Siege of Huesca (1094)

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The siege of Huesca of 1094 was a military action by King Sancho I Ramírez of Aragón as part of the Reconquista against the Taifa of Saragossa , in which Sancho was killed. Huesca was taken without a fight two years later by Sancho's son Pedro I after the battle of Alcoraz .

The siege

Sancho I, who ruled since 1063, had begun in 1089 preparations for the conquest of Huesca to fortify the abbey of Montearagón five kilometers northeast of the city. In 1094 he started a hunger blockade of the city from this protected post. The Christian cavalry was able to prohibit travel on the main route between Huesca and Lérida and to interrupt agricultural work in the area surrounding the well-fortified Muslim city at will.

This policy of Aragon to control the Ebro Basin in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula led to alliances of his opponents: Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as el Cid , who was in the service of the Moorish , allied himself with the Banu Hud against the Aragonese besiegers, while the Almoravids allied themselves with Alfonso VI. of Castile and León , who in the meantime had raised an army against Aragón in Álava .

Death of Sancho I.

In order to explore Huesca's weak points, Sancho I. inspected the city wall on June 4, 1094 on horseback. When he pointed, his armor flipped open to reveal his sleeve. When a Muslim archer noticed this, he shot an arrow at the king and struck him through his open sleeve in his right side. Sancho withholding his wound, returned to Montearagón, ordered his nobles to swear allegiance to his son Pedro , and asked for promises to continue the siege until Huesca was conquered. Shortly afterwards he died.

aftermath

Huesca fell into the hands of Sancho's successor, Pedro I , on November 21, 1096 , possibly as a result of another event. Three days earlier, on November 18, 1096, the Aragonese king had defeated an Almoravid auxiliary force from Saragossa , led by Ahmad II al-Musta'in , for the first time in a conventional war at the Battle of Alcoraz . The Muslim army also included Castilian and Leonese troops under the command of Counts García Ordóñez de Najéra and Gonzalo Núñez de Lara . Pedro's overwhelming victory may have induced the Almoravid defenders to leave Huesca, into which Pedro I then moved unhindered, thus opening the way to Saragossa.

To continue the Reconquista, Pedro allied himself with El Cid in 1097 and married his son Peter to his daughter Maria.

In 1118, Pedro's brother and successor Alonso I conquered Saragossa.

literature

  • Arnold Odio, Huesca, Siege of , in: Clifford J. Rogers (Ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia if Medieval Warfare and Military Technology , Volume 1, Oxford University Press , 2010, pp. 277f
  • Roger Collins , Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 400-1000 ; New York: St. Martin's, 1995
  • Derek William Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain , New York: Longman, 1978, Ger. The Reconquista. The reconquest of Spain by Christianity , Munich: Heyne, 1980
  • Joseph F. O'Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003
  • Clay Stalls, Possessing the land: Aragon's Expansion into Islam's Ebro Frontier under Alfonso the Battler, 1104-1134 , Leiden: Brill, 1995