This hill had heard war before. In 219 BC the ancient city of Saguntum, an ally of Rome, was besieged and destroyed by Hannibal - an act that ignited the Second Punic War and set Carthage and Rome at each other's throats. Rome rebuilt the city and, generations later, carved the great theatre into the mountainside. The Moors held the height after them; medieval Christians took it back. By the Napoleonic era the town at the base was called Murviedro, and its castle hill still commanded the coast road north of Valencia. When Napoleon ordered Suchet to seize the province in 1811, this ancient rock once again became the thing worth killing for.

Suchet hoped to take the castle in a rush. He could not. The garrison of some 2,600 men under Colonel Andriani threw back his first assaults, and a daring midnight escalade at the end of September ended in slaughter - the storming parties climbed their ladders into a wall of alert defenders, and nearly every Frenchman who reached the top was killed or hurled back down. For the cost of a few hundred casualties, the defenders lost fewer than fifty. Forced into a formal siege, Suchet dragged heavy guns up the rocky slope while Spanish guerrilla bands harried his supply lines across Aragon. The walls, half-finished though they were, held longer than anyone had expected.

The Spanish commander, Captain General Joaquín Blake, distrusted his own army and had hoped to avoid open battle altogether. But the people of Valencia would not stand for a general who let their fortress fall without a fight, and to keep his command he had to march. On 25 October he advanced against Suchet with nearly twice the French numbers. It went wrong on the hills. There the raw Valencian recruits of the Spanish left, thrown against seasoned French, Italian, and Polish troops under the Polish general Chłopicki, broke and fled almost at first contact, ridden down by Italian dragoons. On the right, the veteran divisions of Zayas and Lardizabal - hardened at the Battle of Albuera - fought with real skill, and a Spanish cavalry charge briefly overran French guns. It was not enough. Suchet loosed his cuirassiers, the Spanish horsemen were scattered, and the flank collapsed.

Blake had placed himself too far to the rear to steer the battle; by one account he gave the order to advance and then simply let events run. When they ran against him, the retreat became a rout. A single battalion of the Walloon Guard turned to hold a village so the rest could escape, and four hundred of them were captured for their sacrifice. By nightfall the Spanish had lost roughly six thousand men, most of them taken prisoner. The next day, with the relief army shattered before their eyes, the exhausted garrison surrendered the castle. Its 2,500 survivors marched into captivity, two hundred too sick or wounded to be moved at all. In Paris, the name Saguntum was carved onto the Arc de Triomphe as a French victory. On the Valencian plain it was something simpler and sadder - thousands of ordinary men, many of them barely trained, buried far from home beneath a hill that had been swallowing armies for two thousand years.