On the right bank of the river Noguera, which takes rise in the Pic de la Maladetta, the loftiest summit of the Pyrenees, and flows southward along the frontier between the districts now known as Catalonia and Aragon, to mingle its waters with the Segre, had lain from time immemorial the county of Ribagorza. The owners of this land, men of strong arm and devout faith, strove with all their might to check the warlike enterprise of the Moslem, who possessed a sure centre and stronghold in the governorship of Saragossa.
Their family possessions were broken up by repeated partitions, but various members of the ancient stock were scattered over the whole country north of the Ebro and formed fresh alliances and made fresh acquisitions by marriage and inheritance. Thus the line of the counts of Aragon, who ruled the town of Jaca and the province of Sobrarbe, early entered into matrimonial alliances with the family of the counts of Ribagorza. The royal house of Navarre was also connected by marriage with both families, and, on the extinction of the male line in both at the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh, King Sancho, who was in a position to enforce the claims of kinship with the sword, took possession of Aragon, Sobrarbe, and Ribagorza, and on his death bequeathed the province of Aragon, as has already been stated, to his natural son Ramiro (1035).
The latter assumed the title of “king of Aragon,” and endeavoured by fraud and force to gain a fitting extension to the territory of his kingdom. An attempt which he made to wrest Navarre from his elder brother Garcia was frustrated, but, on the other hand, after Gonsalo, the other brother, had been assassinated, he succeeded in gaining possession of his territories of Sobrarbe and Ribagorza, whether by popular election or otherwise cannot be certain. Ramiro also took the field against the Saracens, but the power and personal abilities of the emirs of Saragossa (Mundhir ben Yahya and the Banu Hud) prevented him from gaining any brilliant successes. At the same time he continued to give proof of his piety by founding abbeys and giving gifts to the church in the spirit of the counts before him. The abbey of San Juan de la Peña was the most favoured sanctuary of all, and was richly endowed with lands and revenues, privileges and liberties by the king and the nobles of Aragon. The donation which the king had sent to Pope Alexander II when he introduced the Roman liturgy into Aragon was declared by Gregory VII to be a tribute due to the apostolic see.
Ramiro fell in battle against the Saracens at the siege of Grados (1063), and his son Sancho Ramirez, a young prince full of energy, courage, and adventurous spirit, ascended the throne. He promptly turned his arms against the Moors. Having first wrested from them all the possessions they held in the mountainous districts of Aragon, Sobrarbe, and Ribagorza, he came down upon the fertile plains watered by the Cinca, Gallego, and other tributaries of the Ebro, and after a fierce engagement in which his ally, Count Ermengol of Urgel, lost his life (1065), took the important city of Barbastro which, though lost again a short time after, finally passed into the power of the Aragonese, and provided them with a favourably situated base for subsequent conquests. Soon afterwards King Sancho III of Navarre, the son of Garcia, was murdered at Peñalen by a band of conspirators headed by his ambitious brother Raymond and his sister Ermesenda (1076). As his children were not of age and the Navarrese refused to acknowledge the fratricide as their sovereign, the two kings Alfonso VI of Castile and Sancho Ramirez of Aragon marched into the neighbour kingdom, put Raymond to flight and divided the country between them; the country as far as the Ebro being united to Aragon, and Rioja, with Najera and Calahorra and the Basque provinces of Alava, Guipuzcoa, and Biscay falling to the share of Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon.
[1076-1109 A.D.]
Sancho then undertook a war of revenge against the emir Ahmed Muktadir of Saragossa, who had given shelter to the fugitive regicide Raymond. Having first seized some favourably situated places on the Ebro he advanced upon the city of Huesca, which, with the surrounding district, lay like a broad wedge driven into Aragonese territory, fortified with many strongholds and severing the north of his dominions from the south. In a war which lasted for several years and which was marked with every accompaniment of horror, the brave king succeeded in subjugating a large part of this district and making a safe road to the very walls of Huesca by a succession of skilfully planned fortifications. But he was not destined to witness the fall of the city; he received his death-wound in the siege from the enemy’s arrows (1094). His valiant son Pedro carried on with vigour and energy the work which his father had begun and urgently enjoined on him with his dying breath.
The Moslems strained every nerve to save the bulwark of their dominion in northern Spain. The emir Ahmed Mostain led a great confederate army, which numbered not only Almoravids but Christian auxiliaries in its ranks, into the field against Aragon. But Pedro’s victory at Alcoraz decided the fate of Huesca. In the very year (1096) in which western Christendom was making ready to drive the infidels out of Jerusalem, Huesca and all the country north of the Ebro fell into the hands of the Christians of Spain. Henceforward the fall of Saragossa could only be a question of time, a question which would have been decided earlier than it was if a civil war had not broken out between Alfonso I of Aragon (Alfonso VII of Leon) who succeeded Pedro in 1104, and his wife Queen Urraca of Castile.[o]
Before taking up the story of the war of Urraca and Alfonso, we may consider the exploits of the most famous warrior in Spanish history, the Cid, whose fame was so overgrown with romance that it became the fashion to deny that such a man ever existed in reality. But the critical historian who has robbed us of so many traditions has restored to us the Cid. His deeds are so typical of the period that they may claim some liberality of space, for in the words of H. E. Watts,[r] “The history of mediæval Spain without the Cid would be something more barren than the Iliad without Achilles.”[a]
BURKE’S ESTIMATE OF THE CID
[ca. 1050-1099 A.D.]