Front Lines. Miguel Martinez

Charles VIII’s stunning onslaught in 1494 made Boiardo drop his pen, it did not silence the writers of the popular pamphlets that reported, in the same metrical form, true stories about the Wars of Italy.⁵² For Massimo Rospocher, the poems published in cheap print or performed by street singers about the Wars of Italy, known as guerre in ottava rima, contrasted in important ways with the tradition of the chivalric poem as it was practiced by Boiardo or Ariosto, which had initially shared the frame, language, and structure of their popular counterparts.⁵³ First, this corpus of verse was crucial in “the emergence of contemporaneity,” a new perception of current events that linked the military and political realms in the media of public communication, successfully capturing “the dramatic urgency of the present.”⁵⁴ The wide distribution of these texts allowed the audience to contrast their own experience of the facts with those poetized in the popular pamphlets. This genre created a new relationship between the written matter of war and its readers and listeners. A sense of novelty, moreover, pervaded the typographical and rhetorical strategies of these popular prints. An emphatic rhetoric of truth versus the shining, elaborate fiction of the romanzi became a feature of the genre, and a gory realism shaped the referential world of the guerre in ottava rima that was incompatible with the courtly idealization of warfare in chivalric discourse. Some soldiers, moreover, were involved in the production and distribution, both orally and in print, of these songs. Ercole Cinzio Rinuccini, for instance, wrote several poems on the wars he personally fought, while storyteller Eustachi Celebrino claimed to have written La presa di Roma after the prose eyewitness account of a captain who participated in the sack of 1527.⁵⁵

      The traditions of romanzi and the guerre in ottava rima run parallel, competing with and feeding each other. Most scholars of Spanish epic have rightly emphasized the weight that the former carried in the development of the genre in the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere.⁵⁶ I would like to suggest, however, that the guerre in ottava rima, a tradition of popular print and war writing quite distinct from chivalric fiction, might have played as significant a role as the romanzo tradition in the emergence of Iberian epic in the middle years of the sixteenth century. The ephemeral products of popular print, these war stories circulated widely and could be found anywhere, from the urban centers of Italy to the strongholds and galleys of the Mediterranean war stage where Italian and Spanish soldiers always mingled. The impact of this textual tradition of popular origin on the literary culture of the Habsburg soldiery may have important consequences for our understanding of epic as a genre and of war writing in general.

      What I will call, following Michael Murrin’s argument, gunpowder epic, shared a number of key textual elements with the guerre in ottava rima.⁵⁷ First, a rhetoric of factual precision often punctuates the narrative with specific dates and times, provides the number of combatants, and records the names of commanders and common soldiers alike.⁵⁸ Second, the enthusiastic embracement of the technologies and ethos of the military revolution, as I have already mentioned, oftentimes pits itself against the aristocratic rejection of the lowly forms of new warfare.⁵⁹ Third, the urgency of the present, in Rospocher’s felicitous formulation, leads soldiers to confront those who “today sing about ancient things and leave in oblivion the new ones” just to avoid the pain of telling them (molti cantono ognhor le cose antiche / e lasson preterir l’altere e nove / per seguir l’otio e per fugire fatiche).⁶⁰ Finally, and more important, an explicit rejection of romance’s regime of fictionality is at the root of many war songs. “I will not sing of Orlando or Ruggiero,” says one of these poems, “but of the true subject” (suggetto vero) of the war of Parma in 1551.⁶¹ In the same vein, a widely distributed compilation of war stories from the 1510s opened with a negative to celebrate Orlando, Rinaldo, or Morgante, opting instead to recount just “the events that happened on Italian soil.”⁶²

      Drawing from this tradition, the Spanish soldiers picked up the pen exactly where Boiardo dropped it. Scores of common soldiers, an army of military poets, set out to recount the contemporary wars of the empire in a poetic idiom that sharply contrasted with the fictional registers of chivalric romance. None of these authors lost his grip on his pen in the face of the new, more brutal and diabolic realities of warfare. In lieu of conjuring away or vaguely alluding to this reality, as Verrier claimed in the lines quoted earlier, the new epic poets embraced it as a worthy, novel, enticing, and profitable literary matter. They claimed, insistently and with passion, to tell the truth about war, and that truth entailed “a set of military values that contrasted with the chivalric code.”⁶³

