Teresa and Her Heirs: Queenship and State Formation in Early Portugal

Teresa of Portugal (d. 1130) was the natural or possibly bastard daughter of the King of León, Alfonso VI, and the mother of the first king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques. These facts are undisputed. What has not been appreciated until recently is the key role Teresa herself played in the formation of the new kingdom of Portugal, which began to break away from León under her rule in the 1120s. This was long before 1179, when Pope Alexander III recognized the kingship of Teresa’s son Afonso Henriques. Teresa’s actual governing activity was important: even more important was the recognition accorded to her status as queen by her son and grandson (Sancho I) as they sought to build a stable, strong, independent kingdom in Atlantic Iberia. A significant feature of their strategy was to designate their daughters as queens. As potential heirs to the throne and active co-rulers with their fathers, the queens of early Portugal represent an institutionalization of gendered power, one which was crucial to the success of the new realm. I consider the ways in which certain kinds of queenship acted as one of Strayer’s “permanent institutions” (inflected by the theory articulated in Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies). It was not, however, a sort of honorary kingship, the queen as king. My research on the queens of early Portugal explicates this dynamic and enriches our understanding of the role of gender in early state formation.