The wall of the Sierra Morena now stood before them. Knowing the Despenaperros to be stoppered tight by enemy forces, Alfonso asked his able deputy, Diego Lopez de Haro, the Castilian noble who had chaperoned the obstreperous French through La Mancha, to scout for another pass over the mountains. Don Diego led a small detachment up to a height to the west of Despeñaperros called the Puerto Muradal. The Muslims lay in wait, but the Castilians had the better of the day. They gained a small but serviceable plateau atop the sierra—and the following day, the rest of the army joined them. From there they could see, a few kilometers distant in the haze, the Muslim forces massed in the low hills to the south. A red silk tent signaled the presence of the Miramamolin, the melodious Spanish corruption of amir al-muminin, the commander of the faithful, or caliph. The foe was in sight, but there remained the problem of getting to grips with him. Don Diego once again went scouting. The most direct way down to the valley, through a narrow canyon known as the Losa, was a death trap. Muslim archers waited in ambush. "A thousand men," Alfonso later wrote the pope about the Losa, "could hold it against all the men there are under heaven." Nearby, other defiles carved by the annual runoff of winter rains were bone dry, overgrown, and impossibly steep. After a few deadly skirmishes, Diego's men found that even these egresses were alive with hidden defenders. They were stuck on the Puerto Muradal, their only option retreat.
What happened next, as recounted in the letters of Alfonso and the archbishop of Toledo, strains verisimilitude, but the fact remains that somehow the Spaniards managed to get off the arid mountaintop safely. According to these accounts, after a somber, inconclusive meeting of the monarchs, the nobles, and the friars, a bedraggled villein was brought into the presence of Alfonso, later identified by legend as St. Isidoro, the patron of Madrid. The man, a shepherd, offered to show another route leading down the southern face of the sierra. He claimed the Muslims did not suspect its existence. Given the army's parlous situation, Alfonso ordered Diego to go off with the stranger and see if what he said was true.
It was. A kilometer or two farther west, a small declivity on the summit, called the Puerto del Rey, led to a cahada, or sheep run, that wound down to the south. At daybreak on July 14, the vigilant Muslims may have believed that their strategy had paid dividends: the height of the Muradal, on which they had stranded the crusaders, was empty. The Christians, they thought, had given up and gone away. What the Muslims could not see was that very early in the morning of that day, the entire crusader army had picked its way laterally to the west, high up the northern slope of the Morena, just below the summit ridge and thus out of sight to anyone peering upward from Andalusia. Eventually they reached the Puerto del Rey and hurried across it—in full view of the Muslim sentinels below. The alarm was sounded and skirmishers headed to the hills to impede the Christians toiling down the narrow path below the pass. The Muslims loosed arrows, threw spears and rocks, trying to stem the flow of man and beast pouring down the mountain, but to no avail. At the bottom, about a mile south of the Morena, rose a flat-topped hill called the Mesa del Rey. The Spaniards, outnumbering the hastily assembled defenders, fought their way to the top of the eminence. By late morning, thousands of men and horses covered the mesa, tents had been erected and standards bearing the cross raised around the encampment.
The caliph's commanders tried to engage with the enemy immediately. They moved their forces the few kilometers west from the original encampment near the foot of Despeñaperros to a position facing the Christians, most likely to the hill, or al-ikab, now called Olivares. It was an axiom of medieval warfare that an army just arrived from a long march was at its most vulnerable—and these Christians were hardly fresh, having crossed New Castile and La Mancha for three weeks in the scorching heat, spent two days marooned on a mountaintop, then guided horses and pack animals down the steep slopes of the Sierra Morena that very morning. The great kettledrums rolled, and the caliph's army advanced into the plain between the Olivares and the Mesa del Rey, arrayed for battle.
The Christians did not move. The quarrels of their crossbows chased away those foolhardy enough to come too close to their encampment. Safe atop their slightly wooded mesa, impervious to attack, on a naturally fortified position, they could choose the moment of battle. By late afternoon, the Muslim commanders realized the futility of their stance and moved back to their camp at the Olivares. The caliph's tent was pitched on its summit, and the Turks, Arabs, Berbers, and Andalusis settled down around this new emplacement.
