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C o n c l u s i o n s While King don Fernando was in Alcalá . . . news reached him there that made him grieve greatly: that the noble queen doña Berenguela, his mother, was dead. When the king heard the news, he was deeply troubled and brokenhearted by his great grief; yet the strength of his spirit caused him to endure and disguise his grief. And it was no wonder that he grieved so greatly because of this, for he had lost a mother so attentive to all his affairs that no king of his day had ever lost another like her. She was the mirror of Castile and of León and of all Spain; many kingdoms were guided by her counsel and intelligence , and she surpassed and was far greater than any other queens of her time who held a kingdom. She was mourned throughout Castile by the town councils and by all people of every faith; she was especially mourned by poor knights, for whom she did many good works. She was a wholly attentive servant and friend to God. The fame of her virtues, and of her good works and her nobility, spread throughout the whole world, for she was an example of all goodness. May God have grace and mercy on her, who was his true servant and friend, and make her heir to his kingdom with his faithful ; amen.1 The necrology of Las Huelgas gives November 8, 1246, as the date of Berenguela’s death.2 By that time the queen had not seen her son for over a year. Since 1244 he had spent nearly all his time in Andalucı́a, prosecuting his wars and consolidating his gains, while Berenguela attended to matters in the north. In 1245, though, Berenguela had sent a message to the king at Córdoba, telling him that she was traveling south from Toledo and asking him to meet with her. ‘‘And the king was greatly pleased when he heard this, and he then left that place [Córdoba], and brought the queen his wife with 254 conclusions him, and passed through the mountains and came to a place called Pozuelo . . . and they had their meeting there.’’3 This was not purely a social call; Berenguela was trying to resolve the land dispute between Queen Juana and the heir-apparent, Infante Alfonso.4 But the PCG remembers it primarily as their last face-to-face encounter: this mother and son, who greatly loved each other, never saw each other again. And they stayed there [at Pozuelo] six weeks, taking great pleasure in each other’s company; and then they left each other forever, for she never again saw her son, nor did he ever again see his mother, nor did he ever again pass through the mountains to go to Castile. And Queen doña Berenguela returned to Toledo, and the noble King don Fernando returned to the frontier with his wife.5 Here Fernando III’s farewell to Berenguela becomes, in a sense, his farewell to the Leonese-Castilian heartland. He never did leave Andalucı́a again, constrained by the urgent need for military force and governance on the new frontier. Yet although Berenguela’s own travel grew increasingly limited in her later years—from about 1236 on it becomes rare to find her anywhere other than Burgos, Valladolid, or Toledo—she seems to have remained as spry as a sixty-year-old woman of the mid-thirteenth century could expect to be. The PCG implies that her death was sudden enough to prevent word of her illness being sent to Fernando III. And at the end of September 1246, Juan of Osma had named her an executor of his own will, indicating that he still considered her well enough to carry out that duty only a little over a month before she died.6 She had, in any case, outlived most of her contemporaries. Of her siblings , only her sister Blanche survived her.7 And, at age sixty-six, she had outlived nearly all the men whose loyalty had shaped and sustained her career. Gonzalo Rodrı́guez Girón, Lope Dı́az de Haro, Álvaro Pérez de Castro, and Bishop Mauricio of Burgos had all passed on in the late 1230s. In 1242 Berenguela had lost Garcı́a Fernández de Villamayor, her majordomo.8 And only a few months before Juan of Osma died in Palencia, that see had...

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