Las Navas de Tolosa

I. The Rise of the Almohads

The Almohad movement began in the Atlas mountains of Morocco in the 1120s with the preaching of Muhammad ibn Tumart, a Masmuda Berber scholar who had studied in the east. Ibn Tumart taught a doctrine of the absolute unity of God, tawhid, from which his followers took their name, al-Muwahhidun, the upholders of divine unity. He accused the ruling Almoravids of anthropomorphism in their understanding of God and of laxity in morals, and he proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the rightly guided one expected at the end of time. From his base at Tinmal in the High Atlas he organised the tribes into a disciplined hierarchy.

After Ibn Tumart's death around 1130 the leadership passed to his disciple Abd al-Mu'min, who took the title of caliph. Abd al-Mu'min conquered Morocco from the Almoravids, taking Marrakesh in 1147, and then extended Almohad rule across North Africa to Tunisia and Tripolitania. In al-Andalus the Almohads intervened from 1146 in the disorder that followed the Almoravid collapse. They took Seville in 1147 and Córdoba in 1149, and over the following decades absorbed the second taifa states. The most durable of these, the kingdom of Murcia under Muhammad ibn Mardanish, the Wolf King, who allied with Castile and Aragon, held out until his death in 1172.

The Almohads imposed their doctrine on the Muslim population and treated the remaining Christians and Jews with severity. In the regions they conquered, dhimmi status was withdrawn, and Jews and Christians were required to convert or leave. Many Jewish families, among them that of Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, left Córdoba and lived for a time as outward converts before reaching safety elsewhere. The subject is treated in The Almohad Persecution. Christians who had survived under the Almoravids largely disappeared from al-Andalus in this period.

The Almohad caliphs were also patrons of learning. Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, who reigned from 1163 to 1184, gathered philosophers at his court, among them Ibn Tufayl, the author of the philosophical tale Hayy ibn Yaqzan, and Ibn Rushd, Averroes, whom he commissioned to write commentaries on Aristotle. Seville became the Andalusi capital of the empire, and the great mosque built there between 1172 and 1198 had a minaret that, after the Christian conquest, became the bell tower of the cathedral, the Giralda.

II. The Christian Kingdoms in the Late Twelfth Century

The Christian side of the frontier was divided. On the death of Alfonso VII in 1157 his realms were split between his sons, Sancho III taking Castile and Ferdinand II León. Sancho died a year later, leaving the infant Alfonso VIII, whose long minority was marked by struggles between the Lara and Castro families. The kingdom of Aragon had united with the county of Barcelona through the marriage of Petronila of Aragon and Ramon Berenguer IV in 1137, forming the Crown of Aragon. Portugal had become an independent kingdom, and Navarre, squeezed between Castile and Aragon, had lost its access to the south.

The Christian kings competed among themselves as much as they fought the Almohads. Treaties of partition, such as the Treaty of Tudillén in 1151 and the Treaty of Cazola in 1179, divided the future conquests between Castile and Aragon, assigning Valencia and Murcia to Aragon and Andalusia to Castile. León and Castile fought several wars over their frontier, and on occasion Leonese and Portuguese kings allied with the Almohads against their Christian neighbours.

The military orders became central to frontier defence in this period. The Order of Calatrava was founded in 1158, when the Templars abandoned the fortress of Calatrava on the Guadiana, which guarded the road from Córdoba to Toledo, and the Cistercian abbot Raymond of Fitero and the monk Diego Velázquez offered to defend it. Its members took monastic vows under the Cistercian rule and lived as knights. The Order of Santiago was founded in 1170 at Cáceres and received papal approval in 1175, and the Order of Alcántara emerged from a related foundation in León. These orders held great castles and territories along the frontier and provided a permanent force of trained knights.

III. The Disaster at Alarcos

In 1195 Alfonso VIII of Castile, now an adult king, broke a truce with the Almohads and raided into their territory. The caliph Abu Yusuf Ya'qub, who had taken the title al-Mansur, responded by crossing the straits with a large army. Alfonso, without waiting for the arrival of the Leonese and Navarrese forces that had promised to support him, confronted the Almohads at Alarcos, near the Guadiana, where he was building a new fortified town.

