Another aspect to highlight is its meaning in context Spanish and European. Not in vain did it have the character of a crusade, and as such it had papal support and the participation of troops from beyond the Pyrenees, who were known as the ultramontane . For this reason, although it compromised the main peninsular Christian kingdoms, it was a company that transcended the Hispanic to become a clash between civilizations.
Today, the process of the Reconquest is questioned, if not denied, from various sectors of history, culture in general or even from politics. The most important arguments are four:its discontinuous nature, the lack of political unity among all the Christian kingdoms on the peninsula, the absence of a distinct identity of the Christian kingdoms against Islam , and the absence of explicit references to a clear enterprise of reconquest. However, the very nature of everything that surrounds Las Navas de Tolosa makes this fact proof to the contrary.
In effect, and simplifying a lot, even in contemporary conflicts of great depth such as the Second World War, we do not witness a continuous daily battle, but the intermittent celebration of campaigns; and as such, the successive wars that build the Reconquest could be identified, since they all focus on the recovery of the Christian space that was the Hispanic-Gothic Hispania. Secondly, even though there is no political unity, more typical of modern states and, therefore, unthinkable in a space of fragmentation of political power such as medieval Europe, it is undeniable that the political ties that unite the Lord of Biscay or the council militias with King Alfonso VIII are the basis that allows the king to give cohesion to an army. Thirdly, in Las Navas we see how the Christian identity, as opposed to the Islamic identity of the Almohad army, is the mortar of such a diverse army. Finally, there is no explicit denial from the company either, and yet the sources make it clear that it is a campaign that is part of something larger.(1)
The contenders on the Christian side formed a coalition led by Alfonso VIII of Castile, who was joined by Pedro II of Aragon and Sancho VII of Navarra . Together with the Castilian king, Don Diego López de Haro, Lord of Vizcaya, and Arnau Amalric, Archbishop of Narbonne, at the head of the ultramontane crusaders (Pope Innocent III had proclaimed the crusade), mostly French. The council militias, the military orders, the Leonese and Portuguese volunteers, the royal retinues of the three monarchs... ended up making up an astonishingly large army for its time, which Carlos Vara estimates between 33,300 and 49,950 men (each lance, the unit basic tactic, it was made up of a knight, a squire, a page, and two pawns).(2) For the Almohad army of An-Nasir, González Simancas calculates around 50,000 following the same calculation system.(3)
The shepherd of Las Navas de Tolosa
The Almohads they knew that the Christian army was advancing towards the south, in response to the defeat they had inflicted on it both in the battle of Alarcos (1195) and in the capture of the Calatravo castle of Salvatierra (1211), and for this reason they had to stop the advance of a such a large number of troops. For this they used the characteristics of the land in their favor. Carlos Vara himself describes how the chronicle of Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada,(4) adviser to King Alfonso and probably the intellectual architect of the Christian campaign, perfectly describes the itinerary followed by the Christians from Toledo . The natural path saved the passage from the plateau to the Guadalquivir valley through the Muradal pass. The abruptness of the relief caused a narrowing at a specific point, called the Losa pass, a narrowness that was closed by the Almohads, preventing the passage of the Christian hosts, and thus causing a problem that was difficult to solve.
This is where the protagonist of our story appears, whom Jiménez de Rada describes as a “local man, very disheveled in his clothes and person, who long ago had kept cattle in those mountains”.(5) He is a mysterious character, who according to different sources is sometimes a shepherd(6) and sometimes a hunter. In any case, he was a man who knew those borderlands, and showed an alternative path (an old Roman road) by which the Christian army could overcome this stumbling block, following what has since been known as Puerto del Rey, which led them to the plateau known as the King's Table, easily visible from the Navas de Tolosa Battle Interpretation Center in Santa Elena (Jaén), the place where the Christian camp would be planted and from where the attack against the Almohad army.
The providential appearance of this shepherd allowed the success of the Castilian king, and was soon the subject of different interpretations, as it could not be otherwise in the medieval mind. Jiménez de Rada himself mentions that God sent him. It is not surprising that, following the medieval tradition, he came to be identified with Saint Isidro, implying a divine intervention in the Christian victory, as happened with Santiago in the battle of Clavijo.
Already in the 16th century, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo states for the first time that he is Martín Alhaja or Halaja, and that he used the skull of a cow to indicate the path to the King Alfonso. From here would derive the well-known lineage of the Cabeza de Vaca:
Be that as it may, there are many interpretations that can be made of this legendary character. Shepherd, hunter or bandit, Castilian or late Mozarabic, frontiersman in any case, Martín Alhaja or Martín el Malo, the shepherd of Las Navas de Tolosa he changed the course of events, becoming another anonymous protagonist of the story. In 1987, the Norwegian director Nils Gaup released the film Pathfinder, the guide to the gorge , in which the protagonist frees his village from a Viking attack. The story of the pastor de las Navas could open the doors to the shooting of an epic film about our own hero of the gorge, in which the protagonist managed to open the doors to the most significant advance in the reconquest process, which would culminate more than 250 years later with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom of the peninsula, in the hands of the Catholic Monarchs.
Notes
(1). Probably the greatest expert on Las Navas de Tolosa is Carlos Vara Thorbeck, from whose doctoral thesis his essay “Las Navas de Tolosa” (Editorial Edhasa, Barcelona, 2012).
(2). These total figures respond to the participation of some 12,500 knights, according to Carlos Vara (op. cit., p. 347).
(3). Collected by Carlos Vara (op. cit., p. 354).
(4).Jiménez de Rada:“The facts of the history of Spain”. Alliance, Madrid, 1989.
(5).Vara (op. Cit., p. 295).
(6).Ibid. Page 295. In the Latin Chronicle he also appears as a shepherd, as well as in the Bishop of Tuy version.
(7).Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo:”Royal Catalog of Castile (1532)”, pp. 430-431, transcribed by Evelia Ana Romano de Thuesen.