Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain

A King Travels

❊ This page intentionally left blank A King Travels

FESTIVE TRADITIONS IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN SPAIN

❊

Teofilo F. Ruiz

princeton university press

princeton and oxford Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu Jacket Art: TheBurialoftheSardine (CorpusChristiFestivalonAshWednesday) c.1812–19 (oil on canvas) by Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828). Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, Spain / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruiz, Teofilo F., 1943– A king travels : festive traditions in late medieval and early modern Spain / Teofilo F. Ruiz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-15357-5 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-691-15358-2 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Festivals—Spain—History. 2. Festivals—Political aspects—Spain— History. 3. Philip II, King of Spain, 1527–1598—Travel. 4. Ceremonial entries—Spain— History. 5. Spain—History—711–1516. 6. Spain—History—House of Austria, 1516– 1700. 7. Spain—Social life and customs. 8. Popular culture—Spain—History. 9. Political culture—Spain—History. 10. Spain—Politics and government. I. Title. GT4862.A2R85 2012 394.26946—dc23 2011034618

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Bembo Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America 13579108642

1 TO PAUL H. FREEDMAN FRIEND, COLLEAGUE, ARBITER ELEGANTIARUM

❊ This page intentionally left blank ❊ Contents ❊

Preface ix Abbreviations xiii

Chapter I Festivals in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: An Introduction 1 Chapter II The Meaning of Festivals: A Typology 34 Chapter III Royal Entries, Princely Visits, Triumphal Celebrations in Spain, c. 1327–1640 68 Chapter IV The Structure of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Royal Entry: Change and Continuity 113 Chapter V A King Goes Traveling: Philip II in the Crown of Aragon, 1585–86 and 1592 146 Chapter VI Martial Festivals and the Chivalrous Imaginary 193 Chapter VII Kings and Knights at Play in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain 210 Chapter VIII From Carnival to Corpus Christi 246 Chapter IX Noncalendrical Festivals: Life Cycles and Power 293 Conclusion 331 Appendix The Feasts of May 1428 at Valladolid 335

Bibliography 339 Index 345

vii This page intentionally left blank ❊ Preface ❊

During my adolescence, I was led to the Middle Ages by an unhealthy diet of nineteenth-century romantic novels. Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, and other novelists replaced my earlier fascination with Jules Verne and Emilio Salgari. My youthful and fairly feverish mind was always populated by knights and highborn ladies, by romance and pageantry. When I entered graduate school, I had to leave all that behind me, reluctantly. Becoming a professional historian in the early 1970s meant embracing either the institutional and political history practiced by my beloved master, Joseph R. Strayer, or the new social science–inflicted history which was very much in vogue at Princeton under Lawrence Stone’s brilliant direction. My knights were replaced by peasants, pageantry by structures. I do not regret at all that detour in my growing up as a historian, but having embarked recently on a long journey to re-read everything I read when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, it is only now, at the end of my career or, as Cervantes put it, with my foot almost in the stirrup for that long journey into the night, that I return to my first dreams and love. Although I love fantasy and magic—my lively five-year-old grand- daughter, Sofía, provides that—I am not foolish enough to think that all these delightful accounts that I will so lovingly gloss in chapters to come and relentlessly inflict upon you present anything like an accurate depiction of reality (whatever reality is). I am fully conscious that they are representations, distorted and ideologically-ridden versions of events that took place long ago and to which we have access only indirectly and at secondhand. Moreover, I am also fully conscious that these representations come, more often than not, from those close to the centers of power—whether royal, aristocratic, municipal, or clerical. As such, they reflect peculiar ideological biases. But, once again, these narratives were essentially representations. Despite how close to reality late medieval and early modern narratives tried to make them appear, they were mostly fantasy. Arches were described, even though they were never really built. Displays were exaggerated, and the nature of feasts was often distorted to suit the political needs of the sponsors and writers. But representations also tell us important things about the nature of society, about the men and women who participated in these festive events, who gazed upon them and upon each other, who paid for them, and who scripted them for the benefit of those in power, those seeking power, or those contesting power. Recently, Thomas Bisson, in a spectacular book on the crisis of

ix PREFACE the twelfth century, states that “power was order.” And that order was often articulated through processions and spectacles.1 For sure not all festivals led to order. In fact, on many occasions they were sources of disorder. But to return to my early point, as the reader enters into this bizarre world of late medieval and early modern Iberian festivities, let her/him remember this caveat. It was all, in the end, perhaps quite different from what the chroniclers of a by-gone past would have encouraged us to believe. As always, my list of acknowledgments is extensive. All throughout my life I have accumulated immense debts to many scholars whose example, comments, criticisms, and support as friends and fellow historians have meant a great deal to me. Long ago, a dear friend at Princeton, Park Teter, commented, upon hearing of my projected thesis, that I, who was besot- ted by Carl Schorske’s genre of cultural history, was very much like the kid in high school who wished to play the violin but ended playing the tuba. I have been glad to play the tuba for a long while, but I hope this book is a bit of violin playing. I had a lot of help. In Spain, James Ame- lang, Hilario Casado Alonso, Xavier Gil Pujol, Manuel González Jimé- nez, Francisco García Serrano, the late Julio Valdeón, and many others have inspired me by their work and sustained me by their friendship, as did Ariel Guiance in Argentina. In France, Jacques Le Goff, Christiane Klapisch, Denis Menjot, Jacques Revel, Adeline Rucquoi, Jean Claude Schmitt, Avram Udovitch, and Lucette Valensi have all inspired my work and helped me always to feel at home in Paris. In England, Robert Bartlett, Sir John H. Elliott, Judith Herrin, Peter Linehan, Angus MacKay, and R. I. Moore have contributed, in ways they cannot imagine, to the making of this work. In many respects, this work, as most of my work over the many decades, had its genesis at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center (Princeton). I have been extraordinarily fortunate to grow as a historian in the shadows of my late master Joseph R. Strayer and in close contact with the late Lawrence Stone. I benefitted immensely from the wisdom of Peter Brown, Natalie Z. Davis, and Anthony Grafton, and from William Jor- dan’s enduring friendship and scholarly example. Elsewhere in the country, Elizabeth A. R. Brown, Thomas N. Bisson, Olivia R. Constable, Paul H. Freedman, to whom my debt for his friendship and insights I will never be able to repay, Richard Kagan, David Nirenberg, Joseph O’ Callaghan, Carla and William Phillips, Charles Radding, Daniel Smail, Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, and many others whose names I would have

1 See Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Ori- gins of European Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 5.

x PREFACE included were it not for the fear of making this an endless list, have made my life as a historian a pleasure. If I was fortunate to find an intellectual home at Princeton early in my academic life, I have been equally fortunate to find myself at UCLA in later years. One cannot be the colleague of such scholars as Ivan Berend, the late Father Robert Ignatius Burns, Patrick Geary, Carlo Ginzburg, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Gabi Piterburg, Ron Mellor, David Myers, David Sabean, Debora Silverman, Geoffrey Symcox, and many others, without great profit to one’s own scholarship and social well being. Else- where at UCLA, Efraín Kristal and Jesús Torrecilla have contributed enormously to my work and life in Los Angeles. My graduate and under- graduate students have made important contributions to my development and to specific aspects of this book. My wife, companion, best friend, and first and only love, Scarlett Freund, has created the setting in which I have been able to be productive and, far more important, happy for more than two decades. The incomparable Brigitta von Rheinberg has been a faithful friend and advocate for many years. I have no words to thank her for her help and critical reading. Sarah Wolf and Sara Lerner have been incredibly helpful and kind to me and to my book. I owe them a great debt. Eva Jaunzems has carefully and lovingly copyedited the entire manuscript. She has saved me from many infelicities, but she has also been respectful of the quirks and cadences of my writing style. I am grateful. A special and heartfelt thanks is particularly owed to Richard Kagan who carefully and generously read the manuscript for this book and made it far better than I could ever have done on my own. I have thought for a long time about this. To whom should I dedicate this book? To my great fortune, I have many friends to whom I owe great intellectual and emotional debts. To choose among them is difficult. The names of these friends and colleagues are already acknowledged in this preface. But when I think of festivals, sumptuous banquets, and performance, I always have the image of Paul Freedman, meticulously chroni- cling the great food he eats, the great wines he drinks, the great places he visits, but, far more important, relishing each experience. Not unlike the late medieval and early modern chroniclers who wrote so enchantingly about the festivals they witnessed, Paul converts the quotidian into a feast and turns the discovery of new and exotic places into an act of joy. He has been a dear friend and colleague for more than thirty years. His thoughtful comments on my work, his generosity, his friendship have been very important to me and to many others in the discipline. So has his discern- ment in academic politics, taste, food, and wines. Alas! We can never truly revisit the past. But, if in some improbable fashion, I could return to ob-

xi PREFACE serve in person some of the festivals I describe in this book, I could not think of a better companion than Paul. Nor could I imagine anyone more eager to taste and experience both the old and the new. To Paul, therefore, I dedicate this book in friendship, admiration, and gratitude.

xii ❊ Abbreviations ❊

Alfonso XI Colección documental de Alfonso XI, Esther González Crespo, ed. (Ma- drid: Universidad Complutense, 1985). Anales de Cataluña Narciso Feliu de la Peña, Anales de Cataluña y epílogo breve ...., 3 vols. (Barcelona: Juan Pablo Martí, 1709; facsimile edition, Barce- lona, 1999). Báez de Sepúlveda, Relación verdadera del recibimiento que hizo la ciudad de Segovia (1570) Jorge Báez de Sepúlveda, Relación verdadera del recibimiento que hizo la ciudad de Segovia a la magestad de la reyna nuestra señora doña Anna de Austria en su felicissimo casamiento que en la dicha ciudad celebro 14 noviembre 1570, eds. Sagrario López Pozo and Begoña Canosa Hermida (Segovia: Junta de Castilla y León, 1998). BN Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid). BN (Paris) Bibliothéque nationale (Paris, Richelieu). Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje Juan Cristóbal Calvete de Estrella, El fe- licísimo viaje del muy alto y poderoso príncipe Don Felipe . . . desde España a sus tier- ras de la baja Alemania, 2 vols. (Antwerp, 1562; Madrid: Sociedad de bibliófilos españoles, vols. 7 and 8, 1930). Cock, JornadadeTarazona(1592) Henry Cock, Jornada de Tarazona hecha por Felipe II in 1592, eds. Alfredo Morel-Patio and Antonio Rodríguez Villa (Madrid: Imprenta y Fundición de M. Tello, 1879). Cock, Relación del viaje (1585) Henrique (Henry) Cock, Relación del viaje hecho por Felipe II en 1585, á Zaragoza, Barcelona y Valencia, eds. Alfredo Morel-Fatio and Antonio Rodríguez Villa (Madrid: Aribau and Co., 1876). Comes, Libre de algunes coses asanyalades Pere Joan Comes, Libre de algunes coses asanyaladessuccehidesenBarcelonayenaltrespartes (1583), ed. Joseph Puiggari (Barcelona: La Renaixensa, 1878). Crónica de Alfonso X Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla I (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 66, 1953). Crónica de Sancho IV Crónica de Fernando IV Crónica de Alfonso XI Crónica de Enrique II Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla II (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 68, 1953). Crónica de Juan I Crónica de Enrique III Crónica de Juan II Crónica de Enrique IV Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla III (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 70, 1953).

xiii ABBREVIATIONS Crónica de los Reyes Católicos Crónica del halconero de Juan II Pedro Carrillo de Huete, Crónica del halconero de Juan II, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2006). Generaciones y semblanzas Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones y semblanzas in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla III (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 70, 1953). Gómez de Castro, Recibimiento que . . . Toledo hizo á la reina Doña Isabel Alvar Gómez de Castro, Recibimiento que la imperial ciudad de Toledo hizo á la Majestad de la reina nuestra Señora Doña Isabel, hija del rey Henrico II de Francia . . . a celebrar las fiestas de sus felicissimas bodas con el rey Don Phelipe nuestro señor, segundo de este nombre (Toledo, 1561), ed. Carlota Fernández Travieso (A Coruña: SIE- LAE & Sociedad de Cultura Valle Inclán, 2007). Hechos del condestable Hechos del condestable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (crónica del siglo XV), ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1940). Historia de los Reyes Católicos Andrés Bernáldez, Historia de los reyes católicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, III (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 70, 1953). Horozco, Relaciones históricas toledanas Sebastián de Horozco, Relaciones históri- cas toledanas, intro. and transcription, Jack Weiner (Toledo: Instituto provincial de investigaciones y estudios toledanos, 1981). Lhermite, Le passetemps Jehan Lhermite, Le passetemps, ed. Charles Ruelans (Antwerp: J. E. Buschmann, 1890). López de Hoyos, Real aparato y sumptuoso recebimiento de D. Ana de Austria Juan López de Hoyos, Real apparato y sumptuoso recebimiento con que Madrid . . . recibió a la Serenísima reina D. Ana de Austria . . . (Madrid, 1572; facsimile edition, Madrid: Abaco ediciones, 1976). Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona, eds. Agustí Durán I Sanpere i Josep Sanabre, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Institució Patxot, 1930). Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570) Juan de Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a la C.M.R. del rey D. Philipe N.S., intro., Miguel Bernal and Antonio Miguel Bernal (Seville, 1570; facsimile edition, Sevilla: Fundación el Monte, 1998). Maestro Vargas, Recibimiento que se hizo en Salamanca a la Princesa doña María de Portugal (1543) Recibimiento que se hizo en Salamanca a la princesa doña María de Portugal, viniendoa casarse con el principe don Felipe, colegido por el maestro Vargas, ed. Jacobo Sánz Hermida (Salamanca: Gráficas Cervantes, S.A, 2001). Memorial de diversas hazañas Diego de Varela, Memorial de diversas hazañas in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, III (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 70, 1953).

xiv ABBREVIATIONS Muntaner, Crònica Ramón Muntaner, Crònica, ed. Vicent Josep Escartí, 2 vols. (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim). Muñoz, Viaje de Felipe Segundo a Inglaterra Andrés Muñoz, Viaje de Felipe Se- gundo á Inglaterra y relaciones varias relativas al mismo suceso (Zaragoza, 1554; Ma- drid: La sociedad de bibliófilos, 1877). Relación de la jornada de Felipe II de Santarem a Lisboa Relación de la jornada que hizo Felipe II, desde Santarem a Lisboa y de su entrada en aquella ciudad (1581). Bib- lioteca Nacional (Madrid), MSS/12026. Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid Relaciones breves de actos pú- blicos celebrados en Madrid de 1541 a 1650, ed. José Simón Díaz (Madrid: Insti- tuto de estudios madrileños, 1982). Viajes de extranjeros Viajes de extranjeros por España y Portugal. Desde los tiempos mas remotos hasta comienzos del siglo XX, ed. José García Mercadal, new edition in 6 volumes (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1999).

xv This page intentionally left blank A King Travels

❊ This page intentionally left blank ❊ CHAPTER I ❊ Festivals in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: An Introduction

On the 14th of May 1554, Prince Philip, already the king-consort of England’s Queen Mary and a mere two years away from becoming the ruler of the vast Habsburg inheritance in Spain, Italy, Flanders, North Af- rica, and the lands across the Ocean Sea, departed Valladolid for La Coruña. There a small fleet waited to transport him to his joyless and unfruitful marriage and to face the displeasure and opposition of many of his English subjects.1 Andrés Muñoz, a servant (lacayo) of the nine-year-old and ill-fated Prince Don Carlos (Philip’s son from his first marriage) published an account of Philip’s sojourn in 1554, receiving 50,000 maravedíes for his efforts as both the chronicler of this voyage and a member of the princely entourage that accompanied Philip (and for part of the voyage Don Carlos) on their way from the heart of Castile to England. Not unlike other late medieval and early modern accounts, Muñoz’s Viaje de Felipe Segundo á Inglaterra provides painstaking descriptions of the garments that the prince and the high nobility accompanying him took on the voyage, of the costly jewels that were to be presented to Queen Mary as a wedding gift, and of other such details that reasserted, in the typical sycophantic fashion of such accounts, the majesty of the ruler.2 What interest me most in this narrative are two minor entries made along the route from Valladolid to La Coruña, a seaport town in north- western Galicia. Philip, as was often the case in princely travels, took his time along the way, hunting, resting, and sightseeing. His young son, the Infante Don Carlos, preceded him into Benavente, a small town ruled by a powerful noble, the Count of Benavente. There, the young Infante received a sumptuous reception according to the protocol proper to princely

1 Accounts of his progression through Castile on the way to Galicia and of his reception in England can be found in Muñoz, Viaje de Felipe Segundo á Inglaterra, 31. For the English reaction to Philip’s arrival, see Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 119–27 et passim. As this book was going into press, I was informed of the publication of Geoffrey Parker’s voluminous new study in Spanish of Philip II’s life and reign. I have not been able to obtain this new work, but, as I note below, Parker has long been the authority on the subject. 2 Muñoz, ViajedeFelipeSegundoáInglaterra, 12–31.

1 CHAPTER I entries, though with far less display—in terms of the festivities surrounding the entry—than what Philip was offered during his stay there. The prince appeared at Benavente, as was often his wont, unexpected- ly.3 Only the dust clouds created by his cortege’s horses alerted the authorities to Philip’s unexpected arrival, prompting Pero Hernández, the prince’s privado (favorite) to rush out of Benavente and to plead with the prince to enter the town through its main gate. There the Count of Be- navente waited to kiss Philip’s hand and to give him a golden key, signifying the surrender of the fortress to the prince.4 Philip’s arrival was marked by an artillery discharge that lasted half an hour. Trumpets, drums, and singers accompanied him to the entrance of the palace where he was to rest from his travels. Muñoz does not fail to describe how ele- gantly and costly appointed were the prince’s lodgings and the gold and silver on display. As entries go, this one was quite unspectacular. What followed, however, was another matter. Six good bulls were fought on horseback and on foot while Philip and his young son looked on from a richly decorated stage. One thousand five hundred rockets were exploded in sequence to mark the end of the day. The next day five more bulls were run through the town before Philip stood as godfather to Pero Hernández’s son. In succeeding days many events followed. They included a tournament on foot, an artificial castle, more fireworks, a fake elephant with a semi- naked African riding on it, tableaux vivants, monkeys, wild men, an artificial serpent or dragon la( tarasca) spewing fire through its nostrils and mouth, a fake galley with real artillery, and yet more fireworks. In the next representation, one probably borrowed from Amadis of Gaul (an influence that runs indelibly throughout all of Muñoz’s narrative and which, as we will see, was Philip’s favorite book), a cart carrying a casket entered the site of the performances. Within the casket rested a maiden covered with a black cloth. She complained bitterly of Cupid (Love) who, blindfolded, rode behind her. Suddenly Cupid was lifted into the air by a slender rope, while still more fireworks lit the night. Finally, Lope de Rueda (d. 1565), one of the most important and pioneering Castilian playwrights of the day, came into the courtyard to offer to the prince and others in attendance one of his autos sacramentales (theatrical pieces based on the Scriptures), a heady mix indeed of the secular and the religious.5 On June 9th Philip left Benavente on his way to Santiago de Compos- tela. There similar artillery discharges, solemn receptions, jousts, trium-

3 Ibid., 42. 4 Ibid., 42. 5 Ibid., 43–48. On Lope de Rueda, see Lope de Rueda, ObrasdeLopedeRueda, ed. Real academia española (Madrid: Suc. de Hernando, 1908).

2 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN phal arches, and the like awaited him. One item however differed from his reception at Benavente. Philip entered Compostela, site of the tomb of St. James the Greater, patron of all the Spains and Jesus’ apostle, under a brocade palio or baldachin held high over him on long poles by city officials regidores( ), as befitted the heir to the throne of the Spains and the king of England on his first official visit to Santiago. And at La Coruña a similar reception awaited him.6 In the chapters that follow, these festive themes will recur again and again. Late medieval and early modern accounts of princely and royal entries, tournaments, Carnival, Corpus Christi processions, and the other festivities that marked the life cycle of the great will be animated by detailed, sometimes even bizarre descriptions of such performances. Two points are clear from the above narrative. The first is the close connection between princely and royal travel and festivities; the second is the role of princes and kings in these performances. Both as prince and king, Philip spent a great deal of his time and energies attending and even participating in such events. Many other travels preceded his voyage to England; many others would follow. For a king, allegedly jealous of his privacy and fully at home in the quiet bureaucratic routines he so happily embraced as the ruler of vast possessions, Philip II spent a great deal of time on the road, and his ap- prenticeship as a prince and ruler were marked by extensive travel throughout Iberia and far beyond his Spanish kingdoms into Spain’s possessions outside the peninsula. In 1585, for example, a long journey dis- rupted the well-established routine of travel between his beloved El Es- corial, his hunting lodge at El Pardo, his gardens at Aranjuez, Toledo, his woods near Segovia, and his new capital in Madrid for a year and three months. It was an arduous affair, as the voyage to England had been, and one that reveals to modern readers something of the complexities of rulership in early modern Spain and Western Europe, of the role of festivities and displays in the exercise of political power, and of the continuities and discontinuities one may discern in the relations between a king and his people in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period.7

6 Muñoz, ViajedeFelipeSegundoáInglaterra, 50–58. 7 This particular voyage is described in close detail by Henry Cock (see below and chapter 5). Philip II’s two best modern biographers, Geoffrey Parker and Henry Kamen, note the significance of the voyage in the political culture of the age. See Geoffrey Parker, Philip II, 3rd ed. (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1995 [1st ed. 1978]), 147–52 detail the different political developments that took place while the king was in Aragon. Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 257–65 for the political context of Philip’s sojourn to the Crown of Aragon and an extensive

3 CHAPTER I

Festivals in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain

For over two decades I have been researching and plotting a book on Iberian festive traditions.8 As I began outlining this work, my original plan was to write a traditional and chronologically-determined history of festivals—royal entries, calendrical and noncalendrical events, Carnival, Corpus Christi, and the like—from roughly the 1320s and 1330s, when Castilian chronicles began to provide some detailed accounts of these activities, to 1640, when the Spanish monarchy sank under the unbearable weight of military defeat, regional secession, social and economic up- heaval, and its fragmented past. Studying Henry Cock’s vivid and intriguing descriptions of Philip II’s voyage to his eastern kingdom and of paraphrasing of the highlights of the trip. Since Henry (or Henrique) Cock’s narrative plays such an important role later on, it may be useful to introduce him fully. Cock, a Flemish archer, apostolic protonotary, and member of Philip’s Flemish guard, has left us an extensive (more than two hundred pages in the printed edition) account of this particular voyage. He was also the author of yet another travel narrative of Philip II’s arduous journey to attend the Cortes of the Crown of Aragon, gathered at Tarazona in 1592. See Cock, Relación del viaje (1585). Cock’s manuscript account of the travels of Philip II through the eastern realms in 1585–1586 can be found among the holdings of the original Richelieu branch of the Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris) in the Espagnol section, # 272. This is the version that was superbly edited and published by Morel-Fatio and Rodríguez Villa in the nineteenth century. I saw the manuscript during the summer of 2007, while doing research at the BN. It is an easily legible, small quarto volume, with Latin (the language in which Henry Cock first wrote his account) and a Castilian translation on facing pages). The Latin version has an additional page and a half or so of text that was never translated, which seems to attest to his first rendering of the travel narrative in Latin with a simultaneous translation into Spanish. Through this book, I have used, and will cite from, the late nineteenth-century printed edition. A combination of travel narrative, ethnographic, and historical commentary, Henry Cock’s accounts, as well as other descriptions of Philip’s travels throughout his possessions and/or his participation in festive cycles associated with his voyages, rank, and royal authority serve as a lens through which to explore a series of interrelated issues that lie at the heart of this book. 8 My work on festivals dates back now to more than two decades. I began with a short article on feasts and tournaments, “Fiestas, torneos, y símbolos de realeza en la Castilla del siglo XV,” in Realidad e imágenes de poder. España a fines de la edad media (Valladolid, 1988): 249–66. This was followed by a long piece: “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de mai 1428,” in Annales E.S.C. 3 (1991): 521–46. A few years later, I turned my attention to festive cycles in 1460s Jaén: “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, B. A. Hanawalt and K. L. Reyerson, eds. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994): 296–318. More recently, I presented a broad panorama of late medieval and early modern festivals in my Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (London: Longman, 2001), chs. 5 and 6.

4 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN the festive receptions in localities along the road from Madrid to Zara- goza and beyond to other parts of the Crown of Aragon, I became aware to what an extent this particular voyage may also serve as the focus for an extended reflection on festivals and their usefulness or lack of usefulness to the complex political negotiations and confrontations that were part of statecraft in late medieval and early modern Western Europe. I will center, then, on the 1585–86 journey and on some of Philip II’s other journeys throughout Spain and abroad. I wish, however, to travel back and forth in time and place, plotting the links that joined Philip II’s well planned and carefully negotiated—though as shall be seen not always successfully negotiated—movements through his kingdoms and at the same time to explore the festive traditions that preceded and followed his lifetime and rule. I will focus on a series of issues, already outlined above. At its most basic level, this book, focusing partly on Philip II’s reign, hopes to present a thematic history of festive traditions in the Iberian peninsula. To this end I offer a typology of festivals, providing examples of different types of festive activities and, I hope, explicating their meanings in the context of Spain’s social, political, and cultural life, and, by implication, within the wider context of Western European festive traditions. While there are numerous works, from Burckhardt’s seminal study of festivals in the Renaissance written more than a century and a half ago to Sir Roy Strong’s well-known works that explore feasts in other European realms during the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the early modern period, little attention has been given to inserting the Iberian peninsula within these traditions or of identifying Spanish contributions to Euro- pean cycles of festivities.9 Some important work has been done for Iberia. Francesc Massip Bonet’s beautifully presented and enchanting book opens

9 The bibliography on European festivals is extensive indeed. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was written more than a century and a half ago. It has gone through numerous editions and remains an important introduction to the subject. See the translation by S.G.C. Middlemore with a valuable introduction by Peter Burke (London: Penguin Books, 1990, 2000); part 5, 230–70 includes the influential and ground-breaking section on “Society and Festivals.” Sir Roy C. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Woodbridge (U.K.): Boydell, 1984) has held an influential place in shaping how we see and study festivals. See also Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics, and Performance, eds. J. R. Mulryne and Elizabeth Goldring (Aldershot (Hants): Ashgate, 2002); Spectaculum Europaeum: Theatre and Specta- cle in Europe (1580–1750), eds. Pierre Béhar and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999); La fête au XVIe siècle: actes du Xe Colloque du Puy-en-Velay , Marie Viallon-Schoneveld, ed. (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint Étienne, 2003); and the pioneering collection edited by Jean Jacquot, Les fêtes de la Renaissance (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1956–1975), 3 vols.

5 CHAPTER I new vistas on Spanish late medieval and early modern festivals, but is, as I shall discuss later, limited to a series of well presented and researched vignettes drawn from a functionalist perspective that echoes that of Sir Roy Strong. The extraordinarily scholarly and precocious third volume of Vi- cens Vives’ watershed Historia de España social y económica included a short entry on festivals at a time when the topic was for the most part ignored in general histories.10 Otherwise, what we have for Spain are either accounts of local folklore, anthropological studies—most of them of great value—and limited studies of festive forms. A history of festivals should of course be also a history of cultural transmissions or, to be more accurate, of the circulation of certain cultural tropes, artistic motifs and artifacts, as well as of the broader movements of aesthetic forms across national and regional cultures. This circulation of culture occurred at different levels and is most readily evidenced in the internal commingling in festivals of literary themes and learned tropes with elements of “popular” culture or folk traditions. Thus, the history of festivals is as well the history of the encounters, mixing, and overlapping of different and competing cultural forms in the context of a royal entry, Carnival, Corpus Christi, or other such festive occasions. Two examples, both of which we will have the opportunity to examine in greater detail in later chapters, will suffice here. Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s extravagant Carnival celebrations in Jaén in the 1460s combined chivalrous elements with carnivalesque revelry and almost (but not quite) Bakhtinian inversions. The young Philip’s entry into Brussels in 1549 elicited lavish festivities that juxtaposed scenes from the Old and New Testament with classical allusions, chivalrous displays, the comic and bizarre, and a substantial list of other diverse themes. His entry into Bena- vente, glossed at the opening of this chapter, conflated martial, ludic, and religious themes seemly without the slightest dissonance.11 One of the arguments of this book is so obvious as to be a common- place. The social history of festivals and ludic traditions has often been examined from stubbornly functionalist perspectives. Beyond their aesthetic and anthropological aspects (or in addition to them), celebrations served clearly delineated political agendas, or so it has been alleged. As much is explicit in the title of Sir Roy Strong’s rightly famous book, Art

10 See Francesc Massip Bonet’s enchanting book, La monarquía en escena (Madrid: Co- munidad de Madrid, 2003). I shall refer to this book in subsequent chapters. See also Jaume Vicens Vives, ed., Historia social de España y América, social y económica, vol. 3, 183–202, 302–17. 11 For Jaén, see my “Elite and Popular Culture in Late-Fifteenth Century Castile,” 313–14. For the celebrations in Brussels, see Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 175–219.

6 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1600. A book with rich and evocative examples of late medieval and early modern festive cycles, Art and Power does not fail to make the connection between performance and the wielding of power.12 This formulation, which has often been accepted without question, needs to be somewhat modified. It is true that spontaneous ludic outbursts devoid of political implications are difficult to document, or even to posit as a reality of late medieval and early modern life—and, for that matter, even today. I am firmly wedded to the idea that there were (and are) no festive occasions without a corresponding ideological aim or the intent to make a social statement. Whether meant to impress and lord over our neighbors, friends, or foes, or to promote and enhance royal or princely power, celebrations in the late medieval and early modern periods were, as they are today, inextricably linked to the exercise and experience of power. I have argued as much in the past. And yet, Philip II’s contentious journey through his eastern realms has awakened me to the realization that in the carefully arranged ceremonial entries and processions that attended royal visits or important calendrical celebrations, a great deal more was going on than a facile display of royal splendor for political purposes. Rather than theaters of power, as we have come to read some of these spectacles from inquisitorial autos de fe to Jacobean masques to Louis XIV’s ballets, many of these highly scripted events easily became sites of contestation in which kingly power was often the loser or princely authority diminished.13 In examining Iberian festive traditions in general, and those of Philip II in particular, I mean to critique my own and other historians’ interpretations of these events. Instead of seeing them solely as projections and representations of regal power, I wish to complicate the story. It is cer-

12 See the already cited Sir Roy C. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450– 1650, which is written from a determined royalist perspective, one against I will argue in chapter 5. Some of his other works also present variations on the same theme, as for example his recent and most engaging work on coronations, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: Harper-Collins, 2005), and his superb The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Pimlico, 1999), a reissue of an earlier version. 13 On the English masque, see The Court Masque, David Lindley, ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); on ballet, see Strong’s discussion and Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992). The literature on the auto de fe is extensive. Any reference to the topic should begin with Henry C. Lea’s monumental work, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York: Mac- millan, 1906–1907), 4 vols. See also Miguel Avilés, “The Auto de Fe and the Social Model of Counter-Reformation Spain,” in Angel Alcalá, ed., The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind (Atlantic Studies on Society and Change 49, New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1987), 249–64.

7 CHAPTER I tainly accurate to view these festivities through ideological lenses as attempts to reiterate and display royal authority, but they give witness as well to dialogues with authority and challenges to it. They tell of the nuanced ways in which festive traditions could be manipulated to demonstrate resistance to power. Kings and lords did not always get what they had planned for. In some cases, they got something very different from what they expected. The fluid ideological boundaries of festive spaces and times—what Victor Turner so brilliantly defined as liminal spaces— were more often than not places of contestation.14 Different social groups intermingled, a large variety of messages—sometimes clear, often subtle, rarely comprehensible to all—were hurled back and forth between participants and audience. Festivals were always—and they remain so to this very day—sites for complicated and unpredictable performances open to a multiplicity of readings. Not infrequently those who promoted, scripted and paid for the festivals were displeased with the way things turned out. In reading festivals as texts, I shall, therefore, emphasize their complexity, the ambivalent and imprecise meanings that they conveyed to their contemporaries, and that often remain somewhat mysterious to us today. I wish here to make one minor point. For quite a while, I have argued that the transition from late medieval to early modern was not as sharp a break as it has usually been represented. In many respects, certainly when ad- dressing social and cultural history, there is almost a seamless transition across the fictional chronological divide of 1500.15 The late fifteenth century was indeed marked by a series of events, or grandes journées—the fall of Constantinople (1453), the invention of the printing press (1460s), the encounter with the New World (1492)—that seem to indicate a sea change in the structures of everyday life and the opening of a new age. There is an even more apparent divide in Spain, where 1492 has long been seen as a watershed dividing the Middle Ages from the early modern. It was not, of course, that simple. Festivals will serve us as a means to

14 Here and elsewhere throughout this book, I am deeply influenced by two authors: Victor W. Turner, whose understanding of festivals and performance has had a an enduring influence on numerous historians and anthropologists; and James C. Scott, whose perceptive study of forms of resistance in the modern world has proved to be most ap- plicable to the past. Among Turner’s many works, see his Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); From Rit- ual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publi- cations, 1982); and his edited collection, Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Wash- ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982). For Scott, see Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Dom- ination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 15 See my Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (London: Longman, 2001), 1–8.

8 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN illustrate and explore continuity in at least one cultural category—that of performances and celebratory traditions—across the transition from medieval to early modern. Reading accounts of the royal entries, Carnivals, and other festivities that took place during Philip II’s perambulations throughout his Iberian realms or on his visits to trans-Pyrenean imperial lands as a prince, one is forcefully struck by the ageless quality of what were essentially political and cultural performances. The core structure of a whole range of celebrations or displays of chivalrous prowess—tournaments, for example, and other forms of martial play—had endured little changed from an earlier age. The continuity of these festive forms raises serious questions as to chronological periodization and the arbitrary divide between medievalists and early modern historians. There was little, as we will see below, in these sixteenth and seventeenth century festivals that medieval men and women would not have recognized instantly. There is little in them that a historian of medieval festivals would not see as grounded in medieval practices harkening back to twelfth-century romances and courtly literature. Yet, it would be silly indeed to argue that there was no actual change. In fact, even in the Middle Ages, shifting political contexts shaped each particular celebration and introduced small but significant differences. Moreover, by the sixteenth century, the ruler’s role and place in festive performances had dramatically changed, transforming early modern celebrations into something quite different from their medieval counterparts. While the manner in which festivals were plotted, their inner structure and their appearance, if you will, remained fairly stable, their meanings and messages changed. It is this uneasy play between continuities and discontinuities that lies, I hope, at the heart of this inquiry. It is precisely this tension between the two that makes Philip II’s festivals an appealing touchstone for the study of cultural change and historical process. An examination of Philip II’s festive cycle and those of other Iberian rulers sheds light as well on questions of early modern rulership. It justifies the recent questioning of Spain’s royal absolutism and, by implication, the (by now much-challenged) notions of the centralization of political power and the enhanced authority of kings and the state—in this particular case, that of the Habsburgs in Spain. Indeed, while many of these festivals attest to a different, often increased, level of royal authority, in reading festivals as sites of political contestation one may end up with quite a different assessment. Certainly in the case of the Spanish monarchy, one is left with the strong impression that the power of kings, certainly that of Philip II, may at times have been quite limited. Ideas about “the absolute state” or even about “the state” have been seriously chal-

9 CHAPTER I lenged in recent years, but the evidence to be deployed in the following chapters, will show, I hope, how seriously limited, at certain times and in certain places, Philip II’s power— and that of other rulers as well—really was.16 Finally, there is a question that remains elusive, and that concerns the role and reaction of the “audience.” The people who gathered at royal entries, who paraded, whether willingly or unwillingly, past the king’s window (as they did in Zaragoza in 1585 and elsewhere on numerous occasions)—what did they think about these events? Most festivals and performances were, in the end, useless without large crowds and without some attempt at influencing their allegiance to the prince. Beyond the masques at the Jacobean court or similar entertainments open only to a very restricted audience—the private Carnival celebrations in Philip IV’s court at the palace of the Buen Retiro in Madrid, for example—successful rulership demanded well-attended public performances. It is, however, almost impossible to ascertain how and why the crowds gathered at these events came to be in attendance, and, far more important, how much or how little they were influenced by what they saw and heard. The chroniclers’ repeated assertion that the kings were received with great happiness must always be read with a very critical eye, though it is indeed possible that such was the case. Perhaps one way to read the participation or lack of participation of the audience is through their silence(s). What was going on in those instances in which the king waved to the crowd and nothing happened or, worse yet, something negative happened? Insofar as it is possible to reconstruct the role of nameless crowds attending these royal performances, I will attempt to do so, but the answers will be, by the very nature of the evidence, highly inconclusive.

Philip II’s Travels and Festivals

This is not a history of Philip II. The Prudent King and his reign have already benefitted from the labor of gifted historians. In 1998, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of his death (September 13,

16 See Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516–1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); see also Claudia Mineo’s UCLA PhD thesis, “Litigation, and Power: The Struggle over Municipal Privileges in Sixteenth-Century Castile” (2006), which shows the serious limitations that Philip II faced even in ruling the supposedly centralized kingdom of Castile. See also the remarkable book by Paul K. Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589– 1715 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

10 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN 1598), a deluge of biographies, studies of his court, studies on art under Philip, and on other important aspects of his long and eventful rule, appeared in print.17 This is not even a history of Philip II’s times, or even of festivals during his reign. Nor is it an attempt at a histoire totale of festivals in Spain during the reign of Philip II. In many respects, this is not even a history of the king’s travels and festivals—though such a history would be most welcome. My efforts on this front are modest indeed.

Philip II’s Travels Revisited Although I focus only on a discrete number of Philip II’s journeys, on their medieval precedents, and on some later Habsburg reenactments, it may be useful to place these particular expeditions and the festive events that marked the king’s (or Philip’s as a prince) journeys though his Habsburg lands within the context of a whole life of travel. At present and for the sake of introductory remarks, I offer no more than a few glosses on a list of royal journeys. Each was shaped by a series of factors,

17 The bibliography on Philip II is, as noted in the text, extensive. Only the most pertinent works are listed here. For a biography of the king, see the still formidable late nineteenth-century work by Martin A. S. Hume, Philip II of Spain (London: Mac- millan, 1899). See also the most worthy biographies/studies by Geoffrey Parker and Henry Kamen (note 1), and Jean Paul Duviols and Annie Molinié, Philippe II et l’Espagne (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999). For contemporary or quasi- contemporary accounts of the reign or life of Philip II, see Fray José de Siguenza, Como vivió y murió Felipe II por un testigo ocular (Madrid: Apostolado de la Prensa, 1927), which is mostly an account of the building of the Escorial and Philip’s life there. Also Felipe II. Exterior e interior de una vida (Madrid: Torreblancas Impresores, 1998). This work has been attributed to the Abbot of San Real, as well as to Antonio Pérez, Philip’s secretary and later nemesis. See also Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, Felipe II, Rey de España (Madrid: Imprenta de Aribau, 1877), 4 vols; this particular work was written after Philip II’s death, and it is quite thorough (4 volumes), but not an eyewitness account. For Philip II’s troubled relations with Catalonia, see Ricardo García Cárcel, Felipe II y Cataluña (Vall- adolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1997); for his artistic patronage, see Pedro Navascués Palacio, ed., Philippus II Rex (Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1998); María Paz Aguiló Alonso, Orden y decoro: Felipe II y el amueblamiento del Monasterio de El Escorial (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 2001); on the selection of Madrid as a capital, the always perceptive and brilliant work of Manuel Fernández Alvarez, El Madrid de Felipe II: en torno a una teoría sobre la Capitalida) (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1987); on the administration of Castile under Philip II, see Ignacio Ezquerra Revilla, El consejo real de Castilla bajo Felipe II: grupos de poder y luchas faccionales (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Fe- lipe II y Carlos V (2000); also the always genial Felipe Fernández Armesto, Philip II’s Empire: A Decade at the Edge (London: Hakluyt Society, 1999); the excellent work of Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Additional bibliography will be provided in later chapters and below.

11 CHAPTER I

Figure 1. Carlos I (1500–58) and Felipe II (1527–99), oil on canvas, Spanish School, sixteenth century. Charles V and a young Philip, probably painted around the time when Philip was traveling in Flanders (1549–50) and participated in the reenactment of scenes from the Amadis of Gaul in Binche. Courtesy Universidad de Granada, Spain / The Bridgeman Art Library. such as Philip II’s age, the political context, the weather, the region visited, the state of the realm, and other sundry variables. The intersection of these different vectors generated unique types of responses and influenced the king’s role in each instance. Although festivals, because of their reiterative quality, had important impacts on performers and audiences, each individual festival was also sui generis. Two examples may be in order before I examine some of these travels in great detail. The young Philip’s longest journey, an account of which will play a significant role in this narrative, was a two-year expedition by land and sea from Valladolid to Barcelona and onwards through Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries before returning to Spain (1548–50). It was undertaken at a time when Charles V’s grasp over his realms, with the exception of Germany, was not fiercely contested. Philip’s age, still in his late teens, and his youthful exuberance prompted him, in spite of reports of his aloofness and pride—the result mostly of his linguistic short- comings—to participate in numerous tournaments and to engage in gal-

12 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN lant repartee with the young, beautiful, and eager ladies he encountered at every turn.18 By 1585, the date of his lengthy sojourn in the Crown of Aragon, the king was approaching his sixtieth year. He was beset by physical maladies and facing mounting political problems. Although his courtesy, especially to young ladies, remained exemplary, and though he sought to enter the capital city of his eastern domains in the chivalrous manner dictated by tradition—on horseback—neither his spirit nor his body fully cooper- ated. From an active participant, he had become a passive observer, often safely ensconced on his room’s balcony or in a window. That, beyond the changing political landscape, shaped the nature of the feast.

Philip II’s Itinerancy Medieval and even early modern rulers were, by the very demands of their offices, peripatetic. As Rita Costa Gomes has shown for Portu- guese medieval kings, traveling throughout the kingdom served to connect and fix their territory.19 Charles V, for example, spent most of his time away from Spain, tending to his German and Flemish domains. Philip was not very different. For a ruler allegedly reclusive and shy of public appearances,20 he spent an inordinate amount of time perambulat- ing his peninsular and trans-Pyrenean realms and attending all the receptions, jousts, and other festive (and exhausting) events that went with royal travel. His restlessness, as was the case with most kings in late medieval and early modern Western Europe, was most often determined by political necessity and by the nature of rulership in the period. And so, whether he wished to or not, both as prince and heir to the Habsburg realms and later as king, Philip traveled. Even after building his beloved palace within the monastery of Saint Lawrence at the Escorial and naming Madrid the capital of his Spanish monarchy in 1561, the king traveled. He often did so following a well-defined circuit dictated by the seasons and by his taste. What maybe be described as Philip’s regular itinerary included the Escorial, Madrid, his gardens at Aranjuez, Toledo (he spent most of 1560 there and visited frequently), El Pardo’s hunting lodge

18 Examples of this can be found in Calvete de Estrella; see chapters below.. 19 Rita Costa Gomes, The Making of Court Society. Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 298–356. 20 See Parker, Philip II, 24. Parker maintains that Philip at the end of his life thought that “too much mobility in a monarch was a bad thing.” His advice to his son and heir in 1598: “Traveling about one’s kingdom is neither useful nor decent.” This comes from someone who did a great deal of travelling and who may well have found his two last journeys to the Crown of Aragon quite “indecent.”

13 CHAPTER I

Figure 2. The normal route of Philip II’s annual travels from the Escorial to Valsaín, El Pardo, Aranjuez, Toledo (occasionally), and Madrid. Map prepared by M. Carina Padilla.

(almost always in November), and Valsaín, his hunting lodge in the woods near Segovia. Except for Madrid, which drew increased attention as the bourgeoning administrative capital of his sprawling possessions and as a good place to spend winter, his annual circuit was not dictated entirely by politics but to a considerable degree also by pleasure, by the king’s delight in his gardens, woods, hunting, and his treasures (both spiritual and artistic) at the Escorial. In this respect Philip was not different from his Valois counterparts with their frequent visits to Vincennes, Fountainebleau, and their chateaux in the Loire valley, or the English Tudor monarchs with their sojourns at Hampton Court, Windsor, and other royal retreats. And then there were those long journeys dictated by political needs and by the well-established medieval pattern of royal itinerancy. In spite of their capital cities, ritual centers, and royal pantheons that tended to fix kings to a specific locality, they traveled often, even in the so-called early modern “centralized” monarchies.21 Philip’s entire life, not unlike that of his restless medieval ancestors,

21 On royal itinerancy see, once again, Rita Costa Gomes, TheMakingofaCourtSoci- ety, 291–356 et passim. See also the forthcoming book by William C. Jordan, which compares Westminster and Saint Denis as devotional centers in England and France.

14 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN such as Alfonso XI (1312–1350), his formidable great-grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, or even his own peripatetic father, Charles V, was deeply shaped by travel. While still a young man he embarked, at the request of his formidable father, on a long voyage intended to familiarize him with the lands and subjects he was shortly to rule. The journey also allowed Philip to become known to his subjects-to-be. Much that took place in the course of this trip, from triumphal entries, fabulous tournaments, bad weather, rebellious citizens (in Genoa), politically- uncomfortable dinners in Germany, and political intrigue have been abundantly documented by different sources, but none compare for thoroughness and eyewitness clarity with that of Calvete de Estrella, the prince’s former tutor and companion. Calvete de Estrella’s narrative, com- prising two large volumes in the printed edition, plays a central role in our understanding of the relationship between travel and festivals. Being an account that can be easily compared to other narratives of the same events by non-Spaniards, Calvete’s offers the possibility for a critical reading of these ludic events. More than that, his description of the young prince’s travels abroad also provides a sense of what Calvete thought was novel in the festivals, allowing for comparisons between Spanish festivals and those in other European countries. Of course, beyond his well-known local sojourns as a young prince, Philip had accumulated a wealth of other travel experiences. One may say, without exaggeration, that his experience of travel was also his experience of ruling. In 1542–43, there were two important trips. The first was his not well-documented formal princely entry into Barcelona; the second, the sojourn and celebrations that accompanied his voyage to Sal- amanca to meet his bride-to-be and first wife, Maria of Portugal.22 Five years later came another and much longer voyage. His travels through Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries are a sad reminder of lost opportunities. Comparing the exuberance and promise of Philip’s mid- sixteenth-century journeys through northern climes to the drudgery of his 1585–86 circuit through the Crown of Aragon offers telling signs of the slow but noticeable deterioration of the king’s heath, hope, and possibilities. This is a point I will reemphasize throughout the book, for it serves as a reminder of how festive events allow a reading and understanding of medieval and early modern political processes and of check- ered and uneven political developments. I began this chapter with Philip II’s voyage to England. He took other fairly short trips within the peninsula to nearby Toledo, Guadalajara, Madrid, and Alcalá de Henares in 1560–61, as well as a far more impor-

22 See below, notes 24 and 25.

15 CHAPTER I tant entry into Barcelona in 1564. The latter, undertaken as king and conflated with Philip II’s formal swearing of an oath to respect and uphold the privileges of the Principality, is also known to us only from an alarming paucity of sources. These travels were followed by a series of significant royal tours: to Seville (1570) and to Segovia in the same year for the reception into the kingdom of his fourth and final wife, Ana of Austria. In 1576 the king traveled to the fabled monastery of Guadalupe to meet the king of Portugal, and five years later, in 1581, he took the long road (and river) to Lisbon to assume the crown of the Luisitanian kingdom.23 Two other royal tours play a significant role in this story. (Though we should note that the trips mentioned here do not by any means comprise a full list of the king’s travels through his lands.) When he was already in his late fifties, and then again at age sixty-five, Philip II undertook, as noted earlier, two long and painful trips to his eastern kingdoms. Docu- mented by Henry Cock, an archer, papal protonotary, and a member of Philip II’s Flemish guard, these two voyages, in 1585–86 and 1592, respectively, will be examined in great detail in chapter 5, and referenced throughout this book. In their narrative silences—that is, in what did not happen as opposed to what actually did–they speak of how very different these two long journeys were from those grand and joyous ceremonies held at Binche and elsewhere during his long-past early years. Then, the young prince was at the height of his physical power and still wedded to the Amadis of Gaul-inflicted imaginative expectations of a glorious and chivalrous life. By 1585–86 and, certainly by 1592, those hopes had van- ished. Reality consisted in international reverses and mounting difficulties with his subjects in Spain’s eastern kingdoms. In many, and quite poignant, ways, Cervantes’ Don Quixote parallels the king’s slow and inexorable descent from fantasy into the sad truths of old age, illnesses, and political decline. The question may be validly raised: how much time did Philip II actually spend on the road? And how did the count of his days spent traveling compare to the itinerancy of his predecessors and successors? Although it is difficult to calculate exactly the days and even the years spent away from his desk, one must remember that, as heir to the throne and as king, he followed, as already noted, an annual well-established circuit that took him through most of central Castile. In 1590, when he was already past his sixtieth birthday and suffering from many maladies, including attacks of gout that rendered him partially immobile, Jehan Lhermite reports on his visit to El Pardo and almost a month spent hunting in the area’s

23 Idem.

16 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN woods. The implication in Lhermite’s account is that every November was spent there.24 Before his formal ascent to the throne in 1556, he took an educational and introductory tour to Habsburg lands in Italy, Ger- many, and the Low Countries that lasted for almost two years. Four years later, he sailed to England (1554–55) after a leisurely journey—sketched in the opening pages of this chapter—from Valladolid to La Coruña, where he went to make formal his loveless and unfortunate marriage to Mary Tudor on July 26, 1554. From England, he crossed the Channel for yet another visit to the Low Countries where he attended his father, Em- peror Charles V’s abdication of some of his titles, the first of a series of such abdications.25 On the peninsula, he traveled back and forth between different parts of the realm, attesting thus to the continuity of medieval royal itinerancy into the early modern period and beyond, as well as to similarities with the habits of his medieval ancestors. These trips, taking the king to politically critical sites throughout his diverse realms, represented clear departures from his usual seasonal and well-established circuit in central Castile. Included in these voyages were the entries of royal consorts. Two are of particular interest: the entry and festivities that accompanied Isabelle of Valois’ reception in Toledo as the new queen in 1560, described in careful detail by Alvar Gómez de Castro and Sebastián de Horozco, and that of Ana of Austria, Philip II’s fourth and final wife into Segovia and Madrid in 1570.26

24 Lhermite, Le passetemps, 98. Lhermite indicates that Philip II’s “custom” was to spend November at El Pardo. In 1596, even though the king was by then unable to ride, he was at El Pardo once again in November. See Lhermite, Le passetemps, 312–13. 25 See Kamen, Philip of Spain, 36–65. His long tour of Italy, Germany, and Milan is described in luxurious detail by Calvete de Estrella in his El felicísimo viaje. His sojourn to England is related in a contemporary account by Andrés Muñoz, ViajedeFelipeIIa Inglaterra, Pascual Gayangos, ed. (Madrid: Imprenta de Aribau, 1877). English sources often present a viewpoint that differs from Muñoz’s pro-Spanish perspective. See, for example, John Gough Nichols, ed. The Chronicle of Queen Jane, and the Two Years of Queen Mary, and Especially of the Rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyat (London: Camden Society, 1850). His second voyage to the Low Countries is told, with more emphasis on Charles V’s actions and the politics of succession, in Louis Prosper Gachard, ed., Collection des voyages des souverains des Pays-Bas, 4 volumes (Brussels: F. Hayez, 1874–82). See vol. 4, Journal des voyages de Philippe II, de 1554 à 1569, par Jean de Vandenesse. See also the edition of some of Gachard’s edited documents in CarlosVyFelipeIIatravés de sus contemporáneos, trans. C. Pérez Bustamante (Madrid: Atlas, 1944). 26 Francisco J. Pizarro Gómez’s book is a short introduction to the art and spectacle created by civic authorities for the purpose of receiving Philip II during his travels. It emphasizes sculptures and the architectural aspects of the triumphal arches built for the king’s visit, but it does not address the issues raised in this book. Although it provides a most useful list of the sources for all these travels, it does not offer sufficient bibliographical information to trace some of his sources. I have now consulted those that have been

17 CHAPTER I Later in life, when gout, disappointment, and often abysmal weather added to the unpleasantness of the experience, the king still traveled, propelled by the demands of statecraft (razón de estado) and by his finely developed sense of duty, journeying throughout his eastern kingdoms for more than a year in 1585–86, and then to a meeting of the Cortes of the Crown of Aragon in Tarazona in 1592.27 Once again, though calculating how many days he was away from his desk at the Escorial or Madrid is next to impossible, one may categorically assert that probably more than a decade of his life and reign were spent in travel, with four of them abroad and close to two or more in the Crown of Aragon alone. Perhaps one may obtain a good idea of royal travel by following Lher- mite’s careful descriptions of Philip II’s movements throughout the later years of the king’s life. If we look at one single year, 1594–95, when the king was already quite old, ill, and confined to a special chair in which he was carried from one location to another, we may obtain some sense of that royal restlessness that afflicted even such supposedly sedentary figures as the second Habsburg ruler of Spain. As was his custom, he left the Es- corial for El Pardo (his hunting lodge) after the Feast of All Saints (No- vember 1) and remained there for three weeks. He then left for Madrid to celebrate the feast of St. Andrew in his capital city, as well as a gathering published in U.S. libraries and in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. Unpublished manuscripts or rare books were examined in the Biblioteca Real and the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid during a research trip undertaken in Winter 2008 with the support of a Gug- genheim Fellowship and a UCLA Academic Senate Research Grant. It may be useful to list some of the most important sources for Philip II’s travels, since they will be invoked at a later time for descriptions of festivals. Of these the most significant are: Relaciones del viajedeSuMagestadá Barcelona (1542). A brief notice of this entry, when Philip accompanied his father and swore to uphold the privileges of Barcelona, is found in Anales de Cataluña III, 184; Maestro Vargas, Relación de las fiestas que se hizo en la ciudad de Salamanca a la Príncesa Doña María de Portugal(1543); Alvar Gómez de Castro, Recibimiento que la imperial ciudad de Toledo hizo á la Majestad de la reina nuestra Señora Doña Isabel, hija del rey Henrico II de Francia . . . a celebrar las fiestas de sus felicissimas bodas con el rey Don Phelipe nuestro señor, segundo de este nombre (Toledo, 1561); EntradadeFelipeIIenBarcelonaconob- jeto de jurar los fueros y privilegios del principado y recibimiento y fiestas que se le hicieron (1564). This account is registered in Comes, Libredealgunescosesasanyalades; de Mal Lara, Re- cibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II; López de Hoyos, Real aparato y sumptuoso recebimiento de D. Ana de Austria; LasvistasdelReydePortugalyelde Castilla en Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, año 1576, Diciembre in Sociedad de Bibliófilos Espa- ñoles XXXII (Madrid, 1896); I. Velázquez, La entrada que en el Reino de Portugal hizo la S.C.R.M. de Don Philippe . . . (Lisbon, 1583); and the anonymous Relación de la jornada que hizo Felipe II, desde Santarem a Lisboa y de su entrada en aquella ciudad (1581), Biblioteca nacional (Madrid), MSS/12026; Báez de Sepúlveda, Relación verdadera del recibimiento que hizo la ciudad de Segovia (1570). 27 For these two royal voyages, see chapter 5 and the works of Henry Cock cited above.

18 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN of the Order of the Golden Fleece of which he was the master. He remained in Madrid until the end of June 1595, when he traveled back to El Escorial; and in November, carried by his servants, he made his way back to El Pardo and thence, once again, to Madrid.28 Even though his usual circuit had been reduced—no more visits, at least not every year, to Valsaín near Segovia, or to his gardens in Aranjuez, or to nearby To- ledo—Philip nonetheless kept to a tour that allowed him to spend No- vember at El Pardo, winter in Madrid, and summer in El Escorial. Philip II’s travels were so extensive and so carefully described and em- bellished by his contemporaries that a thorough perusal of these accounts would make for tedious reading of royal perambulations and of the ceremonies that celebrated the king’s arrival, sojourn, and departure. Instead, I will select some high points in Philip II’s itinerary and explore some of the festivals associated with his travels. His experiences provide a lens through which I, and I hope the reader, will be able to telescope back- wards and forwards in time, to examine themes within the context of la longue durée of Spanish festive traditions and their transition from medieval practices under fragmented political rule to the early modern period and the nominal rule of one king over the peninsular realms. Implicit in this approach and in the emphasis on travel may be the sense that festivals and travel are unavoidably linked. In truth, royal travel almost always prompted celebrations, whether elaborate or not. Even the absence of a reception, the initial silence in the record—as in the case of Philip II’s aborted entry into Barcelona in 1585 or his incognito visit to Toledo before his formal entry in late1559 —tell us a great deal about the politics of royal performance and how, as I argued above, these festivals could easily become sites of contestation. Festive cycles could, however, follow a course independent of royal or princely travel as well, and we should not neglect these events—jousts, Carnival, Corpus Christi, births, weddings, deaths, coronations, and others—that played out across the Spanish realms even in the absence of a royal or princely personage. Sim- ilarly, the relation between travel and festivals, and the frequency of Philip II’s arduous journeys throughout Spain and abroad serves as a vivid reminder that even in the sixteenth century, with Madrid as their newly selected capital city,29 the kings of the Spains were forced by the political exigencies of their fragmented rule, to take to the road, and to do so often. Medieval itinerancy was alive and well in this world of so-called centralized monarchies. This is indeed a long preamble to make my point: namely, that even though this is not a history of Philip II, his role

28 Lhermite, Le passetemps, 248–70. 29 On Madrid’s emergence as a capital of the Spanish Monarchy, see above note 17.

19 CHAPTER I in the story is so prominent that I think a brief sketch of his reign and of the social, cultural, and political context in which his travels in Spain and abroad took place may prove useful.

Philip II Born in Valladolid on May 21, 1527, the son of Charles V (I in Spain) and Isabella of Portugal, Philip received the education prescribed for royal heirs.30 Taught by a distinguished series of tutors, among them Cristobal Calvet (or Calvete) de Estrella and Juan Ginez de Sepúlveda, and kept to the straight by the stern hand of his “governor,” Juan de Zuñiga, Philip early developed enthusiasms that became life-long passions. A youthful taste for nature and hunting remained with him throughout his life, and one may find him in his later travels paying what one could only describe as sightseeing visits to wild place and gardens. An interest in architecture is documented by visits to notable buildings. During his visit to Seville, to give just one example, he delighted in an excursion to the country house of Bellaflor.31 But it was his two principal loves, hunting and gardens, that largely shaped the contours of his annual perambulation. High- lights were visits to his gardens at Aranjuez, to his woods near Segovia, and to his hunting lodge at El Pardo (near Madrid). The young prince also cultivated a great and enduring taste for reading, music, and painting. His avid collecting of books and paintings, and his keen interest in architecture and urban planning became the foundations for the impressive collection gathered at the Escorial; in his residence there he assembled as well a first-rate collection of Flemish paintings that would eventually grow into the Prado Museum. Philip’s youthful love of history and geography became useful tools of statecraft later on in life, as did his dogged dedication to his duties as a ruler, his deep religious feelings, his innate reserve, sense of propriety, and natural dignity. It is startling that such an accomplished ruler—and Philip II, notwithstanding the opprobrium hurled at him by some of his contemporaries and by the burgeoning Black Legend, was an exceedingly accomplished one—never wrote a memoir. Some of his later biog-

30 On Philip II’s upbringing and training, see Parker, 3–23; Kamen, 1–20. As both Parker and Kamen comment, Charles V’s letters to his son and his continuous counsel- ing played a significant role in the education of the prince. See Vida interior del Rey D. Felipe II. Atribuida comunmente al Abad de San Real . . . , published by Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor (Madrid: Imprenta de Andrés Ramírez, 1788; facsimile edition with a preface by Pedro Martín Gómez, Madrid: Torreblanca Impresores, 1998), 6–10. 31 For examples of Philip II’s interest in sightseeing unusual and/or beautiful places during his travels, see chapters 3 and 5.

20 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN raphers have argued that he would not allow anyone to write an “official” history of his reign.32 Richard L. Kagan however has shown that the absence of a royal memoir or officially commissioned biography does not necessarily mean that Philip refused to have his story told or failed to shape how it was to be told. By examining the works of Juan Páez de Castro, Ambrosio Morales, Antonio Herrera y Tordesillas, and other humanists close to the king or in his employ, Kagan has provided a more nuanced picture of Philip’s ambivalence on this matter, of his reluctance, on the one hand, and his desire, on the other, to control the telling of his reign and deeds.33 It is possible that the restraint so crucial to his sense of self motivated his silence. Regardless of his true intentions, the result is that what we know about him directly, we know through the innumerable letters he wrote in the exercise of his office or as personal missives to his family, above all to his beloved Isabella and Catalina, his daughters by his third wife, the cherished and too-short-lived Isabelle of Valois. Philip II’s formation as a child and as a ruler deeply influenced both how he traveled and his self-representation in those festive moments that punctuated the liturgical calendar and the progression of the king through his territory. We get a clear sense of this in José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez Molero’s detailed study of Philip’s education. His book is an excellent guide to the complexities and challenges of a princely education. More than just an inventory of the books Philip read, Sánchez Molero offers powerful insights into the socialization of the prince and his introduction to the courtly life. Jousts, tournaments, hunting, horsemanship, fencing, dancing, courteous behavior to the ladies at court, being invested with the order of the Golden Fleece at the very young age of six, playing at being king—all this and more were important components in the young prince’s education. It is not surprising that throughout his life he retained a taste for these activities even in the face of ill health.34 One of his favorite books, according to Geoffrey Parker, one of Phil- ip’s recent and best biographers, was the Amadis of Gaul, the celebrated

32 Kamen, Philip of Spain, xi, argues that “Philip II refused to let his life be written during his lifetime.” 33 See Richard L. Kagan, “ La historia y los cronistas del rey,” in Navascués Palacios, ed., Philippus II Rex, 90–119. More to the point, see his Clio and the Crown. The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 94–148, where he demolishes the myth that he “had refused to let his life be written.” 34 José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, El aprendisaje cortesano de Felipe II (1527–1546). La formación de un principe del Renacimiento (Madrid: Sociedad estatal para la conmemo- ración de los centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 1999), 72–75, 94–100, 103–6, 134–43, et passim.

21 CHAPTER I fifteenth-century rendition of the adventures of Amadis and a seminal text in the revival of the chivalrous romances so central to the fifteenth century.35 That fact in itself tells us much about the king’s taste and about his perspective in experiencing and responding to the celebrations that he sponsored or that were planned in his honor. The Amadis was a summa- tion of medieval romances and one of the most popular examples of the genre, steeped in the hotbed atmosphere of courtly love and adventurous knights-errant. Carried in the conquistadors’ knapsacks to the New World early in the sixteenth century and quoted in a key passage of Ber- nal Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain,36 the Ama- dis fantasy and romance lies at the center of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a text that, although a critique and ironic send-up of chivalry novels, was itself the last great example of them.37 Philip II’s love for the Amadis of Gaul with its fantastic plot(s) helps explain his youthful enthusiasm for the running of the ring (sortija, see below), an old medieval test of equestrian skills. Although not all of his performances of knightly deeds of valor and chivalry were successful, Philip never abandoned his enduring taste for tournaments and courtly gestures. And as he advanced in years and was rendered frail by gout and other maladies, he became an avid spectator rather than a participant. He seldom failed to attend these long martial celebrations, or to rejoice in them. In 1544, when he was not yet twenty, he took part in a tournament held on boats on the River Pisuerga, outside Palencia. “His boat sank twice because of the weight,” of the armor, and the seventeen-year-old prince ended in the water. Shortly afterward, in another fictitious battle, this one held on an island in a lake at Guadalajara, the prince injured both legs.38 But neither of these early reverses quelled his appetite for the glamour of the tournament. In his long journey of 1548, the young prince and heir to his father’s thrones avidly joined in the tournaments scheduled in his honor, cutting a fine figure and excelling in courtesy to the ladies, in his display of courtly manners, and in his prowess in knightly exercises.

35 See Parker, 15. There are innumerable editions of the Amadís de Gaula; see the edition and introduction by Juan Cacho Blecua, Amadís de Gaula (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987– 1988). See also Martín de Riquer, Caballeros andantes españoles (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1967), which provides a wonderful context for the popularity of the Amadís story in fifteenth-century Spain. 36 See the influential study of Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave, BeinganAccountof Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1949). For Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s famous and often cited quote on the Amadís, see chapter 7. 37 On Miguel de Cervantes’s praise of Amadís de Gaula, see chapter 7. 38 Parker, 15ff.

22 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN These performances served as a prelude to the great and rightly celebrated festivals and tournament hosted by Mary of Hungary at her palace at Binche (Bins), where portions of the Amadis of Gaul were performed, with Philip as one of the main knightly protagonists in the reenactment. Although I will later have additional and lengthy comments to make about the celebrations at Binche, it may be useful now to note how Phil- ip’s youthful love for romances and, above all, for the Amadis shaped the way in which he experienced and reacted to festive receptions and chivalrous deeds. Toward the end of his life, when his body could hardly bear travel, and even less horse riding, he almost always insisted when coming into a town to do so mounted, usually on a white horse. This he may have done in remembrance of those long gone years when he was a new Amadis in search of adventures and knightly deeds, dreams that would be buried, but only partially, under the burdens of office and bitter defeat.39 By the mid 1540s, Philip, still in his teens, was drawn more and more into state affairs. He became a regent in 1543, assumed the responsibilities of married life through his wedding to the Portuguese princess Maria Manuela, and dealt with a revolt in far-away Peru two years later. But his taste for the courtly life and for tournaments remained a constant throughout his reign. In this he followed a tradition of Castilian and other peninsular rulers that was centuries old.40 Foreign ambassadors to the court of a mature Philip provide us with sketches of the man as perceived by some of his contemporaries. Beyond the description of Philip’s physique and demeanor, some of these astute, and often critical, observers of the Spanish court describe an often sympathetic and morally upright king. Federico Badoaro, Venetian ambassador to the courts of Charles V and Philip II, notes his slender looks, “his phlegmatic and melancholy” complexion, but also his inclination to do good, his liking for play and nightly adventures, his liberality, amiability, and modesty. In his report to the Venetian senate, another ambassador, Antonio Tiepolo, notes Philip II’s accessibility and sense of justice, as well as his piety. This assessment is seconded several years later by an anonymous Venetian re- porter (probably Lorenzo Priuli), who emphasizes the king’s sense of justice, religiosity, and excessive dedication to statecraft. This account, written in 1577, also describes the king’s annual circuit and confirms some of the points I made earlier about Philip’s itinerancy. The writer states: “He retires between eight to ten months every year to Aranjuez, to

39 See below chapters 5 and 6. 40 See Jesús D. Rodríguez Velasco, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV. La tratadística caballeresca castellana en su marco europeo (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1996). For the pageantry of John II of Castile’s court, see chapter 6.

23 CHAPTER I San Lorenzo de El Escorial, and to El Pardo to enjoy there the pleasures of the countryside with the queen and his children, in the midst of a reduced number of courtiers.”41

The Reign of Philip II: Crucial Events When he assumed full rule after his father’s full resignation of the Span- ish throne and its extensive possessions in 1556, Philip confronted mounting problems. First and foremost, he faced serious fiscal pressures. All the silver of the new world and the increasingly heavy burden of taxation imposed mostly on Castilian peasants could not begin to pay for the cost of Charles V’s wars in Germany and for the excessive costs of maintaining the court. A chronic shortage of money forced the Crown to default on its debt payments three times during Philip II’s reign. Bankruptcy was always a terrible alternative, for it made borrowing money more difficult and far more expensive. Although some of these problems were not of Philip’s making but inherited from his father, the Prudent King was never able to make Spain solvent and prosperous. Towards the end of his reign, adverse weather conditions, the increasing costs of war, plagues, and other disasters further weakened the Spanish economy, above all that of Castile, the economic and military mainstay of the monarchy. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that Philip and his advisers sought to raise funds by every possible means: by selling offices and patents of nobility, by creating new independent municipalities at a price, and by any number of other such imprudent measures. But these efforts were neither collec- tively nor individually sufficient to dam the flood of expenditures that was slowly drowning Spain. In the end, they only contributed to the malaise spreading through the Iberian kingdom and its far-flung empire. Reforms were planned and, sometimes, even enacted, but all eventually foundered on the need to project Spanish military power outside Spain’s natural borders, to protect its trans-Pyrenean and maritime possessions, and to face a growing number of political adversaries. The problems were many, but sectarian violence and war took center stage.42

Religion, War, and Diplomacy The dire fiscal conditions that prompted Philip II’s decision to allow the government to default on its debts shortly after he came to the throne

41 See Viajes de extranjeros II, 280–81 (Badoaro); 314–15 (Tiepolo); 403–4 (attributed to Priuli). 42 On Philip II’s economic policies and bankruptcies, see note 17 above. 24 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN was not the new king’s only problem. He also inherited from Charles V a series of conflicts that committed Spain to a military presence in war theaters throughout Western Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Spain’s overseas colonies. With the signing of the Treaty of Cateau- Cambrésis (1559), Philip won a respite from military engagement and was able to reassert Spanish hegemony throughout Western Europe. The advantages gained from the settlement with France and the restoration of peace were, however, short-lived. Spain, and Philip with it, faced a series of challenges that eventually drove a dagger into the heart of Philip II’s plans for a Europe under the aegis of Spanish armies. If, as Parker has argued, Cateau-Cambrésis confirmed Spain’s role as the gendarme of Eu- rope, it was a role that called for immense efforts and far more wealth than Spain could generate. It also caused a great many headaches.43 Dynastic marriages—which the Habsburgs used adroitly and with great success—neutralized or diminished conflicts at times, but they did not prevent eventual antagonisms that proved, in the long run, fatal to the Spanish monarchy. It may be useful to enumerate the points of conflict that waxed, waned, and waxed again throughout Philip II’s rule. France had been Spain’s first and most significant rival for hegemony in Europe. Charles V and Francis I’s long struggle for control of Italy had ended with Spain’s victory, but France was wealthy and had demographic and natural resources beyond Spain’s dreams. Fortunately for Philip II, France was also mired in inter- necine sectarian violence between Protestants (Huguenots) and Catho- lics. The long struggle between the two groups did not end with the massacre of Protestants on the feast day of St. Bartholomew (August 23– 24, 1572). It lingered on until Henry of Navarre’s (the future Henry IV) victory in the 1590 battle of Ivry, and was not definitively concluded until the Edict of Nantes (April 15, 1598) granted Protestants rights.44 Philip II intervened repeatedly in the affairs of France. He did so directly, claiming a legitimate interest in French affairs because of his marriage to Isabelle of Valois. When that failed, he continued to intervene in France’s internal politics by means of his alliance with, and support of,

43 On the impact of Cateau-Cambrésis and the world that emerged out of that treaty, see John H. Elliott, Europe Divided, 1559–1598, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 44 For France in this period, see Keith Cameron ed., From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State and Society in Early Modern France (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1989), which provides a series of articles covering diverse aspects of French society during the reign of the last Valois king. See also his older study of the reign of Henry IV and the representations of the French monarch, Henri III, a Maligned or Malignant King?: Aspects of the Satirical Iconography of Henri de Valois (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1978). On Henry IV of France there is an extensive bibliography. See, among many other works, David Buisseret, Henry IV (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1984). 25 CHAPTER I the Guise faction and the Catholic League during the civil unrest of Henry III’s (Valois king 1574–1589) final years. Spanish policies sought to undermine French political stability; yet, in spite of France’s internal problems and the gains Spain had made by the Cateau-Cambrésis treaty, France remained a difficult opponent and, much more so after 1589 when Henry of Navarre (Bourbon) came to the throne. In Philip II’s last years, the Spanish king must have bitterly faced the inevitable fact that France was very much on the ascendant while Spain barely held to its initial advantages. For even in the midst of its religious conflicts, France had sided with Spain’s rivals and sought to weaken its power. The same history of alliances, uneasy relations, and antagonisms marked political dealings between England and Spain. England had long been one of Spain’s natural allies. During the early phases of Hundred Years War, Peter I of Castile and the Black Prince had joined in opera- tions against France. Then, in the 1380s, the Trastámaras reversed their allegiance, siding with France, and a Castilian and French fleet raided the English coast.45 Castilian merchants had been trading with, and in England from at least the mid-thirteenth century.46 Nonetheless by Philip II’s reign the Spanish-English alliance had badly deteriorated. As everywhere in Europe, religious beliefs shaped the contours of political alliances and antagonisms alike. Henry VIII’s rejection of Rome and his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Philip II’s great aunt, opened a period of hostility between the two powers, interrupted only by Philip II’s brief marriage to the much older Mary Tudor in 1554. As consort–king of England, Philip, who visited the island for his wedding and received a reception that was lukewarm at best, had little power and less hope of succeeding Mary to the throne, but for that brief interval there seemed a possibility of reversing the Protestant tide in the British Isles and of gaining English support for Spain’s war with France. In fact, English contingents fought on the Spanish side at the battle of Saint Quentin in 1557. Such hopes perished quickly when Mary died in 1558 and Eliza- beth I ascended the throne (1558–1603).47 Elizabeth, whom Philip very briefly thought of as a potential wife, proved instead to be a formidable enemy. During her long reign, the English threatened Spanish possessions in the New World, raided the sea routes connecting Spain to its overseas empire, helped the Dutch rebels, and sought to thwart Spanish policies at every possible turn. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in

45 See Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300–1474 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 77–85 for the political context of a Castilian-English alliance. 46 See Wendy R. Childs, Anglo-Castilian Trade in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), especially 40–70. 47 For Philip II’s voyage to England, see notes 1 thru 6.

26 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN 1588, a defeat more the result of bad weather and worse logistic preparations than of English seafaring prowess, removed for a while English fears of a Spanish invasion and ended Philip II’s hope of conquering England and restoring it to Catholicism.48 England and France, though formidable and resilient enemies, eventually became threats secondary to the enduring and eventually crippling revolt of the Netherlands’ northern provinces. Here again, religion played a central role in the conflict, but Philip II’s reluctance to compromise was driven as well by his Burgundian connection. Although born in Spain and, as noted, first and foremost a Castilian by taste and temperament, Philip could not forsake his connection to the ancestral home of both his father and grandfather. Nor could he forget those halcyon days in his youth when, whether enjoying a princely entry into Brussels, “joyous” entries elsewhere, tournaments, and Binche’s great chivalrous spectacle, everything seemed like a glorious promise of prosperity and unchal- lenged authority. It was very difficult for Philip to cut his losses, but, despite the success of some early efforts to quell the revolt, the rebellious Protestant cities and northern provinces proved to be a quagmire in which the diminishing Spanish treasure and armies sank, quite literally, into the mud. (The Dutch were wont to open their dikes to drown their enemies.) It was the first real token of Spain’s eventual demise.49 The history of the rebellion in the Low Countries and the rise of the Dutch Republic are complex topics and not directly pertinent to the themes of this book, but the lessons that one could derive from Philip’s policies in the Netherlands provide clues to the history of festivals in sixteenth-century Spain. The intersection of deep sectarian conflicts (and Philip, like most sixteenth-century rulers, was profoundly religious) with Philip II’s stubbornness in the face of any resistance to his authority were turned into performances in the elaborate festivals that marked the king’s progress through his kingdom, as well as celebrations related to the ruler and his family’s life cycle. Between 1568 and 1570, while facing increased armed conflicts in the Netherlands, Philip had also to deal with the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean and North Africa and the hard-fought and debilitating Morisco rebellion in the Alpujarras region. The victory of a league of

48 For the Spanish Armada and Philip II, see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Garrett Mattingly’s pioneering work, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962, originally published in 1959). 49 On the Dutch Revolt and Spanish efforts there, see Geoffrey Parker, TheArmyof Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

27 CHAPTER I Catholic naval forces under the command of Philip’s half brother, Don Juan of Austria, over the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto in 1571 provided a temporary respite from Ottoman intrusions into the Western Mediterra- nean but was no permanent solution to the Ottoman threat. Likewise, the defeat of the Moriscos in the Alpujarras and the dispersal of Morisco survivors throughout Castile brought an end to open military conflict but did not at all resolve the question of how to assimilate a large group of Muslims nominally converted to Christianity but in reality living lives still deeply grounded in Islamic traditions. Yet other problems beset Philip II during his long reign. Italy was a nest of untrustworthy allies and rivals. The papacy, for which in principle Philip II did so much, was at best a reluctant ally. Venice was always problematic. Philip’s first son and heir, Don Carlos, was insane and had to be confined, dying shortly afterwards. The untimely death of Elizabeth, his beloved third wife, came as a harsh blow. His heir to be, Philip (Philip III), was indolent and did not share his father’s dedication to statecraft or commitment to his duties as ruler. The eastern kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon were problematic and, at times, as was the case in 1591, openly rebellious. And then, late in life, the king’s health deteriorated badly, a fitting metaphor for the fate of Spain. Philip II’s frequent travels and Spanish festive cycles must always be viewed in the context of these changing social, economic, and political landscapes. Some of the travel, ceremonials, and festive events were directly related to political problems and Philip’s attempts at dealing with them through what may have been distasteful but necessary political spectacles. This does not mean that Philip II’s reign was a series of un- mitigated disasters. He enjoyed successes as well. His youth was quite a charmed one. He loved his books and his art collection at the Escorial, his gardens, and his woods. Cateau-Cambrésis was a great diplomatic victory, so was Lepanto, an example of the king’s ability to forge a broad alliance of Christian powers and a signal victory over the Ottoman navy. Becoming king of Portugal in 1580 and adding the vast and profitable Portuguese colonies to the Spanish monarchy constituted an important gain for Spain and the culmination, albeit for only sixty years, of the enduring dream of peninsular unity. Finally there was the successful defense of the New World against attacks, mostly by the English and the Dutch, which can be counted among Philip’s great achievements.50 Not only in the political sphere did the Prudent King made impressive gains. In the 1570s Philip II sponsored a series of ambitious humanistic and humanistic and scientific programs. A broad and liberal perspective

50 On Philip’s achievements, see notes 1 and 11.

28 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN on knowledge and a desire to itemize the resources and record the history of the monarchy led to initiatives that included the so-called Relaciones topográficas, a vast survey of the history, customs, economic resources, religious practices, and many other aspects of Spanish life. Undertaken in 1575 and 1578, it theoretically aimed at gathering data throughout most of Spain and parts of the Americas (though most of the surviving surveys come from New Castile). The Aragonese realms, as was to be expected, ignored the whole affair. Although theRelaciones topográficas addressed purposes that were not strictly speaking humanistic and may have been indeed, as one of the anonymous readers suggested, more in the “realm of arcana imperii or what Portuondo has described as ‘secret science,’” the Relaciones’ emphasis on local history and religious practices were certainly symptomatic of Philip and his close circle of learned advisers’ voracious appetite for the creation of knowledge.51 Further, Francisco Hernández’s mission to collect botanical specimens and information on local medicine in colonial Mexico yielded an impressive collection of writings, among them, the Index medicamentorum, the Quatro libros de la naturaleza, and the Roman version of his Rerum medicarum novae Hispaniae thesaurus. In the same vein of itemizing and map- ping out his vast possessions, Philip II in 1570 commissioned Anton van den Wyngaerde (known in Spain as Antonio de las Viñas) to undertake a monumental series of pictorial representations of Spanish cities, reflecting the king’s keen interest in urban planning. Not surprisingly, most of these works ended up in Philip II’s new library at the newly constructed monastery and palace at the Escorial. Yet, while in the heady days around 1570, Philip and his advisors sought to reshape the cultural landscape of early modern Spain, economic and political conditions worsened. Wars, fiscal constraints, and sheer exhaustion led, eventually, to the shelving of most of these projects.52 Culture, of course, was intrinsic to festive cycles. In a most useful in-

51 Although Portuondo focuses on the Relaciones geográficas de Indias, there is a short and interesting discussion of the Relaciones topográficas. See María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 213–23. 52 On the Relaciones topográficas, see Javier Campos y Fernández de Sevilla, La mentali- dad en Castilla la Nueva en el siglo XVI: religión, economía y sociedad, según las “Relaciones topográficas” de Felipe II (Madrid: Ediciones Escurialenses (EDES), Real Monasterio del Escorial, 1986). For the paintings of Spanish cities by Antonio de las Viñas, see the formidable study edited by Richard Kagan: Spanish Cities of the Golden Age: The Views of Anton van den Wyngaerde (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). On Fran- cisco Hernandez’s work and the afterlife of some of his botanical and medical treatises, see the two-volume work edited by Simon Vary, Rafael Kobrin, and Dora Weiner, Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Francisco Hernandez and The Mexi-

29 CHAPTER I troduction to the topic, Francisco Javier Pizarro Gómez examines the ephemeral art and decorations built (or planned) for the occasions of Philip II’s royal and princely visits or for great festivals associated with his travels.53 Artificial constructions and temporary decorations were not however the only displays of art. In later chapters, we will have the opportunity to glimpse the Prudent King and other Spanish rulers as they acted in and/or presided over elaborate celebrations, and to look as well at the cultural artifacts—literary, musical, and architectural—that were intrinsic to ludic performances.

Organizing This Book

As I have repeatedly indicated (though the thrust of my the previous paragraphs belies my argument), this is more a book about a selective number of festivals and, to a lesser extent, festivals and travel, than about Philip II. The Prudent King, either as a young prince with dreams of un- surpassed majesty or as an aging ruler beset by disillusion and illness, plays always a central role in the narrative, but I wish to organize my discussion not around his person but rather around themes. Each chapter, while placing events in a historical context, examines the longue durée of specific festive traditions. My main sources throughout have been chronicles and travel accounts that provide careful descriptions of royal movement, of festivities associated with princely or royal visits, but I have also made use of local accounts of royal visits and of Corpus Christi celebrations, as well as contemporary short notices of events taking place in Ma- drid during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and of private chronicles, such as that of Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo. Most of my sources reflect the manner in which royal agents or municipally sponsored chroniclers sought to advance the interests of kings, princes, or local nobles. Others represent ambitions to promote one’s city or one’s politics within the city by festive displays and associations with the king or the sacred. Others, the most useful, let us see, almost “through a glass darkly,” moments of contestation, subtle conflicts, and, in the case of tournaments and other courtly events, the culture of specific social groups. Since a great deal of my narrative is constructed around Henry Cock’s descriptions of two of Philip II’s voyages to the ground of Aragon, Lher- mite’s complementary account of the 1592 journey to Tarazona, and Cal- can Treasury: The Writings of Francisco Hernandez, 2 vols. (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer- sity Press, 2000). 53 Francisco Javier Pizarro Gómez, Arte y espectáculo en los viajes de Felipe II (Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 1999).

