a well-established territorial principality, and a century later its royal family threw up a great ruler, Sancho el Mayor (1004-35).⁽¹⁾ Two features of Sancho's rule are particularly important for us. He absorbed under his dominion nearly all the Christian principalities of Spain: Aragon, Sobrarbe and Ribagorza to his east; to his west the county of Castile and, at the very end of his life, the kingdom of León. Sancho established himself in León, Astorga and Zamora in 1034, and drove the Leonese king Bermudo III back into Galicia. On Sancho's death in the following year his dominions were divided among his four sons, Castile falling to Fernando. Bermudo III quickly regained dominion over León, but two years later in 1037 Fernando defeated him in battle and displaced him. Fernando was to rule as king over Castile, León and Galicia until his death in 1065.

In a longer perspective it was to prove more important that Sancho should have looked outside the Iberian peninsula for ideas about the duties of kingship and for techniques [30] to give them effect. He organized his household on Frankish lines. He was the first Christian Spanish king since the Visigothic age to issue coinage. He had diplomatic relations with the princes of southern France and sometimes travelled outside the peninsula -- we find him at Saint Jean d'Angély in 1010. Above all he entered into relations with foreign churchmen.⁽²⁾ Oliba of Ripoll in Catalonia, culturally if no longer politically a part of Francia, became his correspondent and adviser. It was Oliba who supplied Sancho with one of his monks, Ponce, who seems to have become the king's domestic counsellor on ecclesiastical affairs, and who was rewarded with the rich bishopric of Oviedo. It was Oliba and Ponce who prevailed upon Sancho to re-establish the see of Palencia in 1034 and to install as its first bishop another Catalan, Bernardo. It was again Oliba and Ponce who persuaded Sancho to seek monks from Cluny in about 1025 and to establish them at the monastery of San Juan de la Peña on the borders of Navarre and Aragon. These early Cluniacs in Spain were few in number and negligible in their influence on monastic life. What was significant was that Sancho himself became an associate of Cluny (socius, familiaris) and was thus assured of the intercession of its monks. Though he established no permanent relations between his family and Cluny, the personal compact into which he had entered was not forgotten by the successors of either party to it: for the Cluniacs were expert at prayer for the souls of sin-laden kings, and Sancho's dynasty was to become very rich.

Thus, León and Galicia received a new master in 1037, member of a new Navarro-Castilian dynasty. The effects of this change upon the Galician élite were probably far more serious than historians have allowed. Fernando I rarely went to Galicia. It is noteworthy that the number of royal grants to Galician monasteries and cathedral churches dropped sharply during his reign. His gaze was fixed upon the Leonese and Castilian meseta and the Muslim principalities of the [31] centre and south of the peninsula. The beneficiaries of his acts of piety were such houses as Sahagún, Carrión, Arlanza, Cardeña, Covarrubias, Silos, and above all the churches of the urbs regia of León. Galicia was, by and large, excluded from the sweep of his benevolence. But there may have been more to it than this. It is likely that Galicia was positively disaffected towards Fernando I, and suffered for it. The memory of the last king of the native dynasty, whom he had dethroned, was kept green there. In a short series of annals dating from Fernando's reign Bermudo III was remembered as 'a fighter valiant in battle'; of Fernando the annalist merely made a laconic note of the date of his coronation.⁽³⁾ There was a rebellion against the king by count Munio Rodríguez; defeated, Munio was imprisoned and stripped of his lands.⁽⁴⁾ Was he the only man to meet such a fate? Some answer to this question is suggested by a royal charter of quite exceptional interest. When Fernando I died in 1065 he divided his realms, like his father before him, among his sons. To Sancho (II) went Castile, to Alfonso (VI) León, and to García Galicia. The earliest surviving document of king Garcia's reign records an oath which he swore to the bishop of Lugo and two Galician counts.⁽⁵⁾ García swore to be a good lord to them and promised that he would not deprive them of the lands (honores) which they held then or might acquire in the future, nor send them into exile, nor molest them by encouraging their ill-wishers. We know nothing of the background to king Garcia's oath. However, it was sworn within a mere seven weeks of Fernando's death, it shows that the Galician notables distrusted their sovereign, and it raises the suspicion that the constraints laid on the son were a response to policies pursued by the father. We also know that García later experienced at least one Galician revolt, in 1071, and that the rebels suffered confiscation of their lands.⁽⁶⁾

King García did not last long. He was dethroned by his brother Sancho II of Castile in the early summer of 1071. Sancho in his turn was dethroned by the third brother, [32] Alfonso, in October 1072, and it was thus the latter who reunited all the dominions of his father and as Alfonso VI ruled over a kingdom of León, Castile and Galicia from then until his death in 1109. Galician disaffection continued. A rebellion broke out in 1085 based on the Lugo area and led by count Rodrigo Ovéquiz. The king hastened back from newly conquered Toledo and besieged the rebels in Lugo, within whose Roman walls the count had fortified himself. The town was taken, count Rodrigo and his supporters captured, deprived of their lands and scattered in exile or imprisonment. This revolt was a serious affair. Rodrigo was supported by 'followers from the whole of the province of Galicia'. Among them was the bishop of Compostela, Diego Peláez. A generation later it was believed that Diego had plotted with William I of England to betray Galicia to him. Whether or not there was any truth in this accusation -- and there is some reason to believe it less fantastic than it appears -- the bishop's complicity in the rebellion is indicated by the actions of the king. Alfonso arrested Diego and flung him into prison. In 1088 he was prevailed upon to resign his see at the ecclesiastical council of Husillos in the presence of the king and a papal legate. The remainder of his life was spent in exile at the court of the king's enemy Pedro I of Aragon.⁽⁷⁾

