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Introduction

The Muses’ Comrades

… then Cretheus, friend of the Muses, the Muses’ comrade,

Cretheus, always dear to his heart the song and lyre,

Turning a verse to the taut string, always singing

Of cavalry, weapons, wars and the men who fight them.

—VIRGIL, Aeneid

Virgil was the son of a tinker and he was the best of Italian poets.

—PEDRO MEXÍA, Silva de varia lección

It has been remarked that soldiers do not inherit letters but conquer them.¹ Against all odds, the rank-and-file soldiers of early modern Spain participated in the production, distribution, and consumption of a remarkably innovative set of works on war that have been almost completely neglected by literary and historical scholarship. The soldiers of Italian garrisons and North African presidios, on colonial American frontiers and in the traveling military camps of northern Europe, read and wrote epic poems, chronicles, ballads, pamphlets, and autobiographies—the stories of the very same wars in which they participated as rank-and-file fighters and witnesses. These Spanish soldados pláticos, professional soldiers conversant with war, turned into soldados curiosos, inclined to letters, by engaging in a wide variety of writing and reading practices. Furthermore, it was precisely the vast network of spaces articulated around the political and military institutions of an ever-expanding and struggling Spanish empire that facilitated the global circulation of the men themselves and of their textual production, and constituted what I call “a soldierly republic of letters.” The lines they wrote on the front provide a critical view from below on state violence and imperial expansionism. It is their perspective that grounds this book, a cultural history of Spain’s imperial wars as told by the common men who fought them.

Front Lines develops two symmetrical lines of argument. On the one hand, it exposes how the European military revolution—a locus of intense scholarly debate and a powerful historiographical narrative of modernization linked to state-building, imperialism, and globalization—affected literary practices. In this sense, I contend that the common soldiery of the Spanish armies played a key role in shaping Renaissance literary culture. These men reinvented classical genres such as the epic, produced new regimes of truth for historical writing, experimented with innovative poetic idioms and objects for the lyric, and created new autobiographical subjectivities. On the other hand, I explore the ways in which these varied and enriched literary traditions allowed soldiers to question received values and ideas about the social logic of warfare, the ethics of violence, and the legitimacy of imperial aggression.

The questions that drive my analysis aim at exploring the multiple and vexed relations between literary culture and imperial warfare in the early modern period. How does war affect the production, dissemination, and consumption of different literary genres and products? How do practices of warfare, such as recruitment and military socialization, discipline, war reporting, and worldwide travel, affect early modern literary practice? How does literature represent, legitimize, or oppose colonial violence? What is the social articulation of the different views and representations of war? How does what the observers witness on the battlefield unsettle their previous ideas and values about war? Soldierly writing, I argue, intensely interrogates the nature, means, goals, and consequences of war and empire. The voices of the common soldiers thus provide a privileged place from which to explore these questions, which are no less pressing today than they were in the early modern period. Front Lines contributes to the cultural history of war and violence, contesting a powerful historiographical narrative about Spain’s Golden Age that has long assumed an unproblematic harmony between sword and pen, between the empire, its soldiers, and military literature.

Notions about the theme of “arms and letters” have indeed structured some of the most durable discourses on the Spanish Golden Age and Spain’s imperial past.² The story of the Golden Age usually conflates, intentionally or not, cultural productivity and splendor with imperial grandeur. Take the greatest Spanish writer of the period, Miguel de Cervantes. The bodily mutilation he suffered in Lepanto, where an arquebus shot destroyed one of his hands, was for a long time a metonymy of Cervantes’s “exemplary and heroic life” and remains an icon of the vexed relation between war and writing, between political and cultural history, to which “Golden Age” as a historiographical narrative refers. Lope de Vega, more his enemy than friend, conventionally praised the novelist by saying that his crippled hand had turned the lead of the cannon shots at Lepanto’s mythic battle into diamantine lines of poetry, playing on the two meanings of versos.³ This study draws from an important body of scholarship that, in the last decades, has explored this complex alchemic economy of arms and letters and provided a more nuanced vision of the relation between war and culture and between soldiers and the states that employed them.⁴ In addition to Cervantes, many other writers of Golden Age Spain served in war, from commoners like Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Alonso de Contreras, and Juan Rufo to those belonging to the higher or lower echelons of the nobility like Garcilaso de la Vega, Francisco de Aldana, Alonso de Ercilla, and Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, among many others. In addition to revisiting these soldier authors, this study examines the lives and writings of forgotten or unknown ones, such as Baltasar del Hierro, Alonso de Salamanca, Cristóbal Rodríguez Alva, Sancho de Londoño, and Emanuel Antunes, as well as a cohort of anonymous soldiers. Despite the pervasiveness of the theme of the pen and the sword in Golden Age literature and scholarship, the specific, material relation between the practice of war and the practice of literature has not been fully interrogated in all of its sociocultural dimensions.

