Jaca

Plague and fire left late medieval Jaca in a deep crisis, and only after Ferdinand the Catholic gave it a new town government did its burghers recover, many of them paying the artists whose work filled the cathedral. Its Jewish community, the oldest in Aragon, was expelled in 1492. As France became Spain's great rival, the old pilgrim gateway turned into a frontier fortress, and in 1592 Philip II had the Italian engineer Tiburcio Spannocchi raise a pentagonal citadel on the fields outside the walls. That fortress changed hands in the war against Napoleon. In March 1809 its garrison surrendered to the French, thinned by desertions that an influential missionary friar had secretly encouraged, and General Espoz y Mina took the town back in December 1813 and the citadel only in February 1814.