30 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN vete de Estrella’s extensive account of Philip’s voyage to Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, I have sought to balance these “official” accounts with “unofficial” ones, a distinction to which I will return throughout the succeeding chapters. That is, whenever possible I have sought to de- ploy contemporary evidence that was not royally sponsored. In many cases, my evidence comes from learned men employed by municipalities for the purpose of telling a particular story about a royal entry, but also, and most obviously, to enhance the prestige of their respective cities as well. I have sought to test the veracity of some of my sources by attempting to examine and compare all the available narratives. One should be wary nonetheless. Those who wrote, who had their works printed, and whose works survived were almost all imbricated into the structures that underpinned and justified royal and municipal power. Learning and an interest in these festive displays almost guaranteed a point of view sympathetic to authority and to the representations of that authority. There were exceptions when, as in the Crown of Aragon, various claims to power clashed. But even in Aragon, the perspective, while perhaps anti- Castilian, was nonetheless characteristic of contemporary attitudes toward authority. I am also fully aware that a close study of the rich municipal archival holdings extant in many of the towns that Philip II and other early modern kings (and queens) visited would greatly enhance the representation of royal travel and municipal receptions found in chronicles and travel accounts with their obvious ideological bias. For one, we would garner a better understanding of the economics of festivities—who paid for them, how were they organized, who did the scripting?—of the circulation of goods and foodstuffs provided for those attending the public portions of the festivities, and of the careful negotiations between municipal authorities and the Crown over the nature of royal entries and other types of pageantry. Whenever possible, as is the case with Seville, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Toledo, I have sought out local information, both municipal chronicles and such other material as has been published; in the case in Barcelona, the Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona and Comes’ Libre de algunes coses asanyalades (1583). Further years of research in the municipal holdings of all the different localities that served as sites for my story would not, I think, change the nature of my findings to any radical extent. More likely such research would only expand upon my present descriptions and analysis of royal travel and festivities. My research is grounded, then, on published primary accounts; I have not done extensive work in municipal archives, nor was it my intention to do so. This book, I hope, is about much more than just entries. It is about festive traditions in general in late medieval and early modern Spain. Moreover, as I pointed out in my preface, it is about the representations and the

31 CHAPTER I imaginings of these events and about what those imaginings tell us about power, the absence of it, and the cultural environment of late medieval and early modern Spain. It is about the social, cultural, and political uses of display, its successes and its failures. After this introductory chapter, we will begin in chapter 2 with a general reflection on festivals and an attempt to provide a typology of the diversity of ludic events, their origins, and evolution in late medieval and early modern Spain. Chapter 3 will focus on royal and princely entries as well as royal visits. Seeking to trace the evolution of entries over time, I have contrasted different entries into Seville (to be compared in chapter 5 with Philip’s entries and visits to Barcelona). Beginning with Ferdinand III’s proto-entry into the city in 1248, we followed the subtle changes that occurred in how kings entered or visited the great city on the banks of the Guadalquivir, from Alfonso XI’s iconic entry in 1327—the true chronological departure point of this inquiry—to Philip II’s solemn entry in 1570. Along the way, I gloss one example of an entry with little political consequence, and contrast the entries of royal males with those of princesses come to rule in the realm. Chapter 3 also draws the important distinction between the prince or king’s first visit to a city and subsequent sojourns there. As we shall see, the first entry usually (but not always) called for some unusual or unique gesture. Most often this meant that the king would enter the city and progress along a pre-selected route under a palio (a canopy or baldachin). Triumphal entries, most notably that of Fernando of Antequera into Se- ville after his great victory over Granada’s armies in 1401, also deserve attention. These entries and/or visits need to be explored in the context of, and in reference to, the research agenda set up early in this introduction. I am quite aware that royal entries, above all, often subsumed a good many other festive forms, but for the sake of clarity, I will attempt to discuss each of them as a discrete category of festivity. Chapter 4 revisits the different elements of royal and princely entries, carefully examining each of the different components of a formal entry, while chapter 5 focuses on Philip II’s long voyages to the Crown of Ara- gon in 1585–86 and in 1592, and on the king’s long and conflicting relations with Barcelona. Rather than a close reading of the symbolic meaning of the festivities that accompanied the king’s progression from Castile to the Crown of Aragon and back, the aim of this chapter is to elucidate the political meanings and festive performances as part of complicated political dialogues and as sites of contestation. Chapters 6 and 7 look at tournaments, jousts, pas d’armes, and the romance literature associated with knightly feats of arms. In chapter 8 I turn to the seemingly contradictory, but often structurally linked issues of the role of Corpus Christi

32 FESTIVALS IN SPAIN processions and Carnival. Finally, chapter 9 discusses noncalendrical celebrations, that is, those high moments in the life cycle—birth, coming to age, coronation, marriage and death—and the celebratory, almost ritualized, aspects of events organized to mark such important moments in the life cycles of kings and their close families. A brief conclusion will attempt to tie together all of these different strands and to reiterate the research agendas laid out above. All along, I shall attempt to trace as well the changing role of audiences in medieval and early modern festivals and the shifting spaces occupied by kings. It is time now to begin.

33 ❊ CHAPTER II ❊ The Meaning of Festivals: A Typology

In 1559, Philip II sent his aposentador (head of household) to Toledo to make preparations for his first formal entry into the city as king and for the entry of his new wife, Isabelle of Valois, one year later.1 Similarly, towards the end of 1584 and in the opening days of the next year, Philip II put into motion preparations for his forthcoming long journey through his eastern kingdoms. His aposentador mayor, Don Diego de Espinoza, was sent to Zara- goza to make the royal palaces there fit for the king’s visit and to procure suitable accommodations for the high nobility and the royal counselors “according to the social standing (estado) of each one.”2 Around the same time, the alcalde (a judicial and administrative officer) Valladares, “one of the four judges in the king’s household and court,” was commanded to secure enough provisions for the king’s cortege as it traveled from Madrid to Zaragoza. This was done, as Henry Cock who meticulously chronicled this particular voyage and who deployed in his narrative the usual foreign pejorative representations of Spaniards explained, because “peasants in Spain were inclined to steal and deceive.”3 Simultaneously, Philip II requested that the Council of Aragon await the king’s arrival in Zaragoza, and that Ara- gonese, Catalan, and Valencian grandees make plans to attend a general gathering at the Cortes at Monzón.4 More than a century before, mid- fifteenth-century chronicles describing the fabulous feasts held in Vallado- lid in 1428 noted with great elation that the artificial castle built for the pas d’armes hosted by the Infante Don Enrique was the work of an Italian craftsman and cost the extravagant sum of between 12,000 and 15,000 gold florins.5 1 Gómez de Castro, Recibimiento que . . . Toledo hizo á la reina Doña Isabel, 26. Carlota Fernández Travieso, the editor of Gómez de Castro’s Recibimiento shows how the costs of the feast were paid by either the city or civic organizations: “The great artificial arch at the gate of Bisagra was paid by Toledo’s city council; the arch at he gate of Forgiveness (Perdón) by the cathedral chapter, and the arch at the entrance to the square at Zocodover by the silk guild.” See also Horozco, Relaciones históricas toledanas, 181. 2 Cock, Relación del viaje hecho (1585), 9. See chapter 5. 3 Ibid., 9. I also explore these pejorative references to conditions in Spain in chapter 5. 4 Idem. The events in Zaragoza and Monzón are described in chapter 5. 5 See Alvar García de Santa María, Crónica de Juan II de Castilla in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, vols. IC and C (Madrid: Real Academia de la Histo- ria, 1891): C, 16. See also my “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du povouir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de Mai 1428,” Annales.E.C.S. (1991), 530.

34 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS These small vignettes are reminders that festivals were seldom impromptu affairs. Although we have references to what appear spontaneous celebrations—peasants dancing and snapping their fingers to imitate the sound of castanets, as they did along Philip II’s route to Zaragoza and to Barcelona—the reality is that most important festivities were carefully plotted and highly scripted events. Even though things could go quite seriously awry, as was the case in Genoa in 1548, and, to a lesser extent in Zaragoza and Barcelona in 1585, at the planning stage at least little was left to chance. Festivals in late medieval and early modern Europe in general, and in Spain in particular, were tightly controlled and carefully managed cultural artifacts. As performances dictated by tradition and created for complex social and political reasons, they followed a well- established logic. Although they represented crushing fiscal impositions on towns—municipal authorities were expected to pay for the arrangements—and usually an almost intolerable burden to rulers in terms of time and energy expended, festivals nonetheless were indispensable. Caught in the social and political logic of these cultural constructions, kings, princes, bishops, and municipal officials accepted their roles and performed again and again for the benefit of each other and of the people whom they sought to instruct and bind to their service. The structures of regal power, as well as the challenges to that power, were deeply embedded in festive traditions and celebratory rituals. One cannot imagine the exercise of power in late medieval and early modern Europe without the continuous deployment of symbols in the context of festive cycles and royal travel. Even in our own times, in which electronic communication spans the globe and makes the gathering of people into a particular location fairly unnecessary, pomp and display—from the great military parade down the Champs Elysees in Paris on the 14th of July to the public taking of the presidential oath of office on a usually frigid January day in Washington, D.C.—remain necessary manifestations of political power.

The Meaning of Festivals

Festivities are of course as old as humanity itself. They are, in some ways, an aspect of that ludic drive that articulates the human need for play.6 At

6 On this see Johan Huizinga’s marvelous Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play- Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962); Jacques Heers, Fêtes, jeux et joutes dans les sociétés d’Occident á la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1971); and the general outline of the topic in Pierre Gordon, Les fêtes à travers les âges: leur unité, l’origine du calendrier (Neuilly sur Seine: Arma artis, 1983), as well as in Jean Harrowven, Origins of Festivals and Feasts (London: Kaye and Ward, 1980). Felipe Fernández Armesto describes a very

35 CHAPTER II the individual, family, or community level, celebrations have played, and continue to play, a significant role in social relations, linking networks of individuals into temporary cohesive units. A birth, a coming of age, a wedding, a death, all the high points of the life cycle call for some kind of ritual marking. Depending on wealth and social standing, these celebrations may be either exaggerated displays of one’s lofty position or humble affairs. In Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the author describes the ostentatious (but at the end failed) wedding feast of Camacho “the rich.” A wealthy farmer, Camacho offered to his guests a utopian mountain of food to celebrate his marriage to the very young and beautiful Quiteria. Although the wedding never took place—since, through an elaborate ruse, Quite- ria instead married the penniless but young and handsome Basilio—the feast remains in Spanish letters and popular culture (the saying “rich as Camacho” is still used) a symbol of gaudy personal display.7 As interesting as these individual festivals are—and they are of keen interest to anthropologists and social historians—I am concerned here with a very different kind of celebration. My focus is on festivals that, in Spain as elsewhere in Western Europe, reveal to us broader political and cultural themes. Above all, my interest resides in the role of festivals as places of contestation between political forces within the realm.

Calendrical and Noncalendrical Festivities

Elsewhere in my work, I have already sought to provide a typology of different types of festivities, as well as their temporal location within the reiterative chronology of annual ludic cycles.8 Two significant types of festivals can be posited: calendrical and noncalendrical. Calendrical festivals, deeply linked to liturgical and agricultural calen- dars, mark the celebration of important events in Christian life, following and overlapping the cycle of planting and harvesting: Christmas, the Epiphany, Candlemas, Easter, St. John’s Day, the numerous feast days dedicated to the Virgin throughout the year, All Saints’ Day, St. Mi- chael’s (September 29), and St. Martin’s day (November 11). Twelfth cen- large feast held on a hilltop at Hambledon, England early in the third millennium BCE. Although there is no indication of what the feast was intended to celebrate, the archeo- logical evidence points to a lot of eating and drinking: The World: A History, 2nd ed. (London: Prentice Hall, 2010): vol. 1, 31. 7 See Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Martín de Riquer, ed., 2 vols., 12th edition (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1995), vol. 2, 678–94. 8 See my discussion of festive typologies in several of my works: Spanish Society, 1400– 1600 (London: Longman, 2001), 121–32, and my articles cited in notes 15 and 19.

36 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS tury romances, chronicles, and early modern accounts never fail to note the celebrations associated with these recurring high points of sacred time. Some calendrical festivals, such as Christmas, grew into long festive cycles. Christmas celebrations, for example, often began a few days before Christmas, usually December 21st, the feast of St. Thomas and a day associated with the winter solstice, and ended on January 6th, the feast of the Epiphany. In addition to its obvious religious significance, Christmas observations subsumed, as did most of the festivals we examine in this and subsequent chapters, a variety of festive forms. Carnival, to provide just one more example, flowed into Lent, which itself flowed into the Easter celebrations to form a continuous though emotionally quite volatile season between the revelry of Carnival, the mourning of Lent, and the joy of Easter (and the carnivalesque Easter Monday). Calendrical festivities had rhythms of their own. Although always pregnant with political meaning, the festivities associated with Christmas, Easter (which always included Easter Monday), and other liturgical celebrations were not as deeply imbricated in the social and political negotiations so often associated with noncalendrical events. Nor were they directly associated with royal perambulation or kingly entries and visits to various cities. It would, I fear, be tedious to provide examples for each of these calendrical feasts— they were basically variations of one theme—but a few examples may prove useful before we proceed to other topics.

Christmas in Tortosa In 1585, Philip II spent most of the holiday season—from December 18, 1585 to January 3, 1586—in Tortosa, a city on the banks of the Ebro River. A detailed description of the activities that took place in Tortosa during those two weeks illuminates the heady mixture of religious observance, historical commemoration, and pageantry that marked the dual significance of a king’s visit coinciding with the high point of the Chris- tian calendar. By Christmas 1585, Philip II was already in the final stages of his long journey through his eastern realms, as Valencia remained the last capital (of the kingdom of Valencia) to visit in the Crown of Aragon. He had slowly made his way back to the South, fleeing the endless bickering at the Cortes of Monzón, the illnesses that had plagued the meeting, and the bitter weather. He reached Tortosa, a middle-sized town in the Cata- lan province of Tarragona, around 2 PM and was met by fourteen barges outfitted by Tortosa’s confraternities. After crossing the river he was greeted by the city’s regimiento (the city council) and taken in a formal procession to his palace. Artillery and harquebus discharges accompanied

37 CHAPTER II the formalities, filling the air with great noise. On the following day, De- cember 19th, the king gazed on a large procession of barges on the river, splendid enough to give, as Henry Cock comments, “happiness to the hearts” [of Philip II and his entourage], who had come (into Tortosa) from [a difficult journey] with so many pesadumbres (heartaches). Drums and artillery discharges provided the context for the naval parade. In the early afternoon of December 20th, the town’s artisans performed dances by the door of the palace so that the Infanta and her ladies-in-waiting, who accompanied the king, could be entertained. Musicians positioned on stages that had been constructed on either side of the palace provided music “in the fashion of Barcelona” for the dancers. The confraternities of farmers in Tortosa’s hinterland paraded and danced, some disguised as black men and women, others as giants.9 The banal and carnivalesque elements of the festivities, clearly associated with the royal visit, mixed intimately with religious observations. Philip II attended a private Mass in the oratory of his palace on Decem- ber 21, the feast day of St. Thomas, but later that day the good citizens of Tortosa mounted yet another spectacle for the visiting king. On the bank of the Ebro, a tower was built of wood and other materials and carefully painted to provide some semblance of verisimilitude. Squads of Tortosa’s citizens (mostly fisherman) manned the tower disguised as Moors. Other citizens, playing the role of Christian soldiers, besieged the tower by sea and land with numerous pieces of artillery. By sunset, the tower had been taken and destroyed by the Christian forces, and the defeated Moors captured and paraded into the city and past the king’s window. Bonfires lit the night around the palace. Fictitious sieges and staged battles between Christians and Moors harkened back in time to well-established symbolic humiliations of the defeated Moors. In the context of Christmas and a royal visit, the production also served as a prelude to the historical reenactment of Tortosa’s conquest by Christian forces.10

9 Relación del viaje (1585), 185–221. Cock offers quite a detailed description of Philip II’s stay in Tortosa. 10 On the history of Tortosa, see Enrique Bayerri y Bertomeu, Historia de Tortosa y su comarca (Tortosa: Imprenta moderna de Algueró y Baiges, 1933). The city was taken on December 31, 1148, by Raymond Bérenger, then count of Barcelona. There is a substantial monographic literature on the feasts (and dances) of Moors and Christians (moros y cristianos) for Spain and Latin America. In both places, such events, ranging from mock battles to dances, are still performed to this day and associated with religious events or historical reenactments. See Demetrio Brisset, FiestasdemorosycristianosenGranada (Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1988). For Valencia, which had a great deal in common with Tortosa, see Joan Amades, Lasdanzasdemorosycristianos (Valencia: Institución Alfonso el Magnánimo, 1966).

38 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS The following day, Sunday December 22nd, the king attended Mass at a Dominican convent, and Cock tells us that there was unceasing and heavy rain, a common feature during most of Philip II’s 1585–86 journey. The bad weather certainly put a damper on the festive mood. We learn of no further events until three days later, on Christmas Day. To mark the holiday, the king piously attended three separate Masses in the cathedral, gazed upon and venerated the relics kept in its treasury, which, in honor of the king, were displayed on the main altar, easily accessible to him. The next day, Philip II stayed indoors, but after Vespers an elaborate procession marched by the door of the palace and, although it is not explicitly stated, the king probably looked on from the comfort of his rooms. The procession, which Cock describes with luxury of detail, combined elements of the carnivalesque and the pious, with the order of the marchers providing, as so often on these occasions, a vivid reminder of the social hierarchy and of the mixture of the popular with the profane, the religious with the political in the lives of the local elite. The long parade was led by devils and/or demons engaged in fierce battle among themselves and with a large dragon (la tarasca)—a mechanical float, its nostrils and jaws spewing smoke and flames. We will have many opportunities to see similar dragons play a role in Philip II’s entries elsewhere on the peninsula, as this was one of the favorite displays at royal receptions and other festivities, above all, in the Corpus Christi processions.11 The devils and dragons were followed by a group performing Moorish dances and, although this is not stated, almost certainly dressed in Moor- ish fashion. The third rank of the parade was occupied by marchers costumed as black men and women—a performance similar to the one staged by the confraternity of farmers on December 20th. The fourth rank included men carrying the banners of Tortosa’s confraternities, and Cock tells us that some of the standards were offered to the king. This information provides a clue as to the king’s position relative to the parade. He was removed from the action, and yet close enough to gaze upon the spectacle, to be gazed upon in return, and even to accept offer- ings from the well organized and policed crowd. With the banners of the confraternities marched also the oficios mecánicos, that is, the craftsmen and

11 For the description of the parade, see Relación del viaje (1585), 188. See also chapters 5 and 8. For the liturgical significance of the artificial serpent or dragon in other festivals and in Corpus Christi processions, see chapter 8. Also the classical work of Louis Du- mont, La tarasque. Essai de descriptions d’ un fait local d’ un point de vue ethnographique (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), and Jaime Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 187–227. I will revisit the theme of the tarasca or artificial dragon in great detail in chapter 8.

39 CHAPTER II tradesmen.12 They were followed by clerics and acolytes, carrying crosses from Tortosa’s churches and boxes containing holy relics. After the secular clergy marched the friars of three mendicant orders—the Trinitarians, Dominicans, and observant Franciscans. All of Tortosa’s secular clergy followed, including, one would suppose, the canons of the cathedral. In the next rank—and Cock’s description implies that each group was marching in a distinct order—came the ruling body of the city, municipal officials and the like. Finally, closing the procession and seemingly in no clear order, came the people. Later, I will attempt to provide a close reading of this mixture of royal entry and Christmas festival, but for now, it may be more practical to continue a full listing of the activities that took place during this visit to Tortosa. On December 27, the king did not have to put in an appearance and instead took a boat trip on the river to see some Hungarian horses and a carriage sent to him as gifts by the Habsburg emperor. On the next day, the king seems to have remained indoors, while the city rested as well. On December 29th, the court received the sad news of the death of the Count of Paredes’ daughter. The ladies-in-waiting and other noble women in the itinerant court donned mourning and rode to church to pray for the soul of the deceased young woman. On December 30th, the day of the translation of the body of St. James, knights of the Order of Santiago, of which the king was nominal master, met in the chapel of St. James to commemorate the day. Later, after the midday meal, naval jousting was held in the river with many citizens—for this was obviously a bourgeois and artisan enterprise devoid of knightly participation—falling comically into the river. Cock reminds his readers that the next day, De- cember 31, 1585, was the four-hundred-and thirty-seventh anniversary of the taking of Tortosa from the Muslims.13 That day our narrator, together with other members of his Flemish guard, left for Valencia to prepare for the king’s visit. More will be said about Philip II’s negotiations for that entry later, but Cock, despite his absence, continued to record the king’s movements in Tortosa, probably based on the information given to him by another member of the royal entourage. We learn that on January 1st, the king went to the cathedral wearing his decorations as master of the Order of the Golden Fleece and there raised the Duke of Cardona, one of his noble allies in the eastern kingdom, to the rank of a Spanish Grandee and invested him with mem-

12 On the oficios mecánicos in early modern Spain, see the impressive book by Ruth Mackay, “Lazy, Improvident People”: Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) and my review of the book in Renaissance Quarterly (Winter 2007), 1332–33. 13 Relación del viaje (1585), 201–208.

40 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS bership into the Order of the Golden Fleece. This was quite remarkable since, although the king had extended membership into the Order to other high nobles while in Zaragoza, they were either Castilians or Ital- ians. That he both raised a noble from one of the Crown of Aragon kingdoms to the rank of grandee and bestowed upon him the emblem of the Golden Fleece may tell us a great deal about Philip’s satisfaction with his Tortosa reception, especially after the disappointments he had suffered in earlier entries in the Crown of Aragon that year.14 Resting on January 2nd 1586, when the Infante fell momentarily ill, the king departed Tor- tosa on the 3rd of January, making slow progress to Valencia. After this long summary, it may be useful to attempt to decipher the different themes that played out during the king’s sojourn in Tortosa. In this instance, elements associated with royal entries or princely visits were conflated with the customary Christmas celebrations. As has been seen, the festivities commemorating Jesus’ birth appropriated elements of the carnivalesque and chivalrous. Many patterns established in the late Mid- dle Ages and associated with liturgical events such as Christmas, remained fairly constant throughout the centuries. As I noted above, the power of festivals resided first and foremost in their reiterative quality. Every aspect of any particular festival would have been familiar to the audience; any small change, addition, or subtraction viewed as a novelty. Every citizen would have waited for the fire-spewing dragon and the parade of giants, just as today’s children expect Saint Claus to close Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But every aspect of entries and of the festivals associated with the king’s visit to Tortosa during Christmas was pregnant with meanings expressed in the well-scripted intersection of knightly events, popular entertainments, invocations of historical memories, tradition, and, finally, piety. What were these different layers of meaning?

READING CHRISTMAS IN TORTOSA As things went in Philip II’s long travel through his eastern kingdoms in 1585 and 1586, his time in Tortosa seems to have been fairly uncompli- cated. There was nothing like the political challenges he had met in Zaragoza, the cold shoulder he experienced in Barcelona, or the trying negotiations still ahead with Valencia. He, so Cock tells us, stayed in Tor- tosa beyond the time originally allotted for his visit. If we are to provide a close reading of the royal Christmas in Tortosa, some of the events, though fairly repetitive from the Middle Ages onwards, deserve, what Geertz described as a “thick description.” Music and dancing were important components of all calendrical and noncalendrical events. In mid-

14 See chapter 5.

41 CHAPTER II fifteenth-century Spain, in the innumerable feasts sponsored by the constable of Castile, Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, elaborate music and dancing loudly proclaimed the happiness of the audience and the magnificence of the constable’s gifts.15 In Briviesca in 1440, when the Infanta Doña Blanca came to marry the future Henry IV, heir to the Crown of Castile, she was met by tradesmen performing skits and tableaux vivants, while Jews and Moors danced in the streets with Torahs and the Qur’an carried high by representatives of these religions.16 Early during his trip to the eastern kingdoms, Philip II had seen dances of “savages and peasants” in Brihuega, and, later on, more dances and spectacles in the village of San Matheu on January 7, 1586 and in other locations as well.17 People disguised as captives sang in Valencia as the king passed in his entry to the plaza de la Merced.18 The Infante Don Enrique, one of the fabled and troublesome Infantes of Aragon and son of Ferdinand of Antequera, the first Trastámara king of the Crown of Aragon, danced among the crowd in Valladolid’s main square in May 1428.19 All this “public” dancing and singing, an indispensable part of all festivals, stood in sharp contrast to the courtly dancing (the saraos) done in interior spaces during royal travel, whether in situ at the semi-permanent location of the royal court or in the diverse locations visited by, what remained for a long time, an itinerant court. Restricted to the nobility, important municipal officials, and by exception to rich merchants, these saraos featured such dancing as that undertaken by the Infantas and Infante when they danced among their ladies-in-waiting and attending nobles during Philip II’s 1585–86 journey and stay in Zaragoza. Similarly, when the constable danced with his wife in Jaén in the 1460s, it was a courtly and dignified affair. These courtly dances represented an elaborate counterpart to the popular (though seldom spontaneous) performances associated with royal visits or calendrical festivals. I will have a great deal more to say about dancing and music as important components of festive structures, but for now it may suffice to make two points. First, there is a notable continuity in the role that music and dance played in medieval and early modern festive

15 On the music and dancing found in Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s festivities, see below and T. F. Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, B. A. Hanawalt and K. L. Reyerson, eds. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 296– 318. 16 I shall visit this episode again. The description of the entry of Doña Blanca and of the Jews and Moors dancing for her benefit can be found in Crónica de Juan II, 565. 17 See chapter 4 and Relación del viaje (1585), 222. 18 Ibid., 231. 19 See my “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de mai 1428,” Annales E.S.C. 3 (1991), 521–46.

42 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS traditions. Festivities without music were not festivities at all. Whether it was the sound of trumpets and drums announcing the approach and entry of a king, or more melodic strains performed for the entertainment of the court, music (and dancing) represented an indispensable ingredient in the mise-en-scène of power. Second, the notion of Philip II dancing among the crowds as his distant ancestors did would have been inconceivable. Al- though as a young man, he was particularly fond of dancing and flirting (always in well-policed settings and among the nobility), later in life his illnesses, and, above all, his growing sense of royal dignity made the kind of “public” performances that we will see in the fifteenth century from Don Enrique or Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo not only unacceptable to the king, but even to those in his entourage. The distance between king and people, between court and crowd, so evident in the singular image of the monarch perched in his window or balcony, gazing down on the spectacles performed in his honor tells us a great deal also about what had changed in the transition from the medieval to the early modern. While attempting to trace the role of music and dancing in Tortosa’s Christmas celebrations, I have also sought to place such activities within the broader context of all types of celebratory events. I shall return to this topic in succeeding chapters, but at present will refocus on the central meaning of calendrical festivals and, in this particular instance, on the place of Christmas in the festive calendar. Although a whole set of entertaining spectacles were built around Jesus’ birth (December 25) and the visit of the Magi (the Epiphany, January 6), one must not lose sight of the central religious meaning of the feast. If Christmas played a central role as an occasion for ludic events in twelfth century romances, for Spanish kings of the late medieval and early modern periods, the feast offered yet another opportunity to reassert and display their piety. No king was more inclined to do so than Philip II. Christmas celebrations allowed the king to make a public statement of his piety even though he was far away from his beloved El Escorial, where living as he did in an active monastery, he could punctiliously follow many Masses a day. While in Tortosa, the king privately attended (the translation of the Spanish word oir used by the sources always meant “hearing” or “listen- ing to”) a Mass on 21 December, which was, as noted earlier, the feast of St. Thomas. The next day, Sunday, December 22, 1585, the king went to the church of St. Dominic for Mass. On Christmas Day, he sat or prayed through three successive Masses and had the opportunity to worship holy relics. On the 29th of December the court went to church to pray for the Count of Paredes’ dead daughter. The king was back in church the next day to celebrate the translation of St. James. And these church visits did not preclude the private prayers and daily devotions to which the king

43 CHAPTER II was so firmly wedded throughout his life. A great deal of the king’s time during Christmas at Tortosa was thus dedicated to God. All the mock battles, dances, and displays occurred in the context of royal pious obser- vances and of the uneasy but clearly defined relationship between Philip II’s “private” devotions and his “public” manifestations of Christian piety. That there was a degree of unease we know from instances, at Tortosa and elsewhere, when for reasons of health, piety, fatigue, or simply out of a desire to be on his own tending to affairs of state, the king remained indoors and out of sight. When this happened, all ludic activities more or less ceased. When the king was in the public view, either attending a joust, going to church, or gazing from his window, the pace of civic display and festivities responded accordingly.20 Although in later chapters, I will raise the question as to whether festivals functioned as sites of power or as sites of contestation, it is clear that a symbiosis existed between royal visits and festive cycles, between the physical presence of the monarch, his subjects’ gaze upon him, and celebrations. We cannot leave Philip’s visit to Tortosa—not a royal entry in the real sense of the word—without discussing one event in which two important and enduring themes played out in unison. On December 21, after Mass in the oratory of his palace, the king attended a mock battle between Christians and Moors. The fictitious besieging of castles and ritually staged battles between Christians and Moors harkened back to a long tradition of festive forms in the Iberian Peninsula. A kind of festive play of historical memory, these reenactments in which one side dressed as Moors, even as Moorish women, and the other as Christian warriors, took place most often on the fifteenth-century Spanish frontier between Islam and Christianity. In the Hechos del condestable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, a private chronicle that told the constable’s deeds and described in exhaustive detail every celebration he sponsored, fictional battles between the two sides and even representations that involved the public humiliation of Muslims were a constant. Later we shall see in greater detail how this played out in 1460s Jaén, but some brief vignettes may highlight the way in which festive traditions served as references for each other. In Jaén the constable’s men, dressed as Moorish men and women, joined the reception parade for Henry IV’s entry into the city in 1464.21 In another event during the constable’s troubled rule over the city, two of his men, one dressed as the king of Morocco and the other as Muhammad himself, suffered public humiliation.22 I will return to Jaén later, but for now it suffices to reiterate 20 See note 9. 21 Hechos del condestable, 189–96. 22 Ibid., 98–100.

44 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS that all throughout Spain, but most frequently in the recent frontier areas between Islam and Christianity, these fictitious battles continued to be reenacted. They still are reenacted, even in Latin American processions, as was the case in late medieval and early modern Spain. The enduring military trope of the almost millennial encounter between Muslims and Christians—one in which Christians were always victorious—had now become integrated into festive traditions. Certain themes, such as in this case the mock battles between Moors and Christians, point to the continuity of some festive forms from the late medieval to the early modern period. The fact that these reenactments and dances were constants in the festive calendar—as was the running of bull and also the juego de cañas (a complicated equestrian display featuring participants dressed in Moor- ish costume riding horses in the Moorish manner)—tells us a great deal also about the construction and reconstruction of historical memories for political purposes and the use of certain festive tropes as markers of identity. After all, by the time of Philip II’s visit to Tortosa in 1585, the city had been in Christian hands for more than four centuries and the Reconquest was more than a century in the past. Yet, the Muslim threat from the Moriscos within was very much alive. The Morisco rebellion in the Alpujarras had only been put down fifteen years before, in 1570. To the south, the Moriscos of Valencia, armed to the teeth and quite bellicose, represented a permanent danger. Beyond the shores of Spain proper, Ot- toman ships and North African corsairs remained a constant threat. The fictitious battles and their forced remembrance of Christian hegemony served, through festive forms, to drive home a point to the population at large and to remind them of Christian superiority, embodied, in this particular case, in Philip II’s rule and devotion. These festive and fictitious battles between Christian and Moors, and the juego de cañas and running of bulls as well, remind us powerfully that many elements in Iberian ludic traditions were autochthonous and did not derive from Burgundian or French traditions. They also alert us powerfully to the historical memories that underlay Tortosa’s events. If festivals worked because they reiterated past celebrations and were thus comfortably familiar to the viewers, they also worked as testimonies to local histories. Richard Kagan has shown how numerous Castilian cities—Seville, Burgos, Toledo, and others—sought to construct their individual histories in a fashion deeply embedded in Renaissance historical practices of chorography. Claudia Mineo, in her study of small towns in the lordship of Villena and their responses to Philip II’s inquiries in the Relaciones topográficas, demonstrates how small towns and villages in the region of Murcia constructed short but vivid accounts of their own pasts.

45 CHAPTER II Local history, as was the case of Tortosa, was deeply grounded in the Re- conquest and in the roles that prominent families or individuals in each particular town had played as paladins in the struggle against Islam.23 Festivals were thus pregnant with history. As such, Christians besieging a tower defended by Moors resonated powerfully with the crowd’s emotions and memory. It told them of a glorious past. It told them about their present and their future. Besieging or defending castles was deeply grounded also in the imag- ery of the medieval romance. Philip II may have remembered his own playacting at Binche, where almost forty years earlier he had joyously reenacted scenes from the Amadis of Gaul, or the glorious fictitious assailing of a castle in Mantua just a few months earlier than Binche’s celebration. But there were enough Castilian precedents for Tortosa’s mock battle without the need to find links to either the Low Countries or Italy. These ranged from the fabled artificial castle built for the long-remembered festivities in Valladolid in 1428, where the Infante of Aragon, Don Enrique, held his celebrated pas d’armes, to the mock battle in Jaén on Easter Mon- day when Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo defended a tower against the mock attacks of his men, manning false siege engines, to the artificial castles displayed shortly after Philip’s entry into Benavente in 1554.24 At Tortosa, the Christians besieged the Moorish fortress from land and from the riverbanks, a reenactment of similar battles fought in 1248 Seville, even earlier in Tortosa itself, and elsewhere in a far distant but still glorious and very much alive past.

Other Calendrical Festivities I shall not at this point burden the reader with additional close readings of calendrical festivals. Easter, the Feast of St. John—which had such a signal role in the literary imaginary of the Spanish frontier in the late Middle Ages—the great celebratory cycle around Easter, they all commanded the same kind of festive displays. From carnivalesque mock battles to knightly jousts to pious celebrations, these intrinsically religious

23 See Richard L. Kagan, “Clio and the Crown: Writing History in Habsburg Spain,” in Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); see in particular the section on chorography and the attempts to write local histories in Burgos, Toledo, Seville, and elsewhere, 84–99; Claudia Mineo,” Law, Litigation, and Power: The Struggle over Municipal Privileges in Sixteenth-Century Castile,” PhD thesis, UCLA (2006). 24 For the fictitious castles in Valladolid and in Jaén, see my “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du povouir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de Mai 1428,” 525, 530 and chapters 1 and 7.

46 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS feasts provided a heady mixture of the sacred and the profane.25 Whether conflated with royal visits or entries, as was the case in Tortosa during the Christmas season in 1585, or celebrated without the royal presence, these events provided constant reminders to the population at large of the re- newal of the world, of the recurring cycle of divine and human existence. Jesus’ birth, the visit of the Magi, the lighting of candles on February 2nd (Candlemas), the beginning of Lent, Jesus’ death and resurrection were reenacted annually as a bulwark against the transient disasters of the age and of a world that waxed ever more evil. Besides the continuous displays of hierarchy and political symbols at these festivities, their recurrence provided a sense of order and continuity. Besides providing welcome relief from the drudgery of medieval and early modern daily life and offering much-needed distributions of food and alms to the poor, they as- suaged the fears of the people and helped maintain order. In a world so deeply immersed in religion, the repetition of liturgical and sacred feasts set a rhythm, providing chronological boundaries in which resistance, anger, and even disorder were rendered less threatening to those who ruled, because they were contained within the overlapping boundaries of sacred and secular space and time.

CARNIVAL AND CORPUS CHRISTI The reader will notice that two important calendrical events—Carnival and the celebration of the Corpus Christi—have not been included in this discussion of calendrical festivities, even though both were part of the liturgical calendar. The high point of Carnival (or Carnestolendas in medieval Spain) was always the eve of Ash Wednesday, although carnivals and carnivalesque motifs, as Caro Baroja has shown, proliferated throughout the year. Corpus Christi, a movable feast, would become in time the most significant of all Spanish festivals, subsuming a diversity of festive forms. Because of their importance and the link between profane carnivalesque forms and the sacred perambulations of the Corpus Christi processions, I will examine these as discrete subjects in chapter 8.

25 On St. John’s Day, see Angus MacKay, “The Ballad and the Frontier in Late Medi- eval Spain,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 53 (1976), 15–33. On other calendrical religious festivities, Julio Caro Baroja’s great book on Carnival and the different seasons in which carnivalesque celebrations were found in late medieval and early modern times offers an excellent introduction to the way in which religious themes overlapped with secular ones: Julio Caro Baroja, El carnaval (análisis histórico-cultural) (Madrid: Taurus, 1965), 289–390 et passim. For the blending of religious with popular or secular practices, see the example of Toledo in Antonio Quintanadueñas, Santos de la imperial ciudad de Toledo y su arçobispado: excelencias que goça su santa iglesia, fiestas que celebra su ilustre clero . . . (Ma- drid: P. de Val, 1651).

47 CHAPTER II

Noncalendrical Festivals Unlike calendrical events, noncalendrical celebrations functioned independently or quasi-independently of the liturgical calendar. These events can be grouped into three distinctive categories: 1) those related to royal and princely visits, similar political events, or the knightly martial play associated with noble values; 2) religious festivals or activities of a noncalendrical nature; and 3) celebrations that marked important landmarks in the life cycle of rulers, their families, or leading nobles. The most significant events in the first category were royal entries and/or princely visits and the whole assortment of structurally complex and fairly fluid festive activities that attended such occasions. Tournaments, impromptu jousts, melees, besiegings of castles, and pas d’armes (a “passage of arms,” the holding of a bridge or an arch against other knights who had been challenged to pass through it by the exercise of arms), were intrinsic to royal entries and visits, but did occur independently, absent the political coloring of an entry. Tournaments, however, remained always laden with social and ideological meanings. Because of the significance of these three kinds of celebrations in Philip II’s long reign and in the long tradition of Spanish festivals, they will be examined as separate entities in coming chapters. Entries, royal and princely visits, and the ever-popular joust were only the tip of the proverbial political iceberg. They were complemented, and often overlapped with, what one may call “political ceremonies,” such as the ascent of a king to the throne, coronations (when they took place at all), the taking of an oath, the opening of the Cortes or Cortes, the swearing in of a royal heir, and a whole host of reiterative and highly ritualized performances associated with regal power. We will have the opportunity to look in some detail at these activities in a later chapter, but only insofar as they are seen in relation to the main themes of this book, i.e., travel, festivals, and the exercise or contestation of regal authority. Among religious noncalendrical events, the first and foremost were the great ludic displays that took place during Inquisition’s autos de fe. A topic that has elicited substantial and distinguished scholarly attention, the autos de fe of the very late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were events with complex social, religious, and political meanings, remarkable theatricality, and pedagogical intent. They deserve a monograph of their own, but will come into our story only tangentially insofar as rulers participated in them. Autos de fe were of course not the only noncalendrical religious activity. The canonization of a national saint, such as the celebrations that accompanied the canonizations of Saint Teresa de Avila and Ignatius of Loyola in 1622, Fernando III’s elevation to the rank of saint by

48 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS Pope Clement X in 1671 (which we will examine in the context of the festivities held in Madrid to commemorate the event in chapter 9), or the earlier quasi-religious as well as political commemorations of the great Christian victory over the Ottoman navy at Lepanto in 1571, offered ample opportunities for whole cycles of celebrations.26 Finally, festivals associated with the life cycle represented a distinct category that will be explored in some detail towards the end of the book. One should note here at the outset, though, the deep psychological resonance of celebrating the birth of a royal heir, a wedding, or the mourning of a king’s death. These events functioned as archetypes for all humanity and were replicated at every social level in Spain and elsewhere. Whether vicari- ously or just deeply heartfelt, they have the capacity to touch large numbers of people. Think of the birthday of the English queen, her Jubilee, the weddings of Charles and Diana and William and Catherine, and of course Diana’s funeral following her tragic death. They touched thousands of British citizens and, because of the global spread of information and images, had an impact far beyond England’s shores. So it was in late medieval and early modern Spain.

Festive Traditions in Spain: Recording Festivals

One of the most puzzling questions regarding the history of festivals concerns the sweeping changes that occurred in the manner in which they were seen and recorded by contemporaries. Given that festive traditions were an intrinsic part of Spanish medieval society and that, in principle, their structure remained fairly unchanged into the early modern period, it is remarkable how dramatically descriptions of festivals and other ludic performances were transformed from the fourteenth century onwards. My argument here is not that the festivals themselves changed, although new motifs were often added over time and the spatial relation between the different protagonists (king, nobles, people) shifted in noticeable ways

26 Julio González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 3 vols. (Cordoba: Monte de Pie- dad y Caja de Ahorros de Córdoba, 1980), I: 51–52. González reports important festivities in Guadalajara, Burgos, and, of course, Seville. See also Thomas J. Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 1500–1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), which describes the great celebrations held in the city for the occasion. For the festivities held all around the western Mediterranean in honor of the victory at Lepanto (though late and quite sub- dued in Madrid), see Jenny Jordan, “Imagined Lepanto: Turks, Mapbooks, Intrigue, and Spectacular in the Sixteenth-Century Construction of 1571,” PhD dissertation, UCLA (2004). For the feasts celebrating the canonization of St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. The- resa of Avila in 1622 and the celebration marking England’s return to Catholicism, held in Toledo in 1555, see chapter 9.

49 CHAPTER II from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. Rather, what I note here is how these festivals were recorded or, to be more specific, lit- erarily represented, and the attention paid to specific details in festive structures and to the clothes and colors worn by the participants. In short, it was the representations that underwent a dramatic transformation. Chron- icles and literary works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries mention calendrical celebrations, royal visits, occasional jousts or melees, but chroniclers and writers do not, with some unusual exceptions, spend much time discussing what these festivals were all about, how they played out in front of urban crowds, what they meant, or how those participating dressed. References to festivals were typically brief, noting the event in passing without much in the way of commentary. In Castile, where we have a line of uninterrupted official royal chronicles from the reign of Alfonso X (1252–84) to that of the Catholic monarchs, one can trace this change in emphasis in quite a distinct manner. When the French king, Louis IX (1226–1270), sent his daughter to Cas- tile to marry the heir to the throne, Ferdinand (Ferdinand de la Cerda), the chronicler informs us that the princess’s cortege included her brother (later Phillip III of France), French prelates, and high nobles. We also learn that Alfonso X traveled to Logroño in the company of Prince Ed- ward (the future Edward II of England), as well as other members of the Castilian royal family to receive the French princess. After the reception in Logroño, the entire group of French and Castilian nobles rode to Bur- gos where the wedding ceremonies took place. There Alfonso X also knighted Prince Edward, his own son Ferdinand, and numerous other English and Castilian nobles.27 This must have been a sumptuous ceremony, held as it was in the impressive setting of the monastery of Las Huelgas, a royal Cistercian monastery, a putative sacred place and pan- theon for the Castilian royal house, and located in the outskirts of Bur- gos, the site of the royal chancery.28 Yet, we are told nothing about the nature of the princely entry into Logroño. Later chronicles would refer to the traditional form in which foreign princesses were received when they came to rule Castile, but our

27 Crónica de Alfonso X, 13. For Alfonso X and some passing references to this particular episode, see Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 65 et passim. For the entire thirteenth century and political symbology, see Peter Linehan, Spain, 1157–1300: A Partible Inheritance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). 28 On Las Huelgas’ place in the rituals of the Castilian monarchy, see Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 262, 303, 389, et passim. See also Antonio Rodríguez López, El real monasterio de Las Huelgas y el Hospital del Rey, 2 vols. (Burgos: Imprenta y Librería del Centro Católico, 1907).

50 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS thirteenth-century chronicler gives us no details on the hierarchical order of entry or the nature of the reception. We learn nothing about the celebration of the wedding itself, the knighting ceremonies, or the festivities that must have accompanied such events. Either such details were of no interest to those describing the events, or perhaps the simple mention of the festivities would have conveyed subtle information that is lost to us today. We note a similar paucity of descriptive details when the chronicler mentions the Infante Fernando’s death, his brother Sancho’s ascent to the throne, and his crowning by four bishops. Nor do we have a careful description of the ceremonies and rituals that accompanied Sancho’s death and burial in Toledo, or of the “rising” as king of the ineffective Ferdinand IV (1295–1312), or of the latter’s death.29 In the earlier Poem of the Cid (c.1206), the poet makes a great deal of the wedding of the Cid’s daughters, Doña Sol and Doña Elvira to the cowardly Infantes de Car- rión, but although the wedding scene serves as a confirmation of the Cid’s courage and the Infantes’ cowardice, and the aftermath of the nuptials confirms the Infantes’ unchivalrous behavior, there is no description of the wedding per se.30 Why this seeming lack of interest? Clearly chroniclers and other writers, in referring to these festivals, understood what they were. They knew, as did their audience, the patterns of celebration, the high points in a festive cycle, and the sequence of events. Implicit in the chroniclers’ accounts is that there was an understanding as to how foreign princes were to be received into the realm, how to mark an ascent to the throne, the birth of a royal heir, or the passing of a king. As to dress, contemporaries knew the importance of certain fabrics and colors, even if chroniclers and poets often neglected to inform the reader of them. At about the same time as these laconic accounts of vestments and adornments were written, the Castilian Cortes enacted sumptuary legislation that set strict codes designating certain colors and fabrics as for royal use only, and banning others for use by merchants, Jews, and Muslims.31 That said, we still have not answered the question of why later writers, from the late fourteenth century onward—the chroniclers of John II of Castile (1406–1454), or the private anonymous chronicler of the Consta-

29 Crónica de Alfonso X, 61, 69; Crónica de Sancho IV, 89–90; Crónica de Fernando IV, 93, 169. 30 PoemadeCid, Spanish text edited by Ramón Menéndez Pidal with an English translation by W. S. Merwin (New York: New American Library, 1959), 118–208. 31 On sumptuary legislation establishing sartorial restrictions in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Castile, see CortesdelosantiguosreinosdeLeón y Castilla, 5 vols. (Ma- drid: Imprenta y Estereotipia de M. Rivadeneyra, 1861–63), for vols I and II: 55, 57–59, 63, 68, 79, 454, et passim.

51 CHAPTER II ble Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, or Calvete de Estrella who illustrated the young Philip’s voyages to Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries in 1548–50 or Henry Cock in his accounts of 1585 and 1592 or any of the many other authors of royal and private accounts—why they paid such close attention to the make-up of festivals. Why did they see fit to record everything from the hierarchical order of royal entries and princely visits to the most minute details of the color and quality of vestments? A careful reader would begin to note the first small signs of this change as early as the 1320s. We get an inkling of what is to come in Ramón Muntaner’s elaborate description of Alfonso IV’s coronation in Zaragoza in 1327 in his incomparable Crònica. There are also early hints of a more complex literary representation of festivities in the account of Alfonso XI’s royal entry into Seville, which, although brief and lacking in details, signals a shift in the chronicler’s emplotting of the king’s travels and the festivities surrounding his presence in the city. Alfonso XI’s coronation in 1332, as odd and unexpected an event as his entry into Seville in 1327, elicited the chronicler’s descriptive powers, in ways unusual in the Castilian tradition. These accounts, dating from the 1320s and 1330s, do not at all match, however, the deluge of details that would be found half a century later and would become a regular feature of historical and literary fantasy. Think just for a moment of the Amadis of Gaul’s inventiveness—of the late medieval and early modern world. I must confess that I am unable to provide a single explanation for this dramatic shift. On the one hand, it is clear that the late Middle Ages and the early modern period saw an exponential increase in the number of festivals, in their complexity, and in the amount of display and solemnity attached to them. Whether in Renaissance Italy, the courts of Burgundy, England, the Iberian realms, or elsewhere, diverse political and cultural factors propelled a desire for these spectacles. To what extent was the rise to the throne or to power of illegitimate families, outsiders, or cadet branches of the royal family responsible? Such was the case with the Tras- támaras in Castile and the Crown of Aragon in the second half of the fourteenth century and early fifteenth century, the Tudors in England, the Medici in Florence, and the Sforza in Milan. What prompted this desire for festive displays? Not unlike modern tyrants who seek to legitimize their rule through great monuments and public works, or their Re- naissance despotic counterparts who, as Burckhardt has shown, patron- ized men of talent and commissioned monumental public works as a way to justify their rule, the wave of new comers to the ranks of power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and their desire to give expression to their power may have been one of the causes for the multiplication of fes-

52 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS tivities and their representation.32 To what extent the lethal nature of warfare and the disregard for rank and honor inherent in the new military technology made the tournament a far more desirable venue for a display of knightly prowess than a battlefield is also a question worth ask- ing. By the fourteenth century a crossbow, an arrow shot from a long bow, and artillery had leveled the playing field and made peasants the equal of lords. A nobleman no longer fought against his equals but could be slain, as happened at Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt, and elsewhere, by uncouth longbowmen or by mercenary Italian troops. There was clearly no fun or honor in that. In many respects, the retreat into the ever more fantastic world of the festival, with its elaborate protocols, rules, and, in many cases, the strict exclusion of the lower classes, who had to content themselves with playing the part of an admiring crowd gazing respectfully on deeds of their betters, provided a welcome refuge from the social chaos and carnage of late medieval and early modern warfare. Festivals also allowed for the revival and continuity of courtly traditions. One must not neglect this literary aspect. The fact that chroniclers wrote about these spectacles with such elation, often to the neglect of important political developments, serves as a powerful reminder of the drive to aestheticize these unique events. By narrating them in such exquisite detail and with such obvious literary relish, those in command of the written word—most often royal agents attached to the court—created a space between their own circle and the masses below. The latter, the common people, could now kill nobles in the battlefield with relative frequency, but they were still excluded from these cultural constructs, or, at least, restricted to the role of onlookers.

Courtly Literature, Chivalry, and the New Interest in Narrating Festivals

We should not dismiss the importance of the revival of courtly literature in the fourteenth-and-fifteenth centuries, nor should we ignore the orig- inality of Iberian models in the revival of chivalrous forms. Paralleling the chroniclers’ new concerns with depicting festivals and clothing in vivid details, two interrelated developments helped fuel the appetite for spectacles. In a later chapter, we will have the opportunity to examine in

32 Jacob Burckhardt, TheCivilizationoftheRenaissanceinItaly, trans. S.G.C. Middle- more (New York: Modern Library Edition, 2002), 7–40.

53 CHAPTER II detail some fifteenth-century romances and the resonances between fiction and the knightly life. Here it will suffice to note that chroniclers wrote within a cultural context that, from the mid-fourteenth century onwards, consciously sought to revive a literary chivalrous tradition inherited from twelfth-century courtly romances. Huizinga has master- fully demonstrated the impact that literary models had on the lifestyle of the nobility in Flanders and Burgundy. The same was true in Iberia. There romances even inspired the lower nobility and some well-to-do bourgeois to imitate the ethos of their betters.33 This was, of course, a Western European phenomenon. Froissart’s dramatic account of the Hundred Years War is a veritable celebration of knightly prowess, even if his enthusiasm for courtly deeds cannot fully obscure the wanton carnage of that war or the dishonorable actions of many of its protagonists. With equal vigor he described feats of arms, the awful deeds of rebellious peasants and a queen’s entrance into Paris in the later fourteenth century.34 In Froissart’s account of the war, heralds stood on the fringes of fierce battles to record for posterity the manly deeds of noble participants. The emphasis here is on the word record, that is, to bear witness to courtly deeds, for what we see from the mid-fourteenth century onward is the conscious recording of royal and princely celebrations and deeds for very specific ideological purposes. Chroniclers often times were lyrical poets as well. Or, as was the case with Pero López de Ayala in Castile and Ramón Muntaner in Catalonia, they were full participants in the political and armed conflicts of the age. López de Ayala, chronicler par excellence of the mid-fourteenth century and the main political ideologue for the usurping dynasty of the Trastámaras, played an active role in the civil wars that agitated Castile in the 1350s and 1360s. His copious literary production covers a broad range of genres: from satirical poetry and chronicles to reflections on court life. Muntaner, whose exhaustive description of Alfonso IV’s coronation in 1327 I have already noted as an important landmark in the recording of regal celebrations,

33 Johan Huizinga, TheAutumnoftheMiddleAges, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For Spain (mostly Catalo- nia) and the circularity between fiction and knightly deeds, see Martín de Riquer’s enchanting, Caballeros andantes españoles (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe S.A., 1967), 15–51, 168–70; for a short summary of literary developments in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Spain, see Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300–1474 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 164–95 and chapter 6. 34 For Froissart, see Jean Froissart, Chronicles, selected, translated, and edited by Geof- frey Brereton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978). New scholarly editions have been in the making since 1972 and 1991 by George T. Diller, and there is a recent one of Book III by Peter Ainsworth (2007). We will revisit Froissart’s description of the entry of a new queen and the festivities that the entry prompted later.

54 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS glorified the martial deeds of Catalans in the eastern Mediterranean. He had himself been prominent among the intrepid Catalans and Valencians who advanced the mercantile and political interests of the Crown of Aragon in the western Mediterranean and played a role in the far-flung Catalan expeditions to, and conquest of, the Duchy of Athens.35 Should we be surprised that these writers’ experiences as warriors and their new sensibility to display and gesture would find expression in new ways of representing royal power and in exuberant descriptions of festive forms and dress? This new, or rather, recovered awareness of knightly display aroused in the chroniclers, and obviously in their audiences as well, an unquench- able thirst for chivalrous details. It was a taste that had its roots in the late Middle Ages and only grew in intensity with the transition to the early modern period. In this, as in the case of social and economic structures, there was no abrupt change between one period and the other. As Rich- ard Kagan most graciously and usefully commented, this continuity is also evident in the increased use of ceremonial armor in the sixteenth century—think of Titian’s famous portraits of Charles V and Philip II in armor—at a time when real armor had been rendered useless by new weapons technology. Philip II wore elaborate armor (which could also be used in jousts and tournaments) at the battle of Saint Quentin.36 Of course, it would be easy to find some signs of these developments towards a more detailed representation of knightly deeds in the period before the 1320s and 1330s. In Castile the Poem of the Cid, the Poema de Fernán González, the foundational chronicles of Ximénez de Rada and Lucas de Tuy, written between the early 1200s and the mid-thirteenth century, provide abundant references to heroic deeds and chivalrous behavior. James (Jaume) I (1213–1276), ruler of the Crown of Aragon and conqueror of Valencia in 1238, in his LibredelsFeyts, or Ramón

35 For Pero (Pedro) López de Ayala, see his Rimado de palacio, Germán Orduna, ed. (Madrid: Castalia, 1987), which includes a substantial introduction and a most valuable study of López de Ayala’s life and works. See also Germán Orduna and José Luis Moure’s superb new edition of Pedro López de Ayala, Crónica del rey don Pedro y del rey don En- rique, su hermano, hijos del rey don Alfonso onceno (Buenos Aires: Ediciones INCIPIT, 1994–1997). For Muntaner, see Ramón Muntaner, Crónica, Vicent Josep Escarti, ed. (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1999), 2 vols. 36 National Gallery, Washington, DC, 2009 exhibit, “The Art of Power: Royal Ar- mors and Portraits from Imperial Spain.” As the gallery’s director stated, the use of armor — in this case ceremonial armor and pictorial representations of armor — is an articulation of the sovereign’s power. I was guided to this by one of my anonymous readers. Although I sought to obtain the catalogue, I was unable to do so. The virtual tour of the exhibit and the material still available on the National Gallery’s website compensated somewhat for the absence of the real catalogue.

55 CHAPTER II Llull’s influential proto-novel,Blanquerna, do as much for the eastern kingdoms.37 But for these references to knightly behavior to be rendered into elaborate descriptions other things were necessary. Out of these mid- thirteenth century to mid-fourteenth century origins, a growing interest in defining knighthood—what Jesús Rodríguez Velasco has formidably described as a debate on knighthood—begins to make inroads into the literary imagining of late medieval Castilians, Catalans, Aragonese, and Valencians. From Alfonso X’s Siete partidas to Juan Manuel’s Libro de los estados to the aforementioned Blanquerna, there was a veritable outburst of works that keenly sought to define what knighthood was. Also, and far more pertinent to my argument on the relationship between war and festivals, there was a revival of chivalry and a new interest in the manner in which knighthood was to be lived and displayed. It is in fact possible to trace in careful detail—Rodríguez Velasco has done this—the development of written legal and cultural definitions of knighthood and their impact on the culture of festivals and on descriptions of that culture. One can see the impact that this discourse had on shaping festivals and on the appropriation of literary themes in specific instances—as for example at Binche, when the young prince Philip (later Philip II) reenacted passages from the Amadis of Gaul. Whether these intense literary representations of festivals reflected a general cultural obsession with knightly virtues and literary fiction, or whether it was prompted by a “new” nobility’s (emerging as it did in Castile in the second half of the fourteenth century) desire to newly define and legitimate their rank, it is difficult to say. Both explanations are possibly correct. After all, the protagonist of Rodríguez Velasco’s discussion of treatises on knighthood, Diego de Valera (d.1488), was most probably of Converso origin.38 My observations here serve only as a preliminary suggestion of why chroniclers began, from the 1320s onward, to pay increasing attention to festive cycles and to redirect their energy from tedious blow by blow political accounts and faithful description of royal movement and noble deeds to extensive panegyrics of feasts. There are two additional pieces of evidence that may be added. First, around that critical period of the mid-fourteenth century, confraternities and brotherhoods began to proliferate throughout Iberian realms. This was, of course, not exclusively an Iberian phenomenon. It can be found,

37 Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 180–83. Also James I, Libre dels feyts del rey en Jacme (Barcelona: Universidad, 1972); Ramón Lull, Blanquerna; there is a 1926 English translation with an introduction by E.A. Peers, edited (with a chronology and bibliography) by Robert Irwin (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988). 38 See the descriptions of the events of Binche in Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje II, 1–69 and chapter 7.

56 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS and much earlier, throughout medieval Western Europe.39 But I do not refer here necessarily to the emergence of guilds as economic organizations with some pious components. What I mean is the genesis of mercantile, noble, and non-noble brotherhoods that, in spite of their pious origins and original intent, also included elements of social display and festivity. Their activities and annual celebrations became part and parcel of a new performance model in towns throughout the peninsula. In the city of Burgos, which is the area that I know best, one association or confraternity/fraternity of leading families, merchants, and municipal officers—namely, that of our Lady of Gamonal—in the late thirteenth century provides almost no information on their “public” (if one may use such a term) activities or manner of dress. Less than half a century later, the bourgeois brotherhood of non-noble knights of the Santísimo and Santiago (1338) conveys a very different sense of their use of urban space for their parades, as well as a new understanding of the role of festive displays that is strikingly different from the confraternity’s earlier incarnation as Our Lady of Gamonal. The membership lists and the accompanying portraits of the “Hermandad del Santísimo y Santia- go’s” rules provide us with an inside look into Burgos’s social and familial networks, places of habitation, and information about the age of those who belonged to the brotherhood. I have already written on this topic and there is no need to explicate once again the meaning of this bourgeois yet courtly brotherhood.40 Rodriguez Velasco’s recent book on confraternities and brotherhoods in mid-fourteenth century Castile magisterially elucidates aspects of these associations, most importantly the genesis and early development of the knightly order of La Banda, a topic hitherto ignored or at best incorrectly understood.41 For our purposes, there are two aspects of the brotherhood of the San- tísimo and Santiago that deserve attention: one, individual portraits of the brotherhood’s members reveal a new sensitivity to dress and to the color of the garments. A towering artistic achievement for the period, these portraits reveal the extent to which the noble ethos had filtered

39 The historiography on the rise of confraternities and guilds in the rest of Europe is extensive. For example, see the exhaustive treatment by Gilles G. Meersseman and Gian Piero Pacini, Ordo fraternitatis: confraternite e pietàdei laici nel Medioevo (Roma: Herder edi- trice e libreria, 1977), 3 vols. 40 See T. F. Ruiz, “The Transformation of the Castilian Municipalities: The Case of Burgos, 1248–1350,” Past & Present 77 (1977), 17–20; Teofilo F. Ruiz,Crisis and Con- tinuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 237–55. 41 Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, Poética de la orden de caballería. La regulación de las instituciones caballerescas (Madrid: Akal, 2008), chapters 4, 5, and 6. An English translation has already been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

57 CHAPTER II down to the middling sorts. Mounted on battle horses, carrying lances and displaying coat of arms with the colors and heraldic symbols of the great mid-fourteenth-century mercantile families of Burgos, the members of the brotherhood were expected to parade through the town at least once a year on a designated day and to do so while bohordando, that is, while engaging in a mock military display of horse charges and countercharges.42 One does not need to gloss this description in any detail. The pictorial record provides vivid evidence on the relationships between these festive displays, martial games, and political power (figure 3). All of Burgos’s municipal officers belonged to the brotherhood, and all lived in specific neighborhoods of the city—around the cathedral in the commercial heart of the city and along the road to Compostela. Most were related, either by blood or marriage, creating a powerful oligarchic and familial clan that dominated the affairs of the city. Their festive displays on horseback served as a constant reminder to other of Burgos’s inhabitants—who fought on foot (peones) and were forbidden to wear the colors displayed by brotherhood—of their social, political, and martial superiority.43 The 1338 rules of the brotherhood of the Santísimo y Santiago and the large collection of individual portraits that accompanies the membership list is a doubly valuable piece of evidence. It provides both a careful depiction of a moment in time (1338), and it serves as a basis for comparison with developments in the next century. The brotherhood’s rules and the portraits of its bourgeois members also inform us of the growing aristocratization of urban non-noble elites and, more to the point for the purposes of this chapter, of the closer attention paid to descriptions of “public” and martial activities and dress. The membership lists of the earlier confraternity of Our Lady of Gamonal—founded in 1285, though its first extant rules date from 1305—are almost replicated in the 1338 brotherhood of Santiago. Yet in 1305, although already aiming for exclusivity and for uniting the ruling families of the city, the rules of the order were

42 See note 37 above. The text and portraits of the members are found in the Libro de la Real Hermandad o del Santísimo y Santiago, extant in the Municipal Archive of Burgos (AMB), which I saw long ago while doing research on the city’s history. There is a beautiful and difficult to obtain facsimile edition. For the text of the rules of the 1338 brotherhood, see Texto cronológico de las tres reglas, por las que sucesivamente rigió su vida corporativa la Real Cofradía del “Santísímo y Santiago” de la ciudad de Burgos, Ismael García Rámila, ed. (Burgos: Imprenta Provincial, 1970). For the text of the rules of the confraternity or brotherhood of Santa María de Gamonal, see Julián García y Sáinz de Baranda, “Primi- tiva regla escrita de la Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de Gamonal,” Boletín de la comisión de monumentos artísticos de la provincia de Burgos 65 (1938), 158–64 and below. 43 Ruiz, “The Transformation of the Castilian Municipalities,” 17–20.

58 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS

Figure 3. Non-noble knights, as portrayed in the rule book of the Cofradía de la Real Hermandad or del Santísimo y Santiago (1338). Courtesy Archivo Municipal de Burgos; photos by the author, 1972. far more focused on pious activities and funeral arrangements than on martial displays and sartorial representations.44 The 1305 rule, now available in an annotated and lavishly illustrated facsimile edition, set a modest entry fee (2 maravedís and a pound of wax), called for a communal and festive meal in July, and a celebration of the feast of the Virgin in September that required members “on the eve [of the Virgin’s feast] to take a bull to Gamonal” and give all of its meat to the poor. Further instructions, and penalties for failure to abide by them, covered how to attend the burial of deceased members of the confraternity and how to celebrate funeral Masses. The rules conclude with a detailed account of Don Miguel Estevan’s donations and a listing of the sort of properties that were bequeathed to endow the confraternity. The 1305 membership lists that follow the rules include most of the town’s leading families and, as noted earlier, municipal officials and many others who either themselves as older men, or their descendants would join the brotherhood of the Santísimo and Santiago in 1338. The 1305 list includes

44 “Primitiva regla escrita de la Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de Gamonal,” 158–64.

59 CHAPTER II however a few individuals, such as Johan Pérez, vaynero (sheath maker) and Fernán Martínez, sellero, whose membership in Our Lady of Gam- onal suggests that at that time the brotherhood was not yet socially or politically restrictive.45 By 1338, while most of the membership remained the same (albeit the craftsmen were now absent), the ways in which exclusiveness and martial abilities were displayed and inscribed in the rules of the brotherhood of Santiago had been dramatically altered. This is yet another small piece of evidence hinting at a mental shift in how not only festive forms but also personal appearance and representation were perceived. Although these changes were grounded in an earlier age, they began to be inscribed in chronicles and fraternity rules from the fourteenth century onwards. This development and the concomitant aristocratization of urban elites, most obvious in their heightened sensibility towards self-representation— something somewhat akin to what Greenblatt has described as “self- fashioning”—is most evident in the successive membership lists of the confraternity of Our Lady of Santa María of Gamonal, now renamed Our Lady Santa María de Gamonal de los Caballeros (of the knights) throughout the sixteenth century and in the accompanying pictorial representations of some of its members.46 The membership lists, the earliest of which is dated 1515, work in two distinct ways. First, they are a written record of Burgalese society and political influence, listing, as was the case in 1305 and 1338, municipal officialsalcaldes ( , regidores, escribanos), family connections, and even those members of the brotherhood who were away in the New World. Second, they provide a veritable necrological list of Burgos’ elite. We also learn how one gained admission to the ranks of what had become an exclusive club, its membership limited to a specific number. Usually young adults inherited their fathers’ places, as for example, “on 4 January of 1527 Gon- zalo de Lerma, citizen of this city [Burgos], joined the confraternity succeeding (por subçesyon) of his father, Hernando de Lerma, who in holy glory be. Paid the florin (of admission) to Juan Pardo de Soria, majordo- mos [of the confraternity].”47 Although this information provides an

45 Ibid. 46 Regla de la cofradía de Nuestra Señora de Gamonal, de Burgos y Libro en que se pintan los caballeros cofrades (facsimile of the manuscripts #22.257 and 22.258 at the Biblioteca nacional (Madrid) (Burgos: A.G. AMABAR, S.L., 1995). This edition (limited to 1,200 copies) consists of two volumes. The first is a study and edition of the text. The second is a facsimile of the original document(s). The portraits are veritable pieces of art. See pages 37–55 for the lists of members in the sixteenth century. 47 Regla de la cofradía de Nuestra Señora de Gamonal, de Burgos, 41. There are numerous such examples throughout the successive lists of members in the sixteenth century.

60 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS entry into the rich social history of Burgos and of early modern Spain, it does not answer the question that concerns us here, namely why from the mid-fourteenth century onwards, chroniclers and literary authors became so keenly concerned with descriptions of festivals and of the vestments of participants. The accompanying portraits found in the “Libroenquese pintan los caballeros cofrades” (literally the book in which the confraternity knights are painted) are more elaborate versions of the extensive collection of individual portraits extant from 1338. For our purpose what is most significant is that every knight, as had also been the case in 1338, is depicted lance in hand riding a galloping horse in a posture that closely resembles the riders of the Real Hermandad or Royal Brotherhood of Santiago in 1338. That is, the knights are represented in the act of bohor- dar, engaged in a martial game that was a well-known fixture in late medieval and early modern Spanish festivals, and, as shall be seen in chapter 7, closely related to the omnipresent juego de cañas. Further, the persistence of artistic tropes and the reiteration of specific images, postures, and purposeful self-representation for over two hundred years between 1338 and the sixteenth century are remarkable. So are, for that matter, the links between far more lofty medieval noble orders and those of the early modern period. Contemporaneous with the creation of the Real Hermandad or confraternity of the Santísimo y San- tiago, Alfonso XI, whose reign plays such a significant role in the evolution of festive cycles and in their literary representation in the peninsula, established the Order of la Banda, the first chivalrous order formed in medieval Western Europe, preceding far better known knightly orders such as that of the Star, the Garter, and the Golden Fleece. Rodríguez Velasco’s aforementioned recent book provides the most accurate and insightful reading of the order’s origins and brings to light aspects of its initial organization hitherto unknown to scholars of the period. Alfonso XI’s chronicler, in one of those early bursts of interest in more complex descriptions of festivals, wrote a detailed account of royal and noble garments and of chivalrous activities, describing the foundation of the order in terms that, within the chronicle’s thematic thrust, are new, but that parallel the significance of dress and knightly consciousness displayed in the Real Hermandad’s portraits of 1338. In 1330, the chronicler tells us that the king traveled to the region of Alava to accept the lordship of the region in an open field (the field of Ar- riaga) as it was customary for the men of Alava, nobles and peasants, to freely choose their lord. The king received the people of Alava as his vassals—which in Castile meant something different than it did in other parts of the medieval West—and, in return, he granted privileges to the region and named royal officials to administer the land. The highly ritu-

61 CHAPTER II alized gathering at Arriaga, redolent of tradition and linking lordship and service, served as a perfect framework for Alfonso XI’s actions a few days after. The chronicle tells us that while the king was in Vitoria: . . . he learned that in the past those in the realms of Castile and Leon had always used a menester de caballería (literally, “the business of knighthood”), but that they [the knights of Castile and Leon] had abandoned these practices until his (Alfonso’s) time . . . thus, he ordered that some knights and squires in his retinue wear a banda (a sash) on their garments, and the king would also do so. And while at Vitoria he ordered those knights and squires that he had chosen to dress in vestments (pannos) with a sash that the king had given them. And the king did so as well. The first vestments he gave them were white and the sash dark (black). And to these knights the king gave every year two vestments with a sash. The banda was the width of a hand . . . running from the left shoulder to the waist, and these people (those who wore these distinctive garments) were called the knights of the Banda, and they were given a rule (ordenamiento) that included many good things and all the deeds of knighthood. And when they invested the knights with the banda, they had to take an oath and promise that they would keep all the rules of chivalry that were written in the rules. And the king did this, because men, greedy (cobdiciando) to have that sash would have reason to do chivalrous things. And it was the case later that to those knights and squires who undertook deeds of arms against the king’s enemies . . . the king gave them the banda, and gave them much honor. Thus, all men wished to do chivalrous deeds to gain that honor (membership in the order of the Banda) and the king’s favor.48 I beg the reader’s pardon for such a long paraphrasing of the chronicle’s short passage describing Alfonso XI’s foundation of the Order of the Banda. In later chapters, we will have an opportunity to revisit chivalry and chivalrous deeds, but, at present, the chronicle’s unexpected burst of detail and its attention to the colors of the garments to be worn by the members of the Order serve as a telling sign of those new sensitivities to chivalrous display and description with which I have been so redundantly overwhelming you throughout this chapter. In the short description, embedded in a chronicle’s narrative of political and personal events, there are clues to the manner in which festivals and other ludic and chivalrous deeds were emplotted. The chronicler begins with an appeal to long-established tradition: “. . . he learned that in the past . . . ,” a device that served often to introduce descriptions of en-

48 Crónica de Alfonso XI, 231–32.

62 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS tries, jousts, and the like. When the Infanta Doña Blanca entered Brivi- esca in the 1440s, for example, the chronicler insisted that the manner of her reception follow ancient practices, that it be done “as it was customary to do when foreign princes came to rule the land.”49 It is of course not possible to retrieve that first moment that set a tradition going. My own sense is that the structure of festivals and chivalrous behavior was lifted from twelfth-century romances and integrated into the royal and princely courts’ reenactments of courtly literature. In some respects, these changes, ongoing since the late twelfth century, came to fruition in most Iberian realms by the early fourteenth century.50 Similarly, the revival of Roman law and Roman history that also began in the twelfth century, led to a more widespread knowledge and greater awareness of sacred history, which provided powerful examples to be imitated. The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, the translation of the Ark of Covenant, and other ritual exercises made the description of festive entries and knightly deeds even more attractive of imitation as legacies from a distant and often sacred past. Alfonso XI did not really create anything new, although perhaps he did. He revived, or so he claimed, traditions that have been neglected or lost with the passing of time. Other times he was sensitive to developments elsewhere in the festive tradition of Western Europe. His formal entry into Seville in 1327 was paradigmatic for these events in Castile, but probably inspired by Alfonso IV’s coronation. In establishing the Order of the Banda, in his formal entry into Seville and later coronation, he again powerfully linked a code of behavior, display, and honor with royal service and loyalty to the king. Those who “undertook deeds of arms against the king’s enemies” received the order of the Banda. The feudal and courtly aspects—in a realm where feudal ties did not really exist—of the Order of the Banda, its exclusiveness (you were selected by the king and could not buy your way into it, as you could into Our Lady or Gamonal, or at least not openly), and the distinctive customs that identified and set its membership apart from the rest of the nobility, served as important additional tools of rulership, as did the ritual festivities that accompanied the activities of the order.51

49 See note 16. 50 On these mental shifts or sense of the new, see my From Heaven to Earth: The Reor- dering of Castilian Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chapters 1 and 2. 51 On this point see, once again, Rodríguez Velasco, Poética de la orden de caballería, chapters 4 and 5.

63 CHAPTER II

The Space of Festivals

Before we look further at the diverse categories of festivals, their origins, and meanings, a brief note on the topography of festive events is in order. The choice of the spaces in which festivals took place was never arbitrary. Overlapping spaces, commingling different ideological messages, conveyed specific meanings and associated an entry, a tournament, a procession with the symbolic importance inherent in the spaces it occupied places.52 This use of space, always scripted, always pregnant with symbolic meanings, could in itself be the topic for a book. For our purposes here, it is enough to distinguish a series of related and interconnected spaces in which specific festivities took place. There are three important ritual spaces that often flowed into each other, becoming, at times, indis- tinguishable. One was the space of the court. Wherever the court was located, whether in a city, a small town, or an encampment in the field, the space became immediately marked by the royal presence. This space was infinitely malleable. It was the king’s presence (and that of his entourage) that created this place where certain protocols, rituals, and gestures were to be both observed and performed. In many respects, the peripatetic movement of the court in an entry or a visit to a powerful noble ally created special circumstances and called for specific responses from those in positions of authority who welcomed the king and from the crowds that validated the king’s performance by their participation. The second category was that of sacred space. A church, the route of the Corpus Christi, a pilgrimage site, or a famous shrine embodied the charismatic power of the divine. In the Middle Ages and deep into the early modern period, royal (secular) and ecclesiastical (sacred) spaces often overlapped. It is not a coincidence that the ceremonial route of the royal or comital entry into Barcelona and other Spanish towns was often the same as the route of the Corpus Christi processions. Similarly, country and urban spaces were joined into one contiguous space by the character of the entry and by attempts to either bring the country into the city, or urban symbols and festive modes into the countryside. This was often the

52 There is a vast literature on the role of space and topography. See for example Land- scape and Power, W.J.T. Mitchell, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, Paul C. Adams, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and the monumental and multivolume work edited by Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992); available in an English translation, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

64 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS case in Jaén during the many festivities offered by the constable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo. Similarly, attempts to make rural spaces to flow into urban ones was always inherent in the royal entry with its traditional expectation of a ritual meeting at quite a distance outside the city walls. The third space was civic. Urban squares, plazas in front of churches, and other sites became imbued with either political and/or religious meanings in the context of ludic events. The main square in Valladolid, for example, became the theatrical setting for many of the festive events of fifteenth-century Castile. The square by the palace of the Montcadas in Barcelona had also extraordinary political valence. It was there that most kings stopped to take their oath as rulers of Barcelona and Catalo- nia. It was there that they rested to receive the homage of the great men of the city or to see the displays of its proud artisans. It was there that Philip II, on his knees, worshiped a piece of the True Cross brought from the adjacent monastery of St. Francis. In Madrid the Plaza Mayor, the space outside the palace of the Buen Retiro, the convent of the Jeróni- mos, and that of the Descalzas became integrated ritual spaces for the acclamation of a new king and for other great symbolic festivals. In Toledo, the plaza of Zocodover became deeply bound with the rituals of civic and regal festivities.53 Space always mattered. Where celebrations were to be held was a decision that required careful calculation; locations were, like every other part of a feast, carefully scripted. In the many examples found in the subsequent chapters, we will see that festivals had a clearly determined topography selected to reinforce the ideology of celebrations. One was as important as the other.

Origins of Festivals in Spain: Autochthonous or Foreign?

The early foundation of the Order of the Banda (1330) throws light upon a thorny and elusive question. There has long been an argument (never backed by the evidence) that Spanish festivals, celebratory cycles, and chivalrous activities, such as the tournament, did not originate in the peninsula but were most often imported from elsewhere. The alleged sources of Spanish ludic events shifted depending upon the chronological context: France and its courtly tradition were the source early on, or Re-

53 On the Plaza Mayor and its place in royal rituals, see Jesús R. Escobar, The Plaza MayorandtheShapingofBaroqueMadrid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 6 for the plaza as a political symbol. See also the wonderful book by María José del Río Barredo, Madrid urbs regia. La capital ceremonial de la monarquía católica (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2000), a book to which I will return in some detail in chapter 9.

65 CHAPTER II naissance Italy, mostly through the conduit of Alfonso V’s (1416–58) court in Naples, and then in the early modern period it was Italian and Burgundian festive traditions that were imitated. In the fluid culture of late medieval Western Europe, it is hard to pinpoint a specific place of origin, though most certainly the troubadour culture of Occitania and the Angevin-French romances of the twelfth century did have a powerful influence in the evolution of festive traditions throughout medieval Europe. Having already argued against this idea of cultural centers and peripheries in the past, I do not wish to reengage in the debate. One could of course complicate the issue by pointing to the influence of Arabic-Judaic lyrical and amatory poetry coming out of Spain, to the impact that Roman culture in general and Ovid in particular had on the origins of troubadour and courtly culture, or to the obvious fact that Oc- citanian culture was essentially also Catalan culture. All of this would lead only to a tedious, unnecessary, and unproductive discussion. True, there was nothing in the peninsula that approached the complexities of the festivals and jousts organized for the young Philip at Mantua, Brussels, Antwerp, or Binche. Calvete de Estrella, who describes the young prince’s progress through Spanish Italy and Flanders, frequently uses such phrases as “never seen before.” His descriptions often denote the novelty of displays, whether fireworks, fantastic constructions, or ludic features. But, as I shall endeavor to show in subsequent chapters, the issue was not one of the basic structure of festive displays. One may (and I will) show Castilian and Catalan/Aragonese precedents. The question is one more of scale than of origins. This is of course not to deny that Spaniards borrowed freely from other traditions. They did and with obvious relish. France, Italy, and Burgundy had roles in shaping, altering, and adding to Spanish festive traditions. But there were certainly autochthonous elements as well, and these should not be neglected. The order of the Banda was one, predating, as has been noted, similar developments in other parts of Europe. Before Mantua, Brussels, or Binche, before Al- fonso V’s Renaissance entry into Naples, there was the fantastic feast held in Valladolid in 1428, and Alfonso XI’s dramatic and long delayed entry into Seville in 1327. The twelfth century cantigas de amigo and cantigas de escarnio in Galicia, and Ramón Llull’s late-thirteenth-century chivalrous proto-novel, Blanquerna, are reminders that festive and courtly traditions were either native or found fertile ground and flourished in Iberia. The world that I wish to uncover in succeeding chapters was a bricolage of many different traditions. Some were native to Spain. Others had Islamic origins. All of these were transformed by centuries of contact between Christian, Jewish, and Islamic cultures in the hothouse environ-

66 THE MEANING OF FESTIVALS ment of Iberia. Other strains came from France, England, Italy, and the highly symbolic and festive traditions developed in Burgundy in the twi- light of the Middle Ages. The results were never purely imitative; rather, they were complex, at times even contradictory, but always dazzling and intriguing. To these results we now turn.

67 ❊ CHAPTER III ❊ Royal Entries, Princely Visits, Triumphal Celebrations in Spain, c. 1327–1640

Shortly after reaching fourteen years of age, declaring his majority, and beginning the task of putting an end to the nefarious and greedy rule of his tutors, the new young king, Alfonso XI (1312–1350), toured his realm, seeking to restore order throughout Castile and Leon. His perambulations through his assorted kingdoms led him from Valladolid to Burgos, and from there to Toro. Along the way he meted out harsh justice to unruly nobles and arranged his betrothal to the daughter of the always-troublesome In- fante Don Juan Manuel (a wedding soon forsaken because of Don Juan Manuel’s treachery and ambitions). Alfonso forcefully restored order in Se- govia, punishing with mutilation, beheading, and burning at the stake those who had attempted to burn the cathedral. Dealing equally severely with nobles and urban oligarchs, the young king offered a glimmer of hope to a land devastated by years of civil war and contentious regencies.1 In 1327, Alfonso XI, after fairly successful campaigns to restore royal authority, came to Seville, one of the most important cities in Castile and the unofficial capital of all of Western Andalusia. Alfonso XI’s chronicles dedicate a very short chapter (less than a page) to the king’s entry into the city, but the chronicler’s description is novel in its detail and unparalleled by any of the chronicles covering the reigns of Alfonso XI’s father, grandfather, and great grandfather. The chronicler writes that the coming of the king was ardently wished for, and that his royal visit and formal entry into the city pleased many, as he was well beloved by both ricos hombres (the magnates) and the commons or community (comunidades). We must be wary of the chronicler’s partisan description for, as we know, Alfonso XI’s forceful administration was based, in part, on limiting the power of the high nobility. We are also explicitly told that the general pattern of the king’s entry into Seville did not differ much from how other Castil- ian kings had entered other towns in the realm for the first time. Et( como

1 There are to date no full biographies or studies of Alfonso XI. It is one of the most important gaps in the history of late medieval Castile. A short summary and account of his reign and reforms can be found in Teofilo F. Ruiz,Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300– 1474 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 57–63. The chronicle’s description of the events related in this initial paragraph come from Crónica de Alfonso XI, 198–204.

68 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS quier que lo ficieren en algunas villas del regno.) Seville, the chronicle added, “being one of the noblest cities in the world, having always [among its inhabitants] men of great nobility, and suffering greatly during the king’s minority,” organized an entry worthy of its citizens’ love for the king, knowing, as they did, that they were now safe from anarchy after a long period of troubles.2 The king was thus received into the city with much happiness and many dances. The city commissioned numerous sculptures of beasts that were done so well that “they seemed to be alive.” Alfonso XI was escorted into the city by many knights who, with lance and shield, came out of the city bohordando (engaging in equestrian demonstration), not unlike the non-noble knights of the Real Hermandad in 1338 Burgos, or the knights of the fraternity of our Lady of Gamonal in the sixteenth century. Other nobles and members of the urban elite played martial games, riding à la gineta (in the Moorish style), and already foreshadowing the juego de cañas or “reed-spear (canes) game” so popular in the early modern period. On the River Guadalquivir, a mock battle of barges provided entertainment for the king and crowds alike, a demonstration that would be repeated when Philip II entered Seville in 1570. All of these events played out against a background of loud and festive music of trumpets, drums, and other instruments.3 Before the king entered the gates of the city, “the best men, knights, and citizens,” jumped off their mounts and escorted him into the city under a rich gold-cloth palio held up by poles carried by Seville’s leading nobles. The city streets were tented with gold and silver drapery, which also festooned the walls of the houses along his ceremonial route from the main gate to the cathedral and, the chronicler adds almost as an afterthought, he was also received into the city by a mounted Moorish guard. If we think back to this book’s introduction and to my remarks about continuities and discontinuities in Spain’s festive traditions, we can find in Alfonso XI’s triumphal entry into Seville in 1327 almost all of the main elements of future Spanish entries. In later entries, such as those of the late fifteenth century, the number of festivals, tournaments, and the like grew and the displays became increasingly lavish and fantastic. The number and rank of those receiving the king or prince outside the city, as well as the ensuing procession that accompanied him into the urban precinct, became in time highly hierarchical and closely regulated. No more

2 Crónica de Alfonso XI, 204. On Seville in this period, see the excellent book by Anto- nio Collantes de Terán, Sevillaenlabajaedadmedia (Sevilla: Excelentísimo Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 1977). 3 Crónica de Alfonso XI, 204.

69 CHAPTER III tumultuous gathering of nobles and common people, mingling in no dis- cernable order would be found in later medieval entries. The artifacts, machines, and representations also grew to bizarre proportions, but, as noted, royal entries remained familiar in their basic structures. Someone who had been present in Seville in 1327 would have been struck by the invention and artifice of Henry IV’s entry into Jaén almost one hundred and forty years later, but he or she would have recognized it for what it was: a formal royal visit to one of the king’s cities. The visitor might also have recognized or even have been keenly aware of the principle of reciprocity inherent in the monarch’s entry, as well as of the negotiations and preparation—seldom described by medieval chroniclers—that had preceded it. Alfonso XI’s fabled entry into Seville in 1327 has a special place in the long history of Iberian royal entries because of one special detail. The young king entered the city under a cloth-of-gold canopy or palio. We will hear about the palio, its symbolic importance and political meaning, in greater detail later on. Philip II, in his unfortunate journey through his eastern realms was denied such an entry into Valencia—that is, under a canopy, marching into the city in an almost sacred procession—because he had already been given one before.4 As a prince, however, he had entered Girona—which, according to Calvete de Estrella, was the first peninsular city that Philip entered with “pomp, aparato real (royal ceremonies), and artillery discharges—under “a rich palio,” which was held high over the prince by Girona’s officials.5 We will have the opportunity to return in greater detail to the question of when and why the important palio might be present or absent in royal and princely entries. For now, let Alfonso XI’s entry into Seville serve only as a prologue to a more focused discussion of how royal entries, princely visits, and military triumphs were structured, how they changed between 1327 and 1600s, and what they meant in terms of politics, culture, and from the perspective of the social inferior gazing on these celebrations from below.

Royal Entries and Princely Visits

The royal entry has long held an important place in the historical imagination. Laden with political and cultural symbolism, evoking Jesus’ entry

4 Cock, Jornada del viaje (1585), 306–309. 5 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 9.

70 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS into Jerusalem and reenacting Roman imperial triumphal entries, the royal and princely entries of the Middle Ages and Renaissance with their distinct ephemeral arches (mostly in the early modern period), tableaux vivants, carefully orchestrated processions, jousts, dances, and other ludic performances, were a fantastic and powerful spectacle. An entry bound king and people, king and city, and at the same time served as a site for contestation, negotiations, and the airing of conflicting agendas. Royal entries remained from their early origins onwards complex multivocal performances. They were, first and foremost, ritualized performances of power, but the articulation of that power did not always flow in only one direction. Entries, triumphs, and similar performances worked because of their reassuring familiarity to onlookers. The reiteration of certain motifs, the expectation of a heady bricolage of courtly, religious, classical (mythological), and magical strains, the appeal of flashy and colorful dress, fireworks, and “ unheard of artifacts,” as the chroniclers often described new mechanical and architectural innovations in the feasts, enchanted viewers while forcefully reminding them of the separation between social groups and the distance between one order and another. These often repeated lessons worked at different levels. Civic authorities, religious communities, even, as was the case in Spain, religious minorities, were assigned a place in the processions and in the schedule of festivities that accompanied the entry. All engaged in symbolic conversa- tions not just with the ruler but with each other. Far more important, civic displays also addressed themselves to the crowds who, either because they were attracted by the spectacle and by the distributions of food, drink, and other largesse associated with an entry, or because they were compelled to attend (as was the case sometimes in Spain’s Corpus Christi processions) provided the popular context for celebrations. Long ago, the great Jacob Burckhardt in a seminal chapter on festivals in his TheCivilizationoftheRenaissanceinItaly argued famously that Ital- ian festivals were unique because they were open to all social groups or classes; that interaction between social groups gave to Renaissance feasts, triumphs, and other civic rituals their unique dynamics.6 Of course, though private festivities, open only to specific segments of the populace, proliferated throughout medieval and early modern Western Europe, the open ended and “public” royal and princely entries sought to draw in— pace Burckhardt—all of the urban populations into politically and cultur- ally conscious ludic events. Entries did far more than preach to urban

6 Jacob Burckhardt, TheCivilizationoftheRenaissanceinItaly, trans. S.G.C. Middle- more (London: Penguin Books, new edition, 1990), 230ff.

