Isabel the Queen by Peggy K. Liss

Author:Peggy K. Liss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812293203
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.

Málaga: 1487

Municipalities and nobles were notified to have specified quantities of cavalry and infantry at Córdoba by March 27, a general call went out to all knights, and amnesty was offered to all fugitives from justice who presented themselves for service. And breaking with custom, Isabel now decreed that no camp followers and prostitutes go with that army. The hermanded agreed to a mammoth levy of ten thousand foot with salary for eighty days, and a host similar in size to the previous year was assembled. The plan was to take advantage of the renewed strife within Granada between al-Zagal and Boabdil, their partisans incessantly fighting through its narrow streets.16 Money came in from the bulls of crusade, and through huge individual loans: 11.3 million maravedís from Medina Sidonia, 8.3 million from the Mesta, 5 million from Benavente, and a million and a half from Cádiz.17

Isabel was in Córdoba with her children by March 2. Arrangements having been made with supporters of Boabdil within Málaga, only a brief campaign was expected, and in early April she saw the army off to the base camp at Antequera. It was to invest first the outlying town of Vélez Málaga, thereby cutting Málaga off from Granada. The campaign began inauspiciously: there was an earthquake the following day. She heard from Fernando of his having spent an anxious, sleepless night concerned for her safety and of his wish that “Our Lord guard you above all others.”18 Then came torrential rains, and floods washing out roads and swamping pasture lands, slowing the host to five leagues a day.

Vélez Málaga sits behind a daunting barrier of mountains a half league from the sea. Into that rugged mountainous terrain moved an advance unit of two thousand foot soldiers and along with it carpenters who built bridges over arroyos and filled in deep pools of water, while another four thousand peones wielding iron pikes and poles leveled and paved the ground. The army that followed is estimated at twelve thousand cavalry and forty thousand infantry.19 Once Fernando was encamped before the town, on April 16, trouble persisted. Only a part of the artillery had arrived, the lombards remained mired down in Antequera, and twelve hundred sick and wounded lay in the field hospitals. The gallegos, Asturians, Basques, and other mercenaries were proving unruly. And rain had ruined a great deal of food. Still, ships brought provisions to the coast, and people from Málaga brought some out—until Málaga’s alcázar was taken from Boabdil’s alcaide by partisans of al-Zagal.

Isabel, hearing through her swift couriers that al-Zagal himself was coming to relieve Vélez Málaga with one thousand horse and twenty thousand foot, urgently called upon knights from all Andalusia—the cardinal offered to pay personally all cavalry volunteering—and she ordered all Andalusian men from twenty to sixty “to take arms and go to the King and serve him.” Al-Zagal indeed arrived, by April 25, but almost immediately heard that some of his men in fleeing from a skirmish with Boabdil’s partisans had induced a general panic in Granada.

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