General Notes

ALPHONSO I (1104-1134), King of Aragon, is sometimes counted the seventh in the line of the kings of Leon and Castile. Alphonso was the son of Sancho V RamÌrez. A passionate fighting man (he fought 29 battles against Christian or Moor), he was married to Urraca, widow of Raymond of Burgundy, a very dissolute and passionate woman. The marriage had been arranged by Alphonso VI in 1106 to unite the two chief Christian states against the Almoravides and to supply them with a capable military leader. Urraca was tenacious of her right as proprietary queen and had not learnt chastity in the polygamous household of her father. Husband and wife quarrelled with the brutality of the age, and came to open war. Alphonso had the support of one section of the nobles who found their account in the confusion. The union failed, however, because Leon and Castile felt hostility toward an Aragonese emperor; because Urraca disliked her second husband; and because Bernard, the French Cluniac archbishop of Toledo, wanted to see his protÈgÈ, Alfonso RamÌrez (infant son of Urraca and her Burgundian first husband), on the imperial throne.

Being a much better soldier than any of his opponents, he gained victories at Sep˙lveda and Fuente de la Culebra, but his only trustworthy supporters were his Aragonese who were not numerous enough to keep down Castile and Leon. The marriage of Alphonso and Urraca was declared null by the pope, as they were third cousins. The king quarrelled with the Church, and particularly with the Cistercians, almost as violently as with his wife. As he beat her, so he drove Archbishop Bernard into exile and expelled the monks of Sahagun. He was finally compelled to give way in Castile and Leon to his stepson, Alphonso, son of Urraca and her first husband. The intervention of pope Calixtus II brought about an arrangement between the old man and the young. Alphonso the Battler won his great successes in the middle Ebro, where he expelled the Moors from Saragossa; in the great raid of 1125, when he carried away a large part of the subject-Christians from Granada; and in the south-west of France, where he had rights as king of Navarre. Alfonso was fatally wounded in battle at Fraga in 1134. Deeply religious, three years before his death he made a will leaving his kingdom to the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Knights of the Sepulchre; this his subjects refused to carry out and the kingdoms eventually came under the control of the counts of Barcelona. He was a fierce soldier and nothing else; his piety was wholly militant; but, though he died in 1134 after losing to the Moors at Braga, he has a great place in the reconquest. [Encyclopaedia Britannica CD '97; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1961 ed., Vol. 1, p. 686, ALPHONSO I, King of Aragon]