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October 30, 1340. The last North African army ever to invade Spain was destroyed in about three hours, and the Sultan who brought it lost his wives, his treasure and his son's freedom in the same afternoon. He got out himself. He crossed to Africa that night by galley and no Muslim army from across the strait ever came back. Río Salado is one of the genuinely decisive battles of the Reconquista and it is barely known outside Spain and Portugal. The setup starts with the strait. The thing that had kept Muslim Spain alive for six centuries was reinforcement from Morocco. Every time a Christian advance looked terminal, a North African power crossed over. The Almoravids did it after Sagrajas in 1086, which I posted about on the 23rd. The Almohads did it in the twelfth century. By the 1330s the Marinids of Fez were the power in Morocco, and Abu al-Hasan was ambitious enough to try it one more time. He had reason to think it would work, because in 1340 he beat Castile at sea. On April 8 a Castilian fleet under Admiral Alfonso Jofre de Tenorio was destroyed off the strait. Tenorio was killed, 28 galleys and seven larger ships were captured, and only a handful got away to Cartagena and Tarifa. That gave Abu al-Hasan command of the water. He crossed in August with a huge army, joined up with Yusuf I of Granada, and on September 22 laid siege to Tarifa. Then he made the mistake that lost him the campaign before a land battle was fought. He laid up most of his galleys and sent the allied ships home, on the assumption that Castile could not possibly rebuild a fleet in less than months. He left about twelve galleys at Algeciras. Castile and Portugal rebuilt it in weeks. Portugal sent a fleet under Manuel Pessanha and paid for fifteen Genoese galleys under Gil Bocanegra, and around 27 more ships were finished at Seville. By October the Christian fleets had cut the supply line between Morocco and Spain. That is the whole battle in one sentence, and it happened at sea before anyone drew a sword at the Salado. An army besieging Tarifa that cannot be fed from Africa has a deadline. Abu al-Hasan knew it. On October 10 he threw everything at Tarifa in an all-out assault and it was barely held, with heavy losses on both sides. A storm the same day wrecked twelve Castilian galleys, which was his only good news of the month. Alfonso XI of Castile left Seville on October 15 with a relief army and linked up with Afonso IV of Portugal the next day. They were father-in-law and son-in-law, and the two Iberian crowns fighting on the same side rather than against each other is itself the unusual thing here. The combined army was about 20,000 men. Castile brought 8,000 knights and 12,000 infantry, Portugal 1,000 knights, with Tarifa's garrison of about 1,000 also in the fight. Now the enemy numbers, because they are absurd and you should know it. Christian chronicles give figures like 40,000 knights and 400,000 infantry. One gives 53,000 and 600,000. Another gives the Marinids 70,000 knights and 400,000 foot plus another 700,000 for Granada. Those are fantasies. A medieval logistics system could not feed a tenth of that across a strait. Modern estimates put Granada at around 7,000 knights and the Marinid mobilisation at up to 60,000 total, and even the lowest chronicle figure of 60,000 has been dismissed as unreliable by at least one serious historian. They were outnumbered. They were not outnumbered thirty to one. One detail that tells you how messy the religious framing is: a Christian militia probably fought for Granada, and a Marinid prince fought on the Castilian side. On the night of the 29th Alfonso slipped 1,000 horse and 4,000 foot into Tarifa, to reinforce the garrison and to be in position to come out at the enemy's back. Muslim light cavalry barely contested it, and the commander on that sector then reported to Abu al-Hasan that nobody had got through. That false report is why the Marinid camp was not watching its rear the next morning. The battle started at nine. The Lara brothers led the vanguard into the Salado, a shallow river, and could not get across against heavy resistance until Alfonso fed in another 1,500 knights. Then Juan Núñez de Lara and the Order of Santiago, about 3,000 knights, punched through in the centre and rode straight for Abu al-Hasan's camp. At the same moment the Tarifa garrison came out and hit the camp from the other side. The camp's defenders, around 3,000 horse and 8,000 foot, pulled out. Half ran for Algeciras and half went down into the valley to join the fight. And for a while Alfonso was in real trouble. His right wing was separated from him, he was isolated, and he was about to go into hand to hand fighting personally when Archbishop Gil de Albornoz grabbed his horse's reins and physically stopped him. Then the Castilian rearguard came up, and the men who had been looting the camp came back down and hit the Marinids from behind. That broke it. The Marinid army ran for Algeciras. The Portuguese got across the Salado on their flank, were reinforced, and the Granadan contingent left the field. Three hours, nine in the morning to noon. The pursuit ran about six kilometres to the Guadamecí, though a lot of the allied troops never joined it because they were stripping the Sultan's camp instead, which was reportedly enormously rich. In that camp, many of Abu al-Hasan's wives were killed, including his first wife Fatimah. His sister Umalfat, his son Abu Umar Tasufin and his nephew Alí were captured. Among the dead were the writer Abdullah ben Salmun and the scholar Ibn al-Khatib. Abu al-Hasan got to Algeciras, then to Gibraltar, and crossed to Ceuta by galley that night. The consequences are simple and total. The Marinids went back to Africa and no Muslim army ever invaded the Iberian peninsula again. Control of the strait passed to the Christians, mainly Castile and Genoa, which meant the lifeline that had saved al-Andalus three times was permanently cut. Granada survived, but as an isolated state with no prospect of outside rescue. Algeciras, the Marinid bridgehead, fell in 1344 after a two year siege that drew volunteer knights from across Europe, including Henry of Grosmont and reportedly men who later fought in the Hundred Years' War. Alfonso XI died in 1350, in his camp in front of Gibraltar, of the Black Death. Granada held on for another 152 years after Río Salado. It did it entirely alone, because of what happened in three hours at a shallow river.