This steady record of Galician resentment of the new dynasty was probably the impulse behind a surprising appointment made by Alfonso VI shortly after Rodrigo Ovéquiz's revolt. In the spring of 1087 he entrusted Galicia to a French nobleman, Raymond of Burgundy, who had recently come to his court. Shortly afterwards a marriage was arranged between Raymond and the king's young daughter Urraca.⁽⁸⁾ Raymond was to remain count of Galicia until his death twenty years later. We know very little of the [33] background to this extraordinary decision. Alfonso VI was connected to the comital family of Burgundy through his marriage in 1078 or 1079 to Constance of Burgundy: her brother was married to Raymond's aunt. It may be that abbot Hugh of Cluny had a hand in Raymond's coming to Spain; he was influential with Alfonso VI and had close ties with Raymond's family. We do not know exactly when Raymond came to Spain, though it was probably in 1086. There is some evidence to suggest that he was planning a permanent settlement there. If so, he must have been confident both that the right strings had been pulled for him and that he would make a favourable impression on the king. Alfonso's thinking presumably sprang from exasperation with his troublesome province. Galicia should be given to an outsider who should yet be linked to the new royal family, and who should be richly endowed with land and quasi-regal powers for his task. Such was Raymond.

It is at first sight curious that such a man should have gone down so well as Raymond evidently did in Galicia. One possible explanation for this might be that he did not have to contend with the entrenched opposition of a powerful nobility. For the great families of the tenth century were no longer there. It is literally the case that we lose sight of them in the second quarter of the eleventh; for the unfortunate fact is that there is something of a hiatus in our documentary sources. The copious stream of charters dries up to a mere trickle about the year 1040 and does not swell again for half a century. The uncomfortable suspicion makes itself felt that the old aristocratic families do not so much die out as simply become invisible to us. On the other hand, there are some considerations which help to allay these fears. First, as we have seen, there were revolts against the new dynasty and punishment of rebels by exile or confiscation of property. We should do well to remember that in the eleventh century the imposition of a new dynasty usually had these effects -- seen at their most drastic in the destruction of the Anglo-Saxon nobility by the Normans in and after 1066. Secondly, the families of Galicia which meet our gaze at the end of the eleventh century and in the first half of the twelfth had no demonstrable links with the great houses of [34] the tenth; and this despite the fact that they were as keenly interested in genealogy as their predecessors. Third, these new men were closely associated with the new dynasty, which gives force to the supposition that the new rulers had taken steps to raise up a new aristocracy of service on whose loyalty to themselves they could rely.

It will be profitable to examine one of the families of new men. The house of Traba cannot be described as typical, for it rose rapidly to a position of pre-eminence in Galicia. Yet in many of its features it is not unrepresentative. Furthermore, its close connections with the church of Santiago de Compostela give it a special interest for us.

The first member of the family of whom we know anything was Froila Bermúdez. His descendants were later to claim that he was a grandson of count Menendo González (d. 1008), regent during the minority of Alfonso V and himself a great-nephew of Rosendo of Celanova. The claim can be neither substantiated nor disproved, but the balance of such evidence as we possess is against it. It was probably the fruit of twelfth-century anxiety to provide the family with a distinguished ancestry. The truth may be that Froila's forebears had been among count Menendo's clients. By the 1060s Froila Bermúdez was a man of some consequence. His deputy (vicarius) could sit alongside count Rodrigo Ovéquiz to hear a lawsuit, and Froila himself may be found presiding over a lawsuit in which one of the parties was the monastic community of Jubia.⁽⁹⁾ The monastery of San Martín de Jubia was the religious house with which he had the closest links, and his own lands lay close to it, in the extreme north-west of Galicia. To the monks he was 'our patron' (dominus noster); he made them a lavish benefaction in 1086; and when he died in 1091 he was buried there after a splendid funeral attended by two bishops.⁽¹⁰⁾ But he was a man who looked beyond the confines of the foggy coasts from which he came. His charter for Jubia in 1086 [35] reveals that he had fought against the 'heathen men in the land of the Saracens', and its dating-clause observes that king Alfonso VI was 'ruling in the city of Toledo' -- a small but significant indication of awareness of the outside world and of pride in the king's most famous conquest. Froila may have been loyal to his king, but there is no sign that he rose to any height in his service. He subscribed no surviving royal charter, he never held office as a count. It was to be otherwise with his children.

Froila Bermúdez left three daughters and at least three sons. Ermesenda married a certain Cresconio Núñez; apart from a grant she made to Jubia in 1083 we know nothing of her.⁽¹¹⁾ Visclavara seems never to have married. She was a notable benefactress of religious houses. The family house at Jubia felt her generosity, so too did nearby Cines and the more distant house of Carboeiro; so also the cathedral church of Compostela.⁽¹²⁾ She described herself in 1114 as the 'handmaid of the handmaids of God' (ancillarum Dei ancilla), which suggests that she had entered religion herself. If so, she did so fairly late in life: it is unlikely that a nun would have presided over a court of law as she is known to have done in 1097.⁽¹³⁾ The third daughter, Munia, certainly entered religion for she is nearly always referred to in our sources as 'vowed to God' (Deo vota) throughout her very long life -- she was still alive in 1145. She too was a benefactress of Jubia.⁽¹⁴⁾

Where these ladies exercised their vocation is not clear. We are told on good authority that there were no nunneries in Galicia at this period.⁽¹⁵⁾ This was a matter which was to exercise their brother Pedro. He, together with Suero and Rodrigo, are the three sons of Froila Bermúdez about whom we can be sure. The fourth candidate is no less a man than Gonzalo, bishop of Mondoñedo from c. 1071 to c. 1108. It has been asserted that Gonzalo was a son of Froila Bermúdez but this cannot be demonstrated from the surviving [36] documents. Chronological considerations render it unlikely. If Gonzalo became a bishop in about 1071 at the earliest possible moment, i.e. at the canonical age of thirty, he must have been born about 1040-1: this accords well with the observation that he was worn down by old age in 1104-5.⁽¹⁶⁾ So far as we know, his father Froila married only once. But Gonzalo's brother Pedro was fathering children after a second marriage in 1113 and lived until 1128. It is difficult to believe that bishop Gonzalo was a son of Froila Bermúdez. Possibly he had some less close connection with the family.

