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CHAPTER 1

The Soldiers’ Republic of Letters

CLASS AND LITERACY

Miguel de Cervantes, a veteran soldier himself, knew it all too well when he talked about his comrades: “No one is poorer in their misery, because they depend on their wretched pay, which arrives too late or never at all, and thus they are forced to subsist with whatever they can get with their own hands at the risk of their lives and their conscience” (No hay ninguno más pobre en la misma pobreza, porque está atenido a la miseria de su paga, que viene o tarde o nunca, o a lo que garbeare por sus manos, con notable peligro de su vida o de su conciencia).¹ It seems obvious that it was not only the rank structure and discipline of the army that provided Karl Marx with an old military analogy in his description of the emergent industrial proletariat: soldiering, as precariously salaried mass labor, was always associated with poverty, whether as a way to escape it or, more often, to tragically perpetuate it.²

Early modern imperial warfare was not an aristocratic business but a rather plebeian one. Ragged soldiers, not elegant courtiers, were the protagonists of both the military revolution and Iberian imperial expansion. According to the commoner Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Mexico was conquered by “a fleet of poor men” (nuestra armada era de hombres pobres), and for Gaspar Correia, an imperial official and chronicler of Portuguese Asia, India had been similarly gained with “the blood of the poor and humble folk” (o sangue dos pobres e homens pequenos)—even if the king favored the nobility when distributing his grace.³ For the Venetian military engineer Giulio Savorgnan in 1572, men enlisted in the army “to escape from being craftsmen, working in a shop; to avoid criminal sentence; to see new things; to pursue honour.” But the latter are very few: “the rest,” he added, “join in the hope of having enough to live on and a bit over for shoes or some other trifle that will make life supportable.”⁴

Most early modern soldiers were thus lowborn young men who found in the profession of arms the most plausible path to survival or social promotion, whether as salaried workers in the European wars or as aspirants to a share of the wealth from a colonial expeditionary force. In the case of Spain, the human resources of the empire’s armies were also largely drawn from the popular classes of the multiple nations of the Habsburg composite monarchy.⁵ Additionally, the army was one of the institutions in which the limpieza de sangre statutes were never legislated; racial or ethnoreligious ancestry never played a role in recruitment, which made it easier for large sections of the Iberian population to enroll.⁶ Steady salary, however paltry, and the promise of plunder were indeed the main reasons for most recruits to join the army, since it “offered the starving poor one of their few chances of survival.”⁷

How could, then, an army of poor men, largely formed of peasants, artisans, fugitives, and unemployed youth, provide shelter for a republic of letters?⁸ How could these men read and write, let alone compose complex war narratives in verse and prose? Soldiers, after all, have traditionally been counted among “those who live on the margins of literacy,”⁹ which explains why historians Marie-Christine Rodríguez and Bartolomé Bennassar, in one of the most comprehensive studies of literacy rates in early modern Spain, included soldiers under the same rubric as vagabonds, beggars, sailors, and actors.¹⁰

Some evidence exists, if scant, that allows us to suggest that the skills of reading and writing must have been more widespread among rank-and-file soldiers, whatever their social extraction, than among their civilian peers. In the late sixteenth century, one in three soldiers who made a will before dying at Santiago de Compostela’s Hospital Real could sign his name.¹¹ One among them seemed to have prepared himself carefully for death, as in 1581 he owned a book of hours and a Contemptus mundi, two kinds of books that circulated widely among the popular classes as well as among the soldierly commons.¹² By the middle of the following century, these rates seem to have increased: seven out of nine soldiers could sign their will with their name in Madrid in 1650.¹³ When set against these data, Cervantes’s story about a veteran lieutenant who writes the Dialogue of the Dogs in Valladolid’s Hospital de la Resurrección while convalescing from syphilis would not seem to “exceed all imagination.”¹⁴

In contrast with these intriguing but insufficient glimpses into literacy rates among Spain’s soldiers, surveys of conquistadores in the New World are strikingly systematic and reliable. It is well-known that the social status of almost all conquistadores, even the most eminent, was hardly distinguished. The vast majority of them were commoners of different trades, although some of the leaders belonged to the lineages of the destitute gentry or marginal hidalguía. Only about 120 of the 2,200 men who participated in the campaigns conducting the conquest of Tenochtitlán in 1519–21 were hidalgos, and yet “most of these conquistadors, hidalgo or not, could read and write.”¹⁵ Of the 318 of Cortés’s men whose signatures can still be read in the company’s petition sent from the newly founded Veracruz on June 20, 1519, up to 75 percent must have been literate, even though only 4–8 percent were of noble origin.¹⁶ Strikingly similar figures have been estimated in the case of Tierra Firme, Chile, and New Granada, where 70–80 percent of the soldiers seem to have been at least partially literate.¹⁷ In the case of the conquest of Peru, the leader Francisco Pizarro was illegitimately born—as were most of his brothers—to a humble peasant’s daughter and remained illiterate all his life.¹⁸ Of the 168 conquerors of the Inca empire under his command, however, a total of 108 could sign their name, which amounts to around 77 percent of Lockhart’s “men of Cajamarca.”¹⁹ Of these 108, 51 were “definitely literate,” while for the remaining 57 who could sign their name, we cannot fully ascertain the extent of their skills—although, as Lockhart points out, signing one’s name in the sixteenth century meant some formal instruction, however basic, in reading and writing. Among the literate conquistadores of Peru were Pedro Cieza de León and Francisco de Xerez, both chroniclers of their uneducated captain’s military exploits and soldiers themselves. Cieza was the son of a shopkeeper from the small town of Llerena, while Xerez was a poor commoner, “low, vile, and of little account.”²⁰ Among the seemingly boorish conquistadores there appear to have been many who could read and write, even among those of humble extraction.

Scholarship on popular literacies, the history of the book, and popular culture has long shown that literacy was much more widespread among the laboring classes of early modern Europe and Spain than it was once thought.²¹ To be sure, literacy and cultural capital were unequally distributed, which structured and hierarchized the social world in various ways. It is misleading, however, to assume that this distribution flawlessly overlapped with class distinctions and socioprofessional status.²² At least two historical processes with wide-ranging consequences, namely the printing and educational revolutions, helped alter the social distribution of cultural capital and of written matter beginning in the early sixteenth century, resulting in a substantial increase in literacy rates across class boundaries.²³ Both historical processes converged to offer the lower classes of early modern Spain a path, however tortuous, to social promotion and public relevance; and in this regard, as far as my argument is concerned, they go hand in hand with the massive incorporation of the popular classes into the army as a result of the military revolution.

The expansion of literacy and the partial democratization of written culture have indeed a lot to do with the transformations brought about by movable type.²⁴ The new abundance of printed matter and its agile circulation made all layers of society more familiar with the written word, even those who did not know how to read or write. The rise of cheap print in Renaissance Europe, moreover, made it possible for large numbers of people to purchase its products. It is certainly true that some books remained an expensive luxury for common soldiers with their paltry salaries, even when printed in affordable and unpretentious formats. The price of the first edition of Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (Madrid: Pierres Cossin, 1569), for example, amounted to eighty-four maravedíes (twenty-eight sheets or pliegos at three maravedíes per sheet), which equaled more than two days of pay, and close to 9 percent of a pikeman’s monthly salary. The percentage would be significantly lower for an experienced arquebusier with some ventajas (wage supplements paid to good soldiers) and even lower for a respectable, experienced officer. Despite its apparently high cost, La Araucana circulated widely among the common soldiers of the Spanish armies, as I will show. Yet by comparison, the products of popular print, particularly one-sheet pliegos de cordel, were produced cheaply and massively and were thus much more accessible for the pockets of common soldiers. According to the notes of Renaissance collector Hernando Colón in the 1500s–1530s, most single-sheet pliegos would sell for as little as one or two maravedíes or quatrines, a remarkably low price that would allow soldiers to purchase between 1,000 and 1,200 one-sheet pliegos with one month’s pay. In 1540, for instance, a one-sheet pliego seems to have been cheaper than a loaf of bread or a half-dozen eggs.²⁵ The printed word was by then affordable for almost anyone.

The circulation of printed matter among the soldiers, as in other social groups, enhanced awareness of the written word in general and of the technologies and practices of writing itself, which fostered rather than inhibited the production and distribution of manuscript texts.²⁶ The death inventory of Diego García de Paredes (1533), one of the most famous soldiers of Renaissance Europe, included four printed items: a book of prayers, a book of hours (like that of the anonymous soldier at Santiago’s hospital), a Bible, and Caesar’s Commentarii.²⁷ The paucity of Paredes’s printed library, which resembles that of many early modern soldiers, contrasts with the abundance of his manuscript papers. Up to eight items in his inventory refer vaguely to loose sheets, unbound quires, and notebooks containing different kinds of writings “by his own hand” (de su propia mano). The mention of the portable writing desk (escribanía) and the note-taking device, perhaps erasable, known as libro de memorias confirms that writing was an everyday activity for soldiers like him.²⁸ Indeed, it was among these autograph papers that his Breve suma de la vida y hechos de Diego García de Paredes, one of the first autobiographies written by a soldier in Renaissance Europe and arguably one of the first nonfiction memoirs of any kind written in Spanish, was found.²⁹

The spread of the printing press and its products also contributed to make literacy a desirable goal among larger social sectors. While the costs of learning basic reading and writing skills remained high throughout the period for the Spanish poor, there were abundant alternatives that allowed them to achieve literacy. Parish priests and ordained relatives taught many destitute children for free. Some religious orders, such as the Franciscans and, especially, the Jesuits, also provided free instruction at different levels. Municipal councils in many towns and cities across Castile subsidized schools and supervised the activities of private masters. The children of poor parents could also attend school de limosna, by paying only a fraction of tuition, according to what they could afford.³⁰ During the sixteenth century, this is how some of the Muses’ comrades, like many other commoners, learned their first letters in childhood, as they themselves will often record.

In his many lives, Miguel Piedrola was a tinker (as was Virgil’s father) and a nobleman, a captive and a wandering troubadour, a soldier and a prophet. Born a commoner, Piedrola learned his first letters with an unnamed priest. Later on, he abandoned the tinker’s apprenticeship to go serve another priest who gave him a vessel of holy water (acetre), “which is the way they help poor boys pay for their studies” by using it to beg for alms from door to door: “With the money I got, I paid for grammar lessons,” that is, Latin. Then he went on to serve as a soldier for many years in the Mediterranean and was taken captive on several occasions. He claimed to be a prophet like those he read about in the Old Testament of a Bible he bought from a bookseller in Naples. The soldier-prophet, as he became widely known, wrote letters and prophecies to the king and the pope, and for a while he seemed to have enjoyed credit among followers and opponents alike. Eventually, however, the Inquisition charged Piedrola with sedition against the king and “usurpation of divine and celestial authority.”³¹ The paths to literacy may be tortuous for a soldier, but as this case shows, the ability to read and write often turned soldiers into a threat to authority and the social order.

