The brief war was ignited in part by the strife left over from the division of the kingdom of Sancho the Great in 1035. That division had left Navarre with a supremacy over the "petty kingdoms" (regula) of Castile and Aragon, but by 1065 Navarre was a
García Sánchez III of Navarre
, the father of Sancho IV.
After an initial series of frontier raids, Sancho IV of Navarre asked for an alliance from Sancho Ramírez of Aragon. Most of the war took place in the region of
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, defeated his Navarrese counterpart, Jimeno Garcés, and gained the nickname campi doctor or "master of the field [of battle]", later to become famous in Spanish literature as el Campeador.[1]
Between August and September 1067 Sancho Ramírez led a counterattack against Castile. Tradition is divided over who had the victory, the
Diocese of Oca (the only bishopric in Castile) strongly suggests that Sancho was in a strong position.[2] The chronicler of San Juan de la Peña, a Navarrese source, wrote that Sancho of Castile was forced to raise the siege of Viana and flee on a horse bedecked only in its halter; that he subsequently convinced Abd ar-Rahman of Huesca
to go to war with Aragon; and that Sancho Ramírez eventually made peace with him anyway.
Castile retook
Pancorvo, as well as Bureba and Alta Rioja, but the conflict ended in a stalemate 1067 when the death of Sancha of León, Ferdinand's widow, opened the way to war between Ferdinand's sons.[3] The central issue in the conflict, the possession of the border territories, was resolved in 1076 when Sancho IV of Navarre was assassinated by his own brother and his kingdom partitioned between Sancho Ramírez of Aragon, who became king of Navarre as Sancho V, and Alfonso VI of León and Castile
, who received the disputed lands.
Notes
^The historicity of this event, which is not mentioned by contemporaries, has been suspected. José María Lacarra and Bernard Reilly, however, accept it.
Constable, Olivie Remie, ed. "Concerning King Sancho I of Aragon and His Deeds" trans. Lynn H. Nelson. Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources. Pittsburg: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Besga Marroquín, Armando (2009). "La guerra de los tres Sanchos y otros supuestos conflictos navarro-castellanos del reinado de Sancho IV el de Peñalén (1054–1076)". Letras de Deusto. 39 (125): 9–58.
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Kingdom of Castile
Kingdom of Navarre
Kingdom of Aragon