The Epic Mirror

To situate these questions synchronically to begin with, sixteenth-century Iberian epic was a genre which offered freedom, flexibility and prestige to its practitioners. Renaissance epic in Spanish and Portuguese was heavily influenced by Latin epic, but from the mid-sixteenth century usually took its form from the Italian romanzi.1 The poems which are the subject of this book all share the formal characteristics set out here, which came to be especially associated with heroic poetry in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian from the 1560s onwards. Although literary epics occasionally adopted other metres, and, as familiarity with Aristotle’s Poetics increased, early modern writers on poetics also argued that an epic poem could be written in prose as well as verse, the octava real overwhelmingly dominates in the print market. Epic poetry in its broader, more modern sense need not of course be confined to this, and might include works from this period in a variety of forms and languages, oral as well as literary. In the Americas, the beginnings of ‘colonial epic’ are often traced back to the anonymous manuscript Relaçión de la conquista y descubrimiento que hizo el Marqués don Francisco Piçarro en demanda de las provincias y rreynos que agora llamamos Nueva Castilla […] (c. 1538), usually known as Conquista del Perú, which is written in coplas de arte mayor, a verse form in vogue in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These popular chivalric poems of adventure, which found their most canonical exponents in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1483) and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516) (and his more pessimistic and incomplete Cinque canti, 1545), had a very loose plot based on the legendary campaigns of Charlemagne, Orlando (Roland) and the Franks against the Saracens, with many amorous and magical interludes. They often had more than one part so were left open to sequels and continuation, and each part was divided into an unspecified number of cantos consisting of between 70 and 200 hendecasyllabic octaves known as ottava rima in Italian or octavas reales in Spanish, which had full rhyme in the scheme ABABABCC.2 Spanish epics shortened and regularised this length somewhat, tending to fluctuate between 50 and 110 octavas per canto. The number of cantos within each poem or parte still varied hugely. Even this schematic definition makes clear that these poems were characterised by formal, and often narrative, openness and incompleteness. They posed no obstacles to long digressions and leaps across time, space, and between the natural and supernatural worlds, tied together mainly by an intrusive narrator who often interrupts the action with metanarrative comments.

Although Ercilla and to some extent his successors write in a parodic and sometimes antagonistic relation to the romanzi, several features of the form well suit the political dimension of the narratives. Its loose and expansive structure allows the narrative to move freely through time and space, pairing and juxtaposing varieties of political community and theatres of war of very different complexion. Such dizzying leaps of imagination arouse the reader’s sense of marvel, but they are also ways of connecting worlds that would usually be kept apart. The presence of an often ironic first-person narrator allows them to make narrative comments – usually brief and enigmatic – on these juxtapositions, especially in moral, philosophical and political reflections on the narrative that commonly constitute the first few stanzas of each canto. The rhyming couplet at the end of each stanza lends itself to pithy and aphoristic recapitulation and reflection on the action. These tendencies favour what I describe as the ‘epic mirror’, the ways in which one scenario is reflected in another with little apparent connection, but for which the narrative creates a series of correspondences. Sometimes it feels more like a distorted mirror or a hall of mirrors, with reflections bouncing disconcertingly and even comically in many different directions.3 This notion of a distorted reflection might be productively compared with Alain Viala’s metaphor of ‘prismatic effects’, although he applies it differently: ‘By prisms I mean those mediations, those realities, at once translucent and deformative that are formed by the literary codes, institutions, and fields interposed between the social referent and the text as well as between the work and its readers – those realities that determine meaning.’ Alain Viala and Paula Wissing, ‘Prismatic Effects’, Critical Enquiry, 14.3 (1988), 563–73 (p. 563). These correspondences are not only the result of juxtaposition; sometimes a single episode implicitly reflects on other conflicts and communities, often those which are closer to home to its intended readership and the subject of fraught polemic. In turn, one allusion can evoke another, opening up a multiplicity of perspectives. Political ideas often become apparent through repeated formulae, allusions, similes, figures, turns of phrase and images – in other words, the works’ own distinctive poetic language – rather than through direct statement.

