Author: Irons Deno
Past Period Review:
"Multi-Gun Cult" vs ."Giant Ship Cannon" - "War on top" in the Age of Great Navigation (I)
The pattern is not small! See how the Anglo-Spanish Naval War changed the world's maritime hegemony! The "War on the Top" in the Age of Discovery (II)
The book was picked up, at the end of July and the beginning of August 1588, when the battle between the British Navy and the Spanish Armada ran from the English Channel to the port of Calais, and in this war, which was widely believed to have rewritten the course of the history of the Age of Discovery, both sides showed their due naval combat strength.
However, too many conclusions about this war, such as "the British army won the weak victory over the strong", "Spain has been weakened", "long-range long-range heavy artillery crushed the white blade battle", etc., are full of stereotypes of historical events, and even outright wrong remarks, in the next final chapter of the story of the Armada naval battle, the author will try to review the "war of the century" that determined the fate of Britain and Spain to some extent more than 400 years ago.
1. Goodbye, Don Quixote
In the description of the combat strength of the two warring sides of the Anglo-Spanish Naval Battle on the Internet, the strength of the Spanish Armada was always high and low between the giants Goliath and Don Quixote, and in fact, Spain had a fleet size much higher than that of the British Navy on the one hand, but on the other hand, the shortage of food on the ships, the backwardness of the equipment, especially the artillery, and the lack of mobility of the battleships, made the commanders of the Armada dare not risk attacking the British.
Cervantes, the author of "Don Quixote", lived in the magnificent age of navigation
Thus, when the two sides first fought at sea, they maintained the state of medieval knightly duels, and the sea charge that the British fleet tried to launch had little effect in the face of Spain's strong "crescent formation". Some marketers like to say that the British side is the weak to win the strong, in order to reflect the drama of the sea hegemony alternation in the era of great navigation, but in fact, the British have ordered two or even three skill trees during the preparation period (please type the four words "ship strong cannon" on the public screen), at least it has nothing to do with the so-called "weak".
On the contrary, the Spanish Armada was its own great writer, the knight in Cervantes's "Don Quixote" who forcibly "injected" religious belief and knightly honor and rushed to the "windmill", in fact, the war was indeed fulfilling the religious fanaticism they fought for.
2. Fleet Battle V.S Landing Battle
The Spanish Armada knew that its side was "strong and middle-handed", and it ran to fight the British to the death, which on the surface seemed to be a disaster at the strategic level, but the fact was that Spain did not intend to decide at sea from the beginning of the plan, and the Armada only played the role of landing troop carriers.
The Anglo-Spanish Naval War was essentially a civil war of faith in Christendom
In the context of the bloody medieval Reformation, Spain, backed by the power and pressure of the Catholic Church, launched a "Crusade westward" against Britain, planning to let the Armada cross the English Channel first, and then load the Large Army troops of the Duke of Parma into the ship, and finally carry out a landing war on the British mainland.
While British control over maritime hegemony in the Age of Discovery was still secondary (the British East India Company, as it is known, did not exist until 1600), Elizabeth I's main intention was to resist the invasion of the Catholic Church and snipe at the sea when the army was unlikely to win. This line of thought was reflected in the three days of the Anglo-Spanish War, in which Spain fought and retreated, trying to keep the fleet intact and join the port army, while the British did everything possible to attack each other and make it unable to carry out the next landing battle.
3, fire attacked the port of Calais, and the wind came to help
In the MMORPG mobile game "Sea of Dawn", players who often travel in and out of the Euro-Atlantic route often choose the port of Calais for supply or trade. In the history of great navigation, it was also this port that witnessed a major turning point in the Anglo-Western naval battle.
The port of Calais affected by the influx of refugees from Europe
After a few days of maneuvering with the British Navy in the English Channel, the Spanish Armada, despite its passivity, managed to reach the port of Calais and load the Army, followed by a landing on the British mainland. But the port of Calais was a small port at the time, and the large ships of the Armada could not all enter the port.
So the British seized the opportunity to use the ignition ship to launch a fire attack on these ships outside the harbor, unlike the fire burning Chibi, the fire attack did not cause direct damage to the ship, because the Spanish sailors were experienced, excellent ship control technology, and early detection of the opponent's intentions, chose to anchor to avoid, successfully defused the fire attack, the ignition ship can only burn itself, light up the night sky.
But there was an unexpected storm in the sky, who knew that a fierce wind suddenly blew up in the sea area of the port of Calais, and before the ships that had originally anchored could react, they were blown into the open sea by the strong wind, causing the entire fleet to be scattered and dismembered, and several large capital warships left in the port of Calais had to fight less and more, facing half of the British fleet led by Drake.
4, compared to the long heavy artillery, God is the best in the whole field
In the composition of the crew of the Spanish fleet, the crew composition of the Spanish fleet was dominated by relatively professional sailors (at that time, the countries did not have the concept of a regular "navy"), who were good at controlling ships and boarding battles; while most of the sailors of the British Navy had the background of privateers and even pirates, and usually "worked" often used shelling threats to confirm that there was no mistake before boarding the ship to "take the courier".
Therefore, when the former great pirate Drake led the LinkedIn fleet to besiege the Spanish capital ships remaining in the port of Calais, he was not in a hurry to go forward, but relied on the range advantage of the long heavy artillery to "fly kites", so that the Spaniards could not perform the boarding battle they were best at. After repeated blows, the remaining Armada ships were unable to complete the original battle plan, and its commander, the Duke of Sidonia, decided to retreat in a roundabout way, bypassing Scotland and Ireland from the north and returning to A Coruña via the North Sea.
However, he underestimated God's ability to "take advantage of the victory and chase", and encountered extreme weather along the way, especially on the Irish coast, first of all, the cold that had not been encountered in a hundred years, so that the Spaniards from southern Europe and the mercenaries from North Africa experienced with their lives what is called "frost sorrow"; some ships could not bear the pain of sailing, and when they went ashore to rest on the Irish coast, they were caught by the local Irish militia organization.
The militiamen faced the hungry and cold Spanish regular army, on the one hand, according to the "customs" of the war at that time, the Irish captured them to get a large ransom, but on the other hand, the numerical superiority of the Spanish troops made the Irish militia have little confidence in the capture, and it was absolutely impossible to return to the mountains, so it could only be killed locally.
5. "Drake is dead!" --fake!
Despite successive defeats on the frontal battlefield, Spain's domestic propaganda has always "lived in its own world". Originally, the "Armada Full Configuration Manual" published by the Spanish media before the war explained what a "pig teammate" was, and during the war with the United Kingdom, they intensified their efforts to concoct various explosive pamphlets about "Drake's Death".
Thanks to the adventure story and the previous perennial plundering behavior, at that time, in the hearts of the Spanish people, Drake was equivalent to a synonym for British maritime power, a sea tyrant who could be compared with his own King Philip II, and the "death" of this person triggered the "champagne celebration" of ordinary people in many places. However, just like the routine of first spreading rumors and then refuting rumors today, at this time the media ran out to publish the truth of "Drake is not dead", thus taking advantage of the panic of the people and earning a wave of eyeballs.
The media will have these sources, which have a lot to do with the negligence of the Spanish battlefield reconnaissance system, from the Battle of Calais, the dispersion of the fleet led to the loss of accurate collection of fleet information by the intelligence services, and even the military information reported to Philip II was very flawed, not to mention the civilian misinformation.
As for Drake's true ending, after becoming famous through this war, the great pirate did not stop his passionate life, until he died of wounds and dysentery after the failure of the sneak attack on the Spanish colony in 1596. Of course, players can also adopt Drake as a navigator in Sea of Dawn and embark on a new journey to conquer the Age of Discovery.
Drake in Sea of Dawn
6. Who carries the pot? Who is in charge?
Finally, let's take a look at the fate of Britain and Spain after the end of this war. Not exactly the same stereotype that "Spain was defeated and Spain was never defeated", the Spanish naval commander, the Duke of Sidonia, despite his repeated mishandling of tactics, was treated justly and magnanimously by Philip II, who refused to accept the heavy responsibility of commander-in-chief before the war, and finally returned to his manor and lived a relatively peaceful life amid the insults of the crowds on both sides of the road.
The victorious Elizabeth I did not reward her "fur seals", but disbanded most of the British fleet at the first time, resulting in the unemployment of many sailors, which indirectly provided "human resource guarantee" for the rise of piracy in the following years. Strangely enough, the British people did not think that their fleet had won, after all, in that era of information blockade, since the enemy had not reached the doorstep, where did this victory at the other end of the strait come from? Instead, with the help of second-hand information from the Spanish media, Drake's reputation spread further. In addition to Queen Elizabeth's peace of mind that she could continue to rule, britain opened a passage into the sea in the future, and Drake was one of the biggest winners of this naval battle.
epilogue
In fact, Spain did not really withdraw from the ranks of maritime powers because of the defeat in the Anglo-Spanish Naval Battle, and for decades afterwards, the Armada continued to transport silver from South America to the rest of the world for the glory of the Catholic Church. The fundamental reason for this former maritime empire to lose its maritime supremacy is actually the sharp fluctuations in China's Ming Dynasty silver market, and the specific reasons will be mentioned in our future topics and to you, so stay tuned!