A divided Spanish war council prolonged the Alpujarras campaign into 1569

Evidence

The new supreme commander was a young man of twenty-four; this was his first serious independent campaign. For Mond´ejar it must have been a great humiliation to have to pass from being a captain-general in virtual sole command, and what is more, on what was very much his home terrain, to being one member of an ill-structured Council of War consisting, besides himself, of the duke of Sesa (admittedly an experienced soldier), Luis Quijada (a professional soldier but someone who obviously owed his position to the fact that he had been Don John’s tutor!), Deza (not a soldier at all, but a lawyer and, as we have seen, the architect of the confused military situation that had led to Mond´ejar losing sole command), and finally, Archbishop Guerrero of Granada. Whereas Mond´ejar had been starved of resources, Don John was now kept amply supplied by his half-brother the king. Under this command structure, the fighting did not go well: there were all sorts of further motives for dissension and discord. Sesa was the nephew of the marqu´es de los V´elez, but there was a profound rift between them, so that even they could never operate well together. One might almost suspect that the direction of operations was entrusted to such a divided Council of War in order to ensure that the campaign would be long drawn out. Certainly the prospect of an end to fighting receded ever further as the Spanish armies blundered around through the rest of 1569. Often the Spanish troops seemed more concerned with booty than victory. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1027

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the Alpujarras Revolt’s Castilian command structure and its internal factions.
• QUESTION: Was the deliberately divided Council of War a real Spanish policy or just Harvey’s speculation? Worth checking against other accounts.