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Alfonso VII of Castile
Alfonso VII of Castile (March 1, 1104/5 - August 21, 1157) , nicknamed the Emperor, was the king of Castile and Leon since 1126, son of Urraca of Castile[?] and Count Raymond (the third?) of Burgundy.
He is a dignified and somewhat enigmatical figure. A vague
tradition had always assigned the title of emperor to the
sovereign who held Leon as the most direct representative
of the Visigoth kings, who were themselves the representatives
of the Roman empire. But though given in charters, and claimed
by Alfonso VI of Castile and Alfonso of Aragon the Battler,
the title had been little more than a flourish of rhetoric.
Alfonso VII was crowned emperor in 1155 after the death of
the Battler. The weakness of Aragon enabled him to make his
superiority effective. He appears to have striven for the
formation of a national unity, which Spain had never possessed
since the fall of the Visigoth kingdom. The elements he had to
deal with could not be welded together.
Alfonso was at once a patron of the church, and a protector if
not a favourer of the Muslims, who formed a large part of his subjects.
His reign ended in an unsuccessful campaign against the rising power of the
Almohades. Though he was not actually defeated, his death
in the pass of Muradel in the Sierra Morena, while on his
way back to Toledo, occurred in circumstances which showed
that no man could be what he claimed to be---"king of the
men of the two religions." His personal character does not
stand out with the emphasis of those of Alfonso VI. or the
Battler. Yet he was a great king, the type and to some extent
the victim of the confusions of his age--Christian in creed
and ambition, but more than half oriental in his household.
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