Other writing soldiers provided similar accounts of their childhood schooling. In his autobiography, soldier Jerónimo de Pasamonte recounted how his legal guardian, a maternal uncle and a priest, taught him some Latin (gramática). Similarly, while he does not make explicit mention of his education, rank-and-file soldier Miguel de Castro was mentored in Valladolid by a friend of his uncle, who was also a priest and a licenciado (university graduate). Alonso de Contreras, the son of commoners, attended the school of one of those proverbially cruel masters of primary letters in Madrid around 1590. Contreras “escribía de ocho renglones,” referring to the “renglón de a ocho,” the “first size with which the teaching of writing starts” (tamaño primero con que se empieza a enseñar a escribir), when he had to end his education abruptly because of a violent feud he had with a richer classmate.³² As I will discuss later, some poor boys—future soldiers—learned how to kill as soon as they learned how to write.

Most writing soldiers thus seem to have become literate before they joined the army. The spaces of war attracted men familiar with the written word and even skilled in the arts of the pen, and the urban origin of many recruits, as profiled by Ian Thompson, might also help explain the higher literacy rates among soldiers.³³ Though harder to document, it is also very likely that other soldiers learned how to read and write after enlistment. There are aspects of military life, such as disciplinary socialization, military idle time or otium, and the practice of war reporting that may have contributed to the spread of literacy among serving soldiers, regardless of their social background. Written documentation was a familiar presence in the everyday lives of Renaissance soldiers. From the moment a soldier enrolled—asienta plaza—and was required to sign his name in the company’s books to the moment he was paid or discharged a series of complex administrative operations were mediated by the technologies and materials of writing and record keeping. Scribes, auditors, accountants, and paymasters, as we see in Cervantes’s vivid account in El licenciado Vidriera, were some of the clerks who supported the Renaissance army as the highly complex assemblage of techniques and structures.³⁴ The bandos or ordinances that governed military life were published in the spaces of war in manuscript or even printed form, and every soldier was required to abide by them under the threat of severe punishment.³⁵ Moreover, Spanish and Latin American archives contain hundreds of thousands of documents that soldiers carried around folded in their pockets or in tin cans, as did the fictional lieutenant Mellado in Francisco de Quevedo’s Buscón and the anonymous soldier of the ballad “Mirando estaba el retrato.”³⁶ Cédulas, memoriales, informaciones, testamentos, and probanzas, usually written by professional notaries but occasionally autographed by the soldiers themselves, were the main instruments of interlocution between the soldier and the imperial military authorities. They attested to their professional achievements and military services to the crown. They enabled rank-and-file poor soldiers to request mercedes or rewards, offices, and occasional financial support (ayudas de costa). The presence of the written word in the spaces of war was more than quotidian; it constituted its very structure and enabled its functioning.

Other practices and institutions of army life must have also encouraged illiterate soldiers to engage with written culture. It is not unlikely that in the idle time of presidio life or in the winter quarters some soldiers could have learned how to read from literate comrades, whether gratis or for a low fee. In literature, camaradas are often depicted in fluent and everyday conversation about “matters of war.” The camarada or camarade (the source of the English “comrade”) was a rather informal association among three to six fellow soldiers who agreed to share lodging and meals, significantly reducing living expenses for the permanently underpaid rank and file.³⁷ The term, referring either to one of its members or to the group as a whole, was defined precisely by Covarrubias: “Roommate who eats and sleeps in the same lodging. The word is used by soldiers and it is as much as saying companion and intimate friend, who is in the same company” (Compañero de cámara, que come y duerme en una misma posada. Este término se usa entre soldados, y vale compañero y amigo familiar, que está en la misma compañía).³⁸ This form of institutionalized friendship allowed for a peculiar sociability based on strong bonds of brotherhood and intimate conversation but also fostered lettered practices and the circulation of literary materials. The material culture of sharing among comrades multiplied the potential readers of a book, like those “Hours of Our Lady and a Garcilaso without commentary” that the fictional Tomás Rodaja, “the son of a poor peasant,” “carried in the pockets of his breeches” when boarding a Neapolitan galley on the way to Genoa (unas Horas de Nuestra Señora y un Garcilaso sin comento, que en las dos faldriqueras llevaba).³⁹ Soldier-poet Cristóbal de Virués found shelter against gossip and mockery in the intimacy of the camarade, which facilitated the exchange of poems with a fellow curioso soldier, also a poetry aficionado. Furthermore, literary skills could occasionally help soldiers make their way to the captain’s camarade, where they were expected to partake in a sort of improvised literary academy, according to soldier-poet Andrés Rey de Artieda in 1605.⁴⁰

Rey de Artieda is a case in point to better understand the relation between class, literacy, and the soldiers’ republic of letters. Born in Valencia in the late 1540s to a notary from Aragon, the poet experienced a combination of letters and arms in his youth, spending alternate periods of time in the classroom and on the front lines of Italy, the Mediterranean, and the Low Countries.⁴¹ He also went to college, which was rare even for a literate soldier. Rey de Artieda’s epistles and sonnets represent with painstaking detail the everyday life of military friendship in the social spaces of early modern warfare. The poem titled “To the Soldiers’ Meal” (A una comida de soldados) depicts the joyful conviviality of a soldierly camarade gathering at the Neapolitan port of Barletta, feasting on salad and walnuts, drinking wine, and toasting the appointment of one of them as corporal (cabo de escuadra), the lowest rank for non-commanding officers in an infantry corps. In another sonnet, “To a comrade of captain Antonio Vázquez” (A un soldado camarada del capitán Antonio Vázquez), Rey de Artieda satirizes a soldier for being “skilled” in eating and drinking, skipping watches, and caring only about his personal belongings, all to the detriment of his fellow comrades. More important, however, is the fact that Rey de Artieda included some of his comrades’ poems with his own when he published his collection of military lyric. Antonio Vázquez himself is represented in Rey de Artieda’s generously all-embracing collection with four sonnets on different topics, including a few about one of the most beloved themes of soldier-poets: prostitutes.⁴² These poems must have been collected by his comrade Rey de Artieda throughout the years of a long and sustained military career—forty-seven years for Artieda—since Vázquez is disparately titled soldier, captain, and sergeant major in different pieces. But Vázquez is not the only comrade-poet in Rey de Artieda’s collection. Some Cascajares—an unmistakably plebeian name—contributed poems, as did some well-known Valencian and Aragonese courtiers and humanists.⁴³ Rey de Artieda’s book, while legally published under his name, is a highly collaborative one in which the author not only decided to print some of his best friends’ military poems but also depicted them in scenes of soldierly intimacy and friendly conversation and participating in a vibrant literary activity in the spaces of war. The social spaces of early modern warfare contributed to the creation of a “network of popular sociability” that multiplied the effects of the printing revolution and facilitated an increasingly intimate familiarity with the written word.⁴⁴

Indeed, soldierly comradeship was oftentimes mediated through writing. After the mutiny of Dunkirk was settled in 1594, the accountants of the army used some of the soldiers’ testaments to set the record straight on what had been agreed between the striking infantrymen and the Habsburg military and political authorities. Soldiers often named fellow soldiers as their executors, like Domingo Hernández, who chose “his comrades [camaradas] Francisco Xuárez and Hernando de Guevara, soldiers in my company [soldados en mi compañía],” as the people in charge of carrying out the terms of his last will. It was a common practice among single men who shared in the same camarade to bequeath their overdue pay to each other in case of death, as did the Portuguese Pedro Hernández to his Castilian comrade Bartolomé González, both infantrymen participating in the same mutiny. Other soldiers wrote or signed on behalf of their illiterate brothers-in-arms: “Because I do not know how to write I asked the above mentioned witness Juan Ramírez, to sign it on my behalf” (porque yo no sé escribir rogué al dicho Juan Ramírez, testigo, que lo firmase por mi mano), says Ginés de Escames. And in the case of Luis Gómez, no fewer than eight fellow soldiers signed their names as witnesses at their friend’s deathbed.⁴⁵ The bonds between brothers-in-arms, between “godfathers and godsons” (padrino[s] y ahijado[s])—as Juan Rufo refers to the relationship between comrades—were indeed many times articulated or mediated through witnessing and writing.⁴⁶

Executing or bearing witness to a brother-in-arms’ will, as did these sixteenth-century soldiers of Dunkirk, was much like writing stories about fallen comrades. Writing against oblivion, the most classical and time-honored justification of literary enunciation itself, was acutely felt in a society based on bonds of friendship, comradeship, and shared suffering. Composing war stories was the ultimate act of solidarity and respect among fellow soldiers. An economy of reputation, by which the fame and honor of individual soldiers relied on testimonies, both oral and written, of comrades-in-arms, regulated relations between those who had been killed and those who survived. The impulse to give account of oneself and one’s comrades gave way to many front lines that, written from the battlefield, would keep alive the memory of many common infantrymen and their deeds in the republic of soldiers.

WRITING ON THE BATTLEFIELD

According to a one of the censors of Santiago de Tesillo’s Epítome chileno, ideas contra la paz, published in Lima in 1648, the soldier writes “painting his commas with lead, inking his pen with gunpowder, drawing his words with shots and his lines with lances” (matizando sus comas con plomo, su pluma con pólvora, sus palabras con tiros y sus renglones con lanzas).⁴⁷ In contrast with Garcilaso de la Vega’s symmetrically ordered alternation of the sword and the pen, “ora la espada, ora la pluma,” the trope entails now a radicalization of the contiguity of arms and letters, a total conflation of the practice of writing and the practice of modern warfare.⁴⁸ Lead, gunpowder, shots, and pikes are metaphorically used to write the history of their very usage on the battlefield. Arms double their function as instruments of violence and the material support of writing, symbolically eliminating any distance between things and words, between textual and military culture, between the practice and the representation of warfare. By the middle of the seventeenth century the material cultures of writing and fighting had become indistinguishably equated in a powerful trope.