Rodrigo and Suero, like their sisters, were benefactors of the family monastery at Jubia and other religious establishments.⁽¹⁷⁾ They were men of sufficient standing to subscribe royal charters. Rodrigo subscribed eight such documents between 1095 and 1112, Suero six during the same period. However, it was their brother Pedro who made the biggest mark. His first appearance in our sources is in the year 1086 when he subscribed his father's grant to Jubia. By 1088 he had married Urraca, the daughter of one of the Galician supporters of the new dynasty, count Froila Arias. Pedro first subscribed a royal charter in 1090, in which he was referred to as 'lord of Ferreira' (dominator Ferrarie).⁽¹⁸⁾By 1096 he held the office of count.⁽¹⁹⁾ Thereafter he subscribed regularly as such --sometimes with a territorial designation, comes de Ferraria (21 August 1096), comes de Traba (28 March 1098), but usually simply as comes -- until that glorious moment in 1109 when his name could be subscribed for the first time, in a royal diploma of 22 July, Petrus Froilaz Gallecie comes. He kept this imposing title of count of Galicia until his death in 1128.⁽²⁰⁾

Pedro Froílaz was connected with the royal family. He had been brought up at the court of Alfonso VI.⁽²¹⁾ His [37] association with count Raymond, to which his subscriptions to Raymond's charters testify, was rewarded when Raymond and Urraca entrusted to him the upbringing of their son Alfonso, the future Alfonso VII, born in 1105. Alfonso could refer to himself as count Pedro's 'little dependant' (clientulus) in one of his earliest charters.⁽²²⁾ As we shall see in a later chapter, count Pedro exercised very great power during the troubled reign of queen Urraca between 1109 and 1126. The authors of the Historia Compostellana had no doubts about his greatness. In their eyes count Pedro was 'spirited. . . warlike. . .', a man 'of great power', yet withal 'a man who feared God and hated iniquity', for had not Diego Gelmírez himself 'fed him, like a spiritual son, with the nutriment of holy teaching'?⁽²³⁾ Diego and he were firm friends and political allies for most of the time, and the count showed himself gratefully generous towards Santiago. Some of his benefactions were of a fairly predictable type, but not all. Two are especially interesting. He attempted to restore the regular religious life for women at Cines. This proved awkward, for the house had recently been revived as a monastery for male religious. Pedro expelled the abbot and monks, and substituted nuns. (Did they include his sisters?) Of course, there was a row, and the matter was carried -- another sign of the times -- to the papal curia. The count himself went to Rome armed with the monastic archives and persuaded pope Paschal II that he was in the right.⁽²⁴⁾ Still more interesting was another venture, the grant of the family monastery of Jubia to the monks of Cluny, effected in 1113; we shall return to this episode presently.

There was, then, a certain cosmospolitan largeness about the way in which Pedro Froílaz bestrode his world. He was well-travelled within Spain. His upbringing at the peripatetic court of Alfonso VI must have familiarized him with most corners of the kingdom of León-Castile. He had spent some time in captivity in Aragon; he numbered among his acquaintances the princes of southern France.⁽²⁵⁾ We have already seen evidence of his taste for Moorish cooking. But Galicia was always the centre of his world and it was there that he [38] most sought to be remembered. His deathbed grants to the cathedral church of Santiago were so enormous that the compilers of the Historia Compostellana did not wish to weary their readers by listing them, and it was in the square at Compostela that he had an iron statue of himself erected.⁽²⁶⁾

Count Pedro had many children (It is not always possible to determine of which of his two wives each was the issue.) We know of six sons and perhaps as many as eight daughters. The four younger sons -- Froila, Rodrigo, Velasco and Garcia -- need not concern us here. The two eldest, however, were men of note at whose careers it will be profitable to look more closely. Pedro Froílaz's eldest son was named Bermudo Pérez. His name first meets us among the subscriptions to a royal charter of 17 March 1107, and he lived to what must have been a great age, for he was still alive in September 1161. His brother Fernando Pérez makes his first appearance as Diego Gelmírez's constable (municeps) in 1116, and lived until at least the summer of 1155. Two features of their careers are specially noteworthy; the part they played in Portuguese as 'well as Galician affairs, and their religious patronage. To understand the first of these we must retrace our steps a little.

Count Raymond was not the only Burgundian nobleman to make a career for himself in western Spain. Shortly after his own coming to the court of Alfonso VI he was followed by his first cousin Henry, the younger brother of count Hugh of Burgundy (d. 1078) and nephew of Alfonso's queen Constance. Exactly when Henry went to Spain is not clear: 1092 looks the most likely date. About three years later the king divided the vast Luso-Galician-Extremaduran honour of count Raymond and established a separate county of Portugal for Henry, to whom he gave in marriage Teresa, one of his illegitimate daughters.⁽²⁷⁾ The son of this marriage, [39] Afonso Henriques (d. 1185) was much later to become the first king of an independent Portugal. Henry died at Astorga on 30 April 1112, and his widow the countess Teresa governed the county of Portugal until she was expelled by her son in 1128.

The Traba brothers were prominent among the supporters of countess Teresa during the latter years of her rule. Fernando, indeed, became her lover -- the couple were publicly rebuked by St. Theotonio for their illicit union -- and the (unnamed) daughter born to them was later associated with her father in a grant to Jubia in 1132.⁽²⁸⁾ Throughout the period 1121-8 Fernando was a regular and prominent witness of Teresa's charters and it is fairly clear that he was the effective ruler of the county of Portugal. It was doubtless through Fernando's agency that a splendid marriage was arranged for his elder brother Bermudo in 1122, to Urraca, the daughter of Henry and Teresa.⁽²⁹⁾ Alongside Fernando, Bermudo played a prominent part in the government of Portugal during the ensuing six years. The power of the Traba brothers came to an abrupt end in 1128 when they were defeated near Guimarães by Afonso Henriques and forced to return to Galicia. It will be seen, however, that throughout the years 1121-8 they, with their father Pedro, dominated the whole of western Iberia from the Biscayan coast of Galicia down to the uncertain frontier between Christian and Muslim to the south of Coimbra.

