"There are many things for which the Normans are known. They do not include being easily tamed."
- Fruela of Santiago, 11th century monk
~
Excerpt: Fractured Cross: The Kingdoms of Northern Iberia - Leona Mondeforo, Falconbird Press, AD 2011
Bermudo III of Gallaecia's predicament had crystallized into a genuine danger by the 1060s. The Norman mercenaries he had hired to deliver him victory in his constant war against Leon had indeed taken and sacked the capital of that Kingdom in 1061, driving its monarchy back into the Asturian hills. However, in so doing, the Normans had taken up residence in most of the cities they'd captured along the way.
Bermudo, who had promised his daughter Urraca to Tancred's son Geoffrey to better bind the Norman to service to him, watched the date of her march to adulthood with growing consternation - she seems to have been about 13 in 1061, and to have been one of just two children of Bermudo and his wife Muniadona, both infant daughters. Seeing much of his kingdom in the hands of his mercenaries, he seems to have begun to realize that he had few options for actually asserting himself against the Normans should they continue to entrench themselves.
For the Normans' part, the money flowing from the Gallaecian throne was more than reason enough to continue fighting. The demographics and development of northern Iberia largely worked in their favour: While Muslim Iberia was heavily urbanized, the north was very sparsely populated and broken down into small agrarian villages even through the 11th century, with towns such as Leon and Santiago being virtually the only settlements of any notable size.
The Normans, meanwhile, had advantages in technology and organization. While their numbers were never great, they brought with them a couple of advantages. Militarily, they made excellent use of heavy cavalry - the armoured knight being more a Frankish innovation than an Iberian one, the well-trained Norman horsemen presented the men of Leon with an obstacle they had difficulty overcoming. They also brought with them the motte-and-bailey style of castle construction, borrowed from the Angevins[1] and adapted to most places the Normans went in these years. While easily constructed and simple, able to be built by forced labour, this style of fort enabled the Normans to better hang on to the underdeveloped lands and cities they captured in the still-sparsely-populated lands north of the Duero.
By 1063, Leon had been beaten into submission, though the Normans struggled to make headway in the strongholds in the Astrian mountains, thwarted by terrain and ambush alike in valleys where their cavalry advantage proved ill-suited - essentially running into the same problems the Moors and the Romans ran into when trying to assert control over that part of Iberia. Tancred, by now having taken up semi-permanent residence in Santiago, reminded Bermudo of the betrothal between Geoffrey and Urraca, but Bermudo put him off another year, pleading that his daughter had yet to reach adulthood. The Normans continued to trouble the expanded Gallaecia, beginning to tax pilgrims traveling to see Santiago de Compostela and generally thumbing their noses at Bermudo's dictates, more loyal to themselves than to the Gallaecian throne.
Tancred himself seems to have quickly recognized the strength of his position. In 1065, he demanded an increase in pay from Bermudo for his services, despite the fact that the war had been won and the rump Leon had begun to pay tribute to the Gallaecian crown. Bermudo, with the Norman boot on his neck, acceded.
Later that year, as the monk-historian Fruela of Santiago tells it, Bermudo's queen, Muniadona, became pregnant for the third time, with the king hoping for a son - eager to avoid his daughter and her Norman husband being in line for the crown. Tancred and his son Geoffrey responded to the news with outward joy. However, all was not to go as planned.
With few yet knowing of the queen's pregnancy, a missive was suddenly sent down from Bermudo that he and Muniadona would undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. From the midsummer day upon which the missive was sent, the King and Queen were never to be seen again. The missive stated that Urraca would rule in Bermudo's stead until his return from the Holy Land, and the young infanta was quickly thrust onto the throne, with Geoffrey and Tancred standing behind the throne.
It's unclear what actually happened to Bermudo and Muniadona. Fruela of Santiago's account has proven the most historically titillating: He writes that the Normans locked the King and the Queen up in a dungeon deep beneath the early 11th-century castle at Santiago de Compostela, never again allowing them to see the light of day. By Fruela's telling, Muniadona bore Bermudo a son in captivity, who would be smuggled out of the dungeon by monks and hidden away in a monastery deep in the mountains, where he would be concealed for his own protection while the devout churchmen raised him to one day reappear and become the rightful King.
From this account has come the legend of the Hidden King - the idea that, somewhere out there, the true king of Gallaecia waits, ready to appear and assume his throne. The myth of the Hidden King has fuelled more than a few outside pretenders in northern Iberia over the years. Together with the Reconquista myth, it's also the subject of the popular medieval romance,
The Hidden King of Hispania and the Reconquista, in which the conquerors are instead portrayed as Moors and the Hidden King reappears backed by the Holy Spirit to drive them out of Iberia and reclaim the peninsula for Christendom.
