Ferdinand, king of Castille and Arragon, having, in contempt of
treaties of the most solemn kind, invaded the part of the kingdom
of Naples and Sicily that belonged to France, charged his great
captain Gonsalvo with the siege of the capital of that state. At the
approach of the Spaniards, the French, who placed no confidence in
the inhabitants, retreated to the fortresses of the Château-neuf and
the Œuf. Gonsalvo attacked the first of these, and it made a vigorous
resistance. The garrison had resolved to bury themselves under the
ruins of the place rather than surrender; and without doubt the
Spanish general would have failed in his enterprise if he had only
employed ordinary means. But he had in his army a soldier called Peter
of Navarre, from the name of his country, who opened the gates and
destroyed the ramparts of the castle by the help of a new species of
thunder, if we may so term it. This soldier, a very intelligent man,
had been, in 1487, with an expedition in which the Genoese employed,
but without success, those terrible volcanoes called _mines_. He
examined the _fourneau_ of one of these mines, and observed that the
want of effect in this invention did not arise from any fault in the
art, but from that of the workmen, who had not taken their dimensions
correctly. He perfected this secret, and communicated it to Gonsalvo,
who begged him to put it to the test. Peter of Navarre took his
measures so well, that his mine had all the effect he could expect; he
then pierced several others, which succeeded with such precision that
the New Castle was blown up, and all its defenders were either cut to
pieces or buried under the ruins of the walls. The governor of the
castle of the Œuf, a brave gentleman from Auvergne named Chavagnac,
were not discouraged by the melancholy fate of his compatriots; he was
in vain summoned to surrender: he replied that nothing more glorious
could happen to him than to die for his master, with his sword in his
hand. Peter then commenced some fresh mines, which were sprung with the
same terrible consequences as the former: the walls crushed the greater
part of the soldiers, and the rest perished in sight of a Genoese fleet
which came to their succour.