Crusader Commanders - Peter II of Aragon against Simon de Montfort

Las Navas de Tolosa

The victory of La Navas de Tolosa was the result of a carefully prepared campaign, intended to recover the initiative held by the Almohad Caliph Muhammad since the Christian defeat at Alarcos in 1185. A crusade was preached with considerable success, for despite the fighting between Léon and Portugal, whose rulers played no part, troops gathered from all over Spain. They included those of the religious orders, the King of Navarre - although he came late - and many French crusaders. So large was the army that, as it gathered outside Toledo, enormous sums of money had to be minted for its support and there were great difficulties over feeding it, as Alfonso VIII of Castille admitted in his letter proclaiming the victory.

On 20 June the army, led by Alfonso VIII of Castile and Peter II of Aragon, left Toledo and seized Malagon and Calatrava. At this point, all but 130 French knights abandoned the crusade, although Sancho VII of Navarre then arrived with 200 knights. Encouraged by this desertion, the Muslim army left Jaén and moved to the foot of the Losa canyon. Topography now dictated events. The Islamic army effectively blocked this narrow pass and a vigorous debate ensued in the Christian camp, quite comparable to that before Hattin. However, a shepherd told them of a narrow defile by which they could descend, and this they followed, their vanguard debouching into the plain of the Mesa del Rey to the west of the Muslim advance guard. Both sides spent the whole of 15 July preparing. The Christians planned an attack, while the Almohads took up a defensive position on the slopes opposite them. The battle on 16 July was a confused affair, with the Christian army making a series of attacks with infantry and cavalry over the rocky slopes seamed with ravines, until a final cavalry charge broke the enemy. 

Battle of Muret - September 12, 1213: in which the French nobleman Simon IV de Montfort defeated Raymond VI of Toulouse and King Pedro II of Aragon in a major battle of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars. Peter's death - a famous crusader who had faced the Muslims in Spain-was detrimental to the Cathar cause. 

The next year saw Peter II, one of the victors of Las Navas de Tolosa, in battle against Simon de Montfort at Muret on 13 September. The battle arose as a consequence of Simon's ambition, supported by the Church, to forge a principality in southern France at the expense of the Count of Toulouse and other southern leaders who had been declared heretical. Peter, deeply opposed to such a creation, raised a great army and joined Raymond of Toulouse at Muret. The men of Toulouse besieged the city, while the Spanish army established a camp in the hills to the west of the River Saudrune, about 3km away. The reasons for this dispersion of force are not in the least clear, but it was fatal. Simon de Montfort led his army into Muret in an effort to relieve the city, but his position seemed hopeless, because he only had about 800 knights against an estimated 1,400-1,500 in the allied force, which also had huge numbers of infantry.

The allied army then debated what to do. The Count of Toulouse wanted to continue the siege, for Muret was not a strong place. He seems to have assumed that this would force Simon's army into a sally, and suggested that the Spanish should fortify their camp so that they could shoot down Simon's desperate cavalry with crossbows, before emerging to crush a weakened enemy. But the Aragonese were offended by this proposal, perhaps overconfident after the victory of Las Navas de Tolosa, and they urged an immediate attack. This took the form of a mounted assault on Muret through the Toulouse Gate, which was left open, perhaps to facilitate negotiations that the clergy were conducting. It is possible that this was a ploy by Simon to draw in enemy forces but, if so, it was a great risk and the southerners all but seized the town before retiring to eat lunch. Simon de Montfort then led his forces out of the open gate to confront the southern army, which had taken up station about 2.5km northwest of Muret between the Saudrune and the Pesquiès marsh, a position in which they should, given their numbers, have been invulnerable. They were drawn up in two lines, each of three divisions, and King Peter insisted on taking his place at the head of one of these, dressed only as a simple knight. They appear to have left all of their infantry in the camp, a kilometre to their rear, suggesting that they intended to fight a mounted battle on the open plain. Simon marched his men out of the city, divided them into three squadrons, and sent the first two hurtling into the mass of the enemy army, focusing their effort on King Peter. As they struck the southern army they became enveloped in it; Simon moved forward and to the right, crossed the marsh and took the enemy in the left flank, causing a panic which was intensified when Peter II was killed; "when the rest saw this they thought themselves lost and fled away".

