On the announcement of the landing of the African troops, al-Himiyari (1938, p. 88) tells us that the King of Castile summoned a powerful army of forty thousand men and called on his Catalan and Galician neighbours for assistance. More than all the other Arab historians, Ibn Khallikān and al-Makarrī give us significant details on the decisive role of the black guard of the Almoravid Emir. Both these authors specify that the Berber prince had an elite force of approximately four thousand Sudanese who, on the given signal, threw themselves into the fray, spearing the horses and completely disrupting the army of Alfonso VI, King of Castile and León.  
Wounded, and with his troops decimated, the king finally managed to take refuge on a nearby hill. Under cover of night, he returned to Toledo with a small group of survivors (Ibn al-Athīr, 1898, pp. 482-6), two thousand horsemen according to some, but three hundred, a hundred or even just a few dozen according to others. The author of al-Hulal al-mawshiyya reiterates this information (al-Hulal al-mawshiyya, 1911, p. 33). From the moment that the Sudanese elite troops, until then kept in reserve, entered the fight, the Castilian  
army was completely overrun and defeated. A young black soldier managed to get close to the Christian king and seriously wound him in the thigh. As al-Makkarī tells us, reproducing Ibn Khallikān's narrative almost in its entirety four centuries later:  
Meanwhile, a young black, armed with a dagger, reached the tyrant Alfonso. He severed the straps of his coat of mail and stabbed his thigh and part of his saddle (al-Makkarī, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 367).  
For his part, the author of Wafayāt reports that: