Front Lines. Miguel Martinez

France and Spain in the first decades of the century, when the reputation of the Spanish armies’ effectiveness and ruthlessness rose exponentially in Italy and beyond. Giovio, generally a rather committed supporter of the imperial cause and the official apologist for some of its most famous commanders in Italy, was not always flattering to the imperial victors of Pavia in 1525, the same soldiers that only two years later sacked the Holy City and subdued the pope, and thus was harshly criticized by some for his occasional hostility to the Spaniards.¹⁰² Had they known this, the furious soldiers of the imperial army might not have liked what Giovio was writing about them. Were that the case, whether they ripped them apart out of rage or used them “in foedos usos” because they were otherwise useless, the gesture remains meaningful. And like the German soldiers’ defacing of Raphael’s paintings or the burning of books in the Holy City during the same episode, it would indicate a fluid, but tense, relation with Renaissance high culture on the part of the plebeian army¹⁰³—meanwhile, some other Spanish soldiers harassed the pope, who had taken refuge in the castle of Sant’Angelo, by shouting out adapted versions of traditional songs and a satirically glossed Pater Noster.¹⁰⁴

      The story, in any of its versions, shows a highly complex relationship between literacy, orality, consumption, and soldierly agency. Soldiers were willing to intervene violently in the public pláticas on war through the seizure of uncomfortable historiographical works about their ethos and action. Through vehement erasure, they were rewriting the discursive representation of their own military life and public identity. Whether some enlightened generals confronted the soldierly mass to recover the papers for their own sake or some captains and anonymous soldiers partially kidnaped the material, the anecdote provides an extreme example of Michel de Certeau’s observations about the nature of cultural consumption and his warning that “the elite … always assumes that the public is moulded by the products imposed on it…. This misunderstanding assumes that ‘assimilating’ necessarily means ‘becoming similar to’ what one absorbs, and not ‘making something similar’ to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating or re-appropriating it.”¹⁰⁵ Even if it was just an act of radical carnivalization and Bakhtinian degradation of the humanist’s writings through the workings of “the lower stratum of the body,” the gesture is still meaningful.¹⁰⁶

      The anecdote powerfully recalls the moment in Castiglione’s discussion of the theme of arms and letters when one of his chatting courtiers playfully but brutally asserts the ultimately self-evident superiority of arms over letters. “If you think the contrary,” the Count tells Bembo, “wait until you hear of a contest in which the man who defends the cause of arms is allowed to use them, just as those who defend the cause of letters make use of letters in their defense; for if each one uses his own weapons, you will see that the men of letters will lose.”¹⁰⁷ In the episode just recounted, the soldiers’ quite literal appropriation of Giovio’s account of their action forces us to explore how the circulation of written matter, whether in print, manuscript, or oral form, contributed to the organization of a very peculiar discursive community. Although humanists and soldiers had occasion to interact and, like many other Renaissance historians, Giovio had often relied on the oral accounts of soldiers and captains for his ambitious historiographical enterprise, the story requires us to wonder how a mass of furious soldiers could have found out what a learned humanist was writing about them.¹⁰⁸ It makes us wonder whether a group of Spanish soldiers could have accessed Giovio’s elegant humanistic Latin. Thus the “Giovio affair” suggests the necessity of taking into account the stories, opinions, and ideas that were disseminated orally in the republic of lettered soldiers and that interacted richly, as this anecdote shows, with the written culture of Renaissance Europe.