The battle took place on 19 July 1195. The Castilian heavy cavalry charged the Almohad vanguard, which gave way, but the Castilians were then surrounded by the main Almohad army and its reserves. The defeat was overwhelming. Many Castilian nobles and knights of the military orders were killed, and Alfonso escaped to Toledo. The fortress of Alarcos fell, and in the following years the Almohads took Calatrava, Malagón, Talavera and other strongholds of the Toledo region and raided as far as Madrid and Alcalá.

The defeat was worsened by the enmity of Alfonso's Christian neighbours. Alfonso IX of León and Sancho VII of Navarre made agreements with the Almohads and attacked Castile. Pope Celestine III threatened them with excommunication. The caliph agreed to a truce with Castile in 1197, and his death in 1199 brought his son Muhammad al-Nasir to power.

IV. The Preparation of a Crusade

Alfonso VIII spent the following years strengthening his position and seeking the end of his quarrels with the other Christian kings. He made peace with León in 1206 and with Navarre in 1207. In 1209 the Almohad truce was due to expire, and in 1211 al-Nasir crossed the straits with a great army and besieged the castle of Salvatierra, which the Order of Calatrava had taken as its new headquarters after the loss of Calatrava. Salvatierra fell in September 1211 after a long siege, and its loss persuaded Alfonso that only a general effort could restore the balance.

The principal organiser of that effort was Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo from 1209. Rodrigo was a Navarrese noble who had studied in Bologna and Paris, and he became the leading churchman and historian of thirteenth-century Castile. In 1211 he travelled to Rome and through France and Italy to preach a crusade, with the support of Pope Innocent III. Innocent issued letters in early 1212 granting the full crusading indulgence to those who took part in the Spanish campaign, and he ordered prayers and fasts in Rome for its success. He also threatened excommunication against any Christian king who attacked Castile during the expedition.

The year 1212 was one of intense religious mobilisation in the Latin West. The Albigensian Crusade in southern France, described in The Albigensian Crusade, was in its fourth year. In the same summer the movement known as the Children's Crusade took place in northern France and the Rhineland. The crusade in Spain drew on this enthusiasm, and Innocent's letters treated the defence of Castile as a matter for all Christendom.

V. Alfonso VIII and the Castilian Court

Alfonso VIII, who reigned from 1158 to 1214, was one of the most significant rulers of medieval Castile. He came to the throne at the age of three, and his minority was marked by the rivalry of the Lara and Castro families and by the intervention of his uncle Ferdinand II of León. He assumed personal rule in 1170, and in the same year he married Eleanor of England, the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The marriage brought Castile into the orbit of the Angevin world and gave Alfonso a claim to Gascony, which he pursued without lasting success in 1205.

Alfonso's reign saw the conquest of Cuenca in 1177 after a long siege, an important advance in the eastern Meseta, and the foundation of new towns and bishoprics along the frontier. He founded the first university of the peninsula at Palencia around 1208, bringing masters from France and Italy, and the Cistercian convent of Las Huelgas at Burgos, which became the burial place of the Castilian royal family and was governed by an abbess of great authority. Queen Eleanor was an active patron, and the court attracted troubadours and scholars.

The king's government drew on the resources of all the communities of the kingdom. Jewish officials managed the collection of royal revenues, and the king's almojarife, or chief tax official, was often Jewish. Later Castilian tradition told the story of Alfonso's love for a Jewish woman of Toledo, Rachel, called la Fermosa, and of her murder by the nobles. The story first appears in the late thirteenth century and is generally regarded as a legend, but it became the subject of plays by Lope de Vega and later writers and reflects later perceptions of the role of Jews at the Castilian court.

VI. Peter II and Sancho VII

Peter II of Aragon, who reigned from 1196 to 1213, was the son of Alfonso II and the grandson of Ramon Berenguer IV and Petronila. He was crowned in Rome by Innocent III in 1204, the first king of Aragon to receive papal coronation, and he declared his kingdom a fief of the Holy See in return for papal protection. His involvement in southern France, where many of the nobles were his vassals, drew him into the conflict of the Albigensian Crusade. Peter was regarded as a devout Catholic who nonetheless defended his vassals, including the count of Toulouse, against the crusaders.

