Leonor of England, Plantagenet queen of King Alfonso VIII of Castile, and her foundation of the...

Journal of Medieval History 31 (2005) 346e368www.elsevier.com/locate/jmedhist

Leonor of England, Plantagenet queen of King AlfonsoVIII of Castile, and her foundation of the Cistercianabbey of Las Huelgas. In imitation of Fontevraud?

Rose Walker

Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, The Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Abstract

In 1187 Alfonso VIII of Castile and his queen, Leonor of England, founded a Cistercian nunnery, Santa Ma-ria Regalis de Las Huelgas, on the outskirts of Burgos. Despite the clear allegiance of the foundation to the Cis-tercians from the outset, the idea that the abbey was inspired by and even modelled on the nunnery of Fontevraudin Anjou is an encroaching commonplace in accounts of medieval Spanish history and art history around 1200.This study re-evaluates the arguments for that perception and puts forward a different reading of the early yearsof Las Huelgas, not as a foreign importation but as a peculiarly Iberian, even Castilian, institution.� 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Las Huelgas; Fontevraud; Leonor of England; Alfonso VIII; Cistercian; Castile

Eleanor of Aquitaine’s fondness for the nunnery of Fontevraud, and its effigy tombs that com-memorate her, her husband King Henry II, her daughter Joan, and her son King Richard I havecaught the imagination of both historians and writers of fiction. So it is perhaps not surprisingthat Fontevraud frequently comes to mind when historians turn to the less well-known nunneryof Santa Maria Regalis de Las Huelgas.1 For Las Huelgas was founded by Eleanor of Aquitaine’s

E-mail address: [email protected] For example, Miriam Shadis, ‘Piety, politics and power: the patronage of Leonor of England and her daughters Be-

renguela and Blanche of Castile’ in: The cultural patronage of medieval women, ed. J.H. McCash (Athens, GA 1996),

203, and Henrik Karge, ‘Die konigliche Zisterzienserinnenabtei Las Huelgas de Burgos und die Anfange der gotischen

Architektur in Spanien’, in: Gotische Architektur in Spanien. Akten des Kolloquiums der Carl Justi-Vereinigung und des

Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars der Universitat Gottingen, Gottingen, 4-6 Februar 1994, ed. Christian Freigang (Ver-

vuert, 1999), 16-17. See also Gabor Klaniczay, Holy princesses. Dynastic cults in medieval central Europe (Cambridge,

2002), 235.

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347R. Walker / Journal of Medieval History 31 (2005) 346e368

daughter, and namesake, Queen Leonor, and King Alfonso VIII of Castile on the outskirts of Burgosin northern Castile in 1187. Such an association is supported by the widespread assumption that anyimportant Iberian monument must depend on a French model. Moreover superficially there are sev-eral similarities between Fontevraud and Las Huelgas, which come together to form three broad ar-guments in favour of Las Huelgas’s imitation of the earlier nunnery. First, Leonor of England’sfoundation of Las Huelgas is seen as deliberately imitating her mother’s patronage of Fontevraudin fulfilment of her duty as a royal bride. Secondly both Fontevraud and Las Huelgas were femalehouses dedicated to the Virgin,2 where the abbess apparently wielded exceptional powers.3 Thirdly,both are regularly described as royal pantheons or dynastic burial churches.4 These points are allconnected, and the combination of the three makes a powerful set of parallels. However, all areopen to question, and this study will argue that there are other plausible and more likely modelsfor Las Huelgas.

Those who work on the dissemination of culture by royal and noble women have oftenseen Leonor’s marriage to Alfonso VIII of Castile as pivotal for cultural exchange betweentwelfth-century Castile and the Angevin empire. The marriage has become part of the nowsubstantial literature on international royal brides and their possible effect on the art andsociety of the host country.5 However, doubts have been cast on the role of the internationalroyal wife as a lynch-pin in cultural exchange,6 and the role and influence of a youngqueen on a foreign realm can be viewed as a ‘cultural symptom’ instead of a ‘drivingforce’. Evidence for this kind of cultural transmission is certainly hard to come by, andthe case of Leonor and Castile is no exception in this respect. The mechanisms usually pro-posed for this kind of cultural propagation include the bride’s education and the personneland dowry gifts that accompanied her to her new position. The first argument in favour of

2 As claimed, for example, by Fernando Chueca, Casas reales en monasterios y conventos espanoles (Madrid, 1988),

111, and by Shadis, ‘Piety, politics’, 204-5.3 Shadis, ‘Piety, politics’, 205. See also Julio Gonzalez Gonzalez, El reino de Castilla en la epoca de Alfonso VIII, vol.

1 Estudio (Madrid, 1960), 533. See Luis Martınez-Garcıa, El Hospital del Rey de Burgos. Un senorıo medieval en laexpansion y en la crisis (siglos XIII y XIV) (Burgos, 1986), 57-8 and Sally Thompson, ‘The problem of the Cistercian

nuns in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries’ in: Medieval women, ed. Derek Baker (Studies in Church History,

Subsidia 1, Oxford 1978), 237-8, n.69.4 Shadis, ‘Piety, politics’, 204. James d’Emilio, ‘The royal convent of Las Huelgas: dynastic politics, religious reform

and artistic change in medieval Castile’, forthcoming, in: Studies in Cistercian art and architecture. I am very grateful to

James d’Emilio for sending me an advance copy of this article. Thompson, ‘The problem of the Cistercian nuns’, 237,

n.69; Javier Perez-Embid Wamba, ‘El Cister femenino en Castilla y Leon. Fundacion y organizacion de las communi-

dades monasticas (s.XII-XIII)’ in: Actas das II Luso-Espanholas de historia medieval (Porto, 1989), vol. 3, 1087-88;

Theresa M. Vann, ‘The theory and practice of medieval Castilian queenship’, in: Queens, regents and potentates, ed.

Theresa M. Vann (Dallas, 1993), 125-47, esp. 135-36; Shadis, ‘Piety, politics’, 203-5; Dulce Ocon Alonso, ‘El papel

artıstico de las reinas hispanicas en la segunda mitad del siglo XII: Leonor de Castilla y Sancha de Aragon’, in: VIIjornadas de arte: la mujer en el arte espanol (Madrid, 1997), 28-9. Elizabeth M. Hallam, ‘Royal burial and the cult

of kingship in France and England, 1060-1330’, Journal of Medieval History, 8 (1982), 371. Rose Walker, ‘Images

of royal and aristocratic burial in northern Spain, c.950-c.1250’, in: Medieval memories. Men, women and the past,

700-1300, ed. Elisabeth van Houts (Harlow, 2001), 150-7, esp. 159-60.5 For example, Susan Groag Bell, ‘Medieval women book owners: arbiters of lay piety and ambassadors of culture’,

in: Women and power in the middle ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens GA, 1988), especially

149-50, 167-8, and 173, and John Carmi Parsons, ‘Of queens, courts, and books: reflections on the literary patronage

of thirteenth-century Plantagenet queens’, in: The cultural patronage of medieval women, ed. June Hall McCash (Athens

GA and London, 1996), 175-201.6 H. Westermann-Angerhausen, ‘Did Theophanu leave her mark on the Ottonian sumptuary arts?’, in The Empress

Theophano. Byzantium and the West at the turn of the first millennium, ed. Adelbert Davids (Cambridge, Great Britain,

New York, NY, 1995), 244-68.

348 R. Walker / Journal of Medieval History 31 (2005) 346e368

Fontevraud sees a link between the patronage of the two Plantagenet ‘Eleanors’, and ispredicated on the belief that Leonor had thorough knowledge of Fontevraud because shespent part of her childhood there with her brother John and sister Joan.7

We know that Leonor was born at Domfront in Normandy in 1161 and that she was taken tovisit England in 1163. In 1166 she was at Angers with her parents for Christmas, but we knownothing more about Leonor until her betrothal in 1170. An early thirteenth-century sourceclaims that Leonor’s brother, the future King John, was educated at Fontevraud, but there isno supporting evidence and no mention of his sister, and as John was only three years old atthe time of Leonor’s marriage in 1170 it is unlikely that they were educated together. IndeedJohn may have still been in the care of his mother in that year.8 On the occasion of the marriageAlfonso VIII and Leonor had promised to establish a census (annual render) of one hundredgold coins for Fontevraud,9 and it has been suggested that this was a reward for the nuns foreducating Leonor.10 But it is difficult to translate this into a close and important relationshipbetween Leonor and Fontevraud, as she and Alfonso did not carry out the promise until 30June 1190, after the death, and burial at Fontevraud, of her father Henry II.11 The wordingof the 1190 charter makes much of the importance of fulfilling an earlier promise, but itdoes not emphasise Leonor’s role in the pledge nor are there any words of gratitude to matchthose found in some of Alfonso and Leonor’s other charters that clearly were gifts to peoplewho had rendered them good service. The spur for the gift to Fontevraud was plainly thewish to establish Alfonso VIII and Leonor’s role in the commemoration of Henry II, althoughthe opportunity to request prayers for themselves and their heir Fernando was not missed. Thismotivation fits with what little we know of the contact between Leonor and her family after hermarriage. There is evidence for diplomatic contact between Castile and England, and even forHenry II sending gifts to his daughter. In contrast, there is no evidence for any contact betweenLeonor and Eleanor of Aquitaine until c.1200, and no other recorded communication of anykind between Leonor and Fontevraud.12

There is a record of the secular and ecclesiastical figures who escorted Leonor to her mar-riage through Aquitaine and across the Pyrenees.13 The party included the archbishop of Bor-deaux, as the Plantagenet and Castilian parties met in the Bordelais, and the bishops of Poitiers,Angouleme, Saintes, Perigueux, Dax, and Bazas: the ecclesiastical power of Aquitaine. Thesecular lords included Ralph de Faye, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s uncle, who held the position ofseneschal in Aquitaine, and Elias, count of Perigord. The other listed nobles were all fromAquitaine, for example Fulk of Angouleme and the viscomte of Tartas, although there mayhave been some minor nobles from Normandy and Brittany. The composition of this escort tellsus that Leonor travelled through Aquitaine on her way to Castile, which is hardly surprising,but it tells us very little more. It would be consistent with a journey that began at Fontevraudor elsewhere in Anjou or Normandy. One, much later, chronicle even suggests that Leonor was

7 Promulgated, for example, by Amy Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the four kings (London, 1952), 328.8 Jane Martindale, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine’, in: Richard Coeur de Lion in history and myth, ed. Janet L. Nelson

(London, 1992), 46.9 Gonzalez, El reino, vol. 2, no.551.

