Following some conversations with
Sir William the Aged with respect to Spanish military flags by the end of Charles II era --more specifically, those flown at the battle of Marsaglia (1693)--, I suddenly met an unexpected finding while browsing the Internet in search for some additional information on the matter.
Such finding is the flag you can see at the image left, allegedly belonging to the veteran
Tercio de Saboya. That design was hosted in a webpage related to Facebook with no further explanations attached, thus making impossible to guess whether the flag was simply someone's invention or it was some kind of a serious stuff otherwise. Well, the fact is that such webpage is actually related to an Italian re-enactment group, the so-called
Tercio de Saboya Associazione Storico Culturale. As their name is unequivocally suggesting, this Italian society is devoted to re-enacting that historical Spanish military
Tercio, as a remembrance of its involvement in the 30 Years War Italian campaigns. Their website shows precisely the flag design we were guessing about, and it seems to be strongly backed by the
bibliography they've relied on. This way, thanks to them, we can now attest with some certainty this was the distintctive flag of that
Tercio around 1636 --most likely, a Captain or Company flag. It is far more uncertain whether this unit still was flying such flag by the first years of Philip V. Please note that I've drawn the flag as square or nearly square, as it should already be by the end of 17
th Century, while the Italian website displays it as rectangular.
Following the general target of my prior works, which is no other than collecting the most information possible about Spanish armies in the War of the Spanish Succession, I've worked out a likely design for that unit's flags since 1707, after Philip V reformations and according to his own Ordnances on that matter --thoroughly discussed here lately. These prescribed the background colours of each regiment's Battalion Flags to be the same colour the province/town giving its name to the unit. In this case, it is the Duchy of Savoy, whose coat of arms since medieval times is shown at the image right.
As most of you already know, this consists of a white cross on a red field; this last should be the background colour of the
Regimiento de Saboya according to the already mentioned Ordnances. This way we should be able to deduce for it a flag displaying a red saltire on red again, as in the case of
Regimiento de Castilla. As explained some time ago, such apparently odd combination of colours isn't that unlikely, because we know that Spanish Colonel flags had been that colour before.
After the 1728 Ordnance, discussed in our previous article, Battalion flags of this regiment would now show a red Burgundy Cross on white, with the Arms of Savoy at the corners. This pattern would last without any significant changes until 1843, when it was to be replaced by the red-yellow-red flag. My suggested design can be happily confirmed through the Spanish vexillological website
Banderas Militares of Sergio Camero, which shows an actual flag belonging to the
3rd Battalion of the regiment between 1840 and 1845. It is currently preserved at the Spanish Military Museum (Madrid).
As announced some days ago before Christmas, the revised 1st edition of our Desperta Ferro! Series third booklet is already available for free download. This has been christianized as Defiant Principality - War of the Spanish Succession miniatures campaign and can already be downloaded from this particular page.
