form, proved time and again to be dangerous for the political elites of the empire. Military authorities were thus always concerned about the vitality of the soldiers’ verbal practices and repeatedly tried to curtail the proliferation of words about the matters of war. Open criticism of the decisions, strategies, and general policies of the military high command and the imperial political authorities was frequent both in the civil public sphere and in the soldiers’ conversations. In many cases, this criticism was tolerated and channeled through certain genres, institutions, and practices that helped temper and integrate them in official discourse. But more often than not, soldierly pláticas were rowdy and untamable. The soldiers’ public sphere was a tumultuous and noisy space for the exchange of war news, satire, panegyric, and rumor, where consent and dissent were negotiated between the military and civilian authorities and the soldierly mass.
Let us pause for a moment at a soldierly exchange that shows the complex interaction between private and public, oral and written communication, and of tolerated and intolerable talk in the soldierly republic of letters. In 1568, Jerónimo de Arbolanche and Sancho de Londoño corresponded about Charles V’s imperial defeat in Metz against the French in 1552—public discussion about military matters could last for years after the campaigns had ended. At Metz, an imperial army of 55,000 led by Charles V tried to recover the city, garrisoned with 5,800 French soldiers after Henri II occupied it in the summer of 1552. The siege lasted from October of that year to January 1553, ending in a calamitous defeat for the emperor that left many dead mostly from cold, hunger, and disease. As we will see, the high number of casualties and the abandonment of those who were sick and wounded in the fields seem to have generated a heated debate among the troops.123
Jerónimo de Arbolanche was very likely a commoner from Tudela, Navarre, known in literary history as the author of the long and now forgotten antiquarian poem Las Abidas, which deals with the mythical prehistoric past of Spain. What has remained unknown even to his biographers is that he was also a soldier serving in the Sicilian tercio of Alba’s army and that he was mobilized in the 1567 long march to the Netherlands by the Spanish road.124 Sancho de Londoño, a minor nobleman from La Rioja, has always been considered by military historians as one of the finest soldiers and officers of the sixteenth century, a counselor to the 3rd Duke of Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, and the general (maestre de campo) of the Lombardy tercio. His poetic activities, however, have remained completely unknown to cultural historians.125 The poetic exchange of these two “íntimo[s] amigo[s]”—as Londoño himself refers to their relationship—is exemplary of the production and circulation of public opinion about military and political matters in the social spaces of professional warfare.126 Jerónimo de Arbolanche’s epistle is in Italian tercets, written from Brussels with the usual bitter tone of war lyric, and offers a vivid depiction of the hasty daily life of a common soldier walking the Spanish road:
Figure 3. Poesías del Maestre de Campo don Sancho de Londoño. BNE, Mss/21738, 116r.
¡Cuán miserable es la vida del soldado!
Estaba el tercio en Malta ahora ha un año
y está en Brabante ya muy sosegado.
Todos nosotros, si yo no me engaño,
temíamos salir de Lombardía
para emprender camino tan estraño.127
(How miserable is the soldier’s life! One year ago, I was in the Malta tercio and now we are in Brabant, peacefully. If I am not deceived, we were all scared of leaving Lombardy to walk this unfamiliar road.)
In his epistle, Arbolanche tries to convince Londoño to write a poem about the epic feats of their general and the latter’s patron, the great Duke of Alba.128 What captures the commander’s attention in Arbolanche’s letter, however, is a passing reference to the French city of Metz on the army’s way to Brabant, a fleeting mention that would prompt Londoño to offer a response several times longer than his friend’s motivating epistle:
Que a Mez no vimos, quizá porque pena
no nos causase ver su ancha campaña
de blancos huesos de españoles llena.129
(We did not see Metz, perhaps to avoid the grief of seeing its wide surrounding countryside whitened by Spanish bones.)
With his hyperbolic metonymy about the Spanish bones covering the field, Arbolanche is obviously referring to the high number of casualties at Metz. More than fifteen years after the siege, the place was still marked in the memory of the soldiers by the carnage of 1552, and a soldier serving in the Sicilian tercio and walking the Spanish road on their way to Flanders could not help mentioning it in a letter to a more veteran soldier who would walk the same road in a different contingent a few weeks later.
In his reply, Londoño recounts the details of the military campaign of Metz from the perspective of a captain in charge of a company of arquebusiers, reserving for himself a leading role in every strategic development, praising Alba, and making veiled references to other officers he considers responsible for the defeat because they did not follow his advice. Yet for the veteran commander, the main intent of his letter is to “uproot such an error” (desarraigar tan mal concepto) about the number of victims by contrasting the army’s muster rolls and the number of fallen soldiers of his own company with those circulating in informal soldierly pláticas, which he intends to prove false. Londoño points out, by the end of his epistle, that “the talk was started” (se ha la plática movido) by “so many bad poems” (tantas trovas mal trovadas) that it is difficult to set the count straight in the public’s perception of the events.130 Participating soldiers and witnesses generated a substantial body of discourse and opinion that circulated publicly, mostly in verse, and that Londoño aims at disavowing in the soldierly public sphere.131 Oral and written pláticas fed each other in a fluid interaction that oftentimes confronts the official narrative about specific military events or about the nature and limits of war and empire in general. As if he did not want to contribute to the noise of the soldierly public opinion, he instructs his friend Arbolanche to destroy his own poetic letters: “Once read, sir, I beg you to tear them apart” (Que leídas las rompáis, señor, os pido).132 Londoño signed his letter “in Liexa, without Mars and without Apollo / … lacking everything that we long for, / this year of sixty eight, / except for reading and writing” (quedo en Liexa sin Marte y sin Apolo / … sin cuanto, en fin, por bien se procura / este año de sesenta y ocho quedo / excepto la lección y la escriptura).133 The reproduction of the soldierly republic of letters, favored by the military otium of peacetime, herein remains assured, and the complex interplay between oral and written modes of textual production and exchange, a determining feature of the soldiers’ literary culture, is clearly in evidence.
Class tensions within the army, a constant source of pláticas about the matters of war, may have also been at play in the public discussions and soldierly trovas about what happened in Metz and in Arbolanche and Londoño’s private exchange about it. According to the famous French surgeon Ambroise Paré, present at the siege of Metz, the Duke of Alba “declared to the Emperor that the souldiers dyed dayly, yet, more than the number of two hundred, and that there was but little hope to enter into the Citty.” The emperor then asked whether his men dying under the walls of the sieged city “were gentlemen of remarke or quality,” to which Alba replied that “they were all poore souldiers.” Charles V’s reply was quite crude: “Then, sayd he, it makes no matter if they dye, comparing them to caterpillers and grashoppers, which eate the buddes of the earth. And if they were of any fashion, they would not bee in the campe for twelve shillings the month.”134 The anecdote may very well be false, particularly considering that Paré
