Talk:Blanca of Navarre (daughter of Garcia VI)

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This is an useless article. All that information deals with her husband Sancho III of Castile, thus it would be sufficient that she is mentioned in his article. There is no independent content here. We do not need this sort of repetition, useless articles. 217.140.193.123 22:00, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] name

Was she really the first of name Blanca into the W.Eur culture, so that her parents, when naming her, are originators - a later well spread innovation??? 217.140.193.123 09:20, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Royal Maternal Mortality

217.140.193.123 voices the opinion that this person is "insignificant", and thus she may not "wikipedia-worthy". I beg to differ:

• This person represents a royal maternal mortality. A death of a queen in childbirth is a historically remarkable event (somebody once compared this to the death of a king or general in battle). Other queens are listed among the famous women who died in childbirth, - not many.

we do not make "representations". royal maternal mortality being important, it will be explained in article about it - as phenomenon, as concept. using examples there. royal maternal mortality is not properly presented in this encyclopedia if its presentation is in an article of a person. 217.140.193.123 13:58, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• It was her task to secure the lineage and she paid the ultimate price for it. And what a lineage it is. It does not appear that her family forgot her, and possibly her son Alfonso already kept her memory alive by naming his daughter after her, a future queen of France. 217.140.193.123 seems to wonder about this legacy himself.

if someone is important to her family, it does not mean she is important to public. do you write an article of your mother here, bona fide?

the next to carry the same forename was her brother's daughter Blanca of Navarre who was immensely more important. Not her own daughter... Knowing the customs of medieval lord families, the name was a "family heirloom", and its recurrence does not mean a particular remembrance of one of holders. Alfonso VIII had a bunch of daughters, so of course they were almost compelled to use all the names in family use. Remember that Blanche was only the third daughter - it says that there were two other names with priority in "keeping memory alive" if that was the intention.

Lineage was basically her husband's. She did not bring succession to any country to her lineage, which is the usual reason we make an article about a royal who did not rule. Of course I am aware that there are some sycophants here who write articles about all royal persons, making wikipedia a genealogy site rather than an encyclopedia.217.140.193.123 13:58, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• There is a significant piece of art directly linked to her death.

I have got the impression that her husband paid it, thus he was responsible for its creation, not the dead woman. that point actually argues that this goes to husband's article. 217.140.193.123 13:58, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• There is an unresolved mystery about her death. While the evidence indicates it to be related to childbirth, it is unclear if it is caused by the birth of her son or a later pregnancy.

less interesting. if such "important" quandary deserves analysis here, it fits to the husband's article. or do you think that the child(ren) were not his? 217.140.193.123 13:58, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• The information deals with her, she died, and this woman needs not to be defined by her husband; -that would be a paternalistic view.

Ekem 14:00, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

here it came: the feministic argument. "she was a person - although the customs of the era delegated her to secondary role and although she did not do anything worthwhile, she deserves full equality with her husband." I think that if the article remains, it shows how stupid are feminists' attempts to rewrite history - a reader sees how empty the article is.

For me this is important question: do we allow all sorts of sycophantic articles, made by royal-romantics, to litter the encyclopedia 217.140.193.123 13:58, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Not a queen?

Was her husband mistaken when he wrote about:"..my wife, the venerable Queen Blanca, whom I had buried in the church of Najera"? The sarcophagus carries her title: "Regina". Sancho was also referred to as king before the official coronation. Ekem 18:46, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

According to your writings, she died in 1156 (as also say certain other sources), whereas history knows that Sancho III became king only in 1157. Perhaps you are able to do the calculations. 217.140.193.123 20:33, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I am just going by the evidence: 1. Her husband, Sancho III, says she was a queen. 2. See Valdez del Alamo: "The two reigned briefly as king and queen of Castile, so designated by Sancho's father, Alfonso VII, emperor of Castile and Leon. With her husband, Blanca confirmed royal documents, a traditional role for Spanish queens,...", with further references. 3. Sancho's coronation was in 1157. You seem to imply that kingship is only possible after the ceremony. Ekem 28 June 2005 12:07 (UTC)

The question is not resolved by coronation ceremony, you are mistakes in that idea. Whether she was really a queen, depends on whether her husband became king in her lifetime. Kings USUALLY succeed on the death of the predecessor. Alfonso VII, father and predecessor of Sancho III, died in 1157. At that point, Sancho became the king. The situation before that was apparently such that Alfonso gave a province for training to Sancho, to learn things how to rule. We tend to classify such as "governors". Please see the years of change of king in List of Castilian monarchs. And, your sorce is somewhat loose with titles, as Alfonso's emperorship was far from recognized, see Alfonso VII of Castile.