This mirroring effect is, then, an indirect vehicle for political thought: epic is a genre which often says things without saying them. This might be taken to imply practices of reading which seem to us implausibly abstruse and speculative, and to limit the depth of the poets’ engagement with political ideas. It is not the purpose of this book to argue that all early readers would have framed the politics of these poems in the terms I suggest: they could be and certainly were enjoyed on many other levels, and more direct, explicit political statements also have their place in the works. Epic attracted a diverse readership, and horizons of reception are as a result varied.4 The readership of sixteenth-century Spanish epic is investigated by, among others, Maxim Chevalier, L’Arioste en Espagne (1530–1650): Recherches sur l’influence du ‘Roland furieux’ (Bordeaux, 1966), and María José Vega, ‘Idea de la épica en la España del quinientos’, in María José Vega and Lara Vilà, eds, La teoría de la épica en el siglo XVI (España, Francia, Italia y Portugal) (Vigo, 2010), pp. 103–35, who give evidence for their being read by veterans and soldiers of all classes, nobles, and litterati with rhetorical and humanist interests (and suggest, incidentally, a primarily masculine audience). As the poems’ dedications show, the ‘Christian prince’ was often the ideal reader. Chevalier’s and Vega’s conclusions are mainly relevant to the Spanish reception of epic, and its reading elsewhere in Europe and in the broader Hispanic world merits further research. MacCormack suggests intriguingly, but with insufficient evidence, that European readers might have been more drawn to Ercilla’s literary merits, and American readers to his historical understanding (p. 218). My own investigations suggest that in the Americas soldiers, encomenderos and officials within the colonial bureaucracy at all levels were among the epics’ early readers. Such reading practices were, however, not only possible but in many ways favoured by contemporary education and approaches to poetry. The core of the humanist curriculum was the Roman poet Virgil, and, as numerous studies demonstrate, the Aeneid was very often interpreted in political and imperial terms.5 In modern criticism, the notion that Virgil’s innovation in epic changes the hero’s cause from a personal to a moral and political one concerned with nation and empire goes back to C.M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London, 1945), pp. 11–13. The political terrain of Renaissance epic is sometimes interpreted very broadly, as by Greene, The Descent from Heaven, pp. 17–18, for whom it encompasses the natural and spiritual as well as the human worlds, but a particularly influential reading is that of David Quint, who divides poets after Virgil into two camps, according to their relationship to imperial systems of government: ‘epics of the imperial victors and epics of the defeated, a defeated whose resistance contains the germ of a broader republican or antimonarchical politics’, in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, 1993), p. 8. Scholars differ on whether early modern readers tended to see a panegyric, imperialist Virgil straightforwardly at the service of rulers (as, until recently, was the convention for scholars of Spanish epic), or whether there was room for a plurality of voices as uncovered in the twentieth century by the ‘Harvard School’, applied to this era by Craig Kallendorf, The Other Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford, 2007). With theories of imitation at the centre of poetic practice, readers were sensitive even to hidden allusions and enjoyed discovering and deciphering the layering of voices they created. Golden Age literary imitation tended, moreover, to be eclectic, drawing indiscriminately on a range of texts in different languages and from different periods, often those which are well outside our own literary canon.6 See Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, La imitación áurea: Cervantes, Quevedo, Góngora (Paris, 2016). This book takes this approach to imitative practice for granted, but applies it to the poems’ treatment of non-literary as well as literary sources. The poets dealt with here, then, could not articulate ideas with the exhaustive rigour of scholastic dialectic, but, as early modern poetic theorists often noted, the aim of the epic poet is not to form a logical argument but to create a miniature world so vivid that it comes alive in the imagination, a quality expressed by the Greek term enargeia or Latin evidentia. As well as evoking other allusions and histories which add depth and complexity to the events portrayed, then, political ideas are actualised, dramatised and brought to life in the poems in what we might term thought experiments, testing out what might happen to those ideas in the real world, or how they could be seen to have played out in historical events, but investing the outcome of the experiment with real emotional power.7 Medieval and early modern Spanish epics are sometimes divided into verosimilista and verista ‘schools’, terms which were coined by Ramón Menéndez Pidal to delineate poems to which the Aristotelian notion of mimesis or verisimilitude might be applied from those which aspire to ‘an essential approximation between poetry and historical truth’: ‘Poesía e historia en el “Mio Cid”. El problema de la épica española’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 3.2 (1949), 113–29 (p. 125). As José Antonio Mazzotti points out, the boundaries between the two varieties are not clear-cut, and ‘Both Ercilla and Oña move between both tendencies, with different nuances and intensities’ (which might also be applied to Miramontes): Lima fundida: Épica y nación criolla en el Perú (Madrid and Frankfurt, 2016), p. 52.

By the mid-sixteenth century, though, Spanish epic was already a plural genre with many adaptations of the romanzo form to different purposes. As early as the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, popular news-bearing poems known as guerre in ottava rima sang of recent battles whose gory realism and technological modernity was a deliberate riposte to the escapism and courtly ethos of the romanzi. Miguel Martínez has shown how between the 1560s and 1590s a number of Spanish poems composed by soldiers and those in military circles showed the influence of these guerre, a tradition for which, alluding to Michael Murrin’s classic study, he coins the name épicas de la pólvora or ‘gunpowder epics’.8 Miguel Martínez, Front Lines: Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Philadelphia, 2016), pp. 67–85, and his ‘Género, imprenta y espacio social: Una “poética de la pólvora” para la épica quinientista’, Hispanic Review, 79.2 (2011), 163–87. The term is a tribute to Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago, 1994), the first systematic study of the impact of the military revolution on Renaissance literature, wherein Murrin coins the similar term ‘gunpowder poetics’. The two variants of the genre are characterised by sociological as well as literary difference: while the romanzi and books of chivalry were luxuriously produced and the reading of choice of the high aristocracy, the épicas de la pólvora on recent military history were quickly and cheaply printed in portable editions and circulated among the ‘soldierly republic of letters’.9 Martínez, Front Lines, p. 1. The first part of La Araucana certainly shows the imprint of the latter, with its stated aim to recount recent wars in an uncompromising style and to save the ordinary soldier from oblivion. Their influence on the subsequent parts of the poem is much weaker,10 As Aude Plagnard demonstrates through a study of paratexts, while the first part of Ercilla’s epic affiliates itself with and materially resembles the ‘gunpowder epics’, subsequent editions of the second part also seek more aristocratic backing, while the third part implies an entirely different kind of sociability, with the exclusion of the prefatory material by fellow veterans in favour of pieces contributed by aristocrats and other established poets, a process which developed in tandem with the increase of Ercilla’s literary prestige and his socio-economic status: Une épopée ibérique: Alonso de Ercilla et Jerónimo Corte-Real (1569–1589) [online] (Madrid, 2019), <http://books.openedition.org/cvz/7464>, ch. II, paras 49–52. I have not found evidence for direct influence of the gunpowder epics on Oña and the seventeenth-century poets. but they do partly explain why Ercilla set a precedent of exploring the ethics of conflict in strongly empirical rather than theoretical terms. Warfare cannot be understood in Ercilla and his successors other than how it is actually fought in the present.

