Castles, fortresses, alcázares originally held by Islamic forces, citadels, and walled towns all became part of the urban and rural landscape of Spain. All were fought over, besieged, and taken, frontier by frontier, kingdom by kingdom. Could Spain's urban and rural environment, could its historic memory of conquest and reconquest, have influenced understanding of the Virgin Mary, defender of Christians, in the medieval period?

Anglo-Norman and French writing incorporates architectural allegories of the Virgin as early as the twelfth century, when they begin to appear in homilies and liturgical texts. However, no comparable study has been made of the castle as an allegory of the Virgin in Hispanic writing. This chapter will take the first steps towards examining how and when Hispanic poets and authors in the Middle Ages began to employ castle imagery to symbolize the Virgin and what they believed this to signify. I will examine how the trope of the Virgin as a defensive power and a protective space develops over the Middle Ages.

Believers had begun to think of the Virgin as a protective space long before campaigns began to wrest territory from its occupying forces. The Virgin was the defender of those who called on her. Such belief had already taken root in the Christian faith in the earliest times and is apparent in an intercessory prayer addressed to the Virgin on a fragment of papyrus dating from late ancient Egypt, a very early version of the prayer Sub tuum praesidium: ‘We take refuge in your mercy, Theotokos. Do not disregard our prayers in troubling times, but deliver us from danger, O only pure one, only blessed one.’5 From this protective space, afforded by the Virgin's mercy, there was to develop an allegorical representation of her body as a castle, fortress, or tower, which sheltered the faithful from the onslaught of their enemies.

Castles have been described as ‘the best-known “secular” architecture of medieval religious literature’. Although castles appear in medieval writing, particularly in chivalry novels, they act as a backdrop against which the action takes place. Even so, they transmit certain attributes of place because of their setting: nobility of purpose, rituals of chivalric behaviour, and fortitude. Because of their capacity for protection when there was an onslaught from enemy forces, castles became a way of representing allegorically the virtuous body or the holy soul defending itself from sin.