The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa

In Safar 609 AH (July 1212 CE), on a high pass of the Sierra Morena in southern Iberia, the field army of the Almohad empire was broken by a combined Christian coalition, in the battle the Christians call Las Navas de Tolosa and the Muslims call al-Iqab. The Almohads, the Berber reform empire that ruled the Maghrib and al-Andalus, had pressed hard against the Christian kingdoms of the north, and the caliph Muhammad al-Nasir gathered a great army to meet them. Against him the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre set aside their rivalries and joined into a single host, reinforced by crusaders from beyond the Pyrenees, in a crusade preached against al-Andalus. The two armies met in the pass, and after a hard fight the Almohad line broke and the caliph fled; the defeat shattered the Almohad field army and, with it, the empire's grip on Iberia. The Almohads fell into decline and civil war in the years that followed, and the balance of the peninsula tilted decisively toward the Christian north. Within a generation the great cities of al-Andalus would fall, Cordoba in 633 AH (1236) and Seville in 646 AH (1248), leaving only the Nasrid kingdom of Granada as the last Muslim state in Spain. Las Navas is thus remembered as the hinge of the Reconquista, the day after which the long Muslim presence in Iberia began its final retreat. The battle is recorded by the Maghribi historians Ibn Idhari and al-Marrakushi and, from the other side, by the Latin chronicle of Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, who was present. This scene depicts the field rather than the slaughter: the rocky pass of the Sierra Morena, the Almohad host with the caliph's enclosure at its centre, and the Christian coalition arrayed under the cross, on the day the fate of Muslim Spain turned.