Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba
Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba y Enríquez de Aguilar (Montilla, September 1, 1453-Granada, December 2, 1515), better known as the Great Captain, was a Spanish nobleman and soldier who reached the rank of captain general of the armies of Castile and Aragon for his battles during the War of Granada (1482-1492) and especially, for the First Italian War (1494-1498) and the War of Naples (1501-1504), whose merits made him Viceroy of Naples between 1504 and 1507, as well as being named Duke of Santángelo, Newfoundland, Andría, Montalto and Sessa. He finally returned to Castilla and in his last days he held the mayoralty of Loja, moving to Granada a few months before his death.
In his honor, the third of the Spanish Legion quartered in Melilla bears his name. He was also a knight and commander of the Order of Santiago.
Youth
Castilian captain born in the castle of Montilla, at the time belonging to the Señorío de Aguilar, at the service of the Catholic Monarchs. Relative of Fernando the Catholic and member of the Andalusian nobility (belonging to the House of Aguilar), second son of the noble knight Pedro Fernández de Aguilar, V Lord of Aguilar de la Frontera and Priego de Córdoba, who died very young, and of Elvira de Herrera y Enríquez, cousin of Juana Enríquez, queen consort of Aragon, since she was the daughter of Pedro Núñez de Herrera, Lord of Pedraza and Blanca Enríquez de Mendoza, who was the daughter of Admiral Alfonso Enríquez (son of Fadrique Alfonso de Castilla) and Juana de Mendoza "la Ricahembra".
Gonzalo and his older brother Alfonso Fernández de Córdoba grew up in Córdoba under the care of the prudent and discreet gentleman Pedro de Cárcamo. As a child, he was incorporated as a page in the service of Prince Alfonso of Castilla, brother of the later Queen Isabella I of Castilla, and on his death, he became Princess Isabel's entourage. Their sister, known by the name of Leonor de Arellano y Fernández de Córdoba, would marry Martín Fernández de Córdoba, warden of the Donceles.
Grenada War
Faithful to the Elizabethan cause, he began the military career that corresponded to a second son of the nobility in the War of the Castilian Succession. In the battle of Albuera, in 1479, against the Portuguese, his distinguished name already appears among the most notable warriors in the ranks of the Master of the Order of Santiago, Alonso de Cárdenas. At this time he was designated Voice and Major Vote of the Cabildo de Córdoba and married his cousin Isabel de Montemayor, daughter of Mr. del Carpio, who would soon die giving birth for the first time. As a wedding present, his brother had given him the mayor's office of Santaella. There he fell prisoner of his cousin and enemy Diego Fernández de Córdoba y Montemayor, 1st Count of Cabra, who kept him locked up in the castle of Cabra until his liberation in 1476 through the intercession of the Catholic Monarchs.
But it was in the long War of Granada, where he excelled as a soldier in the siege of Tájara (a square that is also known as the castle of Tajarja or tower of Tájara, located in the current payment of the Torres de Huétor-Tájar, Granada), where he demonstrated command skills, as well as practical ingenuity by devising a siege machine made with the doors of houses to protect the advance of the troops. But the actions that most distinguished him were the conquests of Íllora, Montefrío, where he commanded the assault corps and was the first to climb the wall in full view of the enemy and Loja where he took the Nasrid monarch Boabdil prisoner who surrendered after asking for mercy for the defeated and residents. Accompanied by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, whom he would end up considering his friend, he appeared before King Ferdinand and threw himself at his feet. In 1486 he was appointed mayor of Íllora with the mission of fomenting dissensions between Boadbil, who was supported by the Abencerrajes and the Zagal.
During these years, he remarried at the Portocarrero Palace in Palma del Río with María Manrique de Lara y Espinosa, Lady of Queen Isabel, from the lineage of the Dukes of Nájera with whom he had two daughters: Beatriz and Elvira Fernández of Córdoba, the last being his heiress.
