How foreign knights shaped Spain's Reconquista

The contribution of foreign knights from beyond the Pyrenees to the Reconquista in Spain was real but uneven, and far greater between 1095 and 1217 than in later periods. The first crusading manifestation was Pope Alexander II's call in 1063, which a year later led to the capture of Barbastro.

The Reconquista was not solely an undertaking of the peninsular kingdoms. For centuries, knights from beyond the Pyrenees crossed the mountains to fight Jovenlandeses in Hispania. Their presence was sometimes decisive, sometimes anecdotal, and almost always viewed with suspicion by the local nobility. The first manifestation with crusading overtones appears in 1063, when Pope Alexander II offered indulgences to those who died fighting on Spanish soil. A year later, that call translated into the capture of Barbastro.

## From the Albeldense Chronicle to the call of Clermont

Between 881 and 883, a monk from the monastery of San Prudencio de Monte Laturce wrote in Oviedo a text known as the Crónica Albeldense (Albeldense Chronicle). It states that the Saracens occupied Spain and seized the kingdom of the Goths, and that with them the Christians face battle day and night. That paragraph, belonging to the Codex Vigilanus, shows that as early as the ninth century there was already a consciousness of permanent struggle against Sarracin in the Peninsula.

On 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II issued a call to Holy War at Clermont, in the Auvergne region. A few days earlier a council had been held in that same city, whose second canon was addressed to those who would set out on the road to Jerusalem to liberate the Holy Land. That message represents the first explicit expression of Crusade. When someone shouted Deus lo vult at Clermont, Hispania had long since been a privileged arena for combating the infidel.

After the call of Clermont, the Spanish Reconquista became a sacralised war, fully imbued with religiosity. But the papal call of 1095 did not represent a radical novelty with respect to the ecclesial conception of war prevailing in previous decades. The Gregorian reform, driven by Pope Gregory VII (1020-1085), had prepared the ground. Gregory VII, a Tuscan and former Cluniac monk named Hildebrand, claimed in the Dictatus papae the absolute and universal authority of Rome. The Holy See's stance on war had evolved from the evangelical pacifism of the early Christians to the sanctification of war in the eleventh century.

## Gascons, Normans and the first Hispanic crusade

The first reports of help from beyond the Pyrenees date back to the tenth century, during the more than fifty campaigns carried out by Almanzor in the north of the Peninsula. The violence of the Muslim warlord generated in the society beyond the Pyrenees the obligation to support a Christendom in danger. Some Gascon monks, according to the chronicler Rodulfus Glaber, crossed the Pyrenees at the end of the tenth century and took up arms, ready to fight more out of fraternal love than for worldly glory. The same chronicler recounts that, after death, they were considered holy martyrs.

Those monks came with the troops of the Count of Gascony, William Sancho, who had come to the aid of his brother-in-law, King Sancho Garcés II Abarca of Pamplona, after 975. The same noble lent aid in 994 to King Bermudo II of León (984-999), at the instance of the King of Pamplona. The Anales del Reino de Navarra (Annals of the Kingdom of Navarre) highlight that alongside the Gascon armies there were also Provençal and French troops.

At the beginning of the 1020s we find a Norman noble in the county of Barcelona. His name was Roger I of Tosny and he served Ermesinda of Carcassonne, regent countess of Barcelona (972-1058), widow of Ramon Borrell II since 1017. To attract him, the countess must have offered him part of the parias money (tribute paid by Muslim taifas). During his stay, which lasted ten years, the Norman noble devastated and occupied cities and castles and took part in raids against the Saracens, generating such a climate of terror that the Jovenlandeses were forced to pay substantial tributes. His departure was brought about by a humiliating defeat inflicted by the Jovenlandeses.

Everything changed in the spring of 1064. A large army formed by nobles from Aquitaine, Burgundy and Poitou, but also from Vermandois, Champagne, southern Italy and Normandy, set out to join the Hispanic forces. It was possibly a reaction to the defeat and death of the Aragonese king Ramiro I, which occurred on 8 May 1063 in the failed reconquest of the fortress of Graus. The death of the first king of Aragon caused a strong shock in Christendom beyond the Pyrenees and in Rome. Just one year later an army of European knights had been organised, ready for combat.