The new practices and social spaces, global and local, of Renaissance warfare are largely the result of the military revolution. Since Michael Roberts formulated the concept in 1955, historians have disagreed about its nature, chronology, and relevance.⁵ Despite the vastness and complexity of this scholarship, most specialists would nevertheless agree that during the early modern period the practice of war underwent substantial transformations in Europe, which could be briefly summarized as “larger numbers, greater permanence, and a new firepower.”⁶ Although a far from linear and coherent process, it is possible to single out some pivotal moments that radically transformed the ways war was waged and understood. The pike and pikemen formations as used by the Swiss from the 1470s had a key role in the gradual decline of the traditional aristocratic men-at-arms of heavy cavalry as the decisive units in battle: between the battles of Fornovo (1495) and Pavia (1525) the proportion of infantry to cavalry shifted from 1:1 to 6:1.⁷ The widespread use of gunpowder and the improvement of artillery led to important developments in military architecture and engineering, which in turn led to further innovations in firepower and to a substantial transformation of tactics and strategy. Trench warfare developed around the protracted sieges of strategic cities. Grand field battles remained important, to be sure, but the bulk of combat was now carried out in the form of skirmishes, raids, ambushes, and attrition warfare. Armies required more manpower than ever before in order to successfully implement military policy. The logistics of warfare thus became more complex as campaigns grew longer and tighter, thus requiring important adjustments in recruiting, training, discipline, and the structure of command.⁸

The technologies, social spaces, and practices of early modern imperial warfare helped bring together a community of interests, a public for “the matters of war,” that became the foundation for new writing and reading practices, new genres, and new material ways of distribution and appropriation. My account turns the “society of soldiers,” as some military historians have referred to the peculiar forms of social and institutional organization of early modern armies, into a soldierly republic of letters.⁹ This peculiar republic facilitated, for instance, the collection and publication of romances or ballads, the translation of some of the most important literary works in Renaissance Europe, and the circulation and exchange of all sorts of cultural materials in multiple languages. In the soldiers’ republic of letters, the shared tent became a makeshift literary academy. The chain of command occasionally provided alternative structures for literary patronage. The army’s baggage train carried books from Antwerp to Barcelona, from Milan to Tunis, from Seville to Santiago de Chile or Manila. While the Habsburg territories in Europe, together with their neighboring lands, have been deemed “the heartland of the military revolution,” the dynasty’s imperial ambitions made the soldiers’ republic reach quite far.¹⁰

The soldiers’ discourse on war entailed a proud affirmation of their public relevance as the backbone of imperial Spain. But by celebrating the honor and valor of fighting comrades, they pitted themselves against the ascendancy of a nobility that, since the early sixteenth century, had partially abandoned its traditional military role. Class and professional bonds often overrode ostensibly stronger allegiances such as ethnic and national loyalties, complicating the relationship between soldiers and the kings, countries, or empires they were hired to serve. The late sixteenth-century sonnets and epistles of the poet-soldier Andrés Rey de Artieda, published in 1605, do not depict his comrades as the proud agents of the empire but rather as its cursed victims. In Alonso de Ercilla’s famous epic poem La Araucana (1569–90), which recounts imperial military efforts to defeat a successful indigenous rebellion in Chile, the poet and participating soldier took sides with the enemy he was supposed to be fighting on the battlefield. The longest episode in the Breve suma de la vida y hechos de Diego García de Paredes (1533), one of the first Renaissance autobiographies written by a soldier, is not one of the historically crucial battles of the Italian Wars he witnessed and in which he fought but a tavern brawl in which he viciously killed or maimed insulting thugs and prostitutes. The commoner Baltasar del Hierro did not recount in his short epic published in 1560 the wars against the Ottomans in which he served but instead narrated the successful mutiny of his comrades-in-arms against Spanish imperial authority in the North African fortress they were expected to defend.

