Dear all,

Jaime de Salazar y Acha has published last December a monumental book on Spanish royal dynasties in the Middle Ages.
The book if freely downloadable at
https://www.boe.es/biblioteca_juridica/publicacion.php?id=PUB-DH-2021-233

regards

antoine

A sexta-feira, 29 de abril de 2022 à(s) 12:20:31 UTC+1, antoin...@gmail.com escreveu:
> Dear all,
>
> Jaime de Salazar y Acha has published last December a monumental book on Spanish royal dynasties in the Middle Ages.
> The book if freely downloadable at
> https://www.boe.es/biblioteca_juridica/publicacion.php?id=PUB-DH-2021-233
>
> regards
>
> antoine
Thanks for this, Antoine.

On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 4:20:31 AM UTC-7, antoin...@gmail.com wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Jaime de Salazar y Acha has published last December a monumental book on Spanish royal dynasties in the Middle Ages.
> The book if freely downloadable at
> https://www.boe.es/biblioteca_juridica/publicacion.php?id=PUB-DH-2021-233
>

Thanks.

This started out well, basically taking no interest in the early mythological genealogy of Asturias, not even mentioning it, but unfortunately he can't restrain himself from reaching some dubious conclusions when it comes to his own pet theories. For example, he invents a wife for Ordono II in order to explain the name given his eldest son, Sancho,

"Tuvo que casar Ordoño II por primera vez hacia 895 con una señora desconocida, hija de un Sancho, pues sólo así se explicaría el nombre dado a su primogénito, nombre desconocido en León hasta la fecha."

Except Ordono's own mother, Jimena, was from Pamplona and probably (based on her most common placement) had a brother named Sancho. There is no need to invent a wife to explain this name. In at least one other case, he invents a relationship (in this case previously published) to account for a name that has a more likely (if less desirable) derivition.

That said, in a later case one of his speculations matches something that I mooted here back in the early 1990s, that Cristina, mother-in-law of el Cid, was the Cristina Alfonso, granddaughter of infantes Ordono le Ciego and Cristina Vermudez.

I will comment more if there is anything particularly noteworthy.

taf

On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 11:27:45 AM UTC-7, taf wrote:
> I will comment more if there is anything particularly noteworthy.

Found another howler. In his account of the second dynasty of Pamplona, he shows three sons of 'king' Inigo Garcia (elder half-brother of Sancho I) marrying three daughters of Lubb ibn Muhammad al Qasawi, following Sanchez Albornoz. Too bad Sanchez Albornoz was completely wrong about this, misidentifying the parentage of both the grooms and the brides, and Salazar has just copied it without tracing it back to a primary source (or maybe copied it _specifically because_ he was unable to identify the original source, because there is no original source for the marriages as given). Best bet is that Sanchez Albornoz was working from some extracts stripped of appropraite context, and assumed they related to someone different than they actualy did - the real marriages belong a century earlier. He makes an extremely similar mistake in showing Raymond I of Ribagorza married to a daugther of Mutarrif ibn Lubb, which he doesn't even cite to a source but as has been discussed here before, defives from Levi Provencal apparently doing what Sanchez Albornoz did, taking an out-of-context extract and trying to force it into the respective pedigrees in the wrong place, but later Salazar also has the same marriage later on in a more accurate cchronological context (though not necessarily exactly correct, as the primary source is ambiguous).

I don't want to come across too critical. Overall it is a careful work, but just occasionally the author gets tripped up either by his own ingenuity or the respect he has for his esteemed predecessors. It will certainly prove useful for cleaning up the utter chaos seen in the online pedigrees regarding the fantastical families of people like Fernan Gonzalez. Still, he is a bit quirky in terms of when he chooses to present pet theories as fact (e.g. that Constanza, paternal grandmother of king Garcia Ramirez, was daughter of Roger de Toeni) and when he is more circumspect (with Urraca, wife of Count Sancho Garces of Castile and with Zaida/Isabel). This is perhaps best illustrated by him showing setting off Stephanie, wife of Count William of Burgundy, as a possible daughter of Ramon Borrell, then showing Sibyl, wife of Henry of Burgundy as definitely a daughter, when the latter is no better founded on onomastic speculation than the former.