The sources are quite clear on the reasons for this disaster: the southern army was poorly organized, while Simon formed his squadrons in close order. James I had no doubt as to the causes of his father's defeat: "And thereon they [the French] came out to fight in a body. On my father's side the men did not know how to range for the battle, nor how to move together; every baron fought by himself and against the order of war. Thus through bad order, through our sins and through those from Muret fighting desperately since they found no mercy at my father's hands, the battle was lost." As Simon's army struck the Aragonese, the knights of Toulouse rushed up with no idea of what was going on and "paying heed to neither count nor king". It seems as if the forces between the marsh and the river had not expected an attack and had little time to prepare when it materialized. It is not clear that anyone was in command of the allied army, which had dispersed its strength dangerously. A substantial force, including many cavalry, had tried to get into the Toulouse Gate and seems to have played no part in later events: a massive infantry force was left to do nothing, a kilometre behind the fighting. Once battle was joined, King Peter - imprudently positioned like Frederick I at Legnano - was unable to direct events. By contrast, Simon was very much in command and judged his moment to launch his reserve. His force was small, but it was the kernel of the crusader army and many of its members had been fighting together for a long time. It had the qualities of a highly cohesive force and fought as such against an uncertain and virtually leaderless enemy.

THE CONQUEST OF CEUTA 1415

Prince Henry the Navigator during the conquest of Ceuta, glazed tile of Jorge Colaço

Portuguese expansion into North Africa began in 1415 with a massive military expedition against the Moroccan port-town of Ceuta, a short sea-voyage from Portugal across the narrow Straits of Gibraltar. Various explanations have been offered as to why the Portuguese leadership decided to launch this expedition, the most important of which have been conveniently summarised by Isabel and Paulo Drumond Braga.

Firstly, there were alleged strategic objectives such as gaining a degree of control over the Straits, obtaining a port from which to combat Muslim piracy and outmanoeuvring Castile; but there is little to suggest any of these aims was of decisive importance in 1415. A second type of explanation stresses the economic incentive. Ceuta was known to receive exotic trade goods from trans-Saharan and trans-Middle Eastern caravans for which reason it had already attracted attention from the Venetians and Genoese. Perhaps Ceuta was also seen as a potential supplier of wheat – a commodity Morocco produced in some abundance but Portugal needed to import. In any event, merchant interests, particularly in Lisbon, were supposed to have strongly favoured the expedition. Such explanations received wide credence especially in the midto- late twentieth century, when the magisterial writings of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho were at their most influential.

A third kind of explanation sees the Ceuta expedition, which was strongly supported by the service nobility, as primarily an extension of the Iberian peninsula’s long tradition of Reconquest. Recent historiography has tended to lean towards this view – and with good reason. The goal of Reconquest had been integral to Iberian Christian life since well before the emergence of the Portuguese kingdom in the time of Afonso Henriques. Moreover, although Portugal had freed itself of occupation by the mid-thirteenth century, other parts of the peninsula still remained in Muslim hands. Nor had the threat of further invasions from North Africa disappeared. As recently as 1340 just such an invasion had occurred, led by the Marinid sultan of Fez in person. In response, the king of Portugal and much of the Portuguese nobility had combined with their Castilian counterparts to impose a crushing defeat on the invaders at the battle of Rio Salado, fought near Seville. This encounter took place only seventy-five years before the Ceuta expedition, and in 1415 it certainly still remained a vivid memory. Meanwhile, the Muslim kingdom of Granada persisted – a beleaguered remnant of al-Andalus on peninsular soil, and in Christian eyes a standing provocation.

The notion of Reconquest was not confined to the Iberian peninsula only. The kings of Portugal, Castile and Aragon all claimed to be the rightful heirs to an ancient Visigothic North Africa wrongfully taken from their forefathers by Muslim conquerors in the early eighth century. Against this background, a tacit understanding among the three allowed each to claim the region of North Africa nearest to his own kingdom. In the case of Portugal, this meant northwestern Morocco. So it is unsurprising that, in the decades following Rio Salado, prosecuting the war against Islam remained firmly on Portugal’s agenda. In fact, as Luís Filipe Thomaz points out, five successive papal bulls were secured by Portuguese kings between 1341 and 1377 formally authorising crusades against Muslims in either Granada orNorth Africa. Only the ravages of the Black Death and repeated wars with Castile prevented these bulls from being acted upon.

However, by the second decade of the fifteenth century, the impact on Portugal of ‘plague’ had subsided and João I had established himself securely on the Portuguese throne. In 1411, peace had been made with Castile, and Portugal entered upon a period of economic recovery and political renewal. Expeditions against Muslim targets consequently became more practicable – and, from the crown and nobility’s viewpoints, had much to recommend them. Launching a major attack against Muslims offered a restless, under-resourced nobility the possibility of gaining honour and booty. The most obvious target was Granada, and the Portuguese leadership at first seriously considered moving against that kingdom. But Granada lay within the king of Castile’s zone of conquest and could not be targeted without Castilian co-operation. Therefore, an alternative was needed – which could be found only in nearby Morocco.

