"[They] Are Not of Any Service, Except for Wasting Wages and Burning a Lot of Timber": The Soldiers of the Guard of the Royal Shipyard of Barcelona (1575–1600) (original) (raw)
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The International Journal of Maritime History, 2017
In the early seventeenth century, the construction of galleons and high seas warships became an essential strategic concern for the king of Spain, even more so than in the previous century. In 1603, Philip III ordered the establishment of a Committee for the Building of Ships (Junta para la Fábrica de Navíos), which signed several contracts (asientos) with private individuals to build squadrons and ships. What were the shipbuilding conditions outlined in contracts signed under the auspices of such a committee? By addressing this question, this research note sheds light on the shipbuilding strategies of the Spanish Crown before the Twelve Years' Truce (1609-1621). The notes are part of an ongoing research project on the Spanish Empire's political restructuring of shipbuilding policies during the first half of the seventeenth century.
The Experience of Spain’s Early Modern Soldiers: Combat, Welfare and Violence
War in History, 2002
Between 1500 and 1700, hundreds of thousands of soldiers served in the armies of the Spanish monarchs. Our knowledge of the conditions of service of these men is scant and largely limited to those who served in the Army of Flanders. This article examines the experience of soldiers in the regular armies and the militias in the Iberian peninsula during this period. With a focus on combat, physical and spiritual welfare and the culture of violence, it provides a range of insights into the reality of warfare in mainland Spain. It examines a number of variables which influenced or arose from that experience. These include rates of attrition arising from desertion and casualities; the availability, use and effectiveness of weapons and munitions, along with evidence for ratios of the deployment of artillery; the nature of medical and spiritual assistance; food and drink; association with women; and engagement in and subjection to violence. The article provides incidental evidence for the u...
Battle and Bloodshed: The Medieval World at War, 2013
It is well known that during the Middle Ages warfare was the basis of nobility. On the battlefield members of this social group sought honour, glory and riches. However, fighting was also a social duty. In the medieval imagination of the three orders the bellatores were tasked with defending justice, the helpless and the established social order. Going beyond this imagined order, the relationship between warfare and nobility cannot be understood without considering other factors such as pacts of vassalage, feudal expansion, and the growth of income and the progressive consolidation of the state. Various historical processes modulated the significance of the military role of the nobility. While during the central period of the Middle Ages warfare generated wealth and honours, during the later medieval period it involved the search for new income and the easiest, though also the costliest, way to gain royal favour. In this study we seek to analyze the evolution of the relationship between nobility and warfare in a specific context, that of the kingdom of Valencia, which arose from the Catalan-Aragonese expansion of the 13th Century. The progressive expansion of the presence of the state, the crisis of estate income and the resulting structural indebtedness transformed the context in which the nobility of Valencia existed, nobility ever more subjugated by the interests of royal power. The crown would eventually take control of all the levers of power and become the principle route for social ascent. These changes were particularly noticeable during the reign of Alfonso the Magnanimous, from 1416 to 1458. From the moment he was crowned he engaged in an expansionist policy which led to a series of armed conflicts with Castile, Genoa and France. The behaviour and attitude of the Valencian nobility during these wars was obviously not invariable. Our focus here will be on two members of the minor nobility: Ausias Marc and Hug de Cardona.1 The former can be thought of as a paradigmatic case of those nobles who participated in the kings wars not so much in search of booty and glory as of privileges and positions in the royal administration. The latter saw in war the opportunity to stop paying creditors and paralyze the functioning of the legal system."""
