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CHAPTER 2

The Truth About War

ROLDÁN AND THE KING OF FRANCE

In one of the most spectacular military events of the century, Charles V’s imperial troops famously captured the French king Francis I at the battle of Pavia in February 1525. Juan de Oznaya, a common infantryman who participated in this and other campaigns of the Wars of Italy (1494–1559), recounted in 1544 how some rank-and-file Spanish soldiers had the chance, while they marched after the battle, to chat with the most powerful monarch in Christian Europe:¹

En esto llegó un soldado español arcabucero, llamado Roldán, y bien se le podía llamar por su esfuerzo. Traía dos pelotas de plata y una de oro de su arcabuz, en la mano; y llegado al rey, le dice: “Señor, Vuestra Alteza sepa que ayer cuando supe que la batalla se había de dar, yo hice seis pelotas de plata para vuestros Mosiores, y la de oro para vos. De las de plata, las cuatro yo creo que fueron bien empleadas, porque no las eché sino para sayo de brocado o carmesí. Otras muchas de plomo he tirado por ahí a gente común; musiores no topé más, por esto me sobraron dos de las suyas. La de oro véisla aquí y agradecedme la buena voluntad, que deseaba daros la más honrosa muerte que a príncipe se ha dado, pero pues no quiso Dios que en la batalla os viese, tomalda para ayuda a vuestro rescate, que ocho ducados pesa; una onza tiene.” El rey tendió la mano y la tomó, y le dijo que le agradescía el deseo que había tenido y más la obra que en darle la pelota hacía.²

(And then there arrived a Spanish soldier, an arquebusier named Roldán, a truly fitting name for such a valiant man. He came to the king carrying in his hand two bullets made of silver and one of gold, and he told him: “Lord, your highness should know that when I found out yesterday that the battle would take place today, I cast six silver bullets for your noble vassals and one of gold for yourself. I believe I made good use of four out of six silver bullets, for I fired them into gilded brocade and crimson shirts. I fired off many others, made of lead, towards the common people, because I could not come across more noblemen, and thus I have two left. But this gold one right here (you should thank my goodwill) I saved to ensure you the most honorable death that a prince has ever received. God did not want me to see you during the battle, so here you go, have it and count it as my contribution to your ransom, for it is one ounce, worth eight ducats!” The king took it in his hand and retorted that he was grateful for his thoughtfulness, but even more than that he appreciated receiving the bullet in that fashion.)

When collated with other available sources, Oznaya’s seems like a remarkably rich and reliable historical account of the watershed imperial victory at Pavia. The factual accuracy of his war story about his comrade Roldán, however, is harder to assess—if not completely off. It resembles too closely the structure of the facetiae and apothegms so dear to learned humanists and popular audiences alike during the Renaissance. But it also resonates with many war stories that, orally or in writing, circulated in the soldiers’ republic of letters. For modern readers, it may seem hard to believe that a soldier would spend over two months’ worth of salary in making a gold bullet, but the rituals of early modern warfare and the codes of soldierly gallantry or bizarría could potentially explain the soldier’s liberal, cavalier attitude. Regardless of the actual factuality of the episode, however, Oznaya would probably agree with his modern counterpart, the Vietnam veteran and fiction writer Tim O’Brien: “I had to make up a few things, but listen, it’s still true.”³

Indeed, Oznaya’s apothegmatic anecdote reveals many of the truths about modern warfare with which Renaissance authors had to come to terms. Roldán’s actions and sayings distill a mix of respect and contempt for his betters—no other than the king of France and his most noble vassals—that is characteristic of the popular soldierly ethos in early modern Europe. The use of a distinctly oral register and a somewhat debased idiom of vassalage to blatantly address his superiors is peculiar to the linguistic behavior of the plático soldiers, as was the playful quipping about the rather serious matter of killing and dying in battle. The commoner’s pride in having slaughtered a bunch of noblemen not in single chivalric combat but with his arquebus, the most plebeian of weapons, is indicative of the shocking effects that the military revolution had on previous beliefs, attitudes, and practices of warfare. The truth about war was that in Pavia, on February 25, 1525, a plebeian Spanish rank-and-file soldier could have shot down the king of France—whether the bullet was made of gold or lead, whether Oznaya’s story happened as he recounted it or otherwise. Eight ducats, two months of the arquebusier’s salary: that was the price of the king’s life for Roldán, and that was Roldán’s insolent contribution to his ransom. The truth about war was that the new military technologies and tactics had forever altered the social logics of warfare and of its representation.

Roldán is a somewhat unlikely name for a Spaniard of the time in any of its variants, but it must have surely been a common nickname for soldiers, either seriously extolling military attributes or ironically mocking excessive bravado. Whether real or fictional, the name of this particular character reveals the extent to which the matière de France, as contained in both Spanish romances, or ballads, and Italian romanzi, or narrative chivalric poems, had penetrated the spaces of the early modern soldiery. Yet Oznaya’s war story also strongly emphasizes the distance between Roland, the medieval paladin unfailingly loyal to the king of the Franks, and Roldán, the Spanish plebeian arquebusier trying to kill him—and arrogantly giving him some change for his ransom. The narrative and ideological order of epic, the most time-enduring discursive frame to narrate warfare, has been definitely and radically transformed.

