Carlist Wars: A Visual History

The Carlist Wars were three civil wars in Spain between supporters of Don Carlos, brother of Ferdinand VII, who claimed the throne under Salic law when Ferdinand left it to his infant daughter Isabella II in 1833, and the liberal governments backing the queen. Carlism drew rural, Catholic, traditionalist support in the Basque country, Navarre, Catalonia and Aragon, defending regional fueros against centralising liberalism. The First War (1833-1840), with Zumalacarregui's early victories and the Convention of Vergara, was the bloodiest; the Second (1846-1849) was a Catalan rising; the Third (1872-1876), under Carlos VII during the First Republic, briefly ran a Carlist state at Estella before defeat. Carlism survived to fight for Franco in 1936 and lingers as a movement.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

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Estimated deaths in the Carlist Wars

Timeline of the Carlist Wars

1. 1833
   Ferdinand VII dies; First Carlist War begins
2. 1835
   Zumalacarregui killed at Bilbao
3. 1837
   Royal Expedition reaches Madrid
4. 1839
   Convention of Vergara
5. 1846
   Second Carlist War
6. 1872
   Third Carlist War begins
7. 1874
   Siege of Bilbao; Alfonso XII restored
8. 1876
   Estella falls; fueros abolished

The First Carlist War

Ferdinand VII's Pragmatic Sanction of 1830 let his daughter inherit; his brother Carlos refused to accept it and on the king's death in October 1833 the north rose in his name. Tomas de Zumalacarregui turned Basque and Navarrese peasants into a formidable guerrilla army and won repeatedly until he died besieging Bilbao in 1835. The war became a stalemate of atrocity, the Durango decree ordering foreign volunteers shot, and the Quadruple Alliance sent a British Legion, French Legion and Portuguese to help the queen. Carlist expeditions reached the gates of Madrid in 1837 but could not take it; Espartero and the Carlist general Maroto embraced at Vergara in August 1839, and Cabrera's Aragonese held out until 1840.

The Second War and the Third

The War of the Matiners in Catalonia (1846-1849) followed the failure to marry Isabella to the Carlist pretender. After the Glorious Revolution of 1868 deposed Isabella and Spain lurched through an Italian king and a republic, Carlos VII raised the north again in 1872; the Carlists won at Montejurra and Abarzuza, held Estella as a capital with a mint and university, and besieged Bilbao (1874). The restoration of Alfonso XII in December 1874 rallied the army; Estella fell in February 1876 and Carlos crossed into France, promising to return. The Basque fueros were abolished, though the economic concierto survived.

Legacy

Carlism kept a mass following in Navarre; its Requete militia was among Franco's most reliable troops in 1936, and it was merged into the Falange. The pretender line ended in dispute; some Carlists went left in the 1970s. The wars entrenched the north-south, rural-urban and Basque-Castilian divisions of Spanish politics and inspired novels from Galdos and Unamuno to Valle-Inclan.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Spanish Empire (1492 to 1976)
• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• First Portuguese Empire (1415 to 1663)
• Third Portuguese Empire (1822 to 1999)
• Second Portuguese Empire (1663 to 1822)
• Napoleonic (First French) Empire (1804 to 1815)

Wars of the same era and region

• Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939)
• French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792 to 1815)
• Cristero War (1926 to 1929)

8 surprising things about the Carlist Wars

1. The Carlist motto was 'Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey': God, Fatherland, Charters, King.
2. The Carlists' red beret, the boina, became the emblem of the Requetes who fought for Franco a century later.
3. Zumalacarregui, wounded by a stray bullet at Bilbao, may have died from his doctors' treatment rather than the wound.
4. The British Legion of 10,000 volunteers under de Lacy Evans fought at San Sebastian and Bilbao.
5. The Durango decree of 1834 ordered all captured foreign volunteers shot.
6. Carlos VII's Estella issued its own postage stamps and coins.
7. The Basque economic agreement (concierto economico) that survived 1876 is the basis of the Basque Country's fiscal autonomy today.
8. Carlism's dynastic line petered out; the last widely recognised claimant died in 1936, and rival branches split the movement.

Sources

• Carlism Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Carlist Wars Wikipedia
• First Carlist War Wikipedia
• Raymond Carr, Spain 1808-1975 (1982) Oxford University Press

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