Ordoño IV of León
||This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the Spanish Wikipedia. (June 2012)|
|Father||Alfonso IV of León|
|Mother||Oneca Sánchez of Pamplona|
|Died||c. 962 or 963
|Burial||Basilica of San Isidoro|
In 958, two years into the reign of Sancho I of León, he benefited from a rebellion of the nobility that would succeed in briefly placing him on the throne. The Leonese nobles, as well as the disaffected Galician and Castilian ones, had grown sick of the obese Sancho. He received particular help in this from his brother-in-law, count Fernán González of Castile, whose daughter he married. However, count Fernán was defeated through Navarrese intervention on Sancho's behalf in 960, and Ordoño was forced out. Upon losing his throne, Ordoño fled first to Asturias, then Burgos, where he abandoned his wife. This lost him the support of Fernán González, who allied himself with García Sánchez I of Pamplona. The Castilian count sent Ordoño to Ghalib al-Nasiri, commander of the 'Middle Frontier' in Medinaceli, from whom he was passed on to the court of the caliph of Córdoba. There he submitted and made plea for aid. The caliph at first offered him help, but this led his rival Sancho likewise to offer his submission, thereby neutralizing any benefit to the caliph helping Ordoño, who died in Cordoba, still dethroned.
During the short period of his reign, he was married, for political reasons, to Urraca, daughter of Fernán González and formerly wife of his cousin Ordoño III of León. After Ordoño IV abandoned her, she would remarry to Sancho II of Pamplona. According to chronicler Sampiro, she bore Ordoño IV two children, but their identity is not known with certainty. Chronicler Ibn Hayyan assigns him a son García, but given that Urraca had a son of that name, the future king García Sánchez II of Pamplona by her third husband, Ibn Hayyan may have mistaken this step-son for a son. Likewise, a minority of modern scholars consider Vermudo II of León to have been son of Ordoño IV by Urraca rather than Ordoño III of León.
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- Some modern scholars instead believe him to have been son of Alfonso Fróilaz.
|King of León