71 CHAPTER III dwellers the superiority of their rulers and civic authorities. They did more than just provide an opportunity for dialogue between king and city and between the different political players within urban spaces. Royal entries, which had as their primary object the reception of a visiting dignitary outside the walls of the city, bound together countryside and urban spaces. In Castile, the king or prince was to be met two and a half leagues outside the city and then escorted into the urban space. Two and a half leagues was well beyond the suburbs or faubourgs of medieval towns and yet easily within the city’s area of jurisdiction. Peasants were drawn into the city. Increasingly they engaged in disputes with civic authorities and urban institutions. Yet they also served as witnesses not only to royal splendor, but also to the civic officials’ rich dress and visible deployment of their symbols of authority.7

The Origins of Royal and Princely Entries Although in this chapter and succeeding ones, the emphasis will be on late medieval and early modern festivals—in which the royal entry played such a crucial part—and specifically on Philip II’s travels and festivities, this does not at all mean that royal and princely entries, or events that foreshadowed later entries, did not take place in an earlier period. It is true that it was not until the fourteenth century that chronicles and other narratives began to pay close attention to this type of celebration. It is also true that most historians have focused on the period after 1300. This was the case not only with Burckhardt and Sir Roy Strong with their interest in Renaissance festivals as the womb from which all later spectacles emerged, but also with Bernard Guenée and Françoise Lehoux’s important compilation of French royal entries, which begins in earnest with Philip VI’s entry into Paris in 1328.8 Lawrence Bryant’s influential article on the relationship between the French king and Paris, as articulated in the entry, is also strictly focused on the very late Middle Ages.9 Many

7 For a discussion of festivals and the entry as a way of binding city and countryside, see my “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” in Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson, eds., City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 303–305 and below. 8 Bernard Guenée and Françoise Lehoux, Les entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515 (Paris: CNRS, 1968), 47. The account of the entry or “noble feste” is far shorter than the account of Alfonso XI’s entry, a mere five lines in one source and two in another. 9 See Lawrence M. Bryant, “L’entrée royale à Paris au Moyen Age,” Annales E.S.C. 3 (May-June, 1986), 513–44. This article was reproduced with small changes as “The Me- dieval Entry Ceremony in Paris,” in Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic

72 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS other examples can be offered from other parts of Europe that would seem to confirm the fact that royal and princely entries as continuous, reiterative political performances begin to be described in earnest only in the fourteenth century. Of course, precedents abound in both literature and real life, both in northern Europe and Spain. Galbert of Bruges in his The Murder of Charles the Good describes “the Joyous Advent” of Count William, the Marquis of Flanders into Bruges. The reception or entry of the new ruler of Flan- ders into one of the main cities in the county in 1127 is, as James M. Murray has shown, eerily similar to the “Adventus locundus” of the first Burgundian Count of Flanders in 1384.10 Some of the same elements were present in Charles V’s spectacular entries into Flemish cities and, far more pertinent to this work, in the young Philip’s triumphal tour of Spanish Flanders in 1548–50. So much for the Burgundian origins of festive entries in early modern Spain. Influences there were, but Spain also enjoyed the advantage of an autochthonous tradition. There were of course other festivals that had a long tradition in medieval life, most of them religious in nature. Indeed the origins of medieval drama can be found in the performance of the Mass and in the liturgy itself. Carnival harkened back in time to well before 1300. Remarkable in their continuity, all festivals, and royal entries in particular, deployed a continuous wealth of well known and rehearsed references to previous festive traditions. Textual descriptions and the actual physical performance of entries and other spectacles reveal to us a complex juxtaposition of themes and tropes: what I have already described as a kind of cultural bricolage.11 This points to the manner in which wider and wider bodies of reference were built throughout the centuries, as those imaging and

Ritual, Janos M. Bak, ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 88–118. See also his TheKingandtheCityintheParisianRoyalEntryCeremony (Geneva: Droz, 1986). In a more recent piece, “Configurations of the Community in Late Medieval Spectacles: Paris and London during the Dual Monarchy,” in City and Spectacle in Medi- eval Europe, 3–33, Bryant provides a most thorough and useful review of the historiography and theoretical underpinnings for the study of spectacles in late medieval Europe. From the work of Huizinga to that of Lévi-Strauss, Kantorowicz, Geertz, Foucault, Miri Rubin, and others, he reviews the manner in which spectacles, above all the entry, have been represented in Western culture. See pages 3–12 and his rich and full notes of references to these scholars; and topics on pages 25–33. 10 James M. Murray, “The Liturgy of the Count’s Advent in Bruges, from Galbert to Van Eyck,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, 137–52. 11 The first use of the word “bricolage” for defining cultural processes is in Claude Lévi Strauss, TheSavageMind (Pensée sauvage) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) and further elaborated by Derrida in many of his works.

73 CHAPTER III scripting the festivals borrowed continuously from a rich tapestry of traditions and narratives. But how did these traditions and motifs play out in late medieval and early modern Spain?

Royal, Princely, and Triumphal Entries in Spain Alfonso XI’s iconic entry into Seville was not the first in Iberian history, though the reference to the canopy and the increasing details of the chronicle’s description were quite new. In Ramón Muntaner’s Crònica, which concludes in 1327, there are descriptions of royal visits that give the sense of an already established pattern. In particular, Muntaner’s descriptions of James I’s visits to the main cities of his realms after the conquest of Valencia, and the reception of Alfonso X of Castile in the latter city and afterwards in Tarragona and Barcelona, included all the elements of a princely entry. The feasts in honor of the visiting Castilian king lasted for days (at least fifteen days in Valencia). The spectacles mounted in honor of the royal visitor ranged from the inevitable jousts, parades, carnivalesque games (a battle fought with oranges), and the like. All of these activities would become part and parcel of subsequent royal entries in the peninsula. Similarly, Peter III’s arrival in Palermo included aspects of the entry—a reception outside the city, a formal procession, bonfires, and the illumination of candles and torches—that we will find in the later Middle Ages and early modern period. Finally, the crowning of Al- fonso IV, king of Aragon, a description of which serves as the concluding chapter in Muntaner’s Crònica, involved a ritual visit to all the capitals of his diverse realms.12 But there was no palio mentioned in any of these entries. As we have seen, the chronicle of Alfonso XI, while describing the royal entry into Seville in 1327, placed it in the context of other such entries that had taken place in the past. It was, in the chronicler’s language, a tradition (Et como quier que lo ficieren en algunas villas del regno). Previous chronicles had noted royal visits and entries but, except for cursory accounts of feasts and like, there were no extensive descriptions, no mentions of a formal reception outside the village, or of a palio. There is a short description of the feasts given in honor of a French princess, who came into the kingdom to marry the heir to the throne, Ferdinand de la Cerda, in 1268. There is another short notice of Alfonso XI’s later entry into Seville, which elicited no comments from the chroniclers, except to note the king’s presence in the city. Most of the earlier chroniclers’ ener-

12 Muntaner, Crònica I: 51–60, 73–77, 136–40; vol. II: 612–31.

74 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS gies were reserved for descriptions of royal’s deaths and burials and of the heirs’ subsequent ascent to the throne.13 The temptation is to fill these pages with a narrative of the many and diverse events that surrounded Spanish royal entries from the early fourteenth century to the first half of the sixteenth. I have resisted doing so, although I think not fully successfully, both here and in other chapters. The published accounts are often truly enchanting in their descriptive richness. Most, certainly those from the sixteenth century onwards, provide so much detail as to argue strongly for their verisimilitude. We must nonetheless read always with a critical eye, remembering that the writer may not have been present at the event. For example Cock’s accounts of Philip II’s voyages in 1585 and 1592 appear to be eyewitness accounts, but we know that because of his position in Philip II’s Flemish guard, he seldom saw what was taking place at the front of the procession. More- over, we know that many of the triumphal and ephemeral arches described by these accounts were not built at all. What we have are the plans, an idea but not a reality. Nonetheless, my paraphrasing and sum- maries of what were often, especially in the sixteenth century, book- length representations of an elusive reality, could never capture the full enchantment of these artful and imaginative events. For Castile, one of the earliest attempts to see late medieval entries as part of a well-established tradition can be found in Rosana de Andrés Díaz’s short article on royal entries in the chronicles.14 Published more than a quarter of a century ago and focussing mostly on the chronicles’ accounts of royal visits, de Andrés Díaz also enumerates some of the salient aspects of the entry. A pioneer work in many respects, “Las ‘entrades reales’” remains nonetheless deeply unsatisfactory in that it provides, at best, thin descriptions of royal entries without exploring in detail the myriad of meanings embedded in these events. The prolific José Manuel Nieto Soria also tackles some of these issues in one of his books, but, not unlike Sir Roy Strong, he describes events from a strictly royalist perspective, with emphasis on later royal ceremonies and their ideological and political, but not their social and cultural, meanings.15 I have already

13 Crónica de Alfonso X, 13, 81; Crónica de Sancho IV, 69, 89–90; Crónica de Fernando IV, 93, 169; Crónica de Alfonso XI, 173, 192, 210. 14 Rosana de Andrés Díaz, “Las ‘entradas reales’ castellanas en los siglos XIV y XV, según las crónicas de la época,” in En la España medieval. IV. Estudios dedicados al profesor D. Angel Ferrari Núñez I (Madrid: Editorial de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1984), 47–62. 15 José Manuel Nieto Soria, Ceremonias de la realeza: propaganda y legitimación en la Cas- tilla Trastámara (Madrid: Nerea, 1993).

75 CHAPTER III mentioned the formidable book by Francesc Massip Bonet, La monarquía en escena. It is a most important contribution, but it is selective in its approach and also quite committed to visualizing these ceremonies from a royalist perspective.16 How to tackle royal and princely entries remains a difficult issue. What I would like to do is attempt to deconstruct some aspects of the entry and elucidate their meanings and intent, noting successes, and failures. The innumerable tournaments, jousts, and other such martial events that were permanent features of the entry will be treated separately in chapter 7. But, although I won’t spend a great deal of time on them here, it is important to emphasize that tournaments, jousts, mock battles between barges on a nearby river, sieges, and assaults of fictitious castles were an important part of the overall structure of the entry. In addition, Philip II’s long journey to the Crown of Aragon in 1585–86 and to Tarazona in 1592 will be often mentioned, but the king’s two long and troublesome voyages undertaken towards the end of his life will be fully explored for their political and ritual meaning in another chapter (5). Where then should we begin? I think that it may be appropriate to set off from the city where this chapter began: in Seville.

ROYAL AND TRIUMPHAL ENTRIES INTO SEVILLE We have already seen Alfonso XI’s ceremonial entry into Seville in 1327. I have sketched some of the salient aspects of this particular entry; above all, the king’s entering the city underneath a palio of gold cloth. Why would Alfonso XI, newly arrived to the responsibilities of power but still assailed by the high Castilian nobility and princes of the blood, have chosen Seville for such a spectacle and assertion of his regal power? Seville, the informal capital of western Andalusia, held a unique place in the political symbology of the late Middle Ages, and kings repeatedly appealed to the glorious deeds of the Reconquest in general and to those of Se- ville’s conqueror, Ferdinand III (1217–52), in particular. After a long and costly siege, the Muslim rulers of Seville surrendered to the Christians in the late fall of 1248.17 Ferdinand III, canonized in 1671 after numerous efforts by the Spanish kings and by Seville’s leading citizens to obtain his inscription into the lists of saints, occupied a central place in the history of the Castilian monarchy. As the very model of a warrior saint, even before his final canonization, and the Spanish counterpart of his maternal cousin Louis IX of France (St. Louis), Ferdinand

16 Madrid: Dirección General de Promoción Cultural, 2003. 17 Julio González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 3 vols. (Cordoba: Publicaciones del Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Córdoba, 1980), I: 365–91.

76 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS III’s great military deeds, most notably his conquest of Córdoba in 1236 and of Seville itself in 1248, set a standard for later Castilian and Spanish rulers that was not equaled or surpassed until Ferdinand and Isabella’s final conquest of Granada on January 1–2, 1492. Ferdinand III’s burial place at the Cathedral of Seville—a temple erected on the site of a former mosque and a beautiful Moorish tower, La Giralda—saw the building of successive and increasingly more lavish royal chapels to house the king’s coffin, his sword (the magical sword that had liberated Seville from centuries of Muslim rule), and ever more impressive funerary sculptures. We should not, then, be surprised that Alfonso XI chose Seville for the staging of his elaborate royal entry. It was all the more appropriate as the Primera crónica general—which details the long and arduous siege of the city, its final surrender, and the slow exile of most of the Muslim population—provides hints of a solemn proto-royal entry that took place in Se- ville almost a century earlier. After the city had emptied of its former Muslim inhabitants, a handful of ecclesiastics entered the city to conse- crate the principle mosque and to place it under the advocacy of Our Lady. Only then, when a Christian sacred space had been created in the heart of the conquered city, did the Castilian king choose to enter Se- ville. On the 22nd of December 1248, the feast of the translation of the relics of St. Isidore, the king entered the city, accompanied by nobles, clerics, and other Christians to be received with “great happiness” and cries of praise. A solemn Mass of thanks followed. 18 The date of the entry is recorded in the Primera crónica general, composed during the reign of Ferdinand III’s son, Alfonso X. There are in this narrative several points of interest, which connect what is a partial and barely spelled out royal/triumphal entry with later ones. The day chosen to enter the empty city, that of the translation of the St. Isidore of Seville’s relics to the northern city of León (the ancient capital of the ancient Leonese kingdom), was invested with sacred and historical meaning. St. Isidore, the great Visigothic Christian polymath, saint, and

18 Primera crónica general de España, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, ed., introduction and revisions by Diego Catalán, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1977), II: 767: “Día era de la tralaçion de sant Esidro de Leon, arçobispo que fue de Seuilla—en la era de mill et dozientos ét ochenta et seys, quando andaua el anno de la Encarnaçion de Nuestro Sennor Jeshu Cristo en mill et dozientos et quarenta et ocho—quando ese noble et bienauentu- rado rey don Fernando, de que la estoria tantos bienes a contado, entro en esa dicha noble çipdat de Seuilla, capital de todo ese sennorio del Andalozia, o fue reçebido con muy grant proçesion de obispos et de toda la clerezi et de todas las otras gentes, con muy grandes alegrias et con muy grandes bozes, loando et bendiziendo et dando graçias a Dios. . . . Summary in González, Reinado y diploma, 390, citing a different edition of the Primera crónica general.

77 CHAPTER III scholar, tied the Visigothic past and the Castilians’ claims of hegemony in the peninsula to a powerful religious tradition. St. Isidore’s bones had departed for the Christian north because of the Muslim occupation of al- Andalus and of Seville, the Saint’s chosen city, but now hundreds of years later a saintly warrior king (later to become an actual saint) triumphantly entered the city, now emptied of Muslims. Surrounded by the great men of the realm, traversing streets in which stood houses vacated only a few days before by the Muslim population, Ferdinand III came to the newly consecrated cathedral, a site in which the symbols and architecture of Andalusian Islam were still vividly present, to be blessed and received in acclamation by the clergy. The chronicler writing the story of Alfonso XI and his royal entry into Seville obviously knew the Primera crónica general that, together with the histories written by Ximénez de Rada and Lucas de Tuy in the first half of the thirteenth century, constituted the accumulated historical memory of the Castilian realm.19 The intertextuality and historical links between these narratives are impressive. It serves as a constant reminder of the enduring connection that existed between Spain’s medieval and early modern rulers and Seville, the proud city on the banks of the Guadalquivir River. It may also be worth pointing out that the fictitious battle of barges or boats that provided entertainment for Alfonso XI’s solemn entry in 1327 also reenacted Ferdinand III’s naval assault on the city during the long siege of Seville in 1247–48, and the final capture of the fabled Torre de Oro (the Golden Tower) that kept watch over the city.

Ferdinand of Antequera’s Triumph As Seville grew in power in the late fourteenth century, eventually over- taking Barcelona and Valencia as the largest city in the peninsula, its role as the headquarters for the Christian armies on Granada’s western frontier and its links to the Atlantic propelled it to a central position in the affairs of the realm. Ferdinand III and Alfonso XI’s entries are only two early examples of Seville’s unique place in the political imaginary of the age. The Infante Ferdinand’s triumphal entry into the city in 1410, after almost two years of successful campaigning on the western Granada front, highlighted by his decisive victory over the Muslim armies at An- tequera (he would come to be known afterwards as Fernando de Ante-

19 See Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, Opera (Valencia: Anubar, 1968); Lucas de Tuy, Crónica de España, Julio Puyol, ed. (Madrid: Tipografía. de la Revista. de archivos, bi- bliotecas y museos, 1926). For a description of these sources and their place in medieval Castilian historiography, see Peter Linehan’s magisterial work, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 313–412.

78 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS quera) harkened back to ritual and historical precedents, while at the same time pointing to the new and far more complex celebratory patterns of the fifteenth century.

FERDINAND OF ANTEQUERA The second son of John I of Castile and Leonora of Aragon and the brother of Henry III, king of Castile (1390–1406), Ferdinand became regent for his nephew, the two-year-old John II (1406–1454) after Henry’s death. Although he shared the regency with John II’s mother, Catherine of Lancaster, Ferdinand navigated the always-troublesome period of royal minority with a strong and firm hand. As was the case with others of the period, Ferdinand joined his chivalrous and pious inclinations with a full commitment to the struggle against Islam. It was a well-established dic- tum of Castilian political culture that calling for war against Granada or Islamic foes and leading a host to the frontier with Granada was the surest way to rally aristocratic and urban support and to quell unrest. This pol- icy Ferdinand followed from 1407 onwards. Hearing news of the Grana- dian armies’ siege of Prego, the Infante Ferdinand departed for Andalusia in April 1407. The chronicle of John II, written by Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, author of the rightly famous Generaciones y semblanzas, provides rich details as to the ceaseless skirmishes between Muslim and Christian knights. As befit the chivalrous tenor of the age—Ferdinand had founded the chivalrous order of the Jar and the Griffin in honor of the Virgin Mary on August 15, 1403—Pérez de Guzmán’s narrative juxtaposes great deeds of valor with pious appeals to the Virgin and to the apostle St. James (Santiago).20 For our purposes, Ferdinand’s activities as prelude and context for his triumphal entry into Seville late in 1410 are redolent of symbolic gestures that link the Infante to a rich historical tradition and most of all to the iconic Castilian king, his namesake Ferdinand III. Gathering his forces in Seville, the Infante reached the city in late June and remained there for a few weeks before leaving to besiege the Muslim stronghold of Zahara.

20 There are no studies per se of Ferdinand of Antequera before his election to the Crown of Aragon, except for Inez Isabel Macdonald, Don Fernando de Antequera (Oxford: Dolphin Book Co., 1948) See also Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300–1474, 77, 101– 102. Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones, semblanzas é obras de los excelentes reyes de España Don Enrique Tercero é Don Juan Segundo . . . includes a chapter on Ferdinand of Antequera and other fifteenth-century worthies, 700–702. Crónica de Don Juan II, 286– 90. On the Order of the Jar and the Griffin, see Angus Mackay’s pioneering articles, “Ferdinand of Antequera and the Virgin Mary” and “Frontier Religion and Culture.: Religion, Culture, and Ideology on the Late Medieval Castilian Granadian Frontier” chapters 8 and 10 in Jacob Torfing, ed., Politics, Regulation, and the Modern Welfare State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

79 CHAPTER III The chronicle offers some very important details. Whenever camp was struck, the banners of the military Order of Santiago and that of the city of Seville were in the vanguard. Most important however, before the In- fante abandoned the city on the eve of the Virgin’s feast in September, the “twenty-four,” Seville’s ruling municipal body, gave to the Infante Ferdinand III’s sword. Lying on the funeral monument of the later king, the sword that conquered Seville in 1248 was imbued with all the romance and magic of frontier battles and with the by then well-developed and well-exploited crusading ideology. I doubt very much that the idea of placing this martial relic in the hands of the Infante and regent Ferdi- nand came from Seville’s ruling magistrates. More likely, the Infante had requested the sword as a way of not only further legitimizing the enterprise, but also connecting himself across time with the conqueror of Cór- doba and Seville, who was probably the most venerated king in Castilian history up to that time. We will hear about this quasi-sacred sword again and again and about the ritual significance of swords in general in Span- ish entries. The symbolic importance of the Infante Ferdinand’s actions must have been obvious to all and would have served as a rallying focus for Christian forces.21 The long campaign that culminated with the signal victory at Ante- quera was hard fought. Muslim fortresses and towns had to be taken one by one, often in the face of stiff resistance. Granada’s counterattacks, the tribulations of siege warfare, and interruptions in military activities, as when the Infante traveled north to tend to the business of ruling Castile in 1408, delayed the final outcome. It took most of 1408 and a good part of 1409 before victory was achieved. In the meanwhile, the Infante Fer- dinand forcefully advanced the fortunes of his family, granting extensive possessions and positions of authority in Castile to his sons Don Juan (the future John I of the Crown of Aragon), Don Enrique (Henry), and Don Alfonso (who would also become king of the Crown of Aragon). Don Enrique, for example, became in time master of the Order of Santiago. Ferdinand thus planted the seeds for the endless civil strife that would trouble Castile throughout most of the fifteenth century. All that however was still in the future.22 In 1409, the Infante Ferdinand returned to Seville, the headquarters of the Andalusian campaigns, to begin in earnest the final push against Nasrid Granada. The chronicler inserts one more reference that binds the Infante to former kings, to a mythical Visigothic past, and to the ideology of the Re- conquest. As an aside on the tedious details of battles and political ma-

21 Crónica de Don Juan II, 290–91. 22 See Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300–1474, 86–109.

80 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS neuvering, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán provides a short miracle narrative. The Virgin appeared to two young boys, ten and twelve years old, and led them to freedom out of their captivity in Antequera, the Muslim stronghold.23 Although a seemingly minor point within the chronicle’s narrative structure, this episode asserts a Marian intervention in Ante- quera on the eve of Fernando’s protracted siege of the city, thus linking the Infante’s campaign with divine intercession. In 1410, the Infante returned to the south, and, once again, Ferdinand III’s sword left its funeral monument to serve as an inspiring instrument in Ferdinand’s campaign. Per Afán de Ribera, the adelantado de la frontera (the military commander on the frontier with Granada), carried the sword from Seville to the Infante’s encampment. Ferdinand received the sword with humility, dismounting from his horse and “kissing it with great reverence.”24 As the battles around Antequera intensified and the siege reached a critical point, the Infante Ferdinand called for yet another sacred symbol. The chronicler again invokes tradition to explain this action. Stating that “the kings of Castile had as a custom in the past to bring with them [into battle] the banner of St. Isidore of León (Seville) when they campaigned in Muslim lands, [and] because the Infante was very devout, he sent with great alacrity to León for the banner,” which arrived promptly on September 10, 1410.25. If I have devoted so many pages to setting up the context of this princely entry, it is because in 1410 Ferdinand was not yet a king. He would not become king of the Crown of Aragon until 1412, and his victory at Antequera played an important role in his election. However what is significant here is the flow, or perhaps more accurate, the circulation of sacred objects. Ferdinand III’s sword leaves Seville and eventually returns, playing a significant role in the triumphal entry. The banner of St. Isidore, the Visigothic sage, citizen of Seville and embodiment of the early Le- onese realm’s hegemonic aspirations in the peninsula, comes from León to bestow charismatic protection on the Infante and his armies, and then returns to Seville in glory. Let us skip the gory details of Antequera’s siege and the Infante’s signal victory and go now directly to his triumphal entry into Seville later that year.26 As a prelude to his return to Seville, the Infante had enacted a triumphal entry into Antequera that paralleled Ferdinand III’s entry into Se-

23 Crónica de Don Juan II, 314. 24 Ibid., 317. 25 Ibid., 328–29. 26 Crónica de Don Juan II, the chronicles detail the campaign from the Infante’s settling on a camp outside Antequera on page 317 to the final conquest of the city on page 332.

81 CHAPTER III ville. He entered the city on October 1, 1410, just after Antequera’s main mosque had been consecrated as a church. At the head of his procession were the banners of the Crusades, of St. James, and of St. Isidore of León, followed by the Infante’s banner and his shield. Members of Seville’s high nobility accompanied Ferdinand into the vanquished city and through its streets to a High Mass in the newly founded church of the Savior.27 Four- teen days later, under a heavy rain, the Infante returned to Seville. A large number of high nobles and royal officials are mentioned as having been part of his entourage. They were met outside the city walls—as was the proper protocol for royal and princely entries—by the archbishop of Seville, the municipal council, and the city’s nobles. Tradesmen and guild members brought juegos (“games,” but here in the sense of displays and tableaux), dances, and added great happiness to the entry “in the manner that is usual to receive kings.” Leading the procession were the Infante’s armies, followed on foot by seventeen Muslims taken in battle. On their shoulders they carried banners captured by the Christians in the taking of Antequera. The banners trailed on the mud (suelo or ground). In the next rank came a large crucifix and behind it two banners of the Crusade, one red, the other white. Per Afán de Ribera followed with Ferdinand III’s unsheathed sword held high. Behind him rode the Infante with the banners of St. James, St. Isidore, and Seville, followed by the rich men (the magnates), and other nobles all with their banners and retinues. The In- fante entered the city and rode to the cathedral, outside of which he was greeted by the clergy singing a Te Deum Laudamus. Escorted into the cathedral by a parade of ecclesiastics, he walked to the altar and the tomb of Ferdinand III (facing the main altar). There he placed the sword into the hands of the king’s effigy.28 A “thick” reading of this particular entry would yield many different levels for analysis. I should not pass up the opportunity here of highlighting some of the more salient aspects of this particular triumphal entry, which foreshadows the typology of entry motifs that will be explored in greater detail later. First and foremost, the Infante’s entry followed a great military victory and linked him with his namesake, Ferdinand III’s almost eerie entry into Seville. The ritual humiliation of conquered Mus- lims also resonates with the role that religious minorities came to play, whether in jocular and festive fashion or in violent rituals, in the Iberian peninsula after the great Christian conquest of the south in the 1230s and 1240s.29 One can easily visualize those seventeen weary captives, tread-

27 Crónica de Don Juan II, 332. 28 Crónica de Don Juan II, 332–33. 29 The most masterful analysis of the manner in which religious minorities became part of complex discourses and rituals of exclusion and inclusion can be found in David

82 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS ing through mud in the pouring rain, surrounded by throngs of Christian warriors and dignitaries on horseback. Clearly, these captives had acquiesced in the performative elements of the entry. Whether willingly or under coercion, they were an integral part of the dramatic representation of Christian victory and Muslim defeat. Their banners, smeared with the bitter stains of defeat, also played a role in the elaborate entry. There was, of course, nothing spontaneous in these arrangements. They followed a well-rehearsed script built on the strict hierarchical order of the procession into the city, with as its centerpiece the reception of the Infante by waiting ecclesiastical dignitaries, singing sacred chants in honor of the victor of Antequera. Were we to attempt to read between the lines for ideological meanings, the first challenge would be to understand why Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, writing this particular chronicle much later than the actual events and familiar with the violence and turmoil that Ferdinand of Antequera’s children had visited upon Castile for the next sixty years, chose to glorify so openly the role of the Infante and implic- itly conflate a princely entry with royal traditions of first visits to cities of the realm. The explanation is not far to seek. Pérez de Guzmán’s opposition to Alvaro de Luna, John II of Castile’s favorite, made him a partisan of Alvaro’s harsh enemies, the Infantes of Aragon (Ferdinand’s children). He was in fact engaged in a revisionist history that exalted Ferdinand of Antequera and his descendants while diminishing John II’s surrender to his favorite.30 In this chronological progression that links together royal and princely entries into Seville, it may be very easy to assume that entries, and the description of them, gained in complexity as we move from the late Mid- dle Ages to the early modern period, while, as argued earlier, retaining their basic structure. That is, the entry in itself changed little—except in the display of new technical or military knowledge (discharges of artillery, fireworks, harquebus discharges, and the like). What changed was the literary representation of these events. The laconic descriptions of an earlier age were now replaced by accounts effusive in their detail. This is an attractive formulation, elegant in its simplicity, but, unfortunately,

Nirenberg’s brilliant, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2nd printing with revisions, 1998), 200– 230. 30 On Alvaro de Luna and his antagonism towards the Infantes of Aragon (Ferdinand’s children), see Nicholas G. Round, TheGreatestManUncrowned: AStudy of the Fall of Don Alvaro de Luna (London: Tamesis Books, 1986). One may compare Ferdinand of Ante- quera’s triumphal entry into Seville in 1410 with those of his grandson, Ferdinand the Catholic, into Córdoba after taking Ronda and into Málaga, an important bulwark of Granada’s power. See Crónica de los reyes católicos, 424, 472.

83 CHAPTER III while it is generally accurate, it does not tell the whole story. Clearly the description of Ferdinand of Antequera’s entry into Seville in 1410 raised the discourse level and provided information missing from Ferdinand III’s first entry into a depopulated Seville in 1248 or Alfonso XI’s iconic reception in 1327. And I will close this section with the elaborate entry of Philip II into the city in 1570, an entry that prompted several book- length descriptions. In these cases, our formulation would seem reason- able. Complicating matters are the two different descriptions we have of the entry of the Catholic monarchs into Seville in 1477, a critical time in their attempts to restore order in Castile in general and in unruly Seville in particular. The two chroniclers, Hernando del Pulgar and Andrés Bernáldez, were well-known partisans of the Catholic monarchs’ reform enterprise. Moreover, their work was under close royal supervision and expected to advance the monarchs’ policies and to enhance their image.31 The rest of their chronicles are filled with only positive references to Ferdinand and Isabella and express unwavering confidence in their policies. Descriptions of the royal couple’s ceremonial entry into Seville are flattering as well, but there is a curious scarcity of details about this particular entry, especially when compared with that of Ferdinand of Antequera in 1410. De- scriptions of the event echo in their simplicity those of the mid-thirteenth century and the 1320s. Clearly, the chroniclers’ priorities had changed: the political confrontations that unsettled the Castilian realm at that time and the harsh realities of Sevillian oligarchic struggles easily trumped the celebrations that accompanied the royal entry. To those royal entries we now turn.

The Catholic Monarchs in Seville The Catholic monarchs’ rule and their restoration of order in Castile represent a unique landmark in peninsular history. Political necessities brought them often to the south, where some of their most staunch rivals, the Villenas above all, had large holdings. And in these travels Seville occupied a critical place. For Ferdinand and Isabella, it represented one of their thorniest political problems. The city was divided between two powerful aristocratic factions: those of Don Enrique de Guzmán, duke of

31 On Isabella’s patronage of the arts and her attempts to shape the chroniclers’ representation of the monarchs, see Barbara F. Weissberger, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queen- ship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), especially chapter 3, “Fashioning Isabel’s Sovereignty,” and her edited volume, QueenIsabelIof Castile: Power, Patronage, Persona (Woodbridge, NY: Tamesis, 2008).

84 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS Medina Sidonia, and Don Rodrigo Ponce de León, marquis of Cádiz. Their persistent conflict drew in other social groups and turned Seville, as it did other Andalusian cities, into a veritable battlefield between noble factions to the detriment of royal authority and fisc.32 Seville was also, in spite of civil disturbances, the economic engine of the region and, potentially, a source of import income for the Castilian monarchy. Even before Columbus’ momentous voyage across the Ocean Sea, the city was the largest urban center in Castile. Drawing upon an agriculturally rich hinterland, the Aljarafe, and with access to the Atlantic through the Gua- dalquivir River, the city had gained an importance within the Castilian realm that rivaled that of Barcelona or Valencia in the Crown of Aragon. Finally, Seville often served as headquarters and a starting point for raids or military campaigns in Nasrid Granada’s western frontiers. Without controlling Seville, the Catholic monarchs could not hope to mount any successful campaign against the last Muslim bastion in the peninsula. Fis- cal, political, and military reasons attracted them to Seville. The multiple entries of the Catholic monarchs together, or of either Isabella and Ferdinand individually, into the city between 1477 and 1508 present opportunities to examine the subtle changes that these multiple entries called for. In 1477 the queen made her first formal visit to the divided city. We would expect from the chroniclers a lavish description of the festivities. We get none. Entering the city on July 29,1477, close to the feast day of St. James the Apostle, a paradigmatic representative of Reconquest ideology, the queen was received, or so Hernando del Pulgar tells us, “with great solemnity and pleasure by the nobles, clergy, citizens, and generally all the people (the common) of the city.” And for this reception, they made great juegos, é fiestas que duraron algunos días (plays and feasts that lasted a few days).”33 Andrés Bernáldez’s chronicle only offers a minor additional detail. He dates the entry to July 25th, the precise feast day of St. James the Apostle, and mentions the giving of the keys of the city to the queen. Isabella entered the city and was “highly received” by the Duke of Medina Sidonia who had control over Seville at that time, by other noblemen, the municipal body of Seville (the “twenty-four”), royal officials, and the city’s clergy. There is no mention of games or other festivals, but we learn that Ferdinand, Isabella’s consort, entered the city around a month afterwards and received the same reception.34 Missing from this account is the rich descriptive narratives one finds, for example, in the entry of Henry IV into Jaén more than a decade be-

32 Crónica de los reyes católicos, 323–24. 33 Ibid., 323. 34 Historia de los reyes católicos, 589.

85 CHAPTER III fore (see below) or indeed in Philip II’s magnificent entry into Seville in 1570. There is none of the attention to garments, colors, deeds of bravery, and the like that we find in Muntaner’s description of the coronation of Alfonso IV in 1327, in Alfonso XI’s knighting, ceremonial unction, and coronation in 1332, and in the detailed accounts of the feasts of 1428 found in several of John II’s chronicles. All of these accounts predated, some by a century and a half, those of Hernando del Pulgar and Andrés Bernáldez’s chronicles. Consequently, we cannot say that there was a steady rise in the thoroughness of literary representations of festive events from the late Middle Ages into the modern period. Here it suffices to reiterate that each event was sui genesis, and so were the different chronicles that narrated these events. The context and the writer determined the nature and extent of the text. In the case of 1477, both chronicles chose to emphasize other aspects that for them and for the monarchs were far more significant. In the case of Hernando del Pulgar, the entry was secondary to Isabella’s meting out of justice to an unruly and divided Se- ville, and the literal and symbolic fashion in which she did so. On Fridays the queen held public audiences while sitting on a chair covered with a gold cloth and placed on a high stage. There she heard the complaints and grievances of her people during the two months of her sojourn and handed down harsh judgments on the guilty. “She came to be much loved by the good and feared by the evil,” the chronicler tell us, until she relented and granted a general pardon to the population.35 For Bernáldez, the highlight of the event was not the entry per se or the high ranks of the accompanying cortege, but rather the moment when the duke of Medina Sidonia turned the keys to the city (probably the keys to the Alcazar) over to the king and queen, and the moment when the Marquis of Cádiz, banned from the city since 1471 because of his battles with the Duke of Medina Sidonia, came disguised into the city to kiss the Catholic monarchs’ hands in obeisance.36 Hernando del Pulgar and Andrés Bernáldez were far less reticent when it came to describing the feasts and celebrations that accompanied the marriage of the Catholic monarchs’ firstborn daughter and heir, Doña Isabel, to Don Alfonso, heir to the Portuguese throne. Part of the Catho- lic monarchs’ grand design to unify the peninsular kingdoms, the wedding took place by proxy in Seville in May 1490. Although not strictly a royal entry, the Infanta Isabel’s reception could be considered a princely entry, and it was reportedly a lavish affair. Hernando del Pulgar reflects

35 Crónica de los reyes católicos, 323–25. Bernáldez describes in detail how evildoers fled to Portugal in panic at the frightful justice handed down by the Queen and her agents: Historia de los reyes católicos, 590. 36 Historia de los reyes católicos, 589.

86 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS on the “great feasts, tournaments, and happiness” that marked the occasion, and the expenses incurred by the nobility to pay for their brocade garments adorned with gold and silver ornaments. Both chroniclers note the many knights from Portugal, Sicily, and the realms of the Crown of Aragon who poured into Seville to assist in the celebration. In Bernáldez we find references to the cadalhso (the stage) from which the royal family looked on, and delighted in, the great deeds of the knights fighting in the tournaments held in honor of the event. In the latter, King Ferdinand broke many lances in courtly fashion.37 The deep involvement of the Catholic monarchs with all of southern Spain, and with Seville in particular, led to numerous triumphal entries into the newly conquered towns around Granada. In them, the Catholic monarchs either symbolically claimed a reconquered city or reenacted Fernando III’s entry into Seville in 1248. None however presents as much difficulty in terms of reading its political and symbolic meanings as Fer- dinand the Catholic’s entry into Seville in the company of his new wife on October 28, 1508. As David Alonso has argued, during the period between Isabella’s death in 1502 and Charles V’s ascent to the throne in 1519, Castile had no king. Isabella’s demise was swiftly followed by Philip the Handsome’s untimely death and then by Joanna’s madness. Ferdinand the Catholic, who after being unceremoniously pushed aside, had withdrawn to his own eastern realms, returned after Philip’s death to play a role in the regency. It was a Castile without a king, but not without a ruler. Ferdinand’s uncertain position in the affairs of Castile—complicated as it was by Castilian mistrust of Aragonese interference—his marriage shortly after Isabella’s death, which in case of an heir would have effectively severed the union of the Crowns, made his venture into An- dalusia an important political event.38 His coming to Andalusia was preceded by a tour of Spanish allies and possessions in Italy. Embarking from Barcelona on August 7, 1506, he was received with great festivities in Genoa, where, the chronicler tells us, “he received news of the death of Philip the Handsome.”39 Rather than returning to Spain immediately, Ferdinand and his new queen went on to Naples, where his entry moved even the usually laconic Bernáldez to embellish his narrative with unusual details. Approaching Naples by sea, the royal cortege was welcomed by a large reception committee led by Gonzalo de Córdoba, the Great Captain and highest Spanish commander in Italy, and “all the great of the kingdom.” Bernáldez lingers on

37 Crónica de los reyes católicos, 506; Historia de los reyes católicos, 637–38. 38 For the history of that turbulent period, see John Edwards, The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474–1520 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 282–90. 39 Historia de los reyes católicos, 730.

87 CHAPTER III the cost of the reception: an artificial bridge from the ships to the port built at a cost of four thousand ducats, a triumphal arch worth fifteen thousand ducats, and other such lavish displays and expenses. After swearing the “liberties of the kingdom” and hearing the Te Deum Laudamus sung by a large choir, the king, dressed in red, with a black hat adorned with a ruby and a large pearl (red, white and black), entered the city accompanied by the queen and riding on a white horse under “a rich canopy” (palio) carried by the leading citizens of Naples.40 Musical performances, receptions by the nobility, and more artificial triumphal arches marked the king’s perambulation through the city. Evoking his uncle’s (Alfonso V) entry into Naples after conquering the city, the account of Ferdinand’s solemn visit provides some very important clues. Although I have departed from the Sevillian context, it is important to note that Andrés Bernáldez shows here none of the reticence of his 1477 and 1490 descriptions of entries and feasts. Keen attention is paid to specific details of Ferdinand’s entry, to the king and queen’s garments, to the cost of the artificial constructions, and, most of all, to the palio or canopy that marked the uniqueness of the occasion. It has been important to digress for a bit into these travels and receptions in Italy and his Eastern kingdoms to set the stage for Ferdinand’s visit to Seville in 1508. His claims to the regency were not clear-cut; he faced stiff opposition from the Castilian nobility. A mini “time of trouble,” not unlike that preceding the Catholic monarchs restoration of order, was brewing. Ferdinand the Catholic cunningly deployed his immense symbolic capital—the account of his extravagant entry into Naples and the lavish reception he received from the French king—to buttress his political role in Castile and to reinsert himself into the affairs of the realm. Although I have argued in the introduction to this book that one must be wary of a strict functional interpretation of festivals, that does not mean that royal entries and other ludic displays did not, in fact, often function as quite ef- ficient political tools. Ferdinand’s entry into Seville in 1508 was one of those occasions.

FERDINAND THE CATHOLIC’S ENTRY INTO SEVILLE IN 1508 Ferdinand the Catholic’s entry into Seville in the early sixteenth century belies the idea that formal royal entries marked only the first official reception of a king or queen into one of his or her cities. After all, the king had been to Seville innumerable times. He had already been received with great festivities in 1477, a month of so after Isabella had been welcomed to the city with equal pomp.

40 Ibid., 730.

88 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS Coming to Seville now in 1508, after quelling disturbances in western Andalusia and in northern Castile at the Cortes of Burgos, the king of the Crown of Aragon, for so he was, his queen, and the Infante, his second grandson, Ferdinand (the future Emperor Ferdinand I), entered Seville to a solemn reception by all civic authorities and clergy, including the city’s archbishop. An elaborate procession escorted the royal party into the city, passing underneath thirteen artificial wooden arches richly decorated with cloth and tapestries. The route led from the Gate of la Macarena on the riverside looking towards Triana to the Cathedral. In each of the arches pictorial representations and written accounts celebrated Ferdinand’s victories on the battlefield.41 That Ferdinand came into Andalusia with a large armed contingent probably reinforced to Seville’s civic authorities the need to do something special for Castile’s former and now newly received ruler. Bernáldez describes the arches as “something marvelous to see,” pointing to the effort the city had put into the reception. His account of the entry—that of a regent of Castile for sure, but an Aragonese king and queen as well—is followed by a thick narrative of political conflict, the movement of royal troops, and the eventual taming of some high nobles bent on a return to the profitable anarchy of the period before Ferdi- nand and Isabella’s reforms. Solemn processions, elaborate receptions, and triumphal arches inscribed with the king’s victories reasserted at a symbolic level the king’s authority to the leading men and indeed to all the inhabitants of the city. Ferdinand’s armies positioned in and around the city only strengthened the king’s hand. And the Sevillian entry, following as it did a series of elaborate celebrations, was part of a cycle that began with the king focusing his attention on his eastern realms and Mediterra- nean possessions, and now his reinsertion into Castilian politics.

PHILIP II’S ROYAL ENTRY INTO SEVILLE IN 1570 It is nearing time to bring to a conclusion this long account of, and reflection on, Castilian royal entries into one specific city. But first a look at one final example: Philip II’s elaborate entry into the city in 1570. It was the subject of numerous accounts, the most extensive and elaborate from the pen of Juan de Mal Lara. A Sevillian by birth, he was the author of a series of little-known essays and books, and a fierce advocate of his native city. The title of his work, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciu- daddeSevillaalaCRMdelReyD.Philipe N.S. is already indicative of the tenor of his account. Mal Lara’s language was most often respectful of the figure of the king. One might even call it sycophantic, describing Philip II in almost religious terms. After a large and noisy artillery salvo had

41 Ibid., 735.

89 CHAPTER III panicked the throngs gathered on the riverbank, the smoke settled and the crowd gazed on the king “whose serenity confronted everyone.” Yet, there are also occasions when his tone is almost petulant. The king, Mal Lara tells us, was dressed in mourning clothes (for his recently dead wife, his beloved Isabelle de Valois), robbing the entry of some of the glamour of royal magnificence. The princesses refused to have their hands kissed in obeisance by Seville’s municipal authorities, as the king had done. Philip II also avoided the Sevillian heat and dust by remaining under a canvas tent and cancelling a planned sightseeing trip to Bellaflor because of the crowd of onlookers and the dust.42 The reality of course is that Mal Lara’s Recibimiento is as much, or even far more about Seville as it is about the king. One must draw a sharp distinction between accounts written by royal officials, members of the royal entourage—such as those of Calvete de Estrella or Henry Cock—and chroniclers or local erudites engaged by the city to produce “official,” or “semiofficial” accounts for its own political benefit. Although Juan de Mal Lara was inspired by Calvete de Estrella’s extensive and thorough accounts of the young Philip’s voyages in 1548–50, it is evident that in the former’s account, the king still played the central role, though sharing the stage with his host city.” In this respect, Mal Lara is not unlike Juan López de Hoyos, a learned scholar in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Madrid, whose accounts of a queenly entry and funeral, was commissioned by Madrid’s municipal authorities to provide testimony to the city’s efforts on behalf of the Crown. Mal Lara’s Recibimiento is not an engaging piece of literature. It does not match, in my opinion, the efforts of some of his contemporaries, Cal- vete de Estrella or Henry Cock, for example. Nonetheless, Mal Lara’s narrative provides us with numerous clues as to the nature and organization of entries that are not always present in similar accounts. In the context of praising Seville and describing how much the city contributed to the royal fisc and to the general wealth of the realm, Mal Lara provides a detailed description of the city, its monuments, and, above all, of the role of the Guadalquivir River in Seville’s life and economy. The reader is offered numerous glimpses of the ships anchored on the riverbanks, of the building of a great royal galley for Don John of Austria, Philip’s half brother. Also on the river, to be seen and admired by the entering king, was the Victoria, a ship that had just circumnavigated the globe.43 Mal Lara makes a very great show of his knowledge of Roman and other classical themes. The king is acclaimed by the crowds in the same

42 Mal Lara, RecibimientoquehizolamuynobleymuylealciudaddeSevillaaFelipeII (1570), 36r, 44v, 47r-v. 43 Ibid., 8r-13v. 90 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS fashion as triumphal Roman emperors. Seville’s “twenty-four” (the ruling municipal body) were dressed like Roman senators, or what Mal Lara thought Roman senators dressed like, in honor of their first meeting with the king outside the city. Their robes, reaching to their feet, were of purple velvet, and they wore gold chains around their necks and white velvet shoes. These classical tropes, long a feature of Seville’s attempts to self-fashion itself and described with luxury of detail by Vicente Lleó Cañal more than thirty years ago, were reinforced by some of the arches erected for the royal entry. The first that the king met upon officially entering the city was a veritable cornucopia of mythological and other classical motifs—from Hercules to the Hesperides—which resonated with Seville’s purported mythical origins and which Mal Lara explicated in grand (and tedious) detail.44 We shall return to this first gate later to look at the way in which the civic authorities mixed mythic and royal genealogical references in its iconography for the dual benefit of the visiting monarch and the city. Classical motifs were more than balanced by references to Seville’s medieval past and its signal role in the history of Reconquest Spain. In describing the Torre de Oro, the Golden Tower that Seville’s Muslim rulers built to keep watch over the river, Mal Lara provides a historical aside, retelling (in part) the story of the taking of Seville and of Ramón Boni- faz’s breaking of the chain laid across the river that prevented the besieging Christian navy from sailing freely on the Guadalquivir, an event that took place, he tells us, “when the saintly king (Ferdinand III) had laid siege to Seville.” Similarly, according to Mal Lara’s account, Philip II entered the city through the Gate of Goles (afterwards renamed the “Royal Gate”), the same gate through which Ferdinand III had first entered a deserted city in 1248. In 1570, this particular gate already displayed a sculpture of the latter king on horseback and brandishing an unsheathed sword with a Latin inscription: Regia Fernandus persregit claustra Sevilla. Fernandi e nomen splendet, ut astra Poli That is, “Ferdinand broke the locks (the gates of Seville), and the name of Ferdinand shines as the stars in the sky.”45 Here we see the obvious thread that links all royal entries, providing a historical dimension to these events, and a rich patina of meaning. Again and again in our long journey through the accounts of royal and princely

44 Vicente Lleó Cañal, Nueva Roma: mitología y humanismo en el renacimiento sevillano (Sevilla: Diputación Provincial, 1979). 45 Mal Lara, RecibimientoquehizolamuynobleymuylealciudaddeSevillaaFelipeII (1570), 50r–60v. 91 CHAPTER III entries into the city on the banks of the Guadalquivir, the iconic taking of the city in 1248, Ferdinand III’s role, and his sword, became tropes claimed by each royal visitor in turn, and used to legitimize his rule and providing it with the ballast of history. We ignore these multiple contexts at our peril, and the valence of Reconquest ideology—still a powerful motif even in the sixteenth century—and the manner in which entries, as seamless arguments, connected past, present, and future. This device of connecting a royal entry or a particular king to some previous historical event was not, of course, exclusively Spanish. In 1549, during his solemn entrance into Louvain, Philip had already seen a tableau vivant of King Priam, a mock battle between Greeks and Trojans, and, most spectacular, Alexander the Great’s siege of Tyre.46 Mal Lara also offers evidence of the intricate scripting of these royal visits, with all its give and take between Crown and city. Earlier accounts of medieval festivities organized for visiting monarchs give us only random glimpses of who was responsible for all the elaborate thinking out— within the constraints of tradition and the reiterative nature of the royal entry—of these events, who paid for them, under what terms entries took place, as well as of all the other important aspects of the planning. In a later chapter, we shall see Philip II’s negotiations with recalcitrant cities (Barcelona and Valencia) in his eastern kingdoms. But at present Seville provides the clearest example of how complicated these affairs were to organize. First, Mal Lara informs us that the coming of the king was announced throughout the city to the sound of drums and trumpets, as the city council sought to mobilize the population for what was Philip’s first (and only visit) to Seville. References to Philip II’s triumphal entries elsewhere injected a degree of competitiveness into the affair, for Seville, self-proclaimed first city in Spain, liked, according to Mal Lara, to outdo all other locations. The king was preceded into the city by Don Diego de Espinosa, president of the Royal Council and royal general inquisitor. He established his household near the Alcazar, which was to be Philip’s residence for the less than two weeks he actually remained in the city. One must assume that Espinosa had been entrusted by Philip II to negotiate the terms of the entry and to pave the way for his coming. The king asked for barges to visit the country house of Bellaflor on the banks of the Guadalquivir outside the city. The city council obliged by providing a large barge (capable of transporting eighty passengers) covered with “a palio,” or so Mal Lara describes it, of red and yellow, the colors of Spain.47 The municipal council of Seville met to discuss how to dress for their

46 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 228–31. 47 Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), 7, 11–12. 92 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS king’s reception and agreed that the “twenty-four” should be dressed in brocade garments and the jurymen (lesser officials) in clothes of silver. The king, micromanaging everything as was often his wont, ordered them not to do so but instead to wear silk, probably because the ceremonial palio was made of brocade and the king did not want that fabric to be replicated in the clothing of municipal officials. Far more significant in terms of carefully planning the royal visit was Don Juan de Sandoval, the major lieutenant (alguazil) of Seville, who was selected by the council to make sure that accommodations at Bellaflor were suitable for the king. Francisco Duarte, one of the “twenty-four’ and factor at the Casa de Contratación, had earlier been commissioned to plan the arrangements on the riverbank, the Torre de Oro, as well as Philip II’s entry into the city through the Gate of Goles.48 There was a debate over whether the king should enter through that gate or through the Gate of La Macarena (through which Charles V had ceremonially entered the city), and the Gate of Goles was chosen as it allowed the king a direct route through the city to the Alcazar. The city itself engaged in feverish activity, repair- ing the roads along which the king would travel—Mal Lara does not fail to fill in all the details—renting horses and pack animals açemilas( ), and securing sufficient food and wine to satisfy the king and his cortege.49 The municipal council mobilized the city’s militia, ordering them to march out of the city and to discharge their harquebuses as the king passed. In addition a specific number of representatives of the various guilds and trade associations were ordered to parade out to meet the king. A rehearsal took place before Philip II’s arrival, with the tradesmen and craftsmen marching past the cardinal’s house at 8 AM in the morning to the sound of drums and other musical instruments, displaying banners of different colors and the signs of their trades.50 Nothing was left to chance, and Mal Lara’s descriptions of all these painstaking preparations is a telling sign of the attention, cost, and planning that a royal entry demanded. In return, the king swore the privileges of Seville, confirming its exemp- tion from certain taxes and its jurisdiction over its extensive hinterlands. These were not small favors, and the price and efforts of organizing the entry were thus well worth the benefits received in return. The previous paragraphs raise some important questions as to the complicated planning of an entry and the scripting of these ceremonies. How did the Sevillian authorities know what the protocol was? Who had access to the script for these royal entries in towns throughout the peninsula? The documentation from Seville for Philip II’s 1570 entry, and for

48 Ibid., 9v–10r, 19r–21r. 49 Ibid., 22v. 50 Ibid., 27v. 93 CHAPTER III his entries of Zaragoza, Barcelona, and Valencia a decade and a half later, show what careful negotiations were carried out in advance of a royal visit and how diligently the respective cities worked to clean their streets, fix roads, and provision for the expected crowds. As to the protocols and scripting of the event, there were several sources that ensured historical continuity. First and foremost, there were chronicles in both Castile and the Crown of Aragon, most of them official or royal chronicles, widely read and quoted, which offered guidelines and precedents for the actual festivities. By the late fourteenth centuries, many municipalities began to keep acts, or minutes, of their deliberations. That was the case in Burgos where the municipal acts begin around 1388. Cities thus had resources to consult on the proper etiquette for receiving royalty. Far more important, the acts also recorded information as to how much they were expected to contribute and do for the visiting royals. By the sixteenth century, local histories, accounts specially commissioned to celebrate Philip II’s visit (like Juan de Mal Lara’s narrative), and records of the festivities in a specific city (Barcelona’s Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona is a very good example) offered to local authorities clear directions for the planning and execution of festivities. In addition, there was a well-established Burgundian protocol. Indeed, Burgundy casts a long shadow on European court practices in the early modern period. The Burgundian rulers’ dazzling achievements in the fifteenth century, so vividly and enchantingly described by Huizinga, were not forgotten after the reintegration of Burgundy into the French royal domains. They lived on in even greater glory in Flanders and in the Habsburg lands. Philip the Handsome had an impact on the protocol of the Castilian court during his short life as Prince consort to Joanna. Charles V shaped his court according to Burgundian practices. So did Philip II and, as An- drés Muñoz tells us, so did Queen Mary in England. When Philip traveled to England for his marriage to the Tudor queen, his household consisted of more than five hundred nobles, guards, and servants, arranged according to Burgundian practices. He took the same group to Italy, Germany, and Flanders in 1548 and, presumably, on all his journeys within Spain, including trips to Seville.51 Heralds and kings-of-arms also

51 For the chronicles and Barcelona’s “book of festivities,” see below and chapter 5. For local histories see chapters 1, 2, and above. See also Muñoz, Viaje de Felipe Segundo a Inglaterra, 24–31, and 77. Muñoz indicates that Queen Mary of England’s house was organized “after the fashion of Burgundy, as His Majesty was.” See also Francisco Javier Díaz González, “La introducción de la etiqueta borgoña en la corte española, “ Gregorio del Ser Quijano, ed., ActasdelcongresoVcentenariodelnacimientodelIIIDuquedeAlbaFer- nando Alvarez de Toledo (Avila: Excma Diputación de Avila, 2008), 473–81. Ser Quijano argues that the Duke of Alba combined the Burgundian protocol with Castilian ele-

94 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS contributed an important element of continuity to the structure of entries and other festive events. As a repository of courtly behavior, they became arbiters of royal protocol (chapter 7). But what about the actual entry? Mal Lara offers us a detailed look at Philip II’s perambulations around the city and outside its walls and at the multiple receptions and spectacles offered by Seville and its inhabitants to the king before he actually entered the city. The account also describes in detail the order, number, rank, and garments of those coming out to meet the king. More than three thousand tradesmen from Seville were joined by eight hundred other tradesmen from Triana. Don Francisco Tello, a knight of St. James, led the parade with an escort of four pages and twelve gentlemen (gentilhombres, nobles), armed with golden pikes. This elaborate contingent trekked out to meet the king at the country house of Bellaflor. The king, the cardinals, the princes, and other important functionaries in the royal entourage rode horses. The contingents of the Santa Hermandad (essentially the military force organized by the Catholic monarchs to restore order in the late fifteenth century) also joined the parade, dressed in green and carrying 160 green staffs and crossbows on their shoulders. Numerous servants and other attendants, all dressed in green, followed as well. Then came the university scholars dressed in their elaborate academic gowns and parading according to their scholarly rank.52 As the king passed the Gate of Jerez, he was met by officials of the Casa de Contratación (the office handling all business and trade with the In- dies), accompanied by more than 150 captains, ship’s masters, and pilots of the carreradeIndias (the biannual fleets that crossed the Atlantic and were, for all practical purpose, the lifeline of the Spanish monarchy). Other dignitaries, including Francisco Duarte, the organizer of the reception, approached the king to kiss his hand. On the river, ships sailed in careful formation or raced each other displaying the royal colors. On reaching the Torre de Oro, a massive discharge of artillery and harquebus fire filled the air with noise and smoke. When the king finally reached the artificial arches built outside the Gate of Goles, another massive artillery discharge (involving sixty-two cannons) shook the city and the mul- titudes in attendance. And this point Mal Lara abandons the king altogether and turns to excruciating descriptions, page after page of them, of the arches built by the municipal government in honor of the king and of the other artifices and games that commemorated his entry. In a later ments after the official acceptance of Burgundy’s court protocol and customs of ceremonial eating in 1548. 52 Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), 38r-v.

95 CHAPTER III chapter, I will revisit these ephemeral monuments for they give ample clues as to the ideological meanings articulated in entries in general and in the one into Seville in particular. Mal Lara’s fascination with the artificial constructions prepared for the king serves also as a vivid reminder that royal and municipal narrators had different agendas. For the present, however, it may be useful to examine, however briefly, the iconography of the first of Seville’s ceremonial arches. Although, Mal Lara complains that in Seville, “There was a lack of those masters (craftsmen to build the arches) that could be found in great abundance in Italy and Flanders,”53 he certainly relished the aesthetic excesses of the arches and of the festivities that accompanied the king’s entrance. The first arch, built of wood, was adorned with numerous engravings featuring a heady mixture of mythological references—Hercules depicted naked with his lion’s skin, the Hesperides, Betis (the classical name for Seville), and Parnassus—as well as a representation of the king’s genealogy. Besides the numerous classical representations, sculptures of Ferdinand the Catholic, the emperors Maximilian and Charles, and the king’s grandfather, Philip the Handsome, stood on the arch. Inscriptions in Greek and Latin made classical references that our chronicler painstak- ingly explicates for us. The king entered through the center portion of the arch, his foot guard marched through the side gates, while Princes Rudolf, Ernest, and the Cardinal rode on both sides of the king. As they passed the arch, actors disguised as Apollo, the Muses, and nymphs met the royal cortege, scattering rose petals in the king’s path and singing to the music of harps, vihuelas (a form of violin), and other instruments. Twenty-four young girls with butterfly wings showered the king with flowers and perfume. And then the king was confronted with sculptures representing different localities in the Sevillian hinterland: each of them with symbols representative of their agricultural production or special contributions to Seville’s economy. In an orgy of civic pride, Mal Lara dedicates one hundred folios (two hundred pages in the printed edition) to the description of the first arch alone. In the meanwhile, the king, whose austere taste must have been severely tested by these displays, had yet to pass through a second arch on his way into the city.54 Mal Lara’s narrative thus focuses far more on these ephemeral arches than on the royal entry itself, or even the king. Unlike Mal Lara, we will quickly leave the first arch behind us and follow along, noting salient aspects of the king’s actual entry. A second

53 Ibid., 51v. 54 Ibid., 52v-152r.

96 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS ephemeral arch, drawing on the religious and astrological symbolism so characteristic of the age, may have been of more interest to the king than the first. Philip had a life-long interest in what may be described as the “mysteries of the Renaissance” (hermeticism, astrology, magic, and alchemy), but the second arch, like the first, was topped with sculpture: the iconic figure of Ferdinand III, sitting on a throne with his unsheathed sword on his hand. The inscriptions on the arch directly linked Philip II to the saintly king (who would not actually be canonized until the next century). The reiteration of these motifs, Ferdinand III and his naked sword, in the spectacle’s architectural artifacts, in the emblems inscribed on the walls of the arches, and in Mal Lara’s narrative, projected an entire ideological program to be read by king and subjects alike. The arches were significant, especially the first, in that, besides praising the king and overwhelming him with classical and genealogical references, they linked Seville to an ancient past through Hercules and Betis, the mythical found- ers of the city. The first arch also presented a powerful self-representation or self-fashioning of the city, of its wealth, and its unique contributions to the Spanish monarchy. Finally, the king entered the city. It would be useless to retell Mal Lara’s narrative, but we will highlight some of the salient aspects of this particular entry. First and foremost, as we have just seen, much of the iconography and Mal Lara’s narrative itself linked Philip II to his saintly ancestor Ferdinand III, placing the king within a historical tradition that was peculiar to Seville. Ferdinand III’s greatest victory, the one that consecrated him for generations to come, was his conquest of the city more than three hundred years earlier. The power of historical memory played a significant role in the ideological make up of the Spanish monarchy and in the not always easy relations between king and cities. After all, these memories were shared memories, belonging to Seville as much as to Philip. Seville’s civic authorities, and Mal Lara as a spokesman for Sevillian interests, thus made sure to inscribe them in both the ephemeral and non-ephemeral monuments and in the narrative that commemorated the event. Second, the king entered as Alfonso XI had done, under a gold-cloth canopy (a palio), carried by Sevillian notables and members of the high nobility. He was preceded in the solemn procession by prior Don Anto- nio, carrying on his shoulder an unsheathed sword, thus repeating aspects of Ferdinand of Antequera’s triumphal entry into Seville in 1410. In a small test of wills, the municipal council had asked Philip II to allow the municipal macebearers to carry the city’s silver maces, inscribed with Se- ville’s emblem and heraldic symbols, high up in the air as was the tradi-

97 CHAPTER III tion. The macebearers however marched in the parade with their maces resting in their arms at the king’s command.55 Things would be different in Aragon. The ritual artillery discharge of sixty-two canons as the king stepped into the city was of course a necessary part of the ritual, marking a technological difference between medieval and early modern. Philip II and his cortege then followed a route that took them along Seville’s most important thoroughfares, decorated with tapestries for the occasion: from the Street of Armas to the Duque de Medina Sidonia Square and onwards to the traditional Sevillian street of the Sierpe and the new prison. There female prisoners begged the king for mercy, and he graciously conferred on them pardons for their crimes. The king then continued to the plaza of St. Francisco, site of the municipal buildings and the monastery of St. Francis, and then passed along the richly decorated street of Genova to the Cathedral for a full reception by the clergy. There the king took an oath on the main altar “to keep the immunities and privileges of the Church.” Te deums, music, fireworks, dances, innumerable torches lighting up the night, and the customary dragon spewing fire and smoke from its nostrils and jaw guided the king, still under his golden canopy, to a very well earned rest in the Alcazar, the fabled Moorish fortress/palace, which had been a Christian royal residence since 1248.56 Missing from this already too lengthy summary are Mal Lara’s lavish descriptions of the clothing of both noblemen and commoners. The differences between the costumes of the different social groups are a telling sign of how closely gradations of rank were regulated. Missing also in my paraphrasing and explicating of the Recebimiento is the emphasis placed by its author on the hierarchical order of the procession, on who kissed the king’s hand and who did not. Celebrating, as it did, the triumph over rebellious Moriscos in the Alpujarras, Philip II’s entry accomplished many ends. Because it marked the king’s first and only visit to the most important city in the realm, the municipal authorities lost no opportunity, through their iconographic program, by their selection of the gate through which the king was to enter, and by a myriad of other details, to display the city’s prominence within the realm, its exclusive role in trade with the New World, and its flashy new buildings. Mal Lara’s narrative is far more, as noted earlier, about Seville than about the king. Yet, Philip II kept a tight rein on how he was to be received. He would not always have his way, certainly not in the Crown of Aragon in later years, but in Se- ville at least, he was master. He could not alter the context in which he entered (and many of the classical, astrological, religious, and historical

55 Ibid., 161v-163v. 56 Ibid., 163v–171r.

98 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS references would in any case have been to his liking), but he steadfastly set the parameters of what municipal officials were to wear, how maces were to be carried, and other such small gestures that reiterated his authority as king in Castile. The municipal authorities also had something to gain by these displays. Their reward was the confirmation of the city’s privileges and, of course far more important, the legitimization of their own rule. By associating their oligarchic rule over Seville with the authority of a well-respected and beloved ruler, municipal officials projected their authority and power over the commons. When I argued earlier that festivals and royal power were not inexorably linked, I did not mean to imply that no such connection ever existed. It did at times, but more often royal authority and the image of the king had to take second place to the interests of contesting powers. And there were times when the connection worked against the king. In a later chapter, when we follow an older Philip II through his eastern kingdoms (in 1585–86), we will see how these elaborate entries could go awry in spite of all precautions and negotiations. But we should not leave this topic without looking in some detail at a late medieval entry that, elaborate and lavish though it was, did not reassert royal authority at all.

USELESS ENTRIES: HENRY III OF CASTILE ENTERS JAÉN IN 1464 Festivals served sometimes as sites for a display of royal power, and at other times provided the opportunity for diverse political entities—cities, noblemen, the church—to use the king’s presence for their own benefit or even to undermine regal authority. Examples abound, and the overlapping reading of the symbols, games, and rhetorical tropes deployed in these entries reach levels of high complexity. I have already briefly glossed one such entry in a previous work, but it may be useful to reexamine here Henry IV’s 1464 entry into Jaén.57 We know quite a lot about this entry thanks to the lavish descriptions of it and of other festive cycles in 1460s Jaén found in the HechosdelcondestableDonMiguelLucasdeIranzo. A private chronicle, dated to the second half of the fifteenth century and attributed to Pedro de Escavias, a loyal follower of the constable and eyewitness to these elaborate displays, the Hechos is the most authoritative, albeit exaggerated, source for the nature of festivals during the waning of the Middle Ages in Spain. Although some of the chronicles of John II of Castile (1406–54) come close, as do some of the earlier descriptions found in Muntaner of the coronation of Alfonso IV in 1327 and Italian accounts

57 Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” 304–5.

99 CHAPTER III of Alfonso V’s entry into Naples in the 1440s, the Hechos includes descriptive details that would not be found in Spain until the narratives of Calvete de Estrella, López de Hoyos, Mal Lara, and others in the sixteenth century. It may be useful to examine the main participants in this performance and to contextualize their actions. Henry IV, a weak king at best, faced innumerable noble revolts and challenges to his power, but he was more interested in culture than in waging war. His sexual proclivi- ties, artistic tastes, and lack of political initiative also imperiled his rule and sank Castile into endless civil conflict.58 In 1465, a mere year after his Jaén entry, he would be ceremonially and humiliatingly deposed in a highly symbolic event known as the “farce of Avila.” Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, the second most important, or perhaps in this instance the main protagonist of the entry, emerged from humble origins and enjoyed the king’s favor and thus rapid and undeserved promotion within the realm. His period of influence did not last long, however. Although allowed to keep the title of constable and given Jaén and its vast hinterland on the Granada frontier to administer, his power was severely curtailed by his enemy, Pedro Girón (d. 1466), master of the Order of Calatrava and a member of the powerful Pacheco (Villena) family, a kin network that kept the king fairly in thrall. Don Miguel Lucas also faced strong opposition from the bishop of Jaén and from noble factions within the city. In fact, he was murdered during an anti-Converso riot in 1473 that may have been more an anti–Don Miguel Lucas uprising instigated by antagonistic oligarchic factions than just another case of sectarian violence. The people of Jaén and its countryside, divided as they were by conflicting allegiances, played an important role in the events surrounding Henry IV’s ceremonial entry into the city, serving as participants in, and witnesses to, the numerous events that accompanied the royal visit. Although one must view the chronicler’s effusive descriptions of public happiness and civic devotion with considerable skepticism, it is undeniable that the novelty of such performances, the lavish displays and the distributions of food and other largesse, might very well have pleased those in attendance.59 The constable had taken possession of Jaén in 1463 and a royal visit could only strengthen his hand in the city. Henry IV had come to Anda- lusia to lead a raid on the Granada frontier, as well as to meet the king of

58 Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 94–101; for the farsadeAvila, see the brilliant reading of the event in Angus MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Cas- tile,” Past & Present 107 (1985), 3–43. 59 On Pedro de Escavias and the constable see my “Elite and Popular Culture in late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” 296–318; see also Juan de Mata Carriazo’s erudite introduction to the edition of the Hechos del condestable, ix–lvi. 100 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS Portugal in Gibraltar. This, the chronicler tells us, the king had done to the displeasure of the archbishop of Toledo, the marquis of Villena, and other members of the noble factions who sought to control him. When the king summoned Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo to his side at Alcalá la Real and expressed his wish to visit Jaén, the constable saw a unique opportunity to restore himself to the king’s favor and to display his renewed importance to his subjects. The partisan chronicler hastened to describe in luxurious detail the political circumstances that favored the constable, and to provide also careful descriptions of festivals and the clothing worn by those in attendance as a way of legitimizing Don Miguel Lucas’ right to leadership in Jaén.60 The constable rode from Jaén to Alcalá la Real in February 1464. He was accompanied, so the chronicler tells us, by a contingent of 1,200 horsemen, 1,000 crossbowmen, and 3,000 lancers. They wore the constable’s colors and rode carrying green lances and the constable’s banner of gold damask embroidered with Don Miguel Lucas’ emblem. The leaders of this army were dressed in silk. We must of course discount this as a gross exaggeration. It is doubtful that the constable could muster such an army in the region of Jaén. If he had been able to do so, his role in the kingdom would have been quite different. Pedro de Escavias also pays careful attention to the order of the march and to the constable’s progress from Jaén to Alcalá la Real, naming all the distinguished noblemen who formed part of Don Miguel Lucas’ retinue. On meeting the king, the constable dismounted and insisted on kissing Henry IV’s hand, which the latter refused as a sign, the chronicler implies, of his royal favor and love for the constable. Don Miguel Lucas however insisted on kissing the king’s garments “in the Moorish fashion.”61 The constable’s army returned to Jaén, but Don Miguel Lucas, accompanied by one hundred horsemen, remained with the king. The royal cortege moved towards Jaén where, half a league outside the city, the king was met by the members of the cathedral chapter and civic authorities, who had marched out of the city in a solemn procession. Five hundred horsemen dressed in “Moorish style” (alaMorisca) and with false beards came feigning battles and charges (perhaps a form of the juego de cañas). Thirty of them were dressed like Muslim women who, dismounting from their horses, received the king with tambourines and sonajas (bells) and ululating in the Moorish style (albórbolas). As if these excesses were not enough, Pedro de Escavias, in yet another instance of gross exaggeration, describes how as many as 4,000 children riding straw horses

60 Hechos del condestable, 188; “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” 304–5. 61 Hechos del condestable, 189–90, 192. 101 CHAPTER III and other 1,000 with small crossbows of mimbre (willow twigs) engaged in fictitious warfare. And thus the king entered the city, heard Compline at the cathedral, and attended a luxurious dinner at the constable’s palace. Don Miguel Lucas and his wife served the king themselves, and each course in the meal, which the chronicler thankfully neglects to describe, came into the room to the sound of music. The night ended with eight children, all of similar appearance and dressed like flames, dancing for the king’s entertainment. For a week afterward, the king spent his time riding through the woods near the city, hunting, and attending the running of bulls, and then finally led a small and mostly insignificant raid on the Granada frontier.62 Rather than engage in a close reading of this particular entry, as I have already done to some degree with royal receptions in Seville, it may be best to leave any detailed explication for the following chapter. Nonethe- less, I should not move to the next topic without highlighting, once again, three important points that ought not to be postponed. The first one is the meager, if any, political yield of this elaborate entry. It has been argued that these elaborate ceremonies, which aimed to buttress royal power, did little to enhance Henry IV’s authority in either Castile overall or in Jaén proper. After all, Henry’s authority reached its nadir just a few months later outside the walls of Avila. One can turn the question around. Did the entry benefit Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo? A tentative answer is that it did, to some extent, though without quelling or diminishing the opposition to his rule in Jaén and its countryside. The constable, regardless of his limited power and his partisan chronicler’s blatant exaggeration of his abilities, had great ambitions of his own. He built in Jaén a princely court that included in its protocol some of the gestures of obeisance and a military ethos that paralleled royal usage. Noblemen kissed his hands, and there were numerous festivals and ritual reenactments of Christian victories over Islamic foes. He was able to remove the king briefly from the nefarious influence of the Villena family and to flaunt his obvious intimacy with Henry IV before the people of Jaén in dramatic fashion. Yet, the king was soon called back to Castile, and the constable was left still facing the joint opposition of the bishop, the nobles of the region, and the Villenas. His moment of glory was ephemeral; all the festive displays did not translate into any great political gains. The king had nothing to give the town. It was mostly a week of entertainment. The people of Jaén may have enjoyed themselves, but they had to pay for the festivities for months to come. As noted, Pedro de Escavias’ Hechos (if he was really the author) con-

62 Ibid., 195–98.

102 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS tains one exaggeration after another. This is most obvious in his incredi- ble estimates of the number of people participating in the festivities. Al- though medieval authors were notoriously unreliable when it came to numbers, the Hechos’ galloping inflation of figures, as well as similar tendencies in its description of carnival festivities and other such events, serve as a forceful reminder that all throughout this inquiry what we see are not the festivals themselves but their literary representation. This fact raises serious methodological questions. Indeed seldom, if ever, do we see the feasts, whether entries or otherwise, as they really took place. What we have are accounts about these events highly infected by ideology and partisanship and transformed by the literary embroidery that such representations elicited. This remains a warning, to be invoked again in other chapters, that although this book is about festivals and the manner in which royal and local power were displayed, it is also (perhaps mostly) about the literary representation of these events. We see the past, as St. Paul said, always through a glass darkly. Finally, we should return to a point that was raised in the previous chapter but is worth revisiting here in light of the faux-Moorish displays during Henry IV’s entry into Jaén. As Barbara Fuchs has persuasively argued, Maurophilia in early modern Europe worked in a peculiarly am- biguous fashion. On the one hand, the identification of Spaniards with Moors (Moros, Muslims) and their racialization fed the emergence of the Black Legend. On the other, the exotic garbs and customs of the Spanish Moors provided a powerful incentive for the almost romantic “oriental- ization” of Spain without its concomitant, à la Said, colonialization. That is, Spain, because of its plural society and large number of religious minorities (Jews and Muslims) had already become for foreigners visiting the peninsula a rather exotic and alien place in the late Middle Ages.63 The paradox, of course, is that the Spaniards themselves, while promoting an increasingly anti-Morisco, anti-Muslim discourse (somewhat ame- liorated by positive representations and literary idealization) that led to the early-seventeenth-century expulsion of the Moriscos, nonetheless also internalized “Moorish” dress and customs with great ease and even relish.64. These contradictory trends are evident both in foreign travelers’ pejorative representations of Spain and Spaniards from the Middle Ages on-

63 See my “Representación: Castilla, los castellanos y el Nuevo Mundo a finales de la edad media y principios de la moderna,” in Historia a debate. Medieval, Carlos Barros, ed. (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1995): 63–77. 64 I owe many thanks to Barbara Fuchs for sharing a chapter (chapter 3) of her book before its publication, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

103 CHAPTER III wards and in the facile Spanish appropriation of Muslim practices (Isa- bella and Henry IV, for example, dressed and ate as Muslims). But the hybridizations, to borrow Fuchs’ term, of the two cultures took on different shades of meaning. When Philip II during his visit to England was accompanied by a large contingent of Spanish nobles who, riding in Moor- ish fashion and dressed in a hybridized Christian/Moorish manner, engaged in the quintessential Moorish martial game, the juego de cañas, these garments and the fictitious warfare only added to the English perception of Spaniards as barbarians thoroughly polluted by Muslim practices and miscegenation.65 Of course, the famous battles of Moors and Christians, of which we already seen an example in Philip II’s visit to Tortosa at the end of 1585, represented not the adoption of Muslim practices, but an aggressive reenactment and reaffirmation of Christian superiority over Islam. In the HechosdelcondestableDonMiguelLucasdeIranzo one finds examples of these two approaches to Muslim tradition, the one openly admiring and imitating Moorish customs, the other unrelentingly hostile and mocking. In the chronicle’s passage glossing Henry IV’s royal entry, we see the theatrical impersonation of Muslims for festive purposes. Christian knights disguised as Muslim warriors and damsels joined in the reception of the king. Earlier in the chronicle, Pedro de Escavias describes some of the events of the 1463 Christmas festive cycle. One hundred Christian knights sporting false beards and rich Moorish garments entered Jaén in a mock royal entry, following behind a pseudo- Muhammad holding a Qu’ran in his hand and riding on a richly appointed mule under a lavish canopy. The palio, for this is what the canopy was intended to represent, was held high over the false Muhammad’s head by four alfaquíes (Muslim doctors, interpreters of Sharia law). This mock entry—which completely subverted the ceremonial royal entry— was followed by an elaborate juego de cañas between Christians and false Moors. The latter renounce their faith, hurl Muhammad and the Qu’ran to the ground and then into a fountain, and finally undergo a fictitious baptism into the Christian faith.66 What are we to make of these diverse performances? Of their symbolic meanings? Of the manner in which play and ideology seamlessly flow into each other? As we have already seen, Muslim practices and customs, whether fictitious or real, were deeply embedded in the fabric of Spanish festive traditions. Indeed, although Italian and northern (mostly Burgundian) practices played a significant role in the development of Spanish festivals, that role was only to alter, embellish, and enhance an autochthonous tradition that had, itself, emerged from a long 65 Idem. 66 “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” 296–97.

104 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS history of interactions and borrowings between Christian, Muslim, and, to a lesser extent, Jewish cultures.

Princesses and Queenly Entries Before we leave this inquiry and proceed to an analysis of the structure of the royal entry, it would be well to take a brief look at the way in which gender shaped royal entries. Here one must keep in mind that in Castile women could rule on their own, and did so quite effectively. The description of Isabella’s entry into Seville in 1477 does not differ greatly from that of kings. In the Crown of Aragon, although queens could not inherit the throne, they did, as vice governors for their husband, hold all the ceremonial and real prerogatives of regal power. María de Luna’s long regency for her husband Martin the Humane and María of Castile’s even longer term as surrogate for the perennially absent Alfonso V are the best examples.67 In this section, though, I am concerned with a different type of entry, that of princesses who came into the realm, in this particular case into Castile, to marry either the heir to the throne, as did the Infanta Blanca of Navarre for her ill-fated 1440 wedding with the Infante Henry (later Henry IV), or a foreign princess coming to marry the king, as did Isabelle de Valois (Philip II’s third wife), Ana of Austria (Philip II’s fourth wife), and others.

THE ENTRY OF DOÑA BLANCA INTO CASTILE (1440) The projected betrothal of the Infante Henry and Doña Blanca, daughter of Don Juan, King of Navarre and Infante of Aragon (king of Aragon later and the father of Ferdinand the Catholic) represented, even if short- lived, a victory for Don Juan in the fierce civil conflicts plaguing Castile. His cousin, yet another Juan (or John) II of Castile and the king’s adviser, Don Alvaro de Luna, had to compromise in the face of mounting political difficulties and a young heir too eager to ally himself with his father’s (and Alvaro’s) enemies.68 In 1440, the king of Castile ordered some of the greatest nobles in the land to travel to Logroño, on the frontier between Castile and Navarre, and to accompany the young princess and her mother, the queen of Navarre, in their ceremonial procession to Vallado-

67 Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 76–77, 102–06. On María de Luna, see the recent book by Núria Silleras-Fernández, Power, Piety and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship. Maria de Luna (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2008.); see also Theresa Earenfight, “Ab- sent Kings: Queens as Political Partners in the Medieval Crown of Aragon,” in Queen- ship and Political Power in Early Modern Spain, Theresa Earenfight, ed. (Aldershot: Ash- gate, 2005), 33–51. 68 Crónica de Don Juan II, 563.

105 CHAPTER III lid and Blanca’s wedding. The chronicler, Pérez de Guzmán, reports without commentary on a great reception at Logroño and another in Vil- horado (Belorado), but he saves his descriptive powers for the reception in Briviesca, a small town belonging to the Count of Haro. There the Count had “prepared the greatest festivities and of the most novel and strange fashion that have been seen in Spain in our time.” Having thus alerted us to the fact that new elements were introduced in the traditional structure of the entry, the chronicler now proceeds to a careful rendering of the different components of the princess’s entrance. Two leagues or so outside the city, Doña Blanca’s cortege met a contingent of armored knights wearing elaborate plumed headgear. Fifty of them were in white and the other fifty in red, and at the sight of the princess they com- menced a fierce melee. After breaking lances, they attacked one another with swords, causing many wounds “as it is done in the tournaments.” Instead of the usual mock-Moorish spear-reed combat between light- armored knights, the Infanta Doña Blanca was offered a tournament in the Northern European style, featuring knights dressed in the distinctive colors of the Crusade: white and red.69 She entered Briviesca to a “solemn reception by all of the town’s inhabitants.” The trade and craft associations paraded with their respective banners, and each trade performed theatrical skits (entremeses) and dances for the Infanta. Following the tradesmen came the Jews with the Torah and the Muslims with the Qu’ran “in that manner that is the custom to be made for kings when they come to rule (in Castile) from foreign parts.” Trumpets and drums filled the air with festive music. Four days of sumptuous dances, spear-reed battles, mummery (carnivalesque displays), runnings of bulls, banquets, and excessive largesse followed, with the Count of Haro providing abundant food and wine to all comers. In addition, an elaborate country diversion for Doña Blanca, her mother, the queen, and visiting foreign nobles was held in a large field nearby. Sitting on a very high stage, they witnessed successively a joust, a hunt for bears, boars, and deer (which had been brought into a fictional and enclosed countryside), and fishing for live fish in an artificial lake. The day concluded with succulent food and dancing, against a background of scarlet tapestries and under an evening sky lit by numberless torches.70 We learn from this narrative a few interesting things. When a foreign princess arrived, the display and the excesses were not very different from

69 Ibid., 565. For the importance of colors, specifically white and red, see my “Festivi- tés, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de mai 1428,” Annales E.S.C. 3 (1991): 521–46. See also chapter 6 below. 70 Crónica de Don Juan II, 565–66. The chronicler, who may have had access to eyewit- nesses of the event, commented on its “strangeness.”

106 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS those presented before a king on his first visit to a city. We also learn that the dancing of Muslims and Jews with their sacred books—most likely compelled to do so by civic authorities—formed part of a well- established tradition of how to receive foreign royalty. The Count of Ha- ro’s lavish reception, a strictly noble affair, was soon followed by Doña Blanca’s reception into Burgos, an entry fully organized and managed by the city’s municipal government. Received by a large contingent of Bur- gos’ knights and officials dressed in long purple robes with fur trimmings, the princess entered the city under a scarlet (carmesí) palio, and had to en- dure afterwards the usual round of jousts, a running of bulls, dances, and endless banquets.71 Nothing was different here, except the color of the canopy; red instead of gold. There is not enough supporting evidence (as far as I know) to say for sure, but I wonder if the red, a color that, as Vic- tor Turner has argued, is associated with the female gender, might have been purposely chosen on this particular occasion to create a distinction between the princess’s palio and the golden palio employed for kings? Perhaps. But, as we shall see, this was not always the case.

THE ENTRY OF ISABELLE DE VALOIS INTO TOLEDO IN 1560 The entry of Isabelle of Valois into Toledo as the new queen of the Span- ish realms coincided with a year-long cycle of festivities celebrating a series of different but related events. Sebastián de Horozco’s narrative of Toledo’s efforts to curry the king’s favor is another of those municipal- oriented accounts that aim to show a city in its best light. The campaign did not work very well in this case, for the year after Madrid, the rival to Toledo’s hope to be designated as capital, received the grand prize. Hor- ozco’s Relaciones reiterate some of the themes already familiar to us. As early as October of 1559, Philip II had sent his aposentador to Toledo to lay the groundwork for the royal couple’s accommodation at the Alcazar. From Aranjuez, Philip visited Toledo and the Alcazar almost incognito, as was his custom, to inspect the progress of the work. He had allowed the city to sell property up to the sum of 27,000 ducats to pay for the expenses of his formal entry and that of his queen.

