[Menydh]

Originally Posted by Visigodo

Please buy and read TERCIOS DE ESPAÑA by Fernando Martínez Laínez and José María Sánchez de Toca y Catalá. The last man is ...

yes, the latter is an army chief and the former is a writer of detective novels.

I am not sure or just can not remember that I have said that

Yes, we did talk about that.

but if I said such statement probably was because my Gothicism (that is not the same as Nordicism as you know )

Not quite the same. But it would be very sad if Gothicism turned into a construct to fill the meaningless lifes of a trash public.

The most probably thing is that I told you that a good number of “Hidalgos” served in the glorious “Tercios de España”.

Yes, from hidalgos to the pauper. Such was the nature of the Tercios.

Well I do not doubt about the military qualities and value of your comrades but I have serious doubts that the background of the Spanish soldiers of the Tercios was similar at to those of the unit in that you served. I was serving in the "Military Police"

Don't get offended but I sincerely doubt that you could get a slight idea of what I'm talking about from a post in the military police of the regular army. Because of my height and built I was appointed to the military police section of that unit after the instruction, and that was the only time that I used any contacts to be moved to a company of fusileers.

in Valladolid and saw many Spanish soldiers from all over Spain even elite units.

Elite? If you mean the COEs, those are not comparable units.

The spirit of the Tercios lived on in El Tercio (La Legión) and in Paratroopers Brigade of Infantry which was an offshot of the former.

It is true that in the "Tercios" served all type of men and every "Tercio" was a school of fame and a tribunal of merits. In the "Tercios" what worked was a meritocracy, where nobody is more than other, if he doesn't make more and knows more than another.

That was implemented in El Tercio through the system by which rising through the ranks is possible without passing through the military academies: la escala legionaria.

But we have to keep in mind that in the "Tercios" served Grandes de España an great number of people from the noblest houses of Spain like Juan of Leyva, Antonio of Isunza, Juan of Gamboa, etc. and thousands of Castilian "hidalgos" and "infanzones" and "caballeros" from the Crown of Aragon also served. Let me say that it was plenty of men from small nobility (pequeña nobleza) that was especially abundant in Spain at that time not like nowadays (during the Austrias epoch about ten percent of the population was noble descent, see "La nobleza en la España moderna" by David García Hernán).

Instead of speculating on preconceived archetypes, you should read the descriptions of the soldiers of the Spanish Tercios that were made throughout Europe. They don't fit in what you have in mind. Nothing far from the archetype of Spanish today. A coincidence? I don't think so.

Undoubtedly not all the men of the "Tercios" had such "quality" and also had peasants, artisans or simple and humble villainous but with "clean lineage" after all. But frankly speaking I believe that nowadays neither in Spain neither in any other country the world one could find men of that class.

There you are pointing to a very different problem, which is that of social decadence.

You like to quote Ortega y Gasset about the character of the Spanish people and how this is enhanced during the times of hardship to make them give the best of them.

That is what characterized the men of the Tercios. And this what characterizes the Spanish people today. It is neither positive nor negative per se.

Much as I hate to do this, I must debunk this pseudo-gothicism which is largely unrelated to what Gothicism is about because it is tainted with Nordo-Germanicism.

Gothicism as polluted by Nordicism points to a decadence of Spain as the Gothic element assumedly decreases. It also presumes a gratuitous supremacy of character in the Gothic element as well as adscribing a social superior status.

The causes of the decline of the Spanish Empire are clear to history researchers (maybe not to novelists), both Spanish and not, and these do not point to any change in the racial composition nor in its percetages. And so is the lost of fuel of the Tercios.

For one thing, the Tercios always had a problem with the finances. Not from any particular point in their history but from their very start. Serve as an example the chapter of las cuentas del Gran Capitán, which in French translates as comptes d'apothicaire, and which makes reference to the answer that the Gran Capitán gave to King Ferdinand when the king demanded that don Gonzalo presented the detailed list of expenses in the campaigns of Italy. The Gran Capitán, who had conquered a kingdom for the Crown, furious at this demand instigated by the complaints of certain officers of the exchequer, gave the king a list which started with items such as:

"Two hundred thousand seven hundred and thirty-six ducats, given in alms to the monasteries and the poor, to secure their prayers for the success of the king's enterprise. Seven hundred thousand four hundred and ninety-four ducats to the spies employed in his service."

... and other preposterous as well as ironic items.

If there is a part of legend in this or not, what is important to notice is that this marks the start of a "tradition" in the Tercios, in spite of which the Tercios were the more powerful army that the Europe had seen since the Roman Legions.

The key for the power of this army was in the sacrificed existance of the men of the Spanish companies, a race of men accustomed to the harshness of the lands to which they belonged. No wonder the other men prefered to the Spanish soldiers were not the big German Lanskenets or similars, but the Irish. No other nation gained the honour of fighting in the vanguard mixed with the Spanish companies but Ireland. Which tells that the glorious history of the Tercios is not a story of Northern men but the epic of Western men.

If you need to find the blood of such a race in modern times, you only have to look at the men fighting in Cuba or in The Philippines, or more recently in Spain itself or in Russia.

It is also not a coincidence that those Tercios which some would like to see as a "gothic reemergence" or "gothic remains", had in their two most glorious chiefs men who are clearly not much gothic: don Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, El Gran Capitán, and don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Gran Duque de Alba.



Both of them from the highest nobility of Spain. Grandes de España. It is not that without them Los Tercios would have been different. It is that without them Los Tercios would not have existed.

Now, if I were to follow the patterns in the construction of Nordicism, I would start here to wonder about the role of the Goths in Spain. Or maybe I would start hundreds of years earlier, when the army of the "Visigoths" obtained its most glorious victory against an army much superior in numbers of Franks. This "army of the Goths" was commanded by the Dux Claudio, a non Goth who was both Dux Provinciae and Dux Militaris (the two highest grades of the nobility and the military, which rarely coincided in one man).

And from there on it wouldn't be difficult to build up history where the role of the Goths is relegated and diminished, and even pointed as problematic. If I had to do this, be certain that I would do it with a background of solid historical evidence which Nordicism never had.

But then I would be sinking to their low levels and further I would be creating an unnecesary artificial debate where there should be none.

Likely, this would have never been a problem if some foreigners had been deported from Spain when the seeked refuge here. I hope that I'm making myself clear here.

In all ways a thing is the law and other the life and the estimation is that more or less half of the men of the “Tercios” they were married.

That looks like an estimate based on the status declared by the men at the time of being recruited. So the other half were not married at the moment of being recruited but that doesn't mean that they never married.. or never had children. Let us not forget that in Spain in those times "las inclusas" picked up large numbers of children abandoned to them. Many of these children were of the men serving in Los Tercios and it was a known problem in Spain.

According to the mentioned book "the Spanish soldiers generally married women of the country where they resided and, they made good weddings." For that reason seems probably that not much women and children could go to Spain as most of them they went to the countries where they were from loosing Spain such a good lineages

Yet the testimony of the Parish of Pontedeume points into the opposite direction. That is, children not only from the Spanish soldiers, but from the soldiers of other nations being born in Spain. And let us not forget that this is nothing of a speculative nature, but based on hard facts.

Just to mention a couple of fine lineages, the O'Neills and the O'Donnells.

Do you really believe that many Spanish soldiers of the Tercios would stay in The Lowlands? Seriously..