¿Adonde falta el rey sobran agravios? Philip’s Wars in the Segunda parte de La Araucana

By contrast, the defining dynamic of the Araucanians becomes one of deferral. Although when they do attack, it is with the same ‘presteza’ as ever (XVII. 30), more often they are seen dispersing or retreating in view of the superior, and continually reinforced, invading army. However ordered the retreat (XXII. 40–44) or ‘prudente’ the equivocal diplomacy and delay (XXI. 21–22), it never promises a restoration of their fortunes; as Machiavelli had put it, ‘wars cannot really be avoided but are merely postponed to the advantage of others’.1 Macchiavelli, The Prince, p. 11. The irony here is that, as a military republic, the strengths of the Araucanian community are as much in evidence as ever. Excepting one failure of discipline when they sack the baggage train at Purén (duly punished: XXVIII. 71) their militia is if anything more ‘ordenado’ (XXV. 17) than at the beginning, as the eulogy of their arte militar in the exordium to XXV suggests. The piquería still wreaks considerable damage in direct combat (e.g. XXII. 17), and they continue to devise invenciones to adapt to the new Spanish strategy of fortified camps and barricades, such as siege machinery (XXI. 16). Likewise, the political emphasis seems to shift from barbarity to policía, a reading that the authorial amendments made to the Primera parte in the first edition of 1578 also support, which tend to substitute ‘bárbaros’ and related terms for a more neutral lexis. The mannerisms of the wily ambassador Millalauco, for example, who rides up to the Spanish camp in a ‘góndola’ (an almost undocumented Italianism in this period) towards the end of canto XVI, and finishes his courteous speech with a flourishing bow, are unmistakably Venetian. Perhaps more significantly, while the ‘bestial’ (XVI. 16) tendency towards civil dissent remains in evidence, and is again decried by Colocolo in the opening canto, it is less and less evident that this necessarily obstructs political life or the capacity to take decisions that accord with the common good. The ongoing enmity between Rengo, newly admitted to the council of caciques for his acts of bravery in the Primera parte (XVI. 40), and Tucapel, for example, appears to mimic the constant power struggles between patricians and plebs of Machiavelli’s Rome. Yet if anything it strengthens the hand of Caupolicán, who succeeds in channeling the potential violence into a duel under his authority, and works to the advantage of the Araucanians during battle, as the two rivals watch each other’s backs ‘como si fueran dos hermanos’ [as if they were two brothers] (XXV. 72).

The assumption seems to be, then, that even the most functional and patriotic of Machiavelli’s models of republic is ineffectual against the strategic and technological resources of their opponents, whose superior mobility and artillery power is very much in evidence. The two images of the Araucanians miserably attempting to conduct a siege with their ‘new’ inventions of Roman and medieval pedigree, no sooner created than withdrawn, and of the lord of Arauco, Peteguelén, rudely stopped in his feat of arms by a stray bullet in the first battle, suffice to illustrate the point. Indeed, one of the surprising features of the new dynamic is that it is anything but triumphalist. The wry ‘presteza’ of the poet of the Primera parte skipping over his battles and hastening after the victors reverts to the ‘dificultad y pesadumbre’ [difficulty and sorrow] of the weary soldier-poet (‘Prólogo’), who opens his new epic in a voice of lament, and explicitly refuses to ‘pasar tan presto’ [pass so quickly] (XXII. 18) over the bloody consequences of the conflict, protesting at the uninterrupted monotony of the slaughter (XX. 5) and lingering over the bodies of the defeated.

Another significant change in this part of the work is its expansion to encompass explicitly the global Spanish theatre of war in a series of prophetic episodes that have been read as the most unambiguous panegyrics of the entire work. In the first of these, the poet-narrator has a dream-vision of the Battle of Saint-Quentin (1557), followed by a prophecy by the allegorical figure Razón (Reason) of subsequent events of Philip II’s reign; he later encounters a reclusive Araucanian mage, Fitón, who shows him his cave of marvels with a crystal ball which reveals the Battle of Lepanto (1571), and a vision of the globe. The prologue clearly invites the reader to consider these digressions in a parallel, comparative relationship:

