Mid-Century Madness
1239 - 1253 AD
Family Turmoil
Duke Pelaio II of Navarre, despite his apparent insanity and tendency toward bizarre outbursts at court, had great ambitions. He had laid out a plan to systematically challenge the rival duchies of Castile in order to build a strong, wide-reaching Navarre that would become the most dominant single duchy in mainland Iberia; a plan that his advisors, despite their occasional mistrust of a Duke who was once caught howling at the moon naked in his bedroom, recognized had real potential.
However, Pelaio would not live long enough to see his plan come to fruition. Pelaio, who suffered from gonorrhea in addition to his mental woes, contracted leprosy and finally died in extremely poor health in 1243 AD, without adding even a single county to his territory. For all of his great planning, Pelaio was barely remembered in the history of his people. This was not the case, however, for his eldest son and heir -- Gartzia II, who proved to be one of the brightest men of his lineage. Keenly intelligent and calculating, Gartzia saw Iberia as his chessboard. He maintained a large court of advisors on all matters political, spiritual, and economic, and seemed to be in a constant state of strategic planning. His family, his peers, his liege, his rivals; all of them were pieces to a grand strategic puzzle, and the ultimate goal was power and legacy.
Things did not begin easily for 20 year-old young duke, however. Before he could turn his attention to enacting his many power plays, he first had to contend with his own family. Within a year of his ascension to the throne, Gartzia was challenged by a coalition of Basque counts including several of his relatives. Led by Countess Mentzia of Toro, they pressed for a decrease in the Duke's authority and for greater delegation of responsibilities to his noble council. Rather than fighting to expand his realm, Gartzia found himself fighting to preserve it against an alliance of his own followers. The rebellion was defeated and Mentzia captured, marking what should have been the beginning of a stable reign.
Not convinced by Gartzia's first display of dominance, another of his relatives, the Countess of Asturias de Oviedo, rallied her own supporters in 1248, hoping to force Gartzia to surrender a portion of his large personal demesne to even the balance of power between the Duke and his vassals. Like Mentzia before her, Alaia found herself outmatched by the large personal army Gartzia was able to field from Pamplona and his surrounding counties, and her effort at leveraging power against her kinsman was defeated just as swiftly. Within the span of four years, Gartzia had put down two different rebellions by other members of his family. After Alaia's defeat, his vassals seemed more prepared to fall in line behind their lord. With the threats of insurrection subdued by force, Gartzia could finally focus on his plan for expansion, beginning in 1250 AD -- marking the beginning of a period of rapid and dramatic political change with substantial consequences for the future of Iberia.
Successes and Successions
By 1250 AD, the political climate of Iberia had grown more or less stable compared to recent periods. After a successful crusade brought about the fall of the last Muslim Emirates in Iberia, the peninsula had been divided into three -- Castile to the north, Andalusia to the south, and Aragon to the east. No longer having an infidel enemy to unite their armies against, the Christian kingdoms of Iberia focused inward, as their individual competitions for the throne consumed most of their time, effort, and energy. It was not atypical for multiple attempts at coups and power plays to be happening at any one time within either of the three kingdoms, but two major events set very big changes in motion for the region.
The first happened within Castile; Queen Marta II had grown increasingly unpopular during her reign, and her patrilineal marriage to a landless Anglo-Norse noble meant that the kingdom would pass on her death to Beorhtwald de Normandie. A great many of her vassals found this unacceptable, and Gartzia used the opportunity to gather support around him. He could not convince the Dukes of Castile to support his own claim on the throne, but he did find one common goal; a change of the laws of succession for the kingdom. He rallied the support of the Dukes of Gascony, Valencia, and Toledo, and together the four issued their demand for Queen Martia to surrender the succession of the Castilian throne to a Ducal election. Rather than risk a costly war against four of her most powerful vassals, Marta -- to the ire of her son -- accepted their demands, and permitted the Dukes to elect their next king upon her death.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Andalusia was in a succession crisis of its own. Briac de Penthievre, the realm's first king following the crusade, left the throne to his daughter Onega, who was married patrilneally to Alfonso I, King of Aragon. As a result, their son, Alfonso II, would inherit both titles, uniting Andalusia and Aragon into a single monarchy whose size, wealth, and power could rival Castile. Around the same time that the Castilian dukes were pressuring Marta II to enact succession by election, the Breton Duke of Algarve, Hesdren Parisy, began an uprising to force Onega's abdication in favor of a Arnald of Toro, a lowborn Breton and husband to the once-rebellious Countess Mentzia de Zadorra.
While Gartzia had found himself at odds with Mentzia, he recognized that placing Arnald on the Andalusian throne presented a major opportunity for his family. If Arnald became King, his children -- born into the de Zadorra line by virtue of their matrilineal marriage -- would mean that a de Zadorra would become the next Andalusian monarch after Arnald's passing. Gartzia reached out to Arnald and Mentzia and arranged for a betrothal; his daughter and heir, Fakilo, would be promised to Mentzio, their son and heir. Their marriage would place their child in position to inherit the Kingdom of Andalusia and the Duchy of Navarre, the union of which could definitively produce the strongest kingdom in Iberia. With this goal in mind, Gartzia mobilized Navarre's powerful army in support of the coup.
The war seemed to be an easy victory, as Andalusia's military resources were strapped at the time, and Queen Onega could not muster a force large enough to compete with Gartzia and Hesdren's men. That all changed when, during the first major field battle of the war, Onega was killed on the battlefield. Alfonso II had already inherited Aragon after his father's death while fighting to depose the German Antipope in Europe, and Onega's passing gave him the crown of Andalusia, producing the unified kingdom that Gartzia and Hesdren had been fighting to prevent. Now forced to fight their way through two kingdoms' worth of resistance forces, the two men found themselves in a much more challenging battle.
In a head-to-head war, Aragon should have been the victor. However, much of the Aragonese army was still engaged in Italy as part of the ongoing campaign against the Holy Roman Empire's pet Pope, and young Alfonso II could only send a portion of his kingdom's levies to resist the uprising. With the help of some hired mercenaries, Gartzia mounted a decisive campaign that isolated and surrounded the Aragonese armies that attempted to march against him, and they were definitively beaten at the Battle of Portalegre in 1253 AD. By then, Gartzia's scheming had resulted in the assassination of Alfonso II and his brother, leaving Aragon in the hands of Queen Timbor, his sister. Timbor surrendered in September of 1253, and Arnald was named King of Andalusia. The war had cost Gartzia slightly more than half of his accumulated wealth, but the victory was well worth the cost. Andalusia and Aragon were once again separated, preventing the Jimena line from reclaiming major dominance in Iberia, and Gartzia's first grandchild would be set to inherit Navarre and Andalusia.
