Fernandez Gonzalo de Cordoba, known as El Gran Capitan (the Great Captain) for his many victories, revolutionized sixteenth- century warfare. His integration of die arquebus, a heavy matchlock gun, into his infantry forces gained Spain military superiority in Europe that would last for more than a century.
Cordoba, the son of noble parents, participated in batdes against the Muslim occupiers of Granada while in his early teens and later served as a page to the Spanish royal court. From 1482 to 1492, Cordoba fought as a minor leader in the wars that eventually defeated the Moors, ending more than eight hundred years of Muslim occupation of Spain. During this time, Cordoba honed his knowledge of military tactics and techniques and displayed his personal bravery. At the siege of Montefrio, Cordoba personally led an assault using scaling ladders to breach the Moors’ walled defenses.
Upon orders from his queen, Cordoba led an army of twenty- one hundred soldiers into Italy in May 1495 to aid the king of Naples, whom Charles VIII of France had ousted when he invaded the peninsula. Because his force was inadequately trained and his coordination with his Italian allies poor, Cordoba was no match for the French, who defeated him at the Battle of Seminara.
Following the defeat, Cordoba withdrew, began a rigorous training program, and reorganized his army. Outnumbered, Cordoba initiated a guerrilla campaign to harass the enemy’s long supply lines and avoided large-scale battles unless the conditions were extremely favorable. Within a year Cordoba captured the French commander and by 1498 had returned all of the lost territory to the Italians.
When he returned to Spain, Cordoba applied the lessons he had learned in combat to restructuring the army. To his infantry units Cordoba added soldiers equipped with heavy, shoulder-fired, support-braced guns known as arquebuses. He also developed coordination between the infantry, artillery, and cavalry. He divided his men into independent maneuver forces rather than retain them as one large mass, typical of the period.
Cordoba received the opportunity to test his concept in 1503 when he returned to Italy to meet another French invasion. On the afternoon of April 28, Cordoba moved his force of six thousand to a hillside vineyard near Cerignola, where his Spanish infantry barely had time to dig a defensive trench before the French army of ten thousand charged their positions. Rank after rank of the French fell to the explosive arquebuses; the few Frenchmen who reached the trench died at the point of Spanish pikes. Cordoba and his army likewise held firm through a second charge. For the first time in history, a battle had been won by the use of firearms. No battlefield would ever be the same again.
Cordoba occupied Naples and forced the French to fall back to the Garigliano River. A stalemate developed, with neither side able to acquire an advantage as they faced each other across the iver. Finally, on the evening of December 29, 1503, Cordoba moved sectioned pontoon bridges forward under the cover of darkness and conducted an attack which caught the French completely by surprise. Cordoba’s infantrymen, armed with arquebuses and pikes, proved as lethal on the offense as they had on the defense, and his training of subordinate leaders allowed the difficult operation to run smoothly and with a minimum of communicadons.
In January 1504, Cordoba captured Gaeta, and the French, unable to mount any substantial defense after their defeat at Garigliano, signed a treaty a short time later, ending their claim to Naples.
Cordoba, now known as “the Great Captain,” had fought his last battle. His end as a military leader came not as an outcome of combat but as a result of politics. The new Spanish king, Ferdinand, fearing the popularity of the Great Captain, removed him from command and recalled him to Spain. Cordoba remained loyal to his king, followed his orders, and retired to his family estate in Granada. He died at age sixty-two on December 1, 1515, from malaria that he had contracted during the Italian campaigns.
Cordoba earns his place on this list of most influential commanders not only for being the first to effectively use firearms in battle but also for his innovativeness in integrating them into traditional pike-carrying infantry. Subsequent Spanish commanders would make adjustments of Cordoba’s organization and tactics, but much of what he introduced directly led to Spanish dominance of European warfare for the next century. Cordoba revolutionized combat and played a key role in the transition from medieval warfare of steel blade and pike to that of gunpowder and explosives.