The manner in which the narrative of the battle (XVII–XVIII) is made to mirror the Chilean frontier is illuminating. Although the situation is reversed in Chile, with the Spaniards defending rather than assaulting a ‘plaza fuerte’ [stronghold], there are superficial parallels to the Araucanian assault on Penco which rudely intrudes on the poet’s dream (XIX–XX). Both commence with the division of a numerous attacking army (‘grueso ejército’, XVII. 51; ‘gruesos escuadrones’, XIX.4) into three sections; in both, there is the hyper-realist detail of dead and dying bodies piling up; both Spanish victories eventually chastise the ‘arrogancia’ of the enemy. Battle narratives, of course, and particularly ‘set pieces’ such as the storming of a city, tended to share a number of tropes, and in this instance the parallel between the two highlights difference more than similarity, both in style and structure. While the narrator of Saint-Quentin maintains the panoramic scope of an artist, with only selected commanders picked out from the strategic movement of masses,3 Paul Firbas argues for the influence of sixteenth-century chorographic engravings here, in ‘El sueño en la trama épica: La visión corográfica de San Quintín en La Araucana de Alonso de Ercilla’, in Los sueños en la cultura iberoamericana (siglos XVI–XVIII), ed. by Sonia Rose and others (Seville, 2011), pp. 385–407. the fighting at Penco quickly fragments into a series of individual feats and deaths in the idiom of classical epic. While Saint-Quentin falls into three clearly defined stages of preparation, storming and sack, the attack on Penco endures fiercely but inconclusively until the patchy Araucanian retreat. The comparison does not seem particularly calculated to add prestige to either.

It is the final stage of the Saint-Quentin vision – the sack – that most clearly alludes to Arauco, except that the referent here is not the contemporaneous assault on Penco, but the abandonment of the city and its sack by the Araucanians in the Primera parte.4 I analyse the episodes in more detail in ‘“Adonde falta el rey, sobran agravios” (IV.5)? The Siege of Saint-Quentin and Two Worlds of War in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana’, in Stephen Boyd and Terence O’Reilly, eds, Artifice and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age (Oxford, 2014), pp. 173–84. ‘Penco’ and ‘Concepción’ are used interchangeably by Ercilla for the valley, the fort and the city, and the prologue’s reference to the newly erected Penco as ‘el fuerte de la Concepción’ seems designed to recall the narrative of the city’s destruction in canto VII. So, too, are verbal parallels such as the following:

It is, however, necessary to nuance the view of critics who would regard the scene as uniformly condemnatory.5 For example, Galperin, ‘The Dido Episode’, p. 41. When the commands of ‘el pío Felipe’ [the pious Philip] (XVIII. 23) intervene mid-way through the sack, they have a very real impact on the manner in which it is concluded.6 As Ramona Lagos also points out in ‘El incumplimiento de la programación épica en La Araucana’, Cuadernos Americanos, 238 (1981), 157–91 (pp. 178–80), and Padrón in The Spacious Word, p. 200. They prevent the development of dissent within the troops such as that which plagued the Araucanian plunderers; though the distress of the women may resemble those fleeing from Concepción or the massacred camp-followers, thanks to Philip’s orders to evacuate women and children, ‘aunque fueron sus casas saqueadas | las honras les quedaron reservadas’ [although their houses were sacked, their honour was preserved] (XVIII. 24); the besieging armies do not pursue fugitives, and the fires are swiftly put out by ‘del piadoso Rey la gran clemencia’ [the great clemency of the pious King] (XVIII. 28). Although Ercilla’s view is typically pragmatic – plundering, however unheroic, is the common soldier’s reward (XVIII. 17) – the emphasis is on limited harm. It is even more limited, in fact, than that allowed by Vitoria, who permitted the sacking and burning of a city ‘if necessary to the conduct of the war’ despite acknowledging the difficulties of applying any kind of restraint on the soldiery (p. 323). Indeed, Philip II’s hold over the moral conduct of his soldiers goes beyond even regular discipline. His command enables the soldiers to restrain even with their ‘primero movimiento’ [first inclination] (XVIII. 25) of lust towards the women, a term which is used frequently in Ercilla’s poetic language to signify the drive, especially towards violence, of man’s bestial nature rather than his rational soul.7 From a different perspective, Cyrus Moore analyses the struggle between passion and reason in the poem in terms of Neoplatonic and courtly discourse, in Love, War, and Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Transatlantic World: Alonso de Ercilla and Edmund Spenser (Tempe, AZ, 2014), as does Juan María Corominas in Castiglione y La Araucana: Estudio de una influencia (Madrid, 1980). While several commanders warn against it, both Spanish and Araucanian, the moral power that makes Philip’s orders uniquely effective is, it seems, the difference in Ercilla’s eyes between royal and merely contractual or delegated authority. It seems to be largely the way in which this moral power is used to moderate the conduct of the war with France that facilitates its closure with a definitive peace agreement.

