The first of these was the accelerating internal growth and expansive thrust of the Iberian Christian peoples, whose principal foci were in 1095 temporarily aligned as the united kingdoms of Leon and Castile, with the former including a county of Portugal on the verge [398] of moving towards national autonomy; the similarly linked monarchies of Aragon and Navarre; and the foremost Catalan counties of Barcelona and Urgel. The Leonese-Castilian sovereigns Ferdinand I (1035/1038-1065) and Alfonso VI (1065/1072-1109) had attempted to construct a pan-Iberian federation of both Christian and Moslem states based upon the ancient doctrine that the rulers of Leon, as authentic heirs of the Visigothic kings, were both reges and imperatores Hispaniae (or Hispaniarum), entitled to exercise an imperial hegemony over all other peninsular princes.⁽²⁾ But this thesis met with considerable opposition from the other Christian states, so that in the year of Clermont it was plain that Christian unity would remain a precarious ideal and that the reconquest, conceptually the liberation of the peninsula from Islam but in practice much more a contest for immediate secular prizes, would be fought by independent, often hostile, powers. Nevertheless, despite such disunity, Christian Iberia's increasing population and resources, maturing political, social, and economic institutions, tightening religious, cultural, and commercial ties with trans-Pyrenean Europe, and growing confidence that the reconquest was no longer a mere struggle for survival -- all created strong pressures to gain lands and spoils, power, prestige, and satisfaction of religious ideals, across the open frontier to the south.

Under Alfonso VI indeed, especially after Toledo's capitulation (1085), the reconquest had seemed destined to a quick success, with the Moorish principalities of al-Andalus (Moslem Spain) all being reduced to vassalage as the prelude to complete absorption. Instead Iberian Christendom -- and this is the second fundamental change affecting the reconquest of the late eleventh century -- was to be drawn into a protracted conflict with the three successive North African Berber empires of the Murâbits, the Muwahhids, and the Marinids. From the start, the Murâbit intrusion of Yûsuf ibn-Tâshfîn (1061-1106), commencing in 1086, set the pattern: replacement of weak, divided Hispano-Moslem "Taifa" (from Arabic mulûk attawâ'if) kingdoms by an aggressive imperial power based on the opposite side of the Strait of Gibraltar and possessing abundant manpower reserves in the fighting tribes of the Maghrib and the Sahara. Insofar as this meant Africanization of al-Andalus and of the Islamic counter-reconquest, it rekindled in the peninsula, under Moroccan leadership incarnating Murâbit reformist fervor, the ideal of the holy war (jihâd) against the Christians; and, to the extent that [399] this inevitably provoked corresponding Christian militancy, what had been a kind of limited Spanish civil war now tended to become for both sides a perceptibly grimmer dash of alien peoples and sharply divergent religious, cultural, and political ideologies. It is important to observe, however, that this never ruled out, particularly among the Hispano-Moslems, frequent alliances of Christians and Moors for the purpose of warring upon one another's coreligionists.

Finally, the third new factor after 1095 is the trans-Pyrenean crusading movement, which thenceforth gave the Iberian reconquest its character as the western theater of Catholic Europe's war against Islam, greatly magnifying the peninsular movement's religious objectives and overtones and inspiring increased foreign ecclesiastical and military intervention below the Pyrenees. After Clermont the spreading view that recovery of Spain and Portugal from the Moors was a stage on the road to the Holy Sepulcher began to find expression in numerous innovations: preaching of the crusade in advance of certain campaigns; concessions of episcopal indulgences to fighters in or financial supporters of such ventures; appearance of prelates and priests on the battlefield as commanders of troops or as combatants; formation of religious military confraternities and eventually (as nowhere else in the west except the Baltic) of native military orders patterned after those of the Holy Land; and conciliar, royal, and municipal enactments regarding the religious status and legal rights of reconquest participants.

The thesis that it was primarily the monks of Cluny who converted the reconquest into an Iberian crusade merits little credence. Rather, it was the papacy which played a leading role not only in this process but in the whole development of the reconquest throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. From Urban II's time on, innumerable bulls of indulgence, like the acts of the First Lateran Council of 1123, equated in importance and spiritual privileges anti-Moorish combat in Spain with that against the Saracens of Palestine, while they prohibited (not always successfully) Spaniards and Portuguese from enlisting in eastern expeditions, on the grounds of prior need for their services at home;⁽³⁾ and the popes, not infrequently under royal pressure, conceded peninsular monarchs tenths or other fractions of their kingdoms' ecclesiastical revenues as reconquest subsidies or exhorted them, with limited success, to abandon wars against one another in favor of united action against the common "infidel" foe. [400] Foreign military and naval intervention likewise brought the crusade in all its fullness into the peninsula, whether this took the form of French, Italian, or northern European fighters arriving for this purpose, or of amphibious expeditions lending a hand on their way to the east.⁽⁴⁾ While small numbers of such alien crusaders appeared as late as 1492, this was essentially a phenomenon of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the importance of which should not be exaggerated. Foreign collaboration varied widely even in this period according to region and decade, being most prominent in Aragon, the kingdom which excelled in exploiting the use of the crusade in advancing its reconquest policies, and in Portugal, the way station between the northern Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But such external aid, although decisive in a limited number of campaigns or sieges, neither inspired nor dominated reconquest military planning or the conduct of operations. What made it particularly welcome, until in the later twelfth century the Iberian kingdoms caught up with certain more advanced trans-Pyrenean resources and techniques for warfare, was its three-fold contribution: ships for transport, for blockading and attacking fortified ports, and for engaging enemy fleets; heavy mailed cavalry trained in shock combat tactics, and, in contrast with the light-armed though more mobile horsemen typical of peninsular armies, capable of using massed weight, momentum, and relative invulnerability to smash enemy lines of battle; and improved engines of war and superior ballistic and mining expertise, of manifest utility in a struggle that so often centered about sieges of well-fortified towns and castles.

Revived Iberian Christian vigor, Africanization of the Islamic antagonist, the impact of the European crusade -- these form the dynamic triad taking the Spanish and Portuguese reconquest after 1095 into new stages of dramatically intensified conflict and long-deferred fulfillment.
 

In 1086 the Sanhâjî Berber chieftain Yûsuf ibn-Tâshfîn, responding to the appeal of leading Taifa princes alarmed by Alfonso VI's annexation of the kingdom of Toledo to Leon-Castile, had landed a North African army in al-Andalus and inflicted a smashing defeat [401] upon the king-emperor at Zallaca, north of Badajoz.⁽⁵⁾

The immediate consequences of this Murâbit victory should not be over-estimated: Toledo remained firmly in Christian hands; in 1089 Alfonso could still optimistically plant a strong garrison at Aledo in distant Murcia and successfully throw back Yûsuf's counter-attack upon this projected base; and he could take under his protection two Taifa kings who now feared the ferocious Berbers even more than the Christians, 'Abd-Allâh of Granada and al-Mutawakkil of Badajoz, receiving from the latter the key lower Tagus strongholds of Santarem, Sintra (Cintra), and Lisbon. In 1094 his virtually independent vassal, the Cid Rodrigo Diaz of Vivar, after overrunning the northern half of the kingdom of Valencia and seizing its rich capital city, was able to defeat at Llano de Cuarte a Murâbit-Andalusian army sent against him.

Indeed, for Spain as a whole about 1090 the frontier belt separating Christian and Moorish territories had not yet been forced northward because of Zallaca. Starting at the Atlantic on the northern [402] bank of the Tagus estuary, it ran north toward the Mondego river, struck east below Coimbra, followed the middle Tagus past Talavera and Toledo almost to Molina de Aragón, and turned north to flank the Hûdid Taifa kingdom of Saragossa. This long border of Leon-Castile, reaching halfway down the peninsula to the approaches to the Guadiana plains and the gates of Andalusia, stood far in advance of its counterpart in eastern Spain, where Saragossa and Lerida still penned the Aragonese and Catalans close to the Pyrenees, barring access to the middle Ebro valley; even on the Mediterranean coast the county of Barcelona did not yet cross the Llobregat river just below its capital.

What actually did change the post-Zallacan situation drastically in the Moslems' favor was Yûsuf ibn-Tâshfin's decision, following two further crossings to Spain (1089, 1090), to depose the Taifa kings, annex their territories to his Maghribin domains, and assume permanent military responsibility for throwing back the continuing Christian offensives in the Tagus and upper Ebro valleys and near the Cid's Valencia. The shuttling of African garrisons across the strait and progressive Murâbit occupation of Granada, Seville, and other Taifa capitals speedily provoked violent reaction all along the reconquest frontier, with grave setbacks for the Christian cause. In 1093 Alfonso VI's Burgundian son-in-law count Raymond suffered a defeat by which Santarem, Lisbon, and Sintra were lost and the Leonese-Castilian southwest exposed to imminent invasion, compelling the king-emperor to place all the Portuguese territory below the Minho in the hands of count Henry, the Burgundian husband of his illegitimate daughter Teresa (1094/1095). Alfonso himself lost the battle of Consuegra (1097); the death of the Cid, defeated at Jativa (1099), forced abandonment of Valencia by 1102; and, to cap these misfortunes, an attack upon Moslem-held Uclés in 1108 resulted in the death of the imperial heir-designate, Sancho (or Sanchuelo), Alfonso VI's half-Moorish son by Zaida, the widowed daughter-in-law of the late king al-Mu'tamid of Seville. This last event adversely affected the reconquest for years, since in 1109 it brought to the Leonese-Castilian throne the infanta Urraca, count Raymond's widow, and her second husband king Alfonso I of Aragon-Navarre. The early breakdown of this unfortunate marriage was followed by years of destructive war among the partisans of each estranged spouse, of the queen-empress's young son by count Raymond, Alfonso Raimúndez (the future Alfonso VII), and of count Henry and Teresa of Portugal. Only the failure of the Murâbits to launch major offensives, and sturdy resistance along the middle Tagus by veteran border fighters [403] and the urban militias of the newly colonized towns and castles, averted disaster on the frontier.

It was in Urraca's troubled reign (1109-1126) that Leon-Castile, for the first time since the days of Ferdinand I, lost the leadership of the reconquest, which passed eastward to Aragon, a state which had existed only since 1035 but whose rulers had long been pressing the anti-Moorish war against the Taifas of Lerida and Saragossa. King Ramiro I (1035-1063) had died fighting the allied Saragossans and Castilians at Graus in an effort to move down the Cinca valley to the Ebro. Sancho Ramírez I (1063-1094), fearing imperial Leonese-Castilian domination, had tried the radical expedient of enlisting papal, French, and Catalan collaboration for a kind of proto-crusade; and when this failed at Barbastro (1064-1065), he made Aragon a fief of the papacy (1068) so as to give his kingdom's independence a papal shield. In 1076 Sancho further strengthened himself by becoming king of Navarre. Fighting continuously against the Moors on the line of the Cinca river, he took Estada (1087) and Monzón (1089) and built the fortress of El Castellar threatening Saragossa; but in 1094, when besieging Huesca, he was fatally wounded by an arrow. His son Peter I (1094-1104), who defeated a Saragossan-Castilian relief force at Alcoraz and then compelled Huesca to surrender (1096), also regained Barbastro of bloody memory (1100). In 1101 Peter took the cross, the first Iberian sovereign to do so, enlisted French knights for an attack on Saragossa, and in his last years was constructing just outside the latter city, as a prelude to its investment, a fortress significantly called Juslibol (i.e., Deus le veult, the war cry of Clermont).

When Alfonso the Warrior (el Batallador, 1104-1134) came to the Aragonese-Navarrese throne, he naturally continued this expansionist policy by occupying additional towns and territories on the left bank of the Ebro in the Cinco Villas district above Saragossa, and elsewhere. Plunged from 1110 into the troubles with Urraca and the Leonese-Castilian civil wars, the king came home in 1117 still clinging to the imperial title, the symbol of leadership in the reconquest, that his marriage had brought him. Thus Hispanic imperial tradition, familial pursuit of the reconquest in association with the papacy and the crusading movement, and a warlike, religious temperament all entered into his career as a reconquistador.

After leading the Aragonese-Navarrese forces across the Ebro to take Belchite, Alfonso I pushed preparations for an authentic crusade against Saragossa. A council held at Toulouse in January 1118 and attended by the archbishops of Arles and Auch as well as numerous [404] other French, Navarrese, and Aragonese prelates, called upon the nobles of the Midi and Spain to take the via de Hispania to the Holy Land; and in the first such papal summons since Clermont Gelasius II promised remission of sins to those joining the Iberian crusade. On this basis a large army of Aragonese, Navarrese, Catalan, and south French fighters was assembled, including various noble veterans of the First Crusade, among them viscount Gaston of Béarn, who brought to the banks of the Ebro the siege machines and military engineers that had won him fame in 1099 at the capture of Jerusalem. After seven months of fiercely contested assaults, Saragossa capitulated (December 18, 1118) on the usual Iberian terms permitting those who wished to do so to leave with their movables.⁽⁶⁾ The crusade then moved on to recover during the following year Tudela, Tarazona, Borja, Rueda, Epila, and other towns across the Ebro. When in 1120 the long-delayed Murâbit counterthrust finally came, it was thrown back at Cutanda, southeast of Daroca.