One possibility was Ceuta, an ancient city located on the southeastern fringe of the Straits of Gibraltar. Ceuta had been briefly occupied by the Visigoths, first in the mid-sixth century and probably again in the early eighth century. In 711, it had served as the springboard for Tariq’s expedition against Visigothic Hispania, as it did for subsequent Islamic invasions up to and including that of the Almohads. Ceuta was also one of just three places on the Moroccan side of the Straits that possessed fairly secure anchorages, the other two being Tangier and Al-Ksar as-Saghir. Since 1309 it had been nominally within the sultanate of the Marinids of Fez; but Marinid authority was by this time weak and was exercised only loosely. Ceuta was therefore a semi-autonomous city run largely by its own merchant elite.

After long and careful preparation, João I’s expedition against Ceuta was launched in the summer of 1415. The Cronica da tomada de Ceuta by Gomes Eanes de Zurara, which was written a generation later in 1449–50 at the request of King Afonso V, is the only literary source that describes the expedition and its background in substantial detail. Zurara was Fernão Lopes’s successor as royal archivist, and his account of the taking of Ceuta was intended as a continuation of Lopes’s chronicle of the reign of João I. It is couched in terms of a panegyric of the military nobility who took part and of Prince Henrique in particular. But Zurara’s work nevertheless used contemporary documents and was well informed. All modern accounts of the campaign are based primarily on Zurara, although Peter Russell has recently shown that a number of letters written to King Fernando I of Aragon in 1415 by a secret agent in Lisbon are also relevant. The Ceuta expedition was enthusiastically supported by the three older sons of João I and most of the court nobility. Among its most articulate advocates was João Afonso de Alenquer, the king’s vedor da fazenda. He allegedly stressed the wealth Ceuta derived from the desert caravans – gold and slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, silks and spices from the East via Egypt – as well as cattle, grain and cloth from its own hinterland. Magalhães Godinho follows António Sérgio in arguing that the Ceuta enterprise was adopted largely on the advice of João Afonso, acting as a spokesman for Lisbon merchant interests. However, both Thomaz and Russell doubt that Afonso ever played such a role, seeing him instead as a nobleman promoting nobles’ interests.

The expedition assembled in late July 1415 at the port of Lagos in the southwestern Algarve. It consisted of perhaps about 20,000 men and was formally led by João I himself – although operational command was entrusted to his three oldest sons, Princes Duarte, Pedro and Henrique. That so many male members of the royal family participated personally in such a dangerous enterprise was quite exceptional. The expeditionaries themselves were overwhelmingly Portuguese, but also included contingents of English, French, German and other foreign mercenaries. In August the fleet of over 200 disparate transports crossed to North Africa. However, on arrival off Ceuta it found that the town’s governor had already prepared his defences. The expedition therefore temporarily drew off – and the governor, believing the threat had passed, then dismissed many of his men.

A few days later the fleet returned to Ceuta, catching the defenders by surprise. Many fled, there was little resistance and on 22 August the expeditionaries broke into the largely abandoned city and duly sacked it. According to Zurara, the looters destroyed much of value in the warehouses. They sliced open bags of spices, spilling pepper and cinnamon into the street, where they were trodden underfoot and filled the air with their pungent odours. When order had been restored the victors celebrated a triumphant Te Deum in the principal mosque that had been swiftly converted into a makeshift church. The three royal princes duly received their knighthoods, and, for all the Portuguese present, it was an occasion resonant with symbolism. Later a story gained credence that on the night Ceuta fell a ghostly Afonso Henriques appeared, dressed in armour, to the canons of Santa Cruz in Coimbra – and declared he and his son Sancho had led the Portuguese forces to victory.

After Ceuta had been captured and thoroughly looted King João I convened a council to decide what to do with it. Should the Portuguese occupy the city permanently and use it as a springboard for further North African conquests – or should they merely dismantle its defences and then withdraw? Fatefully, the decision was made that Ceuta be retained. Indeed, this had almost certainly been João’s intention from the start. Why otherwise would he have mounted so large and expensive an enterprise? Dom Pedro de Meneses was selected as captain and governor, beginning a long association between Morocco and the Meneses family – one of the earliest instances of a noble family achieving advancement and profit from overseas service. The king, the princes and most of the expedition then returned to Portugal, leaving behind a garrison of about 2,500 soldiers. The whole operation was over within less than two weeks; but it started a Portuguese commitment in Morocco that would last in one form or another for 350 years.

