Queen of León, Castile and Galicia from 1109 to 1126, the first woman to rule a Christian Iberian kingdom in her own right, whose marriage to Alfonso the Battler of Aragon collapsed into a war for the kingdom and whose reign ended with her son already crowned beside her.
Urraca was queen of León, Castile and Galicia from 1109 until 1126 — the first woman to rule a kingdom of Christian Iberia in her own name rather than as a regent or a consort. She inherited because her only legitimate brother, Sancho, was killed at Uclés in 1108, and she spent seventeen years proving that the inheritance could be held.
The defining act of her reign was not hers. To give the realm a soldier, she was married within months of her accession to Alfonso I of Aragon, the Battler; the marriage was uncanonical, the church annulled it for consanguinity, and the two of them fought each other across León and Castile for years afterwards. Set beside that, her achievement is that at her death the kingdom passed intact to her son, Alfonso VII, who would be crowned emperor of Spain at León nine years later.
She was born at León on 24 June 1081, the eldest daughter of Alfonso VI — the conqueror of Toledo — and his Burgundian queen Constance. Before 1090 she was married to Raymond of Burgundy, a French nobleman who came into Spain with the Cluniac connection her mother represented, and who governed Galicia as count in her father’s name. Two children survived: Sancha, born before November 1095, and the son born in 1105 who became Alfonso VII.
Her position changed twice in quick succession. Raymond died in 1107, leaving her a widow with a small son and a claim on Galicia. Then on 30 May 1108 her half-brother Sancho, Alfonso VI’s only legitimate son, was killed fighting the Almoravids at Uclés. When her father died at the turn of June and July 1109 there was no male heir, and a woman inherited León, Castile and Galicia together.
Every narrative account of Urraca was written by a man with a stake in her failure, and reading her means reading against them. The Historia Compostellana was compiled for the church of Santiago de Compostela and for Diego Gelmírez, the archbishop who was by turns her ally, her prisoner and her opponent. It grants her real qualities — she is called prudent, modest and of good sense — and then explains everything that went wrong by what it calls the weakness and changeability of women. That is a chronicler conceding the evidence of his own eyes and then supplying a reason to discount it.
The Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris is more damaging because it is quieter. It was written to celebrate the reign of her son Alfonso VII and it begins in 1126 — that is, at his mother’s death — so the structure of the work makes her reign the disorder from which his accession delivered the kingdom. A chronicler who starts the story on the day his patron’s mother dies has already made his argument about her before writing a sentence about her. Lucas de Tuy, assembling the Chronicon mundi at San Isidoro in 1236 for Queen Berengaria, inherited that framing and handed it to Castilian tradition, where she acquired the byname la Temeraria, the reckless one.
Modern historians who have worked from her charters rather than the chronicles describe a different figure: a ruler who granted, confirmed, besieged and negotiated continuously for seventeen years, who styled herself regina and on occasion imperatrix totius Hispaniae — empress of all Spain, her father’s title — and who at every crisis kept the one thing that mattered, which was the undivided inheritance. She lost battles, changed allies, and was driven out of her own cities more than once. The charge the chronicles actually make against her, beneath the language about women, is that she governed by shifting alliances; the difficulty with the charge is that it describes the normal practice of every twelfth-century Iberian ruler, including the son who benefited from it.
The Leonese magnates’ answer to a queen regnant was to find her a husband who could lead armies, and in September or October 1109 she was married at the castle of Monzón de Campos to Alfonso I of Aragon and Pamplona, the ablest soldier in Christian Spain. The terms were carefully drawn: he was not to abandon her, and if the marriage produced no children her son Alfonso Raimúndez was to keep the Leonese inheritance.
It failed on two grounds at once. Canonically, the pair were both great-great-grandchildren of Sancho III the Great of Pamplona, so the marriage was within the prohibited degrees, and Pope Paschal II opposed it from the start; the archbishop of Toledo pressed for annulment, which was pronounced around 1110 to 1112, with the last document the two issued jointly dated 22 May 1112. Politically, it failed because the Galician nobility would not accept a settlement that displaced the boy Alfonso Raimúndez, and because the Aragonese king behaved in León as a conqueror rather than a consort, garrisoning its castles with his own men.
The result was that the marriage intended to defend the kingdom became the war that nearly destroyed it. Neither party could simply withdraw: Alfonso the Battler held fortresses across Castile and kept using the title of king there for years, and Urraca had to take them back one by one.
The fighting ran from 1110 to about 1117 and crossed every part of the realm. In Galicia, Count Pedro Fróilaz de Traba raised the province in 1110 in the name of Urraca’s son, and on 11 September 1111 the boy was crowned at Santiago de Compostela — a move that both strengthened her cause against Aragon and created a rival centre of authority inside her own kingdom. On 26 October 1111 her forces were beaten at Candespina, where her supporter Count Gómez González was killed, and Galician troops moving to join her were caught and broken at Viadangos soon after.
She recovered by alliance and by patience. Count Pedro González de Lara became her chief supporter and her companion; the Aragonese garrisons were reduced over years rather than in a campaign; and by 1117 her son held the country south of the Duero while she kept León and Castile. What she never did was partition the inheritance, which was the outcome her husband, her half-sister in Portugal and several of her own magnates were each working towards.
The reign also ran into a force that was new in Iberian politics: the townsmen. At Sahagún the burghers rose against the abbot and his lordship from 1110, in a long quarrel about tolls, monopolies and the terms on which townsmen held their houses, and the crown was dragged in on both sides. At Compostela in 1117 the citizens rose against Gelmírez and against the queen together: the mob attacked the cathedral tower where the two had taken refuge, and Urraca was seized and stoned in the street before her supporters got her away.
Her relations with Diego Gelmírez run through the whole reign and never settle. He was indispensable — the richest and ablest prelate in her kingdom, who made Compostela an archbishopric in 1120 and whose cartulary preserves her image — and he was impossible, negotiating with her son and her enemies whenever it suited Compostela. She had him arrested in 1120 and then reconciled with him, which is the pattern of her government in miniature: an opponent too useful to destroy was bought back instead.