AN ‘AMIABLE ENMITY’: FRONTIER SPECTACLE AND INTERCULTURAL RELATIONS IN

CASTILE AND CYPRUS

by

Thomas C. Devaney B.A., Trinity College, 1998 M.A.T., Boston College, 2000 M.A., University of Chicago, 2004

Dissertation

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University

PROVIDENCE, RI

MAY 2011

This dissertation by Thomas Connaught Devaney is accepted in its present form by the

Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy.

Date:______Amy Remensnyder, Director

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date:______Sheila Bonde, Reader

Date:______Tara Nummedal, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date:______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

ii

CURRICULUM VITAE

Thomas Devaney was born December 27, 1976 in New York City. He attended Trinity

College in Hartford, Connecticut from 1994 to 1998, where he earned a B.A. in History and received the Ferguson Prize in History for the honors thesis, “Fragmenting Social Tensions within the United Irish Movement, 1780-1797.” He later attended the Lynch School of Education at

Boston College from 1999-2000, finishing with an M.A.T. in Secondary Curriculum and

Instruction. After teaching history and social studies in several middle and high schools in the

Boston area, he returned to graduate school in 2003 at the University of Chicago, where he studied with Walter Kaegi and Rachel Fulton. He completed his studies at Chicago in 2004, earning a M.A. in Social Sciences. After a year of study in Latin, French, and German at the

University of Illinois at Chicago, he enrolled at Brown to work with Amy Remensnyder in the

Department of History.

Throughout his studies, Mr. Devaney has received a number of fellowships and research grants. He received a Dean’s Scholarship to support his studies at Boston College, and a

University Scholarship from the University of Chicago. At Brown University, he has received generous support from the Department of History, the Graduate School, and the Cogut Center for the Humanities. In addition to funding during the early years of his studies at Brown, these have included the John Lax Memorial Graduate Fellowship from the Department of History and the

John Carnegie MacMillan Graduate Fellowship from the Cogut Center, both of which supported the writing of this dissertation. In addition, a summer travel fellowship from the Graduate School facilitated the archival research that underlies this project.

In addition to support from Brown University, Mr. Devaney has won several external research grants. These include the Helen Maud Cam Dissertation Research Grant from the

iii Medieval Academy of America, a research grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between ’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, and a Summer Pre-

Dissertation Fellowship from the Council for European Studies at Columbia University.

In addition to serving as a teaching assistant for the Department of History, Mr. Devaney has offered a course on the medieval through the Office of Summer and Continuing

Studies for the last several years. His publications include “Competing Spectacles in the Venetian

Festa delle Marie,” which appeared in the Spring, 2008 issue of Viator (39:1), and “Like an

Ember Buried in Ashes: The Byzantine-Venetian Conflict of 1119-1126,” which was published in

The Crusades: Medieval Worlds in Conflict, a volume edited by Thomas F. Madden, James Naus, and Vincent Ryan and released in early 2011. A third article , “Representing the Medieval

Festivals of Jaén through Text, Enactment and Image,” will soon be available in Re-Presenting the Past: Archaeology through Image and Text. This volume, edited by Sheila Bonde and

Stephen Houston, is currently in press.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The writing of this dissertation, like any work of such length, has depended in large part on the generous contributions of a number of people. Chief among them are the

three members of my committee, whose guidance has extended far beyond this project to

all phases, formal and informal, of my graduate career. All three gave freely of their time in reading drafts of my chapters while providing inspiration, advice, and criticism. My advisor, Amy Remensnyder, helped me to figure out what I wanted to write about, to transform that inchoate set of ideas into a coherent research plan, and to turn that into a finished manuscript. Sheila Bonde encouraged me to expand my methodological approach and to ask new kinds of questions of my sources, helping me to always keep in

mind the material and spatial aspects of the past that do not come across in written

documents. Tara Nummedal’s insightful comments on my drafts have helped me to clarify my arguments and to ensure that I didn’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. She regularly suggested recent books and pointed to new avenues of analysis.

Several other scholars have read excerpts, offered professional advice, and suggested sources. The dissertation was greatly strengthened by the perceptive comments of, among others, James Green, Moshe Sluhovsky, Teofilo Ruiz, Patrick Geary, Nora

Berend, and Alexandra Cuffel. While working in the archives, I had the good fortune to meet several knowledgeable archivists who took the time to discuss the project with me.

In Jaén, Elena Fontecha provided helpful advice about working with the Actas

v capitulares while introducing me to the work of several local historians. In Córdoba,

Alicia Córdoba Deorador explained the ins and outs of the Protocolos notoriales while

Pilar Sáenz-López prepared a valuable bibiliography. In , I would like to thank

María José Hernández Almela, who introduced me to the sometimes labyrinthine

workings of the Proyecto Carmesi database.

None of this would have been possible without the generous financial support

provided by the Department of History, the Graduate School, and the Cogut Center for the Humanities. Several external organizations also provided contributions which enabled me to travel to the Spanish archives. These include the Council for European Studies at

Columbia University, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Program for Cultural

Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities.

Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support during this long process.

My wife Elizabeth and my daughters Ella and Julia exhibited remarkable patience with my extended research trips and many hours of writing. More importantly, they served as a constant reminder that this project is but one step on a larger path and that I need to step away from the manuscript from time to time to laugh and love. This work is dedicated to them.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Curriculum Vitae ...... iii

Acknowledgments ...... v

List of Illustrations ...... ix

Introduction ...... 1

PART ONE

Chapter One. An Amiable Enmity: Inaction and Ideological Dissonance on the Granadan Frontier ...... 10

Chapter Two. The Anatomy of a Spectacle: Participants, Critics, and Onlookers...... 85

Chapter Three. The Meanings of Civic Space...... 147

PART TWO

Chapter Four. , Magi, and Muslims: Miguel Lucas de Iranzo and the People of Jaén ...... 199

Chapter Five. A ‘Chance Act’: Córdoba in 1473...... 257

vii

Chapter Six. Murcia and the Body of Christ Triumphant...... 318

PART THREE

Chapter Seven. Spectacle and Community in Cyprus...... 374

Epilogue ...... 430

Glossary of Spanish Terms ...... 438

Abbreviations ...... 440

Bibliography...... 442

Figures...... 484

viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. The Reconquest. (González Jiménez, “Frontier and Settlement in the ,” 51)

Figure 2a. Biblioteca Catedralicia de de Compostela, Tumbo B, fol. 2v. (Cabrillana Ciézar, Santiago Matamoros, 213)

Figure 2b. Carta de Privilegio Real de Pegalajar. Detail (Lázaro Damas, “Una iconografía de frontera,” 58)

Figure 3. Cantigas de Santa María., f. 247r. (Edición facsímil del Códice T.I.1)

Figure 4. Andalusia after the Thirteenth-Century Reconquest. (MacKay, Spain in the , xvi)

Figure 5. The Parish of San Nicolás de la Ajerquía, Córdoba, in the fifteenth century (Escobar Camacho, La vida urbana cordobesa, 118)

Figure 6. The Plaza del Potro and its environs in the fifteenth century. (Escobar Camacho, La vida urbana cordobesa, 119)

Figure 7. Plaza de la Corredera, Córdoba (Photograph by the author)

Figure 8. 1811 plan of Córdoba showing its medieval parishes (Adapted from Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media, 58)

Figure 9. The sala baja of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s palace.

Figure 10. The main entrance to Iranzo’s palace as it appeared before twentieth-century renovations (Knighton, “Spaces and Contexts for Listening,” 664)

Figure 11. Jaén in 1567 (Kagan, Spanish Cities of the Golden Age, 264-5)

Figure 11. A reconstruction of an early map of Jaén (Pardo Crespo, Evolución e historia de la ciudad de Jaén, 38)

Figure 13a. Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s coat of arms (AMJ, Leg. 1, Cuadro 3. 1465, 2 Enero)

Figure 13b. Modern drawing of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s coat of arms (Memorias de don

ix Enrique IV de Castilla, ii, 142)

Figure 14. Sixteenth-century Córdoba (Córdoba en el siglo XV, ed. Nieto Cumplido, 73)

Figure 15. Córdoba in 1567 (Kagan, Spanish Cities of the Golden Age, 253-4)

Figure 16. The Parish of San Pedro, Córdoba, in the fifteenth century (Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media, 58)

Figure 17. Sixteenth-century alteration of Mezquita, detail (Photograph by the author)

Figure 18. Relative size of Muslim populations in the domains of Murcia. (Menjot, Murcie castillane, ii, 870)

Figure 19. The parishes of Murcia (Menjot, Murcie castillane, i, 661)

Figure 20. The judería of Murcia (Menjot, Murcie castillane, i, 664)

Figure 21. Medieval Murcia (Menjot, Murcie castillane, i, 647)

Figure 22a. Cantigas de Santa María., f. 277v. (Edición facsímil del Códice T.I.1)

Figure 22b. La Virgen de la Arrixaca.

Figure 23. Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean (Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, xvii)

Figure 24. Lusignan Cyprus (Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, xvi)

Figure 25. The sword of Fernando III (Capilla Real, Cathedral of Seville)

x

INTRODUCTION

When Fernando III of Castile signed a treaty in 1238 that made the Emirate of

Granada a tributary state, he envisioned that the Christian reconquest of Iberia would soon be complete. In the preceding decades, after all, the Christians had won great victories, regained vast swaths of territory, and broken the power of the Almohad dynasty. The speedy dissolution of was not to be, however. It instead remained independent for another two hundred and fifty years and Christians coming to settle the newly-conquered regions around Jaén, Córdoba, Murcia, and Seville found themselves in close proximity to Muslims, often trading together and sharing pastureland even while intermittent frontier warfare continued. This combination of peaceful contact and ongoing hostility fostered particular social, religious, and cultural attitudes that left borderland Christians caught between a sincere ideology of holy war against Islam and an equally genuine respect for individual Muslims and many aspects of their culture. This tension created a deep sense of insecurity and a conflicted outlook toward Islam that can best be described as an ‘amiable enmity.’ Dissonant attitudes regarding religious difference were not, moreover, limited to Muslims. Frontier Christians had similar difficulties in according clear social roles to Jews and recent converts to , the conversos or ‘New Christians’.

Yet the social structure of the frontier remained stable throughout the late Middle

Ages, suggesting that its inhabitants developed effective means of mitigating these

1 tensions. This project aims to recover a complex world of spectacles with competing and

negotiated meanings that could function in a variety of ways: as distractions from

pressing concerns, as reminders to Christians that their ultimate victory was assured, as the scapegoating of vulnerable groups such as conversos, or as alternate worldviews that

lowered the stakes of holy war by predicting the fusion of Christian religion with Islamic

culture. All of these theatrics were the product of dialogues, sometimes overt but more

often subtle, between their noble sponsors and local populations about the nature of

frontier society and its priorities and values. Rulers did not simply appropriate popular culture; they used it as a means of making an argument. My dissertation shows that such an argument could not be one sided; that the success of these performances depended on audience participation. Spectators’ responses could be conditioned by the dominant voices in society, but they were never fully passive; nobles could not present messages that did not fit with the expectations of their constituencies. As such, spectacles offered frontier Christians a shared means of publicly addressing the contradictions inherent in intricate ideas of conflict and coexistence.

Much of this study focuses on the second half of the fifteenth century, a period when well-established traditions of frontier life were challenged by a growing intolerance for convivencia and a renewed push for holy war. Through a series of interconnected case studies, the dissertation argues that urban spectacle played an important role in articulating and changing attitudes toward religious minorities. This occurred within a context of renewed interest in holy war and the desire to break a longstanding pattern of semi-belligerency in which leaders had been unwilling to take decisive action, for either peace or war, regarding Granada. Public spectacles reflected these shifts; in doing so,

2 they also accelerated the process. The perception of popular intolerance for the Jews, conversos, and Muslims within ‘Christian’ society encouraged rulers to craft performances that emphasized the marginality of those groups. The Christian populace, assured by these spectacles that religious minorities were no longer under the aegis of the nobility, were then emboldened to act against them.

The social forum provided by public performances thus underwent a feedback cycle that promoted ever greater distrust for religious minorities. The result was a semantic narrowing—urban spectacles which had previously been used to express a range of attitudes toward Jews, Muslims, and converts were now limited in practice to the rejection of those groups—and open intolerance across the social spectrum. Finally, such displays were not limited to late medieval Iberia. By comparing Castilian examples to similar spectacles conducted in Cyprus, where a Western Christian minority ruled over an

Orthodox majority on an island exposed to the constant threat of Muslim attack, I argue that public spectacles played a vital role in medieval borderlands throughout the

Mediterranean world by permitting residents to negotiate—or reject—the flexible confessional boundaries necessary for common action.

**********

In tracing the ways in which public spectacles permitting borderland Christians to articulate these concerns, this dissertation begins by outlining the ideological dissonance of the Granadan frontier and the resulting disinclination to pursue either true war or true peace. The purpose of this chapter is not only to explore the character of this frontier but also how it was defined by medieval people. Abulafia has cautioned that “in general we could say that the ‘medieval frontier’ was not so much an identifiable

3 phenomenon, a hard fact, as it is a conceptual tool used by historians in a wide variety of

ways to make sense of social and political developments in those areas of medieval

Europe where the predominant values and assumptions of Latin Christendom encountered (or indeed collided with) the values and assumptions of other societies.”1

Abulafia perhaps overstates his case by suggesting that frontier is predominantly a modern idea rather than a medieval reality. In fact, medieval Castilians had a clear sense that the regions near the border with Islam comprised a particular kind of space as both a barrier and a bridge between cultures and devoted much effort to pondering its significance. Nevertheless, Abulafia he makes a valuable point: we must examine not only what medieval people did on the frontier, but also how they thought about it. In a related essay, Berend clarifies this point by proposing a series of questions about medieval concepts of frontier that must be considered in order to approach a balanced understanding of them. These include not only medieval definitions and descriptions of frontiers and their functions, but also the development of frontier ideologies and the relationship between such ideologies and real interactions.2

The second and third chapters contend that urban spectacles served to dissipate

this tension by providing a forum in which the issues could be aired, albeit in an often

oblique manner. Such performances often built on familiar and ritualized forms, such as

those of a tournament or a religious procession, while overtly or subtly manipulating their

content. In reading these spectacles, I therefore focus extensively on their social, political,

and physical contexts. As Catherine Bell and Geoffrey Koziol have argued, rituals bore

1 David Abulafia, “Introduction: Seven Types of Ambiguity, c. 1100-c. 1500,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. Abulafia and Berend, 5. 2 Nora Berend, “Preface,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. Abulafia and Berend, xiv.

4 multiple and situated meanings that only become clear when considered in this manner.3

We only know of medieval spectacles through their written representation, however, and

Philippe Buc has pointed out that the written account of a spectacle represents only one possible interpretation and that this interpretation, moreover, reflects not only the personal biases of its author but also a conscious attempt to control the meaning of a spectacle.4 I therefore explore the relations between enacted spectacles and written

descriptions in order both to permit multiple readings of a pageant and to, when possible,

better identify the perceived intent behind a particular presentation.

Intended meanings, however, are not always successful and the response of an audience to a spectacle is a critical component of its ultimate significance. Following

Claire Sponsler, who has discussed the ability of spectators to either conform to or resist

dominant meanings, I outline the central discourses surrounding key types of medieval

Castilian spectacles to suggest the limits within which audience reactions were generally

limited.5 Central to this argument is a discussion of the ways in which the experience of

medieval pageants was shaped by the particular urban spaces in which they were

conducted. Siting, decoration, size, and even the choice of materials for buildings were

often consciously chosen to convey a message or establish a mood. As Janice Mann has

demonstrated, the particular conditions of the Iberian frontier had long provided rulers

with both the need for effective modes of expressing their readings of social, political,

and religious issues and an abundance of themes with which to do so, making the region

3 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1990); and Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval (Ithaca, 1992). 4 Philippe Buc. The Dangers of Ritual: between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, 2001) 5 Claire Sponsler, “The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992), 15-29; eadem, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis, 1997).

5 a crucible of what we might call ‘rhetorical architecture’.6 The meanings of such

buildings, moreover, were not immutable nor were they distinct from the activities

conducted in or near them. Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, in their study of the links

between architecture and ritual, concluded that ritual and space mutually influenced each

other over time.7

Many urban rituals and spectacles, however, moved through the streets and were

not tied to a single location or edifice. I therefore analyze these from the perspective that civic spaces, like architecture, bore meanings to local residents that could contribute to or define the overall experience of a spectacle. A great deal of work has been done on the formation of collective memories or connotations tied to particular locations and I draw especially on Kevin’s Lynch’s seminal study of how people cognitively and emotionally navigate civic spaces.8 In doing so, I pay particular attention to ephemeral architecture, temporary structures tailor built for specific events. These could range from viewing stands and barricades to whimsical wooden castles and palaces. All, however, served to repurpose quotidian spaces, transforming them in various ways. If these chapters sometimes divert from matters specific to the frontier, it is because frontier culture, while often dominant, was not the only context for people living on the peripheries. Priorities might shift in the borderlands, but people living there were in no way isolated from broader developments.

Part Two substantiates and tests this framework by considering three specific urban environments—Jaén, Córdoba, and Murcia—each of which permits the

6 Janice Mann, Romanesque Architecture and its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain, 1000-1120: Exploring Frontiers and Defining Identities (Toronto, 2009) 7 Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines, -Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons: Approaches to its Architecture, Archaeology, and History. Bibliotheca Victorina 15 (Turnhout, 2003) 8 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, 1960)

6 development of a different aspect of the argument. These analyses focus on the second half of the fifteenth century, a period when well-established traditions of frontier life were challenged by a growing intolerance for convivencia and a renewed push for holy war. They are not disconnected case studies, however, but follow a chronological and thematic progression that illustrates the role of urban spectacle in changing attitudes toward religious minorities, Jews and conversos as well as Muslims.

In the 1460s, frontier magnates such as Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, hoping to reap material rewards and fame from intensified frontier warfare, sought to rally the support of a reluctant populace for their martial schemes. Appreciating the importance of strong commercial and personal ties between Andalusia and Granada, they did so with dramatic theatrics that pointed to the benefits of Christian victory while ensuring the people that such a triumph would not destroy those trans-frontier relationships. This was, at best, a uncertain vision of convivencia, one that required Christian victory and Muslim submission, but it did acknowledge the cultural contributions of non-Christians. The enemy was to be converted and embraced, not expelled or eradicated.

By the early 1470s, however, notions of limpieza de sangre, or blood purity, had gained traction and the idea that conversion would erase all social differences was no longer widely appealing. When a wave of anti-converso riots swept Andalusia in 1473, the catalyst was a Marian procession in Córdoba interrupted by inadvertent insult to the

Virgin by a young conversa girl. In the ensuing riot, the Passion story was dramatically retold through the death of a blacksmith who called on all to avenge his death at the hands of the conversos. Soon after the accession to the throne of Fernando and Isabel, the

Catholic monarchs, war with Granada began in earnest. In the wake of significant

7 victories against Granada through the 1480s, Jews and Muslims became less relevant in

the minds of many Christians. They were no longer part of society and no longer posed a

threat to Christians. Instead, they were defeated enemies, reminders to all of Christian

triumph. This diminished social role was dramatized in Murcia through triumphal renditions of the city’s Corpus Christi celebration organized to commemorate the

conquests of Málaga and Granada. Forced to wear their finest clothes and participate in the Christians’ triumph, the Murcian Jews and Muslims were relegated to the rear of the procession, a position often occupied by prisoners of war. Unlike most captives, however, they were required to dance at their own defeat.

The final section expands the discussion to demonstrate that, notwithstanding significant contextual differences, a similar pattern emerged in other frontier settings, notably Cyprus, which long endured as a bastion of Latin Christendom in the eastern

Mediterranean despite a predominantly Orthodox population. In particular, I examine the strategies employed by Peter I of Cyprus and Peter Thomas, papal legate to the East, in

the years preceding the Alexandrian Crusade. Their task was similar to that of Castilian

leaders in the late fifteenth century: to encourage a composite populace that had long lived in close proximity to Muslims and developed pacific relations with them, to attack

these neighbors, risking their lives and livelihoods in the process. They did so with

spectacles designed to remind Christians of their assured victory in inevitable holy war

while pointing to the cooperative nature of their own society. The ultimate result was the

opposite of the Castilian example. The Alexandrian Crusade was unsuccessful while

internal religious tensions were eased. Yet the similar approach adopted in each location

indicates long-standing and widespread traditions in which public displays had served as

8 a means of negotiating and articulating the boundaries between religious communities. It due to this tradition that Castilian elites, during the breakdown in convivencia, employed spectacle as a means of altering traditional interfaith relations. This also meant that they encountered receptive audiences familiar with the ability of performance to present social messages. By consistently turning to the theme of interfaith relations, frontier spectacles throughout the Mediterranean world highlighted the social importance of those relations and the ambivalent attitudes that characterized the borderlands. The late-medieval

Castilian experience, then, must be considered not in isolation but within a unified and coherent Mediterranean system.

9

I.

AN AMIABLE ENMITY: INACTION AND IDEOLOGICAL DISSONANCE ON THE GRANADAN FRONTIER

For modern Americans, the term ‘frontier’ has little to do with concepts of

fortified boundary lines or zones of cultural exchange. Instead, we speak of the frontiers

of science and medicine, of new or unexpected frontiers in the farthest reaches of the globe, of space as the ‘final frontier.’ The term itself implies action: frontiers are to be crossed, conquered, pushed back, and made civilized. To be on the frontier is to be forward thinking, a pioneer at the forefront of a great and progressive endeavor; by implication, the alternative is stagnation, decline, complacency. These frontiers of our popular imagination are not so much physical location as they are processes by which the

unknown is made known and a wilderness tamed, bringing benefit to society as a whole

and prestige to the democratic system which makes such heroism possible. This

understanding owes much to the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and his influential

1893 paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”1

Turner never offered a precise definition of ‘frontier’, which he claimed was an

“elastic” term. Rather, as the “outer edge of the wave – the meeting point between

savagery and civilization,” Turner’s physical frontier comprised a broad swath of

sparsely-populated land between established areas of European settlement and “free land”

or “Indian country.” Turner’s frontier was not only a particular place, but also a set of

1 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 1-3.

10 conditions that challenged its settlers, forcing them to adopt simple modes of life even as

they transformed and civilized the wilderness. Having forced its people to leave behind

European norms, the frontier fostered a form of primitive democracy in a constantly

evolving and competitive society, without roots or respect for central authority. Although

ultimately mastered and incorporated into the broader society, the frontier left a

permanent mark on its denizens: the final result was distinctly American. This process of

American social development was perennially renewed as new frontiers opened and older

ones closed in a cycle of expansion, opportunity, and rebirth that kept the American

character in touch with the “simplicity” of primitive society.

As has happened with so many other great historical works of the nineteenth

century, the years since the initial publication of the ‘Turner Thesis’ have seen it

alternately adopted, adapted, and debunked. Yet, despite the best attempts of its many

detractors, it has clung tenaciously to relevance. Indeed, as one observer has noted,

efforts to explore and expand Turner’s work continue to constitute “a small industry.”2

Links between Turner and medieval studies have been especially vital, due in part to perceived continuities between medieval Europe and the American West. Indeed, Ray

Allen Billington, perhaps Turner’s most prominent follower, began his influential study of the American frontier with a reference to the medieval origins of his topic: “The settlement of the American continent was the last stage in a mighty movement of peoples

2 This historiographical survey which follows can be nothing more than a sketch, as a full treatment of the topic would merit its own book. Therefore, the works mentioned serve to represent the changing tenor of the debate rather than as a full list of the important contributions to the field. For more detailed essays on medieval frontier historiography, see Lawrence McCrank, “The Cistercians of Poblet as Medieval Frontiersmen,” in Estudios en Homenaje a Don Claudio Sánchez Albornez en sus 90 años, Anejos de Cuadernos de Historia de España, 3 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1983), ii, 315-34; Robert Burns, “The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1989), 307-17; Nora Berend, “Medievalists and the Notion of Frontier,” MHJ 2 (1999): 55-72; and Edward Peters, “Omnia permixta sunt. Where’s the Border?” The MHJ 4 (2001): 109- 27.

11 that began in the twelfth century when feudal Europe began pushing back the barbarian

hordes that had pressed in from east, north, and south to threaten the Holy City of Rome

itself.” Lynn White and Luis Weckmann, among others, have explored the connections

that underlie Billington’s broad assertion to argue that a true comprehension of the

modern frontier is impossible without recourse to its medieval roots.3

Medieval Iberia, with its open plains and horse culture, inevitably attracted the

attention of Turnerians, one of whom likened it to a “miniature wild west,” attractive to

adventurous, combative men who were willing to live dangerously and uncomfortably

rather than submit to established hierarchies.” For Claudio Sánchez Albornez, the frontier

defined medieval Castile, as its movement both created a “unique national dynamic” and

spurred the development of a particular set of Iberian cultural values, “a style of life, a characteristic temperament, a cosmology, and set of collective tastes and illusions, of values and aversion… all quite different from the characteristics of the other peoples of

Western Europe.” It was Charles Julian Bishko, however, who was perhaps the most eloquent proponent of a medieval Iberia defined by Turnerian frontiers. Retaining

Turner’s romantic vision, he claimed that “the medieval frontier represented the chief best hope of life, the call to robust adventure and to the risks and rewards of courage and enterprise.”4

3 The irony here is that Turner explicitly argued for fundamental discontinuity and formulated his thesis in part as a reaction to peers who ascribed the American experience to medieval origins. Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (New York, 1949), 15; Lynn T. White, “The Legacy of The Middle Ages in the American Wild West,” Speculum 40 (1965): 191-202; Luis Weckmann, La herencia medieval de México (Mexico City, 1984). 4 Jackson, The Making of Medieval Spain (New York, 1972), 36-7; Claudio Sánchez-Albornez, “The Frontier and Castilian Liberties,” in The New World Looks at its History: Proceeding of the Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico, ed. Archibald R. Lewis and Thomas McGann (Austin, TX, 1963), 28, 30; Charles Julian Bishko, “The Frontier in Medieval History,” paper presented at the American Historical Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C: December 29, 1955. See also his “The Peninsular Background of Latin American Cattle Ranching,” Hispanic American Historical Review 32 (1952): 491-515; and “The Castilian as Plainsman: The Medieval Ranching Frontier

12 Later medievalists have hewed less closely to the original argument, viewing the

thesis more as a guiding vision than a formula and abandoning or adapting those aspects of it that fit poorly with medieval realities.5 In Robert I. Burns’s study of the medieval

Valencian frontier, for instance, a number of simultaneous processes—an influx of

settlers, the distribution of land, the creation of municipal administrations and tax

authorities, the incorporation of Muslim inhabitants, the establishment of a parish

network—mitigated the creative influence of individual frontiersmen. Indeed, “all these

movements constitute a transfer and persistence of the homeland, a replication or

mirroring of traditional patterns,” an understanding that reflects a “post-Turnerian

frontier paradigm.”6 Even so, Burns notes that “the Valencian frontier created a new

man, recognizably different from the Catalan or the Aragonese or the Occitan, in his

speech, in his habits, in his character, in his relation to the environment.”7 Although

Burns’s understanding of the process of social transformation differs from that of Turner,

the transformation itself, the ‘significance of the frontier’, remains.

Yet this Valencian frontier experience as presented by Burns was defined by

cultural interaction and not by an encounter with wilderness as in Turner’s West.

This multiplicity of frontiers suggests the inability of any one theoretical construct to encompass all possibilities. Indeed, Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay, in introducing the collection of essays published as Medieval Frontier Societies, eschew the need for

in La Mancha and Extremadura,” in The New World Looks at its History: Proceeding of the Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico, ed. Lewis and McGann, 47-69. 5 See, for instance, the work of two of Bishko’s students: Lawrence McCrank, “The Cistercians of Poblet as Landlords: Protection, Litigation, and Violence on the Medieval Catalan Frontier,” Citeaux commentarii cistercienses 26 (1975): 255-83; idem, “The Cistercians of Poblet as Medieval Frontiersmen,” 313-60; Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300 (Cambridge, 1984). 6 Burns, “The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages,” 325. 7 Burns, “The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages,” 323.

13 “terminological or definitional debate,” preferring a more empirical approach.8

While the North American concept of frontier has crossed the Atlantic, scholarly treatments of the concept in Europe have tended to reflect a different set of historical conditions. One strand has emphasized the idea of frontier as fortified boundary line, seeking to clarify the evolution of linear boundaries between modern nation-states.

Scholars have reached back as far as the limes of the Roman Empire to find the origins of

political frontiers but have concluded that the modern manifestations bear little in common with their predecessors. This is in large part due to the pioneering work of

Lucien Febvre, who traced the origins of the term frontière to establish that shifting and

complex associations existed between artificial political boundaries and the frontier zones

that organically or naturally evolve between societies. In doing so, he challenged the

notion, so tragically dominant at the time, of natural and immutable frontiers between

states and peoples formed by geographic features.9 For medieval Europe especially, the concept of territorial boundaries or “lines on a map” has been shown to be generally inappropriate. Such lines certainly existed but their importance to medieval people has been repeatedly questioned.10

Rather, medieval boundaries most often have been seen as zones or regions rather

8 Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Bartlett and MacKay, v. 9 Lucien Febvre, “La frontière: le mot et la notion,” Revue de Synthèse Historique 45 (1928): 31-44; reprinted in Lucien Febvre, Pour une histoire à part entière (Paris, 1962), 11-24 and translated as “Frontière: The Word and the Concept,” in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, ed. Peter Burke (London, 1973), 208-18; idem, “The Problem of Frontiers and the Natural Bounds of States,” in Lucien Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History, trans. E.G. Mountford and J.H. Paxton (London, 1932), 296-314. See also Bernard Guenée, “Des limites féodales aux frontières politiques,” in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 2, La nation (Paris, 1986), 11-33; and Daniel Nordmann, “Des limites d’État aux frontières nationales,” Les lieux de mémoire, ii, 35-61. Although these authors do not mention Febvre, their use of terminology is similar. 10 Carefully measured borderlines between political entities were most common when an inheritance was divided, notably the Carolingian partitions in 768 and 806. See Rosamund McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-987 (London, 1983), 87, 97. On the partition of the Empire between Louis the Pious’s three sons in 843, see Timothy Reuter, in the Early Middle Ages, c. 800-1056 (London, 1991),148-50, 187.

14 than sharply demarcated lines. As Denys Hay noted while describing the medieval

frontier between England and Scotland, “the Border was not merely a line, notionally following rivers and burns and leaping to standing stones and ditches or dykes. It was a tract of territory separated in some senses from the countries on either side of it.”11

Merely widening a boundary from a line to a frontier zone does little to address the conceptual problems, however. Medieval political entities, unlike modern states, were not based on a geographic paradigm. Rather, as Ronnie Ellenblum has demonstrated, kingdoms were defined by “an ethnic identity and geographical center.” Instead of well- defined boundaries, there were “spheres of various degrees of influence.” Thus frontier castles or fortifications were centers of strength offering safety within a particular radius, not points along a line. Peripheral regions where competing influences were somewhat balanced were defined by “heterogeneous space” in which sovereignty was ambiguous and rival rulers could hold property as well as collect and pay taxes on either side of the putative border.12

Central to Ellenblum’s understanding of heterogeneous spaces is intercultural contact. He is not alone. The study of frontier interaction and acculturation has led to an extensive body of literature on the nature and significance of medieval communities comprising people of different languages, cultures and religions. In seeking to define the

11 Denys Hay, “England, Scotland and Europe: The Problem of the Frontier,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series 25 (1975), 80. For other examples of this approach, see Patrick Gautier Dalché, “De la liste à la carte: limite et frontière dans la géographie et la cartographie de l’Occident médiéval,” Castrum 4: Frontière et peuplement dans le monde méditerranéen au Moyen Age. Actes du colloque d’Erice-Trapani, 18-25 septembre 1988. CCV 38(Rome and , 1992), 19-31; André Bazzana, Pierre Guichard, and Philippe Senac, “La frontière dans l’Espagne médiévale,” Castrum 4, 35-59; Daniel Power, “What did the Frontier of Angevin Normandy Comprise ?” Anglo-Norman Studies 17 (1995): 181-201 12 Ronnie Ellenblum, “Were there Borders and Borderlines in the Middle Ages? The Example of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. David Abulafia and Nora Berend (Aldershot, 2002), 108-110.

15 salient characteristics of such societies, Nora Berend has outlined several key types of frontier cultural contacts identified by scholars.13 Among the most studied of these are military encounters, but frontier warfare nearly always occurred alongside various forms

of nonviolent contact, not only trade but the myriad forms of negotiation and arbitration required to prevent endemic fighting, This led to dual dynamics of war and peaceful that created modes of life particular to the frontier and even the development of ‘institutions’ that differed from the counterparts in central areas, specifically because of the distinct needs of the frontier.14

But central or even local authorities often had little control over cultural exchange

on frontiers, and populations on either side of a frontier often intermingled to the point

where they bore more similarities with each other than their nominal home cultures.

Acculturation, however, was not an all or nothing proposition that led either to cultural immersion or strictly-controlled interactions. People living in contact with other societies were able to adapt, borrow, or reject particular aspects of those societies as they saw fit, leading to highly localized modes of cultural exchange. Recent work has focused on frontiers as ‘borderlands’ in which cultural exchange and hostility act in tandem. Among the most influential of such work is that of Homi Bhabha, who defines borderlands as a

‘third space’, or realm of negotiation, translation and remaking. The third space, for

13 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (London, 1993). Thomas Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester, 1995). See also his earlier Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Comparative Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation (Princeton, 1979). Berend, “Medievalists and the Notion of the Frontier,” passim. 14 For examples, Juan de Mata Carriazo, “Un alcalde entre los cristianos y los moros, en la frontera de Granada,” in Homenaje al profesor Carriazo, 1: En la frontera de Granada (Seville, 1971), 85-142; previously published in Al-Andalus 13 (1948): 35-96; José Enrique López de Coca-Castañer, “Institutions on the Castilian-Granadan Frontier, 1369-1482,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Bartlett and MacKay, 127-50; Robert I. Burns, “The Parish as a Frontier Institution in Thirteenth Century ,” Speculum 37 (1962): 244-51; Berend, “Medievalists and the Notion of the Frontier,” 61.

16 Bhabha, is not simply an amalgam of its two constituent cultural groups but is instead a

true hybrid, a new society that has the potential for fresh understandings of each of its

predecessors.15

The enormous variety of frontier experiences brings us back to the question of

definition. How can one usefully employ a term than can variously refer to a social

process, military conquest, political borders, or cultural interaction? Conflict between

Muslims and Christians in Iberia, for instance, carried a different set of possibilities than did frontier strife in the British Isles. André Bazzana has proposed one solution, a typology of medieval frontiers based on a number of factors. These include stability, or the degree to which frontiers interactions developed in the same space over an extended period of time to create something that could be called a frontier society, as well as the nature of war and peace in the region. In a related point, Bazzana argues that if military frontiers bore the role of protecting the center, than we must consider both the effectiveness of this defensive zone as well as the means used to safeguard the protectors.

Other major considerations include relations between the center and the periphery and the degree to which the frontier region was a ‘melting pot’ in which the various and often marginal groups who gravitated to frontier regions were assimilated.16

Toward the same end, Berend suggests a distinction between ‘frontier zone’ as the

meeting point between different civilizations and ‘frontier society’ as an area that

15 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994); idem, “Culture’s In-Between,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London, 1996), 53-60; and Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Rutherford (London, 1990), 207-221. 16 André Bazzana, “El concepto de frontera en el Mediterráneo occidental en la Edad Media,” in Actas del Congreso la Frontera Oriental Nazarí como Sujeto Histórico (S.XIII-XVI): Lorca-Vera, 22 a 24 de noviembre de 1994, ed. Pedro Segura Artero (Almería, 1997), 30-1. See also Pierre Toubert, “Frontière et frontières: un objet historique,” in Castrum 4: Frontière et peuplement dans le monde méditerranéen au Moyen Age. Actes du colloque d’Erice-Trapani, 18-25 septembre 1988 (Rome and Madrid, 1992), 15-17.

17 encompasses two or more religious or cultural groups within one political entity. In other

words, by separating the political and military dimensions of frontier from its cultural

aspects, we can employ the term with a greater degree of precision. This is not to say that

such aspects existed in isolation; medieval Iberia possessed both a frontier zone and a

frontier society and each had a major influence on the other. But it does permit us to

distinguish between places such as Normandy where frontier contact was between groups

with a shared religion as well as similar social, political, and economic systems, and

regions where unfamiliar or “ideological hostile” societies came face to face.17

At one time or another, nearly of all these historical approaches to frontiers have

been applied to the frontier between medieval Castile and Granada. It has been seen as a

region of free land, an arena for the expansion of Latin Christendom, a militarized border

zone, a site for cultural contact and exchange. But the Iberian frontier fits easily into

neither of the broad visions of frontier. It was a fortified boundary between two

civilizations, but it was not a defined, linear border as between modern nation-states. Nor,

despite its many fortifications, was it closed; the movement of people and ideas never

ceased and even the religious identities that defined it were not fixed. It was indeed a

cultural melting pot, but one over which religious intolerance proved ultimately

dominant.

This project therefore views medieval Mediterranean frontiers as borderland

17Berend, “Medievalists and the Notion of the Frontier,” 68-72. It is the latter type of interaction that continues to be of great interest to historians, in part due to the reality of multicultural societies in our own time. CLIOHRES, a broad research collaborative of forty-five European universities, has recently offered an inclusive definition of frontier that both reflects current scholarship and suggests the social forces that influence European perceptions of the concept and will likely guide future work. http://www.cliohres.net/ thematic/frontiers.html [accessed 7-9-09]. On the relevance of frontier studies for contemporary Europe, see also Pierre Toubert, “Le concept de frontière. Quelques réflexions introductives,” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos xi-xiv), ed. Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Pascal Buresi and Philippe Josserand. CCV 75 (Madrid, 2001), 1-4.

18 regions in which multiple religious, linguistic, and cultural groups maintained close

contacts. These frontiers, however, were not simply composite societies. They were

distinguished from other sites of cultural encounter by their insecurities. These

insecurities stemmed both from the constant threat of physical attack and an awareness

that there was a significant gap between the reality of acculturation and ideologies of

Christian dominance. The resulting anxieties effectively prevented the creation of what

Bhabha calls a third space. For Christians living on the medieval frontier were caught

between a sincere ideology of holy and just war against Islam and an equally sincere

respect and understanding not only for individual Muslims but also for many aspects of

Islamic culture, an esteem that went far beyond Castro’s “chance symbiosis of beliefs.”18

The result was a conflicted attitude that we may best describe as an ‘amiable enmity’.

How could people reconcile such opposed ideas as Crusade and convivencia?

Peter Linehan offers one solution, pointing out that an either/or understanding of the

frontier supposes a social homogeneity that we would not expect in our own times. As he

puts it, “In theory, the very idea of frontier convivencia is inconceivable. Crusade and co-

existence comprise a confessional oxymoron if ever there was one. But in fact people

aren’t like that.”19 But Linehan goes on to suggest that this contradiction is unworthy of

further discussion, as it was no more than a predictable outcome of human nature. What he fails to address is how people coped with these all-too-human inconsistencies. For if, as the evidence suggests, there is no reason to suspect that medieval Castilians were unaware of the incongruities that lay at the core of their understanding of the world, the

resulting tensions and general mood of uncertainty they created hold the key to

18 Castro, España en su historia, 565: “La tolerancia, la ocasional simbiosis de las creencias, cuadra bien con haber iniciado su vida el hispano-cristiano a caballo sobre su creencia, el caballo de Santiago.” 19 Linehan, “At the Spanish Frontier,” 53 (italics in original).

19 understanding the medieval Granadan frontier.

Frontier peoples found themselves unable to define clear and proper boundaries

between members of different religions, such as those in Aragon which have been well

described by David Nirenberg, and unable to take decisive action to alter the situation by

abandoning either the goal of expelling Islam from Iberia or their regard for Muslim

acquaintances and culture. Nor did they want to be perceived as having ‘gone native’ by

their counterparts in more central areas. These pressures—physical insecurity, ideological

dissonance, and a sense of being on the periphery—defined late medieval Mediterranean

frontier societies. There was always, that despite real tolerance for other groups, a curb

on how far frontier Christians were willing to adapt. In response, they often resorted to

contradictory extremes, ranging from unrestrained violence toward enemies to the

rejection of fixed religious identities by individuals.20

********

The earliest documented uses of the term ‘frontier’ in Iberia date from mid- eleventh century Aragon in two testaments of King Ramiro I (1035-1063) dated to 1059 and 1061, which refer to “castles on the frontier with the .”21 Philippe Sénac has suggested that at this time “the boundaries of Aragonese territory now coincided with the crests of a chain of high mountains and it is likely that this concordance played a decisive role in the emergence of the term.” The temporary linearity of the border, Sénac claims, not only led to the employment of the neologism ‘frontera’ but also gave it the sense of a

20 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996) 21 Antonio Ubieto Arteta, Cartulario de San Juan de la Peña, 2 vols. (Valencia, 1962-1963), ii, doc. 150: “et ad castros de fronteras de mauros que sunt pro facere... in castellos de fronteras de mauros qui sunt per fare unde prodesit de christianis totum.”

20 fortified, linear boundary. Sénac goes on to suggest, moreover, that it implied a specific type of boundary. Noting that the term was used only in reference to Muslims, he places

its coining in the context of a particular set of geographic and political conditions that led

Ramiro I to engage in intensified combat with the Muslims to the south. Therefore, he

argues, frontera referred to Muslims in general and not only to the “mauros” of the Ebro

Valley. The term thus suggested a geographical opposition between the Christian in the

highlands of northern Iberia and the Muslim lands to the south (see figure 1).22

The new term ‘frontera’ as well as the French frontière and the Italian frontiera

(both of which appeared somewhat later) derived from the classical Latin ‘frons, frontis’

and the later ‘frontaria’. Frons bears a number of meanings and Sénac understands it as

“that which stands opposite.” In its most basic sense, it refers to the front or forepart of an

object but it also carries military connotations, as in the vanguard of an army or a military

front, which remained strong in most early vernacular adaptations of the term.23 Sénac’s interpretation of frontera in the eleventh century, therefore, goes beyond the etymological evidence. He may well be correct in arguing that Ramiro’s use of the word implies a significant shift in attitudes toward Muslims and a new territorial understanding; but it could just as easily be argued that the king used frontera in a more basic manner to distinguish fortifications that directly faced the enemy or were at the ‘front’ of his lands.

22 Philippe Sénac, “Frontière et Reconquête dans l’Aragon du XIe siècle,” in Frontières et espaces pyrénéens au Moyen Âge, ed. Philippe Sénac (Perpignan, 1992), 48-50 ; idem, “« Ad castros de fronteras de mauros qui sunt pro facere ». Note sur le premier testament de Ramire Ier d’Aragon,” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval, ed. Ayala Martínez, Buresi and Josserand, 205-21. See also his “La frontière aragonaise aux XIe et XIIe siècles: le mot et la chose pro defensionem Christianorum et Confusionem Sarracenorum,” CCM 42 (1999): 259-72. 23 Sénac, “« Ad castros »,” 210-212; Jan Frederick Niermeyer, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden, 1984), 455. On the earliest known instances of frontière in French (1312) and frontiera in Italian (thirteenth century), see Guenée, “Des limites,” 21; Max Pfister, “Grenzbezeichnungen im Italoromanischen und Galloromanischen,” in Grenzen und Grenzregionen, ed. Wolfgang Haubrichs and Reinhard Schneider (Saarbrücken, 1994), 37-50; and Klusáková and Ellis, “Terms and Concepts,” 5-6.

21 This sense of the word is reflected (albeit somewhat later) in the documents describing

Alfonso VIII’s (1158-1214) 1183 donation of the castle of Consuegra to the Hospitallers.

The Latin version of this donation mentions a “castle known as Consuegra, on the

frontier with the Moors,” while the Castilian notes that it “faces the Moors.”24

Regardless of its intended meanings, the new word did not quickly supplant

existing terminology for referring to boundaries or territorial limits and so we find

references to Muslim lands following traditional phrasings, such as “contra partes

Maurorum” or “terminus contra sarracenos” for much of the following century. Indeed, even if we include its initial usages, frontera appears only nine times in Aragonese

sources between 1059 and 1209.25 By the early thirteenth century, however, the political

geography of Iberia had changed drastically and in 1222, Fernando III of Castille (1217-

1252) could use the term in a manner familiar to modern readers: “It is the duty of kings

to defend their frontiers.”26 What happened in the interim is the subject of some debate.

Several scholars have argued that the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries

saw the confluence of several factors which led to the clear emergence of the word and

notion of frontera as an exact political boundary. These include regular contact between

members of different cultures in densely-populated regions as well as a fortified

boundary zone and an ideology of expansion to the south.27 Pascal Buresi sees a major

24 Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Libro de privilegios de la Orden de San Juan de Jerusalén en Castilla y León (siglos XII-XV) (Madrid, 1995), doc. 144: “castellum quod dicitur Consogra, in fronteria maurorum.” Julio González González, El reino de Castilla en la época de Alfonso VIII, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1960), ii, doc. 409: “a la frente de los moros.” Pascal Buresi, “Nommer, penser les frontières en Espagne aux XIe-XIIIe siècles,” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval), ed. Ayala Martínez, Buresi and Josserand., 54-5; Sénac, “« Ad castros »,” 55, n. 22. 25 Buresi, “Nommer,” 208-9. 26 Julio González González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 3 vols. (Córdoba, 1980-6), ii, docs. 154, 157. 27 Jean Gautier Dalché, “Islam et Chrétienté en Espagne au XIIe s: contribution à l’étude de la notion de frontière,” Hespéris 46 (1959): 183-217; Bazzana, Guichard, and Sénac, “La frontière dans l’Espagne médiévale;” Berend, “Medievalists and the Notion of the Frontier,” 66.

22 turning point in the set of alliances that joined Navarre to Castile and Aragon, its

traditional enemies, and created the conditions leading to the great victory of Las Navas

de Tolosa (1212). For Buresi, this alliance crystallized tendencies that had developed

over the previous decades to signal a new consensus among the Christian rulers in Iberia

that their borders with Islam were something different than the boundaries between their

kingdoms. This marked the emergence of a “Hispanic Christendom,” the perception that,

despite their many differences, the Christians of Iberia formed a religious and cultural

community facing Islam.28 If the reality of in Iberia was not new, a surge in the number of references to the new term frontera at this time, Buresi argues, points to a

change in how it was perceived, at least by the ruling class.

Although the idea of holy war against Islam was certainly not a new development and the case that Christian struggles against the infidel in the Holy Land and in Iberia were linked was well established, it took some time for the ideologies developed in the

East to complement or, in some cases, to supplant understandings built up over several

centuries of contact and conflict.29 However, the efforts of successive , notably

Celestine III (1191-1198), Innocent III (1198-1216), and Honorius III (1216-1227), both

as mediators between the Christian powers and as promulgators of an ideology that

insisted upon the community of the faithful and on the alterity of Muslims, played a key role in this transformation. Indeed, papal influence on Iberian politics was such that the

28 Buresi, “Nommer,” 52-3. 29 On the role of Crusade ideology in Iberia, see Jean Flori, “Réforme, , croisade. L’idée de reconquête dans la correspondance pontificale d’Alexandre II à Urbain II,” CCM 40 (1997): 317-35; F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003); Pascal Buresi, La frontière entre chrétienté et Islam dans la peninsula Ibérique. Du Tage à la Sierra Morena (fin XIe-milieu XIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2004), 269-88. On measures taken to resolve the tension between the Spanish impulse to crusade in Jerusalem and the obligation to battle Muslims at home, see Patrick O’Banion, “What has Iberia to do with Jerusalem? Crusade and the Spanish Route to the Holy Land in the twelfth century,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 383-95.

23 Almohad ruler Abû Hafs ‘Umar al-Murtadâ (1248-1266) could address Innocent IV

(1243-1254) as “sovereign of the Christian kings, honored by the nobles of the rûmiyya

[white] community, head of the Christian faith, heir to the religious leadership,

Innocent.”30

`Noting that Christians in both Iberia and the Holy Land fought the same Muslim

enemy, these popes viewed the struggles in Iberia and in the Holy Land as but two fronts

in the same apocalyptic battle, reflecting a new concept of frontier. For the frontiers of

the Christians in Iberia were the frontiers of Christendom itself and the purpose of the

struggle the same as in the East: “in order that Christendom might expand.”31 And such a

frontier was no mere political boundary, but a threat to the community of the faithful. In

an 1196 letter excommunicating Alfonso IX of León (1188-1230) for treating with the

enemy, Celestine III likened Christian society to a healthy body that could be kept so

only by excising its diseased portions (Matthew 18:8-9). It was through the frontier, the

meeting ground between Christians and outsiders (aliene gentis), that such spiritual infections entered the sacred body politic.32

So this frontier had to be a sacred boundary. Not only was it to be pushed forward as far as possible but it also must be impermeable; Muslims should not enter Christian lands and no Christian ruler could legitimately treat with them. Attacks on the frontier were a defiance of god and to be countered harshly. In addition to preaching, several

30 Eugène Tisserant and Gaston Wiet, “Une lettre de l’almohade Murtadā au pape Innocent IV,” Hespéris 6 (1926): 27-53; Buresi, “Nommer,”69. 31 Demetrio Mansilla Reoyo, La documentación pontificia de Honorio III (1216-1227) (Rome, 1965), doc. 151 : “pro christianorum finibus dilatandis.” Paul Rousset, “La notion de Chrétienté aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Le Moyen Âge 69 (1963): 191-203 ; Buresi, “Nommer,” 70-1. 32 Pascal Buresi, “Deux bulles pontificales de Célestin III à l’archevêque de Tolède (1192 et 1196),” in Pays d’Islam et monde latin (Xe-XIIe siècle). Textes et documents (Lyon, 2000), 178-81; Kenneth R. Stow, “Holy Body, Holy City: Conflicting Medieval Structural Conceptions,” in Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land, ed. Benjamin Kedar and R.J. Zwi Werblowsky (New York, 1998), 151-71.

24 practical innovations were key to the dissemination of this ideology of a Christian

frontier. In considering those men fighting in Iberia as equally eligible for Crusade

indulgences as those going to the East, the papacy not only encouraged to stay and confront the enemy at home while persuading significant numbers of northern

Europeans to join them, but also made the struggle to reconquer former Visigothic lands a holy endeavor.

Moreover, the central role played by the military orders (not only the existing

Temple and Hospital but also the new Iberian foundations, notably Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcántara) on the frontier in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries lent strength to the idea that this was a war in defense of Christendom, and not for the aggrandizement of any

one ruler, a perception necessary to maintain the close alliance of often-competitive

rulers. Substantial gifts of lands and fortresses in frontier regions created what were, in effect, international military bases. Military orders could be, and often were, simultaneously active and influential in multiple kingdoms, even when these kingdoms were embroiled in conflicts. The effects this might have on relations between Christian

kings were not lost on them. The 1181 treaty of Medina de Ríoseco between Alfonso VIII

of Castile and Fernando II of León, for instance, assigned a number of fortifications on

their shared border to Pedro Fernández, the Master of Santiago, and Pedro de Areis, Prior

of the Hospital, “to safeguard and ensure the peace between us and our sons and

daughters in perpetuity.”33 But the impact of the military orders was not only to ensure a

modicum of peace between rival kings; they also contributed to the emergence of a united

33 Julio González González, Alfonso VIII, ii, doc. 362; idem, Regesta de Fernando II (Madrid, 1943), doc. 40: “pro tenenda et obseruanda pace inter nos et filios nostros et filias in perpetuum.” On the papacy and the military orders in Iberia, see Luis García-Guijarro Ramos, Papado, cruzadas y órdenes militares (siglos XI-XIII) (Madrid, 1995); Buresi, La frontière, 183-93.

25 front against Islam.

These simultaneous developments were part of what can be described as a process

of social and territorial differentiation that gave the frontier an absolute dimension that it

had not known before the mid-twelfth century. During this period, the Christian powers

of the peninsula enacted numerous treaties of alliance and mutual defense centered on the

notion of Christian territorial integrity and solidarity, revealing that boundaries between

their kingdoms were political and legal.34 They might be subject to disputes, to be sure,

and even be the cause of hostilities, but they were points of contact, not barriers. Not so

the borders with Islam. Contemporary sources provide a number of vivid images of the

frontier, all reflecting its closed nature. It was a wall, a barrier, a mountain, as in a 1216

bull of Innocent III that directed “the Master and brothers in arms of Saint James [i.e. the

Order of Santiago] to place themselves as a wall for the defense of the Christian faith against Saracen treachery.”35 The frontier thus became the dividing line between

Christendom and the rest of the world. On one side of this wall are ‘us’ and on the other

are ‘them,’ the sources of evil and contagion. This geographic representation of social and religious differences was aided by demographic changes as the Mozarabic

community of al-Andalus, whether by conversion or displacement, had almost entirely

disappeared by the end of the twelfth century.36 On the other side of the frontier, then,

was only the infidel.

********

To justify the conquest of Muslim lands, Christian authors produced a number of

34 See Esther Pascua Echegaray, Guerra y pacto en el siglo XII. La consolidación de un sistema de reinos en Europa occidental (Madrid, 1996) 35 Archivo Histórico Nacional, OO.MM., Uclés, carpeta 4/11 no. 1 (24 January 1216), as cited in Buresi, “Nommer,” 60: “… Magister et fraters milicie sancti Jacobi se pro defensione fidei christiane contra Sarracenorum perfidiam murum defensionis opponunt.” 36 Richard Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (Cambridge, 1979)

26 polemical works seeking to present Islam as a heresy propagated by Mohammed and to

demonize his followers.37 This was in keeping with the discourse regarding Islam

elsewhere in Europe and the vigorous Iberian production of anti-Muslim tracts was in

part a response to the perceived dangers posed by Islam’s insidious influence on those

Christians forced to interact with the enemy. The experiences of Pedro Pascual, bishop of

Jaén, exemplify both these fears and the aggressive forms of the response. Pascual was

captured in 1298 and spent some time as a prisoner in Granada, where he was shocked to

see the frequency with which his fellow prisoners converted to Islam. While still imprisoned, he composed Sobre la seta mahometana, a wide-ranging work intended to provide Christian prisoners with basic instruction in the key tenets of Christian theology in order that they be prepared with defensive arguments in debates with Muslims.38

In addition to offering set responses to typical Muslim challenges, such as the charge that veneration of the crucifix amounted to nothing more than idol worship, he also sought to prepare his audience to face martyrdom rather than renounce their faith.

His approach here was two-sided. First, he urged them to consider the martyrs of old, similarly imprisoned for their faith, as models of courage and devotion. Second, he portrayed Islam and its followers as inherently violent, lascivious, and stupid, fundamentally different than Christians and worthy only of disdain. Presenting historical and biblical examples to argue that war between Christianity and Islam is eternal and inevitable, Pascual compares Muslims to demons and beasts of the field in order to

37 On Christian views of Islam, see Philippe Sénac, L’image de l’Autre. Histoire de l’Occident médiéval face à l’Islam (Paris, 1983); Ron Barkaï, Cristianos y musulmanes en la España medieval. El enemigo en el espejo. (Madrid, 1984); John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002). 38 Pedro Pascual, Sobre la seta mahometana, in Obras de San Pedro Pascual, ed. Pedro Armengol Valenzuela, 4 vols. (Rome, 1906-1908), iv, 1-357.

27 dehumanize the enemy.39 As John Tolan writes in his recent discussion of the work, “For

Pedro Pascual, the law and theological differences were not enough to isolate Christians from the pernicious influence of Islam; there also had to be barriers of hatred and contempt.”40

If the ideology of reconquest required an image of Islam as debased in order to cast the Muslim presence in Iberia as illegitimate, it also needed outward signs of God’s blessing of Christian dominance over the peninsula.41 For if the struggle was against the enemies of the faith, it stood to reason that God would take an active and visible role in the outcome. Victories were signs of the Lord’s benevolence and setbacks evidence of his displeasure. Thus, the defeat suffered by Alfonso VIII at Alarcos in 1195 was seen not as the result of Muslim military superiority, but of the king’s extramarital dalliance with a

Jewish girl. As the sixteenth-century chronicle of Gonzalo Argote de Molina tells us, the king “knew that this punishment from God was on account of an offense he had committed against Him for he had taken a beautiful Jewish girl as a friend and, for this reason, not lived with his wife, Queen Leonora, for the past six months.” Reprimanded by

39 Pascual, Sobre la seta, iv, 68, 70-1. 40 John Tolan, “Barrières de haine et de mépris. La polémique anti-islamique de Pedro Pascual,” in Identidad y representación de la frontera, ed. Ayala Martínez, Buresi, and Josserand, 255: “Pour lui, la loi et la différence théologique ne sont pas suffisantes pour protéger le chrétien de l’influence néfaste de l’Islam : il faut ériger des barrières de haine et de mépris.” 41 The term ‘reconquest’ is a modern and therefore a contested one, with many scholars employing it only with qualifications. It is not, however, an artificial concept but one that reflects medieval realities. As Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada notes, “Actualmente, muchos consideran espúreo el término reconquista para describir la realidad histórica de aquellos siglos, y prefieren hablar simplemente de conquista y sustitución de una sociedad y una cultura, la andalusí, por otra, la cristiano-occidental; pero aunque esto fue así, también lo es que el concepto de reconquista nació en los siglos medievales y pertenece a su realidad en cuanto que sirvió para justificar ideológicamente muchos aspectos de aquel proceso, “¿Es todavía España un enigma histórico? Releyendo a Sánchez-Albornoz,” in Lecturas sobre la España historica (Madrid, 1998), 334. Accordingly, ‘reconquest’ is used here as a shorthand for the ensemble of ideas and beliefs to which Ladero Quesada refers and which are described below. For a discussion of recent work on this topic, see Manuel González Jiménez, “Sobre la ideología de la reconquista: realidades y tópicos,” in Memoria, mito y realidad en la historia medieval: XIII Semana de Estudios Medievales, Nájera, del 29 de julio al 2 de agosto de 2002, ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte; José Luis Martín Rodríguez (Logroño, 2003), 151-70.

28 an angel, Alfonso repented and made recompense to the Church through alms and the foundation of several monastic houses. That God accepted this penance was made clear by Alfonso’s great victory at Las Navas de Tolosa.42 In this brief anecdote are themes common to many Christian representations of frontier warfare: the dangers of contact with non-Christians, God’s active intervention, and a celestial visitation. Legends of such intercessions and other miraculous events caught the popular imagination, lending strength to an ideology focused on the expansion of the true faith and the expulsion of all contagion. Of these, the most widespread and influential were the stories of intervention associated with Santiago (St. James the Greater) and the Virgin Mary.43

The association between Santiago, whom late medieval chroniclers often described as Matamoros (the Moor-slayer), and the idea of reconquest stems from the

story of the help he provided to the Asturian army in the putative 844 battle of Clavijo.44

The legend of Clavijo and the belligerent aspects of Santiago only became widely known, however, when included in the thirteenth-century histories of Lucas of Túy and Rodrigo

Jiménez de Rada.45 The legend, with its message of Christian resistance and heavenly

42 Gonzalo Argote de Molina and Ambrosio de Montesinos, Comentarios de la conquista de la ciudad de Baeza y nobleza de los conquistadores della, ed. Enrique Toral Peñaranda (Jaén, 1995), 67: conoció haberle sucedido este castigo de Dios por la ofensa que contra él habia cometido en haber tenido una judía hermosa por amiga y a causa della no haber hecho siete meses vida con la reina doña Leonor, su mujer.” 43 For a detailed discussion of the role of miracles in the ideology of Reconquest, see José Rodríguez Molina, La vida de en la frontera (Jaén, 2007), esp. chap. 6, “La realidad de la confrontación ideológica,” 167-201; and José Luis Martín Martín, “La frontera como entorno legendario,” in IV Estudios de Frontera. Historia, tradiciones, y leyendas en la frontera. Homenaje a Don Enrique Toral y Peñaranda: Congreso celebrado en Alcalá la Real en noviembre de 2001, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén 2002), 17-30. 44 Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz has linked this legend to the historical battle of Monte Laturce in “La auténtica batalla de Clavijo,” CHE 9 (1948): 94–139. 45 Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie sive Historia gothica, ed. Juan Fernández Valverde, CCCM 72 (Turnhout, 1987), iv, chap. 13, 132-3; Lucas of Túy, Chronicon Mundi, CCCM 74, ed. Emma Falque (Turnhout, 2003), iv, 76-7. These versions of the legend are based on the “Privilege of the Vows of Santiago,” a twelfth-century forgery purporting to be an 844 document in which Ramiro I granted the church of Compostela certain tributes after the victory at Clavijo. See O’Callaghan, Reconquest

29 aid, was told and retold by successive chroniclers and, in the slightly later account given

in the royal chronicle Estoria de Espanna, we can see it in its full development. In this

version, events hinge on the practice of giving Christian virgins to the Muslims as tribute,

a practice described as disgraceful.46 When Ramiro I (842-850) came to the throne, the

Muslims sought to maintain their ascendancy and overawe the young ruler and so “they sent envoys to ask him to give each year fifty maidens of the highest nobility for marriage, and fifty more from the rest of the people for solace and delight; and these hundred girls should all be virgins and mounted on horseback, just as king Mauregatus had given them in the past.”47 Ramiro chose to fight rather than accept this indignity and

soon found himself and his army surrounded and outnumbered on a small hill near

Clavijo.

Although he anticipated a disastrous battle the next day, Ramiro retired for the

night and “the Apostle Santiago appeared in his sleep and said: ‘know that Our Lord

Jesus Christ divided all the provinces of the land amongst me and the other Apostles, my

brothers, and to me alone He gave Spain to protect from the hands of the enemies of the

faith… King Ramiro, be brave in your heart, and be firm and strong in your actions, for I am James, the Apostle of Jesus Christ and I come to help you against your enemies. And know that, with the help of God your victory tomorrow morning over these Moors is certain. And I tell you that though many of your men were killed, for those is the glory of

and Crusade, 194-5. The text of the privilege is published in Antonio López Ferreiro, Historia de la santa a.m. iglesia de Santiago de Compostela, 11 vols. (Santiago de Compostela, 1989-1909), ii, 132-7. 46 PCG, ii, 360, ch. 629: “cosa tan mala et tan descomulgato.” For a discussion of the legend’s tradition and evolution, see Luis Fernández Gallardo, “Santiago Matamoros en la historiografía hispanomedieval: origen y desarrollo de un mito nacional,” Medievalismo 15 (2005): 139-74. 47 PCG, ii, 359, ch. 629: “...et enuiaronle pedir que les dixesse cada anno L donzellas de las mas fijas dalgo con que casassen, et otras L de las otras del pueblo con que ouiessen entre si sus solazes et sus deleytes; et estas cient donzellas que fuessen todas uirgines et en caballos, assi cuemo ge las diera el so rey Mauregato en su tiempo que fuera ante dell.”

30 God and everlasting peace. And so you do not doubt any of what I have said, you will see me tomorrow as I come to the battle on a white horse with a white banner, and a gleaming sword in my hand.’”48 In the morning, Ramiro shared his vision with the bishops and other leaders of the army. Thus heartened, they confessed, took communion,

“and then they entered into the battle and fought the Moors. And the Apostle Saint James was there with them, just as he had promised... and when they saw Santiago, the

Christians were greatly heartened, and crediting the aid of God and of the Apostle

Santiago, began to smite the Moors with great vigor.”49 And, the chronicler noted, “from that day forward the Christians made a custom of saying as they entered battle against their mortal enemies, the Moors: ‘God and Santiago, help us.’”50

In its basic sense, the lesson of this myth is clear: God will help those with the courage to fight Muslims rather than accept dishonorable peace. Moreover, it suggests the dangers of dealings of any kind with Muslims, casting those, such as Mauregatus, who would grant them tribute as connivers. But the legend of Santiago is also tied to more

48 PCG, ii, 360, ch. 629: “Appareciol estonces en suennos ell apostol sant yague et dixol: “sepas que Nuestro Sennor Jhesu Cristo partio a todos los otros apostoles mios hermanos et a mi todas las otras prouincias de la tierra, et a mi solo dio a Espanna que la guardasse et la amparasse de manos de los enemigos de la fe… rey Ramiro, esfuerça en tu coraçon, et sey bien firme et fuerte en tus fechos, ca yo so Yague, ell apostol de Jhesu Cristo et uengo a ti por ayudarte contra estos tus enemigos. Et sepas por uerdad que tu uençras cras en la mannana con ell ayuda de Dios a todos estos moros que te agora tienen cercado. Et digote que tomaron y muerte muchos de los tuyos, a los que esta apareiada la gloria de Dios et la su folgança que siempre durara. Et por que non dubdes nada en esto que te yo digo ueer medes cras andar y en la lid en un caballo blanco con una senna blanca, et grand espada reluzient en la mano.” 49 PCG, ii, 360, ch. 629: “... et fueron luego entrar en la fazienda et lidiar con los moros. Otrossi el apostol sant Yague fue y luego con ellos, assi como les el prometiera... Los cristianos, quando uieeron a sant Yague, fueron muy esforçados, et fiando en ell ayuda de Dios et dell apostol sant Yague, començaron de ferir en los moros muy de rezio.” 50 PCG, ii, 361, ch. 629: “Et desde aquel dia adelante ouieron et tomaron los cristianos en uso de dezir en las entradas de las faziendas et en los alcanços de los moros sus enemigos mortales, ‘Dios, ayuda, et sant Yague.’” Clavijo is also linked to the founding of the in some versions of the legend. See Michel García, Repertorio de Príncipes de España y obra poética del alcaide Pedro de Escavias (Jaén, 1972), 135: “E después de aquella batalla, quedó por costumbre de decir los cristianos en las peleas. ‘Dios, ayuda a Santiago’. E avn de allí, ovo comienço en España la horden de Santiago.” The Order of Santiago actually traces its origins to Cáceres in the late-twelfth century. On its foundation, see Derek Lomax, La Orden de Santiago (Madrid, 1965), 5-8; and José Luis Martín Rodríguez, Los orígenes de la Orden Militar de Santiago (, 1974).

31 specific ideas of kingship, as well as an apocalyptic understanding of the war against

Islam. The ideology of reconquest bore a certain kind of legitimacy; wars against Islam

were not simple wars of aggression or conquest, but attempts to regain lands that had

once been Christian and were wrongly stolen from the hands of the faithful. Continuity

between the present and an idealized image of the pre-invasion of

Iberia was central to this vision and chroniclers continually sought to present current

dynasties—particularly the kings of León and later those of Castile as well—as the only

lawful continuation of the Visigoth monarchy and as heirs to Pelayo. Thus chronicles

such as the twelfth-century Historia seminense, which offered a particularly detailed

account of the Clavijo story, presented Ramiro I and other rulers in this line of succession

as worthy heirs to the orthodox, learned, and successful kings of the past, permitted by

God to do the just work of rebuilding the kingdom.51 Mauregatus, on the other hand, was

not the legitimate king, but the bastard son of Alfonso I, a slave (possibly a Muslim serf),

and a usurper.52 His ignoble dealings are a warning that subjugation at Muslim hands will

be God’s penalty for permitting illegitimate and degraded rulers.

Santiago was usually depicted astride a white horse, a figure reminiscent of

several biblical images, most notably the celestial rider (usually identified as the second

coming of Christ) of Revelation 19:11-14, “And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white

horse; and he that sat upon him was called faithful and true, and with justice doth he

judge and fight… And the armies that are in heaven followed him on white horses,

51 The World of : Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest, ed. and trans. Simon Barton and Richard Fletcher (Manchester, 2000), 18. 52 Crónica de Alfonso III, ed. Antonio Ubieto Arteta. Textos medievales 3 (Valencia, 1971), 40-1.

32 clothed in fine linen, white and clean.”53 The idea that war with Islam in both Iberia and the East was apocalyptic, representing the final battle between good and evil that presaged the end of the world, was common during this period, though its importance has been disputed.54 In Iberia, this eschatological tradition and its links to Santiago date back to Beatus of Liébana, whose eighth-century Commentary on the Apocalypse, widely

popular in the tenth and eleventh centuries, was one of the first texts to claim that

Santiago had evangelized Iberia.55 Beatus’s Commentary, which brought together a variety of Patristic works to explore the allegorical meanings of the word, did not

explicitly link the sacred text of Revelation to contemporary events. Its popularity,

however, rested on the resonance between its message and the struggles of Iberian

Christians during this period, threatened both internally by doctrinal divisions,

particularly Adoptionism, and externally by Islam.

In providing an acceptable explanation for the existence of heretics and

unbelievers and also guaranteeing the ultimate victory of the faithful, the Commentary

became an inspiration for Christian resistance.56 By the tenth century, the association between Islam and apocalyptic themes was explicit both in anti-Muslim theological treatises and in the illumination of Beatus manuscripts, with the Whore of Babylon

53 Vulgate: “Et vidi cælum apértum, et ecce equus albus, et qui sedébat super eum, vocabátur Fidélis, et Verax, et cum justítia júdicat et pugnat… Et exércitus qui sunt in cælo, sequebántur eum in equis albis, vestíti býssino albo et mundo.” See also Revelation 6:2 describing the first of the four horsemen: “Et vidi: et ecce equus albus, et qui sedébat super illum, habébat arcum, et data est ei coróna, et exívit vincens ut vínceret”; as well as 2 Maccabees 10:29 and 11:8, which tell of divine aid through resplendent horsemen. The heavenly host accompanying the rider is paralleled in some versions of the Clavijo legend, e.g. Escavias, Repertorio de Príncipes, 135: “que por la graçia de nuestro señor Dios e de señor Santiago, que allí con gran compaña de ángeles visiblemente le vieron, fueron los moros vençidos.” 54 Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford, 2006), 12; Paul Alphandéry and Alphonse Dupront, La Chrétienté et l'idée de Croisade, 2 vols. (Paris, 1954), i, 97. 55 Beati in Apocalipsin Libri Duodecim, ed. Henry A. Sanders (Rome, 1930), 116; later edited as Sancti Beati a Liébana Commentarius in Apocalypsin, ed. Eugenio Romero Pose, 2 vols. (Rome, 1985), i, 192. See also Carlos Cid, “Santiago el Mayor en el texto y en las miniaturas de los códices del Beato,” Compostellanum 10 (1965): 231-82. 56 Charles Reginald Dodwell, The Pictorial Arts of the West, 800-1200 (New Haven, 1993), 244-6.

33 depicted beneath Muslim symbols, the Beast colored in the black and green of Islam, or a

Muslim rider representing Herod.57 One of the most lavish of these manuscripts was that

of Fernando I and Queen Sancha, completed in 1047 and shortly thereafter donated to the

monastery of San Isidoro de León, in which the Historia seminense author was likely

writing several decades later. This chronicler, as evidenced by the frequent literary

references throughout the text, was well read and it is no great stretch to imagine that he

had perused Beatus’s work, one of the treasures of their library, and was inspired to link

the second coming of Christ to Spain’s . Although he does not explicitly

mention Beatus or the Book of Revelation, his occasionally prophetic language is

reminiscent of such texts.58 At the same time, some scholars have pointed to descriptions

of celestial riders on white horses in tenth-century French texts as evidence of northern

influences on the Santiago legend without, however, discounting the biblical origin of

such images.59

The iconography of Santiago Matamoros drew heavily on these apocalyptic

themes while also aiming to capture the saint in his dual roles, the pilgrim and evangelist

of Iberia but also miles christi. While primarily a sixteenth-century phenomenon, the

earliest known graphic presentation of a bellicose Santiago on a white horse is the 1326

image in Tumbo B of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (figure 2a).60 In this

illumination, the essential features of the Clavijo legend—the sword, the banner, the

57 John Williams, “Purpose and Imagery in the Apocalypse Commentary of Beatus of Liébana,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Kenneth Emerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, 1992), 229-30; idem, Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination (London, 1977), 20, 77, pl. 19a; Otto Karl Werckmeister, “The Islamic Rider in the Beatus of Girona,” Gesta 36 (1997): 101-106. 58 The World of El Cid, 36 and n. 77. The Fernando I Beatus manuscript is now held by the Biblioteca Nacional, MS Vit 14-2. See also Umberto Eco, Beato di Liébana. Miniature del Beato del Fernando I y Sancha (Codice B.N. Madrid Vit 14-2) (Parma,1973). 59Rodríguez Molina, La Vida de Moros y Cristianos, 179; Fernández Gallardo, “Santiago Matamoros,” 142. 60 Angel Sicart Giménez, Pintura medieval. La miniature (Santiago de Compostela, 1981), 148-51; idem, “La iconografía de Santiago ecuestre en la Edad Media,” Compostellanum 27 (1982): 11-32.

34 white horse—combine with the figures of Muslims lying beneath the hooves and the

posture of both horse and rider to project a sense of forward motion, of charging into

battle. Santiago is here not only a warrior eager to confront the enemies of the faith, but a

leader bearing the standard of Christianity. At the same time, this image is placed below a

more traditional rendering of Santiago seated majestically accompanied by Teodoro and

Atanasio, the disciples who returned his body to Spain, in a reference both to his journey to Iberia and the role of the Camino de Santiago in linking the peoples of northern Iberia.

While this image of Santiago seems to have grown in popularly only slowly, with some

examples from the fifteenth century and many more by the sixteenth, later artists were

remarkably faithful to this initial representation, pointing to stable understandings of the

sacred character of the frontier. In the mid-sixteenth century “Privilegio de Pegalajar,” we find the Apostle presented in far greater detail but with the same essential attributes: the raised sword, the bare feet (figure 2b).61 Indeed, the differences are minimal, the most

striking being that here Santiago Matamoros stands alone without an accompanying

image of Santiago the evangelist. However, the artist did address the dual roles of

Santiago by rendering him barefoot, the traditional hallmark of the pilgrim. One other disparity is noteworthy: whereas the thirteenth-century Santiago is shown in the act of charging into battle, the version painted after the successful completion of the reconquest shows the horse rearing; not in forward motion, but in exultation after a battle won and an enemy dispersed.

The Virgin Mary was a military patron at least as significant as Santiago. While

61 For a detailed analysis of the elements of this image, see María Soledad Lázaro Damas, “Una iconografía de frontera: Santiago Matamoros en el Privilegio de Pegalajar,” Sumuntán. Revista de estudios sobre Sierra Mágina 15 (2001): 51-8. Juana Hidalgo Hogayar lists the known manuscript illuminations depicting Santiago as Matamoros in “La imagen de Santiago ‘Matamoros’ en los manuscritos iluminados,” Cuadernos de arte e iconografía 4 (1991): 340-5.

35 we may have trouble reconciling the notion of a bellicose Mary to the more common

image of her as virgin and mother, medieval Christians had no such difficulty.62 In

addition to performing that role, however, she also fulfilled a deeper need for protection

and security, acting as a guardian against both physical and moral danger. The deep

devotion accorded to Mary had profound implications for the development of frontier

life. Her sanctuaries, located throughout the frontier regions of Iberia, and especially in

Andalusia, acted not only as centers of devotion but also as safe waystations for travelers, centers of commerce and cultural interaction, and as the inspiration for festivals and fairs.

Many of these sanctuaries were created on the sites where statues or images of

Mary, supposedly buried centuries earlier by Christians fleeing the Muslim invasions, were found. The legends of two of the most significant, the Virgen de Guadalupe in

Cáceres and the Virgen de la Cabeza in Andújar, share a number of key features and doubtless inspired a number of other discoveries. In both cases, the statue of Mary was one with a distinguished history.63 The Virgen de Guadalupe was alleged to have been

crafted by the evangelist Luke and later possessed by San Leandro of Seville while the

Virgen de la Cabeza had been given to San Eufrasio, first bishop of Andújar and an early

missionary to Iberia. Both were buried in high and inaccessible places by fleeing priests

in the eighth century and both were discovered by shepherds guided to the correct

location by miraculous apparitions. Finally, shrines built on both sites eventually

developed into major pilgrimage sites.

62 Amy G. Remensnyder, “The Colonization of Sacred Architecture: The Virgin Mary, Mosques, and Temples in Medieval Spain and Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” in Monks and Nuns, and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society. Essays in honor of Lester K. Little, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, 2000), 204-5. 63 Rodríguez Molina, La vida de moros y cristianos, 189-93; Manuel González Jiménez, “La frontera de Granada en las Cantigas de Santa María,” IV Estudios de Frontera, 229-45; Martín Martín, “La frontera como entorno legendario,” 22-5.

36 The Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of songs and poems recounting

miracles performed by the Virgin Mary, were gathered by or at the direction of Alfonso

X el Sabio (1252-1284) over a period comprising much of his reign. The Cantigas

portrayed Mary as the great mediator, one upon whom anyone could call when in need of

the Lord’s intercession. She could take action in a number of ways that ranged from a

direct appearance to a subtle influence on a person’s choices, and the text points often to the miraculous qualities of statues or images of the Virgin, especially their power to safeguard the honor of the Lord and the bodies and souls of His flock. The collection had a number of purposes, and high among them was Alfonso’s stated goal: he “composed this book… for the honor and praise of the Holy Virgin Mary, who is Mother of God, in whom he greatly trusts.”64 The Cantigas, however, also played a more practical role,

serving to advance Alfonso’s political agenda. On one level, this was accomplished by

describing the Virgin’s approval for his acts, such as the renaming and reorganization of

Puerta de Santa María near Cádiz.65 The Cantigas also served, as did many other

hagiographical works, to extol the virtues and proclaim the fame of the Virgin’s

sanctuaries. In this sense, they functioned as an aid to Alfonso’s policy of repopulating

newly-conquered territories by drawing pilgrims and giving prospective settlers a sense

of security: how could one fear to live in lands so abundantly blessed by the Mother of

God?66

64 CSM, i, 54, no. A: “este livro… / fez a onrr’ e a loor / Da Virgen Santa Maria / que éste Madre de Deus, / en que ele muito fia.” English translation from Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Tempe, AZ, 2000), xxv. For the sincerity of Alfonso’s devotion to Mary, see Amy G. Remensnyder, “Marian Monarchy in Thirteenth-Century Castile,” in The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950-1350. Essays in honor of Thomas N. Bisson, ed. Robert Berkhoper III, Alan Cooper, and Kosto (Aldershot, 2005), 253-70. 65 CSM, iii, 159-62, no. 328; Songs of Holy Mary, 398-9. 66 González Jiménez, “La frontera de Granada,” 238; Rodríguez Molina, La vida de moros y cristianos, 189-90.

37 Cantiga 185 illustrates not only the protective powers of a Marian image, but also the dangers of treating with perfidious Muslims, thus offering a concise view of frontier ideology. The episode tells of the great friendship between the Christian alcaide of

Chincoya, a fortress near Jaén, and his Muslim counterpart in Bélmez.67 The Muslim,

hoping to capitalize on this association, promised the king of Granada that he could

capture the Christian leader and take the castle. Accordingly, he attempted to entice the

Christian to leave the safety of his castle by offering a peace treaty. The ruse worked and

he seized the hapless Christian, forcing him to reveal the weakness of Chincoya’s

garrison. A Muslim army soon reached the castle and, rebuffed in their demand for its

surrender, mounted a fierce attack. Fearing for their lives, the defenders “took the statue

of the Mother of the Savior which was in the chapel and put it… on the battlements,

saying, ‘If you are the Mother of God, defend this castle and us, who are your servants,

and protect your chapel so that the infidel Moors will not capture it and burn your statue.’

They left it there, saying: ‘We shall see what you will do.’ ”68

The attackers at once turned back, and three Muslims who had managed to enter

the castle were tossed from the walls, leading the king of Granada to retreat and confess

that “I would consider myself foolish to go against Mary, who defends Her own.”69 This

was no figurative protection; the illumination for this Cantiga (figure 3) depicts Mary’s

image as physically mounted atop the castle and fitting neatly into the scheme of the

battlements, almost as it were a natural extension of the stone walls. The moral of the

67 On this castle, see Juan Antonio López Cordero, “El Castillo de Chincoya en la Bibliografía,” Elucidario 1 (2006): 237-48. 68 CSM, ii, 204-7, no. 185: “que fillaron a omagen | do Madre do Salvador / que estava na capela | desi fórona põer… / Ontr’ as amèas, dizendo: | ‘Se tu es Madre de Deus, / deffend’ aqueste castelo | e a nos, que somos teus, / e guarda a ta capela | que non seja dos encreus / mouros en poder, nen façan | a ta imagen arder.’ / E leixárona dizendo | ‘Veremo-lo que farás.’ ”; Songs of Holy Mary, 221-2. 69 Ibid, “e tèer-m-ia por fol / sse contra Maria fosse, | que os seus defender sol.”

38 song, as professed in its refrain is “Holy Mary has great power to help Her faithful and

keep them from harm wherever they may be.”70 Yet this pious message is clearly not all that the author intended as the political content is quite explicit. The whole sorry situation

could have easily been avoided if only the alcaide of Chincoya had realized that true

peace and friendship with Muslims was not possible, for the enemy saw such overtures

merely as a weakness to be exploited. As the alcaide’s squires warned, “the Moors are

treacherous.”71 Here we see the ideology of conquest confronting the realities of the frontier: while fraternizing with the enemy was an unavoidable aspect of life, Alfonso

counseled caution in such dealings, especially for those tasked with the defense of the

border. Yet the episode did not end in tragedy and this too is central to the political

message. The frontier was safe, despite the best efforts of the Muslims.

The Virgin Mary not only protected newly-conquered territory, but played a

central role in making these lands Christian. The conquest of a town or city offered the

opportunity to conduct a solemn ceremony to convert its mosque into a church suitable

for Christian worship. In this act, the land was made part of Christendom and the victory

dedicated to God, reminding all witnesses that war against Islam was a holy act, blessed

from above. One might expect the Christians to have destroyed these mosques. That they

did not can be attributed to both practical and symbolic reasons.72 On the one hand,

erecting a new church was an expensive and time-consuming business. Neither the

Castilian Church nor its crown could afford major construction programs while in the

70 Ibid, “Poder á Santa Maria | grande d’ os seus acorrer, / en qual logar quer que sejan, | e os de mal defender.” Remensnyder, “Colonization of Sacred Architecture,” 199-200. 71 Ibid, “e com’ os mouros son falssos” 72 On the conversion of mosques, see Julie A. Harris, "Mosque to Church Conversion in the Spanish Reconquest," Medieval Encounters 3 (1997): 158–72; Pascal Buresi, “Les conversions d’églises et de mosques en Espagne aux XIe-XIIIe siècles,” in Religion et société urbaine au Moyen Âge. Études offertes à Jean-Louis Biget par ses élèves, ed. Patrick Boucheron and Jacques Chiffoleau (Paris, 2000), 333-350; Remensnyder, “Colonization of Sacred Architecture,” 189-219.

39 midst of a prolonged and extensive war. Moreover, existing mosques provided not only a

ready-made place to pray, but also a powerful statement of Christian dominance. Many of

the converted mosques were reputed to have originally been Visigothic churches or at least occupied the sites of former churches, and thus their conversion was actually a

that proclaimed the legitimacy of the Christian conquest. That the architecture

of these mosques was not Christian was not only acceptable, but an advantage in that it

permitted the Christians to appropriate the visual language of Islamic forms, for centuries associated in Iberia with power. Even in places where no Christians lived, as in parts of

Valencia, mosques were converted to churches in order to serve as symbols of the new order.73

In all aspects of mosque to church conversion, the Virgin Mary was a central

symbol. A significant number of these newly-consecrated churches were dedicated to her,

more than to any other saint, and the written descriptions of these dedications show the

Virgin’s symbolic power functioning on multiple levels.74 She legitimated the Visigothic

connection. Rarely were documents available to confirm that such-and-such a mosque

stood on the site of a Visigothic church; the structures, moreover, were usually Islamic in

origin. In the absence of earthly evidence, the miraculous discovery of an image of the

Virgin which had been hidden from invading Muslims proved beyond doubt that the

Visigoths had worshipped there. One such story described the appearance of “Nuestra

Señora de la Antigua” in Seville, a Visigothic painting walled over by the Muslims after

they were unable to efface it. When, in 1248, Fernando III captured the city, the wall

73 Harris, “Mosque to Church Conversion,” 167-9; Remensnyder, “Colonization of Sacred Architecture,” 193-4; Burns, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 326. 74 It is difficult to give an exact number of converted mosques dedicated to Mary, but Remensnyder has identified twenty-six instances, which include the cathedrals of Jaén, Córdoba, Murcia, and Seville, “Colonization of Sacred Architecture,” 195, 212-9.

40 spontaneously collapsed to reveal the image and establish the church’s origin.75 She

transformed sacred space. Noting that (1213-1276) described the

conversion of mosques by writing that “we have built (havíem edificada) a church of Our

Lady, Saint Mary” in all conquered cities, Amy Remensnyder has argued that consecration of a structure to Mary was understood as a profound act of transformation, a literal construction of new Christian space.76

Key to this transformation was cleansing the mosque of the taint of Muslim

worship or the “spurcicia Mahometi,” a process that involved cleansing or lustration with

holy water, the ceremonial installation of altars, and was often following by a triumphant

Mass of consecration attended by the ruler. Mary was the embodiment of female purity and often allegorically interpreted as the Church. Her powers were therefore seen to

heighten the efficacy of this cleansing.77 Finally, Mary protected the newly-converted churches. As an image of Mary defended a Christian castle in Cantiga 185, so too did she defend those churches dedicated to her, protecting them from enemies who sought to tear them down.78 This protection extended beyond the physical structure as the Virgin and

her churches formed a spiritual bulwark on the frontier, sheltering the Christians within

from their enemies. For Mary’s perpetual virginity was a symbol for integrity and impregnable space; she was a “closed door” and “a castle which only Christ could

75 Harris, “Mosque to Church Conversion,” 168; José Augusto Sánchez Pérez, El culto mariano en España (Madrid, 1943), 48-9. 76 Remensnyder, “Colonization of Sacred Architecture,” 196; James I of Aragon, Llibre dels feits del rei En Jaume o crònica de Jaume I, in Els Quatre Grans Cròniques, ed. Ferrán Soldevila (Barcelona, 1971), 160, ch. 450. 77 This process is usually presented formulaically in the chronicles. For instance, on the cleansing of the mezquita of Córdoba, Jiménez de Rada, Historia de rebus Hispanie, 206, vi, ch. 24; and 299, viiii, ch. 17: “eliminata spurcicia Mahometi et aqua lustrationis perfusa.” Harris, “Mosque to Church Conversion,” 162-3, notes that the term spurcicia in Biblical usage (specifically Numbers 19:13 and Matthew 23:27) refers to the contamination of dead bodies, suggesting the depth of anti-Muslim polemic at the time. On various allegorical representations of Mary and their relation to mosque conversions, see Remensnyder, “Colonization of Sacred Architecture,” 197-8. 78 CSM, ii, 172-4, 301-2, nos. 169 and 229; Songs of Holy Mary, 204-5, 275.

41 enter.”79 Given all these factors, Remensnyder has concluded that “…installed as the

saintly patron of converted space, Mary symbolically defined and fixed the frontier in

defiance of the realities of the all-too-fluid nature of boundaries between Muslim and

Christian territory and between the Christian Virgin and the Muslim Maryam.”80

********

For proponents of holy war, the frontier was greatly in need of such fixing. The

first half of the thirteenth century produced extensive conquests, reducing the Islamic

presence on the Peninsula to a shadow of its former power and bringing great cities—

Cádiz, Seville, Córdoba, Jaén, Murcia, and Valencia—into the Christian fold. These victories, which were indeed dramatic, created the illusion of total victory over Islam. Yet

the success was not as complete as it might seem. Diplomacy played as great a role as

arms, and the terms of surrender were often extremely lenient by the standards of the

time. Through much of Valencia and Murcia, for instance, treaties of capitulation

recognized local Muslim authorities and laws while many Muslim property owners

retained title to their possessions. The religious infrastructure, notwithstanding those

mosques converted to churches, was partially retained and the victors even permitted a

number of fortifications to remain in Muslim hands. Christian rulers usually interpreted

surrender agreements in quasi-feudal terms, requiring key Muslim leaders to perform

homage and to provide service, which usually consisted of tribute (paria) and/or military

assistance.81 The most significant such agreement was that made between Ferdinand III

79 Remensnyder, “Colonization of Sacred Architecture,” 198-9. 80 Remensnyder, “Colonization of Sacred Architecture,” 206-7. 81 Angus MacKay, . From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 (New York, 1977), 60- 5; O’Callaghan outlines the terms of surrender for a number of locations in the course of describing the campaigns of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Surrender on such benevolent terms was common, but not always the case. The fall of Seville, for instance, came about after a lengthy siege and was followed by a large exodus of its former inhabitants, Reconquest and Crusade, passim.

42 of Castile and Ibn al-Ahmar of Granada in 1246, by which al-Ahmar kissed Fernando’s

hand, became his vassal, and surrendered the city of Jaén.82 In a political sense, this

treaty and the subsequent conquests in eastern Andalusia that it enabled were a coup

beyond measure; for with the fall of Seville in 1248, one could contend that Christian

authority over the whole of the peninsula assured the Reconquest complete. As Fernando

III told his son, “Sir, I leave you all the lands on this side of the sea which the Moors won

from King Roderick of Spain. All this now lies within your power – one part of it

conquered and the other laid under tribute.”83

A pact of vassalage—so pragmatic a solution for a holy war! Yet Muslims and

Christians in Iberia had been finding ways to work around their religious differences for

centuries. By the mid-thirteenth century, Iberia had known two hundred years of

ideologically-fueled warfare which had produced an atmosphere of habitual violence and anxiety. But anti-Muslim rhetoric and open war were not the only features of frontier life, even in its most intense moments. Indeed, Iberian Christians’ “casual disregard for the normal indecencies of Holy War” surprised Crusaders coming from elsewhere in

Europe.84 Iberia had always been a crossroads, the meeting point between Europe and

Africa as well as the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Commerce was the region’s

lifeblood, with the movement of goods, merchants and money never ceasing entirely.

82 PCG, ii, 746, ch. 1070: “ese rey de Granada… para librar sus moros et su tierra de destroymiento, vinose meter derechaminete en su poder del rey don Fernando et en la su merçed, et besol la mano et tornose su uasallo en esta guisa, que feziese del et de su tierra lo que fazer quisiese, et entregol luego Jahen.” 83 PCG, ii, 772-3, ch. 1132: “Ssennor te dexo de toda la tierra de la mar aca, que los moros del rey Rodrigo de Espanna ganado ouieron; et en tu sennorio finca toda: la vna conquerida, la otra tributada.” Translation by MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages, 58-9. 84 Peter Linehan, “At the Spanish Frontier,” in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London and New York, 2001), 39; Francisco García Fitz, “Una frontera caliente. La Guerra en las fronteras castellano-musulmanas (siglos XI-XIII),” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval, ed. Ayala Martínez, Buresi and Josserand, 159-79.

43 Melville’s Father Mapple noted, and no doubt polemicists like Pedro Pascual would have

agreed, that “sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas

Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”85 Even those most invested in Crusade saw

the utility of trade. In 1234, for instance, Pope Clement IX, one tireless advocate of holy war, licensed another, Archbishop of Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, to establish commercial relations between his frontier possessions and those of the Muslims, with only weapons and horses proscribed.86

And this commerce was not the prerogative only of the powerful. The 1229 fuero

of Cáceres, where the Order of Santiago only decades before had been founded, granted

the town a month-long fair to which Christians, Jews, and Muslims were welcome,

explicitly including traders from Muslim lands. The boundary of Christendom was, in

practice, neither a barrier to spiritual contagion nor an ideological wall. It was, as Peter

Linehan has contended, more akin to the public baths found in frontier cities, where

Christians, Muslims, and Jews all shared the same water, but on different days.87

The treaty between Fernando III and Ibn al-Ahmar, confirmed time and again

over the next two centuries, introduced a new element into the political and religious

calculus of frontier relations and combined with a series of military threats to put the

objective of crusade—the removal of the Muslim presence in Iberia and the frontier itself

85 Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Basingstoke, 2004), 85. 86 José Rodríguez Molina, “Relaciones pacíficas en la frontera con el reino de Granada,” in Actas del Congreso ‘La Frontera Oriental Nazarí como Sujeto Histórico (s. XIII-XVI)’: Lorca-Vera, 22 a 24 de noviembre de 1994, ed. Pedro Segura Artero (Almería, 1997), 264. Lucy Pick has argued that the Crusading fervor and anti-Muslim polemics of Jiménez de Rada, author of De rebus Hispaniae, were intended “to stabilize relations between Christians and others by defining the position of each group in relationship with the other,” thus highlighting the paradoxical nature of cross-confessional discourse at this time, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (Ann Arbor, 2004), 3. 87 Buresi, “Nommer,” 74; Linehan, “At the Spanish Frontier,” 40. On the baths, see James F. Powers, “Frontier Municipal Baths and Social Interaction in Thirteenth-century Spain,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 649-67.

44 once and for all—on hold for the time. Christian armies had achieved a string of victories

and taken broad swaths of territory, but their hold on these lands was tenuous at best. The

1260s saw a major Mudéjar revolt in Andalusia and Murcia as well as increased pressure

from Marinids of Morocco, who were joined by Granada (which, despite its status as

Castile’s vassal, played a deft game of war and peace to forestall its neighbors to both

north and south). This campaign nearly resulted in the loss of Murcia and underscored the

fragility of the new order.88 Given a pressing need to secure the new lands now under

Christian control and with papal support waning as events in the Levant monopolized

their attention, the ideology of reconquest became a victim of its own success. While

fighting continued, the great campaigns of the thirteenth century were abandoned as

rulers were diverted first by the need to consolidate and populate their gains and then by a

variety of political crises, stemming both from abroad and from within. With this shift in

priorities came the construction of the frontier as a fixed and stable region, understood at

times as distinct from other Christian lands. For nearly two hundred years, the Christian

cities of Andalusia would remain frontier outposts, sentinels poised on the edge of

Christendom.

The colonization of this region, termed ‘la verdadera Reconquista’ by Jaume

Vicens Vives, proved to be extraordinarily difficult.89 The Christians were, by this time,

quite experienced in the organization and division of conquered lands, and the chroniclers often make the process seem routine, as in this description of the conquest of Jaén: “Once

King Fernando [III] has captured Jaén… he entered it with an impressive procession

comprised of all the clergy. He proceeded directly to the chief mosque, which he named

88 Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Learned King: the Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia, 1993), 181- 97. 89 Jaume Vicens Vives, Manual de historia económica de España, 5th. edn. (Barcelona, 1967), 144.

45 Santa María, and raised an altar in her honor, and mass was sung by don Gutierre, bishop

of Córdoba. He established a seat and bishopric, endowing the church very finely with

towns, castles, and lands. He sent for settlers from all parts, promising great liberties to

anyone who would come and settle. Many came from all across the land, and he ordered

them to divide the towns and lands communally.”90 In some cases, the settlers did indeed

come. But they rarely did so in the anticipated numbers, leading to a perennial dearth of

colonists.

Why did so few come to settle the storied metropolises of sunny Andalusia?

After all, the initial stages of Christian expansion had seen great numbers of northern

Europeans flock to Iberia. Perhaps the sun had something to do with it; the Andalusian

climate is a far cry from that of northern Spain, where the Duero and Ebro valleys might

have seemed akin to home for settlers from the Pyrenees region or France. No less an

authority than the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X notes the significance of this climate on

newcomers, “The frontier of Spain is naturally hot, and animals born there are larger and

of stronger constitution than those which belong to the older country. For which reason,

the infantry… should be physically qualified, accustomed to, and prepared for, exposure

to the open air and the hardships of their calling; for, where they are not of this

description, they cannot long remain healthy, though they be astute and valiant.”91 Or

perhaps it was the diet since, as Linehan jests, “The awesomeness for northerners of the

90 PCG, ii, 746-7, ch. 1071: “Desde ouo el rey don Fernando cobrado Jahen de la guisa que oydo auedes et fue apoderado della, entro y con grant proçesion que fezieron toda la clerecía. Et fue luego derechamiente para la mezquita mayor, que fizo luego poner nonbre Sancta Maria, et fizo y luego altar a onrra de sancta Maria, et cantar mis a don Guiterre, obispo de Cordoua; estableçio y luego siella et obispado, et heredo muy bien la iglesia et diol uillas et castiellos et heredamientos. Desy enbio por pobladores a todas partes, enbiando prometer grandes libertades a quantos y viniesen a poblar; et vinieron y muchas gentes de toda la tierra, et mandoles partir la uilla et los heredamientos a todos muy comunalmente.” 91Partidas, ii, 437, tit. 22, law 7.

46 prospect of eternal olive oil is not to be underestimated.”92 Why the thirteenth-century frontier failed to draw those who might have found more and better opportunities than at home remains uncertain. The implications of this shortfall, however, are easier to understand and they were profound. A sparse Christian population meant the persistence of Muslims under Christian rule and therefore the incomplete Christianization of the frontier (figure 4). Although only a few significant Mudéjar populations remained in

Andalusia after the expulsions prompted by the rebellions of 1264, the numbers were far greater in Valencia and Murcia. Andalusia did not, however, avoid the effects of underpopulation. With many of the native inhabitants removed, vast tracts of formerly- cultivated land lay deserted. The population gap also fed the anxieties of those settlers

who did come, for the lack of soldiers to sufficiently man the towers and castles facing

Granada meant their continual exposure to attack. And attacks might not only come from without; remembering 1264, the Christians of Andalusia had begun to consider the

displaced Muslims among them to be potential threats as well.93

Who were the brave souls willing to endure the climate of the south as well as its many dangers? The repartimiento of Seville, the most attractive destination, offers a glimpse into their varied origins. While the majority of settlers came from northern

Castile and , there were relatively few from the central areas of the peninsula.

From abroad, the largest contingents hailed from Genoa and France, with a scattering of

English and Germans.94 While only a few Mudéjars remained in the city, the Jewish

community of Seville was one of the largest in Iberia and is especially noteworthy as

92 Linehan, “At the Spanish Frontier,” 48. 93 Manual González Jiménez, La repoblación de la zona de Sevilla en el siglo XIV (Seville, 1975), 10-2, 22- 5; Ramón Carande, Sevilla, fortaleza y mercado. Las tierras, las gentes y la administración de la ciudad en el siglo XIV (Seville, 1975), 24. 94 Julio González González, Repartimiento de Sevilla, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1951).

47 there is no evidence for their presence before the Christian conquest.95 They came for the trade. As the Primera Crónica General highlights, Seville was a major port at the center

of both Mediterranean and Atlantic trade routes, serving as a point of transshipment and a

center of export for the goods of Andalusia, notably olive oil: “There is no town so well situated and so level in all the world, this town to which daily come up the river from the sea. Inside its walls, ships, galleys, and other sea-going vessels dock with all types of

goods from all parts of the world: from Tangier, Ceuta, Tunis, Bougie, Alexandria,

Genoa, Portugal, England, Pisa, Lombardy, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Sicily, Gascony,

Catalonia, Aragon, and also from France and many others places across the sea, from

both Christian and Muslim lands.”96 Here, as elsewhere on the frontier, commerce knew no religion.

The challenges of repopulation combined with economic opportunities and military necessities to favor a system of landholding based on large grants of property or donadíos to powerful nobles or to the military orders. While the royal distributions did not exclude small proprietors, these grants established the agrarian economy on the basis of great estates or latifundia and the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the gradual consolidation of smaller parcels into the hands of a few great landholders.97 In addition,

major land grants often included the right of jurisdiction or a señorío over local towns

and villages. Major cities, however, such as Seville or Córdoba remained directly subject

95 MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages, 69. For the case of Córdoba, see John Edwards, Christian Córdoba: the City and its Region in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1982), 6-13. 96 PCG, ii, 769, ch. 1128: “Villa tan bien asentada et tan llanna non la a en el mundo, villa a quien el nauio del mar le viene por el rio todos dias; de las naues et de las galeas et de los otros nauios de la mar, fasta dentro a mos muros, apuertan alli con todos mercadorias de todas partes del mundo: de Taniar, de Çepta, de Tunez, de Bogia, dAlexandria, de Jenua, de Portogal, de Ynglaterra, de Pisa, de Lonbardia, de Burdel, de Bayona, de Cezillia, de Gasconna, de Catalonna, dAragon, et aun de Francia, et de otras muchas partes dallen mar, de tierra de cristianos et de moros.” 97 Antonio Collantes de Terán Sánchez, “Le latifundium sévillan aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Ebauche d’une problématique,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 12 (1976): 101-25.

48 to the Crown and usually received extensive land holdings of their own, though the size

of the municipal tierras had decreased drastically by the fifteenth century as kings

created new señoríos to reward loyal service. This division of land, adopted by Fernando

III and Alfonso X in order to delegate the responsibility for securing and populating large

tracts of land, meant that the majority of the population was, from the beginning,

dependent on a relatively small military elite.98 Alternating periods of peace and war on

the frontier also facilitated the rise of the urban knightly class (caballeros villanos or caballeros de premia), who could both defend against attack and take advantage of economic opportunities. Royal support of the caballeros as a hedge against the increasingly powerful and autonomous frontier nobility gave this group huge influence in urban economies and administrations at a time when they were in decline in the cities of northern Castile and would prove vital to maintaining municipal order and legal institutions. The power of these two groups formed a social dynamic that diverged widely from that of the north and was to have significant implications for the future development of Andalusia.

The organization of frontier space for military purposes and a general policy of royal disengagement from its administration served to accentuate the high nobility’s freedom of action. Confronted by a series of crises in their relations with other Iberian

Christian powers as well as England and France, and forced all too often to deal with vicious factional struggles amongst the nobility that threatened the integrity of the realm,

98 For noble preeminence on the frontier, see Manuel Rojas Gabriel, “En torno al «liderazgo» nobiliario en la frontera occidental granadina durante el siglo XV,” HID 20 (1993): 499-522; idem, La frontera entre los reinos de Sevilla y Granada en el siglo XV (1390-1481). Un ensayo sobre la violencia y sus manifestaciones (Cádiz, 1995), 43-152; idem, “La nobleza como élite militar en la frontera con Granada. Una reflexión,” in Actas del Congreso «La frontera Oriental Nazarí como sujeto histórico (s. XIII-XIV)»: Lorca-Vera, 22 a 24 de noviembre de 1994, ed. Pedro Segura Artero (Almeria, 1997), 181-90; Rafael Sánchez Saus, “Aristocracia y frontera en la Andalucía Medieval,” Estudios de historia y de Arqueología Medievales 11 (1996): 191-215.

49 Castilian kings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries administered the frontier by

proxy. Indeed, it has been suggested that royal power in relations with Granada was

limited to signing treaties, naming deputies, and collecting parias.99

The details of the responsibilities and powers granted to these deputies varied

somewhat over time but they were extensive; in the Partidas, one bearing this office

acted “as the hands of the king.”100 In general, these deputies, who bore titles such

Adelantado Mayor de la Frontera or Capitán Mayor de la Frontera, were responsible for the safety of a particular sector of the frontier but they also held broad judicial and administrative powers. The danger of abuse inherent in such an office was clear to contemporaries and, as early as 1295, the Cortes attempted to ensure that only “men who love justice” be appointed. Yet the offices tended to become the province of particular families who, while rarely rejecting royal interests entirely, often gave priority to local and familial agendas, as did the Farjardo family, whose control over the office of

Adelantado Mayor in the fifteenth century resulted in essentially independent rule in

Murcia.101 And this was not the autonomy of lords secreted in remote fortresses, hoping

to avoid the attention of the king. Indeed Alonso Fajardo, who was at the time

commanding a mixed force of Christians and Muslims devastating the towns and

settlements in the vicinity of Lorca, warned Enrique IV (1454-1474) in unambiguous

terms that he would respond poorly to royal attempts to keep him in line: “And I say to

99 Carriazo, “Un alcalde,” 139. Another line of argument contends that royal neglect of the frontier was the source of noble discontent. From this perspective, the reconquest had acted as a ‘safety-valve’ in focusing the martial energies of the nobility against an external enemy. When, however, the late-medieval kings failed to fulfill their duty of persecuting this war, these energies were directed inward toward civil war and anarchy. See Angus MacKay, “The Ballad and the Frontier,” in Ian Macpherson and Angus MacKay, Love, Religion and Politics in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden, 1998), 8 (Previously published as “The Ballad and the Frontier in Late Medieval Spain,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 53 [1976]: 15-33). 100 Partidas, ii, 324-5, tit. 9, law 22. 101 Joseph F. O'Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, 1983), 445; MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages, 157; Rodríguez Molina, La vida de moros y cristianos, 28-9.

50 you, Your Highness, that of all the people in your lands I am the one who has done the most good and the most evil deeds, and have made myself known in foreign kingdoms and lordships… And you should not goad me so much, sir, since you know that I could surrender castles I hold to the Moors and become a vassal of the king of Granada, and yet still live under Christian law, as others are doing under him.”102

Fajardo’s threat was not exceptional; if we are to believe the accusations of treachery that litter the chronicles of the time, alliances with Granada were far from uncommon. Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, for instance complained bitterly about the perfidy of Diego Fernández de Córdoba, Count of Cabra and owner of vast territories in the Córdoba region, whom he accused not only of passing information to the Muslims but also of actively allying with the king of Granada against fellow Christians.103

Treating with Granada, however, was only one way for a marcher lord to pursue an independent policy. In 1394, for instance, Martín Yáñez de Barbudo, master of Alcántara, ignored a royal truce to invade Granada. Although he enjoyed local support, Yáñez was quickly killed in battle, ending the escapade but forcing Enrique III (1390-1406) to

102 Juan Torres Fontes, Fajardo el Bravo (Murcia, 2001), 228-30: “y digo, muy alto señor, que de buenos hechos y malos yo soi el que él más ha hecho en vuestros reinos y me he hecho conocidos por reinos y señorios estraños… Y no debéis señor aquejarme tanto, pues sabeis que podria dar los castillos que tengo á los moros y ser vasallo del rey de Granada y vivir en mi ley de cristiano como otros hacen con él.” Rodríguez Molina, La vida de moros y cristianos, 15. On the Fajardo family, see María de los Llanos Martínez Carrillo, Manueles y Fajardos: la crisis bajomedieval en Murcia (Murcia, 1985); Juan Manuel Moyano Martínez, “Familia y poder político en la Murcia bajomedieval (siglos XIV y XV) MMM 27 (1992): 9-41. 103 Hechos del condestable don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (Crónica del siglo XV), edición y estudio, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 3 (Madrid, 1940), 434: “… avía sabido y era çertificado quel conde de Cabra y Martín Alonso de Montemayor, su yerno, estauan confederados y conçertados con el dicho rey de Granada para meter los moros a facer todo mal y daño a la çibdad de Jahén e a su tierra, e las villas e lugares de los dichos señores Condestable e don Alonso.” See also pp. 441-3, 464-7. There is also a more recent edition titled Relación de los hechos del muy magnífico e más virtuoso señor, el señor don Miguel Lucas, muy digno condestable de Castilla, ed. Juan Cuevas Mata, Juan del Arco Moya, and José del Arco Moya (Jaén, 2001), 355, 360-2, 380-3.

51 apologize to the Nasrid Sultan Muhammad VII (1392-1408).104

The result was a frontier divided into four relatively autonomous sectors (the

reinos of Seville, Córdoba, Jaén, and Murcia), each organized by a complex defensive

system based on the principle of a forward line of fortifications, the banda fronteriza or

banda morisca, supported by the larger cities and towns to the north.105 The capitals of

each reino, located in the fertile valleys of the Guadalquivir and Segura valleys, as well as Jerez, Baeza, Ubeda and a few other centers of population, were responsible for provisioning less fertile and more dangerous areas in direct contact with Muslims. In

1361, for instance, Pedro I (1350-1369) ordered the concejo or municipal council of

Baeza to provide “mis villas e castiellos fronteros” with five hundred cahices of wheat each year.106 As administrative centers, these cities often housed the key military

authorities (although such leaders usually joined the army in times of war) and oversaw

the civil government of outlying areas. Between these centers of production and Granada were two lines of fortifications, the nearer consisting of a number of fortified towns, often controlled by one of the military orders. The outermost band of territory was defended by a network of small towers and castles. Intended as the first line of resistance in case of invasion, they also served, in times of truce, to guard and control the roads and passes connecting the sectors to each other as well as to Granada.107 All of these strips of

104 Pero López de Ayala, Crónica del rey don Enrique, tercero de Castilla é de León, ed.Cayetano Rosell, BAE 68 (Madrid, 1953), 221-4; Leonard Patrick Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (Chicago, 1992), 223-7. 105 González, Repartimiento, i, 42-6, 53; Manuel García Fernández, El reino de Sevilla en tiempos de Alfonso XI (1312-1350) (Seville, 1989), 44-7. 106 Colección Diplomática de Baeza (siglos XIII-XV), ed. José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 1983), 200-1, doc. 76. A cahiz is roughly equivalent to twelve English bushels. 107 For details on the organization and functions of such networks, see Carmen Argente del Castillo Ocaña, “Factores condicionantes del sistema defensivo fronterizo en el Reino de Jaén,” in V Estudios de Frontera. Funciones de la red castral fronteriza: homenaje a Don Juan Torres Fontes: Congreso celebrado en Alcalá la Real en noviembre de 2003, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén,

52 territory were considered to be of the frontier, and jealously guarded that status as a

source of municipal privileges. But there was a hierarchy of ‘frontierness’, determined

according to distance from the enemy and acknowledged in documents which might refer

to such-and-such a place as “más frontera” or “muy frontera.”108 Such designations were

not merely semantic; they defined a town’s purpose as well as its right to provisions from

the hinterland. The organization of Andalusia and Murcia into relatively self-sufficient

sectors, imposed in part by the ruggedness of the countryside and exacerbated by royal

neglect, gave the frontier a fragmented and local character and enhanced the autonomy of the nobility. This independence, in turn, meant that the various sectors of the frontier acted in unison toward Granada only when directly orchestrated by the king, a rare occurrence.

********

That trade and other peaceful contacts between Christians, Jews, and Muslims on the frontier brought about significant and lasting cultural change has long been acknowledged. To detail the varied effects of this mingling, which impacted all aspects of society, would require far more space than is possible here. If one example can suffice to describe the breadth and depth of this cultural transmission, it is the linguistic impact of

Arabic. Many hundreds of Castilian terms bear Arabic origins and only Latin has had more influence on the language. This linguistic borrowing, much of which occurred during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, outlined those areas of knowledge in which the Christians found much to learn and value in Muslim society. In particular, we find

many adopted terms related to practical fields such as warfare, irrigation, and

2004), 37-55; and Ricardo Córdoba de la Llave, “El sistema castral fronterizo en la provincia de Córdoba (1240-1400),” in Funciones de la red castral, 109-24. 108 Rodríguez Molina includes several examples of such references, La vida de moros y cristianos, 29-30.

53 construction as well as words describing aspects of urban life, including markets and their

regulation and the names of key offices. It is not simply the words themselves that are significant; it is that the objects and ideas to which they referred were new.109

Such cultural contact was not limited to the frontier, of course; it took place

wherever peoples of different cultures lived or traded together. On the frontier, however,

the proximity of Muslims outside the jurisdiction of Christian rulers added another

dimension and complicated the picture of holy war which dominated so many of the

chronicles and official documents. Of particular relevance to those living on the frontier

were the numerous institutions developed to govern both hostile and peaceful trans-

frontier contacts. Because they could only function if adhered to by authorities on both

sides of the boundary, these institutions were forged in the course of official truce

negotiations between Castile and Granada, which took place on a fairly regular basis.110

While the emphasis usually lay on trade regulation with details of customs duties and the

like laid out in painstaking detail, care was also taken within such dealings to make

mutually acceptable arrangements for the administration of frontier law and the peaceful

resolution of local conflicts. Common to all the extant truces, in fact, are provisions to

regularize the exchange of captives, to safeguard merchants and their property, and to

prevent reprisal warfare through the peaceful settlement of trans-frontier disputes. To

perform the latter function, the office of alcalde entre los cristianos y los moros

(sometimes known as juez de las querellas) was created. These officials were responsible

109 MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages, 89-90. For a detailed example of such linguistic change, see Thomas Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, 1970), esp. chap 12, “The Impact of Islam upon the Terminology of Irrigation,” 217-29. 110 José Enriquez López de Coca Castañer has identified eleven truces between 1406 and 1481 for which published editions are available, “Castilian-Granadan Frontier Institutions,” 133, n. 15. This list does not include truces that have not yet been edited, those for which the documentation has been lost, or agreements that did not involve royal representatives.