In the last third of the sixteenth century, two further poems which would have a particular influence on the subsequent history of Iberian epic adapted the romanzo form to a more historically distant, classically informed and unified subject matter. Luis de Camões’s Os Lusíadas [The Lusiads] (1572), an account of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India (1497–99) and the foundation of the Portuguese overseas empire, came to particular prominence in the Hispanic world on Philip II’s annexation of Portugal and the union of the two Iberian empires in 1580.11 See Eugenio Asensio, ‘La fortuna de Os Lusíadas’, in Estudios portugueses (Paris, 1974), pp. 303–24, and Miguel Martínez, ‘A Poet of our Own: The Struggle for Os Lusíadas in the Afterlife of Camões’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 10.1 (2010), 71–94. Three erudite translations into Spanish were published between 1580 and 1591, one of them by Enrique Garcés in Peru. Also in 1580, the long-awaited magnum opus of Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, was published, a poetic reimagining of the First Crusade (1096–99) led by Godfrey of Bouillon and culminating in the Christian ‘liberation’ of Jerusalem. While the poets dealt with in this book show awareness of and react to these innovations, they do not adopt them as a model for their own poems. Tasso and Camões are a concealed presence within Ercilla’s and Miramontes’s works respectively, but the latter construct their poems in many ways against the poetics and values of these two predecessors.12 I argue this elsewhere in ‘La presencia oculta de Torquato Tasso en la Tercera parte de La Araucana de Alonso de Ercilla (1589–90)’, Bulletin Hispanique, 121.1 (2019), 73–101, and ‘Os lusíadas and Armas antárticas: Eros, Eris and the Art of Imitation in Colonial Epic’, in Rodrigo Cacho and Imogen Choi, eds, The Rise of Spanish American Poetry, 1500–1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 222–38. Jaime Nicolopulos, The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in ‘La Araucana’ and ‘Os Lusíadas’ (University Park, PA, 2000), discusses Ercilla’s response to Camões. Oña and Miramontes pay homage to Tasso by incorporating a providential framework that situates their accounts of warfare within a Christian–Infidel matrix, but still owe more to Ercilla; like his poem and like the romanzo, their narratives are centrifugal, resist closure, and – despite cameo appearances of the divine and demonic – still remain firmly in the human, and political, sphere.

Tasso and Camões are nevertheless informative points of comparison. Camões famously adopted the prophetic framework and divine machinery of Virgil’s Aeneid to elaborate a glorious vision of an early modern, global empire of navigation (albeit not without its ‘further voices’),13 An idea familiar to scholars of Classics through R.O.A.M. Lyne’s Further Voices in Virgil’s Aeneid (Oxford, 1992). and his work points to the importance of empire as another factor in the relationship between conflict and political community and to the significance of prophecy as a literary means of addressing it. The Gerusalemme, in turn, aimed to retain the fascination of the romanzi, with its unbounded imagination, varied digressions, larger-than-life heroes and love stories across religious divides, but to subordinate it to an explicitly Christian and political purpose. The poem, the Allegoria which was usually printed alongside it, and the treatise on poetics which accompanied it, the Discorsi del poema eroico (1594; an earlier version dates to 1587), foreground the importance of allegory as a way of reading epic politically. According to the Allegoria, the conquest of Jerusalem is a symbolic analogy for the perfect political community: a Christian, monarchical one. In this, Tasso follows in a long tradition of allegorical reading frequently applied to Scripture but also to the classical Greco-Roman tradition, and shows how this could be adapted to an early modern concern with the body politic. While the poems dealt with in this book are not straightforwardly allegorical in this way, and the political communities they depict rarely fit Tasso’s mould, allegory is one filter through which a contemporary reader might have understood their mirroring effect. Through an allegorical lens, the historical subject matter is significant not only in its own right but as a symbol for broader ideas about the ascension and decline of political communities.

Allegory, in turn, leads us onto one further criticism sometimes made (or more often assumed) about epic poetry during this period: that because it is a genre that relies heavily on literary formulae with a long past, it tends towards ‘formulaic portrayals of its objects’, fitting the subject to its conventions and incapable of real curiosity about differences in peoples and cultures.14 Rolena Adorno, The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (New Haven, CT, 2007), p. 204. Such a criticism becomes particularly acute when applied to representations of Amerindian culture, at a time when early efforts to write of Amerindian history and ethnography were made, but often faced difficulties in achieving publication and dissemination. Epic poems were certainly not ethnographic masterpieces – although they did not always shy away from genuine recognition of cultural difference, either, and the representation of indigenous peoples in particular varied in depth according to the authors’ length of residence in the Americas and their degree of familiarity and interactions with native groups.15 As Mazzotti points out, the writing of epic also carried different stakes for a chapetón author like Ercilla (a relatively short-term resident in the Americas), a criollo like Oña, born on the Arauco frontier, and a baqueano like Miramontes (a long-term resident); as he puts it, creole identity is fundamentally ambivalent, ‘a particular socio-political formation of Neo-European “ethnic” and racial prevalence within a radically heterogeneous and multiracial context’: Lima fundida, p. 15. In some ways, however, these limitations also favoured the kind of comparative approach to questions of political community and conflict ethics I have outlined. The works of this period were humanist, in the sense encapsulated by Terence’s maxim that nothing human is alien, and share the conviction of a fundamental common human nature across time and space. As Mercedes Blanco puts it, through this universalising lens, warfare too is ‘a stage or theatre which makes human beings and the peoples of the world actors in the same drama or figures in the same dance’.16 Mercedes Blanco, ‘La épica áurea como poesía’ in Rodrigo Cacho Casal and Anne Holloway, eds, Los géneros poéticos del Siglo de Oro (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 13–30 (p. 29). It is what permits the creation of the multiple mirrors and reflections I discuss, the perception of analogies as well as differences between the ‘republican’ community of Arauco and the restive Dutch republic, the indigenous frontier communities of a fabulous Cebu and infernal Antarctic, or the historical Araucanian warriors and the contemporary preoccupations of the province of Chile.

