The most outstanding feature of the reality of Renaissance military memoirs is that it is made of facts rather than of experiences. Many episodes that memoirs record consist of a single fact, and even when an episode contains many facts, they seldom add up to form an experience. In the rare cases when we do get an experiential description, it is usually the accidental result of the accumulation of many facts.

What this means is best understood by comparing Renaissance and twentieth-century memoirs, which privilege experiences over facts. For twentieth-century memoirists, particularly of junior rank, the truth about war is the experiential truth. A veteran narrating a Vietnam battle may get wrong the date, the place, the numbers of the soldiers, of the enemy, of the killed and of the wounded, the names, even the tactical moves and dispositions – yet if he gets the experience right, his account is considered true. A professional historian who writes about the same battle may have all the correct facts, yet if he gets the experience wrong, or fails to refer to it, his account is considered false. For it is believed that the truth about war – as about any other phenomenon – is experiential rather than factual.

The million-dollar question of our era is not ‘what happened?’ but rather ‘how did it feel?’ In countless interviews with the participants of wars, terror attacks, natural calamities, sports contests, elections, and any other news stories, the ubiquitous question is always ‘how did it feel?’ Even reporters, who are ostensibly just observers sent to report the facts, frequently end up reporting their own experiences.