Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. II.djvu/56

32 (32 WAR OF GRANADA. PART I. Outworks carried. Grievous (amine. But no virtue nor valor could avail the unfortu- nate Malagans against the overwhelming force of their enemies, who, driving them back from every jioint, compelled them, after a desperate struggle of six hours, to shelter themselves within the defences of the town. The Christians followed up their success. A mine was sprung near a tower, connect- ed by a bridge of four arches with the main works of the place. The Moors, scattered and intimidat- ed by the explosion, retreated across the bridge, and the Spaniards, carrying the tower, whose guns completely enfiladed it, obtained possession of this important pass into the beleaguered city. For these and other signal services during the siege, Francisco Ramirez, the master of the ordnance, received the honors of knighthood from the hand of King Ferdi- nand. ^^ The citizens of Malaga, dismayed at beholding 23 There is no older well-authen- ticated account of the employment of gunpowder in minin^ in Euro- pean warfare, so far as I am aware, than this by Ramirez. Tirabos- chi, indeed, refers, on the authority of another writer, to a work in the library of the Academy of Siena, composed by one Francesco Gior- gio, architect of the duke of Urbi- no, about 1480, in which that per- son claims the merit of the inven- tion. (Lctteratura Italiana, torn, vi. p. 370.) The whole statement is obviously too loose to warrant any such conclusion. The Italian historians notice the use of gun- powder mines at the siege of the little town of Serezanello in Tus- cany, by the Genoese, in 1487, precisely contemporaneous with the siege of Malaga. (Machia- velli, Istorie Fiorentine, lib. 8. — Guicciardini, Istoria d' Italia, (Mi- lano, 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. How- ever this may be, the writers of both nations are agreed in ascrib- ing the first successful use of such mines on any extended scale to the celebrated Spanish engineer, Pedro Navarro, when serving under Gon- salvo of Cordova, in his Italian campaigns at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Guicciardini, ubi supra. — Paolo Giovio, De Vita Magni Gonsalvi, (Vita; Illus- trium Virorum, Basilise, 1578,) lib. 2. — Aleson, Annalcsde Navarra, tom. V. lib. 35, cap. 12.