One more note: He cites as in press a work on the battle of Ucles. This is also now available online, and includes a discussion of the Zaida controversy (again) and of several of the counts involved in the battle.
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=8372897
https://www.rah.es/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2_La-batalla-de-Ucles-1108.-Algunos-datos-e-hipotesis-sobre-sus-protagonistas_-Jaime-de-Salazar-W-1.pdf

taf

A sexta-feira, 29 de abril de 2022 à(s) 19:27:45 UTC+1, taf escreveu:
> On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 4:20:31 AM UTC-7, antoin...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > Jaime de Salazar y Acha has published last December a monumental book on Spanish royal dynasties in the Middle Ages.
> > The book if freely downloadable at
> > https://www.boe.es/biblioteca_juridica/publicacion.php?id=PUB-DH-2021-233
> >
> Thanks.
>
> This started out well, basically taking no interest in the early mythological genealogy of Asturias, not even mentioning it, but unfortunately he can't restrain himself from reaching some dubious conclusions when it comes to his own pet theories. For example, he invents a wife for Ordono II in order to explain the name given his eldest son, Sancho,
>
> "Tuvo que casar Ordoño II por primera vez hacia 895 con una señora desconocida, hija de un Sancho, pues sólo así se explicaría el nombre dado a su primogénito, nombre desconocido en León hasta la fecha."
>
> Except Ordono's own mother, Jimena, was from Pamplona and probably (based on her most common placement) had a brother named Sancho. There is no need to invent a wife to explain this name. In at least one other case, he invents a relationship (in this case previously published) to account for a name that has a more likely (if less desirable) derivition.
>
> That said, in a later case one of his speculations matches something that I mooted here back in the early 1990s, that Cristina, mother-in-law of el Cid, was the Cristina Alfonso, granddaughter of infantes Ordono le Ciego and Cristina Vermudez.
>
> I will comment more if there is anything particularly noteworthy.
>
> taf
Dear Todd, thanks for this analysis. Would it be wrong to mention early Asturias genealogy simply to say it should not be trusted?

On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 6:12:05 PM UTC-7, Paulo Ricardo Canedo wrote:

> > This started out well, basically taking no interest in the early mythological genealogy of Asturias, not even mentioning it,

> Dear Todd, thanks for this analysis. Would it be wrong to mention early Asturias genealogy simply to say it should not be trusted?

In a source like this, yes, it would be wrong. What is known about the founders from the authentic sources is that one was of royal blood, and the other was related to (that is what the source says, not desended from) two named kings. It was only in the 16th and 17th centuries that Iberian historians started to invent specific named lines of descent connecting to earlier kings. In a study that is supposedly based on what the primary sources say and the products of modern scholarship, and explicitly (in the introduction) insisting on setting aside such antiquarian inventions, then to list these specific pedigrees, even if only to say they 'shouldn't be trusted', is to still give them too much credit, because the very act of listing them says they are something more than the completely baseless outright inventions they are. Also, sadly, there are enough sloppy genealogists who simply cherry-pick names, without worrying about the accompanying text that might urge caution or even dismiss the descent. Ironically, by including completely baseless material only to refute it, one invariably ends up propagating it..

taf

A sábado, 30 de abril de 2022 à(s) 06:59:13 UTC+1, taf escreveu:
> On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 6:12:05 PM UTC-7, Paulo Ricardo Canedo wrote:
>
> > > This started out well, basically taking no interest in the early mythological genealogy of Asturias, not even mentioning it,
> > Dear Todd, thanks for this analysis. Would it be wrong to mention early Asturias genealogy simply to say it should not be trusted?
> In a source like this, yes, it would be wrong. What is known about the founders from the authentic sources is that one was of royal blood, and the other was related to (that is what the source says, not desended from) two named kings. It was only in the 16th and 17th centuries that Iberian historians started to invent specific named lines of descent connecting to earlier kings. In a study that is supposedly based on what the primary sources say and the products of modern scholarship, and explicitly (in the introduction) insisting on setting aside such antiquarian inventions, then to list these specific pedigrees, even if only to say they 'shouldn't be trusted', is to still give them too much credit, because the very act of listing them says they are something more than the completely baseless outright inventions they are. Also, sadly, there are enough sloppy genealogists who simply cherry-pick names, without worrying about the accompanying text that might urge caution or even dismiss the descent. Ironically, by including completely baseless material only to refute it, one invariably ends up propagating it.
>
> taf
What if instead of listing those pedigrees, you just noted at the beginning that the traditional ancestry of the founders of the Kingdom of the Asturias are not to be trusted?

On Saturday, April 30, 2022 at 7:48:14 AM UTC-7, Paulo Ricardo Canedo wrote:
> What if instead of listing those pedigrees, you just noted at the beginning that the traditional ancestry of the founders of the Kingdom of the Asturias are not to be trusted?

