Battle of Montiel, 1369: the fight that ended in a king's murder

The battle itself was short, by one account hardly a battle at all. What made Montiel famous is what came after: a king of Castile killed in a tent by his own half-brother, who took his crown. The victory founded a new royal house, the Trastámara, and its chroniclers made sure that the dead king would be remembered as a monster.²

Who won the Battle of Montiel and why?

Henry of Trastámara won. With Bertrand du Guesclin and his French and Breton men-at-arms he rode through the night and fell on King Peter's army while it lay scattered over the villages around Montiel. Only the king's guard and his Granadan horsemen were at hand, they broke almost at once, and Peter fled into the castle that became his trap.³

Background: two half-brothers

Peter I, called the Cruel by his enemies, became king of Castile in 1350. His reign, as Cecilia Devia reads it in the chronicle of Pedro López de Ayala, was one of almost constant war: against his illegitimate half-brother Henry, count of Trastámara, against Aragon, and against the Moors, some of whom were at times his allies. Castile was drawn into the Hundred Years' War, with England backing Peter and France backing Henry.⁴ › Peter I of Castile

Henry had already driven Peter out once, with French help. Peter turned to the English. At Nájera in April 1367 an English army under Edward, the Black Prince, destroyed the army of Henry and his French allies and restored Peter to the throne, but he was soon in trouble again.⁵

Henry came back from Aragon, took Burgos and León, and laid siege to Toledo. Charles V of France stood behind him and sent Du Guesclin back to Spain with a company of men-at-arms: 500 lances by Ayala's figure, 600 in Mérimée, 2,000 soldiers in Froissart.⁶

Armies and commanders

Peter, who still held the south, allied himself with the king of Granada, whose troops raided Andalusia, and early in March 1369 he marched north from Seville to relieve Toledo. Henry, on Du Guesclin's advice, left part of his army before the city and went to meet him with his best men.⁷

The alliance with Granada cost Peter dearly. In 1368 the Granadan army besieged Córdoba in vain, destroyed Jaén and Úbeda, and carried off thousands of people from the country around Utrera, near Seville, into captivity. The raids drove several Andalusian towns over to Henry, while Toledo, under siege, held out for Peter.⁸

How large the armies were depends on whom one believes. Froissart, the chronicler of the Hundred Years' War, gives Henry 6,000 picked men against an enemy six times as strong, some 40,000 Christians, Jews and Muslims. Prosper Mérimée, working from Ayala in his history of Peter published in 1848, counts some 3,000 Christian horsemen and 1,500 light horse from Granada on the king's side, with little infantry, and gives Henry about 3,000 veteran men-at-arms, among them the French lances of Du Guesclin, 600 by his count.⁹

On Peter's side, besides the king himself, the chronicles name Fernando de Castro, the great lord of Galicia who had brought him troops, and Garci Morán, the knight of the Order of Santiago who held Montiel, a rich commandery of the order. With Henry rode Du Guesclin, his Breton and French captains and knights from Aragon.¹⁰

The commanders' decisions

When word came that Peter had crossed the mountains, Henry called his captains to council. Ayala says he resolved to force a battle as fast as he could, because he knew that if the war dragged on, every day would bring Peter new advantages; Mérimée, following him, has the captains advise striking before the king could reach Toledo. Henry left his infantry in the siege lines and rode ahead with his best men-at-arms to Orgaz, on the edge of La Mancha, where the master of Santiago, Gonzalo Mexía, joined him with the men he had brought from Córdoba.¹¹

Peter did not know that Henry had left Toledo. Turning east from Calatrava, he camped by Montiel and let his companies lodge in villages one and two leagues from the castle. When the warning about the fires reached him, he took them for Gonzalo Mexía and the men from Córdoba on their way to join the siege, and only sent word to his scattered companies to come to him at Montiel at dawn.¹²

Henry also chose how to fight. Ayala says he formed only two battles and no wings: a vanguard under Du Guesclin with the masters of Santiago and Calatrava and the knights of Córdoba, and a second battle with everyone else under his own banner. Mérimée describes the same order, with the knights of the military orders and the adventurers in the vanguard and the larger reserve led by Henry in person.¹³

The battle in phases

The approach. Peter did not expect Henry so far from Toledo. Near Montiel he let his troops spread out into the surrounding villages to find food and fodder, so that his army lay scattered over several leagues.¹⁴

The warning. On the night before the battle the commander of Montiel castle, Garci Morán, saw great fires moving about two leagues away and warned the king. They were the torches of Du Guesclin's vanguard marching through the dark. Peter did not heed the warning.¹⁵

The attack. The blow came at the first hour of the day on Wednesday 14 March 1369. Henry rode with his banner straight for Peter's, and the men around the king, who had only his guard and his Granadan horsemen at hand, began to give way. Froissart tells a story of great feats, Peter laying about him with an axe and the Granadan archers doing heavy damage before the royal army broke.¹⁶

