‘Del extremado en todo jóven tierno’ (I. 1)? Prudence, mañas and Means in Governing the Frontiers
The latent potential of the virgin territory of Arauco, of course, serves its purpose only when paired with a governing presence capable of bringing it to fulfilment – one conspicuously lacking in La Araucana, and which therefore looms large in Oña’s representation of the youthful García Hurtado de Mendoza. As a historical revindication of the former captain-general who believed himself to have been unjustly neglected and maligned, Oña’s hero displays all of the virtues one would expect: perfectly ethical in the causes and conduct of the war; exemplary in military art and strategy; effective in command and control of his men. There are also some rather unexpected innovations, however: while Hurtado is capable of exerting a kinglike sway over the soldiery at certain times, at others the troops show themselves to be disobedient, and – more significantly – go unpunished. While the governor illustrates the full spectrum of cardinal virtues, rectifying the problems of injustice and inclemency which are decisive in La Araucana, these virtues are more frequently applied to ruling the wayward Spanish than the enemy, and are consistently redefined. It is here, again, that Oña’s surprising emphases stimulate a dialogue with contemporary colonial concerns, in the first instance as an implicit recognition of the complexities of frontier governance, but also establishing a particular image of political leadership which will be echoed and expanded in the subsequent elaboration of the role and virtues of the viceroy.
As the previous sections clarify, the justice of the campaign in Arauco is expressed in part in the contemporary terms of limited, missionary-oriented entradas and pacification missions. As in La Araucana, the general exhorts mercy towards the defeated (AD IV. 23, VIII. 76–77). Unlike Ercilla’s Don García, he is able to make this command effective (e.g. AD XI. 111), to both moral and strategic advantage. The address to the viceroy in the exordium – ‘sin vos quedó su historia [de Ercilla] deslustrada’ [without you Ercilla’s history was tarnished] (19, my emphasis) – highlights this crucial difference: Ercilla’s notorious depiction of the blood-crazed army pursuing those who have surrendered uses a similar turn of phrase (‘iban la gran vitoria deslustrando’, LA XXVI. 7) when, as a result of ineffective leadership, the troops fail to comply with orders in the aftermath of victory. Likewise, while the armies of La Araucana were, in large part, the playthings of fortune, and the relationship between fortune, fate, Providence and Machiavellian virtù was not always transparent, in Arauco domado the cosmic struggle between the diabolic infidel and the captain of Christ is rendered unambiguously visible. The pious Hurtado, oblivious to hardships and temptation, curbs abuses, reaffirms orthodox religious devotion (III. 37–42), explicitly redirects the aims of the campaign towards the cause of the monarch and the dissemination of the Good News, and as a result is unflaggingly favoured by both fortune and Providence, in contrast to his morally frail predecessors: ‘Mientras sulcó el exército cristiano | en Chile el mar del vicio a vela y remos, | jamás gozó de próspera fortuna, | porque sin Dios mal puede haver alguna’ [While the Christian army in Chile sailed on the sea of vice, it never enjoyed prosperous fortune, because without God there can hardly be any] (XII. 8).
