What Was the Battle of Najera?
The Battle of Najera was fought on 3 April 1367 on the south bank of the Río Najerilla, near the Castilian town of Nájera (and known to English chroniclers as the Battle of Navarrete). It was a decisive English and pro-Petrine victory in the Castilian civil war of 1366–1369, won by Edward the Black Prince, Prince of Aquitaine, in support of his ally Pedro I “the Cruel” of Castile, against a Franco-Castilian army led by Henry of Trastámara and the French constable Bertrand du Guesclin. The field was English, but the political price of the campaign ruined the duchy of Aquitaine and set the Caroline phase of the war in motion.
The Castilian civil war
Pedro I had been an English ally since 1363, when he concluded the Treaty of London with Edward III, and he had concluded a separate treaty with the Black Prince in 1366. The partnership rested on cold calculation. Pedro’s wars needed Castilian wool and Mediterranean ports; the Black Prince needed Castilian troops and money to garrison his new principality of Aquitaine. The arrangement collapsed in 1366. Henry of Trastámara, Pedro’s illegitimate half-brother, invaded Castile with French and Aragonese support, defeated Pedro at the Battle of Nájera’s mirror image — the disaster of Ateca, on the Jalón, in late 1366 — and was crowned at Burgos. Pedro fled to Bayonne and threw himself on the Black Prince’s mercy.
The Aquitanian council voted to back the expedition in February 1367, against the advice of Jean Chandos, the Black Prince’s seneschal of Aquitaine. The cost would be borne by the duchy: a fouage (hearth tax) was raised, and the prince himself was already showing the symptoms of the illness that would kill him within a decade. The army that crossed the Pyrenees in February 1367 numbered perhaps 12,000 men, including the Black Prince, John of Gaunt (whose claim to the Castilian throne through his wife Constance would later be pursued independently), Chandos, and a substantial company of Gascon lords under the Captal de Buch.
The opposing armies
The Franco-Castilian army was larger — modern estimates range from 30,000 to 60,000 — and more heterogeneous. It included du Guesclin’s French and Breton men-at-arms, Castilian noble levies under Henry’s banner, and a substantial number of light cavalry drawn from the meseta. Du Guesclin had advised Henry to refuse battle and to draw the English deeper into Spain, where the climate, the terrain, and the supply problem would do his work for him. Henry refused. The combined army took up a strong position on rising ground south of Nájera, with the Najerilla in front and a rocky hillside behind.
The Black Prince deployed as he had at Poitiers: dismounted men-at-arms in three divisions, archers on the wings, and Chandos and the Captal holding the vanguard. He had been advised, by the ambassador Jean Froissart and by Chandos, to give battle on ground of his own choosing. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham, writing later in England, would call it the most beautiful deployment in Christendom.
The day of battle
The English crossed the Najerilla on the morning of 3 April and attacked uphill into the Franco-Castilian position. Du Guesclin’s defensive tactic — the hedge of stakes, the dismounted men, the reluctance to charge — was well-conceived, but his men broke the order when they saw the archers. The Castilian light horse, which should have been kept in reserve, was committed too soon and was driven back through Henry’s own division. The Genoese crossbowmen who had been hired for the campaign were overrun. Du Guesclin himself was unhorsed and captured on the field, along with a substantial proportion of the French and Breton nobility. Henry escaped with a small escort and made for Aragon.
The English and Petrine losses were remarkably light. The Black Prince’s decision to accept the surrender of the high-value prisoners — du Guesclin among them — was generous, and the ransom revenues would help to offset the cost of the campaign. But the political purpose of the campaign was not achieved. Pedro was restored to Burgos, refused to honour the financial commitments he had made to the Black Prince, and within a year the English army was withdrawing across the Pyrenees.
The price of the campaign
The Najera campaign broke English Aquitaine. The fouage had to be repeated to pay the troops. Chandos warned the prince in 1369 that the duchy was on the edge of revolt. Charles V of France reopened the war in June 1369, summoning the Gascon lords to Paris and inviting them to repudiate their allegiance. The Caroline reconquest that followed — the capture of Poitiers 1372, the loss of La Rochelle, the surrender of Limoges 1370 — was the direct consequence of the over-extension of 1367.
Jonathan Sumption calls Najera the most expensive English victory of the war. Clifford Rogers treats it as evidence that the Black Prince had lost the strategic judgment that had won him Poitiers. Either reading is consistent with what followed: within seven years, the Black Prince was dead, and the duchy he had governed was in French hands.
The memory of Najera
The battle has been obscured in English memory by Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt; in French memory by the disasters of the Black Prince’s chevauchées. Froissart, who was personally attached to the Black Prince’s household, gives a vivid and almost certainly embroidered account; the Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis and the Crónicas of Pero López de Ayala are the more sober Castilian and French sources. The English chronicler Thomas Walsingham transmits a confused account that confuses the Najera campaign with the Aquitanian campaign of 1369.
For the place of Najera in the larger arc of the war, see the Edwardian phase and the Caroline phase cluster pages. The full Black Prince biography treats his role at greater length. The opposing commander is treated in the Bertrand du Guesclin cluster article.