Wonders and Marvels: The Cantigas de Santa Maria

By Jessica Knauss

King Alfonso directs his subjects to worship Jesus through the Virgin Mary
and the angel Gabriel in the F manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. 

A poor woman takes her baby with her to the wheat fields — she has no alternative. While his mother works, the boy swallows a head of wheat and his belly swells to alarming proportions. His mother, believing he’s been poisoned or bitten by a spider, frets over him for several days. When she despairs for his life, there’s only one person — or supernatural being — she can turn to. She lays him before the altar of Our Lady of Atocha. The boy’s clothes are removed, and no one can find a spider bite, but they do find an intact head of wheat coming out the boy’s side. The boy recovers immediately. Everyone gives praise to the Virgin Mary for such a beautiful miracle.

The Cantigas de Santa Maria tell of the wonders of the Virgin Mary in a way that still makes people marvel.

Alfonso X of Castile and León is called el Sabio because he loved learning. He made it possible for a team of scholars to record the latest scientific advances for future generations. He carried this compulsion for compilation through to the Cantigas, which are a collection of nearly 400 songs with words, music, and illustrations.

Many of the miracles involve a dramatic recovery, as in Cantiga 315 above, or theatrical leaps of faith, as in the story about the good wife whose husband was so jealous of her that he mistreated her terribly. She asks him if he would believe she’s faithful to him if she underwent a trial by fire. He responds that he doesn’t think that’s necessary, but she can jump off a cliff! If she comes out alive, that will be proof of her fidelity. The woman comes to the edge of the highest, scariest cliff for miles around.

She commends herself to the Virgin Mary and throws herself over. With the entire town as witness, she lands feet first on ground that seems soft and smooth to her, although for non-believers, it would have been rocky — and deadly.

In the style of a rosary, the Cantigas punctuate the miracle stories with songs in praise of the Virgin Mary’s own wondrous nature at every tenth cantiga.

Even these most spiritual of the Cantigas display a down-to-earth quality. One of Alfonso’s main objectives with these songs was to show how wonder could reach absolutely everyone in his realm through Mary, from the poor lady in the wheat field, through nobles, sheriffs, monks, nuns, and warriors, to the king himself. Because they so accurately portray real life, the Cantigas don’t limit Alfonso’s realm to people, but also include the animals that cohabited with his subjects, such as horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, ermines, and silk worms!

A woman who makes her living with silk has trouble: her silk worms are dying. She goes to the Virgin Mary’s altar and promises that if Mary revives her silk worms, she will make an altar cloth to honor the Queen of Heaven. Soon enough, the silk worms are hard at work again, but the woman forgets her promise — until, one day, she comes home to find that the worms have taken her promise upon themselves. They make not one, but two altar cloths, and in the illustrations we see the added miracle that they already have a beautiful lacy design. The fame of the miracle spreads, and since there are two of them, King Alfonso takes one for his own altar to the Virgin Mary.

Most of the lower-numbered cantigas take stories from all over Europe’s Marian repertoire, but as the king’s demand for more and more miracles increased (the goal may have been 500), the poets searched closer to home and in more recent history. As Cantiga 18 shows, some feature Alfonso himself, and 22 take place during the reconstruction of El Puerto de Santa María in the south, one of the king’s pet projects.

Cantiga 371 tells how a large ship headed for El Puerto was laden with flour and people. Some of them were coming for the land grants, some to work as masons, some to form part of the new religious community. El Puerto’s fame was already widespread, as the refrain reports: “Holy Mary performs so many miracles in her Port that we poets can’t describe the least part of them.”

Unfortunately, the ship in this cantiga hits a rock and sinks, killing everyone on board except one woman. She cries out to the Virgin, “I’m coming to you, so save my life with your great power.” In that instant, one of the sacks of flour emerges from the ship, and even though it’s heavy, it floats as if it were very light. The woman floats along atop it, calling, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, Emmanuel,” until she arrives at El Puerto to be welcomed by the residents.

Not all the miracles are so outwardly spectacular. In one of my favorites, the miracle consists of a violent, lustful knight deciding to change his ways.

As you can see in the illustrations, he’s already got an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. The Virgin Mary appears to him with a beautiful silver platter filled with rotten food — a metaphor for the knight’s outward loveliness and evil interior. He gets the message loud and clear. Even though the knight’s life is never threatened in this cantiga, his soul is in danger of eternal damnation, which, to medieval thinking, is the most dramatic story of all.

