15 June 1637, and why that battle mattered
That day, 21 Spanish galleys turned their prows into the gulf. The village was not the target: four ships of the King lay under repair in the harbour, immobilised, and the Spanish fleet had come to destroy them.
The odds were crushing. The Tropeziens, helped by the crews of the four ships, took up the fight. It ran to roughly three hours of artillery fire. At the end of it, the Spanish fleet left without sinking a single ship of the King.
Seen from today the affair can look minor. It was not. France and Spain were at war, and the seventeenth-century Mediterranean was a permanent theatre of operations, where Barbary corsairs had been raiding coastal villages for over a century. Saint-Tropez had one feature that made it a target: a deep, sheltered gulf, easy to defend, and therefore convenient for repairing the royal fleet. What protected the village also drew the enemy in. Losing four ships of the King at anchor would have been a strategic humiliation and a real blow to the French navy in the Mediterranean.
The village, for its part, was organised. Since 1558 it had elected a captain of the town every year, commanding a local militia. When the galleys appeared, the Tropeziens were not improvising: they had been preparing for eighty years.
On 11 July 1637, less than a month later, the consuls voted to establish a general thanksgiving procession every year on the fifteenth day of June. The Bravade des Espagnols was born of that vote and has never stopped since. That is what you watch on 15 June: a seventeenth-century municipal vow still carried out to the letter.