10 Jean-Marc Bienvenu, ‘Alienor d’Aquitaine et Fontevraud’, Cahiers de civilisation medievale, 29 (1986), 20, n.36.11 Gonzalez, El reino, vol. 2, no.551.12 Regine Pernoud, Alienor d’Aquitaine (Paris, 1965), 107. Vann, ‘The theory and practice’, 131.13 Gonzalez, El reino, vol. 1, 187-93, and Jeronimo Zurita, Los anales de la corona de Aragon. [A.D. 709-1492.] His-

toria del rey D. Fernando el catolico; de las empresas y ligas de Italia, ed. Angel Canellas Lopez (Zaragoza, 1967),

vol.1, book. II 28.


collected from England and began the journey by sea.14 Leonor’s dowry gifts give us no furtherclues, as we have no description of them and can only speculate that they would have equalledthose of her younger sister Joan, who went to Sicily in 1177 to marry William II and was sentoff with presents of gold, silver and horses.15

We know nothing about the members of Leonor’s first court, although some female membersof her escort probably stayed with her. These may have included a dona Juliana, to whom Al-fonso VIII gave Medinilla in 1179.16 There has also been a suggestion that her court may haveeven included Maurice, the future bishop of Burgos, who was to rebuild the cathedral, anda master Richard who was granted land in 1203 for the ‘praiseworthy work that he had shownin the construction of Las Huelgas’.17 But there is no evidence to support these conjectures, andit is more likely that Maurice had Iberian parents, while Richard’s origins and date of arrival inBurgos are just unknown. Leonor’s own officials were clearly Iberian, for example her mayor-domos from the 1170s to the 1200s came mainly from one family, beginning with Martın Gon-zalez de Contrereas, whose widow, Marıa Gutierrez, became the second abbess of Las Huelgas.Martın was followed by his two sons Garcıa Martinez and Rodrigo Martinez.18 Indeed all butone of the names associated with the Queen, from chaplains to the nurses of her children, areIberian.19 The exception comes from an entry in the Norman Pipe Rolls, which says that in1198 King Richard gave the mills of Domfront and the domain of La Fontaine Ozert ‘to a cer-tain Andrew of Domfront for serving the Queen of Spain, the daughter of Queen Eleanor’.20

Unfortunately we know nothing about the nature of this service or the length of it, and thereis no record of Andrew of Domfront in the Castilian chancery. The surviving evidence thus sug-gests that Leonor became quickly absorbed into the society of her adopted country, and whatlinks she retained with her origins were connected with her father and her place of birth in Nor-mandy. There is nothing to support the idea that Leonor had any sentimental attachment toFontevraud.

Appeals to a supposed broader pattern of female Plantagenet patronage might have helped tosubstantiate Las Huelgas’s imitation of Fontevraud, but there is very little documented evidencefor the patronage of Eleanor of Aquitaine or of Leonor of England. Eleanor has been lauded forher putative support for troubadours, but not widely celebrated for her gifts to the Church, andshe was not responsible for any new foundation.21 If we set aside the more romantic ideas abouther ‘Court of Love’ and some minor gifts, we are left with only her patronage of Fontevraud inold age. For most of her gifts to that house - a new wall of enclosure, a gold processional crosswith precious stones, as well as gold and silver vessels and silks for the church - were madeafter 1185/86.22 Through these gifts Eleanor was continuing the tradition of her ancestors

14 Gonzalez, El reino, vol. 1, 188.15 For Joan’s gifts see Edmond-Rene Labande, ‘Les filles d’Alienor d’Aquitaine: etude comparative’, Cahiers de civ-

ilisation medievale, 29 (1986), 108.16 Luciano Serrano, El obispado de Burgos y Castilla primitiva desde el siglo V al XIII (Madrid, 1935), 258 no.159.17 Jose Manuel Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion del monasterio de las Huelgas de Burgos (1116-1230) (Fuentes me-

dievales castellano-leonesas 30, Burgos, 1985), 122-3, no.73: pro laudabili obsequio quod in constructione burgensis

monasterii nostri Sancte Marie Regalis nobis exibuistis.18 Gonzalez, El reino, vol. 1, 253-6. Serrano, El Obispado, 341, no.220.19 Gonzalez, El reino, vol. 1, 256.20 Thomas Stapleton, Magni rotuli scaccarii normanniae sub regibus anglicae (London, 1844), vol. 2. I should like to

thank Dr Lindy Grant for drawing my attention to this reference.21 See Eleonor of Aquitaine: patron and politician, ed. William W. Kibler (Austin, Texas, 1976), which, despite its title,

identifies almost no evidence for direct patronage by Eleanor.22 Bienvenu, ‘Alienor d’Aquitaine’, 21-22, 26, and n.96 and 98.


and their patronage of Fontevraud, which included an important gift of revenues from her fa-ther, William X, duke of Aquitaine.23 But Fontevraud was not the exclusive preserve of thedukes of Aquitaine, indeed it fell not only within the diocese of Poitiers, but also in the countyof Anjou, and from its earliest days had attracted the patronage of Henry II’s Angevin ances-tors. Henry himself and his son Richard continued this tradition, perhaps even more keenly thanthe Poitevin dynasty, for Richard’s aunt Mathilda was abbess from 1149-55.24 Since Fontevraudwas the site where the interests of Aquitaine, in the person of Eleanor, and those of the Ange-vins coalesced, Eleanor’s patronage of it after the death of Henry II constituted both theadoption of a strategic position and a statement of a complex network of patrimonialrelationships.25

The foundation of Las Huelgas is the sole act of patronage attributed to Leonor. Her nameappears alongside that of her husband, Alfonso VIII, in his charters in the Iberian way; there areno acts of patronage in Leonor’s name alone and no work of art is associated with her name. Itis Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada in his chronicle De Rebus Hispaniae, commissioned by FernandoIII, Leonor’s grandson, and completed around 1243, who states that the monastery was built ‘atthe earnest supplication of his [Alfonso’s] most serene wife Queen Leonor’.26 Rodrigo becamea close advisor of the Castilian royal family, and he fought alongside Alfonso VIII at Las Navasde Tolosa. He was also to become Archbishop of Toledo. His uncle was Martın of Finojosa, theCistercian abbot of Santa Maria de Huerta and later Bishop of Siguenza, who had helped toestablish Las Huelgas. So one could argue that Rodrigo was in a good position to know aboutLeonor’s contribution. One might equally well argue that Rodrigo had good reasons to inventthat contribution. He was writing some sixty years after the foundation and he came froma younger generation, as he was born in 1170 some ten or more years after the marriage ofthe Castilian monarchs. Furthermore he was Navarrese and he was educated outside Iberia,probably in Bologna and Paris, and came to the Castilian court only in 1207 long after the foun-dation of Las Huelgas.27 Most significant of all, as Peter Linehan has pointed out, Rodrigoshowed that he was prejudiced against Las Huelgas, quite reasonably so, as Alfonso VIII clearlyneglected Toledo in favour of Las Huelgas and of Burgos, the principal city of Castile.28 Al-though Rodrigo mentions the foundation, he fails to inform his readers that in 1204 AlfonsoVIII confirmed his important decision to be buried at Las Huelgas.29 With this Alfonso brokethe pattern established by his father and grandfather who lay in Rodrigo’s cathedral at Toledo.

The original foundation charter describes Las Huelgas as a joint royal foundation from theoutset, but the King was clearly in the lead, and the charter is not signed or witnessed by Leo-nor. The other main chronicler of the period, who wrote his Chronicon mundi at the same timeas Rodrigo was producing his De Rebus Hispaniae, confirms this conclusion. Before becomingBishop of Tuy in 1239, Lucas was a canon at the monastery of San Isidoro at Leon, where he

23 Martindale, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine’, 20, and Bienvenu, ‘Alienor d’Aquitaine’, 16.24 Bienvenu, ‘Alienor d’Aquitaine’,19, and Bienvenu, ‘Henri II Plantagenet et Fontevraud’, Cahiers de civilisation me-

dievales, 37 (1994), 25-32, and Rene Crozet, ‘Fontevrault’, Congres Archeologique de France, no. 122 (Anjou, 1964),

431.25 Bienvenu, ‘Alienor d’Aquitaine’, 21.26 Rodericus Ximenii de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie siue Historia Gothica, ed. J. Fernandez Valverde (Corpus

christianorum continuatio medievalis 72, Turnhout, 1987), ch. VII, xxxiii: ad instanciam serenissime uxoris sue Alienor

regina.27 Rodericus Ximenii de Rada, De Rebus Hispanie, IX.28 Peter Linehan, History and the historians of medieval Spain (Oxford, 1993), 289.29 Ibid., 303.


tells us he was commissioned to write the chronicle by Leonor’s daughter Berenguela.30 Beren-guela lived in Leon while she was married to its King from 1197 until 1204, and she returnedthere with her son, Fernando III, in 1230; and it was probably on this second occasion that sheinstructed Lucas to begin work on the chronicle that he most likely completed before he be-came bishop of Tuy. On her return to Burgos, after the annulment of her marriage, Berenguelahad gone on to play an important role at Las Huelgas, so Lucas of Tuy would have had access toprivileged information. Thus it is initially puzzling that he, unlike Rodrigo, clearly assigns thefoundation of Las Huelgas to Alfonso VIII and gives Leonor no role in the process. Indeed he isunequivocal in his praise of Alfonso for his religious building and draws on a standard biblicalallusion to liken the King to Solomon.31

One explanation for Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada’s description is that he was also using a liter-ary device, as it is possible that Rodrigo took his concept of queenly virtue from an anonymouschronicle probably written in the early twelfth century at the monastery of Sahagun. Thischronicle is commonly known as the Historia Silense and it attributed the rebuilding of San Isi-doro at Leon to the persuasive abilities of the eleventh-century Queen Sancha.32 Indeed thisattribution may have developed into a trope by this period, since, as Raymond McCluskeyhas shown, Lucas of Tuy attributed the patronage of the Trinity chapel at San Isidoro ofLeon to Berenguela in 1185, although she did not become Queen of Leon until 1197.33 Thereare, unsurprisingly, reasons for the different approach of each chronicler. Both were writing al-most contemporaneously some sixty years after the events; both had distinct agendas and ma-nipulated their evidence accordingly.34 Lucas of Tuy set out to enhance the standing of SanIsidoro de Leon, where he had been a canon, while Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, as archbishopof Toledo, determinedly built up the historical role of his see and its primacy. To Rodrigothe importance attached to Las Huelgas represented a slight to his primatial see at Toledo.He may, therefore, have wished to minimise Alfonso VIII’s neglect of Toledo and its cathedralin favour of Burgos and Las Huelgas by implicitly blaming the Queen for the decision. Therewas even a Toledan precedent for attributing an inopportune initiative to a Queen and thus ex-culpating her husband. Rodrigo recounts the story in his chronicle: how Alfonso VI’s Queen,Constance of Burgundy, together with Bernard of Sahagun, converted the great mosque of To-ledo into a Christian cathedral and thus contravened the terms of the city’s surrender that Al-fonso VI had so scrupulously agreed.35 Lucas of Tuy, on the other hand, had every reason topromote San Isidoro, the house that had been his home for many years and was favoured byhis patron, Queen Berenguela.

In light of this historiographical impasse, it is worth noting that the anonymous Latin Chron-icle of the Kings of Castile, which may have been composed by Juan, royal chancellor from1217 to 1246 and Bishop of Osma, does not comment on the circumstances of the foundation,

30 Lucas Tudensis, Chronicon mundi, ed. Emma Falque (Corpus christianorum continuatio medievalis 74, Turnhout,

2003), vii-xii, xvii-xxi, and Praefatio 1, 47-51.31 Lucas Tudensis, Chronicon mundi, 324, bk.4, 84, 43-5: Alter nostris temporibus Salomon idem rex.32 Historia Silense ed. Justo Perez de Urbel and Atilano Gonzalez Ruiz-Zorrilla (Madrid, 1959), 197-8, 94: domini

regis colloquium Sancia regina petens, ei in sepulturam regum ecclesiam fieri legione persuadet, uby et eorundem cor-

pora iuste magnificeque humari debeant.33 Raymond McClusky, ‘The genesis of the concordia of Martin of Leon’, in: God and man in medieval Spain, ed.