His career was nearly cut short in a night skirmish off Granada that took place before the conclusion of the war; because having fallen from his horse in the middle of the fray, he would have perished had it not been for a loyal servant of the family who, riding his horse, gave his life for that of his lord. Spy and negotiator, he took charge of the last negotiations with the Nasrid monarch Boabdil for the surrender of the city at the beginning of 1492, although they became close friends and even accompanied the monarch in his exile to Fez in 1494. In reward for his outstanding services, he received a commendation from the Order of Santiago, the lordship of Órgiva, and certain rents on the production of silk from Granada, which contributed to enlarge his fortune.
First expedition to Italy
Background
In 1494 King Ferdinand I of Naples, son of Alfonso V of Aragon, died and his son Alfonso II of Naples was proclaimed king.
Charles VIII of France decided that, in order to reconquer the Holy Places (the main objective of many contemporary kings), he had to conquer the territories of Italy. To cover his back, he signed a secret treaty with King Ferdinand, which, in the disseminated clauses, was an alliance against the Turks, but, secretly, it was an alliance of friendship. That is to say, Spain would not interfere with France in her wars except against the Pope, the same thing that France would do. But when Fernando discovered the intentions of Carlos VIII, he acted skilfully, considering Naples a territory infeuded to the Pope, and therefore, of his concern. Ferdinand II of Aragon begins a diplomatic offensive to help his relative, obtaining the approval of the Pope of Rome and Florence and the neutrality of Venice.
Preparations
In 1495, the Cantabrian and Galician ports were summoned to supply ships that were to be concentrated in Cartagena and Alicante, and placed under the command of Galcerán de Requesens and Joan de Soler, Count of Trivento and general of the galleys of Sicily.
Sixty ships and twenty logs are assembled, and 6,000 foot soldiers and 700 horsemen embark. Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba leads the expedition. They go out to sea in bad weather, and the convoy splits in two. The vanguard group, that of Requesens, arrives in Sicily, where it waits in Messina for the arrival of the transports with the troops, which arrive on May 24, where it fully receives the Neapolitan royal family.
The campaign
Gonzalo moved the fleet to Calabria, entering the Kingdom of Naples and occupying Reggio Calabria and the surrounding towns. Despite the fact that King Alfonso II of Naples was defeated at the Battle of Seminara in 1495, Fernández de Córdoba maneuvered with great skill and achieved several successes, including the Siege of Atella in the summer of 1496, while Requesens appeared with their galleys in front of the city of Naples. The Duke of Montpensier, lieutenant of Charles VIII, decides to leave the city walls to avoid the landing, and the people of Naples, seeing the French troops leave, rise up, having to take refuge the few French that remained in the New and Egg castles. A French fleet appears with 2,000 reinforcing men, but decides not to confront Requesens and lands his people in Leghorn. Montpensier is forced to withdraw towards Salerno, and Naples falls to the Spanish.
The monarch Ferdinand II of Naples (r. 1495-96) died in October 1496 and Queen Juana de Trastámara requested help from Gonzalo and his troops for the coronation of her son Federico I (r. 1496-1501) as new Neapolitan king.
Gaeta and Tarento remain in French hands. Requesens organized two squadrons, one with four carracks and five ships that Gaeta blocked, and another with four ships, a caravel and two galleys to guard the coast and intercept relief from the French. The latter captured a Genoese ship with 300 soldiers and a cargo of flour. The Venetians cooperated by guarding the ports of Genoa and Provence. The plague broke out in the French ranks, from which Montpensier died with many of his soldiers. Gaeta is forced to capitulate, and the French can take all her belongings. They embark to France, but a furious storm sinks their ships.