However, Fruela is the only contemporary writer who speaks of this. Another contemporary writer, the merchant Munio of Pamplona, states instead that Muniadona and her baby died in childbirth, while Bermudo died later that year after breaking his neck falling down a flight of stairs - remarks suggestive of a cover story for an assassination. The Frankish monk Aldebert also repeats the story of Muniadona and her child dying in childbirth, but states that Bermudo died of grief.
Historians generally believe the accounts of Munio and Aldebert to be more accurate. Accepted consensus is that Muniadona died giving birth to a stillborn son, at which point Tancred had Bermudo assassinated to make way for Urraca and Geoffrey. Whatever the real story, however, 1065 saw Urraca crowned Queen and Geoffrey crowned king consort, though in fact Urraca was almost immediately sidelined in favour of Geoffrey, who styled himself not just King, but as the Protector of Santiago and the Lord of Hispania. He has become known to history as Geofredo I, the first King of Santiago.
Almost immediately, two illegitimate sons of Ramiro IV declared themselves king, mustering support from the nobles against the Normans. One of those claimants' efforts proved to be little more than a brushfire rebellion, but the more serious Ramiro V - considered the last King of Gallaecia - mustered a significant army backed by the Count of Portucale and several barons and declared Geofredo an usurper. Similarly, King Alfonso VII of Leon declared himself king by right over the Norman lands, beginning to mass an army in the Asturian mountains to liberate the city of Leon. The Count of Castile, meanwhile, declared that he had given no oath to neither Alfonso nor Geofredo, once and for all proclaiming Castile to be independent of either crown.
Like sparking a match in a room full of blackpowder explosives, the usurpation of Geoffrey blew up northern Iberia into a big fiery ball of feuding principalities, shattering the old order. The Normans' organizational advantages would give them the edge in the long run, but Geoffrey found himself facing rebellion in almost every quarter of northern Iberia, surrounded by factions who hated him. Many of the old soldiers and nobles of Gallaecia deserted to Ramiro and Alfonso. Ramiro, in turn, called upon the aging mercenary Lucio de Viseu, who drew upon his own contacts with the Moors to bring in Berbers from the Algarve on Ramiro's side.
The wars in the north dragged on for years, during which Geofredo fathered a son, Tancredo, upon Urraca's body. The Normans were driven out of Leon in 1068, and Alfonso restored his dynasty's control over that city for a year or two, before the Normans retook it in 1070. The city's infrastructure would suffer mightily over the next few years as Leon changed hands several times, becoming a key frontier in the fighting between the Normans and the Iberians. While the Normans had the advantage in the quality of their fighting men, the army of Leon held its own through the defection of native loyalists to their cause, including a few Gallaecian nobles, as well as peasants opposed to the Normans flocking to their banner; the Portucale-backed Gallaecian claimant, meanwhile, relied mainly on hired Berbers and the favour of the Slavic administration in al-Andalus to keep itself in the fight.
The Norman usurpation delivered Northern Iberia the time known to history as the Great Upheaval.[2]
On the one hand, the Upheaval would mark the beginning of an economic transition in northern Iberia, one long put off by political division. The Norman-held areas of the peninsula saw the arrival of new fortress-building technologies as the Normans began to fortify cities within their dominion against Leonese and Gallaecian attack, with rural peasants often fleeing to these new fortifications to escape raids, and it saw the arrival of Frankish models of administration and religious life, reforming the civil service and the clergy in the Norman-held areas over time. While the Normans never replaced the natives, they formed a ruling class which gradually adapted to the culture while bringing new, modern innovations which put northern Iberia on the road to urbanization.
On the other hand, the Upheaval doomed northern Iberia to decades of political disunity and internecine warfare, with pretender kings vying for various crowns and local lords going into business for themselves. More than anything, the explosive, rapidly-shifting period after the Norman Usurpation put to rest any hope of the Christian Iberians driving the Moors out of Andalusia. The reach between the Duero and the central Iberian mountains became the effective boundary between Christian and Muslim Iberia, with the Muslim slice of the peninsula simply watching with bemusement as the Christians fought amongst themselves for supremacy.
[1] The first motte-and-bailey shows up in Anjou about three years after the POD. The butterflies probably did not wipe it out.
[2] Turns out it's the Christian part of Iberia that got a
Fitna this time. Who knew.
SUMMARY:
1065: With King Bermudo III of Gallaecia and his queen, Muniadona, due to have a child, the Norman lord Tancred abruptly arranges for Bermudo's removal. Bermudo and Muniadona vanish, and Bermudo's daughter Urraca takes the throne. She's married to Tancred's son, Geoffrey, who styles himself Geofredo, Protector of Santiago. Opportunists across northern Iberia immediately rebel against Geofredo. Northern Iberia explodes into decades of civil war as the Normans retrench in what will become known as the Kingdom of Santiago. The Great Upheaval begins.
Mansa Musa in the Amazon.