Roldán, the Spanish arquebusier, also contrasts sharply with the most famous reincarnation of his namesake in the days of the battle of Pavia. Cantos 9 and 11 of Ariosto’s 1532 edition of Orlando furioso fictionalized the revolting effects that gunpowder had for the chivalric imagination of European aristocracy. Cimosco, king of Frisia, used against Count Orlando a “strange new weapon.”⁴ The arquebus is in Ariosto’s fiction a hellish invention of some northern, aggressive tyrant, and it will take Orlando himself to throw it into the ocean, so that no one could ever recover it: “that never more a cavalier may be / advantaged by your aid, nor evil gain.” A legendary necromancer, however, would retrieve “the infernal machine” with a spell. The arquebus, which stands, metonymically, for the radical transformation of warfare in the first moments of the military revolution, is alien to the referential universe of romanzo fiction. The genre can only rationalize it by tracing a mythical genealogy that vaguely refers to the historical invention. But the moral condemnation of gunpowder as the destroyer of individual valor and chivalric heroism had deep social implications. The fraudulent weapon of lowly cowards, the arquebus was associated with the plebeianization and massification of the early modern army, and thus it shook the ground of the nobility’s most powerful legitimations as the exclusive practitioners of the noble art of war. As it happened in Pavia, the “brutta invenzïon” had indeed revolutionized the social logics of warfare: “How many lords, alas! How many more / among the bravest of our cavaliers / have died and still must perish in this war / by which you brought the world to bitter tears / and Italy left stricken to the core?” (Per te son giti et anderan sotterra / tanti signori e cavallieri tanti / prima che sia finita questa guerra / che’l mondo, ma più Italia, ha messo in pianti).⁵ The resistance against the gunpowder revolution in the aristocratic imagination of the age can be found everywhere outside Ariosto’s fiction. In 1536, for instance, one nobleman from Valencia challenged a peer to a duel, accusing his rival of having schemed “to have some lowly people shoot their arquebuses,” and was utterly outraged for “those things do not belong among gentlemen” (concertar de tirar arcabuces por medio de bellacos … tales cosas no han de caber en caballeros).⁶

When rewriting his poem for his 1532 edition, when Ariosto added to the princeps (1516) the series of episodes on Olimpia that contained the story about Cimosco’s arquebus, the poet might have indeed been reacting to the shock of Pavia, as condensed in Oznaya’s anecdote about Roldán. The battle of Pavia has long been considered a turning point in the military, political, and even social history of early modern Europe, the climax of the Italian Wars.⁷ The engagement represented, at the military level, the ultimate triumph of a professional army based on the massive use of infantry companies of pikemen and arquebusiers over a fighting force still relying too much on the heavy cavalry of men-at-arms for which the French were famous. From a political point of view, the young and ambitious Charles of Habsburg achieved a crucial victory over his main continental rival, a victory that would break with the Italian—and thus European—hegemony of the Valois. Finally, Pavia would be remembered during the sixteenth century for having dramatically changed values and beliefs about the social consequences and meaning of warfare. Contemporary witnesses and modern historians often noted how plebeian infantrymen like Roldán, making good use of the gunpowder revolution, had slaughtered the crème of the French nobility. An army of Roldanes overpowered and killed the old Orlandos. When in the battle of Pavia gunpowder weapons became “the arbiter of battles and sieges,” many longstanding assumptions on war were shattered.⁸

Many of Ariosto’s contemporaries and successors reacted in a similar fashion to the social (and national) dangers of gunpowder and firearms. Sebastián de Covarrubias devoted four long columns and more than two pages to the arcabuz entry in his dictionary Tesoro de la lengua castellana, quoting extensively from Orlando furioso.⁹ A religious man of letters, Covarrubias apologized for “not having followed the career of arms, but of spirit” (porque no he seguido la milicia … heme criado en la espiritual) and thus for the potential inaccuracies of a layman’s definition.¹⁰ His humanistic, antiquarian impulse does not prevent him from giving firearms a mythical origin that would go back to the medieval fantastic chivalric world as imagined by Renaissance poetic fiction but that would find continuity in Iberian history: “The first time that firearms were used in Spain was in the siege of Algeciras in the year of 1344, when king Alfonso XI conquered it from the Moors, who fired into our people from the fortress” (La primera vez que en España se usaron los tiros de pólvora con pelotas de hierro fue en el cerco de Algezira, cuando el rey don Alonso el Onceno la ganó de los moros, año de mil y trecientos y cuarenta y cuatro, que los de dentro tiraban a los nuestros).¹¹ If for Ariosto, gunpowder weapons were a hellish invention from the barbaric north that was ravaging the flowers of Italian civilization in the days of the “horrendous wars,” for Covarrubias they had their origin in Spain’s Muslim, equally barbaric south. The lexicographer adds ethnic overtones to the class markers of the staple technology of the military revolution, contributing to its moral and social dismissal, while grudgingly acknowledging the weapon’s supremacy in Europe’s military battlefields. The word arcabuz, he says, is composed of “the Greek archos, princeps” and “buso or cannon, for this is the prince and lord of all weapons and there is none that can compare to it” (por ser este buso, o cañón, príncipe y señor de toda cualquiera arma y que no hay ninguna que se le pueda comparar).¹²