That could be done, but were he to do so, whole sections would consist of more such statements than actual fact. The made-up parents of Pedro of Cantabria, the made-up wife of Pedro of Cantabria, the made-up wife of his son Fruela, the made-up wife of his son Bermudo I, and on and on. There has been just too much of this invention to refute each bit individually. Salazar y Acha has chosen instead to simply dismiss it in one fell swoop in the introduction, to there state that a lot of nonsense is floating around but he is only going to include the documentable material, making it implicit that everything he doesn't mention is untrustworthy, without individually stating so explicitly for every untrustworthy detail.

taf

On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 12:56:04 PM UTC-7, taf wrote:
>
> I don't want to come across too critical. Overall it is a careful work, but just occasionally the author gets tripped up either by his own ingenuity or the respect he has for his esteemed predecessors.

More commentary: Where Salazar goes most afield is when he draws conclusions based on a simplistic view of onomastics. I have already commented on how he invented a wife for Ordono II through the insistence that a son Sancho must have been named for a maternal grandfather rather than an immediate relative of the child's grandmother. Another example is found in his coverage of early Aragon where he says of Aznar Galindez I:
"Se desconoce su matrimonio, aunque por el nombre de su hijo menor, pudo contraerlo con una hija de Centulio, conde de Gascuña" (We don't know of his marriage, but from the name of his son, he may have wed a daughter of Centullo, count of Gascony)

If for the sake of argument we take it as given that names must have come from immediate family members, there is still multiple problems with this. The first is the supposition that the name Centullo must have been introduced into the family by Aznar's marriage. What do we know about the names used in the family before this marriage? Aznar was son of Galindo. That's it. We know two names. Is it really a reasonable supposition that only these two names were in use by the family prior to this marriage? In fact, for all we know, Aznar was grandson or nephew or brother of a Centullo, rather than marrying into the name. Even were the name to have come from the marriage, were the counts of Gascony really the only family in the region using this name, such that every subsequent Centullo must come from them? There is inherent bias to such a conclusion - our novel name must have come from the absolutely most powerful person in the region, not because he was the only person with that name, but because he was the only person with that name important enough to be preserved in the scant record. It is the same flawed reason there has been a long tradition of insisting every person named Raymond must descend from the Toulouse counts, and inventing marriages to make that the case that have now joined the body of 'genealogical fact' even though it is anything but. And even if the name derived from the count of Gascony, must the connection be direct? Might not, for example, a niece of Centullo have wanted to honor her prominent uncle?

So yes, Aznar's wife may have been a daughter of count Centullo but she also may have been daughter of literally any other noble family in the entire region at the time, and a single name, devoid of sufficient onomastic context either within the specific family or for the overall region, is entirely insufficient to even suggest a specific parentage. But now that it is 'out there', it is only a matter of time before it appears in Wikipedia and propagates through the online genealogies as little short of fact.

It is frustrating to see that while Salazar is stripping away the cumulative consequences of centuries of genealogists going off the rails, he is adding in his own (and the oft-cited Settipani's) no better-founded modern 'acceptable' version of genealogical 'connect the dots'.