      Both Ariosto’s Orlando and Urrea’s translation are absolutely crucial to understanding Spanish Renaissance epic. They functioned as a rhetorical, narrative, and linguistic archive that nurtured the war stories soldiers liked to tell themselves and others. But their multiple and complex relations to romance fiction were often underwritten by an oppositional logic. Michael Murrin made a crucial point when he asserted that “critics so far have not recognized or acknowledged that the two genres [epic and romance] present different kinds of war. The warrior in romance usually fights on horseback, while in classical epic Achilles and Aeneas chase their enemies about the field on foot. Romance thus fits the old cavalry battles of the Middle Ages, while classical epic better accommodates the new styles of infantry fighting adopted by the English, Swiss, and Spanish.”⁶⁴ The epics that began to be published in mid-sixteenth-century Spain indeed constituted themselves as the enunciation of this sociocultural difference, as a gesture of both emulation and rejection of the chivalric cultural models that would continue to shape most of the courtly and literary practices of the early modern nobility.

      Most likely a commoner and a soldier in his younger days, Jerónimo Sempere was a modest shopkeeper in his native Valencia by the time he published his Carolea (Valencia: Joan de los Arcos, 1560), an epic about the military deeds of Emperor Charles.⁶⁵ Sempere’s two-part, nineteen-canto epic in octaves is one of the first long narrative poems to deal with the contemporary wars of the Spanish empire. The first part of his Carolea is devoted to the “hard-fought war that happened in Italy between the Spaniards and the French until the battle of Pavia” (la reñida guerra que pasó en Italia entre españoles y franceses hasta la batalla de Pavía). It recounts, he continues in the opening “Argumento,” “the skirmishes, the marches, and the battles of that war, and the capture of cities and fortresses, and it describes the foundations and the sites of many towns in Italy” (cuenta los rencuentros que hubo en ella en muchas jornadas y diversas ocasiones, y las presas de ciudades y fortalezas. Y descríbense las fundaciones y sitios de muchos pueblos de Italia, y otras partes).⁶⁶ In sharp contrast with the elusive referentiality of romance representations of war, the novelty of Italian poliorcetics and the operationality of the new war constitute the object of Sempere’s poetic chronicle of the Wars of Italy in the 1520s.

      Carolea’s first part, as rich in Virgilian reminiscences as it is in historical detail, culminates in the emblematic battle of Pavia, where the French gendarmerie, Francis I’s corps of aristocratic heavy cavalrymen, was crushed, according to Paolo Giovio—and our Roldán—“with good shots of arquebus” (con buenos disparos de arcabuz).⁶⁷ By narrating war with the brutal technical precision that became characteristic of soldierly discourse, Sempere celebrates what Ariosto and Boiardo had condemned. Firearms, which allowed foot soldiers to fight the hitherto invincible heavy cavalry of the French army, brought about a new social dynamic to the representation of warfare. In Sempere’s rendering of the battle, as in Oznaya’s, Spanish arquebusiers, whether anonymous or flaunting rather plebeian names, kill ranks of famous French knights, some of whom belong to the most illustrious lineages of French nobility: “Ranks of arquebusiers destroy the French knights, gallant skill! With bursts of gunfire, they killed scores of enemies” (Deshacen a los Gallos caballeros / con mangas de arcabuces, bella maña: / con darles ruciadas de pelotas / mataban de enemigos muchas flotas).⁶⁸

      Sempere depicts the gendarmerie’s lavish display of aristocratic fashion—Roldán’s “golden brocades and crimson shirts”—as a lack of adaptability to the new realities of war and as poor strategic judgment. For it is the material culture and the ethos of the old aristocratic warfare, which the rank and file mock as more fit for jousting than for real fighting, that allow both Roldán and Sempere’s arquebusiers