Leon (Kingdom)

• Place

| מספר מערכת987007550225405171 Copied successfully

• Print
• Save successful
  The item can be found in your Personal Zone
  שגיאה
  Log in to your account to save

• Encyc. Brit.(Leon, Kingdom of; After the final union with Castile in 1230, Leonese political and administrative institutions were, for a time, maintained and the records of the Cortes (parliament) show that some sense of separate identity ofLeon survived into the 1st half of the 14th cent.)
• Díez y Lozano, B. Historia y noticias del culto a la Virgen ... 1982:t.p. (antiguo Reino de León)
• Dic. de his. de España, 1979:(León, Reino de; 910-1037, 1065-1072, 1157-1230)

The Kingdom of León was an independent kingdom situated in the northwest region of the Iberian Peninsula. It was founded in 910 when the Christian princes of Asturias along the northern coast of the peninsula shifted their capital from Oviedo to the city of León. The kings of León fought civil wars, wars against neighbouring kingdoms and campaigns by both the Moors and the Vikings, all in order to protect their kingdom's changing fortunes. García is the first of the kings described by the charters as reigning in León. It is generally assumed that the old Asturian kingdom was divided among the three sons of Alfonso III of Asturias: García (León), Ordoño (Galicia) and Fruela (Asturias), as all three participated in deposing their father. When García died in 914, León went to Ordoño, who now ruled both León and Galicia as Ordoño II. At Ordoño's death in 924, the throne went to his brother Fruela II (924–925), who died of leprosy a year later. Fruela's death in 925 was followed by a civil war, after which Alfonso, the eldest son of Ordoño II, emerged as the new king Alfonso IV, ruling from 925 to 932. After a further power struggle, Ramiro, the younger brother of Alfonso IV, became king in 932, having captured his brother Alfonso, as well as the three sons of Fruela II – Alfonso, Ordoño and Ramiro. Alfonso IV may have died soon after, but he left two infant sons, called Ordoño and Fruela. When Ramiro died in 951, he left two sons by two different wives. When the elder son Ordoño III, who ruled from 951 to 956, suddenly died aged little more than thirty, he was succeeded by his younger half-brother Sancho I "The Fat" (956–966), as Ordoño had failed to produce a legitimate heir. Sancho's son Ramiro had been born in 961 and was only about five years old when his father died. He was also the only legitimate member of the direct family line. His mother Teresa Ansúrez had retired into the recently founded monastery of San Pelayo, of which her sister-in-law Elvira was the abbess. Another nun, Sancho's full sister Elvira Ramírez emerged as regent during his long minority. Under the regency of Elvira, fresh raids of the Northmen were repelled from the coast of Galicia. In 968, Gunrod of Norway, the Viking leader, established himself on Galician soil and held out for a year and a half: Bishop Sisnando of Compostela died fighting him, and his successor St Rudesind carried on the struggle until Count Gonzalo Sánchez defeated the invaders and killed Gunrod himself. Count Sánchez destroyed the entire fleet of Gunrod. In 1008, Norman Vikings attacked Galicia, destroying Santiago de Compostela and seventeen other towns, while Olaf Haraldsson of Norway raided Spain's Atlantic coast. There are also reports of a series of attacks on the Christian lands of north Spain in 1028, 1032, and 1038, and the Christian kingdoms in the north commonly used Vikings as mercenaries in their internecine wars. The County of Castile split off in 931, and the County of Portugal separated to become the independent Kingdom of Portugal in 1139. The Kingdom of León expanded south beyond the Douro, and then beyond the Sistema Central in the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries into the so-called Extremadura Leonesa, whose southern frontier was primarily settled by military orders. The Kingdom of León became part of a personal union with Kingdom of Castile since the 1230s, in dispute from 1296 to 1300. It remained from then on and up to 1833 a constituent realm of the Crown of Castile and then the Spanish Crown.