54 for settling trans-frontier lawsuits and quarrels and had the authority to prosecute

offenders as well as pass sentence. These truces also protected the professional

ransomers, or alfaqueques, ensuring their ability to move with relative freedom on both

sides of the border and establishing procedures for the payment of ransoms and the return of captives.111

In practice, however, royal attempts at local peacekeeping such as the alcaldes

were ineffective; a circumstance López de Coca Castañer has suggested was inherent to

the frontier, where the creation of local solutions and modes of behavior was a reasonable

adaptation to the proximity of those across the frontier and the distance of central

authority. The interest of local authorities in stability was therefore the determining factor

in the success of interventions intended to prevent violence from escalating. Perhaps the

most effective of these local responses were the expert scouts known as rastreros or fieles

del rastro, employed by municipal authorities or aggrieved individuals and responsible

for determining the perpetrators of a crime. The rastreros operated in cooperation with

their counterparts from other municipalities on both sides of the border to follow a trail

from one jurisdiction to another and then reported their findings to the relevant local

authorities for action.112 Their spirit of cooperation was strong enough to permit several

rasteros of Jaén to conclude that the killing of a Christian by a group of Muslims

retaliating for an earlier murder was justified as no suitable reparations had been made, a

decision ratified by the town’s council.113

111 The role of alfaqueque was not a new one; indeed, their duties were defined in the law code of Alfonso X: Partidas, ii, 524-6, tit. 30, laws. 1-3. 112 López de Coca Castañer, “Castilian-Granadan Frontier Institutions,” 146-9; Juan de Mata Carriazo, “Relaciones fronterizas entre Jaén y Granada. El año 1479,” in En la frontera de Granada, 269-70. 113 AMJ, AC 1479, ff. 127r, 134v, 147v. Juan de Mata Carriazo, “Los moros de Granada en las actas del concejo de Jaén de 1479,” in En la frontera de Granada, 285-6, 295-6; MacKay, “The Ballad and the Frontier,” 15-7.

55 Such collaboration went beyond the bounds of criminal prosecution to encompass

the gamut of situations that arose between two communities who lived in close proximity

but maintained a great degree of separation. In a complaint sent to the concejo (municipal

council) of Jaén by the Muslim authorities of Cambil we can perceive both the

propinquity of Muslim and Christian populations and the prevailing attitude of

neighborly cooperation: “A Moor was coming from Granada to Cambil and mistook his

way near Torre el Galín, and he left the road and took a path thinking it led to Cambil but then showed up in Huelma where he is evidently being held by the alcaide [military governor]. Mahomad Lentín, alcaide of Cambil, has written to the alcaide of Huelma about this said Moor, but he has received no answer. And because many Christians going to Huelma get lost and find themselves in Cambil, and the alcaides of Cambil give them

Moors to show them the way to Huelma and do not take them for criminals, those of

Huelma should do the same, and if this Moor took the wrong road, the alcaide should have shown him the correct one, for this is what neighbors do.”114

Tornadizos (those who had converted from Islam to Christianity or vice versa)

and elches (used primarily to refer to Christian apostates) posed a more difficult problem,

as they directly challenged ideas of fixed religious identity. Yet here too frontier

authorities, at least at times, approached the issue in a cooperative manner. During an

exchange of captives in 1479, for instance, the authorities of Muslim Colomera requested

assistance from Christian Jaén in their attempts to persuade a young shepherd named

114 AMJ, AC 1479, f. 2v: “Otrosí que venía vn moro gasí de Granada a Canbil e viniendo que erró el camino de aquel cabo de la Torre el Galín, e dexó el camino e echó por vna senda pensando que venía a Canbil, e aportó a Huelma, e lo tiene de magnifiesto el alcalde de Huelma. E quel alcalde de Canbil Mahomed Lentín le ha escripto sobre ello al alcalde de Huelma que lo de el dicho moro, e que nunca le ha rrespondido. E porque muchas veces xistianos van a Huelma e yerran el camino e se van a Canbil, e los alcaydes de Canbil dan moros que les muestran el camino de Huelma e no los tomo por perdidos, que así avrán de faser los de Huelma; e el alcayde si erró el camino el moro ge lo deviera mostrar, que para esto es la vecindad.”

56 Pedro, who had converted and wished to remain in Granadan lands, to return home.

According to their envoys, “The alcaide and concejo of Colomera have sent us to you, gentlemen, with this message: ‘We have received the two Moors you sent to us, and in turn sent you your three Christians, but you should know, honorable concejo and knights,

that one young man has become a Muslim. This caused us much regret and we asked that

he go with his companions but he did not wish to. We ask that you send his mother and

relatives here to Colomera and persuade the youth to return with them, and we will let

him go.”115

Conversions by captives were infrequent but not unknown, with several such incidents recorded in concejo records. About a month after Pedro balked at the idea of

returning home, jurado (parish representative to the concejo) Martín de Espinosa reported

to his fellows regarding a journey to Granada he had made with the aim of securing the

release of a number of captives, many of whom professed to have converted. Espinosa’s

account of his interviews with these hostages conveys both a distrust of conversion

claims and a sense of religious fluidity. In one instance, he refused to accept the word of

the Granadan authorities regarding a young man, instead requesting a private interview.

But the youth insisted repeatedly that he was of an age to make the decision, and that he

was indeed a Muslim. Regarding another putative captive, of whom Espinosa wrote, “She

had been abducted by people from Cambil, converted to Islam, and is a Christian,” the

Muslims were constrained to protest that she had crossed the border willingly, had

115 AMJ, AC 1479, f. 101r: “El alcayde e conçejo de Colomera nos encomendamos en vosotros, señores: Reçebimos los dos moros nuestros que vosotros nos enbiastes, e luego vos enbiamos los tres xistianos vuestro; e sabed, honrrado conçejo e caualleros, quel vn moço se tornó moro, e nosotros ovimos mucho pesar dello, e le deximos que fuese con sus compañeros e no quiso. Mandad que venga su madre e parientes aquí a Colomera e trabajen con el moço para que se vaya con ellos, y nosotros lo dexaremos yr.”

57 rejected prior offers of redemption, and moreover had an active love life in Granada.116

The aftermath of Espinosa’s journey was a flurry of letters alternately making claims and offering compromises as both sides sought to bring the affair to a suitable end while saving face. The problem was not limited to the Jaén region. In 1472, for instance, Juan de Ubeda, adalid (garrison commander) of Lorca, converted to Islam, leading the governor of the Murcia region, Pedro Fajardo, to spend significant time and money attempting to convince him to return.117 Each of these examples demonstrates the lengths to which authorities would go in order to reach reasonable settlements and to tolerate, if not respect, individual religious choice, offering a counterpoint to the common narrative of forced conversions and harsh treatment of apostates.

All of these various mechanisms for keeping the peace have been ably described and analyzed elsewhere and no more is required here save to emphasize their most significant impact on frontier life.118 Their very existence demonstrates the pervasiveness of cattle rustling, kidnapping, theft, and murder across the frontier and they ultimately failed to prevent such violence, but these institutions enabled hostile interactions to take place within a mutually understood set of customs and rules; in short, they lent restraint

116 AMJ, AC 1479, ff. 137r-139r: “fue tomada por los de Canbil, e se tornó mora, y es xistiana.” Carriazo, “Los moros de Granada,” 288-91. 117 Juan Torres Fontes, “La frontera de Granada en el siglo XV y sus repercusiones en Murcia y Orihuela: los cautivos,” in Homenaje a Don José María Lacarra de Miguel, 5 vols. (Zaragoza, 1977), iv, 197. Juan Francisco Jiménez Alcázar cites several other examples of religious ‘renegades’ in the Murcia region in “El hombre y la frontera,” 83-4. 118 In addition to the works cited in the previous paragraphs, see José Enriquez López de Coca Castañer’s “Esclavos, alfaqueques y mercaderes en la frontera del mar de Alborán, 1490-1516,” 38 (1978): 275-300, as well as Juan Torres Fontes, “El alcalde entre moros y cristianos del reino de Murcia,” Hispania 20 (1960): 55-80; idem, “Notas sobre los fieles del rastro y alfaqueques murcianos,” Miscelánea de estudios árabes y hebraicos 10 (1961): 89-105; idem, “Los alfaqueques castellanos en la frontera de Granada,” in Homenaje a don Agustín Millares Carlo, 2 vols. (Las Palmas, 1975), ii, 99-116; José García Antón, “La tolerancia religiosa en la frontera de Murcia y Granada en los últimos tiempos del reino nazarí,” Murgetana 57 (1980): 133-43; and idem, “Cautiverios, canjes y rescates en la frontera entre Lorca y Vera en los últimos tiempos nazaríes,” in Homenaje al profesor Juan Torres Fontes, 2 vols. (Murcia, 1987), i, 547-59.

58 to a tense and often chaotic situation without attempting to impose peace on the region.

Although some of the methods, such as the office of alcalde entre los cristianos y los moros, were new, this approach was not a fifteenth-century innovation. As María

Martínez has shown, even the cabalgada (large-scale cavalry raid into Muslim territory) was closely regulated from the thirteenth century onward through ordinances that not only stipulated who could take part and the permitted methods for dividing the proceeds of the foray, but also required indemnities for those injured or killed. Such oversight shaped the development of the cabalgada as neither ideological nor wanton. It was a

“risky but profitable means of making a living” rather than an expression of holy war.119

Late medieval frontier ballads similarly present frontier hostilities as taking place in an atmosphere governed by custom and restraint. But though the ballads emphasize the familiarity and friendliness of interactions between Christians and Muslims, this intimacy is linked to a message of Christian dominance. The Romance de Abenámar, set in the

1430s, imagines Juan II as suggesting an alternative to ceaseless war when he proposes marriage to the city of Granada, even offering a substantial dowry: “If it pleased you,

Granada, I would marry you; and will give you in dowry Córdoba and Seville.” But such a solution is impossible, as Granada must respond, “I am married, King Don Juan, I am married and not a widow; the Moor to whom I belong loves me very well.”120 In the

Romance de Fajardo, the Murcian magnate Pedro Fajardo plays a high-stakes game of

chess with the King of Granada, with Fajardo betting the city of Lorca and the King that

of Almería. Despite the wagers, the poet depicts the players as close friends, referring to

119 María Martínez Martínez, “La cabalgada: un medio de vida en la frontera murciano-granadina (siglo XIII),” Miscelánea medieval murciana 13 (1986), 50. 120 Spanish Ballads, ed. Colin Smith (Oxford, 1964), 125-7: “Si tú quisieses, Granada, / contigo me casaría; / daréte en arras y dote / a Córdoba y a Sevilla / Casada soy, rey don Juan, / casada soy, que no viuda; / el moro que a mi me tiene / muy grande bien me quería.”

59 “the love the king had for Fajardo.” Yet when Fajardo loses the game, he refuses to honor

the agreement, saying instead, “Oh be quiet, sir king, don’t be so annoying. Although you

won the city from me, it won’t surrender to you. I have knights there who will defend it against you.”121

Angus MacKay concludes from his study of these and other ballads that they

describe an ideal of “acculturation without assimilation,” a sense of camaraderie that,

while significant, was unable to overcome religious and political differences.122 But

Muslims and Christians are not equals in the ballads. Granada is presented as female,

submissive and passive, who will be taken when she is ‘widowed.’ The Muslim king of

the Romance de Fajardo is conciliatory in the face of Fajardo’s brusque refusal to honor

his wager and takes care not to give offense by pressing the matter: “Let’s not play

anymore, Fajardo, nor argue further, for you are such a good that all the world

fears you.”123 In fact, the language of the entire dialogue emphasizes Muslim submissiveness and desire for peace, while Fajardo’s words are consistently aggressive, militant, and threatening, a pattern of speech consistent with contemporary expectations for interactions between meek women and dominant men. The ballad tradition, therefore, acknowledges the importance of peaceful relations, but ascribes to Muslims the emasculating role of losing face to maintain such ties, while Christian knights are free to comport themselves in a socially-appropriate belligerent manner. Finally, the Romance de

Fajardo accurately outlines the conditions under which the fragile peace could be preserved. Muslims are permitted to win in games of war, as indeed they often did on

121 Ibid, 133-4: “… con amor que le tenía…Calles, calles, señor rey, no tomes la tal porfía; / que aunque me la ganases, / ella no se te daría; / caballeros tengo dentro / que te la defenderían.” 122 MacKay, “The Ballad and the Frontier,” 14-5. 123 Spanish Ballads, 133: “No juguemos más Fajardo, / ni tengamos más porfia, / que sois tan buen caballero / que todo el mundo os temía.” See the detailed analysis of the language of this ballad in Louise Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile (Ann Arbor, 1996), 55-9.

60 raids and in frontier skirmishes, but Christians will not tolerate significant Muslim

victories. The potential loss of a Christian city meant an end to the pretense of harmony

and restraint.

If chronicles, legends, and romances composed for noble audiences functioned as

ideological tools intended to present a specific image of Islam, then it should come as no

surprise that they tended to describe only those interactions that accorded with this

agenda. In a similar sense, official reports and requests to the court composed by municipal concejos painted the frontier in terms of blood and violence while exaggerating

the malice of neighboring Muslims in order to defend privileges gained by virtue of their

location.124 From the discrepancy between the official portrayal of frontier life and the

extensive evidence for pervasive and meaningful peaceful interaction, José Rodríguez

Molina has suggested that there were two distinct frontiers: the perilous borderlands of

separation and hostility emphasized in official and literary accounts and the natural

reality of communication, cultural transfer, and trade. But he contends that this

dichotomy was an illusion, that the idea of a frontier centered on religious animosity in

which true convivencia was impossible was the invention of later authors who magnified

hints that appeared in wartime propaganda to interpret the frontier through a lens colored

by captives, martyrs, and despoiled virgins. For Rodríguez Molina, the complexity of

frontier life requires an explanation that does not rely on religious strife. Instead, he

proposes that most frontier hostilities arose from neighborly contacts and economic

competition, as could and did happen amongst co-religionists, or from Castile’s need to

124 For examples, see Ana Belén Paniagua Lourtou, “Consideraciones sobre la imagen de los musulmanes en la Gran Crónica de Alfonso XI,” in IV Estudios de Frontera. Historia, tradiciones, y leyendas en la frontera. Homenaje a Don Enrique Toral y Peñaranda: Congreso celebrado en Alcalá la Real en noviembre de 2001, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 2002), 417-29; and Manuel Pérez Gallego, “La leyenda de la frontera antequerana: personajes y ficciones (1440-1476),” in IV Estudios de Frontera, 431-45.

61 enforce the terms of Granada’s vassalage, in particular the prompt payment of parias

(tribute). Conflict plays a role in this conception of the frontier but in a form less aggressive and absolute than holy war. Rather, it was conducted through raids and dubious commercial practices, all within a structured and agreed-upon system of competition.125

Rodríguez Molina’s view of frontier life has much to recommend it, not least that it allows us to consider discord between Christians and Muslims without according it an exclusive character and to see those who fought on the frontier as they lived most of their lives, as workers, artisans, shepherds, or merchants: people who hoped to trade, make a living, and co-exist in relative peace. Yet, in referring to peaceful convivencia as the

“inevitable and natural” result of close contact between Christians, Muslims, and Jews, he minimizes the power of what he calls the “imagined” frontier. The clash of ideologies may indeed have been “imagined” insofar as it was not inevitable, but we should remember that ideologies, no matter how divorced from or rooted in existing social conditions, have a tendency of creating their own reality. Written denunciations of Islam or descriptions of miracles certainly functioned as propaganda in the sense that they served a particular agenda. But the written word was not, at the time, an effective tool for swaying the masses. Rather, the chroniclers intended to bolster the faith of an elite audience that already believed in the message, to remind them of the importance of and the divine support behind their holy mission in times of doubt and to give a narrative structure to events. We should be wary of overly cynical readings of the sources. That the

Cantigas of Alfonso X, for instance, were intended to support his policy of repopulation in no way implies that they lacked sincerity. On the contrary, the king’s devotion to Mary

125 José Rodríguez Molina, La vida de moros y cristianos en la frontera (Jaén, 2007), 11-3, 16-9.

62 was a constant feature of his reign and central to his notion of royal power.126

In a similar sense, modern skepticism regarding the heavenly apparitions that appeared time and again in the chronicles is misplaced. Critics have interpreted these as tales invented by those seeking to give comfort and security to the people, anecdotes that came to be repeated by others until given immortality by credulous chroniclers or as collective hallucinations induced by the stress of constant danger. Or, more simply, they have been dismissed as a product of medieval mentalities alien to us, of Burckhardt’s veil

“woven of faith, illusion, and childlike prepossession, through which the world and human society were seen clad in strange hues.”127 Such objections miss the point.

Whether it was God’s will that Christians should rule the whole of Iberia or whether

Santiago Matamoros indeed appeared on the field of battle to rally the faithful matters less than the fact that significant numbers of medieval Christians believed such things to be true and acted accordingly. Their beliefs played no small role in these victories. Faith is neither an invention nor an illusion, but a powerful and tangible social force.

********

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the great victories were deep in the past and there had been very few sustained campaigns for two centuries. For many scholars, the long periods of truce (between 1350 and 1460, for instance, there were eighty-five years of truce and only twenty-five of declared war) and various forms of acculturation have bolstered the idea that the frontier in this period was essentially open. As MacKay has suggested, “at times it would almost seem as if the frontier had in some ways ceased

126 Amy Remensnyder, “Marian Monarchy in Thirteenth-Century Castile,” in The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950-1350. Essays in honor of Thomas N. Bisson, ed. Robert Berkhoper III, Alan Cooper, and Adam Kosto (Aldershot, 2005), passim. 127 Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. Middlemore (London, 1990), 98.

63 to exist.”128 For many of the frontier nobility, however, the ideology of reconquest

remained as strong as ever despite centuries of close contact with Islam, with war against

Muslims as a sacred duty and truces with the enemy as ignoble devices that merely

delayed the inevitable. Raised in a culture that cherished the mythology of the reconquest and in which historical education centered on the great epics, these nobles sought to live

up to the ideal of their ancestors and the great heroes of the past, especially Fernán

González and the Cid.129 To do so required that they insert themselves into the grand narrative of Iberia’s recovery from the Muslims. This narrative was based on faith and

divine intervention, on the same beliefs that underlay the legend of Clavijo: that God will

help those with the courage to fight Muslims rather than accept dishonorable peace.

Such aspirations were particularly appealing in fifteenth-century Castile, where

the political landscape was a morass of factional fighting and competing ambitions in

which there was no strong ruler able to unite all in a holy purpose. And so the Constable

of Castile, Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, wrote to Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484) on 15

October 1471 with both despair and hope: “Most blessed Father, to whom except your

Holiness can we Christians, your most faithful children, appeal? To whom shall we go

when my lord the king cannot come because of his labors and duties and when his

knights are even less willing, with some of them more hostile to us than to the very

enemies of Christ? No longer will Charlemagne, who used to [fight the Muslims], come,

nor Godfrey de Bouillon who dared to, nor our most holy kings who won this land, for

they are held by death.”130 The Constable directed his appeal to the Pope because, as he

128 Angus MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Bartlett and MacKay, 217, 222. 129 On frontier lineage education, see MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology,” 232-8. 130 Hechos del Condestable don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, edición y estudio, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo.

64 put it earlier in the letter, the fight against Islam was a holy exercise (santo exerçiçio) which required papal authority for success. Although Miguel Lucas and his followers were willing to offer “all our possessions, our wives, our children, our freedom, our homeland, and in the end, our lives,” only a pope could offer the plenary indulgences that might inspire other Christians to join their struggle or at least make a small contribution

(vn poco dinero) to the cause.131

Don Rodrigo Ponce de León, marquis of Cádiz, petitioned a yet higher power, the

Virgin Mary. In 1462, as a young man burning to prove himself in battle with Muslims, he spent time each day praying before an image of the Virgin. On one of these occasions,

“Our Lady the Virgin Mary appeared visibly before him, and said to him, ‘Oh good knight, my devout follower, know for certain that my beloved son Jesus Christ and I have received your prayers and, as they have been so constant and expressed such a pure and heartfelt desire, we promise that you will be victorious in any battles against the Moors in which you find yourself’.”132 Just as in the thirteenth century, Mary appears here in a

manner that combines her well-known role as nurturer with a martial aspect; as one

scholar has noted, for Ponce de León, Mary was “the mother of battle.”133

Colección de Crónicas Españolas 3 (Madrid, 1940), 474: “Pues ¿a quién reclamaremos, ¡O muy bienaventurado Padre!, nosotros los cristianos, vuestros fidelísimos fijos, saluo a Vuestra Santidad? ¿A quién yremos, que ya el rey mi señor no puede, segúnd sus trabajos y necesidades; sus caualleros mucho menos quieren, ante ay algunos que nos son más contrarios que los mismos enemigos de Cristo? Ya Carlos el Grande, que solía, Godofré de Bullón, que osaua, nuestros muy santos reyes que ganaron esta tierra, ocupados por la muerte, no vienen.” 131 Hechos del condestable, 471, 474-5: “ponemos todas las faciendas, las mugeres, los fijos, los parientes, la libertad, la patria, y a la postre, las vidas.” 132 Historia de los hechos del Marqués de Cádiz, ed. Juan Luis Carriazo Rubio (Granada, 2003), 159: “le apareçío nuestra Sennora la Virgen María visiblemente, e le dijo: “¡O, buen caballero, devoto mio, sepas por çierto que mi amado fijo Iesu Christo e yo avemos resçebido tu oraçión, y por ser fecha tan continua y con tan lynpio deseo de coraçón, te otorgamos que en todas quantas batallas de moros te fallares, serás vençedor!” 133 Amy Remensnyder, “The Colonization of Sacred Architecture: The Virgin Mary, Mosques, and Temples in Medieval Spain and Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society. Essays in honor of Lester K. Little, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara

65 With their talk of Crusade indulgences and miraculous visitations, Miguel Lucas

and Ponce de León quite deliberately evoked an imagined ethos of the thirteenth century

in which uncompromising faith had led to great victories. They brought to battle with

Muslims a brutality born of a certainty that theirs was a righteous task, and their actions

belie the notion that secular motives such as economic competition lay at the root of

trans-frontier squabbles. For its participants, the frontier skirmishes of the mid-fifteenth

century were as holy as had been the great campaigns of Fernando III and James the

Conqueror. About a year before the Constable’s letter to the pope, for instance, a troop of

his soldiers patrolling near Jaén came upon a smaller group of almogávares (Muslim

raiders). After a brief scuffle in which two of the Muslims were killed and two captured,

the Christian band returned to Jaén with their captives and the severed heads of the slain.

They sent a report of the encounter, along with the heads, to Miguel Lucas, who was in

the nearby town of Andújar. “And when he saw them [the heads] and heard the tidings,

he was pleased and ordered that each of them be impaled on a raised lance, and so they were borne into Andújar. There all the children of the town dragged them through the

streets, and then they left them for the dogs to eat.”134 The soldiers of Rodrigo Ponce de

León showed a similar disdain for the enemy in 1487. After defeating a significant

Muslim force near Málaga and killing three hundred twenty Muslims in battle, his

deputies executed all the Muslim wounded, about eighty in number, “because Don Diego

[Rodrigo’s brother] and Don Alonso [his cousin] had vowed that, should God grant them

a victory, they would take no one alive.” All four hundred bodies were then decapitated

H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, 2000), 205. 134 Hechos del condestable, 417-8: “E como las vido e supo la nueua, ovo plaçer, y mandólas poner en sendas lanças enfiestas, e así las metieron por Andujar. Do todos los muchachos de aquella çibdad las troxieron arrastrando por las calles della, y después las dexaron comer a los perros.” Relación de los hechos, 342.

66 and the heads borne on lances for a triumphal entry into the royal camp where, we are

assured, all “greatly enjoyed the sight.”135 Such mutilations of slain enemies were common, though rarely on such a large scale. Raiding parties would often return with severed heads or ears as grisly souvenirs of their successes, and almogávares typically received the harshest treatment of all. Indeed, the practice was even institutionalized at times. In the mid-1430s, for example, the concejo of Murcia paid bounties of 100 maravedíes each for the heads of Muslim raiders in the hope of inspiring vigilance against incursions.136

Despite their complicity in such atrocities, Miguel Lucas and Ponce de León were

no simple bigots with a one-dimensional understanding of Islam. Indeed, the evidence

strongly suggests that the frontier nobility had extensive and personal dealings with

Muslims, could respect them as noble and brave opponents, and even admired their

culture. The ability to work effectively with Granadans of all descriptions was essential to

military success on the frontier, as both the episodes described above illustrate. The

Muslims almogávares whose heads were sent to the Constable had been accompanying a

man named Juan, described as a “Moor who had converted to Christianity (vn cristiano

tornadizo morisco).” This man, who had been residing in the Constable's home, was

returning to Granada in order to collect information for Miguel Lucas under the pretense that he wanted to return home and again live as a Muslim.137 Ponce de León, meanwhile,

owed his 1487 victory to information brought to him by a Muslim knight wishing to

convert. Although initially Ponce de León harbored doubts about this information,

135 Historia de los hechos del Marqués, 265-6: “porque don Diego e don Alonso avían fecho voto, dándoles Dios victoria, de no tomar ninguno a vida.” “Toda la gente… gozáuanse mucho en lo ver.” 136 Archivo Municipal de Murcia, Actas capitulares 1434-1435, Saturday, 29 January 1435, f. 49v. 137 Hechos del condestable, 417.

67 wondering if it was an attempt to lead his men into an ambush, he eventually concluded

that it must be reliable, as the Muslim who brought it was “such a strong knight

(cauallero tan esforçado).”138 While one might dismiss such stories as ruses de guerre

that imply no sincere rapport with Muslims, the point is not that these were the only times

that Miguel Lucas or Ponce de León interacted with Muslims but rather that such contact

was so customary that it played a role even in instances of savagery. These anecdotes also

suggest that religious boundaries were not nearly as absolute as might be expected. The

same Murcian concejo that paid bounties for Muslim heads in 1435 not only regularly dealt with complications arising from conversions but also conducted business with local

Muslims that ranged from providing space within the city for their worship to contracting them as skilled masons and artisans to enforcing debts owed by Christians to Muslims.

The situation was exacerbated by the atmosphere of continual physical insecurity in which residents of the frontier lived. We must remember that the Granadan frontier remained a dangerous place in the late fifteenth century. For though we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that the heavy lifting of the conquest of Iberia had been accomplished two centuries or more earlier and that the final defeat of Nasrid Granada lay only decades away, people are generally not conscious of living at the ends of eras.

Moreover, the nature of frontier war meant that even times of declared truce gave little comfort to those who suffered at the hands of raiding parties or individual malefactors.

There was, in fact, no such thing as an effective truce, a point to which Juan de Mata

Carriazo has drawn attention in a passage defining the particular conditions in which the alcaldes worked. He notes, “On the frontier of Granada peace and war were not simple concepts of unchanging meaning and universal application. Neither was peace peace nor

138 Historia de los hechos del Marqués, 264.

68 war war in the full sense of each word. War was almost never the struggle of the whole of one people against the other. The most violent actions in a certain sector of the frontier were compatible with peaceful and even harmonious relations in another. But above all, peace was never lasting nor a complete cessation of all forms of warfare. Nor were truces complete: at best, they resulted in a state of diminished warfare. In this way, the normal state of the frontier was something akin to semi-belligerency, at the mercy of the restless temper and thousand fickle moods of the frontier folk on each side… Everyone made his own peace or his own war at his own pleasure, and he was exposed of course to the whims of his neighbors”139

The siege mentality and uncertainty produced by such circumstances are well- illustrated by the responses to Muslim actions in Jaén and its environs in the months following truce agreements signed in March 1475 and January 1476. The first of these, negotiated by King Abū’l-Hasan ‘Alī (1464-1482) of Granada and Diego Fernández de

Córdoba, Count of Cabra, was meant to last for two years but was later deemed to be insufficient in duration by Fernando V and Isabel I (1474-1504). At the time, the Catholic

Monarchs faced serious opposition to their succession in Castile as well as war with

Portugal. Hoping for an extended period of stability on their southern flank, they instructed a pair of regidores (also known as veinticuatros, these were municipal officials nominated by the Crown), one from Córdoba and one from Soria, to negotiate a new and more enduring pact. This treaty was finalized on 11 January 1476 and added an

139 Carriazo, “Un alcalde entre los cristianos y los moros, en la frontera de Granada,” in En la frontera de Granada, 139. Cf. Rodríguez Molina, who argues that peace and war were markedly different states on the frontier, La vida de moros y cristianos, esp. chap. 3, “La guerra y la paz. Dos tiempos de la frontera,” 95- 114.

69 additional four years to the terms of the original accord, or until March of 1481.140 The unusual duration of the truce seems to have raised expectations of stability and conditions conducive to trade, and the authorities in Jaén did their best to ensure that local relations with Granada remained positive. In that same month of January, for instance, the concejo agreed to pay restitution to the Muslims of Cambil for an alleged theft of farm implements whose perpetrators could not be located.141

A serious threat to the peace emerged on 21 February when word reached Jaén

that the town of Huelma, to the southeast of Jaén, was besieged by local Muslim leaders.

The concejo reacted with a strongly-worded letter to the king of Granada demanding both

reparations and an end to hostilities. In response, the Granadans justified their actions by

contending that Diego de Viedma, alcaide of Huelma, had instigated the fight, as he “had

committed many crimes against the Moors of Guadix, having taken Muslims captive or

ordered them taken as well as having stolen mules and mares during a time of peace.”142

An envoy was sent to Granada to sort things out and both sides agreed to withdraw their claims for restitution, a result indicative of the general interest in maintaining the peace.

Yet the hope of stability proved short lived.

In May, rumors that Muley Hacén, as the king of Granada was known in Castile, was approaching Cambil with a large force alarmed the concejo. In response, they delayed a planned transfer of troops to the Portuguese front and discreetly placed

140 The text of the 1475 truce has been lost while that of the later agreement is published in El Tumbo de los Reyes Católicos del Concejo de Sevilla, ed. Ramón Carande and Juan de Mata Carriazo (Seville, 1929- 1968), i, 122-3. A slightly different version is preserved in AMJ, AC 1476, ff. 29r.-30r. A transcription of this text is available in Manuel González Jiménez, “Peace and War on the Frontier of Granada. Jaén and the Truce of 1476,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence. Studies in Honor of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), 168-70. 141 AMJ, AC 1476, ff. 14v, 20r. 142 AMJ, AC 1476, f. 57v: “…avía fecho muchas sinrazones a los moros de Guadix tomando y mandando tomar moros furtados e çiertas acémilas y yeguas estando asentada la paz.”

70 watchers in the mountain passes “because we do not know what the Moors are up to.”143

This came to nothing in the short run, but word that the anticipated invasion had indeed materialized came to Jaén on 8 August, when “on this day came news that the king of

Granada has mobilized and entered Christian lands to do evil and damage. Later the council ordered that the people of the city, both knights and infantry, be warned.”144 Jaén

itself appeared to be in no danger, both because the incursion was directed to the

southwest, toward Priego de Córdoba and Alcalá la Real, and because the city concejo

continued its efforts to maintain the truce and avoid provocations. Such precautions

included abiding by the responsibilities outlined in the truce agreement to facilitate the

free movement of trade, to investigate crimes against Muslims, and to punish offenders.

Yet the authorities also sought to do everything possible to prepare for attack, and the

Actas capitulares record a comprehensive series of orders designed to improve all aspects

of the city’s defense. Such preparations included the setting of regular watches on both

the city walls and on towers guarding key roads as well as repairs to these fortifications.

Most important, and most problematic, was the need to insure that the city’s militia and

cavalry forces were well trained and equipped. In this regard, the concejo was perturbed to find that many of those duty-bound to provide military service were unprepared to do so and, on 15 July, the regidores reported that “the caballeros de cuantía [those obligated by income level to maintain a horse and equipment] of this city are much diminished and are not the caballeros they used to be, and from this situation comes great harm to the

143 AMJ, AC 1476, ff. 112v-114r, 191r: “porque no se sabe qué farán los moros.” 144 AMJ, AC 1476, f. 185r: “este día vino nueva como el rey de Granada avía corrido e entrado en tierra de cristianos a faser mal e daño, luego los dichos señores mandaron apercibir la gente desta çibdad, caualleros e peones.”

71 city and disservice to the monarchs, our lords.”145

Notably, these preparations were not instigated by the specific threat of invasion but had been ongoing at least since the beginning of the year, with the first orders (on 3

January) coinciding with the beginning of the available records.146 The May scare, while lending greater urgency to these efforts, did not initiate them. Nor did this vigilance end with the threat posed by the Granadan incursion near Alcalá la Real. In 1479, for instance, the concejo maintained ten permanent night watchmen on the city gates as well as an unspecified number of others at the various towers around the city at a cost of ninety mrs. each per month. In that same year, corregidor (crown representative who oversaw the concejo) Francisco de Bobadilla personally inspected each of the cavalry mounts and arranged numerous troop reviews to insure that the caballeros de cuantía were meeting their obligations and were ready to fight.147 It seems, therefore, that despite the long duration of the truce and despite the determination of local authorities to rigidly observe its terms, they had scant confidence that the signing of a royal truce would bring real stability. Indeed, such stability was not in everyone’s interests, as demonstrated by the case of Francisco Sánchez de Baeza. This man, a stonemason, was contracted in May

1476 to repair the parapets of Pagalajar, a key point in Jaén’s outer defenses that directly abutted the Muslim lands near Cambil. But he never did the work and defended his inaction by pointing out that he was unable to do it alone and his son Antonio, who was to have assisted him, had instead left to pursue the more profitable business of raiding

145 AMJ, AC 1476, f. 177r: “los caualleros de contia desta çibdad esta muy amenguada e non ay caualleros como solía, de lo qual viene grand daño a la çibdad e deserviçio a los reyes nuestros señores.” González Jiménez provides a detailed account of the concejo’s attempts to ready the city’s military forces, “Peace and War,” 166-8. 146 AMJ, AC 1476, f. 9r. No Actas capitulares for Jaén prior to 1476 are extant. 147 AMJ, AC 1479, ff. 68v, 115r.

72 Muslim territory.148

For Carriazo, this constant state of anxiety created a creative and dynamic tension.

In stirringly romantic terms he describes how the risks and rewards of frontier

skirmishing brought men to action and led to “a singular elevation of individual virtues, a

natural selection of frontier populations, with its automatic elimination of the weak and

its exaltation of the strong, bold and the undaunted.” The frontier provided opportunities

for glory in abundance and here, in song and in deed, the Castilian knighthood found its

pinnacle of fame while the lawless and rebellious, welcome nowhere else, sought

atonement in “this unquiet and heroic world of the Granadan frontier.” Carriazo, to his

credit, sees the other side of the coin and notes that the frontier offered little more than

peril and frustration for the peasantry on both sides. Raiding stripped the land of its

bounty, killed its keepers, and stymied attempts to improve its productivity.149 And for

what? Perhaps the most vexing aspect of the fifteenth-century frontier was the continuity

of organized violence despite a dearth of concrete accomplishments.

The most obvious motives for warfare—financial gain or religious animosity— therefore do not fit well with the general pattern taken in this conflict. The economic repercussions of hostilities, for instance, included lost trade, burnt crops, ransoms for captives, and the great expense of maintaining significant standing armies, all of which far outweighed the bounty of raiding parties. Since those adversely affected by instability tended to include the wealthiest and most powerful members of society, we should expect

to see their influential voices raised against actions that undermined their own interests

and, indeed, it was Jaén’s elites who ensured that the city did its utmost to uphold the

148 AMJ, AC 1476, ff. 114r, 179v. 149 Carriazo, “Un alcalde,” 140-2.

73 truces of 1475 and 1476. Yet the collective power of the elite nearly always failed to

ensure that disruptive raiding in times of truce be limited to outlaws. Part of the problem stemmed from the mountainous and underpopulated Andalusian terrain, which was difficult to police even under ideal circumstances. It is clear, however, that much of the marauding took place with the approval, or at least the benign indifference, of frontier

authorities. But if this inability or reluctance to enforce a true peace stemmed from the

idea that there could not or should not be pacific relations with the enemies of God, why

then did the fighting remain so localized and limited? For only on rare occasions was

actual conquest or conversion the goal (let alone the achievement) of an attack. With the

exception of Fernando de Antequera’s campaigns early in the century, attempts to

reassert the crusading drive of the thirteenth century lacked sufficient support to

accomplish much of anything. Holy war was no longer a unifying message, and would

not be so again until the reign of the Catholic Monarchs was well established.

It was the interaction of competing social realities—an ideology of holy war, the

practical advantages of transfrontier trade, a tradition of convivencia, and a constant lack

of physical security—that defined the ‘amiable enmity’ so prominent in what we might

call the frontier mentality. The fundamental characteristic of this mindset was not, as

Carriazo would have it, a creative tension or a drive to heroism. Rather it was indecision

and a disinclination to alter the uneasy equilibrium of conflicting forces that prevented

the elite from pushing too vigorously for stability and confounded the ambitions of those

who sought a return to general warfare. For if holy war was central to the self-image of

Castilians and especially the military elites of the frontier, offering purpose and

rationalization as well as dreams of glory, then the realization of its objective, the

74 expulsion of Muslims from Iberia, posed a very real danger to their raison d’être. And so

the cabalgadas continued, alcaldes, alfaqueques, and city councils kept a modicum of

order, knights made their reputations in savage battle, and kings negotiated truce after

truce. All the while, the farmers, herders, and merchants on both sides endured, working

the same lands, trading when they could, smuggling when they could not, and engaging

daily in a thousand little interactions with their ‘enemies’. When this precarious balance

came to a crisis, it was during the troubled reign of Enrique IV, who himself embodied

the contradictions of the frontier.

********

With Enrique, the conflicted ethos of amiable enmity and its corollary

indecisiveness transcended the frontier to come to the royal court. It is difficult to say

much with certainty about the personality of this enigmatic ruler, as the documentary

record is dominated by the vitriol of chroniclers partisan to his half-sister and successor,

Isabel, who sought to denigrate every aspect of Enrique's rule and his person, dismissing

him as a heretical degenerate.150 Yet even if one leaves aside most of the accusations of his enemies, it seems clear that Enrique embraced Muslim culture to a degree that surprised and alarmed the high nobility. Mudéjar architecture was widely accepted at this time, as were Islamic pottery and, to a degree, styles of dress.151 Enrique went far beyond

this, not only dressing in Muslim fashions but eating and drinking according to their

custom and receiving visitors while seated on the ground. He also surrounded himself

150 On the historiography of his reign, see William D. Phillips, Jr. Enrique IV and the Crisis of Fifteenth- Century Castile, 1425-1480 (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 1-16; Luis Suárez, Enrique IV de Castilla. La difamación como arma política (Barcelona, 2001); Gregorio Marañón, Ensayo biológico sobre Enrique IV y su tiempo (Madrid, 1934); and Barbara Weissberger, “¡A tierra, puto! Alfonso de Palencia’s Discourse of Effeminacy,” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, cultures, and crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (Durham, 1999), 291-324. 151 Carmen Bernis, “Modas moriscas en la sociedad cristiana española del siglo XV y principios del XVI,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 144 (1959): 199-228.

75 with a large personal guard consisting of several hundred guardas moriscos whose

members were richly rewarded with lands and money. For a Bohemian visitor in 1466,

such affectations confirmed that Enrique was “an enemy of Christians” who “has driven

out many Christians and settled the heathen in their place.” Whether or not Enrique’s

Muslim manners reflected a secret inclination to Islam has been hotly debated. Even if he

was innocent of apostasy, the perception that his “unchristian ways” posed a danger was

widely held by contemporaries.152

Attitudes toward Islam, however, were rarely straightforward and Enrique’s maurophilia did not prevent him from undertaking a series of moderately-successful

campaigns against Granada in the early part of his reign, before internal rifts demanded

all of his attention. These were of scant benefit to his reputation as his nobles complained

that he approached warfare with a lack of seriousness that belied the large armies he

raised and the vast amounts of money spent on the endeavor. As one chronicler noted, his

siege of Granada was so laxly persued that it seems he came “more to contemplate the

city than to attack it.”153 But it wasn’t just that he fought without sufficient fervor; he

seemed to view war as but an amusing diversion. In a skirmish near Cambil in 1457,

Enrique took his wife Juana and several of her female attendants to have a look at the

enemy: “And so the King and Queen with their entourage approached so close to Cambil

that it seemed they wanted to attack the fortress. As the Moors came out to intercept them… the Queen demanded a crossbow, which the King gave her already loaded, and

she took several shots at the Moors. After this game, the King returned to Jaén, where the

152 MacKay, “The Ballad and the Frontier,” 25; Phillips, 87-90. 153 Alfonso de Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 257, 258, and 267 (Madrid, 1973-1975), i, 71: “a donde fue el Rey más a contemplar la ciudad que a combatirla.”

76 knights, veterans who knew a thing or two about war, poked fun at them and joked that this war was directed more at the Christians than at the Moors, while others said, ‘Oh yes, this is just like the Cid used to fought in his day.’ And while Enrique stayed in Jaén, the

King of Fez sent him a rich gift of cloaks and silks and bridles in the Muslim style, as well as a great variety of exotic perfumes for the Queen.”154 In the jibe about the Cid we see that reverence for the heroes of the past could cut two ways, both to honor knights for their dedication and courage and to castigate a young king who merely played at war.

Enrique’s conflicted attitudes toward Muslims did not precipitate the internal crises of his reign, which had more to do with his inability to control powerful and opposed noble factions. Yet it is significant that other personal attacks on the king—that he was impotent and a homosexual—were rhetorically linked to his perceived softness on

Islam. For the Castilian temperament was conceived as uncompromisingly masculine, a legacy of both the original Iberian peoples and the conquering Visigoths. But this native virility had been repeatedly violated by invasions of effete foreigners, first the Romans and later the Muslims, with their bathhouses, fine clothing, and gentle manners. The tracing of royal bloodlines to the Visigoths, a common theme in fifteenth-century chronicles, was more than political sophistry; it was central to the claim that war against

Granada was a legitimate reconquest, that Castile sought to recover something that had once been its own. By restoring their Visigothic inheritance, moreover, the Castilians

154 Mosén Diego de Valera, Memorial de diversas hazañas: crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, Colección de Crónicas Españolas 4 (Madrid, 1941), 45: “y llegaron asi con esta gente el Rey y la Reyna tan cerca de Cambil, que parecian que querian combatir la fortaleza; y como los moros vieron ansí llegar la gente… y la Reyna demandó una ballesta, la qual el Rey le dió armada y fizo con ella algunos tiros en los moros; y pasado este juego, el Rey se volvió para Jaen, donde los caballeros que sabian facer la guerra y la habian acostumbrado, burlaban y reian diciendo que aquella guerra más se hacía á los christianos que á los moros; otros decian: por cierto esta guerra bien parece á la quel Cid en su tiempo solia facer. Y estando ansí el Rey de Jaen, el Rey de Fez le envió un rico presente de almexias y almayzares y arreos de la gineta, é menjuy y estoraque y algalia, y muchos otros olores para la Reyna.” Palencia also described the incident, but with a focus on Juana’s martial attire, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 101-2.

77 could not only redeem territory lost to the Muslims; the recovery of their untainted

masculinity was also at stake.

But a sexually-ambiguous king fit more with contemporary notions of Muslim

attributes than with the ideal of virile, vigorous Goths. Enrique IV’s effeminacy was

therefore not only repugnant to nobles accustomed to the idea of a king as an exemplar of

martial virtues, but also represented an internal threat to the holy mission of reconquest, a

betrayal of Castile itself. Unable and unwilling to perform his regal and conjugal duties,

he had instead gone to bed (perhaps quite literally) with the enemy.155 And so it is

unsurprising that the extensive list of complaints presented to the king in 1464 began with

the demand that the king expel all the Muslims from his household and personal guard

and begin preparations for an immediate and effective war against Granada. Amiable

enmity was a necessary and acceptable response to social conditions on the frontier,

where regular and peaceful contact with Muslims meant that those of all stations had to

reconcile convivencia with the ideology of reconquest. But Enrique’s introduction of the

same ideological dissonance to the court, where the dearth of such contacts and the

association of maurophilia with the king’s alleged personal perversions lent strength to

polemical representations of Islam, led to an immediate and powerful backlash. As Angus

MacKay has noted, “now there were demands for total rejection… and respect for the

Moor would only return once he had been defeated.”156

Chroniclers writing during Isabel’s reign welcomed her accession to the throne as an act of providence, a heaven-sent opportunity for Castile to redeem the sins of its erstwhile ruler. For Alonso de Palencia, Isabel assumed a role analogous to that of the

155 Weissberger, “¡A tierra, puto!,” 299-302; Mirrer, Women, Jews, and Muslims, 47-52. 156 MacKay, “The Ballad and the Frontier,” 25-6.

78 Virgin Mary while Enrique’s wife, the supposedly adulterous Juana de Portugal, was likened to Eve, whose sins removed mankind from divine grace: “In the end, she [Juana]

was a weak woman and the ancient and chief instrument of mankind’s disgrace, for whose reparation was chosen a Virgin and special mother, so that by the extraordinary and famous virtue of a woman was resolved the original sin that the corruption of another had brought into the world from its beginnings.”157 The reign of the Catholic Monarchs coincided with a resurgence of millenarianism, inspired both by their successes and by the approaching half-millennium, and their chroniclers drew upon an extensive Iberian literature to cast them, and especially Fernando, in an apocalyptic role.158 This tradition, based in part on prophecies attributed in St. and influenced by

Joachimite ideas, had long predicted the rise of an Spanish messianic king, known variously as the New David, the Encubierto (‘Hidden One’), or the murciélago (the

‘Bat’) who would conquer all of Islam and eventually the world.

This vision did not arise with Fernando and Isabel; in fact, such expectations

heralded each new king. Even Enrique IV, although later despised as an “excretable

monster since he had nothing of humanity about him,” figured in an apocalyptic spectacle

157 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 132: “Al cabo, frágil mujer y antiguo principal instrumento de la desgracia de la humanidad, para cuya reparación fue escogida una Virgen y madre singularísima, a fin de que por la extraordinaria e insigne virtud de una mujer se remediase el pecado original que la corrupción de otra introdujo en el mundo desde su comienzos.” It is worth noting that Palencia presented Isabel as the remedy for Juana’s sins, not those of the king. Indeed, Isabel’s prominent role in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs was the source of considerable anxiety for him as he viewed her construction as a masculine figure to be a transgression against traditional gender roles nearly as dangerous as Enrique’s femininity. See Weissberger, “¡A tierra, puto!,” 303-10. 158 On this subject, see Angus MacKay, “Andalucía y la guerra del fin del mundo,” in Andalucía entre oriente y occidente (1236-1492). Actas del V Coloquio internacional de historia medieval de Andalucía, ed. Emilio Cabrera (Córdoba, 1988), 329-42; José Cepeda Adán, “El providencialismo en los crónicos de los Reyes Católicos,” Arbor 17 (1950): 177-90; Américo Castro, Aspectos del vivir hispánico. Espiritualismo, mesianismo, actitud personal en los siglos XIV al XVI (Madrid, 1970); and Alain Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica en el ambiente franciscanista español (Valladolid, 1983).

79 hosted in 1463 by Miguel Lucas de Iranzo in Jaén.159 Yet victories against Granada in the

1480s hinted that reality and prophesy might finally coincide, fueling an eschatological fervor whose tone is well expressed in Rodrigo Ponce de León’s 1486 letter addressed to

Fernando and circulated amongst the high nobles of Castile: “the illustrious, powerful, and great prince, King Fernando… born under the most copious and highest planet that any king or emperor ever was… And there will be nothing in this world able to resist his might… because God has allowed total victory and all glory to the rod, that is to say, to the Bat, because he is the Hidden One… He will put pressure on all peoples from sea to sea and destroy all the Moors of Spain. And all apostates will be completely and cruelly destroyed because such people are mockers and scorners of the holy Catholic faith. And not only will his highness conquer the kingdom of Granada quickly, but he will subdue all Africa, and the kingdoms of Fez, Tunis, Morocco, and Benemarin, and the other kingdoms until the gates of Egypt… And he will conquer the holy house of Jerusalem… and plant the banner of Aragon with his own hands on Mount Calvary, where stood the

True Cross on which our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, and become emperor of Rome and of the Turks and of the … and he will be not only emperor but monarch of the whole world.”160 In these revelations, the Granadan frontier held a special place as the site of the first battles of the Apocalypse. In his Treatise, written in the first half of the

159 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 71: “…aquel monstruo execrable, puesto que nada de hombre tenía.” Iranzo’s spectacle is described in Hechos del condestable, 98-100. 160 Historia de los hechos del Marqués, 244-7: “… el yllustre y muy poderoso grand príncipe rey don Fernando… nasçío en las más copias y más alta planeta que rey nin enperador nunca nasçío… Y no será cosa en este mundo que se le pueda resistir… porque toda esta gloria y victoria tiene Dios permytida al bastón, conuiene a saber, al morçiélago, que éste es el Encubierto… Y éste apretará todos los pueblos de mar a mar, e destruyrá todos los moros de Espanna. Y todos los tornadizos serán cruelmente del todo destruydos, por quanto son escarnidotes y menospreçiadores de la santa fé católica. Y no solamente Su Alteza ganará el reyno de Granada muy presto, más sojudgará toda África e los reynos de Fez e de Túnez e de Marruecos e Benamaryn, e todos los reynos fasta la entrada de Egipto… E ganará fasta la casa santa de Ierusalem… E porná por sus manos el pendón de Aragón en el monte Caluarie en el mismo lugar donde fue puesta la santa Vera Cruz en que nuestro Sennor Iesu Christo fue cruçificado… E será enperador de Roma e de los turcos e de las Espannas… E no tan solamente será enperador, mas monarca del mundo.”

80 fifteenth century but printed and popularized some decades later, Fray Juan Alemán predicted that the Antichrist would rise in Seville to be met near Cádiz by the armies of the Encubierto in a colossal battle. The victorious messianic king would then conquer and cleanse Granada of the accursed Muslims, and only then move on to Jerusalem and the rest of the world.161

Events seemed to bear out this vision. 1492 had been widely predicted to mark the end of the world for it was, according to Byzantine calculations, the seven-thousandth year since its creation and it was indeed an annus mirabilis in the , with the surrender of Granada on 2 January marking an end to the Muslim political presence in

Iberia and to the frontier itself. This same year gave reason to expect that the rest of the prophecies would come to pass as well. When Christopher Columbus sailed, it was with the hope of establishing trade whose profits would finance a new Crusade to retake

Jerusalem and of forming alliances with Asian powers in order to encircle the Muslims.

That he instead ‘discovered’ the Americas did not dishearten the faithful. Not only did this give the Encubierto new worlds to conquer, but the dream of Jerusalem continued to thrive.162

With the external enemy vanquished, attention turned to those who might threaten the faith from within and in that same year the Catholic Monarchs issued the Alhambra

Decree, expelling from their territory all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity.

This rejection of convivencia, heralded by the reaction to Enrique’s maurophilia as well

161 Fray Alemán’s Treatise can be found in Ramón Alba, Acerca de algunas particularidades de las Comunidades de Castilla tal vez relacionadas con el supuesto acaecer terreno del Milenio Igualitario (Madrid, 1975), 180-97. On his vision of the end of the world, see Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad, 238-40, 302-16; idem, “Le chauve-souris, le Nouveau David et le roi caché. Trois images de l’empereur des derniers temps dans le monde ibérique: x. XII-XVII,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velásquez 18 (1982): 61-78; and MacKay, “Andalucía y la guerra del fin del mundo,” passim. 162 MacKay, “Andalucía y la guerra del fin del mundo,” 334, 342.

81 as the establishment of the Inquisition in Seville in 1478, was the fruit of a new emphasis

on religious and cultural homogeneity and a response to the ambiguities of the frontier.

Juan Torres Fontes once wrote that “the medieval history of Murcia is the history of an

insecurity,” a statement that could be expanded to include all of Andalusia as well.163 On

the marches of Christendom, nothing was absolute: war, peace, religious affiliation, and

cultural difference were all attenuated to some degree. The juxtaposition of this cultural

confusion with a powerful and pervasive ideology of holy war fostered a degree of

anxiety that was ultimately intolerable. If there was, as has been so often argued, a broad

shift from a cultural paradigm of convivencia to one of national unity, its progress was

slow and uneven and its impetus from above. Undoubtedly, many embraced this new

emphasis on conformity and exclusion. But it is equally certain that others did not

entirely reject their former neighbors, business partners, and friends. In simply casting

out the Jews and later the Muslims, however, the crown attempted to negate the threat

from within without reliance on the divided minds of their subjects. The success of this

endeavor was mixed; there was, however, to be no more vacillation.

But throughout the centuries-long history of the frontier, except perhaps during

the heady conquests of the thirteenth century, there was no such unity of purpose. The

hesitation that had defined it was born of uncertainty, not fear. Even Enrique’s

unwillingness to effectively prosecute his wars had not been due, given his escapades at

Cambil, to a lack of physical courage. Although the hazards of frontier life were real,

incongruous attitudes toward Muslims posed a far more difficult problem. The resolution

of this dilemma in a rejection of Islam and intensified focus on defending the faith

163 Juan Torres Fontes, “El concepto concejil murciano de limosna en el siglo XV,” in A pobreza e a assistência aos pobres na Península Ibérica durante a Idade Média: actas das 1as Jornadas luso- espanholas de História Medieval, 25-30 de setembro de 1972, 2 vols. (Lisbon, 1973), ii, 839.

82 against real or imaginary attack by Jews or Muslims was a development external to the

frontier, set in motion by the reaction to Enrique and by the Catholic Monarchs’ need to

unify their lands. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Granadan frontier was its

remarkable permanence in the face of such pressures. There were periods of chaos, to be

sure, and countless moments of crisis, but the majority of these were due to hostilities

with Granada or the internecine struggles of the nobility. There were no prolonged or

general instances of social upheaval, no credible threat to the established order. Frontier

culture was indeed molded by anxieties, but in its relative stability is evidence that its

inhabitants developed effective means of mitigating that tension. Unrestrained violence

against the religious enemy, both in the excesses of brutality in times of declared war and

in the depredations of the cabalgada during putative truces, served as one form of

release. The rejection of fixed religious identities was another. But these were both

modes of extreme behavior, which, if left unchecked, bore the risk of even greater

insecurity.

In seeking to understand social stability on the frontier, we must look to the role

played by public spectacles. Extravagant pageants of all kinds—religious processions,

festivals, sporting events, coronations, even executions—were an essential tool of governance throughout medieval Europe. On the frontier, however, such displays assumed an even greater importance. Away from the hinterlands, where people were free

to consider issues of religion and identity in absolute terms, local elites were forced to

address publicly the contradictions inherent in complex ideas of conflict and co- existence. The messages they articulated through spectacle varied. At times they functioned as a sort of therapy, aimed at either distracting spectators from pressing social

83 concerns or holding out the hope that there was an acceptable solution to the contradictions by fashioning alternate worldviews of a society in Christian religion and the best aspects of Muslim culture were joined and the deadly struggle between the peoples was ended. At others, they served to sustain the frontier ideology, reminding the masses of their religious beliefs and holy mission and directing their energies against the enemies of the faith, primarily the Muslims but also, at times, Jews and conversos as well.

84

II.

THE ANATOMY OF A SPECTACLE: PARTICIPANTS, CRITICS, AND ONLOOKERS

Frontier spectacles were usually sponsored and organized by elite social groups.

Municipal councils, cathedral chapter, and nobles had far greater access to the necessary financing, expertise, and social capital than did the urban populace and so were able to control or restrict the content of most public performances. This is not to say, however, that such control was absolute. Through corporate bodies such as guilds and confraternities, other privileged members of the community, such as merchants and artisans, sought and often obtained direct influence over civic spectacles. These groups were particularly involved in annual events such as Corpus Christi. More generally, elites had to carefully present messages that the urban population would accept; spectacles that failed to accord with popular expectations or sentiments were less than useless, creating unrest or leaving the sponsor open to public ridicule. Most public pageants, moreover, contained elements of popular participation that permitted the audience to directly express its approval or displeasure.

The meanings of spectacles, like those of texts, were therefore partially created by their audiences. Each group or social class, even each individual, brought their own set of expectations and values to a performance and created an ensemble of associations through which to interpret it. This is not to proclaim yet again the death of the author.

Spectacles were not blank tapestries on which the viewer could inscribe what he or she

85 wished nor were they, as Roger Chartier and others have suggested, culturally neutral artifacts.1 Most spectacles bore dominant meanings intended by their producers that

conditioned the responses of all participants and observers to create a relatively limited

range of probable responses.

To consider one common spectacle in which many of us have participated in one

way or another, a graduation ceremony can bear different connotations for each

participant and spectator. For one, the event may inspire feelings of nostalgia for milestones past, and another may feel reminded that commencements are one of the very few occasions on which the entire educational community comes together while the speaker might focus on nothing more profound than the hope that he or she will not flub a name.2 At the same time, it would be the inattentive spectator indeed who lost sight of a

commencement’s central purpose in recognizing the achievements of a graduating class.

This chapter outlines the complex relationship between a spectacle’s intended

meanings and how these were interpreted by audiences. The central difficulty in

examining spectator reactions is that they have not been recorded. I therefore begin by exploring recent efforts to determine how medieval spectacles were experienced. Given

the lack of contemporary evidence, many scholars have generalized from modern

examples. These attempts, at best, offer limited insight but do suggests ways in which we

can define possible responses. On one level, it is possible to identify universal aspects of

public spectacle, such as the presence of cues meant to help spectators understand the

purpose and structure of a performance. Such cues were, and are, often meant to inform

1 Teofilo Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: the Case of Jaén,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), 309. 2 I thank the participants of Brown University’s Medieval and Early Modern History Seminar for these reflections on graduation ceremonies.

86 the audience of their proper roles: where to direct their attention; what to wear; when to stand, applaud, or be silent. Yet audiences do not always react as they are intended. They

might be disruptive, apathetic or overly enthusiastic. Even when they behave as expected,

moreover, we cannot assume that this reveals their agreement with the performance. To

clarify this point, I closely examine the dethronement in effigy of Enrique IV in 1465, the

so-called ‘Farce’ of Ávila, to show how the audience’s ritual lament at the king’s death,

which has been taken as evidence of their complicity in the Farce, ultimately reveals little

of their actual responses to the event.

The difficulties posed by the crowd’s reaction at the Farce point to a central

problem in the interpretation of medieval spectacles: eyewitnesses did not generally

record their experiences, leaving us to reconstruct those experiences through written

accounts from other sources. These include subjective descriptions usually penned by

elite authors as well as legal codes and ordinances whose attempts to legislate proper

behavior at public performances indicate the kinds of disorderly conduct organizers were

likely to encounter. Such sources offer limited insight at best, and many scholars have

accordingly focused their attentions on the intent behind public spectacles, considering

the crowd only in terms of complicity or overt resistance. Audience responses, however,

are rarely unanimous and usually fall somewhere between overt conformity or

opposition, leading some historians to consider how our direct observations of

contemporary spectacles can inform studies of past events.

In order to recreate the various ways in which crowds could react, some scholars

have looked beyond contemporary descriptions of individual spectacles. Claire Sponsler,

for instance, applies conclusions reached by critics of modern mass culture to define the

87 “culture of the spectator.”3 She argues that varied forces at work in the reception of any

cultural production result in audience responses that are both free and constrained. Noting

that prior studies of medieval audience response centered either on resistence or

solidarity, she points instead to what critics of modern mass culture have called

“digressive responses,” reactions that seem irrelevant to the content of the spectacle and

thus fall into neither category. Although these have generally been dismissed as evidence

that a production has failed to model the appropriate spectator response, she suggests they

may instead point to how audiences actually interpret enacted performances. These

“divergent responses” point to a host of extratextual influences—including individual

factors (such as class, gender, and religion) but also the various ways in which

inducements to community solidarity competed with fragmenting social tensions.

Individual spectator responses were influenced by these social discouses, the staging and

enactment of the spectacle, and the physical surroundings and were therefore

unpredictable. At the same time, she notes that the reactions of surrounding members of

the audience and of the crowd as a whole also had a powerful influence on the individual,

channeling their potential responses into particular directions. This ultimately limited the potential for destabilizing or subversive reactions to spectacle.

Using Sponsler’s understanding of multiple influences acting simultaneously to limit the range of potential audience responses as a starting point, I use the central

sections of the chapter to consider debates regarding knightly tournaments, one of the

most popular and most controversial forms of spectacle at the time. Taking in turn each

of the three orders of medieval society as understood at the time—the nobility, the

3 Claire Sponsler, “The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992), 15-29.

88 church, and the populace—I argue that each produced independent strands of discourse.

By detailing the arguments made to rationalize and condemn festive military exercises as well as the ways in which these strands intersected and overlapped, we can clarify the outlines of a network of competing alliances and perspectives that, although they did not strictly curtailed one’s potential responses, did set limits within which onlooker experiences were likely to fall and thus provide a foundation upon which we can posit likely reactions.

Although the focus is on tournaments, I also address other forms of urban spectacle in the context of this discussion. In doing so, I acknowledge that there were no absolute divisions between types of spectacle at this time. Fifteenth-century tournaments often included dramatic performances, religious processions, and popular festivities. This merging of genres resulted in part from a repurposing of tournaments as these formerly courtly entertainments were now presented in urban contexts to mixed audiences, leading sponsors to deliberately integrate popular and ecclesiastic elements in order to better appeal to the crowd. The chapter concludes by considering the particular pressures of the frontier to this urban milieu, arguing that physical and ideological uncertainty that characterized frontier cities created new social networks and alliances that transcended the traditional ‘three orders of society’.

**********

First, however, we must determine the degree to which we can fruitfully and legitimately draw comparisons between modern and medieval spectacles. Sponsler was not the first scholar to invoke modern experiences, but her explicit and organized approach is somewhat unusual. Most references to twentieth-century mass culture made

89 by historians of medieval Castile are impressionistic, intended to clarify certain ideas through comparison to a familiar phenomenon or to lament the enduring character of elite

efforts to control the populace. In arguing that the elaborate theatrics which Don Miguel

Lucas de Iranzo presented to the people of Jaén in the 1460s served to divert and disarm

popular resistance, for instance, Teofilo Ruiz explicitly links these events to the putative

reactionary role of modern spectacles, asking us to reflect that “the ludic displays of our

own times, whether football or television evangelists, are reminders of the ways in which

those who rule provide for distractions, for making the exercise of naked power more

‘acceptable’.”4 In reconstructing and interpreting the same spectacles, Max Harris refers to Mardi Gras street gangs in New Orleans as well as Olympic baseball. His analysis is influenced throughout by the experiences of those who even now participate in the modern versions of such productions. To give just one example, when Harris considers why Christians knights were amenable to dressing as Muslims during a certain pageant, he posits that a preference for exotic attire is a likely explanation, noting that today’s revelers prefer to play the role of Muslims because “the Moors get the better costumes.”

He extends this comparison to the deeper meanings of past spectacles suggesting that now, as then, participants weave a complex path between reality and fantasy as they struggle to articulate the “simultaneous tensions and mutual accommodations of convivencia.” Although the conquest was completed centuries ago, one participant tells

Harris that “the Moors are not a symbol, they are something in us.”5

Harris’s approach, even as it permits the reader to visualize the events more fully,

raises epistemological questions. Do modern renditions of public spectacles, often

4 Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture,” 308. 5 Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin, 2000), 56, 216-26.

90 enacted at least in part for tourist audiences, bear anything in common with their

medieval antecedents? Or does this approach, though evocative in its attempt to flesh out the textual record, ultimately delude us into thinking that we can understand aspects of popular experience that have been irretrievably lost? In its essence, this is a question

about whether human experience has universal aspects or is wholly contingent on a

particular set of historical conditions. To put it another way: can we consider

ethnographic parallels without recourse to an ahistorical conflation of widely disparate experiences?

Book layouts can help to explain how modern analogies might apply to medieval public spectacle. A modern scholarly text includes a number of features that help readers orient themselves and access critical information, including a table of contents, footnotes, page numbers, and indices. Such tools require a basic level of cultural literacy for easy use and are relatively specific. The location and format of these finding aids varies widely and we would not expect to see the same layout for a novel as for a scientific textbook. Similarly, the mise-en-page of a medieval manuscript contains a number of helpful features, including the organization of the page into columns that accommodated glosses and commentaries and the use of incipits and initials, all of which permit the experienced reader to move quickly and easily about the text. Both the modern printed book and the medieval manuscript offer solutions to the universal challenge of efficiently navigating a long text. Moreover, both are part of the same centuries-long textual tradition and thus, although far from identical, they bear enough commonalities that meaningful comparisons can be drawn between them. To put it in another way, book layouts that mark different stages of the same evolutionary process can be said to be

91 written “in the same language.”

Public performances of all kinds contain similar cues meant to help the audience

navigate the content and meaning of the event. Such prompts may range from overt

messages clear to all involved to more subtle signals intelligible to only a few; some

measure of cultural literacy, however, is generally required to make sense of them. Their

language can be visual, with the use of particular combinations of color or of evocative

symbols articulating clear and often complex messages about the nature of the spectacle.6

But it can just as easily be verbal, as explicit messages or the tone of a speaker’s voice directing the audience’s attention to a particular purpose. Styles of dress, written signs, verbal cues, the layout of the venue: these cues act in concert to inform the audience of the type of spectacle presented, its structure, its message, and their role. These are not the province solely of those presenting the performance; the audience can add its own prompts, whether invited to do so or not. As these can materially affect the unfolding of the spectacle, the boundary between actors and audience is often murky.

At times, spectators play an expected and supportive role in a spectacle. Fans at modern sporting events create their own banners, perform synchronized gestures, engage in chants both self-directed and led by cheerleaders or mascots. The applause at a concert or play is an expected response to the efforts of performers, one that not only signals the audience’s approval but is also an enacted and ritualized conclusion to a performance.

The role of the ‘audience’ in the liturgy, a ubiquitous and perhaps defining spectacle of

Christendom, varied from time to time and place to place. In medieval Europe, despite a long tradition of antiphons and responsorial psalmodies, the use of Latin and a focus on

6 See Teofilo Ruiz, “Festivités, couleurs, et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 3 (1991): 521-46.

92 clerical actions often precluded the congregation’s formal participation. Nevertheless,

rituals of worship in any faith require at least the engaged attention of observers to create

the proper atmosphere of veneration and usually involve their responses at predetermined

moments.

Audience responses do not always accord with the intended aims of a spectacle.

Contemporaries bemoaned the crowd’s inattention and failure to understand the Venetian

celebration of Candlemas, the Festa delle Marie. Repeated disruptions of this event by

organized groups of spectators who flung trash at bejeweled effigies of the Virgin Mary

played a role in its eventual prohibition. As I have argued elsewhere, this behavior was

more than mere disorderly conduct. It was the articulation of a popular understanding of

the festival that centered on neighborhood identities and was therefore at odds with the

official message of civic unity.7 Public spectacles always bore the possibility that some

groups would express competing messages or take advantage of the assembled masses to

advance unofficial agendas. The annual unveiling of the Santo Rostro, Jaén’s most holy

relic, occurred each August and was accompanied by processions and a lively fair

featuring the wares of the great number of rural dwellers who flooded the city. During the

Revolt of the Comunidades in 1521, however, the municipal and cathedral councils of

Jaén agreed to cancel this event, fearing that the influx of visitors and the large crowds hoping for a chance to see and touch the sacred cloth would lead to agitation and disorder.8

********

7 Thomas Devaney, “Competing Spectacles in the Venetian Festa delle Marie,” Viator 39:1 (Spring, 2008): 107-25. 8 AMJ, AC 1521 Jaén, ff. 275v-276r. For a description of the annual festival, see Hechos del Condestable, 41.

93 That it is not always clear to historians whether popular interventions at spectacles

served to bolster or challenge their intended messages indicates both the specificity and

depth of the language of cues and shared associations that organize public performances.

The role of the crowd in the so-called ‘Farce of Avila’, in which a group of rebellious

nobles ritually deposed an effigy of Enrique IV and crowned his half-brother Alfonso XII

as king, is a case in point. The conspirators consciously intended this deposition as a

public spectacle, with great care taken to ensure that the stage could be viewed from any

angle. The essential elements of the ritual were straightforward. Having placed an effigy

adorned with the symbols of monarchy (including crown, sword, and scepter) on a stage,

the conspirators read out a series of accusations against Enrique and proclaimed their

sentence of dethronement. Having done so, they removed the emblems of kingship and

cast the effigy to the ground with a shouted curse. As described in contemporary

chronicles, the moment of the effigy’s fall to the ground was the ritual’s central moment

for spectators, leading to a great cry of lamentation from the massed spectators. Moments

later, with the king symbolically dethroned, Alfonso was brought from where he had

been waiting, took up the royal accoutrements, and was acclaimed as king.

Angus MacKay, in a careful study of the Farce, argues that it was a

“constitutional dramatic ritual” through which rebel leaders sought to overcome

difficulties associated with replacing a reigning monarch, namely that there could not be

two living kings in the same land.9 Although rejecting prior scholarship which claimed that the conspirators believed that the effigy actually became Enrique IV in some magical

way, MacKay contends that the effigy did represent the death of the king and the passing

9 Angus MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” Past and Present 107 (1985): 3- 43.

94 of kingship from Enrique to Alfonso.10 In doing so, he relies on a pair of related ideas:

the Castilian understanding that kings relied on noble election and popular acclamation

for their legitimacy and the more general medieval notion of the king’s two bodies, that

the physical person of the king and the dignitas of the crown are essentially separate.11

For the conspirators, Enrique did not die at Avila, but King Enrique did perish when

symbolically stripped of his emblems and thrown to the ground. From this perspective,

the crowd’s lament was but a necessary step in the sequence of ritual events needed to

depose one king and crown another. Alfonso could take the stage to be crowned only

after the people’s cries had confirmed that the effigy was dead and the throne empty and

he could only truly be king once they had acclaimed him.12

While MacKay’s reading of the Farce is generally convincing, his interpretation

of the crowd’s role in this spectacle is problematic. He assumes that their lament was pro

forma, an imitation of the ritual cryings (llantos) that typically took place at a royal

funeral and preceded the acclamation of his successor. But, if this was indeed the case,

the language used by the chroniclers is curious. Alfonso de Palencia, although an ardent

polemicist who rarely missed an opportunity to heap invective on Enrique, noted that the

effigy fell to the ground “amid the sobs of those present who seemed to be crying because

of the unfortunate (desastrada) death of the deposed.”13 If the lament was a necessary

10 For magical interpretations of the ‘Farce’, see Jean Lucas-Dubreton, El rey huraño: Enrique IV de Castilla y su época (Madrid, 1945), 135-46; Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250-1516, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1976-1978), ii, 334. 11 Thus the king may die but the crown does not. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957). 12 MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda,” 18-20. 13 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 168: “entre los sollozos de los presentes que parecían llorar la muerte desastrada del destronado.” Diego de Valera described the scene in similar terms, Memorial de diversas hazañas, 99: “y a todo esto gimian y lloraban la gente que lo veyan.” Diego Enríquez del Castillo, the other key chronicler who gave an account of the ritual, does not mention the lament, Crónica del rey Don Enrique el cuarto de este nombre. BAE 70 (Madrid, 1953), 144-5,

95 element in the ritual, why did Palencia choose to describe it as a spontaneous outpouring

of grief and not explicitly as a llanto? At the funeral rites conducted in Avila upon

Enrique’s actual death in 1474, which MacKay also describes, the ritual laments are not

only unambiguously referred to in the sources as “llantos” but bear a markedly formal

character. In this case, the funeral procession stopped at four different locations on its

way to the cathedral. At each of these, a black shield was shattered to the cry of “¡A por

buen rey é buen Señor!”14

The idea of a ritual lament seems at odds with MacKay’s presentation of a

carefully orchestrated constitutional drama in that it implies that Enrique was a real king

deserving of the proper protocols of respect. The conspirators, in planning the event, had decided that the best means of successfully discrediting Enrique would be to accuse him of tyranny and weakness, presenting their rebellion as a response to “the swift and sudden oppression of a tyrant who had in his favor neither mental energy, nor talent, nor capacity, nor any other gift of skill.” This line of reasoning supposes that Enrique, lacking the perquisite qualities, had never truly been a legitimate king. A ritual crying was therefore unnecessary and a potential distraction from the central message that

Enrique was “king in name only.”15 Moreover, a planned lament required either that the

crowd had been advised in advance to cry out at the predetermined time or that they were

so well versed in royal funereal customs as to know precisely the correct moment for the

lament. The latter was no mean feat for, as MacKay points out, the effigy had been

dressed in mourning (as if already dead) throughout the deposition but only symbolically

14 MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda,” 23-4. 15 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 167: “la prontitud y la repentina opresión de un tirano que, no teniendo en su favor ni la energía de alma, ni el talento, ni la capacidad, ni otro don alguno de habilidad, sino sólo el nombre de Rey.”

96 lost its kingship upon hitting the ground. The former seems equally unlikely, as Palencia

noted that the construction of the stage was the only means of publicity used to attract the

people of Avila. While the crowd could well have been ‘seeded’ with sympathizers

prepared to lead the crowd at the correct moment, they would have needed to be

convincing indeed to entice all those present to go along. These difficulties and

Palencia’s choice of words indicate that the crowd’s wailing was not an intended part of

the event, but rather a sign that the show did not altogether please the crowd, that Enrique

enjoyed support among the people of Avila and they felt genuine sorrow at the harsh

treatment given to Enrique in effigy.

Yet Palencia reported that this same audience erupted a short time later into the

popular acclamation symbolically necessary for Alfonso to become king. This seems

more like the intended and perhaps planned response that MacKay suggests and

challenges the idea that their prior lament for Enrique was a display of contrary emotion.

So what really happened? In all likelihood, some spectators expressed genuine grief,

some understood that the llanto was needed to depose Enrique properly, some followed

the lead of those around them, and others remained silent. In this sense, the crowd was

typical and highlights the challenges presented in attempting to characterize the actions,

emotions, or thoughts of an assembly as those of a unified entity, even (or perhaps

especially) when medieval chroniclers employ such terms. Even if medieval people

conceived their identities in corporate terms, their thoughts remained their own and an

individual could hold a number of group allegiances simultaneously. It does not follow that they were subsumed in the collective identity presented in a spectacle. Some at Avila may indeed have comprehended and embraced the deeper meanings of the Farce,

97 envisioning themselves in the ancient kingmaking role of “los pueblos de León y de

Castilla,” but we should view with skepticism the claim that all did.16

The difficulties behind understanding the crowd’s role in the Farce of Avila lie in the nature of the extant sources, all of which were written by nobles who viewed the events through particular perspectives. We do not have access to a compilation of medieval eyewitness accounts by common spectators that might indicate their range of responses to a show, as a scholar studying modern pageants might collect. MacKay attempts to mitigate this issue by exploring the deposition in relation to the Coplas de

Mingo Revulgo, a poem written by Fray Iñigo de Mendoza in which shepherds discuss the political crisis in terms of a pastoral allegory, and the popular festival of Corpus

Christi, which occurred in 1465 only a few days after the Farce. Both functioned, he argues, as popular propaganda and both were consciously presented so that their arguments would be accessible and appealing to the masses. To do so, “the content had to be extraordinarily rich in sensory references, and a constitutional dramatic ritual had to be elaborated in which the symbolic was part of, not merely a reflection of, political action.”17 Thus, the Coplas borrowed numerous elements from the Corpus celebrations and, though composed by the erudite Fray Iñigo, were written in a peasant dialect, employing rustic analogies to describe political events. Meanwhile, the spectacle coincided with Corpus Christi both in its timing and in the similar nature of both spectacles; the Farce was shown to “a world which was busy completing its preparations for the scaffolds, plays, games, and dances of Corpus.”18

MacKay’s exploration of popular contexts to political propaganda is both creative

16 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 167. 17 MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda,” 41-2. 18 MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda,” 5-7, 34, 39.

98 and useful. But it aims, at its core, to clarify elite efforts to sway the populace rather than to discuss directly the popular reception of such propaganda. Insofar as elites of the time knew their people better than we can, his study of how they expected (or hoped) the people would react and the steps they took to ensure that this was so sheds light on the crowd’s responses. Given that he is limited to representations of the event and its significance penned by chroniclers with particular biases and agendas, MacKay can ultimately do little more than recreate the perspectives of these sources. His unwillingness to go further is reasonable given the documentary evidence, but his analysis is also characterized by the dangerous assumption that these elite agendas were realized, that the crowd accepted and adopted the political and social content of spectacles.

This assumption is a common one, as illustrated by a survey of historical studies of Iranzo’s program of spectacles in 1460s Jaén, the key textual source for which is the contemporary Hechos del Condestable, whose anonymous author was not only an intimate of the Constable but likely participated in many of the events described. The chronicle, which revolves around detailed descriptions of the numerous feasts, pageants, and rituals that Iranzo organized to commemorate nearly every significant day on the calendar, explicitly presented Iranzo as a latter-day El Cid, recounting the Constable’s struggles with his rivals, his daring feats against Granada, and his careful governance of

Jaén. This emphasis on Iranzo’s person reveals the intent of his theatrical productions in ways that a more journalistic approach may not but also presents a perspective shared only by the town’s elites, telling us little about how the majority of people in Jaén experienced and understood the festivities. This point of view has been adopted by a

99 number of scholars whose representations of the Constable’s festivities focus on their

intended political utility.19 Teofilo Ruiz, to give only one example, argues convincingly

that Iranzo adapted popular motifs and symbols in his spectacles to augment his own

status and to diffuse social tensions by directing lower-class unrest toward external

enemies. While he is interested in the vertical relations between those above and those

below, Ruiz does not seek non-elite perspectives for Jaén’s festivals. Instead, he gives

voice to the resistance of the oppressed by exposing the strategies of the powerful. But in

limiting his gaze to those onstage and casually contending that the “entire urban

population” of Jaén lent their support to these festivals, cheerfully absorbing not only the

playacting but also the political content, he implies widespread complicity in Iranzo’s

agenda.20 The conclusion here, as in MacKay’s study of the Farce, is that the common

people bought into the propaganda of the powerful. Certainly Palencia and the author of

the Hechos wanted their audiences to think so, but can we trust them?

If Ruiz limits himself to recreating the elite perspectives found in the Hechos, it is

because popular culture “cannot be recaptured in its original form.”21 Yet the continuing

influence of a single written account on modern interpretations raises a central question: how can historians represent enacted performances and oral popular culture known solely through textual means? The arguments raised in a pair of studies on early medieval political rituals clarify the issues. Philippe Buc has taken Ruiz’s point further to argue for strict limits to modern readings of medieval rituals.22 In particular, he questions social-

19 For a more detailed study of this issue, see Thomas Devaney, “Representing the Medieval Festivals of Jaén through Text, Enactment and Image,” in Representing the Past: Archaeology through Image & Text, ed. Stephen Houston and Sheila Bonde (Oakville, CT: David Brown Book Co, forthcoming). 20 Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture,” 305, 315. 21 Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture,” 309. 22 Philippe Buc. The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, 2001).

100 scientific understandings of ritual as the “envelope” for deeper spiritual, social, or

political truths because they are based in modern, not medieval, experience. Instead, he

argues that that medieval authority and legitimacy lay not in the performance of rituals,

but in controlling their interpretation. The texts describing such spectacles, not the

dramas themselves, were the forces in the practice of power. Therefore, Buc argues that

medievalists should exercise great caution in attempting a hermeneutics of enacted ritual

as “one should master a culture’s grammar, but not think thoughts none of its members

ever thought.”23 Ultimately, Buc concludes that only rigorous attention to the contexts

within which authors worked can allow us to reconstruct from medieval documents how

spectacles might have functioned.

Geoffrey Koziol, on the other hand, has used his study of rituals of supplication in

early medieval France to contend that such performances shaped beliefs about power, and

therefore the actual exercise of power.24 His work, like that of Buc, emphasizes the contingency of ritual meanings that depended highly on context. At the same time, he rejects modern “skepticism” regarding the significance of ritual displays to their

audiences and contends the contemporaries were well aware of how rulers were apt to

manipulate spectacles for their own ends. Instead, he suggests that “apathy, skepticism,

and belief can coexist in regard to the same ritual.”25 For Koziol, however, the enactment

was critical; symbolic gestures are, by their nature, ambiguous, capable of bearing

multiple meanings in a way that words never can. As Koziol puts it, “Here again the

differences between words and symbols can be instructive. Both may be spoken of as

23 Buc. The Dangers of Ritual, 226-7. 24 Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, 1992). 25 Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor, 292-3.

101 having meanings. But words denote, and sentences fail to communicate information

accurately if their words have too many possible referents. In contrast, symbols are

inherently ambiguous because multivalent; and the more possible referents a symbol has,

the more evocative it becomes—in other words, the more ‘meaningful’.”26 To describe

the polysemic nature of spectacle in another way, language can be thought of as sequential, with each word modified by the next to ultimately create meaning, while visual depictions present multiple images simultaneously, which must be read together

for proper interpretation. Such multivalence, Koziol contends, is an essential aspect of a

ritual or spectacle’s relevance to its audiences for its meanings could be adjusted to their

expectations.

A written description of a spectacle can therefore never include all the various

potential meanings because an author must emphasize one to the detriment of others. Still

less can the written word capture the divergent responses of engaged and participatory

audiences to these multiple meanings. In the Farce of Avila, we can see the relevance of

both Buc’s and Koziol’s perspectives. A spectacle staged by noble conspirators who

aimed to manipulate the symbols of royal power as well as ancient traditions linking monarchical power to popular acclamation led to a particular response on the part of both audience and chroniclers. The spectators, we are told, responded as expected, with the ritual lament and acclamation necessary to legitimize Enrique’s symbolic death and

Alfonso’s accession to the throne. But this response, even if it was as general as Palencia

and Diego de Valera describe, had multiple inspirations. In texts composed by chroniclers

sympathetic to the rebels, however, the crowd’s role in the event is reduced to a single

voice, a unified roar of support. And in Castillo’s chronicle, the only description of the

26 Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor, 308-9.

102 Farce by an author who supported Enrique, the crowd’s lament is not mentioned at all.

To return briefly to a textual metaphor, it is as if the ambiguous character of both

the symbolic elements of the spectacle itself and of the crowd’s response are the marginalia on the page of a manuscript, the commentaries that offer insight into the significance found in a static text by its various readers. The chroniclers who transcribed the event offer us not the complete, annotated text but a formal edition that carried only

an ‘authentic’ text in which viewpoints apart from the dominant one have been

submerged. How can we then recover the lost glosses? Modern ethnographic parallels

offer one avenue of illumination, providing analogies that may illuminate medieval

experiences. Buc warns that doing so is dangerous, for we may unintentionally introduce

anachronistic concepts into past events. But there are other options. By identifying

various contemporary discourses on the social functions of spectacle, I apply insights

gained through modern spectacle—that spectator responses are individual but

constrained—while retaining a focus on the medieval sources.

Although we cannot hope to capture the full range of individual responses to

medieval pageants, contemporary controversies over their nature and presentation offer

insight into several point of views through which they were interpreted, which are

roughly analogous to the ‘three orders’ of medieval society: the rulers (e.g. the king,

nobility, and knights), the church, and the people. Such a division is by no means an

arbitrary one nor is it a modern imposition, as Alfonso X’s legal code proposes a similar

breakdown: “There are three kinds of festivals, the first, those which the Holy Church

orders to be observed in honor of God and the saints; as, for instance, Sundays, the

birthday of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and those of Holy Mary, of the Apostles, and of the

103 other male and female saints. The second are those which emperors and kings order to be

observed in honor of themselves; as, for instance, the days on which they are born; those

of their sons who expect to reign, or the days of which they have been successful in great

battles with the enemies of the Faith by conquering them, and such other days as they

order to be observed in honor of themselves, which are treated in the Title on Citations.

The third kind, called Ferias, are instituted for the common benefit of men, as, for

instance, days upon which fruits are gathered.”27

Each of these groups not only participated in particular kinds of spectacles but

also was able to draw upon a set of shared experiences and associations that conditioned

their responses to a performance. This is not, of course, to say that membership in a

social group defined or limited an individual’s possible responses or that a certain

performance would appeal to only one such group and no other. There was, in fact, a

great deal of overlap. Most medieval religious festivals had what we would call secular

aspects; at the same time, most secular festivals also had a strong religious component.

Audiences were often diverse. As we have seen, the conspirators at Avila actively sought

the presence of commoners in order to endorse the ritualized deposition. Penitential

processions, burlesque tournaments, royal entrances, spontaneous revelries, all these drew spectators and participants across social, economic, and even religious boundaries.

If we were to describe the interplay between cues, symbols, and associations that organized spectacles as a language, then each of these groups could be said to share a distinct dialect through which they filled in the symbolic images presented to them with the specifics of their own perspectives.

All types of urban spectacles drew upon this language to evoke particular

27 Partidas, i, 256-7, tit. 23, law 1.

104 intended responses, and each type inspired a range of corporate responses. A popular celebration such as Corpus Christi might be broadly supported by the people, viewed with suspicion by nobles and civic authorities watchful for signs of insurrection, and roundly condemned by the church on moral grounds. The perspectives characteristic of each group, however, did not constrain individuals: one would not have to look hard to find priests carousing, knights moralizing, or townsfolk alert to signs of trouble. As we shift the focus from the intent behind to audience reception of public spectacles, the interactions between these dominant strands of discourse become central. Although a number of cultural critics have construed the individual as strong in the face of cultural pressures and emphasized the ability of spectators to remake meanings to their own specifications, they tend to minimize the multiplicity of influences that shape the experience and perception of performances.28

We cannot reduce audience response to a dichotomy of conformity or resistance.

Rather, individuals created their own responses along a spectrum of possibilities. These

could perhaps deflect the dominant message but were nevertheless constrained by ingrained cultural patterns. A full consideration of the range of responses to all the myriad forms of spectacle in fifteenth-century Castile would be unwieldy. A detailed reading, however, of the ways in which the nobility and the church rationalized and critiqued the caballero tournament can serve to illustrate the interplay of multiple perspectives and their influence on audience responses. Tournaments were not only one of the most common urban spectacles, they were also a form of spectacle the defense and critique of which spawned an intense outpouring of linguistic rhetoric, whose authors invoked issues directly related to the frontier and the mission of Reconquest.

28 Sponsler, “Culture of the Spectator,” 19-21.

105 ********

Fifteenth-century knightly tournaments in Castile took place within the context of significant recent changes in the position of the aristocracy that placed it in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, a succession of weak kings accorded the greatest of their number unprecedented influence and power while the Granadan frontier offered autonomy and glory, leading Castilian to the pinnacle of its fame. On the other, competition from the caballeros de cuantía (non-noble mounted warriors) and letrados

(university graduates trained in law) undermined the aristocracy’s traditional military and political roles. At the same time, nobles increasingly lived in cities where they often became embroiled in local politics and were required to directly engage the needs of urban constituencies. These social and economic changes inspired passionate discussions on the functions of chivalry, nobility, and monarchy. Amongst the nobility, these took place through literary debates that explored the comparative values of arms and letters or of birth and personal achievement.29 In order to appeal to the populace, however, nobles

adapted tournaments and dramatic skits previously limited to courtly audiences. Before

describing how such tournaments were perceived by various social groups, however, we

must first consider how ongoing debates over the role of nobles and knights in Castilian

society created the need for such displays.

While the Farce of Avila was highly unusual in its direct political significance, it

drew, in its noble sponsorship and urban setting, on both a long tradition of courtly

exhibitions and the relatively recent practice of regularly presenting them as public

entertainments. This trend had gained momentum in the mid-1300s and elaborate urban

29 For an overview of this literature, see Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV: La tratadística caballeresca castellana en su marco europeo (Valladolid, 1996).

106 festivities became commonplace in the fifteenth century, as nearly every extraordinary

event or holy day was taken as an excuse for recreation or as the object of a ceremony.

The range of spectacles enacted on the streets and plazas of Castilian cities is seemingly

endless: intricate processions, martial tournaments, mime shows, dramatic performances

and, of course, bullfights. These marked all manner of occasions including royal visits,

religious events (including Corpus Christi, Christmas, and Epiphany), the anniversaries

of key dates in civic history, noble weddings, funerals, and births, and so on. Local fêtes

were often the liveliest, but external events, especially royal deaths and coronations, were

publicly commemorated throughout the realm. MacKay notes, for instance, that the Farce

made Alfonso king in Avila only. For his crowning to be meaningful, nobles elsewhere

needed to accept his claim and enact similar public rituals in their towns.30

The subject matter of the Farce—particularly the claim that royal legitimacy

depended on noble and popular consensus—was also deeply rooted in contemporary

developments. The position of the fifteenth-century aristocracy throughout Europe was

simultaneously powerful and insecure. Although they retained significant power as a

group, social, political and economic changes led to continuous debates on questions of

chivalry, knighthood, and nobility and a general rethinking of the nature and purpose of

social hierarchies. The particulars of the Castilian situation made the question all the

more pressing. This was partly a result of the social implications of long-term frontier fighting. Given the military requirements of the war against the Muslims, especially the

need for large numbers of horsemen, the Castilian nobility lacked the monopoly over the

role and accoutrements of the mounted warrior enjoyed by their counterparts in France

30 Gema Palomo Fernández and José Luis Senra Gabriel y Galán, “La ciudad y la fiesta en la historiografía castellana de la baja edad media: escenografía lúdico-festiva,” Hispania 54/1 (1994): 5-36. The celebration of royal accession throughout the realm was especially important. MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda,” 22-3.

107 and England. Members of urban militias could claim at least some of the honors and obligations of knighthood, even though they lacked titles, and some merchant associations even adopted the trappings of chivalry.

Political innovations dating to the accession of the new Trastámara dynasty in the mid-fourteenth century provided the nobility with other rivals. The first of the

Trastámaras, Enrique II (1369-1379) had succeeded in overthrowing his predecessor in a lengthy civil war and thus recognized the danger to the monarchy in permitting any single group to amass too much power. His initial hold on the throne was insecure, however, and he was constrained to reward his followers with substantial privileges and extensive grants of lands from the royal patrimony. The result was a broad transformation of the high nobility, as families prominent since the eleventh and twelfth centuries were forced to make way for the ‘new’ nobility, which mostly consisted of formerly minor branches of the great old noble houses.31 To balance the power of the nobles and caballeros

(knights), who held key offices at court and conducted the military and political administration of nearly all the territories of the realm, Enrique turned to the letrados

(university graduates trained in canon or civil law), giving them control of the Audiencia, the king's own court of civil and administrative law with jurisdiction in cases involving the nobility.

Competition from non-noble mounted warriors and letrados challenged the traditional military and political roles of the aristocracy. Nor could nobles take solace in their ancient and storied lineages, for most, even those of the highest rank, traced their privileges and lofty titles only as far back as the Trastámara accession, a precedent that highlighted the contingent nature of their position. Just as they had replaced the old

31 Teofilo Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 1300-1474 (Oxford, 2007), 81-2.

108 nobility, so too could they be replaced. Moreover, many lacked free title to their estates

as Enrique II had required the recipients of lands from the royal patrimony to convert

them into mayorazgos (perpetual trusts).32 Although the distinctions were quite clear in

theory, it was not always easy in practice to distinguish hereditary nobles and knights

from commoners. The privileged status of the highest ranks of the nobility, those who

held titles as dukes, marquises, or counts and who were known as grandes or títulos, was not in question. There was, however, a good deal of confusion in contemporary society, as reflected in official documents, regarding the difference between the the caballeros and hereditary nobles who lacked titles (hidalgos). While hidalgos held special legal rights, both groups enjoyed tax exemptions and were required to maintain horse and weapons so as to always be prepared to answer a military summons.33

For the lowest ranks of the nobility, this last requirement blurred the lines even

more. Though prohibited by law from supporting themselves through work or, as a law of

Juan II put it, living by “rank and vile offices,” minor hidalgos were often forced to resort

to such means in order to afford their military accoutrements. The status of caballeros

and hidalgos was confused also with that of the caballeros de cuantía or de premia,

urban citizens of any trade who, because they possessed a certain degree of wealth, were

required to provide themselves with the equipment needed to fight on horseback and in turn received some of the tax exemptions enjoyed by caballeros. This group, although

prominent at this time only in cities near the frontier, were generally disdained by both

32 Nader, The Mendoza Family, 110-5. 33 The duties and privileges of caballeros crystallized in the thirteenth century, as the Partidas detailed both a way of life and a set of legal responsibilities. Partidas, ii, tit. 21. See also the sources collected in La caballería castellana en la Baja Edad Media. Textos y contextos, ed. Carlos Heusch and Jesús Rodríguez Velasco (, 2000), which include treatises on knighthood contemporary with the Partidas, 53-80. For the early development of Castilian knighthood, see Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV: La tratadística caballeresca castellana en su marco europeo (Valladolid, 1996), 17-25; and Josef Fleckenstein, La Caballería y el Mundo Caballeresco (Madrid, 2006).

109 hidalgos and career caballeros.34

Yet, the fourteenth-century land grants to the new nobility provided them with

sufficient political resources and economic stability to challenge royal authority

repeatedly. For Enrique II’s rise offered another precedent. He had used the positions,

titles, and incomes given to him by his father, Alfonso XI, to take the throne. In many respects, the political chaos of fifteenth-century Castile can be traced to the relative weakness of the crown and power of the nobility. Even so, the division of power between nobles and letrados generally served the monarchy well, providing successive rulers with

the military and administrative resources necessary to resist the ambitions of their own

powerful relations.35 During the course of the fifteenth century, however, as university- educated bureaucrats vied with caballeros for influence over kings, these groups developed contrary social and political worldviews which were articulated through literary means, especially the writing of history. While the caballeros saw themselves as partners with the monarchy in a secular and particularistic government, the letrados viewed society in terms of a divinely-ordained hierarchy of institutions, all staffed by anonymous civil servants and under the rule of the king.36

These literary debates were not solely directed at the nature of the monarchy or

the broad sweep of Iberian history. Many of these literary conflicts focused on the

comparative values of arms and letters or of birth and personal achievement in an effort

34 John Edwards, Christian Córdoba. The City and its Region in the late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1982), 63-4, 131-3, 144-7. For reasons of simplicity and clarity, the term ‘caballero’ is employed throughout this discussion as contemporaries generally used it: to refer to military professionals, those who trained as knights and made a career in military and administrative service, whether or not they were members of a hereditary lineage (linaje). Urban knights who received their privileges by attaining a minimum wealth qualification or through occasional service are described as ‘caballeros de cuantía’. 35 Ruiz offers a useful synopsis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century political struggles, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 51-138. 36 Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350-1550 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979), 19-35.

110 to convey those qualities that distinguished the nobility and made them indispensable to society.37 It was not wealth (merchants had that, after all) or land (while nobles

effectively controlled their grants of land, this remained in theory the property of the royal fisc) nor horse and armor (knights and urban militias fought with the same equipment and the in same manner) nor influence (which was shared with the letrados).

Ultimately, many chose to argue that true nobility derived from virtue, particularly that of prudentia, which was defined roughly as good sense and judgment. Chief among these was Mosén Diego de Valera (1412-1488), whose career as a caballero and author spanned the reigns of three monarchs. Although he was the son of a converso physician,

Valera’s mother was nobly born and he received training as a knight in the court of Juan

II, whom he later served as a military commander and diplomat. He served as corregidor of Palencia for Enrique IV and joined the king on campaign at times but devoted himself mostly to intellectual pursuits during Enrique’s reign. After Fernando and Isabel took the throne, Valera returned to court as an economic and military advisor and occasional diplomatic envoy but continued to write, penning three chronicles dedicated to Isabel.38

In his writings, and especially in several letters and treatises devoted specifically

to the subject, Valera commented on and helped to define ideas of chivalry, knighthood,

and nobility. Despite his family background and his own status as a self-made man, he

37 For a detailed and comprehensive study of fifteenth-century caballero literature, see Rodríguez Velasco, El debate. 38 On Diego de Valera’s life and works, see Rodríguez Velasco, El debate, 195-274; as well as Lucas de Torre, "Mosén Diego de Valera. Su vida y sus obras," Boletín de la Academia de Historia 75 (1914), 50-83, 133-168; Juan de Mata Carriazo, “Estudio preliminar,” in Memorial de diversas hazañas, xii-xxvi; Epístolas de mosén Diego de Valera, enbiadas en diversos tiempos e a diversas personas, ed. José Antonio de Balenchana (Madrid, 1878); María Lourdes Simó, “Los conocimientos heráldicos de Mosén Diego de Valera,” La Corónica 22 (1993): 41-56; Cristina Moya García, “La producción historiográfica de Mosén Diego de Valera en la época de los Reyes Católicos,” in La literatura en la época de los Reyes Católicos, ed Nicasio Salvador Miguel and Cristina Moya García. Biblioteca Áurea hispánica 52 (Madrid, 2008), 145- 66; and Béatrice Leroy, De l'épée à l'écritoire: En Castille de 1300 à 1480, deux siècles de nobles écrivains (Limoges, 2008), 42-67.

111 sided with the traditional aristocracy and was opposed to the expansion of the nobility to

include the new knights and nobles. He was particularly critical of the caballeros de

cuantía, whom he despised as interested solely in the benefits of the position—tax

exemptions, social advancement, and local political power—while neglecting their duties.

His Espejo de verdadera nobleza, an early work composed in 1440 or 1441, was

written in response to continental debates on knighthood and nobility.39 Citing a host of ancient and medieval authorities, and particularly inspired by the work of Bartolo da

Sassoferrato, a fourteenth century Italian jurist, Valera articulated a conception of nobility as based in lifelong service. He begins by outlining the three classes of nobility as understood by the ancients and espoused by Bartolo—theological, natural, and civil— but his attention is on the last and most controversial of these. Defining civil nobility as

“a quality given by the ruler, through which one seems to be more pleasing than other good men,” he traced its historical development, finding its supreme expression in the

equites or equestrian order of Rome.40 The success of the Roman model came, for

Valera, from its unrelenting insistence on virtue: “the ancient commanders of the very

noble order of equestrians had, from the beginning, three considerations: the first was

love for the public good; the second a desire to attribute proper honors to virtue; the third

to give suitable ministers and servants to the order.”41

But Valera was well aware that the reality too often fell short of his ideal, an

39 Valera, Espejo de verdedera nobleza, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Mario Penna, BAE 116 (Madrid, 1959), 89-116. For the context in which it was written, see Rodríguez Velasco, El debate, 222-4. For a detailed analysis of Valera’s argument, see María Isabel Perez de Tudela y Velasco, “La «dignidad» de la Caballería en el horizonte intelectual del s. XV,” El la España Medieval 5 (1986): 813-29. 40 Valera, Espejo, 92-3: “Nobleza es una calidad dada por el príncipe, por la qual alguno paresce ser más acepto allende los otros onestos plebeos.” 41 Valera, Espejo, 105-6: “los antiguos començadores de la muy noble orden de caballería tres consideraciones ovieron en su principio: la primera fue amor del bien público; la segunda deseo de atribuir honor devido a la virtud; la tercera dar a la orden devidos ministros e servidores.”

112 understanding expressed in the title of his work—The Model of True Nobility. He took

pains to differentiate the true and noble caballero from the common urban knight, arguing that mere possession of the title of knight did not change one’s personal or social standing, “knighthood, in common law, is not a dignity, nor does it confer nobility.”42

Even less relevant for Valera was the idea that possession of wealth was enough to

ennoble a man, dismissing the caballería de cuantía as an expedient measure intended to

force those capable of maintaining horse and arms to do so. Yet this unfortunate practice

had led some to equate affluence with dignity, raising to knighthood men who were little

better than bandits, “Now the customs of knighthood are changed into robbery and

tyranny, now we do not trouble ourselves over how virtuous a knight may be but rather

how much wealth he may possess. Now the efforts formerly devoted to accomplishing

great deeds are converted to pure avarice; now a knight doesn’t blush to trade as a

merchant or engage in trades even less honest, thinking such things were acceptable in

the past; minds which used to be focused only on the public good are scattered by a great

desire for gathering riches by land and sea.”43

Valera believed that the institution of knighthood had become decadent and retained little of its former honor, but he saw an opportunity for redemption in the Roman model and its expectation that knights would combine military and political service with intellectual inquiry. Arguing that the caballeros of his own time had a duty to live up to the equestrian tradition, he suggested that knighthood should be a lifelong commitment, with military service as a young man, political activity in one’s middle years, and

42 Valera, Espejo, 116, n. 12: “La cavallería, de derecho común, no es dignitat ni fase nobleza.” 43 Valera, Espejo, 107: “… Ya las costumbres de cavalleria en robo e tirania son reformadas, ya no curamos cuanto virtuoso sea el cavallero, mas quánto abundoso sea de riquezas; ya su cuidado que ser solía en conplir grandes cosas es convertido en pura avaricia; ya no envergüençan de ser mercadores e usar de oficios aun más desonestos, antes piensan aquestas cosas poder convenirse; sus pensamientos que ser solían en sólo el bien público, con grant deseo de allegar riquesas por mares e tierras son esparcidos.”

113 attention to scholarly and literary endeavors throughout. By taking a voluntary oath to observe a high moral code, the caballero might be transformed from a warrior bound by custom and social ties into a noble granted the ‘sacrament’ of knighthood.44 But the

Castilian knights were too caught up in their quest for riches to undertake their own reform and the impetus had to come from above, from the king whose favor was the source of civil nobility. The means of reforming the knighthood was readily available to a ruler so inclined, as this form of nobility could be lost or rescinded, if the recipient were no longer worthy, and the knights would keenly feel the loss of their privileges: “For if the nobles truly considered that dissolute living would lose them their nobility and dignities, they would be careful about doing such things because they would lose what their ancestors had won with great effort, and the punishment of one would no doubt chastise many.”45

Despite his humanist tone, Valera never lost sight of the knight’s principal vocation of fighting and it was here that the virtuous and noble caballero might most clearly distinguish himself from the caballeros de cuantía, whose distaste for their military duties was notorious and at least partly based in fact. It was perhaps inevitable that these part-time warriors, who had attained their rank either by meeting a minimum wealth requirement or through active pursuit of the tax exemptions, would be more concerned with their regular professions to the detriment of their obligations. Observers regularly decried their failure to maintain horse and arms, their lack of training, and the

44 Perez de Tudela y Velasco, “La «dignidad» de la Caballería,” 817. 45 Valera, Espejo, 92-3, 105: “Ca si los nobles cierto sopiesen que viciosamente biviendo perderían la nobleza e dignidades, guardarse y an de faser tales cosas por que deviesen perder lo que sus antepasados con grandes trabajos ganaron, y la pena de uno no dubdo que a muchos castigaría.”

114 custom of paying another (often a servant) to take their place in the ranks.46 For the true

knight, lack of a civilian calling made possible the regular attention to military training

necessary to his proper station: “Those who have been made knights and given very

noble horses and arms suitable for mounted battle are enjoined to exercise these weapons

in peacetime, so they will be the more ready whenever war looms.”47

Valera consciously wrote of the world as it should be, not as it was. Ideally, of

course, the military training he described would be simply an aspect of knightly duty,

worthy of note only when it was lacking, and hardly an opportunity for self-

aggrandizement. But although Valera seems to have done a reasonable of living up to

the ideal he championed, serving the monarchy and papacy faithfully and without undue

pretensions, he set a high standard. His perspective is well summarized by Rodrigo

Sánchez de Arévalo in his Suma de la Política when he concluded a list of the qualities possessed by a good knight by stating that “every knight should be well armed and poorly dressed,” a piece of advice no doubt disconcerting for the knights and lords whose lush

attire is minutely described in many chronicles.48 But they dressed in this manner not

solely from personal conceit. Vanity no doubt played a role, but the bright clothes,

gorgeous trappings, and general pomp which suffused their public exhibitions of military

training—for such was the rationale behind their many tournaments, jousts, mêlées, and

hunts—were different means of attaining the same goal, that of differentiating themselves

from the urban knights and confirming their rank and place in the social hierarchy.

46 See above, chapter 1, p. 69 for the “diminished” state of the caballería in Jaén in 1476. Edwards cites a number of Cordoban examples from the end of the century, Christian Córdoba, 146. 47 Valera, Espejo, 106: “A los quales así fechos cavalleros fueron dados muy nobles cavallos e armas convenibles al exercicio de la cavallería, los quales asimesmo fuesen apremiados exercer las armas en el tienpo de la paz, por que más dispuestos para la guerra se fallasen.” 48 Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, Suma de la Política, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Penna, 277: “deve ser todo cavallero bien armado y mal vestido.”

115 Armed with learned treatises that elevated their training exercises into an act of

virtue, nobles throughout Castile missed no opportunity for displaying both their martial

skills and talents for putting on a good show. Huizinga has argued that the knightly ideal

was, at its heart, more of an aesthetic than a moral code, one that presented honor in

combination with egoism and audacity. This was especially so in the fifteenth century,

when the gap between ideal and reality had become so wide that chivalric virtue had only

limited social utility in comparison with noble status, wealth, and power.49 Civic

spectacles, and especially those with a military theme, were the ideal venue for

displaying all these to the whole of society. As Rosana de Andrés Díaz has argued, the

esteem these events supplied to those who hosted and engaged in them is incalculable.

And this prestige was not only before their peers, “but above all before the eyes of the

people who, just as they acclaimed monarchical power during royal entradas, were dazzled by the power, valor, and skill of the aristocracy.”50

If spectacle is a stage on which a society projects its values, customs, and

collective desires in a formalized manner, then all of these fell short of the standard of the

quixotic essayists. Yet the ideal was not wholly ignored. It endured as a source of

inspiration, a goal to be forever sought and only rarely attained. Nor were Valera and

those of like mind the only arbiters of knightly virtue. Fernando del Pulgar, for one,

rejected the tendency to hold up the ancients as exemplars while disparaging

contemporary knights, grumbling that “certainly it should be believed that a Castilian feat

would be praised like that of a Roman if there were authors in Castile able to extol in

49 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996), 119-20. 50 Rosana de Andrés Díaz, “Las fiestas de caballería en la Castilla de los Trastámara,” En la España medieval 5 (1986): 82.

116 writing the deeds of the Castilians, just as there were Romans who knew how make those

of their nation sublime.”51 Notwithstanding their desire for fame and riches, many nobles

and knights did spend their careers and often their lives in service to the crown. If,

unwilling to cast aside their finery, they failed to live up to the last of Arévalo’s qualities

of a good knight, they did their utmost to attain most of the rest: fortitude and courage,

discretion and prudence, agility and a strong constitution, decisiveness in the attack, and

dedication to training. In Pulgar’s opinion, the knights of his time were as impressive as

any from the past: “I, for certain, have neither seen in my times nor read of in past eras,

such knights come at any cost from foreign lands to our kingdom of Castile in order to

bear arms, just as I have seen knights leave Castile for all parts of Christendom to do the

same. I know of Count don Gonzálo de Guzmán and of Juan de Merlo…, of Gutierre

Quixada and of mosén Diego de Valera and I have heard talk of other Castilians who

travel to foreign lands to bear arms with whichever knights are willing to fight with them,

and they have won honor for themselves, fame for their courage, and strong knights for

the nobility of Castile.”52

Pulgar wrote this during a time of war, when there were occasions aplenty for a

bold knight to win glory and fame. But during peacetime, such opportunities were in

short supply. Certainly, as Pulgar notes, participation in foreign conflicts was a means for

51 Fernando del Pulgar, Claros Varones de Castilla, ed. Robert B, Tate (Oxford, 1971), 75: “Por cierto se deve creer que tan bien se loará un fecho castellano como se loa un fecho romano si oviera escritores en Castilla que sopieran ensalçar en escritura los fechos de los castellanos, como ovo romanos que supieron sublimar los de su nación romana.” 52 Pulgar, Claros Varones, 56: “Yo, por çierto, no vi en mis tiempos, ni leí en los pasados, viniesen tantos cavalleros de otros reinos é tierras estrañas a estos vuestros reinos de Castilla é de León, por fazer en armas a todo trançe, como vi que fueron cavalleros de Castilla a la buscar por otras partes de la Cristiandad. Conoçi al conde don Gonçalo de Guzmán e a Juan de Merlo..., a Gutierre Quixada é a Mosén Diego de Valera é oi dezir de otros castellanos que con ánimo de cavalleros fueron por los reinos extraños a fazer armas con qualquier cavallero que quisiere facerlas con ellos, e por ellas ganaron honra para sí, é fama de valientes é esforçados cavalleros para los fijosdalgo de Castilla.”

117 some to build their personal reputations and to represent the courage and prowess of

Spanish chivalry abroad. But this route was viable only for a few. Even if all Castilian knights had the means to do so, it would have been folly for them to go abroad in great numbers, leaving the frontier open to Muslim incursions. What remained were tournaments and jousts, bitterly contested sports which at times carried a real threat of serious injury or death and therefore served as an acceptable proxy for the battlefield. For

Arévalo, it was this danger, the fact that it was more than playacting, that made tournaments a worthy sport: “Particularly admirable is the joust, more so than target practice and other games of chance, because it is difficult and brings one into danger, instilling the virtue of fortitude. Moreover, the tournament is a sport even more noble than the joust, because it more closely resembles war, and is more pronounced in its danger and test of strength.”53

Putting on these contests was obligatory for all nobles and senior knights with

social aspirations and there was never a shortage of participants. Many young and often

penniless hereditary knights seeking fame and advancement traveled from competition to

competition throughout Castile and even beyond.54 Balancing these little-known contestants were senior nobles, famous men whose presence raised the profile of a tournament and who sought to bolster their own renown in the lists. The chroniclers relate the most dazzling of these tournaments as events significant in their own right,

53 Arévalo, Vergel, 326: “más loable es el exercicio de justas, que non el juego de tablas o que otro juego de fortuna, porque es difficultoso e se llega más al peligro e a la virtud de la fortaleza. Otrosí, más noble exercicio es e deporte el torneo, que non la justa, porque más figura tiene de guerra, e más allegado es al peligro e a la fortaleza.” 54 On the culture of Castilian knights errant in the fifteenth century, see Martín de Riquer, Caballeros andantes españoles (Madrid, 1967); and Víctor Gibello Bravo, “La violencia convertida en espectáculo: Las fiestas caballerescas medievales,” in Fiestas, juegos y espectáculos en la España medieval. Actas del VII Curso de Cultura Medieval, celebrado en Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia) del 18 al 21 de Septiembre de 1995 (Aguilar de Campoo, 1999), 157-72.

118 more than entertainments or diversions but as occasions when love or honor or fame was

won or lost. And so they related in moving terms innumerable tournaments, jousts, and

contests of arms, including the games held to celebrate a royal wedding in 1428, the

Passo Honroso organized by Suero de Quiñones in Medina del Campo in 1434 and

which lasted thirty days, and the competition held near Madrid in 1472 to honor a visiting

ambassador, in which no less a personage than Beltrán de la Cueva, the former royal

favorite and putative father of the Infanta Juan, appeared in the lists.55

The drama and visual appeal of the knightly tournament captured the imagination

of Castilian courtiers. The romances and poetry of the fifteenth century, in singing the

praises of knights errant who risked their lives for the respect of their peers and the

adoration of eligible women, bring their readers into a highly charged atmosphere of

rivalries, real fighting, maimed contestants, and always a brilliant play of sound and

color.56 Even Valera could not repress his delight in the glorious palette of colors and the intricate ceremonies of the tournaments and throughout his oeuvre described both in exhausting detail for the edification of his audience. In enumerating the roles of the Reyes de armas (civil servants responsible for granting and recording coats of arms), for instance, he declared that “…all challenges between kings and rulers should be organized and conducted by the Reyes de armas… It is also a general custom throughout the world that, when knights duel in the presence of a ruler, all flags and coats of arms and pennants

55 Pedro Rodríguez de Lena, El Passo Honroso de Suero de Quiñones, ed. Amancio Labandeira Fernández (Madrid, 1977); Pedro Carrillo de Huete, Crónica del Halconero de Juan II, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 8 (Madrid, 1946), 20-2; Lope de Barrientos, Refundación de la Crónica del Halconero, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 9 (Madrid, 1946), 59-62; Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Crónica del Príncipe don Juan Segundo, ed. Cayetano Rosell. BAE 70 (Madrid, 1953), c. 16; Enríquez de Castillo, Crónica del rey Don Enrique, chaps. 23-4; Riquer, Caballeros andantes, 59; Francisco Rico, “Unas coplas de Jorge Manrique y las fiestas de Valladolid en 1428,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 2 (1965): 517-24; Ruiz, “Festivités, couleurs, et symboles du pouvoir,” passim; Andrés Díaz, “Las fiestas de caballería,” 94-5. 56 Andrés Díaz describes the presentation of tournaments in several of the most popular romances, including Curial y Güelfa and Tirant lo Blanc, “Las fiestas de caballería,” 89-91.

