Roldán, the Spanish arquebusier, also contrasts sharply with the most famous reincarnation of his namesake in the days of the battle of Pavia. Cantos 9 and 11 of Ariosto’s 1532 edition of Orlando furioso fictionalized the revolting effects that gunpowder had for the chivalric imagination of European aristocracy. Cimosco, king of Frisia, used against Count Orlando a “strange new weapon.”4 The arquebus is in Ariosto’s fiction a hellish invention of some northern, aggressive tyrant, and it will take Orlando himself to throw it into the ocean, so that no one could ever recover it: “that never more a cavalier may be / advantaged by your aid, nor evil gain.” A legendary necromancer, however, would retrieve “the infernal machine” with a spell. The arquebus, which stands, metonymically, for the radical transformation of warfare in the first moments of the military revolution, is alien to the referential universe of romanzo fiction. The genre can only rationalize it by tracing a mythical genealogy that vaguely refers to the historical invention. But the moral condemnation of gunpowder as the destroyer of individual valor and chivalric heroism had deep social implications. The fraudulent weapon of lowly cowards, the arquebus was associated with the plebeianization and massification of the early modern army, and thus it shook the ground of the nobility’s most powerful legitimations as the exclusive practitioners of the noble art of war. As it happened in Pavia, the “brutta invenzïon” had indeed revolutionized the social logics of warfare: “How many lords, alas! How many more / among the bravest of our cavaliers / have died and still must perish in this war / by which you brought the world to bitter tears / and Italy left stricken to the core?” (Per te son giti et anderan sotterra / tanti signori e cavallieri tanti / prima che sia finita questa guerra / che’l mondo, ma più Italia, ha messo in pianti).5 The resistance against the gunpowder revolution in the aristocratic imagination of the age can be found everywhere outside Ariosto’s fiction. In 1536, for instance, one nobleman from Valencia challenged a peer to a duel, accusing his rival of having schemed “to have some lowly people shoot their arquebuses,” and was utterly outraged for “those things do not belong among gentlemen” (concertar de tirar arcabuces por medio de bellacos … tales cosas no han de caber en caballeros).6
When rewriting his poem for his 1532 edition, when Ariosto added to the princeps (1516) the series of episodes on Olimpia that contained the story about Cimosco’s arquebus, the poet might have indeed been reacting to the shock of Pavia, as condensed in Oznaya’s anecdote about Roldán. The battle of Pavia has long been considered a turning point in the military, political, and even social history of early modern Europe, the climax of the Italian Wars.7 The engagement represented, at the military level, the ultimate triumph of a professional army based on the massive use of infantry companies of pikemen and arquebusiers over a fighting force still relying too much on the heavy cavalry of men-at-arms for which the French were famous. From a political point of view, the young and ambitious Charles of Habsburg achieved a crucial victory over his main continental rival, a victory that would break with the Italian—and thus European—hegemony of the Valois. Finally, Pavia would be remembered during the sixteenth century for having dramatically changed values and beliefs about the social consequences and meaning of warfare. Contemporary witnesses and modern historians often noted how plebeian infantrymen like Roldán, making good use of the gunpowder revolution, had slaughtered the crème of the French nobility. An army of Roldanes overpowered and killed the old Orlandos. When in the battle of Pavia gunpowder weapons became “the arbiter of battles and sieges,” many longstanding assumptions on war were shattered.8
Many of Ariosto’s contemporaries and successors reacted in a similar fashion to the social (and national) dangers of gunpowder and firearms. Sebastián de Covarrubias devoted four long columns and more than two pages to the arcabuz entry in his dictionary Tesoro de la lengua castellana, quoting extensively from Orlando furioso.9 A religious man of letters, Covarrubias apologized for “not having followed the career of arms, but of spirit” (porque no he seguido la milicia … heme criado en la espiritual) and thus for the potential inaccuracies of a layman’s definition.10 His humanistic, antiquarian impulse does not prevent him from giving firearms a mythical origin that would go back to the medieval fantastic chivalric world as imagined by Renaissance poetic fiction but that would find continuity in Iberian history: “The first time that firearms were used in Spain was in the siege of Algeciras in the year of 1344, when king Alfonso XI conquered it from the Moors, who fired into our people from the fortress” (La primera vez que en España se usaron los tiros de pólvora con pelotas de hierro fue en el cerco de Algezira, cuando el rey don Alonso el Onceno la ganó de los moros, año de mil y trecientos y cuarenta y cuatro, que los de dentro tiraban a los nuestros).11 If for Ariosto, gunpowder weapons were a hellish invention from the barbaric north that was ravaging the flowers of Italian civilization in the days of the “horrendous wars,” for Covarrubias they had their origin in Spain’s Muslim, equally barbaric south. The lexicographer adds ethnic overtones to the class markers of the staple technology of the military revolution, contributing to its moral and social dismissal, while grudgingly acknowledging the weapon’s supremacy in Europe’s military battlefields. The word arcabuz, he says, is composed of “the Greek archos, princeps” and “buso or cannon, for this is the prince and lord of all weapons and there is none that can compare to it” (por ser este buso, o cañón, príncipe y señor de toda cualquiera arma y que no hay ninguna que se le pueda comparar).12
Soldiers like Roldán and his princely plebeian weapon would indeed rule over the wars of early modernity, as well as their literary representations. The arquebusiers who killed throngs of noblemen in Pavia significantly altered aristocratic conceptions of warfare and made a durable impact on the cultural memory of this class and their intellectuals. The gun, as Michael Murrin rightly pointed out, “posed a problem for the writers of romance,” but the popular soldiery of Spain’s army enthusiastically embraced it, in their professional practice and in the stories they told themselves.13 In the 1560s, a group of Spanish soldiers not dissimilar from Oznaya or Roldán set out to write in verse the wars of the monarchy of Spain. And they did so in a particularly innovative form of epic poetry that emerged in Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century. By focusing on the place that Italy and the wars that ravaged it in the first half of the sixteenth century had in the literary culture of the plático soldiers, I will discuss contrasting kinds of heroic discourse that made different claims about the nature, the goals, the ethics, and the social logics of warfare. I will also attempt to explore the social distribution of different heroic traditions within the army and the emergence of new epic forms that better fit the concerns and aspirations of the popular soldiery.
THE ROMANCE OF ITALY
The impact that the Wars of Italy had on the cultural production of both Italy and Spain can hardly be overemphasized. Italy was in every sense the alpha and omega of the soldiers’ lives, the desired destination for fresh Castilian recruits, the object of longing for Flanders’ veterans, the center, if there was one, of the military machinery and the political imagination of imperial Spain. The Italian experience determined the soldiers’ linguistic practices, models of heroism, international relations of friendship, solidarity, and patronage, their desires and aspirations. Garcilaso, the father of all soldier-poets in Renaissance Spain, yearned for Naples, “once full of leisure and love” (de ocio y d’amor antiguamente llena), while traveling the roads and inns of France.14 Cervantes’s nostalgia, or desire, for Italy glimmers between the lines of El licenciado Vidriera, and for its main character, soldier Tomás Rodaja, Italy stands for pleasure, freedom, opportunity, and bounty.15 Pedro de Valdivia, a veteran of the Italian Wars, persisted in the use of Italianisms and Italian proverbial idioms well after he became the first European settler of Chile in the remotest frontier of the empire.16
The glittering pleasures of Italy would eventually become a problem for military administrators. According to the Duke of Parma, a commander in the army of Flanders, “a Spanish soldier who had never breathed the air of Italy served better in the Netherlands than two who had, because they never lost the desire to return.”17 More important, Italy is the crucial crossroads in the itineraries of