Derek W. Lomax and David Mackenzie (Warminster, 1989), 26.34 Linehan, History and the historians, ch.12, 385-412.35 Bernard F. Reilly, The kingdom of Leon-Castilla under King Alfonso VI (Princeton, 1988), 182. Linehan, History and

the historians, 220-22.


but it does refer to Las Huelgas as ‘the paternal monastery’, thus implying that it was regardedas the king’s foundation.36 Moreover the foundation of Las Huelgas, and its ascendancy overthe other Iberian female Cistercian houses, not only in Castile but also in Leon and evenmore significantly in Navarre, gave Alfonso VIII additional political muscle in the disputed ter-ritory on the eastern boundary of Castile.37 It may also be significant that it is Alfonso VIII whois shown on his tomb in the church at Las Huelgas founding the monastery, depicted holding thecharter and giving it to the abbess and three nuns, although this tomb probably dates to the sec-ond half of the thirteenth century or early part of the fourteenth.

Lucas of Tuy and Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada both conspire to confuse us about the date of thefoundation, possibly because Rodrigo relied on Lucas for some of his information, and Lucas ofTuy, as we have seen, was not always reliable in his dating.38 Both Lucas of Tuy and RodrigoJimenez de Rada date the foundation of Las Huelgas to the late 1190s. Lucas places it after thepeace with Leon sealed by Berenguela’s marriage to Alfonso IX of Leon in 1197,39 while Ro-drigo concurs that it was after the peace between the kings of Castile, Navarre and Leon andafter the disastrous battle of Alarcos in 1195.40 This implies that the foundation was viewedin some way as a penance for the past hostilities between the Hispanic kingdoms, so thoroughlydisapproved of by the papacy, and for the ensuing defeat at Alarcos. The mythologizing of thesubsequent victory at Las Navas de Tolosa, and the much later reunion of the Leonese and Cas-tilian kingdoms under Fernando III, may well explain this piece of mis-dating. The charter ev-idence that places the foundation of Las Huelgas in 1187 is difficult to set aside, and there isindependent evidence from Cıteaux that corroborates the active existence of the community in1191.

From the investigation so far it has not been possible to identify any link with Fontevraud oreven a specific role for Leonor in the setting-up of Las Huelgas, which seems rather to havebeen an initiative of her husband, Alfonso VIII. However this impression may be counteredwhen we move on to consider the next points in favour of Fontevraud as the inspiration forLas Huelgas.

The second argument claims to identify common features that associate the two houses. Itcontends that Fontevraud served as a model for certain aspects of the structure and organisationof Las Huelgas, which included the power of the abbess and the decision to create a femalehouse. Yet the motives and processes behind the foundations of Fontevraud and Las Huelgas

36 Chronica Hispana Saeculi XIII. Chronica Latina Regvm Castellae, ed. Luis Charlo Brea (Corpus christianorum con-

tinuatio medievalis 73, Turnhout, 1997), 80, para. 37: Regina uero cum episcopis et cum aliis religiosis fecit deferri

corpus fratris sui ad monasterium paternum et ibidem honorofice sepeliuit. Translated in Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The

Latin chronicle of the kings of Castile (Tempe, Arizona, 2002).37 D’Emilio, ‘Royal convent of Las Huelgas’. In his forthcoming article James D’Emilio gives a very helpful broad

summary of the political and military context.38 Linehan, History and the historians, 402, ‘Lucas’s chronic disregard for chronology’.39 Lucas Tudensis, Chronicon mundi, 324, bk. 4, 84, 35-45. Pacificatum est inter reges preditos post multas strages et

dampna, sed iterum eos mota discordia cum venirent ad pacem, dedit rex Adefonsus Legionensis uxori sue regine dom-

ine Berengarie .. Post haec cepit excogitare de salute anime sue et construxit de nouo nobile monasterium sancta

Marie in Olgis Burgensis ciuitatis.40 Rodrigo Ximenii de Rada, De rebus Hispanie, 255, bk. 7, 33: Postea autem inter regem Castelle et regem Nauarre et

regem Legionis treuga per interuallum temporis interuenit; rex enim nobilis Aldefonsus bellum de Alarcuris corde al-

tissimo reponebat. Set ut Altissimo complaceret, prope Burgis ad instanciam serenissime uxoris sue Alienor regine

monasterium dominarum Cisterciensis ordinis hedificauit et nobilissimis fabricis exaltauit et multis redditibus et pos-

sessionibus nocte laudabiliter Deo psallunt, nec inopiam senciant nec deflectum, set structuris, claustro et ecclesia et

ceteris hedificiis regaliter consumatis expertes sollicitudinis in contemplatione et laudibus iugiter delectantur.


were very different. Fontevraud was founded at the end of the eleventh century by Robert ofArbrissel and thus grew out of the eremitical movements of that time. From the beginning itincluded communities of nuns and monks. After Robert’s death, though, it was run by an aris-tocratic abbess who was to have absolute sway over matters spiritual and secular.41 The monkscontinued to provide security and assistance with the practicalities of life, and those who werepriests could offer the sacraments, but despite their large numbers and the responsibilities theycarried for business transactions, the monks were clearly subservient to the nuns. This was whatdistinguished Fontevraud above all from other nunneries: the large number of men integratedinto the community as part of the design of the founder.42 Over time Fontevraud developedinto a rich and powerful institution and headed a small Order of nuns. It held a General Chapterfrom 1149, although it was presided over by the abbot of Premontre.43 The power of the abbesswas considerable, and she was certainly the symbol of central authority, but there are doubtsabout the extent of her control over the rest of the Order. For example the rule says that shehad to approve the election of prioresses, although in practice the prioresses may have had con-siderable independence.44 The abbess was also dependent on episcopal patronage, especiallyfrom the bishops of Angouleme and Poitiers, for the expansion of the Order.45 Thus while Fon-tevraud may have maintained its claim to exemption, even as late as 1244 the bishop of Poitiershad the authority to correct the nunnery, and it was only in 1245 that the archbishop of Reimsupheld the claim.46

Las Huelgas was conceived in a very different age. It was probably planned in the early1180s, although the only written evidence for 1180 itself comes from an eighteenth-centurymanuscript.47 A contemporary document suggests that Las Huelgas was under constructionin 1185,48 and in 1189 the bishop of Castile referred to the abbey’s construction using thepast tense.49 By 1187 it was already occupied by the nuns, and it was at this point that it re-ceived its foundation charter, the original of which is still in the Las Huelgas archive. It statedthat ‘among the other monasteries that have been built to the honour of God and his worship,a monastery built for women dedicated to God earns great merit with God’.50 It is worth notingat this point that the wording used, deo dicatae feminae, is notably archaic. It is found for

41 Penny Schine Gold, The lady and the virgin. Image, attitude, and experience in twelfth-century France (Chicago and

London, 1985), 99: ‘all the affairs of the church, spiritual as well as secular, are to remain in her hands, or to be given to

whomever she assigns, just as she decides.’42 Gold, The lady and the virgin, 93-113, and Michel Parisse, ‘Fontevrault, monastre double’, in: Doppelkloster und

andere Formen der Symbiose mannlicher und weiblicher Religiosen im Mittelalter, ed. Kaspar Elm and Michel Parisse

(Berlin, 1992), 135-48.43 Sally Thompson, Women religious. The founding of English nunneries after the Norman conquest (Oxford, 1991),

119.44 Thompson, Women religious, 120.45 Bruce L. Vernarde, Women’s monasticism and medieval society (Ithaca and London, 1997), 123, and 62-64 for the

sponsorship of bishops who wanted a Fontevrist priory in their diocese.46 C.R. Cheney, Episcopal visitation of monasteries in the thirteenth century (Second revised edition, Manchester,

1983), 40.47 Santiago Sebastian, ‘Sobre Las Huelgas de Burgos’, Archivo Espanol de Arte 31 (1958).48 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 18, no.10: Et hoc in commutatione cuiusdem ecclesie, uidelicet,

Sancte Marie de Villaaluura, quam similiter cum omni iure suo et pertinenciis suis idem episcopus domnus Marinus,

una cum consensu et uoluntate capituli sui, concedit monasterio quod fabricatur nostris largitionibus et sumptibus iuxta

burgensem ciuitatem.49 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 47, no.24: de nouo construxerant.50 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 21, no.11: Inter cetera monasteria que ad honorem Dei et obsequium

edificantur, magnum meritum obtinet apud Deum monasterium Deo dicatis feminis constructum.


example in late Roman and Visigothic documents but, within the confines of what had been theold Visigothic kingdom including Catalonia and the Midi, it was still in use in the twelfth cen-tury.51 Significantly, Lucas of Tuy used similar terminology in his eulogy of King Fernando I ofLeon and Castile, where he evokes the assistance given by him to poor monks, canons, priestsand mulieres Deo dicatae.52

The Las Huelgas charter continues ‘Alfonso, by the grace of God king of Castile and Toledoand his wife Alienor, queen, with the agreement of his daughters Berengaria and Urraca, havebuilt to the honour of God and of his holy mother the Virgin Mary a monastery in the vega ofBurgos, called Santa Maria Regalis, in which the Cistercian rule is to be observed forever’.53

The abbey was then handed over to the first abbess, Dona Misol, and her sisters, and generouslyendowed with estates. The charter does not assign the abbess any exceptional powers, spiritual orsecular, and there is nothing either in the 1188 papal bull from Clement III or in the letter fromWilliam, abbot of Cıteaux, that enhances the role of the abbess.54 It is sometimes suggested thatthe abbess presumed to hear nuns’ confessions, to preach homilies and to bless novices, functionsthat properly belonged to the episcopate or to priests appointed by the bishop. The main evidencefor this is a letter of Pope Innocent III in 1210 to Abbot Guy of Morimond, Bishop Adamo ofPalencia and Bishop Garcia of Burgos that condemns abbesses in the dioceses of Palencia andBurgos for such abuses.55 There is no specific mention of Las Huelgas in the letter, which sug-gests that, if there were lapses, they were widespread and not confined to Las Huelgas.

