Nobility, kinship and memory in Santa Eufemia de Cozuelos, the first female convent of the Military Order of Santiago

Abstract

This paper refers to the noble patronage around Santa Eufemia de Cozuelos, the first female house of the Military Order of Santiago since 1186, based in the north of the Kingdom of Castile, during the second half of the thirteenth century. This patronage provided the convent with funerary spaces to perpetuate the memory of some noble Castilian and Leonese families whose members effected important land donations to the monastery, thus assuring prayers for the salvation of their souls. Unlike the vast majority of the many female monastic houses founded in the kingdoms of Castile and León in the Middle Ages, the lack of aristocratic founders, patrons or benefactors in all the female Jacobean convents in Castile and León since their founding until the second half of the thirteenth century, Santa Eufemia among them, is striking. The subject of this paper aims to determine how the Military Order of Santiago managed to attract to its first female house a whole group of noble lineages. The patronage of these noble families along the second half of the thirteenth century provided the Jacobean monastery with the noble prestige that many other Castilian female convents had from their origin and of which Santa Eufemia lacked, and furthermore, also provided the Jacobean convent with the most relevant territorial expansion of its monastic domain, precisely along this same period. A detailed revision of the available source material and bibliography allowed us to put together enough information to follow and verify this process.