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Updated: May 23, 2025
He reached with his men the place which the Moorish army had occupied: the heights were abandoned and strewed with cuirasses, scimetars, crossbows, and other weapons. His force was too small to pursue the enemy, but returned to the royal camp laden with spoils. Ferdinand at first could not credit so signal and miraculous a defeat, but suspected some lurking stratagem.
Wilkin Flammock left the buttery, and with a mien and judgment alike undisturbed by the deep potations in which he had so recently indulged, undisturbed also by the various rumours concerning what was passing without doors, he made the round of the castle and its outworks, mustered the little garrison, and assigned to each their posts, reserving to his own countrymen the management of the arblasts, or crossbows, and of the military engines which were contrived by the proud Normans, and were incomprehensible to the ignorant English, or, more properly, Anglo-Saxons, of the period, but which his more adroit countrymen managed with great address.
"In this defeat thirty-five or forty Spaniards, and more than a thousand of our allies, were slain by the enemy, besides more than twenty Christians wounded, among whom was myself in the leg. We lost the small field-piece that we had taken with us, and many crossbows, muskets and other arms.
In the early days, matchlocks were sneered at as being inferior to crossbows, much in the same way that the first railway engine was contemptuously spoken of and written about by the coaching men at the beginning of this century; but when in 1700 the flintlock musket made its appearance popular prejudice was shaken, and it was completely removed in 1820 when percussion guns came into pretty general use.
Some were killed, but their swiftness of foot, their knowledge of the forest, and their dexterity in winding through the most tangled thickets, enabled the greater number to elude the pursuit of the Spaniards, who were encumbered with armor, targets, crossbows, and lances.
Round the centre of the dealing, in a circle round us, were arranged many retainers in tribal costumes; some of them held golden umbrellas, others silver-mounted swords, spears, crossbows, and flags. The arrangements and effect was so picturesque that it is to be hoped the Prince and Princess will see these people in the same situation.
They draw nigh the castle and see that it turneth all about faster than the wind may run, and it had at the top the archers of crossbows of copper that draw their shafts so strong that no armour in the world might avail against the stroke thereof. Together with them were men of copper that turned and sounded their horns so passing loud that the ground all seemed to quake.
Success would place a rich town at their mercy; failure would deliver them into the hands of the tyrant of Granada. The contest raged from morning until night, when the Moors began to yield. Retreating to a large mosque near the walls, they kept up so galling a fire from it with lances, crossbows, and arquebuses that for some time the Christians dared not approach.
On reaching the shore, the Admiral landed, on the 27th of April, 1521, and at once, with his muskets and crossbows, attacked the enemy, who were drawn up to receive him. The natives were brave fellows, and though some fell, others came on, soon learning to despise the slight effect produced by the bolts of the crossbows and the shots from the ill-constructed firearms of their invaders.
By this time all Don Quixote's companions had come up to where he lay; but the processionists seeing them come running, and with them the officers of the Brotherhood with their crossbows, apprehended mischief, and clustering round the image, raised their hoods, and grasped their scourges, as the priests did their tapers, and awaited the attack, resolved to defend themselves and even to take the offensive against their assailants if they could.
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