Despite the precariousness of military life, pen, ink, and paper, manuscript and printed matter, were found in large quantities in the baggage train of every early modern army and constituted an integral part of the soldier’s daily life and material culture. Juan de Oznaya, a plebeian arquebusier who fought in the Wars of Italy and wrote about them, reveals the wealth of paper in his description of the Renaissance tactic of encamisada. The soldiers of an encamisada were detailed to storm an enemy position at night wearing white shirts (camisas) on top of their defensive arms in order to be recognized by their fellow combatants in the dark while they took advantage of the surprise factor.⁴⁹ “Tonight,” says Oznaya, recollecting the orders of a commander, “you will wear shirts on top of your arms and go where the squadrons are formed” (Todos armados y con camisas encima de las armas o vestidos, salgáis donde se hicieren los escuadrones), but if the cloth of shirts or tents were not enough, the soldiers “will take two sheets of paper from that to be found in the camp and make a kind of mantle or cloak to whiten themselves and be recognized” (si no bastare, de dos pliegos de papel de lo que en todo el campo se hallare, harán unos capotines o sambenitillos con los que blanqueen por ser conocidos).⁵⁰ Paper and other basic tools of writing were as important for the military revolution as other enabling technologies readily associated with it, such as gunpowder and military engineering. And even far from the rich and cultured cities of Lombardy, the materiality of writing provided fighting soldiers in the farthest frontier of Spain’s empire with a language to describe the shocking realities of the New World. During Pedro de Valdivia’s first military expedition to Chile, the soldier Jerónimo de Vivar observed how the indigenous peoples of the northern coast built rafts with the skin of sea lions, which they pressed and folded “just like sheets of paper are folded” (como está un pliego de papel doblado).⁵¹ In the second half of the sixteenth century, arquebusiers used paper in their ramrods and musketeers started to fabricate paper cartridges containing gunpowder and bullets in order to accelerate the loading of their guns.⁵²

In August 1590, poet and infantry captain Andrés Rey de Artieda was instructed to raise a company in his native Valencia. In the book used to record the plebeian names of several dozens of young recruits, we find a wealth of calligraphic exercises, presumably by the company’s scribe or by Artieda himself (Figures 1 and 2). Written rehearsals of epistolary formulae and random names of unidentified men not enrolled in the company fill the numerous blank pages of a notebook that carries with it the marks of the commerce of war. Perhaps to kill time while waiting for new recruits to show up at the drummer’s call in a public square, one writer has drafted the first two lines of a ballad: “Dressed with our colors / in green and silver flowers” (De nuestro color vestido / de verde y flores de plata). The lines belong originally to a Moorish ballad, “Romance del gallardo Arbolán,” turned a lo divino to sing the Nativity. The original (“A la jineta vestido / de verde y flores de plata”) was first published anonymously in Flor de varios romances nuevos y canciones (Huesca, 1589), barely one year before Artieda’s company book was drafted, and was later gathered in the Romancero general of 1600.⁵³ This particular example vividly illustrates not only the instrumental role of the technologies of writing in the constitution of the early modern armies but also the close rapport, the intimate contiguity of military and literary practices, in the society of soldiers.

The availability of the most basic writing materials and familiarity with the written word still do not suffice to fully articulate the soldiers’ republic of letters, a site for the organized production, distribution, consumption, and discussion of literary texts. We have, however, numerous testimonies to the intensity of literary practices, which were widespread and unexceptional among the soldiers of Habsburg armies and amid the roar of war. When editing the poems written by his brother Francisco, Cosme de Aldana listed the titles of the many other texts that he had not been able to recover because they were “lost in war, where he always carried them” (perdidas en la guerra, do siempre las traía).⁵⁴ He was able, however, to recover and publish a substantial collection of Francisco’s poems in Milan in 1589, a second one in Madrid two years later, and three more reprints in Spain’s capital and the Low Countries, an editorial trajectory that closely follows the soldiers’ roads throughout Europe. An infantry captain like Aldana, Cristóbal de Virués is best known for his Monserrate, an epic poem printed in 1588 recounting the legends of hermit Juan Garín. When Virués’s friend Baltasar de Escobar, a humanist and diplomat at the Roman curia, received a copy, he encouraged him to “bring to light the lyric poems that, gathered in your drafts, have escaped the storms and dangers of your honorable military pilgrimages” (sacar las rimas que se hallaren recogidas por los borradores que se han escapado de las borrascas y peligros de sus honrosas peregrinaciones militares).⁵⁵ Some did indeed survive and were eventually collected in Obras trágicas y líricas del capitán Cristóbal de Virués (Madrid: Alonso Martín, 1609). Despite war’s pressures on cultural activity, literary traffic was intense, and the backpacks of some soldiers, like Tomás Rodaja’s faldriqueras, seem to have carried at least as many sonnets as licencias or recommendation letters.

Figure 1. Lista de la compañía del capitán Andrés Rey de Artieda, August 1590. España, Ministerio de Cultura, AGS, GyM leg. 315, fol. 71.

Virués and Aldana are among the best-known writing soldiers of the period. Both of them came from the lower nobility, were well educated, and were raised to the position of infantry captains. Despite their rank and privileged background, however, they were no exception. Martín García Cerezeda, an arquebusier from Córdoba, very likely of plebeian background, wrote his voluminous Tratado de las campañas del Emperador Carlos V “in the times that I was idle while serving in the army” (en los tiempos que en la milicia fallaba ociosidad).⁵⁶ His work narrates year by year, almost month by month, and with painstaking detail, the many military campaigns in which he participated as a rank-and-file soldier from 1522 to 1545, giving testimony to the radical transformations of warfare during the years of the Italian Wars and the Mediterranean conflict with the Ottomans in the first half of the century. García Cerezeda reproaches “the many excellent pens, both in philosophy and poetry, that I have seen and see every day in this most glorious army” (muy excelentes plumas, ansí en filosofía como en poesía, que he visto e veo cada el día en este felicísimo ejército) for not writing about the war they were waging and thus justifies his own firsthand narrative of these crucial events.⁵⁷ While apparently more inclined to poetry and philosophy, and not focused on recounting the war they were fighting, writers were not particularly uncommon among the ranks of Charles V’s troops.

Figure 2. “De nuestro color vestido / de verde y flores de plata.” Lista de la compañía del capitán Andrés Rey de Artieda, August 1590. España, Ministerio de Cultura, AGS, GyM leg. 315, fol. 1.

In his Vida y hechos del emperador Carlos V, royal chronicler Prudencio de Sandoval confirms the literary activity of this sizable group of soldiers inclined to letters (soldados curiosos), many of them anonymous, who provided commanders and historians alike with fresh reports from the field.⁵⁸ For the section on the campaigns against the Schmalkaldic league during 1546–47, Sandoval relied heavily on D. Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga’s Comentario de la guerra de Alemaña (Venice: Thomás de Gornoça, 1548). Count by birth and marquis by marriage, Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga was one of the emperor’s closest collaborators, a splendid courtier, an experienced military commander, and a respected historian.⁵⁹ His relation with Charles V was so intimate that His Majesty considered him a “witness to my thoughts” (testigo de mis pensamientos).⁶⁰ His Comentario, the most Caesarian of all military texts produced in Renaissance Spain, had sixteen editions in six years and almost immediate translations into Italian, Dutch, French, English, and Latin. It was arguably the most popular European book on the Schmalkaldic War and one of the most widely praised and read works of history in Spanish. The authority and popularity of the Comentario notwithstanding, Sandoval complemented this source “with some manuscript reports that the curious soldiers in the imperial camp carefully wrote and sent to Spain” (relaciones escritas de mano por soldados curiosos que andaban en el campo imperial que las escribían con cuidado y enviaban a España). Sandoval states that one of these reports, written by an anonymous soldier who recounted “what he saw, most of it on horse, as it happened” (lo que vio y que la mayor parte de ello lo escribía a caballo como iba ello pasando), is in fact identical to Luis de Ávila’s second chapter. Since the soldier signed his account on November 11, 1547, allegedly antedating the first edition of the Comentario, Sandoval claims that this part of D. Luis’s book borrows this anonymous soldier’s account.⁶¹

There is no reason not to believe the scrupulous Sandoval, always transparent and thorough when assessing the sources of his monumental history of Charles V’s reign, for which he profitably used and acknowledged Ávila y Zúñiga’s praiseworthy work.⁶² His testimony also restores the protagonism of the rank and file not only in fighting the wars, as they claimed repeatedly, but also in recounting them. Caesarian, noble captains writing with their pen what they fought with their swords were accompanied by anonymous soldiers in their common attempts to record the experience of war and make sense of it. Sometimes their respective accounts of imperial violence would resemble each other, but many other times they would radically differ. Whether by commanders or rank-and-file soldiers, all these testimonies suggest that writing and reading were widespread practices in Renaissance armies and in the spaces of war.

Moreover, relying on the eyewitness accounts of curious writing soldiers seems to have been simply natural for historians. The idea that soldierly texts produced on the battlefield were the principal sources for the writing of reliable history would eventually become naturalized among humanists and professional historians. When reflecting on the differences between writing general and particular histories, the highly respected humanist Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola wrote that many historical events worth recounting remain unknown “because those who fought on those occasions only wrote in passing about them, leaving most of it for general histories, and their writings are not found when they are required” (porque remitiéndolas para las historias generales, no se escriben cuando suceden sino de paso por los que militaron en ellas, y cuando son menester sus escritos, no parecen).⁶³ For Argensola, the voice of the eyewitness soldier writing from the battlefield is the main source and ultimate guarantee of authority for historiographical discourse.

