Bernard F.Reilly<scp>and</scp>SimonDoubleday: León and Galicia under Queen Sancha and King Fernando I. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024; pp. xix + 233.

What kind of person is a king?What is a kingdom, a realm, a monarchy, and how may its story best be told?Is it a narrative of a single and singular, usually male, individual and how he puts (or fails to put) his mark on the world?Or is it something more complicated than that, a web of persons and personalities of unequal power, enmeshed with each other, and their travails across a particular though possibly changing territory?All who have read and used Bernard Reilly's earlier histories of the reigns of King Alfonso VI, Queen Urraca, and King Alfonso VII, appreciate his meticulous use of often recalcitrant documentary and narrative sources to map out the lives of these central figures and those who surrounded them.And all who know Simon Doubleday's The Wise King about Alfonso X have drawn profit from how he has worked to integrate new sources and new kinds of sources into a three-dimensional portrait of a kingdom and all its many players.Now they have teamed up, Reilly passing the torch before his death to Doubleday, to bring us a history of Galicia and Le on during the reigns of King Fernando and Queen Sancha in the middle years of the eleventh century that describes a network of king, queen, family, nobility, bishops and major monasteries working together, sometimes in concert but often in opposition.They have written a revisionist portrait, and it is a welcome one.The authors emphasise the central importance of Galicia and what is now northern Portugal, and the challenge this region posed to the Leonese monarchs.From the earliest days of the Asturian kingdom, whose mantle Sancha and Fernando inherited, Galicia, with its fertile landscape, entrenched nobility, and long history, posed both opportunity and threat.Its nobles jealously protected their independence and were wary of the upstart Fernando, who gained his throne through marriage to Sancha.The authors highlight how Fernando strived year after year to bring them under his control, and how he fought to draw new lands in northern Portugal under the umbrella of the Leonese kingdom.This noble elite included an ecclesiastical elite of bishops and abbots, and they highlight the ambitions Bishop Cresconio had for his see of Iria-Compostela, site of the pilgrim shrine to Saint James.If Galicia rises in prominence in their telling, the traditional image of King Fernando as Christian warrior engaged in the reconquest of Muslim al-Andalus is cut down to size.Preoccupied for most of his career by Galicia in the west and Navarra in the east, to the extent that he did fight against Muslims, it was late in his career and appears motivated by pragmatic ends rather than by ideals of Holy War.Moreover, the authors nuance the traditional story that Fernando enriched the Leonese kingdom by forcing the Muslim taifa kingdoms to pay him regular parias, tribute in the form of protection money.They show that what evidence we have of these kingdoms paying Fernando anything at all is partial, and most likely represents irregular payments as part of an alliance and in recompense for military aid, of the kind that were common earlier between the caliphate and Berber groups in North Africa.With the parias gone, or shifted to the era of Fernando and Sancha's children, the image of a fabulously wealthy Le on, capable of supporting the French abbey of Cluny with an annual payment of gold likewise receives a further blow.The grounds for these revisions lie in the authors' reading of their main sources, documentary charters and narrative histories.