Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa

Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa
Part of the Reconquista (Spanish Christian–Muslim War of 1172–1212)
Portrayal of the battle by Francisco de Paula Van Halen (1864)
Date 16 July 1212 Location Near Santa Elena, Jaén, Andalusia, 38.28443°N 3.58286°W / 38.28443; -3.58286[1] Result Spanish-Crusader victory[2][3][4][5]
Belligerents
Kingdom of Castile Order of Santiago Order of Calatrava Crown of Aragon Kingdom of Navarre Knights Templar Volunteers from the Kingdom of Leon and the Kingdom of Portugal Crusaders from all over Europe	Almohad Caliphate
Commanders and leaders
Centre: Alfonso VIII of Castile Vanguard: Diego López II de Haro Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada Right wing: Sancho VII of Navarre Left wing: Peter II of Aragon[6]	Muhammad al-Nasir
Strength
12,000–14,000[7][8]	22,000–30,000[7][9] "Many hundreds of thousands"[10]
Casualties and losses
~2,000[11]^[page needed]	Very high[7][12] ~20,000[8]

The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, known in Islamic history as the Battle of Al-Uqab (Arabic: معركة العقاب), took place on 16 July 1212 and was an important turning point in the Reconquista and the medieval history of Spain.[13] The Christian forces of King Alfonso VIII of Castile, were joined by the armies of his rivals, Sancho VII of Navarre and Peter II of Aragon, in battle[14] against the Almohad Muslim rulers of the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula. The caliph al-Nasir (Miramamolín in the Spanish chronicles) led the Almohad army, made up of people from all over the Almohad Caliphate.

Navas de Tolosa (also called Las Navas) is a town and hamlet in southern Spain, in the municipality of La Carolina, in the province of Jaén, in the eastern part of the Sierra Morena region, fifteen kilometers from the border with the province of Ciudad Real.[15][16]

Background

In 1195, the Almohads defeated Alfonso VIII of Castile in the Battle of Alarcos.[17] After this victory, the Kingdom of León and the Kingdom of Navarre made an alliance with the Almohads and attacked Castile, starting the Castilian–Leonese War.[18] Duirng those years, Yaqub al-Mansur attacked several important cities: Toledo, Trujillo, Plasencia, Talavera, Cuenca, Guadalajara, Madrid, Uclés and others.[19] However, he signed a ten-year truce with Alfonso VIII] in 1197.[20][21]

In 1211, Muhammad al-Nasir crossed the Strait of Gibraltar with a powerful army, invaded Christian territory, and captured the Salvatierra Castle, the stronghold of the knights of the Order of Calatrava.[22][23] The threat to the Hispanic Christian kingdoms was so great that Pope Innocent III called Christian knights to a crusade.[23]

Previous movements

There were some disagreements among the members of the Christian coalition; notably, French and other European knights did not agree with Alfonso's merciful treatment of Jews and Muslims who had been defeated in the conquest of Malagón and Calatrava la Vieja.[24] Previously, they had caused problems in Toledo (where the different armies of the Crusade gathered), with assaults and murders in the Jewish Quarter.[25]

Battle

Alfonso crossed the mountain range that defended the Almohad camp, sneaking through the Despeñaperros Pass, led by Martín Alhaja, a local shepherd who knew the area. On 16 July 1212,[26] the Christian coalition caught the encamped Moorish army by surprise, and Alhaja was granted the hereditary title Cabeza de Vaca for his assistance to Alfonso VIII.[27]

Monument at Navas De Tolosa (1881)

The battle was fought at relatively close range, so that neither the Almohads nor the Spaniards could use archers in the melee-dominated fight. Spanish knights became locked in close-quarter combat, in which they were superior to the Almohads.[28]

"They attacked, fighting against one another, hand-to-hand, with lances, swords, and battle-axes; there was no room for archers. The Christians pressed on." – (The Latin Chronicle of The Kings of Castile)[28]

Some of the Spanish knights, namely the Order of Santiago, eventually broke the Almohad line of defense decisively as they inflicted heavy casualties on the Almohads and established a breakthrough with gaps appearing in the enemy lines. This led to a possible spearhead. King Sancho VII then led his mounted knights through the gaps, exploiting them, and charged at the Caliph's tent.[29]