From its earliest days Las Huelgas was marked out as more than just another Cistercianhouse, but not by any special role played by the male members of the community as at Fontev-raud. Cistercian practices probably first came to Spain in the mid to late twelfth century fromEscaladieu in the Hautes-Pyrenees - itself a Morimond foundation - with the support of AlfonsoVIII’s grandfather, Alfonso VII. By the end of his reign there were fifteen priories in Iberia.56

By the end of the twelfth century Morimond had seventeen daughter houses in Spain and Clair-vaux had nineteen. And Alfonso VIII made several grants to other Cistercian monasteries, andespecially to nunneries, in the early 1180s.57 But Las Huelgas was set up to be directly

51 Montserrat Cabre I Pairet, ‘Deodicatae y deovotae: La regulacion de la religiosidad femenina en los condados cata-

lanes, siglos IX-XI’, in: Imagenes teoricas y cauces de actuacion religiosa, ed. Angela Munoz Fernandez (Madrid,

1989), 171-80 for Catalonia, and Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier, ‘Formes feminines de vie consacree dans les pays du

Midi jusqu’au debut de XIIe siecle’, in: La femme dans la vie religieuse du Languedoc, Cahiers de Fanjeux, 23

(1988), 193-216 for the Midi.52 Lucas Tudensis, Chronicon mundi, 293, bk.4,.57: Ad hec etiam ubicumque monachos, canonicos, clericos uel mu-

lieres Deo dicatas uiuere in paupertate reperiebat, eorum penuire compaciens, aut per se, ut eos consolaretur uenire sue

pecuniam mittere crebro consueuerat.53 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 21, no.11: Idcirco, ego, Aldefonsus, Dei gratia rex Castelle et Toleti,

et uxor mea Alienor, regina, cum consensu filiarum nostrarum Berengarie et Urracce, . construimus ad honorem Dei et

Sancte eius genitricis Uirginis Marie monasterium in la uega de Burgis, quod uocatur Sancta Maria Regalis, in quo cis-

terciensis ordo perpetuo obseruetur.54 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 38-45, no.21 and no.22 (papal bulls), no. 16 (copy of a letter from

William of Cıteaux from the second half of the thirteenth century).55 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 168, no.104, quod abbatisse, videlicet, in Burgensi et Palentina dio-

cesibus constitute moniales proprias benedicunt, ipsarumque confessiones in criminibus audiunt, et legentes evangelium

presumunt publice predicare.56 Bernard F. Reilly, The kingdom of Leon-Castilla under Alfonso VII 1109-1126 (Princeton, 1982), 272. For the arrival

of the Cistercians in Iberia, see Maur Cocheril, ‘L’implantation des abbayes cisterciennes dans la peninsule iberique’,

Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 1 (1964), 217-87. Richard Fletcher, ‘Diplomatic and the Cid revisited: the seals and

mandates of Alfonso VII’, Journal of Medieval History, 2 (1976), 305-38, esp. 315.57 Gonzalez, El reino, 510-40.


dependent upon Cıteaux, and it had the right granted by Cıteaux, to hold an annual GeneralChapter like the Mother House.58 This was to be attended by the heads of all the Cisterciannunneries in Leon and Castile and possibly also by Tulebras in Navarre, who thereby woulddeclare their subservience to Las Huelgas. If we can rely on the late thirteenth-century copyof the letter from William of Cıteaux, all of this was granted in response to letters from AlfonsoVIII and from the abbesses of Leon and Castile, delivered to Cıteaux by Martın de Finojosa.59

The early involvement of Cıteaux is importantly verified by Cıteaux’s records of the 1191 An-nual General Chapter, which say that the king of Castile had written to ask them to force theabbesses to attend the Las Huelgas Chapter.60

The acquiescence of the General Chapter in such an unusual arrangement needs some ex-planation. This may be found in another recorded transaction between Iberia and the Chapter.Alfonso VIII’s father, Sancho III had given the castle of Calatrava to the abbot of the Cister-cian monastery of Fitero in 1158 so that it could be protected from ‘the enemies of the crossof Christ’. In 1187, the same year as the foundation of Las Huelgas, the Order of Calatravawas formally affiliated to the Order of Cıteaux. It is likely that Cıteaux saw that much prestigeand influence were to be gained in papal circles from close association with the battle againstthe infidels in Iberia, especially after the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.61 Perhaps the sta-tus of the new foundation of Las Huelgas was part of the negotiations. The general chapter ofCıteaux certainly valued Martın, who had played the role of ambassador for Alfonso VIII, andin 1194 they promised that a plenary Office for the Dead would be said for him after hisdeath.62 Martın came from the noble family of Finojosa whose lands were in the provinceof Soria, and his parents and grandparents had held positions in the royal house of Leonand Castile under Alfonso VI and Alfonso VII.63 He was abbot of the Cistercian house, SantaMaria de Huerta and then, from 1186, bishop of Siguenza, the capacity in which he played thecrucial role in arranging the formal link between Las Huelgas and Cıteaux. He was rewardedby Alfonso VIII just before the formal foundation of Las Huelgas with the gift of a Jewishslave, and, in 1189, when Alfonso gave the cathedral and chapter of Siguenza the castle ofRiba, Martın was described by the King as his beloved and close friend who had done himgreat service.64

58 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 31, no.16: ut semel in anno, certo die, ad monasterium Sancte Marie

Regalis, in quo Domino deseruitur, liceat eis pariter conuenire, vbi, generale capitulum tamquam in Matre Ecclesia cel-

ebrantes. See also Thompson, ‘The Problem of the Cistercian Nuns’, 237-8.59 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 31, no. 16: Litteras domini regis Castelle cum litteris dominarum

abbatissarum Legionis et Castelle per karissimun patrem nostrum et dominum Martinum, segontinum episcopum, nobis

destinatas.60 Chrysogonus Waddell, Twelfth-century statutes from the Cistercian general chapter, Cıteaux: (Commentarii cister-

cienses, Studia et Documenta, vol. 12, Brecht, 2002), 224, 1191 no.26: Domino Regi Castellae scribatur quod non pos-

sumus cogere Abbatissas ire ad Capitulum de quo scripsit, et si uellent ire, sicut eis iam consuluimus, multum nobis

placeret.61 Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and crusade in medieval Spain (Penn, 2003), 54.62 Waddell, Twelfth-century statutes, 282.63 For Finojosa, see Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, ‘The saint’s capital, talisman in the cloister’ in Decorations for the

holy dead, ed. Stephen Lamia and Elizabeth del Alamo (Turnhout, 2002), 121 and 128 n.80, and Hipolito Gonzalez

Cano, ‘Influencia de San Martın de Huerta en la fundacion y preeminencia del real monasterio de Santa Marıa de

Las Huelgas de Burgos’, Celtiberia, 23 (1962), 77-93, and Marius Ferotin, Histoire de l’abbaye de Silos (Paris,

1897), 91, 346-7.64 Gonzalez, El reino, vol.2, no.471: iudeum quemdam, Medinensem incolam, Habrahem nomine, cum omnibus rebus

mobilibus et inmobilibus, and no.536 venerabilis viri et diserti domini Martini Segontini nunc episcopi dilecti et famil-

iaris amici mei, qui immense mihi cum omni sedulitate et fidelitate exhibuit obsequia.


Las Huelgas is recorded as holding its first annual Chapter in 1189,65 even if two of the mostdistinguished nunneries, the Navarrese house of Tulebras and its daughter house in Palencia,Perales, refused to attend. Even Alfonso VIII’s appeal to Cıteaux had no effect, until Guy, abbotof Cıteaux, visited Castile and forced them to obey ten years later. The only non-Iberian rep-resentative at the Chapter was the abbot of Escaladieu, the house that had already founded maleaffiliate houses in Iberia, including Fitero in Navarre, the original home of the Order ofCalatrava.

The 1188 bull from Pope Clement III emphatically recognised both Alfonso VIII andLeonor as founders of Las Huelgas, confirmed the Cistercian affiliation, and took the mon-astery under papal protection, thus exempting it from episcopal interference.66 There is noindependent confirmation of this papal bull or of the exemption in the Vatican archives,67

but it falls within the Cistercian Order’s general aim to establish exemption for all its mem-bers, and it does not seem to have been challenged by the bishop of Burgos. Innocent III’sletter to Alfonso VIII of 1205 suggests that he would not have granted such an exemption,and he tried to push back the boundaries of what he saw as Alfonso’s infringement of ec-clesiastical liberties.68

Although exemption from episcopal control was not unusual for a Cistercian house by thelast decades of the twelfth century,69 Las Huelgas is the first known instance where the Gen-eral Chapter of Cıteaux was copied and its functions in effect delegated. The female Cister-cian abbey of Tart also held annual Chapters, but this is documented only between 1194 and1200 when Guy was abbot of Cıteaux, so Tart was probably the imitator not the leader.70

There is an Iberian precedent, however, for this kind of association with a major monasticOrder based outside the peninsula. This is the status accorded to the Cluniac monastery ofSS Facundus and Primitivus at Sahagun, the so-called ‘Cluny of Spain’, and its patronageby Alfonso VIII’s ancestor Alfonso VI, king of Leon and Castile.71 Sahagun had been atthe centre of liturgical reform in Spain at the end of the eleventh century, and it was alsoan important political location, with several treaties to its name, and a focus of patronagefor both the Castilian and Leonese monarchies.72 But at the end of the twelfth century Spainno longer looked to Cluny as the embodiment of orthodoxy and reforming monasticism. Al-though Alfonso VIII and his family continued as patrons of Sahagun and in 1178, for

65 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 46-48, no.24 and 48-51, no.25.66 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 38-41, no.21: monasterium Sancte Marie, prope ciuitatem burgensen,

a karissimo in Christo filio nostro, A[ldefonso], illustri rege Castelle, et A[lienore], regina, uxore eius, pia deuotione

constructum atque dotatum. and Quod si qui episcopi propter hoc in personas uestras uel monasterium ipsum sententiam

aliquam promulgauerint, eandem sententiam tamquam contra Apostolice Sedis indulta prolatam decernimus irritandam.67 C.H. Lawrence, Medieval monasticism, 136. ‘Forged papal letters were freely used to vindicate claims to exemption,

and in the absence of any scientific documentary criticism, they often carried the day.’68 Demetrio Mansilla Reoyo, La documentacion pontificia hasta Inocencio III 965-1216 (Rome, 1955), 344-5, no.312:

quod regia celsitudo illis se gravem exhibet et severam.69 Louis J. Lekai, The Cistercians, ideal and reality (Kent, 1989), 16-17.70 Thompson, ‘The problem of the Cistercian nuns’, 238 and Elizabeth Connor, ‘The abbeys of Las Huelgas and Tart

and their filiations’, in: Hidden springs: Cistercian monastic women, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank

(Kalamazoo 1995), 42-5.71 Rose Walker, Views of transition. Liturgy and illumination in medieval Spain (London and Toronto, 1998), 35-6.72 Sancho III had signed the Treaty of Sahagun in 1158 with his brother Fernando II of Leon. Alfonso VIII would

himself meet with his uncle, Fernando, at Sahagun in 1164 to conclude another agreement, and again with the king

of Aragon, in 1170 just before his marriage to Leonor.


example, he confirmed the donation of his great-aunt Elvira,73 for new foundations he lookedalmost exclusively to the Cistercians.

