Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba

Biography

The most important soldier of the age and the one who understood first what was happening. A veteran of the Granada campaign, Gonzalo went to Italy in 1495, was beaten by the French and their Swiss pikes, and — instead of demanding better knights — rebuilt Spanish infantry from scratch around the arquebus and the spade. At Cerignola in 1503 he dug a ditch, lined it with arquebusiers, and let the French gendarmerie charge into it. The finest heavy cavalry in Europe was shot to pieces at point-blank range for the loss of about a hundred Spaniards — generally counted the first battle in history decided by handheld gunpowder weapons. Eight months later he crossed the flooded Garigliano on a secret pontoon bridge in freezing rain and destroyed the French again. Naples was Spanish for two hundred years. His reorganisation of infantry into self-contained mixed units of pike, sword, and shot became the *coronelía* and then the tercio, which dominated European battlefields until the Dutch broke it at Nieuwpoort ninety-seven years later. Ferdinand of Aragon, suspicious of a subject that famous, recalled him and left him in honourable idleness for the rest of his life.

Key Battles