119 and tapestries which are carried should be registered with the heraldic office, and when royal jousts are conducted with a prize, then the winning knight or nobleman should receive such prize by hand from the Reyes de armas present, and the stages are of the heraldic office, and if largesse is given in some festival of a king or ruler, half goes to the heraldic officers and half to the trumpeters and minstrels. Any request which has been made between knights or noblemen [during a tournament] can, if it is possible, be granted only by the official of arms…”57 He similarly waxed eloquent on the various colors painted on the contestants’ shields, assigning each an element, heavenly and earthly analogies, and virtues: “Arms can be painted in seven colors… yellow compares to fire, which is the most noble of elements; to celestial bodies, to the sun; in earthly things, to

, to topaz, to honeysuckle; and in virtues, to temperance. 58

The dramatic and romantic aspects of the knightly tournament were deliberate, an integral part of the action rather than a distraction or a backdrop. The challenges, oaths,

57 Diego de Valera, Preheminencias y cargos de los oficios de armas, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Penna, 170-1: “...todos los desafíos que entre los reyes o príncipes se oviesen de haser, se hisiesen por los reyes d’armas... Es asimesmo general costunbre en el mundo que quando conbaten caballeros en presencia de algún príncipe, que los pavellones y cotas d’armas y vanderas y paramentos que traen, sean dell oficio de armas; y quando justas reales se hasen y ay precio en ellas, que el tal precio se dé al cavallero o gentil onbre por la mano de los reyes d’armas que presentes fueren, y los cadahalsos que para ellos se hasen son de los oficiales d’armas; y si larguesa se diere en qualquier fiesta de rey o de príncipe, es la mitad del oficio de armas y la otra mitad de los tronpetas y ministriles; y qualquiera requesta que se haya de haser entre cavalleros o gentiles onbres, no se acostunbra a faserse salvo por oficial d’armas si puede ser avido...” See also Diego de Valera, Tratado de las armas [or Tratado de los rieptos e desafios], in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Penna, 117-40; and Gonzalo Aguila Escobar, “La educación del caballero: ‘Tratado de los rieptos e desafios’ y ‘Ceremonial de príncipes’ de Diego de Valera,” Las letras y las ciencias en el medievo hispánico, ed. María Isabel Montoya Ramírez and María Nieves Muñoz Martín (Granada, 2006), 299-318. Remedios Morán Martín describes the evolution of the duel in Castilian society in “De la difusión cultural de la virtud caballeresca a la defensa del honor,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Historia Medieval, 13 (2000): 271-290. 58 Valera, Espejo, 137: “siete son los colores sobre que las armas pintar se puede… lo amarillo comparar lo emos al fuego, que es el más noble de los elementos; a cuerpos celestiales, al sol; si a cosas elementadas, al oro, a la estopacia, a la madreselva; si a virtudes, a la tenperanza.” He linked each of the other seven colors with a virtue as well—chastity for white, nobility of heart for red, hope for green, strength for black, loyalty for blue. Only purple was left unpaired, for “a virtudes conparar no se puedo, que no tiene con ellas conformidad ninguna.” See also Martín de Riquer, Caballeros medievales y sus armas (Madrid, 1999), 293-305.

120 and love interests that often organized these events reveal a blurring of the distinction between reality and fiction, as caballeros built episodes from the great romances into their own life stories.59 In doing so, they gave to these sports narrative dimensions, a plot and protagonist. A tournament was rarely just a test of skills between two or more combatants, but a pivotal moment in their lives in which they sought to put into practice and on display their love, virtue, and fidelity. As such, it filled the social need for the enactment of dramatic and erotic stories that the theatre, at this point still focused on biblical themes, would later appease.60 Even the scenery could be deliberately designed

to invoke the romances, as in the tournament at Valladolid in 1428, whose sets created an

imagined world, including a mock castle complete with twenty-seven towers, a belfry,

and a great arch.61

The dramatic and ornamental features of the tournament predominated at times, especially when kings or grandes were involved, muting its warlike aspects and, in the eyes of those like Arévalo, its virtues. Lances were tipped with coronals to reduce the number of casualties and elaborate, ceremonial arnés real replaced the authentic and more dangerous arnés de guerra. Many of the more violent events were replaced with tests of skill (the juegos de tables Arévalo disdained). A further safety innovation was the

59 Andrés Díaz, “Las fiestas de caballería,” 95. The novelizing of one’s life was not unusual. Mary Carruthers, in describing how Heloise quoted Cornelia’s lament as means of making sense of her entry into a convent, argues that, “A modern woman would be very uncomfortable to think she was facing the world with a ‘self’ constructed out of bits and pieces of great authors of the past, yet I think in large part that is exactly what a medieval self or ‘character’ was.” The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), 179-80. 60 Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages, 85: “Sports retain at all times such a dramatic and erotic element; today’s rowing or soccer contests contain much more of the emotional qualities of a medieval tournament than athletes and spectators themselves are perhaps conscious of. But while modern sports have returned to a natural, almost Greek, simplicity and beauty, medieval, or at least late medieval, tournaments were a sport overladen with embellishments and heavily elaborated, in which the dramatic and romantic element was so deliberately worked out that it virtually came to serve the function of drama itself.” 61 Carrillo de Huete, Crónica del Halconero, 20-2; Barrientos, Refundación, 59-62; Andrés Díaz, 82-3, n. 4, 91, n. 43; Palomo Fernández and Senra Gabriel y Galán, “La ciudad y la fiesta,” 33-4.

121 tela, a central divider that prevented jousters from colliding.62 In losing its purely military focus, the tournament became a festive event for courtiers, with dancing, music, banquets, entremeses (brief and comical plays, usually performed during the natural interludes between tournament events), poetry, and invenciones (word games and riddles). Such was the tournament that Alvaro de Luna, constable for Juan II and the key figure in his court, organized in honor of the royal family on 1 May, 1436: “this festival was very well ordered with daytime jousts involving practice lances in a clearing and later with real weapons by torchlight in the palace. Many knights competed in the jousts, and the King, Queen, and prince dined richly in the constable’s palace and they composed skits and danced the night away.”63 Alvaro de Luna seems to have been a master organizer of these multivalent spectacles, which his king so enjoyed. Luna’s biographer claimed that “he was very creative and much given to presenting invenciones and putting on entremeses in festivals or jousts or in mock battles, in which his invenciones always meant just what he intended.”64

The entremeses and dramas presented at these events were often comic, even burlesque, but they were never seditious. On the contrary, they served the same end as the tournaments themselves, to confirm the rank and privilege of those involved and to honor, even exalt, the monarchy. The closing ceremonies of a huge tournament held at

62 Ian Macpherson, “The Game of Courtly Love,” in Ian Macpherson and Angus MacKay, Love, Religion and Politics in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden, 1998), 241-3. 63 Crónica del Halconero, 228: “La qual fiesta fué muy noblemente ordenada, de justas en arnés rreal, de día en vna floresta, e después en su posada de noche con antorchas, en arnés de guerra. En la qual justoran muchas caualleros, e çenaron el Rey y Reyna e Prínçipe en la posada del condestable, ricamente, e fizieron momos e danças que duraron fasta la media noche.” Only a few months later, the royals returned to Luna’s palace for a similar event, Crónica del Halconero, 231. 64 Crónica de don Alvaro de Luna, Condestable de Castilla, Maestre de Santiago, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 2 (Madrid, 1946), 207: “fue muy inventivo e mucho dado a fallar invençiones, e sacar entremeses en fiestas, o en justas, o en guerra; en las quales invençiones muy agudamente significaba lo que quería.” Macpherson explains the wordplay in some examples of invenciones from the Crónica del Halconero in “Game of Courtly Love,” 243-4.

122 Valladolid in 1434 and attended, according to Pedro Carrillo de Huete, by more than ten thousand spectators, neatly combined the literary, military, playful, and propagandistic

aspects of knightly spectacle. After the jousts had been completed, the royals retired for

dinner and dancing with the contestants and a number of nobles, ladies, and churchmen.

Following dinner, the tournament judges rose and, dressed as the gods Amor and Mars,

gave their verdicts, pronouncing Juan II as champion “because of his excellence as much

as for the virtue of his magnificent royal person” and awarding him a fine horse. Alvaro

de Luna, as host, received a feathered crest and among the others honored was Don Juan

Niño, whose trophy was a helm “made by Vulcan, armorer to Jupiter.”65

Far bolder was Juan II’s appearance at the great Valladolid tournament in 1428:

“and the King left the tela with a dozen knights, he dressed as God the Father, and the others, all wearing crowns and each with the title of a Saint, carrying a sign of a martyr who had passed to our Lord God.”66 Yet here too the overt political significance of the

monarch publicly identifying himself with God was leavened with a sense of play as well

as a strong dose of ostentation as the chronicler devoted much of his account of the

tournament to detailed descriptions of the participants’ dress and the decoration of the

stages. Juan’s decision to play God, so to speak, is significant also in that it was a

reminder to himself and to the crowd of the high expectations of a monarch. As God’s

regent on earth, he was theoretically above worldly reproach, but he was also subject to divine judgment for his actions. The theme of humility and the quest for virtue, subtle though it often was, is a constant in fifteenth-century Castilian tournaments, coming to

65 Crónica del Halconero, 154-60: “por rrazón de su exçelençia como por la virtud de su magnífica rreal persona… vna çelada, fecha por Bulcano, armero de Júpiter.” 66 Crónica del Halconero, 25: “e luego salió el señor Rey a la tela, él e otros doze cavalleros, él como Dios Padre, e los otros, todos con sus diademas, cado vno con su título del Santo que era, e con su señal en la mano cada vno del martirio que avía pasado por Nuestro Señor Dios.”

123 the fore in those tournaments where knights explicitly took on the roles of romantic heroes, emulating their deeds and morality. While publicly proclaiming their status and power through wealth, literary diversions, and military proficiency, the nobility returned time and again to the values of their order, to the integrity of past heroes, to their holy

mission.

From a cynical perspective, this is unsurprising. After all, knights owed their

social station to their supposed ideals of piety, generosity, and asceticism. They could do

no less than pay lip service to this standard for the benefit of the people while they were

bedecked in rich apparel and prancing about on their fine chargers as a prelude to long

nights of playacting, dancing, and drink. This was no doubt a central motive but the very

pervasiveness of the theme points to a real insecurity on the caballero’s part; they knew

the expectations of knights, sincerely admired the heroes of the past, and did not delude

themselves into thinking that the Cid or Fernán González would have behaved so. If they

devoted themselves to wholly realizing one aspect of the model, that of physical courage,

they did not reject its other facets but took pains to remind themselves, even in moments

of revelry, of what true knighthood meant. In subordinating but not abandoning these

lofty aspirations, the caballería kept alive the hope—in themselves as well as in the

people—that they would someday be worthy of them.

It was within this context that the conspirators at Avila conceived and constructed

their drama. They did so using familiar tools, from situating the spectacle on a level and

easily accessible area to constructing a stage or cadalhalso that is described in the

chronicles in the same terms as those used for tournament entremeses. Physical props

were key to the unfolding of the drama, especially those emblems symbolizing the

124 monarchy. Just so, participants in a tournament bore shields, devices, and banners proclaiming their identities and status, over and above the weapons and armor that were contested symbols. The legitimacy of the entire enterprise, in fact, rested on the ability of spectacle to affirm the social station of nobles and knights. Their authority to depose the king, even ritually, was based on the understanding that both the nobility and the people had voices in the selection of a monarch. These responsibilities were separate—the nobility elected a ruler; the people acclaimed one—but both were required. Popular acquiescence to the nobility’s more prominent role was necessary for the deposition to have any real meaning. But the Farce was also unlike most other caballero spectacles. Its purpose was far more ambitious than that of the usual tournaments, mêlée, or entremeses.

Nor was it meant to be fun, lacking the joie de vivre so central to Alvaro de Luna’s productions.

In its combination of traditional motifs with innovative intentions, then, the Farce of Avila reveals an important aspect of the knightly spectacle: its flexibility. Huizinga and others have condemned the fifteenth-century caballeros for their lack of originality in propping up an outdated ideal with the same tired scenes to the point where the repetition stripped the spectacles of their original beauty.67 Perhaps, however, the endurance of a few dominant motifs is evidence of their lasting utility rather than of an inability or unwillingness to move forward and develop new discourses. The themes of the tournament are archetypal—war, love, and virtue—and their sensory expression through sound and color was compelling. Even today, the glittering knights and bright banners of the joust are evocative images of the Middle Ages. Because they were based on fundamental ideas, their meanings were malleable. Knightly spectacles were adapted to

67 Huizinga, 118-9.

125 each moment, each new set of circumstances.68 The Farce of Avila, though drawing on

the same set of social understandings and staged in a similar manner, has little in

common with the joyful larks of Juan II’s court while neither bears much resemblance to

the ideal of knightly virtue advocated by Valera and Arévalo.

The marriage of tournament and drama was perhaps most fully realized on the

frontier, whose particular social conditions created a rich source of content for knightly

spectacles and fostered a deep sense of insecurity. In Jaén, for instance, Constable Iranzo

arranged for complex theatrical performances in concert with exhibitions of martial

prowess, with tournament mêlées and skirmishes often held on or near major holidays. In

these productions, there was only a fine line between the political and social functions of

the spectacle and the pure diversion of the entremeses. One such was the combate de

hueves, presented on Easter Monday in 1461 and 1463, in which the Constable and his

knights expended three or four thousand eggs in a battle between the palace and a

wooden castle constructed nearby. This was followed by a meal of eggs and cheese,

served to all present, and the ensemble of events thus combined martial and religious

themes with a demonstration of the city’s wealth and the Constable’s generosity.69 In all of his pageants, Iranzo made full use of visual elements—colorful costumes, coats of arms, and sumptuous embellishments—and constant music in order to heighten the

68 Francisco Flores Arroyuelo, El caballero: Hombre y prototipo (Murcia, 1979), 11-2; Angel Luis Molina Molina, “Estampas medievales murcianas. Desde la romántica caballeresca, caza y fiesta, a la predicación, procesión y romería,” in Fiestas, juegos y espectáculos en la España medieval. Actas del VII Curso de Cultura Medieval, celebrado en Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia) del 18 al 21 de Septiembre de 1995 (Aguilar de Campoo, 1999), 33-4; Juan Torres Fontes, “Don Fernando de Antequera y la romántica caballeresco,” MMM 5 (1980): 83-120. 69 Hechos del Condestable, 63-4, 123; Lucien Clare, “Fêtes, jeux et divertissements à la cour du connétable de Castille, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (1460-1470) : les exercices physiques,” in Frontières andalouses : La vie à Jaén entre 1460 et 1471, d'après « Los hechos del Condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo », ed. Jacques Heers (Paris, 1996), 29-30. See below, chap 3, for a more detailed discussion of Iranzo’s program of spectacles.

126 audience’s sense of unreality and to create a fantastic and diverting environment in which

quotidian cares could be forgotten. From productions such as this, in which the dramatic

element clearly overshadowed the military training, it was only a small step to pure

drama, to transforming the entremés from a sideshow into the main event, as at Avila.

********

Valera and his peers composed their work as a defense of and theoretical justification for military exercises and contests. In doing so, they responded to steady but, by the fifteenth century, generally passive clerical condemnation of tournaments and

spectacles. This church opposition had its roots in the Peace and Truce of God

movements, which began around the year 1000 and gained strength in the eleventh

century, but it was not until the mid-twelfth century that it took concrete shape.70 , writing in the mid-1120s in defense of the new Templar order, saw particular merit in the Templars’ rejection of traditional chivalric displays. He lamented that most knights had abandoned their true calling as warriors of God: “What error, knights, so incredible, what madness so unbearable draws you to chivalrous deeds at such expense and labor, all for no return but death or crime? You cover your horses in silks and dress your armor with swatches of flowing cloth; you figure your lances, shields and saddles; your bridles and your spurs you adorn with gold and silver and jewels; and with all this display, you rush only towards death, in shameful madness and shameless idiocy.”

The Templars, Bernard argued, had rededicated themselves to the Church and abandoned the frivolity and vanity of their former peers, “They swear off dice and gaming; they detest hunting, and take no pleasure in the absurd cruelty of falconry, as it is practiced.

70 The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca, 1992).

127 They renounce and abominate mimes and magicians and romanciers, bawdy songs and

the spectacle of the joust as vanity and dangerous folly.”71

The synod convened by Innocent II at Clermont in 1130 formalized Bernard’s

objections to tournaments, agreeing that “We forbid those detestable fairs and festivals,

which the vulgar call tournaments, where knights customarily gather by agreement and

heedlessly fight among themselves to make show of their strength and bravery, whence

often result men’s deaths and souls’ peril. Should any one of them die on such an

occasion, he should not be denied penance and the last rites if he asks for them; yet let

him not enjoy Church burial.”72 Later church councils in 1139, 1148, 1179, 1215, and

1248 reiterated this ban and it was not until 1316 that John XXII formally repealed the

prohibition on chivalric tournaments, although local authorities likely relented much

sooner.73 Georges Duby saw this retraction as evidence for a shift in church attitudes

away from a monastic distaste for military matters (generally excluding, of course, the

Crusade). After the mid-twelfth-century, more worldly clerics came to dominate the

church. These men were familiar with war and open to new ideas of secular chivalry.74

Richard Kaeuper, however, has argued that church opposition to secular chivalry was never solely a monastic phenomenon and that most theorists continued to criticize

71 Bernard of Clairvaux, “In Praise of the New Knighthood,” in Treatises III: On Grace and Free Choice, trans. Conrad Greenia. The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux 7, Cistercian Fathers Series 19 (Kalamazoo, 1977), 127-167. 72 Gregory IX, Decretalium D. Gregorii Papæ IX, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Emil Ludwig Richter and Emil Friedberg, 2 vols. (Graz, 1959), ii, book 5, tit. 8, “De torneamentis,” 804: “Detestabiles illas nundinas vel ferias, quas vulgo torneamenta vocant, in quibus milites ex condicto convenire solent, et ad ostentationem virium suarum et audaciae temere congredi, unde mortes hominum et animarum pericula saepe proveniunt, fieri prohibemus. Quodsi quis eorum ibi mortuus fuerit, quamvis ei poscenti poenitentia non negetur, ecclesiastica tamen careat sepultura.” 73 The text of John XXII’s repeal can be found in John XXII, Extravagantes tum viginti D. Ioannis Papæ XXII tum communes suæ integritati restitutæ, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Richter and Friedberg, ii, tit. 9, “De torneamentis,” 1215. 74 Georges Duby, “Guerre et société dan l’Europe féodale: ordonnancement de la paix, la guerre et l’argent, la morale des guerriers,” in Concetta, storia, miti e immagini del Medio Evo, ed. V. Branco (Florence, 1973), 449-82.

128 tournaments, setting a standard for ideal chivalry that was nearly unattainable. Instead of

one ecclesiastic discourse on chivalry replacing another, Knauper argues that both “the hostile and the valorizing” responses to knights were present throughout the Middle

Ages. Yet he concedes that there was a shift in emphasis and in tone as the proper

conduct of secular knights, and not their existence, became the central issue, and didactic

exhortations replaced, for the most part, the vitriol of Bernard and his ilk.75

Both critics and advocates of secular knighthood and its trappings were active in fifteenth-century Castile. Protests about the physical dangers of the joust and other tournament events did not, on the whole, break new ground but rather reiterated the points made by earlier detractors. Alfonso de Cartagena, a bishop of Burgos who spent much of his career outside of Spain, catalogued these objections in his mid-1440s

Doctrinal de los caballeros but also sought to relate them to the particular social and political problems of fifteenth-century Castile.76

He presented tournaments as an analogy for the faction fighting and civil wars that plagued the country. Arguing that two unworthy activities dominated nobles’ time,

“the one is in conflicts of the kingdom, the other is in games of arms,” Cartagena devoted an entire section of the Doctrinal, a work primarily intended as a compilation of Castilian laws relating to chivalry, to an impassioned plea that such games be banned.77 He was

particularly opposed to the fanciful and idealistic notions of knighthood presented in

romances such as Amadís or the Arthurian legends, which he dismissed as reading

75 Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), 80ff. 76 Alfonso de Cartagena, The Chivalric Vision of Alfonso de Cartagena: Study and Edition of the Doctrinal de los caualleros, ed. Noel Fallows (Newark, DE, 1995). On his career, see Luciano Serrano, Los conversos D. Pablo de Santa María y D. Alfonso de Cartagena, obispos de Burgos, gobernantes, diplomáticos y escritores (Madrid, 1942); Penna, "Alfonso de Cartagena", Prosistas españoles del siglo XV, xxxvii-lxx; Luis Fernández Gallardo, Alfonso de Cartagena, 1385-1456: una biografía política en la Castilla del siglo XV (Valladolid, 2002). 77 Cartagena, Doctrinal, 255: “la vna es en contiendas del rreyno, la otra es en juego de armas.”

129 material “of no useful value,” instead espousing an understanding of civil nobility akin to

Valera’s, one that emphasized knightly obligations and a practical set of

ideals.78

For Cartagena, a knight could rightly earn prestige and honor only through the honest exercise of arms, which he limited to defense of the realm and holy war, and never through success at the games. He considered the notion that mêlées, pasos, duels, and

other voluntary battles were a necessary evil that allowed knights a relatively safe release

for their martial spirit, but ultimately rejected their utility in this regard. Yes, they were

better than civil war but bore their own dangers. For too many knights saw the games as

an end in themselves, a way to make a living, a reputation, and even an advantageous

marriage. This focus on play led not only to injuries and to death, but fomented the very

noble rivalries they supposedly muted and delayed the persecution of war with

Granada.79

It was not even a useful form of military training as it lacked the true risk to life

and limb that permitted a man to test his own mettle. As such, the honors and fame

granted to tournament champions were hollow. He lamented: “But what can we tell

ourselves, when we see a land full of money and of arms, and at peace with Granada?

Should the nobles fidgeting to exercise their arms pit their armies against relatives and

those who should be friends, or in jousts and tournaments, of which the one is loathsome

and abominable and a thing which brings dishonor and destruction, and the other a game

78 Alfonso de Cartagena, Un tratado de Alfonso de Cartagena sobre la educación y los estudios literarios, ed. Jeremy N.H. Lawrance (Barcelona, 1979), 54: “nullius utilitatis.” 79 Iñigo López de Mendoza and Alfonso de Cartagena, “Qüestion fecha por el marqués de Santillana al muy sabio e noble perlado don Alfonso de Cartagena y su respuesta,” in Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, Obras completas, ed. Angel Gómez Moreno and Maxim P.A.M. Kerkhof (1988), 420-2 [Previously published in Angel Gómez Moreno, “La qüestion del marqués de Santillana a don Alfonso de Cartagena,” El Crotalón 2 (1985): 335-63].

130 or test only, not the principal activity of a knight. For which reason, the philosopher

[Aristotle] said that one cannot determine who is strong through tournaments and tests of

arms. For true fortitude can only be known through terrible and life-endangering acts

done for the common good. And an ancient proverb sometimes the successful tournament

knight is the timid and cowardly one in battle… And taking the two extremes, that is to

say, either playing games with weapons or using them to threaten those we call friends,

leads us from the purpose for which they were wrought, which is reducing the pride of

our enemies.”80

For Cartagena, these were urgent problem for the knights of Castile because they

defended the frontiers of the Christian world. He stressed in the Doctrinal that the

Reconquest had not significantly advanced since 1264 because of the infighting and distractions. The heroes of the thirteenth century had triumphed because of their unity and because of Muslim complacency. In making such points, Cartagana emphasized the holy nature of the quest for Reconquest and argued that piety and gratitude for divine aid played no small part in all this. Invoking Santiago’s appearance at Clavijo, for instance, he noted that Ramiro both promised the saint recognition for this timely aid and followed through on the pledge: “It was ordained long ago that the church of Santiago should share in whatever profit comes in the war against the Moors as if it were a knight… And this was promised and ordained, according to the chronicles, by King Ramiro I, who offered

80 Cartagena, Doctrinal, 255: “Mas que diremosnos que veemos el rreyno lleno de platas e de guardabraços e estar en paz los de Granada, e el fermoso meneo de las armas exerçitarse en ayuntar huestes contra los parientes e contra los que deuian ser amigos, o en justas o en torrneos, de lo qual lo vno es aboresçible e abominable e cosa que trae desonrra e destruyçion, lo otro vn juego o ensaye mas non prinçipal acta de la cauallería. Onde, el philosopho dize que en los torrneos e en las prueuas de las armas non se paresçe qua les fuerte. Ca la fortaleza verdadera en los fechos terribles e peligrosos de muerte que por la rrepublica se fazen se conosçe. E prouerbio antiguo dizen que a las vezes el buen torrneador es temeroso e couarde batallador… E asi tomando los dos estremos, es a saber, o jugando con las armas o amenazando con ellas a los que llamamos amigos, dexamos el medio para que se fizieron, que es para abaxar la soberuia de los enemigos.”

131 his vows in the battle he fought near Calahorra [not far from Clavijo] where the apostle

Santiago came in visible form and through his intercession God conquered the enemies of

the faith.”81

Now it was the Christians who had become complacent and their failure to expel

Islam from Iberia once and for all when they had the chance presented real dangers, especially since a new Muslim power, the Ottoman Turks, had arisen at the other end of the Mediterranean. Fearing a ‘pincer movement’ in which Granadan and Turkish

Muslims linked together to challenge the foundations of Christendom, Cartagena reminded the knights of their obligations to god, king, and country. Knights in France or

England could play at their games and fight amongst themselves without posing a danger to Christendom; those in Castile, however, needed to end their frivolous rivalries and engage the real enemy.82 To this end, Cartagena proposed a ban on tournaments, citing earlier prohibitions as his precedents. Noting that “jousts were banned in France at one time because it was understood that they obstructed the war in Outremer,” he explicitly compared the twelfth- and fifteenth-century situations to present the Reconquest as a holy war equal to the Crusades in its importance in which, then as now, tournaments diverted knights from their pious obligations.83 The urgency and earnestness of Cartagena’s plea

81 Cartagena, Doctrinal, 178: “e fue antiguamente ordenada, es rrazon que yo diga, la qual es esta: que en qualquier ganançia que en guerra de moros se ha, la yglesia de Santiago deue auer tanto como vn cauallero… E esto fue prometido e ordenado, segund las coronicas cuentan, por el rrey don Ramiro el primero, en la batalla que ouo çerca de Calahorra, quando fueron ofreçidos los votos, donde visiblemente vino el apostol Santiago, e por interçesion suya Dios vençio los enemigos de la fe.” 82 See Noel Fallows, “Introduction,” in Doctrinal, 29-34; and his “Just say no? Alfonso de Cartagena, the Doctrinal de los caballeros, and Spain’s Most Noble Pastime,” in Studies on Medieval in Honor of Charles F. Fraker, ed. Mercedes Vaquero and Alan Deyermond (Madison, 1995), 129-41. 83 Cartagena, Doctrinal, 255: “E vedadas fueron en vn tiempo las justas en Françia porque tanto se dauan a ellas que se destorruaua la guerra de Vltramar.” He refers here, and again on 291-2, to the conclusions of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which not only banned tournaments but also linked them to private warfare and general disorder. Fourth Lateran Council, Canon 71, in Henry Joseph Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation and Commentary (St. Louis, 1937), 236-296: “Though tournaments have been, under certain penalties, generally forbidden by different councils, since however at

132 is accentuated by its inclusion in a text that was primarily a legal anthology. He recognized this discrepancy, pledging to keep his comments brief: “I have perhaps failed to consider well that, if I said more about my own concerns, I could speak less of what the material deserves. But having introduced this topic, I need only a few words before embarrassment quiets me and I can return to what I started.”84

But Cartagena was also a pragmatist and realized that his appeals were unlikely to put an end to tournaments, given that papal bans had failed to provide a permanent solution. He therefore proposed a compromise solution: if knights must have their tournaments and jousts, they should do so within a strict set of rules. He specifically had in mind the code of the Order of the Band, a secular military order founded in the early fourteenth century by Alfonso XI.85 For Cartagena, the Order offered a number of advantages, foremost of which was order itself. It would join in brotherhood the young, ambitious, and competitive knights most likely to participate in tournaments, counteracting the divisive aspects of knightly sport. Its emphasis on piety and obedience would return knights’ attention to their duties. Jousting would be a pastime only and this time they are a serious obstacle to the success of the crusade, we strictly prohibit them under penalty of excommunication for a period of three years. But, since for the success of this undertaking it is above all else necessary that princes and Christian people maintain peace among themselves, we decree with the advice of the holy council that for four years peace be observed in the whole Christian world, so that through the prelates discordant elements may be brought together in the fullness of peace, or at least to the strict observance of the truce. Those who refuse to acquiesce in this are to be compelled by excommunication and interdict, unless the malice that inspired their wrongdoings was such that they ought not to enjoy such peace. But, if by chance they despise ecclesiastical censure, they have every reason to fear lest by the authority of the Church the secular power will be invoked against them as disturbers of the affairs of the One crucified. The Latin text of this canon is published in Constitutiones Concilii Quarti Lateranensis una cum commentariis glossatorum, ed. Antonio García y García. Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Ser. A: Corpus Glossatorum 2 (Città del Vaticano 1981), 167-70. Despite this censure, tournaments may not have actually obstructed Crusade preparations as Maurice Keen, for instance, has argued that they provided an unparalleled opportunity for advertising the Crusades and recruiting knights, Chivalry (New Haven, 1984), 97ff. See also Fallows’s comment in Doctrinal, 255, n. 5. 84 Cartagena, Doctrinal, 256: “E aun quando lo bien considerare fallara que si se dize algo mas de lo que pertenesçia a mi dezir pero menos de lo que la material meresçe. Mas por este punto que abri entienda el buen entendedor lo que la vergüença me fizo callar e yo continuare lo començado.” 85 On the Order of the Band, see D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton, The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe, 1325-1520 (New York, 1987), 46-95.

133 tournaments held under the Order’s auspices would not only be far safer than in

unregulated events in which recklessness was an asset (blunted weapons only would be

permitted) but would also be stripped of their playful and theatrical aspects. In short,

Cartagena hoped that the Order of the Band would make the joust and mêlée what they

should be, military training exercises conducted in a spirit of collegiality rather than

dangerous spectacles that sparked destructive rivalries and vendettas.86

Cartagena’s was not the only clerical voice to comment on knightly tournaments

in fifteenth-century Castile. His student Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo presented a far

sunnier perspective. A letrado theorist and Bishop of Palencia who spent most of his life

in Rome serving as refendarius (petitions secretary) to Popes Pius II and Paul II, Arévalo

agreed with Valera on the link between virtue and military training, describing the

practice of arms in the most glowing terms.87 In his Vergel de los Príncipes, a mirror of

princes dedicated to Enrique IV and written in the mid-1450s, Arévalo described the

importance for rulers and nobles of “honest sports and commendable exercises.”88 He

began by arguing, with extensive references to ancient authorities, for the restorative

value of such pursuits, observing that “continuous mental effort overtaxes and weakens

not only the body, but also the human heart and its powers.” In need of respite from their

intellectual duties, rulers should turn to physical activity instead of passive relaxation,

86 Cartagena, Doctrinal, 291-302. 87 On his life and works, see Teodoro Toni, “Don Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo. Su personalidad y actividades,” Anuario de historia del derecho español 12 (1935): 97-360; Richard H. Trame, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, Spanish Diplomat and Champion of the Papacy (Washington, D.C., 1958); Robert B. Tate, “Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo (1404-1470) and his Compendiosa Historia Hispanica,” Nottingham Mediaeval Studies 4 (1960): 58-80; Juan María Laboa, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, alcaide de Sant’Angelo (Madrid, 1973); and Lorenzo Velázquez Campo, “Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo,” in La filosofía española en Castilla y León: de los orígenes al Siglo de Oro, ed Maximiliano Fartos Martínez (Valladolid, 1997), 121-136. 88 Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, Vergel de los Príncipes, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Penna, 311-41: “honestos deportes e loables exercicios.” Palomo Fernández and Senra Gabriel y Galán, “La ciudad y la fiesta,” 9.

134 because, in addition to offering their own rewards, “these sports and delights are the same

as comfort and repose.”89 So which kinds of physical activities are the most virtuous and

necessary? Foremost, Arévalo tells his reader, is the “generous and noble exercise of

arms, through which not only are kingdoms and lands defended but also expanded and improved.” Second is hunting on horseback, and third is the playing and composing of

music, “which brings joy and strength to the human heart, stimulating it to acts of

virtue.”90 The rest of the work expands upon the virtues of these noble pursuits, describing for each of them twelve “excellencias” or qualities.

He summarized the benefits of both military training and the actual conduct of war in the eighth excellencia, listing the many virtues it engenders in noblemen:

obedience, patience, perseverance, fortitude and strength of heart, magnanimity, liberty,

openness, justice, and temperance. The exercise of arms also destroys vices and evils,

including injustice, pugnacity, avarice, pride, and arrogance.91 The ultimate goal of all this military preparation, as revealed in the twelfth excellencia, was no less than the redemption of the world and the triumph of good over evil. For “through such noble exercises and temporal deeds of arms, men are prepared and trained for the spiritual war

which we have with our invisible enemies, that is to say, with the devil and with the

world and with vices.”92 Even though Arévalo repeatedly emphasized that a primary goal

of warfare was the ability to live in peace, this spiritual war was inherently an unending

89 Sánchez de Arévalo, Vergel, 313: “los muchos e continuos pensamientos oprimen e debilitan non solamente al cuerpo, más aun al coraçón humano e a sus potencias… ca estos deportes e delectaciones son aquella misma foganca e reposo.” 90 Sánchez de Arévalo, Vergel, 314: “El primero, es el generoso y noble exercicio de armas, con que los regnos e tierras non solamente son defendidos mas acrecentados e decorados… las quales alegran e esfuerçan al coraçón humano excitándole a actos de virtud.” 91 Sánchez de Arévalo, Vergel, 319-20. 92 Sánchez de Arévalo, Vergel, 322-3: “... por los tales nobles exercicios e fechos de armas tenporales, son los omes habituados e exercitados para la guerra spiritual que avemos con nuestros enemigos invisibles: conviene a saber, con el diablo e con el mundo e con los vicios.”

135 one that required eternal vigilance. And so the ruler “should not cease the acts and

exercises and preludes which are the image of war,” for such training exercises not only

kept these Christian warriors fit for battle but, in improving their moral character, were themselves significant victories in the struggle against vice.93

Church observers may have been divided on the merits of martial sports but they had no such difficulties with the games as spectacle. Clerics of all stations were, of course, quite familiar with public events as regular participants in any number of organized festivals, both official ceremonies (such as coronations, royal entrances, noble weddings, births, and funerals) and religious observances. Of these, the liturgy was the most common and contained features that differentiated it from most other public rituals.

In its invocation of emotional responses through clothing, decoration, and formalized

speech, however, the mass also had much in common with other types of spectacle.

Church representatives also took a prominent place in the public eye during processions

honoring local saints as well as in the many observations of the liturgical calendar. Such

public events, productions that could be as elaborate and expensive as any knightly creation, were the prime religious activity for much of the laity and so a major way in which the Church communicated with the masses according to their own customs.94

Another means was public preaching. Although local priests generally gave Sunday sermons, municipal concejos or guilds would contract mendicants for major holidays, when a big crowd might be expected. The purpose of these sermons was educational, communicating to the people the life, virtues and deeds of the saint celebrated and perhaps taking the opportunity to comment on the moral aspects of a timely topic.

93 Sánchez de Arévalo, Vergel, 323: “Pero non deve cesar los actos e exercicios e preludios que son imagen de guerra.” 94 Molina Molina, “Estampas medievales murcianas,” 59.

136 Successful preachers were master performers, unafraid to give their lessons a

theatrical character. They could move from invective to sentiment to tears in a few

moments, an approach that seems to have been successful. The emotional absorption of

both preacher and flock could so complete as to disturb those unfamiliar with the

experience, like the French traveler, Barthélemy Joly, who commented that, “In their

preaching, they make use of an impressive vehemence… On this topic, two things disturb

me in the Spanish sermons: the extreme, almost turbulent, impetuousness of the preacher

and the continual sighs of the women, so loud and forceful that they completely disrupt

one’s attention.”95 These poignant performances, which acted as complements to the

professions, were staged like theatrical events and often required extensive preparations on the part of the guilds or concejos.

St. Vincent Ferrer’s well-documented tour through Murcia in 1410-1411, while notable in its scale, exemplifies the importance accorded to public preaching. Ferrer, who came to Murcia at the invitation of Pedro de Santa María, Bishop of Cartagena (and father to Alfonso de Cartagena), brought a retinue of three hundred, all of whom had to be fed and lodged, a task which fell to the local Dominican prior.96 Additional

preparations included the construction of a pulpit and arrangement of space for the

substantial crowds who came to hear the famous preacher. Efforts were likely taken to

ensure that the audience was orderly even to the extent of forbidding mothers to bring

95 Cited in Marcellin Defourneaux, La vida cotidiana en la España del Siglo de Oro (Barcelona, 1983), 111: “En su predicación hacen uso de una vehemencia demasiado grande… Por eso, dos cosas me turbaban en los sermones de España: esa impetuosidad extrema, casi turbulenta, del predicador, y los continuos suspiros de las mujeres, tan grandes y vehementes que perturbaban toda la atención.” 96 Ferrer’s journey to Castile is detailed in José María Garganta and Vicente Forcada, Biografía y escritos de San Vicente Ferrer (Madrid, 1956); Pedro Manuel Cátedra García, Sermón, sociedad y literatura en la Edad Media. San Vicente Ferrer en Castilla (1411-1412) (Salamanca, 1994); Molina Molina, “Estampas medievales murcianas,” 52-9; and Juan Torres Fontes, “Moros, judíos y conversos en la regencia de don Fernando de Antequera,” CHE 31-32 (1960): 84-5.

137 young children “because their crying distracts the preacher,” as happened in 1435 and again in 1472.97

In return for their efforts and expenditures, the municipal authorities hoped for

dramatic social repercussions and in this they were, as Angel Luis Molina Molina has

argued, largely gratified.98 In addition to the relatively common calls for greater moral

fervor and new laws against collective sins such as gambling, Ferrer made an effective

appeal for stricter segregation between the various religious communities in the city, and

particularly for the removal of Jews from much of civic life. But his approach was not

wholly divisive. The concejo, concerned about urban antiseigniorial movements and

more generally about conflict “between the principal knights and citizenry,” hoped “that

through the words he preaches to many people, he moves Christians as well as Jews and

Muslims to voluntarily pardon the deaths of their parents, siblings and other relatives as

well as other offenses and injuries.”99

Although they could be comfortable indeed on stage, clerics tended to remain on

the margins of more playful public events. The idea that clerics should spend their free

time in service to God rather than engaging in activities of doubtful morality was well

established, as were priestly obligations to serve as moral exemplars for their flocks. The

expectations for their public and private comportment were explicitly laid out not only in

ecclesiastic law but also in the civil code, as the Partidas decreed that, “Prelates should

pay careful attention to their conduct as men whose example others follow, as above

97 AMC AC 1434, f. 48r; AC 1471, f. 56r; María de los Llanos Martínez Carrillo, “Fiestas ciudadanas: componentes religiosos y profanos de un cuadro bajamedieval Murcia.” MMM 16 (1990-1991): 13. 98 Molina Molina, “Estampas medievales murcianas,” 53. 99 Molina Molina, “Estampas medievales murcianas,” 56-7: “entre los cavalleros principales y ciudadanos.” Torres Fontes, “Moros, judíos y conversos,” 85: “por sus palabras quel pedrica muchas personas, asi cristianos como judios e moros por oyr las dichas palabras se le mueve la voluntad para perdonar, asy muertos de sus padres e de sus madres e hermanos e de otros sus parientes, como ofensas e injurias.”

138 stated; and for that reason, they should not witness exhibitions, as, for instance, lance

throwing, tilting or fights with bulls or other wild beasts, or visit those who take part in

them. Moreover, they should not throw dice, or play draughts, or ball, or quoits, or any games like those which tend to interfere with their composure, nor should they remain to witness them, or be familiar with those who play them.”100

The documentary record for the actual behavior of ecclesiastics in the fifteenth-

century is scattered and frequently unreliable. This is partly due to the paucity of official

church records, which understandably glossed over this issue, and partly to the nature of

chronicle and literary descriptions, which often presented highly subjective views of the

clergy. The minutes, however, of a number of synods held in fifteenth-century Castile

detail attempts to legislate the behavior of clerics while reports from diocesan inspectors

describe the failings of the parish priests.101 From these sources, it appears that

intellectual and legal efforts to proscribe playful activities were less than effective,

leaving the councils repeatedly obliged to ratify formal bans on any number of private or semi-private diversions. These ranged from more private moral failing (drinking in taverns, comporting with women, playing at cards and dice) to attending bullfights or public dances and musical performances to participating in burlesque public theatrics.

But church authorities did not seek only to improve the morality of their clergy, but also that of society as a whole. Both Cartagena and Arévalo, although they disagreed

100 Partidas, i, 76-7, tit. 5, law 57. 101 Ana Arranz Guzmán provides a detailed study of both synodal records and inspection reports in “Fiestas, juegos y diversiones prohibidas al clero en la Castilla Bajomedieval,” Cuadernos de historia de España 78 (2003-2004): 9-33; idem, "Las visitas pastorales a las parroquias de la Corona de Castilla durante la Baja Edad Media. Un primer inventario de obispos visitadores", En la España Medieval 26 (2003): 295-339; and Bonifacio Bartolomé Herrero, "Una visita pastoral a la diócesis de Segovia durante los años 1446 y 1447", En la España Medieval 18 (1995): 303-349. Antonio García y García summarizes synodal restrictions by category in “Religiosidad popular y festividades en el occidente peninsular (siglos XIII-XIV),” in Fiestas y Liturgia, Actas del coloquio celebrado en la Casa de Velásquez, 12 al 14 de diciembre, 1985 (Madrid, 1988), 38ff.

139 sharply in their views of caballero tournaments, emphasized the moral influence of these

spectacles. Although Cartagena’s objections were frequently echoed by others, knightly

jousts and mêlées did not receive much overt church scrutiny, a lack of reaction that may

in part be explained by the frequent presence of high ecclesiastic officials at the more

lavish events, where they mingled with their temporal peers. What really drew their ire

were dramatic performances, the entremeses and theatrics that frequently accompanied

these games, and especially those that mocked, or seemed to them to mock, holy rituals.

Most efforts to suppress such performances, however, focused on the popular urban

festivities that bore much in common with their noble counterparts but had less powerful

sponsors. These events, whose frequency waxed and waned in time with the liturgical

calendar, were performed in all Castilian cities but seem to have been more popular and

prevalent—or at least better documented—in some places. On the frontier, Murcia, for

instance, possessed a particularly vibrant festive culture as evidenced by the extent of

ecclesiastic and civil attempts to curb its ardor.102

Popular festive activity took a number of forms. Spontaneous celebrations and

games occurred the year round, but the most elaborate and formalized dramatic

presentations tended to fall near major church holidays, including the festival of the

‘reyes pájares’ on 27 December or Carnival immediately before Lent.103 This timing

102 The literature on urban festivities is too extensive to be summarized here. Relevant recent work on the relationship between popular dramatic activities and church or civil authorities on the Castilian frontier includes La fiesta, la ceremonia, el rito, ed. Pierre Córdoba and Jean-Pierre Etienvre (Granada, 1990); Maria Marcela Mantel, “Carácter socioeconómico de los juegos y entretenimientos en Castilla. Siglos XII al XV,” in Estudios de Historia de España 3 (1990), 51-116; Raquel Homet, “Sobre el espacio de las fiestas en la sociedad medieval,” in Temas Medievales 1 (1991): 143-61; Fiestas y religión en la cultura popular andaluza, ed. Pedro Gómez García (Granada, 1992); María de los Llanos Martínez Carrillo, “Elitismo y participación popular en las fiestas medievales,” MMM 18 (1993): 95-107; Juan José Capel Sánchez, “Murcia como espacio lúdico en la Baja Edad Media,” MMM 25-26 (2001-2002): 9-22 and Mariana Valeria Parma, “Fiesta y revuelta. La teatralidad política en Valencia a principios de la modernidad,” CHE 77 (2002): 145-64. 103 Martínez Carrillo, “Fiestas ciudadanas,” 17-23, 26.

140 incensed the clergy, who referred to such festivals as games of ridicule (juegos de escarnio), defined by one scholar as “sacro-profane theatrical activities with the intervention of the faithful and of clerics in a given moment of which appeared a literary element of ridicule: twisted speeches, satirical sermons, lascivious songs, comic dialogues, etc.”104 They therefore tried to abolish popular events that coincided with religious observances but lacked a strictly liturgical character. In 1473, for instance,

Concilio de Aranda in 1473 prohibited “playful” spectacles put on by both people and clergy during the festivals of Christmas, St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents, referring specifically to “… staged games, performances with masks or monsters, spectacles and other diverse fictions, all equally dishonest… clumsy poems and burlesque speeches.”105

Here, too, church authorities were in full agreement with restrictions laid down in the Partidas, which prohibited the clergy from presenting or viewing plays in church or during the liturgy that might distract audience attention from the rites, preferring instead plays that might improve the moral character of their flock. At the same time, the

Partidas expressed little confidence in the abilities of parish priests to discern between the two, noting that, “representations of this kind, which induce men to do good and have devotion for the faith, ecclesiastics can perform; and they are also beneficial, for they cause men to remember that the other events actually happened. These things should be

104 Fernando Lázaro Carreter, Teatro Medieval (Madrid, 1981), 22: “actividades sacroprofanas con intervención de fieles y de clérigos en las que en un momento dado aparece el elemento literario de escarnio: oraciones contrahechas, sermones satíricos, canciones lascivas, diálogos bufos, etc.” See also, idem, “El drama litúrgico, los ‘juegos de escarnio’ y el ‘Auto de los Reyes Magos’,” in Historia y crítica de la literatura española, ed. Alan Deyermond (Barcelona, 1979), i, i, 461-5; and “Juegos de escarnio,” in Dictionary of the Literature of the , ed. Germán Bleiberg, Maureen Ihrie, and Janet Pérez (Westport, CT, 1993), i, 897. 105 Palomo Fernández and Senra Gabriel y Galán, “La ciudad y la fiesta,” 9-11; Lázaro Carreter, Teatro Medieval, 24-5: “…juegos escénicos, máscaras, monstruos, espectáculos y otras diversas ficciones, igualmente deshonestas… torpes cantares y pláticas burlescas…”

141 done in an orderly way, and with great devotion, and should take place in large cities where there are archbishops or bishops, and either by their command, or by those of others who occupy their places; and they should not take place in villages, or in vile places, or for the sake of earning money by means of them.”106

How does this discourse relate to ecclesiastic reception of noble spectacles and tournaments? Certainly, the authorities deemed clerical involvement in almost any aspect of those occasions as unacceptable, regardless of whether or not they considered the sporting events as morally corrosive for secular participants and spectators. Moreover, they would certainly have dismissed the majority of the plays, skits, and other dramatic entertainments presented during breaks as juegos de escarnio. Nevertheless, the church’s purview was not wholly spiritual and political considerations made direct criticisms of caballero spectacle exceedingly rare. That the need for positive relations with influential nobles and rulers outweighed the moral dangers of irreverent theatre is attested to by the presence of often-senior churchmen at these games. Several prominent bishops and archbishops, to give just one example, attended the closing banquet for the 1434 tournament in Valladolid in which Roman gods handed out the trophies.107 It is unlikely that they openly decried any pagan or burlesque elements in a skit honoring the king himself. Politics aside, such acts were often fun; this was after all the reason they were presented at all. Church officials high and low attended them, participated in them, and tacitly condoned them for just that reason; they were a guilty pleasure that many no doubt rationalized as less heinous than other available forms of entertainment.

106 Partidas, i, tit. 6 law 34. For licit church plays, see Richard B. Donovan, Liturgical Drama in Medieval Spain (Toronto, 1958); and Humberto López Morales, Tradición y creación en los orígenes del teatro castellano (Madrid, 1968). 107 Crónica del Halconero, 158.

142 ********

The onlookers who gathered at knightly tournaments to enjoy the sports as well as

the skits and entremeses were perfectly aware that the nobility presented such shows to

confirm their social status, to parade their wealth, fidelity, and courage before their peers

and to demonstrate both their generosity and their monopoly on the use of force for the

people. They were also fully cognizant that the church nominally condemned these shows but that this disapproval was insufficient to prevent all but the most zealous prelates from attending. These observers may have lacked a voice both in the content of these performances and in the dominant mode of analyzing them. They did not record in writing their experiences of the tournament and, on the occasions they appear in the chroniclers’ accounts, it is collectively, as the large crowd whose presence confirms the prominence of the organizers or the appeal of the message. The weight of these well- established cultural narratives did constrain the range of possible individual responses available to onlookers even while their presence signaled tacit complicity in the caballero perspective.

However, onlookers need not have consented to the perceptions of reality shown them or to their authority or value. In practice, spectators’ priorities acted in concert with noble and church messages to create meaning in spectacles. Popular concerns varied from time to time and place to place, making it misleading to make broad generalizations.

There were, on the other hand, several structural issues that nearly always influenced popular perceptions of power in fifteenth-century Castile. Chief among these were economic stresses related to the degradation of the currency and particularly the price of grain. The structure of urban society and the concentration of power in caballero hands

143 rankled many of the nascent bourgeoisie who not only resented high taxes and their lack of influence but also, as we have seen, aspired to the very trappings of nobility and knighthood flaunted in the tournaments. Religious as well as social boundaries divided urban populations, with antipathy toward religious minorities a constant undercurrent with periodic outbreaks of violence.108 Popular perceptions of spectacles were not influenced only by resentments over real or perceived injustices. Numerous scholars have seen in the period a growing need amongst the populace for their own public expression of civic identity and religious devotion, expressions that may have competed with noble tournaments but also drew inspiration from them.109 Finally, the role of diversion should not be ignored; festivals were fun, regardless of their sponsorship, and even the bluntest propaganda represented a bit of excitement and a break in the workday.

The culture of the Castilian frontier was characterized by a deep sense of both physical and social insecurity that intensified all of the social discourses described above.

Caballeros and clergy saw great challenges and opportunities in the frontier. For caballeros, the frontier signified the sum of their aspirations, the goal of their constant military training and the supreme test of their virtue. Even the greatest of tournaments paled in comparison to successful combat against the enemies of god. For clerics, it was the battleground where Christians engaged the forces of evil, where popular morals could earn god’s favorable intervention or cause him to abandon his unworthy followers to the infidels. The realities of frontier life, however, tested both of these quixotic perspectives.

Regular and often cordial interactions with Muslims undermined ideologies of holy war

108 For overviews of these issues, see Angus MacKay, “Popular Movements and Pogroms in Fifteenth- Century Castile,” Past and Present 55 (1972): 33-67; idem, Money, Prices, and Politics in Fifteenth- Century Castile (London, 1981); Pablo Sánchez León, “Changing Patterns of Urban Conflict in Late Medieval Castile,” Past and Present 195, Supplement 2 (2007): 217-32. 109 See, for instance, Molina Molina, “Estampas medievales murcianas,” 59-63.

144 while the inability or unwillingness to bring the Reconquest to a successful conclusion brought the honor of the knights and the efficacy of the clergy into question. For the masses, meanwhile, the physical danger and religious diversity of the frontier exaggerated social pressures common to all Castilian cities. Taxes were generally higher, given the need to support armies in a constant state of readiness. Obligations for military service were onerous. Civic freedoms were suppressed by royal administrators who governed the frontier as the militarized zone it was. Economic competition between members of different religious communities led to interfaith conflict even while many opposed military escalations and the interruption of trade with Granada.

Together, these ambivalent attitudes and divided loyalties created a network of coalitions and exclusions that operated across a number of social and economic arenas.

At one moment, popular feeling might sympathize with elite efforts to build support for a renewal of hostilities with Granada or more stringent limitations on religious minorities.

At another, the economic burdens of war or empathy with Muslim merchants would make the same policies highly unpopular. Such ambivalences defined frontier cities, making it difficult to reduce any of these tensions to simple oppositions like Christian versus non-Christian, elite versus common, military versus civilian, or religious versus secular. In some cases, this set of conditions resulted in intensified noble efforts to impose particular readings of frontier society through spectacle, and especially through the entremeses and dramas that framed military tournaments. These could range from forceful restatements of traditional narratives describing the ‘correct’ social and religious hierarchy to thoughtful attempts to decode the complex set of relations governing urban life and propose compromises between religious imperatives and social realities. In all

145 instances, however, frontier municipal elites presented their dramas in an atmosphere of tension and uncertainty, if not outright mistrust, that made unpredictable audience reactions likely. These responses were closely tied to local conditions, however, and it is only through a close examination of such contexts that we can hope to untangle the particular issues that motivated the public to consent to elite messages, to resist them, or to propose alternatives.

146

III.

THE MEANINGS OF CIVIC SPACE

The fanciful tournaments, secular theatrics, and elaborate religious processions

and festivals that proliferated in fifteenth-century Castile were an urban phenomenon,

requiring the physical environments, artisanal skills, financial resources, and

organizational expertise that cities fostered. Only in cities, moreover, were there crowds

sufficient to inspire the great efforts required. Speaking primarily of vernacular drama in

France, Jean-Charles Payen has argued that, without cities, “le théâtre ne peut exister.”1

But cities did more than provide the logistical capacity to conduct mass spectacles. As the physical and social stage on which such performances were conducted, cities had an indelible impact on their content and reception.

This chapter considers the city as context for spectacle in several ways, beginning with contemporary efforts to understand the purpose and reality of civic life. One’s environment, fifteenth-century authors argued, had powerful and indelible effects on his or her personality and character. Thus, a person daily stimulated by positive and temperate sights and sounds would be more energetic and creative than someone regularly oppressed by an unforgiving climate or crime or decrepit buildings. To realize fully their potential, however, citizens required not only the proper physical surroundings, but also opportunities to cultivate their minds and bodies, including leisure time and access to parks, musicians, teachers and a close-knit, supportive community. Public

1 Jean-Charles Payen, “Théâtre médiéval et culture urbaine,” Revue d'histoire du théâtre 35 (1983), 233.

147 spectacles, from this perspective, had an integral role in a city’s proper functioning,

allowing the community moments to withdraw from quotidian cares and to come together

as a unified body social. While these commentaries were sometimes philosophical,

attempts to define the city were not wholly theoretical, as surviving descriptions of

Seville and Córdoba applauded their success in creating such ideal environments.

A careful examination of these laudatory accounts, however, reveals that neither

of their authors succeeded in considering the cities in their totality, focusing instead on

those districts and monuments with which they were most familiar and which best fit

their agendas. A second, less congratulatory vision of Córdoba bears the same failing,

pointing to a central feature of medieval Castilian cities: their division into neighborhoods or quarters with distinct physical and occupational characters. The

fragmentary quality of cities had a number of consequences for the experience of public

spectacles. It defined potential audiences, for instance, as individuals tended to move

within limited areas of the city, frequenting the same streets and markets while staying

close to familiar people and sights. For all but the most anticipated or publicized events,

the composition of the crowd largely reflected the demographics of its immediate

surroundings. The location of an event thus predicted, to some degree, its reception by

determining the collective influences on individual members of the audience.

Strong neighborhood allegiances also influenced personal identities. While a

person might describe oneself as a native of Murcia and take great pride in this heritage,

professions of parish affiliation and occupation that qualified the general statement of

Murcian birth were more meaningful because they explained which Murcia an individual

hailed from. Those presenting spectacles to the public therefore had to navigate

148 sentiments of both unity and divisiveness, leading them to promote a myth of civic solidarity while confirming existing social divisions and hierarchies.

They did this by making use of the ways in which individuals emotionally and

cognitively responded to their urban environments. Rulers employed specific civic

spaces—public buildings, markets, plazas, streets, and landmarks—to define, clarify, or

augment the social messages expressed in their spectacles. In some cases, this was a

simple association of a pageant with a location whose meaning was well-defined, either

through aspects of its architecture and decoration or by its place in communal memory.

The everyday connotations associated with civic spaces, however, were mutable. At

times, rulers were able to shift or transform these connotations to better suit the purposes

of their spectacles. Ephemeral architecture, or structures purpose-built for a particular

event, were a favored means of doing so. By constructing barriers and viewing platforms,

elites underlined the stratified nature of civic society by assigning a spatial hierarchy to

formerly-egalitarian spaces. But not all ephemeral structures were overt attempts to

confirm the social order. Fanciful wooden palaces, castles, or arches, for instance, could

turn a market square into a scene from a romance or a cathedral plaza into a frontier

citadel that must be defended from the infidels.

********

For contemporary thinkers, cities were more than mere aggregations of people

and buildings but natural and artificial environments that profoundly influenced the

character of those who dwelt in them. In this they differed from the thirteenth-century

Partidas, which alternately described the city as “a place surrounded by walls” or as a

149 “communal gathering of men—the old, those of middling age, and the young.”2 Drawing upon a body of work that included classical authors such as Aristotle and Strabo as well as more recent travel literature including the Mirabilis urbis Romae and humanist descriptions of other Italian cities, a number of fifteenth-century Castilian authors commented on how an agreeable setting benefited human temperament. Among them was Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo who, in a work describing the social and spatial organization of an ideal city, used classical examples to stress the importance of situating such a city in an advantageous location.3 For Arévalo, a suitable location was indispensable to the functioning of his hypothetical city because the natural ambiance determined much of the character of its inhabitants.

Arévalo suggested, for example, that the heat of Africa and the cold of northern

Europe had negative affects on the human spirit, for a hot climate results in a reflective but overly cautious and relaxed temperament while cold and stormy lands foster an

“overabundance of internal heat” and therefore active but impetuous and turbulent minds.

2 Partidas, vii, 1473, tit. 33, law 6; ii, 332, tit. 10, law 1. The literature on urban life in medieval Castile is vast. For an introduction to the historiography of the topic, see Fermín Miranda García, “La ciudad medieval hispana. Una aproximación bibliográfica,” in Las sociedades urbanas en la España Medieval. XXIX Semana de Estudios Medievales. Estella, 2002 (Pamplona, 2003), 591-626; and María Asenjo González, “Las ciudades medievales castellanas. Balance y perspectivas de su desarrollo historiográfico (1990-2004),” En la España Medieval 28 (2005): 415-453. General studies include Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Consideraciones metodológicas sobre el estudio de los núcleos urbanos en la Castilla bajomedieval: notas para un modelo teórico de análisis,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Historia Medieval 4 (1991): 353-66; Ángel Luis Molina Molina, Urbanismo medieval. La región de Murcia (Murcia, 1992); Teofilo Ruiz, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Philadelphia, 1994); Juan Gelabert, “Cities, Towns and Small Towns in Castile, 1500-1800,” in Small Towns in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Clark (Cambridge, 1995), 271-294; the articles in La ciudad medieval. Aspectos de la vida urbana en la Castilla Bajomedieval, ed. Juan Antonio Bonachía Hernando (Valladolid, 1996); and Pablo Sánchez León, “Town and Country in Castile, 1400-1650,” in Town and Country in Europe, 1300- 1800, ed. S.R. Epstein (Cambridge, 2001), 272-291. 3 Brian Tate offers a brief background on the medieval urban Descriptio genre as it relates to Iberian authors in “Laus Urbium: Praise of Two Andalusian Cities,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence. Studies in Honor of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), 148-52. Antonio Antelo Iglesias examines Arévalo’s classical and medieval sources in “La ciudad ideal según fray Francesc Eiximenis y Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo,” En la España medieval 6 (1985): 19- 50.

150 He then argues that in Iberia, “…between these extremes, the people who dwell in mild

and temperate lands, neither too hot nor too cold but somewhere in the middle, are

disposed of an even spirit, and are also of an inventive and agile understanding.” Like the ancient Greeks, therefore, the Castilians were poised between continents and, boasting the best qualities of each, were “ingenious, intellectual, and speculative, but less so than

Asians; they were also spirited and bold and robust, but less so than northern

Europeans.”4 This was not a racial vision. Arévalo made no claims here for the inherent superiority of the Castilians or Greeks, instead stressing that anyone might benefit from the benefits of moving to an agreeable climate to argue for the material advantages enjoyed by rulers who founded and fostered well-sited towns: “for those who live in such cities will be temperate, balancing intellect and audacity… for this reason the Romans were victors and ruled alone and in their armies they included people of all nations.”5

While Arévalo went on to highlight a number of other attributes of his model city, most of these served to develop his central premise that the human spirit is a product of its environment. In this vein, he describes the need for nearby mountains and forests, a

supply of clean water, sufficient pasture and farmland, even gaps in the city wall to

permit fresh breezes to stir the city’s air. He also devotes significant attention to the

social structure of the city, commenting at length on issues relevant to the frontier,

particularly the dangers of foreign influences and the proper conduct of war. Arévalo did

4 Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, Suma de la Política, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Mario Penna, BAE 116 (Madrid, 1959), 256-7: “esta gran abundancia del calor interior… entre estos extremos, las personas que moran en tierras tempradas y medianas, ni mucho calientes ni mucho frías, assí como tienen el medio, assí medianamente son dispuestas a temprada animosidad, y otrosí a las cosas de ingenio y operaciones de entendimiento… ca son ingeniosos, intelectivos, especulativos, pero menos que los de Asia; son, otrosí, animosos y audaces y robustos, pero menos de los de Europa.” 5 Arévalo, Suma de la Política, 257-8: “… ca los que en tales ciudades bivieren, serán temprados, y quanto cunple intelectivos, y quanto cumple animosos... por esto los romanos fueron vencedores y ovieron la monarchía, y en sus exercicios ovieron gentes de todas naciones.”

151 not refer specifically to the juxtaposition of acculturation and war on the Castilian

frontier with Granada. Noting that Aristotle had suggested that cities should not be sited

too near the sea, he did argue that overmuch contact with foreigners might undermine the

social structure of the city “since people are naturally eager to try new customs and

things, from which great inconvenience and harm comes to the city and which is the

beginning of corruption within it.”6 Instead, he proposed that trade take place in smaller

towns and villages located on the water (or on the frontier), a solution that kept foreigners segregated from the general population and allowed the city to remain free of possible

contagion.

On military matters, Arévalo outlined a number of criteria for just war,

emphasizing that responsible leaders should seek peaceful solutions whenever possible.

Nevertheless, he decreed that these leaders should also ensure that their cities be well

prepared for war, with a unified citizenry and extensive stockpiles of provisions and

weapons. The most significant of these preparations was the fostering of a disciplined and

well-prepared standing militia of cavalry, the caballería. By describing in detail the

attributes of such horsemen and the training required to develop their potential, Arévalo

underscored their central and indispensable role in his idealized city. They were not only

to provide physical security to the populace but they were the defenders of municipal

honor and morality. He understood the knighthood to be a “strict religion” and held those

admitted to this fellowship to the highest of standards. Their obligations to the civic

community ranged from courage and steadfastness in battle to faith in God and the

Church to caring for widows and orphans. Arévalo would brook no attempts to water

6 Arévalo, Suma de la Política, 264: “porque, naturalmente, los omes son avidos por desseosos de provar policías e cosas nuevas, de que viene gran inconveniente e daño a la tal cibdad e es principio de corrupción della.”

152 down these holy duties: “Although the caballeros nowadays do not swear specifically to

these things, they swear to them silently in accepting the knighthood, and are no less perjurers that if they were to do something contrary to what they expressly vowed.”7 The

ideal city, as conceived here, revolved around the institution of knighthood; if they were

to fail to uphold their venerable traditions, the social structure would inevitably fall.

As described in chapter 2, Arévalo saw public military training to be an essential

component in the creation of an urban militia that was both morally sound and effective

in combat.8 But he did not limit the benefits of public displays to the martial. He took a

classical understanding of the concept of leisure time (otium cum dignitas) as the

opportunity to withdraw from daily affairs in order to cultivate one’s intellectual or

spiritual aspects and ultimately achieve virtue. Leisure was also a valuable opportunity

for people to invigorate themselves, casting off the worries of the world, refreshing their

social bonds, and taking joy in life. Given access to the proper forms of leisure activities,

which included stargazing, poetry, and music to inspire the soul as well as hunting,

riding, and nature walks to relieve the body, Arévalo argued that “people will become

inventive and intellectual through the continual use and exercise that they have given to

acts of understanding and virtue… It is therefore advisable for any good politician to

provide these things… that citizens have access to woods and areas suitable for hunting

and riding, that there also be in the city masters of prose and splendid singers for

delightful harmonies as well as poets and other such entertainers.”9 What was true for the

7 Arévalo, Suma de la Política, 278: “como una estrecha religión… Y puesto que los cavalleros de agora no juren estas cosas expressamente, por esse mesmo fecho que reciben la cavallería calladamente las juran, e no menos son perjuros si fazen lo contrario que si expressamente lo jurasen.” 8 In chapter 2, 47-8. 9 Arévalo, Suma de la Política, 260, 266: “por continuo uso e exercicio se han dado los hombres a estas cosas de entendimiento y virtud, contecerá que las tales personas serán ingeniosas e intelectivas…Por ende, es conveniente, a todo buen político proveer en estas cosas… que los cibdadanos ayan disposición de

153 individual was true for the collective, which not only had need of creative and active

citizens but also required moments of repose to release its tensions and rejuvenate itself.

Arévalo thought that certain types of public spectacles could meet this requirement, and

so he further advised rulers to insure “that certain representations and public games are

presented on special days for the joy and consolation of the inhabitants of the city.”10

If such a city—situated in a beneficial location and free from foreign influences, shielded by a dedicated order of caballeros, governed by the wise, and peopled by thoughtful citizens who came together on occasion for public acts of catharsis—was the

ideal as seen through fifteenth-century eyes, how did real cities measure up? Arévalo’s

interests lay in the realm of theory and he did not comment at length about any particular

city. In fact, only a few fifteenth-century Castilian authors offered extended descriptions

of contemporary cities, a marked contrast to the popularity of the genre in later

centuries.11 In those that portrayed frontier cities, we can see a measure of agreement with Arévalo on the links between the human spirit and its environment but also important differences, particularly on the role of foreign influences.

One such portrayal was that of Don Jerónimo of Córdoba, a canon of the Real

Colegiata de San Hipólito during the reign of Enrique IV, who likely wrote his Descriptio bosques e términos aptos para caça e monte; teniendo otrosí en la cibdad maestros de prosas e famosos cantores para delectable armonía, e poetas e otros ministros…” For the classical understanding of otium, see Jean-Marie Andre, L’otium dans la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine des origines a l'époque Augustéenne (Paris, 1966); and Antelo Iglesias,“La ciudad ideal,” 37-9. 10 Arévalo, Suma de la Política, 266: “…ordenando aun ciertas representaciones e juegos públicos en días señalados para alegría e consolación de los abitantes en la tal cibdad.” 11 For Golden Age treatises on the nature of cities, which developed ideas first articulated in the fifteenth century, see Santiago Quesada, La idea de ciudad en la cultura hispana de la edad moderna (Barcelona, 1992), especially chapters 2 and 3; Richard Kagan, “Urbs and Civitas in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth- Century Spain,” in Envisioning the City: Six Studies in Urban Cartography, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago, 1998), 75-108; Richard Kagan and Fernando Marías, Urban images of the Hispanic world, 1493-1793 (New Haven, 2000), 19-44; and Andrea Mariana Navarro, “Pasado y antigüedad clásica en los discursos sobre ciudades: Las Laudes en la historiografía andaluza” Temas Medievales 16 (2008), http://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0327-50942008000100004&lng=es&nrm=iso (accessed 22 January 2010).

154 cordubae sometime before taking up this position and while away from the city. In his

prologue, he referred to wide-ranging travels: to the Holy Land, Italy, Greece, and

Muslim countries, writing that he considered himself an exile.12 While we know little

about these journeys or his experiences abroad, the comparisons he made between his

home and other cities imply that they made a deep impression on him. Nevertheless, he

retained a fond memory of his native land’s soft beauty, noting its ideal combination of

river, fields, and hills, a landscape that recalled to him the topography of Palestine and

evoked images of the Garden of Eden. Córdoba’s climate not only nurtured its fertile soil,

able to feed all of Spain on its own, but also its human population. In terms strikingly

similar to those of Arévalo, he opined that “a sweltering climate generates plagues but

also inventive people. A cold climate brings forth slow, fraudulent, and ignorant minds.

Only a temperate climate brings together positive qualities in the customs of the people.

This is what was said about ancient Athens, the seat of wisdom, because the clarity of the

air there brought about clarity of the senses and prepared people for the contemplation of wisdom.”13 The wholesome climate was not Córdoba’s only natural charm, but one

feature of an environment that also offered hilltops for stargazing and even sweet music

to soothe the soul and offer inspiration of philosophical thoughts: “Who would not be

enraptured when, in the evening silence, hearing the sonorous rhythm of the water wheel,

recalling the harmony of the heavens in the spheres at both poles, arctic and antarctic?”14

Alfonso de Palencia, in an undated letter composed at roughly the same time as

12 Jerónimo of Córdoba, Córdoba en el siglo XV, ed. Manuel Nieto Cumplido (Córdoba, 1973), 43. 13 Jerónimo, Córdoba en el siglo XV, 49: “Patria siquidem feruens lues eficit et acutos, frigida tardos subdolos et ignaros, sola temperata est que mores hominibus sua qualitate conponit. Hinc est quod antique Athenas sedem sapientuum esse dixerunt quia puritate aeris lucidissimos sensus hominum ad contemplandam sapienciam preparauit.” 14 Jerónimo, Córdoba en el siglo XV, 45: “Set quis in vespertino silentio sonorous axis eius stridores audiens non delectatur com reuocent ad memoriam pollorum artici et antarthici cum sp(h)eris cellorum armonie representationem?”

155 Jerónimo’s work, praised Seville to the Archdeacon of Carrión, a friend who had left that

city to live in Palencia, as a means of comforting him in his exile. In this letter, Palencia

similarly commented on the beneficial climate and the natural bounty of the city’s

hinterlands, but in an altogether more practical sense. For Palencia, the advantages of the

natural environment lay in its contributions to civic wealth and physical vigor.15 In

cataloguing Seville’s wealth in wheat, fish, olive oil, and livestock, he notes its self-

sufficiency and its ability to outproduce any three Italian cities. In describing the

temperate climate, he makes the familiar comparisons to regions that are too cold or too

hot but emphasizes its benefits to citizens’ health rather than its ability to foster a

particular character: “For here a person does not endure the numbing cold which makes

one’s limbs lifeless, nor can we compare it to the tropics when the summer sun is most

intense. There never lacks a breeze strong enough to refresh the young, breathe vigor and

life into the old, and comfort and succour the infirm... it seems as if people here only

rarely die of illness before the age of eighty.”16

Palencia did not contest the notion that one’s surroundings have a profound

influence on his or her character; rather, he deemed the most relevant physical features in

the urban environment to be those made by man. Nature, or more properly God, “that

supreme artisan and architect,” had provided Seville most generously with the raw

materials of prosperity and virtue.17 It was only in the hands of a noble and talented

15 Alfonso de Palencia, Epístolas latinas, ed. Robert B. Tate and Rafael Alemany Ferrer (Barcelona, 1982), 37-9; Robert B. Tate, “The Civic Humanism of Alfonso de Palencia,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 23 (1979), 38. 16 Alfonso de Palencia, Epístolas, ii, “De laudibus Ispalis,” 36-7: “nec enim ea frigiditatis rigiditas est qua hominum solent torpescere menbra, nec alicujus calide respectu provincie estatis, ectiam ubique solis ferventissimi tempore umquam defficit aura que sit amena satis adolescentibus, et vigore spirituque vitali reficiat senes et decrepitos foveat atque sustentet... mala corporis valitudine quemquam ancte octogesimum annum finire vitam fere nunquam aut raro videtur.” 17 Alfonso de Palencia, Epístolas, ii, 37: “o summe artifex Deus, rerum sublimes architector.”

156 people, however, that such gifts could be made to flower. Palencia’s perspective on this

had been shaped by his time in Italy and particularly by the impressive reworking of

Florence that took place over the course of the fifteenth century. In his treatise De

perfectione militaris triumphi, written near the end of the 1450s, Palencia has his

character Exercitum (an allegorical figure representing military discipline) marvel at the

links between noble people and noble surroundings: “He did not leave before seeing all

parts of the great city and delighting in visiting the beautifully arranged temples and in

considering the public buildings, much more refined than the pen can describe, on whose

façades were written letters that praised the deeds of its citizens in peace and in war. …

and the men on the streets seemed like consuls or patricians, not unlike their ancient

Roman ancestors.”18 To this literal flowering of human potential, Palencia contrasted

Rome, whose magnificent ancient buildings had fallen into ruin and destroyed the

harmonious ambiance that had once been. Now, “this ugly landscape wounds the soul

through the windows of the eyes” and the Romans “for this reason have turned their

native intelligence to interpretations of the law and other bureaucratic obligations.”

Meanwhile they have been outstripped by their Florentine neighbors, full of ingenuity

and eloquence “because they daily contemplate with joyful eyes their well-ordered world

and contemplate a city flowering in more than just name.”19

18 Tate, “Laus urbium,” 156-7; Alfonso de Palencia, De perfectione militaris triumphi: La perfeçión del triunfo, ed. Javier Durán Barceló (Salamanca, 1996), 161-2: “No dexó con todo eso de bien mirar las partes de la grand çibdad y avía deleyte de visitar los templos, hermosamente compuestos y de considerar los edificios públicos, muy más polidos de quanto las péñola descrivir podría, en el antepecho de los quales, y en sus muros más delanteros estavan esculpidas letras que enseñadamente manifestavan los loores de los çibdadanos aquisitados en paz y en guerra… ni la presençia de los varones entonçes por las carreras çient çibdadanos consulares y patriçios no infiriores a los antiguos padres de los romanos.” 19 Alfonso de Palencia, Epístolas, vii, “Sapientissimo viro patrique ornatus ac utilis...,” 60: “fedus iste conspectus per oculorum fenestras animum ledit... Si hanc ob causam quod restat Romanis acumen dijudicationi legum aliisque oficiis quam suaviloquio potius aptatur... quippe compositam rem suam quotidie letis intuentur oculis contemplanturque floridam non aliter in aliis quam in nomine civitatem.” For Palencia’s other written comments on fifteenth-century Rome, see Tate, “Civic Humanism,” 30-2.

157 So how did the people of Seville order their world? According to Palencia, it was

with elegant simplicity and pragmatic industry. The city’s general layout was circular,

with high walls designed to act in concert with the river to provide a secure defensive

system. Within the walls was a dense network of streets, public buildings, and housing

that provided for the needs of a large population while simultaneously displaying the

civic pride and architectural skills of the citizens, “between the walls are sacred temples

and incredible buildings constructed through the arts of Daedalus [with great skill] that

house 150,000 inhabitants.”20 Although it would seem thus far that he was in accord with

Arévalo (with whom he likely studied in the household of Alonso de Cartagena), Palencia emphasized throughout that the source of Seville’s wealth was the trade to which much of

the populace was devoted. He had no fear of foreign influences, and commented a

number of times on the close relationships between Seville and several Italian cities

whose merchants thronged the markets of the city. It was not only the Italians who come

to buy and sell. In a passage that recalls the cosmopolitan Seville of the Primera Crónica

General, Palencia noted with pride that “here there is such a great gathering of merchants

that, if you consider only the languages, it truly seems like another Babel.”21

Palencia’s discussion of why Seville had developed into such an entrepôt neatly

encapsulated his understanding of natural and artificial environments. Here too the city

possessed a number of natural benefits that human hands had both harnessed and

improved. “The river,” for instance, “accommodates great ships and protects them from

20 Alfonso de Palencia, Epístolas, ii, 38-9: “Intra muros sacratissimi tenpla edificiaque maxima sunt Dedalica arte constructa que hominum circiter millibus centum quinquaginta ornatissima habitacula prebent.” The population figure is certainly exaggerated and Tate suggests that 60,000 would be more likely, “Laus Urbium,” 154. 21 Alfonso de Palencia, Epístolas, ii, 39: “Hic idcirco adeo magnus est mercatorum concurcus est ut, si linguarum consideres differencias, Babel tibi altera non immerito videatur.” PCG, ii, 769, ch. 1128. See chapter 1, n. 124 for the text of that passage.

158 all storms. These ships are propelled by wind or oars until they reach the city’s bridge

which, because of the water’s great depth and the sandy bottom, was constructed upon

small boats.”22 It was the moral virtue of its citizens and specifically their ability to not

be overcome with greed, however, that enabled Seville to maintain and expand her trade.

In De perfectione militaris triumphi, he praised the citizens of Barcelona for their self-

criticism, which enabled them to avoid complacency and arrogance, while also

commenting on the beauty and size of the Stock Exchange in which they gathered to

transact business. Palencia later claimed that Barcelona’s leaders succumbed to these

very sins in the 1460s, to the detriment of their city.23 He saw no danger of the same happening in Seville, for its inhabitants could live comfortably enough while still devoting themselves to cultural activities, which they knew to be more wholesome than the pursuit of ever-greater wealth: “They possess great domestic comforts and would have even more if it were not that surfeit leads to sloth. For those are not wanton, the benefits of dwelling under the sun here in our homeland are life and light and joy; one does not have to labor unduly, and is appropriately recompensed for his work.”24 For

Palencia, as for Arévalo, leisure well spent was the hallmark of civic society. Seville’s achievement was that its wealth permitted such repose even as its harmonious architecture inspired the people to engage in fruitful cultural activities.

The modernity of the built environment was nearly as important to Palencia as its

22 Alfonso de Palencia, Epístolas, ii, 37: “Cujus fluminis... ingentes rescipit naves omnique tempestate custodit illesas, que usque civitatis pontem, ob multam profunditatem arenosumque solum super naviculas constructum remorum impulsu aut velis facillime devehuntur.” Tate similarly constrasts the river descriptions of Palencia and Jerónimo in “Laus urbium,” 154. 23 Alfonso de Palencia, De perfectione militaris, 140; Tate, “Civic Humanism,” 39. 24 Alfonso de Palencia, Epístolas, ii, 39: Quibus ampla supelex anplior multo redderetur, si desidiam, ut assolet, rerum copia non pareret. Non lascivientibus namque incolis patria ipsa adeo benefica est ut sub sole, hic vitam, hic lucem, hic dici potest habitare leticiam cujusque et enim amplissimus industrie redditur modus cuique condecens est merces artiffici.

159 appearance. He allowed that ancient edifices could be as sublime and as capable of

rousing the spirit as anything built in the fifteenth century but, as demonstrated by the example of Rome, these usually retained but a shadow of their former glory, having fallen into disuse or been plundered for building materials. And so his exemplars were invariably modern: the Florentine customs and architecture he praised were quattrocento

innovations and the Stock Exchange in Barcelona was built at the end of the fourteenth

century. He did not, however, devote much ink to the monuments of Seville, choosing to

focus instead on its utilitarian marvels.25 While Jerónimo similarly defined Córdoba

through human interactions with the natural environment—recall the music of the

waterwheel—it is in a more poetic mode, emphasizing harmony and continuity as opposed to commerce, bustle, and change.

If Seville’s virtue lay in forbearance, Córdoba could boast the courage of its residents. Its very name—understood to mean “it raises up the heart”—referenced this quality, as did the outline of the city walls, which Jerónimo described as resembling the shape of a lion. This layout was no happenstance, but a powerful symbol of the city’s valiant defense of the frontier: “like a lion tears apart the beasts, just so this city of courageous people frequently suffered the insults of its pernicious enemies and attacked them with a mighty hand.”26 The constant vigilance implied by this comparison carried

over into civic life, which revolved around its public spaces. The most notable such area

in Córdoba was not an imposing and modern marketplace thronged with Italian merchants, but its “large and spacious open-air theatre in which the judges meet to hold

25 Tate, “Civic Humanism,” 34-5. 26 Jerónimo, Córdoba en el siglo XV, 44: “Corduba etnimologizatir quasi Cordium basis…sicut leo dilascerat beluas ita hic ciuitas gentis animose infestantium hostium insultus crebro perdomuit et manu vallida expugnauit.”

160 court and rule on civil cases and the young men learn their military skills through

games.” That such events were intended for public viewing is clear from his account, as

he referred to the training exercises as “spectacles,” describing their intricacies in

detail.27 Córdoba’s most prized product was not one destined for export and trade.

Instead, the locally bred horses were renowned for their agility and strength, qualities necessary for complex military maneuvers that challenged their riders and protected the

citizens.

Jerónimo gave some attention to other significant civic landmarks, including the

Alcázar and its extensive botanic gardens, but he reserved his most lavish praise for the

“glory of Spain and Córdoba’s signal distinction of honor, the illustrious seat of its

bishop, and a monument that honors its kings,” the Cathedral of Santa María, the former

Great Mosque of Córdoba.28 In a fulsome description of a building that he claims

outshines all the seven wonders of the ancient world, Jerónimo seems not to care that its

twelve doors, its arcades, and its fountains were all products of Muslim culture and

religion and a testament to the vibrant civilization of those “pernicious enemies”

displaced by Córdoba’s Christian inhabitants. He even commented on the beauty of the

minaret: “Standing there is a famous tower built of stone, inscribed with geometric

patterns and decorated with marble latticework, whose cornice terminates in a bronze

pinnacle. One climbs it by the two interior staircases where it seems that the architect

27 Jerónimo, Córdoba en el siglo XV, 51-2: “theatrum magnum et spaciosum in quo judices ad consistoria conueniunt causas ciuiles exacturi. Ibi juuenes militari erudiuntur in arte modo lusu… ista spectacula.” Although the Italian community in Córdoba, which Jerónimo never mentions, was far smaller than that of Seville, it was still significant in terms of both numbers and influence. See Manuel Nieto Cumplido, Historia de Córdoba. Islam y cristianismo (Córdoba, 1984), 285-6; idem, Córdoba 1492: Ambiente artístico y cultural (Córdoba, 1992), 57-8. 28 Jerónimo, Córdoba en el siglo XV, 50: “Est enim decus Hyspanie et Cordube honoris signaculum. Suo presuli inclita sedes et regnum honorabile monumentum.”

161 truly outdid himself.”29 Here is Arévalo’s fear of foreign contagion imbued with a frontier flavor: in a city where preparations for war against Islam were constant, a city whose shape and name alluded to this overriding purpose, one could still wander a mostly-intact mosque and take pleasure in the elegant design of the “throne made for a certain king Almanzor, decorated with ivory tracings and set under a coffered ceiling.”30

********

We can see a number of broad similarities between Palencia’s and Jerónimo’s accounts of their respective cities—a wholesome climate, impressive buildings, an active citizenry—as well as, if we leave aside the question of foreign influences, between each of these and Arévalo’s ideal metropolis. Can these parallels, however, be said to reflect a broad consensus in Castilian society about the central characteristics of urban life?

Certainly, none of these authors was a typical specimen, nor did any have a popular audience in mind. Palencia and Jerónimo wrote in Latin while making generous use of literary and Biblical allusions to display their erudition, limiting potential readers to scholars and clergy. Suma de la política was one of only two works that Arévalo composed in Castilian as opposed to Latin (Vergel de los príncipes was the other), a circumstance that implies a desire to reach a wider audience, but his extensive reliance on classical philosophy and his subject matter would only have added intellectually inclined nobles

29 Jerónimo, Córdoba en el siglo XV, 50: “Ibi turris egregia consistit lapideis tabulis constructa, opera exclusorio tota rubricate, cancelisque marmoreis insignita. Cuius fastigium pignaculo eneo galeato terminator. Duobus scalis ab intro ascenditur in quibus geometram autumno totam suam inpresisse periciam.” 30 Jerónimo, Córdoba en el siglo XV, 51: “In cuius concavi tronus eburneus regis quondam Almancoris opera laqueario tarsiatus.”

162 to this readership.31

Nor were their experiences representative of Castilian city-dwellers, even among

the literati. It is surely no coincidence that all three spent significant amounts of time in

Italy or that all their writings allude to exile.32 In one sense, this is to be expected. Few

people devote much time reflecting on familiar surroundings; how many of us have given

serious thought to the spaces in which we spend our daily lives? It is only when we have

left these familiar surroundings that we reflect on their comforts and personal

significance. These travels also exposed the authors to a broad range of urban conditions,

permitting them to view their native lands from a comparative perspective. It is certainly

true, as Brian Tate notes, that “a trip to Italy does not mean that one necessarily returns as

a humanist.” Such was, in fact, the case with Palencia, whose work bore many of the hallmarks of the humanists with whom he studied and who was particularly clear about

his reactions to different Italian cities, seeing in Florence the epitome of urban life while

using Rome as a cautionary tale about resting on the laurels of the past.33 The label of

humanist fits only moderately well on Arévalo and not at all on Jerónimo. Yet even their

more traditional outlooks had been developed through extended exposure to many of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Mediterranean and to the literary debates raging within them, and even the most parochial of Jerónimo’s arguments reflects the influence of these

31 Penna suggests that Arévalo chose Castilian in order to better honor Don Pedro de Acuña, to whom the work was dedicated and who did not read Latin. “Estudio preliminar,” in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, lxxv-lxxvi. 32 We do not know how long Jerónimo lived in Italy, but the opening line of his Descriptio underscores the personal importance of that visit: “Córdoba gave birth to me, Italy made me an adult.” Jerónimo, Córdoba en el siglo XV, 43: “Cordoba me genuit, Italia redigit adultum.” 33 Tate, “Laus Urbium,” 158. On humanist influences on Palencia’s writings, see Robert B. Tate and Anscari Mundó, “The Compendiolum of Alfonso de Palencia: a Humanist Treatise on the Geography of the Iberian Península,” Journal of Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 5 (1975): 253-78; Ottavio di Camillo, El humanismo castellano del siglo xv (Valencia 1976), 180ff; and Antonio Antelo Iglesias, “Alfonso de Palencia: historiografía y humanismo en la Castilla de siglo XV,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Historia Medieval, 3 (1990): 21-40

163 experiences.

If humanist aspirations were not the norm in Castilian society, however, neither

were they unknown or limited to a select group of scholars. A number of historians have

considered the culture of the court and the high nobility as a mixture of medieval mores

with Italian humanist and Renaissance ideals, an example of which might be the peculiar

combination of traditional themes with a powerful sense of the individual expressed in

Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s spectacles in Jaén.34 But even if Palencia and Jerónimo’s

impressions of urban space were familiar to some magnates, we would still have little

reason to suspect that they reflected popular understandings.

We do not—alas!—know of any displaced Andalusian artisan or laborer who,

pining away in Italy, penned an account of how he or she recalled their native city, its

personal significance, or its ideal features. We can, however, turn to the fictional

experiences of Francisco Delicado’s heroine Aldonza, an Iberian expatriate in Rome lavishly described in the novel Retrado de la Loçana andaluza.35 Drawing historical

conclusions from any work of fiction entails the risk of misconstruing elements of artistic license for reality. The dangers are minimal in this case, however, as Delicado has been widely applauded by scholars for his faithful portrait of the lives of lower-class

Andalusian women in Spain and in Rome at the time, with one commentator going so far as to describe the “photographic naturalism” of the work. Delicado himself wrote of his

34 Di Camillo, El humanismo, esp. Chapter 1; José Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad de Jaén en tiempos del Condestable Iranzo (Jaén, 1996), 289. 35 Francisco Delicado, La Lozana andaluza, ed. Jacques Joset and Folke Gernert (Barcelona, 2007). The text has been edited a number of times, and other recent editions include La Lozana andaluza, ed. Bruno M. Daimani (Madrid, 1982) and Retrato de la Lozana andaluza, ed. Claude Allaigre (Madrid, 1985). It has also been translated into English and French in Portrait of Lozana: The lusty Andalusian woman, trans. Bruno M. Daimani. Scripta Humanistica 34 (Potomac, MD, 1987); and Portrait de la Gaillarde andalouse. Roman, trans. Claude Bleton (Paris, 1993).

164 efforts to base events on real life.36

Little is known about Delicado, and nearly all of this is derived from the preface and colophon to his 1534 edition of the chivalric novel Primaleón. He was born near either Córdoba or Jaén around 1480 but lived much of his life in Rome, arriving in that city around 1500 and fleeing when it was sacked in 1527 to settle in Venice. Delicado, who may have been a cleric or held a benefice and may also have been of converso origin, is the likely author or publisher of an eclectic collection of works, whose topics range from cures for syphilis to Italian grammar to the proper administration of the sacraments by parish priests. If he indeed wrote all that bears his name, he was an accomplished linguist, fluent in Latin and Italian as well as Castilian. In fact, he paid a great deal of attention to linguistic details, composing La Lozana in the common tongue of Andalusia and employing a host of specific terms that not only confirm that he lived both there and in Rome but also reveal a deep familiarity with what John Edwards has called ‘the culture of the street’. Despite these merits, scholars long ignored La Lozana, objecting on moral grounds to its blunt portrayals of prostitutes and thieves until a series of papers published in the 1960s and 1970s rehabilitated the text and pointed to its historical value.37

36 Delicado, La Lozana, 9-10. Angus MacKay has outlined the likely sources of such distortions in La Lozana, which include Delicado’s approval of the 1527 sack of Rome, literary influences such as La Celestina, and the difficulties of a book primarily about women written by a man, “Women on the Margins,” in Ian Macpherson and Angus MacKay, Love, Religion and Politics in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden, 1998), 28-9. See also Augusta Foley, La Lozana andaluza. Critical Guides to Spanish Texts 18 (London, 1977), 25-7; and John Edwards, “Conversion in Córdoba and Rome: Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence. Studies in Honor of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), 205. 37 None of these details is corroborated by evidence outside of his own works, but they are accepted by modern critics for lack of any other biographical details about this elusive figure. Daimani, La Lozana, 9- 10; John Edwards, “The culture of the street: the Calle de la Feria in Córdoba, 1470-1520,” in Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400-1700, ed. Alexander Cowan (Exeter, 2000), 69-70; idem, “Conversion in Córdoba and Rome,” 203-5; MacKay, “Women on the Margins,” 28-9; idem, “The Whores of Babylon,” in Macpherson and MacKay, Love, Religion and Politics, 179.

165 La Lozana begins in Córdoba, where Aldonza was born into a converso family

around 1490. After her father dies, leaving the family with little money and, after they lost a court case, no land, she moved with her mother to Jerez de la Frontera. When her

mother also died, Aldonza went to live with her aunt in Seville and soon began an affair

with the Italian merchant Diomedes that took the couple on travels throughout the

Mediterranean world, visiting Greece, North Africa, and the Levant as well as the more

familiar ports of Italy and France. Diomedes’s father, however, thought her unsuitable to

marry his son and arranged to have her drowned at sea. Spared by her would-be-assassin,

Aldonza (by this time known by the nickname ‘Lozana’, a term often used in medieval

Spanish literature to denote a woman of beauty but also of strong character) made her

way to Rome, arriving in 1513.38 She remained there for many years, making a living

through various means, including prostitution, midwifery, and cosmetics. In 1527,

Lozana fled Rome in advance of Charles V’s troops along with most of the rest of the

city’s Spanish community.39

Little of the novel is set in Córdoba, and descriptions of life there are sparse in

comparison to its detailed topography of Rome, whose various quarters are vividly

portrayed. But Lozana’s Rome is centered on the Pozzo Bianco, a neighborhood of

Andalusians who retain a strong grip on their language and culture, still eating traditional

foods and recalling the ballads of their homeland. Through a meticulous reading of the

text, moreover, John Edwards has drawn attention to a number of invaluable references to

Córdoba itself that provide a counterpoint to Jerónimo’s idealized presentation of a city

38 Edwards, “Culture of the Street,” 71. Daimani, Portrait of Lozana, translates the term as ‘lusty’, capturing a similar sense. 39 Summaries of La Lozana can also be found in Edwards, “Culture of the Street,” 70-1; and “Conversion in Córdoba and Rome,” 204, 211-3.

166 distinguished by its favorable climate, natural beauty, and imposing monuments.

Delicado’s Aldonza instead defined Córdoba through personal relationships, local

allegiances, and notable events, a perspective that highlights several Cordoban landmarks

not mentioned by Jerónimo and casts others in a new light. To illustrate this, it is helpful to consider a few of the examples highlighted by Edwards.

The novel begins with a very brief summary of Aldonza’s early years in Córdoba

and the events that led her to her aunt’s house in Seville. This woman, with an eye to her niece’s quick marriage, asks for an account of her skills. In response, she received an

impassioned description of Lozana’s culinary talents, which reads in part: “If my

grandmother still lived, I would know more than I do, because she showed me how to

cook. It was while in her care that I learned to make noodles; meat pies; couscous with

beans; rice—whole, plain, and fried—and meatballs, round and hard, with coriander. You

could tell my work from that of a hundred others. Remember, lady aunt, that my

grandfather used to tell my father: ‘These come from the hand of my [grand]daughter

Aldonza!’ And how about my marinated meat? When that appeared, all the cloth

merchants in the Calle de la Feria wanted to try it, especially when it came from a good

breast of lamb.”40

Edwards focuses on Lozana’s mention of the Calle de la Feria in this speech,

noting both the street’s lengthy history and its central role in Cordoban life, both as the

heart of its commerce and as the physical divide between the older walled Medina area to

the west and the eastern, more industrial Ajerquía. In addition to housing numerous shops

40 Delicado, La Lozana, ed. Joset and Gernert, 14-5: “… y si esta mi agüela vivía, sabía yo más que no sé, que ella me mostró guisar, que en su poder deprendí hacer fideos, empanadillas, alcuzcuzú con garbanzos, arroz entero, seco, graso, albondiguillas redondas y apretadas con culantro verde, que se conocían las que yo hacía entre ciento. Mirá, señora tía, que su padre de mi padre decía: «¡Éstas son de mano de mi hija Aldonza!». Pues ¿adobado no hacía? Sobre que cuantos traperos había en la cal de la Heria querían probillo, y máxime cuando era un buen pecho de carnero.”

167 and workshops, this street was, as its name indicates, the site for regular market fairs

specializing in woolen cloth and luxuries. By the late fifteenth century, this trade lay

mostly in the hands of drapers from Burgos and it was likely these well-connected out-of-

town merchants who so enjoyed Lozana’s meat dishes.41 Her account blurs the lines

between private and communal spaces, explicitly linking the domestic duty of preparing

food for family to the public role of selling such food in the marketplace. But in one’s

own hometown, differences between relations, neighbors, and acquaintances were minor.

Comparing her current situation and poverty to her past life, she noted that her cooking

had pleased “not only my father, but all of my relatives.” This loosely-defined group

seems to have included those cloth merchants on the Feria, for she went on to lament to

her aunt that “then I spent my time pleasing my own people, now I please only

strangers.”42

Delicado again invoked this sense of neighborhood solidarity when describing

Lozana’s first days in Rome, when she was trying to find a means of earning a living and

a place to stay. Her plan was simple: she would seek out Spanish expatriates and attempt

to exploit them by claiming that she had relations in their hometowns in order to

ingratiate herself. “If she met someone from Alcalá la Real, then there she had a cousin,

and another in Baena, and relatives from Luque and in Peña de Martos. She met people

from Arjona, Arjonilla, and Montoro, and had relatives and cousins in all these

41 Edwards, “Culture of the Street,” 71-5; idem, “Conversion in Córdoba and Rome,” 207-8. On the Calle de la Feria and the surrounding streets, see José Manuel Escobar Camacho, La vida urbana cordobesa. El Potro y su entorno en la Baja Edad Media (Córdoba, 1985), 36-40, 56-63; idem, Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media. Evolución urbana de la ciudad (Córdoba, 1989), 134-48. Regulations for wool merchants are enumerated in the “Ordenanzas del concejo de Córdoba (1435),” ed. Manuel González Jiménez, HID 2 (1975): 194-5, 202, 244. 42 Delicado, La Lozana, ed. Joset and Gernert, 14: “no solamente a él, mas a todo el parentado… entonces estaba ocupada en agradar a los míos, y agora a los estraños.”

168 places…”43 Central to the ruse’s success, of course, was the ubiquity of such widespread

families and a culture of hospitality that extended to even the relatives of neighbors. As it

happened, Lozana soon came upon an authentic connection when a woman from Seville

spotted her walking along the street and called out to her:

“... My lady, are you Spanish? What are you looking for? LOZANA: Madam, even though I’m dressed as a Genovese woman, I am Spanish and from Córdoba. SEVILLANA: From Córdoba? By your life, all of us have relatives there! In what part of Córdoba did you live? LOZANA: Madam, in the Tannery [Cortiduría]. SEVILLANA: By your life, a cousin of mine married a rich tanner there! So relax here, I want to send for my cousin Teresa de Córdoba so she can see you!”44

As Edwards explains, the Tannery of Córdoba was located just to the north of the

Guadalquivir River in the parish (collación) of San Nicolás de la Ajerquía (see figure 5).

The work, which involved a great deal of pollution, had a deleterious affect on those

living nearby and was often associated with Jews or conversos. It is therefore no surprise

that the neighborhood was known for its converso character.45

The same parish also housed several of Córdoba’s brothels whose attendant crime

combined with the stench of the tanneries to make for an unsavory environment. The

Plaza del Potro and neighboring Calle de la Mancebía contained not only the public

brothel, which was owned by the cathedral and whose employees were taxed by the

concejo, but several inns of dubious reputation (figure 6). The area was famous at the

43 Delicado, La Lozana, ed. Joset and Gernert, 26: “Halló aquí de Alcalá la Real, y allí tenía ella una prima, y en Baena otra, en Luque y en la Peña de Martos, natural parentela. Halló aquí de Arjona y Arjonilla y de Montoro, y en todas estas partes tenía parientas y primas…” 44 Delicado, La Lozana, ed. Joset and Gernert, 27: “—Señora mía, ¿sois española? ¿Qué buscáis? LOZANA.—Señora, aunque vengo vestida a la ginovesa, soy española y de Córdoba. SEVILLANA.—¿De Córdoba? ¡Por vuestra vida, ahí tenemos todas parientes! ¿Y a qué parte morábades? LOZANA.—Señora, a la Curtiduría. SEVILLANA.—¡Por vida vuestra, que una mi prima casó ahí con un cortidor rico! ¡Así goce de vos, que quiero llamar a mi prima Teresa de Córdoba, que os vea! 45 Edwards, “Culture of the Street,” 75-8; and “Conversion in Córdoba and Rome,” 208; “Ordenanzas,” ed. González Jiménez, 270; Escobar Camacho, La vida, 34-5, 65-6.

169 time and even Cervantes, who lived in Córdoba for a time, reportedly modeled the inn

featured in Book 1 of on the Mesón del Potro.46 Edwards has uncovered a

likely reference to the Potro in La Lozana that highlights the difference in status between younger escorts who frequented the inns and the ‘public’ prostitutes in the brothel.47 It was, in short, just the sort of place that Jerónimo would neglect to mention in his tribute to Córdoba but whose dangers and converso population would have fostered close ties amongst moderately respectable families such as Lozana’s.

While the preceding examples show that Jerónimo’s presentation of Córdoba was incomplete, the differences between his perspective and the grittier city remembered in

La Lozana are best clarified by comparing their treatments of an identical location.

Jerónimo’s spacious open-air “theatre” refers to the still extant (although much modified)

Plaza de la Corredera, an area within the city limits originally set aside as open space in which to exercise horses.48 By the fifteenth century, la Corredera, located in the parish of

San Pedro directly to the north of San Nicolás del Ajerquía where lay the Tannery and

Potro, had acquired a number of other functions to become one of the central gathering

places in the city, so busy that the municipal authorities made public announcements

there (figure 7). The judges Jerónimo mentioned were the alcaldes ordinarios, who settled cases from a public bench on the east end of the plaza, near the Hospital de la

46 Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, ed. Tom Lathrop (Newark, 1997), I.3, 32, and I.17, 122; “Ordenanzas,” ed. González Jiménez, 237; Escobar Camacho, La vida, 28-32. 47 Edwards, “Culture of the Street,” 77-80; and “Conversion in Córdoba and Rome,” 209-10; Delicado, La Lozana, ed. Joset and Gernert, 144-5. On the topography and economics of the Potro area, see Jesús Padilla González and José Manuel Escobar Camacho, “La mancebía de Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media,” in La sociedad medieval andaluza, grupos no privilegiados: actas del III Coloquio de Historia Medieval Andaluza (Jaén, 1984), 279-292; and Escobar Camacho, La vida urbana cordobesa, 28-32. 48 Ricardo Molina, Córdoba en sus plazas (Córdoba, 1962), 16-7.

170 Santísima Trinidad y San Pedro.49 The equestrian military exercises he extolled were still

a common occurrence in the fifteenth century, but were only one of a host of sporting

events and festivities, which were so common that property owners who rented homes

along the plaza reserved for themselves the rights to use their buildings’ “views of the

bullfights, festivities and other events.”50

Like the Calle de la Feria, the Plaza de la Corredera was an important center for

commerce. Whereas the former hosted major semi-annual events centered on wholesale

textiles, the Corredera’s trade was more inclusive. Markets were held each Thursday,

with wares ranging from the ubiquitous woolen cloth to fresh and salted fish.51 It was in

this commercial, as opposed to civic, role that Delicado referred to the plaza. As Lozana

and her beau Rampín walk through Rome, he tells her of the wonderful markets held in

the Piazza Navona each Wednesday, where everything “born on land or in the sea” could

be bought. His description sparked a rare mood of nostalgia in Lozana, who responded:

“Then I want you to show me that. In Córdoba, they do this on Thursdays, if I remember

correctly:

Thursday, it was Thursday, market day that Fernando invited the Commanders’.

Oh, if only I had died when I heard that lament!”52 The verses Lozana quoted are from a

49 Teodomiro Ramírez de Arellano y Gutiérrez, Paseos por Córdoba, o sea Apuntes para su historia (León, 1973), 225-9. 50 Miguel Ángel Ortí Belmonte, Córdoba monumental, artística e histórica (Córdoba, 1980), 164-70; Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media, 218-9: “las vistas en las fiestas de toros, regozijos y demás funciones.” 51 ACC, caj. Z, nos. 52 (1 January, 1428); and 296 (30 September, 1456); Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media, 219. 52 Delicado, La Lozana, ed. Joset and Gernert, 70-1: “…no falta nada de cuantas cosas nacen en la tierra y en el agua… Pues eso quiero yo me mostréis. En Córdoba se hace los jueves, si bien me recuedro: Jueves,

171 version of the popular Cantar de los Comendadores de Córdoba, which related the tragic deaths of Jorge Fernández de Córdoba and his brother Fernando Alonso, both of whom were commanders (comendadores) in the .53

Their story was well known in Córdoba and throughout Castile. In 1448,

Fernando Alonso de Córdoba, veinticuatro of the city and lord of Belmonte, suspecting

that his wife, Beatriz de Hinestrosa, was romantically involved with one of the brothers,

invited both comendadores to join him on a hunt. They declined, complaining of urgent

duties in the city, and Belmonte pretended to depart, leaving them free to act as they would. He then returned home suddenly to catch them in flagrante delicto, Jorge

Fernández with Beatiz and Fernando Alonso with her niece. The offended husband murdered all four, as well as several servants in the house who had known about his cuckolding. He then fled to the court of Juan II, who offered him a pardon but sent him to fight the Granadans on the frontier, likely near Antequera.54 Thus, the Plaza de la

Corredera was a place that spoke to Jerónimo of order and chivalry with its judges and martial youths. The image that struck Lozana so forcefully when thinking of it was one of bustling commerce and of violence, of word passing through a crowd of a horrific crime

era jueves, / Día de mercado, / convidó Hernando / los Comendadores. ¡Oh si me muriera cuando esta endecha oí!” 53 Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Edición nacional de las obras completas de Menéndez Pelayo, 65 vols. (Madrid, 1940-1959), xxv, 449-51. The Cantar reads in part: “Al comienzo malo—de mis amores / convidó Fernando—los Comendadores / a buenas gallinas—capones mejores… / Jueves era, jueves, —día de mercado, / y en Sancta Marina—hacían rebato, / que Fernando dicen, —el que es veinticuatro, / había muerto a Jorge—y a su hermano, / y a la sin ventura—Doña Beatriz.” This was not the only literary rendition of these events. For the contemporary version penned by the converso poet Antón de Montoro, see his “Coplas que fizo Antón de Montoro de Córdoba por la muerte de los dos hermanos comendadores Jorge e Fernando de Córdoba, que mataron un día,” in Cancionero, ed. Marcella Ciceri and Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas (Salamanca, 1990), 249-54. The theme remained popular in the sixteenth century, with renditions by, among others, Juan Gutiérrez Rufo and Lope de Vega. For citations to these, see Cancionero, 249. 54 For an in-depth study of these events, see José Manuel Escobar Camacho and Antonio Varo Pineda, El veinticuatro Fernán Alonso y los comendadores de Córdoba: historia, literatura y leyenda (Córdoba, 1999).

172 at the heart of the noble oligarchy that ruled the city.

Like other commoners, of course, Lozana herself would have had little to do with

members of families such as the Fernández de Córdoba. Direct interactions in public

between disparate social groups were a rarity; the great and noble were seen from a

distance, if at all. That there was mutual disdain between the elite and the masses is taken

as a given in La Lozana, which is rife with unflattering comments about powerful nobles

and churchmen. This disparagement must be taken with a grain of salt, for Delicado had

his own axes to grind and his views may not have been universal. In one exchange,

however, he presents a somewhat different perspective, depicting elites as so removed

from the populace that they seem as foreigners, completely alien in dress and manners.

While walking with Rampín down the Via dell’Orso near Piazza Navona, Lozana spotted

a peculiarly dressed individual and, leaping to a conclusion that apparently seemed

logical to her, asked:

LOZANA: “Who is that? Is it the Bishop of Córdoba?” RAMPÍN: If only my father lived as well! It is one of those outlandish bishops from Asia Minor. LOZANA: A Mameluke always has to be in charge. RAMPÍN: The cardinals here are just like the Mamelukes. LOZANA: They are to be worshipped. RAMPÍN: And the Mamelukes too. LOZANA: Cardinals are so arrogant. RAMPÍN: “They’ll admit it to me in 1527.”55

This exchange is revealing on several levels, pointing to divisions in Córdoba that were

55 Delicado, La Lozana, ed. Joset and Gernert, 47-8: LOZANA.—¿Quién es éste? ¿Es el obispo de Córdoba? RAMPÍN.—¡Ansí viva mi padre! Es un obispo espigacensis de mala muerte. LOZANA.—Más triunfo lleva un mameluco. RAMPÍN.—Los cardenales son aquí como los mamelucos. LOZANA.—Aquéllos se hacen adorar. RAMPÍN.—Y éstos también. LOZANA.—Gran soberbia llevan. RAMPÍN.—El año de veinte y siete me lo dirán.”

173 both social and physical. We should not be surprised to hear Lozana and Rampín sniping about the arrogance and profligacy of senior church officials. The Sack of Rome in 1527

as punishment for the Church’s failure to reform is an ongoing theme in the novel and

Rampín’s concluding remark here is the first of many predictions of this event.

More interesting is that Lozana could mistake an Anatolian prelate for one from

her own home city. Not only had she never attended any services over which the bishop

of Córdoba had presided, which is perhaps to be expected, but she had also apparently

never even seen a Castilian bishop or cardinal and could only assume that such a person

would dress in an “outlandish” fashion. Certainly, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, bishop of

Córdoba around the time Delicado would have left the city, was a courtier and bureaucrat

often absent from his seat.56 He was, however, a tireless self-promoter and, like his predecessors and successors, would have doubtless been a visible presence in the city when resident there, taking part in the numerous processions conducted in and around the cathedral districts. Thus, Lozana’s complete lack of familiarity with the episcopal trappings implies that she had never, or only rarely, crossed the Calle de la Feria to walk about the Medina.

Despite her exile and the unglamorous district of the city she had called home,

Lozana, like Jerónimo, remembered Córdoba fondly and was fiercely proud of her birthplace. She expressed this sentiment succinctly, proclaiming that, “I gave many thanks to God that he made me in Córdoba rather than in any other land, and that he made me a wise woman and not a beast, of the Spanish nation and not of any other.”57

56 On his career, see Adelaida Sagarra Gamazo, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, un toresano en dos mundos (Zamora, 2006). 57 Delicado, La Lozana, ed. Joset and Gernert, 242: “Yo doy munchas gracias a Dios porque me formó en Córdoba más que en otra tierra, y me hizo mujer sabida y no bestia, y de nación española y no de otra.”

174 This statement expresses a quality of the medieval city that perhaps all of these authors would agree upon: that it was one source of identity, leaving an indelible mark on its natives. Lozana defined herself as Cordoban throughout the novel, even though most of her life experiences occurred elsewhere. Throughout the world travels of which he was so proud, Jerónimo devoted a great deal of time to reflections on Córdoba. Unlike Lozana, however, he ultimately was able to return home.

The social and spatial organization of Córdoba that so conditioned the accounts of both Lozana and Jerónimo merits further comment, as it was another and profound source of communal identities, inextricably linked to the question of how medieval urban spectacles were presented and experienced. Both Jerónimo’s boasts and Lozana’s memories of Córdoba, as discussed above, were limited to the areas with which they were most familiar, in each case encompassing only a small section of the city. For each, the remembered Córdoba was less a panorama of an entire city and a composite society than a series of snapshots that tracked their former lives. When Lozana remembered her life in

Córdoba, she was actually referring to the Ajerquía, an area economically and socially distinct from Jerónimo’s Medina neighborhood. By plotting the areas mentioned by each on a plan of the city (see figure 8), we can see that Lozana’s Cordoban experiences were confined to the two most southerly parishes in the Ajerquía side of the city. With the exception of the Plaza de la Corredera, meanwhile, Jerónimo described only features found in the Medina (the map also marks the location of the Real Colegiata de San

Hipólito, where Jerónimo resided later in his life). The Calle de la Feria did not act as an

absolute barrier and we can find converso leatherworkers, for instance, to either side of

the street. It was, however, a metaphorical divide between different, and generally

175 exclusive, social networks.

This and other forms of boundary were common features of medieval and early

modern cities. One sort includes particular urban spaces to which access was explicitly

limited. Some of these served political or military purposes, such as barracks and training

grounds or the open-air courts of which Jerónimo wrote. Most significant among forms of

‘official’ distinctive spaces were markets, defined not only through physical means but

also through law. Full access to these spaces was available only to certain people and

only for certain purposes, restrictions that facilitated the regulation of trade in certain

vital goods and thus ensured their availability and quality. Yet market spaces inevitably

failed to remain separate from the rest of the city as much, perhaps even most, of a city’s

trade took place outside these privileged zones even while non-economic activities

penetrated the marketplace—festivals, social interaction, political pageantry.58 Despite the explicit branding of the space for particular purposes, it could not be kept isolated from the unfettered activity around it. Sacred spaces acted in a similar manner; although theoretically apart from ‘profane’ quotidian spaces, worship nonetheless spilled into the streets through festivals, processions and acts of popular piety that temporarily transformed their meanings even while secular business entered the precincts of cathedrals, churches, and monasteries.

The Calle de la Feria and the similar, ‘soft’ boundaries that divided cities into quarters or neighborhoods defined by their occupational, economic, or religious character were of a different kind than those delineating markets or churches. They were unwritten, unregulated and even more open to transgression. Indeed, they were so at odds with

58 Martha C. Howell, “The Spaces of Late Medieval Urbanity,” in Shaping Urban Identity in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Marc Boone and Peter Stabel (Leuven, 2000), 8-9, 14-6.

176 efforts to represent cities as unified and ‘public’ entities that attempts to formally define

or enforce them were rare and one could cross without fear of significant consequences.

For the most part, custom and social approbation prevented one from frequenting areas of

a different social rank than one’s own. At the same time, civic ceremonies, confraternal

and guild processions, and festivals deliberately eroded these boundaries by associatively

linking diverse locations and creating legitimate reasons for people to move about the

city. The torturous routes often followed by such processions, in fact, were explicitly

meant to articulate notions of unitary civic space by linking diverse locations.

Residents, of course, were well aware of spatial boundaries, both official and

informal, within their city and the meanings of particular locations were a part of local

culture. To use the terminology developed by Kevin Lynch in his seminal The Image of

the City, people navigate cities by means of emotional and cognitive responses to their

visual structures. Based on their social functions, Lynch has assembled a typology of the

associative connotations that particular streets, edifices, or other physical elements of the

urban environment can convey to those knowledgeable enough to read them. These

include ‘paths’, ‘edges’, ‘nodes’, ‘districts,’ and ‘landmarks’.59 Understood from this

perspective, the Calle de la Feria was a central location in Córdoba that functioned in

multiple ways. It was simultaneously a ‘path’ linking disparate areas of the city and an

‘edge’ that acted as a symbolic barrier between the distinct districts of Santa María and

San Nicolás de la Ajerquía.

It was, moreover not defined solely by its navigational attributes. The shops and

fairs dedicated to cloth provided the Calle de la Feria with its own distinctive character

59 For brief description of each type of element, see Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, 1960), 46-8.

177 and atmosphere, making it a district in its own right that drew residents from other parts

of the city. Finally, the Cruz del Rastro at the river end of the street was a convergence of

paths or a ‘node’, both a point of congregation for local residents and a space in which residents from all parts of the city passed through on a regular basis. Lynch calls attention

to such nodes as places of particular significance and often the dominant feature of the

local urban landscape. In terms of meaningful associations, however, Lynch’s study

revealed that longtime residents of an area pay most attention to small landmarks, which

depend on individual relations with the environment and thus can range widely in kind.

For our purposes, the relevant point is that nearly any physical feature could serve as a

focal point for personal and communal associations and could therefore be employed,

consciously or not, in one’s assessment of a spectacle that included or passed by that

feature.

How were such associations formed and burned into the collective memory? We

have seen several examples already. Jerónimo and Palencia created connections between

their physical surroundings and classical or biblical allusions. Their writings, no doubt,

passed these associations to some of their readers. A tragic event and its commemoration

in song sufficed to create indelible meanings for Lozana. Processions and festivals were

conscious efforts to define spaces to serve particular agendas. Such references usually

acted, or were intended to act, subconsciously. On occasion, however, leaders made overt

efforts to endow particular landmarks with clear connotations. These are of particular

interest in that they can reveal contemporary understandings of how specific landmarks

came to acquire diverse meanings in the public mind.

