Alfonso VI of León
Alfonso VI of León was the king who took Toledo in May 1085, the old capital of the Visigoths and the first great city of al-Andalus to fall to a Christian king, and who then called himself emperor of all Spain; the Almoravids came from Africa the next year in answer and beat him at Sagrajas, and he spent the rest of a forty-four-year reign holding what he had taken. He was the second son of Ferdinand I, who divided his kingdoms among three sons, and Alfonso got León. His elder brother Sancho of Castile beat him twice, took León, and drove him to exile at the Muslim court of Toledo in 1072, where he lived as the guest of the taifa king al-Mamun and learned the city. When Sancho was murdered at the siege of Zamora that October, Alfonso came back and took Castile and León together, and the legend has the Cid make him swear at Santa Gadea in Burgos that he had no hand in the killing. The taifa kingdoms paid him tribute, and the gold of the parias paid for Cluny's abbey church, for the Roman rite replacing the Mozarabic one, and for the French monks and wives who came south; he married five times, the last a Muslim princess of Seville. Toledo was taken by siege and starvation after four years of pressure, on terms that left the Muslims their mosque and their law and the libraries intact, and the terms were broken within a year when the queen and the archbishop took the mosque. The taifa kings, frightened, invited the Almoravid emir Yusuf ibn Tashfin across the strait. At Sagrajas near Badajoz in October 1086 Alfonso's army was destroyed and he escaped with a wound in the thigh; Yusuf went home, came back, and by 1094 had swallowed the taifas one by one, so that the king who had lived on their tribute now faced an African empire across the Tagus. He lost his only son, Sancho, at Ucles in 1108 in another defeat, and died at Toledo in July 1109, leaving the kingdom to his daughter Urraca and a civil war. Toledo held, and the translations that came out of it were the return on the libraries he had spared.
- Lived: 1040 CE – 1109 CE
- Nationality: Leonese
- Roles: king, monarch
