Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa

Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa
Part of the Reconquista
Portrayal of the battle by Francisco de Paula Van Halen (1864)
Date 16 July 1212 Location Near Santa Elena, Jaén, Andalusia, 38°17′04″N 3°34′58″W / 38.28443°N 3.58286°W / 38.28443; -3.58286^[1] Result Spanish-Christian Coalition victory^[2]
Belligerents
Kingdom of Castile Crown of Aragon Kingdom of Navarre Order of Santiago Order of Calatrava Knights Templar Knights Hospitaller Knights of St. George Narbonne Portuguese crusaders French crusaders Leonese crusaders Occitanian crusaders German and Italian crusaders	Almohad Caliphate
Commanders and leaders
Centre: Alfonso VIII of Castile Vanguard: Diego López II de Haro Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (Archbishop of Toledo) Right wing: Sancho VII of Navarre Left wing: Peter II of Aragon^[3]	Muhammad al-Nasir
Strength
12,000–14,000^[4]	22,000–30,000^[4]^[5]
Casualties and losses
~2,000^[6]	Very high^[4]^[7] ~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.^[9] 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^[10] 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.

Background

In 1195, the Almohads defeated Alfonso VIII of Castile in the Battle of Alarcos. After this victory, they took several important cities: Trujillo, Plasencia, Talavera, Cuenca, Madrid, and Uclés. Then, in 1211, Muhammad al-Nasir crossed the Strait of Gibraltar with a powerful army, invaded Christian territory, and captured Salvatierra Castle, the stronghold of the knights of the Order of Calatrava. The threat to the Hispanic Christian kingdoms was so great that Pope Innocent III called Christian knights to a crusade.

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. Previously, they had caused problems in Toledo (where the different armies of the Crusade gathered), with assaults and murders in the Jewish Quarter.^{[citation needed]}

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,^[11] 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.

 

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.

"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)

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.^[12]

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.^[13] The victorious Christians seized several prizes of war; Muhammad al-Nasir's tent and standard were delivered to Pope Innocent III.^[14]

Christian losses were far fewer, only about 2,000 men (though not so few as legend had it).^[6] 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.

Muhammad al-Nasir died in Marrakech shortly afterwards.

Aftermath

The crushing defeat of the Almohads significantly hastened their decline both in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Maghreb a decade later. That gave further impulse to the Christian Reconquest and sharply reduced the already declining power of the Moors in Iberia. Shortly after the battle, the Castilians took Baeza and then Úbeda, major fortified cities near the battlefield and gateways to invade Andalusia. 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 the number given is almost 100,000 Saracens, including children and women, who were captured.^[15]

Thereafter, Alfonso VIII's grandson Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236, Jaén in 1246, and Seville in 1248; then he took Arcos, Medina-Sidonia, Jerez, and Cádiz. 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. James I of Aragon conquered the Balearic Islands (from 1228 over the following four years) and Valencia (the city capitulated on 28 September 1238).

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 Morocco. 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. 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.

Moorish Granada

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

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.

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

References

1. Smith, Colin (1989). Christians and Moors in Spain. Vol 2 Latin documents and vernacular documents AD 1195–1614. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-1800857742 – via Google Books.
2. Gitlitz, David Martin and Linda Kay Davidson, The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago, (St.Martin's Press, 2000), 60.
3. Setton, Kenneth Meyer, A History of the Crusades, (University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 423.
4. Martín Alvira Cabrer: Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212: idea, liturgia y memoria de la batalla. Madrid 2012, p. 332
5. Martín Alvira Cabrer: Guerra e ideología en la España medieval: cultura y actitudes históricas ante el giro de principios del siglo XIII: batallas de las Navas de Tolosa (1212) y Muret (1213). Universidad Complutense, Madrid 2000/2003. p. 196
6. Gomez, Miguel Dolan (1 August 2011). "The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa: The Culture and Practice of Crusading in Medieval Iberia". Doctoral Dissertations.
7. Nafziger, 87.
8. Prof. Nick, National Museum of Las Navas de Tolosa, Spain. (2015). Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa Museum, Andalusia. https://www.visit-andalucia.com/battle-of-navas-tolosa-museum-jaen
9. Lynn Hunt describes the battle as a "major turning point in the reconquista..." See Lynn Hunt, R. Po-chia Hsia, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, and Bonnie Smith, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures: A Concise History: Volume I: To 1740, Second Edition (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's 2007), 391.
10. Guggenberger, Anthony, A General History of the Christian Era: The Papacy and the Empire, Vol.1, (B. Herder, 1913), 372.
11. Setton, Kenneth M., ed. (1975). A History of the Crusades. Vol. III: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. The Wisconsin University Press. p. 669.
12. deremilitari.org. (2014, November 20). Three sources on the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. De re Militari. Retrieved from https://deremilitari.org/2014/11/three-sources-on-the-battle-of-las-novas-de-tolosa-in-1212/
13. According to the king of Castile, "On their side 100,000 armed men fell in battle..." See Lynn Hunt, R. Po-chia Hsia, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, and Bonnie Smith, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures: A Concise History: Volume I: To 1740, 2nd ed., (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's 2007), 391.
14. Riga and Rome: Henry of Livonia and the Papal Curia, Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, Crusading and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Baltic Frontier, ed. Marek Tamm, Linda Kaljundi, Carsten Selch Jensen, (Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 224.
15. "Three sources on the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 » De Re Militari". deremilitari.org. Retrieved 9 December 2017.

Sources

• Alvira Cabrer, Martín, Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212: idea, liturgia y memoria de la batalla, Sílex Ediciones, Madrid 2012 (Spanish).
• García Fitz, Francisco, Las Navas de Tolosa, Ariel, Barcelona 2005 (Spanish).
• García Fitz, Francisco, Was Las Navas a decisive battle?, in: Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (JMIS), vol. 4, no. 1, 5–9.
• Nafziger, George F. and Mark W. Walton, Islam at War: a history, Greenwood Publishing Company, 2003.
• O’Callaghan, Joseph F., Reconquest and crusade in medieval Spain, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia PA 2004.
• Setton, Kenneth Meyer, A History of the Crusades, University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.
• Vara Thorbeck, Carlos, El lunes de las Navas, Universidad de Jaén, 1999. Re-edited with another title: Las Navas de Tolosa: 1212, la batalla que decidió la Reconquista, Edhasa, Barcelona 2012 (Spanish).
• .
• Gomez, Miguel Dolan, "The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa: The Culture and Practice of Crusading in Medieval Iberia." PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2011.
• La Casa de Valladares, del siglo XVII, está en riesgo de desaparición.
• [Prof. Nick, National Museum of Las Navas de Tolosa, Spain. (2015). Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa Museum, Andalusia. https://www.visit-andalucia.com/battle-of-navas-tolosa-museum-jaen]

Further reading

•  Christianity portal
•  Spain portal

• "Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa". Reader's Companion to Military History. from the original on 26 February 2006. Retrieved 9 February 2006.
• (in Spanish) Martín Alvira-Cabrer, Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212. Idea, liturgia y memoria de la batalla, Sílex, Madrid, 2012. ISBN 978-8477377214