‘El furor del pueblo castellano’ (XXXVII. 1): Political Communities and the Problem of Wrath in the Tercera parte de La Araucana

While the overall mood is bleaker, the poem still abounds in invention and surprise, with many flashes of the poet’s distinctive humour, and there is also considerable continuity with the political questions of the first and second partes. The eventual resolution of the poem is, however, conditioned in part by some intervening events, most of which have not been considered in the critical literature. Firstly, while it would be unwise to exaggerate the importance of Machiavelli’s appearance on the Index of 1583 – it neither marked the start of anti-Machiavellian discourse nor resulted in an immediate taboo on his ideas – it nevertheless represents an official change of attitude. Secondly, there is a change in perception concerning the security of the Spanish monarchy: as well as the rebellions discussed in the previous section, the overseas aspirations of England and the Ottoman Empire assumed a new stature within peninsular discourse and policy. Thirdly, there are significant innovations in literature: Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581) and the first edition of his Discorsi dell’arte poetica (1587) created a new model of Christian epic, while the last quarter of the sixteenth century also saw the rise of the commercial Spanish theatres, or corrales, and the zenith of the neo-Senecan tragedies which were some of the first plays to be performed there.3 The complex dialogue with Tasso is given considerably more attention in my article ‘La presencia oculta’, while the interaction with contemporary tragedy is explored in Imogen Choi and Felipe Valencia, ‘The Tragedy of Women in Power: La Araucana and Sixteenth-Century Neo-Senecan Theatre’, and Mercedes Blanco, ‘Un episodio trágico en La Araucana: La traición de Andresillo (cantos XXX–XXXII)’, both in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, forthcoming 2021. These new impetuses are reflected within the poem in a number of ways, but for the purposes of this chapter I will focus on two: firstly, the conclusion of the Chilean wars interrogates more explicitly the Machiavellian ideas already explored in preceding parts; secondly, the narrative digresses from these in order to incorporate alternative models of external, infidel political communities with whom conflict is not the most appropriate pragmatic response.

The early cantos are in large part the natural conclusion of the trajectory of the Segunda parte; they demonstrate more definitively than before the disjunction between military, and even administrative, efficacy and enduring success. Hurtado becomes the very embodiment of ‘presteza’ (XXXIV. 66), and is constantly on the move. As often happened with the narrative persona in the Primera parte, here again Ercilla ironically observes his difficulties in keeping up with him (XXXIV. 45). As Hurtado imposes law and order in the Spanish settlements (XXX. 28, XXIV. 45), founds the new city of Cañete (XXX. 29) and puts a swift stop to the ‘nueva codicia’ [new greed] (XXX. 31), he corrects the abuses of Valdivia’s reign while replicating his military initiative. As he breaks through the ‘términos vedados’ [forbidden borders] of Arauco all the way through to La Imperial (XXX. 25–34) and onwards to the ‘nuevas conquistas’ [new conquests] of undiscovered territory, his course is for the most part a consistent advance, accompanied by ‘los más diestros y pláticos soldados’ [the most skilled and experienced soldiers] (XXX. 30). The one engagement narrated in detail, the Spanish victory at the battle of Tucapel, demonstrates exemplary ‘industria’ and illustrates to the full the technological superiority and discipline of the troops (XXXI. 34, 43–45; XXXII. 11–12).

Likewise, the decline of Arauco appears to be in greater evidence than ever. The duel of the warriors Rengo and Tucapel, which is resumed in the first canto after Tucapel is famously left for eleven years with his mace suspended in the air at the end of the Segunda parte, while entertaining, is deemed to be unjust (XXX. 7), and almost results in the death of both. In his condemnation of the practice of duelling, Ercilla coincides with the arguments advanced by his father some sixty years earlier and adds to the prevailing impression of disorder in the Araucanian republic.4 Fortún García de Ercilla, ‘Tratado de la guerra y el duelo’, in Carolina Nonell, Fortún García de Ercilla y su ‘Tratado de la guerra y el duelo’ (Bilbao, 1963), pp. 93–243. As Luis Gómez Canseco demonstrates in ‘Ercilla, la guerra justa y el duelo: Fuentes y razones’, Arte Nuevo. Revista de Estudios Áureos, 8 (2021), 47–83, Ercilla closely imitates sections of the treatise in the first and final cantos of this book, both in the exordium opposing duels in XXX, and in the disquisition on just warfare which precedes the conflict with Portugal in XXXVII. The loss of the Araucanian army at Tucapel is a massacre, with the first squadrons annihilated and only the rearguard fleeing to safety. At this point, Caupolicán implicitly recognises defeat, and the uncharacteristic fear and weakness of his remaining troops, ‘dando licencia a la cansada gente’ [putting the tired men on leave] (XXXII. 24). It is also the only battle, aside from Lautaro’s expansionist campaign, in which most of the aristocratic class refrain from joining the action. The two similes applied to the slaughter – a wind dispelling the clouds that threaten the sky (XXXII. 18), and a comparison between the firepower turned against the attackers and a mine destroying a city (XXXII. 9) – are clearly symbolic. The image of the storm is a motif throughout for the fury of the Araucanian militia and other rebels battering the boat of Spanish empire. That of the collapsing city reminds us of the earlier paradox of a republican civitas without an urbs, in line with Contarini’s truism that one should not ‘account a Citie to bee the walls and houses merely, but rather the assemblie and order of the citizens’.5 Gasparo Contarini, The Magistrates and Commonwealth of the Venetians, trans. by Lewis Lewkenor (London, 1599), p. 5.

