borders and contact zones in which the soldiers spent most of their daily lives, facilitated unexpected exchanges and solidarities. The same comradeship that was necessary to boost combat morale and unit cohesion allowed for dangerous sociabilities and rebellious confraternization. The structures that enabled the waging of war also allowed for the material production and circulation of soldierly texts that many times opposed those very same structures. These writings voiced criticism of the soldiers’ military superiors and of imperial policies, while publicizing their exploitative working conditions and establishing solidarities among the troops that often led to mutiny and massive desertion.
The myriad pens and mouths of common soldiers had indeed many stories to tell about war and empire, oftentimes at odds with those told by their superiors, whether back home or on the front. Their stories were told in “the small voice of history,” in Ranajit Guha’s apt phrase. And, albeit occasionally, we certainly find in their texts “the voice of a defiant subalternity committed to writing its own history.”12 Early modern soldiers made a particularly compelling effort, against the burden of partial literacies and the lack of cultural capital, to become authors and to understand in their own terms the imperial wars in which they fought. Although hawkish warmongering had a place in the writings and sayings of common soldiers, attitudes toward imperial warfare, toward its glories and horrors, vary widely, from enthusiastic support to frontal opposition, from skepticism to indifference. The chaotic tumult of war, the agitation of combat, the exhilaration of victory, the misery of defeat, the extreme material deprivation of life at war, and the challenges of the veteran back home all formed part of the thematic repertoire of soldierly writing.
Whether in the strictly coded form of a classical epic or in the swift and protean ephemerality of political gossip, whether in an autobiographical manuscript or in a printed broadside ballad, plático soldiers aspired to participate in the pláticas (conversations) of public discourse. They constructed their social and political identities, individually and collectively, by telling their stories to themselves and to others. And the often clamorous, rowdy voices of common, sometimes marginal soldiers were frequently perceived by authorities as suspiciously heterodox and disruptive of the social order. The type of the veteran soldado roto (broken soldier) did indeed pose problems of order and discipline. The figure of the bravo or valentón (braggart), idling in the streets of early modern Madrid, became a popular hero, a dangerous (counter)model of social behavior and public speech. Furthermore, the codes and ethos of military masculinity often conspired to offer alternative textual conceptualizations of affective relations, sometimes in sharp contrast to the traditions of Petrarchan love, Ciceronian friendship, or Virgilian filial piety.
The first chapter provides a detailed portrayal of the social and cultural world of these writing soldiers. “The Soldiers’ Republic of Letters” gathers a wealth of testimonies about the widespread presence of literature and the dissemination of literate practices among the common fighting men of the Habsburg monarchy. I first show that literacy rates were significantly higher among soldiers, regardless of their social background, than among their civilian peers, and I explore the material conditions under which soldierly writing and reading took place while in deployment. Next I examine the global circulation and reception of texts throughout the spaces of war and the role that these spaces played in the shaping of publics and reading practices in the army. Finally, the chapter traces the relation between oral and written culture in the soldiers’ republic of letters, establishing connections between war news and the early modern public sphere.
From this point, the organization of my argument combines a flexible geographical and chronological structure with attention to corresponding shifts in literary genre. Beginning with the Wars of Italy (1494–1559), the second chapter (“The Truth About War”) focuses on a new group of Spanish poems written in ottava rima and divided in cantos that, in contrast to the fictional self-awareness of previous traditions of European heroic writing, claimed to offer realistic and accurate eyewitness accounts of the multiple contemporary wars of the Habsburg empire. These new Spanish epics established a sharp opposition to the textual tradition of chivalric romance from which they partially derived and, by claiming to tell “the truth about war,” generated new understandings of the means and nature of armed strife and imperial violence. Building on Michael Murrin’s illuminating insights about the new “relation between poetic and real war,” I argue that this corpus of gunpowder epics, by authors such as Jerónimo Sempere, Jerónimo Jiménez de Urrea, Juan Rufo, and Miguel Giner, became the poetry of the new war, the specialized genre of the soldierly class, the proletarians of warfare.13
The third chapter, “Rebellion, Captivity, and Survival,” focuses on the early modern Mediterranean conflicts between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, particularly in North Africa, as experienced by the fighting and writing rank and file. Grounded in archival documentation, this chapter also brings to light several previously unknown or forgotten texts written by common soldiers that provide compelling articulations of rebellion and captivity, and of personal and collective defeat. First, the epic poems and ballads of Baltasar del Hierro reveal the shifting political and religious allegiances of the common soldiery in the face of conflict and prolonged contact across cultures. Next, the chapter explores the relation between epic and autobiography, and the heroics of survival and authorship, in the poetry and military treatises of a Spanish soldier captured by the Turks in the 1574 Ottoman conquest of La Goleta and Tunis.
“New World War,” the fourth chapter, considers the soldierly texts produced in the New World during the wars of conquest. The Arauco War in Chile prompted a massive amount of discourse, perhaps unmatched in any other part of the Indies, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly by fighting soldiers. The challenge for contemporaries was to understand why the seemingly almighty Spanish empire had failed to defeat the Mapuche in southern Chile. This American experience effectively shattered some of the most defining and dearly held self-representations of Spanish imperial soldiery, representations that had been consistently elaborated on the European and Mediterranean fronts of the empire. Among the authors and works considered here are Pedro de Valdivia’s letters, Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s Milicia y descripción de las Indias (1599), and Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–90), together with a wealth of heterogeneous writings by Melchor Xufré del Águila, Santiago de Tesillo, and other anonymous colonial soldiers.
The last chapter, “Home from War,” focuses on the experiences of the mutilated, the deserters, and the discharged in their conflicted returns to civil society. Often depicted as picaresque and even criminal, the voices of the returning soldier did indeed pose significant problems to the city’s public order and the state’s military policies. This chapter analyzes, on the one hand, the war ballads and lyrical languages produced and circulated in Europe’s battlefields, particularly in the Netherlands, which helped publicize the soldiers’ extenuating conditions of service in one of the longest and bloodiest wars of the period. On the other hand, it explores the group of well-known personal narratives by veterans, mainly Diego García de Paredes’s Breve suma and Alonso de Contreras’s Discurso de mi vida, in which they strived to produce proud and convincing autobiographical subjectivities. These bold first-person narratives openly defied the authority of the state and ended up questioning the thin lines between legitimate and illegitimate violence.
The overall argument of the present book is particularly concerned with what can be called the Icarian logic of soldierly writing. In a masterful study of popular culture, James Amelang uses the myth of Icarus, “the classic symbol of punishment for popular overreaching,” as a powerful class allegory to understand subaltern forms of authorship and literary practice in early modern Europe.14 The son of an artisan, Daedalus, Icarus attempts to fly too high, with manmade wings and against his father’s counsel, and meets his demise as a punishment
