Fruela Díaz

A man of great private wealth who expanded his landholdings through numerous purchases, he was able to marry royalty and maintain good terms with his sovereigns of León as well as the rulers of Galicia and Portugal, whose territories lay immediately to the west of his area of influence.

83) a brief genealogy of Antonio and Fruela, then children, as part of a diploma whereby their mother donated the monastery of San Pedro de Valdoré to the cathedral in December 1073.

[14] On 10 April 1104, according to a royal charter now lost, Fruela and his wife founded a settlement at the foot of the castle called castro Dactonio in the fiefdom of Sarria on land owned by the monastery of San Vicente del Pino.

[18] Her royal pedigree was mentioned in a grant of land in Astorga they received from Henry of Portugal on 1 March 1112, which included the Torre Cornellera and ten sections of the city wall.

[20] With twenty-three such exchanges having left records, their case is one of the best preserved of its kind: private land transactions, especially aristocratic purchases from peasants, increased dramatically in Spain between the late tenth and early twelfth century.

[21] Some of the couple's early, eleventh-century property gains were of the form of loan repayments, though this type of transaction disappears from the record altogether in the twelfth century.

[3] Fruela was one of the magnates who witnessed the first recorded act of Queen Urraca, on 22 July 1109, and implicitly acknowledged her claim to have been granted "the whole kingdom" (regnum totum) by her father, Alfonso VI, shortly before his death.

[9][14] On 17 November 1110 he signed a document as comes in terra de legione et in gralare (count in the land of León and in Grajal), perhaps a special authority associated with the breakdown of relations between Urraca and the King of Aragon, Alfonso the Battler, who was also her husband.

[25] In 1115, when Urraca and Alfonso were fighting for control of the important monastic site of Sahagún, Fruela was acting as count in Ceia (Ceón) just to the north.

[28] Fruela's elder daughter Constance died in the flower of youth, while the younger, María, married twice: first to a Galician magante, Melendo Núñez, and second to the count Pedro Alfonso.

Prudencio de Sandoval claimed to find the sepulchres of "the countess Estefanía who endowed this church, and the count Don Fruela, a great knight in arms" among ten of their family in the third row of burials in either the main chapel or the Panteón (it is unclear which).

[29] Fruela's posthumous reputation can be gauged from lines 3000–3006 of the Poema del Cid (c.1140), where he is placed in the second tier of nobility, immediately beneath Alfonso VI, Henry of Portugal, and Raymond of Galicia, all of whom he served in his long career.

Fruela Díaz's family tree.
The fortified monastery of San Vicente del Pino sits on a hill overlooking Monforte de Lemos. Archaeological excavations in 2007 indicate that the Castro Dactonio likely stood on the same hill when Fruela founded the town at its foot in 1116.
Fruela's patrimonial lands contained some of Spain's premier horse pastures, and he was able to give the queen a horse worth 5,000 solidi in 1116. The famous warhorse Bavieca was said, albeit wrongly, to have hailed from Fruela's lands. The above illustration is from c .1086.
The Panteón wherein Fruela is reportedly interred has been called the " Sistine Chapel of Spanish Romanesque " for its well-preserved, high-quality ceiling frescoes.