Ponce de Minerva
Ponce de Minerva was a nobleman, courtier, governor, and general serving, at different times, the kingdoms of León and Castile. Originally from Occitania, he came as a young man to León, where he was raised probably in close connection to the royal family. His public career, first as a courtier and knight in the military retinue of Alfonso VII of León and Castile, began in 1140. By later historians he was implicated in the strife between Alfonso's successors, Sancho III of Castile and Ferdinand II of León, but he was generally loyal to the latter, although from 1168 to 1173 he was in voluntary exile serving Alfonso VIII of Castile.
Ponce had a long and distinguished military career. He participated in at least twelve campaigns, more than half of them campaigns of Reconquista fought against the Moors, but also campaigns against Navarre, Portugal, and Castile, as well as one famous campaign against some Castilian rebels, in which he was captured. He acquired landed wealth largely through royal preferment—even in the major cities of the realm, such as León and Toledo—and an advantageous marriage—his wife was a descendant of García Sánchez III of Navarre—and he rose to hold the highest rank in the kingdom, count, and the highest civil post, majordomo, in both Castile and León. In 1167 he founded a monastery, Santa María de Sandoval, and he was also a donor to the Order of Calatrava. In 1173 he re-populated half of the village of Azaña and granted it a fuero.
Move from Occitania to León
As his toponymic surname indicates, Ponce was from the Minervois in southern France, then a part of the County of Carcassonne, one of the possessions of Raymond Berengar III, Count of Barcelona. He may have been related to the Counts of Toulouse, but his genealogy has been disputed since the seventeenth century. The name of either of his parents is unknown. He arrived in León in November 1127 in the entourage of Berenguela of Barcelona, daughter of Raymond Berengar III, who wed Alfonso VII that month at Saldaña. He was probably a young man of about twelve years at the time. He may have been related to Raymond II, Bishop of Palencia, who also hailed from Minerve and was also a protégé and perhaps a relative of Berenguela. It is likely that he was raised and educated for a time at the court of Alfonso VII's sister, the infanta Sancha Raimúndez.Ponce does not appear in contemporary records until 1140, but his presence in the following of the Catalan princess is established by a charter in the archives of the convent of Santa María de Carrizo. This document, dated 13 March 1207, records a pesquisa carried out by orders of Alfonso IX to determine what was owed by the village of Quintanilla to the convent in light of a donation made by Ponce. It mentions how Ponce had come to León with Berenguela:
When the lord emperor brought his wife the empress, he also brought along the count Ponce de Minerva and married him to the countess Doña Estefanía, daughter of Count Ramiro, and gave him half of Carrizo, which was royal fiscal land, and he gave it to her as bridewealth... And the other half of Carrizo belonged to Count Ramiro, and he gave it to him with his daughter in marriage...
Because he hailed from an Occitan-speaking region ruled by the counts of Barcelona, he is often considered a Catalan. His name, in contemporary Latin, was Pontius or Poncius, transformed in Castilian to Ponce, the form used here, or Poncio, and also transformed into Ponç or Pons.
Marriage to Estefanía Ramírez
The record of the royal pesquisa of 1207 also notes how Ponce was subsequently betrothed to Estefanía Ramírez, daughter of Ramiro Fróilaz, and endowed by Alfonso VII with fiscal lands: half of the village of Carrizo de la Ribera and an estate at a place called Quiro, between Carrizo and Quintanilla. To this his future father-in-law added the other half of Carrizo, which had been a part of his patrimony. Carrizo included a palace, which was later given to the monastery there, and stood to the right of the "old gate".The charter provides no date for Ponce's betrothal or marriage, but a document dated 30 May 1140 records a grant given by the king's sister, Sancha Raimúndez, to Ponce on the occasion of his marriage: the village of Argavallones "at your marriage, because I nourished you". This document survives only in a copy from 1716 that has clearly been altered. For instance, it anachronistically cites Martin as Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela even though he was not consecrated until 1156. Of Ponce de Minerva it says:
The Count exchanged this mortal life in order to enjoy the prize of his heroic works, as was said, in the year 1212 of the Era, leaving finished the monastery of Sandoval and the greater chapel of the church, with the rest being finished after his days by Don Diego Martínez de Villamayor, his son-in-law and a benefactor of that house, where he was buried.
The charter is accepted as genuine by some, and as having some basis in fact by others. Ponce was very young at the time of his arrival in León is probable in light of the contours of his subsequent career. His first appearance in a court document dates to 9 September 1140, when he witnessed an act of Alfonso VII's as alférez, that is, armiger and standard-bearer of the royal mesnada. This office was usually reserved for the scions of noble houses and other young and aspiring aristocrats. At the time of his advent in León in 1127 he would therefore have been placed in an aristocratic household capable of raising him, and the king's sister is known to have raised at least one other young nobleperson in her court: Urraca Rodríguez, daughter of Rodrigo González de Lara, whom she remembered in her will as "Urraca, daughter of Count Rodrigo, whom I raised". Likewise, the village of Argavallones must have been acquired by Ponce sometime before his marriage, since he gave it to his bride as her arras, along with all his lands at Carrizo, San Pedro del Páramo, and Grulleros. According to a document in the Tumbo Antiguo cartulary of Carrizo, Argavallones was located near Grulleros, just west of Villaverde de Sandoval. It may be supposed that the forged eighteenth-century charter was designed to replace an authentic lost charter. This document aside, the earliest reference to Ponce's marriage to Estefanía is from 13 February 1146, when Alfonso VII rewarded them with a grant of land at Villamoros de Mansilla "for the service to me which you have done and are doing".
