War rages across Iberia.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French had occupied Portugal and placed his brother
Joseph on the throne of Spain, but many in both countries refused to bend the knee to
the French.
In the spring of 1808, they rebelled.
The insurgents formed militias and guerilla bands, and regulars from the Spanish and Portuguese
armies mutinied against their French masters.
Napoleon rallied his armies to crush the uprising.
The Peninsular War had begun.
Spain in 1808 was the scene of a chaotic struggle.
Events had moved so quickly that neither side was prepared for total war.
The Spanish rushed to unify the local rebellions and to train their raw recruits and inexperienced
officers into armies capable of challenging the greatest military on earth.
France had 90,000 troops in Spain, but they were spread out all over the country, and
many were fresh conscripts, not much better-trained than the Spanish rebels.
Napoleon tried to manage the war in Iberia from afar, but day-to-day command fell to
his friend and brother-in-law, Marshal Joachim Murat.
Murat was brave, tough, and charismatic, but he was unimaginative and preferred brute force
to subtlety.
His aggressive methods turned people against Joseph Bonaparte’s regime and exposed his
men to violent reprisals from Spanish guerrillas.
Murat decided on a bold strategy: rather than falling back to his strongholds to concentrate
and organize his forces, the French would remain spread-out and immediately set about
suppressing the rebellion in every corner of Spain.
Napoleon agreed.
They were taking a terrible risk by spreading their forces so thin.
The French had profoundly underestimated the size and strength of the uprising.
Securing Zaragoza was Murat’s main priority-- it was the key to his main lines of communication
back to France.
He immediately dispatched 4,000 men under General Charles Lefèbvre-Desnoëttes to seize
the city.
Lefèbvre-Desnoëttes pushed his men as hard as he could, but the march to Zaragoza proved
arduous.
The French were harassed by guerrillas, and although Lefèbvre-Desnoëttes won all of
these engagements easily, they slowed him down, and by the time the French arrived at
the gates of Zaragoza on June 15th, the Spanish had assembled a garrison of over six thousand
men, outnumbering the attackers.
Spanish forces in the area were led by General José de Palafox, an energetic career military
officer.
Palafox had begun his campaign with only 500 regulars, but thousands of Spaniards flocked
to his banners.
Although they outnumbered the French, Palafox was wary of taking his untrained, ill-equipped
militia out from the safety of Zaragoza’s walls, so he prepared his defenses.
The people of Zaragoza helped by building improvised barricades and even taking up arms
to join the defenders.
Zaragoza had a formidable defensive position: with the river Ebro on one side, and massive
medieval city walls on the other three.
Upon arriving at the city, Lefèbvre-Desnoëttes ordered an immediate assault.
He did not believe the rag-tag Spanish militias were capable of serious resistance.
He divided his troops into three columns and ordered an attack on the three main gates.
The assault began with a cavalry charge, led by the Polish lancers- elite soldiers, who
saw Napoleon as the liberator of their homeland.
The lancers pushed aside the Spanish units guarding the gate and galloped into Zaragoza.
But rather than panicking, the Spanish poured musket fire onto the horsemen from all sides.
The fire was so intense that the French infantry was unable to follow into the gap created
by the charge.
Once inside the city, the Polish lancers found they had nowhere to go-- every street was
barricaded, and more Spanish defenders waited in every alley, and behind every door and
window.
Very few of the Poles made it out alive.
It was a similar story at the other two gates into Zaragoza: the French breached the walls,
but once inside, found even more fierce resistance.
Every one of the city’s narrow, winding medieval streets had been barricaded by the
Spanish, and with nowhere to advance, the French were vulnerable to counter-attack,
and soon forced out.
In disbelief, Lefèbvre-Desnoëttes ordered his men renew the assault.
Once again, the French broke through the outer walls, but once again, they found it impossible
to advance into the heart of the city, and were pushed out by Spanish counter-attacks.
Lefèbvre-Desnoëttes had no choice but to admit failure.
The French lost roughly 700 men, compared to only about 300 Spaniards.
