He succeeded to relinquish suzerainty of his cousin Alfonso VII of León, becoming instead a subject of the papacy, as the kingdoms of Sicily and Aragon had done before him.

Several precursor kingdoms have had an Alfonso I.

Alfonso also moved the capital from Pravia, where Silo had located it, to Oviedo, the city of his father's founding and his birth.

Alfonso was the eldest son of Prince Francisco de Asis de Borbón-Dos Sicilias and Queen Isabel II, whose reign was marked by a constant political crisis which had several causes.

He assumed the title of Alfonso XII, for although no King of united Spain had borne the name " Alfonso XI ", the Spanish monarchy was regarded as continuous with the more ancient monarchy represented by the 11 kings of Asturias, León and Castile also named Alfonso.

Coming to the throne at such an early age, Alfonso had served no apprenticeship in the art of ruling, but he possessed great natural tact and a sound judgment ripened by the trials of exile.

Alfonso had two sons by Elena Armanda Nicolasa Sanz y Martínez de Arizala ( Castellón de la Plana, 15 December 1849 – Paris, 24 December 1898 ):

Alfonso and Ena had six children:

The marriage had been arranged by her father Alfonso VI of León in 1106 to unite the two chief Christian states against the Almoravides, and to supply them with a capable military leader.

Alfonso had the support of one section of the nobles who found their account in the confusion.

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.

After being widowed in 1327, Alfonso married in February 1329 Eleanor of Castile ( 1308 – 1359 ), who was betrothed to his brother James, who had refused to consummate the marriage.

In 1421 Queen Joan II of Naples, who had no children, adopted and named him as heir to the Kingdom of Naples, and Alfonso went to Naples.

When Sforza also abandoned Louis, Alfonso seemed to have all his problems solved ; however, his relationship with Joan suddenly worsened, and in May 1423 he had her lover, and a powerful figure in the Neapolitan court, Gianni Caracciolo, arrested.

Alfonso requested support from Braccio da Montone, who was besieging Joan's troops in L ' Aquila, but had to set sail for Spain, where a war had broken out between his brothers and the Kingdom of Castile.

Alfonso tried to regain the favour of the queen, but failed, and had to wait for the death of both Louis ( at Cosenza in 1434 ) and Joan herself ( February 1435 ).

As the Neapolitans had called for the French, Alfonso decided to intervene and, with the support of several barons of the kingdom, captured Capua and besieged the important sea fortress of Gaeta.

Papal troops had invaded the Neapolitan kingdom, but Alfonso corrupted the cardinal Giovanni Vitelleschi, who commanded them, and his successes waned.

This was because in 1448, while Skanderbeg was victoriously fighting off the Turkish invasions, three military columns, commanded by Demetrio Reres along with his sons Giorgio and Basilio, were dispatched to help Alfonso V defeat the barons of Naples who had rebelled against him.

Alfonso had been betrothed to Maria of Castile ( 1401 – 1458 ; sister of John II of Castile ) in Valladolid in 1408 ; the marriage was celebrated in Valencia on 12 June 1415.

There has not been a monarch known as Alphonso or Alfonso I of Spain, the first king of that name of the unified Spain being Alfonso XII of Spain ( 1874 – 1885 ).

The story of Ratoncito Pérez has been adapted into further literary works and movies since then, with the character of Alfonso XIII appearing in some.

The ELN guerrilla had been seriously crippled by military operations in the region of Anorí by 1974, but it managed to reconstitute itself and escape destruction, in part due to the administration of Alfonso López Michelsen ( 1974 – 1978 ) allowing it to escape encirclement, hoping to initiate a peace process with the group.

Although there has been an old tradition and like for making census in Spain, the oldest ones dating back to the 12th century ( by Alfonso VII of the Kingdom of Castile ), the first modern census was carried out in 1768 by Conde de Aranda, under the reign of Carlos III.

This is the generally given reason for El Cid's exile, although several others are plausible and may have been contributing factors: jealous nobles turning Alfonso against El Cid, Alfonso's own animosity towards El Cid, and an accusation of pocketing some of the tribute from Seville.

After Alfonso VII's death in 1157, the title was abandoned, and the kings who used it are not commonly mentioned as having been " emperors ", in Spanish or other historiography.

As Arab contact with the West expanded, so too did the game and its various permutations, and by the twelfth century, chess was becoming an entertaining diversion among a growing population of Europeans, including some scholars, clergy, the aristocracy, and the merchant classes ; thus, by the thirteenth century, the iconography and symbolism associated with chess would have been accessible and familiar to Alfonso and his literate court culture, who may have had access to the private library, and manuscripts, of Alfonso, including the Libro de juegos.

