Battle of the Three Kings

The battles of the Three Kings take place in 1578 in the Oued Makhzen with Ksar to el-Kébir in the north of the Morocco between the Moslem armies of the sultan Marocain Abu Marwan Abd Al-Malik and of Moulay Mohammed, including/understanding in addition to the Moroccan riders, the artillerists Turkish and the Andalusian arquebusiers, and the army " chrétienne" directed by Sebastien I {{er}}, king of the Portugal also including/understanding Spaniards, Italians and Germans. This battle showed a clear victory of the sultan, but these three kings found death there.

Preparation

In 1578, Sebastien I {{er}}, gathers in the small port of Lagos a strong Christian army of seventeen thousand men to conquer the Morocco. It can count on the alliance of a Moroccan prince of the dynasty saadienne, Mohammed el-Mottouakil which, driven out capacity by his/her uncle, hopes to regain it thanks to the support of the Portuguese. Moreover Portuguese is installed for a long time in several coastal fortified towns: Ceuta, Tangier, Mazagan. Started from Lisbon the June 24th, unloaded in Arzila (Asilah), the army of Sebastien penetrates the earths with the meeting of its adversary, Moulay Abu Marwan Abd Al-Malik…

Unfolding

The battle takes place the August 4th in the vicinity of the river Oued Makhzen.

The conclusion

After having one moment believed in the victory, the 23 000 Portuguese are put in rout by 40 000 Morrocans and, thing held for amazing and memorable by all the chroniclers, the three kings engaged in the combat find death there.

Consequences

Disputed between the monarch and the saint, the memory of the battle of the three kings causes out of Moroccan ground a plurality of accounts: histories, hagiographic, folk. But, curiously, it is not the subject of any celebration. Only the Jewish communities established in the north of the country and inhabited by the resentment against those which expelled them of the Iberian peninsula celebrate the defeat of king Sebastien at the time of the Pûrim of los cristianos, the first Eloul of each year.

The biblical text is mobilized to give the significance of the event: the devastation of the Jewish community of Marrakech by Muhammad Al-Mutawakkil is identified with the destruction of the Temple, king Sebastien with the Haman of the Livre of Esther which decided the extermination of all the Jews, its defeat with the execution of this last. As Pûrim celebrates the distance of the threat of destruction which weighed on Mardochée and them his, new the pûrim, instituted by the rabbis after the battle of 1578 (5338 in the Jewish Calendrier), returns thanks to God to have diverted a mortal danger.

With the Portugal, the shortly after the defeat are those of the refusal of memory. It is only in 1607 that the first Portuguese relation of the battle is published which hitherto had been the object only handwritten texts, showing the king of lightness and imprudence. In spite of the reiterated burials of Sebastien (in Ksar to el-Kébir the shortly after the battle, with Ceuta, in the church of the Trinitaires, in December 1578, with Belem, in the convent of Hiéronymites in November 1582), the belief settles that the king was not killed on the battle field and that it will make return, restoring the size of the Portugal. After others, Lucette Valensi attempts to include/understand the mystery of the sebastianism, this Messianisme powerful and durable which converts into central myth of the national identity the memory of an overcome king.

It shows the reasons of them: uncertainty on the fate of the king at the evening of the defeat, opposition to king d' Espagne who, in 1580, seized the crown of Portugal left without heir, the impossibility of the work of mourning for those remained out of African ground. The awaited return, prophesied of the king gives force to the hope: those which one says dead it are perhaps not, and the kingdom could not remain a long time between foreign hands. It marks some, also, the recurrences: in Portugal where the Faux Sebastien multiply until the beginning of the 17th century and where the prophetic Croyance re-appears in each moment of crisis (for example in the years which precede 1640 and the return to independence or at the time of the occupation by the Napoleonean troops), but also with the Brésil where the myth takes at the 19th century the dimension of a social protest and a eschatologic promise.

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