During the siege, ambassadors arrived from an African potentate, the king of Tremecen, bearing a magnificent present to the Castilian sovereigns, interceding for the Malagans, and at the same time asking protection for his subjects from the Spanish cruisers in the Mediterranean. The sovereigns graciously complied with the latter request, and complimented the African monarch with a plate of gold, on which the royal arms were curiously embossed, says Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, cap. 84.
[17] This nobleman, Don Alvaro de Portugal, had fled his native country, and sought an asylum in Castile from the vindictive enmity of John II, who had been put to death by the duke of Braganza, his elder brother. He was kindly received by Isabella, to whom he was nearly related, and subsequently preferred to several important offices of state. His son, the count of Gelves, married a granddaughter of Christopher Columbus. Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS.
[18] Oviedo, Quincuagenas, MS., bat. 1, quinc. 1, dial. 23.—Peter Martyr, Opus Epist., lib. 1, epist. 63.—Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 84.—Bleda, Corónica de los Moros, lib. 5, cap. 15.—L. Marineo, Cosas Memorables, fol. 175, 176.
[19] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 87-89.—Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 84.
[20] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 87.—Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 71.
[21] Conde, Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. iii. pp. 237, 238.—Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 80.—Caro de Torres, Ordenes Militares, fol. 82, 83.
[22] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, cap. 9l.—Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 84. The honest exclamation of the Curate brings to mind the similar encomium of the old Moorish ballad,
"Caballeros Granadinos, Aunque Moros, hijosdalgo."
Hyta, Guerras de Granada, tom. i., p. 257.
[23] There is no older well-authenticated account of the employment of gunpowder in mining in European warfare, so far as I am aware, than this by Ramirez. Tiraboschi, indeed, refers, on the authority of another writer, to a work in the library of the Academy of Siena, composed by one Francesco Giorgio, architect of the duke of Urbino, about 1480, in which that person claims the merit of the invention. (Letteratura Italiana, tom. vi. p. 370.) The whole statement is obviously too loose to warrant any such conclusion. The Italian historians notice the use of gunpowder mines at the siege of the little town of Serezanello in Tuscany, by the Genoese, in 1487, precisely contemporaneous with the siege of Malaga. (Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine, lib. 8.—Guicciardini, Istoria d'Italia, (Milano, 1803,) tom. iii. lib. 6.) This singular coincidence, in nations having then but little intercourse, would seem to infer some common origin of greater antiquity. However this may be, the writers of both nations are agreed in ascribing the first successful use of such mines on any extended scale to the celebrated Spanish engineer, Pedro Navarro, when serving under Gonsalvo of Cordova, in his Italian campaigns at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Guicciardini, ubi supra.—Paolo Giovio, de Vitâ Magni Gonsalvi, (Vitae Illustrium Virorum, Basiliae, 1578,) lib. 2.— Aleson, Annales de Navarra, tom. v. lib. 35, cap. 12.