Muño Peláez

Who is Muño Peláez?

Muño or Munio Peláez was a Galician magnate during the reigns of Alfonso VI, Urraca and Alfonso VII. By December 1108 he held the title of comes, the highest in the kingdom. He was a son of Pelayo Gómez, son of Gómez Díaz de Carrión and Teresa Peláez, and Elvira Muñoz, daughter of Muño Rodríguez and Ilduara Velázquez. His ancestors had founded the monastery of Santa María de Ferreira.

On 17 September 1111, Muño participated in the coronation of a young Alfonso VII in opposition to his mother, Urraca, at Santiago de Compostela. At the banquet following the coronation Muño acted as regalis offertorius, the official in charge of the food. Between May 1112 and November 1116 Muño governed the Galician tenencia of Monterroso, a region south of Lugo, west of the river Miño, and along the Way of Saint James. By the summer of 1114 he made peace with Queen Urraca, which keeps with the description of him provided by the Historia compostellana that he tried to steer a moderate course. He was still on Urraca's side in 1116. In the spring of 1120 Queen Urraca imprisoned Muño, probably for defecting to her son, and deprived him of all his lands, but by the next year he was restored and was supporting the queen against the Galician archbishop Diego Gelmírez. Muño was among those nobles forced in 1114 to swear an oath to "honour" Diego as part of the archbishop's reconciliation with the queen. Sometime in 1121 Muño built an "adulterine" castle on the River Iso near Compostela. The Historia compostellana calls it a "den of robbers and bandits", and Diego managed to raze it to the ground soon after it was built. Muño was soon interceding on Diego's behalf with his brother-in-law Vermudo Pérez de Traba, whose castle at Faro Diego claimed.