ABSTRACT
Either in late December 1122 or early in January 1123, when he was negotiating a truce with the rulers of León-Castile on his western frontier, Alfonso I of AragónNavarre (1104-1134) established a confraternity at the recently captured city of Belchite in the Ebro River Valley.1 e king, known as the Battler, commissioned the brothers “to ght in defense of Christian people and the service of Christ.”2 ose who joined the confraternity at Belchite were promised a remission of penance, the amount of which was determined by the length of time spent providing military service. A brother who served with the confraternity for one year would receive the same remission of sins due to those unarmed pilgrims who “marched to Jerusalem,” while a brother who devoted the rest of his life to serving the confraternity would be “absolved of all sins as if he were entering upon the life of a monk or hermit.”3 e grant of spiritual privileges to members
1 B.F. Reilly, e Kingdom of Léon-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109-1126 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 171-173; A. Ubieto Arteta, Historia de Aragón. La formación territorial (Saragossa, 1981), pp. 157-159; J.M. Lacarra, “La conquista de Zaragoza por Alfonso I (18 diciembre 1118) in En la España medieval. Estudios dedicados al professor Don Juio González González (Madrid, 1984), pp. 74-75; C. Stalls, Possessing the Land. Aragon’s Expansion into Islam’s Ebro Frontier Under Alfonso the Battler, 1104-1134, e Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400-1453 No. 7 (Leiden, 1995), pp. 35-36, and 46-48.