While the ethics of the mission are beyond reproach, however, the relative weakness of the Araucanians in battle in Oña’s rewriting requires effort to establish a new kind of heroism on the part of the Spanish forces. As we have seen, this is partly accomplished in crudely numerical terms: the fighting sets not only the many against the few, but also the single Spaniard in combat against a number of Araucanian champions. The culto epithet ‘joven’ had already become associated with the youthful victories of Don John of Austria in works such as Juan Rufo’s highly regarded La Austríada [The Austriad] (1584), and Fernando de Herrera’s ‘Canción’ (1572), and Oña seeks to transfer some of its lustre to the precocious military virtues of his protagonist, who was twenty-one at the beginning of his governorship. At times such emulation is made explicit, as in the reference to the waters of Lepanto stirred at the superhuman blow of the hero’s aristeia (VI. 26). Hurtado also boasts an exclusive mastery of the various elements of the arte militar distributed in La Araucana between Lautaro, Caupolicán and the two armies as a collective. He is characterised in action, like Valdivia or Lautaro, by that highly prized quality presteza (III. 63, IX. 90, XI title), ever on the advance, but never impetuous in attack (V. 70). His own industria leads by example, literally marching ahead of his men (X. 15), keeping the army always busy, prepared (IV. 48) and disciplined (X. 1–7) and demonstrating for them the requisite qualities of wakefulness or courage as the circumstances require (VIII. 50). He shows a particular concern for selecting, building and repairing sites for fortifications (IV. 37, VIII. 39, X. 33), for an astute employment of artillery (IV. 22, VI. 82), and for the securing of reinforcements (IX. 17), carefully employing secrecy and surprise to leave both his own men and the enemy in awe of his ‘ardid extraño’ [strange trick] (X. 17) to cross the Biobío undetected.
Such descriptions of successful strategy often have a contemporary sting, addressing the flaws not only of García’s predecessors but also, implicitly, of those who succeed him. The eleven-stanza digression on the dangers of stopping in Santiago (Mapocho) en route to Arauco (III. 68–78), comparing the city’s enervating effects to the monstrous diversions keeping Odysseus from Ithaca, is at first sight difficult to explain:
de Mapochó se apartan los navíos,
alvergue de holgazanes y valdíos,
adonde el vicio a sus anchuras mora,
y tierra do se come el dulce loto,
que al filo de la guerra tiene boto.
Es la vadosa Sirte, donde encallan
o todos o los más governadores,
y adonde, por hablar cosas de amores,
las del guerrero adúltero se callan. (III. 68–69)
[The ships keep their distance from Mapocho, the refuge of layabouts and idlers, where vice spreads itself out, and the land where the sweet lotus is eaten, which blunts the blade of war. It is the sandy reef on which all or most of the governors run aground, and where, for talk of love, the affairs of the adulterous warrior [Mars] fall silent.]
It comes into poignant relief, however, in the light of the difficult relationship between the viceroy and the long-standing governor of Chile, Alonso de Sotomayor (r. 1583–92), who often found himself berated for his extended spells in the region’s capital, where he had contracted an advantageous marriage with a local encomendera. In part, the ill feeling between the two generals is explicable in personal terms, compounded by muddled instructions from Madrid concerning the two veterans’ respective mandates over the region. As contemporary documents reveal, there was nonetheless also a larger dispute regarding the overarching strategy to be pursued in Chile, the primary point of contention being the extent of indigenous resistance.
For the viceroy, the key to the war was the pacification of Arauco, and he repeatedly called for a full and immediate invasion of this district, following his own strategy of more than twenty years before.
1 For example, ibid., p. 103. Sotomayor, on the other hand, was facing a loose confederation of polities across the region, with resistance concentrated in formerly tributary communities around the outskirts of many Spanish cities. Under pressure from the viceroy, he dedicated one campaign to Arauco, constructing a new Spanish fort, but also adopted a broader strategy centred on a scorched-earth policy around the cities, interpreted by Hurtado as an indication of decadence in both troops and governor. The difference of approach was Sotomayor’s justification for leaving the battlefield to make his case in Lima, ‘considerando, que la población de Arauco no avía de librar de Guerra lo demás’ [deeming that the settlement of Arauco would not free the rest of the region from war], from where he was reappointed to Panama to lead the defence against Francis Drake, leaving the future direction of policy unresolved.
2 Caro de Torres, Relación de los servicios, fols 46r, 49r. It is significant, in this light, that the focus of Oña, as of his patron, remains exclusively on the risks and promise of Arauco. The other independent ‘estados’ who interact with the Araucanians in Ercilla disappear entirely, while the allied, auxiliary and tributary indigenous communities are presented as both loyal and utterly subservient, even servile, in need of protection rather than worthy of suspicion.
