Front Lines - Miguel Martinez Material Texts

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blasphemy and swearing, and the kind of “scandalous words” that, according to Londoño’s warning, “may cause tumult and mutiny” (palabras escandalosas de las cuales puede causarse tumulto o motín). Anyone uttering them or covering up a brother-in-arms who does so was to be punished with immediate death.140 Similarly, the main reason for banning heavy drinking does not seem to lie in moral concerns about the soldiers’ temperance or in doubts about its effects on their professional performance in camp and battle. Rather, intemperate drinking was again prosecuted because too much wine “turns men into beasts and with its heat they dare to say certain words that provoke mutinies, and new sects and opinions” (vienen los hombres a convertirse en fieras y con el calor osan decir palabras bastantes a motines y a nuevas sectas y opiniones).141

      All these mandates regarding the most basic aspects of soldierly daily life are aimed at disciplining speech by regulating what could and could not be spoken. Londoño’s public ordinances, like his private correspondence, suggest the existence of a rich—and dangerous—public culture in the republic of soldiers, one that often intersected with the civilian spaces of political communication and that threatened the most basic structures of imperial armies. Military authorities had every interest in trying to effectively curb potentially subversive talk and the circulation of unsettling news, opinions, and ideas in the discursive community of the plático soldiers. The most explicit of Londoño’s regulations to control the serious threat posed by the informal constitution of popular spheres of soldierly public opinion orders that “there shall not be secret gatherings or public coteries, because that is where mutinies are formed and they conjecture about what has been discussed in secret by the military command, from which many times the enemy is warned and the defenders of posts are discouraged” (que no haya juntas secretas ni corrillos públicos, porque en los tales se fabrican los motines y se trata por conjecturas de cuanto pasa en los consejos secretos, de que procede avisar a los enemigos para que se aperciban y muchas veces desaniman a los que tienen cargos de defender fortalezas).142

      In 1590, the conquistador Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, like a New World Londoño, wrote his Milicia indiana, a military treatise intended to describe the different modes of colonial warfare and to discipline the soldiers of the American conquest wars accordingly. For Vargas Machuca, the ideal soldier should never be “gossipy and restless” (revoltoso ni chismoso), “vices that most of the time engender mutiny” (destos vicios las más veces se suele engendrar un motín). Again, the informal institution of the camarada, which both Londoño and Vargas Machuca explicitly encouraged in their treatises, seems to have given coverage to political gossip and soldierly public opinion. The good soldier, according to Vargas Machuca, “should not save the face of even his own comrade if he sees him going against the king” (a la misma camarada no debe guardar la cara si viere que va contra el rey).143 For Pedro de Valdivia, the (failed) conquistador of Chile, “pláticas” had an intrinsically negative, subversive sense. Pressed to rebel against his king by some conspirers in Peru, he was forced to respond “to those who moved these talks” (a los que me movían estas pláticas).”144 “Mutiny” is etymologically related to the verb to move, and pláticas, in this context, can only mean subversive talk.

      The same practices that were institutionalized and encouraged by military authorities in order to foster and strengthen the soldierly ethos and military morale could easily transform themselves into illicit forms of organization. Camaradas could turn into “secret reunions” (juntas secretas) and “public gatherings” (corrillos públicos).145 These social spaces constituted by the circulation of political and military opinions, by conversations about their trade, also allowed for the production and dissemination of dangerous pláticas. While it provided the basis for the esprit de corps that military administrators and strategists valued so highly, oral and written culture in the soldiers’ republic also contributed to a great extent to the articulation of resistance and to the constitution of a collective identity for the soldierly mass that was oftentimes at odds with the aims and methods of the administrators of imperial war. And soldierly unrest could easily travel back home to threaten even the most sacred institutions of early modern Spain. In 1579, alférez don Fernando Díaz, a veteran of Flanders, and Juan de Minaya Maldonado started a conversation about “whether it was easy or not to kill a king” while strolling through the streets of Ledesma, in Salamanca. Someone must have overheard the conversation and reported them to the authorities: “Don Fernando said that he had just come from the court, complaining about not being given the post he expected by his majesty the king, whom he wanted to kill although he did not know how” (Dijo don Fernando que venía de la corte quejoso de su majestad e que le deseaba matar e que no sabía cómo lo hacer porque no le había proveído con cargo a su gusto para la guerra).146

      As we have discussed, the written and the spoken word interacted in a complex regime of publicity that was constitutive of the society of soldiers. The republic of curious soldiers, or any republic for that matter, was hardly a harmonious one. The class tensions that inhered the spaces of war could eventually generate conflict and subversive attempts, particularly from the subaltern sectors of that society. One of Sancho de Londoño’s most detailed dispositions was meant to keep track of the soldiers’ handwriting in order to control the proliferating practice of mutiny:

      Otrosí por excusar los motines y los medios que se usan para movellos y cuajallos, se debe mandar que todos los Capitanes cuando recibieren los soldados, entiendan si saben escrebir y hagan que los que los [sic] supieren, escriban sus nombres y los de sus padres, madres y tierras en un libro que cada furrier tenga para tal efecto, con lo cual en gran parte se excusará el poner de los carteles, pues pocos saben disimular tan bien su letra que en algo no conforme y se pueda conoscer, teniendo cómo poder cotejarla, que pocos en tales casos se osan fiar de otros.147

      (In order to avoid mutinies and the means they use to organize them successfully, all captains must inquire if the soldiers they enlist know how to write; and those who do, must write their names and the names of their fathers, mothers and homelands in a book kept by the quartermasters. With this we will avoid the hanging of posters, since very few know how to dissimulate their handwriting to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and we will be able to collate it, since in these cases they never trust anyone else to write them.)

      Both the practice of the mutiny cartel or poster and the authorities’ effort to suppress it insist upon the spread of literacy within the army: there were enough literate infantry soldiers to force military authorities to keep track of them in the quartermasters’ (furrieres) books. Writing was a valuable skill for the captains and other officers who were in charge of administering and disciplining an infantry company but also for rank-and-file, potentially mutinous soldiers. It was instrumental, as we have seen, in the organization of imperial armies, a crucial technology to sustain the structures upon which the defense and expansion of empire relied. But as Londoño knew all too well, writing also allowed for the organization of the social and political resistance previously, and simultaneously, articulated in the soldiers’ oral practices.

      Londoño’s regulation tellingly speaks to the complex relation between the discursive practices, written and oral, and the political culture of the soldiers. But more important, it stands as an illuminating metaphor of the power of writing in relation to the practices of imperial war, showing that literacy enabled subversion. However conventional in the rhetoric of dedications and preliminary poems, the contiguity of the pen and the sword was potentially dangerous. Just as literate soldiers could help start a mutiny and disturb imperial practice on the field, they could also tell and read stories that voiced some of the exploitative conditions under which they worked or challenge the basic tenets and goals of imperial practice and discourse.

      CHAPTER 2

      The Truth About War

      ROLDÁN AND THE KING OF FRANCE

      In one of the most spectacular military events of the century, Charles V’s imperial troops famously captured the French king Francis I at the battle of Pavia in February 1525. Juan de Oznaya, a common infantryman who participated in this and other campaigns of the Wars of Italy (1494–1559), recounted in 1544 how some rank-and-file Spanish soldiers had the chance,

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