This final battle also evokes the battle of Pharsalus in Lucan’s rendition in his Bellum civile. For Lucan, Pompey’s defeat in this battle, the climax of his epic as we have it, marks the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. Both Pharsalus and Tucapel open with the tragic topos of the sun and moon reluctant to rise and illuminate the slaughter (XXXI. 35), suggesting a war which is somehow unnatural and ungodly, and both end with the generals, Pompey and Caupolicán respectively, embarking on an erratic flight which will eventually culminate in their ignominious execution. The parallels between the two figures are made explicit in the exordium to XXXIV, which uses Hannibal, Pompey and Caupolicán as examples of a tragic fall from fortune, ‘Hombres famosos […] a quien la vida larga ha deslustrado’ [famous men, whom too long a life has tarnished]. Indeed, the critical attention to the brutal execution of Caupolicán after his deathbed conversion to Christianity, seated naked on a stake which lacerates his organs and then shot with arrows, with its contradictory overtones of hagiography and horror, has obscured the fact that prior to capture his moral and political authority has been constantly on the wane.6 For a provocative analysis of the execution in terms of the poem’s rhetoric of desire, see Ricardo Padrón, ‘Love American Style: The Virgin Land and the Sodomitic Body in Ercilla’s Araucana’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 34 (2000), 561–84. We are told that he is subject to rumours and potential conspiracies (XXX. 35) and has lost the unanimous support of the governing class. As often happens, the information that the Spanish receive about him, although false (‘fingido’), is revealing: the Araucanian informants allege that only his ‘bárbara insolencia’ secures obedience while he remains in hiding (XXXII. 26), and he is, in fact, betrayed on at least three occasions. Fortune is repeatedly shown to be hostile towards her former favourites, and very much at work in the protracted and ignominious demise of their once-powerful leader (XXXII. 10, 25; XXXIV. 3, 30), united this time with Fate (XXXII. 6, XXXIV. 5–7).

Following this logic, however, the main contribution of this part of the epic is to demonstrate, paradoxically but unequivocally, that however total the destruction visited on the Araucanian republic, it does not impede its survival or resistance. Likewise, however pragmatic and even licit the conduct of the conquerors, it neither justifies nor in the end brings to fruition their campaign. The duel of Rengo and Tucapel appears to confirm that internal dissent does not cripple the republic; again, Caupolicán intervenes and succeeds in re-establishing concord. In turn, his execution is clearly counter-productive, provoking not fear but a desire for vengeance, as he had predicted (XXXIV. 10):

