The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait Sam Zeno Conedera Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011) vii + 376 pp. In 2003, Joseph O’Callaghan made an important scholarly contribution with the publication of Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. While his latest book picks up where Reconquest left off chronologically, it is significant that [End Page 248] The Gibraltar Crusade is not presented as a second volume in a series. It mostly steers clear of the debate over Reconquest and crusade, opting instead for a straightforward narrative of the battle for the Strait between 1248 and the death of Alfonso XI. Gibraltar is divided into eleven chapters. The first describes the geography of the Strait, gives a brief synopsis of major events prior to 1248, and identifies the main sources that the author has used. The next eight chapters proceed chronologically through the back-and-forth contest for control of the Pillars of Hercules. The book is rounded out with a thematic chapter on the waging of the crusade in general, and a conclusion that very briefly describes the final Christian victory over the Strait in the age of the Catholic Monarchs. The conclusion may indicate that O’Callaghan does not intend to write another monograph on Reconquest and crusade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Gibraltar displays all the hallmarks of the scholarship that has made O’Callaghan one of the great historians of medieval Iberia. His masterful command of the sources allows him to put together a clear and detailed account of events. One particular area of strength is the attention to numbers. O’Callaghan offers the best approximation of how many troops participated in campaigns, the cost of expeditions, and so forth. Obtaining reliable numbers is a difficult task thanks to the exaggeration of contemporary chronicles, but O’Callaghan is meticulous in his calculations. The reader learns, for example, that the Battle of Salado, though much less well known than Las Navas de Tolosa, was not only decisive for the war of the Strait, but was also the largest battle ever fought in medieval Iberia in terms of troop participation (188). There is no lack of colorful episodes during a century of war. O’Callaghan revisits the tragic story of Alfonso X’s decline and humiliation, about which he had written at greater length in his biography of the Learned King. Readers will enjoy the tale of Robert Bruce’s posthumous participation in the siege of Teba in 1330. Sir James Douglas, on his way to the Holy Land to bury the Bruce’s heart, was persuaded to participate in the Iberian crusade. The Scottish historian John Barbour tells us that Douglas flung the silver casket containing the heart at the Moorish armies before going into battle after it, ultimately to his own death (279). There is also the case of Alfonso Pérez de Guzmán, who earned the sobriquet of el Bueno for his defense of Tarifa. When his son was captured and threatened with death, Guzmán threw down a knife from the city walls, in case the captors needed a weapon with which to do the deed. A frequently forgotten detail of this episode is that it was not the Moors who executed the boy, but the rebel Infante Juan (107). Guzmán himself, before his heroics at Tarifa, had once been in the service of the Marinid emir (258). The habit of making alliances across religious lines, a practice that was documented in Reconquest, remained alive and well in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In writing such a thorough yet concise and readable account of the oft-neglected post-1248 Reconquest, O’Callaghan has done an important service to the field. I have the feeling, however, that something is missing from Gibraltar. O’Callaghan offers little sense of how ideology or the social reality of chivalry changed during the period, nor how such changes were relevant to the battle for the Strait. To be fair, he does not altogether neglect the theoretical questions [End Page 249] that were more prominent in his...