Estella

Estella's medieval setting was the Kingdom of Navarre, a Pyrenean realm that had once stretched across both sides of the western mountains. By the 14th century its native royal line had ended in 1234 and its rulers were tied by marriage to French dynasties, while the kingdom still defended its own laws and institutions. The chancery and court used Navarro-Aragonese officially from 1329, and the older pilgrim route through Navarre had already brought Franks, crafts and Romance speech into Navarrese towns. Navarre's political weight had been reduced earlier, after the loss of the western Basque districts to Castile in 1200 left it landlocked. At the opening of the period, Estella therefore belonged to a small but legally distinct kingdom rather than to Castile. In 1512 Ferdinand the Catholic invaded Navarre; Queen Catherine and King John III withdrew north of the Pyrenees, and south of the mountains Navarre was annexed to the Crown of Castile in 1515 while keeping an ambiguous separate status. The kingdom retained home rule and a Diputación, but tensions with the Spanish government sharpened in 1794 when Manuel Godoy tried to suppress Navarrese and Basque self-government. Estella itself had been founded in 1090 by King Sancho Ramírez on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela, and its streets filled with Frankish merchants and craftsmen.