Las Navas de Tolosa 1212: A Shepherd's Secret Pass Breaks the Almohads

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After King Alfonso VIII of Castile was routed by the Almohads at Alarcos in 1195, the Christian kingdoms of León and Navarre allied with the Almohad Caliphate to take Castilian land, and a ten-year truce followed. When it expired, Caliph Muhammad al-Nasir brought a large army from Morocco and in 1211 took Salvatierra, headquarters of the Order of Calatrava. Pope Innocent III called a crusade, and Peter II of Aragon and Sancho VII of Navarre joined Alfonso at Toledo along with knights from France, Italy and Germany and Portuguese town militias and Templars, while Alfonso IX of León stayed home and invaded Portugal. Foreign crusaders attacked Toledo's Jewish quarter, and when Alfonso accepted the surrender of Muslim garrisons at Malagón and Calatrava la Vieja, many French knights went home in disgust.

In the July heat the coalition found al-Nasir's army holding the exits of the Sierra Morena passes near modern Santa Elena. A local shepherd, Martín Alhaja, led them through the unguarded pass of Despeñaperos onto the high plains, and on July 16, 1212, the armies met on rocky ground too cramped for massed archery. After hours of infantry deadlock, the Knights of Santiago opened a gap and Sancho VII charged through to the caliph's tent. Al-Nasir fled to Marrakesh and died within a year. Baeza and Úbeda fell, and Ferdinand III took Córdoba in 1236, Jaén in 1246 and Seville in 1248, leaving only the Emirate of Granada, which paid tribute until 1492.

• Alfonso reportedly rewarded the shepherd with the noble name Cabeza de Vaca, after the cow skull said to have marked the hidden path.
• Chronicler Lucas of Tui wrote that the Portuguese militias rushed into combat as if to a feast.
• Gómez Ramírez, master of the Portuguese Templars, was killed in the fighting.
• The story of the caliph's guards being chained together likely comes from a mistranslation of Arabic describing a tightly packed formation.
• The caliph's captured standard was sent to Pope Innocent III as a trophy.