Front Lines. Miguel Martinez
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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