León and Galicia Under Queen Sancha and King Fernando I. By Bernard F.Reilly and Simon R.Doubleday. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2024. xix + 233 pp. + 14 b/w illustrations and 5 maps. $65. ISBN 978 1 5128 2462 9 (hardback); 978 1 5128 2463 6 (ebook).
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: In 1988, when detailing the political landscape of the Christian realms of the Iberian Peninsula in the decades leading to Alfonso VI’s (d. 1109) reign in León-Castilla, Bernard F. Reilly noted that ‘the internal consolidation of the realm of León-Castilla under [Alfonso’s parents] Fernando el Magno and Sancha (1037–1065) is a history that remains to be researched and written’ (Reilly, Alfonso VI, p. 8). León and Galicia Under Queen Sancha and King Fernando I, published more than thirty-five years after Reilly wrote these words, details this history. Based on Reilly’s final book project and brought to completion by Simon R. Doubleday, the present study – the first in English – narrates Fernando and Sancha’s reign, interrogating the prevailing understandings of this period of Iberian history and making clear that the royal couple played fundamental and complementary roles in consolidating royal power within their territories. Like Reilly’s three previous regnal studies, this one is also guided by a close and critical reading of surviving diplomatic sources, together with a parallel reading of surviving narrative sources detailing the couple’s reign. Despite the constraints presented by a notably smaller corpus of diplomatic records, this allows the authors to lay out a (relatively) detailed account, one which challenges the proto-crusading narrative generally associated with Fernando and his reign and identifies the main sources of tension and conflict as emerging from Galicia and Navarra – chiefly in the persons of Bishop Cresconio of Iria-Compostela and García Sánchez III, king of Navarre and Fernando’s older brother – rather than from al-Andalus. The book’s nine chapters and epilogue can be divided into three parts: Chapters 1–3 narrate the Iberian Peninsula’s political landscape in the lead up to Fernando and Sancha’s ascension to the Leonese throne in 1037 and in the first decade of their rule, during which they endeavoured to cement their hold. Chapters 4 and 5 offer a thematic analysis of the anatomy of eleventh-century monarchical power, presented as multiple in its sources and characterized by collaboration between all the members of the royal family – male and female – together with close collaboration with both the nobility (Chapter 4) and the clergy (Chapter 5). The remaining chapters return to a chronological narrative of the final two decades of Fernando and Sancha’s rule, once they had largely consolidated their authority, and the aftermath of their deaths. In doing so, these chapters also offer a closer interrogation and examination of the three key narratives the book seeks to correct. First, it challenges the idea of the individual figure of the monarch by detailing the many ways royal women were fundamental participants in eleventh-century rulership. Second, it demonstrates that Fernando and Sancha were primarily preoccupied with Navarre and, to a lesser extent, the north-west and especially Iria-Compostella, with little concern for their southern Muslim neighbours. Finally, it dismisses the narrative of stark opposition between Christians and Muslims characterized by proto-crusading attitudes as detailed in twelfth- and thirteenth-century narrative sources, positing instead more pragmatic and ambivalent relations between Christians and Muslims. These new narratives are underscored and reiterated in Chapter 9 and the Epilogue. León and Galicia Under Queen Sancha and King Fernando I follows in the footsteps of Reilly’s earlier studies. But it is also a clear, and enormously successful, collaboration between two eminent scholars of medieval Iberia. The Prologue emphasizes Reilly’s core convictions regarding the centrality of the Iberian north-west during Fernando and Sancha’s reign, as well as the limited reality of religious binaries and proto-crusading attitudes in the mid-eleventh century. It likewise highlights Doubleday’s own core conviction of the importance of understanding medieval Iberian monarchy as a collective enterprise in which all family members – male and female alike – played crucial roles. The acknowledgement of female political participation was never absent from Reilly’s work, as evident in his study dedicated to Urraca of León’s rule and his 1988 reference to ‘the realm of León-Castilla under Fernando el Magno and Sancha [emphasis my own]’. Nonetheless, Doubleday seamlessly weaves in a broader conceptualization of monarchical power throughout the text, detailing and demonstrating the corporate reality of medieval rulership in a manner that Reilly’s previous studies have not. The book is usefully complemented by fourteen images of manuscript illuminations and buildings, as well as five maps, and will, like its predecessors, become an essential reference work for scholars studying the Christian realms in the Iberian Peninsula in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This makes it all the more surprising that it lacks a bibliography, leaving the reader to wade through fifty-seven pages of endnotes.
Source: Early Medieval Europe
DOI: 10.1111/emed.70013
Author: Anaïs Waag
Institution: University of Lincoln
Language: English
Topic: Medieval Iberian Studies
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4416730782
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