“Flanders was the Spanish Vietnam. It was an absolute waste. Some provinces that arrived by rebound and that were maintained by the fanaticism of some and others. There were absolutely useless wars, impossible to win and that resulted in total political ruin. The monarchs of the 17th century were victims of what was called the prestige of the crown and, therefore, no country wanted to graciously renounce any territory.That means leading to death, to the slaughterhouse, thousands and thousands and thousands of soldiers and ruin the country.”
Juan Carlos Losada, a doctor in contemporary history specializing in military history, explains it for La Vanguardia and details it in La pica y el arquebus. The great battles of the Spanish empire. A graphic history (Past and Present), a work that rescues from the clutches of neo-Francoism and historiographic ultranationalism episodes of military history, restores their historical rigor and presents them in a summarized and attractive way –with illustrations by Eugènia Anglès–, “for that the reader who now shies away from the history book can one day read a historical essay starting earlier with books like this, reliable, documented and attractive”, explains Ferran Pontón, editor of Past and Present.
This publishing house wants to plant a pike in the reading public between 20 and 30 years old, with these essays, an initiative that started with The Second World War , by Antony Beevor –also with images by Eugènia Anglès–, which continued with The Middle Ages , by Eleanor Janega, and which will continue in September with a volume devoted to Francoism, the work of Gonzalo Pontón, Ferran’s father.
“The readership of historical essays and essays in general has dropped a lot,” says Ferran Pontón. Before he was taken over by university students, who at that age bought and read books, and this has practically disappeared, because they read less and less and, directly, do not buy. From the university reading is encouraged very little and one is forced to read bibliographies that are not updated… And nobody explains the absolute necessity of having a library, be it physical or virtual, but a library, which means what you have studied and what has happened to you in life. Few things explain more to me than looking at the books I have at home”, concludes Pontón.
Faced with this challenge, the objective of La pica y el arquebus was clear: a rigorous book far from patriotic fervor. Of military history, but not of military exploits: “I do military history, because I love military history, but I am anti-war,” says Losada. I am not antimilitarist, but I am antiwar and I believe that every good military story must be antiwar, it must talk about wars, teach wars, but with the aim of hating wars, not the army, but hating wars”.
Losada has summarized them and moved away from unbridled jingoism: “The military history of all the countries of the world tends to be exalted, manipulated and taken to the great chorus of the epic glories of nations, and it is totally falsified. Nationalism is perverse and therefore exalts blood shed in an obscene manner. I have wanted to approach history, in a way that is not nationalistic or jingoistic, but realistic, commenting on what our ancestors have done, the good and the bad, the miseries and the heroics, and dealing with the human aspect. Talking about the poor hundreds of thousands of soldiers whose vast majority went to war to earn a living and flee misery, simply. I never want to forget that background, because for me it is the basis of military history.”
And that is where the critical aspects emerge, which are found throughout the book, such as the desire to preserve not only Flanders, but that empire that Vox and PP leaders so yearn for: “The Spanish empire was tremendous, enormous, and Spain could not neither economically nor demographically sustain it. Spain died of glory, she died absolutely defeated by a totally excessive effort in international politics and impossible to maintain. This is the great tragedy and the great ruin for Spain. A cursed inheritance from Carlos I that all the Habsburgs wanted to keep at all costs”.
With Losada we learn the importance of the tercios, of how that infantry organization, which initially consisted of a third of arquebusiers, another of pikemen and another of coseletes, ended with the predominance of cavalry. Faced with inept military leaders, who bought admiralties and generalships, military geniuses like the Duke of Alba emerged, “who even calculated the number of prostitutes who had to travel with the soldiers, he calculated one for every eight, because he knew that if he wanted to win the war, he could not allow the soldiers to dedicate themselves to raping Flemish women”.
We see how Alberto de Austria pays the salary of the troops to go to the balla de Nieuport (1600); to Ambrosío Spínola to advance the enormous expense of the company of the siege of Ostend (1602) and to pay the arrears that are owed to the soldiers or to the Duke of Medina-Sidonia to advance all the expenses of the Invincible Armada. The Crown cannot. “Seeing it in perspective, you wonder how so many battles could be won with the human conditions of the soldiers: the rickets, the poverty, the lack of clothing, the hunger they suffered…”, adds Losada.
Hardships that can be seen in the line that Eugènia Anglès has given to the faces of the soldiers, in addition to drawing the main protagonists –all men– of this work, made with graphite and with a digital finish, “which allowed me to dwell on the details”. So much so that he sometimes amused himself in the details “of the fabrics, the filigrees, the ruffs, the armor, the buttons… or in the reproduction of engravings and maps”. The care in the images is such that Agnès likes to explain that the entire book has “a very subtle background, on all the pages, which are from the period. We have searched for fabrics, tapestries, textile samples, above all, sometimes an endpaper, but that correspond to each of the chapters dedicated to the countries or continents, which gives it a uniformity. It may be hard for people to see, but the work is there.”
The images are from “pictorial works provided to me by the publisher, who wanted everything to have a point of contention, of sobriety, which gives it a tone of tranquility, far from epic, heroism and patriotic pride.” After a year of work and being inspired by so much pictorial work, Anglès felt “that she was privileged; as if they had closed the room of a museum so that I could stay a while longer”.