Once the Kingdom of Naples had been secured for Federico I, he gathered his troops with the intention of dissolving them, but in February 1497 Pope Alexander VI asked him for help. A certain Menaldo Guerra, a Biscayan privateer, had seized Ostia and its castle under the French flag, closing the Tiber river and subjecting Rome to a contribution. For five days the Spanish batteries hammered the fortifications until they opened breaches in the walls. The Siege of Ostia allowed Menaldo Guerra and his henchmen to surrender as prisoners without offering resistance.A few days later the Great Captain was acclaimed in Rome. Upon receiving the Spanish general, Alexander VI dared to accuse the Catholic Monarchs of being ill-disposed towards him; but Gonzalo replied by listing the great services that the kings had rendered to the cause of the Church and branded the Pontiff as ungrateful and abruptly advised him to reform his life and customs since those he led caused a great scandal in Christianity. As a result of this reprimand, Alexander VI awarded Fernández de Córdoba the Golden Rose and the Blessed Rapier.
After three years of campaigning, in 1498 the troops returned to Castile, leaving the Kingdom of Naples in the hands of Federico I, who thanked him for his services with the titles of Duke of Santángelo and Duke of Newfoundland, as well as numerous pieces of land in Italian lands. Furthermore, after the capture of Roccaguglielma, his own soldiers and even the French who had defended it began to give him the nickname The Great Captain.
Agreement with France and alliance against the Ottomans
Ferdinand II of Aragon and Louis XII of France sign a reserved treaty in 1500 (the Treaty of Chambord-Granada) dividing up the kingdom of Naples, awarding the provinces of Labor and Abruzzo to the French, with the titles of King of Naples and of Jerusalem and the rest of Aragonese, with the title of Duke of Apulia and Calabria.
The reserved agreement coincides with a request for help from Venice, whose square in Modon, in the Peloponnese (Greece), is being attacked by the Ottoman Empire. On the Spanish side, an armada of 60 sails was being prepared in Malaga, transporting 8,000 infantry and cavalry men, commanded by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba as captain-general of land and sea.
The ships arrive at Messina, after a painful journey, as the water became scarce, and some men and many horses died. In Messina, the expedition was joined by some 2,000 Spanish soldiers who had stayed in Italy in the previous expedition, and several ships from Biscay, among which Pedro Navarro was presumably among them.
On September 27 they put to sea, arriving on October 2 in time to rescue Candía. The Venetian fleet and two French carracks with 800 men joined the expedition. They agree to take Kefalonia, beginning the siege of the island on November 8 and ending on December 24 with the conquest of the fortress of Saint George. They return to Sicily with many hardships and some riots due to shortages.
Second expedition to Italy
In 1501 Pope Alexander VI made public the secret agreement between France and Aragon, and the French occupied their part with 20,000 men, meeting resistance only in Capua. The Aragonese monarch orders the Great Captain to occupy his part, but in Taranto he meets resistance to his advance. The square was well fortified and defended, so the land siege and the naval blockade were established, Juan de Lezcano seizing a ship with artillery and ammunition for the square.
In view of the impossibility of doing it by sea, due to the strong defenses, 20 caravels were transferred by land to the inner bay of Taranto, and the place where it had no defenses was attacked. Thus, in 1502, Taranto surrendered to the Great Captain, with which the Spanish and French each occupied their part of the kingdom of Naples.
French expulsion from Naples
From the beginning there were frictions between the Spanish and the French over the division of Naples, which led to the reopening of hostilities. The French numerical superiority forced Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba to use his genius as a strategist, concentrating on the defense of strongholds while waiting for reinforcements. At the end of 1502 the Spanish entrenched themselves in Barletta, on the Adriatic coast. The Great Captain refuses a pitched battle, despite the discontent of his soldiers, but organizes an active defense (harassing the enemy and attacking their lines of communication). During the French siege of Barletta, the knightly tournament known as the Barletta Challenge takes place.
When reinforcements arrive and he sees that the French have made the mistake of dispersing, he gives the order to abandon Barletta and goes on the offensive, taking the city of Ruvo di Puglia and achieving victory in the battle of Cerinola, in which he crushes the troops of the French Generalissimo, Luis de Armagnac, Duke of Nemours and in a few minutes 3000 Swiss and French corpses were lying on the battlefield. This victory coincides with that of the Spanish army under the command of Fernando de Andrade, against Bérault Stuart d'Aubigny's French troops at the Battle of Seminara.
The war was not yet over and shortly after Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba took the fortresses of Castel Nuovo and Castel dell'Ovo. The rest of the French troops marched to Gaeta awaiting reinforcements. Louis XII sends another large army under the command of Marshal Louis II de la Trémoille (30,000 soldiers, including 10,000 horsemen and numerous artillery). The Great Captain could not take Gaeta and set up a defensive line on the Garellano River, relying on the castles of Montecassino and Roca Seca, to close the French pass to the Neapolitan capital. La Tremouille falls ill and is replaced by Francisco II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, who will later be replaced by Ludovico II, Marquis of Saluzzo. On the night of December 27, 1503, the Spanish army crosses the Garellano on a bridge of boats and surprises the following day the French army fleeing in disarray. The French left several thousand men on the battlefield, an estimated three or four, with all their baggage, flags, and artillery. The Spanish casualties are not known but they must also have been high. The next day the Great Captain was ready to assault the heights of Monte Orlando, which dominated the Gaeta square, but before the artillery fired a messenger from the Marquis de Saluzzo proposing capitulation. This capitulation was surprising because the French army still had numerous troops, the place was equipped with artillery, it had food for ten days and the French fleet was anchored in the bay to supply them and maintain communications with the outside world. However, French troops were totally demoralized. After the battle of Garellano and the capture of Gaeta, the French abandoned Naples.
Viceroy of Naples (1504-1507)
After the war, Fernández de Córdoba ruled as viceroy in Naples for four years, with all the authority of a sovereign. He was instrumental in being sent to Spain as a prisoner in 1504 by César Borgia, son of the Spanish Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) for his custody in Chinchilla. But when he escaped to Navarre in 1506 and went from having been Bishop of Pamplona in his childhood thanks to his father, to now being Constable of Navarre by his brother-in-law King Juan III de Albret, husband of the incumbent queen of Navarre Catalina I of Navarra, who were fighting to avoid the absorption of his small kingdom by a Navarrese-Castilian-Aragonese coalition, César Borgia would lose his life in the Battle of Viana in March 1507. The Navarrese Beamontese would see more than 80% of the territory of the kingdom incorporated into the domains of Ferdinand II of Aragon and his new and young wife Germana de Foix in 1512 as advocated and in the interregnum 1516-1520 to those of his grandson.
An important member of the Royal Council of Juan III de Albret, a colleague of César Borgia, was precisely the father of the later famous Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier, sent by the Founder of the Order Saint Ignatius of Loyola to India and Japan to evangelize for the papal privileges granted to the Portuguese and implanted in the Chancellery for Eastern Affairs in Lisbon of King John III of Portugal "The Pious".
After the death of Isabel la Católica, King Ferdinand echoed certain rumors accusing Fernández de Córdoba of appropriating war funds during the Italian conflict, which together with fears that he would become independent thanks to the great fame and notoriety he had acquired ended with his dismissal from command, and although it is not proven that he asked for an account, Gonzalo, to justify that what was said about him was not true, presented some accounts (which are kept in the General Archive de Simancas) in such detail that they have remained as a proverb in the popular language. It is true, however, that he did not comply with the offers he had made, despite his wishes to return to Italy.
Death
The sudden termination of his position as viceroy of Naples ended his Italian stage, after which Queen Juana I of Castile granted him the mayoralty of Loja on July 15, 1508, where he retired for the last years of his life. There he established a kind of national and international observatory to follow the events of the kingdom, he even corresponded with Cardinal Cisneros and received the historian Francesco Guicciardini, a fact that angered the monarch. The noble revolt of his nephew, the 1st Marquis of Priego, was the perfect excuse for Fernando el Católico to destroy the castle of Montilla, where Gonzalo himself had been born. This fact was seen as an act of enmity between them.
Despite these last years in Loja, feeling ill, he returned to Granada with his family at the beginning of August 1515, where he died on December 2. His remains rested temporarily in the now-defunct convent of San Francisco in Granada, while works were being carried out for his transfer to the monastery of San Jerónimo, a fact that finally occurred, after the permission of Carlos I, in 1522. His wife and several other relatives would also end up resting in the crypt, with more than 700 war trophies.
Exhumations
In 1810, during the War of Independence, the French troops led by General Horace Sebastiani desecrated his tomb, mutilating his remains and burning the 700 flags. Sebastiani, in his flight from Spain in 1812, took his skull and a probable copy of his gala sword, objects that still remain unaccounted for today.
In 1835 the remains were exhumed again after the Spanish confiscation, although a monk was able to guard them and hand them over to the Láinez y Fuster family, members of the Academy of Noble Arts, who handed them over to the Monuments Commission and these, to the civil governor. A few years later, in 1848, General Fermín de Ezpeleta was interested in the bones and, after a complete medical report, discovered that the corpse was incomplete, mixed with other bodies and there were many objects in the crypt. In 1868 they were transferred to the church of San Francisco el Grande in Madrid, where a pantheon of illustrious Spaniards was projected; however, once this objective failed, the remains returned to their crypt in the monastery of San Jerónimo de Granada.
In 2006, an investigation by the Andalusian Historical Heritage Institute concluded that the remains did not belong to the Great Captain.
The Great Captain's Art of War
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The Great Captain was an exceptionally gifted military genius, who for the first time managed combined infantry, cavalry, and artillery taking advantage of naval support. He knew how to skillfully move his troops and lead the enemy to the terrain that he had chosen as most favorable. He revolutionized military technique by reorganizing the infantry into colonelías (embryo of future tercios). Idolized by his soldiers and admired by all, he had his greatest enemy in his popularity.
The combination of combat operations allowed Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, during the wars in Italy, to introduce several successive reforms in the Spanish army, which led to the Tercio. The first reorganization was in 1503. Gonzalo created the division with two colonelías of 6,000 infantry each, 800 men-at-arms, 800 light horses, and 22 cannons. The general had in his hands all the means to bring the fight to a decision. Gonzalo de Córdoba gave predominance to the infantry, which is capable of maneuvering in all kinds of terrain. He doubled the proportion of arquebusiers, one for every five infantrymen, and armed two infantrymen out of five with short swords and throwing lances, charged with slipping between the long pikes of the battalions of Swiss snipers and lansquenets and wounding the adversary in the belly.
It gave cavalry a more important role in dealing with a "broken" enemy (persecution or harassment) than in "breaking" it, taking away the role of queen of battles it had had until then. It replaced medieval shock warfare by the defense-attack tactic giving preference to the infantry over all weapons.
He also put into practice a staggering in depth, in three successive lines, to have a reserve and an additional possibility of maneuver. Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba facilitated the passage of the travel column to the combat order by dividing the battalions into companies, each one of which was placed at the height and to the right of the one that preceded it, with which the formation of troops was easily achieved. combat. He trained his men through rigorous discipline and shaped his morale by awakening in them pride of body, personal dignity, a sense of national honor and religious interest. He made of the Spanish infantry that formidable army of which the French said after having fought against him, that "they had not fought with men but with devils."
Great Captain's Beads
Although it may not be more than a legend, it is said that King Fernando the Catholic asked Don Gonzalo for an account of what he had spent the money of his kingdom on. This would have been seen by him as an insult. There are several versions of the answer, the most common would say:
For spikes, shovels, and hoards, a hundred million ducats; for alms, that friars and nuns may pray for the Spaniards, a hundred and fifty thousand ducats; for gloves perfumed so that the soldiers may not smell the stench of the battle, two hundred million ducats; for replenishing the bells because of the continual repicar to victory, a hundred and seventy I have given away a kingdomOne hundred million ducats.
Whether the anecdote is true or not, the expression the accounts of the Great Captain has remained as a phrase made for a little-detailed relationship, in which the elements that comprise it seem exaggerated, or for an explanation requested for something to which one has no right.
Fiction
| Year | Series | Actor |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | Isabel | Sergio Peris |
| 2011 | The Borgia | Scott Cleverdon |
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