Alfonso VI

Alfonso VI (c. 1040 –1 July 1109), nicknamed the Brave (El Bravo) or the Valiant, was the son of King Ferdinand I of León and Queen Sancha, daughter of Alfonso V and sister of Bermudo III. He became king of León (1065–72) and of Galicia (1071 – 1109), and then king of the reunited Castile and León (1072 – 1109). After the conquest of Toledo in 1085, Alfonso proclaimed himself victoriosissimo rege in Toleto, et in Hispania et Gallecia (most victorious king of Toledo, and of Hispania and Galicia) The Battle of Sagrajas (1086) and the Battle of Uclés (1108), in which his only son and heir, Sancho Alfónsez died, constituted defeats for the Leonese and Castilian armies.

Legacy In the cultural field, Alfonso VI promoted the safety of the Camino de Santiago and promoted the Cluniac Reforms in the monasteries of Galicia, León and Castile. In the spring of 1073, he made the first concession of a Leonese monastery to the Order of Cluny. 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.