The revalidation of Hurtado’s role in the campaign goes beyond a simple appropriation of the virtues and legitimacy conspicuously lacking in
La Araucana, however, or an implicit statement regarding the future conduct of the war. The captain-general is not only a commander but also a ruler, whose actions serve as an exemplary picture of governance as well as of military strategy. One striking innovation in this light is that the authority of the leader is presented in terms exclusively reserved for the king in Ercilla. The regal quality of majesty,
maiestas, attributed to Ercilla’s Philip II but at best partially transmitted to his distant representatives, is here not only fully reflected in the governor of Chile, but also appears to be an innate property, independent of the monarch. His physical person is not only ‘nebulous’ (in that it is never described directly),
3 Cf. Pittarello, ‘Arauco domado de Pedro de Oña’, p. 259. but mysteriously impressive too, inspiring awe in all who encounter his gaze (
AD VI. 49, IX. 23). Even more significant is his infallible command of Fortune. The
fortuna of Philip II, as Chapter 2 argued, plays a significant role in Ercilla’s
Segunda parte. The storm of the outset shows the reader a literally and symbolically ungoverned ship, tossed without mercy by the rebellious winds (‘corriendo fortuna’, in nautical terminology) until the
fortuna of Philip hauls the craft to a precarious harbour.
4 Santiago Fernández Mosquera points out that the topos of the storm in this period is usually more poetic than historical, and is most commonly ‘the representation of natural or human chaos’, La tormenta en el Siglo de Oro: Variaciones funcionales de un tópico (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2006), p. 31. Cf. also María Gabriela Huidobro, El imaginario de la guerra de Arauco: Mundo épico y tradición clásica (Santiago de Chile, 2017), pp. 90–102. In
Arauco domado, the vessel has a ‘diestro piloto’ [skilled pilot] in the person of Don García (XII. 9), whose supplication secures salvation from the diabolical storm, and who not only literally steers the ship to safety (IV. 18) like Aeneas on the death of Palinurus, but also appears – next to God – to be the lord of the restless winds, ‘verdadero dios Eolo’ [the true god Aeolus] (III. 43). ‘El señor de las venturas’ [the lord of fortunes] (VIII. 49) is, in fact, associated with fortune throughout the poem in a very special way: ever willing, in Machiavellian terms, to ‘dar un tiento | al pecho de la varia y ciega diosa’ [take a swipe at the breast of the changeable and blind goddess] (IX. 33), the divinely crafted shield of this new Achilles/Aeneas emblematically displays ‘la fortuna lúbrica rendida, | y a la Ocasión por el copete asida | con poderosa mano en ciego ñudo’ [mournful fortune surrendered, and Opportunity seized by her lock with powerful hand in a tight knot] (IX. 51). This allegorical transition takes on a particular significance when it is put into the context of the figurative slippage between the goddess Fortuna and
fortunas at sea in both poems, between the maritime tempests and the tempestuous waves of rebellion across the empire. The colonial governor, in this sense, symbolically displaces the monarch within his own jurisdiction, the guarantor of Providential success and security and the locus of majesty on his own merits alone.