The hard feelings caused by the rupture of 1128 softened fairly quickly. Subscriptions to Portuguese charters suggest that Bermudo and Fernando were soon on reasonably good terms with Afonso Henriques. In any case, they had plenty on their hands in Galicia after their father Pedro's death in 1128. Here, as in Portugal, it was Fernando who stood out. He succeeded ultimately to his father's title as count of Galicia. He stood high in the counsels of Alfonso VII of León-Castile, on several of whose Andalusian campaigns he served, notably those which resulted in the taking of Córdoba in 1146 and Almería in 1147. Alfonso VII entrusted [40] the upbringing of his younger son Fernando to him, and in the thirteenth century it was believed that the count had been responsible for shaping Alfonso's decision to divide his dominions, on his death in 1157, between his two surviving sons, to Fernando II going León and to Sancho III Castile. Like his father Pedro before him, Fernando was a man who travelled to foreign parts: twice he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.⁽³⁰⁾

It need hardly be pointed out that the Traba brothers were very rich. Bermudo, for example, could purchase land from queen Urraca in 1113 for 3,000 solidi.⁽³¹⁾ Some of the benefactions to the church which this wealth made possible were as predictable as their father's. But, like him, they experimented with new forms of patronage. Their most novel venture was the refoundation of a religious house at Sobrado. A monasterium at Sobrado had been granted -- this may have been a concealed sale -- to the brothers by queen Urraca in 1118. (In view of earlier remarks it is interesting to note that they claimed that Sobrado had been confiscated from their ancestors by Fernando I. If the truth of the claim cannot be established, the fact that it was made is an indication of the posthumous reputation of Fernando I in Galician aristocratic circles.) Urraca's grant was confirmed by Alfonso VII in 1135. There is as yet no hint that the brothers intended to install a regular religious community there. A further charter was granted in 1142 to 'all the holy men of God and St. Benedict, living according to the custom of the Cistercians'. The house had been refounded as a Cistercian monastery, a daughter-house of Clairvaux.⁽³²⁾ It was among the earliest Cistercian foundations in the Iberian peninsula. Bermudo himself, in his old age, between 1157 and 1161, entered Sobrado and died as a monk there.⁽³³⁾

Count Pedro Froílaz was able to marry off his daughters well. Toda Pérez married count Gutierre Bermúdez, whose family came from the north-eastern parts of Galicia. His [41] brother Suero was the most powerful nobleman in the Asturias during the reign of Urraca and in the early years of Alfonso VII's. Gutierre's landholdings were for the most part near Lugo, of whose cathedral church he was a generous benefactor, though he was buried further west, in Traba country, at the monastery of Lorenzana. From 1109 onwards he was a frequent witness of royal charters. He and his wife were benefactors of Caabeiro, Carboeiro and Lorenzana. After his death in 1130 his widow was among the early benefactors of her brothers' Cistercian foundation at Sobrado.⁽³⁴⁾ Her sister Lupa Pérez married count Munio Peláez of Monterroso, near Lugo. The pattern will by now be familiar. Count Munio's name was prominent among the witness-lists of royal charters over many years from 1111 onwards. He and his wife were benefactors of the cathedral churches of Lugo and Santiago de Compostela. They were associated with a Cistercian foundation at Monfero, established about 1147. After her husband's death (c.1150?) Lupa founded a house for Benedictine nuns at Dormeán.⁽³⁵⁾ So the list could be continued. Elvira married Fernando Yáñez, the greatest nobleman of southern Galicia. A second Toda married count Gutierre Osorio, an important aristocrat of the León region. Eva married García Garcés de Aza, a Castilian grandee renowned for his wealth and dullness. Estefania married Ruy Fernández, a member of the Castro clan, who together with their rivals the Lara family were the most powerful of the nobility of Castile. The even level of eminence among the husbands whom Pedro Froílaz de Traba secured for his girls -- with one significant exception, which we shall notice in a later chapter -- is a further indication of his standing in the first quarter of the twelfth century.

It would be intriguing to follow the family into the next generation, in which one of its members married a reigning monarch of León, but we have followed it far enough already. The house of Traba and the families with which it was [42] connected formed a new Galician aristocracy. As far as we can see, this new aristocracy was raised up by Alfonso VI and his son-in-law Raymond, and sustained by his daughter Urraca and her son Alfonso VII. Entrusted with the administration of Galicia, its members had ample scope for self-enrichment and the exercise of power. And they were loyal: after Rodrigo Ovéquiz's revolt in 1085-7 there were no more dangerous Galician rebellions. Yet this new aristocracy was not quite like the one which it replaced. However close its association with the royal family, the house of. Traba was never, during our period, bound to it by ties of blood as the tenth-century Galician nobility had been tied to the royal dynasty of León. Alfonso VI, Urraca and Alfonso VII married into the royal or noble dynasties of other parts of Spain, of France, of Germany; they maintained a distance between themselves and their new aristocracy of service. Secondly, we are left with the impression -- for given the nature of the evidence it can be no more than this -- that although the Trabas and their connections were very rich, they were not possessed of wealth on the princely scale of St. Rosendo and his relations. Their benefactions to the church, lavish though they were, did not have quite the breath-taking amplitude of the endowments granted by the monastic founders of the tenth century. Perhaps this helped to keep them loyal to the monarchs from whom further wealth might flow: if they worked hard they could always hope for more. In the third place they were less circumscribed in their interests. Political intrigue took them to Portugal, marriage removed daughters to Castile, duty took their menfolk to the peripatetic court of the king-emperors of León-Castile and to far-flung campaigning in Andalusia, litigation urged Pedro Froílaz to Rome and devotion his son Fernando to Jerusalem. They moved on a wider stage than their predecessors, and we have seen how their religious benefactions mirror awareness of a Christendom beyond Galicia. One last feature of the new aristocracy is most surprising to the enquirer familiar with tenth-century conditions. Although the new men had a firm grip on nearly all the most important positions in the secular administration of Galicia, they did not monopolize the higher ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

