Front Lines. Miguel Martinez

according to Sempere, as he would to one of Binche’s tournaments, which is what facilitates his capture by Spanish soldiers by revealing the presence of the king.⁷⁰ The poet barely hides his enthusiasm for the plebeianization of new warfare. Sempere concludes his narration of Pavia by enumerating the ranks of titled nobility and the dozens of mussiores or noblemen that the Spanish infantrymen sent to fill the ranks of Death—“muy rica fue la muerte de Señores.” Soldierly writing oftentimes becomes a quite literal version of class warfare.⁷¹

      In 1561, the experienced soldier Baltasar del Hierro published in Granada his Libro y primera parte de los victoriosos hechos del muy valeroso caballero Don Álvaro de Baçán.⁷² In spite of the title, which echoes with chivalric paratextuality, Hierro’s epic stanzas concerned the most recent military events of the empire and purported to be a factual account of the Marquis of Santa Cruz’s naval Mediterranean and Atlantic campaigns against Algerian and French privateering, in which the author participated. Hierro explicitly delimits the object of his epic poem as a highly professionalized version of warfare: “the clashes, skirmishes, and battles, the many sieges and the many squadrons and ranks of arquebusiers” (los grandes recuentros, escaramuzas o batallas y diferentes sitios de tierras [y] diferentes los escuadrones y mangas que se hacen).⁷³ Bazán was a highly respected general among sixteenth-century Spanish soldiery, and thus he is unequivocally celebrated in a poem that bears his name in its title. But the heroes in Hierro’s poem are also his comrades-in-arms, the plático soldiers he fought alongside, those who “have seen a great number of towers, walls, casemates, ravelins, moats and ditches, artillery plots in bridges and walls; and they understand the blows of the trumpet and the playing of the drums as if they spoke to them” (han visto gran número de torreones caballeros, murallas, casasmatas, revellines, fosos y contrafosos, entradas o salidas de puentes, con sus traveses; y entienden como si les hablasen las palotadas de las cajas, o los retumbos de las trompetas).⁷⁴ The representation of warfare becomes almost conflated with the representation of military discipline and the soldierly esprit de corps. War is understood as the professional business of a group of fellows-in-arms who derive their discursive legitimacy from their technical expertise. The works of Sempere and Hierro are arguably the first narrative poems in octaves in Spanish that addressed the new realities of contemporary warfare, with that urgency of the present foregrounded by the guerre in ottava rima.