At Las Navas, Peter commanded the left wing and brought a substantial force of Aragonese and Catalan knights. His participation in the crusade enhanced his prestige, and Innocent III praised him. Yet within a year he was dead at Muret, fighting against the crusaders of Simon de Montfort in defence of his Occitan vassals. His death left the Crown of Aragon to his infant son James I, who would later conquer Majorca and Valencia.

Sancho VII of Navarre, called the Strong, reigned from 1194 to 1234. His relations with Castile had been hostile, and he had spent time in North Africa, apparently seeking an alliance with the Almohads, in the years after Alarcos. His decision to join the campaign of 1212 was a reconciliation with Castile and with the papacy. He was a man of exceptional height, and an examination of his remains in the twentieth century suggested that he stood well over two metres tall. His tomb is in the collegiate church of Roncesvalles, where the chains associated with the battle are also displayed.

VII. The Almohad Army

The army that Muhammad al-Nasir led in 1212 was drawn from across his empire. Its core consisted of the Almohad tribes of the Masmuda Berbers, organised in a hierarchy that went back to Ibn Tumart, and of the Arab tribes of Ifriqiya, the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym, whom the Almohads had brought to Morocco as cavalry. There were also contingents of Andalusi troops, regular soldiers from the Almohad garrisons of al-Andalus, slave soldiers of African origin who formed the caliph's guard, and large numbers of volunteers who had come to fight in the holy war.

The Almohad armies used tactics that combined the steady infantry line with mobile cavalry. The Arab and Berber light horsemen harassed the enemy with javelins and arrows and feigned retreat to draw out the heavy cavalry. The infantry, armed with long spears and shields, formed squares that could withstand a charge. Archers and crossbowmen supported them. Drums and banners regulated the movements of the army, and the caliph's presence at the centre was a powerful symbol.

The army of 1212 had weaknesses. The Arabic sources report that many of the Andalusi troops were disaffected because the caliph's vizier, Ibn Jami, had executed Andalusi commanders after the loss of Calatrava in the previous campaign, and that they withdrew during the battle. The length of the campaign of 1211, including the siege of Salvatierra, had exhausted the army, and the soldiers' pay was in arrears. These problems help to explain the collapse of the Almohad lines once the Christian kings had broken through.

VIII. The Liturgy of the Crusade

The crusade of 1212 was accompanied by an intense programme of prayer and ritual. In May 1212 Innocent III ordered a general procession in Rome, in which men, women and clergy walked separately to the Lateran, praying for the success of the Spanish campaign. The procession was accompanied by fasting and almsgiving. Similar processions were held in other cities of the Latin West. The pope's letters describing the procession emphasised that the outcome of war depended on divine favour rather than on numbers, and they drew on the example of Moses praying with raised hands while Joshua fought the Amalekites, as recorded in Exodus 17:11-12.

In the Christian camp itself the clergy preached, heard confessions and celebrated mass. The army carried banners with the image of the Virgin, and the archbishop of Toledo carried the cross before the king. The chronicles record that a canon of Toledo carrying the archiepiscopal cross passed twice through the Muslim ranks during the battle without being harmed, an incident presented as a miracle. After the victory the Te Deum was sung on the battlefield.

Martín Alvira Cabrer has studied the liturgy and memory of the battle in detail. He has shown how the victory was incorporated into the liturgical calendar of Toledo and other churches, and how the image of a victory won by prayer shaped later Castilian conceptions of holy war. The festival of the Triumph of the Holy Cross on 16 July was celebrated in Toledo for centuries and was later observed more widely in the Spanish churches.