Epic held other, more practical attractions for its practitioners too. Many epic poems and romanzi – Ariosto, Tasso, Camões and Ercilla included – were phenomenally popular, and perhaps the most commercially viable form of poetry of the period. La Araucana, for instance, went through eighteen different editions and reprints before 1600, some of them (incredibly, considering its length) pocket-sized, was translated into English and (in 1619) Dutch, was converted into shorter ballads, romances, to be sung and performed, and inspired a number of works of theatre.17 In the English and Dutch translations, the war in Arauco is explicitly presented as an analogy for the English colonial venture in Ireland and the defence of the Dutch republic against Habsburg aggression, respectively, lending further support to the view that reading the conflicts as a mirror for other theatres of war and political communities came naturally to its early readers: see Patricia Palmer, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 93–124, and Barbara Fuchs, ‘Travelling Epic: Translating Ercilla’s La Araucana in the Old World’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 36.2 (2006), 380–95. The Dutch translation by Isaac Janszonius still lacks a proper study but is briefly discussed in Martínez, Front Lines, pp. 160–61, Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 206–07, and Lisa Kattenberg, ‘Braving the Batavians: Classical Models and Countering Rebellion in the Spanish Empire’, forthcoming in Joris Oddens, Mart Rutjes and Arthur Weststeijn, eds, Discourses of Decline: Essays on Republicanism in Honor of Wyger R.E. Velema (Leiden). On the works of theatre inspired by La Araucana and Arauco domado, see my article ‘The Spectacle of Conquest: Epic Conflicts on the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Stage’, in Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Stephen Harrison and Claire Kenward, eds, Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2019), pp. 336–50. To compose such a poem was not just a commercial venture, but strove for ‘what we would today call creating a myth’.18 Mercedes Blanco, Góngora heroico: Las ‘Soledades’ y la tradición épica (Madrid, 2012), p. 11. In addition, for the most part, epics seem to have been peculiarly resistant to formal censorship, other than when they intervened very directly in the controversial political manoeuvres of their patrons.19 This was the case for Oña, copies of whose poem were confiscated by the Archbishop of Lima and attacked by other local dignitaries, as I discuss in Chapter 3; and for Lope de Vega’s 1598 Dragontea on the death of Francis Drake, which was denounced to the Council of the Indies by the royal chronicler Antonio de Herrera, as Elizabeth Wright discusses in Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598–1621 (Lewisburg, PA, 2001), pp. 24–51. Even in these cases, interested attempts at restricting the poems’ circulation proved only partially successful. This is not entirely surprising; the Inquisition and its Index of Prohibited Books was, with a few signal exceptions, notoriously unconcerned with works of imaginative literature. It remains true, though, that even when the poems deal with sensitive topics which in other contexts might have been restricted information, such as the pre-colonial history of indigenous peoples and their religious customs, this does not attract official censure or impede their circulation. This is in stark contrast to works of history and ethnography on the Indies, which often encountered direct or indirect suppression, risking prohibition by the Council of the Indies in addition to the regular mechanisms of censorship, and remained in manuscript, at least during the reign of Philip II.20 Two informative studies of censorship in this period which focus on the unusual case of Jerónimo Román y Zamora’s Repúblicas del mundo [Republics of the World] (1575, 1595), with differing conclusions, are Rolena Adorno, ‘Censorship and its Evasion: Jerónimo Román and Bartolomé de las Casas’, Hispania, 75.4 (1992), 812–27, and Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘The Concept of Gentile Civilization in Missionary Discourse and its European Reception: Mexico, Peru and China in the Repúblicas del mundo by Jerónimo Román (1575–95)’, in Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile, and others, eds, Missions d’évangélisation et circulation des savoirs: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Madrid, 2011), pp. 311–50. Whether the poets could gain the necessary financial backing and patronage to see the work into print was another matter; writers in this period were still vulnerable in other ways, and Chapters 3 and 4 will discuss the difficulties faced by those such as Oña and Miramontes who lacked the resources to publish and publicise their poems themselves. It is arguable, though, that things could be said in an epic poem which might face more scrutiny in a chronicle, a scholastic disquisition, or a political treatise.