The Caliph had surrounded his tent with a bodyguard of black slave-warriors. Though it was once claimed that these men were chained together to prevent flight, it is considered more likely that this results from a mistranslation of the word "serried", meaning a densely packed formation. The Navarrese force led by their king Sancho VII broke through this bodyguard. The Caliph escaped, but the Moors were routed, leaving heavy casualties on the battlefield.[30] The victorious Christians seized several prizes of war; Muhammad al-Nasir's tent and standard were delivered to Pope Innocent III.[31]

Christian losses were far fewer, only about 2,000 men (though not so few as legend had it).[11]^[page needed] The losses were particularly notable among the Orders: those killed included Pedro Gómez de Acevedo (bannerman of the Order of Calatrava), Alvaro Fernández de Valladares (comendator of the Order of Santiago), Pedro Arias (master of the Order of Santiago, died of wounds on 3 August), and Gomes Ramires (Portuguese master of the Knights Templar and simultaneously master of Leon, Castile, and Portugal); Ruy Díaz (master of the Order of Calatrava) was so grievously wounded that he had to resign his command.[32]

Muhammad al-Nasir did not overcome the defeat of this battle: he went to Marrakesh and locked himself in his palace until his death a year later.[33][34]

Aftermath

The crushing defeat of the Almohads significantly hastened their decline both in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Maghreb a decade later.[35] That gave further impulse to the Christian Reconquest and sharply reduced the already declining power of the Moors in Iberia.[36] Shortly after the battle, the Castilians took Baeza and then conquered Úbeda, major fortified cities near the battlefield and gateways to invade Andalusia.[37] According to a letter from Alfonso VIII of Castile to Pope Innocent III, Baeza was evacuated and its people moved to Úbeda; Alfonso laid siege, killing 60,000 Muslims and enslaving many more. According to the Latin Chronicle of Kings of Castile[38] the number given is almost 100,000 Saracens, including children and women, who were captured.[29]

Thereafter, Alfonso VIII's grandson Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236, Jaén in 1246, and Seville in 1248;[39][35][40][41] then he took Arcos, Medina-Sidonia, Jerez, and Cádiz.[42] In 1252, Ferdinand was preparing his fleet and army for invasion of the Almohad lands in Africa, but he died in Seville on 30 May 1252, during an outbreak of plague in southern Hispania; only his death prevented the Castilians from taking the war to the Almohad on the Mediterranean coast.[43] James I of Aragon conquered the Balearic Islands (from 1228 to 1232)[44] and Valencia (the city capitulated on 28 September 1238).[45]

By 1252 the Almohad empire was almost finished, at the mercy of another emerging Berber power. In 1269 a new association of Berber tribes, the Marinids, took control of present-day Morocco.[46] Later, the Marinids tried to recover the former Almohad territories in Iberia, but they were definitively defeated by Alfonso XI of Castile and Afonso IV of Portugal in the Battle of Río Salado, the last major military encounter between large Christian and Muslim armies in Hispania.[47] So, the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa seems to have been a true turning point in the history of the region, including the western Mediterranean sea.[13]

Moorish Granada

In 1292 Sancho IV took Tarifa, key to the control of the Strait of Gibraltar.[48] Granada, Almería, and Málaga were the only major Muslim cities remaining in the Iberian peninsula.[49] These three cities were the core of the Emirate of Granada, ruled by the Nasrid dynasty.[50] Granada was a vassal state of Castile, until finally taken by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492.[51]

In fiction

Harry Harrison's 1972 alternate history/science fiction novel Tunnel Through the Deeps depicts a history where the Moors won at Las Navas de Tolosa and retained part of Spain into the 20th century.[52]

S.J.A Turney describes the battle in his historic novel The Crescent and the Cross.[53]

