So, if Cebolla’s name comes from Arabic, does that mean the town was founded by the Moors? It certainly would follow, but the fact is, life there goes back much further. Cebolla as a human settlement probably started during the Roman occupation of Spain, known as Hispania at the time. It seems there existed a fairly prosperous villa nearby known as Los Merillos, which was located along a major road between the urban centers of Toletum and Emerita Augusta, today Toledo to Merida respectively. Roman roads were, as Robert Graves put it without a hint of ambiguity, “the greatest monument ever raised to human liberty by a noble and generous people.” Yes, that is, they were both admired and certainly built to last. The current national highway that traverses the zone today is essentially the same thoroughfare.
The newcomers constructed their home near the Tajo River and chose this spot because the land was ideal for farming. It was also during this period that the foundations for what would later become the Castillo de Villalba (Castle of Villalba) were laid. Standing on high ground with an enviable east-west view of their beloved highway below, the fortress made perfect sense from a strategic standpoint. It would be both useful and used for centuries to come.
The Romans stuck around for several hundred years until they eventually relinquished their grip on the Iberian Peninsula. That doesn’t mean, however, that they fully departed; undoubtedly, some may have returned to what was left of their collapsing empire, but it wasn’t as if there was anything back home to look forward to. Indeed, by the end of the 5th Century most were Hispanic-Romans, that is, inhabitants whose roots went back to the Eternal City but who were born and raised in the province of Hispania. These people generally stayed on. The only difference now was that there was no army available to defend them if things turned sour. And, believe me, they would.
The power vacuum that arose in Roman Spain was filled by wave after wave of Germanic tribes. The Alans, Vandals and Suebi were among the first to make themselves at home. It would appear no Barbarian was left behind when it came to invading. Basically, if you were Teutonic and had an itching to occupy a distant land, Hispania was the place for you. Eventually the Visigoths, after being evicted from France by the Franks, muscled out the competition and turned most of the peninsula into their permanent residence, making Toledo their capital.
That meant the power hub of these people was but a stone’s throw from our town of interest, partly explaining why the former village of Aldehuela, now a part of Cebolla, is believed to be of Visigoth origin. It also accounts for the valuable archeological remains from that period unearthed in Los Merillos.
The Visigoths failed to dominate Hispania the way the Romans had (in all fairness, it was a tough act to follow) mainly because their leaders were constantly bogged down with internal fighting and busy staving off assassination attempts, often unsuccessfully. Despite more or less running the show for nearly two hundred years, their historical footprint on this land has often been overlooked, which is odd because they did contribute a couple of extremely important concepts that would have a lasting effect on this country: Catholicism and a primitive attempt at national identity.
Aside from those minor details, Visigoth control was destined to come undone and it ended the day the Muslims invaded in 711 and took over most of what is now present-day Spain and Portugal in pretty much a jiffy. Predictably, the conquest was the result of a civil war between feuding factions among the Goths. Before anyone could do anything about it, the Moors were thrusting into southern France and threatening to swallow up the rest of Western Europe. A veritable blitzkrieg. The only exception to the otherwise utter and complete subjugation at the hands of the Moors was a few enclaves in Asturias and the Basque Country in the north. It was from these tiny pockets of resistance that a slow (and I mean very slow) but steady comeback by Christian forces would be mounted.
In the meantime, the Muslims went virtually unchallenged for what must have seemed like eons. Pleased by the new and fertile land they had conquered, they began to make themselves at home, often occupying existing towns. Just like the Romans and Visigoths before them, the invaders settled in and around the lands of Cebolla, presumably gracing the town with what would become its definitive name. But that wasn’t all: they also provided valuable technological and agricultural knowhow, like hydropower, irrigation, Arabic numerals, math, medicine, improved techniques on leather and steel manufacturing, to name just a few. The contributions were vast and profound.
Unlike other parts of Spain, little physical evidence of their presence can be found in Cebolla, at least above ground. Down below, beneath some of the homes, the town hides tunnels and caverns and ancient wells. And it is generally believed the current church of San Cipriano stands on top of the crushed remains of original structure: a mosque. The Muslims are also said to have reinforced the fortifications the Romans had built centuries before and turned them into the full-fledged castle it is known by today. They too saw the obvious strategic pros of owning a military base from that vantage point.
