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Matthew S. Tanico
Spain was, like most of Europe, constantly at war during the years that Cervantes was writing the novel and during which the narrative presumably takes place, and "el manco de Lepanto" who suffered three harquebus wounds in that military campaign, knew combat personally.3 Still, while there are allusions to warfare in the novel, Don Quixote never comes close to seeing real battle until entering Catalonia and specifically the city of Barcelona, where a Turkish galley arrives-captained by none other than Ana Félix-and two Spaniards consequently die from gunshot wounds in the melee.4 Approaching the denouement of the book, this scene suddenly and briefly converts Cervantes's text from an Odyssean account of Don Quixote's wanderings, trials, and tribulations, into a more Iliadic narrative.5 This is not simply another Trojan War, however, since it involves gunpowder and galleys, the stuff of modern warfare rather than literature. The gun is the epitome of the Iron Age that so discourages Don Quixote, and it is in the episodes of the braying regidores, of Claudia Jeronima and Roque Guinart, and the ultimate one involving Ana Félix and the galley soldiers that the knight, consciously or not, will face the fact that his outdated chivalric worldview is futile in such intensely modern scenarios. INFERNAL NOISE Gunpowder weapons were used in European warfare at least as early as the fourteenth century.7 The first documented mention of gunpowder is in Roger Bacons Epistola de secretis operibus artiis et naturae (1267), and its earliest practical recipe comes from an Arabo-Spanish work, the Liber ignium ad comburendos hostes attributed to "Marcus Graecus" but compiled between the eighth and fourteenth centuries.8 It is likely that the Moors introduced gunpowder weapons to Spain, and the production of both weapons and gunpowder in the Iberian Peninsula dates to the fourteenth century (Vigón 1: 49-61).9 By the 1320s gunpowder weapons such as cannons and projectiles were becoming familiar in European warfare, though not necessarily popular (Hall 43-45). Since early firearms were bulky, it was easier to manufacture them at home than to import them, though the latter did occur. [...]despite these challenges, firearms grew in popularity, and the period known as the "military revolution" (c. 1500-1750) involved interdependent changes in weaponry, fortifications, tactics, and the size of armies with subsequent effects of war on society.11 Within this period of change, pikemen were used at first to protect musketeers, and by the end of the sixteenth century a volley technique, known as the snail {caracol), was being implemented in which lines of gunmen would allow the first rank to shoot and then retire to the back to reload (Parker, Military Revolution 18-19)