71 Crónica de Don Juan II, 566. See also Victor Turner, “Color Classification in Ndembu Ritual: A Problem in Primitive Classification,” in TheForestofSymbols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 59–90; Linda Woodbridge, “Black and White and Red All Over: The Sonnet Mistress amongst the Ndembu,” Renaissance Quarterly 11 (1987), 247–97. Michael Pastoreau has written extensively and well on the importance of color in the Middle Ages. See a series of articles and chapters in his Figures et couleurs: études sur la symbolique et la sensibilité médiévales (Paris: Léopard d’or, 1986), and Jacques Le Goff, “Codes vestimentaire et alimentaire dans Erec et Enide,” in L’imaginaire médiéval. Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 188–201.

107 CHAPTER III On November 26th, he made his way from Aranjuez once again, this time for his first formal entry as king. Although in Horozco’s narrative this is only very superficially described, Philip II also came to Toledo to attend the gathering of the Castilian Cortes and to have them swear Don Carlos as heir to the throne. He arrived in the city, therefore, surrounded by a large contingent of grandees, both Spanish and foreign nobles. The city had built an enormous ceremonial arch (in the shape of a castle and costing the extravagant sum of 5,000 ducats) right outside the city’s main entrance, the Gate of Bisagra (Visagra). An endless procession met him outside the city, all marching, as would be the case in Seville and in Zara- goza, in strict hierarchical order. A military guard, dancers (performing sword dances and American Indian dances), the different trade and craft associations of the city with their banners, members of the Old Santa Hermandad of Toledo and the officials of the Holy Office, each group with their respective banners, all arranged by rank of seniority and office, were followed by the officials of the mint on horseback. Then came the faculty of the university and college of Santa Catalina, again by rank and seniority, the public scribes riding on horseback, as did the members of the Royal Chapel with their maces, the canons of the cathedral chapter of the city, and the municipal officials with their royal maces (a privilege that Toledo enjoyed). Finally came the king under a purple brocade canopy held high over him by twenty-four regidores with golden poles. He followed the traditional route through the city that took him past all of Toledo’s important historical sites and onwards to the cathedral to swear the privileges of Toledo. Then he retraced his steps to the Alcazar to rest. As usual bonfires followed, and torches lit the city’s night sky. It is significant that Prince Don Carlos, heir to the throne, followed his father to Toledo on November 27, 1559, but, Horozco is careful to tell us, he was not received as king, nor did he enter under a palio.72 The royal entry coincided with a convocation of the Castilian Cortes or parliament, which met in Toledo throughout the royal sojourn. The king, however, left the city to marry Isabelle officially in Guadalajara on January 18, 1560. After a short visit to Madrid, the royal couple made its way back to Toledo, where the Queen entered the city formally on Feb- ruary 13, 1560. Her reception did not much differ from that of Philip II a few weeks before. There were more dances, more children, more festive floats, and cupids. There were peasants, newly wed, dancing and parading in front of the queen. She had traveled to Toledo in a hand- chair, as did the king, but changed to a white mare before entering the

72 Horozco, Relaciones históricas toledanas, 188. For Philip II’s entry, see pages 181–88.

108 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS city. She rode under a brocade palio (we are not told its color) held high on twenty poles (not twenty-four as had been the case for the king). With the royal couple in residence, Toledo became a permanent feast. There were tournaments on foot and horseback (in which the king participated, but not the prince), juegos de cañas with as many as one hundred high nobles taking part, and the running of bulls (always associated with the game of canes). The festivities lasted for almost a year, as Philip and Isabelle remained in Toledo until the beginning of 1561. The city must have been fiscally exhausted by then, and so probably were the king and queen.73

THE ENTRY OF ANA OF AUSTRIA INTO MADRID IN 1570 A monograph could be written solely on these female entries—there were so many of them, and they elicited such a deluge of accounts—but I will content myself here with a perfunctory description of just two of them. The first was the entry into Madrid of Ana of Austria, fourth wife of Philip II in November of 1570. Juan López de Hoyos, a humanist who had already written a lengthy account of the funeral of Isabelle of Valois, Philip II’s third wife, in 1568 (published in 1569), was, once again, commissioned by Madrid’s municipal council to write a description of the Queen’s municipal receptions. The facsimile edition of the original published in 1572 runs to more than 262 folios, or more than 500 pages. It follows the princess’s trajectory and the numerous festivities that enlivened her journey from Austria to the Low Countries, her sea voyage to Santander, and her subsequent slow progress through northern Castile on her way to Madrid. Just as Mal Lara did in describing Philip II’s entry into Seville just a few months before Ana’s reception, López de Hoyos alerts us to the careful planning and formidable efforts undertaken by Madrid’s civic authorities to prepare for the queenly entry. Landscaping and the construction of fountains and numerous ephemeral arches were only part of their frenetic activity, as the city’s councilors were kept fully informed of the princess’s progress towards Madrid. Like Mal Lara, López de Hoyos had as much interest in promoting his city and patron, Madrid (a street in the city is still named after him), as he did in telling the story of the entry or in glossing the attributes of royal power. Thus, he too spent an inordinate amount of his narrative describing the many elaborate ceremonial arches built for the occasion. As had been the case in Se-

73 For Isabelle of Valois’ entrance and the festivities that followed, see Horozco, Rela- ciones históricas toledanas, 189–213. See also Gómez de Castro, Recibimiento que . . . Toledo hizo á lareina Doña Isabel, 57–151, which includes elaborate descriptions and iconographic interpretations of the artificial arches built for Isabelle’s entry.

109 CHAPTER III ville earlier in the year, the arches made the usual mix of classical and Christian references, linking the Visigothic past—Pelayo is represented close to an effigy of the emperor Charles V—to Spain’s most notable rulers. The ubiquitous Ferdinand III was of course on the scene, along with inscriptions in Latin and Castilian praising his deeds and the reconquest of Andalusia. López de Hoyos displays his erudition, providing his readers once again with a heady cocktail of religious, classical, and medieval references. Descriptions of the different arches and glossings of their iconography occupy the bulk of the book, more than 200 folios or 400 pages. These descriptions appear, inconveniently, right in the middle of the narrative of the queen’s entry into Madrid. But what about Ana of Austria’s actual reception?74 As she neared the city on November 26, 1570, the crowds lined up along the roads outside the gates for almost a league. Large contingents of infantrymen (4,000 of them) and 1,500 men armed with harquebuses and displaying fifteen colorful banners engaged in brisk military drills. These, López de Hoyos does not fail to inform us, formed part of the armies that had fought in the Alpujarras against the rebellious Moriscos. In well- established order, different army corps (Spanish, Flemish, German) accompanied by military bands playing lively tunes marched out of the city to meet the queen. A large stage had been built on the road, fourteen steps high, on which the queen was to sit to have her hand kissed. As she ascended the stage, artillery charges and a gran alarido de los Moros, (great Moorish cries) greeted her. She was then offered the spectacle of a mock battle, both on land and sea, and yet another display of Christians and Moors in fictitious combat. Our informant could not stop himself from comparing the naval battle—in landlocked and always thirsty Madrid of all places—to the great Roman imperial spectacles. Finally, a hierarchical procession of richly dressed municipal officials came to meet Ana of Aus- tria, kissing her hand in strict order of seniority. Speeches and other acts of welcome and obeisance ran their course. All along, we are informed of the types and colors of the lavish clothing of officials, nobles, and of the queen herself who, dressed in gold, silver, and black velvet, wore a “hat adorned with a gold belt and white, red and yellow plumes . . . Philip II’s colors.” Along the way she encountered arches built only for her entry

74 López de Hoyos, Real aparato y sumptuoso recebimiento de D. Ana of Austria; chapter 1 deals with the queen’s journey; chapter 2 with the preparations made by the municipal government of Madrid for her reception; chapters 3 and 4 describe the journey through Castile and the actual wedding in Segovia (see chapter 9 of this book for a discussion of this particular wedding as described by another source); chapter 5 and succeeding chapters describe the entry into the city and the ephemeral arches (see next chapter). For Pelayo, Charles V, and Ferdinand III, see 34r–37v.

110 ROYAL ENTRIES AND PRINCELY VISITS and decorated with mythological figures. Bacchus the most prominent— on a fountain gushing wine.75 When she arrived at the Gate of the Almudena, the gate was breached to allow her cortege to enter. There are echoes here of Alfonso V’s ceremonial entry into Naples in the mid-fifteenth century (chapter 4). Other mythological and astrological sculptures, epigrams, and emblems lined her route to the Church of Our Lady, where she attended a solemn Te deum. The usual fireworks, festivities, jousts, fictitious battles, and the like completed the reception. For the purpose of comparison, we can examine another queenly entry into Madrid. The entry of Philip III’s new Queen Margarita into Madrid in 1599 called for similar arches and receptions. Both queens, Ana and Margar- ita, reached the outskirts of the town in a carriage. Both entered on horseback. Both were met outside Madrid’s perimeter. Ana, met on the west boundary of the town, entered through the gate of La Almudena. Margarita’s entry, less than thirty years afterwards, was on the opposite side of town, by the monastery of St. Jerome (Los Jerónimos, and the beginning of Madrid’s traditional street of Carrera de San Jerónimo), a variation that points to some degree of fluidity in these entries, especially in a new capital such as Madrid. Margarita, however, received the keys to the city as a part of her entry, as did numerous kings and princes, but Ana did not. Margarita entered the city under a baldachin or palio, also a detail missing from the earlier queenly entrance. We are told that the city officials who carried the palio wore golden garments, but the fabric and color of the palio are not mentioned. The terminus of the entry was, once again, the Church of Our Lady, and it was followed by the usual festivities, fireworks, a running of bulls, spear-reed demonstrations, and the like.76 There is little in the chroniclers’ accounts of queenly entries; that is, entries of foreign princesses “who came to rule Spain,” that distinguishes them from those of kings or princes. Beyond the tantalizing description of Infanta Doña Blanca’s crimson canopy, not much difference can be discerned. What is striking in all these entries that I have so profusely paraphrased in this chapter is the continuity and discontinuity of some of the basic elements of the entry, and, far more significant, the fluidity of

75 López de Hoyos, RealaparatoysumptuosorecebimientodeD.Ana de Austria, 20r–29v. 76 See a description of Margarita’s entry in Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, Relaciones de las cosas sucedidas en la corte de España desde 1599 hasta 1614 (Madrid: Imprenta de J. Martín Alegría, 1857), 18–22; and León Pinelo, Anales de Madrid. Reinado de Felipe III, años 1598–1621, Ricardo Martorell Téllez-Girón, ed. (Madrid: Estanislao Maestre, 1931), 46–51. Pinelo provides engravings of the Puerta de Alcalá built for this occasion. See also Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid, 42.

111 CHAPTER III their organizational structures. Certain elements are always present: the reception outside the city walls, the religious ceremonies, the order of reception. Others seem completely random: whether a palio is used or not (though as we will see the first visit of a royal as king or queen called always for a palio), and whether the visitor was given the city’s keys. The entry was a spectacle that depended for its success on reiteration; that is, on the crowd’s familiarity with what was going on. There were not, and could not be, radical departures from the norm. And yet, within these structures there was latitude, so that, for example, in the modern period it was possible to introduce new technologies: artillery discharges, fireworks, dragons and serpents spewing fire and smoke, ceremonial arches, and the like. It may be useful, however, to examine royal entries not from the particular perspectives of individual entries but from the point of view of their structural components. To that task I now turn.

112 ❊ CHAPTER IV ❊ The Structure of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Royal Entry: Change and Continuity

With their roots in Roman triumphal entries and in Jesus’ reception into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, royal and princely entries and/or visits functioned as sites of memory. Although deeply embedded in syncretistic traditions that conflated the Roman past with the Christian opening of Holy Week, the entry as it developed in the Middle Ages—and was further modified in the early modern period—represented a novel way of articulating princely authority, or, as we have seen and will see again, of contesting that authority. But whether playing as age-old patterns or as variations on those patterns, entries became deeply woven into the fabric of history and memory. The literary representations, the celebrations, the ephemeral architecture that was so soon to be relegated to the dustbin of history were, above all, self-conscious attempts to link a particular entry with earlier festivals and, beyond that, with distant imperial and sacred pasts. In many respects, entries, which for all practical purposes are an early-fourteenth- century phenomenon, fall into the category of “invented traditions.”1 I do not of course mean to suggest that some royal agent or a member of some municipal council falsified the genealogy of royal entries. Rather, in that perpetual quest for order and authority that so profoundly marks the medieval mind, it may have seemed patently evident to eager royal agents that these important celebrations could not have been created ex- nihilo, that they must have had ancient origins that doubly legitimized them. Festivals, and in this particular case, the royal entry, gained a great deal of their effectiveness through reiteration. This is a point I have made several times in previous chapters, but it is worth emphasizing again. In Spanish medieval and early modern festive traditions, as in the rest of Western Europe, the weight of tradition (created of course through reiteration) imparted a highly desirable patina to these celebrations that set

1 On the whole idea of the “invention of tradition,” see the rightly celebrated new edition of the collection of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). As to the beginning of this “tradition” in earnest in the early fourteenth century, see chapter 3 and Bernard Guenée and Françoise Lehoux, Les entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968), 9–10.

113 CHAPTER IV them firmly apart from the quotidian. Even today most Spanish and Eu- ropean festivals appeal to the notion that such and such a performance has a venerable legacy in a remote past. When in the 1980s the mayor of Ma- drid revived the “burial of the sardine,” with all of its carnivalesque aspects, he argued that he was resurrecting an ancient medieval tradition; this though only the most tenuous of links existed between sardines and medieval carnivals, either as they were really celebrated or as they were represented in literature or in art (by Brueghel for example, or Goya). It was not just that the entire entry served as a site of memory and, at the same time, a link to historical precedent, but that the different components of the entry functioned individually as agents of this reiterative process, granting both a link with an illustrious past and a sense of familiarity and ownership to those gazing, voluntarily or not, on these ceremonies. Narratives, municipal acts, and other written documents provided a historical record to be mined for how-to guides on conducting an entry. Thus, the intertextuality of entries, as well as that of other festive forms, allowed for reiteration (to use this term yet again) while leaving room for innovation and change. And nothing about these performances, as we saw in the previous chapter, was impromptu. Everything was carefully scripted, researched, and staged in accord with ideological and political agendas. Sometimes the royal agenda more or less dictated the outcome. Sometimes it did not. In Spain the play of history and memory in royal entries is most evident in the continuous references to the image of Ferdinand III for more than three centuries. Always identified as a saintly king, even though his official canonization would not come until the seventeenth century, and as the conqueror of most of Andalucía and of Se- ville in the 1240s, Ferdinand III joined piety with heroism in the cause of Christianity. He was thus a link with historical tradition and a symbol that made all or most subsequent royal entries into powerful ideological statements. While the historical figure of Ferdinand III was missing from Charles V and Philip II’s entries in Italy, the Low Countries, and even the Crown of Aragon, in Castile his presence was ubiquitous. This was true not only in Seville, a city so closely associated with Ferdinand III’s greatest victory, but also in sixteenth-century Madrid, as López de Hoyos shows in his narratives of Ana of Austria’s entry into the city. Ferdinand III and his glorious deeds had to be there. From Ferdinand III’s walk through a city that had been emptied of its Muslim population during the three days after its surrender to Alfonso XI’s remarkable entry into Seville in 1327—a performance and location that clearly was not chosen at random but for its carefully calculated symbolic valence—a thread was created that linked Castilian (and Spanish

114 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY ceremonial entries) into a coherent ideological statement. It took a century for Ferdinand III’s victory and saintly reputation to become imbued with historical meaning and tradition. Ferdinand of Antequera’s theatrical “borrowing” of Ferdinand III’s sword, as magical an object as one could find in Reconquest Castile, the Catholic monarchs’ visits, and Philip II’s elaborate entry in 1570 were all redolent of Ferdinand III’s spirit, as successive kings claimed the mantel of historical memory and the genealogical links that connected their present to a past, by then more than three hundred years old.2 There is nothing unique in this. The French kings also embraced memories (invented though these often were) as “lieuxdememoire” that went back to Clovis in the late fifth century.3 And of course, these strategies are still deployed in our contemporary world. We use them continuously in our political campaigns; though of course to medievalists modern claims to history and tradition seem so close and presentist as to involve no real memory at all.

The Entry Deconstructed

I would like to examine briefly the structure of the royal entry. By breaking royal entries or princely visits into their different components, we can follow visiting royals as they move through the many different stages that mark their progress from the city’s hinterland, that is, from the rural spaces outside the city into the town’s very heart. It is a progress that might be viewed, in the highly sexualized metaphors of Medieval Eu- rope, as the king’s penetration of the city—and the many civic officials and others who were responsible for paying for the festivities, probably thought the metaphor not inappropriate. In deconstructing the entry, we can see the play of different forms of symbolic languages, the shifting ideological venues, and the different roles assigned to the “audience” in these elaborate performances. We may also be able to highlight the continuities and discontinuities that were part and parcel of the king’s (or queen’s) entrance into one of their cities.

2 See chapters 2 and 3 for descriptions of these entries. Once again, for Ferdinand III, see the impressive biography cum study of the king and his documents in Julio González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 3 vols. (Córdoba: Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Córdoba, 1980). 3 See Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds.,Fairedel’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Also the monumental multivolume study edited by Nora: Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992), and in particular for our purposes here, Jacques Le Goff’s article on Reims: “Reims, ville du sacre,” in vol. 2.

115 CHAPTER IV

Receiving the King Common to all the entries and royal or princely visits was the reception outside the city. Without these elaborate gatherings of nobles, municipal officials, clergy, and sometimes (but not always) the general public, we cannot speak of a formal entry or visit. These receptions heralded the coming of a ruler or visiting prince and, at their most basic level, represented an act of courtesy, not unlike what happens when esteemed visitors come to one’s home and one goes to meet them outside the door. Certainly such gestures were required when I was growing up in another part of the world, and, though often it is seen as odd by many of my guests, I must confess that I still engage in the practice to this very day. I do not wish however to equate the workings of individual courtesy in its many manifestations, such as insisting on picking up guests at the airport or walking them to their cars, with the complex and multivocal performance of the royal entry. The reception outside the city, while honoring visiting royalty, also honored those who, more and more as we come into the late Middle Ages, marched in well-ordered and hierarchical processions to meet the king, queen, or prince(ss). And it is not just that these worthies came out to meet the king, but that they also went back into the city, usually through the main gate and through ceremonial triumphal arches, with the king. Thus, the reception outside the walls of the city was, first and foremost, an act of establishing bonds of reciprocity and mutuality. We receive you because in our city we are the ones who due to our position in the urban administration or in the church, or because of blood and family connections, have the right to do so. The honor inherent in their near- ness to the king was reemphasized by their costly garments—such as the scarlet robes worn by Burgos’ municipal officials at the Infanta Doña Blanca’s entry in 1440—and by their symbols of office (municipal maces, keys, banners of the city and the like), and by their carrying the canopy or palio that protected the king. Each of these tokens reaffirmed the reception committee’s place in local society. For the sake of clarity, it may be best to examine the development of entry ceremonies by taking the discrete elements of the entry, one by one, and looking at each through illustrative descriptions and a “thick reading” of its multifaceted aspects.

LIMINALITY, BOUNDARIES, CITY, AND HINTERLAND The reception procession always met the king at a certain distance— often specifically indicated in the narrative—that changed from locality to locality. This distance, ranging from a half league (in Jaén in the 1460’s for the entry of Henry IV) to as much as two leagues (in 1570 Madrid for

116 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY the reception of Ana of Austria), created a liminal space between countryside and city and extended the boundaries of the city outwards into its hinterland, an area that was often the site of conflict between a town and its dependent villages. It would seem then that the location where the king was to be met was not determined by the actual boundaries of urban jurisdiction—they could be too far out for comfortable walking from the city—but by a series of circumstances that were unique to each location. It was therefore at a “liminal” site in Arnold von Gennep or Victor Turn- er’s sense of that term—a place “betwixt and between”—that a visiting king or prince came into his first formal and direct (but also symbolic) contact with his subjects.4 As I have argued elsewhere, in medieval and early modern Spain, relations between a city or town and its dependent villages often were not cordial. Issues of jurisdiction, rights to pasture lands, taxes, the use of commons, and the like created persistent antagonisms. The problem was compounded in the sixteenth century when fiscal exigencies led Philip II to sell the right to become autonomous townships to many small towns and large villages, thus removing them from the jurisdiction of nearby towns.5 These rituals of reception, practiced routinely in most parts of medieval and early modern Western Europe, functioned therefore as ways of reasserting civic authority outside the walls of the city.6 Thus, to summarize this important point, the royal entry, and specifically the reception in the countryside, projected municipal power outside the town walls and reasserted civic authority in the contiguous countryside. Where this took place was important and carefully choreographed. Philip II waited in Antonio Palavicino’s house, outside Zaragoza, for the urban procession to come to him at an appointed hour.7 Philip and every other king or prince visiting Barcelona stopped at the monastery of Val- donzella and waited there for the city’s representatives, who would lead

4 See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960); Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in ritesdepassage,” in TheForestofSymbols. Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93–111. 5 See Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (London: Longman, 2001), 128–29; for conflicts over rural jurisdiction, there is a long bibliography. See David E. Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Castile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); for the sale of towns during Philip II’s reign, see Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: the Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516–1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) and Claudia Mineo’s unpublished PhD dissertation, “Law, Litigation, and Power: the Struggle over Municipal Privileges in Sixteenth-Century Castile,” UCLA (2006). 6 See my “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de mai 1428,” Annales E.S.C. 3 (1991): 542, note 21. 7 Cock, Jornada del viaje (1585), 32–33.

117 CHAPTER IV the visitor into the city.8 Sometimes, of course, there were unusual twists to this phase. Philip II’s reception outside Seville’s walls took the form of a promenade in the space between the precinct wall of the city and the Guadalquivir River. The ceremonial space where the king first encountered urban dignitaries was thus shaped by a combination of Seville’s topography and the king’s desire to sightsee and to stay at the gardens of Bellaflor, located on the banks of the river outside the city.9 Philip II’s complicated entry into Lisbon involved sailing from Santarem to the city, and thus a naval reception was in order.10 On other occasions, as for example in Ferdinand III’s proto-entry into an empty Seville in 1248, there was as yet no one to do the receiving. The king, surrounded by great men and warriors, entered the city to no proper reception. What is clear, however, in every other entry after 1248, as reported in the chronicles or in elaborate descriptions of royal visits, is that representatives of all the different institutions in the city had to exit the city to some point beyond its walls—there could not be a proper entry without walls and a gate through which to enter—and meet the princely visitor outside. This requirement held (except for some rare exceptions) whether it was a formal entry—that is when the king or a foreign prince or princess entered for the first time—or just another royal visit. If I may get ahead of myself here, the encounter in that liminal space between urban jurisdiction and open countryside; between the bustle of city life and either the rural world or the wilderness, was reinscribed as the king was led in elaborate ceremonial procession through the city gate. The latter, the city gate, was yet another liminal space between country and city. When that space was breached, the city often brought elements of the countryside into urban spaces in the form of syl- van ephemeral arches, displays of greenery, fruits, and the like, and of course embodied in the many countryfolk who poured into the city to gaze on the king and his cortege, and to enjoy the festivities.11 The level of sophistication of course varied. Larger towns—Zaragoza, Madrid, or Seville, for example—went for a deluge of classical, religious, and historical references to celebrate a royal entry.12 Smaller ones, such as Daroca, made do with references to their rural hinterlands, that is to their own domain, and well-placed epigrams celebrating the king’s life and his visit.

8 See chapters 3 and 5. 9 Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), 35v–47v. 10 Relación de la jornada que hizo Felipe II, desde Santarem a Lisboa, BN (H143r–143v). 11 For the displays of tree limbs, leaves, fruits, and other natural products on the ephemeral arches, see chapter 5. 12 See chapters 2, 3, and 5.

118 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY

PROCESSIONS: HIERARCHY AND COLORS If liminality and the ceremonial binding of countryside and urban space were the most distinctive aspects of the first meeting between a king and his urban subjects, the nature of the processions that came out of the cities to meet the king and the order in which the participants marched were perhaps the aspects of the entry that made the clearest political statement to the population at large. Sometimes these articulations of power- relations were made explicit to the visiting king. While in early narratives of these encounters, the details that interest us were not always included, we can safely assume that the procession was not a confused and disorderly mass of citizens engaged in spontaneous celebration. By the late Middle Ages and, certainly by the early modern period, the hierarchical arrangement of the procession that met the king outside the city walls was clearly spelled out. It was not just anyone who was permitted to come out of the city. Participation must have been restricted to certain social groups even in the earlier period. It certainly was by the 1450s and afterwards. In addition, the order of march reflected local politics and the pecking order within the city. Clearly, church dignitaries could be included or not included in these receiving processions. The crafts and other confraternities might or might not come out, but municipal officials, the high nobility and the like were always there. We will have many opportunities in the next chapter to explore in greater detail the carefully scripted order of these processions. Seldom was the order or ranking of the receiving cortege the same from one occasion or place to the next, a fact that speaks to the fluidity of these highly ritualized ceremonies and to the local political give and take that marked all royal entries. Who came out of Seville to kiss Philip II’s hand in 1570 was carefully orchestrated, and the chronological and spatial aspects of this important act of obeisance followed strict protocols of rank.13 The princess María of Portugal, entering into Salamanca on November 13, 1543

13 Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), 28v–47v. Before the king’s entry, there was a rehearsal. Don Francisco Tello, a knight of the military Order of Santiago led the parade. Mal Lara provides a detailed description of his garments, as he does of all the participants. Four pages preceded him. Twelve gentlemen (gentilhombres) followed, as well as almost 3,000 craftsmen. As the king approached the gate of the city, all the officials of the Casa de Contratación, with more than 150 captains and maestres of the Fleet of the Indies followed, with large contingents of municipal officials, doctor Vázquez of the Council of the Indies, and other high officials of the council. We learned that the “twenty-four” (Seville’s most important municipal officials) came to pay obeisance to the king “dressed as Roman senators, with togas of purple velvet, gold chains, and white velvet shoes.”

119 CHAPTER IV to marry the young prince Philip, was welcomed into the city by all the masters and members of the University of Salamanca.14 In Jaén we have already seen the careful order—even if still clearly imbued with carnivalesque and frontier references—of the procession that, coming out through the city gates, met Henry IV half a league outside the city walls.15 When the young prince Philip traveled to Barcelona on October 13, 1548, on his way to Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, he was met outside the city at Molinderey by a committee composed of Don Juan Fernández Manrique, Marquis of Aguilar and Viceroy of Catalonia, and Don Bernardino de Mendoza, Captain general of the Spanish Medi- terranean fleet, as well as by knights, and other nobles. One should note that these were Castilian noblemen and that this was not a royal or princely entry per se, but just a reception committee. Half a league from the city—and the distance is significant—the bishop of Barcelona and the bishop of Vic, the deputies of the Principality, consuls, nobles, and citizens, all arranged in hierarchical order, met the young prince before, it being already evening, he went directly to the house of Doña Estefanía de Requesens (chapter 5).16 A far more solemn reception was accorded to the prince in Girona, about which Calvete de Estrella wrote that it was “the first city where the prince entered with the royal pomp and festivities.” (Fuelaprimeraciudad adonde el Príncipe entró con pompa y aparato real.) Here, Philip was received outside the city to the clamor of large discharges of artillery—something different from medieval entries when artillery and firearms were either nonexistent or rare—and met (at a distance not specified) a contingent of foot soldiers and another armed with harquebuses. Knights and nobles also formed part of the procession. The heir to the throne was conducted in ceremony to the city gate. Preceding him were two macebearers carrying the royal maces, followed by two rey de armas (kings-of-arms or heralds, and thus royal officials with a vast repository or knowledge on how to script festivals) dressed with the distinctive royal insignias. Imme- diately in front of Philip walked Don Antonio de Toledo, the prince’s caballerizo mayor (master of the horse) with an unsheathed sword (the royal sword of justice) held up high in his hand. Riding behind the prince came the Duke of Alba. As they approached the city, Girona’s consuls (city officials) came out of the main gate “with great pomp and solemnity,” bearing a rich palio, which they held over the prince’s head. The reins of Philip’s horse were also held by “two thick ropes of silk” by the

14 Maestro Vargas, Recibimiento que se hizo en Salamanca a la Princesa Doña María de Por- tugal, 66. 15 See chapter 3. 16 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 8–9.

120 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY regidores (the king’s appointed municipal officials), who led the horse and the king on it into the city “as it was the custom in Catalonia when they receive and swear allegiance to their prince.”17 Similar receptions with some added components (a parade of galleys in Genoa, triumphal arches in Genoa and Pavia) marked Philip’s long journey through Italy and the Low Countries. Germany, as Calvete de Estrella emphatically describes, did not accord him any solemn entry. In some towns, such Milan and Mantua (both Spanish controlled cities that organized spectacular entries), the naked sword of justice, carried once again (in Mantua) by Don Anto- nio de Toledo, and the king-of-arms wearing Austrian or Habsburg livery, point to the continuity of some reception motifs, but also to the flexibility of rituals and symbols in the Spanish and Habsburg rulers’ complex web of jurisdictional claims. The organizational structure and festive motifs seen in Girona’s entry were, in essence, replicated all throughout Phil- ip’s voyage, although as part of far more elaborate festivities in the larger imperial cities, such as Milan, or in important centers of government and commerce, such as Mantua, Brussels, Antwerp, and others.18 Early in his narrative of the voyages of the young heir, Prince Philip, Calvete de Estrella notes that Hernando Alvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alba, had been charged with the responsibility to plan Philip’s long voyage and “to organize the prince’s household in the Burgundian style.”19 The implications here are twofold: One, that all of the receptions, formal entries, and subsequent festivities that accompanied the prince’s transit through Habsburg lands came about as the result of careful negotiations between the Duke of Alba and/or, most probably, his agents and the local and regional governments located along Philip’s projected itinerary. Bar- celona, always reluctant to engage in these celebrations of royal authority, obviously gave less than Girona. The latter, a city reluctantly in the orbit of Barcelona, probably welcomed the opportunity to feast and address the prince without the mediation of Barcelona’s authorities. Genoa, nominally independent of Spanish power, organized festivities—marred by a full-scale riot—that were symbolically less impressive than those of Milan, Mantua, and Brussels, all cities secure in the Habsburgs’ grip.

17 Ibid., 9–10. I have already discussed the importance of the canopy or palio in chapter 3 and will do so again in chapter 5. Calvete de Estrella describes the sword carried by Don Antonio de Toledo as an estoque, or rapier, but it really was the royal sword of justice. 18 Ibid., 29–113. Calvete de Estrella provides a luxury of details—most of them discussed or summarized in other chapters of this book—of the entries into these cities, the elaborate tournaments, reed-spear games (juego de cañas), fireworks, the clothing, and, of course, the ubiquitous ceremonial arches and ephemeral architecture. 19 Ibid., 2–3.

121 CHAPTER IV The second point that may be deduced from Calvete de Estrella’s comments is that the establishment of the new Burgundian style may have played a role in the reception of the prince and in the subsequent celebrations. As noted in the previous chapter, Burgundian protocol and the manner in which Philip’s household, first as a prince and then as king, was organized had a great deal to do with the ceremonial aspects of the court and the festivities associated with an itinerant monarchy. Yet, if we examine the different components of these receptions, we see that those elements that were laden with the highest symbolic and emotional value had peninsular antecedents. The meeting outside the city in that liminal space between countryside and urban spaces, the highly hierarchical arrangement of the receiving cortege, the naked sword of royal justice (which was to be displayed outside and inside the city), the chivalrous presence of the prince’s kings-of-arms or heralds, the royal maces, and, finally and most important, the palio, had been present in Spanish royal entries long before there was any Burgundian connection or political ties to Renaissance Italy. As we will see in the next chapter, the absence of many of these components in Philip II’s voyages of 1585–86 and 1592 is a telling sign of political contestation. Of course, new elements were incorporated in the transition from medieval to early modern, reflecting, as I have noted, new technologies of warfare. No sixteenth-century reception would be without its artillery barrage or harquebus discharges, and almost always both were on offer, making as much noise as was humanly possible. Some of them, as those in Mantua in 1548 or Seville in 1570, were so spectacular as to be particularly noted in the narratives of the festivities.20 Sixteenth-century literary accounts of these events paid even more attention to details than earlier ones. The colors of the garments, the types of fabrics, the color of the king’s horse, topics that will be examined in some detail below, are noted in exquisite detail. More and more, the reception of a visiting monarch or prince drew crowds from the city into the countryside, either summoned by the authorities or attracted by the novelty and splendor of the spectacle, to witness the majes- tic progression of the prince or king from countryside to city, but also, and this is of equal political significance, to provide testimony to the richly dressed reception committee. Philip II’s chaotic reception in Seville was held in spite of the press of the people. Seville’s citizens, not unlike modern crowds following in the wake of celebrities, ran back and forth to get a glimpse of the king, an-

20 Ibid., 109, 111; Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla aFelipeII(1570), 43v–44v.

122 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY noying him to no end.21 Crowds poured out of Madrid to an area quite a long distance from the city walls (“more than a league”), lining up along the triumphal route of Ana of Austria on her entry into Madrid in 1570.22 This was, of course, no impromptu demonstration of popular fervor for the queen. It followed closely from political exigencies and adapted to the social logic of the context.

Entering the City The symbolic moment when the royal personage actually entered the city through its main gate—or through whichever gate had been chosen—was laden with important symbolic and political meanings. In order to articulate what one might call the erotic discourse of royal entries, I recently used a slightly risqué, if not necessarily inaccurate, metaphor for the moment when the royal visitor enters a city. These events always brought the king or prince to a preselected gate. The choice depended on whether it was the recognizable main entrance to the city, as was the case in Jaén in 1462, or a gate rich in historical symbolism, like the Gate of Goles, through which, Mal Lara tells us, Philip II entered Seville—the same gate that Ferdinand III had used in 1248 and which, appropriately, displayed a sculpture of the saintly king on horseback with a naked sword in his upraised hand. This ritual flexibility in selecting either the main gate or one linked to a particular historical event allowed for adaptation and for the reinscribing of the event within a new and powerful script.23.

GATES AND EPHEMERAL ARCHES Charles V, immersed as he was in his Burgundian heritage and influenced probably by his grandfather Maximilian’s proclivity for ritual events, was particularly keen on spectacular entries, imperial pomp, and ceremonial gates. He commissioned the building or rebuilding of several city gates throughout Spain, most notable among them the imposing gate of Bis- agra (Visagra) in Toledo and the arch or gate of Santa María in Burgos.24

21 Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), 47v. 22 López de Hoyos, Real Apparato y sumptuoso recebimiento de D, Ana de Austria, 20–21 23 Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), 50. 24 For Toledo see Francisco de Pisa, Descripción de la imperial civdad de Toledo, y historia de sus antiguëdades, y grandeza, y cosas memorables que en ella han acontecido (Toledo: Pedro Rodríguez, 1605; Toledo: Diputación Provincial, 1974). For Burgos, see Matías Mar- tínez Burgos, Puente, torre y arco de Santa María (Burgos: Publicaciones del excelentísimo ayuntamiento de Burgos, 1952), 110–11.

123 CHAPTER IV Both of these gates had long been either the main gate or certainly one of the most important ones in their respective cities, but now, and strictly to serve the ceremonial needs of the new Habsburg ruler, they were stripped of most of their medieval characteristics and catapulted to the status of Roman and Renaissance triumphal arches. Thus, when Charles V (Charles I in Spain) made his triumphal entry into Barcelona, the civic authorities, perhaps at the prompting of the king, built an elaborate arch right by the gate, or puerta, of St. Anthony, the ceremonial entrance to the city.25 Ana of Austria, Philip II’s fourth wife, was met by two artificial arches outside the Gate of la Almudena, which elicited, as noted earlier, more than two hundred folios of description from the sycophantic López de Hoyos. Horozco described in meticulous detail the artificial arch built in front of the Gate of Bisagra in Toledo for Philip II and Isa- belle of Valois’ entries in 1560. Alvar Gómez de Castro’s account of the same entry is mostly a lengthy celebration of the arches. We have also seen, in Mal Lara, Calvete de Estrella, and others the careful descriptions and elaborate glossing that these arches and their decorations prompted.26 During Philip’s voyage in Italy, Germany (where, as mentioned earlier, no entries were recorded), and in the Low Countries, a profusion of artificial arches filled the cities along his triumphal route. The complex iconography of these arches changed from location to location, with pious and classical themes mixing freely with dynastic references or even local or personal ones. Charles V’s effigy, or that of his imperial lineage, appears often in Italian and Low Country arches. Geographic references— to the Arctic and Antarctic on one of Genoa’s arches—as well as a variety of other erudite references, with again an emphasis on classical allegory and historical remembrances, were also common in the iconographic programs of these artificial constructions.27 The arches with their elaborate emblems and the displays of erudition by local savants were part of an intense competition between urban centers for novel ways to praise the visiting royal. They also served to connect him or her (in the case of a queenly entry) to some classical, patristic, or otherwise glorious lineage, and they furnished a canvas for unavoidable and insistent self-references to the locality paying for the arches. Besides seeking their genealogical or historical messages, there are of course other ways of reading the elaborate iconographical programs that

25 See the splendid and scholarly tourist guide by James Amelang, Xavier Gil, and Gary W. McDonogh, Dotze passajedas per la història de Barcelona. Guia (Barcelona: Ajun- tament de Barcelona and Fundació “la caixa,” 1992), 55. 26 López de Hoyos, Real Apparato y sumptuoso recebimiento de D. Ana de Austria, 30–242 (folios). See chapters 3 and 5. 27 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 30–31.

124 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY decorated ephemeral arches; just as there are different way to read the theatrical representations that accompanied festivals in early modern Eu- rope. These juxtapositions of diverse motifs always included mythological and “pagan” references. One must accordingly ask, following Frances Yates’ remarks in her paradigmatic study of Giordano Bruno and Her- meticism, whether many of these displays did not also aim to convey a covert message, couched in the symbolism of Hermetic astrology and magic lore, that would be understood only by initiates.28 Since Philip II, in spite of his well-known piety, may have had an abiding interest in magic and other so-called Renaissance mysteries (the point is debated), this suggestion may not be far off the mark.29 This notion is all the more attractive as echoes of the Hermetic tradition and other magical currents can be found in some of the great—and not so great—plays of Spain’s Golden Age. Calderón de la Barca’s wonderful work, La vida es sueño (Life IsaDream), dabbles in astrological lore and hermetic themes, even if only to reject them at the end. Written almost twenty years after Calderon’s final revision of LifeIsaDream in 1673, Francisco de Bances Candamo’s (1662–1704) play, La piedra filosofal (The Philosopher’s Stone) borrows shamelessly from Calderón’s play, but without any of its elegance or sensitivity. Beyond its obvious title, The Philosopher’s Stone also echoes numerous astrological and alchemical elements. And these two plays are only the most obvious examples of a tradition still going strong in the late seventeenth century, long after Isaac Casaubon discovered that the works ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus were written in the Early Christian era. If we return to the issue of ephemeral arches and view them next as cultural artifacts, we observe that they functioned as signs of urban wealth and importance, and as markers of the relationship between city and king. Where there were not enough funds, or the city was not large enough to permit for such extravagances, arches of green boughs laden with fruit (even in the middle of winter) evoked, as noted earlier, the agricultural richness of the town, while epigrams and emblems glorified the visiting royals. The written word played a central role in the design of these arches and gates, both in the moment of entering the city, and afterwards during the royal promenade through city streets and squares. Pedantic poems, usually composed in Latin by local scholars, allusive emblems and shields, heraldic colors, and other such devices inscribed the visitor’s presence and

28 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; paperback edition of the 1964 original), 176. Here, in a passing reference, Yates raises the issue of whether Catherine of Medici, the French queen, may not have, above all in the Ballet comique de la reine, seen it as an “extended and complicated talisman” of Hermetic magic. 29 Geoffrey Parker, Philip II, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 49–50.

125 CHAPTER IV reiterated his/her location within classical, religious, and genealogical contexts. They provided as well a rich opportunity for narrators such as Calvete de Estrella, Mal Lara, López de Hoyos, and others to display their erudition by providing a transcript of the original, followed by their own translation. It would be as exceedingly tedious and as pedantic as these authors were themselves to provide examples here of these displays of erudition. I have relegated them to the notes.30 However we are still left with a question: if most readers of these narratives were not expected to know Latin (hence the necessity for translations), for whose benefit were these inscriptions? Clearly, the immense majority of the audience, of the crowds that flocked to these events and admired these artificial arches and renovated gates, could not read Latin, much less comprehend the comparatively rare inscriptions that appeared in Greek or Hebrew, as was the case during Philip’s sojourns in the Low Countries in 1548–50. The kings and many members of their cortege did not know how to do so either. Neither did most of the civic authorities, certainly not in Spain, and when, after angels sang and offered the keys to Barcelona to Charles V in 1519, a speech in Latin was delivered by one of the scholars in the city’s service, I doubt very much that Barcelona’s authorities knew what it was all about.31 In a peculiar incident that I will revisit in the next chapter, a learned scholar, Ascanio Colonna of the University of Alcalá de Henares in 1585 gave a speech in Latin in honor of Philip II and his children. The king ordered that the speech be translated into Castilian since the Infantas and the young heir to the throne (the future Philip III) did not know Latin.32 The scholars at Salamanca, Alcalá de Henares, and other learned centers may have known Latin, but the common citizens of these locations certainly

30 One example of this will suffice, for the description of the ceremonial arches and the emblems, poems, and other panegyrics ran, as has been seen, for many pages. In López de Hoyos, Real aparato y sumptuosos recebimiento de D. Ana de Austria, the description of the first ephemeral arch built for the entry of Ana of Austria in 1570 begins with an inscription in Latin in celebration of Charles V: “Imper. Caes. Carol. V. Hisp. Rex Cath. P.F. Avgu. Gentium et Externorum Bellorum Hostium Que Terra Marique Vic- tor.” As familiar as such praise of Charles V may have been for the general population, the abbreviations and some of the words were likely incomprehensible to most. Which is why the learned López de Hoyos immediately informs the reader that the Latin means. “El emperador Caesar Carlos quinto maximo rey de España, catholico, piadoso, felice, sempre augusto, vencedor de las gentes estrañas de todas las batallas, y enemigos es- trangeros, triumphador por tierra y mar.” Even the Castilian version is complicated and clearly intended for an audience capable of reading his narrative in Castilian, but most certainly not for the lower social groups. 31 James Amelang, Xavier Gil, and Gary W. McDonogh, Dotze passajedas per la història de Barcelona. Guia, 55. 32 Cock, Jornadadelviaje(1585), 12.

126 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY did not. But these inscriptions in Latin were of course not wasted. They created a distance between the educated and the uneducated. They legitimized the positions of both king and local worthies, and they linked (and legitimized) civic pageantries with the sacred language of the Church and of new Renaissance erudition. I have gone off on a tangent describing the gates and ephemeral arches built (or rebuilt) in celebration of the peaceful entry of the king into a city or town. But if we are to further gloss the erotic connotations of the entry, we must recognize that it was an epithalamic moment, reminiscent of the Song of Songs and of the language of both mystical and courtly poetry. It was the perfect marriage, or at least it sought to represent itself as such to all outward appearances, between the reigning king and his city. But appearances, as we know, can be deceiving. Although there is only one notable example, or perhaps two, of things going terribly wrong in an entry, an entry nonetheless might, with its violent displays, remind the reader of a forced entry, or worse. The case in point is the unceremonious yet very elaborate entry of Alfonso V into Naples after the conquest of the city in 1443. Paraphrasing the Italian chronicle of the event, the great Jacob Burckhardt did not fail to remark, in a lengthy paragraph, the bizarre aspects of this particular event. Burckhardt’s account (quoted here not quite in its entirety) reemphasizes some of the themes already discussed in previous pages: Alfonso the Great, on his entrance into Naples (1443), declined the wreath of laurel. . . . For the rest, Alfonso’s procession, which passed by a breach in the wall through the city to the cathedral, was a strange mixture of antique, allegorical, and purely comic elements. The car, drawn by four white horses, on which he sat enthroned, was lofty and covered with gild- ing; twenty patricians carried the poles of the canopy of cloth of gold which shaded his head. The part of the procession which the Florentines then present in Naples had undertaken was composed of elegant young cavaliers, skillfully brandishing their lances, of a chariot with the figure of Fortune, and of seven Virtues on horseback. . . . Sixty Florentines, all in purple and scarlet, closed this splendid display. . . . Then a band of Cata- lans advanced on foot, with lay figures of horses fastened on to them before and behind, and engaged in mock combat with a body of Turks [one must imagine pretend Turks], as though in derision of Florentine senti- mentalism. Last of all came a gigantic tower, the door guarded by an angel with a drawn sword; on it stood four Virtues, who each addressed the king with a song.33

33 Jacob Burckhardt, TheCivilizationoftheRenaissanceinItaly (reimpression, New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 265–66.

127 CHAPTER IV The first and most important point to note is that, instead of entering the city through one of its gates, Alfonso V, king of the Crown of Aragon and uncle to Ferdinand the Catholic, broke through the walls of Naples making, as he did so, his own unique ceremonial gate. Alfonso V had suffered a great deal and undertaken many trials in his consuming passion to possess Naples. He remained there after conquering the city and neglected his Aragonese realms, fortunately ruled ably by his queen as vice- regent. Naples’ walls had to be breached before the city submitted to its new Aragonese master. By choosing to enter in such a bizarre fashion, Alfonso V made a political and symbolic statement that must have been heard loud and clear throughout Renaissance Italy. The Spaniards were coming! And come they did, with a vengeance. Before the fifteenth century was done, Spanish armies had established their hegemony over the Ital- ian peninsula, and there they would remain for centuries to come. Al- fonso entered and traveled through the city in a carriage under a gold palio, as had his ancestor Alfonso XI in Seville more than a century before.34 The Catalans rode on artificial horses, not unlike the children in Jaén would do less than two decades later. Their mock combat with the Turks reenacted the traditional battles between the Moors and Chris- tians so peculiar to the Iberian peninsula and the ubiquitous juego de cañas. The angel with an unsheathed sword may have been the iconic figure of the angel at the now forbidden entrance to Paradise, but it also echoes the role of the sword in Spanish entries, including that of Alfonso V’s own father, Ferdinand of Antequera, when he entered Seville in 1410. But, of course, this particular ceremonial entry was part and parcel of a long tradition—except for the breaching of the wall, Alfonso V’s ringing and blunt message to his new Neapolitan subjects. There were other breachings of walls, or of gates as we saw in the entrance of Ana of Austria into Madrid. Since the Gate of la Almudena, on the western edge of the city proved too narrow for her cortege, an army of workers demolished parts of the gate to make room for what must have been a carefully scripted reception (including in that script the breaking of the gate itself). This was also done with the Gate of Guadalajara in the outer wall precinct.35 And remember that Ana had already entered the city symbolically by passing through two artificial arches built outside the city walls.

34 See chapter 3. 35 López de Hoyos, Real aparato y sumptuoso recebimiento de D. Ana de Austria (1572), 219r, 242r.

128 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY

KEYS TO THE CITY The moment of the actual entering into the city was marked with music and, by the early modern period, with additional rounds of artillery. Noise was as important a component of these entries with their festive- political meanings as the profusion of visual elements: arches, adornments, special clothing, and the like. But more and more often, as Spain transitioned from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period, the arriving monarch or visiting prince was offered the keys to the city. This gesture could constitute the formal surrender of a city or a kingdom, as in the case of Boabdil, the king of Granada, when he handed the keys to the city and its fortress to the conquering Ferdinand the Catholic on January 2, 1492. Sometimes, as was the case in Benavente in 1554 and Seville in 1570, the golden keys given to Philip by the count of Benavente and Se- ville’s municipal dignitaries, respectively, were most probably symbolic tokens of his possession of the city rather than actual keys that might open a real gate or door.36 Philip, who must have had a sizeable collection of keys among his treasures, had also received the keys to Louvain while still a prince during his tour of Habsburg lands in 1548–50.37 Ana of Aus- tria also received the keys to Madrid in 1570, as did Philip III’s new queen in 1599.38 And now that that all these formalities and ceremonies had been fulfilled, it was time to finally get a look at the city.

The Procession through the City and the Ceremonies at the Church Not all descriptions of royal or princely entries offer the same details. They all more or less agree that large crowds lined up along the route followed by the regal procession and that the noise and confusion were such as befit an important moment. Some chronicles emphasized the rich tapestries and silk adornments. Others, such as in Henry Cock’s description of Philip II’s entry into Zaragoza, commented on the beauty of the young ladies who, perched on their balconies and in windows, saluted the entering king and received back a courteous royal acknowledgment (in Philip’s case, he removed his hat in a debonair salute). The narrow streets of medieval and early modern cities were sometimes tented with white cloth, which, joining buildings from one side of the street to the other, pro-

36 Historia de los reyes católicos, 643; Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), 163v. 37 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 227. 38 See Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid, 42. Also López de Hoyos, Real aparato y sumptuoso recebimiento de D. Ana de Austria.

129 CHAPTER IV vided some refuge from the sun and a symbolic canopy to the entering royalty. This is of course done to this very day in Toledo for the procession of the Corpus Christi and was done, according to Horozco, in the same city for the dual entry of Philip II and Isabelle of Valois in 1560. Such was also the case in the small town of Alejandra de la Palla (near Pavia) in the duchy of Milan, when the young Philip entered on Decem- ber 12, 1548.39 In many instances, of course, certain crucial elements of the entry—the king, queen, or prince under a canopy, the unsheathed sword carried high in the air by an important royal official, the innumerable ephemeral and highly decorated arches (usually set in the city squares through which the king passed)—marked special stages in the royal tour of the city. Philip III, upon entering Madrid for the first time as king, did so under a palio of golden brocade with crimson fringes. It was held aloft by twenty golden poles carried by members of the city council.40 Artillery and harquebus discharges were also unavoidable components of entries in the early modern period, as was continuous music in both medieval and early modern entries. Stages were built along the route where tableaux vivants, profuse with classical, religious, and/or regal allusions, were performed, or musicians played to the delight of the entering procession and of the crowd. Sometimes small theatrical pieces were enacted, such as the skit featuring the Three Kings that enlivened Henry IV’s entry to Jaén. They functioned as a kind of street theater. The successive arches themselves, described with such luxury of detail, also featured ingenious and carefully chosen motifs. In Genoa, a place where triumphal arches could not be built until order had been restored after the riots and disturbances sparked by the excesses of the Spanish troops, one particular arch had effigies of two giants holding across the square a garland of fresh fruits and vegetables, while a small triumphal arch at the square of St. George told the story of the saint and patron of the city.41 Arches, tableaux vivants, theatrical skits, the abundant and ever present music, and other such exhibits together comprised a didactic program aimed at the visiting royalty, at civic authorities, and at the crowd. They entertained as well, of course, all those who looked on as trades, municipal officials, and neighborhoods competed for the most fantastic displays. The picture is not very different from the scolas de Samba in Rio de Janeiro’s carnival today. But most critical to these perfomative events were the ideological messages they were designed to convey. Many of the displays formed part of that quartet of classical, religious, historical, and genealogi-

39 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 53. 40 Antonio de León Pinelo, Anales de Madrid. reinado de Felipe III, 1598–1621 (Madrid: Estanislao Mestre, 1931), 39–41. 41 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 44–47.

130 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY cal allusions that imbricated the king and the city into well-established traditions. Others, such as the arch built on the street of St. Ciro in Genoa—to continue with a Genoese example, a city that while an ally of Spain sought to preserve its independence—where four columns made for yet another gate. A confused allegorical representation grouped the Olympian gods, Philip himself on horseback, the goddess Victory, nymphs, zephyrs, Virtue, and a direct allusion to the emperor Charles V’s victories against the Ottoman Turks on the Danube Frontier. Africa, the New World, and a multitude of other allusions were also thrown into this complex iconographic jumble.42 The route the royal visitors took through the city was lit by innumerable bonfires and torches. There seemsto have been a clear preference for nocturnal affairs. The chronicles remark on how the night was turned into day by the “luminaries” that lit up the usually dark and dangerous streets of medieval and early modern cities. Fireworks, another early modern innovation (imported of course from China), filled the skies to the great amazement of chroniclers and crowd alike.43

THE ROUTE We are not always told by the chroniclers what was the specific route followed by the honoree on his/her way from the gate of the city to the terminus of that initial entering procession (usually the cathedral or the royal accommodations). As we move from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, the narratives acquired greater detail, and we are able to discern that the route taken was not always the same. While, as Mal Lara reminds us, Philip II entered Seville by the same gate through which Ferdinand III had allegedly entered in 1248 (though that may have been an invented tradition), that gate was not the one used for royal entries. Philip II’s circuit in Seville was clearly chosen as the most direct route to the cathedral. At the same time, it showed Seville to its best advantage, taking the king along the city’s most important thoroughfares, the streets of the Feria and Genova. This circuit allowed, as has been seen, for the display of the newly built prison, the latest municipal building project. In Genoa, we are told by Calvete de Estrella, the young Philip, after a troubled landing (an artificial bridge connecting Philip’s

42 Ibid., 45. 43 The references to torches, bonfires, and fireworks are found in every account of royal or queenly entries. A few examples will suffice here. See Cock,Jornada del viaje (1585), 35 et passim; Comes, Libredealgunescosesasnyaladas, 37, 292, et passim; Báez de Sepúlveda, Relaciones verdadera del recibimientio que hizo la ciudad de Segovia (1570), 155 et passim; Mal Lara, RecibimientoquehizolamuynobleymuylealciudaddeSevillaaFelipeII (1570), 174v.

131 CHAPTER IV ship to the embankment failed to work as planned and the ceremonial procession had to be postponed due to a riot), entered the city by the ancient Gate of Saint Thomas, then proceeded through the Gate of La Vaca (the Cow), a gate in the older wall of the city, along the street of St. Ciro towards St. George Square, past Justinian Square, and then on to the city’s cathedral.44 In Barcelona, for the already mentioned royal entry by the nineteen- year-old Charles I, an entry meticulously illustrated by Amelang, Gil, and McDonough in a wonderful guide to historical walks in Barcelona, the king followed a circuitous route that led him past most of the city’s significant civic sites. After the reception outside the city walls, he entered through the Gate of Saint Antoni around 3 PM on February 15 (it was another of those semi-nocturnal winter entries). Going down what is today the popular tourist destination of Las Ramblas, the king was “welcomed” by an artillery discharge. He proceeded to a stage with a throne upon it, placed in front of the Montcadas’ family palace. There the newly minted king swore to keep the “constitutions” of Catalonia and the privileges and customs of Barcelona. From there, the king’s cortege continued along the carrer (street) Ample, Barcelona’s aristocratic neighborhood, to Santa María del Mar, an important center of commercial and maritime activities, and on to the Born. Beyond the Born, Charles proceeded to the street of Montcada, to Llana Square, the historical Plaça del Rei, past all the important civic building (on Casa de la Ciutat), and finally reached the cathedral.45 This exhausting tour brought Catalonia’s new foreign prince into contact with all of the different segments of Barcelona’s society and, by implication, with Catalonia’s. It also gave young Charles a history lesson about Catalan (and Barcelona’s) institutions and rights, exacting from him those promises and oaths so central to Catalan liberties. The point here is not only to note the political negotiations that were an inevitable part of royal entries, but also the unstable character of these displays of royal power. We see moreover that a royal entry demanded extraordinary stamina. What could be walked in two hours or so at a leisurely pace would have taken most of the day as part of a ceremonial entry. It may be useful to make a comparison with a French queen’s entry as described in loving detail by Jean Froissart. His words remind us, forcefully, that these kingly (or queenly) tours could be punishing affairs.

44 Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), 164r–172v; Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 43–49. 45 See Amelang, Gil, and McDonogh, Dotze passajedas per la història de Barcelona. Guia, 55–63; the detailed description of Charles I’s route through Barcelona can be found in Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona I, 391–402.

132 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY Froissart, an eyewitness to young queen Isabella of Bavaria’s entry into Paris on Sunday, August 20, 1389, describes, as did Spanish chronicles for Iberian entries, the crowds that lined her route, the initial reception at the town of Saint Denis (the site of the abbey) and the impressive cortege of noble ladies and men. Paying special attention to the colors of the entry: “twelve hundred citizens of Paris” lined the road, wearing “tunics of green and crimson silk.” The ladies in the royal cortege traveled in litters, something I have not seen in Spanish entries where riding horseback or at least in a carriage was expected. Reaching the Gate of St. Denis (laPortedeSaintDenis), Isabella gazed from her open litter at ingenious tableaux vivants. The fountains on the rue Saint Denis poured honied and spiced wine for “all who wished to drink.” By the small square across from the Church of the Trinity, the queen witnessed a tournament in which knights played the roles of past paragons. The mock battle pitted Saladin and his followers against heroic Christian paladins. Isabella stood to watch the fierce combat for a while before continuing through the second Gate of St. Denis, where another theatrical skit awaited her. At the ancient Gate of the Châtelet, a bizarre spectacle awaited her that included live animals, the royal litdejustice, and maidens, all adding up to complex ideological messages about French royal power. Finally, the queen arrived at the Cathedral of Notre Dame where yet another elaborate spectacle was performed, before (at last) the bishop of Paris and the clergy led the Queen from her litter into the church.46 The long entry covered a distance that could easily be walked in an hour and a half or less. But what with stops to watch the diverse spectacles along the route, it took Isabella and her entourage the entire day, this though the road from the Gate of St. Denis to Notre Dame was as direct a way as could be found, passing by significant Parisian landmarks before reaching the Châtelet, the ancient fortress protecting the river crossing. Excepting the litdejustice, a uniquely French symbol, and the fact that Isabella rode on an open litter, there is nothing in this entry that would not have been recognized by a Spanish audience: the theatrical skits, the battles between Christians and the Moors, the wine pouring out of fountains for everyone’s delight, and the formal conclusion of the ritual procession at the church. The international flavor of these events created a kind of cultural continuity that helped shape the men- tality of the ruling orders of Western Europe across emerging national boundaries.

46 The whole description is found in Jean Froissart, Chronicles (London: Penguin Books, reprint 1978), 351–56.

133 CHAPTER IV

Sacred Spaces as the Terminus of the Royal Entry Almost every royal entry or princely visit concluded at the cathedral or the town’s main church. Sometimes, as was the case at Daroca in 1585, the king went directly to his palace (someone else’s residence and a royal abode only through his visit), postponing the visit to sacred places for later. That was also the case in Zaragoza for Philip II’s entry in 1585. After the long ceremonials of the entry, he proceeded to the palace of the Duke of Sástago, which would be his residence in the capital of the kingdom of Aragon until “the palace of the archbishop on the banks of the Ebro was ready to receive him.”47 In both of these instances, we witness a royal visit and not a royal entry. The distinction, as noted earlier, is significant. All royal entries incorporated the cathedral or main church of the town as the terminus of the ceremonial procession. In a highly symbolic fashion, the king then entered a very different kind of space, a sacred space, having reached, often by a circuitous route, the liturgical heart of the community. The bishop, or archbishop, and the members of the cathedral chapter waited outside the main door of the church to receive him, thus reiterating the formal reception of the king outside the city. Having met the king, they led him, in a once again carefully plotted procession, through the main portal of the cathedral and into the sanctuary. There a Mass was celebrated and the clergy always sang a Te Deum Laudamus. The emotional valance of such performances in a world in which the sacred and the profane so freely overlapped can never be fully assessed. What is certain is that the message would not be lost on either the spectators or the participants. The king (or queen) passed through a series of spaces: countryside, city gate, triumphal arches, and the commercial and/or administrative heart of the city, but ended always at its ritual center. This final arrival at sacred space after what had been essentially a carefully scripted dance between local authorities and nobles on the one hand and the Crown on the other allowed visiting royalty to assume, once more, the cloak of religiosity while providing the church assurances of its long and close relationship with royal power. Of course, the cathedral remained a place closely associated with the royals throughout their sojourn in the town. Kings demonstrated their piety by frequent attendance at divine services. Philip, who was particularly pious, divided his attentions among all the churches and monasteries in the cities he visited. And there was the case of young Philip’s elaborate

47 Cock, Jornadadelviaje(1585), 34.

134 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY entry into Brussels in 1549, when an important ecclesiastical moment arose that called for yet another visit to the cathedral and further ceremonies. In the always difficult relations between the papacy and the Spanish kings, symbols played an important role. Pope Paul III decided to send the young Philip a sword and a cap or bonnet, a “crown” symbolic of his investment by the pope, while Philip was still in Brussels. Why this was not done during the Philip’s travels in Italy appears to be clearly tied to Spain’s hegemonic role in the Italian peninsula. Brussels was conveniently far away, beset, as the Low Countries were beginning to be, by religious antagonisms, and these symbols sought, ineffectively it proved in the end, to bind the soon-to-be-king to the defense of the Holy See. Having arrived in Brussels, the papal envoy held the sword, with the cap on its tip, high up in his raised arm, then placed the cap on the main altar. Philip swore to defend the Faith and the Holy See, and the bishop girded the sword around Philip’swaist and placed the cap on the young prince’s head. What was important about this event, however, was that Philip kneeled while the bishop girded him with the sword, a gesture that would have been completely unacceptable to Philip’s Castilian ancestors.48 This rather bizarre performance (Philip must have known that his ancestors loathed ecclesiastical interference in their affairs) was directly related to the entry, and though a unique event in the long history of Spanish royal entries, it reaf- firms the special role of the Church and the place of the sacred within the rhythms of a first kingly or princely visit to a city.

The Aftermath of the Entry Once the king had entered the city, followed the preordained route that led him to the cathedral, and heard a Te Deum, what was next? Quite a lot in fact. What was next could go on for weeks, as was the case in Zara- goza in 1585, and it could leave the host city fiscally exhausted. In our earlier medieval entries, we either read, without excessive description, of tournaments, juego de cañas, dances, food distributions, and the like, or the chronicler simply notes that there were “great feasts,” as the chronicle of Alfonso XI does in describing the birth of the the Infante Don Fer- nando, which elicited “muchas alegrías” (much happiness).49 By the early

48 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 211–15. On the refusal of the Castilian kings (and even the Aragonese) to let themselves be knighted or have their swords girded on by anyone, see chapter 9; also T. F. Ruiz, “Unsacred Monarchy: The Kings of Castile in the Late Middle Ages,” in Rites of Power. Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, Sean Wilentz, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 124. 49 Crónica de Alfonso XI, 239.

135 CHAPTER IV modern period, the narratives are filled with detail about how cities competed with each other in organizing the most elaborate and ingenious of feasts, artfully and carefully planned. One should begin by noting that every royal entry or visit called for a large number of tournaments, jousts, Moorish equestrian displays, and other such martial games. Since I will be discussing these in detail (chapters 6 and 7), we should set them aside for now, but keep in mind that mock warfare was probably the most important class marker in the entry, reiterating the place and role of the nobility in the social fabric. Besides these fictive combats—and some of them provided really first-rate entertainment (think of the one held in Brussels in which one hundred men on stilts, dressed in the imperial and Burgundian colors, fought a battle) there were many other activities that followed the formal entry, which can be fit into a neat typology.50 These different categories provided an even flow between activities that were fairly official in nature, and those that, although still official, had a public character in that they offered the king to the gaze of all citizens. Although such categories as “private” and “public” do not adequately characterize the ebb and flow of the relationship between the ruler and his people in late medieval and early modern Europe, it is not incorrect to argue that there were moments during a monarch’s visit to the city, whether many or few, in which the king engaged in activities that were open only to the few important nobles and political figures of the town. There were other occasions when the king or queen traveled to some event within or near the city and found themselves put on what one might call “public display.” He or she was there to be seen, admired, to be the object of the crowd’s gaze. Sometimes the press of the crowd became intolerable, as it did for Philip II in Seville in 1570. Often times, but mostly in the early modern period, the king or queen would look down on the crowd from the security of his/her balcony, removed from the turmoil of public celebrations, both an observer and the focus of the crowd’s observation. The next chapter (and chapter 9) will provide abundant examples of these literal removals of the king from direct contact with the people. And finally, there were instances when the monarch simply stayed put in his palace and was accessible only to his most immediate advisors and courtiers. Private moments were scarce indeed, for a large part of the work of rulership rested in the duty to see and be seen. Nonetheless, although early modern rulership depended, to a large extent, on being available to the public, there is a noticeable shift that oc- 50 For the tournament of knights on stilts, see Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 164. Calvete de Estrella comments that it was something “new to see them” battle like that.

136 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY curs in the transition between the late medieval and the early modern periods. This subtle change is not necessarily a result of the literary trend toward more descriptive and detailed chronicles, nor is it always in evidence, but the careful observer begins to detect a gradual tendency for the king to be removed from contact with the crowds. Although the reception outside the walls of the city and the ceremonial procession through the city streets were “public” and brought the king or queen into intense contact with the crowds, once this was over, the king withdrew to a safe distance to be seen and to see for sure, but with a clear buf- fer between His Royal Majesty and commoners. This distance was reinforced by the clothing, colors, and symbols of authority displayed at the entry. The Infantes of Aragon and King John II of Castile danced and enacted chivalrous feats of arms in the main square of Valladolid to the delight of the crowd in 1428 (feasts associated with the princely entry of an Infanta of Aragon),51 but it is hard to imagine Philip II dancing among the people. His dancing, even as a young man when he loved to dance, was always within the strictures of formal parties to which only those of high rank and royal favor were admitted. This flow from open contact with the people and proximity to the crowds to more secluded or removed spaces is best encapsulated by the scene of the king ensconced on his balcony, looking down from a high window, or presiding over celebrations from a raised stage. It reflects new configurations of power and the changing nature of political relationships within the realm in Iberia and elsewhere. Although distance did not always create the expected political results, it nonetheless projected new ways of representing regal authority and drummed, without missing a beat, a continuous statement about hierarchy and obedience. New symbolic gestures and new public displays of obedience became part of early modern statecraft and had their counterpart in festive displays and in the choreography of the entry. But, I have promised a typology of the events that followed the king’s attendance at a solemn Te Deum in the cathedral or main church. What kind of events took place? Spectacles came in different forms. Not all of them, of course, took place in every entry, and my list is not at all inclusive. The different categories of activities can be divided as follows: a) noble and popular acts of obeisance and honor to the king (processions); b) tournaments, jousts and other chivalrous activities; c) music, dances, and banquets; d) artificial constructs, such as dragons and other mystical beings, fictitious castles and towers, fireworks, night illuminations, and

51 See my “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de mai 1428,” 521–46.

137 CHAPTER IV other bizarre and ingenious devices aimed at awing both the public and the visiting prince; e) theatrical skits, tableaux vivants, and other dramatic representations. Obviously each of these categories would yield enough material and examples to fill an entire book. For the sake of brevity, I will provide only a smattering of the evidence in the text and limit the bulk of references to the notes. The first category represents a crucial moment in the entry and has significant political meaning. Once the religious ceremonies had concluded and the royal visitor had withdrawn to rest in his palace, the great nobles, royal and municipal officials of high standing, and other notables came to kiss the king’s hand in obedience, as the “knights, jurados (city officials), and deputies to the Cortes” did in Zaragoza on February 25, 1585.52 Sometimes, as in Seville in 1570, the great nobles and urban dignitaries paid their respects to the king and kissed his hand outside the city and before the formal entry.53 In Toledo, during Isabelle de Valois’ s ceremonial entry, all the city officials and other dignataries came out of the city to kiss the Queen’s hand in obeisance.54 In most entries, at one time or another, there would have been these ritualized ceremonies of obedience in which the leading men of the city or region would enact formal gestures of respect and devotion. Rarely, as was the case with Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, the observance would follow the Moorish fashion of approaching the monarch while he was still on horseback and kissing or attempting to kiss his feet. At the formal surrender of Granada, King Boab- dil tried to kiss the hand of Ferdinand the Catholic and ended up kissing his arm.55 These ceremonies of obedience were restricted to the few who could approach the monarch, who were deemed deserving of the honor of kissing his hand (or arm). They were not for the many who could only demonstrate their love for the monarch by organizing elaborate processions past the king’s window. In the next chapter, we will have the opportunity to look in detail at some of these processions and to read them for their social and political meanings. Here it will suffice to provide one or two examples and to note, once again, the importance that the hierarchical order of these parades had within the internal politics of the city and in the relations between the different social orders estamentos( ) represented in the march. In Brussels, on June 2, 1548, the Sunday after the Ascen-

52 Cock, Jornadadelviaje(1585), 35. 53 Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), 35v–36v. 54 Horozco, Relaciones historóricas toledanas, 195. 55 Hechos del condestable, 189–96; Historia de los reyes católicos, 642.

138 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY sion, the emperor Charles V, visiting queens (including the queen of France), and the young prince Philip looked down from a window on an elaborate parade. In ranks of three, two hundred pikemen opened the procession dressed in blue, white, and red garments, while men dressed in the same colors carried banners and played drums and pífaros (the modern Spanish word is pífanos or fifes). They were followed by another rank of pikemen and soldiers carrying broad swords held with both hands. A third rank was manned by a squad of harquebusiers dressed in white, followed by a company of archers in white, black, and red garments. Imme- diately after came two companies of crossbowmen, one with white and red clothing, the other in green with armor. Once the military aspect of the procession had passed, young men on horseback with scepters in their hands and ducal crowns on their heads appeared. They were dressed in multicolored silk clothing, and they represented all the successive dukes of Brabant from the first one to Charles V. Pages accompanied the parade carrying the ducal standards. Fifty-two guilds, each with their banners and an image of their patron saint, followed this theatrical and dramatic representation of Brabant’s history. And they were, in turn, followed by triumphal carts—essentially floats—where pious tableaux vivants commemorated the “principal feasts of Jesus and the Virgin.” There was, however, still more to come, so much more that Calvete de Estrella, a careful narrator most of the time, gave up and described the entire performance as having “many games and inventions,” though he did not fail to note a man dressed as a devil riding on a bull that spewed fireworks from its horns, a young man dressed as a wolf, and a choir of cats that screeched not so musically when their tails were violently pulled. Following these unique exhibits came a dance of monkeys, bears, wolves, and other exotic animals (in reality of course men disguised as them). A real couple of monkeys in a cage played windpipes, while, following behind the monkeys, a tableau vivant told the story of Circe and Ulysses. In the next rank of this seemingly interminable procession came a dancing giant and giantess, and next a large horse with wings, a representation of the mythical Pegasus with four children riding on its back. Adding to the exoticism of the parade, a camel strode by, carrying on his humps an artificial tree with eleven naked children, or more likely children dressed to appear naked, sitting on its branches and enacting the Virgin Mary’s genealogical tree. One more stage of the procession brought in a griffin with eight children riding upon it, and next, trailing the griffin, came many children, some apparently naked, some dressed in white, riding camels and horses, while behind them a huge artificial serpent hurled flames and sky rockets cohetes( ) from its body. Finally it was over, closing

139 CHAPTER IV with a number of triumphal carts carrying religious tableaux vivants, and the royalty went off to lunch.56 Brussels’ carnival was, by no means, the only one that conflated such seemingly contradictory and outlandish elements, though, as was always the case, the local context dictated what was displayed and how didactic messages, political and religious in nature, mingled with the exotic animals, bizarre displays, and carnivalesque entertainments that were meant only for the sheer delight of onlookers. The very impressive military parade, not usual in early modern Spain civic processionals (but frequent also in Corpus Christi celebrations and other religious events during Fran- co’s regime) may have been a not-so-subtle reminder to the restless Low Countries of Spanish might. Or Brussels’ Catholic authorities may have welcomed such martial displays as a bulwark against Protestant threats. The young men with scepters and ducal crowns historically linked Charles V and his Burgundian ancestry with a different and older comital line, that of the Dukes of Brabant. They thus represented one more claim to legitimacy and paved the way for Philip’s assumption of the title in just a few years. They also made clear references to the themes displayed profusely in Philip’s entry into the city a few days before when tableaux vivants and emblems announced Philip’s forthcoming rule, associating the young prince with his father and with Hercules, and with the symbolic trope of an imperial eagle. An emblem reminded the population that “blessed are those who obey and are subjects to his rule (the imperio, that is, that of Charles V), while genealogical markers traced Philip’s lineage to the Catholic monarchs, the Habsburgs, and the Flemish-Burgundian comital line.57 That in the formal procession organized by the city, but surely with the emperor’s acquiescence, the next rank was manned by Brussels’ numerous guilds, reflects the long historical importance of guild life in the Low Countries and their role in its government. Note that neither city officials nor ecclesiastics were represented in this parade, even though the guilds were followed by floats representing important landmarks of the religious calendar. The guilds were, in fact, the effective government of Brussels, and their banners and patron saints were part of a dialogue with Charles V and, by implication, with Philip, soon to be heir to the Low Countries. The fantasy that followed these more formal aspects of the procession mixed the carnivalesque with the religious, fanciful inventions and ribaldry with the political, mythological scenes with exotic animals, in ways which remind the reader of Bakhtin’s arguments for the open

56 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 206–10. 57 Ibid., 179–84.

140 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY flow of medieval culture and its excesses.58 Children, naked (or dressed as naked) or fully dressed, always played significant roles in these entries. We have already seen them in Jaén, marching to meet the king in different disguises and in Toledo for Isabelle of Valois’ entry. We meet them here, perilously perched on top of a camel, a Pegasus, and a griffin, both as iconic representations of religion and innocence and as little cupids and/or mythological pagan beings.

GIFTS AND PRIVILEGES Although they are never mentioned in Iberian accounts, Philip of course collected innumerable gifts, either currency or precious objects, in almost every city he visited during his Italian-German-Low Countries sojourn. While in Spain it may also have also been the case that the king received some gifts, the cities after all already contributed mightily (certainly Cas- tilian cities) to the Spanish monarchy. Mal Lara, for example, tediously reminds the reader of Seville’s contributions to the royal fisc. Abroad the transactions were blunt and direct, and Calvete de Estrella never fails to note either the amount of the contributions or the nature of the gift. They ranged from the 10,000 doubloons of gold given to the young prince by the wealthy city of Milan, to the smaller amounts given to him by city officials in Ulm and Augsburg (a golden cup and 1,000 florins in each of these cities). In return, as we have seen, a king or princess swore to uphold the privileges of the particular city or territory—always a wise thing to do in the Crown of Aragon—and was himself or herself acknowledged as ruler.59 It may be wise therefore to briefly review the other components present in elaborate royal entries. Music was always integral; it could be martial music, such as the beat of drums, trumpets, and other instruments that accompanied the king’s triumphal entry, but other kinds of music filled the towns during royal visits as well. As we have seen, stages were set along the king’s route and on every corner of the medieval and early modern city to provide entertainment to the visiting king, his entourage, and the common citizens. Likewise dances took place all over the city, in three distinctive forms and settings. There were dances performed “publicly” for the entertainment of the prince. They could be spontaneous, such as the dances of the peasants who flocked to the sides of the roads as the elderly Philip II traveled through Castile and danced “making noises

58 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Indiannapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 196–277 et passim. 59 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 90, 150–51. For the swearing of privileges, see chapters 3 and 5.

141 CHAPTER IV with their fingers or their castanets.” They could also be prearranged, such as the dances of “savages and peasants” performed for Philip II and the Infantas by the humble rural inhabitants of Brihuega in 1585. Or they could be traditional, like the dances of Jews and Moors in the narrow streets of Briviesca that celebrated the coming of the Infanta Doña Blanca into the kingdom in 1440.60 In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, mighty princes thought nothing of dancing for the entertainment of the crowd.61 By the sixteenth century, however, princes seldom danced among their people. Philip’s travels, both as a prince and as a king, are an endless inventory of saraos, dances in which the young prince participated avidly and acquited himself well. Later in life, he continued to attend and look on in delight.62 Similarly, banquets moved uneasily between two poles. There was the open distribution of food and the ever-present fountains pouring wine that were open to all, a tradition that persisted without notable change from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period. And then there were the more exclusive banquets to which only the royal family and the highest nobles were invited. The etiquette and protocol of these affairs are telling signs of the political context in which they took place. In Munich, one of those German cities where Philip was given no ceremonial entry and where no decorative arches were built, no one sat at the head of the table.63 In Milan, over which the Spaniards enjoyed a firm grip, Philip sat on a high stage, flanked by two lower stages where princesses sat. The banquet mixed lively dancing with elaborate food. It was so sumptuous an affair as to provoke Calvete de Estrella’s description of all the courses.64

Artificial Constructs Throughout the previous chapters, we have already seen descriptions aplenty of elaborate ephemeral constructions. And we will have opportunity to see more of them in later chapters, for like music, banquets, and tableaux vivants, they were not restricted to royal entries. One finds them

60 Cock, Jornada del viaje (1585), 16; Crónica de Juan II de Castilla, 398–400. 61 See chapters 6 and 9. 62 For examples of saraos (dances in which the young Philip danced), see Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I: 7, 10, 79, 85, 142, et passim; Maestro Vargas, Recibimiento que se hizo en Salamanca a la princesa doña María de Portugal (1543), 79, 86, et passim; for Philip II as a spectator, see Cock, Jornada del viaje (1585), 11, 59, 72, 80, et passim. 63 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 148. 64 Ibid., 80–81.

142 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY in different degrees of elaboration in all festive cycles. It is not always easy to measure what impact these inventions and artificial constructs had on the towns’ inhabitants, but one must assume that they were objects of awe and great amusement. Even the chroniclers, sophisticated humanists most of them, burst into words of wonderment at the ingenuity of these constructs.65 And the time and energy that they devoted to describing them are clear evidence of their importance. We here will make do with a few outstanding examples. I have already glossed the fabled feasts that took place in Valladolid in May of 1428 and the construction there of a fictitious castle. The chronicler noted in quite respectful terms that it had cost 10,000 florins, an enormous amount, and that it had been built by an Italian designer.66 In Jaén those scripting the constable’s festivities showed enormous ingenuity. The carnivalesque battle of eggs on Easter Monday 1464 called for the building of a large and movable tower with which to besiege and attack the real tower defended by Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, in which gardeners fought with the constable using boiled eggs as missiles.67 In Italy, Philip’s trip through the peninsula was punctuated by fantastic constructions and a multitude of triumphal arches, while at Trent, in the liminal space between his Italian and Habsburg’s possessions, the young prince and the town’s citizens were delighted by artificial pyramids, another artificial castle, giants, a mythical cave, Hercules, artificial lions spewing fire through their mouths, centaurs battling each other, Turks, and other imaginative displays.68 Trent’s festivities will merit revisiting in a later chapter since, together with the great spectacle at Binche, they represent the heights of artifice achieved during Philip’s 1548–50 journey. As to bonfires, fireworks, torches and the like, I have provided sufficient references to indicate how important a role artificial lighting played in the entry’s symbolic structure, as it did in that of other festive events. A bull madly rushing about with torches on its horns, to the delight and peril of those gathered to see the king, would not have had nearly as much dramatic impact if its run had taken place during the day. Noctur- nal settings added a special frisson to all performances.

65 See many examples in chapters 3 and 5. Most of Mal Lara’s description of Philip II’s entry into Seville is given over to the description of triumphal arches: Mal Lara, Re- cibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a Felipe II (1570), and so was López de Hoyos’s description of the entry of Anna of Austria into Madrid. 66 See my “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de mai 1428,” Annales E.S.C. 3 (1991): 521–46. 67 Hechos del condestable, 165–66. 68 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 108–9.

143 CHAPTER IV

Bulls, Theater, Moors, and Fashion in the Royal Entry Later on I will explore the connection between bulls and the game of canes in greater detail. Here, it may be useful to note briefly the importance of bulls in the entry, an important and exclusively Iberian phenomenon. The roots of the Iberian fascination with bulls can be found in the ancient past. They played a significant role in medieval festivities, and come dramatically to the fore in the early modern period. Whether they were let loose—bulls with torches on their horns, running through the town’s streets (an early version of the famous Pamplona run)— or fought on foot or horseback—bulls occupied a unique place in the Spanish imagination, a cultural hold that endures until today. And then there were the plays, entremeses (skits), comedies, tableaux vivants, and other dramatic representations, which were such important parts of all festive occasions. In many respects, the king’s arrival near the city, progress through the succession of urban spaces, and the final denouement at the religious service in the cathedral or town’s main church was in itself a theatrical event. So were the parades and demonstrations. Arches served as stages for these enactments as well. Stories were told, scenes from mythology or sacred history were enacted. Spectators were bombarded with a complex array of overlapping and even contradictory themes, a continuous mise-en-scène that intermingled regal, religious, “popular,” and elite motifs. Finally, we should not conclude this chapter without mentioning two additional and significant topics. One consists of the careful attention to the fabrics and colors worn at the feast. This is a topic I have explored in some detail elsewhere and will revisit below. Nonetheless, we should note here how, in a society where customs and specific colors provided for easy social coding, our contemporary narrators carefully described the costumes of entering royalty, the great nobles, and the attending guards. Even the king’s horse came in for attention, as every detail in these highly scripted ceremonies was of importance. Entries were multicolored. The guards’ uniforms could be garish indeed by our modern standards, as indeed were most noble garments. As we have seen, in Burgos city officials dressed in scarlet to receive the Infanta Doña Blanca. The one hundred knights who fiercely fought outside Briviesca wore either red or white. Philip dressed in white and black as he entered Genoa. His horse was almost always white, though in Milan’s entry it was brown. His guard often wore costumes in yellow or gold and red, the quintessential Spanish colors, or they could be, as was the case in Milan, gold and black. In Mantua, the royal king-of-arms had

144 THE STRUCTURE OF THE ROYAL ENTRY clothes of scarlet damask embroidered with royal shields.69 In 1428 Vall- adolid, King John of Castile wore gold and silver, green, and red and white in three successive feasts. The constable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo was a perpetual fashion show, his colors ranging all over the spec- trum. One gets the idea that almost any color was possible, but in fact it was the colors of the crusade, red and white, and the distinctive Burgun- dian black that played the most significant symbolic roles. They came to be associated in the Iberian peninsula not only with regional folk costumes but with regal power itself.70 As did brocade, damask, silk, and velvet, the most often mentioned fabrics in royal entries and in great festive cycles. Our second topic is the ubiquitous Moorish cultural presence, an element as peculiarly Spanish as bulls. Before 1492 and the conquest of Granada, Moorish equestrian military games (juegos de cañas), battles of Moors and Christians, Spanish nobles dressed alamorisca (in Moorish style), Moorish clothes, and the like featured in some festive celebrations. By the early modern period, these Moorish tropes were ever present. Spanish kings traveling abroad or high nobles accompanying the royal retinue exported these Moorish fashions and military games to the amazement and bewilderment of the lands beyond Spain and as a further confirmation of the inherent hybridity, “blackness,” and barbarity of the Spanish.71 Yet, no self respecting monarch could do without the intricate juego de cañas. Thus in Milan six squads, each consisting of eight Span- ish knights dressed alaMorisca, fought with reed spears on the Day of the Epiphany 1549.72

We have traveled a long road in these last chapters: from descriptions and analyses of specific entries to an attempt to explicate the different components of the royal entry. I fear that we are not yet done yet with this topic, for we turn in the next chapter to a discussion of the political gains and pitfalls of Philip II’s royal entries and visits to the always recalcitrant realms of the Crown of Aragon.

69 Ibid. 70 On color coding (above all red, white, and black) and a bibliography on this subject, see my “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célé- brations de mai 1428,” Annales E.S.C. 3 (1991): 521–46. 71 See chapter 6 below. 72 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 86–88.

145 ❊ CHAPTER V ❊ A King Goes Traveling: Philip II in the Crown of Aragon, 1585–86 and 1592

On Tuesday November 17, 1592, Philip II, already tormented by severe attacks of gout, arrived at the famous monastery of Irache in the middle of a fierce snowstorm.1 After a light collation, a visit to the monastery, and a quick glance at the many relics stored there, the king proceeded to Estella, one of the kingdom of Navarre’s most important cities, a mere quarter of a league away. Outside the gate, he was met by the city officials who, carrying a ceremonial palio to cover the king, brought him into the city with great solemnity. The civic authorities were dressed in long, red-velvet robes, reaching to their feet, as was “the custom of the land.”2 The king was led to his lodgings where, in a small square facing his residence, a large fictitious serpent or dragon spewed fire and flames from its mouth and the inevitable fountain poured wine for all passersby. The gate through which the king entered the city had been built anew just for this purpose, but the incessant snow and rain—and Cock’s truncated narrative—would have made the entire entry into Estella a very sorry affair, were it not that the ceremonial reception included a palio, something that Philip did not always get on his travels outside Castile.3 Although some elements of Philip’s royal entry are easily recognizable—the reception outside the walls, the palio, the civic authorities’ long, red-velvet robes, the ubiquitous dragon and wine fountain—the spirit (and description) of the event appear quite removed from those earlier dramatic entries we have witnessed in previous chapters. Past were those halcyon days when Philip had entered Salamanca for his first wedding, or Benavente on his way to England. Very much like the realms he ruled, ceremonies were now muted not only by the weather but also by the malaise spreading throughout Spain.