At the same time, however, there is also a subtle shift towards a conciliatory stance in the manner in which this awesome power is wielded. In Ercilla, the heroic commander is the one who commands absolutely, since the army – any army – is a body ever liable to disorder, cruelty, greed and collapse. His Don García falls short in the Segunda parte not through poor intentions, but because his orders are not entirely obeyed by his men, just as the few moments of failure of Caupolicán’s sway over the senate and of Lautaro’s control of his army are significant in their demise. Only Philip II, it appears, has the ability to prompt and control the delicate balance of fury and restraint in his soldiers. This power of command is in most cases transferred to the youthful captain in Arauco domado, but not in all, and there are two particularly notable incidents of tolerated disobedience. In the eighth canto, a sentinel, Rebolledo, is caught asleep on two occasions by the vigilant general, condemned to death, but spared at the entreaty of the others. In the tenth, two soldiers leave the fort without permission to look for strawberries, leading to the death of Guillén mentioned earlier, and triggering a full battle from a weaker position when a member of the scouting party sent to investigate the disturbance also disobeys orders and leads a reckless charge, drawing out the entire army in their defence. While the incidents are relatively innocuous in comparison with the atrocities perpetrated in La Araucana, confined to a few common soldiers and narrated with a comic touch, like many humorous episodes in Arauco domado, they might be seen also as a way of indirectly engaging with some of the troubling questions raised by Oña’s predecessor. The fact that the episodes mirror in a lighter vein precisely the flaws that have such devastating consequences in Ercilla – disobedience, greed and impetuousness – as well as the contemporary problems of desertion, shortages and poor discipline; that the episodes are innovations in a narrative which otherwise closely follows Mariño de Lobera’s and Ercilla; that each is followed by a moralising discussion; and that collectively they do jeopardise the general’s position (‘estuvo por los suyos puesto a canto | de peligrar su crédito aquel día’ [he was on the brink of endangering his reputation that day on account of his soldiers], XI. 11) adds further support to this interpretation.
What distinguishes Oña’s approach is that the correct response to such insubordination is pragmatic flexibility and an inclination towards mercy unprecedented in the military manuals, which tended to prescribe swift and exemplary punishment. In the first instance, this might be a response to Ercilla’s notorious allusion to his own near-execution by the ‘mozo capitán acelerado’ [impetuous young captain] (LA XXXVII. 70), but the language used opens broader questions. Hurtado’s decision to mitigate his initial verdict of hanging the negligent Rebolledo is presented in the very terms of the balance between clemency and rigour in the application of justice and in warfare which had characterised Ercilla’s ongoing concern with appropriate conduct towards the enemy:
alcançó perdón mediante el ruego
y la necessidad que havía de gente;
que en tierra como aquella tan reziente
no ha de llevarse todo a sangre y fuego
como en las ya políticas famosas
donde tan en su punto están las cosas.
Usó con esto el joven de clemencia,
sin cuyo acompañado la justicia
apenas es virtud, porque se envicia
con parecer crueldad o malquerencia;
y es donde se requiere más prudencia,
porque si de este medio el juez desquicia
en un extremo viene a dar forçosso,
si de remisso no, de rigurosso.
De entrambos se apartó como prudente,
siguiendo el justo medio don Hurtado […] (VIII. 58–60)
[he gained pardon through the request (of the other soldiers) and the need of men; for in lands recently won not everything has to be carried through as ruthlessly as it is in those already famous and civilised where everything is just as it should be. The youth made use of clemency in this, without whose companionship justice is hardly a virtue, because it is corrupted by seeming to be cruelty or malice; and it is where most prudence is required, because if the judge deviates from this mean he inevitably falls into an extreme, if not too remiss, too severe. Don Hurtado prudently avoided both extremes, following the golden mean.]
Like Ercilla, therefore, Oña suggests the need for a differential ethics of warfare in remote and recently subdued provinces, in which the full application of the laws of war may be ineffectual. Instead of applying this reasoning to the incompatible perspectives of adversaries, however, he turns it back towards the exceptional demands of commanding the frontier forces themselves. In light of contemporary anxieties over the waywardness of the growing and increasingly permanent Chilean militia, the emphasis can hardly have escaped the attention of politically engaged readers in the viceroyalty.
The concern with limits (‘términos’, ‘modos’) and with equilibrium is, as Chapter 2 demonstrates, an obsession in
La Araucana. Typically, Oña introduces new if rather conventional concepts in order to resolve but in the process transform the nature of the dilemma: the cardinal virtues, and the Golden Mean. Naturally enough, Hurtado exemplifies the four cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice, with a special emphasis on prudence. In itself there is nothing surprising here: the continuing presence of the classical virtues and the particularly high regard for prudence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political treatises, referring back to Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, is a commonplace, and here it is again a response to the many imprudent youths who wreak disasters in
La Araucana.