Alfonso the Warrior's next move was to occupy the plains country of the Jiloca and Jalón basins south of the great river, where he took such places as Calatayud and Daroca, and settled Aragonese, Navarrese, Catalan, and French colonists in towns that were given the added protection of the semi-military, semi-religious confraternities organized in Saragossa, Belchite, Daroca, Monreal del Campo, and other frontier danger points. In 1125-1126 he led a mobile army down past Valencia, Denia, Murcia, and Guadix all the way to Granada; when a promised Mozarab uprising failed to occur, he devastated the countryside of Cordova, defeated the Murâbit army near Lucena, and returned north with thousands of Mozarab settlers for his Ebro colonies. Thereafter Alfonso took Molina de Aragón, vainly besieged Valencia (1129), and secured Mequinenza at the junction of the Cinca and the Ebro (1133); but the next year the Murâbits crushed the royal army at Fraga, and Alfonso I died childless a few weeks later (July 17, 1134), bequeathing his kingdoms to the Palestinian orders of the Temple, Hospital, and Holy Sepulcher.

Meanwhile, to the east of Aragon-Navarre old Christian rivalries had long complicated the plans of the counts of Barcelona and Urgel to penetrate the Moorish borderlands extending from Lerida and Fraga down the Ebro to Tortosa and the sea. In 1093, for example, the Barcelonese count Berenguer Raymond 11(1076-1096) had been [405] compelled to take up arms against a combined force of Leonese-Castilian and Aragonese-Navarrese troops and Genoese and Pisan naval squadrons which intended to assault Tortosa. By the time of count Raymond Berenguer III (1096-1131), the Barcelonese, despite stiff Moorish resistance along the Mediterranean coast, were at last driving their southern frontier beyond the Llobregat into the Panadés and the valleys of the Gayá and Francolí rivers. Count Raymond's particular goal here was the deserted site of the old Romano-Visigothic metropolitan see of Tarragona, at the mouth of the Francolí, which he hoped to restore as the head of an independent Catalan church by subordinating to it Barcelona and other Spanish March dioceses dependent since the early reconquest upon the archbishopric of Narbonne. Urban II not only gave this project his approval in 1089 but accepted Tarragona as a papal fief from the count, although three decades were to pass before the plan could be put into execution.

An important Catalan advance occurred in 1106, when the former Leonese counselor of Alfonso VI, count Peter Ansúrez, acting as guardian of the young count Ermengol VI of Urgel, captured the city of Balaguer. In reaction both to this loss and to Raymond Berenguer III's incursions around Tarragona, Murâbit forces struck north along the Mediterranean, devastating the Panadés and menacing Barcelona itself for the first time since the dark days of al-Mansûr a century before. But this situation must have improved by 1114. When a fleet from Pisa arrived at Barcelona and solicited Catalan assistance in conquering the Baleares, which Gregory VII had assigned as a papal fief to Pisa (1085) and whose conquest Paschal II had just urged again in a bull of 1113, count Raymond readily agreed to command the expedition. A combined force of Catalan, Pisan, and south French crusaders sailed to Ibiza and occupied Majorca for a few months in 1114-1115, before being driven out by Murâbit troops who annexed this former Taifa kingdom to the North African empire.

Undaunted, Raymond Berenguer III continued to push south and west of Barcelona, in spite of a serious defeat on the Segre at Corbins, near Lerida (1124), while Catalan nobles and peasants poured irresistibly into the fertile farmlands of the so-called New Catalonia that stretched from Balaguer down the middle Francolí and through the district of Montblanch to the ruins of Tarragona and the sea. In 1118 Gelasius II had raised bishop Oleguer of Barcelona to the dignity of archbishop of Tarragona and entrusted to him the political administration of the papal fief, which embraced the city [406] and its countryside. Soon afterward the new archbishop entered into a feudal contract with a Norman crusading nobleman famed for his exploits at the recent siege of Saragossa, Robert Bordet, who along with the title of princips was given responsibility for the defense, colonization, and government of the district, although details remain obscre; Oleguer himself set about restoring the ancient metropolitan church and its province.

On the opposite side of the peninsula, in the country of Portugal, no counterpart to this active reconquest in Catalonia and Aragon can be discovered in the first third of of the twelfth century. Bounded on the south by Coimbra and that city's ring of protective fortresses (like Soure) that guarded the rim of the Mondego valley, the county was a true frontier marchland, remote enough from Leon to be thrown upon its own resoures -- a fact that reinforced the strongly regionalist outlook of its nobles and peasants and found further expression in the plans of its comital dynasty to reduce Leonese-Castilian political control to a minimum. Count Henry (1094/1095-1112) seems to have been content to remain on the defensive along the Mondego and in the shelter of the sierras of Lousã and Estrêla. Although defeated at Malagón in 1100, when aiding Alfonso VI against the Murâbits, he rated the Moorish danger so low as to leave the peninsula in 1103, ostensibly to participate in the Holy Roman emperor Henry IV's projected crusade of that year. But there is no evidence that the Portugese ruler actually went beyond Rome, where bishop Gerald of Braga was then pressing for restoration of his see's metropolitan rank as a way of taking the Portuguese dioceses out from under the authority of Leonese-Castilian Toledo.

On his return home in 1104 and thenceforth until he died, Henry ignored the reconquest to plunge into the troubled political waters of Alfonso VI's last years and Urraca's Aragonese marriage. Similarly, his widow and successor Teresa (1112-1128), engrossed in expanding the county across the Minho into Galicia rather than southwards, made no response when a Murâbit army swept through lower Beira, took the guardian fortresses of Coimbra, and briefly occupied that frontier bastion (1116). This paralysis can doubtless be attributed also to the widening schism within the Portuguese baronage and hierarchy between her own partisans and those rallying around her young son Afonso Henriques. At the battle of São Mamede (1128), where the two factions crossed swords, the Portuguese county passed from the defeated Teresa into the power of her son and his supporters, but Afonso Henriques was for some years too preoccupied with internal affairs, further Galician interventions, and wars aimed [407] at preventing Alfonso VII of Leon-Castile's exercise of authority over Portugal, to pursue the reconquest.

By 1135, after fifty years of warfare against the Murâbits and their Hispano-Moslem auxiliaries, it can be seen that in the western and eastern halves of the peninsula the reconquest had so far followed a course quite the reverse of that between Ferdinand I's reign and the fall of Toledo. In the west, the frontier line had changed little from where it lay at Alfonso VI's death: in Portugal it still ran along the Mondego, in Leon it clung closely to the central sierras, and only in Castile, between Talavera and Toledo, did it yet extend below the southern edge of the Tagus basin. By contrast, in the once-diminutive eastern sectors notable progress had been registered: the Moorish kingdom of Saragossa, with its incomparable capital, had been won; great tracts on both sides of the middle Ebro were now in Aragonese-Navarrese possession; and the Catalans had marched from the Llobregat to the Francolí. Now the picture was about to change again into one of vigorous advance all across the peninsula from sea to sea, in part because of rapid Murâbit decline in Africa and therefore in Spain, in part by reason of the emergence in Christian Iberia of new political and military leadership that would take prompt advantage of the enemy's growing weakness.

At Alfonso the Warrior's death in 1134 Navarre again became an independent kingdom, but cut off by its more powerful neighbors from direct contact with the Moslem frontier, it thenceforth exercised decreasing influence upon the reconquest. Aragon, after Ramiro II's brief reign (1134-1137), joined with Raymond Berenguer IV's Barcelonese county to establish the powerful federation known as the Crown of Aragon. Alfonso VII, who had ruled Leon-Castile since his mother Urraca's death in 1126, having been formally crowned emperor in 1135, and protected on both his flanks by the peace treaties of Tuy with Afonso Henriques (1137) and of Carrión with Raymond Berenguer IV (1140), could turn his energies and those of his subjects back to the pursuit of the old imperial objective of the liberation of Spain. In Portugal also count Afonso, so soon to be a king, turned south toward the great prizes awaiting him on the Tagus and beyond.

All this helps explain why by 1140 there developed an uncoordinated but simultaneous three-pronged Portuguese, Leonese-Castilian, and Aragonese-Catalan offensive. In Portugal, as a preliminary, count Afonso Henriques began construction in 1135 of a powerful new base at Leiria, below Coimbra, which attracted and survived determined Moorish attacks in 1137 and 1140. At the same time military [408] and colonizing activities to the southeast of Coimbra achieved Portuguese occupation of the valleys of the Ocreza, Nabão, and middle Zêzere rivers. Above all, in 1139 the count won a semi-legendary battle, reputedly against five Moslem princes, at Ourique, a site located perhaps above the Tagus but possibly, in this epoch of long-range raids into al-Andalus, near the town of that name in lower Alentejo, where Portuguese tradition places it. Whatever its military significance, this famous victory seems to lie behind Afonso's assumption in 1140 of the royal title, a step acknowledged by Alfonso VII in the treaty of Zamora (1143) on condition that the new kingdom of Portugal remain within the Hispanic empire. Thus it is as king Afonso I that in this same year he attacked the strongly fortified port of Lisbon, with the help of seventy ships carrying French crusaders to the east. This attack, like several others mounted in 1142 and afterward without such foreign collaboration, failed to take the key citadel of the Tagus estuary; but this need not detract from the very substantial achievement of the Portuguese in repeatedly deploying their armies on the north bank of the great river where Murâbit power had theretofore been unchallenged.

Alfonso VII was even more successful. In 1139 he captured the strategic fortress city of Oreja across the Tagus and afterward led various destructive expeditions across the marchlands (extremaduras) fringing both Leon and Castile. In 1142 he took Coria in the Leonese extremadura (still so called) and then rode northeast to Salamanca for a conference with Peter the Venerable of Cluny at which the abbey's annual Hispanic stipend of 2,000 gold dinars was re-funded. The Burgundian abbot's famous journey to Spain and commissioning of the first Latin translation of the Koran for his "intellectual crusade" against Islam thus belong in the optimistic context of Murâbit decline and Christian military success.⁽⁷⁾ The king-emperor indeed was now to venture far beyond the Tagus basin: on long raids (entradas) in 1143 and 1144 he boldly crossed the Sierra Morena to invade Andalusia itself. Here Alfonso could take advantage of the spreading Hispano-Moslem revolts against Murâbit governors that were producing a new set of independent regional caudillos, the "Second Taifas," and promote political chaos at Cordova and elsewhere, with the help of such Moorish allies as Ahmad ibn-Yûsuf Ibn-Hûd (self-styled Saif-ad-Daulah or Sword of the State, whence his Romance name Zafadola) at Saragossa and Hamdîn ibn-Muhammad, Ibn-Hamdîn at Cordova. Above all, he gained control of the key pass across the Sierra Morena, Muradal, the medieval predecessor [409] of modern Despeñaperros, and with this principal gateway between southern Castile and Andalusia in his hands, he conquered Baeza, Ubeda, and other places in upper Andalusia. In 1146, when Alfonso was besieging Cordova, Genoese envoys arrived in the Leonese-Castilian camp and plans were concerted for an early joint land and naval attack upon Almeria. Then in January 1147 the king-emperor took the invaluable castle of Old Calatrava north of Muradal in La Mancha, commanding the point where the trunk highway south from Toledo to Andalusia crossed the Guadiana river. Simultaneously in the east, where Raymond Berenguer IV (1137-1162) as ruler of the newly federated Crown of Aragon had inherited the active reconquest plans of both Alfonso the Warrior and the Barcelonese counts, the Murâbit war was also being pressed. By 1141 the last few remaining Moorish outposts north of the Ebro in the Cinca and Alcanadre valleys had been wiped out, and Catalan frontier fighters were penetrating across the Francolí below Tarragona. Raymond himself was negotiating with Genoa for an invasion of the Baleares when, in 1147, he was persuaded instead to collaborate in the international attack upon Almeria and hastened south with his army to join Alfonso VII on Moorish soil.
 

In the fifth decade of the century, therefore, the reconquest was advancing vigorously in all three sectors when Eugenius III's summons to the Second Crusade (December 1145) accelerated the Iberian offensive by bringing into the Murâbit war sizable contingents of foreign crusaders whose ultimate destination was the Holy Land.⁽⁸⁾ The contribution of these warriors to the success of the sieges of Lisbon and Almeria (1147) and Tortosa (1148) has already been described in an earlier volume of this work, but now it needs to be considered in its reconquest context as auxiliary to the already successful Iberian exploitation of the crumbling Murâbit power. How much in 1145-1148 the pope may have been inspired to call for the Second Crusade by the good news from Spain (as well, of course, as by the shock of Edessa's fall), and how far correspondence with peninsular monarchs may have prepared the way for foreign intervention in the three sieges, is not altogether clear. In May 1145 Eugenius granted partial remission of penance to those giving aid to the Templars fighting in Spain; his crusading bull Divina dispositione in its revised version of April 6, 1147, recognized Spain as a crusade [410] theater; another bull of this year exhorted the Genoese to lend all possible assistance against Almeria; and on June 22, 1148, he promulgated another crusade bull for Raymond Berenguer's Tortosa campaign.

