As the war grew more serious the purely Spanish troops were augmented by mercenaries, principally Swiss mountaineers. “Hardy warriors who fight on foot,” Pulgar describes them, “so resolved never to turn their back on the enemy that they wear defensive armour only in front, and are thus able to move with the greater ease.” The Swiss had won their laurels against Charles the Bold on the fields of Granson and Nanci; but even farther reaching than their vindication of national independence had been the triumph in their persons of infantry over cavalry; another blow struck at the old feudal ideas. In the war of Granada, it is still the cavalry who hold sway; but the presence of the Swiss foot-soldiers was not without its influence in the history of Spain, whose infantry, drilled and disciplined after their method by Gonsalvo de Ayora in the latter years of Ferdinand’s reign, was to become the admiration and fear of Europe.
More immediate in its effects was the improvement of the artillery, a department of war that came under the Queen’s special supervision, and on which she expended her usual vivid interest and energy. A study of the almost barren results of the first two years of fighting had made it obvious that future campaigns must resolve themselves into a war of sieges, a war whose ultimate issue depended not so much on cavalry or infantry as on gunners and engineers. Isabel had already summoned from Germany and Flanders the men most gifted in this particular branch of military science, placing at their head Francisco Ramirez, a knight of Madrid, whose knowledge and experience was to win him the nickname “El Artillero.”
DOUBLE BREECH-LOADING CANNON, IN BRONZE; USED IN SPAIN FROM THE END OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
FROM “SPANISH ARMS AND ARMOUR”
REPRODUCED BY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR, MR. A. F. CALVERT
During the campaigns against the Moors in the reign of John II., Isabel’s father, the Christian army had been proud of its five “lombards” or heavy guns; but the growing importance of the artillery can be estimated, when we learn that in 1486, at the second siege of Loja, there were twenty lombards in action, while in two of the batteries placed before Malaga there were eleven heavy pieces, without counting the smaller ordnance.
Some of the very lombards employed in the attack on Baeza can still be seen in that city, constructed of thick bars of iron clamped together by rings of the same metal; while in the fields around the peasants dig up balls of iron and marble, that once made such havoc of the ramparts. Beside a modern field-gun these cannon appear ludicrously clumsy. Fixed so that they could be pointed neither to the right nor left, without changing the position of the whole machine, and built only to fire horizontally, the weight of their ammunition prevented the powder used from igniting quickly; yet compared with the artillery of bygone days their discharge had the swiftness of the wind. When two lombards could arrive between them at one hundred and forty shots within the day, their gunners could proclaim a marvellous achievement; and Isabel looking round on her formidable batteries could boast, as Prescott has complimented her, on having “assembled a train of artillery, such as was probably not possessed at that time by any other European potentate.”
The kingdom of Granada, regardless of her enemy’s heavy guns, still kept her derisive smile. Fatal to the most solid masonry these lombards might prove indeed, when once in action, but who should bring them by river-bed and goat-track to assault fortresses and castles built on crags, that had hitherto defied the approach even of a battering-ram?
It was a question that might have dismayed the most intrepid of generals; but Isabel was of the fibre of which Hannibals and Napoleons are made. She recognized difficulties but to overcome them; and the actual provision of guns was merely a section of her extensive preparations. Carpenters, blacksmiths, stone-masons, bricklayers, colliers, weavers of ropes and baskets; these were but a few of the army of workmen and engineers who built bridges, filled in valleys, and levelled heights, that the artillery might reach their destination. At the head of each department was an official deputed to see that nothing was lacking to his branch of the work, whether food for the troops, fodder for the horses, wood for carts and bridges, forges for iron-moulding, powder fetched from Sicily, Flanders, or Portugal, or marble and stone to be fashioned into shot.
In the end two thousand gun-carriages, drawn by oxen, lumbered heavily across the frontier, and soon were winding up the mountains into the heart of Granada by peak and ridge. Pulgar describes how a road more than three leagues in length was constructed within twelve days “by the command and great insistence of the Queen”; while the Curate of Los Palacios, lost in awe and admiration, declares that “he who had not seen the passes by which those monstrous lombards and heavy artillery made their way would have deemed it a thing incredible.”
“The Queen has provided for every need,” wrote the Italian scholar, Peter Martyr, to the Archbishop of Milan, when at the seat of war before Baeza; and his letter shows that Isabel’s thoughts were not wholly occupied with the destruction of the Infidel.