Alfonso I

(Alfonso Henriques), 1109?-85, first king of Portugal 1139-85.

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▪ duke of Ferrara, 1505-34

born July 21, 1476, Ferrara, Duchy of Ferrara

died Oct. 31, 1534, Ferrara

      duke of Ferrara from 1505, a noted Renaissance prince of the House of Este, an engineer and patron of the arts.

      Alfonso succeeded to the duchy at the death of his father, Ercole I. He employed the poet Ludovico Ariosto and the painters Titian and Giovanni Bellini, and made Ferrara's artillery the best in Italy. In the political sphere, Alfonso maintained Ferrara against the expanding power of the papacy by allying himself with France. Lucrezia Borgia (Borgia, Lucrezia), whom he married in 1501, bore him seven children.

▪ king of Aragon and Navarre

byname  Alfonso The Battler,  Spanish  Alfonso El Batallador 

born c. 1073

died September 1134

      king of Aragon and of Navarre from 1104 to 1134.

      Alfonso was the son of Sancho V Ramírez. He was persuaded by Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile to marry the latter's heiress, Urraca, widow of Raymond of Burgundy. In consequence, when Alfonso VI died (1109) the four Christian kingdoms were nominally united and Alfonso I took his father-in-law's imperial title. The union failed, however, because Leon and Castile felt hostility toward an Aragonese emperor; because Urraca disliked her second husband; and because Bernard, the French Cluniac archbishop of Toledo, wanted to see his protégé, Alfonso Ramírez (infant son of Urraca and her Burgundian first husband), on the imperial throne. At Bernard's prompting, the Pope declared the Aragonese marriage void, but Alfonso continued to be involved in civil strife in the central kingdom until he eventually gave up his claims in favour of his stepson after the death of Urraca (1126). Despite these embroilments, he achieved spectacular victories against the Moors, capturing Saragossa (Zaragoza) in 1118 and leading a spectacular military raid far into southern Andalusia in 1125. In his campaigns he received much help from the rulers of the counties north of the Pyrenees, resulting in the involvement of Aragon in the affairs of southern France. Alfonso was fatally wounded in battle at Fraga in 1134. Deeply religious, he bequeathed his kingdom to the Templars and the Hospitallers, but his former subjects refused to accept the donation, and the kingdoms eventually came under the control of the counts of Barcelona.

▪ king of Asturias

byname  Alfonso The Catholic,  Spanish  Alfonso El Católico 

born 693?

died 757, Cangas, Galicia

      king of Asturias from 739 to 757, probably the son-in-law of the first Asturian king, Pelayo. The rebellion of the Berber garrisons in Islāmic Spain (741) and the civil strife there that followed gave him the opportunity to incorporate Galicia into his kingdom. He also campaigned far to the south of the Asturian mountains, but lack of manpower made it impossible to exert permanent control on the plains and, in his time, a wide, largely uninhabited no-man's-land came into being between Asturias and the settled territories of the emirate of Córdoba.

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