Calle de Maldonado

On 24 April 1871 Madrid’s City Council named three neighbouring streets in the Salamanca ensanche after the captains executed at Villalar: Padilla, Bravo and Maldonado. The date was no accident: it marked 350 years since those beheadings, and the liberalism of the Democratic Sexennium had turned the Comuneros into a banner for anyone opposing absolute power. Francisco Maldonado governed Salamanca as an alderman. When the revolt broke out in 1520, he took military command of the city. He gathered nearly six thousand infantry and two hundred horsemen, won a few towns and was captured after the disaster at Villalar. He was beheaded in the town square the next morning. The image of the three captains on their way to the scaffold was fixed in the memory of the liberal nineteenth century by the oil painting Antonio Gisbert made in 1860, now hanging in the Congress of Deputies.