Garcia Moniz de Ribadouro, called the Gascon (o Gasco) was a medieval Knight that participated in Reconquista against the Moors.
[5][6] Old accounts tell that in 999, in a year of change in the Kingdom of León, when Bermudo II died and Count Mendo Gonçalves de Portucale became regent of the young Afonso V, a landing of Christians took place at the mouth of the Douro, commanded by Monio Viegas, the supposed founder of the Ribaduriense (or Gascan) lineage, who was said to have originated in Gascony.
[5] This information may be credible, but in the donation that Garcia Moniz made in 1068 to the King of Galicia, it refers to goods that he had inherited from his grandparents, so that they, the supposed parents of the “founder of Gascony” already had control in Ribadouro, and so Monio did not conquer such control, but inherited it, and therefore could not come from Gascony, as he was a native of Portugal, probably from a Portuguese place called Gasconha (or Casconha, in the current municipality of Paredes).
[7] Thus, the priests Afonso and João brought a case against him before the “vicars” of Ferdinand I of León in Portugal, namely Diogo Trutesendes, Mendo Dias and Gosendo Arnaldes de Baião.
When the first instance failed, the vicars themselves took the matter to Palencia, before King Ferdinand himself and his council, composed of the bishops Alvito, Diogo Vestruariz, Mauselo, Miro and Sisnando (the bishop of Porto), Count Sancho Vasques, Nuno Mendes (probably the one who would later become the Portuguese leader) and Framego Dias and the Portuguese infantrymen Gomes Echegues de Sousa, Mendo Gonçalves da Maia and Godinho Viegas, in addition to several other nobles; there the case was decided in favour of the monastery, of which Garcia Moniz's grandparents were the patrons, and he ended up granting the estate in question to the priests.