Loarre Castle is in Spain, in the Catalonian foothills of the Pyrenees. The oldest sections were built around 1020 by Sancho el Mayor -- the Great, more or less -- of Navarre.
Sancho came to power around 1000 at the low ebb of Christian Europe, at the end of a century of humiliation. Europe was besieged by Vikings, by the Muslim pirates known as Saracens -- one band of Muslim freebooters seized the St. Bernard Pass and for more than a decade charged a steep toll to cross the Alps, holding the occasional rich abbot or bishop for ransom -- and by assorted locally bred thugs. Most of Iberia was under Muslim control. Christian rule was limited to the County of Barcelona, nominally still part of France, and a few small Christian kingdoms in the rugged north. Sancho's father comes down to us as "Sancho the Tremulous," which gives you an idea what the chroniclers thought of him. The younger Sancho unified most of the Christian lands, won a battle, reconquered some land, and built a few castles, achievements that seemed
mayor enough in his dismal time to merit the name. That's the lid of his tomb above.
Loarre Castle was much enlarged in 1073-1097. At this time the lovely church was built, and the central core of the castle largely completed.
The curtain wall was added in the late twelfth century.
The castle was restored in the early twentieth century, but I can't find any clear indication of how much was rebuilt. Loarre has been nominated for World Heritage status, which would imply that it is highly intact, but on the other hand it does not seem to have been listed yet.
This is known as the Patio of the Arches, but I assume it was once a hall with a wooden roof.
Looks like a wonderful place, especially if a certain friend of mine would give me a tour and tell me stories about Catalan kings.
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I know you'll want to start our tour with a detailed technical history of the terms of tenure by which the castle was held, as well as the castellan's rights, including calonia, fonsadera, etc. Yes, there are legends, climbings through windows and all that. But WE ARE HISTORIANS. :)
Actually I've always been curious about how the rulers of those tiny Iberian states came call themselves kings. Did they claim some sort of descent from the Visigothic kings, or did they appoint themselves, or get some sort of appointment from the pope? And did any special rights attach to the crown in those states, like taxation?
The castle is in Aragon not in Catalonia.
There were´nt any Catalan Kings as you said, As catalonia was a part of the Aragon Crown.
As you can imagine, questions like who was a king and why are a mess, both in the primary sources and in the secondary lit. As I understand it, the Christian lords of Asturias began calling themselves kings probably in the mid-to-late 8th cent., and then by around 800 are definitely making it look like their monarchy is descended from the Visigoths. Then the kings of Asturias expand into Leon and become known as kings of Leon; and eventually the idea that there should be a king of Asturias is forgotten, at least sometimes. And sometimes they're called kings of Galicia too. Later on they become counts of Castile as well, and then they pass Leon to one son and Castile to another, except by some mysterious alchemy Castile is now a kingdom and the son they pass it to is a king.
Then from maybe the 820s we've got some independent lords--Spanish historians tend to call them "caudillos"--in Pamplona who may have called themselves kings, and whose descendants were definitely calling themselves kings by sometime in the 10th century. And some of that gets really weird, like when the 10th century genealogies list the kings of Pamplona, and then list the "kings of another part of the kingdom," whatever that means, and then for a while there was a separate little kingdom of Viguera, which is basically a village in Rioja. And while they're doing this they like to create codices with the Visigothic law copied in and portraits of Chindaswinth and then of themselves as a sort of new Chindaswinth with bishops around, etc. Meanwhile Aragon becomes a kingdom by sort of the same process as Castile does.
Aren't you glad you asked? And I haven't even gotten to Portugal (where the pope makes a king out of the count of Porto and Galicia--get it?--in the 12th century, and don't ask why the title to Galicia couldn't have made him a king well enough, because I don't know) or Catalonia, where the rulers are definitely NOT kings, not legally, no sir, except by the late 12century they're also king of Aragon, so the Catalans just call them Lo Senyor Rey for short, except sometimes they insist on not doing that.
Don't forget that meanwhile every few years they conquer some Islamic town whose ruler called himself malik, which means when he's in the mood the king of Castile can give himself a right royal string of kingships, like king of Algarve, king of Jaen, king of Gibraltar, while for some reason the kings of Aragon don't string out the titles quite so much.
In all this, I haven't mentioned that IMHO Loarre is one of the very greatest castles ever (granted always that some of that neatness may be an artifact of its reconstruction). I'm surprised it hasn't been used much in movies.
Thanks, I suspected it was at least partly a matter of claiming the title and daring people to question. But what sort of rights did they claim as kings? Did it make any difference in terms of their laws or taxes?
I don't know. The problem is that the best evidence we have is for Barcelona, Urgell, and other points east of Navarre; in these lands the counts clearly exercised Frankish monarchic prerogatives, especially the right to allocate uncleared land, but showed no interest in claiming royal title.
For Navarre and westward, it's anybody's guess what being a king would add to one who was already a caudillo. Navarre is an utter mystery. The Basques had no native tradition of kingship or even, so far as I think anyone can tell, boss-ship. Suddenly in the 9th century the Arab chronicles give us the names of guys who are Christian lords in the mountains that appear important in the political games of the local Islamic dynasties, and in the 10th century their own people look back on these names as people who "ruled" or were the ancestors of "kings" in the 10th century.
Basically the 9-10th century west Pyrenees was a place where not much happened according to familiar medieval patterns. Christian and Islamic dynasties married back and forth, and you get potentates with names like Muhammad ibn Garcia.
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