Spanish Frontier

• Rodrigo died being the ruler of the Levante principality of Spain (Capital being Valenicia)
• The ballads discussing el Cid refer to his childhood as contrasting himself, being brash and disobedient
• Rodrigo friends w/ Sancho (the kings eldest son) through the king's court
• Most kingdoms of Christian Spain under Ferdinand and the muslim Taifas were weak and fragmented, so Ferdinand divides his kingdoms among his 3 sons
• Sancho expected all of the kingdom and was enraged
• Sancho allies w/ Alfonso to overthrow Galicia then turns on Alfonso, Rodrigo played a key part in all of these
• Sancho still wanted Zamora which belonged to Alfonso's sister Urraca
• It was later offered to King Alfonso who declined it as only El Cid was fit to ride it
• Misinterpretation as presented by the poem
• Cid centres around Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar - a Spanish knight meant to embody traditional Spanish values
• Vivar - small mill town in Castile, Rodrigo's family was from the poorest class 'infanzones'
• Nobility was based on military service so anyone could become a caballero if they had a horse and a sword
• Without the strength of resistance in Spain it undoubtedly would have been Islamised like the other provinces of the Roman Empire
• Backed by the policy of depending on one ideal → the recovery of the Gothic states and recovery of Churches for christianity
• Declared as such in the Epitome Ovetense in the 9th cent.
• Movement backed by the common people
• Arguably achieved by the 13th cent.
• Arabic influence took from Persia and Byzantium unlike the Western inspo of Greece and Rome
• Key people of Visigothic monarchy

  • St Isidore of Seville
  • St Julian of Toledo
  • King Sisebut
  • King Wamba
• That the Visigothic state could be destroyed as the result of a single defeat in pitched battle may be seen as paradoxical tribute to the very effectiveness of its monarchy
• Berber conquerers in this era were little-touched by islamic teaching
• Christians interpret them as heretics
• An Islamic society developed gradually in al-Andalus, the part of the Iberian peninsula under Islamic rule
• Some Christians converted other left to go to other Christian kingdoms
• Arab influence was reluctant in the Basque country and Galicia, it was ecologically unappealing
• Leon and Pamplona (Navarre) were the only Christian principalities in this era
• in Catalonia, the Frankish aristocracies of southern Gaul set up frontier lordships' which came to make up Barcelona
• Restive under Leonese control, the counts achieved a de facto independence in the course of the tenth century, and Castile was constituted a kingdom in the eleventh
• the ruling elites of León consistently thought of themselves as the primary political authorities in Christian Spain
• They thought of themselves as heirs to the Visigoth kings
• Muslim rulers of al-Andalus called amirs until 929 when they took a spiritual title of caliph
• Had a centralised state governed from Cordoba
• Described as looming over kingdom of Leon
• Last 20 years of 10th cent. relations btwn Cordoba and Leon soured
• Between 981 and his death in 1002, Almanzor struck repeatedly at the principalities of the Christian north in a series of campaigns
• For the latter part of the ninth century Asturo-Leonese ruling circles enjoyed: ideas of continuity with the Visigoths, a restored Christian order which would supersede Islamic presence
• Leon and Castile cavalry forces grew in the late 9th early 10th cent., 11th in Aragon
• Report of Fernando I delivering speech to the Toledo embassy in 1040 concerning the principality of Zaragoza. Fernando refused their cry for help.
• They only wanted lands which had been previously taken from them
• This was a claim by Ibn Idhari in 1310 thus is a very late account, while he often cited his work this was not cited