“Two armies so brave and brilliant have rarely faced each other”

The pride that many Spaniards feel in this battle has lasted for the past 120 years. ‘The universal moment of San Quentin’, ABC titled an extensive report from 1951, describing the place where two of the world’s most powerful armies clashed in the mid-16th century: «San Quentin was a border town that had been occupied by the French for seventy years. It was as large as Madrid and its surroundings. It was surrounded by gardens and defended by good artillery. There was a lake on the Flanders side and next to it was a suburb with wooden gates. The suburb had about a hundred houses. There was a bastion inside the wall and after a drawbridge at the entrance.

The victory achieved by Spain on August 10, 1557, the day of San Lorenzo, will always be remembered, if only because the famous monastery of El Escorial was built in his honor. In 1944, Francisco de Cossio described the confrontation in this same newspaper as “the highest point of Spanish royal power” and “a defining moment for the world.” And the victory was resounding, worthy of the complex in which the Spanish kings of the Austrian and Bourbon dynasties are buried today, with the exception of Philip V and Ferdinand VI.

The battle took place within the framework of the Italian Wars, a year after the Kingdom of Naples was invaded by the French troops of the Duke of Guise. That humiliation caused Philip II to take his revenge and immediately ordered his troops in the Spanish Netherlands to invade France. At that time, the open war between Henry II of France and the King of Spain entered its most critical phase. The first confrontations took place in Italy, where the Gauls had the support of Pope Paul IV, but the main confrontation took place on the border between France and Flanders.

aggressive

The offensive began before the end of July 1557, with a diversionary movement by Manuel Filiberto, the man commanding the Spanish troops, leading the French to believe that he and all his allies were going to invade Champagne and then move towards Guise. This prompted the French to send a large contingent to defend it, although in reality, the Spanish command was moving at full speed towards Saint Quentin, a city in Picardy located on the banks of the Somme River.

Ruy Gómez de Silva, a Portuguese aristocrat of great importance in the court of Philip II, managed to recruit 8,000 infantry and a large sum of money for the King of Spain. For his part, he went to England to obtain aid from his second wife, Mary I Tudor, from whom he received 9,000 pounds and 7,000 men. All of them marched towards Brussels, where they formed an army of 42,000 soldiers, 30,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, as well as eighty regiments. Of these, only 6,000 were Spanish; the rest, Flemish, Burgundian, Savoyard, Hungarian, Italian and, above all, German.

However, the capture of the city was not easy. Saint-Quentin dominated an area of ​​more than two leagues from a hill, and its south-south-west part was in those days filled with some swamps and the Somme river. In contrast, the French garrison of the city consisted of only a few hundred soldiers under the command of a captain. The Spanish army began the attack on August 2, capturing the suburb to the north, composed of about a hundred houses and protected by a few ditches and batteries.

Montmorency

The French response was to send Admiral Gaspar de Coligny in command of a relief detachment of only 500 men, which entered San Quentin on the night of August 3. He knew that the entire French army was behind him, with about 22,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry and 18 cannons, under the command of the Constable de Montmorency and his brother Andelot. When he tried to attack the wall, he failed as a result of an ambush prepared by the German Count Ernest of Mansfeld, commanding part of Philip II’s troops.

On August 10, Montmorency decided to try again and had his men cross the Somme by boat with the aim of storming the town while the bulk of the French army waited hidden in the nearby woods. Underestimating Filiberto’s military skills, he eventually ordered his troops to leave their hiding place and deploy in front of the enemy across the river. This was his great mistake, since he allowed the Spanish to cross the Rouvroy bridge and surprise the Gauls in the middle of the operation. The carnage was spectacular: only 200 Frenchmen managed to reach the town.

It was a massacre in which even Montmorency could not escape capture, being captured by a simple cavalryman who received 10,000 ducats as a reward for his action. Philip II received the news at Cambrai on the 11th and on the 13th he went to the camp to thank his troops for giving him his first victory since his coronation. That day earned him the title of prudent king, because instead of immediately destroying the city, crossing the large breach opened in the wall after the explosion of the powder magazine, he decided to wait until 27 August.

“I was not there”

That fateful day for the Gaul survivors, the Spanish and their allies attacked San Quentin from the north, south and east. It was this action that closed the operation and ended a battle, won with intelligence and great skill in organizing military strategies by the Duke of Savoy, which caused a massacre of historic dimensions. Most of the besieged were put to the sword. It is estimated that 12,000 French were killed, 2,000 wounded and 6,000 others taken prisoner. To these we must add about a thousand nobles, including Montmorency himself. And more than 50 flags and all the artillery were captured.

Upon learning the result, Philip II regretted not being present at the overwhelming victory at San Quentin. Only 500 of his men died. He commented to his father Charles I, who had already retired to a monastery, “I was not there and I am sorry for what your Majesty thought, but I can only tell you about what happened through rumors.” Yuste, by letter.