My initial intention was simply to write a short narrative of the battle but, as I researched the lives of those who fought there, understanding where these men can from and where they went became just as important as knowing what they did on the battlefield.
A collective biography of the veterans of the Battle of El Santuario, fought in Colombia in 1829, is published today by Matthew Brown in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol.
The Struggle for Power in Post-Independence Colombia and Venezuela uses the untold stories of the soldiers’ ordinary lives to explain the reconfiguration of European influence in the region after the end of Spanish colonial power, a subject almost entirely ignored by historians up to now.
At the Battle of El Santuario, fought on mountainous Andean terrain on October 17, 1829, the rebel General José María Córdova was defeated by an army in the service of the Gran Colombian government, reporting to the orders of the famous Liberator, President Simón Bolívar.
For present-day Colombians, El Santuario is remembered primarily for Córdova’s death. After the battle as he lay wounded, he was sought out and brutally murdered by one of the opposing army’s senior officers - an Irishman, Rupert Hand. Hand’s commanding officer was General Daniel O’Leary, who decades later became the British Empire’s highest diplomatic representative in Bogotá. All this gives rise to conspiracy theories about the power and machinations of the British Empire in Colombia after the colony’s independence from Spanish colonial rule.
The Struggle for Power tells the life stories of those who served at the Battle of El Santuario, from O’Leary and Hand to the local people, including slaves and indigenous men, whom Córdova recruited into his army just days before the battle.
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