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C h a p t e r 7 Queen of Castile and León, 1230–1246 The crown’s chroniclers agreed that Berenguela, as much as or more than her son, had brought about Fernando III’s elevation to the throne of León and the union of the long-sundered western kingdoms. To see Fernando crowned in León had been perhaps Berenguela’s most cherished ambition; it had certainly been the one for which she fought the longest. While their accession in Castile had been a dynastic accident, Berenguela had sought to establish Fernando as León’s heir ever since he was born. Finally she had succeeded, even despite the wishes of Alfonso IX. Yet her very success called her role into question. In Castile, Berenguela was an inheriting queen; Fernando III’s birthright and power originated in and were shared with her. In León, she had no such rights. She had been the queen of León once, both during her marriage and for a long time thereafter. But Innocent III had invalidated the marriage that had given her that title. And although Fernando III’s legitimacy had been restored by Innocent’s successor , his parents’ union had received no such rehabilitation. Berenguela herself had given up the title of queen of León once she could replace it with that of queen of Castile. She had no grounds to reclaim it now, and therefore no grounds on which to establish in León the independent royal authority that she held in Castile. This was a perilous moment for Castile’s plural monarchy. If Berenguela held no authority in León, then the balance of royal power that had prevailed in Castile would become almost impossible to maintain. But to transfer the plural monarchy intact from Castile to León required Fernando III to cede some authority in León to his mother, who had no real right to it. Yet Fernando III did exactly that. Even his earliest diplomas as king of León were issued by Berenguela’s ‘‘agreement and approval,’’ assensus et Queen of Castile and León, 1230–1246 209 beneplacitum, just as his Castilian diplomas had always been. This was true even of diplomas that dealt exclusively with Leonese institutions and concerns .1 Berenguela’s authority to ‘‘agree and approve’’ such acts showed that her status as a reigning monarch in Castile now extended into León as well. To some extent, the formal delineation of her role remained vague. In her independent letters and diplomas, Berenguela continued to title herself only as queen of Castile and Toledo.2 Other royal and nonroyal documents simply called her the queen, without bothering to specify what she was queen of; this is the case with most of Fernando III’s diplomas, for example, although they had observed the same formula before 1230. Nevertheless, individual charters quickly recognized her as reigning with her son, much as they recognized his wife, Beatriz. In 1232, for example, Garcı́a Muñoz de Villavega and his nephew don Muño gave property to the monastery of San Andrés de Arroyo, dating their gift ‘‘In the reign of King don Fernando with Queen doña Berenguela his mother, and with Queen doña Beatriz his wife in Castile and in Toledo, and in León and in Galicia.’’3 And, both at home and abroad, Berenguela was often explicitly or implicitly recognized as queen of both Castile and León. Her own chronicler, Lucas of Tuy, titled her ‘‘Queen of the Spains,’’ Yspaniarum regina,4 which echoed the language of western hegemony used by Alfonso VII, the last ruler of a united León-Castile, and by Fernando II of León in the years when he sought to extend his dominion over Castile.5 And in a 1234 letter, King Thibault of Navarre addressed her unequivocally as ‘‘queen of Castile and León,’’ regina Castelle et Legionis.6 There was some ambiguity, then, about Berenguela’s formal role in León, but it was a deliberate ambiguity . Berenguela refrained from openly using her married title, perhaps to soothe León’s anxieties about Castilian domination—Fernando III was at least the son of the late king, but Berenguela had always been a foreigner, bound to the interests of Castile at least as much as to those of León. Still, her subjects, her court, and her neighbors all recognized that after 1230, she held royal...

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