Fortún Garcés Cajal

The ruins of the old castle (castillo mayor) of Daroca, which Fortún governed for a time

Fortún Garcés Cajal[lower-alpha 1] was an Navarro-Aragonese nobleman and statesman, perhaps "the greatest noble of Alfonso the Battler's reign".[1] In 1113 Fortún replaced Diego López I de Haro in the large and important tenancy of Nájera and Viguera.[2][3] He held it until 1135. After the death of Alfonso the Battler in 1134, Fortún became a vassal of King Alfonso VII of Castile.[4]

Fortún received from Alfonso grants of both property and lordship over Daroca and Tudela.[1] In 1127 Fortún and his wife Toda[lower-alpha 2] bought various properties around Tudela from some Muslims. In 1130/1 the couple purchased property at a place called Uli in interior Navarre. Their property transactions have left an extensive written record. "[T]heir holdings were scattered throughout the Ebro River Valley and also located in the interior of Navarre."[1]

A royal charter of Alfonso the Battler drawn up at Briviesca on 10 October 1129 names Fortún as holding Briviesca as a fief (tenencia). Another charter, this time a private one from the abbey of San Salvador de Oña, dating to November of that same year, recognises the lordship of Rodrigo Gómez, a partisan of Alfonso VII of Castile, over Briviesca. These two charters indicate the contested nature of the frontier district of the Bureba. At a local level the king of Castile's man was recognised and active as tenant, but when the king of Aragon was present, his choice of tenant, in this case his most powerful magnate, was enforced.[5]

At Gronium, a ford of the Ebro two kilometres from Munilla, Fortún founded a bridge with a hospital and a church dedicated to Saint John around 1120.[6] This foundation served the pilgrims along the Way of Saint James. By his will Fortún "divided his honour between his nephews", Fortún Íñiguez and Sancho Íñiguez, respective lords of Grañón and Belorado.[7]

In 1133, Fortún and Toda made a donation the Cluniac monastery of Santa María de Nájera and its prior, Peter. It consisted in a proprietary church dedicated to San Adrián and a heritable estate (heredad) at Vadoluengo, another church and heredad at Sangüesa, two heredades at Aibar and, most valuable of all, a grove (soto) at Alcatén, in territory that had recently been conquered from the Muslims. Fortún and Toda maintained lifetime rights (vitalicia) over the properties, and probably intended that they should form the basis of a new Cluniac dependency after his death.[8]

Late in 1133, while campaigning with Alfonso the Battler against Mequinenza, García Cajal, Fortún's son, was killed in battle.[8]

Alfonso the Battler died on 7 September 1134, and Aragon and Navarre separated. The Navarrese chose as their king García Ramírez, lord of Monzón, while the Aragonese chose Alfonso's younger brother, Ramiro II. During his short reign (1134–37), Fortún was Ramiro's closest and most influential counsellor.[8] In January 1135 he helped negotiate the Pact of Vadoluengo with Navarre, which gave Aragon suzerainty over it and defined the border.[9]

The events of 1134–35 left Fortún's lands and tenancies spread across three kingdoms. At Nájera in May 1135, Alfonso VII made a large gift to Fortún in the presence of the leading regional nobility.[4] In mid-1136, while traversing Navarre to negotiate with Alfonso VII an anti-Navarrese alliance, he was captured by agents of King García. In order to raise the cash for his ransom, he had to sell numerous properties in both Aragon and Navarre to the wealthy monastery of San Salvador de Leire. The lands previously granted to the monastery of Nájera were exempted from sale by order of King Ramiro, but in fact the estates at Aibar and Alcatén were taken over by Leire at this time. Fortún, reduced in wealth and status, regained his freedom in 1137.[8]

After his liberation, Fortún set about redeeming some of his properties from Leire. In the same year (1137), he and Toda made a donation to their chaplain, a Frenchman named Peter, probably a Cluniac monk. The donation—a manor house (palacio) and heritable estate in the Burgo Nuevo of Sangüesa—were supposed to be the kernel of a new monastery that would make intercession with God on behalf of Fortún, his wife and late son and the late kings Peter I (1094–1104) and Alfonso, whom Fortún calls his relatives (parentes).[8]

Fortún was succeeded at Nájera, sometime before 1139, by his predecessor's son, Count Lope Díaz de Haro.[10]

In 1141, Fortún and Toda altered their plans to establish a Cluniac subpriory at Vadoluengo under Nájera. Enlisting the aid of Sancho de Larrosa, bishop of Pamplona, who re-consecrated San Adrián as a Cluniac priory, they donated both the church and the heredad at Vadoluengo to the mother church of Cluny, turning it into a priory directly under the mother abbey. They also donated the manor and heredad at Sangüesa, previously granted to their chaplain, to Cluny at this time. Together these lands formed the church and temporal endowment (abadengo) of a new Cluniac foundation, San Adrián de Sangüesa.[lower-alpha 3] Cluniac monks moved into their new priory on the day it was consecrated. Although Fortún's original intention in 1133 had been to establish the first Cluniac house in Aragon, boundary changes in the interim had turned his foundation into the first Navarrese priory.[lower-alpha 4] It is possible that Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny, visited his new daughter house of San Adrián during his trip through Spain in 1142.[8]

By 1145, Fortún's wife had died and Sancho de Larrosa had been succeeded by Lope de Artajona as bishop of Pamplona. In that year, through the "intervention and authority" (interuentus et auctoritas) of Bishop Lope, Fortún repeated his donation of 1141 in the presence of Abbots John of San Juan de la Peña (Aragon), Peter of Leire (Navarre) and Peter of Santa María de Irache (Navarre). This second donation was designed to remove any uncertainty over the validity of that of 1141.[8]

Notes

  1. ↑ His Christian name may also be spelled Fortunio; his patronymic García; and his nickname Caixal or Caxal.
  2. ↑ Also spelled Tota.
  3. ↑ Sometimes erroneously known as San Adrián de Zaragoza.
  4. ↑ There was already a Nájeran subpriory in Navarre: San Jorge de Azuelo at Berrueza.
  1. 1 2 3 William C. Stalls, "The Written Word in the Aragonese Reconquista", Anuario de Estudios Medievales 22 (1992), 13.
  2. ↑ Carlos Estepa Díez, "Frontera, nobleza y señoríos en Castilla: el señorío de Molina (siglos XII–XIII)", Studia historica: Historia medieval 24 (2006), 21 n. 30.
  3. ↑ Luis Javier Fortún Pérez de Ciriza, "La quiebra de la soberanía navarra en Alava, Guipúzcoa y el Duranguesado (1199–1200)" Revista internacional de los estudios vascos 45:2 (2000), 441.
  4. 1 2 Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla Under King Alfonso VII, 1126–1157 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 49.
  5. ↑ Estepa Díez (2006), 24 nn. 45 and 47.
  6. ↑ José G. Moya Valgañón, "El trazado del camino de Santiago en la Rioja: aspectos de planeamiento y construcción", Semana de Estudios Medievales de Nájera (Nájera, 1993), IV, 106.
  7. ↑ Estepa Díez (2006), 22 n. 39: diuisit suum honorem suis nepotibus.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Charles Julian Bishko, "Peter the Venerable's Traverse of Spain: Some Further Observations" Spanish and Portuguese Monastic History, 600–1300 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), 1–13, at 11–12.
  9. ↑ Federico Balaguer Sánchez, "La ciudad de Barbastro y las negociaciones diplomáticas de Ramiro II", Argensola: Revista de Ciencias Sociales del Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses 2 (1950), 137.
  10. ↑ Reilly (1998), 302.

Further reading

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