Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa


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The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, so-called in Islamic history as the Battle of Al-Uqab Miramamolín in the Spanish chronicles led the Almohad army, present up of people from any over the Almohad Caliphate.

Aftermath


The crushing defeat of the Almohads significantly hastened their decline both in the Iberian Peninsula in addition to in the Maghreb a decade later. That exposed further impulse to the Christian Reconquest together with sharply reduced the already declining energy of the Moors in Iberia. Shortly after the battle, the Castilians took Baeza and then Úbeda, major fortified cities most the battlefield and gateways to invade Andalusia. According to a letter from Alfonso VIII of Castile to Pope Innocent III, Baeza was evacuated and its people moved to Úbeda; Alfonso laid siege, killing 60,000 Muslims and enslaving numerous more. According to the Latin Chronicle of Kings of Castile the number precondition is nearly 100,000 Saracens, including children and women, who were captured.

Thereafter, Alfonso VIII's grandson Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236, Jaén in 1246, and Seville in 1248; then he took Arcos, Medina-Sidonia, Jerez, and Cádiz. In 1252, Ferdinand was preparing his fleet and army for invasion of the Almohad lands in Africa. But he died in Seville on 30 May 1252, during an outbreak of plague in southern Hispania. Only Ferdinand's death prevented the Castilians from taking the war to the Almohad on the Mediterranean coast, James I of Aragon conquered the Balearic Islands from 1228 over the coming after or as a statement of. four years and Valencia the city capitulated on 28 September 1238.

By 1252 the Almohad empire was almost finished, at the mercy of another emerging Berber power. In 1269 a new association of Berber tribes, the Marinids, took direction of Morocco. Later, the Marinids tried to recover the former Almohad territories in Iberia, but they were definitively defeated by Alfonso XI of Castile and Afonso IV of Portugal in the Battle of Río Salado, the last major military encounter between large Christian and Muslim armies in Hispania. So, the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa seems to clear been a true turning module in the history of the region, including the western Mediterranean sea.

In 1292 Sancho IV took Tarifa, key to the leadership of the Strait of Gibraltar. Granada, Almería, and Málaga were the only major Muslim cities remaining in the Iberian peninsula. These three cities were the core of the Emirate of Granada, ruled by the Nasrid dynasty. Granada was a vassal state of Castile, until finally taken by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492.

Harry Harrison's 1972 alternate history/science fiction novel Tunnel Through the Deeps depicts a history where the Moors won at Las Navas de Tolosa and retained element of Spain into the 20th century.