Background
Alfonso was the second and favorite son of Ferdinand I, Count of Castile and King of León.
Alfonso was the second and favorite son of Ferdinand I, Count of Castile and King of León.
By the terms of his father's division of the realm, Alfonso became king of León in 1065. (The eldest son, Sancho, became king of Castile, and Galicia was allotted to the youngest son, Garcia. ) Relations between Alfonso and Sancho were hostile from the start, and Sancho defeated him at Llantada in 1068. In 1071 the brothers joined temporarily to deprive Garcia of Galicia, but the following year Sancho again worsted Alfonso in battle, taking him prisoner but then allowing him to leave for exile in the Islamic kingdom of Toledo.
Alfonso spent 9 months in Toledo as the guest of the king al-Mamun, departing in October 1072 after his sister Urraca had engineered the assassination of Sancho. Alfonso was now king of Castile, but he was forced by Sancho's chief military aide, Rodrigo Diaz (the Cid), to disavow publicly his complicity in the murder of his brother.
From 1072 to 1086 Alfonso adopted an aggressive policy toward the Moslems. He extorted monetary tributes and in 1085 captured the ancient Visigoth capital of Toledo—his most glorious achievement. During this period he also strove to bring Spain out of isolation and into the orbit of European Christianity; he encouraged foreign pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, supported the Pope in supplanting the Spanish Mozarab liturgy with that of the Roman rite, and encouraged the activities of French monks.
The final stage of Alfonso's reign, from 1086 to 1109, was marked by a series of frustrating defeats at the hands of the Almoravid Berbers, who invaded Spain at the behest of Spanish Moslem leaders worried about growing Christian power. On Oct. 23, 1086, Alfonso suffered a humiliating defeat at Sagrajas, after which no Christian troops except those of the Cid were to have any success against the invader. The Cid's success in Valencia served only to deepen the hostility between the King and the former champion of his hated brother.
After the Cid's death in 1099, Alfonso finally heeded the call of the hero's widow, Jimena, and joined the Cid's troops at Valencia. But that city had to be abandoned to the Almoravids in 1102. The defeats continued unabated until the bitter battle of Uclés in 1108, in which Alfonso suffered the loss of his only son, Sancho. The King died in Toledo on June 30, 1109, leaving his realm in the hands of his daughter, Urraca, and in a state of insecurity and vulnerability from which it was not to recover fully for another century.
Though his reign was politically unsuccessful, Alfonso VI carried out an important cultural task by Europeanizing his dominions.
Alfonso VI, the conqueror of Toledo, the great Europeanizing monarch, saw in the last years of his reign how the great political work that he had carried started to be dismantled due to the Almoravid attacks and internal weaknesses. Alfonso VI had fully assumed the imperial idea of León and his openness to European influence had made him aware of the feudal political practices which, in the France of his time, reached their most complete expression. In the conjunction of these two elements, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz sees the explanation of the grant of the iure hereditario (sharing between the two daughters and the son the kingdom instead of bequeathing all to the only son) —more typical of the Navarrese-Aragonese tradition— of the Counties of Galicia and Portugal to her two Burgundian sons-in-law, Raymond (Urraca's first husband) and Enrique (Teresa's spouse). After a few years, that decision led to the independence of Portugal and the possibility of an independent Galicia under Alfonso Raimúndez, which finally did not materialize when the infante became King Alfonso VII of León.
His marriage with Agatha, daughter of William the Conqueror, King of England and Duke of Normandy, was negotiated in 1067, but her premature death frustrated the project.
According to Bishop Pelagius of Oviedo, contemporary of the king, in his Chronicon regum Legionensium ("Chronicle of the Kings of León"), Alfonso VI had five wives and two concubines nobilissimas (very noble). The wives were, according to the bishop, Agnes, Constance, Berta, Isabel, and Beatrice and the concubines Jimena Muñoz and Zaida.
(c. 1015 – 24 December 1065)
(c. 1018 – 27 November 1067)
(8 May 1046 – 1093)
She was an 11th-century Queen of Leon and Castile by her marriage to Alfonso VI of León and Castile.
(April 1079 – 8 March 1126)
(1080 – 11 November 1130)
(c. 1100 – 8 February 1135)
(before 1082?-1151)
(ca. 1093 – 29 May 1108)