It’s said that the Cantigas were the king’s favorite project, as they incurred the most labor, expense, and time. The compilation may have begun before Alfonso ascended to the throne in 1252 and ended only upon his death in 1284. In his will, Alfonso instructed that the Cantigas manuscripts should be kept in the chapel where he was buried (in the cathedral in Sevilla) and sung on high feast days. None of the four extant manuscripts reside there now: an early draft without illustrations known as To is in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid; King Felipe II had three deluxe manuscripts (including E and T) removed to the Escorial in the sixteenth century; and somehow one of those deluxe manuscripts (F) came to be at the Italian National Library in Florence today.

The Cantigas de Santa Maria deal with people’s interior lives as well as the most unexpected details of their exterior lives, and include everyone from every social class, from Spain to Europe to Northern Africa and the Middle East. Some of these songs are masterpieces of lyricism, others are solid narratives from a time before short stories existed, and still others take humor to new heights. Each of the thousands of illustrations offers delights to appreciate from any point of view. They constitute the largest collection of medieval music ever amassed and contain every imaginable Western musical style.

In their time, the Cantigas celebrated marvels and wonders, and today they have become a marvel in themselves because of the sense of wonder they convey in greater measure as time goes on. 

You can now experience ten of the Cantigas de Santa Maria in a fun new way in J. K. Knauss's Our Lady's Troubadour. 

Jessica Knauss earned her PhD in Medieval Spanish with a dissertation on the portrayal of Alfonso X’s laws in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, which has been published as the five-star-rated Law and Order in Medieval Spain. A driven fiction writer, Jessica Knauss has edited many fine historical novels and is currently a bilingual copyeditor at an educational publisher. Find out more about her historical novel, Seven Noble Knights, and her other writing and bookish activities here. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter, too!

HEA or Not: Urraca of León-Castile and Alfonso I of Aragón

By Jessica Knauss

A Marriage That Sparked Rebellion, Sieges, and Battles

She was the Queen of Castile. He was the King of Aragón. Their marriage could unite two dynasties and create the most powerful kingdom in Western Europe…

You might think I’m referring to the 1479 union of Isabel and Fernando, the Reyes Católicos, one of the most successful monarchical couples in history (and profiled beautifully here). But this Queen of Castile and King of Aragón were married 370 years before Isabel and Fernando. The marriage of Urraca of León and Castile and Alfonso I of Aragón was an experiment in nation-building that failed miserably, perhaps to pave the way for the later success of the Reyes Católicos.

Statue of Urraca in the Parque del Buen Retiro
(Photo by Jessica Knauss)

Before this explosive marriage, Urraca had already been a child bride, given birth to the boy who would be Alfonso VII, and become Queen of León and Castile. She married her first husband at the age of eight. Historical evidence suggests that the marriage was consummated when she was all of thirteen. She had no time for naïveté, and by the time her first husband died and she was on the marriage market again, she was 26 and ready to assert all the command granted by her position. In Aragón, women were not allowed to become queen, but in Castile, Urraca had always known ultimate earthly power as her birthright. Regardless, her authority became jeopardized during the life of her father, who named her brother his heir and opened up the possibility of his illegitimate children, including his daughter Teresa, sharing the fractured kingdom with the legitimate ones. Her father unwittingly trained Urraca in strategy and the willingness to fight for her rights.

Statue of Alfonso I of Aragón in Zaragoza
(WikiMedia Commons)

Alfonso I of Aragón, known as “the Warrior,” proved the validity of his nickname in battle and also in this marriage. He was well over 30 when the nuptial negotiations began and had been the King of Aragon for five years when the wedding took place. His agenda revolved around the taking and keeping of cities and power, occupations in which women did not play a role. Alfonso’s inured bachelor ways left him unprepared for Urraca’s refusal to play a subordinate role to his imperial ambitions.

The fireworks began when Urraca’s father came up with the mere idea of getting Urraca and Alfonso I together. In spite of the obvious advantages such a union would have against the Almoravid threat from the south, many local nobles feared the eastward shift in power. They were also anxious to unite their own families with the Castilian royal line. The marriage negotiations, which took place over the protests of Castilian and French nobles in addition to Urraca herself, became protracted beyond the death of Urraca’s father. Once Urraca was Queen, any new marriage could disenfranchise her ability to assure her children’s inheritance. Pure enjoyment of the privileges of widowhood may have been her chief reservation about Alfonso I.