He was made Duke of Gravina by King Alfonso, title definitely assigned to his son Giacomo ( died 1472 ), to which had been added the counties of Conversano, Campagna and Copertino.

Three national synods were held during his pontificate at Naples under Alfonso Cardinal Caraffa ( whose family had, after inquiry, been reinstated by Pius V ), at Milan under Saint Charles Borromeo, and at Machim.

Alfonso Soriano, who had often been mentioned in trade speculation, was finally dealt to the Nationals for outfielders Brad Wilkerson and Terrmel Sledge.

* October 23 – Battle of az-Zallaqah: Alfonso VI of León and Castile is defeated by the Almoravids, who had been called into Spain by Abbad III of Sevilla.

Pope Gregory X, in spite of Otakar's protests, not only recognised Rudolph himself, but persuaded King Alfonso X of Castile ( another grandson of Philip of Swabia ), who had been chosen German ( anti -) king in 1257 as the successor to Count William II of Holland, to do the same.

In the same year Alfonso's sister, Eleanor of Castile, married Henry's heir to the throne, Edward: with this act Alfonso renounced forever all claim to the Duchy of Gascony, to which Castile had been a pretender since the marriage of Alfonso VIII of Castile with Eleanor of England and Gascony.

The director for the third Harry Potter film has been announced as Mexican-born Alfonso Cuarón.

But though appearing in charters, and claimed by Alfonso VI of León and Alfonso the Battler, the title had been little more than a flourish of rhetoric.

René's captivity, and the poverty of the Angevin resources due to his ransom, enabled Alfonso V of Aragon, who had been first adopted and then repudiated by Joanna II, to make some headway in the kingdom of Naples, especially as he was already in possession of the island of Sicily.

He has been confused with his twin brother Alfonso ( a courtier of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who attended Charles's coronation in Aachen in 1520 and was Latin secretary of state from 1524 ).

Catullus ' love poem " Vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus " in the translation by Ben Jonson was set to music ( lute accompanied song ) by Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger.

Lord Voldemort () Alfonso Cuarón, director of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban compared Voldemort with George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, as the two of them "... have selfish interests and are very much in love with power.

Alfonso and his love affairs are mentioned in poems by many troubadours, including Guillem de Berguedà ( who criticized his dealings with Azalais of Toulouse ) and Peire Vidal, who commended Alfonso's decision to marry Sancha rather than Eudokia Komnene that he had preferred a poor Castilian maid to the emperor Manuel's golden camel.

In 1502 and 1503 he was again in Ferrara, and had a love affair with the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, who was the wife of Alfonso d ' Este.

After a year of rumours about which princess the King of Spain would marry, Maria Christina of Austria finally acceded to her son's selection in January 1906 and wrote a letter to Princess Beatrice, Victoria Eugenie's mother, telling her about the love Alfonso felt for her daughter and seeking unofficial contact with King Edward VII.

His greatest success, the song " Zaraza ", said to refer to a Gypsy woman he was in love with at that time, was in fact an adapted version of a Uruguayan tango written in 1929 by Benjamín Alfonso Tagle Lara.

* Alfonso Baptista as Óscar Reyes, in love with Jimena

In the late 19th or early 20th centuries the monarchs of Belgium, Russia, and Spain all withheld consent from members of their families to marry for love into foreign dynasties: Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich of Russia and Infante Alfonso de Borbon-Orléans of Spain sought to marry a pair of sisters who were also British princesses, Princess Victoria Melita of Edinburgh and Princess Beatrice of Edinburgh, choosing to elope and endure ( temporary ) banishment rather than obey their sovereigns ' commands.

The song is using the melody placed on Romances, in particular the one of Romance del Conde Olinos o Niño, a sad love story very popular in the Spanish folk some of which were compiled at the court of Alfonso X and others like the Cancionero de Uppsala later by the House of Trastamara.

According to explanations in the manuscripts of Gaucelm Faidit's poems, Alfonso was a rival of the troubadour's for the love of Jourdaine d ' Embrun.

Without forgetting the former Kronprinz, Marthe had a short love affair with Alfonso XIII of Spain, and another with the French Socialist representative Henry de Jouvenel.

* Video of " What If I seek for love " by Robert Jones performed by Valeria Mignaco, soprano & Alfonso Marin, lute

The heart and the entrails of the king Alfonso X the Wise are buried under the main altar of the cathedral, as he indicated in his testament, as a gift and proof of his love to Murcia and in thanks to the fidelity that the city showed to him.