Soldierly discourse oftentimes eroded imperial certainties and assumptions. As Adam McKeown has argued about Elizabethan writing soldiers, Spanish servicemen very often “used [their] authority as veterans to question not only the state’s rationale for waging war but also the role of war in creating relations between the state and its subjects.”¹¹ The social, cultural, national, and religious heterogeneity of the spaces of war, together with the porosity of the borders and contact zones in which the soldiers spent most of their daily lives, facilitated unexpected exchanges and solidarities. The same comradeship that was necessary to boost combat morale and unit cohesion allowed for dangerous sociabilities and rebellious confraternization. The structures that enabled the waging of war also allowed for the material production and circulation of soldierly texts that many times opposed those very same structures. These writings voiced criticism of the soldiers’ military superiors and of imperial policies, while publicizing their exploitative working conditions and establishing solidarities among the troops that often led to mutiny and massive desertion.

The myriad pens and mouths of common soldiers had indeed many stories to tell about war and empire, oftentimes at odds with those told by their superiors, whether back home or on the front. Their stories were told in “the small voice of history,” in Ranajit Guha’s apt phrase. And, albeit occasionally, we certainly find in their texts “the voice of a defiant subalternity committed to writing its own history.”¹² Early modern soldiers made a particularly compelling effort, against the burden of partial literacies and the lack of cultural capital, to become authors and to understand in their own terms the imperial wars in which they fought. Although hawkish warmongering had a place in the writings and sayings of common soldiers, attitudes toward imperial warfare, toward its glories and horrors, vary widely, from enthusiastic support to frontal opposition, from skepticism to indifference. The chaotic tumult of war, the agitation of combat, the exhilaration of victory, the misery of defeat, the extreme material deprivation of life at war, and the challenges of the veteran back home all formed part of the thematic repertoire of soldierly writing.

Whether in the strictly coded form of a classical epic or in the swift and protean ephemerality of political gossip, whether in an autobiographical manuscript or in a printed broadside ballad, plático soldiers aspired to participate in the pláticas (conversations) of public discourse. They constructed their social and political identities, individually and collectively, by telling their stories to themselves and to others. And the often clamorous, rowdy voices of common, sometimes marginal soldiers were frequently perceived by authorities as suspiciously heterodox and disruptive of the social order. The type of the veteran soldado roto (broken soldier) did indeed pose problems of order and discipline. The figure of the bravo or valentón (braggart), idling in the streets of early modern Madrid, became a popular hero, a dangerous (counter)model of social behavior and public speech. Furthermore, the codes and ethos of military masculinity often conspired to offer alternative textual conceptualizations of affective relations, sometimes in sharp contrast to the traditions of Petrarchan love, Ciceronian friendship, or Virgilian filial piety.

The first chapter provides a detailed portrayal of the social and cultural world of these writing soldiers. “The Soldiers’ Republic of Letters” gathers a wealth of testimonies about the widespread presence of literature and the dissemination of literate practices among the common fighting men of the Habsburg monarchy. I first show that literacy rates were significantly higher among soldiers, regardless of their social background, than among their civilian peers, and I explore the material conditions under which soldierly writing and reading took place while in deployment. Next I examine the global circulation and reception of texts throughout the spaces of war and the role that these spaces played in the shaping of publics and reading practices in the army. Finally, the chapter traces the relation between oral and written culture in the soldiers’ republic of letters, establishing connections between war news and the early modern public sphere.

From this point, the organization of my argument combines a flexible geographical and chronological structure with attention to corresponding shifts in literary genre. Beginning with the Wars of Italy (1494–1559), the second chapter (“The Truth About War”) focuses on a new group of Spanish poems written in ottava rima and divided in cantos that, in contrast to the fictional self-awareness of previous traditions of European heroic writing, claimed to offer realistic and accurate eyewitness accounts of the multiple contemporary wars of the Habsburg empire. These new Spanish epics established a sharp opposition to the textual tradition of chivalric romance from which they partially derived and, by claiming to tell “the truth about war,” generated new understandings of the means and nature of armed strife and imperial violence. Building on Michael Murrin’s illuminating insights about the new “relation between poetic and real war,” I argue that this corpus of gunpowder epics, by authors such as Jerónimo Sempere, Jerónimo Jiménez de Urrea, Juan Rufo, and Miguel Giner, became the poetry of the new war, the specialized genre of the soldierly class, the proletarians of warfare.¹³

The third chapter, “Rebellion, Captivity, and Survival,” focuses on the early modern Mediterranean conflicts between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, particularly in North Africa, as experienced by the fighting and writing rank and file. Grounded in archival documentation, this chapter also brings to light several previously unknown or forgotten texts written by common soldiers that provide compelling articulations of rebellion and captivity, and of personal and collective defeat. First, the epic poems and ballads of Baltasar del Hierro reveal the shifting political and religious allegiances of the common soldiery in the face of conflict and prolonged contact across cultures. Next, the chapter explores the relation between epic and autobiography, and the heroics of survival and authorship, in the poetry and military treatises of a Spanish soldier captured by the Turks in the 1574 Ottoman conquest of La Goleta and Tunis.