Swayed by a sense of duty to her father’s wishes, Urraca married Alfonso in 1109 at the castle of Monzón de Campos. Alfonso wasted no time in titling himself Emperor of Spain and naming his Aragonese nobles to high positions all over the Christian part of the Iberian Peninsula. The Galician nobles declared a rebellion when they insisted Urraca’s son was the rightful inheritor to their kingdom. Alfonso responded with military action and established control against Galician troops at Monterroso Castle in 1110.

This military action was only a prelude to the unrest and all-out civil war the marriage would provoke for the next few years. It seems that Urraca and Alfonso had an explosive case of negative chemistry. Two factions developed at court, each one in support of one spouse against the other. Urraca quickly achieved an annulment from Pope Paschal II on the basis that she and Alfonso were second cousins. She also cited abuses, tyranny, removing bishops from their dioceses and planning the death of her son. Urraca had already put some geographical distance between herself and Alfonso, but he refused to accept the annulment. When he learned that she had been carrying on an affair with Gómez González, an important count at her court, Alfonso had Urraca imprisoned and used all his military might to take over as many cities that supported her as he could, deposing more bishops and archbishops as he went.

Urraca as Queen
(WikiMedia Commons)

Gómez González, with the help of the Queen’s supporters, freed her from Alfonso’s prison and took her to Candespina, where they thought she would be safe. Alfonso could not allow such an affront to his power. In October 1111, with support from Urraca’s illegitimate half-sister Teresa, he won the Battle of Candespina, which Gómez González did not survive.

The emotional blow of losing her lover did no harm to Urraca’s strategic thinking. Teresa attempted to use the victory as a bargaining chip, but Urraca hated her more than she hated Alfonso. She agreed to reconcile with her husband as long as he forced Teresa to stay within her own lands in Galicia.

With disregard for Alfonso’s wishes, Urraca then proceeded to proclaim her son from her first marriage King of Galicia. The entire year of 1112 was a succession of confrontation and reconciliation in words and deeds, including the battles of Astorga and Carrión de los Condes. In 1113, the Queen besieged Burgos, the most Castilian of cities. Although his military prowess could have won the city for Alfonso, he understood that with only the support of his Aragonese and Navarrese nobles, he wouldn’t be able to make this empire work in any practical way. He finally accepted the annulment in 1114, making it official at a council in Palencia and returning to Aragón.

Urraca's royal signature

Urraca never married again, preferring to keep the company of powerful men without being under their thumbs. The union of Castile and Aragón would have to wait for a different kind of spark.

The definitive work in English about Urraca’s reign is Bernard F. Reilly’s The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126.

A driven fiction writer, Jessica Knauss has edited many fine historical novels. Find out more about her historical novel, Seven Noble Knights, and her other writing and bookish activities here. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter, too!

HEA or Not: The Nation Builders, Fernando of Aragón and Isabel of Castile

By Lisa J. Yarde

Queen Isabel's portrait at Segovia's Alcazar

On October 18, 1469 at Valladolid in the northern Iberian Peninsula, a wedding occurred. By all accounts, the bride was a fair-faced beauty at almost nineteen with reddish-gold hair, who had earned the admiration of many for her appearance and religious piety. Most judged the groom, just under a year younger, as equally attractive, chivalrous, and intelligent. Bride and groom shared proud bloodlines dating from the 14th century Duke of Lancaster John of Gaunt, a younger brother of Edward, the Black Prince. Of all who might have thought the couple well-suited, the bride perhaps held the highest hopes for the union with her would-be husband. Suitors had come and gone from Portugal and France, most of them disagreeable in her view for their avarice and dubious intentions. Fernando, the son of John II of Aragón would inherit the second largest kingdom in the peninsula and already held Sicily in his own right. For Isabel, a princess of Castile who had emerged in recent years as the presumed heir to her brother Enrique IV, no one but Fernando would do as a choice for her husband.