References

1. Smith 1989, p. 14.
2. Gitlitz & Davidson 2000, p. 60.
3. Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291. United States: University of Pennsylvania Press, Incorporated, 2013, p.80
4. Villalon, Andrew., Kagay, Donald. To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle: Nájera (April 3, 1367), A Pyrrhic Victory for the Black Prince. Netherlands: Brill, 2017, p.40
5. McNab, Chris. Famous Battles of the Medieval Period. United States: Cavendish Square Publishing LLC, 2017, p.46
6. Setton 1975, p. 423.
7. Cabrer 2012, p. 332.
8. Nutter 2023.
9. Cabrer 2000, p. 196.
10. ,Notes On Entering Deen Completely: Islam as its followers know it. N.p.: EDC Foundation, 2015, p. 619[1]
11. Gomez 2011.
12. Nafziger & Walton 2003, p. 87.
13. Hunt et al. 2007, p. 391.
14. Guggenberger 1913, p. 372.
15. "Navas de Tolosa, map". google.com/maps. Retrieved 15 January 2025..
16. "Paseo por Navas de Tolosa". alltrails.com. Retrieved 15 January 2025..
17. Benito & Gómez 1996, p. 254.
18. O'Callaghan 2013, p. 62.
19. Fitz 2002, p. 140.
20. Martínez 2021, p. 239. sfn error: no target: CITEREFMartínez2021 (help)
21. de León 1993, p. 310. sfn error: no target: CITEREFde_León1993 (help)
22. Rogers 2010, p. 28.
23. Carey 2024, p. 155.
24. Gómez, Lincoln & Smith 2019, p. 155–156.
25. Gómez, Lincoln & Smith 2019, p. 154.
26. Setton 1975, p. 669.
27. Cabeza de Vaca 1983, p. 8.
28. Ibrahim 2018, p. 224.
29. Peter 2014.
30. Hunt et al. 2007, p. 391 According to the king of Castile, "On their side 100,000 armed men fell in battle..."
31. Tamm, Kaljundi & Jensen 2011, p. 224.
32. Browne Ayes 2010, p. 531.
33. Pennell 2013, p. 52.
34. Gebhardt 1864, p. 360.
35. Travel 2017, p. 54.
36. Fierro 2021, p. 311.
37. Mikaberidze 2011, p. 641.
38. de Soria 1230. sfn error: no target: CITEREFde_Soria1230 (help)
39. Kohn 2006, p. 516.
40. El Hareir 2011, p. 418.
41. Robinson 2023, p. 59.
42. Colmeiro 1893, p. 110.
43. Gerli 2017, p. 331.
44. Hartzenbusch 2019, p. 97.
45. Ocaña 2020, p. 34.
46. Hasan 1998, p. 64.
47. Pierson 1999, p. 40.
48. Emmerson 2013, p. 592.
49. Fletcher 2006, p. 158.
50. Fierro 2020, p. 176.
51. Boloix-Gallardo 2021, p. 282.
52. Harrison 2011, p. 8.
53. Turney 2020, p. 340.

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• Browne Ayes, John J. (11 December 2010). Juan Ponce de Leon His New and Revised Genealogy. John Browne Ayes. ISBN 978-0-557-46653-5.
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• Fierro, Maribel (18 January 2021). The Maghrib in the Mashriq: Knowledge, Travel and Identity. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. ISBN 978-3-11-071344-2.
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• Fletcher, Richard A. (5 May 2006). Moorish Spain. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24840-3.
• Gebhardt, Victor (1864). Historia general de España y de sus Indias, desde los tiempos más remotos hasta nuestro días (in Spanish). Librería de D.A. de San Martín.
• Gerli, E. Michael (5 July 2017). Routledge Revivals: Medieval Iberia (2003): An Encyclopedia. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-66578-0.
• Gitlitz, David Martin; Davidson, Linda Kay (2000). The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago. St.Martin's Press. ISBN 978-1-4668-2598-7.
• Gomez, Miguel Dolan (1 August 2011). The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa: The Culture and Practice of Crusading in Medieval Iberia. Doctoral Dissertations.
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Further reading

• Alvira-Cabrer, Martín (2012). Las Navas de Tolosa: 1212. Idea, liturgia y memoria de la batalla (in Spanish). Madrid: Sílex. ISBN 978-8477377214..
• García Fitz, Francisco (2005). Las Navas de Tolosa (in Spanish). Barcelona: Ariel.
• Setton, Kenneth Meyer (1975). A History of the Crusades. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-10744-4.
• O’Callaghan, Joseph F. (2004). Reconquest and crusade in medieval Spain (in Spanish). Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press..
• Smith, Damian J. (July 2015). "The Papacy, the Spanish Kingdoms and Las Navas de Tolosa". Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia (20): 157–178. doi:10.15581/007.20.2408. Retrieved 15 January 2025..
• Vara Thorbeck, Carlos (1999). El lunes de las Navas (re-edited with another title: Las Navas de Tolosa: 1212, la batalla que decidió la Reconquista, Edhasa, Barcelona 2012) (in Spanish). Universidad de Jaén..