[43] The Galician church of the tenth century furnishes a fine example of what German historians term an Adelskirche. The greater noble families shared out among themselves the plums of ecclesiastical preferment. The church was run by them and for them. If they sometimes squabbled over who should get what, there was never any question of outsiders knuckling in to take from them what they would probably have regarded as their birthright. But when we shift our gaze forward to the twelfth century, what a contrast meets the eye. Appointments to bishoprics are in the hands of the king. Many bishops have served the crown in some capacity, often in the royal chancery, before their promotion. Bishops drawn from noble families are conspicuous by their absence.⁽³⁶⁾ Bishops who were natives of France or of other parts of Spain are not uncommon. How had this come about? It is tempting to associate this shift with the change of dynasty. No medieval king needed telling that a bench of loyal bishops could assist him in containing the disaffection of a restive province. We need think only, for example, of the rapid Normanization of the English episcopate under the rule of William the Conqueror. With this instance in mind, let us examine the Galician appointments which occurred during the reigns of the sons of Fernando I.

Three bishops were appointed to Galician sees in the reign of García (1065-71). Gudesteo became bishop of Iria-Compostela probably in 1066. He was the nephew of his predecessor Cresconio, who had been 'sprung from a very noble stock' (nobilissimo genere ortus).⁽³⁷⁾ Cresconio had been appointed before the old Leonese dynasty came to an end, for he subscribed a charter of Bermudo III dated 9 June 1037. It is reasonable to see in Gudesteo a member of the older nobility. Relations between him and king García may have been guarded. It is significant that García made no grants to the church of Santiago de Compostela. (The argument from silence, hazardously resorted to by the [44] historian of the early middle ages, has force here because the early charters of Compostela have been preserved in copies made, as we shall see in chapter X, a mere sixty years later than king Garcia's reign.) No change of bishop occurred at Lugo where bishop Vistruario, first traceable in 1062, outlasted García and his brother Sancho and lived well into the reign of Alfonso VI. The only indication of his attitude to the king is furnished by the oath which he and the two Galician counts exacted from García in 1066. The bishopric of Tuy, vacant for about half a century, was restored during García's reign with his active support, if not actually at his instance; on 1 February 1071 he granted endowments to the see and its first bishop, Jorge (Georgius). Nothing is known of this man (who survived for only a short time, dying in 1074 at the latest), but it is difficult to suppose that the king's part in the re-establishment of the see did not involve some say in the choice of the bishop who was to have charge of it. King García also undertook the restoration of the metropolitan see of Braga, though its first bishop-elect, Pedro, did not receive consecration until after the king's dethronement. We may say the same of him as of bishop Jorge of Tuy.

In 1071 García was defeated, dethroned and imprisoned by his brothers Sancho II of Castile and Alfonso VI of León, who jointly ruled the kingdom of Galicia until Sancho's murder in 1072, after which Alfonso ruled it alone. Four episcopal appointments may belong to the period of joint rule in 1071-2. At Compostela bishop Diego Peláez was the choice of king Sancho, as the Historia Compostellana bluntly tells us.⁽³⁸⁾ Since the Historia fails to say anything about his ancestry, contrary to its authors' habitual practice, we may take it as likely that he was of undistinguished birth, and perhaps not a local man at all. At the neighbouring see of Mondoñedo bishop Gonzalo first appears to us in a royal charter of 13 June 1071. As we have seen, the claims of noble birth that have been made on his behalf cannot be substantiated; and even supposing that he were a member of the house of Traba, we should remember that that family [45] was itself new and that its upward social progress owed much to the impulsion of the royal hand. Two bishoprics in southern Galicia and northern Portugal, Orense and Lamego, seem to have been re-established in 1071. The restoration-charter for Orense, dated 31 July 1071, is a suspicious document which has almost certainly been tampered with. For what it is worth, it records that Sancho II brought about the restoration of the two sees, appointing Ederonio to Orense and Pedro to Lamego. Nothing is known of the antecedents of these two men.

The first Galician bishopric to fall vacant in the reign of Alfonso VI after 1072 was Tuy, to which a new bishop had been appointed by May 1074. His name is recorded variously as Adericus (1075, 1088) and Audericus (1087, 1095). The name is not Spanish but French, its bearer presumably one of the earliest clerical immigrants to León-Castile who secured a bishopric there. It is unlikely that the interest exerted in his favour could have been any other than royal. Vistruario of Lugo is last referred to in February 1086; his successor Amor makes his first appearance in July 1088. We know nothing of his background, but it is difficult to believe that in the aftermath of Rodrigo Ovéquiz's rebellion the king did not ensure that the new bishop should be a man without local aristocratic connections, on whose loyalty he could depend. This supposition is strengthened in the light of what occurred at Santiago de Compostela. After Alfonso VI had rid himself of bishop Diego Peláez in 1088 his choice fell upon Pedro, abbot of the distant Castilian monastery of Cardeña. At Orense a bishop Juan Alfonso appears to have held the see briefly in 1087, to be succeeded shortly afterwards by a certain Pedro: but these are no more than names to us. Dalmatius, who became bishop of Compostela in 1094, was a monk of Cluny: Alfonso VI and count Raymond were instrumental in his appointment.⁽³⁹⁾ Gerald, who received the see of Braga probably in 1095, was another Frenchman, formerly a monk of Moissac and a protégé of the archbishop of Toledo, in whose promotion it is again very probable that the king and his son-in-law were concerned.

