Biography
As the son of Duke Peter of Cantabria, Alfonso held many lands in that region. He may have been the hereditary chief of the Basques, but this is uncertain. He is said to have married Ermesinda, daughter of Pelagius, who founded Asturias after the Battle of Covadonga in which he reversed the Moorish conquest of the region. He succeeded Pelagius' son, his brother-in-law, Favila, on the throne after the latter's premature death.
Whether Pelagius or Favila were ever considered kings in their own lifetime is debatable, but Alfonso certainly was. He began a lifelong war against the Moors. In 740, he conquered Galicia and in 754, León. He went as far as La Rioja. However, the few urban populations of these frontier regions fled to his northern dominions, leaving a depopulated buffer between the Christian and Muslim states.
This created the so-called Desert of the Duero, an empty region between the River Duero and the Asturian Mountains. Alfonso intended it this way; he wished to leave such a zone where any invading army would find it too difficult to survive. Besides the martial, the demographic and cultural effects of this policy on later Asturian, Spanish and Portuguese history is large. It was over a hundred years before the region was repopulated (an event known as the Repoblación).
The Arab writers speak of the kings of the northwest of Iberia as the Beni-Alfons (descendants of Alfonso), and appear to recognize them as a Galician royal stock derived from Alfonso I. Alfonso is credited with establishing the shrine of Our Lady of Covadonga, in commemoration of his father in law's victory at the Battle of Covadonga.
Read more about this topic: Alfonso I Of Asturias
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