Eight hundred and nine years since Las Navas de Tolosa. Historian Raymond Ibrahim gives us the details:
“Then we,” Alfonso continues, “realizing that the fighting was becoming impossible for them [retreating Spaniards], started a cavalry charge, the cross of the Lord going before [us] and our banner with its image of the holy Virgin and her Son imposed upon our device.” They fought valiantly, but the Africans continued to close in on them.
Then something of a miracle happened: “Since we had already resolved to die for the faith of Christ, as soon as we witnessed . . . the Saracens” attacking the cross and icons “with stones and arrows,” the furious crusaders “broke their line with their vast numbers of men, even though the Saracens resisted bravely in the battle, and stood solidly around their lord.”
Christians in the rear saw the cross appear as if miraculously and remain aloft behind enemy lines. Inspired beyond hope, the native sons of Spain broke through the Muslim center, slaughtering “a great multitude of them with the sword of the cross.” Sancho VII, the giant king of Navarre, followed by his men, was first to bulldoze through and rout the African slave soldiers chained around the caliph’s tent.
Instantly mounting a horse, Muhammad “turned tail and fled. His men were killed and slaughtered in droves, and the site of the camp and the tents of the Moors became the tombs of the fallen…. In this way the battle of the Lord was triumphantly won, by God alone and through God alone,” concluded the victorious king, Alfonso VIII of Castile.
Las Navas de Tolosa was seen as a miracle by pope and peasant. Not only was the full might of the hitherto unbeatable Almohad caliphate decimated; but whereas tens of thousands of Muslims died, only some two thousand Christians—mostly the warrior-monks of the military orders who were always wherever fighting was thickest—perished.
More importantly, it ushered in the liberation of Spain from Islam, as Muslim kingdoms in southern Spain came to fall one by one to the sword of the Reconquista, so that, by 1248, only the remote kingdom of Granada, at the southernmost tip of Spain, remained to Islam—and it was a tributary of Castile.
Indeed, as an indicator of the importance of the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, for centuries thereafter, July 16 was celebrated as the “Triumph of the Holy Cross” in the Spanish calendar, until, that is, Second Vatican abolished it—in keeping with the spirit of the new age of forgetfulness.
Go here to read the rest. For those who fervently believe in Christ, no matter the odds, they never fight alone.
