The most gentle gentleman and great ally of Castilla against the pillows |News La Tribuna de Ciudad Real
Of the three kings who led the decisive charge in the crucial battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, the one who has been most obscured in history has been the young, loyal and reckless king of Aragon. However, if there was someone whose loyalty and friendship was decisive for the beleaguered Castile in its fight against the terrible Almohad empire, it was none other than Pedro II of Aragon. He was the one who helped the already mature Castilian king Alfonso VIII to endure the worst moments of tribulation that had begun with his defeat in Alarcos (1195) and which reached their point of maximum difficulty when the caliph Al Nasir attacked the border in the year 1211 taking the Calatravian castle of Salvatierra. Aragon, with Pedro II, was always by his side, he never failed him, as a good son of Queen Sancha, aunt of the Castilian king, and of Alfonso II, a great king who, like him, united the county of Barcelona to the Aragonese crown. and the Occitan lands on the other side of the Pyrenees. The defense of his Cathar subjects against the latter would ultimately cost Pedro his life against the crusaders of Simón de Monfort. Precisely to him, who carried the nickname of El Católico. But that he put his duties towards his vassals ahead of everything else.
In the assault on the palenque of the Almohad caliph Al Nasir, the impetuous Pedro had already suffered a spear to the side that could end his life. His chain mail managed to stop the edge of the Muslim steel that July 16, 1212 in Las Navas but he could not stop the crusader's spear just a year later, on September 13, 1213, in the battle of Muret.
Pedro II of Aragon was born in Huesca in the year 1178 and in addition to being educated with his brother Alfonso, later heir to Provence, in the values that every Christian king of the time should have, he was imbued with the chivalrous spirit and transcendent of the military orders, in his case especially that of the Temple. Knighted by his father when he turned 10 in the monastery of Sigena in 1188, he succeeded him only eight years later, at 18 as King of Aragon, Count of Barcelona and with extensive properties in French Occitania to which he later added some more after his marriage to María de Monpelier. His brother Alfonso received Provence and his sisters married very well. Constanza first with Aymerich of Hungary and when she became a widow with Frederick II of Sicily, later Holy Roman Emperor. Leonor with Count Ramón VI of Tolosa and Sancha, with Ramón VII his son. Two brothers entered religion. Dolca in the monastery of Sigena of which the king was prodigal protector and Fernando as abbot in Montearagón. Don Pedro, something very unusual, in the case of borders and kings, had the best and most fraternal treatment with all of them.
The most gentle knight and great ally of Castile against the Almohads - Photo: jmmj According to his father's will, the young king remained in the custody, until he turned 20, of his mother Dona Sancha de Castilla, with whom he had always a special relationship that was beneficial and balsamic above all in relations with the then troubled Castilian king Alfonso VIII. This, his nephew, was being harassed after Alarcos not only by the Almohads but by the king of León, also his uncle, Fernando and by the king of Navarra who established alliances and even received support from African troops. Pedro II already in that same year in which he occupied the throne, after resolving some minor disputes and fixing their borders by mutual agreement, established a pact with the Castilian to which both would always be faithful and that would even transcend them and their heirs would continue. His sons, and between them they managed to keep the triumphant Almohads at bay and stop the ambitions and attacks of, above all, the King of Leon. The crown of Aragon, since the time of Sancho Ramírez, had a particular relationship with the Papacy, since this monarch had enfeuded his kingdom to the Vatican and had placed it under the protection of Saint Peter (1068) a century and a half later and traveled to Rome with a spectacular entourage to be crowned by the great Innocent III on November 11, 1204 in a spectacular ceremony with full cardinals and bishops held in the Transtebere where the pontiff imposed the royal insignia on him and he swore vassalage and fidelity to the Holy Campus. In the end, and to defend his vassals, he would have to face him.
King Pedro was a young king and a gentle knight, very well served by ladies, by the way, since from a very young age he had great liking for them and they had it for him, just as he had it for music and music. evening evenings accompanied by minstrels, songs and wine. But that he did not want to get married and he resisted it until the same year that the Roman ceremony took place and only as a result of the pressure that urged him to do so and procreate an heir, he did it with María de Monpelier, who already came from two other , and to which from the beginning he paid so little attention that legend has it that in order to conceive he had to pose as one of the many ladies who ended up sharing his bed and to which Monpelier was never invited. Pedro II even wanted to repudiate her and annul her marriage to marry María Monferrato, who he liked much more and was the heiress of the only existing kingdom of Jerusalem in the Crusader dream.
