Definition of Battle of Navas de Tolosa
Miscellanea / / July 04, 2021
By Florencia Ucha, in Dec. 2013
In history it was called with the term of crusades to those military campaigns that the Papacy would promote and which practice Christian nations of Europe and whose special mission was to reestablish Christianity's control over the territory holy. These confrontations mostly lasted almost two hundred years, while other campaigns that would take place in Spain and Eastern Europe and which would only end in the 15th century, they were also named in the same way and were intended to reestablish Catholic hegemony.
Meanwhile, their common objective has been the Muslims and all those enemies of the Popes.
Meanwhile, the Battle of the Navas de Tolosa It was a very important warlike confrontation that took place in the century XIII and that faced, on the one hand, several allied Catholic Spanish kingdoms, Castile, Aragon and Navarre, the kingdom of Portugal, French and Leonese volunteers and military orders, institutions religious military that arose at the time of the Crusades, against the
Empire Almohad, a Moroccan dynasty that would dominate the north of theAfricaand the south of the Iberian Peninsula between 1147 and 1269.The triumph would be for the Christian forces and the defeat obviously for the Arabs. The victory for the allies would have a special flavor since it occurred in a minority of forces.
The aforementioned crusade would be promoted by King Alfonso VIII, the Archbishop of Toledo Rodríguez Ximéne de Rada and Pope Innocent IIIand was destined to fight the Almohad dynasty, a population Muslim that dominated the region called Al-Andalus.
The battle took place on the day July 16, 1212 but it had started a long time before, when King Alfonso had been defeated by the Muslims in the battle of Alarcos and that ended by to run the border up to the Montes de Toledo, certainly threatening the city of Toledo. Meanwhile, when the king learned that the Almohads were planning a new offensive, he organized alliances and confronted the forces that led the Caliph Muhammad al-Násir.
It should be noted that this battle has a very special space in the history of the crusades and the reconquest. of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christian kingdoms, since the victory undoubtedly marked the beginning of the end of the domination Muslim in the region.
Themes in Battle of Navas de Tolosa