Jimena Díaz
gigatos | June 9, 2022
Summary
Jimena Díaz (Asturias, before July 24, 1046) was the wife of Rodrigo Díaz el Campeador, whom she married between July 1074 and May 12, 1076, and upon the death of the Cid, governor of Valencia between 1099 and 1102.
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Ancestry
Jimena Díaz, according to the genealogy proposed by Professor Margarita Torres Sevilla-Quiñones de León, based on narrative and documentary sources, was the daughter of Count Diego Fernández, who died before July 24, 1046, and a lady with the surname Fernández, probably named Cristina. Count Diego Fernández, son of Count Fernando Flaínez (in first marriage with Elvira Ovéquiz and in second marriage with Cristina Fernández.
According to the Historia Roderici, Doña Jimena was nepta (niece) of Emperor Alfonso VI of León. The author, Margarita Torres, reconstructs the genealogical scheme of the Flaínez and the reigning dynasty to clarify the kinship between doña Jimena and the monarch coming from the paternal side (the Flaínez), since King Alfonso VI and Jimena share as ancestors Count Bermudo Núñez and his wife Argilo. Ramón Menéndez Pidal (La España del Cid, II, pp. 722-723) suggested that the mother of Jimena Díaz was of royal blood and that perhaps the wife of Fernando Gundemáriz, who would be the maternal grandfather of Jimena Díaz, was Jimena Alfonso, daughter of King Alfonso V of León. This is because Jimena appears confirming the donation of Muniadona and her son Fernando Gundemáriz in 1036 to her half-sister, the nun Gontrodo Gundemáriz, although the document does not specify if there was any family relationship between the infanta and Fernando. It has also been proposed as the wife of Fernando Gundemáriz a Sancha Ordóñez, supposed daughter of Ordoño Ramírez the Blind and Cristina Bermúdez, although Sancha is not documented as the daughter of these princes. The wife of Fernando Gundemáriz, according to a Portuguese diploma dated 1045, was Muniadona Ordóñez, daughter of Ordoño Ramírez, great-grandson of Count Gonzalo Menéndez, and his wife Elvira. In 1045 Menendo Folienz with his wife Gontrodo Ordóñez mentions an inheritance that Ordoño Ramírez had donated to his son-in-law Fernando Gundemáriz and his wife Muniadona Ordóñez. Therefore, the wife of Fernando Gundemáriz was called Muniadona Ordóñez, she was the daughter of Ordoño Ramírez, who was the great-grandson of Count Hermenegildo González and his wife Countess Muniadona Díaz, members of the highest Galician-Portuguese nobility.
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Brothers
Doña Jimena”s father probably married twice. The documented daughters of the first marriage to Elvira Ovéquiz, daughter of Count Oveco Sánchez and Countess Elo, were:
From his second marriage to a daughter of Fernando Gundemáriz, son of Count Gundemaro Pinióliz, possibly named Cristina.
After marrying Rodrigo Díaz (according to legendary tradition, in the church of San Miguel de Palencia), she accompanied her husband, although it has not been possible to determine if she resided with him in the taifa of Zaragoza during the first exile of the Champion (between 1080 and 1086) as leader of the army of the Andalusian kingdom in the service of Al-Muqtadir, Al-Mu”taman and Al-Musta”in II. There is also no certainty that she marched in this period to Asturias, since in the document on which this hypothesis was based (a lawsuit of Tol of 1083) she intervened in absence.
At the beginning of the second exile of the Cid, in 1089, Jimena was put in prison with her children Cristina, Diego and Maria by order of Alfonso VI. Nothing more is known of Jimena until the end of 1094, when Rodrigo Díaz wins the battle of Cuarte on October 21, secures his dominion over Valencia (which he had conquered on June 17 of that year) and definitively rejoins her husband until his death in the summer of 1099.
From that moment she was lady of Valencia plenipotentiary until 1102 when Alfonso VI, her cousin, decided to abandon the city to the Almoravids, but not before setting fire to it, due to the null possibilities of maintaining this place, escorting Jimena in her return to Castile. From this period a donation made by Jimena Díaz to the cathedral of Valencia in 1101 is preserved, where her autograph signature is recorded.
In 1103 she signed a document in San Pedro de Cardeña in which she sold a monastery of her property to two canons of Burgos, although this does not mean that Jimena lived in seclusion in the Cardeña abbey during her entire widowhood, as the legendary tradition spread by the monastery from the 13th century onwards in the hagiographic materials known as Leyenda de Cardeña (Legend of Cardeña) maintains. It is more likely that she lived her last years in Burgos or in some town near that city. He died between August 29, 1113 and 1116, probably in the latter year.
She was buried next to the Cid in the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, being plundered during the Spanish War of Independence. In 1921 the remains were transferred from France to the cathedral of Burgos, where they remain.
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Marriage and children
She married between July 1074 and May 12, 1076 with Rodrigo Díaz el Campeador as a policy of rapprochement between the nobles of Alfonso VI, having the following succession:
Sources
