sino de paso por los que militaron en ellas, y cuando son menester sus escritos, no parecen).63 For Argensola, the voice of the eyewitness soldier writing from the battlefield is the main source and ultimate guarantee of authority for historiographical discourse.
Presidios and marching camps provided a locus of enunciation, both real and metaphorical, for the writing soldier. The long periods of inactivity for garrisoned soldiers increased the appeal of reading, writing, and discussing literature as entertainment in the often dull life of the military. Baltasar de Vargas, a veteran soldier of the Naples tercio in the Duke of Alba’s journey on the Spanish road in 1567, wrote his Breve relación en octava rima de la jornada que ha hecho el Señor Duque de Alba “in this idle life of the presidio” (en esta ociosidad del presidio).64 This text narrates the journey with a wealth of detail about the logistics of deployment of an early modern army, paying a lot of attention to operations required to lodge, feed, move, and protect the army. The heroic actions of this brief epic are the duke’s diligent dispatch of messengers, his negotiations with local lords and merchants, the precautions of secretaries, overseers (veedores), and accountants, the timely distribution of paychecks, and the agile transportation of the army’s artillery train through the Alps. Although called “the veteran Vargas” by a comrade contributing a preliminary poem, he deems himself a greenhorn in poetry (en la poesía soy novicio).65 Amateurism at writing is again set against their professionalism as soldiers. They make explicit the discrepancy between their public persona and their writing practice, between their profession of war and their tentative poetic endeavors, continuously thematizing a tension between fighting and writing that they nonetheless exploit to their benefit. The link between the symbolic capital of the professional participant soldier and the discursive authority of a text on the matters of war became so naturalized that when the clergyman Lorenzo de Zamora published his Primera parte de la Historia de Sagunto, Numancia y Carthago in 1589, he excused himself for writing on war, however ancient, not having any experience on the matter, “since I can assure you that not only have I not ever been to war, but even a private brawl I have never witnessed” (que te puedo jurar que no solamente no me he hallado en guerras, pero ni aun he visto riña particular ninguna).66
The transoceanic fleets that supported imperial warfare were not unfit spaces for writing on the matters of war either. The Portuguese poet and soldier Luís de Camões wrote part of Os Lusíadas (1572) while traveling and battling all along the Portuguese colonial possessions in the East and claimed to have saved his “sea-drenched Epic Song” (os cantos … molhados) from a shipwreck in the South China Sea by holding in his hands the actual sheets on which it was written.67 Similarly, the common soldier and poet Gaspar García de Alarcón rhetorically asked the readers of his epic poem La victoriosa conquista … de los Azores (1585) “that they excuse the flaws of the work because I could not depart from the truth and because it was written at war, in the middle of the ocean; and because the military art that I practice is very different from that of writing in verse, with little study, little experience, and little time” (que me tomen en descuento el no poder salir de la verdad a que va arrimada, y escrita en un golfo, y parte della en la guerra. Y cuán diferente es el arte de milicia que profeso al componer en metro, con poco estudio, menos experiencia, no muy ayudado del tiempo).68 The conventionally humble excusatio against the potential murmuradores or critics is indeed a proud defense of his professional role and of his military experience in the Marquis of Santa Cruz’s naval campaign against the French fleet of Philippe Strozzi during the wars that followed the Habsburg conquest of Portugal in the early 1580s.
Many of the better-known chronicles and relaciones from the colonial American context were written by major and minor figures in the liminal spaces of the war of conquest in the new territories. The writing of war narratives was by no means limited to the leaders of the expeditions, such as Hernán Cortés. On the contrary, it was a widespread practice and was one of the main war genres in the soldiers’ republic of letters. Most famous among them, Bernal Díaz del Castillo took up the pen in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España in order to counter the accounts written by historians far from the field that exaggerated the role of the leaders in the accomplishments of the conquest.69 The chronicler of the conquest of Peru, the plebeian soldier Pedro Cieza de León, attributed the faults of his chronicle of Peru to his “pocas letras” and to his “being too absorbed in the business of war.” “Many times,” he continues, “when most soldiers rested, I exhausted myself writing. The roughness of the mentioned lands, mountains, and rivers, the intolerable hunger and necessity, none of this ever prevented me from dutifully following my two occupations, writing and serving my company and my captain” (Muchas veces, cuando los otros soldados descansaban, cansaba yo escribiendo. Mas ni esto, ni las asperezas de tierras, montañas y ríos ya dichos, intolerables hambres y necesidades, nunca bastaban para estorbar mis dos oficios de escribir y seguir a mi bandera y capitán sin hacer falta).70
Perhaps the most emblematic and dramatic example of this gesture linking the practice of writing to the battlefield is Alonso de Ercilla’s prologue to his first Araucana of 1569. Although this work was published more than ten years after his return from the Chilean frontier, the poet claims to have written his powerfully realistic stanzas “amid the very war, in the very marches and sieges, often writing on leather because of the lack of paper, and on scraps of letters so small that barely six lines fit, all of which made it rather difficult to put everything together later” (en la misma guerra y en los mismos pasos y sitios, escribiendo muchas veces en cuero por falta de papel, y en pedazos de cartas, algunos tan pequeños que apenas cabían seis versos, que no me costó después poco trabajo juntarlos).71 The representation of the practice of writing in the most distant spaces of the imperial frontier is a powerful rhetorical device to produce discursive authority, determining the enunciative structure and truth-value of soldierly texts in very important ways. The legitimacy of Ercilla’s poem is clearly linked to the detailed description of those rare moments provided by military otium, as in García Cerezeda’s case, “stolen” (hurtados) from the professional exercise of warfare. The very inadequacy of the “pasos y sitios” for the intellectual practice of writing and the material precariousness of those pieces of paper and leather—“poor diapers”—make his firsthand account “truer” (más verdadero), even if those pieces do not fit the eight lines required to compose an octava real, the basic metrical unit of Renaissance epic.72 The image of the soldier writing on the battlefield becomes the documentary and symbolic foundation of the historical authenticity of the soldierly text. The representation of the personal practice of war—“I am a soldier and I was there”—authorizes the poetic or narrative voice of a social subject whose discursive legitimacy relies on his military expertise and his direct contact with the spaces of war rather than on humanistic erudition, nobility, service at court, or inventive genius.
Critics have often taken these assertions, particularly Ercilla’s, to be conventionally rhetorical at best, or plainly false. “One of the romantic fictions regarding the accounts of conquests in the Indies,” says Rolena Adorno, “is that they were written at night in military encampments by soldier-hidalgos who, with quill in hand, bravely ignored the intimidating sounds of enemy war cries and drums. Hernán Cortés and Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga are among the authors who create this familiar impression.”73 Adorno’s skepticism about the truth of the Caesarian image of the soldier simultaneously fighting and writing on the battlefield is a standard and healthy reminder of the long tradition of a particular literary convention. While acknowledging the “retrospective quality” of most soldierly writing,74 evidence supports my contention here that this trope refers to actual practices in the spaces of war, both in the New World and the Old, that gained prominence over the period. For the first Araucana of 1569, Ercilla’s brother-in-arms, the veteran captain Juan Gómez, wrote an aprobación where he legally testified that Ercilla was seen, by him and everyone else, “serving your majesty in that war, where he publicly wrote this book” (vi a don Alonso de Ercilla servir a Su Majestad en aquella guerra, donde públicamente escribió este libro).75 Writing in the spaces of war was common, as we have seen, and the public