Soldiers like Roldán and his princely plebeian weapon would indeed rule over the wars of early modernity, as well as their literary representations. The arquebusiers who killed throngs of noblemen in Pavia significantly altered aristocratic conceptions of warfare and made a durable impact on the cultural memory of this class and their intellectuals. The gun, as Michael Murrin rightly pointed out, “posed a problem for the writers of romance,” but the popular soldiery of Spain’s army enthusiastically embraced it, in their professional practice and in the stories they told themselves.¹³ In the 1560s, a group of Spanish soldiers not dissimilar from Oznaya or Roldán set out to write in verse the wars of the monarchy of Spain. And they did so in a particularly innovative form of epic poetry that emerged in Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century. By focusing on the place that Italy and the wars that ravaged it in the first half of the sixteenth century had in the literary culture of the plático soldiers, I will discuss contrasting kinds of heroic discourse that made different claims about the nature, the goals, the ethics, and the social logics of warfare. I will also attempt to explore the social distribution of different heroic traditions within the army and the emergence of new epic forms that better fit the concerns and aspirations of the popular soldiery.

THE ROMANCE OF ITALY

The impact that the Wars of Italy had on the cultural production of both Italy and Spain can hardly be overemphasized. Italy was in every sense the alpha and omega of the soldiers’ lives, the desired destination for fresh Castilian recruits, the object of longing for Flanders’ veterans, the center, if there was one, of the military machinery and the political imagination of imperial Spain. The Italian experience determined the soldiers’ linguistic practices, models of heroism, international relations of friendship, solidarity, and patronage, their desires and aspirations. Garcilaso, the father of all soldier-poets in Renaissance Spain, yearned for Naples, “once full of leisure and love” (de ocio y d’amor antiguamente llena), while traveling the roads and inns of France.¹⁴ Cervantes’s nostalgia, or desire, for Italy glimmers between the lines of El licenciado Vidriera, and for its main character, soldier Tomás Rodaja, Italy stands for pleasure, freedom, opportunity, and bounty.¹⁵ Pedro de Valdivia, a veteran of the Italian Wars, persisted in the use of Italianisms and Italian proverbial idioms well after he became the first European settler of Chile in the remotest frontier of the empire.¹⁶

The glittering pleasures of Italy would eventually become a problem for military administrators. According to the Duke of Parma, a commander in the army of Flanders, “a Spanish soldier who had never breathed the air of Italy served better in the Netherlands than two who had, because they never lost the desire to return.”¹⁷ More important, Italy is the crucial crossroads in the itineraries of soldierly literary culture. It was the academy and university of the soldiers’ republic of letters. Naples, Rome, and Milan were at least as important nodes as Madrid, Valencia, and Seville in the cultural networks of the writing soldiers. The Spanish garrisons of Italian cities and towns became spaces of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. Italian linguistic and literary practices, it has long been recognized, shaped to a large extent Spanish Golden Age culture; yet more important for the argument developed here, soldiers were among the key agents of this cultural exchange and cross-fertilization.¹⁸

The two peninsulas had long been politically connected on the upper side of their respective societies. By the early sixteenth century, Aragonese aristocratic families had intermarried with their Italian counterparts since the times of Alfons el Magnànim, and some Castilian lineages established solid alliances with Roman, Lombard, Genoese, or Neapolitan patricians. Aragonese and Castilian kings accompanied their aggressive military policies with strategic patronage and local alliances. The Iberian elites in charge of administering the Habsburg “soft” or informal empire in Italy were often fluent in Italian and Spanish or Catalan, if not fully bicultural. The Spanish courtier and veteran general Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga was at ease going back and forth between Italian and Spanish. He oftentimes code-switched between the two languages in his witty, facetious correspondence with Spanish officials, such as the emperor’s secretary Gonzalo Pérez or Italian writers such as Aretino. In a letter sent from Rome to Charles V, on November 20, 1539, he studiously apologized for changing to Italian, purportedly without noticing: “I have turned to Italian, which I speak like Spanish. I promise your majesty that I am struck by myself, and if I wanted, the whole letter would be in Italian” (Yo he tornado a la lengua italiana, que la hablo como español. Yo prometo a V. M. que me espanto de mí mismo y que si quisiera, que toda esta fuera en italiano).¹⁹

At the center of the literary culture developed in this transnational republic of letters were two modes of heroic writing that succeeded among the most diverse groups of readers but particularly among these military and courtly elites: Spanish books of chivalry and Italian romanzo. With the Spanish came chivalric fiction, which developed and rose exponentially as a genre during the very same years of the Wars of Italy and the military revolution. The Italians enjoyed Amadís’s bright tales of chivalry just as much as the Spanish avidly consumed and mimicked Orlando’s feats of arms and love.²⁰ One of the outstanding heroes of the military revolution, the victor of Pavia, the Marquis of Pescara, Fernando de Avalos, had grown up in late fifteenth-century Naples reading books of chivalry.²¹ Questioned by one of his Italian interlocutors in his Diálogo de la lengua, Juan de Valdés acknowledged a quasi-Quixotic passion for books of chivalry: “For ten years, the best of my life, that I spent in palaces and courts, I did nothing more virtuous than reading these lies, which I enjoyed so much that I would devour my own hands after them. So note how spoiled my taste was, that if I took a book of those translated from Latin into our vernacular and written by true historians, or so considered, I would never be able to finish it” (Diez años, los mejores de mi vida, que gasté en palacios y cortes, no me empleé en ejercicio más virtuoso que en leer estas mentiras, en las cuales tomaba tanto sabor que me comía las manos tras ellas. Y mirad qué cosa es tener el gusto estragado, que si tomaba en la mano un libro de los romanzados en latín que son de historiadores verdaderos, o a lo menos que son tenidos por tales, no podía acabar comigo de leerlos).²² Romance was indeed associated with the spaces of political and social power, the palaces and courts in the memory of the Italianized Valdés. Although we know that they did not completely prevent a book from reaching popular audiences, the material elaboration and the high prices of romances of chivalry must have certainly limited their potential publics. According to Daniel Eisenberg, “the romances of chivalry are clearly the most expensive Spanish literary works” in the well-supplied library of Renaissance collector Hernando Colón in the first decades of the sixteenth century.²³

