San Jerónimo, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, Pasamonte claims to have sung “with no little flair” (con no poca gracia) the first stanza of Orlando furioso’s canto 23 (“Studisi ognun giovare altrui; che rade”), which is a warning for readers to do all the good they can to others, for any damage they inflict will unexpectedly be reciprocated. An old acquaintance of his times of captivity, who had once betrayed him, overheard the Italian song and inquired, approvingly, about Pasamonte’s linguistic and musical skills. The soldier retorted gallantly with a mix of Spanish and Italian—“Caro me costa”—and explained to the traitor how he had acquired these skills while spending “many years in captivity among Italians” (muchos años captivo entre italianos). The persuasive fictionality and emplotment devices of romance serve in Pasamonte’s text to emphasize the exceptional nature of a conventional anagnorisis.47
Similarly, Alonso de Contreras’s autobiography contains one mention of the chivalric tales of Orlando furioso. While serving in the galleys of Malta, Contreras participated in a sally to the coasts of Barbary in order to fight off some of the corsairs who had recently attacked the positions of the Order in the island. During this expedition, they briefly docked in Lampedusa, which “they say … is enchanted and that it was in this island where Ruggero and Bradamante fought against each other, which I think is just a fable” (dicen está encantada y que en esta isla fue donde se dieron la batalla el rey Rugero y Bradamonte, para mí fábula).48 The hearsay that Contreras puts down in writing in his autobiography makes clear that Ariosto’s fiction figured prominently in the daily pláticas of the Spanish popular soldiery, to the extent that it shaped the ways they made sense of the physical spaces of war with which they were most familiar. Yet at the same time, it shows that the value of these tales, their legitimacy as literary models to recount the experience of serving soldiers eager to tell the truth about war, was always in dispute. If romance textuality impregnates military writing and even the soldiers’ daily lives, it frequently shows up in their tales in an ironic fashion, or in an open negation, that reveals the tensions involved in its regime of fictionality.
A GUNPOWDER POETICS
The epic poem can only refer to the sixteenth-century military figure through occultation or allusion.
(Le poème épique ne peut entretenir avec la figure militaire du XVIe siècle qu’un rapport fait d’escamotage et d’allusion.)
—FRÉDÉRIQUE VERRIER, Les armes de Minerve
The fight for Italy transformed not only the art of war and the forms of government, as Guicciardini famously proclaimed, but also “the very modalities of narrating war.”49 Thus Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, dropped his pen sometime in September 1494. For eighteen years the poet had been writing his Orlando innamorato in the Este’s Ferrarese palace. Suddenly, when the barbarian armies of Charles VIII of France crossed the Alps and invaded Italy, his light tales of love and chivalry somehow stopped making sense. “While I sing,” says Boiardo, “I see all Italy in flame and fire by these French.” The fire of the first artillery train in history obliterates the burning love of Fiordespina’s tale, now “vain,” which the narrator promises his readers to take up again soon.50 The poet died, however, shortly after giving up his massive poetic and narrative enterprise, in December of the same year. For the writers of romanzi, Charles VIII’s descent in Italy must have been traumatic.51 It is as if the ravages of real war, the increasingly destructive technologies and tactics of the military revolution, could find no place in Boiardo’s bright, chivalric world of love and arms. Moreover, the most powerful monarchy of Christendom, which in the fictional world of the Carolingian narrative cycles defended European Christianity against the barbarian Saracens, turned into the invading barbarian king destroying the soil of ancient Rome.
Though Charles VIII’s stunning onslaught in 1494 made Boiardo drop his pen, it did not silence the writers of the popular pamphlets that reported, in the same metrical form, true stories about the Wars of Italy.52 For Massimo Rospocher, the poems published in cheap print or performed by street singers about the Wars of Italy, known as guerre in ottava rima, contrasted in important ways with the tradition of the chivalric poem as it was practiced by Boiardo or Ariosto, which had initially shared the frame, language, and structure of their popular counterparts.53 First, this corpus of verse was crucial in “the emergence of contemporaneity,” a new perception of current events that linked the military and political realms in the media of public communication, successfully capturing “the dramatic urgency of the present.”54 The wide distribution of these texts allowed the audience to contrast their own experience of the facts with those poetized in the popular pamphlets. This genre created a new relationship between the written matter of war and its readers and listeners. A sense of novelty, moreover, pervaded the typographical and rhetorical strategies of these popular prints. An emphatic rhetoric of truth versus the shining, elaborate fiction of the romanzi became a feature of the genre, and a gory realism shaped the referential world of the guerre in ottava rima that was incompatible with the courtly idealization of warfare in chivalric discourse. Some soldiers, moreover, were involved in the production and distribution, both orally and in print, of these songs. Ercole Cinzio Rinuccini, for instance, wrote several poems on the wars he personally fought, while storyteller Eustachi Celebrino claimed to have written La presa di Roma after the prose eyewitness account of a captain who participated in the sack of 1527.55
The traditions of romanzi and the guerre in ottava rima run parallel, competing with and feeding each other. Most scholars of Spanish epic have rightly emphasized the weight that the former carried in the development of the genre in the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere.56 I would like to suggest, however, that the guerre in ottava rima, a tradition of popular print and war writing quite distinct from chivalric fiction, might have played as significant a role as the romanzo tradition in the emergence of Iberian epic in the middle years of the sixteenth century. The ephemeral products of popular print, these war stories circulated widely and could be found anywhere, from the urban centers of Italy to the strongholds and galleys of the Mediterranean war stage where Italian and Spanish soldiers always mingled. The impact of this textual tradition of popular origin on the literary culture of the Habsburg soldiery may have important consequences for our understanding of epic as a genre and of war writing in general.
What I will call, following Michael Murrin’s argument, gunpowder epic, shared a number of key textual elements with the guerre in ottava rima.57 First, a rhetoric of factual precision often punctuates the narrative with specific dates and times, provides the number of combatants, and records the names of commanders and common soldiers alike.58 Second, the enthusiastic embracement of the technologies and ethos of the military revolution, as I have already mentioned, oftentimes pits itself against the aristocratic rejection of the lowly forms of new warfare.59 Third, the urgency of the present, in Rospocher’s felicitous formulation, leads soldiers to confront those who “today sing about ancient things and leave in oblivion the new ones” just to avoid the pain of telling them (molti cantono ognhor le cose antiche / e lasson preterir l’altere e nove / per seguir l’otio e per fugire fatiche).60 Finally, and more important, an explicit rejection of romance’s regime of fictionality is at the root of many war songs. “I will not sing of Orlando or Ruggiero,” says one of these poems, “but of the true subject” (suggetto vero) of the war of Parma in 1551.61 In the same vein, a widely distributed compilation of war stories from the 1510s opened with a negative to celebrate Orlando, Rinaldo, or Morgante, opting instead to recount just “the events that happened on Italian soil.”62
Drawing from this tradition, the Spanish soldiers picked up the pen exactly where Boiardo dropped it. Scores of common soldiers, an army of military poets, set out to recount the contemporary wars of the empire in a poetic idiom that sharply contrasted with the fictional registers of chivalric romance. None of these authors lost his grip on his pen in the face of the new, more brutal and diabolic realities of warfare. In lieu of conjuring away or vaguely alluding to this reality, as Verrier