Be that as it may, the combined efforts of Iberians and crusaders proved militarily fruitful. In Portugal king Afonso I, in the spring of 1147, had slipped south from Coimbra for a surprise assault on Santarem, the Murâbit stronghold which guarded the head of the Tagus estuary as Lisbon did its mouth. In mid-March the Portuguese, escalading the walls at night and overcoming the resolute Moorish garrison, made themselves masters of the city, and were already marching to do the same at Lisbon when news came of the arrival at Oporto of the Anglo-Flemish-German expeditionaries of the Second Crusade. Persuaded in the king's name by bishop Peter Pitões of Oporto to join the royal army, the crusaders unquestionably made it possible for Afonso to take Lisbon, for its stubborn defense of some four months (June 28-October 23/24) against the combined Portuguese and crusader resources, including the northerners' heavy siege machines and poliorcetic skills, makes it certain that, the city was still too strong to be taken by Afonso's men alone. The narrow limits, however, within which such collaboration was possible are illumined by the incompatibility in outlook evinced by trans-Pyrenean crusaders and Iberian reconquistadores. One instance is the constant breaking out in the crusader camp of misunderstanding and bitter suspicion because of the primarily secular attitude with which the Portuguese approached fighting the Moslems; the other, the implacably hostile ideas the northerners entertained of how to treat Lisbon's surrendered inhabitants, in contrast to the typically Iberian respect for capitulation terms and readiness to accept the vanquished as fellow-subjects under the king.

The siege of Almeria, between August and October 1147, by three kings -- Alfonso VII, Raymond Berenguer IV, and Garcia Ramírez of Navarre -- and a combination of Genoese seamen and Leonese-Castilian, Aragonese-Catalan, and south French land units, can be explained, as far as the Italians are concerned, in terms of the city's commercial importance and its use as a base for Moorish attacks on Christian shipping in the western Mediterranean. But from Alfonso VII's standpoint, the selection of Almeria for assault can be seen as related both to his already extensive conquests and raids below Muradal and hopes of occupying all Andalusia, and to the continuance of the policy followed by Ferdinand I, Alfonso VI, and the Cid of securing a Mediterranean window for the Leonese-Castilian state. [411] Here no doubt the blockading Italian fleet, the few French noble participants, and the troops of Alfonso VII and Raymond Berenguer IV share the laurels; and it is indicative of the better spirit that prevailed here than at Lisbon that after Almeria's fall king Raymond contracted for an assault of his own upon Tortosa with the Genoese ships and also with some of the Anglo-Flemish-German veterans of the siege of Lisbon. Thus Tortosa's capture in December 1148 was a joint operation; on the other hand, the Aragonese and Catalans (assisted by troops of count Ermengol VI of Urgel) then went on without foreign support to besiege simultaneously in 1149 both Lerida and Mequinenza, taking both towns and clearing the whole line of the Segre river to its junction with the Ebro. The reconquest in Catalonia proper was now virtually complete.

The capture of these five urban centers in 1147-1149 constituted a new highwater mark in reconquest history, portending an immediate end to the Murâbit war and even, as in 1085, the possible total extinction of Islamic power in the peninsula. The rise of the Muwahhid empire in Africa and its expansion across the strait was soon to crush this hope and embroil Christian Iberia in a new epoch of savage warfare.
 

In North Africa, by the middle of the twelfth century, the Masmûdah Berber reform movement of the Muwahhids, founded by the Mahdî Muhammad ibn-'Abd-Allâh, Ibn-Tûmart (c. 1080-1128 or 1130), had largely overthrown the Murâbit empire and firmly established itself at Marrakesh under the caliph 'Abd-al-Mu'min ibn-'Ali (1130-1163).⁽⁹⁾ As early as 1146 Muwahhid troops were disembarking [412] in al-Andalus to take over Spanish Islam, commencing with Seville, a process in which it became evident that their chief opponents were not the helpless Murâbit governors but the new Hispano-Moslem caudillos of the Second Taifas who had sprung up during the last years of Murâbit dominion. Foremost among these was the redoutable Muhammad ibn-Sa'd, Ibn-Mardanîsh (1152-1172), el Rey Lobo or the Wolf-King, as the Christians called him, who made himself ruler of Murcia and Valencia and for many years fought to expel the Muwahhids and conquer all al-Andalus. In this he was aided by his able general and father-in-law Ibn-Hamushk, by large bodies of Christian mercenaries, and by the friendship of Raymond Berenguer IV and Alfonso VII, who saw him as a shield against the new Maghribin imperialism. In 1159 Ibn-Mardanîsh besieged Jaen, Cordova, and Seville without success; in 1161 he captured Granada; and thereafter his mixed Moorish-Christian armies overcame the Muwahhid forces in three battles before the exasperated caliph 'Abd-al-Mu'min himself crossed the strait and defeated him near his capital of Murcia. Even then, Ibn-Mardanîsh managed to retain control over most of southeastern Spain, his big realm of Murcia-Valencia serving as a protective buffer between Aragon-Catalonia and Muwahhid Andalusia until his death in 1172.

Islamic civil war in al-Andalus and Muwahhid attempts to suppress continuing opposition in the Maghrib encouraged Christian hopes of maintaining the momentum of the reconquest. In 1151 the emperor Alfonso VII and king Raymond Berenguer IV optimistically drew up at Tudellén the first of the great partition pacts of reconquest diplomatic history which allotted zones of future occupation in Moslem Spain to particular Christian states. In this covenant of January 27, 1151, Alfonso VII, acting on the premise that he held title as Hispanic emperor to all territory recovered from the Moors, conceded the Aragonese-Catalan crown the right to reconquer and hold in fief of him the entire southeast from the limits of the old kingdom of Tortosa down through the realms of Valencia, Denia, and Murcia (except the castles of Lorca and Vera) all the way to Castillan-held Almeria. This encouraged Raymond Berenguer, after eliminating the last Moorish outposts in Catalonia in the sierra of Prades and at Miravet (1152-1153), to look hungrily towards Valencia, although for the time being his and the king-emperor's friendship pacts with Ibn-Mardanîsh restrained him from open aggression. Alfonso VII, on the other hand, continued his war in Andalusia, vainly besieging Cordova (1150), repulsing the first ominous Muwahhid effort to recover Almeria, and in 1155 capturing Andújar and trying [413] also for Jaen and Guadix, the vital stations on the overland route from Muradal to his Mediterranean port.

Meanwhile, in the Portuguese sector king Afonso I moved on from Lisbon across the Tagus to seize Almada and Palmela, which gave him control of the strategic peninsula between the Tagus and the Sado. Lisbon's new English bishop, Gilbert of Hastings, was sent back to his island home to recruit crusaders for the next target along the coast, the regional Moorish capital of Alcácer do Sal. Strengthened by foreign auxiliaries the Portuguese attacked this stronghold in 1151 or 1152, again in 1154, and a third time in 1157, being joined in this last year by a crusader fleet en route to Palestine under the count of Flanders, Thierry of Alsace. But it was not until 1158 that, unaided, they were successful. Allying himself with various anti-Muwahhid chieftains in the south, king Afonso was also able to occupy Évora and Beja far down in Alentejo, and thus to threaten the whole Moslem position in the lower Guadiana valley and Algarve.

Before long, however, as the Muwahhid caliphate firmly established itself throughout the Maghrib and moved to enlarge its territorial base on the Spanish side of the strait, its resistance to further Christian expansion became formidable. In the summer of 1157, in fact, Muwahhid sea and land forces closed in on Almeria; in spite of Alfonso VII's stout defense the precious port had to be abandoned to the enemy. Even worse, the Berber army drove the Leonese and Castilians back across Andalusia, recovering all the Baeza-Úbeda region Alfonso had held for over a decade, and streamed through the Muradal pass to invade southern New Castile. During this retreat the king-emperor died at Fresneda (August 21, 1157); and his will compounded the disaster by assigning Leon and the imperial title to one son, Ferdinand II, and Castile to another, Sancho III, a splitting of the Hispanic empire that resulted in seventy years of interstate rivalry and seriously impeded the reconquest until in 1230 Ferdinand III reunited the two kingdoms permanently.

The earlier Muwahhid caliphs -- 'Abd-al-Mu'min, Yûsuf I (1163- 1184), Ya'qûb al-Mansûr (1184-1199), and Muhammad an-Nâsir (1199-1213) -- ruled a stronger, better organized, more enduring empire on both sides of the strait than had the Murâbits; and between 1150 and 1212 great African armies, not infrequently led by the caliph in person, crossed into Spain on numerous occasions. But for all their power the lords of Marrakesh could not field sufficient forces to cope at any given time with more than two of the three sectors of the Iberian frontier -- west, center, and east -- so that after 1150 the reconquest tended to advance in at least one of these [414] subdivisions, even when halted or in retreat in the other two. This becomes evident as early as the death of Alfonso VII. Sancho III (1157-1158), his successor in Castile, reigned only a single year, during which Muwahhid incursions above Muradal forced him to replace the Templar garrison at battered Old Calatrava by a religious military confraternity; this, organized by the Navarrese Cistercian abbot of Fitero, Raymond, and one of his monks, the veteran frontier warrior Diego Velázquez, swiftly developed into the first native Iberian military order, that of Calatrava. Sancho also negotiated with his brother Ferdinand II of Leon the treaty of Sahagún (May 23, 1158) which projected southward into al-Andalus the demarcation line between their kingdoms and, by assigning Leon not only Extremadura and western Andalusia but also Alentejo and Algarve, seemed to deny any future to the Portuguese reconquest.

King Afonso I's subjects, however, ignored this pact and indeed took advantage of the fact that the Muwahhids were concentrating their attacks upon Castile and Ibn-Mardanîsh to overrun much of the Alentejan-Extremaduran region through which the modern Spanish-Portuguese boundary now runs. Here a talented military commander, Gerald the Fearless (Geraldo sem Pavor), often called the Portuguese Cid, who like Rodrigo Díaz belonged to the large class of aristocratic soldiers-of-fortune that the reconquest produced in every stage of its history, assembled a private army (mesnada) with which he seized most of the leading fortified Moorish towns in the area. Having perfected techniques of nocturnal surprise in wintry or stormy weather, stealthy escalading of walls by picked commando-like troops, cutting down of sentries and opening of town gates to the larger force stationed without, Gerald made himself lord of Serpa, Evora, Cáceres, Montánchez, Trujillo, and other citadels. By about 1165 he seemed to be on the point of carrying the Portuguese banner so far east in the basin of the lower Guadiana as to confine Leon's southern expansion to the Transierra district just below the Tagus. This thoroughly alarmed Ferdinand II, who proceeded to take Alcántara from the Moors, thus assuring himself safe passage across the famous trans-Tagan bridge (1166), and then entered into a military alliance with caliph Yûsuf so that both might cooperate against their common Portuguese foe.

This did not deter Gerald from getting possession in 1169 of the city of Badajoz, except for its alcazaba where the garrison took refuge. Caliph, king-emperor, and Afonso I of Portugal all rushed to the Guadiana city; in one of the more remarkable episodes of the reconquest the Leonese army drove the Portuguese from Badajoz, [415] relieved the Moorish garrison, and took prisoner both the wounded king Afonso and the fearless Gerald. The two captives purchased their release by surrendering many of Gerald's captured towns either to Ferdinand II or to Yûsuf; the latter was now free to march off to the east, where in 1171 he decisively defeated Ibn-Mardanîsh and, after the latter's death in 1172, annexed Murcia and Valencia to his domains. With the caliphal army now so remote, Gerald the Fearless escaladed and took Beja in lower Alentejo (1172), amid renewed fighting among Portuguese, Leonese, and Moors throughout the Guadiana valley; but after quarreling with his king, apparently over whether to hold or raze Beja, Gerald in anger went over to the Muwahhid side and accompanied the caliph to Morocco. Here he was given the governorship of Sûs, only to be put to death some time later when seized correspondence revealed he was proposing to turn this district over to king Afonso as a base for Portuguese invasion of the Maghrib.

During the long minorities of Alfonso II (1162-1196) in Aragon-Catalonia and of Alfonso VIII (1158-1214) in Castile, when conspiracies and wars among noble factions seeking to dominate each kingdom left the Moorish frontier largely unguarded save for the border nobility and the militias of adjacent towns, the Muwahhids were too busy quelling a rebellion at Tunis and too torn between the military demands of the Maghrib and Spain to take advantage of this situation. By the 1170's it was too late. In 1169, even before the defeat and death of Ibn-Mardanîsh, Alfonso II was moving into the northern reaches of the Valencian kingdom, annexing Caspe, Alcañiz, and Guadalaviar, founding Teruel (1171) -- thenceforth the major bastion of lower Aragon -- and leading armies south as far as Valencia and Jativa (1172). In 1177 he went all the way to Murcia; but this had the effect of arousing Alfonso VIII who, in spite of the treaty of Tudellén, regarded this kingdom as falling within his sphere of future reconquest. The result, on March 20, 1179, was the new partition treaty of Cazorla, which restricted the Aragonese-Catalans territorially, although it relieved them of doing homage to the emperor for their southeastern acquisitions. The utmost limits of their permissible reconquest were now shifted from the southern to the northern boundary of the kingdom of Murcia, along a line from Biar, near Villena, to the sea at Calpe (in modern Alicante province), thus reserving Murcia for Castile.

