THE ORIGINS OF THE SPANISH MILITARY DRUM: THE XVth CENTURY (I)
When did war drums begin to be used in the Kingdoms of Spain
to transmit orders? Many of us have
asked ourselves. That is the question
The answer: At the end of the 15th century. Until then, the
large military drums from which our war drums are derived simply did not exist.
Medieval percussion instruments did NOT transmit orders, they were not even
large snare drums, and belong to another sound aesthetic, the medieval one. We
will not proced into this investigation… for the moment.
It was the Swiss who, as in other European armies,
introduced these instruments into the military in order to transmit clear and
precise sound orders that everyone had to know and obey.
These instruments arrived in Spain in 1483, hired by the
Catholic Monarchs for the war of Granada, a fact that is recorded by its
chronicler, Hernando del Pulgar[1]:
“…There also came
to serve the King and Queen some people who were called the Swiss, natives of
the Kingdom of Sweden, which is in Upper Germany. These warlike men fight on
foot and are determined not to turn their backs on their enemies,".
And, indeed, if we visite the lower Choir of the Cathedral
of Toledo, sculpted by Rodrigo Alemán, around
1493, there we have the first military drums in the history of Spain. This is a
source of extraordinary importance contemporary to the feats of arms, and which
portrays in wood the chronicle of the capture of different places in the War of
Granada between 1482-92. In the No. 12, Capture of Mojácar, 1488, we can
see a trumpeter, who plays a bastard trumpet, who looks at the drum (left
above) to coordinate the music, while a mace-bearer (right above) complements
the formal capture of the city by the King on June 12, 1488. As we can see, 50
years before the creation of the spanish Tercios there were already drums in
the militia with the function of transmitting orders in the form of distinctive
drumbeats. Regarding the invention of the war drum by the Swiss, this Swiss
military application was already known in the war treaties of the 16th century,
such as De Re Militari, translated into Spanish in 1567 by Diego Gracian[2]:
“The Swiss, who are the inventors of the drum..”
A few years later, the drum was already integrated into the
ranks of the Aragonese and Castilian troops during the First Italian War, at
the end of the 15th century. But we will see that in another article.
