Wikipedia: Alphonso I of Portugal

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ALPHONSO II., "the Fat," was born in 1185, and succeeded
ALPHONSO I. is said to have married Ormesinda, daughter of
Pelavo, who was raised on the shield in Asturias as king
of the Goths after the Arab conquest. He is also said to
have been the son of Peter. duke of Cantabria. It is not
improbable that he was in fact an hereditary chief of the
Basques, but no contemporary records exist. His title of"the
Catholic" itself may very well have been the invention
of later chronicles. ALPHONSO II. (789-842), his reputed
grandson, bears the name of "the Chaste." The Arab writers
who speak of the Spanish kings of the north-west as the
Beni-Altons, appear to recognize them as a royal stock derived
from Alphonso I. The events of his reign are in reality
unknown. Poets of a later generation invented the story
of the secret marriage of his sister Ximena with Sancho,
count of Saldana, and the feats of their son Bernardo del
Carpio. Bernardo is the hero of a cantar de gesta (chanson de
geste) written to please the anarchical spirit of the nobles.

The first faint glimmerings of medieval Spanish history begin
with ALPHONSO III. (866--914) surnamed "the Great." Of him
also nothing is really known except the bare facts of his reign
and of his comparative success in consolidating the kingdom
known as "of Galicia" or "of Oviedo" during the weakness
of the Omayyad princes of Cordova. ALPHONSO IV. (924-931)
has a faint personality. He resigned the crown to his brother
Ramiro and went into a religious house. A certain instability
of character is revealed by the fact that he took up arms
against Ramiro, having repented of his renunciation of the
world. He was defeated, blinded and sent back to die in the
cloister of Sahagun. It fell to ALPHONSO V. (999-1028)
to begin the work of reorganizing the Christian kingdom of
the north-west after a most disastrous period of civil war
and Arab inroads. Enough is known of him to justify the
belief that he had some of the qualities of a soldier and a
statesman. His name, and that of his wife Geloria (Elvira),
are associated with the grant of the first franchises of
Leon. He was killed by an arrow while besieging the town
of Viseu in northern Portugal, then held by the Mahommedans.
(For all these kings see the article SPAIN: History.)

With ALPHONSO VI. (1065-1109) we come to a sovereign of
strong personal character. Much romance has gathered round his
name. In the cantar de gesta of the Cid he plays the part
attributed by medieval poets to the greatest kings, to Charlemagne
himself. He is alternately the oppressor and the victim of
heroic and self-willed nobles--the idealized types of the patrons
for whom the jongleurs and troubadours sang. (For the events of
his reign see the article SPAIN: History.) He is the hero
of a cantar de gesta which, like all but a very few of the
early Spanish songs, like the cantar of Bernardo del Carpio
and the Infantes of Lara, exists now only in the fragments
incorporated in the chronicle of Alphonso the Wise or in ballad
form. His flight from the monastery of Sahagnn, where his
brother Sancho endeavoured to imprison him. his chivalrous
friendship for his host Almamun of Toledo, caballero aunique
moni, a gentleman although a Moor, the passionate loyalty of
his vassal Peranzules and his brotherly love for his sister
Urraca of Zamora, may owe something to the poet who took him for
hero. They are the answer to the poet of the nobles who
represented the king as having submitted to take a degrading
oath at the hands of Ruy Diaz of Bivar (the Cid), in the church
of Santa Gadea at Burgos, and as having then persecuted the
brave nian who defied him. When every allowance is made,
Alphonso Vl. stands out as a strong man fighting for his
own hand, which in his case was the hand of the king whose
interest was law and order and who was the leader of the
nation in the reconquest On the Arabs he impressed himself
as an enemy very fierce and astute, but as a keeper of his
word. A story of Mahommedan origin, which is probably no
more historical than the oath of Santa Gadea, tells of how
he allowed himself to be tricked by Ibn Ammar, the favourite
of Al Motamid, the king of Seville. They played chess for
an extremely beautiful table and set of men, belonging to Ibn
Ammar. Table and men were to go to the king if he won.
If Ibn Ammar gained he was to name the stake. The latter
did win and demanded that the Christian king should spare
Seville. Alphonso kept his word. Whatever truth may lie
behind the romantic tales of Christian and Mahommedan, we know
that Alphonso represented in a remarkable way the two great
influences then shaping the character and civilization of
Spain. At the instigation, it is said, of his second
wife. Constance of Burgundy, he brought the Cistercians
into Spain, established them in Sahagun, chose a French
Cistercian, Bernard, as the first archbishop of Toledo after
the reconquest in 1085, married his daughters, legitimate and
illegitimate, to French princes, and in every way forwarded
the spread of French influence--then the greatest civilizing
force in Europe. He also drew Spain nearer to the papacy,
and it was his decision which established the Roman ritual
in place of the old missal of Saint Isidore--the so-called
Mozarabic. On the other hand he was very open to Arabic
influence. He protected the Mahommedans among his subjects and
struck coins with inscriptions in Arabic letters. After the
death of Constance he perhaps married and he certainly lived
with Zaida, said to have been a daughter of "Benabet" (Al
Alotamid), Mahommedan king of Seville. Zaida, who became a
Christian under the name of Maria or Isabel, bore him the only
son among his many children, Sancho, whom Alphonso designed
to be his successor, but who was slain at the battle of
Ucles in 1108. Women play a great part in Alphonso's life.

