Sir Julián Romero de Ibarrola (1518 - 13 October 1577) was a Spanish general and mercenary of the 16th century. He became a military legend in his own time by a variety of colourful facts, chief of them being that he rose from a pauper soldier to a full-fledged field commander by his own merits, and second to it, that he seemed to be utterly unable to die on the battlefield, where he lost an eye, an arm, a leg and an eardrum among many other war wounds, to the point he was rumored to be not only a Handicapped Badass, but also a sorcerer that kept himself alive through occult arts. His long and motley career earned him the honor of being immortalized by Lope de Vega and other writers.
His story as a Self-Made Man was something he valued highly and cultivated himself, to the extent of choosing the intriguing Pretentious Latin Motto of sine causa et principio impossibile ese ("it would be impossible without causes and principles"). This punny quote alludes to the law of cause and consequence, and at the same time to the importance of one's principles, ultimately turning into a Badass Boast: he wanted everybody to know that if he reached so high, it was by the power of his hard work and the strength of never losing sight of his ideals.
The son of a builder, Julián joined the armies of King Charles V as a drummer at the young age of 15, witnessing the capture of Tunis in 1534 before eventually progressing into a soldier and a captain. His unit was honorably discharged after a career in Italy, but due to a lack of money, they decided to become Private Military Contractors and enter the service of Henry VIII of England, at the time allied with Spain against France. The Spaniards distinguished themselves in the English campaigns in Scotland and France, and in one of those Romero had the chance to shine by himself against a Spanish mercenary working for the French, Antonio Mora, in a duel highly publicized and witnessed by King Francis I of France himself. Romero was a heavy underdog, and he accordingly lost his horse and sword early into the three-hour match, but he eventually managed to take down Moro and submit him with his dagger to the English' rejoicement. He eventually inherited the team's command, being knighted by Henry VIII for his services, although the squad would terminate their services in 1551, ultimately driven away by religious agitation between Anglicans and Catholics.
After rejoining the Spanish army with honors, Romero added extra action against the French, the Dutch and the Turks. He commanded the imperial center during the Curb-Stomp Battle of St. Quentin, origin of the Spanish idiom se armó la de San Quintín (meaning roughly "all hell broke loose"), although he didn't come out without losing the usage of a leg by an arquebus shot. Later he landed in Sicily, and was among the Spanish and Italian troops that relieved the Great Siege of Malta, after which he received of the whole tercio stationed there. Some sources claim that Romero had returned briefly to England as part of Prince Philip's entourage during his marriage to Mary Tudor, with a legend spousing that he saved Philip in spectacular fashion from an attempt on his life, but historians consider it a myth. Even if he didn't, though, the contacts he made during his English tenure would come in handy to feed Philip's spy network.
In 1666, the man that started as a drummer boy was riding the wave of his fame, as he was promoted to second-in-command by no other than Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alba, in route to drown the revolt of the Protestant Dutch provinces. With the soon-to-be captain Juan del Águila as his own underling, Romero became the Iron Duke's frontline enforcer, leading all sorts of sieges, operations and brawls throughout the years, even although this way of life came at the realistic outcome of losing now the usage of an arm, an eye, four brothers, three sons-in-law and an illegitimate son. Among his feats, the piece of increasingly Dented Iron that was Romero spearheaded the army that curbstomped the rebels in Jemmingen, and later almost managed to arrest William the Silent himself in an encamisada-style raid in Mons (no, there were no Mons involved, sadly), from where William only escaped thanks to the alarm of his ironically Spaniel whippet, Kuntze. Romero came to be included in the "Flemish Trinity" of Alba's veterans, which also included Sancho Dávila and Cristóbal de Mondragón, names that would still resound in Flanders long after their master was gone.
At the end, as one can imagine, even Romero had to get tired of a war that seemed endless, especially when the similarly disgruntled Duke of Alba was replaced by Luis de Requesens, whose differences of approach led to the renovation of the whole commanding staff and the neglection of many officers with experience. In one of the most dramatic instances, Romero was roped into leading naval action against an English-Dutch fleet, even although, echoing the future mismanagement of the Spanish Armada, he didn't stop telling Requesens that he was a land commander with zero naval experience (there are even speculations that Requesens deliberately put Romero in this position to screw him up). The imperial fleet was defeated so badly that Romero's own flaship was peppered and sank, but he managed to pull one of his unlikely survival stunts by jumping off a porthole and swimming away among the fire and shots, fueling the aforementioned rumors that Romero was a Magic Knight and that it was thanks to the dark arts that he could still be alive and kicking by this point.
When payments took too much time to arrive, a general mutiny stopped the whole war, and to top it all off, Requesens died of illness at the same time, leaving 86.000 Habsburgian soldiers of multiple nationalities pissed off and with various attitudes about what to do. Romero and the substitute governor Peter Ernst von Mansfeld tried to appease the mutineers, but after several Dutch loyalists and European mercenaries switched sides and allowed the rebels to trap Dávila in the citadel of Antwerp, all the imperials could do was to redirect the frustration against the enemy. The mutineers utterly crushed the besiegers in Antwerp and proceeded vent themselves by looting the city, causing such chaos that the fires got out of hand and ended up destroying 80 houses. Although not all the attackers were Spaniards and paradoxically the sack itself was quite average for time's customs, the incident went into history as an example of the so-called Spanish Fury, which ruined the Spaniards' already bad reputation in the Netherlands. Somehow, Romero always found himself in the best and the worst of the wars.
After John of Austria's Edict of 1577, Romero found himself and his troops returning to southern Europe, being granted a castle in reward for his 44-year military career... only for his army to be recalled again to the Netherlands, much to the chagrin of the tired generals, because nobody had believed for a moment that the war would end like that. However, Julián would never return to the battlefield, as he died anticlimactically of a stroke on his horse while training younger officers in cavalry tactics in Italy.
The rumors about his sorcery were so strong that a Jesuit chronicler had to specifically write in his report that there were no magical signs in his body, and even then, folklore claims he was covering up that when they opened Romero up, they found he had a giant, hairy heart, like a beefed-up version of the dude from The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
In fiction
Literature- Lope de Vega wrote a eponymous comedy about him.
- Playwright José de Cañizares wrote another comedy about Romero, named Ponerse hábito sin pruebas y el valor como ha de ser, el guapo Julián Romero.
- José Javier Esparza started an entire series of Historical Fiction about him, of which the existent chapters are San Quintín and El tercio que nunca existió: Gloria y tragedia de los soldados españoles en Escocia.
