ALPHONSO 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.]
Initial text from 1911 encyclopedia -- Please update as needed