Sounds like a fairytale match destined to end happily ever after, but pragmatism governed decisions in the marriage between Fernando of Aragón and Isabel of Castile. In the Pact of the Toros de Guisando negotiated a year before the union, Enrique IV withdrew his long-held declaration that his daughter the Infanta Juana (whom many believed to be the child of another man) would be Castile's heir. With his queen in disgrace, pregnant by another man, and his younger half-brother the Infante Alfonso dead of a sudden illness, Isabel emerged as the best candidate in the succession. The Pact required her marriage, but she rejected her brother's choice and selected Fernando. He traveled to Castile under escort while Isabel wrote her brother of her intent to marry, despite his personal opposition to the interference of Aragón in Castile's political future. Isabel and Fernando met at Valladolid. They had a prenuptial agreement requiring each to support the other in the defense of their individual realms, but the terms made it clear; Isabel expected to remain in control of Castile without her husband's meddling. A fake dispensation from the papal court alleviated claims that their blood ties should prevent the marriage, a situation Isabel abhorred and ensured she had rectified some years later by a real papal bull issued from Pope Sixtus IV.

Painting of Isabel's crowning

Since the union occurred without the approval of Enrique IV, he judged the terms of the Pact as voided and refused to uphold Isabel's rights to succession. Instability followed, which even the death of Enrique IV on December 11, 1474, did not resolve. When her brother's demise occurred, Isabella was in Segovia and rushed to claim the throne of Castile. Back in Aragón, Fernando heard the news and returned to assert his right as king; since he and his wife had independent interests, he might have held some concern over Isabel's failure to wait to claim her rights through her husband. The Portuguese monarch backed the claim of Isabel's niece Juana (who was also his niece through her mother), whom he married. Another five years would pass before Pope Sixtus IV annulled Juana's marriage to her maternal uncle and invalidated her claim to Castile.

Isabel and Fernando had five daughters and one son. During this time, she also endured her husband's adulterous behavior, the proof being children born in subsequent years after their wedding. Fernando named his illegitimate son an archbishop. Despite these affairs, the mutual interests of Isabel and Fernando prevailed. They established the Inquisition to root out so-called heretics, rid the country of its last Moorish rulers, and maintained a highly effective rule over their respective kingdoms. While their son died before his parents, their daughter Juana inherited the unified crowns of Castile and Aragón.            

Fernando and Isabel's relationship as dramatized in the Spanish TV series, Isabel

Sources
History of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, volume 1, by William Hickling Prescott

Spain: the Root and the Flower by John A. Crow

A History of Medieval Spain by Joseph O'Callaghan

Spain's Centuries of Crisis: 1300-1474 by Teofilo F. Ruiz 

All images are mine, taken during visits to Spain.

Lisa J. Yarde writes fiction inspired by the Middle Ages in Europe. She is the author of two historical novels set in medieval England and Normandy, The Burning Candle, based on the life of one of the first countesses of Leicester and Surrey, Isabel de Vermandois, and On Falcon's Wings, chronicling the star-crossed romance between Norman and Saxon lovers before the Battle of Hastings. Lisa has also written four novels in a six-part series set in Moorish Spain, Sultana, Sultana’s Legacy, Sultana: Two Sisters, and Sultana: The Bride Price where rivalries and ambitions threaten the fragile bonds between members of a powerful family. Her short story, The Legend Rises, which chronicles the Welsh princess Gwenllian of Gwynedd’s valiant fight against English invaders, is also available.

June 1, 1252: Retracing a Day in the Life of Alfonso X el Sabio

Alfonso X in the monument in Plaza Nueva, Sevilla

Today Sevilla, Spain, is the capital of Andalusia. It exudes Baroque splendor at the same time that it shows off the latest technology. In this post, however, let me take you on a tour through the small nucleus of the city and imagine what it was like on one specific day during the reign of King Alfonso X. Alfonso's father, Fernando III, took Sevilla from the Moorish taifa king in 1248, only four years before our day. It quickly became Alfonso's favorite city and he spent nearly half his reign here, in spite of frequent, extensive travels for matters of court and politics.