5 Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s influential Tratado de la religión y virtudes que deve tener el Principe Christiano (Madrid, 1595), for instance, terms prudence ‘la guía y maestra de todas las virtudes morales del Príncipe Cristiano’ [the guide and master of all the moral virtues of the Christian Prince], and the ‘arte de la vida’ [art of life], encompassing eleven chapters of advice (XXIII–XXXIII), including those on the art of war. The relative marginalisation of these virtues in the latter poem (prudence and fortitude, or ‘serenidad’, do appear, but in association with Dido and Caupolicán, while justice is more a point for discussion than a stable attribute) is one of the surprising features of its political make-up, and on a first reading Oña simply appears to be returning the Christian governor to the realms of political orthodoxy. However, such virtues became ‘problematic’ from the mid-sixteenth century, susceptible to conflicting and contradictory interpretations, polarised in their reading as secular or religious, even with their relevance to the modern prince brought into question.
6 Truman, Spanish Treatises, pp. 361–67; cf. also Jeremy Robbins, ‘Prudence and Baltasar Gracián’s Oráculo manual: Baroque Political Thought and the Thomistic Dimension’, in Boyd and O’Reilly, eds, Artifice and Invention, pp. 43–52. In this light, Oña’s particular application of the virtues to the difficulties of governance on the frontier takes a rather particular, and in some ways unusual, position.
One crucial innovation here is that the practice of these virtues always adopts the Golden Mean, which guides the employment of clemency and justice discussed above and is first introduced in the moral exordium preceding Hurtado’s entry into his governorship:
¡Oh cuánto se requiere, cuánto importa
haver moderación y medio en todo,
pues lo que va sin límite ni modo,
¿qué limitada fuerça lo soporta?
Ni es bueno que la capa quede corta,
ni que de larga frise con el lodo:
virtud está en el medio como en quicio,
y siempre en los extremos anda el vicio. (III. 1–8)
[Oh how important and necessary it is to observe moderation and the mean in everything, since what kind of force could bear what is without limits or checks? It is no good for the cloak to be too short, nor to be so long that it drags in the mud: virtue is in the middle in its element, and vice is always in extremes.]
While this ‘justo medio’ was another commonplace inherited from Aristotle and the classics, like prudence, it was a ‘flexible tool’ and a ‘contested concept’.
7 Rich Rabone, Moderation and the Mean in the Literature of Spain’s Golden Age (Oxford, forthcoming). Ethan Shagan’s The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011) explores how the concept of moderation might be appropriated for coercive and authoritarian purposes. Oña sometimes employs it in its classical Aristotelian sense, in which virtue is the middle ground between two vices that represent extremes, but he also uses it as a more flexible poetic figure, as the appropriately moderate response relative to a particular situation. Hurtado uses it here both to reform the system of Indian tributes and encomiendas, which he moderates without overhauling,
8 On Hurtado’s reforms to the encomienda system in Chile, which were in reality quite controversial and led to considerable tensions with the old conquistadors, see Mazzotti, Lima fundida, pp. 87–97. and to arbitrate between the two interim claimants to the captain-generalcy, Francisco de Villagrán and Francisco de Aguirre: ‘como la virtud, se puso en medio’ [like virtue, he positioned himself in the middle] (III. 46). While it is particularly associated with prudence, the
aurea mediocritas applies in equal measure to all the virtues exemplified by García. His ‘justicia’ balances the need to punish but also conserve his forces and, united with clemency, avoids the extremes of either severity or permissiveness. His temperance corresponds to his imperviousness to temptations of the flesh, but also to a more holistic control of appearances: his show of emotions is always ‘templada’ [tempered], neither stoically impassive nor fully transparent (III. 11–12; cf. IX. 48). His ‘fortaleza’ strikes a straight course between boldness and timorousness as he awaits the right time to begin his campaign (IX. 1–7). As Rich Rabone has demonstrated, the myths of Icarus and Phaethon were often used interchangeably to illustrate the Golden Mean: in the famous versions in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, their fathers Daedalus and Phoebus both advise their heedless sons to strike a middle course in their flight (‘medio tutissimus ibis’,