One such instance for which we have a painstakingly detailed account is Miguel

178 Lucas de Iranzo’s 1470 attempt to fix permanently Jaen’s boundary with the neighboring

town of Andújar.60 As long running discussions had failed to resolve the issue, leading

representatives from both Jaén and Andújar requested that Iranzo, whose position as

regional overlord made him an unbiased judge, adjudicate the dispute. He seems to have

taken the request quite seriously and devoted himself to both studying all available documents and personally walking the countryside in order to reach a just and authoritative solution. On May 7, he gathered all the interested parties to hear his conclusions and mark the agreed-upon boundaries in a version of ceremonies sometimes used to ‘beat the bounds’ of a parish. The group was a large one, including the dean and prior of Jaén’s cathedral and the head of the local Franciscan house as well as many knights, squires, and commoners from both towns. Iranzo also invited a large band of children and youths from the towns and the surrounding countryside “so that they might see it [the boundary line] and retain the memory for all time.”61

He led this group on a tour of his proposed boundary line, conducting various activities at each of several landmarks or mojones. At the first, a small well (pozuelo),

Iranzo threw a lance into its depths, then instructed one of the accompanying youths to

jump in fully clothed and submerge himself completely. After he had been pulled out, the

Constable then invited all the children to engage in a water fight in which, “taking the

water from the well by hand, they splashed each other for a time.”62 From the well, the party moved along a line marked by small cairns until they reached a nearby hill, where

60 The situation and Iranzo’s response are described in Hechos del Condestable don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (Crónica del siglo XV), edición y estudio, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 3 (Madrid, 1940), 424-31. Angus MacKay treats these events briefly in the context of ballads and stories as arbitors of communal memory in “Religion, Culture, and Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1989), 235-6. 61 Hechos del Condestable, 425: “que para ver aquello y porque dello quedase memoria… para sienpre jamás.” 62 Hechos del Condestable, 426: “tomando el agua dél con las manos, se mojaron vnos a otros vn rato.”

179 they built a much larger pile of stones. To celebrate the construction of the next marker,

the younger members of the excursion enjoyed a lengthy game of “mares in the field.”63

The third marker of note was constructed of earth and consecrated with the

sacrifice of a ram, whose head was placed in its center. Some of those present then

suggested that this marker should be named “The Ram” (El Carnero). Iranzo, however,

chose to appease the clerics present and announced that it would be more appropriate to

christen it “The Lamb” (El Cordero). He explained this choice by noting that this marker

lay between the church estates (donadíos) of Santa María and San Juan de Acre. The new

moniker thus honored both Jesus’s mother and the apostle who first described Christ as

the Lamb of God (John 1:29). The priests declared themselves well satisfied.64 The

seemingly tireless Iranzo led his group through the construction of several more minor markers before reaching the conclusion of his trek where again a great pile of earth was raised into a landmark. Here, to ensure that it would be remembered (por memoria), the

Constable directed his knights to conduct a bullfight, inviting the residents of the nearby villages of Cazalilla and Villanueva de la Reina. They quickly erected a makeshift corral and had their sport, dispatching the bull with sharpened spears (cañas). With the spectacle concluded, Iranzo had the bull butchered and the meat distributed to local paupers.65

Iranzo employed any number of tactics in his efforts to deeply inscribe his

boundary. By including a large number of young people, he ensured that the events he

organized at each marker would remain in living memory for a long time to come. Those

events included a wide array of different elements ranging from comic or unusual

63 Hechos del Condestable, 427: “las yeguas en el prado.” 64 The only other marker to receive a name was dubbed “Buena Vista,” Hechos del Condestable, 428-9. 65 Hechos del Condestable, 430.

180 activities involving the personal participation of onlookers to generosity to religious

allusions to landmarks and cairns constructed for this particular purpose. These were

calculated to appeal to each of the diverse groups in the crowd: the children would recall

the water fight and dunking at the well, the pious christening of a marker appealed to the

clerics, and the bullfight was a notable event not only for the knights who participated but

also the rural dwellers who rarely had the opportunity to watch such a spectacle.

Such directed content reveals a sophisticated understanding on the part of the

Constable of both his audience and the ways in which public memoria can be created, an

impression strengthened by the careful manner in which he made certain that the events were distributed among the various markers so that no single mojón bore too many or

conflicting associations. Thus the first two cairns were sites for frivolity, the third for

piety (both Christian and pagan), and the last for festivities traditionally linked to noble

rule, martial sports and charity. By making himself personally available to his subjects,

Iranzo made the day yet more noteworthy while burnishing his personal reputation as a

compassionate and munificent ruler. No doubt many of the children present related the

story of the wild doings with the great man to their grandchildren, just as he had intended.

Finally, Iranzo took care not to rely solely on communal memory. Just as he employed

both written records and oral testimony to ensure that the boundary be laid out “just as it

always had been” and to give his verdict the proper auctoritas, he arranged that a precise

and detailed written record of the layout of the boundary be compiled to complement folk

memory.66

Civic spectacles attempted to create, though on a less overt level than Iranzo’s

boundary marking, cognitive or emotional significance for physical features of the city

66 Hechos del Condestable, 430: “como sienpre lo fué.”

181 that went beyond their intended or overt purposes. Some structures, however, had their

social meanings built into their architecture. City walls, for instance, needed no ritual

associations to convey their function as a barrier nor could the primary functions of a church or palace be mistaken for anything else. But architectural forms could be employed in subtler and more complex ways that went beyond the function of a particular structure. Siting, decoration, size, and even the choice of materials for buildings were often consciously chosen to convey a message or establish a mood, meanings which played a central role in the overall experience of a spectacle conducted in or near them.

The particular conditions of the Iberian frontier had long provided rulers with both the need for effective modes of expressing their readings of social, political, and religious issues and an abundance of themes with which to do so, making the region a crucible of what we might call ‘rhetorical architecture’.

Janice Mann’s study of the cultural meanings of San Pedro at Loarre, although devoted to a church whose construction greatly predates our period, is perhaps the most detailed consideration of architecture as forged by a frontier context and thus offers a useful introduction to the topic.67 San Pedro, a monumental and lavishly decorated church housed within a major frontier castle and within sight of towns remaining in

Muslim hands, was erected under the patronage of King Sancho Ramírez of Aragon in the 1070s and 1080s, a moment when Christian control of newly acquired territories was tenuous. Mann argues that the complex combined military and ecclesiastic features in order to remind the people both of the ruler’s legitimate and divinely authorized rule and

67 Janice Mann, “San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre: a Study in the Relation of Cultural Forces to the Design, Decoration and Construction of a Romanesque Church” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1991). See also her Romanesque Architecture and its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain, 1000-1120: Exploring Frontiers and Defining Identities (Toronto, 2009), especially chap. 4, “Shaping the Christian Presence in Aragon: The Frontier Fortress-Monasteries of King Sancho Ramírez (r. 1064-94),” 101-31.

182 of the differences between themselves and their Muslim neighbors. It was built in a

Romanesque style borrowed from France that marked a break from earlier Mozarabic

churches and signaled not only a change in the ownership of the land but, through its

Roman motifs, the idea that all Christians sprang from a common background. Just as the

Romans had been preordained for greatness, they too would see grand victories.

This expression of a cohesive and self-assured Christian posture was heightened

by its decorative scheme. Through carved portrayals of biblical victories and God’s wrath

against his enemies, the church inspired those within the castle to greater faith as a means

to overcoming their own enemies. Even the disposition of the church sent a powerful

message. Situated at the most vulnerable point in the complex, it was the only means of

ingress to the castle available to enemies and thus protected the fortifications, rather than

the other way around. Attacking Muslims would have to navigate its narrow spaces and

confront the visual depictions of God’s might that defined Loarre as a bastion of spiritual

as well as physical strength.68 Given the historical and political context in which San

Pedro and other similarly organized church-fortress complexes were built, Mann

proposes that the Aragonese rulers employed architecture as a weapon of psychological

or spiritual warfare, meant to rally the faithful and overawe the enemy. In 1067, for

instance, Sancho Ramírez described the purpose of a tower near Alquézar as “to exhort

the Christians and confound the Muslims.”69

While some of the conditions that prompted these innovative uses of architecture

were particular to the eleventh-century Aragonese frontier, others remained relevant in

the fifteenth century. Rulers continued to struggle with their inability to project effective

68 Mann, Romanesque Architecture, 123-7. Cf. the defensive use of Mary’s image at Chincoya described in the Cantigas, above, chapter 1, 37. 69 Cited in Mann, Romanesque Architecture, 128: “ad examplamentum de christianos et malum de moros.”

183 power on the periphery even as they sought to assuage the sense of constant physical

insecurity that characterized the fifteenth-century frontier. The perceived need to remind

frontier Christians that their beliefs were different from and opposed to those of nearby

Muslims, moreover, remained strong. To all of these problems, they responded as had

Sancho Ramírez, with monuments that emphasized their divine sanction and right to rule

while encouraging Christians in the ongoing struggle to reclaim Iberia from Islam. Yet

the real victories of the intervening centuries permitted a degree of triumphalism that led

architects such as Juan Guas and Simon de Colónia to incorporate Muslims motifs into

their masterpieces, a colonization of the enemy’s art that loudly proclaimed Christian

confidence.

Perhaps the best known example of this approach is the Franciscan monastery

church of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo, which brought together Italian, Gothic, and

Mudéjar elements in a fusion known as the Isabelline style. The church, commissioned

by Isabel and Ferdinand in 1477 to commemorate their victory over Portugal in the 1476

Battle of Toros that effectively ended the Castilian succession crisis, was intended to be

the royal burial site and was suitably lavish. It combined a traditional layout with

decorations ranging from Flemish arches to a Mudéjar ceiling and extensive heraldic

imagery. Its themes, moreover, combined elements, such as the ribs of its central lantern

vault, that deliberately invoked the Mezquita of Córdoba and thus paid homage to the

work of Muslim architects with explicit reminders of the Catholic Monarch’s success in

war against Granada, most notably the chains of Christian captives freed during the

conquest of Málaga in 1487 that adorned the church’s exterior walls.70

70 Joaquín Yarza Luazes, Los Reyes Católicos. Paisaje artístico de una monarquía (Madrid, 1993), 70; María Estrella Cela Esteban, Elementos simbólicos en el arte castellano de los Reyes Católicos (el poder

184 Public spectacles conducted within or near such buildings augmented, adapted,

and expanded their rhetorical purposes, sometimes even turning older structures with

preexisting social connotations toward new meanings. Occasions, however, in which

rulers conducted spectacles involving buildings they had personally commissioned permit us to consider how the symbolic content of spectacle and architecture was purposefully

integrated. One such example is that of Iranzo, whose palace played a role in nearly every

public or semi-public spectacle he sponsored during his time in Jaén as well as any

number of private diversions.71 His pageants certainly made use of other buildings,

notably the cathedral, as well as the open spaces of plazas and streets in and around the

city. The visual language of his palace, however, constructed under his direction and tied

closely to his public persona, was deliberately conceived to complement his theatrical

productions. Its public role began almost immediately after the Constable’s arrival in

Jaén in December 1460. On entering the city, he proceeded directly to the cathedral for a solemn mass to celebrate his assumption of power. He then went “to his palace, which he

had not seen since he had ordered it built,” where many of the local people came to “give

their respects to him with much pleasure and joy.”72

Soon after, the palace, and especially its sala baja or main hall (see figure 9), hosted the reception following his wedding to Teresa de Torres. Upon leaving the cathedral, where the ceremony had been performed, the couple escorted by a retinue of senior clergy and local notables retired to the palace, where “they went directly to the

real y el patronato regio) (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1990), 358-68. 71 On the transformation of fortified urban castles into palaces designed chiefly for political and recreational purposes, see Gema Palomo Fernández and José Luis Senra Gabriel y Galán, “La ciudad y la fiesta en la historiografía castellana de la baja edad media: escenografía lúdico-festiva,” Hispania 54 (1994), 10-15. 72 Hechos del Condestable, 37: “para su posada, la qual aún no avía visto después que la mandara labrar…a le facer reuverençia, com mucho placer y alegría.”

185 very large main salon, which was decorated with rich and new French wall-hangings portraying King Nebuchadnezzar. And at one end was a high wooden platform with steps, all covered with tapestries. On this was the hosts’ table; at their backs was an expensive canopy of rich brocade.”73 This room was the focal point of this and nearly all

other festive events conducted in the palace and mentioned in the Hechos del

Condestable.74 These gatherings generally followed a predictable course: first dinner with the Constable and his wife presiding at the high table while all others ate at tables on

the floor level; then dancing to tunes played by professional musicians, a diversion which

often lasted for hours and which might be interrupted by participatory singing, poetry,

and invenciones. The sala was also the site for theatrical performances, the entremeses

common to such gatherings as well as set pieces involving complex costumes and props.

The festivities often continued to the small hours of the morning.

This was an intimate space, as the sala’s diminutive dimensions, roughly fifty by

fifteen feet, meant that gatherings here, which often included upwards of fifty people,

were closely packed.75 It was also public; Iranzo’s guests included not only his circle of

friends and family but also church officials, members of the city concejo, and prominent

nobles from throughout the region. As such, its decorative scheme was meant to portray

73 Hechos del Condestable, 45-6: “derechemente se fueron para vna prinçipal sala, asaz grande, la qual estaua guarnida de muy ricos & nueuos paños françeses, a la memoria del rey Nabucodonosor. Y al vn cabo della estaua vn alto estrado, fecho de madera, de gradas, todo cubierto de tapeçería, do estaua la mesa de los dichos señores; y a sus espaldas, vn valioso dosel de muy rico brocado.” A nineteenth-century description of the palace, written by Valentín Carderera, can be found in Relación de los hechos del muy magnífico e más virtuoso señor, el señor don Miguel Lucas, muy digno condestable de Castilla, ed. Pascual de Gayango. Memorial histórico español: Colección de documentos, opúsculos, y antigüedades 8 (Madrid, 1855), Appendix D, “Sobre las casas del Condestable en Jaén,” 512-7. While the sala’s original Mudéjar ceiling and door remain intact, the palace has since been renovated and its exterior facade as well as several of the interior halls date from the 1920s. 74 Tess Knighton discusses both the decoration of the sala and its social functions, with an emphasis on musical performances, in “Spaces and Contexts for Listening in 15th-Century Castile: The Case of the Constable's Palace in Jaén,”Early Music 25 (1997): 661-677. 75 Knighton, “Spaces and Contexts,” 669.

186 the Constable in a particular light, to impress strangers and acquaintances alike with his lineage, generosity, courtly manners, and social standing. Thus the rich brocade, à la mode tapestries, and raised dais worked in concert with heraldic carvings and ranks of servants, musicians, and attendants lining the walls as well as the bountiful feasts and rivers of wine that he invariably served. Somewhat at odds, however, with this feudal vision are the room’s Mudéjar embellishments, notably an ornate ceiling akin to that of

San Pedro de los Reyes.

On one level, the two ceilings served a like purpose: to display a confidence in

Christian culture and ultimate victory strong enough to permit the adoption of the enemy’s artistic forms. On another, the Mudéjar coffering in Iranzo’s palace reflected his social sophistication; just as he imported chic French tapestries, so too was he up to date with courtly architectural trends. In practice, however, the Constable’s palace was built just as noble resentment over Enrique IV’s philo-Islamic tendencies was gathering force and thus demonstrated an unfashionable loyalty to the king. In combination with the positive references to Muslim culture that pervaded Iranzo’s public lifestyle and displays, moreover, the Mudéjar styling confirmed Iranzo’s grasp of the contradictory views of

Islam fostered by frontier life. The Muslims were enemies of the faith and potentially dangerous adversaries, to be treated accordingly and not to be lightly provoked. At the same time, the Muslims of Granada were trading partners, vital to Jaén’s economic wellbeing and to the fortunes of those influential residents who were Iranzo’s guests in the sala. Finally they were neighbors whom many Christians in Jaén had come to know and respect as individuals. The Mudéjar accoutrements in Iranzo’s palace, which appeared in the public sala and around its main entrance (figure 10) but nowhere in the

187 private quarters, therefore reassured high-ranking local officials that the Constable too could appreciate Muslims as more than religious enemies.

Performances and diversions in the Constable’s sala were public in the sense that they often included people with whom he had no strong personal attachments. They were not, however, in any sense open to the community as a whole. In fact, Iranzo’s wedding festivities, which ended with the invitation of Jaén’s elite to the palace after open-air processions specifically intended for popular enjoyment, set a pattern to which he would generally adhere throughout his time in the city. Pageants began in the private spaces of the palace, from which Iranzo and a select few would emerge at an appointed time, often to join a procession of knights and officials formed up outside and ordered by rank, and proceeded to the focal point for the day’s festivities, usually a tournament, bullfight, or banquet open to all. With the main event concluded, the Constable and his retinue would return to the palace, now accompanied by a host of celebrants, who could expect that food, drink, and popular amusements—mummers, trumpeters, and short theatrical skits— would be provided while the privileged filed into the sala for their courtly revelries. The difference in the type of entertainments offered was not accidental. Teofilo Ruiz has shown in his study of Iranzo’s festivals that the types of display offered closely mirrored the intended audiences, and so courtly pageantry, notably the hierarchical processions whose protocol was strictly enforced, marked the spatial transition from private to public while ribald and Carnivalesque themes featured prominently in events open to the commoners. Upon the return to the palace and subsequent exclusion of the masses,

188 courtly manners reappeared with formal dining, elegant music, and refined dances.76

Ruiz interprets these moves from private to public to semi-public as attempts to

“define the boundaries between those above and those below.”77 The resulting patterns of

inclusion and exclusion were certainly a recurring theme in Iranzo’s festivities and the

links between the shifting content of his pageants, their intended audiences, and their

architectural settings confirm that spatial hierarchy was a central aspect of fifteenth-

century civic spectacle. Restrictions on access have long been seen as a window into the

social and spatial formation of power relationships, and new work on the movements of

people through interior spaces has concluded that late-medieval developments in

architectural styles reflected new notions of spatial hierarchy.78 Such principals acted in

outdoor spaces as well, with free access to marketplaces, for instance, denoting one’s full

membership in civic society. Populations who lacked this visible badge of citizenship—

religious minorities, outsiders, paupers, and especially women—were thus marginalized

in a spatial, as well as economic and social, sense. While the approach might be applied

to the rooms comprising the Constable’s palace (and would clearly show that the public

sala was indeed one of the most accessible spaces in the structure, with multiple interior and exterior entrances), it is more suitable for our purposes to consider the strategies

employed to limit access and create spatial hierarchies during public spectacles. This

often involved temporary shifts that transformed previously public locations (a corner of

76 Teofilo F. Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: the Case of Jaén,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), 311-3; Knighton, “Spaces and Contexts,” 663, 666; Rodríguez Molina, La vida, 293. 77 Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture,” 313. 78 On access analysis, see Sheila Bonde and Clark Maines.“‘Ne aliquis extraneus claustrum intret’: Entry and Access at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, Soissons.” in Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude: Essays on Cistercians, Art and Architecture in Honour of Peter Fergusson, ed. Terryl N. Kinder. Medieval Church Studies 11, Studia et Documenta 13 (Turnhout, 2004), 173-186; and Amanda Richardson, “Corridors of Power: A Case Study in Access Analysis from Medieval England,” Antiquities 77 (2003): 373-84.

189 a plaza or a stretch of roadside, for instance) into restricted areas to which access was

limited to the elite and strictly enforced.

Although the effect was to confirm the social standing of elites, these various

ways of transforming the meanings of civic spaces could also be used to reach across

social boundaries and present the city as an authentic community. The Constable treated

the birth of his son and heir on April 11, 1468 as a momentous occasion and organized a

flurry of celebrations, both public and private, that lasted several days.79 These began with the formal presentation of baby Luis to the people of Jaén. Those wishing to pay their respects from a crowd waiting outside the palace were admitted to its private quarters in a strict hierarchical order (nobles and officials, then noblewomen and their maids, merchants, artisans, peasants, and finally, common women). Iranzo then emerged to accept the shouted congratulations of the crowd and, hoisted on the shoulders of two knights, joined an impromptu parade to the church of the Magdalena. There he entered a cloister to pray for his son, asking the nuns to join him. The next event on the Constable’s crowded itinerary was a lunch with several high-ranking officials at the palace, while the afternoon was devoted to public jousts after which were public banquets at all the parish plazas. The next day saw further popular entertainments, beginning with more banquets, but now in the parish cemeteries. The regidor Fernándo de Berrio led a live wolf through the streets with hunting dogs and horns while various mummer shows, dances, and skits ensured that a range of diversions was available.

Six days later, on April 18, the baby was baptized in the cathedral in a courtly ceremony. The journeys to the cathedral and back to the palace were in formal

79 Hechos del Condestable, 376-80. Ruiz comments briefly on these spectacles in “Elite and Popular Culture,” 312-3.

190 procession, but Iranzo then emerged to walk with the people to the Plaza del Arrabal

outside the city walls where he had arranged a bullfight. There he, as was his custom,

“with the regidores and other knights and squires, ascended a mirador of the kind made

for such events. This was very finely adorned with the best French tapestries as well as

others made of silk.”80 The day ended with a private banquet at the palace while those

outside were treated to a free meal and the popular entertainments continued unabated.

Iranzo was nothing if not thorough, and here we can see a deliberate attempt not only to

enhance his reputation by appealing to all his many constituencies but also to unify and

transform the civic topography.

Some of the events were deliberate inversions of the customary uses of particular

spaces (a wild animal in the streets, banquets in the cemeteries) calculated to fix the day

in public memory. Others, such as the popular diversions, sporting events, and free meals,

exhibited the Constable’s generosity while his ostentatious prayers in the cloister and

cathedral proved his piety. The egalitarian processions to the Magdalena and the Arrabal,

moreover, demonstrated his affinity to the masses while singling out particular

neighborhoods for his attention. No parish failed to receive some notice, however, as

smaller banquets and entertainments were offered in each. Through his use of civic space, the Constable transformed the birth of Luis de Iranzo from a notable event in the city’s ruling family into a celebration of Jaén itself in all its guises—as a unified entity, as a collection of barrios, as both sacred and profane, as a highly stratified society and an egalitarian brotherhood.

Iranzo’s ability to grasp the city on so many levels is particularly impressive when

80 Hechos del Condestable, 380: “Y él, con los regidores y otros caualleros & escuderos, se subió al mirador que para tales cosas es fecho, el qual estaua muy bien guarneçido de muy finos paños françeses y otros paños de seda.”

191 we consider the fractured nature of other accounts. In a single series of spectacles, the

Constable reached out to perspectives as diverse as the religious idealism of Jerónimo

and the civic humanism of Palencia. Perhaps most importantly, he also addressed the

‘culture of the street’ in terms comprehensible to a Lozana. Such a presentation would, he likely hoped, convince the people to consider his good fortune as their own and to celebrate the occasion as a genuine triumph for Jaén rather than a mere opportunity to enjoy noble largesse.

Such measures were necessary in the fifteenth century, when the presentation of hitherto courtly spectacles in urban settings created a new set of social dynamics. If elites such as Iranzo intended pageants to reaffirm their social standing, they needed to cast traditional feudal relationships in a manner appropriate to urban constituencies. When conducted in urban plazas rather than in castles or palaces, however, spectacles drew large numbers of spectators who interpreted their content from their own perspective while tacitly inviting the input of prominent citizens—caballeros de cuantía, merchants,

and successful artisans—who were intent on imitating the nobility and improving their own social positions. Unable to insulate their productions from what one scholar has described as a “process of democratization,” the urban elites nevertheless sought to rigidly define the content of festivals and limit popular improvisation. They included, in

most of their productions, demonstrations of military might, emblems of judicial

authority, and references to their intrinsic superiority. Processions of knights in tight

ranks, tournaments, mace-bearers, and banners adorned with heraldic devices or symbolic

color schemes were all calculated to impress their continued preeminence upon

192 audiences.81

Equally effective was the organization of the audience along hierarchical lines in which elites viewed events from the comforts of raised and shaded viewing platforms

(cadalhalsos, catafalcos, or miradores) while the hoi polloi had to scramble for advantageous spots and endure the elements. Iranzo was exceedingly careful to organize his processions and dinner parties by office and seniority, even arranging officials from the Cathedral according to the positions in which they sat in their cabildo.82 A similar fastidiousness defined his personal arrangements for appearing before his people during public spectacles. On nearly every occasion, the Constable was not only dressed to perfection but also situated in an elevated and visible location, an honor he customarily extended to his intimate circle as well as the guests, prominent knights, and civic officials who shared the privilege of his personal hospitality. During his wedding celebrations in early 1461, for instance, “after the nobles had eaten with the Bishop of Salamanca and all the other knights and people accustomed to dine there, they mounted and went to the viewing platform [mirador] that the concejo had made in the Plaza de Arrabal. This platform was carefully shaded by fine French tapestries and many decorative cloths. In its center, at the spot designated for the Constable and his wife, was an especially fine tapestry of rich brocade.”83 Such preparations ensured that the grandes were comfortable

81 Juan José Capel Sánchez, “Murcia como espacio lúdico urbano en la Baja Edad Media,” MMM 25-26 (2001-2002), 10-11; José Damián González Arce and Francisco José García Pérez, “Ritual, jerarquías y símbolos en las exequias reales de Murcia (siglo XV),” MMM 19-20 (1995-1996): 129-38; Mariana Valeria Parma, “Fiesta y revuelta. La teatralidad política en Valencia a principios de la modernidad,” CHE 77 (2001-2002): 145-64. Teofilo Ruiz offers a thorough analysis of how such symbolic representations of power were deployed during a series of spectacles sponsored by Juan II at Valladolid in 1428 in his “Festivités, couleurs, et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 3 (1991): 521-46. 82 Hechos del Condestable, 157. 83 Hechos del Condestable, 54: “Y aquel día, después que los dichos señores ovieron comido, y con ellos el señor obispo de Salamanca y todos los otros caualleros & gentes que cada día solían comer, caualgaron y fueron al mirador que la çibdad tiene fecho en la plaça del arraual; el cual estava muy bien entoldado de

193 even while their position and the sumptuous decorations made them part of the spectacle,

as much on stage as the participants. At this same event, Iranzo’s chronicler notes that

“At the other end, across the plaza from the mirador where [the noble party] gathered,

was a cadalhalso on four wooden columns, also shaded by new satin hangings, where sat

certain judges who were to be the referees.”84

Repeated efforts by the Murcian concejo to limit access to their viewing platforms reveals how jealously guarded a privilege they represented. In Murcia, the main route for

Corpus Christi processions ran along the Calle de la Trapería to the cathedral. Although the feast usually fell in June, a notoriously hot month in the city, it still drew dense

crowds who congregated along both sides of the street. While the concejo organized

shaded grandstands for themselves as early as 1419, their efforts to separate themselves from the masses are recorded in detail from the 1470s.85 As recorded in their minutes, the

veinticuatros’ reasons were prosaic enough: “Since, during the days of Corpus Christi,

the regidores and officials of the concejo who accompany the Body of Our Lord Jesus

Christ are so crowded amongst the people who gather there to see the entremeses in the

procession that these officials cannot see the entremeses well enough, the said concejo

orders their mayordomo Juan Nuñes de Astudillo to have a wooden catafalco constructed

so that the concejo officials can view the procession from it.”86 If the municipal council

muy buenos paños françeses, y muchos tapetes. Y en el medio, do el dicho señor Condestable y la señora condesa avían de estar, estaua vn paño de rico brocado.” 84 Hechos del Condestable, 55: “Al otro cabo, enfrente del mirador donde los dichos señores estauan, quedando enmedio vna gran plaça, avía vn cadahalso sobre quatro vigas de madera, bien alto, asímismo entoldado de muy nuevos paños de Ras, donde estauan çiertos jueces quel acto advenidero avíen de judgar.” 85 Luis Rubio Garcia has painstakingly reconstructed fifteenth-century preparations for Corpus Christi in Murcia in his La procesión de Corpus en el Siglo XV en Murcia (Murcia, 1987). 86 AMC, AC 1469-1470, 6 June 1470, f. 121v: “Por quanto los días del Cuerpo de Dios los regidores e ofiçiales del dicho Conçejo que van aconpannar el Cuerpo de Nuestro Sennor Jhesu Xpristo estan muy apretados entre la gentre que alli andan quando pasan los entremeses que van en la prosysión en tal manera que los regidores e ofiçiales del dicho Conçejo buenamente nos puden asy bien mirar los dichos

194 wanted a better view, however, so did others.

The concejo passed a series of resolutions in the early 1480s attempting to limit

use of these viewing platforms to themselves and those they approved, struggles that

indicate ongoing attempts either to gain access to the official cadalhalso or to build

additional ones. In 1480, they resolved to “authorize the alcaldes of the Hermandad who

are present to guard the cadalhalso in which the regidores view the events on the day of

Corpus Christi and to deny entry to any person who is neither a regidor nor a jurado.”87

While it is not clear whether this was a proactive measure or a response to prior attempts

by members of the crowd to storm or sneak onto the concejo platform, the decision to

surround the platform with guards would have only heightened its visibility and unmistakably signaled its exclusive character. Wealthier residents of Murcia, not deigning to trespass on the official platform, chose instead to construct their own and the concejo moved quickly to regulate this practice as well. In 1481, they gave “the jurado

Antonio Hurtado authority over the cadalsos which they have ordered to be built on the

Trapería… and order that no one else may build a cadalso on the Trapería on the day of

Corpus Christi without Hurtado’s consent under penalty of a fine of five hundred mrs., a

third of which will go to the accuser and the other two thirds to the Hermandad.”88

Just three days later, they agreed to assess a fine of six hundred mrs. on anyone

entremeses por toda rason los dichos sennores conçejo ordenaron e mandaron a Juan Nunnes de Astudillo su mayordomo que faga faser un cadafalgo de madera para que esten los dichos regidores e ofiçiales del dicho Conçejo para mirar desde alli la dicha prosysyon.” 87 AMC, AC 1479-1480, 27 May 1480, f. 222v: “Otrosy dieron cargo a los allcaldes de la hermandad que heran presentes para que esten guardando el cadalso en que ha de mirar el regimiento el dia del Cuerpo de Dios e non de logar a persona alguna que este en el si non fuere regidor o jurado.” 88 AMC, AC 1480-1481, 16 June 1481, f. 170. “Otrosy dieron cargo a Antonio Hurtado jurado para los cadalsos que se ovieron de faser en la Traperia… e mandaron que ninguno non faga cadalso en la dicha calle de la Traperia el dia del Corpus Xpristi syn el dicho Antonio Hurtado so pena de quinientos maravedis la terçia parte para el acusador e las dos terçias partes para la hermandad.” A similar resolution had been passed several years earlier: AMC, AC 1474-1475, 30 July 1474, f. 59.

195 attempting to enter the official cadalhalso without permission.89 On the same day, in

another decree that acted both in a practical sense and as a means to safeguard their own

status, the concejo resolved that all non-official cadalhalsos should be at the same height

with respect to the street. Their ostensible reason was the danger that one close to the

parade might block the views of those farther removed. Behind this evenhanded rationale,

however, was likely a fear that the citizens with the deepest pockets might construct

platforms that would dwarf that of the concejo.90 In June 1482, the concejo approved

another contract to have a viewing platform constructed for their use; this time, however,

the order included provisions for the regidores and jurados to be supplied with beverages

throughout the day.91 This was perhaps a wise precaution given the heat of a Murcian

summer. In conjunction with the other pronouncements, it had the effect, whether

intended or not, of further differentiating the members of the municipal government from

their constituents. Hoisted above the masses on their platform, shaded by awnings,

surrounded by guards, and now supplied with beverages as they reclined, they resembled

nothing so much as the great magnates as they looked down on the sweating, standing,

crowded, and thirsty commoners. The concejo’s repeated need to legislate these markers

of status, however, indicates that not everyone freely acquiesced to them.

The construction of temporary viewing platforms enclosed and ordered

customarily egalitarian spaces on the Trapería. Works of ‘ephemeral architecture’ did not

function solely, however, as markers of spatial hierarchies. Spectacles that held an

element of danger to the crowd, such as bullfights and the juegos de cañas that often

89 AMC, AC 1480-1481, 19 June 1481, f. 171v. 90 AMC, AC 1480-1481, 19 June 1481, f. 171r. 91 AMC, AC 1481-1482, 1 June 1482, f. 255; a similar arrangement is documented in AMC, AC 1483-1484, 12 June, 1484, f. 60r.

196 followed them, required barricades to define the playing field and to keep spectators out of harm’s way.92 These barriers, constructed by the concejo at some expense, were another mean by which public spaces could be transformed. In this instance, they turned places where people lived, worked, and socialized into a festive arena, a space where the quotidian could be forgotten and, through sport and theatre, fantasy reigned. Barricades and cadalhalsos were, in fact, some of the most pedestrian means by which such transformations were effected. As we will see in later chapters, nobles and concejos employed various means, from the cleaning and decorating of streets to citywide illumination to the construction of triumphal arches and fairy castles to create provisional but overwhelming spatial associations among their subjects. Momentary structures bore the same attributes—conscious and purposeful rhetorical argument, emotional content, and limited access—as permanent edifices but their provisional character made them all the more effective as bearers of meaning. Although retained in memory, their physical presence was fleeting and thus never became familiar or mundane, fading into the background of the cityscape. Ephemeral architecture thus revealed a central aspect of civic space: that it was simultaneously transient and durable. A new idea or a passing fancy could meld seamlessly with long-held associations and no building, space, or landmark was subject to a single interpretation.

********

The social and physical contexts of an urban spectacle were, therefore, more than mere backdrops. They were an essential aspect of the performance. If Iranzo’s extravagant commemoration of his son’s birth catalogues the many ways in which

Castilian municipal authorities could exploit and subvert civic spaces as a means of

92 Capel Sánchez, “Murcia como espacio lúdico,” 18.

197 influencing the people, it remains to be seen if they can be usefully described as a frontier phenomenon. Iranzo’s spectacles took place, as did those in Murcia and Córdoba, in a place where the realities of frontier life were deeply felt. They made full use of their urban contexts in order to address tensions rising from the contradictory forces of

reconquista ideology and religious acculturation. A full understanding, however, of how

these realities conditioned spectacles in frontier cities requires a closer look at the particulars of each case. This chapter has introduced some of the key figures, such as

Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, and roughly outlined the relevant issues. The next three chapters present examples that detail the evolving role of urban spectacles during the last decades of the fifteenth century, a time when the well-established traditions of frontier life described in chapter one were challenged by a growing intolerance for religious minorities and a renewed push for holy war.

198

IV.

KNIGHTS, MAGI, AND MUSLIMS: MIGUEL LUCAS DE IRANZO AND THE PEOPLE OF JAÉN

Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s career in Jaén, captured in lush detail by an anonymous

biographer, offers a kind of natural experiment in which Castilian court politics

encountered the frontier culture of Jaén at a critical moment in the development of

Christian attitudes toward members of other religions. Iranzo was an outsider who came

to Jaén with the explicit intent of exacerbating hostilities with Granada in the hopes of

regaining a reputation that had been sullied. But he immediately embarked upon an extensive program of pageantry meant to deflect, rather than exacerbate, religious tensions in Jaén. Iranzo’s was, at the time, the most ambitious attempt yet to transfer the traditional entertainments of the nobility to an urban setting. It should be no surprise, then, that his spectacles were marked by an evolving relationship between the noble patron and the urban audience that fused traditional knightly and religious themes with the contradictory attitudes toward Islam that characterized Jaén and its environs more than perhaps any other sector of the frontier.

The Constable was, by all accounts, intensely religious, viewing the conquest of

Granada as a holy imperative while taking pains to attend Mass faithfully and often retiring to solitary prayer. He was also fully immersed in caballeresca culture, a staunch proponent of military exercises and an avid reader of romances extolling the traditional knightly virtues: honor, courage, munificence, and loyalty. This strong inclination to act

199 in the manner idealized by Cartagena, Valera, and Arévalo was balanced, however, by

the imprint of his years at the royal court, which shaped his public persona and approach to rule while instilling in him a love of the fanciful theatrics popularized by Juan II (and often organized by Alvaro de Luna, his predecessor as Constable) as well as the admiration for Islamic culture that created such troubles for Enrique IV. He was a pious man given to self-aggrandizement and a Crusader who often emulated the dress, manners, and weapons of his enemies. Yet he adhered to many of the knightly ideals he professed, remaining, for instance, loyal to Enrique IV throughout the faction fighting and civil wars of the 1460s and 1470s.

The city in which he arrived in December, 1460 was no less a study in contrasts.

Overlooking Jaén and dominating its skyline is the imposing fortress of Santa Catalina, named for Catherine of Alexandria, whose medieval worship was strongly associated with the Crusades (see figures 11 and 12). In the fifteenth century, the fortress combined with an extensive system of walls and gates to give a dominating military aspect to the physical appearance of a city permitted since the fourteenth century to style itself the

“guardian and defender of the kingdoms of Castile.”1 At the same time, the city, whose

a place where caravans meet’), was‘ :جيــان) name likely derived from the Arabic Ŷayyān

situated at the convergence of a number of trade routes connecting Castile and Granada.

These military and economic roles, both of which resulted from the region’s mountainous

terrain and the nearby frontier, conditioned life in fifteenth-century Jaén.2 As a frontier

1 The full title was “La muy noble, famosa y muy leal ciudad de Jaén, guarda y defendimiento de los reinos de Castilla.” José Rodríguez Molina, “Jaén, organización de sus tierras y hombres (S. XIII-XV), in Historia de Jaén (Jaén, 1982), 216-7; Ordenanzas de la muy noble, famosa y muy leal ciudad de Jaén, guarda y defendimiento de los reinos de Castilla, ed. Pedro A. Porras Arboledas (Granada, 1993), 74. 2 José Martínez de Mazas, Retrato al natural de la ciudad y términos de Jaén, ed. José Rodríguez Molina (Barcelona, 1978); Rafael Machado Santiago and Emilio Arroyo López, “El territorio y el hombre (análisis geográfico). Jaén,” in Historia de Jaén (Jaén, 1982), 15-48.

200 bastion and the major Castilian city most exposed to Granadan attack, Jaén was in a constant state of military preparations or active warfare throughout the 1460s; this was, of course, why Iranzo had chosen it.3 For these same reasons, the city was a hub of trans- frontier trade in which much of the population maintained active and numerous contacts with Granada even as Morisco and Muslim traders were welcome throughout the year and especially at its annual fairs.4 It was a provincial city whose relatively impoverished economy depended heavily on rural products and on trade with Granada, but which embraced Iranzo’s elaborate spectacles that presented Jaén as a world dedicated to holy war and defined by abundance and profligacy.

Within the context of Giennense society and the conflicts, both internal and external, of the 1460s, we should understand Iranzo’s pageants and entremeses as attempts to articulate a vision of war against Islam in which the victors would not eradicate or expel the Muslims, but instead force their conversion. Such a course would

3 José Rodríguez Molina, “La frontera entre Granada y Jaén. Fuente de engrandecimiento para la nobleza,” in Relaciones exteriores del Reino de Granada. IV Coloquio de historia medieval andaluza, ed. Cristina Segura Graíño (Almería, 1988), 237-50. 4 José Martínez de Mazas, Retrato al natural de la ciudad y términos de Jaén, ed. José Rodríguez Molina (Barcelona, 1978); Rafael Machado Santiago and Emilio Arroyo López, “El territorio y el hombre (análisis geográfico). Jaén,” in Historia de Jaén (Jaén, 1982), 15-48. 4 José Rodríguez Molina emphatically argues for the centrality of peaceful trans-frontier relations among non-elite members of society. See his La vida de la ciudad, 103-32; and La vida de moros y cristianos en la frontera (Jaén, 2007), 11-9. Several other scholars have advocated similar readings of the Actas capitulares. See Juan de Mata Carriazo, “Relaciones fronterizas entre Jaén y Granada. El año 1479,” in Homenaje al profesor Carriazo, 1: En la frontera de Granada (Seville, 1971), 237-64; idem, “Los moros de Granada en las actas del concejo de Jaén de 1479,” En la frontera de Granada, 265-310; Juan Carlos Garrido Aguilera, “Relaciones fronterizas con el reino de Granada en las Capitulares del Archivo Histórico Municipal de Jaén,” in IV Coloquio de Historia Medieval Andaluza (Almería, 1988); Pedro A. Porras Arboledas, “Las relaciones entre la ciudad de Jaén y el reino de Granada (La paz y la guerra según el libros de Actas de 1480 y 1488),” Al-Qantara 9, fasc. 1 (1988), 29-46; idem, “El comercio entre Jaén y Granada en 1480,” Al-Qantara 9, fasc. 2 (1988), 519-24; and idem, “La frontera del Reino de Granada a través del Libro de Actas del Cabildo de Jaén de 1476,” Al-Qantara 14, fasc. 1 (1993), 127-62. Other relevant work on frontier relations in Jaén includes Denis Menjot, “La contrebande dans la marche-frontière murcienne au bas Moyen Âge,” in Homenaje al Profesor Juan Torres Fontes, 2 vols. (Murcia, 1987), ii, 1073-1083; José Rodríguez Molina, “Banda territorial común entre Granada y Jaén. Siglo XV,” in Estudios sobre Málaga y el Reino de Granada en el V Centenario de la Conquista (Málaga, 1987), 113-30; and Carmen Argente del Castillo Ocaña, “Los cautivos en la frontera entre Jaén y Granada,” in Relaciones exteriores del Reino de Granada. IV Coloquio de historia medieval andaluza, ed. Cristina Segura Graíño (Almería, 1988), 211-26.

201 permit Christians to fulfill their holy obligations while, in theory at least, conserving the commercial and personal relationships with Muslims that trans-frontier contact had engendered. We do not have access to the thoughts or opinions of most of Iranzo’s subjects but can suggest that they were subject to several competing social realities— including ideologies of holy war, a long tradition of convivencia, and the constant lack of physical security—all of which conditioned their responses to the Constable and his project of renewed war against Granada. We also know that Iranzo took great care to present well-crafted and directed spectacles with a close eye to their popular reception.

He succeeded, moreover, in winning support for his ambitious civic projects and his struggles against Granada despite the heavy tax burden these implied, indicating that many found his perspective appealing. At the same time, Iranzo’s vision of a society in which conversion to Christianity could erase all differences was out of step with broad social trends, in particular the growing desire for social homogeneity and the emphasis on limpieza de sangre that would lead ultimately to the Inquisition and the expulsion of

Castile’s Muslims and Jews. A wave of uprisings targeting conversos, or Jews who had converted to Christianity, swept through Andalusia in the early 1470s and the Constable was killed by a mob while protecting the conversos of Jaén.

This chapter considers how the social and physical contexts of Jaén conditioned the content and reception of Iranzo’s spectacles. The analysis centers on the interplay between sponsor and audience, both of whom held contradictory attitudes toward other religions, and therefore it begins by outlining Iranzo’s origins and career with the goal of determining, to the extent possible, the personal attitudes that lay behind his attempts to articulate ideas of holy war, religious identity, and Muslim culture through spectacle.

202 There is no doubt, however, that Iranzo intended his spectacles to not only express his

own perspective but also to be widely appealing, employing a wide range of popular

memes to engage his subjects. The second section closely examines several of Iranzo’s public displays. The record of his time in Jaén is a veritable catalogue of detailed descriptions of such events and therefore we can only consider a small subset of them here, focusing on those presented in winter of 1462-1463, the months immediately following the Constable first, and highly successful, forays into Granada. After the campaigning season was done, Enrique IV signed a new truce with the Muslims meant to last through much of the following year. Iranzo, however, almost immediately began to plot a campaign in defiance of this truce and this period of time thus corresponds to a critical point in the Constable’s attempts to win the support of his new subjects for this war. They had just experienced both an interruption in trade and the sight of Iranzo

returning from battle laden with booty. The thought of renewed hostilities, this time

without the hope of royal support, must have led to mixed feelings at best. The

performances Iranzo organized in the hope of directing public opinion therefore offer a

window into elite understandings of the popular mindset. His perceptions were, of course,

mediated by his high station and noble background and we should take care not to

assume that his productions accurately reflected the opinions of the masses. At the same

time, we should not discount the resources of a leader whose position depended to a large

degree on the support or, at least, the complicity of his subjects. The Constable did not invent that combination of largesse and entertainment often known derisively as ‘bread and circus’. His idiosyncratic and often creative use of the approach, however, merits close attention.

203 ********

Miguel Lucas de Iranzo was a ‘new man’, one of the many commoners and conversos raised to high positions in the court by fifteenth-century Castilian monarchs, especially Enrique IV, who saw them as a means of countering the influence of the great magnates. His humble origins played an important role throughout his career, influencing his rise to prominence, his staunch support of the king, and his rule of Jaén. He was born, according to several chroniclers, in Belmonte, a town near Cuenca ruled by Juan

Pacheco, the Marqués of and Master of the Order of Santiago, and was the son of

Alonso Álvarez de Iranzo, “who was a poor farmer.”5 These sources have been questioned, however, on the basis that Alonso Álvarez was his stepfather, not his natural father (whose name is not known), and José Rodríguez Molina has suggested that he was actually born in Belmontejo, a hamlet near Montizón and northeast of Jaén. This reading accords well with the Iranzo’s later decision to reside in Jaén and explains the family’s connection to Montizón, ruled by his brother Diego Fernández de Iranzo in the 1460s.

There is no documentary evidence, however, to support this argument against the consensus of the chroniclers.6 While questions about his origins have also led some scholars to argue that Iranzo was born into the minor nobility, his early poverty has not

5 Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal, “Adiciones genealógicas a los Claros varones de Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, señor de Batres,” en Colección de Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de España 18 (Madrid, 1851), 453: “que era un pobre labrador.” Many of the additional details are found in Gayango’s appendices to his edition of the Hechos. These were compiled from notes in the Salazar manuscript (Real Academia de la Historia, D-117) and from a “libro viejo de Cabildo del Archivo de Baeza.” See the Relación de los hechos del muy magnífico e más virtuoso señor, el señor don Miguel Lucas, muy digno condestable de Castilla, ed. Pascual de Gayango, Memorial histórico español: Colección de documentos, opúsculos, y antigüedades 8 (Madrid, 1855), 498-9. Cf. Hechos del Condestable don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (Crónica del siglo XV), edición y estudio, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 3 (Madrid, 1940), xxxviii-xxxix. 6 José Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad de Jaén en tiempos del Condestable Iranzo (Jaén, 1996), 231-2. Iranzo is also described as “natural nascido en la villa de Belmonte” in his patent of nobility, “Cédula del Rey don Enrique haciendo noble a Miguel Lucas de Iranzo con señalamiento de las armas que debía traer en el escudo. En el real sobre Granada 12 de Junio de 1455,” in Memorias de don Enrique IV de Castilla, Colección diplomática de Enrique IV, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1913), 141.

204 been challenged and it was only through Villena’s intervention that his courtly career was

begun. This young son of a farmer likely joined the magnate’s household through his

mother’s status as a hidalga and, once there, he seems to have made an impression, as

Villena proposed that he be taken into Juan II’s court as page (doncel) to the Infante

Enrique. Villena’s motives were clear—he wanted to surround the young prince with his

people and thus extend his influence—and the penniless Miguel Lucas must have seemed

a likely choice whose gratitude for the opportunity would keep him loyal.7

Iranzo was at court at least by 1452, where his role was both that of a servant

(criado) and a member of the household, who received military training and participated

fully in hunts, jousts, and the other elements of a young nobleman’s education. Despite

his humble role and relative poverty (his resources at this time consisted of only a

doncel’s meager salary of 20,000 mrs.), his natural abilities, ambition, and willingness to please permitted him to outshine the hidalgos surrounding him at all these endeavors and he was soon a member of Enrique’s circle of intimates.8 He particularly distinguished

himself during Enrique’s many hunts, and was soon made chief falconer (halconero

mayor) and granted additional incomes. Soon after Enrique became king in 1454, moreover, he appointed Iranzo as alcaide of the frontier city of Alcalá la Real.9

7 Alfonso de Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia, BAE 257, 258, and 267 (Madrid, 1973-1975), i, 82. 8 Crónica anónima de Enrique IV de Castilla, 1454-1474, ed. Maria Pilar Sánchez-Parra García (Madrid, 1991), 13; Enrique Toral Peñaranda, Jaén y el Condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (Jaén, 1987), 13-4. On the ambiguous role of a criado in a noble household, see Angus MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1989), 233. 9 Crónica anónima de Enrique IV, 16; Toral Peñaranda, Jaén y el Condestable, 14-8; Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 237. The halconero mayor’s access to the monarch and all aspects of courtly life is exemplified by his predecessor, Pedro Carrillo de Huete, who wrote a detailed account of events from 1435-1454. Carrillo’s chronicle was reworked by the influential bishop Lope de Barrientos, who likely had a hand in Miguel Lucas’s entry to court. See Pedro Carrillo de Huete, Crónica del Halconero de Juan II, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 8 (Madrid, 1946) and Lope de Barrientos, Refundición de la Crónica del Halconero, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 9 (Madrid, 1946).

205 The real turning point in Iranzo’s fortunes, however, occurred in 1455, after what

likely was his first experience of real combat. Enrique invaded Granada early in that year,

in what appears to have been less an attempt to conquer new territory than it was a show

of force, with a focus on causing economic damage and collecting booty while avoiding

major confrontations. His small army therefore moved through a wide swath of Granadan

territory, coming within sight of the city itself, while fighting only a series of small-scale

skirmishes.10 While the army was camped in the vicinity of Illora, Miguel Lucas and his

brother, who was the king’s table servant (camarero de los paños), took it upon

themselves to gather a group of men and attacked a nearby tower “from which the

Christians had received much damage.” Having succeeded in ousting the Muslim

garrison, they tore down the tower and returned to the main body of troops.11

A couple of days later, on 12 June, a significant Muslim force attacked the

Christians near Granada. Enrique was unable to coordinate his army’s movements and

the Christians responded in a piecemeal manner but ultimately succeeded in driving the

Muslims away with only a few casualties. While fighting in one of the many skirmishes,

“Garcilaso de la Vega, the comendador of Montizón, killed a very valiant Moor in the

presence of the king and knocked down another. He took the horse and shield [of the dead man] and presented the horse to the king, and the king gave it to Miguel Lucas.”12

Taking trophies after defeating an enemy in single combat was a custom of the frontier as was the presentation of a captured mount to the king, who would then receive the

10 Diego Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica del rey Don Enrique el cuarto de este nombre, ed. Cayetano Rosell. BAE 70 (Madrid, 1953), 149-58. 11 Diego de Valera, Memorial de diversas hazañas: crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 4 (Madrid, 1941), 22: “de donde los cristianos resçibían mucho daño.” 12 Diego de Valera, Memorial, 22-3: “En el qual día Garcilaso de la Vega, comendador de Montizón, de quien de suso es fecha mençion, en presencia del rey, mató vn moro muy valiente, y derribó otro, y tomóle el cauallo y la adarga, y presentó el cauallo al rey; y el rey diólo a Miguel Lucas.” A nearly identical account is found in the Crónica anónima de Enrique IV, 40-1.

206 victorious knight with the appropriate honors. According to Palencia, however, Enrique

IV regularly perverted this tradition by disdaining those who actually fought the Muslims

in favor of his courtiers.13

This was, for Palencia, what happened with Garcilaso de la Vega. In his version of events, Enrique “began to look upon that devoted and most noble knight with disfavor because the knight, provoked into combat by a Moor, killed the enemy with his customary skill and took his horse and some other trophies. The king, offended by the deed, did not disguise his annoyance, and so that his displeasure with the victor would be clear, he gave the steed to Miguel Lucas: an act which led to many rumors, nearly causing [the army] to fall into turmoil.”14 Enrique’s repudiation of an established knight

in favor of Iranzo—who was still a mere doncel at that time—was of a part with his

support for other lowborn intimates. It also placed Iranzo at the center of a controversy and earned him the rancor of those who thought that Iranzo had been chosen more for his

13 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 71. Palencia thought this habit indicative of Enrique’s vicious nature and disgraceful attitude toward his office and the good men of the realm. 14 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 88: “A Garcilaso de la Vega, caballero esforzado y nobilísimo sujeto, empezó a mirarle con malos ojos porque, provocado a combate por un moro, dióle muerte con su acostumbrada destreza, y se llevó el caballo y demás trofeos. Sentido el Rey de la hazaña, no disimuló su enojo, y para que claramente se conociese su injusticia con el vencedor, entregó el corcel a Miguel Lucas: hecho que provocó grandes rumores, próximos a degenerar en tumulto.” This was not the Iranzo family’s only triumph at Garcilaso de la Vega’s expense. Vega, a member of the powerful Manrique clan, was killed in 1458 while battling the Muslims, an event commemorated by the chronicler Fernando del Pulgar and the poet Gómez Manrique, who contrasted Vega’s courage against the Muslims to Enrique’s seeming admiration for them. After his death, Enrique IV refused to grant the encomienda of Montizón to Garcilaso’s young son, giving it instead to Miguel Lucas’s brother Diego Fernández de Iranzo. This slight left his heir penniless and, as had the one in 1455, provoked strenuous objections. In 1467, Pedro Fajardo of Murcia helped Garcilaso’s brother, Rodrigo Manrique, capture the castle by force. The title of comendador of Montizón passed to Vega’s nephew, Jorge Manrique, and his line. Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 108-9; Crónica anónima, 87; Gómez Manrique, “Defunzión del noble cauallero García Laso de la Vega,” in Cancionero, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia, Colección de escritores castellanos 36, 39 (Madrid, 1885-1886), i, no. 36, 103-115; Fernando del Pulgar, Claros Varones de Castilla, ed. Robert B, Tate (Madrid, 1985), 129; Harry Sieber, “Narrative and Elegiac Structure in Gómez Manrique’s Defunzión del noble cavallero Garci Laso de la Vega,” in Studies in Honor of Bruce W. Wardropper, ed. Dian Fox, Harry Sieber, and Robert TerHorst (Newark, 1989), 287; and Carl W. Atlee, “Political Protest in Gómez Manrique's Defunzión del noble cauallero Garçía Laso de la Vega,” The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 87 (2010): 169-186.

207 personal connections than the merit of his own victory. From the beginning, therefore,

Iranzo’s public career was marked by his total dependence on the monarch.

This first public recognition was followed immediately by another with more

tangible implications when, on that same day, Enrique knighted Iranzo in company with

several others. This occasion may also have been the moment in which Iranzo was made

a hereditary noble; certainly his formal patent of nobility bears the date.15 As María del

Pilar Carcaller Cerviño has pointed out, however, this patent does not mean that Iranzo

had not previously been ennobled. There is no mention of this in the chronicles, and the

act of making him a knight did not imply a conference of nobility; the caballeros de

cuantía, for instance, bore the title of knight but not the privileges of a noble. At the same

time, the formal rite of investiture at the king’s hand was generally a privilege limited to

the nobility. To ensure the regularity of the ceremony, Iranzo likely was already a noble or was made so at the time.16

The chroniclers did not describe the ceremony of Iranzo’s knighting, and his

patent of nobility noted merely that it was done “with the solemnity that knighthood

demands and requires, within the limits imposed by the time and place [that is, on the

field of battle].”17 The traditional full ceremony for the investiture of a knight was a

lengthy and involved process, meant to symbolize a knight’s military purpose and

personal virtue. This would include a vigil and mass preceding the ceremony, a ritualized

process of dressing, and the central acts of the ritual itself: the laying of the king’s hands

on the initiate, the girding on of his sword, a blow with his own sword meant to remind

15 Diego de Valera, Memorial, 23; Crónica anónima de Enrique IV, 41; “Cédula del Rey don Enrique,” 141. 16 María del Pilar Carcaller Cerviño, “El ascenso político de Miguel Lucas de Iranzo. Ennoblecimiento y caballería al servicio de la monarquía,” BIEG 176 (2000): 18-9. 17 “Cédula del Rey don Enrique,” 143: “con aquella sollepnidad que demanda y require la caballería, segund el tiempo y lugar lo padescia.”

208 him of his humility, and the taking of his oaths. By the fifteenth century, however, and

especially under less than ideal circumstances (such as in a military camp within sight of

Granada), an abbreviated ceremony centered on the ritualized blow with a sword was

considered sufficient.18 This is likely the form which Iranzo’s investiture took, with

Enrique delivering the ritual gesture that legally made him a knight.

After the formalities were complete, Iranzo received permission to bear a personal

coat of arms (see figures 13a and 13b) and thus publicly exhibit his nobility and

knighthood. This privilege was a central one for the Castilian elite, signifying their ability

to participate in all the layers of knightly life. Through their regular display in battle and

at tournaments, a heraldic device or escudo was the primary means through which a

noble could publicly advertise the antiquity of his line or make personal, ethical, or

ideological statements. Lacking a distinguished family to honor through his emblems,

Iranzo instead chose to demonstrate his fidelity to the king and his ardent pursuit of holy

war. The organization of his shield, divided into four sections, recalled the shape of the

cross, as did Enrique’s own banner. The lions salient at the upper left and lower right

quadrants similarly derived from elements of the king’s device. Such resemblances thus

clearly stated Iranzo’s close relationship with the king; indeed, the patent given Iranzo by

Enrique directed that the lions “should be positioned as those on my royal arms and

appear in the same colors and accoutrements as are on my royal arms.”19 The bands in

the other two quadrants represented a knight’s swordbelt and particularly those worn by

Crusaders, a potent symbol claimed in the fourteenth century by Alfonso XI when he

18 Partidas, ii, 424-6, tit. 21, laws 14-15; José Manuel Nieto Soria, Ceremonias de la realeza. Propaganda y legitimación en la Castilla Trastámara (Madrid, 1993), 73ff; Nelly Raquel Porro Girardi, La investidura de armas en Castilla: del Rey Sabio a los Católicos (Valladolid, 1998), 168-9; Carcaller Cerviño, “El ascenso político,” 24-5. 19 “Cédula del Rey don Enrique,” 142: “… de aquellos que en mis reales armas son puestos y figurados por la manera y con aquellos colores matices y blasones que en las mesmas mis armas reales se deben.”

209 created the Order of the Band.20

Iranzo had joined the expedition to Granada as an unknown courtier with no

relevant familial connections; he had access to the king, it is true, but in the role of

huntsman and criado. He returned to Castile as a knight and a hidalgo, the king having

publicly and ostentatiously demonstrated his favor. Nobles of old family might have

resented his rise, certainly Garcilaso de la Vega had reason to do so, but now they knew

him as a person of import. Iranzo had two circumstances to thank for his good fortune:

Enrique’s friendship and the frontier. Without the opportunity to distinguish himself via

the invasion, the king might never have found a suitable excuse for honoring the young

doncel. The king himself, in the document ennobling him, had declared that Iranzo’s

military success was the reason for his rise: “I am standing here in person in the field

against the infidel Moors, enemies of the holy Catholic faith, and in sight of them… and

ready to fight them in pitched battle… and you, Miguel Lucas, standing in my squadron, below my royal banner, have shown yourself courageous and eager to fight and do great deeds.”21 Moreover, Iranzo had been transformed, in a real sense, through the ritual of

investiture and before the eyes of his new peers. His patent of nobility and the privileges

it encoded were important confirmations of his new status and he never lost his respect

for the written word, but it was the formal ceremony that truly and permanently turned

the farmer’s son into a warrior noble.

Given his later deeds, it makes sense to consider how this sudden change in

20 “Cédula del Rey don Enrique,” 142; Carcaller Cerviño, “El ascenso político,” 20-2. On the Order of the Band, see D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton, The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe, 1325-1520 (New York, 1987), 46-95. 21 “Cédula del Rey don Enrique,” 142-3: “estando yo por mi persona en campo contra los infieles moros, enemigos de la santa fe católica, y en vista dellos… y dispuesto para pelear con ello en batalla campál… et vos el dicho Miguel Lucas, estando en mi batalla, debajo de mi real bandera, mostrándovos animoso y deseoso para pelear y facer proeza.”

210 circumstances may have affected his perceptions and priorities. Having experienced the honor one accrues through frontier skirmishing and acts of bravery, for instance, it is not surprising that a few years later, he chose to again fight the Muslims, this time in the hope of salvaging his position. His later particularity over both the outward forms of nobility—colors, emblems, and titles—and awareness of the power of public spectacle likewise suggest that his own dramatic and public investiture made a deep impression. He had enjoyed the king’s confidence in private for some time but only when this was openly and formally recognized did he gain the fruits of this friendship. Some things, in other words, only mattered when everyone knew about them. His lack of an ancient lineage and the affront many voiced at his ennobling and Enrique’s callous means of rewarding him with Vega’s horse played a role here as well. He was not a real noble in the eyes of those like Valera who valued linaje and personal prudentia over the short- lived and arbitrary preference of a king. His efforts to build a network of criados and vasallos in Jaén and his flamboyant shows of largesse were attempts to build a noble persona independent of Enrique’s support. All of these were, of course, central aspects of noble and knightly life at the time, and Iranzo could easily have gained these appreciations elsewhere. It may, however, be significant that all came together on what was arguably the most significant moment in his meteoric rise to power.

Iranzo certainly had reason to be concerned about his reputation. At a time when both newly-minted nobles and established families were busily creating and embellishing illustrious lineages, his own success prevented Iranzo from obscuring his origins; as the king’s intimate and a prominent player in courtly politics, he could not quietly forget his rise and claim that he had, in fact, been a scion of noble clan dating back centuries. The

211 public nature of his rise had drawbacks as well as advantages. As he began to contend for

choice appointments, this truncated lineage provided fuel for his rivals and enemies. All

of the chroniclers regularly referred to Iranzo’s common parentage. They did so most

reliably, however, when describing moments when Iranzo came into conflict with another

noble faction or when he received new honors, suggesting that this issue was an integral

factor in such disputes. Diego de Valera, for instance, referred to “Miguel Lucas, who

later was Constable,” when describing his attack on the tower of Illora in 1455. When

Iranzo was named constable in 1458, however, Valera noted that he was a “man of little

property and low lineage.”22

Enrique’s support for Iranzo knew few bounds in the mid to late 1450s and this,

combined with the young knight’s ambitions, brought him into conflict both with

established magnates and up-and-comers like himself who sought advancement through

the king’s favor. Already his appointment as alcaide of Alcalá la Real had raised the ire

of Diego Fernández de Córdoba, who forced the king to make him Count of Cabra in

recompense. The titles and salaries, including the position of corregidor of Baeze and

alcaide of Jaén, continued to accrue after Iranzo’s knighting, as the king “wished to make him one of the chief men of the kingdom.”23 Iranzo’s rise culminated in March 1458, when Enrique granted him a further set of properties and incomes and then successively made him, in a single grand ceremony at the royal Alcazár in Madrid, a baron, a count, and Constable of Castile for life. Never before in any kingdom, marveled Valera, had

22 Diego de Valera, Memorial, 22: “Miguel Lucas, que después fue condestable;” 48: “hombre de poco estado y bajo linaje.” 23 Hechos del Condestable, 5: “deseáualo facer vno de los mayores onbres destos reynos.” Toral Peñaranda, Jaén y el Condestable, 18-21; Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 238-9.

212 anyone received such a set of promotions on the same day.24 The office of Constable of

Castile, which had lain vacant since the death of Alvaro de Luna five years earlier, was

essentially that of a commander-in-chief. By concentrating martial power in Iranzo’s

hands as “president, leader, and governor of all the hosts, armies, legions, and military

camps of Castile,” Enrique may have hoped to give unity of purpose to his fading war on

Granada in addition to rewarding his favorite.25 Instead, he simply fueled ongoing

rivalries that ultimately pitted Iranzo against the most influential of Enrique’s counselors.

Issues soon came to a head over another position vacant since Alvaro de Luna’s

death, that of Master of the Order of Santiago. This office came with a hefty income and

there was a lively competition amongst the king’s intimates over who should be

appointed. Villena, who held immense power at this time and acted as de facto co-ruler

with Enrique, desired the title and expected no difficulties in obtaining it.26 He was to be

disappointed in this, however, as the king preferred Iranzo for the role, and the new

Constable was able to secure enough support to prevent Villena’s machinations.

According to the author of the Crónica anónima, the king was ready to choose Iranzo

“because he liked that he was a man of low birth born in Belmonte, a town of that same

marques. Villena thought it was scandalous that Miguel Lucas would have the

mastership, when he knew who he was and that it was by his hand that he came into the

king’s household, and now thought to compete with him… But as both don Lope de

24 Valera, Memorial, 48: “las quales dignidades se cree no ser dadas a honbre del mundo fasta oy en vn dia.” The ceremony is described in detail in Hechos del Condestable, 6-11. 25 Hechos del Condestable, 10: “presidente, ductor, & gouernador de todas sus huestes, exércitos, legiones e reales de Castilla.” 26 A number of historians have referred to the years 1457-1463 as the time of “Villena’s government of Castile.” See Nancy F. Marino, Don Juan Pacheco. Wealth and Power in Late Medieval Spain (Tempe, 2006), 67-90. On the rivalry between Iranzo and Villena, see Lucien, Clare and Michel García, “La guerre entre factions ou clientèles dans la crónica de Miguel Lucas de Iranzo,” in Frontières andalouses: la vie à Jaén entre 1460 et 1471, d'après Los hechos del condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, ed. Jacques Heers. Iberica n.s. 6 (Paris, 1996), 137-9.

213 Barrientos, the bishop of Cuenca, who had been the king’s counselor, and the duke of

Medina Sidonia, both of whom had had their disagreements with Villena, took Miguel

Lucas’s part as best they could, it seemed that he could compete with the marquis as an equal.”27

Palencia’s version notes that the king was forced to publicly favor Villena. “In secret, however, he preferred the young Miguel Lucas, a man of low birth but not scorned for this, whom he had earlier distinguished with much affection. This exacerbated the rivalries common in those days, because the marques [of Villena] opposed the idea of raising someone from such humble origins to a post so high, and masked the worries that so agitated him so that the King would not suspect his secret plans. He could not, however, keep the envy often roused by such conflicts between powerful men hidden for long; and so the court was divided into two factions, with their respective candidates.”28

As happened all too often during Enrique’s reign, struggles for prominence among his courtiers paralyzed the king; no one was appointed to the Mastership of Santiago until

1463.29

This may have been a pyrrhic victory for the Constable, however. Only scant

27 Crónica anónima de Enrique IV, 47: “como quiera que fuesse onbre de muy baxo linaje natural de Belmonte, villa del mesmo marques; e tanto a el era mas grave de conportar que Miguel Lucas oviesse el maestradgo, quanto conosçia quien era e lo avia puesto por su mano en la cassa del rey,… e como el obispo de Cuenca don Lope de Barrientos, que avia seydo maestro del rey, dessamasse mucho al marques de Villena, favoresçie a la parte de Miguel Lucas quanto podia, e no menos el duque de Medina Sidonia, el qual como toviesse algun desgrado del marques de Villena, favoresçiale assy mesmo, e asy paresçia Miguel Lucas contender de paridad con el marques.” 28 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 62-3: “En secreto, sin embargo, prefería al joven Miguel Lucas, de bajo nacimiento, mas no por eso despreciado, antes distinguido con singular cariño. De aquí las rivalidades que en aquellos días surgieron, pues el Marqués se oponía á elevarle desde tan humilde origen á dignidad tan alta, y encubría con disimulo los cuidados que vivamente le agitaban, para que el Rey no penetrase los secretos planes que meditaba. No pudo, sin embargo, mantenerse mucho tiempo oculta la envidia que en semejantes contiendas entre potentados fácilmente suele descubrirse por émulos de análogas condiciones; y así la corte se dividió en dos bandos, con sus respectivos candidatos.” 29 When Enrique did choose a Master, it was, ironically, another young aspirant pushed to the fore by Villena in order to supplant Iranzo. Beltrán de la Cueva held the office from 1463 to 1467, at which time Villena finally secured the appointment and was Master until his death in 1474. Villena’s complaints are also ironic in that he too was a hombre nuevo, whose rise under Juan II was similar to that of Iranzo.

214 months after his investiture as Constable, he withdrew completely from court politics and

retired to Jaén, where he remained until his death. Why he did so is unclear as the

chronicles disagree about the circumstances of his fall from grace. For the author of the

Hechos del Condestable, Iranzo was the victim of Villena’s deliberate attempt to destroy

a rival. This began in June 1458, when Iranzo and the king were with the army in

Granada near a large Muslim force. Apparently seeking to prove that Iranzo was incapable of leading the army, Villena and his brother, Pedro Girón, the Master of

Calatrava, arranged a brawl in the encampment between their followers and Iranzo’s retinue. After the fracas was broken up, Enrique called the three men to his tent in order

to clear the air: “And the king made them friends and they conversed; but the marquis

and Master bore a mortal hatred for the Constable, because they envied the king’s great

love to him.”30

Soon thereafter, a man named Chavez was arrested near Jaén carrying letters to

Moclín, a town in Granadan territory, and claiming to be in the Constable’s service. Upon

inspection, these letters “appeared to bear the signatures of the king and of the Constable”

and “contained many treasons and evils concerning the Constable.” Confronted with

these “false letters,” Chavez claimed innocence, saying he knew nothing about them

other than that they came from “some nobles of the royal council that envied the

Constable because his highness wanted to give him the Mastership of Santiago.”31 This stratagem bore for fruit for Villena and Girón as Enrique now seemed to suspect that his

30 Hechos del Condestable, 16-7: “Y el señor rey los fizo amigos, e ficieron todos colaçión, avnque los dichos marqués y maestre desamauan mortalmente al señor Condestable, de enbidia, por el grand amor que el señor rey le avía.” 31 Hechos del Condestable, 18-9: “paresçían firmadas del señor rey y del señor Condestable… se contenían muchas trayçiones y maldades tocantes al señor Condestable… cartas falsas… algunos caualleros del consejo del rey nuestro señor que del dicho señor Condestable avian enbidia, porque su alteza le quería dar el maestrazgo de Santiago.”

215 Constable was indeed acting against him. After interrogating Iranzo about the letters and

his other activities, the king announced to his council that he would place him and several

associates under house arrest while stripping him of his authority in Alcalá la Real,

Baeza, and Jaén. While this imprisonment began with the Constable confined to his

chambers with a guard set over him, soon enough the king asked only for his pledge to

remain with the traveling court. Seeing that his full restoration was unlikely, Iranzo requested that the king return him to Jaén so that he could spend his time fighting the

Muslims.32

Enrique, though initially incensed at the idea, eventually assured Iranzo that his

loyalty was not in question and that his restoration was imminent. After ten months,

Iranzo gave up hope of this promised reinstatement, “seeing that his highness would carry

out none of what he had pledged since, even though he wished to [restore the Constable],

he could not do it, as he would not displease those nobles who held so much power over

him.”33 In early May 1459, he left Segovia with his treasury and a few trusted squires and

made his way to Aragon. From there, and through the mediation of Lope de Barrientos,

Iranzo arranged an accord with the king in October through which he could return to

Castile. He would stay away from court, thus appeasing Villena’s party, and instead

would “choose and take for himself any city or town or place in all the realm… With a great desire to be on the frontier, in order to make war on the Moors, he chose the city of

Jaén.”34

32 Hechos del Condestable, 22-3. 33 Hechos del Condestable, 27: “veyendo que su alteza no cumplía ninguna cosa de las que le avía prometido, y que avnque quería no lo poder facer, por no desconplacer a aquellos señores que tan apoderados estauan dél.” 34 Hechos del Condestable, 30-1: “escogiese y tomase qualquier çibdad o villa o lugar de todos sus reynos… Y con grand deseo que tenía de estar en la frontera, por facer guerra a los moros, que eligió la çibdad de Jahén.”

216 While this account of Iranzo’s fall is the most detailed, it is not corroborated by

any other chronicle or documentary source. In its depiction, moreover, of a loyal knight

undone by the malice and envy of his rivals and by the weakness of the king, the

chronicle bears a suspicious likeness to the story of El Cid, similarly exiled by court

intrigues. Indeed, the whole of the chronicle seems consciously modeled on the Cantar

de Meo Cid and bears the same moral: “God, what a good vassal! If only he had a good

lord!”35 The Crónica anónima, in a more mundane explanation for Iranzo’s withdrawal

from court, suggested that he had left in a fit of pique after Enrique’s failed attempts to

court Francisco de Valdés, another of his criados, with gifts and promises: “Because of

these events Miguel Lucas was greatly discontented and left the court to go to Valencia

but, on the advice of Lope de Barrientos, bishop of Cuenca, returned there [to Cuenca]

and stayed with the bishop for some days. While he was there, the king sent many

messengers and bid him return to Madrid. And there, [Enrique] had him placed in a tower

of the alcázar, where he remained two months. When the king ordered him released he

made him baron, and count, and constable in a grand ceremony, and all in one day as is

said. At this, all the grandes of the realm marveled and were discontent.”36

Valdés was not Iranzo’s only competitor in this regard. Influential newcomers at

the time included Gómez de Cáceres y Solís, who received the posts of mayordomo and

35 MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology, 229: “¡Dios, que buen vassalo! ¡Si oviesse buen señor!” 36 Crónica anónima, 85: “De los qual Miguel Lucas era muy mal contento, e partiose de la corte e fuese para Valençia, e a ruego de don Lope de Barrientos, obispo de Cuenca, ovo de bolver alli e estovo con el obispo algunos dias, donde el rey le enbio asaz menssajeros e el ovo de bolver a Madrid, e ally lo mando poner en una torre del alcaçar, donde estovo bien por espaçio de dos meses; e quando lo mando sacar lo fizo baron e conde e condestable, con muy gran ponpa, toda en un dia como dicho es; de que todos los grandes del reyno fueron mucho maravillados e mal contentos.” A nearly identical account was written as an addition on the Salazar manuscript of the Hechos del Condestable, and published as ‘Appendix A’ in Gayango’s edition of that text, Relación de los hechos del muy magnífico e más virtuoso señor, el señor don Miguel Lucas, muy digno condestable de Castilla, ed. Pascual de Gayango, Memorial histórico español: Colección de documentos, opúsculos, y antigüedades 8 (Madrid, 1855), 495-6. Palencia commented on these events as well, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 106-7.

217 Master of Alcántara for (as Palencia put it) “his arrogant bearing, beauty, and

affability.”37 Among others of this sort were Juan de Valenzuela, made Prior of San Juan,

and Beltrán de las Cuevas, who was soon to replace Iranzo as the king’s unquestioned favorite. While the Crónica anónima presented the behavior of Iranzo and the king, as well as of others in the royal circle, in terms reminiscent of childish spats or lover’s quarrels, it also linked these events to the envy of the magnates. Some scholars have suggested, in fact, that Villena brought these rivals to Enrique’s attention, hoping that their novelty would turn the inconstant king from Iranzo.38

Palencia related a similar story about Iranzo absconding from court in response to

Enrique’s attentions to Valdés but drew an altogether different conclusion. Palencia’s

chronicle is rife with accusations about Enrique’s moral and sexual depravities that he

used to justify the rebellion against the king and, of all Enrique’s cronies, Iranzo is the

only one for whom he seemed to have any regard. This is particularly notable given that

the Constable remained unwavering in his loyalty to the king throughout the 1460s and

made Jaén a bastion of royalist support in the civil war. But Palencia saw Iranzo’s

withdrawal from court as a redemptive act, the conscious choice of a young man who

“renounced the primacy of [royal] favor” and the corrupting influence of the king and his

degenerate lackeys. In his opinion, Enrique’s unabashed pursuit of Valdés, to which he

imputes a sexual motive, was the final straw: “Miguel Lucas, a young man who carefully

observed religious precepts, saw all this with great disgust, and hating the causes of this

[homosexual] inclination and embarrassed at the constant effort that it produced, fled the

37 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 105: “su arrogante estatura, su belleza y lo afable de su trato.” Palencia similarly had little good to say about either Valenzuela or Cueva, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 81, 92, 105. 38 Marino, Don Juan Pacheco, 75-6; Townsend Miller, Henry IV of Castile, 1425-1474 (Philadelphia, 1972), 103-7.

218 court and sought refuge in the .”39 Whereas elsewhere Palencia

condemned Iranzo’s humble birth as evidence of Enrique’s inability to properly choose

advisors, it now proved the Constable’s essential honesty, for he knowingly gave up his

only source of patronage. As the chronicler admits, “I have already spoken of the humble

birth of Miguel Lucas, whose undistinguished origins later gave credit to the hatred that

Enrique’s universally corrupting customs aroused in him.”40

Palencia was not the only one who complained about the apparently dubious

morality of many in Enrique’s court and his description of Iranzo as a man of faith and

integrity may explain why the Constable posed such a threat to Villena. The marquis’s position was, by 1458, too secure for Enrique’s favor alone to have made Iranzo into a

credible challenger. As we have seen, it took the support of Lope de Barrientos and the

Duke of Medina Sidonia to force a stalemate over the Mastership of Santiago. Why

would such men back the lowborn and ambitious Iranzo? One reason, no doubt, was to

deal Villena a setback, either out of personal animosity or because they feared that he had

already accumulated too much power. Others would have seen a favorite who had the

king’s ear, a man whose goodwill was worth cultivating. Beyond his connections with

Enrique, however, Iranzo’s personal qualities may have stood out to them, as to Palencia,

as a contrast with the king’s other criados who were, often enough, crass opportunists or

woefully unprepared for the prestigious but often demanding positions they received.

Elsewhere in his chronicle, Palencia quoted at length the opinions of Alfonso

39 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 105-6: “renunció la primacía del favor… Todo lo veía con gran disgusto Miguel Lucas, joven muy observador de los preceptos religiosos, y que detestando las causas de aquella inclinación y avergonzado del continuo afán que producía, huyó de la corte y se refugió en el reino de Valencia.” 40 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 81: “Hablé ya brevemente del humildísimo nacimiento de Miguel Lucas, cuyos principios poco recomendables ennobleció luego el odio que le inspiraron las costumbres de D. Enrique, universalmente corruptoras.”

219 Carillo de Acuña on the state of the kingdom. Although Carillo, the Archbishop of

Toledo and an avowed enemy of Enrique who played a principal part in the Farce of

Ávila, had little patience for Enrique’s supporters (and Iranzo was, at the time, the king’s most ardent defender in Andalusia), he expressed a surprisingly positive judgment of the

Constable: “‘It is certain that in years past the King, with his excessive insolence, preferred for many posts men of both obscure origin and little counsel. Of these, we should consider Miguel Lucas as the prime example, but this man behaved with temperance in many things; he was known for his conscientious observation of religion, as indicated by his public acts: he went to church daily, heard the mass with devotion, frequently took the sacraments, and carried himself in all things as a member of the community of the faithful. In addition, after his marriage, you see that he retired to Jaén, the residence of his wife, entirely devoted to his conjugal duties and, having fled the corruption of the court, to diligently reforming his deeply-rooted dissolute habits.

Moreover, the Constable’s strict integrity made him so disgusted by the King that he had resigned his position in Alcalá la Real, a fortified city facing Granada, earlier entrusted to his care in order to give a poor man a sign of appreciation’.” All this was, for Carillo, in marked contrast to the most prominent of Enrique’s other protégés: Beltrán de la Cueva,

“whose nefarious crimes… and corrupting influence were such that there was no

Catholic, no sensible man who could doubt that he had driven the realm to the brink of perdition.”41

41 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 150: “Cierto es que en años pasados el Rey con excesiva insolencia y demasía, ha preferido para muchos puestos a hombres ya de oscuro origen, ya de escaso consejo, y que entre todos débese considerar como el primero a Miguel Lucas; pero éste se conduce en muchas cosas con templanza; está reputado por celoso observador de la religión, como lo indican sus actos públicos, la visita diaria á la iglesia, la devoción con que oye la misa, la frecuentación de sacramentos y el mostrarse en todo partícipe de la comunión de los fieles. Además, después de su matrimonio, consagrado por entero a sus deberes conyugales y huyendo de la corrupción de la corte, veisle retirado en Jaén, residencia de su

220 There is no way to determine precisely the circumstances that led the Constable to

withdraw from court. The conflicting accounts do bear some similarities and Villena’s

influence certainly played a meaningful role. But while reports of Iranzo’s supposed

treason effectively explain his imprisonment and the loss of his offices in Jaén, Baeza,

and Alcalá la Real, they do not account for Enrique’s unbroken regard for Iranzo or his

continued use of the title ‘Constable’. In August 1458, in fact, the king offered him a

valuable set of economic concessions in Seville in a document which praised “the many

and good and loyal and special services of don Miguel Lucas, my Constable of

Castile.”42 While Enrique may well have remained personally attached to his friend, it

seems unlikely that the transfer of valuable incomes to an accused traitor could have been

accomplished without significant outcry. A more convincing explanation would be that

the king withdrew his support for Iranzo in order to appease Villena, who required that

the upstart lose some of his positions. The marquis had earlier bullied Enrique into

signing documents of mutual defense that effectively led to shared sovereignty, implying

that the taming of Iranzo was well within his power.43 Such a reading of events clarifies

the donation of Sevillan revenues, which Toral Peñaranda has interpreted to be

recompense for Iranzo’s lost offices.

At the same time, Iranzo seems to have welcomed the opportunity to leave court,

as indicated by his repeated requests for authority in Jaén rather than a full reinstatement

esposa, reformando allí con gran acierto viciosos hábitos inveterados. Pues bien; ésta su severa integridad ha disgustado de tal modo al Rey, que le ha quitado la tenencia de Alcalá la Real, ciudad fortísima y frontera de los granadinos, antes encomendada á la guarda del Condestable, para dársela a un hombre poco digno de aprecio… los nefandos crímenes… cuyos efectos corruptores no hay católico, no hay hombre sensato que dude han de acarrear al cabo la perdición de estos reinos.” While these opinions do come to us through Palencia, there is little reason to doubt his veracity as Carillo remained alive and able to correct any misrepresentation until 1482. 42 Quoted from a privilege dated 30 August, 1458 by Toral Peñaranda, Jaén y el Condestable, 23-4: “los muchos y buenos y leales y señalados servicios que don Miguel Lucas, mi Condestable de Castilla.” 43 Marino, Don Juan Pacheco, 70-1.

221 of his former role. He may have seen the latter as impossible by this point or perhaps he had, as Juan Torres Fontes suggests, simply tired of court politics.44 In any event he had

made arrangements for the construction of his ornate palace in Jaén in time for it to be

completed by the time he arrived there on 17 December, 1460. It is unclear whether this

project was begun before Enrique conceded Jaén to him or after. Although he left court in

November 1459 to take up his new responsibilities, he interrupted his travel due to plague

in the city and instead remained for nearly a year in the small town of Bailén to the north

of Jaén, where he diverted himself with hunting and festivities. With this delay, it is

possible that Iranzo commissioned the palace only after Enrique’s capitulation. Given the

building’s substantial size and elaborate decorations, however, it is more likely that his

plans to spend significant time in Jaén predated Villena’s machinations. Even if they did

not, Iranzo’s immediate plans to construct a suitable abode were hardly the response of a

demoralized outcast but rather those of one excited by his new prospects.

********

Jaén was a suitable destination. Iranzo had personal ties in the region and the city;

not only was his brother commander of the nearby fortress of Montizón but Enrique had

earlier in the decade, probably between 1454 and 1456, arranged his betrothal to Teresa

de Torres (or ‘de Solier’), a member of a prominent local hidalgo family and, as sole heir

44 Juan Torres Fontes, “Los condestables de Castilla en la Edad Media,” Anuario de historia del derecho español 41 (1971), 89: “Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, lacking the political genius and ambitions of don Alvaro Luna, did not want to fight to defend the position which the king had assigned him. Without grand aspirations and prudent in the face of the scant security that Enrique’s personality offered, he was attracted by the more tranquil and bourgeois life possible in Jaén and chose to remove himself from the intrigues and conspiracies. There he could build a strong military force to consolidate his territories and secure his sector of the frontier with Granada.” (“Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, sin el genio político y ambición de don Alvaro Luna, no quiso luchar por mantenerse en el puesto a que el rey le destinaba. Sin grandes aspiraciones, prudente ante la poca seguridad que le ofrecía la personalidad de don Enrique y atraído hacia una vida más tranquila y aburguesada que podía encontrar en Jaén, optó por alejarse de intrigas y conspiraciones . Allí se creó un poder fuerte militar que le permitiría afianzar su dominio y asegurar su sector fronterizo con el reino de Granada.”)

222 to the señorió of Villardompardo, a significant property owner in her own right.45 Iranzo seems to have genuinely welcomed this match and, soon after arriving in Jaén, made his wedding into an extended festival with both public and private entertainments.

Contemporaries, including Alonso de Palencia and Alfonso Carillo de Acuña, thge

Bishop of Toledo, suggested that Iranzo was deeply offended by the loose morals of

Enrique’s court, and the Constable endeavored to ensure that his marital relations were above reproach, even purportedly refusing to consummate the union until it had received papal approval.46 Whether this caution resulted from his religious convictions, from a

concern about proper forms related to his common origins, or from a desire to avoid the

rumors surrounding Enrique’s other intimates is not known.

While Carillo’s contention that Iranzo was devoted to his conjugal duties is

supported by the lack of any evidence of marital tensions or of licentious behavior in the

Constable’s palace, Iranzo could not completely avoid inclusion in the aspersions cast on

Enrique’s supporters. Given Enrique’s supposed homosexuality, it was perhaps inevitable

that gossipers attributed the Constable’s rise to his willingness to be the king’s lover and

Carillo, despite his admiration for the man, asserted that Iranzo had “dissolute habits” to

reform. But the rumors died away once he was away from court, with the only notable

example after this time being the Coplas de Provincial, a risqué poem likely penned in

1465 that told the story of a church dignitary come to monitor the members of a convent,

which turned out to be Enrique’s court. The Provincial interrogated each member of the

court/convent, accusing all of flagrant offenses. While only a couple of the poem’s 147

45 Enrique Toral Peñaranda describes the betrothal arrangements in Jaén y el Condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (Jaén, 1987), 14-5. On the Torres family, see José Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad de Jaén en tiempos del Condestable Iranzo (Jaén, 1996), 223-31. On Teresa de Torres, see María del Consuelo Díez Bedmar, Teresa de Torres (ca. 1442-1521): Condesa de Castilla (Madrid, 2004). 46 Alfonso de Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 257, 258, and 267 (Madrid, 1973-1975), i, 81, 105-6, 150.

223 stanzas were directed at Iranzo, the first of these clearly accused him of sexual

misconduct: “Oh, brother count without a county, / Constable without benefits, / how

much is it worth / to be a proven scoundrel? / - ‘I can hear and be heard / and can always

get laid / and though I’m well known / they cannot punish me’.”47 The Provincial,

however, was an attack on Enrique, with his Constable likely included only for completeness’s sake and without reference to any recent actions. His efforts to distance

himself from courtly intrigues meant that he was spared the tempest of rumor

surrounding Cueva, one of the poem’s main targets and a central figure in noble attempts

to disinherit Enrique’s daughter.

The opportunities to leave the perhaps oppressive atmosphere of the court and to

commence his married life did not outweigh Iranzo’s stated reason for going to Jaén: to

pursue the war against the Muslims. As Castile’s most exposed major city and an

epicenter for both ongoing border raids and recent campaigns against Granada, Jaén

offered unparalleled prospects for autonomy and distinction in battle. Iranzo had not been

impressed with Enrique’s military abilities and a position of authority on the frontier,

where royal control was ineffective at best, would let him act independently. In this, he

had the recent example of Alonso Fajardo, who had told Enrique in no uncertain terms to

stay out of frontier affairs.48 Jaén was therefore a place where the Constable could

47 Poesía crítica y satírica del siglo XV, ed. Julio Rodríguez Puértolas (Madrid, 1989), 238: “¡Ah, fray conde sin condado, / Condestable sin provecho!, / ¿a cómo vale el derecho / de ser villano probado?” / ‘A oder y a ser odido / y poder bien fornicar, / y aunque me sea sabido, / no me pueden castigar’.” The other mention of Iranzo in the Provincial challenged his origins, Poesia, 253: “And you, friar back-scratcher, / chancellor, who was your mother? / Well, we know that your father / was an honest laborer. / Because of that, you can / hold your head up high / since he paid his taxes / and tithes without much fuss.” (“A ti, fraile arañador, / cancillor, ¿quien fue tu madre? / pues sabemos que tu padre / fue un honrado labrador; / puedes de su condición / loarte bien con derecho, / pues las monedas y pecho / las pagaba sin pasión.”). On Iranzo supposed homosexuality, see Gregorio Marañón, Ensayo biológico sobre Enrique IV y su tiempo (Madrid, 1997), 102-3; and Carcaller Cerviño, “El ascenso político,” 25-6. 48 Fajardo was, at the time, commanding a mixed force of Christians and Muslims devastating the towns and settlements in the vicinity of Lorca. Faced with royal condemnation of his actions, Fajardo sent

224 embellish his reputation, win followers by his deeds and generosity, and, if he so desired,

arrange his triumphant return to court. Perhaps most importantly, here Iranzo could emulate the heroes of old, not only the Cid, who had regained his honor in just such a manner, but also Fernán González, one of Castile’s founding fathers. González’s example was perhaps especially vivid to Iranzo at this time. During the time of his enforced attendance on the king in 1459, Enrique had decided to make a brief trip from Segovia in which “he went to the monastery of Arlanza, where Count Fernán González is buried. His highness ordered him to be uncovered in the sepulchre where he lay and looked upon him, as did the Constable.”49

Once settled in Jaén, Iranzo threw his energies into re-organizing the city’s

military forces and, when a truce signed by Enrique expired in 1462, immediately took the field. He would spend much of the next ten years on campaign but enjoyed only mixed success on his forays into Granada. He fought both independently and in alliance

with other frontier nobles, particularly the Cordovan magnate Alonso de Aguilar, but

never as part of a major army, for Castile mounted no general expedition against the

Muslims during this time. Iranzo had better results in battle with other Christians,

successfully defending the region from incursion by the Alfonsine or Isabelline factions

and particularly embarrassing his old enemy Pedro Girón, the Master of Calatrava, whose

Enrique a letter that read, in part, “You should not goad me so much, sir, since you know that I could surrender castles I hold to the Moors and become a vassal of the king of Granada, and yet still live under Christian law, as others are doing under him.” Juan Torres Fontes, Fajardo el Bravo (Murcia, 2001), 228- 30: “… Y no debéis señor aquejarme tanto, pues sabeis que podria dar los castillos que tengo á los moros y ser vasallo del rey de Granada y vivir en mi ley de cristiano como otros hacen con él.” 49 Hechos del Condestable, 23: “… fué al monasterio de Arlança, donde está enterrado el conde Fernán Gonçales, al qual su alteza mandó descobrir en la sepultura donde estaua, y lo vido, y el señor Condestable con él.”

225 territories bordered his own.50

Iranzo’s triumphs stemmed from an impressive ability to organize and inspire his

troops, which he did through a carefully-constructed public persona, rather from than any

tactical or strategic genius. Palencia reported on his efforts to field an army in Jaén with

awe and not a little fear: “Certainly the Constable was a man of poor and limited

ingenuity; but he employed an appearance of supreme authority, and his new kind of

severity and eloquence ensured that he could never hold any of his citizens to the yoke of

obedience without them obeying as if he were an illustrious king. He imposed strict

penalties for the smallest failing; he spared no one from armed service. Even so, they

obeyed him blindly; they did not protest poverty or neglect to buy horses and were

always prepared to leave for sudden expeditions. They received no salary beyond the

Constable’s goodwill and never gave a thought to their expenses or hardships or to their

own profit and pleasure, satisfied with earning the approval of their general. Such was his

influence among those of Jaén that the citizens and commoners held such a high opinion

of him that they forgot the lineage of the man they obeyed, whose inherited status

compared to none of his subordinates, and would not deviate from his orders in the

slightest way. A city that had never, even under the direst threats, produced five hundred

horsemen now easily turned out a thousand, resolute and trained in all types of

fighting.”51

50 Iranzo’s military campaigns are described in detail in the Hechos del Condestable and receive numerous mentions in Palencia’s Crónica de Enrique IV. For syntheses, see Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 75-103; and Mateo Antonio Pérez García, “El Condestable Iranzo y la Frontera con Granada. Un itinerario de sus actividades militares,” in Andalucía entre oriente y occidente, (1236-1492): actas del V Coloquio Internacional de Historia Medieval de Andalucía, ed Emilio Cabrera Muñoz (Córdoba, 1988), 385- 398. 51 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, i, 183: “Ciertamente el Condestable era hombre de ingenio reconocidamente pobre y limitado; pero empleaba cierta apariencia de suprema autoridad, y su nuevo género de severidad y de elocuencia hacía que aquellos ciudadanos a quienes jamás pudo nadie sujetar al

226 Perhaps the clearest indication of Iranzo’s understanding of the war against

Granada comes from his chronicler’s insistence on the Constable’s ability to bring a

sense of order to a chaotic situation. Before his arrival, Jaén “had become greatly

weakened and destroyed by the widespread death, captivity, and robbery that the Moors

had inflicted each day in times past. They charged right up to the [city] gates and killed

the men, made off with prisoners and livestock, and burned or felled the fields, vines, and

gardens.”52 Such attacks had gone on for decades. In concert with frequent outbreaks of plague, the most recent of which immediately preceded Iranzo’s arrival, had demoralized and nearly depopulated the city.53 Little was left, lamented the author of the Hechos, of

the city hailed in the old romances as “Jaén, Jaén, the warrior.” Undone by their

misfortunes and thinking themselves abandoned by God, its residents were ready to think

themselves “blessed by the coming, industry and aid of the Constable.”54

Iranzo not only organized proper defenses for the city and revived its martial spirit but also reformed the civic and judicial administration, embarked on an ambitious building program, and provided entertainments meant to raise popular morale. He even yugo de la obediencia no se desdeñasen de acatarle como a Rey esclarecido. En imponía rigurosos castigos por las faltas más ligeras; a nadie exceptuaba del servicio de las armas, y sin embargo, obedecíanle ciegamente; no se negaban a comprar caballos, aun abusando de los recursos de su fortuna, y siempre preparados para salir a las más repentinas expediciones, ni recibían otro estipendio que las buenas gracias del Condestable, ni consideraban los gastos y penalidades sino como ganancias y placeres, satisfechos con merecer la aprobación de su general. Tal influencia le granjeó entre los de Jaén esta opinión de los ciudadanos y de la plebe, que olvidados del linaje de quien los mandaba y de su antigua condición que no correspondía con la de ninguno de sus subordinados, no se apartaban un ápice de sus mandatos, y una ciudad que a duras penas pudo reunir en ningún tiempo quinientos caballos, logró fácilmente presentar mil, resueltos y ejercitados en todo género de pelea.” 52 Hechos del Condestable, 65-6: “la falló muy disipada & destroyda de grandes muertes & cautiverios & robos que los moros de cada día en los tiempos pasados le avían fecho, corriéndola fasta las puertas, & matando los onbres, & leuando muchos prisioneros & ganados, & quemando & talando los panes & viñas & huertas.” 53 José Rodríguez Molina, El reino de Jaén en la baja Edad Media. Aspectos demográficos y económicos (Granada, 1978), 54-6; Teofilo Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: the Case of Jaén,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), 301. 54 Hechos del Condestable, 66: “Jahén, Jahén, la guerrera… bienaventurada por la venida, yndustria, & socorro del dicho señor Condestable.”

227 improved educational opportunities, sending to Seville for proper masters of grammar,

rhetoric, and logic. Through such works, according to the Hechos, Iranzo restored order

to his sector of the frontier, a necessary condition for the ultimate end to the reconquest.

In the process, he transformed Jaén into a new Rome. In a telling passage, his chronicler

related how, upon his return from a successful raid, the people received him “with joy

and happiness as great as that with which Rome received its emperors when they returned

victorious from their conquests.”55 In Jaén, Iranzo acted as the ruler of an independent

city state. Free from vacillating kings and scheming courtiers, he could conduct affairs

properly. If this work required a public image that presented him as Jaén’s savior and a

throwback to the heroes of old, so much the better.

Iranzo’s extensive program of public spectacles was, in fact, a central component

of his approach to restoring order to Jaén, meant to win popular support while espousing

what has been characterized as a “frontier ideology.”56 This was by no means an unusual

tactic, but both the extent and the content of Iranzo’s theatrics was idiosyncratic,

reflecting his personal understandings of society, hierarchy, and holy war. To understand

the intent behind his many productions, we need to consider his own non-traditional route to a position of authority. Iranzo’s very reliance on spectacle, for instance, may well be tied to his personal experiences, particularly his investiture as a knight and promotion to título and Constable. In each of those instances, a ritual performed publicly had a transformative effect, in both a literal and figurative sense. Before Enrique touched him with a sword in front of the assembled army near Granada, Iranzo was a commoner and a

55 Hechos del Condestable, 89: “con tan grant gozo & alegría como solían resçevir en Roma sus emperadores quando de sus conquistas boluíen vençedores.” 56 Angus MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1989), 233.

228 relative nonentity. When he stood after the ceremony, he had been remade as a knight in

a sense more binding than the written document that later formalized the event. The

physical gestures and spoken words that made him Constable acted in the same manner.

If ceremonies could so efficaciously enact such pivotal personal conversions, they might

perform the same role in Iranzo’s attempt to transform an entire city.

Spectacles could also ensure that the citizens of Jaén were continually reminded

of their ruler’s status. Iranzo was certainly aware of the unease caused by his rapid

advancement, and was constantly subjected to whispers and outright confrontations about

his origins. The attempts of Villena and his followers to remove Iranzo from his

influential position and the king’s inability or unwillingness to act decisively in his protégé’s defense would have highlighted his vulnerability. He lacked useful familial ties

and carried an authority always open to challenge. This was the case even in Jaén, where

many of his subordinates could boast a superior lineage. As Palencia also pointed out, the

Constable established his right to power by employing “an appearance of supreme

authority” through “his new kind of severity and eloquence.”57 Palencia did not here

elaborate on what the “new” approach was or how it was innovative, but could only have

been referring to Iranzo’s habit of sponsoring and appearing in a diverse set of public

theatrics and formal processions through which the Constable simultaneously presented

himself as a man of the people and as an exalted ruler. Such entertainments were not

wholly new, however, even if their scope in Jaén was. Alvaro de Luna, Constable under

Juan II, had organized similar events for courtly audiences, possibly including Iranzo during his early days at court. Enrique IV was also known for extravagant productions and the future Constable likely learned the intricacies of organizing them as the king’s

57 See above, n. 51.

229 personal attendant.

Iranzo’s personal mission in Jaén was to invigorate the war against Granada, a

task he saw as a religious obligation.58 But for this to succeed, he needed the people of

Jaén to share his vision and be willing to make the sacrifices required. To that end, he sought to inspire them with his own example of conspicuous religiosity. In 1464, for instance, he made a point of attending mass on every day of Lent, in the process visiting all the churches of Jaén: “The first day of Lent, the lord Constable went to the cathedral for terce, and there walked in the procession, heard the sermon, and received the ashes.

Later, as Lent proceeded, his lordship heard mass at all the churches of the city, in this manner: on the first Sunday of Lent at San Llorente, and the next day at Santiago, the next at San Juan…” and so on through another fourteen examples. In addition to hearing mass throughout Lent, moreover, he walked the Stations of the Cross at each church and with his full retinue.59 Such a maneuver was typical of Iranzo’s public acts as it

functioned on multiple levels. Not only did he display his devotion before the eyes of his

people while obligating his household to do the same; he also offered his personal

attention to each parish, an itinerary that conveniently afforded him a chance to inspect

the condition and management of every church, while linking all of these local churches

to the greater whole.

Iranzo, moreover, used public spectacle to link this religious devotion to the

58 The clearest statement of this is a letter Iranzo wrote to Pope Sixtus IV on 15 October 1471 in which he pledged that he and his followers would devote “all our possessions, our wives, our children, our freedom, our homeland, and in the end, our lives” to the “holy exercise” of fighting Granada. Hechos del condestable, 471, 474-5: “ponemos todas las faciendas, las mugeres, los fijos, los parientes, la libertad, la patria, y a la postre, las vidas... santo exerçiçio.” 59 Hechos del Condestable, 164: “El primero día de Quaresma, el señor Condestable yva a la yglesia mayor, a la misa de terçia, por andar en la proçesión e oyr el sermón; e por tomar la çeniza. E después, andando la quaresma, su señoría yva a oyr misa a todas las iglesias de la çibdad, en esta manera: el lunes de la cuadragésima dominica de quaresma a Sant Lloreynte, e otro día a Santiago, e otro día a Sant Juan…”

230 military struggle with Islam and to his personal rule. At times, this could be quite explicit, with the Constable casting himself as a key player in the eschatological story of

Christianity’s ultimate triumph over Islam. At others, the connections were more subtle.

Tournaments might be held on or near major religious holidays or martial and religious themes would be combined without overt reference to Islam. Such was the case with the unorthodox combates de hueves presented on Easter Monday in 1461, 1463, and 1464, in which thousands of eggs were expended in battle between the Constable’s home and a wooden castle constructed nearby.60 These ‘tournaments’ either preceded or followed public banquets featuring eggs and cheese at which all comers were served. The parties provided a welcome burlesque entertainment following the austerity of Lent while demonstrating the city’s wealth and the Constable’s generosity. More importantly, however, they reminded the townspeople, at the start of the year’s campaigning season, of the city’s military role. Christ’s sacrifice meant that they too must be willing to give their utmost to destroy his enemies.

Even as he rejected Enrique’s policy of diplomacy with Granada as a form of appeasement and labored to most effectively confront the enemy, Iranzo offered an ambivalent image of Islam in his spectacles. This was partly an aspect of his efforts to present himself as the supreme and only authority in Jaén. The Constable had few models upon which to fashion his public persona and Enrique, who had been a dominant presence in his life at court, was his only example for how a ruler should present himself as apart from and above the rest of the nobility. When given the opportunity to determine

60 Hechos del Condestable, 63-4, 123, 166; Lucien Clare, “Les formes dramatiques primitives du théâtre espagnol d’après “Los Hechos del Condestable don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo” (1460-1470),” in Frontières andalouses: la vie à Jaén entre 1460 et 1471, d'après Los hechos del condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, ed. Jacques Heers. Iberica n.s. 6 (Paris, 1996), 85-6; Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 300-1; Francis Very, “A Fifteenth-Century Spanish Easter Eggs Combat and Some Parallels,” Romance Notes 4 (1962): 66-9.

231 his own image, Iranzo therefore styled himself in a manner akin to that of the king, who

was notorious for his Muslim tastes. His chronicle emphasized the care he took with his

attire and personal appearance, as well as their inspiration. To attend mass one day in

1461, for instance, he was “dressed in a riding tunic of very fine yellow wool over a

crimson doublet, and a blue cap whose hood was dyed with cochineal: all done up as a

Morisco, and very nicely too.”61

This understanding of the trappings of power does not, however, explain the many other positive references to Muslim culture that suffused his spectacles. These demonstrated a sincere respect for Granadan military, intellectual, and architectural prowess and predicted a future in which the Muslims would convert to Christianity and all would live together in peace. This was not a vision of true tolerance; Iranzo always emphasized Christian victory and dominance. Unlike Enrique, whose appreciation for

Muslim habits led to accusations of secret apostasy, the sincerity of Iranzo’s faith seems never to have been questioned. In his public spectacles, the Muslims were always both religious enemies and cultural brethren. Whether or not this reflected his personal feelings cannot be known. The dichotomy, however, reveals a sensitivity to local perspectives. Jaén’s geographic and economic situation placed its people at the center of both the combative and acculturative tendencies of the frontier and Iranzo needed to address both aspects of their perspective on Islam to win their support.

********

Iranzo’s initial attempt to articulate this message through drama came soon after the end of his first campaigning season. With the expiration of Enrique’s truce with

61 Hechos del Condestable, 52: “vn sayo de caualgar vestido, de muy fino paño Amarillo, sobre vn jubón de carmesy, y vna capa azul con vn capirote morado de grana: tocado todo morisco & bien fecho.”

232 Granada early in 1462, the Constable embarked upon a series of spectacularly successful

incursions into Muslim territory. These, according to the Hechos del Condestable,

included not only profitable raids or cabalgadas but also significant invasions that caused

the Muslims to abandon a number of border posts and to fear “their total destruction.”62

Accordingly, they appealed to the king and, on 20 November, Enrique signed a truce intended to last until the following June despite Iranzo’s desire to continue the campaign.63 With his military activities curtailed for the moment, Iranzo returned to Jaén,

intending to pass the winter with celebrations, dances, tournaments, and “other acts of

honest pleasure.”64

The first of these described by his chronicler was an elaborate tournament, held

on 26 December, the day after Christmas, in which two hundred knights took part. Half

of these dressed themselves as Muslims, complete with false beards, and pretended to be

a delegation accompanying a visit by the king of Morocco. Joining them was the prophet

Mohammed who arrived “with great ceremony, riding on a lavishly adorned mule and

bearing the Qu’ran and books of his law in the shade of a rich tapestry borne on four

poles by four alfaquíes [doctors of Muslim law].”65 The procession moved into the city to

the sound of trumpets and kettledrums and two of these ‘Moors’ proceeded to the

Constable’s palace. Dismounting, they entered the sala to find him and his wife, dressed

in their best finery and attended by a crowd of knights, squires, and noblewomen. The

two knights described themselves as envoys from the king of Morocco and kissed

62 Hechos del Condestable, 94: “su total destruyçión.” Iranzo’s military endeavors in 1462 are described in Hechos del Condestable, 76-94 and summarized in Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 81-5; and Pérez García, “El Condestable Iranzo y la frontera.” 63 Hechos del Condestable, 95-6. 64 Hechos del Condestable, 98: “otros actos de placeres onestos.” 65 Hechos del Condestable, 98: “con el Alcorán e libros de su ley, con grant çirimonia, en vna mula muy enparamentada; y en somo, vn paño rico en quatro varas, que trayan quatro alfaquíes.”

233 Iranzo’s hands before handing him a fictive chancery letter.

This missive purported to be from the king of Morocco and began by saluting the

“valiant, strong, and noble knight, Don Miguel Lucas, Constable of Castile.” The king

then lamented that “I have heard of the great destruction and shedding of blood that you,

honored knight, have inflicted on the Moors of the king of Granada, my uncle.”66 These

defeats, he went on, indicated that Mohammed had forgotten Granada while the Christian

god actively helped the knights of Castile. Therefore, he had come with the best and most

prestigious of his knights to challenge the Christians to a juego de cañas. If the Christians

should, through the aid of their god, prove victorious, then the king and his knights would

convert to Christianity and become the Constable’s vassals. Iranzo accepted the challenge

and ordered the contingent of knights who had retained their usual attire to engage the

Muslims in the test of martial skill, which took place in the Plaza de Santa María. The

juego de cañas lasted for more than three hours, “until the horses could no longer move”

and ended predictably.67

The king of Morocco and his knights then gathered to tender their submission to

Iranzo and confirmed their willingness to convert and to renounce (renegar) Islam. All the participants paraded the length of the city in a joyous procession to the church of

Santa María Magdalena. There, the putative king of Morocco and his knights were ceremoniously baptized while Mohammed, with Koran in hand, was dunked into a fountain for a more theatrical sort of baptism. Afterwards, the knights, including the newly-Christianized Muslims, joined a large crowd of commoners and children at the

66 Hechos del Condestable, 99: “el valiente y esforçado & noble cauallero don Miguel Lucas, condestable de Castilla… Fago vos saber oyendo la grant destruyçión & derramamiento de sangre que vos, onrrado cauallero, aveys fecho en los moros del rey de Granada mi tío.” 67 Hechos del Condestable, 100: “que ya los cauallos no se podían mover.”

234 Constable’s palace, where they feasted on wine and fruit.

Scholars have described this series of events in derisive terms as “frontier

fantasy,” a “wish-fulfillment piece,” or “confirmatory magic” in which Iranzo’s

“primitive mind” was motivated by the belief that the “proper representation of a desired

event will result in its realization in reality.”68 Such characterizations tend to emphasize

the performance’s whimsical nature while obscuring its political purposes. The staging of

the tournament certainly was playful, from the elaborate costumes to Mohammed’s

dunking, and the chronicler emphasized the great joy and merrymaking that accompanied

each act. But the production, even in its most farfetched aspects, had a serious purpose.

On a basic level, this and other tournaments were designed to promote and maintain a

high level of physical fitness and skill amongst the Constable’s knights. The juego de

cañas was a rigorous form of military training that played a role in a variety of annual

festivals as well as in special events such as the carta bermeja tournament. The game

required the knights to charge in formation at a full gallop, while aiming their nine to

twelve foot lance at an opponent’s shield and defending with their own shield. After

successfully breaking their canes, the knights wheeled and returned to the starting points, again at a full gallop. All of this had to be done within the confines of the Plaza de Santa

María and without trampling the spectators. In using such entertainments to drill the

knights in horsemanship and the use of their weapons, the Constable ensured that he

would have a fit, skilled, and cheerful fighting force. At the same time, he neatly

68 Ronald Surtz, The Birth of a Theatre: Dramatic Convention in the Spanish Theater from Juan del Encina to Lope de Vega (Madrid, 1979), 81-2; MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology, 227; Charlotte Stern, “Christmas Performances in Jaén in the 1460s,” in Studies in Honor of Bruce W. Wardropper, ed. Dian Fox, Harry Sieber, and Robert TerHorst (Newark, 1989), 326. For an overview of scholarly readings of this festival, see Thomas Devaney, “Representing the Medieval Festivals of Jaén through Text, Enactment and Image,” in Representing the Past: Archaeology through Image & Text, ed. Sheila Bonde and Stephen Houston (Oakville, CT, in press, 2011).

235 reminded all present that the object of all this martial skill was the defeat of the enemy in

Granada.69

As with nearly all of Iranzo’s theatrical productions, this tournament functioned

on multiple levels. Angus MacKay, while acknowledging that it was a form of military

training, highlights its role in supporting what he calls ‘frontier ideology’. The purpose of

the tournament’s theatrical framework, he argues, was to place the Constable’s victories within the larger context of reconquista and thus indelibly impress them in communal

memory.70 By inserting himself into the story of Christianity’s ultimate triumph over

Islam, dramatized by the Christian knights’ victory in the juego de cañes, the humiliation

of Mohammed, and the ‘baptism’ of the King of Morocco and his knights, Iranzo linked

martial and religious success directly to his personal rule. It was not the first time the

Constable had attempted to represent his contributions to the war on Granada through

theatre. In 1461, for instance, he hosted a banquet in the palace which included a

company of his knights dressed in foreign clothes and pretending to be captives freed by

the Constable’s personal intervention.71 That, however, had been a private party in the

sala and not intended as a public statement of his intentions. Now, with his first

successful invasions of Granada behind him and the hope that Enrique’s truce would be

short lived, he openly professed a grandiose plan for the conquest and subjugation of

Granada.

Or did he? Despite the unquestioned military successes of 1462, the Constable’s policies disrupted long-standing commercial relations between Jaén and Granada. This

69 Lucien Clare, “Fêtes, jeux et divertissements à la cour du connétable de Castille, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (1460-1470) : les exercices physiques,” in Frontières andalouses, 25-9. 70 MacKay, MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology,” 235, 239. 71 Hechos del Condestable, 47-8.

236 commerce involved the movement of a wide range of goods and its interruption posed a

direct threat to the financial well-being of many of Iranzo’s subjects, ranging from rural

herders to his own relatives by marriage in the influential Torres family.72 In contrast to

the valorization of the martial aspects of the frontier presented in the Hechos and likely

shared by the Constable himself, most residents of Jaén and its territories preferred

simple stability and conditions conducive to trade. Both Iranzo’s campaigns and his

festivals were, moreover, quite costly. Some of this expense was offset by the riches

gained in battle but more was covered by increased taxes on residents of the city and

especially on those living in the surrounding territories. The hardships created by these

economic displacements, in concert with failed harvests and larger anti-aristocratic and

anti-converso movements, would ultimately lead to popular unrest and Iranzo’s death

during a riot in 1473.73

While there is no direct evidence for disturbances in Jaén in 1462, the specter of internal strife was a concern for Iranzo and one school of thought therefore sees a sinister side to Iranzo’s efforts to forge his ‘frontier ideology’. Teofilo Ruiz, for instance, argues that Iranzo’s festivals used popular motifs to diffuse social tensions and direct lower-class discontent toward external enemies: both the Muslims of Granada and the Constable’s noble rivals in Castile. In doing so, he casts the Constable’s spectacles, and particularly

72 Archivo Municipal de Jaén (AMJ), Libros de Actas Capitulares (AC) 1476, ff. 27v, 37v-38r, and 198r; AMJ, AC 1480, 80r-84v; AMJ, Ordenanzas de Jaén, ff. 105v, 160r, 161v; Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 104-17; Juan Carlos Garrido Aguilera, “Relaciones fronterizas con el reino de Granada en las Capitulares del Archivo Histórico Municipal de Jaén,” in IV Coloquio de Historia Medieval Andaluza (Almería, 1988), 166; Pedro A. Porras Arboledas, “Las relaciones entre la ciudad de Jaén y el reino de Granada (La paz y la guerra según el libros de Actas de 1480 y 1488),” Al-Qantara 9, fasc. 1 (1988), 30; and idem, “El comercio entre Jaén y Granada en 1480,” Al-Qantara 9, fasc. 2 (1988), 519-23. 73 Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture,” 298; Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 16-20; Pablo Sánchez León, “Changing Patterns of Urban Conflict in Late Medieval Castile,” Past and Present 195 [supplement 2] (2007): 217-32; Emilo Cabrera Muñoz and Andrés Moros, Fuenteovejuna. La violencia antiseñorial en la siglo XV (Barcelona, 1991), esp. 137, 142, 150; Julio Valdeón, Los conflictos sociales en el reino de Castilla en los siglos XIV y XV (Madrid, 1975).