[46] This brief survey of Galician episcopal appointments in the generation following the death of Fernando I in 1065 suggests, first, that kings were playing a more forceful part in them than they had been accustomed to do in the past; second, that men with distinguished family connections in Galicia were becoming more rare among the bishops; and third, as a corollary, that preferment was going to men who were outsiders either socially or geographically. It is all of a piece with this trend that the same period should have witnessed new and vigorous attempts to supervise the Galician church on the part of an ecclesiastical authority which was closely connected with the crown. Archbishop Bernardo of Toledo was the most commanding figure in the life of the Spanish church in the late eleventh and early twelfth century. We shall encounter him frequently in the pages which follow, for Diego Gelmírez was to find him the ablest and most implacable of his opponents.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Bernardo was a Frenchman from the Agenais, a monk successively at Auch and at Cluny. He came to Spain in 1080 at the bidding of his abbot, Hugh of Cluny, and was shortly afterwards given the abbacy of the important royal monastery of Sahagún. In 1086 Alfonso VI promoted him to the metropolitan see of newly conquered Toledo, the ancient capital of the Visigothic kingdom. Bernardo was determined that Toledo should be once again a capital -- but of the Spanish church. He visited the papal curia in 1088. An old friend from his days at Cluny, Eudes of Chatillon, had recently become pope as Urban II. Of the privileges which then were lavished, with so unsparing a hand, upon the church of Toledo the most important was the bull Cunctis sanctorum.⁽⁴¹⁾ The pope ruled that Bernardo as archbishop of Toledo should be the primate of Spain, enjoying the dignity and rights -- prudently undefined -- of a primate. Furthermore, in addition to his own rights as metropolitan over dioceses within the province of Toledo he was to exercise authority over those bishoprics whose own metropolitan see was for the present in Islamic hands. A few years later, [47] probably in 1093, Bernardo was appointed papal legate throughout all the ecclesiastical provinces of the Spains, that is those of the Iberian peninsula together with the province of Narbonne.⁽⁴²⁾ As Bernardo interpreted it, he had been given an almost unbounded liberty of interfering in the ecclesiastical life of any part of Christian Spain.

Among his first actions after his return to Spain was a journey into Galicia to consecrate the new cathedral church of Braga on 28 August 1089.⁽⁴³⁾ This was not simply a case of a distinguished churchman performing a ceremonial function on a great occasion. It was a considered statement about who mattered most in the Galician church, a claim of the most public kind for the rights of the church of Toledo. It had not been Bernardo's first visit to Galicia. In the summer of 1087 he had visited Lugo -- whose bishopric was probably vacant at the time; we cannot discount the possibility that he had some share in the election of bishop Amor -- where he had presided over a suit between bishop Gonzalo of Mondoñedo and the monks of Lorenzana, and had come down strongly in favour of the latter.⁽⁴⁴⁾ He had also interested himself in the affairs of the church of Santiago de Compostela after the resignation -- in effect, the deposition -- of bishop Diego Peláez in 1088. This is a difficult matter to elucidate. The canonicity of the proceedings at Husillos, where Diego had been removed from his see, was impugned by the pope. Bernardo seems to have been caught between two fires: Urban II wished to have Diego restored, but to this Alfonso VI was irreconcilably hostile. Diego's release from captivity may have been effected at Bernardo's instance. What is certain is that the pope consulted the archbishop of Toledo in 1089 about the choice of a legate to Spain, part of whose brief was to sort out the Compostela business. The man chosen, cardinal Rainerio, later to succeed to the papacy as Paschal II, held a council at León in 1090 at which Pedro de Cardeña, Alfonso VI's bishop of Compostela, was deposed. But he could not bring about Diego [48] Peláez's reinstatement, and the bishopric of Compostela remained vacant. On a rather different front, we may surmise that Toledan pressure was being exerted throughout these years to enforce Galician conformity in the matter of the adoption of the Roman liturgy, decreed in 1080 but, it would seem, only reluctantly accepted by conservative Galician churchmen. And we can detect Bernardo's hand as well as the royal family's in some of the appointments to north-western sees in the 1090s; in Gerald's to Braga in 1095, for example, and in Maurice's to Coimbra in 1099.

The dispute between the bishop of Mondoñedo and the abbey of Lorenzana had concerned the monastic endowments. Bernardo's willingness to uphold the monks might have owed something to the fact that he was himself by training a monk. As we have seen, Lorenzana had been founded in 969. It had been one of the last houses established during Galicia's tenth-century monastic reformation. It was not until after the change of dynasty that new developments took place in the monastic history of Galicia. The first of these was the foundation by king García in 1067 of a monastery at Toques, about three miles north of Mellid. The new royal family had few connections with Galician monasticism. Fernando I had been a generous benefactor of Celanova but he had made no new religious foundation of his own in Galicia. What mattered about Toques was that it was a royal foundation, a little island of commitment to the new dynasty in a sea of indifference or hostility. Its church was dedicated to St. Antoninus (San Antolín), a patron in whose cult the royal family had lately been interesting itself. The foundation charter tells us that García had established the house in remembrance of his parents Fernando I and queen Sancha 'of divine memory' -- which was not how many of their Galician subjects looked back at them. Though its material endowments were modest, Toques was given a generous privilege of immunity. Garcia's charter was subscribed by men and women who included some of the staunchest supporters of the new order like, for example, Oveco Sánchez whose subscriptions to royal charters may be traced down to 1112 and whose lands lay near the vital Piedrafita pass from the Leonese meseta into [49] Galicia.⁽⁴⁵⁾ It is a pity that we know nothing of Tanoy, the first abbot of Toques. The new monastery continued to be the recipient of royal patronage; charters were granted by Alfonso VI in 1077 and by Raymond and Urraca in 1099.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Thereafter we have practically no information about it. Toques never grew into a house of any significance. To that degree it stands for a royal initiative which bore little or no fruit. But that does not mean that we should underestimate the interest of the Toques episode as one means chosen by the new dynasty of making its presence felt in Galicia.

