Who won the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa?
The Christian coalition of Castile, Aragon and Navarre won. On 16 July 1212 the armies of Alfonso VIII, Peter II and Sancho VII broke the army of the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir below the Sierra Morena and stormed his camp. The defeat crippled Almohad power in al-Andalus and opened the Guadalquivir valley to Christian conquest.1
On Monday 16 July 1212, on broken ground below the passes of the Sierra Morena, a crusading army led by Alfonso VIII of Castile, Peter II of Aragon and Sancho VII of Navarre met the army of the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir, called Miramamolín in Christian chronicles. Arabic chroniclers named the battle al-Iqab and, like Christian writers, came to see it as the beginning of the end for Muslim rule in al-Andalus.2
Alarcos, Salvatierra and a crusade
The Almohad caliphs ruled Morocco and, since the mid twelfth century, al-Andalus. In 1195 at Alarcos, al-Nasir's father Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur crushed Alfonso VIII; for years afterwards the Christian kingdoms quarrelled while the papacy tried to reconcile them.3
In September 1211 al-Nasir took Salvatierra, the forward castle of the Order of Calatrava. Alfonso answered by planning a campaign for 1212 against the caliph's army itself, and Pope Innocent III gave it the status of a crusade. Francisco García Fitz argues that Alfonso wanted a decisive battle to avenge Alarcos, while al-Nasir tried, without success, to avoid one.4
The armies and their commanders
The Christian host combined the royal armies of Castile and Aragon, the Navarrese, who joined late with what Alfonso called scarcely 200 knights, the military orders of Santiago, Calatrava, the Temple and the Hospital, frontier town militias, and volunteers from León and Portugal. García Fitz estimates it at about 12,000 men.5
In García Fitz's reconstruction the caliph's army joined early and late Berber tribes, Arab tribes, archers, mounted Kurds, Andalusi contingents, Christian mercenaries and the caliph's guard of Black slave soldiers; the provincial museum adds sub-Saharan and Turkish contingents. Alfonso told the pope it had 185,000 horsemen; García Fitz judges it a little more than twice the size of the Christian army.6
The march south and the shepherd
The army left Toledo on 20 June, and Calatrava surrendered on terms on 1 July. Soon after, most transpyrenean crusaders went home, tired of heat and short supplies and angry at the lenient terms: their legate claimed 40,000 left, while Alfonso wrote that scarcely 150 knights and serving men stayed. According to Ibn Abi Zar, al-Nasir executed Ibn Qadis, the Andalusi commander who had given up Calatrava.7
On 12 July the vanguard under Diego López de Haro took the Muradal pass and Castro Ferral, but the Almohads held the defile of La Losa beyond. Alfonso's letter credits a certain shepherd, sent by God, who showed his barons another passage; the Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile says only Alfonso and the Aragonese commander García Romeu met him, and later local tradition gave him a name and made him a shepherd to some, a hunter to others, Saint Isidore to the devout. On 14 July the Christians camped on the plateau still called the Mesa del Rey.8
Battle order on 16 July
The Christians rose after midnight, heard mass and formed up. Diego López de Haro, Alfonso's former standard-bearer, led the vanguard with the military orders, and García Romeu the first Aragonese line. Castile held the center and the Aragonese and Navarrese the wings, though modern accounts disagree on which wing each held; Alfonso stayed with the rear beside Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada of Toledo.9
Across the valley, light Arab cavalry covered the Almohad flanks. Behind the main body, on a hill, stood the caliph's red tent, ringed by his guard with lances planted in the ground and closed by a palisade of stakes, which later accounts say was joined with chains.10
The battle, phase by phase
The vanguard swept down from the Mesa del Rey, brushed aside the Almohad forward line and stalled against the main body. The Latin Chronicle describes a close fight of lances, swords and axes with no room for archers, ground won and lost on both sides. Peter II brought up town militias that did not hold well, and some Christians began to flee crying that the battle was lost.11
The turning point: the charge of the three kings
Alfonso sent his standard up the slope and committed the rear, and the kings of Aragon and Navarre joined the attack; the Almohads, says the Latin Chronicle, took it for a fresh army. In Ibn Abi Zar's account the volunteers in front were already destroyed, the Andalusis fled, and the Berber and Arab tribes broke. Al-Marrakushi, writing in 1224, blamed pay in arrears: aggrieved troops never drew their swords.12
The charge reached the palisade. Who broke in first became a point of pride: Castilian writers credited the standard-bearer Álvar Núñez de Lara, Navarrese ones Sancho VII, later Aragonese ones their own knights. Ibn Abi Zar has al-Nasir sitting on his shield before his tent until the Christians were almost upon him; then he mounted a mare and fled. The pursuit lasted until nightfall.13
Why did the Almohads lose at Las Navas de Tolosa?
