The Lines of Elvas: how a plague-struck town was relieved in 1659

At sunrise on Tuesday 14 January 1659 a thick fog lay over the hills west of Elvas. From inside the Spanish siege lines an officer, named by the Portuguese chronicler as D. João Pacheco, went out with some troops to look at the Portuguese army camped on the heights. It had not broken camp, and its men were not under arms. He rode back and told his commander, Luis de Haro, that nothing would happen that day.1 source1 source

The infantry regiments and cavalry that had guarded that stretch of the lines all night went back to their quarters, leaving only the small earth forts manned. At about eight the fog lifted. Drums and trumpets sounded in the Portuguese camp, and some 11,000 men began to march on a stretch of low ground called the Murtais, between the Spanish positions on the hill of Graça and at São Francisco.2 sources2 sources

Behind the walls, the garrison that was meant to help could barely stand. After nearly three months of siege and plague it could put only 1,000 infantry and 160 horsemen into a sortie, according to Luís de Meneses, later Count of Ericeira. He was inside the town as a young cavalry captain, commanded the Portuguese artillery at Montes Claros six years later and wrote the fullest Portuguese history of the war. By nightfall the Spanish lines were broken and Haro was on his way back to Badajoz.2 sources2 sources

Portugal had broken away from the Spanish Habsburg monarchy on 1 December 1640, when a group of nobles proclaimed the Duke of Bragança King João IV; our article on the Restoration of 1640 tells that story. Keeping the crown meant war with Spain. For most of the next 16 years Madrid was tied down in Catalonia and in Europe, and the frontier saw raids, sieges and one big battle, at Montijo in 1644.2 sources2 sources

Things grew worse after João IV died in November 1656. His heir, Afonso VI, was 13, and the regent was his widow, Luísa de Gusmão, who had been born a Spanish noblewoman in Andalusia. In 1657 Spanish troops took Olivença and Mourão on the Alentejo border. In 1658 the Portuguese answered by besieging Badajoz, the main Spanish base across the frontier, and failed.1 source1 source

Elvas was the obvious target in reply. It guarded the main border crossing on the road between Madrid and Lisbon, and Portugal had spent the 1640s turning it into a fortress. Work on new walls began in 1643 to designs by Cosmander, a Jesuit engineer whom UNESCO calls Dutch. He fitted the geometry of the Dutch school of Samuel Marolois to the town's uneven hills: twelve fronts of low, sloping bastions, surrounded by a dry ditch and outworks, replaced medieval walls that could not stand up to cannon.2 sources2 sources

So that no enemy could plant guns on the hill 410 metres south-east of the town, the Portuguese also built the Fort of Santa Luzia there between 1641 and 1648. It was a square of four bastions joined to the town by a covered way, with two cisterns that could supply 300 to 400 men for two or three months. It had already held out when a Spanish army under the Marquis of Torrecusa besieged Elvas in 1644.2 sources2 sources

Haro was the most powerful man at Philip IV's court, a minister who in Ericeira's words dominated the Spanish monarchy with absolute power, and he had come to Extremadura with the army that saved Badajoz. He was a politician rather than a soldier. The Duke of San Germán, the experienced governor of arms of Extremadura, wanted to pick off weaker towns such as Estremoz, Borba and Évora first. Haro listened instead to courtiers who told him that Elvas would fall as soon as it was surrounded.2 sources2 sources

His army crossed the Caia, the river that marks the border, and camped on the Portuguese bank on 15 October 1658: 14,000 infantry and 5,000 horse, by Ericeira's count. Before dawn on 22 October it appeared west of Elvas and seized the Franciscan monastery of São Francisco, on a rise beside the aqueduct that brought the town its water, and turned it into a fort. Two days later the Spaniards began to dig.2 sources2 sources

Their line of contravallation, a trench and earth rampart behind a ditch, ran for 15 to 18 kilometres around the town. Along it stood the forts of São Francisco and Graça, six large camps and a string of small forts, placed to stop sorties from the town and relief from outside. The Fort of Santa Luzia stayed in Portuguese hands, and the town council's history of the fort credits its garrison with a central part in the defence. For reasons that are still unclear, the Spaniards never cut the Amoreira aqueduct, and water kept flowing into Elvas.3 sources3 sources