1 On the monastery of Irache and its geographical location, see the documents and introduction in José Ma. Lacarra et al., eds., Colección diplomática de Irache (Pamplona: Principe de Viana, 1986), 2 vols. 2 Cock, Jornada de Tarazona (1592). We have another eyewitness account of this voyage, written by Jehan Lhermite. I will compare the two accounts throughout my discussion of Philip’s voyage to Tarazona below. 3 Cock, Jornada de Tarazona, 62–64.

146 A KING GOES TRAVELING

Two Royal Journeys

After a long general discussion of royal entries in Spain, from Alfonso XI’s entry into Seville under a golden palio in 1327, to numerous other princely entries and visits in late medieval and early modern Spain, I would like to turn my attention now to two specific instances of royal travel—first Philip II’s voyages in 1585–86, which took him throughout most of the Crown of Aragon; and then another voyage, in 1592, to attend the Aragonese Cortes meeting at Tarazona—and to provide a narrative and, at times, a close reading of what the conflation of travel and festivals meant in political terms. These two extended journeys, coming as they did towards the end of Philip II’s rule, allow us to compare the celebrations of an earlier age with the complicated and often unsuccessful emplotment of the king’s progress through his eastern kingdoms. It is here in this chapter, one that I have foreshadowed through the previous ones, that the efficacy, or lack thereof, of festive cycles as tools of ruling can be most easily tested, and it is here, too, that we come face to face with the difficulties that Spanish monarchs encountered in ruling their different Habsburg realms. The pageantry of Philip’s early years, when still as a prince he traveled through, and enjoyed lavish receptions in, Italy and the Low Countries, had been replaced by a comparative auster- ity born of new political realities and the slow but noticeable deterioration of Spanish influence in European affairs. Festive displays and triumphal entries were still planned and carried out. The results, however, often left a great deal to be desired and reflected the king’s enduring problems with his eastern subjects.4 4 Although this chapter focuses on the two accounts written by Henry Cock for Philip II’s travels in 1585 and 1592—plus some Catalan sources that describe his entry and visits to Barcelona—the trips are also mentioned or discussed, though without too much detail, in a number of secondary and contemporary (or almost contemporary) accounts of Philip’s activities. They are as follows: Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 257–61, 291–92. Geoffrey Parker, Philip II, 3rd ed. (Chi- cago: Open Court, 1995). Parker does not deal directly with Philip’s two voyages to the Crown of Aragon but provides context for the period, 143–58. Luis Cabrera de Cór- doba, Felipe II, rey de España Madrid: Impresora de Cámara de S. M., 1877), 4 vols. Vol. 3, 111–18 provides a much abbreviated description of the king’s voyage in 1585–86. Written in the seventeenth century, Cabrera de Córdoba’s account is notable for a short description of Philip II’s entry into Barcelona (see p. 113 and below): “Acompañó á sus hijos hasta Barcelona, donde entró de noche por excusar ceremonias antiquísimas, man- tenidas por los catalanes por sagradas é inalterables, no convenientes á la grandeza de los presentes reyes y tantas veces omitidas de sus primitivos señores.” (He accompanied his children to Barcelona, where he entered in the evening to avoid ancient ceremonies,

147 CHAPTER V

Figure 4. Philip II’s travels in the Crown of Aragon, 1585–86. Madrid– Guadalajara–Alcalá de Henares–Zaragoza–Barcelona–Monzón–Valencia– Madrid. Map prepared by M. Carina Padilla.

Philip II’s Entries and Festive Cycles in the Crown of Aragon in 1585–86: Theaters of Power or Contestation? In 1585, the king of Spain, Philip II, went traveling for almost a year and three months. It was not, overall, a good trip. But his long journey through the Crown of Aragon nonetheless provides us with a unique perspective on the peculiar nature of the relations between a king and his subjects in Europe in general, and in modern Spain in particular. It also highlights the close relationship between royal itinerancy and festivities. What was this trip and the festivals that were associated with Philip II’s sojourn all about? Shortly after the 1584 Christmas celebrations, Philip II, the most powerful ruler in sixteenth-century Europe, and probably in the entire world at that particular moment in his long reign, left his austere surroundings in the newly built monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial and traveled to nearby Madrid, his recently appointed capital.5 He remained in Ma- maintained by the Catalans to be sacred and unalterable, [but] not convenient to the majesty of the present kings and often omitted by its original lords.). The sorry affairs of Monzón are discussed on pp. 135–45, while the reasons for the trip to Tarazona are given on pp. 596–612. 5 There is a vast literature on Philip II, and I limit myself here to the most recent

148 A KING GOES TRAVELING drid for a few days, and on January 19, 1585, embarked on a long journey throughout his eastern realms: Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. A reluctant traveler (although, as has been seen, he traveled enough to belie this reputation) and an intensely private ruler, Philip II is thought to have preferred the daily routine of exhaustive work at his desk, especially later in life, to the festive displays usually associated with peripatetic kingship.6 The long and trying journey to the Crown of Aragon took all of 1585 and the early part of 1586. Such a lengthy absence from the center of the spiderweb from which he ruled most of the world had become necessary for “reasons of state” (the famous razón de estado). The journey was undertaken purportedly to enable him to preside over the lavish wedding of his daughter Catalina to the Duke of Savoy at Zaragoza, but, if one thinks about it, that wedding could just as well have taken place in Madrid. The long trip also served to ensure the smooth succession of the young Prince Philip (to become Philip III, king of the Spains, in 1598) to the realms and possessions that constituted the Spanish monarchy in the late sixteenth century and, far more important, to showcase the authority of the monarch to his often recalcitrant subjects in the Crown of Aragon.7 Henry Cock, an archer in Philip II’s Flemish guard and a papal protonotary as well, has left us a detailed account of Philip’s journey and of the numerous events, festive and political, that played out along his route.8 works in English. Full bibliographical references to Philip II can be found in chapter 1 and in the bibliography. See John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (New York: St. Martin Press, 1964), pp. 242–78; John Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1, 177–367. More recent works include Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); and Geoffrey Parker, Philip II, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 1995). 6 See Parker, Philip II, 45. 7 Spain was what John H. Elliott has accurately described as a “composite monarchy.” This means that Philip II, as well as all his Habsburgs predecessors and successors, exer- cised limited authority outside Castile. That fact is at the core of this essay. See John H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past&Present 137 (1992), 48–71; Ruth Mackay, The Limits of Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 8 The original of this narrative is extant at the Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris), in the manuscript collection (Richelieu) Espagnol 272. I consulted this version, written in a very clear hand in both Latin and Castilian, in the summer of 2007. Cock’s account was, as noted earlier in chapter 1, published and edited by Alfredo Morel-Fatio and Antonio Rodríguez Villa, Relación del viaje hecho por Felipe II en 1585, á Zaragoza, Barcelona y Va- lencia (Madrid, 1876). All references are to this edition, hereafter Relación del viaje (1585). On Henry Cock and the manuscript, see Relación del viaje (1585), pp. v–xvii. The actual title of Cock’s account is Anales del año ochenta y çinco, en el qual el rey catholico de España Don Phelipe con el prinçipe Don Phelipe su hijo fué á Monçon á tener las cortes del reino de Ara- gon. Henry, or Henrique, Cock was the author of yet another significant account of Philip II’s voyage to which I have referred earlier and will gloss in this chapter, Jornada de

149 CHAPTER V His narrative, which occupies 256 pages in the nineteenth-century edition, includes significant historical details and ethnographic information about the cities and small towns he visited throughout the eastern realms. It also provides detailed descriptions of buildings, customs, and other such information of interest to Cock’s inquisitive and observing mind. A foreigner, one of those many Flemish soldiers, diplomats, and courtiers who seem to have populated the Habsburg court, Cock spent close to a decade in Spain while in the service of his king. His account provides us with a remarkable perspective on sixteenth-century culture and on the close relationship that existed (and still exists) linking spectacle, the contestation of power, and crowds (or what we might describe today as the “public”). Although his account is most deserving of its own monograph, in these pages, because of limitations of space, I focus on following Philip and his cortege first from Madrid to Zaragoza, then to the other two capitals of the Crown of Aragon, and eventually to Monzón, the site of the meeting of the cantankerous Cortes of the Crown of Aragon. In doing so, I hope to provide a “thick description” of the meaning of the processions and celebrations that marked the king’s progress through his kingdoms. At the same time, in keeping with my opening remarks in the introduction to this book, I would like to question the efficacy of spectacles in the workings of power in early modern Spain and Europe, and to argue that we need to think of these spectacles in new and more complex ways.

PHILIP II AND HIS WORLD Although I have earlier provided a short synopsis of Philip II’s life and times, it may be useful to explore in greater detail the historical context of this trip. In 1585, Philip was perhaps at the very height of his considerable powers and of his remarkable abilities as a statesman. His rule covered the entire Iberian peninsula (he had become king of Portugal and its vast maritime empire in 1580), and extended through parts of Asia, Africa, the New World, most of Italy, and the Low Countries. Spanish armies, still undefeated in pitched battle and enjoying considerable superiority over any other national army, served as the bulwark for Habsburg interests in Austria and Catholic Germany. Yet in 1585, and certainly much more so in 1592 when the king traveled to Tarazona, while still in what Parker describes as “years of triumph,” the Spanish monarchy was beginning to be beset by mounting problems that would, in a little over

Tarazona hecha por Felipe II en 1592 pasando por Segovia, Valladolid, Palencia, Burgos, Logroño, Pamplona y Tudela, Alfredo Morel-Fatio y Antonio Rodriguez Villa, eds. (Madrid, 1879).

150 A KING GOES TRAVELING half a century, lead to Spain’s eventual demise as a major political power. A rebellion in the Low Countries, sectarian and national in nature, turned into an unsolvable political problem. Staying the course meant a continuous drain of Spanish manpower and fiscal resources. Twice already Philip II had had to declare bankruptcy, and he would be forced to do so again before his death. Abandoning the Low Countries with their historical ties to Burgundy and to Philip’s ancestral home was not yet an option.9 By 1592, the disasters that befell the Invincible Armada, serious economic difficulties, and the king’s deteriorating health made his sojourn even more gloomy.10 The Spanish economy, which had been growing since the late fifteenth century, had entered a period of decline by 1585. Plagues and other en- demic illnesses reduced the population of the peninsula. Castile, the rich- est source of taxes and conscripts, saw its peasant population, overbur- dened by taxes, begin to flee to the peripheries of the empire. The very ambitious programs of the 1570s—the great census of the monarchy’s resources undertaken in the Relaciones topográficas, the pictorial depiction of Spanish cities, and other such humanist projects—had now been shelved in the library of the monastery of El Escorial as examples of Philip II’s once ambitious programs and fierce collecting impulses. Only Wyn- gaerde’s paintings of Spanish cities remained on public display in the Great Hall of the Alcazar (the royal palace) in Madrid, as a visual testament to the monarchy’s power.11 In 1585, the kingdom had not yet fully recovered from the 1568–1570 Morisco rebellion in the Alpujarras. The Ottoman Empire, in spite of having been soundly defeated at Lepanto in 1571, still presented a serious threat to Spanish interests in the Mediterranean and, together with Bar-

9 On Philip’s growing economic problems, see Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs 1, 129–55; Elliott, Imperial Spain, 279–95. 10 For the Tarazona trip and the presence of locusts in the northern Castilian countryside, see below. For the Armada, see the old but always delightful book by Garrett Mat- tingly, TheDefeatoftheSpanishArmada (London: J. Cape, 1959), and Felipe Fernández- Armesto, The Spanish Armada: The Experience of the War in 1588 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 11 Richard L. Kagan’s preface in Richard L. Kagan, ed. SpanishCitiesoftheGoldenAge: The Views of Anton van den Wyngaerde (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 11: Wyngaerde had painted “the principal islands and land of Zeeland, with its towns, ports rivers, banks . . .” for a gallery at El Pardo. “In 1599 the German traveler Jacob Cuelvis reported that painted views of Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Ghent, Gravelines, and Lisbon, together with a number of Spanish cities, were hanging in the entrance hall of this palace [the Alcazar]. He also states that the decoration of the Great Hall in the Alcazar included views of thirteen Spanish cities and of Mexico City, Rome, Genoa, and Milan.”

151 CHAPTER V bary pirates, a continuous menace to its Mediterranean shores. Even Spanish possessions in the New World had come under pressure from English and Dutch privateers, and though they did not seriously threaten the empire, they were a costly nuisance. By 1585 preparations for the so- called Invincible Armada were already under way.12 Religious conflicts in Germany and Central Europe also demanded continuous outlays of men and money. The king’s star was no longer on the rise. In hindsight one can see that all these problems would eventually wreck Spain, much more so as Philip II’s successors—his son, his grandson, and his great grandson—were not as gifted rulers as Philip, or in the particular case of Charles II, utterly insane. The king’s long and difficult journey in 1585, though a display of his power and politically motivated, was not undertaken from a position of strength. In fact, one of its purposes was to confront mounting political difficulties in ruling the Crown of Aragon. It is in the context of these political tensions that we must place Philip II’s journey and the scripted, and often not so successfully choreographed, ceremonials that accompanied his slow progression from Madrid to Zaragoza to the Cat- alan cities, and eventually to Barcelona, the capital of the Principality of Catalonia. From Barcelona, the king proceeded to Monzón to have his young son sworn as heir to the thrones of the Crown of Aragon by a combined meeting of the Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian parliaments. And from Monzón, he traveled to Valencia, the eponymous capital of the kingdom. A journey to the Crown of Aragon was always a risky business. The eastern kingdoms resented violently any infringement of their traditional liberties. They contributed little to the Spanish monarchy’s far-flung enterprises: not much in the way of taxes, and even less manpower. The county of Ribagorza, strategically located on the Pyrenean border with France and not too distant from Zaragoza, had been plagued by an open civil war between the lord of the region and its peasants for centuries. Violent attacks against Moriscos in Aragon and Valencia were common. Morisco reprisals were just as common. Banditry was widespread, with the great road connecting Zaragoza and Barcelona for all practical purposes in the bandits’ hands.13 Mobs could be mustered at any time by wily lords and city officials to create disturbances and put pressure on visiting dignitaries. The Crown of Aragon was a headache and a heartache.14

12 Parker, Philip II, 148. 13 See Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Martín de Riquer, ed., 12th edition, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Juventud, 1995) 2: chapter 60. 14 See Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (London: Longman, 2001), 170–82, 200–205.

152 A KING GOES TRAVELING

PHILIP II’S VOYAGE: MADRID TO ZARAGOZA After such a long introduction, we should look carefully at that part of Philip II’s journey that took him from Madrid to Zaragoza and attempt to explicate its meanings, successes, and failures, as well as the role that the common people played in these theaters of power. It is important to reemphasize the nature of our source. The narrator, Henry Cock, was part of a royal archers’ guard manned exclusively by foreigners, mostly Flemish.15 He wrote therefore from a foreigner’s vantage point. More- over, his narrative was far more concerned with the description of what he saw and the history of the places he visited along the way than with the political implications of royal travel. Although he was clearly loyal to and respectful of the king and did not fail to make political comments favorable to Philip throughout his narrative, describing the spectacle of monarchy from an ideological standpoint was not his motive. We must trust our source, however, and appreciate what it does show about the social and cultural contexts in which Philip undertook his long and tiring travels through the eastern realms. As prelude to the voyage to Aragon, the Prince was sworn as heir to Castile by the usually pliant Castilian Cortes on November 11, 1584. Royal officials were then sent in advance of the royal journey to Zaragoza to prepare suitable accommodations and to ensure that supplies for the king and his court were in place along the route.16 There were careful negotiations as to the nature of royal entries or visits, the nature of the expected receptions, and other such matters which were part of the careful scripting of royal movement through the kingdom. For example, as noted in the opening pages of this chapter, royal officials had gone ahead to pave the way and to arrange for a reception in Zaragoza, and the king himself had sent a letter to the municipal authorities in the town. Wheat was imported from Sicily to feed the royal court while there. Joan Campi, a royal envoy, came to Zaragoza in early January 1585 to request that the roads leading to the city be tidied and repaired, and that citizens clean the fronts of their houses. The city governments undertook a series of measures, though the usual haggling over money continued, and the king was delayed when one of the bridges leading into the city sank into the Ebro River for lack of repair.17 It is clear, nonetheless, that in spite of all

15 For the names and lists of Philip II’s Flemish guard, see Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 91–96. 16 Ibid., 9. This description contains a pejorative reference to Spanish peasants. Royal orders were given to ensure a just price for goods purchased along the royal journey because “the peasants of Spain are inclined to deception and theft. . . .” (My translation) 17 V. Luis Barrio y Sánchez, Relación del viaje hecho por el rey Felipe II a la ciudad de Zara-

153 CHAPTER V these preparations the size of the royal entourage and of the mounted guards was far greater than what many of the small locations along the way could comfortably host. Henry Cock and his fellow guardsmen often rested in different towns from where the king slept, which also tells us something about Philip II’s sense that in Castile he was quite safe. Im- plicit in the account of the king’s perambulations from Madrid to his eastern realms is the harsh reality that the most important king in sixteenth- century Europe could not command a flow of supplies sufficient to support him and his court for a few days in small localities. In fact, many courtiers and their retinues, bent on accompanying the king, were ordered to stay behind in Madrid or to proceed ahead to Zaragoza. On Saturday January 19, 1585, Philip II, riding on horseback and followed by large carriages, each pulled by six horses and carrying his daughters, the young prince (who traveled in the lap of one of his sisters), and the Infantas’ ladies-in-waiting, left the royal palace in Madrid. After a brief stop at the monastery of the Discalced Carmelites to visit his sister, Philip proceeded to the village of Barajas, spent the night at the palace of the count of Barajas, and graced with his presence the marriage of the count’s daughter. From Barajas, today a mere thirty minutes by car from the center of Madrid, the king and his cortege proceeded to Alcalá de Henares, site of a famous university. There he was received, the account tells us, with “great happiness and festivities.” Learned speeches in Latin were given in the king’s presence, one of them by Ascanio Colonna, the Italian humanist.18 The king ordered that these speeches be given also in the “romance” (in Castilian) so that the princesses and the Infante could understand. Philip II’s call for translation was a touching moment of paternal concern, but it serves also as a reminder of the vigor of the ver- nacular and of the fact that all the Latin inscriptions that we saw earlier adorning artificial arches in royal entries could not be read even by members of the royal family. Not even highborn Infantas could understand Latin.19 From Alcalá the king traveled a short distance to Guadalajara, the seat of the powerful dukes of Infantado. He remained there for four days as he goza en el año 1585 (Zaragoza: Tipografía la Academia, 1926), 5–14. This is not a reprint or re-edition of Cock’s work. Rather, it is a short essay containing long quotes from Zaragoza’s municipal archives, which confirm and amplify Cock’s description. 18 On Ascanio Colonna and Philip II’s visit to Alcalá de Henares, see Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 12. On the university itself, see Miguel Angel Castillo Oreja, Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso de Alcalá de Henares: génesis y desarrollo de su construcción, siglos XV– XVIII (Madrid: Edascal, 1980). 19 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 10–12.

154 A KING GOES TRAVELING prepared to cross the sparsely inhabited region between Guadalajara and the Aragonese border. A substantial number of the members of the royal cortege left for Zaragoza ahead of the king, not only to pave the way for his arrival but also so as not to overburden the small villages along the way. As the king made his slow progression through eastern-central Cas- tile, often delayed by bad weather, snow, and terrible roads, the local population, most of them peasants, came to the road and danced for the benefit of the king, “making noises” by snapping their fingers or playing castanets.20 The first leg of the royal journey serves as a prelude to his arrival in Aragon and his eventual royal entry into Zaragoza. It deserves some explication. As we saw earlier, in the late sixteenth century, royal itinerancy still helped to firmly establish royal hegemony.21 Even for a king as fond of the Escorial, his gardens, and his hunting lodges around Madrid as Philip was, showing his royal presence around his lands was an important aspect of rulership. This worked at two levels. A royal visit to a high nobleman— as his stay at the count of Barajas’ house and his presence at the wedding of the count’s daughter, and as his long stay in Guadalajara (the seat of one of the most powerful noblemen in Castile) indicate—was a great honor to be treasured as a sign of royal largesse. It built loyalty and enhanced the prestige of both the noblemen and the king. It bound the monarch and the nobility together through ceremonial and commensality. Displaying the magnificence of the royal court (even though by then Philip II usually dressed in austere black), was also an important component in the theatricality of power. The king’s retinue, including Henry Cock’s archers, were garbed in bright colors, presenting a vivid tableau vivant to the common people who came to the side of the road to see their king. At Brihuega, a small town or outgrown village, all the members of the town’s council waited outside the gates to kiss the king’s hand in obeisance. Then they led him through Brihuega’s streets, which were all adorned with triumphal arches made of ivy and covered with poems celebrating the king’s visit, to the main square of the town and the house

20 Ibid., 13–16. 21 See above chapter 2. Also Rita Costa Gomes, The Making of a Court Society: Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 291–95; Jean Boutier, Alain Dewerpe, and Daniel Nordman, Un tour de France royal: le voyage de Charles IX, 1564–1566 (Paris: Aubier, 1984), in which Charles IX’s itinerancy paid careful attention to visiting the frontiers of the realm, thus reinforcing France’s boundaries. There are numerous books and published sources for the famous progresses of Elizabeth I of England through her realm. See, for example, The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I, Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

155 CHAPTER V where he was to rest that night. As an aside, one should note that Philip II had entered Brihuega after 5 PM, an hour when the town would have been quite dark and cold, making the whole celebration a bit of a trial for everyone. As the king gazed at them from a balcony, the citizens of Bri- huega danced two types of dances for the king’s entertainment. One was a dance of savages and the other of peasants, though for some members of the sixteenth-century upper elite when it came to rustics, savages and peasants were one and the same. After the dances were concluded, the entire town’s population—Henry Cock estimated them at around 1,200 citizens (or around 5,000 inhabitants)—paraded in front of the king’s balcony.22 If one considers the cold, how awkward it must have been for Philip to stand on the balcony with his frequent attacks of gout, and how tiresome and unsophisticated the whole affair must have seemed to such a punctilious king, one comes to realize what a very difficult task ruling was in early modern Europe. Yet, one also understands how important these contacts between a king and his people were for the well being of the monarchy. Beyond these highlights, Henry Cock’s narrative provides us with a vivid portrait of rural Castilian life: the sparse population, the insignificant and impoverished villages, the awful weather, the impassable roads. Philip II’s Spain was a “giant with feet of clay,” to borrow Ferdinand Lot’s felicitous phrase about the late Roman Empire. When one thinks of the Loire valley in France and the network of pleasure chateaux built by the sixteenth-century Valois kings and their prosperous subjects around the same time as Philip’s journey, one is struck by the realization that though Spain still enjoyed undisputed military hegemony in Europe, that hegemony was not sustainable, nor did it translate into a desirable quality of life in the peninsula. By February 15th, almost a month after departing Madrid, the king’s glacial progression through his own secure and loyal kingdom of Castile brought him finally to the boundary with the kingdom of Aragon. Cross- ing into Aragon required a series of ceremonies that signaled Philip II’s acknowledgment of Aragon as a separate jurisdiction from that of Castile, or, as the narrative puts it, as “another kingdom.” On the Aragonese side of the border, the Justicia of Aragon waited, together with the inhabitants of the region singing and dancing in honor of the king. The office of the Justicia dated back to the thirteenth century and was the most important office in Aragon proper. Essentially an ombudsman, he was the jealous defender of Aragonese liberties and privileges and, as Philip II found to his chagrin in 1591, capable of effectively thwarting royal authority in the

22 Cock,Relacióndelviaje(1585), 16.

156 A KING GOES TRAVELING kingdom.23 His actions at the border provide a vivid reminder of the limitations of Philip’s power when it came to Aragon. In approaching the border, Castilian royal officials placed their staffs of office on the ground, signifying that they had no jurisdiction whatsoever in Aragon; and, as they crossed into the kingdom, the royal guard dis- charged their pistols. Processions and celebrations were always multivocal performances. The king gained a great deal from them; others did as well. In this particular case, the ceremonial crossing of the border functioned as a dialogue. In Castile, where Philip II ruled with a great deal of authority (though not as much as we had once assumed), processions and spectacles were highly scripted to enhance the king’s image and authority. Such was the case in Philip II’s highly choreographed entry into Se- ville in 1570. In Aragon—and the same would be true later on in Catalo- nia and Valencia, as well—Philip II could not always be sure of what was in store for him.24 The crossing was one of those moments in which tradition and the privileges of Aragon dictated the king’s behavior and the almost ritual aspects of entering a new realm. To return to Philip’s journey, reaching Daroca on February 16th, the king left the comfort of his carriage and rode his horse as the Justicia, the council, and the knights of Daroca led him into the town. In spite of his failing health, Philip made sure to enter towns on horseback, thus reasserting his knightly prowess and courtly youth. It was a trying effort, but one necessary to project an image of royalty which, even in the case of such a committed public servant as Philip and one so wedded to his bureaucratic duties as to be called the rey papelero (a king who dealt mostly with official papers), still harkened back to the medieval ideal of courtly kingship so rigorously upheld by his formidable father and other royal ancestors. He remained in Daroca until Sunday, with the usual Masses, the exposition of the Corpus Christi, the running of the bulls, and theatrical representations of St. George slaying the dragon.25 The political implications could not have been lost on the king in spite of the entertaining real flames pouring out of the dragon’s mouth and nostrils. St. George

23 Ibid., 22. On the Justicia of Aragon, see Luis G. de Valdeavellano, Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas. De los orígenes al final de la Edad Media (Madrid: Revista de Oc- cidente, 1968), 571–80. See also the article “La presencia del rey ausente: las visitas reales a Cataluña en la época moderna,” in Imagen del rey, imagen de los reinos. Las ceremonias públicas en la España moderna (1500–1814), Agustín González Enciso and Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa, eds. (Pamplona: EUNSA, 1999), 63–116. I am grateful to Xavier Gil Pujol for calling this and other articles to my attention. 24 For Philip II’s travels, especially in the Crown of Aragon, see María de los Angeles Pérez Samper, “La corte itinerante. Las visitas reales,” in FelipeIIyelMediterraneo, Ernest Belenguer Cebria, ed. (Madrid, 1999), 115–42. 25 Cock,Relacióndelviaje(1585), 24.

157 CHAPTER V was a saint emblematic of the Crown of Aragon and its privileges. He was not the king’s favorite saint.

ENTERING ZARAGOZA Finally, after other stops and multiple replays of such ceremonies, the king reached the outskirts of Zaragoza. His guard had gone into the city earlier and now it came out through the city’s main gate, blowing trumpets to announce the king’s arrival. A procession, probably organized long before the actual event, emerged from the city in a strictly hierarchical order. The king was to ride into Zaragoza flanked by the senior jurado (municipal official) of the city, and the governor of Aragon, Juan de Gur- rea. The latter, either because of sickness or more likely because of political conflicts, was not available and was replaced at the eleventh hour by Zaragoza’s archbishop. The ceremonial procession was led by a large contingent of knights from Castile and Aragon, riding on their well- appointed horses. City officials and deputies to the Cortes, dressed in red velvet with gold trimmings, followed. Behind them marched the members of the royal council of Aragon with their macebearers, dressed in scarlet robes with silver trimmings. Occupying the fourth group in the procession were eight deputies of the Cortes, or parliaments, of Aragon, two each representing the four branches of the Cortes: ecclesiastics, the high nobility, the lower nobility, and urban representatives. Four macebearers marched with them, holding their maces high in the air. Mixed with them, the grandees of Castile also walked into the city. The position of the maces is significant, for when the king entered Seville in 1570, the municipal authorities had begged permission for the city’s macebearers to carry their maces, with the emblems and heraldic markings of Seville, high in the air as was, the chronicler Mal Lara tells us, the custom of the city. Philip refused, and the macebearers kept their maces low in the presence of the king. That was certainly not the case in Zaragoza. Next came the king on his horse, flanked by thejurado de Cap and the archbishop, with his German and Castilian guards on both sides of the road. Behind the king came the royal carriage with the Infantas and the young heir to the throne. Other carriages with the ladies-in-waiting followed, while Henry Cock’s guard of Flemish archers closed the procession. Slowly the king entered the city surrounded by a large but orderly crowd. All the houses and windows along the royal procession route were gaily decorated with silk banners and tapestries. Beautiful maids, our observant informant does not fail to tell us, gazed from balconies and windows. At very short intervals along the royal way, stages had been built where musicians played. Bonfires were lit at every corner of the city as throngs of people marched to and fro carrying torches and candles. Fi-

158 A KING GOES TRAVELING nally, the king reached the palace of the Count of Sástago, where he was to remain during his long stay in Zaragoza.26 That night, around 8 PM, still more was in store for the long-suffering king, but before providing yet another description of yet another procession, we should make some attempt to explicate the meaning of this particular episode of the king’s entry into the capital of Aragon.

The Meaning of Festivals: Theaters of Power or Contestation? Royal entries, and both calendrical and noncalendrical festivals projected, it is traditionally assumed, the power of kings to special interest groups and/or to the population at large. Through colors, symbols, and display, these peripatetic theaters of power buttressed royal authority and that of the Church; especially, in the case of the latter, the great Corpus Christi processions and spectacular autos de fe. But did these theaters of power work always to the benefit of rulers? The simple answer is that they did not. It is clear that they were, more often than not, sites of contestation and part of an elaborate, polite, but intricate dialogue between political forces.27 While royal authority was never overtly challenged (though, as was the case in Barcelona, it could be briefly ignored), and although careful steps were taken to enhance the ruler’s majesty, other agendas were very much in play. Specific political and regional contexts dictated the scripting of processions and the great festivals of early modern Europe. Local authorities, after all, paid the expenses, and they had some say, as we have seen in the case of Philip II’s entry into the Crown of Aragon, on how the drama was plotted. As Victor Turner has shown us in his From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, festivals, which are essentially a form of ritual, are never inexorably fixed. They undergo a continuous process of re-signification. While still depending greatly on reiteration—all royal entries shared many characteristics—performances changed, were added to, or subtracted from. Given, then, the inherent mutability of festivals, we must abandon overarching interpretations because they do not truly describe the myriad of possibilities inherent in all festive displays. But what about Philip II’s entry into Zaragoza? Here I attempt only the most perfunctory of analyses. As already noted, the Spanish king went to the capital of the kingdom of Aragon for very specific reasons, the most important of which was having his young son Philip sworn as heir to the realms of the Crown of Aragon. While there was no real 26 Ibid., 32–35. 27 See Sir Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

159 CHAPTER V threat to the succession, even after the sorry affair of Don Carlos, the Crown of Aragon in general, and the kingdom and its capital city in particular, had proven quite resistant to Madrid’s rule. I have already mentioned the brutal civil war raging in the large and strategically important county of Ribagorza. Juan de Gurrea, who allegedly could not accompany the king in the ceremonial entry because of illness, was a member of the family that ruled Ribagorza and had been carrying out predatory campaigns against its own dependent peasants for decades. They sponsored and paid bandits to raid Morisco enclaves in the Zaragoza hinterland, massacring Moriscos at Pina, Codo, Gelsa, and other Morisco villages. Led by the infamous bandit Lupercio Latrás—but with the open support of the Gurreas—these gangs of bandits sacked Pina in 1588, killing more than 300 Moriscos, raping and killing their wives, smashing the heads of their children against the walls, and looting Morisco property. The village of Pina was under the jurisdiction of the Count of Sástago, a royal ally in whose house the king remained throughout his long sojourn in Zaragoza.28 I hope the reader is getting a sense of how, once we begin to deconstruct these spectacles, they no longer appear as straightforward assertions of royal power, but rather as complicated political dances. In fact, Philip II, unable to pacify Ribargorza by force, had to buy the county from the Gurreas at a very high price only a few years after his solemn entrance into Zaragoza. There was no other way to restore royal rule to the region. The city itself, which received the king with music and celebrations in 1585, rebelled against the king in 1591 and refused to accept Philip II’s authority and his demands for the return of Antonio Perez as being in violation of Aragonese liberties.29 That the king had entered the city flanked by the highest municipal official, the jurado de cap, and that the latter rode on equal footing with the king and the archbishop spoke volumes to the crowds lining the royal entry about Aragon’s autonomy and sent a clear message about the power of the city and the Aragonese realm and about their relations to their distant (and Castilian) king in Madrid. To add insult to injury, while the royal council’s macebearers processed in the entry with their maces pointing downwards, those holding the Cortes’ signs of authority lifted them proudly not only to the avid gaze of the people crowding the city’s streets but to the king himself. And the king followed directly behind those same Aragonese parliamentary representatives who had a long history of conflict with the Spanish Crown, and who, as we know, would procrastinate and torment the king at the 28 Ruiz, Spanish Society, 179–82. 29 For the disturbances of 1591 and the Antonio Pérez affair, see Kamen, Philip of Spain, 284–92; Parker, Philip II, 186–90.

160 A KING GOES TRAVELING general meeting of the Cortes at Monzón just a few months afterwards. The processional order, giving the place of honor to the Cortes, was clearly part of a highly scripted ceremonial to which the king might have acquiesced out of political necessity, but about which he could not have been very happy. We should not neglect either to note the vivid robes worn by municipal and parliamentary officials and the impact that their scarlet clothes, trimmed with silver and gold, must have had on the crowds attending these spectacles. Colorful garments, restricted by sumptuary legislation and by their expense to those in the upper echelons of society, contrasted powerfully with the habitually simple garments of the king and, of course, with the vestments of those in the huge crowds that, as reported by Henry Cock, gazed so avidly on the royal procession. Unfortunately for Philip II, the day was not yet done. He had still to submit to another scripted procession that evening and to yet another the next day. In what amounted to an epilogue to Philip II’s initial sally into the kingdom of Aragon—more, as we know, awaited him in the days, weeks, and months to come—a “popular” demonstration was organized in honor of the king. Any thought that this may have been a spontaneous show of loyalty and love for the king by the common people is given the lie by the procession’s rigid hierarchical organization and by the clear messages conveyed to the king and to the citizens of Zaragoza through the symbols displayed at the event. The king had had barely time to rest when he was called to the balcony as tradesmen and craftsmen, all marching in separate ranks according to their occupations, paraded by the king’s residence with trumpets and lit torches. They were followed by forty- eight knights, divided into four squadrons of twelve, carrying torches. Each group wore a distinctive color—white, red, gold, and blue—and as they processed they playfully engaged in Moorish-style skirmishes; that is, mock battles with reed spears (the juego de cañas). Finally, two bulls with torches tied to their horns were let loose upon the celebrants, an entertainment that gave the king and his family the chance to rest for a little while. The next day, after attending several Masses, nobles came, one by one, to kiss the king’s hand in obeisance, and on that early evening, February 26, 1585, yet another elaborate affair was staged.30 Shortly after 8 PM, on what may well have been a bitterly cold Febru- ary night in Zaragoza, the king stood with some of his children and retinue in one of the windows of the Count of Sástago’s palace to gaze out on a large crowd parading past his window. Departing from the cathedral of San Salvador de la Seo, the procession was led by a large group of mentecatos (the mentally impaired). These men and women dressed in two

30 Cock,Relacióndelviaje(1585), 35.

161 CHAPTER V colors, the men playing tambourines, lived at the hospital of the Annun- ciata, a reminder that mental asylums existed in Zaragoza even avant Foucault. The mentecatos were followed by a large group of orphans, the inhabitants of another philanthropic institution. The third rank of the procession included those who had been found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition. These were the sanbenitos in their peculiar saffron garments and pointed hats. Each of them carried a cross. They were swiftly followed by members of Zaragoza’s confraternities and guilds, with their banners, lit candles, and music. The fifth rank consisted of representatives of the mendicant orders, walking in pairs and followed by the laymen and priests attached to their respective monasteries. They carried with them gold and silver boxes filled with relics. Behind them, the secular clergy formed the sixth rank, singing hymns, with the archbishop closing the procession. Five days afterwards carnival celebrations, according to Henry Cock one of Philip’s favorite festivals, began throughout the city. Together with the arrival of the Duke of Savoy, the conflation of carnival and wedding gave rise to festivities and receptions beyond number. We should not proceed to a retelling of Philip’s long stay in Zaragoza and his further journeys in Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian lands without attempting to explicate, once again, the sequence and nature of the entry and successive processions and the role of the crowd who looked on at these performances. From the royal entry, a spectacle that though dominated by the Cortes and aimed at reminding the king of the long- held privileges of the Aragonese also featured a large contingent of nobles, we move to a strange mixture of a more “popular” and knightly evening parade, with its evocation of Reconquest battles, the colors of the Crusade (red and white), and carnivalesque elements (the two bulls with flaming horns). This was quickly followed by the ecclesiastical parade on February 26th. We see every section of society participating in the festivities—the well-known medieval tripartite imaging of society— competing for the attention of the king and flaunting their particular attributes, symbols, and special relationship with the Crown. Each and every one of these processions was highly scripted, albeit presented as a spontaneous celebration. Each emphasized the hierarchical nature of early modern Spanish society. These didactic claims to social distance sought to advance different agendas. In the actual royal entry, we can see attempts to articulate parliamentary independence and the Cor- tes’ “constitutional” relation with the Crown. In the parade that evening, although the foremost ranks of the procession were manned by the guilds, the accent was on knightly prowess and the superiority of nobles to tradesmen, emphasized by the equestrian show. Next day the ecclesiasti-

162 A KING GOES TRAVELING

Figure 5. Mudejar decorations on the façade the La Seo Cathedral in Zaragoza, the terminus of Philip II’s royal entry in 1585. Photo by Scarlett Freund.

163 CHAPTER V cal parade established a clear gradation of mental competence and orthodoxy that privileged the secular Church and diocesan authority over mendicant pretensions. More was still to come, and the frequent reasser- tions of these civic performances, aimed as they were at teaching the king (and the people in attendance) salutary lessons as to the links between Philip and his eastern subjects, would in the end prove extremely taxing for the aging king.

THE AFTERMATH OF THE ENTRY INTO ZARAGOZA Philip II’s reception into the kingdom of Aragon and to its capital city, Zaragoza, was soon reenacted, although with far less solemnity and fewer festivities, to celebrate the arrival of the king’s soon to be son-in-law, the Duke of Savoy. Accompanied to the border between Catalonia and Ara- gon by the Catalonian viceroy, the Count of Miranda, and received at the Aragonese side by the Count of Sástago, the viceroy of Aragon (in whose palace the king rested), the Duke of Savoy approached Zaragoza.31 In the meanwhile, and beyond the bouts of bad weather and flooding that plagued the long celebrations, the king attended Mass dutifully, while the city came alive for the carnival festivities (Cock’s descriptions of these will be examined in chapter 8). What should be noted in the aftermath of Philip II’s initial entry is that the king, dressed in black and with his Golden Fleece decoration as his sole adornment, came out of the city gates to welcome the Duke of Savoy with a paternal embrace and a special gesture of courtesy. The usual bonfires, a running of bulls, and other such festivities marked the ducal entry and the solemn wedding that soon followed. All of these ludic activities—described in great detail by Cock (who paid special attention to the garments worn by the most illustrious participants)—included endless dances, obligatory jousts, and juegos de cañas with four squads, each dressed in the “Moorish style” and sporting its color: gold, white, red, and blue respectively. Innumerable Masses and other pious visits to famous monasteries and relics marking the beginning of Lent were balanced by the already mentioned frequent dances, banquets, and yet another elaborate joust—though these delights were often delayed by the unremitting rain.32 The great joust held on March 23, 1585 in Zaragoza’s market square provided the king with yet another opportunity to put the monarchy on

31 Ibid., 37–38. For the Duke of Savoy’s entry into Zaragoza, we have a contemporary description: a series of letters written by M. De Longlée to Henry III of France and the Queen-Dowager Catherine of Medici. See Viajes de extranjeros II, 603–5. Longlée also informs the French court of the sickness sweeping through Monzón and of the king’s illness during his stay there (see below) 605–7. 32 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 51–60 et passim.

164 A KING GOES TRAVELING display before the town’s citizens. This time his presence was not mediated by city officials or Aragonese authorities, as had been the case in his formal entry. Philip II gazed down from a high window on the fictitious combat, but his central place on the market square focused all the crowd’s attention on him. The civic authorities, most probably at the order of the king, had ordered that pillows, velvet, and silk tapestries be removed “from all the windows looking onto the joust, because the king’s presence was no good reason for the people to get used to such displays.”33 Thus the king’s window was the only one to remain fully decorated with rich tapestries and other luxury displays. Royal guards surrounded the open spaces where fictional war was to be fought, creating a barrier between the king’s courtiers, who were to engage in battle, and the general public. Only leading nobles and high royal officials participated in the joust, some receiving the different prizes allocated for martial dexterity, prowess in honor of a lady, deportment, and elaborate garments. The world of the Amadis was still alive and well thirty-five years after Binche.34 More elaborate tournaments, juegos de cañas, bonfires, and the like continued throughout March, punctuated on March 31st by Philip II, in his capacity as head of the order of the Golden Fleece, investing the Duke of Savoy, the Admiral of Castile, and the Duke of Medinaceli as members of the order. This was followed by a solemn Mass to which the king went in an elaborate procession, marching behind macebearers (a way to remove the bad taste of his initial entry?), followed by his king-of-arms or herald (rey de armas). Once in church, the king prayed in solitude, protected from inquisitive eyes by golden curtains.35 Here he followed a pattern, most likely borrowed from Burgundian practices, that would become more firmly established in the seventeenth century (as we shall see below in the 1638 and 1639 celebrations of carnival in Madrid) of creating a clear distance between monarch and people. Although Philip II’s entry into the city had undoubtedly served as an occasion for the Ara-

33 Ibid., 73. 34 Ibid., 72–76. Cock provides a detailed description of the joust that took place on March 23rd, which was both preceded and followed by elaborate saraos, or dances, held in private places and open only to the high nobility and members of the court. Close attention is paid in Cock’s narrative to the rank and names of the participants—Don Mar- tín de Lanuza, Don Juan de Lanuza, Emmanuel Çapala, Don Hierónimo de Mendoça y Lavajo, and many others. The joust included Aragonese, Italian, and Castilian knights. Cock also paid close attention to the fabrics and colors of the joust. The garments displayed a profusion of velvet, silk, gold, and silver clothing, white, red, and black, as well as terciopelo leonado (velvet in the color of lions). The dinner that followed was worth 1,500 ducats, with the king refusing to eat because it was the eve of the Feast of the In- carnation of the Lord. 35 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 51.

165 CHAPTER V gonese to contest the proper order and relationship between the kingdom (the Cortes) and the king, as well as for a display of Zaragoza’s and Ara- gon’s symbols of autonomy, the king’s long presence in the city allowed him to regain some control over the ceremonial script. Surely not all the festivities that followed, whether religious, martial, or simply pleasurable, resulted from careful emplotting by the king or by his agents; nonetheless, a reading of Cock’s detailed descriptions of the celebrations that followed the original entry into the city shows that Philip II had matters firmly in hand. Coming out of the city to meet the Duke of Savoy in the outskirts of Zaragoza and leading him into the city, while a great royal gesture of courtesy and an honor for his son-in-law, also eliminated any Aragonese or Zaragozan participation. The king clearly dictated when he was going to show up or not to an event, and what level of privacy he required. Most of the jousts, though admittedly not all, were fairly Castilian affairs. The king bestowed membership in the Golden Fleece on his foreign son- in-law and two great Castilian nobles. No Aragonese grandee received such an honor on this occasion. The test of wills lasted for almost a month. Many more tests awaited the ailing king.

AFTER ZARAGOZA: PHILIP II IN CATALONIA Philip II departed from Zaragoza on April 2, 1585, more than thirty-five days after his arrival in the city on February 24th. The weather had proved generally inclement, the reception not always enthusiastic; yet the king had been able to somewhat even the score and to display his kingly majesty by attending jousts, Masses, and other celebrations unmediated by civic interference. Along the road to Barcelona, he witnessed, as he had in Castile, local peasants coming out of their nearby villages to crowd the roadsides and dance in honor of his visit.36 What seems to have been the spontaneous reaction of rustics would not necessarily be replicated by their betters along the way. Cock also loses no opportunity to continue what had become by then a litany of complaints, noting bitterly the bad weather, the absence of lodgings for the guards, the scarcity of food and drink, and the greed of local inhabitants in their dealing with the royal cortege. In his reports, Cock followed on a long tradition of pejorative representations of the peninsula by foreign travelers, even quoting from some of them.37 As the king had done upon reaching the border between Castile and

36 Ibid., 97. 37 Idem. In this aside Cock cites the Italian traveler Justo Pascasio as his authority for his pejorative views of Spaniards. See also my article, “Representación: Castilla, los castellanos y el Nuevo Mundo a finales de la edad media y principios de la moderna,” in

166 A KING GOES TRAVELING Aragon, our narrator paid close attention to the linguistic shift that occurred as the royal entourage moved from one kingdom into another. By the border, the inhabitants of Aitona, a frontier town, already spoke only in Catalan, and the king was met by the Principality’s guard. This served as a powerful reminder to Philip II that he had entered into yet another jurisdiction where his rule was wielded as prince and not as king.38 Continuing his way to Barcelona, the king was given a small reception at Lleida (Lérida), with most of the city officials, militia, and nobles waiting for him outside the city and then accompanying him to the palace where he was to rest. Later, Lleida’s civic authorities commanded some sort of semiformal procession, paid obeisance to the king, and ordered the usual bonfires and the running of bulls within sight of the king’s window. Philip moved on at a leisurely pace, making the rounds of important religious and political sites, such as the ancient monastery of Poblet, the site of an ancient Arago-Catalan royal pan- theon, before resting for more than a week in the impressive monastery of Montserrat. An important site of Catalan spirituality and devotion, the monastery was not unfamiliar to the king. He had visited it as a prince before entering Barcelona on his way to Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries in 1548. He had also stayed there for a while before his visit to the nearby city on February 6, 1564. In many respects, the king’s long memory and sense of protocol and of his own dignity shaped the events that soon followed.

BARCELONA AND THE KING On 7 May 1585, after his midday meal, the king traveled to Barcelona, entering the city in the dark of night and without the smallest reception and ceremony. Cock indicates that “there have been disagreements among the civic authorities and nobles (the grandees) [of Barcelona] and His Majesty on how the king was to be ceremonially received.” Since they could not come to any accord, the king chose to enter without fanfare or escort. Cock adds that Barcelona had wished Philip to enter on horseback as count of the city, and the king had answered that he had already done that when sworn as count twenty-one years earlier. The experiences of 1564, which will be reviewed in detail below, must have been indelibly engraved in the king’s memory and may have shaped his visit to Barcelona in 1585. As to that earlier visit in 1564, Feliu de la Peyna (d. 1708), a chronicler and editor of the Anales de Cataluña, de-

Historia a debate. Medieval (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Com- postela, 1995), 63–77. 38 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 99–100.

167 CHAPTER V scribes (using sources contemporary with the actual entry) how the king came from Montserrat into Barcelona, where he was received “without the ceremonies usual on such occasions.” Philip swore to uphold the privileges of the city and the Principality, as was requisite of all those claiming authority over Catalonia, and he received in return the city’s fealty. But more about earlier visits later.39 It may be useful to review briefly Philip’s numerous entries, whether festive or not, into, and relations with, Barcelona. While 1585 seems on the surface to have been close to another disaster in the not always ami- cable relations between the monarch and the city (though as we shall see below, the city tried to make amends after the king’s stealthy entrance), these entries and visits were only a chapter in a long and complicated dance between the claims of royal authority on the one hand, and Barce- lona’s jealous regard for its privileges on the other. Philip had first visited the city in 1542, when he was fifteen years old. He came to the general Cortes called by his father, Charles V, at Monzón that year. On Septem- ber 13th, Philip was sworn as heir to the realms of the Crown of Aragon, but “with the condition that he would have no jurisdiction until he had sworn formally to obey the privileges of Barcelona and the Principality in Barcelona itself.”40 Almost a month later (October 16) the emperor arrived in the city, and the prince did so as well on November 7th, making the obligatory stop at Valldonzella and being received into the city “as it was the custom.” At Barcelona’s cathedral, the young heir renewed the oaths he had given at the Cortes of Monzón to adhere to the city’s and Catalonia’s privileges, and then, and only then, received the oath of fidelity from the city authorities and the members of the Diputaçió. He left the city together with his father on their way to Valencia on November 21st. The Anales de Cataluña are particularly silent as to the nature of the festivities, and Pere Joan Comes’ usually loquacious citation of city sources and chronicles is uncharacteristically vague. The prince, he writes, entered the city in the “customary fashion,” took the oath, received gifts, and left.41 One should note that Philip took his oath not at the traditional place for oath taking, the plaza by the monastery of the Franciscans and across from the palace of the Montcadas, but in the cathedral. The Llibre

39 Ibid., 121–28. As to Feliu de la Peyna’s account of what happened in 1564, he described it in the following manner: “De Montserrate llegó el rey a Barcelona, entró sin las ceremonias que se acostumbran. Juró conde de Barcelona, recibió el juramento de fi- delidad. Celebró Cortes que se concluyeron en Monzón, a donde les havía antes convo- cado a los reynos y principado”; as cited in Joan Reglá Campistol, Felip II I Cataluyna (Barcelona: Editorial Aedos, 1956), 19–20. See note 19. 40 Anales de Cataluña III, 184. 41 Idem. Comes, Libredealgunescosesasanyaladas, 464–64.

168 A KING GOES TRAVELING de les solemnitats de Barcelona, often quite careful in its descriptions of entries or other festive displays, includes no account of Philip’s visit in 1542. The young prince returned to the city in 1548. Calvete de Estrella, also much given to elaborate descriptions of any festivity in Philip’s honor, has only the most laconic of accounts. He was first met outside the city by the viceroy, the Marquis of Aguilar, and by Don Bernardino de Mendoza, Captain General of the Spanish Mediterranean fleet, both of them high Castilian nobles. Only then did the bishop of the city and diverse municipal and Principality officials come out of the city gates to welcome the young prince. But Philip entered the city at night and without any celebrations—the Catalans probably thought he had already had his princely entrance six years before and needed no other—and made straight for the house of Doña Estefanía de Requesens, widow of his former tutor, Don Juan de Zúñiga, to whom he was linked by filial feelings. The cardinal of Trent (but not the city) offered Philip a sumptuous banquet and a masked ball, but within three days, the prince was gone on his way to Rosas, his point of departure for Italy. The Anales de Cataluña are even more laconic, praising the lavishness of the feast offered in Philip’s honor but without revealing its provenance.42 Philip passed through Bar- celona upon his return from his long sojourn abroad in 1551. He was received, once again, “without any demonstration of an entry” (sin demon- stración de entrada). Although he was sworn as lugarteniente of Catalonia, the lieutenancy of the Principality, a rank equivalent to that of Viceroy, he was not given any festivities. Comes indicates that there were negotiations between the city and the prince and that the city council met to discuss how to honor Philip, but, after careful deliberations, decided that since they had organized feasts for his first visit and the prince had demanded only dances, music, and fireworks (or so the counselors interpreted Philip’s wishes), no feasts would be given (el consell delibera que altes quehavianfetesperlasuaprimeravingudaysualtezanodemandavasinoballes . . . gaytes . . . luminaria . . .).43 Philip’s not always smooth relations with Barcelona, that is, with the city’s punctilious adherence to its traditional rights and reluctance to do anything more than it was obligated to do, show the limitations of royal power in dealing with the eastern kingdoms in general and with Catalo- nia in particular. The king would get a feast, but only when protocol demanded it. Amends would always be made to appease the king’s sense of his own standing, but often they were not enough or came too late. If in Seville he could order city officials to dress in a specific fashion or dictate

42 Anales de Cataluña, III, 189; Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje II, 8–9. 43 Anales de Cataluña, III, 190; Comes, Libredealgunescosesasanyaladas, 479–80.

169 CHAPTER V the nature of his reception, this was certainly not the case in either Zara- goza or Barcelona. This does not mean that Barcelona would not be willing to go out of its usually carefully controlled ways to offer Philip a good feast if the occasion merited it. When the king came to the city for the first time as ruling monarch of the Spains, especially after waiting almost eight years since ascending to the throne, Barcelona did display all of its rather extensive experience in these affairs and offered Philip a lavish reception.

PHILIP II COMES TO BARCELONA FOR THE FIRST TIME AS A KING Philip II’s formal entry into Barcelona in 1564 followed on a long tradition of royal (or should one say “comital”) entries into the city. Pere Joan Comes, drawing on the archives of the city in 1583, reports on the elaborate entries of Ferdinand II as the new king of the Crown of Aragon on 1479 and on of that of Isabella two years afterwards. We have already seen that of Charles V in 1519, and now it was Philip II’s turn.44 While at Monzón, attending a joint meeting of the Arago-Valencian-Catalan Cortes, the king wrote to the city announcing his visit. Thus began the usual negotiations between Crown and town as to the nature and protocol of the entry. The ConselldeCent (the Catalan administrative committee) deliberated on how to pay for the expected festivities and on the manner in which the entry would take place. Nothing came easy, and fiscal questions, plus the need to ensure that the exact nature of the relationship between the Castilian king and Catalonia (and Barcelona) was clearly respected, were to be the subject of much preparation and debate. The king came to the monastery of Montserrat, as he usually did in every visit to Barcelona. There he met two Catalonian ambassadors, mossen Jonot Çalba (a member of the military) and mossen Joan Luys Lull (citizen of Barcelona), who “thanked the king” in advance for his visit to the city and asked when the king was to come to the monastery of Valdon- zella, “where it was the custom for the kings to rest” before entering the city.45 On February 5, 1564, the king departed Montserrat on his way to Val- donzella, but the careful preparations went somewhat awry. A procession of city officials, their clothing and hierarchical processional order carefully described by Pere Joan Comes and by the Llibre des les solemnitats, left the city to pay their respects and homage to the king and to accompany him to Valdonzella, but the king had already departed Molinderey, or Molins de Rey (where he had stopped), and along the way he met the

44 Comes, Libredealgunescosesasanyaladas ..., 287–95. See chapter 3. 45 Ibid., 549–50.

170 A KING GOES TRAVELING

Figure 6. An image of modern-day passeig de Born, with a medieval façade in the background and, at the end of the street, the Church of Santa María del Mar (the church of Barcelona’s merchants and seafarers). The passeig de Born, on the edge of the route followed by kings in their royal entry into the city, was the site of the most important jousts and tournaments in late medieval and early modern Barcelona. Photo by Scarlett Freund. ceremonial group coming from Barcelona. Pere Joan Comes does not comment on the mix-up, thus leaving the door open for speculation. The Llibre de les solemnitats, on the other hand, explains that the city officials had been late in departing the civic building (the Casa). (Eesasaberque los dits honorables consellers partiren de la present Casa un poch tart.) Had the king, tired of waiting and quite experienced with Barcelona’s quirky behavior, decided to push ahead and not wait? Did the Barcelona authorities seek to make the king wait as a reminder of their cherished autonomy? Whatever the true reason for this mistake, it forced the Catalans to dismount from their horses and rush to kiss the king’s hand and then return to Valdonzella for the formal entry. The Llibre de les solemnitats includes an interesting short description of the conversation between the king and the consellerencap (Barcelona’s most senior counselor) and the manner in which the counselor covered and uncovered his head repeatedly while the king spoke and then waited each time for the king to give him permission to don his cap (barret) again.46 The usual artillery discharges,

46 Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona II, 5: “E per le dit camí moltes vegades dit senyor

171 CHAPTER V three days of feasts (with closing of all business and trades), and the lighting of bonfires and torches throughout the city were ordered by Barcelo- na’s authorities. On February 6, 1564 around 9 AM, the king entered the city under an elaborate palio of gold brocade. flanked on his left by mossen Jaume Joan Çapila, the conseller en cap, and on his right by mossen Miguel de Vallesec, described as ciuteda antich (an old citizen of Barcelona). A contingent of children and citizens costumed as angels and St. Eulalia, the patroness of Barcelona, sang verses in Latin in praise of Philip. Trumpets and drums announced the perambulation of the king as he progressed through the city. With the conseller en cap holding the reins of the king’s horse, he passed through ceremonial arches, the solemn procession following the usual route prescribed for royal and princely entries and arrived at the plaza of the Friars Minors by the Church of St. Francis, and the palace of Montcada. In the square stood a stage (cadafal) covered with rich tapestries and richly adorned. The Franciscan friars brought a piece of the True Cross which Philip, pious as ever, worshipped on his knees, and then the king received the homage (his hand was kissed by all the great men of Barcelona). Next the different confraternities and guilds of the city marched past the king who sat on a throne or ceremonial chair on the stage. Thirty-two trades took part in this splendid procession, each carrying their banners in a manner similar to their practice in the Corpus Christi celebrations. After this exhausting display, the king continued his march, riding on horseback through the city under the palio. In front of him, with an unsheathed sword in his hand and his head uncovered, rode Don Antonio de Toledo, the king’s equerry. Past Santa María del Mar, the Born (the traditional square, or passeig, for jousts and tournaments in Barcelona), onwards to the street of Montcada, a thoroughfare lined with the palaces of wealthy nobles and merchants, the royal cortege proceeded past the important sites of Barcelona’s social, political, and cultural life. Torches lit the route as the king made his way to the headquarters of the Diputació and eventually to the cathedral. There more pious demonstrations until at last the king, who must have been exhausted by now, withdrew to his palace. Almost three weeks later, on March 1st, he swore once again the liberties of the Principality and Barcelona.47 And once rey interrogá dit conseller en cap, lo qual quant li responia estava en lo barret en la ma, y dit senyor rey cada vegada aprés de haver parlat, li deya y assenyalava se cobrís, y axi se cobría y descobría cada volta parlava, y sperava que dit senyor li manás se cobrís.” 47 Comes, Libredealgunescosesasanyaladas, 550ff.; Llibre de les solemnitas de Barcelona II: 1–13. “E apreés, dimecres, al prinmer del mes de març, dit any MDLXIII, lo dit senyor rey jurá en la forma acostumada en lo palau del rey, la cual cerimonia esta continuada en lo Dietari.”

172 A KING GOES TRAVELING again we discover that Philip’s relation with Barcelona was full of sur- prises. Not only did he not swear to uphold the privileges of Catalonia and Barcelona right after his ceremonial entry, but he did so in his own time, and in his own palace, and not in any of the traditional locations associated with Barcelona’s relations with its rulers: either the square by Saint Francesco or the cathedral. For Catalans, it could not have been a pleasant experience.

PHILIP II’S VISIT TO BARCELONA IN 1585 The events of 1585 should, then, be considered in the context of Philip II’s previous experiences with the city. We must not accept Cock’s take on what actually transpired without some critical perspective. While there is no question that the king entered at night without any fanfare and that there may have been friction between the city’s ruling groups as to the proper way of receiving a king, different explanations are possible. The Llibre de les solemnitats dedicates many pages to this failed entry, but its emphasis is on the feasts that followed the king’s arrival into the city. And Luis Corteguera has rightly noted the impressive displays put forth afterwards by Barcelona’s tradesmen and craftsmen in honor of the king.48 None of these displays, however, can obscure the reality of the king’s lonely and unceremonious entry. The Llibre de les solemnitats relates that the king entered alone around 7 PM on May 7th without any reception, that the people of Barcelona ran to the Ramblas to get a glimpse of the king, and, finally, that this sudden and “no pensada” (not thought out) entry left the people of the city disconsolate and fearing that the king was angered for some reason or another.49 On May 9th the city officials came to kiss the king’s hand dressed in garments of gold and red velvet. Only then, either because Barcelona’s authorities had made their point and chose not to antagonize the king further, or because negotiations between an angry king and the city offi-

48 On the general issue of the troublesome relation of those who were essentially Cas- tilian kings with Catalonia and Barcelona, see Agustín González Enciso, “Del rey ausente at rey distante,” in Imagen del rey, imagen de los reinos. Las ceremonias públicas en la Es- paña Moderna (1500–1814), 1–18, though I do not agree entirely with the depiction of Philip II as a sedentary king. For the Llibre de les solemnitats’s account of the king’s entry, the deliberations that preceded it, and the festivities that followed, see Llibre de les solemnitas II: 38–64; see also Luis Corteguera, Per al bé comú. La política popular a Barcelona, 1580–1640 (Vic: Eumo Editorial, 2005), 90–96. This is an expanded and revised Cata- lan translation of his For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580–1640 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 49 Llibre de les solemnitas II, 45: “Per la qual entrada tan súbita y no pensada, essent tant desijada per tots, restá lo poble tant desconsolat que era lastima . . . que sa magistat es- tigués descontent de alguna cosa. . . .” See also note 4 above.

173 CHAPTER V cials had yielded some compromise, did Barcelona order great feasts to be held in Philip II’s honor. Lights and music filled the city streets, and fifty stages were built, on each of which five musicians played trumpets and other musical instruments.50 On Saturday, at the bishop’s behest, a large procession, along the lines of the one organized for the king in Zaragoza, paraded by the king’s residence. Departing from the cathedral, the parade was led by two dragons (la tarasca) and men disguised as devils, who engaged the dragons in fierce battle. Twenty-two knights followed on fictitious horses, a replay of what the Catalans had done for Alfonso V’s triumphal entry into Na- ples almost 140 years earlier. Leading this group was a trumpet player. The third rank of the parade brought into the king’s view yet another dragon spewing fire through its nostrils and mouth, a camel, a golden pelican, and a long procession of guilds and trades. Behind the artisan groups came men carrying the crosses from all of Barcelona’s parishes, followed by friars, and then by the clergy all mixed together—secular clergy, canons, and the like. Twenty-four children dressed as angels came next, playing instruments. Then came the bishop, carrying a relic in his hand and walking under a palio. A “large number of women and men” closed the procession.51 This “public” demonstration of love for the king, which, as the Llibre de les solemnitats indicates, paralleled the processions on the eve of the Corpus Christi, was quite substantial, but it did not compare to such events in other parts of the peninsula or during Philip’s entries in Italy and the Low Countries between 1548 and 1550. It did not even match the elaborate events in Zaragoza just a few weeks earlier. And to top it all, the bishop marched under a palio. Granted that he carried a relic, but seeing the palio must have been a grim reminder to the king that he had received such an honor in Barcelona once, but no more. And whether the king was really sick, as Cock informs us, or whether he chose to remain indoors, Philip did not step out of his palace for two days. Cock notes the bonfires and confraternity dances held in front of the royal palace, but there is no mention of the king appearing in or looking down from his window. Yet, when he attended Mass on Tuesday, May 14th, the streets leading to the cathedral were strewn with flowers.52 The arrival of the large fleet that was to take his beloved daughter away to Savoy, sight-seeing family outings to the Barcelona arsenals, occasional

50 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 129; Llibre de les solemnitas II, 45–50. The Llibre includes a lengthy description of the city ambassadors’ clothing and on whether or not they covered their heads while in Philip’s presence. 51 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 129–30. 52 Ibid., 131–33.

174 A KING GOES TRAVELING fireworks, and the king ailing from his attacks of gout consumed most of the month of May. It was not until June 6th that Barcelona’s leading nobles and citizens came to the royal palace to escort the king to a joust of Barcelona’s knights. That event, paid for by the Diputaçió, included the usual ephemeral castles (three of them), fireworks, and other forms of entertainment. Cock informs us that the Diputaçió paid 6,000 ducats for the feasts, a rather modest figure compared to the usual outlay for such spectacles, as, for example, the outlays Toledo made for Philip and Isa- bella’s entry into Toledo in 1560. Neither in Zaragoza nor Barcelona do we hear of triumphal arches built for the occasion. Nor was there an entrance underneath a palio, its absence justified by the king’s previous ceremonial entries into both places. Nonetheless, as has been seen, the royal entry of 1564 was fraught with difficulties and missteps. In 1585, these missteps were magnified.

READING PHILIP II’S ENTRIES INTO BARCELONA It may be useful to revisit Philip II’s entries and visits to Barcelona as heir to the throne and then as king, and to summarize some of the points made earlier. Philip II’s entries into the city provide us with a lens through which to raise different questions as to the nature of the king’s authority in his fragmented possessions. Though I have spoken of the lands of the Crown of Aragon as the “eastern kingdoms,” the Spanish Habsburgs’ rule extended of course east of Iberia (to Italy), west (to the New World and Pacific holdings), north (to the Low Countries), and south (to the Portuguese African colonies that came under Philip II’s rule after 1580). That is, the king ruled over far-flung lands, well beyond the center of his base of power in Madrid. While he did not visit his Catalan and Aragonese subjects with the frequency with which they may have wished (or not wished), other lands within the composite monarchies that constituted Spain never benefited (or suffered) from the royal presence. Therein lies a great conundrum. While Aragonese and Catalan civic authorities often bemoaned the absence of their king—as shown, for example, by the incessant complaints of Barcelona’s municipal officers during Alfonso V’s long sojourn in Naples in the second half of the fifteenth century—a distant king was far better than a king close at hand.53 In the case of Barcelona, this was especially true, for the city and the Principality (Catalonia) fiercely cherished their autonomy and ancient privileges. Royal visits, as I have shown in the examples above, allowed for the opportunity to renew the contractual relationship between king and city, between king (or count) and Catalonia. It also provided civic

53 See, once again, Agustín González Enciso, “Del rey ausente al rey distante.”

175 CHAPTER V authorities an opportunity to display their power over other groups within the city and their largesse to Barcelona’s citizens. Barcelona was a volatile city. It had been torn by strife since the late Middle Ages, and circumstances had not much improved. A royal visit provided the local oligarchy with a unique opportunity to display their authority to oppos- ing factions within the city.54 In a sense, the king served as mediator between the ruling elites and territorial lords who controlled Catalan politics (or who fought bitterly among themselves for that control), their enemies, and the populace.55 But the presence of the king also led to royal interference, requests for troops, taxes, donations, and the like from an impoverished monarch, as well as large expenses for festivities and decorations. Reading the descriptions of Philip’s visits, one is struck by the municipal council’s numerous deliberations as to the nature of the festivities to be held on the occasion of the king’s visit and by the careful negotiations that took place between Barcelona and royal officials as to the extent of the royal reception. This was always a complicated and, often, unsatisfying dance between king and city officials. Philip II had always the option to skip the whole thing and humiliate Barcelona’s officials by entering the city without any fanfare and, far more important, without allowing them to play any role, as he did in 1585. Barcelona’s municipal officials could pay back by neglect and bickering, though they could not fully ignore the royal presence without some consequences, and, thus, they were always prompt to organize some celebration or another. These entries were always multivocal performances. We hear distinct voices from our sources (Cock, Comes, the Llibre de les solemnitats, the Anales de Cataluña), each clearly expressing a particular agenda. Cock’s account reflected the royal position. He was never shy of pointing out what he interpreted (or probably heard from Philip II’s courtiers) to be Barcelona or Valencia’s slights or delays in acknowledging the king’s visit (in 1585). Pere Joan Comes’ accounts, the Llibre de les solemnitats, and the Anales de Cataluña, while maintaining a respectful attitude towards the king, did not fail to note the role of the city in sponsoring festivities, or, far more important, the king’s ceremonial acknowledgement of Barcelo- na’s liberties. By memorializing the events that accompanied Philip II’s visits (or by their silence about some of the king’s slights), these munici-

54 In the late Middle Ages and throughout the early modern period, Barcelona was torn between two factions, the so-called popular elements (merchants, gildsmen, and others) known as the Busca and the “honored citizens” and their noble allies (the Biga). See Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400–1600, 62–63. 55 For civil strife in Barcelona in greater detail, see James S. Amelang, Honored Citizens of Barcelona: Patrician Culture and Class Relations, 1490–1714 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 24–101.

176 A KING GOES TRAVELING pally sponsored accounts represented the city and its government in the best light possible against the king’s unwillingness to play by Barcelona’s rules. But the dialogue included many other actors. Two monasteries outside the city, the famous shrines at Montserrat and Valdonzella, allowed the king to circumvent city officials and deal directly with the sacred. A stay at both these monasteries before entering or visiting Barcelona became part of the formal ritual of a royal visit. Municipal officials were not invited, and they could meet the king only outside Valdonzella before entering the city. Yet, once the king was within the city, monastic institutions played a minor role, one subordinated to episcopal authority. Then, of course, there was the anonymous mass of the population. They formed a most necessary element in the complex dialogue between king and subjects. The accounts, whether those in support of the king or those that promoted the municipal government, are often silent as to the levels of popular participation and “happiness” at the sight of the king. Although, as we saw above, the Llibre de les solemnitates did describe how disconsolate the people were at missing the king in 1585, adding tenden- tiously that they (the chronicler, the municipal government) could not understand why the king might have been upset. In their silences they differed from similar accounts in Castile, where the crowds were, according to both royal and municipal-sponsored accounts, always deliriously happy, rushing to and fro to catch a glimpse of the king (remember Se- ville in 1570). But if there was to be any formal entry, any memorable visit, crowds needed to be there. Thus, it was the task of Barcelona’s officials to provide the entertainment and food that would attract them. This was less because their presence validated the monarch than because of their role in legitimating municipal authority. In the end, these back-and-forth negotiations and the refusal of Barce- lona’s officials to do more than what was minimally required were limitations on royal power to which even the most powerful king in early modern Europe had to submit as gracefully as possible. Civic authorities and nobles were jealously attached to their ancient liberties, and they did not scruple to use festive occasions (or the refusal of them) to reassert their autonomy and their resistance to royal ambitions and encroachment. We have seen how these dynamics played out between Philip II and Bar- celona, but we are not yet done. Philip still had other tribulations and discomforts to suffer in the course of his travels through the lands of the Crown of Aragon.

ON THE WAY TO MONZÓN On June 14, 1585, the king finally left Barcelona. The two days previous to his departure were spent in a sorrowful goodbye to his daughter

177 CHAPTER V Catalina, the sounds of their weeping covered by artillery discharges. The artificial constructions—castles, ingenious firework carts, and other ephemera—were put away or discarded as the king traveled back to Ara- gon to attend the meeting of the Cortes at Monzón. The slow trek was fairly uneventful. Small towns, small processions past the king’s lodgings, an arrival without great fanfare (excepting some pistol shots fired by the king’s guard) at Monzón on the evening of June 27th. Cock, as was usual with him, complained that the Monzón authorities had made no provisions for lodging the royal guards, and that the Flemish archers had to fend for themselves to find a place to sleep. These complaints were par for the course throughout the long royal journey and serve as yet another grim reminder of the logistic inadequacies associated with royal travel in sixteenth-century Spain. The muted reception serves also as a coda for the annoyances that were in store for the king at the long and cantankerous meeting of the Cortes.56 On June 28, sometime after 4 PM, Philip II left his palace and proceeded to the Church of Santa María to formally summon the representatives of the Cortes into session. This called of course for yet another formal procession, one again replete with symbolism reflecting the nature of the relationship between king and Cortes. The cortege opened with the knights of all the different Spanish kingdoms who were in attendance at the meeting (caballeros que había de todos los reinos, though they may have been mostly nobles from the Crown of Aragon), followed by macebearers on horseback, and four kings-of-arms. The constable of Aragon came next with an unsheathed sword in his hand, riding in front of the king, and then came royal officials and royal guards. The formal opening of the Cortes called for the sword of justice as a symbolic element in the spectacle of political representation. We have already seen the important role that this unsheathed sword played in peninsular medieval entries and in Philip’s own entries and visits to Seville, and Italian and Flemish cities. The absence of the naked sword preceding the king as he made his rounds of cities and towns throughout the Crown of Aragon is telling. That at Monzón it was carried by the constable of Aragon and not by the king’s equerry (or caballerizo mayor), as had been customary throughout his long reign, is an even more revealing sign. And then, to add to Philip’s discom- fort, the king had to explain to the gathered representatives of the three different Cortes (Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia) why he had failed to attend these meetings for the previous twenty-two years.57 56 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 145–53. 57 Ibid., 153–56. It is worth noting that the king did not even have a palace in Monzón, a traditional place for the gathering of the Cortes of the Crown of Aragon. Cock com-

178 A KING GOES TRAVELING Between late June and the early part of October nothing was accomplished. The deputies engaged in bitter arguments over precedence— who was to sit where and when. Anti-Castilian resentment boiled over in angry denunciations of Castilian friars and other Castilian excesses. The spokesman for the Cortes’ urban branch orated a “philippic” against the friars of the Castilian province, while the ecclesiastical representatives did the same. Cock, who had gone to Zaragoza since he had little to do in Monzón, spent a great deal of time describing Monzón and Barbastro (where the guards did finally find lodging) instead of the inac- tion of the Cortes. Plaintively, he reported on a horse and foot race attended by the king and his family “to rest a bit from the burdens he had.”58 Between the often mortal illnesses that spread among those in attendance to the Cortes (most likely forms of the bubonic plague), the gout and other maladies that afflicted the king, and the continuous bad weather, Philip II must have had a terrible time. Writing to the Infanta Catalina after his departure from Monzón, he used a revealing expression, “those of us who escaped Monzón,” to summarize the experience.59 But as summer turned into fall, the king had not yet “escaped.” Instead, Philip II sat uselessly in this small town, not well connected to the main peninsular thoroughfares (it was sixteen leagues from Zara- goza), while the important business of government took place elsewhere. In fact, his long absence from Madrid forced him to relinquish some of his duties. The combination of ill health, cantankerous subjects, and in- action could have only aggravated the sense that Philip probably had of being slighted and thwarted throughout his eastern sojourns. Not until November 7th, more than four months after the formal opening of the Cortes, did the Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian parliamentary assemblies agree to take the oath acknowledging the young Philip (almost seven and a half years old by then) as heir to the thrones and to do obeisance to their future ruler. Even then, it took a week more for the grandees of the different kingdoms to do so. Valencia took the oath on No- vember 7th. Two days afterwards, on Saturday November 9th, the grandees of Aragon did the same. Their oath-taking was followed by feasts, artillery discharges, and the usual bull laden with firecrackers. Not until November 14th did the always-reluctant lords of Catalonia ments that his palace consisted of a “few houses gathered together” to make a lodging somewhat worthy of the king. See also note 4 above. 58 Ibid., 167–68. 59 Cited from a 1585 letter that the king wrote from Valencia to his daughter, in Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain, 260–61.

179 CHAPTER V take their oath.60 I beg permission to postpone or, better, to omit a description of these feasts. They did not amount to much, and I will provide some descriptions of the usual ceremonies that accompanied crowning and the swearing in of heirs in a later chapter. But we cannot leave Monzón without a look at the closing ceremony, undertaken outside Monzón in Binessa, where the protonotaries of Aragon and Catalonia requested from the king, sitting on a special throne (solio), his signature confirming the decisions of the Cortes and swearing to uphold them.61 Finally, the long-suffering king left the area on December 2, 1585. Winter had come early to the region, and the long stay in Monzón had taken its toll on Philip. It had even cost the life of some of his closest advisers, including the Marquis de Aguilar, royal crier and hunter (pregonero y cazador mayor), Don Pedro Velasco, a member of the king’s chamber, and others. Cock mentions that around 1,500 people, between locals and visitors died during the royal visit to Monzón from assorted illnesses. Even if exaggerated, the figures are ominous. It was not a very good trip.

ON THE WAY TO VALENCIA Fleeing Monzón, on his way to Valencia by way of Catalonia, the king met snowstorms, bad roads, and austere accommodations in the small towns he favored for stopovers. Philip avoided large towns, even Lleida (Lérida), where he had received such an impressive reception in 1548. He finally arrived in Tortosa where he spent Christmas (chapter 2) and enjoyed receptions and festivities somewhat befitting his regal dignity.62 That the king lingered in Tortosa as long as he did may have been due to his precarious health and the festive season, but Cock gives us enough hints, as well as explicit evidence, that the negotiations with Valencian authorities as to the nature of the king’s reception did not go as well as Philip might have desired. In Valencia, the last important stop in his more than year-long circuit through the capitals of his eastern realms, the Pru- dent King probably expected celebrations that could somewhat mitigate the aggravations he had suffered in Barcelona and Monzón. Don Diego de Espinosa, the royal official in charge of arranging for the king’s lodgings, had already gone ahead to Valencia to negotiate the terms of the visit. Cock himself and his fellow archers departed Tortosa on December

60 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 169–73. Cock provides careful and detailed descriptions of these festivities. 61 Ibid., 173. 62 Ibid., 175–84. Cock reports that Barcelona sent forty-eight men, dressed in green, with twelve sedan chairs, to transport the king over the awful roads. This may also tells us something about the king’s physical condition and the hardships of travel by carriage (even by royal carriage) over the uneven roads.

180 A KING GOES TRAVELING 31st to pursue the ever-elusive goal of billeting the royal guards. Al- though we cannot assume that Cock was at all close to the inner workings of the court, he must have known the tenor of the dealings with Valencia. In a particularly bitter aside, he tells us: The citizens of Valencia were very inhumane and inhospitable people [when it came] to receiving the royal family. And they defended themselves [their actions] with their rights and privileges [ fueros] so that they did not receive anyone except with much pleadings [ruego] and many of them did not fear either God or hell in these matters, and not even Don Diego de Espinosa, the king’s aposentador mayor, could do anything in this particular case.63 If Cock is correct, and one should always take his assertions with a grain of salt, what we have is a glimpse of the Crown’s main agent negotiating, even pleading, for a reception worthy of a great king. Something had to be done. Slipping silently into the city a la Barcelona would not, to say the least, serve Philip II’s political needs. This may help explain the king’s slow progress after leaving Tortosa on January 3, 1586 and his lingering in small locations such as San Mateo, where dances, runnings of bulls, the inevitable fountain of wine, and trumpet music sought “to give a bit of happiness to the king.” In Castellón de la Plana, a triumphal arch, built of ivy, oranges, vegetables, and flowers—an admirable achievement con- sidering it was January—may have brought back memories of those halcyon days more than thirty years before when Philip had sailed into the Mediterranean from another Castellón.64 The king traveled through lands inhabited primarily by Moriscos who, as Cock observed, still used their ancestral language and remained true to their customs and beliefs while entertaining a “great hatred of the Christians.”65 Had all the expense, all the lives lost in the cruel wars on rebellious Moriscos in the Alpujarras been for nothing? Was the Morisco problem, particularly acute in Valen- cia, still a threat to the Spains? Arriving in Morvedre to artillery discharges, the king delayed his entry into Valencia for yet a few more days, choosing to do so on a Sunday, precisely the one-year anniversary of his departure from Madrid. While the king waited in a royal monastery, a mere two thousand steps away from Valencia’s main gate, a reception committee came out of the city to meet the king. Philip rode on a beautiful horse, preceded by Cas- tilian nobles, as was the custom. The hierarchical order of the reception committee, the order in which local nobles and city magistrates were to 63 Ibid., 208. 64 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje II, 13. 65 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 224.

181 CHAPTER V pay obeisance to the king, and in what fashion they were to do, tell us a great deal about social relations between the different segments of Valen- cian society and their respective relations to the king. On this matter, Philip may have had a say. His responses to each of the different orders that came to meet him reminds us powerfully that even in a society in which money had eroded the old medieval sense of social orders, medieval notions of the place of each of these social groups remained very much alive in the protocol and order of precedence, regulating access to the monarch. Once again, in spite of his ailing health, the king rode on his horse into the city, still wedded to the medieval sense of chivalry and to the imaginary world of the Amadis of Gaul. The archbishop of Valencia came out of the city to welcome him. The king’s hand was kissed by the inquisitors and by the general baille of the kingdom of Valencia. The master of the Order of Montesa merited Philip’s warm embrace. Only then came the deputies of the kingdom’s Cortes and the city officials. Yet, the king entered the city flanked by the two jurats en cap (jurymen, the leading or most senior municipal officials), mossen Geroni Artes de Al- banell, knight, and Nofre Martorell, citizen. This was the traditional manner in Valencia (as also in Zaragoza and Barcelona) for the king to enter the city and, as Cock tells us, a tradition that Philip chose to keep as well. A contemporary Valencian eyewitness describes the “magnificent” city officials who exited the city dressed in scarlet velvet with brocade trimmings to receive the king. Philip II, as usual, was dressed in black. The king, and this is the key passage, “entered without a palio, because he had already entered the city of Valencia as king in an earlier visit.”66 As the king progressed into the city, the procession formed. It began with the guards from the coast, eighty of them all dressed in green, leading the way. They were followed by many knights from the different Spanish realms with their pages and servants, richly dressed but marching in no particular order. Then came the city officials (jurats) with the king riding, as we have seen, between the two oldest. The royal carriages followed with the Infante and other members of the royal family. The Flem- ish guard, in which Cock served, closed the procession. This is as humble an entry parade as one could get. And yet, within the city, triumphal arches (made of greenery and not, to be sure, the customary expensive productions) and stages well distributed along the route recreated, through visual and textual references, Philip’s five great victories, while weaving mythical and textual allusions to the entire history of Spain. It

66 Libre des memories de diversos sucessos é fets memorables é coses señaladas de la ciutat é regno de Valencia, manuscript at the Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris), cited in Morel-Fatio and Rodríguez Villa, Relación del viaje hecho por Felipe II en 1585 . . . , 306–7; for Cock’s less detailed account, see Relación del viaje (1585), 226–27.

182 A KING GOES TRAVELING was a history told from the perspective of Valencia and privileging Valen- cia’s heroic past—El Cid, King James I, and those Mediterranean victories at Malta, Lepanto, and elsewhere, where the fleets of the Crown of Aragon had played a significant part. By the Church of La Merced, an altar to the Virgin Mary was surrounded by people playing the role of captives, pleading with the king for his help and breaking into song as he passed. The meagerness of the arches—at least there were arches in Va- lencia—were only matched by the atrocious poetry displayed on them. They combined the same melange of historical, genealogical, classical, and religious tropes as we have seen in other written celebrations of visiting royalty.67 Once again these erudite manifestations were the work of local savants writing at the command of local authorities and intended for those few in the king’s cortege who could decipher both the language and symbolism. It is easy for us to dismiss them, as I have done just now, as pretentious failures. Nonetheless, Calvete de Estrella, Mal Lara, López de Hoyos, Cock (himself the writer of very bad poetry), and others always carefully recorded these “public” writings for posterity. For us, they are not worthy of notice; for them they were. Philip II remained in Valencia for a bit over a month. Besides receiving large groups of visitors at his palace and watching a few processions and games, which I will gloss shortly, the king engaged, as usual, in a small amount of sightseeing and other such activities. From his window, he admired some forty horses just arrived from Naples and later saw them perform equestrian maneuvers in a field near the city. As always, Philip II paid close attention to religious ceremonies, attending the cathedral with great solemnity and accompanied by his entire court on the feast day of the city’s patron saint. He visited the cell where St. Vincent Ferrer had lived and worshiped his relics at the monastery of St. Dominic. Other pious visits to churches, monasteries, and the celebration of Candlemas were somewhat balanced by an outing to the lake at the Albufera. But mostly the king remained indoors in his palace. At one point he did not step out of doors for close to a week. In the meanwhile, Valencia’s different orders attempted to muster enough energy to organize festivities in honor of the king. Compared to the elaborate festivities he had seen as a young prince in Italy and the Low Countries, or even to the celebrations that accompanied his entry into Seville, the Valencian festivities are a telling sign of what had happened to Spain in the intervening years, be-

67 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 233. An example would suffice. This was a short inscription or poem dedicated to the heir to the Crown. “Ciñete oh sacro Turia! La cabeça / De yedra, juncos, arrayan y cañas / Pues hácia ti sus pasos endereça / El principe de entrambas [dos] Españas / Con la felicidad del padre empieça / Y no serán menores sus hazañas, / Christiana religion y santo celo / Que del famoso Emperador, su aguelo.”

