Sancho VII of Navarre
Sancho VII of Navarre, called the Strong, was the king who at Las Navas de Tolosa broke through the chain of slaves guarding the Almohad caliph's tent, the chains that have been on the arms of Navarre since, and who was by the standards of his time a giant, over seven feet tall by the measurement of his bones when the tomb at Roncesvalles was opened. He reigned forty years, lost the Basque provinces to Castile, spent years at the Almohad court in Africa, and died a recluse at Tudela, the last king of the old Navarrese line. He was the son of Sancho the Wise and the brother of Berengaria, Richard the Lionheart's queen, and he fought beside Richard in Aquitaine before he was king. He succeeded in 1194 to a kingdom squeezed between Castile and Aragon which had already agreed to partition it, and in 1198 he went to Africa to seek the caliph's help, or a Muslim bride, while Alfonso VIII took Alava, Guipuzcoa and the Duranguesado in his absence. They never came back. He made peace with Castile, and when the caliph al-Nasir marched north in 1212 he answered Alfonso's call with two hundred knights and came to Toledo. On 16 July at Las Navas he was on the right of the line, and when the Christian charge reached the caliph's camp on the hill his Navarrese cut their way through the ring of chained guards, which is why the chains and the emerald at their centre became the arms of the kingdom and are on the flag of Navarre today. He came home with the caliph's tent. The rest was money and land. He lent to everyone, bought castles along the Ebro from his debtors, held the Aragonese king James I in his debt, and in 1231 the two agreed that whichever died first would leave his kingdom to the other, a treaty the Navarrese cortes ignored. He shut himself in the castle at Tudela in his last years, huge, ulcerated and unwilling to be seen, and died there in April 1234, unmarried and without an heir, and the kingdom went to his sister's son, Theobald of Champagne.
- Lived: 1157 CE – 1234 CE
- Nationality: Navarrese
- Roles: king, monarch
