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The fire of Medina del Campo

Medina del Campo, Tierra de Medina, Valladolid

1 Villages · 4 Monuments · 1 Activities · 2 Historical milestones

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The fire of Medina del Campo

Historical milestone · Medina del Campo, Tierra de Medina, Valladolid

Image of Medina del Campo, not of the place itself.

On 21 August 1520, in one of the first actions of the Comuneros' War in Castile, the troops of Charles I, commanded by Rodrigo Ronquillo and Antonio de Fonseca, arrived in Medina del Campo — an important trading town with an artillery garrison — to claim it and use it against rebellious Segovia. The corregidor Gutierre Quijada agreed to hand it over, but the townspeople rose up, gathered the artillery pieces in the square and, faced with Fonseca's ultimatum, refused to surrender them, knowing they would be used against their sister city. The royalist response was to set fire to several districts, destroying much of the town and definitively igniting, throughout the Crown of Castile, the Comunero movement that had until then been only incipient.

21 de agosto de 1520

Photo: Contando Estrelas from Vigo, España / Spain (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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