On 4 August 1578, on a small floodplain in Morocco, three kings died on the same battlefield in a single afternoon — an event with the convenient name *Battle of the Three Kings*. Two were rivals for the Moroccan throne; the third was the young king of?
King Sebastian of Portugal had spent years organising a Catholic crusading expedition into Morocco. He died charging into the centre of his collapsing army; his body was never reliably identified, and a Portuguese myth (*Sebastianismo*) insisted for centuries that he had survived and would return. The two Moroccan kings — the reigning Saadi sultan Abd al-Malik (probably typhus) and his rival Mohammed al-Mutawakkil (drowned in the river fleeing) — also died that afternoon. Sebastian's childless death produced the Iberian Union of 1580 (Spain inherited Portugal under Philip II), which produced — eight years later — the catastrophic Spanish Armada.
Read the full story →In August 1578 the 24-year-old King Sebastian of Portugal led 17,000 men into Morocco to depose its sultan. Three kings died in a single day. Sebastian had no heir. Two years later his great-uncle Philip II of Spain claimed the empty Portuguese throne. The Armada disaster of 1588 followed.
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