The following day was a Sunday. The tired armies of the three Spanish kings took their day of rest. When the Almohad forces formed their battle lines once again, they were confronted with the same passive response. By noon, everyone was back at camp, surveying the other side, playing dice, praying, waiting for the next day. The decisive battle would take place on Monday, July 16, 1212.
The Christian battle order was quite simple. The three kings and the various mailed bishops and their vassals occupied the rear guard, Alfonso in the middle, Pedro on the left, and Sancho on the right. An intermediate contingent, composed of a mix of citizen militias and warrior-monks, stood in front of each sovereign. In the vanguard, dead in the center, were the shock troops of the Christian army, the vassal knights and kinsmen of Diego Lopez de Haro. An anecdote holds that his son, born of a mother who had deserted the family, tried to stoke his father's belligerence by saying that he never wanted to be known as "the son of a coward," to which Diego replied, "They'll call you the son of a whore, not the son of a coward."
This vanguard began the encounter. Racing down the Mesa del Rey, Diego and his men plowed into the slowly advancing center of the caliph's men, composed of religious volunteers, many of whom had never seen battle or were past the age of putting up a good fight. The Castilian knights mowed them down, hacking their lines to pieces in a horrific one-sided encounter.
Once they had finished butchering the volunteers, Don Diego and his men began the ascent of the Olivares, which was crowned by their goal, the red tent of the Miramamolin. Between them and it stood the regular contingents of the Almohad army, shields planted in the ground, Berber horsemen ready to dart out between foot soldiers, spears, lances, and scimitars at the ready. The Castilian knights struggled up the slope and attempted to pierce the Almohad line, but it was too strong. Don Diego's men faltered, began to fall back, losing ground and momentum as the Berbers let out war cries and counterattacked.
The second corps of the Christian center advanced, over the carnage of the Muslim volunteers, toward the melee that was now backing down into the plain. Diego's embattled vanguard, forced rearward by the Berbers, came crashing into this second line of combatants, the Spaniards a confused mass beset on all sides. The day seemed to be going for the caliph. Battle standards wavered in the dust and shouting, as the Christians desperately tried to hold their ground but seemed poised to desert en masse. From his vantage point atop the Mesa del Rey, King Alfonso is supposed to have turned away from the disheartening spectacle and said to Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada, "Archbishop, let us die here, you and I."
Although there is no shortage of accounts of the battle, many of them at this point turn to miracles for an explanation of the ensuing action. A cross appeared in the sky; a pennant carried into the thick of the fighting remained unsullied; various saints appeared to slay the infidel. What can be stated with a degree of rationality is that the kings in the rear guard, sometime in the late morning, gave the order to charge. A fresh wave of armored knights rolled off the Mesa del Rey and smashed into the fray. For reasons that cannot be adequately explained, the Muslims then collapsed. One source speaks of the An-dalusis on the wings of the formation running away without ever having fought. Others say that the soldiery's discontent over pay arrears and mistreatment ran so deep that even the smallest reversal of fortune was enough to spark off a generalized retreat. Whatever the reasons, the giralda of contingency spun to favor the Christians. The battle became a rout. The caliph leaped onto a fast steed
and galloped back to Jaén, and thence all the way to Seville. His followers were not so lucky—in the hills and hollows south of the battlefield a great throng of distraught, disorganized men fled in panic, to be hunted down for the rest of the day and night and slain by the thousands. Alfonso, Sancho, and Pedro had won an unimaginable victory. They followed it up in the ensuing days by attacking Baeza and Ubeda, well into al-Andalus. These Muslim cities fell to the medieval conquistadors, and all of their inhabitants were either slaughtered or sold into slavery. Innocent, on learning of his crusade's great triumph, had church bells peal across the length and breadth of Christendom. The impiety that was al-Andalus still stood, but the day of Las Navas de Tolosa had doomed it.
