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,