Front Lines. Miguel Martinez
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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