Who won the Battle of Aljubarrota?
Portugal won a decisive victory at Aljubarrota on 14 August 1385, when a small Portuguese army, fighting on foot in a strong position and aided by English longbowmen, destroyed a much larger Castilian invasion. The battle secured Portugal's independence and kept its new king, João I, on the throne.
In August 1385, near Aljubarrota, a small Portuguese army stood against a much larger Castilian invasion that aimed to swallow Portugal into a single Iberian crown. Fighting on foot in a strong position, and supported by English longbowmen, the Portuguese destroyed the Castilian attack in a single evening. Aljubarrota secured Portugal's independence and kept its new king, João I, on the throne.1
A crown in dispute
When King Ferdinand of Portugal died in 1383 without a clear male heir, the king of Castile claimed the Portuguese throne through marriage, threatening to unite the two kingdoms under Castile. João, Master of Avis, led the Portuguese resistance and was proclaimed king, while England, Castile's enemy, backed the Portuguese cause.2
How many soldiers fought at Aljubarrota?
No muster rolls survive, so every figure is an estimate. The Fundação Batalha de Aljubarrota puts the Portuguese at about 7,000 combatants, while the historian João Gouveia Monteiro counts fewer than 10,000 men, non-combatants included, among them an English contingent of at least 800. Monteiro suggests perhaps 20,000 Castilians; the foundation's reconstruction goes as high as 31,000 to 44,000.3
The odds on the field were narrower than those totals suggest. Monteiro argues that the Castilian column marching from Leiria stretched for many kilometers and that its head reached the battlefield only after 5 p.m., an hour or two before the attack, so much of the army never came into action.
The foundation estimates that only about 10,000 Castilians actually fought. Monteiro goes further and concludes that at the moment of combat the two sides were roughly even, perhaps with a slight edge to the Anglo-Portuguese army. Even so, Aljubarrota is usually counted among the classic battles won against the odds.4
The Portuguese position
The Portuguese commander Nuno Álvares Pereira chose strong defensive ground and had his men dig in behind ditches, pits and barriers of felled trees. Both the Portuguese men-at-arms and their English allies fought on foot, with English longbowmen and Portuguese crossbowmen posted on the wings to sweep the narrow approach the enemy would have to cross.5
The Castilian charge breaks
When the much larger Castilian and French force attacked, its cavalry funneled into the narrow front and was shot down and cut apart, much as the French had been at Crécy almost four decades earlier. The dense attacking ranks lost all order under the arrow storm and among the obstacles, and the Portuguese counterattack turned the repulse into a slaughter.6
What tactics won the battle?
The Portuguese fought the English way. Their men-at-arms dismounted to form a solid block of infantry, archers and crossbowmen stood on the wings, and the front was covered with ditches, concealed pits and barriers of felled trees, built to break the momentum of the charge and hold the attackers under missile fire.7
Monteiro traces the model to the English victories of the Hundred Years' War, from Crécy to Poitiers, and argues that the large English contingent, many of them veterans of those wars, must have shaped Nuno Álvares's choice. According to the foundation, the attack came at about the hour of vespers, around 6 p.m., and the outcome was clear after little more than an hour; Monteiro calls it a slaughter completed in under an hour. The same pattern would decide Agincourt in 1415, and the contest between the two missile weapons is traced in longbow vs crossbow.8
Who was the baker of Aljubarrota?
Brites de Almeida, the "baker of Aljubarrota," belongs to legend rather than to the record. In the tradition set down by the municipality of Alcobaça, she killed seven Castilian fugitives with her baker's peel after the battle; in another version they were hiding in her oven. The municipality notes that historians regard the story as legend.9
The same account places her in the village of Aljubarrota, some 11 kilometers from the battlefield, so the tradition sets her deed during the flight, not the fighting. The foundation that manages the battlefield reads the legend as an echo of what local people really did in the days after the battle, when they killed many of the fleeing Castilians.10
Independence secured
The victory confirmed João I as king and the House of Avis on the throne, and although Castile recognized Portuguese independence formally only in the Treaty of Ayllón of 1411, its bid to absorb Portugal was finished. Portuguese independence held, and João's reign opened the age of Portuguese expansion. In thanks for the victory the great monastery of Batalha was built, and Aljubarrota became a founding moment of Portuguese nationhood.11 › Battle of Ourique, 1139
What is the Batalha monastery?
The Monastery of Batalha, formally Santa Maria da Vitória (Saint Mary of the Victory), is the Dominican abbey that João I founded around 1388 to commemorate Aljubarrota. It remained the Portuguese crown's main building project for about two centuries, shaped a national form of Gothic architecture, and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1983.12
Most of the complex dates from João I's reign, when the church, finished in 1416, the royal cloister, the chapter house and the founder's funerary chapel were built. In that Founder's Chapel lie João I, Philippa of Lancaster and their son Henry the Navigator. For other turning points of the age, see our guide to the greatest medieval battles.13
The oldest alliance
Aljubarrota also sealed a partnership that outlived the age of knights. English archers had fought beside the Portuguese, and in 1386 the two kingdoms signed the Treaty of Windsor, which pledged mutual security and opened each country's trade to the other's subjects. The next year King João I married Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, adding a dynastic tie to the alliance. The Anglo-Portuguese alliance is still in force today, and the UK government's history blog calls it the longest continuing alliance in global history.14
See what else happened on 14 August, or play today's Battle of the Day.
