On the next day he made a general assault upon the city. Valencia was not a modern fortress: it had merely a wet ditch and an enceinte of mediaeval walls. There were several points where it seemed possible to escalade the defences, and the marshal resolved to storm the place. But he had forgotten that he had to reckon with the auxiliary fortifications which the populace had constructed during the last three days. They had built up the gates with beams and earth, barricaded the streets, mounted cannon on the walls where it was possible, and established several batteries of heavy guns to sweep the main approaches from the open country. The city being situated in a perfectly level plain, and in ground much cut up by irrigation canals, it had been found possible to inundate much of the low ground. As the river Guadalaviar washed the whole northern side of the walls, Moncey’s practicable points of attack were restricted to certain short spaces on their southern front. The marshal first sent a Spanish renegade, a Colonel Solano, to summon the place. But the Valencians were exasperated rather than cowed by their late defeats; their leaders--especially Padre Rico, a fighting priest of undoubted courage and capacity--had worked them up to a high pitch of enthusiasm, and they must have remembered that, if they submitted, they would have to render an account for Calvo’s abominable massacre of the French residents. Accordingly the Junta returned the stirring answer that ‘the people of Valencia preferred to die defending itself rather than to open any sort of negotiations.’ A mixed multitude of 20,000 men, of whom some 8,000 were troops of one sort and another[107], manned the walls and barricades and waited for the assault. [107] But only 1,500 were regulars; the rest were newly incorporated levies.