taf

On 01-May-22 6:04 AM, taf wrote:
> On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 12:56:04 PM UTC-7, taf wrote:
>>
>> I don't want to come across too critical. Overall it is a careful work, but just occasionally the author gets tripped up either by his own ingenuity or the respect he has for his esteemed predecessors.
>
> More commentary: Where Salazar goes most afield is when he draws conclusions based on a simplistic view of onomastics. I have already commented on how he invented a wife for Ordono II through the insistence that a son Sancho must have been named for a maternal grandfather rather than an immediate relative of the child's grandmother. Another example is found in his coverage of early Aragon where he says of Aznar Galindez I:
> "Se desconoce su matrimonio, aunque por el nombre de su hijo menor, pudo contraerlo con una hija de Centulio, conde de Gascuña" (We don't know of his marriage, but from the name of his son, he may have wed a daughter of Centullo, count of Gascony)
>
> If for the sake of argument we take it as given that names must have come from immediate family members, there is still multiple problems with this. The first is the supposition that the name Centullo must have been introduced into the family by Aznar's marriage. What do we know about the names used in the family before this marriage? Aznar was son of Galindo. That's it. We know two names. Is it really a reasonable supposition that only these two names were in use by the family prior to this marriage? In fact, for all we know, Aznar was grandson or nephew or brother of a Centullo, rather than marrying into the name. Even were the name to have come from the marriage, were the counts of Gascony really the only family in the region using this name, such that every subsequent Centullo must come from them? There is inherent bias to such a conclusion - our novel name must have come from the absolutely most powerful person in the region, not because he was the only person with that name, but because he was the only person with that name important enough to be preserved in the scant record. It is the same flawed reason there has been a long tradition of insisting every person named Raymond must descend from the Toulouse counts, and inventing marriages to make that the case that have now joined the body of 'genealogical fact' even though it is anything but. And even if the name derived from the count of Gascony, must the connection be direct? Might not, for example, a niece of Centullo have wanted to honor her prominent uncle?
>
> So yes, Aznar's wife may have been a daughter of count Centullo but she also may have been daughter of literally any other noble family in the entire region at the time, and a single name, devoid of sufficient onomastic context either within the specific family or for the overall region, is entirely insufficient to even suggest a specific parentage. But now that it is 'out there', it is only a matter of time before it appears in Wikipedia and propagates through the online genealogies as little short of fact.
>
> It is frustrating to see that while Salazar is stripping away the cumulative consequences of centuries of genealogists going off the rails, he is adding in his own (and the oft-cited Settipani's) no better-founded modern 'acceptable' version of genealogical 'connect the dots'.
The word omitted from your translation, "menor", is another emblem of
unwarranted assumption from a genealogical point of view - there is no
source cited for making Centulo into the younger son of his parents,
that presumably is an arbitrary choice by Salazar y Acha implicitly
bolstering the notion that his given name may have come from his
maternal grandfather while his brother Galindo was obviously named after
their paternal grandfather. The methodology applied by devotees of the
onomastics cult can be insidious.
Peter Stewart

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On Saturday, April 30, 2022 at 7:13:17 PM UTC-7, pss...@optusnet.com.au wrote:
> On 01-May-22 6:04 AM, taf wrote:
> > "Se desconoce su matrimonio, aunque por el nombre de su hijo menor, pudo contraerlo con una hija de Centulio, conde de Gascuña" (We don't know of his marriage, but from the name of his son, he may have wed a daughter of Centullo, count of Gascony)

> The word omitted from your translation, "menor", is another emblem of

Oops. Thanks for the correction - my eyes just jumped right over that word without my brain registering its presence.

> unwarranted assumption from a genealogical point of view - there is no
> source cited for making Centulo into the younger son of his parents,

Indeed, the Codice de Roda lists him before his brother Galindo, though as I have argued here in the past, these earliest generations fall before the historical horizon of the compiler, so a grain of salt and all that.

> that presumably is an arbitrary choice by Salazar y Acha implicitly
> bolstering the notion that his given name may have come from his
> maternal grandfather while his brother Galindo was obviously named after
> their paternal grandfather.

Yes, begging the question by selecting an order to match the 'rule', then applying the 'rule' to the reordered list to draw a conclusion. Oddly, as I already commented, he had no problem with Sancho Ordonez being first born named for a maternal grandfather (such that a new marriage for Ordono had to be invented), and then Alfonso IV the second son named for the paternal grandfather, yet in this Aragon case the order had to be changed so that Galindo, named for the paternal grandfather, had to be made the eldest. There isn't even any consistency in the case-by-case fudging.

taf

On 30-Apr-22 5:56 AM, taf wrote:
> On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 11:27:45 AM UTC-7, taf wrote:

<snip>

> I don't want to come across too critical. Overall it is a careful work, but just occasionally the author gets tripped up either by his own ingenuity or the respect he has for his esteemed predecessors.

I have no such inhibition about being too critical, as academic heads
often need a sharp banging.

The main disappointment for me is that the whole enterprise is shot
through with the outdated conceit of the ivory tower - the citation of
primary sources or (with unbecoming frequency here) only secondary
literature by archive/publication details, without providing the salient
text or even a brief paraphrase, assumes that all readers will either
have these materials at their fingertips to check or else will accept
unquestioningly whatever the author has understood from them.

In the era of internet downloads I can see no good reason to present
just a scan of the print version of a work like this. Publishers may
need to save paper and ink, and an author may still have some arcane (or
just simply vain) rationale for expending resources unnecessarily to
produce a physical book, but if so why duplicate this online instead of
augmenting it with the specific fruits of research that must be readily
available assuming the work has been dutifully done in the first place?

Peter Stewart

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