226 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINprecious stones. An elaborate oral epic, full of robust dialogue and
improbable personal confrontations between the participants, was
composed; some of it survives in the two versions of the Chronicle of
Alfonso III, and in due course the battle came to be associated with a
miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary.5
The truth is more prosaic. In the first place this was obviously a
purely Asturian rising, and the chroniclers say as much. Its leader
Pelagius is a shadowy figure. The Chronicle of Albelda had him being
expelled from Toledo by King Wittiza, but, as this monarch and his
descendants are objects of the particular opprobrium of this and
other chroniclers writing after 711, conflict between him and the
founder of the line of the Asturian kings may well be a personalising
and legendary accretion. Pelagius could certainly have been an
Asturian noble. No substantial movement of refugees from the heart-
land of the former Visigothic kingdom into the northern mountains
could have taken place before the battle, and in view of the realities
before 711 it was hardly an obvious area for them to think of fleeing
to. Besides, the Asturias, overrun by Musa in 714, was as much under
Arab military domination as other regions of the peninsula.
Pelagius, who, according to the chroniclers, had been elected king
by the Asturians prior to the battle, made his capital at Can gas de
Onis, probably little more than the site of a royal residence and
church, and ruled his small realm until his death in 737, facing no
serious attempt by the Arabs to restore their authority. The exact
extent of the Asturian kingdom in his day is hard to determine; it
probably included little if any of Galicia, and Cantabria, its neighbour
to the east, had its own dux or duke. What kind of formal relationship
Duke Peter had with the Asturian monarch is unclear, but it was to be
his son Alfonso who ultimately reaped the benefits of Pel agius' achieve-
ments, for he married the latter's daughter Ermosinda. When Pelagius's
son Fafila was killed by a bear in 739 it was his brother-in-law who was
chosen to succeed him. With the rule of this king, Alfonso I 'the
Catholic' (739-757), the small realm starts to take on a clearer shape.
He and his father, unlike Pelagius, are linked genealogically with
the former Visigothic monarchs in the Ad Sebastianum version (only)
of the Alfonsine chronicle, being described as descendants of Leovigild
and Reccared. This is probably a false claim, but the parallel between
Leovigild and Reccared," the creators of the Toledan kingdom and
the Catholic monarchy respectively, and Peter and Alfonso 'the Catho-
lic' was deliberate. In the reign of Alfonso I, taking advantage of the