In the latter third of the sixteenth century and first decade of the seventeenth, three authors writing in Spanish penned epic poems on the recent history of conflict in their own times. Alonso de Ercilla (1533–94) published in Madrid a trilogy looking back to the Chilean frontier war between Spanish squadrons and Mapuche people groups (whom he calls araucanos, Araucanians) in which he had fought during his youth. The three parts of his testimonial epic La Araucana [The Araucaniad], painstakingly expanded and reworked over more than twenty years until almost the end of his life (1569, 1578, 1589–90), were among the bestselling works of the Spanish Golden Age. One of a number of authors to capitalise on Ercilla’s success, the young Pedro de Oña (b. 1570, d. after 1635), the son of an officer who had perished in the ongoing conflict in Arauco, wrote the first poem to be printed in Lima, Arauco domado [Arauco Tamed] in 1596. Even before the third part of La Araucana was printed, another military veteran, Juan de Miramontes Zuázola (1567–1610) may have begun work on his monumental Armas antárticas [Antarctic Arms] (c. 1608–09), a sweeping panorama of what he poetically termed the ‘Antarctic’ region, comprising the Viceroyalty of Peru and its Pacific waters, from the Inca Empire, to the wars of conquest and rebellion, to the defence of the coastline and the Isthmus of Panama against piracy and the threat from African maroon settlements. La Araucana soon formed part of the canon of Spanish Golden Age literature, and was emulated by Cervantes, Góngora and Lope de Vega among others, but these three epics are also integral to the formation of Latin American colonial literature. In these authors, writing in the most highly regarded poetic form of their day about conflicts that were bitterly fought but little known, the confines of the Spanish Empire take centre stage.
The argument of this book, made up of three substantial case studies of each of the poems preceded by a synoptic historical chapter, is that these three poems form and dramatise a series of experimental and challenging ideas about warfare and political community. The poems attest to a fascination with how human societies become political, with the different forms of governance that emerge across an early modern globe which was increasingly connected, and in which several forms of polity might coexist within the same geographical space. All arise from contexts intimately conditioned by warfare and rebellion, and from debates about the ethics of war and its conduct, and their most insistent and consistent concern is with the ways that political communities are threatened, shaped, re-formed and broken apart in response to violent conflict within and among themselves. The two concepts, of conflict ethics and political community, haunted this era. The preoccupation with political community is one the poems have in common with other modes of intellectual expression such as juridical theories of natural law, humanist commentaries and political treatises, and many
crónicas de Indias and histories of the world.
1 On natural law, see Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton, 2011); for ideas of political community in chronicles of the Americas (specifically the Andean region), see Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru (Princeton, 2007), chapters 3 and 4; on world histories, Giuseppe Marcocci’s The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas (Oxford, 2020). It carried particularly high stakes in the Americas, still strongly marked by the legacy of the mid-sixteenth-century debates about the legitimacy of dominion and conquest which had partly hinged on the civil and political status of the Amerindian collective. The same might be said for the history, conduct and ethics of conflict, in an age in which the military revolution and its distinct forms of sociability had an incalculable impact on culture. Both themes have generated a large body of scholarship across various disciplines, but there is still need for a greater understanding of how the two concepts developed concurrently and influenced each other. In the poems in question, conflict and political community are closely intertwined, and this neglected dimension of their thought has implications for the study of both Golden Age and Hispanic colonial literature. The idiosyncratic ways in which literature confronts these political questions offers, in turn, a distinctive window onto the intellectual history of the era – and might also facilitate the decoupling of the latter from its traditionally Eurocentric parameters.
The literary epic of this period is one way into these questions, but one which requires readers to immerse themselves in its own distinctive, imaginative and often slippery language to make any sense of them at all. These lengthy narrative poems, known in their day as
poemas heroicos and traditionally termed
épica culta in modern criticism, constituted one of the most prestigious cultural forms of the Renaissance because of their association with the revered poets of the Greco-Roman canon: Virgil, Homer, Ovid, Lucan and Statius among others.