183 CHAPTER V tween the mid-century and 1585, and of the reluctance of the Crown of Aragon’s urban authorities to fully acknowledge, with the pomp and cir- cumstance that such occasions demanded, the visits of their king and master. Valencia’s efforts even paled somewhat in comparison with those of Zaragoza. There were in fact even some occasions when homage to the king was used to ridicule some of those paying him obeisance. That was the case with the University of Valencia’s masters. Their visit to the king became the target for a scurrilous and biting satire which, while un- covering the pretense of these scholars, also diminished the figure of the king.68 As to the usual ecclesiastical procession, it may have reflected existing antagonisms between the Church and urban authorities, or so Cock’s narrative implies.69 The order of the clerical parade was, as always, highly hierarchical. Orphans dressed in white led the way, while lay confraternities followed, each member carrying a candle and each dressed in the colors and vestments of his pious association. Next came the friars from the monasteries of Victoria, Trinity, Mercy, St. Augustine, and the Car- melites, marching in pairs. Three hundred Franciscan friars marched behind, with a large contingent of Dominicans in the next rank. Members of the secular clergy followed, wearing capes and carrying crosses, herbs, flowers, and relics. Finally came the patriarch of the city, holding a chalice with a consecrated host, the Corpus Christi, within. Six consuls closed the parade, leading a “multitude of people” in no set order.70 The description calls for little comment, except to note that it followed the same format we have seen before and that, as elsewhere, it aimed more at displaying to the king and the people of Valencia the importance of the Church than at fully honoring the king. On Monday, February 3, 1586, the day after the feast of Candlemas, there was yet another evening procession that marched past the royal lodging. Organized by the oficios mecánicos (the craftsmen, tradesmen and other laborers), the parade consisted of a series of triumphal carts on top of which diverse tableaux vivants were represented. Cock and the contemporary Valencian chronicle agree on the attractiveness of the fisher- men’s display. It showed men playing the apostles Peter, Andrew, and John as they cast their nets from a fictitious barge, reenacting a passage in the Gospels. But our two sources disagree sharply on one of the carts, which carried a satirical representation of the oath of fidelity given to the

68 Gaspar Guerau de Montmajor, Breu descripció dels mesteres que anaren a besar les mans a sa majestad del rei don Pelipe al real de la Ciutat de Valencia a 8 de Febrer any 1586 (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 1999; Biblioteca Nacional Mss fasc/984). 69 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 250. 70 Idem.

184 A KING GOES TRAVELING Prince and the king at Monzón by the Valencians a few months earlier. Our Valencian informant comments that the performance was humorous and a success, noting that the royal family looked on with smiles on their faces.71 Cock however had a very different take on the whole affair, ful- minating at the insolence of the performers. “That burlesque spectacle,” he wrote, “seemed ridiculous and unworthy to be represented in front of his royal majesty.”72 What was going on here? From Cock’s perspective at least, it would seem that there were two very specific grievances. First, the whole ceremony at Monzón and the long delayed oath taking by the representatives of the Cortes had been an affront to Philip II’s dignity, too blatant a questioning of his royal authority. To compound the evil, as Cock saw it, a group of uncouth tradesmen had now reopened the wound by their carnivalesque representation of such a serious political matter. Twenty days after the king’s entry, the city paid for the running of fourteen bulls in its main square, followed by the almost obligatory juego de cañas. Valencia, however, a city with a well-earned reputation for brave knights who had blazoned the name of the city in numerous tournaments throughout the peninsula, did not pay for a single joust during Philip’s visit. Cock’s account ends abruptly on February 15, 1586 with the report of a great fire that burned the city archives. We know from other sources that Philip left for Madrid on the eve of carnival (February 27th). The journey back did not keep to the glacial pace that had marked the early portions of the king’s travels in his eastern kingdoms. Philip probably could not wait to get home, for as his experiences in the Crown of Aragon must certainly have shown him, Castile was home. Moreover, pressing business awaited him in Madrid and at the Escorial; none more pressing than the business of the Armada. One incident in his swift trip back is worth mentioning. Entering into Xátiva with “many feasts and happiness,” the king passed underneath numerous triumphal arches (which are not described by the chronicler) and rode into the city under a fine brocade palio. There he received two fine gold bowls or cups, unusually, for on his other visits in the Crown of Aragon no gifts had been forthcoming. Why in Xátiva? The town was not what one might call a big city or great trading center. In the shadows of Valencia, it had, like most other small Spanish towns, a fierce sense of its own importance and ambitions. Fortunately Cock, in describing affairs at Monzón, provided a valuable clue. Xátiva had been lobbying strenuously to become an independent diocese and to have its own bishop.”73 Who could fulfill that wish better than the king? We 71 See chapter 6 below. 72 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 252. 73 For Philip II’s reception in Xátiva, see Libre des memories de diversos sucessos é fets

185 CHAPTER V may, I think, safely dispense with the notion that this was a gesture of pure kindness, that finally a city in the Crown of Aragon deigned to receive Philip within its walls in 1585 in the same manner as they had when he “came to them as king for the first time”—the expression used by the Valencian chronicler to describe Philip II’s entry into Xátiva. Whether a discreet bribe or a real outpouring of loyalty for the king, however, Xátiva’s reception and the festivities it put on in his honor would have provided Philip with some emotional recompense for his long and exhausting trip. And after all, his next stop was Castile. We, too, have taken a very long journey as we accompanied the Pru- dent King on his transit from Madrid to the many different cities and towns in his eastern realms. It was a trip that taxed Philip’s health and emotional well being. The weather was mostly terrible. Monzón was in- fested with illness and death. His gout flared up. His beloved daughter, Catalina, departed, not to be seen again. Politically, although his subjects in the Crown of Aragon were not in open rebellion—armed challenges to the king would come a few years later—the king received a few slights, or, at least, so I have interpreted some of the unimpressive feasts and receptions. Nothing came easy. Royal officials had to engage in long and painstaking negotiations to secure any kind of reception for the king. At Monzón, Barcelona, and Valencia, Philip had to deal with endless pro- crastination and haggling. The greatest and most powerful king in sixteenth-century Europe was reminded at almost every turn of the very real limits to his power posed by the Crown of Aragon. The contractual nature of his relations with the Arago-Catalan realms was hard driven into his consciousness by awkward or partially failed negotiations to arrange for royal visits and by the manner in which the king was flanked, as tradition and local privileges dictated, by local authorities. Festivals were not, after all, theaters for the well-rehearsed exaltation of royal power. Other players claimed the stage, and did so successfully, subverting royal expectations. More than anything else, one is struck in reading these narratives by how physically grueling the voyage must have been. Bad roads, bad weather, poor lines of supply, and insufficient accommodations for the royal court and for lodging Philip’s guards were constants. Cock’s allusions to banditry, to the endless violence in Ribagorza, to the presence of Moriscos openly practicing their ancestral religion, and to the jealously memorables é coses señaladas de la ciutat é regno de Valencia, manuscript at the Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris), cited in Morel-Fatio and Rodríguez Villa, Relación del viaje hecho por Felipe II en 1585 . . . , 314. For Xátiva’s pretensions, see Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 171: “Xátiva pretiende hacerse obispado y eximirse de la matrix é iglesia de Valencia ....”

186 A KING GOES TRAVELING kept borders between Aragon and Castile and between Aragon and Cata- lonia tell of Spain’s vulnerability and of the Crown’s inability to exert its power fully in some areas. It would seem that any pretense of absolute power or real political unity was just that. We can also see the extent to which the king was, more often than not, a spectator rather than an active participant, as he had been at Binche. He did enter into Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian towns on horseback to the acclaim of crowds, or so we are told. He doffed his hat to the pretty ladies on the balconies, still as debonair as he had been in his youth. But age and a new understanding of his majesty led to his withdrawal from too much contact with the “public.” Philip and other early modern kings became lookers-on of spectacles rather than the center of attention. Although spectacles were necessary concomitants of ruling, the open feel of late medieval celebrations was, for all practical purposes, a thing of the past.

The Trying Trip to Tarazona in 1592 After following Philip II on his long journey through the eastern kingdoms in 1585–86, it may prove useful to return to the opening paragraphs of this chapter and take a quick comparative glance at the shorter trip that the king took to attend the gathering of the Cortes of the Crown of Aragon at Tarazona in 1592. After not attending the Aragonese Cortes for twenty-two years and offering excuses for his long absence at Monzón in 1585, the king took to the road again in what proved to be his last long trip. He did so less than seven years after his return to Madrid from Va- lencia. Though less than a decade had passed, everything had changed for the worse. The king’s health had deteriorated even further. Gout and other maladies were to turn him soon afterwards into an invalid. Most of the Invincible Armada had foundered in the English Channel or on the rugged Irish coast, the casualty of adverse weather and inadequate logistic support. After 1588, the year of the Armada, it was clear that God may have been an Englishman, even a Dutchman or a Frenchman, but he/ she/it was certainly not a Spaniard. The Spanish economy had continued its precipitous downturn, running almost parallel to the king’s decline. Locusts—which Cock reports seeing in great numbers in northern Castile—and plagues swept through the peninsula. Far more important, in 1591 Zaragoza and most of the Aragonese realm rose up in arms, purportedly because of the Antonio Pérez affair, but in reality for a number of other complex reasons. The entry of 1585, as troubled as it may have been, seems a golden age when compared to the “alterations” of Aragon. The king’s harsh military response, which many thought exaggerated and unnecessary, placed the

187 CHAPTER V king in direct confrontation with his Aragonese subjects. Hence the need to travel to Tarazona to mend fences with his restless vassals. Unlike the journey of 1585–86, the trip to Tarazona, conveniently across the border from Castile, did not bring the king into any of the major cities of the Crown of Aragon. Cock’s narrative of this voyage is a truncated one. His original manuscript was lent to a friend and lost. What we have consists mostly of his notes, offering a brief outline of the trip instead of the careful cultural and ethnographic observations that made his account of the 1585-86 voyage such a compelling source. Cock’s account in many respects reflects the somber tone of the voyage, broken only rarely by some meager reception or festivity. Fortunately, Jehan Lhermite was part of the king’s cortege on the trip to Tarazona, and we have his version, shorter still than Cock’s, to offer a somewhat different perspective on Philip II’s sojourn74. Once again, Philip II presided over a meeting of the Castilian Cortes in April 1592. From Pentecost to a few days after the feast of the Corpus Christi, the king was in El Escorial and his beloved woods near Segovia. He entered the latter city without any formal reception and, poignantly, the Infante Don Philip (later Philip III) rode into the city on horseback, while the king and the Infanta Doña Isabel stuck to their royal carriage. Although there was no formal reception, Segovian authorities organized some small entertainments, lighting the city at night and putting on the usual equestrian demonstrations and a running of bulls. Cock and Lher- mite describe the bulls as being of “little importance” and not worth remembering (lesqueles pour n’estre de bonne grace, ni y avoir un succès extravagant digne de memoire). The king fulfilled, as always, his pious duties and left the city on June 12, 1592, at around 4 PM to a two-hour-long artillery discharge.75 As had been the case in 1585–86, Philip II’s cortege met endless difficulties in finding lodging for the royal guards, incessant rain, and fields covered with locusts. Remarkably, in spite of the hardships of the voyage and the king’s worsening health, Philip went hunting for rabbits outside Tordesillas. Few receptions or celebrations marked the king’s progress, with the exception of a few obligatory runnings of bulls and a delightful assortment of pastries made with sugar and fruits—fifty different plates in all—sent to the king by the nuns of Santa Clara. Not until the king reached Valladolid was he met in proper form. A regulation hierarchi-

74 For Lhermite’s account, see Lhermite, Le passetemps, 126–208. Much like Cock, Lhermite spends most of his narrative describing the towns, religious institutions, etc., that he saw along the way. 75 Cock, Jornada de Tarazona (1592), 7–9, 12; Lhermite, Le passetemps, 129. See also note 4 above.

188 A KING GOES TRAVELING cally arranged procession came out of the city gates to meet and escort him into the city through the Gate of El Campo. The president of the Royal Chancery (located in Valladolid) opened the way, followed by the Inquisition’s secretaries with their distinctive banners. Then came the clergy and the University of Valladolid’s rector and scholars. The corregidor (the royal representative in Valladolid’s municipal government), accompanied by the members of the municipal council, closed the reception parade. Each of the individuals in this welcoming group kissed the king’s hand in obeisance, and the royal cortege, now substantially reinforced by the addition of the city’s delegation, entered the city, crossed the main square of Valladolid, and reached the house of the Marquis de Camarasa, directly across from the monastery of Saint Paul, where, coincidentally, Philip had been born sixty-five years earlier.76 Valladolid, as devoted to the king as any other Castilian city and still an important administrative center in spite of Madrid’s new role as the Spanish monarchy’s official capital, valiantly sought to organize feasts worthy of the king. What was lacking in terms of elaborate arches and lavish tournaments was made up by a great deal of ingenuity. There were floats with “Indians” (natives from the New World), and “Japanese” (probably meaning Asians). One cart was filled with wolves, foxes, rabbits, and hares, and, as they paraded past the king’s window, many of the animals were released to the confusion, and probable delight, of the crowd. The usual suffering bull with fireworks and torches tied to its horns and tail, together with (they were always coupled together) the juego de cañas, one that impressed Lhermite greatly, added to the spectacle. The king and his family gazed down from the safety of their windows and balcony on this hot summer’s day in Valladolid and, as they had done in 1585 in Alcalá de Henares, attended some of the university lectures. There, a sycophantic master glossed glowingly on the nature of royal authority. Of particular interest to Lhermite was a naval battle on the Pisuerga River on August 8th.77 Nothing of significance signaled the king’s progress after he left Vall- adolid on August 25th, except the usual green arches and pious devotions along the way. Burgos, for example, contributed only the ritual procession of civic and religious authorities to meet the king outside the city gates. Similar events took place in Logroño, and not much else passed until the king reached the border between Castile and Navarre. Here three ceremonial entries took place that need to be glossed once more. In Estella, an important Navarrese city, Philip entered under a palio held

76 Cock, op. cit., 19–23; Lhermite, op. cit., 144–45. 77 Cock, op. cit., 27–31; Lhermite, op. cit., 150–57.

189 CHAPTER V aloft by municipal officials dressed in long red-velvet robes. The usual serpent or dragon (la tarasca of Corpus Christi fame) spewing fire from its nostrils and mouth also met the king. Notably, the ceremonial gate, rather than ephemeral arches, through which the king entered the city, was constructed just for the occasion. In Pamplona, in spite of horrible weather, a large military contingent paraded in front of the king. He entered the city in his carriage, but, once again, the carriage was covered by a palio. At Pamplona, the young Infante Philip was sworn as heir to the throne of Navarre. Finally, at Tudela, a similar reception awaited. There the municipal officials brought the king into the city under a palio, “as it was the custom,” Cock writes, “to receive kings on their first visit to the city.”78 If I have provided such a long summary of what was a rather unimpressive journey, it is because, since Philip had never visited Navarre before, a kingdom added to the diverse realms of the Spanish Monarchy only in the early sixteenth century, the formal entries under a canopy serve as a reminder of the power of rituals and ceremonies even when such spectacles did not fully concord with the realities of power. And of course Tarazona waited! The city had gone to the expense of building a temporary triumphal arch with the ubiquitous Hercules motifs, religious allusions, and bad Latin poems and inscriptions. Here the king, in what was his last voyage to the lands of the Crown of Aragon, entered the city on a white horse, probably a painful sacrifice given his declining health. Cock and Lhermite tell us little of what transpired at Tarazona, except that, unlike Monzón, where the king lingered inactively for what seemed forever, he remained at Tarazona only from November 30th to Decem- ber 5th, and his son, soon to be Philip III, was sworn as heir to the realms of the Crown of Aragon once again. In December he made his way to Castile by the quickest possible route. After some celebrations at Soria, the king fled to Madrid and the Escorial because, as Cock tells us, “there would be no more ‘public’ entries.”79 For Philip II, always punctilious about the respect and formal gestures owed to his majesty, these final ceremonial entries must have been somewhat comforting—he still got them, and without the haggling necessary in the eastern kingdoms—but they would have been also a bitter reminder of the downward trajectory of his life. Although Cock and Lhermite are particularly laconic in their descriptions, there is no indication that any of the Navarrese receptions came at all close to young Philip’s glorious experiences in Italy and the Low Countries four decades before. And for a king so wedded to chival-

78 Cock, op. cit., 61–67; Lhermite, op. cit., 190–95. 79 Cock, op. cit., 74–85.

190 A KING GOES TRAVELING rous gestures, entering the city in a carriage, even under a rich baldachin, was a graphic and not reassuring demonstration of the parallel declines of his health and his kingdom. Philip II’s long voyages to the Crown of Aragon in 1585–86 and in 1592 provide a unique glimpse into the political rituals of the Spanish monarchy and into the limitations of spectacles as forms of articulating power in early modern Europe and Spain. Art and spectacle were displayed for a whole series of conflicting purposes. While I do not dispute that such celebrations reified the existing social order and provided continuous didactic messages as to the hierarchical structure of society, they also made points forcefully about the conflicts between city or realm and the king, between secular and ecclesiastical authorities, guilds and confraternities. And even if in the end, whether entering under a palio was important or not—after all, its use was set by tradition and only to be conferred once—what was significant for the king and his exercise of power was the willingness of his subjects to receive him without too much haggling and a perverse (in the king’s mind) commitment to reminding him of the contractual nature of his rule in the Crown of Aragon. Nonetheless, the lines along which political discourse, as articulated in festive events, was voiced fractured easily. It appears to us, when closely reading these accounts, that these multivalent and often inconsistent discourses about power were highly susceptible to shifting and overlapping. The messages conveyed to the “people,” to that amorphous, anonymous, but necessary audience without which these large political spectacles would have no meaning, could be quite confusing. The myriad messages encrypted in ceremonial arches and in elaborate processions may have been difficult indeed for the majority of the audience to read, but for those organizing the feasts they served as a way to articulate their own power within the city and the nature of their relations to the Crown. Nonetheless, the messages, the mise-en-scène of royal, municipal, and ecclesiastic power, were effective because they enjoyed the sanction of “popular” participation. Bound by ritual, every level of society—municipal and kingdom-wide authorities, nobles, guilds, clergy, and the common people—operated within shared and recognizable “webs of significance.” But, although we should always be clear that everything was bound by ritual, flexibility also existed within the constraints of tradition and ritualized performance. Thus Barcelona was expected to provide Philip II with a formal entry in 1564, as expensive as that might prove to be. The king, for his part, had to adhere to a well-established protocol and respect mutual obligations by swearing to uphold Catalonian privileges in a specific place—the square of the Friars Minors, across from the

191 CHAPTER V Montcada palace. He swore in words cast in stone by tradition. The route the king followed, the hierarchical organization of receiving processions, and other such elements of the entry appear to have been solidly fixed. To depart radically from such established formulas would amount to open confrontation and could undermine the social order that underpinned the authority of both king and community. But, as we have seen in the multiple examples from Barcelona, everything else was open to negotiation and was in many respects, but only to a point, unpredictable. Moreover, the nature of the negotiations that eventually brought a king to a city and initiated a complex festive cycle varied according to location and context. In Castile, Philip II had the right—and the power to enforce that right—to expect far more than he could in Zaragoza, Barcelona, or Valencia. Within each city, the different foci of authority differed, with either ecclesiastics or civic officials on top. In Barcelona and Valencia, and even in Segovia in 1570, the influence wielded by crafts and lay confraternities gave different contours to a royal visit and to the festivities associated with it. The spectacles were, then, polyphonic. Each of them sui generis. In the end, Philip II’s 1585–86 and 1592 journeys provide a rather accurate reading of political shifts and of the mounting difficulties facing Spain. The displays and expenses of the feasts appeared dramatically curtailed from previous years. The palpable realities of bad roads, inclement weather, plagues, sparse room for billeting troops, and all the other complaints that I have tediously reiterated throughout this chapter, testify to the difficulty in maintaining a decent quality of life while engaged in endless wars outside the peninsula. Philip II tried very hard to do his best. It was not enough.

192 ❊ CHAPTER VI ❊ Martial Festivals and the Chivalrous Imaginary

On 1 January 1434, Suero de Quiñones, a member of Alvaro de Luna’s retinue, came to the court of John II of Castile wearing full armor and an iron collar on his neck, and accompanied by nine knightly friends. Once in the presence of the king and all the great men and prelates gathered at Me- dina del Campo, the faraute (herald) Avanguarda read Suero’s long petition to the king. Since, as Suero argued, he was a prisoner of love (hence his iron collar), he requested of the king the privilege of holding a pas d’armes near the bridge on the Órbigo River. Located near the city of León, the bridge stood strategically (and bothersomely) at a key point on the pilgrimage road to Compostela. Suero was to hold the pas d’armes until he and his companions had broken three hundred lances. Once he had done this, he would be finally “liberated” from the prison of love cárcel( de amor), where he had been bound by the charms of an unnamed lady.1 After some deliberation the king and his council granted Suero and his companions the right to hold this pas d’armes, which Suero, to the chagrin of most travelers, did between July 20 and August 9,1434, at the very height of the pilgrimage season to the tomb of St. James, July 25th being his feast day. Although he never broke the promised three hundred lances, this famous event, known as the Passo Honroso (the “honorable pass”) long resonated in an Iberian peninsula swept by a vogue for chivalrous deeds and knight-errantry that began in the late fourteenth century, endured throughout the fifteenth century, and then lived on in the knightly deeds of the sixteenth century and in the imaginary of early modern literary works. Philip II, as we have already seen, was devoted to the Amadis of Gaul and reenacted portions of it during the lavish feasts at Binche and Benavente. Bernal Díaz del Castillo invoked books of chivalry on first gazing upon the great city of Tenochtitlan, and then, of course, there was

1 Pedro Rodríguez de Lena, Libro del passo honroso defendido por el excelente caballero Suero de Quiñones (Valencia: Textos medievales 38, 1970; facsimile reproduction of 2nd edition, Madrid: Imprenta de D. Antonio de Sancha, 1783), 2–4; Martín de Riquer, Cabal- leros andantes españoles (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1967), 52–69; on Alvaro de Luna, see the recent and excellent study by Nicholas G. Round, TheGreatestManUncrowned: AStudy of the Fall of Don Alvaro de Luna (London: Tamesis Books,1986). On the theme of the “prison of love,” one should think of the great impact of Diego de San Pedro, Cárcel de amor. ArnalteyLucenda. Sermón, J. F. Ruiz Casanova, ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995), originally published in 1492 but written much earlier.

193 CHAPTER VI always Don Quixote, which was not really a critique of knight-errantry at all but its best example. In Don Quixote, the eponymous hero engages in a heated discussion with a canon of Toledo about the verisimilitude of books of chivalry. When the canon excoriates the novels for their prepos- terous claims, Don Quixote responds by pointing to the actual deeds of knights such as Juan de Merlo and the jousts of Suero de Quiñones, among others. Cervantes here invokes real chivalrous deeds that took place a mere hundred and fifty years earlier.2 These books of chivalry and genuine knightly deeds have been enchantingly glossed and brilliantly contextualized in the twentieth-century literary scholar, Martín de Riquer’s Caballeros andantes españoles (Spanish knights-errant), in which he treats of Suero’s adventures on the banks of the Órbigo. An idiosyncratic and delightful book, Caballeros describes in luxurious detail the day-by-day events that took place at the Passo Hon- roso. Much earlier, Pedro Rodriguez de Lena, a royal scribe in early fifteenth-century Castile, recorded in notarial detail every encounter and the final outcome of Suero’s passo for posterity. Suero de Quiñones’ deeds are thus a perfect introduction to a study of martial display and chivalrous feasts in late medieval and early modern Spain. Combining actual deeds of arms with literary fantasy, his remarkable (and bizarre) adventure is redolent of the complex conflation of fiction and reality so magisterially depicted by Johan Huizinga for the Low Countries in his TheAutumnof the Middle Ages and reprised by Martín de Riquer for the Iberian Penin- sula later.3 Suero’s deeds at the bridge over the Órbigo River cannot be divorced, however, from the political realities of the world in which they took place. The plan for the knightly deeds of Suero, who stood as proxy for his master, the constable Alvaro de Luna—deeds that some might (and did at the time) consider nothing but a terrible annoyance for pious 2 On the scene from Don Quixote, see Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Martín de Riquer, ed., 12th edition, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1995) 1: 497–98. 3 As I received the copyedited version of this chapter and of the next one, I had the pleasure of reviewing Noel Fallows’ new book, Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance Iberia (Woodbridge (UK): Boydell Press, 2010). In this wonderful and thoroughly illustrated examination of some little-known treatises on jousting, Fallows provides short biographies of the authors, placing them in the context of their times. He also edits and trans- lates these treatises for the first time, including a new version of Libro del passo honroso defendido por el excelente caballero Suero de Quiñones. See, for example, pages 1–68. For Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, see below and his influential “Invención y consecuencias de la ca- ballería,” in Josef Fleckenstein, La caballería y el mundo caballeresco (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2006). Here and throughout this entire book, I write in the shadow of the great Johan Huizinga’s TheAutumnoftheMiddleAges, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mam- mitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See chapters 1–2, 11, and 12 for discussions on the circularity between fiction and reality in courtly deeds and literature.

194 MARTIAL FESTIVALS noble pilgrims, or even a species of insanity—were laid out at the court of Castile while one of the fabled Infantes of Aragon was present. In many respects, this was a highly political act, a literary rendering of a martial and courtly display that reiterated the constable’s (and by extension his king’s) superiority over their rivals.4 It serves as yet another reminder that festive displays were always imbricated in their cultural and political contexts. Thus, the Passo Honroso serves as a powerful reminder of several important points. First, unlike the royal entries examined in previous chapters or the carnival and Corpus Christi festivities to be discussed later, martial displays were strictly noble and/or urban elites games. There may or may not have been a popular audience. We have seen that mock warfare was not infrequently an adjunct to broader kinds of festivities, but in formal exercises of knightly valor, crowds were essentially unnecessary. Martial displays in the fifteenth and, to a lesser extent, in the sixteenth century were, by the very nature of the activities, closed to popular participation or at least separated from it by clearly marked physical and cultural boundaries. Second, all of these formal knightly displays depended on a heady mix of fantasy and reality. While real warfare continued throughout this period as a constant of noble life, and many high noblemen and princes, from Don Enrique, the Infante of Aragon, to the rightly celebrated poet Jorge Manrique, lost their lives on the battlefield, Suero’s Passo Honroso and similar pas d’armes, jousts, melees, and reed-spear combats, recreated an idealized battlefield on which nobles and the urban patriciate, all of them caught up in the feverish revival of courtly culture and enchanting romances, could show their mettle without risk of falling victim to a peasant’s arrow, a lance, or distant artillery. Honor, that very important commodity in what was often the dishonorable world of a self- ish and greedy nobility, was obtainable in the highly regulated world of formal knightly displays. For most of the nobility, the reality of the world in which they now lived was detestable indeed. As we are reminded vividly by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, artillery marked the end of an age that celebrated the valor and honor of the individual nobleman. A few further comments on this event may be necessary. Once the enterprise had been approved by king and court, Suero’s faraute (herald) laid out the plan for the event. Speaking for Suero and his companions in the typical mix of heightened religious and courtly language reserved for such occasions, he laid out, in legalistic fashion, twenty-two conditions

4 On the political context of the Passo Honroso, see Luis Suárez Fernández, Nobleza y monarquía. Puntos de vista sobre la historia política castellana del siglo XV (Valladolid: Departa- mento de Historia Medieval, 1975), 119–80; Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300–1474 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 87–101.

195 CHAPTER VI that would govern the Passo Honroso’s chivalrous battles. Among the most notable aspects of this elaborate document were the entries that defined the types of armor and weapons to be used and stipulated that defenders and challengers alike were obliged to break three strong lances. Being thrown off the horse or bloodied in the encounter counted as one broken lance. Ladies traveling on the pilgrimage road without a knight to engage in combat on their behalf had to relinquish their right gloves as pledges for future redemption by combat. Three Castilian ladies of high standing—but not including Suero’s courtly object of love—were to join the adventurers to give testimony to the month-long pas d’armes. Knights on their way to Santiago de Compostela who did not wish to engage in combat had to leave behind a weapon and their right spurs to be re- deemed by combat upon their return. Strict injunctions were made on acknowledging one’s rank and name, limiting combatants to members of the nobility. Other stipulations bound the Passo Honroso with a whole courtly tradition and with Castile’s finely-honed martial ethos.5 Martín de Riquer superbly connects Suero de Quiñones and his companions’ remarkable adventure with other pas d’armes throughout Eu- rope. The Passo Honroso itself was widely publicized throughout other Western European courts, as Castilian heralds traveled abroad to invite foreign knights-errant to join the fray. The international character of these knightly activities—pas d’armes, tournaments, jousts, and the like—connected Spanish knights with their counterparts elsewhere in the West. It gave a special patina to these events that spoke of an enduring chivalrous community of interests that crossed emerging national frontiers. I will return later on to the Passo Honroso to gloss some of Pedro Rodríguez de Lena’s descriptions of the actual combat, but not before anticipating the passo’s denouement. Two Catalan knights, Francesc Des- valls and Riambau de Corbera, arguing that the Passo Honroso was an inconvenience for noble pilgrims wishing to go to Santiago, requested that they be permitted to break all the lances remaining to free Suero from his prison of love. The remarkable literary exchange (for the letters between the defenders of the pas d’armes and the intrepid Catalan knights were, in their refined style, a form of literature) grew testier with each new missive and led, finally to a challenge to fight to the deathaultra- ( nça). Joined by another Catalan or Aragonese knight, Esberte de Clara- monte (who was the only knight to die in combat at the Passo Honroso on August 6, 1434), Francesc and Riambau inflicted enough damage on the Castilian defenders of the pas d’armes to prompt Suero de Quiñones

5 Rodríguez de Lena, Libro del passo honroso, 4–7, includes the twenty-two stipulations and the king’s answer, delivered by his king-of-arms, León.

196 MARTIAL FESTIVALS to declare himself free, to have his iron collar removed, and to declare the long ordeal at an end, even though only a bit more than half of the lances promised had been broken by August 9th.6

Mock Warfare in the Spanish Tradition

Mock warfare had a long history in Spain, and while it shared many characteristics with other European traditions, certain aspects of these martial festivals were deeply rooted in Iberian autochthonous experiences of warfare against Islam and in the long and complicated symbiosis of Castilian, Aragonese, Catalan, and other regional communities with Is- lamic Spain. The juego de cañas and fictitious battles between moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians)—two topics that have already been discussed and will be revisited in chapter 7—are only the most obvious examples of festive military displays that reflect historical interactions between these two religions traditions. Below I wish to examine different manifestations of these venerable martial traditions and explore how the nobility and select members of the urban patriciate increasingly reserved these activities exclusively for themselves. One may view festive martial displays from two different perspectives. The first, which I would describe as the social and military perspective, evolved in Spanish realms after the Islamic conquest in 711 and relates to the legal and social practices that encouraged single combat and military readiness. The second relates to the romances and chivalrous literature that promoted and served as models for these activities. Suero de Quiñones’ pass d’armes would have been inconceivable without reference to that fictional world in which knights-errant thrived, without such fictive constructs as being “a prisoner of love,” without a taste, shaped by literature, for certain colors, gestures, and the like. This was not of course just a medieval phenomenon. Similar literary artifice deeply influenced young Philip’s behavior. Later, as an old and ailing man, he retained a well-documented proclivity for fantastic displays and mock warfare. Nor can we understand Cervantes’ Don Quixote, that great monument of western literature, without reference to medieval chivalrous romances and literary descriptions of knightly deeds. But more about these things later. In the next chapter, I turn to the actual exercise of arms within the

6 Martín de Riquer provides a version different from that of the contemporary account of the Passo Honroso. In Rodríguez de Lena’s account, on August 6th the Catalan knights played a role not unlike that of any other challenger. Libro del passo honroso, 52– 55. For Riquer’s reading, which I follow here, see Caballeros andantes españoles, 75–93.

197 CHAPTER VI controlled setting of the tournament, the joust, and other such events exclusively reserved for the nobility and urban elites. There I hope to provide a typology of these different activities and to explain their meaning within the changing political contexts that marked the transition from medieval to early modern. One of the most remarkable things about festivities of this kind—and they were indeed part of festive cycles—is their continuity over time. I should also emphasize that although I look at tournaments, jousts, juegos de cañas, and other such displays as one specific festive category, they often were extensions of greater festivities such as royal and princely entries or visits, calendrical and noncalendrical celebrations, coronations, and the like. Although late medieval chronicles are crowded with references to fictional martial engagements, those that called for elaborate descriptions or that reached really epic proportions were (with some notable exceptions) those that were adjuncts, essentially, to greater festive occasions. Tournaments and jousts did take place in isolation, but not often. In this chapter the focus is on the manner in which these fictional combats were imagined and shaped by literature and social practices. Al- though the fictional and the real were inexorably connected, that is, life imitated art and art imitated life, for the sake of clarity, I will discuss these two aspects of festive combats and their representations as separate entities. They were of course one single social and cultural reality. Sym- bolic and ritual forms of warfare and knightly challenges, captured so vividly by the romances of the late fifteenth century, provided the models for actual jousts, tournaments, and other such martial displays. The actual events recreated and historicized the literary imagination.

Imagining Fictional Martial Games and the Realities of Warfare We ought to begin where medieval Spanish martial traditions really began. Not with literature, but with Spain’s long history of unending war, continuous raids, military sieges, shifting alliances, and violent con- quests. Although the experience of war was inscribed in the history of all medieval polities, the Iberian realm had traditions of sustained combat that were quite unique in Western Europe. I have always been reluctant to embrace the Reconquest as that magical explanatory scheme that provides an answer to all questions; yet, one cannot dispute the impact of sustained warfare, albeit complemented by peaceful exchanges and cultural symbiosis, in shaping the Spanish imaginary. This was much more so after the Christians began to get the upper hand after the collapse of the Caliphate in the 1030s. In that first stage, they obtained some rough parity with their Muslim enemies; then, they gained decisive military

198 MARTIAL FESTIVALS and political advantages after the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212).7 These watershed moments ended the Christians’ centuries-long subordi- nation to the armies of al-Andalus and marked the beginning of a Chris- tian advance that, though it slowed down considerably after the 1260s, led eventually to the final victory over Islam in 1492. As we saw in chapter 2, the citizens of Tortosa reenacted for Philip II’s pleasure the wrest- ing of the city from Muslim hands many centuries before by engaging in elaborate fictional warfare.8 This did not of course mean that the Christians never fought against one another. They did, and just as often as they fought the Muslims, but memories of the so-called Reconquest had been reshaped from the eleventh-century onwards by the Cluniac importation into the peninsula of the ideology of the Crusade. Although kings, especially Castilian ones, deployed calls for a crusade for their own secular purposes, the doctrinal impetus of these sectarian struggles cast a large shadow on the history of the Spanish realms. The fictitious struggles between Moors and Chris- tians, celebrated to this very day in Spain and parts of Latin America are a reminder of the lasting power of these traditions. There are also other, far more practical connections between frontier warfare and martial games. Because of the need to conduct campaigns at a long distance and to undertake raids that depended on celerity rather than on overwhelming force, Spain’s Christian armies imitated, and adapted to, Muslim war tactics. In contrast to the rest of the West, heavy armor played no significant role in peninsular warfare. Lightly armored forces relying on equestrian skills reigned supreme on Iberian battlefields, as in Iberian festive imitations of war. It should not surprise us, then, that the juego de cañas became the distinctive Spanish military festive display and that, unfailingly, those engaged in the juego did so dressed in the Moorish fashion and riding in a Moorish manner. In this regard, we should note that Spain was rightly celebrated for its horses. They commanded exorbitant prices beyond the Pyrenees, and their exportation was jealously regulated and very often banned. Their excellence was in large part the result of extensive crossbreeding with Arabian stock, which pro-

7 On the advance of Christian armies in the peninsula and the different stages that led to Christian military hegemony in the peninsula, see Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), with bibliography. 8 On the crisis of the thirteenth century that slowed down, and almost stopped cold, Christian gains in Castile (the Crown of Aragon by this period was already committed to expansion in the western Mediterranean and had left a free hand to Castile in the peninsula), see my article “Expansion et changement: la conquête de Séville et la société castillane, 1248–1350,” Annales E.S.C. 3 (May-June, 1979): 548–65.

199 CHAPTER VI duced agile and spirited animals. Not surprisingly, the juego de cañas and other particularly Spanish martial festive traditions emphasized ridership and equestrian skills far more than they did actual fighting.9 I shall return to this point below. At present, we need only emphasize that, unlike the rest of the West, in the Iberian peninsula—for Portugal shared Spain’s traditions and military history in the Middle Ages—war drew in most of the population. In a “society organized for war,” to use Elena Lourie’s felicitous title (later expanded by James Powers), every free man was liable for service.10 We know of course that the careful distinctions between “those who work” and “those who fight” were not as clear as medieval thinkers, keen on providing an ideological foundation for the tripartite division of society, represented them in their work. As French noble armies learned, to their chagrin, at the Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302 or at Crécy and Poitiers in the early decades of the Hundred Years War, bourgeois militias (that is military contingents manned by citizens soldiers) and peasant archers could do untold damage to knightly forces. We do not have to travel far forward to the time when new military techniques were transforming the nature of battle in the medieval West. Medieval instances abound north of the Pyrenees—and Italy is a paradigmatic example—of the role of urban contingents in warfare. This is, in many respects, part of the conundrum of these festive martial exercises: how to limit fictional warfare to the few in a society in which the many engaged in war. In the Spanish realms, it was never in doubt that all social groups were expected to contribute to military efforts. The Reconquest is inexplicable without the participation of urban militias in the war against Islam. Even peasants, who in Castile were “free,” were theoretically liable for service and often paid a tax, the fonsado, to compensate for not fulfilling their military duties. These non-noble contingents included not only well-to-do merchants and artisans fighting on horseback—the non-noble urban knights or caballeria villana—but also members of the commons fighting on foot, the peones, who were as important to the war enterprise as anyone else. The fact that no social group had a monopoly of weapons

9 On the banning of the selling and export of horses, see Archivo Municipal of Bur- gos, clasif. 1391 (October 12, 1252); Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, 5 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta y Estereotipia de M. Rivadeneyra, 1861–63), I: Valladolid, 1258, 57; Jerez, 1268, 71; Haro, 1288, 105; Valladolid, 1307, 194; Valladolid, 1312, 215; Palencia 1313, 243 et passim. 10 See Elena Lourie, “A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain,” Past & Present 35 (1966): 54–76; James F. Powers, A Society Organized for War. The Iberian Municipal Mi- litias in the Central Middle Ages, 1000–1284 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 112–35 et passim, for horses, see pages 132–33.

200 MARTIAL FESTIVALS or an exclusive right to combat, makes the importation of tournaments and jousts into Spain in the fourteenth century and afterwards even more poignant and peculiar and points to an important social and cultural shift that became codified in later centuries. Thanks to their ownership of horses and combat weapons, which won them tax exemptions and other royal privileges, the non-noble urban knights or caballeros villanos—a social group I have studied exhaus- tively—consolidated their position within Castilian society, just as their counterparts, the “honored citizens” had done in Barcelona. They also engaged in martial displays that legitimated their place in society. An important aspect and justification of their newly gained rights was the annual alarde (a showing to the royal officials that they did indeed still hold horses capable of engaging in long-distance warfare and the necessary arms to fulfill their military duties).11 The alarde became in time a highly ritualized affair. As we read in the 1338 rules and see from portraits of the Burgalese Real Hermandad, or Confraternity of the Santísimo y Santi- ago, these non-noble knights paraded on horseback once a year with shields, banners, and weapons. They also galloped through the town bofordando, a kind of less sophisticated game of canes. Although most of the children and grandchildren of the 1338 membership entered the ranks of the lesser nobility in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, none of them would have been found participating in the elaborate jousts and tournaments that became part of court culture in the late Middle Ages. Those events were reserved for the high nobility and for those within the exalted circles of the court. The point here is that the widespread interest in festive martial displays shown by the chroniclers of the late Middle Ages—and further perpetu- ated by erudite humanists describing royal entries and travel in the early modern period—was rooted in a Spanish military tradition and ethos that perhaps went far deeper than in other parts of the West. The road to Binche was paved by the martial spirit of Spain’s Reconquest, as it was by many other factors. And to reiterate a point raised earlier, it is even more remarkable that in this society where no social group had exclusive claims over the exercise of arms, we see from the late Middle Ages on a decisive aristocratization of fictional combat. While the entire population continued to be mobilized for war in Granada, Italy, Germany, the New World,

11 See my “The Transformation of Castilian Municipalities: The Case of Burgos, 1248–1350,” Past & Present 77 (1977): 3–33; also my Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), chapters 7 and 8; also Carmela Pescador, “La caballería popular en León y Castilla,” Cuadernos de Historia de España 33–34 (1961): 101–238; 35–36 (1962): 156–201; 37–38 (1963): 88–198; 39–40 (1964): 169–260.

201 CHAPTER VI and the Low Countries, at court only the few could share in the intoxicating atmosphere of these newfangled martial games.

Knights-Errant and the Imaginary

As Martin de Riquer has so enchantingly shown, the conflation of literary fantasy with actual deeds of arms created a hothouse atmosphere in which, in Huizinga’s formulation, the boundaries between fiction and reality were dramatically obliterated. It is worth noting that these deeds of arms no longer took place on real battlefields but on fictitious ones. Only one knight died at the Passo Honroso, even though more than one hundred and fifty lances were broken. The odds of survival were far better than in real combat on the ever more dangerous peninsular and Euro- pean battlefields—although, admittedly, Henry II of France died in a tournament. Literature had a powerful role in shaping this new sensibility and in legitimizing the exclusion of other social groups. And even more significant for my purpose here was that turning inward of the ruling groups and the concomitant aestheticizing of combat in late medieval and early modern Spain.

Literature and the Imagining of Knights Perhaps it is proper to begin at the end, to begin with Don Quixote, perhaps the greatest of all chivalrous romances. Through this early and remarkable seventeenth-century work (its first part was published in 1605), we can grasp the long and illustrious afterlife of fifteenth-century romances and their enduring impact on Spain’s social and cultural landscape. The entire book is, among many other things, a reflection—sometimes ironic, always thoughtful—on books of chivalry. Our purpose here, however, is not to discuss Don Quixote, however tempting that may be to me, but rather to take inventory of the genre of chivalry and knights-errant as we find it in Part I of the book, and to consider the mordant assessment of such literary works by the priest and barber in Don Quixote’s unnamed village. Early in the book, after Don Quixote’s first, lonely, and unfortunate sally into the fields of La Mancha, it dawned upon his friend the village priest that the old and poor hidalgo (lesser nobleman) Alonso Quijano had gone mad from his too assiduous reading of the tales of knights-errant.12 Enlisting the help of Master Nicolas, the barber and surgeon in the vil-

12 Don Quixote, part I, chapters 5–6.

202 MARTIAL FESTIVALS lage, they both went to Quijano’s house. There they met with the house- keepers who wished the priest to exorcize the books—more than one hundred of them and well encuadernados (bound in leather?)—and then to burn them indiscriminately. Several asides can be made: one, such a substantial library in the household of a rural and not-too-well-off hidalgo raises issues about the role of books and reading in sixteenth-century Spain. As we know from recent studies, the book trade and the availabil- ity of books was far more widespread than once thought.13 But such dedicated reading in one particular genre, the romances of chivalry, serves as a reminder of the continuity between medieval and early modern, and of the fact that some of the most notable knights-errant in late medieval Spain borrowed and sometimes also inspired, as Riquer has shown, the deeds depicted in chivalrous romances. But let’s go back to the house of good Alonso Quijano. The priest and the barber undertook a close examination of the threatened books, trying to determine which deserved to be condemned to the flames and which did not. Not surprisingly, the first book examined was the first four volumes of Amadis of Gaul, printed for the first time in 1508 and translated into many different European languages, and later even into Hebrew. Although earlier forms of the Amadis dated back to the late fourteenth century, the version Don Quixote (and Philip II) must have read was the compilation of earlier versions made by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. The Amadis of Gaul not only inspired the fictitious deeds of Don Quixote but was carried, as we have seen, fresh from the printing press to the New World by the early conquistadores and was, as also noted, Philip II’s favorite book. Below we shall see how passages of the Amadis served as scripts for some of the most elaborate festive martial displays. It should not come as a surprise that the Amadis of Gaul was spared de- struction by the diligent inquisitors of Don Quixote’s library and set aside as worthy of saving. A harsher fate befell most of the other books. The priest provided a short summary of each and found them wanting. The list is long, and Cervantes ironically let us know that the priest was probably far better versed in this particular literature than in his own ecclesiastical duties. From sequels to the Amadis, to translations of Ariosto’s great works, some were thrown into the bonfire, a few set aside for further consideration, but a considerable number, from Johanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanch (1490) to Jorge Montemayor’s La Diana and Cervantes’ own La Galatea, were found worthy of being saved, read, and enjoyed. Although most of the texts that were saved are important sixteenth-century literary

13 See the excellent article by Sara Nalle, “Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Cas- tile,” Past&Present 125 (November, 1989), 65–96.

203 CHAPTER VI masterpieces, including pastoral novels (the aforementioned La Galatea and La Diana), and epic heroic works such as Ercilla’s La Araucana, pride of place was given to the Amadis and to Tirant lo Blanch, which harkened back to the rich atmosphere of the fifteenth century and to the close relationship between erudite discussions of knighthood and the duties and privileges of knights, chivalrous romances, and actual deed of arms.14 In the opening chapter of this book, I cited at length Jesús Rodríguez Velasco’s extensive study of the heated debate on chivalry in Castilian literature. Although he focuses to a large extent on the work of Diego de Valera (1412–1488), he also ranges over a long span of years, exploring the different ways in which knighthood was defined. In these debates, who became a knight and how was an important issue in both law and literature. Moving from Alfonso X’s Siete partidas (in the second half of the thirteenth century) through Don Juan Manuel’s Libro de los estados and other of his works (in the first half of the fourteenth century), to Pero López de Ayala’s works later in that century, one reaches that hothouse of chivalrous imaginings that is the fifteenth century. Most notable among works dedicated to describing the nature of knighthood were Alonso de Cartagena’s Doctrinal de los caballeros and Fernando del Pulgar’s Claros varones de Castilla. Their works, engaging as they did the question of who was a knight, provide a clear discursive road map to the manner in which lower social groups were excluded from the highly symbolic and artificial world of knights.15 At the same time, one must note that those drawing the boundaries of what knighthood was were often Conversos or belonged to the middling sorts. Alonso de Cartagena was from the illustrious Santa Maria Converso family, so was Diego de Valera. Gutierre Díaz de Games, the author of the influential El Victorial, was certainly not a member of the aristocracy. Yet, in his biography of his patron, Pero Niño, the count of Buelna, Díaz de Games provides an elaborate apology for knighthood, comparing knights to angels and emphasizing that the self- less exercise of arms is what confers nobility. In words that will be powerfully echoed in Don Quixote, Díaz de Games argues: “They are not good knights who ride upon horses; nor are they all knights to whom kings give arms. They all have the name, but they do not pursue the

14 Don Quixote, part I, chapter 6. 15 Jesús D. Rodríguez Velasco, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV. La tratadística caballeresca castellana en su marco europeo (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1996), 17– 193. See also Alonso de Cartagena, Doctrinaldeloscavalleros, José María Viña Liste, ed. (Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1995); Fernando del Pulgar, Claros varones de Castilla, Robert B. Tate, ed. (Madrid: Taurus, 1985); Pedro (Pero) López de Ayala, Librorimadodepalacio, Kenneth Adams, ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1993). For short entries on all these writers, see Rodríguez Velasco, 383–420.

204 MARTIAL FESTIVALS calling.”16 We should keep this contradiction always in mind. The apolo- gists for knighthood, for its being a “calling,” were not always those whose names would be found in the lists of a joust or a tournament. But they were very clearly those who thought they should be in those lists and whose chivalrous behavior, àlaDonQuixote, they felt was enough to confer upon them the honor of knighthood.

Knighthood and the Law In Alfonso X’s Siete Partidas, partida II focuses on royalty, knighthood, war, and the duties of royal subjects in armed conflict. The law codes leave no doubts as to the obligation of all citizens, noble or not, to rally to the defense of king and country, and to do so with arms. Since the Parti- das owed a great deal to Roman Law and to its revival in the twelfth century, it is not surprising to find this image of citizens-in-arms (though of course the idea of citizenship as defined much later did not yet exist). This aside reiterates the question raised earlier: Spain was a society organized for war both by law and in the realm’s practical experiences of everyday life. But if nobles did not enjoy a monopoly on weapons and were not the only ones who fought for the defense of the realm, what then legitimated their rank? What gave them the intellectual and moral grounds to formulate, by the fourteenth century, a world of fictitious combat and martial display from which much of the population was excluded? Partida II, title xxi presents an elaborate argument for the exclusiveness of knighthood. Harkening back to the canonical tripartite division of society, it argues as follows: For, just as those who pray to God for the people are called preachers; and those who cultivate the earth and perform the work in it, by means of which men must live and be supported, are called laborers; those, on the other hand, whose duty is to protect all, are called defenders; and hence it was considered proper by the ancients, that the men who have such labors to perform should be carefully selected. This is the case because three things are implied by defence, namely, energy, honor, and power.17 The argument here rehashes medieval society’s dogma of a tripartite social structure, but we should emphasize also how the institution of

16 Gutierre Díaz de Games, The Unconquered Knight: A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Niño, Count of Buelna, Joan Evans, trans. and ed. (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1928), 12. See pages 9–10 for his comparison of knights to angels. Cited in my Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (London: Longman, 2001), 70. 17 Las Siete partidas, trans. Samuel Parson Scott, Robert I. Burns, S.J., ed., 5 vols. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2, 417.

205 CHAPTER VI knighthood is legitimated by its antiquity and by the association of defenders with energy, honor, and power. Of these three attributes, honor will play an ever-increasing role in the definition of knighthood in succeeding centuries. But Title xxi goes beyond that. Laws 2 and 3 continued to trace the emergence of nobles to a distant past, while tracing the emergence of knighthood from a strict selection—one in a thousand—of knights from among carpenters, butchers, hunters, and others engaged in occupations that provided some war-like training. While nobles come ultimately—back in the mists of time—from common origins (kings were of course quite careful about not promoting the social standing of rival noble families), it was property, the creation of lineages, and virtues (such as intelligence, dexterity, and loyalty) that formed the core of the present knighthood and gave it its permanence. Title xxi continues with a careful discussion of how certain men can become knights and who has the power of knighting, and then presents a list of attributes, obligations, and rights derived from membership in the order of knights that is too extensive to discuss here. One more point should be made before proceeding to other topics. There is an injunction in Partida II, title xxi, law 20 stipulating that “great deeds of arms should be read to knights while they eat....”18 An interesting parallel to the monastic custom of pious table-readings, this linking of reading and knightly status and conduct would seem to echo the overlapping of fiction and deeds of arms in later centuries. That Alfonso X paid such close attention to knighthood and to the exercise of arms should not surprise us. In an often-quoted statement, it is said that Ferdinand III, Castile’s model king, had lectured his son on how to secure fame. “Sir,” Ferdinand III is said to have told his son and heir Alfonso, “ 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. If you should manage to hold it all in the way which I leave it to you, then you are as good a king as I, and if you should enlarge it, you are better than I; and if you should lose any of it, you are not as good as I.”19 If one’s standing as king was to be determined by deeds of arms against the Muslim enemy and by the conquest (or reconquest) of al Andalus, then martial traditions were, by necessity, all important. This was of course not an exclusively Castilian ethos, but one that prevailed throughout the dif- 18 Ibid., 417–19, 428–29. 19 Cited from the Primera crónica general II, 772–73, in Angus MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages. From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500 (London: MacMillan Press, 1977), 59.

206 MARTIAL FESTIVALS ferent Spanish realms and indeed all of medieval Western Europe. Alfonso X’s father-in-law and contemporary, the great James I (1213–1276), ruler of the Crown of Aragon, conqueror of Valencia in 1238, and a warrior without parallel, wrote, in collaboration with others, a remarkable autobi- ography, the Libre dels feyts (Book of Deeds) which celebrated his own martial accomplishments. A few years afterward, the great chronicle by Ramón Muntaner (1265–1336) waxed enthusiastic on Catalan feats of arms, including the author’s own, in the Mediterranean.20 The marriage of literary and military enterprise, as is obvious from these examples, had a long ancestry before it became part of erudite discussion and romantic fancy in the late fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. It was not as if this interest in the nature of knighthood emerged ex nihilo, like Venus from the seafoam. Not only was there a long warring tradition on the peninsula, but there was in the fueros (charters) a keen preoccupation with combat. Although linked to the ordeal, these single combats seem almost a prefiguration of the brutal personal armed encounters of later centuries. In the writings of the influential Fuero de Cuenca (1177), we can see the importance of warlike prowess and the legal regulation of single combat. To complicate matters further, the Fuero de Cuenca served as a model for later charters issued throughout the newly conquered territory in the South. The Cuenca Charter itself borrowed many of its formulas from Aragonese municipal charters, most notably that of Teruel.21 And, to complicate matters even further, the king behind these charters was Alfonso VIII, husband to one of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughters. It is easy to see how we might slip into an endless regression until we found ourselves linking the Castilian and Ara- gonese courts with both the courtly traditions of the Angevin court and its own autochthonous Galician tradition of troubadour-like cantigas de amigo. But following these paths further and further into the past would require yet another book very different from this one. Suffice it for now to hint at the variety of rich traditions from which knightly ideals could borrow from the twelfth century onwards. To return to the fuero of Cuenca and its legitimization of single combat, this municipal law code gave considerable attention to regulating the “judicial combat,” or ordeal, but certain points require special emphasis here.

20 See the excellent entries by Robert I. Burns and Michael Gerli in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2003), 433–35, 593. Also see Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300–1474 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 164–95. 21 On the Cuenca Code, or fuero, see The Code of Cuenca. Municipal Law on the Twelfth- Century Castilian Frontier, translated and with an introduction by James F. Powers (Phila- delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 1–4, 14–24. See 135–39 for fighters in judicial trials.

207 CHAPTER VI As early as the end of the twelfth century, those choosing to fight on horseback (the plaintiff) must “bring in each nine day period five gentlemen (emphasis mine) who should not be professionals on salary, nor spe- cialists, nor left-handed, but rather are the equal of the challenged.”22 Whether fighting on horseback or on foot, “the weapons of the horseman established in the code should be the following: a mail jacket, a helmet, upper arm and tight armor, a lance, a shield, and two swords. For those who fought on foot they should be the same, minus the sword.”23 Since the code also specifies that the “points of the combatants’ lances should be blunted,”24 we have clearly reached a point where the requirement for certain weapons and a certain style of combat—fighting on a horse being far preferable to doing so on foot, the use of blunted lances that allowed for combat but avoided serious wounding, and so forth—would exclude many segments of the population who could afford neither a horse, weapons, nor a substitute, or who did not have the military skills to engage in this type of combat. We are also very close to the heavy armor that was the essence of the late medieval joust. Finally, we should not leave this particular discussion without a brief examination of the rey de armas (king-of-arms), heralds ( farautes), pursuivants-at-arms (persevante) and others, who acted as arbiters of knightly behavior and fictitious combat. Just as literary representations of festivals, jousts, tournaments, and the like increased exponentially from the fourteenth century onwards, so did mentions of the rey de armas and the farautes in the chivalrous literature of the period and in the chronicles. As Alfonso de Ceballos-Escalera y Gil has shown, although heralds, kings- of-arms, and other officials associated with the correct use of knightly etiquette and arms are known in the courtly literature of the twelfth century, they do not appear in Spain until the fourteenth century. A king-of-arms is the chief of heralds. Attached to royal courts or to great noble houses, these experts in heraldry and the forms of combat helped fix the terms of noble combat. By the sixteenth century, they became, as we have seen, the bearers of royal arms and heraldic colors and important components in the pageantry of royal entries and displays of power.25

The realities of warfare, the legalization of combat, and the glorification of martial deeds in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries pointed inexorably to

22 TheCodeofCuenca, 135. 23 Ibid., 137. 24 Ibid., 138. 25 On the reydearmas and heraldos in Spain, see Alfonso de Ceballos-Escalera y Gila, HeraldosyreyesdearmasenlacortedeEspaña (Madrid: Prensa y ediciones Iberoamericanas, 1993), 7–142.

208 MARTIAL FESTIVALS later developments and to the fictionalizing of knightly achievements in the secure confines of the tournament. Although a great deal can be said about literary imagining and the feverish interest in books of chivalry, there is little I could say here that would not be mere paraphrase of Martin de Riquer’s rich descriptions of this world of knights-errant and romance, which I have cited frequently above. More importantly, the links between literature and chivalrous deeds and the lives of some knights-errants are uncanny. Authors like Martorell, who wrote the remarkable Tirant lo Blanch, a book not unlike James I’s early Libre des feyts or Muntaners’s Crònica, built upon lived experiences of duels and combats, mixing fiction and reality. That heady mixture would find full display in the martial imaginary of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century tournaments and jousts. It is to them that we now turn.

209 ❊ CHAPTER VII ❊ Kings and Knights at Play in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain

The origins of tournaments in Western Europe can be traced back to classical sources and to a sparse number of references to events that looked like tournaments in the Central Middle Ages. While these early mentions provide interesting glimpses of the genealogy of fictitious combat, it was the twelfth century that truly saw the formal beginnings of these traditions of artificial warfare that would hold such a powerful grip on the European imagination for many centuries to come. Closely tied to courtly culture and in a symbiotic relationship with the great outburst of courtly literature that took place in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the tournament sank deep roots in England, France, the Low Countries, and parts of Germany during the twelfth, and then developed elaborate rules of engagement and pageantry in succeeding centuries.1

1 The literature on tournaments, jousts and other forms of fictive combat is extensive indeed, and many of the primary sources, containing lavish descriptions (and illustrations) of such events are available in print. See the very handsome and extremely useful book by Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Press, 1989), 13–28, 77–106; Juliet R. V. Barker, TheTournamentinEngland, 1100–1400 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1986); Francis H. Cripps-Day, TheHistoryoftheTournament (New York: AMS Press, 1982); for the relation between the tournament, art, and armor, see Braden K. Frieder, Chivalry and the Perfect Prince: Tournaments, Art, and Armor at the Spanish Habsburg Court (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008). Frieder includes a most useful appendix detailing the number of tournaments held in Habsburg Spain. See the long list of collected examples of these events in Spain in Enrique de Leguina, Torneos, jineta, rieptos y desafíos (Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fé, 1904); see also the study of these events in France (many examples) by Christian de Mérindol, Les fêtes de chevalerie à la cour du roi René: em- blématique, art et histoire; les joutes de Nancy, le Pas de Saumur et le Pas de Tarascon (Paris: Editions du C.T.H.S., 1993), and the original edition of the manuscript that narrates these tournaments: Edmond Pognon, Le Livre des tournois du roi René, de la Bibliothéque nationale (ms. français 2695) (Paris: Herscher, 1986). For the juego de cañas in particular, see below and notes on this equestrian game in Luis Toro Buiza, Noticias de los juegos de cañas reales, tomadas de nuestros libros de gineta (Seville: La Imprenta municipal, 1944). For early modern tournaments in England, see Alan R. Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tourna- ments (London: George Philip and Son, 1987). Finally, binding together these fictitious military exercises, Maurice H. Keen’s delightful and comprehensive book, Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).

210 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY Most scholars have argued that the Iberian Peninsula was a latecomer to these festive martial traditions. If one considers the continuous military demands of the Reconquest, such an argument may appear plausi- ble.2 I am not however fully convinced that such was the case. The intense contacts between Catalonia and parts of northern Aragon with Occitania, and the familiarity of northern Castilians with French customs—thanks to the stream of pilgrims pouring into northern of Spain on their way to Compostela—argue for the peninsular nobility’s having extensive familiarity with tournaments, jousts, and other such activities. Although, as far as I know, the evidence is lacking, jousts and tournaments may well have been held in the peninsula prior to the mid- thirteenth century, the date usually given for the first mentions of these fictitious military games. The Fuero of Cuenca’s description of judicial combats, despite its ordeal-like quality in this law code’s particular context, reflects—in terms of organization, choice of weapons, and the linking of nobility and horsemanship—a clear understanding of the tournament or joust’s rules and regulations. If Alfonso X describes such events in a derisive fashion in the Siete Partidas, he was only cleaving to his usual disparaging attitude towards French influence and claims, as evidenced for example by his dismissal of French royal claims to thaumaturgy.3 But the question of whether the Iberian Peninsula shared fully in the tournament in the twelfth century or not (it most probably did not) has little relevance to my discussion here. The reality is that from the late fourteenth century onward, the Spanish realms hosted and promoted an endless number of such affairs. While borrowing many elements from Northern Europe’s tournament and joust culture—most obvious the heavy armor—the Iberians also cultivated elements that were unique to the peninsula. Before examining some of the most salient of these martial fantasies, it might be useful to provide a typology of what these events were like and a brief outline of the topics I hope to examine below. Al- though I use the word tournament to describe mock combat between knights (though there were also carnivalesque imitations of these noble events put on by commoners, see below and chapter 8), the term does not

2 Barber and Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants, 91. 3 Idem., citing a section of the Siete partidas where Alfonso X’s legal advisers provide a different definition of the word “tournament,” contrasting its use in Spain to refer to real warfare (and the killing of the enemy), with its use in other countries to mean simply a form of exercise. For Alfonso X’s rejection in the Cantigas de Santa María of French and English claims of healing by the king’s touch, see Teofilo F. Ruiz, “Unsacred Monarchy: The Kings of Castile in the Late Middle Ages,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual & Politics Since the Middle Ages, Sean Wilentz, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 109–44.

211 CHAPTER VII fully comprehend the full range of fictional warfare that served to showcase the skills, courage, and perseverance of knights. In the Spanish realms, the proliferation of these fictitious military displays in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period appears, as was the case elsewhere in the West, to be connected with the popularity of certain literary genres. As noted in the previous chapter, this connection between art and warfare remained an important one.4 And of all the literary tropes, none played such an important role in the tournament as love. The presence of ladies as spectators or, as we saw in the Passo Hon- roso as witnesses, attests to the formulaic nature of these affairs. Most of the defenders and/or attackers in the tournaments—and in the pas d’armes, jousts, and the like as well—carried with them either the colors of their respective ladies, their tokens, or signs of their “imprisonment” or enchantment, usually by a neglectful female. The female gaze, not unlike the royal gaze, played a signal role in shaping the cultural contours of the tournament.

Towards a Typology of Fictional Warfare: The Juego de Cañas and the Battles between Moors and Crusaders (Christians)

On the very early morning of St. John’s Day (June 24th, or Midsummer’s Day) 1595, the heir to the throne of the Spains, Philip (who became king as Philip III three years later) left the royal palace dressed in the Moorish fashion and riding a la gineta (in the Moorish style). He was accompanied by one hundred knights dressed in the same fashion, who rode through the streets of Madrid two by two, engaging in equestrian maneuvers associated with the game of canes. Returning to the palace by eight in the morning, Philip II, now confined to his chair by gout, came to the window accompanied by the ladies of the court to watch, delighted, as his son and heir engaged in a lively game of canes. Jehan LHermite, who describes the event in his Le passetemps, tells his readers that it was “one of the best he had ever seen in Spain.”5 This small vignette, revealing of Philip II’s long fascination with the juego de cañas, serves as a good introduction to the topic.

4 In this regard, the exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain (June 28, 2009–November 9, 2009) is a very good example of the overlapping of art and war. The exhibit and the plates of ar- mors are available on line at http://www.nga.gov/press/exh/3018/3018_list.pdf. 5 Lhermite, Le passetemps, 256–67.

212 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY

Figure 7. Game of Canes in the Plaza Mayor, Madrid by Juan de la Corte (c. 1585–1660). Detail of a juego de cañas held in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid in 1623. Note the reed-spears and the equestrian formations. Courtesy Museo Municipal, Madrid, Spain / Index / The Bridgeman Art Library.

The juego de cañas and fictional battles between Moors and Christians originated in Iberia. These two activities were quite distinct. The first was a display of equestrian skills and required most often (or always) that the performers—for the juego de cañas was above all an aesthetic performance featuring elaborate maneuvers on horseback and involving little actual violence—dress as Moors and ride with a Moorish saddle (alagi- neta) in the Moorish manner. Heavy armor and weapons were very much out since they would only impede the careful charges and countercharges that were part of the game. The game derived its military aspect from reed-spears (with a weighted lower part, usually filled with sand) that could be thrown fairly harmlessly at the feigned enemy, and daggers car-

213 CHAPTER VII ried on the left hand. The juego de cañas demanded considerable skill, and it is therefore quite surprising that there are many instances in which grandees and noblemen of very high rank participated avidly in these displays, as well as the lesser nobility. Participation in the juego did not preclude of course embracing as well the more dangerous heavy-armored jousts. Some donned their fancy Moorish clothes one day and heavy armor the next. Although there were periods when the juego de cañas barely registered in the chronicles, as for example at the court of John II of Castile with its heavy investment in pas d’armes, jousts, and traditional tournaments, Spaniards on the whole were quite attached to the game. In the sixteenth century no festival or entry was without its displays of horsemanship. And when Spanish princes or kings traveled abroad, the juego de cañas served as a special signature of Spanish uniqueness. The game itself with its intricate riding maneuvers and, far more relevant, the riders’ exotic Moorish customs and dress, only reinforced the perception of Spain as intrinsically alien, outright Moorish compared to other European cultures.6 Luis Toro Buiza in his short monograph, Noticias de los juegos de cañas reales, provides a summary of the different early modern descriptions of the game of canes in Pedro de Aguilar’s Tratadodelacavallería de la gineta (1572), Pedro Fernández de Andrada’s De la naturaleza del cavallo (Seville, 1580) and his LibrodelaginetadeEspaña (Seville, 1599), Luis de Bañuelos y de la Cerda’s Tratadodelajineta (early seventeenth century), and Grego- rio de Zuñiga y Arista’s Doctrinadelcavalloyartedeenfrenar (Lisbon, 1705).7 Toro Buiza’s discussion, essentially a survey of early modern erudite reflections on the elaborate equestrian exercises and ritualized performance of the game of canes, connects horsemanship, horse rearing, and training—all of these treatises are really much more about horses and riding

6 On the juego de cañas, see Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation. Maurophilia and the Construc- tion of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 89–102 et passim. Citing the Diccionario de autoridades (1726–37), Fuchs (Exotic Nation,163) provides the dictionary’s description: “Juego o fiesta de a caballo, que introduxeron en Es- paña los Moros, el cual se suele executar por la Nobleza, en ocasiones de alguna celebri- dad.” See also Noel Fallows’ wonderful new book, Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance Iberia (Woodbridge (UK): Boydell Press, 2010), chapter 7, which includes a discussion of the game of canes and of bulls, plus numerous illustrations and a discussion of the daggers used in the game. See also his edition and translation of a few excerpts of the influential treatise by Hernán Chacón, Tractado de la cavallería a la gineta (1551), on pages 503–508. 7 See Luis Toro Buiza, Noticias de los juegos de cañas reales (Seville: Imprenta Municipal, 1946), 5–22; Pedro de Aguilar, Tratadodelacavallería de la gineta (1572), fasc. Ed. (Málaga: El Guadalhorce, 1960); Luis de Bañuelos y de la Cerda, Librodelajinetaydescendenciade los caballos Guzmanes (Madrid: Sociedad de bibliófilos españoles, 1877).

214 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY than about the game per se—with noble status. But this concern with defining good horsemanship and the proper way of riding in the Moorish style and engaging in the game of canes (careful descriptions are provided as to the rules of the game) also tell us volumes about the importance of the game in the festive life of early modern Spain. The juego de cañas, beyond attesting to the centuries of warfare between Islamic and Christian knights on the peninsula, also reenacted the military strategies (especially long distance raids by light cavalry) that dominated Spanish warfare until the wars against Granada in the late fifteenth century. It should not be surprising then that the juego de cañas, and the concomitant Moorish dress, became really popular only after Islam had been driven out of the Peninsula in 1492 and Muslims were either forced to convert or were driven into submission (there were juegos de cañas on the Granada frontier, as we saw, during the festivities put on by Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, chapters 3 and 8). It seems almost a perverse contradiction that Philip II, who introduced punitive measures to forbid Muslims from dressing in their traditional garbs, derived such pleasure and encouraged his nobles to play and dress like Moors.8 Moreover, the juego de cañas, Moorish in origin, overlapped with the art of bohordo or bofordar. Members of the bourgeois confraternities of Burgos went on parade through the town bohordando, that is, throwing reed-spears and leading their horses through elaborate maneuvers of attack and retreat. The knights of Seville also received Alfonso XI on his solemn entry into the city in 1327 with equestrian games that included bohordos. The DiccionariodelaRealAcademiadelaLenguaEspañola defines “bohordas” as “throwing bohordos in chivalric events” and the “bohordo” as “a short reed lance, around six hands long with the first segment filled with sand to facilitate the throwing.” These equestrian and military displays carried out by fourteenth-century non-noble knights and lesser nobility were quite different, however, from the juego de cañas described by sixteenth-century chronicles. First, the game of canes became, as noted earlier, an activity mostly restricted to the high nobility; though occasional juegos de cañas were organized in which local knights displayed their martial and riding skills.9 Second, the game required special and expensive garments. Participants had to dress and ride in Moor- ish fashion.

8 On Philip II’s agreement to put into effect punitive anti-Morisco edicts that had been previously enacted, see John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 228–34. 9 For examples of lesser juego de cañas, see chapter 5.

215 CHAPTER VII During the young Philip’s visit to Italy, Germany, and the Low Coun- tries, the game of canes played a central role in the elaborate feasts that marked the king’s progress through Habsburg lands. In Milan, a long cycle of celebrations that included, in order, a princely entry, ephemeral art (arches and the like), tournaments in the traditional style, theatrical representations, a foot tournament engaging Spanish soldiers, banquets, and yet another foot battle, concluded with a lavish juego de cañas and a comedy.10 Calvete de Estrella, chronicler of Philip’s journey, takes great care in describing the event. On the Epiphany, January 6, 1549, the game of canes was performed in the palace courtyard to the delight of the princess of Molfeta, her daughter, and other ladies, because “it was a new feast” and seldom seen in that land (Milan).11 Here Calvete de Estrella reminds his readers of the Spanish character of the juego de cañas, practiced mostly in Spain but carried abroad as a way of displaying Spanish military and equestrian skills. That the performers dressed strictly in Moorish fashion provided both an element of the exotic and an opportunity to catalog Spaniards as alien others.12 In Milan, six squads participated, each manned by eight Spanish noblemen. But these were not just any knights in Philip’s cortège. The squads were led respectively by the Admiral of Castile, the Duke of Sessa, the Marquis de Pescara, the Prince of Ascuti, the Count of Luna, and Don Francis de Beaumont. It seems that either non-Spaniards had acquired the skills for the game or, more likely, were given the nominal honor of leading the squads. All those who engaged in the actual maneuvers, including some of Spain’s highest nobles, were Spaniards.13 The list, provided in the previous note, reads in fact like a “who’s who” of the Spanish nobility. Everyone participating in the game, although dressed in

10 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 67–90. 11 Ibid., 86. 12 Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 115–44. 13 Calvete de Estrella provides the actual names and ranks of most of the participants in his. El felicísimo viaje, I, 87–88. The nobles listed are: Count Castañeda, the Marquis de Navas, the Count of Olivares, Don Antonio de Rojas, Don Hernando de Aragón, Don Juan de Benavides, Don Juan de Granada, the Count of Cifuentes, Don Antonio de Toledo, Don Gómez de Figueroa, Don Rodrigo Manuel, Don Sancho de Córdoba, Don Luis de Córdoba, Don Diego de Córdoba, the Count de Gelves, the Marquis de Falces, Don Pedro de Ávila, Don Diego de Acuña, Don Bernardino Manrique de Salamanca, Don Luis Méndez de Haro, Gutierre Quijada, Don Gabriel de la Cueva, Don Alonso de la Cueva, Don Hernando Carrillo de Mendoza, Don Juan Mausino, Don Pedro de Cas- tilla, Don Pedro Quintana, Don Rodrigo de Benavides, el Comendador mayor de Al- cántara, Ruy Gómez de Silva, Don Fadrique Enríquez, Don Pedro Manuel, Don Ber- nardino Manrique de Lara, Don Juan Manrique de Valencia, Don Iñigo de Barahona, Don Alvaro de Luna, Don Manuel de Luna, Don Diego de Haro, Don Juan de Saavedra, Don Francisco de Ibarra, Don Jorge Manrique, Don Juan del Río.

216 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY distinctive colors, wore the required Moorish garb, that is, a marlota or Moorish cloak and caperuças and capellares (hoods and hooded cloaks). The squad led by the Admiral of Castile wore marlotas of white and purple velvet and capellares of purple damask with gold trimming. Those accompanying the Duke of Sessa—and his squad included several members of de Córdoba family—wore marlotas of blue velvet with golden ribbons. Their capellares were also of blue damask with gold adornments. Others came in gold and red, yellow and black, scarlet and gold, but all wore headgear in the Moorish style with plumes matching the colors of their garments. Philip, dressed in black and with furs, gazed with the princess Molfeta and other worthies from the window of the palace.14 Such equestrian displays required a life-long training in horsemanship. Moreover horses trained and experienced in these elaborate maneuvers had to be transported across the face of Europe, along with all the special Moorish saddles, gear, and garments that were to be used only in these performances. The juego de cañas thus became an important display of Spanish skills (and of Spanish difference) wherever Philip traveled.15 Valladolid organized, among many other festive performances, an elaborate game of canes when the king passed through the city on his way to the Cortes at Tarazona in 1592.16 The nocturnal parade of Zara- goza’s knights just after the king’s entry into the city in 1585 included a performance of the juego de cañas. An especially lavish game of canes was also played by Zaragoza’s knights on March 12, 1585, in honor of the king’s daughter’s wedding to the Duke of Savoy.17 The successive entries of Anna of Austria into Castilian cities, as she traveled to her wedding with Philip II in 1570, drew the usual processions of craftsmen, military displays, triumphal arches, and similar other festive displays, as well as the inevitable juegos de cañas. The queen witnessed a celebrated encounter in Segovia, the site of the marriage, when knights wearing distinctive livery, formed in squads, dressed in Moorish fashion, and armed with short knives and bohordos (reed spears, which according to Báez de Sepúlveda were used in Segovia instead of the reed-spears used in the game of canes) performed in her honor.18 A very large juego de cañas,

14 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 86. 15 In Ghent the young Philip led three squads in the game of canes while his father, the emperor Charles V, and other members of the royal family looked on. See Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 306–309. For England and Philip’s sponsorship of the juego de cañas in London in 1554, see Fuchs, Exotic Nation, 98. 16 See Jornada de Tarazona, 29. 17 Relación del viaje (1585), 35, 60–61. 18 Báez de Sepúlveda, Relación verdadera del recibimiento que hizo la ciudad de Segovia (1570), 158–60.

217 CHAPTER VII involving as many as 380 knights, was also part of the celebrations marking Prince Philip’s first wedding to the Infanta María of Portugal in Sala- manca in November of 1543.19

On Bulls and the Juego de Cañas Jorge Báez de Sepúlveda, who chronicled Anna of Austria’s entry into Segovia, made some poignant and doleful remarks as to the close relationship that existed, at least in Spain proper, between the game of canes and the running and fighting of bulls. While transporting abroad the well-trained horses, Moorish garments, reed-spears, and other gear required for the game of canes was not logistically impossible, bringing fierce bulls along was another matter. The running or fighting of bulls and the juego de cañas were seldom, if ever, displayed together outside of the peninsula, but in Spain, as we have seen, bulls were a ubiquitous presence at festivals and, above all, were closely associated with the juego de cañas. Long a signal part of Iberian folklore and tradition, bulls played a unique role in late medieval and early modern Spanish feasts, as they do to this day, though the customs connected with them have been much eroded by the onslaught of modernity. No royal or princely entry was complete without bulls. Ranging from the carnivalesque beasts with torches on their horns or fireworks on their bodies, to the potentially deadly encounter between a man on foot or horseback and a full-grown bull, the spectacle had the same universal appeal as the aristocratic reed- spear game to which it was wedded. The crux of the confrontation was often between the horse and the bull, as with the rejoneo (bullfighting on horseback) in today’s bull ring. It pitted the Spanish horse, domesticated, tamed by the rider’s skill, against a fearsome opponent, an untamed animal symbolic of irrational strength and bravery. But let us return to the beginning of this discussion. Báez de Sepúlveda, in describing the juego de cañas held in Segovia for the reception of Anna of Austria in 1570, makes a revealing aside. Commenting on Pius V’s bull, De salute gregis (1567), forbidding the running and fighting of bulls, he writes: “In truth, banning this play (happiness, regozijo) of bulls in Spain [one] removes the people’s most agreeable feast, and little by little, the juego de cañas will disappear, [a game] in which the Spaniards show far more [honorable] skill (gallardía) than in others.”20 Báez de Sepúlveda’s linking of the juego de cañas with the running of the bulls emphasizes

19 Maestro Vargas, Recibimiento que se hizo en Salamanca a la Princesa doña María de Portu- gal (1543), 84. Philip, dressed in black and red, rode a la gineta. 20 Báez de Sepúlveda, Relación verdadera del recibimiento que hizo la ciudad de Segovia (1570), 157–58.

218 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY the unique superiority of the Spanish in the Moorish game, something they could not necessarily claim in other martial arts. But his comments also speak to the blending of popular and elite culture and the complementary roles of the two. Having described in lavish detail the very elaborate and intricate juego de cañas in which forty-eight knights were divided into squads dressed in Moorish fashions of different colors, Báez de Sepúlveda comments plaintively: “The game looked very good to all lords and courtiers. But if the bulls [the running or fighting of bulls] had preceded [the game of canes], the feast would have been fully complete, because in the end bulls are the best popular entertainment of all that for a long time have been performed (usado) in Spain.”21 Of course, the papal bull’s prohibition was short-lived. In Cock’s narrative of Philip II’s voyages to the Crown of Aragon in 1585–86 and in 1592, we find the juego de cañas and its association with bulls restored to their central place as Spain’s autochthonous martial and popular play. I do not wish to leave this section without a brief reprise of my earlier comments on fictitious battles between Moors and Christians. These battles, which were in part historical reenactments—as was the case in Tor- tosa in late December of 1585 when the city celebrated its liberation from Muslim rule—and in part popular entertainments that occupied a very different place in Spanish festival cycles than the juego de cañas. In these representations, the Moors always lost. Thus, the mock battles, through a serious reenactments of real long-ago battles, provided comic, popular, and entertaining reminders of the superiority of Christianity over Islam. They made an appeal to historical memory that was also evidenced in the triumphal arches, commemorations, and other elements of the feast. The elegant and exclusive juego de cañas, by contrast, was an appropriation of the culture of the conquered, of their clothing, horsemanship, and battle strategies. It was an appropriation, but, paradoxically, a loving one. The battles between Moors and Christians, however, were not always gentle in spirit. Finally, different and with deeps roots in Iberian martial displays was the running of the ring or sortija. As an adolescent in Cuba, I saw this game played, and I even tried my hand at it, though not very successfully. The game involved a rider at full gallop trying to thrust a short stick or small lance through a ring hanging suspended high up from a cord. It required excellent horsemanship, for the rider had to keep the horse at a steady gallop, while controlling its movements with the knees rather than with the bridle. It also called for excellent eye and hand coordination. Alas! I had neither of these two skills in sufficient quantity. One can eas-

21 Ibid., 160.

219 CHAPTER VII ily see, though, that the running of the ring was superb preparation for the type of warfare normal to the Reconquest. The running of the ring, although somewhat displaced by the more elaborate juego de cañas and by the novelty of tournaments and jousts, remained a constant in Spanish knightly festivities, and Philip II, as a young prince, seems to have had great affinity for this particular form of martial display.22 It was also one of the favorite activities of early confraternities of non-noble knights, and is often mentioned as a component of great chivalrous festivals, notably the cycle of festivities organized by the constable of Castile, Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo in the 1460s.23 Again, unlike jousts, the juego de cañas and the running of the ring were grounded in Spanish military experience and in particular with skills honed in the long struggle against peninsular Islam. Tournaments and jousts were another matter.

Tournaments, Jousts, Pas d’Armes and Knights-Errant

Tournaments, jousts, melees, pas d’armes, and other such martial festivities appear to have been imported from abroad and inspired by the great chivalric romances of the twelfth century. Although tournaments were explicitly condemned at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and those dying in these military events were to be denied Christian burial, it is quite clear that this canon, like many others of that celebrated council, was ignored by most knights who avidly sought settings in which to demonstrate feats of arms.24 In Castile, where the canons of the council dealing with clerical celibacy and other such matters were also most often ignored, tournaments, jousts, and pas d’armes became especially popular only by the fifteenth century. In an earlier period the joust was not a part of Spanish culture because the required equipment, namely the heavy armor of northern countries, was not suitable for actual warfare in the peninsula. The social and cultural changes that came about in the late Middle Ages and the revival of courtly ideals brought the joust to Spain

22 Geoffrey Parker, Philip II, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 8. 23 See Hechos del condestable, 98–100, 111–12, et passim. 24 IV Lateran Council (1215). Canon 14: “We condemn absolutely those detestable jousts or tournaments in which the knights usually come together by agreement and, to make a show of their strength and boldness, rashly engage in contests which are frequently the cause of death to men and of danger to souls. If anyone taking part in them should meet his death, though penance and the Viaticum shall not be denied him if he asks for them, he shall, however, be deprived of Christian burial.” In www.fordham .edu/halsall/basis/lateran2.html.

220 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY as a part of court culture, especially in John II of Castile’s court. The derivation of the Castilian words arnés and torneo from the French (har- nais, tourner), reflects their cultural provenance. These martial displays were, as we have seen, an important component of all cycles of festivities and of royal and princely entries and visits. Philip’s journeys of 1548–50, 1570, 1585–86, 1592, and his other travels throughout Spain and abroad were marked by innumerable tournaments and jousts on either foot or horseback. As also noted, tournaments, jousts, and pas d’armes also occurred independently of royal travel. The court of John II of Castile, under the aegis of his favorite, Alvaro de Luna, himself a consummate rider and participant in these celebrations, was a cauldron of aristocratic military display. For, and one should be very clear about this, these games, though often bruising and sometimes even deadly, were exclusively aristocratic forms of play.25

RAMÓN MUNTANER As is true of a good number of firsts in Iberian history, the Catalans, Ara- gonese, and Valencians were also pioneers in these martial games. Catalo- nia’s continuous links with France, the Catalan political and cultural presence in wide areas of southern France (centered in Montpellier and Perpignan) brought French tournaments and jousts vividly to the attention of Catalan rulers and Catalan nobility. Ramón Muntaner (1265– 1336), whom we have met earlier and will meet again in the last chapter, provides an excellent point of entry to the early history of tournaments and jousts in Spain. A cloth merchant, royal and municipal official, tire- less warrior—he participated in more than thirty campaigns under Peter III of Aragon, Roger de Loria, and the corsair Roger de Flor—and author of the most compelling semiautobiographical chronicle of the early fourteenth century, Muntaner’s military and administrative activities en- compassed the whole of the Mediterranean. His writings promoted the Arago-Catalan rulers, while also providing us with a close look at the kind of bourgeois who, in Iberia, would often be rewarded for his military deeds, service, and literary skills with promotion to a status not far below that of the nobility.26 Muntaner demonstrated very early in his chronicle a peculiar taste for

25 In a short and old book, Enrique de Leguina, Torneos, jineta, rieptos y desafios (Ma- drid: Librería de Fernando Fé, 1904), mentions that the Chronicle of Juan II describes twenty-three tournaments (19). See below. 26 Ramón Muntaner, Crònica, Vicent Josep Escartí, ed., 2 vols. (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1999), 1, 7–29 is an introduction to his life and works. On upward mobility from the bourgeoisie to the nobility by means of wealth and military service, see T. F. Ruiz, “The Transformation of the Castilian Municipalities: The Case of Bur-

221 CHAPTER VII pageant, military adventures (in which he actively participated), and the rarified world of kings. The chivalrous aspects of his Chronicle orLlibre , as he entitled it, would serve, it has been argued, as a model for Tirant lo Blanch, the great fifteenth-century romance work. Here once again, fiction and reality blended seamlessly in the construction of the idealized life of a knight. One of Muntaner’s earliest references to tournaments appears in a miraculous account of James I’s birth. Peter II of Aragon (1196– 1213) engaged in feat of arms, fought in tournaments, and showed his expertise with a lance by charging the quintain. All of this he did, Muntaner tells us, in honor of a lady in Montpellier, while his wife lan- guished in solitude. This went on until Peter was reminded by the consuls of Montpellier of his royal and marital duties, whereupon James was conceived.27 Muntaner also describes the celebrations that marked the visit to Valencia of Alfonso X, king of Castile, and his reception by James I with jousts (engaging “wild knights”), mock naval battles, round tables (à la Arthurian tradition), knights-errant who came to the festivities, and other celebrations.28 While these descriptions were mostly based on hear- say, since Muntaner would have been either yet unborn or too small to have witnessed the events, subsequent martial displays described in his Crònica took place during his lifetime, and he may have witnessed them in person. His narrative strategies show a deep immersion in twelfth century romances. Describing Peter III, he states that he was better than Roland, Oliver, Tristan, Lancelot, Galahad, Parsifal, and other worthies of legend. (Mas no us cuidets que anc Rotlan, ne Oliver, ne Tristany, Llançalot ne Galeàs ne Parceval ne Palamides ne Boors ne Estors de Marés ne el Morat de Gaunes ne neguns d’altres poguessen fer tots dies ço qu el rei en Pere feia.)”29 He described a great tournament in Figueras involving four hundred knights with typical hyperbole as “the greatest deed of arms that has ever taken place in a tournament since the time of King Arthur.”30 Although Muntaner has an annoying tendency to describe feasts as “the greatest ever” and then to tell his readers very little about the actual event, there is enough evidence in his narrative to show that probably by the thirteenth century, and most decidedly by the fourteenth, tournaments, jousts, round tables (with their pronounced reenactment of Ar- thurian lore), and knights-errant were vividly present in the festival cycles of the Crown of Aragon. Since Iberian courts were in constant gos, 1248–1350,” Past&Present 77 (1977): 3–33; and my Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1994), chapter 8. 27 Ramón Muntaner, Crònica I, 37–41. 28 Ibid., 73–77. 29 Ibid., 123–24. 30 Ramón Muntaner, Crònica II, 356.