Introduction: Military Lives in the Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World
eHumanista, 2023
If, as the often-repeated ancient precept would have it, money comprises the sinews of war, during the medieval and early modern periods the written word increasingly comprised its other connective tissue. Against the backdrop of burgeoning administrative correspondence, technical treatises, and the bureaucratic testimony and self-narrative required for oversight and career ascent, the evolving armies of the period became sites of a vibrant textual culture. Access to paper and familiarity with writing practices in various registers were among the material conditions that allowed military writing, including life writing, to flourish. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the heterogeneous character of armies, the precarious status of non-noble soldiers, and the contested nature of the means and justification for warfare were all debates in which soldiers themselves could intervene by writing. In such works it is often the lived experience of the soldier - figured in either a biographical or (pseudo)autobiographical frame - that is offered as entertainment, edification, or the grounds for authoritative argumentation. The present volume focuses on this singular thematic element in the multifarious military textual ecology: the military vida or life, defined broadly here as an account of a life (real or imagined), marked by service in arms. Beyond the writing required for basic military functioning, the institution - along with the conflicted figure of the soldier - left a distinctive literary footprint, in genres including the chivalric biography and humanist dialogue, which rehearsed problems associated with military ethics, to comic and dramatic literature, which alternately satirized or idealized military experience through the contradictory figures of the valiente and the braggart soldier. The present volume brings together eleven articles examining different aspects of medieval and early modern military life, as it is refracted through the prism of a variety of textual genres. The essays are organized in a roughly chronological arc, although a web of shared themes connects them to each other. By bringing together different approaches to the study of military lives and their textual manifestations, spanning the global empires of Spain and Portugal, this volume aims to explore these works as aesthetic laboratories, engines of knowledge production, and sites of ideological articulation.
Military Labour and Martial Honour in the Vida de la Monja Alférez, Catalina de Erauso
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 2017
This article explores the characterisation of military labour and martial honour in the Vida attributed to Catalina de Erauso (1592?-1650). Reading Erauso’s Vida against the backdrop of the military revolution and concurrent social upheavals, and alongside other military memoirs from the period, I argue that there is an underlying coherence between the Vida’s criminal episodes and heroic scenes, which in turn reflects a conflicted notion of martial honour that comprises both exemplary conduct and transgression. At stake in this recontextualisation of the Vida is both a more nuanced grasp of the text itself and a more capacious understanding of the ways in which the professionalisation of war was represented in early modern literature.
Essays on production and trade in late medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean, 1100-1500. Miranda, F. (ed.), 2023
This essay traces the history of the military industry in the Crown of Aragon between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is shown that the Catalan armoury was a thriving sector with specialized productive centres and a trade network that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula and western Mediterranean. Using a broad range of sources, this study will compare productive structures and exports in Barcelona, Mallorca, and Valencia. Resumo Este ensaio investiga a história da indústria militar na Coroa de Aragão entre os séculos XIV e XVI. É demonstrado que o arma
Acta Periodica Duellatorum
This article gives an overview of the evolution of trial by combat in the Principality of Catalonia, culminating in a study of this interesting treaty that, because of historiographic circumstances, is relatively unknown to most academics. The Libellus de batalla facienda is a brief Catalan legal treatise that regulated judicial combat in the Principality of Catalonia, especially Barcelona. There are some characteristics to it that make it unique. Written in around 1255, it is not only very early for its time, but is also a very clear and detailed description of the formalities and the procedures that the two combatants had to go through before, during, and after the fight. Written in a down-to-earth fashion, it starts with the prearrangements – such as guarantees and pledges, or the oath taking – before detailing the preparation of the lliça – the battleground. It continues with a description of the rules for combat and finally ends with regulations regarding the outcome and its af...
Arms and Letters: Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain
University of Toronto Press, 2020
Arms and Letters analyzes the unprecedented number of autobiographical accounts written by Spanish soldiers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These first-person, retrospective works recount a range of experiences throughout the sprawling domain of the Hispanic Monarchy, from the disease and disorder of the Spanish Road from Italy to the Low Countries, to the terrors of traversing the contested waterways of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific. Reading representative autobiographies in contemporary historical context, including the coalescing of the first modern armies, which were partially populated by forced recruits and the urban poor, against a backdrop of economic crisis, imperial decline, and controversies surrounding the conduct of war, the book shows how soldiers exploited a capacious concept of honor and contributed to the development of the nascent autobiographical form. Honor, as a means of mediating the growing divide between the public and private realms, was inevitably gendered, relational, intersubjective, and performative, and as such, it functioned as one of the overarching metrics of value that early modern men and women applied to themselves and others. In charting how non-elite subjects rendered their lives legible through an eclectic appropriation of bureaucratic and literary genres, the book contributes both to a critical genealogy of honor and the history of life writing.