On this date in 1940, Cayetano Redondo was shot at Madrid’s largest cemetery.

Cayetano Redondo (English Wikipedia page | Spanish | Esperanto), a former journalist and editor, was the socialist onetime mayor of Madrid — having ascended that position during the Spanish Civil War when the previous mayor fled for Valencia as Franco attacked Madrid. Redondo was the guy with his name on the letterhead during the bloody November 1936 Battle of Madrid, when the Luftwaffe tried out terror bombing (Guernica followed in April 1937).

This “hombre de una bondad inagotable” (Manuel Albar, quoted here) was also a leading esperantist — an advocate of building international solidarity through the extension of the constructed language Esperanto.

Disdaining escape as the war ended, he was arrested when Franco’s forces finally took Madrid in 1939 and shot a year later as a rebel. (His tombstone evidently records the wrong date.)

Though Redondo was long a neglected figure, the Madrid city council recently named a street for him. So he’s got that going for him.

On this day..

• 1559: Spanish Protestants at Valladolid
• 1832: Elizabeth Jeffery, Carluke poisoner
• 1525: Jäcklein Rohrbach, for the Weinsberg Blood Easter
• 1521: Xicotencatl Axayacatl, Cortes fighter
• 1650: James Graham, Earl of Montrose
• 1912: Rev. Clarence Richeson, minister, madman, and murderer
• 2013: Five beheaded and crucified in Jizan
• 1484: Olivier le Daim, diabolical barber
• 1894: Six anarchists in Barcelona
• 1997: Bruce Edwin Callins, in the machinery of death
• 1894: Emile Henry, because there are no innocent bourgeois
• 1425: Parisina Malatesta and Ugo d'Este, for incest