''Alférez'' of Alfonso VII
From the time of his appointment as alférez sometime between 26 June and 9 September 1140 until his replacement sometime after 19 December 1144 and before March 1145, Ponce de Minerva was a constant presence at the royal court and on all of Alfonso VII's military campaigns. He took part in the expedition against García Ramírez of Navarre in 1140 and that against Portugal in 1141. He definitely participated in the Siege of Coria in 1142, as recorded in the Tumbo Negro, cartulary of the Cathedral of Zamora, and he probably also accompanied the royal forces on a razzia of the environs of Córdoba and Granada in 1144. This last campaign is mentioned in a charter issued at Toledo in November 1144 "as the emperor arrived from the fortification that he had made against Córdoba and Granada".Ponce's rewards for these various services were extensive. There are two false documents dated to 25 January and 14 June 1141 which purport to record royal donations to Ponce. The first is the donation of Quiro, which occurred on the occasion of his betrothal according to the account of the pesquisa of 1207. The second is the donation of San Pedro del Páramo, which it is known that Ponce gave to his wife as part of her bridewealth. The above charters are classified as spurious because they name Alfonso VII as ruling in Baeza and Almería, places he did not conquer until 1147, and they list Martin, Archbishop of Santiago, as confirming. They nevertheless contain a kernel of truth. More securely datable is Alfonso's grant to Ponce the village of Villaverde de Sandoval, on the bank of the Porma near the possessions which he had given his wife at their marriage, in 1142.
Acquisition of governorships
A change in Ponce's career began with his long absences from court in 1145, after he had left the post of alférez. He only attended the court on a few occasions in 1144, and by that year he had received the tenancy of Mayorga to govern. There is no reference in any surviving royal charter to Ponce's rule in Mayorga, rather it is cited in no less than fifteen private charters dated between 23 January 1144 and 3 May 1157. By 1148 he had also received the government of the royal city of León. Specifically this tenancy, called the "towers of León", consisted in the fortified royal citadel that guarded the northern gate of the city. There are ten royal documents from the reign of Alfonso VII that show Ponce holding this "most sensitive post". Both of these tenancies had previously been held by Osorio Martínez, who had been disgraced sometime in the first half of 1142. Despite his greater responsibility in the kingdom that kept him away from court, Ponce continued to take part in all of Alfonso VII's major military actions.In 1147, which has been described as an annus mirabilis for the Iberian Christians because of Alfonso VII's summer campaign, Ponce was with the royal army at Calatrava the week of 4–9 June. He was still with the royal forces at Andújar, witnessing a royal charter issued on 17 July, but it is not clear if he participated in the successful sieges of Baeza and Almería later that summer. There is no contemporary record of his presence with the royal army after Andújar, On 18 November 1153, Alfonso VII granted "to my faithful vassal for the good and faithful service which you did me in Almería and in many other places in both the Christian and Muslim regions", the castle of Albuher near Villamanrique de Tajo. According to Manuel Recuero Astray, the recipient was Ponce de Minerva, but more likely it was his namesake Count Ponce de Cabrera. Another twentieth-century historian mistakenly believed that the "Count Ponce" of the Prefatio de Almaria, a poetic retelling of the conquest of Almería in 1147, was Ponce de Minerva.
In 1150, Ponce probably took part in the failed siege of Córdoba, since he was with the king at Jaén immediately after the siege was lifted. By that year he had received the tenancy of Villalís. The following year, on 30 January 1151, at Calahorra, Alfonso awarded Ponce, called "our faithful vassal", with the village of Grulleros, which he later gave to his wife. Later that year, according to documents in the cathedral archives of Santa María de León, he was at the siege of Jaén and the second siege of Baeza, which had been lost again. In 1152, he took part in the assault on Guadix. On 18 December that year he was one of the select magnates whom Alfonso took counsel with before modifying the fueros of Sahagún.
During this time he was rewarded further, first with a castle on the Tagus. The original document recording this grant, issued at Soria on 18 November 1153, has survived, and is one of possibly ten charters of Alfonso VII to have been authenticated with a seal. At the same time, Ponce was rewarded with further governorships: Cea by 1152, Castrotierra by 1153, and Gatón de Campos by 1155. His territorial lordships, however, were generally scattered, although they were all in the province of León and relatively near to the city itself, whose government he continued to hold throughout the period. The lordship of Cea was shared with Ermengol VI of Urgell, according to a private charter of 23 June 1152. Another charter of 27 March 1150 shows Ermengol sharing it with Lope López, suggesting that Ponce was Lope's replacement. In 1155, Ponce was with Alfonso for the capture of Andújar. The last reference to Ponce holding Cea, site of a royal castle, dates from 28 June 1156.