237 the carta bermeja tournament, as cynical attempts to better bind the people to his authority. Ruiz limits himself, he says, to recreating the elite perspectives found in the

Hechos del Condestable because popular culture “cannot be recaptured in its original

form.” Instead, he gives voice to the resistance of the oppressed by exposing the

strategies of the powerful, concluding that “those above continuously appropriate and

transform popular unrest and culture for their own benefit.”74

Iranzo certainly sought to appeal to his subjects in the most effective manner

possible; to do less would be pointless. That he consciously drew upon popular themes in

articulating his vision is therefore, as Ruiz insists, quite likely. But if he indeed sought

only to disarm malcontents or portray himself as a champion of Christianity, why did he

muddle the message by dressing as a Morisco? Why design the sala of his palace, a semi- public space where he often held banquets and balls, in a Mudéjar style? Such affectations were not unknown at the time but the mixed messages did not end with

physical decorations.75 The whole of the tournament was suffused with complimentary references to the Muslims. Everyone rode in the Muslim fashion (a la jineta) and the style of fighting was the juego de cañas, which was of Islamic origin. The Church of the

Magdalena, where the Muslims were baptized after their defeat, had been built on the site of a mosque partly demolished during the Christian conquest of the city. The fountain which provided the water for these baptisms had once been used by Muslims for ritual ablutions.76 Perhaps most significantly, all participants, both Christian and New

Christian, joined together for a feast after their struggle. In fact, the only object of

74 Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture,” 309, 315. 75 On the popularity of Muslim styles of dress, see Carmen Bernis, “Modas moriscas en la sociedad cristiana española del siglo XV y principios del XVI,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 144 (1959): 199-228. On the context for the Mudéjar features of Iranzo’s palace, see chapter 3, 35-7. 76 Max Harris points out a number of these aspects of the carta bermeja tournament in Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin, 2000), 58-9.

238 contempt was the prophet Mohammad and his Koran. It would be wrong to present this

as a vision of convivencia. After all, the central theme of the drama was Christian victory.

But the enemy was neither eradicated nor driven away, but converted and embraced. The only thing wrong with Muslims, Iranzo seems to have been saying, was their religion.

Take that away and there were no obstacles to peaceful interaction or to mutually beneficial cultural exchange.

To argue that Iranzo sought to indoctrinate the people through pageantry therefore misses key aspects of his approach. He had come to Jaén with a particular and dissonant vision of Islam that drew both on his experiences at Enrique’s court and his fervent support for holy war. Confronted with the amiable enmity that his new subjects evinced toward their Muslim neighbors, he sought to reassure them that he would not seek an unrestrained war against Granada that would permanently destroy their livelihoods and

expel their trading partners. In effect, the Constable aimed to lower the stakes of holy war

by suggesting that victory over Islam required the conversion but not the destruction of

Muslims and would not entail the loss of Granadan culture. His emphasis on conversion

and on the links between religious and secular concerns, moreover, was not limited to this

one tournament.

Christmas was one of the high points of the Christian festive calendar and the

Constable marked the season with “the most significant festivals of all the year.”77 The carta bermeja tournament was only one event in a series that lasted from 24 December through 6 January and culminated in a dramatic enactment of the biblical story of the three Magi or the Representación de los Reyes Magos. The Magi play was performed for the first time in 1462 and thereafter every year until the Constable’s death in 1473. Its

77 Hechos del Condestable, 152-3: “las más prinçipales de todo el año.”

239 initial performance began with an evening procession that moved the length of the city,

from the home of regidor Fernando de Berrio near the Magdalena to the Constable’s palace, along a route decorated with tapestries and lit by so many torches “that the brightness of the light made it almost seem like the middle of the day.”78 Spectators lined

the route. Some, like the Constable’s wife and her ladies, enjoyed the scene from high

towers while others followed along on foot or horseback, watched from their windows, or sat on walls or roofs. Iranzo himself was the centerpiece of the show, riding on a fine

horse and “dressed in a gold-encrusted doublet and over it a short jacket adorned with his

coat of arms made of fine yellow wool and very nicely outlined with black embroidery.

On his head he bore a well-made royal crown with a mask [lit. a ‘false face’] and in his

hand, placed carefully on the saddle as might a noble knight, was a bared sword.”79

Preceding him were a pair of fifteen-year-old pages, each bearing a lance and wearing his own yellow jacket and brocade doublet, and in front of them a parade of twelve knights with lances and a thirteenth bearing a standard. All the knights wore, as did the

Constable, crowns and masks “in memory of the Magi kings, whose feast they celebrated.”80

Interestingly, these fourteen Magi did not abandon their knightly personae in

dressing for the occasion. Despite the crowns, their mounts, naked swords, and personal

devices meant that the transformation was incomplete. The actors were deliberately

poised between the past and the present in an effort to incorporate the biblical Magi into

78 Hechos del Condestable, 70: “que no paresçia sino en meytad del día, por la grande claridad de la lunbre.” 79 Hechos del Condestable, 71: “vn jubón chapado de oro vestido, y ençíma vna jaqueta corta, con sus bla[s]ones trepados de muy fino paño amarillo, muy bien calçado vnas calças negras bordadas; en la cabeça vna corona real muy bien fecha con su falso visaje; y en la mano, vn estoque desnudo, muy bien puesto en la silla, como gentil cauallero.” 80 Hechos del Condestable, 71: “... a memoria de los res reyes magos, cuya fiesta çelebraua.”

240 their own chivalric world. As Charlotte Stern has suggested, “the sages of antiquity became medieval knights just as much as the knights became Magi.”81 Once the

procession reached the palace, all enjoyed an elaborate banquet and the play itself began,

now in the relative privacy of the sala. Here too, the boundaries between past and present

were blurred as were those between stage and audience. Thus, the Constable received the

Virgin Mary in his own persona and escorted her and the Christ child to sit with the noble

ladies of the court and there the holy family remained when he returned in the guise of a

Magi to offer gifts to the holy family.82

The procession for the following year, that of the carta bermeja tournament, was largely the same, although a few new elements were introduced. Preceded by a troop of trumpeters and drummers, the dozen knights in the guise of Magi rode down the Calle

Maestra, the city’s main thoroughfare, on their fine horses, followed by “a fool that was called the Master of Santiago.”83 Next was a group of thirty torchbearers and then, as

before, Iranzo appeared in his fine clothes, with crown and mask on his head and bared

sword in his hand. He was followed by ten or twelve musketeers who fired their weapons

into the air. When they reached the Plaza de Santa María, Iranzo and his knights engaged

in a lively game of sortija (in which the knights attempted to thrust a lance through an

iron ring while charging at full speed) with rich prizes for the winners.

A dinner for all the knights followed and the Magi play occurred late in the

evening. This too had been embellished in several ways. After all had dined, “the three

81 Stern, “Christmas Performances,” 328. 82 Hechos del Condestable, 71-2. 83 Hechos del Condestable, 102: “vn loco que se llamaua Maestre de Santiago.” Ruiz claims that this ‘fool’ was meant to represent “a sworn enemy of the constable,” presumably Villena, “Elite and Popular Culture,” 297. But the Mastership remained in Enrique’s custody at this time and would only be given to Cueva in the following year. Villena did not become Master of Santiago until 1467. Given Iranzo’s own past flirtation with the office, it is more likely, then, that this character was intended to personify the foolishness of anyone embroiled in the cutthroat struggles for position in the royal court.

241 Magi kings came on horseback, guided by a star hung on a rope that was strung along the street to the gate of the sala where the Constable waited. Dismounting and entering, they found another guiding star and there offered their gifts to the child Jesus.”84 Even so, the

play blurred past and present just as it had done the year before. With Iranzo’s palace

serving as the biblical manger, the audience and the players mingled, moving in and out

of character and ending the evening with a round of dances and desserts.

Iranzo’s carta bermeja tournament presented his Granadan campaigns as directed

at the eventual conversion rather than the destruction or expulsion of the Muslims of

Granada and therefore in a manner palatable to the people of Jaén. The emphasis he placed on the Magi story—whose central feature was the conversion of pagan kings— served the same end. Dramatic presentations of this biblical story were not unknown but it was not a common choice for theatrics in Spain at this time; the shepherds’ tale was vastly more popular. In bringing the Magi to the fore while dressing them in a fusion of exotic robes and chivalric accoutrements (which resulted in an appearance not unlike that of the ‘Muslims’ in the carta bermeja spectacle), Iranzo linked his own martial efforts to the Passion story. The newborn Christ had converted the pagan kings peaceably through the power of his divinity. Iranzo was, of course, unable to match such holy charisma, but the play made clear that his attempts to convert the infidels through the tools available to him were but attempts to imitate Christ himself.

The Magi play was conducted in a courtly setting, open only to the civic elite, but the processions that preceded it were a public affair and the populace, familiar with the

84 Hechos del Condestable, 102: “vinieron a cauallo los res reyes magos, guiándolos el estrella, que estaua puesta en vn cordel por la calle, fasta la puerta de vna sala donde el dicho señor Condestable estaua. E descaualgaron y entraron en ella, do estaua puesta otra estrella que los guiase; & allí ofreçieron sus presentes al buen niño Jesús.”

242 story, would have been able to make the associations necessary to discern the Constable’s meaning. These processions, moreover, presented the Magi as exalted and worldly rulers who bore the crowns and swords of their station. As the most prominent of their

company, Iranzo drew attention to his own powerful station and emphasized the point, as

he did on many other occasions, by making a timely exit from the public eye in order to

complete the day’s festivities amongst the select.

The author of the Hechos del Condestable clearly linked the political and

religious statements of the carta bermeja tournament and the Magi play to each other and

to the Constable’s situation at the time. Although these events comprised only a small

part of a fortnight of revelry and theatrics, he devoted nearly his entire account of the

Christmas season to them, devoting only a short paragraph to a summary of “the other

festivals” that occurred during the intervening days.85 All of this was framed, moreover,

by explanations of contemporary political events that emphasized the Constable’s efforts

to pursue the war against Granada despite royal vacillations. Immediately preceding the

detailed descriptions of these two spectacles was the chronicler’s account of Enrique’s

truce. Immediately following was an elaborate defense of Iranzo’s decision, made during

the Christmas season, to break it.

The terms of the truce required that the Muslims return to Castile a number of

Christian captives, a transfer that was to be overseen, as was the custom, by alfaqueques

from both sides. But, according to the Hechos, many prisoners were removed from the

city of Granada in order to keep them out of the alfaqueques’ sight. A number of these,

perhaps thirty, were stashed in the castle of Montefrío where, taking advantage of lax

guards, they staged a revolt and managed to barricade themselves inside the castle.

85 Hechos del Condestable, 101: “los otras fiestas.”

243 Unable to escape Muslim territory without external support, they made contact with a

Christian alfaqueque, asking him to find a frontier lord willing to send an expedition to their rescue. The alfaqueque set off to find Iranzo for he thought that no one else would be willing to attempt such an audacious deed. Arriving in Jaén four or five days before

Christmas, he presented the situation to a receptive Constable and plans were quickly put together for a force of six hundred horsemen, two thousand infantry, and an artillery train.

As he planned and participated in the carta bermeja tournament and the Magi play, then, Iranzo was planning to break a truce whose ink was not yet dry and to do so in a dramatic fashion. The size of the force he gathered was more appropriate for a significant campaign than for the rescue of the captives, and required a major outlay of funds as well as the active cooperation of Iranzo’s deputies in nearby towns. To succeed, he needed also the support of Jaén’s population. Already unsettled by the disruption in trade caused by the previous summer’s fighting and by their increased tax burden, they were likely to balk at these new demands, especially since Iranzo’s venture clearly lacked the king’s blessing. He had already used the Magi play and procession to impress the people and to suggest the idea of conversion prior to his first raids the year before. Now, with higher stakes, he made the implications of the pagan kings’ decision to follow Christ more explicit and with a greater emphasis on his own role. This gambit, unlike the winter campaign, seems to have been successful, for the Hechos does not record, even in passing, any indication of unrest or lack of cooperation on the part of the populace. The actual invasion did not work out so well. The army set out late in January but the venture accomplished little. Bad weather and lack of supplies plagued the army and, after several

244 skirmishes and the destruction of some minor fortifications, the Constable was forced to

return to Jaén. The captives whose rescue had been the putative purpose of the expedition

were forced to surrender and eventually converted to Islam. There was, moreover, so

major response from Granada, meaning that Iranzo had even failed to conclusively break

the truce.86

He was unable to follow up on this failed expedition due to an ongoing dispute

with the Bishop of Jaén, Alfonso Vázquez de Acuña, for control of the city. In order to ease Iranzo’s transition to authority in Jaén, Enrique had ordered Acuña to withdraw to

Begíjar, near Baeza. From there, however, the displaced bishop attempted to marshal

support for an attempt to retake Jaén. This proved unsuccessful, but occupied the

Constable’s attention for much of 1463, leaving little time for military adventures. In

early spring, he thus found himself in the ironic position of hosting a Granadan

delegation sent to Jaén to conduct “certain negotiations,” most likely regarding matters

necessary for maintaining the peace, such as the exchange of hostages and the swift

resolution of private trans-frontier disputes.87 On the Sunday of Carnival, the alcaide of

Cambil arrived in Jaén, accompanied by three or four other knights sent by the king of

Granada. Iranzo immediately organized a juego de cañas in their honor, to take place that

very day and to include all the knights of his personal bodyguard and of the city.

This was meant in part to impress the visitors with the size and preparedness of

Jaén’s garrison and they apparently responded as expected. The Hechos recorded that

“the Moors were not a little frightened and amazed, seeing the ferocity of the game and

86 Hechos del Condestable, 103-9; Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 85-6. 87 Hechos del Condestable, 110: “çiertos negoçios.”

245 the confidence and number of the knights of the city.”88 While other aspects of their

reception similarly indicate a desire to overawe the emissaries, the proceedings also bore

a distinctly informal character. After the juego de cañas, for instance, the guests and their

hosts moved to Iranzo’s palace in a procession that reflected careful preparation and the

appropriate level of pomp. They rode “with many torches, and all the streets full of lances

topped by burning flambeaux so that there was not a single shadow in all the city, and six

pairs of kettledrummers, and many trumpets, flutes, and tambourines.”89 For such formal

processions, Iranzo usually marched or rode in a majestic pose, bearing his sword and

displaying his heraldic devices. On this occasion, however, he rode a pony (although a

very fine one, to be sure) with his wife perched behind him on the animal’s haunches.

The Constable’s brother and sister-in-law rode in a similar manner, as did Teresa’s uncle

Juan de Torres and his wife María Cuello. The scene as described in the Hechos is a pleasant, familial, comfortable one, a mood that persisted during the Carnival revelries throughout Jaén that followed. Mimes and actors presented invenciones in the plazas, townspeople danced and sang, and the sounds of trumpets and drums pierced the air. The visitors wandered through these street parties until midnight, and then joined the highborn for a meal at the palace.

The next day brought further festivities. The nobles and their Granadan guests sat on an elaborately decorated stage in front of a vast bonfire on the Plaza de Santa María while the townsfolk crowded the adjoined streets or watched from their windows as the

Constable’s knights played at sortija. The ‘Master of Santiago’ made an appearance as

88 Hechos del Condestable, 110: “de que los moros estauan no poco espantados & marauillados, veyendo la feroçidad del juego & la desenboltura & moltitud de los caualleros de aquella çibdad.” 89 Hechos del Condestable, 110: “con muchas antorchas, & todos las calles llenas de faraones ardiendo en varas de lanças, que en toda la çibdad no era tiniebra ninguna, & seys pares de atabales, & muchos tronpetas & chirimías & tanborinos.”

246 the game’s judge, directing a group of pages to beat the winner of the contest, Iranzo’s

mace bearer Pero Gómes de Ocaña, with ‘clubs’ made of wool stuffed with cotton. After a luxurious dinner (at which food was provided “in such great abundance that the people began throwing it at each other”) and several skits and dances, “a band of one hundred fifty men entered with baskets on their heads and clean round skullcaps, each with three or four large, dry pumpkins.”90 They proceeded to engage in a vigorous burlesque mêlée

that involved hitting each other on the head with the pumpkins to the sound of trumpets, a

struggle “that seemed to be the fiercest fight in the world. Such seemed to be the case to

everyone present, especially the Moors, who exclaimed ‘axudy’ amongst themselves.”91

The author of the Hechos clearly assumed that the Constable intended to use the spectacles and games already planned for Carnival as a means of overawing the Muslim diplomats. But his willingness to bring the visitors into his home as honored guests and to treat them to a succession of events defined more by playfulness than military or courtly grandeur betrays an ease at odds with the idea of Muslims as religious enemies. On one level, for instance, we can suggest that the absurd oversupply of food at the open-air dinner was meant to demonstrate the city’s wealth: Jaén provided so much food that, not only could they eat to excess, they could play with it, a point driven home by the grand pumpkin battle that followed. But the very silliness of this behavior would only have undermined such a message. If the Constable wanted the Muslim knights to return home with an image of a wealthy and fierce enemy, would not a staid but opulent meal and a repeat of the first day’s intense juego de cañas have served him better? Instead, he treated

90 Hechos del Condestable, 111-2: “… en tan gran abundançia, que la gente se dauan vnos a otros con ello… vinieron contía de çiento & çinquenta onbres, armadas las cabeças de capaçetes & caxquetes redondos bien linpios, & cado vno con tres o quatro calabaças destas largas & secas.” 91 Hechos del Condestable, 112: “que no paresçía sino la más braua pelea del mundo. Fué cosa por çierto que a todos bien paresçíó; mayormente a los moros, que dicían vnos a otros axudy.”

247 his guests to what Max Harris has described as “a kind of mockery of the knights’ own

mock battles.”92

By permitting the emissaries to join in the town’s Carnival fun, Iranzo treated them honestly: they really were honored guests rather than barely-tolerated

representatives of an infidel whose rule was illegitimate. He did so publicly, sharing his cadalhalso with them and letting the people of Jaén see the vision he had presented in the carta bermeja festival made a reality. If Christians and Muslims could eat together and play together even while the memories of atrocities on both sides were so fresh, then the future might be bright indeed. Such, too, may have been the message he hoped the delegation would bring back to Granada: that the Constable was a fierce and dangerous foe but also a generous and noble leader whose motivations did not include a reflexive hatred of Muslims.

********

Iranzo’s penchant for burlesque tournaments suffused with positive references to

Islam did not end in 1463, but continued throughout his time in Jaén. In February 1464, for instance, a year after the Granadan emissaries’ visit, Iranzo put on one of his most elaborate shows to commemorate Enrique’s visit to Jaén. As the king, escorted by Iranzo and some of his knights, approached the city, they met five hundred mounted knights dressed like Muslims who entertained the company with mock skirmishes. Continuing along their way, the royal party met thirty other knights dressed as Muslim women and

playing tambourines. Finally, and most dramatically, they encountered “four thousand”

children in white Muslim robes and riding wicker hobby horses and another thousand

with wicker crossbows. Joined by this multitude of children, the king entered Jaén in a

92 Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, 55.

248 triumphal ceremony.93 These spectacles were only not reserved for special visitors; more

often, they marked particular moments in the ecclesiastic calendar. The feast days of San

Juan (24 June) and Santiago (25 July), for instance, usually saw mock battles with some participants in Muslim attire while the Epiphany celebrations continued to feature the

Magi play and a tournament.

Even significant moments in the Constable’s life, such as the birth of his daughter in 1465, could inspire mock battles between Christians and ‘Muslims’. On that occasion, the usual configuration of costumes, torches, and music included añafiles (Muslim

trumpets).94 Despite their regular place in Jaén’s festive life, however, these tournaments

should be seen in the context of the winter of 1463-1464, when the pattern they would

thereafter follow was set. Although Iranzo was then flush with his first successes against

Granada and considering an open rejection of the king’s truce, the local population,

despite the wealth their new ruler had captured in the season’s campaigning, looked

forward to the security and commercial opportunities the truce would provide. The

combination of Iranzo’s personal background and his perceptions of popular fears created

a novel result. His experiences in Enrique’s court had given the Constable a familiarity

with Muslim culture that allowed him to use a variety of Islamic motifs and to embrace

the Granadan visitors as fellows, while the need to assuage popular concerns forced him

to temper his zeal for holy war with considerations for what would come after the (for

him) inevitable Christian victory.

In proposing that conversion would put an end to the meaningful differences

93 Hechos del Condestable, 187-95. Harris sees this as an attempt to present the Muslims as feminine and childish, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, 56-7. See also Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture,” 304-5. 94 For the examples mentioned, see Hechos del Condestable, 95, 116-7, 132, 169-72, 257-9. Rodríguez Molina offers an overview of tournaments involving Muslim attire in La vida de la ciudad, 299-300. See also Angustias Contreras Villar, “La Corte de Condestable Iranzo. La ciudad y la fiesta,” En la España medieval 10 (1987): 305-22.

249 between Muslims and Christians (or more properly, given his professed expectations,

between converted Moors and Old Christians), Iranzo drew on an understanding of

conversion that assumed baptism effectively removed the taint of Islam. Once a

Christian, the convert would suffer no social or legal disabilities. Such was the case already, in theory at least, with the communities of Mudéjares living in or near Jaén and

such was the situation of the more significant population of conversos in the city. But

Iranzo’s vision ran against the temper of the times. Christians remained eager to engage

in trade with Muslims but their willingness to live on somewhat equal terms with recent

converts or members of other faiths, long a hallmark of the frontier, was now fading.

The Jewish community of Jaén seem to have nearly disappeared after the

destructive pogroms of 1391, but the city boasted a significant converso population that lagged only those of Seville and Córdoba. They played an important role in the civic economy and were involved in professions ranging from crafts and farming to trade, moneylending, and tax collection.95 The Constable put his ideas about conversion into practice in his relations with these ‘New Christians’, backing individual conversos in

their efforts to join the ruling councils or to hold municipal office. This support provided

ammunition to his numerous enemies, who accused Iranzo of unduly favoring the

conversos. In doing so, these rivals, who included the Marquis of Villena and his

supporters as well as the bishop of Jaén and other local notables distressed by Iranzo’s

military and economic policies, sought to undermine the Constable’s popularity by

identifying him with the conversos, whose success had inspired widespread popular

95 Luis Coronas Tejada, Conversos and Inquisition in Jaén (Jerusalem, 1998), 11-22; and idem, Los judíos en Jaén (Jaén, 2008), 27-50.

250 envy.96

Anti-converso sentiment amongst both the nobility and populace was rooted in

the concept of limpieza de sangre (blood purity), the idea that Jewish or Christian identity was a physical, inheritable condition. Rooted in contemporary understandings of linaje as well as practical experiences of the natural world (through, for instance, horse breeding), this naturalization of ‘Jewishness’ meant that any Jewish ancestry made one unsuitable for inclusion in the Christian community. Although starkly at odds with official church doctrine, the idea gained traction in the mid- to late-fifteenth century and, beginning with the 1449 Sentencia-Estatuto of Toledo, slowly became part of Castile’s legal culture. The ultimate causes of this anti-converso movement have been much debated and variously attributed to racism, economic pressures, and anti-Semitism. Likewise, there is no consensus regarding whether the impetus generally stemmed from the nobility or the populace.97 In early-1470s Jaén, however, it seems clear that existing anti-converso

feeling among the commoners was deliberately stoked by Iranzo’s noble rivals.

Such machinations first came to a head in 1468, when the Constable uncovered a

plot to assassinate him and spark an anti-converso riot. The account of this conspiracy

given in the Hechos neatly demonstrates how anti-converso sentiments could be coldly

mobilized to serve political ends during the civil war that erupted after the Farce of Ávila:

“As the Constable so diligently persevered in his loyalty and service to the lord king, the

Marquis of Villena, who was now Master of Santiago, wished to destroy him and have

the city of Jaén in his hand, believing that, if this could be accomplished, the king would

96 Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture,” 302, 310. 97 For an overview of scholarly debates on the development of limpieza de sangre in the fifteenth century, see María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2008), 25-41.

251 be lost in every way and have nothing in Castile that could sustain him. And so Villena,

the Master of Santiago, made a deal with a knight by the name of Fernán Mexía, a native

of Jaén, and also the comendador Juan de Pareja, whom the king had fostered and

rewarded, for it was through his highness that the man held the town and castle of

Pegalajar, which is in the domain of Jaén, as well as other natives and citizens of Jaén.

They agreed and conspired to kill the lord Constable through treachery and to rob the conversos, so that the populace of that city would wish to join them (my emphasis).”98

The attack was to take place as the Constable left the vespers service on the Feast of San Lázaro (the day before Palm Sunday). But the Constable attended church that day with a large entourage and, “by a miracle of God,” Mexía faltered at the key moment and was taken into custody, whence he revealed the details of the scheme.99 Although the

assassination attempt came to naught, several conspirators, including Pareja, escaped and

the episode illustrates the Constable’s increasingly insecure position as well as the

vulnerability of the conversos. The conspirators’ confidence that the populace would rise

against Iranzo if offered the opportunity to pillage their converso neighbors implied a

dangerous level of tension that could explode under the right circumstances.

This indeed happened in 1473, when an anti-converso pogrom in Córdoba

inspired a wave of similar attacks across Andalusia. By 20 March, the violence had

98 Hechos del Condestable, 372-3: “como el dicho señor Condestable tan supremamente perseuerase en su lealtad y en el seruiçio del dicho señor rey, y el marqués de Villena, que ya era maestre de Santiago, le desease destruyr e aver aquella çibdad de Jahén a su mano, creyendo que si esto pudiese acabar el dicho señor rey era de todo punto perdido, y que no le quedaua cosa en Castilla que se pudiese sostener, vn cauallero que se dicía Fernánd Mexía, natural de la dicha çibdad de Jahén, e otro comendador Juan de Pareja, a quien el rey nuestro señor avía criado & fecho merçedes, e por estonçes por su alteza tenía la villa & castillo de Pegalajar, que es de la dicha çibdad de Jaén, e otros çiertos naturales e vecinos della con ellos, por trato quel dicho marqués de Villena, maestre de Santiago, tenía con ellos, eran de acuerdo y estauan conjurados de matar a trayçión al dicho señor Condestable y robar a los conversos, porque la comunidad de la dicha çibdad de mejor voluntad se juntase con ellos.” 99 Hechos del Condestable, 374-5: “por miraglo de Dios.”

252 reached the town of Andújar, ruled by Iranzo’s confidant Pedro de Escavias.100 In a letter

written the following day, Iranzo exhorted Escavias to act decisively in protecting the

conversos and restoring order in the town. Iranzo’s letter, as Michel García has pointed

out, reveals both that the Andújar garrison was unable to control the uprising and that the

Constable saw the outbreak of violence as a direct challenge to his own authority.

Escavias was one of his most trusted deputies and the refusal to obey him amounted to

rebellion against Iranzo.101 The uprising next broke out in Jaén. Anti-Semitic sentiment

in Jaén had hitherto been repressed due, according to Palencia, to the Constable’s resolute

defense of the converso community: “The example of the booty gained in Córdoba

greatly encouraged the people of Jaén, who were eager to throw themselves into a similar

attack, and they were contained only by the energy of Constable Miguel Lucas.”102

However, Palencia continued, Iranzo’s star had lost much of its luster. He had recently taken the field against a Granadan incursion led personally by Sultan Abū al-

Hasan 'Ali (known to the Castilians as Muley Hacén). Encountering the Muslim army in the pass of La Guardia and possessing an army that could easily have overwhelmed the enemy, he was “seized by fear” and withdrew his forces.103 The political ramifications of

this failure were profound for “the people of Jaén converted this shame into disdain for

their leader and soon enough began to plot disorder with more boldness than was their

habit, for they were losing their earlier docility. On 22 March they took advantage of a

100 On the spread of anti-converso riots from Córdoba to Jaén, see Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 385-93. 101 Michel García, “Una carta inédita del condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo,” BIEG 53 (1967): 15-22; Toral Peñaranda, Jaén y el Condestable, 110-1; Rodríguez Molina, La vida de la ciudad, 392-3. 102 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 88: “El ejemplo del despojo realizado en Córdoba traía muy excitados los ánimos de los de Jaén, ansiosos de lanzarse al saqueo, y sólo contenidos por la energía del condestable Miguel Lucas.” Diego de Valera’s account of the uprising is similar in nearly all the details, Memorial de diversas hazañas: crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, Colección de Crónicas Españolas 4 (Madrid, 1941), 243-4. 103 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 89: “acometido del miedo.”

253 conspiracy against the unsuspecting Constable in order to eagerly join together in robbing

the conversos of their goods.”104 Led by several of Iranzo’s enemies, including Gonzalo

Mexía, the aguacil mayor of Jaén, a mob of residents fought a running battle with

Iranzo’s troops through the streets of Jaén that eventually reached the cathedral. There the

Constable was hearing mass and “when he knelt [to pray], one of the conspirators who was nearby dealt him a wounding blow to the temple with a crossbow, and then many of those present tore at him with swords and spears so much that his body barely looked human. Meanwhile, the crowd gave themselves to the looting the homes of the conversos

and killing them.” 105

It may well be that there was a conspiracy against him, that his earlier defeat at La

Guardia had weakened Iranzo’s reputation in the city, permitting his enemies to build support for their plans to remove him. It is clear, however, that the Constable’s death was linked to popular anger against the conversos; all sources agree that he was actively defending their community in the days preceded his death. His passing, moreover, signaled carte blanche to rob and kill the New Christians of Jaén. Even those seen to support the conversos were targeted and Iranzo’s family and many members of his circle were forced to take refuge in the Castilla de Santa Catalina overlooking the city.106

********

104 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 89: “Convirtieron los de Jaén esta vergüenza en desprecio de su caudillo, y bien pronto empezaron con más audacia que de costumbre a urdir trastornos, perdido ya el acatamiento de los antiguos días. El 22 de marzo aprovecharon la ocasión de una conjura contra el incauto Condestable, para lanzarse al saqueo de los bienes de los conversos.” 105 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 89: “Al arrodillarse, uno de los conjurados que junto a él se hallaba le descargó sobre la sien un golpe con la ballesta de hierro, y en seguida muchos de los presentes con espadas y lanzas le acribillaron de tal modo, que apenas ofrecía aspecto de figura humana. Entretanto la multitud se entregaba al saqueo de las casas y a la matanza de los conversos.” Iranzo’s death is also recorded in Escavias, Repertorio, 368. For the attack on the converso community, see Luis Coronas Tejada, “El motín antijudio de 1473 en Jaén,” in Proceedings of the Seventh World Congress of Jewish Studies, ed. Israel Gutman, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1981), ii, 141-77. 106 AMJ, AC 1476, ff. 5r-5v; José Rodríguez Molina, Colección diplomática del Archivo histórico Municipal de Jaén. Sigos XIV y XV (Jaén, 1985), doc. xii.

254 Christians in Jaén, like those elsewhere on the frontier, had long struggled to

define clear social boundaries between members of different religious groups. In response

to this dilemma, they often resorted to contradictory extremes, ranging from unrestrained

violence toward enemies to the rejection of fixed religious identities. Iranzo’s program of pageants proposed a middle ground in which Muslims (and Jews) who had converted to

Christianity would live in peace under Christian rule. He had adopted this message as a means of making religious warfare more appealing to the people of Jaén and of assuring

them that his campaigns would interrupt trade only temporarily. His spectacles and

heavy-handed methods of governance succeeded in securing at least the tacit support of

Jaén’s populace despite the high taxes required for his military endeavors, his civic

building programs, and the spectacles themselves. At the same time, these taxes and his

role in noble factional struggles won him a number of enemies who took advantage of the

waning tolerance for the sort of convivencia Iranzo espoused. Enrique IV’s maurophilia

led many of the high nobility to reject Islamic culture in all its aspects while a generalized

reaction against Castile’s conversos, often attributed to economic causes, undermined the

security of not only the conversos themselves but also those nobles who supported them

too prominently. This popular disaffection, likely manipulated by Iranzo’s noble enemies,

led to the Constable’s death at the hands of populace upon whom he had lavished such

attention.

Iranzo’s willingness to turn so often to the pomp and splendor of elaborate

spectacles was a product of his own past. Never entirely comfortable in his exalted

position and ever aware of the gossip regarding his humble birth and his dependence on

the king’s largesse, he sought to present himself not only as noble in appearance but as a

255 paragon of the noble virtues of generosity, piety, and courage. But the content of his

theatrics owed much to his perceptions of the people of Jaén. Through his experiences in

Enrique’s court, he certainly was familiar with Muslim clothing and manners, but there is

little evidence he shared the king’s deep feeling for Muslim culture. He appreciated the

finer things in life, and many of these in fifteenth-century Castile were products of

Muslim and Mudéjar artistry. But he was a holy warrior at heart and fully embraced the vision of a Christian-dominated Iberia. His presentation of this struggle as one for hearts and minds, therefore, was less an expression of his own feelings than an attempt to win the support of his subjects, to convince them that his purposes were not at odds with livelihoods built on the precarious but enduring frontier institutions.

Although they were open to trade and contact with the Muslims of Granada, the people of Jaén ultimately rejected Iranzo’s colonial vision of a society in which conversion to Christianity could erase all differences. The converso community in Jaén recovered somewhat after 1473 but remained vulnerable. The Tribunal of the Inquisition was established in Jaén in 1483 (only those in Seville and Córdoba came earlier) and first housed, ironically, in Iranzo’s palace, amid his Mudéjar decorations. Jaén’s autos-de-fé were conducted on the Plaza de Santa María, where the Constable first proposed, through his carta bermeja tournament, that one day Muslims and Christians might live in peace, competing on the practice ground instead of the battlefield.107 It is ironic, too, that the

anti-converso riots that shattered Andalusia in 1473 began with a public spectacle meant,

just as were Iranzo’s, to move public sentiment toward religious minorities in a particular

direction.

107 Coronas Tejada, Conversos and Inquisition, 23-4.

256

V.

A ‘CHANCE ACT’: CÓRDOBA IN 1473

The anti-converso riots that raged through Andalusia in 1473 were sparked in

Córdoba by what Alfonso de Palencia called a “chance act” (un hecho casual). In the first days of March of that year, the Cofradía de la Caridad (Brotherhood of Charity) conducted a procession down the Calle de la Feria bearing an effigy of the Virgin Mary.

As they passed through the Cruz del Rastro, a small but busy market square near the

Guadalquivir river, a young girl, eight or ten years old, spilled some water from a

window overlooking the square. The home in which she stood belonged to a converso.

The liquid spattered the statue, causing Alonso Rodríguez, a blacksmith who was part of

the procession, to cry frantically that the girl had deliberately thrown urine on the Virgin

as an insult to Christians. “I offer you my condolences,” he shouted, “honorable citizens,

for the evident derision that these detestable heretics have dared to present to the holy

religion, with no fear of punishment for their crimes. Let us now take vengeance on these

reprobate enemies of the faith and of charity.”1

1 Alfonso de Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia, BAE 257, 258, and 267 (Madrid, 1973-1975), ii, 86: “Condoleos, honrados ciudadanos, del manifiesto escarnio que estos aborrecidos herejes se atreven a hacer de la santa religión, sin temor alguno al castigo de sus crímenes. Vamos a vengarla en esos róprobos enemigos de la fe y de la caridad.” See also the less detailed but fundamentally similar account by Diego de Valera in his Memorial de diversas hazañas: crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 4 (Madrid, 1941), 240-2. The events here are given scholarly treatment in Manuel Nieto Cumplido, “La revuelta contra los conversos de Córdoba en 1473,” in Homenaje de Antón de Montoro en el V centenario de su muerte (Montoro, 1977), 29-49; Margarita Cabrera Sánchez, “El problema converso en Córdoba. El incidente de la Cruz del Rastro,” in La Península Ibérica en la Era de los Descubrimientos (1391-1492), Actas de las III Jornadas Hispano-portuguesas de Historia Medieval, 2 vols. (Seville, 1997), i, 331-339; and John Edwards, “The ‘Massacre’ of Jewish Christians in Córdoba, 1473-1474,” in The Massacre in History, ed. Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (New York, 1999), 55-68.

257 The gathered crowd, incited by his words, set about setting the offending house,

as well as others owned by conversos in the surrounding streets, on fire. Almost

immediately, Pedro de Torreblanca, a knight both well known in the city and especially

popular amongst the ‘Old Christians’ who made up the crowd, sought to dispel the

tension.2 Playing on his reputation, he pleaded with the crowd to leave off the riot, which could do nothing but disservice to god and king.3 As Torreblanca spoke, however,

Rodríguez attacked him and the disturbance developed into a running battle between the

rioters and townsfolk coming to Torreblanca’s aid. The blacksmith and his supporters

fled to the church of San Francisco, located a few streets away on the grounds of the

Monastery of San Pedro el Real (see figure 5). At this point, the chief magistrate (alcalde

mayor) of the city, Don Alonso de Aguilar, came onto the scene.

Both Palencia and Diego de Valera described Aguilar as consumed with anger at

both the riot and the injury to Torreblanca. He managed to convince Rodríguez to leave

the sanctuary of the church with an offer of mercy and then, perhaps after the blacksmith

offered some intemperate words, stabbed him with a lance. Friends and relatives bore the

wounded Rodríguez home, where he soon died, while the converso community prepared

for the worst. Palencia, who evinced no love for the New Christians, described their

precautions from a perspective likely shared by the Old Christians, that is to say, as

evidence of their guilt: “The conversos, fearful by nature and through knowledge of their

wicked deeds, organized defenses in their most populous neighborhoods; they armed

themselves and hid away their treasures, most of which had been accumulated by their

Yitzhak Baer offers a summary of Palencia’s description, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1961-1966), ii, 306-9. 2 Palencia claimed that he was “especialmente honrado entre los cristianos viejos por su humanidad y por la pureza de sus costumbres.” Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 86. 3 Valera, Memorial, 241: “de que se podía seguir muy gran daño e deservicio a Dios e al rey.”

258 immoral wiles.”4

Drawn by rumors, a large crowd gathered near Rodríguez’s home, where a macabre reinterpretation of the Passion was enacted as “some of the more hotheaded among them, having the gullibility of the common folk, began to shout that he had risen from the dead and that he implored those present to avenge his unjust death and also the outrages committed against the sacred religion by evil men.”5 Inspired by this fresh infusion of religious enthusiasm, the crowd renewed and expanded the assault on converso homes. Don Alonso de Aguilar returned to the scene, fully confident that his personal authority, combined with a squad of mounted knights, would suffice to disperse the crowd and end the troubles. He was confounded both by the rioters’ fervor and by the efforts of veinticuatro Pedro de Aguayo, described by Palencia as “a fractious man and a friend to the converso tanners,” who had aided the conversos in their efforts to organize a defense and now rallied them to resist the attackers.6 Embroiled in a pitch battle in the streets, neither side heeded Aguilar’s interventions and instead turned upon him and his retainers. Aguilar, forced to flee under a hail of rocks and arrows, retired to his headquarters in the Alcázar, in the western end of the city and far from the fighting.

With the city government now taking a passive role, the situation settled into an uneasy standoff that lasted a number of days. The Old Christian rioters saw their ranks augmented by sympathizers who gathered from throughout the city and even the

4 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 86: “Los conversos, tímidos por carácter y por la conciencia de sus maldades, preparan defensas en sus barrios más populosos; se arman, y esconden los tesoros las más veces por malas artes acumulados.” 5 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 87: “algunos de los más exaltados, contando con la credulidad del vulgo, comienzan a vocear que ha resucitado y que excita a los circunstantes a vengar su injusta muerte y con ello los ultrajes cometidos contra la sacrosanta religión por hombres malvados.” 6 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 87: “hombre faccioso y amigo de los curtidores conversos.”

259 surrounding countryside with the hope of “earning their pay” by looting the conversos.7

Aguilar, meanwhile, advised his friends among the New Christians that they might take

refuge in the city’s old castle, the Alcázar Viejo, and many of the wealthier were able to

do so. Others choose to defend themselves as best they could in the streets, barricading

intersections near the old walls that still ran through the heart of the city and afforded

some protection. Unable to regain full control of the city in the face of the rioters’

intransigence, Aguilar and other civic leaders acquiesced to their demands and disowned

the converso community. The tacit complicity of the authorities left the rioters free to

vent their wrath on their New Christians neighbors. And this they did, as Palencia related

in graphic detail: “No one among the Old Christians now favored the conversos; indeed,

they hurried to burn their homes, to steal their treasures, and to plunder in general. They violated maidens and cruelly stripped the matrons or made them suffer horrible deaths.

Finding a certain beautiful young woman, already stripped of all her clothes save a fine shirt, decorated like a newlywed’s with intricate lace, one of them tore it from top to bottom with his sword, opening her chest and stomach and killing her instantly. It is said that there was even one man who violated the corpses of the young women; and many older residents were killed as well. No form of cruelty was omitted on that disastrous day of 16 March, 1473, the sixteenth since the troubles began.”8 After the violence, which

7 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 87: a cobrar sus jornales.” 8 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 87: “Nadie entre los cristianos viejos favorecía ya a los conversos, antes corrían al incendio de las casas, al robo de alhajas y al saqueo general. Violaban doncellas y despojaban cruelmente a las matronas o las hacían sufrir horrible muerte. A cierta hermosísima joven, ya despojada de todas sus vestidos, excepto de la rica camisa, según costumbre de las desposadas enriquecida con preciosos encajes, uno de aquéllos, para quitársela más pronto, la rasgó de alto abajo con su espada, abriendo el pecho y el vientre a la joven, que expiró inmediatamente. Dícese que hubo quien violó los cadáveres de las doncellas; muchos ancianos fueron degollados; no se omitió género alguno de crueldad en aquel nefasto día 16 de Marzo de 1473, el décimosexto desde que empezó el tumulto.” Valera’s description here reads as a summary of Palencia’s, only leaving out some of the details, Memorial, 242: “And so the converso homes, and some belonging to Old Christians, were burned and robbed, and many were killed, and many virgins defiled and matrons dishonored, and some killed. There was no kind of

260 left the heavily converso neighborhoods near the Calle de la Feria and the Plaza de las

Tendillas de Calatrava in ruins, many of Córdoba’s New Christians chose to flee to

Seville. They suffered further depredations on the roads, perhaps at the instigation of

Aguilar and his brother, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (later to be the famed Gran

Capitán). Meeting with further violence in Seville, they continued on to Gibraltar, joining other converso refugees in emigration to Italy or Flanders.9

Historians have traditionally explained this riot and the pogroms across Andalusia that it provoked as part of a larger trend of increasing anti-Semitic feeling that resulted in the Inquisition and the Edict of Expulsion. This stemmed both from theological understandings of Jews that cast them as the enemies of Christ and from social tensions that marginalized and isolated religious minorities in general. The breakdown in the circumstances of Castile’s Jews, from this perspective, was part of a general social crisis in medieval Castile that began with the incomplete colonization of Andalusia in the thirteenth century and was exacerbated in the fourteenth by plague and civil war. These dislocations led to the scapegoating of Jews and culminated in the pogroms of 1391 that devastated Jewish communities throughout Castile and forced many to convert. Despite a somewhat more congenial atmosphere in the early fifteenth century, the rapid rise of conversos or ‘New Christians’ who left behind the legal restrictions placed on Jews aroused popular envy and, when harvest failures and renewed civil war again stressed

Castilian society, these converts found that their new status was little protection against old prejudices. As an explanation, this argument has much to commend it and goes far in

cruelty that was not practiced that day by the looters.” (E así todas las casas de los conversos, e algunas de los cristianos viejos, fueron quemadas e puestas a robo, e muchos muertos, e muchas vírgenes corronpidas e matronas deshonrradas, e algunos muertos. E ningun linaje de crueldad quedó que aquel día no se exerçitase por los robadores.) 9 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 87-8, 128-30; Valera, Memorial, 243.

261 explaining the circumstances that led Córdoba’s people to turn upon their New Christian neighbors with such ferocity.

It does not give us insight, however, into the moment when all these long-term

tensions exploded or explain how and why Palencia’s “chance act” was the catalyst for an

outpouring of rage against conversos in a city where their position had been secure for

three quarters of a century. It might be expedient to dismiss this as historical contingency or true happenstance, but that would be to overlook the role played by the Cofradía de la

Caridad’s ill-fated procession and the particular reactions of those concerned to the course of events. David Nirenberg has argued forcefully that the existence of a particular discourse about an ‘other’ is insufficient to explain actions based upon it. People, he notes, only draw on traditional or widely-held hostilities if the circumstances warrant it.

The only valid perspective from which to understand instances of persecution therefore centers on the immediate social context in which individuals mobilized, modified, or

discarded such discourses.10 Following Nirenberg’s lead, we should then look to the

specific motives of Rodríguez and his followers as well as those of local conversos and

those Old Christians, such as Aguilar, who sought to defend them. But we must also

extend this line of reasoning to explore how such narratives drew their power from the

manner of their articulation and the ways in which they juxtaposed with other potent

ideas. We should discount neither the visceral significance of an apparent insult to the

Virgin’s dignity during a celebration in her honor nor the appeal of Rodríguez’s strident

call to arms.

Although we cannot hope to reconstruct the emotional experience of the moment

10 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), 3-6.

262 when devotion turned to anger, we can consider the range of possible reactions likely

available to both protagonists and onlookers. The young conversa’s spilt water may have served as provocation enough for Old Christians ready to exploit the slightest opportunity to assault the conversos. The success of Alonso Rodríguez’s harangue, however, suggests that less-hostile onlookers were also in a mood particularly amenable to his message. We cannot ascribe this solely to anti-Semitic sentiments for, as already noted, these had lain dormant for generations. Part of the answer lies in ritual elements of the procession and initial disturbances that took advantage of their timing. Following Palencia’s dating, the

Cofradía’s march took place on 1 March, or just before the start of Lent in a year when

Easter fell on 18 April.11 The casting of the spilled water as a willful act of disrespect to

the Virgin and, more dramatically, the rumors of the blacksmith’s resurrection,

effectively moved a crowd already inspired by the licenses of Carnival and the religious

passions of Lent. But even these associations do not suffice to explain the extraordinary

power of a moment that induced even some conversos to turn against their peers.

One of these was the poet Antón de Montoro who, in a regretful and sarcastic

poem addressed to Aguilar, lamented that “I, how unfortunate I was, / was the first to put

on / the livery of the blacksmith.”12 Montoro, as an outspoken critic of the tendency to

view conversos as more “Jews than Christians,” seems hardly likely to have embraced the

11 Valera states that the disturbances took place in April, with the culminating riot on the 17th of that month, or Holy Saturday. Evidence from the cathedral archives, however, confirms Palencia’s report that they occurred in March as does Pedro de Escavias, Repertorio de Príncipes de España y obra poética del alcaide Pedro de Escavias, ed. Michel García (Jaén, 1972), 230. Diego Enríquez del Castillo gave no date in his brief mention of the riots, Crónica del rey Don Enrique el cuarto de este nombre, ed. Cayetano Rosell. BAE 70 (Madrid, 1953), 214. 12 Antón de Montoro, “A don Alonso de Aguilar, quando la destruiçión de los conversos de Córdoba,” in Cancionero, ed. Marcella Ciceri and Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas (Salamanca, 1990), 294-5: “yo, el desdichado de mí, / fui el primero que vestí / la librea del herrero.”

263 notion that the New Christians of Córdoba must be punished for Christ’s death.13 Yet by his own admission, the waves of resentment that swept the city caught him up, at least for a time. Unscripted through parts of it may have been, the opening events of the 1473 pogrom (including the procession, the spilled water, Rodríguez’s speech, Torreblanca’s rejoinder, Aguilar’s attack, and the rumors of Rodríguez’s resurrection) functioned as a public performance complete with a coherent plot, characters, and moral message. In analyzing it as such, it is essential to consider long-term narratives about Jews and conversos as well as the ways in which Rodríguez and others mobilized those narratives.

But the success of the endeavor depended, as did as Farce of Ávila, on the reactions of spectators. These individuals were free to reach their own conclusions, and relied upon their particular psychological perspectives and implicit expectations about the purpose of the performance to do so, but only within certain constraints. In order to understand the range of possible responses to Rodríguez’s call to arms, we must closely examine the context, both social and physical, in which it occurred. Only in a city, and only in a frontier city at that, could events have proceeded along the lines that they did.

Córdoba’s proximity to the frontier created the conditions under which this riot began and influenced its unfolding in multiple ways. On one level, the exigencies of intermittent frontier warfare created a society dominated by noble factions with no meaningful royal check to their power. More importantly, the amiable enmity of frontier life extended to Jews and conversos as well as Muslims. Their role in Córdoba’s society and economy was analagous to what they held in many other Castilian cities. The depth of Old Christian attitudes toward conversos, however, was greatly intensified by their ambivalence. Religion was a social factor on the frontier in a way it was not elsewhere in

13 Antón de Montoro, “A don Alonso de Aguilar,” 291: “les valiera ser judíos / que cristianos.”

264 the realm. The insult to the effigy of the Virgin, Rodríguez’s response, and the enactment

of a Passion story all related to Jews and conversos, not Muslims. But local traditions of

defending the faith swayed the responses of onlookers. Even Antón de Montoro was

conditioned enough to leap into action at the thought of an attack on Christian beliefs without considering the broader ramifications of the riot.

Cordoban society in the 1470s was marked by both cohesion and division. On the

one hand was a powerful self-mythology of unity and a theoretically representative

municipal government to which was added the frontier ideology that offered citizens a

collective purpose and role within the larger drama of reconquista. All these served to

create a shared sense of identity and pride in Cordoban heritage. On the other was a

social hierarchy defined by Córdoba’s martial purpose. A military elite divided against

itself held jealously to the reins of urban power, both in disputes over access to privilege

and influence between the hereditary nobles and the caballeros de cuantía and in

factional struggles for predominance that led at times to open fighting and bloodshed.

The populace was both drawn into these noble conflicts while it was itself divided into a

number of small corporate bodies defined by occupation, locality, and religion.

Individuals could belong to several different such clusters and the drama of March 1473

played before an audience in which each person had alliances among multiple groups

while harboring resentments against several others. An attack directed against the

conversos could thus serve to attack the nobles who protected them, the municipal

government into which they had purportedly paid their way, the trade guilds to which

they belonged, or the parishes in which they lived. Such aggression by proxy had real

benefits as it allowed effective expression of resentments against inconvenient targets. It

265 also demonstrates that we cannot reduce Córdoba’s divisions to simple binary

oppositions, such as noble versus popular or New versus Old Christians.

The physical setting of the processions and riots was as significant as its social context and we could say that the city itself was a player in these dramas. The spatial organization of the city exacerbated competition, both friendly and not, among groups by geographically segregating and thus limiting contact between them. This had the effect of containing latent discord by preventing the lower classes from coalescing as a unified whole even while it prevented the full assimilation of Córdoba’s conversos. Moreover, the streets, buildings, and plazas of Córdoba held various associations for the residents who lived in and visited them. By considering residents’ emotional and cognitive responses to their physical environment, we can understand how these—in concert with the public actions of the protagonists, their use of established discourses about Jews and conversos, and the larger social context—enabled viewers to order events into a coherent narrative in which they played a role.

********

As typically depicted in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century illustrations, Castilian cities, like most European cities of the time, were distinct, bounded, and unitary spaces, separated from their surroundings by high walls and densely inhabited in stark contrast to the barren and unremarkable countryside “like a jewel set in a sea of otherness.”14 While pictorial representations of cities did not usually deny internal divisions, they did subordinate them to the dominant message of urban separateness. In an anonymous drawing of Córdoba that likely dates from the sixteenth century (figure 14), for example,

14 Martha C. Howell, “The Spaces of Late Medieval Urbanity,” in Shaping Urban Identity in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Marc Boone and Peter Stabel (Leuven, 2000), 4-7.

266 the landscape appears mostly without significant human features, with only a few scattered buildings outside of the city proper and these mostly near the Puente Romano leading into Córdoba. The backdrop stresses the towering heights of the Sierra Morena, unsuitable for settlement, but even the more level areas nearer the city show no signs of cultivation or habitation. The viewer’s attention is focused instead only on the city itself.

Differences within the city are less plain. While the Mezquita and other monumental buildings dominate the image, the cityscape itself is rather uniform, consisting of mostly undifferentiated homes studded with churches and other notable landmarks. The only indication of neighborhood distinctions is the open space to the east of the Mezquita, which represents the Calle de la Feria. Anton van den Wyngaerde’s 1567 depiction of the city (figure 15) presents a similar contrast between town and country; while there is more activity outside Córdoba’s gates than in the other image, it remains focused on the city itself. Inside the city, Wyngaerde offers an unbroken conglomeration of housing with no indications of open spaces or internal divisions (the riverside terminus of the Calle de la

Feria can be seen here in the lower image just past the westernmost boats as a small opening in the wall of homes). Like many such images, these drawings of Córdoba draw on a mythology of cities as communal entities, whose citizens were free from feudal ties, able to hold municipal privileges, and living together in fellowship.15

There were a number of factors in civic life that would have encouraged

Cordobans to think of themselves in terms of a community united toward mutual ends.

The municipal government was, in theory at least, representative. The concejo, which referred to itself regularly as ‘Córdoba’ and thus claimed to embody the city, consisted of two chambers. The first was made up of the regidors, crown-appointed councilors who

15 See Howell, “Spaces of Late Medieval Urbanity,” 20-3, for a series of similar representations.

267 held their office for life and who were generally known as veintecuatros (because there were supposed to be twenty-four of them). The second was made up of jurados, parish

representatives who could be elected by the vecinos (male property owners of the parish) or, as was usually the case, appointed by the crown. At times a corregidor, another royal appointee, held precedence over the council as de facto governor of the city. While there was regularly a corregidor in place near the end of the century, long periods during the reigns of Juan II and Enrique IV saw the position vacant.16 Despite the reality of royal

authority in the city, however, the semblance of popular involvement on the council

seems to have fostered some sense of belonging. Moreover, there were a great many

other municipal offices whose holders were named without royal or even concejo

influence, but rather were elected by the caballeros de cuantía. These included the

alcaldes (judges) and fieles (literally, “reliable men”) who supervised the markets and

workshops as well as the constables who provided public order.17 The shared tax burden

for such highly visible servants of the public good as well as the construction and maintenance of public properties such as streets, bridges, weighing houses, etc. would

also have contributed to a sense of common purpose, at least for those on the upper end of the social and economic spectrum who were most likely to make use of these services.18

Córdoba’s position on the Granadan frontier provided another impulse for civic

solidarity, uniting much of the population through a shared religious identity that offered

16 Margarita Cabrera Sánchez, “Los corregidores de Córdoba en el siglo XV,” Meridies. Revista de Historia Medieval 2 (1995): 95-108; idem, “Los regidores de Córdoba en 1480. Aproximación prosopográfica,” Meridies. Revista de Historia Medieval 3 (1996): 61-88. 17 For a detailed description of municipal government in Córdoba, see John Edwards, Christian Córdoba: the City and its Region in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1982), 24-57. 18 Claire Sponsler, “The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992), 22-3.

268 a collective sense of purpose and of playing a role in a larger drama. The city itself was

not as exposed to attack in the fifteenth century as were other frontier cities, and there were few panics such as gripped Jaén in the late 1470s. Córdoba did act, however, as a rear base in the endemic skirmishing and, during the final war with Granada in the 1480s,

served as headquarters for the Catholic Monarchs and their extensive retinue. Throughout

the century, then, the city and its territories were therefore never able to relax their guard

fully. Córdoba’s constant military preparations had a notable impact on its demographic

and social makeup, ironically providing sources of social division and confusion within

the Christian community that contrasted with the unifying rhetoric of religious

homogeneity.

Cordoban society in the fifteenth century was dominated by its military classes

and a brief discussion of the social hierarchy is necessary here before returning to the

spatial organization of the city. Córdoba military forces included the hidalgos, or

hereditary nobles, as well as the caballeros de cuantía, commoners who bore the

obligation of providing horse and weapons for themselves because of their wealth,

receiving in return exemptions from some taxes. The remainder of the population, those

unable to procure their own mounts and equipment, were not excused from military

service or categorization but rather had to fight on foot as infantry or peones, while still

paying their taxes. Together, the privileged groups were a sizable minority within the

city. Hidalgo families numbered about two hundred and seventy five. They therefore,

along with the clergy and military orders, who also enjoyed general tax exemptions,

made up about five percent of the overall population of twenty-five thousand. The

caballeros numbered roughly three hundred, meaning that they, with their families,

269 comprised another five percent.19

While the latter acted, in theory, as no more or less than a mounted militia, their

privileges denoted some level of status and their social position over time became

confused with that of the hidalgos. This was due in part to changing realities of frontier

warfare. When the caballeros first received their privileges in the thirteenth century, it

was at a time when the dangers of Muslim invasion were more profound and their service

was indispensable to the crown. As the frontier settled into a predictable pattern of

skirmishes after the thirteenth-century conquests, however, the caballeros seem to have

lost their military fervor, as far as we can glean from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century

efforts to maintain their effectiveness. Caballeros established in towns and cities out of

reach of direct attack by the Muslims, for instance, continued to enjoy their exemptions

while failing to uphold their duties. This led to compulsory service for those with

sufficient means as well as the loss of status and financial benefits for those who failed to

comply. This was a strictly pragmatic form of knighthood and, as Elena Lourie has

commented, “there was no mystique of knighthood; they were privileged because they

were useful. Entry into their ranks was solely the result of acquiring a horse, inheriting

one or having it thrust upon you. And exit was just as casual. The unreplaced loss or sale

of one’s horse would reduce one to the ranks of the tax-paying infantry.”20 In order to

ensure that they were meeting their obligations, caballeros de cuantía were expected to attend annual or semi-annual parades or alardes in full panoply.

19 Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media, 287-8; Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 133, 139-43; María Concepción Quintanilla Raso, “Estructuras sociales y familiares y papel político de la nobleza cordobesa (siglos XIV y XV),” En la España Medieval 3 (1982): 331-52; Marie-Claude Gerbet, “La population noble dans la royaume de Castille vers 1500. La répartition géographique de ses différentes composantes,” Anales de historia antigua y medieval 20 (1977-1979): 78-99. For the general condition of the Cordoban elite, see Margarita Cabrera Sánchez, Nobleza, oligarquía y poder en Córdoba al final de la Edad Media (Córdoba, 1998). 20 Elena Lourie, “A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain,” Past and Present 35 (1966): 57-9.

270 In a practical sense, leaving aside the hidalgos’ supposed purity of blood and

virtue, the difference between the hereditary nobles and the municipal knights lay in these

requirements. A hidalgo served his king willingly, paying for his weapons and mount and

often providing a contingent of followers to serve as well. The caballeros de cuantía, in

contrast, would only serve when compelled (through legal requirements or public

shaming) or bribed (through tax exemptions). Even then, they performed poorly. As we

have seen, rumors of Muslim incursions in 1476 led the Giennense authorities to bemoan

the sad state of the local fighters “who are not the caballeros they used to be.”21

Conditions were no better in Córdoba. Although its military parades are not well documented before 1490, the reports from the last decade of the fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth reveal a deep disengagement on the part of the caballeros who, preferring to attend to their personal business than attend the alardes, did not bother to attend at all, sent servants or sons in their place, or paid deputies to do their duty. Many of those that did appear were not properly equipped. The concejo seems to have expected no better and in at least one instance ordered that caballeros that had no horses should appear nonetheless to march as infantry.22

Political power in Andalusian cities, given the ubiquity and importance of war against Islam, was closely tied to military efficacy. The caballeros de cuantía, while they

remained a significant force in this region at a time when they had mostly disappeared in

northern Castile, were clearly subordinate to the hidalgos, who dominated in the concejo

and held many of the municipal offices. The hidalgos, however, were not a homogeneous

21 See chapter 1, 69. 22 AMC, AC, 4/5/1495; 29/2/1496; 5/11/1497; 27/5/1500; and 12/11/1515; Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, La hacienda real de Castilla en el siglo XV (La Laguna, 1973), 199-211; Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 145-6; idem, “The Morality of Taxation: the Burden of War on Córdoba and Jerez de la Frontera, 1480- 1515,” Meridies. Revista de Historia Medieval 2 (1995): 109-20.

271 class but ranged in significance based on their finances. At the low end of this spectrum

was the penniless knight of whom it can be said that “his sole tangible possession is his

sword; his most valued intangible possession is his honor.”23 At the high end were the

great magnates who owned great estates, wielded immense influence in regional politics,

and were active in court politics. In the late fifteenth century, the most prominent of these

were several branches of the Fernández de Córdoba lineage, which dated back to the

city’s conquest, whose struggles for dominance lasted throughout the period.

The fortunes of the houses of Aguilar and of Cabra, of which the chief figures

were, respectively, Don Diego Fernández de Córdoba, third count of Cabra, and Don

Alonso de Aguilar, alcalde mayor of Córdoba, were based in extensive landholdings to

the south of Córdoba. Both, however, owned significant property within the city itself

and controlled extensive bandos (groups of relatives, vassels, and supporters) through

which they could wield influence over municipal government. A favored method was to

pay retainers (acostamientos) to veinticuatros and other officeholders in return for their

votes and support. Their conflicts, which often broke into open warfare and were loosely

connected to the larger upheavals surrounding Enrique IV’s reign and Isabel’s

succession, thus inevitably spilled over into the city itself. Ultimately, the Aguilar lineage

proved victorious in the 1470s, but Isabel later expelled Don Alonso, appointing a

corregidor in his place and exerting crown authority over a city which had been virtually

autonomous for a decade. The struggles for supremacy in the Córdoba region, however,

which had reflected this general inability of Castilian monarchs to impose direct rule in

their frontier provinces, had divided the citizenry and encouraged wide-ranging

23 Angus MacKay, “The Lesser Nobility in the Kingdom of Castile,” in Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Later Medieval Europe, ed. Jones (Gloucester, 1986), 160.

272 seigniorial interference in municipal politics. Even with the reassertion of royal prerogatives, the magnates and their opposed bandos continued to act as significant forces in the city.24

The position of the minor hidalgos, those who did not bear titles and might or

might not hold a señorío, was just as divisive. Within a virtual monopoly on the offices of

veinticuatro and other municipal bureaucracies, they retained a firm grip on political influence, even if this was often in the service of the lords, and enjoyed a social stature that was frequently at odds with their economic status. Many were quite poor, in fact, having few viable means of making a living while retaining their rank. A law passed during Juan II’s reign barred nobles from working in “rank or vile offices,” examples of which included tailoring, leatherwork, carpentry and stone cutting, and trading as a merchant.25 To ‘live nobly’ generally required landholdings sufficient to support an appropriate lifestyle. Failing this, warfare offered the best prospects, while living as a

knight errant and competing in tournaments was an option for the young. Many of the

lesser hidalgos, however, lacked the resources necessary to present themselves for

military service and were forced into common trades.

The caballeros de cuantía, a class that included perforce nearly all of the

wealthier commoners in Córdoba, meanwhile found themselves excluded from the higher

24 Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 131-63; idem, “Nobleza y religión: Don Alonso de Aguilar (1447-1501), Ámbitos. Revista de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de Córdoba 3 (2000): 9-19; María Concepción Quintanilla Raso, Nobleza y señoríos en el reino de Córdoba. La casa de Aguilar (siglos XIV- XV) (Córdoba, 1979); idem, “El dominio de las ciudades por la nobleza: El caso de Córdoba en la segunda mitad del siglo XV,” En la España medieval 10 (1987): 109-24; idem, “Estructura y función de los bandos nobiliarios en Córdoba a fines de la Edad Media,” in Bandos y querellas dinásticas en España al final de la Edad Media (Paris, 1991), 135-55; idem, “La caballería cordobesa a finales de la Edad Media: análisis de un conflicto social urbano,” in Villes et sociétés urbaines au Moyen Age, ed. Pierre Desportes (Paris, 1994), 121-32; and José Luis del Pino García, “El concejo de Córdoba a finales de la Edad Media: estructura interna y política municipal,” HID 20 (1993): 355-402. 25 See above, chapter 2, 23-4.

273 municipal offices as well as the elevated status accorded to the hidalgos by their birth.

They viewed local hidalgos as pretentious or idle at best and, in too many instances, even

poor. They resented the full tax exemptions that the nobles did not seem to earn. In

response, caballeros repeatedly attempted to have the credentials of all hidalgos

inspected, in the hopes of bringing some down to their own, more ambiguous, social

standing. They also began to present themselves as defenders of the traditional liberties

granted to the citizens or vecinos of frontier cities against the domination of the magnates

and their collaborators. In this role, they attacked the position of the hidalgos on several

levels, clamoring for a more evenhanded distribution of the burden of taxes and military

requisition and demanding access to concejo meetings. Whether these actions point to the

“radicalism” of the caballería, as some have suggested, is open to debate.26 It is clear,

however, that there was no harmonious privileged class in Córdoba; the dichotomy

between economic and social status kept the nobility and the knights at arm’s length.

The rest of the population was no less divided, although it was in different ways.

Leaving aside for the moment the position of religious minorities, much less is known

about those Christian Cordobans who did not possess wealth sufficient to require

mounted military service than there is about the more prominent and politically active

hidalgos and caballeros de cuantía. This is due to the nature of the existing archival

sources, the most detailed of which are concejo minutes limited in scope to issues and

people that came before the council. Much of what one can learn about commoners

comes from laconic administrative records that offer little qualitative information about

26 John Edwards, “A Society Organized for War? Córdoba in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella,” in Jews, Muslims and Christians in and around the . Essays in Honour of Professor Elena Lourie, ed. Harvey J. Hames (Leiden, 2004), 92-6. On the traditional urban liberties of the frontier which the caballeros professed to defend, see Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, “The Frontier and Castilian Liberties,” in The New World Looks at its History: Proceeding of the Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico, ed. Archibald R. Lewis and Thomas McGann (Austin, TX, 1963), 27-46.

274 the experience of living in fifteenth-century Córdoba. These data can provide insight into

their collective situation and help us gain a sense of the urban economy and the social

networks within it. José María Escobar Camacho has been able, for instance, to compile

extensive lists of occupations that reveal both the key occupational groups within the city

and their internal distributions, allowing us to establish the character of particular

neighborhoods.27 The overall picture is one of a relatively prosperous city, able to

support a significant proportion of non-producers and with an economy more or less

evenly divided between internal and external trade. It is the spatial organization of the

populace, however, that is of most interest here.

That there were no generalized uprisings of the people in the second half of the

fifteenth century, after repeated popular tumults over the course of the preceding hundred

years, may be attributed in part to the efficacy of the nobles in establishing control.28

Latent unrest inspired by social inequalities and grievances was, however, a perennial problem and one exacerbated during the political upheavals of Enrique IV’s reign despite

the myth of civic solidarity and elite attempts to control tensions. In seeking to

understand Córdoba’s relative tranquility, we might also consider the influence of an

urban layout that effectively divided the population into small corporate bodies that were

physically separate. Such spatial organization, common in medieval cities, quelled

popular dissatisfaction by creating divisions that, as Robert Muchembled has put it,

27 José María Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media. Evolución urbana de la ciudad (Córdoba, 1989), 292-314; idem, La vida urbana cordobesa. El Potro y su entorno en la Baja Edad Media (Córdoba, 1985), 105. 28 On fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century unrest, see Emilio Mitre Fernández, “Córdoba y su campiña. Una comarca fronteriza al comenzar el siglo XV,” Cuardernos de Estudios Medievales 1 (1973): 9-32; Manuel Nieto Cumplido, “Luchas nobiliarias y movimientos populares en Córdoba a fines del siglo XIV,” in Tres estudios de historia medieval andaluza, ed. Manuel Riu Riu, Cristóbal Torres, Manuel Nieto Cumplido (Córdoba, 1977), 11-65; and Fernando Maza Romero, “Tensiones sociales en el municipio cordobés en la primera mitad del siglo XV,” in Actas del I Congreso de Historia de Andalucía, 8 vols. (Córdoba, 1978), ii, 85-112.

275 “effectively prevented both individualism and the development of struggles between

entire social classes.”29 In general terms, this was accomplished through occupational

zoning by which people engaged in a particular trade would work and live together, with

particular streets often named for their specialties. In Córdoba, for instance, we have

already seen the Calle de la Feria where gathered the cloth merchants as well as the

Ajerquía’s Tannery. There were also, among many others, streets named for their

silversmiths (the Calle de los Plateros), blacksmiths (de la Herrería), butchers (de los

Carniceros), boatmen (de los Barqueros), and so on.

There were practical reasons for such groupings, which facilitated quality control,

training of apprentices, and guild business. Certain trades, notably tanning, also required

access to particular resources and it follows that more than ninety-percent of Córdoba’s

tanners lived in the three parishes adjacent to the Guadalquivir.30 In Córdoba, as in most

cities, the spatial distribution of these enclaves reflected local hierarchies. The wealthiest

and most influential lived in the city center. Here too was the pinnacle of civic

architecture, with the townhouses and compounds of the affluent rubbing shoulders with

the cathedral, the bishop’s palace, the Alcazar, the exchange, and the guildhalls.

Córdoba’s marginal population—the unemployed, the day-laborers, the prostitutes, and

the non- or newly-Christian—were relegated to the outskirts of the city or carefully

demarcated regions within it. Together, these arrangements resulted in a city of cliques,

with neighborhoods and parishes whose residents worked in the same trades, had equal

social and economic standing, and knew each other well. This spatial segregation served

to confirm social differences and inequalities while minimizing direct contact and thus

29 Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400-1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge, 1985), 109. 30 Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la baja edad media, 293.

276 open confrontation.31

Even parishes in close proximity could exhibit striking differences, as a comparison of San Nicolás de la Ajerquía and San Pedro reveals. Using Escobar

Camacho’s data, we can see that three trades employed nearly seventy percent of San

Nicolás’s recorded population: textiles, leather production, and metalwork. A further ten

percent worked in the hospitality industry centered on the Potro and Mancebía while the

remainder of the populace provided various support services for the community as shopkeepers, construction workers, servants and so on.32 The Parish of San Pedro, which lay directly to the north, had a markedly different character. The trades that predominated in San Nicolás de la Ajerquía were well represented here, with more than half the population devoted to textiles, leather, and metal production. The clergy who staffed the parish’s many churches and religious houses comprised another significant portion of the population. Holders of public offices, however, made up the largest single group of residents mentioned in the records. These included military officers as well as several veinticuatros but also many in the lower ranks of the civic bureaucracy: judges, fieles, tax

collectors, and inspectors. They were attracted to this residential neighborhood not only

due to its proximity to the city center but also by its lively commerce, with centers for weekly markets and seasonal fairs. These exchanges employed many others in the parish, not only the merchants who owned warehouses in close proximity to their stalls but also

scribes and notaries to record transactions and carters to move goods. This parish was

therefore diverse in terms of the occupations represented, but in practice its various

aspects remained separate. Its mercantile centers and the more affluent residents were

31 Sponsler, “Culture of the Spectator,” 22-4. 32 On the demographics of San Nicolás de la Ajerquía, see Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la baja edad media, 191-206, 311; idem, La vida urbana cordobesa, 105.

277 concentrated in its western end, near both the Calle de la Feria and the Plaza de la

Corredera, while the majority of San Pedro’s artisans and producers lived to the west,

especially concentrated in the streets to the north of Calle Mayor (see figure 16).33

Privileged groups in Córdoba, which we can define to comprise Escobar

Camacho’s categories of civil servants and military functionaries, merchants, and those

employed in the ‘liberal professions’ (which include scribes, lawyers, doctors, apothecaries, notaries, scholars, and letrados) as well as the clergy, were dispersed

throughout the city.34 This makes sense. Certain positions, such as that of jurado,

required residence in a particular parish while other officials would have dwelled near to their places of responsibility. Córdoba was replete with churches, sanctuaries, shrines,

monasteries, and other religious institutions that required resident staff. Similarly, all

districts of the city save the most marginal would have supported at least a few

physicians, scribes, and lawyers. In the grittier parts of Córdoba, however, members of

these groups were a distinct minority. Leaving aside the clergy, they combined to make

up a small fraction of those recorded in the 1509 census for San Nicolás de la Ajerquía.35

Instead, those with more lucrative or respectable professions outside government and

church service tended to cluster in the Medina and particularly the parish of Santa María.

Home to Córdoba’s centers of ecclesiastic, royal, and municipal authority, Santa

María was the city’s largest and most populous parish. Like San Pedro, it possessed

somewhat of a dual aspect. Like other waterfront parishes, it housed a significant

33 Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la baja edad media, 207-23, 303, 307; Josefa Leva Cuevas. “Escribanos y Notarios en la Castilla Bajomedieval. Su ejercicio en la Córdoba de la época,” Ambitos. Revista de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 21 (2009): 63-93. 34 Unfortunately, he is able to classify by occupation only and not by wealth. These broad categories thus do not distinguish between, for instance, the wealthy merchant and the humble shopkeeper. They also do not take into account social capital by outlining the distribution of those who claimed hidalgo or caballero status. 35 Escobar Camacho, La vida urbana cordobesa, 105.

278 population of leather and textile workers who required access to the river. Away from the

Guadalquiver, however, were the streets where Córdoba’s most prestigious artisans worked in ceramics or precious metals, where the veinticuatros lived and met, where wealthy merchants had their townhouses, and where the region’s true elite, the bishop and grandes, stayed when in the city.36 In this one parish were nearly half of Córdoba’s

clergy, a majority of its merchants, and two thirds of its goldsmiths, enamellers, and

jewelers. Confirming the affluence of an area that lay only a short walk from the Potro

and Tannery of the Ajerquía was the presence of far more domestic servants, butchers,

and construction workers than any other district. Other measures of the relative wealth of

Córdoba’s parishes, although incomplete, are the 1502 investigation into individual grain

holdings undertaken by corregidor Deigo López Dávalos in 1502 and a 1510 account of

tithes owed the bishop of Córdoba. While most useful as indicators of the degree to

which Córdoba’s residents lived off the production of the surrounding countryside, it also

permits comparisons between the aggregate wealth of different parishes. In both cases,

the highest totals were found in Santa María and San Pedro, another notable center of

wealth, while San Nicolás de la Ajerquía fell near the bottom.37 Santa María was the city’s center in another sense, as its residents literally owned the rest of Córdoba. Both its institutional and individual inhabitants were major landlords with extensive holdings both

within and without the city. Precise figures are difficult to come by, but the bishop, the cathedral chapter and other religious houses, the concejo, and a number of the hidalgo

36 See Margarita Cabrera Sánchez, “La vivienda noble en Córdoba durante el siglo XV,” in Córdoba en la Historia: la construcción de la urbe, ed. Francisco R. García Verdugo and Francisco Acosta Ramírez (Córdoba, 1999), 263-270. 37 Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 95- 99. The relevant documents have been published in: Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Producción y renta cerealeras en el reino de Córdoba a finales del siglo XV,” in Actas del I Congreso de Historia de Andalucía, 8 vols. (Córdoba, 1978), i, 375-96; and Emilio Cabrera Muñoz, “Renta episcopal y producción agraria en el obispado de Córdoba en 1510,” in Actas del I Congreso de Historia de Andalucía, i, 397-412.

279 families combined to own as much as eighty percent of Córdoba’s dwellings. Most of

these holdings were leased for a tenant’s lifetime, offering a measure of security, but the

ability to evict disorderly lessees served to amplify the elites’ already firm grip on urban

authority and dampen the potential political role of other groups.38

The social homogeneity of individual neighborhoods was reinforced by the

division of the populace into a series of corporate groups that tended to have their own identities. In Castilian society, these were generally defined by internal hierarchies, public displays of solidarity, and privileges within the city that might range from preferential access to civic spaces (such as markets) to monopolies on the production or sale of certain products to the right to solicit charitable donations. Such clusters, built around shared interests and a feeling of hermandad, were often close-knit, commanding a loyalty that at times compared to the devotion given the nuclear family and lineage.39

Córdoba, however, seems to be an exception to this general pattern, at least in terms of

the political role of civic corporations. The most prominent and powerful such

organization in Córdoba was the urban government, which included the concejo and the

jurados as well as royal appointees and various bureaucrats. It was composed of social

(although not economic) equals, with the hidalgos controlling nearly all of the key offices

but was also, in some regards, the least integrated of Córdoba’s constituent groups, often

divided by conflicts between rival lineages or bandos. Yet the elites presented a unified

front when facing challenges to their political and economic privileges, striving

successfully to retain what amounted to a military hegemony that controlled the political,

38 Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la baja edad media, 123-48, 307; Leva Cuevas, Josefa, “Una elite en el mundo artesanal de la Córdoba de los siglos XV y XVI: plateros, joyeros y esmaltadores,” Ámbitos. Revista de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 16 (2006): 99-115; Margarita Cabrera Sánchez, “Oligarquía urbana y negocio inmobiliario en Córdoba en la segunda mitad del siglo XV,” HID 20 (1993): 107-26; Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 166-7. 39 Richard Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500-1700 (Chapel Hill, 1981), 18-9.

280 economic, and social life of the city.

That they were able to do so reflects the inability of the city’s other groups to

wield effective political power. The most common civic corporations among commoners

in medieval Castilian cities were the guilds and confraternities. Little is known about

their internal workings in Córdoba as none of their records have survived, leaving only

external and administrative sources which offer little insight into their activities,

memberships, or agendas. Broadly speaking, however, there were gremios (trade

organizations or guilds) and cofradías (lay religious brotherhoods and charitable

organizations). While the scant references to such groups in the concejo records use the

terms indiscriminately and their functions and memberships likely overlapped, it makes

sense here to describe each separately with the caveat that contemporaries did not see

sharp distinctions between one and the other.

The major trade guilds were those of the cloth workers in the Ajerquía, with

separate organizations representing the weavers, the dyers, the fullers, and the shearers.

The records do not mention other significant guilds, and it is possible that artisans

practicing other trades either joined one of the existing cloth guilds or did not organize.40

That said, the manufacture of cloth was one of Córdoba’s most lucrative industries. As

such, it was highly regulated by both municipal and crown authorities. These required the cooperation of the cloth guilds in order to ensure effective quality and price controls and it is in this regard that those guilds appear in the records. It is therefore highly likely that a number of smaller or less formal organizations existed to provide internal services to practitioners of others professions, such as quality control or the training of apprentices.

These groups, dealing with less prominent products and having no political aspirations,

40 Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 127-30.

281 were less liable to come before the concejo’s attention and therefore left few if any

imprints on the surviving sources.

Confraternities offered their members many of the same services available to

those in the trade guilds. These included entitlements to practical assistance in times of

penury, sickness, and death as well as a useful means of building relationships with

business contacts and creating a social support network. Like guilds, the confraternities

generally required of their members evidence of good character, a willingness to work

harmoniously with other members and adhere to a code of conduct, and the ability to pay

dues. Both guilds and confraternities might also march in a similar manner in civic

processions, present banquets for members and local notables, and conduct charitable

works. Despite their comparable structures and benefits, however, there was a meaningful

difference in emphasis. Guilds existed for trade purposes and, notwithstanding their many

other activities, retained a focus on the economic well being of their constituents.

Confraternities developed out of a desire for the lay expression of religious devotion. The

modes of this expression varied. Groups might organize penitential processions to

celebrate various saints’ days or particular aspects or moments of the Passion in displays

that ranged from luxurious banners and statues to flagellants who proclaimed their

solidarity with Christ in his trials and atoned for their own sins through ritual scourging.41

They might also focus on charitable deeds. Confraternities provided a number of essential services to fifteenth-century cities by using their monies to supply dowries to poor or orphaned girls, feed and bury indigents and convicts, endow hospitals, and generally ensure that the marginalized populations of the city had at least minimal comforts and so

41 Manuel Nieto Cumplido, “Religiosidad popular andaluza: la regla medieval de la Cofradía de Animas de Castro del Río (Córdoba),” Revista del Centro de Estudios Históricos de Granada y su Reino 16 (2004): 257-82.

282 would be less likely to cause disruptions.42 There were a significant number of such organizations in fifteenth-century Córdoba, with one scholar mentioning by name at least a dozen religious brotherhoods.43 Of these, the best known and likely most influential was the Cofradía de la Caridad, to which we shall return below.

Segregated, to varying degrees, from the life of the city were spaces and communities defined by their religious, as opposed to their social or economic, character.

These included the Christian clergy as well as Muslim and Jews.44 The institutional church was a powerful presence not only in terms of wealth and influence but also through raw numbers. It is impossible to determine with any precision how many priests, nuns, and monks lived in fifteenth-century Córdoba, but the number would have been substantial. Escobar Camacho classifies just over twenty percent of his subjects as clergy, but we should again remember that his numbers are limited to persons mentioned in written documents, artificially inflating the proportion of clerics who were more likely

42 While the dearth of detailed sources means that no systematic study of the confraternities of medieval Córdoba has been attempted, such work is available for several other Iberian cities. See, for instance, Marie-Claude Gerbet, “Les confréries religieuses à Cáceres de 1467 à 1523,” MCV 7 (1971): 75-114; Rafael Angel Martínez González, Las cofradías Penitenciales de Palencia (Palencia, 1979); Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400-1700 (Ithaca, 1989) (where the focus is on Zamora); idem, “The Spectacle of Suffering in Spanish Streets,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), 153-68; Antonio Gil Albarracín, Cofradías y hermandades en la Almería moderna (historia y documentos) (Barcelona, 1997); Susan Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain: Sevillan Confraternities and the Processional Sculpture of Holy Week (Princeton, 1998); and Manuel Benítez Bolorinos, Las cofradía medievales en el Reino de Valencia, 1329-1458 (, 1998). There is a vast literature on European confraternities that explores both their devotional and social aspects. Useful introductions include André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices (South Bend, 1993); Catherine Vincent, Les confréries médiévales dans le Royaume de France. XIII-XVe siècle (Paris, 1994); Katherine A. Lynch, Individuals, Families and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800 (Cambridge, 2003), esp. 87-102, and 111ff; and the articles in Confréries et dévotions dans la catholicité moderne (mi-XVe-début XIXe siècle), ed. Bernard Dompnier and Paola Vismara. Collection de l'École française de Rome, 393 (Rome, 2008). 43 Ramírez de Arellano, Paseos por Córdoba, 41, 137, 207. Escobar Camacho refers to various confraternities and their foundations in his descriptions of Córdoba’s neighborhoods, Córdoba en la baja edad media, passim. 44 The place of recent converts to Christianity, or ‘New’ Christians, in Cordoban society was more complex and is deserving of separate treatment.

283 than most to appear in such records.45 The 1502 grain investigation offers precise

numbers for one community, the staff of the Cathedral. Not counting members of the

bishop’s staff, this document enumerates no less than seventy-two canons, officials, and

chaplains. While this number seems extravagant by today’s standards, it was in keeping

with contemporary norms. There were, moreover, the secular clergy who staffed the

fourteen parish churches of Córdoba and at least seventeen monastic houses. Most

prominent among these were the multiple Franciscan and Dominican foundations, but

there were also Augustinian and Cistercian communities as well as several convents,

including those dedicated to Sts. Clare, Inés, and Martha. All of these entities, the

bishop’s household and the cathedral chapter chief among them, were property owners,

with the result that the organized church’s economic role in the city resembled that of the

wealthier hidalgos and caballeros who collected rents and redistributed the proceeds in

the markets or as charity. The central vehicles of noble and ecclesiastic charity were the

many hospitals—at least eighteen—whose work complemented that of the

confraternities.46

In stark contrast to the wealth and influence of formal Christianity and to their

own imprint on the physical aspect of Córdoba, was the city’s Muslim community.

Shortly after the city’s thirteenth-century conquest, the Muslim population was deported, though a small community of artisans soon returned. That the community of Mudéjares,

or Muslims living under Christian rule, in Córdoba remained small was due in part to

additional taxes levied upon them, causing many to emigrate to Granada. The continued

45 A more likely estimate, based on the 1509 census, would suggest the clerics comprised three to five percent of the population. 46 Ladero Quesada, “Producción y renta cerealeras,” 387-8; Iluminado Sanz Sancho, “El poder episcopal en Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media,” En la España medieval 13 (1990): 163-206; Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 164-70.

284 survival of this group, estimated to be about one percent of the total population, attests to

their economic contributions to the civic community, to which they brought highly prized

skills not readily available from other sources. Employed in masonry, gardening, and

veterinary medicine, the Mudéjares of Córdoba traditionally lived in and around the

Plaza de las Tendillas de Calatrava, on the border between San Nicolás de la Villa and

San Miguel parishes to the north of the cathedral. In the 1470s and 1480s, however,

successive attempts were made to increase their tax obligations, to more effectively

segregate them from the Christian majority and, ultimately, to force their conversion.

Some of these measures, such as a requirement that Muslim wear distinguishing marks on

their clothing, had been on the books since the early part of the century, but only came to

be vigorously enforced at this time. Other policies, such as that of the segregation or

apartamiento of Muslims into quarters or ghettoes (morerías), were revivals or

extensions of earlier approaches. Together, they represented a shift in the intensity of

persecution.

The first attempt to restrict the Mudéjares from the rest of the population seems to

have occurred in 1479, when corregidor Francisco de Valdés moved them to the Alcázar

Viejo (old castle) in San Bartolomé parish, a location whose tight quarters were physically separate from the rest of the city and without access to fresh water. The order not only required the Muslims to reside there, but forbade them from leaving for any reason without permission. Isolated not only from society, but from their means of earning a living or of worshipping (their mosque was closed at the same time), the

Muslims of Córdoba appealed to Isabel and Ferdinand for relief in 1480. This petition, addressed to the monarchs in their traditional role as protectors of the Muslim

285 community, had mixed results. After an inspection, the Catholic Monarchs agreed that

conditions in the Alcázar Viejo were unacceptable. They also declared that the Muslims must remain segregated in a new morería, which was located in San Nicolás de la Villa,

near to their old neighborhood around the Plaza de las Tendillas. Here the community

remained, faced with ever-increasing tax burdens and with many of their members

choosing at last to convert, until formally expelled in 1502.47

The persecutions of Córdoba’s Islamic community were not, however, of local

origin. Despite the concejo’s willingness to tax them, policies intended to exploit and

then isolate the Muslims generally stemmed from royal prerogatives. The city’s

Christians, on the contrary, seem to have tolerated and even admired the culture of its

former rulers. Jerónimo’s fervent praise for the Mezquita, whose minaret and arcades

proclaimed it the work of Muslim architecture, is but one example. Perhaps no other city

of fifteenth-century Castile retained such a distinct Muslim flavor in its architecture and

layout. Why was this so? Córdoba’s former glory as the capital of al-Andalus and

consequent monumental architecture might be one explanation, but there was little

conscious effort expended to preserve any of this. Córdoba was instead notable for its

relative lack of deliberate attempts to efface the past. In its particular version of the

amiable enmity that defined the frontier, the city treated its Muslim minority in the same

47 AMC, AC 20.4.1479; 20.5.1495; 15.7.1495; Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, Los mudéjares de Castilla en tiempos de Isabel I (Valladolid, 1969), 91-2; Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la baja edad media, 110-2, 291; Juan Aranda Doncel, Los moriscos en tierras de Córdoba (Córdoba, 1984), 41-5; Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 177-9. There are no works in English on general condition of the mudéjares in Castile to match those centered on the Crown of Aragon such as John Boswell’s The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven, 1977); and Brian Catlos’s The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims in Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300 (Cambridge, 2001). A useful introduction to recent work on this topic, however, can be found in Manuel González Jiménez and Isabel Montes Romero Camacho, “Los mudéjares andaluces (siglos XIII-XV) aproximación al estado de la cuestión y propuesta de un modelo teórico,” in Los mudéjares valencianos y peninsulares, ed Manuel Ruzafa (Valencia, 2004), 47-78.

286 way: with generally benevolent neglect. Although we might expect that the Christian

population of the city, constantly involved in military efforts and exposed to the steady

polemic of Crusade, to have resented their Muslim neighbors, they instead ignored them,

failing to harass them but also failing to defend them against crown edicts. The position

of Islamic influence in Córdoba is illustrated best by its ultimate fate. Only after the fall

of Granada and the end of the frontier were the Muslims of Córdoba expelled. Only then

was its Great Mosque, which had been pressed into service as a Christian cathedral since

the conquest, defaced. In 1523, and despite the protests of many in the city, Carlos V

approved a plan to construct an extensive chapel within the existing structure, a project

which destroyed the central part of the original mosque. Yet even this proved to be a

suggestive statement of Córdoba’s Muslim heritage, with the new grafted onto the old but unable to eradicate it completely (figure 17).

The Jewish community in late fifteenth-century Córdoba was also quite small, having never recovered from attacks that nearly destroyed it in 1391. These riots, which began in Seville but soon spread throughout Andalusia and all Iberia, had their origins the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Ferrán Martínez, archdeacon of Ecija. While Martínez seems to have had a vision, such as it was, of a homogeneous Christian society untainted by the contagion of Jewish ‘heresy’, those who acted on his preaching were motivated more by the prospect of robbery than the pursuit of religious ends. Facilitated by rampant economic problems and a weak regency, the riots were largely unimpeded and, by year’s end, thousands of Jews had been killed or displaced and the traditional Jewish quarters of many cities, including Córdoba, lay in ruins. Although the monarchy acted against the rioters in the aftermath of the attacks, ordering that victims be paid compensation, the

287 long-term effects of 1391 were devastating. The Jews of Castile had long endured policies that limited their social and economic activities, but this stark display of their insecure position led most to convert to Christianity in the ensuing years. In doing so, they would automatically lose their legal disabilities and, in theory at least, remove any barriers to full acceptance into Christian society.48

In Córdoba, this meant a physical as well as religious and social relocation. While those few Jews who refused conversion remained in the old judería and formed a small community that survived until the early 1480s, the conversos moved to other parts of the city, including the parishes of Santa María and San Pedro, but especially to Lozana’s neighborhood of San Nicolás de la Ajerquía and the streets around the Plaza de los

Tendillas.49 For the early part of the fifteenth-century, the New Christians of Córdoba seem to have faced no overt enmity, although the lack of detailed records for the period means that this cannot be stated with confidence. Such was not the case elsewhere in

Castile, where the conversos faced increasing hostility from at least the 1440s. This was due in part to their rapid social and political rise. Freed from legal barriers, the conversos achieved prominent positions in Church, court, and municipal hierarchies, while marrying into a number of noble Old Christian families, including the Fernández de

48 Baer, History of the Jews, ii, 95-169; Philippe Wolff, “The 1391 Pogrom in Spain. Social Crisis or Not?” Past and Present 50 (1971): 4-18; Nieto Cumplido, “Luchas nobiliarias,” 43-6. Angus MacKay has focused particularly on the economic contexts of anti-Semitic rioting in Castile. See his “The Hispanic-Converso Predicament,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 35 (1985): 159-179; idem, “Popular Movements and Pogroms in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” Past and Present 55 (1972), 33-67; and idem, “Climate and Popular Unrest in Late Medieval Castile,” in Climate and History: Studies in Past Climates and Their Impact on Man, ed. Thomas M. L. Wigley, Martin J. Ingram, and G. Farmer (Cambridge, 1981), 356-76. Mark Meyerson’s study of the Jewish community in Morvedre, a small town inValencia, has recently challenged the accepted view of an overall decline in Jewish fortunes after 1391, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 2004). 49 Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la baja edad media, 108-9.

288 Córdoba lineage.50 Opponents claimed that the conversos purchased their offices and

took the opportunity to settle old scores against the Old Christians and consequently

attempted to ban them from holding office. These campaigns, intended to expand the

legal proscriptions on Jews to include conversos, argued that conversion could not make

a Jew into a full member of society and, in effect, were a first step in the transformation

of a religious distinction into a racial one ultimately articulated as the idea of limpieza de

sangre or ‘pure blood’.51

Complementing this was the often-repeated assertion that the New Christians

were not really Christian at all but ‘crypto-Jews’ who had converted under duress or for

temporal gain and continued to practice Judaism in secret. This was no doubt true of

some converts, and it is equally certain that some became sincere Christians. Many of the

former Jews and their descendents, however, lay open to charges of heresy or Judaizing

simply because they knew next to nothing about the faith to which they had theoretically converted. Perhaps the best assessment of the attitudes toward religion held by these untutored conversos is given us by Delicado, whose character Teresa of Córdoba opines that Lozana “will be Christian when among the Christians, Jewish among the Jews, and

Turkish among the Turks.”52 Ultimately, however, these suspicions reflected more on an

unwillingness to accept former Jews than on their actual religious behavior. Antón de

50 Margarita Cabrera Sánchez, through extensive research in surviving notarial documents, has developed a detailed study of one prominant converso family, “Los conversos de Córdoba en el siglo XV: la familia del jurado Martín Alonso,” Anuario de estudios medievales 35 (2005): 185-232. 51 MacKay, “Hispanic-Converso Predicament,” 163; and “Popular Movements,” 46-8. Their visibility and the success of their penetration of the highest ranks in the realm is attested by the proportion of authors mentioned in this study who either had themselves converted or had converso relations, including Alfonso de Palencia, Diego de Valera, Hernando del Pulgar, Alonso de Cartagena, Iñigo de Mendoza, and Antón de Montoro. For a comprehensive list of fifteenth-century converso authors, see Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison, 1995), 157-202. 52 Delicado, La Lozana, ed. Joset and Gernert, 38: “con los cristianos será cristiana, y con los jodíos, jodía, y con los turcos, turca…”

289 Montoro, for instance, offered a visceral description of the impossibility of ever gaining acceptance as a true Christian:

“O sad, bitter Ropero / who does not feel your sorrow! / Seventy years since your birth, / and, in all of them, you always said / “you [the Virgin] remained immaculate,” / and I never swore by the Creator! / I recited the Creed, I worship / pots of pork fat and / eat rashers of half-cooked bacon, / listen to Mass and pray, / cross myself every which way / and never could I slay / this stain of converso. / On bent knees / and with great devotion / in all those holy days / with great devotion I pray / and recite / the stations of the Passion, / adoring the God-and- Man / as my highest Lord, / that my guilt be removed, / but never could I lose the label / of the old faggot Jew.53

Montoro’s closing words—‘puto y judio’—neatly encapsulate the position of the conversos. They do not suggest that he was accused of homosexuality but rather link two

outcast groups as a means of intensifying an insult. As Rafael Carrasco notes, “behind the

sodomite, bearer of pestilence, is the outline of the converso. They are joined in the worst

popular insult that could be hurled: ‘faggot Jew!’” Moreover, the term ‘faggot’ cannot, as

Weissberger has argued, fully express the connotations of ‘puto’, a masculinized form of

‘puta’ which cast the Jew or converso both as prostitute and passive partner in the

homosexual act.54

Fueled by suspicion and envy, the Old Christians led attacks on local conversos in

53 Montoro, “A la Reina doña Isabel,” Cancionero, 75: “¡O Ropero amargo, triste, / que no sientes tu dolor! / ¡Sententa años que naçiste / y en todos / siempre dixiste / ynviolata permansiste / y nunca juré al Criador! / Hize el Credo y adorar / ollas / de toçino grueso, / torreznos a medio asar, / oyr misas y rezar, / santiguar y persignar / y nunca pude matar / este rastro de confeso. / Los ynojos encorvados / y con muy gran devoçión / en los días señalados / con gran devoçión contados / y rezados / los nudos de la Passión, / adorando a Dios y Hombre / por muy alto Señor mío, / por do mi culpa se escombrer, / no pude perder el nombre / de viejo, puto y judío. Montoro was popularly known by the sobriquet of ‘Ropero’, or cloth merchant. Yirmiyahu Yovel suggests that the ‘guilt’ to which Montoro referred was that of Jewish complicity in Christ’s death, which conversion could not, in the eyes of the Old Christians, erase, “Converso Dualities in the First Generation: The ‘Cancioneros’,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 4 (1998), 5-6. On the way in which Montoro used his poetry to better understand his converso identity and position in society, see Ana M. Gómez-Bravo, “Ser social y poética material en la obra de Antón de Montoro, mediano converso,” Hispanic Review 78 (2010): 145-167. 54 Rafael Carrasco, Inquisición y represión sexual en Valencia: historia de los sodomitas (1565-1785) (Barcelona, 1985), 27, as quoted in Barbara Weissberger, “¡A tierra, puto! Alfonso de Palencia’s Discourse of Effeminacy,” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, cultures, and crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (Durham, 1999), 294, n. 14; and idem, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis, 2004), 74.

290 Toledo in 1449, in Toledo and Seville in 1465 and again in 1467, and throughout

Andalusia in 1473 and again in 1474. Angus MacKay has shown with remarkable

precision that such violence was associated with social and economic pressures, notably harvest failures and subsequent hikes in food prices,55 but the increasing frequency with

which the Old Christians took solace in blaming them for such troubles would have

shown the conversos in unmistakable terms the degree to which their security had eroded.

Even so, early attacks on Andalusian conversos met with resistance as many

municipal councils and nobles protected the New Christians who not only held many

social ties but also held often-vital positions within the community.56 Ultimately, however, the suspicion with which many Old Christians viewed the conversos and the real problem of establishing clear religious boundaries overcame these objections and resulted, after several abortive attempts during Enrique IV’s reign, in the establishment of the Inquisition in Seville in 1480. The appointments of inquisitors in Córdoba in 1482, and Jaén and Ciudad Real in 1483 soon followed. The Inquisition’s monopoly over the persecution of conversos replaced mob violence against conversos with the rule of law, a

transformation facilitated, ironically, by the conversos’ legal status as Christians.

Although baptism was seemingly unable to remove the taint of Judaism, it did permit the

trial of suspected crypto-Jews as Christian heretics.57 The transfer of persecution to the

55 MacKay, “Popular movements,” passim. 56 Francisco Márquez Villanueva, “Conversos y cargos concejiles en el siglo xv,” Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos 58 (I957): 503-40; MacKay, “Popular movements,” 43-52. 57 The historiography of the Inquisition is vast, but useful introductions include Baer, History of the Jews, ii, 324-423; Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial: The Inquisition in Ciudad Real (Jerusalem, 1981); John Edwards, The Spanish Inquisition (Stroud, 1999); Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau, In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and conversos in Guadalupe, Spain (Princeton, 2003); Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition: a History, trans. Janet Lloyd (New Haven, 2005); and Helen Rawlings, The Spanish Inquisition (Malden, MA 2006). On the leyenda negra of the Inquisition, see Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: a Historical Revision (New Haven, 1998); and Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, 4 vols. (New York, 1902-1908)

291 public sector did not go entirely unchallenged, but those who criticized it openly were

few. The most prominent of these was Hernando del Pulgar, who speaking out against the

Inquisition in the early 1480s, was scandalized that the church, having failed to educate

these putative Christians, now proposed to punish them. Writing to Cardinal Pedro

González de Mendoza of Seville, he argued that “I am certain, my lord, that there are ten thousand young girls between ten and twenty years of age in Andalusia, who from the time they were born have never left their homes or heard of or learned of any doctrines

save that which they have observed of their parents indoors. To burn all these people

would be a very cruel thing.”58 Pulgar’s disapproval was met by the vociferous

objections of the Inquisition’s defenders who impugned his loyalty and forced him to

admit that the intentions behind the tribunals were good.

The Inquisition in Córdoba seems to have functioned, during its first decade,

much as those in other Andalusian cities. Even as Córdoba acted as a major staging post

for the final war against Granada, the Holy Office secured the support of local civic and

ecclesiastic leaders and prosecuted a number of suspected heretics, including minor

officeholders, senior clerics, and moderately wealthy traders and artisans. While the

practice of distributing goods confiscated from these victims to local notables no doubt

facilitated the acquiescence of the authorities, their interest waned with the escalation of

trials that followed the appointment of cathedral canon Diego Rodríguez Lucero as

Inquisitor in 1495. Lucero was convinced that Judaism continued to be widely practiced

in private homes that served as synagogues and, moreover, that the Jews of Córdoba were

58 As quoted in MacKay, “Whores of Babylon,” 182-4. See also his “Women on the Margins,” 41-2. Pulgar went on to note that to burn the uninformed was not only cruel but “even difficult to do, because they would flee in desperation to places where there would never be any hope of ever correcting them.” The Rome of Delicado’s Lozana, full of Andalusian conversas, would seem to bear out this prediction.

292 associated with a messianic movement that foretold the coming of in March 1500.

In response, he cast his net widely, implicating important local figures and conducting multiple mass autos de fe. This roused the joint opposition of the concejo and cathedral chapter, who managed, in 1508, to have Lucero removed from office. At the same time, however, Lucero’s activities divided the city, with popular feeling in support of the arrest of so many prominent conversos.59

********

The 1473 riots were a transformative moment for the condition of Córdoba’s converso community. Old Christian prejudice certainly predated this moment, but it was mostly implicit and the New Christians faced little overt discrimination and few restrictions on their activities. In the wake of the disturbances, Aguilar was quick to make a public declaration that henceforth no converso could hold public office, indicating that this issue was a particular point of contention.60 But there is little evidence for long-term efforts to exclude them from civic life and what there is suggests a relatively low level of anti-converso feeling. The 1466 will of Ferrán Ruiz de Aguayo, precentor of the

Cathedral, founded a chantry there with the proviso that New Christian clergy be prohibited from serving at its altar. Aguayo, however, softened the blow by noting that he made this restriction “notwithstanding that in this generation of conversos there are many virtuous and good persons, and of good conscience and life.”61 The 1470s found this real, but relatively painless, form of discrimination replaced by violent and systematic repression. Córdoba’s conversos were first attacked by the mob, then rejected by the

59 Lucero’s career and fall are well described in John Edwards, “Trial of an Inquisitor: the Dismissal of Diego Rodríguez Lucero, Inquisitor of Córdoba, in 1508,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37 (1986): 240-57; and idem, “The Judeoconversos in the Urban Life of Córdoba, 1450-1520,” in Villes et sociétés urbaines au Moyen Âge, ed. Pierre Desportes (Paris, 1994), 287-99. 60 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 87. 61 Nieto Cumplido, “La revuelta,” 35-36; Edwards, “Massacre,” 65.

293 nobility, and finally criminalized by the legal system.

Can we attribute this sudden transformation to a cascade of nascent expressions of discontent, that each person who openly condemned the conversos, beginning with

Alonso Rodríguez, encouraged the next to do the same, and that once the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, it could never be put back in? Perhaps, but even if this is so, we need to consider the modes of social communication that laid the groundwork for this mobilization of anti-converso sentiment. In doing so, we can identity several aspect of the general Castilian situation and the particular social and spatial structure of their own city that enabled the anti-conversos of Córdoba to translate personal animosities, however widely held, into effective mass action that united people from disparate social and economic backgrounds. They did so both by enlisting religious passions and by transforming the meanings of quotidian surroundings. And so the bustling Calle de la

Feria became the route for a holy procession, the Cruz del Rastro with its fish market, booths, and tanneries the site for a deadly insult to the Virgin, and the Church of San

Francisco and a blacksmith’s abode the setting for a new Passion story.

Before analyzing how this was accomplished, however, the identities and motives of those most intimately involved in the riots must be determined. At the heart of the initial disturbances were the members of the Cofradía de la Caridad, whose violent reaction to the supposed insult to their effigy of the Virgin sparked the whole affair. This group, founded in the first half of the fifteenth century, was based at the Monastery of

San Pedro el Real, to which Alonso Rodríguez fled.62 The Caridad’s social composition, as indicated by contemporary evidence, seems to have been mostly common, although there are no mentions of specific occupations other than Rodríguez’s. According to a

62 On the layout and history of the Monastery, see Escobar Camacho, La vida urbana cordobesa, 87-94.

294 1481 document, its leader, the hermano mayor, qualified as a caballero de cuantía but

was not, on account of this position, required to perform military duties. Their charitable

works were wide ranging and involved many of the most marginalized groups in the city.

They maintained prisoners in the city prison, provided burials for paupers and travelers

who died in Córdoba, and arranged dowries and marriages for poor but respectable girls.

In 1493 the brotherhood received permission from the bishop of Córdoba to construct the

still-extant Hospital de la Santa Caridad and a bell tower in the Plaza del Potro, where

masses might be said and the brothers have a suitable headquarters for their charitable work.63

Palencia and Valera, however, presented the Caridad as an organization dedicated

to Old Christian dominance and closely engaged with national and bando politics. By

about 1470, the faction headed by Alonso de Aguilar had emerged as the de facto rulers

of the city and Aguilar’s adversaries Diego Fernández de Córdoba, third count of Cabra,

and Pedro de Córdoba y Solier, his relative and the bishop of Córdoba, had left the city.

The principals and their respective bandos continued their struggles, both in the city and

countryside as well as at court, for regional predominance and the privileges and

patronage that went with it. These bandos engaged nearly all members of society through

familial, military, or economic links. Geographical proximity also played a role, as

particular streets or districts tended to support the same faction.64 Aguilar seems to have

enjoyed the support of Córdoba’s conversos and Palencia wrote of “the establishment of

a certain reciprocity of services between them and Don Alonso de Aguilar.” As he

63 APC, PN, 13666P, ff. 58r, 201r; 13667P, ff. 418v, 435v, 446v, 508r, 520v, 532r, 555v, 559v; AMC, AC 21.4.1503; Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 169-70; and Escobar Camacho, La vida urbana cordobesa, 96-7. The brotherhood was refounded in 1940, and still conducts processions through the Cruz del Rastro and along the Calle de la Feria. They maintain a website at http://www.hermandaddelacaridad.org/principal.html. 64 Edwards enumerates the prominent families in each party, Christian Córdoba, 152-3.

295 described it, the conversos were required to enlist, arm, and pay the wages of three

hundred well-armed horsemen, in return for which their patron would turn a blind eye to

their open Judaizing and purchase of offices.65 In response to Aguilar’s supposed alliance

with the conversos, Cabra and his supporters, notably Solier, presented themselves as champions of the old Christians, thus further dividing Old and New Christians.

Both chroniclers claimed that external influences played a decisive role in these developments. At the time, Castile was divided between those who supported Enrique IV and the succession of his daughter Juana of Castile (sometimes known pejoratively as

Juana la Beltraneja after her supposed father Beltrán de la Cueva) and those who preferred his sister Isabel la Católica. This dispute had led to civil war in the 1460s and would so again in 1475, but the early 1470s was a time of uneasy peace and shifting alliances. The Cordoban magnates seem to have maneuvered to keep their options open and both enjoyed, at one time or another, the favor of each monarch. In 1473, Aguilar was loosely linked to Enrique’s party while Cabra was in the Isabelline faction. Their approach was typical of the frontier nobility, which used the succession struggle to extend their traditional autonomy even as it added a new dimension to their already- intense rivalries. In Murcia, Pedro Fajardo refused to recognize any king after 1468 and ruled unencumbered for a decade. In Seville, the Duke of Medina Sidonia forced Isabel to promise him the mastership of Santiago before committing to her cause. Only in Jaén did either candidate have a base of support, as Miguel Lucas de Iranzo remained faithful to his longtime friend Enrique. Iranzo complained bitterly about the lengths to which other nobles would go in order to gain advantage, accusing Cabra, for instance, of passing

65 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 85: “Establecida luego cierta reciprocidad de servicios entre ellos y D. Alonso de Aguilar.”

296 information to the Muslims and even of actively allying with them against fellow

Christians.66

Quarrels in one part of the region, moreover, could easily spill over into others.

Valera saw the Cordoban troubles as stemming partly from disputes in western Andalusia

and partly from deliberate attempts to sow discord and thus weaken Isabel’s position:

“From the differences and past struggles between the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the

Marquis of Cadíz came great evils, not only to the city of Seville, but also in Córdoba and

in Sanlúcar and much of Andalusia. And, since the monarchs Fernando and Isabel were

much loved in those cities, some that did not desire their service tried to cause trouble

between the Old and New Christians, especially in the city of Córdoba, where there was

great enmity and envy between them.67 Palencia put a name to those troublemakers,

claiming that Juan Pacheco, Master of Santiago, “who knew no equal in the art of

plotting sedition and tumults,” decided that unrest in Córdoba would further his own

ends.68 Noting that Old and New Christians were already at odds, he sent some knights

sworn to his nephew Rodrigo Téllez Girón, Master of Calatrava, to cause more trouble

and “throw fresh fuel on the fire.”69

Palencia claimed that the Cofradía de la Caridad had a central role in these plans,

66 See chapter 1, n. 131. For an overview of the political situation at this time, see Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms: 1250-1516, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1978), ii, 330-65. 67 Valera, Memorial, 240: “De la diferençias e guerras pasadas entre el duque de Medinasidonia y el marqués de Cádiz, resultaron grandes males, no solamente de la çibdad de Sevilla, más en Córdova y en Sanlúcar e la mayor parte de Andalucía. E como en aquellas çibdades los príncipes don Fernando y doña Isabel fuesen mucho amados, algunos que su serviçio no deseavan procuraron de meter gran ciçaña entre los cristianos viejos e nuevos, espeçialmente en la çibdad de Córdova, donde entre ellos avia grandes enemistades e grande envidia.” 68 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 85: “a quien nadie superaba en el arte de maquinar sediciones y tumultos.” 69 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 85: “para echar leña seca al fuego.” Pacheco was the Marquis de Villena and Enrique IV’s former chief minister. On his career, see Nancy F. Marino, Don Juan Pacheco: Wealth and Power in Late Medieval Spain (Tempe, 2006). For Girón, see Manuel Ciudad Ruiz, “El maestrazgo de Don Rodrigo Téllez Girón,” En la España medieval 23 (2000): 321-65.

297 though he is not clear whether this was by chance or by design. Directly after describing

Pacheco’s acts, he went on to note that, “For their part, the Old Christians, apparently

moved by religious zeal, founded a devotional confraternity dedicated to Charity and

such was the people’s fervor that in only a few days its members were numerous; they

conducted weekly processions to the churches and liberally distributed their wealth as

alms to the needy (italics added).”70 De Valera was more direct, arguing that New

Christian arrogance, inspired in part by their connection to Aguilar, led to anti-converso

feeling and was “the reason that a conspiracy formed in the city, under the color of

devotion, in which entered the greater part of the population, which they called the

Brotherhood of the city. They conducted processions on certain days, thus demonstrating

their great devotion.”71 Alonso Rodríguez was a prominent figure in this organization. As

Palencia observed: “Notable among those possessed by this religious fervor was a certain blacksmith who was very hospitable to the poor and to travelers. His charity had earned him the affection of the masses, and for his passion against the conversos he had acquired a remarkable degree of authority among the brothers; whoever he praised they considered the more worthy; whoever he condemned they found despicable.”72 And it seems as if

Rodríguez’s peers were not the only ones listening. Although it is impossible to

70 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 86: “Por su parte, los cristianos viejos, movidos por cierto aparente celo religioso, fundaron una devota cofradía bajo la advocación de la Caridad, y tal fue el fervor del pueblo, que en pocos días el número de cofrades llegó a ser numeroso; celebrábanse procesiones semanales por las iglesias, y los ricos distribuían liberalmente limosnas entre los necesitados.” Palencia is incorrect in stating that the confraternity was founded at this time; it may, however, have greatly expanded its membership in the late 1460s and early 1470s. 71 De Valera, Memorial, 240: “de tal forma que esta causa se ovo de hacer vna conjuraçión en la çibdad, so color de devoçión, en que entró la mayor parte della, a la qual llamaron Hermandad de la çibdad. E hizieron en çiertos días proçisiones, mostrando hazerse con grande deboçión.” 72 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 86: “Entre los cordobeses poseídos de este fervor religioso hacíase notar cierto herrero muy hospitalario con pobres y peregrinos. Su caridad le había granjeado el cariño de la muchedumbre, y por su arrebatada vehemencia contra los conversos había adquirido singular autoridad entre sus cofrades. Lo que él alababa se tenía por lo más digno de alabanza; lo que censuraba era lo más vituperable.”

298 determine if any of these men were connected to Cabra’s party, the involvement of

several prominent Cordoban nobles in riots ostensibly committed by members of a

plebian organization is suggestive. Bartolomé Ruiz de la Mesa, Luis de Córdoba, or Luis

Muñiz de Godoy, the latter two of whom were veinticuatros, all confessed their

participation in attacks on the conversos in later wills that included reparations to the

victims.73

If Palencia and Valera were accurate in their descriptions of the Caridad’s

purposes—and there is no reason to suppose that they were not as Palencia, in particular,

was clear about his lack of sympathy for the victims—then the initial riot during its

procession was as much a planned attempt to reap political gain as it was a religious

observation. Both authors emphasize the Cofradía’s penchant for conducting numerous

processions and refer to this in conjunction with the organization’s political connections

and anti-converso stance. Given their route through the heavily-converso neighborhood

adjoining the Calle de la Feria, we can surmise that its regular processions, including the

one that led to the troubles, were attempts as provocation, planned with an eye for taking

full advantage of any disruptions that might come about either by chance or because of

the New Christians’ perceived hostility to the Old. Palencia was correct in describing the

young girl’s spilling of water as a “chance act,” but it was one for which the Caridad’s

members were prepared and they used it to attack the position of not only Córdoba’s

conversos but also Aguilar himself.