The poet Abu al-Baqa al-Rundi, from Ronda, summed up the feeling of sad bewilderment felt through the dar al Islam at the events of the half-century following Las Navas de Tolosa:
Therefore ask Valencia what is the state of Murcia; and where is Játiva, and where is Jaén?
Where is Córdoba,, the home of the sciences, and many a scholar whose rank was once lofty in it?
Where is Seville and the pleasures it contains, as well as its sweet river overflowing and brimming full?
[They are] capitals which were the pillars of the land, yet when the pillars are gone, it may no longer endure!
The tap of the white ablution fount weeps in despair, like a passionate lover weeping at the departure of the beloved,
Over dwellings emptied of Islam that were first vacated and are now inhabited by unbelief;
In which the mosques have become churches wherein only bells and crosses may be found.
Even the mirhabs weep though they are solid; even the pulpits mourn though they are wooden!
In the end, the actors of the battle, save the fighting archbishop of Toledo, did not live to see the further triumphs of Christian Spain. Caliph Muhammad al-Nasir died in 1213—of drink, it is thought—in Marrakesh. He was succeeded by an incompetent. In the same year Pedro II of Aragon met a paradoxical end, this time fighting against a crusade: that of Innocent's French eviscerators of the Cathars in Languedoc. Alfonso VIII passed the following year, his work to be left up to his grandson, Fernando III. Canonized in the seventeenth century, Fernando was a man of great piety and martial skill, a Nur al-Din of Christendom. As the Almohads plunged into a swift and irreversible decline in Morocco and the rest of the Maghrib, the Castilian monarch doggedly campaigned to carve up their Iberian possessions: Jaén fell to him in 1246, Seville in 1248. When Córdoba, was taken, Archbishop Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada wrote of the capture of Abd al-Rahman's exquisite Mezquita: "Once the filth of Muhammad had been eliminated and holy water had been sprinkled, they transformed it into a church, erected an altar in honor of the Blessed Virgin and solemnly celebrated mass." Fernando shipped Almanzor's bells-turned-lamps back to the pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela. Only the kingdom of Granada held out, through diplomacy and the strength of its arms. It would survive the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa for an unlikely 280 years and mark its passage indelibly by building the Alhambra.
Today the battlefield lies unvisited, except by hunters and their prey, in a national park. The Mesa del Rey is clearly distinguishable, a great wooded hill in the shape of a capsized rowboat. Local archaeologists have discovered the iron detritus of medieval battle everywhere in the area. Finding the passageway that the shepherd showed Don Diego is more problematic. The paths of the sierra wind back and forth through the scrub, the only true route being, as always, an old Roman road of the mare nostrum, its paving stones instantly recognizable. The village of Las Navas de Tolosa lies a good ten kilometers from the site and is now a suburb of the busy market town of La Carolina, named for the king (Carlos III) who invited central European peasants to found a settlement there in the seventeenth century as a means of pacifying an area then infested with bandits. In La Carolina stands a stern monument to the battle, in a scruffy park orphaned by an expressway. Erected in the Franco era, it shows a group of kings and clergy standing behind shields, their white figures elongated, their faces stern. Behind them rise two slim walls of concrete, between which hovers a cross in a nod to one of the miracle stories. The overall effect is mournful, especially given the monument's placement in a spot test driven by at great speed.
To be sure, monuments to the battle are scattered throughout Spain. In Jaén, the administrative capital of the province in which the clash took place, a tall, elegant column commemorating the victory stands at the intersection of two busy boulevards. In Vilches, a hilltop town near Santa Elena, a banner said to have been carried by the Christians into battle hangs in the darkness of the town's main church; at the convent of Las Huelgas, founded by Alfonso VIII in the northern city of Burgos, an enormous swath of cloth advertised as the personal standard of the Miramamolin adorns a wall. However touching the sympathetic magic once attributed to these objects, the most important monument to Las Navas de Tolosa and its pivotal role in history will always be intangible.
The monument to Las Navas de Tolosa at La Carolina. The figures depicted are three Spanish kings and the archbishop of Toledo.
