Welcome to Finding Medina.

Episode 9, Artifacts at Last.

I'm Brandon Seale.

On July 27, 1813, President Governor Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara of the First Republic of Texas,

who over the previous year had raised a multi-ethnic army, negotiated foreign backing for his cause,

issued a declaration of independence, promulgated a constitution, and three times defeated a better trained, better-equipped

royalist army, including as recently as a month ago at the Battle of Alassan Creek, was deposed.

Worse, he was deposed by the junta that he had personally appointed just a few months before.

The junta was meant to perform the duties of a legislative branch and to hold certain checks

against executive authority. But the fact that Gutierrez Delara's own appointees voted unanimously

to remove him showed how quickly and how wildly the political situation had spun out of his

control. The five San Antonioians and two Americans on the junta replaced him with a dashing young

Spaniard named Jose Alvarez de Toledo, whose principal service to the cause so far had been

in the form of writing newspaper articles from east of the Sabine River.

So what in the world happened here? And who in the world was Toledo?

35-year-old Jose Alvarez Toledo came from a wealthy Spanish family in Cuba and had attended

the Royal Naval Academy back in Spain. He briefly served on a Spanish

frigate, but soon abandoned a military career to take a seat in the Spanish Parliament. He struggled

there to find his faction in the turbulent world of Napoleonic Spain and fled around 1811 to the even

more turbulent new world. Upon meeting Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara in the winter of 1811 to the even more turbulent new world.

Upon meeting Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara in the winter of 1811 in Philadelphia,

he became, like many others who met Gutierrez de Lara, a follower,

...