We keep bringing up Alfonso X, also known as Alfonso el Sabio. He's currently my favorite European monarch. One of the things I like about him is that he created a Spanish version of the communes that began in Italian city-states of the era, the mesta, an association of 3,000 large and small sheep holders in northern Spain, notably Castile, for reasons that I don't yet know, the usual imports of wool from England had sharply dropped. Wool rapidly became a primary Spanish export. Sheep raised now on commercial scale, as later would be tobacco and sugar in the New World, the sheep soon destroyed the arable lands of Castile. Additionally the sheepholders were granted so many rights, privileges and tax exemptions, they did a great deal to destroy Spain's economy not much later, not to mention create political conflict. But nevermind.
Alfonso was a great supporter of learning, literature and the arts, and was notable for a reign of both intellectual and religious tolerance, in an era that generally elsewhere was not -- with the exception of Occitan, which not coincidentally was a close neighbor. Thus the female trouvéres ....
What other monarchs would one admire ....
Sort of an odd soundtrack to el V's current reading: he's backtracking through a stack of books on the War of 1812, I've read read and taken notes from for The American Slave Coast. Right now he's marveling at how differently the Canadian author of the one he's currently reading writes of the War for Independence. He's recovering but he's still not there. I won't let him go out because it's cold, the wind is fierce and cuts like a blade of ice.
However, he is well enough to make dinner tonight -- yay! I am burned out for cooking or even planning dinner; wouldn't bother with it at all, would contentedly graze upon all the leftovers stuffed in the refrigerator. He, however, is never, ever, burned out on foods, eating or dinner.
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