the legacy of the Spanish Tercios that no army has equaled

Don Pedro was not the only one. During this glorious era when the Tercios dominated the Old Continent, almost three hundred years, countless soldiers fought together with sword, pike and pen. “They created the best literature ever written while fighting the greatest battles of the age. This incredible circumstance only happened in Spain and at a very specific time: the golden age,” the lieutenant-colonel (right) explains to ABC. Norberto Ruiz Lima. The philologist does not speak at random either, since he devoted months and months of study in the confines of the Army General Staff library – of which he is director – to bring to life the essay “Writers in combat, a golden century of war and letters” (Dragon Collection, 2025).

José Luis Hernandez Garvieditor of the work, emphasizes that this intense fusion between literature, the arts and the military world was a kind of miracle. “In the Golden Age, a series of historical circumstances coincided which allowed this merger. On the one hand, the fronts opened by the Hispanic monarchy mobilized significant human capital which served in the Tercios. Those who always had literary aspirations found inspiration in their experiences on the battlefields for their plays or novels,” he reveals.

At the same time, he affirms that everyone contributes to the fight against black legend: “These writers present to us what the Tercios really were. It has been said that they were savages, but the reality is very different: in their ranks there were many people of high intellectual standing.

hard differences

The names of the scholars who joined the ranks of the Tercios shine with their own light. Lope de Vega is one of the most famous. Born in 1562, Ruiz defined it as “love in its purest form”; a man capable of “falling in love with every step he took” and of writing verses and plays in which the tragic and the comic merged through language that some considered shanty. “His love of women was excessive until his old age. Even though he was over sixty years old, he was able to dazzle the young Marta de Nevares, who was only 26 years old. His appeal, not only through his verses, but also through his seduction, must have been obvious,” explains the author. “Fuenteovejuna” or “The Knight of Olmedo” are some of his masterpieces.

Lope was an adventurer emotionally, but also on the battlefield. Even though he was not a soldier for long, he was proud of his time in the Tercios in his texts. “Even my fortune does not change / to see in three decades of my early age / with the drawn sword / the courageous Portuguese”, he wrote in a text attributed to him. It is assumed that the playwright sailed for the Terceras Islands with Don Álvaro de Bazán when he was barely twenty years old, and that he was also one of the members of the Great Armada that Philip II sent against England in 1588. Although Ruiz is skeptical. “He left traces of his days in Lisbon and his commitments, but… who can trust a poet?” he jokes.

In the 16th century, everyone had their adversaries with a sword in their belt and a word of steel, and Lope de Vega was no exception. His rival was Pedro Calderón de la Barca, a guy he considered elegant and pretentious. “Today, this image of a serious priest, dressed in black and author of grand sacramental works, persists. The reality is that he used his sword in theatrical bullshit and caused more than one death during his youth,” Ruiz explains. We asked him about a famous person, and he made it clear. “That of the son of the servant of the Duke of Frías. “He judicially persecuted him and his brother until they paid a large sum for the crime,” the soldier said.

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Calderón had a slightly shy monk. “He participated in multiple battles as a soldier of the Military orders of the cavalry regiment. Among them, the attempt to take Hondarribia by Cardinal Richelieu. It is suspected that he enlisted in the Tercios between 1624 and 1625 and was with them at the siege of Breda. And that makes sense given the level of detail he demonstrated in a piece he wrote on the subject. Moreover, the same one that Velázquez used to bring to life what was one of his most famous paintings: “The Surrender of Breda”. “The handing over of the keys did not happen as the playwright described, it was less spectacular: it was signed in a store on a rainy day, and Justin of Nassau and his men came out well dressed and with their jewelry. But the painter liked the way Calderón had imagined it,” he emphasizes.

Soldiers and spies

Garcilaso de la Vega, born around 1500, was as much a soldier as they were. There are many myths about him, although the main one is to imagine him with an immaculate face, as shown on his tomb. “The truth is that he suffered several facial injuries. The first was in the mouth during a fight in Esquivias, where he faced the Comuneros. Another occurred during the capture of La Goleta and the last, this one fatal, receiving a stone during the assault on the Muy tower. His stay in Italy made him the Renaissance knight par excellence and marked his way of writing. After fighting on the battlefields, his work began to convey discipline, honor, courage, nostalgia and suffering.

A few decades later, in 1537, Francisco de Aldana was born, famous for his short poems and elegies, but also for being what Ruiz calls a total soldier. “He had missions in England, Flanders and Italy. In addition, he was a spy in the Rif for three months, dressed as a Jewish merchant to inform King Philip II of the expansion that King Don Sebastian of Portugal wanted to undertake in Africa,” he reveals. This soldier died, like a character in a novel, in the Battle of Alcazarquivir, during which the Portuguese monarch died. Majesty, this is not the time to ride a horse, this is the time to die,’” adds the author.

Better known is Miguel de Cervantes, this great humanist who fought in the Battle of Lepanto. Ruiz sees in his seminal book, “Don Quixote”, a reflection of his life as a soldier: “This work can only be written by a Spaniard who goes through the vicissitudes of Cervantes and who is able to face them without idealism and with the certainty that he comes to this world to live.” We know a lot about him, even if certain data, explains the author, are not true: “Studies placed him in command of the boat of the Marquise galley, something impossible for a novice soldier.” The same thing, he confirms, happened with his sexual inclination. “In the reports from Algiers, several witnesses swore that he had not converted to Islam and that he had not committed any homosexual acts. But his great enemy in the region, the Dominican Blanco de Paz, said the opposite.

Many writers could join the list, but Ruiz doesn’t want to close the interview without quoting Francisco de Quevedo: “It was literature in its purest form, we all know that, but he was also an agent of the great Osuna, as he called him, viceroy of Sicily and then of Naples.” A good swordsman, he almost died several times, and even ended up in prison when the king changed authority and the Duke of Lerma took power.

The conclusion is that never before or since has an army written verses of such magnitude. Because yes, the Tercios of the Golden Age dealt with both war and literature, and with the same success.