Peninsular affairs were dealt with by Pedro II with the greatest of skill and he obtained his greatest triumph in it. When Al Nasir, who threatened to water his horses in the fountains of Rome, launched the attack in 1211, it was he, helped by the son of Alfonso VIII, the prematurely deceased that same year, Infante Fernando, who convinced the Castilian not to go to the pitched battle against such superior forces, stay crouched in the mountains of Avila, while the Miramamolin besieged Salvatierra and wait for the following year to be able to gather all possible support and then they will be the ones to launch, with the Crusade proclaimed by Inocencio in the middle III, to the attack. A bet that, despite having been about to become a disaster, disaffection of the Frankish crusaders, blocked the Losa gorge and the moment in the battle in which defeat could have been the result, ended up being so successful and definitive that It would tip the balance on the Christian side forever and in the end it would mean the end of Al-Andalus as it had been until then and assumed to be a lethal threat. Las Navas would mean, in addition to the triumph and prestige that resonated throughout Europe, an immense loot that served the Aragonese to fill his coffers that were not only empty but also full of holes and debts. Alfonso VIII was very generous with him and even gave him as a gift, shared with King Sancho el Fuerte de Navarra, the shops and great goods in jewellery, furnishings and silks that were in the palenque of the defeated caliph.
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A blow to the kingdom
But it would not be any of the two loyal friends, don Alfonso de Castilla and don Pedro de Aragón, who would exploit their triumph and culminate their efforts against Islam. If the first one died just two years later, his young ally would still do it earlier, since it would be the following year when death would be waiting for him in Muret. They would have to be the grandson of the first, Fernando III el Santo and the son of the second, Jaime I the Conqueror, related again and also firm allies in turn, who finished off his work.
King Pedro II was ultimately forced to intervene in defense of his vassals on the other side of the Pyrenees, because taking advantage of the excuse of the Cathars, the Capetian monarchy undertook a campaign that Pope Innocent III blessed as a crusade, even though he had been the one who crowned him, in order to put an end to the Albigensian heresy and that what he sought was to annex the entire region of the French Midi. Luck was adverse to the gentile king, he fought with bravery, daring and recklessness, he went in the vanguard with his troops and ended up being isolated and in the middle of a powerful group of French knights, although gossips also say that that night, according to As usual, he had not used it to rest and sleep, but rather in more pleasant tasks, and perhaps for all of this he succumbed to the lances of Simón de Monfort and, when he fell, Aragon fell defeated. His corpse was collected by the knights of the Hospital de San Juan and taken to his convent home in nearby Toulouse. From there, four years later, his son Jaime would obtain authorization from the new pope, Honorio II, to transfer them to the San Juan monastery of Sigena, which he had favored so much and in which his mother Dona Sancha, who had been its founder, and her sister Dolca rested in which he had professed.
The defeat was also a very hard blow for the kingdom, because in addition to the defeat, the heir, just a child, Jaime, born in Monpelier, was left in the hands of Simón de Monfort, as the result of previous negotiations and even an agreement later broken, of a marriage when the time came for this with the daughter of the Frenchman, he was in his city and fiefdom of Carcassonne.
Pope Innocent III, to a certain extent shocked by the death of someone who, even having faced him, held him in great esteem, intervened decisively at the request of the Aragonese and Catalan nobility who demanded that Monfort return the heir. Through a bull, the pontiff demanded the immediate return of the young Jaime, something he achieved, being handed over in Narbonne in April 1214 to a delegation of Aragonese nobles headed by the Master of the Temple in Aragon, Guillem de Montredón, who took charge of his guardianship and his education, since he was just a child, in the Templar castle of Monzón. But before, in Lleida, the solemn act took place in which the joint courts of the kingdom of Aragon and the county of Barcelona swore him in as king, the one who would be Jaime I the Conqueror and would become one of the most powerful and remembered monarchs not only of his kingdom but of the entire history of Spain and who, according to his writings, maintained a strong devotion and pride for his father, remembering that he was the son of the victor of Las Navas de Tolosa.
