opposition to Queen Urraca and sometimes, particularly
after her separation from Alfonso in 1112, her close
collaborator. With the death of Urraca in 1126 and the
succession of her son as Alfonso VII (r. 1126–1157),
Gelmírez initially shared the glory of his former protégé.
At the Council of León in 1130 he was able to place
canons of his church in the bishoprics of the royal city
of León and of Salamanca. Three years later another
canon of Compostela became bishop of Orense.
But royal favor was inconstant, and as early as 1127
Gelmírez found himself the subject of extortion at the
hands of a needy Alfonso VII. After 1134 the archbishop
was increasingly eclipsed by the rising infl uence of the
archbishop of Toledo, who placed his own canons as
royal chancellor and then in Compostela’s suffragan
see of Salamanca in 1135. The following year the king
collaborated in an attempt to have Gelmírez removed
from his ecclesiastical dignity. At the Council of Burgos
in 1136 the Galician prelate was rescued only by the
support of the papacy and the ineptitude of the conspira-
tors. Nevertheless, the cost of maintaining his offi ce
again came at the price of substantial future subsidies
to the king.
The troubles of the archbishop of Santiago de Com-
postela were, in good part, due to his position as one of
the great magnates of Galicia as well as a prelate there.
His offi ce made him the administrator of widespread
royal lands, and these, combined with the lands of the
shrine–church itself, automatically established him as
the most powerful fi gure of central Galica. There he
was caught between the ambitions of the Trastámara
counts of Traba in the north and of the monarchs Teresa
(r. 1112–1128) and Afonso I Enriques (r. 1139–1185)
of Portugal in the south.
By royal grant and policy Gelmírez was also the
lessee of the royal mint in Compostela and the city’s
civil administrator. In the latter capacity he resisted
the ambitions of a nascent citizen commune to a share
in the goverment of the town, although he did grant a
measure of participation to it. The communal movement
had allies even within the cathedral chapter. When his
troubles in the larger political arena became acute, he
faced outright revolt in 1117 and again in 1135. Both
began with unsuccessful attempts on his life that failed
only by the narrowest of margins. In each case the
crown had initially encouraged Gelmírez’s enemies,
and repudiated them only when their attempt at assas-
sination had failed.
After 1136 Gelmírez played only a small part in the
life of the realm, and his activities in the church seem to
have tapered down as well. From 1138 he was probably
intermittently ill, and he died on 31 March 1140.
See also Alfonso VI, King of León-Castile; Urban
II, Pope
Further Reading
Briggs, A. G. Diego Gelmírez, First Archbishop of Compostela.
Washington, D. C., 1949.
Falque Rey, E. (ed.) Historia compostelana. Turnhout, 1988.
Fletcher, R. A. Saint James’s Catapult: The Life and Times of
Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela. Oxford, 1984.
Bernard F. ReillyGEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH
(ca. 1100–1155)
Author of the highly infl uential Historia regum Britan-
niae (History of the Kings of Britain). Probably born
in Wales and possibly of Breton descent, Geoffrey
lived in Oxford from 1129 to 1151, presumably as a
secular canon at the College of St. George, where he
was engaged in teaching. By 1151 or 1152 he had been
elected bishop of St. Asaph in northeast Wales, although
there is no evidence to suggest that he ever visited his
Welsh see.
Geoffrey’s fi rst book, the Prophetiae Merlini, or
Prophecies of Merlin (ca. 1135), purports to be a series
of prophecies delivered by Merlin to the 5th-century
king Vortigern and translated from British verse into
Latin. The prophecies are retrospective, anticipatory,
or apocalyptic: that is, some allude to events before
Geoffrey’s time; others to events that in 1135 seemed
relatively imminent (e.g., the Norman conquest of
Ireland); and still others to events that might be antici-
pated at the end of the world. Although the Prophecies
stems mainly from Geoffrey’s vivid imagination, parts
of it betray a debt to native prophetic traditions and
to such written sources as Lucan’s Pharsalia and the
Bible. Having circulated independently in a manuscript
or manuscripts no longer extant, the prophecies were
ultimately incorporated into the enormously popular
History of the Kings of Britain, a Latin work that was
probably completed in 1138 and survives in over 200
manuscripts.
Geoffrey claims that he translated his history of the
Britons from the time of Brutus to the reign of Cad-
walader from an ancient book in the Breton (or Welsh)
tongue. That which Geoffrey did not simply invent for
the purposes of his history, however, seems to be derived
from not one but several sources. Much of his account of
the founding of the British nation, for example, derives
from Virgil and from Nennius’s Historia Brittonum.
The history of Britain from its founding by Brutus to
the reigns of Uther Pendragon and Arthur would seem
to derive largely from Welsh genealogies and legends.
Geoffrey concludes his history with an account of the
Saxon conquest that owes much to these same sources
and to accounts of the conquest found in Gildas and
Bede.GELMÍREZ, DIEGO, ARCHBISHOP OF COMPOSTELA