240 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINduring the minority of Alfonso V, the chief prop of the regime of his
mother Queen Elvira, the regent, was the Galician count Menendo
Gonzalez. Conflicts between active Leonese kings exercising their own
rule and the great marcher counts, who were in theory only their
appointed representatives, was scarcely avoidable. Sancho I had per-
ished as a consequence and his son was no more successful in curbing
his overmighty subjects. Unspecified difficulties with the counts in
Castille and Galicia led to a revolt in the latter region and the crowning
of a rival king at Compostela in the person of Vermudo II. Whether
a purely Galician kingdom, a revival of that which had existed briefly
earlier in the tenth century, was envisaged by the supporters of this
monarch, an illegitimate son of Ordoiio III, is unknown, for the
legitimate king Ramiro III failed in an attempt to dislodge his rival
and died almost immediately, supposedly of natural causes. (See Table
II.)
The standing of Vermudo II (982-999) may have been further
weakened by doubts as to his legitimacy as well as by the nature of his
succession. Whether as a result of this initial fragility in his position
or not, Vermudo II is recorded, uniquely amongst the Asturian and
Leonese kings, as having formally confirmed the continued applica-
tion in his realm of the Visigothic lawcode and the acts of the Church
councils.^25 No new version of either seems to have been issued, and
no extant manuscript can be associated with the king's decree, but
the importance attached to them at this period may be illustrated by
the existence of two great manuscripts containing full collections of
ecclesiastical and secular laws that were produced in the Navarrese
monastery of Albelda in 976 and 992.26 These lavish products of both
the calligrapher and the illuminator's art, the Codex Vigilanus (named
after the abbot who commissioned it) and the Codex Aemilianensis
(named after the monastery of San Millan, its later home) have been
associated with King Ramiro III of Leon by reason of a full-page
illumination that is common to both, and which depicts in three rows
the Visigothic kings Chindasuinth, Reccesuinth and Egica, to whom
the manuscripts ascribe responsibility for the Forum Iudicum, then below
them a Queen Urraca, a King Sancho and a King Ramiro, and in the
bottom row three scribes, these latter differing in the two codices.
Dating alone might cast doubt on the ascription of the central figure
to Sancho I of Leon and the one to the right of him to his son
Ramiro III. It is perhaps more likely that the ruler represented in the
dominant central position is King Sancho Garces II of Pamplona