Presidios and marching camps provided a locus of enunciation, both real and metaphorical, for the writing soldier. The long periods of inactivity for garrisoned soldiers increased the appeal of reading, writing, and discussing literature as entertainment in the often dull life of the military. Baltasar de Vargas, a veteran soldier of the Naples tercio in the Duke of Alba’s journey on the Spanish road in 1567, wrote his Breve relación en octava rima de la jornada que ha hecho el Señor Duque de Alba “in this idle life of the presidio” (en esta ociosidad del presidio).⁶⁴ This text narrates the journey with a wealth of detail about the logistics of deployment of an early modern army, paying a lot of attention to operations required to lodge, feed, move, and protect the army. The heroic actions of this brief epic are the duke’s diligent dispatch of messengers, his negotiations with local lords and merchants, the precautions of secretaries, overseers (veedores), and accountants, the timely distribution of paychecks, and the agile transportation of the army’s artillery train through the Alps. Although called “the veteran Vargas” by a comrade contributing a preliminary poem, he deems himself a greenhorn in poetry (en la poesía soy novicio).⁶⁵ Amateurism at writing is again set against their professionalism as soldiers. They make explicit the discrepancy between their public persona and their writing practice, between their profession of war and their tentative poetic endeavors, continuously thematizing a tension between fighting and writing that they nonetheless exploit to their benefit. The link between the symbolic capital of the professional participant soldier and the discursive authority of a text on the matters of war became so naturalized that when the clergyman Lorenzo de Zamora published his Primera parte de la Historia de Sagunto, Numancia y Carthago in 1589, he excused himself for writing on war, however ancient, not having any experience on the matter, “since I can assure you that not only have I not ever been to war, but even a private brawl I have never witnessed” (que te puedo jurar que no solamente no me he hallado en guerras, pero ni aun he visto riña particular ninguna).⁶⁶

The transoceanic fleets that supported imperial warfare were not unfit spaces for writing on the matters of war either. The Portuguese poet and soldier Luís de Camões wrote part of Os Lusíadas (1572) while traveling and battling all along the Portuguese colonial possessions in the East and claimed to have saved his “sea-drenched Epic Song” (os cantos … molhados) from a shipwreck in the South China Sea by holding in his hands the actual sheets on which it was written.⁶⁷ Similarly, the common soldier and poet Gaspar García de Alarcón rhetorically asked the readers of his epic poem La victoriosa conquista … de los Azores (1585) “that they excuse the flaws of the work because I could not depart from the truth and because it was written at war, in the middle of the ocean; and because the military art that I practice is very different from that of writing in verse, with little study, little experience, and little time” (que me tomen en descuento el no poder salir de la verdad a que va arrimada, y escrita en un golfo, y parte della en la guerra. Y cuán diferente es el arte de milicia que profeso al componer en metro, con poco estudio, menos experiencia, no muy ayudado del tiempo).⁶⁸ The conventionally humble excusatio against the potential murmuradores or critics is indeed a proud defense of his professional role and of his military experience in the Marquis of Santa Cruz’s naval campaign against the French fleet of Philippe Strozzi during the wars that followed the Habsburg conquest of Portugal in the early 1580s.

Many of the better-known chronicles and relaciones from the colonial American context were written by major and minor figures in the liminal spaces of the war of conquest in the new territories. The writing of war narratives was by no means limited to the leaders of the expeditions, such as Hernán Cortés. On the contrary, it was a widespread practice and was one of the main war genres in the soldiers’ republic of letters. Most famous among them, Bernal Díaz del Castillo took up the pen in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España in order to counter the accounts written by historians far from the field that exaggerated the role of the leaders in the accomplishments of the conquest.⁶⁹ The chronicler of the conquest of Peru, the plebeian soldier Pedro Cieza de León, attributed the faults of his chronicle of Peru to his “pocas letras” and to his “being too absorbed in the business of war.” “Many times,” he continues, “when most soldiers rested, I exhausted myself writing. The roughness of the mentioned lands, mountains, and rivers, the intolerable hunger and necessity, none of this ever prevented me from dutifully following my two occupations, writing and serving my company and my captain” (Muchas veces, cuando los otros soldados descansaban, cansaba yo escribiendo. Mas ni esto, ni las asperezas de tierras, montañas y ríos ya dichos, intolerables hambres y necesidades, nunca bastaban para estorbar mis dos oficios de escribir y seguir a mi bandera y capitán sin hacer falta).⁷⁰

Perhaps the most emblematic and dramatic example of this gesture linking the practice of writing to the battlefield is Alonso de Ercilla’s prologue to his first Araucana of 1569. Although this work was published more than ten years after his return from the Chilean frontier, the poet claims to have written his powerfully realistic stanzas “amid the very war, in the very marches and sieges, often writing on leather because of the lack of paper, and on scraps of letters so small that barely six lines fit, all of which made it rather difficult to put everything together later” (en la misma guerra y en los mismos pasos y sitios, escribiendo muchas veces en cuero por falta de papel, y en pedazos de cartas, algunos tan pequeños que apenas cabían seis versos, que no me costó después poco trabajo juntarlos).⁷¹ The representation of the practice of writing in the most distant spaces of the imperial frontier is a powerful rhetorical device to produce discursive authority, determining the enunciative structure and truth-value of soldierly texts in very important ways. The legitimacy of Ercilla’s poem is clearly linked to the detailed description of those rare moments provided by military otium, as in García Cerezeda’s case, “stolen” (hurtados) from the professional exercise of warfare. The very inadequacy of the “pasos y sitios” for the intellectual practice of writing and the material precariousness of those pieces of paper and leather—“poor diapers”—make his firsthand account “truer” (más verdadero), even if those pieces do not fit the eight lines required to compose an octava real, the basic metrical unit of Renaissance epic.⁷² The image of the soldier writing on the battlefield becomes the documentary and symbolic foundation of the historical authenticity of the soldierly text. The representation of the personal practice of war—“I am a soldier and I was there”—authorizes the poetic or narrative voice of a social subject whose discursive legitimacy relies on his military expertise and his direct contact with the spaces of war rather than on humanistic erudition, nobility, service at court, or inventive genius.

Critics have often taken these assertions, particularly Ercilla’s, to be conventionally rhetorical at best, or plainly false. “One of the romantic fictions regarding the accounts of conquests in the Indies,” says Rolena Adorno, “is that they were written at night in military encampments by soldier-hidalgos who, with quill in hand, bravely ignored the intimidating sounds of enemy war cries and drums. Hernán Cortés and Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga are among the authors who create this familiar impression.”⁷³ Adorno’s skepticism about the truth of the Caesarian image of the soldier simultaneously fighting and writing on the battlefield is a standard and healthy reminder of the long tradition of a particular literary convention. While acknowledging the “retrospective quality” of most soldierly writing,⁷⁴ evidence supports my contention here that this trope refers to actual practices in the spaces of war, both in the New World and the Old, that gained prominence over the period. For the first Araucana of 1569, Ercilla’s brother-in-arms, the veteran captain Juan Gómez, wrote an aprobación where he legally testified that Ercilla was seen, by him and everyone else, “serving your majesty in that war, where he publicly wrote this book” (vi a don Alonso de Ercilla servir a Su Majestad en aquella guerra, donde públicamente escribió este libro).⁷⁵ Writing in the spaces of war was common, as we have seen, and the public nature of this practice in the case of Ercilla seems to make it a prestigious, collective activity and an integral part of the socialization processes of the Renaissance soldiery. Furthermore, our doubts about the actual truth of some of these statements should not prevent us from realizing the way in which they associate the authority of the written text with its material production, with the immediacy and urgency of imperial warfare and frontier spaces, with the contingencies of a military expedition on the Chilean frontier or of a sea journey from Macau to Goa.

In addition to providing evidence for the intensity of literary practice in the spaces of war, the discussion thus far has made it clear that for these writing soldiers the construction of discursive authority is based upon the fundamental link between the soldier’s own enunciation, the material conditions of the battlefield, and the professional practices and institutions of the military corporation. The elaboration of this contiguity of pen and sword, of writing and fighting, is not always free of tension, but it will be crucial for understanding the rhetorical appeal of these texts for the society of soldiers. Moreover, the urgency of in situ writing, the material ephemerality of the soldierly text, is also important in understanding the memorializing drive of much of the heroic textual production on war. For “those who live dying” (los que moriendo vivimos), as veteran Torres Naharro put it, leaving a trace of who they were in writing must have been a particularly pressing impulse.⁷⁶

Cristóbal Rodríguez Alva, a soldier who fought in Italy and the Netherlands during the last years of the sixteenth century, held the matter of his epic poem La inquieta Flandes (1594) to “have been entirely seen by my eyes” (es toda obra por mis ojos vista), as did many other soldiers who offered their own firsthand accounts of their and their comrades’ exploits, but he also claimed that the lines of his poem were “watered with the blood of my veins, and written among the arms and the furor of death” (regada con la sangre de mis venas y escrita en medio de armas y furor de muerte).⁷⁷ However rhetorical, the image is a powerful reminder of the dire conditions under which soldiers carried out their daily lives. The wrecking of the body in the spaces of war, whether actual or metaphorical, threatens to disintegrate the very material support of soldierly narratives. The fragile materiality of the text is, like the bodies of soldier-poets, always threatened by the ravages of war. Writing on the front line entailed a sort of precarious survival amid the violent urgencies and unpredictable contingencies of early modern warfare.

TRAVELING TEXTS

Ercilla did indeed manage to preserve those pieces of authentic writing produced amid the roar of war. He brought them back to the metropolis from the farthest frontier of the empire and put them together in print. In the prologue discussed earlier, published in the first Araucana of 1569, Ercilla appealed to a public of fellow warriors who shared the same socioprofessional spaces, the many “keen to the matters of war” who “were present to many of the events that I narrate here” (aficionados a las cosas de guerra; que se hallaron en muchas cosas de las que aquí escribo) and who were taken to be the final guarantors of the truth so carefully produced by the Caesarian rhetoric of the fighting and writing soldier.⁷⁸ Which is to say that soldiers usually expected fellow soldiers to read their texts. We know that some of the brothers-in-arms who were present in the brutal war of Chile did indeed get to read the poem. Some of them even used it as legal proof of their participation in the conquest of Chile, referring to Ercilla’s poetic stanzas as some kind of probanza de mérito, a witness’s sworn testimony to one’s deeds.⁷⁹ Irving Leonard suggested that La Araucana was a popular read on the ships of the carrera de Indias, while the poem also circulated widely among the soldiers of the army of Flanders, back on the European war stage, as we will see in detail in Chapter 4.⁸⁰ The highly organized military practices, agents, and institutions of the Spanish Habsburgs provided the material basis for the fast circulation and consumption of cultural products among the curious soldiers. While the previous section focused on the production of textual materials in the spaces of war, the pages that follow will revolve around reading and exchanging in a soldierly republic of letters that was quickly becoming global.

Soldiers were usually the first to reach the edge of the empire and the last to leave, so they had a particularly intense and concrete experience of imperial space. Regardless of specific itineraries and military careers, soldiers often experienced extended travel across several territories of the empire. When the soldiers of the second Cambodia Campaign of 1594 faced a larger Ming Chinese army in Churdumuco, today’s Phnom Penh, they heartened each other by recalling that they “were old soldiers, with experience in the Low Countries, France, Africa, and England, in addition to these parts of the West … the Philippines” (éramos soldados viejos que en Flandes, Francia, África e Inglaterra y en estas partes del poniente … las islas Filipinas), according to the testimony of one of the participants.⁸¹ Their movement, as we have seen, was crucial to structure some of the major routes and networks of imperial power, including those uniting Spain with the Americas, Portugal with its eastern colonies, Italy with the Netherlands, and Mexico with the Philippines. The Habsburg courts, the African and Italian presidios, the migrating military camps of Europe’s battlefields, the Asian and American colonial garrisons, and the metropolis of the returning soldier were some of the physical and social spaces in which soldiers had a key role as cultural agents.⁸² These soldiers were not only producers of epic, lyric, and relaciones but also consumers of the same kind of products; they were not only the makers but also the partakers of an intense literary circulation and exchange. The vast network of spaces articulated around the political and military institutions of early modern European empires facilitated the wide and rapid circulation of literary works in the context of a never-ending and worldwide imperial contest; it also provided an institutional ground for the formation of military publics. “The increased mobility of things themselves,” it has been argued, “created public life in early modern culture.”⁸³ The practices that allowed for the global mobility of imperial armies—travel, march, sea voyage, deployment, encampment—turned soldiers into crucial actors in the global circulation of textual materials during the period.

