Ramiro II was the warrior-king of León whose victory at Simancas in 939 shattered a caliphal army and marked the height of tenth-century Leonese power.
Ramiro II of León ruled from 931 to 951 and was the dominant Christian war-leader of his generation. His great victory at Simancas in 939, over the campaigning army of Caliph Abd al-Rahman III, was the outstanding Christian success of the tenth century.
He came to the throne by force, expanded the Leonese frontier toward the Duero, and left his Muslim opponents with a lasting dread of his name. His reign marks the moment when León pressed hardest against the power of Córdoba.
Ramiro took the crown in 931 after deposing and blinding his brother Alfonso IV, "the Monk", who had tried to reclaim it. As king he waged relentless war on the southern frontier, winning at Osma in 933 and, above all, at Simancas and the ravine of al-Khandaq in 939, where the caliph's army was destroyed.
He worked with the frontier lords of Castile and the kings of Pamplona, though these alliances were uneasy — Count Fernán González of Castile was as much a rival as a partner. Ramiro pushed forward the repopulation of the borderlands and died in 951, leaving the throne to his son Ordoño III.
The Ramiro of the sources is a hard and formidable man, a king who took his crown by deposing a brother and who fought the caliphate with a relentlessness that earned him the byname "the Devil" from his Muslim enemies. That name, hostile in origin, is itself a measure of the fear he inspired.
He was evidently a gifted battlefield commander and a determined frontier-builder, but also a ruler of his violent age, willing to blind a rival and to execute failure. The admiring Christian and dismayed Muslim accounts agree on his effectiveness even where they differ on everything else.