We turn after our recent tour of Muslim al‑Andalus to the 11^th-Century Spain of the Christians. Like the later Teutonic and Danish crusader states of the Levy & Campaign Series’ previous volume, Nevsky, the Christian lords featured in Almoravid seek to expand their realms at the expense of neighbors of a competing religion. Albert and Volko introduce us to these Christian kingdoms and counties along with their depictions and roles in the game. All game art in this article is playtest only and game details are provisional.

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After the 8^th-Century Muslim invasion’s defeat of the Visigoths at Guadalete, control of the Iberian Peninsula passed into Muslim hands. The entire Peninsula? No. Cornered at its northern limits, a population that decided to escape Muslim rule mixed with local inhabitants. This refuge was a strip of land between the Peninsula’s northern mountains and the sea—Asturias. The Muslims, knowing that military action in this rugged area would be costly at best and probably indecisive and prolonged, decided to limit themselves to punitive expeditions, both to obtain loot and to avoid a strengthening of the Christian nucleus.

During the following 300 years, these Christian settlements took advantage of periods of calm brought about by Muslim internal struggles or by those emirs who had little appetite for arduous expeditions to the north. Gradually, the Christians would evolve and strengthen their territories enough to create lasting structures. These small kingdoms and fiefs, despite continuous setbacks, would fight for new territories and establish bases for the future reconquest of the Peninsula.

In addition to this indigenous evolution of Christian resistance, Frankish Carolingian monarchs sought to establish a buffer zone that would prevent future Muslim expeditions beyond the Pyrenees. A Hispanic Christian culture over time promoted the creation of new Christian kingdoms and counties out of these buffer marches that then gradually escaped control by the Franks. In many cases, the tiny Christian states expanded their territories not only at the expense of the Muslim enemy but also from one another. Alliances, ruptures, and annexations that altered the vassalage and the boundaries among the different Christian zones were frequent. As we shall see, such fighting among Christian lords remained a key ingredient in the emergence of a unified Kingdom of León in the 11^th-Century as a potent offensive Christian force. By 1085, as with the Muslim taifa kingdoms, the geography of the Christian kingdoms would reach a new but unstable balance among the following political actors: The Kingdom of León, the Kingdom of Aragón, and the Catalan counties.

Kingdom of León

The history of León during the 11^th-Century gives us a leading example of the evolution of a Christian kingdom of the time and the fragility of its position among its neighbors. That history therefore deserves rendition in some detail, in order better to understand the unique opportunity that the Christians would enjoy in 1085 under King Alfonso VI.

In 1037, León under its monarch Bermudo III included the western third of the peninsular north, the regions of León, Galicia, and Asturias. Bermudo’s strained relations with his cousin and brother-in-law, Fernando, count of Castilla, resulted in open conflict. Fernando, with the help of his brother, King García Sánchez III of Pamplona, ended up defeating the Leonese at Tamarón in 1037, where Bermudo died on the battlefield. No descendants survived him, which allowed Fernando to take the throne of León through Fernando’s wife Sancha, Bermudo’s sister and sole heir.

Seventeen years later, Fernando I, now King of León and Count of Castilla, could compare his forces to those of his brother and old ally García Sánchez III. Fernando revived an old discord over the Castilian territories held by the Kingdom of Pamplona, some of which Fernando himself had ceded in exchange for García’s help against the Leonese at Tamarón. The rivalry between the two brothers ultimately led to a war, a victory for Fernando in the Battle of Atapuerca in 1054, and death on the field there of García Sánchez. Fernando approved the proclamation on the spot of García’s fourteen-year-old son, Sancho Garcés IV, as successor King of Pamplona—after first obtaining agreement on the recovery of the claimed Castilian territories claimed for León and Castilla.

From there, Fernando consolidated his power throughout his realm and then dedicated himself to extending his domain at the expense of Muslim territory. In addition to conquering important holdings such as Viseo, Lamego, and Coimbra, he obtained regular parias tribute payments from the taifa emirates of Zaragoza, Seville, Badajoz, and Toledo. (See our previous article for details about the Muslim taifa states.)

Fernando I’s death in 1065 distributed his wide territorial domains are among his children. Sancho, the eldest, inherited Castilla, established from this moment on as a kingdom, along with rights to the parias payments from Zaragoza. Next in line, Alfonso received the Kingdom of León and the parias of the Toledo taifa. Finally, the youngest son, García, took possession of Galicia in the extreme northwest, also elevated to a kingdom, to which accrued the Christian territory in the north of Portugal and the parias of Sevilla and Badajoz.

Sancho II’s dissatisfaction with this distribution soon became a matter of dispute. After successively defeating his two brothers in war, imprisoning García with Alfonso’s help, and then forcing Alfonso to flee to the taifa of Toledo to seek its emir’s protection, Sancho in 1072 proclaimed himself sole king of all the territories that his father had bequeathed. Later that same year, Sancho besieged his sister Urraca’s stronghold at Zamora and there met his death by assassination. Alfonso wasted no time in returning to León and crowning himself King of Galicia, Castilla, and León.

