Re: clan of Vimara Peres

On Jun 13, 2:32 pm, Francisco Tavares de Almeida
<francisco.tavaresdealme...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 13 Jun, 21:26, taf <t...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It is true that this hypothesis was never refuted, but that makes it
sound better than it is.  It was a guess based on nothing but
onomastics: that Oneca is a Basque name, and that she had children
named Leodegundia and Jimeno, which Perez de Urbel would make the
names of Oneca's parents.  

If nothing more is known, history is not offended and chronology is
not impeditive, my personal opinion - IMAO as somebody says -
onomastics may be considered. If onomastics are not regional but from
a hundreds of miles away in a time without newspapers and television,
onomastics are an hypothesis.

But how far away do you have to look to find a family using Basque
names? No farther than Alfonso III. The thing is, it is not the use
of Basque names that makes the argument. This would never have been
suggested had they not used an Asturian name, Leodegundia. That is
the only reason the husband of the princess becomes the (supposed)
necessary mother of Oneca, yet for all we know that could have been
the name of Diego's mother, or could have been drawn from the princess
without a genetic connection. If all we have is a couple of Basque
names, that of the wife and son of a midling-ranked nobleman, we
wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) dream of looking at the King of
Pamplona to be her father. It is not like this is the only example of
Basque names in the western kingdom either. There is a scattering of
Garcias, Inigos, Aznars, etc. - most slightly later, but that has as
much to do with sampling error as a sudden change in demographics.
Again, were it not for Leoegundia Diaz, we would not be looking at
royalty for Oneca's parentage, and given that we know nothing of
Diego's parentage, the leap is not justified.

Again, just to show how easy it is to come up with likely
alternatives, Oneca could have been a lady-in-waiting for queen
Jimena. As such she would have been married to a nobleman, but
probably not of the highest rank, but sh would have been well known
and likely to receive largesse from the royal family, and in turn she
may have had a royal serve as godmother for one of her children
(Leodegundia). I see this as the genealogical equivalent of the 'past
life' scenario. When a mystic takes someone back to a past life, they
were always a king, an adventurer, a warrior, a celebrity. They were
never a ditch digger or a dirt farmer. Well of all of the possible
Basques for this mid-level Portuguese nobleman to marry, we end up
deciding it was the king's daughter.


Given that the Basques used a very small pool of
names, then given a Basque woman named Oneca, there is a reasonable
chance she would name a son Jimeno, independent of who her parents
were (and likewise, there is a reasonable chance that she had a
brother, father, or grandfather named Jimeno).

It is true that a basque name does nor necessarily means the royal
family but if the connections are royal in León, royal basque origins
seem more probable.

How so? Other than the use of the name Leodegundia, do we have any
evidence of Diego and Oneca being royally connected?

With your argument
above, you have removed one plank from Perez de Urbel's hypothesis,
that Leodegundia married Jimeno, father of Garcia Jimenez.

True. Same thing when P.de Urbel said Adozinda or Gontroda and
accepting his reasoning for who the father was, a correction was made
to the detail: Teresa and not Adozinda or Gontroda or Aragunta.

Except that other argument did not depend on the name of the
daughter. This argument had a direct reliance - Jimeno Diaz was named
for his maternal grandfather Jimeno. In the other argument, you can
swap one name for another, and it doesn't matter. In this argument,
you swap Garcia Iniguez (who through the generation of his children
has not a single occurance of Jimeno in the entire family) in place of
Jimeno, and the onomastic argument is impoverished.

Btw the basis for this Teresa is really the unreliable bishop Pelayo
and the argument goes as follows. Diferently from your opinion that he
was prone to errors, portuguese genealogists (São Payo was not the
first) noted that his so called errors on wifes of Leonese kings were
all in the sense to enhance those kings connections and concluded that
the bishop did not err but lied. In this particular case "Queen
Teresa" Queen was the lie but Teresa made no sense if there was not a
Teresa.

This is supposed to make me accept his reliability, that he chose to
lie when he felt like it? It doesn't change the fact that he gave the
wrong name to numerous royal wives, whatever explanation you give to
this behavior, either error or intent to deceive, and as such I am
less willing to trust him on this particular name.


