In fact, the representational traditions of romance fiction in prose and verse clearly privileged the image of the “medieval centaur,” the relevance of an aristocratic corps of heavy cavalry whose role on the battlefields of Europe was decreasing at the same rate that the output figures of Orlandos and Amadises printed in Venice or Seville swelled.42 This literature legitimized the social preeminence of the bellatores against the emerging social logics of new warfare practices and discourses. The rise of the court nobility was accompanied by a proportional decline in the aristocracy’s traditional military function. The social and cultural practices of the noblemen that constituted the ideal audiences for Ariosto’s romance in the Habsburg world ultimately veiled the crucial developments that historians have associated with the military revolution, such as the generalization of gunpowder and siege artillery, the new infantry formations of pikemen, and the improvement of military engineering and fortification. More important, the substitution of massive infantry squadrons for a select and aristocratic corps of heavy cavalry as the backbone of the army entailed somehow a democratization of military activity, which was now accessible to plebeians and low hidalgos.43 This is not to say that the high nobility completely abandoned its traditional military function or that cavalry totally disappeared from European armies, but the centrality of both was substantially displaced after some of the Renaissance battles that transformed warfare, from Ravenna (1512) to Bicocca (1524) or Pavia (1525).44 By the time Urrea translated the Furioso for the enjoyment of Prince Philip’s noble entourage in 1549, the protagonists of European battles were not the “men-at-arms” (gens d’armes, gendarmerie) who jousted in Binche but the plebeian infantrymen who fought in Italy and Germany in large, disciplined armies based on the pike and the arquebus. The individual effort of the chivalric ethos had been replaced by the soldier’s obedience and professionalism, together with the technical knowledge and strategic skill of meritorious officers.
The aristocratic rules of individual fighting, the prominence of the horse in knightly culture, the honor codes that had been outmoded by the new culture of warfare, the fantastic fictionality of imagined wars as opposed to those the soldiers experienced distinctly—none of these aspects could provide an undisputed model for the literary culture and social practice of the soldierly mass. Soldiers appropriated some elements of the language, the rhetoric, the narrative patterns, and the names of the chivalric traditions. They may well try to imitate and participate in the noble practice of joust on one occasion and openly mock it as ridiculous or anachronistic in another. Strategic sameness as well as strategic difference would guide the practices and discourses of the common soldier in relation to those of their social superiors. Soldierly culture is shaped after and in confrontation and competition with aristocratic literary forms.
Indeed, Italian linguistic and cultural competence was taken for granted not only among the commanding elites but also among many of the rank and file. As early as 1517, the lack of Italian skills of Juan Gozález and Pero Pardo, the laughable bisoños mocked for being “raised in the court of the plow” (crïados / en corte de los arados) and for not being “fluent in the Italian language” (no son enseñados / en la lengua italïana), was the main source of amusement for the presumably bilingual audience of Torres Naharro’s Comedia soldadesca.45 The Captain, Guzmán, Manrique, and Mendoza, veterans who served in the armies of the feared Cesare Borgia, Pope Alexander’s son, or under the command of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the Great Captain, all are fluent in Italian. Popular readers certainly appropriated and enjoyed the stories of chivalric literature, and common soldiers were, as a matter of fact, familiar with the sagas of Orlando and his progeny.46 Yet however attracted the common soldiery of early modern Europe was to the chivalric tales of Amadís and, above all, Orlando, the rank and file’s exposure to and active appropriation of these literary traditions were rarely exempt of tension.
In his military memoir about Mediterranean soldiering and captivity, Jerónimo de Pasamonte quotes a full stanza of Orlando furioso, but he does so in the context of a narrative coincidence that he deems miraculous and that shows the author’s fictional elaboration of this episode in an otherwise highly verisimilar narrative regime. While relaxing on the grass by the Fountain of Caño Dorado, in Madrid’s Prado de San Jerónimo, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, Pasamonte claims to have sung “with no little flair” (con no poca gracia) the first stanza of Orlando furioso’s canto 23 (“Studisi ognun giovare altrui; che rade”), which is a warning for readers to do all the good they can to others, for any damage they inflict will unexpectedly be reciprocated. An old acquaintance of his times of captivity, who had once betrayed him, overheard the Italian song and inquired, approvingly, about Pasamonte’s linguistic and musical skills. The soldier retorted gallantly with a mix of Spanish and Italian—“Caro me costa”—and explained to the traitor how he had acquired these skills while spending “many years in captivity among Italians” (muchos años captivo entre italianos). The persuasive fictionality and emplotment devices of romance serve in Pasamonte’s text to emphasize the exceptional nature of a conventional anagnorisis.47
Similarly, Alonso de Contreras’s autobiography contains one mention of the chivalric tales of Orlando furioso. While serving in the galleys of Malta, Contreras participated in a sally to the coasts of Barbary in order to fight off some of the corsairs who had recently attacked the positions of the Order in the island. During this expedition, they briefly docked in Lampedusa, which “they say … is enchanted and that it was in this island where Ruggero and Bradamante fought against each other, which I think is just a fable” (dicen está encantada y que en esta isla fue donde se dieron la batalla el rey Rugero y Bradamonte, para mí fábula).48 The hearsay that Contreras puts down in writing in his autobiography makes clear that Ariosto’s fiction figured prominently in the daily pláticas of the Spanish popular soldiery, to the extent that it shaped the ways they made sense of the physical spaces of war with which they were most familiar. Yet at the same time, it shows that the value of these tales, their legitimacy as literary models to recount the experience of serving soldiers eager to tell the truth about war, was always in dispute. If romance textuality impregnates military writing and even the soldiers’ daily lives, it frequently shows up in their tales in an ironic fashion, or in an open negation, that reveals the tensions involved in its regime of fictionality.
A GUNPOWDER POETICS
The epic poem can only refer to the sixteenth-century military figure through occultation or allusion.
(Le poème épique ne peut entretenir avec la figure militaire du XVIe siècle qu’un rapport fait d’escamotage et d’allusion.)
—FRÉDÉRIQUE VERRIER, Les armes de Minerve
The fight for Italy transformed not only the art of war and the forms of government, as Guicciardini famously proclaimed, but also “the very modalities of narrating war.”49 Thus Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, dropped his pen sometime in September 1494. For eighteen years the poet had been writing his Orlando innamorato in the Este’s Ferrarese palace. Suddenly, when the barbarian armies of Charles VIII of France crossed the Alps and invaded Italy, his light tales of love and chivalry somehow stopped making sense. “While I sing,” says Boiardo, “I see all Italy in flame and fire by these French.” The fire of the first artillery train in history obliterates the burning love of Fiordespina’s tale, now “vain,” which the narrator promises his readers to take up again soon.50 The poet died, however, shortly after giving up his massive poetic and narrative enterprise, in December of the same year. For the writers of romanzi, Charles VIII’s descent in Italy must have been traumatic.51 It is as if the ravages of real war, the increasingly destructive technologies and tactics of the military revolution, could find no place in Boiardo’s bright, chivalric world of love and arms. Moreover, the most powerful monarchy of Christendom, which in the fictional world of the Carolingian narrative cycles defended European Christianity against the barbarian Saracens,