Navas de Tolosa (also called Las Navas) is a town and hamlet in southern Spain, in the municipality ofLa Carolina, in theprovince of Jaén, in the eastern part of the Sierra Morena region, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from the border with theprovince of Ciudad Real.[15][16]
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 ofMalagón andCalatrava la Vieja.[24] Previously, they had caused problems inToledo (where the different armies of the Crusade gathered), with assaults and murders in theJewish Quarter.[25]
Alfonso crossed the mountain range that defended the Almohad camp, sneaking through theDespeñaperros Pass, led byMartín 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 titleCabeza 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 theOrder 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 toPope 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 theOrder of Calatrava),Alvaro Fernández de Valladares (comendator of theOrder of Santiago),Pedro Arias (master of the Order of Santiago, died of wounds on 3 August), and Gomes Ramires (Portuguese master of theKnights 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 toMarrakesh and locked himself in his palace until his death a year later.[33][34]
The crushing defeat of the Almohads significantly hastened their decline both in the Iberian Peninsula and in theMaghreb a decade later.[35] That gave further impulse to theChristian Reconquest and sharply reduced the already declining power of the Moors in Iberia.[36] Shortly after the battle, the Castilians tookBaeza and thenconquered Úbeda, major fortified cities near the battlefield and gateways to invadeAndalusia.[37] According to a letter from Alfonso VIII of Castile to Pope Innocent III, Baeza was evacuated and its people moved toÚbeda; Alfonso laid siege, killing 60,000 Muslims and enslaving many more. According to theLatin 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 grandsonFerdinand III of Castile tookCórdoba in 1236,Jaén in 1246, andSeville in 1248;[39][35][40][41] then he tookArcos,Medina-Sidonia,Jerez, andCádiz.[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 theBalearic Islands (from 1228 to 1232)[44] andValencia (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, theMarinids, took control of present-day Morocco.[46] Later, the Marinids tried to recover the former Almohad territories in Iberia, but they were definitively defeated byAlfonso XI of Castile andAfonso IV of Portugal in theBattle 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]
^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
^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
^McNab, Chris. Famous Battles of the Medieval Period. United States: Cavendish Square Publishing LLC, 2017, p.46
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..
Alfonso VIII of Castile
Sancho VII of Navarre
Peter II of Aragon[6]
