Sieges of Zaragoza

Zaragoza became the byword for 'war to the knife', a city that made the French take it street by street and room by room, blasting through the walls between houses while every house fought as a fortress. Disease, not shot, was the real killer, as typhus swept soldiers and packed civilians alike and turned the town into rubble and corpses. The defence fused regulars, monks, women and children into a single armed populace, one of the earliest examples of a whole civilian city resisting a regular army. General Palafox himself fell to typhus and surrendered from a sickbed when the second siege finally broke the city early in 1809. Together the two sieges made Zaragoza a European symbol of Spanish endurance and helped inspire the wider guerrilla war.

The city's fame owes as much to its myth-makers as to its walls. Agustina de Aragon, the woman who took over a cannon at the Portillo gate after its crew fell during the first siege of 1808, was mythologized by Byron in Childe Harold and painted by Goya, and the two sieges' episodes have blurred together in popular memory ever since. Zaragoza became a founding case study in the history of siege and urban warfare, and a centerpiece of Spanish national martyrology. Modern historians work to separate the patriotic legend, and the conflated events of 1808 and 1809, from the documentary record.