and Urrea’s translation are absolutely crucial to understanding Spanish Renaissance epic. They functioned as a rhetorical, narrative, and linguistic archive that nurtured the war stories soldiers liked to tell themselves and others. But their multiple and complex relations to romance fiction were often underwritten by an oppositional logic. Michael Murrin made a crucial point when he asserted that “critics so far have not recognized or acknowledged that the two genres [epic and romance] present different kinds of war. The warrior in romance usually fights on horseback, while in classical epic Achilles and Aeneas chase their enemies about the field on foot. Romance thus fits the old cavalry battles of the Middle Ages, while classical epic better accommodates the new styles of infantry fighting adopted by the English, Swiss, and Spanish.”64 The epics that began to be published in mid-sixteenth-century Spain indeed constituted themselves as the enunciation of this sociocultural difference, as a gesture of both emulation and rejection of the chivalric cultural models that would continue to shape most of the courtly and literary practices of the early modern nobility.
Most likely a commoner and a soldier in his younger days, Jerónimo Sempere was a modest shopkeeper in his native Valencia by the time he published his Carolea (Valencia: Joan de los Arcos, 1560), an epic about the military deeds of Emperor Charles.65 Sempere’s two-part, nineteen-canto epic in octaves is one of the first long narrative poems to deal with the contemporary wars of the Spanish empire. The first part of his Carolea is devoted to the “hard-fought war that happened in Italy between the Spaniards and the French until the battle of Pavia” (la reñida guerra que pasó en Italia entre españoles y franceses hasta la batalla de Pavía). It recounts, he continues in the opening “Argumento,” “the skirmishes, the marches, and the battles of that war, and the capture of cities and fortresses, and it describes the foundations and the sites of many towns in Italy” (cuenta los rencuentros que hubo en ella en muchas jornadas y diversas ocasiones, y las presas de ciudades y fortalezas. Y descríbense las fundaciones y sitios de muchos pueblos de Italia, y otras partes).66 In sharp contrast with the elusive referentiality of romance representations of war, the novelty of Italian poliorcetics and the operationality of the new war constitute the object of Sempere’s poetic chronicle of the Wars of Italy in the 1520s.
Carolea’s first part, as rich in Virgilian reminiscences as it is in historical detail, culminates in the emblematic battle of Pavia, where the French gendarmerie, Francis I’s corps of aristocratic heavy cavalrymen, was crushed, according to Paolo Giovio—and our Roldán—“with good shots of arquebus” (con buenos disparos de arcabuz).67 By narrating war with the brutal technical precision that became characteristic of soldierly discourse, Sempere celebrates what Ariosto and Boiardo had condemned. Firearms, which allowed foot soldiers to fight the hitherto invincible heavy cavalry of the French army, brought about a new social dynamic to the representation of warfare. In Sempere’s rendering of the battle, as in Oznaya’s, Spanish arquebusiers, whether anonymous or flaunting rather plebeian names, kill ranks of famous French knights, some of whom belong to the most illustrious lineages of French nobility: “Ranks of arquebusiers destroy the French knights, gallant skill! With bursts of gunfire, they killed scores of enemies” (Deshacen a los Gallos caballeros / con mangas de arcabuces, bella maña: / con darles ruciadas de pelotas / mataban de enemigos muchas flotas).68
Sempere depicts the gendarmerie’s lavish display of aristocratic fashion—Roldán’s “golden brocades and crimson shirts”—as a lack of adaptability to the new realities of war and as poor strategic judgment. For it is the material culture and the ethos of the old aristocratic warfare, which the rank and file mock as more fit for jousting than for real fighting, that allow both Roldán and Sempere’s arquebusiers to identify and exterminate the flower of French nobility. “Brocade,” “rich arms,” and “golden harnesses” are of little use against the disciplined rank-and file arquebusiers of the imperial army.69 The luxury of courtly war games is at odds with the harsh realities of the battlefield. Francis I goes to war, according to Sempere, as he would to one of Binche’s tournaments, which is what facilitates his capture by Spanish soldiers by revealing the presence of the king.70 The poet barely hides his enthusiasm for the plebeianization of new warfare. Sempere concludes his narration of Pavia by enumerating the ranks of titled nobility and the dozens of mussiores or noblemen that the Spanish infantrymen sent to fill the ranks of Death—“muy rica fue la muerte de Señores.” Soldierly writing oftentimes becomes a quite literal version of class warfare.71
In 1561, the experienced soldier Baltasar del Hierro published in Granada his Libro y primera parte de los victoriosos hechos del muy valeroso caballero Don Álvaro de Baçán.72 In spite of the title, which echoes with chivalric paratextuality, Hierro’s epic stanzas concerned the most recent military events of the empire and purported to be a factual account of the Marquis of Santa Cruz’s naval Mediterranean and Atlantic campaigns against Algerian and French privateering, in which the author participated. Hierro explicitly delimits the object of his epic poem as a highly professionalized version of warfare: “the clashes, skirmishes, and battles, the many sieges and the many squadrons and ranks of arquebusiers” (los grandes recuentros, escaramuzas o batallas y diferentes sitios de tierras [y] diferentes los escuadrones y mangas que se hacen).73 Bazán was a highly respected general among sixteenth-century Spanish soldiery, and thus he is unequivocally celebrated in a poem that bears his name in its title. But the heroes in Hierro’s poem are also his comrades-in-arms, the plático soldiers he fought alongside, those who “have seen a great number of towers, walls, casemates, ravelins, moats and ditches, artillery plots in bridges and walls; and they understand the blows of the trumpet and the playing of the drums as if they spoke to them” (han visto gran número de torreones caballeros, murallas, casasmatas, revellines, fosos y contrafosos, entradas o salidas de puentes, con sus traveses; y entienden como si les hablasen las palotadas de las cajas, o los retumbos de las trompetas).74 The representation of warfare becomes almost conflated with the representation of military discipline and the soldierly esprit de corps. War is understood as the professional business of a group of fellows-in-arms who derive their discursive legitimacy from their technical expertise. The works of Sempere and Hierro are arguably the first narrative poems in octaves in Spanish that addressed the new realities of contemporary warfare, with that urgency of the present foregrounded by the guerre in ottava rima.
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