Front Lines. Miguel Martinez
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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