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THE CHRISTIAN RECONQUEST OF THE NORTH PORTUGAL

When Musa left al-Andalus for Syria his armies had already occupied virtually all the Iberian peninsula except for a few remote areas in the far north, including the mountains of Asturias. It was here in about 722 that a Christian force led by a certain Pelayo won a small victory against the Muslims at a place called Covadonga. Possibly, as the late ninth century ‘Chronicle of Alfonso III’ claims, Pelayo was King Rodrigo’s noble sword-bearer and stood for the old Visigothic order; but more probably he was a local leader of the mountain peoples who traditionally resisted all invaders. Whatever the truth, after Covadonga the Muslim authorities made no serious attempt to subdue Pelayo, who was duly proclaimed king by his following, and whose small remote kingdom became a nucleus of Christian resistance and future reconquest. Within a century, Covadonga had been transformed by Christian imagination into a miraculous happening in which Muslim missiles were turned back by the intervention of the Virgin Mary.

In Portugal, the Reconquest – the long, drawn-out process whereby al-Andalus was gradually recovered from Islam by Christian forces advancing from the north – took over five centuries to complete from the time of Covadonga to the surrender of the last Muslim enclave in 1249. Religious differences always underlay the Reconquest; but the early Christian rhetoric was nevertheless as much political as credal. In the Asturian chronicles of the ninth and tenth centuries, the struggle was presented as ‘just’ because it was waged to reclaim a stolen Visigothic inheritance. But in practice more mundane motives were often foremost, including the desire for booty and protection money.

These basic drives, and the fact that cultural interaction with the Muslim world was considerable, not infrequently led to deals and understandings that blurred the lines of faith. There were long interludes of relative peace, broken by periods of heightened conflict. As Fernández-Armesto has shown, the sense of a long, continuing struggle between good and evil – Christianity and Islam – was strong at the Leonese court around the year 1000. But it was not until the late eleventh century that religious fanaticism might be considered the dominant driving force of the Reconquest – and even then, it was far from being the only spur. The territorial ambitions of Christian leaders, sometimes involving intense competition, was another factor of growing importance.

The emergence of the kingdom of Portugal was a long-term by-product of Christian expansion that had its roots in Asturias. After Covadonga the eighth century Asturian kings consolidated their realm, incorporating neighbouring Galicia and the Basque country. Pelayo’s successor, Alfonso I (739–57), declared his descent from Leovigild, effectively laying claim to the Visigothic inheritance. Soon Asturian raiders were penetrating as far south as the Douro valley, laying waste the countryside and plundering Muslim-held towns, including Portucale, Braga, Chaves and Viseu. Unable to hold these places, Alfonso is said to have forced their Christian inhabitants to move north, leaving a deserted buffer zone separating Christian and Muslim territory known as the ermamento. The extent of the ermamento, whether it arose more from forced or spontaneous depopulation, and indeed whether it existed at all, are contested issues among historians. However, it seems that while many people did migrate from the region to safer areas, others remained, and in the late eighth century the ermamento was a virtually autonomous no-man’s land outside the control of either side.40 But in the ninth century, when the emirate in Cordoba was weak and troubled by internal revolts, the Asturian kings were able to move in and establish a presence in the area.

Parts of northern Portugal, notably Minho and Trás-os-Montes, began to be incorporated into the kingdom of Asturias from about the 850s. Subsequently, Alfonso III (866–911) extended his control over most territory north of the Douro – and even into some areas between the Douro and Mondego, regions in which Cordoba apparently showed little interest. The processes of settling these lands and establishing an administrative framework were then pressed forward in the late ninth century. Two important landmark achievements were the seizure of the towns of Portucale in 868 and Coimbra in 879. Vímara Peres, the captor of Portucale, was appointed its count with responsibility for most of Entre Douro e Minho, the area between the Minho and Douro rivers. He was granted generous benefices, and his family remained pre-eminent in the region until 1071.

Under the Peres family, Portucale became a flourishing town and already had its own bishop by the end of the ninth century. Braga, the old capital of Gallaecia, was much decayed; but efforts were now made to restore it, though it was over a century before its bishop returned. A monastery and fortress were also now constructed at the villa of Guimarães, which developed into the spiritual shrine and principal military stronghold of the Peres family. The counts of Portucale worked hard to repopulate Entre Douro e Minho by attracting to it Christian settlers from the north as well as Mozarabs from the south. Meanwhile, counts were also appointed to other important centres in the re-occupied territories, including Chaves and Coimbra. Coimbra was the key to the Mondego valley, but was close to the frontier and therefore vulnerable to Muslim attack. Having been substantially Islamised, it for long retained a predominantly Mozarab population. To Count Hermenegildo Guterres of Coimbra, and his descendants, cultural tolerance and good relations with Cordoba were therefore particularly important.

