Pedro Manrique de Lara (died January 1202), commonly called Pedro de Molina or Peter of Lara, was a Castilian nobleman and military leader of the House of 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. He was one of the most powerful Castilian magnates of his time, and defended the Kingdom of Toledo and the Extremadura against the Almohads. He also fought the Reconquista in Cuenca, and was a "second founder" of the monasteries of Huerta and Arandilla.
Pedro was married three times. By his first marriage, to a Navarrese princess, he forged a connection with the lineage of the folk hero El Cid, and scholars have suggested that Lara patronage lies behind the epic Poema de mio Cid. Pedro's second wife was a relative of Henry II of England. Pedro's trans-Pyrenean connexions explain his adoption of seals for authenticating documents; he is the first Spanish aristocrat from whom an examples survives. He also adopted the style "by the grace of God" to indicate his independence in ruling the lordship of Molina, which he inherited from his father.
Inheritance Pedro was the eldest son and heir of Manrique Pérez de Lara and Ermessinde, daughter of Aimery II of Narbonne.Barton, 264 n3. He regularly called himself "de Lara", a toponymic surname first employed by his grandfather and namesake Pedro González. Pedro's descendants adopted his own patronymic, Manrique, as part of their surname.Barton, 44. Pedro's patrimony was extensive, but he is well known among historians for how much of it he mortgaged or sold for a small profit. This had led to the accusation that he was a poor administrator. He owned land at Cogolludo.Doubleday, 40 and 42 for a map of Pedro's patrimony.
Pedro first appears in a public document on 18 December 1157.Barton, 282 n1. 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.Grassotti, 34–35. By November 1164 Pedro was governing the eastern fief of Atienza, which his father had held before his death.Barton, 282 and 283 n9. Dating to 1 March 1165 is the only document that cites Pedro as actually ruling Lara, from which his family took its name.Barton, 282 and 283 n17. There is a second document that may date to 1184 that shows him governing Lara.
First marriage Pedro's first wife was the infanta Sancha Garcés, a daughter of King García Ramírez of Navarre and his second wife, Urraca, illegitimate daughter of Alfonso VII of León and Castile and his mistress Gontrodo Pérez. This was thus a highly auspicious match for the young nobleman.Barton, 282 and n3. She first appears as his wife in a donation to the Praemonstratensian foundation at La Vid dated to 1165.Barton, 282 and 283 n30. This presents problems, however, as her first husband, Gaston V of Béarn, did not die until 1170. In May 1172, Pedro and his brother Manrique donated half of the saltworks (salinas) of Tercegüela to the abbey of Santa María de Huerta and Abbot Martín de Finojosa. In February 1173 Manrique along with Sancha donated the remaining half in exchange for a horse. 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).Lacarra, 158–59. This indicates that the marriage must have occurred sometime after February 1172, and as Sancha does not appear with her husband in the donation of May 1172, probably after that date as well.
Sancha and Pedro had three sons: García, Aimerico, and Nuño.Barton, 282. Nuño, known as Nuño Pérez II to distinguish him from his great uncle, Nuño Pérez I, was still alive in 1228.Doubleday, 157. He had received the tenencia of Bertabillo.Corral, 583. Nuño Pérez I and Pedro Manrique shared the guardianship of the young Alfonso VIII before he attained his majority in 1169.Corral, 582. British historian Richard A. Fletcher believed that Manrique, the Bishop of León from 1181 to 1205, was a son of Pedro and Sancha, although it is more likely that he was Pedro's brother.Fletcher, 71; Doubleday, 138.
Sancha was a great-granddaughter of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called the Cid.Smith, 177–79. It has been argued that the author of the Poema de mio Cid, perhaps Per Abbat, was patronised by the Lara family and that the Poema can be read as a work of escarnho e mal dizer ("shaming and cursing") against the Laras' enemies, the Castros (represented in the epic by the Infantes de Carrión). 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.
