order to control the proliferating practice of mutiny:
Otrosí por excusar los motines y los medios que se usan para movellos y cuajallos, se debe mandar que todos los Capitanes cuando recibieren los soldados, entiendan si saben escrebir y hagan que los que los [sic] supieren, escriban sus nombres y los de sus padres, madres y tierras en un libro que cada furrier tenga para tal efecto, con lo cual en gran parte se excusará el poner de los carteles, pues pocos saben disimular tan bien su letra que en algo no conforme y se pueda conoscer, teniendo cómo poder cotejarla, que pocos en tales casos se osan fiar de otros.147
(In order to avoid mutinies and the means they use to organize them successfully, all captains must inquire if the soldiers they enlist know how to write; and those who do, must write their names and the names of their fathers, mothers and homelands in a book kept by the quartermasters. With this we will avoid the hanging of posters, since very few know how to dissimulate their handwriting to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and we will be able to collate it, since in these cases they never trust anyone else to write them.)
Both the practice of the mutiny cartel or poster and the authorities’ effort to suppress it insist upon the spread of literacy within the army: there were enough literate infantry soldiers to force military authorities to keep track of them in the quartermasters’ (furrieres) books. Writing was a valuable skill for the captains and other officers who were in charge of administering and disciplining an infantry company but also for rank-and-file, potentially mutinous soldiers. It was instrumental, as we have seen, in the organization of imperial armies, a crucial technology to sustain the structures upon which the defense and expansion of empire relied. But as Londoño knew all too well, writing also allowed for the organization of the social and political resistance previously, and simultaneously, articulated in the soldiers’ oral practices.
Londoño’s regulation tellingly speaks to the complex relation between the discursive practices, written and oral, and the political culture of the soldiers. But more important, it stands as an illuminating metaphor of the power of writing in relation to the practices of imperial war, showing that literacy enabled subversion. However conventional in the rhetoric of dedications and preliminary poems, the contiguity of the pen and the sword was potentially dangerous. Just as literate soldiers could help start a mutiny and disturb imperial practice on the field, they could also tell and read stories that voiced some of the exploitative conditions under which they worked or challenge the basic tenets and goals of imperial practice and discourse.
CHAPTER 2
The Truth About War
ROLDÁN AND THE KING OF FRANCE
In one of the most spectacular military events of the century, Charles V’s imperial troops famously captured the French king Francis I at the battle of Pavia in February 1525. Juan de Oznaya, a common infantryman who participated in this and other campaigns of the Wars of Italy (1494–1559), recounted in 1544 how some rank-and-file Spanish soldiers had the chance, while they marched after the battle, to chat with the most powerful monarch in Christian Europe:1
En esto llegó un soldado español arcabucero, llamado Roldán, y bien se le podía llamar por su esfuerzo. Traía dos pelotas de plata y una de oro de su arcabuz, en la mano; y llegado al rey, le dice: “Señor, Vuestra Alteza sepa que ayer cuando supe que la batalla se había de dar, yo hice seis pelotas de plata para vuestros Mosiores, y la de oro para vos. De las de plata, las cuatro yo creo que fueron bien empleadas, porque no las eché sino para sayo de brocado o carmesí. Otras muchas de plomo he tirado por ahí a gente común; musiores no topé más, por esto me sobraron dos de las suyas. La de oro véisla aquí y agradecedme la buena voluntad, que deseaba daros la más honrosa muerte que a príncipe se ha dado, pero pues no quiso Dios que en la batalla os viese, tomalda para ayuda a vuestro rescate, que ocho ducados pesa; una onza tiene.” El rey tendió la mano y la tomó, y le dijo que le agradescía el deseo que había tenido y más la obra que en darle la pelota hacía.2
(And then there arrived a Spanish soldier, an arquebusier named Roldán, a truly fitting name for such a valiant man. He came to the king carrying in his hand two bullets made of silver and one of gold, and he told him: “Lord, your highness should know that when I found out yesterday that the battle would take place today, I cast six silver bullets for your noble vassals and one of gold for yourself. I believe I made good use of four out of six silver bullets, for I fired them into gilded brocade and crimson shirts. I fired off many others, made of lead, towards the common people, because I could not come across more noblemen, and thus I have two left. But this gold one right here (you should thank my goodwill) I saved to ensure you the most honorable death that a prince has ever received. God did not want me to see you during the battle, so here you go, have it and count it as my contribution to your ransom, for it is one ounce, worth eight ducats!” The king took it in his hand and retorted that he was grateful for his thoughtfulness, but even more than that he appreciated receiving the bullet in that fashion.)
When collated with other available sources, Oznaya’s seems like a remarkably rich and reliable historical account of the watershed imperial victory at Pavia. The factual accuracy of his war story about his comrade Roldán, however, is harder to assess—if not completely off. It resembles too closely the structure of the facetiae and apothegms so dear to learned humanists and popular audiences alike during the Renaissance. But it also resonates with many war stories that, orally or in writing, circulated in the soldiers’ republic of letters. For modern readers, it may seem hard to believe that a soldier would spend over two months’ worth of salary in making a gold bullet, but the rituals of early modern warfare and the codes of soldierly gallantry or bizarría could potentially explain the soldier’s liberal, cavalier attitude. Regardless of the actual factuality of the episode, however, Oznaya would probably agree with his modern counterpart, the Vietnam veteran and fiction writer Tim O’Brien: “I had to make up a few things, but listen, it’s still true.”3
Indeed, Oznaya’s apothegmatic anecdote reveals many of the truths about modern warfare with which Renaissance authors had to come to terms. Roldán’s actions and sayings distill a mix of respect and contempt for his betters—no other than the king of France and his most noble vassals—that is characteristic of the popular soldierly ethos in early modern Europe. The use of a distinctly oral register and a somewhat debased idiom of vassalage to blatantly address his superiors is peculiar to the linguistic behavior of the plático soldiers, as was the playful quipping about the rather serious matter of killing and dying in battle. The commoner’s pride in having slaughtered a bunch of noblemen not in single chivalric combat but with his arquebus, the most plebeian of weapons, is indicative of the shocking effects that the military revolution had on previous beliefs, attitudes, and practices of warfare. The truth about war was that in Pavia, on February 25, 1525, a plebeian Spanish rank-and-file soldier could have shot down the king of France—whether the bullet was made of gold or lead, whether Oznaya’s story happened as he recounted it or otherwise. Eight ducats, two months of the arquebusier’s salary: that was the price of the king’s life for Roldán, and that was Roldán’s insolent contribution to his ransom. The truth about war was that the new military technologies and tactics had forever altered the social logics of warfare and of its representation.
Roldán is a somewhat unlikely name for a Spaniard of the time in any of its variants, but it must have surely been a common nickname for soldiers, either seriously extolling military attributes or ironically mocking excessive bravado. Whether real or fictional, the name of this particular character reveals the extent to which the matière de France, as contained in both Spanish romances, or ballads, and Italian romanzi, or narrative chivalric poems, had penetrated the spaces of the early modern soldiery. Yet Oznaya’s war story also strongly emphasizes the distance between Roland, the medieval paladin unfailingly loyal to the king of the Franks, and Roldán, the Spanish plebeian arquebusier trying to kill him—and arrogantly giving him some change for his ransom. The narrative and ideological order
