On this day 1264… Jerez liberated

On this day in 1264 the Kingdom of Castile captured Jerez de la Frontera from the Moors.

The recapture of Jerez by Alfonso X of Castile (pictured), which had been a Moorish possession since its capture from the Visigoths in 711 AD, came towards the end of the Reconquista in Andalusia in the thirteenth century.

The Christians had won a victory outside Jerez in 1231, captured Cádiz and Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248.

Following the ultimate capture of Jerez in 1264 and coupled with the taking of Faro in the Algarve by Alfonso III of Portugal in 1249, the emirate of Granada remained the only Muslim possession in Spain.

Thanks to Christian in fighting over the next 200 years it would survive until 1492 until it was formally surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella.

In Jerez itself the church of San Marcos dates to the reconquest of the city as does San Dionisio – although most of the current edifices date to the 14^th or 15^th centuries.

Viticulture – introduced to the region by the Phoenicians in 1100 BC – had not died out under the rule of the emirs but would certainly go on to flourish under its Christian rulers. However the style of wine for which the region is so renowned today – Sherry – owes an enormous debt to the Almohads and earlier Islamic rulers who brought distillation to the region with them.

Interestingly, Alfonso himself was linked to two French vineyard regions. He was part of the House of Ivrea Burgundy, a cadet branch of the Capetian Dukes of Burgundy who variously ended up as kings of both Portugal and (until 1369) Castile y Léon in a fabulously complicated series of dynastic marriages and manoeuvrings we need not go into now.

Furthermore, as King of Castile he was a pretender to the Duchy of Gascony – and its vineyards around Bordeaux of course. His claim was based on the marriage of his ancestor Alfonso VIII to Eleanor of England, the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Yet he renounced this claim in 1254 when he signed an alliance with Henry III of England against Louis IX of France and arranged for the marriage of his half-sister, Eleanor of Castile to the Prince of Wales – the future “Hammer of the Scots”, Edward I.

A devoted and loving relationship despite being an arranged marriage, when Eleanor died in 1290 each stop of her funeral cortege from Nottingham to Westminster was marked with a cross – Charing Cross in London for example (although the one which stands outside the station today is a reproduction from 1865. The original cross was situated on the south side of Trafalgar Square and was destroyed in 1647 by the Parliamentarians in the Civil War. A statue of Charles I raised after the restoration now stands in its place).