One other form of writing with which epic often affiliated itself in this period, particularly when giving an account of recent wars, was historiography. The Neronian poet Lucan, who recounted the (relatively) recent history of the wars between Julius Caesar and Pompey in his Pharsalia or De Bello Civili [Concerning the Civil War], and who was adopted as ‘nuestro Lucano’ in Spain because of his birth in Roman Corduba, provided a prestigious precedent for blurring boundaries between the two genres.21 In Books of the Brave (Berkeley, CA, 1992), pp. 203–04, Irving Leonard demonstrates the frequency with which Lucan appeared on the inventory of books destined for export to the Indies, for instance, although not the preferred edition or editions. The widely read and abundantly annotated prose translation of the Pharsalia by Martín Lasso de Oropesa (c. 1538–40, with numerous subsequent editions) only added to this confusion, with its titling variously as La historia que escribió en Latín el poeta Lucano [The History which the Poet Lucan Wrote in Latin] or Lucano, poeta y historiador antiguo: En que se tratan las guerras Pharsalicas [Lucan, Ancient Poet and Historian: In which Are Narrated the Pharsalian Wars]. Epic poems often shared shelf space and a common readership with works of history in the period,22 As Vega argues, based on a study of libraries in ‘Idea de la épica’, pp. 103–35. and in the prologue to the first part of La Araucana, Ercilla makes the historical veracity of his narrative and its military subject matter his primary justification for publication: ‘considerando ser la historia verdadera y de cosas de guerra, a las cuales hay tantos aficionados, me he resuelto en imprimirla’ [considering that this is a true history about the business of warfare, which has so many followers, I have resolved to print it].23 Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucana, ed. by Isaías Lerner, 2nd edn (Madrid, 1998), ‘Prólogo’, p. 69; quotations from the first two parts of the poem are taken from this edition based on that of Madrid, 1597, and designated by canto and stanza number, except where there is significant variation from an earlier edition or state, in which case the variant used is indicated in a footnote. There is as yet no reliable critical edition of the poem, although one by Luis Gómez Canseco is forthcoming in the Biblioteca Clásica of the Real Academia Española. Translations from the primary texts are my own. Oña follows suit in describing his book as a ‘grave historia’ [serious history], one which sets out to make good Ercilla’s supposed omissions, and although the opening to Armas antárticas is a classical epic proem evoking Camões, Tasso and Virgil, elsewhere the poet muses on the challenges of striking a balance between truth and poetic fiction in a historia such as his own, and harks back to the ‘poetas coronistas’ [poet-chroniclers] of the classical past.24 Pedro de Oña, Arauco domado, ed. by Ornella Gianesin (Pavia, 2014), ‘Exordio’ stanza 17, p. 85: quotations from the poem are taken from this critical edition derived from the various states of the 1596 princeps, and designated by canto and stanza number. Juan de Miramontes Zuázola, Armas antárticas, ed. by Paul Firbas (Lima, 2006), V. 369–72, X. 822–26, pp. 268–69, 388–89: quotations from the poem are taken from this critical edition based on the autograph manuscript in the Biblioteca Nacional de Enpaña, MS BNE 3956, and are designated by canto and stanza numbers, which in this case are numbered sequentially throughout the whole poem rather than within each canto. Admittedly, historia is a slippery term in Spanish meaning both ‘history’ and ‘story’, and in this period it was used both for factual histories in prose and for the Byzantine (or Greek), Moorish and chivalric romance in works such as Heliodorus’s Historia etiópica [An Ethiopian Story], the anonymous Historia del Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa [The Tale of Abencerraje and the Lovely Jarifa], or La historia del emperador Carlomagno y de los doce pares de Francia [The History of Emperor Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France], the first two of which were also significant influences on Miramontes in particular. Nevertheless, the poets’ insistence on the truth of their narratives, and their occasional references to their methodology, marks out their discussions as engaging to differing degrees with emergent theories of early modern historiography. La Araucana, especially, goes on to stress that various differing accounts of events which happened before the narrator’s arrival in Chile have been compiled and compared, and that thereafter Ercilla’s status as an eyewitness who professes impartiality gives ground for the reader’s trust.25 XII. 69–70. Ercilla’s sources are most likely a mixture of oral testimonies and, perhaps, relaciones: he also refers briefly (IV. 70) to a Latin chronicle of Chile and Peru by the humanist and former Latin tutor to himself and to the future Philip II, Juan Cristóbal Calvete de Estrella (c. 1520–1593), probably the De rebus indicis, but this deals only with events up to 1542. He demonstrates a limited awareness of the only other chronicle of Chile known to be extant in 1569, Gerónimo de Vivar’s unpublished 1558 Crónica de los reinos de Chile [Chronicle of the Kingdoms of Chile], whether directly or through conversations with Vivar, as demonstrated by Giorgio Antei in La invención del reino de Chile: Gerónimo de Vivar y los primeros cronistas chilenos (Bogotá, 1989), and Gilberto Triviños in ‘El mito del tiempo de los héroes en Valdivia, Vivar y Ercilla’, Revista Chilena de Literatura, 49 (1996), 5–26. It is not clear whether he later read Alonso de Góngora Marmolejo’s 1575 Historia de todas las cosas que han acaecido en el Reino de Chile [History of All the Things that Have Happened in the Kingdom of Chile], which does, for its part, respond to Ercilla’s Primera parte; the chronicle remained unpublished until the nineteenth century but was sent to the Council of the Indies in 1576.