The ravine. The two battles did not arrive together. Du Guesclin's vanguard came up against a valley it could not cross, through the fault of its guides in Mérimée's telling, while Henry's battle went round by another way and rode straight at Peter's banners. Ayala says the king's men and the Granadans did not hold for a moment; Mérimée, drawing also on Froissart, has Peter withstand the first shock with some vigor before his guard was broken and Du Guesclin's arrival completed the rout.¹⁷

The pursuit. Henry's men went after the Granadan horsemen and killed many of them: Ayala says only that some were caught and killed, while Mérimée writes that, easy to recognize by their dress, they were hunted down by the country people and almost all cut to pieces. Martín López de Córdoba, who was bringing more men to the king, heard of the defeat, turned back and shut himself up in Carmona, where Peter's children were, with some 800 horsemen.¹⁸

Turning point: from the field to the castle

Peter, with a few of his lords, rode for the castle of Montiel and shut himself in, and the French captain Le Bègue de Villaines took his post at the approach to the gate. Froissart, who has the king fight his way there, dates the battle wrongly, to August 1368.¹⁹

Froissart has the victors chase the fugitives for three leagues; in Ayala's account, followed by Mérimée, they learned that the king was inside and turned back at once. Either way, Henry and Du Guesclin then blockaded the castle closely. Montiel was strong, but it was crowded and short of food; in Froissart's account it had supplies for only four days.²⁰

Counting the losses

No count of the dead is shared by the sources. Froissart claims 24,000 dead on the field, more than five times the 4,500 horse that Mérimée, following Ayala, gives the king. Ayala, as Froissart's nineteenth-century editor Siméon Luce and Mérimée both point out, says almost no one of note died, only a knight of Córdoba named Juan Ximénez, because many of Peter's men were still in their village quarters and the rest fled with him into the castle.²¹

Mérimée concluded that no victory ever cost less blood, and that the heaviest losses fell on the Granadan auxiliaries in the pursuit. Neither chronicle gives the losses of Henry's army, which won the field in a single charge.²²

The night of 23 March

The two chroniclers disagree about what came next. In Froissart, Peter tried to slip out at midnight with Fernando de Castro and was caught by Le Bègue de Villaines. In Ayala's version, which Luce summarizes and Mérimée follows, Peter sent one of his knights, Men Rodríguez de Sanabria, whom Du Guesclin had once ransomed, to offer the Breton the towns of Soria, Atienza, Almazán and others and 200,000 gold doblas if he would lead him to safety.²³

Du Guesclin told Henry, and pretended to accept. Devia describes a trap carefully laid by Henry, with the collaboration of Du Guesclin, reluctant at first; in Ayala's vivid telling, Peter seems to suspect the deceit and yet cannot resist what will be his fate. Mérimée, who admired Du Guesclin, still concluded that the extraordinary favors Henry later heaped on him lent weight to Ayala's account.²⁴

On the night of 23 March Peter left the castle in silence with Men Rodríguez, Fernando de Castro and a few knights, and was led into a tent in the French lines, that of the Breton captain Yvon de Lakouet in Froissart's telling. Henry came at once, armed. In Ayala, the brothers at first did not recognize each other; then Peter named himself, and Henry struck him in the face with a dagger, followed by other blows that killed him.²⁵

Froissart has the two men wrestle after an exchange of insults, Peter on top, until the Aragonese viscount of Rocaberti pulled him aside and Henry stabbed him; an anonymous Catalan writer also names Rocaberti.²⁶

Peter died at 35 years and seven months, as both Ayala and Mérimée reckon, and his head was cut off after his death.²⁷

Aftermath

The commander of Montiel gave up the castle, Toledo opened its gates, and Henry was now sole king of Castile. He paid his debts to his French allies: Du Guesclin was made constable of Castile, and a grant dated at Seville on 4 May 1369 gave him Molina with the title of duke, together with Soria, Atienza, Almazán and other towns, the very places Peter had offered him.²⁸

Not everyone accepted the new king. Peter's cousin, King Ferdinand of Portugal, defied the killer and sent his forces against the country around Seville before he made peace, and Martín López de Córdoba held out in Carmona with the dead king's children.²⁹

Legacy and memory

Henry's victory founded a new royal house in Castile, the Trastámara. Devia argues that the chancellor Ayala became the most brilliant voice of Trastámara propaganda, turning a legitimate king into a monster and a usurper into the instrument of providence. Mérimée, writing in 1848, tried to rescue Peter from that portrait: in his view the king's deceit and broken oaths were the vices of his age, and his great passion was not money but power.³⁰

Visiting Montiel today

The castle where Peter took refuge, the Castillo de la Estrella, stands on its hill above the village of Montiel in the province of Ciudad Real. Long a ruin, it was bought by six local patrons and handed to the town in 2012, and since then excavation and restoration have uncovered the keep, the walls of the medieval village and its old church of the Virgen de la Estrella.³¹

Every year at the end of March the people of Montiel recall the death of Peter I with a medieval festival at the foot of the castle, which reenacts the events of 1369.³²