The miracle of Empel
Authors: Enrique Montoliu, Mario Carvelli and Chema Torres (Valencia)
Let's focus on the Thirty Years' War, it is December 7, 1585, it is fought on Dutch lands, more specifically on the island of Bommel, between the Meuse and Waal rivers.
The nearly five thousand soldiers of the Tercio Viejo of Zamora commanded by the Field Master D. Francisco Arias de Bobadilla are in a quite unfavorable situation, the siege on them has been tightened, they are completely blocked by the Dutch squadron of Admiral Filips van Hohenlohe-Neuenstein, and food and dry clothes begin to run out.
The Dutch admiral proposed an honorable surrender to Bobadilla, but his response was blunt: «The Spanish infantrymen prefer death to dishonor. "We will talk about capitulation after we are dead." The Dutch immediately resorted to a method often used in that conflict: opening the river dams to flood the enemy camp. In a short space of time there was no more solid land left than the Empel hill, where the Spanish soldiers took refuge.
As tradition tells us, in that critical situation one of the soldiers of the Tercio, while digging a trench, stumbled upon a wooden object buried there that turned out to be a Flemish table with the image of Our Lady the Most Pure and Immaculate Conception.
Once the discovery was announced, they placed the image on an improvised altar and Master Bobadilla, considering the fact as a sign of divine protection, urged his soldiers to fight, entrusting themselves to the Immaculate Virgin: “This rich treasure that they discovered beneath the earth was a divine nuncio of good, which through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, they awaited on her blessed day.”
During that night a completely unusual and intensely cold wind was unleashed, freezing the waters of the Meuse River. The Spanish soldiers marching on the ice attacked the enemy fleet by surprise at dawn on December 8 and obtained a victory so complete and so unexpected that the Dutch admiral went so far as to say: "It seems that God is Spanish when he works, to me , such a great miracle.
That same day, amidst cheers and acclamations, the Immaculate Conception is proclaimed patron saint of the Tercios of Flanders and Italy.
However, this patronage would only be consolidated much later, forty years after the bull Ineffabilis Deus of December 8, 1854, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin was proclaimed by Pope Pius IX as a dogma of Catholic faith. This is how the Immaculate Conception becomes the patron saint of the current Spanish Infantry weapon.
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