Some scholars have argued that the rise of the news market in early modern Europe was closely related to military conflict, particularly the Habsburg-Valois wars of the first half of the sixteenth century and the Mediterranean confrontation with the Ottomans.⁸⁴ Soldiers were indeed key agents in the production, dissemination, and consumption of news and ballads, in the form of pliegos de cordel, or broadsheets, from the very first days of the military and the printing revolutions. The Coplas noevamente fechas de la guerra y presa de Fuente Rabía y de Salvia tierra y Monleón (Barcelona: Carles Amorós, ca. 1525) were composed by Juan del Rincón, a “soldier who was in all of the said war” (soldado que se halló en toda la dicha guerra) of Navarre in the 1510s. Some Coplas de la presa de Túnez are said to have been “made by a soldier” (fechas por un soldado), who wrote in traditional octosyllabic verse about the 1535 imperial conquest of the North African city. Hernando Colón’s bibliographies also tell us about another anonymous “soldier who says in verse that the king of France is the cause of the Emperor’s wars” (soldado que dice en coplas ser el rey de Francia causa de la guerra que tiene el Emperador), also lost today. Some romances and other forms of traditional octosyllabic verse were composed about the landmark battle of Pavia, sometimes based on the imperial commanders’ reports from the battlefield, such as the Coplas nuevamente hechas al caso acaescido en Italia en la batalla de Pavía, “which can be sung to the melody of Condes Claros” (las cuales se pueden cantar al tono de Condes Claros).⁸⁵ The conquest of Granada, the never-ending Wars of Italy, the struggle with the Ottomans for the control of the Mediterranean, and even the New World battles of the empire were all sung far and wide in the traditional form of romances and coplas and distributed in print through the ephemeral, disposable materiality of the pliego suelto.

Early in 1551, Joannes Steelsius printed Romance de la conquista de la ciudad de África en Berbería in Antwerp, which had been written during the Habsburg reconquest of the Tunisian city of Mahdia (also known as Africa) in September 1550. The ballad, “sent by a soldier who participated in the conquest to a friend of him who resides in Italy” (enviado por un soldado que se halló en la conquista a otro amigo suyo que reside en Italia), attests to the agile circulation of poetry through the complex political and social geography of the imperial spaces of war, from North Africa to Italy and from Italy to Antwerp.⁸⁶ Sometimes this geography of exchange, which is coextensive with the physical and institutional spaces of the Habsburg military machine, is nonetheless surprisingly dynamic and efficient. Baltasar del Hierro, a veteran from the same Mahdia campaign serving in Milan in 1560, published a sonnet about the Portuguese viceroy Constantino de Bragança’s military success in India in 1559. In a little over a year, the war news had traveled from Goa to Lombardy, presumably carried by Portuguese soldiers, had been transformed into a sonnet by an infantryman garrisoned in Milan, and had reached the popular Sevillian printing workshop of Sebastián Trujillo. The propagation of news and poetry, of oral and printed texts on the matters of war, is one of the main pillars of an increasingly transnational soldiers’ republic of letters. The constitution of a public around the matters of war also reinforced a sense of corporate identity and proud solidarity among soldiers who were serving far away from each other, an identity that oftentimes was at odds with the aims and methods of empire administrators. As we will see, the global reach of the Habsburg military corporation generated solidarities and fraternizations—“that familiar headache of military administrators” in Hale’s words—between soldiers and civilians of different nations, different religious allegiances, and even different sides of the conflict.⁸⁷

Literacy rates, I argued earlier, seem to have been higher in the army than in other social spaces and professional groups, allowing for the articulation of relatively large publics. Bernardino de Escalante took for granted that many infantrymen, to whom he addressed his Diálogos del Arte militar (1583), would be able to read his book. “I decided to write these military dialogues,” he says, “so that the fresh, unexperienced recruits can quickly become expert soldiers by reading them” (me determiné a hacer estos diálogos militares … para que los soldados bisoños, leyéndolos, se hagan pláticos en breve tiempo).⁸⁸ Being a priest and a commissary of the Holy Office of the Inquisition at the time he wrote his treatise, Escalante made sure to point out that he had been “raised in war since childhood,” once again grounding his discursive authority in his own military experience. It was natural for military writers to assume that their works would circulate fluidly and rapidly among the spaces of war, and he envisioned his treatise helping soldiers in “the provinces of Peru, New Spain, the Philippines and other islands of that ocean.” Furthermore, just as bisoños were expected to be trained in the arts of war by the pláticos, it seems that training in letters was also part of the process of military socialization. Escalante offers his work as only a provisional contribution to the art of war “until some of you can write with more propriety about this art, since you practice it so courageously” (hasta que algunos de vuestras mercedes escriban con más propriedad esta arte pues la ejercitan con tanto valor). If we believe Escalante, the ability to read and write seems to have been widespread among those “illustrious gentlemen” (muy ilustres señores)—a common form of soldierly respectful address, regardless of social background—“of the Spanish infantry that serve in the presidios of the kingdoms and estates of king Philip, our lord” (de la infantería española que asiste de presidio en los reinos y estados del rey Felipe nuestro señor).⁸⁹ Escalante was not particularly self-delusional: a Jesuit criticizing the newly founded Reales Estudios de San Isidro (1629) claimed that what was taught in the Chair of Fortifications in one year “would be read amply by a soldier from Flanders in three months.”⁹⁰ Books must have been as familiar a presence on the front line as in the college classroom.

Texts, as Escalante suggests and we know well, also traveled easily between the Old World and the New thanks to a large extent to the conquistadores and settlers who ventured to cross the Atlantic. The circulation and consumption of books, particularly those of chivalry, among the Spanish conquistadores is a well-known story since Irving Leonard’s classic study, although his idealizing view of this phenomenon has been rightly criticized.⁹¹ Books also circulated among garrisoned or retired soldiers in the Indies. In his will, the Chilean veteran Melchor Xufré del Águila declared that he owned “about eighty bound books” (como ochenta cuerpos de libros), most of which we should assume came from Spain. The retired soldier also stated that he left “a ream of paper” (una resma de papel) and three more books at Lieutenant Andrés de Góngora’s house, which he was supposed to sell as part of a debt settlement.⁹² According to Bernal Díaz, moreover, the conquistadores of Mexico carried in their memories romances viejos—old narrative ballads of octosyllabic verse that rhymed assonantically—that were frequently sung during the conquest wars and to a certain extent shaped their interpretations of New World events. In turn, the heroic feats of the respected commander Hernán Cortés gave way to the composition of new ballads that were transmitted orally and crossed the Atlantic back to the metropolis.⁹³

The spaces generated by global armed conflict and imperial expansion during the early modern period also allowed for the cross-cultural dissemination of all kinds of literary products and genres, far beyond ballads, relaciones, or sonnets. With the occasion of Philip IV’s ascension to the throne in 1621, the cabildo—municipal council—of Manila decided to organize a theater festival to bring a glorious end to the city’s celebrations. Despite the fact that Manila had a university and a large number of active lettered clerics, the cabildo appointed the soldiers of the San Felipe garrison to carry out every aspect of the performances. According to Diego de Rueda y Mendoza, one of the soldiers who participated in this theatrical event, the cabildo found “among the soldiers of this garrison some skilled in this matter [of theater] to whom it commissioned three [plays]. Some of them being men of good taste, and others witty, funny, and talented musicians, they took them in charge, and designed the stage, dramaturgy, and costumes” (habiendo hallado entre los soldados de este campo algunos práticos en esta facultad les encargaron tres; que unos como hombres de buen gusto y otros de donaire y gracejo y diestros músicos las tomaron a su cargo y fueron dispuniendo de su traza, invenciones y vestuario).⁹⁴ Soldiers of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian origin were present among the attendants to the performances, along with a highly heterogeneous audience of Tagalog, Chinese, Mexican, and Japanese civilians who lived in Manila, one of the most diverse cities of the early modern world. Similarly, Rueda y Mendoza was invited to a Chinese wedding in Manila where he described “a comedy in the Chinese style” (una comedia … a usanza de China) that was performed over lunch.⁹⁵ Miguel de Loarca, another soldier serving in the Philippines like Diego de Rueda, also described a Chinese performance in his Relación del viaje que hecimos a la China. Being received by a local governor in southern China, the soldiers and priests in the Spanish legation were the privileged audience to “a play, and the entremeses lasted for the whole meal, and there were singers and vihuela players” (una comedia, que duraron todos los entremeses toda la comida, hubo cantores, músicos de vihuela de arco).⁹⁶ By virtue of their wandering, multicultural, and socially heterogeneous nature, the armies of the monarchy of Spain were spaces of cultural encounter as much as they were the frightening carriers of extreme violence that they were and are known to be. The production, circulation, and reception of the body of literature on the matters of war were intricately related to the progressive formation and increasing institutionalization of these spaces and with the social practices and discourses that constituted them.

The spaces of war were not structured sites of assembly but unstable, moving, and heterogeneous spaces of cultural production and exchange. Lettered soldiers are bound together not only for their interest in the matters of war as producers but also as consumers and agents of exchange of literary materials. The circulation of texts discussing “las cosas de guerra” among its practitioners is crucial to understanding the soldiers’ republic of letters but also the society of soldiers at large. One of the main arguments of this book is that soldierly literature, both manuscript and printed texts about the matters of war, was not only distributed in the already existing structures of social intercourse enabled by the global military machine but also constitutive of them, being a crucial factor in the articulation of the society of soldiers. The literary sociability enabled by the circulation and consumption of these multiple forms of writing, moreover, contributed to a great extent to the development of a collective identity for the common soldiery.

Whereas many writing soldiers explicitly addressed their works to “those who know how to fight” (los que saben pelear), thus articulating a public of fellow comrades-at-arms, all kinds of textual products were distributed and consumed in the soldiers’ republic of letters, and not only those produced by insiders.⁹⁷ The complexity of the soldiers’ literary practices is illustrated by an episode from the Sack of Rome in 1527.