• However, in some cases, medieval father crowned the son already in the father's lifetime, which gives a justification to regard the son a sort of king ("young king") from that event. We tend to classify such "young kings" as crown princes in today's terminology. For contemporaries, they appeared a sort of kings, as they already had the title.
• If you are saying that Sancho was not crowned before 1157, then that possibility excludes Blanca, since she died before that year. Are you trying to allow a young king in the father's lifetime without even a coronation? If so, what is the event which made Sancho king before Alfonso's death (not only crown prince). 217.140.193.123 28 June 2005 19:24 (UTC)

It looks to me that Alfonso was crowned "emperor" and subdivided his empire into two kingdoms during his lifetime. Thus Sancho and Blanca understood themselves to be "king" and "queen" during his lifetime already, and apparently performed royal functions. This would explain Sancho referring to his wife as "queen". Now, of course, you could come and argue he is not a king because Alfonso is still around, and Castile is just a province and Sancho is kind of a crown prince or governor, but that was not their understanding and appears to be a later, post hoc interpretation. (I tried to confirm that Sancho underwent a coronation procedure, but find no documentation for it, neither in 1157 (Alfono's death) (-as I surmised-), nor before, and I am not saying it did not happen. So, the support for his kingship prior to Alfonso's death is provided by Valdez del Alamo.) Ekem 30 June 2005 20:35 (UTC)

If Sancho used the title of king already in Blanca's lifetime (which has yet no confirmation, only speculation), then that "king" is not king in the sense used in Wikipedia. To maintain comprehensibility here, we call persons kings if they actually reigned sovereign. Otherwise, there would be King Victor Emmanuel IV of Italy, Empress Maria Vladimirovna of Russia, and between 1650-60 Charles II of England were the King, etc. In such cases as you now have presented (or speculated) for Sancho and Blanca, it may be mentioned in the text of the article that they were "styled" as king and queen, when Sancho acted as his father's governor of Castile.
Re Wiki-worthiness, would you in bona fide deem an article about Victor Emmanuel IV of Italy's wife worthwhile here, provided she had never herself did anything encyclopedic. 217.140.193.123 1 July 2005 07:38 (UTC)

You are creating a false analogy. Pretenders have been deprived of all authority which would adhere to their supposed titles. Co-kings are a different matter, and there does not appear to be a fixed rule regarding them (nor am I convinced we should promulgate one). Henry the Young King is not numbered among the Kings of England (which adheres to standard historical practice); Henry (VII) of Germany is only parenthetically included among the German Kings; Roger III of Sicily is included in the numbering scheme for the Kings of Sicily. As regards evidence for the kingship, Valdez del Alamo reports that Sancho's father granted his son the Kingship of Castile, and that the couple exercised authority at least insofar as they were sealing documents. The sensible thing to do would be to call her "Queen of Castile", but refer to Sancho as a co-king, which alerts the reader to this situation and allows him to read further about the nature of Sancho's reign if he so chooses. This calls the attention of the reader to it early in the article, but has the advantages of:

1. Being concise. A long digression on her status to open the article is rather awkward; and as she was a consort rather than a ruler per se, it's not as important to make the distinction immediately as it is for her husband.
2. Being correct. Calling her "Crown Princess" is, technically speaking, a falsehood, and misleads people into thinking that it was a title used at that time in Castile. Respecting her contemporary title solves this problem.

As for unimportance, Valdez del Alamo's article reports that "Other historians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries swore devotion to the young queen in their writings, probably because she was viewed as a significant maternal figure in Spanish history." Even if her achievements of themselves were not particularly notable, she clearly has her own place in history. Choess July 1, 2005 09:02 (UTC)