Pedro Manrique de Lara
Although he spent most of his career in the service of Alfonso VIII of Castile, he also served briefly Ferdinand II of León (1185–86) and was Viscount of Narbonne by hereditary right after 1192.
Pedro's trans-Pyrenean connexions explain his adoption of seals for authenticating documents; he is the first Spanish aristocrat from whom an examples survives.
Pedro was the eldest son and heir of Manrique Pérez de Lara and Ermessinde, daughter of Aimery II of Narbonne.
[1] He regularly called himself "de Lara", a toponymic surname first employed by his grandfather and namesake Pedro González.
[4] Pedro's father died at the Battle of Huete in the summer of 1164 and his semi-independent lordship of Molina was inherited by his widow, who promptly invested half of it in her eldest son.
This charter reads was "made in the month of February in the era 1211 in the year when King Sancho of Navarre gave his sister to count Pedro son of Manrique" (facta ... mense febrero in era M.CC.XI in anno quando rex Sancius Navarre dedit sororem suam comiti Petro filio comitis Almarica).
[13] Nuño Pérez I and Pedro Manrique shared the guardianship of the young Alfonso VIII before he attained his majority in 1169.
The town of San Esteban de Gormaz, nearby where the daughters of the Cid were beaten and abandoned, was also the site where the Laras, led by Pedro's father, hid the young Alfonso VIII in 1163; and the favourable light shone on Avengalvón, the last Muslim ruler of Molina (which fell to the Christians shortly before 1138), may reflect his relationship with the later Lara rulers of the same.
[17] He regularly titled himself Dei gratia, "by the grace of God", a rare usage for a nobleman in twelfth-century Spain, perhaps borrowed from his Occitan or Catalan cousins.
[26] The earliest surviving aristocratic wax seal from Spain is found hanging from a document of Pedro's dated 22 January 1179.
[27] Since this practice was already current in France, it is probable that it entered Spain through the Laras' connexions with Narbonne and was certainly influenced by Occitan and Catalan designs.
[27] This is the only surviving example of Pedro's seal and, although heavily worn, its image is describable: It depicts a knight, protected by a conical helmet and a long kite-shaped shield, mounted upon a galloping charger and brandishing a lance.
This, without any shadow of a doubt, was how Count Pedro wished to present himself to the world: warlike, puissant, unstoppable; a warrior aristocrat indeed.
[32] The charter to which it was attached put the village of Torralba de Ribota, which belonged to the mother church at Calatayud of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre in Spain, under the protection of Pedro Dei gratia comes, "by the grace of God count".
[37] Although he made donations to the Praemonstratensians and the Benedictines (the monastery of Arlanza on an unknown date[38]), the Cistercians were his preferred monastic order.
[21] On 1 January 1181 Pedro and his sister María granted the vill of Carabanchel, on the outskirts of Madrid, to a certain Gonzalo Díaz and his wife Melisenda.
Pedro also instructed that he was to be buried at Arandilla if work on the monastery had not been finished by the time of his death, and that his successor was to donate a further 3,000 maravedíes.
Ermessinde further pledged 200 gold pieces per annum for the erection of a monastery at Arandilla, offering even to pay the salary of the master builder who would supervise its construction.
On 11 March 1183, Pedro and his eldest son, García, made a donation to the Order of Calatrava for the good of the soul of his first wife, the latter's mother, the infanta Sancha.
[45] Some time in 1183 Pedro and María mortgaged their joint property of the vill and castle of Los Ausines to the monastery of La Vid for 1,000 maravedíes.
[37] Also in June 1179 Pedro rewarded one of his loyal followers, García de Alberit, and the latter's daughter Toda and brother Pascasio with land at Valtablado.
The couple first appears as married in a charter redacted at Angers and preserved in the cartulary of Llanthony Secunda, recording the gift of bridewealth to a certain Margaret, relative of Henry II of England, by her husband, Petrus Dei gratia comes de Lara.
By that time, however, Pedro had been appointed to a post away from court: the large and important, if quiet, tenencia of Asturias de Oviedo.
Pedro's brother Aimerico Manrique de Lara was invited to co-rule with Ermengarde, but on his death in 1177 the viscountess again ruled alone, at least until 1184.
In that year the abbot of Fontfroide, the abbey where Aimerico was buried, donated the hamlet of Terrail to the Archbishop of Narbonne, Bernard Gaucelin.
In April 1199 Pedro was present at Huerta when it was visited by Alfonso VIII, the occasion for which the Poem de mio Cid may have first been publicly recited.
He died early in 1202 and was buried in the abbey of Huerta, next to his first wife under the first stone archway of the cloister,[14] on 14 January, according to the Anales toledanos primeros.