“New World War,” the fourth chapter, considers the soldierly texts produced in the New World during the wars of conquest. The Arauco War in Chile prompted a massive amount of discourse, perhaps unmatched in any other part of the Indies, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly by fighting soldiers. The challenge for contemporaries was to understand why the seemingly almighty Spanish empire had failed to defeat the Mapuche in southern Chile. This American experience effectively shattered some of the most defining and dearly held self-representations of Spanish imperial soldiery, representations that had been consistently elaborated on the European and Mediterranean fronts of the empire. Among the authors and works considered here are Pedro de Valdivia’s letters, Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s Milicia y descripción de las Indias (1599), and Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–90), together with a wealth of heterogeneous writings by Melchor Xufré del Águila, Santiago de Tesillo, and other anonymous colonial soldiers.

The last chapter, “Home from War,” focuses on the experiences of the mutilated, the deserters, and the discharged in their conflicted returns to civil society. Often depicted as picaresque and even criminal, the voices of the returning soldier did indeed pose significant problems to the city’s public order and the state’s military policies. This chapter analyzes, on the one hand, the war ballads and lyrical languages produced and circulated in Europe’s battlefields, particularly in the Netherlands, which helped publicize the soldiers’ extenuating conditions of service in one of the longest and bloodiest wars of the period. On the other hand, it explores the group of well-known personal narratives by veterans, mainly Diego García de Paredes’s Breve suma and Alonso de Contreras’s Discurso de mi vida, in which they strived to produce proud and convincing autobiographical subjectivities. These bold first-person narratives openly defied the authority of the state and ended up questioning the thin lines between legitimate and illegitimate violence.

The overall argument of the present book is particularly concerned with what can be called the Icarian logic of soldierly writing. In a masterful study of popular culture, James Amelang uses the myth of Icarus, “the classic symbol of punishment for popular overreaching,” as a powerful class allegory to understand subaltern forms of authorship and literary practice in early modern Europe.¹⁴ The son of an artisan, Daedalus, Icarus attempts to fly too high, with manmade wings and against his father’s counsel, and meets his demise as a punishment for his insolent hubris. Just like the artisans who took up the pen and wrote, against all odds and expectations, writing soldiers made ample use of “the images of flight, and the language of trespass and intrusion” that have been found revealing in the autobiographies of craftsmen.¹⁵ This myth is a powerful story about arrogance and failed ambitions, but it is also about audacious disobedience and self-determination. The usual moral message is deeply rooted in a social conservatism that assumes that, just as mortals do not fly, artisans—or soldiers—do not write.

As we will see, soldiers, like Icarus or Phaeton, did indeed disobey. They deserted, rebelled, switched sides, abstained from fighting, killed officers, defied kings, and insulted popes. Their writing, like their behavior, was too often mutinous. Some early modern mutinies lasted long enough to transform what can be understood as an early labor strike into significant improvement of soldierly life, if rarely long lasting. And while hardly conceived as large-scale political action, soldierly self-organization and protest ended up many times challenging imperial designs. In contrast, some soldiers told the story of the relative failure of their class and of the early modern army as a set of practices and structures that could have allowed the popular classes of Spain to thrive and dispute political and social power. In either case, the stories they wrote and read narrate the struggle for survival and daring human endeavor, suffering and triumph. Their legacies in the long run will, moreover, shed light on the modern cultural and political history of warfare and war writing.

The fact that many of the texts I discuss in this book have remained hidden in the archive for so long speaks to canonical inertias in a discipline that has nonetheless striven to incorporate a varied array of texts that had been traditionally stripped of meaning and value. But more important, it reveals the scholarly unease, the humanistic unwillingness to understand war as an inextricable part of culture in the early modern age—and perhaps in other periods of human history. As Fernand Braudel argued, “War is not simply the antithesis of civilization” but a constitutive part of it.¹⁶ This is far from arguing, as some conservative military historians do, that war is “the father of us all” or an ahistorical “tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence.”¹⁷ Nor is it a celebration of the cultural productivity of violence. Quite the opposite: this argument is instead meant to stress the need for historians to account for “the cultural location of war.”¹⁸ It is an attempt to recover the ways in which the common people have tried to understand and give meaning—multiple and conflicted meanings—to the apparently meaningless irrationality of war. War is a discursive phenomenon with its own logic as much as it is an illogical, unutterable calamity, and many of its dimensions can only be understood by paying attention to the texts written by those who experienced it firsthand. Every war story participates in previous narrative structures, ideas, and ideological framing held in common, and the texts written by serving soldiers are not exempt from these preexisting discursive frames.¹⁹ They are not more transparent, real, or authentic than any other textual product; they are not free from the cultural mediations that organize experience, a concept memorably scrutinized by Joan Scott.²⁰ But “for those who experience war first hand,” Adam McKeown rightly points out, “the tortured process of negotiating a set of conflicted and deeply personal relations to war through another set of conflicted discourses about war in order to arrive at a meaningful narrative is especially pronounced.”²¹

