Francisco Gómez de Terán y Negrete, 4th Marquess of Portago
Command Ratings
Commands
Francisco de Paula Gómez de Terán y Negrete (also styled in Spanish noble usage as Francisco Gómez de Terán y Negrete, IV marqués del Portazgo; in much Anglophone military literature as the Marquis of Portago, “Portago” sometimes appearing as “Portage”) was a Spanish regular-army officer of the late Bourbon period whose principal wartime service fell in the Peninsular War, where he held field command at divisional level during the first campaigns of 1808 and later appeared in higher territorial and administrative appointments. Born in Madrid on 13 April 1760, he belonged to the titled house of Portago/Portazgo and succeeded as 4th marqués in 1801, a succession reflected in later military and civil documentation that alternates between the title-forms Portago and Portazgo depending on author and register.
His early military formation took place in the professional establishment of the late eighteenth-century Spanish army. He entered service as a cadet and saw active duty during the Great Siege of Gibraltar (1779–1783), an experience that placed him in the long-running combined operations around the fortress and in the routine of siege-line service, artillery fire, and the management of garrison and field detachments in Andalusia. He also served in the period of Spain’s participation in the American Revolutionary War, a phase in which Spanish forces operated across multiple theaters, and in which many officers of his generation acquired practical familiarity with expeditionary movement and the administration of forces under sustained logistical strain.
By the opening of the French invasion and the insurrection of 1808, Gómez de Terán was a senior officer with enough standing to be advanced rapidly by provincial authority. At the outbreak of the Peninsular War, the Junta of Galicia promoted him to mariscal de campo, placing him in the rank tier commonly entrusted with divisional command in the improvised field armies being assembled in the north. He joined Joaquín Blake’s Army of Galicia and was given command of the 4th Division, a formation whose internal composition reflected the crisis conditions of 1808: alongside regular battalions and established units, the division incorporated a significant proportion of newly raised troops and partially trained recruits, and it operated under the acute constraints in arms, ammunition, and staff work that marked the first Spanish field efforts of the war.
His first Major engagement as a divisional commander came at the Battle of Medina de Rioseco on 14 July 1808, fought against French forces under Jean-Baptiste Bessières. Within Blake’s army, Gómez de Terán’s 4th Division fielded approximately 5,800 men in contemporary strength estimates. The battle ended in Spanish defeat, and Spanish accounts and later operational narratives consistently underline the difficulty of coordinating separate Spanish groupings on the field and the vulnerability of newly formed infantry to rapid French pressure once the line began to break. In that context Gómez de Terán’s division was committed within a battle plan that sought to hold position and contest French advances in open ground with limited cavalry and artillery support relative to the enemy’s concentration. The outcome contributed to the rapid disruption of the northern Spanish front in the weeks after the initial patriotic uprisings, compelling repeated Spanish withdrawals and reassemblies.
Later in 1808, during the autumn operations in the north that culminated in the French drive on Bilbao and the reassertion of French control in much of the Basque and Cantabrian zone, Gómez de Terán was again engaged with Blake’s forces. He fought at the Battle of Zornoza on 31 October 1808, one of the clashes in the sequence of actions around the Bilbao approaches and the Spanish attempts to delay superior French forces while preserving a line of retreat and maintaining cohesion in the presence of active French cavalry and combined-arms columns. In these operations his responsibilities combined tactical command with the continual practical problems of marching and sustaining a division in mountainous country where movement corridors were narrow, where communications were uncertain, and where maintaining a regulated supply flow to troops was persistently difficult amid disruption to civil administration.
Gómez de Terán also appears in the record connected with fighting in central-western Spain in 1809, including the Combat of Mesas de Ibor (1809), a lesser but sharp action during the French penetration and Spanish counter-movements in Extremadura and adjacent zones. In the same year he is associated with the Battle of Talavera (27–28 July 1809), the large Anglo-Spanish engagement in which Spanish forces under Gregorio de la Cuesta fought alongside Arthur Wellesley against French troops commanded by Claude Victor and Horace Sébastiani. Spanish senior-officer assignments around Talavera were complicated by the coexistence of allied command arrangements, Spanish internal command politics, and the practical need to concentrate Spanish infantry for holding prepared positions while managing exposure to French attacks and artillery. Gómez de Terán’s inclusion among the commanders linked to Talavera situates him within the cohort of Spanish general officers present in one of the war’s most prominent set-piece battles.
Beyond these early-campaign battlefields, he held further senior appointments that indicate continued confidence in his reliability within the army’s upper administrative framework. He is described in later registers and summaries as having held command within the Captaincy General structure, including an association with the Capitanía General of Catalonia. Such posts were not merely ceremonial; they involved the supervision of garrisons, the management of provincial military administration, the direction of local defense arrangements in a theater where French forces and allied Spanish formations repeatedly contested lines of communication, and the coordination of mobile columns and fortress garrisons in a region whose operational situation was frequently shaped by sieges, blockades, and the need to secure coastal and interior routes.
Gómez de Terán died on 9 May 1816. His death occurred shortly after the close of the Napoleonic Wars and the restoration period in Spain, ending a career that bridged the late eighteenth-century professional army—formed in the milieu of Gibraltar and Atlantic conflict—and the emergency field commands of 1808–1809 when Spanish forces attempted to rebuild operational capacity in the face of sustained French invasion.
Sources
XX 08-09 Medina del Rio Seco; Talavera, Medellin