Mérida

The knights' Mérida stayed small, its houses filling barely a third of the ground the Roman city had covered, and its council spent the 14th century quarrelling with the Order's officers over who governed it. The walls were tested in the war over the Castilian succession. In 1476 supporters of Joanna la Beltraneja seized the town, and in 1479 the Portuguese troops holding it were besieged by the master of Santiago, Alonso de Cárdenas, until the peace of that September returned Mérida to Isabella. The fighting left breaches in the walls and cracks in the Roman bridge, and by the end of the century only some 3,500 people lived within the old circuit. Worse came with the war against Napoleon: between 1808 and 1812 a quarter to a third of the houses were destroyed, and two arches were blown out of the bridge the Romans had built.