Hunger turned out to be the lesser enemy. Bread never ran out, Ericeira wrote, though men used to more than bread suffered on it. Disease did the damage. Ericeira describes fever and weakness and says the contagion killed like plague, though it was not true plague; modern accounts simply call it plague. Soldiers who had come back sick from the Badajoz campaign were packed into the town with auxiliaries and militiamen who had no quarters, and some of them slept in church porches under the clothes of the dead.1 source1 source

The dead could not be buried outside the walls without showing the Spaniards how few defenders were left, and the rock floor of the ditch could not be dug. Once the churches were full, bodies went into the earth of the ramparts. By the eve of the battle one infantry regiment, Agostinho de Andrade's, was down to 90 men even after absorbing auxiliary and militia companies. Modern accounts put the deaths in the town during the siege at about 5,000, mostly from plague.3 sources3 sources

In Lisbon the regent took the siege personally. Luísa de Gusmão wrote often to the governor of Elvas, Sancho Manoel, urging him to hold on and promising that help was coming. He was a veteran who had fought in Spanish armies in Italy and Flanders, and he had been made governor of Elvas in 1658, during the attack on Badajoz.1 source1 source

To lead the relief she first named the Duke of Aveiro, who accepted and gave the post up within days. Her second choice was António Luís de Meneses, Count of Cantanhede, then in his mid-fifties, whom she made governor of arms of the Alentejo in November 1658. He was an administrator more than a soldier, one of the heads of the royal treasury.2 sources2 sources

Cantanhede reached Estremoz, where the army was gathering, in late November and leaned on professionals, above all André de Albuquerque Ribafria, the general of cavalry. Albuquerque had slipped out of besieged Elvas by night with a small cavalry escort. Ericeira dates his escape to 14 November, with 180 horsemen, and has him waiting at Estremoz for the count; Mareco puts it on the night of 24 November, the day Cantanhede arrived, with 200.2 sources2 sources

In about six weeks they scraped an army together from Alentejo garrisons, survivors of Badajoz and the militia of the surrounding districts. Ericeira counted 8,000 infantry, of whom only 2,500 were paid regulars, 2,500 horse, 400 mares and seven field guns, followed by 2,000 loads of ammunition and food and 2,000 head of livestock to drive into the town. Carlos Mareco's account for the Fundação Batalha de Aljubarrota puts it at 11,000 men, half of them too young, too old or too green for battle.2 sources2 sources

The army left Estremoz on Saturday 11 January 1659 and on the 13th reached the Serra do Bispo, in sight of Elvas. It drew up opposite the Murtais, the weakest stretch of the Spanish line, where the forts of Graça and São Francisco stood too far apart to support each other. That evening Haro's council voted against marching out to fight in the open and chose to wait inside the lines.2 sources2 sources

The plan, a single concentrated blow, was argued inside Elvas by the veteran Diogo Gomes de Figueiredo and adopted by Cantanhede's council. Mareco says Sancho Manoel approved it. Ericeira, who had proposed a night attack on the Graça fort instead, says the governor preferred his plan.2 sources2 sources

The assault was led by 1,000 picked men under Figueiredo, followed by about 1,000 pioneers with tools to fill in the Spanish ditch. Behind them came three bodies of infantry, each with cavalry on its flanks. Portuguese guns on a knoll at the Murtais and some 20 heavy pieces on the town's Prince bastion caught the Spanish line in a crossfire.1 source1 source

The defenders fired three volleys, and the Portuguese still got over the rampart, first on the left, near Graça. Several hundred Spanish horse (500 in Ericeira, about 700 in Mareco) charged down from the hill. Cavalry from the Elvas garrison hit them in the flank, more Spanish horse came up from the camp at Vergada, and the Portuguese vanguard cavalry joined in until the Spanish horsemen broke and fled. By ten the whole army was inside the lines.2 sources2 sources

The rest of the day was a fight for one small fort after another. André de Albuquerque was killed in one of these attacks, aged 39 by Ericeira's account. By three in the afternoon every fort on the Murtais had fallen; São Francisco fell later in the day, with Cantanhede taking part in the attack in person. Haro, who had watched from the Graça hill without taking part, left for Badajoz with most of the surviving cavalry, and the supply convoy rolled into the town.2 sources2 sources