The prestigious Italian humanist Paolo Giovio, perhaps one of the most renowned historians of the time in the intellectual milieus of Renaissance Europe, had set out to write a monumental history of his own present time. His Historiarum sui temporis tomus primus (Rome: Laurentii Torrentini, 1550) started with a series of “epitomes” that summarized books 5–10, covering the years from 1498 to 1512, and 19–24, which covered the decade from 1517 to 1527. The original books seem to have been dramatically disfigured under unclear circumstances, since Giovio’s elucidation of these lacunae was contradictory and changed over time.⁹⁸ First, the humanist explained that he had hidden the manuscripts in the crypt of a church, but they nonetheless fell into the hands of the furious sackers. Two Spanish captains, named Herrera and Antonio Gamboa, are said to have kept those written on vellum and bound, while disdainfully discarding everything written on paper. The former would eventually be ransomed by the humanist, imprisoned with Pope Clement VII in the Castle of Sant’Angelo; the latter was used by the soldiers as toilet paper (dissipati in foedos usos).⁹⁹ According to a second version of the events, the manuscripts were recovered from the troop “with the aid of certain famous generals who understood their import for their own fame.”¹⁰⁰ And one of Giovio’s Spanish translators gave yet another, similar account of the kidnaping of the humanist’s manuscripts. The slight variation, nonetheless, is significant, since in this case the protagonists are not two Spanish captains but the collectivity of the soldierly mass: “The soldiers came across these papers and tore some of them apart. Once peace was reestablished thanks to the pope’s commands, together with Giovio’s begging and money, they returned the books to him, although damaged and incomplete” (Viniendo estas escrituras en manos de soldados, rompieron y hicieron pedazos algunas dellas. De apaciguadas las cosas, con mandamientos del Papa, con ruegos y dineros del Jovio, volvieron los libros a su poder, aunque en algunas partes faltos y rasgados).¹⁰¹

While it might seem that Spanish soldiers acted in that manner out of sheer ignorance and barbarism, the opposite is quite possible. The sections seized or selectively destroyed by the Spanish soldiers were those dedicated to narrating the Italian wars between France and Spain in the first decades of the century, when the reputation of the Spanish armies’ effectiveness and ruthlessness rose exponentially in Italy and beyond. Giovio, generally a rather committed supporter of the imperial cause and the official apologist for some of its most famous commanders in Italy, was not always flattering to the imperial victors of Pavia in 1525, the same soldiers that only two years later sacked the Holy City and subdued the pope, and thus was harshly criticized by some for his occasional hostility to the Spaniards.¹⁰² Had they known this, the furious soldiers of the imperial army might not have liked what Giovio was writing about them. Were that the case, whether they ripped them apart out of rage or used them “in foedos usos” because they were otherwise useless, the gesture remains meaningful. And like the German soldiers’ defacing of Raphael’s paintings or the burning of books in the Holy City during the same episode, it would indicate a fluid, but tense, relation with Renaissance high culture on the part of the plebeian army¹⁰³—meanwhile, some other Spanish soldiers harassed the pope, who had taken refuge in the castle of Sant’Angelo, by shouting out adapted versions of traditional songs and a satirically glossed Pater Noster.¹⁰⁴

The story, in any of its versions, shows a highly complex relationship between literacy, orality, consumption, and soldierly agency. Soldiers were willing to intervene violently in the public pláticas on war through the seizure of uncomfortable historiographical works about their ethos and action. Through vehement erasure, they were rewriting the discursive representation of their own military life and public identity. Whether some enlightened generals confronted the soldierly mass to recover the papers for their own sake or some captains and anonymous soldiers partially kidnaped the material, the anecdote provides an extreme example of Michel de Certeau’s observations about the nature of cultural consumption and his warning that “the elite … always assumes that the public is moulded by the products imposed on it…. This misunderstanding assumes that ‘assimilating’ necessarily means ‘becoming similar to’ what one absorbs, and not ‘making something similar’ to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating or re-appropriating it.”¹⁰⁵ Even if it was just an act of radical carnivalization and Bakhtinian degradation of the humanist’s writings through the workings of “the lower stratum of the body,” the gesture is still meaningful.¹⁰⁶

The anecdote powerfully recalls the moment in Castiglione’s discussion of the theme of arms and letters when one of his chatting courtiers playfully but brutally asserts the ultimately self-evident superiority of arms over letters. “If you think the contrary,” the Count tells Bembo, “wait until you hear of a contest in which the man who defends the cause of arms is allowed to use them, just as those who defend the cause of letters make use of letters in their defense; for if each one uses his own weapons, you will see that the men of letters will lose.”¹⁰⁷ In the episode just recounted, the soldiers’ quite literal appropriation of Giovio’s account of their action forces us to explore how the circulation of written matter, whether in print, manuscript, or oral form, contributed to the organization of a very peculiar discursive community. Although humanists and soldiers had occasion to interact and, like many other Renaissance historians, Giovio had often relied on the oral accounts of soldiers and captains for his ambitious historiographical enterprise, the story requires us to wonder how a mass of furious soldiers could have found out what a learned humanist was writing about them.¹⁰⁸ It makes us wonder whether a group of Spanish soldiers could have accessed Giovio’s elegant humanistic Latin. Thus the “Giovio affair” suggests the necessity of taking into account the stories, opinions, and ideas that were disseminated orally in the republic of lettered soldiers and that interacted richly, as this anecdote shows, with the written culture of Renaissance Europe.

PUBLIC OPINION AND ORAL CULTURE

According to a soldier fighting in Chile in the 1640s, war had become debatable (“se ha hecho openable”).¹⁰⁹ Indeed, war and the people who waged it were at the center of early modern forms of publicity and political discussion since the first moments of the military revolution. Massimo Rospocher has shown, in a series of important essays, the richness of the popular public sphere in the cities of Renaissance Italy.¹¹⁰ The business of war was, not surprisingly, the main object of public discussion all throughout the peninsula, whether in the papers being written, printed, sold, bought, and sung in the streets of Venice or in Pasquino’s anonymous posts loudly echoing the public voices of Rome. Popular poetry provided a language of political communication that circulated widely, though ephemerally, through a diversity of discursive practices, from mouth to mouth, to manuscript or print reproduction and dissemination. “Nowadays everybody discusses war” (hor tutto’l mondo di guerra raggiona), said an anonymous popular poet in 1509 Venice.¹¹¹

Spanish sources confirm Rospocher’s emphasis on the matter of war as the main topic of early modern popular opinion and public discourse. The account of the battle of Pavia by common soldier Oznaya makes reference to Pasquino’s facetious coverage of the Wars of Italy. “The imperial army,” writes Oznaya, “was ignored to the point that a paper appeared one morning on Maese Pasquino: ‘Whoever knows anything about the Emperor’s camp, which got lost in the mountains of Genoa a few days ago, please reveal it and he will be rewarded’” (Era tan poco el caso que del ejército cesáreo se hacía, que en este tiempo amanesció puesta una cédula en el Pasquino de Roma deste tenor: “Quien quiera que supiese del campo del emperador, el cual se perdió entre las montañas de la ribera de Génova pocos días ha, véngalo manifestando y darle han buen hallazgo”). A few days later, after a successful military campaign for the imperial camp, Pasquino mockingly announced that the imperial army had finally appeared.¹¹² High-ranking Spanish officials in Italy also showed an acute interest in street rumors related to the matters of war. Charles V’s ambassador in Rome, Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga, wrote in December 1539 to Francisco de los Cobos, the emperor’s secretary, that he was surprised by the fact that Pasquino could only produce positive gossip about one of the most prestigious imperial generals in the Wars of Italy, Alfonso de Ávalos (1502–46), Marquis of Vasto.¹¹³ Pasquino, the Roman machine of popular rumor and political opinion, had been interested in the business of war ever since the battered statue was unearthed from the underground of Renaissance Rome.

Pasquino’s ways traveled easily to the New World. After the conquest of Tenochtitlán, the soldiers and their captains engaged in disputes over the division of the spoils, and consequently disruptive rumors (murmuración) emerged about Cortés’s justice toward his subordinates. Although Bernal Díaz does not go as far as other soldiers in accusing the captain of keeping the gold treasure for himself, he records the episode: “While Cortés was in Coyoacán lodging in some palaces that had their walls plastered and white-washed on which it was easy to write with charcoal and other inks, numerous rather malicious sentences (motes) appeared [on them] every morning, some written in prose and others in verse, in the way of pasquinades” (Y como Cortés estaba en Coyoacán y posaba en unos palacios que tenía blanqueadas y encaladas las paredes, donde buenamente se podía escribir en ellas con carbones y con otras tintas, amanecía cada mañana escritos muchos motes, algunos en prosa y otros en metros, algo maliciosos, a manera de mase-pasquines).¹¹⁴ Bernal readily summarizes some of these coplas—or traditional Spanish octosyllabic stanzas rhyming in consonant—but refuses to reproduce them because most of them contained “words that cannot be put in this story” (palabras que no son para poner en esta relación). First Cortés took pride in answering the accusations “by good rhymes much to the point” (por buenos consonantes y muy a propósito) since the captain “was something of a poet himself” (era algo poeta). When the coplas became too impudent, Cortés famously wrote “a blank wall is the paper of fools” (pared blanca, papel de necios), to which the restless soldiers replied: “and of wise men and of truths and His Majesty will soon know it” (aun de sabios y verdades, y Su Majestad lo sabrá muy presto). Cortés ended up threatening the satirists with serious punishment.¹¹⁵

Ballad singing and writing were pervasive in the soldiers’ everyday practices in the New World and contributed to the rapid circulation of military news. Among Pizarro’s men, one Saravia used satirical circumstantial coplas in his correspondence with conquistador Pascual de Andagoya. The improvisational skills and malicious use of traditional ballads and songs by the caustic Francisco de Carvajal—a feared old veteran soldier and field marshal of Gonzalo Pizarro during Peru’s civil wars in the late 1540s—were proverbial. Lope de Aguirre’s seemingly demential rebellion gave way to the composition of new songs usually recorded in writing by other soldiers, such as Gonzalo de Zúñiga.¹¹⁶

