Battle of Atapuerca

The battle of Atapuerca took place on September 1, 1054 on the plain in front of the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos) between Fernando I, King of León and Count of Castile, and his brother García Sánchez III "el de Nájera", king of Pamplona, both sons of Sancho III el Mayor.

Background

Following the death of the young count García Sánchez de Castilla in León in 1028, Sancho el Mayor occupied the County of Castilla and its part in Álava in the name of his wife, but with the intention of keeping it as an inheritance to endow Fernando. Upon his death in 1035, Sancho divided his domains among his sons: García Sánchez III inherited the patrimonial kingdom of Pamplona, plus Álava and practically half of the County of Castilla: Montes de Oca, La Bureba, Trasmiera and Las Merindades, among other territories. Fernando, who had been holding the count dignity already in the life of his father Sancho de él, would receive a diminished County of Castilla. Two years after inheriting the young King of León, a refugee until the death of Sancho III in the Marches of Galicia, he tried to recover territories from Cea annexed by his Castilian brother-in-law and some of the lost prestige and mobilized against Fernando. This, in inferiority of forces, asked for help from his brother in Pamplona to resist King Bermudo in exchange for good perks in the border territories of Álava and Old Castilla. Bermudo's death in the campaign after falling dismounted on the battlefield of Tamarón would transform the status quo between brothers, Fernando becoming king Jure uxoris by his wife Sancha and crowned in León in 1038. Fernando, 17 years after seizing the crown of León, he faced his brother García to recover those territories.

The Crónica Silense, written a few decades later, relates that King García made enemies of his brother Fernando when he visited him in Nájera during his illness. Restored from his state and sorry for him, García returned the visit to Fernando to make peace and apologize. Fernando not only did not accept him but loaded him with chains and locked him up in a tower on Cea lands.When García was able to escape, he declared war against León and already rejected all official embassies. García asked for help from his brother Ramiro I of Aragón, bailío in Aragón and some Moors from Taifa debts.

According to the Crónica Compostelana, King García offended one of his nobles, Sancho Fortún, which pushed him to betray him. However, the authorship of La Compostelana had obvious Fernandino interests. This Fortún had been García's tutor since his birth and loved him as his own son, having fallen in combat with him.

The Nájera Chronicle attributes it to a treacherous death during combat, at the hands of relatives of the late Leonese monarch Bermudo, who defied Fernando's orders not to intervene in the fight against García but to force his live capture.

On the death of their king, the Navarrese guarded the field during the night and vigil to take him in a funeral procession to the pantheon recently built by himself in Nájera. Fernando himself attended the funeral chapel of his brother and the proclamation and oath of his nephew Sancho, still a teenager, as the new king of Navarre, whom he promised to keep under his protection as the reigning king in Hispania. The recovery of Castilian-Alava territories and the border of both kingdoms in line with the Ebro from the road to Santiago in Logroño was agreed as a term of peace.

The sources in common agree that there were serious personal grievances between the fraternal monarchs, although for their closest courtiers they also had substantive interests in terms of possessions and bordering jurisdictions to be elucidated more clearly, in territories that to date and perhaps long before the conquest of the peninsula by the Arabs, a rather blurred and imprecise separation was maintained between the Navarrese area and the central plateau in the upper Ebro and they were marked like this and with varied alternations for more centuries and still until the days today between cultural identity and Castilian and Navarrese spheres of power.

Consequences

The Pamplona monarch was mortally wounded by a Castilian nobleman, dying in the arms of San Íñigo. Fernando I annexed the region for his kingdom, which was at that time Pamplona territory. On the same battlefield, the son of the deceased García, Sancho Garcés IV, was named king of Pamplona, after having paid homage to Fernando I.

After the battle, Diego Flaínez, father of El Cid, reconquered around 1055 the castles of La Piedra and Úrbel del Castillo, then from Pamplona, which blocked the passage through the upper Urbel valley.

King's End

Although the battle was given in the plain traveled through the Fuentes stream, according to the local tradition, the mortally wounded king. He went to die, outside the camp of the struggle, at the term known by the name of Prado Redondo, near the serrezuela, to the southwest of Ages, together with an abundant regato that near there will join the former and a path of merinas. In memory of the event, according to the same tradition, a huge stone was placed in the place of death, which the neighbors call of the King's End; and it is as seen by the photograbbed number 2 a rock without a two-and-a-half-foot tall, brought from the nearby mountain range and placed there probably by order of the victorious king Fernando I.

It consigns the Madoz Dictionary, which "at the entrance of the sacristy of the parish church of Agés there is a tombstone, in which derredor is seen an illegible inscription, and in its center a figure of man, and in this tomb it is believed that the remains of Don García III of Navarre were locked, dead in a battle, given in 1st of September of 1054 between this town and Atuer.

We argue in full the paragraph to refute it and make it known that the local tradition repeats that at the entrance of the temple the bowels of that unfortunate sovereign are buried under a great slab; but it no longer exists, and it must have disappeared when the pavement was renewed in the centuryXIXIt's believed there.

The tombstone described by Madoz subsists, but it is a lauda proper to an ecclesiastical character with his priestly and bonete garments, carved in relief in the style of the centuryXVI, very spent his inscription, and probably corresponds to the Arcedian of Alcaraz, dignity of the S.I.P. of Toledo, who made the church an important legacy, or to D. Miguel Gutierrez, priest of Agés, who expanded the temple, and founded a work to sustain a schoolmaster. As the body of the sovereign was transferred to Nájera, it seems very reasonable that following the practice of the time, they extracted his bowels before doing so, and deposited them in the church closest to the Navarre camp, which was in Agés.

Commemoration

Historical representation of the Battle of Atapuerca

The historical representation of the battle of Atapuerca organized by the Friends of Atapuerca Association, has been held since 1996, it has been declared a Festival of Tourist Interest in Castilla y León and distinguished as the Best Local Development Initiative in Castilla y León. It also has the Tamarón Cultura, Atapuerca Cultura and Atapuerca Turismo Awards, granted by the town council. It is part of the Spanish Association of Historical Festivals and Reenactments and the European Confederation of Historical Festivals and Demonstrations. It is held on the penultimate Sunday of August and is the central event around which various events take place throughout the weekend. It is held outdoors, on the slope of the Church of San Martín, in the town of Atapuerca, It is free of charge and is intended for all kinds of audiences. The events begin a few days before, with the parade of the troops of King Fernando I of León through the streets of the historic center of the city of Burgos. The night before the contest, the reception of King Fernando I, a concert and the delivery of the National Battle of Atapuerca Award take place in the town of Atapuerca. Unfortunately, the evocation of the facts is far from accepting the European academic precepts of historical reconstruction, where material culture, collegiate dissemination and reconstructed elements are taken to the extreme. The historical representation is not a historical recreation that conforms to the historical fact, but year after year from the organization they try to improve the staging, weapons, props, costumes, customs and historical loyalty.^{[citation required ]} Atapuerca currently has the Batalla de Atapuerca Cultural Tourist Center, an interpretive, research, dynamization and dissemination space that promotes knowledge of the historical event that occurred in the year 1054.