      PUBLIC OPINION AND ORAL CULTURE

      According to a soldier fighting in Chile in the 1640s, war had become debatable (“se ha hecho openable”).¹⁰⁹ Indeed, war and the people who waged it were at the center of early modern forms of publicity and political discussion since the first moments of the military revolution. Massimo Rospocher has shown, in a series of important essays, the richness of the popular public sphere in the cities of Renaissance Italy.¹¹⁰ The business of war was, not surprisingly, the main object of public discussion all throughout the peninsula, whether in the papers being written, printed, sold, bought, and sung in the streets of Venice or in Pasquino’s anonymous posts loudly echoing the public voices of Rome. Popular poetry provided a language of political communication that circulated widely, though ephemerally, through a diversity of discursive practices, from mouth to mouth, to manuscript or print reproduction and dissemination. “Nowadays everybody discusses war” (hor tutto’l mondo di guerra raggiona), said an anonymous popular poet in 1509 Venice.¹¹¹

      Spanish sources confirm Rospocher’s emphasis on the matter of war as the main topic of early modern popular opinion and public discourse. The account of the battle of Pavia by common soldier Oznaya makes reference to Pasquino’s facetious coverage of the Wars of Italy. “The imperial army,” writes Oznaya, “was ignored to the point that a paper appeared one morning on Maese Pasquino: ‘Whoever knows anything about the Emperor’s camp, which got lost in the mountains of Genoa a few days ago, please reveal it and he will be rewarded’” (Era tan poco el caso que del ejército cesáreo se hacía, que en este tiempo amanesció puesta una cédula en el Pasquino de Roma deste tenor: “Quien quiera que supiese del campo del emperador, el cual se perdió entre las montañas de la ribera de Génova pocos días ha, véngalo manifestando y darle han buen hallazgo”). A few days later, after a successful military campaign for the imperial camp, Pasquino mockingly announced that the imperial army had finally appeared.¹¹² High-ranking Spanish officials in Italy also showed an acute interest in street rumors related to the matters of war. Charles V’s ambassador in Rome, Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga, wrote in December 1539 to Francisco de los Cobos, the emperor’s secretary, that he was surprised by the fact that Pasquino could only produce positive gossip about one of the most prestigious imperial generals in the Wars of Italy, Alfonso de Ávalos (1502–46), Marquis of Vasto.¹¹³ Pasquino, the Roman machine of popular rumor and political opinion, had been interested in the business of war ever since the battered statue was unearthed from the underground of Renaissance Rome.

      Pasquino’s ways traveled easily to the New World. After the conquest of Tenochtitlán, the soldiers and their captains engaged in disputes over the division of the spoils, and consequently disruptive rumors (murmuración) emerged about Cortés’s justice toward his subordinates. Although Bernal Díaz does not go as far as other soldiers in accusing the captain of keeping the gold treasure for himself, he records the episode: “While Cortés was in Coyoacán lodging in some palaces that had their walls plastered and white-washed on which it was easy to write with charcoal and other inks, numerous rather malicious sentences (motes) appeared [on them] every morning, some written in prose and others in verse, in the way of pasquinades” (Y como Cortés estaba en Coyoacán y posaba en unos palacios que tenía blanqueadas y encaladas las paredes, donde buenamente se podía escribir en ellas con carbones y con otras tintas, amanecía cada mañana escritos muchos motes, algunos en prosa y otros en metros, algo maliciosos, a manera de mase-pasquines).¹¹⁴ Bernal readily summarizes some of these coplas—or traditional Spanish octosyllabic stanzas rhyming in consonant—but refuses to reproduce them because most of them contained “words that cannot be put in this story” (palabras que no son para poner en esta relación). First Cortés took pride in answering the accusations “by good rhymes much to the point” (por buenos consonantes y muy a propósito) since the captain “was something of a poet himself” (era algo poeta). When the coplas became too impudent, Cortés famously wrote “a blank wall is the paper of fools” (pared blanca, papel de necios), to which the restless soldiers replied: “and of wise men and of truths and His Majesty will soon know it” (aun de sabios y verdades, y Su Majestad lo sabrá muy presto). Cortés ended up threatening the satirists with serious punishment.¹¹⁵

      Ballad singing and writing were pervasive in the soldiers’ everyday practices in the New World and contributed to the rapid circulation of military news. Among Pizarro’s men, one Saravia used satirical circumstantial coplas in his correspondence with conquistador Pascual de Andagoya. The improvisational skills and malicious use of traditional ballads and songs by the caustic Francisco