Front Lines - Miguel Martinez Material Texts

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esto llegó un soldado español arcabucero, llamado Roldán, y bien se le podía llamar por su esfuerzo. Traía dos pelotas de plata y una de oro de su arcabuz, en la mano; y llegado al rey, le dice: “Señor, Vuestra Alteza sepa que ayer cuando supe que la batalla se había de dar, yo hice seis pelotas de plata para vuestros Mosiores, y la de oro para vos. De las de plata, las cuatro yo creo que fueron bien empleadas, porque no las eché sino para sayo de brocado o carmesí. Otras muchas de plomo he tirado por ahí a gente común; musiores no topé más, por esto me sobraron dos de las suyas. La de oro véisla aquí y agradecedme la buena voluntad, que deseaba daros la más honrosa muerte que a príncipe se ha dado, pero pues no quiso Dios que en la batalla os viese, tomalda para ayuda a vuestro rescate, que ocho ducados pesa; una onza tiene.” El rey tendió la mano y la tomó, y le dijo que le agradescía el deseo que había tenido y más la obra que en darle la pelota hacía.2

      (And then there arrived a Spanish soldier, an arquebusier named Roldán, a truly fitting name for such a valiant man. He came to the king carrying in his hand two bullets made of silver and one of gold, and he told him: “Lord, your highness should know that when I found out yesterday that the battle would take place today, I cast six silver bullets for your noble vassals and one of gold for yourself. I believe I made good use of four out of six silver bullets, for I fired them into gilded brocade and crimson shirts. I fired off many others, made of lead, towards the common people, because I could not come across more noblemen, and thus I have two left. But this gold one right here (you should thank my goodwill) I saved to ensure you the most honorable death that a prince has ever received. God did not want me to see you during the battle, so here you go, have it and count it as my contribution to your ransom, for it is one ounce, worth eight ducats!” The king took it in his hand and retorted that he was grateful for his thoughtfulness, but even more than that he appreciated receiving the bullet in that fashion.)

      When collated with other available sources, Oznaya’s seems like a remarkably rich and reliable historical account of the watershed imperial victory at Pavia. The factual accuracy of his war story about his comrade Roldán, however, is harder to assess—if not completely off. It resembles too closely the structure of the facetiae and apothegms so dear to learned humanists and popular audiences alike during the Renaissance. But it also resonates with many war stories that, orally or in writing, circulated in the soldiers’ republic of letters. For modern readers, it may seem hard to believe that a soldier would spend over two months’ worth of salary in making a gold bullet, but the rituals of early modern warfare and the codes of soldierly gallantry or bizarría could potentially explain the soldier’s liberal, cavalier attitude. Regardless of the actual factuality of the episode, however, Oznaya would probably agree with his modern counterpart, the Vietnam veteran and fiction writer Tim O’Brien: “I had to make up a few things, but listen, it’s still true.”3

      Indeed, Oznaya’s apothegmatic anecdote reveals many of the truths about modern warfare with which Renaissance authors had to come to terms. Roldán’s actions and sayings distill a mix of respect and contempt for his betters—no other than the king of France and his most noble vassals—that is characteristic of the popular soldierly ethos in early modern Europe. The use of a distinctly oral register and a somewhat debased idiom of vassalage to blatantly address his superiors is peculiar to the linguistic behavior of the plático soldiers, as was the playful quipping about the rather serious matter of killing and dying in battle. The commoner’s pride in having slaughtered a bunch of noblemen not in single chivalric combat but with his arquebus, the most plebeian of weapons, is indicative of the shocking effects that the military revolution had on previous beliefs, attitudes, and practices of warfare. The truth about war was that in Pavia, on February 25, 1525, a plebeian Spanish rank-and-file soldier could have shot down the king of France—whether the bullet was made of gold or lead, whether Oznaya’s story happened as he recounted it or otherwise. Eight ducats, two months of the arquebusier’s salary: that was the price of the king’s life for Roldán, and that was Roldán’s insolent contribution to his ransom. The truth about war was that the new military technologies and tactics had forever altered the social logics of warfare and of its representation.