The tales of Italian romanzo and Spanish books of chivalry became ingrained in the literary culture of these elites to the point that the two heroic traditions seem to have merged into one at some point—as they were one century later in the mind of Alonso Quijano.²⁴ The materiality of Italian chivalric poems and that of Spanish prose romance usually shows that both genres were meant to compete for the same readers. And a quick look at the transnational circulation of these books confirms that the two literary traditions were closer than we usually think. The first French translation of Orlando furioso, published in Lyon in 1543, is explicitly said to compete in the market with the French translation of Amadís.²⁵ In the same year, Bernardo Tasso, Torquato’s father, decided to translate the Spanish best seller Amadís de Gaula in Italian verse at the request of Ávila y Zúñiga and Francisco de Toledo—a member of the Alba family and the future viceroy of Peru.²⁶ Just as Bernardo translated the prose of Amadís in Ariosto’s ottava rima, the Spanish Vázquez de Contreras, years later, converted the stanzas of Orlando furioso into Spanish chivalric prose.²⁷ In the cultural world of the two peninsular aristocratic and military elites there existed a tight connection between Italian romanzo and Spanish chivalric fiction.

The story of the first Spanish translation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso confirms that the highest layers of European aristocracy were involved in the promotion and patronage of these genres. In 1549, Prince Philip of Spain arrived in Antwerp, accompanied by most of the Spanish nobility and a few Italian potentates, after a glorious journey—or felicíssimo viaje, as it was referred to in Spanish—throughout the European territories of the Habsburg composite monarchy. The voyage from Barcelona to Genoa, from Milan to Trento, from Augsburg to Brussels, was intended to introduce Prince Philip to the vassals and allies of the Austrian house in Europe in order to secure the loyalty of the social and political elites of those territories. When it arrived in the Habsburg Netherlands, Prince Philip’s itinerant court joined the retinue of his father, Charles V, in an atmosphere of political euphoria after the emperor’s triumph in Mühlberg and the recent death of Francis I of France in 1547. Just two weeks before Philip’s select entourage of the felicíssimo viaje entered Antwerp on September 11, 1549, the prosperous local printer Martinus Nutius, active in the city from 1540 to 1558, had published Orlando furioso traduzido en Romance Castellano, which would become one of the most frequently and successfully reprinted Spanish books of the sixteenth century. A member of a dispossessed hidalgo family from Navarre, the translator, Jerónimo Jiménez de Urrea, pursued a lifelong military career, mostly in Italy and Germany, which earned him the post of infantry captain and eventually a habit of the Order of Santiago. After the victory at Mühlberg and in the days of the felicíssimo viaje, his military service must have granted him some kind of access to the courtly circles of Emperor Charles and Prince Philip, since it seems that Urrea personally offered the latter a copy of his Furioso traduzido.²⁸ The book must have aroused much enjoyment from the courtly and aristocratic circles of the prince’s entourage. “Dear reader,” says the printer in one of the preliminary texts, “the main cause that has moved us to print the Orlando furioso in Castilian has been … the dearness and want of these books in the present kingdoms; to this we should add the requests of our friends and noble gentlemen from Spain and other nations, which we decided to heed first because they were fair, and also because they have helped us with the correction of the book” (Amigo letor, la principal causa que nos ha movido a imprimir el Orlando furioso en Romance Castellano ha sido … la carestía y falta que hay destos libros en estos reinos. Hase allegado a esto las rogarías de nuestros amigos y señores españoles y otras naciones las cuales hemos querido obedecer por parecernos justas, como por la ayuda que nos han dado en la correción del libro).²⁹

The immediate market for Urrea’s Orlando traduzido is indeed the cream of the European high nobility, which gathered around Prince Philip in his continental tour of 1549, in the context of one of the most magnificent chivalric celebrations of Renaissance Europe in Mary of Hungary’s palace at Binche, in the Southern Netherlands. The courtly festivals that took place there in the summer and fall of that year were informed by the literary tales of Amadís and Orlando.³⁰ A jamboree of banquets, theatrical performances, dances, and, above all, elaborate jousts and “adventures” was designed in order to entertain those who still liked to think of themselves as belonging to the warrior class. In a world made of damsels, islands, enchantments, giants, and flamboyantly named knights, a cohort of grandees and titled aristocrats reproduced in the rituals of the court society the literary models provided by romance fiction, whether in verse or in prose. Romance fiction was actively used, collectively, in the elaboration of a transnational courtly sociability. Individually, reading or hearing chivalric tales was part of the “aristocratic bildung” of many noble houses and courts.³¹

Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier has always been invoked in discussions of aristocratic education and noble sociability. From the very beginning in Castiglione’s handbook, Count Lodovico di Canossa asserts that “the principal and true profession of the Courtier must be that of arms.”³² These arms, however, have little to do with the dramatic transformations of warfare that were taking place just outside the walls of the Duke of Urbino’s palace and other such Renaissance courts. When Castiglione writes that the courtier, “born of a noble and genteel family,” should “know how to handle every kind of weapon, both on foot and on horse” but “be especially acquainted with those arms that are ordinarily used among gentlemen,” he is referring to the different modalities of courtly tournament and joust, as well as the aristocratic practice of duel. The courtier’s fighting skills have nothing to do with the real practice of warfare but with the ritualized sociability of courtly chivalry. Castiglione’s courtier, rather than a perfect soldier, must be “a perfect horseman in every kind of saddle,” an accomplished jouster, a virtuoso of stick throwing, bullfighting, juegos de cañas, hunting, and ball game.³³

It has rarely been noted that the social model of the courtier, as far as arms are concerned, is precisely built against that of the soldier.³⁴ “We do not wish him,” said Count Lodovico, “to make a show of being so fierce that he is forever swaggering in his speech, declaring that he has wedded his cuirass, and glowering with such dour looks.”³⁵ And indeed what follows this passage is a courtier’s joke about a coarse soldier who, not being conversant with the codes of the palace’s sociability, arrogantly rejects a lady’s offer to dance.³⁶ Castiglione, moreover, despises even what constitutes the very definition of modern soldiering, that is, serving in war in exchange for a salary. “The true stimulus to great and daring deeds in war,” he says, “is glory, and whosoever is moved thereto for gain or any other motive, apart from the fact that he never does anything good, deserves to be called not a gentleman, but a base merchant.”³⁷ As opposed to the knight’s, a soldier’s identity is inextricably linked to money; it is constituted by it from the very etymology of the word soldado.³⁸ The opposition between the professional soldier and the amateur knight could not be stated more clearly. The court and the battlefield will generate not only two different patterns of social behavior but also two distinct, and many times opposed, literary cultures.

Renaissance courtly sociability has indeed been described as a “shelter against the universal calamity of the Wars of Italy … a space aristocratically separated from the real world.”³⁹ Romance’s representations of combat were utterly anachronistic to actual fighting men, fit to be reproduced in the palace by a group of high-born jousters but far from the realities of Italy’s battlefields. Of course, the ritual mimicking of war in courtly practice remained an enjoyable theatrical recreation for the knights of the palace and played an important role in court society; but it could no longer be justified as a mirror, let alone training, for actual military practice. “The cult of the emblazoned individual heavy cavalryman” and the “glamorized choreography” of the celebrations at Binche and elsewhere were at odds with the newly massive, plebeian, and quite bloody character of Renaissance warfare.⁴⁰ And in the eyes of many, the disconnect between the practice and the representation of warfare in the world of the high nobility ended up destabilizing their social legitimacy, traditionally based in the profession of arms and the defense of society. The tales of Orlando and Amadís seem to have been more appropriate for those “more keen to courtesy than to war” (di cortesia più che di guerre amico), as the author of the former would eloquently put it.⁴¹

In fact, the representational traditions of romance fiction in prose and verse clearly privileged the image of the “medieval centaur,” the relevance of an aristocratic corps of heavy cavalry whose role on the battlefields of Europe was decreasing at the same rate that the output figures of Orlandos and Amadises printed in Venice or Seville swelled.⁴² This literature legitimized the social preeminence of the bellatores against the emerging social logics of new warfare practices and discourses. The rise of the court nobility was accompanied by a proportional decline in the aristocracy’s traditional military function. The social and cultural practices of the noblemen that constituted the ideal audiences for Ariosto’s romance in the Habsburg world ultimately veiled the crucial developments that historians have associated with the military revolution, such as the generalization of gunpowder and siege artillery, the new infantry formations of pikemen, and the improvement of military engineering and fortification. More important, the substitution of massive infantry squadrons for a select and aristocratic corps of heavy cavalry as the backbone of the army entailed somehow a democratization of military activity, which was now accessible to plebeians and low hidalgos.⁴³ This is not to say that the high nobility completely abandoned its traditional military function or that cavalry totally disappeared from European armies, but the centrality of both was substantially displaced after some of the Renaissance battles that transformed warfare, from Ravenna (1512) to Bicocca (1524) or Pavia (1525).⁴⁴ By the time Urrea translated the Furioso for the enjoyment of Prince Philip’s noble entourage in 1549, the protagonists of European battles were not the “men-at-arms” (gens d’armes, gendarmerie) who jousted in Binche but the plebeian infantrymen who fought in Italy and Germany in large, disciplined armies based on the pike and the arquebus. The individual effort of the chivalric ethos had been replaced by the soldier’s obedience and professionalism, together with the technical knowledge and strategic skill of meritorious officers.

