‘Commoner-Knights’ and Napoleonic Spain: The Guerrilla Chieftain El Empecinado

In the autumn of 1809, at an important crossroads in the Peninsular War in Spain (1808-14), Napoleon began considering a complete overhaul of his occupation strategy. The change was prompted due to a shortage of funds in Paris to fuel the unexpected conflict, but played into the provincial nature of a growing guerrilla insurgency coalescing along regional lines led by local chieftains such Juan Martín Díez (El Empecinado). Spain’s official ruler was Napoleon’s older brother Joseph, installed as king in 1808 (a move sparking the war), but the true power lay with Napoleon himself, who often micromanaged affairs from Paris. When Napoleon was upset with his brother’s leadership, he refrained from mentioning him by name. “Let the King know that my troops in Spain have no power over the provinces,” Napoleon wrote his war minister General Henri-Jacques Guillaume Clarke in October of 1809, “and the feebleness of the Spanish authorities enables the junta to obtain money through its agents; that therefore the administration of the country must be put in the hands of the military commanders.” Napoleon’s strategy contemplated dividing the country into several regional theaters, each under the respective control of a French military governor-general. With each of them operating independently under limited funds procured without the assistance of France, Napoleon essentially undermined the cross-provincial coordination needed to fight a growing insurgency capable of perpetuating itself without a centralized authority. As 1810 arrived, Joseph saw his hold on Madrid and its vital connection to France become more tenuous. Reading the unfolding drama from Paris, Napoleon could only demand his chief of staff “maintain perfect security all along the line from France to Madrid.” By the summer of 1810, the treasury was dry, and six distinct military governments were carved from the provinces of Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, Biscay, Burgos, and Valladolid. King Joseph was on his own.[1]

RIGHT: Juan Martín Díaz, el Empecinado by Salvador Martínez Cubells (1845–1914). Source: Wikimedia.

Emerging as a major contender to French control over Spain was the guerrilla chieftain Juan Martín Díez, better known as El Empecinado, or ‘The Undaunted’. El Empecinado refused to engage in the open-field battles preferred by the French, and with his mostly-mounted 200-man force (partida) attacked convoys and positions throughout the region skirting the capital. By 1810 his operational prowess had grown, and after failing to convince him to change sides, the French attempted to capture him – sending 2,500 soldiers on November 12 to the nearby city of Guadalajara. El Empecinado and most of his soldiers escaped the snare, losing only seven men with sixteen captured. Predictably, the guerrilla’s leader’s military forays into Madrid’s environs were rarely published in French occupation newspapers. There were the occasional vague references to insurgent forces slowly undermining the regime’s military monopoly, but in contexts positive to the regime. On January 29, 1810, London’s Morning Chronicle reported from the “French Papers” of Madrid that one hundred “banditti” of El Empecinado’s force was slain in an action “between Huerta and Cuenca”. The report also claimed that it appeared “certain, that Empecinado, and his cousin Matiana, are among the slain.” The information (or disinformation) was incorrect, but it demonstrates the regime’s frustration with the elusive chieftain and partidas undermining their authority in the heart of the country. “The gang of the freebooter Empecinado, which has so often made its appearance to the left of Madrid, and by its depredations and atrocities of every description struck terror into the peaceable inhabitants” near the capital.[2]

Formalizing the ‘Wild Spirit’ of the Partidas

In the spring of 1810 Spain’s ad hoc ruling Junta in the besieged coastal city of Cádiz, known as the Regency, or Cortez, formalized El Empecinado’s two battalion groups into the military hierarchy of the Spanish Army. Debate about the effectiveness of formalizing the roughly 50,000 guerrilla fighters among the disparate insurgent partidas has continued today, and even the Duke of Wellington, the British general fighting the French from his base in Portugal, believed it undermined the operational effectiveness of the insurgent system. To him, the novel form of warfare had seemingly sprung from the Spanish soil. “This desultory warfare had its peculiar advantage,” Wellington wrote in his 1836 memoirs, “was eminently suited to the genius and habits of the Spanish peasantry, and should have been watched and encouraged by the government, or left to grow up into a wide and wild spirit of resistance to the invader.” Wellington believed the Spanish government’s effort “to regulate these irregulars” was neither “wise or advisable” – since it eviscerated the organic meritocratic insurgent system that arose in the absence of conventional resistance: "They rewarded men who had made themselves chieftains, made themselves a name, with military rank, which by subordinating them to the officers of the regular army, destroyed their independence, shackled their movements, and froze up that fountain of zeal which had fed the torrent of their rage. Under this arrangement the once enterprising guerrillas became bad, tame, indolent regulars, or they dispersed to their scattered homes."[3]

