a cohort of grandees and titled aristocrats reproduced in the rituals of the court society the literary models provided by romance fiction, whether in verse or in prose. Romance fiction was actively used, collectively, in the elaboration of a transnational courtly sociability. Individually, reading or hearing chivalric tales was part of the “aristocratic bildung” of many noble houses and courts.31
Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier has always been invoked in discussions of aristocratic education and noble sociability. From the very beginning in Castiglione’s handbook, Count Lodovico di Canossa asserts that “the principal and true profession of the Courtier must be that of arms.”32 These arms, however, have little to do with the dramatic transformations of warfare that were taking place just outside the walls of the Duke of Urbino’s palace and other such Renaissance courts. When Castiglione writes that the courtier, “born of a noble and genteel family,” should “know how to handle every kind of weapon, both on foot and on horse” but “be especially acquainted with those arms that are ordinarily used among gentlemen,” he is referring to the different modalities of courtly tournament and joust, as well as the aristocratic practice of duel. The courtier’s fighting skills have nothing to do with the real practice of warfare but with the ritualized sociability of courtly chivalry. Castiglione’s courtier, rather than a perfect soldier, must be “a perfect horseman in every kind of saddle,” an accomplished jouster, a virtuoso of stick throwing, bullfighting, juegos de cañas, hunting, and ball game.33
It has rarely been noted that the social model of the courtier, as far as arms are concerned, is precisely built against that of the soldier.34 “We do not wish him,” said Count Lodovico, “to make a show of being so fierce that he is forever swaggering in his speech, declaring that he has wedded his cuirass, and glowering with such dour looks.”35 And indeed what follows this passage is a courtier’s joke about a coarse soldier who, not being conversant with the codes of the palace’s sociability, arrogantly rejects a lady’s offer to dance.36 Castiglione, moreover, despises even what constitutes the very definition of modern soldiering, that is, serving in war in exchange for a salary. “The true stimulus to great and daring deeds in war,” he says, “is glory, and whosoever is moved thereto for gain or any other motive, apart from the fact that he never does anything good, deserves to be called not a gentleman, but a base merchant.”37 As opposed to the knight’s, a soldier’s identity is inextricably linked to money; it is constituted by it from the very etymology of the word soldado.38 The opposition between the professional soldier and the amateur knight could not be stated more clearly. The court and the battlefield will generate not only two different patterns of social behavior but also two distinct, and many times opposed, literary cultures.
Renaissance courtly sociability has indeed been described as a “shelter against the universal calamity of the Wars of Italy … a space aristocratically separated from the real world.”39 Romance’s representations of combat were utterly anachronistic to actual fighting men, fit to be reproduced in the palace by a group of high-born jousters but far from the realities of Italy’s battlefields. Of course, the ritual mimicking of war in courtly practice remained an enjoyable theatrical recreation for the knights of the palace and played an important role in court society; but it could no longer be justified as a mirror, let alone training, for actual military practice. “The cult of the emblazoned individual heavy cavalryman” and the “glamorized choreography” of the celebrations at Binche and elsewhere were at odds with the newly massive, plebeian, and quite bloody character of Renaissance warfare.40 And in the eyes of many, the disconnect between the practice and the representation of warfare in the world of the high nobility ended up destabilizing their social legitimacy, traditionally based in the profession of arms and the defense of society. The tales of Orlando and Amadís seem to have been more appropriate for those “more keen to courtesy than to war” (di cortesia più che di guerre amico), as the author of the former would eloquently put it.41
In fact, the representational traditions of romance fiction in prose and verse clearly privileged the image of the “medieval centaur,” the relevance of an aristocratic corps of heavy cavalry whose role on the battlefields of Europe was decreasing at the same rate that the output figures of Orlandos and Amadises printed in Venice or Seville swelled.42 This literature legitimized the social preeminence of the bellatores against the emerging social logics of new warfare practices and discourses. The rise of the court nobility was accompanied by a proportional decline in the aristocracy’s traditional military function. The social and cultural practices of the noblemen that constituted the ideal audiences for Ariosto’s romance in the Habsburg world ultimately veiled the crucial developments that historians have associated with the military revolution, such as the generalization of gunpowder and siege artillery, the new infantry formations of pikemen, and the improvement of military engineering and fortification. More important, the substitution of massive infantry squadrons for a select and aristocratic corps of heavy cavalry as the backbone of the army entailed somehow a democratization of military activity, which was now accessible to plebeians and low hidalgos.43 This is not to say that the high nobility completely abandoned its traditional military function or that cavalry totally disappeared from European armies, but the centrality of both was substantially displaced after some of the Renaissance battles that transformed warfare, from Ravenna (1512) to Bicocca (1524) or Pavia (1525).44 By the time Urrea translated the Furioso for the enjoyment of Prince Philip’s noble entourage in 1549, the protagonists of European battles were not the “men-at-arms” (gens d’armes, gendarmerie) who jousted in Binche but the plebeian infantrymen who fought in Italy and Germany in large, disciplined armies based on the pike and the arquebus. The individual effort of the chivalric ethos had been replaced by the soldier’s obedience and professionalism, together with the technical knowledge and strategic skill of meritorious officers.
The aristocratic rules of individual fighting, the prominence of the horse in knightly culture, the honor codes that had been outmoded by the new culture of warfare, the fantastic fictionality of imagined wars as opposed to those the soldiers experienced distinctly—none of these aspects could provide an undisputed model for the literary culture and social practice of the soldierly mass. Soldiers appropriated some elements of the language, the rhetoric, the narrative patterns, and the names of the chivalric traditions. They may well try to imitate and participate in the noble practice of joust on one occasion and openly mock it as ridiculous or anachronistic in another. Strategic sameness as well as strategic difference would guide the practices and discourses of the common soldier in relation to those of their social superiors. Soldierly culture is shaped after and in confrontation and competition with aristocratic literary forms.
Indeed, Italian linguistic and cultural competence was taken for granted not only among the commanding elites but also among many of the rank and file. As early as 1517, the lack of Italian skills of Juan Gozález and Pero Pardo, the laughable bisoños mocked for being “raised in the court of the plow” (crïados / en corte de los arados) and for not being “fluent in the Italian language” (no son enseñados / en la lengua italïana), was the main source of amusement for the presumably bilingual audience of Torres Naharro’s Comedia soldadesca.45 The Captain, Guzmán, Manrique, and Mendoza, veterans who served in the armies of the feared Cesare Borgia, Pope Alexander’s son, or under the command of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the Great Captain, all are fluent in Italian. Popular readers certainly appropriated and enjoyed the stories of chivalric literature, and common soldiers were, as a matter of fact, familiar with the sagas of Orlando and his progeny.46 Yet however attracted the common soldiery of early modern Europe was to the chivalric tales of Amadís and, above all, Orlando, the rank and file’s exposure to and active appropriation of these literary traditions were rarely exempt of tension.
In his military memoir about Mediterranean soldiering and captivity, Jerónimo de Pasamonte quotes a full stanza of Orlando furioso, but he does so in the context of a narrative coincidence that he deems miraculous and that shows the author’s fictional elaboration of this episode in an otherwise