The Almohad army was larger, but its parts did not hold together. The volunteers in front were cut down, Andalusi contingents and unpaid tribal troops gave way, and a last charge by the Christian reserve under the three kings broke through to the caliph's guarded camp, turning a stalemate into a rout.14
Casualties
No reliable count survives. Alfonso told the pope that 100,000 of the enemy fell against twenty or thirty Christians, and Ibn Abi Zar claims more than 10,000 of the caliph's guard died around him. Historians reject such figures; the sources agree only that Almohad losses were very heavy and Christian ones much lighter.15
The Almohad side
The Arabic sources do not make al-Nasir a coward. Al-Marrakushi says he stood firm on that day like no king before him
, saving the army from annihilation, and Ibn Idhari gives a similar picture. The fullest account, the Rawd al-Qirtas written in Fez around 1328, became the best known medieval chronicle in Morocco, almost a national history, and was copied into the nineteenth-century Moroccan history of al-Nasiri. Ambrosio Huici Miranda judged it one of the least reliable sources for the Almohad period. Its scene of the caliph on his shield echoes a cry attributed to Saladin at Hattin, the victory that led to the Third Crusade and his duel with Richard the Lionheart. García Fitz renders the Arabic name al-Iqab as "the punishment".16
The Christian side
Miguel Dolan Gomez argues that Las Navas was the only one of Innocent III's crusades that unfolded as planned, and that it helped Spanish Christians adopt crusading ideas; he also warns against reading it as one step in a continuous national reconquest, an idea partly built by later writers. Las Navas is regularly counted among the greatest battles of the Middle Ages.17
Aftermath
In the following days the Christians took Vilches, Baños, Tolosa and Ferral, occupied Baeza and besieged Úbeda until it capitulated; then dysentery broke up the army. Al-Nasir crossed to Marrakesh in January 1213, never to return to Spain, and died later that year. Peter II was killed at Muret in September 1213 fighting Simon de Montfort's crusaders.18
The defeat opened the way to the definitive Christian conquest of al-Andalus. Within forty years, as Gomez notes, Ferdinand III of Castile had taken Córdoba and Seville and James I of Aragon Valencia, leaving only Granada in Muslim hands. García Fitz, following Huici Miranda, is more cautious: sickness ended the campaign within a month, the Almohads were far from destroyed, and he doubts the battle was the turning point it is often called.19
Legends: the chains of Navarre and the Huelgas banner
Navarrese tradition holds that Sancho VII stormed the palisade and brought its chains home; links said to come from them are kept at Tudela cathedral, Irache monastery and Roncesvalles. Late medieval chronicles, popularized by the seventeenth-century Jesuit José Moret, made them the origin of the arms of Navarre. Heraldic research disagrees: Sancho VII used an eagle, the radiating bars first appear as royal arms under Theobald I, king from 1234, and they were first called chains around 1400.20
The great Almohad textile at the monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos is traditionally identified as booty from the caliph's camp and is the best known piece in its museum of medieval fabrics.21
The battlefield today
A museum devoted to the battle stands in nearby Santa Elena, and archaeological survey on the Mesa del Rey and around Castro Ferral has found the Christian camp and debris of the assault on the castle.22