By adroitly manipulating popular resentment over Aguilar’s supposed preferential

treatment of the conversos, an anger that they had had a role in creating, Rodríguez and

73 Emilio Cabrera Muñoz, “Violencia urbana y crisis política en Andalucía en el siglo XV,” in Violencia y conflictividad en la sociedad de la España Bajomedieval, ed. (Zaragoza, 1995), 22-4; Edwards, “Massacre,” 62-3.

299 his supporters placed the alcalde mayor in a difficult position. Aguilar could either side

with the conversos against the majority of the city’s population, risking a popular

backlash, or abandon them to their fate and thus lose a key base of support. For Cabra and the Old Christian party, it was a win-win situation; Aguilar’s standing in the city

would be reduced in either case. Aguilar’s subsequent behavior demonstrates the efficacy

of the maneuver. His personal inclination was to stand with the New Christians, as

revealed in his attack on Rodríguez and offer to shelter at least some of the converso

population. Faced with the mobilized and well-organized Old Christians (whose ability to

bring in reinforcements from the countryside and to maintain a cohesive force for several

weeks is further evidence of both prior preparations and expert support) and upon sober

reflection, he was forced to accede to the situation in order to save his own position. If

the disturbances following the Caridad’s interrupted procession can therefore be

described as political theatre instead of a spontaneous outpouring of hostility, it makes

sense to understand it as the improvisational performance that contemporaries suggested

it was. To do so, we must examine the ways in which its architects intended to appeal to

the population as well as the reasons for their success in doing so.

Rodríguez’s original call to arms attempted to arouse the indignation of the

townspeople in a traditional manner: by casting the young conversa’s spilling of water on

the effigy of the Virgin as a deliberate insult to the Christian faith. This played on both

the devotion with which Mary was commonly held as well as common fears that the

conversos secretly despised Christianity. The virgin was a special protector of Córdoba

whose image, in the form of an effigy of Our Lady of Linares, had played an essential

role in Fernando III’s capture of the city and to whom, in thanks for this miracle, its

300 cathedral had been dedicated. She was also a more general symbol of the defense of the

faith and an insult to the Virgin by infidels was an especially effective symbol around

which the indignant could rally. The sense that it was a ritual insult only intensified their

affront. In the tense atmosphere surrounding conversos in late-medieval Castile, their

every action was scrutinized for evidence of Judaizing or heresy and their modes of dress,

of eating, and of worship acquired a ritual significance that proved their religious

conformity or dissent.

As Angus MacKay has noted, “the predicament of the conversos and moriscos

meant that a chance remark or an inappropriate action, even if uttered or performed by a

child, might have the most serious consequences.”74 It was inconceivable in these

circumstances that a conversa could accidentally spill water on the Virgin. To the Old

Christians, such an act must bear a deeper significance, implying not only an attack on the faith but one which implicated the whole of the converso community, for the child

must have been put up to the task or learned disrespect for Christianity from her elders.

Rodríguez’s words thus fit the expectations of an audience composed primarily of those

who shared his views regarding conversos and directed them to a set of actions many

already thought appropriate. They were sufficient to spark a riot and sustain it in the face

of Torreblanca’s opposition.

They may not, however, have induced the demonstrators to carry on after

Aguilar’s intervention. The insult had, arguably, been avenged when the houses

surrounding the Cruz del Rastro were plundered and burned. The alcalde mayor’s veteran

soldiers, a daunting force, were in the streets and the rioters’ leader, the man who not

only instigated the fighting but also, according to Palencia, had inspired much of existing

74 MacKay, “Hispanic-Converso Predicament,” 171.

301 anti-converso sentiment, was injured and dying, no longer able to rally them. By presenting Alonso Rodríguez’s death as a modern recurrence of the Passion, however, his supporters were able not only to continue the insurrection but to widen its scope and

redouble its fervor. In doing so, they took full advantage of the timing of events.

The Easter season was a time of intense religious passion in which biblical

experiences came to life for Christians. These were as much emotional as cognitive

responses. Maureen Flynn, for instance, has described ritual self-flagellations on Holy

Thursday meant to recall Christ’s sufferings. These were not, as she demonstrates, simple

historical simulations of an event in the distant past, but a representation of a living past

that continued to reverberate through physical pain and emotional release in the present.75

Easter was also a dangerous time for Iberian Jews, however, for they were often considered to have been complicit in the death of Christ and this annual emphasis on the present and continued relevance of the Passion served as a reminder that this supposed crime was not a thing of the past. If Christ’s suffering and death were symbolically renewed in the hearts of the faithful, then he was also murdered again and again by his enemies.

David Nirenberg has argued that “the world of holy week violence was one in which the sacred was physically experienced, relations of power were criticized, the past became the present, and urban space was transformed.”76 The rumor of Rodríguez’s rebirth was not a premeditated attempt to exploit this mood—no one could have known that he would be mortally wounded—but it was an extemporaneous response to events

75 Maureen Flynn, “The Spectacle of Suffering in Spanish Streets,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), 153-68. 76 Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 201. On what he describes as the ‘systematic violence’ of Holy Week, see the same work, 200-30.

302 that placed them in a coherent order and assigned allegorical roles to the main figures. If

Alonso Rodríguez represented the slain Christ, then those responsible for his death signified Christ’s killers. Aguilar’s decision to attack the blacksmith with a lance placed him firmly in the role of the Romans; both the soldier who used his lance to stab Christ’s side and Pilate, who was unwilling to stand before Jewish attempts to see Christ killed.

But the Romans were not the villains in contemporary readings of the Passion; and the

Roman soldier was even honored as St. Longinus. In the Gospel of Matthew, meanwhile,

Pilate significantly washed his hands of the execution while the Jewish people willingly accepted responsibility for the crime: “All the people answered, “We take his upon ourselves and our children.”77 Just as their forefathers were responsible for Christ’s

death, so the conversos must have been behind Rodríguez’s and their associative guilt

was confirmed by the rumors which described his deathbed cry for revenge. To an

audience incensed by present-day events as well as experientially engaged in the religious

events of the season, a call for retribution would have seemed appropriate; it was what

Jesus might have wanted, perhaps what he should have wanted.

All this, moreover, took place on a frontier where millenarian visions were

commonplace and not solely the province of Old Christians or those who saw victory

over Islam in Iberia as the first step of the Apocalypse. Palencia ends his account of the

pogrom by noting that “A wonder that had occurred a little earlier had inspired among the

conversos the belief that the coming of their false Messiah was near. They were the

Andalusians most given to such imaginations and, as it came to their attention that an

77 Matthew 27:25: “et respondens universus populus dixit sanguis eius super nos et super filios nostros.” John Edwards speculates that he did so because a commoner was unworthy of death by a sword, “Massacre,” 56. Christ’s wounding by a Roman soldier is described in John 19:34. Pilate plays a role in all four Gospels; Matthew 27:13-25 is the most emphatic regarding Pilate’s unwillingness to take responsibility for Christ’s death.

303 enormous whale had died while chasing a ship on the coast of Portugal near Setúbal, it

appeared to them that this whale was the one named Leviathan, heralded by the prophets,

and therefore their Messiah could not be far distant.”78 We can, to some degree, leave

aside his underlying assumption that the conversos were relapsed Jews and therefore the references to a “false Messiah.” An equally likely interpretation of this fervor is that the conversos, whose religious knowledge, in many cases, consisted of a jumble of Jewish traditions and incompletely-understood Christian doctrines, had developed amongst themselves a reading of this whale sighting that loosely conformed to Christian theology.

In relating the story of Leviathan to present hopes for a Messiah, the conversos of

Córdoba spoke, therefore, not of the Jewish Messiah but of the second coming of Christ.

Their expectations accorded well with those of the general population, for whom the

troubled times of famine and civil war were signs of the impending apocalypse. In this,

we can perhaps gain some insight into the experiences of Antón de Montoro and others

tempted to raise arms against their fellow conversos. It was not only that they faced a

pressure to conform to Old Christian social and religious conventions that would have

intensified the typical impulse to follow the crowd.79 They may also have shared, in their

own manner, in the experiential understanding of the Easter season that transformed

Córdoba into a New Jerusalem and drove the mob to a sustained and destructive

78 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 88: “Un prodigio acaecido poco antes había extendido entre los conversos la creencia de que estaba próxima la venida de su falaz Mesías. Eran la mayor parte andaluces muy dados a estas imaginaciones, y como les llegó la noticia de que en las costas de Portugal, cerca de Setúbal, había perecido una descomunal ballena en persecución de una nave, se figuraron que aquel cetáceo era el llamado Leviatán, anunciado por los profetas, y por tanto, que no podía tardar su Mesías.” Palencia, despite his disdain for such “imaginings”, diligently followed up on reports of this whale sighting to provide a detailed description of its miraculous appearance. 79 For another example of converso attempts to prove their Christian worth by attacking other conversos, see Yovel, “Converso Dualities,” 3.

304 passion.80

That Palencia (and presumably the Old Christians of Córdoba) failed to consider

the possible Christian origins for the converso community’s apocalyptic ideas and instead

dismissed them as yet another sign of their unrepentant Judaism was a function both of

their general suspicion for New Christians and the conversos’ physical and social

separateness. To some degree, this seems to have been consciously fostered by many

converso authors, who took pride in the idea that they comprised their own ‘nation’. They

defined this in terms more racial than religious, presenting themselves proudly as

descendents of the ancient Israelites and members of Christ’s own linaje. Diego de

Valera thus referred to the conversos in the words of Deuteronomy—“Is there any nation

so noble?—while Alfonso de Cartagena reportedly described the Virgin Mary as “my

blood-relative.” Such pretensions led to a predictable backlash and Andrés Bernáldez, for

one, grumbled that “they entertained the arrogant claim that there was no better people in

the world than they.”81 Pacheco stirred up resentment against the conversos by claiming

that “They spoke openly against the Christian religion, while they secretly devised

despicable crimes, as a nation apart which nowhere accepted cooperation with the Old

Christians. Instead, as a people with completely antagonistic aims, they openly and with

the greatest boldness supported whatever was contrary to them [the Old Christians], as

demonstrated by the seeds of bitter fruit spread throughout the cities of the kingdom

80 On millenarian impulses at this time, see above, chapter 1; Angus MacKay, “Andalucía y la guerra del fin del mundo,” in Andalucía entre oriente y occidente (1236-1492). Actas del V Coloquio internacional de historia medieval de Andalucía, ed. Emilio Cabrera (Córdoba, 1988), 329-42; and John Edwards, “Elijah and the Inquisition: Messianic Prophecy among Conversos in Spain, c. 1500,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 28 (1984): 79-94. 81 These examples, and many others, are cited in Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 42; and Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York, 1995), 995-6.

305 (italics added).”82

The fears inspired by the conversos’ self-definition as a nation, which stemmed

more from defensiveness than pride, differed little from those directed as Jews

throughout Iberia and Europe. They were, however, intensified by their status as

Christians, which removed the social limitations placed on Jews, and confirmed by their

physical separateness. The converso clusters in a few sections of the city (the riverside

areas of Santa María and San Nicolás de la Ajerquía as well as the Plaza de los Tendillas)

resulted from a combination of social and economic factors. The dissolution of the

judería and the large number of converts at the beginning of the century created a wave

of internal migrants too large to be successfully dispersed and assimilated throughout the

city. It is likely, moreover, that the conversos would have resisted attempts to break up

their social networks. Instead, a spate of new building provided accommodations in

previously underpopulated areas of the city while the converts often received their own

churches and formed their own confraternities. De facto occupational zoning, particularly

for the curtidores but also among those wealthier conversos engaged in trade whose

shops lined the Calle de la Feria, had the effect of maintaining the spatial integrity of the

population over time.83

Their proximity to each other inspired communal solidarity among the conversos.

They married, worked, worshipped, and socialized amongst themselves. Even while it

82 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 93: “Tampoco se recataban para combatir la religión cristiana, y en secreto tramaban infames injurias, como nación aparte que en ningún territorio aceptaba consorcio con los cristianos viejos, antes, cual pueblo de ideas completamente opuestas, favorecía a las claras y con la mayor osadía les era contrario, como demostraban las semillas de amarguísimos frutos extendidos por tantas ciudades del reino. 83 On the broad implications of such clustering and their relation to Tobler’s First Law of Geography (like things tend to be near to one another, and the more alike, the nearer they are), see John Logan, Weiwei Zhang and Hongwei Xu, “Applying Spatial Thinking in Social Science Research,” GeoJournal 75 (2010): 15-27.

306 provided a social and economic safety net, however, this segregation and the associated

self-identification of the conversos as a nation left them vulnerable to attacks by the Old

Christians. For the perception that they formed “a nation apart” meant that they were an

alien people, one necessarily at war with the larger Castilian nation and whose

willingness to betray Castile for their own ends was taken for granted.84 Such a situation

meant that all rumors, no matter how fantastic, were given some credence. With a general

lack of personal connections among the conversos, Old Christians were willing to believe

the worst about people they hardly knew and few were willing to rebut widely-circulated

reports about their nefarious doings.

That the converso’s putative pride in their status as a separate and exalted nation

motivated Old Christian resentment in Córdoba and played a role in the 1473 riots is

suggested by the emphasis on sex in the sources. Sexual tension was a constant feature of

interconfessional relations, with marriage and sexual contact between members of

different faiths often raising high emotions. David Nirenberg has shown that all religious

communities invested a great deal of energy in defining and maintaining sexual

boundaries.85 The conversos did not, in theory, comprise a distinct religious group and

there is ample evidence of intermarriage with Old Christian families among the

economically privileged, but the evidence suggests a general tendency to marry their own

kind that stemmed from both the social forces that isolated them from the rest of the civic

population as well as Old Christian fears of such mixing. Antón de Montoro, in verses

dedicated to his wife, commented on how this limited one’s potential partners while

revealing the hidden advantages of the situation: “Since God wished you / and I to be

84 Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, 42-3; Netanyahu, Origins of the Inquisition, 997ff. 85 David Nirenberg, “Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain,” AHR 107 (2002): 1065-1093; and idem, Communities of Violence, 127-65.

307 unlucky / and of little value, / much better that we pervert / one house only, and not two. /

Since it would be a waste of time / and an offense to reason / for you [to wish] to enjoy a

good husband, / I, old, dirty, and crippled, / can caress a lovely woman.”86 Here, as

elsewhere, Montoro lamented his inability to be fully accepted into Christian society,

who would view his (or his wife’s) marriage into an Old Christian family to be a

‘perversion’. He presented this as an ironic source of good fortune that permitted him to

wed a younger woman who lacked alternatives.

The actions of the mob in 1473, however, were not meant to protect their

daughters from the contagion of conversos. Palencia particularly emphasized the sexual

violence exercised against conversas, which ranged from rape to public stripping to

violation of corpses, and Valera, who used Palencia as a source for his own account,

made no substantive alterations. There are a number of ways to read the graphic

descriptions of the indignities imposed on these women, not least of which is a prurient

interest on Palencia’s part, who certainly never shied away from such details. But given

that Valera accepted Palencia’s report of events, it is safe to assume that, even if he

emphasized relatively isolated incidents, Palencia did not invent these crimes. We could

explain them away as the work of individuals who took advantage of a chaotic situation or were carried away by the passions of the moment. Rhetoric against the conversos in

the weeks preceding the riots, moreover, may well have demonized the conversos to a degree that induced some to assume that any license could be taken against them. The tone of both accounts, however, suggests something more systematic, if not a planned

86 Antón de Montoro, “Otra suya a su mujer,” in Cancionero, 60: “Pues quiere Dios que seamos / Desmazalados yo y vos, / Y que tan poco valgamos, / más vale que cohondamos / una casa que no dos / que serié tiempo perdido / y la razón ofender / vos gozar de buen marido / yo, viejo, suzio, tollido, / sovajar linda muger.”

308 campaign of rape than perhaps a general sense that this was a particularly appropriate way to attack the conversos. While the formal use of sex as a military weapon is more of a modern phenomenon, receiving particular attention in recent conflicts in the Balkans and in central Africa, the efficacy of such an approach as a means of destroying social and familial ties would not have been lost on the Old Christians of Córdoba, who were well aware of the shame and loss of honor this sexual contact, forced though it was, meant for victims and their families.

The pride taken by conversos in their ancestry offers another reading of these attacks, one implied by Valera, who summarized the riot by noting that “there was no kind (linaje) of cruelty that was not practiced that day by the looters.”87 The term ‘linaje’

is not entirely inappropriate here, but it is curious choice as the term most often referred

to family or ancestry. In a sentence with almost precisely the same sense, for instance,

Palencia wrote that the perpetrators failed to omit “any form (género alguno) of cruelty.”

The wording is particularly striking when one considers the rape of the conversa women

as an assault on their own linajes, an attempt to dilute the Jewish blood which was a font

of communal pride but was also viewed fearfully by Old Christians as a source of

pollution. It would be too much to suggest that the rapes of 1473 were a form of ethnic

cleansing on the lines of that practiced against Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, that is to

say, a conscious and systematic attempt to breed the community out of existence. In the

context of the 1470s and the beginnings of an anti-Semitic rhetoric centered on limpieza

de sangre, however, it is no stretch to view this as an assault on the conversos that

challenged a pillar of their sense of community and exceptionalism.

If the riots were aimed at the destruction of the converso community, we should

87 Valera, Memorial, 242. See above, n. 8.

309 also consider how this benefited the rioters. This question of cui bono ultimately reveals

that Old Christians of all stripes sought advantage in the conversos’ misfortune. Just as in

1391, contemporaries saw the pogrom as a “robbery.” Palencia used the term, and Valera

noted that “many came to plunder.” The minutes of the cathedral chapter, who met a

fortnight after the events to discuss what should be done with rental properties which had

been let to conversos, spoke of the “robbery of the conversos which was committed in

this city.” Likewise, Luis de Córdoba’s will acknowledged that he was involved “when

the robbery of the conversos happened in this city,” and the testaments of other notables

who felt deathbed remorse described events in the same way.88

These wills described plunder in meaningful amounts—5,000 mrs. in one case,

1,500 in another, and a silver cup in a third—at a time when an escribano earned about

300 mrs. per annum, a lawyer 2,000 and senior municipal officials no more than 3,000

while a fanega (approximately 1.5 bushels) of barley or wheat normally cost 50 to 100

mrs.89 Such wealth would have tempted many even in good times; in the early 1470s,

when the price of cereals had skyrocketed to upwards of several hundred mrs. per bushel,

it would have been well nigh irresistible to the desperate. Even Alfonso de Aguilar and

his brother Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the conversos’ erstwhile defenders, joined

enthusiastically in the search for valuables buried or hidden on their properties and in the

systematic robbery of fugitives. They did this both for monetary gain and to fit in with

popular sentiment in order to effect “a reconciliation with the frenzied masses.”90

The void created by the flight of the conversos and their subsequent absence from

88 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 87; Valeria, Memorial, 242: “muchos vinieron a robar;” Nieto Cumplido, “La revuelta,” 47; Cabrera Muñoz, “Violencia urbana,” 23n; Edwards, “Massacre,” 61-3. 89 Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 197-8; MacKay, “Popular Movements,” 66-7. 90 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 87-8: “Ambos buscaban en la rapiña la reconciliación con el desenfrenado populacho.”

310 civic life offered benefits to Old Christians of all social classes that were less tangible but

no less advantageous than the theft of their physical property. For artisans and merchants, the riots removed a number of successful competitors. Nieto Cumplido’s examination of

properties rented to conversos by the cathedral and abandoned after the tumults offers a

sense of the occupations affected. His twenty-seven examples include a pair of

blacksmiths (which implies, perhaps, that Alonso Rodríguez’s motives were not wholly

religious), several cloth merchants, leather workers, and a carpenter as well as a surgeon

and an innkeeper.91 Aguilar’s decree, in the aftermath of the pogrom, that conversos were henceforth ineligible for public office similarly profited the minor nobility as well as the caballeros de cuantía, who saw the pool of applicant for such positions dwindle. Their positions on town councils, in fact, was one of the most general complaints regarding conversos, and this declaration pleased all, from Cabra and other magnates who wanted

Aguilar’s position weakened to the populace who had bought into the rhetoric of converso conspiracies.

The Cofradía de la Caridad as an institution was itself a beneficiary. Palencia described the group as founded solely to act against the conversos, but it predated the events of the 1470s by several decades. It did, however, experience a rapid influx of new members in the late 1460s and early 1470s, and may have acquired its anti-converso

qualities at that time. Based as it was in the church of San Francisco in the heavily- converso San Nicolás de la Ajerquía parish, and likely drawing its members from this and

the adjacent parish of San Pedro, the Caridad’s leadership may have felt itself in

competition with the New Christians in defining the character of the neighborhood.

Moreover, the Caridad was a devotional society dedicated not only to charitable works

91 Nieto Cumplido, “La revuelta,” 43-4, 47, 49; Edwards, “Massacre,” 59.

311 but to improving the moral fiber of its members. The proximity of large numbers of

conversos who might yet have retained Jewish religious practices and certainly had

preserved a strong Judaic communal culture would have struck its members as a

dangerous influence. Proximity can result in similarities, as they well knew, and the idea

of heresy as an infection remained strong in Córdoba as elsewhere on the Granadan

frontier.92 In conducting their processions through the streets of the Ajerquía, the Caridad

not only sought to provoke confrontation, but to embed the idea that it was an Old

Christian neighborhood. The Calle de la Feria was the epicenter of the converso business

community where many of its most successful members had their offices and stalls.

These merchants and other wealthy New Christians lived in Cruz del Rastro. By making

their presence in these areas highly visible, the brothers of the Caridad hoped to not only

displace the conversos but also to replace them. The strategy worked and the decades

after the pogrom saw the Caridad embark upon its building program in the Plaza del

Potro and become the most prominent confraternity in the city, transforming the parish into an Old Christian bastion.

********

The decision to use the interruption of a holy procession as pretext for an assault

was an astute means of gaining widespread Old Christian support. As such, it is a revealing window into the nature of their distrust for conversos. Many scholars have

noted that the Inquisition was more concerned with outward behaviors than inner belief.93

This emphasis, moreover, extended beyond formal religious ceremonies to include the

92 Broadly speaking, proximity and contact does tend to make unlike groups more similar. See Logan et al, “Applying Spatial Thinking,” 15-7. 93 See, for instance, MacKay, “Hispanic-Converso Predicament,” 169-71; Edwards, “Religious Belief and Social Conformity,” 126-7.

312 ways in which recent converts ate, drank and interacted with others, thus emphasizing

social conformity as well as doctrinal orthodoxy. It was, of course, the only approach open to Inquisitors; it is far easier to judge one’s deeds than his or her heart. As ritual actions were central to Islam and Judaism as well as Christianity, moreover, the proper conduct of such actions was seen as a reasonable proxy for adherence to Christian beliefs while retention of behaviors associated with a convert’s former religion implied recidivism. The converso problem therefore centered on ritual gestures as Old Christians,

firm in their conviction that conversos secretly retained Jewish beliefs, were ever

watchful for meaningful ‘slips’: a convert who avoided pork, an improperly-made sign of

the Cross, the casual use of a Hebrew name. Nothing could be attributed to chance, all

gestures bore symbolic overtones, whether intended or not. And so a young girl’s spilling

of water on the statue of Mary could be nothing other than a deliberate and ritualized attack on the Virgin, an insult that, in the context of fears about the conversos’ ties to

Aguilar and their supposed recent ‘arrogance’, held the portent of incipient converso action against the faithful. This was met first with a formal call to arms and then, poetically enough, with a ritualized solution, a reworking of the most sacred of Christian rituals, the remembrance of the Passion.

People do not, as a rule, lightly turn upon their neighbors, even neighbors about whom they harbor deep suspicions or from whose adversity they have much to gain. This was the case in Córdoba, despite a number of related factors that may have inclined the

Old Christians to act against the conversos, including the agrarian depression, ongoing anti-Semitic polemic, and uncertainty over the succession. Although the groundwork for the scapegoating and expulsion of the New Christian population lay in the dislocations

313 engendered by these problems, they proved insufficient on their own. In the event, only a public performance that illustrated the conversos’ perfidy by placing local events in the context of the Passion was able to induce the Old Christians of Córdoba to action. The success of this performance, moreover, was based on its perceptive exploitation of local social and physical contexts. On one level, the choreographers of the procession and the subsequent rumors took full advantage of features unique to the frontier, including a local tradition of defending the faith, the absence of effective monarchical power, and the bando politics that facilitated an alliance between influential nobles and a grassroots religious movement.

The frontier provided a receptive (and perhaps prepared) audience while the social topography of Córdoba isolated the conversos from the occupational, religious, and neighborhood networks that defined public life, leaving them particularly vulnerable to coordinated attacks. Finally, the procession and initial riots played out in specific locations within Córdoba that held multiple associations for residents and intensified their emotional responses to these events. Once released, these emotions led to a horrific wave of violence as the Old Christians lost all inhibitions regarding their converso neighbors.

The brutality of the pogrom should not, however, be seen as evidence of an inexorable hatred of conversos that would have eventually resulted, no matter the trigger, in their expulsion. On the contrary, in revealing long-pent tensions which had not been released in nearly a century, it confirms that such a riot was difficult to spark. The 1473 attack was possible only with a particular confluence of circumstances and the presence of individuals willing to make use of them.

Many of these circumstances, of course, were present throughout the realm and

314 the relationship between Córdoba’s position on the frontier and the unfolding of the

pogrom is illustrated by what happened (or, rather, what did not happen) in other cities.

After his success in Córdoba, Juan Pacheco, the Master of Santiago whom Palencia fingered as the mastermind behind the riots, next attempted to do the same in Segovia, a fortified town north of Toledo that had recently declared for Isabel. In seeking to incite the populace against the New Christians, he used several of the arguments that had proved so effective elsewhere: he alleged that the conversos had bought their way into municipal power, that this was detrimental to the public good, and that they were an alien people bent on undermining the Old Christians. Pacheco, moreover, made the most of the precedent set by the recent pogroms in Andalusia, word of which had reached northern cities, including Segovia, and “excited” the people. It did not work, however, as “in no way could he persuade the Old Christian in Segovia” to turn against the conversos. They responded that the conversos of Andalusia were wholly different than those living in their region, who were known for their piety and had produced some of the most significant churchmen of the time, notably Pablo de Santa María and his son Alfonso de Cartagena.

Forced to abandon his plans for Segovia, Pacheco turned to Toledo, where he met much the same response.94 The Andalusian population, it seems, was more open to such

arguments.

John Edwards has characterized late fifteenth-century Córdoba as dominated by

the frontier, which created a society utterly controlled by the nobles and “organized for

war and taxation.” In this context, he continues, “it was hard for a merchant or an

94 Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ii, 93-4: “excitaron…a muchas poblaciones.” “En ninguna manera podía persuadírselo a los cristianos viejos de Segovia.”

315 industrialist to live, and virtually impossible for a faithful Jew or Muslim.”95 Despite, or

perhaps because of, a century of social and economic success, Córdoba’s conversos found themselves increasingly defined as enemies of the faith and able to do little to transform popular opinion. Attempts to defend themselves through political alliances or, in the last resort, with arms were seen as further proof of their perfidy. Attempts to accept their diminished status were no more successful. Antón de Montoro, in a pitiable passage of his poem to Aguilar, described the lengths to which the conversos might go, and perhaps had gone, in order to be accepted into Christian society: “We’re willing to give

[you] tribute, / be captives and serve. / We’ll be beggers, cuckolds, and faggots… / so that we can live.”96 Like members of all minority groups, Montoro and other Cordoban

conversos had depended on the goodwill and occasional active protection of those in the

majority who bore them no grudge. This support by tolerant Old Christians melted away

in the face of adversity, as Aguilar and others decided on expediency. With the loss of

noble protection, the social organization of Córdoba left them no other avenues of

defense other than barricades and arms.

A religious outlook defined by frontier ideology and dedicated more to the

defense of the faith than any other purpose lent strength to popular resentment of the

conversos’ success.97 For notwithstanding the social, economic, and political dimensions

of the 1473 pogrom, it was ultimately an attack on a religious minority in which

theological understandings of Jews came to the fore, specifically their continued

responsibility for the death of Christ. That is why, despite ongoing war with Granada, it

95 Edwards, “Politics and Ideology,” 302-3. 96 Antón de Montoro, “A don Alonso de Aguilar,” in Cancionero, 294: “que queremos dar tributos, / ser captivos y servir, / pobres, cornudos y putos… / y vivir.” 97 See Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 164-77, 188, for an assessment of contemporary Cordoban religious practices that argues for a relatively lax level of personal devotion combined with a stress on external acts, both charitable works and the overt defense of Christianity.

316 was the converso and Jewish residents of Córdoba, not the Muslims, who bore the brunt of Old Christian anger. Renewed intolerance for Muslims under Christian rule at this time radiated from the core areas of Castile, particularly from those irritated by Enrique IV’s policies, and only gradually wore away at established modes of co-existence at the frontier. But the rejection of Castile’s Jews and conversos, although begun in Toledo in the 1440s, was rooted in attitudes at the periphery, where the need to protect Christianity from real or imagined attacks was deeply felt. Frontier dwellers agreed on the need to end the Muslim political presence in Iberia, although they disagreed on how to put this idea into practice,. Within their own society, however, it was the conversos who posed the greatest threat to the faith. Arguments that acknowledge only secular motives for the anti- converso riot fail to explain its ritual character and its explicit religious content or dismiss these as a functional ‘envelopes’ for other social processes. To do so, however, is to obscure both the beliefs and subsequent actions of Córdoba’s New Christians.

317

VI. MURCIA AND THE BODY OF CHRIST TRIUMPHANT

During the reign of Enrique IV, internal conflicts and a lack of political will had

made a sustained war of conquest against Granada impossible. The king’s brief campaign

in the 1450s was more an attempt to display the trappings of holy war than a serious

effort to displace the Muslim presence in Iberia. Later in his reign, even this was beyond

Enrique’s capabilities as he was forced to seek truces in order to focus on wayward

nobles, leaving the war with Granada, such as it was, in the hands of frontier lords whose

resources or inclinations only occasionally permitted aggressive acts more ambitious than

traditional border raiding. This state of affairs persisted through the 1470s. Even if, as

Alonso de Palencia suggested, Fernando and Isabel held an unshakable resolve to

conquer Granada even before they took the throne in 1474, they were unable to act on

this immediately due to the need to deal with lingering challenges to their authority and

to stabilize the realm even while embroiled in a war with Portugal. The frontier situation

in the early years of their reign, therefore, resembled that of Enrique’s time. There was a

general hardening of noble sentiment against Islam caused in part by a reaction to

Enrique’s policies and a few influential aristocrats, notably Iranzo and Rodrigo Ponce de

León, the Marquis of Cádiz, made energetic attempts to organize an effective campaign explicitly aimed at conquest. For the most part, however, life on the frontier remained as it had been: defined by vacillation and conflicting attitudes toward Islam.

By 1480, however, the Catholic monarchs had decisively ended the threat of the

318 Portuguese pretender and settled the most serious of Castile’s internal disputes. In particular, they limited the power and autonomy of the nobility, rationalized the royal administration through the Cortes of Toledo, and brought anti-converso feeling under their control by establishing the Inquisition.1 These acts, while not completely or

immediately successful, permitted the rulers to turn their attention and the resources of

the realm to the conquest of Granada and a final end to the reconquest. To that purpose,

they entrusted Diego de Merlo, the asistente (chief magistrate) of Seville, with the task of

inciting a war with Granada. Merlo mounted an expedition to Ronda that failed to

achieve any significant gains. In response, however, a Granadan force under the personal

command of Abū al-Hasan ‘Ali (or Muley Hacén, as the Castilians knew him) captured

the fortress of Zahara on 27 December 1481, using it as a base for further raids. This

galvanized the Catholic monarchs and the nobility. While Fernando traveled to Córdoba

to take personal control of the army, a coalition of frontier lords, including Ponce de

León and Alonso de Aguilar, captured the critical fortress of Alhama, located between

the cities of Granada and Málaga, and repulsed a Muslim attempt to retake it. This began

what would be a costly and laborious, but also a sustained and ultimately successful,

campaign.2

The newly confident and aggressive pose toward the Muslims of Granada inspired

1 For the early years of Fernando and Isabel’s reign and their efforts to consolidate their rule, see John Edwards, The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474-1520 (Oxford, 2000), esp. 1-67. For the resolutions of the Cortes of Toledo in 1480, see Juan Manuel Carretero Zamora, Corpus documental de las Cortes de Castilla (1475-1517) (Toledo, 1993). 2 On the start of the war, see Alfonso de Palencia, Historia de la guerra de Granada, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia, BAE 267 (Madrid, 1975), 88ff; Fernando del Pulgar, Crónica de los reyes Católicos, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 5-6. 2 vols. (Madrid, 1943), ii, 3-5. There are a number of scholarly accounts of the Granadan war. See especially Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, Castilla y la conquista de Granada (Valladolid, 1967); and Luis Suárez Fernández, Los Reyes Católicos: el tiempo de la Guerra de Granada (Madrid, 1989). Summaries of the war’s progress can be found in Edwards, Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 101-40; and Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250-1516, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1976- 1978), ii, 367-93.

319 new approaches to representing ideal relations between members of different religious groups. Attempts such as Iranzo’s to sway public opinion toward war by predicting future harmony between Old and New Christians were no longer relevant for a populace that had lost interest in welcoming converts to Christianity. Nor did the enemies of the conversos find further attempts to rouse public indignation necessary or expedient. The

Inquisition had effectively suborned the pogrom as the accepted means of preventing religious recidivism and of limiting the social influence of New Christians. This is not to suggest, however, that residents of the frontier broke cleanly with their past culture of amiable enmity or that there was a broad consensus regarding the war with Granada or the proper place of converts and religious minorities in ‘Christian’ society. If there was, as has been often argued, a broad shift from a cultural paradigm of convivencia to one of national unity, its progress was slow and uneven and its impetus from above.

Undoubtedly, many embraced this new emphasis on conformity and exclusion. But it is equally certain that others did not immediately or entirely reject their former neighbors, business partners, and friends.

Ultimately, the crown cast out the Jews and later the Muslims, negating the potentially disruptive influence of religious minorities without the need to rely on the divided minds of its subjects. During the 1480s, however, such sweeping and absolute solutions were not an option. The war with Granada was persecuted under the auspices of well-respected monarchs and with the full support of the nobility. Yet the backing of the public was still required to conduct an expensive and long-lasting campaign that threatened, even if successful, to destroy traditional modes of life on the frontier. To that end, municipal concejos presented exuberant celebrations of victories that explicitly

320 linked the progress of the war to popular religious practices. Such festivities proclaimed a vision of a Castile that was triumphant and unabashedly Christian, a society in which

Jews, Muslims, and recent converts would have, at best, a tenuous position.

This chapter examines the galas conducted in Murcia to commemorate the conquests of Málaga in 1487 and Granada in 1492. The highlights of these events, arranged by the civic authorities and financed at public expense, were the juegos de

Corpus, the ‘mysteries’ or short plays customarily reserved for the festival of Corpus

Christi. As one of the most popular celebrations of the ecclesiastic calendar in Murcia,

Corpus was usually marked with grand and expensive processions. The Actas capitulares list the extensive preparations required for the suitable decoration of the streets, the staging of the mysteries, and the attire of the participants. The Murcian presentation of the festival was also notable, throughout the fifteenth century, for the careful manner in which it approached the diverse population of the city. Although Corpus acted as a pretext for Christians to affirm their faith in a public and ostentatious manner deliberately calculated to remind their Muslim and Jewish neighbors than Murcia was a Christian city, religious minorities were generally included in the festivities. All members of the civic community could, and often did, participate actively in the processions and plays whose fame was such that it often attracted an influx of visitors from the heavily Muslim countryside.

On one level, the use of Corpus mysteries to commemorate key victories against

Granada was a matter of pragmatism. The concejo needed to organize an appropriately extravagant gala on short notice and already had significant experience in arranging the

Corpus events. Moreover, the decorations, props, and performers already existed; rather

321 than create an entirely new display, they used what was to hand. Even if it this was the

primary motivation, however, it is unlikely that the concejo was unaware of the potential

significance of their choice. For in symbolically linking the veneration of Christ’s body to

military victories, they declared, in a visceral manner no formal proclamation could

replicate, that these conquests had a religious significance. More meaningful than any

temporal success, these were triumphs over the enemies of Christ. The association between the conquests and the celebration of Corpus Christi, moreover, ensured that the annual holiday would henceforth serve as a reminder of these historic occasions and of the dubious position of the Jews and now-defeated Muslims in Christian society.

The chapter begins with a brief account of the Granadan war and fifteenth-century

Murcian society, with a focus on the position of religious minorities in the city. Murcia and its surroundings were situated on the eastern end of the frontier, creating an isolation unequaled by any other region in Castile. As Juan Torres Fontes has noted, it would be more appropriate to think of Murcia’s border with Granada as only one of three or even

four frontiers that prevented its full incorporation into Castilian life while fostering a

constant sense of insecurity.3 The resulting segregation from the rest of Castile fostered

significant populations of Muslims and Jews while sheltering them, for a time, from the

anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic sentiments that characterized other sectors of the frontier in

the 1460s and 1470s. We then turn to Murcia’s celebration of Corpus Christi, the most

elaborate event on its liturgical calendar. The perceived importance of Corpus Christi is

illustrated by the immense sums dedicated to its celebration, even during times of

economic hardship. Its main attraction was a series of brief plays (known also as the

3 Juan Torres Fontes, “La guerra de Granada. La documentación de los archivos murcianos,” in Juan Torres Fontes, La frontera murciano-granadina (Murcia, 2003), 489-90.

322 games or mysteries of Corpus) that presented biblical passages and saints’ lives for the

entertainment and edification of the audience. As these plays were transposed to other milieus during the last part of the century, it is critical to define how they were experienced and what they meant to the populace. We will also consider the representation of Muslims and Jews in the plays and accompanying processions. Finally, we look at the galas occasioned by the capture of Ronda, Málaga, and Granada, placing

them within the context of other moments in which religious holidays and military

victories were linked. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the use of Corpus

imagery on these occasions bore a message of Christian triumphalism and attempted to

define the place of Jews and Muslims in Murcian society.

********

In many respects, fifteenth-century Murcia was a typical Castilian frontier city,

subject to social and political tensions akin to those found elsewhere. Its administrative

structure, like that of Córdoba, Jaén, and most other Castilian towns, was centered on a

concejo composed of the veinticuatros and often led, in the fifteenth century, by a crown-

appointed corregidor. The lower levels of municipal bureaucracy included the council of

jurados and a host of functionaries: alcaldes, scribes, tax collectors, and the like.4 At the same time, true power in Murcia through much of this period was held by local magnates, most notably the powerful Fajardo family, through the office of frontier adelantado.

4 The structure and functioning of the Murcian concejo has been more extensively studied than that of Córdoba or Jaén, due to the extent of the surviving Actas capitalures. For overviews, see Juan Torres Fontes, “El concepto concejil murciano de limosna en el siglo XV,” in A pobreza e a assistência aos pobres na Península Ibérica durante a Idade Média : actas das 1as Jornadas luso-espanholas de História Medieval, 25-30 de setembro de 1972, 2 vols. (Lisbon, 1973), ii, 839-872; Juan Abellán Pérez, “El concejo murciano de junio de 1429 a junio de 1430: su estructura,” MMM 5 (1980): 121-58; Francisco Veas Arteseros, “Dinámica del concejo de Murcia (1420-1440): Los regidores,” MMM 9 (1982): 87-117; and María Belén Piqueras García, “Funcionamiento del concejo murciano (1462-1474),” MMM 14 (1987- 1988): 9-47. On the transition to crown control of municipal authority, see Denis Menjot, Murcie castillane. Une ville au temps de la frontière (1243-milieu du XVe s.), 2 vols. (Madrid, 2002), ii, 937-77.

323 Struggles between the Fajardos and the rival Manuel and Calvillo families, however, resulted in bando politics that involved, through familial and client ties, much of the population and served to destabilize Murcian society.5 By the late 1470s, in fact, faction

fighting had become so problematic that King Fernando ordered all bandos and

confederations to disband on pain of a 20,000 mrs. fine and loss of public office.6

As a frontier city, Murcia was subject to the characteristic tensions of the

Castilian periphery. Although, like Córdoba, it functioned more as a rear base for military operations against the Nasrids than as a frontier citadel, its people lived in a near-constant state of physical insecurity.7 Despite a number of truces, many of long duration, intermittent skirmishing continued throughout the period, leaving little faith that agreements to cease fighting would endure or be honored.8 In March 1475, for instance, the Catholic Monarchs ordered Pedro Fajardo to ready his forces for war. A scant ten days later, they wrote to inform him that a truce had been signed, but ordered him to keep arms and horses ready in the event of renewed hostilities.9 During the same month, the crown responded to a petition by Murcian Jews and Moors to end the requirement that they contribute to the maintenance of soldiers and arms by noting that the city was “so

5 Juan Manuel Moyano Martínez, “Familia y poder político en la Murcia bajomedieval (siglos XIV y XV),” MMM 17 (1992): 9-41; Juan Torres Fontes, “Los Fajardo en los siglos XIV y XV,” MMM 4 (1978): 107- 78; idem, “Murcia y Don Juan Manuel. Tensiones y conflictos,” in Don Juan Manuel. VII centenario (Murcia, 1982), 353-83; idem, Fajardo el Bravo (Murcia, 2001); María de los Llanos Martínez Carrillo, Manueles y Fajardos: la crisis bajomedieval en Murcia (Murcia, 1985); and Menjot, Murcie castillane, ii, 984-1011. 6 AMM, CR 1478-1488, f. 49r-v: 1479 noviembre 14. Also published in Andrea Moratalla Collado, Documentos de los Reyes Católicos: 1475-1491. Colección de documentos para la historia del reino de Murcia 19 (Murcia, 2003), doc. 172, 354-5. 7 The town of Lorca acted as Murcia’s first line of defense, as Priego did for Córdoba. See Francisco Veas Arteseros, “Lorca, base militar murciana frente a Granada en el reinado de Juan II (1406-1454),” MMM 5 (1980): 159-88; and Juan Torres Fontes, Xiquena, castillo de la frontera (Murcia, 1960) 8 Menjot offers a concise summary of hostilities in the Murcian sector of the frontier in Murcie castillane, i, 222-253. Juan Torres Fontes has written extensively on frontier truces and hostilities. A number of these essays are collected in his La frontera murciano-granadina (Murcia, 2003). See especially “La actividad bélica granadina en la frontera murciana (ss. XIII-XV), 11-44; and “Las relaciones castellano-granadinas de 1475 a 1478,” 417-72. 9 AMM, CR 1453-78, ff. 223r-v: 1475 marzo 15; AMM, CR 1453-78, f. 223r: 1475 marzo 26.

324 near to the Moors, the enemies of our holy Catholic faith” that such a request could not be entertained.10

This attempt to lift the burdens of military obligation was not limited to the

Jewish and Muslim residents of the city, however. Indeed, the standard requirements for military service and division of the population into hidalgos, caballeros de cuantía, and peones, so representative of the Castilian ‘society organized for war’, were viewed by many in Murcia, as elsewhere, as burdensome and were often ignored.11 And, as

elsewhere, trans-frontier accommodations were the rule rather than the exception with the

full set of frontier institutions, including the alcaldes entre los cristianos y los moros and the rastreros, serving to dispel nascent feuds. In times of truce, a robust trade between

Murcia and Granada produced significant tax revenues while smuggling and illicit trading thrived during both peace and war.12 Such activities supplemented an economy based, like those of Andalusian cities, primarily on agriculture, ranching, and cloth production.13

At the same time, Murcia and its surrounding territories were not mirror images of

Andalusian frontier cities. The region’s maritime location opened trading possibilities

10 AMM, CR 1453-78, ff. 223v-224r: 1475 marzo 14: “tan çercana a los moros enemigos de nuestra santa fe católica.” The requirement that Jews and Muslims maintain horses and arms dated from 1473, AMM, AC 1473-1474, f. 110r: 1474 marzo 15. See also Juan Torres Fontes, “La incorporación a la caballería de los judíos murcianos en el s. XV,” Murgetana 27 (1967): 5-14, esp. doc. 2, 13-14. 11 Menjot, Murcie castillane, i, 171-6; ii, 731-3, 763-76. On frontier relations in general, see Juan Francisco Jiménez Alcázar, “El hombre y la frontera: Murcia y Granada en época de Enrique IV.” MMM 17 (1992): 77-96. 12 Juan Torres Fontes, Instituciones y sociedad en la frontera murciano-granadina (Murcia, 2004); Menjot, Murcie castillane, i, 584-605; José García Antón, “La tolerancia religiosa en la frontera de Murcia y Granada en los últimos tiempos del reino nazarí,” Murgetana 57 (1980): 133-43; Moratalla Collado, Documentos de los Reyes Católicos, doc. 55, 99-100. 13 On the Murcian economy, see Menjot, Murcie castillane, i, 484-644; Juan Torres Fontes, “Los cultivos murcianos en el siglo XV,” Murgetana 37 (1971): 89-96; idem, El Regadío murciano en la primera mitad del siglo XIV (Murcia, 1975); Ángel Luis Molina Molina, El campo de Murcia en el siglo XV (Murcia, 1989); Isabel García Díaz, La huerta de Murcia en el siglo XIV: (propiedad y producción) (Murcia, 1990); María Martínez Martínez, La industria del vestido en Murcia: siglos XIII-XV (Murcia, 1988); and eadem, La cultura del aceite en Murcia: siglos XIII-XV (Murcia, 1995).

325 throughout the eastern Mediterranean, creating a more diverse economy but also leaving

it vulnerable to piracy and seaborne raiders.14 More significantly, Murcia’s demographics

differed markedly from that of any other region in Castile. This was, in part, due to the

unusual circumstances of the region’s incorporation into the kingdom. Although it had

been conquered by Castile in the 1260s, the Christians who initially settled the area came

mainly from Catalonia and Provence. After three decades under Castilian rule, moreover,

Murcia briefly became part of the Crown of Aragon until the treaties of Torellas and

Elche returned it to Castile in the early fourteenth century. The result was a Christian

settlement even less complete than that in other sectors of the frontier and an urban

population more closely linked culturally and economically with Aragon and especially

Valencia than with the rest of Castile.

Moreover, the Muslim and Jewish communities of Murcia dwarfed those of most

Andalusian cities. The incomplete settlement of rural Murcia left intact a sizable Muslim

peasantry which was to play a significant role in the agrarian economy throughout the

medieval period while the Arrixaca morería in the city of Murcia housed Muslim artisans

whose contributions were similarly important (see figures 18 and 19) This urban

community varied in size over the course of the fifteenth century. By mid-century a long-

term decline due to poverty, intermarriage, plague, floods, and political instability had

pushed it to a nadir of fifteen households. It recovered somewhat in the 1470s and 1480s,

only to decline again with an outbreak of plague in 1489. The concejo’s subsequent

request that the monarchs relocate some Muslims from newly-conquered territorities,

14 Ángel Luis Molina Molina, “Mercaderes genoveses en Murcia durante la época de los Reyes Católicos (1475-1516),” MMM 2 (1976): 277-312; Juan Torres Fontes, “Relaciones comerciales entre los reinos de Mallorca y Murcia en el siglo XIV,” Murgetana 36 (1971): 5-20. Interior cities, notably Córdoba but also Jaén, hosted communities of Italian merchants but these were much smaller than that of Murcia.

326 made in January 1490, underscores the contemporary perception that a thriving Muslim community was a necessity for Murcia’s continued growth and prosperity.15

Although tolerated for this contribution, the Muslims of Murcia were often caught in the middle of frontier hostilities, suffering depredations at the hands of both sides and widely mistrusted by both Christians who questioned their ties to Granadan Muslims and

Granadans who did not understand their continued willingness to live under Christian

rule. In 1477, for instance, a major Granadan force entered Murcian territory and forcibly

carried away a large number of Mudéjares, leaving some rural areas, such as the Val de

Ricote, effectively depopulated. When some of these Mudéjares sought to return to their

lands, they found themselves resented by the local Christians. Ultimately, it took a royal

order, written on account of the Mudéjares’ economic importance, to bring an end to

these reprisals.16 Yet royal protection of the Murcian Mudéjares had limits. During the

Granadan war, suspicions that they provided aid to Granadan raiders (moros

almogaveres) mounted and led to regulations prohibiting them from carrying arms or

having Muslims from Granada in their homes. This stemmed from their perceived

tendency to provide the almogaveres with weapons and secretly lodging raiding parties.17

The Jewish population similarly occupied a niche in Murcian society that was economically essential while socially vulnerable. Although there is little extent

15 On the position of the Mudéjares in Murcian society, see María del Carmen Veas Arteseros, Mudéjares murcianos: un modelo de crisis social (s. XIII-XV) (Cartagena, 1992), 29-41; as well as Ángel Luis Molina Molina, “Datos sobre sociodemografía Murciana a fines de la Edad Media (1475-1515),” in Anales de la Universidad de Murcia, Filosofía y letras 36 (1977-1978), 176-82; idem, La sociedad murciana en el tránsito de la edad media a la moderna (Murcia, 1996), 65-84; Juan Torres Fontes, “La puerta de la traición,” Murgetana 37 (1971): 83-8; idem, “Los mudéjares murcianos: economía y sociedad,” in IV Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo: Economía (Teruel, 1993), 365-394; and idem, “Los mudéjares murcianos en la Edad Media,” in III Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo: Economía (Teruel, 1986), 55-66. 16 AMM, CR 1453-1478, f. 264v: 1477 junio 25 (also published in Moratalla Collado, Documentos de los Reyes Católicos, doc. 124, 267-8). 17 AMM, CR 1478-1488, ff. 107v.-108r: 1483 mayo 29 (also published in Ródolfo Bosque Carceller, Murcia y los Reyes Católicos [Murcia, 1994], doc. 8, 217).

327 documentary evidence from the time and there is some disagreement among historians, it

appears that the 1391 pogrom against Iberian Jews, so devastating to the Jewish communities throughout Castile and Aragon, did not extend to Murcia or, at the least, spared most of the city’s Jewish inhabitants. Thus, while Andalusian cities saw mass conversions to Christianity in the wake of these attacks and a new population of conversos, Murcia’s Jewish community remained vibrant well into the reign of the

Catholic Monarchs.18 It was a large community by Castilian standards, perhaps dwarfed

only by those of Seville and Toledo. While precise figures are lacking, scholars have estimated the Jewish population of Murcia as ranging from seven hundred fifty to two thousand, a significant enclave in a city housing, at most, ten to twelve thousand residents.19 Nor were the Jews an invisible minority here. Even in the 1470s, in the wake of the anti-converso uprisings throughout much of Castile, a number of Murcian Jews held prominent positions in the municipal and regional administrations.

In 1476, for instance, the crown appointed Gabriel Israel, a Jewish vecino of

Murcia and an interpreter and scholar of Arabic letters, its herald on business transacted in Murcia with local and Granadan Muslims.20 That Israel enjoyed royal favor was made

clear through a letter intervening in a lawsuit involving him in Lorca. Fernando and

Clemente de Henares, residents of Lorca, had apparently seized two of Israel’s vineyards

there and used them for their own gain. Queen Isabel’s letter, sent to the attending

18 Much has been written on Murcia’s Jews. For overviews with extensive bibliographic notes, see the documents collected in Luis Rubio García, Los judíos de Murcia en la baja Edad Media (1350-1500). Colección documental, 3 vols. (Murcia, 1992-1994); as well as Francisco Veas Arteseros, Los judíos de Lorca en la Baja Edad Media (Murcia, 1992). On the particular period during and after the 1391 pogroms, see Juan Torres Fontes, “Los judíos murcianos a fines del siglo XIV y comienzos del XV,” MMM 8 (1981): 55-117. 19 Molina Molina, La sociedad murciana, 54; Menjot, Murcie castillane, i, 331-3, 345-7. 20 AMM, CR, ff. 255v.-256r: 1476-abril 18.

328 magistrates, was a pointed hint that their ruling on the matter be in Israel’s favor.21 Don

David (or Daví) Aben Alfahar, another Jewish vecino of Murcia, enjoyed at least as much influence. As a wealthy landlord and tax collector, he had numerous dealings with the municipal concejo as well as royal representatives.22 Murcia was also an attractive locale

for Jewish merchants of less exalted status as it offered numerous opportunities beyond

those to which Jews were traditionally limited, such as medicine and moneylending. The

constant frontier skirmishing and especially the extensive campaigns of the 1480s created

a market for provisioners in which the Jews of Murcia and Lorca played a prominent

role.23 Many worked in trades as well with Jewish artisans heavily involved in the wool

industry as well as in metalworking.24

All this is not to say that the Jews of Murcia enjoyed an existence free from the discrimination faced by their co-religionists elsewhere in Iberia. Extensive legislation imposed taxes on them, limited their employment opportunities, and erected social barriers, such as the prohibition against sexual relations with Christians, which clarified their status as inferior or , at best, as outsiders.25 Jews, moreover, had been physically

segregated from their Christian neighbors since the city’s thirteenth-century conquest and

Alfonso X’s decree that no Murcian Jew should live amongst Christians, instead residing

only in the judería set aside for them (see figure 20). This requirement seems to have

been short lived and Juan Torres Fontes, for one, has argued that such legal disabilities

21 Moratalla Collado, Documentos de los Reyes Católicos, doc. 82, 148-50. 22 AMM, CR 1453-1478, ff. 233v.-234v., 258v.-259r., 260v.-261r., 262r.-v. See also Moratalla Collado, Documentos de los Reyes Católicos, docs. 21, 38, 83, 85, 95, 117, 119, 143, 151, 176, 194, 204, 206, 215, 230, 286, 288, 293, 421, 425, and 426. 23 Jiménez Alcázar, “El hombre y la frontera,” 85-7. 24 Rubio García, Los judíos de Murcia, i, 15-32. 25 See, for instance, the case of Mosé Cohen, who was imprisoned for purchased a Christian slave, despite his protestations that he had reasonably thought her a Muslim. Jiménez Alcázar, “El hombre y la frontera,” 87; and Juan Torres Fontes, Estampas medievales (Murcia, 1988), 482-5.

329 faded after the end of the thirteenth century.26 By the late fifteenth century, however,

external trends led to new efforts to separate Murcia’s religious minorities from its

Christian population. In 1481, the crown, contending that continued proximity between

Christians, Muslims, and Jews would result in great damage and inconvenience for all,

ordered Juan de la Hoz to organize separate living areas for Jews and Muslims according

to the laws passed in the 1480 Cortes of Toledo.27

The segregation of Murcia’s Jews was but one step in a series of attempts to

reinstate or more strenuously enforce restrictions on the community. In 1473, the year of

anti-converso pogroms, for instance, the Murcian concejo noted that physical

cohabitation was both an “unpleasant situation” and a “bad example” and ordered that all

Jews living outside the boundaries of the old judería should move back within them.28

Earlier that year, just a few days after the Córdoba riots has raged out of control, the

concejo passed a series of other limits on Jews, including the provision that no Jew should serve as legal counsel for a Christian, or vice versa.29 Even so, the legal and social

disabilities faced by Murcian Jews in the 1470s and 1480s must be seen in the contexts of

a general policy of protection on the part of both the municipal concejo and local church

authorities.30 Together with the region’s relative isolation from the rest of Castile, their policies seem to have prevented the overt physical violence seen elsewhere in the

kingdom.

26 Juan Torres Fontes, “Los judíos murcianos en el siglo XIII,” Murgetana 16 (1962): 5-20. 27 AMM, CR 1478-1488; ff. 55r.-56r: 1481 abril 24 (also published in Torres Fontes, D. Pedro Fajardo, pp. 301-4); and ff. 64v.-65r: 1481 agosto 27. On this issue, see also Juan Torres Fontes, “La judería murciana en la época de los Reyes Católicos,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Historia Medieval, ser. 3 (1993): 177-228. 28 AMM, AC 1473-74, f. 75r: 20 noviembre 1473: “cosa fea... mal ejenplo.” 29 AMM, AC 1474-75, f. 167r: 20 marzo 1473. 30 On relations between church authorities and Jewish communities in the region, see Francisco Reyes Marsilla de Pascua, “Los judíos y el concejo catedralicio de Murcia en el siglo XV,” MMM 15 (1989): 55- 84.

330 Murcia’s Muslims and Jews may have had reason to hope that the wave of new restrictions would be fleeting and that their traditional protections would continue to insulate them from outright violence. Indeed, Murcia had a history of periodic legal attacks on its Jews that soon faded. The most recent of these came in the aftermath of

Saint Vincent Ferrer’s preaching tour of Castile in 1411-1412.31 Ferrer’s visit to Murcia

and its environs, made at the invitation of Pablo de Santa María, Bishop of Cartagena

(himself a converso), lasted from 19 January to 25 February 1411 and included at least

thirty public sermons. These talks focused on the Apocalypse, and Ferrer spoke

extensively on the coming of the Antichrist, the end of the world, and the final judgment.

He appealed to the people to prepare their souls for these imminent events by adopting

immediate and wide-ranging reforms.

In response to his preachings, municipals concejos throughout the region passed a

series of measures meant to improve public morals. The new restrictions were, like

Ferrer’s sermons, hardly unique. They included prohibitions against swearing,

blasphemy, gambling, and witchcraft as well as attempts to limit faction fighting and

bring some popular festivities under tighter control. The clergy was ordered to limit their

contact with women and to teach parishioners some basic prayers. In addition to this push

for social discipline, however, Ferrer emphasized the importance of converting Jews and

Muslims to Christianity, arguing that their presence lay at the root of many of the other

social problems. This, too, led to a municipal legislative program and the Murcian

concejo, on 24 March 1411, passed a number of ordinances directed at the social isolation

and eventual conversion, of the city’s religious minorities.

Many of the restrictions emphasized physical separation. Jews and Muslims could

31 See chapter two, 50-1.

331 no longer own property outside the judería or morería; any real estate they currently possessed must be sold within one month. Christians were not to cohabitate with Jews or

Muslims, attend their weddings, or enter the ghettos for any purpose. Those Christians who currently maintained places of business in the judería or morería would be relocated to new facilities elsewhere in the city. Other regulations had the further purpose of undermining the economic role and social status of these groups. Not only were Jews and

Christians forbidden to sell wine or meat from each other, but Jews were no longer permitted to own pharmacies or to practice surgery or medicine among the Christian population. Still other laws, such as that directing Christians to no longer light fires or bring food to Jews on the Sabbath, were no doubt intended to stress the religious differences between the faiths. They had the additional, and not unwelcome, effect of making Jews’ lives more difficult. That all of this was directed at the ultimate conversion of these troublesome communities is emphasized by the first of the new rules, prohibiting those who had already converted from returning to their old religion.32

Taken as a whole, these legal disabilities posed a significant threat to the long-

term viability of the Jewish and Muslim communities within Murcia. If stringently

enforced, they would encourage many to convert and leave behind these debilitating limits on social and economic life. This, in fact, was the case in a number of towns and cities elsewhere in Castile that passed similar legislative programs in response to Ferrer’s preaching and the impulses he represented. The kingdom as a whole saw a wave of conversions similar to the one that followed the 1391 pogroms that in many cases

32 AMM, AC 1410-1411, ff. 146v.-147v: 24 marzo 1411; Ángel Luis Molina Molina, “Estampas medievales murcianas. Desde la romántica caballeresca, caza y fiesta, a la predicación, procesión y romería,” in Fiestas, juegos y espectáculos en la España medieval. Actas del VII Curso de Cultura Medieval, celebrado en Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia) del 18 al 21 de Septiembre de 1995 (Aguilar de Campoo, 1999), 55-6; idem, Estudios sobre la vida cotidiana (ss. XIII-XVI) (Murcia, 2003), 133-4.

332 resulted in the dissolution of already-weakened communities. In Murcia, however, efforts

to implement the new ordinances were half-hearted, short lived, or both. This permitted

the Jewish and Muslim communities to thrive for several more decades.

By the 1480s, however, Murcia was no longer as isolated from the rest of Castile

as it had been for much of the century. The Catholic Monarchs’ efforts to impose

effective royal control throughout the kingdom and especially on its frontier regions had

already proved successful. The war with Granada, moreover, was fought as an integrated

campaign under royal oversight. This limited noble autonomy while bringing Murcian

troops into contact with contingents from other parts of the realm and thus potentially opening the region to anti-Semitic discourses from elsewhere. When the concejo and royal representatives began renewed efforts to impose physical and social separation, the protective influences that had hitherto sheltered Murcia’s Jews and Muslims lacked their former strength. The very success of the Granadan war, moreover, eroded these communities economic importance. The anticipated end of the frontier meant that the need to provision armies and garrisons, still critical in the 1480s, would soon be lessened.

The cessation of Granada’s ability to mount raids on Murcian territory helped to open the land to settlers from the north and created a push to displace Muslim peasants.

By the end of the decade, with Málaga conquered and Granada besieged, Murcian

Jews and Muslims were no longer seen as economically relevant or deserving of protection. Instead, they were viewed as remnants of the past and symbols of the defeated. They were also no longer real threats to a triumphant and invigorated Christian population. Even so, given the new emphasis on a homogenous and Christian society, they remained aberrations who espoused strange ideas and were therefore a spiritual

333 contagion which might infect the Christian community. They were unwelcome but yet not enemies. Irrelevant but still the focus of much attention. And so without directly attacking them, the Christians of Murcia sought to emphasize that Jews and Muslims were not really part of the community but outsiders who could, at best, play only a marginal role in society. One means of doing so was, of course, to place legal restrictions on these groups. Public performances, however, offered Christians the opportunity to celebrate their own religion while displaying its power to those outsiders. The feast of

Corpus Christi, the most elaborate and popular event in fifteenth-century Murcia, proved an ideal forum for expressing this vision of an exclusively Christian society.

********

Corpus Christi was a relatively new feast, having been added to the liturgical calendar only in 1264. It celebrated the sacrament of the Eucharist and resulted from early thirteenth century debates on the nature of the miracle of transubstantiation, which had been defined by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Philosophical and theological discussions of the seemingly contradictory ideas regarding simultaneous physical and spiritual transformations of the Host were reflected by popular fervor centered on the sacrament.33 This religious enthusiasm was inspired in part by the relatively new practice of elevating the bread and wine during Mass so that the faithful could see and venerate them and in part by social and economic dislocations that led people to see the Eucharist as a shared symbol of faith and unity. It was expressed in a number of ways, including miraculous visions of Christ within the Host. The most influential visions were those experienced by Juliana of Mont Cornillon, an Augustinian nun living in Liège. In the

33 Miri Rubin, “The Eucharist and the Construction of Christian Identities,” in Culture and History, 1350- 1600, ed. David Aers (Detroit, 1992), 43-63.

334 visions, which took place over several decades, Christ asked her to petition for a new feast dedicated solely to celebrating the miracle of the Eucharist. Although she long delayed, Juliana eventually brought the visions to the attention of her confessor and then campaigned for the establishment of the feast. It was instituted in the diocese of Liège in

1246 and eventually formerly adopted by the Church through Pope Urban IV’s 1264 Bull

Transiturus de hoc mundo.

The new feast, despite the endorsements of the pope and of church luminaries such as (who wrote the office for the feast), did not immediately attract much attention. Pope Clement V confirmed Urban’s bull in 1312, but it was John XXII who put it into practice, formally establishing its date and instituting a devotional procession as a key aspect of its celebration. From that point forward, Corpus Christi grew rapidly in popularity, becoming, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one of the most important outward manifestations of popular religious feeling.34 In Castile,

Corpus was certainly celebrated in some locales by the late fourteenth century and in most larger towns by the fifteenth. In Murcia, archival evidence indicates that a procession was conducted regularly at least by 1406, and perhaps earlier, with a commemorative procession.35 At this point, the procession was most likely a relatively

34 On the origins and early adoption of the feast, the urban contexts of the Eucharistic veneration in which it originated, and the influence of new forms of female religiosity on Juliana of Mont Cornillon’s visions, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), 164-212; Barbara R. Walters, Vincent Corrigan, and Peter T. Ricketts, The Feast of Corpus Christi (University Park, PA, 2006), xv-54. 35 The text of the first mention of Corpus processions in Murcia indicates an ongoing, rather than a new, festival. From 1406 on, mentions of the procession in the Actas capitulares occur nearly every year. Juan Barceló Jiménez, Historia del teatro en Murcia (Murcia, 1980), 15, n. 24: “Item, que ningún clérico ni sacristán que non preste vestimenta alguna que sea de la Iglesia para ningunos, salvo sinon fuesen juegos de la Iglesia o a la procesión de Corpus Cristi e otras procesiones semejantes.” See also María Martínez Martínez, “Gastos del concejo lorquino para el Corpus de 1472,” in Estudios románicas 6 (1987-1989): 1688. For an example of Corpus festivities elsewhere in Castile, see Antonio Romero Abao, “La fiesta del Corpus Christi en Sevilla en el siglo XV,” in La religiosidad popular, ed. María Jesús Buxó i Rey, Salvador Rodríguez Becerra, and León Carlos Álvarez y Santaló. 3 vols (Seville, 1989), iii, 19-30.

335 simple affair focused on the liturgical elements of the feast.

Over the course of the fifteenth century, however, it would become progressively

more complex and ostentatious, involving secular and clerical processions, a series of plays mounted on moving carts known as the ‘games’ or ‘mysteries’ of Corpus, a resplendent banquet for municipal elites, and even, on occasion, bullfights. Its essential purposes were those for which Juliana of Mont Cornillon had campaigned: Christian faith and unity. But other messages were expressed as well: it proclaimed the wealth of a city that could present such a flamboyant display and confirmed the social order through spatial hierarchies, not only of participants but also of spectators.36 It highlighted the

status of the official church and instructed the faithful through educational displays while emphasizing to non-Christians that their place in society was provisional and marginal.

Christians in fifteenth-century Murcia viewed their particular celebration of

Corpus Christi as an essential statement of their corporate identity and acted vigorously to ensure that it be conducted in an appropriate manner. It required the active participation of members of all social strata, coordination between the municipal concejo

and the cathedral chapter or cabildo, and, above all, money. The economics of Corpus

were a concern throughout the century, with the concejo assuming responsibility for most

of the expenses. These included wages for musicians to accompany the civic banner, the

cadalhalsos installed along the Calle de la Trapería from which local notables viewed the

procession, banquets, the cleaning and decorating of streets along the route, as well as

sundry other costs. In addition, the concejo regularly provided financial assistance to the

cathedral cabildo, which was responsible for the procession itself. This subvention was

initially quite small, ranging from one to two hundred mrs. from 1420, when it was first

36 For the spatial arrangement of spectators, see chapter 2, 42-5.

336 mentioned in the documents, to the early 1460s.37

From that point, however, these costs increased dramatically, indicating the extent to which the concejo saw Corpus as a spectacle closely linked with municipal honor. In

1462, it sent three hundred sixty mrs. to the cabildo; by 1465, the number had risen to

five hundred mrs. and, in 1469, to one thousand mrs. By the end of the century, the

concejo’s direct contribution to Church expenses, in addition to the costs of their own areas of responsibility, was four thousand five hundred mrs.38 The rise in costs was due

to several factors. Chief among these was the desire to present a greater number of ever

more elaborate mysteries. This impulse coincided, however, with a series of economic

crises occasioned by crop failures and currency devaluations and meant that the concejo

struggled greatly to raise the necessary funds. The regidors approached the problem with

a variety of strategies. In 1469, for instance, they delegated half of their contribution to

Murcia’s Jewish community: “Furthermore, they ordered and commanded that the Jews

give and pay, as an aid to the games of Corpus, five hundred maravedís, three hundred to

the cathedral and two hundred for the games [sponsored by the monastery] of San

Francisco.”39

This was a stopgap measure, however, and two years later the concejo imposed a

special tax in order to cover the expenses of Corpus. This was to be organized jointly by

municipal and church authorities and the concejo “ordered and commanded the regidors

Juan Tallente and bachelor Antón Martínez de Cascales to speak with the members of the

37 AMM, AC 1419-1420, f. 76v: 1 junio 1420; Luis Rubio García, La procesión de Corpus en el Siglo XV en Murcia (Murcia, 1987), 101-7; Juan José Capel Sánchez, La vida lúdica en la Murcia bajomedieval (Murcia, 2000), 94-5. 38 AMM, AC 1461-1462, f. 80v: 1 junio 1462; 1464-1465, f. 122v: 8 mayo 1464; 1468-1469, f. 108r: 20 mayo 1469; 1494-1496, f. 179r: 26 mayo 1496; Rubio, Procesión, 109-10, 127-8. 39 AMM, AC 1468-1469, f. 108r: 20 mayo 1469: “Otrosy, ordenaron e mandaron que los judios den e paguen para ayuda de los juegos del Cuerpo de Dios quinientos maravedis los trezientos para la yglesia mayor e los dozientos para los juegos de Sant Francisco.”

337 cabildo in order that they impose a tax on meat for a period of eight days to assist with the games of Corpus Christi.”40 The logistical measures required to obtain this money in

advance allow us to get a sense of the total amounts of money involved in presenting the

Corpus festivities. In June, the relevant tax collector, the Jewish arrendador de los

carnicerías Ysaque Abenturiel, advanced the sum of at least 14,000 mrs. on the condition

that the concejo not cancel the tax until he had recouped his investment.41 Given that

annual municipal budgets generally ranged from 130,000 to 200,000 mrs., this was no

small sum.42 Special taxes therefore became a regular means of raising the required

funds.

In 1480, the tax on meat was set at seven mrs. but only for the day of Corpus. In

addition, however, the council ordered contributions from a number of groups in the city,

including those working on church construction, various tax collectors, Jews, and

Muslims.43 We do not have specifics on the amounts required from each of these groups.

For the Muslims, however, the concejo decided, in a separate session, that the aljama

should put forward five hundred mrs.44 A good deal of all this money was spent on the

mysteries of Corpus. Accordingly, the concejo occasionally tried to limit the number or

richness of the plays by threatening to withhold contributions to the cabildo, which was

in charge of the mysteries. Popular outrage, however, put an end to these attempts and the

concejo was forced, on several occasions, to postpone municipal improvements in order

40 AMM, AC 1470-1471, f. 122v: 25 mayo 1471: “Otrosy ordenaron e mandaron que Juan Tallente e el bachiller Anton Martines de Cascales regidores fablen con los sennores de Cabildo para que pongan en ocho dias de carne una ymposyçion para ayuda de los juegos de Corpus Xpristi.” Rubio, Procesión, 111-2. 41 AMM, AC 1470-1471, f. 131r: 18 junio 1471; Rubio, Procesión, 111-2. For comparative purposes see Martínez Martínez, “Gastos del concejo lorquino,” 1690-6, in which the author has compiled the dozens of separate expenses involved in the 1472 Corpus festival in the smaller city of Lorca and calculated the total cost at 6,462 mrs. 42 Menjot, Murcie castillane, ii, 1053. 43 AMM, AC 1479-1480, f. 211v: 5 mayo 1480; Rubio, Procesión, 116. 44 AMM, AC 1479-1480, f. 222v: 27 mayo 1480; Rubio, Procesión, 116-7.

338 to fund the Corpus procession.

At times, however, and particularly during the war with Granada in the 1480s,

economic difficulties meant that the festival had to be canceled. Such was the case in

1483, and the concejo’s response to the situation reveals the popular enjoyment of the

event as well as its ties (at least for the regidors) to civic pride and the war effort. They

declared that “no person, man or women, should go to [the nearby town of] Orihuela this

feast of Corpus Christi because [by staying] they thus fulfill their duty to our lords the

King and Queen.”45 The concejo underscored how seriously they took this issue by

setting the fine for violators at a staggering two thousand mrs.

The question came up again in 1484 when Murcia, despite its financial troubles,

was made responsible for housing and provisioning a sizable Castilian army poised for an

attack on Granada. Because Corpus was to fall relatively late that year, on 17 June, the

regidors put off a final decision on whether or not to hold the procession as long as they

could. Finally, on 29 May,

vecinos Sancho Manuel and Ruy García de Harronis appeared before the concejo to

formally ask that the full show be conducted, both because it would provide a much

needed morale boost and because people would just go to Orihuela to see the mysteries if they could not do so at home. Pushed to a decision, the concejo cited a lack of funds in telling them it would be impossible to provide money for the mysteries.46 Three days

later, on 1 June, the same men appeared again, this time to propose that they would

45 AMM, AC 1482-1483, f. 167r: 27 mayo 1483: “E los dichos sennores Conçejo ordenaron e mandaron que ningunas personas onbres sin mugeres non vayan a Orihuela esta fiesta del Cuerpo de Dios porque cunple asy a serviçio del Rey e Reyna nuestros sennores.” Rubio, Procesión, 120-1. 46 AMM, AC 1483-1484, f. 154r: 29 mayo 1484; Rubio, Procesión, 72, 121-2. María de los Llanos Martínez Carrillo, “Fiestas ciudadanas: componentes religiosos y profanos de un cuadro bajamedieval Murcia.” MMM 16 (1990-1991): 9-50.

339 organize the mysteries themselves and at no cost to the city. All they needed was

permission to borrow the carros, the wagons on which the mysteries were mounted and

which were stored in a city-owned warehouse. They were again rejected but apparently

attempted to remove the carros without permission, for on 3 June, alcalde Lope Alonzo

de Lorca, accompanied by the jurados Alonso Celdrán and Alonso Zamora, ordered

Alonso Hurtado, who was responsible for both warehouse and carros, not to lend them to

anyone and to take measures to ensure that they not be stolen.47

Lope Alonzo de Lorca was apparently subjected to a great deal of criticism for

this decision, for on 5 June he presented a letter to the concejo defending his actions. He

described at length the dubious state of municipal finances and the difficulties of

providing assistance to the military forces in the area. He cited his attempts to work out a

more amenable bargain with their commander, Juan de Benavides. Benavides, however,

had responded not only by emphasizing his authority as a royal deputy but also by noting

the sad state of the troops, who had little to eat and would take what they needed by force

if it was not freely offered. He, Lope Alonso, had had little choice in the matter but to

provide the requested provisions and therefore protect the property of Murcia’s citizens.

Given that it would, he argued, be impossible to also fund the traditional elaborate

Corpus procession, he had worked out an agreement with Bishop Lope de Rivas to

replace it with an austere and solemn rogation procession in which the citizens of Murcia could join together to ask God’s forgiveness and pray that the Christian armies would prove victorious in their struggles. With this decided, the mysteries were no longer appropriate, even if funded by private citizens, “because they are meant to relax and delight the people rather than bring them to devotion.” His efforts came to naught,

47 AMM, AC 1483-1484, f. 154v: 1 junio 1484; f. 155r: 3 junio, 1484; Rubio, Procesión, 161-2.

340 however, for he was not the only one under pressure from the public. The entry in the

Actas capitulares containing the text of his letter concluded with the terse notation that:

“once the said document had been presented, the members of the concejo said that,

despite what had previously been ordered, they now directed that the games be held that

year.”48 Where they obtained the money to finance them is not mentioned; their earlier

strategies suggest that it was through a combination of special taxes and the cancellation or delay of other municipal business.

The debate over the 1484 Corpus festivities reveals both the high regard with

which the event was held and the various meanings it bore in Murcia. The mysteries

come through as the most popular aspect of the procession, so important that many were

willing to travel to Orihuela to see them. The concejo saw them as an expression of the

community and a focus of civic pride worth the risk of bankrupting the city or shortchanging the army. The mysteries, moreover, represented the city, and so no one but

the concejo (which, in a legal sense, was the city) should have control over them nor

should they be presented unless this could be done properly. Indeed, the concejo seems

generally to have preferred cancellation to an unimpressive presentation.

Yet Lope Alonso’s letter reveals another strain of thought regarding the

significance of Corpus, a feeling that the mysteries had, in their popularity and growing

pomp, obscured the holiday’s religious aspects. In proposing their “solemn procession,”

he and the Bishop sought to return the commemoration of Corpus to its simpler and more

pious antecedents, a shift that had the welcome corollary of costing far less. This was

48 AMM, AC 1483-1484, f. 156-7v: 5 junio 1484: “porque son fechos mas para solazar e deleytar la gente que no para trahella a devoçion... E asy presentado el dicho escripto luego los dichos sennores Conçejo dixeron que syn embargo de lo en el estando mandavan e mandaron que se fisiesen los dichos juegos este dicho presente anno.” Rubio, Procesión, 172-5; Capel Sánchez, La vida lúdica, 87-8.

341 linked, of course, to the war of Granada. In praying for Christian victory while

demonstrating their own faith and austerity, the people of Murcia could use Corpus as a

means of advancing the Christian cause. The failure of their proposal in the face of popular pressure indicated that this was a minority view. The Corpus plays trumped all other considerations and were, in the popular mindset, what the holiday was all about. So what were these plays, how did they relate to the others aspects of the Corpus festivities, and what vision of Murcian society did they express?

The celebration of Corpus Christi in most Castilian towns had two central events: the procession and the plays. In Murcia, however, concerns that the plays drew too much attention from the Host, ostensibly the point of the holiday, led church authorities to formally divide these components in 1482, culminating a process of gradual separation that had been going on since the 1460s. The day would begin in the cathedral with a solemn celebration of the Office of Corpus Christi, followed by a formal procession bearing the Host in triumph through the city, ultimately returning to the cathedral. Once the religious ceremonies had been concluded, the plays might begin.49 The procession,

which centered on the Calle de la Trapería was meant both to demonstrate the city’s

devotion and to confirm publicly the hierarchical nature of civic society.

The focus of the procession was the vessel or ostensorio containing the Host. This

container, carried on a covered litter and draped with a rich tapestry (purchased in 1461 at

the cost of 4,000 mrs.), was borne by six regidors and followed by a closely regulated

parade of nearly all the city’s recognized corporate entities.50 First came the city’s clergy,

all of whom were obliged to attend dressed in their finest vestments, who carried with

49 ACM, Libro viejo de acuerdos, 1455-1494, ff. 62-3; Rubio, Procesión, 62-3, 151-2. 50 AMM, AC 1461-1462, f. 41r.-v: 7 julio 1461; Capel Sánchez 101; Rubio, Procesión, 57.

342 them the relics and treasures of Murcia’s churches. They were followed by the civic corporation, composed of the regidors and senior officials, bearing the official banners of

the city and the realm.51 The regidors’ prominent role in the procession as standard

bearers seems to have been more of an onerous duty than a privilege, however, a

testament to the physical strains of an ever longer and often delayed procession. The

concejo had difficulty finding volunteers to carry the litter and repeatedly needed to pass

legislation chastising and punishing regidors who laid the civic and royal banners on the

ground or abandoned them entirely.52 The reminder of the procession consisted of

contingents from the city’s guilds, each with its own banner and arranged (often

contentiously) according to seniority. Interspersed throughout the procession were

musicians and, on occasion, actors dressed as angels or saints.53

Traditionally, this procession was preceded by the Corpus Christi plays. These

were mounted on carts and moved along the procession route, stopping at predetermined

locations to conduct a short performance. These stops meant, in theory at least, that the

plays and the religious procession could be timed to come together and move along the

Calle de la Trapería together. In addition to the predictable delays and difficulties in

coordinating the two groups, spectators lining the Trapería often flocked to the plays, leaving the formal procession to march nearly unattended along this final stretch to the cathedral. After the new regulations passed in 1482, therefore, the plays embarked on their tour of Murcia only after the Host had been formally ensconced in the cathedral.

The plays were always religious in nature. Some brought biblical passages, from

51 On the Murcia’s banner, or pendón, see Juan Torres Fontes, “Estampas de la vida murciana en la época de los reyes católicos: El pendón de la ciudad,” Murgetana 13 (1960): 47-72. 52 Capel Sánchez, 101-2; Rubio, Procesión, 28-34. 53 On the guild representatives and musicians who participated in the procession, see Rubio, Procesión, 63- 8, 88-99.

343 both the Old and New Testaments, to life while others depicted Christianity’s triumph through tellings of saints’ lives. These all touched, in one way or another on the mystery of transubstantiation and were performed for the edification of the crowd, to bring the soul to better knowledge and devotion. But even church authorities acknowledged that the plays were popular chiefly because they were enjoyable. Indeed, the idea behind them was to catechize in the most appealing and effective manner possible and so the cabildo was a tireless proponent of efforts to make them more elaborate, lifelike, entertaining, and, of course, expensive. To a degree, this strategy backfired as the emphasis came more and more to be on the decorations, size, and number of the plays rather than on their pedagogical potential. The cabildo, however, resisted this tendency and made repeated attempts to gain better control over their organization and content.

The plays were performed from atop mobile carts, or carros, constructed for the purpose. These were owned by the concejo and varied in size according to the needs of a particular performance but generally had two axles and were propelled by a group of men hauling on a long ropes.54 The carts stopped several times over the course of their procession route, performing each time. The schedule varied from year to year in the locations and number of performances. In 1470, for instance, with provincial adelantado

Pedro Fajardo in attendance, the concejo planned for a total of eight performances and

“ordered and commanded that the presentation of the mysteries of Corpus Christi be conducted in this manner: the first performance in front of the Host, the second near the gentlemen [accompanying the] adelantado and doña Leonor [Manrique, Fajardo’s wife], the third near Alfonso de Vallebrera’s property, the fourth near Cabezón’s estate, the fifth at the houses owned by Rodrigo de Soto, another at San Lozenzo, another in front of the

54 On the construction, maintenance, and ownership of the carros, see Rubio, Procesión, 70-5.

344 Plaza de Almenara, and another at the houses of regidor Alfonso Carles. And they gave

joint authority to alguacil Rodrigo de Roda and Sancho de Aroca, the adelantado’s deputy, to ensure that they be performed in those places.”55

The concejo records provide the titles of some of the Corpus plays, giving a sense

of the topics presented. They offer little information for the first half of the century,

however, likely because the still-modest presentations were organized solely by the

cabildo. The first mention of a specific play occurred in 1447, when cathedral chaplain

Juan Valero, appeared before the regidors to report that the “carretones del Parayso” had

been stolen.56 Paradise told the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden by an angel wielding a wooden sword. It appears to have been one of the core plays of Corpus,

presented on all the occasions for which we have records. In 1471, for instance, the new

tax on meat was to pay for an ensemble of plays including El paraíso as well as “Los

santos padres” (the harrowing of hell), “Sant Geronimo” (St. and the lion), “el

belem” (the nativity), “el Juyzio” (Judgment Day), “el Aguila” (perhaps related to St.

John the Evangelist), “Sant Miguell,” “Sant Jorje,” and “Sant Françiso.” The Holy

Fathers, Paradise, and St. George were also presented in 1480, as were La

desenclavación (the removal of Christ from the Cross), La Salutación (the Annunciation),

and “la destruycion del mundo.” Concejo records from 1481 do not offer a full account of

the plays presented that year but do mention a new title: “la misterio del Drago” (likely

the St. George play). In 1492, we hear of “Ynfierno” and “Calvario” plays but as separate

55 AMM, AC 1469-1470, f. 126v: 19 junio 1470: “Otrosy ordenaron e mandaron que la representaçion de los misterios del dia del Cuerpo de Dios se faga en esta manera, el primer delante el Corpus, el segundo donde estovieron los sennores adelantado e dona Leonor, el terçero al canton de Alfonso de Vallybrera, el quarto al canton del Cabeçon, el quinto a las casas de Rodrigo de Soto e el otro a San Llorençio, e el otro en par de la plaça de Almenara, e el otro a las casas de Alfonso Carles, regidor. E dieron cargo para que los fagen faser en todos los lugares a Rodrigo de Roda, alguasil e a Sancho de Aroca, merino del sennor adelantado.” Rubio, Procesión, 78. 56 AMM, AC 1446-1447, f. 55v: 30 mayo 1447.

345 from Los Santos Padres and El desenclavamiento. Other titles mentioned in the records

from the time include the biblical stories of and , and plays

dedicated to Saints Anthony, Joseph, and Martin. 57

We have some details concerning how these plays were staged. The ‘holy

fathers’, for instance, were usually eleven in number and wore embroidered skirts and

breeches, with gauntlets on their hands, beards and wigs made of canvas strips, and diadams of lace-covered paper. The cart for El juicio, meanwhile, included a ceiling of

clouds constructed over a wooden framework, atop which was an angel bearing a bouquet

of flowers and meant to represent Our Lady of Salvation (Nuestra Señora de la

Salvación), who intercedes on behalf of sinners.58 There are, however, no surviving

scripts for any Corpus Christi plays conducted in Murcia during this period. There is, in fact, a nearly total lack of extant medieval Corpus texts for the whole of Iberia, a circumstance some have explained by noting that these were working documents, owned by traveling companies and divided amongst the players, each of whom needed to know their own lines.59

The evidence available, however, allows us to gain some sense of the content and

style of these presentation. Over the course of the fifteenth century, Castilian Corpus

Christi plays likely developed from painted images mounted on carts to tableaux vivants

narrated by a speaker who sat to the rear of the cart and was often joined by a musician to

something akin to a ‘play’ in the modern sense of the word.60 The timing of these

57 AMM, AC 1470-1471, f. 122v: 25 mayo 1471 (see note 39 above); AC 1471-1472, f. 16r: 2 julio 1471; AC 1479-1480, f. 211v-212r: 5 mayo 1480; AC 1493-1494, f. 33v: 15 octubre 1493; Rubio, Procesión, 81- 5; Capel Sánchez, La vida lúdica, 116-23. 58 Capel Sánchez, La vida lúdica, 119-22; Rubio, Procesión, 86-7. 59 For an overview of surviving Corpus scripts, see Charlotte Stern, The Medieval Theater in Castile (Binghamton, 1996), 18-20, 116-21. 60 Vincente Lleó Cañal, Fiesta grande. El Corpus Christi en la historia de Sevilla (Seville, 1980); Stern,

346 transformations, however, is uncertain and likely varied from place to place. By the

1490s at the latest, scripted performances were being conducted in Toledo, as attested by

script outlines and the sole surviving fragment of a Corpus script, a décima from the Auto

de los santos padres, which has Jesus addressing the Holy Fathers and rescuing them

from Hell.61

Extant scripts from similar performances can give us a sense of the length,

structure, and sources for Corpus plays. The Auto de la Pasión, for instance, was

composed between 1486 and 1499 in Toledo. Its several hundred lines were divided

between ten characters and included several laments and meditations on the Passion.

Though it was meant to be performed on Good Friday, its lyrical tone, limited cast, and lack of physical action made it, as Josep Lluís Sirera has suggested, well suited for staging atop a mobile cart and we can therefore surmise that similar structures were used in Corpus Christi performances.62 Late fifteenth-century religious plays performed in

monastic settings, such as the Auto de la huida a Egipto and the Auto de San Martín,

offer further clues to potential Corpus styles, including varied meters that kept the dialogue lively, emotional appeals, and songs.63

There is a greater survival rate of Corpus plays outside of Castile, particularly in

France but also in England. The French examples, however, offer little insight into the composition or content of Iberian plays for they were unified works rather than loosely

Medieval Theater, 118-9. For the development of Corpus pageants in the Crown of Aragon, see also Hermenegildo Corbató, Los misterios del Corpus de Valencia (Berkeley, 1932); and Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona, vol. 1 (1424-1546), ed. A. Duran i Sanpere and Josep Sanabre (Barcelona, 1930). 61 Carmen Torroja Menéndez and María Rivas Palá, Teatro en Toledo en el siglo XV: ‘Auto de la Pasión’ de Alonso del Campo (Madrid, 1977), 181-4; Stern, Medieval Theater, 119-20. 62 Torroja Menéndez and Rivas Palá, Teatro en Toledo, passim; Josep Lluís Sirera Turo, “La construcción del Auto de la Pasión y el teatro medieval castellano,” in Actas del III Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, ed. María Isabel Toro Pascua (Salamanca, 1994), ii, 1011-20. 63 Stern, Medieval Theater, 124-5.

347 connected series of skits. They were, moreover, literary works composed by prominent authors and meant to be read as well as staged. Surviving texts for English Corpus Christi cycles, including the York, N-Town, and Coventry cycles, however, share structural and compositional traits with what we know of those in Iberia. They may, therefore, clarify the intended and received messages of Murcian Corpus plays.64 Given the differences in physical, cultural, and linguistics milieus, such a comparison is necessarily limited. On the other hand, the central themes of the Corpus celebration—the mystery of the body of

Christ and the social unity implied by a shared devotion to this miracle—were common to both locales.

The picture of Corpus Christi plays that emerges from the English texts, moreover, is one centered on the physical body and on violence, themes linked to medieval understandings of the Eucharist and also present in Castilian commemorations of holy week and other Christological feasts. The “spectacle of suffering,” as scholars working both in England and Castile have termed it, was intended to evoke emotional responses and even experiential understandings of Christ’s suffering, both from the perspective of the victim and the torturer. This vicarious experience of pain echoed spiritual practices through which the actual mortification of the body demonstrated one’s true devotion, denied the flesh and all it represented, and brought one into closer communion (in a real sense) with Christ. Bodily violence could thus represent a quest for higher spiritual virtues free of the base, even animalistic, connotations more familiar to modern observers. But it did not necessarily do so. In England and Castile, the emotional energies mobilized through representations of violence found resonances in social

64 Stern, Medieval Theater, 20-4.

348 realities and thus bore the risk of spilling beyond the boundaries of the performance.65

Although violence was prevalent throughout the English Corpus scripts, it was generally relegated to certain groups. The most common victims were Jews, usually attacked in the course of transgressions against Christian or Christian symbols; women, and particularly female martyrs; and Christ. The perpetrators of violence were more diverse, but Jews played a role here as well as the enthusiastic torturers of Christ. Violent acts were represented as graphically as possible in order to heighten the emotional experience: actors playing Christ, for instance, would wear skintight and flesh colored suits on which horrific injuries were painted; scourges were made from birch branches dipped in red dye that would leave ‘bloody’ stripes.66 The very vividness of this depiction

played a role in the plays’ popularity. But was it simply that, as John Gatton, for instance,

has argued, that medieval people enjoyed depictions of violence for their own sake, that

torture and blood “attracted rather than repelled men and women of the Middle Ages”

and that Corpus Christi plays were “violent theatre for a violent era?”67

Claire Sponsler, on the other hand, suggests that the theatrical representation of

violence served specific but ambivalent social purposes. On one level, the plays were

object lessons directed at those who might transgress against the social order, using

children, women, and Jews at subjects in order to emphasize the masculine, aggressive

65 Rubin, Corpus Christi, 271-87 and 302-11; Maureen Flynn, “The Spectacle of Suffering in Spanish Streets,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), 153-68; Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis, 1997), esp. chapter 6: “Violated Bodies: The Spectacle of Suffering in Corpus Christi Pageants,” 136-60; Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays of Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), 181-238; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), esp. 200-30. 66 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 137, 147. 67 John Gatton, “‘There must be blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge, 1991), 80.

349 power of authority. But there were ambiguities here, particularly as the plays rhetorically

linked Jesus to these marginalized groups. He, too, was a powerless victim of violence

and presented as passive, naked, and weak; silent in the face of his torturers’ taunts and

disembodied even as his body was the focus of attention. The plays therefore threatened to subvert the social order even while confirming its authority. People could tolerate, even enjoy, spectacles in which Jewish and female bodies were tortured or violated. Such treatment of Christ’s body, however, emphasized that they too were subject to authorized physical attack. Spectators, moreover, were reminded that, as passive witnesses, they too

were complicit in the represented and implied abuses. By exposing the ways in which

social structures controlled and objectified the body, Sponsler concludes, Corpus Christi

pageants offering the possibility of resisting those structures. Like the condemned in a

public execution, who speaks with complete freedom for perhaps the only time in his or

her life and often to the cheers of the crowd, the tortured body of Christ reversed the

authoritarian logic of those who sponsored the Corpus plays.68

Sponsler notes but does not explore, however, the ways in which Christ’s body

represented the Christian body social, an association particularly powerful on this of all

days. By displaying this body, the Corpus Christi itself, in a broken and abused state, the

English plays suggested that Christian society was under attack and point to the culprit:

the Jews who take such joy in buffeting the helpless Christ. The celebration of Corpus

Christi linked biblical tales of Christ’s Passion with the experience of Christian worship

and the unity of Christian society. The plays depicted Jews as a threat to all three. Casting

the Jews in this role drew upon familiar narratives, including the belief that Jews bore

continued guilt for the death of Christ and, perhaps more viscerally effective on the

68 Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, 149-60.

350 festival dedicated to the mystery of the Eucharist, accusations of ritual murder and Host

desecration.69 Seeing Jews stabbing, spitting on, and beating the wounded Christ would

have reminded some viewers of the stories of Jewish atrocities that had circulated

through England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This played, moreover into

concerns about the mysteries of the Eucharist; several scholars have argued that host

desecration was a projection onto the Jews of Christian doubts about transubstantiation.70

In reflecting the imagined image of a bleeding Host stabbed by Jews, the bleeding figure

of Christ on the stage provided emotive truth of the Eucharistic miracle.

********

Without scripts, we cannot know if the Corpus plays performed in Murcia

depicted violence or Jews in a manner similar to the English pageants. The themes of

these plays, as shown by their titles, certainly provided ample scope for the graphic

depiction of brutality and torture. The display of Christ’s broken body would have been appropriate in El Calvario and El desenclavamiento, while El Juicio, Ynfierno, and La

destrucción del mundo would hardly have been complete without mention of the fate

awaiting Jews, Muslims, and heretics. The saints’ tales were likewise full of possibility in

this regard. We know, moreover, that violence and suffering were common themes in

Castile, both in spectacles and in the experience of popular religion.71 There were,

however, no Jews or Muslims in England. All Jews had been expelled from the kingdom

in 1290 and there never had been any meaningful Muslim population. English

69 On Host desecration, see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia, 2004). On ritual murder accusations, see Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, 1988). 70 Lester K. Little, “The Jews in Christian Europe,” in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation, ed. Jeremy Cohen (New York and London, 1991), 287; Hsia, Myth of Ritual Murder, passim. 71 Flynn, “The Spectacle of Suffering,” passim.

351 playwrights, actors, and audiences therefore had license to project particular discourses

onto these religious others from a distance, without the need to confront them directly. In

Castile, and especially in Murcia, Jews and Muslims were present at and even participated in Corpus Christi theatrics. This limited the freedom with which Jews and

Muslims could be presented while making even subtle statements about them socially relevant and emotionally powerful.

Luis Rubio García, one of the foremost scholars of Corpus Christi in Murcia, pointed explicitly to the influence of religious minorities on the meaning of its celebration of the festival, noting that part of its appeal for Murcian Christians was the opportunity to trumpet their faith in front of their Muslim and Jewish neighbors. He argues that “a key characteristic for a city like Murcia was its mixed population. Even if people of various religions, such as Muslims or Jews, lived in separate neighborhoods, they became a suitable pretext for the Christians to conduct a prideful and ostentatious public affirmation of their faith.”72 But he qualified this point by arguing passionately

that Corpus actually served to bring members of different faiths together for, “even

though it was in essence a Christian ceremony, its scope and resonance extended to

people of different faiths, and this day, perhaps the only of its kind in the year, was

considered exceptional and the Muslims and Jews who were invited to contribute felt

attracted by the magnificence of the celebration... No one was excluded from the festival;

on the contrary, the joy of some infected the rest, and in a certain way all competed to

adorn their homes and streets and to wear their finest clothes. This meant that the

72 Rubio, Procesión, 16: “Notoria importancia adquiría en una ciudad de las características de Murcia, pues al relacionarse, si bien en barrios separados, gentes de varias religiones, tales moros y judíos, se convertía en el pretexto idóneo para que el pueblo cristiano realizara una afirmación pública de su fe, con orgullo y ostentación.”

352 Thursday of the celebration produced, even if only for the single day, an authentic and

fraternal convivencia.”73

Rubio overstates his case—he provides no evidence, for instance, to support the

contention that Muslims and Jews “felt attracted” by the splendor of the event or that they

decorated their homes in a spirit of joyous competition. His claim that Corpus presented a rare moment of true interfaith harmony therefore has a quixotic or antiquarian quality; it

is an expression of hope that, in times past, people were indeed able to treat each other

with true tolerance. More importantly, he does not comment on the shift in tone in the

1480s, when Christian triumphalism become the festival’s dominant aspect regarding

Jews and Muslims.

All the same, Rubio is correct in pointing out that Murcian authorities were unusually open to the presence and even the active and voluntary participation of religious minorities in the Corpus Christi festivities for much of the century. Elsewhere in

Iberia, strict laws either forbade the involvement of Jews and Muslims in Corpus, even as spectators, or forced them to join in this Christian act of worship. In Saragossa, for

instance, Jews and Muslims were forbidden to view the procession, even from their own

windows. Its concejo, in an attempt to tighten control over the events, in 1455 banned “all manner of [unauthorized] entremeses, masks, Jews, and games nor should anyone throw firecrackers, under penalty of imprisonment.”74 Authorities in the then small town of

73 Rubio, Procesión, 13, 16: “Con ser en esencia una solemnidad cristiana, su alcance y resonancia se extendía a gentes de otra religión, y aquel día, quizás único en el año, se consideraba excepcional y se invitaba a cooperar a moros y judíos, que se sintieron atraídos por la magnificencia de la celebración... Pero a nadie se excluía de la fiesta, muy al contrario, la alegría de unos contagiaba a los demás, y en cierto modo todos competían en adornar sus casas y calles y en vestir sus más preciosas galas, de manera que en el jueves de la celebración se producía, aunque fuera por un solo día, una auténtica y fraternal convivencia.” Cf. Molina Molina who paraphrases Rubio’s claim,“Estampas medievales,” 228. 74 Stern, Medieval Theater, 117; Gabriel Llompart, “La fiesta del Corpus y representaciones religiosas en Zaragoza y Mallorca (siglos XIV-XVI),” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia. Revista de ciencias

353 Madrid adopted the opposite strategy when, in 1481, they ordered that the Jewish and

Muslim communities present musical and dance performances or face a fine of 3,000

mrs.75

While we cannot know the zeal with which Murcia’s Jewish and Muslim

communities decorated their homes in friendly competition with their Christian

neighbors—or if they were required to do so—it is clear that their voluntary involvement

was a regular feature of Corpus in that city. Musicians were a key part of all aspects of

the celebration: they accompanied the procession, provided the score for the plays, and entertained guests at the closing banquet. Muslim players were particularly prized as they were renowned throughout the region for their skills. In 1425, for instance, the concejo

records note that “insofar as the festival of Corpus Christi, which each year is conducted

with honor and solemnity, comes very soon, [the concejo] orders and commands Juan

Ferrandez de Campo, its majordomo, to send to all the morerías so that all available musicians come eagerly to the said festival in order to honor it in the accustomed manner.”76

It was common practice in Murcian society to hire Muslim musicians for

important events; they played trumpets, kettledrums, and tambourines, as well as stringed

instruments, at banquets in private salas, at the festival of San Juan, to celebrate civic

appointments, for the king’s anniversary, and so on.77 It therefore became a point of pride

historioeclesiásticas 42 (1969): 181-209: “toda manera de entremeses, caraças, jodíos et todos juegos ni lancen cohetes, en pena de leverlos a cárcel.” 75 Stern, Medieval Theater, 123. 76 AMM, AC 1424-1425, f. 95v: 2 junio 1425: “Otrosy por quanto la fiesta del Cuerpo de Dios viene muy çerca la qual de cada anno se fase muy honrrada e solebne mente orderaron e mandaron al dicho Juan Ferrandes de Canpo mayordomo sobre dicho que enbie a todas estas morerias para que vengan los mas juglares que pudieron ser ávidos para la dicha fiesta e que faga la dicha fiesta onrrada mente segund que de cada anno se acostumbra.” Rubio, Procesión, 89-90. 77 Veas Arteseros, Mudéjares murcianos, 65-6.

354 for the Corpus Christi organizers to secure the services of as many Muslim players as

possible in order to maintain the festival’s reputation. In 1430, the majordomo brought

eleven juglares from the Ricote Valley; in 1466, the search was cast even further, as far

as La Albatera in Valencia. Those hired included women as well as men; in 1440, a

number of ‘moras’ were contracted for Corpus and later references to “juglares y

juglaresas” likely indicate Muslim women as well, given restrictions on the activities of

Christian women.78 For these services, they were well paid; the 1425 order noted that

cost was not a primary concern.

Concejo records from 1480 confirm both that the Christian authorities considered

Muslims to be an essential part of the Corpus festivities and that the Muslims themselves took part willingly. At 27 May, a delegation from the aljama came before the council to

argue that “the Muslims have, since this city was won from them and they came to the

morerías, been accustomed to wear robes of Morisco silk and whips and to never came

out in other attire.” They therefore requested that “the committee permit them to wear

their robes and silk head coverings on the day of Corpus Christi without fear of

consequences.”79 After three days of deliberation, the concejo responded with an order

that lifted restrictions on attire for all in the city, regardless of religion, proclaiming that

“for the day of Corpus Christi and for the honor of the festival, any and all persons,

whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, may wear all clothes restricted and reserved under

78 Capel Sánchez, La vida lúdica, 110. 79 AMM, AC 1479-1480, f. 223r: 27 mayo 1480: “despues que esta çibdad se gano de los moros e los moros destas morerías quedaron aqui syempre acostunbraron vestir e traer aljubas de seda morisca e fustules e nunca en otros vedamientos generales gelos quitaron... tienen suplicado a la junta general entre tanto que los dichos diputados generales les provean ordenaron que los dichos moros pueden vestir aljubas e cubertores de cabeça de seda esto el dia del Cuerpo de Dios e non mas syn pena alguna.” Rubio, Procesión, 131-2.

355 the law of the hermandad without any penalty.”80 With its careful phrasing, this decision

skirted religious issues and instead indicated a general easing of restrictions for a festival

day. Yet the speedy response demonstrated a desire to ensure Muslim participation in the

procession and perhaps also expressed a degree of pleasure at the thought of colorful

Muslim robes lending a sense of the exotic to Murcia’s Corpus festivities.

A far stronger suggestion of ecumenical sentiment dates from 1471, when the

concejo “ordered that it be proclaimed that, for the honor of the festival, any persons, be they Christian, Jew, or Muslim, who wishes to be ‘rabbis with masks’ on the day of

Corpus Christi can do so without permission.”81 The idea of Christians, or indeed

anyone, choosing to dress as a rabbi during one of the holiest days of the year is striking

but it points to a general easing of boundaries during Corpus Christi that was a hallmark

of many popular and religious events. In addition to dressing in costumes, the crowds

were often rowdy, especially during the plays, when spectators were wont to break into

applause during performances and loudly request encores from the actors. There is no evidence to suggest that Jews or Muslims were expected to act in a more respectful or controlled manner.

This did not, however, mean that Jews and Muslims were considered to be truly

part of the religious aspects of the festivities. In 1468, the concejo passed an ordinance

stating that “that Jews and Muslims who are in the street when the Host is carried past or

when its procession comes through the city are obliged to move away from that street or

80 AMM, AC 1479-1480, f. 227r: 30 mayo 1480: “que para el dia del Cuerpo de Dios que por onrra de la fiesta todas e qualesquier presonas asy xpristianos como judios e moros pueden traher e vestir aquel dia todas las ropas e cosas defendidas a vedadas por la ley de la hermandad syn pena alguna.” 81 AMM, AC 1470-1471, f. 122v: 25 mayo 1471: “E mandaron que se pregone que qualesquier personas asy xpristianos commo judios e moros que quisieren ser rabinos con caras el dicho dia de Corpus Xpristi que lo pueden ser syn pedir liçençia para ellos por honra de la fiesta.” Rubio, Procesión, 85-6; Capel Sánchez, La vida lúcia, 116; Veas Arteseros, Mudéjares murcianos, 65.

356 to hide themselves or to kneel until the Host and the procession has passed.” Any

Christian observing a Jew or Muslim failing to do so was obliged to arrest the offender

and bring him before a local magistrate. The agreement of two witnesses was enough to

confirm guilt and the penalty was a stiff fine of two hundred mrs. In addition, the guilty

party’s clothes were given to the reporter.82 In addition to providing an easy pretext for any small group of Christians to dispossess a Jew or Muslim of his or her clothing, this edict may have confirmed to Murcia’s religious minorities that they were tolerated guests only, and full participants neither in the Corpus procession nor, by extension, in Murcia society.

We should not read too much into that decree, however. The Eucharist was a holy object and therefore worthy of vigilance, especially in regard to those, like Jews and

Muslims, who could not be expected to feel the proper sense of adoration toward it.

Compelling the outward signs of respect, therefore, was an aggressive act but not necessarily one that expressed intolerance. It was of a part, moreover, with other attempts by authorities to establish control over spectator behavior during the Corpus revelries. In

1482, for instance, the cabildo adopted a measure chastising anyone—Christian, Muslim, or Jew—who engaged in shameless acts (deshonestidades) during Corpus, mentioning in

particular the plays and noting that such behavior was all the more appalling as women

82 AMM, AC 1467-1468, f. 115r: 20 abril 1468: “Otrosi que los judios e moros que estudiesen en la calle quando llevaren el Cuerpo de Dios o quando fisieren proçesiones generales por la çibdad, sean tenidos de se apartar de la calle o de se esconder o que finquen los ynojos fasta quel Cuerpo de Dios e las proçesiones sean pasados e sy algunos de los tales judios e moros fisiesen lo contrario, que qualquier xpristiano syn pena alguna lo pueda tomar e levar delante la justiçia donde acaesçiere, e le acusar sy gelo provare por dos testigos, aunque sean xpristianos, que la justiçia le ajudgue la ropa que tal judio o moro toviere ençima cubierta o vestida, quando no guardare lo suso dicho, e sea para el xpristiano que lo asy llevare e acusare, e demas pague de pena quinientos maravedis la mitad para la obra de la yglesia mayor desta çibdad e la otra mitad para la justiçia.” Rubio, Procesión, 130, 176-7.

357 were present at the time.83 The special taxes imposed on Jews and Muslims perhaps fall

into this same category. In times of financial need, the concejo may well have noted that

they took part in the festivities and enjoyed the show, yet paid no parish taxes. The levies

were therefore a means of correcting this situation. Corpus Christi demonstrated the

solidarity of civic society. Jews and Muslims were therefore required to demonstrate the

proper respect for the Host as a symbol of this unity and to contribute appropriately.

The clearest indication that Corpus Christi in Murcia, prior to the 1480s, was not a

flashpoint for interfaith tensions occurred in 1472. Just after the Corpus procession

ended, a Jewish man by the name of Yehuda drew a sword and attacked, for reasons

unknown, a priest in front of the church of San Bartolomé. The priest, named Pedro

Gómez (or Fernández, according to another witness who appeared before the concejo),

avoided his assailant’s charge and ducked into the church while bystanders subdued and

detained Yehuda. The concejo immediately met to take statements and determine the

appropriate punishment, but they were preempted by adelantado Farjardo’s deputies,

who claimed that Yehuda was in the service of doña Leonor and that their lord, who was

known to be a protector of the Jewish community, thus had jurisdiction over the case.

The concejo, resenting the perceived usurpation of their authority and fearing that the act

would go unpunished, then wrote to Fajardo with an outline of events and a firmly-

worded note stating their jurisdiction over all Jews and Muslims residing within the city’s

juderías and morerías.84

Fajardo’s response and Yehuda’s ultimate fate are not recorded and concejo records do not mention the case again. Given the timing and sensational nature of the

83 ACM, Libro viejo de acuerdos 1455-1494, ff. 62-3: 7 junio 1482. 84 AMM, caj. 80, 1472, 29 mayo 1472; AMM, AC 1471-1472, f. 85v-86v: 30 mayo 1472; Rubio, Procesión, 113-4, 166-7; Rubio, Los judíos de Murcia, 37-9.

358 assault, this silence is notable. A Jew had, in broad daylight, attempted to murder a priest on the steps of a church during the festival honoring the body of Christ, a body whose sufferings at the hands of Jews were likely relived in the Corpus plays. Yet there was no popular outrage, no unrest, no attacks on Jewish homes. Less than a year later, a far less dramatic offense in Córdoba would lead to pogroms throughout Andalusia. The conclusion is inescapable: in Murcia in 1472, tensions between Jews and Christians were so minimal that even a blatant provocation did not lead to further trouble.

**********

The position of Murcia’s Muslim and Jewish communities began to deteriorate from the early 1480s on, however, and the role accorded to them in civic festivities soon reflected this new reality.85 During this period, moreover, the concejo began to present the Corpus Christi plays to commemorate various significant events in the war with

Granada, creating an explicit connection between Christian victory over the enemies of the faith and the mystery of Christ’s body. The authorities kept careful records of their preparations for these special events. These reveal that Muslims and Jews were no longer seen as valid, if marginal, members of society. They were now ornaments whose participation was compelled or financial resources to be exploited as fully as possible.

The first links between the celebration of Corpus Christi and military victory were forged in 1485 to honor the Castilian conquest of Ronda, a key stronghold in western

Granada. The concejo wanted to make a public acknowledgement of the victory in order to raise civic morale. Their continued financial struggles, however, presented challenges.

They were barely able to fund Corpus and other events already on the annual calendar; adding an additional spectacle would be impossible. They therefore solved the problem

85 See above, n. 27.

359 by extending the festivities of Corpus while cutting what costs they could. They ordered the majordomo, for instance, to purchase no beverages for the post-procession banquet and use the money instead to purchase a bull which “would be run on the Trapería on the

Sunday after Corpus for the celebration of the capture of the city of Ronda and the other conquests that the King our lord has made in the kingdom of Granada.”86

There were recent precedents in Murcia both for the public commemoration of military victories and for linking such events to established religious holidays. The 1452 battle of Los Alporchones, for instance, took place on 17 March. It was thus associated with , who was consecrated as a patron of the city and thereafter honored with a civic procession each year. As late as 1495, the concejo was arranging payment for musicians who participated in this ceremony.87 The capture of Málaga in August, 1487, however, called for a more dramatic celebration. Málaga was the second city and major port of the kingdom of Granada and its surrender after a lengthy siege seemed to presage the final end to Muslim independence in Iberia.88

The concejo therefore abandoned fiscal restraint in organizing a series of celebrations that culminated in a grand three-day gala. The preparations, which took nearly a month to complete, are unusually well documented, likely because this was a special event for which customary arrangements could not be assumed. On 4 September, just two weeks after Málaga’s capitulation, the regidors appointed a small group of delegates to organize a presentation of the Corpus Christi plays on Sunday, 9 September and ordered “that [these men] have the authority to order all that should be done in order

86 AMM, AC 1484-1485, f. 150v: 31 mayo 1485: “agarrochen en la Traperia el domingo delante del dia del Corpus Cristi por las alegrías de la toma de la çibdad de Ronda e de los otros lugares e villas quel Rey nuestro sennor a tomado en el reyno de Granada.” Rubio, Procesión, 19, 45, 133-4. 87 AMM, AC 1494-1495, f. 134r-134v: 24 marzo 1495. 88 For the seige and fall of Málaga, see Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, ii, 382-4. The announcement of the city’s capture came immediately to Murcia in a royal missive, AMM, CR 1478-88, f. 202r: 18 agosto 1487.

360 to present the plays.”89 Only after the event did the concejo address the costs for this

spectacle, which included 8,100 mrs. to a single creditor. They instituted a tax of one mr.

on sales of meat to last for nine days and took special care to specify that it applied also

to sales of meat in the judería.90

This special rendition of the mysteries of Corpus, however, paled in comparison to the ambitious plans they made for an extended party that lasted from Friday, 28

September, to Sunday, 30 September, and was meant to coincide with the feast day of

Saint Michael the , a figure long associated with the triumph of good over evil.91 According to their posted orders, the celebration was to begin on Friday with the ringing of all the city’s church bells and a fireworks display. On Saturday morning, to mark Saint Michael’s feast, there would be a solemn procession featuring the civic, royal, and guild banners. The council went on to order that “on Saturday afternoon the Jews and

Muslims would dance.” This command differed from the concejo’s efforts on this and other occasions to secure Muslim musicians for Corpus entertainments. Those players were hired for their renowned skills and were paid accordingly. Their identity as Muslims was relevant only insofar as Muslim musicians were known to be the best. The order for

Jewish and Muslim dances, in contrast, makes no mention of wages and does not specify that only trained dancers would be included. This was a demand made on specific communities requiring that they make themselves available for the enjoyment of the

Christians, not an attempt to engage talented performers for the benefit of all.

The day would end with bonfires, church bells, and an additional fireworks

89 AMM, AC 1487-1488, f. 32r: 4 septiembre 1487: “... e que ellos tengan cargo mandando de fazer todo lo que sera menester para que se fagan los dichos juegos.” 90 AMM, AC 1487-1488, f. 33r: 11 septiembre 1487. 91 Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003), 194.

