With his marriage to Urraca, queen regnant of Castile, León and Galicia, in 1109, he began to use, with some justification, the grandiose title Emperor of Spain, formerly employed by his father-in-law, Alfonso VI.

He won his greatest military successes in the middle Ebro, where he conquered Zaragoza in 1118 and later took Ejea, Tudela, Calatayud, Borja, Tarazona, Daroca, and Monreal del Campo.

[3] His earliest years were passed in the monastery of Siresa, learning to read and write and to practice the military arts under the tutelage of Lope Garcés the Pilgrim, who was repaid for his services by his former charge with the county of Pedrola when Alfonso came to the throne.

The marriage had been arranged by her father Alfonso VI of León in 1106 to unite the two chief Christian states against the Almoravids, and to supply them with a capable military leader.

[5] During his marriage, he had called himself "King and Emperor of Castile, Toledo, Aragón, Pamplona, Sobrarbe, and Ribagorza" in recognition of his rights as Urraca's husband; of his inheritance of the lands of his father, including the kingdom of his great-uncle Gonzalo; and his prerogative to conquer Andalusia from the Muslims.

Alfonso's late marriage and his failure to remarry and produce the essential legitimate heir that should have been a dynastic linchpin of his aggressive territorial policies have been adduced as a lack of interest in women.

In 1119, he retook Cervera, Tudejen, Castellón, Tarazona, Ágreda, Magallón, Borja, Alagón, Novillas, Mallén, Rueda, Épila and populated the region of Soria.

In the great raid of 1125, he carried away a large part of the subject Christians from Granada, and in the south-west of France, he had rights as king of Navarre.

[b] Generous bequests to important churches and abbeys in Castile had the effect of making the noble churchmen there beneficiaries who would be encouraged by the will to act as a brake on Alfonso VII's ambitions to break it – and yet among the magnates witnessing the will in 1131 there was not a single cleric.

In the event it was a will that his nobles refused to carry out – instead bringing his brother Ramiro from the monastery to assume royal powers – an eventuality that Lourie suggests was Alfonso's hidden intent.

Alfonso's only brother, Ramiro, had been a Benedictine monk since childhood, and his commitment to the church, his temperament and vow of celibacy made him ill-suited to rule a kingdom under constant military threat and in need of a stable line of succession.

The step-son of the deceased king, Alfonso VII of León, as reigning monarch and legitimate descendant of Sancho III of Navarre, put himself forward but garnered no local support.

Pedro de Atarés had so alienated his own partisans there with his perceived arrogance that they had abandoned him, yet at the same time were unwilling to accept Alfonso's younger brother Ramiro.

"The result of the crisis produced by the result of Alfonso I's will was a major reorientation of the peninsula's kingdoms: the separation of Aragon and Navarre, the union of Aragon and Catalonia and – a moot point but stressed particularly by some Castilian historians – the affirmation of 'Castilian hegemony' in Spain"[9] by the rendering of homage for Zaragoza by Alfonso's eventual heir, Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona.

This pretender was an old man (appropriately, since the Battler had died some decades earlier) and Alfonso II expressed confidence that Louis would arrest him at the earliest possible moment and bring him to justice.

[11] According to an annalist source for the years 1089–1196, the pretender was received with honour and pomp in Zaragoza, Calatayud, and Daroca, which the Battler had conquered, but after it was found out that he was false he was executed before the city of Barcelona in 1181.

The earliest chronicle source for the imposture is Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, writing in the middle of the thirteenth century, who records that there were several legends then current about the death of Alfonso the Battler: some believed he perished in the battle of Fraga, some that his body had never been recovered, others that he was buried in the monastery of Montearagón, and still others that he had fled from Fraga in shame after his defeat and became a pilgrim as an act of penance.

[16] Zurita dates the impostor's appearance to the death of Raymond Berengar IV of Barcelona, who had been exercising power in Aragon, and the succession of the child Alfonso II in 1162.

Ab aliquibus enim dicitur corpus eius in montis Aragonis monasterio tumulatum a mauris tamen ante redemptum.

Ab aliis dicitur vivus a proelio evasisse et confusionem proelii nequiens tolerare peregrinum se exhibuit huic mundo effigie et habitu immutatus.

Et annis aliquot interpositis, quispiam se ostendit qui se eumdem publice fatebatur et multorum Castellae et Aragoniae id ipsum testimonio affirmabant qui cum eo in utroque regno fuerant familiariter conversati et ad memoriam reducebant secreta plurima que ipse olim cum eis habita recolebat et antiquorum assertio ipsum esse firmiter asserebat.