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martes, 13 de diciembre de 2022

The royal dynasties of Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages.

 



The royal dynasties of Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages. Jaime de Salazar y Acha. "La antigüedad de los linajes nobiliarios españoles", https://youtu.be/X4E8dkKYbZA.

The interest of the subject is evident when we see the extraordinary importance that the study of genealogy implies for a better understanding of the medieval world.

The medieval world does not work with the schemes that our modern world imposes. There they do not exist – and it is useless to look for them – the ideological differences between those who dispute power.

The medieval man, therefore, when he seeks power and wealth, does so based on his family relationships and, when these are insufficient, he pursues them through the establishment of a marriage bond.

With the exception of the Portuguese dynasty, all the other Spanish dynasties are extinct in the male line, not only in their reigning first-born lines, but also in the minor ones, both legitimate and natural.

Let's take the example of the old Barcelona dynasty, ending in the royal line in the person of King Martin the Human († 1410), whose bastard lines, especially in Italy, peter out centuries later. Specifically, the last of his lines, that of the Ayerbe, a descendant of Jaime the Conqueror, will become extinct in Italy in 1837.

The main causes for which a large part of the families of the Spanish high nobility died out during the 14th century are the following.

In the first place "the biological extinction of various lineages in which, together with the general causes that may have influenced the low marital fertility within families of high nobility - age of the spouses, duration of the marriage, diet in the childhood, etc.– one must consider very carefully the inbreeding that prevailed in that social class and that undoubtedly contributed to exhausting or at least weakening the strength of old lineages that made up the circle of rich men prior to the Trastámara.

The second cause would be based on the casualties suffered by the nobility in military campaigns, since "the ways of life and the warlike activity of the nobility always constituted a threat to the biological destiny of the lineages that made it up."

The main problem of early medieval genealogical research lies in the paucity of primitive chronicles. Indeed, if we analyze the Spanish chronicle sources between the 9th and 13th centuries, the knowledge they offer us about the genealogies of their time is scant and irritatingly parsimonious.

For more detailed information on The royal dynasties of Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages, "Las dinastías reales de España en la Edad Media", by Dr. Jaime de Salazar y Acha, Madrid December 2021. Real Academia de la Historia, https://cpage.mpr.gob.es.
 
Related episode,  "A new ebook, The Lineage of the Portuguese Conquerors of the 16th century" by Rafael Alberto Vilagut.  December 10, 2022, blog Happy and Healthy (Feliz y Saludable), http://felizysaludable.blogspot.com.

Curridabat, San Jose, Costa Rica, December 13, 2022. alberto.doer@gmail.com.       

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