Front Lines
MATERIAL TEXTS
SERIES EDITORS
Roger Chartier
Joseph Farrell
Anthony Grafton
Leah Price
Peter Stallybrass
Michael F. Suarez, S.J.
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Front Lines
SOLDIERS’ WRITING IN THE EARLY MODERN HISPANIC WORLD
Miguel Martínez
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS Philadelphia
THIS BOOK IS MADE POSSIBLE BY A COLLABORATIVE GRANT FROM THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION.
© 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-4842-5
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Muses’ Comrades
1. The Soldiers’ Republic of Letters
3. Rebellion, Captivity, and Survival
ABBREVIATIONS
| AGI | Archivo General de Indias. Accessed through PARES: Portal de Archivos Españoles. |
| AGS | Archivo General de Simancas. GyM: Guerra y Marina. |
| BAE | Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. 305 vols. Madrid: M. D. Rivadeneyra, 1846–1999. |
| BNE | Biblioteca Nacional de España. |
| CODOIN | Colección de Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de España. 112 vols. Madrid: Impr. de la Viuda de Calero, 1842–95. |
| HSA | Hispanic Society of America. |
| JCB | John Carter Brown Library. |
| RAH | Real Academia de la Historia. |
Front Lines
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,