To me, Oneca, wife of Aznar Galindo, and Oneca wife of Diego
Fernandez, appear to be of different generations.  Aznar Galindez was
old enough to be count in 867.  Diego Fernandez does not appear in the
historical record until 909.  Yes, older men marry younger women, who
could then remarry to younger men, but this is quite a difference, 42
years between the first appearance of husbands 1 and 2.  Note also
that the birthdate you give to Oneca Garces is about the latest
possible birthdate for er niece, Oneca Fortun, daughter of Fortun
Garces (she had a grandson born 889/91) This would seemingly place
Aznar's Oneca in the 840s generation, which matches well with her
husband, Aznar, but poorly with Diego Fernandez.  Of course, one
cannot rule out that Oneca was daughter of Leodegundia as a late
second wife of Garcia Iniguez, and hence she did belong to a later
generation, and then she too married a much later spouse, Aznar
Galindez,

Not the second but the third wife. García Inigues, m1 Urraca Sanchez
(dau. od Sancho Lopez, duke of Gascogne, m2 Eldeburge (dau. of Ulrich
III marquis of Gothia) and m3 Leudegundia.
Onega was then not least 20 but probably 30 years younger than her
eldest half brother and quite the same age than her niece. No trouble
at all here.

Neither of these are supportable. There is an undated and dubious
document that names King Garcia and Queen Urraca, and since none of
the other Garcia's had a queen of this name, it has been assumed that
this must be Garcia Iniguez and wife. However, an alternative
hypothesis makes this document refer to Garcia Sanchez 'the Trembler'
and his mother 'queen' Urraca Fernandez. Even if her name was Urraca,
there is no reason to make Sancho her father, and opinion is all over
the place as to her parentage. As to Eldeburge, daughter of Ulrich of
Gothia, I don't think this is supportable at all.

With regard to Oneca being 30 years younger than her siblings, this
also puts her about the same degree younger than her husband, and it
would put the birth of her son Galindo improbably late.

It is all too forced, considering that we just have the use of the
name Leodegundia to suggest it to begin with.


such that on becoming his widow she could then cross Iberia
to marry an obscure nobleman who was a decade or more her junior, but
this seems too much ad hoc.

If I am taking the right conclusions from your reasoning, one obscure
nobleman married to an ignored Onega, suddenly became "presor" of
Portugal and fathers a powerful generation including the "magna
comitissa".

Well, I don't know that he was all that obscure. Part of the problem
here is that we are working at the historical horizon. We have no
idea who his father was, not because his father was obscure, but
becase we have such a poor record before his generation. Still, royal
princesses, even widowed ones, rarely crossed the length of their own
country, a no-man's land, then the length of another country to marry
just anybody. Even were we to attribute the family's power to Oneca,
what is to say she had to be royal, rather than of high-comtal rank?
Still, even were she lower, it would not be the first case of a
meteoric rise. THere is just too much being read into the few nuggets
of information we have.


The real point is that it is all just unsupported speculation, leaving
nothing to refute.  Perez de Urbel made a guess based on the
appearance of two Basque names and a Asturian one in a family
completely unknown prior to the generation of the marriage in
question.  To give this some special consideration because, there
being no actual evidence available, a formal refutation is impossible
seems unwise.

Depends on what you make "special consideration". Beeing no actual
evidence available, means that the whole must be seen and evaluated in
all sides, history, chronology, onomastics in a frame of 2 or 3 more
generations. I just pointed that nobody said it was an error or even
un unprobable event against common sense, history, etc..

You can't show something to be an error when there is no evidence. As
to common sense, again, in the absence of evidence all kinds of things
'make sense'. Most historians have dismissed out of hand the idea
that Leodegundia married Jimeno. Why would they go out of their way
to address the other half of the same argument? I want an argument to
stand on its own, not on the lack of a formal refutation.

This Diogo Fernandez was a castilian magnate, never mentioned as count
and never "owner" of Guimarães. What we see in Genealogics was a
portuguese reconstruction from the XXth century trying to give an
historical continuity to the county of Portugal since Vímara Peres. A
classical reconstruction for political purposes that was given some
credit by Almeida Fernandes but not sustainable both by history and
chronology.

There was more to it than just politics.  The hypothesis that Oneca
was daughter of Vimara Perez, proposed by Paulo Merea, cited a
document from 919 that named an Oneca Vimarez. It has subsequently
becaome clear that the document in question is forged, and was based
on an actual Oneca Vimarez who lived in the last quarter of the 10th
century.  Whetever one thinks of Oneca's actual parentage, this
solution can be safely dismissed.

If Diogo Fernandez was never a count, why Onega was sometime called
countess? Again no documental prove but being a widow of a count would
explain it.

And the only count she could have been widow of was from three states
to the east?

.. . . .

Paulo Merêa was an university professor of history in a time when all
universities were statal, the state had a nationalist ideology and
professors had to pass a political screen.

That may well be the case, but I prefer an analysis to show the flaw
in his evidence, rather than in his politics.

taf
.

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