French reinforcements arrived outside the city in the coming days and weeks, and a more
senior French officer took command-- General Jean-Antoine Verdier.
The new commander spent weeks methodically demolishing the walls of Zaragoza with artillery.
On July 1st, Verdier decided Zaragoza was ripe for another assault.
The French stormed the battered walls of the city once again, this time in a better-coordinated
attack at six different points.
The fighting was fierce, but Spanish morale remained high.
At a crucial point in the battle, an entire Spanish artillery crew fell wounded.
A young woman named Agustina de Aragón rushed forward to fire their cannon at the advancing
French.
Her bravery made her an icon of the anti-French resistance, and earned her a commission as
second lieutenant of artillery-- making her the only female officer of the war.
The French were able to penetrate the walls of Zaragoza, but found it impossible to advance.
After a day of brutal close combat, they were pushed out of the city.
The French lost roughly five hundred men.
General Verdier gave up any hope of a quick victory, and began preparations for a siege
-- entrenchments to choke off the lines of supply into the city, and batteries for heavy
artillery.
The Spanish fought tenaciously to keep the supply routes into the city open, but by July
24th, Zaragoza was sealed off.
The French stepped up their bombardment.
Three large gaps had been blown into the walls, and on the 4th of August, Verdier ordered
his men into the city once again.
This time, the assault made slow but steady progress.
The French had to fight for every street, but by the afternoon, they controlled half
of Zaragoza.
General Verdier sent Palafox a message under a flag of truce; it was a simple, one-word
question: “Surrender?”
Palafox responded with a short message of his own: “war to the death.”
The vicious house-to-house fighting continued.
General Verdier himself was wounded.
Finally, by the early evening, the French were exhausted.
The Spanish counter-attacked and regained some ground.
The two sides passed an uneasy night in their respective sections of the city.
Verdier had lost nearly two thousand men-- twenty percent of the attacking force.
Spanish casualties were high as well.
Both sides were exhausted and depleted from the epic combat and found it nearly impossible
to advance through the fortified ruins of the city.
Street battles continued, but as Zaragoza burned, events were ramping up elsewhere.
The Andalucia region of southern Spain was a major rebel stronghold.
Napoleon dispatched General Pierre Dupont to re-assert French control over the area.
Dupont was a rising star, only recently promoted to general.
Napoleon promised him a noble title and a promotion to marshal if Andalucia was subdued.
This was a huge task for such an untested commander, and he was not given much to accomplish
it.
The core of his 13,000-man force was not even French, but Swiss.
These were experienced regular soldiers, but they had been forced into the Imperial army
under duress, so their loyalty was dubious.
The rest of Dupont’s force were mostly raw recruits who had never seen action.
Still, Dupont had success in the initial stage of his campaign.
On June 7th, he seized the strategically-important city of Córdoba.
However, as the French advanced, Dupont neglected to garrison any troops in his rear.
This would cost him dearly.
The countryside behind Dupont’s army began to rise in rebellion.
Peasants formed guerrilla bands that attacked French messengers and supply convoys.
If the General did not act quickly, he would be cut off.
Dupont did not realize the seriousness of his situation for several days, until finally,
the couriers from headquarters stopped arriving-- the rebels had taken control of the last road
between Córdoba and Madrid.
Dupont finally evacuated Córdoba on June 16th, but moved with no urgency, allowing
his men to keep any captured loot, which slowed their movements to a crawl.
General Dupont managed to re-establish contact with Madrid, and received reinforcements,
bringing his total strength to around 20,000 men.
His army was still in a vulnerable position, separated from Madrid by the Sierra Morena
mountains and the Guadalquivir River.
By now, a Spanish army of around 31,000 men arrived in the area, under the command of
General Francisco Javier Castaños.
Still, Dupont was not ordered to retreat, and he began to set up defensive positions.
The Battle of Bailen and the conclusion of the Siege of Zaragoza were coming and they
would change the situation in Europe and the fates of both the Napoleonic and Peninsular
Wars forever.
The eyes of all the monarchs of the Old World were fixed on Spain...
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