In this respect, Spain is one of the most interesting places of memory around the sea of faith, as it partakes of a shared recollection. Al-Andalus remains a presence in Arab-language lore and literature, its loss keenly felt. Any comparison with Latin melancholy over the collapse of Outremer is far-fetched—for those present-day westerners who do not subscribe to the newly revived idea of a militant Christianity, the Crusades are an era to lament, not for passing, but for having occurred in the first place. Not so al-Andalus: in the memory of Muslims—and of Jews, who would suffer greatly as a result of the regained Christian ascendancy—the era resembles a golden age, the polyglot poets and superb craftsmen overshadowing, in recollection, the cruelties and wars that were a hallmark of the age.
As for the descendants of the victors, the time of unquestioning acceptance of the narrative of king and bishop is most definitively over. The Spaniards, alive to their history in a way not seen in other western European countries, are in the process of reclaiming their memory from pious legend. A historiographical struggle has been joined. In the Spanish province of Andalusia, the scene of so much reconquista lore, the authorities have laid out tourist routes celebrating the Islamic past. Impeccably maintained secondary roads have been branded with colorful iconography indicating the Route of the Caliphs, or the Route of the Nasrids (Granada's last taifa dynasty). The pendulum of memory is swinging toward a reconciliation of many different traditions. In the summer of 2004, the provincial government of Jaén announced it was budgeting one million euros for the construction of a museum on the site of the battle of 1212. One suspects that it will commemorate both al-Ikab and Las Navas de Tolosa.
*From taking the Latin word used by the chroniclers, puer, to mean, literally, "boy" rather than "young fellow" or "landless youth."
*Politically dubious etymology holds that Despeñaperros—roughly, "throw the dogs from cliff"—was what the victorious Christians did to the defeated Muslims in 1212.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SEA OF FAITH
Missionaries, merchants and monarchs, a convivencia of contradictions; the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the rise of the Ottomans
Damietta (Dumyat, Egypt). Saladin's nephew, Malik al-Kamil, the Ayyu-bid sultan, must have been bemused when his mamluks hauled a gray-robed, sandal-shod Frank into his presence. The year was 1219. A day's ride to the north of the sultan's encampment, the knights of the Fifth Crusade were massed in the Nile Delta, where they had been trying to take the town of Damietta. Despite the perils of the hour, the visitor would not have troubled the sultan overmuch, for the family of al-Kamil had a long history of dealing with invading Franks. Al-Kamil's father, at the bidding of his brother, Saladin, had gone on repeated missions of mediation to the camp of the Franks during the Third Crusade in the 1190s. So taken was King Richard Lionheart with al-Kamil's father that he briefly floated the i
dea of giving him his sister. The woman in question, Joanna of England, became "furious with indignation and wrath" at the thought of wedding and bedding an infidel—although her eventual mate, Raymond of Toulouse, the protector of the Languedoc Cathars, would scarcely be any more pleasing in the eyes of Catholic orthodoxy.
Sultan al-Kamil's visitor on that day of 1219 was not a heretic, but neither was he an ordinary Christian. Disheveled, dirt poor, and—like so many spiritual rabble-rousers of the age—charismatic, Francis of Assisi had been spared from excommunication several years earlier by Innocent III, who, so the story goes, saw in a dream that the tatterdemalion piety of the Franciscans would reinvigo-rate the Church. Innocent, who died in 1216, four years to the day after Las Navas de Tolosa, would never know of his protege's Egyptian exploit: Francis had slipped out of the crusader camp before Damietta and made the risky journey across hostile territory, animated by a simple, if herculean, goal—to convert Sultan al-Kamil's subjects to Christianity. Failing that, perhaps someone would make him a martyr.
The ruler of Cairo, a worldly Muslim accustomed to the excesses of his Sufis, gave the man a polite hearing. According to the hagiographers of Francis, the sultan came away so impressed with the saint's pious harangues that he tried to load him down with gifts, all of which the holy ascetic refused—thereby redoubling al-Kamil's admiration for him. What actually transpired during this peculiar interview will forever remain unknown, save that Saladin's nephew allowed Francis to talk—and to live. And that each man kept worshiping his own god. Dante Alighieri wrote in Canto XI of his Paradise:
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