The counts of Portucale and Coimbra have traditionally been regarded as playing significant if perhaps unwitting roles as precursors of the Portuguese kingdom. In particular, the counts of Portucale have attracted attention because of their association with the place that gave the kingdom its name. The word ‘Portucale’ (Portugal) is derived from the Latin Portus Cale. In Roman times, Cale was a settlement on the left bank of the Douro near its mouth, where the river met the road coming up from the south. There was also a small port on the right bank, and there the Suevi later built a fortress, around which the town grew. Located in fertile country and at a major communications junction, it eventually became Porto, Portugal’s second city; but in the ninth and tenth centuries it was usually called Portucale. The term ‘Portucale’ was also sometimes applied to the entire region between the Minho and Mondego rivers – eventually giving its name to the kingdom of Portugal itself.

Meanwhile, after the death of Alfonso III in 910, the kings of Asturias had shifted their court down to Leon on the Spanish meseta, and the kingdom itself had become known as Leon. The move signalled increasing Christian self-confidence and greater commitment to the permanent occupation of reconquered land. Coincidently the accession of Abd al-Rahman III in al-Andalus helped to stabilise for the time being the western border between Christian and Muslim territory on the line of the Mondego; but when conflict returned in the era of al-Mansur, it was the Muslim side that took the initiative. The period of al-Mansur’s supremacy (980–1002) constituted a terrifying interlude for the Christian north. Repeated raids into Leonese territory wrought widespread destruction and resulted in the capture and enslavement of large numbers of Christian prisoners. In 987 al-Mansur retook Coimbra, then captured and destroyed the city of Leon. King Vermudo II (982–99) was forced to submit and marry his daughter to al-Mansur. In 997, al-Mansur launched a great raid into what is now northern Portugal and Galicia where he captured and burned the pilgrim city of Compostela. Though he spared the shrine of St. James, he carried off the cathedral’s bells and doors to Cordoba, where they were melted down to make chandeliers for the great mosque. Large tracts of the Christian north were ravaged over the next few years, and the border with al-Andalus was pushed back to the Douro.

However, despite the widespread panic and mayhem caused by al-Mansur, his campaigns were more predatory and prestige-building than imperial. Al-Mansur was a master of the razia in the classic Muslim tradition; but he showed little interest in permanently extending al-Andalus beyond the Douro or in sponsoring Muslim re-settlement. Consequently the impact of his campaigns, though momentarily stunning, soon faded. Moreover, after 1008 conflict between Andalusis and the imported Berber soldiery enveloped al-Andalus, bringing its spectacular military revival to a rapid end. Within a decade or two of al-Mansur’s death, the nightmare of his career for the Christians was over, and their advance had resumed.

Leon meanwhile was becoming overshadowed by the growing size and importance of Christian Castile. In 1035 Castile was transformed from a semiautonomous county on the eastern frontier of Leon into an independent kingdom which rapidly assumed leadership within Christian Iberia. Fernando I ‘the Great’ of Castile (1037–65) married the sister and heiress of the king of Leon, and the latter kingdom was absorbed into its larger neighbour. Fernando was now the pre-eminent Christian figure in Iberia, and he styled himself emperor, claiming a general overlordship. A consequence of Fernando’s ascendancy was a shift in the focus of Christian power from the north of the peninsula towards Castile.

On the other side of the frontier, al-Andalus in the early eleventh century had dissolved into a patchwork of taifa principalities with much reduced capacity to resist military pressure. Consequently, all the Christian losses sustained in the time of al-Mansur were soon recovered. In 1064, the Christians re-occupied Coimbra and then went on to extend the frontier to the Tagus. Fernando entrusted reoccupied Coimbra to one of his confidential aides, the Mozarab Sisnando Davidis. Sisnando had been educated at the taifa court in Seville and was thoroughly familiar with Islamic culture. A tolerant broadminded governor, he was respected by the Muslims and Mozarabs under his charge and ruled Entre Douro e Mondego with considerable sensitivity until his death in 1091. Nevertheless, the reconquered lands of northern Portugal remained politically fragmented. The counts of Portucale and Coimbra, whose domains were separated by the Douro, were rivals often at loggerheads. Like other counts they focussed on their own territories and interests, and their careers betray no consciousness of a nascent Portuguese nationhood. As late as the eleventh century there were still no leaders who identified with ‘Portugal’.