On this date in 1522, the leader of the Revolt of the Brotherhood came to his grief in Valencia.
Spain circa 1519-1520 was a powder keg. The rival kingdoms Aragon and Castille had of late been joined by a personal union of Ferdinand and Isabella, but now that couple was several years dead, and the scepter held by an irritating Flemish youth who had just popped in to hike everyone’s taxes so he could fund the bribe campaign necessary to become the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
These tensions triggered the Revolt of the Comuneros in Castile, whose consequent executions we have already dealt with; in Aragon, they launched the Revolt of the Brotherhoods. The “brotherhoods” in question were the germanias, urban artisan guilds. Those guilds stepped into a power vaccuum in Valencia when a 1519 plague triggered anti-Moslem riots and sent the nobles scurrying for the safety of their country estates. (Charles was busy in Germany being crowned Holy Roman Emperor.)
This was more than fine by the salty Valencia townsfolk, who much detested the overweening aristocracy.
[G]entlemen (caballeros) were regarded with the greatest hostility by the masses of the people. Argensola and Sandoval relate a story which places this hostility in a conspicuous light. One day, as a gentleman passed through a certain street, a woman called upon her son to look at him, and mark his appearance carefully. The child inquired the reason. The mother replied, “In order that when you become a man you may be able to say that you had seen a gentleman; for long before that time the whole race shall have disappeared, and been as completedly destroyed as the Templars were. (Source)
A “Council of Thirteen” — one representative from each of Valencia’s principal guilds — took over the city’s government.
Vicente Peris (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish), a firebrand weaver, soon came to be the first among this leading baker’s dozen. He enjoyed some military successes in 1521, and took advantage of them wherever possible to impose forced conversions, property expropriation, or summary execution on any Muslims he could lay hands upon.
No surprise but this alarming situation drove the hated caballeros into organized counterattack, just as the Valencian factions started breaking apart over how far to push the revolution. After they were thrashed at the Battle of Oriola in August 1521, they didn’t have to worry about that question any more.
Peris was caught slipping back into now-royalist-controlled Valencia on February 18, 1522, apparently hoping to stir up his old comrades in arms once more, and caught only after a running street battle that night that ended with him being smoked out of his house as it was burned around him.
As addenda to his execution this date, that house was entirely razed and the ground salted over, with a decree that nothing should ever be built there again. Peris’s descendants were anathematized as traitors to the fourth generation.
* The island of Mallorca followed Valencia’s lead in revolt, and by 1523, followed its unhappy fate as well.
On this day..
- 1944: Osmund Brønnum
- 1562: Sophie Harmansdochter, "Gele Fye"
- 1882: Dead Shot, Dandy Jim and Skippy, mutinous Apache scouts
- Themed Set: The Ordinary of Newgate
- 1708: Thomas Ellis and Mary Goddard
- 1903: Edgar Edwards, sash weight killer
- 1882: Bob Jones and Billy Miller, murderers on the open road
- 1676: George Bromham and Dorothy Newman, on the Combe Gibbet
- 1865: Antone Richers, Galveston deserter
- Unspecified Year: Bigger Thomas
- 1955: Gerald Albert Gallego, like father like son
- 1323: Andrew Harclay, too chummy with the Scots
- 1999: Walter LaGrand, a German gassed in America
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