“Muy Grandes Hombres de Acaballo”: New World Influences on Spanish Horsemanship in the Sixteenth Century

Spanish horsemanship has lasting associations with the frontier of the Reconquest for fostering the role of cavalry mounted “a la jineta”.  Characterized by the use of short stirrups, riding a la jineta provided the advantages of speed and agility in skirmishes or raids, and was used by both the Christian and Muslim sides of the frontier.  Indeed, riding a la jineta became commonplace for martial exercises of the Spanish nobility, and therefore also provided a distinctively Spanish character to the introduction of horses to the Americas during campaigns of conquest.  These campaigns extended the strategies of frontier warfare by implementing the encomienda system and narrating the deeds of the Spanish cavalry in terms of chivalric epics.  However, in this paper I argue that horsemanship a la jineta in the Americas underwent dynamic changes because the social codes surrounding it were planted in a new environment that included greater access to horses and novel tactics in warfare; moreover, these changes in turn affected discourse around horsemanship in Spain with several authors arguing that Spain had lost the skills in horsemanship that were now perfected on the frontiers of its American colonies.  Through five works on Spanish horsemanship published between 1580-1605, I show that these expert horsemen were not only Spaniards but also criollos, peruleros, and conversos who shaped the concept of horsemanship a la jineta in its re-presentation in Spain at the end of the sixteenth century.