As this discussion implies, history in this period had a much broader meaning than it does today, and could encompass poetry, geographical descriptions and cosmography, for instance, as well as texts which are closer to the modern definition.26 Plagnard and Blanco give nuanced analyses of the porosity of the boundaries between history and epic poetry in this period, and of the ways in which epic is distinguishable from history, in Plagnard, Une épopée ibérique, ch. II, and Blanco, ‘La épica áurea como poesía’, and ‘Sur les frontières mouvantes de l’historiographie et de l’épopée: L’Araucana d’Alonso de Ercilla (1569–89)’, in Paloma Bravo, and others, eds, La renaissance des genres: Pratiques et théories des genres littéraires entre Italie et Espagne (XVe–XVIIe siècles) (Dijon, 2012), pp. 241–65. Models of historical writing were evolving with much experiment, and the points of contact between epic and historiography cannot be really traced without consideration of the particular forms that the latter took between the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One of these, which had a particular bearing on the poems’ treatment of political communities and the ethics of conflict, is the humanist vision of history as a tool for political education. Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose influence on the thought and literature of sixteenth-century Spain and Spanish America was profound, recommended in his 1516 mirror of princes that rulers peruse the Greco-Roman historians in order to find examples of moral virtue and vice in governance.27 Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, ed. by Lisa Jardine, trans. by Neil Cheshire and Michael Heath (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 62–64. The classic study of the influence of Erasmus in Spain remains that of Marcel Bataillon, Érasme et l’Espagne: Recherches sur l’histoire spirituelle du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1937). Increasingly, though, the study of history came to be associated with a realist and empiricist understanding of the political art. When the Valencian humanist Fadrique Furió Ceriol affirmed in 1559 that the perfect counsellor must be ‘grande historiador’, a great historian, his maxim had very specific implications for the kinds of history that should be read – those of the prince’s state, its neighbours, allies and enemies – and of how they should be read. For him, the focus above all should be on changes of rulers and on ‘el alma de la guerra’ [the spirit of war]: how wars were incited, fought, maintained, negotiated and ended; the reasons for losses and victories; the causes, effects and resolution of rebellions. In this way a reader might acquire a mastery of all the ‘mañas’ and ‘dobles tratos’ [ruses and double-dealings] of war, superior to that which a veteran might obtain through experience alone.28 Fadrique Furió Ceriol, El concejo y consejeros del Príncipe [The Council and Counsellors of the Prince], ed. by Henry Méchoulan (Madrid, 1993), pp. 32–35. In this he coincides with Niccolò Machiavelli, who encapsulated ‘all that I have learned about the conditions of the world through long experience and constant reading’ precisely in the form of a commentary on the Roman historian Livy in order to redeem the corruption of governance from ‘people not having a true understanding of the histories’.29 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses, trans. by James B. Atkinson and David Sices, in The Sweetness of Power: Machiavelli’s Discourses and Guicciardini’s Considerations (DeKalb, IL, 2002), ‘Dedication’, p. 13; ‘Preface B’, p. 22. In political treatises such as these, history is a storehouse of practical examples of how political communities rise and fall, how power is lost or maintained, and on the ways in which warfare plays out in these political contexts.

This humanist understanding, and the Machiavellian paradigm in particular, are crucial to the way Ercilla constructs his own narrative of the wars in Chile as a mirror for broader problems of rebellion and governance in a composite empire. The sixteenth century also heralded a series of historical writings which expanded their vision beyond Europe. The trend began early with chronicles of the Americas, all of which, in Rolena Adorno’s terms, are concerned to some degree with the ‘polemics of possession’, the question of the legitimacy of the Spanish presence in the Indies and of the status of Amerindian peoples and societies.30 Adorno, Polemics, p. 4. Against the background of these crónicas de Indias, the poetic representation of indigenous political communities, their relative status and their capacity for warfare is always highly fraught. Giuseppe Marcocci has recently added to these a series of histories of the world, which burgeoned into a variety of forms during precisely the same period as the compositions of Ercilla, Oña and Miramontes. In Marcocci’s view, this was a ‘brief season’ in which historians attempted to find alternatives to the limiting framework of medieval universal histories, seeking new ways to capture and connect the polyphony and multiplicity of pasts across the globe.31 Marocci, The Globe on Paper, p. 5. In their own way, the historical epics of this book give expression to the same search. Situated in their local contexts, the poets nevertheless contemplate the globe as a whole: while critics have tended to read them along the axis of relations between Europe and the Americas, in fact they seek to incorporate political communities separated by both space and time across not only the Atlantic but also Africa and Asia, albeit following the trajectory of travel of Iberian imperial interests. Their particular focus on contemporary societies and recent conflicts shares with the most popular world histories and their readers a desire for novelty and an interest in the synchronicity of ‘news’ as it occurs.32 The plethora of poems published in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Lepanto are another compelling example of this trend. As their recent editor Sarah Spence puts it, ‘Lepanto’s immediate international resonance, amplified through broadsheets, letters, and printed poems, is the Renaissance news story that comes closest to a “news event” of our time’: The Battle of Lepanto, ed. and trans. by Elizabeth R. Wright, Sarah Spence and Andrew Lemons (Cambridge, MA, 2014), p. xx.

Unlike the historians, and despite their self-fashioning as impartial chroniclers, the poets need not be bound entirely in their narratives by what actually happened in the conflicts they recall, much of which, especially in the opposing camp, was of course unknowable. Even before the dominance of Aristotle’s Poetics, which drew a firm dividing line between historical and poetic truth, poets could fill in gaps in their accounts, treat events selectively or invent new ones, play around with chronology and different ways of ordering episodes, and in general limit themselves only to what seemed credible, or verisimilar, and in some cases allow their imagination to roam even freer than that, all while still holding that what they wrote was in some way ‘true’. This means that at times the political and ethical questions that most vexed them emerge even more clearly than in their historical counterparts, because they are free to let them play out and repeat themselves, consciously or otherwise, in many different guises.

Chapter 1, ‘Political Community and Just War in the City of Lima’, outlines the local and intellectual contexts to which the three poems were attuned. Marcocci observes that the authors of world histories often led ‘unusual lives’, and the same might be said for the writers of the historical epics considered here, two of whom are veterans themselves and all of whom are intimately conditioned by their position in the ‘contact zone’ between different cultures.33 Marocci, The Globe on Paper, p. xx. The notion of the ‘contact zone’ is Rolena Adorno’s, and first appeared in her introduction to Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ed. by John V. Murra, Rolena Adorno and Jorge L. Urioste (Madrid, 1987), I, xviii. Mary Louise Pratt later popularised the idea (unfortunately without due attribution), in ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession (1991), 33–40, and in the introduction to Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York, 1992). The context of their engagement with conflict ethics and political community therefore needs to be reconstructed in detail. The chapter is attuned, firstly, to the intellectual context of the works’ composition, the background of sixteenth-century debates over Just War Theory, political community and the Indies, which will allow for an examination of just what might have been meant by terms such as ‘empire’, ‘just war’ and ‘the republic’ in the period. As Quentin Skinner reminds us, ‘texts are concerned with their own questions and not with ours’, and this kind of framing is necessary if we are, ‘so far as possible, to see things their way’, bearing in mind that, especially in the case of poetry, the texts’ engagement with ideas may well be an attempt to ‘think out problems’ rather than elaborate a coherent doctrine.34 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge, 2002), I, 88, 3, 78.