The aristocratic rules of individual fighting, the prominence of the horse in knightly culture, the honor codes that had been outmoded by the new culture of warfare, the fantastic fictionality of imagined wars as opposed to those the soldiers experienced distinctly—none of these aspects could provide an undisputed model for the literary culture and social practice of the soldierly mass. Soldiers appropriated some elements of the language, the rhetoric, the narrative patterns, and the names of the chivalric traditions. They may well try to imitate and participate in the noble practice of joust on one occasion and openly mock it as ridiculous or anachronistic in another. Strategic sameness as well as strategic difference would guide the practices and discourses of the common soldier in relation to those of their social superiors. Soldierly culture is shaped after and in confrontation and competition with aristocratic literary forms.

Indeed, Italian linguistic and cultural competence was taken for granted not only among the commanding elites but also among many of the rank and file. As early as 1517, the lack of Italian skills of Juan Gozález and Pero Pardo, the laughable bisoños mocked for being “raised in the court of the plow” (crïados / en corte de los arados) and for not being “fluent in the Italian language” (no son enseñados / en la lengua italïana), was the main source of amusement for the presumably bilingual audience of Torres Naharro’s Comedia soldadesca.⁴⁵ The Captain, Guzmán, Manrique, and Mendoza, veterans who served in the armies of the feared Cesare Borgia, Pope Alexander’s son, or under the command of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the Great Captain, all are fluent in Italian. Popular readers certainly appropriated and enjoyed the stories of chivalric literature, and common soldiers were, as a matter of fact, familiar with the sagas of Orlando and his progeny.⁴⁶ Yet however attracted the common soldiery of early modern Europe was to the chivalric tales of Amadís and, above all, Orlando, the rank and file’s exposure to and active appropriation of these literary traditions were rarely exempt of tension.

In his military memoir about Mediterranean soldiering and captivity, Jerónimo de Pasamonte quotes a full stanza of Orlando furioso, but he does so in the context of a narrative coincidence that he deems miraculous and that shows the author’s fictional elaboration of this episode in an otherwise highly verisimilar narrative regime. While relaxing on the grass by the Fountain of Caño Dorado, in Madrid’s Prado de San Jerónimo, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, Pasamonte claims to have sung “with no little flair” (con no poca gracia) the first stanza of Orlando furioso’s canto 23 (“Studisi ognun giovare altrui; che rade”), which is a warning for readers to do all the good they can to others, for any damage they inflict will unexpectedly be reciprocated. An old acquaintance of his times of captivity, who had once betrayed him, overheard the Italian song and inquired, approvingly, about Pasamonte’s linguistic and musical skills. The soldier retorted gallantly with a mix of Spanish and Italian—“Caro me costa”—and explained to the traitor how he had acquired these skills while spending “many years in captivity among Italians” (muchos años captivo entre italianos). The persuasive fictionality and emplotment devices of romance serve in Pasamonte’s text to emphasize the exceptional nature of a conventional anagnorisis.⁴⁷

Similarly, Alonso de Contreras’s autobiography contains one mention of the chivalric tales of Orlando furioso. While serving in the galleys of Malta, Contreras participated in a sally to the coasts of Barbary in order to fight off some of the corsairs who had recently attacked the positions of the Order in the island. During this expedition, they briefly docked in Lampedusa, which “they say … is enchanted and that it was in this island where Ruggero and Bradamante fought against each other, which I think is just a fable” (dicen está encantada y que en esta isla fue donde se dieron la batalla el rey Rugero y Bradamonte, para mí fábula).⁴⁸ The hearsay that Contreras puts down in writing in his autobiography makes clear that Ariosto’s fiction figured prominently in the daily pláticas of the Spanish popular soldiery, to the extent that it shaped the ways they made sense of the physical spaces of war with which they were most familiar. Yet at the same time, it shows that the value of these tales, their legitimacy as literary models to recount the experience of serving soldiers eager to tell the truth about war, was always in dispute. If romance textuality impregnates military writing and even the soldiers’ daily lives, it frequently shows up in their tales in an ironic fashion, or in an open negation, that reveals the tensions involved in its regime of fictionality.

A GUNPOWDER POETICS

The epic poem can only refer to the sixteenth-century military figure through occultation or allusion.

(Le poème épique ne peut entretenir avec la figure militaire du XVIe siècle qu’un rapport fait d’escamotage et d’allusion.)

—FRÉDÉRIQUE VERRIER, Les armes de Minerve

The fight for Italy transformed not only the art of war and the forms of government, as Guicciardini famously proclaimed, but also “the very modalities of narrating war.”⁴⁹ Thus Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, dropped his pen sometime in September 1494. For eighteen years the poet had been writing his Orlando innamorato in the Este’s Ferrarese palace. Suddenly, when the barbarian armies of Charles VIII of France crossed the Alps and invaded Italy, his light tales of love and chivalry somehow stopped making sense. “While I sing,” says Boiardo, “I see all Italy in flame and fire by these French.” The fire of the first artillery train in history obliterates the burning love of Fiordespina’s tale, now “vain,” which the narrator promises his readers to take up again soon.⁵⁰ The poet died, however, shortly after giving up his massive poetic and narrative enterprise, in December of the same year. For the writers of romanzi, Charles VIII’s descent in Italy must have been traumatic.⁵¹ It is as if the ravages of real war, the increasingly destructive technologies and tactics of the military revolution, could find no place in Boiardo’s bright, chivalric world of love and arms. Moreover, the most powerful monarchy of Christendom, which in the fictional world of the Carolingian narrative cycles defended European Christianity against the barbarian Saracens, turned into the invading barbarian king destroying the soil of ancient Rome.

