Rome, and Milan were at least as important nodes as Madrid, Valencia, and Seville in the cultural networks of the writing soldiers. The Spanish garrisons of Italian cities and towns became spaces of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. Italian linguistic and literary practices, it has long been recognized, shaped to a large extent Spanish Golden Age culture; yet more important for the argument developed here, soldiers were among the key agents of this cultural exchange and cross-fertilization.18
The two peninsulas had long been politically connected on the upper side of their respective societies. By the early sixteenth century, Aragonese aristocratic families had intermarried with their Italian counterparts since the times of Alfons el Magnànim, and some Castilian lineages established solid alliances with Roman, Lombard, Genoese, or Neapolitan patricians. Aragonese and Castilian kings accompanied their aggressive military policies with strategic patronage and local alliances. The Iberian elites in charge of administering the Habsburg “soft” or informal empire in Italy were often fluent in Italian and Spanish or Catalan, if not fully bicultural. The Spanish courtier and veteran general Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga was at ease going back and forth between Italian and Spanish. He oftentimes code-switched between the two languages in his witty, facetious correspondence with Spanish officials, such as the emperor’s secretary Gonzalo Pérez or Italian writers such as Aretino. In a letter sent from Rome to Charles V, on November 20, 1539, he studiously apologized for changing to Italian, purportedly without noticing: “I have turned to Italian, which I speak like Spanish. I promise your majesty that I am struck by myself, and if I wanted, the whole letter would be in Italian” (Yo he tornado a la lengua italiana, que la hablo como español. Yo prometo a V. M. que me espanto de mí mismo y que si quisiera, que toda esta fuera en italiano).19
At the center of the literary culture developed in this transnational republic of letters were two modes of heroic writing that succeeded among the most diverse groups of readers but particularly among these military and courtly elites: Spanish books of chivalry and Italian romanzo. With the Spanish came chivalric fiction, which developed and rose exponentially as a genre during the very same years of the Wars of Italy and the military revolution. The Italians enjoyed Amadís’s bright tales of chivalry just as much as the Spanish avidly consumed and mimicked Orlando’s feats of arms and love.20 One of the outstanding heroes of the military revolution, the victor of Pavia, the Marquis of Pescara, Fernando de Avalos, had grown up in late fifteenth-century Naples reading books of chivalry.21 Questioned by one of his Italian interlocutors in his Diálogo de la lengua, Juan de Valdés acknowledged a quasi-Quixotic passion for books of chivalry: “For ten years, the best of my life, that I spent in palaces and courts, I did nothing more virtuous than reading these lies, which I enjoyed so much that I would devour my own hands after them. So note how spoiled my taste was, that if I took a book of those translated from Latin into our vernacular and written by true historians, or so considered, I would never be able to finish it” (Diez años, los mejores de mi vida, que gasté en palacios y cortes, no me empleé en ejercicio más virtuoso que en leer estas mentiras, en las cuales tomaba tanto sabor que me comía las manos tras ellas. Y mirad qué cosa es tener el gusto estragado, que si tomaba en la mano un libro de los romanzados en latín que son de historiadores verdaderos, o a lo menos que son tenidos por tales, no podía acabar comigo de leerlos).22 Romance was indeed associated with the spaces of political and social power, the palaces and courts in the memory of the Italianized Valdés. Although we know that they did not completely prevent a book from reaching popular audiences, the material elaboration and the high prices of romances of chivalry must have certainly limited their potential publics. According to Daniel Eisenberg, “the romances of chivalry are clearly the most expensive Spanish literary works” in the well-supplied library of Renaissance collector Hernando Colón in the first decades of the sixteenth century.23
The tales of Italian romanzo and Spanish books of chivalry became ingrained in the literary culture of these elites to the point that the two heroic traditions seem to have merged into one at some point—as they were one century later in the mind of Alonso Quijano.24 The materiality of Italian chivalric poems and that of Spanish prose romance usually shows that both genres were meant to compete for the same readers. And a quick look at the transnational circulation of these books confirms that the two literary traditions were closer than we usually think. The first French translation of Orlando furioso, published in Lyon in 1543, is explicitly said to compete in the market with the French translation of Amadís.25 In the same year, Bernardo Tasso, Torquato’s father, decided to translate the Spanish best seller Amadís de Gaula in Italian verse at the request of Ávila y Zúñiga and Francisco de Toledo—a member of the Alba family and the future viceroy of Peru.26 Just as Bernardo translated the prose of Amadís in Ariosto’s ottava rima, the Spanish Vázquez de Contreras, years later, converted the stanzas of Orlando furioso into Spanish chivalric prose.27 In the cultural world of the two peninsular aristocratic and military elites there existed a tight connection between Italian romanzo and Spanish chivalric fiction.
The story of the first Spanish translation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso confirms that the highest layers of European aristocracy were involved in the promotion and patronage of these genres. In 1549, Prince Philip of Spain arrived in Antwerp, accompanied by most of the Spanish nobility and a few Italian potentates, after a glorious journey—or felicíssimo viaje, as it was referred to in Spanish—throughout the European territories of the Habsburg composite monarchy. The voyage from Barcelona to Genoa, from Milan to Trento, from Augsburg to Brussels, was intended to introduce Prince Philip to the vassals and allies of the Austrian house in Europe in order to secure the loyalty of the social and political elites of those territories. When it arrived in the Habsburg Netherlands, Prince Philip’s itinerant court joined the retinue of his father, Charles V, in an atmosphere of political euphoria after the emperor’s triumph in Mühlberg and the recent death of Francis I of France in 1547. Just two weeks before Philip’s select entourage of the felicíssimo viaje entered Antwerp on September 11, 1549, the prosperous local printer Martinus Nutius, active in the city from 1540 to 1558, had published Orlando furioso traduzido en Romance Castellano, which would become one of the most frequently and successfully reprinted Spanish books of the sixteenth century. A member of a dispossessed hidalgo family from Navarre, the translator, Jerónimo Jiménez de Urrea, pursued a lifelong military career, mostly in Italy and Germany, which earned him the post of infantry captain and eventually a habit of the Order of Santiago. After the victory at Mühlberg and in the days of the felicíssimo viaje, his military service must have granted him some kind of access to the courtly circles of Emperor Charles and Prince Philip, since it seems that Urrea personally offered the latter a copy of his Furioso traduzido.28 The book must have aroused much enjoyment from the courtly and aristocratic circles of the prince’s entourage. “Dear reader,” says the printer in one of the preliminary texts, “the main cause that has moved us to print the Orlando furioso in Castilian has been … the dearness and want of these books in the present kingdoms; to this we should add the requests of our friends and noble gentlemen from Spain and other nations, which we decided to heed first because they were fair, and also because they have helped us with the correction of the book” (Amigo letor, la principal causa que nos ha movido a imprimir el Orlando furioso en Romance Castellano ha sido … la carestía y falta que hay destos libros en estos reinos. Hase allegado a esto las rogarías de nuestros amigos y señores españoles y otras naciones las cuales hemos querido obedecer por parecernos justas, como por la ayuda que nos han dado en la correción del libro).29
The immediate market for Urrea’s Orlando traduzido is indeed the cream of the European high nobility, which gathered around Prince Philip in his continental tour of 1549, in the context of one of the most magnificent chivalric celebrations of Renaissance Europe in Mary of Hungary’s palace at Binche, in the Southern Netherlands. The courtly festivals that took place there in the summer and fall of that year were informed by the literary tales of Amadís and Orlando.30 A jamboree of banquets, theatrical performances, dances, and, above all, elaborate jousts and “adventures” was designed in order to entertain those who still liked to think of themselves