Despite the obvious continuities with 1578, there is, nonetheless, a subtly different dynamic at work here, elucidated in part by patterns of intratextual repetition. Caupolicán’s final battle, given a prominence beyond its historical one by its climactic and exclusive position in Ercilla’s narrative, is in some respects an echo of Mataquito (XII–XV), Lautaro’s last. In both, alerted by an auxiliary of the opposing camp, an army approaches a fort by stealth at the hour of repose, believing in the assistance of fate and Providence (XXX. 61) in punishing a dissolute imperial aggressor. Both appear to discover its garrison manned by unreliable novice soldiers (XV. 20–22, XXX. 40–41) and, ominously, ‘en vino y dulce sueño sepultados’ [buried in wine and deep sleep] (XXXI. 23, repeating XIV. 5 and echoing the fall of Troy and exploits of Nisus and Euryalus in the Aeneid, as Moore notes). In both, the resulting carnage is almost total and described in similar phraseology, with no blow against the victims of fortune failing to draw blood, and ends with an Araucanian survivor suicidally hurling himself against the weapons (XV. 55, XXXII. 15).7 In at least one version of 1589–90, there is a further verbal echo in that the ‘comarcano’ who betrays Lautaro’s location to Villagrá is said to have left the camp ‘a robar’ [to steal], presumably to extract supplies out of the local populace (XII. 62), while the treachery against Caupolicán begins as Pran and Andresillo leave the fort together ‘a robar comida, | cosa a los yanaconas permitida’ [to steal food, something permitted to the yanaconas] (XXX. 47); another state reads ‘buscar’ for ‘robar’. There is an ironic reversal, however, for in the later battle it is the Araucanian attackers who ‘al engaño | ciega, pensando de engañar venía’ [blindly came to be tricked, thinking to trick] (XXXII. 7). The decisive factor in their defeat, according to the narrator, is the double-dealing of Andresillo, a yanacona or Hispanicised indigenous servant in the Spanish camp who manipulates Caupolicán’s spy Pran into allowing him to orchestrate an Araucanian attack at midday, supposedly during the siesta but in fact leading the forces into a trap. Andresillo is depicted with a level of detail quite unlike any of the other shadowy, anonymous informants of the poem. His treachery against his ‘patria’ is unequivocally condemned, apparently exculpating Caupolicán for falling into a plot so execrable, ‘la más fea maldad y condenada, | que más ofende a la bondad divina’ [the ugliest and most condemnable kind of evil, the kind that most offends divine goodness], that it could not possibly have been foreseen (XXXI. 1–4).

Here, Ercilla very deliberately distinguishes his approach from the tacit acceptance of the use of spies, informers and deserters by both Spaniards and Araucanians in previous parts of the poem, over what was in reality a very fluid frontier.8 Indeed, in ‘Un episodio trágico’, Blanco notes that Caupolicán greets Andresillo in terms which echo his welcoming of another yanacona, Lautaro, in the Primera parte. Here it is doubly unsuccessful, both in the initial misleading reports provided by Pran about the strength of the fort’s garrison, and in the disastrous treachery of Andresillo, leaving Caupolicán’s faith in his two informants looking foolish. By contrast, the archaic and patently unstrategic ‘arrogancia generosa’ [noble arrogance] of the dissenting caciques (XXXII. 22–23), who refuse any participation in a battle based on trickery, ‘que el peligro en la guerra es el que honra’ [since it is the danger of war that brings honour], ensures their survival. The prudent and swift advantage the Spaniards take of their opportunity is equally condemned by the reluctant narrator-participant, who in this battle more than any other – in another echo of the Pharsalia – lingers in horror to ‘figurar las formas de los muertos’ [depict the shapes of the dead] (XXXII. 13), torn between ‘lástima justa y odio justo’ [righteous pity and righteous hate] (XXXI. 49–50), and intrudes a long exordium on clemency into the midst of the fighting:

The particular emphasis on Caupolicán in this part of the poem, as the other caciques fade into the background after the first canto, adds further support to the notion of a more forceful critique of Machiavellian – and indeed Vitorian – pragmatics. In large part Caupolicán comes to exemplify the ideal ruler of Il principe, from his ‘prudente’ decision to ‘[dar] otro tiento a la fortuna’ [try his fortune again] and wage war with ‘presteza’ rather than seeing his position further decline, to the secrecy of his dealings with the senate and people, to his astute bolstering of his fading reputation, remaining feared and respected if not loved (XXX. 36–38). His degree of control over his citizens is demonstrated by their new oath of obedience, and the awe in his presence even as he is led to execution. The Spanish actions in the final battle and its aftermath are thus perfectly legitimate in one sense, given the Vitorian maxim that all things necessary to victory (at least against infidels) are permitted, including vengeance and exemplary punishment. Indeed, Caupolicán explicitly acknowledges responsibility for three of the most culpable atrocities of the war even as he appeals for mercy: the killing of Valdivia; the slaughter of the innocents at Purén; and the destruction of Penco. As we have seen, in reality these events are somewhat more complex: Caupolicán is inclined to grant Valdivia mercy but his hand is forced by an unauthorised intervention, and Penco and Purén occurred in his absence under Lautaro. His rhetoric, then, is calculated to appeal not to justice – he freely admits the injustice of his cause (XXXIV. 9) – nor even to the legitimacy of his sovereignty, but rather to the ‘esperiencia’ of his listener, persuading them of his sway over the Araucanians and thus his usefulness. The morality of his speech, such as it is, is a purely political one, the maintenance of ‘la paz común’ [the common peace], and clemency is made conditional on the fulfilment of his promises (XXXIV. 11). The irony is that here a Machiavellian logic, as well as a Vitorian one, would applaud the ‘rigor y priesa’ [severity and haste] (XXXIV. 17) with which the execution of a powerful enemy with abundant reasons for resentment is conducted. The final twist is that, despite seeing his moral authority reduced to its lowest point, in the most humiliating of ends the convict assumes the sympathy, dignity and even sanctity that most readers remember.