A further new direction in monastic life was struck out in 1075 when, for the first time, a Galician monastery was placed under the patronage of Cluny. The house in question was San Salvador de Villafrio, near Lugo, the donor was Iñigo Bermúdez and the occasion of the gift his entry to Cluny as a monk. Iñigo's family connections cannot be established with certainty but there is some likelihood that he was the brother of count Fernando Bermúdez, a prominent figure at the court of Alfonso VI and also a friend to Cluny. It is probable that the Cluniac leanings displayed in the brothers' monastic patronage owed something to the example set by the royal family.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Sancho el Mayor's initiative had been taken further by his son Fernando I, who at some date between 1053 and his death in 1065 had bound himself to pay an annual census to the monks of Cluny, set at the very considerable sum of 1,000 gold pieces, in return for their intercession. From 1072 onwards, the year of his succession to the undivided kingdom of León-Castile, Alfonso VI's relations with Cluny were extremely close. Between 1073 and 1077 he granted four Spanish monastic houses to the monks of Cluny and in 1077 not only re-established the [50] Fernandine census but doubled the rate at which it was paid. Thenceforward the colossal sum of 2,000 gold pieces made its way from León-Castile to Cluny every year. It was the biggest donation that the monks of Cluny ever received. Further monastic houses were made over by the king in 1079 and 1081. Abbot Hugh of Cluny visited his court in 1077. In 1080 the Cluniac monk Robert was given the abbacy of Sahagún, where he was shortly afterwards succeeded by another Cluniac, Bernardo, who, as we have seen, went on to become archbishop of Toledo in 1086.

It is into such a context of specially close links between the royal house of León-Castile and the Cluny of St. Hugh that we must set the eager patronage of the lay and ecclesiastical magnates of Galicia. If count Raymond made no grants to Cluny that we know of, his widow Urraca made over the monastery of San Vicente de Pombeiro to Cluny in 1109. Count Henry of Portugal had close connections with Cluny: his grandmother Hélie of Semur was the sister of St. Hugh, and his elder brother had resigned the duchy of Burgundy in 1078 in order to enter Cluny as a monk (thereby occasioning a famous letter to its abbot from pope Gregory VII). Henry was a benefactor of Sahagún; and together with his wife Teresa he granted the church of Rates to the Cluniac house of La-Chanté-sur-Loire in 1100. Two years later bishop Maurice of Coimbra -- another Frenchman, another Cluniac, and a protégé of the archbishop of Toledo -- granted the church of Sta. Justa in Coimbra to the same house. Somewhat later, in 1113, as we have seen, Pedro Froílaz de Traba granted the monastery of Jubia to Cluny. He prudently, if uncanonically, stipulated that if the Cluniacs should wish to depart from Jubia they should give the house back to the Traba family. A still more interesting stipulation was that the prior appointed from among the monks of Cluny should be a man learned in scripture (in divina pagina doctus): this is a provision without parallel in Spanish charters of this type and date which perhaps sheds further light upon the tastes of Pedro Froílaz and his relatives.

Cluniac monks were not the only foreign ecclesiastics who made their way to Galicia. From the 1060s onwards we have also to reckon with the emissaries of the reformed papacy. [51] Cardinal Hugo Candidus may have visited Santiago de Compostela in the course of his legation to Spain in the years 1065-7. It was a papal legate, Richard of Marseilles, who presided over the council of Husillos in 1088 at which bishop Diego Peláez was prevailed upon to resign his see. It was another legate who deposed his successor and attempted to reinstate the exiled Diego in 1090. Another visitor on papal business was Jarenton, abbot of St. Benigne at Dijon, who can be traced at Coimbra in 1084. Unfortunately we know nothing of the affairs which brought Jarenton to Spain: it is intriguing to speculate on what (if any) connection there might have been between Alfonso VI's appointment of Raymond to the county of Galicia in 1087 and the visit to his dominions three years previously of the distinguished head of a famous monastery with which Raymond's family enjoyed close connections.

We also have the beginnings of traffic in the other direction, which probably owed its impulse at least in part to the encouragement of the papal legates. In 1095 bishop Dalmatius of Compostela, himself as we have seen a Frenchman and a Cluniac, travelled to France to attend Urban II's council of Clermont. He was accompanied by 'certain bishops from the same ecclesiastical province' (quibusdam comprovincialium episcoporum).⁽⁴⁸⁾ Who were they? A papal letter of 28 November 1095 concerning the affairs of the church of Lugo was directed from Clermont to the bishops of León, Oviedo and Mondoñedo.⁽⁴⁹⁾ The text makes it clear that the three addressees had not attended the council, but that bishop Amor of Lugo had. It also mentions the bishops of Braga and Orense in such a way as to imply that neither of these prelates had been at Clermont. That leaves us with the bishops of Tuy or Astorga, or both, as the companions of Dalmatius and Amor. Both, as it happens, were Frenchmen. Audericus of Tuy we have already encountered. Osmundus of Astorga (1082-96) had a northern French name and may perhaps have come from the region of Boulogne, with whose countess, Ida, he corresponded.⁽⁵⁰⁾

There will be more to be said of these contacts between [52] the churchmen of Galicia and the papal court, for they were to be of very great importance in the career of Diego Gelmírez. Suffice it to say for the present that this early traffic in the 1080s and 1090s must be reckoned as yet another factor tending to break down the barriers between Galicia and the rest of Latin Christendom. We have seen how the sons of Fernando I, representatives of a new royal dynasty, attempted to bring their remote and rebellious province to heel. We have witnessed the emergence of new aristocratic families, watched the character of the episcopate changing, looked at the ambitions of the church of Toledo and glanced at new developments in the regular religious life. By the last decade of the eleventh century it must have been evident to the intelligent contemporary observer -- such as the young Diego Gelmírez -- that the ecclesiastical life of Galicia would never be quite the same again.

But there was another force more potent than any of these in reducing Galician isolation -- the coming of pilgrims to the shrine of St. James. To that shrine, those pilgrims, we must now turn.

1. For what follows, see J. Pérez de Urbel, Sancho el Mayor de Navarra (Madrid, 1950).

2. C.J. Bishko, 'Fernando I y los orígenes de la alianza castellano-leonesa con Cluny', Cuadernos de Historia de España 47-8 (1968), 31-135, contains the best account of Sancho's ecclesiastical policies and corrects Pérez de Urbel, op. cit., on a number of points.

