Page "Alfonso the Battler" Paragraph 16

At the Siege of Bayonne in October 1131, three years before his death, he published a will leaving his kingdom to three autonomous religious orders based in Palestine and politically largely independent on the pope, the Knights Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, whose influences might have been expected to cancel one another out.

The will has greatly puzzled historians, who have read it as a bizarre gesture of extreme piety uncharacteristic of Alfonso's character, one that effectively undid his life's work.

Elena Lourie ( 1975 ) suggested instead that it was Alfonso's attempt to neutralize the papacy's interest in a disputed succession — Aragon had been a fief of the Papacy since 1068 — and to fend off Urraca's son from her first marriage, Alfonso VII of Castile, for the Papacy would be bound to press the terms of such a pious testament.

Generous bequests to important churches and abbeys in Castile had the effect of making the noble churchmen there beneficiaries who would be encouraged by the will to act as a brake on Alfonso VII's ambitions to break it — and yet among the magnates witnessing the will in 1131 there is not a single cleric.

In the event it was a will that his nobles refused to carry out — instead bringing his brother Ramiro from the monastery to assume royal powers — an eventuality that Lourie suggests was Alfonso's hidden intent.