One indication that Alfonso VIII may have seen a resemblance between his ancestors’ rela-tionship with Cluny and his own with Cıteaux is the gift of an annual census. Apart from thesmall commemorative gift to Fontevraud in 1190, Cıteaux was the only non-Iberian recipient ofAlfonso VIII’s largesse. In 1090 Alfonso VI had renewed and doubled his father, Fernando I’sannual census of 1,000 gold dinars to Cluny, and, although it had fallen into abeyance duringthe reign of his daughter Urraca, Alfonso VII had restored the bond when he invited Peter theVenerable to visit Iberia in 1142. At that point the Castilian abbey of San Pedro de Arlanza wasgranted to Cluny, but the annual sum was reduced to 200 gold dinars.74 In 1203 Alfonso VIIIadded an annual census of 300 gold pieces to the 2500 gold dinars that he had already givenCıteaux for the building of the domus conversorum.75 Other aspects of Sahagun resonatewith Las Huelgas, as we shall see, for Sahagun also incorporated not only a royal palace,but also a royal mausoleum, where Alfonso VI was buried - despite having died at Toledo -together with four of his successive wives. So Alfonso VIII could well have had Sahagun’shistory in mind when he created a very special kind of Cistercian royal house for Castile.However, Sahagun was a house of monks and so in that very important and particular way itcould not have been the model for Las Huelgas. Was the decision to make Las Huelgas afemale house inspired by Fontevraud?76

A prestigious royal female foundation was not a mainstream choice for a European monarchat this period. In the early middle ages female foundations had been major dynastic institutionsin much of Latin Europe; the Merovingians, followed by the Carolingians, the Lombards andthe Ottonians had all supported royal nunneries presided over by their female relatives, and oneof their primary functions had been intercession for living and dead members of the family.77

The popularity of these great houses had waxed and waned over the centuries, but had generallybeen overtaken by the massive organisation of Cluny and its rival Cıteaux in the eleventh andtwelfth centuries.78 Despite a revival of interest in the various roles that women could play inreligious life, including dynastic cults, at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenthcenturies this was not regularly expressed through new female foundations.

Iberia, on the other hand, had retained its royal nunneries long after most of the rest of Eu-rope, and San Isidoro at Leon was, for example, handed over to Augustinian canons only in1148. Nor was Las Huelgas the only royal female foundation in Iberia in the 1180s. In Aragon,Alfonso VIII’s aunt, Queen Sancha, founded a female house of the Hospitallers at Sigena in1188, although the community of nuns may not have been in place for another couple of years.

73 Jose Antonio Fernandez Florez, Coleccion diplomatica del monasterio de Sahagun (837-1300), vol. 4 (1110-1199),

(Leon 1991), no.1357. Gonzalez, El reino, vol. 2, 484 no.295. See also Mansilla, Documentacion, 308-9, where the Pope

attempts to prevent Alfonso VIII from favouring Sahagun: nolumus autem regiam excellentiam reputare molestum,

quod petitionem tuam super eo, quod sepedictam ecclesiam in potestatem monasterii S. Facundii redigi postulabas,

non duximus admittendam, cum id de iure facere non possemus.74 Reilly, Alfonso VII, 73-4. Charles Julian Bishko, ‘Peter the Venerable’s journey to Spain’, in: Charles Julian Bishko,

Spanish and Portuguese monastic history 600-1300 (Collected Studies Series, 188, London 1984), XII.75 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 121, no.72: quos iamdudum pro edificanda domu conuersorum in

cisterciensi monasterio contulimus. Alfonso VIII’s will of 1204 also makes an additional bequest to Cıteaux: see Gon-

zalez, El reino, vol. 3, 341-7, no. 769.76 Klaniczay, ‘Holy rulers’, 196-209.77 Barbara Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon royal houses (London and New York, 2003), 187. Gold, The Lady

and the virgin, 111.78 Christopher Brooke, The age of the cloister. The story of monastic life in the middle ages (Stroud, 2003), 204-6.


She remained very closely associated with Sigena during her lifetime and, in accordance withher will, she was buried there in 1208.79 There are superficial similarities between the roughlycontemporary foundations of Sigena and Las Huelgas, and both monasteries were full of noblewomen, including those who had served at court.80 However, there are many deep-seated differ-ences and no indication that Sigena inspired Las Huelgas, although both foundations clearlyexisted in the same intellectual milieu.

Sigena was a Hospitaller foundation, not Cistercian, and that determined some of its moreunusual features. For example, it was not a new foundation, as it was attached to a pre-existingmale Hospitaller house or preceptory, and thus it was effectively a double monastery, whereboth fratres and sorores were under the rule of the prioress. The monks at Sigena providedchaplain services for the community and also seem to have had a role in administration ofthe estate.81 There is a resonance here with Fontevraud but not with Las Huelgas. In commonwith other Hospitaller monasteries Sigena followed the rule of St Augustine, and it had twoadditional bodies of legislation: first its own ‘rule’ written by Bishop Richard of Huesca, whichdirected its domestic and liturgical life, and second: a body of ‘case law’ developed throughformal documents exchanged between Sigena and the Grand Master of the Order of St Johnand the regional Hospitaller authority, the castellan of Amposta.82 Indeed Sigena seems tohave been just as much an initiative of the Hospitallers, who were seeking to establish a femalefoundation in Spain, as of Queen Sancha,83 and, despite the efforts of Sancha, Sigena was not,unlike Las Huelgas, autonomous. It was subject to the Grand Master and to the castellan ofAmposta. The prioress drew her power ultimately from the former, but she owed obedienceto the latter and had to attend the general chapter of the castellan once a year.84

The feature that seems to link Sigena and Las Huelgas most clearly is the important role ofQueen Sancha at Sigena and the role that developed for royal women at Las Huelgas. At Si-gena, Sancha’s role is very clear and interventionist: all the nuns and monks, including the pri-oress, were subordinate to her as dominatrix.85 The election of the prioress required consent notonly from the castellan but also from Queen Sancha, while she lived, and Sancha did her best tolimit potential interference from the castellan. In contrast, the early documents from Las Huel-gas make no reference to such a role for Queen Leonor. Queen Sancha’s foundation, and evenher position within it, would not have been at all unusual if she had been widowed, as nearly allmedieval women who founded monasteries on their sole initiative were widows who often re-tained some control over property.86 For example, Berenguela de Cervera, the Count of Cer-vera’s widow, entered the neighbouring Cistercian house of Vallbona, but did not take the

79 Agustin Ubieto Arteta, El real monasterio de Sigena (1188-1300) (Valencia, 1966), 15-22. Karl F. Schuler, The pic-

torial program of the chapterhouse of Sigena (unpublished doctoral thesis, New York University, 1996), 22, 34. The

body of her son, Pedro II, was moved to the same chapel of St Peter at Sigena in 1217, four years after his death.80 Ubieto, El real monasterio, 16, 32-3.81 Ibid., 24-6.82 Ibid., 11-13, 21-3.83 Schuler, Pictorial program, 17-18, ‘because of repeated requests from the master of the Hospital of Jerusalem . to

construct and make in that place of Sigena a house of God and hospital where all of the sisters under the guardianship of

Amposta who offer themselves to the Hospital may be assembled and established and shall be able to dwell there living

together.’84 Ubieto, El real monasterio, 13, 21, 24-5.85 Schuler, Pictorial program, 26. Ubieto, El real monasterio, 26, 50-1. It is worth noting that the vocabulary of Sigena

also uses sorores instead of Deo dicatae feminae.86 Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in monastic profession. Religious women in medieval France (Chicago and London,

1991), 28-9, 37-8.


veil and, acting alongside the abbess, she attracted young noblewomen to the foundation anddonations from Queen Sancha and King Alfonso II.87 What was exceptional was that QueenSancha dedicated herself ‘to God, the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Blessed John and to thesick of the poor Hospital of the Order of Jerusalem in life and in death’ in 1187, nine yearsbefore the death of her husband, King Alfonso II of Aragon. He, meanwhile, was busying him-self with the Cistercian foundation of Poblet. Moreover the position of dominatrix held byQueen Sancha at Sigena was personal, and no other royal woman inherited it. After Sancha’sdeath, it was the prioress who became more powerful.88

Alfonso VIII’s lead role in the foundation of Las Huelgas, together with its very differentand innovative structure, sets Las Huelgas apart from Sigena. On the other hand, I think it iswell worth exploring the possibility that Alfonso VIII was inspired to found Las Huelgas asa female institution not by Fontevraud, nor by Sigena, but by a Leonese-Castilian tradition,which provided very particular roles for royal women. This tradition, best exemplified inLeon by San Isidoro de Leon and in Castile by SS Cosmas and Damien at Covarrubias, isthe lordship of the infantaticum or, in Spanish, infantado, which was found in Leon and Castilefrom the tenth to the mid-twelfth centuries. The organisational structure of this traditional royaland noble institution may well explain both the decision to make Las Huelgas a female houseand the somewhat unusual role of the abbess. The detail of the infantado arrangements is stillinsufficiently understood, but broadly they entrusted considerable property and judicial andeconomic authority to an unmarried daughter or sister. The woman who held the infantadowas usually based in a double monastery where she held a parallel position alongside the abbessthat did not require her to become a nun but to be ‘dedicated to God’. On the woman’s death,the property and power reverted to the king or other noble who had given it to her, or to hissuccessor. There is evidence that this arrangement operated satisfactorily for Ramiro II and Al-fonso V, kings of Leon; and especially for Fernando I, Alfonso VI, and Alfonso VII, kings ofLeon and Castile. The counts of Castile, and possibly King Sancho II, used similar arrange-ments at Covarrubias and at San Salvador de Ona.89

San Isidoro de Leon had been at the centre of the royal Leonese infantados. Fernando I hadfounded the double monastery of San Isidoro, at the behest of his queen Sancha, for his burialand on his death he passed it, together with the other monasteries of the kingdom under hiscontrol, to his daughters Elvira and Urraca. The arrangements at San Isidoro, however, osten-sibly came to an end, when Alfonso VII’s sister, Sancha, handed over the monastery to Augus-tinian canons in 1148. It is possible that Alfonso VIII saw Fernando I and Queen Sancha asparticularly illustrious and comparable ancestors. Before his marriage to Sancha and his con-quest of Leon, Fernando I had been Count of Castile and, like Alfonso VIII, he came frommixed Castilian and Navarrese parentage. Together Fernando and Sancha had been generouspatrons of the monastery of San Isidoro and, like Alfonso VIII and Leonor, produced severalchildren.

We know that there was demonstrable interest in the Visigothic, Asturian and Leonese her-itage during the early years of Alfonso VIII’s reign over the kingdom of Castile. Not only was

87 Les Cisterciens, ed. Julie Roux (Vic-en-Bigorre, 2003), 296.88 Ubieto, El real monasterio, 55.89 Patrick Henriet, ‘Deo votas. L’Infantado et la fonction des infantes dans la Castile et le Leon des Xe-XIIe siecles’ in:

Au cloıtre et dans le monde. Femmes, hommes et societes. Melanges en l’honneur de Paulette L’Hermite-Leclercq, ed.

