El Monasterio de Santa María la Real de Tordesillas (1363-1509)

Abstract

The monastery of Santa Maria la Real of Tordesillas was founded on January 2th, 1363 by king Peter I of Castile. Since then and across the Middle Ages, it became one of the most important royal foundations of the all Peninsula. In material terms, jurisdiction and heritage extended from the self land of Tordesillas to Transierra of Madrid, Soria, Sepúlveda, Medina del Campo, Burgos and Zamora. But economic history should not obscure the main bases of the success of this clare community: from the late fourteenth century the model of observant reform became the reference that brought together Castilian clare convents in a new organizational model convent, under the authority of a Franciscan General Visitor. In 1509 arrived to the town of Tordesillas the queen Juana I. This date defines the general frame of this research, but not closes it, because the knowledge of what happened in the following centuries, until now, helps explain what happened at the beginning. From the study of bibliography and documentation, mostly unpublished, of Santa Clair Archive and the General Archive of Royal Palace, the convent of Saint Clair of Tordesillas is presented as an active community, who participated directly, trought the reasoned decisions of its components, in the legal defense of their interests or finding new incomes through the dense network of social and political relations that had woven the families of the professed nuns in the closure.