España Bélica is the first of a projected two-volume military history of Spain in the sixteenth century. In his first volume Martínez de Campos, a lieutenant general in the Spanish army and a member of the Royal Academy of History, focuses on the military strategy and campaigns of Spain in Europe, North Africa, and America during the reigns of the Catholic Kings and Charles V. A subsequent volume will cover the reign of Philip II.
In his prologue Martínez de Campos develops the theme that “the discovery of America was a consequence of the conquest of Granada” (p. 26). He believes that Spain’s drive to acquire overseas possessions and wealth had its origins in the defeat of the Moors in Granada and the achievements of Columbus at the end of the fifteenth century. In this work he describes the spread of Spanish arms overseas to Africa, Italy, and America. Seven of the fifteen chapters relate directly to the discovery and conquest period in colonial Spanish America. They are brief, factual accounts, offering neither depth of discussion nor interpretation of the complex motives of the conquistadores. The treatment of Spanish military activities in America, with the exception of Cortés and the fall of Tenochtitlán, is weaker than the chapters devoted to Spain’s Italian campaigns, in which Martínez de Campos describes individual battles, personalities, military strategy, recruiting, provisioning, and fortification. Such detail is lacking for Spanish America.
He relies heavily on contemporary chronicles and secondary source material and has developed his work with a minimum of historical interpretation. In several chapters an all-too-brief treatment of the subject at hand becomes a mere catalogue of events. This suggests that the work is intended for the general-interest reader of history rather than for the specialist in military history. Nowhere does the work approach the synthesis produced by John Lynch in his recent work on the sixteenth-century Hapsburg monarchy in Spain.
