From Newsgroup: soc.genealogy.medieval

For those interested in medieval Iberian genealogy, last year saw the publication of a major new resource:

Jaime de Salazar y Acha, El Poder del Linaje: La alta nobleza de
Castilla y Le||n en la Edad Media, Real Academia de la Historia, 2024

This can be viewed online, or for those who prefer old-school printed
paper, can be purchased as a single-volume large paperback. https://www.boe.es/biblioteca_juridica/publicacion.php?id=PUB-DH-2024-342

As the title suggests, this is focused on the medieval high nobility, specifically of the realms of Le||n and Castile. As such, its purview is
not all of Iberia, but the core ancestral realms of the Crown of
Castile, though it does include a few families from outside of this
core, three from lands historically part of Pamplona and one from
Mozarab Toledo. Due to the quirks of the kingdom's high nobility, a
relatively small number of families account for the majority, and this
work covers 34 families, tracing multiple male lines, some as far down
as the early 17th century, and tops out at over 700 pages of genealogy
(plus another 100 pages of bibliography and index).

This is best viewed as a companion work to the author's earlier book,
the 2021, Las dinast|!as reales de Espa|#a en la Edad Media. https://www.boe.es/biblioteca_juridica/publicacion.php?id=PUB-DH-2021-233

Its compendious nature makes this a valuable resource, and it does a particular service in drawing together into a single location a lot of
the recent scholarly work that has been done on these families,
published individually in journal articles or as footnotes in books.

It also, though, has some problems. In addition to the typical
occasional editorial slips (I just saw a case where the generations are numbered I, II, III, IV, VII, VIII...), the biggest cause for concern is
due to its nature as the work of a single scholar. As such some of his
own hypotheses are presented as fact without an indication whether other scholars have accepted them or not (the good news on this is that most
of the author's hypotheses are more likely to be right than wrong). An
example of this is his placement of count Ordo|#o Ord|||#ez (father Garc|!a Ord|||#ez, the premier count in the kingdom under Alfonso VI) as a scion
of the Banu G||mez of Castile and not a son of a Leonese royal bye-blow - rightly, I think. Likewise, as we all know, no genealogist can have a
thorough knowledge of every family active during the time of their
study, and as such, Salazar y Acha falls back, too often, on the earlier
work of Luis de Salazar y Castro, writing in the late-17th and
early-18th centuries. While that researcher approached genealogy in a scholarly manner, it was the scholarship of his time, and not ours, and Salazar y Acha's reliance on Salazar y Castro sometimes serves him poorly.

This directly affects those anglophone genealogists who might be
interested in this work for the ancestry of Sancha de Ayala. Five of her ancestral families receive detailed coverage, while others are mentioned
in passing. Unfortunately, all of these are problematic to a greater or
lesser extent. These are not all Salazar y Acha's fault. For a couple of
them, he is following the current literature, which is itself flawed. In
one case in particular, he fails to notice that he is working with a hypothetical person invented by Salazar y Castro to fulfill a specific genealogical need and subsequently repeated by others, and then he
changes the ancestry of that non-person in order to make a 'more likely' connection to the agreed upon ancestral family. However, in so doing he negates the whole reason Salazar y Castro invented the individual to
begin with. In another case, in a footnote he alludes to a document
transcript that gives a woman a different patronymic than in the reconstruction as if a source (the only one I am aware of to name her)
giving her a different name than the reconstruction being followed was
only a secondary concern.

In the most egregious case of demonstrable error I have found, he shows
a nobleman with the wrong father (actually uncle), the wrong wife (his sister-in-law, with an invented name), and four children who were
actually: a sister (probably); a chimera of a completely unrelated
person with the same man shown as a brother (but was actually a first
cousin); a grandnephew (probably, or maybe cousin); and just one son who actually belongs to this family group, all based on, you guessed it,
Salazar y Castro. Such problems do not affect the majority of the
information shown on these families (he corrects many of the absurdities
of prior generations of scholars), but unfortunately the problems in
Sancha's ancestry occur at critical junctures, making the links to the accurate material different (in one case very different, thanks to a coincidental link to the same family through an entirely different line
that replaces the erroneous connection) from what is shown.

Finally, something that particularly caught my attention was his
rendering of the immediate family of Sancha's mother. For her and her siblings, we actually have an account given in order by gender, written
by her father. Salazar cites this source, yet nonetheless omits a
daughter who died in childhood, and he assigns approximate birth dates (extrapolated from marriage and other information) that alter the order
from that explicitly supplied by their father - he seems not to have
given this account the attention it merited when compiling the children
of this generation.

For the broader group of genealogists who connect to the nobility
through the royal marriages of Edward I and Edward III, it provides
detailed accounts of all of the small group of families from which the
royalty of Le||n and Pamplona drew their non-royal wives, the Banu G||mez,
the Counts of Cea, and the descendants of Hermenegildo and Osorio
Guti|-rrez and of Alfonso Bet||te. And for those with a more broad
interest in the topic, it would prove invaluable, if used with due care.

taf
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