2 The term épica culta, which originated as a means of distinguishing Renaissance epic from the medieval cantares de gesta and the romancero, both seen as forms of primary, oral epic, has its disadvantages. As Miguel Martínez points out, when used irreflexively it has often ‘favoured the understanding of the genre, without exception, as elitist, imitative and hypercodified by the classical tradition of epic’: ‘Prácticas y representaciones del imperio. Guerra, imprenta y espacio social en la épica hispánica del quinientos’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, City University of New York, 2010), p. 6. In the interests of concision, I directly translate this and other secondary sources into English without comment. Notable for their ‘permeability’ with other genres and their complex web of allusions,
3 Stephanie Béreizat-Lang and Eugenia Ortiz-Gambetta, ‘El género épico entre Europa y América: Poéticas, ideologías y prácticas culturales’, Rilce: Revista de Filología Hispánica, 36.1 (2020), 7–21 (p. 8). they tend to mirror questions obliquely rather than answering them directly, and something strange has usually happened to the reflection in the process. One question often feeds into another whose connections are not immediately apparent, but which this form of epic, which stretches all the way back to the classical canon of western literature and sideways to converse synchronically with other genres and media of its era, is expansive, encyclopaedic and eclectic enough to encompass.
4 On the expansive quality of epic, see Thomas Greene: ‘The first quality of the epic imagination is expansiveness, the impulse to extend its own luminosity in ever-widening circles’ (The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity, New Haven, CT, 1963, p. 10), and Margaret Beissinger: ‘the inclusiveness of epic – the tendency of a given poem to present an encyclopaedic account of the culture that produced it – also explains its political potency’ (‘Introduction’ to Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus and Susanne Wofford, eds, Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community, Berkeley, CA, 1999, pp. 1–19 [pp. 2–3]). Already in the sixteenth century, Torquato Tasso speaks of epic’s ability to create a ‘picciolo mondo’: I ‘Discorsi del poema eroico’ di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Francesco Flora (Milan, 1951), p. 221. Such obliqueness is, then, partly in the nature of the form, but partly also because writers were still searching for adequate means of expression for new forms of political community and conflict which were a distinctive product of the early modern colonial and imperial experience over a globe whose contours were not yet fully known. The wars described and in some cases lived by these writers took place on the frontiers: frontiers that sometimes had clear coordinates, such as the river Biobío, which came to mark the effective dividing line between Spanish- and Mapuche-controlled territory in Chile and over which much blood was spilled, but which often existed in a space that, quite literally, had no place yet on the map.
5 For further reflections on the notion of frontier in the context of colonial epic, see Celia López-Chávez, Epics of Empire and Frontier: Alonso de Ercilla and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá as Spanish Colonial Chroniclers (Norman, OK, 2016), pp. 7–10. The outlying areas of the Spanish Empire whose governance was still undefined, the areas of tentative exploration and attempted expansion across the Americas and South East Asia, and the waters of the Indo-Pacific also acted as fluid and incalculable frontiers around and between this Antarctic world.
These are also frontiers in a more conceptual sense. Ongoing, ill-defined and often inglorious, the conflicts of these poems are at the frontiers of history, rarely finding a substantial place in printed chronicles and other historiographical works. They are at the frontiers of Just War Theory, which tended to depend on a shared code of ethics and a defined declaration and cessation of hostilities remote from the realities of discontinuous and inchoate outbreaks of colonial violence. On these frontiers, new kinds of political community were taking shape and becoming visible for the first time: the Araucanians and other indigenous people groups who did not seem to fit the mould of Amerindian polities elaborated in the mid-sixteenth century; urban settlements and mobile groups of soldiers and others which formed the
república de españoles around the Viceroyalty; the sea-borne communities of the merchant, naval or pirate economy; settlements of freed and runaway slaves. By and large, it was their actual or threatened conflict with the Spanish imperial project which made these communities visible to the European eye, and these were thus also extreme situations which tested the consistency and durability of these polities to the core. The language our writers found most adequate to describe them was an imaginative one, and, to reiterate the epigraph to this chapter, this perhaps made new depths of connection accessible. Zambrano suggests that poetry works best when it gives voice to ideas that are not yet stable or fully fledged, and which, in a sense, it creates: not in capturing ‘what already has “number, measure and weight”’, but in finding ‘“number, measure and weight” for what does not yet have it’.
6 María Zambrano, Filosofía y poesía (Mexico City, 1987 [1939]), p. 88, itself written in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and on the outbreak of the Second World War.