222 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY communication—Castilian kings and knights frequented the Aragonese court, as the Portuguese did other peninsular courts—one can easily see why Alfonso XI would have insisted on tournaments and jousts to mark his coronation in 1332. In a great round table held in Calatayud, with Roger of Loria, admiral of the Crown of Aragon as defender, the “list,” or area where the encounter was to take place, was clearly delineated by an artificial castle. There Roger awaited the coming of a challenger, who appeared in the person of Don Berenguer Arnaldo de Alquera, a knight- errant from Murcia and a member of the Castilian king Sancho IV’s entourage. He challenged the admiral Roger de Loria to single combat. At the sound of trumpets they charged at each other with heavy lances, and did such damage (Berenguer broke his nose) that the king ordered a stop “for the fear of the joust degenerating into a dispute.”31 Beyond the exposure of the Castilian court to these northern martial games and to the literary context in which they took place, three other points are obvious from Muntaner’s narrative. The first is that jousts, tournaments, and other forms of fictitious warfare served as training for war. When the Arago-Catalan king failed to encounter the French king, Philip III, on the battlefield, he organized the great tournament at Figueras as a substitute for real combat and to keep his knights prepared for war.32 Similar tournaments, jousts, and other military exercises of such nature that “everyone had to marvel” at them were also held in advance of the French invasion in the mid-1280s.33 The second point follows from the description of Roger of Loria’s round table. These martial celebrations were closely monitored and regulated. They were rough. Deaths and maimings were not unknown, but efforts were made to preserve life and limb. Finally, the main protagonists of these martial celebrations, with some notable exceptions, were the kings and princes. In imitation of Arthurian lore, the kings of the Crown of Aragon and, later in the fifteenth century, those of Castile took to the lists to demonstrate their knightly skills and courage. And although these events were exclusively aristocratic affairs, they took place in public spaces and were open to all who could squeeze into the area and obtain a vantage point from which to observe the proceedings. Jousts, tournaments, and pas d’armes reinscribed the social order, provided entertainment to high and low, and gave important lessons in an age in which such lessons were becoming increasingly necessary due to changes in the nature of warfare. The role of tournaments, jousts, and other chivalric activities remained fairly constant over the transition from the Middle Ages to the early 31 Ibid., 385–85. 32 Ibid., 356. 33 Ibid., 276–79.

223 CHAPTER VII modern period. It is true that later in life, Philip II and his Habsburg descendants preferred the safety and isolation of a remote window high above the fray to actually mixing with the combatants and crowd, but the young Philip, as we have seen, was an avid participant in these literature-inspired chivalrous exercises. Detailing every important joust, tournament, pas d’armes, or savage foot combat in the long history of late medieval and early modern Spain would be a tedious enterprise requiring several volumes. In an appendix to his book, Frieder lists fifty-nine tournaments and other “martial games” for the period 1504–1604, while a second appendix lists the fictitious battles and military performances, as well as their participants, that took place during Philip’s tour of imperial lands in 1548–50.34 I propose to focus on two or three significant examples and will consign the additional evidence to the notes.

Tournaments, Jousts, and Pas d’Armes Revisited: Medieval and Modern Earlier we had the opportunity to look briefly at the great pas d’armes (the Passo Honroso) held by Suero de Quiñones and his nine companions near the bridge over the Órbigo in 1434. Suero’s spectacular display built upon an even more lavish cycle of festivals held in Valladolid in May and early June of 1428. They played such a role in the Castilian, and peninsular, imaginary that they deserve particular attention. Long ago I undertook a close reading of these festivities.35 My intention then—in what was my first foray into the world of festivals—was to read these celebrations for their political meaning and for the manner in which they articulated the political antagonisms between the king of Castile, John II, and his favorite, Alvaro de Luna, on the one hand, and the fabled Infantes of Aragon, John (also king of Navarre) and Enrique, or Henry, Master of the Order of Santiago, on the other. The Infantes of Aragon were the younger sons of Ferdinand of Antequera, whom we met earlier at a spectacular triumphal entry into Seville in 1410 and as elected king of the Crown of Aragon in 1412. As such, the Infantes of Aragon were first cousins of John II of Castile, and their brother Alfonso V (whose spectacular and dramatic entry into Naples was also summarized earlier) was already securely enthroned in his various kingdoms in eastern Spain and the Mediterranean. The feasts of 1428 thus represented a fractious family affair, as members of the Trastámara family came to hold all the peninsular Christian kingdoms in their hands, either as outright kings in the case

34 Frieder, ChivalryandthePerfectKing, 179–211. 35 “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébra- tions de mai 1428,” Annales E.S.C. 3 (1991): 521–46.

224 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY of Navarre, Castile, and the Crown of Aragon, or as consorts in the case of Portugal. Although the political context in which the feasts took place had to do with the recent imprisonment of John II by his cousins, the Infantes of Aragon, and Alvaro de Luna’s release of the king and his restoration to power, the overt excuse for these fabulous festivities centered on the entry of the Infanta Leonor, sister to the Infantes of Aragon and cousin to John II, who was passing through Valladolid on her way to Portugal and her wedding to the Portuguese heir to the throne. The festivals, most of them elaborate tournaments, jousts, and banquets, that marked the princess’s visit to Valladolid resonated powerfully in the Castilian imagination. Although earlier Castilian chronicles had referred to tournaments and jousts, most famously as festive components of Alfonso XI’s 1332 coronation, no earlier narrative approaches the detailed and careful description of these events that we find in the chronicles of John II’s reign. The vivid memory of 1428 Valladolid, of lively displays and of kings and sons of kings engaged in fierce jousting, echoes powerfully almost half a century afterwards in Jorge Manrique’s great and moving poem, CoplasalaMuertedemiPadre—and Manrique was not even born in 1428. Manrique’s intent was to show the vanity of such exercises and their ephemeral nature, but the stanzas in which they are described nonetheless resonate with the awe that such displays evoked in contemporaries and succeeding generations. ¿Que se fizo el rey don Juan? Los infantes de Aragón, ¿que se fizieron? ¿Qué fué de tanto galán? ¿Qué fué de tanta invención como truxieron? Las justas y los torneos, paramentos, bordaduras, y cimeras, ¿Fueron sino devaneos? ¿Que fueron sino verduras de las eras?36

36 Jorge Manrique, Coplas por la muerte de su padre, in Ten Centuries of Spanish Poetry, Eleanor L. Turnbull, ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1955), 58. The rather bad translation by Longfellow goes as following: “Where is the king Don Juan? Where / each royal prince and noble heir / Of Aragon? / Where are the courtly gallantries? / The deeds of love and high emprise, / In battle done? / Tourney and joust, that charmed the eye, / and scarf, and gorgeous panoply, / And nodding plume, / What were they but a pageant scene? / What but the garlands, gay and green / That deck the tomb?

225 CHAPTER VII The feasts of May 1428, despite their intense political play, were first and foremost a celebration of warrior skills and aristocratic excesses, with parallel discourses on inclusion and exclusion. A close reading of the accounts gives entry into what these events meant unto themselves, tells of the deployment of literary and mythological tropes, and of the keen attention paid by participants and narrators to garments, colors, and artificial constructs.

Festive Cycles in May 1428 The feasts held in Valladolid in May 1428 incorporated a whole range of performative displays of the types often associated with princely entries or visits, but the chronicles tell us very little as to Leonor’s actual entry or reception. In fact, the tournaments, jousts, and pas d’armes that marked the princess’s visit seemed to have been peculiarly disconnected from the usual entry ceremonials, and the sequence of events and the way the different chronicles recorded them vary slightly in emphasis, providing a nuanced representation of the political realities behind the feasts. As is the case with every such cycle of festive events, and more so when they are as laden with politics as these were, preludes are important. Pedro Carrillo de Huete, falconer of the king of Castile and a partisan of Alvaro de Luna, begins his narrative with the constable’s entry into Segovia on Feb- ruary 6, 1428. A whole chapter (three printed pages) is dedicated mostly to the names of the prelates, high noblemen, and members of the entourage of 450 men on horseback who accompanied Alvaro de Luna, plus assorted pages and their attendants. Dressed all, nobles and servants, in olive and silver colored garments, they followed the constable who wore a silver garment and was accompanied by four attendants riding large and well-appointed horses. Opening the way for the constable walked two black men (slaves?), each of them holding a black hunting dog, one armed with a hunting spear and the other with a lance (lança de Jerez). The In- fantes of Aragon and a whole cohort of high nobles came out of Segovia to receive the constable “at least half a league outside the city and some as much as two leagues.”37 This almost royal reception obscures the political realities: we do not see that the constable had wrested the king from the hands of the Infantes of Aragon or the ascendant trajectory of the constable’s political fortunes after a brief exile. The clothing, which Pedro Carrillo de Huete does not fail to emphasize, and the exotic quality, certainly in 1428 Valladolid, of the two black men leading the parade, un- derpin the very strong show of force that a company of more than 450

37 Crónica del halconero de Juan II, 17–18.

226 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY well-armed riders represents, not to mention a whole complement of attendants and support troops. The lavish description of the constable’s entry stands in vivid contrast to Carrillo de Huete’s description of that of the Infanta Leonor into Val- ladolid on April 29, 1428: “The Infanta Doña Leonor entered into Vall- adolid. With her came, from Medina, the king of Navarre and the In- fante Don Enrique [her brothers], the archbishop of Lisbon . . . and other knights accompanied her. And the king of Castile came out to receive her, with many knights, and took her to the lodging of his wife the queen. And that night the Infanta dined with the queen.”38 In passing, the chronicler tells us that on Sunday, May 2nd, the constable held a formal tournament or joust with Alvaro de Luna and seven friends as defenders, and the Infantes of Aragon, the king of Castile, and other knights came to the list as challengers and broke strong lances.39 Fernán Pérez de Guzmán’s Crónica del rey Don Juan II, though covering the same chronological period, remains curiously silent as to the constable’s entry, choosing instead to gloss extensively a single combat between two hidal- gos (lower nobility) of Soria, both named Velasco, who met in the presence of the king for a duel to the death. After ferocious exchanges, the king stopped the struggle, forced them to settle their disputes amicably, and himself knighted the challenger. The king of Navarre did the same to the man challenged.40 Beyond a shared taste for tournaments and duels, each chronicler chose the specific events that best showcased his political stance. Pérez de Guzmán’s description of the duel illuminates an additional element of these martial games, one that we have already noted. Even when serious encounters aimed at bodily harm or death, the joust was a sure avenue to social promotion and royal favor. Many, as we shall see, made their fortune and rose to higher station because of their particular skills in the lists or in individual combat. There was nothing new about this. William the Marshall’s iconic career in the twelfth century was very much shaped by his prowess in chivalrous games.41 But once again I apol- ogize for delaying with these many preambles the actual description of the cycle of festivities that took place in May 1428. There was still, however, one more event before the festivities began, and it should have sent a chill through some of the constable’s enemies. John García de Guadalajara, accused of falsifying the seal and letters of

38 Ibid., 18–19. 39 Ibid., 15. 40 Crónica de Juan II, 445–46. 41 See Georges Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal, ou, Le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris: Fayard, 1984).

227 CHAPTER VII the previous constable, Don Ruy López Dávalos, was beheaded in a public ceremony. Since John García had been previously chosen as one of the members of the Order of la Banda, the emblem denoting his membership was destroyed so he would not be beheaded while possessed of a token of knighthood.42 On May 18, 1428, on the main square of Valladolid, Don Enrique, In- fante of Aragón and Master of the military Order of Santiago, held a most memorable pas d’armes/joust, notable for its theatricality and a reminder that these martial displays were as much about performance and spectacle as they were about knightly skills. To create a proper mise-en- scène for the event, Don Enrique had ordered and paid for the building of a lavish artificial castle of wood and canvas. The castle had a tall tower surmounted by four additional smaller towers reaching skyward, and on top of the tower roof, a bell and a pillar. On top of the pillar, at the highest point of this fantastic construction, stood a griffin holding in its paws a large red and white banner. The tower was girded by a high wall with a shorter tower at each of its four corners. A lower exterior wall also had twelve smaller towers, and on each one of them sat a lavishly dressed lady. Rooms and great halls were built within this artificial and ephemeral construction to lodge the Infante and his five noble companions, who would all be defenders of the pas d’armes. From the gate of the ephemeral castle, a reed barrier, or tilt, ran to yet another two towers flanking an arch. Through this arch all the knights willing to take the challenge would have to pass. On top of the arch, an inscription announced: “This is the arch of the dangerous passage of the fuerte (difficult) adventure.”43 Two men, each standing on top of one of the two towers flanking the arch of “la fuerte adventura,” blew their hunting horns. Everything, Car- rillo de Huete tells us, looked really to have been made of stone. To top it all off, a large golden wheel, the wheel of the adventure or “wheel of Fortune” with a rich throne-like seat next to it, completed the stage setting for the Infante’s fabulous feast. The chronicler reported that the whole affair had cost between 12,000 and 15,000 florins and that it had been built by a Florentine (or Italian) craftsman, anticipating Mal Lara’s complaint that no native artisan was capable of carrying out such an enterprise.44 The visual context of the pas d’armes—the castle, griffin, banners, gentle ladies patiently sitting on their towers, an arch of adventure, and

42 Crónica del halconero de Juan II, 19–20. 43 Crónica del halconero de Juan II, 20–21; Crónica de Juan II, 446. 44 Alvar García de Santa María, Crónica de Juan II de Castilla in Colección de documentos indeditos para la historia de España, vols. IC and C (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1891), C, 16.

228 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY the banner—were more than complemented by the blaring sounds of hunting horns and by the elaborate celebrations and feasts that preceded the actual combat. Before coming out armed to defend the pas d’armes, the Infante Enrique with many of his noble retinue had danced outside the walls of the mock fortress. A sumptuous meal was served after which an elaborate theatrical skit was performed. Eight lavishly dressed young ladies rode on “gentle and well-appointed horses.” Behind them came a cart with a woman playing the role of a goddess, and twelve young ladies as attendants, all singing to tunes played by numerous accompanying musicians. The goddess, clearly the goddess of Fortune, seated herself on the richly appointed throne next to the golden wheel, and from there she presided over events. Finally, the Infante Don Enrique and his knights put on their amour and, dressed in silver, made ready to enter the lists. Every time a knight, including the king of Castile—who came accompanied by twenty-four knights in green and himself dressed in gold and silver with ermine trimmings and a plume and diadem of butterflies—arrived at the arch of adventure, the hunting horns blew, the bell tolled, and a magnificently costumed lady rode out on a mare to meet the challenger, while a herald read the following challenge, its wording taken straight out of literary romances: “Knights (cavalleros), what adventure has brought you to this so perilous a pass (pas d’armes) that it is known as ‘the [pass] of the difficult adventure’? Return, for you cannot continue without jousting.” Her challenge accepted by the contestant, the joust began. Some formidable blows were given and received, for combats of this sort were never purely fictional. The possibility of severe wounds and death added excitement to the game. In fact, in the course of this “adventure,” a lance broke inside the body of Alvaro de Sandoval and he died two hours later. The king of Castile himself broke two lances. When the joust had ended, all the kings, princes, and high nobility dined together at the lodgings of Don Alfonso Enriquez, admiral of Castile.45 This is now the second time in my academic career that I am focusing in detail on this particular cycle of fictitious martial celebrations, and I do so because the tournaments and jousts of May 1428—but please note the absence of a juego de cañas—exemplify many of the themes of this book. The complex and delicate political nuances of these festivities reflect the contentious nature of all festivals. Though John II and his favorite, Al- varo de Luna, succeeded in the end in their purpose of gaining important political advantages over their rivals, the Infantes of Aragon, the latter also capably displayed their symbolic repertoire and contested royal power. Exaggerated displays and excessive expenditures were directed at

45 Crónica del halconero de Juan II, 21–22.

229 CHAPTER VII multiple audience segments. First, one’s rivals were to be put on notice of one’s resources, ingenuity, and knightly prowess, but so were one’s allies as well. In the end, the spectacle was also aimed at the people of Vallado- lid and at the numerous visitors who had poured into town for the events. The multiple levels of audience and the hierarchy of messages—from eso- teric courtly references understood only by a few to the blatantly obvious physical combats that required no interpretation—bespoke of finely crafted and scripted performances. The chronicles give us little indication of how the whole program was conceived and carried out, but of course nothing was spontaneous. If we place Binche, that other great martial spectacle, alongside the feasts of 1428, we can note also the continuity of festive forms and intents. One aspect however was missing in the early modern period in general and in Binche in particular. Crowds were still present, but they were now no longer in close proximity to the main participants. The aristocratic nature of these martial games had been fully asserted. Noticeable also in the chroniclers’ accounts of 1428 is the absence of ecclesiastics from the proceedings. Bishops and archbishops in fifteenth-century Castile were great lords, vying for power for themselves or for their families, and thus not to be fully trusted or included in the games of the military aristocracy. By the sixteenth century, they were completely under the Crown’s control. Two more spectacular jousts were held in the next two weeks, followed by the Infantes of Aragons’ exile from the court and the Castilian king’s temporary victory, or, more likely, that of his constable, Alvaro de Luna. I have explicated the political meaning and symbolism the garments and colors displayed during the martial festivities of May 1428 elsewhere, and there is no need to engage in yet another extensive paraphrasing of the chronicles’ account.46 In Appendix I, I have sought to provide a summary of the entire feast. To be able to read its entire political significance, one needs to see it as a whole. For the moment, I would like to return to the Infante Don Enrique’s feast and attempt to read it for its social significance.

Reading Tournaments: The Preparations The Infante Don Enrique’s great pas d’armes/joust was only the high point in a long cavalcade of jousts and tournaments that served as a scin- tillating counterpart to the sordid and violent real world of Castile in the fifteenth century. Every political intrigue and conflict, every oppressive

46 See my “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de mai 1428,” 521–46.

230 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY measure against the weak was obscured or erased by yet another description in the chronicles of nobles engaged in mock warfare. But Don En- rique’s feast has also a lot to teach us about culture, about the internal social logic of this particular event, and about the meaning of ludic displays. As was the case with royal entries, there was nothing spontaneous about the Infante Don Enrique’s feast or the succeeding joust involving his royal brother and cousin. The political outcome of the struggle between the Infantes of Aragon and the constable Alvaro de Luna for control of the king had for a month been uncertain, but the Infante Enrique knew that his sister was coming through Valladolid in late April, and he had close to two months to plan his pas d’armes cum celebration. This meant hiring foreign craftsmen and putting an unidentified courtier or friend to work scripting the festival. It also required an impressive outlay of money. We have already mentioned the expenditure of between 12,000 and 15,000 florins (a princely sum) for the artificial castle, but there would have been the additional costs of maintaining the large retinue that accompanied and served the Infante for more than a month of residence in Valladolid, paying for lavish banquets, clothing, arms, musicians, actors for the skit, the construction of the fabled golden wheel of Fortune, and horses for the ladies and knights. These expenses may easily have doubled the original sum. The Infante Enrique, master of the fabulously wealthy Order of Santiago and one of the heirs to his mother, Leonor de Albuquerque, the rica hembra (rich woman) par excellence in Castilian history, had the resources to meet these expenses and more. The issue, of course, is why such excessive and fatuous displays were considered necessary within the cultural and political hothouse of late medieval Castilian, Iberian, and European courts? Clearly, political points were to be scored at Valladolid, and not all of them by kings. Al- though, as we know, the cycle of festivals in the end reiterated the king of Castile’s hegemony, Enrique, who of the three main protagonists was the only one who did not have a crown and who therefore displayed the enigmatic emblem Non es (He is not [a king]), had his own agenda. He was certainly keen to surpass his brother John, the King of Navarre (with whom he did not always have the warmest of fraternal relations), and his cousin John II of Castile, whom he wished to replace or control. And such goals called for the kind of extensive preparation and scripting that turned almost all festivals into carefully constructed cultural artifacts.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE Most late medieval and early modern jousts and pas d’armes—the Passo Honroso and Binche being exceptions—took place in the most “public” or central space in the city or its environs. The Infante Enrique’s feast,

231 CHAPTER VII too, was intimately open to the gaze of humble onlookers. Although first and foremost an aristocratic display, the dancing, the sheer spectacle of the fictitious castle, the music, and the skits entremeses( ) were directed not only at the noble participants but also at the population at large. Their approval was sought, and their amazement. Carrillo de Huete, who was no friend of the Infantes of Aragon, could not help but be amazed by the rich details and care given to the preparations for this particular pas d’armes. It was held in the main square of Valladolid, surrounded by civic and religious buildings. The artificial castle must have taken days to build and days to dismantle. Local workers had to be hired for this and for other work. The impact on the local economy, beyond the usual noble largesse and distributions of food, must have been significant. Providing lodging and provisioning the city for such an influx of noble and non-noble participants and visitors would have added to the excitement and profit generated by the feast. But again, emphasis needs to be placed on the audience. They are never mentioned by the chronicles, their view of the events may have been limited or obstructed, as we know was the case in a famous judicial duel that took place in Paris in 1388,47 but the people were most certainly there, legitimizing by their presence and awe at the spectacle the social order and strict social hierarchy of Castilian and Span- ish society. The Infante Don Enrique was engaged after all in a deathly struggle with Alvaro de Luna and, by implication, with the king. That struggle lasted more than two decades and did not end until his death at the hands of the royal army at the battle of Olmedo on May 19, 1445. Is it not possible that the Infante would have sought to enlist the people Vall- adolid in his continuous challenge to royal authority?

HIGH AND LOW AND “PUBLIC” AND “PRIVATE” EXPLAINED Further, as I have argued elsewhere, the feasts held by the Infante En- rique borrowed freely, as did other jousts held that month, from courtly and classical themes. The displays featured symbolic images that echoed twelfth-century romances and the descriptions found so profusely in Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian cycle, images that would have been immediately recognizable to aristocratic performers and to other nobles in attendance. Most of this iconography would have been at best only half understood by the popular audience in attendance, which gazed awe- struck at the sheer drama of the actual events. The 1428 feasts thus took cognizance of the range of cultural acuities between “high” and “low,”

47 See the enchanting study of this duel by Eric Jager, TheLastDuel: ATrue Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France (New York: Broadway Books, 2004).

232 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY by presenting a rich mélange of literary and oral culture, within which were both popular tropes easily recognizable to all, such as the red and white banner of the crusade, the wheel of Fortune, the bear and lion that the king of Castile brought to the joust hosted by the king of Navarre in late May, and also tropes with recondite meanings that would be understood only by the literate few, such as the formulaic language of the challenge issued to knights coming through the arch, the procession of ladies, the griffin, and other such symbols. This free-flowing mix of cultural signifiers, popular and aristocratic, ended when it came time for the intimate banquets that followed the joust. To these only kings, princes of the blood, and the most powerful nobles were invited. The feast transited now from “public” spaces open to the audience, to the gaze of the crowd, to the “private” and interior settings where power truly resided.

GARMENTS AND COLORS These distinctions—the social and cultural tropes that separated those on top from those below—were at their most evident in the garments of participants, and in the iconographical intent of the adornments they carried or displayed. The silver clothing of the Infante, the red and white banners flying from the towers of the ephemeral castle, the white, gold, and black colors of the king’s clothing, his wearing of ermine, all of these were pregnant with symbolic meanings that served as powerful reminders to all present of the nature of regal power and of the links between the present and the Reconquest. And then, of course, there were the many disguises and costumes that played a role in the cycle of festivities. The king of Castile appeared successively carrying butterflies, a medieval symbol of rebirth (the rebirth of his power?), as a hunter and King of the May, and as God the Father. The king of Navarre rode inside an artificial rock while his entourage imitated the sound of thunder. In another joust, his men dressed as windmills which, Angus MacKay has argued, may have inspired Don Quixote’s sallies against La Mancha’s windmills.48 The In- fante Don Enrique’s retinue dressed as flames. There is no need here to gloss in detail the varied meanings of these sartorial displays, but only to emphasize their creative power and their lasting impact on contemporaries and generations to come. And then, almost as an afterthought, came the actual combat. It was the ostensible reason for all these com- petitive displays, but the displays served also as the means by which kings and nobles created a space of their own. Through clothing, the colors of their garments and banners, their emblems, and then finally, through the

48 Angus MacKay, “Enrique, Infante de Aragón,” in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, E. Michael Gerli, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 307.

233 CHAPTER VII military contest itself, the reenactment of courtly and chivalrous romance, they staked their claims against one another and declared their superiority to those below. The medieval tropes of the jousts and pas d’armes of May 1428 lived on and pointed the way to Binche.

Prince Philip’s Feast at Binche (Bins) I hope that the reader will indulge my desire to retell the story of the events that transpired at Mary of Hungary’s castle at Binche in the Low Countries in August of 1549. What took place represents a watershed in Iberian festivals, and it has often been discussed as such, even though the ceremonies, like those in Milan and Mantua, took place outside peninsular borders. The feasts at Binche were outwardly very much like those at Valladolid in 1428, but in many ways they departed radically in intent and meaning. How so? As with other spectacles, the preparations for the fantastic festivities at Binche had long been in the making and were well plotted to dazzle the young prince and future ruler of Spain and Flanders. While at Brussels, where Philip was received with all the solemnity due to him as the new Duke of Brabant and heir to the Habsburg Empire, the young prince broke lances in a lavish tournament held in his honor, with the emperor Charles V and the queens of Hungary and France in attendance.49 At the banquet that followed, Charles V, the queens, and Philip sat by themselves at a table on a raised stage, presiding over the august company. At one point, a knight-errant came to the “door dressed in all green, his weapons broken and disheveled, his horse tired and mistreated.”50 The knight went to the emperor with a sad and painful face, gave him a letter, and asked permission to place a placard or challenge at the door of the imperial castle. The placard, not unlike similar challenges to battle in fifteenth-century Catalonia, invited all the knights present to a “strange adventure” at Binche.51 Although the young Philip may have not known in advance what was planned, it is obvious that this theatrical representation had been agreed previously by the emperor, Queen Mary of Hungary, and the humanists and courtiers who had devised the entertainment for the young prince. The dramatic aspects of the challenge are redolent of the culture

49 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 199–200. 50 Ibid., 201. 51 On the literary aspect of these challenges, see Martín de Riquer y Mario Vargas Llosa, El combate imaginario. Las cartas de batalla de Joanot Martorell (Barcelona: Barral, 1972); and de Riquer’s wonderful Lletres de batalla; cartells de deseiximents I capítols de passos d’armes (Barcelona: Editorial Barcino, 1968). Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 201.

234 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY of knight-errantry and chivalry that was so widespread throughout late medieval Western Europe. Placards of defiance and knightly challenges were, as we have noted earlier and as studied by Martin de Riquer, an important part of the highly charged atmosphere of peninsular chivalry. For Charles V, pronouncements such as the one nailed to the door of his castle in Brussels, may have also brought a painful reminder of Luther’s challenge to doctrinal orthodoxy at Wittenberg almost three decades before. But before the fun could begin at Binche, the prince still had to perform the onerous duty of being received and feted by his cities in Bra- bant and Flanders. After more processions, jousts, and other celebrations that marked his entry into Brussels, he traveled to Ghent where, as was the case elsewhere, innumerable arches and inscriptions in Latin, He- brew, Greek, Flemish, and French praised the prince and his genealogy. At Ghent, Philip led some of the principal nobles of the city in a spirited juego de cañas.52 From Ghent he traveled to Bruges, where his entourage arrived on July 19th, and then onwards to Ypres, Artois (with some small locations in between), St. Omer, Bethune, Lille, Tournai, Douai, Arras, Cambrai, and Valenciennes, finally arriving at Binche on August 22, 1549. Binche, or “Bins,” served as a place of respite before the prince had to embark on yet another tour of Habsburg cities in the northern provinces. Ahead Antwerp’s “Joyous Entrance” still awaited him, with more arches, inscriptions reminding the young prince of his duties to his Burgundian and Flemish subjects, more jousts, dances, banquets, juegos de cañas, and all the rest of the festivities that accompanied a princely entry.53 The adventure at Binche must have been a welcome interlude for Philip, a special moment that he may have carried with him as a cherished remembrance during those trying visits to his eastern kingdoms when his health was failing and his subjects were less prone to joyous entries. Binche, a small town in the present province of Hainault in Bel- gium (near Mons and famous today for its Carnival), belonged to Queen Mary of Hungary, Philip’s aunt and Charles V’s beloved sister. The feast that she hosted there lasted eight days and was of such an elaborate nature as to defy a comprehensive summary. The description written by Calvete

52 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 306–307. 53 Philip’s extravagant entry into Antwerp elicited one hundred and nine pages in the printed edition from Calvete de Estrella’s irrepressible pen, Triumphal arches were built or commissioned by the Spaniards, the Genoese, the Germans, the English, and the city of Antwerp, among others. Great public spectacles served as background to a great tournament on horseback, another on foot, and a royal joust. See Calvete de Estrella, El fe- licísimo viaje II, 108–217.

235 CHAPTER VII de Estrella, an eyewitness, fills almost seventy pages in the printed edition of his travel account.54 Besides descriptions of the numerous mythological, classical, and chivalrous references included in the iconography of the commemorative arches, Calvete also provides lavish details as to the chambers (and clothing) given to the prince, the emperor, and the queen of France by their hostess. The festivities began with a foot tournament held on the feast day of St. Bartholomew. French, Flemish, and Spanish knights engaged in fierce battle, defenders against “adventurers” displaying their skills with a variety of weapons—pikes, lances, axes, and both two-handed and single- handed swords. It was more of a melee than an actual tournament, a carnivalesque element being added when an artificial serpent (the ubiquitous dragon or tarasca of Corpus Christi processions in early modern Spain) burst into the proceedings spewing fire from its nostrils and mouth. Two knights, dressed as savages or wild men, emerged from the artificial serpent, their bodies covered with ivy, and joined in the confusion. It was then that Philip, to the sound of drums and reed instruments and accompanied by an entourage of great noblemen, all dressed in scarlet velvet with gold trimmings and gold silken calças (leggings), came into the list and challenged the knights to fight with pike and sword. The prince fought against the Marquis de Berghes, with “great effort and dexterity,” before joining his father and the queens on the stage. Additional combats and dances followed the actual tournament. They continued until midnight when the rey de armas (king-of-arms) called the names of those to be awarded prizes for their valor, dexterity, and deportment.55 The tournament, as lavish as it was, would not have marked the celebrations at Binche as truly memorable. At the banquet and dance—necessary accompaniments to all martial games—a letter was read to the emperor that reiterated the challenge posted on the door of the imperial castle at Brussels. A panegyric to knight-errantry and borrowing freely from Arthurian legends, the letter, like the Brussels placard, described a fantastic adventure that all true knights should be eager to undertake. The letter described the power of a wicked magician and sworn enemy of chivalry named Norabrock. He lived in an enchanted castle, eternally covered with “dark and thick clouds” which, together with the “Fortu- nate Isle, the Dangerous Tower, and the Fortunate Pass (a pas d’armes),” served as a test for all knights-errant. Because there is never in this kind of story an evil without a counterbalancing good, Queen Fadada, a lover of peace, good, and of all valiant knights had placed an enchanted sword

54 Ibid., 1–69. 55 Ibid., 13–20.

236 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY into a rock on a hill. The knight able to extract the sword from the rock would break the enchantment and deliver from captivity those poor knights languishing in Norabrock’s captivity. Getting to the sword was not to be an easy task. To get to it and eventually reach Norabrock’s enchanted castle, adventurers had to meet the challenges of three successive pas d’armes. The first, or Fortunate Pass, was defended by a knight named the Red Griffin. The second pas d’armes was held by the knight of the Black Eagle, while the third test of knightly prowess, that of the Danger- ous Tower, was defended by the knight of the Golden Lion.56 The rules of this elaborate game clearly set the order of the pas d’armes. An adventurer would come to the barrier, blow an ivory horn, a dwarf would then come to the barrier, and then the knight defending the pas d’armes, in the first case the knight of the Griffin, would meet the challenge. Only if the adventurer surpassed the skills of that first knight defender could he proceed to the second pas d’armes, and so on to the point where the knight-errant could then test whether he was destined to extract the enchanted sword from the stone and assail Norabrock.57 The spectacle, although it seemed to be taking place in an elaborate and extensive topography, could in fact be seen in its totality from the windows of the palace’s tower. There the emperor, the queens, and the prince gazed down on the challenges, while a large crowd behind the barriers, perched on nearby trees and other heights looked on avidly. Nu- merous knights with names borrowed from fictional accounts—a number of them even dressed in Moorish fashion—came to the different pas d’armes. Some battles got so heated that combatants were wounded. Pages upon pages, written by the meticulous Calvete de Estrella, describe the deeds and the fictitious (and not so fictitious) battles of high Spanish and Belgian knights-errant, including one knight, named appropriately enough for this Quixotesque adventure, Juan Quijada.58 One can see clearly where the entire narrative was headed. By the end of the second day, after numerous knights had failed either to defeat the defenders or to remove the sword from the stone, a knight under the name of Beltene- bros came to the test, defeated with ease all of the defenders in the three challenges, and removed the enchanted sword from the stone. Beltene- bros was, of course, none other than the young Philip who, now wielding the enchanted sword, defeated the forces of Norabrock, broke through the gates of the evil magician’s castle, and freed all the enchanted knights languishing there in captivity.59 Other equally bizarre celebra-

56 Ibid., 23–24. 57 Ibid., 24–26. 58 Ibid., 28–45. 59 Ibid., 48–51.

237 CHAPTER VII tions, fireworks, dances, banquets, yet another tournament, an enchanted chamber with mirrors, disappearing tables, and a celestial crown completed the unforgettable experiences of the great feasts held at Binche between August 22 and 31, 1549.60

READING BINCHE After such an extensive summary of what took place at Binche, a few comments are in order. At a time when cruel religious wars agitated most of Germany and the Habsburg lands in Central Europe, when the Otto- man threat and corsair activity thrust deeply into Iberia’s Mediterranean shores, the emperor and his heir took time to play. I do not think that the Infantes of Aragon would have allowed themselves to act in such elaborate theatrical representations if the certain outcome would have added to John II of Castile’s reputation. The Infantes clearly tried not to maim the king of Castile in their elaborate jousts, but the martial theater of 1428 was clearly balanced by serious combat. At Binche, although serious jousting took place, a substantial number of great Spanish and Low Countries’ nobles agreed to engage in an elaborate and tightly scripted role play. Borrowing from a vast chivalrous tradition—some of the elements of this dramatic performance seem to have been lifted shamelessly from twelfth-century romances and, most of all, from the fifteenth- century Amadis of Gaul—tournaments were turned into art. The main purpose of the dramatic representation was not to please the young Philip, but to enhance his authority. These were not innocent games. They were enactments of authority and prestige. Many of the knights engaged in the adventure could have defeated Philip in a joust and inflicted great harm on the prince. As the fate of Henry II of France shows, things could go very wrong at jousts. Even kings could die. But none of this could ever have happened at Binche. The permanence and enduring hold of the chivalrous tradition on Eu- ropean political life did not end with Charles V and Francis I’s anticipated duel (which in fact did not take place). It remained not only an important part of the political imaginary but was powerfully inscribed in the ruler’s mind. For all the descriptions of an older Philip as a bureaucratic king, he never relinquished his taste for these reenactments of chivalrous adventures. Spanish society thrived on them. The pages of Don Quixote were filled with stories not unlike those acted out at Binche. One wonders to what extent Cervantes, who would certainly have read Calvete de Es- trella, borrowed some of his ideas from this narrative and turned into fiction what was already fictionalized reality.

60 Ibid., 61–69.

238 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY

REWARDS To add further incentive to these fictitious enterprises, almost every tournament and joust offered prizes for jousting prowess, for deportment, for bravery, and for other assorted skills. In the joust cum tournament held in Zaragoza in 1585, the categories and rewards were the following: 1) “he who had the best garments received a gold ring; 2) he who broke lances best for the love of a lady (a replay of the “prison of love” motif) received a medal; 3) he who broke a lance best received gloves.”61 That the awards often went to the highest of the nobles—Philip as we have seen received a reward from breaking a lance in Brussels—and that the tournaments were followed by dances (saraos) and banquets, running often past midnight, provided a circularity to these events that transcended their strictly military aspect. They were pregnant with social meanings as well. A combination of a display of military skills with social exclusiveness, tournaments and their concomitant festivities drew highborn ladies into the elite world of aristocratic mock warfare. The tournaments were, as noted early, a form of military training and a way to engage in combat without the unpredictable outcome of real battles, but yet another element was added when the tournament was performed in front of a noble female audience, with women often playing the role of mythological goddesses and bestowing rewards on worthy knights. These circumstances served to reiterate the links between male and female within a canonical courtly tradition.

Tournaments on Foot Although tournaments and jousts were, with some notable exceptions, plotted to avoid knightly woundings, let alone deaths, there were occasions, as we have seen, where tragedies took place. The court of John II

61 See, for example, Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 201, where Philip wins a ruby for breaking a lance in a Brussels’ joust, and also page 203. Also Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje II, 20, where the author describes the prizes given at a great tournament on foot held at Binche. Juan Quijada received the prize for swordplay; Daniel of Marcke for the pike; Gaspar de Robles for the throwing lance; Andrés de Busanton for the two- handed sword. To Mingoval was given the award for the “trozo de la lanza”(or “piece of the lance”?) And to the Count of Egmont went the prize for wielding the ax. Prince Philip received a diamond. See also Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 75, where he describes a joust in Zaragoza in 1585, held after the wedding of Philip II’s daughter to the Duke of Savoy; also page 143 on awards given to combatants in Barcelona’s joust. See also Maestro Vargas, Recibimiento que se hizo en Salamanca a la Princesa doña María de Portu- gal (1543), 80, on awards given at a joust held on November 18, 1543, to the best knight, the knight with the best deportment, and the best performance in the joust.

239 CHAPTER VII was the site of several savage affairs. During the 1440 wedding of the In- fante Henry to the Infanta Doña Blanca (whose entry into Briviesca and Burgos I described in chapter 2), a great pas d’armes was held in Vallado- lid in honor of the ill-fated couple. By 1440, factional struggles in Castile had already degenerated into open civil war. The almost two-decades- old antagonisms between the Infantes of Aragon on the one hand and the constable Don Alvaro de Luna and the king on the other had so deeply divided Castilian nobility that their rivalry often spilled into bloody encounters in the supposedly safe confines of the pas d’armes and/ or tournament. Ruy Díaz de Mendoza, the king’s mayordomo, promised to break at least four lances in each single challenge during a Valladolid pas d’armes that he, along with nineteen other knights, defended for forty days. The type of weapons chosen and the fierceness of the combat led to at least two deaths, and a good number of high noblemen were seriously injured. In view of the carnage, King John II ordered the combat to cease.62 Although this notable pas d’armes was fought on horseback, jousting and other forms of mock fighting on foot were also quite common throughout late medieval and early modern Spain, and often quite violent. Horses, which needed to be protected from damage at all costs, provided added protection to combatants. When that protection was removed, things could easily turn quite nasty. These tournaments on foot differed also from “judicial” duels, which sought to address personal grievances and involved the presentation of a formal list of injuries and insults. A letter of challenge sent by Lope de Mendoza to Pedro de Ayala in 1441 began with the insult, “To you, Pedro de Ayala, knight, son of a bad father, I, Lope de Mendoça, one of the knights who are and live in the magnificent house of my lord the archbishop of Toledo, instead of peace and salutations I challenge you to arms [an armed conflict], with the desire to fight and to kill you if you deny what I affirm.” Martin de Riquer has vividly glossed innumerable challenges and battles of this ilk. The latter, he shows, involved a great deal of symbolic humiliation for the defeated knight and, of course, the very real peril of losing life or limbs.63 In June 1428, the king and his court witnessed a fierce combat on foot between the Castilian Gonzalo de Guzman, Lord of Torija, and an Ara- gonese knight, Luis de Fazes. The foot joust took place in an enclosed area by the church of St. Paul in Valladolid. Beginning as a joust on

62 Crónica de Juan II, 567. 63 See Jager, The Last Duel: Crónica del halconero de Juan II, 382; Martín de Riquer, Ca- balleros andantes españoles (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1967), 142–67; and his Lletresdebatalla: cartells de deseiximents i capítols de passos d’armes.

240 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY horse, in which each of the two contenders broke eight lances, they fought on with daggers until they had each delivered fifty blows of the dagger (with a small rest period after the first twenty five blows). After their exertions, the knights received rich gifts from the king of Castile.64 Juan de Merlo, a noted knight-errant and member of the king’s and the constable’s retinue, was one of the most celebrated of these intrepid fifteenth-century warriors. On foot and horseback both, he established a reputation for courage and martial skills.65 Traveling to the Burgundian court with his king’s permission, Juan de Merlo carried with him an empresa, an emblem or sign inviting other knights to combat. At Arras, he fought and wounded the Lord of Charny and received a set of silver dishes from the count of Burgundy, Philip the Good. From there he went to Basel, the site of the Church council, where he also fought on foot and received from the judges “the honor of arms.”66 Similarly Guti- erre Quexada, lord of Villagarcía, and Pero Barba carried their challenges to the court of Burgundy—a veritable epicenter of knight- errantry. At a joust in Saint Omer, Gutierre Quexada, known for being particularly skilled in throwing the lance, fought on foot against Pierre, the bastard of Saint Pol. The battle involved an assortment of weapons, lances and axes included. Brutal ax blows were exchanged in hand-to- hand fighting. It ended with Quexada sitting on top of his opponent, ready to deliver a fatal blow, at which point the Duke of Burgundy intervened.67 Three hundred Spanish soldiers fought a large tournament on foot in Milan on December 31, 1548, for the entertainment of the young prince Philip, the princess of Molfeta, and other high nobles. The tournament involved harquebus discharges and a hand-to-hand combat with pikes and swords.68 This was followed a few days later with another foot battle, in which this time the young heir to the Habsburg lands led one of the contending squads manned by the scions of Spanish noble houses. The prince distinguished himself, or so Calvete de Estrella reports, and was “much regarded by the ladies because of his spirit and martial dexterity.” In the course of his 1548–50 journey, Prince Philip witnessed similar foot tournaments, some of them held at night by the light of innumerable torches. In Trent a particular foot combat involved men disguised as centaurs and Turks, wheels of Fortune, artificial castles, savages, giants, fire-

64 Crónica del halconero de Juan II, 26–27. 65 Crónica de Juan II, 513: “Era hombre muy dispuesto, de gentil gesto é cuerpo; fue un gran justador (he was a great man in the jousts).” 66 Ibid., 513–15. 67 Ibid., 523–24. 68 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 77–78.

241 CHAPTER VII works, and the whole panoply of martial, carnivalesque, and mythological references.69

Knights Errants: Burgundy and Spain Obvious from the previous section is the lively connections that existed between the Burgundian court and the Spanish realms. And this was long before the marriage between Philip the Handsome and the Infanta Juana in the late fifteenth century, which resulted in the birth, in Ghent in 1500, of Charles V (Charles I in Spain) and established a formal Bur- gundian/Flemish/Habsburg connection. Castile, above all, was intimately linked to Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant through intense trade connections. The export of wool to the Low Countries was already two centuries old by the time of Charles V’s birth. But knights-errant circu- lating back and forth between the peninsula and the Burgundian and other Western European courts provided further indelible links within what one might describe as an international chivalrous brotherhood. The word in Spanish to describe knights-errant—and the title of Riquer’s impressive book—is caballeros andantes, which, I think, truly captures what these knights were all about. They were travelers, wanderers. They were not really “errant” at all (unless we take Don Quixote as our only example), for they most often knew very well what their destination was: a court that would welcome them with open arms, brothers-in-arms willing to engage them in spirited and often (but not always) fair combat. They found in their knightly counterparts abroad shared values, an understanding of courtly values, and romance. Before the Habsburgs, Spain fully participated in, and contributed substantially to, what may be described incorrectly as the Burgundian ideal. In a world torn by civil wars (Castile) and the last bloody decades of that interminable struggle known as the Hundred Years War, knights-errant found meaning for their lives in the heady atmosphere of romance and service. They shared in an international fraternity of common values that often transcended the allegiances and battlefield enmities of a Europe beginning to feel the stirrings of national feelings. Chivalry was not long for this world. The new battlefields of early modern warfare, as noted earlier, were becoming inhospitable places for heavily-armored knights. When knights became soldiers and their loyalty was transferred to king and country, the medieval ideal began its slow but inexorable death. As Don Quixote argued in Cervantes’ masterpiece: knight-errantry is religion. And Cervantes got it right; knight-errantry was indeed a form of

69 Ibid., 85, 138–44.

242 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY religion in which the aesthetics of fictitious warfare granted spiritual rewards transcending those of religion. It would be redundant, as we come to the conclusion of this chapter, to provide too many more examples of the numerous Iberian knights, Por- tuguese, Castilian, Catalans, Aragonese, and Valencian, who traveled beyond the Pyrenees with their empresas, seeking liberation from love’s captivity and an opportunity to display their skills and courage. While these knights journeyed away from the peninsula, knights from every corner of Europe, from as far away as Poland, poured into it, seeking adventures and other knights with whom to joust. Castile, and above all, the court of John II was a receptive place for such activities. In the Crown of Aragon, king Alfonso V had moved his court to Naples, where the Italian world of the late fifteenth century was radically different from that of the “waning of the Middle Ages,” to use the incorrect but evocative English translation of the title of Huizinga’s great work. Juan de Merlo, Gutierre Quexada, and Pedro Barba were just some of those wandering knights who fled the sordid politics of late-fifteenth century Castile in search of honor elsewhere. Martín de Riquer tells the stories of those Catalan and Valencian knights who, whether or not they went traveling abroad, sought honor through their bizarre deeds. On Jan- uary 20, 1431, the knight Bernat de Coscón walked the streets of Zara- goza with an arrow piercing his leggings in honor of St. Sebastian. Joanot Martorell (1413–1468), author of the remarkable chivalrous romance Ti- rant lo Blanch, traveled to England to the court of Edward IV, where he challenged his rival (who had probably dishonored his sister) to a combat to death. Miguel d’Orís, a Catalan knight, traveled to Paris on August 20, 1400. There he posted a placard challenging all English knights to battle on foot and horseback so that he could be liberated from his “prison of love.” In the meantime, he walked the streets of the French capital with a punzón (the equivalent today of an ice pick), piercing his leggings. It was not to be removed until his deeds were accomplished and all challenges met.70 Riquer provides an extensive list also of those foreign knights who, from the end of the fourteenth century onwards, came into the peninsula seeking deeds of arms.71 None could match either the influence or glamour of the Burgundian knight Jacques de Lalaing, whose adventures were detailed in the well-known LivredesfaitsdeJacquesdeLalaing. A semi- fictionalized version of his adventures in the peninsula from 1445 onwards, it successfully married actual deeds of arms with romanticized lit-

70 de Riquer, Caballeros andantes españoles, 17, 41, 123, et passim. 71 Ibid., 100–105.

243 CHAPTER VII erary accounts. Besides his famous combat against John of Bonifacio, a well-known Sicilian knight-errant, at Philip the Good’s court in 1448, Jacques de Lalaing engaged in a brutal combat in Valladolid with Diego de Guzmán, with John II of Castile acting as witness and arbiter. The battle on foot was fought with axes. Diego de Guzman was badly wounded in his arms—because, the chronicle of John II argues, of Jacques de Lalaing’s treachery—yet, he had enough strength left to wrest Jacques de Lalaing’s ax from his hand, throw him to the ground, and begin to strangle him with his bare hands. He would have finished the job, had the king not intervened and put an end to the combat.72

What has only been lightly glossed here is the ritualized nature of these fictionalized combats. Heralds and kings-of-arms (rey de armas, farautes, persevantes)—Castilian terms of such euphonic quality that they conjure, by their sole utterance, a world of magic—made up a distinguished collection of knowledgeable individuals, many of them known to us by name, who called knights to battle, set the terms of combat, and sang the glories of knightly efforts. We hear how in 1608 at the swearing in of Philip III, the future Philip IV as heir to the throne, the “oldest rey de armas, [dressed] with mace and coat of mail explained what had to be done at the ceremony.”73 Elabo- rate placards issued challenges and answered them, a form of “public” literature that wove one more layer of fantasy into these elaborate performances. Fantastic ephemeral constructions were built for the occasion. Ladies came to gaze at these “heroic” activities and to reward the most worthy knights with prizes. The lists, the places of battle, were clearly delineated areas, a knightly “sacralized” space to which only nobles were admitted, where only nobles could fight and die. Those in the lower ranks of society could only look on with awe and wonder. Little change occurred in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. Although actual warfare was radically transformed, with large battles becoming killing fields, the high nobility still embraced that fictionalized life where gun powder, longbows, and other such innovations had no place. Whether in reenactments of Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian cycle or of the Amadis of Gaul, or, as was the case with the juego de cañas, in exercises deeply inspired by Hurtado de Mendoza’s maurophilic Guerras de Granada, kings, princes, and knights imitated art. But their art was in itself a form of alternative reality.

72 Ibid., 22–36. De Riquer includes abundant citations from the chronicle and from Lesfaits.... 73 León Pinelo, Anales de Madrid. Reinado de Felipe III, 1598–1621, Ricardo Martorell Téllez-Girón, ed. (Madrid: Estanislao Maestre, 1931), 77. For rey-de-armas and other knightly offices, see the already cited Alfonso de Ceballos-Escalera y Gila Floresta,Her- aldosyreyesdearmasenlacortedeEspaña (Madrid: Ediciones Iberoamericanas, 1983).

244 KINGS AND KNIGHTS AT PLAY Chivalrous literature, romance, tournaments, and the like were a means of articulating power, though a limited power at best, and also a way of reminding the crowds standing outside the barriers of the aristocratic and ritualized space of combat of the importance of social hierarchy and martial skills. The church played no role. Priests were not wanted, unless they were there to gaze admiringly on the events. There was no blessing of arms, no confessions in these chivalrous exercises. But the drama and fantasy of it all captured everyone equally. In a great tournament held in Burgos in 1424 to celebrate the king’s visit to the city, one of the defenders of the joust was Pedro de Cartagena. He defended with such skills that he received one of the prizes, a piece of scarlet silk. Pedro had an unusual background for an expert in the chivalric arts. He was in fact the very distinguished son of the very distinguished bishop of the city, Don Pablo de Santa María, formerly Selomah ha Levi, the learned great rabbi of Burgos. After converting to Christianity in 1390 and a stint at the University of Paris, Don Pablo had been elected bishop of the city with overwhelming support. This in a city in which the attacks against Jews in 1391 had been particularly ferocious and where the entire aljama, or Jewish community, had been forcefully converted, exiled, or killed. And yet his son, born into the highest levels of Jewish society, was suffi- ciently immersed in the chivalrous life and had enough dexterity in the exercise of arms to become champion defender in a pas d’armes organized for the formal entry of Castile’s new king. And, of course, the joust was also accompanied by the running of bulls. Only in Spain!74

74 Crónica de Juan II, 427–28. For a vivid biographical sketch of Pablo de Santa María and his son, Pedro de Cartagena, see Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones y semblanzas in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla II, 709–10; and Luciano Serrano, Los conversos, d. Pablo de Santa María y d. Alfonso de Cartagena, obispos de Burgos, gobernantes, diplomáticos y escritores (Madrid: C. Bermejo, 1942).

245 ❊ CHAPTER VIII ❊ From Carnival to Corpus Christi

In Juan Ruiz’s canonical text, the Libro de Buen Amor (Book of Good Love, composed around 1337), the author includes a delightful aside, telling of the iconic battle between Lord Carnality (Don Carnal) and Lady Lent (Doña Cuaresma) held on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, that is on Mardi Gras. In the text, we come face to face with the easy flow between the world of the everyday, of food and pleasure, the world of matter, and the highly somber and austere period that precedes the commemoration of Jesus’ death and resurrection. A focus of the story is Lady Lent’s tenuous hold on mankind, as seen in her eventual defeated by carnal love on Easter Sunday and Monday. What is also obvious in the Libro de Buen Amor is Carnality’s sway throughout the year, and the proclivity of the flesh to eat, drink, and celebrate. Don Carnal, richly installed on a stage (not unlike the raised stages from which kings and queens gazed down on parades during their royal entries), enjoys a whole assortment of delightful foods, while jongleurs play and sing for his pleasure. Wine of course flows, placing the whole company in sweet slumber. But Lady Lent’s armies, a whole assortment of sardines, eels, and other seafood associated with Lent, soundly defeat Don Carnal’s troops. For forty days, Lent’s forces rule the world as the dissipation of Carnival and Mardi Gras are left behind. But on Easter Sun- day, Lent is overthrown. Carnality and Love once again recover their rightful thrones. That Juan Ruiz chose the high point of Carnival as the setting for what was, essentially, a romp across the full range of fourteenth-century Castilian cuisine, ranging from the delectable foods consumed throughout the year to Lent’s austere fare, tells us a great deal about the prominent place of carnival celebrations in the Western tradition, particularly in Iberia.1 As Julio Caro Baroja has shown and the LibrodeBuenAmor demonstrates, Carnival time was extended throughout the year by means of a cycle of popular and secular festivities often juxtaposed with sacred time. Although Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, was seen as the culmination of the Carnival season (Carnestolendas in the Castilian language)—as is the case today in Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans, and other locations known for

1 Arcipreste de Hita, Libro de buen amor, María Brey Mariño, ed., 2nd ed. (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1960), 199–230, lines 1076–1317. This battle is a well known trope in Western art. One of the most vivid representations is Peter Brueghel’s wonderful painting, “The Fight between Carnival and Lent.”

246 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI their Carnival celebrations—in the Middle Ages, carnivalesque elements became intrinsic parts of all festivals and flowed in and out of that commingling of the aristocratic and the popular so peculiar to festive cycles, serving as a cultural bridge between the erudite celebrations of those above and the ancient ludic practices of those below.2

Carnival and Corpus Christi

In the two previous chapters, I have focused on martial festivities and literary representations of those who, because of their noble status and wealth, could engage in elaborate tournaments, fantastic pas d’armes, and other such displays. These highly scripted warring games consciously excluded non-nobles from participation, relegating the “people” to the margins of the feast or limiting their participation to that of spectators. In this chapter, I wish to turn to the Carnival and to its relation to the annual Corpus Christi celebrations in late medieval and early modern Spain. Although it might seem odd to juxtapose a feast such as Carni- val—which has been always associated with revelry, subversive inversions of the social order, and transgressive behavior—with that of the Corpus Christi, the high point of the Catholic devotional cycle in early modern Spain, I would argue (and hope to show below) that there was a progression, uneven but perceptible, from the carnivalesque to the elaborate appropriation of some of these allegedly subversive themes of Carnival by the carefully programmed procession of the living body of Christ through the streets of Iberian cities.3 In many respects the title of this chapter—from Carnival to Corpus Christi—seeks to express the transformation, slow but inexorable, that affected certain types of popular feasts during the transition from late medieval to early modern. While the festivities of the powerful showed a remarkable degree of continuity, popular celebrations were either ab- sorbed into formal and highly regulated celebrations or ludic displays confined to the rural world, or simply ignored—maybe even censored—

2 For the study of Carnival in late medieval, early modern, and modern Spain, the best guide is Julio Caro Baroja’s superb El carnaval, análisis histórico-cultural (Madrid: Taurus, 1965), and his El estío festivo: fiestas populares del verano (Madrid: Taurus, 1984). 3 On the subversive aspects of the Carnival, see the paradigmatic work by Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indi- ana University Press, 1984), 196–277 et passim. See also Jacques Heers, Fêtes des fous et carnavals (Paris: Fayard, 1983), and his earlier general study of festive forms, Fêtes, jeux et joutes dans les sociétés d’Occident à la fin du Moyen Age (Montreal: Institut d’études médiévales, Librairie J. Vrin, 1971).

247 CHAPTER VIII by those describing these type of festivities. More and more the “popular” carnival emerged into literary consciousness only if it led to violence, as was the case at Romans, where the carnival turned into an insurrec- tion, an event well described in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s suggestive book. Carnivalesque tropes also remained alive in the charivari (a form of ritual public embarrassment common in the late Middle Ages) and fabliaux, which require careful deconstruction to ferret out their political and cultural meanings.4 The point I am making here is, of course, not a new one. I have made it myself in the past.5 I would argue that although spontaneous carnivalesque folk celebrations must have existed and survived—paralleling the great celebrations of the powerful—into the early modern period, we have little or no access to these popular festivities. When we are informed by the extant sources of similar activities, it is always either the Carnival as celebrated by those in high places, or carnivalesque themes that have been fully appropriated and domesticated by the same privileged elite. By the late Middle Ages, the Carnival, as reported in the chronicles and accounts of such festivities, had become an event formally and fully scripted. It allowed for wildness, but only within the well-policed parameters of the established order. It permitted inversions, but only inasmuch as they reasserted and buttressed the existing social order. There are few Carni- vals as regulated today as Rio de Janeiro’s. There is nothing spontaneous or wild about the time-bound parades of the escolasdesamba as they march through the Sambadrome. There one finds near-nudity and intoxicating music. There may be drinking and drugs, but any truly subversive or transgressive behavior occurs only on the margins of the official celebration. The long planning for the parade—a year in the making—has de- fanged any hint of popular unrest and channeled all energy into harmless paths of conformity.6

4 See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans: de la Chandeleur au mercredi des Cendres, 1579–1580 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979). Also Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975). See also Elizabeth A. R. Brown and Nancy Regalado, “La grand feste: Philip the Fair’s celebration of the Knighting of his Sons in Paris at Pentecost of 1313,” in B. A. Hanawalt and K. L Reyerson, eds., City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 56–86. 5 For my own interventions on these topics, see my Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (Lon- don: Longman, 2001), chapters 5 and 6, 121–62; “Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille aux XVe siècle: Les celebration de mai 1428,” Annales E.S.C. 3 (1991), 521–46; and “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Fes- tivals: The Case of Jaén,” in B. A. Hanawalt and K. L Reyerson, eds., City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, 296–318. I shall refer often to these works in the following pages. 6 For the Carnival in Rio, and I should emphasize that the Carnival, though also

248 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI And so it was in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. What we find in the sources describing these events is a great unwillingness on the part of those who ruled to permit spontaneous outbursts of popular celebration for fear that they might turn into a riot or a challenge to established rule. But again, we should view contemporary chronicles and accounts of these events with an ever-critical eye. After all, the sources that describe these events do so almost always from the perspective of those on top. If the royal entry served sometimes as a site of contestation and as a contentious dialogue between political forces—as we saw in the examples from Philip II’s journeys throughout his eastern kingdoms— Carnival may have served as a time of respite, a space of transgression that buttressed the established structures of power. In the end, many carnivalesque elements were integrated into that most paradigmatic of early modern Catholic official celebrations of the unholy link between Church and State: the ceremonies and processions of the Corpus Christi.

Carnival The origins of the medieval Carnival long pre-date Christianity. Its roots can be found not only in the great Roman festivals, above all in the Sat- urnalia, but also and simply in that well-ingrained human tendency to play. A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to carefully laying out the points of contact between the medieval and early modern carnivals with ancient festive forms. As Julio Caro Baroja, the brilliant Spanish polymath, has adroitly pointed out, the importance of Carnival in that period resides in its temporal relationship to Christianity. In other words, Carnival becomes for the late medieval mind a part of the religious calendar, just one more feast, albeit one demanding a different set of rituals and festive forms, in a whole cycle of annual celebrations.7 That is how early modern accounts describe Carnestolendas, as one more feast in the calendrical observation of the religious year’s high points. But, once again as Caro Baroja has pointed out, Carnival time in a sense persists throughout the year in the continuous resurfacing of ribaldry and permitted inversions associated, always, with other religious festivals. scripted, has a more open and free spirit in places like Salvador (Bahía), see Neusa Fer- nandes, Síntese da história do carnaval carioca (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Estadual do Pat- rimônio Cultural, 1986). 7 Caro Baroja, El carnaval, análisis histórico-cultural, 11–45; Heers, Fêtes, jeux et joutes dans les sociétés d’Occident à la fin du Moyen Age, 120–21; Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play- Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962); Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).

249 CHAPTER VIII Carnivalesque elements merged with more formal ludic forms to provide an additional type of popular entertainment and a comic note of release in entries, religious processions, and the like. Not unlike the early modern theater, where the most somber plays always include a comedic interlude or a carnivalesque figure—Falstaff in the Henry IV–Henry VI Shakespearean cycle, for example, or Clarín in Calderón de la Barca’s famous LifeisaDream—celebrations in Spain and elsewhere, more often than not, appropriated the themes and symbols of the Carnival for their entertainment value and also—and this is most significant—because they provided the opportunity for a heady melange of high and low cultural forms. Triumphal arches with erudite inscriptions, elaborate martial games that reenacted portions of the Amadis of Gaul as it was played in Binche and elsewhere may have filled the public with awe, and certainly they did provide entertainment. The processions of nobles and royalty with their elaborate clothing and spirited horses also held the attention of the populace, just as the parade of famous actors on the red carpet on their way to the Oscar presentation entertains audiences today. Yet, none of these displays provided the fantastic and bizarre, that Rabelaisian touch—to follow Bakhtin once again—of bodily connections, food, and inversions. The former appealed to the mind and to the aesthetics of combat and chivalrous pursuits, even though they too were always sprin- kled with carnivalesque tropes. The latter meant the triumph of carnality and revelry which remained, and remain, vital needs of the human spirit and indispensable to popular celebration. What I am attempting to elucidate here is that elusive connection between the individual’s proclivity for forms of entertainment that emphasize bodily functions and sensual behavior, something close to anarchy, and communal attempts to organize these tendencies into structured performance. The former has inherently the potential for challenging the social order and for reducing society to its rudiments. The latter resists such attempts, seeking to channel popular ribaldry into safe and politically inoffensive channels. At the heart of this tension is of course the real issue of resistance to the established social order. Viewed from an opti- mistic perspective, carnivalesque forms can be seen as either truly subverting—though always only for a short time—civic or royal authority or, at least, challenging it. From a pessimistic point of view, Carnival and carnivalesque revelry were, at best, only a small release of pent up frustra- tions, managed by those on top as a diversion from the injustice of their rule and a brief respite from stress for those below.8 8 This paragraph summarizes a discussion at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton between James Scott and the late and much missed Lawrence Stone. Stone argued that resistance, of which Carnival inversion is one example, slowed down the

250 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI Reading late medieval and early modern Carnivals means, almost always, seeing these events as mediated by narrators. What we see in them, with some well-known exceptions (such as the Carnival at Romans), is a mood that though festive is very much under control. Thus we know very little about those undocumented events and spaces in which Carni- val turned its rich symbolic meanings into social protest and political action. Carnivals and charivaris come and go, structures of power remain. Even interpolating information derived from the modern Carnival does not help much, because what we especially notice about today’s Carnival, whether in Rio de Janeiro or New Orleans, is their appallingly scripted character. Even in places such as Salvador (Bahia, Brazil), where Carnival is supposedly far more spontaneous and popular in nature, in the end, where, when, and how to celebrate is always the decision of the city’s public authorities. But what about the actual Carnivals in Spain?

CARNIVALESQUE CELEBRATIONS IN LATE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY JAÉN As we saw in an earlier chapter, Jaén in the 1460s was the site of numerous carnivalesque performances. Perched uneasily on the border with Granada, ruled by the constable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, a man with numerous enemies, who held for dear life to an uncertain political position, the city provides a unique opportunity to observe festive cycles in late medieval Spain. We are able to see carnivalesque elements with particular clarity thanks to a very detailed chronicle that seems, somewhat perversely, to focus on celebrations and rituals rather than on the constable’s very real problems in managing a fledgling war against Granada and in retaining his title and autonomy in the face of the ever greedy Pacheco (Villena) family.9 The disguises and cross-dressing that seem to have been an intrinsic part of Jaén’s feasts, including Henry IV’s entry are only a small part of the numerous carnivalesque elements found in the anonymous HechosdelcondestableDonMiguelLucasdeIranzo. The book provides a small, though tainted, window into popular celebrations, the interaction between rulers and the ruled, and the careful scripting of these supposedly spontaneous festivals.

WHAT WAS THE CARNIVAL IN SPAIN LIKE? Before attempting to provide a thick description of some specific Carni- vals, it may be useful to include here a general outline of carnivalesque activities. In Caro Baroja’s seminal work on the Spanish Carnival, he in-

“machine” (of repression and authority), but that it did not fundamentally alter relationships of power. 9 See my “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” 296–318, with references.

251 CHAPTER VIII cludes two general descriptions of the main elements of Carnestolendas, as described by two seventeenth-century sources. The first comes from Gaspar Lucas Hidalgo’s Dialogo de apacibles entretenimientos (Dialogue of Peaceful Entertainment, not alas an inspiring title, written in 1615). The second example is drawn from Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s little known play, Las carnestolendas.10 Both texts provide a road map to what seem, compared with some of the late medieval Carnivals, quite tame diversions. In Lucas Hidalgo, there is the sharp contrast between the laughter of Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, and the sadness of Ash Wednesday. On Tues- day, there is cross-dressing, dogs and cats are thrown into the air, people pelt each other with flour, cuckolded husbands are adorned with horns (a kind of charivari), and a lot of noise is made by banging on and breaking old pots. Calderón’s description is quite similar.11 Caro Baroja, who was far more interested in the anthropology of the Carnival than in its historical meaning—hence his reference to, and critique of, James Frazer’s TheGoldenBough—provides a most useful outline of the activities described in both texts, though omitting the quintessential cross-dressing. They are as follows: 1. To throw salvado (bran) and flour on passers by. 2. To burn clothing. 3. To chase cocks (and hens). 4. To place cats and dogs on a blanket and toss them into the air. 5. To tie horns, cans, and other objects on the tails of cats and dogs. 6. To throw water-filled jeringas (sausage stuffers) orvejigas (animal bladders) on passers-by. 7. To throw eggs, oranges, and other objects at Carnival revelers. 8. To toss on a blanket peleles or muñecos (stuffed figures, dolls) or hang them from their necks. 9. To hit each other with bladders and clubs. 10. To make noise with special instruments. 11. To break pots and pans. Some of these diversions were not restricted to the eve of Lent, but enjoyed throughout the year. Many became iconic in Spanish literature and art. Goya’s painting, El Pelele, and the famous episode in Don Quixote where Sancho is tossed up and down in a blanket—one of Cervantes’ numerous interpolations of carnivalesque element in his great work—are only two well-known examples.12 I remember as a child experiencing

10 Caro Baroja, El carnaval, análisis histórico-cultural, 49–50. 11 Idem. 12 Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, text and notes by Martín de Riquer, 2 vols., 12th edition (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, S.A., 1995), I, chapter 252 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI the noise-making, the water tossing, the tying of objects to animals’ tails, and many others of the activities listed by Caro Baroja as taking place during Carnival, but they also occurred on New Year’s Eve, on our town’s feast day, and on other calendrical and liturgical celebrations as well. With the exception of cross-dressing, which, as noted, Caro Baroja does not include in his list of carnivalesque activities, none of these deeds seem peculiarly transgressive. Even cross-dressing, so abundantly portrayed in Golden Age plays and literary works—Don Quixote crawls with examples—belongs more to the category of ribaldry than to subversion. Is this a sign that by the seventeenth century Carnival had been domesticated? What did happen, or at least, what do sources tell us happened in the late medieval Carnival, and how did the reality of carnivalesque celebrations differ from later literary accounts? Here, after a long detour, we return to Jaén. During the Carnival celebrations (1463), the constable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo hosted several Muslim knights, envoys of the king of Granada to Don Miguel’s court in Jaén. To please them, or so the chronicle tells us, the constable held an elaborate juego de cañas. It was so elaborate in fact that it “fright- ened and marveled the Moorish knights” by the ferocity and dexterity of the numerous Christian knights involved in the game (a game which, after all, was of Moorish provenance).13 That evening the constable rode on a richly appointed façanea (a small horse). His wife sat on his horse’s croup. Both of them were dressed in gold clothing, and they were accompanied by other nobles and attendants who rode and dressed in the same fashion—as it is done to this very day in the cavalcade/pilgrimage to the monastery of El Rocío near Seville, even to the ladies dressed in their finery riding on the horses’ croups. Jaén’s streets were filled with torches, and the constable’s small procession marched through the city to the music of drums, trumpets, tambourines, and other musical instruments. In the squares along the route of the ceremonial procession, mummers and “other inventions” danced for the benefit of passers-by. The parade lasted until midnight and was followed by the usual feeding of the constable’s entourage. On the evening of Mardi Gras, the constable ordered a huge bonfire built in the square before his lodgings. The street leading into it was decorated with tapestries and “rich French cloth.” Torches and lights illumined the square, the street, and a stage covered with brocade, from xvii, 157. “. . . y allí, puesto Sancho en mitad de la manta, comenzaron a levantarle en alto, y a holgarse con él, como un perro por Carnestolendas” (my italics). El pelele was one of the cartoons (a model for Charles III’s residence tapestries) made by Goya around 1791–92. 13 Hechos del condestable, 110. 253 CHAPTER VIII which the constable was to survey the festivities. Then, at the constable’s order, a madman or fool (loco) came into the festive area. He was dressed in silk and rode a small horse, and he joined in the feast, seating himself among the constable’s court. The chronicler describes the large crowd in attendance: nobles, squires, and the city’s “plebeians “ gathered in the square, the latter looking on from windows and roofs.14 Pedro Gómez de Ocaña, one of the constable’s crossbowmen, rode skillfully in the running of the ring. After succeeding three times in capturing the ring, he was mockingly hit with a leather strip filled with cotton at the order of the madman—he is described as a loco (fool) in the chronicle, but the appropriate word may be “buffoon” or” jester”—who claimed to be the Master of Santiago, and thus Gómez de Ocaña’s lord. After the carnivalesque interlude was over, Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo sat on the stage to eat with his immediate family, but under the gaze of all those in attendance. A cornucopia of food, rivaling Juan Ruiz’s descriptions in the battle between Carnality and Lent, was distributed to the people, or so the chronicler tells us, so much of it in fact that people engaged in a food fight, “hitting each other” with chickens, partridges, and other victuals.15 Once the supper ended, two sets of mummers with masks came into square. One set wore white garments with adornments in imitation of flames; the other black with brown trimmings. They “gently” danced for the multitude, and, after a while, the constable, his wife, and those close to the constable danced for the entertainment of the people. Once the dancing was done, one hundred and fifty men, dressed in mock armor and each armed with “three or four” pumpkins engaged in fierce battle to the sound of trumpets and drums. The mock joust concluded around 1 AM when, finally, the constable and his wife went to bed. We are a long way here from the events at Binche and from the elaborate entertainments of the early modern period.

THE MEDIEVAL CARNIVAL: SCRIPTING THE CARNIVAL Many of the carnivalesque elements that are part of the above description were replicated, and often, in other festivals held in Jaén during the first half of the 1460s and described, with equal relish, by the anonymous author of the Hechos del condestable. As Carnivals go, Jaén’s in 1463 was carefully planned, conflating carnivalesque motifs with other festive themes. The celebration’s epicenter was the constable and his immediate family. They sat on a stage presiding over the festivities and ate in the presence of nobles, squires, and common people, who, if we are to believe the chron-

14 Ibid., 110–11. 15 Ibid., 111.

254 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI icler, constituted a very sizeable crowd. Their largesse fed those in attendance to such excess that they used the food as projectiles and cudgels. Martial displays became part of the event, as Gómez de Ocaña showcased his equestrian skills in the running of the ring. This overlapping of military displays and carnivalesque elements was the norm, and, as we have seen throughout the royal entries described in the chapters above, ribaldry, mummers’ dances, and other popular spectacles were regular components as well. Martial displays were of course ubiquitous in carnivalesque festivals, as they were in almost every festivity or theatrical representation. To give just one example, on Fat Tuesday 1544 in Ma- drid, an elaborate joust was held in front of the comendador mayor’s lodgings. Philip, still a young prince, attended, looking down on the fictitious combat from a window. The anonymous chronicler spends most of his energy describing the elaborate garments of the noblemen and ladies in attendance. The unavoidable dance followed, but everything ran so late that there was not enough time to award prizes to the best knights.16

FOOLS AND OTHER JESTERS The loco was also, as has been seen, not a stranger to Jaén’s celebrations. On January 6, 1463, on the feast of the Epiphany, the fool known as the Master of Santiago played an important role in the elaborate parade and feasts that brought to a close the long Christmas festive cycle.17 It helps a great deal to know that, although the fool playing the master of the powerful military Order of Santiago might appear as a classical example of social inversion, in this case the mockery of those in high places, the actual Master of Santiago was a member of the Pacheco (Villena) family and a sworn enemy of the constable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo. Thus, his representation by a fool, whether at the Epiphany or at Mardi Gras, was an attack on the constable’s enemies. It would have been subversive indeed if the fool had announced himself as the constable or perhaps even as the king, but that kind of humor was not permissible in tightly controlled Jaén carnivals. As to disguises, masks, cross-dressing, and the like, they were certainly not restricted to the carnival season. The Epiphany festivity just referenced is a good example of carnivalesque elements sneaking into other celebrations throughout the annual festive calendar. During that Christ- mas season all kinds of entertainments and games, including a spirited juego de cañas, helped to mark Jesus’ birth. On the day after Christmas two hundred knights entered the city, half of them wearing false beards

16 Relaciones breves de autos públicos, 8–9. 17 Hechos del condestable, 98–100.

255 CHAPTER VIII and Moorish garments. They pretended to be the escort of the king of Morocco and of Muhammad himself. An exchange of letters between the constable and the feigned king of Morocco led to a juego de cañas between Christian knights and these disguised as Muslims. The valor of the Christians led the pretend king of Morocco to renounce his Muslim faith and to lead Muhammad to the Fountain of the Magdalen, There the Prophet and other false Moors were mockingly thrown into the water and baptized. Large distributions of food followed. Torches were lit throughout Jaén, and the running of the ring and other familiar events were held between Christmas and the Epiphany. The crowds, for we must not forget the importance of their participation in these performances, looked on, or so the chronicler tell us, with amazement. In particular, the chronicler noted that many women were in attendance, both at ground level and gazing down from their traditional posts at windows and on balconies and roofs. On the Epiphany, drums and trumpets accompanied a parade of twelve crowned knights with lances in their hands, followed as we have seen above, by the fool known as the Master of Santiago. Then came thirty torchbearers lighting the way for the constable, who marched in his most fashionable and costly garments. The usual running of the ring followed, prizes were given to those showing the greatest skill, the banquet took place, and other events were held, all of which fit into the pattern of diversions, carnivalesque elements, martial games, displays of lights and music that run as a constant pattern through late medieval and early modern festivals. But each festival called as well for special performances closely linked to the specific feast being celebrated. During Jaén’s celebration of the Epiphany, three knights dressed as the Magi followed a star suspended on a string over the streets to the constable’s lodgings. There they reenacted the adoration of the Magi, while the constable’s wife and his mother flanked the Virgin and Child. Dancing followed.18

FOOD FIGHTS AND ARTIFICIAL STRUCTURES The food fight that marked the conclusion of the 1463 Carnestolendas in Jaén, outrageous though it might seem to us, was also not a unique event. There are precedents both in Jaén’s festive tradition and in other carnivalesque celebrations in late medieval and early modern Iberia. Nor was the battle of the pumpkins altogether unusual. And the same could be said of the fantastic constructions, the artificial castles and the like that formed an important component of all these celebrations. Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s return to Jaén from a pious visit to the monastery of

18 Ibid., 71–72.

256 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI Guadalupe in 1461 prompted a whole cycle of festivities, all the more so as his entry into the city coincided with Easter week. On Easter Monday, a day celebrated in Europe to this date with carnivalesque events, a prolonged battle of eggs took place as a cart, manned by gardeners and with an artificial tower built upon it, besieged a real tower defended by the constable. The chronicles, in what must certainly be an exaggeration, describe a battle in which between nine and ten thousand boiled eggs were employed as projectiles. On succeeding days, the constable led many of Jaén’s inhabitants to the fields outside the city. There a lavish banquet was served to all. Bear baiting and an elaborate joust melded popular and elite themes in celebration and reaffirmation of the constable’s largesse and power.19 One year after the carnival celebration we have just described, Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo entertained the population of Jaén with more or less the same performances. The running of the ring (sortija)—”and there were no lack of fools or buffoons” wishing to do so—mummers’ dances, and the obligatory dancing display by the constable and his wife were followed by an elaborate tournament featuring the gardeners of Jaén, armed once again with pumpkins. The night was illumined, as always, by innumerable bonfires and torches, and the festivities ended with the usual distribution of food. Here the chronicler provides an important clue, revealing that the order or script for the Carnival celebrations and the events held in 1463 and 1464 followed the same pattern as in other years. The chronicle also noted that, in case of rain, the feast was to be partially held indoors.20

READING THE MEDIEVAL CARNIVAL Before proceeding to early modern Carnival celebrations, it may be useful to offer a few comments on the salient aspects of the medieval Carni- val, emphasizing those areas in which it differed from early modern descriptions of carnivalesque activities. Clearly, the anonymous chronicler of Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s feasts in Jaén—and most of his narrative is concerned with the descriptions of celebrations and the garments worn by the constable and his entourage—saw festivities as reaffirmations of the constable’s magnificence and power. This is quite different from Bakhtin’s paradigmatic descriptions of the medieval Carnival. These literary representations (certainly those in the constable’s chronicle), so abundant in this period, may very well obscure a far more spontaneous and gritty popular Carnival à la Bakhtin, which went unreported. We

19 Ibid., 164–70. 20 Ibid., 162–64.

257 CHAPTER VIII may either never know or only be able to speculate in the most tentative manner what truly happened. Perhaps we may read hints of the subversive potential of the medieval Carnival in those known instances when Carnival turned into a riot or into a rebellion, à la Romans, or in fictional accounts of carnivalesque ribaldry such as we read in Victor Hugo’s NotreDamedeParis While Hugo’s medieval Carnival had a very definite edge and a subversive quality, it is also interesting to note, just as an aside, that Dumas’ description of the Roman carnival, in spite of the bandits lurking in its margins, shows us a fairly tame, upper-class affair.21 What we should give up immediately is any idea of the autonomy of carnivalesque forms from other festive event, as well as the notion that Carnival was not subject to manipulation by those in high places. Not only was it carefully plotted to be maximally entertaining and to buttress the authority of those sponsoring and paying for the feast, but, as rendered in these literary descriptions, it appropriated elements from, and was itself appropriated by, other festive cycles. Hugo’s romantic rendering of fifteenth-century Paris begins with a maypole and bonfires on the Feast of the Epiphany. His description is not too different from those we find in late medieval narratives that conflate all manner of feasts into a plurality of performances. Although the days leading to Ash Wednesday and, above all, Mardi Gras, called for special displays, carnivalesque themes were confidently borrowed to add a welcome lightness to more serious or more elite celebrations. Medieval carnivalesque themes served to add a popular touch, and thus as a heuristic method of integrating the lower social orders into well-planned festive cycles. At the same time, the dominant orders of society, through the ubiquitous jousts, reed-spear games, the running of the ring, elaborate garments, and lively horses reasserted their superiority and reinforced the hierarchical order of society. Unlike royal and princely entries and visits that often served as sites of contestation, the medieval Carnival, carefully crafted as it was, delivered two powerful and overlapping messages: 1) this is for you (for those below), for your entertainment, to fill your belly, to sate your hunger; and 2) we, or in the case of Jaén, the constable, are the ones who organize it and pay for it. Be grateful, be obedient. Of course, though this may have been the intent, it seldom worked to per- fection. Nothing ever does. Jaén broke into rebellion soon after the splendid Carnivals sponsored by the constable. He, in the end, paid with his

21 For Romans, see note 4. See also Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, rev. trans. Catherine Liu (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), Book 1, chapters 1, 2, et passim; Alexander Dumas, The Count of Montecristo, trans. Robin Buss (London: Pen- guin Books, 2003), 395–413.

258 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI life. Zaragoza’s entertaining feasts in 1585 did not prevent very serious noble and popular unrest from breaking out seven years afterwards. There was a limit to what could be accomplished by these performances. There was more about them that was ephemeral than wasted food and artificial castles. To paraphrase the beautiful lyrics of a Brazilian bossa nova song, closely associated with carnival, “Sadness has no end, happiness does.” Tristesa non ten fin, felicidade sim. The reiterative nature of these carefully crafted calendrical celebrations, Christmas, Easter, Carnival, with their overlapping elements provided the common people with a temporary release from their daily toil. There was seldom resistance or subversion to be found in these carefully scripted performances of the powerful. In Jaén, as the Infante Don En- rique had done in Valladolid in 1428, the constable, his wife, close rela- tives, and entourage danced in public, thus participating not only in those festive forms from which the commons were excluded (the jousts, the juego de cañas, the running of the ring), but also, in actual physical proximity to the commons, displayed their gentilesse, their finery, and their bonhomie. Although they sat on stages to eat, they did so, at least during Carnival, in the presence of, and in contact with, the crowd of commoners who filled the squares of Jaén, and the windows and roofs overlooking the plaza. By Philip II’s time, this had dramatically altered. Although the young prince gladly participated in chivalrous games, his banquets were always restricted to his intimates, the highest status members of the court. At times, in fact, Philip ate alone, as he did in Milan while a banquet was held next door.22 The Duke of Savoy may have mixed with the Car- nival crowds in Barcelona, but this was not where early modern Spanish monarchs wanted to be. More and more, they withdrew, placing ever- greater distances between themselves and those they ruled. I will have a great deal more to say about this below, but I want to make the distinction now, while we have fresh in our minds the image of Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo dancing gently with his wife among his subjects. Fi- nally, although I have noted this before, it is worth remarking once more on the marginal role of churchmen qua religious figures in these performances. Whether because the chronicles purposely ignore them—in the case of Jaén this may have resulted directly from the antagonism between the constable and the bishop—or because high church dignitaries were counted among aristocrats rather than as ecclesiastics, it would seem that they added nothing of the sacred to what were essentially secular displays.

