March 1350
Alfonso XI at Gibraltar, March 1350
Alfonso XI of Castile has spent his reign fighting the Marinid sultans of Morocco and the emirs of Granada for the Strait of Gibraltar. He defeated them at the Río Salado in 1340 and took Algeciras in 1344 after a siege of 20 months. In August 1349 he lays siege to Gibraltar, which the Marinids have held since 1333. About 20,000 men dig in on the isthmus north of the town, while his son and heir Pedro stays in Seville.
The plague has been in Iberia since spring 1348. It reached Portugal in April or May 1348 and Lisbon by early summer. In the new year of 1350 it breaks out in the Castilian camp. The king’s nobles beg him to lift the siege, but he refuses. The chronicle of his reign has him answer that it would be “a greatly shameful thing if because of fear of death he left it as it was”. He falls ill with the swellings of the plague and dies in the night of 25 to 26 March 1350, Good Friday, at the age of 38. The chronicle gives 27 March. The historian Nicolás Agrait counts him as the only medieval monarch to die of the plague.
The siege ends at once. The army carries the king’s body to Seville, where his son, aged 15, becomes king as Pedro I. Yusuf I of Granada orders his men not to attack the funeral train, and some of the garrison of Gibraltar come out of the walls to watch it leave. Alfonso is later buried at Córdoba, and Gibraltar stays in Muslim hands until 1462.
Alfonso XI rides with his nobles in the Book of the Coronation of the Kings of Castile, made in his reignWikimedia Commons, unknown painter, Public domain (Libro de la Coronación de los Reyes de Castilla--2 (cropped).jpg)
The plague in the Christian camp before Gibraltar in 1350, as Josep Serra i Porsón drew it about 1872Wikimedia Commons, Josep Serra i Porsón, Public domain (Levant Christians at the siege of Gibraltar, 1349-1350.png)
Sources
- Crónica del rey don Alfonso el Onceno (14th century), tr. in George Hills, Rock of Contention: A History of Gibraltar (1974).
- María León-Sotelo and Esther González Crespo, “Notas para el itinerario de Alfonso XI en el periodo de 1344 a 1350”, En la España Medieval 8 (1986).
- Nicolás Agrait, “The Reconquest During the Reign of Alfonso XI”, in On the Social Origins of Medieval Institutions (1998).
- Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (2021).
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