The Battle of Salado in 1340 was the penultimate major battle of the reconquest of Spain. The King of Castile, Alfonso XI, leading a crusade in which Portugal also took part, destroyed the armies of the King of Granada and the Marinids of Fez. The battle has not been fully understood, but there is a strange and anecdotal mention by the chroniclers. It offers a key to what happened in the battle: the literary and Machiavellian Infante Don Juan Manuel, in command of the vanguard, suddenly knocked down his own ensign when he tried to charge the Moors… Treason, or something different?
Since the Muslim invasion of Spain, successive waves of North African peoples helped the Hispano-Arabs in their struggle against the Christians. After successive battles and sieges, the fiery Alfonso XI of Castile took Tarifa, but then the King of Marinids, Abu l-Hassan, crossed the Strait to besiege it on 23 September 1340. With his fleet destroyed, Alfonso XI had no choice but to march overland and attack the Africans. Pope Benedict XII called for a crusade.
In October, Alfonso IV of Portugal, the king's father-in-law, joined the crusade in Seville with 1,000 knights carrying a relic of the True Cross. On 29 October, just as food was about to run out, the two Alfonsos arrived at La Peña del Ciervo, 5 miles from Tarifa, protected by the rivers Jara, Salado, and Vega, to the east. The Muslims, who had also two royal armies – since Abu l-Hasan had been joined by Yusuf I, King of Granada – burnt their siege machines and marched to contain the