Ercilla’s choice to narrate the siege and capture of Saint-Quentin, rather than the much larger battle two weeks before, is itself significant. It was the only battle in Philip’s reign, and as it turned out the last in the reign of any Spanish monarch, at which the king was present in person. According to much of the political theory of the sixteenth century, from Machiavelli or Fox Morcillo to the Jesuit scholastic Juan de Mariana, the prince had a responsibility not only to defend his realms but even to risk his own life in leading his armies.8 See e.g. Machiavelli, Art of War, p. 239; Sebastian Fox Morcillo, De regni, regisque institutione libri tres (Antwerp, 1556), S1v–3v; Juan de Mariana, De rege et regis institutione (Toledo, 1599), III.vi, V4r–X1r. Interestingly, however, the king does not appear here in triumphalist mode as the conquering general, as for instance he had in the portrait in armour commissioned in 1557 from Anthony de Mor. In fact, he does not appear directly at all. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, is there any hint of divine providentiality or of the intercession of St Lawrence, as the battle was commemorated in the Escorial. Instead, the monarch is present here in the abstract, not so much in physical symbols such as emblems,9 An argument made by Carlos Albarracín Sarmiento in ‘El poeta y su rey en La Araucana’, Filología, 21 (1986), 99–116 (p. 109). as by the directive force of his qualities and virtues, his righteous ‘furor’, his pietas, his ‘gran clemencia’. He does not so much lead the troops to victory – he was not, in fact, one of the commanders of the campaign, which was fought in the name of the ruler of Flanders – as preside over and condition the way in which it is won. In this sense Ercilla both affirms and fundamentally alters the dictates of contemporary political thinkers. While Philip seems to be the decisive factor in the battle, it is not through his power or bellicosity, but ultimately through his capacity to channel the violence towards peace.

In this light, the apparent contradiction between the efficacy of Spanish military operations in Chile and the tone of reluctance and lamentation with which they are narrated becomes clearer. In tune with the ending of the first part, at the opening of the second the Spanish expedition seems to regain a sense of moral purpose. On their first landing at the island of Talcaguano, Hurtado reassures the inhabitants that his sole purpose is the ‘religión y salvamento | de la rebelde gente bautizada’ [religion and salvation of the rebel baptised people] (XVI. 29), and although in the event the negotiations are only an Araucanian stratagem, his response to their ambassador momentarily holds out the possibility of a fair peace as he promises:

