ALPHONSO I., king of Aragon, "the Battler," who married Urraca, daughter of Alphonso VI. (1104-1134), is sometimes counted the VIIth in the line of the kings of Leon and Castile. A passionate fighting-man (he fought twenty-nine 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. But 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. Being a much better soldier than any of his opponents he gained victories at Sepalveda 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 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. Three years before his death he made a will leaving his kingdom to the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Knights of the Sepulchre, which his subjects refused to carry out. He was a fierce, violent man, a soldier and nothing else, whose piety was wholly militant. Though he died in 1134 after an unsuccessful battle with the Moors at Braga, he has a great place in the reconquest.]
ALPHONSO VII., "the Emperor" (1126-1157), is a dignified and somewhat enigmatical figure. A vague tradition had always assigned the title of emperor to the sovereign who held Leon as the most direct representative of the Visigoth kings, who were themselves the representatives of the Roman empire. But though given in charters, and claimed by Alphonso VI. and the Battler, the title had been little more than a flourish of rhetoric. Alphonso VII. was crowned emperor in 1155 after the death of the Battler. The weakness of Aragon enabled him to make his superiority effective. He appears to have striven for the formation of a national unity, which Spain had never possessed since the fall of the V'isigoth kingdom. The elements he had to deal with could not be welded together. Alphonso was at once a patron of the church, and a protector if not a favourer of the Mahommedans, who formed a large part of his subjects. His reign ended in an unsuccessful campaign against the rising power of the Almohades. Though he was not actually defeated, his death in the pass of Muradel in the Sierra Morena, while on his way back to Toledo, occurred in circumstances which showed that no man could be what he claimed to be---"king of the men of the two religions." His personal character does not stand out with the emphasis of those of Alphonso VI. or the Battler. Yet he was a great king, the type and to some extent the victim of the confusions of his age--Christian in creed and ambition, but more than half oriental in his household.
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This article is from the 1911 edition of an encyclopedia, which is out of copyright here in the U.S. See the encyclopedia main page for disclaimer and copyright information.
