(los que saben pelear), thus articulating a public of fellow comrades-at-arms, all kinds of textual products were distributed and consumed in the soldiers’ republic of letters, and not only those produced by insiders.97 The complexity of the soldiers’ literary practices is illustrated by an episode from the Sack of Rome in 1527.
The prestigious Italian humanist Paolo Giovio, perhaps one of the most renowned historians of the time in the intellectual milieus of Renaissance Europe, had set out to write a monumental history of his own present time. His Historiarum sui temporis tomus primus (Rome: Laurentii Torrentini, 1550) started with a series of “epitomes” that summarized books 5–10, covering the years from 1498 to 1512, and 19–24, which covered the decade from 1517 to 1527. The original books seem to have been dramatically disfigured under unclear circumstances, since Giovio’s elucidation of these lacunae was contradictory and changed over time.98 First, the humanist explained that he had hidden the manuscripts in the crypt of a church, but they nonetheless fell into the hands of the furious sackers. Two Spanish captains, named Herrera and Antonio Gamboa, are said to have kept those written on vellum and bound, while disdainfully discarding everything written on paper. The former would eventually be ransomed by the humanist, imprisoned with Pope Clement VII in the Castle of Sant’Angelo; the latter was used by the soldiers as toilet paper (dissipati in foedos usos).99 According to a second version of the events, the manuscripts were recovered from the troop “with the aid of certain famous generals who understood their import for their own fame.”100 And one of Giovio’s Spanish translators gave yet another, similar account of the kidnaping of the humanist’s manuscripts. The slight variation, nonetheless, is significant, since in this case the protagonists are not two Spanish captains but the collectivity of the soldierly mass: “The soldiers came across these papers and tore some of them apart. Once peace was reestablished thanks to the pope’s commands, together with Giovio’s begging and money, they returned the books to him, although damaged and incomplete” (Viniendo estas escrituras en manos de soldados, rompieron y hicieron pedazos algunas dellas. De apaciguadas las cosas, con mandamientos del Papa, con ruegos y dineros del Jovio, volvieron los libros a su poder, aunque en algunas partes faltos y rasgados).101
While it might seem that Spanish soldiers acted in that manner out of sheer ignorance and barbarism, the opposite is quite possible. The sections seized or selectively destroyed by the Spanish soldiers were those dedicated to narrating the Italian wars between France and Spain in the first decades of the century, when the reputation of the Spanish armies’ effectiveness and ruthlessness rose exponentially in Italy and beyond. Giovio, generally a rather committed supporter of the imperial cause and the official apologist for some of its most famous commanders in Italy, was not always flattering to the imperial victors of Pavia in 1525, the same soldiers that only two years later sacked the Holy City and subdued the pope, and thus was harshly criticized by some for his occasional hostility to the Spaniards.102 Had they known this, the furious soldiers of the imperial army might not have liked what Giovio was writing about them. Were that the case, whether they ripped them apart out of rage or used them “in foedos usos” because they were otherwise useless, the gesture remains meaningful. And like the German soldiers’ defacing of Raphael’s paintings or the burning of books in the Holy City during the same episode, it would indicate a fluid, but tense, relation with Renaissance high culture on the part of the plebeian army103—meanwhile, some other Spanish soldiers harassed the pope, who had taken refuge in the castle of Sant’Angelo, by shouting out adapted versions of traditional songs and a satirically glossed Pater Noster.104
The story, in any of its versions, shows a highly complex relationship between literacy, orality, consumption, and soldierly agency. Soldiers were willing to intervene violently in the public pláticas on war through the seizure of uncomfortable historiographical works about their ethos and action. Through vehement erasure, they were rewriting the discursive representation of their own military life and public identity. Whether some enlightened generals confronted the soldierly mass to recover the papers for their own sake or some captains and anonymous soldiers partially kidnaped the material, the anecdote provides an extreme example of Michel de Certeau’s observations about the nature of cultural consumption and his warning that “the elite … always assumes that the public is moulded by the products imposed on it…. This misunderstanding assumes that ‘assimilating’ necessarily means ‘becoming similar to’ what one absorbs, and not ‘making something similar’ to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating or re-appropriating it.”105 Even if it was just an act of radical carnivalization and Bakhtinian degradation of the humanist’s writings through the workings of “the lower stratum of the body,” the gesture is still meaningful.106
The anecdote powerfully recalls the moment in Castiglione’s discussion of the theme of arms and letters when one of his chatting courtiers playfully but brutally asserts the ultimately self-evident superiority of arms over letters. “If you think the contrary,” the Count tells Bembo, “wait until you hear of a contest in which the man who defends the cause of arms is allowed to use them, just as those who defend the cause of letters make use of letters in their defense; for if each one uses his own weapons, you will see that the men of letters will lose.”107 In the episode just recounted, the soldiers’ quite literal appropriation of Giovio’s account of their action forces us to explore how the circulation of written matter, whether in print, manuscript, or oral form, contributed to the organization of a very peculiar discursive community. Although humanists and soldiers had occasion to interact and, like many other Renaissance historians, Giovio had often relied on the oral accounts of soldiers and captains for his ambitious historiographical enterprise, the story requires us to wonder how a mass of furious soldiers could have found out what a learned humanist was writing about them.108 It makes us wonder whether a group of Spanish soldiers could have accessed Giovio’s elegant humanistic Latin. Thus the “Giovio affair” suggests the necessity of taking into account the stories, opinions, and ideas that were disseminated orally in the republic of lettered soldiers and that interacted richly, as this anecdote shows, with the written culture of Renaissance Europe.
PUBLIC OPINION AND ORAL CULTURE
According to a soldier fighting in Chile in the 1640s, war had become debatable (“se ha hecho openable”).109 Indeed, war and the people who waged it were at the center of early modern forms of publicity and political discussion since the first moments of the military revolution. Massimo Rospocher has shown, in a series of important essays, the richness of the popular public sphere in the cities of Renaissance Italy.110 The business of war was, not surprisingly, the main object of public discussion all throughout the peninsula, whether in the papers being written, printed, sold, bought, and sung in the streets of Venice or in Pasquino’s anonymous posts loudly echoing the public voices of Rome. Popular poetry provided a language of political communication that circulated widely, though ephemerally, through a diversity of discursive practices, from mouth to mouth, to manuscript or print reproduction and dissemination. “Nowadays everybody discusses war” (hor tutto’l mondo di guerra raggiona), said an anonymous popular poet in 1509 Venice.111
Spanish sources confirm Rospocher’s emphasis on the matter of war as the main topic of early modern popular opinion and public discourse. The account of the battle of Pavia by common soldier Oznaya makes reference to Pasquino’s facetious coverage of the Wars of Italy. “The imperial army,” writes Oznaya, “was ignored to the point that a paper appeared one morning on Maese Pasquino: ‘Whoever knows anything about the Emperor’s camp, which got lost in the mountains of Genoa a few days ago, please reveal it and he will be rewarded’” (Era tan poco el caso que del ejército cesáreo se hacía, que en este tiempo amanesció puesta una cédula en el Pasquino de Roma deste tenor: “Quien quiera que supiese del campo del emperador, el cual se perdió entre las montañas de la ribera de Génova pocos días ha, véngalo manifestando y darle han buen hallazgo”). A few days later, after a successful military campaign for the imperial camp, Pasquino mockingly announced that the imperial army had finally appeared.112 High-ranking Spanish officials in Italy also showed an acute interest in street rumors related to
