On 30 October 1340 Alfonso XI of Castile and Afonso IV of Portugal destroyed the army of the Marinid sultan Abu al-Hasan Ali and Yusuf I of Granada beside the Salado near Tarifa, ending the last great African invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and handing control of the Strait of Gibraltar to the Christian kingdoms.
The Battle of Río Salado, fought on 30 October 1340 on a stream between Tarifa and the sea, is the battle that closed the Strait of Gibraltar. For sixty years the Marinid sultans of Fez had been landing armies in Spain, propping up Granada and fighting for the ports on both sides of the crossing; in 1340 Abu al-Hasan Ali brought over the largest of them and besieged Tarifa. Alfonso XI of Castile and his father-in-law Afonso IV of Portugal marched to relieve it, and in about three hours destroyed the sultan’s army and plundered his camp.
The victory is remembered in both kingdoms as a rescue, and the alarm had been real: a Castilian fleet had already been annihilated in the strait that April, leaving the crossing open. But the point of Salado is what it ended rather than what it saved. No North African army ever invaded the Iberian Peninsula again. The war with Granada went on for another century and a half, and Granada fell in 1492 to Castilian armies rather than to anything decided in 1340 — what stopped in 1340 was the African intervention that had kept al-Andalus alive since the eleventh century.
Control of the crossing was the whole strategic question of fourteenth-century Iberia. Whoever held Tarifa, Algeciras and Gibraltar controlled whether African troops could reach Spain, and the Marinids had spent two generations buying and fighting their way into those ports. Abu al-Hasan came to the throne in 1331 and pushed the policy hardest: he sent 5,000 men to Algeciras in 1333 who helped Granada take Gibraltar from Castile in under two months, and then began assembling in Morocco the army that would reverse the previous century’s Christian gains outright.
The naval war came first, and Castile lost it. On 8 April 1340 the Castilian fleet under Admiral Alfonso Jofre Tenorio met a larger Marinid force off Gibraltar at Getares; Tenorio was killed, twenty-eight galleys and seven naos were taken, and only a handful of ships escaped to Cartagena. Abu al-Hasan crossed on 14 August with the strait effectively his, ferried troops and supplies over all summer, and formally invested Tarifa on 22 September with Yusuf I of Granada beside him.
Alfonso XI needed Portugal, and Portugal had every reason to refuse him. His queen was Maria, Afonso IV’s daughter, and he had humiliated her for years in favour of his mistress Leonor de Guzmán, by whom he had the sons who would eventually tear Castile apart. When Maria was sent to plead with her father, Afonso IV sent back word that if the King of Castile wanted help he could ask for it himself. Alfonso swallowed it and wrote the letter, and the Portuguese came.
What Portugal contributed was partly naval and decisive. Afonso IV sent a fleet under Manuel Pessanha, the Genoese-descended Admiral of Portugal, and paid for fifteen Genoese galleys under Gil Bocanegra; twenty-seven more ships were finished in a hurry at Seville, and an Aragonese squadron joined them. By October these squadrons were in the strait in force. That mattered because of the mistake Abu al-Hasan had already made: assuming Castile could not rebuild a fleet for months, and wanting to save the expense of maintaining his own, he had laid up most of his galleys and sent his allies’ home, keeping only twelve at Algeciras. His army besieging Tarifa depended on supplies from Morocco, and the sea route was now cut.
Alfonso XI left Seville on 15 October and joined Afonso IV the next day; on 26 October the combined army crossed into enemy country, and on the 29th it halted at Peña del Ciervo, five miles from Tarifa, with a valley and the streams of La Jara and the Salado between it and the enemy. The council of war divided the work: the Castilians would go for the sultan, the Portuguese — reinforced with 3,000 Castilian knights and the military orders of Alcántara and Calatrava — would take Yusuf I. That night Alfonso slipped 1,000 horse and 4,000 foot past the Marinid screen and into Tarifa. The officer commanding the covering light cavalry reported that nothing had got through. Whether he was lying to save himself or genuinely believed it is not recoverable, but the sultan went into the battle thinking his camp was safe.
They attacked at nine in the morning on 30 October. Abu al-Hasan had left the Jara crossing open but held the Salado hard, and Juan Núñez de Lara’s vanguard could not get over until Alfonso fed another 1,500 knights into it. Once across, the Castilian centre with the knights of Santiago drove up the hill towards the sultan’s camp — and at that moment the troops hidden in Tarifa came out and hit the camp from the other side. Its garrison broke; half ran for Algeciras. Alfonso, meanwhile, was dangerously exposed in the middle with his vanguard gone up the hill, and was about to fight hand to hand when Archbishop Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz took hold of his reins and stopped him. The Castilian rearguard arrived, the men who had been sacking the camp came back down the slope into the enemy’s rear, and the sultan’s army broke. On the other wing the Portuguese crossed the Salado and the whole Granadan contingent left the field. It was over by noon.
The pursuit ran six kilometres to the Guadamecí, and much of the victorious army never joined it because the sultan’s camp was the richest prize anyone in Iberia had seen. Abu al-Hasan had brought his household with him. His first wife Fatimah, daughter of the sultan of Tunis, was killed in the camp along with other women of his family; his sister Umalfat, his son Abu Umar Tasufin and his nephew Ali were taken. Among the dead were senior Marinid officers and the Granadan writer Abdullah ben Salmun. The plunder was so large that Alfonso sent a share to the Pope, and Castilian coinage felt the injection of Moroccan gold.
Both rulers got away. Abu al-Hasan and Yusuf reached Algeciras; the sultan went on to Gibraltar and crossed to Ceuta in a single galley that same night. He never came back. His attention turned east to Tunis, and the Marinid state that had been able to intervene in Spain for sixty years was finished as an Iberian power — not because it was destroyed at Salado, but because after Salado it stopped trying.
Alfonso XI spent the victory immediately and sensibly. He besieged Algeciras, the Marinid bridgehead, from 1342 and took it in 1344 after a siege famous enough to draw volunteers from across Europe; a later attempt on Gibraltar failed, and he died of plague in his camp before its walls in 1350. But the strait was Castilian and Genoese from 1340 onwards, and that is the change. Granada survived because Castile chose tribute and truces over conquest, not because Africa could still reinforce it.
The commemoration was Portuguese as much as Castilian. Afonso IV, who had had to be asked twice, raised the Padrão do Salado in front of the church of Nossa Senhora da Oliveira at Guimarães, and it still stands — the only monument put up at the time for the battle, and a better guide to how the victory was understood than any of the paintings made centuries later. Within eight years the Black Death had reached both kingdoms, and within a generation Castile and Portugal were at war with each other; the alliance that won at the Salado did not outlive the men who made it.