Castile, in the years preceding the Cazorla settlement, had been experiencing extreme danger and scoring two notable successes. In 1172, determined to punish Alfonso VIII and the Castilians for their [416] southern raids, Yûsuf mustered in Andalusia an army of Africans and Hispano-Moslems whose numbers contemporary sources reckon at 100,000. With this large host he crossed the Muradal, throwing out detachments to assail smaller Castilian settlements north of the Sierra Morena, and headed for the Tagus valley where he proceeded to besiege Huete, a Castilian frontier stronghold between Moslem Cuenca and the Tagus. The town was completely surrounded, its water supply was cut, and, with the caliph himself watching from before his red tent pitched on an adjoining hill, the Muwahhid soldiers to the accompaniment of rolling drums and wild battle-cries tried to storm Huete. The garrison, commanded by count Nuño Manríquez, resisted stubbornly; an extraordinary mid-July rainfall relieved -- miraculously, it was believed -- the thirst of the besieged; and rations ran short in the Moorish camp, so that on the news of Alfonso VIII's approach with the royal army the caliph gave orders to retreat southward. This sorry failure the caliph could not repair, although remaining several years in Spain and launching various lesser offensives against Castile. Alfonso VIII in turn, with the help of Alfonso II of Aragon, placed Cuenca under siege in 1177; and after nine months received the surrender of this base on the mountainous rim of the New Castilian tableland, invaluable for further advances toward the south and east.
 
 

Over a quarter of a century had now elapsed since the Muwahhid counteroffensive had become the chief barrier to reconquest advance. Although the years 1150-1177 had seen the Moslems recover Almeria and upper Andalusia, halt Portuguese penetration of Alentejo and Extremadura, invade Castile as far as Huete, and launch scores of destructive raids in all directions, this had slowed, but in no sense reversed, the insistent southern encroachments of the Christians. By 1180 the struggle had long assumed the shape of a gigantic duel in, which each combatant could deal the other heavy blows but not mortal wounds; though this was partly due to their rough equality in effective strength -- a parity intermittently upset by the landing of huge armies from Morocco -- it was imposed even more by the special geographic conditions of the arena over which much of the conflict raged.

On the western and eastern flanks of the long frontier zone the duelists were in more or less continuous contact, but in the vast center they were separated by the bleak, thinly populated plateaux and steppelands of the southern half of the Iberian tableland (meseta), across which each side had to travel to strike its opponent. [417] In this epoch reconquest warfare was noteworthy for sieges and innumerable skirmishes but few pitched battles. Especially characteristic were the long-range cavalry incursions (cabalgadas, correduras) of fast-moving raiders and the larger invasions or penetrations (entradas, algaras) of horsemen (caballeros, jinetes), infantry (peones), and archers under the banner of free-lance nobles, frontier officials, frontier towns, or, when the king himself led the campaign, the full royal host (hueste) of the kingdom. Royal law codes, notably the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X, and Spanish and Portuguese municipal legislation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries preserve a vivid picture of such bands and armies marching across the plains country of the Guadiana basin between the Tagus and the Sierra Morena on their way to attack unsuspecting towns or castles, throwing forward a column of highly mobile raiders (the algara proper) while the remaining troops of the alzaga constructed a fortified encampment in which the returning horsemen with their booty, livestock, and ransomable captives could find shelter against the inevitable counterraid. Particularly do the town law codes (fueros, forais) contain for the frontier urban militias, upon which kings were becoming increasingly dependent, detailed regulations on the service obligations of their noble and non-noble citizens (vecinos), the arms and other equipment required, the command structure, booty division, and compensation for wounds, and the terms of employment of spies and scouts. Adoption of Arabic military terminology and of such ruses as the feigned cavalry retreat (rebato, torna fuye) shows that enemy techniques and tactics influenced this Christian frontier warfare, while numerous royal, municipal, and papal condemnations of supplying the Moors with weapons, foodstuffs, or other strategic materiel such as horses make it plain that a lively contraband trade existed.⁽¹⁰⁾

[418] On the defensive side, to keep guard over border castles and towns, and to form the first line of resistance against serious attacks across the frontier, there were developed, in addition to the municipal militias, two types of standing armed forces: professional fighters and soldiers-of-fortune who lived off the spoils of forays and skirmishes; and the knights and sergeants of the military orders, both Palestinian and Iberian, whose rules show them sleeping clothed with weapons at their side, ready for instant action. Mimesis of the Templars and Hospitallers, present in the peninsular kingdoms from the 1120's, seems a far more likely inspiration for the Iberian groups than, as often contended, the Moslem ribât and its jihâd combatants.⁽¹¹⁾ We have already mentioned the religio-military confraternities springing up in the Ebro valley in the days of Alfonso the Warrior. Leon, Castile, and Portugal produced similar societies in the twelfth century in the fratres of Avila, Segovia, Salamanca, Évora, and other towns.

The first true Iberian military order, that of Calatrava, was founded in 1158, as noted above, by the Navarrese Cistercians of Fitero; granted approval of its rule in 1164 by Alexander III, it speedily acquired lands, castles, and commanderies in Aragon, Leon, and Portugal as well as in Castile, with its headquarters first at Old, then at New, Calatrava. From the castle given it in 1211 by Afonso II, the Portuguese branch took the name the Order of Avis. In Leonese Extremadura the Order of St. James (Santiago) arose in 1170 from the Fratres de Caceres, with the support of Ferdinand II and of the Compostelan archbishop Peter Gudestéiz, who was eager to recover [419] his Moslem-occupied suffraganates between the Tagus and the Guadiana. Quickly spreading into Alfonso VIII's Castile as well as Portugal and Aragon, Santiago administered its rapidly expanding patrimonies from Uclés in Castile and San Marcos in the city of Leon. By 1176 a third major order, primarily Leonese, that of St. Julian of Pereiro, which from 1218 became known as Alcántara, had come into existence; and in this same decade there was founded the relatively short-lived Order of Montegaudio (1175), active primarily in Aragon. Later royal foundations of still other military orders, such as those of St. George of Alfama in the Crown of Aragon (by Peter II in 1201) and Alfonso X's ephemeral Santa María de España, or those replacing the abolished Templars -- the Order of Montesa in Aragon (by James II in 1317) and the Order of Christ in Portugal (by king Dinís in 1319) -- make it clear how indispensable a role these increasingly aristocratic corporations played in the reconquest for the rest of the Middle Ages.

The anti-Muwahhid reconquest, by reason of the emphasis both sides gave to raids aimed at seizing persons as well as livestock and movable property, led to a strong interest in the redemption of Christian captives from Moorish hands. Procedures for ransoming now became institutionalized in the hands of professional redemption agents (alfaqueques, exeas), whose methods and responsibilities the royal and municipal law codes defined; gifts to the church for redemptionist purposes multiplied; and such new organizations as the Order of Santiago or king Alfonso II of Aragon's Hospital of the Holy Redeemer at Teruel (by 1188) devoted part of their incomes ad redimendos captivos. Two new religious orders also took shape specifically for this purpose: that of the Most Holy Trinity, founded in France in 1198 by St. John of Matha, which early became active below the Pyrenees; and the Order of St. Mary of Mercy, which (by 1218 or 1223) grew out of the redemptionist work of St. Peter Nolasco at Barcelona. Trinitarians and Mercedarians, not only in Spain but in Morocco, Tlemsen, and Tunis, now labored to secure the release of thousands from Moslem captivity, often at great risk or even by substitution of their own persons.⁽¹²⁾

The appearance of these military and redemptorist orders manifestly reflected heightening religious and crusading fervor in the struggle against the Muwahhid caliphate. This is further indicated by what few details are known about the propagation in the mid-twelfth [420] century of the cults of St. James the Moorslayer (Santiago Matamoros -- a guise in which, contrary to frequent asseveration, the Apostle had not previously appeared) and of his firmly anti-Leonese-Castilian counterpart in the Crown of Aragon, St. George.⁽¹³⁾ Along with these warrior saints viewed as patrons of the reconquest, the Virgin Mary also was considered a champion of Hispanic liberation from the Islamic yoke. Popular preaching of the crusade, constant papal encouragement of the anti-Muwahhid war, and the ferocity of the fighting itself were so intensifying the ideological and emotional dynamics of the conflict that by the thirteenth century the Riojan poet Gonzalo of Berceo could depict the Moors as responsible for the Crucifixion.
 

By 1180 strenuous efforts to break the prevailing deadlock in the long war can be discerned on the part of both Muwahhids and Christians. The caliphal fleet from Ceuta struck repeatedly at Lisbon in king Afonso I's last years, until driven off by his capable admiral Fuas Roupinho. In 1183 caliph Yûsuf himself, assembling another huge Maghriban-Andalusian host, marched across Alentejo to strike at Santarem. In a bitterly contested siege the Portuguese garrison not only held out but succeeded in penetrating the enemy camp, and in desperate hand-to-hand fighting broke through the caliph's Negro bodyguard and mortally wounded Yûsuf, who died as the shattered Moorish army retreated southward.

Two years after this resounding triumph the aged Afonso I was succeeded by his son Sancho I (1185-1211), and he and the new caliph Ya'qûb resumed the war in the western sector. For several years, however, the new Muwahhid sovereign was busy in Africa shoring up his disputed authority there, so that in 1189, the year of the Third Crusade, the Portuguese were able to strike another heavy blow. They organized a seaborne expedition and, with the support of twelve thousand Frisians and Danes who had arrived in Lisbon that spring, sailed around Cape St. Vincent to the south coast of Algarve, where they stormed the large castle of Alvor. Here, contrary to peninsular practice, the northern crusaders barbarously slaughtered some six thousand prisoners of war. In mid-July, when a second fleet, this time laden with Germans, Englishmen, and Flemings, put in at the Tagus on its way east, Sancho I took his army overland to join the crusader fleet in an assault on Silves, the chief town of [421] central Algarve. After a siege fought in midsummer heat amid the usual exacerbation of feelings between Iberians and crusaders, the city fell in early September. The Portuguese king this time succeeded in preventing a general slaughter of the vanquished.⁽¹⁴⁾

Santarem, Alvor, and Silves were impressive successes but Ya'qûb, destined to be remembered in Maghribin annals as al-Mansûr (the Conqueror), was now ready to reply in kind. In 1190 he dispatched an army of Andalusians to invest Silves, while he himself invaded Portugal, devastating the countryside, and in Ribatejo, well north of Lisbon, destroying to its foundations the powerful base of Torres Novas, although a similar attempt there to wipe out the Templar stronghold of Tomar failed. In 1191 he recovered Alcácer do Sal, which had been in Portuguese hands since 1158; then, after receiving in the same year the surrender of Silves, and judging Portugal sufficiently punished, he turned to harass Alfonso VIII of Castile.

Castile in the 1180's, like Portugal, was the scene of furious strokes and counterstrokes. In 1182, while Muwahhid attention was focused on the imminent siege of Santarem, Alfonso VIII invaded Andalusia, besieged Cordova and Écija, and dared place a garrison in the castle of Setefilla, on the Guadalquivir above Seville. When the Moors, unable to take this potential base for raiders, tried a diversionary invasion of the Tagus valley, they accomplished little except to cause Ferdinand II of Leon to break off his old friendship with the Muwahhids; in 1184 both kings joined in pressing the war at Cáceres and Alarcón, respectively, a policy continued after Alfonso IX ascended the Leonese throne in 1188.

This promising Leonese-Castilian cooperation, however, in 1195 met with disastrous consequences. That year caliph Ya'qûb was again in Spain, preparing to march north with the customary large force of Berber, Arab, Negro, and Andalusian troops. Alfonso VIII, unwisely failing to wait as planned for the arrival of Alfonso IX and the Leonese army, hastened south to engage the enemy as soon as possible. At Alarcos, southwest of Ciudad Real, on July 19, 1195, he led his army of nobles and urban militiamen into the largest battle the Guadiana plains had seen in many years. The heavy mass of some seven or eight thousand Castilian armored cavalrymen drove back the Muwahhid center but failed to break through; in the savage hand-to-hand encounter the far more numerous Moslems surrounded the Christian army on both flanks and in the rear. From the crushing [422] defeat that followed, Alfonso VIII barely escaped with his life and found refuge in Toledo.⁽¹⁵⁾

Alarcos was an impressive victory by a great Moslem commander, but it was destined to be Islam's last major triumph in the peninsula. It halted reconquest advance for a decade and a half but, just as after Zallaca in 1086, a decisive full-scale invasion of Castile did not ensue, only destructive raids around Talavera and Toledo (1196, 1197). Castilian determination to resume the offensive at the earliest opportunity remained unshaken. Peter II of Aragon-Catalonia (1196-1213), furthermore, supported Alfonso in this crisis by reconquering the rugged highland district of Rincón de Ademuz in the Iberian cordillera, thus relieving pressure on Castile from the east.