The chapter goes on to add to this linguistic context a local one: as Gabrielle Spiegel puts it, texts are ‘situated uses of language’, and each work emerges ‘within a local environment of social and political networks which it seeks to shape and which are being organized around it’.35 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 65.1 (1990), 59–86 (p. 77). Ercilla had already returned to Madrid several years before publishing La Araucana, although he famously claims to have begun composing it during the Arauco campaign itself, but both Oña and Miramontes composed their epics while resident in Lima. Their poems are part of the beginnings of a literary tradition in the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the chapter gives a sense of the vantage point this city offered them. The chapter engages with Lima as a ‘lettered city’ and a ‘global city’, coming into its own as a centre of policymaking for the Viceroyalty in this period. It was a place on which all kinds of interest group converged, and in which all kinds of debate could be had. The high degree of migration and mobility, Lima’s outlook on both the Indo-Pacific and the Andean hinterland as well as the Atlantic crossing to Europe, and the complex ethnic make-up of the city, influenced in turn the perspective of the literary community which was developing over the turn of the century.

The remaining chapters constitute case studies of the three epics in question. In Chapter 2, ‘Republicanism, Rebellion and Empire in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana’, I consider the long and complex publication history of the poem, and stress the importance – still rarely treated with any degree of seriousness by critics – of treating the three parts of the poem as distinct compositions, arising at different historical moments and asking different questions of their readers. There is a high degree of intratextual allusion and repetition which quite deliberately flags the ways in which the text evolves through the three partes. In the first part, the Araucanians are presented as an unlikely military republic, one with echoes of both contemporary Venice and republican Rome filtered through the lens of Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra [The Art of War] and Discorsi as well as Virgil and Lucan. As they move from a strategy of defence against Spanish conquest to aggressive expansion and territorial encroachment, they raise the question of republicanism and empire which was one of Machiavelli’s central concerns: can a republic remain within its bounds? Does expansion always lead to decline? In another volte-face, the reader realises that the Araucanians mirror the Spanish themselves as well as their traditional enemies, and that the question of empire reflects back on them.

In the Segunda parte, the emphasis shifts more to rebellion than expansion; the Araucanian theatre of war is explicitly juxtaposed with other military fronts, most notably that of Flanders, and the problem of how far a war can be conducted ethically and won on multiple fronts without the physical presence of the monarch is raised. Finally, the Tercera parte presents an even more fragmented series of mirror images: the end of the war in Arauco which is actually not an end at all, the incipient conquest of ‘another new world’ to the south, the Carthaginian republic of an anti-Virgilian Dido, and the outbreak of hostilities between Spain and Portugal as Philip II prepared to annex the latter. This puzzling conclusion to the poem is, I argue, a deliberate eschewal of closure, which shows the ultimate failure of the Machiavellian logic tested out at the beginning, and expands the notion of political community to consider non-Christian republics more widely, with the Ottoman Empire particularly in mind.

Chapter 3, ‘The Golden Mean of Colonial Governance in Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado’, shows how Oña, who was born in the frontier town of Los Confines de Angol in what is now Chile, rewrites La Araucana to respond not only to his explicit and self-interested commission by the outgoing viceroy of Peru and former commander of the Chilean campaign, García Hurtado de Mendoza, but also to the broader anxieties and hopes for the Chilean frontier felt by the settler communities there on the eve of another major indigenous rebellion. Ercilla’s Araucanian military republic is systematically deconstructed, but in its place a virgin land of promise and potential coexistence is erected, all the more poignant for its remoteness from reality. The consistent panegyric of García in his different roles, as capitán general in Chile, and as a viceroy faced with the threat of a tax rebellion in Quito and the incursion of the pirate Richard Hawkins into Pacific waters, also allows Oña to elaborate a kind of mirror of princes for colonial governors, their political virtues and interactions with the república de indios and de españoles; his text consistently portrays colonial rule as the search for a Golden Mean between extremes which in the last reckoning is more pragmatic than moral. Arauco domado also develops in much more detail than La Araucana a picture of the urban communities around the Viceroyalty, which are at once fragile and volatile and capable of concerted action when under threat.

‘Defence, Desire and Community in Juan de Miramontes Zuázola’s Armas antárticas’, the fourth chapter, picks up where Oña had trailed off, with the threat of English and Dutch piracy to the many coastal settlements of the Viceroyalty. While the scholarship often presents Miramontes, who spent most of his career as a soldier in Lima’s coastal guard, as a rather hawkish figure, banging the drum of the Counter-Reformation crusade against heresy, I argue that in fact the poem shows a consistent scepticism regarding imperial expansion, and advocates a military preparedness which is, in his own terms, purely defensive. This becomes apparent by various means: in Miramontes’s presentation of the frontiers of the Spanish Empire as a sinister no man’s land, in the pervasive language of frustrated erotic desire used as a mirror for colonial yearnings, and in the mysterious absence of Providence from a supposedly evangelical war. The geographically dispersed conflicts which populate the narrative also build up a picture of the república de españoles as a political community free from the vices which had troubled Oña’s portrayal, and of viceregal rule as a kind of middle way between republicanism and monarchy, or a Golden Mean between the two vicious extremes of despotism and liberty. The African cimarrones, at once within and outside this sphere, are paradoxically depicted as Christian and pagan, utopian and savage, African and colonial, in such a way as to hold up a mirror to the unspoken problem of slavery and the potential for rebellion.

