Siege of Guardamar

In 1306 the council of Guardamar del Segura, which consisted of a thousand inhabitants in 1308^[2] sent a letter to James II of Aragon affirming, through captives, that whenever a raid was planned on territories of the Procuració General d'Enllà Xixona they thought of attacking Guardamar because it was the weakest point due to the conditions of the castle and the wall.

In 1329 the Granadans managed to recover Algeciras, and at the beginning of 1330 Pope John XXII three years of tithes to the kings of Aragon, Castile and Portugal with the obligation to make at least one expedition to the Emirate of Granada in which they had to go personally.^[3]

In 1330, coinciding with the Castilian attack, with 500 horsemen from the Kingdom of Portugal^[4] on the western border, which ended with the Battle of Thebes, there was a Catalan raid on the Murcia-Andalusian border in the context of the crusade against the emirate of Granada started in 1330: with the presence of Alfons XI of Castile on the western front, the Castilian troops and Valencians tried to cause all the damage they could to the populations of the eastern part, leaving Llorca.

With the truce signed on February 19, 1331^[5] the campaign of Alfonso XI of Castile ended, the Grenadians were able to concentrate their forces, consisting of two thousand five hundred men on horseback and twelve thousand on foot,^[6] commanded by Abu-l-Nuaym Ridwan ibn Abd Allah on the border with the Crown of Aragon.

The Grenadians, with reinforcements from Morocco, from their base in Algeciras, took Gibraltar and Xerès.

The residents of Guardamar del Segura, fearing the attack, asked for help from the prosecutor Guillem de Liminyana, who was in Oriola, but only Pere de Tona, with twenty -and-seven crossbowmen and lancers went to the defense of the town.^[1]

The Grenadians, led by Abu-l-Nuaym Ridwan, with an army of five thousand men on horseback, fifteen thousand footmen, among them five thousand crossbowmen, and some machines of war that threw fireballs,^[7] entered the Kingdom of Valencia by Oriola and on October 18 of 1331 the siege was established and the next day Guardamar was shot down and taken completely, twenty-two of the defending soldiers dying, and the rest, being captured with the rest of the population.^[2]