IX. The Gathering at Toledo

During the spring of 1212 crusaders from across the Pyrenees assembled at Toledo. The largest foreign contingent came from southern France, led by Arnaud Amaury, archbishop of Narbonne and papal legate, who had been the leader of the Albigensian Crusade, and by the archbishop of Bordeaux and the bishop of Nantes. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada later claimed that the foreigners numbered tens of thousands, and the archbishop of Narbonne's own letter speaks of a hundred thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand knights, figures that historians regard as greatly exaggerated. Modern estimates of the whole Christian army vary widely, but it was probably in the order of ten to fifteen thousand men, with perhaps a few thousand from beyond the Pyrenees.

Peter II of Aragon arrived with his army, which included Aragonese and Catalan knights. Sancho VII of Navarre, a giant of a man according to the sources, came later with a smaller force. Alfonso IX of León, still in dispute with Castile over frontier castles, did not take part, although some Leonese knights joined individually. Portuguese knights also came, although the young king Afonso II stayed at home. The military orders of Calatrava, Santiago, the Temple and the Hospital sent their contingents.

The presence of so many crusaders created tensions. The foreign troops, according to Castilian sources, attacked the Jews of Toledo, killing some before the Castilian knights intervened to stop them. The Jewish community of Toledo was under royal protection, and its members played a significant role in the financing of Alfonso VIII's government. The episode recalls the violence against Jewish communities that accompanied other crusades, a subject treated on this site in The Rhineland Massacres of 1096.

X. The March South and the Departure of the Crusaders

The army left Toledo on 20 June 1212 and marched south across the plain of La Mancha. On 24 June it took the castle of Malagón, and the crusaders from beyond the Pyrenees killed the garrison despite a promise of safety. On 1 July the army reached Calatrava, which surrendered on terms. Alfonso VIII allowed the garrison to depart, which angered many of the foreign crusaders, who had expected to plunder the town.

Shortly after the fall of Calatrava most of the crusaders from beyond the Pyrenees left the army and returned home. The sources give different reasons. The Castilian accounts attribute their departure to the heat, the hardships of the march and their unwillingness to submit to discipline. Other explanations include disputes over the division of booty and the treatment of the Calatrava garrison. Only Arnaud Amaury and about one hundred and thirty knights from his region remained. The departure reduced the army substantially, but the Castilians presented it as a providential purification, leaving the victory to the Spanish kings.

The army continued southwards, taking Alarcos and other castles, and was joined by Sancho VII and the Navarrese. In early July it reached the northern slopes of the Sierra Morena, the mountain range that separates the Meseta from the valley of the Guadalquivir.

XI. The Pass of the Despenaperros

The Almohad caliph al-Nasir had gathered his army at Jaén and Baeza and moved north to block the passes of the Sierra Morena. His forces held the pass known as the Puerto del Muradal, where the main road crossed the mountains, and a narrow defile called the Losa, which could be defended by a small force. The Christian army, reaching the summit of the Muradal on 12 July, found its way blocked.

According to Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and other sources, a shepherd appeared at this point and offered to guide the army by a little known path across the mountains to a plateau where it could deploy. Later tradition identified the shepherd with Isidore the Labourer, the patron saint of Madrid, or with an angel. The army followed the path and reached the plateau of the Mesa del Rey, overlooking the Almohad camp at the place called Las Navas de Tolosa, meaning the plains of Tolosa. The name Despeñaperros, given to the main pass of the Sierra Morena, is sometimes associated with this campaign but is later in origin.

For two days the armies faced each other while the Christians rested and prepared. On 15 July the Almohads drew up for battle, but the Christian kings refused to engage. On the night of 15 to 16 July, according to the chronicles, the Christian army heard mass, confessed and received the sacrament, and at dawn on Monday 16 July the battle began.

XII. The Battle of 16 July 1212

The Christian army was organised in three divisions. Alfonso VIII commanded the centre, with the military orders and the Castilian nobility. Peter II of Aragon led the left wing, and Sancho VII of Navarre the right. The Castilian vanguard was commanded by Diego López de Haro, lord of Biscay. Each division had its own vanguard, centre and rearguard, a deployment that gave the army reserves.

The Almohad army was arranged on rising ground. Its front was formed by light troops, volunteers for the holy war and Andalusi contingents, and behind them stood the regular Almohad forces. At the rear was the caliph's camp, surrounded by a palisade or ring of chained warriors and baggage, inside which al-Nasir sat before his red tent with a Qur'an in his hand, according to the Christian accounts, guarded by a corps of black slave soldiers chained together or bound by their oaths.