Though Charles VIII’s stunning onslaught in 1494 made Boiardo drop his pen, it did not silence the writers of the popular pamphlets that reported, in the same metrical form, true stories about the Wars of Italy.⁵² For Massimo Rospocher, the poems published in cheap print or performed by street singers about the Wars of Italy, known as guerre in ottava rima, contrasted in important ways with the tradition of the chivalric poem as it was practiced by Boiardo or Ariosto, which had initially shared the frame, language, and structure of their popular counterparts.⁵³ First, this corpus of verse was crucial in “the emergence of contemporaneity,” a new perception of current events that linked the military and political realms in the media of public communication, successfully capturing “the dramatic urgency of the present.”⁵⁴ The wide distribution of these texts allowed the audience to contrast their own experience of the facts with those poetized in the popular pamphlets. This genre created a new relationship between the written matter of war and its readers and listeners. A sense of novelty, moreover, pervaded the typographical and rhetorical strategies of these popular prints. An emphatic rhetoric of truth versus the shining, elaborate fiction of the romanzi became a feature of the genre, and a gory realism shaped the referential world of the guerre in ottava rima that was incompatible with the courtly idealization of warfare in chivalric discourse. Some soldiers, moreover, were involved in the production and distribution, both orally and in print, of these songs. Ercole Cinzio Rinuccini, for instance, wrote several poems on the wars he personally fought, while storyteller Eustachi Celebrino claimed to have written La presa di Roma after the prose eyewitness account of a captain who participated in the sack of 1527.⁵⁵

The traditions of romanzi and the guerre in ottava rima run parallel, competing with and feeding each other. Most scholars of Spanish epic have rightly emphasized the weight that the former carried in the development of the genre in the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere.⁵⁶ I would like to suggest, however, that the guerre in ottava rima, a tradition of popular print and war writing quite distinct from chivalric fiction, might have played as significant a role as the romanzo tradition in the emergence of Iberian epic in the middle years of the sixteenth century. The ephemeral products of popular print, these war stories circulated widely and could be found anywhere, from the urban centers of Italy to the strongholds and galleys of the Mediterranean war stage where Italian and Spanish soldiers always mingled. The impact of this textual tradition of popular origin on the literary culture of the Habsburg soldiery may have important consequences for our understanding of epic as a genre and of war writing in general.

What I will call, following Michael Murrin’s argument, gunpowder epic, shared a number of key textual elements with the guerre in ottava rima.⁵⁷ First, a rhetoric of factual precision often punctuates the narrative with specific dates and times, provides the number of combatants, and records the names of commanders and common soldiers alike.⁵⁸ Second, the enthusiastic embracement of the technologies and ethos of the military revolution, as I have already mentioned, oftentimes pits itself against the aristocratic rejection of the lowly forms of new warfare.⁵⁹ Third, the urgency of the present, in Rospocher’s felicitous formulation, leads soldiers to confront those who “today sing about ancient things and leave in oblivion the new ones” just to avoid the pain of telling them (molti cantono ognhor le cose antiche / e lasson preterir l’altere e nove / per seguir l’otio e per fugire fatiche).⁶⁰ Finally, and more important, an explicit rejection of romance’s regime of fictionality is at the root of many war songs. “I will not sing of Orlando or Ruggiero,” says one of these poems, “but of the true subject” (suggetto vero) of the war of Parma in 1551.⁶¹ In the same vein, a widely distributed compilation of war stories from the 1510s opened with a negative to celebrate Orlando, Rinaldo, or Morgante, opting instead to recount just “the events that happened on Italian soil.”⁶²

Drawing from this tradition, the Spanish soldiers picked up the pen exactly where Boiardo dropped it. Scores of common soldiers, an army of military poets, set out to recount the contemporary wars of the empire in a poetic idiom that sharply contrasted with the fictional registers of chivalric romance. None of these authors lost his grip on his pen in the face of the new, more brutal and diabolic realities of warfare. In lieu of conjuring away or vaguely alluding to this reality, as Verrier claimed in the lines quoted earlier, the new epic poets embraced it as a worthy, novel, enticing, and profitable literary matter. They claimed, insistently and with passion, to tell the truth about war, and that truth entailed “a set of military values that contrasted with the chivalric code.”⁶³

Both Ariosto’s Orlando and Urrea’s translation are absolutely crucial to understanding Spanish Renaissance epic. They functioned as a rhetorical, narrative, and linguistic archive that nurtured the war stories soldiers liked to tell themselves and others. But their multiple and complex relations to romance fiction were often underwritten by an oppositional logic. Michael Murrin made a crucial point when he asserted that “critics so far have not recognized or acknowledged that the two genres [epic and romance] present different kinds of war. The warrior in romance usually fights on horseback, while in classical epic Achilles and Aeneas chase their enemies about the field on foot. Romance thus fits the old cavalry battles of the Middle Ages, while classical epic better accommodates the new styles of infantry fighting adopted by the English, Swiss, and Spanish.”⁶⁴ The epics that began to be published in mid-sixteenth-century Spain indeed constituted themselves as the enunciation of this sociocultural difference, as a gesture of both emulation and rejection of the chivalric cultural models that would continue to shape most of the courtly and literary practices of the early modern nobility.