One historian who believes guerrilla warfare was, as Wellington believed – ‘eminently suited to the genius and habits of the peasantry’ – was Elena Lourie. Writing in 1966, Lourie argued the penchant for non-conventional warfare among the Spanish originated from the medieval period and Reconquista (718–1492) – when the Spanish ousted the Muslims from Spain after a centuries-long campaign against their occupation. In her opinion, a warlike culture developed among the serfs on the northern plains, “particularly in Castile,” where they lived a semi-autonomous existence relatively free from a strong aristocracy. “It was from among these non-noble freemen that one of the most important military classes in medieval Spain was recruited: a class that emerged in the struggles between Castile and León in the tenth century”. Lourie asserted their “formation was chiefly due to its role in the Reconquest” and that they essential composed a “class of the commoner-knights, the caballeros villanos, whose numbers greatly increased as numerous towns arose between the Duero and the Tagus to hold the new frontier in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.” In her estimation, these warrior-settlers, sanctioned by the support of the Christian nobility within and without Spain, composed the phalanx of the Reconquista’s slow but methodical ouster of the invaders:

"Many of the small men who came to settle the new lands, although lacking sufficient resources to carve out great estates for themselves, were nevertheless very well able to afford a horse. Thus with the descent from the mountains the demand for a cavalry force and the means of supplying it appeared simultaneously. Indeed, as settlement became more systematically organized, newly conquered towns would be divided into caballerías (cavalry portions) and peonías (infantry portions) to be allotted to newcomers who accepted the relevant obligations."[4]

LEFT: The Battle of Somosierra 1808, by artist Louis-François, Baron Lejeune (1775–1848). Source: Wikimedia.

French Response and El Empecinado’s Revenge

The regime responded to the enhancement of El Empecinado’s status and military capabilities in central Spain. They fortified the garrison of Guadalajara to 1,500 men, placed restrictions on venturing beyond its gates while the insurgent leader was suspected to be in the vicinity, and unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Spaniards to form a domestic army who could “enlist in the regiments of infantry or cavalry that are forming,” and be paid for “the years in which they have previously served.” The speed at which the insurgent cavalry groups moved in Castile-La Mancha kept the French constantly guessing and reacting. Operating close to the capital, the insurgents alarmed the regime to the point where capturing El Empecinado became a high priority. Assigned to that task was El Empecinado’s mother’s former jailer General Joseph Hugo, who was given command of Guadalajara province in June along with 3,000 soldiers. The Madrid Daily noted that although some “have happily recognized our government, there are still some perverse men” who intended to bring about “the ruin of their homeland by criminal and violent means, compromising public tranquility”. The Gazeta labeled the guerrillas “the terror of the towns, the fields and the roads.” – and sarcastically demeaned the chieftain’s motives. “His love of the country inspires him to steal and murder the quiet defenseless inhabitants. His patriotic prowess is reduced to exercising the most ferocious vandalism against his own countrymen.”[5]

As the insurgency took on new and more dangerous forms in 1810, Joseph himself became the target of attack – with El Empecinado attempting to abduct him while travelling outside of Madrid. Even before that event occurred, Joseph’s will to continue the war was sapped, as he began planning his own exit from Spain without consulting his brother. Contacting his wife in France that spring, he begged her “to prepare for me the means of living independently in retirement.” Three months later, in July, Spanish partisans attempted to seize him while he staying at his country house in the vicinity of Cuenca, near the capital. The raid was unsuccessful, but its proximity to him and the plan’s boldness was unnerving, and reinforced perceptions that he was left there to fend for himself. Jackson’s Oxford Journal in England reported:

