War of the Bands

The main primary source for the War is Las Bienandanças e fortunas by Lope García de Salazar, written c.1471.

The urban warfare was less fatal than the pitched battles often fought in the countryside: only five men died in a fracas in Bilbao in 1440 and only ten in the streets of Bermeo in 1443.

In 1413 a private war broke out between Juan de Sant Pedro, from the Labourd in the English Duchy of Gascony, and the Navarrese houses of the Espeleta and the Alzate.

As early as 1390 and 1393 warring in Biscay had been reduced by the intervention of the royalist hermandades, capable of drawing on the revenues of royal estates.

In 1415 the corregidor, the royally-appointed governor of the hermandad, acting on royal orders, siphoned off Biscayan wheat to the Asturias, inciting a rebellion.

In 1457 the war between the Gamboinos and the Oñaz was brought to an abrupt end when the hermandades rebelled against them both, seized their manors, and expelled their leaders from Guipúzcoa.