22 Calvete de Estrella, El felicísimo viaje I, 85.

259 CHAPTER VIII

THE EARLY MODERN CARNIVAL In Henry Cock’s description of Philip II’s long journey to his eastern kingdoms in 1585, the narrator makes a clear distinction—within what was essentially a dismissive appraisal of the Spanish celebrations of Carni- val—between the way in which the dominant classes celebrated the feast and the festive activities of the gente baxa (literally “the low,” but meaning the common people). From March 3rd to the 6th, Zaragoza and other European cities and towns celebrated Carnestolendas. Cock implies that the Spanish manner of celebration differed from what he had experienced elsewhere. “It was the custom in Spain,” he writes of what he witnessed on the streets of Zaragoza in early March of 1585, “for the well-to-do to walk the streets with masks on their faces, reciting couplets and other humorous saying, and throwing eggs filled with perfumes to the young ladies gazing down from their windows.”23 Cock’s description turns Car- nival into a courtly game, though one still well within the parameters Caro Baroja outlines of a typical Carnival. The flirting between revelers and young maidens, made even more transgressive by the use of masks, provoked Cock’s displeasure: . . . because this is the greatest inclination of the people of this land (Spain), who are too desirous of luxuria (lustful things), and thus removing every restraint they go these three days (the days of Carnival), whether on horseback or on foot, declaiming such couplets as they know in hopes of being rewarded by the ladies for their poetry.24 In a post-Trent world, the serious-minded Flemish archer—who was after all also a papal protonotary—reduced the Spanish carnival to an un- restrained and lustful love feast. Although all carnivals feed from an inherent sensuality, Cock here follows a long tradition of foreign travelers in Spain for whom, among their many charges against the natives, lust was always a favorite. Turning to the lower order, that is to say to male and female servants, Cock reports that they went around throwing flour in one another’s faces, or snowballs (if there was any snow on the ground) or oranges, the latter “mostly in Andalucia where there are a lot of oranges.” Cock adds that in some parts of Spain, as he had witnessed in Salamanca, there were street spectacles—by which I assume he meant music, dancing, and jocular skits.25

23 Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 38. 24 Idem. 25 On pejorative foreign views of Spain in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, see my article, “Representación: Castilla, los castellanos y el Nuevo Mundo a

260 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI Meanwhile, the Duke of Savoy was in Barcelona, donning his mask for Carnestolendas, riding thought the streets of the city in the company of other high noblemen and hurling oranges to young ladies perched in their windows. Of course in describing the Duke of Savoy’s behavior— which he must have heard about at secondhand—Cock makes no critical remarks. The important point to be gathered from this short but revealing description is that Cock reflected quite consciously on the growing gulf dividing the aristocratic and the well-to-do from the poor in their manner of celebrating Carnival. Gone was the inclusiveness of Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s Carnival celebrations in early 1460s Jaén. There, although differences in rank were carefully observed by restricting participation in martial games and theatrical representations to the nobility, high and low shared a space and ate together, after a fashion. There was none of that in the streets of Zaragoza or Barcelona. In fact, the events in those cities call to mind far more Dumas’ description of the Roman Car- nival in his TheCountofMontecristo than medieval precedents. Those on top sang amorous couplets, threw eggs filled with perfumes and engaged in risky flirtations; the “people” just threw flour in each others’ faces. They may have been walking and riding in the same streets, for all practical purposes they populated two different universes.26 This removal of the powerful from the popular world of Carnival, if not physically at least in terms of festive forms, is most evident in the celebration of Madrid’s 1637 Carnestolendas. According to the anonymous chronicler who described the events as part of a larger narrative of the Spanish monarchy, the festivities celebrated in Philip IV’s court that year surpassed, in the chronicler’s sycophantic and exaggerated rhetoric, those ever held by any European court. On Carnival Sunday, while the king and queen, foreign ambassadors, and royal councilors looked down from high windows in the facade of the royal palace, the main square filled with Madrid’s citizens, all of whom were required to wear masks to be admitted into the square—a fact that implies some careful policing of the event. Three carts came into the square and paraded in front of the king’s balcony. The first was a float built as a galley and crowded with musicians playing “sweet” music. The musicians and dancers were part of the re- nowned Carnestolendas de Barcelona, pointing to the unique skills of Barcelona musicians and dancers. (There are many references to performances “in the manner of Barcelona.”) The float was surrounded by masked riders on horseback with “extraordinary figures and inventions, finales de la edad media y principios de la moderna,” inHistoria a debate. Medieval (San- tiago de Compostela, 1995): 63–77. 26 See Cock, Relación del viaje (1585), 38–41 and note 21.

261 CHAPTER VIII and with many servants who carried amazing figures and displays.”27 After the first float had made its circuit, a second entered the square with great clamor. This float carried a representation of all the people of the Indies (America), dressed in their regional customs and described in a Said-like Orientalist fashion as luxurious and bizarre: “because since they came from the Indies, the float had to be rich.” It too was accompanied by a large contingent of masked men on horseback or on foot, carrying mannequins (peleles) and other festive displays. Then, the third float entered, with music and a diversity of other inventions. The celebrations continued into the afternoon, with dances performed by a group especially brought to the palace for the occasion. We hear from the chronicler that the city of Madrid held a great feast for the king in the city proper on Mardi Gras, but he provides no description of this event.28 This particular seventeenth-century account removes festive carnival performances one step further from those played out in Zaragoza and Barcelona’s streets in 1585. The king, queen, ambassadors, and court looked down from a balcony high above the crowd of masked revelers. Some sort of guard or gatekeeper must have prevented unmasked celebrants—and most probably all those who were unsuitably dressed or of obviously vulgar demeanor—from entering the palace’s front courtyard. These new forms of emplotting Carnival remind me of my youth in La Habana, Cuba. Carnival was also an important event there in pre- revolutionary years, and the manner in which it was celebrated was most probably partly appropriated from its Spanish roots. In a country where Catholicism had imposed, at best, a very thin veneer over the island’s African deities with their inherent sexuality, Carnival had always the potential to awaken misrule. On evenings during the celebrations, well- organized groups paraded through the streets wearing fantastic disguises, while vibrant music played, and alcohol flowed freely. People followed the groups they favored, dancing and drinking as they went. Scantily dressed revelers added to the almost subversive quality of the event, though always there was watchful police surveillance and a previously scripted plot was followed. On the afternoon of Carnival Sunday, elaborate floats paraded down the main street of La Habana, between bleachers. There sat the bourgeoisie, mostly whites, while the previous evening’s revelers had been mostly black. The Sunday observers, gazing placidly from their limited-access bleachers, launched streamers at the passing floats, in what was a reassertion of their place and standing. The Carnival parade in the

27 Relaciones breves de actos públicos en Madrid, 450. 28 Ibid., 450–51.

262 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI courtyard of the Retiro Palace more than three hundred years earlier was not so very different. Carnival had been emasculated. There are many other examples of Carnivals so tightly scripted as to suffocate any popular spontaneity and any hope for subversion. Here I wish to conclude this section with two different accounts of carnivalesque events. I have already discussed these festivities to some extent in a previous book, but it may be useful to revisit them in a broader context. In 1638, the Carnival cycle began with masked revelers and entertainment in the palace of the Buen Retiro. On Carnival Monday, there was a masque, acted by six men and six women, followed by a comedic representation. The description of this comedy skit, published long ago in the Memorial Histórico Español, informs us that important ecclesiastics were in attendance at the special invitation of the countess of Olivares, the wife of the count-duke of Olivares, Philip IV’s powerful minister. On Mardi Gras, as was the custom, the king and his court traveled the short distance between the Retiro and Madrid’s center to attend the city’s official festivities. We are not told what was the nature of the Carnival celebrations sponsored by the municipal officials, except that they had become an annual tradition and so were probably tame enough to allow for royal attendance. They may have included the burial of the sardine, a Madrid tradition revived around twenty-five years ago and symbolic of the struggle between Carnality and Lent, as well as other celebrations such as we saw in Zaragoza and Barcelona a century earlier and as Caro Baroja outlined in his typology. We also know that the official municipal festivities were held during the day; thus removing the cover of night that would have allowed for illicit behavior, since the court returned to the palace of the Buen Retiro late that day and celebrated its own Mardi Gras through the performance of a picaresque skit. The powerful count-duke of Oliva- res took one of the acting parts, as did other court members. The ribald skit presented an old and ugly (de muy mala cara) servant dressed as a bride, engaging in a fake wedding with one of the royal buffoons in “ridiculous and entertaining costumes.” The anonymous account emphasized that there was not much harm in this, as it was performed in the privacy of the court, among the courtiers, and royal servants.29 Except for the cross-dressing, so obviously comedic as to remove any threat of subversion, and the flaunting of the sacrament of marriage, this was as pathetic a carnivalesque performance as one could find. As night fell, the court was safely at home in the Buen Retiro. The powerful no longer mixed with urban crowds in revelry. If there was any popular cel-

29 Memorial histórico español, 49 vols. (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1835– 1948), 14: 336–38. Hereafter MHE. I discuss this event in my Spanish Society, 138.

263 CHAPTER VIII ebration, it was ignored by the chronicler. He wrote about what he thought important in these carnivalesque festivities, and what he thought important was limited to the participation of the members of the court. A note of caution is necessary here. The paucity of descriptions of popular celebrations and, specifically, of the Carnival activities of the common people does not mean that they did not take place. Although, as I have argued before, I do not fully agree with the existence of an autonomous carnival à la Bakhtin, there is no question but that there were many breaches of the official script. Whether as communal breaks from the rules that regulated Carnival and other festive events, or individual acts of defiance that mocked what was most sacred—and in doing so challenged royal authority—these lapses from protocol did happen. They did not emerge into the world of the written word, however, unless their nature was so transgressive or perceived as so transgressive that it attracted the attention of the authorities. Blasphemous oaths, taking the name of the Lord in vain, and impious references to the Virgin and her progeny— what Bakhtin called the rough speech of the marketplace—were quite common in Spain and drew the constant attention of the Inquisition. This discussion however takes us away from the main focus of the chapter. Popular forms of speech that may have played a role in resistance are deserving of careful study. This book is of course not the place for that. I mention them only briefly, because I do not wish to leave the reader with the impression that what we are dealing with here is a docile population, that the taming of Carnival meant the taming of the people as well. After all, a mere two years after the cross-dressing and feigned exchange of marriage vows at the palace of the Buen Retiro in 1638, parts of the Spanish realms (Portugal and Catalonia above all) rose in rebellion against the politics of Philip IV and Olivares. The Catalans, as always, led the way, and the Principality temporarily seceded. So did Portugal, permanently. Unrest in Andalucía and elsewhere shook the foundations of the Spanish monarchy and, in just a few years, turned an empire that had held hegemony throughout most of the world for more than a century and a half into a second-rate European power. The potential for resistance that was ever-present in Carnival could never be truly tamed and could emerge in most unexpected fashion.30 I have already quoted Caro Baroja as to an event that took place in Mérida (Extremadura). It was connected with the local Carnival celebrations of the year 1642, two years after the revolt of the Catalans. An al-

30 On a partial reconstruction of the revolts that occurred in 1640, see John H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598–1640) (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1st paperback edition, 1984); and his Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 316–82.

264 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI most completely naked man with a paper crown on his head, a scepter in his hand, a sword on his belt, and a decorative chain around his neck marched through the streets of Mérida around ten o’clock in the evening. He was preceded by two men with lit torches and followed by another two men, also carrying torches. A group of musicians followed playing trumpets and clarinets to announce his progression through the city, but the music was such as to give the impression that the Corpus Christi (the Host) was making its way to someone on the verge of death. When women flocked to their windows and balconies to worship the consecrated host, the naked man turned towards them and exposed his geni- tals, while his companions shouted obscenities. This they did even to the wife of the Viceroy. The chronicler later reported that the naked man, guilty of sexual and social misconduct and, even more serious, of the sac- rilege of impersonating the consecrated host, fell violently ill and was, at the time of writing, close to death. His partners in crime, a motley crew of servants and a few well-to-do young men, were imprisoned in a room and put on a diet of bread and water. Worse things, I am sure, awaited them.31 There are lessons to be learned from this performance, even if it was anything but typical. First, Carnival (and carnivalesque ribaldry), as tamed as it may have been by political power, always retained its subversive potential. In this case, the naked performance challenged several agendas in one wide sweep: sexuality, religion, and political power. The naked man, his phallic display, and the sexual verbal play (insults and sexual harassment may be a more precise description) violated the en- forced modesty and strict sexual mores of early modern Spain, where elite women were often restricted to the household. His paper crown was an insult to what was, in 1642, after the secession of Portugal and Catalo- nia and the crushing defeats in central and northern Europe, an unstable monarchy. Lastly, representing himself as the consecrated Host, was a very serious transgression indeed in the morbid religious atmosphere of mid-seventeenth-century Spain. At court, in the intimacy of the royal chambers, a small group of courtiers, as we saw above, could get away with cross-dressing and play-acting, but in the streets, the agents of the Inquisition and the Crown were ever vigilant—and dangerous. The fact that the malefactor in this story impersonated the body of Christ is, in addition to being a grievous offense, also a reminder to us of the intimate links between Carnival and the elaborate processions of the Corpus Christi in the Spanish imaginary. To those links we now turn.

31 MHE, 16, 267–69, as paraphrased in Caro Baroja’s El carnaval. This section, as is much of the discussion of Carnival, follows closely my Spanish Society, chapter 5.

265 CHAPTER VIII

The Festivities of the Corpus Christi in Spain In Pere Joan Comes’ long account of festive events in Barcelona, the Libre de algunes coses asanyladas succehides en Barcelona y en altres partes (1583) or (Book of some notable things taking place in Barcelona and other places), a text that I have mined before for information on royal entries and the royal circuit through the city, there are two lengthy entries describing the order of the Corpus Christi procession. The first one, dating from the late fifteenth century, describes the processional order from the cathedral to the Lotja, or merchants’ guild. The account takes over six pages in the printed edition, meticulously describing each rank in the procession from the trumpets that led the solemn perambulation of the body of Christ through the streets of the city, followed by the banner of St. Eulalia, the patroness of Barcelona—a banner we have already seen proudly displayed in royal entries in a previous chapter—to the two wild men (or actors representing wild men) who also had a place in Corpus processions. Armed with staffs these two wild men kept the crowds that followed the procession at bay, preventing them from disrupting the careful order of the parade. Altogether, it is possible to identify 161 different ranks of participants, marching in hierarchical order, with crowds joining in behind the ordered ranks. The ranks themselves were divided into eleven distinct groups. Each group consisted of from five to a maximum of twenty- two ranks. The clerical group, to give one example, included five ranks: a) scholars and beneficiaries of parochial churches; b) the friars of our Lady of Mercy, walking two abreast; c) the friars of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel on the right and Augustinians on the left; d) the Dominicans marching on the right side of the procession, with the Franciscans to their left; and e) the cathedral canons and other diocesan clergy, closing this particular group. Representations of sacred history followed, in the form of theatrical skits and tableaux vivants, sponsored by the cathedral. There were twenty-two in all, and they followed a clear chronological sequence, from the opening tableau of Moses and Aaron to other worthy prophets and scenes of the Old Testament, then on to St. John the Baptist, the Annunciation, the three Magi (each of them riding by himself as a distinct rank in the parade) to the concluding act (no. 22) of twelve angels chanting lauds to the Corpus Christi.32 The order in which the groups appeared in the procession tells us a great deal about the social coding inherent in the Corpus Christi celebra-

32 Comes, Libredealgunescosesasanyalades, 200ff. Numerous ordinances for the celebrations of the Corpus Christi processions in Barcelona are also found in the Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona I, 22–24, 34–39, et passim.

266 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI tion and its place within Spanish festive traditions. The first group opened the procession, as already noted, with trumpets, the banner of St. Eulalia, the cathedral clergy and the clergy of the most important city parishes, all marching in strict hierarchical order. The second group included eleven ranks carrying lit torches or large candles. They were led, once again, by those representing the cathedral, lined up on the right of the processional order, and as many as forty representatives of the city government. They were followed by torches and/or large candles carried by guild and confraternities’ members. Then came the crosses of the cathedral and churches in twelve separate ranks, followed by the five ranks described above, opening the way for six different groups of theatrical representations sponsored by the cathedral, churches, and guilds. One should note that the first skit, performed on the top of a cart or float, represented the Creation of the world, while the second featured Hell, Lucifer, four devils, and St. Mi- chael’s dragon (la tarasca). The representation then continued with a chronological (and didactic) account of sacred history, including some entertaining carnivalesque representations, such as a battle between angels and devils (as many as twenty-four of the latter). St. Michael and twenty angels with unsheathed swords who battled (fallen) angels, while King David and Goliath also joined in the fray. The final group consisted of the apostles, once again marching in hierarchical order, with St. Peter and St. Paul leading and building expectations toward the culminating moment of the procession: the display of the elaborate reliquary (custodia) in which the Corpus Christi rested. After the apostles came young people dressed as angels playing musical instruments. The next rank included other young people carrying large white candles, and just preceding the reliquary came singers. Finally there came the gospel writers, St. Luke and St. John on the right and St. Mark and St. Matthew on the left, carrying the palio under which the living presence of Christ perambulated through the streets of Barcelona, followed by the bishop and his ministers with more white candles, more angels and devils, and finally the two wild men with their staffs closed the ritual procession. And then came the people.33 If I have spent so much time summarizing Pere Joan Comes’ long account of the Corpus Christi procession in late fifteenth-century Barcelona—and confusing you thoroughly as to the exact order of the procession—it is because his simple outline of the procession order and his list of participants, information that needed to be inscribed in memory, permits us to see to what an extent the Corpus Christi procession had already become a central focus for festive traditions in the late Middle Ages. A procession such as this re-

33 Idem.

267 CHAPTER VIII quired extensive planning and manpower, and a considerable fiscal commitment. Later we may have glimpses of the municipal contributions to these events, but, at present, it is enough to note the sheer number of participants, the clearly delineated ranks, and the strict order that was maintained. It could easily have required most of the day to accomplish this one procession. It was a cathartic as well as signal demonstration of the power of church and municipality to mobilize the population. Above all, the Corpus Christi was a veritable moving lesson in sacred history. The skits, tableaux vivants, and other representations required elaborate costumes to make the lessons they taught and the sacred stories they told attractive and entertaining. The presences of devils and the ubiquitous battles between good and evil contributed a carnivalesque element, a jocular flourish to what must have been, as we know from reports of Corpus Christi celebrations elsewhere, a highly emotional day. I will have a great deal to say later about Pere Juan Comes’ summary and the contrast between Corpus Christi celebrations in the late fifteenth and his sixteenth- century description, but at present, the reader might be wondering what Corpus Christi was all about. What was the historical significance of this festive tradition in late medieval and early modern Spain?

ORIGINS OF THE CORPUS AND ITS HISTORY IN SPAIN As calendrical and liturgical feasts go, the celebration of the Corpus Christi with its elaborate processions was a relative latecomer. Although the genesis of the worship of the body of Christ may lie in part in female mystics’ preoccupation with their bodies, food, and the Eucharist— themes brilliantly discussed by Caroline Bynum more than two decades ago—its beginnings are usually connected to the visions of Juliana of Liège, a thirteenth-century Augustinian nun, whose vigorous lobbying for the adoration of the Host led to the first celebration of the feast in Liège in 1246. Less than two decades afterwards, claims of a miraculous bleeding Host led to a papal proclamation establishing the celebration of the Corpus Christi as an annual holiday to be celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. A moveable feast, the Corpus Christi devotion relates to Holy Thursday and Jesus’ words to his disciples at the Last Supper in which he encourages them to eat the bread and drink the wine of the Paschal meal as his redemptive body and blood.34

34 On the history and meaning of the Corpus Christi, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); the origins of the Corpus and its development in the late Middle Ages is summarized in a short but comprehensive account by Vicente Lleó Cañal, Fiesta grande: El Corpus Christi en la historia de Sevilla (Seville: Biblioteca de Temas Sevillanos, 1980), 9–21. For the relationship between female devotion, the Eucharist, and food, see the magisterial book by

268 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI The adoration of the Host or body of Christ spread slowly to other parts of Europe. Several papal interventions were required to ensure its survival during the early fourteenth century, but when Pope John XXII linked the festivity to a solemn procession in 1317, he guaranteed its survival as a central feast of the church and a repository of complex juxtapositions of popular devotions and revelry.35 By the sixteenth century the festivity had acquired an important theological aspect as well, as its pomp and displays reiterated the significance of the Host (and thus of transubstantiation) in the face of the Protestant denial or downplaying of this most sacred Catholic ritual. Beyond its liturgical power, the celebrations of the Corpus Christi gained, after Luther’s break with the Catholic Church, an important political component that would foster more and more elaborate displays. Commanding the participation of the population in the celebration of, as the Council of Trent dictated, the triumph of Truth over Heresy, Corpus Christi processions reiterated the alliance between church and state and the ideology of Counter-Reformation Europe.36 Vicente Lleó Cañal, in his delightful short monograph on the feast of the Corpus Christi in Seville, as well as other historians of the celebration in Spain, have argued that the first formal celebrations took place in the Crown of Aragon, first in Barcelona between 1319 and 1322, and then spreading to other cities in Catalonia and Valencia (1348–1355) in the succeeding decades. There are, to be sure, few descriptions of Corpus Christi processions until the late fifteenth century. Nonetheless, the full and complex outline of the order of the procession in late medieval Bar- celona strongly suggests that the ceremonies had been evolving for quite a while, as civic and religious authorities sought to make the procession an annual and recognizable instrument of civic and religious devotion.37

Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medi- eval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), and her Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 35 Lleó Cañal, Fiesta grande, 19. 36 Idem. 37 One of the most valuable contributions, to be glossed below, is that of Francis George Very, The Spanish Corpus Christi Procession: A Literary and Folkloric Study (Valen- cia: Tipografía Moderna, 1962), 3–9; see also Miguel Garrido Atienza, Lasfiestasdel Corpus (Granada: Imprenta de D. José López Guevara, 1889), 5–32. He describes the evolution of the feast of the Corpus Christi in Spain and Granada in particular; Luis Rubio García, La procesión del Corpus en el siglo XV en Murcia y religiosidad medieval (Mur- cia: Academia Alfonso X el Sabio, 1983); Nieves de Hoyos Sancho, LasfiestasdelCorpus Christi (Madrid: Publicaciones españolas, 1963), 3–7 for the connection of the feast to the autos sacramentales. See also Julián de Chía, La festividad del Corpus en Gerona. Noticias

269 CHAPTER VIII

MUTABILITY AND STRUCTURE OF THE CORPUS: AN INCLUSIVE FESTIVAL? The symbolic valence of all forms of ritual performance—and Corpus Christi processions were highly ritualized events—depend to a large extent on reiteration. It is through repetition that what is new becomes familiar, and then traditional. The seemingly repetitive nature of the Cor- pus Christi performance; that is, the annual perambulation of the Host thought the streets of Spanish and other European cities, the order of the procession, the competition of ecclesiastical establishments, civic authorities, and crafts to sponsor the most lavish or artistic representations, all these elements combined to create a sense of ownership and popular awe. These seemingly contradictory emotions were very much in tune with the parallel phenomenon of the king’s gradual withdrawal from popular spectacles and with the new brand of Catholic religiosity that emerged after the Council of Trent. This of course did not mean that the Corpus Christi processions and celebrations were immutable. Ritual performance is always to some degree flexible. Pere Joan Comes’s description of the Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona in the second half of the sixteenth century seems on the surface quite similar to that of almost a century before, but it was not. Subtle but important changes had taken hold. The festivities had become far more elaborate, as the auto sacramental (a type of theatrical play centered on the sacrament) came to occupy greater and greater importance, until its zenith in the seventeenth century with Calderón de la Barca’s rightly famous autos.38 The order in which the parishes marched in the procession had changed. The church of St. Ana’s importance in the ceremonial ranking of ecclesiastical institutions had diminished. A new parish, that of St. Mi- chael, was added. Trades were ranked in a different order, and the confraternity of St. James of the Blacks (St. Jaime dels negres) now appeared among the celebrants, reflecting the freed African population of Barce- lona. The savages had disappeared, and the people could now follow the históricas acerca de esta festividad desde el siglo XIV hasta nuestros días, 2nd ed. (Gerona: Im- prenta y librería de Paciano Torres, 1895), 1–63. 38 On the general European context for the reforms of the Council of Trent, see Ce- sare Mozzarelli e Danilo Zardin, eds., Tempi del Concilio: religione, cultura e societá nell’Europa tridentina (Roma: Bulzoni editore, 1997); for popular beliefs in Spain at the height of Corpus popularity and on the wake of Trent, see William A. Christian, Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); for Calderón de la Barca’s autos, see W. F. Hunter, ed., El Auto sacramental de la universal redempción (Exeter (UK): University of Exeter, 1976) and I. Arellano et al., eds., Divinas y humanas letras: doctrina y poesía en los Autos sacramentales de Calderón. Actas del congreso internacional (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 1997).

270 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI body of Christ without the wild men (a medieval trope) as a barrier. Dragons, devils, and theatrical skits remained.39 On June 15, 1623, the feast of the Corpus Christi coincided with the festivities for the wedding of Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales. This conflation of festive and religious events called for an especially lavish procession and displays. At Madrid’s Church of the Almudena, the members of the royal councils filled the different chapels off the side naves of the church, while the king, grandees, and special chaplains presided over the opening of the Corpus ceremonies from the main altar. The order of the procession resembled that of the Corpus feast in Barcelona, and, to a certain extent, that of the processions in honor of Philip in Barcelona and Zaragoza in 1564 and 1585. This resemblance, to use one of Foucault’s favorite arguments in The Order of Things, serves as a vivid reminder of the ideological underpinnings of these events and the conflation of the sacred and the secular in their performance. But, as always, similitude extended only so far. In 1623 Madrid, there were significant departures as more social groups, diverse constituencies, and new festive themes were subsumed into the Corpus celebration. In the 1623 procession, drums and wind instruments opened the way, followed by orphaned or abandoned children—most probably the inmates of a charitable institution—making noises by banging on clay pots filled with water (a clear carnivalesque trope). As in Barcelona, the banners and crosses of the parishes followed. In the next rank came the mendicant orders and representatives of all the other monastic institutions in Madrid, including the Je- suits. The procession continued with the cross from the Almudena and an entire group comprised of the clergy of the military orders, the members of the different royal councils, four priests with censers, the whole choir of the Royal Chapel singing Tantum Ergo, three chaplains (one of them carrying the archbishop’s staff), the king’s servants with torches, and the Corpus Christi itself carried in a small temple of gold and silver under a palio held high by civic authorities. Directly behind the consecrated Host came Philip IV, a whole cohort of bishops, ambassadors, grandees, and the count-duke of Olivares, with the Spanish and German guards and the royal archers’ guard (the same in which Cock served?) closing the parade.40 Indeed much had changed from Comes’ earlier description, reaffirming the idea that each festival was, to a certain extent, sui generis, reflecting local conditions and the changing times. Direct royal participation in

39 Comes, Libredealgunescosesasanyalades, 634ff. 40 de Hoyos Sancho, Las fiestas del Corpus Christi, 10–11.

271 CHAPTER VIII Madrid’s festivities may have influenced the inclusion or exclusion of certain groups. Absent here are the guilds and crafts with their elaborate theatrical representations. Barcelona had a long and vigorous artisanal tradition; Madrid did not. This particular Corpus procession, briefly paraphrased above, included a few civic representatives carrying the palio. It brought together, most of all, ecclesiastical and royal dignitaries in a strong reaffirmation of the unholy alliance of Crown and Church, now sanctified by the worship of the body of Christ. The people who once followed the procession, as they did in Barcelona in the late fifteenth century, have become passive spectators. We are told that they crowded the windows of the houses located along the route of the processions. Ele- gantly dressed, holding parties in their residences in the festive atmosphere that preceded the Corpus procession, they were now distant observers. Gone, too, were the carnivalesque elements, the devils and the fictional battles between angels and demons. The streets along the ceremonial route were decorated with tapestries and shaded from the sun by bright canopies. Each parish built altars along the way for small devotional stops, a practice not different from the similar short, pious short detours along the routes of the Good Friday processionals in Latin Amer- ica or in Catholic parishes in the U.S. In an anonymous description of the same Corpus celebration, the author describes the tarasca (the great serpent or dragon so ubiquitous in royal entries and Carnival), at least a hundred poor children, eight-years-old or younger, marching with blue cas- socks, green boughs in their hands, crowns of roses on their heads, and then he lists all the ranks, mostly ecclesiastics and royal officials, with the king, as noted above, closing the procession, while the Prince of Wales, a Protestant most surely, looked on from a high window, together with his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham.41 Madrid, of course, had known Corpus Christi celebrations in the late Middle Ages, long before it became the capital in 1561 and the permanent royal residence in the seventeenth century. In the late 1480s “city officials and nobles took turns, six persons on a side, carrying the canopy under which the Host was paraded through the town.”42 Members of the city oligarchy preceded the Corpus with lit torches. Unlike Barcelona around the same period—and in far less elaborate and organized fashion than in the capital of the Principality—Madrid’s ecclesiastics marched through the town in their best clerical garments. Behind them, the trades and artisanal confraternities followed (missing from the seventeenth-

41 Relaciones breves de actos públicos en Madrid, 213–14. 42 Ruiz, Spanish Society, 151. See note 10.

272 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI century procession). The members of the confraternity carried with them stages (some small ones on their backs and, later on, movable stages) on which skits or tableaux vivants were displayed depicting the mysteries of the Corpus, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, and hagiographi- cal subjects. And, lest we forget that nothing was really spontaneous, a fine of three thousandmaravedís (mrs.) was imposed on any confraternity that failed to join in, or contribute to, the entertainment. Those trade or artisanal associations too poor to organize such displays on their own were encouraged to pool their resources for a worthy display.43 Before 1492 and 1502, the dates when Jews and Muslims, respectively, were compelled to choose between conversion and expulsion, these religious minorities were compelled, as had been the case with craftsmen, to participate in the general celebration of this most central of Christian festivities. The same fine, three thousandmrs. was levied on communities that failed to make a showing. A 1481 document, cited by Angela Muñoz, ordered the Moors to bring out their juegos (games, entertainments, but here meaning also representations and dances). The Jews were also expected to participate with dances or to incur similar penalties. In this the Corpus Christi followed the long-established Spanish pattern of incorpo- rating religious minorities into important festivals. David Nirenberg has shown this at work in the Holy Week celebrations in the Crown of Ara- gon, and we have already seen it in the Infanta Doña Blanca’s entry into Briviesca.44 Jews and Muslims are not mentioned in Barcelona’s late medieval order of the Corpus celebration (the great pogroms of 1391 had cleared the city of Jews), and by the sixteenth and seventeenth century, they were, at least theoretically, no longer part of Spanish society. As the reader may remember, Judaizers, condemned by the Inquisition, marched in the ecclesiastical parade in honor of Philip II in 1585 Zaragoza. Clergy and tradesmen followed instead of preceding the body of Christ in Ma- drid. The opposite was true in Barcelona. One hundred and fifty years later, more or less, Madrid’s procession had been dramatically transformed, giving a central role to the king, the royal administration, and the military aristocracy.

43 Ibid., 151–52. See note 13. For the order of the Corpus procession in Granada, see Garrido Atienza, Las fiestas del Corpus, 108ff. 44 Ruiz, Spanish Society, 152, note 14. In Granada, as Garrido Atienza (Las fiestas del Corpus, 112) shows, guild and artisanal groups were also fined for being absent from the procession. On the compelled participation of religious minorities during the Holy Week celebrations, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 200–230.

273 CHAPTER VIII

THE CORPUS CHRISTI IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN VALENCIA, SEVILLE, AND GRANADA: ORGANIZING AND PAYING FOR THE FEAST It may be useful to provide two or three more examples of the manner in which the Corpus was celebrated throughout the different Spanish realms. In doing so we can draw in information from different cities on the peninsula to construct a somewhat impressionistic vision of what the celebrations may have been like, and far more important, gain some notion of their varied meanings. In the course of the transition from its late medieval format to its apogee in the early modern period, the Corpus slowly appropriated elements from other festive traditions. Ceremonial arches, recalling the triumphal arches built for royal entries, carnivalesque elements, and ludic displays, the highly hierarchical order of the procession, and the nefarious overlapping of civil authorities and the Church catapulted sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Corpus processions to a place of primacy in the festive calendar. As the celebration moved into the early modern period (and after the Protestant Reformation), the planning of the procession and of the skits and tableaux vivants enacted by local groups (parishes, confraternities, guilds, and the like) called for a higher level of organization and plotting. It also called for a significant outlay of funds. Committees, organized exclusively for these tasks, worked through the year, competing to outdo each other with grander displays. All of these efforts remained, as was to be expected, within the boundaries set by tradition and religious propriety.45 Civic authorities were expected to make substantial contributions to the feast. In Girona, the city paid close to sixty Spanish libras for the importation from Barcelona of two gigantic figures representing a dragon, la jacant, and for the construction (locally) of an equally large eagle to be displayed in the 1513 Corpus procession. Similar payments were made for the construction of a giant in 1518.46 In 1466, Murcia’s municipal authorities decided to vary the route of the Corpus procession every other year so as to give equal opportunity to different sections of the city and to the different local parishes.47 Stands were commissioned and paid for on a permanent basis by the authorities, while the city’s regidores reserved for themselves the honor (and obligation) of carrying the palio under which the Corpus processed through streets.48 Here we see, once again, how

45 See de Chía, La festividad del Corpus en Girona, 18–95; Lleó Cañal, Fiesta grande, 27– 28; see also note 38. 46 De Chía, La festividad del Corpus en Girona, 66–69. 47 Rubio García, La procesión del Corpus en el siglo XV en Murcia, 79. 48 Ibid., 80. Rubio García cites three documents to buttress the information included in his study.

274 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI municipal authorities could play both their religious role within the city, and at the same time their primary hegemonic role in relation to other groups within Murcia. And of course there were in all Corpus celebrations, as in Carnival and princely entries, distributions of food. In Mur- cia, and elsewhere, this cost a substantial sum. Among the items purchased for the Corpus meal in Murcia, the municipal council bought large amounts of bread (over 120 pounds), wine, a calf, thirty-six chickens, beef, bacon, fruits, and of course they incurred as well the expenses for preparing the food, and for the entertainment provided by musicians and jongleurs. All through the fifteenth century the council subsidized the procession, providing financial help to the cathedral to the amount of an additional 150 mrs. in 1435. In 1436, 1446, and 1450, the chapter requested and received a raise in municipal support to 200 mrs. to pay for juegos (games and festive displays).49

THE CORPUS CHRISTI IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN VALENCIA There was in the Corpus Christi celebration and, in some respects, also in the Inquisitorial trials a unity in matters of belief and ritual performances that Spain sorely lacked in the political arena. In Valencia, another of the great capitals of the Spanish realms, the Corpus Christi procession followed the general pattern already described, but perhaps because of the town’s Mediterranean setting and its distance from the center of political and religious power in far away Madrid, the festivities had an exuberance (by which I mean that there were more secular elements) that surpassed the processions in Madrid. Antoni Ariño in his excellent study, Festes, rituals i creences, pays close attention to the evolution of the Corpus Christi processions in Valencia from the fourteenth century to the present.50 According to Ariño, the procession evolved from a fairly egalitarian ritual in the 1330s—in which men and women, artisanal tradesmen, the well-to-do, and both seculars and ecclesiastics participated freely—to a complex cultural phenomenon. By 1425, social orders in the procession were ranked in a clear hierarchical order. The addition, in the course of the fifteenth century, of masked actors, music, theatrical representations, and carnivalesque figures introduced further complexities. In the long list of symbolic figures and characters represented, the sources for early fifteenth-century processions mention angels, devils, patriarchs (Noah and his ark, Jacob and his ladder), prophets, apostles, saints and virgins,

49 Ibid., 83–87. 50 Antoni Ariño, Festes, rituals i creences, Temes d’etnografia Valenciana, vol. 4, Joan F. Mira, ed. (Valencia, 1988).

275 CHAPTER VIII other characters (the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus, the Magi, etc.), as well as mythological and Biblical animals.51 An important component of the feast of the Corpus in Valencia were the entremeses (theatrical skits; roques in Valencian). In the procession of 1528, the entremeses included representations of the Last Supper, of Abra- ham’s sacrifice, of Hell, of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, of the Cru- cifixion, and of other equally edifying and/or lugubrious events. More- over, within each social rank participating in the Corpus celebrations, there were specific, well-defined hierarchies. Artisanal guilds or confraternities followed a well-regulated order of precedence. Canons of the cathedral and other ecclesiastics also marched in a pre-arranged order, which clearly signaled, to themselves and to those in attendance (almost the entire population of Valencia), the proper social ranking of each group or individual. The same attention to status was evident in the procession of royal and municipal officials, city oligarchs, and the nobility in residence.52 As early as 1416, the ruling elite (ecclesiastical as well as secular) of Valencia fixed the route of the procession to coincide precisely with the ceremonial route followed by kings on a first royal entry into the city. Thus, as in Madrid, Seville, and elsewhere, there was a convergence between religious and political festive performances. Both rituals, by repetition and consistency, ensured the social order. Moreover, as Ariño shows, the Corpus was not only a representation of Christ on earth; the feast functioned also as a powerful symbolic event, affirming the power of religion and the Crown on many levels: a) visually, by the great display of rich tapestries, rugs and banners, which provided an explosion of color within the city; b) to the sense of smell, by the profusion of flowers thrown from the balconies and windows at the passing of the consecrated host; c) through sound, by the continuous playing of music throughout the city. Should we be surprised then that in Madrid or Seville (where the feast of the Corpus reached unprecedented levels of frenzy), the population as a whole reacted with extreme forms of joy and devotion (tears, shouts, expressions of tenderness, etc.) at the sight of their living God? Antagonisms and violence were set aside, at least for a day.53

51 Ariño, Festes, rituals i creences, 365–74. 52 Ibid., 386, 395–96. 53 Ibid., 401–404. For Valencia, see also the classic study by Very, The Spanish Corpus Christi Procession, 3–109, with documents that illustrate the nature of the feast in Valencia.

276 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI

THE CORPUS IN SEVILLE Vicente Lleó’s enchanting short monograph on the Fiesta grande. El Cor- pus Christi en la historia de Sevilla links ludic traditions in Seville with the feast of the Corpus within a Bakhtinian paradigm. In summarizing one of the first written accounts of the Corpus Christi procession in the city (1454), Lleó describes how the procession’s expenses were shared between the cathedral chapter and the city council. In fact, as in other cities on the peninsula, a special commission was organized to plan the final order of the procession, the activities associated with the event, theatrical representations, and the like. Streets had to be cleaned and repaired for the greater ease of those carrying upon their shoulders the stage on which rested the body of Christ. The streets and the cathedral floor were covered with aromatic herbs. The important stops along the procession’s route and the streets through which the Corpus passed were protected from the bright Sevillian sun by canopies (as they are still today in To- ledo). In 1454 the procession opened with twelve young men carrying wax torches; others followed with censers and large silver candleholders. Four men, dressed as prophets, formed the next rank; twenty-seven children sang in a choir, some dressed as angels, to the music of two portable organs. The cathedral canons, carrying holy relics, came next, followed by “La Roca,” essentially a float upon which performers represented a tableau vivant, which, as Lleó describes it, showed the Virgin Mary, the four evangelists, St. Dominic, and St Francis. Next came three jongleurs. One of them made the sound of thunder, just as had happened in the feast of 1428, when the entourage of the Infante of Aragon, Don Juan, made the same kind of noise. The other two recited or sang poems in praise of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, as the Roma do with their saetas or poems during the Holy Week procession in present-day Seville. One additional and enchanting technical detail was added. The float had a cover in the form of a symbolic heaven that, in climactic moments, was opened by two children dressed as angels to reveal an effigy of God the Father. And then and only then came an Ark, a reference to the Ark of the Covenant on which the Holy Eucharist was displayed. The archbishop followed, then the nobility and city officials.54 As elaborate as this procession was, it could not compare to the elabo-

54 Lleó Cañal, Fiesta grande, 25–26. For Seville and the Corpus, see also the wonderful treatment of confraternities and festivals in Seville, with special attention to the celebrations of the Corpus Christi, in Susan V. Webster, ArtandRitualinGoldenAgeSpain: Se- villian Confraternities and the Processional Sculptures of Holy Week (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

277 CHAPTER VIII rate arrangements made in Barcelona around this same time. As noted earlier, the place of the crafts in Barcelona dictated different patterns of cultural, artistic, and religious representation in the parade, and, thus, far more elaborate and diverse theatrical performances. That said, the 1454 Sevillian Corpus procession, in terms of its elaborateness and lavishness, pales next to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments. By then, the Corpus feast had grown steadily. The guilds joined the procession and mythical and carnivalesque elements were added, above all the notable tarasca about which I will have something additional to say below. Giants, theatrical representations, local competition among parishes and groups to create ephemeral art—such as triumphal arches, castles, and sculptures—all these combined to turn Seville’s Corpus into a remarkable feast that left all other religious celebrations, including those of longer medieval ancestry in the shadows. Lleó, citing a manuscript account of 1594, relates that “the procession opened with the march of more than one thousand five hundred members of confraternities, plus more than four hundred and fifty monks, all of them followed by the parishes’ crosses.” All the participants carried lighted candles provided by the city council. The city also sponsored dances, theatrical representations, and the like, which ballooned the municipal contribution to 5,500 escudos, not a negligible sum at all. Lleó also provides sketches of elaborate processions in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even the twentieth century that further testify to the complexity of the Corpus celebration and its role in Seville’s cultural life. He examines, briefly but in detail, the theatrical representations that accompanied the Corpus procession and the street decorations prompted by competition between Seville’s neighborhoods that extended the festivities of the Corpus Christi to every corner of the city. Thus by the seventeenth century, the feast was drawing every segment of the population in its reaffirmation of the central tenet of Catholic belief.55

GRANADA The Corpus Christi celebrations came late to Granada. In Muslim hands until 1492, the city experienced its first Corpus procession in the early sixteenth century, by the direct order of the Catholic monarchs. Further examples of Granada’s Corpus Christi celebrations were collected by Garrido Atienza in the late nineteenth century. They raise the possibility that Hernando de Talavera, the first bishop of recently conquered Granada and a cleric quite sympathetic to the Muslims, encouraged

55 Lleó Cañal, Fiesta grande, 27–28.

278 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI Moorish dances (zambras) as part of the Corpus and of other religious festivities. In Granada, as elsewhere in Spain, neighborhood commis- sions and municipal and ecclesiastical institutions competed to make their contributions the ones “with the greatest display, and great fame (dexando fama)” in the celebration (referred in a document of the early eighteenth century simply as the Fiesta with a capital F). One can easily understand that these efforts to create ever more impressive displays of Granada’s religiosity (and at the same time first-rate entertainment) would have required a growing outlay of funds. From 400 to 600 ducats in 1600, the expenses for the Corpus rose to 2,000 ducats in 1618 and to 3,000 in 1630.56 By the early seventeenth century, the day of the Corpus itself was preceded by preaching in the cathedral and in the parishes throughout the city, exhorting the faithful to fasting and inner retrospection, while urg- ing them to avoid such worldly displays as coming to the procession on horseback. Between Trinity Sunday and the Thursday following, when the feast was celebrated, well-attended rehearsals of the theatrical representation (autos sacramentales), dances, and other forms of entertainment associated with the Corpus took place. Admission was very much in de- mand and usually monopolized by the oligarchy of the city. The excesses of these pre-Corpus festivities became so problematic that in the eighteenth century they were held mostly in ecclesiastical settings in an attempt to curtail dancing and other forms of licentious behavior. Grana- da’s Corpus also called, as was the case elsewhere, for the cleaning of the streets through which the Holy Eucharist was to pass. On the vigil of the Feast Day, fireworks, music, and dances were held all over the city, bringing Granada to life. Ephemeral and lavishly decorated triumphal arches, canopies, tapestries, temporary altars, and other decorations adorned streets, windows, and doors along the processional route. Distributions of food played an equally important role, joining the sacred with the material.57 In Granada, as elsewhere, the day of the Corpus was announced by the prolonged tolling of church bells and public cries, loudly proclaiming the beginning of the feast and the obligatory closing of all businesses and houses of prostitution. All flocked to windows or other vantage points to watch the procession, which began its slow progress through the city

56 Garrido Atienza, Las fiestas del Corpus has the particular benefit of including full transcriptions of the original documents in its many footnotes. See page 6, note 1; 7, note 1; 15–17 (and notes therein). 57 Garrido Atienza, LasfiestasdelCorpus, 23–24. See also discussions of food in chapter 6 and above.

279 CHAPTER VIII from the cathedral. Mischievous little devils (diablillos) and the tarasca took places of honor in the cortege. In Granada the tarasca, a gigantic mechanical representation of a serpent, dragon (or hydra) carried a symbolic figure sitting on a throne balanced on the shoulders of the fantastic monster. It could be a beautiful woman, sometimes a black woman, declaiming praise for the feast, or Muhammad, or even Lucifer. Giants and other people wearing masks or dressed as horses followed. The triumphal carts or floats with their various skits or tableaux vivants came next, with music and dances enlivening all of these performances. Those who had paid for the events marched behind the floats. City officials, the “twenty- four” (knights who were part of the municipal government) met the actual procession as it exited the cathedral, reorganized itself in the by-now familiar ranks of carnivalesque and sacred elements: devils, giants, tarasca, Granada’s clergy, the confraternities, the crafts and guilds, the clergy of nearby towns under Granada’s jurisdiction, the parish clergy, and the monks, with floats and dances interspersed among the clergy and guilds. And then came the cathedral canons with censers and music, followed by the custodia, the lavish reliquary holding the body of Christ carried on a palanquin. The archbishop and the army closed the long (one might almost say “interminable”) procession.58 It is easy to see that the Corpus Christi procession in Granada paralleled to a great extent similar events elsewhere on the peninsula, though the relative importance of artisanal participation depended on the economic structure of each specific locality. The royal presence, as in early modern Madrid, clearly transformed the nature of the procession, leading to the removal of such “popular” aspects as might be unbecoming to the royal majesty. As we move into the seventeenth century, soldiers came to play a role in the procession, as they did in Franco’s Spain, a feature certainly absent during the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century.

ON DRAGONS, SERPENTS, AND DEVILS: THE TARASCA All throughout this narrative, I have often invoked the tarasca. Whether in royal entries, Carnival, Corpus Christi celebrations, above all during the early modern period, the tarasca was there. We have seen the considerable expense and artifice necessary to produce these fire and smoke- spewing monsters that delighted (and still delight) the crowds at the Cor- pus Christi processions and other festive events. So I would ask your indulgence for a brief digression into the role of this figure in Spanish festive events. The origins are, of course, obvious. The tarasca was a repre-

58 Garrido Atienza, Las fiestas del Corpus, chapter 4.

280 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI

Figure 8. An illustration of the tarasca, the artificial dragon or serpent that was an integral part of early modern festivals, above all, Corpus Christi processions. Pen and ink with wash on paper, 1657, Spanish School, seventeenth century. Courtesy Museo de Historia, Madrid; photo © AISA / The Bridgeman Art Library.

281 CHAPTER VIII sentation of the Biblical devil, the serpent thrown into the pit, the dragon that rose against the power of God to be cast into the abyss and chained for a thousand years. In an eighth century “Beatus” from the cathedral of Girona, a serpent or dragon is dramatically portrayed in combat with the forces of good. The tarasca of a later age had been transformed, however, into a carnivalesque figure. What was a representation of evil became humorous and festive, the spectacle produced by its working machinery adding to its obvious popular appeal. In this form, the creature appears to be a very late medieval or early modern invention. It depended on the ability of artisans to construct a very large puppet with movable parts, usually a serpent or dragon, like those that entertained crowds in sixteenth-century royal entries.59

CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSIONS IN LATER CENTURIES As we move into the seventeenth century, the festival traditions that we have followed through their long and slow transition from the medieval to the early modern period seem to acquire a new face. Royal entries and elaborate visits become less frequent, as kings take fewer circuits through their realms.60 “Public” spectacles are far more tightly policed than they had been in an earlier age. The royal court withdraws from the public gaze as much as possible, as distinctions between the social orders are more sharply drawn, a festive replay of Elias’s powerful insights on court society. Every festivity now was redolent of traditions and themes that harkened back to a previous age, but only to a certain extent. Subtle changes, sometimes radical ones, were introduced. What had in the past been a subtle scripting of events became the wholesale management of every possible festive detail by those on top of the civil and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Spontaneity was dead. Participation was compulsory. Nowhere was this move more evident than in the transition from Carnival to Cor- pus Christi.

59 On the tarasca, see below and also the paradigmatic book by Louis Dumont, La Tarasque; essai de description d’un fait local d’un point de vue ethnographique (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); José María Bernáldez Montalvo, LasTarascasdeMadrid (Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1983), which collects wonderful images of Madrid’s tarascas, but annoyingly fails to note fully their origin or how to find these images, except for a brief notice in the introduction that places them in the Archivo de la Villa de Madrid. All the sources listed for different celebrations of the Corpus have references totarascas . 60 Madrid, however, as María José del Río Barredo shows in her Madrid, Urbis Regia. La capital ceremonial de la monarquía católica (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2000), 55–92, remains active in the monarchy’s representation of itself. There is also an insightful discussion of the relation between the Corpus Christi celebrations and the royal court in chapter 6 of Río Barredo’s book.

282 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI

From Carnival to Corpus Christi

To argue, as I have throughout this chapter, that late medieval and early modern celebrations of the Corpus Christi took place within a Bakhtin- ian atmosphere of inversion and carnivalesque revelry (albeit that those inversions were scripted from above), is not at all original. Other scholars have long noted the seeming discordance between the solemnity and majesty of the body of Christ and the irreverent multitude of mischievous devils, giants, cabezudos y cabezudas (men wearing costumes with dispro- portionately large and bizarre headpieces), and elaborate tarascas that accompanied the Corpus as it processed. Nor do I need to reiterate here, for the umpteenth time, that the Corpus celebration came to hold a unique place within Spanish festive tradition. It did, and its enhanced role in the sixteenth century and beyond had profound ideological, cultural, and political consequences. It may be useful here at the end of this particular chapter and with only one more to come before the conclusion, to summarize some of the most important points about the transition from Car- nival to Corpus Christi.

Plotting the Corpus: Feasts of Affirmation We have seen that Carnival, or at least Carnival as we can document it, was always the result of careful planning and, most often, undertaken with either the outright or tacit approval of rulers. Corpus Christi processions and festivities required the same kind of long-term planning, and the commitment and involvement of the whole community. Local neighborhood committees had to be organized, ecclesiastical and civic com- missions performed executive functions, municipal subsidies were essential, craftsmen had to be hired to construct the ephemeral decorations and fantastic inventions, skits had to be rehearsed, and then there was all that went into the preparation of elaborate costumes, banquets, and food distributions. The effort was massive, and it bound all social groups within the city into a glorious affirmation of faith. But, as we know, this faith, the triumph of the Host and of Orthodoxy over the despised Protestants, was, at least in Spain, inextricably bound to the monarchy and to the political program of the Spanish government. The Corpus also represented a celebration of unity in a monarchy where real political unity remained elusive at best. Here we have seen glimpses of Corpus Christi celebrations in only a few major cities, but on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday every city and town throughout Catholic Europe glorified the Holy Eucharist with processions that may

283 CHAPTER VIII have varied in the lavishness of their displays, but not in their intent. In the several kingdoms that constituted Spain, variations occurred but all within a well-established theme that would have been recognized by anyone attending from another city. And attendance, as noted earlier, was mandatory. Before 1492 and 1502, Jews and Muslims were compelled to attend, as were the guilds. The aims of the Corpus Christi celebrations would have failed had not everyone participated, even if their cooperation was by force of law or public opinion, under the ever watchful eyes of Inquisition informers. In some respects, and ironically, the elaborate plotting and preparations for the Corpus Christi celebrations remind me of Carnival celebrations in Rio de Janeiro today. Preparations for next year’s Carnival begin on the day after the conclusion of this year’s feast. And, as in the early modern Corpus, the celebration binds all social groups into a collective affirmation, though in Rio’s case it is an affirmation of civic and local pride rather than of religious and political ideologies.

The Triumph of the Host It must have troubled the religious authorities to see carnivalesque elements intrude into their religious celebrations. But the hard reality was that one could not hope to bind the entire population without providing the masses with those well-tried and proven entertainments. Those who came to see the devils, giants, and the tarasca would also benefit from the pious tableaux vivants and religious skits that year after year told the same narrative that moved inexorably from the creation of the world to human redemption through the flesh of Christ. The experience of the procession was cumulative and overwhelming. It was a long affair that took the viewer and participants slowly up a gradual ascent from the carnal and banal, through the serious themes of sacred history to, finally, the con- templation of the body of Christ. Nonetheless, doubts remained as to the propriety of some of the popular forms of entertainment. An example was the running of bulls, always an integral part of the feast and often its final and concluding act. In Granada, by a municipal edict of 1515 and under the pretense that the population ended the long procession too tired for yet another spectacle, the six bulls that were to be fought at the end of the Corpus were reserved for the feast of St. John in late June.61 The reality was that the running of bulls, so ubiquitous in other forms

61 Garrido Atienza, Las fiestas del Corpus, 11.

284 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI of celebration and the object of much papal opposition, was often omitted from descriptions of the Corpus Christi celebration. In some cases, religious authorities sought to separate and to censor somewhat the ludic and popular from the sacral aspects of the event. As we have seen above, the procession of devils, fantastic figures, and the much-beloved tarasca waited outside the cathedral for the Holy Eucharist to emerge from within the sacred space and only then joined in its long circuit through the city. In Granada the church of Santa María de la Alhambra gained the privilege of celebrating the Corpus procession within the walls of the royal fortress, thus excluding most of the crowd and some of the most offensive displays.62 In Madrid’s 1623 Corpus Christi procession, glossed earlier, carnivalesque elements were excluded from the actual parade. Instead, before the procession proper, a monstrous tarasca, in this case a devil with a woman sitting on its neck (representing the whore of Babylon), and the usual company of giants, Moors, mummers, and the like, ran through the city’s streets to the delight of children and those adults who had a taste for such pleasures. One more important note: The Corpus procession followed a route that took it past the facade of the royal palace where, in 1626, the king, the queens of Spain and Hungary, and other members of the royal family gazed down on the parade and were greeted by the gen- uflecting faithful as they bowed to the king. On other occasions, the king, walking under a palio, followed the body of Christ in the order of the parade.63 What more emphatic statement could there be about the role of kings and their relation to the Host than these physical statements by the monarchs. While on the one hand kings had withdrawn from direct contact with “the public,” in these communal affirmations of faith, the king, though well protected (there were guards) and covered often by the palio, marched “among his people.” And this linking of royal majesty with the Holy Eucharist was not limited to the annual Corpus Christi procession. A short anonymous narrative tells of events that took place on July 5, 1624, a year after the great Corpus procession in 1623. Apparently on that day a “sacrilegious foreign heretic” (a Protestant?) entered the church of the Monastery of Saint Philip in Madrid, snatched the consecrated host from the hands of the priest, tore it to pieces, threw the pieces into the fire and onto the floor and stomped on the remaining fragments of the body of Christ. The unnamed desecrator also took the chalice, filled with 62 Ibid., 11–12. 63 de Hoyos Sancho, LasfiestasdelCorpusChristi, 10–11; for the tarascas in Madrid, see Jose María Bernáldez Montalvo, LasTarascasdeMadrid, 14–15 et passim.

285 CHAPTER VIII unconsecrated wine, spilled it on the floor, and, drawing his dagger, attacked the priest. Those in attendance drew their swords (notice the carrying of weapons into church) and sought to punish the heretic on the spot. The priest interceded and prevented a swift execution. Rather than remitting the offender to the Holy Office tribunal in Toledo, it was decided that he should be brought immediately to trial in Madrid. On Sun- day, July 14th of the same year, a small auto de fe was held in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor. Even though there was such a short time for preparation, all the city’s important ecclesiastical and civil authorities, as well as a large crowd of common people, were in attendance. The accused’s route through the streets of Madrid passed the royal palace, where the king saw him from a balcony as the procession made its way to the Plaza Mayor. There, the heretic was placed on a high stage and, as his crimes were read, the people broke into “shouts, tears . . . slapped and scratched their faces and bodies, pulled their beards and hair.” All of these are, of course, the traditional signs of mourning. In this case the actions represented a collective and popular mourning for the sacri- lege committed on the body of Christ. The death sentence was announced; the accused was taken outside the walls of the city. There, in an empty field, he was asphyxiated—as a form of mercy—his body burned to cinders and the ashes cast on the fields and in the streams. The king and his court, dressed in mourning, attended Masses at the monastery of Saint Philip. A large throng of the poor and weak also came to mourn and to see the spectacle of their betters.64 Yet, when all those pious juxtapositions of Crown and Church (with a sprinkling of “popular” devotion) were done, the reality of carnivalesque elements remained forcefully in place. There is no need to review all those recurring themes that have already been so abundantly sketched. Antoine de Brunel, one of those acutely sensitive foreign observers who visited Spain in the seventeenth century, was struck by the links between Carnival and the Corpus Christi celebrations. His remarks are revealing indeed, all the more so as they come from an outsider. “Among the first pasos (the different stages in the order of the procession),” he wrote, “there was a large number of musicians and Basques with their drums and castanets. In addition, among them, there was a large number of people dressed in different colors who, at the sound of music, danced and jumped, making pirouettes with ease, just as they would have done during Carnestolendas (carnival).... There were also [marching] in front of

64 Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid, 93. These paragraphs on this event are taken in toto (with some small edits) from my Spanish Society, 159–60.

286 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI the parade gigantic machines, that is, cardboard sculptures maneuvered by a man hiding inside....”65 The machines that Brunel describes were of course the tarascas. The accompanying images give us a sense of how attractive and engaging these mechanical devices must have been. They would surely have intrigued all in attendance, even those compelled to be present. Two other points must be made in passing. The first is that as we move into the seventeenth century, the autos sacramentales and other theatrical representations associated with the mystery of transubstantiation continued to be represented in the post–Corpus Christi or festival cycle, most of them, of course, exclusively at court. The second point is that there is one type of “festival”— for however grim and cruel, it was a festival—that I have not included in either my rough typology of festivals or discussed in previous chapters; namely, the auto de fe. I have examined its festive aspects elsewhere and will limit myself here to a summary. It is worth noting, however, the extent to which these great trials borrowed from the existing festive vocabulary of late medieval and early modern Spain. Al- though a sort of dark reverse image of Carnival, royal entries, and the Corpus, the auto de fe shared with them the same emplotting and sought as well to bind the common people into yet another affirmation of faith and of the overlapping authority of church and state.

Inquisition Trials and the Auto de Fe

As theatrical as the religious processions were (and still are), they did not match the performative power of the great inquisitorial trials held in Spain throughout most of the early modern period. The Inquisition’s autos de fe functioned as theaters of power (in ways that royal entries open to contestation did not), attracting thousands of spectators. The wealthy and powerful watched from well-appointed balconies or from the stage itself (on which the trials, punishments and reconciliations of the heretics took place), the less well-off from wherever they could find a viewing spot. We must not imagine, however, that these were common occurrences. The cost of an auto de fe was exceedingly high and the preparations so elaborate that they were held only intermittently. They

65 My translation, as cited in Bernáldez Montalvo, Las Tarascas de Madrid, 15. Brunel’s entire description can be found in Antonio de Brunel’s Viaje de España (1665) in José García Mercadal, ed. Viajes de extranjeros por España y Portugal (Salamanca: Junta de Cas- tilla y León [facsimile edition in 6 vols], 1999), 3, 253–365; for the actual description of the Corpus ceremony in Madrid, see pp. 290–92.

287 CHAPTER VIII lacked the cyclical nature of Corpus Christi processions and similar religious festivities in the liturgical calendar. But precisely because of their noncalendrical character and their infrequency, they had tremendous psychological impact. In a strange and contradictory way, the elaborate public trials of the Spanish Inquisition functioned as sites for the inclusion of all social orders but, at the same time, as sites for the exclusion of certain individuals. One action was intimately linked to the other. The act of excluding some meant the inclusion of others. Definitions of the self, either collective or individual, and representations of membership in a community, religious or political, always involve representations against others. The main purpose of the public auto de fe was, in theory, to cleanse the Christian community from damning heretics. This was done by the trial and condemnation of those accused of heresy, and by the Inquisitors’ public preaching to those found guilty and to the audience in attendance. In a sense an auto became, not unlike the Corpus Christi procession, a public and communal reaffirmation of faith. We must also remember that the actual execution—either by asphyxiation or burning, or a combination of both—did not take place at the auto de fe. The ceremony was not about the spectacle of torture and death. By the time the accused arrived on the scene, his or her guilt had already been determined. The ceremony was not a judicial affair but a display of the power of the Church and the state, an articulation of this power through a theatrical ceremony. After the performance was over, condemned heretics were taken to another location, usually outside the city walls, and executed out of sight of the public by the civil authorities. As members of the Church, inquisitors were not allowed to shed blood; it is my impression, however, that even if the Church had been interested in carrying out executions, the Spanish monarchy would have proved too jealous of its power to allow the exercise of high justice by any body but itself. Let us return to the point I am attempting to make here. In their affirmation of faith, all of the people, powerful and weak alike, became participants and therefore complicit in the punishment of heretics. Through prayer, shouts of approval or condemnation, and gestures that shaped the ebb and flow of these public performances, they took part in excising heretics from the social body and thereby restoring to health the moral economy of their particular town. By casting out crypto-Jews, Moriscos, foreigners, Protestants, sodomites, and blasphemers, they reaffirmed their own rightful place in Spanish and Christian society. The representation of “otherness,” which underpinned inquisitorial trials, was also a counter- representation of communal identity, a reverse index of what it meant to be a Spaniard and a Catholic in the sixteenth century. One was granted

288 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI membership in the community by participating and acquiescing in the exclusion of a targeted few, an old and well-known practice that, sadly, is not unfamiliar in our own age. Yet the auto de fe—and here is the paradox—also sought to reconcile, and thus to include, those who were to be punished, even those who were to be put to death. In fact, the cooperation of those indicted was often a prerequisite for the ceremony’s proper functioning as a cleansing and binding ritual. This was made implicit in the processional march and in the trial itself. Those dressed in the humiliating garb of the sanbenito (a yellow tunic with saffron-colored crosses) marched in orchestrated processions to the site of the auto de fe. They attended their own public humiliation usually, but not always, with little or no resistance and made exemplary acts of contrition at the announcement of their guilt and punishment, even when the latter was death. This of course was accomplished through forms of coercion: the threat and/or infliction of social, psychological, moral, financial, and, above all, physical injury. The sanbenitos were cogs in the machine, made to enact acquiescence to the dominant social and moral codes. There was a script, and those found guilty knew it and often followed it to the letter. The pressures and terrors applied to obtain such compliance may trouble our modern conscience. But for those orchestrating and witnessing the public spectacle in the sixteenth century, the acceptance of hegemonic cultural values—implied in the embracing of punishment by the individuals who had transgressed them—legitimized the Church and state’s use of power and the hierarchical character of society. More than that, the auto de fe served as a double-edged reminder to all, wealthy and poor, pious and sinners, of their conditional membership in the community of faith. Those found guilty stood on a high platform, open to the gaze and shouts of those in attendance. The inquisitor preached a sermon to the suspected heretics, and also of course to the audience. At the prompting of the speaker, the sermon was often interrupted by shouts from the crowd. This was a participatory ceremony, with the interruptions and clamor of those in attendance functioning as a choral response to the inquisitor’s religious (and social) admonitions. Indulgences were granted to those in attendance; the accused were handed down their sentences. Many of those found guilty kneeled and repented their heretical deeds; they then were absolved and reinserted in the communal body. Those who refused to accept their guilt, or who remained faithful to their errors, were taken away to be punished or executed.66 From this

66 Miguel Avilés, “The Auto de Fe and the Social Model of Counter-Reformation Spain,” in Alcalá, ed. The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitional Mind, 249–64; Henry C.

289 CHAPTER VIII rather simple ceremony, the Spanish auto de fe grew into an elaborate social and religious ritual, charged with symbolic meanings and social lessons. As the great Henry C. Lea pointed out long ago, the sermo genera- lis first, and the auto de fe later, were physical enactments—one might almost say “previews”—of the Final Judgment, and thus laden with all manner of frightful and redeeming associations.67 They were events long in the planning. Local tribunals might propose holding a large inquisitorial auto, but approval from the Supreme Council of the Inquisition had to be sought before proceeding with its organization. The date had to be carefully chosen. Feast days of important Christian saints, especially of saints with special relevance to Spanish history, or days dedicated to the adoration of the Cross (May 3rd, September 14th) were preferred. These dates inscribed the workings of the Inquisition within a liturgical and historical calendar, but they also allowed for a larger attendance. As Lea also pointed out, the less frequent the autos, the more elaborate they became. After approval to hold an auto was obtained from the Su- preme Council, early notices went out—as much as a month before the scheduled date. Invitations were sent to the authorities participating in the ceremony, securing their presence for the great event. A great many accoutrements had to readied: the special garments to be worn by the accused, the “mitres” (conic hats in reverse imitation of a bishop’s hat) that would cover their heads; also effigies of those who had fled or died and were to be tried in absentia, and special boxes to carry the bones of those exhumed and brought to trial after their death and burial. A special box or coffer of “crimson velvet with gold fringes and a gilt lock and key” held the sentences of those to be “relaxed” (put to death). Green crosses, to be carried by the accused, also had to be made, as well as other crosses for the processional that took place the day before the auto. A Dominican prior marched with the large green cross of the Inquisition, and a confraternity official proudly raised a white cross. The prosecuting attorney was assigned his own standard: a banner of red damask with the royal coat of arms and the cross of the Inquisition, a symbol of the marriage of Church and state in the rooting out of heretics. In the days preceding the ceremony, local Inquisition officials occupied the main square of the town. In Madrid or Toledo, where some quite spectacular autos de fe were enacted throughout the sixteenth century, the Plaza Mayor, Madrid’s main square and the site for the acclamation of new kings and for the running of bulls, was the place of choice. In To-

Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1906–7) 3, 200 ff. 67 Lea, A History of the Inquisition 3, 200 ff.

290 FROM CARNIVAL TO CORPUS CHRISTI ledo, the Zocodover and the square in front of the great Gothic cathedral were the preferred sites. In these squares, two large stages were built. One was assigned to the “penitents,” that is, those found guilty, and their guards. The other was reserved for the Inquisitors, municipal and royal officials, and a bevy of other ecclesiastics. The windows and balconies of the houses surrounding the square filled with important people and their families. Although, as Lea indicates, ecclesiastical and secular authorities were most willing participants, their presence was nonetheless compulsory. This requirement was imposed to forestall absences prompted by political antagonisms or by refusals to occupy, in the rigid hierarchy of the procession, an assigned position that was inferior to rival orders or to other officials. The autos served, thus, as one more event where the social ranking of the elite could not be contested, even by members of the elite themselves. Familiars (officials of the Inquisition) on horseback, notaries and town criers carrying the banner of the Inquisition and blowing loud trumpets, perambulated through the town. At strategic corners, they made stops and called all the people of the city to attend the auto to be held “at such place and on such date.” The affair began very early in the day, with Masses held at the parish church and at the site of the auto itself, before the ceremonial procession began. Soldiers came first, as they do today in the procession of the Cor- pus Christi; then the heretics in an ascending hierarchy of guilt. Those found guilty of lesser crimes, and thus liable for lesser punishments, appeared first; those to be executed marched last. They walked their painful and humiliating journey one by one, escorted on either side by familiars of the Inquisition or by friars. Along the processional route, excited crowds shouted words of opprobrium and sometimes attempted to take matters into their own hands. It was a scene that calls to mind George Orwell’s “hate week.” The auto lasted into the night, an exhaustive, cathartic form of psychological theater. It ended with the reconciliation of some of the accused and the taking away of the recalcitrant and relapsed to be burned. The king, his court, and distinguished visitors were often present, for great autos were often timed to coincide with signal political moments: the swearing of the heir to the throne, a gathering of the Cor- tes, a royal wedding.68 What impact did such celebrations have on the common people? How did they serve as sites for social exchanges? How did they erase, and at the same time reaffirm, social hierarchies? I think the answer is clear. Processions, autos de fe, and other such religious manifestations—unlike Carnival and tournaments, which eventually became segregated by class—

68 Ibid., 209–29.

291 CHAPTER VIII occasioned a public outpouring of emotion, anger, physical and verbal gestures. These signs, a kind of performative text, inscribed the community in the worship of the Host, the devotion of saints, and, in the case of the Inquisition, made them complicit in the trial and punishment of heretics. We are quite far from the simple delights of Carnestolendas with which this chapter began. Something increasingly dark and threatening has taken the place of laughter.

292 ❊ CHAPTER IX ❊ Noncalendrical Festivals: Life Cycles and Power

On May 13, 1543, a young Philip, barely sixteen years old, married by proxy the princess Doña María of Portugal. The Spanish ambassador to the Portuguese court, Don Luis Sarmiento de Mendoza, stood for the prince in concluding a series of nuptial negotiations agreed more than five months earlier on December 1, 1542.1 In an earlier chapter, I glossed the events that surrounded Doña Maria’s crossing of the border into Castile. We have seen the elaborate procession that accompanied her ritual entry under a red palio into Salamanca, where her espousal to Philip was to be consummated. The arrogant young princess had given evidence throughout her slow journey from Lisbon to Salamanca of at times petulant behavior, but now with all the rituals of the entry behind her, she stepped in an almost seamless fashion into the cycle of festivities organized to highlight the importance of her wedding to the heir of the Spanish realms and its varied possessions throughout the globe. On November 14, 1543, the young couple was married once again by the Cardinal of Toledo. María and Philip had been lodged in adjacent houses, connected by a large salon or wide hall built just for the occasion. Master Vargas, who has provided us with a contemporary account of the ceremony and who was obviously impressed by this ephemeral construction, does not fail to give us its dimensions: seventy-three feet long, forty- three wide, and twenty high. It was richly decorated with tapestries and contained two stages, one for the musicians and another for the bride and groom. Doña Maria sat on cushions of brocade. When Philip entered the room and ascended the stage each sought to kiss the other’s hands; Philip as his courtly nature demanded; Doña Maria in obeisance to her new husband and king.2 As the two teenagers sat on the stage, they received the homage of those present who now came to kiss the prince and princess’s hands. Only then did the wedding ceremony take place. It is note- worthy that the setting was not in a church or a cathedral, but one of those artificial constructions so common in late medieval and early modern spectacles. The bridge between the two lodgings echoes the ritual spaces, so famously examined by van Gennep, that provide the physical

1 Maestro Vargas, Recibimiento que se hizo en Salamanca a la Princesa doña María de Portu- gal (1543), 7–8. 2 Ibid., 78–79.

293 CHAPTER IX settings for significant rites of passage.3 The obligatory sarao, or dance, followed, and our narrator does not fail to describe in detail the fabrics and colors worn by the nobles.4 In the meanwhile, the deadly struggle for precedence continued un- abated between the Dukes of Alba and Medina Sidonia, a struggle that had festered throughout Maria’s voyage from Lisbon to Salamanca and emerged at its most virulent during the princess’s entry. It now broke into the open again when the Duke of Alba claimed that as a padrino (a “best man” in this context), he was the only one who should be allowed to sit on a bench in front of the prince. While the dance went on inside the salon, knights in the retinues of the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the Duke of Alba fought the knights of other grandees with axes and swords, resulting in several of them being severely wounded.5 Philip left the dance to eat in the solitude of his own chambers, while Maria remained among the revelers until 11 PM or so, when she too went to her room to eat and change her clothes. In the meantime, an “altar,” adorned with the Cardinal’s arms, was being set up in the princess’s lodgings. Benches were covered with gold cloth and cushions in brocade for the prince and princess to kneel on in front of the altar, and for the best man as well (the honor that the Duke of Alba had claimed for himself). Other benches accommodated archbishops and bishops and high royal officials from Castile and Portugal. A short religious ceremony took place, after which Philip and Maria withdrew to their respective chambers. Doña Maria finally undressed around 7 AM, whereupon the prince joined her in bed. Only then did the archbishops, bishops, and high nobility of both Castile and Portugal leave the nuptial chamber and go to sleep. In spite of the very late hour and how exhausted they both must have been, the marriage was probably consummated, because around 10 AM Philip left the bed “very happy.” Surprisingly, the prince spent the day visiting the university and attending lectures there, and he did so the following day as well instead of tending to his young wife. Only then did the festivities begin. On November 16, the princely couple witnessed the running of bulls on horseback (in the Portuguese fashion, called today rejoneo) in the main square of Salamanca and an elaborate juego de cañas in which as many as 350 horsemen dressed in Moorish fashion participated. Fireworks followed and the day ended with a sarao in the prince’s lodgings. On No-

3 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans, Monika A. B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 116–45. 4 Maestro Vargas, Recibimiento que se hizo en Salamanca a la Princesa doña María de Portu- gal (1543), 79–80. 5 Ibid., 81.

294 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS vember 17th, another elaborate juego de cañas sponsored by the Duke of Medina Sidonia took place, though this time participation was restricted to the highest nobility. The next day a joust matched twelve knights against a similar number of opponents. Awards were given to those who excelled in martial prowess. And yet another dance followed that evening. On Sunday, November 19, Philip visited one of the colleges’ chapels and monasteries throughout the city, and the obligatory sarao capped the evening. Then came the culminating event of the wedding festive cycle. An artificial wooden castle provided a window from which the young couple could gaze down on diverse forms of entertainment. Gi- ants, fireworks, bonfires, a joust involving twelve knights, great noise from petards, and music from drums and trumpets served as a prelude to theatrical skits. Finally, the unavoidable tarasca marched into the courtyard of the artificial castle spewing the unavoidable fire from its nostrils and mouth. From within the serpent, twelve knights emerged who fought bravely in a joust. Master Vargas provides no more details on the next three days, before the young couple left Salamanca for Medina del Campo on November 24th.6

Reading a Princely Wedding Feast

There is little in the description of the elaborate feasts organized for the wedding of Philip and María that distinguishes them from the events that complemented a royal entry or a Corpus Christi procession. Nor do they depart from many of the celebrations associated with the religious calendar, such as the Christmas season, Easter, St. John’s Day, and the like. Beyond reaffirming the essential continuity of festive forms, this particular wedding feast and others like it are vivid reminders that the high points of the life cycle of princesses and commoners both—births, weddings, deaths—were often marked by festive and extravagantly expensive events. Regardless of rank, these timeless occasions provided ample opportunities for displays, for the reassertion of one’s social status, and for breaking with the dull routines of everyday life. Anthropologists and other social scientists have provided explanations aplenty of the multilay- ered meanings underlying these liminal moments in the life cycle, and there is no need here to review that vast literature. Unlike a royal or princely entry in which the king, queen, or prince was the focus of attention (though all segments of the population played their assigned roles), noncalendrical events bound all social groups in cycles of celebration

6 Ibid., 82–88.

295 CHAPTER IX across time and across the divides of wealth and rank. The numerous and diverse forms of entertainment and display that we saw in Maria and Philip’s wedding were often replicated in the weddings of members of the high and lesser nobility, the bourgeoisie, and even the common people. The difference was always a matter of scale and in the number of people engaged in the event; the meaning and intent of the celebrations were the same. All weddings are linked by common patterns; the same is true of births and deaths. One may be an occasion of happiness, the other of sadness. Some may be undertaken secretly and without overt festive displays. Yet, at the heart of each these signal life events—and others that I do not discuss here but that are equally important: such as coming-of- age, graduations, and the like—lie cultural determinants that are easily recognizable through time. When parents today sacrifice every penny they have or fall into serious debt to give their daughters spectacular weddings, we are witnessing a venerable tradition that, as irrational as it may seem to the objective observer, remains necessary. Birthdays, weddings, even funerals provide all with opportunities for making important social statements, for exchanging gifts, paying back long-standing social obligations, and a chance as well to reaffirm existing social bonds. No matter how humble the event, or what an effort or sacrifice was required to finance the feast, on that particular day parents, husbands, all involved feel that they have done their duty and claimed their rightful place in the social order.7 Clearly, this is not a chapter about the different ways these life-cycle events have been celebrated across social groups and times. Rather, my purpose here is to examine, through a few examples, how these celebrations functioned in the social, cultural, and political contexts of late medieval and early modern Spain. I am particularly interested in the way that celebrations often served as an extension of kingly and noble (or even ecclesiastical) hegemony, not forgetting, of course, the elements of resistance that sometimes lie at the heart of celebrations. In this regard, how other contending centers of authority—cities, noblemen, ecclesiastic authorities, and others—reacted to, shared in, or ignored these celebrations provides telling signs that, then as now, none of these feasts were innocent affairs undertaken “just for fun.” They were always rife with wider political intent and meaning. The intersection that feasts marking special

7 The literature is vast on these topics. They include the already cited van Gennep and the classical work by Marcel Mauss available in a new translation of Essai sur le don, in The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (Lon- don: Routledge, 1990); and the incomparable Natalie Z. Davis’ contribution to the field: The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), with bibliography.

296 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS moments in the lives of kings and royal families provide between them and their subjects provide rallying points that bind people to their rulers. They may also function as sites for public catharsis. This is not to say that there were no occasions when political necessity dictated the avoidance of feasts. The wedding of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, which took place in secret to avoid Isabella’s half brother, Henry IV, from interfering, is one of many examples of important events purposely occluded for political reasons. The death of the ill- fated Don Carlos is another. It was too embarrassing for Philip II to mark it with any special funeral arrangements, or certainly not in the manner in which the death of his beloved queen, Isabelle of Valois, or his own death would be commemorated. The fact that an important occasion was celebrated in high style, was only modestly acknowledged, or was ignored has significance. And each festival, whether related to life cycle events or not, was sui generis, obeying the internal logic of changing social and political contexts. Jenny Jordan, in her superb unpublished thesis, has argued that the celebrations of the great Christian victory at Lepanto over the Sublime Porte’s naval forces—a category of festivity I do not examine in this book—varied considerably. While they reached extraordinary and lavish levels in Venice, Naples, and Rome, they were muted in Madrid and in Spain in general. Her suggestion is that Philip II did not wish to add to the fame of his half-brother Don Juan de Austria at a time when he himself had no male heir.8 Whether this was the case or not— and I find her argument quite persuasive—the important thing for us here is that celebrations were not fully bound by the strictures of either ritual or tradition. While the core structure of each feast remained fairly fixed through time, there was always substantial latitude in how to script the celebration, who to target as an audience, what and who to include in the proceedings, and, far more important, what and who to exclude. In Philip and María’s wedding, the actual nuptial celebration and the well-ordered sequence of events that led to the consummation of the marriage were, as was to be expected, carefully controlled and open only to a few privileged courtiers and ecclesiastics. Room had to be made for the inclusion of representatives of both realms, but the strict hierarchical protocol of the ceremonies preceding the young couple’s actual going to bed allowed for privileging some nobles over others. In this particular case the Duke of Alba occupied a place of which he proved worthy. He would in coming years serve the monarchy dutifully (though not always well). The always troublesome Duke of Medina Sidonia had to accept his

8 Jenny Jordan, “Imagined Lepanto: Turks, Mapbooks, Intrigue, and Spectacular in the Sixteenth Century Construction of 1571,” UCLA PhD thesis (2004).

297 CHAPTER IX slightly lesser place, and all his discontent and disruptive behavior came to naught. The main festivities took place in an artificial salon where, because of space limitations, only a small and select company of the high nobility was invited. The prince ate by himself, so did the princess, creating a separation of rank vivid enough to be understood by all present. When the wedding festivities moved onto the wider canvas of the city, the celebrations opened to the public. Yet the princely couple often watched from the protected confines of a window or balcony. This back- and-forth flow between events carefully restricted to a select group of the ruling elite and more open forms of celebration that, by their obvious attempt to impress the crowds with the nobility’s military powers (juego de cañas, jousts, and the like), illustrate well the ludic fluctuations in the topography of feasts between “private” and “public” spaces. The latter always required a “public.” But with the exception of royal entries and the Corpus Christi processions in Habsburg Madrid, where the royal presence was unavoidable, kings and queens no longer move from private interior spaces to “public” ones, but rather to semi-private and removed spaces, such as high balconies or windows. Something had clearly changed since the Middle Ages.

Births

Celebrations for the birth of a royal heir share some of the same patterns that we have seen in other celebrations and were replicated in lesser form all down the social ladder. A princely birth constituted an important political event, and chronicles always noted the occasion. In the chronicle of Alfonso XI, the king “wishing to have a child” (codiciosedeaverfijo) fathered Don Pedro with his mistress Doña Leonor de Alburquerque. Even though his first-born male was a bastard and, in theory, not eligible to inherit the throne, Alfonso had great pleasure in the event. Many of the king’s vassals came to the feasts bofordando (that is, engaged in a variation of the juego de cañas), and they made muchas alegrías (literally “many happy things,” but here meaning games and festivities). The king then conferred great holdings on his young son, the first of endless concessions he would grant to his many bastard children over the years, eventually creating an intolerable situation for his rightful heir.9 Alfonso XI’s chronicle also directly connects the news of Queen Doña María’s pregnancy with the celebrations of knighthood and crowning that swiftly followed.

9 Crónica de Alfonso XI, 230. See also my Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 1300–1474 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 57–63.

298 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS Besides the royal entry into Seville in 1327, already examined earlier in this book, the celebration of his coronation in 1332 marked the highest point of Alfonso XI’s festive cycles. The chronicle also emphasizes the joy of the court during that year at the possible birth of an actual royal heir born to the queen (as opposed to the innumerable children he had already with his mistress).10 In many respects, Alfonso XI’s extravagant displays in 1332 were linked to the expectation of a legitimate successor. When the short-lived child, named Ferdinand, was born—it was the royal custom in Castile to name the first royal heir after his grandfather—the king ordered many feasts (muchas alegrías) in Valladolid, though, as noted earlier, the celebrations of 1332 have to be considered as linked to the expected birth. As usual, the king settled titles and domains on the young child, though his prolific mistress gave him yet another son, this one named Don San- cho, who also received important lordships and rents.11 The Infante Don Pedro’s birth in 1333 also brought happiness to the king and to the realm (plogo mucho al rey), but the chronicle does not note any particular feast. Perhaps with the king away and dealing with severe challenges to this rule, the reality of a legitimate heir after the Infante Fernando’s death so soon after his birth was celebration enough.12 The laconic references to celebrations of royal births in early fourteenth- century chronicles pale however in comparison to the always exuberant accounts in later chronicles, as for example the Hechos del condestable Don MiguelLucasdeIranzo. In that case the birth, of the constable’s son, was not a royal birth. For that matter, it was not even a high noble birth, but Pedro de Escavias or the chronicle’s anonymous author gives a sense of how much things had changed, not so much in the actual nature of feasts, as in the representation of them. The birth of Don Miguel Lucas’s son on Monday, April 11, 1468, in the midst of growing anarchy prompted a swift transition in the chronicle’s narrative flow. After a somber account of a failed plot against the constable’s life, the chronicler moves on to a detailed description of the feasts accompanying the birth of his first male heir. He begins by noting—in what is a blatant political move to show a celebration uniting the community—the jubilation of all the people of Jaén, “great and small.” Early in the morning, in a clearly hierarchical order (by rank and sex), the high municipal officials, noble women and maids, merchants, artisans, and peasants abandoned their labors and poured into the constable’s house to the sound of trumpets, tambourines and bells. A singing and dancing mob crowded the streets around the palace. Borne on two of his knights’ 10 Crónica de Alfonso XI, 234. 11 Ibid., 239. 12 Ibid., 264.

299 CHAPTER IX shoulders, the constable was paraded in triumph through the throng and taken to a nearby monastery, where, for one hour, he talked to the clois- tered nuns and solicited their prayers. In the afternoon, after a private meal attended by the important people of the city, a great joust was held in the square of Santa María. That evening, city officials of Jaén’s parishescollaciones ( ) organized and paid for public banquets and festivals in front of their respective local churches. Lit by great bonfires, dancing, singing, eating, and drinking took place throughout the city. The following day, Tuesday, April 12th, tables were set up in the city’s cemeteries, and all parishioners were invited to yet another banquet. Once sated, the crowd marched back to the constable’s palace with such clamor “that the world seemed to be falling down.” Riding on a mule to the sounds of barking hounds and the blowing of hunting horns, the regidor Fernando de Berrio and the officials of the parish of St. Mary Magdalen led a live wolf back and forth across the city. That evening mummers, dances, banquets, and short theatrical skits took place throughout the city. Six days later, on April 18th, the newborn child was baptized in the cathedral. Elaborate descriptions of the clothes and tapestries adorning the constable’s son and the church, of the silk canopy covering the ceremonial bed, and of the hierarchical procession to the cathedral serve as reminders of the courtly character of the feast and of the pretended historical importance of the birth of the constable’s son. After the baptism, Miguel Lucas and those in attendance walked to an open square outside Jaén. From a high place, clothed with silk and rich French draperies, he witnessed the running of six bulls and an additional distribution of food. The night ended with a private banquet for the mighty, and mummery, skits and other entertainment for the common citizens of Jaén. Here and elsewhere, changes in the level of thoroughness with which representations of these ceremonies were described are keyed to changes in the chroniclers’ multiple political agendas or personal inclinations. The chronicle genre, as Richard Kagan noted in his careful comments on this manuscript, “was far from static and allowances must be made for the id- iosyncrasies of the chroniclers themselves.” And if anyone required that allowances be made for him, Pedro de Escavias, the chronicler of Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, was certainly at the head of the line. In his narrative, nonetheless, we already see the flow from “private” to “public” spaces, an important cultural shift that was to become even more pronounced in the early modern period and afterwards in the liminal period between festivities that commemorated actual births and those that celebrated baptisms. This change, far more pronounced in sixteenth-century Spain, especially after Trent, reveals the growing formalization of the re-

300 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS ligious ceremony of baptism, the celebration of a child’s entry into the community of believers, as the high point of the birth festivities. The birth and baptism of princes and heirs to the throne called for a lot more pomp than that of an ineffectual and parvenue constable of Castile. