SEVENTH SIEGE, A.D. 1503.
Ferdinand, king of Castille and Arragon, having, in contempt of treaties of the most solemn kind, invaded the part of the kingdom of Naples and Sicily that belonged to France, charged his great captain Gonsalvo with the siege of the capital of that state. At the approach of the Spaniards, the French, who placed no confidence in the inhabitants, retreated to the fortresses of the Château-neuf and the Œuf. Gonsalvo attacked the first of these, and it made a vigorous resistance. The garrison had resolved to bury themselves under the ruins of the place rather than surrender; and without doubt the Spanish general would have failed in his enterprise if he had only employed ordinary means. But he had in his army a soldier called Peter of Navarre, from the name of his country, who opened the gates and destroyed the ramparts of the castle by the help of a new species of thunder, if we may so term it. This soldier, a very intelligent man, had been, in 1487, with an expedition in which the Genoese employed, but without success, those terrible volcanoes called mines. He examined the fourneau of one of these mines, and observed that the want of effect in this invention did not arise from any fault in the art, but from that of the workmen, who had not taken their dimensions correctly. He perfected this secret, and communicated it to Gonsalvo, who begged him to put it to the test. Peter of Navarre took his measures so well, that his mine had all the effect he could expect; he then pierced several others, which succeeded with such precision that the New Castle was blown up, and all its defenders were either cut to pieces or buried under the ruins of the walls. The governor of the castle of the Œuf, a brave gentleman from Auvergne named Chavagnac, were not discouraged by the melancholy fate of his compatriots; he was in vain summoned to surrender: he replied that nothing more glorious could happen to him than to die for his master, with his sword in his hand. Peter then commenced some fresh mines, which were sprung with the same terrible consequences as the former: the walls crushed the greater part of the soldiers, and the rest perished in sight of a Genoese fleet which came to their succour.