The dilemma here, however, is more complex than the link in the Primera parte between unethical warfare and military decline and defeat. Not only is the military success of the expedition beyond question, as we have seen, but in juridical terms its declaration and conduct are not precisely illicit either. Vitoria argued for a discretionary application of the laws of war depending on the nature of the enemy: in the case of infidels, ‘from whom peace can never be hoped for on any terms’, the rights to plunder, enslavement and killing of those who surrender can be exacted in full, but with rebels, or the Amerindians, such actions may well be disproportionate and ‘against the public good’, and in the case of fellow Christians can only ever lead to further conflict and ruin (p. 321). The Araucanians sit uneasily between these categories of combatants: like infidels or heretics, they have repudiated the Christian faith, and like rebels have broken their oath of fealty to the king; yet in their own perception they are themselves the aggrieved, endeavouring to punish the invasion of their sovereign territory (XVI. 44). The Galbarino episode (XXII–XXIII), in which an Araucanian cacique has his hands cut off to serve as a deterrent to others, but instead makes an impassioned speech which resolves the senate to continue the struggle, is one particularly acute dramatisation of these competing logics, or what twenty-first-century conflict theory might call ‘incompatibilities’. For the Spanish, such mutilation is an admissible and unremarkable punishment of a rebel leader, one which was commonly employed in colonial warfare. For Galbarino, it is a gratuitous abuse of a prisoner of war and an indication of complete disregard for the Araucanian body politic. Like the killing of Valdivia, it acts as a turning point in which an act of inclemency (or insufficient ‘rigor’, depending on one’s perspective, cf. XXIII. 1) results in the brief prospect of a negotiated peace, which the senate is debating precisely as the injured cacique arrives, being definitively excluded after his harangue. The scene contrasts with Ercilla’s treatment of his captive Cariolano, whose valour and despair are converted by his captor’s clemency into an advantageous loyalty, ‘doméstico el que indómito había sido’ [he who had been untamed was now domesticated] (XXVIII. 52), but this finds no analogy in the Spanish campaign as a whole.

The real crux here is not so much the legitimacy or otherwise of a given action; it is the fact that, given the differences in perception and status between the two warring parties, the actions taken outside the royal control are ineffective even when they result in short-term success. It is here that, while still influenced by the empirical logic of Machiavelli, Ercilla begins to make the interrogation of his core ideas more explicit. In Il principe (and again in the Discorsi, I.20, II.2, etc.), Machiavelli suggests several methods for fully subduing newly acquired principalities with different languages, customs and institutions, particularly aristocratic republics. Once the movement of the ruler’s residence there is excluded, destruction and colonisation are the only real methods of leaving the new ruler in a secure position; ‘poor and scattered’, the injured parties can never strike back and will eventually lose their memory of freedom (pp. 9, 18). The difficulty here, though, is that despite the inherent instability of the Araucanian republic, it possesses a perverse capacity to survive and resist. In European terms, the inhabitants are ‘poor and scattered’ even before the Spanish arrive, and now occupy a landscape transformed by war from the locus amoenus of the Primera parte to a locus eremus of ‘campos incultos y pedregosos’ [uncultivated and stony fields] (‘Prólogo’). The gesture in the final canto, in which the caciques burn their own homes and estates so as to serve their ‘patria’ unimpeded, seems to prove that, although the imagery of devastation is taken from Las Casas, the outcome will not be the complete destruction of the Amerindian polity. In a republic whose identity resides not in a city but in a society, little or nothing will cause the inhabitants to weaken or lose their memory of freedom. This prospect of a bloody stalemate was already hinted at in the Primera parte, in which the Araucanians at Mataquito declare themselves ‘muertos, pero no rendidos’ [dead, but not surrendered]. At this point it appears more definitive, however: Fitón’s prophecy bodes well for neither side in the war (XXVI. 45), and the suicidal tendency of Arauco assumes a new prominence and a new rhetoric, paradoxically linked to the estado’s resilience. Towards the end of the book, the poet gives a further catalogue of Roman republicans who ‘por la cara patria han convertido | en sus mismas entrañas las espadas’ [for their dear fatherland have turned their swords against their own insides] (XXIX. 2), refusing to be beaten by either ‘hado’ or ‘fortuna’.

The ‘fortuna’ of Philip is prominent in this part of the poem. In the opening canto, in a storm scene with evident allegorical overtones, it intervenes almost divinely to pull the poorly governed ship of the Spanish (expedition, poem, empire) out of the ungoverned wind and waves to which the Araucanians are so frequently compared; thereafter, as we have seen, ‘fortuna’ remains with the Spanish throughout. At the Battle of Lepanto, Don Juan suggests, in line with the fifteenth-century poet Juan de Mena in his Laberinto de fortuna [Labyrinth of Fortune], that fortune and ‘hado’ are simply synonyms for Providence; this simplification of the complex causalities of the Primera parte is one way of understanding the uniquely favourable fortune of Philip, wherever he is represented. At other points, however – the exordia to XXVIII and XXIII, for example, with the warning that from a single spark, a conflagration can burn us all (‘nos abrasemos’), a conventional figure for the threat of rebellion – the inconstancy of both ‘fortuna’ and ‘hado’ persist. Nor do those unfavoured by fortune, as demonstrated above, necessarily disappear.

