So far we have seen that the reality of Renaissance military memoirs is made of tangible facts. Yet Renaissance military memoirs do not record just any tangible facts. The facts they record belong to a very special category. When defining what they are writing, memoirists repeatedly explain that they record ‘things worthy of remembrance’ (‘choses digne de memoire’, ‘cosas que merecen hacer memoria della’).

For instance, Martin du Bellay argues that the main aim of writing history is ‘to consecrate into immortality the things worthy of remembrance’; la Marche intends to write ‘all the things worthy of remembrance, prosperous and adverse, that happened in my time’; and Rabutin intends ‘to summarily put into writing what seems to me most worthy of remembrance’, hoping that it will preserve these ‘memorable deeds’.

This is a very old idea, going back to the medieval and classical tradition of digna memoria, and many Renaissance authors besides military memoirists claim to be writing digna memoria. What makes a fact worthy of remembrance? In general, a fact is memorable either because of some intrinsic quality, or because of its relation to external factors. There are two main types of external relations that can make a fact memorable:

(1) A fact can be memorable because it exemplifies other facts like it. Such exemplary facts can be deemed worthy of remembrance for various reasons: first, exemplary facts can be memorable because, by knowing them, we understand general phenomena.