On 23 November 1808 Marshal Jean Lannes, with about 34,000 French troops, attacked the Spanish Army of the Centre under General Francisco Javier Castaños and two divisions of the Army of Aragon, some 45,000 men strung along a ten-mile line from Tudela on the Ebro to Tarazona. The Spanish line was never properly formed. Lannes broke through a gap in its center and routed the Aragonese, while half the Spanish army stood by. A week later Napoleon forced the Somosierra pass, and on 1 December he reached Madrid.
Napoleon's trap
The Spanish risings of 1808 had driven the French back to the Ebro, and in November Napoleon came to Spain in person. His plan was to break through the Spanish front at Burgos and then swing his columns outward to trap the Spanish armies on either side. On 21 November Castaños learned that Marshal Moncey's corps had crossed the Ebro and was coming down the river toward him, while Marshal Ney's column was marching through the mountains toward his rear, threatening to trap him between the two. He fell back to Tudela and chose to fight there.1
His line ran about ten miles west from Tudela along the little Queiles river to Tarazona, far too long for his own troops alone. He needed the Army of Aragon, whose divisions under General O'Neille lay across the Ebro, but O'Neille would not move without orders from his own commander, José Palafox, and those came only at noon on 22 November. By the time the Aragonese reached the river it was dark, and O'Neille decided to camp on the north bank and cross in the morning.2
The gap at Tudela
Napoleon had given the attack to Lannes. The historian Charles Oman relates that Lannes had been laid up for a fortnight after his horse fell with him over a precipice, and that the surgeon Larrey was said to have cured him by sewing him into the skin of a freshly killed sheep. Lannes marched at dawn on the 23rd with Moncey's four divisions and Lagrange's division from Ney's corps. Castaños had kept his 3,000 cavalry close to his infantry instead of sending it out to scout, and, according to Oman, his first warning came at nine in the morning, when French horsemen rode up to the outskirts of Tudela while the Aragonese were still filing across the bridge.3 › Napoleon Bonaparte
The Spanish divisions were hurried onto the heights beside the town, but a gap of some three miles opened between them and the Army of the Centre at Cascante. Castaños rode off to bring up his divisions there and was chased off by French cavalry. Lannes' infantry stormed the Cerro de Santa Bárbara above Tudela and the ridge beside it, and General Lefebvre-Desnouettes charged with three cavalry regiments through the gap, breaking the Spanish center. The Aragonese fled toward Saragossa. At Cascante, Oman counts at least 18,000 Spanish infantry and 3,000 horsemen who spent the afternoon held in place by a single French division, and withdrew after dark.4
The cost and the road to Madrid
Oman puts the losses of the beaten Spanish right at 26 guns, more than 1,000 prisoners and at least 3,000 killed and wounded, and those of the idle left at 200 at most; Moncey's corps lost 44 killed and 513 wounded. The historian John Rickard gives the same Spanish figures. More of the Spanish army would have been caught had Ney arrived, but his column was still around Soria, some fifty miles away. Napoleon blamed Ney; Oman and Rickard both argue that the march the Emperor demanded of him was impossible in the time.5
Many of the Aragonese soldiers went on to fight in the second siege of Saragossa, while the rest of Castaños' army headed for Madrid. Napoleon was faster: he forced the pass of Somosierra on 30 November, told in our article on the Battle of Somosierra, and reached Madrid on 1 December.6