361 display “just as is done for Carnival.” The gala culminated on Sunday morning with a performance of the Corpus Christi plays along the Trapería.92 Here, too, the expenses were enormous. Tax collector Jaime de Juan, for instance, was authorized to pay the suppliers of shoes and gloves needed for the performances as Diego Hurtado, one of the organizers, had spent all the 5,000 mrs. allotted to him. For this expense and others, such as the covering of the Trapería with awning, the concejo did not try to haggle or cut costs, instead directing their subordinates to “pay all the monies needed” to ensure the proper presentation of the plays.93

Just a few months later, Fernando and Isabel arrived in Murcia to oversee the conduct of the war and the concejo put on a similar show to celebrate their entry into the city. In addition to a feast of the finest delicacies, the royals were to be greeted with bullfights, the largest possible array of Corpus plays possible, and Jewish dances. These last were organized by the jurado Alonso Hurtado, who was directed to ensure that “they be enjoyable.”94 Alonso Hurtado, it should be noted, appears to have had no particular connections with the Jewish community. His role was instead that of municipal servant experienced in organizing Corpus and perhaps other civic spectacles. In 1484, he had overseen the depot housing the Corpus carros and, together with his brother Diego, he was involved in the planning and presentation of the galas celebrating the conquests of

Málaga and Granada as well as this event. Jewish participation in this event was not a form of inclusion; rather, they, along with the bulls, were one of a number of entertainments.

92 AMM, AC 1487-1488, 39r: 27 septiembre 1487: “Las dichos sennores mandaron... sabado en la tarde que baylen las judios y los moros,” “... segund se faze las carnestolendas.” 93 AMM, AC 1487-1488, 39r-39v: 27 septiembre 1487: “todos los maravedis que son menester.” 94 AMM, AC 1487-1488, f. 113: 5 abril 1488: “... que sean tales que den plazer.”

362 The most elaborate, and the most carefully planned, of Murcia’s special

presentations of the Corpus plays took place in January 1492 to commemorate the

capture of the city of Granada. Granada’s surrender, after an eight-month siege, was, for

Castilian observers, an event of momentous proportions. It marked the end of a seven-

hundred-year struggle, the conclusion to the Muslim political presence in Iberia, and a

victory of Christians over Muslims that seemed to fulfill apocalyptic prophesies and

therefore foreshadow the conquest of Jerusalem. More prosaically, but no less

importantly to Castilians, was the conclusion of a decade-long war that had consumed

immense resources and countless lives while disrupting agriculture and stifling trade, thus

driving many municipalities, including Murcia, to the brink of bankruptcy.

Upon hearing the joyous news, Murcia’s concejo immediately began making

preparations for a gala that would last nearly a week. This would include processions

through the city from Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the tenth through twelfth of

January, as well as Corpus plays and bullfights on Sunday the fifteenth. In order to make the arrangements as quickly as possible, they delegated authority to several of their own number as well as experienced jurados including Alonso and Diego Hurtado. To emphasize that these celebrations marked a religious triumph by Christians over the enemies of Christ, and not just a military victory that could be embraced by all residents of the city regardless of confession, the concejo ordered that, “for those three days, all officials, workers, and women not involved in presenting [the festivities], should behave as they do on Sunday or face a penalty of two mrs. toward the expenses of the

363 revelries.”95

The first of the events was a Tuesday procession to Santa María de la Arrixaca, an effigy of the Virgin housed in the church of San Andrés in the Arrixaca, or Muslim quarter of the city, and closely associated with the thirteenth-century conquest of the city and the subsequent failure of the Muslims to retake it (see figure 21). Cantiga 169 of

Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María described Mary’s miraculous protection of the church housing this image from repeated attempts by Muslims, who resented this church in the midst of their community, to destroy it. Although the text does not directly reference the effigy, it is clear from the accompanying illumination that it is the source of the miracles described (see figures 22a and 22b). The poem went on to link Mary’s powers to the failure of the Mudéjar rebellion of the 1260s as well as an attempt by the army of Abu Yusuf Ya’qub, the Marinid ruler of Morocco, to capture Murcia through the treachery of those in the morería. In response, Mary drove the Muslims out of the

Arrixaca, leaving only a few behind. The Virgin of the Arrixaca, however, was not only a symbol of defense against Muslim aggression; she is also presented as an allegory of irreversible and extensive Christian triumph in Iberia and beyond. The poem concludes that Mary’s church is not free since “Mohammed can never have power there because she conquered it and, furthermore, she will conquer Spain and Morocco, and Ceuta and

Asilah.”96

In the context of the fall of Granada and contemporaneous plans to push forward

95 AMM, AC 1491-1492, f. 96v: 9 enero 1492: “Que en estos tres días todas los ofyçiales y labradores y mugeres que non fagan faziendo en estos tres días sy non que los guarden como el dia de domingo so pena de dozientos maravedis a cada uno que lo contrario fiziese para los dichos gastos de las dichas albriçias.” 96 CSM, ii, 172-4, no. 169: “... nunca Mafomete poder y averá; ca a conquereu ela e demais conquerrá Espanna e Marrocos, e Ceta e Arcilla.” Joseph F. O'Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria: a Poetic Biography (Leiden, 1998), 121-5; Amy G. Remensnyder, “Marian Monarchy in Thirteenth-Century Castile,” in The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950-1350. Essays in honor of Thomas N. Bisson, ed. Robert Berkhoper III, Alan Cooper, and Adam Kosto (Aldershot, 2005), 204-5.

364 into North Africa, Santa María de la Arrixaca was an appropriate site for veneration that

celebrated the long-delayed fulfillment of Alfonso X’s plans for such conquests. It served

as a reminder, moreover, to the Muslims of Murcia that their subordinate position was

permanent. Neither the Virgin nor the Christian rulers of the city would permit any

insurrection. This was emphasized through the procession route, which proceeded from

the cathedral to San Andrés through the morería. This march was headed by the royal and

civic banners; at the rear, in the position occupied by prisoners of war in a military triumph, were Jews and Muslims ordered to dance and make merry while dressed in their finest attire. The remaining two processions also passed conspicuously through the

Muslim and Jewish neighborhoods of the city while honoring sites linked to reconquest

ideology. On Wednesday, a similar (de la misma manera) procession terminated at the

Church of Santiago, also located in the Arrixaca (near ‘Porte Neuve’ on figure 21). The series of parades ended on Thursday. The destination this time was the Trinitarian house,

dedicated to the redemption of captives. It lay on the far side of the judería from the

cathedral, meanings that its route cut directly through the Jewish quarter.97

On Sunday, six Corpus plays were presented—El paraíso, Infierno con los santos

padres, La desenclavación, San Jorge, San Martín, and Abrahán.98 Their preparation and

funding was shared by the concejo and the cabildo. No procession or religious services

are mentioned but the carnivalesque revelries continued, headlined by a bullfight

featuring eight animals. The concejo issued a proclamation on Saturday that hints at both

the extravagance with which they hoped to present the plays and the likelihood that

entertainments continued throughout the day. They ordered that all “all trumpeters and

97 AMM, AC 1491-1492, f. 97r: 9 enero 1492 98 AMM, AC 1491-1492, f. 101v: 14 enero 1492: “todos los tronpetas e otros menestriles e juglares e moros e xpristianos de qualquier calidad y condiçion.”

365 minstrels and players, both Muslims and Christians of whatever quality and station” were

not permitted to leave the city until the festivities had ended. Those disregarding the

command were subject to a 1,000 mrs. fine. Never before had the concejo hired so many musicians that they feared a lack of supply. They had, it is true, previously imported

Muslim players from surrounding areas, but that was on account of their reputed skill.

Now the emphasis was on quantity rather than quality.

No doubt the fines collected from those violating various decrees were one means of offsetting the costs of such mammoth performances. But the scope of those expenses clearly exceeded that of any prior celebrations. The concejo made no attempt to impose a short-lived tax on meat or any other product. Instead they sought to deflect the costs onto those not fully part of Murcian society. Demands were made upon the Genoese merchant community, for instance, and Tadeo de Negro contributed 15,000 mrs. on their behalf.99

But the pecuniary demands focused particularly on Jews and Muslims. One aspect of this was a property tax on all Muslims within Murcia’s jurisdiction and the concejo, in the course of planning the processions and plays, directed Juan de la Cueva to inform the various Muslim communities of this new levy. Appraisals of their goods were to take place the following day in order to ensure that each paid a share suitable to his or her wealth. Any who failed to pay appropriately would be subject to further fines and taxes.100

The tax levied on Murcia’s Jews, like the much smaller impositions of the past, was communal. During their meeting to plan the galas for the capture of Granada, the

concejo instructed regidor Pedro de Zambrana (who was also placed in charge of the

99 Molina Molina, La sociedad murciana, 25. 100 AMM, AC 1491-1492, ff. 97v-98r: 9 enero 1492.

366 event’s Corpus plays) and the knight Alfonso de Palazol to “speak with the Jews and

command them to pay, within three days, the 50,000 mrs that they owed as their share of

the war, of which they had been informed but said they did not owe.”101 The reference

here to “their share of the war” likely refers to contributions to the Santa Hermandad

(Holy Brotherhood). The Hermandad originated in local militias tasked to patrol roads

and rural regions and was reorganized in 1476 by Fernando and Isabel as a national organization for the same purposes. During the latter stages of the war with Granada, however, the monarchs used the Hermandad as a means of raising money and troops while avoiding the need to summon the Cortes. Its original purposes remained, however, and its troops could be used only to defend Castilian territory. This, however, made other

soldiers available for offensive operations in Granada. Hermandad taxes were calculated on the basis of population and levied on municipal concejos, who were then responsible

for collecting individual payments.102

In the late 1480s, the Jews and Muslims of Murcia had appealed the Hermandad

tax, arguing that they should have the same tax-exempt status “as widows or orphans or

other miserable persons.”103 Their original claim did not survive, so we do not know the

basis upon which they made this argument; it may, however, have rested on their general

poverty or inability to engage in particular trades. The concejo had directed this claim to

court administrators, who had predictably affirmed a tax that had the direct support of the

monarchs and ruled that Jews and Muslims were subject to the same rates as their

101 AMM, AC 1491-1492, f. 97r: 9 enero 1492: “... fablen con los judios e les manden que paguen de oy en tres dias cinquenta mill maravedis que les cupieron del repartimiento de la guerra, fueles notificada e dixeron que non heran obligadas.” 102 On Murcia’s hermandad taxes, see Lope Pascual Martínez, “Las hermandades en Murcia durante la baja Edad Media,” MMM 3 (1977), 206-9. 103 AMM, CR 1488-1495: 19 julio 1490: “sobre las biudas e huerfanos e otras miserables personas.” Antonio Gomariz Marín, Documentos de los Reyes Católicos: 1492−1504. Colección de documentos para la historia del reino de Murcia 20 (Murcia, 2000), doc. 429.

367 Christian neighbors. In other instances, however, the monarchs had ruled in favor of

Muslims resident in Murcia and the surrounding countryside, fearing that heavy tax burdens which induce them to emigrate to Granada and thus deprive Murcia of their economic contributions. In 1487, for instance, when confirmed the aljama’s existing privileges, they noted that “because of the wars and other evils that have beset the land of

Murcia, the majority of the Muslims are dead and the rest have fled, leaving the land very depopulated and diminished.” The concejo should therefore impose no unusual or burdensome taxes since “the Muslims who live outside of my territory [i.e. in Granada] would like to come and all be happy and prosperous, they can do us a great service.”104

While this restriction clearly did not prevent the concejo from seeking a special tax on Muslim property, it presumably did discourage attempts to impose rates so high that the Muslims would appeal to the monarchs. Under Fernando and Isabel, the Jewish community had few such protections and so the concejo moved aggressively to collect the 50,000 mrs. they claimed to be owed, returning to the issue several time in their deliberations on 9 January. In a later reference, they clarified that the monies were both

“for their share of the Granadan war... and for the revelries and entertainments that are made in this city for the surrender of Granada.” This time, they went on to add that failure to pay within three days would lead to an additional fine of 20,000 mrs.105 Soon

thereafter, perhaps on the same day, the concejo noted that Zambrano had indeed

delivered their orders to Abulafía, the jurado of the Jewish community, but had

104 AMM, pergamino 151: 14 octubre 1487, “Carta de privilegio y confirmación de los Reyes Católicos a la aljama de moros en Murcia de los privilegios otorgados por los reyes anteriores,” f. 1v-2r: “por razón de las guerras e de los otros males que son acaesçidos en tierra de Murçia e la mayor parte de los moros son muertos e los otros fuydos, por las tales cosas la tierra es muy despoblada e menguada... los moros que son fuera de la mi tierra, ayan favor de venir e que todos sean ricos e bien andantes e que nos puedan mejor servir.” 105 AMM, AC 1491-1492, f. 97r: 9 enero 1492: “para el sueldo de la guerra de Granada... e para las alegrías e albriçias que en esta çibdad se han de fazer y par el entrego de la dicha çibdad de Granada.”

368 apparently raised the penalty for noncompliance to 50,000 mrs. He reported also that

Abulafía had protested the demands in the presence of witnesses.106 No further comments on this special tax are recorded in the Actas capitulares and it remains unclear whether the payment was made or if penalties were imposed.

In the event, Murcia’s Jewish community was in no position to appeal this tax nor did the concejo have many further opportunities to exploit it. In a document dated 31

March 1492, Fernando and Isabel accused the Jews of attempting “to subvert and to steal faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith.” They argued that recent converts from

Judaism to Christianity were particularly susceptible to apostasy due to contact with

Jews. Prior efforts to deal with this problem, specifically the physical segregation of Jews and the Inquisition, had proved to be insufficient barriers as the Jews continued to win adherents to “their own wicked belief and conviction.” As all this was “to the great injury, detriment, and opprobrium of our holy Catholic faith,” the monarchs resolved that the only remaining course of action was to require that that all Jews within their lands leave, convert, or face draconian penalties. This decree, generally known as the Alhambra

Edict or Edict of Expulsion, was to take effect on 31 July. As it was not publicized throughout the kingdom until late April, however, the Jewish population effectively had only three months to depart. They were not permitted to bring with them any precious metals, horses, or metals.107 In Murcia, the concejo duly copied and publicized the initial edict as well as various decrees issued by the monarchs regarding the logistics of this mass emigration, including regulations for the sale of Jewish property and arrangements

106 AMM, AC 1491-1492, f. 97v: 9 enero 1492. 107 The Castilian version of the Edict is published in Luis Suárez Fernández, Documentos acerca de la expulsión de los judíos (Valladolid, 1964), 391-5. The translation above is from Edward Peters, “Jewish History and Gentile Memory: The Expulsion of 1492,” Jewish History 9 (1995), 23-28.

369 for their protection until they should depart.108 Their records, however, indicate no other attempts to aid the Jews of Murcia.

**********

The concerns expressed by Fernando and Isabel, namely the danger of converso recidivism as a result of contact with their Jewish neighbors, were not particularly relevant to Murcia. The lack of pogroms in 1391 and the economic opportunities provided by the frontier had resulted in a Jewish community larger and more vibrant than most others in Castile. Since there had been fewer and less compelling reasons to convert, there were also fewer conversos who might revert to their old religion. The Muslim population of Murcia and its surrounding territories was Castile’s most significant and an essential part of the rural economy. Both Muslims and Jews living in Murcia were treated with relative tolerance by the concejo and the Christian population in general. The city was no idyllic haven and these religious minorities dealt with periodic efforts to isolate them, such as Vincent Ferrer’s campaign in 1411, and with a general lack of full acceptance. Even so, for much of the fifteenth century, Murcia was a mixed society to a degree unmatched within the kingdom of Castile and, with the possible exception of

Valencia, Iberia. This was a consequence of the circumstances of Murcia’s thirteenth- century conquest and its maritime economy as well as its relative isolation from the rest of Castile.

This situation changed in the 1480s. Court initiatives meant to isolate Jews from

Christian society were enforced in Murcia and the region was the object, along with all other frontier zones, of efforts to firmly establish royal control over territories that had been virtually autonomous during the preceding decades. The war with Granada

108 All relevant documents are published in Rubio García, Los judíos de Murcia, ii, 336ff.

370 intensified this process.

The city served as a base for operations in eastern Granada, bringing the concejo under

the eye of royal deputies and, on occasion, the monarchs themselves. Contact with

incoming soldiers exposed the Murcian population to the growing anti-Semitism of

Andalusia and other parts of Castile even while fears of fifth-columnists led the Murcian

authorities to curtail the freedom of local Muslims. There was, moreover, from the

beginning of the Granadan war, a sense that it would bring a final end to the frontier and

therefore to the peculiar accommodations that frontier life had required.

Special presentations of the Corpus Christi plays were a means of recognizing

changed conditions. There are no recorded instances of their performance on any day but

Corpus nor of any extensions of the Corpus feast before the capture of Ronda in 1485.

After this date, however, they became an almost regular feature of Murcian life,

expressing a sense that the victories commemorated were world changing and beyond the

scope of normal events and thus required extraordinary celebrations to give them

meaning. The new role of Muslims and Jews in these performances similarly echoed

contemporary predilections. By requiring them to dance in apparent joy at the tail end of each processions, Murcian Christians could assure themselves that these groups no longer posed a threat to the body social; they were marginalized but also tamed.

The victory galas were, however, more than social barometers. They not only reflected changing attitudes toward religious minorities and a sense of Christian achievement, they helped to create those attitudes. By choosing the Corpus plays to represent Christian victory on the frontier, the Murcian concejo deliberately invented links between popular religious practice and royal policy. They did so in a manner well

371 calculated to resonate with the people. The Corpus plays were immensely popular both

because they were a rare form of theatrical performance but also because the

representation of Christ’s sufferings, likely presented in graphic form, spoke to

fundamental aspects of their beliefs. By linking Christ’s torments to the triumphs of the

Catholic Monarchs, the concejo also affirmed royal policy toward the enemies of the faith within their midst. The body of Christ, moreover, represented Christian society, both in a

physical manner and as a symbol of unity in a shared faith. The relegation of Muslims

and Jews to a subordinate and humiliating position within the procession, another

representation of society but organized in spatial terms, thus stated that Murcia’s was an

exclusively Christian society. Just as holy week permitted the faithful to vicariously

experience the torments of Christ, the Corpus procession, as planned by the concejo,

offered a means of symbolically expelling undesirables.

That such an association was intended is indicated in the concejo’s deliberations

in early January, 1492. These were ostensibly aimed at organizing the victory galas but

the debate returned repeatedly to the role of Muslims and Jews: their place in the

processions, their attire, their financial contributions. Whatever else the celebrations of

victory over Granada might accomplish, the concejo meant them to convey a particular

message regarding these religious minorities. The Actas capitulares are silent regarding

the overall reception of these events, a silence that points toward general acquiescence.

They were no disruptions or attempts to evade the special taxes imposed on certain

populations. Yet it is unlikely that the import of these galas escaped participants or

spectators. The role of non-Christians in the new order was made clear by the sight of

Jews and Muslims, attired in their finest clothes by order of the Christian concejo, made

372 to dance in celebrating a victory in which they would not share and relegated to the tail

end of a hierarchical procession.

Charlotte Stern has characterized the Murcian Corpus Christi festival as a

“puzzling mix of ecumenism and bigotry.”109 If we put these festivals into the context of the amiable enmity that marked frontier relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews, they are no longer puzzling, but a reflection of the social confusions engendered by the frontier. By the 1480s, however, the Murcian presentation of this holiday tended strongly toward bigotry rather than tolerance. This was the product less of internal developments than the increasing influence of broader Castilian, and particularly courtly, trends. The galas commemorating the victories in Ronda, Málaga, and Granada demonstrated the concejo’s understanding of these new external trends as well as its desire to articulate them to the general population. Yet the Murcian processions and plays did not express fear or hatred of religious minorities. There were no incitements to violence, no overt rejections, nor even an attempt to ban Jews and Muslims from attending. Instead the revelries expressed the irrelevancy of non-Christians in Murcian society. They were barely tolerated guests required to convey their insincere joy at the triumph of Christian arms. With the end of the frontier would come an end to frontier convivencia. Tellingly, the concejo passed an order forbidding anyone to wear mourning at the gala marking the fall of Granada.110

109 Stern, Medieval Theater, 117. 110 AMM, AC 1491-1492, f. 98v: 9 enero 1492.

373

VII. SPECTACLE AND COMMUNITY IN CYPRUS

The preceding chapters have described a shift in attitudes toward religious minorities in Jaén, Córdoba, and Murcia from the 1460s to the 1490s that progressed from an uncertain convivencia to pogroms to a triumphant rejection of Jews’ and

Muslims’ social relevance. The causes of this transformation were many, including the push to end the reconquest and natural disasters as well as the development of an ideology of limpieza de sangre. Urban spectacles played a central role in this gradual erosion of religious tolerance. By reflecting the ambivalent mind-set of frontier dwellers toward members of other religious groups in specific, and often carefully calculated ways, spectacle acted as a means through which local rulers—magnates, municipal councils, or bando leaders—could attempt to mobilize or suppress existing discourses of intolerance.

Public performances were an ideal tool for such purposes and had long served as the primary means for the expression of power. On the Granadan frontier, however, the renewed emphasis on holy war put rulers in a difficult position. A broad base of popular backing is, of course, a prerequisite for any successful military venture. This pertains especially when the intended war is presented in religious terms; when, in other words, expected material or economic gains are secondary motives for fighting. But how does one mobilize support for a holy war among a population that has mixed views of the religious enemy? Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo handled this issue by proposing the

374 conversion and partial assimilation of Muslims, thus lowering the stakes of religious

conflict. The Marquis of Villena deftly roused Córdoba’s Old Christians against their converso neighbors by framing local concerns through the Passion story. And the

Murcian concejo transformed the most popular event on the religious calendar into a commemoration of Christian victory, highlighted by processions meant to humiliate

Jewish and Muslim residents.

Such displays resonated with their audiences. Conditions on the frontier created unsettling inconsistencies between ideology and reality and the potential for such displays to address publicly these incongruities gave them an importance beyond what they held in other parts of Iberia. This was particularly true during times of plague or economic hardship, as was the situation in each of the three cases described in previous chapters. Repeated instances of plague had substantially depopulated Jaén prior to Miguel

Lucas’s arrival; the anti-converso riots that began in Córdoba followed on the heels of successive crop failures; and the Murcian concejo’s financial difficulties in the 1480s reflected widespread penury during a time of rising food prices.1 Such ecological

challenges have often been seen as a prime cause of outbreaks of violence against

vulnerable religious groups.2 Their role, however, must be understood in the context of

other factors, notably spectacles which served to mobilize feelings of resentment against

religious minorities, and in comparison with the many occasions in which food shortages

or epidemics did not lead to overt hostility toward any one group.

The influence of spectacles on the Granadan frontier is also closely related to

1 For food prices in Murcia, see Cayetano Tornel Cobacho, “El problema del trigo en Murcia en la época de los Reyes Católicos,” MMM 6 (1980): 57-98. 2 For example, Angus MacKay, “Popular Movements and Pogroms in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” Past and Present 55 (1972): 33-67.

375 long-standing and widespread traditions in which public displays had served as a means

of negotiating and articulating the boundaries between religious communities. Such

boundary-making bore the potential for violence but was not in itself an instrument of

tolerance or of hostility. As David Nirenberg has argued, for instance, ritualized violence

could either stabilize social relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews or incite

further, “catastrophic” instances of aggression.3 This chapter aims to place developments

in Jaén, Córdoba, and Murcia during the second half of the fifteenth century within this

wider perspective by exploring the ways in which frontier spectacle functioned in other

contexts. In Castile, as we have seen, frontier spectacles turned consistently to the theme of relations between different religious groups. In the process, they highlighted the social

importance of those relations and the ambivalent attitudes that characterized the

borderlands. We should not, however, see the amiable enmity of the frontier or its

expression through spectacle as limited to these three urban milieux, or even to Castilian

society.

Instead, such concerns and responses were present in multi-confessional societies

throughout the medieval Mediterranean world. That we can, and perhaps should, consider

the many and varied societies around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea as a unified and

coherent system within which fruitful comparisons can be made has been argued with

great force on multiple occasions, notably by Fernand Braudel in The Mediterranean and

the Mediterranean World and, more recently and on an even broader scale, by Peregrine

3 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996)

376 Horden and Nicholas Purcell in The Corrupting Sea.4 The title of this latter points to the relevance of the Mediterranean as an ideal site for the comparative study of frontier spectacle and inter-confessional relations, for the term ‘corrupting’ as used by the authors refers, in part, to the connectivity of the region, which exposed local traditions to a constant flow of goods, people, and ideas. From a different perspective, moreover, the unity of the Mediterranean experience can be seen through its role as a frontier zone writ large, the site of a centuries-long confrontation between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

This view of the Mediterranean has a long history; in a scholarly sense, however, its conception owes much to Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne.5 From the

perspective of each of these traditions, the particular reactions of Iberian Christians to

their Muslim and Jewish neighbors can be seen within the framework of larger

Mediterranean trends.

There are any number of potential comparisons to the amiable enmity of the

Granadan frontier. We could look to Sicily after the Norman conquest, the Crusader

principalities in the Latin East, southern Italy, and elsewhere for direct and extended

relations between Latin Christians and Muslims under their rule. This was not, of course,

the only possible type of religious encounter and composite societies were more the rule

than the exception, with formerly Byzantine territories throughout the eastern

Mediterranean providing perhaps the widest range of peoples living in close contact with

each other. Rather than attempt a full typology of the range of possible confessional

tensions and their expression through spectacle, I have instead chosen to focus on one

4 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York, 1972); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000) 5 Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne (New York, 1939)

377 example with the goal of establishing the ways in which frontier spectacles functioned

under conditions related, in some ways, to those which pertained in late fifteenth century

Castile.

The situation in Cyprus in the late fourteenth century offers several useful parallels to that in Castile during the reigns of Enrique IV and Isabel. It was, like

Andalusia and Murcia, a land whose conquest by Latin Christians was relatively recent and whose settlement by its new rulers was far from complete. It was a frontier bastion.

Since 1291, the island had been the farthest outpost of Latin Christendom in the eastern

Mediterranean. Its population, both elites and commoners, were subject to conflicting

notions of Muslims, viewing them simultaneously as trading partners and as a military

threat. This population included a multitude of religious groups who maintained an

uneasy co-existence and there was an emphasis, in certain quarters at least, on erasing this heterogeneity by ‘converting’ those among the population who did not follow the

Latin Christian rite. Both of these issues were common to nearly all Latin outposts in the

East, including the Crusader principalities and Venetian colonies on Crete and the Greek mainland. The Cypriot situation differed from these in its long duration, the Mamluks’ failure to mount an effective invasion until the fifteenth century, and the lack of organized Greek resistance to Latin rule. These factors combined to permit the slow development of tolerance and respect.6 As would occur in Castile a century later, Cyprus

6 For relations between Latin and Oriental Christians in the mainland Crusader principalities, see Benjamin Kedar, “Multidirectional Conversion in the Frankish Levant,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville, 1997), 190-99; “Latin and Oriental Christians in the Frankish Levant, 1099-1291,” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land, First to Fifteenth Centuries C.E., ed. Arieh Kofsky and Guy G. Stroumsa (Jerusalem, 1998), 209-22; Andrew Jotischky, “Ethnographic Attitudes in the Crusader States: The Franks and the Indigenous Orthodox People,” in East and West in the Crusader States: Context, Contacts, Confrontations, ed. Krijnie Ciggaar and Herman Teule, vol. 3 (Leuven, 2003), 1-20; and Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia, 2008). For the Venetian colony of Crete, see

378 in the 1360s saw a wave of interest in holy war against Islam that followed upon a long

period in which peaceful relations had predominated, an enthusiasm that would lead to

the so-called Alexandrian Crusade. Finally, the region suffered numerous ecological

challenges during the period in which Crusading fervor and anti-Muslim sentiment

reached its height. In response to these various challenges, and with the goal of uniting

the population toward the shared goal of a successful Crusade, temporal and religious

leaders presented public spectacles that offered ambivalent messages about interfaith

relations.

There were, however, many important differences between Cypriot and Castilian

society. First and foremost, we must remember that the internal religious differences here

were between Latin and Orthodox Christians. However acrimonious these may have been

at times, there remained a shared faith and sense of community of a kind that never

extended to Castile’s Jews and Muslims, even during a supposed ‘golden age of

convivencia’. This meant that fears of social and religious contagion were much reduced;

there is little evidence that Cypriots converted to Islam or Judaism in any numbers or that

there was a fear of such apostasy. There were no New Christians whose conversions

could be held suspect and lead to accusations of heresy or crypto-Judaism. The Latin

Christians, moreover, were a minority group. Pressure to conform to particular religious

practices came from a small cadre of elites rather than from large sections of the

population and followed a dynamic quite distinct from that in Castile. There was no

question in Cyprus of pogroms against people whose religious beliefs or practices

differed from those of the rulers. On the contrary, fears of popular religious violence were fears of a rebellion against the Lusignan dynasty rather than of a pogrom against a

Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (Philadelphia, 2000).

379 vulnerable minority group. This is not to say that Latin Christians on Cyprus did not express anxieties about the influence of other faiths, however. In fact, they went to great

lengths to present themselves as Western in culture, religious practice, and appearance.

Such differences are a benefit to our analysis, however, for they permit us to

consider frontier spectacle under diverse conditions. As we shall see, civic pageants

performed similar social functions despite divergent local histories and conditions. These

parallels confirm the validity of notions of a loosely unified Mediterranean civilization as

well as scholarly constructs such as ‘medieval frontier societies’ for helping us to

understand how regions as diverse as Andalusia and Cyprus developed along similar

lines. At the same time, Andalusia was not Cyprus nor Cyprus Andalusia. Each society’s

domestic religious tensions ultimately played out in markedly different ways. During

much of the medieval period, however, both enjoyed a remarkable degree of social

stability despite significant internal and external pressures. Public spectacles played an

important role in maintaining such constancy in each of these regions. By examining

these performances as a product of conditions both general to frontier societies and

particular to the locale, we can not only comprehend how they functioned but also better

assess interfaith relations within each society.

This chapter approaches these questions by juxtaposing a pair of urban spectacles

from Cyprus and Sevillae that shared related content. Seville is a useful point of

comparison here for two reasons. First, it was a major port and a larger, more

cosmopolitan city than the Castilian examples thus far considered. As such, it more

closely mirrors the economic and social makeup of the maritime trading center of Cyprus,

whose commerce extended from Italy to Egypt to the Levant, than do the inland cities of

380 Jaén, Córdoba, and Murcia. Second, it allows us to view the Castilian frontier from a broader perspective. I have focused thus far on the last decades of the fifteenth century, the period during and immediately preceding the Granadan war during which Castile experienced a wave of renewed interest in holy war and a corresponding breakdown in attitudes of tolerance for religious minorities and recent converts living in Christian- dominated territories. While the Cypriot spectacles I examine here occurred during a similar context of religious warfare, they did generally succeed in easing internal religious tensions. In contrast to the extended and decisive war with Granada under

Fernando and Isabel, moreover, the Crusading fervor on Cyprus and the actual campaign lasted only a brief time and its leaders evinced little interest in meaningful or long-term

conquests. In comparing these to events in Seville, I have therefore chosen to concentrate

on the first half of the fifteenth century, prior to widespread shifts in policies toward

Granada and internal religious minorities.

Conditions in early fifteenth-century Seville were similar, however, to those in

later decades. Attitudes toward non-Christians, especially Jews, vacillated between

hostility and tolerance. Despite a series of campaigns early in the century led by the Juan

II’s regent Fernando, who later became Fernando I of Aragon, and culminated in the

conquest of Antequera, the general disinclination to pursue either a decisive war of

conquest or a true peace led to intermittent warfare with Granada while fostering a

constant sense of physical insecurity. These ambivalent responses, however, included

moments of perhaps genuine tolerance and communal action, such as occurred during a

time of plague in 1449 when the Jewish community, with the open agreement of the

archbishop and many of the canons, marched in a rogation procession that almost

381 precisely mirrored one conducted by Christians a few days earlier. These two moments—

Fernando’s campaign and the Jewish procession—marked a break from the general state of ambivalence.7 Carefully presented public performances were also at the heart of each.

The 1449 procession involved the deliberate fusion of Christian practice with Torah

veneration while Fernando began his campaigns with a procession centered on the sword

of Fernando III, thus invoking the virtue, divine favor, and fighting prowess of the past

king.

The Latin elite on Cyprus similarly invoked the past when, in 1360, King Peter I

took for himself the additional title of King of Jerusalem in a grand public ceremony

meant to establish the legitimacy of his attempt to lead a Crusade. The endeavor was

perhaps saved two years later when the Papal legate Peter of Thomas led multi-faith

processions through Famagusta and Nicosia to ask that God deliver all the people of

Cyprus from plague. When the plague ended shortly thereafter, this seemingly

miraculous event served as a reminder of shared faith as well as a sign that God favored

the legate and his mission of Crusade. Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, of course, used both of

these strategies—invocations of the past and attempts to unite the people in a common

cause—in his attempts to influence the people of Jaén through grand spectacles. That

similar means were used to accomplish similar ends decades earlier in Seville and nearly

a century before in Cyprus indicates both their efficacy and the persistence of analogous

tensions in all of these frontier settings. Before turning to these spectacles, however, we

must outline the Cypriot situation in the late fourteenth century.

7 To these two moments, we could perhaps add the anti-Jewish pogrom of 1391 as an instance of intensified anti-Semitic sentiment. This, however, has been well studied and does not fit well with the definition of frontier spectacle as described here. See Philippe Wolff, “The 1391 Pogrom in Spain. Social Crisis or Not?” Past and Present 50 (1971): 4-18; Emilio Mitre Fernández, Los judíos de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III: el pogrom de 1391 (Valladolid, 1994); Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 245-9.

382 **********

By 1360, the kingdom of Cyprus had for nearly seventy years been the

easternmost Mediterranean territory ruled by Latin Christians (see figure 23). It had been

in the hands of westerners for far longer, having been captured by Richard I of England

in 1191, during the Third Crusade. Richard’s attack was a response to a perceived

personal slight by the island’s ruler, Comnenus, who was then in rebellion against the Byzantine Empire. But Richard had little interest in maintaining this possession and quickly sold it to the Templar Order. The Templar regime, however, was greatly

unpopular and, after suppressing an attempted rebellion in Nicosia, the Order concluded

that the island was not worth the resources required to control it. They returned

sovereignty to Richard, who sold Cyprus again, this time to Guy de Lusignan, the one- time king of Jerusalem whose defeat to Saladin at Hattin had ended his reign. This second purchase of Cyprus proved far more durable and marked the beginning of a dynasty which persisted for over three hundred years and outlasted all other Crusader conquests in the East. Through generous land grants, Guy was able to attract a number of settlers, including a military core of perhaps three to five hundred knights and mounted sergeants

(although these numbers are likely exaggerated) that would become Cyprus’s ruling class. The Lusignans, particularly Guy’s brother and heir Aimery, also sought papal confirmation of their rule and the establishment of Church institutions on the island.

Although Cyprus had been taken from Orthodox Christians, not Muslims, and its conquest was therefore technically illegitimate, Pope Celestine III recognized that the island could support the hard-pressed Christians on the Levantine mainland and serve as a base for further Crusades. He therefore approved the request in 1196, thus establishing

383 the Lusignans as legitimate rulers, from a western perspective at least, and creating an

ecclesiastic hierarchy for Cyprus.8

This Latin Christian ruling structure was laid atop a population that lived almost

exclusively in the countryside and included a multiplicity of religious groups.

Although the majority were Greek Orthodox, there were also Syrians, Jacobites,

Nestorians, Maronites, and Armenians as well as small communities of Jews and

Muslims. There was also a strong aspect of Arabic culture amongst all these groups, a

remnant from the earlier Muslim domination of the island.9 Waves of refugees from the

collapsing Crusader principalities on the mainland swelled the ranks of the non-Orthodox

sects during the thirteenth century, but these new arrivals congregated chiefly in the cities

of Famagusta, Nicosia, and Limassol (see figure 24).10

It was in these cities, as well, that the Latins mostly resided. Limassol had hosted

Italian merchants communities since soon after the first Crusade, but the Lusignans and

their retainers flocked primarily to Nicosia while Famagusta became the island’s main

port, attracting foreign merchants—especially Italians, Catalonians, and Muslims—as

well as those in associated trades. This international trade was increasingly central to the

Cypriot economy during the Lusignan period. Although most residents pursued

traditional roles as peasants or landowners, Cyprus attained new levels of wealth due to

8 For a general history of Cyprus during this period, see Peter Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374 (Cambridge, 1991). For the establishment and organization of the Roman Church on Lusignan Cyprus, see Nicholas Coureas, The Latin Church in Cyprus, 1195-1312 (Aldershot, 1997). 9 Jean Richard, “Culture franque, culture grecque, culture arabe dans le royaume de Chypre au 13e et au début du 14e siècle,” Université de Saint-Joseph. Annales du Department des Lettres Arabes, 6 (1991–2) [1996], 235–45. 10 Chris Schabel outlines the religious groups on Cyprus in rough order of demographic importance in “Religion,” in Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191-1374, ed. Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel (Leiden, 2005), 157-218. See also Nicholas Coureas, “Non-Chalcedonian Christians on Latin Cyprus,” in Gesta Dei per Francos: Studies in Honour of Professor Jean Richard, ed Benjamin Kedar, Michel Balard and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Aldershot, 2001), 349-60.

384 changing economic patterns in the eastern Mediterranean. Papal bans on direct trade between Europe and the Muslim world offered Cyprus a role as an entrepôt for a wide variety of goods, ultimately funding a plethora of Gothic monuments as well as military expeditions which far outweighed the numerical strength of Cyprus’s Latin military elite.11 This trade benefited the Muslims as well and may partially explain why the

Mamluks did not mount a serious attack against the island until the fifteenth century.

Contact between Cypriots and mainland Muslims was not limited to the

commercial realm. In the early fourteenth century, for instance, a lengthy treatise titled

The Letter from the People of Cyprus was sent to two Muslim scholars in Damascus, Tāqī

al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Taymiyya and Shams al Dīn Muḥammad Ibn Abī Ṭālib al-Anṣāri al-

Dimashqī. Written in Arabic by an unknown Cypriot Christian, likely in Famagusta, the

Letter argued that Islam was merely the version of the true faith as given to the Arabs,

and thus was subordinate to Christianity. It included extensive references to and

quotations from the Bible and the Qurʻan, subtly amending the text of the latter in order

to make it support Christian doctrine. The author of this work, likely a Melkite of Syrian

extraction, therefore knew Arabic and was intimately familiar with the Qurʻan. That there

were regular scholarly exchanges between Cypriots and Mamluks is further indicated by

al-Dimashqī, who rebutted the Letter in a lengthy treatise of his own addressed to the

11 Nicholas Coureas, “Economy,” in Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191-1374, ed. Nicolaou-Konnari and Schabel, 103-156; idem, “Controlled Contacts: The Latin Church of Cyprus, the Papacy, and Mamluk Egypt, 1250-1350,” in Proceedings of the 9th and the 10th International Colloquia on the History of Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Islamic Periods, ed. Urbain Vermeulen and Jo van Steenbergen, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 140 (Leuven, 2005), 395-408; David Jacoby, “Citoyens, sujets et protégés de Venise et de Gênes en Chypre du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” Byzantinische Forschungen 5 (1977): 159-88; idem, “The Rise of a New Emporium in the Eastern Mediterranean: Famagusta in the Late Thirteenth Century,” Μελέται και Υπομνήματα 1 (1984): 143-79; Jean Richard, “Le peuplement latin et syrien en Chypre au XIIIe siècle,” Byzantinische Forschungen 7 (1979): 157-73; Catherine Otten-Froux, “Les Italiens à Chypre (fin XIIe - fin XVe siècles),” in Identités croisées en un milieu méditerranéen: le cas de Chypre (antiquité – Moyen Âge), ed. Sabine Fourrier and Gilles Grivaud (Rouen, 2006), 279-300; and Peter Edbury, “Famagusta in 1300,” in Cyprus and the Crusades, ed. Nicholas Coureas and Jonathan Riley- Smith (Nicosia, 1995), 337-53.

385 leading churchmen on Cyprus.12

If the political geography of the time left Cyprus poised between the Christian and

Muslim worlds and thus provided its wealth, it was also a source of physical insecurity.

As on the frontier of Castile, trade and other peaceful contacts here took place side by

side with overtly hostile actions. The Lusignans regularly provided aid to Crusaders on

the mainland during the thirteenth century; after the fall of Acre, they were among the

chief proponents of new expeditions against the Turks and Mamluks. At the same time,

the collapse of the Crusader principalities left Cyprus open to naval attack and there were

numerous scares during the thirteenth and fourteenth century. In 1271, for instance, a

Mamluk fleet foundered near Limassol before troops could be landed. Rumors of

invasion abounded in the 1290s and again in 1306. In 1308, Amaury of Tyre wrote to

Pope Clement that the Mamluks were preparing an invasion fleet of eighty galleys. The

threat of attack was deemed so dire that King Henry II of Cyprus successfully petitioned

the Pope to grant indulgences for those frantically constructing fortifications in

Famagusta. Threats of Mamluks attack came again in 1322 when Cypriot forces

intervened on behalf of the Armenians in Ayas. In 1363, shortly before the Alexandrian

Crusade, repeated Turkish raids led King Peter I to conduct a series of retaliatory attacks

along the coast of Anatolia. On the whole, however, no serious fighting took place on

Cyprus until war with Genoa in the 1370s and the island was not the focus of a successful

Muslim strike until the 1420s.13

12 Muslim-Christian Polemic during the Crusades: The Letter from the People of Cyprus and Ibn Abī Ṭālib al-Dimashqī's Response, ed. Rifaat Y. Ebied and David Thomas (Leiden, 2005) 13 Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, 15-6, 120-2; idem, “Latins and Greeks on Crusader Cyprus,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. David Abulafia and Nora Berend (Aldershot, 2002), 133-4; and Leontios Makhairas, Recital Concerning the Sweet Land of Cyprus entitled ‘Chronicle’, ed. R.M. Dawkins, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932), i, 150-2, § 137-44. On this issue in general, see Peter Edbury, The Lusignan Kingdom of Cyprus and its Muslim Neighbours (Nicosia, 1993) (reprinted in Kupros apo tin proistoria

386 This sense of constant danger conditioned relations between the Latin rulers of

Cyprus and their mostly Orthodox subjects. The history of medieval Cyprus is often

written as religious struggle with two dominant themes: Latin coercion and Greek

resistance. According to this tradition, which reflects the partisan perspectives of some

contemporary sources, the Latins stripped the Greek church of its property, brought its

clergy under the control of the papacy, and persecuted those who resisted attempts to

bring its beliefs and practices into line with Western norms. It was only the strength of

the Cypriots’ faith that allowed the Orthodox Church to weather this storm and retain its identity.14 Aspects of this are accurate. The papacy did, at least on occasion, direct the

Latin Church on Cyprus to do all in its power to bring the Orthodox population into

obedience. But these attempts to control Greek Christianity on Cyprus focused upon the

institution of the church and generally not on the religious practices of the common people.15

The Lusignan dynasty similarly applied a combination of harsh practices and a light touch. Peasants, or paroikos, who initially comprised the bulk of the Orthodox population, were legally defined as chattel and bore a heavy tax burden. At the same time, there is little to suggest that rural dwellers suffered more under the Lusignans than

they had under Byzantine rulers. Cognizant of the revolt against the Templars, the early

Lusignans kept traditional economic structures in place and their successors followed this

stous neoterous chronous [Nicosia, 1995], 223-42). 14 Schabel lists examples of such scholarship and their relationship to perspectives in the primary sources, “Religion,” 158-9. See also Annetta Iliéva, “Francus contra Graecum? Some notes on identity in Cypriot history writing during the thirteenth century,” in Visitors, Immigrants, and Invaders in Cyprus, ed. P.W. Wallace (Albany, 1995), 114-124. 15 Harry J. Magoulias, “A Study in Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Church relations on the Island of Cyprus between the Years A.D. 1196 and 1360,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 10 (1964): 96-106.

387 example.16 For Greeks higher on the social spectrum, conditions were different. The

archontes, or Byzantine landholding class, seems to have disappeared quite early in the

Latin regime, perhaps even before Guy de Lusignan purchased the island. Whether the

majority of these nobles were killed in the initial conquest, emigrated, or remained on

Cyprus in reduced circumstances is unknown. It is clear, however, that they played no

significant role under the Lusignans. At the same time, the Greek population did not

ultimately remain limited to the countryside, but slowly emigrated to the cities, where

they became economically and politically indispensable as artisans, merchants, and

administrators.17

The Latins on Cyprus lived primarily in these areas from the beginning of the

Lusignan period; indeed, they transformed Nicosia and Famagusta from unwalled,

minimally-populated towns into urban centers. In doing so, they deliberately eschewed

local traditions and modes of life into order to replicate European and Levantine

conditions. This ensured a striking spatial separation between themselves and their

subjects. Even Greeks living in the cities were kept apart from Latins; in Famagusta, for

instance, they were limited to the southern part of the city.18 This segregation was not

merely physical, but was mirrored in distinct and separate institutions developed to keep

Latins and Greeks apart in ecclesiastic, judicial, and economic matters.19

The Lusignans and their retainers developed and maintained these divisions as

16 Edbury, “Latins and Greeks,” 137-9; “Le régime des Lusignans en Chypre et la population locale,” Coloniser au Moyen Âge, ed. Michel Balard and Alain Ducellier (Paris, 1995), 354–8. 17 Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, 20-1; “Latins and Greeks,” 138-9. 18 Nicholas Coureas, “The Latin Elite on Cyprus: Trying to Keep Apart,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 10 (2001): 33-4; Edbury, “Famagusta in 1300,” 346. It is unclear whether similar restrictions pertained in Nicosia but there is some evidence to suggest that was indeed the case. See The Cartulary of the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom of Nicosia, ed. Nicholas Coureas and Chris Schabel, TSHC 25 (Nicosia, 1997), 184-94, 205-8, 210-2, nos. 75-77, 79, 81; and Nicola Coldstream, Nicosia: Gothic City to Venetian Fortress (Nicosia, 1993). 19 See Coureas, “Latin Elite on Cyprus,” passim.

388 part of a larger attempt to preserve an identity separate from their environment. The

Latins saw themselves as Western European in nearly every respect—in their religion,

literature, architecture, diversions, food, dress, and politics—and they aggressively

presented themselves as such. Fourteenth-century coins depict Cypriot kings in western

attire while tombstones did the same for both male and female Latins.20 Royal coronation

ceremonies were conducted in accordance with western norms, court officials bore the

same titles as their counterparts in the Crusader Principalities or in France, legal codes

were imported (in the fourteenth century, Cypriot kings usually had an Italian jurist on

their council), and all land was held according to western feudal customs.21 In one sense,

these were means of governing a subjugated indigenous population: no Greeks or Syrians

were permitted to hold a fief until the fifteenth century; no one who was not a man de la

lei de Rome could bear witness in court against a Latin. The retention of social customs

was also essential to the maintenance of close military and commercial alliances with the

West. This was particularly true in a religious sense; the Lusignans were careful to

present themselves as wholly orthodox in order to ensure the continued and active

support of the papacy. Yet the insistence of Cyprus’s Latin elite at maintaining inherited

social and cultural customs was more than practical politics; it was an attempt to maintain

a particular knightly identity.

There was a particular emphasis on chivalric ideals and romances, such as the

Arthurian cycle, were popular as a means of staying culturally linked to the west despite

infrequent contacts. These romances, as in Castile, were more than reading material; they

20 David M. Metcalf, Coinage of the Crusades and the Latin East in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (London, 1995), 199-224, plates 26-33; Edbury, “Latins and Greeks,” 134-5. 21 Peter Edbury, “Franks,” in Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191-1374, ed. Nicolaou-Konnari and Schabel, 70-1, 79-80; and idem, “Latins and Greeks,” 136-7.

389 were a form of education that provided exemplars upon which Cypriot knights sought to

model their own lives. Philip of Novara, for instance, wrote of his youthful service to a

Cypriot knight in which he was required to read aloud from the romances. Also as in

Castile, chivalric tales were used as narrative and theatrical framing devices for public

tournaments. Indeed, Maurice Keen has pointed out that the earliest known instance of

knights playing Arthurian roles during a joust dates from a knighting ceremony on

Cyprus in 1223.22 Similar role-playing was featured at a celebration held in Acre later in

the thirteenth century that involved many prominent Cypriot knights: “And the festival

was the finest that anyone had known for the last hundred years, of pleasures and bohorts

[free-for-all style of joust]. And they imitated the Round Table and the queen of Femenie,

that is knights dressed as ladies and jousted together; then they played nuns who were

with monks and held a bohort among themselves, and they imitated Lancelot and Tristan

and Palamedes and many other fine and delightful and pleasant games.”23 The Cypriot

love of chivalric culture even influenced those back in Europe: Philip of Novara’s Les

quatre ages de l’homme was widely read in France and the writing of early Grail legends

may be linked to the Lusignan court. That the Cypriot Latins took the ideals expressed in these stories to heart is indicated by their acceptance as equals by visiting Crusaders. Jean de Joinville, for instance, described Guy of Ibelin as “the most accomplished knight I have ever seen.”24

Early Latin Cypriot authors like Philip of Novara have almost nothing to say

22 Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, 1984), 93; David Jacoby, “Knightly Values and Class Consciousness in the Crusader States of the Eastern Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Historical Review 1 (1986), 163-4, 166-7; Krijnie Ciggaar, “Le royaume des Lusignan: terre de littérature et de traductions. Échanges littéraires et culturels,” in Les Lusignans et l’Outre Mer (Poitiers, 1995), 91-2; and Edbury, “Latins and Greeks,” 134-5. See also Chapter 2, pp#, and notes 67-8. 23 “Les Gestes des Chiprois,” in RHC, Arm., vol. 2 (Paris, 1906), 793. 24 Edbury, “Franks,” 82-3.

390 about the Greek population. In one sense, this is not surprising. The disappearance of the archontes as a social class left the island with a dearth of influential natives. This was a key factor behind the success of the Lusignan dynasty, for there was no one to organize rebellion. It meant that, in addition to cultural, linguistic, cultural, and ethnic divides, there was a social gap between the knightly Latin rulers and the Greek peasantry. The establishment of political and legal structures closed to Greeks ensured that this gap would be long lived and means that there is little documentary evidence regarding the reactions of the Greek populace to their new rulers. What does remain is generally from the perspective of the Greek clergy, who faced Roman Catholic attempts to remove the

Orthodox hierarchy, reducing the number of bishops, for instance, from fourteen to four and placing these under Latin authority. Their records tell a story of repression and resistance focused on attempts to retain Orthodox practice despite the harsh tactics of the

Latins.25

Such writing is epitomized by the story of the ‘thirteen monks of Kantara,’ who

came from Mount Athos and founded the monastic community of Panagia Kantariotissa

near the castle of Kantara. These monks were imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately

brutally executed in public in Nicosia in 1231 over the issue of whether leavened or

unleavened bread was appropriate for the Eucharist. Medieval and modern historians

alike have used this “major persecution” to explain how “the oppression of the Greek

religion and national feeling was institutionalized.26 But more recent work has pointed

out that a single set of executions during the Lusignan’s three centuries of rule on Cyprus

25 Annetta Iliéva, “L’image des Lusignans dans l’historiographie chypriote: héros et antihéros,” in Les Lusignans et l’Outre-Mer, Actes du colloque Poitiers-Lusignan, octobre, 1993, ed. J.-P. Arrignon (Poitiers, 1995), 159-162. 26 Costas P. Kyrris, “Greek Cypriot identity, Byzantium and the Latins, 1192–1489,” History of European Ideas 19 (1994): 564-5.

391 cannot be thought to typify Latin attitudes or policies. Moreover, the executions were less

about religious practice than rebellion—Latin sources indicate that the monks were executed not for their use of leavened bread, which was not significant to the Latins, but

because they refused to stop calling the Latins heretical for their use of unleavened

bread—during a chaotic time when there was a child on the throne and the threat of civil

war.27 Others have pointed out that Greek bishops and clergy were generally allowed to

attend their flocks without much interference.

There is some evidence for conversion, if such a term is appropriate in this case,

to the Latin rite. It was not common, however. As one scholar has noted, conversion

“involved a complete change of cultural values and group attachment” that was generally

unattractive. Even in the fifteenth century, when acculturation was well advanced,

Orthodox Greeks or Syrians who converted for material ends faced open condemnation.28

Writing of Thibauld Belfarage, a convert who became one of the first Cypriot Greek to be

knighted, Leontios Makhairas wrote that “he was so much lifted up by the world that he

deserted the faith of his fathers, (the Greek faith), and became a Latin, (and thought that

the God of the Latins is different from the God of the Greeks. And if a man thinks thus

and changes his allegiance, God loves him neither in this world nor in the other.) I am not

condemning the Latins, but what is the need for a Greek to become a Latin? For should a

good Christian despise the one faith and betake himself to the other?... Thibald was no

27 Schabel, “Religion,” 195-7; idem, “Martyrs and Heretics, Intolerance of Intolerance: The Execution of Thirteen Monks in Cyprus in 1231,” in Schabel, Greeks, Latins, and the Church in Early Frankish Cyprus. Variorum Collected Studies (Aldershot, 2010), 1-33; On the issue of leavened/unleavened bread (enzymo/azymo), see The Synodicum Nicosiense and Other Documents of the Latin Church of Cyprus, 1196-1373, ed. Chris Schabel, TSHC 39 (Nicosia, 2001), 124-6, 142-5, 254-7, 296-9, nos. B.6a, B.18g, L.10, X.12, X.13; and Cartulary, 175-84, nos. 69, 71-4. 28 Angel Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” in Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191-1374, ed. Nicolaou-Konnari and Schabel, 45; Nicholas Coureas, “Conversion on Latin Cyprus: A New Faith or a New Rite?” EKEE 24 (1998): 77-86.

392 heretic who became a good Christian.”29

The relative lack of conversion is evidence that the Latins did not attempt

coercion, at least not effectively. It also indicates that, although conversion was a

prerequisite for those hoping to join the ruling noble elite, social advancement was

possible without abandoning one’s cultural and religious identity. The divide between

Greeks and Latins, although wide, was not total. The Lusignan regime depended on

Greeks to help them administer the realm. From the thirteenth century onwards, Greeks were employed in positions of responsibility and influence as estate managers and staffed the royal finance office and other civil service posts. Many of these likely were former archontes who chose to compromise and collaborate with the invaders in order to ensure their survival, even if this meant loss of their property as well as their former status and privileges. Regardless of their origins, those Greeks who served the Latins as administrators formed the nucleus of a class of educated, wealthy, and socially prominent

Greeks whose lack of land or feudal titles, by the fifteenth century, was only a moderate social impediment. As Angel Nicolaou-Konnari points out, it is misleading to view the

conditions of prominent Greeks under Lusignan rule as the old Byzantine nobility in

reduced circumstances. Instead, the Greeks created a new system of stratification in

which they managed “to use the new social realities to their own advantage.”30

Social relations and cultural exchange between this new Greek class and the

Latins multiplied from about the middle of the fourteenth century. This is perhaps best

exemplified by the formation of a Greek Cypriot dialect that drew heavily on French loan

words. This was spoken both by the ruling class, which relied almost solely on French

29 Makhairas, Recital, i, 577, § 579; Costas P. Kyrris, “Some Aspects of Leontios Makhairas’ Ethnoreligious Ideology, Cultural Identity, and Historiographic Method,” Stasinos 10 (1989-1993): 182-3. 30 Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” 45.

393 until the late fourteenth century, and by Greeks of all social classes. Makhairas spoke

wryly of this in noting that “(when the Latin period began) men began to learn French,

and their Greek became barbarous, just as it is today, when we write both French and

Greek, in such a way that no one in the world can say what our language is.”31 Makhairas

was also the first to use the term ‘Kypriotis’ to refer to both Latins and Greeks, indicating

a shared linguistic and political affiliation.32 Makhairas was not the only one to use this

term and much has been made of the emergence of a national identity during the fifteenth

century. Yet it remains unclear whether Kypriotis was a concept shared only by the

Latins and wealthy, urban Greeks like Makhairas or whether it reflects the self-perception of the island’s population as a whole. More importantly, scholars have proposed a range of potential reasons for slow but complete shift in attitudes on the part of Cyprus’s divided population.33

Nicolaou-Konnari and Gilles Grivaud attribute this to a breakdown in Latin,

French society on Cyprus. Intermarriage with Italian and Catalan merchants and

demographic decline due to plague and decreased immigration made it increasingly

difficult to maintain the earlier exclusiveness. This was exacerbated by the loss of papal

support after the Great Schism in 1378, which weakened the Latin Church hierarchy on

Cyprus, and the Mamluk invasion in 1420, which dealt a powerful blow to the dominance

31 Makhairas, Recital, i, 143, § 158. See also Daniele Baglioni, “ Interférence et convergence linguistique dans les documents chypriotes du XVe siècle,” in Identités croisées en un milieu méditerranéen: le cas de Chypre (antiquité – Moyen Âge), ed. Sabine Fourrier and Gilles Grivaud (Rouen, 2006), 301-29. 32 As opposed to the terms ‘Romanoi’ which indicated Byzantine culture, Orthodox rite, and Greek language, or ‘Kyprios’, which referred to a place of origin and an ethnic identity. Gilles Grivaud, “Éveil de la nation chyproise (XIIIe-XVIe siècles,” in Kyprios Character: Quelle identité chypriote?, ed. P. Gontier (Paris, 1995), 105-16 ; Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” 58-62; and Jean Richard, “Culture franque et culture grecque: le royaume de Chypre au XVème siècle,” Byzantinische Forschungen 11 (1987): 399-415. 33 Acculturation is also evident in fifteenth-century Cypriot architecture. See Thierry Soulard, “L’architecture gothique grecque du royaume des Lusignan : les cathédrales de Famagouste et Nicosie,” in Identités croisées en un milieu méditerranéen, ed. Fourrier and Grivaud, 354-383; and James Schryver, “Monuments of Identity: Latin, Greek, Frank, and Cypriot?,” in Identités croisées en un milieu méditerranéen, ed. Fourrier and Grivaud, 384-405.

394 of the Lusignans.34 Others point to further external factors. Laura Balletto suggests that

the Genoese victory over the Lusignans in the 1370s and 1380s gave the republic a great

deal of influence over Cypriot affairs. Rather than a dominant, French ruling class, there were now competing Latin Christian interests and this left room for a variety of social interactions which had not been possible prior to this period.35 Peter Edbury has proposed that little to no assimilation would have occurred if not for the constant danger of Muslim invasion. Finally, some scholars suggest that there was no such Cypriot nation in the fifteenth century. Coureas argues that the Latins lifted social and legal barriers only grudgingly and always with the goal of obtaining increased revenues. The development of a new Greek elite in the cities or the freeing of peasants was not a sign of tolerance but of expediency. The Lusignans never fully accepted the Greeks and thus “there was never a complete fusion of Latin and Greek elements on Cyprus, but merely a segregated co- existence which broke down partially over time, but never completely.”36 Kyrris takes the same perspective from the Greek side, suggesting that the tone of unceasing efforts to maintain the independence of the Orthodox Church are evidence that most Greek

Cypriots remained, until well into the sixteenth century, “obstinately Greco-Byzantine despite [Latin] rule and Byzantium’s collapse.”37 Yet Kyrris also admits that the situation changed in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the Latins became hellenized and permitted Greeks like Makhairas to hold prominent positions.

Even if Coureas and Kyrris are correct in arguing that notions of a Cypriot national identity were limited to certain groups, their depiction of the last decades of

34 Nicolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” 60; Grivaud, “Éveil de la nation.” 35 Laura Balletto, “Ethnic Groups, Cross-Social and Cross-Cultural Contacts on Fifteenth-Century Cyprus,” in Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Benjamin Arbel (London, 1996), 35-48. 36 Coureas, “Latin Elite,” 41-2. 37 Kyrris, “Greek Cypriot identity,” 571.

395 Lusignan rule is overly pessimistic. If the Greeks remained an oppressed majority who

retained a strong sense of Greek identity opposed to Latin rule, why were there no

instances of popular rebellion during a chaotic fifteenth century in which the ruling class was economically, politically, demographically, and militarily weak? This lack of overt resistance, coupled with evidence of more and closer social ties, indicates that there was a some sense of common feeling across religious and cultural divides, even if we cannot

describe it as a “complete fusion.” All of these authors date the beginnings of this shift in

attitudes to the middle of the fourteenth century (Coureas is the most precise, marking

1348 and the arrival of bubonic plague on Cyprus as the turning point). Many of the

external events cited, including the defeat by Genoa, the papal schism, and the Mamluk

invasion, cannot therefore have spawned the trend, though they may well have intensified

existing problems within the Latin community. Instead, the structural challenges facing

the Lusignan regime—plague, decreased immigration, financial difficulties, and the

proximity of hostile Muslim power—are the most likely sources for the eventual easing

of inter-communal barriers. All of these factors played a role in the preparations for the

Alexandrian Crusade, which began in the early 1360s, or about a decade after the first

instance of plague on Cyprus. A close examination of the manner in which Latin

temporal and ecclesiastic leaders publicly presented themselves and their plans for

Crusade demonstrates that they sought a level of détente with the Greek population that

went beyond practical concessions meant to bolster revenues or forestall revolt. Instead,

they used public spectacles to point out common ground between Latins and Greeks,

emphasizing a shared faith and the mutual benefits that would accrue if the Muslims were

to be defeated.

396 **********

The foreign policy of Peter I, who began his decade-long reign in 1359, was the

most aggressive and ambitious of any Lusignan ruler. In some respects, this reflects the island’s economic wellbeing at the time, which permitted him to undertake campaigns that would have been impossible to both his predecessors and successors. Many of his

actions were less departures from established policies than attempts to implement them

on a grander scale. His first major initiative, for instance, was an attempt to combat

Turkish piracy by attacking and capturing their bases on the southern Anatolia coast. This

had been a longstanding Cypriot project. Peter’s father, Hugh IV, had participated in

several naval leagues comprised of Cyprus, Venice, and the Hospitallers, toward the

same end. Peter’s campaign, however, was conducted without assistance. Its success was

complete. He captured several town, including Satalia and Gorhigos, raided others, and

ensured that Turkish corsairs did not trouble Cyprus for the remainder of his reign (see

figure 23).38 The purposes of this campaign seem to have been the same as those of the

naval leagues, which were intended to safeguard the free movement of trading vessels

and secure Cyprus’s coasts. In other respects, Peter’s policy reversed that of prior

Lusignan monarchs. Hugh had avoided confrontation with the Mamluks who ruled

Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Not only was that regime far more powerful than Cyprus, but

the island’s trade depended heavily on transshipping Mamluk goods to Europe. War with

them therefore bore the threat not only of defeat but also of financial ruin. Peter,

however, devoted much of his reign to open war against the Mamluks.

From 1362 to 1365, Peter traveled through Western Europe—he was the first

reigning Lusignan monarch to do so—in order to settle disputes over his succession and

38 Makhairas, Recital, i, 103- 25, § 119-43; Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, 160-4.

397 to confirm commercial relations with the Italian republics of Genoa and Venice. His chief

purpose, however, was to recruit support for a Crusade against the Mamluks with the

ultimate goal of recovering the holy sites and recreating the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He

found a ready audience in Pope Urban V and King Jean II of France, who had already

begun to envision such an endeavor. The Crusade was formally announced in 1363, with

Jean II, a French monarch and a successor of Saint Louis, as overall leader. This was

imagined as a Crusade in the old style, an armed pilgrimage of the flower of Christendom

that would erase all the defeats suffered since the Crusading movement’s early

victories.39 Jean II’s death in 1364, however, removed much of the momentum behind

the movement. Peter became the expedition’s leader but recruitment was now much more

difficult. Troubles with Venice, which was dealing with a rebellion on Crete, and with

Genoa, which threatened war with Cyprus over a legal dispute, posed further problems.

In the event, Peter launched his invasion in October, 1365, keeping its destination secret

until it was at sea. He had with him a force of roughly 10,000 troops, the vast majority of

which consisted of Cypriots but with some smaller contingents from Venice and the

Order of the Hospital.

The story of the Alexandrian Crusade has been told many times and only the

briefest of summaries is needed here. The fleet reached Alexandria without mishap and

took the Mamluk defenders entirely by surprise, enabling them to capture the city with

ease. They subjected Alexandria to a brutal sack, confiscating anything of value,

including the property of Western merchants, and destroying much of the city and its

defenses. Unable therefore to hold it against an approaching army, the Crusaders

39 Makhairas, Recital, i, 113-7, § 129, 131; Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, 164-6.

398 abandoned Alexandria a week after their arrival, despite Peter’s protests.40 The long-term

effects of the invasion were minimal. The Mamluks were unprepared for a naval war and,

though they began constructing a fleet, no retaliatory strikes on Cyprus were realized.

Peter likely expected news of this victory to inspire Western knights to join further

attacks on the Mamluks, but no such help was forthcoming. The mercantile republics

were aghast at the damage done to their trade and worked actively to restore peace. Their

influence eventually prevailed with the Pope, who advised Peter to end hostilities. Over

the next two years, however, Peter attempted to press his advantage, negotiating with the

Mamluks to delay matters while launching a pair of further attacks against Syria which,

despite some successes, were largely disappointing. He returned to the West in 1368 in an

attempt to revive interest in the war but instead was pressured to permit Venice and

Genoa to negotiate peace on his behalf. This embassy failed and, on 16 January, 1369,

Peter was murdered by a group of his vassals. This assassination had much to do with

personal grievances and perceived abuses of monarchical power, but there is no doubt that the financial repercussions of the war with the Mamluks played a key role as well.

Peter had failed to consult key nobles regarding the conduct of the war; he had imposed ruinous taxes to pay for it while alienating royal assets; and he had greatly rewarded foreign Crusading nobles with extensive grants of Cypriot land. Peter’s brother John, regent for his son, ultimately concluded the war in October, 1370.41

Why did Peter undertake such a risky policy when his ostensible aim—the capture

40 Makhairas, Recital, i, 151-5, § 171-3; Philippe de Mézières, The Life of Thomae, ed. Joachim Smet. Textus et studia carmelitana 2 (Rome, 1954), 133-4, 138 ; Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, 166-8. 41 Makhairas, Recital, i, 157-97, § 177-214; 205-13, § 223-31; 263-9, § 278-81; Chypre sous les Lusignans. Documents chypriotes des Archives du Vatican (XIVe et XVe siècles), ed. Jean Richard (Paris, 1962), 80, 84. Edbury offers a concise account of events and references to the sources and prior literature, Kingdom of Cyprus, 169-79. See also his “The Murder of King Peter I of Cyprus (1359-1369),” Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980): 219-33.

399 of Jerusalem and defeat of the Mamluks—was so unlikely? Peter Edbury has proposed that his purpose was not Crusade at all; that Peter understood perfectly well that winning back the Holy Lands was not possible and instead used Crusading rhetoric to win

Western support. Instead, using evidence from the draft treaties of 1367 and 1368, he argues that Peter’s foremost aim was to secure trading concessions in Mamluk lands.

Italian and Catalan merchants had already begun to deal directly with their Muslim counterparts and Peter feared that Cyprus’s lucrative role as middleman was in danger.

He therefore attempted to disrupt commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean while securing

Alexandria and retaining control over East-West trade.42 This argument effectively explains Peter’s actions after the withdrawal from Alexandria; he attempted to effect some gain from the events and likely feared that disagreements over the peace would endanger Cyprus’s commercial relations. But if this was the plan from the beginning, it seems an overly convoluted means to an end. Peter knew what his troops could accomplish and of the Mamluk’s naval weakness. Indeed, he ultimately managed to take

Alexandria without significant support. Why then tour for years in Western Europe recruiting knights for a Crusade that was meant to be led by Jean II of France and would, therefore, be conducted out of his own control?

In developing this argument, Edbury responded to earlier scholarship that described Peter as a fervent proponent of holy war who desired to emulate the legendary heroes of the First Crusade and restore the holy sites of Jerusalem to the Christian world.

While there is relatively little evidence regarding Peter’s feelings regarding his faith,

Crusade or desire for personal fame, he does seem to have displayed excesses of piety at

42 Edbury presents this argument in detail in “The Crusading Policy of King Peter I of Cyprus,” in The Eastern Mediterranean Lands in the Period of Crusades, ed. P.M. Holt (Warminster, 1977), 90-105; and summarizes it in Kingdom of Cyprus, 171.

400 times. In 1353, for instance, Pope Innocent VI absolved him from a number of vows,

including oaths to walk the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela, to abstain from

meat, and to fast every Saturday.43 As king, Peter repeatedly referred in his letters to the

Crusade as aimed at recovering the Holy Land and he certainly convinced

contemporaries of his sincerity. Several of his closest advisors during the early 1360s,

moreover, including the Frenchmen Philippe de Mézières, his chancellor and Peter of

Thomas, Papal Legate to the East, were avid supporters of Crusade.44 It seems highly

unlikely that King Peter could have successfully deceived these men, close companions with whom he worked regularly and who joined him on his travels to Europe, if his interest in holy war was a mere pretense meant to cover commercial ambitions. Further,

Edbury discounts much contemporary evidence regarding Peter’s motives as “blatant propaganda.”45 If such propaganda successfully convinced the king’s contemporaries,

why should we suppose that Peter himself was alone immune to their appeal and instead

remained grounded in geopolitical realities?

Regardless of his intentions, Peter needed the wholehearted support of all of his

subjects, Latin and Greek, in order to succeed. The Latin knights were the basis of his

military might and therefore the most critical group. In Europe, Peter seems to have used

the traditional means of recruiting volunteers for a Crusade. Important supporters sent

letters to key temporal and ecclesiastic leaders, exhorting them to take the cross and aid

in recruitment, while evocative texts, the excitatoriae, were circulated as widely as

possible. The goal of these approaches was to enlist wealthy nobles, who would join with

43 W.H. Rüdt de Collenberg, “Les grâces papales autres que les dispenses matrimoniales accordées à Chypre de 1308 à 1378,” EKEE 8 (1975-1977), 211-2; Peter Edbury, “The Murder of King Peter I of Cyprus (1359-1369),” Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980): 219. 44 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 102-6; 45 Edbury, “Crusading Policy,” 90-1.

401 bands of their vassals and retainers. For commoners or for knights whose lord was not

going on Crusade, however, recruitment usually took place during public gatherings. This

could occur in the context of a tournament or fair, but there were also dedicated Crusade

rallies, in which speakers would appeal to listeners with tales of past heroes, the sufferings of Christians in the East, or the defilement of the holy places. Prelates would

offer indulgences and, if all this was successful, people would flock to join the

expedition. Peter spoke at many such gatherings while in Europe, seeking specifically to

enlist the many mercenaries currently in France who were unemployed after France and

England declared peace in 1360. Pope Urban, in particular, wanted the members of the

‘Free Companies’ of mercenaries to take the cross and therefore put an end to their

disruptions.46 Though such methods had worked in the past, Peter had little success on

his tour of Europe.

He had, however, undoubtedly used the same tactics on Cyprus before his

departure. The Latin knights shared, through their own deliberate efforts, a set of

chivalric ideals with knights in France and Germany and so were likely amenable to the

same Crusading propaganda that Peter employed in the West. At the same time, Cypriot

knights also understood that Peter’s campaign could place their homeland at risk. We

know relatively little of how the king worked to build a consensus amongst his own

knights. The one example we have, his 1360 coronation as King of Jerusalem in

Famagusta, however, shows that he presented the issue in terms of both Christian faith

and Cypriot (or Lusignan) pride. The Lusignan claim to the crown of Jerusalem stemmed

ultimately from Guy, who had ruled the kingdom in the late twelfth century and famously

46 Norman Housley, “The Mercenary Companies, the Papacy, and the Crusades: 1356-1378,” Traditio 38 (1982): 270-3.

402 lost much of it to Saladin. He had lost Jerusalem while gaining Cyprus, but his successors

continued to claim the succession. There were multiple claimants in the thirteenth

century, notably the Angevins of Sicily, but Peter’s grandfather, Henry II, won support

and ultimately recognition for his claim in the last years of the mainland Crusader

principalities. He was crowned in Tyre in 1286 in a lavish celebration that involved

representations of the Arthurian legends.47 Just a few years later, however, the Mamluks

conquered Acre and put an end to the Kingdom of Jerusalem as a physical entity. Cypriot

monarchs continued to style themselves as Jerusalem et Cypri Rex, however, and Peter’s

father, Hugh IV, had nevertheless had himself crowned king of Jerusalem. He chose to do

so in Famagusta, the easternmost city on Cyprus, as it was closest to Jerusalem itself.

Hugh also began a tradition of appointing Cypriot nobles to honorific titles included

Seneschal, Constable, Marshall, and Chamberlain of Jerusalem.48

Peter’s coronation as King of Jerusalem was not, therefore, an innovation.

Nevertheless, he made the most of the opportunity to make a statement about the

directions of his reign. First, he selected Easter Sunday, 1360, as the date for the event.

He had been crowned king of Cyprus on 24 November in 1358 or 1359 and so there was

a significant span of time between the coronations.49 Peter’s father Hugh, on the contrary, held his two coronations about a month apart, permitting time for the necessary travel and

preparations but not deliberately separating the two coronations in time. Peter likely

47 See above, n. 21; “Les Gestes des Chiprois,” in RHC, Arm., vol. 2 (Paris, 1906), 793. 48 “Chronique d’Amadi,” in Chroniques d’Amadi et de Strambaldi, ed. René de Mas Latrie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1891-1893), i, 401-3; Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, 107-9. 49 Makhairas offers both dates. It is likely that his coronation occurred in 1358, during his father’s lifetime. This was unprecedented for Lusignan Cyprus, but had been relatively common in France and, on occasion, in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Makhairas’s later statement that it occurred in 1359 either reflects the ambivalence of the sources available to him or was an attempt to reconcile the data with familiar practices. Recital, i, 77-81, § 86, 90. Edbury suggests that Hugh had Peter crowned early in order to pre-empt any questions about the succession, Kingdom of Cyprus, 147.

403 chose to delay his crowning as titular king of Jerusalem in order to organize a lavish and extended celebration and so that it would coincide with Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the year. Easter, though the sources do not draw this analogy, corresponded nicely with

Peter’s plans to make himself king of Jerusalem in fact as well as in name. Just as Christ had arisen from the dead, so too would Peter resurrect the dream of Christian rule over the very places Christ had walked. Second, he chose to have the papal legate Peter of

Thomas perform the ceremony, thus giving papal imprimatur to the coronation. As the coronation was linked to the king’s plans for Crusade and as the legate had come to

Cyprus with the express purpose of organizing anti-Turk and -Mamluk leagues, Peter of

Thomas’s role also served to drew attention to Peter’s desire to make a reality of the kingdom to which his new title referred, implying papal endorsement for this as well.

Finally, Peter marked this coronation, unlike his previous installation as king of Cyprus, with a grand celebration, indicating that he considered it, or wanted others to consider it, to be the more momentous occasion.

As described by Mézières, the coronation took place in the cathedral of St.

Nicholas in Famagusta and was attended by a great crowd, including the nobles as well as

“all the army and the people of both sexes.”50 Neither Mézières nor Makhairas, however, indicates whether ‘the people’ referred to representatives from all the peoples of Cyprus or just the Latins. Peter of Thomas then asked each the nobles and commoners whether they accepted Peter as king, thus offering the spectators, as was common, an active role in the proceedings. Once the crowd had acclaimed Peter, the legate anointed and consecrated him as king “for the glory of god and his holy church, the increase of the

50 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 91: “omnis exercitus, et populus utriusque sexus.”

404 faith, and the destruction of the enemies of the cross.”51 These, too, were standard

features of a coronation but Mézières made sure, in his account, to highlight the last of

these phrases. Just before the coronation, moreover, Peter appointed several of his chief

vassals to the chief official positions in the kingdom of Jerusalem.52 Like his crown,

these were nominal titles for the moment; if the kingdom should be won, however, they

would provide influence and wealth to their holders. The coronation, therefore, reminded

all present of the Crusading origins of the Lusignan dynasty while linking plans for future

Crusade to the defense of the faith, the realization of the king’s birthright, and the

prospect of great rewards for his followers.

Peter spent the days after the coronation celebrating with the assembled nobles of the realm. Mézières referred to a festival lasting “many, many days in Famagusta and later in Nicosia.”53 Makhairas confirmed this, noting there was a great rejoicing and a

noble assembly for eight days, when he was crowned at Famagusta.”54 Makhairas’s use

of the term ‘noble assembly’ suggests that Peter used the occasion to confer with his

vassals and perhaps take advantage of the impressions made by the coronation to build

support for his Crusading agenda. If so, it was likely with the active aid of his chancellor

and the papal legate. Mézières described Peter of Thomas as spending the days after the

coronation, “praying, teaching, and strengthening the king and others in the way of God

and the destruction of the enemies of the faith.”55 These ideas were discussed in the

context of direct action for Peter had already moved to occupy the town of Gorhigos on

51 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 91-2: “ad honorem Dei et ecclesiae suae sanctae et multiplicationem fidei et destructionem inimicorum crucis.” 52 Makhairas, Recital, i, 93, § 104. 53 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 92: “duravit solemnitas post coranationem multis et multis diebus in Famagusta et postea Nicosia.” 54 Makhairas, Recital, i, 93, § 104. 55 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 91-2: “legato semper praedicante, docente, in viam Dei et inimicorum fidei destructionem.”

405 the southern coast of Anatolia. In January, Peter had responded to pleas for aid from this town, whose hard-pressed defenders “were holding the place for the love of Christ,” with a small fleet.56 The Turkish response to this intervention led to Peter’s successful early campaigns and further conquests in Anatolia.57 His coronation as king of Jerusalem therefore took place in the context of efforts to regain a Latin foothold on the mainland and should be seen as more than an empty ceremony.

**********

Peter needed his Latin vassals to support his endeavor and to fight for him, and accordingly appealed to them in traditional and chivalric terms. Whatever his ultimate goal, however, Peter’s ambitions involved military gambles and, to have any hope of success, he needed the absolute support of all Cypriots. The Greek population of the island included few warriors and no nobles and therefore would take little part in the actual campaigns. They were unlikely, moreover, to have much interest in the king’s hereditary claim to the kingdom of Jerusalem. Their tacit support for his rule was no less important, however. Their taxes would finance the Crusade and their quiescence would permit him to be absent for extended visits to Europe and to bring the vast majority of his army to Alexandria, leaving Cyprus unguarded.

There were worrisome developments elsewhere in the Latin East, however. The

Venetian-ruled island of Crete (or the Kingdom of Candia) spent most of the 1360s in a state of rebellion. The St. Tito revolt began in 1363 when a number of Latin landowners on Crete refused to pay a new tax levied by the Venetian Senate, which they considered to favor merchant interests over their own. The uprising soon spread across the island as

56 Makhairas, Recital, i, 99-103, § 112-118. 57 See above, note 34.

406 the instigators were joined by many of the Greek inhabitants. Here, as on Cyprus, acculturation between Latins and Greeks had led to some feelings of mutual identity and the new administration established by the rebels included Greek representatives while loosening restrictions on the Orthodox hierarchy. A Venetian fleet managed to suppress the rebelling colonists in 1364. A significant proportion of the native Greek nobility remained recalcitrant and controlling the west of the island until 1368, declaring that they fought for the Byzantine Empire and the Orthodox faith.58

The situations on Crete and Cyprus were not wholly analogous. Although the origins of Latin rule on each were similar—Venice had purchased Crete from Boniface of

Montferrat, who could not pacify it, in 1211—political relations between Greeks and

Latins were quite different. Venice had never managed to break the power of the archontes on Crete and the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw repeated attempts by the Greek nobles to reestablish their control over the island. Although these failed, there was never the stability that marked Lusignan Cyprus. Nevertheless, Peter had reasons to worry that the rebellion might spread. First, despite the sympathies many Cypriot Greeks might hold regarding their co-religionists on Crete, Peter needed Venetian assistance for his Crusading plans. He therefore offered to travel to Crete and put down the rebellion there in person, using the Crusaders he had recruited in Europe. In the event, Venice managed without his help and was still able to provide the vessels Peter needed to assault

Alexandria. But the king had put himself firmly against Orthodox interests.

Potentially more worrisome was the divisive effect of the papal legate, Peter of

Thomas, who had also been involved in religious issues on Crete. Peter of Thomas was a

58 Sally McKee, “The Revolt of St Tito in Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete: A Reassessment,” Mediterranean Historical Review 9 (1994): 173–204; and eadem, Uncommon Dominion, 133-67.

407 Carmelite friar who had worked within that order until 1353, when, thanks to personal

connections within the Vatican, Pope Innocent VI appointed him papal nuncio to several

Italian cities.59 Later diplomatic missions involved him in Balkan politics and he spent

several years attempting to bring the Serbian Orthodox Church into union with Rome and

to broker a peace between Venice and Hungary. These assignments gave Peter of Thomas a reputation for expertise in Orthodox affairs and the pope next sent him to

Constantinople to discuss church union with the Byzantine Emperor John V Palaeologus and thus heal the breach between the Greek and Latin churches that had endured since

1054. John V had offered the potential of such a reconciliation in return for western aid against the Turks. Peter of Thomas’s embassy had no real chance for success, since he was not empowered to make any concessions and few Orthodox leaders were interested in unilateral submission to Rome. Instead, he spent his time in Constantinople discussing the relevant issues and strenuously working to win converts. He also traveled widely during this embassy, visiting Cyprus for the first time in 1358 while en route to the Holy

Land.60

In 1359, Peter of Thomas was named papal legate in the East, an office that bore

the missions of promoting alliances against the Turks and suppressing heresy as well as

significant spiritual and temporal powers. He spent the rest of that year traveling

throughout the eastern Mediterranean and working with the Byzantine Empire. He took

an active role when seeing to the defense of Latin cities in Greece and working to

59 On his life and career, see Frederick Boehlke, Pierre de Thomas: Scholar, Diplomat, and Crusader (Philadelphia, 1966); and book one of Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 51-161. Mézières wrote this vita with the express purpose of Peter of Thomas’s . While he was an eyewitness to many of the events described, therefore, he tends throughout to exaggerate Peter of Thomas’s actions and personal qualities. 60 Boehlke argues that this visit to Cyprus ignited in Peter of Thomas a passion for Crusade, likely through contact with Peter I of Cyprus. He does not, however, offer any direct evidence for this, Pierre de Thomas, 151-3.

408 organize concerted anti-Turkish policies. According to Mézières, these duties often took him to the forefront of battles in Anatolia, where he distinguished himself through courageous action.61 At the same time, however, Peter of Thomas seems to have met a

good deal of resistance from Orthodox leaders who feared that he had come to institute a policy of forceful conversion to the Latin rite.

Late that same year, the legate heard rumors of a heresy spreading among the

Latin population on Crete. Mézières, the sole source for this episode, does not identify the nature of this heresy; given the acculturation taking place here and elsewhere in the

Eastern Mediterranean between Latins and Greeks, however, it is likely that the issue centered on conversion to the Orthodox rite. This supposition is borne out by Mézières’s language. He usually referred to both Latins and Greeks as “Christian” and referred to such things as “the Christian faith.” On this occasion, however, Mézières repeatedly spoke of the “Catholic faith” and the “church of Rome,” thus indicating that the ‘heresy’ had more to do with the Orthodox rite and obedience to Rome than doctrinal matters.62

According to Mézières, Peter of Thomas’s visit was not a welcome one and he met

resistance from all quarters. Having failed to convince the offenders, among whom was

the duchess of Candia, wife of Pietro Baduario, the Venetian ruler of Crete, to renounce

their beliefs, he called on the duke to help suppress the heresy. The duke refused, and

Peter of Thomas excommunicated him and placed Candia under interdict. He then

publicly chastised Baduario in terms that demonstrate an absolute certainty that the

61 Mézières described, for instance, a battle at Lampsacus, in which Peter of Thomas led a charge of Hospitallers after much of the Christian army had fled, Saint Peter Thomas, 85-6. 62 For instance, Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 88: “... omnes suos Latinos ecclesiae Romanae pie confortabat, et usque ad mortem pro eo sustinendam pro fidei Catholica si expediret roboravit.” Cf. the previous chapter, a description of the battle at Lampsacus. The army consisted of “... plurimorum Venetorum, Ianuensium, Anglicorum, Graecorum et aliorum Christianorum associatus... viliter et in opprobrium fidei Christianae ad galeas fugerunt.” Saint Peter Thomas, 85.

409 papacy would back his actions, no matter how divisive: “and he spoke to the duke in a

manner that astounded everyone, saying to him that the church of Rome gave kingdoms

to the faithful, and took them from the unfaithful and, if they should harbor disobedient

and heretical men, the pope would take the rule of Crete from the Venetians and give it to

others.”63 Properly impressed, the duke submitted and was pardoned, as were all others

who confessed and sought forgiveness. One heretic, a relative of the duchess, refused to

submit and Peter of Thomas ordered him burned at the stake.

It is quite likely that Peter of Thomas did not speak so boldly. Doing so would

have overstepped his authority and placed Innocent VI in a difficult position. Peter of

Thomas’s threats, if implemented, might lead to a break between Rome and Venice, a key ally of the papacy, that would far outweigh the benefits of putting down religious irregularities on Crete. But Mézières’s account is still revealing. He chose to present the legate as absolutely uncompromising and a harsh critic of any deviation from Latin religious practice. It is also possible that Mézières’s account reflects not his own exaggerations but how the story was retold and experienced by Cypriots, who would have heard rumors spread by sailors and merchants. Such rumors may well have led Greek

Cypriots to suspect that Peter of Thomas, who already had a reputation as a dedicated proponent of church union and now had shown himself to be a zealous enforcer of the

Latin rite, would attempt to enforce the nominal authority he had over the Greek clergy.

As Makhairas reported, “his [Peter of Thomas’s] intention was to make the Greeks

Latins, and he wanted to give them confirmation; and there arose a great uproar between

63 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 88: “et duci talia verba dixit quod omnes mirabantur, sibi dicendo quod ecclesia Romana fidelibus regna dabat, et ab infidelibus regna levabat, et in casu quod inobedientes et haeresim sustinerent, dominus papa a Venetis dominationem Cretarum levaret et alteri daret.”

410 the Greeks and the Latins.”64

Peter of Thomas arrived on Cyprus in the spring of 1360 and, soon after Peter I’s

coronation as king of Jerusalem, proceeded to confirm those fears. According to

Mézières, he was shocked at the lack of respect shown to Latins by the majority Greek

population and at the level of acculturation that had taken place amongst the Latins, so

much so that he feared that the on Cyprus would soon be lost.65 He therefore, perhaps with the permission of the king, organized a meeting at the cathedral of

Saint Sophia in Nicosia. He summoned the Greek bishop of Solea, who was, since the position of Orthodox archbishop of Cyprus had been discontinued in the thirteenth century, the senior Greek churchman on the island, and as many other Greek bishops, abbots, and priests as possible. He also ordered a number of Latin clerics to attend and assist him.66 When all were seated, Peter of Thomas ordered all the doors of the cathedral shut in order to prevent interruption from outside. Then, attended by Latin clerics and standing before the high altar, he proceeded to preach to the assembly. What he said is unclear. We have two key sources for this event: Makhairas’s fifteenth-century Greek

chronicle of and the hagiographical vita of Peter of Thomas by his friend Philippe de

Mézières. According to Mézières, the legate tried to convince the Greek clergy through

reasoned argument, explaining their schismatic errors using scripture and chiding them to

more scrupulously meet the obligations of obedience they owed the Latin Church. He

may have suggested a full acceptance of the Latin rite and he certainly rebuked them for

welcoming Latins to their masses. But Mézières was clear that he did not try to coerce the

64 Makhairas, Recital, i, 91, § 101. 65 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 92. 66 For accounts of this meeting, see Makhairas, Recital, i, 91, § 101; Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 92-4; Boehlke, Pierre de Thomas, 186-91 ; and Schabel, “Religion,” 157-8.

411 Greek clergy. Makhairas’s version is starker. For him, Peter of Thomas’s assembly was

an ambush by someone whose intention was, as he put it, “to make the Greeks Latins” and meant from the outset to do so by force.

Whatever his approach, the result was not to the legate’s liking, though again the sources disagree on what happened. Mézières recounted that, at first, the Greeks confessed their errors and agreed to abide by the legate’s dictates. But then one of the

Greek priests, an “obstinate and perfidious man,” unable to abide Peter’s sermon, burst out in protest and roused his colleagues to follow his lead.67 Local people outside the

cathedral heard the uproar and soon rumors of Peter’s mistreatment of the Greek priests were circulating. A crowd gathered, and with shouts of “death to the legate,” attempted to rescue those within. As they burst into the cathedral, Peter of Thomas, as he did so often in Mézières’s version of his life, stood firm: “The legate, seeing many Latins running away or hiding, said to those Latins who remained by him, “Take comfort in the Lord.

Bear the cross before me, and let us die gladly for the Catholic faith’... and he stood there, awaiting a sweet death.”68 The Greek priests opened the doors to the mob and only the

timely arrival of the king’s brother with a band of soldiers prevented bloodshed. Here, too, Mézières’s possible hyperbole is telling, for he presents Peter of Thomas as a willing martyr, but a martyr whose enemies were not infidels, but other Christians. The acculturation that had permitted Latins and Greeks to live together is not much apparent in Mézières’s telling; for him, the Greeks were as much pagans or infidels as the

Muslims.

67 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 92: “cor cuiusdam sacerdotis obstinati et perfidi alios inflammavit.” 68 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 92: “Legatus autem hoc videns, multis Latinis fugientibus et se abscondentibus, illis Latinis qui secum remanserunt dixit: ‘Confortamini in Domino. Afferte crucem ante me, et laetanter moriamur pro fide Catholica.’... et dulciter mortem expectabat.”

412 Makhairas agreed with the general outline of Mézières’s account, but with some

key differences. He claimed that Mantzas, the priest whose protest inflamed the rest,

spoke up only when the Latin clergy “seized” him and tried to “confirm him by force.”

The townspeople arriving on the scene found the doors not only closed but barred, and

began to beat upon them with a makeshift battering ram. When the king’s representatives,

including his brother, arrived to break up the riot, they opened the doors and bade the

Greek clergy to “continue to act as they were accustomed,” thus putting the blame firmly

on the legate. The king, Makhairas wrote, ordered Peter of Thomas to leave the island

and the debacle led him to write the pope with a request that he send no more legates to cause unrest. This was an exaggeration. We know that Peter of Thomas did not leave

Cyprus at this point, and later events show that there was no serious breach between the king and the papal legate.

Yet Peter of Thomas’s actions had caused the king problems. Boehlke cites an eighteenth-century history of Cyprus that describes the aftermath of the riot. Giovanni

Francesco Loredano wrote that Peter of Thomas urged the king to punish the responsible parties, chiefly because the honor of the Roman church was at stake. He defended himself by claiming to have attempted no innovations but had only claimed the recognized rights of the pope on Cyprus. Peter I replied that he could not take the legate’s side against his own people and thus risk inciting their hatred.69 This was not the first time a papal legate

had incited a riot—on 1 May 1314, a crowd attempted to burn the resident of legate Peter

of Pleine-Chassagne while he was meeting with a delegation of Orthodox bishops. The particular issues at stake in that instance are not known, but Peter of Pleine-Chassagne

69 Boehlke, Pierre de Thomas, 191, citing Giovanni Francesco Loredano, Histoire des rois de Chypre de la maison de Lusignan, 4 vols. (Paris, 1732), i, 385-6.

413 spent much of his tenure on Cyprus attempting to reform the Latin Church and bring the

Orthodox into stricter obedience. He had also previously decried aspects of the Greek rite that he saw as idolatrous.70 Then, as now, the Lusignan ruler had avoided association

with unpopular papal policies. Such forbearance, combined with the completeness of

Richard’s initial conquest and the success of the Lusignan settlement of the island had

ensured stability on Cyprus, had enabled a small minority to rule over the majority Greek

population with little unrest. In 1360, however, the stakes were higher than normal. Peter

needed also to ensure that the Cypriot Greeks were not only quiescent, but acted as full

supporters of his regime; any prospect of rebellion would put an end to his plans for

Crusade. He took no action against the Nicosia rioters and quietly assured the Greek

bishops that their positions were in no danger.

Peter of Thomas ultimately managed to atone for his initial errors. He too wanted

the Crusade to go forward and was unwilling to jeopardize it through overzealous

attention to his perceived duties on Cyprus. More importantly, the realities of interfaith

relations on Cyprus altered his approach to the Greeks. Mézières went to great lengths to

present Peter’s proselytizing on Cyprus as a success, noting that Peter ultimately brought

nearly all the Greek priests and bishops on the island into obedience to the Pope. But

formal obedience to the Latin Church had been the norm for over a century and there is

no evidence that Peter’s work produced more than a token submission. Instead, stymied

in his attempts to convert them, Peter ultimately developed an understanding of and

tolerance for the Greeks.

Peter of Thomas’s volte-face should not be taken lightly. He was no

inexperienced cleric who was feeling his way and blundered into a situation he could not

70 “Chronique d’Amadi,” 395-6; Schabel, “Religion,” 199; Coureas, Latin Church, 106-11.

414 control. He was a papal legate, the titular Latin of Constantinople, the bishop of

Coron in southern Greece. He had met regularly and productively with popes, emperors,

and kings. Though new to the post of legate in 1360, he had spent years in the eastern

Mediterranean and was familiar with the politics of church union. In all likelihood,

whether he had attempted to persuade or to coerce, he had used familiar tactics at Saint

Sophia. Conditions on Cyprus were therefore sufficiently different from those in the

Balkans or Constantinople to merit a shift in approach. Although he was often absent, his

time on Cyprus afforded him a chance to consider the common ground between the Latin

and Greek Churches. He was then able to view them in contrast to the many other

religious groups on Cyprus, not only Jews and Muslims but also the various Eastern

Christian rites. The Latins and Greeks were, as Schabel has put it, “Chalcedonian

Christians in a sea of non-Chalcedonians, Jews, and Muslims.”71

The arrival of plague late in the summer of 1362 provided Peter with an

opportunity to express this new appreciation in a politically effective manner.72 News of

disease raging in Rhodes, Syria, and Anatolia had earlier reached the island and Peter of

Thomas sought to soothe worried Cypriots, who no doubt remembered the horrors of an

epidemic fifteenth years earlier, He therefore appealed to the king for masses, penances,

and processions in order to placate the wrath of God and spare Cyprus from this

affliction. When the plague reached Famagusta, the legate redoubled these efforts; he

“gathered the king, queen, nobles and people, and began to preach, urging all to penitence

71 Schabel, “Religion,” 158. 72 Makhairas refers to two instances of plague in this period, first in 1348 in which “half of the island died” and again in 1363. Recital, i, 61, § 66. The dates given in Mézières’s account, which place the later outbreak in 1362, is likely more reliable as he was an eyewitnesses. Saint Peter Thomas, 97-8.

415 and moving them to tears.”73 Further reports from Famagusta revealed an increasingly

dire situation and Peter of Thomas called for a general procession of all the people of

Nicosia. Everyone, regardless of rank or rite, would fast on bread and water and march

barefoot to beg God’s forgiveness. When the appointed day came, the “king with all his

children, the nobles, the merchants, and the people, together with the queen and the ladies

of the royal palace,” barefoot and simply dressed, walked praying from the palace to the

cathedral of Saint Sophia. There, they met Peter of Thomas “with all the clergy of the

various Christian nations.”74 All entered the church, and the legate guided the assembly

in hymns, with the other clergy responding and the people in tears. He then led the

gathering in procession through the streets of Nicosia to the cemetery, where he gave a

rousing oration that greatly comforted the people.75 The crowd then returned to Saint

Sophia, where Peter of Thomas celebrated high mass.

Confident that the people of Nicosia were repentant and thus protected from the

plague, Peter of Thomas went to Famagusta, “that furnace of pestilence and death,” to

provide similar comfort to the stricken city.76 Conditions had worsened and thirty to forty

people were dying each day. Peter of Thomas, according to Mézières, despaired at the

deaths of so many Christians, but also feared “the danger that the Catholic faith would be

lost in Cyprus.”77 He organized another general procession that, as in Nicosia, attracted

members of a multitude of religious groups. In addition to the Latins, there were “Greeks,

73 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 97-8: “regem, reginas, nobiles, et populos congregavit et praedicare incepit, ad paenitentiam omnes inducendo, et ad lacrimas provocando.” 74 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 98: “rex cum omni progenie sua, nobilibus, burgensibus, et populo, una cum reginis et mulieribus de palatio regio... cum omni clero et diversarum nationum Christianorum associatus.” 75 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 98-9. Boehlke suggests that what Mézières described as a cemetery (coemeterium) was actually the abbey of St. Dominic, where many nobles and members of the royal family were buried. Pierre de Thomas, 199. 76 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 99: “fornace pestilentiae et mortalibus.” 77 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 99: “periculum perditionis fidei Catholicae in Cyprum.”

416 Armenians, Nestorians, Jacobites, Georgians, Nubians, Indians, Ethiopians, and many

other Christians.”78 Peter of Thomas provoked this eclectic group to such devotion that

“many infidel Turks, Saracens, and Jews.. burst into tears and walked with bare feet and

great devotion in the Christian procession.”79 All these various groups followed Peter of

Thomas to the cathedral singing hymns, songs, and lamentations, each in their own

language. At the cathedral, he delivered a sermon so powerful “all were brought to tears

by God, not only the faithful Latins of the Christian church who understood his words,

but also those of other nations who could not and even the infidels.”80 The effect of this

shared worship was profound: all those lying in hospital waiting to die were healed and

“from this day of compassion on, the plague ceased in Famagusta and in all parts of

Cyprus due to the mercy of God and the prayers of the legate.”81

Mézières’s description of these interfaith processions must be read critically. Not

only was he the legate’s personal friend, but his avowed purpose in writing Peter of

Thomas’s life was his friend’s canonization and the revival of the Crusading

movement.82 He therefore had compelling reasons to exaggerate both Peter of Thomas’s

role in the processions and their miraculous results. Even if he overstates the impact of

Peter of Thomas’s orations, delivered in French or Latin, on crowds who had little

reason to love the legate and an imperfect understanding of the language, he was an

78 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 100: “Certe ibi erant Graeci, Armeni, Nothorini, Iacobini, Georgiani, Nubiani, Indiani, Aethiopiani, et alii multi Christiani.” 79 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 100: “multi infideles Saraceni, Turci, et Iudaei... in lacrimas prorumpebant, et nudis pedibus ad processionem Christianorum devotissime ambulabant.” 80 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 100: “et tantum fructrum in sermone suo fecit, quod non solum Latinos ecclesiae Romanae fideles ipsum intelligentes, sed etiam alias nationes sermonem non intelligentes, et etiam a Deo infideles ad lacrimas provocabat.” 81 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 100: “Ab illo die miserationis in Famagusta et in omnibus partibus regni Cypri mortalitas Deo miserante et legato orante recessit.” 82 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Philippe de Mézières's Life Of Saint Pierre de Thomas at the Crossroads of Late Medieval Hagiography and Crusading Ideology,” Viator 40 (2009): 223-248.

417 eyewitness to these events. There is little reason to doubt that Peter of Thomas

deliberately opened his penitential processions to Cypriots of all rites and faiths. He

responded to the crisis not as a Latin cleric, although he seems to have concerned about

the effect that plague would have on the ruling minority. Instead, he acted as a Christian

leader, one who sought neither to proselytize nor blame but to bring the community

together to seek God’s forgiveness. In this, he responded to a general shift in Nicosia’s

mood. Religious tensions seem to have faded in importance in the face of plague reports

since, as Mézières tells us, everyone felt conscious that God “was scrutinizing their hearts

in order to test the Cypriots”83 The legate’s ability to respond appropriately was grounded

in the regular interaction with non-Latins that his office required and his understanding

that conditions on Cyprus necessitated an ecumenical approach.

Given the existing tensions and the apparent efficacy of the processions, the

legate’s prominent role enhanced his reputation considerably. These actions were not a

cynical attempt to curry favor with the non-Latin population of Cyprus. On the contrary,

the evidence we have suggests that his sincere faith was the motivating force. That does

not mean, however, that he was blind to the political benefits. Peter of Thomas’s

overriding goal and the reason for his presence in the East remained Crusade.

Uncontrolled plague on Cyprus would have dealt just as serious a blow to these ambitions

as would Greek opposition to Cypriot participation in the Crusade. Peter of Thomas

managed to address both problems with a single act. It was no accident, moreover, that this was a public act. The closed doors of the cathedral had played a key role in his earlier

failure. Whatever success he may have found in dealing with the Orthodox hierarchy on

other occasions, he chose here to appeal directly to the people with a visible example of

83 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 98 : “scrutans corda hominum, ut Cyprienses probaret.”

418 his faith and the power of God.

Although the Greek clergy continued to bitterly oppose his attempts to bring them

into the Catholic Church, we can judge the legate’s success in a couple of ways. First,

though they were forced to pay high taxes to support the Cypriot Crusade of 1365-1366

while seeing no tangible benefits, there is little evidence of unrest among the non-Latin population. Second, Peter of Thomas’s death in 1366 led to an outpouring of grief from

Cypriots of all denominations, who visited the Carmelite church in Famagusta where he lay in state. Mézières describes the scene as follows: “The church was filled with people of both sexes, Catholics but also schismatics and infidels, who unanimously and with devout reverence venerated the legate’s body as holy. Wondrous to say, for the nations of schismatic Christians, that is, the Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, Jacobites, Copts,

Maronites, and others divided from the Catholic Church—but especially the Greeks and their monks, who when the legate was alive drank freely of his blood in sacrifice of

oblation—now forgot all their injuries and were partially converted from their errors or

even become the devoted sons of the legate. Because he had confuted their errors with

clear arguments and convinced them that they should come back to the holy church of

Rome, they kissed the feet and hands of the holy legate with profound reverence with

heads bare and in contrast to their customs.”84

It is likely that Mézières, as elsewhere, exaggerated the level of devotion

84 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 155-6: “et replata est ecclesia utriusque sexus hominum tam Catholicorum quam schismaticorum quam infidelium, corpus legati tamquam sanctum unanimiter et devotissime colendo venerati sunt. Mirabile dictu, nam nationes schismaticae Christianorum, scilicet Graeci, Armeni, Georgiani, Iacobitae, Copti, Maroni, et alii divisi ab ecclesiae Catholica maxime Graeci et calogeri eorum, qui vivente legato sanguinem eius in sacrificium oblationis libenter bibissent, quia errores eorum claris demonstrationibus confuderat, ipsosque ad gremium sanctae ecclesiae Romanae debere venire moverat, nunc omnium iniuriarum obliti, sed quasi ab erroribus suis conversi, aut eius legati filii devotissimi, capitibus discoopertis contra morem ipsorum, cum profunda reverentia altero non expectato pedes et manus sancti legati deosculabantur.” Schabel, “Religion,” 218-9; Boehlke, “Pierre de Thomas, 309-10.

419 expressed at Peter of Thomas’s funeral by non-Latins. But he was not inventing it entirely. He concluded his vita of Peter of Thomas with a lengthy description of the

various miracles attributed to the legate. In itself, this is not surprising. The accounting of

miracles was standard practice and a necessary part of the case for canonization, which

was Mézières’s avowed purpose. To this end, he and the Bishop Simon of Laodicia, who

was also the Latin vicar of Famagusta, opened a formal inquiry into Peter of Thomas’s miracles about three months after his death. Tellingly, many non-Latins presented

evidence at this inquiry. Among those whose testimony Mézières included in the vita

were Costa, a slave “of the Greek race,” Elizabeth “of the Nestorian nation,” and George,

“a Syrian of the Greek sect.”85 That Greeks and Nestorians were willing to speak on the

legate’s behalf before a Latin ecclesiastic tribunal confirms that Peter of Thomas had

indeed endeared himself to them. That Mézières, who thought of these people as

“schismatics” and was notorious for his anti-Greek sentiments, felt compelled to base his

case for Peter of Thomas’s sainthood in part on their testimony is evidence for the close,

if sometimes uncomfortable, ties that conditions on Cyprus created between the various

confessional groups.

King Peter and legate Peter set themselves a formidable challenge in advocating

Cypriot leadership of an anti-Mamluk Crusade. They needed to unite Cyprus’s diverse

population behind a plan that placed the island’s economy and security in considerable

danger while offering little in the way of tangible rewards. Each adopted different

strategies based on their social positions and backgrounds. Peter I courted the Latin

community, especially the nobles, by reminding them of the Lusignan claim to Jerusalem

85 Mézières, Saint Peter Thomas, 173-4, 180, 182: “de genere Graecorum... natione Nesturmorum... natione Syrium, de secta Graecorum.” Schabel, “Religion,” 219.

420 and appealing to their westernized notions of chivalry. He sought the complicity rather

than the active support of the population by attempting to respect their traditional right to

practice within the Orthodox rite without undue Latin interference. The king’s

involvement in Venetian Crete and Peter of Thomas’s disastrous meeting with the

Orthodox clergy in Saint Sophia placed all in doubt, however.

The legate ultimately managed to mend the situation by demonstrating in a

visceral manner that he believed all Cypriots, regardless of rite, shared a devout faith. In

doing so, and in doing so in a public manner, Peter of Thomas managed to find an effective means of negotiating the complex religious landscape of Lusignan Cyprus. He certainly did not earn the love of all—Leontios Makhairas does not mention the plague processions and had nothing positive to say about the legate—but he did win qualified approval from enough of the Greek hierarchy and people that the Crusade proceeded without fear of rebellion.

Both the king and the legate drew on traditional approaches. Lusignan rulers had long let Cypriot Greeks go their own way in matters of faith and religious practice, so long as they offered proper respect to the Latin Church. Only direct insubordination, such as occurred with the thirteen monks of Kantara, would lead to a crackdown. Similarly,

Peter of Thomas was neither the first nor the last to organize a penitential interfaith procession in response to natural disaster. In 1308, a prolonged drought inspired Amaury of Tyre (who, in 1306, had seized control of the government from his brother Henry II) to lead a procession of “all the nations through the island.” The procession, moreover, may have been a response to political as well as natural dangers, for that same summer saw panic over a rumored Mamluk invasion fleet. In 1330, flooding on the river Pedhios

421 inundated Nicosia, drowning, it was said, three thousand residents. John of Conti,

Dominican archbishop of Nicosia, therefore led processions of “Franks, Greeks,

Armenians, Nestorians, Jacobites, and Maronites” for forty days.86 In 1393, another outbreak of plague led to processions in Nicosia. According to Makhairas, the Bishop of

Nicosia, at the request of King James I, ordered a barefoot procession which was headed by a Greek preacher named Menzis and a group of Orthodox priests bearing icons. Most

of the Latin aristocracy, although notably not the king himself, joined this procession,

which circled the city and culminated with a mass in the church of Saint Therapon.87 By

the early fifteenth century, in fact, shared processions were apparently so common that

Joseph Bryennios, a monk sent by the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1405 to assess the

condition of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus, sharply rebuked the Cypriot Greek clergy for attending processions, funerals, and festivals organized by the Latins.88

**********

Unlike the urban spectacles described in previous chapters, those arranged by the

Latin temporal and religious authorities on Cyprus occurred in the context of a gradual,

though real, improvement in relations between different religious groups. Although some

Latins, like Mézières, dismissed the Greeks as schismatics, and many others earnestly

sought to bring them into obedience to the Catholic church, they could not and did not

pursue oppressive policies. Likewise, the Greek population was not willing to brook any

interference in their religious affairs but did desire greater contact with and acceptance

86 “Chronique d’Amadi,” 404-5; Schabel, “Religion,” 160; Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, 120. 87 Recital, i, 611-2, § 623. 88 Coureas, “Conversion on Latin Cyprus,” 83-4. Coureas goes on, however, to note that a group of Greek bishops claimed, in a 1441 letter written after the Council of Florence (which unified, in theory, the Catholic and Orthodox), that the Latins still refused to invite them to such events. He concludes that Bryennios may have exaggerated, but that at least some Greeks certainly wanted to be part of Latin- sponsored rituals.

422 into Latin society. In contrast, the late fifteenth century in Iberia was a decisive moment in the breakdown of convivencia both in theory and in reality that ended with the establishment of the Inquisition, the subjugation of the Moriscos, and the expulsion of the

Jews.

The form and content of the spectacles described here do not, therefore, precisely match those we have examined in Jaén, Córdoba, and Murcia during the reigns of

Enrique and the Catholic monarchs. Yet they closely resemble spectacles conducted in

Castile in the preceding decades. A comparison might be made, for instance, between

Peter I’s elaborate coronation as king of Jerusalem, meant to inspire a Latin nobility uncertain about the wisdom of attacking the Mamluks, and Fernando de Antequera’s attempt to rally support for his campaign against Granada in 1407. Fernando, who was regent for Juan II, gathered his forces in Seville in preparation for an invasion. While there, he visited the cathedral of Santa María la Mayor in order to take the sword of

Fernando III, el Santo, who had captured the city as well as most of the rest of Castilian

Andalusia in the thirteenth century. The sword, which was kept with the king’s effigy in the Capilla Real, had a great reputation (see figure 25).89 A mid-fourteenth century

description of the Capilla Real, which focused on the ornamentation of this and other

effigies in the chapel noted that “in the right hand is a sword, said to be of great virtue,

with which he conquered Seville... And whoever desires protection from evil, let him

place a kiss on the sword and he will be sheltered thereafter.”90 It was perhaps with this

89 Cynthia L. Chamberlin, “ ‘Unless the Pen Writes as it Should.’ The Proto-cult of Saint Fernando III in Sevilla in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Sevilla 1248: Congreso Internacional Conmemorativo del 750 Aniversario de la Conquista de la Ciudad de Sevilla por Fernando III, Rey de Castilla y León, ed. Manuel Jiménez González (Seville, 2000), 389-418; and Manuel González Jiménez, Fernando III El Santo (Seville, 2006), 291-2 90 Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga, Anales eclesiásticos y seculares de la ciudad de Sevilla, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1795), ii, 144 (año 1356): “en la mana derecho una espada, que dice es de gran virtud, con la qual ganó a

423 in mind that the later Fernando entered the church and , took the sword from the effigy’s

hands in a solemn ceremony involving the cathedral canons and viewed by many of his retainers. These rituals ended with Fernando privately praying before an image of the

Virgin Mary.

As he was about to leave, the Conde de las Marchas spoke to him, saying “Sir, it

seems that this sword is virtue, and take it in procession around the church and around the

city on horseback.”91 Fernando accepted this advice and immediately acted upon it, but

we do not have a detailed account of this procession. After his successful campaign, he

reverently returned the sword to the cathedral and placed it again in the statue’s hand.92

The protective powers were likely associated with the Virgin Mary, who had been a special patron of Fernando III and remained linked to the idea of reconquest in the fifteenth century. Fernando may well have believed in the sword’s virtue, but by following the count’s advice to bear it in procession through the city, he also responded to practical political concerns. His plans for campaign had earned him a lukewarm response from the local nobility and populace. Residents of Seville were long accustomed to trading with Granada. Aside from this campaign, in fact, the city enjoyed a nearly uninterrupted series of truces from 1350 to 1450. Even so, the city’s environs were subject to Granadan raids. Fernando’s military agenda was in response to a series of

Muslim raids in central Andalusia, especially near Jaén and Baeza. As a base for the regent’s army, however, Seville might become a new focus for Granadan attack. The conditions that led generally to a disinclination for decisive action on the frontier

Sevilla... E los que quieren guarecer del mal que tienen, besan en aquella espada y son luego guaridos.” 91 Crónica de Juan II de Castilla, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1982), 130: “Señor, esta espada paresçe que es virtud, e vos la deuedes sacar por la iglesia e por la çiudad caualgando.” 92 Crónica de Juan II, 129-31, 189-91; Angus MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1989), 231.

424 throughout the period, therefore, pertained in this instance.

By claiming the sword for his own purposes, Fernando de Antequera declared that he too enjoyed the special attentions of the Virgin. By bearing it in procession around the cathedral and then through the city of Seville, he extended that protection to encompass all those who lived there, thus relieving their anxiety about potential

Granadan retaliation. But he also linked himself and his plans for battle with those of his predecessor, who had enjoyed unparalleled success. In this, he spoke primarily to those on whom his own martial success would depend, the “knights, counts, and rich men” who joined him in the cathedral and on the procession.93 They, like Fernando, had been raised and educated in a chivalric culture that lionized such heroes and presented them as exemplars; to truly excel and win fame, a knight must prove himself worthy of the past and of his lineage.94

That the sword of Fernando III held powerful associations for fifteenth-century

Castilian knights is best expressed in the opening chapter of the chronicle describing

Rodrigo Ponce de León’s career: “Oh, what relief it would be to be counted among the most holy and illustrious kings of glorious memory and the very noble and virtuous knights, who shine before the order of God, having defended and held up the holy

Catholic faith against the Muslims and infidels, enemies of the faith of Jesus Christ! Just as the magnificent king don Fernando, who took Seville on the day of San Clemente. On the evening before that feast day, our Lady the Virgin Mary appeared to him and placed the keys to the city in his hand and took him inside [the walls of Seville]. And that holy king, having there knelt before her image with devoted prayers, forgot his sword upon his

93 Crónica de Juan II, 130-1: “caualleros, condes, e ricos omes.” 94 MacKay, “Religion, Culture, and Ideology,” 233-9.

425 departure. The next morning, the Muslim king sent it to him, asking that he spare their

lives by the mercy of His Highness, because His Highness had vowed to put them all to

the sword.”95 For Ponce de León, as for Fernanda de Antequera and his followers, the

sword of the saintly king was more than a protective object; it encapsulated their personal

and collective aspirations. By publicly but reverently co-opting this history, Fernando

inspired his knights in a manner that engaged deeply-held beliefs about themselves and

their society.