At nightfall the Spaniards still held the redoubt on the Graça hill and the camp called the Corte. A night attack on Graça failed because the attackers had brought no ladders or fascines. In the dark the Spaniards abandoned the Corte and other camps, and many drowned trying to cross the Caia and the Guadiana. On the morning of the 15th the commanders of the Graça redoubt, with some 600 men, and of one other fort surrendered, and Sancho Manoel's cavalry rode to the Caia, picking up two guns, ammunition and five of Haro's wagons.2 sources2 sources

In the abandoned camp the soldiers found the wooden huts Haro had lived in, his officers' tents full of valuables and his secretariat with all its papers, including his private correspondence with the king. The etching made to celebrate the victory gloats over that detail.2 sources2 sources

Nobody agrees on the numbers, and almost all of them, including nearly every figure in the table below, come from the Portuguese side. Ericeira's, written down within forty years of the battle by a man who had been inside the town, are the most detailed. The Spanish army that held the lines on 14 January was 17,500 strong in his account, and when it mustered in Badajoz the next day only 6,300 men answered. The gap of 11,200, often quoted as Spanish losses, is the difference between two musters, so it takes in the dead, the prisoners and everyone else who failed to answer.1 source1 source

On the Portuguese side, Ericeira's roll of the dead adds up to about 200, among them André de Albuquerque, the former admiral Fernando da Silveira, a regimental commander, two cavalry captains and ten infantry captains. His wounded come to almost 700. Those battle losses were small beside the deaths inside the town during the siege.2 sources2 sources

The Spanish account survives mostly in private letters. A few weeks earlier Philip IV had told his confidante, the abbess Sor María de Ágreda, that the siege was going slowly because of heavy rain but that, according to Haro, no relief had got in. His next letter, printed in the 1886 edition with the date 2 January 1659 although it describes the battle of the 14th, broke the news.1 source1 source

The king saw in it, as he put it, a manifest scourge for our sins. Sor María replied on 30 January that she was grieved and astonished that such great human means had failed and that so many prayers had gone unheard, from which she concluded it was a punishment from God.1 source1 source

Within the year Spain made peace with France. On 7 November 1659, on a small island on the Basque border between the two kingdoms, the two crowns signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees, ending a war that had lasted since 1635. Peace with France was what Spain needed to reconquer Portugal. France broke off diplomatic relations with Lisbon, and Portugal was left to find another ally.2 sources2 sources

It turned to England. The regent negotiated an alliance and a marriage treaty, and on 21 May 1662 João IV's daughter Catarina married Charles II, taking Bombay and Tangier as her dowry. French officers led by Schomberg had also come to Portugal in 1660 to reorganise the army on the French model.3 sources3 sources

The big Spanish invasions came in the 1660s, and the men of Elvas met them. Sancho Manoel, by then Count of Vila Flor, commanded the Portuguese army that beat Don John of Austria at Ameixial, near Estremoz, on 8 June 1663. Cantanhede, now Marquis of Marialva, commanded alongside Schomberg at Montes Claros on 17 June 1665. Peace came in 1668, with Charles II of England as mediator.4 sources4 sources

On 30 June 2012, at its session in Saint Petersburg, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee inscribed the Garrison Border Town of Elvas and its Fortifications on the World Heritage List. The committee called it the largest bastioned dry-ditch system in the world, and Cosmander's design a masterpiece of its time. The listed property takes in the walled town, the aqueduct, the forts of Santa Luzia and Graça and three smaller forts.3 sources3 sources

The Amoreira Aqueduct, which Haro's army left running, is 7,504 metres long, partly underground and partly on arches more than 30 metres high. Begun in the sixteenth century under the architect Francisco de Arruda, it only brought water into the town in 1622. The Fort of Santa Luzia was converted into a military museum in 1999 and 2000.3 sources3 sources

The hill of Graça, where the Spaniards built their redoubt in 1658 and Haro watched his army break, was fortified much later. As cannon grew longer in range, Wilhelm, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, whom King José had put in charge of reorganising the Portuguese army, began the Forte da Graça there in 1763; the work was finished only in 1792. From 1894 it housed a military disciplinary depot, where political prisoners were held from the First Republic until 1974. It reopened to visitors on 27 November 2015 after restoration.3 sources3 sources