Patrick Henriet et Anne-Marie Legras (Universite de Paris, Sorbonne, Paris, 2000), 189-203. Rose Walker, ‘Sancha,

Urraca and Elvira: the virtues and vices of Spanish royal women "dedicated to God"’, Reading Medieval Studies, 24

(1998), 113-38. See also Luisa Garcıa Calles, Dona Sancha, hermana del emperador (Leon-Barcelona, 1972).


there a revival in the production of Beatus manuscripts in the last quarter of the twelfth century,but also, as Peter Linehan has shown, ecclesiastics used Visigothic terminology at the Synod ofSegovia in 1166.90 We can also be confident that Alfonso VIII would have known about theinfantados. Some of his education was under the control of his uncle, Fernando II of Leonand the rest was organised by other royal relations or powerful nobles,91 and in theory Alfonsocould even have met his great-aunt Sancha, who had held the infantado at Leon and did not dieuntil he was four. Alfonso could also have learnt about the infantados from chronicles. The His-toria Silense describes how Ramiro II built the church of San Salvador for his unmarried daugh-ter, Elvira, and in considerable detail how pius et excellentissimus Fernando I had newlyconstructed the church of San Isidoro in Leon at the suggestion of his Queen Sancha, howhe gave the monasteries under his control to his unmarried daughters,92 and how he used tosupport monks, canons, priests and mulieres Deo dicatae.93 Large parts of the same text reap-pear in Lucas de Tuy’s Chronicon mundi in the 1230s, which is not surprising as Lucas was atSan Isidoro,94 but Alfonso VIII did not spend time at Leon. It is particularly significant, there-fore, that either the Historia Silense or a text from which parts of the Historia Silense weredrawn, was almost certainly in Castilian territory towards the end of the twelfth century. Forseveral similar passages are incorporated into a late-twelfth-century Riojan chronicle, the Cron-ica Najerense.95 This chronicle was probably compiled during the 1170s at the Riojan monas-tery of Najera, where Alfonso VIII had close connections as his mother, Blanca, had beenburied there in 1156. Unfortunately for the neatness of this part of the argument, the sentencethat talks of Fernando I giving his monasteries to his daughters, Urraca and Elvira, is missingfrom the Cronica Najerense, although it does contain the passage that describes Ramiro II’sarrangements for his daughter.96 But there is other more conclusive and concrete evidence ofAlfonso VIII’s understanding of the infantados.

The infantados had considerable political importance, which did not disappear when San Isi-doro de Leon was handed over to the Augustinian canons in 1148. The lands of the Tierra deCampos, which formed the basis of the property attached to one of the infantados, also constitutedthe boundary territory between the kingdoms of Leon and Castile. These lands were the subject ofa long-running dispute between Alfonso VIII and his uncle Fernando II, because Fernando hadencroached onto Castilian territory during Alfonso’s minority.97 During this same period, in

90 Peter Linehan, ‘The Synod of Segovia (1166)’, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, 10 (1980), 31-44: [archbishop]

‘Juan and his colleagues looked further back, to the Visigothic councils, employing the terminology of those assemblies

(conventus, decretum), .’.91 Gonzalez, El reino, vol. I, 181-3.92 Simon Barton and Richard Fletcher, The world of El Cid (Manchester and New York, 2000), 61, n. 191. The authors

rightly suggest ‘under his entire control’ as a helpful translation of totius regni sui.93 Historia Silense, 197-8, para 94, and 205, para. 103: Tradidit etiam filiabus suis omnia totius regni sui monasteria, in

quibus vsque ad exitum huius vite absque mariti copula viuerent. 207-9, para 104: Amabat pauperes peregrinos, et in eis

suscipiendis magnam habebat curam. Ad hoc vbicumque christianos monachos, clericos uel mulieres Deo dicatas in

paupertate viuere conpererat.94 Lucas Tudensis, Chronicon mundi, 293, bk. 4, 57: in Legione nouiter construxerat ecclesiam et in honore sancti

antistitis Ysidori fecerat dedicari, plurime pulcritudinis auro et argento lapidibusque preciosis et cortinis sericis

decorauit.95 Chronica Hispana Saeculi XII, pars II, Chronica Naierensis, ed. Juan A. Estevez Sola (Corpus Christianorum Con-

tinuatio Medievalis 71A, Turnholt 1995), 162, bk. 3. 9. For a consideration of the likely author and date, see Introduc-

cion, LXXXIX-XCIV, for the relationship to the Historia Silense, XXXIX-XLIV. The most relevant passages are: 162,

bk. 3, 9.1-2; 167, bk.3, 11. 15-17 and 168, bk. 3, 11.29.96 Chronica Naierensis, 133, bk. 2, 29.97 Gonzalez, El reino, 683-97; Martinez Diez, Alfonso VIII, 64-70.


1165, Fernando II had made a tactical move to preserve his control of the lands by re-inventingthe infantado and, at the same time, strengthening his alliance with the kingdom of Navarre. AsPatrick Henriet has drawn to our attention, Fernando II conferred all the property of the infantadounder his dominion, which included not only the Tierra de Campos but also lands in Toledo, theTransierra, Estremadura, Leon, Bierzo, Galicia and Asturias, on his married sister, Sancha,Queen of Navarre.98 This strategy was only briefly successful, as the young King Alfonsosoon began to regain the land that Castile had lost to his uncle. Alfonso VIII and Fernando II con-tinued to battle over the boundary between Leon and Castile, and Alfonso IX of Leon took up thefight again until he married Alfonso VIII’s daughter Berenguela in 1197. So we can be sure thatAlfonso VIII was highly aware of the infantado that had been based at San Isidoro.

Alfonso VIII had first-hand dealings with one of the Castilian infantados, when he disbandedthe infantado of Covarrubias in 1175 and gave it to the cathedral of Toledo and its archbishop,together with all its appurtenances, not only for the cure of his own soul but for the care of thememory of his grandfather, Alfonso VII, and his father, Sancho III, who were buried in that ca-thedral.99 Another Castilian infantado had once been based at the monastery of San Salvador deOna, but it had been discontinued in the eleventh century.100 Thus the end of the old style Cas-tilian institutions in 1175 paved the way for a new kind of royal female religious house. This wasfive years before the earliest possible date for the founding of Las Huelgas, and twelve years be-fore its foundation charter. There is more to link these events, however, than just the sequence ofdates, for Las Huelgas was endowed, perhaps symbolically, with properties that had been held byOna or Covarrubias. The foundation charter for Las Huelgas explicitly says that one of the en-dowed properties, in San Felizes, was held by the abbot of Ona.101 Less obviously but just as sig-nificantly, several of the other endowments had formed part of the properties owned by theinfantado of Covarrubias.102 This strongly suggests that Alfonso VIII was consciously manipu-lating the old institution of the infantado and re-inventing it in a modern Cistercian guise.

One way in which Las Huelgas may have imitated elements of the infantado tradition was inits physical structure as a palace-monastic complex. Speaking of Las Huelgas, Lucas de Tuy, inhis Chronicon mundi, says that Alfonso VIII ‘has built the palace of the king next to the houseof God’, just as Solomon did’.103 Although no one has identified any remains of the palace, andsome have even doubted its existence, it is possible that the structure now called the Chapel ofSantiago and set apart to the east of the cloister was once part of the palace, as its Mudejar stylewould fit well with other royal palaces of this time. Iberia had several distinguished antecedentsfor such a palace-monastic complex, notably San Isidoro at Leon and Sahagun. Fontevraud, onthe other hand, seems to have been an entirely monastic complex, and, although it must havehad suitable accommodation for Eleanor of Aquitaine, it did not officially offer a palatialresidence.104

98 Patrick Henriet, Deo votas, 199-203.99 Cartulario del infantado de Covarrubias, ed. Luciano Serrano (Fuentes para la historia de Castilla, vol.2, Silos,

1907, repr. Burgos, 1987), 59-62, no.24.100 Patrick Henriet, Deo votas, 191-3.101 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 22, no.11, hereditatem quam oniensis abbas habuit in Sancto Felice.102 Gonzalez, El reino, 530 n.121: including the farm of Estepar and estates in Bembibre. Cartulario de Covarrubias,

13-21.103 Lucas Tudensis, Chronicon mundi, 324, bk. 4, 84: Alter nostris temporibus Salomon idem rex iuxta predictam do-

mum Domini hedificauit palacium regis.104 In addition to the main abbey, Fontevraud comprised the priory of St John for the attendant monks, the priory of St

Mary Magdalen for fallen women, and the priory of Saint Lazare for those who attended the lepers.


Secondly, there may have been similar roles for royal women at Las Huelgas and, for exam-ple, at San Isidoro at Leon. During the period of the Leonese infantado, before Alfonso VIII’sgreat-aunt Sancha had handed it over to Augustinian canons in 1148, royal women had hada significant role at San Isidoro: not as abbess, but as a parallel figure with secular as wellas monastic responsibilities. This role sometimes had the title domina et senior, and in thecase of San Isidoro seemed to have carried responsibility for the care of the dead.105 It hasbeen argued that Las Huelgas only acquired a royal senora around 1255, when Alfonso X de-scribed his daughter, another Berenguela, in those terms.106 Many of the documents relating tothe early years of Las Huelgas are issued in the name of the King and Queen and their children,reflecting a continuing close involvement by the royal family. But there is very little evidence ofany independent action by Leonor beyond her merino or her mayor-domo witnessing six trans-actions involving Las Huelgas between 1187 and 1207.107 Equally, Fernando I and Sancha’srelationship with San Isidoro in Leon had probably followed a broadly similar pattern of closejoint responsibility until their unmarried eldest daughter, Urraca, became the domina probablyafter the death of Fernando I in 1063. Likewise at Las Huelgas, long before 1255, Leonor’sdaughter Berenguela may have taken on some of the roles associated with a domina or senoraof Las Huelgas, when she returned from her annulled marriage in 1204. For example RodrigoJimenez de Rada, who says that he officiated at the funerals of Alfonso VIII in 1214 and of hisson Fernando in 1211, places Berenguela at the centre of the arrangements on both occa-sions.108 Berenguela’s younger sister, Constanza, who entered the monastery as a nun, becamethe first royal princess to act officially in the governance of Las Huelgas in 1232 when the ab-bacy was vacant.109

So, although Alfonso VIII and Leonor chose to found a Cistercian house in the twelfth-centuryfashion,110 Sancha and Fernando I’s foundation of San Isidoro de Leon, and the similar Castilianinfantados, may have been behind the decision to make Las Huelgas a female house. San Isidorosupplies an Iberian precedent for the ambiguous institutional roles of the abbess and of the royalwomen in the Las Huelgas community, as well as a model for a palace-monastic complex. Fromthis perspective, the supposed parallels between the organisation of Fontevraud and Las Huelgasno longer seem so clear or distinct, and it seems more likely that Alfonso VIII drew his inspirationfrom the institutions that had played important roles in the monastic arrangements of his mostdistinguished ancestors. He may have re-conceived them in a new form that combined their fam-ily and territorial advantages with the spiritual benefits of association with the reforming Cister-cians. There now remains the question of the ‘royal pantheon’ status accorded to both Fontevraudand Las Huelgas, which, as we shall see, is not an entirely separate issue.

