Cannon failed at Galera where underminers and gunpowder breached walls

Evidence

Any piece of terrain can be taken if only the attacking army is willing to expend sufficient lives and munitions in the attempt. In the case of Galera, the force deployed was utterly disproportionate to the prize, bearing in mind that the task was to eliminate resistance in a large village that had no outer defensive wall (although it did have an abandoned castle near its center). A place, frankly, of no great strategic importance. Facing John of Austria’s twelve thousand men (plus ancillary troops) the Morisco defenders had some three thousand local men, stiffened by a few Turks and Berber professional soldiers who had come from outside. They had few weapons (apart the small arms carried by the soldiers). Women (backed up by children supplying them with improvised missiles such as rocks and rubble) helped to hold off the assault forces that were endeavoring to breach the walls. The attackers, besides cavalry and infantry, brought up several batteries of cannon. However, such success as they achieved was thanks not to these unsuitably ponderous weapons, but to their military engineers, who drove a sap under parts of the village, and then blew up the buildings that had been undermined with charges of gunpowder. These explosions actually failed to take the attackers into the heart of the defensive area (which was on bedrock, so could not be undermined), but did open up great breaches in the walls. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1041

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to other siege-and-sapper warfare material — undermining as the decisive technique against masonry walls appears in many early-modern campaigns. Could cross-reference Drake’s Cartagena siege from the reading list.
• CANDY: Women and children hurling rocks and rubble at professional soldiers with cannons is a vivid, self-contained image.