Alfonso VII of Leon and Castile

Alfonso VII had himself crowned emperor of all Spain in 1135 and spent his reign making the title mean something, with mixed success. He is not Alfonso VIII, his grandson, who lost at Alarcos and won at Las Navas de Tolosa. He inherited a kingdom wrecked by the civil wars of his mother Urraca's reign and reassembled it, then took the imperial title at Leon with the kings of Navarre and Aragon, the count of Barcelona and Muslim rulers of Zaragoza attending as vassals - a claim to primacy over the whole peninsula rather than to an empire in the German sense. He took Coria, Oreja and finally Almeria in 1147 with Genoese and Catalan naval help, the first time a Christian force had reached so far down the Mediterranean coast. Then the Almohads arrived from Morocco and took most of it back; Almeria fell again in 1157 and he died retreating through the Sierra Morena. His worst decision was his last: he divided his realms between his sons, giving Castile to Sancho and Leon to Ferdinand, and the two crowns stayed separate for seventy years. The imperial title died with him. The imperial title had been used intermittently by Leonese kings since the tenth century and it died with him because his own partition made it unsustainable. Castile and Leon were reunited in 1230 under Ferdinand III, who then took Cordoba and Seville. Almeria's fall in 1157 closed Christian access to the Mediterranean for eighty years. His daughter Constance married Louis VII of France, and his court was the one where the translation movement at Toledo was getting under way - Arabic science into Latin, which is among the more consequential things happening in his reign and had nothing to do with him.

• Lived: 1105 CE – 1157 CE
• Nationality: Castilian
• Roles: monarch