were expected to partake in a sort of improvised literary academy, according to soldier-poet Andrés Rey de Artieda in 1605.40
Rey de Artieda is a case in point to better understand the relation between class, literacy, and the soldiers’ republic of letters. Born in Valencia in the late 1540s to a notary from Aragon, the poet experienced a combination of letters and arms in his youth, spending alternate periods of time in the classroom and on the front lines of Italy, the Mediterranean, and the Low Countries.41 He also went to college, which was rare even for a literate soldier. Rey de Artieda’s epistles and sonnets represent with painstaking detail the everyday life of military friendship in the social spaces of early modern warfare. The poem titled “To the Soldiers’ Meal” (A una comida de soldados) depicts the joyful conviviality of a soldierly camarade gathering at the Neapolitan port of Barletta, feasting on salad and walnuts, drinking wine, and toasting the appointment of one of them as corporal (cabo de escuadra), the lowest rank for non-commanding officers in an infantry corps. In another sonnet, “To a comrade of captain Antonio Vázquez” (A un soldado camarada del capitán Antonio Vázquez), Rey de Artieda satirizes a soldier for being “skilled” in eating and drinking, skipping watches, and caring only about his personal belongings, all to the detriment of his fellow comrades. More important, however, is the fact that Rey de Artieda included some of his comrades’ poems with his own when he published his collection of military lyric. Antonio Vázquez himself is represented in Rey de Artieda’s generously all-embracing collection with four sonnets on different topics, including a few about one of the most beloved themes of soldier-poets: prostitutes.42 These poems must have been collected by his comrade Rey de Artieda throughout the years of a long and sustained military career—forty-seven years for Artieda—since Vázquez is disparately titled soldier, captain, and sergeant major in different pieces. But Vázquez is not the only comrade-poet in Rey de Artieda’s collection. Some Cascajares—an unmistakably plebeian name—contributed poems, as did some well-known Valencian and Aragonese courtiers and humanists.43 Rey de Artieda’s book, while legally published under his name, is a highly collaborative one in which the author not only decided to print some of his best friends’ military poems but also depicted them in scenes of soldierly intimacy and friendly conversation and participating in a vibrant literary activity in the spaces of war. The social spaces of early modern warfare contributed to the creation of a “network of popular sociability” that multiplied the effects of the printing revolution and facilitated an increasingly intimate familiarity with the written word.44
Indeed, soldierly comradeship was oftentimes mediated through writing. After the mutiny of Dunkirk was settled in 1594, the accountants of the army used some of the soldiers’ testaments to set the record straight on what had been agreed between the striking infantrymen and the Habsburg military and political authorities. Soldiers often named fellow soldiers as their executors, like Domingo Hernández, who chose “his comrades [camaradas] Francisco Xuárez and Hernando de Guevara, soldiers in my company [soldados en mi compañía],” as the people in charge of carrying out the terms of his last will. It was a common practice among single men who shared in the same camarade to bequeath their overdue pay to each other in case of death, as did the Portuguese Pedro Hernández to his Castilian comrade Bartolomé González, both infantrymen participating in the same mutiny. Other soldiers wrote or signed on behalf of their illiterate brothers-in-arms: “Because I do not know how to write I asked the above mentioned witness Juan Ramírez, to sign it on my behalf” (porque yo no sé escribir rogué al dicho Juan Ramírez, testigo, que lo firmase por mi mano), says Ginés de Escames. And in the case of Luis Gómez, no fewer than eight fellow soldiers signed their names as witnesses at their friend’s deathbed.45 The bonds between brothers-in-arms, between “godfathers and godsons” (padrino[s] y ahijado[s])—as Juan Rufo refers to the relationship between comrades—were indeed many times articulated or mediated through witnessing and writing.46
Executing or bearing witness to a brother-in-arms’ will, as did these sixteenth-century soldiers of Dunkirk, was much like writing stories about fallen comrades. Writing against oblivion, the most classical and time-honored justification of literary enunciation itself, was acutely felt in a society based on bonds of friendship, comradeship, and shared suffering. Composing war stories was the ultimate act of solidarity and respect among fellow soldiers. An economy of reputation, by which the fame and honor of individual soldiers relied on testimonies, both oral and written, of comrades-in-arms, regulated relations between those who had been killed and those who survived. The impulse to give account of oneself and one’s comrades gave way to many front lines that, written from the battlefield, would keep alive the memory of many common infantrymen and their deeds in the republic of soldiers.
WRITING ON THE BATTLEFIELD
According to a one of the censors of Santiago de Tesillo’s Epítome chileno, ideas contra la paz, published in Lima in 1648, the soldier writes “painting his commas with lead, inking his pen with gunpowder, drawing his words with shots and his lines with lances” (matizando sus comas con plomo, su pluma con pólvora, sus palabras con tiros y sus renglones con lanzas).47 In contrast with Garcilaso de la Vega’s symmetrically ordered alternation of the sword and the pen, “ora la espada, ora la pluma,” the trope entails now a radicalization of the contiguity of arms and letters, a total conflation of the practice of writing and the practice of modern warfare.48 Lead, gunpowder, shots, and pikes are metaphorically used to write the history of their very usage on the battlefield. Arms double their function as instruments of violence and the material support of writing, symbolically eliminating any distance between things and words, between textual and military culture, between the practice and the representation of warfare. By the middle of the seventeenth century the material cultures of writing and fighting had become indistinguishably equated in a powerful trope.
Despite the precariousness of military life, pen, ink, and paper, manuscript and printed matter, were found in large quantities in the baggage train of every early modern army and constituted an integral part of the soldier’s daily life and material culture. Juan de Oznaya, a plebeian arquebusier who fought in the Wars of Italy and wrote about them, reveals the wealth of paper in his description of the Renaissance tactic of encamisada. The soldiers of an encamisada were detailed to storm an enemy position at night wearing white shirts (camisas) on top of their defensive arms in order to be recognized by their fellow combatants in the dark while they took advantage of the surprise factor.49 “Tonight,” says Oznaya, recollecting the orders of a commander, “you will wear shirts on top of your arms and go where the squadrons are formed” (Todos armados y con camisas encima de las armas o vestidos, salgáis donde se hicieren los escuadrones), but if the cloth of shirts or tents were not enough, the soldiers “will take two sheets of paper from that to be found in the camp and make a kind of mantle or cloak to whiten themselves and be recognized” (si no bastare, de dos pliegos de papel de lo que en todo el campo se hallare, harán unos capotines o sambenitillos con los que blanqueen por ser conocidos).50 Paper and other basic tools of writing were as important for the military revolution as other enabling technologies readily associated with it, such as gunpowder and military engineering. And even far from the rich and cultured cities of Lombardy, the materiality of writing provided fighting soldiers in the farthest frontier of Spain’s empire with a language to describe the shocking realities of the New World. During Pedro de Valdivia’s first military expedition to Chile, the soldier Jerónimo de Vivar observed how the indigenous peoples of the northern coast built rafts with the skin of sea lions, which they pressed and folded “just like sheets of paper are folded” (como está un pliego de papel doblado).51 In the second half of the sixteenth century, arquebusiers used paper in their ramrods and musketeers started to fabricate paper cartridges containing gunpowder and bullets in order to accelerate the loading of their guns.52
In August 1590, poet and infantry captain Andrés Rey de Artieda was instructed to raise a company in his native Valencia. In the book used to record the plebeian names of several dozens of young recruits, we find a wealth of calligraphic exercises, presumably by the company’s scribe or by Artieda himself (Figures
