Kingdom of León

The city of León was founded by the Roman Seventh Legion (for unknown reasons always written as Legio Septima Gemina, or 'twin seventh legion'). It was the headquarters of that legion in the late empire and was a center for trade in gold which was mined nearby. In 540 the city was conquered by the Visigothic king Leovigild and in 717 it fell again, this time to the Moors. However it was one of the first cities retaken during the reconquest and became part of the Kingdom of Asturias in 742.

In 913 an independent Kingdom of León was founded when the Christian princes of Asturias along the northern coast of the peninsula shifted their main seat from Oviedo to the city of León. They turned their back on the unnavigable Atlantic, infested with Vikings and sea monsters, and settled in the meseta, the high tableland of central Spain. Almost immediately they began to expand to the south and east, populating the newly gained territory with numerous castles. The newly added area was the County of Burgos until the 930s, at which time Count Fernan Gonzalez began a campaign to expand Burgos and make it independent and hereditary. He took upon himself the title King of Castile, after the numerous castles in the area, and continued expanding his kingdom at the expense of León by allying with the Caliphate of Cordoba, until 966, when he was stopped by Sancho the Fat of Leon. Constant rivalry between the two kingdoms opened rifts that could be exploited by outsiders, and Sancho the Great of Navarre (1004-35) absorbed Castile in the 1020s, and added León in the last year of his life, leaving Galicia to temporary independence. In the division of lands which followed his death, his son Fernando succeeded to the county of Castile. Two years later, in 1037, he conquered León and Galicia. For nearly thirty years, until his death in 1065, he ruled over a combined kingdom of León-Castile as Ferdinand I of Leon. In these clashes in an impoverished and isolated culture, where salt-making and a blacksmith's forge counted as industries, the armies that decided the fate of the kingdoms numbered in the hundreds of fighting men.

Directly to the south of León lay the incalculably rich, sophisticated and powerful Caliphate of Cordoba, like a Western Byzantium. Internal dissensions divided Islamic loyalties in the 11th century, so that the impovershed Christians who had been sending tribute to the Caliphate, found themselves in a position to demand payments (parias) instead, in the classic extortion that is part of the definition of "barbarian.". Thus, though scarcely influenced by the culture of the successor territories of the former Caliphate, Ferdinand I followed the example of the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Aragon, and became hugely wealthy from its gold coinage. When he died in 1065, his territories and the parias were split among his three sons, of whom Garcia emerged the victor, in the classic fratricidal strife common to feudal successions.

Who in Europe would have known of this immense new wealth in a kingdom so isolated that its bishops had virtually no contact with Rome? —except that Ferdinand and his heirs, the kings of Leon-Castile, became the greatest benefactors of the Abbey of Cluny, where Abbot Hugh (died 1109) undertook construction of the huge third abbey church, the cynosure of every eye.

A turning point in the development of Leon-Castile was the taking of Toledo (May 6, 1085) by Alfonso VI. He was drawn in by strife with Toledo, but then faced unfamiliar problems of settling garrisons in the small Muslim strongholds dependent on Toledo, which had fallen to him with the city, and the appointment of a Catholic bishop. Revised definitions of the role of a Catholic king faced with the independent Muslim client-states that bought him off with gold (the definition of barbarian status, had to be worked out in timley fashion a Catholic king now governing sophisticated urban Muslim subjects. The fall of Toledo, 1085, is a milestone in the Reconquista.

The two kingdoms were split again around 1195, when a major defeat of Alfonso VIII weakened the authority of Castile, but the lands were reunited in 1230 under Ferdinand III. Though later kings of Castile continued to take the title King of León as the superior title, and to use a lion as part of their standard, the history of Leon after 1230 can be followed at Kingdom of Castile, and locally at entries for the individual cities of Leon. Under a unified Spanish kingdom, in the 16th century León became a captaincy-general.

The modern province of León was founded in 1833. It has ist own entry.

External link

• R.A. Fletcher, The Episcopate in the Kingdom of Léon in the Twelfth Century: Chapter 1 gives the cultural context of earlier and 12th century Léon.