The inclusion of Castilla under León that Alfonso achieved was not without friction. As the King of León during the war against Sancho II of Castilla, Alfonso got help from León’s nobles, and now, in the distribution of the unified Kingdom’s most important positions, he favored those Leonese noblemen who had fought at his side against his brother. In the years of Alfonso’s reign to come, these Leonese would provide the King unwavering support. But the Castilian nobility felt left out—resentments that may have affected their eagerness to fight in the coming campaigns against the Almoravids. Separately, just a few months after the defeat at Sagrajas, Alfonso had to put down a rebellion by major nobles of Galicia, who probably sought to free his imprisoned brother García.

In 1076, an internal conspiracy culminated in the murder of King Sancho IV Garcés of Pamplona in the northeast. Alfonso VI skilfully took advantage of the resulting confusion to achieve new territorial gains, incorporating the holdings of Álava, Vizcaya, La Rioja, and part of Guipúzcoa into Castilla. Simultaneously, the Pamplonese nobles chose to entrust the crown of Pamplona to Sancho Ramírez, King of Aragón, who agreed to take control of the remainder of Pamplona’s territory, establishing a union that would last to 1134.

With the Kingdom’s internal situation stabilized, Alfonso VI followed in the footsteps of his father and concentrated his attention and efforts on the Muslim kingdoms to the south. Not only did he take sides in several disputes among the taifa emirs of Sevilla and Granada, Toledo and Badajoz, he also launched cabalgadas—long-range raids—into their territories and a campaign of conquest that in 1079 seized the town of Coria from Badajoz.

The King aimed most of these initiatives at forcing the taifas to continue to pay the parias that Alfonso then used to finance further military actions, maintain control over his nobility, and, to a lesser extent, develop projects to improve the Kingdom. And there was another important reason to enforce the collection of the parias, although it would bear fruit only over the long term: the taifa emirates’ continuous financial bleeding would weaken them so as to make possible their definitive conquest by the Christians. That situation seemed to have arrived at the outset of 1085 for the taifa of Toledo.

In light of Alfonso VI’s leading role in warring upon the Muslims in these years, the game Almoravid features numerous representatives from his Kingdom of León and Castilla—

• As Lords with their own mats and maneuver pieces: King Alfonso himself with his royal mesnada household troops, the Kingdom’s most important counts Pedro Ansúrez of León and García Ordoñez of Castilla, Alfonso’s current alférez—royal standard bearer—Álvar Fáñez, and Alfonso’s most effective captain in prior years before exile and soon again as the African Muslim threat became dire—Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid Campeador.
• As royal Vassals who bring their own forces to augment the armies led by these great lords and captains, several other individual nobles of the period (some as wealthy as Pedro or García): the Leonese Counts Martín Flaínez and Martín Alfónsez, Castillians Gonzalo Núñez and Gómez González, Galicians Froilá Bermudez and Vela Ovéquez, and the high nobles of Asturias Fernando Díaz and Pelayo Peláez.
• Via the BISHOPRICS Capability card: the ecclesiastical Vassal forces of Bishops Pedro of León, Vistuario of Lugo, and Edenoro of Orense.
• As Capability cards for the Christian side: lesser nobles who provide local and border defenses against Muslim raiders—CABALLERIA VILLANA—and paid levies of commoners—MILITES—who add lighter forces, both mounted and on foot, to the feudal armies.

Kingdom of Aragón

Within the growing kingdom that joined León to Castilla, the latter would eventually overshadow the former. And centuries later, a monarch of that Kingdom of Castilla would partner with the ruler of Aragón to finally fully reconquer and reunify a Christian Spain. But in the late 11^th-Century, Aragón was still but a small kingdom, a tiny strip along the edge of al‑Andalus and no where near the equal of Alfonso VI’s León-Castilla.

The history of Aragón as a kingdom began to take shape with Ramiro, the illegitimate son of King Sancho Garcés III of Pamplona. Known as Ramiro I, son and brother of kings, he ruled from his father’s death in 1035 as a de facto king of what had been the County of Aragón. While his contemporaries treated him as a sovereign king, he did not call himself such, as Aragón on paper remained a holding of the Kingdom of Pamplona. Taking advantage of the death of his brother Gonzalo in 1044, Ramiro added to Aragón the territories of Sobrarbe and Ribagorza.

Ramiro died in 1063 as a casualty in a frustrated attempt to take the Muslim border fortress of Graus from the taifa of Zaragoza, which had the support of a mesnada sent by Fernando I of León to help the emir by virtue of his vassalage to the Leonese king.

Ramiro’s eldest son and successor, Sancho I Ramírez, made a bold political move to reinforce Aragón’s legitimacy as a kingdom and to escape de jure vassalage to the Kingdom of Pamplona: he travelled to Rome in 1068 to offer vassalage to Pope Alexander II. The murder in 1076 of Sancho Garcés IV of Pamplona by his own brother incited that kingdom’s Pamplonese nobility to offer their crown to Sancho, achieving for Aragón the annexation of the Kingdom of Pamplona. In 1077, Sancho made the town of Jaca the capital of what was by then officially the Kingdom of Aragón.