In dialogue with Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” the French historian Arlette Farge insists on the need to recover the things said (les choses dites) about the wars of the past as a means to avoid the interpretation of war as an eternal fatality, as some kind of recurring damnation alien to the rationality of human action: “To study war and its moments as sayable articulated events is the best way to show the reasons why they have been possible, and thus, how those events could have escaped that possibility.” Moreover, to study the things said about war, the discursive formation the soldiers themselves called “las cosas de guerra” (the matters of war), will help us “to understand its recurrence, not to rejoice on its evolution, but to realize that other scenarios have been possible, with different rationalities and passions. Always keeping in mind that in any case, what has happened could have not taken place.”²²

The recovery of the eyewitness’s gaze, the perspective of the killer and the survivor, the victor and the defeated, allows us to restore the contingency of imperial war and history. The soldiers’ specialized languages shaped a down-to-earth representation of war that avoids some of the most common traps of modern discourse on violence, such as its association with the sublime or the transcendental, sometimes even theological, understanding of the causes of armed conflict. Providence or God’s corrective punishments had little to do with the killing of men by men. Writers from the field very often identified the commanders or imperial officials that were responsible for wrong strategic decisions and offered alternative courses of action that could have avoided defeat, captivity, or carnage. Against its apparent excess, inevitability, and irrationality, war is a thoroughly human affair, and those who conduct it, from the emperor to the lowest pikeman, are entirely human. This is why the multiple voices of the early modern common soldiery, from the epic intonation of the victorious hero to the autobiographical whisper of the defeated captive or the mutinous political rumor of the returning veteran, invite us to engage with Farge’s ultimately ethical proposal of historicization.²³

In a fleeting moment of the Iliad, we hear the best soldier of all time, Achilles, playing his lyre and singing about “men’s deeds of renown” to his dear comrade Patroclus.²⁴ In this intriguing mise-en-abyme the bard and his hero become ambiguously conflated. The greatest poet of antiquity seems to dress up for a moment, however short-lived, in warrior guise, and the coarse warrior poses briefly as the persuasive epic poet. The move would be imitated and taken further by Homer’s most daring competitor. In book 9 of the Aeneid, in the roar of battle, Turnus sneaks into the Trojan camp just before Pandarus closes the gates to their Latin enemies. Among the scores of fleeing Trojans that Turnus viciously kills—Alcander, Halius, Prytanis, Noëmon, Lynceus, and others—we are told about a certain Cretheus, “friend of the Muses, the Muses’ comrade.” Like all of the Aeneid’s secondary characters, this soldier is granted a fugitive moment of glory in Virgil’s war tale. Uniquely among all of Turnus’s victims, however, Virgil takes the time to give a fully developed portrait of Cretheus as devoted poet, “always dear to his heart the song and lyre,” and always singing “of cavalry, weapons, wars and the men who fight them.”²⁵ The close parallelism between this verse (“arma uirum pugnasque canebat”) and the Aeneid’s proposition (“Arma uirumque cano”) forces the reader to make the connection: Cretheus, the soldier-poet, unmistakably resembles Virgil himself.

Unlike his compatriots and predecessors Naevius and Ennius, the founders of Roman epic, Virgil never served as a soldier.²⁶ Yet for Pedro Mexía, one of the most widely read authors of sixteenth-century Spain, the poet was the best example of “how those who are born to humble parents and lineages should follow the example of men who from lowly beginnings rose to great status.”²⁷ The son of a tinker, as Mexía read in Suetonius, this figure of Virgil was particularly well suited for our Icarian soldiers who, against all expectations about their kind, rose above their status in daring literary flight to write the songs of their lives and travails. This book tells the story of the Spanish historical counterparts of Virgil’s fictional Cretheus, the frontline comrades of the Muses who wrote about weapons, wars, and the men who fought them.