Peter I’s campaign against the Mamluks may have been intended, as Edbury has

argued, at least in part as an attempt to ensure Cyprus’s future commercial prosperity. If

so, however, it was a risky strategy and it would be no mean feat to gain the support of

his nobles by appealing solely to their commercial instincts. Much more compelling for

knights fostered in the western tradition of chivalry was the opportunity to follow the

king of Jerusalem in an attempt to reclaim his birthright, open the holy land to all

Christians, and defeat the infidels. In all these things, moreover, they would follow in the footsteps of earlier heroic kings of Jerusalem and enjoy the divine protection that such a noble and holy endeavor must attract. This was not, of course, an approach suited only for the frontier: it was the same arguments that had brought generations of European knights to fight Muslims on Mediterranean frontiers in the first place. But these associations held a special relevance on the frontier. Castilian and Cypriot knights

95 Historia de los hechos del Marqués de Cádiz, ed. Juan Luis Carriazo Rubio (Granada, 2003), 142: “¡O, qué descanso será de contar de tan santísimos y esclareçidos reyes de gloriosas memorias y muy nobles y virtuosos caualleros, que tanto resplandeçen antel acatamiento de Dios, defendiendo y escalçando la santa fe cathólica contra los moros e ynfieles, enemigos de la fe de Iesu Christo! Asy commo el muy magnífico rey don Fernando, que ganó a Seuilla día de San Clemeynte, e la bíspera antes de su fiesta, en la noche, le apareçio nuestra Sennora la Virgen María e le puso las llaues de la çibdad en su mano e lo metío dentro. Y este santísimo rey, enbeuido ante su ymagen con muy deuota oraçión, al tienpo de su partida oluidósele su espada. E otro dia por la mannana, el rey moro ge la enbió, pidiendo por merçed a Su Alteza les quisiese releuar las vidas, porque Su Sennoría tenía fecho voto de los meter todos a espada.”

426 differed from their French or English counterparts in that they were familiar with the

enemy and understood the risks of beginning a war that might result in the destruction of

their own homes. They often responded by urging caution or avoiding such conflicts

altogether. In order to win their full support, Fernando and Peter I appealed to them on a

visceral level.

These spectacles were primarily intended for relatively limited audiences,

however. But it was equally important for rulers to ensure that non-combatants living

near the frontier supported these military endeavors and thus minimize the risk of unrest.

Frontier dwellers bore the majority of the costs for holy war as well as the risks of

retaliation. They held, moreover, divided opinions regarding the religious enemy that did

not always match those of elites. In Castile the central issue was a divided attitude toward

the religious enemy; in Cyprus it was a lack of engagement with the chivalric and

Crusading ideals of the Latins. In both cases, however, frontier attitudes were more

complex than those held by people who had little direct or regular contact with members

of other religious groups. To effectively wage war against Muslims, frontier elites had to

temper their public personae and messages in order to better fit local sentiments. Miguel

Lucas de Iranzo, whose family likely originated near the Granadan frontier and who had

maintained connections in Jaén while at Enrique’s court, was well aware of this necessity

and acted at once to present a particular vision of holy war. Peter of Thomas’s early

missteps indicate that such was not immediately apparent to outsiders. But he ultimately, after spending time in Cyprus’s composite society, adopted a more conciliatory tone.

That he did so successfully during a plague epidemic is notable; for scholars often associate instances of disease, famine, or natural disaster with increased violence toward

427 members of other groups.96 This was not, however, always the case in frontier societies, where the social stress of inexplicable calamities could bring people together as well as drive them apart.

Plague broke out in Seville, for instance, in 1449 (the same year as the anti- converso riots in Toledo, which MacKay and others have attributes to a rise in food prices). In response, local church authorities organized a number of penitential processions. Soon thereafter, or perhaps at the same time, Seville’s Jewish community conducted its own procession, apparently imitating a number of features of the Christian version, decorating the procession route and scattering branches before them. In place of the Bible, however, they bore the Torah aloft as they walked. The Jews did this with the permission of García Enriquez Ozorio, archbishop of Seville, and their action seemed to occasion little comment among the people and clergy of Seville. Antonio Ferrari, a cathedral canon, however, remonstrated violently that the Jews should not be allowed to emulate Christian practice. When he brought these concerns to the archiepiscopal authorities, Ferrari was excommunicated as a troublemaker. When Ferrari sought reinstatement from Rome, he was imprisoned. Word of these events soon reached the ear of Pope Nicholas V, who ordered an investigation into Ferrari’s allegations of persecution. The Pope contended that the canon had been correct to oppose the Jewish procession and presented it as an attack on the Christians, because it insinuated that God would prefer their plea over that of the Christians. Ferrari had attempted to prevent the

Jews from acting “as if God did not hear the prayers of the faithful” and so should be completely indemnified, while those had excommunicated and imprisoned him should be

96 For instance, MacKay, “Popular Movements and Pogroms.”

428 punished for abuse of their powers.97

Such convergences in religious practice, as the Sevillan church authorities well

knew, were common amongst Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Castile. These did not

always take the form of Jewish imitation, moreover. As we have seen, Murcian

authorities sought or compelled Jewish and Muslim participation in Corpus Christi while

shrines such as San Ginés de la Jara brought together worshippers of multiple faiths.98

Such was also the case on Lusignan Cyprus, where papal legates grumbled that Latin women preferred to hear mass in Greek churches while visiting Orthodox monks wondered why Cypriot co-religionists wanted so much to join the Latins in their civic processions. In all these instances, outsiders decried what they saw as a slow drift toward a common religious practice on the frontier. Frontier conditions, it would seem, were incomprehensible to those living in places where they were free to consider issues of religion and identity in absolute terms and without the troubling presence of members of other religious groups. Only, perhaps, when they had lived there for a time could someone like Peter of Thomas come to terms with and even embrace the idea that there was no simple way to define frontier religion, except that it was devout.

97 ASV, Reg. Vat. 389, ff. 136r-137r. Published in Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents: 1394-1464 (Toronto, 1988), 930-932, no. 773: “tamquam Deus ipsorum fidelium preces non exaudivisset.” Yitzhak Baer, Die Juden im Christlichen Spanien: Urkunden und Regesten: Kastilien/Inquisitionsakten (Berlin, 1936), 302, 315. 98 For examples, see Baer, Die Juden, 162, 520, 523-4; Ángel Luis Molina Molina,“Sermones, procesiones y romerías en la Murcia bajomedieval,” MMM 19-20 (1995-1996): 229-32. Benjamin Kedar offers a useful typology of religious syncretism in “Convergences of Oriental Christian, Muslim and Frankish Worshippers: the Case of Saydnaya and the ,” in The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity, ed. Zsolt Hunyadi and József Laszlovsky (Budapest, 2001), 89-100.

429

EPILOGUE

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? (How solemn the faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen but the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.1

Soon after the events described in these chapters, conditions changed drastically

in both Iberia and Cyprus. The fall of Granada meant the end of the frontier within Iberia even as a push toward social and religious homogeneity left Jews and Muslims living

under Christian rule increasingly marginalized. Although the Morisco presence in Spain

would last another century, the Jews were expelled scant months after the Granadan war

came to an end. Those Jews, moreover, who converted in order to stay in Iberia faced a

powerful and aggressive Inquisition. Spain, as defined by its temporal and religious

rulers, was to be not only a Christian kingdom but one that zealously defended traditional

orthodoxies. For Lusignan Cyprus, the Alexandrian Crusade proved to be a last hurrah.

Peter I’s crusade had weakened royal finances while damaging relations with the Italian

maritime republics. Matters came to a head in October 1372 during, ironically, his son’s

coronation as king of Jerusalem. As Peter II emerged from the cathedral, Venetian and

Genoese representatives tussled for the privilege of leading his horse. Though initially

1 Constantine P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, revised edition (Princeton, 1992), 18-9.

430 suppressed, the violence broke out again that night with Venetians pursuing their

Genoese rivals through Famagusta, killing many. Peter II, blaming the Genoese for the disturbance, refused to offer compensation.2 Thus rebuffed, Genoa decided to take reparations by force and invaded Cyprus, capturing and retaining the city of Famagusta.

This essentially cut the Lusignans out of the still-lucrative Mediterranean trade. The regime never recovered. In 1426, the long-feared Mamluk attack finally materialized.

Egyptian troops sacked Limassol and Nicosia, imprisoned the king, and imposed a heavy annual tribute.3

In each case, however, these shifts followed roughly two centuries of social stability, a circumstance remarkable when one considers the significant internal and external pressures that they faced and the lack of decisive action that those pressures generated. In particular, the combination of hostility and cultural exchange that characterized frontier interactions fostered, in Latin Christians, dissonant attitudes toward other religious groups and led to deep-seated anxieties about the proper boundaries between groups and the nature of their society. These social anxieties, moreover, played out in the context of the real or imagined specter of invasion from nearby Muslim polities. Ironically, however, it was the constant threat of physical attack that permitted these composite societies to thrive despite discourses of religious intolerance. The need for collective responses to shared challenges and the regular, peaceful interactions that co-existence required meant that such ideologies—whether holy war against Islam, anti-

Semitism, or Orthodox submission to Rome—always competed with practical concerns that could not be ignored. This amiable enmity was therefore a source of stability.

2 Makhairas, Recital, i, 309-11,313-25, § 324-5, 328-40. Edbury, Kingdom of Cyprus, 199-200. 3 Edbury, Cyprus and its Muslim Neighbours; idem, “The Aftermath of Defeat: Lusignan Cyprus and the Genoese, 1374-1382,” in Les Lusignans et l'Outre Mer (Poitiers, 1995), 132-40.

431 Public spectacles of various kinds, including knightly tournaments, theatrics, and religious processions, permitted the articulation of these social incongruities through theatrics which could function in a variety of ways, as distractions from pressing concerns but also as reminders of past glories, attacks on vulnerable groups, or alternate worldviews that emphasized the cooperative nature of society. Elites often controlled the messages but circumstances often required them to invite the active participation of the audience or to craft their pageants in particular ways. Elites, in other words, could not use spectacle to freely impose their viewpoints on the populace. Instead, they attempted to nudge the people toward a policy while seeming to tell them what they wanted to hear.

The content of these performances, therefore, acts as a window into often-elusive popular sentiment. We cannot know for certain how individual audience members understood or received a performance, but we can assess how the elite sponsors of that performance, who were far closer to medieval popular culture than we can be, expected people to react.

The final decades of the fifteenth century in Iberia saw the gradual disintegration of traditional modes of frontier life or, as it has been described, the breakdown of

convivencia. The causes of this shift have long been debated and scholarly theories have

blamed, among others, ecological challenges, the misrule of Enrique IV, and the

extension of monarchical power as well as new doctrines of limpieza de sangre. On the

frontier, the ramifications of this shift from relative tolerance to a society defined as

exclusively Christian can be traced through public spectacles as leaders attempted to

harness changes in popular sentiment for their own ends. Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s

attempt to break the patterns of inaction through a decisive campaign illustrates that

traditional attitudes toward Granada were still largely in place in the 1460s; he chose to

432 appeal to the people by showing them that Christian victory would not disrupt existing relations with the people of Granada. A decade later, Villena could predict that the Old

Christians of Córdoba would reject their converso neighbors while Alonso de Aguilar would attempt to protect them, thus putting Aguilar at odds with his people. By the

1480s, successive victories in the war against Granada meant that Jews and Muslims were no longer seen as dangerous enemies. The Murcian concejo confirmed this by forcing them into roles in the Corpus Christi festivals show portrayed them simply as outsiders, defeated enemies who had no place in the new order. These public representations of Jews and Muslims were particularly effective on the frontier because they were familiar, having been a fundamental means of addressing issues arising from religious pluralism.

This was more than a Spanish phenomenon. As the examples from Cyprus illustrate, late medieval frontier societies shared, despite significant contextual differences, several key problems. Here too, internal religious tensions combined with

physical insecurity to produce particular social, cultural, and religious attitudes. Similar

patterns can be discerned, though there is not space here to detail them, throughout the

Mediterranean world, in the Kingdom of Sicily, the Crusader Principalities, the Balkan,

and Muslim North Africa, notably Cairo. Whether the prominent role played by public

spectacles in suppressing or mobilizing extant discourses of intolerance in fifteenth-

century Spain was replicated elsewhere is a topic for further study. It is, however, a

relevant question. An understanding of the ways in popular sentiments regarding

religious minorities, or elite perceptions of those sentiments, conditioned the content of

civic pageants can offer insights into similar breakdown of religious tolerance in our own

433 times. As Susan Sontag wrote in 2004, “The Western memory museum is now mostly a

visual one.”4 The representation of religious others through visual media continues to

have a cachet beyond that of the written word.

**********

Nor is the late medieval world completely separate from later events. I opened

this chapter with Constantine Cavafy’s 1898 poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians.” This

poem’s setting, an indeterminate imperial capital paralyzed at the potential approach of

barbarians, at first glance seems to have little relation to late medieval Mediterranean

interactions between Christians and Muslims. But its central question—how does a

society respond when the encounter to which it has dedicated itself is no longer

relevant—reminds us of the significance of the end of the Granadan frontier for Castilian

society. The nobility had dedicated itself to the project of reconquest and the realization

of this objective posed a real danger to their self-identities. In the event, of course, they

soon moved on to new frontiers in the Americas and in North Africa, where the

experience of the Granadan frontier conditioned their responses to native peoples.5

In Spain itself, the effects of the long encounter with Islam in Iberia did not easily fade. Notably, recent work has shown that the complex attitudes toward other religious groups held by many in the fifteenth century did not simply disappear. In the century after the fall of Granada, Spanish authorities moved to forcibly convert their Muslim subjects. At the same time, ironically, Christians could once again openly express their admiration for Islamic culture and dally with Muslim manners and dress in a way

4 Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” The New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html (accessed 6 March 2011) 5 For a comparison of Spanish conceptions of Empire and treatment of native peoples with the approaches adopted in Britain and France, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500 - c.1800 (New Haven, 1995).

434 similarly to that which had helped to doom the reign of Enrique IV.6 This was not simply a superficial interest in exotic customs, however. The fluid notions of religious identity that had characterized the frontier survived as well. As Stuart Schwartz has shown, members of all strata of society held relativistic views of religion throughout the

sixteenth century.7

The sixteenth century in Spain also saw a flowering of theatrics and civic spectacles, many of which drew on the frontier past. Mock battles between Christians and

‘Muslims’ akin to Iranzo’s carta bermeja tournament became popular in Spain and in its

American colonies only Christian victory in Granada. In Spain, the prevalence of these

festivals as well as other instances of what Fuchs calls ‘playing the Moor’ indicates

deeply-felt insecurities about Christian identities that led people to defeat Muslim

incursions symbolically and repeatedly while proudly displaying evidence of cultural

hybridity.8 In the new world, these danzas de moros y cristianos became what Max

Harris has called a ‘hidden transcript’ of dissent and resistance.9

Although Golden Age openly addressed their conflicting notions regarding the Muslim past, their descendents sought to downplay or even erase the role played by Muslims in Spanish history. This is in part due to lingering fears that the

Muslim incursion into Iberia has somehow pushed Spain from the historical paths traveled by other European nations, a sentiment concisely articulated by W.H. Auden

6 Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia, 2008) 7 Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, 2008). 8 Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 88ff.; Marlene Alpert-Llorca and José Antonio González Alcantud, Moros y cristianos: representaciones del otro en las fiestas del Mediterráneo occidental (Toulouse, 2003); and Demetrio E. Brisset Martín, “Fiestas hispanas de moros y cristianos: historia y significados,” Gazeta de Antropología 17 (2001), http://digibug.ugr.es/handle/10481/7433 (accessed 22 February, 2011). 9 Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin, 2000)

435 who referred to “that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot / Africa, soldered so

crudely to inventive Europe.”10 In response, Spanish historians have struggled to understand the role played by the centuries of Muslim rule on the development of modern

Spain. Two of the most influential of these scholars—Américo Castro and Claudio

Sánchez-Albornoz—proposed conflicting interpretations that highlight still unresolved tensions. Castro, in his España en su historia, argued that ‘Spanish’ culture did not exist until the Muslim invasion. Emphasizing the importance of convivencia (a term he coined), Castro contended that regular interaction between Christians, Muslims, and Jews was a creative process that sharply differentiated Iberian Christians of the later Middle

Ages from their supposed Roman and Visigothic forerunners.11 Sánchez-Albornoz,

however, argued for a herencia temperamental, a set of inherited characteristics quite

resistant to change and therefore for the essential continuity of Hispanic culture from the

Roman era to the present. He does not discount the significance of the Muslim presence,

but does claim that it offered little contribution to the national character.

While Castro concentrated his research on literary sources, Sánchez-Albornoz

looked to institutional history, finding evidence for his arguments in the reproduction of

economic, political, and legal institutions. Even the culture of al-Andalus, from this

perspective, was essentially Hispanic, owing its nature to the native converts who formed

much of the population. For Sánchez-Albornoz, Spanish identity is an historical constant,

one that transcends the fleeting influence of outside groups.12 Although few scholars

today hold to this understanding of a fundamental and ahistorical Spanish national

10 W.H. Auden, Spain (London, 1937) 11 Américo Castro, España en su historia (Cristianos, moros y judios) (Barcelona, 1983). See also his La realidad histórica de España (Mexico City, 1954). 12 Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, España: Un enigma histórico, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1956). The arguments are refined in El drama de la formación de España y los españoles (Barcelona, 1973).

436 character, the idea that Muslim influence was temporary and superficial has proved

resilient; moveover, Glick has argued that the image of the ‘Moor’ in Spanish culture

continues to represent otherness and danger.13

Nevertheless, the role of Muslim influence on modern Spain remains an open and important question, with the nation’s self-image at stake. Is Spain a cosmopolitan society

that has inherited an ideal of tolerance and convivencia from the historic and open

medieval encounter between cultures and religions? Or is it an unabashedly Roman

Catholic nation, forged in eight centuries of struggle against the infidel invaders? Such

questions, though never far below the surface, have recently emerged anew with the

March 11, 2004 Atocha bombings in Madrid and particularly through former Prime

Minister José María Aznar’s comments explicitly linking 11-M to the Muslim invasion of

Iberia in 711 and the fall of al-Andalus in 1492.14 Modern Spanish anxieties and

ambivalent attitudes toward Islam reflect, in many ways, those of their medieval

forebears. This perhaps may help us understand why Spanish civic and religious

spectacles are, even today, heavily draped in the trappings of overt Christianity while the

Muslims are, each year, defeated anew on dozens on town plazas throughout Spain.

13 Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Comparative Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation (Princeton, 1979), 1. 14 José María Aznar, “Seven Theses on Today's Terrorism,” lecture presented at Georgetown University, 21 September 2004.

437

GLOSSARY OF SPANISH TERMS

All Spanish words in the text are explained when first used. The list below consists of selection of the most commonly used terms.

actas capitulares city council minutes adelantado military governor aguacil (mayor) (chief) constable alcaide garrison commander alcalde judge alfaqueque professional ransomer aljama the Muslim (or sometimes Jewish) community almogávar raider bando network of relatives, clients, and vassals, usually headed by a noble cabalgada raiding party caballero villano non-noble urban knight (or de premia or de cuantía) cabildo* cathedral chapter

concejo city council

converso a convert (usually from Judaism to Christianity)

convivencia peaceful co-existence

cadalhalso viewing platform

* ‘Cabildo’ and ‘concejo’ each mean ‘council’, and were used interchangeably to refer to civic, ecclesiastic, and other councils. For clarity, I have limited the use of ‘cabildo’ to cathedral chapters, and ‘concejo’ to municipal councils.

438

catafalco viewing platform

comendador commander

corregidor royally-appointed civic administrator escribano scribe or notary entremés short skit performed during intermissions, such as between courses at a banquet or contests at a tournament.

fanega dry measure (1.6 bushels or 55.5 liters)

hidalgo hereditary noble

invención word games or riddles

judería Jewish quarter

jurado neighborhood representative

limpieza de sangre blood purity

linaje family lineage

maravedí monetary unit of account whose value fluctuated widely in the late fifteenth century.

mirador viewing platform

morería Muslim quarter

paria tribute

peón foot soldier

repartimiento allocation or distribution

señorío lordship

regidor member of city council

vecino citizen

veinticuatro member of city counci

439

ABBREVIATIONS

AC Libros de Actas Capitulares

ACC Archivo de la Catedral de Córdoba

ACM Archivo Catedralicio de Murcia

AMC Archivo Municipal de Córdoba

AMJ Archivo Municipal de Jaén

AMM Archivo Municipal de Murcia

APC Archivo Histórico Provincial de Córdoba

BAE Biblioteca de Autores Españoles

BIEG Boletín del Instituto de Estudios Giennenses

CCE Colección de Crónicas Españolas

CSM Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Walter Mettmann, 3 vols.

CCM Cahiers de civilisation médiévale

CCCM Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis

CCV Collection de la Casa de Velásquez

CHE Cuadernos de historia de España

EKEE Epeteris tou Kentrou Epistemonikon Ereunon Kyprou (Επετηρίς του Κέντρου Επιστημονικών Ερευνών Κύπρου)

HID Historia. Instituciones. Documentos.

MCV Mélanges de la Casa de Velásquez

MHJ The Medieval History Journal

440 MMM Miscelánea medieval murciana

Partidas Las Siete Partidas, ed. Robert I. Burns, trans. Samuel Parsons Scott, 5 vols.

PCG Primera crónica general de España, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 2 vols.

PL Patrilogiæ Cursus Completus, Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols.

RHC Recueil des historiens des Croisades, 16 vols. (Paris, 1841-1906) Arm. RHC, Documents arméniens, 2 vols. (Paris, 1869-1906) Lois RHC Lois, Les assises de Jérusalem, 2 vols. (Paris, 1841-3)

TSHC Texts and Studies in the History of Cyprus

441 BIBLIOGRAPHY

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES:

Archivo Catedralicio de Murcia - Libro viejo de acuerdos, 1455-1494.

Archivo de la Catedral de Córdoba - Caja Z.

Archivo Histórico Provincial de Córdoba - Protocolos notariales.

Archivo Municipal de Córdoba, - Libros de Actas capitulares 1479, 1495, 1496, 1497, 1500, 1503, 1515.

Archivo Municipal de Jaén - Leg. 1, Cuadro 3. - Libros de Actas Capitulares: 1476, 1479, 1480, 1521. - Ordenanzas de Jaén.

Archivo Municipal de Murcia - Caja 80. - Cartas reales, 1453-1478; 1478-1488; 1488-1495. - Libros de Actas Capitulares 1419-1420, 1424-1425, 1429-1430, 1434-1435, 1446-1447, 1460-1461, 1464-1465, 1467-1468, 1468-1469, 1469-1470, 1470-1471, 1473-1474, 1474-1475, 1479-1480, 1481-1482, 1482-1483, 1483-1484, 1484-1485, 1487-1488, 1488-1489, 1491-1492, 1493-1494; 1494-1496. - Pergamino 151.

PUBLISHED DOCUMENTARY SOURCES:

Ayala Martínez, Carlos de. Libro de privilegios de la Orden de San Juan de Jerusalén en Castilla y León (siglos XII-XV) (Madrid, 1995)

Baer, Yitzhak. Die Juden im Christlichen Spanien: Urkunden und Regesten: Kastilien/ Inquisitionsakten (Berlin, 1936)

Carretero Zamora, Juan Manuel. Corpus documental de las Cortes de Castilla (1475- 1517) (Toledo, 1993)

The Cartulary of the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom of Nicosia, ed. Nicholas Coureas and Chris Schabel, TSHC 25 (Nicosia, 1997)

442 Chypre sous les Lusignans. Documents chypriotes des archives du Vatican (XIVe et XVe siècles), ed. Jean Richard (Paris, 1962)

Colección Diplomática de Baeza (siglos XIII-XV), ed. José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 1983)

Constitutiones Concilii Quarti Lateranensis una cum commentariis glossatorum, ed. Antonio García y García. Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Ser. A: Corpus Glossatorum 2 (Città del Vaticano 1981)

Galíndez de Carvajal, Lorenzo. “Adiciones genealógicas a los Claros Varones de Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, señor de Batres,” en Colección de Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de España 18 (Madrid, 1851)

García, Michel. “Una carta inédita del condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo,” BIEG 53 (1967): 15-22.

Gomariz Marín, Antonio. Documentos de los Reyes Católicos: 1492−1504. Colección de documentos para la historia del reino de Murcia 20 (Murcia, 2000)

González González, Julio. Regesta de Fernando II (Madrid, 1943)

- Repartimiento de Sevilla, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1951)

- El reino de Castilla en la época de Alfonso VIII, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1960)

- Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 3 vols. (Córdoba, 1980-6)

Gregory IX, Decretalium D. Gregorii Papæ IX, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Emil Ludwig Richter and Emil Friedberg, 2 vols. (Graz, 1959)

Heusch, Carlos and Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, eds. La caballería castellana en la Baja Edad Media. Textos y contextos (Montpellier, 2000)

John XXII, Extravagantes tum viginti D. Ioannis Papæ XXII tum communes suæ integritati restitutæ, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Emil Ludwig Richter and Emil Friedberg, 2 vols. (Graz, 1959), ii, 1201-36.

Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona, vol. 1 (1424-1546) , ed. A. Duran i Sanpere and Josep Sanabre (Barcelona, 1930)

Mansilla Reoyo, Demetrio. La documentación pontificia de Honorio III (1216-1227) (Rome, 1965)

Martínez de Mazas, José. Retrato al natural de la ciudad y términos de Jaén, ed. José Rodríguez Molina (Barcelona, 1978)

443

Memorias de don Enrique IV de Castilla, Colección diplomática de Enrique IV, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1913)

Metcalf, David M. Coinage of the Crusades and the Latin East in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (London, 1995)

Moratalla Collado, Andrea. Documentos de los Reyes Católicos: 1475-1491. Colección de documentos para la historia del reino de Murcia 19 (Murcia, 2003)

“Ordenanzas del concejo de Córdoba (1435),” ed. Manuel González Jiménez, HID 2 (1975): 189-316.

Ordenanzas de la muy noble, famosa y muy leal ciudad de Jaén, guarda y defendimiento de los reinos de Castilla, ed. Pedro A. Porras Arboledas (Granada, 1993)

Pays d’Islam et monde latin (Xe-XIIe siècle). Textes et documents (Lyon, 2000)

Poesía crítica y satírica del siglo XV, ed. Julio Rodríguez Puértolas (Madrid, 1989)

Rodríguez Molina, José. Colección diplomática del Archivo histórico Municipal de Jaén. Sigos XIV y XV (Jaén, 1985)

Rubio García, Luis. Los judíos de Murcia en la baja Edad Media (1350-1500). Colección documental, 3 vols. (Murcia, 1992-1994)

Schroeder, Henry Joseph. Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation and Commentary (St. Louis, 1937)

Las Siete Partidas, ed. Robert I. Burns, trans. Samuel Parsons Scott, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, 2000-2001)

Simonsohn, Shlomo. The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents: 1394-1464 (Toronto, 1988)

Suárez Fernández, Luis. Documentos acerca de la expulsión de los judíos (Valladolid, 1964)

The Synodicum Nicosiense and Other Documents of the Latin Church of Cyprus, 1196- 1373, ed. Chris Schabel, TSHC 39 (Nicosia, 2001)

Ubieto Arteta, Antonio. Cartulario de San Juan de la Peña, 2 vols. (Valencia, 1962- 1963)

PUBLISHED NARRATIVE SOURCES:

444 Alfonso X, el Sabio. Cantigas de Santa María. Edición facsímil del Códice T.I.1 de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial, siglo XIII (Madrid, 1979)

- Cantigas de Santa María, ed. Walter Mettmann, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1986-1989)

- Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Tempe, AZ, 2000)

Alonso de Cartagena, Un tratado de Alonso de Cartagena sobre la educación y los estudios literarios, ed. Jeremy N.H. Lawrance (Barcelona, 1979)

- The Chivalric Vision of Alfonso de Cartagena: Study and Edition of the Doctrinal de los caualleros, ed. Noel Fallows (Newark, DE, 1995)

Antón de Montoro, Cancionero, ed. Marcella Ciceri and Julio Rodríguez-Puértolas (Salamanca, 1990)

- “Cantar de los Comendadores de Córdoba,” in Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Edición nacional de las obras completas de Menéndez Pelayo, 65 vols. (Madrid, 1940-1959), xxv, 449-51.

Argote de Molina, Gonzalo and Ambrosio de Montesinos. Comentarios de la conquista de la ciudad de Baeza y nobleza de los conquistadores della, ed. Enrique Toral Peñaranda (Jaén, 1995), 67.

Beati in Apocalipsin Libri Duodecim, ed. Henry A. Sanders (Rome, 1930)

Barrientos, Lope de. Refundación de la Crónica del Halconero, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 9 (Madrid, 1946)

Bernard of Clairvaux, “In Praise of the New Knighthood,” in Treatises III: On Grace and Free Choice, trans. Conrad Greenia. The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux 7, Cistercian Fathers Series 19 (Kalamazoo, 1977), 127-167.

Carrillo de Huete, Pedro. Crónica del Halconero de Juan II, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 8 (Madrid, 1946)

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, ed. Tom Lathrop (Newark, 1997)

Crónica anónima de Enrique IV de Castilla, 1454-1474, ed. Maria Pilar Sánchez-Parra García (Madrid, 1991)

Crónica de Alfonso III, ed. Antonio Ubieto Arteta. Textos medievales 3 (Valencia, 1971), 40-1.

445 Crónica de don Alvaro de Luna, Condestable de Castilla, Maestre de Santiago, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 2 (Madrid, 1946)

Crónica de Juan II de Castilla, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1982)

Chroniques d’Amadi et de Strambaldi, ed. René de Mas Latrie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1891-1893)

Delicado, Francisco. La Lozana andaluza, ed. Jacques Joset and Folke Gernert (Barcelona, 2007)

- La Lozana andaluza, ed. Bruno M. Daimani (Madrid, 1982)

- Retrato de la Lozana andaluza, ed. Claude Allaigre (Madrid, 1985)

- Portrait of Lozana: The lusty Andalusian woman, trans. Bruno M. Daimani. Scripta Humanistica 34 (Potomac, MD, 1987)

- Portrait de la Gaillarde andalouse. Roman, trans. Claude Bleton (Paris, 1993)

Enríquez del Castillo, Diego. Crónica del rey Don Enrique el cuarto de este nombre, ed. Cayetano Rosell. BAE 70 (Madrid, 1953)

Escavias, Pedro de. Repertorio de Príncipes de España y obra poética del alcaide Pedro de Escavias, ed. Michel García (Jaén, 1972)

Étienne de Lusignan, Chorograffia e breve historia universale dell’isola de Cipro principiando al tempo di Noè per il fino al 1572 (Bologna, 1573; repr. Famagusta, 1973; repr. Nicosia, 2004)

García, Michel. Repertorio de Príncipes de España y obra poética del alcaide Pedro de Escavias (Jaén, 1972)

“Les Gestes des Chiprois,” in RHC, Arm., vol. 2 (Paris, 1906)

Gómez Manrique, Cancionero, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia, 2 vols. Colección de escritores castellanos 36, 39 (Madrid, 1885-1886)

Hechos del Condestable don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (Crónica del siglo XV), edición y estudio, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 3 (Madrid, 1940)

Historia de los hechos del Marqués de Cádiz, ed. Juan Luis Carriazo Rubio (Granada, 2003)

Historia Silense: edición crítica e introducción, ed. Justo Pérez de Urbel and Atilano González Ruiz-Zorrilla (Madrid, 1959)

446 James I of Aragon. Llibre dels feits del rei En Jaume o crònica de Jaume I, in Els Quatre Grans Cròniques, ed. Ferrán Soldevila (Barcelona, 1971)

Jerónimo of Córdoba, Córdoba en el siglo XV, ed. and trans. Manuel Nieto Cumplido (Córdoba, 1973)

Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo. Historia de rebus Hispanie sive Historia gothica, ed. Juan Fernández Valverde, CCCM 72 (Turnhout, 1987)

López de Ayala, Pero. Crónica del rey don Enrique, tercero de Castilla é de León, ed. Cayetano Rosell, BAE 68 (Madrid, 1953), 161-271.

López de Mendoza, Iñigo and Alonso de Cartagena, “Qüestion fecha por el marqués de Santillana al muy sabio e noble perlado don Alonso de Cartagena y su respuesta,” in Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, Obras completas, ed. Ángel Gómez Moreno and Maxim P.A.M. Kerkhof (1988), 414-34.

Lucas of Túy, Chronicon Mundi, ed. Emma Falque, CCCM 74 (Turnhout, 2003)

Makhairas, Leontios. Recital Concerning the Sweet Land of Cyprus entitled ‘Chronicle’, ed. R.M. Dawkins, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932)

Muslim-Christian Polemic during the Crusades: The Letter from the People of Cyprus and Ibn Abī Ṭālib al-Dimashqī's Response, ed. Rifaat Y. Ebied and David Thomas (Leiden, 2005)

Ortiz de Zúñiga, Diego. Anales eclesiásticos y seculares de la ciudad de Sevilla, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1795)

Palencia, Alfonso de. Crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia, BAE 257, 258, and 267 (Madrid, 1973-1975)

- Epístolas latinas, ed. and trans. Robert B. Tate and Rafael Alemany Ferrer (Barcelona, 1982)

- De perfectione militaris triumphi: La perfeçión del triunfo, ed. Javier Durán Barceló (Salamanca, 1996)

Pascual, Pedro. Sobre la seta mahometana, in Obras de San Pedro Pascual, ed. Pedro Armengol Valenzuela, 4 vols. (Rome, 1906-1908), iv, 1-357.

Pérez de Guzmán, Fernán. Crónica del Príncipe don Juan Segundo, ed. Cayetano Rosell. BAE 70 (Madrid, 1953)

Philip of Novara, “Livre de Phillippe de Navarre,” in RHC, Lois, vol. 2 (Paris, 1843)

447 Philippe de Mézières, The Life of Saint Peter Thomae, ed. Joachim Smet. Textus et studia carmelitana 2 (Rome, 1954)

Primera crónica general de España, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1977)

Pulgar, Fernando del. Claros Varones de Castilla, ed. Robert B, Tate (Oxford, 1971)

Relación de los hechos del muy magnífico e más virtuoso señor, el señor don Miguel Lucas, muy digno condestable de Castilla, ed. Juan Cuevas Mata, Juan del Arco Moya, and José del Arco Moya (Jaén, 2001)

Rodríguez de Lena, Pero. El Passo Honroso de Suero de Quiñones, ed. Amancio Labandeira Fernández (Madrid, 1977)

Sancti Beati a Liébana Commentarius in Apocalypsin, ed. Eugenio Romero Pose, 2 vols. (Rome, 1985)

Sánchez de Arévalo, Rodrigo. Suma de la Política, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Mario Penna, BAE 116 (Madrid, 1959), 249-309.

- Vergel de los Príncipes, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Mario Penna, BAE 116 (Madrid, 1959), 311-41.

Spanish Ballads, ed. Colin Smith (Oxford, 1964)

El Tumbo de los Reyes Católicos del Concejo de Sevilla, ed. Ramón Carande and Juan de Mata Carriazo (Seville, 1929-1968)

Valera, Diego de. Epístolas de mosén Diego de Valera, enbiadas en diversos tiempos e a diversas personas, ed. José Antonio de Balenchana (Madrid, 1878)

- Memorial de diversas hazañas: crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, CCE 4 (Madrid, 1941)

- Espejo de verdedera nobleza, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Mario Penna, BAE 116 (Madrid, 1959), 89-116.

- Tratado de las armas [or Tratado de los rieptos e desafios], in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Mario Penna, BAE 116 (Madrid, 1959), 117-40.

- Cirimonial de príncipes, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Mario Penna, BAE 116 (Madrid, 1959), 161-8.

- Preheminencias y cargos de los oficios de armas, in Prosistas castellanos del siglo XV, ed. Mario Penna, BAE 116 (Madrid, 1959), 169-71.

448 The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest, ed. and trans. Simon Barton and Richard Fletcher (Manchester, 2000)

SECONDARY SOURCES:

Abellán Pérez, Juan. “El concejo murciano de junio de 1429 a junio de 1430: su estructura,” MMM 5 (1980): 121-58.

Abulafia, David. “Introduction: Seven Types of Ambiguity, c. 1100-c. 1500,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. David Abulafia and Nora Berend (Aldershot, 2002), 1-34.

Aguila Escobar, Gonzalo. “La educación del caballero: ‘Tratado de los rieptos e desafios’ y ‘Ceremonial de príncipes’ de Diego de Valera,” Las letras y las ciencias en el medievo hispánico, ed. María Isabel Montoya Ramírez and María Nieves Muñoz Martín (Granada, 2006), 299-318.

Alba, Ramón. Acerca de algunas particularidades de las Comunidades de Castilla tal vez relacionadas con el supuesto acaecer terreno del Milenio Igualitario (Madrid, 1975)

Alpert-Llorca, Marlene and José Antonio González Alcantud, Moros y cristianos: representaciones del otro en las fiestas del Mediterráneo occidental (Toulouse, 2003)

Alphandéry, Paul and Alphonse Dupront. La Chrétienté et l'idée de Croisade, 2 vols. (Paris, 1954, 1959)

Andre, Jean-Marie. L’otium dans la vie morale et intellectuelle romaine des origines a l'époque Augustéenne (Paris, 1966)

Andrés Díaz, Rosana de. “Las fiestas de caballería en la Castilla de los Trastámara,” En la España medieval 5 (1986): 81-107.

Antelo Iglesias, Antonio.“La ciudad ideal según fray Francesc Eiximenis y Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo,” En la España medieval 6 (1985): 19-50.

- “Alfonso de Palencia: historiografía y humanismo en la Castilla de siglo XV,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Historia Medieval, 3 (1990): 21-40.

Aranda Doncel, Juan. Los moriscos en tierras de Córdoba (Córdoba, 1984)

Argente del Castillo Ocaña, Carmen. “Los cautivos en la frontera entre Jaén y Granada,” in Relaciones exteriores del Reino de Granada. IV Coloquio de historia medieval andaluza, ed. Cristina Segura Graíño (Almería, 1988), 211-26.

- “Factores condicionantes del sistema defensivo fronterizo en el Reino de Jaén,” in V

449 Estudios de Frontera. Funciones de la red castral fronteriza: homenaje a Don Juan Torres Fontes: Congreso celebrado en Alcalá la Real en noviembre de 2003, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 2004), 37-55.

Arranz Guzmán, Ana. "Las visitas pastorales a las parroquias de la Corona de Castilla durante la Baja Edad Media. Un primer inventario de obispos visitadores", En la España Medieval 26 (2003): 295-339.

- “Fiestas, juegos y diversiones prohibidas al clero en la Castilla Bajomedieval,” CHE 78 (2003-2004): 9-33.

Asenjo González, María. “Las ciudades medievales castellanas. Balance y perspectivas de su desarrollo historiográfico (1990-2004),” En la España Medieval 28 (2005): 415- 453.

Atlee, Carl W. “Political Protest in Gómez Manrique's Defunzión del noble cauallero Garçía Laso de la Vega,” The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 87 (2010): 169-186.

Avalle-Arce, Juan Bautista. El cronista Pedro de Escavias: una vida del siglo XV (Chapel Hill, 1972)

Baer, Yitzhak. A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1961- 1966)

Baglioni, Daniele. “ Interférence et convergence linguistique dans les documents chypriotes du XVe siècle,” in Identités croisées en un milieu méditerranéen: le cas de Chypre (antiquité – Moyen Âge), ed. Sabine Fourrier and Gilles Grivaud (Rouen, 2006), 301-29.

Balletto, Laura. “Ethnic Groups, Cross-Social and Cross-Cultural Contacts on Fifteenth- Century Cyprus,” in Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Benjamin Arbel (London, 1996), 35-48.

Barkaï, Ron. Cristianos y musulmanes en la España medieval. El enemigo en el espejo. (Madrid, 1984)

Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (London, 1993)

Bartolomé Herrero, Bonifacio. "Una visita pastoral a la diócesis de Segovia durante los años 1446 y 1447", En la España Medieval 18 (1995): 303-349.

Bazzana, André. “El concepto de frontera en el Mediterráneo occidental en la Edad Media,” in Actas del Congreso la Frontera Oriental Nazarí como Sujeto Histórico (S.XIII-XVI): Lorca-Vera, 22 a 24 de noviembre de 1994, ed. Pedro Segura Artero (Almería, 1997), 25-46.

450

Bazzana, André, Pierre Guichard, and Philippe Sénac. “La frontière dans l’Espagne médiévale,” Castrum 4: Frontière et peuplement dans le monde méditerranéen au Moyen Age. Actes du colloque d’Erice-Trapani, 18-25 septembre 1988 (Rome and Madrid, 1992), 35-59.

Beinart, Haim. Conversos on Trial: The Inquisition in Ciudad Real (Jerusalem, 1981)

Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1990)

Benítez Bolorinos, Manuel. Las cofradía medievales en el Reino de Valencia, 1329-1458 (Alicante, 1998)

Berend, Nora. “Medievalists and the Notion of Frontier,” MHJ 2 (1999): 55-72.

- “Preface,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. David Abulafia and Nora Berend (Aldershot, 2002), x-xv.

Bernis, Carmen. “Modas moriscas en la sociedad cristiana española del siglo XV y principios del XVI,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 144 (1959): 199-228.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London, 1994)

- “Culture’s In-Between,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London, 1996), 53-60.

Billington, Ray Allen. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (New York, 1949)

Bishko, Charles Julian. “The Peninsular Background of Latin American Cattle Ranching,” Hispanic American Historical Review 32 (1952): 491-515.

- “The Frontier in Medieval History,” paper presented at the American Historical Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C: December 29, 1955.

- “The Castilian as Plainsman: The Medieval Ranching Frontier in La Mancha and Extremadura,” in The New World Looks at its History: Proceeding of the Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico, ed. Archibald R. Lewis and Thomas McGann (Austin, TX, 1963), 47-69.

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate. “Philippe de Mézières's Life Of Saint Pierre de Thomas at the Crossroads of Late Medieval Hagiography and Crusading Ideology,” Viator 40 (2009): 223-248.

Boehlke, Frederick. Pierre de Thomas: Scholar, Diplomat, and Crusader (Philadelphia, 1966)

451

Bonachía Hernando, Juan Antonio, ed. La ciudad medieval. Aspectos de la vida urbana en la Castilla Bajomedieval (Valladolid, 1996)

Bonde, Sheila and Clark Maines, Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons: Approaches to its Architecture, Archaeology, and History. Bibliotheca Victorina 15 (Turnhout, 2003)

- “’Ne aliquis extraneus claustrum intret’: Entry and Access at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, Soissons.” in Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude: Essays on Cistercians, Art and Architecture in Honour of Peter Fergusson, ed. Terryl N. Kinder. Medieval Church Studies 11, Studia et Documenta 13 (Turnhout, 2004), 173-186.

Bosque Carceller, Ródolfo. Murcia y los Reyes Católicos (Murcia, 1994)

Boswell, John. The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven, 1977)

Boulton, D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre. The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe, 1325-1520 (New York, 1987)

Bourdieu, Pierre. “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York, 1993), 339-56.

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York, 1972)

Brisset Martín, Demetrio E. “Fiestas hispanas de moros y cristianos: historia y significados,” Gazeta de Antropología 17 (2001), http://digibug.ugr.es/handle/10481/ 7433 (accessed 22 February, 2011)

Buc, Philippe. The Dangers of Ritual: between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, 2001)

Bulliet, Richard. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (Cambridge, 1979)

Burckhardt, Jacob. The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, ed. and trans. S. G. Middlemore (London, 1990)

Buresi, Pascal. “Les conversions d’églises et de mosques en Espagne aux XIe-XIIIe siècles,” in Religion et société urbaine au Moyen Âge. Études offertes à Jean-Louis Biget par ses élèves, ed. Patrick Boucheron and Jacques Chiffoleau (Paris, 2000), 333-350.

- “Nommer, penser les frontières en Espagne aux XIe-XIIIe siècles,” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos xi-xiv), ed. Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Pascal Buresi and Philippe Josserand. CCV 75 (Madrid, 2001), 51-74.

452 - La frontière entre chrétienté et Islam dans la peninsula Ibérique. Du Tage à la Sierra Morena (fin XIe-milieu XIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2004)

Burns, Robert I. “The Parish as a Frontier Institution in Thirteenth Century Valencia,” Speculum 37 (1962): 244-51.

- “The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1989), 307-30.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays of Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), 181-238.

Cabrera Muñoz, Emilio. “Renta episcopal y producción agraria en el obispado de Córdoba en 1510,” in Actas del I Congreso de Historia de Andalucía, 8 vols. (Córdoba, 1978), i, 397-412.

- “Violencia urbana y crisis política en Andalucía en el siglo XV,” in Violencia y conflictividad en la sociedad de la España Bajomedieval, ed. (Zaragoza, 1995), 5-25.

Cabrera Muñoz, Emilio and Andrés Moros, Fuenteovejuna. La violencia antiseñorial en la siglo XV (Barcelona, 1991)

Cabrera Sánchez, Margarita. “Oligarquía urbana y negocio inmobiliario en Córdoba en la segunda mitad del siglo XV,” HID 20 (1993): 107-26.

- “Los corregidores de Córdoba en el siglo XV,” Meridies. Revista de Historia Medieval 2 (1995): 95-108.

- “Los regidores de Córdoba en 1480. Aproximación prosopografía,” Meridies. Revista de Historia Medieval 3 (1996): 61-88.

- “El problema converso en Córdoba. El incidente de la Cruz del Rastro,” in La Península Ibérica en la Era de los Descubrimientos (1391-1492), Actas de las III Jornadas Hispano-portuguesas de Historia Medieval, 2 vols. (Seville, 1997), i, 331-339.

- Nobleza, oligarquía y poder en Córdoba al final de la Edad Media (Córdoba, 1998)

- “La vivienda noble en Córdoba durante el siglo XV,” in Córdoba en la Historia: la construcción de la urbe, ed. Francisco R. García Verdugo and Francisco Acosta Ramírez (Córdoba, 1999), 263-270.

- “Los conversos de Córdoba en el siglo XV: la familia del jurado Martín Alonso,” Anuario de estudios medievales 35 (2005): 185-232.

Cabrillana Ciézar, Nicolás. Santiago Matamoros. Historia e imagen (Málaga, 1999)

453

Camillo, Ottavio di. El humanismo castellano del siglo xv (Valencia 1976)

Capel Sánchez, Juan José. La vida lúdica en la Murcia bajomedieval (Murcia, 2000)

- “Murcia como espacio lúdico en la Baja Edad Media,” MMM 25-26 (2001-2002): 9-22.

Carande, Ramón. Sevilla, fortaleza y mercado. Las tierras, las gentes y la administración de la ciudad en el siglo XIV (Seville, 1975)

Carcaller Cerviño, María del Pilar. “El ascenso político de Miguel Lucas de Iranzo. Ennoblecimiento y caballería al servicio de la monarquía,” BIEG 176 (2000): 11-30.

Carlson, David. “Religious Writers and Church Councils on Chivalry,” in The Study of Chivalry, ed. Howell Chickering and Thomas Seiler (Kalamazoo, 1988), 141-71.

Carrasco, Rafael. Inquisición y represión sexual en Valencia: historia de los sodomitas (1565-1785) (Barcelona, 1985)

Carriazo, Juan de Mata. “Un alcalde entre los cristianos y los moros, en la frontera de Granada,” in Homenaje al profesor Carriazo, 1: En la frontera de Granada (Seville, 1971), 85-142; previously published in Al-Andalus 13 (1948): 35-96.

- “Relaciones fronterizas entre Jaén y Granada. El año 1479,” in Homenaje al profesor Carriazo, 1: En la frontera de Granada (Seville, 1971), 237-64; previously published in Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos 61 (1955): 23-51.

- “Los moros de Granada en las actas del concejo de Jaén de 1479,” Homenaje al profesor Carriazo, 1: En la frontera de Granada (Seville, 1971), 265-310; previously published in Miscelánea de estudios árabes y hebraicos 4 (1955): 81-125.

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990)

Castro, Américo. España en su historia (Cristianos, moros y judios) (Barcelona, 1983)

- La realidad histórica de España (Mexico City, 1954)

- Aspectos del vivir hispánico. Espiritualismo, mesianismo, actitud personal en los siglos XIV al XVI (Madrid, 1970)

Cátedra García, Pedro Manuel. Sermón, sociedad y literatura en la Edad Media. San Vicente Ferrer en Castilla (1411-1412) (Salamanca, 1994)

Catlos, Brian. The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims in Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300 (Cambridge, 2001)

454

Cela Esteban, María Estrella. Elementos simbólicos en el arte castellano de los Reyes Católicos: el poder real y el patronato regio (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1990)

Cepeda Adán, José. “El providencialismo en los crónicos de los Reyes Católicos,” Arbor 17 (1950): 177-90.

Chamberlin, Cynthia L. “ ‘Unless the Pen Writes as it Should.’ The Proto-cult of Saint Fernando III in Sevilla in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Sevilla 1248: Congreso Internacional Conmemorativo del 750 Aniversario de la Conquista de la Ciudad de Sevilla por Fernando III, Rey de Castilla y León, ed. Manuel Jiménez González (Seville, 2000), 389-418.

Cid, Carlos. “Santiago el Mayor en el texto y en las miniaturas de los códices del Beato,” Compostellanum 10 (1965): 231-82.

Ciggaar, Krijnie. “Le royaume des Lusignan: terre de littérature et de traductions. Échanges littéraires et culturels,” in Les Lusignans et l’Outre Mer (Poitiers, 1995), 89-98.

Ciudad Ruiz, Manuel. “El maestrazgo de Don Rodrigo Téllez Girón,” En la España medieval 23 (2000): 321-65.

Clare, Lucien. “Fêtes, jeux et divertissements à la cour du connétable de Castille, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (1460-1470) : les exercices physiques,” in Frontières andalouses la vie à Jaén entre 1460 et 1471, d'après Los hechos del condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, ed. Jacques Heers (Paris, 1996), 15-34. Originally published in La fête et l’écriture : théatre de cour, cour-théatre en Espagne et Italie, 1450-1530 (Aix-en-Provence, 1987), 5-32.

- “Les formes dramatiques primitives du théâtre espagnol d’après “Los hechos del condestable don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo” (1460-1470),” in Frontières andalouses: la vie à Jaén entre 1460 et 1471, d'après Los hechos del condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, ed. Jacques Heers. Ibérica n.s. 6 (Paris, 1996), 77-94.

Clare, Lucien and Michel García. “La guerre entre factions ou clientèles dans la crónica de Miguel Lucas de Iranzo,” in Frontières andalouses: la vie à Jaén entre 1460 et 1471, d'après Los hechos del condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, ed. Jacques Heers. Ibérica n.s. 6 (Paris, 1996), 135-50.

Coldstream, Nicola. Nicosia – Gothic City to Venetian Fortress (Nicosia, 1993)

Collantes de Terán Sánchez, Antonio. “Le latifundium sévillan aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Ebauche d’une problématique,” MCV 12 (1976) : 101-25.

Contreras Villar, Angustias. “La Corte de Condestable Iranzo. La ciudad y la fiesta.” En la España medieval 10 (1987): 305-22.

455

Corbató, Hermenegildo. Los misterios del Corpus de Valencia (Berkeley, 1932)

Córdoba, Pierre and Jean-Pierre Etienvre, eds. La fiesta, la ceremonia, el rito. Coloquio Internacional, Granada, Palacio de la Madraza, 24-26 de septiembre de 1987 (Granada, 1990)

Córdoba de la Llave, Ricardo. “El sistema castral fronterizo en la provincia de Córdoba (1240-1400),” in V Estudios de Frontera. Funciones de la red castral fronteriza: homenaje a Don Juan Torres Fontes: Congreso celebrado en Alcalá la Real en noviembre de 2003, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 2004), 109-24.

Coronas Tejada, Luis. “El motín antijudio de 1473 en Jaén,” in Proceedings of the Seventh World Congress of Jewish Studies, ed. Israel Gutman, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1981), ii, 141-77.

- Conversos and Inquisition in Jaén (Jerusalem, 1998)

- Los judíos en Jaén (Jaén, 2008)

Coureas, Nicholas. The Latin Church in Cyprus, 1195-1312 (Aldershot, 1997)

- “Conversion on Latin Cyprus: A New Faith or a New Rite?” EKEE 24 (1998): 77-86

- “The Latin Elite on Cyprus: Trying to Keep Apart,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 10 (2001): 31-45.

- “Controlled Contacts: The Latin Church of Cyprus, the Papacy, and Mamluk Egypt, 1250-1350,” in Proceedings of the 9th and the 10th International Colloquia on the History of Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Islamic Periods, ed. Urbain Vermeulen and Jo van Steenbergen, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 140 (Leuven, 2005), 395-408.

- “Non-Chalcedonian Christians on Latin Cyprus,” in Gesta Dei per Francos: Studies in Honour of Professor Jean Richard, ed Benjamin Kedar, Michel Balard and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Aldershot, 2001), 349-60.

Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191-1374, ed. Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Chris Schabel (Leiden, 2005)

Devaney, Thomas. “Competing Spectacles in the Venetian Festa delle Marie,” Viator 39:1 (Spring, 2008): 107-25.

- “Representing the Medieval Festivals of Jaén through Text, Enactment and Image,” in Representing the Past: Archaeology through Image & Text, ed. Stephen Houston and

456 Sheila Bonde (Oakville, CT, forthcoming)

Díez Bedmar, María del Consuelo. Teresa de Torres (ca. 1442-1521): Condesa de Castilla (Madrid, 2004)

Dillard, Heath. Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100- 1300 (Cambridge, 1984)

Dodwell, Charles Reginald. The Pictorial Arts of the West, 800-1200 (New Haven, 1993), 244-6.

Dompnier, Bernard and Paola Vismara, eds. Confréries et dévotions dans la catholicité moderne (mi-XVe-début XIXe siècle). Collection de l'École française de Rome, 393 (Rome, 2008)

Donovan, Richard B. Liturgical Drama in Medieval Spain (Toronto, 1958)

Duby, Georges. “Guerre et société dan l’Europe féodale : ordonnancement de la paix, la guerre et l’argent, la morale des guerriers,” in Concetta, storia, miti e immagini del Medio Evo, ed. Vittore Branco (Florence, 1973), 449-82.

Dunning, Eric. Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence, and Civilization (London, 1999)

Eco, Umberto. Beato di Liébana. Miniature del Beato del Fernando I y Sancha (Codice B.N. Madrid Vit 14-2) (Parma,1973)

Edbury, Peter. “The Crusading Policy of King Peter I of Cyprus,” in The Eastern Mediterranean Lands in the Period of Crusades, ed. P.M. Holt (Warminster, 1977), 90- 105.

- “The Murder of King Peter I of Cyprus (1359-1369),” Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980): 219-33.

- The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374 (Cambridge, 1991)

- The Lusignan Kingdom of Cyprus and its Muslim Neighbours (Nicosia, 1993) (reprinted in Kupros apo tin proistoria stous neoterous chronous [Nicosia, 1995], 223-42).

-“Famagusta in 1300,” in Cyprus and the Crusades, ed. Nicholas Coureas and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Nicosia, 1995), 337-53.

- “The Aftermath of Defeat: Lusignan Cyprus and the Genoese, 1374-1382,” in Les Lusignans et l'Outre Mer (Poitiers, 1995), 132-40.

- “Le régime des Lusignans en Chypre et la population locale,” Coloniser au Moyen Âge,

457 ed. Michel Balard and Alain Ducellier (Paris, 1995), 354–8, 364-5.

- “Latins and Greeks on Crusader Cyprus,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. David Abulafia and Nora Berend (Aldershot, 2002), 133-42.

Edwards, John. “Religious Belief and Social Conformity: The 'Converso' Problem in Late-Medieval Córdoba,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 31 (1981): 115-128.

- Christian Córdoba: the City and its Region in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1982)

- “Elijah and the Inquisition: Messianic Prophecy among Conversos in Spain, c. 1500,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 28 (1984): 79-94.

- “Trial of an Inquisitor: the Dismissal of Diego Rodríguez Lucero, Inquisitor of Córdoba, in 1508,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37 (1986): 240-57.

- “The Judeoconversos in the Urban Life of Córdoba, 1450-1520,” in Villes et sociétés urbaines au Moyen Âge, ed. Pierre Desportes (Paris, 1994), 287-99.

- “The Morality of Taxation: the Burden of War on Córdoba and Jerez de la Frontera, 1480-1515,” Meridies. Revista de Historia Medieval 2 (1995): 109-20.

- “The ‘Massacre’ of Jewish Christians in Córdoba, 1473-1474,” in The Massacre in History, ed. Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (New York, 1999), 55-68.

- The Spanish Inquisition (Stroud, 1999)

- The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474-1520 (Oxford, 2000)

- “The culture of the street: the Calle de la Feria in Córdoba, 1470-1520,” in Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400-1700, ed. Alexander Cowan (Exeter, 2000), 69-82, 232-5.

- “Nobleza y religión: Don Alfonso de Aguilar (1447-1501), Ámbitos. Revista de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de Córdoba 3 (2000): 9-19.

- “Conversion in Córdoba and Rome: Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence. Studies in Honor of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), 202-24.

- “A Society Organized for War? Córdoba in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella,” in Jews, Muslims and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragon. Essays in Honour of Professor Elena Lourie, ed. Harvey J. Hames (Leiden, 2004), 75-96.

Ellenblum, Ronnie. “Were there Borders and Borderlines in the Middle Ages? The

458 Example of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” in Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, ed. David Abulafia and Nora Berend (Aldershot, 2002), 105-119.

Escobar Camacho, José Manuel. La vida urbana cordobesa. El Potro y su entorno en la Baja Edad Media (Córdoba, 1985)

- Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media. Evolución urbana de la ciudad (Córdoba, 1989)

Escobar Camacho, José Manuel and Antonio Varo Pineda, El veinticuatro Fernán Alfonso y los comendadores de Córdoba: historia, literatura y leyenda (Córdoba, 1999)

Febvre, Lucien. “La frontière: le mot et la notion,” Revue de Synthèse Historique 45 (1928): 31-44; reprinted in Lucien Febvre, Pour une histoire à part entière (Paris, 1962), 11-24 and translated as “Frontière: The Word and the Concept,” in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Febvre, ed. Peter Burke (London, 1973), 208-18.

- “The Problem of Frontiers and the Natural Bounds of States,” in Lucien Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History, trans. E.G. Mountford and J.H. Paxton (London, 1932), 296-314.

Fernández Gallardo, Luis. Alonso de Cartagena, 1385-1456: una biografía política en la Castilla del siglo XV (Valladolid, 2002)

- “Santiago Matamoros en la historiografía hispanomedieval: origen y desarrollo de un mito nacional,” Medievalismo 15 (2005): 139-74.

Fleckenstein, Josef. La Caballería y el Mundo Caballeresco (Madrid, 2006)

Flores Arroyuelo, Francisco. El caballero: Hombre y prototipo (Murcia, 1979) Flori, Jean. “Réforme, reconquista, croisade. L’idée de reconquête dans la correspondance pontificale d’Alexandre II à Urbain II,” CCM 40 (1997): 317-35

Flynn, Maureen. Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400-1700 (Ithaca, 1989)

- “The Spectacle of Suffering in Spanish Streets,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), 153-68.

Foley, Augusta. La Lozana andaluza. Critical Guides to Spanish Texts 18 (London, 1977)

Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700-1700, ed. Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (Basingstoke, 1999)

Fuchs, Barbara. Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia, 2008)

459

García, Michel. “A propos de la Chronique du Connètable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo,” Bulletin Hispanique 85 (1973): 5-39

García Antón, José. “La tolerancia religiosa en la frontera de Murcia y Granada en los últimos tiempos del reino nazarí,” Murgetana 57 (1980): 133-43.

- “Cautiverios, canjes y rescates en la frontera entre Lorca y Vera en los últimos tiempos nazaríes,” in Homenaje al profesor Juan Torres Fontes, 2 vols. (Murcia, 1987), i, 547-59.

García Díaz, Isabel. La huerta de Murcia en el siglo XIV: (propiedad y producción) (Murcia, 1990)

García Fernández, Manuel. El reino de Sevilla en tiempos de Alfonso XI (1312-1350) (Seville, 1989)

García Fitz, Francisco. “Una frontera caliente. La Guerra en las fronteras castellano- musulmanas (siglos XI-XIII),” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos XI-XIV), ed. Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Pascal Buresi and Philippe Josserand. CCV 75 (Madrid, 2001), 159-79.

García y García, Antonio. “Religiosidad popular y festividades en el occidente peninsular (siglos XIII-XIV,” in Fiestas y Liturgia, Actas del coloquio celebrado en la Casa de Velásquez, 12 al 14 de diciembre, 1985 (Madrid, 1988), 35-51.

Garganta, José María and Vicente Forcada. Biografía y escritos de San Vicente Ferrer (Madrid, 1956)

Garrido Aguilera, Juan Carlos. “Relaciones fronterizas con el reino de Granada en las Capitulares del Archivo Histórico Municipal de Jaén,” in IV Coloquio de Historia Medieval Andaluza (Almería, 1988), 161-72.

Gatton, John. “‘There must be blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge, 1991), 79-91.

Gautier Dalché, Jean. “Islam et Chrétienté en Espagne au XIIe s: contribution à l’étude de la notion de frontière,” Hespéris 46 (1959): 183-217.

Gautier Dalché, Patrick. “De la liste à la carte: limite et frontière dans la géographie et la cartographie de l’Occident médiéval,” Castrum 4: Frontière et peuplement dans le monde méditerranéen au Moyen Age. Actes du colloque d’Erice-Trapani, 18-25 septembre 1988 (Rome and Madrid, 1992), 19-31.

Gelabert, Juan. “Cities, Towns and Small Towns in Castile, 1500-1800,” in Small Towns in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Clark (Cambridge, 1995), 271-294.

460 Gerbet, Marie-Claude. “Les confréries religieuses à Cáceres de 1467 à 1523,” MCV 7 (1971): 75-114.

- “La population noble dans la royaume de Castille vers 1500. La répartition géographique de ses différentes composantes,” Anales de historia antigua y medieval 20 (1977-1979): 78-99.

Gibello Bravo, Víctor. “La violencia convertida en espectáculo: Las fiestas caballerescas medievales,” in Fiestas, juegos y espectáculos en la España medieval. Actas del VII Curso de Cultura Medieval, celebrado en Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia) del 18 al 21 de Septiembre de 1995 (Aguilar de Campoo, 1999), 157-72.

Gil Albarracín, Antonio. Cofradías y hermandades en la Almería moderna (historia y documentos) (Barcelona, 1997)

Glick, Thomas. Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, 1970)

- Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Comparative Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation (Princeton, 1979)

- From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester, 1995)

Gómez-Bravo, Ana M. “Ser social y poética material en la obra de Antón de Montoro, mediano converso,” Hispanic Review 78 (2010): 145-167.

Gómez Moreno, Ángel, “La qüestion del marqués de Santillana a don Alfonso de Cartagena,” El Crotalón 2 (1985): 335-63.

González Arce, José Damián and Francisco José García Pérez, “Ritual, jerarquías y símbolos en las exequias reales de Murcia (siglo XV),” MMM 19-20 (1995-1996): 129- 38.

González Jiménez, Manuel. La repoblación de la zona de Sevilla en el siglo XIV (Seville, 1975)

- “Frontier and Settlement in the Kingdom of Castile (1085-1350),” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1989), 49-74.

- “Peace and War on the Frontier of Granada. Jaén and the Truce of 1476,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence. Studies in Honor of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), 160-75.

- “La frontera de Granada en las Cantigas de Santa María,” in IV Estudios de Frontera. Historia, tradiciones, y leyendas en la frontera. Homenaje a Don Enrique Toral y Peñaranda: Congreso celebrado en Alcalá la Real en noviembre de 2001, ed. Francisco

461 Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 2002), 229-45.

- “Sobre la ideología de la reconquista: realidades y tópicos,” in Memoria, mito y realidad en la historia medieval: XIII Semana de Estudios Medievales, Nájera, del 29 de julio al 2 de agosto de 2002, ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte and José Luis Martín Rodríguez (Logroño, 2003), 151-70.

- Fernando III El Santo (Seville, 2006)

González Jiménez, Manuel and Isabel Montes Romero Camacho, “Los mudéjares andaluces (siglos XIII-XV) aproximación al estado de la cuestión y propuesta de un modelo teórico,” in Los mudéjares valencianos y peninsulares, ed Manuel Ruzafa (Valencia, 2004), 47-78.

Grivaud, Gilles. “Éveil de la nation chyproise (XIIIe-XVIe siècles,” in Kyprios Character: Quelle identité chypriote?, ed. P. Gontier (Paris, 1995), 105-16.

Guenée, Bernard. “Des limites féodales aux frontières politiques,” in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 2, La nation (Paris, 1986), 11-33.

Harris, Julie A. "Mosque to Church Conversion in the Spanish Reconquest," Medieval Encounters 3 (1997): 158–72.

Harris, Max. Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin, 2000)

Harvey, Leonard Patrick. Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (Chicago, 1992)

Hay, Denys. “England, Scotland and Europe: The Problem of the Frontier,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 25 (1975): 77-91.

Head, Thomas and Richard Landes, eds. The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, 1992)

Hidalgo Hogayar, Juana. “La imagen de Santiago ‘Matamoros’ en los manuscritos iluminados,” Cuadernos de arte e iconografía 4 (1991): 340-5.

Hillgarth, Jocelyn N. The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250-1516, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1976-1978)

Homet, Raquel. “Sobre el espacio de las fiestas en la sociedad medieval,” in Temas Medievales 1 (1991): 143-61.

Horden, Peregrine and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000)

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass

462 Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1977), 120- 67.

Housley, Norman. “The Mercenary Companies, the Papacy, and the Crusades: 1356- 1378,” Traditio 38 (1982): 253-80.

- Contesting the Crusades (Oxford, 2006)

Howell, Martha C. “The Spaces of Late Medieval Urbanity,” in Shaping Urban Identity in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Marc Boone and Peter Stabel (Leuven, 2000), 3-23.

Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia. The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, 1988)

Huizinga, Johan. The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996)

Iliéva, Annetta, “Francus contra Graecum? Some notes on identity in Cypriot history writing during the thirteenth century,” in Visitors, Immigrants, and Invaders in Cyprus, ed. P.W. Wallace (Albany, 1995), 114-124.

- “L’image des Lusignans dans l’historiographie chypriote: héros et antihéros,” in Les Lusignans et l’Outre-Mer, Actes du colloque Poitiers-Lusignan, octobre, 1993, ed. J.-P. Arrignon (Poitiers, 1995), 159-162.

Jackson, Gabriel. The Making of Medieval Spain (New York, 1972)

Jacoby, David. “Citoyens, sujets et protégés de Venise et de Gênes en Chypre du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” Byzantinische Forschungen 5 (1977): 159-88.

- “The Rise of a New Emporium in the Eastern Mediterranean: Famagusta in the Late Thirteenth Century,” Meletai kai Ypomnèmata (Μελέται και Υπομνήματα) 1 (1984): 143- 79

- “Knightly Values and Class Consciousness in the Crusader States of the Eastern Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Historical Review 1 (1986): 158-86.

Jensen, Erik. “Crowd Control: Boxing Spectatorship and Social Order in Weimar Germany,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford, 2002), 79-101.

Jiménez Alcázar, Juan Francisco. “El hombre y la frontera: Murcia y Granada en época de Enrique IV.” MMM 17 (1992): 77-96.

Jotischky, Andrew. “Ethnographic Attitudes in the Crusader States: The Franks and the Indigenous Orthodox People,” in East and West in the Crusader States: Context, Contacts, Confrontations, ed. Krijnie Ciggaar and Herman Teule, vol. 3 (Leuven, 2003),

463 1-20.

Kaeuper, Richard W. Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999)

Kagan, Richard. Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500-1700 (Chapel Hill, 1981)

- “Urbs and Civitas in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain,” in Envisioning the City: Six Studies in Urban Cartography, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago, 1998), 75-108.

Kagan, Richard and Fernando Marías, Urban images of the Hispanic world, 1493-1793 (New Haven, 2000)

Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: a Historical Revision (New Haven, 1998)

- Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity (New Haven, 2008)

Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957)

Kedar, Benjamin. “Multidirectional Conversion in the Frankish Levant,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville, 1997), 190- 99.

- “Latin and Oriental Christians in the Frankish Levant, 1099-1291,” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land, First to Fifteenth Centuries C.E., ed. Arieh Kofsky and Guy G. Stroumsa (Jerusalem, 1998), 209-22

- “Convergences of Oriental Christian, Muslim and Frankish Worshippers: the Case of Saydnaya and the Knights Templar,” in The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity, ed. Zsolt Hunyadi and József Laszlovsky (Budapest, 2001), 89-100.

Keen, Maurice. Chivalry (New Haven, 1984)

Knighton, Tess. “Spaces and Contexts for Listening in 15th-Century Castile: The Case of the Constable's Palace in Jaén,”Early Music 25 (1997): 661-677.

Kolve, V.A. The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, 1966)

Koziol, Geoffrey. Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1992)

Kyrris, Costas P. “Some aspects of Leontios Makhairas’ Ethnoreligious Ideology, Cultural Identity, and Historiographic Method,” Stasinos 10 (1989-1993): 167-281.

- “Greek Cypriot identity, Byzantium and the Latins, 1192–1489,” History of European

464 Ideas 19 (1994): 563–73.

Laboa, Juan María. Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, alcaide de Sant’Ángelo (Madrid, 1973)

Ladero Quesada, Miguel Ángel, Castilla y la conquista de Granada (Valladolid, 1967)

- Los mudéjares de Castilla en tiempos de Isabel I (Valladolid, 1969)

- La hacienda real de Castilla en el siglo XV (La Laguna, 1973)

- “Producción y renta cerealeras en el reino de Córdoba a finales del siglo XV,” in Actas del I Congreso de Historia de Andalucía, 8 vols. (Córdoba, 1978), i, 375-96.

- “Consideraciones metodológicas sobre el estudio de los núcleos urbanos en la Castilla bajomedieval: notas para un modelo teórico de análisis,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Historia Medieval 4 (1991): 353-66.

- “¿Es todavía España un enigma histórico? Releyendo a Sánchez-Albornoz,” en Lecturas sobre la España histórica (Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, 1998), 317-44

Lázaro Carreter, Fernando. “El drama litúrgico, los ‘juegos de escarnio’ y el ‘Auto de los Reyes Magos’,” in Historia y crítica de la literatura española, ed. Alan Deyermond (Barcelona, 1979), i, i, 461-5.

- Teatro Medieval (Madrid, 1981)

Lázaro Damas, María Soledad. “Una iconografía de frontera: Santiago Matamoros en el Privilegio de Pegalajar,” Sumuntán 15 (2001): 51-8.

Lea, Henry Charles. A History of the Inquisition of Spain, 4 vols. (New York, 1902-1908)

Leroy, Béatrice. De l'épée à l'écritoire: En Castille de 1300 à 1480, deux siècles de nobles écrivains (Limoges, 2008), 42-67.

Leva Cuevas, Josefa, “Una elite en el mundo artesanal de la Córdoba de los siglos XV y XVI: plateros, joyeros y esmaltadores,” Ámbitos. Revista de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 16 (2006): 99-115.

- “Escribanos y Notarios en la Castilla Bajomedieval. Su ejercicio en la Córdoba de la época,” Ámbitos. Revista de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 21 (2009): 63- 93.

Lindenbaum, Sheila. “The Smithfield Tournament of 1390,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990): 1-20.

Linehan, Peter. “At the Spanish Frontier,” in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and

465 Janet L. Nelson (London and New York, 2001), 37-59.

Little, Lester K. “The Jews in Christian Europe,” in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation, ed. Jeremy Cohen (New York and London, 1991), 276-97.

Lleó Cañal, Vincente. Fiesta grande. El Corpus Christi en la historia de Sevilla (Seville, 1980)

Llompart, Gabriel. “La fiesta del Corpus y representaciones religiosas en Zaragoza y Mallorca (siglos XIV-XVI),” Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia. Revista de ciencias historioeclesiásticas 42 (1969): 181-209.

Logan, John, Weiwei Zhang and Hongwei Xu. “Applying Spatial Thinking in Social Science Research,” GeoJournal 75 (2010): 15-27.

Lomax, Derek. La Orden de Santiago (Madrid, 1965)

López de Coca-Castañer, José Enrique. “Esclavos, alfaqueques y mercaderes en la frontera del mar de Alborán, 1490-1516,” Hispania 38 (1978): 275-300.

- “Institutions on the Castilian-Granadan Frontier, 1369-1482,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1989), 127-50.

López Cordero, Juan Antonio. “El Castillo de Chincoya en la Bibliografía,” Elucidario 1 (2006): 237-48.

López Ferreiro, Antonio. Historia de la santa a.m. iglesia de Santiago de Compostela, 11 vols. (Santiago de Compostela, 1989-1909)

López Morales, Humberto. Tradición y creación en los orígenes del teatro castellano (Madrid, 1968)

Lourdes Simó, María. “Los conocimientos heráldicos de Mosén Diego de Valera,” La Corónica 22 (1993): 41-56.

Lourie, Elena. “A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain,” Past and Present 35 (1966): 54-76.

Lucas-Dubreton, Jean. El rey huraño: Enrique IV de Castilla y su época (Madrid, 1945)

Lynch, Katherine A. Individuals, Families and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800 (Cambridge, 2003)

Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City (Cambridge, 1960)

466 MacEvitt, Christopher. The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia, 2008)

Machado Santiago, Rafael and Emilio Arroyo López, “El territorio y el hombre (análisis geográfico). Jaén,” in Historia de Jaén (Jaén, 1982), 15-48.

MacKay, Angus. “Popular Movements and Pogroms in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” Past and Present 55 (1972): 33-67.

- “The Ballad and the Frontier,” in Ian Macpherson and Angus MacKay, Love, Religion and Politics in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden, 1998), 1-27; previously published as “The Ballad and the Frontier in Late Medieval Spain,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 53 (1976): 15-33.

- Spain in the Middle Ages. From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 (New York, 1977)

- “Climate and Popular Unrest in Late Medieval Castile,” in Climate and History: Studies in Past Climates and Their Impact on Man, ed. Thomas M. L. Wigley, Martin J. Ingram, and G. Farmer (Cambridge, 1981), 356-76.

- Money, Prices, and Politics in Fifteenth-Century Castile (London, 1981)

- “The Hispanic-Converso Predicament,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 35 (1985): 159-179.

- “Ritual and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” Past and Present 107 (1985): 3- 43.

- “The Lesser Nobility in the Kingdom of Castile,” in Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Later Medieval Europe, ed. Michael Jones (Gloucester, 1986), 159-80.

- “Andalucía y la guerra del fin del mundo,” in Andalucía entre oriente y occidente (1236-1492). Actas del V Coloquio internacional de historia medieval de Andalucía, ed. Emilio Cabrera (Córdoba, 1988), 329-42.

- “Religion, Culture, and Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian-Granadan Frontier,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1989), 217- 44.

- “Women on the Margins,” in Ian Macpherson and Angus MacKay, Love, Religion and Politics in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden, 1998), 28-42; previously published as “Averroistas y marginadas,” in Actas del III Coloquio de Historia Medieval Andaluza: La sociedad medieval andaluza: Grupos no privilegiados, ed. Manuel González Jiménez and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 1984), 247-61.

- “The Whores of Babylon,” in Ian Macpherson and Angus MacKay, Love, Religion and

467 Politics in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden, 1998), 179-87; previously published in Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period: Essays, ed. Marjorie Reeves (Oxford, 1992), 223-32.

Macpherson, Ian. “The Game of Courtly Love,” in Ian Macpherson and Angus MacKay, Love, Religion and Politics in Fifteenth Century Spain (Leiden, 1998), 236-53.

Magoulias, Harry J. “A Study in Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Church relations on the Island of Cyprus between the Years A.D. 1196 and 1360,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 10 (1964): 96-106.

Mann, Janice. “San Pedro at the Castle of Loarre: a Study in the Relation of Cultural Forces to the Design, Decoration and Construction of a Romanesque Church” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1991)

- Romanesque Architecture and its Sculptural Decoration in Christian Spain, 1000-1120: Exploring Frontiers and Defining Identities (Toronto, 2009)

Marañón, Gregorio. Ensayo biológico sobre Enrique IV y su tiempo (Madrid, 1997)

Marcela Mantel, Maria. “Carácter socioeconómico de los juegos y entretenimientos en Castilla. Siglos XII al XV,” in Estudios de Historia de España 3 (1990), 51-116.

Marsilla de Pascua, Francisco Reyes. “Los judíos y el concejo catedralicio de Murcia en el siglo XV,” MMM 15 (1989): 55-84.

Marino, Nancy F. Don Juan Pacheco. Wealth and Power in Late Medieval Spain (Tempe, 2006)

Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. “Conversos y cargos concejiles en el siglo xv,” Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos 58 (I957): 503-40.

Martín Martín, José Luis. “La frontera como entorno legendario,” in IV Estudios de Frontera. Historia, tradiciones, y leyendas en la frontera. Homenaje a Don Enrique Toral y Peñaranda: Congreso celebrado en Alcalá la Real en noviembre de 2001, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 2002), 17-30.

Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2008)

Martínez Carrillo, María de los Llanos. Manueles y Fajardos: la crisis bajomedieval en Murcia (Murcia, 1985)

- “Fiestas ciudadanas: componentes religiosos y profanos de un cuadro bajamedieval Murcia.” MMM 16 (1990-1991): 9-50.

468 - “Elitismo y participación popular en las fiestas medievales,” MMM 18 (1993): 95-107.

Martínez González, Rafael Ángel. Las cofradías Penitenciales de Palencia (Palencia, 1979)

Martínez Martínez, María. “La cabalgada: un medio de vida en la frontera murciano- granadina (siglo XIII),” MMM 13 (1986): 50-62.

- La industria del vestido en Murcia: siglos XIII-XV (Murcia, 1988)

- “Gastos del concejo lorquino para el Corpus de 1472,” in Estudios románicas 6 (1987- 1989): 1687-1696.

- La cultura del aceite en Murcia: siglos XIII-XV (Murcia, 1995)

Martín Rodríguez, José Luis. Los orígenes de la Orden Militar de Santiago (Barcelona, 1974)

Martínez Carrillo, María de los Llanos. Manueles y Fajardos: la crisis bajomedieval en Murcia (Murcia, 1985)

Maza Romero, Fernando. “Tensiones sociales en el municipio cordobés en la primera mitad del siglo XV,” in Actas del I Congreso de Historia de Andalucía, 8 vols. (Córdoba, 1978), ii, 85-112.

McCrank, Lawrence. “The Cistercians of Poblet as Landlords: Protection, Litigation, and Violence on the Medieval Catalan Frontier,” Citeaux commentarii cistercienses 26 (1975): 255-83.

- “The Cistercians of Poblet as Medieval Frontiersmen,” in Estudios en Homenaje a Don Claudio Sánchez Albornez en sus 90 años, Anejos de Cuadernos de Historia de España, 3 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1983), ii, 313-60.

McKee, Sally. “The Revolt of St Tito in Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete: A Reassessment,” Mediterranean Historical Review 9 (1994): 173–204.

- Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (Philadelphia, 2000).

McKitterick, Rosamund. The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, 751-987 (London, 1983)

Menjot, Denis. “La contrebande dans la marche-frontière murcienne au bas Moyen Âge,” in Homenaje al Profesor Juan Torres Fontes, 2 vols. (Murcia, 1987), ii, 1073-1083.

- Murcie castillane. Une ville au temps de la frontière (1243-milieu du XVe s.), 2 vols.

469 (Madrid, 2002)

Meyerson, Mark. A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 2004)

Milhou, Alain. “Le chauve-souris, le Nouveau David et le roi caché. Trois images de l’empereur des derniers temps dans le monde ibérique: x. XII-XVII,” MCV 18 (1982): 61-78.

- Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica en el ambiente franciscanista español (Valladolid, 1983)

Miller, Townsend. Henry IV of Castile, 1425-1474 (Philadelphia, 1972)

Miranda García, Fermín. “La ciudad medieval hispana. Una aproximación bibliográfica,” in Las sociedades urbanas en la España Medieval. XXIX Semana de Estudios Medievales. Estella, 2002 (Pamplona, 2003), 591-626.

Mirrer, Louise. Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile (Ann Arbor, 1996)

Mitre Fernández, Emilio. “Córdoba y su campiña. Una comarca fronteriza al comenzar el siglo XV,” Cuardernos de Estudios Medievales 1 (1973): 9-32.

- Los judíos de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III: el pogrom de 1391 (Valladolid, 1994)

Molina, Ricardo. Córdoba en sus plazas (Córdoba, 1962)

Molina Molina, Ángel Luis. “Mercaderes genoveses en Murcia durante la época de los Reyes Católicos (1475-1516),” MMM 2 (1976): 277-312.

- “Datos sobre sociodemografía Murciana a fines de la Edad Media (1475-1515),” in Anales de la Universidad de Murcia, Filosofía y letras 36 (1977-1978): 169-83

- El campo de Murcia en el siglo XV (Murcia, 1989)

- Urbanismo medieval. La región de Murcia (Murcia, 1992)

- La sociedad murciana en el tránsito de la edad media a la moderna (Murcia, 1996)

- “Estampas medievales murcianas. Desde la romántica caballeresca, caza y fiesta, a la predicación, procesión y romería,” in Fiestas, juegos y espectáculos en la España medieval. Actas del VII Curso de Cultura Medieval, celebrado en Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia) del 18 al 21 de Septiembre de 1995 (Aguilar de Campoo, 1999), 33-64. (Some sections previously published as “Sermones, procesiones y romerías en la Murcia bajomedieval,” MMM 19-20 [1995-1996]: 221-232).

470 - Estudios sobre la vida cotidiana (ss. XIII-XVI) (Murcia, 2003)

Morán Martín, Remedios. “De la difusión cultural de la virtud caballeresca a la defensa del honor,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Historia Medieval, 13 (2000): 271-290.

Moya García, Cristina. “La producción historiográfica de Mosén Diego de Valera en la época de los Reyes Católicos,” in La literatura en la época de los Reyes Católicos, ed Nicasio Salvador Miguel and Cristina Moya García. Biblioteca Áurea hispánica 52 (Madrid, 2008), 145-66.

Moyano Martínez, Juan Manuel. “Familia y poder político en la Murcia bajomedieval (siglos XIV y XV) MMM 27 (1992): 9-41.

Muchembled, Robert. Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400-1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge, 1985)

Nader, Helen. The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350-1550 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979)

Navarro, Andrea Mariana. “Pasado y antigüedad clásica en los discursos sobre ciudades: Las Laudes en la historiografía andaluza” Temas Medievales 16 (2008), http://www.scielo.org.ar/ scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0327-50942008000100004&lng=es&nrm=iso (accessed 22 January 2010)

Netanyahu, Benzion. The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York, 1995)

Niermeyer, Jan Frederick. Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden, 1984)

Nieto Cumplido, Manuel. “La revuelta contra los conversos de Córdoba en 1473,” in Homenaje de Antón de Montoro en el V centenario de su muerte (Montoro, 1977), 29-49.

- “Luchas nobiliarias y movimientos populares en Córdoba a fines del siglo XIV,” in Tres estudios de historia medieval andaluza, ed. Manuel Riu Riu, Cristóbal Torres, Manuel Nieto Cumplido (Córdoba, 1977), 11-65.

- Historia de Córdoba. Islam y cristianismo (Córdoba, 1984)

- Córdoba 1492: Ambiente artístico y cultural (Córdoba, 1992)

- “Religiosidad popular andaluza: la regla medieval de la Cofradía de Animas de Castro del Río (Córdoba),” Revista del Centro de Estudios Históricos de Granada y su Reino 16 (2004): 257-82.

Nieto Soria, José Manuel. Ceremonias de la realeza. Propaganda y legitimación en la

471 Castilla Trastámara (Madrid, 1993)

Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996)

- “Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain,” AHR 107 (2002): 1065-1093.

Nordmann, Daniel. “Des limites d’État aux frontières nationales,” in Les lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 2, La nation (Paris, 1986), 35-61.

O’Banion, Patrick. “What has Iberia to do with Jerusalem? Crusade and the Spanish Route to the Holy Land in the twelfth century,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 383-95.

O’Callaghan, Joseph F. A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, 1983)

- The Learned King: the Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia, 1993)

- Alfonso X and the Cantigas de Santa Maria: a Poetic Biography (Leiden, 1998)

- Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003)

Ortí Belmonte, Miguel Ángel Córdoba monumental, artística e histórica (Córdoba, 1980)

Otten-Froux, Catherine. “Les Italiens à Chypre (fin XIIe - fin XVe siècles),” in Identités croisées en un milieu méditerranéen: le cas de Chypre (antiquité – Moyen Âge), ed. Sabine Fourrier and Gilles Grivaud (Rouen, 2006), 279-300.

Quesada, Santiago. La idea de ciudad en la cultura hispana de la edad moderna (Barcelona, 1992)

Quintanilla Raso, María Concepción. Nobleza y señoríos en el reino de Córdoba. La casa de Aguilar (siglos XIV-XV) (Córdoba, 1979)

- “Estructuras sociales y familiares y papel político de la nobleza cordobesa (siglos XIV y XV),” En la España Medieval 3 (1982): 331-52.

- “El dominio de las ciudades por la nobleza: El caso de Córdoba en la segunda mitad del siglo XV,” En la España medieval 10 (1987): 109-24.

- “Estructura y función de los bandos nobiliarios en Córdoba a fines de la Edad Media,” in Bandos y querellas dinásticas en España al final de la Edad Media (Paris, 1991), 135- 55.

472 - “La caballería cordobesa a finales de la Edad Media: análisis de un conflicto social urbano,” in Villes et sociétés urbaines au Moyen Age, ed. Pierre Desportes (Paris, 1994), 121-32.

Padilla González, Jesús and José Manuel Escobar Camacho, “La mancebía de Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media,” in La sociedad medieval andaluza, grupos no privilegiados: actas del III Coloquio de Historia Medieval Andaluza (Jaén, 1984), 279-292.

Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500 - c.1800 (New Haven, 1995)

Palomo Fernández, Gema and José Luis Senra Gabriel y Galán, “La ciudad y la fiesta en la historiografía castellana de la baja edad media: escenografía lúdico-festiva,” Hispania 54/1 (1994): 5-36.

Paniagua Lourtou, Ana Belén. “Consideraciones sobre la imagen de los musulmanes en la Gran Crónica de Alfonso XI,” in IV Estudios de Frontera. Historia, tradiciones, y leyendas en la frontera. Homenaje a Don Enrique Toral y Peñaranda: Congreso celebrado en Alcalá la Real en noviembre de 2001, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 2002), 417-29.

Parma, Mariana Valeria. “Fiesta y revuelta. La teatralidad política en Valencia a principios de la modernidad,” CHE 77 (2002): 145-64.

Pascua Echegaray, Esther. Guerra y pacto en el siglo XII. La consolidación de un sistema de reinos en Europa occidental (Madrid, 1996)

Pascual Martínez, Lope. “Las hermandades en Murcia durante la baja Edad Media,” MMM 3 (1977), 163-209.

Pérez, Joseph. The Spanish Inquisition: a History, trans. Janet Lloyd (New Haven, 2005)

Pérez García, Mateo Antonio. “El Condestable Iranzo y la Frontera con Granada. Un itinerario de sus actividades militares,” in Andalucía entre oriente y occidente, (1236- 1492): actas del V Coloquio Internacional de Historia Medieval de Andalucía, ed Emilio Cabrera Muñoz (Córdoba, 1988), 385-398.

Pérez Gallego, Manuel. “La leyenda de la frontera antequerana: personajes y ficciones (1440-1476),” in IV Estudios de Frontera. Historia, tradiciones, y leyendas en la frontera. Homenaje a Don Enrique Toral y Peñaranda: Congreso celebrado en Alcalá la Real en noviembre de 2001, ed. Francisco Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina (Jaén, 2002), 431-45.

Pérez de Tudela y Velasco, María Isabel. “La «dignidad» de la Caballería en el horizonte intelectual del s. XV,” El la España Medieval 5 (1986): 813-29.

473 Peters, Edward. “Omnia permixta sunt. Where’s the Border?” MHJ 4 (2001): 109-27.

Pfister, Max. “Grenzbezeichnungen im Italoromanischen und Galloromanischen,” in Grenzen und Grenzregionen, ed. Wolfgang Haubrichs and Reinhard Schneider (Saarbrücken, 1994), 37-50.

Phillips, Jr., William D. Enrique IV and the Crisis of Fifteenth-Century Castile, 1425- 1480 (Cambridge, MA, 1978)

Pick, Lucy K. Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (Ann Arbor, 2004)

Pino García, José Luis del. “El concejo de Córdoba a finales de la Edad Media: estructura interna y política municipal,” HID 20 (1993): 355-402.

Piqueras García, María Belén. “Funcionamiento del concejo murciano (1462-1474),” MMM 14 (1987-1988): 9-47

Pirenne, Henri. Mohammed and Charlemagne (New York, 1939)

Porras Arboledas, Pedro A. “Las relaciones entre la ciudad de Jaén y el reino de Granada (La paz y la guerra según el libros de Actas de 1480 y 1488),” Al-Qantara, Revista de estudios árabes 9, fasc. 1 (1988), 29-46.

- “El comercio entre Jaén y Granada en 1480,” Al-Qantara, Revista de estudios árabes 9, fasc. 2 (1988), 519-24.

- “La frontera del Reino de Granada a través del Libro de Actas del Cabildo de Jaén de 1476,” Al-Qantara, Revista de estudios árabes 14, fasc. 1 (1993), 127-62.

Porro Girardi, Nelly Raquel. La investidura de armas en Castilla: del Rey Sabio a los Católicos (Valladolid, 1998)

Power, Daniel. “What did the Frontier of Angevin Normandy Comprise?” Anglo-Norman Studies 17 (1995): 181-201.

Powers, James F. “Frontier Municipal Baths and Social Interaction in Thirteenth-century Spain,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 649-67.

Ramírez de Arellano y Gutiérrez, Teodomiro. Paseos por Córdoba, o sea Apuntes para su historia (León, 1973), 225-9.

Rawlings, Helen. The Spanish Inquisition (Malden, MA 2006)

Remensnyder, Amy G. “The Colonization of Sacred Architecture: The Virgin Mary, Mosques, and Temples in Medieval Spain and Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” in

474 Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society. Essays in honor of Lester K. Little, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, 2000), 189-219.

- “Marian Monarchy in Thirteenth-Century Castile,” in The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950-1350. Essays in honor of Thomas N. Bisson, ed. Robert Berkhoper III, Alan Cooper, and Adam Kosto (Aldershot, 2005), 253-70.

Reuter, Timothy. Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c. 800-1056 (London, 1991)

Richard, Jean. “Le peuplement latin et syrien en Chypre au XIIIe siècle,” Byzantinische Forschungen 7 (1979): 157-73.

- “Culture franque et culture grecque: le royaume de Chypre au XVème siècle,” Byzantinische Forschungen 11 (1987): 399-415.

- “Culture franque, culture grecque, culture arabe dans le royaume de Chypre au 13e et au dèbut du 14e siècle,” Université de Saint-Joseph. Annales du Department des Lettres Arabes, 6 (1991–2) [1996], 235–45.

- “Culture franque et culture grecque: le royaume de Chypre au XVème siècle,” Byzantinische Forschungen 11 (1987): 399-415.

Richardson, Amanda. “Corridors of Power: A Case Study in Access Analysis from Medieval England,” Antiquities 77 (2003): 373-84.

Rico, Francisco. “Unas coplas de Jorge Manrique y las fiestas de Valladolid en 1428,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 2 (1965): 517-24.

Riquer, Martín de. Caballeros andantes españoles (Madrid, 1967)

- Caballeros medievales y sus armas (Madrid, 1999)

Rodríguez de Gálvez, Ramón. La verdad de la tradición del descenso de la Santísima Virgen María a la ciudad de Jaén, en la noche del diez de junio del año MCCCCXXX (Jaén, 1883)

Rodríguez Molina, José. El reino de Jaén en la baja Edad Media. Aspectos demográficos y económicos (Granada, 1978)

- “Jaén, organización de sus tierras y hombres (S. XIII-XV), in Historia de Jaén (Jaén, 1982), 201-63.

- “Banda territorial común entre Granada y Jaén. Siglo XV,” in Estudios sobre Málaga y el Reino de Granada en el V Centenario de la Conquista (Málaga, 1987), 113-30.

- “La frontera entre Granada y Jaén. Fuente de engrandecimiento para la nobleza,” in

475 Relaciones exteriores del Reino de Granada. IV Coloquio de historia medieval andaluza, ed. Cristina Segura Graíño (Almería, 1988), 237-50.

- La vida de la ciudad de Jaén en tiempos del Condestable Iranzo (Jaén, 1996)

- “Relaciones pacíficas en la frontera con el reino de Granada,” in Actas del Congreso ‘La Frontera Oriental Nazarí como Sujeto Histórico (s. XIII-XVI)’: Lorca-Vera, 22 a 24 de noviembre de 1994, ed. Pedro Segura Artero (Almería, 1997), 257-90.

- La vida de moros y cristianos en la frontera (Jaén, 2007)

Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús. El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV: La tratadística caballeresca castellana en su marco europeo (Valladolid, 1996)

Rojas Gabriel, Manuel. “En torno al «liderazgo» nobiliario en la frontera occidental granadina durante el siglo XV,” HID 20 (1993): 499-522.

- La frontera entre los reinos de Sevilla y Granada en el siglo XV (1390-1481). Un ensayo sobre la violencia y sus manifestaciones (Cádiz, 1995)

- “La nobleza como élite militar en la frontera con Granada. Una reflexión,” in Actas del Congreso «La frontera Oriental Nazarí como sujeto histórico (s. XIII-XIV)»: Lorca-Vera, 22 a 24 de noviembre de 1994, ed. Pedro Segura Artero (Almería, 1997), 181-90.

Romero Abao, Antonio. “La fiesta del Corpus Christi en Sevilla en el siglo XV,” in La religiosidad popular, ed. María Jesús Buxó i Rey, Salvador Rodríguez Becerra, and León Carlos Álvarez y Santaló. 3 vols (Seville, 1989), iii, 19-30.

Roth, Norman. Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison, 1995)

Rousset, Paul. “La notion de Chrétienté aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Le Moyen Âge 69 (1963): 191-203.

Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991)

- “The Eucharist and the Construction of Christian Identities,” in Culture and History, 1350-1600, ed. David Aers (Detroit, 1992), 43-63.

- Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia, 2004)

Rubio Garcia, Luis. La procesión de Corpus en el Siglo XV en Murcia (Murcia, 1987)

Rüdt de Collenberg, W.H. “Les grâces papales, autres que les dispenses matrimoniales accordées à Chypre de 1308 à 1378,” EKEE 8 (1975-1977): 187-252.

476 Ruiz, Teofilo. “Festivités, couleurs, et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle,” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations 3 (1991): 521-46.

- Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Philadelphia, 1994)

- “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: the Case of Jaén,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), 296-318.

- Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 1300-1474 (Oxford, 2007)

Rutherford, Jonathan. “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Rutherford (London, 1990), 207-221.

Sagarra Gamazo, Adelaida. Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, un toresano en dos mundos (Zamora, 2006)

Sánchez-Albornoz, Claudio. “La auténtica batalla de Clavijo,” CHE 9 (1948): 94–139.

- España: Un enigma histórico, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1956)

- “The Frontier and Castilian Liberties,” in The New World Looks at its History: Proceeding of the Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico, ed. Archibald R. Lewis and Thomas McGann (Austin, TX, 1963), 27-46.

- El drama de la formación de España y los españoles (Barcelona, 1973)

Sánchez León, Pablo. “Changing Patterns of Urban Conflict in Late Medieval Castile,” Past and Present 195 (2007) Supplement 2: 217-32.

Sánchez Pérez, José Augusto. El culto mariano en España (Madrid, 1943)

Sánchez Saus, Rafael. “Aristocracia y frontera en la Andalucía Medieval,” Estudios de historia y de Arqueología Medievales 11 (1996): 191-215.

Sanz Sancho, Iluminado. “El poder episcopal en Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media,” En la España medieval 13 (1990): 163-206.

Schabel, Chris. “Martyrs and Heretics, Intolerance of Intolerance: The Execution of Thirteen Monks in Cyprus in 1231,” in Schabel, Greeks, Latins, and the Church in Early Frankish Cyprus. Variorum Collected Studies (Aldershot, 2010), 1-33.

Schryver, James. “Monuments of Identity: Latin, Greek, Frank, and Cypriot?,” in Identités croisées en un milieu méditerranéen: le cas de Chypre (antiquité – Moyen Âge), ed. Sabine Fourrier and Gilles Grivaud (Rouen, 2006), 384-405.

477 Schwartz, Stuart. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, 2008)

Sénac, Philippe. L’image de l’Autre. Histoire de l’Occident médiéval face à l’Islam (Paris, 1983)

- “Frontière et Reconquête dans l’Aragon du XIe siècle,” in Frontières et espaces pyrénéens au Moyen Âge, ed. Philippe Sénac (Perpignan, 1992), 47-60.

- “La frontière aragonaise aux XIe et XIIe siècles: le mot et la chose pro defensionem Christianorum et Confusionem Sarracenorum,” CCM 42 (1999): 259-72.

- “« Ad castros de fronteras de mauros qui sunt pro facere ». Note sur le premier testament de Ramire Ier d’Aragon,” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos xi-xiv), ed. Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Pascal Buresi and Philippe Josserand. CCV 75 (Madrid, 2001), 205-21.

Serrano, Luciano. Los conversos D. Pablo de Santa María y D. Alfonso de Cartagena, obispos de Burgos, gobernantes, diplomáticos y escritores (Madrid, 1942)

Sieber, Harry. “Narrative and Elegiac Structure in Gómez Manrique’s Defunzión del noble cavallero Garci Laso de la Vega,” in Studies in Honor of Bruce W. Wardropper, ed. Dian Fox, Harry Sieber, and Robert TerHorst (Newark, 1989), 279-90.

Sicart Giménez, Ángel. Pintura medieval. La miniature (Santiago de Compostela, 1981)

- “La iconografía de Santiago ecuestre en la Edad Media,” Compostellanum 27 (1982): 11-32.

Sirera Turo, Josep Lluís. “La construcción del Auto de la Pasión y el teatro medieval castellano,” in Actas del III Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, ed. María Isabel Toro Pascua (Salamanca, 1994), ii, 1011-20.

Soriano del Castillo, Catherine. “El exilio voluntario de un Condestable de Castilla, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo,” 1616: Anuario de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada 6-7 (1988): 71-6.

Soulard, Thierry. “L’architecture gothique grecque du royaume des Lusignan : les cathédrales de Famagouste et Nicosie,” in Identités croisées en un milieu méditerranéen: le cas de Chypre (antiquité – Moyen Âge), ed. Sabine Fourrier and Gilles Grivaud (Rouen, 2006), 354-383.

Sponsler, Claire. “The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992), 15-29.

- Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England

478 (Minneapolis, 1997)

Starr-LeBeau, Gretchen D. In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and conversos in Guadalupe, Spain (Princeton, 2003)

Stern, Charlotte. “Christmas Performances in Jaén in the 1460s,” in Studies in Honor of Bruce W. Wardropper, ed. Dian Fox, Harry Sieber, and Robert TerHorst (Newark, 1989), 323-34.

- The Medieval Theater in Castile (Binghamton, 1996)

Stow, Kenneth R. “Holy Body, Holy City: Conflicting Medieval Structural Conceptions,” in Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land, ed. Benjamin Kedar and R.J. Zwi Werblowsky (New York, 1998), 151-71.

Suárez Fernández, Luis. Los Reyes Católicos: el tiempo de la Guerra de Granada (Madrid, 1989)

- Enrique IV de Castilla. La difamación como arma política (Barcelona, 2001)

Surtz, Ronald. The Birth of a Theatre: Dramatic Convention in the Spanish Theater from Juan del Encina to Lope de Vega (Madrid, 1979)

Tate, Robert B. “Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo (1404-1470) and his Compendiosa Historia Hispanica,” Nottingham Medíaeval Studies 4 (1960): 58-80.

- “The Civic Humanism of Alfonso de Palencia,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 23 (1979): 25-44.

- “Laus Urbium: Praise of Two Andalusian Cities,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence. Studies in Honor of Angus MacKay, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, 2002), 148-59.

Tate, Robert Brian and Anscari Mundó, “The Compendiolum of Alfonso de Palencia: a Humanist Treatise on the Geography of the Iberian Peninsula,” Journal of Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 5 (1975): 253-78.

- Feudal Germany, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1928)

Tisserant, Eugène and Gaston Wiet. “Une lettre de l’almohade Murtadā au pape Innocent IV,” Hespéris 6 (1926): 27-53.

Tolan, John V. “Barrières de haine et de mépris. La polémique anti-islamique de Pedro Pascual,” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos xi- xiv), ed. Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Pascal Buresi and Philippe Josserand. CCV 75 (Madrid, 2001), 253-66.

479

- Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002)

Toni, Teodoro. “Don Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo. Su personalidad y actividades,” Anuario de historia del derecho español 12 (1935): 97-360.

Toral Peñaranda, Enrique. Jaén y el Condestable Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (Jaén, 1987)

Tornel Cobacho, Cayetano. “El problema del trigo en Murcia en la época de los Reyes Católicos,” MMM 6 (1980): 57-98.

Torre, Lucas de. “Mosén Diego de Valera. Su vida y sus obras,” Boletín de la Academia de Historia 75 (1914), 50-83, 133-168.

Torres Fontes, Juan. Xiquena, castillo de la frontera (Murcia, 1960)

- “Estampas de la vida murciana en la época de los reyes católicos: El pendón de la ciudad,” Murgetana 13 (1960): 47-72.

- “El alcalde entre moros y cristianos del reino de Murcia,” Hispania 20 (1960): 55-80.

- “Moros, judíos y conversos en la regencia de don Fernando de Antequera,” CHE 31-32 (1960): 60-97.

- “Notas sobre los fieles del rastro y alfaqueques murcianos,” Miscelánea de estudios árabes y hebraicos 10 (1961): 89-105.

- “Los judíos murcianos en el siglo XIII,” Murgetana 16 (1962): 5-20.

- “La incorporación a la caballería de los judíos murcianos en el s. XV,” Murgetana 27 (1967): 5-14.

- “Relaciones comerciales entre los reinos de Mallorca y Murcia en el siglo XIV,” Murgetana 36 (1971): 5-20.

- “La puerta de la traición,” Murgetana 37 (1971): 83-8.

- “Los cultivos murcianos en el siglo XV,” Murgetana 37 (1971): 89-96.

- “Los condestables de Castilla en la Edad Media,” Anuario de historia del derecho español 41 (1971): 57-112.

- “El concepto concejil murciano de limosna en el siglo XV,” in A pobreza e a assistência aos pobres na Península Ibérica durante a Idade Média : actas das 1as Jornadas luso-espanholas de História Medieval, 25-30 de setembro de 1972, 2 vols. (Lisbon, 1973), ii, 839-872.

480

- El Regadío murciano en la primera mitad del siglo XIV (Murcia, 1975)

- “Los alfaqueques castellanos en la frontera de Granada,” in Homenaje a don Agustín Millares Carlo, 2 vols. (Las Palmas, 1975), ii, 99-116.

- “La frontera de Granada en el siglo XV y sus repercusiones en Murcia y Orihuela: los cautivos,” in Homenaje a Don José María Lacarra de Miguel, 5 vols. (Zaragoza, 1977), iv, 191-211.

- “Los Fajardo en los siglos XIV y XV,” MMM 4 (1978): 107-78.

- “Don Fernando de Antequera y la romántica caballeresco,” MMM 5 (1980): 83-120.

- “Los judíos murcianos a fines del siglo XIV y comienzos del XV,” MMM 8 (1981): 55- 117.

- “Los mudéjares murcianos en la Edad Media,” in Actas del III Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo (Teruel, 1986), 55-66.

- Estampas medievales (Murcia, 1988)

- “Los mudéjares murcianos: economía y sociedad,” in Actas del IV Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo: Economía (Teruel, 1993), 365-394.

- “La judería murciana en la época de los Reyes Católicos,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Historia Medieval, ser. 3 (1993): 177-228

- Fajardo el Bravo (Murcia, 2001)

- “La guerra de Granada. La documentación de los archivos murcianos,” in Torres Fontes, La frontera murciano-granadina (Murcia, 2003), 489-502.

- Instituciones y sociedad en la frontera murciano-granadina (Murcia, 2004)

Torroja Menéndez, Carmen and María Rivas Palá. Teatro en Toledo en el siglo XV: ‘Auto de la Pasión’ de Alonso del Campo (Madrid, 1977)

Toubert, Pierre. “Frontière et frontières: un objet historique,” in Castrum 4: Frontière et peuplement dans le monde méditerranéen au Moyen Age. Actes du colloque d’Erice- Trapani, 18-25 septembre 1988. CCV 38 (Rome and Madrid, 1992), 9-17.

- “Le concept de frontière. Quelques réflexions introductives,” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos xi-xiv), ed. Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Pascal Buresi and Philippe Josserand. CCV 75 (Madrid, 2001), 1-4.

481 Trame, Richard H. Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, Spanish Diplomat and Champion of the Papacy (Washington, D.C., 1958)

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 1-38.

Valdeón, Julio. Los conflictos sociales en el reino de Castilla en los siglos XIV y XV (Madrid, 1975)

Valeria Parma, Mariana. “Fiesta y revuelta. La teatralidad política en Valencia a principios de la modernidad,” CHE 77 (2001-2002): 145-64.

Vauchez, André, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices (South Bend, 1993)

Veas Arteseros, Francisco. “Lorca, base militar murciana frente a Granada en el reinado de Juan II (1406-1454),” MMM 5 (1980): 159-88.

- “Dinámica del concejo de Murcia (1420-1440): Los regidores,” MMM 9 (1982): 87- 117.

- Los judíos de Lorca en la Baja Edad Media (Murcia, 1992)

Veas Arteseros, María del Carmen. Mudéjares murcianos: un modelo de crisis social (s. XIII-XV) (Cartagena, 1992)

Velázquez Campo, Lorenzo. “Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo,” in La filosofía española en Castilla y León: de los orígenes al Siglo de Oro, ed Maximiliano Fartos Martínez (Valladolid, 1997), 121-136.

Very, Francis. “A Fifteenth-Century Spanish Easter Eggs Combat and Some Parallels,” Romance Notes 4 (1962): 66-9.

Vicens Vives, Jaume. Manual de historia económica de España, 5th. edn. (Barcelona, 1967)

Vincent, Catherine. Les confréries médiévales dans le Royaume de France. XIII-XVe siècle (Paris, 1994)

Walters, Barbara, Vincent Corrigan, and Peter T. Ricketts, The Feast of Corpus Christi (University Park, PA, 2006)

Webster, Susan. Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain: Sevillan Confraternities and the Processional Sculpture of Holy Week (Princeton, 1998)

482 Weckmann, Luis. La herencia medieval de México (Mexico City, 1984)

Weissberger, Barbara. “¡A tierra, puto! Alfonso de Palencia’s Discourse of Effeminacy,” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, cultures, and crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (Durham, 1999), 291-324.

- Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis, 2004)

Werckmeister, Otto Karl. “The Islamic Rider in the Beatus of Girona,” Gesta 36 (1997): 101-106.

White, Lynn T. “The Legacy of The Middle Ages in the American Wild West,” Speculum 40 (1965): 191-202.

Williams, John. Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination (London, 1977)

- “Purpose and Imagery in the Apocalypse Commentary of Beatus of Liébana,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Kenneth Emerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, 1992), 217-33.

Wolff, Philippe. “The 1391 Pogrom in Spain. Social Crisis or Not?” Past and Present 50 (1971): 4-18.

Yarza Luazes, Joaquín. Los Reyes Católicos. Paisaje artístico de una monarquía (Madrid, 1993)

Yovel, Yirmiyahu. “Converso Dualities in the First Generation: The ‘Cancioneros’,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 4 (1998): 1-28.

483

FIGURES

Figure 1: "The Reconquest." From Manuel González Jiménez, "Frontier and Settlement in the Kingdom of Castile (1085-1350)," in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Bartlett and MacKay, 51.

484

Figure 2a: Biblioteca Catedralicia de Santiago de Compostela, Tumbo B, fol. 2v. (1326) from Nicolás Cabrillana Ciézar, Santiago Matamoros. Historia e imagen (Málaga, 1999), 213, fig. 1.

Figure 2b: Carta de Privilegio Real de Pegalajar. Detail (1559) from María Soledad Lázaro Damas, “Una iconografía de frontera: Santiago Matamoros en el Privilegio de Pegalajar,” Sumuntán. Revista de estudios sobre Sierra Mágina 15 (2001): 58.

485

Figure 3: Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María. Edición facsímil del Códice T.I.1 de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial, siglo XIII (Madrid, 1979), f. 247r.

486

Figure 4: “Andalusia after the Thirteenth-Century Reconquest.” From Angus MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages. From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 (New York, 1977), xvi.

487

entorno en la Baja Edad Media

Figure 5: The Parish of San Nicolás de la Ajerquía, Camacho, La vida urbana cordobesa. El Potro y su Córdoba, in the fifteenth century. From Escobar

plano 3.

(Córdoba, 1985), 118,

Figure 6: T fifteenth century. From Escobar Camacho, La vida urbana cordobesa. El Potro y su entorno en la Baja

Edad Media (Córdoba, 1985), 119, plano 4.

he Plaza del Potro and its environs in the

488

Figure 7: Plaza de la Corredera, Córdoba. Photograph by the author.

Figure 8: 1811 plan of Córdoba showing its medieval parishes, with San Nicolás de la Ajerquía and San Pedro outlined in blue and monuments described by Jerónimo in red. Adapted from Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media. Evolución urbana de la ciudad (Córdoba, 1989), 58, plano 4.

489

Figure 9: The sala baja of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s palace.

Figure 10: The main entrance to Iranzo’s palace as it appeared before early twentieth-century renovations. From Tess Knighton, “Spaces and Contexts for Listening in 15th-Century Castile: The Case of the Constable's Palace in Jaén,”Early Music 25 (1997): 664.

490 Figure 11: Jaén in 1567. From Richard L. Kagan, ed. van den Wyngaerde

(Berkeley, 1989), 264-5. Spanish Cities of the Golden Age: The Views of Anton

491

Figure 12: A reconstruction of an early map of Jaén. From José María Pardo Crespo, Evolución e historia de la ciudad de Jaén (Jaén, 1978), 38

492

Figure 13a: Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s coat of arms. AMJ, Leg. 1, Cuadro 3. 1465, 2 Enero. Enrique IV, from Avila, “Carta de Privilegios otorgada por Enrique IV a los vecinos de la ciudad de Jaén.”

Figure 13b: Modern drawing of Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s coat of arms showing details. From Memorias de don Enrique IV de Castilla, Colección diplomática de Enrique IV, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1913), 142.

493

Figure 14: Sixteenth-century Córdoba. From Jerónimo, Córdoba en el siglo XV, ed. Nieto Cumplido (Córdoba, 1973), 73.

494

Figure 15: Córdoba in 1567. From Richard L. Kagan, ed.

The Views of Antonvan den Wyngaerde (Berkeley, 1989),

Spanish Cities of the Golden Age:

495

Figure 16: The Parish of San Pedro, Córdoba, in the fifteenth century. From Escobar Camacho, Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media. Evolución urbana de la ciudad (Córdoba, 1989), 58, plano 4.

Figure 17: Sixteenth-century alteration of Mezquita, detail. Photograph by the author.

496

Figure 18: Relative size of Muslim populations in the domains of Murcia. From Denis Menjot, Murcie castillane. Une ville au temps de la frontière (1243-milieu du XVe s.), 2 vols. (Madrid, 2002), ii, 870.

497

Figure 19: The parishes of Murcia. From Denis Menjot, Murcie castillane. Une ville au temps de la frontière (1243-milieu du XVe s.), 2 vols. (Madrid, 2002), i, 661.

Figure 20: The judería of Murcia. From Denis Menjot, Murcie castillane. Une ville au temps de la frontière (1243-milieu du XVe s.), 2 vols. (Madrid, 2002), i, 664.

498

Figure 21: Medieval Murcia. From Denis Menjot, Murcie castillane. Une ville au temps de la frontière (1243-milieu du XVe s.), 2 vols. (Madrid, 2002), i, 647.

Figure 22a: Edición facsímil del Códice T.I.1 de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial, siglo XIII (Madrid, 1979), f. 277v.

499

Figure 22b: La Virgen de la Arrixaca.

500

Figure 23: Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean. From Peter Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374, xvii.

501

Figure 24: Lusignan Cyprus. From Peter Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374, xvi.

Figure 25: The sword of Fernando III, Capilla Real, Cathedral of Seville.

502