One might hypothesise that something of the caution with which the good fortune of the Spanish in Chile should evidently be treated transfers itself to other parts of the Spanish realms. The prophecy that follows Saint-Quentin is full of ambiguous combatants, returning threats and inconclusive conflicts that in one way or another mirror the paradoxes of Arauco. There is the barbarous, indomitable Turk (XVIII. 43), continually returning from defeat; in Flanders ‘los estados | desasidos de Dios’ [the states which have let go of God] (the first time the term ‘estado’ has been applied to a community other than Arauco), where ‘las cosas […] durarán gran término dudosas’ [things will remain uncertain for a long time] (XVIII.47); and the Morisco revolt, ‘con pretensión de libertarse’ [aiming to liberate themselves] (XVIII. 48), and not remedied quickly enough, resolved only by a literal depopulation of the region whose devastating outcome would again have been notorious to the reader (XVIII. 51). While Philip’s history appears to march forward teleologically, it is clear that many of these threats remain. Even the more ostensibly triumphant narratives of Lepanto and the mapamundi have been read in this light.10 For example, Quint, Epic and Empire, pp. 158–59, notes the parallels that turn Spanish into republican resistance and the Turks into the imperial forces of Caesar in the battle; Galperin, ‘The Dido Episode’, pp. 43–47, emphasises the dwelling on violence and lament and the avoidance of the paean of Fernando de Herrera; Fuchs and Padrón alike question the reliability of Fitón as a medium of the visions and note a cartography that dwells on fallen empires, although this reading has recently been questioned by Luis Gómez Canseco, in ‘Ercilla, Giovio et la géographie du globe’, Les Langues Néo-Latines, 394 (2020), 11–25. The closing vision of the victors pursuing the surrendered Turks at Lepanto, who are depicted as a supremely professional and loyal fighting force, to a gruesome and almost total slaughter, is uncomfortable in the light of Chile.

Of all these analogies to the conflict in Arauco, it is the rebellion of Flanders that is most prominent. I would like to conclude this section by suggesting that virtually every episode I have analysed here would have brought the ongoing conflict painfully to mind for an informed contemporary. Saint-Quentin is first introduced as a stronghold on the ‘confín de Flandes y de Francia’ [border of Flanders and France] (XVII. 52) before being named four stanzas later. The use of it to dwell on the moral and pragmatic consequences of the sacking of a city appears less than two years after the climax of the ‘Spanish Fury’ at Antwerp. By this time, the conduct of the irregularly paid Spanish troops on taking a city or fortress had become one of the most notorious liabilities for their commanders, the government in Madrid and civilians alike, and the 1576 atrocities led almost immediately to the subscription of the previously loyal provinces to the Pacification of Ghent, concluding an otherwise effective Spanish military campaign with a major diplomatic defeat in a reversal not unlike the narrative pattern of the Chilean wars in this parte. The debate over the future of Flanders was a public one. Advocates for a moderate and pragmatic settlement such as Furió Ceriol in his Remedios appeared from as early as 1573, once the damage inflicted by the brutal legacy of Alba was fully apparent, and a reading of the official correspondence of the late 1570s reveals a sense of crisis concerning the future direction of the conflict.