Following Ya'qûb al-Mansûr's death in 1199, his much less able successor Muhammad an-Nâsir (1199-1213) was content to maintain a truce with Alfonso, so that the Castilian monarch was relatively free to commence preparations for an international crusade to regain the initiative lost at Alarcos. During the next decade Castile strengthened its border fortresses, built up its army, and tightened its ties with the other peninsular kingdoms. By 1210 these preparations were rapidly maturing when, in anticipation of early resumption of large-scale hostilities, the Muwahhids moved a large army across the strait, marched north of Muradal, and captured the castle of Salvatierra, then the seat of the Order of Calatrava and a major base for entradas into Andalusia (1211). In this year, as in early 1212, Innocent III, who shared Alfonso's conviction that the great crisis of the reconquest was at hand and that all possible European assistance should be given Christendom's Iberian defenders, addressed bulls and letters to Spain and France, calling upon the Iberian kings to cooperate in the forthcoming crusade, to which as usual he extended the Holy Land indulgence, and urging the French and Provençal hierarchies to preach the cross and raise recruits.

With this papal backing, an international army now commenced to muster at Toledo, at its core the full Castilian royal hueste of nobles, town militias, members of military orders, and mercenaries. From the other peninsular kingdoms came king Peter II of Aragon, with some three thousand knights and a strong force of crossbowmen; numerous Portuguese and a smaller band of Leonese, permitted to serve by their kings, who themselves remained aloof; and, joining later, king Sancho VII of Navarre with two hundred retainers. Over [423] the Pyrenees streamed thousands of south French knights and other crusaders, mounted and on foot, whom the Castilians had to restrain by force from massacring Toledo's Jewish community.

On June 20, 1212, this Christian army, the greatest the reconquest had ever seen, moved south to meet the even larger Muwahhid host commanded personally by caliph Muhammad an-Nâsir. During the crossing of the Guadiana plains the summer heat, shortage of rations, and a bout of hard fighting around Old Calatrava that yielded little spoil proved too much for the trans-Pyrenean crusaders; on July 3 they ignominiously quit the crusade and returned home. The Iberians, however, veterans of plains warfare, pushed on resolutely, retook Alarcos of unhappy memory, and, skirting Moslem-held Salvatierra, reached the foot of Muradal on July 12, to find the pass already blocked and the high ground about the defile occupied by detachments of the enormous Muwahhid army already visible in the distance. A local rustic, it is said, pointed out an alternate route by which the Christians in long slow column descended into the plains (navas) on the Andalusian side of the Sierra Morena, where the greatest battle of all reconquest history, Las Navas de Tolosa, was to be joined.

On both the 14th and the 15th the Moslems deployed for battle in three lines, the great central mass of horse and foot screened by a vanguard of light-armed Berbers, Arabs, and bands of archers. Muhammad an-Nâsir stationed himself with the rearguard, surrounded by his Negro bodyguard and the massed banners and drums, where, seated on his shield before his red tent, clad in the black cloak of his predecessor 'Abd-al-Mu'min, sword and Koran in hand, he could direct his commanders. The Christians, however, carefully observing the enemy order of battle, refused to engage on either day. But on the 16th, at dawn, they drew up in battle array in three lines, their left wing under king Peter II of Aragon, their right under king Sancho VII of Navarre, and the center under Alfonso VIII, who remained with his rearguard, behind the second line of Castilian nobles and the military orders. In contrast with Alarcos, the less experienced municipal militias were distributed in all three lines of each division and reinforced by cavalry. The Christian vanguard began the attack, crashing through the Arab and Berber skirmishers, and with the second line closed with the main body of the Muwahhid troops.

Sanguinary but indecisive fighting raged for hours, but when the caliph ordered his reserves into the struggle, the weary Christian center and flanks fell back. At this critical juncture Alfonso VIII, [424] resolved to conquer or die, threw himself and the strong rearguard into the attack, while Peter II and Sancho VII rallied the wings. In the face of this general Christian counterassault the Moslems, commencing reputedly with the Andalusian contingents but soon continuing with the Berbers and Arabs, began to give way. As confusion and panic spread, the Christians broke through to the area of the red tent, cutting down the fiercely resisting Negro guards. Muhammad an-Nâsir barely managed to escape on horseback, and his whole immense army streamed rearward, hotly pursued by the Christian cavalry with immense slaughter while the infantry fell upon the rich spoils of the Muwahhid camp.⁽¹⁶⁾

Thus on July 16, 1212, was Alarcos avenged at Las Navas de Tolosa. With no help other than the encouragement of Innocent III, the Iberians had shattered the full might of the Muwahhid caliphate, dealing it a blow from which neither in Spain nor in Africa was it destined to recover. For the first time since 1150, the road to the reconquest of Andalusia, Algarve, and the southeast at last lay open.
 

As so often in reconquest history, the fruits of victory were slow to be harvested.⁽¹⁷⁾ Although after Las Navas Alfonso VIII quickly seized New Calatrava and other fortresses above the Sierra Morena, and Baeza and Úbeda in Andalusia, his efforts were cut short by death in 1214; and under the regency for his son Henry I (1214-1217) and during the early reign of Ferdinand III (the son of Alfonso VIII's daughter Berengaria by Alfonso IX of Leon), internal dissensions halted Castilian advance. Similar disorders swept Aragon during the minority of James I, after his father Peter II, who had fought so valiantly at Las Navas, died in the battle of Muret (1213) while supporting the Albigensians against Simon of Montfort and his crusaders. [425] To the west, however, the fight against the Moslems actively continued. The Portuguese, eager to throw back the Muwahhids below Palmela, welcomed in July 1217 the arrival of a fleet of some two hundred ships of the Fifth Crusade. Approximately half of these, carrying mostly German crusaders under the command of counts George of Wied and William of Holland, were persuaded to join Afonso II's army in a sea and land assault on Alcácer do Sal. A combined northern and Portuguese squadron blockaded the mouth of the Sado during the two months' siege; the Portuguese, with Leonese aid, turned back a Moorish relief column; and on October 18, 1217, Alcácer capitulated, so that after half a century the frontier could once more sweep eastward from the Atlantic into Alentejo.

In Leon also Alfonso IX was moving vigorously toward reconquering Extremadura from weakening Muwahhid hands. In 1218-1219 his forces, among whom the military orders took a prominent role, besieged Cáceres, at first without success; but by 1221 they managed to capture Valencia de Alcántara, the city's chief protective fortress to the north, and in 1227 Cáceres capitulated. In 1230, just before Alfonso's death in September, the Leonese took possession of some other Extremaduran towns, including Montánchez, Mérida, and Badajoz, so that the Leonese reconquest was now firmly anchored all along the Guadiana from Mérida to Badajoz and south across the prized pasturelands of southern Extremadura to the slopes of the Sierra Morena.

By 1230, furthermore, both Castile and Aragon-Catalonia, free from their dark years of minorities and internal disorders, were in the capable hands of two of the foremost kings in reconquest annals, Ferdinand III (1217-1252) and James I the Conqueror (el Conquistador, [426] 1213-1276). In Castile as far back as 1224 king Ferdinand had begun to take advantage of the civil strife in al-Andalus and the appearance of the caudillos of the Third Taifas. When in that year the governor of Baeza, 'Abd-Allâh ibn-Muhammad ibn-'Umar ibn'Abd-al-Mu'min, "al-Baiyâsî," declared himself caliph and threw Moslem Spain into political chaos, he appealed to the Castilian monarch for military assistance. Ferdinand, hopeful of resuming the reconquest where Alfonso VIII had left off, lost no time in fishing these troubled waters. In 1224 he captured Quesada and devastated adjacent districts in the Guadalquivir valley; in 1225 at Las Navas de Tolosa he made a pact with al-Baiyâsî under which the latter accepted Castilian vassalage and recognized that kingdom's rights to Martos, Andújar, Jaen, and other places (except Baeza) that might be recovered from his enemies. On this basis Ferdinand III's troops entered Andalusia, captured Priego and Loja, devastated the environs of Jaen and Granada, and compelled the latter city, under threat of immediate siege, to release all Christians it held captive. When in 1226 al-Baiyâsî was murdered by partisans of the caliph 'Abd-Allâh al-'Âdil (1224-1227) and his brother Idris, the governor of Cordova and Granada, the Castilians quickly occupied Baeza.

When Idris proclaimed himself the true caliph at Seville in 1227 and prepared to invade Morocco, Ferdinand agreed to provide troops for his army in return for the concession of ten Andalusian frontier fortresses, the right to build Christian churches in Marrakesh, and assurance of the personal safety there of all converted Moslems. With the help of these Castilian expeditionaries -- like the alliance itself suggesting that so soon after Las Navas Castile had hopes of carrying the reconquest across the Strait of Gibraltar -- Idrîs was successful in Morocco, but in 1228, during his absence from al-Andalus, another Hispano-Moslem caudillo, Muhammad ibn-Yûsuf Ibn-Hûd, raised the black flag of the 'Abbâsids against the Muwahhid caliphate, and was widely accepted throughout al-Andalus. This allowed Ferdinand III, posing as a defender of Idrîs, to besiege Jaen and devastate as far as the fertile Vega plain outside Granada, returning home with rich spoils and numerous captives.

In the midst of these events, in 1230, on the death of his father Alfonso IX, Ferdinand inherited the Leonese crown. The two states, separated and often at war since 1157, were now definitively reunited in what is commonly styled the kingdom of Castile, a reunion which made possible coordination of Christian efforts all along the reconquest frontier from Extremadura to Andalusia. In 1231 archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo reoccupied Quesada and various castles; [427] one of the latter, Cazorla, the Toletan church was to retain as the capital of a new border march to the east of Jaen, the Adelantamiento of Cazorla. In 1233 Ferdinand himself retook Úbeda; Ibn-Hûd, menaced by such other caudillos as Muhammad ibn-Yûsuf Ibn-Nasr, al-Ahmar, was soon driven to make peace with Castile at the cost of surrendering various border fortresses. Disorder in Andalusia allowed the Leonese, particularly the military orders of Alcántara and Santiago, to strike hard blows in Extremadura, where in 1233 Trujillo fell, in 1234 Santa Cruz, Medellín, and Alange, and in 1235 Magacela.

By 1236 the civil wars in al-Andalus produced a major Islamic catastrophe, the loss of Cordova. Here in 1235 a Cordovan faction offered to help the Castilian nobles stationed at Andújar to take over the city's Ajarquía quarter, outside the walled Medina (al-madinah) proper; when the plot succeeded and the Christians found themselves under attack from the city's garrison, they appealed to their king. Strong Castilian forces soon came up, invested Cordova, and on June 29, 1236, when it was on the verge of starvation and without hope of relief, the old Umaiyad capital surrendered. Ferdinand III's solemn entry into the fallen city, preceded by the affixing of the cross and the royal standard to the minaret of the famed caliphal mosque, can be taken as inaugurating the rapid downfall of Islamic power in Andalusia and Murcia. The fertile Cordovan countryside also now passed into Castilian power; and Ibn-Hûd, unable to retain his own kingdom of Murcia against the efforts of al-Ahmar and the new Moroccan caliph, 'Abd-al-Wâhid II ar-Rashid, to overthrow him, had to purchase Castilian help by placing a number of Murcian towns, including the capital, under tribute to Castile and allowing Castilian garrisons to occupy their alcázars.

Ibn-Hûd died in 1238, leaving al-Ahmar (1232-1273) as the chief Taifa ruler in al-Andalus, but this prince, who by 1237 had established his capital at Granada and -- as Muhammad I -- founded the Nasrid dynasty there, was not strong enough either to dominate all Moslem Spain or to hold back the steady Castilian infiltration all along its northern edges. When in 1244 he raided the environs of Andújar and Martos, Ferdinand III retaliated by first besieging and taking Arjona, and then going on to invest Jaen, one of the largest and best fortified of the Andalusian cities. During the long, difficult siege, which lasted from August 1245 to April 1246, al-Ahmar tried without success to relieve the city. Finally, confronted with revolt in Granada itself, and desperate for peace with Castile, he agreed to allow Jaen's surrender, to become Ferdinand's tributary vassal, and, [428] on summons, to attend the Castilian Cortes and serve with his troops in Castile's wars. It is this pact of Jaen in 1246 that ensured exclusion of Granada from the main Christian reconquest of al-Andalus, allowing this kingdom, under the Nasrid dynasty descended from al-Ahmar, to maintain itself to 1492 as a viable Moslem state.

