Today’s post comes from Simon R. Doubleday, Professor of History at Hofstra University and co-author of León and Galicia Under Queen Sancha and King Fernando I, along with the late Bernard F. Reilly. In this thoughtful reflection, Doubleday explores the book’s genesis and how he came to be involved, examines Reilly’s scholarly career and legacy, and shares how this project contributes to our understanding of medieval Spanish history.
The envelope was addressed to me in an intriguing, unfamiliar handwriting. I opened it quickly, relieved to have a change of pace from student essays and bureaucratic forms, to discover that the writer was Bernard F. Reilly, Professor Emeritus at Villanova University. Bernie, as he was widely known to friends and colleagues, had long been recognized as a pioneering scholar in the field of medieval Iberian history, and his work was a fundamental point of reference. Ever since the 1960s, he had been driven by intense intellectual excitement, by a conviction that vast dimensions of the medieval Spanish past remained unexplored. His research output was formidable; he had written numerous works that remain essential in the field, helping to forge a new understanding of the Christian Spanish realms in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
In his letter to me, Reilly explained that he had written a manuscript on the reign of Fernando I, an eleventh-century ruler of the kingdom widely known as “León-Castile”. The manuscript, at that time entitled Fernando I and the Resurgence of Christian Iberia, 1037-65, was designed to be a companion piece to several other prize-winning histories of the realm he had produced, all of them fundamental to my own generation of scholars. Among these earlier books had been The Kingdom of León-Castile Under Queen Urraca, 1109-26, a study of monarchy, power, and society in twelfth-century Spain: effectively, a monument to his labors in dusty Spanish archives. Reilly had also written rich, detailed studies of the reigns of Urraca’s father (Alfonso VI) and son (Alfonso VII). But this new manuscript, which ran to several hundred pages, had encountered problems. The external readers at Penn had proposed some significant changes, and as he was now well into his nineties—he explained in the letter—the prospect was understandably daunting. In a completely unexpected and deeply generous gesture, he invited me to take on the manuscript, bring it to completion, and make whatever changes I might see fit.
At that stage, I had been planning to move forwards in time from the subject of my previous book, The Wise King (2015), which had been set in the thirteenth century. I had never ventured quite so far back in time. My very first monograph on The Lara Family (2001) had begun its narrative arc about a generation after Fernando’s reign. I had read enough to know that the standard opinion was that this was a period when the Christian rulers of the north of Spain were gaining the upper hand over the Muslim rulers of the south. The old caliphate of Córdoba had collapsed in the early eleventh century, and most scholars said that Christian kings like Fernando were able to extort enormous tributary payments called parias from the petty kings of new kingdoms of Seville, Granada, and Toledo. But the reign of Fernando I Queen Sancha (r. 1038-1065) was largely terra incognita for me.
There was a curious caveat: unbeknownst (to the end) to Bernie, I had in fact been one of the external readers for the University of Pennsylvania Press, and in the process of reviewing the manuscript had already begun to learn a great deal from his research. In my original report to Penn, in 2016, I had written: “Prof. Bernard Reilly is, of course, one of the great and pioneering historians of medieval Iberia: a scholar to whom all of us in the field owe a great debt of gratitude. The current volume, aiming to address the reign of Fernando I, aspires to provide a complement to his earlier studies on the reigns of Alfonso VI (Fernando’s son) and Urraca (Alfonso VI’s daughter). In principle, such a volume is to be welcomed; I am not familiar with any English-language work addressing the reign. The manuscript is clearly and deeply informed, on every page and in every paragraph, by close familiarity with the laconic primary sources of the period, published and archival, and by a thoughtful reading of these documents.” However—like the other reviewer, as it turned out—I had also expressed the desirability of modifying the manuscript, as it then stood, on multiple levels.
Delightfully, the project had now fallen once more into my lap. Picking up the gauntlet, I wrote to accept Bernie’s kind offer. Later that spring, I visited him at his home in suburban Philadelphia, taking an Uber from the Penn campus where the Medieval Academy of America was meeting. Bernie offered me a set of hundreds of 5 x 8 index cards relating to Fernando’s reign, in a cardboard box that also contained half-a-dozen books on the eleventh century. When the conference finished, I carried the box back on the Amtrak train to New York. The index cards were one of Reilly’s principal bulwarks for decades; his handwriting evolved between the earlier phases of his career and the culminating stages. On them, he kept notes on every charter that he reads—every record of property transactions, every grant of privilege—from the period in question, and on many other themes besides: the consolidation of medieval bishoprics, for instance, and the emergence of royal administration.
I gradually set to work on adapting and updating the manuscript. There were, of course, other projects, commitments, and distractions, among them the global pandemic, and a major series of video lectures to write and record on another (medieval) pandemic (After the Black Death, 2022). But thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship and the generous support of Hofstra University, I was able to spend the 2022-23 academic year fully focused on the book. It proved a deeply rewarding experience: a chance to immerse myself in Spain a thousand years ago, to read recent scholarship with which Reilly was less familiar, and to revisit some of the original primary sources on which he drew.
In the process of rewriting, I nuanced some of Reilly’s positions: I tweaked some of his statements about holy war, while maintaining his general position that relations between the Christian rulers with the Muslim rulers to his south to were less binary, more complex, and even at times more collaborative, than previous scholars had assumed. I returned to the charters, of which he had exceptional knowledge, to check details and seek new evidence, and integrated new editions that appeared in recent years. For a variety of reasons, among them the pivotal importance of Galicia in the realm, I retitled the book: it is now The Kingdom of León and Galicia under Queen Sancha and King Fernando. My hope is that the new title signals the need to move beyond a focus on the singular figure of the medieval king, since scholarship has made it clear that we should envision eleventh-century monarchy as a corporate, collective enterprise in which royal women (including queens such as Sancha) also played a variety of crucial roles, and which worked as a web of power extending beyond even the extended royal family.
Bernard F. Reilly passed away on December 11, 2021, at the age of ninety-six. I remain in awe of his insights, originality, and laborious analysis of the charter evidence, and earnestly hope that, together, we have produced a book of which he would have been proud.