The remains of the Moorish baths that were extant in Alfonso's time now house
an Italian restaurant. www.sanmarco.es

Just beyond the cathedral, nestled up close to the royal palace for protection and a short commute to the king's side, Sevilla's Jewish quarter keeps its secrets in a maze of narrow streets. Today's judería is largely a nineteenth-century reconstruction, but it preserves the idea of what it must have been like to walk around Sevilla in the thirteenth century as well as at least one authentic bit of history: the archways of a Moorish bath. While these baths served the community at large in the thirteenth century, Alfonso X and his household probably used a bath within the royal palace walls on a daily basis. On June 1, 1252, Alfonso probably took great care in his morning grooming routine, calling on all the available attendants and slaves.

Only the lower three quarters of the Giralda
bell tower existed in 1252.

Behind him, the best lineage and upbringing as well as training in politics and war. Ahead, spectacular achievements in the arts and sciences, the disappointing pursuit of his candidacy for Holy Roman Emperor, strife, and much more war. But on June 1, 1252, Alfonso X, whom history calls "el Sabio" (the Learned), was crowned King of Castile at thirty years old. Reasonably experienced at that age, but also not too old, the new king might have been a little nervous, but also secure in his destiny and obligation when the decree rang out at the cathedral in Sevilla.

The current cathedral in Sevilla is an enormous gothic masterpiece, started some 200 years after Alfonso's coronation. The cathedral in Alfonso's time would have been architecturally a mosque, hastily reconsecrated to the Christian faith. The minaret would subsequently be redesigned as a bell tower, but even today it preserves the wide ramps visitors can climb to stand under the bells and look out over the city. Originally, these interior ramps were intended to accommodate a muezzin, who would ascend to the highest point in Andalusia on horseback to perform the call to prayer.

Fernando III as depicted in a 17th-century sculpture
in the Sevilla cathedral treasury

Fernando III's conquests and his ability to unite the kingdoms of Castile and León made him so well loved that he became a serious candidate for sainthood just after his death on May 30, 1252. Alfonso, the heir to that legacy of consolidating the Iberian peninsula under Christian power, had a lot to live up to.

With the city mourning the beloved king, and with the pragmatism that usually dominates Castilian politics, the coronation was probably not an elaborate affair. No descriptions have come down to us, but it likely took place in the morning hours and involved Alfonso's oath, a bishop placing the ceremonial crown upon Alfonso's head, and oaths of fealty from the many noble vassals present. Alfonso's biographer Ballesteros Beretta imagines that the spectators then lifted Alfonso on their shoulders and paraded him around the cathedral square. Did he look down and see the faces of the nobles who would revolt against him, or the brother who would conspire against the crown? Perhaps he looked into the bright sky of Sevilla and glimpsed the Virgin Mary smiling on him. The cult of Mary would be Alfonso's lifelong devotion.

After a bit of a welcome to his new role, it's likely King Alfonso had to head straight back to the royal palace to work on matters of state. Like the cathedral, the royal palace in Sevilla was adapted from a beautiful complex constructed by the previous Muslim rulers. Only one salon and one garden area survive from the original building. Although splendid, they are now dwarfed by the labyrinthine layout and opulence of the mudéjar-style palace constructed for Pedro the Cruel in the fourteenth century.

The gothic sections of the palace were constructed beginning in 1254. New crossed archways hold the ceilings up elegantly in this small chapel and two other state rooms. In 1535, Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V had the gothic rooms covered with painted tiles and tapestries commemorating the conquest of Tunis. Alfonso would have slept and toiled in the original buildings while the gothic salons were constructed and moved his business to the area that would most impress a specific visitor once all was complete.

At the end of a terribly busy and emotional June 1, 1252, Alfonso would have climbed into a bed supported on ropes and furnished with the softest ticking, the finest sheets, and the most luxurious pillows. Although most historians have tried to paint an unhappy picture of his marriage, the person most likely sleeping next to Alfonso was his consort, now Queen Violante. She would bear ten children who survived into adulthood. She would also become embroiled in the battles of royal succession that took place upon the death of her firstborn son. But on June 1, 1252, Violante assumed her new role with quiet dignity and stood by her husband in the cathedral, the square, and the palace.

A driven fiction writer, Jessica Knauss is also a freelance editor, a translator, and a founding partner and editor at Loose Leaves Publishing. Find out more about her writing and bookish activities here. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter, too! She took five of the photos in this post in 2009 and can't wait to go back to Spain. 

Her tribute to Alfonso X's contribution to world culture, Our Lady's Troubadour, lets you experience the Cantigas de Santa Maria in a fun new way!