As the Christian forces licked their wounds up in the impenetrable mountains of Asturias after the crushing defeat by the Moors, they swore vengeance, but making that a reality proved a more daunting task than they could have imagined. Pushing back the Muslims would require several hundred years and a lot of patience to achieve. King Alfonso VI, for example, would not liberate nearby Talavera de la Reina and its surroundings, including Cebolla, until 1083, a whopping 372 years after the Islamic invasion. Toledo, the former capital of the Visigoths and symbolic hub of pre-Islam Spain, was retaken two years later. Clearly, generations of local residents hoping for a swift response from the Christian strike force must have gone to their graves sorely disappointed.
As the Reconquista (Reconquest) progressed, soldiers and inhabitants from the northern kingdoms of Leon, Castile, Aragon and Navarre began to move into the lands further south and either installed themselves in the existing towns or started new ones up all together. The newly arrived became, in effect, the frontiersmen of their day and for several decades were still helplessly susceptible to attacks by their eternal enemies. Little by little, though, the northern kingdoms secured the territories.
The land around Cebolla came under the jurisdiction of the king of Castile, Alfonso VIII, but it fell locally under the protection of the members of the religious military Order of Calatrava in 1205, who occupied the Castillo de Villalba. Excellent timing by anyone’s standard since. Just ten years before, the Christian forces had been taken to the cleaners by a huge army of fierce Almohad Muslims from Morocco in the Battle of Alarcos, in the present-day province of Ciudad Real. It was an embarrassing loss. King Alfonso VIII had sent his cavalry into the heart of the Muslim line of defense. They were following by the king himself, who led the infantry. They initially met success, but the going was slow and the enemy was gradually forming a ring around the Castilians. Soon enough, they were surrounded by the enemy and swarms of arrows rained down on them, forcing them to hack their way out for dear life. It also didn’t help the fact the battle took place in the middle of the day on July 18th, when the insufferable summer La Mancha heat wore them down to mere companies of wilting warriors. You’d think someone would have thought of that before fastening on the armor and slapping the helmet on their head.
Alfonso VIII managed to escape to Toledo, but much of his army had been obliterated. The ragtag remains negotiated its way out of a nearby fortress through the mediation of Alfonso VIII’s enemy, Pedro Fernández de Castro, yes, a fellow Christian and Castilian, who mingled with the Moors to obtain a political advantage over his rival. Such were the complicated twists of the Reconquista period.
With the Christians in the midst of major internal fighting, the orders of knights in tatters, and much of La Mancha exposed, the Moors once again threatened to expel the Castilians from of central Spain. Fortunately for the king, the Muslim leader, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub al-Mansur, failed to capitalize on the victory and returned to Andalusia to recover from his own losses. Nonetheless, many castles and major towns surrendered, including nearby Talavera (and presumably Cebolla), but the big prize, Toledo, held on. For how long, no one knew. The potential for a cataclysm loomed. Should the Muslims return soon, the results could spell disaster for Spain as a whole.
Sixteen years later, which is not a very long time in medieval warfare terms, Mohammed al-Nasir crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to finish the job. He didn’t get very far. At the Battle of Navas de Toloso, in the Andalusian region of Jaen, a consortium of Christian kingdoms, which this time managed to put aside their differences for once and pool together a sizable force to face the invader. This time, Alfonso opted for slyness as a tactic rather than a full-frontal launch, a sensible decision given the fact the Muslims were reported to have three to four times more troops. To do this, he counted on the services of a local shepherd named Martin Alhaja to lead the warriors through the rugged Despeñaperros hills and thus take the enemy by surprise. It worked, and the Spanish forces emerged victorious. For his excellent skills as a local guide, Martin Alhaja, was awarded the title of nobility “Cabeza de Vaca” (Cow’s Head) and his own coat-of-arms. It was an honor and form of compensation which probably requires some historical context to really appreciate because if it had been me, I’d be like, “WTF!”
The Muslims would never again be a serious menace to the La Mancha or most of Spain for that matter.