This trio of poems are only the tip of the iceberg of what Raúl Marrero-Fente has called the ‘ghost genre’ of Hispanic epic: out of more than a hundred penned during the Spanish Golden age, most are still in need of more scholarly scrutiny, better critical editions, and even bringing to light from the archives.36 Raúl Marrero-Fente, Poesía épica colonial del siglo XVI: Historia, teoría y política (Madrid and Frankfurt, 2017), p. 11. Even restricting analysis to the decades dealt with here, and to Peru,37 My use of the terms ‘Peru’ and ‘Peruvian’ throughout this book is loosely descriptive rather than prescriptive, denoting the territories which constituted the Viceroyalty of Peru during the period rather than the modern nation state. other works could be productively considered, such as Diego de Hojeda’s La Christiada [The Christiad], completed around the same time as Armas antárticas, likewise dedicated to Viceroy Juan de Mendoza y Luna, and framed even more explicitly as a mirror of princes; Martín del Barco Centenera’s 1602 Argentina, recounting the exploratory expeditions and conflicts of the River Plate; or Diego Arias de Saavedra’s unpublished Purén indómito [Purén Unconquered] (c. 1602–04), attesting against Oña, with the urgency of a soldier and settler on the ground in Chile, that the indigenous communities there were very far from ‘tamed’. I choose to discuss fully a few outstanding examples rather than engaging more cursorily with the whole tradition: the works I select are particularly rich and complex in their thinking around politics and warfare, as well as being poems of significant literary merit. The fact that Oña was responding closely to Ercilla, and Miramontes to both previous poets, also makes a dedicated comparison of the three particularly productive. With the partial exception of La Araucana, they are little known except to scholars of colonial literature, and the detailed case studies are necessary to establish on solid ground a new framework for reading the epic of this period.38 Elizabeth Davis reflects on the processes of canon formation, and the reasons for epic’s frequent exclusion, in her introduction to Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain (Columbia, MI, 2000), pp. 1–19. It is hoped that they will encourage further research in this field as well as serving as a useful introduction to the individual works.

It is hoped, too, that the book will prove valuable to scholars of Comparative Literature and the Renaissance, who might be more familiar with epic in other guises. Epic has always been regarded as an intensely political genre. The Roman poet Horace, in his Ars poetica, already delineates a set of eminently political topics for epic – ‘res gestae regumque ducumque et tristia bella’ [the deeds of kings and generals and grim wars] (73) – and, by and large, criticism on the politics of epic both comparatively and in the Iberian world has not strayed far beyond these bounds, with the addition of empire and emergent criollismo or proto-nationalism.39 One exception is Christopher N. Warren’s Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–1680 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 32–61, which demonstrates how, in the context of early modern England, epic and international law developed in tandem, with epic being particularly well suited to considering ‘the hard case in the law of nations’ (p. 32). This book opens up other avenues derived from the poems’ intellectual and colonial contexts. In addition to kingship, the poets were concerned with viceregal power and the problems of colonial governance, problems which did not feature in the mirror of princes tradition and which forced them to be creative in devising their own language and imagery for the evolving practice of viceregal rule. The conflicts of the colonial sphere often took new forms, too: rebellion, mutiny and dissent; pockets of ethnic resistance; piracy, and frontier campaigns, harder to define, harder to regulate and harder to win than the ‘grim wars’ of conventional pitched battles and sieges. Empire as a static formulation rarely appears in these poems, but Armas antárticas and La Araucana return insistently to what I call the imperial urge, a longing for territorial expansion conceptualised both in political terms, and as an insidious language of desire. Especially forgotten, though, has been another topic integral to the formation of political thought during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: that of political community. Unquestioned assumptions regarding the elitism of epic, a genre which launches itself into the sublime ‘plebe relicta | sub pedibus’ [leaving the crowds beneath his feet], as Marco Girolamo Vida’s De arte poetica (1527) pithily counsels the aspiring author, have obscured the extent to which the body politic itself emerges as a subject of interest, alongside its rulers, heroes and generals.40 The De Arte Poetica of Marco Girolamo Vida, ed. and trans. by Ralph G. Williams (New York, 1976), I. 6–7 (p. 2). For Ercilla, the fascination remains largely with military bodies and aristocratic republics, while in the civic environment of Lima a broader range of constituents of urban society, including those belonging to the lower strata, appear, a development which is in tandem with formal and generic experimentation.

In studies of Hispanic colonial literature, the temptation has sometimes been to forget that problems of armed conflict persisted at all. Even during the apparent lull of the reign of Philip III (1598–1621), the pax hispanica remained more of an aspiration than a reality, even in the relative stability and prosperity of Lima. If the massive conquests and civil wars of the early period of the Viceroyalty had passed into historical memory, conflicts were still experienced in the Americas and evolved into quite distinctive, if equally troubling and ill-defined, forms, which the conventions and resources of the poetic imagination are employed to address. The final word in this discussion must go to the poets themselves, whose degree of agency to intervene indirectly in the complex ethical and political debates of their environments has not always been sufficiently recognised. The efforts, confusion and surprises which come of reading their works with these contexts in mind constitute part of the excitement of exploring how their thinking begins to grapple with an unfamiliar and uncharted political world. Their attempt to intellectually accommodate new and unpredictable patterns of warfare and violence might, in some respects, resonate more with the uncertainties of this dawning third millennium than the scrupulous logic of the scholastics. The questions are theirs, of course – but they are also ours.