Regalian Right in Twelfth-Century Spain: the Case of Archbishop Martín of Santiago de Compostela
In the spring of the year 1160 archbishop Martin of Santiago de Compostela was expelled from his see by his king, Fernando II of León. Except for a brief period of about six months in the winter of 1164–65 he remained excluded from his church and sometimes from the kingdom until shortly before his death in 1167. For some of this period of seven years he sought to exert pressure upon the king through the papal curia of Alexander III in order to bring about his reinstatement; usually in vain. This cause célèbre in the relations between Church and State in the most westerly of the Spanish kingdoms has attracted little attention from Spanish ecclesiastical historians, and none at all from others. What makes it of more than parochial interest is its timing. Fernando II was not the only western European ruler to be at loggerheads with his archbishop in the 1160s; neither is the spectacle of a pope unwilling decisively to intervene in a quarrel of this kind an unfamiliar one to students of the ecclesiastical affairs of that troubled decade. Only fragments of evidence have survived to shed light on the tortuous diplomacy of those years. To disinter and to attempt to fit together the dead bones of this forgotten dispute may, it is hoped, be to provide a further fragment, which, in its turn, may be of interest to those whose concern is with the larger affairs of empire and of papacy, of Angevins and of Capetians. To historians of Spain its interest will (we hope) be sufficiently obvious to need no commendation.