A digression between the defeat of Caupolicán and his capture and execution, the ‘verdadera historia’ [true story] of Dido (XXXII–XXXIII) acts in part as a point of comparison between different models of rulership and republic. The episode, whose immediate inspiration is in Francisco de Enzinas’s additions to his Spanish translation of Livy’s history,10 As demonstrated recently by Luis Gómez Canseco, ‘Dido y Francisco de Enzinas en La Araucana’, Bulletin Hispanique, 122.1 (2020), 145–60. but which is also influenced by contemporary tragedies on the Phoenician queen,11 See Choi and Valencia, ‘The Tragedy’. recounts the story of Dido which preceded the inventions of Virgil. It tells of how Dido escapes from her brother Pygmalion, the king of Phoenicia, who had murdered her husband Sychaeus, and founds Carthage in North Africa. When a local king, Yarbas, threatens the fledgling city with destruction unless Dido accepts his hand in marriage, she commits suicide to preserve her chastity and protect her citizens. Ercilla’s version, among many other things, develops the underlying critique of Machiavellian ideas sustained throughout this part of the poem. Like Caupolicán, Ercilla’s Dido is nothing if not pragmatic and prudent, making skilful use of dissimulation and rhetoric in a series of speeches with which Ercilla embellishes Enzinas’s account. Yet this political wisdom is reconciled with a deliberate eschewal of force, outright deception, and injury. By contrast, her treacherous brother Pigmaleón, who is developed in more detail in Ercilla’s account than in any of his sources, is not simply morally corrupt, but veils his degeneracy with an astute show of virtue, concealing his murder of Sychaeus with poison, while all other sources refer to a violent death. In the exordium to XXIII, the overtones of this act are made explicit. The reader encounters another Machiavellian principe whose manoeuvrings prove vain:

The expedition to Ancud – which hints at its own fictionality for the ‘savvy reader’, as Padrón highlights – describes another example of a stable and peaceable republic.12 Padrón, The Spacious Word, p. 227; cf. p. 267, note 55. The amiable Indians of the ‘islas deleitosas’ [delightful islands] (XXXV. 41) of the lake at the edge of the known world are painted with unmistakable parallels to Venice. In the first glimpse the (land-bound) explorers have of them, Ercilla employs a simile comparing his companions to storm-blown sailors coming into harbour, most European travellers’ first view of the famous city (XXXV. 41). The native inhabitants are repeatedly described as travelling in ‘góndolas’, alternating with the caribe term ‘piraguas’. When a cacique appears (XXXVI. 7–8), his pale face, woollen robes and pointed ‘capelo’ [mitre] recall the ceremonial dress of the Doge with its distinctive corno ducale. Although the scene recalls the early history of La Serenissima in the Discorsi, before the trading city began to expand, the islanders are a living refutation of the principles of Machiavelli: they are absolutely faithful to their ‘promesa’, refuse to take anything in return for their gifts, and are so far removed from the use of violent weapons that we are told, somewhat fancifully, that the meat they offer to the Spanish has been hunted with their own nails. In addition, they voluntarily comply with all the criteria of Vitoria’s ius gentium as well as the precepts of natural law, freely offering the strangers food, water, a dwelling place in the territory, guides and hospitality, and thus removing any legitimate pretext for aggression. The ‘sincera bondad’ [sincere goodness] and ‘ley natural’ [natural law] of this community, then, bars the way to ‘la maldad, el robo y la injusticia | (alimento ordinario de las guerras)’ [wickedness, theft and injustice (the usual fuel of wars)] (XXXVI. 13), although there is a fleeting hint that the inhabitants would be capable of self-defence were it to prove necessary.

