Sancho VII of Navarre

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Sancho in stained glass in the church at Roncesvalles.

Sancho VII (1160 – 1234), called the Strong (el Fuerte in Spanish, Santxo Azkarra in Basque), was the king of Navarre from 1194 to his death.

He was the son of Sancho VI, succeeding his father in 1194. He was the last male-line descendant of the first two dynasties of kings of Navarre, the Houses of Íñiguez and Jiménez. He was the elder brother of Berengaria, who was married to King Richard the Lionheart of England in 1191 on the island of Cyprus on the way to the Holy Land for the Third Crusade. Sancho and Richard were reputed to have been good friends and close allies, even before the marriage brought them together. The French took advantage of Richard's captivity in Germany and captured certain key fortresses of the Angevin dominions including Loches. When Richard returned to his continental lands in 1194, the knights of Sancho were besieging the castle for Richard. As soon as Richard arrived though, Sancho was forced to return to Navarre with the news of the death of his father.

He arrived late at the Battle of Alarcos in 1195 and thus ruined good relations with the Castilian sovereign Alfonso VIII. The ensuing confrontation resulted in Sancho devastating Soria and Almazán and Alfonso accepted the Peace of Tarazona.

Sancho made expeditions against Murcia, Andalusia, and, in the year 1200, he campaigned in Africa. Taking advantage of his absence, the kings of Castile and Aragón invaded Navarre, which lost the provinces of Álava, Guipúzcoa, and Vizcaya to Castile. These conquests were subsequently confirmed by the Treaty of Guadalajara (1207).

The new blazon of Navarre, acquired at Las Navas by Sancho and his men.

His leadership was decisive in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the year 1212. In that engagement, the Christian forces of Sancho, Alfonso, Afonso II of Portugal, and Peter II of Aragón allied to defeat the forces of the Almohad Caliph Muhammad an-Nasir. Sancho's troops cut the chains guarding the store of Miramamolín. For this, the chains became the symbol of Navarre and replaced the sable eagle on a golden field with a golden chain on a gules field in the Navarrese coat-of-arms.

His relations with the countries north of the Pyrenees were notable better than his Castilian ones. Several Pyrenean counties declared themselves his vassals and he concluded treaties with John of England, and the various Aragonese kings of his time, the aforementioned Peter II and James I. With the latter he signed at Tudela, in 1231, which was never finished, a treaty stating that whoever survived the other would inherit unopposed the other kingdom's.

Sancho went into retirement (el Encerrado) at some point, when his youngest sister Blanca took administration of the kingdom (see note in Kings of Navarre family tree) and died in 1229. His eldest sister, Berengaria, queen of England, died in 1232, thus leaving Sancho alone among the children of Sancho VI. When he died in Tudela, Blanca's son Theobald was recognized as the next monarch of Navarre on 7 April. Sancho is interred in Roncesvalles.

He was married twice: firstly to Constance de Conulouse and secondly to a daughter of Abu Yaqub al-Mustansir Yusuf II, emir of Morocco. He had no children, and some modern writers have alleged that this is because he was homosexual.