The fall of Jaen in 1246 underscored the vulnerability of Seville, the economic and cultural center of Andalusia and, under both Murâbits and Muwahhids, the chief Maghribin military base in Spain. It was against Seville that Ferdinand III next turned, in full awareness of the city's formidable defenses of walls, the protective encirclement of the Guadalquivir, and the outlying belt of guardian fortresses. Fortunately for Castile, in 1246 Seville was politically isolated: her citizens had refused allegiance to Marrakesh and driven out an extortionate governor sent them by king Yahyâ I of Hafsid Tunisia, whose protection they had earlier solicited. In 1246 Ferdinand's warriors began by raiding Carmona on the Cordova-Seville highway and by storming the stronghold of Alcalá de Guadaira southeast of Seville. During the winter of 1246-1247 Raymond Boniface of Burgos was ordered to bring south ships from the ports of Cantabria, and the royal summons went out to towns and nobles for the convocation of the hueste. The summer of 1247 saw Castilian armies drive down the Carmona and Lora roads toward Seville, capture smaller towns en route, ravage all the countryside, and establish a fortified encampment at Tablada in preparation for a formal siege.

During the course of 1247 the city's walls were completely surrounded, the sallies of the besieged were repulsed, and under Raymond Boniface the first Castilian royal fleet to participate in a major reconquest enterprise moved up the Guadalquivir in the face of violent harassment from both banks. Throughout the winter of 1247-1248 the siege was vigorously pressed, with especially savage fighting by spring in the suburb of Macarena, at the powerful fortress of Triana located on the west side of the river and connected with the city by a pontoon bridge, and further down the Guadalquivir at Aznalfarache. As reinforcements poured in from all over Castile, Ferdinand moved his camp closer to the walls, while the fleet severed the pontoon bridge, isolating Triana. By autumn, Seville was completely cut off on the land and river sides, battered by catapults, and running short of provisions for the winter; on November 23, 1248, it capitulated. Once the city was emptied of inhabitants under the terms of surrender, the division of lands and properties (reparto, repartimiento) among the victors was drawn up, the royal entry took [429] place, the chief mosque was consecrated as the cathedral, and Christian settlers moved in, so that Hispano-Moslem Seville now became a major Castilian city, the kingdom's chief military and naval base for Andalusia and the waters of the strait. On the morrow of his victory, without further fighting, Ferdinand also received the capitulation of other western Andalusian towns - Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Jerez de la Frontera, Puerto de Santa María, Cadiz (probably), Medina Sidonia, and Arcos, as well as Alcalá del Río north of Seville.

On the east coast the Aragonese-Catalan monarchy of James I was enjoying a no less spectacular series of reconquest triumphs. Once the bleak years of his minority were over, the young king revived the traditional expansion toward the southeast. In 1225 he mounted an abortive attack on the port of Peñíscola down the coast from Tortosa. By 1228 he was ready to undertake a major national effort, the reconquest of the Baleares, a project the Catalan Cortes greeted with enthusiasm and the concession of an extraordinary subsidy. An assembly of western Catalans and Aragonese at Lerida, however, refused support (even though the cardinal-legate Thomas de Episcopo affixed the cross to the royal mantle in their presence) on the grounds that the crusade should be directed not toward the islands, in which they had no commercial interest, but against the old Aragonese goal of Valencia. James's army, therefore, aside from a few Aragonese and south French combatants, was a predominantly Catalan one, and the occupation of the Baleares in 1229 a truly Catalan enterprise, demonstrating the principality's new naval strength as well as the effectiveness of its almogàvers (Castilian, almogávares) and other land troops.

On September 5, 1229, James's fleet of some 155 heavy ships and many lighter vessels, carrying a reputed fifteen hundred knights and fifteen thousand foot, sailed from Salou for Majorca. Disembarking at night on the north coast, the expeditionaries routed the Moslems from the nearby heights, and drove quickly south to the capital, Palma. The city held out resolutely for over three months, but the crusaders, after rejecting the governor Ibn-Yahyâ's offer to negotiate out of desire to avenge their fallen comrades, stormed the city on December 31 and slaughtered a large part of its population. The reconquest of the rest of the island took another fourteen months; and James, who had meanwhile returned to the mainland, twice had to come back to Majorca to continue the campaign, once in 1231 when a rumored Hafsid expedition from Tunis failed to materialize, again in 1232 as Moorish resistance flared up in the hills. Many Moors were allowed to retain their lands, but the new Catalan [430] colonial population now coming in ensured the establishment of that stock, language, and institutions. The Moslems of Minorca, threatened with large-scale invasion, surrendered in 1232; and in 1235, with royal approval, the archbishop-elect of Tarragona, William de Montgrín, the infante Peter of Portugal, and various Catalan magnates overran Ibiza and Formentera, both these islands becoming archiepiscopal fiefs of the church of Tarragona.

James I's second great triumph, the annexation of the old Moorish kingdom of Valencia, was a much more truly national enterprise. In this the Aragonese were predominant but the Catalans made significant contributions of money, men, and, above all, the ships required for provisioning the king's army, making landings, and blockading the coast. In 1232, fresh from his insular victories, king James stirred up general enthusiasm for a Valencian campaign, which Gregory IX proclaimed an authentic crusade. This turned out to be a much more formidable business than that of the Baleares; extending with pauses and truces over a period of thirteen years, it can be divided into three stages. In the first, 1232-1235, after Ares in the northwest was taken by the municipal army of Teruel, and Morella by the ricohombre Blasco of Alagón, the king himself, in a two-month siege, captured the important coastal town of Burriana (1233), which was to serve as a supply depot for foodstuffs brought from Catalonia; this victory was followed by the surrender of outflanked Peñíscola and other neighboring centers, while the Templars and Hospitallers, respectively, took over Chisvert and Cervera. By 1235, in short, the whole northern sector of the Valencian kingdom, roughly the modern province of Castellón, was in Christian possession.

The second phase of the Valencian reconquest, 1236-1238, saw operations focus upon the central zone and the capital. In 1236 James's army established a permanent base not far from Valencia city, on the hill known as Pueyo de la Cebolla or Puig de Santa María, where the Valencian king Ziyân ibn-Sa'd Ibn-Mardanîsh had recently destroyed a castle he had despaired of holding. As rebuilt by the Aragonese and provided with a strong garrison under the king's uncle Bernard William, this became the object of repeated Moorish onslaughts, but even after his kinsman fell in its defense king James refused to give up this strategic outpost. Returning to Valencia in 1238 with a larger army than ever, one that included a few English and French knights and archbishop Peter of Narbonne, he proceeded to place the capital, crowded as it was with refugees from smaller towns and the countryside, under tight investment by land and sea. Throughout the summer the siege machines battered the walls and [431] houses; the defenders' frequent sallies were thrown back and hunger steadily sapped their ability to hold out. All hope of external succor vanished when a Hafsid squadron of eighteen ships sent by king Yahyâ of Tunis failed to enter Valencia's harbor or to effect a landing at Peñíscola, so that on September 28, 1238, king Ziyân agreed to terms under which all who wished were given protected escort with their movables to his other cities of Cullera and Denia. The victors then proceeded to occupy Valencia and carry out the usual repartimiento of houses and lands within and outside the walls. Over the next few months Moorish sovereignty also ceased in various towns and castles below Valencia; by the end of 1238 the Aragonese frontier stood at the line of the river Júcar.

In the third and terminal phase of the Valencian war, 1239-1245, the Conqueror's warriors crossed the Júcar to annex the kingdom's southern sector, but at this point Ferdinand III of Castile, who had recently reconquered Cordova and was moving towards Jaen, and whose son the infante Alfonso (X) was engaged in occupying the kingdom of Murcia, intervened to impose a more precise demarcation of the zones of Castilian and Aragonese-Catalan reconquest as laid down in 1179 by the treaty of Cazorla. In the new partition treaty of Almizra (1244) the two kings reaffirmed the Cazorla line based on Biar with only slight modifications; what is significant is that with James I pressing south, once again the kingdom of Murcia, which lay just beyond that of Valencia, was recognized as reserved to Castile. Soon afterward, Alcira fell to the Conqueror; in 1248 his men took Jativa; and in 1253 they reached the castle of Biar on the line of the Cazorla-Almizra treaties. This is often mistakenly taken as the termination of the Aragonese-Catalan reconquest, in favor of the Crown of Aragon's expansion towards Sicily, the eastern Mediterranean, Sardinia, and Italy, but, as we shall see, the attempts to secure parts of Murcia and of the kingdom of Granada, and the policies followed in the eastern Maghrib as a zone of potential Christian penetration, prove that the reconquest ideal remained very much alive in the eastern Spanish realms.

Finally, in these same stirring years the Portuguese reconquest came to a climax. Sancho II (1223-1245, d. 1248) gained Elvas after several tries (1230) and even crossed the Guadiana to take Moura and Serpa (1232). In a sweep south of Évora, Aljustrel fell in 1234 and was given to the Order of Santiago, a principal agency in the whole reconquest of Alentejo; and Moorish districts along both sides of the Guadiana to its mouth, along with the Algarvan coastal towns of Cacela and Tavira (1239), surrendered to Sancho. In 1240-1241 the [432] king had high hopes of a crusade against Silves. This did not materialize and Sancho was soon distracted by internal problems, so that the full occupation of Algarve awaited the reign of Afonso III (1248-1278). This king quickly took Faro (1249), Silves, and other towns, and since Portuguese power now extended all across Algarve and beyond the Guadiana into lands subsequently lost to Castile, it can be said that by 1250 the Portuguese reconquest, territorially speaking, had attained its long-hoped-for goals.

By 1252, then, the year of Ferdinand III's death, the consequences of Las Navas de Tolosa were patent. Muwahhid dominion in the peninsula -- to say nothing of Africa -- had collapsed completely in the course of the Hispano-Moslem civil wars, and the victories between 1220 and 1250 of Alfonso IX, Ferdinand III, James I, Sancho II, and Afonso III had wrested from Islam Extremadura, Algarve, Andalusia (except the kingdoms of Granada and Niebla), Murcia, Valencia, and the Baleares. Most of the peninsula was now in Christian hands, yet the reconquest as an ideal, as an immediate factor in foreign relations with Islamic states, and as still for Castile-territorially incomplete, was by no means over, as succeeding rulers in all three Christian kingdoms rapidly discovered.
 

After 1250 the elimination of Muwahhid power from the peninsula and the drastic contraction of al-Andalus to Granada and the tiny kingdom of Niebla brought about radical changes in the theaters and modes of operation of the Iberian reconquest.⁽¹⁸⁾ Castile alone now possessed a contiguous land frontier with the Moors, in Murcia and Andalusia; this imposed upon it not only the defense of a long border district, in which fighting always simmered and sporadically boiled over into active warfare, but the far more difficult task of preventing the intrusion into Spain of the foremost North African successor state to the Muwahhids, the Marînid sultanate with its capital at Fez. Furthermore, Castile, Aragon, and Portugal all still [433] had a sea frontier with the Maghribin Mediterranean and Atlantic waters that constituted an area of attacks upon their shores and shipping, an avenue of communication with the post-Muwahhid kingdoms at Tunis, Tlemsen, and Fez of potential value as the prelude to military occupation, and -- again primarily for Castile -- the first line of defense against debarkation of Marînid troops in Spain. It was above all the control of this maritime frontier, rather than the elimination of Granada, which dominated the active pursuit of the reconquest between 1250 and 1350, and gave greater importance than previously to seapower and naval actions. The shores and waters of the extreme western Mediterranean leading to the Strait of Gibraltar became the principal arena of Christian-Moorish confrontation, and Tarifa, Algeciras, and Gibraltar, rather than the more remote, mountain-ringed Granadan harbors of Malaga, Vélez-Málaga, and Almeria, as the indispensable bridgeheads for Marinid invasion of the Andalusian heartland, became the chief objects of Maghribin-Castilian conflict.⁽¹⁹⁾

Of the four Castilian reigns that span the century 1250-1350, the first, that of Alfonso X the Learned (el Sabio, l252-l284), has been regarded unfavorably (except on the cultural side) by historians, who see it given over down to 1273 to the king's utopian quest for the Holy Roman imperial title and thereafter plunged into disarray by the succession struggles between Alfonso's second son Sancho (the later Sancho IV) and the infantes de la Cerda, the two sons of the king's eldest son Ferdinand, who in 1275 was killed by the Moors. In reconquest annals, however, Alfonso X's reign is especially notable as the first in Castilian history to confront the triple problem of Granada, Marinid Africa, and the strait, and in its initial years it scored some significant gains, among them the formation of Castile's new Andalusian fleet, based on the Guadalquivir at Seville and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and commanded by the thenceforth high-ranking royal official, the admiral (almirante) of Castile. On land Alfonso, already well-blooded in frontier fighting as his father Ferdinand III's lieutenant in the annexation of Andalusia and as himself the reconquistador of Murcia, clearly aimed at pursuing his father's goals in Spain and Africa. Beginning with reimposition of royal control over the rebellious Moslem towns below Seville of Jerez de la Frontera, Lebrija, Arcos de la Frontera, Medina Sidonia, and others, [434] and the pacification of parts of eastern Algarve which he returned to his son-in-law Afonso III of Portugal, the Castilian monarch went on in 1262 to annex the small Moorish kingdom of Niebla, and apparently the town of Cadiz also, although the latter may have previously acknowledged Fernandine suzerainty.

