Talk:Almanzor

Wives

I have cut out and transferred here the following lines about supposed wives of Almanzor:

Records name several other wives, among them Nålevende, Urraca Garces (born deNavarre) and Oneca Garces (born Äbtissin von San Salvador de Castile) whom he married in 995.

This sentence seems to be referenced but "myheritage.com" is not what we can call a trustworthy source for anything. And the information is obviously gibberish. There is one Oneca Garces in Spanish sources, but a century earlier, and she cannot have been "born Äbtissin von San Salvador de Castile" as "Äbtissin von" means in perfect German: "Abbess of". Nobody is born as an Abbess, and once you're an Abbess, you don't marry. And "Nålevende" is neither an Arabic nor a Spanish name, but means simply "alive" in Norwegian. So this is to be kept out for the moment. Ilyacadiz (talk) 20:08, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

With the exception of the Norwegian, this is a garbled rendering of an authentic problem regarding Almanzor's wife/wives. It is separately reported that Almanzor took as wife the daughter of Sancho Garcés of Navarre, and of Garcí Fernández of Castile. As these are reported by different primary sources, it is not entirely clear whether he took a daughter from each, or if one or the other source erred in identifying the father of the Christian princess that Almanzor took as spouse. The mother of Sanchuelo is explicitly named as 'Abda', but this represents Arabic for 'slave', and given the political environment, there is every reason to suppose that Almanzor extorted a daughter from one, the other, or both Christian lords in exchange for peace, and thus calling her 'wife' perhaps doesn't quite capture the nuances of their relationship. Sancho of Navarre had a daughter named Urraca who is usually identified with Almanzor's wife, and the "Urraca Garces (born deNavarre)" given here is someone's botched attempt to describe her - in other words, this wife is not another wife, but the one already named in the article. Oneca García, refers to an actual abbess of San Salvador de Oña who was daughter of Garcí Fernández. Some have identified her (apparently through process of elimination) as the daughter of Garcí most likely to have been Almanzor's 'wife'. The prohibition of an abbess marrying would not have been one Almanzor felt bound by when he extorted from her father a symbol of his domination - indeed, it may have made her more attractive as it allowed him to show his disregard for the Christian church at the same time as he was extorting a symbol of his domination over her father (and it should be noted that Urraca, daughter of Sancho II often identified with 'Abda', was also in a convent prior to her 'marriage'). There are two sources that are likely to discuss this in some detail, Menéndez Díez's El condado de Castilla, 711-1138 and Simon Barton's Conquerors, Brides and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia, but I don't have either handy. Agricolae (talk) 18:03, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

References

Chancellor

It is not at all obvious to the average reader that this title entailed military. The article Chancellor#Historical uses does not describe any such role anywhere in the Muslim realm let alone specifically in Al-Andalus. In an edit summary it was suggested that "most chancellors, pms, kings were military leaders and statesmen" but this is simply not true. Most PMs were not military leaders, and the role of a chancellor is very different depending on context and time period - I don't recall Angela Merkel leading any army. Not only would this have the reader extrapolating from the specific to the general, but also they would have to figure out who other al-Andalus chancellors were to find out what was said about them in their articles - there is no category for al-Andalus chancellors. The choice is between giving a handful of words that may be obvious to a small minority of knowledgeable readers, vs. requiring a naive reader to do significant research just to find an answer to something that could be simply stated. The better approach is the one that serves the most readers. Agricolae (talk) 18:18, 3 December 2020 (UTC)