105 Rose Walker, ‘Sancha, Urraca and Elvira’, 121-2. Rose Walker, ‘The wall paintings of the Pantheon at San Isidoro

de Leon’, Art Bulletin (2000), 200-25, and Rose Walker, ‘Images of burial in northern Spain c.950-c.1250’ in: Medieval

memories. Men, women and the past, 700-1300, ed. Elisabeth van Houts (Harlow, England, 2001), 150-72.106 For this argument see Andrea Gayoso, ‘The lady of Las Huelgas. A royal abbey and its patronage’, Cıteaux: com-

mentarii cistercienses, 51 (2000), 1-2, 91-115.107 Martinez-Garcia, El hospital del rey de Burgos, 57-8 and 95.108 Rodrigo Ximenii de Rada, de rebus Hispanie, 258, bk.7.36: excellentissima sorore sua Berengaria regina, ad quam

postea regnum Castelle successione prouenit, impendente liberaliter et decenter officia funeris et honoris, gemitus et

doloris. and 280, bk.8.15: officiosa obsequia funeris filia eius regina Berengaria impendente, que tanto dolore eius ex-

equias consumauit, quod fere dilaceratione et lacrimis se extinxit.109 Perez-Embid, ‘El cister femenino’, 1108-9. Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1231-1262), no. 269, 274, and 321.110 A Fontevraudine foundation in Iberia would have been exceptional. Queen Urraca had uniquely given the Asturian

monastery of Vega to Fontevraud in 1125. See Bernard F. Reilly, The kingdom of Leon-Castilla under Queen Urraca1109-1126 (Princeton, 1982), 196-7.


The third part of the argument for Fontevraud as the inspiration for Las Huelgas, their shareddesignation as royal burial sites, is in fact the most widely quoted resemblance between thesetwo monastic institutions. It is closely bound up with the architectural and sculptural history ofthe site, and it would be ideal if, at this point, we could compare the twelfth-century buildingsof Fontevraud with those at Las Huelgas. However, as I have not been able to identify any sur-viving part of Fontevraud that has anything significant or distinctive in common with any sur-viving part of Las Huelgas, I shall be concentrating on the functional and institutional aspectsof this claim. The only surviving structure from the first building phase at Las Huelgas (c.1185-c.1199) is the cloister known as Las Claustrillas. At Fontevraud, on the other hand, we have thechurch (choir consecrated 1119), but we have lost nearly the entire twelfth-century cloister,which was probably built under the patronage of Henry II and King Richard I of England.111

Recent archaeological discoveries at Fontevraud have shown that the cloister arcades were car-ried on twinned columns that in turn rested on a low wall.112 Also a capital has recently beenuncovered from the doorway to the refectory. Although the capital is elongated like those at LasClaustrillas, it is decorated with two addorsed birds roughly carved in low relief. It is thus verydifferent from the capitals at Las Huelgas, which are almost entirely foliate or geometric and ofhigh quality. For analogues for the capitals at Las Huelgas we look rather to the Languedoc orto earlier examples in northern Spain. It has been suggested that the capilla de la Asuncion,attached to the north-east side of the cloister at Las Huelgas, may have formed part of theeast end of the first twelfth-century church on the site, and, if so, it is remarkably at variancewith the church at Las Huelgas. The capilla is constructed of ladrillo brick and decorated withblind polylobed arches in the Almohad manner, while the church of Las Huelgas is a stone-builtstructure with Romanesque sculpture.

It is very difficult to consider the claims for both Fontevraud and Las Huelgas as ‘royal pan-theons’ without clarifying what we mean by that term. The phrase is often used in an Iberiancontext, but perhaps most frequently in referring to the dynastic burial churches of, for exam-ple, the French monarchs at Saint-Denis, the Salian emperors at Speyer, or, or at the end of thetwelfth century the Sicilian Normans at Monreale.113 In the case of Saint-Denis and Speyer, wehave burial churches that have come to define the dynasties whose members lie in them and theconcept of kingship that is associated with those monarchs.114 However, Saint-Denis was a Mer-ovingian cult-site where burial was the exception, until it was adopted by the Carolingians.Even they did not all remain loyal to it, and Carloman chose burial at St-Remi at Reims andCharlemagne was buried at Aachen. Indeed Saint-Denis was only fully developed as a symbolicembodiment of the continuity of the French monarchy in the mid-thirteenth century, when therewas a translation of burials from other churches so that the rulers of France could be commem-orated by a series of effigy tombs.115 Speyer was founded by Konrad II and chosen for his burialin 1039; some other Salian emperors made individual decisions to be buried there, but only laterdid it acquire its exceptional concentration of burials and thus its symbolic status.116 Indeed it is

111 Lindy Grant, ‘Henri II Plantagenet et son temps’, Cahiers de civilisation medievale, 37, 1-2 (1994), 73-84.112 Daniel Prigent, ‘Le cadre de vie a Fontevraud dans la seconde moitie du XIIe siecle’, Fontevraud. HistoireeArch-

eologie, 5 (Fontevraud, 1997-98), 39-56, esp. 44-5. Crozet, ‘Fontevrault’, 431.113 Hallam, ‘Royal burial’, 359-80, 371.114 Janet Nelson, ‘Carolingian royal funerals’ in: Rituals of power from late antiquity to the early middle ages, ed. Frans

Theuws and Janet Nelson (Leiden, Boston, Koln, 2000), 139-41.115 Paul Binski, Medieval death. Ritual and representation (London, 1996), 75.116 Caspar Ehlers in Stiftungen und Stiftungswirklichkeiten. Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart ed. Michael Borgolte

(Berlin, 2000).


difficult to identify any foundation that was created from the outset as the planned burial site ofmore than one monarch with or without his immediate family group. Instead they were usuallycreated retrospectively through a royal wish to emphasise legitimacy and continuity or a monas-tic desire for enhanced status.

Fontevraud is seen as the Plantagenet royal pantheon, because it contains the tombs of HenryII, of Eleanor of Aquitaine and of two of their children, Richard I and Joan. But there is nothingto suggest that Henry II planned it that way. His predecessors as Kings of England, from Ed-ward the Confessor onwards, had not created dynastic mausolea, and they were usually buriedin abbeys that they had founded or made their own through generous and frequent gifts. Edwardthe Confessor had founded and been buried at Westminster; William the Conqueror likewise inSt Etienne at Caen; Henry I at his foundation, Reading Abbey; and King Stephen with his wifeand son at Faversham. Most of these were single burials that could claim the full attention of theliturgical intercession available at the institution.117 Henry II’s other ancestors, the Dukes ofNormandy, had favoured cathedral burial first at Rouen, and then at Fecamp, in family groups,while the Counts of Anjou had used the more traditional aristocratic family burial pattern thatconcentrated on one favoured church, in their case Saint-Nicolas at Angers. This pattern wasbroken when Count Geoffrey, Henry II’s father, died in 1151 and chose burial in Le Mans ca-thedral with special liturgical arrangements for intercession. This practice continued for hissons, Geoffrey in Nantes cathedral in 1158 and William in Rouen in 1164, and for his grand-child Henry the Young King, also at Rouen in 1174.118 Eleanor of Aquitaine’s ancestors, on theother hand, were buried family-fashion, like the earlier Counts of Anjou, at Montierneuf inPoitiers.119

We have no evidence that Henry II ever considered founding an abbey for his burial. Hechose Henry I’s foundation at Reading for his eldest son William, who died in 1156 andwas buried symbolically at the feet of his great-grandfather.120 But for himself he seems tohave chosen, at least initially, to be buried at the mother-church of the ascetic order of Grand-mont near Limoges.121 But there is some evidence, albeit from a seventeenth-century source,that he later changed his preference to Fontevraud,122 and given the internal political troublesat Grandmont in the mid-1180s a change of mind would have been unsurprising.123 Fontevraudwas certainly one of Henry II’s most favoured ecclesiastical institutions, for he issued severalcharters in its favour, and in 1182 he donated two thousand marks, a large sum that was onlyexceeded by a gift to Grandmont. He was also quite specific in one of his charters about his roleas protector of the nuns’ possessions, and he may well have wished to emphasise the Angevinclaims to such a frontier institution.124 His death at nearby Chinon was probably the decidingfactor.125

117 Hallam, ‘Royal burial’, 358, 367-9.118 Lindy Grant, ‘Aspects of the architectural patronage of the family of the counts of Anjou in the twelfth century’, in:

Anjou. Medieval art, architecture and archaeology, ed. John McNeill and Daniel Prigent (British Archaeological Asso-

ciation Conference Transactions 26, 2003), 102-3.119 Martindale, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine’, 32.120 Hallam, ‘Royal burial’, 359.121 Bienvenu, ‘Henri II’, 31.122 Charles T. Wood, ‘La mort et les funerailles d’Henri II’, Cahiers de Civilisation Medievale, 37 (1994), 119-23; Bi-

envenu, ‘Henri II’, 31-2, Hallam, ‘Royal burial’, 371.123 Carole A. Hutchison, The hermit monks of Grandmont (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1989), 74-82.124 Vernarde, Women’s monasticism, 153.125 Emma Cownie, Religious patronage in Anglo-Norman England 1066-1135 (Woodbridge, 1998), 208.


There is, however, no indication that Henry II was considering Fontevraud as a dynasticmausoleum, and Fontevraud rather became the Plantagenet burial church through a series ofaccidents. No one could have predicted the death of King Richard only ten years later at Chalusin the Limousin, but the decision to bury him at Fontevraud (11 April, Palm Sunday, 1199) atHenry II’s feet (except for his heart at Rouen, and his brain and entrails at Charroux) was ac-cording to Roger of Howden, his own.126 This could have been a wish to glorify the Plantagenetdynasty, but it is more likely that it was determined by Richard’s role as Duke of Aquitaine,reinforcing the long association of those Dukes with the nunnery. It may also have been signif-icant that Richard I had no heir and so had not established his own line. Circumstances con-spired again in September of the same year, 1199, when Leonor’s sister, Joan, took refuge atFontevraud from her husband Raymond of Toulouse, died at Rouen in childbirth, and was bur-ied in the nuns’ cemetery at Fontevraud with her still-born child.127 Thus Fontevraud does notappear to be a planned burial church for the Plantagenet dynasty, but an opportunistic creationrooted in the dual patronage of the Angevins and of the Dukes of Aquitaine. It was a fitting sitefor the commemoration of Henry II who, through his own inheritance and through his marriageto Eleanor, had ruled over vast territories to the north and south of the abbey, and it was equallyright that his son Richard I, who died without issue, should lie with him. The inclusion of Ele-anor and her daughter Joan emphasised the patrimonial contribution through the female side ofthe family.