In 1260 Alfonso sent a crusading fleet to attack Atlantic Morocco, the first tentative counterblow to the Murâbit-Muwahhid invasions of Spain. After extensive preparations and with strong papal encouragement the Castilians sailed from Seville in September, surprised the port of Salé -- perhaps with some idea of striking thence towards Arzila or even Marrakesh, then still feebly held by a Muwahhid caliph -- and three weeks later returned laden with spoils and captives. While indubitably ephemeral, this African crusade of Alfonso X was no mere isolated venture: preceding by a decade king Louis IX of France's Tunisian crusade, it continued Ferdinand III's known interest in getting a foothold in Africa, embodied Castilian hopes, strong all through the thirteenth century, of carrying the reconquest to the principal enemy's homeland, and was the authentic forerunner of the landings by the Portuguese at Ceuta (1415) and by the Castilians themselves at Melilla (1497) and Oran (l505).⁽²⁰⁾

In 1264, with the encouragement of king Muhammad II of Granada (1273-1302), the Mudejars (or subjugated Moors of Andalusia and Murcia) rose in a formidable revolt against Castilian rule, but by 1266 they were finally suppressed, in Andalusia by Alfonso X, and in Murcia by his father-in-law, James I of Aragon, who then restored this territory to Castile. Many of these rebels were expelled to Granada or North Africa, their place being taken by Christian colonists.

Alfonso's reconquest record after this date is less impressive. After failing to prevent the hostile Granadans from repeatedly violating their truces and vassalage pacts with Castile, he was confronted in 1275 with the formation of a dangerous military alliance between Muhammad II of Granada and the Marînid ruler Ya'qûb ibn-'Abd-al-Haqq (1258-1286), under the terms of which, in return for promised early dispatch of his troops to Spain, the sultan received the cession of the extreme western zone of the Nasrid kingdom, comprising the fortified ports of Gibraltar, Algeciras, and Tarifa. This in effect reestablished African power in Spain, providing the bases required for landing troops and supplies for an Andalusian war against Castile; [435] and since, unlike their Murâbit and Muwahhid predecessors, the Marînids were no reformist zealots, it seems evident that Ya'qûb saw championship of a jihâd to recover the lost realms in al-Andalus primarily as a means of strengthening the somewhat precarious position of his dynasty against his Maghribin enemies. In any case, in 1275 and again in 1278, he proceeded to bring into the peninsula large African armies, the first seen there since Las Navas, armies which behaved with extraordinary ruthlessness; on both occasions Alfonso X, embroiled in succession problems, proved unable to halt the invaders. After he failed to capture Algeciras, at a time when his son, the infante Sancho, was raising most of the kingdom in revolt against him, the harassed Castilian monarch was actually driven in his last year to form a coalition with the caliph that permitted the Marînid warriors to stream through Seville northwards as far as Toledo, no doubt stirring grim recollections there of days when that city still served as Castile's bastion in the frontier wars of the Guadiana plains.

Sancho IV (1284-1295) faced the same Marînid-Granadan menace throughout his reign but much more successfully, for when Ya'qûb returned to Spain once more in 1285, put Jerez under siege, and captured Sanlúcar de Barrameda, thus shutting off Seville's access to the sea, the Castilian army drove back the enemy so decisively that the defeated sultan hastily returned to Fez. A peace, negotiated in 1285, was several times renewed, and this permitted Sancho IV to quell a new uprising of Alfonso and Ferdinand, the infantes de la Cerda, while never losing sight of plans to gain control of the strait. In 1291, when another Marînid war was imminent, Sancho concluded a new reconquest partition agreement with James II of Aragon, which for the first time envisaged the division of North Africa into Castilian and Aragonese zones, showing how firmly rooted was the concept of extending the Christian advance southward beyond the peninsula into the Maghrib itself. By the treaty of Monteagudo (November 29, 1291) the Moulouya river, which enters the Mediterranean not far from the present Moroccan-Algerian boundary, was taken as the dividing line, everything to the west falling in Castile's sphere of penetration and possible future conquest, all to the east in Aragon's. In 1292 the Castilians captured the fortified port of Tarifa, where king Sancho placed a strong garrison under the command of the magnate Alfonso Pérez de Guzmán, immortalized in Castilian annals as Guzmán the Good (el Bueno) for his refusal to surrender the fortress as the alternative to the execution of his son.

[436] Tarifa still held firm for Castile, as did Algeciras for the Marînids, when Sancho's death left the kingdom to the young Ferdinand IV (1295-1312). While the new ruler's capable mother Maria de Molina tried to fend off noble conspiracies on behalf of the infantes de la Cerda, James II of Aragon took the opportunity to seize, contrary to the treaties of Cazorla and Almizra, the old Moorish kingdom of Murcia. Although in 1304 he returned most of this to Castile, he was able to annex permanently to the Crown of Aragon its northern portion in the Vinalapó and Segura basins, with the cities of Alicante, Elche, and Orihuela, or roughly the modern province of Alicante. Castilian weakness during Ferdinand IV's minority also encouraged Muhammad II of Granada to try for Tarifa; his army sacked Quesada, defeated a Castilian force at Alcaudete, southwest of Jaen, and devastated the environs of Jaen itself, but the valiant Guzmán el Bueno once more held Tarifa safely for his king. The next Nasrid ruler, Muhammad III (1302-1309), was even more ambitious; although recognizing Castile's title to Tarifa in 1304, he showed himself highly belligerent toward Ferdinand IV throughout a reign that brought almost continuous war to Andalusia. In 1306 Muhammad, exploiting political disorders in Morocco, occupied Ceuta, another instance -- this time Moorish -- of peninsular ambitions in the Maghrib.

By 1309 all this had led to the formation of a Christian-Moorish triple alliance against Granada: first, Ferdinand IV and James II at Alcalá de Henares agreed upon a total reconquest and partition of the Nasrid kingdom, by which the Aragonese crown was to retain one-sixth of its area, comprising the city and kingdom of Almeria; then they were joined by the Marînid sultan 'Amir (1307-1308), who sought to recover Ceuta. This was a year filled with fighting: 'Amir quickly regained Ceuta and then switched to the Granadan side; Ferdinand IV's siege of Algeciras and James II's of Almeria both proved failures; and Guzmán el Bueno succeeded in taking Gibraltar for Castile, although not long thereafter he died while invading Granada. An uneasy peace was arranged in 1310, but Ferdinand IV was preparing for a new Granadan war when in 1312 death overtook him.

The reign of Alfonso XI of Castile (13 12-1350) also began with a long regency filled with factional disorders and civil wars, during which the young king's uncle, the infante Peter, acting as coregent with his grandmother Maria de Molina, twice took Christian armies to the gates of a Granada riven by civil war (1316-1317, 1319), and captured the border stronghold of Tiscar. But in the latter year the [437] Castilian army, under Peter and his uncle and coregent the infante John, was surprised in the Vega of Granada by troops of king Ismâ'îl I (1314-1325), and cut to pieces in a disastrous battle in which both princes died.

In 1325 Alfonso XI finally reached his majority and, rampant aristocratic violence notwithstanding, moved to avenge the defeat of 1319 by attacking Granada in 1327 and forcing Muhammad IV (1325-1333) to sue for peace. But in 1333 a combined Granadan-Marînid column retook Gibraltar from the Castilians, and this encouraged the sultan at Fez, 'Alî (1331-1351), to muster over the next several years a large Marînid army for crossing the strait and striking a major blow against Castilian Andalusia. The admiral of Castile, Jofre Tenorio, commanding a fleet into which a number of Catalan ships had been incorporated with the approval of Alfonso IV of Aragon (1327-1336), attempted to turn back the two hundred vessels of the Marînid expedition; in a spirited engagement off Gibraltar the Castilians were defeated and their admiral killed (1340).

This victory ensured Marînid control of the strait, so that in June 1340 'Alî and his ally king Yûsuf I of Granada (1333-1354) were able to concentrate large forces against Tarifa, where the garrison put up its traditional vigorous defense. At the same time, in October, Alfonso XI, along with king Afonso IV of Portugal (1325-1357), and supported at sea by an Aragonese-Catalan and Portuguese naval squadron, marched towards Tarifa with the royal hueste, which papal concession of a crusade bull had helped him to raise. Arriving near the city, the king slipped orders into Tarifa for the beleaguered garrison to sally forth and attack the Moslems during the coming battle. On October 30 the Christian army, much inferior in size to that of its foes, drew up in order of battle on the bank of the Salado river near Tarifa, and was soon in close combat with the Marînid-Granadan host. At the height of the fighting the Tarifa garrison, as planned, fell upon the Moslem rear; this proved decisive in winning for the Castilians the battle of the river Salado, the largest such encounter fought in the reconquest since Las Navas de Tolosa a century before.⁽²¹⁾

Although this victory is often taken as marking the end of Marînid ability to land large armies on Iberian soil, this was not immediately apparent. It was not until 1344, at the end of a two-year siege, that Algeciras finally capitulated, once Alfonso had defeated a relief army [438] of Maghribins and Granadans in the battle of the Palmones river (1343). The Castilian monarch moved next to recover Gibraltar, the last remaining African bridgehead; but internal conditions in his kingdom kept him from besieging the fortress of the Rock until 1349-1350, at which time he died in the plague that swept through his camp and made the campaign a failure. Nevertheless, Alfonso XI's victories and his capture of Algeciras did make virtually impossible further large-scale troop debarkations from Morocco. African auxiliaries would still appear in the future in the service of Granadan kings but the days of Berber dominion on peninsular soil were gone forever, and in its next phase the Castilian reconquest would center above all upon the continuing problem of the kingdom of Granada.

Castile so overshadows reconquest history from the mid-thirteenth century that it is important to recognize that both Portugal and Aragon-Catalonia also continued to participate in the pursuit of and to retain consciousness of the anti-Moorish war. The Portuguese, stimulated by the expanding trade of their western and southern coastal cities with Andalusia and the Maghrib, obliged to protect their merchant shipping against attack by Barbary pirates or war navies, and determined to secure a sphere of interest in western Morocco in an era when Castile and Aragon were partitioning the Maghrib at the line of the Moulouya without reference to Lisbon, never lost sight of reconquest goals. Portuguese knights in considerable number fought in the Castilian campaigns against the Marînids; king Afonso IV himself joined Alfonso XI for the crucial battle of the Salado; the Portuguese church, the military orders, the many exhortatory papal communications, stressed the urgency of the anti-Moorish effort; and it has been argued with some cogency that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when their peninsular frontier had closed, the Portuguese exhibited greater crusading fervor than ever before.

So too in Aragon-Catalonia reconquest values and objectives remained very much alive after 1250.⁽²²⁾ The rulers sought to acquire Murcia and at least eastern Granada, they deployed powerful war fleets against the Maghrib, and they repeatedly contributed indispensable ships and troops in anti-Marînid and anti-Granadan alliances with Castile. The already noted treaties of Monteagudo (1291) and Alcalá (1309), evincing James II's reconquest goals in Africa as in the [439] peninsula, attest the not always justly appreciated policy of this ruler, who in his long reign (1291-1327) helped materially to stabilize the whole peninsular confrontation with Islam during the series of Castihian minorities and civil wars that continued down to Alfonso XI's majority in 1325. Under James II the Aragonese crown's manifold ties with, above all, Hafsid Tunisia, but also with other Islamic states from Morocco to Egypt, reached their peak in exchanges of embassies, pacts of friendship and military assistance, recruitment of hardy Catalan border fighters, the famous almogàvers, for service in North African militias,⁽²³⁾ and the intensive commercial penetration of the Barcelonese mercantile community, which in return for Catalan textiles imported into Europe African grain and the gold, ivory, and spices transported from the Sudan by the trans-Saharan caravan trade. This was the period also of the plantation of Christian churches and missions in the Maghrib, the trend that so attracted the new mendicant orders, and stirred the imagination of that remarkable theoretician of the crusades and the reconquest, the Majorcan Raymond Lull (1232-1315), whose Liber de fine and other works envisage, on the one hand, coordination of an eastern and an Iberian assault upon Islam and, on the other, the peaceful conversion of North African Moslems through missionaries trained in the Arabic language and Islamic thought.⁽²⁴⁾

The period after 1350 often tends to be passed over as if it were of minimal significance in reconquest history.⁽²⁵⁾ In fact, it possesses high interest both in itself and as the historical connection between the anti-Moorish wars of Alfonso XI and those of the "Catholic Kings," Ferdinand and Isabella (los Reyes Católicos). The key fact explaining the astonishing prolongation of the reconquest to the end [440] of the Middle Ages is of course the stubborn survival of the kingdom of Granada.⁽²⁶⁾ Solidly ensconced in the Sierra Nevada and outlying ranges of the Baetic Cordillera, the Nasrid commonwealth was a formidable military nut to crack. Its interior could be reached only through a limited number of passes and twisting mountain roads, readily commanded by castles or walled towns and ideal for ambuscades. The few good harbors along its rockbound coast -- Malaga, Vélez-Málaga, Almeria -- gave no easy access to the interior. The relatively dense population, in part descended from refugees of previous fallbacks, possessed naturally warlike inclinations, hatred of the ancestral Christian enemy, a fierce love of independence, and a deep awareness that they were defending the last free Islamic homeland in the peninsula. Granada's rulers, usually capable or served by sagacious counselors, suffered constant harassment from dynastic and aristocratic factionalism and from recurrent uprisings in the Albaicín quarter of Granada city aimed at seizing the magnificent fortified palace of the Alhambra, but their armies generally managed to hold the long border against Castile and reduce Christian penetrations from the level of projected conquest to merely destructive raids.