## Barbastro, 1064: the first crusade before the crusades

In April 1064, the troops from beyond the Pyrenees plundered the region of Huesca and in June set their sights on taking the small town of Barbastro. The place was chosen because it was probably not committed to either of the Muslim sides facing each other at that moment. Barbastro enjoyed a certain strategic importance as it lay on the road leading to Lleida. A group of some 10,000 Christian knights set out towards Muslim territory.

The Christians took the town and the alcazaba (fortress) in July. The action was not an example of pious violence. There was a massacre echoed above all by Muslim sources, some of which report the enormous number of Christian combatants who entered Barbastro, the more than 40,000 Muslim combatants killed, both horsemen and foot soldiers, and the pillaging they indulged in, which included women and children later sold as slaves. A contemporary chronicler, the monk Amatus of Montecassino, reproached the soldiers of Christ who took Barbastro for their conduct and announced to them that the just judgement of God would fall upon them.

Just nine months later the Jovenlandeses retook the town, massacring the garrison, including its commander Armengol III of Urgell. However, 1064 would remain forever in the memory of the Christian combatants from beyond the Pyrenees. Streets in Reims and Poitiers were named after the Aragonese town, which they still bear today, and a thirteenth-century chanson de geste, Le Siège de Barbastre, evoked that epic antiestéticat.

The capture of Barbastro has been the subject of debate among medieval historiography regarding the greater or lesser Frankish military presence in the Peninsula. A letter that Pope Alexander II (died 1073) had sent to the clerus Vulturnensis at the end of 1063 offered indulgences to those who died in combat in Hispania: penitentian eis levamus et remissionem peccatorum facimus. Some opinions maintain that the expedition was promoted by Alexander II after the disaster of Graus. The call would have been framed within the postulates of Gregorian reformism, which had brought about a decisive shift in the struggle against Sarracin.

We do know the names of most of the nobles who crossed the Pyrenees. At their head was Duke William VIII of Aquitaine (1023/1025-1086), also Count of Poitiers. Alongside him were the Poitevin viscount Aimerico of Thouars, the Burgundian Theobald of Semur, Count of Chalon, Hilduin III of Ramerupt, Godfrey of Anjou and the Normans Robert Crispin and Walter Giffard, lord of Longueville, better known by the significant name of Giffard of Barbastro.

## The papacy, the Hispanic kingdoms and control of the holy war

Even so, the kingdoms accepted, always due to the internal weaknesses of their monarchs, the papal protagonism that longed for the return of Hispania to Roman jurisdiction. An example is the frustrated expedition of 1073, designed between the last days of Alexander II and the first of Gregory VII's pontificate. At its head was Count Eblo II of Roucy, a great ally of Rome. The story had begun five years earlier, in 1068, when King Sancho Ramírez made a pilgrimage to the Holy See seeking an agreement with Alexander II to break the political isolation to which the monarchs of Navarre and Castile and the counts of Barcelona had subjected him.

The papal backing carried important counterparts. The king recognised himself as the Pope's vassal, accepted Rome's direct superiority over the Aragonese bishoprics, admitted the Roman rite in the monasteries of the kingdom and declared himself Miles Sancti Petri (Soldier of Saint Peter). It was an open door to Roman military intervention in the kingdom. The 1073 expedition was prepared on the argument that the regnum Hyspanie was the property of the Apostolic See. The Pope called for the participation of any milites who recognised their submission to the see of Saint Peter and revealed a pact with the Count of Roucy whereby the latter would possess the lands he managed to conquer from the Jovenlandeses. Probably that was the reason why the expedition was not carried out.