The status of Las Huelgas as the Alfonsine ‘dynastic pantheon’ is both more and less com-plicated. The first surviving record of Alfonso VIII’s decision to be buried at Las Huelgas, to-gether with Queen Leonor and his children, is a charter of December 1199, which formallygives the monastery of Las Huelgas to the Cistercian Order. Alfonso, together with Queen Leo-nor and the heir Fernando, promise to be buried in the monastery and, should they becomemembers of a religious community, they pledge that it will be the Cistercian Order and noother.128 Alfonso’s decision is confirmed in his will of 1204.129 The question as to whetherLas Huelgas was founded for that purpose remains open: there is no reference to it in the foun-dation charter of 1187. The funerals of Alfonso VIII, Leonor, and two of their children, Fer-nando who died three years before his father and the young Henry I who died three yearsafter his parents, all took place between 1211 and 1217 at Las Huelgas, and are describedby Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada who officiated at them. The eldest daughter, Berenguela, wasthen regent for her son, the future Fernando III, and, although she was buried at Las Huelgas,he was buried in the newly reclaimed Seville cathedral, which marked the extent of his con-quest and repopulation of Muslim territory.130

The date of Alfonso VIII’s recorded decision within months of the 1199 burials at Fontevraudsuperficially suggests that the idea of Las Huelgas as the royal burial church could indeed havebeen inspired by events at Fontevraud. But there were other options. One was an indigenous

126 John Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven and London, 1999), 324-6.127 Labande, ‘Les filles d’Alienor’, 110-1.128 Lizoain Garrido, Documentacion (1116-1230), 93, no.52: Preterea, promisimus in manu predicti abbatis [Guido]

quod nos et filii nostri, qui consilio et mandato nostro acquiescere uoluerint, in supra dicto monasterio Sanctee Marie

Regalis sepeliamur. Et si contigerit quod in uita nostra transferamus nos ad religionem, promisimus quod ordinem cis-

terciensem suscipiemus et non alium.129 Gonzalez, El reino, vol.3, 341-7, no.769: Item, dono pro meo aniuersario, monasterio Burgensis Sancte Marie Re-

galis, quod ego et regina uxor mea construximus, ubi corpus meum tumuletur.130 Teofilo F. Ruiz, ‘Unsacred monarchy: The kings of Castile in the late middle ages’ in: Teofilo F. Ruiz, The city andthe realm: Burgos and Castile 1080-1492 (Aldershot, 1992), XIII, 126.


Iberian royal burial foundation on the model of San Isidoro. Another was burial in a cathedral.Alfonso VIII’s immediate Leonese and Castilian predecessors, his father and grandfather, insteadof choosing a new foundation for their burial (even though Alfonso VII had founded Cistercianhouses) had both been buried in Toledo Cathedral, not traditionally with their wives and otherchildren, but alone. Alfonso VII had died far from any of the traditional Leonese or Castilian buri-al churches on campaign in the Andalusian hamlet of Almuradiel in 1157.131 Sancho III had diedat Toledo in 1158. Alfonso VII’s queen, Berengaria, was buried in the cathedral at Santiago deCompostela,132 where Fernando II of Leon was also buried in 1188. The pattern was brokensomewhat by the burial of Alfonso VIII’s mother, Blanca, in 1156 at the Navarrese mausoleumof Santa Marıa de Najera, but this was probably a territorial decision reflecting the Riojan landclaimed by both Navarre and Castile. Thus Alfonso VIII’s decision to opt for burial in a monasterywith his family members was a clear departure from what had been customary practice for somefifty years.133 But was it inspired by Fontevraud?

Cistercian lay burial was limited before 1190, as the statutes allowed only kings and queens andbishops to be buried in Cistercian churches and oratories,134 and such burials therefore acquiredgreat status and spiritual prestige, which combatted papal opposition to the practice. Outside Ibe-ria, Louis VII of France, who had been married briefly in the mid-twelfth century to Alfonso VIII’saunt, Constanza, had set a precedent by founding a Cistercian abbey outside Paris, at Barbeaux, in1146, and by choosing to be buried there in 1180, and not at the dynastic pantheon of Saint-Denis.135 In turn, this may have influenced Alfonso II, king of Aragon and count of Catalonia,in his 1196 choice of a Cistercian burial in the church that he had built for his father’s foundationat Poblet.136 If Alfonso VIII’s 1199 announcement that he intended to be buried at Las Huelgas hadtruly been the first indication that the complex was planned as a royal burial site, it would be logicalto suggest that the king of Castile was merely following the lead of the king of Aragon. However,Alfonso VIII may have made his decision long before he announced it.

There is clear evidence for pre-1199 burial at Las Huelgas, in the form of a tomb, a magnificentgable tomb for a child, dated by its inscription to 1194. In form and iconography this tomb is re-lated to the much more roughly carved tomb of Alfonso VIII’s mother, Dona Blanca at Santa Mariade Najera, which supports the idea that it is a royal tomb. There are also two plain stone sarcophagiof a suitable size for child burials and the fragments of a substantial arcosolium, or tomb niche, thatbelongs stylistically with the 1194 tomb.137 Leonor’s second child Sancho probably died in 1181the year of his birth; his sister Sancha, born the following year, died in 1184, and it is possible thatthere were other unrecorded infant deaths.138 If these were indeed royal child burials, there are twoimmediate explanations: one is that Alfonso VIII and Leonor had already decided that Las Huel-gas would be their family mausoleum and that these burials merely confirm that intention,139 the

131 Reilly, Alfonso VII, 133-4.132 Reilly, Alfonso VII, 104.133 Reilly, Queen Urraca, 200-01. Alfonso VII’s mother, Queen Urraca, had been buried at San Isidoro at Leon in 1126.134 Waddell, Twelfth-century statutes, 88, 178.135 Hallam, ‘Royal burial’, 369; Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis (London and New York, 1998), 156-7.136 Zurita, Los Anales, II, xlvii.137 Ricardo del Arco, Sepulcros de la casa real de Castilla (Madrid, 1954), 92-98, 241-50. Manuel Gomez-Moreno, El

panteon real de Las Huelgas (Madrid, 1946), 9-10; Gonzalez, El reino, vol. 1, 202-3; Ramon de Grado Manchado, ‘Se-

pulcro de don Sancho (?)’, in: Monjes y monasterios. El Cister en el medievo de Castilla y Leon, ed. Isidro G. Bango

Torviso (Valladolid, 1998), 382.138 Martınez Diez, Alfonso VIII, 46-58.139 Nelson, ‘Carolingian royal funerals’, 165-6, Charles the Bold may have indicated his plan for a dynastic necropole

church at Saint-Denis by burying the two sons who pre-deceased him there.


other is that they saw it initially as a burial church only for their children, as Royaumont wouldlater be for their French grandchildren and great grand-children.140 The original features of thefoundation and their similarity to San Isidoro at Leon and to Sahagun suggest that it is more likelythat Las Huelgas was planned for royal burial from the beginning. For, like Las Huelgas, San Isi-doro was the burial church of Fernando I and Queen Sancha, and of other female members of thefamily and of kings who had not established a line of their own.141 Fernando I had ensured inter-cession after his death not only at San Isidoro where his daughters oversaw it, but also at Clunyitself, while Alfonso VI had brought Cluniac intercession to Iberia at his mausoleum in Sahagun.Yet San Isidoro remained the supreme royal burial church in Leon-Castile, and continued to pre-serve the memory of Fernando I and Sancha, despite its later change of regime. It was perhaps thissuccess that influenced Alfonso VIII and Leonor in choosing the form of Las Huelgas, since bothSan Isidoro and Las Huelgas were originally palace-monastic complexes, royal burial churches,and female houses of feminae Deo dicatae where royal women played important roles. The stillpowerful monastery of Sahagun also exemplified the first two characteristics, and, while it lackedthe third, it had set a precedent for an almost self-governing outpost of a major religious Order. It isnot impossible that Fontevraud also formed part of this mix, and the analogy would certainly havebeen a useful riposte to any papal or episcopal questioning of such a powerful nunnery, but there isnothing to show that it was ever invoked in that way.

The late announcement of Alfonso VIII’s decision to be buried at Las Huelgas may havebeen due to a sensitive political situation. He may have been reluctant to confirm his choice,as he would have known that it was likely to offend the bishops of his kingdom with whomhe did not always have easy relations. It is William II of Sicily’s foundation of Monrealethat provides a parallel in this respect, not Fontevraud, for William II of Sicily had foundedthe Benedictine palace-monastic complex of Monreale and planned to be buried there partlyto counterbalance the oppressive dominance of the archbishopric of Palermo. The choice ofa Cistercian foundation enabled Alfonso VIII to make a similar move, for Cistercian affiliationbrought with it not only the possibility of episcopal exemption but also an unimpeachable royalburial church. The decision to make Las Huelgas a female foundation gave Alfonso and Leonorgreater control over the foundation through the traditional role that royal women could play inits administration and in remembrance of the dead.142

When Alfonso VIII inherited the kingdom of Castile at the age of three after the earlydeath of his father, it had had an existence separate from the kingdom of Leon for onlyone year. During Alfonso’s minority it was threatened and overrun from the west by the Leon-ese and from the east by the Navarrese, as well as facing a Muslim resurgence from the south.By the time of Alfonso and Leonor’s deaths in 1214, Castile was not only an established andenlarged kingdom with an important capital at Burgos, but it had been at the forefront of themajor victory over the Muslims at Las Navas de Tolosa. Alfonso VIII was hailed as the sav-iour not only of Hispania but of Rome and all Europe, and both chroniclers, Rodrigo and

140 Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, Le roi est mort. Etude sur les funerailles, les sepultures et les tombeaux des rois deFrance jusqu’a la fin du XIIIe siecle (Paris, 1975), 77-8. See also Alexandra Gajewski-Kennedy, ‘Recherches sur l’arch-

itecture cistercienne et le pouvoir royal Blanche de Castille et la construction de l’abbaye du Lys’, in: Art et architecture

a Melun au moyen age: actes du colloque d’histoire de l’art et d’archeologie tenu a Melun les 28 et 29 novembre 1998,

ed. Yves Gallet (Paris, 2000), 223-54 esp.243-4.141 Walker, ‘Images’, 155-9.142 Shadis, ‘Piety, politics’ 207. Miriam Shadis argued that Alfonso VIII and Leonor thought they could exert more

patronal power over a female house, and even that a female house would allow them to exert more authority within

the Cistercian Order, but did not set the argument in this context.


Lucas, regardless of their differences, were to praise Alfonso for his strenuitas, and hissapientia.143

Although doubtless external factors played a part, none of this could be said to have beenfortuitous. For, as early as 1180, Alfonso’s chancery was styling him rex christianus,144 andhis will of 1204 shows that he had not forgotten how far he had travelled since the insecuretimes of his boyhood.145 Thus there is much to suggest that the image of the king and the iden-tity that he forged for his newly independent kingdom were carefully crafted and promoted,and, apart from the subtly shifting language of the charters, Lucas of Tuy tells us that AlfonsoVIII was the first to paint a castle on his coat of arms.146 The foundation and conception of LasHuelgas was surely an important part of that image and identity. New and international in thechoice of its affiliation, but also firmly rooted in Iberian tradition, Las Huelgas was fitted toboth embody and to preserve that identity.

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank Professor Janet Nelson for her valuable comments on this text and forsending me down some fruitful paths of enquiry. I am also indebted to Dr Elisabeth van Houts,to the organisers of the Early Medieval Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research and theMedieval Hispanic Seminar, at the University of London, for giving me the opportunity to pres-ent papers that led to this article.

Rose Walker is Academic Registrar and Deputy Secretary of the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is the author of Views

of Tradition. Liturgy and Illumination in Medieval Spain (British Library, 1998). Her recent work has been on women,

liturgy and memory in medieval Iberia.

143 Linehan, History and historians, 290-9.144 Ibid., 292.145 Gonzalez, El reino, vol.3, 345-6: Sciendum est preterea quod, cum ego eram puer et a regibus Legionis et Nauarre,

etaimque a sarracenis, regnum meum acriter infestabatur.146 Lucas Tudensis, Chronicon mundi, 325, bk. 4, 84: Iste re Aldefonsus primo castellum in armis suis depinxit.

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