Tudela

Tudela lies on the right bank of the Ebro in the south of Navarre. As Muslim al-Tutili it was the home of the Banu Qasi chieftain Musa ibn Musa and had a great mosque, a market, a Jewish quarter and a citadel. Alfonso the Battler took it on 25 February 1119 with an army of Navarrese, Aragonese and French crusaders, and for some four hundred years afterwards Muslims, Jews and Christians lived in separate quarters, each under its own customs. Its Jewish community produced the traveller Benjamin of Tudela.

Navarrese kings often wintered here. After a pogrom that followed the death of Charles I in 1328, Charles III the Noble made Tudela a city in 1390 and rebuilt its old castle as a royal palace. In the later fifteenth century the town was drawn into the war between the Agramont and Beaumont factions; the Castilian crown, allied with the Beaumonts, conquered Navarre in 1512 and Tudela surrendered. Navarre's Jews were expelled in 1498, and Muslims and Moriscos followed in 1516 and 1610. A new public square was built at the end of the seventeenth century, Tudela became a bishopric in 1783, and in 1808 the Battle of Tudela was fought on its plain during the Peninsular War.