was surprised by the fact that Pasquino could only produce positive gossip about one of the most prestigious imperial generals in the Wars of Italy, Alfonso de Ávalos (1502–46), Marquis of Vasto.113 Pasquino, the Roman machine of popular rumor and political opinion, had been interested in the business of war ever since the battered statue was unearthed from the underground of Renaissance Rome.
Pasquino’s ways traveled easily to the New World. After the conquest of Tenochtitlán, the soldiers and their captains engaged in disputes over the division of the spoils, and consequently disruptive rumors (murmuración) emerged about Cortés’s justice toward his subordinates. Although Bernal Díaz does not go as far as other soldiers in accusing the captain of keeping the gold treasure for himself, he records the episode: “While Cortés was in Coyoacán lodging in some palaces that had their walls plastered and white-washed on which it was easy to write with charcoal and other inks, numerous rather malicious sentences (motes) appeared [on them] every morning, some written in prose and others in verse, in the way of pasquinades” (Y como Cortés estaba en Coyoacán y posaba en unos palacios que tenía blanqueadas y encaladas las paredes, donde buenamente se podía escribir en ellas con carbones y con otras tintas, amanecía cada mañana escritos muchos motes, algunos en prosa y otros en metros, algo maliciosos, a manera de mase-pasquines).114 Bernal readily summarizes some of these coplas—or traditional Spanish octosyllabic stanzas rhyming in consonant—but refuses to reproduce them because most of them contained “words that cannot be put in this story” (palabras que no son para poner en esta relación). First Cortés took pride in answering the accusations “by good rhymes much to the point” (por buenos consonantes y muy a propósito) since the captain “was something of a poet himself” (era algo poeta). When the coplas became too impudent, Cortés famously wrote “a blank wall is the paper of fools” (pared blanca, papel de necios), to which the restless soldiers replied: “and of wise men and of truths and His Majesty will soon know it” (aun de sabios y verdades, y Su Majestad lo sabrá muy presto). Cortés ended up threatening the satirists with serious punishment.115
Ballad singing and writing were pervasive in the soldiers’ everyday practices in the New World and contributed to the rapid circulation of military news. Among Pizarro’s men, one Saravia used satirical circumstantial coplas in his correspondence with conquistador Pascual de Andagoya. The improvisational skills and malicious use of traditional ballads and songs by the caustic Francisco de Carvajal—a feared old veteran soldier and field marshal of Gonzalo Pizarro during Peru’s civil wars in the late 1540s—were proverbial. Lope de Aguirre’s seemingly demential rebellion gave way to the composition of new songs usually recorded in writing by other soldiers, such as Gonzalo de Zúñiga.116
In the wildly rich narrative world of Juan de Castellanos’s Elegías de varones ilustres, a voluminous epic history mostly on the conquest of New Granada, the author praises his longtime friend and veteran Lorenzo Martín, a commoner like the author himself, as an accomplished poet in the old Castilian style. Famous for his “gracias y facecias,” Castellanos tells us, Martín intends to cheer up the melancholic survivors of starvation during an expedition to the New Granadan northwest by reciting a “stream of improvised redondillas” (torrents / de coplas redondillas repentinas), of which Castellanos reproduces only six that someone copied for him. Martín’s oral stanzas poke fun at some of his famished comrades, one of whom has just devoured with delight a tallow candle. Their clothes have grown large at the same rate that their bodies shrank; the stumbling movement of the undernourished is likened to a gambeta dance; their napes are all peels (hollejos); and their empty bowels happily sing villancicos, a form of Castilian popular verse. Martín resorts to the eschatological humor so dear to Renaissance culture, popular or otherwise, to laugh at some comrades who cannot stop farting after sustaining themselves with only leaves of the bihao plant for two weeks. The sacrifice of the conquering soldier, which in most instances bestows honor and legitimacy upon the bodies and voices of the empire’s agents, is carnivalized here with a Rabelaisian degrading imagery of popular and oral stock.117
The soldiers’ republic of letters, its peculiar publicity, was built upon a complex interaction between the spoken and the written word. The production, circulation, and consumption of soldierly writing should not be dissociated from the many forms of oral speech that constituted everyday military sociability in the spaces of war. A rich, tumultuous oral culture, constantly intersecting with its written forms, emerges when we look at the sources. Bragging, cursing, arguing, joking, gossiping, conversing, and even “speaking soldier” (hablar a lo soldado), among other oral practices that shaped their public identity, are crucial for understanding not only the social lives of the common men-at-arms but also their literary and political culture.118 Francisco de Quevedo referred to the soldiers’ jargon as “lengua soldada” in La vida del Buscón and the petitioning soldier who accompanies Pablos on his way to Segovia considered cursing and swearing the very substance of the soldier’s profession. Informal conversation about recent battles, or about ancient warfare for that matter, arose in every corner of their makeshift encampments. Epistles exchanged among fellow soldiers deployed on different fronts finish conversations that started in the same trench. Ballads created or improvised after the heat of the battle are sent to friends or to potential printers, who in turn distribute them as widely circulated pliegos de cordel. Traveling bisoños disseminate political rumor from the court, while the returning veteran brings the latest military news from the battlefield to the streets of Seville or Madrid. Collective criticism of the commanders’ strategy by their subordinates could start in the camarade’s shared tent and end up reaching the streets of Milan in the form of a satirical pamphlet. “The fluid, transitional nature of communication in the sixteenth century” between the written and the spoken word also applied to the discursive practices of the soldiers’ republic of letters.119
Throughout his military career as infantry captain and castellan of Capua, Marcos de Isaba wrote a series of “papers,” as he called them, that were collected with the goal of “getting the military back to the good order and discipline it used to have” (la Milicia torne a la buena diciplina que solía tener) and published in 1594 under the title Cuerpo enfermo de la milicia española.120 To open his examination of the history of warfare and empire, Isaba refers to the frequent discussions that took place orally in the social spaces of the professional soldiery: “In their everyday conversations, those soldiers who are somewhat curious wonder about what was the origin of ancient soldiering, who first went out to conquer, and where were arms invented for the first time” (En plática se trata cada día entre gente de guerra un poco curiosa, sobre el principio de la milicia antigua, por saber quiénes y cuáles y dónde fueron los primeros que salieron a conquistar y dónde fue la primera invención de las armas).121 The discursive formation of “the matters of war” is thus constituted not only by the texts written by fighting and witnessing soldiers but also by their everyday, informal, oral communicative practices. More important, the tools and technologies of their professional trade are not isolated from the history and politics of empire in Isaba’s discourse. For Isaba, accustomed to the long sieges and bloody battles of the Italian Wars, the wars of the past were occasional, short, and usually clement with the vanquished. Eventually, however, “kingdoms and senates and empires with many provinces were formed, and they invented many kinds of weapons,” including “gunpowder and artillery, arquebuses, muskets, mines, fire trumpets, bombards and many other instruments” (después formándose reinos y senados e imperios de tantas provincias como hay en él, inventaron otros muchos géneros de armas … pólvora y artillería, arcabuces, mosquetes, minas, morteretes, trompas de fuego y tanto género de instrumentos) that made wars longer, more cruel, and unjust.122 For this and other soldiers who engaged in the professional pláticas of their trade, military technology and imperial expansion were inextricably linked. Equally familiar with the material realities of war and with the political and practical reason derived from years of service in different imperial fronts, the soldiers of the republic placed the politics and history of warfare at the center of their verbal exchanges. The technicalities of the business of war were inextricably linked to the political history of empire, to its legitimacy and its
