Calatrava la Vieja

The city held a flat-topped hill of about five hectares on the left bank of the Guadiana, commanding the crossing on the Córdoba–Toledo road, and through the High Middle Ages it was the only important city of al-Andalus in the middle Guadiana valley. The hill gave a wide view but little defensive strength; the river, then broad and marshy, was its one solid natural defence. Excavation has reached Iberian levels beneath the medieval town, though nothing indicates Roman or Visigothic use.

The name comes from the Arabic Qal'at Rabāḥ, read by some accounts as the fortress of an Arab nobleman who held the district in the eighth century, by others as 'fortress of the rábida', with no person behind the name. The fortified place is documented from 785; in 853, in the fighting between rebel Toledo and the emirate of Córdoba, it was left half-ruined.

The city was refounded after 853 by al-Hakam, brother of the emir Muhammad I, and until 1147 was capital of a wide region. Rebuilding of the alcázar followed a single plan promoted from Córdoba to declare its supremacy there: great entrance towers casing the earlier ones and a triumphal arch before the old gate. Some 1,500 m of wall carried at least 44 flanking towers, and a dry ditch, mostly rock-cut, over 750 m long and 10 m deep on average made the town an island on every side but the river.

The rebuilding of 854 also set out a hydraulic defensive system with no parallel in medieval military architecture. Four corachas, walled spurs running down to the water, have been identified; the one below the medina reaches almost 80 m into the Guadiana on five buttress towers, raising water by a relay of norias. The alcázar's coracha lifted river water to the top of the eastern wall, whence channels fed the alcázar and a castellum aquae in a pentagonal prow-shaped tower, which discharged it back into the ditch at high pressure through ceramic pipes in its walls. It kept the ditch supplied when the river ran low in summer, and made a statement of Umayyad power.

When the Caliphate of Córdoba fell, the taifas of Seville, Córdoba and Toledo competed for it. After Alfonso VI took Toledo in 1085 and the Almoravids landed the following year, Calatrava was the most advanced Andalusi position for raiding the Christian kingdom.

In 1147 Alfonso VII took Calatrava, which became one of the farthest Christian outposts of that stage of the wars. It passed to the Knights Templar, among the order's first holdings in Castile, but the arrangement proved unsatisfactory and they left; their unfinished twelve-sided apse of 1147–1158 is one of the few pieces of Templar building to survive in the kingdom. Sancho III of Castile then offered town and fortress to anyone who would defend it. Raymond of Fitero took it up, urged on by Diego Velásquez, a friar who had been a warrior; with the support of Juan II, Archbishop of Toledo, he raised an army that kept attackers off in 1158. Out of that success Raymond founded the Order of Calatrava, organised along Cistercian lines.

The Almohads recovered the city in 1195 after their victory over Alfonso VIII at Alarcos, and held it seventeen years, until 1212, when it was taken back in the campaign that ended at the decisive battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. After the capture a quarrel opened in the Christian coalition: the French and other European knights were unused to the summer heat and, more importantly, disagreed with Alfonso VIII's order that Jews and Muslims be treated humanely. At Toledo, where the crusade's armies gathered, they had already committed assaults and murders in the Jewish quarter. More than 30,000 men deserted and crossed back over the Pyrenees.

In 1217 the Order moved its master's seat to the castle of Dueñas, 60 km south, known thereafter as Calatrava la Nueva; the old city became Calatrava la Vieja, Old Calatrava. It stayed the head of an encomienda seated in the former Islamic alcázar, where the commandery's church and quarters were raised over older remains in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By the early fifteenth century the site was abandoned entirely; the Knight Commander of Calatrava had moved his residence to neighbouring Carrión de Calatrava.

Calatrava la Vieja was declared a bien de interés cultural on 3 June 1931. In the municipality of Carrión de Calatrava, it ranks among Spain's foremost archaeological sites of Islamic origin, belongs to the Archaeological Parks of Castile-La Mancha, and remains under excavation and restoration.