I recently came across the claim that a Portuguese exile to England married there to the daughter of King Ecgbert, and by her gave rise to much of the Portuguese nobility. As is not uncommon with such claims, it has spread beyond the confines of the genealogy echo chamber: I recently came across a blog post by an established scholar explaining the geopolitical context of relations between England and Portugal that led to the marriage. But did it actually happen?

The claim is that Rodrigo Romães, count of Monterroso fled to England and there married Milia, daughter of King Ecgberht of Wessex. That an Anglo-Sazon king would name a daughter Milia is an immediate red flag, but such claims are hard to run down.

The earliest source I have found naming a Count Rodrigo Romães of Monterroso amounts to two brief and contradictory mentions of Rodrigo in the nobiliario of Pedro, Conde de Barcelos. The author was a younger son of a Portuguese king, writing in the late 14th century, and using as his source earlier nobiliarios, in particular the Livro Velho, which was written in the 1280s but only surviving in a partial copy from the 17th century that does not include mention of Count Rodrigo that I have found. It should also be noted that Conde Pedro was partial to exotic origin legends. In one mention of a man with the name of interest it says that Rodrigo Romaaez became count of Monteroso through his services to the kings of Portugal, while elsewhere it says that he gave assistance to King Alfonso of Leon. The chronology here is wonky – the Kingdom of Leon did not exist until the early 10th century, and that of Portugal the 12th. The mention associating him with Leon says he was maternal grandfather of count Fruela Bermudez, who lived in the 11th century. That is a hard fit for somone exiled in England during the reign of Ecgberht.

Over the next two centuries, the story got a significant upgrade, as seen in the 1588 work of Gonçalo Argote de Molina, Nobleza de Andaluzia. There (p. 270), he writes of the Quesada lineage:

“El origen deste linage, como escrive Martin Lopez de Leçana, es del Códe don Rodrigo de Romaes Señor de Monterroso en el Reyno de Galizia, que casó con vna Infante de Inglaterra llamada doña Milia. La qual traxo a Galizia, y vivieron en Fortiguera, y yacen en la Iglesia de Sancta Maria de aquella villa. Era este Códe don Rodrigo de Romaes (como escrive el Conde don Pedro) hijo de el Conde don Remon, y este Conde don Remon era hijo del Rey don Fruela de Leon.”

‘The origin of this lineage, as written by Martin Lopez de Leçana, is the Count don Rodrigo de Romaes, Lord of Monterroso in the Kingdom of Galicia, who married with a princess of England named Lady Milia. He brought her to Galicia, and they lived at Fortuguera and lie in the church of Santa Maria in that town. This Count don Rodrigo de Romaes (as written by the Conde don Pedro [de Barcelos]) was son of the Count don Remon, and this Count don Remon was son of King don Fruela de Leon.’

A few observations. At least Rodrigo, as grandson of King Fruela [I of Asturias] (not really – this is just the ‘claim your line descends from a king without known descendants’ trope), would be in living in the early 9th century. It is unclear how he got there as our only identified precursor lived two centuries later. Second, we get a name for his Anglo-Saxon wife, Milia, which is, um, . . . not exactly a fit for Anglo-Saxon naming practices. We don’t know who her father was, only that she was an English infanta. One would think that a Spaniard would appreciate that the area occupied by a single nation-state in his time might have contained multiple independent states in the early medieval period. Calling someone a ‘princess of England’ is nonsensical, or at least incredibly vague.

The cited source for the information, Martin Lopez de Leçana, proves difficult to nail down. His work, “Nobiliario de linages de Espana” was apparently a widely circulated manuscript pr book in the late-16th and early 17th centuries, but no source I could find gives any more information than that he was herald to the Duke of Medina (a title first granted in the mid-15th century, putting a limit on how early he could have been active). I will add that this is a period when Fernan Perez de Ayala wrote a series of sketches on the notables of the realm, and had some skeptical things to say about the various legends of exotic origins that had come down to him. As to the time of Count Rodrigo, even by the 15th century there was very little historical material (essentially none) from the early 9th century surviving. There is zero chance that this reputed marriage was based on authentic historical documentation.

Well into the next century, authors simply replicated what Argote de Molina had said. That changed in mid-century when a much more elaborate tradition is reported. The first I find relating it is Gaspar de Seixas Vasconcelos y Lugo, in his 1656 Corona Imperial Conseguida en la Mayor Victoria y Firmada con el Meior Triunfo, reporting:

“El segundo Escudo de las insignias Gentilicias, organizòle D. Rodrigo Romais, hijo legitimo del Conde D.Remon. La causa que hallan los Genealogistas en el linage de los Baamondes, es, que como te tiranizò el Reyno de Leó por Mauregato, librandose el Conde D. Rodrigo Romais, passo a Inglaterra, donde le amparò el Rey Egberto, cuya hermana fue la Infanta Milia, con quié caso D.Rodrigo Romais: y en honor le concedio Egberto, que como los Reyes de Inglaterra traian en insignias Reales tres coronas de oro en cape açul,”

‘The second heraldic shield of the Gentilicias, designed by D. Rodrigo Romais, son of the Count D. Remon. The reason, as found by the Genealogists of the Baamondes lineage, is that the Kingdom of Leon was terrorized by King Mauregato, and Count D. Rodrigo Romais went to England, where he received the protection of King Egberto, whose sister was the Princess Milia, with whom D. Rodrigo Romais married: and in his honor, Egberto granted him what the Kings of England used for royal insignias, three gold crowns on a blue field.’

If understand it correctly, the account then goes on to describe several evolutions of these arms, with the addition of an M for Milia, and an orle.

So now we have a specific king, Ecgberht, and we have a coat of arms that he granted and . . . who are we kidding? This is 300+ years before the introduction of heraldry. The three-crowns coat is attributed, not actually borne by the Anglo-Saxon kings in question, and further, those kings are not kings of either Kent or Wessex (which had kings named Ecgberht): the coat was attributed in medieval times to the East Anglian Wulffingas. So no, the author of this tract did not find a long-lost 9th-century source. Rather, he extrapolated backwards, one of those ‘just so stories’ about arms origins, but he was too unfamiliar with English history to know the difference between the kingdoms. He was creative enough to realize that a story is more compelling when given specific details, and so the English king left vague by Argode de Molina was now specified, with the obvious pick from the period, Alfred the Great’s grandfather, being selected.

The final transformation comes only in the 19th and 20th centuries, at least as best I have been able to find. In 1887, a paired set of similar meeting notes were published in prominent historical and archaeological journals. These had an item about the Milia family being descended from infanta Milia, daughter of King Egberto of England. Setting aside the absurdity of a spanish family with the surname attributing it to a 9th century woman with thsi given name (surnames didn't begin to be used until the late 11th century in Iberia, and even then did not derive from the name of a female ancestor), the transfer of Mila from sister to daughter could be an error, but it seems more likely it was an intentional upgrade – why claim a sister of a king when you can claim a daughter of one, and hence the king himself.. This seems to have been largely ignored, but then in 1959, one historian repeated the relationship as daughter – it is unclear if they derived it from the 1887 report or altered the relationship independently, but then you see progressively more sayign 'daughter' over subsequent decades, and of course, once it got into the internet genealogy echo chamber, it became canon.

One shouldn’t need to go beyond the shifting of the count in question two centuries backwards in time between the first identified mention and the more elaborate one two centuries later to reach a conclusion. Add to that the vague-to-precise progression in the identification of the king involved, the anachronistic use of arms for the wrong kingdom, and the very recent shift from sister to daughter of the king, and one should realize that her name being the non-Anglo-Saxon Milia is the least of the story’s problems.

taf