Met. 2.137, ‘inter utrumque vola’,
Met. 8.206) in phrases which were often paired with emblems. The doomed youths were also common examples of the dangers of entrusting rule to one too young. Oña almost certainly has this in mind when he makes of his young Hurtado an antidote to their recklessness, an emblematic embodiment of the mean in all his undertakings:
No quiero yo dezir que el hombre sea
un Ícaro sobervio y temerario
para que, dando nombre al Mar Icario,
entre sus ondas muerto al fin se vea;
sino que, si jamás errar dessea,
a nuestro joven siga de ordinario,
al cual, sin ser altivo ni arrogante,
no hay cosa tan terrible que lo espante. (IX. 5)
[I do not mean that man should be a proud and reckless Icarus, so that, giving his name to the Icarian Sea, in the end he meets death in its waves; but that, if he desires never to err, he should make a habit of following our youth, who without being proud or arrogant, can never be alarmed by anything, however terrible.]
9 The passage is also an echo of Garcilaso, sonnet XII, which uses Icarus (and Phaethon) as figures for amor hereos, ‘cayendo, fama y nombre al mar ha dado’.These form a distinctly conservative set of virtues, ‘en cosa no mostrándose moderna’ [not showing himself to be an innovator in anything] (III. 35). Pragmatically flexible, they are consensual rather than absolutist in execution, always seeking and taking council (III. 24, XIV. 83, XVIII. 34). While maintaining them with constancy is the mark of a hero, they are in themselves emphatically human and even ordinary, a kind of ‘common sense’, as Oña’s tendency to illustrate them with homely proliferations of everyday images, colloquialisms, proverbs and folkloric wisdom suggests. While Oña’s terminology is impeccably orthodox, therefore, its application consistently avoids dogmatic generalisations; in a frontier which is shown to be inherently unstable and divided, threatened less by external forces or the miserable ‘indios de paz’ than by the negligence, ambition, greed and disorder of its own military and civil societies, a moderate, conciliatory pragmatism is the only effective approach.
Here, too, there are parallels with the moderate reformism and acknowledgement of the difficulties and difference of government in the Indies present in much discourse of the 1580s and 1590s (in contrast with the hardening of attitudes in much political literature of the Peninsula towards the end of the reign of Philip II). The correspondence of this period increasingly attests to this recognition, with the insistence of the Crown, viceroy and delegated governors on the necessity of proceeding always gradually and gently with overseas subjects. Acosta’s insistence on the diversity, novelty and instability of ‘res Indicae’ (p. 54), the difficulty of reaching a consensus and even of finding the right political language in which to speak, leads him to argue for a new, pragmatic approach to both evangelisation and governance, the former moderate in its expectations and neither pacifist nor employing more than a necessary minimum of force, the latter working prudently within existing institutions, with caution, consultation and patience, and with as much attention to civil as to military affairs. One passage in particular is very similar in tone to Oña’s above (VIII. 58–60):
The very state of the republic is so diverse and changeable, and so heterogeneous in itself, that what was held yesterday to be very correct and beneficial, today, if the situation changes, might be the most iniquitous and pernicious thing. (p. 407)
It is in this sense, then, that a moderate approach which in essence changes very little at all merits Oña’s governor the title of ‘gran legislador del nuevo mundo’ [great legislator of the New World] (III. 33). The pragmatism and empiricism of Ercilla’s political discourse remain, but the model which emerges is quite different.