Epistola Adefonsi Hispaniae regis

The Epistola Adefonsi Hispaniae regis anno 906[1] (“letter of Alfonso, king of Spain in the year 906”) is a letter purportedly written by Alfonso III of Asturias to the clergy of the cathedral of Saint Martin's at Tours in 906. The letter is primarily about the king of Asturias purchasing a crown kept in the treasury of the church of Tours, but it also includes instructions for visiting the shrine of James, son of Zebedee, which lay in Alfonso's kingdom. An exchange of literature was also arranged in the letter. Alfonso requested a written account of the posthumous miracles worked by Saint Martin. In return the church of Tours would receive the Vitas sanctorum patrum Emeritensium, a hagiography of some early Bishops of Mérida.

The authenticity of the letter is widely questioned and "it has generally been regarded with scepticism by modern historical scholarship".[2] It is rejected, for example, by Lucien Barrau-Dihigo,[3] although it has been accepted as genuine by Hermann Hüffer,[4] Carl Erdmann,[5] and Richard Fletcher.[6]

  1. ^ This is its title in the Patrologia Latina (Paris , 1853), 133, col. 730.
  2. ^ Richard A. Fletcher, Saint James's Catapult: The Life and Times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 71.
  3. ^ Alfonso García Gallo "El imperio medieval español", Arbor, 4:11 (1945) 203, citing Barrau-Dihigo, "Recherches sur l'histoire politique du royaume asturien (718–910)", Révue Hispanique, 52 (1921): 86–91.
  4. ^ Hermann J. Hüffer, "Die leonesischen Hegemoniebestrebungen und Kaisertitel", Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft, 3 (1930) 337–84.
  5. ^ Erdmann, Forschungen zur politischen Ideenwelt des Frühmittelalters, F. Baethgen, ed. (Berlin: 1951), 31–33, cited in Fletcher 1984, 323.
  6. ^ Appendix C, pp. 317–23, in Fletcher 1984 is devoted to demonstrating the authenticity of the letter.