and an integral part of the socialization processes of the Renaissance soldiery. Furthermore, our doubts about the actual truth of some of these statements should not prevent us from realizing the way in which they associate the authority of the written text with its material production, with the immediacy and urgency of imperial warfare and frontier spaces, with the contingencies of a military expedition on the Chilean frontier or of a sea journey from Macau to Goa.
In addition to providing evidence for the intensity of literary practice in the spaces of war, the discussion thus far has made it clear that for these writing soldiers the construction of discursive authority is based upon the fundamental link between the soldier’s own enunciation, the material conditions of the battlefield, and the professional practices and institutions of the military corporation. The elaboration of this contiguity of pen and sword, of writing and fighting, is not always free of tension, but it will be crucial for understanding the rhetorical appeal of these texts for the society of soldiers. Moreover, the urgency of in situ writing, the material ephemerality of the soldierly text, is also important in understanding the memorializing drive of much of the heroic textual production on war. For “those who live dying” (los que moriendo vivimos), as veteran Torres Naharro put it, leaving a trace of who they were in writing must have been a particularly pressing impulse.76
Cristóbal Rodríguez Alva, a soldier who fought in Italy and the Netherlands during the last years of the sixteenth century, held the matter of his epic poem La inquieta Flandes (1594) to “have been entirely seen by my eyes” (es toda obra por mis ojos vista), as did many other soldiers who offered their own firsthand accounts of their and their comrades’ exploits, but he also claimed that the lines of his poem were “watered with the blood of my veins, and written among the arms and the furor of death” (regada con la sangre de mis venas y escrita en medio de armas y furor de muerte).77 However rhetorical, the image is a powerful reminder of the dire conditions under which soldiers carried out their daily lives. The wrecking of the body in the spaces of war, whether actual or metaphorical, threatens to disintegrate the very material support of soldierly narratives. The fragile materiality of the text is, like the bodies of soldier-poets, always threatened by the ravages of war. Writing on the front line entailed a sort of precarious survival amid the violent urgencies and unpredictable contingencies of early modern warfare.
TRAVELING TEXTS
Ercilla did indeed manage to preserve those pieces of authentic writing produced amid the roar of war. He brought them back to the metropolis from the farthest frontier of the empire and put them together in print. In the prologue discussed earlier, published in the first Araucana of 1569, Ercilla appealed to a public of fellow warriors who shared the same socioprofessional spaces, the many “keen to the matters of war” who “were present to many of the events that I narrate here” (aficionados a las cosas de guerra; que se hallaron en muchas cosas de las que aquí escribo) and who were taken to be the final guarantors of the truth so carefully produced by the Caesarian rhetoric of the fighting and writing soldier.78 Which is to say that soldiers usually expected fellow soldiers to read their texts. We know that some of the brothers-in-arms who were present in the brutal war of Chile did indeed get to read the poem. Some of them even used it as legal proof of their participation in the conquest of Chile, referring to Ercilla’s poetic stanzas as some kind of probanza de mérito, a witness’s sworn testimony to one’s deeds.79 Irving Leonard suggested that La Araucana was a popular read on the ships of the carrera de Indias, while the poem also circulated widely among the soldiers of the army of Flanders, back on the European war stage, as we will see in detail in Chapter 4.80 The highly organized military practices, agents, and institutions of the Spanish Habsburgs provided the material basis for the fast circulation and consumption of cultural products among the curious soldiers. While the previous section focused on the production of textual materials in the spaces of war, the pages that follow will revolve around reading and exchanging in a soldierly republic of letters that was quickly becoming global.
Soldiers were usually the first to reach the edge of the empire and the last to leave, so they had a particularly intense and concrete experience of imperial space. Regardless of specific itineraries and military careers, soldiers often experienced extended travel across several territories of the empire. When the soldiers of the second Cambodia Campaign of 1594 faced a larger Ming Chinese army in Churdumuco, today’s Phnom Penh, they heartened each other by recalling that they “were old soldiers, with experience in the Low Countries, France, Africa, and England, in addition to these parts of the West … the Philippines” (éramos soldados viejos que en Flandes, Francia, África e Inglaterra y en estas partes del poniente … las islas Filipinas), according to the testimony of one of the participants.81 Their movement, as we have seen, was crucial to structure some of the major routes and networks of imperial power, including those uniting Spain with the Americas, Portugal with its eastern colonies, Italy with the Netherlands, and Mexico with the Philippines. The Habsburg courts, the African and Italian presidios, the migrating military camps of Europe’s battlefields, the Asian and American colonial garrisons, and the metropolis of the returning soldier were some of the physical and social spaces in which soldiers had a key role as cultural agents.82 These soldiers were not only producers of epic, lyric, and relaciones but also consumers of the same kind of products; they were not only the makers but also the partakers of an intense literary circulation and exchange. The vast network of spaces articulated around the political and military institutions of early modern European empires facilitated the wide and rapid circulation of literary works in the context of a never-ending and worldwide imperial contest; it also provided an institutional ground for the formation of military publics. “The increased mobility of things themselves,” it has been argued, “created public life in early modern culture.”83 The practices that allowed for the global mobility of imperial armies—travel, march, sea voyage, deployment, encampment—turned soldiers into crucial actors in the global circulation of textual materials during the period.
Some scholars have argued that the rise of the news market in early modern Europe was closely related to military conflict, particularly the Habsburg-Valois wars of the first half of the sixteenth century and the Mediterranean confrontation with the Ottomans.84 Soldiers were indeed key agents in the production, dissemination, and consumption of news and ballads, in the form of pliegos de cordel, or broadsheets, from the very first days of the military and the printing revolutions. The Coplas noevamente fechas de la guerra y presa de Fuente Rabía y de Salvia tierra y Monleón (Barcelona: Carles Amorós, ca. 1525) were composed by Juan del Rincón, a “soldier who was in all of the said war” (soldado que se halló en toda la dicha guerra) of Navarre in the 1510s. Some Coplas de la presa de Túnez are said to have been “made by a soldier” (fechas por un soldado), who wrote in traditional octosyllabic verse about the 1535 imperial conquest of the North African city. Hernando Colón’s bibliographies also tell us about another anonymous “soldier who says in verse that the king of France is the cause of the Emperor’s wars” (soldado que dice en coplas ser el rey de Francia causa de la guerra que tiene el Emperador), also lost today. Some romances and other forms of traditional octosyllabic verse were composed about the landmark battle of Pavia, sometimes based on the imperial commanders’ reports from the battlefield, such as the Coplas nuevamente hechas al caso acaescido en Italia en la batalla de Pavía, “which can be sung to the melody of Condes Claros” (las cuales se pueden cantar al tono de Condes Claros).85 The conquest of Granada, the never-ending Wars of Italy, the struggle with the Ottomans for the control of the Mediterranean, and even the New World battles of the empire were all sung far and wide in the traditional form of romances and coplas and distributed in print through the ephemeral, disposable materiality of the pliego suelto.
Early in 1551, Joannes Steelsius printed Romance de la conquista de la ciudad de África en Berbería in Antwerp, which had been written during the Habsburg reconquest of the Tunisian city of Mahdia (also known as Africa) in September 1550. The ballad, “sent by a soldier who participated in the conquest to a friend of him who resides in Italy”
