The Tratado de las campañas of Martin García Cerezeda: military life writing and self-advancement in the memoirs of a sixteenth-century Spanish veteran

Abstract

ABSTRACT The memoirs of the Spanish arquebusier Martin García Cerezeda, who served in the Spanish army during the Italian Wars (1494–1559), were employed several times in studies on early modern military and intellectual history and the experience of soldiering and warfare. Using Cerezeda’s Tratado de las campañas as an exhaustive narrative full of instructive and significant information is indeed understandacle, but very little was written on Cerezeda’s potential motivation to write his recollections of his long and arduous military service in the larger context of the writing of autobiographies and memoirs, whether military or otherwise, in early modern Europe. While returning to the original manuscript in the library of the Escorial produced more questions than answers on Cerezeda and his work, this paper nevertheless demonstrates that the veteran Cerezeda was carefully and meticulously attempting to present himself as worthy of the patronship or assistance of the ascending noble and soldier Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, 3rd Duke of Sessa (d.1578), the grandson of the famous Gran Capitán. By placing himself in several key events, alongside several central figures of his time, and especially the Emperor Charles V, and presenting himself as a zealous and principled Christian soldier, Cerezeda was attempting to press the specific buttons that could more easily caught the eye of a sixteenth century Spanish nobleman who was steeped in a mixed cultural environment of humanistic stylistic preferences and a traditional chivalric ethos.