Written rehearsals of epistolary formulae and random names of unidentified men not enrolled in the company fill the numerous blank pages of a notebook that carries with it the marks of the commerce of war. Perhaps to kill time while waiting for new recruits to show up at the drummer’s call in a public square, one writer has drafted the first two lines of a ballad: “Dressed with our colors / in green and silver flowers” (De nuestro color vestido / de verde y flores de plata). The lines belong originally to a Moorish ballad, “Romance del gallardo Arbolán,” turned a lo divino to sing the Nativity. The original (“A la jineta vestido / de verde y flores de plata”) was first published anonymously in Flor de varios romances nuevos y canciones (Huesca, 1589), barely one year before Artieda’s company book was drafted, and was later gathered in the Romancero general of 1600.53 This particular example vividly illustrates not only the instrumental role of the technologies of writing in the constitution of the early modern armies but also the close rapport, the intimate contiguity of military and literary practices, in the society of soldiers.
The availability of the most basic writing materials and familiarity with the written word still do not suffice to fully articulate the soldiers’ republic of letters, a site for the organized production, distribution, consumption, and discussion of literary texts. We have, however, numerous testimonies to the intensity of literary practices, which were widespread and unexceptional among the soldiers of Habsburg armies and amid the roar of war. When editing the poems written by his brother Francisco, Cosme de Aldana listed the titles of the many other texts that he had not been able to recover because they were “lost in war, where he always carried them” (perdidas en la guerra, do siempre las traía).54 He was able, however, to recover and publish a substantial collection of Francisco’s poems in Milan in 1589, a second one in Madrid two years later, and three more reprints in Spain’s capital and the Low Countries, an editorial trajectory that closely follows the soldiers’ roads throughout Europe. An infantry captain like Aldana, Cristóbal de Virués is best known for his Monserrate, an epic poem printed in 1588 recounting the legends of hermit Juan Garín. When Virués’s friend Baltasar de Escobar, a humanist and diplomat at the Roman curia, received a copy, he encouraged him to “bring to light the lyric poems that, gathered in your drafts, have escaped the storms and dangers of your honorable military pilgrimages” (sacar las rimas que se hallaren recogidas por los borradores que se han escapado de las borrascas y peligros de sus honrosas peregrinaciones militares).55 Some did indeed survive and were eventually collected in Obras trágicas y líricas del capitán Cristóbal de Virués (Madrid: Alonso Martín, 1609). Despite war’s pressures on cultural activity, literary traffic was intense, and the backpacks of some soldiers, like Tomás Rodaja’s faldriqueras, seem to have carried at least as many sonnets as licencias or recommendation letters.
Figure 1. Lista de la compañía del capitán Andrés Rey de Artieda, August 1590. España, Ministerio de Cultura, AGS, GyM leg. 315, fol. 71.
Virués and Aldana are among the best-known writing soldiers of the period. Both of them came from the lower nobility, were well educated, and were raised to the position of infantry captains. Despite their rank and privileged background, however, they were no exception. Martín García Cerezeda, an arquebusier from Córdoba, very likely of plebeian background, wrote his voluminous Tratado de las campañas del Emperador Carlos V “in the times that I was idle while serving in the army” (en los tiempos que en la milicia fallaba ociosidad).56 His work narrates year by year, almost month by month, and with painstaking detail, the many military campaigns in which he participated as a rank-and-file soldier from 1522 to 1545, giving testimony to the radical transformations of warfare during the years of the Italian Wars and the Mediterranean conflict with the Ottomans in the first half of the century. García Cerezeda reproaches “the many excellent pens, both in philosophy and poetry, that I have seen and see every day in this most glorious army” (muy excelentes plumas, ansí en filosofía como en poesía, que he visto e veo cada el día en este felicísimo ejército) for not writing about the war they were waging and thus justifies his own firsthand narrative of these crucial events.57 While apparently more inclined to poetry and philosophy, and not focused on recounting the war they were fighting, writers were not particularly uncommon among the ranks of Charles V’s troops.
Figure 2. “De nuestro color vestido / de verde y flores de plata.” Lista de la compañía del capitán Andrés Rey de Artieda, August 1590. España, Ministerio de Cultura, AGS, GyM leg. 315, fol. 1.
In his Vida y hechos del emperador Carlos V, royal chronicler Prudencio de Sandoval confirms the literary activity of this sizable group of soldiers inclined to letters (soldados curiosos), many of them anonymous, who provided commanders and historians alike with fresh reports from the field.58 For the section on the campaigns against the Schmalkaldic league during 1546–47, Sandoval relied heavily on D. Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga’s Comentario de la guerra de Alemaña (Venice: Thomás de Gornoça, 1548). Count by birth and marquis by marriage, Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga was one of the emperor’s closest collaborators, a splendid courtier, an experienced military commander, and a respected historian.59 His relation with Charles V was so intimate that His Majesty considered him a “witness to my thoughts” (testigo de mis pensamientos).60 His Comentario, the most Caesarian of all military texts produced in Renaissance Spain, had sixteen editions in six years and almost immediate translations into Italian, Dutch, French, English, and Latin. It was arguably the most popular European book on the Schmalkaldic War and one of the most widely praised and read works of history in Spanish. The authority and popularity of the Comentario notwithstanding, Sandoval complemented this source “with some manuscript reports that the curious soldiers in the imperial camp carefully wrote and sent to Spain” (relaciones escritas de mano por soldados curiosos que andaban en el campo imperial que las escribían con cuidado y enviaban a España). Sandoval states that one of these reports, written by an anonymous soldier who recounted “what he saw, most of it on horse, as it happened” (lo que vio y que la mayor parte de ello lo escribía a caballo como iba ello pasando), is in fact identical to Luis de Ávila’s second chapter. Since the soldier signed his account on November 11, 1547, allegedly antedating the first edition of the Comentario, Sandoval claims that this part of D. Luis’s book borrows this anonymous soldier’s account.61
There is no reason not to believe the scrupulous Sandoval, always transparent and thorough when assessing the sources of his monumental history of Charles V’s reign, for which he profitably used and acknowledged Ávila y Zúñiga’s praiseworthy work.62 His testimony also restores the protagonism of the rank and file not only in fighting the wars, as they claimed repeatedly, but also in recounting them. Caesarian, noble captains writing with their pen what they fought with their swords were accompanied by anonymous soldiers in their common attempts to record the experience of war and make sense of it. Sometimes their respective accounts of imperial violence would resemble each other, but many other times they would radically differ. Whether by commanders or rank-and-file soldiers, all these testimonies suggest that writing and reading were widespread practices in Renaissance armies and in the spaces of war.
Moreover, relying on the eyewitness accounts of curious writing soldiers seems to have been simply natural for historians. The idea that soldierly texts produced on the battlefield were the principal sources for the writing of reliable history would eventually become naturalized among humanists and professional historians. When reflecting on the differences between writing general and particular histories, the highly respected humanist Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola wrote that many historical events worth recounting remain unknown “because those who fought on those occasions only wrote in passing about them, leaving most of it for general