      Roldán is a somewhat unlikely name for a Spaniard of the time in any of its variants, but it must have surely been a common nickname for soldiers, either seriously extolling military attributes or ironically mocking excessive bravado. Whether real or fictional, the name of this particular character reveals the extent to which the matière de France, as contained in both Spanish romances, or ballads, and Italian romanzi, or narrative chivalric poems, had penetrated the spaces of the early modern soldiery. Yet Oznaya’s war story also strongly emphasizes the distance between Roland, the medieval paladin unfailingly loyal to the king of the Franks, and Roldán, the Spanish plebeian arquebusier trying to kill him—and arrogantly giving him some change for his ransom. The narrative and ideological order of epic, the most time-enduring discursive frame to narrate warfare, has been definitely and radically transformed.

      Roldán, the Spanish arquebusier, also contrasts sharply with the most famous reincarnation of his namesake in the days of the battle of Pavia. Cantos 9 and 11 of Ariosto’s 1532 edition of Orlando furioso fictionalized the revolting effects that gunpowder had for the chivalric imagination of European aristocracy. Cimosco, king of Frisia, used against Count Orlando a “strange new weapon.”4 The arquebus is in Ariosto’s fiction a hellish invention of some northern, aggressive tyrant, and it will take Orlando himself to throw it into the ocean, so that no one could ever recover it: “that never more a cavalier may be / advantaged by your aid, nor evil gain.” A legendary necromancer, however, would retrieve “the infernal machine” with a spell. The arquebus, which stands, metonymically, for the radical transformation of warfare in the first moments of the military revolution, is alien to the referential universe of romanzo fiction. The genre can only rationalize it by tracing a mythical genealogy that vaguely refers to the historical invention. But the moral condemnation of gunpowder as the destroyer of individual valor and chivalric heroism had deep social implications. The fraudulent weapon of lowly cowards, the arquebus was associated with the plebeianization and massification of the early modern army, and thus it shook the ground of the nobility’s most powerful legitimations as the exclusive practitioners of the noble art of war. As it happened in Pavia, the “brutta invenzïon” had indeed revolutionized the social logics of warfare: “How many lords, alas! How many more / among the bravest of our cavaliers / have died and still must perish in this war / by which you brought the world to bitter tears / and Italy left stricken to the core?” (Per te son giti et anderan sotterra / tanti signori e cavallieri tanti / prima che sia finita questa guerra / che’l mondo, ma più Italia, ha messo in pianti).5 The resistance against the gunpowder revolution in the aristocratic imagination of the age can be found everywhere outside Ariosto’s fiction. In 1536, for instance, one nobleman from Valencia challenged a peer to a duel, accusing his rival of having schemed “to have some lowly people shoot their arquebuses,” and was utterly outraged for “those things do not belong among gentlemen” (concertar de tirar arcabuces por medio de bellacos … tales cosas no han de caber en caballeros).6

      When rewriting his poem for his 1532 edition, when Ariosto added to the princeps (1516) the series of episodes on Olimpia that contained the story about Cimosco’s arquebus, the poet might have indeed been reacting to the shock of Pavia, as condensed in Oznaya’s anecdote about Roldán. The battle of Pavia has long been considered a turning point in the military, political, and even social history of early modern Europe, the climax of the Italian Wars.7 The engagement represented, at the military level, the ultimate triumph of a professional army based on the massive use of infantry companies of pikemen and arquebusiers over a fighting force still relying too much on the heavy cavalry of men-at-arms for which the French were famous. From a political point of view, the young and ambitious Charles of Habsburg achieved a crucial victory over his main continental rival, a victory that would break with the Italian—and thus European—hegemony of the Valois. Finally, Pavia would be remembered during the sixteenth century for having dramatically changed values and beliefs about the social consequences and meaning of warfare. Contemporary witnesses and modern historians often noted how plebeian infantrymen like Roldán, making good use of the gunpowder revolution, had slaughtered the crème of the French nobility. An army of Roldanes overpowered

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