Battle of Saragossa, 1710: the allies take back Aragon

By 1710 the War of the Spanish Succession had been going on for nearly a decade. When Charles II died childless, his will named Philip of Anjou, who became Philip V, but the Habsburg Archduke Charles, backed by most of the lands of the Crown of Aragon, disputed the throne. Zaragoza, writes Eliseo Serrano Martín of the University of Zaragoza, was a Bourbon city in 1710.²

It had changed hands before. The regional news site HoyAragón, drawing on the Atlas de Historia de Aragón, recalls that Charles entered Zaragoza in 1706, that Philip retook Aragon after the allied defeat at Almansa in 1707, and that he then issued the Nueva Planta decrees abolishing most of Aragon's own laws and institutions.³

From Almenar to the Ebro

In the summer of 1710 the allied army under Guido Starhemberg beat the Marquis de Bay at Almenar near Lleida on 27 July. The Bourbon army fell back on Zaragoza to regroup. The allies, led by the archduke himself and commanded by the English general James Stanhope and the German Starhemberg, took Huesca on 10 August, according to the Gran Enciclopedia Española.⁴

The Bourbon troops drew up with their backs to the city, from the right bank of the Ebro to the hills of Torrero, in ground that today lies under the districts of Las Fuentes, San José and Torrero. Bay, new to his command, had been told that there was no ford by which the allies could cross the Ebro. They crossed anyway, with the help of local people, and formed for battle on 19 August.⁵

The numbers vary. The Gran Enciclopedia Española gives the allies 23,000 men and the Bourbons no more than 20,000; the historian Joaquín Beltrán, quoted by HoyAragón, and the tercentenary portal Zaragoza 1710-2010 give the allies 25,000.⁶

Two kings on one field

One unusual feature, the tercentenary portal notes, is that both claimants to the throne were present. Neither fought, but both were close enough to the action to be in danger. The armies were strikingly mixed: on the Bourbon side Spaniards from both crowns, French, Walloons, Italians and Irish; on the allied side Spaniards, English, Germans, Austrians, Portuguese, Dutch and Huguenot French.⁷

The guns opened at first light and by mid-morning the allies were advancing. The portal, weighing the differing accounts of the contemporaries Bacallar, Castellví and Boyer, reconstructs the fight this way. On the allied left, where Stanhope led the cavalry, the horsemen clashed without result but the allied infantry gained the upper hand. On the allied right, the Bourbon cavalry routed the allied horse and chased it off the field, which gave the allied infantry time to re-form and counterattack. Finally the German infantry in the center used the ground to meet the Bourbon center as it advanced, and the Bourbon line, threatened on its flank, gave way and dragged the rest of Philip's army with it.⁸

HoyAragón tells the same story in broad strokes: the fight was even at first, Castilian cavalry even broke into the allied lines, but the counterattack of the Anglo-Austrian troops broke the Bourbon front and the retreat became a rout.⁹

Counting the cost

The figures for the Bourbon losses differ widely. The tercentenary portal gives 4,000 dead and 6,000 wounded and prisoners, against 2,000 allied casualties, and says the allies took 22 guns and more than 70 flags and standards. HoyAragón reports Beltrán's figure of about 10,000 killed and wounded and nearly 5,000 prisoners, while the Atlas de Historia de Aragón speaks of about 3,000 dead and 4,000 prisoners.¹⁰

Philip V had to retreat into Castile and, according to the historian Sergio Martínez Gil, came close to being captured; a local tradition says a miller helped him escape. On 21 August Charles entered Zaragoza, stayed five days and restored the laws that Philip had abolished.¹¹

A victory that did not last

The triumph was brief. In December 1710 the allied defeats at Brihuega and Villaviciosa turned the war again, Zaragoza returned to Philip V and the Nueva Planta was imposed on Aragon for good. Britannica notes that Stanhope himself was defeated and captured at Brihuega that December.¹²

Little marks the battlefield today. Much of it lies under the southern districts of the modern city, but the name of the Barranco de la Muerte, the Ravine of Death, survives, and a plaque was placed in 2010 for the tercentenary. Serrano Martín quotes a guide of 1860 that already explained the name by the great battle fought there at the start of the previous century.¹³