Llywelyn the Great(c. 1173–1240)

Llywelyn ap Iorwerth was born around 1173 in the small Snowdonia stronghold of Dolwyddelan in upper Gwynedd, only legitimate son of Iorwerth ab Owain Gwynedd (the elder son of Owain Gwynedd whose claim to the senior Aberffraw line had been set aside in favour of his younger half-brother) and Marared ferch Madog of the Mathrafal line of Powys. His father died when he was a small child; the boy was raised at the court of his maternal Powysian uncles in mid-Wales through the disputed succession of Gwynedd in the 1170s and 1180s and emerged in his fifteenth year as one of several rival claimants to the disputed senior Aberffraw position. He took the country in a series of campaigns from 1188 to 1200: he defeated his uncle Dafydd ab Owain Gwynedd at the battle on the Conwy in 1194, took the senior Anglesey-and-Conwy heartland of Aberffraw in 1199, and by 1200 was the undisputed prince of all Gwynedd.

He married in 1205 in his thirty-second year Joan, natural daughter of King John of England, the political marriage that established the Aberffraw dynasty's diplomatic relationship with the Plantagenet crown. Through the long reign of John he combined the careful diplomatic management of the English court with the steady extension of Gwynedd's overlordship across the southern Welsh kingdoms, fought the unsuccessful war against King John in 1211 (after which he ceded the four cantrefs east of the Conwy), recovered the lost territories through the rising of 1212 and the alliance with the Marcher barons that produced Magna Carta in 1215 (the only Welsh prince mentioned in the Charter is Llywelyn, whose feudal positions were specifically secured by it), and across the 1220s and 1230s consolidated his political position as the effective sovereign of an integrated Welsh principality.

He took at the Council of Aberdyfi in 1216 the homage of the other Welsh princes (Maredudd ap Robert of Cedewain, the sons of Madog ap Maredudd of Powys, the sons of Rhys ap Gruffydd of Deheubarth) and from that date governed Wales as effectively a single princely authority, the first Welsh ruler since Hywel Dda to have done so. He styled himself in his charters Princeps Norwallia or Princeps Aberffraw et Dominus Snowdonie, drew up a unified Welsh law-code based on the older Hywel Dda corpus, and constructed across his reign the new stone castle architecture (Castell-y-Bere, Criccieth, Cricieth, Deganwy, Dolwyddelan, Dolbadarn) that became the architectural signature of the Welsh princes' independent military authority.

He retired in 1238 in his sixty-fifth year, took the Cistercian habit at the abbey of Aberconwy (which he had founded in 1186 and patronised throughout his reign), and presided over the Council of Strata Florida at which the other Welsh princes paid homage to his son Dafydd as his designated successor. He died at Aberconwy on the eleventh of April 1240 in his sixty-seventh year and was buried at the abbey under a stone coffin that survives today at the parish church of St Grwst, Llanrwst (the coffin was moved there after the dissolution of the abbey at the sixteenth-century reformation). His unified Welsh principality survived him by two generations under his son Dafydd ap Llywelyn and his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffydd (Llywelyn the Last) until the fall at Cilmeri in 1282. The Aberffraw name in modern Welsh memory carries the weight of his forty-year political project.