One further dimension, moreover, is common to both episodes: they represent non-Christian political communities in a positive light. Galperin has already highlighted the provocative ‘connection between the Carthaginians and the Ottomans’ as Dido voyages through a benevolently portrayed Turkish Mediterranean to the hostile North African coastline of Ercilla’s day (p. 52). To this might be added a possible parallel to the Elizabethan monarchy, certainly prominent in Spanish minds after the defeat of the Armada.13 Elizabeth I was frequently compared to Dido in English literature of the period: see Deanne Williams, ‘Dido, Queen of England’, English Literary History, 73.1 (2006), 31–59. In addition, the story of Dido has certain features in common with that spun by the Syrian sorceress Armida before the Christian warriors in canto IV of the Gerusalemme. In both, the long speech allegedly aims to restore a queen’s honour and ‘fama’, and in both the usurping tyrant from whom she flees resorts to poison to achieve his ends. While Goffredo rightly ‘Teme i barbari inganni, e ben comprende | che non è fede in uom ch’a Dio la neghi’ [fears barbarian deceit, and understands well that one cannot have faith in men who deny faith to [the Christian] God] (IV. 65), however, Ercilla frames his digression with an insistence on ‘la verdad, que es la ley de toda gente’ [truth, which is the law of all peoples: my emphasis], and on the purity of Dido’s faith maligned by the Virgilian account (XXXII. 48–53).14 Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. by Lanfranco Caretti (Milan, 1979). I use this edition throughout. ‘Fe’, indeed, appears as one of Dido’s defining characteristics, not only towards Siqueo, but also towards her own people and the North Africans with whom she interacts. This is despite numerous passages that underline the idolatry of the heroine: her husband’s priesthood to Jupiter (XXXII. 54); her own appeals to the Roman pantheon (XXXIII. 30); her worship after death by the Carthaginians (XXXIII. 15, 52–53). Ercilla here explicitly diverges from Tasso’s dictum that ‘where there is a false piety and a false worship of God there can be no perfection in prince or principality’.15 Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. by Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford, 1973), p. 37. The effect is to bring into question the notion that either infidels or heretics represented political communities absolutely irreconcilable with monarchical Christendom, the only appropriate form of interaction with whom was warfare until an impossible meeting of minds, rather like the delusional marriage proposal of Yarbas.

One of the many ironies of the expedition to Ancud is its demonstration that, in the absence of such a polarising conflict, the Spanish appear to be unable to relate to such political communities at all. The entire enterprise – repeatedly promised to the reader long before its eventual appearance – is consistently phrased in terms of conquest. The preparations of Don García, with the recruitment of experienced soldiers and ‘tumulto bélico’ [the tumult of war] (XXXIV. 47), seems to be a simple continuation of his rapid campaign through Arauco. This is certainly how the ‘horrible estruendo de la guerra’ [horrible din of war] is interpreted by the first Indians encountered. The difference here is that the gathering of this ‘noble compañía’ in council, under the sway of ‘Tunconabala plático soldado […] en la araucana escuela dotrinado’ [Tunconabala, an experienced soldier, trained in the Araucanian school] (XXXIV. 53), regards military resistance as an impossibility. Their tactic of avoidance of conflict and dissimulation is nevertheless singularly effective, leaving the ‘furia’ of nature to almost bring the soldiers to starvation. Faced with a political and friendly island republic, and an almost unnavigable gulf, the campaign comes to an abrupt and anticlimactic stop, and uneventfully retraces its steps back to La Imperial. Following Pastor’s reading that this is a deliberately constructed allegory of the conquest, ‘fictitiously returning to the beginning of a historical process now approaching its end’ (p. 258), the conclusion appears to be that without the conventional cycle of conflict and decline, the narrative of imperial expansion is thwarted before it can begin.

