# Jimena Sánchez (queen)

Jimena Sánchez (also spelled Ximena) was an infanta of Pamplona and queen of León (1035–1037).

## Life

Jimena was the daughter of King Sancho III the Great, king of Pamplona and Nájera, and his queen, Muniadona. She is listed last of his children in a genealogy from the monastery of Leire dated 1074, after her four brother and her sister Mayor. She was the youngest child, probably born around 1018–1020 and named for her paternal grandmother, Jimena Fernández.
In 1035, Sancho arranged the marriage of Jimena to King Bermudo III of León, who was about the same age or slightly older. This took place between 2 February, when Sancho was still reigning in León, which he had conquered the previous year, and 17 February, when Bermudo, restored to power, was reigning with Jimena as queen. On the latter date, Bermudo and Jimena granted a diploma to the diocese of Palencia, which her father had restored, defining its boundaries. They also dedicated it to the Virgin Mary and Saint Antoninus, inciting a wave of devotion to this saint in León. Perhaps as part of the peace agreement between Sancho and Bermudo, Sancho's son Ferdinand was married to Bermudo's sister, Sancha, although this marriage did not take place until later.
According to the 13th-century historian Lucas de Tuy, Jimena and Bermudo had one son, Alfonso Vermúdez, who died after only a few days. In 1036, she was a witness with her husband when her grandmother and namesake made a donation to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. She signed the royal diplomas of 20 January 1036 and 9 June 1037, the latter during a trip to Galicia. She was widowed on 4 September 1037 when her husband was killed in the battle of Tamarón.
In a document that should probably be dated to 1044, she is named as tenant-in-chief of the abbey of San Andrés de Vega de Espinareda [es]. She appears in a document of 23 May 1057. She was still living on 21 December 1062 or 1063, when she signed a document recording a donation to León Cathedral made by Ferdinand and Sancha. Two days later, she witnessed her brother donating the monastery of Santa Marta de Tera [es] to the diocese of Astorga. She was the last surviving of Sancho III's children and the only one who may have outlived her mother, who died in 1066. The date of Jimena's death is unknown.

## Tomb and mistaken identity

Jimena was buried in the royal pantheon [es] in the basilica of San Isidoro de León. Her tomb is first mentioned by Pelagius of Oviedo in the 12th century. Only a fragment of her tomb remains, but its effigy was described by Enrique Flórez as depicting her in full in a royal mantle, crowned, with a cross in her left hand and a fleur-de-lis in her right, which Flórez interpreted as representing the top of a sceptre rather than any connection to France. Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras interprets the cross as the crucifix of Ferdinand and Sancha, a processional cross owned by San Isidoro.
There were two epitaphs on the tomb, an earlier one in verse and a later one in prose. Neither is contemporary. They both erroneously call her the daughter of a count named Sancho, with the verse epitaph specifying that he was Count Sancho García of Castile. The verse epitaph also gives the day of her death as 23 November.
The 13th-century historians Lucas de Tuy and Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada also call her the daughter of Count Sancho, but they mistakenly give her name as Teresa, a mistake repeated in the epitaph of Sancho's wife, Urraca, in San Salvador de Oña. Chronological, onomastic and political difficulties make it implausible that she was an otherwise unattested daughter of Count Sancho. Scholars today identify the queen with the daughter of Sancho III. The errors of name and filiation in later sources may stem from the popular romancero tradition.