of poetry through the complex political and social geography of the imperial spaces of war, from North Africa to Italy and from Italy to Antwerp.86 Sometimes this geography of exchange, which is coextensive with the physical and institutional spaces of the Habsburg military machine, is nonetheless surprisingly dynamic and efficient. Baltasar del Hierro, a veteran from the same Mahdia campaign serving in Milan in 1560, published a sonnet about the Portuguese viceroy Constantino de Bragança’s military success in India in 1559. In a little over a year, the war news had traveled from Goa to Lombardy, presumably carried by Portuguese soldiers, had been transformed into a sonnet by an infantryman garrisoned in Milan, and had reached the popular Sevillian printing workshop of Sebastián Trujillo. The propagation of news and poetry, of oral and printed texts on the matters of war, is one of the main pillars of an increasingly transnational soldiers’ republic of letters. The constitution of a public around the matters of war also reinforced a sense of corporate identity and proud solidarity among soldiers who were serving far away from each other, an identity that oftentimes was at odds with the aims and methods of empire administrators. As we will see, the global reach of the Habsburg military corporation generated solidarities and fraternizations—“that familiar headache of military administrators” in Hale’s words—between soldiers and civilians of different nations, different religious allegiances, and even different sides of the conflict.87
Literacy rates, I argued earlier, seem to have been higher in the army than in other social spaces and professional groups, allowing for the articulation of relatively large publics. Bernardino de Escalante took for granted that many infantrymen, to whom he addressed his Diálogos del Arte militar (1583), would be able to read his book. “I decided to write these military dialogues,” he says, “so that the fresh, unexperienced recruits can quickly become expert soldiers by reading them” (me determiné a hacer estos diálogos militares … para que los soldados bisoños, leyéndolos, se hagan pláticos en breve tiempo).88 Being a priest and a commissary of the Holy Office of the Inquisition at the time he wrote his treatise, Escalante made sure to point out that he had been “raised in war since childhood,” once again grounding his discursive authority in his own military experience. It was natural for military writers to assume that their works would circulate fluidly and rapidly among the spaces of war, and he envisioned his treatise helping soldiers in “the provinces of Peru, New Spain, the Philippines and other islands of that ocean.” Furthermore, just as bisoños were expected to be trained in the arts of war by the pláticos, it seems that training in letters was also part of the process of military socialization. Escalante offers his work as only a provisional contribution to the art of war “until some of you can write with more propriety about this art, since you practice it so courageously” (hasta que algunos de vuestras mercedes escriban con más propriedad esta arte pues la ejercitan con tanto valor). If we believe Escalante, the ability to read and write seems to have been widespread among those “illustrious gentlemen” (muy ilustres señores)—a common form of soldierly respectful address, regardless of social background—“of the Spanish infantry that serve in the presidios of the kingdoms and estates of king Philip, our lord” (de la infantería española que asiste de presidio en los reinos y estados del rey Felipe nuestro señor).89 Escalante was not particularly self-delusional: a Jesuit criticizing the newly founded Reales Estudios de San Isidro (1629) claimed that what was taught in the Chair of Fortifications in one year “would be read amply by a soldier from Flanders in three months.”90 Books must have been as familiar a presence on the front line as in the college classroom.
Texts, as Escalante suggests and we know well, also traveled easily between the Old World and the New thanks to a large extent to the conquistadores and settlers who ventured to cross the Atlantic. The circulation and consumption of books, particularly those of chivalry, among the Spanish conquistadores is a well-known story since Irving Leonard’s classic study, although his idealizing view of this phenomenon has been rightly criticized.91 Books also circulated among garrisoned or retired soldiers in the Indies. In his will, the Chilean veteran Melchor Xufré del Águila declared that he owned “about eighty bound books” (como ochenta cuerpos de libros), most of which we should assume came from Spain. The retired soldier also stated that he left “a ream of paper” (una resma de papel) and three more books at Lieutenant Andrés de Góngora’s house, which he was supposed to sell as part of a debt settlement.92 According to Bernal Díaz, moreover, the conquistadores of Mexico carried in their memories romances viejos—old narrative ballads of octosyllabic verse that rhymed assonantically—that were frequently sung during the conquest wars and to a certain extent shaped their interpretations of New World events. In turn, the heroic feats of the respected commander Hernán Cortés gave way to the composition of new ballads that were transmitted orally and crossed the Atlantic back to the metropolis.93
The spaces generated by global armed conflict and imperial expansion during the early modern period also allowed for the cross-cultural dissemination of all kinds of literary products and genres, far beyond ballads, relaciones, or sonnets. With the occasion of Philip IV’s ascension to the throne in 1621, the cabildo—municipal council—of Manila decided to organize a theater festival to bring a glorious end to the city’s celebrations. Despite the fact that Manila had a university and a large number of active lettered clerics, the cabildo appointed the soldiers of the San Felipe garrison to carry out every aspect of the performances. According to Diego de Rueda y Mendoza, one of the soldiers who participated in this theatrical event, the cabildo found “among the soldiers of this garrison some skilled in this matter [of theater] to whom it commissioned three [plays]. Some of them being men of good taste, and others witty, funny, and talented musicians, they took them in charge, and designed the stage, dramaturgy, and costumes” (habiendo hallado entre los soldados de este campo algunos práticos en esta facultad les encargaron tres; que unos como hombres de buen gusto y otros de donaire y gracejo y diestros músicos las tomaron a su cargo y fueron dispuniendo de su traza, invenciones y vestuario).94 Soldiers of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian origin were present among the attendants to the performances, along with a highly heterogeneous audience of Tagalog, Chinese, Mexican, and Japanese civilians who lived in Manila, one of the most diverse cities of the early modern world. Similarly, Rueda y Mendoza was invited to a Chinese wedding in Manila where he described “a comedy in the Chinese style” (una comedia … a usanza de China) that was performed over lunch.95 Miguel de Loarca, another soldier serving in the Philippines like Diego de Rueda, also described a Chinese performance in his Relación del viaje que hecimos a la China. Being received by a local governor in southern China, the soldiers and priests in the Spanish legation were the privileged audience to “a play, and the entremeses lasted for the whole meal, and there were singers and vihuela players” (una comedia, que duraron todos los entremeses toda la comida, hubo cantores, músicos de vihuela de arco).96 By virtue of their wandering, multicultural, and socially heterogeneous nature, the armies of the monarchy of Spain were spaces of cultural encounter as much as they were the frightening carriers of extreme violence that they were and are known to be. The production, circulation, and reception of the body of literature on the matters of war were intricately related to the progressive formation and increasing institutionalization of these spaces and with the social practices and discourses that constituted them.
The spaces of war were not structured sites of assembly but unstable, moving, and heterogeneous spaces of cultural production and exchange. Lettered soldiers are bound together not only for their interest in the matters of war as producers but also as consumers and agents of exchange of literary materials. The circulation of texts discussing “las cosas de guerra” among its practitioners is crucial to understanding the soldiers’ republic of letters but also the society of soldiers at large. One of the main arguments of this book is that soldierly literature, both manuscript and printed texts about the matters of war, was not only distributed in the already existing structures of social intercourse enabled by the global military machine but also constitutive of them, being a crucial factor in the articulation of the society of soldiers. The literary sociability enabled by the circulation and consumption of these multiple forms of writing, moreover, contributed to a great extent to the development of a collective identity for the common soldiery.
Whereas