Most likely a commoner and a soldier in his younger days, Jerónimo Sempere was a modest shopkeeper in his native Valencia by the time he published his Carolea (Valencia: Joan de los Arcos, 1560), an epic about the military deeds of Emperor Charles.⁶⁵ Sempere’s two-part, nineteen-canto epic in octaves is one of the first long narrative poems to deal with the contemporary wars of the Spanish empire. The first part of his Carolea is devoted to the “hard-fought war that happened in Italy between the Spaniards and the French until the battle of Pavia” (la reñida guerra que pasó en Italia entre españoles y franceses hasta la batalla de Pavía). It recounts, he continues in the opening “Argumento,” “the skirmishes, the marches, and the battles of that war, and the capture of cities and fortresses, and it describes the foundations and the sites of many towns in Italy” (cuenta los rencuentros que hubo en ella en muchas jornadas y diversas ocasiones, y las presas de ciudades y fortalezas. Y descríbense las fundaciones y sitios de muchos pueblos de Italia, y otras partes).⁶⁶ In sharp contrast with the elusive referentiality of romance representations of war, the novelty of Italian poliorcetics and the operationality of the new war constitute the object of Sempere’s poetic chronicle of the Wars of Italy in the 1520s.

Carolea’s first part, as rich in Virgilian reminiscences as it is in historical detail, culminates in the emblematic battle of Pavia, where the French gendarmerie, Francis I’s corps of aristocratic heavy cavalrymen, was crushed, according to Paolo Giovio—and our Roldán—“with good shots of arquebus” (con buenos disparos de arcabuz).⁶⁷ By narrating war with the brutal technical precision that became characteristic of soldierly discourse, Sempere celebrates what Ariosto and Boiardo had condemned. Firearms, which allowed foot soldiers to fight the hitherto invincible heavy cavalry of the French army, brought about a new social dynamic to the representation of warfare. In Sempere’s rendering of the battle, as in Oznaya’s, Spanish arquebusiers, whether anonymous or flaunting rather plebeian names, kill ranks of famous French knights, some of whom belong to the most illustrious lineages of French nobility: “Ranks of arquebusiers destroy the French knights, gallant skill! With bursts of gunfire, they killed scores of enemies” (Deshacen a los Gallos caballeros / con mangas de arcabuces, bella maña: / con darles ruciadas de pelotas / mataban de enemigos muchas flotas).⁶⁸

Sempere depicts the gendarmerie’s lavish display of aristocratic fashion—Roldán’s “golden brocades and crimson shirts”—as a lack of adaptability to the new realities of war and as poor strategic judgment. For it is the material culture and the ethos of the old aristocratic warfare, which the rank and file mock as more fit for jousting than for real fighting, that allow both Roldán and Sempere’s arquebusiers to identify and exterminate the flower of French nobility. “Brocade,” “rich arms,” and “golden harnesses” are of little use against the disciplined rank-and file arquebusiers of the imperial army.⁶⁹ The luxury of courtly war games is at odds with the harsh realities of the battlefield. Francis I goes to war, according to Sempere, as he would to one of Binche’s tournaments, which is what facilitates his capture by Spanish soldiers by revealing the presence of the king.⁷⁰ The poet barely hides his enthusiasm for the plebeianization of new warfare. Sempere concludes his narration of Pavia by enumerating the ranks of titled nobility and the dozens of mussiores or noblemen that the Spanish infantrymen sent to fill the ranks of Death—“muy rica fue la muerte de Señores.” Soldierly writing oftentimes becomes a quite literal version of class warfare.⁷¹

In 1561, the experienced soldier Baltasar del Hierro published in Granada his Libro y primera parte de los victoriosos hechos del muy valeroso caballero Don Álvaro de Baçán.⁷² In spite of the title, which echoes with chivalric paratextuality, Hierro’s epic stanzas concerned the most recent military events of the empire and purported to be a factual account of the Marquis of Santa Cruz’s naval Mediterranean and Atlantic campaigns against Algerian and French privateering, in which the author participated. Hierro explicitly delimits the object of his epic poem as a highly professionalized version of warfare: “the clashes, skirmishes, and battles, the many sieges and the many squadrons and ranks of arquebusiers” (los grandes recuentros, escaramuzas o batallas y diferentes sitios de tierras [y] diferentes los escuadrones y mangas que se hacen).⁷³ Bazán was a highly respected general among sixteenth-century Spanish soldiery, and thus he is unequivocally celebrated in a poem that bears his name in its title. But the heroes in Hierro’s poem are also his comrades-in-arms, the plático soldiers he fought alongside, those who “have seen a great number of towers, walls, casemates, ravelins, moats and ditches, artillery plots in bridges and walls; and they understand the blows of the trumpet and the playing of the drums as if they spoke to them” (han visto gran número de torreones caballeros, murallas, casasmatas, revellines, fosos y contrafosos, entradas o salidas de puentes, con sus traveses; y entienden como si les hablasen las palotadas de las cajas, o los retumbos de las trompetas).⁷⁴ The representation of warfare becomes almost conflated with the representation of military discipline and the soldierly esprit de corps. War is understood as the professional business of a group of fellows-in-arms who derive their discursive legitimacy from their technical expertise. The works of Sempere and Hierro are arguably the first narrative poems in octaves in Spanish that addressed the new realities of contemporary warfare, with that urgency of the present foregrounded by the guerre in ottava rima.