The Lara Family: Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain

by Simon R. Doubleday

For much of the Middle Ages, the Lara family was among the most powerful aristocratic lineages in Spain. Protégés of the monarchy at the time of El Cid, their influence reached extraordinary heights during the struggle against the Moors. Hand-in-glove with successive kings, they gathered an impressive array of military and political positions across the Iberian Peninsula. But cooperation gave way to confrontation, as the family was pitted against the crown in a series of civil wars.

This book, the first modern study of the Laras, explores the causes of change in the dynamics of power, and narrates the dramatic story of the events that overtook the family. The Laras' militant quest for territorial strength and the conflict with the monarchy led toward a fatal end, but anticipated a form of aristocratic power that long outlived the family. The noble elite would come to dominate Spanish society in the coming centuries, and the Lara family provides important lessons for students of the history of nobility, monarchy, and power in the medieval and early modern world.

Genres: History

198 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2001

Reviews

[Michael Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

In northern Castile, in the coastal mountains fronting the Bay of Biscay, are a number of small farming villages now bound in pastoral poverty but which a thousand years ago were the original domain of the Lara family who supplied the earliest counts of Castile, beginning with the successes of Gonzalo Fernandez de Lara in the Reconquista, and who remained influential in neighboring León until late in the 14th century, when they lost a serious confrontation with the crown. This monograph provides a straightforward survey of the national political aspects of the family’s history, especially their role as favorites during the long reigns of Alfonso VII and Alfonso VIII in the 12th century. The author omits both the web of client relationships they established (a complex subject all on its on) and the branch of the family that established itself in Narbonne.