In the wildly rich narrative world of Juan de Castellanos’s Elegías de varones ilustres, a voluminous epic history mostly on the conquest of New Granada, the author praises his longtime friend and veteran Lorenzo Martín, a commoner like the author himself, as an accomplished poet in the old Castilian style. Famous for his “gracias y facecias,” Castellanos tells us, Martín intends to cheer up the melancholic survivors of starvation during an expedition to the New Granadan northwest by reciting a “stream of improvised redondillas” (torrents / de coplas redondillas repentinas), of which Castellanos reproduces only six that someone copied for him. Martín’s oral stanzas poke fun at some of his famished comrades, one of whom has just devoured with delight a tallow candle. Their clothes have grown large at the same rate that their bodies shrank; the stumbling movement of the undernourished is likened to a gambeta dance; their napes are all peels (hollejos); and their empty bowels happily sing villancicos, a form of Castilian popular verse. Martín resorts to the eschatological humor so dear to Renaissance culture, popular or otherwise, to laugh at some comrades who cannot stop farting after sustaining themselves with only leaves of the bihao plant for two weeks. The sacrifice of the conquering soldier, which in most instances bestows honor and legitimacy upon the bodies and voices of the empire’s agents, is carnivalized here with a Rabelaisian degrading imagery of popular and oral stock.¹¹⁷

The soldiers’ republic of letters, its peculiar publicity, was built upon a complex interaction between the spoken and the written word. The production, circulation, and consumption of soldierly writing should not be dissociated from the many forms of oral speech that constituted everyday military sociability in the spaces of war. A rich, tumultuous oral culture, constantly intersecting with its written forms, emerges when we look at the sources. Bragging, cursing, arguing, joking, gossiping, conversing, and even “speaking soldier” (hablar a lo soldado), among other oral practices that shaped their public identity, are crucial for understanding not only the social lives of the common men-at-arms but also their literary and political culture.¹¹⁸ Francisco de Quevedo referred to the soldiers’ jargon as “lengua soldada” in La vida del Buscón and the petitioning soldier who accompanies Pablos on his way to Segovia considered cursing and swearing the very substance of the soldier’s profession. Informal conversation about recent battles, or about ancient warfare for that matter, arose in every corner of their makeshift encampments. Epistles exchanged among fellow soldiers deployed on different fronts finish conversations that started in the same trench. Ballads created or improvised after the heat of the battle are sent to friends or to potential printers, who in turn distribute them as widely circulated pliegos de cordel. Traveling bisoños disseminate political rumor from the court, while the returning veteran brings the latest military news from the battlefield to the streets of Seville or Madrid. Collective criticism of the commanders’ strategy by their subordinates could start in the camarade’s shared tent and end up reaching the streets of Milan in the form of a satirical pamphlet. “The fluid, transitional nature of communication in the sixteenth century” between the written and the spoken word also applied to the discursive practices of the soldiers’ republic of letters.¹¹⁹

Throughout his military career as infantry captain and castellan of Capua, Marcos de Isaba wrote a series of “papers,” as he called them, that were collected with the goal of “getting the military back to the good order and discipline it used to have” (la Milicia torne a la buena diciplina que solía tener) and published in 1594 under the title Cuerpo enfermo de la milicia española.¹²⁰ To open his examination of the history of warfare and empire, Isaba refers to the frequent discussions that took place orally in the social spaces of the professional soldiery: “In their everyday conversations, those soldiers who are somewhat curious wonder about what was the origin of ancient soldiering, who first went out to conquer, and where were arms invented for the first time” (En plática se trata cada día entre gente de guerra un poco curiosa, sobre el principio de la milicia antigua, por saber quiénes y cuáles y dónde fueron los primeros que salieron a conquistar y dónde fue la primera invención de las armas).¹²¹ The discursive formation of “the matters of war” is thus constituted not only by the texts written by fighting and witnessing soldiers but also by their everyday, informal, oral communicative practices. More important, the tools and technologies of their professional trade are not isolated from the history and politics of empire in Isaba’s discourse. For Isaba, accustomed to the long sieges and bloody battles of the Italian Wars, the wars of the past were occasional, short, and usually clement with the vanquished. Eventually, however, “kingdoms and senates and empires with many provinces were formed, and they invented many kinds of weapons,” including “gunpowder and artillery, arquebuses, muskets, mines, fire trumpets, bombards and many other instruments” (después formándose reinos y senados e imperios de tantas provincias como hay en él, inventaron otros muchos géneros de armas … pólvora y artillería, arcabuces, mosquetes, minas, morteretes, trompas de fuego y tanto género de instrumentos) that made wars longer, more cruel, and unjust.¹²² For this and other soldiers who engaged in the professional pláticas of their trade, military technology and imperial expansion were inextricably linked. Equally familiar with the material realities of war and with the political and practical reason derived from years of service in different imperial fronts, the soldiers of the republic placed the politics and history of warfare at the center of their verbal exchanges. The technicalities of the business of war were inextricably linked to the political history of empire, to its legitimacy and its limits.

Military speech, whether in writing or in oral form, proved time and again to be dangerous for the political elites of the empire. Military authorities were thus always concerned about the vitality of the soldiers’ verbal practices and repeatedly tried to curtail the proliferation of words about the matters of war. Open criticism of the decisions, strategies, and general policies of the military high command and the imperial political authorities was frequent both in the civil public sphere and in the soldiers’ conversations. In many cases, this criticism was tolerated and channeled through certain genres, institutions, and practices that helped temper and integrate them in official discourse. But more often than not, soldierly pláticas were rowdy and untamable. The soldiers’ public sphere was a tumultuous and noisy space for the exchange of war news, satire, panegyric, and rumor, where consent and dissent were negotiated between the military and civilian authorities and the soldierly mass.

Let us pause for a moment at a soldierly exchange that shows the complex interaction between private and public, oral and written communication, and of tolerated and intolerable talk in the soldierly republic of letters. In 1568, Jerónimo de Arbolanche and Sancho de Londoño corresponded about Charles V’s imperial defeat in Metz against the French in 1552—public discussion about military matters could last for years after the campaigns had ended. At Metz, an imperial army of 55,000 led by Charles V tried to recover the city, garrisoned with 5,800 French soldiers after Henri II occupied it in the summer of 1552. The siege lasted from October of that year to January 1553, ending in a calamitous defeat for the emperor that left many dead mostly from cold, hunger, and disease. As we will see, the high number of casualties and the abandonment of those who were sick and wounded in the fields seem to have generated a heated debate among the troops.¹²³

Jerónimo de Arbolanche was very likely a commoner from Tudela, Navarre, known in literary history as the author of the long and now forgotten antiquarian poem Las Abidas, which deals with the mythical prehistoric past of Spain. What has remained unknown even to his biographers is that he was also a soldier serving in the Sicilian tercio of Alba’s army and that he was mobilized in the 1567 long march to the Netherlands by the Spanish road.¹²⁴ Sancho de Londoño, a minor nobleman from La Rioja, has always been considered by military historians as one of the finest soldiers and officers of the sixteenth century, a counselor to the 3rd Duke of Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, and the general (maestre de campo) of the Lombardy tercio. His poetic activities, however, have remained completely unknown to cultural historians.¹²⁵ The poetic exchange of these two “íntimo[s] amigo[s]”—as Londoño himself refers to their relationship—is exemplary of the production and circulation of public opinion about military and political matters in the social spaces of professional warfare.¹²⁶ Jerónimo de Arbolanche’s epistle is in Italian tercets, written from Brussels with the usual bitter tone of war lyric, and offers a vivid depiction of the hasty daily life of a common soldier walking the Spanish road:

Figure 3. Poesías del Maestre de Campo don Sancho de Londoño. BNE, Mss/21738, 116r.

¡Cuán miserable es la vida del soldado!

Estaba el tercio en Malta ahora ha un año

y está en Brabante ya muy sosegado.

Todos nosotros, si yo no me engaño,

temíamos salir de Lombardía

para emprender camino tan estraño.¹²⁷

(How miserable is the soldier’s life! One year ago, I was in the Malta tercio and now we are in Brabant, peacefully. If I am not deceived, we were all scared of leaving Lombardy to walk this unfamiliar road.)

In his epistle, Arbolanche tries to convince Londoño to write a poem about the epic feats of their general and the latter’s patron, the great Duke of Alba.¹²⁸ What captures the commander’s attention in Arbolanche’s letter, however, is a passing reference to the French city of Metz on the army’s way to Brabant, a fleeting mention that would prompt Londoño to offer a response several times longer than his friend’s motivating epistle:

Que a Mez no vimos, quizá porque pena

no nos causase ver su ancha campaña

de blancos huesos de españoles llena.¹²⁹

(We did not see Metz, perhaps to avoid the grief of seeing its wide surrounding countryside whitened by Spanish bones.)

With his hyperbolic metonymy about the Spanish bones covering the field, Arbolanche is obviously referring to the high number of casualties at Metz. More than fifteen years after the siege, the place was still marked in the memory of the soldiers by the carnage of 1552, and a soldier serving in the Sicilian tercio and walking the Spanish road on their way to Flanders could not help mentioning it in a letter to a more veteran soldier who would walk the same road in a different contingent a few weeks later.

In his reply, Londoño recounts the details of the military campaign of Metz from the perspective of a captain in charge of a company of arquebusiers, reserving for himself a leading role in every strategic development, praising Alba, and making veiled references to other officers he considers responsible for the defeat because they did not follow his advice. Yet for the veteran commander, the main intent of his letter is to “uproot such an error” (desarraigar tan mal concepto) about the number of victims by contrasting the army’s muster rolls and the number of fallen soldiers of his own company with those circulating in informal soldierly pláticas, which he intends to prove false. Londoño points out, by the end of his epistle, that “the talk was started” (se ha la plática movido) by “so many bad poems” (tantas trovas mal trovadas) that it is difficult to set the count straight in the public’s perception of the events.¹³⁰ Participating soldiers and witnesses generated a substantial body of discourse and opinion that circulated publicly, mostly in verse, and that Londoño aims at disavowing in the soldierly public sphere.¹³¹ Oral and written pláticas fed each other in a fluid interaction that oftentimes confronts the official narrative about specific military events or about the nature and limits of war and empire in general. As if he did not want to contribute to the noise of the soldierly public opinion, he instructs his friend Arbolanche to destroy his own poetic letters: “Once read, sir, I beg you to tear them apart” (Que leídas las rompáis, señor, os pido).¹³² Londoño signed his letter “in Liexa, without Mars and without Apollo / … lacking everything that we long for, / this year of sixty eight, / except for reading and writing” (quedo en Liexa sin Marte y sin Apolo / … sin cuanto, en fin, por bien se procura / este año de sesenta y ocho quedo / excepto la lección y la escriptura).¹³³ The reproduction of the soldierly republic of letters, favored by the military otium of peacetime, herein remains assured, and the complex interplay between oral and written modes of textual production and exchange, a determining feature of the soldiers’ literary culture, is clearly in evidence.

