……

In the Calabrian Peninsula, the last French army to be cut off in the south, several Swiss battalions and German mercenary battalions finally got fed up and mutinied, reaching a consensus with the Castilian army to allow them to leave freely.

The remnants of the French army surrendered at the end of July, and the Italian war was completely over.

During this period of time in England, Castile and Aragon, the robbery operation on the Atlantic coast of France was also very smooth, and for a time almost all the places on the Atlantic coast of France where "crimes" could be carried out......

After the heavy cavalry and field artillery of the French demons showed their might in the First Italian War, the war was about to enter a new era.

Starting with the "enlightenment" of the plate duck in this war, the role of hot weapons in the war will increase at a faster rate than before, gradually overpowering supercooled weapons. Of course, this is a long stage.

However, the massive use of thermal weapons, especially for Ferdinand's open-hanging version of thermal weapons, mineral resources, like Ferdinand's many headaches in the past, are a very helpless bottleneck.

At present, although there are some mines in Sardinia, the general pattern of coal and iron shortage in southern Europe has not changed, and it has to continue to import a lot of coal and iron ore from England, especially the former.

The other was to launch a new expedition to the Americas (the fleet had already departed this year, but not yet mentioned) to the "barren forest" of Alabama in the future, and establish bases in the vicinity of Mobile and Birmingham to obtain rich coal and iron ore. However, at present, the foothold is not yet stable, let alone the organization of mineral mining and smelting.

In summary, if you want to "open source" as soon as possible and without spending too much cost, it is best to find new mineral resources in the local area.

However, it is a bit embarrassing that Ferdinand did not think about whether there are some relatively large coal and iron deposits in Iberia itself.

However, at noon on the second day of the departure of the fleet to the Americas while the First Italian War was still going on, he overheard the "bad news" that dozens of people had died in an accident at a small iron ore mine in Bilbao where iron ore was mined.

Such "trifles", as a rule, are not easily known to the king very quickly, and who else can do this, except by the miraculous author?

However, this "bad news" made Ferdinand enlightened, and he suddenly retrieved a bunch of vague things from his memory.

It was pleasantly surprised to find that although it is true that Iberia itself lacks coal and iron, it is not without large coal and iron deposits.

Take, for example, the famous industrial city of northern Spain (well, just famous in Spain...... Bilbao, because of the large-scale mining of iron ore, has become one of the more important industrial cities in modern times. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, large-scale iron mining would make it the second largest industrialized regional centre in Spain – after Barcelona.

The mining of iron ore in Bilbao began in the days of the Roman Empire in Spain and continues to this day......

Wait, is there something wrong?

If Bilbao has been a major iron ore producing town in Castile since ancient times, even if Ferdinand's memory of the 21st century ignores this, the brain of the original owner at the end of the 15th century should finally leave an impression.

Even because Queen Isabella was in charge of Castilian affairs, King Ferdinand of Aragon did not have the leisure to care about Castilian affairs, and he would not have been without a little information in the court.

Well, that's mainly for two reasons.

One, is that the mine did not find the right one. For more than a thousand years, the real rich mining area near Bilbao has not been discovered, and the local area has not had enough financial resources and attention, and is basically in a state of stocking, and there are still only a few "small iron mines" - which are really small, and they are a drop in the bucket for the production of artillery and Mushtec arquebuses and brown Bess flintlock guns.

Another reason is political instability and frequent changes of hands. – Bilbao is an important city in the Basque Country. Queen Isabella had fought a war with France here before, and the two sides faced off in the Pyrenees in the First Italian War. By the Second Italian War, the two sides fought again for the Kingdom of Navarre......

However, now that Ferdinand remembered this stubble, things were much simpler. Although Bilbao has not been able to mine iron ore in large quantities, it has a long history of exporting iron ore and manufacturing iron tools. It is also a seafaring settlement in the Basque Country.

In other words, as long as Ferdinand sent a prospecting team to conduct a very careful and meticulous search and find a large amount of iron ore, the subsequent mining and smelting would be very easy.

However, in this era, the technology of prospecting was not as mature as that of later generations, so Ferdinand could only make the prospecting team "work hard" for the time being, in addition to hiring exploration talents from Western Europe.

In addition to the iron mines, another city in the northwestern region of Spain was also noticed by Ferdinand, which was also a city with a long history but was still not well-known at this time - Gijón. It was also a regional center during the Roman Empire.

Bilbao has a large amount of iron ore deposits, while Gijón has a large number of coal mines, so that Ferdinand's industrial base in Sardinia has found another coal supply place other than England, and the cost of its own resources is much lower.

The coal mines of Gijón are even more significant than those of Bilbao, because until the 19th century, coal deposits were undiscovered, and after the discovery of the mines, the city, which had been stagnant, immediately began to develop rapidly, with roads, railways and ports expanding rapidly. It was here that the peninsula's first coal port was built, and that was in 1893!

This was nearly four hundred years later than Ferdinand's current era, and he could not wait that long to start digging up this treasure now.

As for whether it will deplete local resources too quickly, there is no way to take this into account, who makes time tight now, and the Iberian Peninsula is congenitally insufficient? As long as it is stable for half a century, no, for twenty or thirty years, you can breathe a sigh of relief after that.

Of course, it is a very tortuous thing to invoke the memories of later generations to direct people hundreds of years ago to open mines.

Even before World War II, if you want to dig for oil in Libya, the protagonists have to withstand the ridicule of Europe and the tirelessness of the oil exploration team, and tan in North Africa for a month to break through the earth. In an era of scarcity of relevant technical means and knowledge, it is likely that a region's mineral deposits, even rich mines, will not be found for months or even more than a year.

As a result, the protagonist may be seen as a fool or even a liar, and after trying to fool people into doing everything possible, he will be beaten up again and get nothing.

Of course, this is normal, the people of later generations are not fully ahead of the ancients, even if there is a golden finger, there are places that can't be helped.

Well, that's why Ferdinand "exiled" hundreds of explorers to a small new wharf in the port of Gijón, and ordered them to explore the area until they found enough coal...... The king moved his mouth, and his men broke their legs......