The parallels this correspondence presents to the Segunda parte are remarkable. In his Relación de los servicios [Memorial of the Services] of Alonso de Sotomayor, a prominent commander and diplomat of this period, Francisco Caro de Torres prints a number of confidential letters and instrucciones exchanged between Philip II, his governors in Flanders, and nobles and diplomats in France between 1577 and 1579.11 Francisco Caro de Torres, Relación de los servicios que hizo a su Magestad del Rey Don Felipe Segundo y Tercero, don Alonso de Sotomayor […] (Madrid, 1620), fols 4–44. The most frequent themes and concerns coincide with those addressed in the poem: the difficulties of maintaining diplomatic exchange between parties whose intentions are unclear, the question of imprisoned rebel nobles and clemencia, or lapses in discipline and the need for ‘pláticos’ soldiers, for example. So, too, does their imagery: the metaphor of the gathering storm applied to the growing rebellion (fol. 11r); the figure of searching for ‘otro camino diferente’ [another different path] to represent the need to change tactic (fol. 39r), like the poet-narrator’s reluctant continuance of his ‘camino tan desierto y estéril’ [barren and sterile path]; or the vision of the hoped-for peace as a safe port (fol. 34r). Like the Araucanians, the Dutch are presented primarily as rebels rather than as heretics, pursuing their ‘diabólica libertad’ and seeking to undermine not only Philip’s authority but monarchy in general (fol. 11r). In an exchange with the Duke of Parma, Philip II outlines several possible remedies, expressing preference for a comprehensive or partial peace treaty, accompanied by a reduction of troops and costs. If these fail, the third and final remedy is to ‘entretener la Guerra […] por tiempo largo’ [stretch out the war for a long time] (fols 43v–44r) – in other words, to prepare for a war with no definite ending point, rather like that glimpsed in the poem. The letter itself wilfully ignores several points of the report that prompted it, most notably Parma’s insistence (basing his authority, like Ercilla’s, on his presence in the field) that the only two points on which the monarch refuses to compromise – complete loyalty to himself and to the Catholic faith – are now the two on which the rebels will never negotiate. His implication is that only a de facto recognition of the independence of the northern provinces (fol. 34v) will offset an inevitable upsurge in both troops and costs.

By the time the Jesuit chronicler Diego de Rosales wrote his Historia general del reino de Chile, Flandes indiano [General History of the Kingdom of Chile, the Flanders of the Indies] in 1674, the comparison between the two most prolonged and apparently unwinnable conflicts of the Spanish Empire was an obvious one. Almost a hundred years earlier, it must have been more shocking. Ercilla allows the two to mirror each other, as ever, indirectly, only allowing for a glimpse of his own stance as the reader follows through the logic of the empirical examples presented for their consideration and the poetic language in which they are framed. The tendency to represent conflicts of many hues in this part of the poem through the Lucanesque lens of civil war, in what Plagnard calls a ‘multiplex imitation’ – the allusions in Lepanto not only to Actium but also to Pharsalus, for instance, or the slippage between the Araucanians as republicans to Hurtado’s Caesar, or as proponents of an empire of equal laws, facing like Caesar or Octavian the massed hosts of the ‘últimas partes orientales’ [farthest parts of the East] (XVI. 42–43) – raises the question of whether the conventional standards of engagement between ‘non-civil’ opponents are appropriate, either morally or practically, for enemies whose expectations of war are not shared.12 Plagnard, Une épopée ibérique, ‘Résumé’, para. 4. If the Turks of Lepanto or the Indians of Chile can participate poetically in a shared civitas, might not the same be said for the heretics of Flanders, implying the necessity for a correspondingly different approach to conflict? At Saint-Quentin, the king’s presence indirectly conditions the conflict towards a peaceful resolution, but this, a large staged battle between two Christian European monarchies, was a model that no longer bore much relation to the heterogeneous conflicts fought on ill-defined fronts across the far-flung territories of the Mediterranean and Spain’s Atlantic empire at the end of the 1570s. It was exceptional in almost every regard: Philip’s personal distaste for the brutality of war was by now well known; even on a peaceful front, if demands continued to be made for his appeasing presence in the Low Countries, the hopes for their realisation had grown progressively thinner. The distinctive virtues that allow the monarch to bridge conceptual fractures and uphold a degree of restraint in the conglomerate mercenary forces of the period rarely transfer to the frontiers. In some cases, his authority is asserted at the cost of complete ethical integrity; in others, an attempt to impose the principles of reason and clemency is thwarted, and in either case the fundamental step from winning battles to winning wars is barred as a result. Vitoria’s brief examination of the possibility of a permanent war between fundamentally divided antagonists with full use of the laws of warfare is, in Ercilla’s narrative, dramatically actualised. The ‘third and final remedy’ is, however, implied but not inevitable; at this stage, alternative endings can still be postulated, and it is only in the Tercera parte that the trajectory is pursued to its bleak conclusions, as we shall see.