Military governor of the southern frontier By 1 September 1166 Pedro was a count (comes in Latin), the highest dignity to which a Castilian nobleman of his time could be appointed by the king.Barton, 282 and 283 n6. 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.Barton, 30 n11; Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, 105. There is also an example of his use of the phrase munere divino ("by divine mercy").Barton, 329. In 1168 he was sent to govern the tenencias of Osma and San Esteban de Gormaz in eastern Castile.Barton, 282 and 283 nn 20 and 22. On 4 October that year he made a donation to the parish church of Molina.Barton, 282 and 283 n31.
Pedro was a regular patron of the military order of the Knights of Calatrava. He made his first donatio to them on 8 May 1169.Barton, 282 and 283 n28. In 1169 Pedro intervened to arbitrate a dispute between the settlers of Molina and the Abbey of Huerta concerning the boundaries of the village of Arandilla.
In June 1170 Pedro was the governor (or tenant, tenens) of the militarily important frontier zone of Extremadura.Barton, 282 and 283 n14. On 5 November 1172 he was cited as governing Cabezón.Barton, 282 and 283 n11. By 3 April 1173 Pedro was governing the Kingdom of Toledo, the region centred on the populous city of Toledo and bordering al-Andalus to the south.Barton, 282 and 283 n23. That year, when Alfonso VIII invaded Navarre as far as Pamplona, Pedro acted as a mediator between his sovereign and the king of Navarre, Sancho VI, his brother-in-law. The war ended in a treaty in October.
In 1177, Pedro took part in the conquest of Cuenca. On 19 August, during the siege, Cerebruno, Archbishop of Toledo, purchased Pedro's lands at Añover and Barcilés for 100 maravedíes. The size and sophistication of Pedro Manrique's own court and mesnada (private army) is indicated by his employment of a majordomo (maiordomus) of his own, Pedro Vidas, in 1177.Barton, 59.
Use of seals The earliest surviving aristocratic wax seal from Spain is found hanging from a document of Pedro's dated 22 January 1179.Barton, 62; Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, 103 n7. 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.Perhaps Raymond Berengar IV of Barcelona's 1150 seal was its model (Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, 107). It may have been made from a matrix cast as early as 1164, when Pedro succeeded his father in Molina. 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.Barton, 148. The seal is double-sided, both sides bearing equestrian depictions of Pedro. The obverse bears the barely discernible legend "seal of count Pedro",Reading of Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, 106: +S/IGIL[LVM] D[...] PETRI CO[M]ITIS. and the reverse and indiscernible legend that appears to be a sentence or motto.Reading of Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, 107: +[...]IT SIGNA[...] FORT[...]. This would be the earliest of only three examples of personal seals from medieval Spain bearing mottoes.The others being one of Sancho VII of Navarre from 1214 and another of Nuño Sánchez from 1226 (Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, 107). 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".Barton, 282 and 283 n34. It was confirmed in the city of Calatayud on Saint Vincent's Day in the year 1217 of the Spanish era. The identification with Pedro Manrique is secure, since there was neither another count named Pedro in Castile at the time nor any other count using the style Dei gratia.Menéndez Pidal de Navascués, 105. Pedro was at Torralba in March 1179. On 20 March Pedro assisted Alfonso VIII in laying the foundation stone of the Abbey of Huerta.Duggan, 84–86.
Relations with religious houses On 11 February 1172 Pedro received half the vill of Beteta from Cathedral of Santa María in Sigüenza in exchange for the monastery of Santa María de Molina. On 2 May Pedro made a donation to the Cistercian monastery at Sacramenia.Barton, 282 and 283 n33. On 17 May he made another donation to a Cistercian house, this time the Abbey of Huerta.Barton, 282 and 283 n29. Although he made donations to the Praemonstratensians and the Benedictines (the monastery of Arlanza on an unknown dateBarton, 282 and 283 n26.), the Cistercians were his preferred monastic order. The Cistercian historian Ángel Manrique in his Annales Cistercienses (II, 429) considers Pedro and his descendants, the Manriques de Lara, as the "second founders" of Huerta because of their numerous benefactions.
On 26 June 1176 Pedro made a donation to the regular clergy of Alcalech.Barton, 282 and 283 n25. In October 1176 he made an apparently pious donation to the cathedral of Sigüenza, for this time he received nothing in return.Barton, 282 and 283 n35. On 16 January 1178 he made his second donation to the parish of Molina.