Class tensions within the army, a constant source of pláticas about the matters of war, may have also been at play in the public discussions and soldierly trovas about what happened in Metz and in Arbolanche and Londoño’s private exchange about it. According to the famous French surgeon Ambroise Paré, present at the siege of Metz, the Duke of Alba “declared to the Emperor that the souldiers dyed dayly, yet, more than the number of two hundred, and that there was but little hope to enter into the Citty.” The emperor then asked whether his men dying under the walls of the sieged city “were gentlemen of remarke or quality,” to which Alba replied that “they were all poore souldiers.” Charles V’s reply was quite crude: “Then, sayd he, it makes no matter if they dye, comparing them to caterpillers and grashoppers, which eate the buddes of the earth. And if they were of any fashion, they would not bee in the campe for twelve shillings the month.”¹³⁴ The anecdote may very well be false, particularly considering that Paré spoke from the other side of the front line, but it does remind us that class and rank indeed structured the production, distribution, and consumption of soldierly pláticas. And it confirms the existence of different memories about military events, of competing—many times irreconcilable—views and values about war and soldiering.

Whether or not the emperor ever uttered such harsh words, common soldiers had many reasons to share their discontent about the military and political superiors who governed their republic. The everyday conversations described by Isaba, Arbolanche, and Londoño could easily be transformed into illicit forms of speech that could go far beyond the limits when criticizing royal policies. It was precisely Sancho de Londoño who made the first systematic effort to discipline speech within the soldiers’ republic. His widely read military treatise, Discurso sobre la forma de reducir la disciplina militar a meyor y antiguo estado, which would be repeatedly copied, imitated, and extracted during the last decades of the sixteenth century, was requested by and dedicated to the Duke of Alba in 1568, and it included a well-known set of military ordinances that give us a glimpse of the soldiers’ daily life while in camp, marching, or in battle.¹³⁵ Interestingly, many of these dispositions regulating a wide range of soldierly everyday practices, most notably drinking, whoring, and gambling, were driven by the authorities’ concern about the limits of legitimate speech in the spaces of war and were aimed at controlling what soldiers could and could not say. One of the often-mentioned liberties of soldierly life was the possibility of engaging in legal gambling. Illegal gambling, however, was forbidden because “it provokes curses, blasphemies, and swearing” (reniegos, blasfemias y juramentos), and military commanders and treatise writers agreed that “no soldier shall blaspheme or curse” (ningún soldado reniegue ni blasfeme).¹³⁶ Blasphemy, not a minor fault in civil society as it could be charged and punished by the Inquisition, was more tolerated among soldiers, for whom swearing was just one more component of their public personae, a form of bizarría, according to Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, a soldier in the Americas.¹³⁷

Bizarría was mix of dash, proud daring, arrogant gallantry, and military discipline, all publicly displayed in a combination of gestural demeanor, verbal manners, and dressing habits—a certain bodily hexis, that is, a “pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic [social], because linked to a whole system of techniques involving the body and tools, and charged with a host of social meanings and values.”¹³⁸ It defined a whole behavioral pattern that was ultimately the essence of the soldierly habitus of the new war. Veteran colonial soldier Santiago de Tesillo warned Chilean bisoños against their hurry to become pláticos and bizarros, “since they think that one becomes a soldier just by enrolling; the drum sounds, they sign their names, loosen their cloaks, change the way they walk, they dally and threaten, and they think that is all they need to be soldiers” (pues piensan que no hay más que entrar a ser soldados y serlo desde luego. Suena la caja, concurren, asientan plaza, sueltan la capa y mudan el paso, galantean y desgarran, sin presumir por necesaria otra circunstancia).¹³⁹ The authorities’ concern, however, was not only about the soldiers’ morality and devotion. There is a thin line between bizarro blasphemy and swearing, and the kind of “scandalous words” that, according to Londoño’s warning, “may cause tumult and mutiny” (palabras escandalosas de las cuales puede causarse tumulto o motín). Anyone uttering them or covering up a brother-in-arms who does so was to be punished with immediate death.¹⁴⁰ Similarly, the main reason for banning heavy drinking does not seem to lie in moral concerns about the soldiers’ temperance or in doubts about its effects on their professional performance in camp and battle. Rather, intemperate drinking was again prosecuted because too much wine “turns men into beasts and with its heat they dare to say certain words that provoke mutinies, and new sects and opinions” (vienen los hombres a convertirse en fieras y con el calor osan decir palabras bastantes a motines y a nuevas sectas y opiniones).¹⁴¹

All these mandates regarding the most basic aspects of soldierly daily life are aimed at disciplining speech by regulating what could and could not be spoken. Londoño’s public ordinances, like his private correspondence, suggest the existence of a rich—and dangerous—public culture in the republic of soldiers, one that often intersected with the civilian spaces of political communication and that threatened the most basic structures of imperial armies. Military authorities had every interest in trying to effectively curb potentially subversive talk and the circulation of unsettling news, opinions, and ideas in the discursive community of the plático soldiers. The most explicit of Londoño’s regulations to control the serious threat posed by the informal constitution of popular spheres of soldierly public opinion orders that “there shall not be secret gatherings or public coteries, because that is where mutinies are formed and they conjecture about what has been discussed in secret by the military command, from which many times the enemy is warned and the defenders of posts are discouraged” (que no haya juntas secretas ni corrillos públicos, porque en los tales se fabrican los motines y se trata por conjecturas de cuanto pasa en los consejos secretos, de que procede avisar a los enemigos para que se aperciban y muchas veces desaniman a los que tienen cargos de defender fortalezas).¹⁴²

In 1590, the conquistador Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, like a New World Londoño, wrote his Milicia indiana, a military treatise intended to describe the different modes of colonial warfare and to discipline the soldiers of the American conquest wars accordingly. For Vargas Machuca, the ideal soldier should never be “gossipy and restless” (revoltoso ni chismoso), “vices that most of the time engender mutiny” (destos vicios las más veces se suele engendrar un motín). Again, the informal institution of the camarada, which both Londoño and Vargas Machuca explicitly encouraged in their treatises, seems to have given coverage to political gossip and soldierly public opinion. The good soldier, according to Vargas Machuca, “should not save the face of even his own comrade if he sees him going against the king” (a la misma camarada no debe guardar la cara si viere que va contra el rey).¹⁴³ For Pedro de Valdivia, the (failed) conquistador of Chile, “pláticas” had an intrinsically negative, subversive sense. Pressed to rebel against his king by some conspirers in Peru, he was forced to respond “to those who moved these talks” (a los que me movían estas pláticas).”¹⁴⁴ “Mutiny” is etymologically related to the verb to move, and pláticas, in this context, can only mean subversive talk.

The same practices that were institutionalized and encouraged by military authorities in order to foster and strengthen the soldierly ethos and military morale could easily transform themselves into illicit forms of organization. Camaradas could turn into “secret reunions” (juntas secretas) and “public gatherings” (corrillos públicos).¹⁴⁵ These social spaces constituted by the circulation of political and military opinions, by conversations about their trade, also allowed for the production and dissemination of dangerous pláticas. While it provided the basis for the esprit de corps that military administrators and strategists valued so highly, oral and written culture in the soldiers’ republic also contributed to a great extent to the articulation of resistance and to the constitution of a collective identity for the soldierly mass that was oftentimes at odds with the aims and methods of the administrators of imperial war. And soldierly unrest could easily travel back home to threaten even the most sacred institutions of early modern Spain. In 1579, alférez don Fernando Díaz, a veteran of Flanders, and Juan de Minaya Maldonado started a conversation about “whether it was easy or not to kill a king” while strolling through the streets of Ledesma, in Salamanca. Someone must have overheard the conversation and reported them to the authorities: “Don Fernando said that he had just come from the court, complaining about not being given the post he expected by his majesty the king, whom he wanted to kill although he did not know how” (Dijo don Fernando que venía de la corte quejoso de su majestad e que le deseaba matar e que no sabía cómo lo hacer porque no le había proveído con cargo a su gusto para la guerra).¹⁴⁶

As we have discussed, the written and the spoken word interacted in a complex regime of publicity that was constitutive of the society of soldiers. The republic of curious soldiers, or any republic for that matter, was hardly a harmonious one. The class tensions that inhered the spaces of war could eventually generate conflict and subversive attempts, particularly from the subaltern sectors of that society. One of Sancho de Londoño’s most detailed dispositions was meant to keep track of the soldiers’ handwriting in order to control the proliferating practice of mutiny:

Otrosí por excusar los motines y los medios que se usan para movellos y cuajallos, se debe mandar que todos los Capitanes cuando recibieren los soldados, entiendan si saben escrebir y hagan que los que los [sic] supieren, escriban sus nombres y los de sus padres, madres y tierras en un libro que cada furrier tenga para tal efecto, con lo cual en gran parte se excusará el poner de los carteles, pues pocos saben disimular tan bien su letra que en algo no conforme y se pueda conoscer, teniendo cómo poder cotejarla, que pocos en tales casos se osan fiar de otros.¹⁴⁷

(In order to avoid mutinies and the means they use to organize them successfully, all captains must inquire if the soldiers they enlist know how to write; and those who do, must write their names and the names of their fathers, mothers and homelands in a book kept by the quartermasters. With this we will avoid the hanging of posters, since very few know how to dissimulate their handwriting to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and we will be able to collate it, since in these cases they never trust anyone else to write them.)

Both the practice of the mutiny cartel or poster and the authorities’ effort to suppress it insist upon the spread of literacy within the army: there were enough literate infantry soldiers to force military authorities to keep track of them in the quartermasters’ (furrieres) books. Writing was a valuable skill for the captains and other officers who were in charge of administering and disciplining an infantry company but also for rank-and-file, potentially mutinous soldiers. It was instrumental, as we have seen, in the organization of imperial armies, a crucial technology to sustain the structures upon which the defense and expansion of empire relied. But as Londoño knew all too well, writing also allowed for the organization of the social and political resistance previously, and simultaneously, articulated in the soldiers’ oral practices.

Londoño’s regulation tellingly speaks to the complex relation between the discursive practices, written and oral, and the political culture of the soldiers. But more important, it stands as an illuminating metaphor of the power of writing in relation to the practices of imperial war, showing that literacy enabled subversion. However conventional in the rhetoric of dedications and preliminary poems, the contiguity of the pen and the sword was potentially dangerous. Just as literate soldiers could help start a mutiny and disturb imperial practice on the field, they could also tell and read stories that voiced some of the exploitative conditions under which they worked or challenge the basic tenets and goals of imperial practice and discourse.