In this light, the decision to turn to the war in Portugal at the culminating moment of the narrative is a significant gesture. Tasso had argued influentially that the most, if not the only, appropriate subject for a Christian epic was the war between a Christian monarchy and infidels. The final canto of Ercilla contains the only campaign of his poem, with the exception of Lepanto, that might meet such a criterion: Alcazarquivir. It is an enterprise unmistakably foolish, entirely committed to fortune (XXXVII. 35), unjustified, and utterly destructive, ‘la ruina de un reino irreparable’ [the irreparable ruin of a kingdom] (XXXVII. 37), the only suffering being Christian. The ‘ardor juvenil y movimiento’ [youthful ardour and inclination] (XXXVII. 33) of Sebastian are an ironic echo of the young kings Pigmaleón and Yarbas, and to a lesser extent of the ‘acelerado’ [impetuous] young commander Don García. While the tone of lament and condemnation of the hubris of the venture find parallels with Fernando de Herrera’s well-known canción on the disaster, ‘Voz de dolor, y canto de gemido’ [‘Voice of Sorrow, and Song of Groans’], both the providential overtones of the latter and its promise that Spain will soon wreak a bloody vengeance are conspicuously absent. Instead, this final canto definitively turns away from the cosmological dimension of both Herrera’s Biblical allegorisation of Alcazarquivir or Lepanto and the ‘armi pietose’ [pious arms] of the Gerusalemme to return the theatre of conflict to the sphere of human affairs, ‘de derecho de las gentes’ [the law of nations] (XXXVII. 3), just where most of the scholastic tradition had placed it.16 As the jurist Hermogenianus states, ‘of this law of nations, wars were brought in, peoples separated, kingdoms founded, properties distinguished, boundaries put on fields, buildings set in place, trade, buyings and sellings, lettings and hirings, and obligations instituted’, quoted in Brett, Changes of State, pp. 115–16. It is thus that it is able to justify a war between Christians of the kind utterly condemned by Tasso as a rich potential subject for future epic poets. The crusading impulse, then, of Tasso, Herrera and to some extent Camões, an impulse not unrelated to certain factions within the Spanish court, is treated with scepticism or silence in a poem whose narratives of expansion are always firmly human.

The presentation of the annexation of Portugal as a case which fully complies with the criteria for just warfare, however, creates problems of its own. The analysis, which is in line with the thinking of Vitoria and closely follows Fortún García de Ercilla’s Tratado, as we saw earlier, at times appears to contradict the preceding cantos: for example, the maxim that ‘todo al vencedor le es concedido’ [everything is permitted to the victor] (XXXVII. 7).17 Luis Gómez Canseco suggests that the account of the diplomatic negotiations preceding the invasion derives from a piece of Philippian propaganda disseminated in 1580 and which survives in a single manuscript, in ‘La anexión de Portugal en La Araucana: Fuentes, composición y lectura política’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 98.6 (2021), 581–96. In my view, the parallels do not prove this definitively, but they do demonstrate that Ercilla is drawing closely on arguments brandished by Philip II’s camp in Portugal at the time of the event. There may simply be some degree of mismatch here, given Gómez Canseco’s hypothesis of a Tercera parte that is often carelessly composed. Nonetheless, I believe that two brief observations might clarify the final canto and relate it to the preceding analysis. The first is the exceptional nature of the conflict. The presence of Philip here, as at Saint-Quentin, is enormously significant. He is shown to be in complete command of the whole process of the declaration of war against the Portuguese, and, no less significantly, of the prior initiatives to resolve his claim peacefully: ‘llamado del derecho y la justicia | contra el rebelde reino va en persona’ [called by right and justice, he goes in person against the rebel kingdom] (XXXVII. 15). This, in turn, is in accord with the emphasis throughout the preceding section on the exclusivity of the king’s authority to decide when and how to ‘justificar sus armas’ [justify the use of arms] (XXXVII. 13). All criteria, of course, which have proved not only lacking but demonstrably unrealisable at the other frontiers of empire. Likewise, the campaign is not seen as an expansion of empire, a motivation immediately denied (XXXVII. 14), but rather as the taking possession of a hereditary but rebellious state.

Secondly, there is the implicitly conditional nature of Ercilla’s excursus. The campaign itself is never narrated, a campaign in which, under the command of Alba whose name is conspicuously absent here, ‘plunder, brutality and outrages occurred throughout’, investigations into which remained suspended at his death.18 Kamen, Philip of Spain, p. 175. Despite the promise of glories for the poet willing to take on the theme, the allusions to the imminent conflict, the fruit of ‘discordia’ and lamentable civil war (XXXVII. 27), have tragic overtones. Nor is there any glimpse as there had been after Saint-Quentin of a definitive peace; after the departure of Philip from Lisbon, the kingdom was indeed more unstable.19 Ibid., p. 295. Overall, it might be said that the discussion of the ideal war invites questioning precisely because of its idealism: it is entrusted exclusively to a king capable of judging ‘como un ángel sin pecado, | puesta en la causa universal la mira’ [like a sinless angel, his gaze fixed on the universal cause] (XXXVII. 6), assuming that he alone will be capable of restraining ‘furor’ within due limits and directing it always towards peace. In a poetic world full of ‘accidentes’ that complicate this juridical ideal, such a war – at least without the physical presence of royalty – has never been narrated. The work here definitively retains its Ariostesque openness, refusing to provide the resolution of narrative threads sought by Tasso in the conclusion of a heroic poem.