[ALPHOASO I., king of Aragon, "the Battler," who married
Urraca, daughter of Alphonso VI. (1104-1134), is sometimes
counted the VIIth in the line of the kings of Leon and
Castile. A passionate fighting-man (he fought twenty-nine
battles against Christian or Moor), he was married to Urraca,
widow of Raymond of Burgundy, a very dissolute and passionate
woman. The marriage had been arranged by Alphonso VI. in
1106 to unite the two chief Christian states against the
Almoravides, and to supply them with a capable military
leader. But Urraca was tenacious of her right as proprietary
queen and had not learnt chastity in the polygamous household
of her father. Husband and wife quarrelled with the brutality
of the age and came to open war. Alphonso had the support
of one section of the nobles who found their account in the
confusion. Being a much better soldier than any of his
opponents he gained victories at Sepalveda and Fuente de
la Culebra, but his only trustworthy supporters were his
Aragonese, who were not numerous enough to keep down Castile and
Leon. The marriage of Alphonso and Urraca was declared null
by the pope, as they were third cousins. The king quarrelled
with the church, and particularly the Cistercians, almost
as violently as with his wife. As he beat her, so he drove
Archbishop Bernard into exile and expelled the monks of
Sahagun. He was finally compelled to give way in Castile
and Leon to his stepson Alphonso, son of Urraca and her first
husband. The intervention of Pope Calixtus II. brought
about an arrangement between the old man and the young.
Alphonso the Battler won his great successes in the middle
Ebro, where he expelled the Moors from Saragossa; in the
great raid of 1125, when he carried away a large part of the
subject Christians from Granada, and in the south-west of
France, where he had rights as king of Navarre. Three years
before his death he made a will leaving his kingdom to the
Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Knights of the Sepulchre,
which his subjects refused to carry out. He was a fierce,
violent man, a soldier and nothing else, whose piety was wholly
militant. Though he died in 1134 after an unsuccessful battle
with the Moors at Braga, he has a great place in the reconquest.]

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Initial text from 1911 encyclopedia -- Please update as needed

ALPHONSO I. (Affonso Henriques), son of Henry of Burgundy, count of Portugal, and Teresa of Castile, was born at Guimaraes in 1094. He succeeded his father in 1112, and was placed under the tutelage of his mother. When he came of age, he was obliged to wrest from her by force that power which her vices and incapacity had rendered disastrous to the state. Being proclaimed sole ruler of Portugal in 1123, he defeated his mother's troops near Guimaraes, making her at the same time his prisoner. He also vanquished Alphonso Raymond of Castile, his mother's ally, and thus freed Portugal from dependence on the crown of Leon. Next turning his arms against the Moors, he obtained, on the 26th July 1139, the famous victory of Ourique, and immediately after was proclaimed king by his soldiers. He assembled the Cortes of the kingdom at Lamego, where he received the crown from the archbishop of Braganza; the assembly also declaring that Portugal was no longer a dependency of Leon. Alphonso continued to distinguish himself by his exploits against the Moors, from whom he wrested Santarem in 1146 and Lisbon in 1147. Some years later he became involved in a war that had broken out among the kings of Spain; and in 1167, being disabled during an engagement near Badajoz by a fall from his horse, he was made prisoner by the soldiers of the king of Leon, and was obliged to surrender as his r:asom almost all the conquests he had made in Galicia. In 1184, in spite of his great age, he had still sufficient energy to relieve his son Sancho, who was besieged in Santarem by the Moors. He died shortly after, in 1185. Alphonso was a man of gigantic stature, being 7 ft. high according to some authors. He is revered as a saint by the Portuguese, both on account of his personal character and as the founder of their kingdom.

Initial text from 1911 encyclopedia -- Please update as needed