Glorieta del Gran Capitán

The name honors Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (Montilla, 1453 – Granada, 1515), the soldier all of Europe knew as the Great Captain. He served Ferdinand and Isabella in the war of Granada and then crossed the Mediterranean to wrest the kingdom of Naples from France. At Cerignola, in 1503, he did something that changed warfare: he sheltered his arquebusiers behind a ditch and let coordinated fire break the charge of the French heavy cavalry. For the first time gunpowder beat the lance in open field. From that blend of arquebus, pike and discipline would come the tercios that dominated the battlefields of Europe for a century and a half. The story goes that, when asked to justify what he had spent on the campaign, he answered with a bill as outlandish as it was sarcastic: vast sums for friars, spies, even picks and shovels to bury the dead. The “Great Captain’s accounts” survive as an expression for any inflated, unverifiable figure.