Late medieval Castile long lacked the prerequisites for the conquest of this highly compartmentalized mountain massif which, as the ultimately successful ten-year Granadan war of Ferdinand and Isabella showed, demanded strong leadership and national persistence in the multiple campaigns and sieges of a costly war of attrition. Between Peter I (1350-1369) and Henry IV (1454-1474) a dismal succession of minorities, regencies, weak rulers, and spreading intra-aristocratic and anti-royal strife kept Castilian society in a state of constant civil violence and disorder, drastically weakening the monarchy's traditional authority, leadership, and ability to mobilize its military and financial resources or stir the popular enthusiasm necessary for the Granadan struggle. In consequence, for much of the time [441] after 1350 the Iberian reconquest, as a predominantly Castilian enterprise, assumed two main forms: a roughly stabilized confrontation along a Castilian-Granadan border zone of endemic petty hostilities, and an intermittent full-scale war bringing kings and armies into serious combat. Together these two modes of conflict come to be known as the Guerra de Granada or Guerra del Moro, centering on what chroniclers and official documents call la Frontera, the borderland of daring deeds, violence, raids, and depredations commemorated in Castilian story and heroic balladry (the romances fronterizos).

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Castile's reconquest frontier with Granada consisted of the southern districts of the former Moorish kingdoms of Seville, Cordova, and Jaen; the March (Adelantamiento) of Cazorla, controlled by the archbishops of Toledo; and the kingdom of Murcia. Not a line but a border zone, the frontier was the product of the fortuitous distribution of lands, castles, and towns held by each side in the mid-thirteenth century. After 1350 it began in the west just above Gibraltar (still in Moorish hands), and ran northward near Castellar de la Frontera and Jimena de la Frontera along the Serranía of Ronda to Morón de la Frontera. From there it continued eastward above Cañete la Real, Teba, and Antequera before turning northeastward again past Cambíl and Huelma (southeast of Jaen) to Quesada, whence it descended eastward past Huéscar toward the Mediterranean below Lorca, leaving Vélez Blanco, Vélez Rubio, Huércal-Overa, and Vera on the Granadan side.

Wardens (adelantados), frontier alcaldes,⁽²⁷⁾ and the garrisons of castles represented the royal authority on the frontier, but in large part defense against Moorish incursions or even major invasions rested with the so-called borderers (fronteros), the great Andalusian nobles such as the Guzmán dukes of Medina Sidonia, the Ponce de León marquises of Cadiz, and the counts of Cabra, Arcos, and the like. Their private armies of vassals and dependents joined the municipal militias and the knights of the military orders to hold the frontier, no matter how weak Castile's central government was.⁽²⁸⁾ But whenever, as intermittently occurred, the frontier's relative, uneasy peace broke down, either because one side had taken a castle or town by surprise, [442] inflicting damage too serious for the enemy to accept, or because Castile or Granada failed to renew the usual two- or three-year truce, then the reconquest became an active effort to weaken and ultimately to destroy the Granadan state through annual ravaging (tala) and progressive annexation of its towns and territories.

For really large campaigns the crown was heavily dependent upon the Andalusians and Murcians, whose principal cities -- Seville, Cordova, Jaen, Murcia, Lorca -- were the bases for all such frontier operations, and whose noble retinues, urban militias, and military commanderies made up the bulk of the royal army. Such troops for the most part were willing to serve only short terms while being fed and paid at royal expense; and aside from the knights of the military orders, and such Castilian, Portuguese, and Aragonese volunteers as came to fight the "infidel," it is often difficult to visualize an army like this as a crusading host, however much its members prized the spiritual privileges secured for them by the king in papal crusade bulls. On the other hand, at times the crusading spirit burned high, and served to attract a thin trickle of extra-peninsular crusaders who found their way in this epoch to the Granadan frontier, like Sir James Douglas and other Scottish nobles who, while transporting the heart of king Robert Bruce for burial in Jerusalem, died in Spain in 1330 fighting the Moors; or Chaucer's knight, who presumably fought with Alfonso XI in 1344: "in Gernade [Granada] at the seege eek hadde he be/of Algezir [Algeciras] and riden in Belmarye [Banû Marîn, Morocco? Marînid Andalusia?]." Castilian and foreign knights brought to this war, as indeed the Granadan Moors did also, much of the pageantry, color, and chivalric mores of late medieval aristocratic life: contemporary narratives abound in vivid scenes of military drama and heroism in this stage of the reconquest.

Warfare on the Granadan frontier, as the infante John Manuel points out in the illuminating military science sections of his Libro de los estados (written 1327-1332), differed in important respects from that fought by Castile against Christian enemies.⁽²⁹⁾ This he attributes in part to the special difficulties created by the very broken terrain, long waterless stretches, and scant foraging possibilities of the Granadan kingdom, in part to the fact that the Moors, shunning armor, continued to depend upon highly mobile light [443] cavalry (jinetes) and infantry in an essentially guerrilla-type war. The Granadans commonly avoided engagements with the heavy Castilian armored horse in its closed battle formations; when such encounters occurred, they used their traditional tactics of the torna fuye, making feigned or real thrusts (puntas) of wildly shouting horsemen against the Christian ranks to throw them into panic or disorder. Of course, ever since the twelfth century the Castilians had also possessed jinetes, riding in light saddles with short stirrups, and frontier conditions in Andalusia reinforced the indispensability of such troops as well as of the heavy cavalry.

Although it was apparently the Granadan Moors who in the mid-fourteenth century first introduced gunpowder into the reconquest, the Christians quickly discovered its utility for mines, wall-breachings, and cannon, so that the Castilian army's train came to include lombards and other artillery along with the older siege engines. In sieges Christian superiority was great; and on the battlefield the dense bodies of Castilian armored horse and well-equipped infantry were rarely defeated in regular combat. But for both sides so much of the war of Granada was fought off the battlefields, in cavalry raids, in the destruction of crops, livestock, and villages, and in surprises, ambuscades, and small-scale melees, that Moorish inferiority in numbers or materiel counted less and the fortunes of war were more equal than might be supposed.
 

It is against this background of the Granadan frontier, and the abiding consciousness in the minds of the Castilian people of the reconquest as an ultimate objective, that the reigns of the six kings between Alfonso XI and Ferdinand and Isabella prove more significant for reconquest history than is often recognized. To be sure, under Peter I (1350-1369), dubbed by his enemies "the Cruel" and accused of undue pro-Moorish and pro-Jewish sympathies, a coalition of rebel Castilians and of French barons drawn to Castile by the expansion of the Hundred Years' War below the Pyrenees, and seeking to depose the king in favor of his illegitimate half-brother, count Henry of Trastámara, kept the kingdom in an uproar until Peter's defeat and murder. This gave the throne to the new Trastámara dynasty, but neither in Henry II's time (1369-1379) nor during the long minority and weak rule of John I (1379-1390), was there much interest in Granada except for renewal of truces.

The same paralysis marks the first decade of Henry III's reign (1390-1406), so that between 1350 and 1400 the reconquest, at least on the part of the crown, can be said to have reached its nadir [444] for the entire period since 1095. Yet at the opening of the fifteenth century the pattern abruptly changed when midway through his reign Henry III displayed clear signs of an intention to resume the reconquest on a scale unknown since Alfonso XI. The causes of this new offensive policy have been little studied, but surely they include Henry's own crusading proclivities, the even stronger convictions of his brother, the infante Ferdinand, increased royal military strength due to the new system of annual musters ordered by the Cortes of Guadalajara in 1390, and the intensifying social and religious tensions throughout Castile in the epoch of the Great Schism and the conciliar movement, which found expression in the drive to substitute uniformity of belief for traditional peninsular tri-fideism, the spread of Observantism in the monastic orders, the popular preaching of Vincent Ferrer and other mendicants, and the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1391. No doubt also the landing of the Portuguese at Ceuta (1415), carrying the reconquest into Morocco, aroused the Castilian monarchy to renewed consideration of its own Granadan and African expansionist possibilities. Finally, by 1400 there seems also to have been increased Granadan bellicosity; whether this was caused by a royal shunting of Nasrid faction-torn nobility into a common anti-Christian enterprise or by a reaction to growing Castilian pressures, remains unclear. In 1401, a large Moorish algara crossed the border; five years later king Muhammad VII invaded Murcia and Jaen, in violation of the prevailing truce, but his troops were repulsed at Vera, Lorca, and Caravaca. In Andalusia, however, they took Ayamonte, near Setenil, and ravaged widely until the adelantado de la frontera Peter Manrique defeated them near Quesada in the battle of Los Collejares (October 1406).

In 1406, therefore, the Cortes of Castile at Toledo supported Henry III's proposal for a Granadan war, but the king's grave illness and early death meant that the leadership of this project and the regency for the young John II (1406-1454) passed into the hands of the infante Ferdinand.⁽³⁰⁾ The scope of the revived reconquest is noteworthy: the Cortes promised a grant (servicio) of 45,000,000 maravedís, on condition that it be matched by a similar amount from the royal treasury; these funds were to be used for commissioning a naval squadron of thirty galleys and other ships to patrol the Granadan coast, and for raising an army optimistically set at four thousand Castilian and fifteen hundred Andalusian horse, sixteen thousand lances, fifty thousand foot, and sufficient artillery.

[445] With violence flaming along the frontier as both sides sensed the approach of a general conflict, Ferdinand marched south towards the Serranía of Ronda while the Granadans attacked Lucena in order to draw him back. Nasrid hopes of obtaining supplies from North Africa were cut short when on August 26, 1406, the Castilian fleet defeated the Marînid navy. By September the Castilian army, carrying in its midst the crusading sword of St. Ferdinand III, moved in the direction of Ronda, and stormed the frontier strongpoint of Zahara; but after this achievement the reluctance of the nobles to tackle a long Rondan siege with winter approaching led the infante to substitute the smaller but strategically valuable town of Setenil. This siege, however, during which detachments of the army recovered Ayamonte and gained Cañete la Real, Priego, and other places, proved unsuccessful, and on October 25, 1407, it had to be abandoned, in part, perhaps, because of aristocratic recalcitrance.

Undaunted, Ferdinand all through 1408 and 1409 made careful preparations for a second campaign in the Granadan west, possibly aimed at Ronda or Malaga as an ultimate objective, but having for its secret immediate target the border fortress-city of Antequera, which dominated the Guadalhorce valley. Once again the royal hueste, with its long train of siege engines and artillery, rolled across the frontier in the spring of 1410, surrounding Antequera, setting up five great encampments (reales) on various sides of the town, and seizing control of the nearby sierras and the routes to Granada city. King Yûsuf III (1408-1417) sent a large army of relief under his brothers Sîdî 'Alî and Sîdî Ahmad, but the Castilians repulsed this decisively in the battle of Boca del Asno and proceeded to tighten the siege through ever greater use of catapults and cannon, a huge movable tower (bastida), and attempts at escalading, notwithstanding the ferocious resistance of the embattled Antequerans. A big assault in late June was thrown back with heavy Castilian casualties, but the isolated defenders were gradually worn down, and a new all-out attack commencing on September 16 forced them to capitulate within a week, giving to the weary Castilians their most important reconquest victory since Alfonso XI's capture of Algeciras in 1344, and to Ferdinand the proud sobriquet "of Antequera."

The Antequeran campaign was the infante's last anti-Moorish enterprise; in 1412 by the famed Compromise of Caspe he became king of Aragon and left Castile. As a reconquistador Ferdinand of Antequera's name is unquestionably the most important between Alfonso XI and the Catholic Kings for three reasons: his campaigns of 1407 and 1410 revived the reconquest spirit in Castile; at Antequera he [446] brought about the first really major change of the frontier in Castile's favor since Algeciras; and his strategy of attacking the Nasrids in the west so as to cut off the Ronda and Malaga sectors before closing in on Granada city was the one eventually adopted by Ferdinand and Isabella.

The infante's departure for his eastern throne, leaving the Castile of John II to fall under the sway of the powerful magnate Alvaro de Luna, led to some years of uneasy peace, but in 1430 the monarchy resumed the war against Granada. After a Castilian contingent had seized Jimena de la Frontera above Gibraltar (1431), drawing Granadan attention to the west, Alvaro de Luna invaded the Vega of Granada; here he and the king fought and won the modest battle of La Higueruela, just outside the capital (July 1, 1431). Thereafter it was left to the men of the frontier to press the attack: in Murcia the adelantado