While King Sancho I’s greatest successes thus were at the expense of other Christians, he also carried on and eventually would gain some progress in his father’s project of the conquest of territory from the taifa of Zaragoza. In 1064, Sancho took the town of Barbastro with the help of Frankish contingents attracted by a call for a crusade from Alexander II, but it returned to Muslim hands the following year. His attempts at Reconquista accelerated in the late 1070s. During the early 1080s, Sancho Ramírez participated in a series of campaigns that arrayed Aragon and the Count of Barcelona (more on which below) with the neighboring Emir of Lérida-Tortosa, al‑Mundir, on the one side, against al-Mundir’s brother al-Mutamin, the Emir of Zaragoza, on the other. Al-Mutamin at this time had in his employ the great Castilian captain Rodrigo Díaz, theCid, thanks to whom in no small measure the campaigns went badly for the Aragonese and Barcelonans.

In Almoravid, Sancho takes the field as an independent Lord on the Christian side but with notably fewer resources than available to León and Castilla. His role often will be to either hold the line against any Muslim invasion of the Christian northeast or—depending on whether or not Barcelona or Rodrigo are in the field and, if so, on which side—to help press a Leonese offensive into Zaragoza’s taifa.

Catalan Counties

Although the Almoravid game board does not show the northeast third of the Iberian Peninsula, some of the political entities that inhabited that off-map area, the so-called Catalan Counties (see the context map near the top of this article), had a history of involvement in conflict with either Aragon or Zaragoza. They appear in the game in the form of forces that can augment certain Christian armies. For this reason, it is convenient here to add a little brushstroke on their behalf.

Once the 8^th-Century Carolingian Empire had stopped the Muslim expansion beyond the Pyrenees and recovered the Frankish territories under its control, it set its sights on the north of Iberia with the dual objective of probing for new expansion and of consolidating a border region as an advanced bastion that would protect Gascuña, Septimania, and Aquitania against any renewed Muslim attacks.

Carolingian influence in the Peninsula differed in intensity and duration, from the alliance with the native Christian aristocracy (the Velasco in the Kingdom of Pamplona) to military conquests in collaboration with the Spanish-Gothic nobility. In this latter endeavor, the Franks’ intervention ended up establishing a set of territories, articulated as counties and governed by Frankish counts or held by related local families.  What has traditionally become known as the Marca Hispanica began its journey at the outset of the 9^th Century with the counties of Aragón, Sobrarbe, Ribagorza, Pallars, Urgell, Cerdaña, Conflent, Besalú, Osona, Barcelona, Rosselló, Vallespir, Girona, Perelada, and Ampurias.

Over time, the ties of dependency of these counties to their northern neighbor weakened. The continuing disputes among Charlemagne’s successors and their collective inability to effectively assist border counties against the Muslim enemy caused a de facto natural evolution toward full autonomy. The marcher counties developed their own internal politics—with vassals, alliances, and internecine conflicts of their own—while trying to exploit their natural path of expansion to the south.

In the last third of the 11th Century, the political core of the Catalan Counties (those that did not render vassalage to others) comprised the counties of Barcelona, Urgell, Roselló, Ampurias, Pallars Jussa, and Pallars Sobirá. Of all these, only the key realms of Barcelona and Urgell appear in the game.

Almoravid represents the potential of the County of Barcelona to take part in the military campaigns of 1085-1086 with paired Event and Capability cards, one in each side’s deck. Either side can purchase the services of the COUNT OF BARCELONA’s hard-hitting armored troops of via a Capability card and the expenditure of two Coin. The forces may join only the Lords based in the northeast, near the Catalan Counties: either Sancho I of Aragón or the Burgundian crusader Duke Eudes for the Christians or al-Mustain of Zaragoza (al-Mutamin’s son) or al-Mundir of Lérida for the Muslims. The Event on the same card—named for BERENGUER RAMÓN II, the Count of Barcelona during—should it occur, either leads the Count to abandon the enemy’s service or to join up with the playing side at a far cheaper rate! This double possibility represents an intention on the part of Berenguer Ramón not only to garner pay but also to obtain plunder and land, perhaps at the cost of the taifa of Zaragoza as historically (and as noted in the section above), or of Lérida, or perhaps of Aragón.

Finally, the Catalan County of Urgell appears in the game as a Vassal force that Sancho of Aragón may Levy (as pictured just beneath Sancho’s Lord mat shown above). In this period, County Urgell hewed closely to the Aragonese Kingdom and participated in many of the military expeditions that Sancho organized, such as the aforementioned Siege of Barbastro.

We hope that these two companion InsideGMT articles about the political geography of 11th-Century Spain have helped whet your apetite to play Almoravid. The Background Book that accompanies the game expands on this geographic history with chapters on aspects such as the lords and forces featured, the parias tribute system between the Muslim and Christian rulers, and the military campaigns fought, plus individual, sourced historical notes on each and every Event and Capability card.

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