Page:History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic Vol. III.djvu/110

84 84 ITALIAN WARS. PART obliged to content himself with sending forward '- — his cavalry and German levies, and to permit the infantry to take up its quarters in the capital, under strict orders to respect the persons and property of the citizens. He now lost no time in pressing the siege of the French fortresses, whose impregnable situation might have derided the efforts of the most formida- ble enemy in the ancient state of military science. But the reduction of these places was intrusted to Pedro Navarro, the celebrated engineer, whose im- provements in the art of mining have gained him the popular reputation of being its inventor, and who displayed such unprecedented skill on this occasion, as makes it a memorable epoch in the annals of war.^^ P.^l?'^»5' Under his directions, the small tower of St. vo stormed. ' Vincenzo having been first reduced by a furious cannonade, a mine was run under the outer de- fences of the great fortress called Castel Nuovo. On the 21st of May, the mine was sprung; a pas- sage was opened over the prostrate ramparts, and the assailants, rushing in with Gonsalvo and Na- varro at their head, before the garrison had time to secure the drawbridge, applied their ladders to the walls of the castle and succeeded in carrying the place by escalade, after a desperate struggle, in 29 The Italians, in their admi- his glory was scarcely less, since ration of Pedro Navarro, caused he was the first who discovered the medals to he struck, on which the extensive and formidable uses to invention of mines was ascribed to which they might be applied in the him. (Marini, apud Daru, Hist, science of destruction. See Part I. de Venise, torn. iii. p. 351.) Al- Chapter 13, note 23, of this His- Ihough not actually the inventor, lory.