3. LFH II, ap. xcii, pp. 225.

4. R. 19 August 1061.

5. R. 17 February 1066.

6. A. de J. da Costa, O bispo D. Pedro e a organização da diocese de Braga (Coimbra, 1959), pp. 30-1, 380-7.

7. R. 18 June 1088, 21 July 1088, 17 June 1089; HC, pp. 16-17, 254; A. Ubieto Arteta, Colección diplomática de Pedro I de Aragón y Navarra (Zaragoza, 1951), nos. 24, 25, 48, 68, 83, 140. Rodrigo Ovéquiz's revolt has hitherto been dated to 1087, but the royal charters make it clear that word of it was brought to Alfonso VI shortly after his conquest of Toledo in May 1085.

8. The difficult chronological problems connected with these events are discussed by B. F. Reilly, 'Santiago and Saint Denis: the French presence in eleventh-century Spain', Catholic Historical Review 54 (1968), 467-83.

9. Sobrado Cart. II, no. 391; Jubia Cart., no. iv.

10. Jubia Cart., pp. 45-6 and nos. iv, ix. Froila Bermúdez's grandson Menendo Rodríguez stated in a charter of 1137 that his avi et bisavi had founded the house. Yet it had been in existence as early as 977. Possibly Froila had been involved in a refoundation: not all the Galician houses which were founded in the tenth-century monastic revival had a continuous history through to the twelfth.

11. Jubia Cart., no. vii.

12. Jubia Cart., no. xxii; Santíago de Compostela, Archivo de la Universidad, Pergaminos sueltos, no. 10; Carboeiro Cart., no. 62; HC, p. 88.

13. Sobrado Cart., I, no. 139.

14. Jubia Cart., nos. xxi, xlvi.

15. HC, p. 58; see also below, ch. IX.

16. HC, p. 77.

17. Jubia Cart., no. vi, xxiii; AHN 491/3; AHN cód. 1044B, fo. 44v; HC, p. 186.

18. R. 28 January 1090 (a document not without some suspicious features). The Ferreira in question is a little to the south-west of Carballo in the district of Bergantiños. Traba is midway between Ferreira and Carballo.

19. R. 11 January 1096.

20. For the extent of Pedro's comital authority see the discussion in Reilly, Urraca, pp. 288-92.

21. R. May 1112.

22. R. 5 July 1118.

23. HC, pp. 116, 122, 174, 205.

24. HC, pp. 91-3 (=JL 5944, 6001, 6027).

25. HC, pp. 122, 319.

26. HC, p. 478; LFH IV, ap. xxi, pp. 57-9.

27. The precise sequence of events and their interpretation remain unclear: for discussion of the chronological and other problems see D. Peres, Como nasceu Portugal (6^th edn., Porto, 1967), pp. 55-74; B. F. Reilly, 'Santiago and Saint Denis: the French presence in eleventh-century Spain', Catholic Historical Review 54 (1968), 467-88; P. 'Feige, 'Die Anfänge des portugiesischen Königtums und seiner Landeskirche', Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft 29 (1978), 85-436, at pp. 110-22.

28. HC, pp. 517-18; Jubia Cart., no. xxxv; Vita Theotonii, in Portugalliae Monumenta Historica, Scriptores, ed. A. Herculano (Lisbon, 1856), pp. 79-88, at p. 81.

29. AHN 526/5.

30. AHN 527/6, 1126/6.

31. R. 17 June 1113. Fernando owned urban property in Lugo as well as Compostela: AHN 1325D/8 bis.

32. R. 29 July 1118, 29 May 1135; AHN 526/10 (Sobrado Cart., II, no. 11).

33. AHRG, Particulares, no. 261; AHN 556/4.

34. HC, p. 246; AHN 491/13, 526/11, 1325C/21; AHN cód. 1044B, fo. 26v- 27v, 50v-51r; Carboeiro Cart., no. 76; R. 10 September 1109, May 1112, 12 October 1113, etc. For Suero Bermúdez see CAI, pp. 255-6.

35. HC, pp. 121, 188; AHRG, Particulares, no. 58; AHN 497/4, 1325C/11, 22; R. 8 December 1111, 2 March 1112, 8 December 1113, etc.

36. The single possible exception is Gonzalo of Mondoñedo. As will be apparent from earlier remarks in this chapter, I am now more doubtful about his aristocratic connections than I was a few years ago: cf. Episcopate, pp. 61, 84.

37. HC, p. 15.

38. HC, p. 16.

39. HC, p. 20.

40. The best treatment of Bernardo's career is to be found in J. F. Rivera Recio, La iglesia de Toledo en el siglo XII (1086-1208), vol. I (Rome, 1966), especially ch. III.

41. JL 5366.

42. On the date of this appointment see Rivera, op. cit., pp. 141-3.

43. J. A. Ferreira, Fastos episcopaes da igreja primacial de Braga (Famalição, 1928), I. 198.

44. AHN cód. 1044B, fo. 30r-3lv.

45. R. 23 February 1067.

46. R. 17 October 1077, 23 January 1099.

47. The Cluniac connection has attracted much attention: see, most recently, C. J. Bishko, 'The Cluniac priories of Galicia and Portugal: their acquisition and administration', Studia Monastica 7 (1965), 305-56; idem, 'Fernando I y los orígenes de la alianza castellano-leonesa con Cluny', Cuadernos de Historia de España 47-8 (1968), 31-135 (now reprinted in an English translation in his Studies in Medieval Spanish Frontier History (London, 1980), no. ii); P. Segi, Königtum und Klosterreform in Spanien. Untersuchungen über die Cluniacenserklöster in Kastilien-León vom Beginn des 11. bis zur Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts (Kallmünz, 1974).

48. HC, p. 20.

49. ANN cód. 1043B, fo. 38v.

50. ES, XVI, ap. xxii, pp. 473-4.