We are assured that on the 7^th of July a party of 400 cavalry made an attempt to surprise King Joseph at his country seat near Madrid, whether he occasionally resorts to visit a chere amie. They killed the guard which was constantly kept there, but they did not meet with their object: the usurper having gone that night to a play at the Colisco del Principe. Informed of this they pursued their course to the palace, where they cut down the guards at the gate. They did the same to those whom they found guarding the theatre. This occasioned an immediate uproar; and from the great confusion that took place in the theatre they were prevented from passing to the box where King Joseph was seated, which gave them an opportunity of escaping by a private door, to the main guard, who defended him for a short time till he got off.[6]

RIGHT: The death of Pedro Velarde y Santillán during the defence of the Monteleon Artillery Barracks. By artist Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923). Source: Wikimedia.

That autumn, after El Empecinado was made Brigadier General of Cavalry in the National Army, he engaged with an increasingly frustrated General Hugo in the vicinity of Sigüenza – located along the important Zaragoza-to-Madrid road. For the remainder of 1810, the insurgent leader and his hardened corps of insurgents harassed the French, intercepted communications and convoys, and took prisoners when the opportunity arose. Hugo would try again in 1811 to capture him, with five times as many soldiers, but failed. For his part, Napoleon, was simply not ready to accept the reality of the situation on the ground on Spain, and futiley tried to manage a war unresponsive to conventional rules. He ordered his chief of staff, Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier, to “Divide into districts the provinces of Segovia, Avila, Soria, Guadalajara, part of Extremadura, and the little provinces towards Aragon. Add likewise Cuenca.” These divisions, like previous ones, only made things worse. Likewise, the insurgents kept at it, picking off couriers, intercepting supplies being sent from France, killing stragglers or supply contractors, or taking them as hostages – if they were lucky. After hearing of a convey being intercepted in November, Napoleon wrote a telling demonstration of his naïve assessment of the insurgent problem. “We shall hear no more of these accidents, now so frequent.” By 1811, the war was lost, and the outcome only a matter of time and attrition.[7]    

Footnotes

(1) Napoleon Bonaparte, The Confidential Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte with His Brother Joseph, Sometime King of Spain, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1856), 75, 98. Napoleon to Clarke, Oct. 8, 1809; Napoleon to Berthier, Jan. 20, 1810. 

(2) Anonymous (Translated by a General Officer), The Military Exploits of Don Juan Martin Diez, The Empecinado; Who first commenced and then organized the system of guerrilla warfare in Spain (London: Carpenter and Son, 1823), 39–41; The Morning Chronicle, London, January 29, 1810. Report from “French Papers” dated December 29, 1809.

(3) Moyle Sherer (ed.), The Duke of Wellington: Military Memoirs of Field Marshal, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Robert Desilver, 1836), 57; The Military Exploits, 61-62.

(4) Elena Lourie, “A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain,” Past & Present, no. 35 (Dec. 1966), 55.

(5) Gazeta de Madrid, April 6, 1810 (No. 96); Diario de Madrid, May 17, 1810 (No. 137); Gazeta de Madrid, March 30, 1810 (No. 89); The Military Exploits, 62–64.

(6) Confidential Correspondence vol. 2, 111. Joseph to Julie, April 12, 1810; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, September 1, 1810; Albert-Jean Rocca, Memoirs of the War of the French in Spain (London: John Murray, 1815), 324. “Some Spanish partisans had been on the point of taking King Joseph prisoner in one of his country houses near Madrid.” See: The Morning Post, London, October 4, 1810. The Morning Post ran an account of a July raid against King Joseph “at his country seat near Madrid.”

(7) Confidential Correspondence vol. 2, 151, 159. Napoleon to Berthier, October 4, 1810; Napoleon to Berthier, December 2, 1810; The Military Exploits, 70, 91–8; Andrés Cassinello Pérez,  Juan Martín, “El Empecinado”, o el amor a la libertad (Madrid: Editorial San Martín, 1995), 123.