The battle began with the advance of the Christian vanguard against the Almohad front line. The light troops gave way, but the Almohads counterattacked and the Christian vanguard was pushed back. At the critical moment Alfonso VIII, according to Rodrigo, turned to the archbishop and declared that they should both die there. Rodrigo urged him to trust in God. The king then led the rearguard of the centre in a charge, and the Aragonese and Navarrese wings advanced at the same time. The combined assault broke through the Almohad lines and reached the caliph's camp. The Navarrese were said to have broken the chains of the palisade, and the chains later appeared on the arms of Navarre, although historians consider the heraldic connection a later development.

Al-Nasir fled to Jaén and then to Seville. The Almohad army collapsed, and the slaughter during the pursuit was great. Rodrigo and the archbishop of Narbonne gave figures of Muslim dead in the tens or hundreds of thousands, which are not credible, but the losses were certainly heavy. Christian losses were comparatively light. The victors took the caliph's tent and banner. A banner preserved in the monastery of Las Huelgas at Burgos was long identified as a trophy of the battle, but its inscriptions suggest that it was made later in the thirteenth century and taken in a subsequent campaign.

The cost of the victory was borne largely by Castile. Alfonso VIII had paid the foreign crusaders and supplied the army from his own revenues, and the chronicles record that the king provided food, horses and arms to the poorer participants. The church of Toledo contributed heavily, and the military orders spent their own resources. The campaign left the royal treasury exhausted, and the famine that struck Castile in 1213 and 1214 made it impossible to follow up the victory at once.

XIII. Accounts of the Victory

Several accounts of the battle were written by participants or contemporaries. Alfonso VIII himself sent a letter to Innocent III announcing the victory, in which he described the campaign and gave thanks to God. Arnaud Amaury wrote a similar letter. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada described the battle in detail in his history of Spain, the De rebus Hispaniae, completed in 1243. The Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile, attributed to Juan of Osma, chancellor of Ferdinand III, gives another detailed narrative. The Arabic accounts, written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by authors such as Ibn Idhari and Ibn Abi Zar, describe the defeat as a calamity and attribute it to the disaffection of the Andalusi troops and the incompetence of the caliph's ministers.

The Christian sources frame the victory in strongly religious terms. Alfonso's letter attributes it to God alone, and Rodrigo includes accounts of a cross appearing in the sky and of the miraculous preservation of the standards. Innocent III ordered a procession of thanksgiving in Rome. The language recalls the biblical narratives in which victory is ascribed to divine help rather than to the strength of armies, such as Psalm 20:7 and the story of Gideon's small army in Judges 7:2. The chronicles present the departure of the foreign crusaders as a reduction of the army that made the victory more evidently divine.

XIV. The Aftermath of the Campaign

After the battle the Christian army advanced into the valley of the Guadalquivir. It took the castles of Vilches, Baños and Tolosa, and the town of Baeza, which had been abandoned by its inhabitants. On 23 July it reached Úbeda, where many refugees had gathered. The town surrendered after a short siege, and despite an offer of ransom the kings, according to the chronicles, ordered its destruction and the enslavement of its inhabitants on the advice of the clergy. Disease then broke out in the army, and the kings returned north.

The battle did not lead immediately to the conquest of al-Andalus. Alfonso VIII died in 1214, and Castile entered another period of minority and conflict. Peter II of Aragon was killed at the battle of Muret in 1213, fighting on the side of the count of Toulouse against the crusaders of Simon de Montfort, an event that ended Aragonese ambitions north of the Pyrenees. Muhammad al-Nasir died in 1213, perhaps poisoned, and was succeeded by his young son Yusuf II. The Almohad empire, weakened by the defeat, was soon divided by succession disputes and by revolts in al-Andalus and North Africa.

XV. The Collapse of Almohad al-Andalus

The decisive consequences of Las Navas de Tolosa became clear only in the following two decades. In 1224 the death of Yusuf II without an heir provoked a civil war among the Almohad princes. One of them, Abd Allah al-Bayyasi, the lord of Baeza, allied himself with Ferdinand III of Castile and ceded castles in return for help. In 1228 the caliph al-Ma'mun crossed to North Africa to fight for the throne and formally renounced the doctrine of Ibn Tumart, an act that symbolised the end of the Almohad project in its original form. In al-Andalus local leaders such as Ibn Hud in Murcia and later Muhammad ibn Nasr in Arjona and Granada took power.

The disintegration of Almohad authority opened al-Andalus to the Christian kingdoms. Between 1225 and 1248 Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba, Jaén and Seville, an advance described in Ferdinand III and the Fall of Córdoba and Seville. James I of Aragon took Majorca in 1229 and Valencia in 1238, and the Portuguese completed the conquest of the Algarve in 1249, as related in The Taking of Lisbon in 1147 and the Portuguese Reconquista. By 1250 only the kingdom of Granada remained under Muslim rule.

In North Africa the defeat was remembered as the beginning of the end of Almohad power. The Marinid dynasty, a Zanata Berber people from the eastern plains of Morocco, began to challenge Almohad rule in the years after 1212, and in 1269 they took Marrakesh and ended the caliphate.

XVI. The Military Character of the Battle

Historians of warfare have studied Las Navas de Tolosa as an example of a medieval pitched battle, an event that commanders usually sought to avoid. The battle shows the value of the reserves held by the Christian divisions and of the coordination of the three royal armies. It also shows the strength of the Almohad deployment, which absorbed the first Christian attacks and nearly broke the vanguard. The Christian heavy cavalry, with mail armour, great helms and lances, was decisive when it could be brought to bear on a disordered enemy.

The campaign as a whole depended on logistics as much as on battle. The Christian army carried supplies from Toledo and could not remain long in the Sierra Morena, which explains the kings' willingness to fight after the crossing of the mountains. The Almohads, by contrast, could have waited, and Arabic sources criticise al-Nasir's commanders for allowing the Christians to reach the plateau. The departure of the crusaders from beyond the Pyrenees reduced the burden on the army's supplies and may have made the campaign possible.

Archaeological surveys of the battlefield since the early 2000s, led by Francisco Arias and others, have identified the probable positions of the armies and recovered arrowheads, horseshoes and fragments of armour. These finds have helped clarify the topography of the engagement and confirmed that the battle took place on the slopes north of the modern village of Santa Elena.

XVII. Memory and Commemoration

The victory at Las Navas became one of the best remembered events of the Spanish Middle Ages. Alfonso VIII had the anniversary celebrated in Toledo as the Triumph of the Holy Cross, a feast that was kept in the Spanish church for centuries. The battle was celebrated in Castilian and Latin poetry and in later chronicles. The legend of the shepherd guide, the miraculous cross and the chains of Navarre became part of popular memory.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the battle acquired a national meaning. It was presented as the turning point of the Reconquista and the victory of a united Spain, an interpretation that obscured the separate interests of the kingdoms and the role of foreign crusaders. Modern historians, such as Martín Alvira Cabrer, who compiled the sources of the battle, and Francisco García Fitz, have placed it in the context of the Almohad and crusading history of the period, stressing both its significance and the contingency of its outcome.

XVIII. The Battle and the Communities of Toledo

For the Jewish communities of Castile, the period around Las Navas was one of both opportunity and danger. The attack of the crusaders on the Jews of Toledo in 1212 was halted by the Castilian nobility, and Alfonso VIII's government continued to rely on Jewish administrators. The defeat of the Almohads removed the threat that had driven Jewish refugees from al-Andalus to Castile in the previous generation, and Toledo became the main centre of Jewish life in the Christian kingdoms, as described in Jews of Toledo.

Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada himself was a patron of learning who commissioned translations and supported scholars in Toledo. His concern to defend the rights of his see led him into disputes with the Jewish community over tithes, which were resolved by agreement in 1219. The relations between the crusading archbishop and the Jewish community illustrate the complex position of minorities in Castile after the victory.

XIX. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.