The most aware of all the Hispanic monarchs of the specificity of the peninsular kingdoms was Alfonso VI of León, proclaimed emperor in 1078. It is likely that with his proclamation as Imperator totius Hispaniae, the king was responding to a letter from Gregory VII a year earlier, in which the reformist pope claimed all power over the lands of Hispania. Alfonso VI would never accept submission to the Pope as Sancho Ramírez had done. Against Romanness, Christendom: not to be a soldier of Rome, only of Christ.

Through this agreement, the Cluniac nobility may have reached Castile and taken part in the emperor's reconquering projects, above all in the defence of the kingdom against the Almoravid advance. That could explain the presence of many Franks from beyond the Alps at the battle of Sagrajas in 1086, as a consequence of the call made by Alfonso VI for the defence of the kingdom against the Almoravid invasion. It is striking that, with the exception of the Chronicon Lusitanum, the presence of Frankish troops is recorded only by foreign chronicles such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum and the Annals of Waverley.

It is possible that these same troops were in 1087 at the unsuccessful siege of Tudela, led, among other French nobles, by Eudes I (c. 1058-c. 1103), Duke of Burgundy, brother-in-law of Alfonso VI. Probably also by Raymond of Saint-Gilles (Raymond IV), Count of Toulouse and Marquis of Provence (c. 1042-1105), married to Elvira, daughter of King Alfonso VI. Alongside all of them, Alfonso VI of Castile and Sancho Ramírez of Aragon. One and the other, tired and frustrated, lifted the siege and abandoned the surroundings of Tudela in the spring of the trinc year. They would not return until after the call of the First Crusade in 1095.

## The decline of the foreign contribution and the image of the crusader

From the thirteenth century onwards, the papacy considered that the matter was the concern of the kings and inhabitants of Christian Hispania, although merging the idea of Reconquista into that of Crusade. It no longer encouraged the arrival of combatants from beyond the Pyrenees. Their presence, however, had an effective impact on many occasions from the final years of the eleventh century. Sometimes they came directly from nearby lands, north of the Pyrenees, as peine during the conquest of the middle Ebro valley. At other times there were the interested supports of the Italian maritime republics of Pisa and Genoa, for example in the first attempt to conquer the Balearics in 1114 or in the capture of Almería in 1147.

The passage of large expeditions of English, German and Flemish crusaders towards the Holy Land especially benefited the new kingdom of Portugal because their aid facilitated the conquests of Lisbon (1147), Silves (1188) and Alcácer do Sal (1217), but also the county of Barcelona, for its intervention in the capture of Tortosa (1148). The only moment when the contribution from beyond the Pyrenees reached a certain weight was during the campaign of Las Navas de Tolosa, in 1212, although most of those from beyond the Pyrenees withdrew in the weeks prior to the battle.

Once the great conquests were over, in the mid-thirteenth century, the coming of European crusaders became much rarer. The frontier of Granada was always a suitable place for warriors from other countries to come per fer caballerías (to perform deeds of arms), sometimes as part of a formation that already included a kind of grand tour or journey abroad and the testing of weapons against the infidel on some frontier, whether the Granadan or the Prussian. There were small groups of combatants in major campaigns: Teba (1330), Algeciras (1342), Antequera (1407-1410) and, of course, in the war of conquest that culminated in 1492. They were of no importance from a military point of view, although they were given some prominence in the chronicles of the time for politico-religious propaganda reasons.

The image of the crusaders offered by the Hispanic chronicles is seldom positive because they highlight their condition as others, alien to the social realities and the ways of relating to Jovenlandeses characteristic of the country. Often rapacious, incapable of understanding and respecting pacts and customs proper to war and truce, sometimes undisciplined, at other times arrogant and ignorant because they were not versed in the war of the Moors. That gave rise to catastrophes such as that of the Scot Sir James Douglas in 1330, who died with all his men by falling into the classic feigned-retreat trap laid by the Granadans. In short, "gentes que non entendíamos" (people who did not understand us), as a thirteenth-century Toledan analyst writes. Too negative, but perhaps the only thing that did not change was their inability to understand what was really happening in the Peninsula, to grasp the arguments and desires of those who lived there, and to know the difference between living in the rear and living on the frontier.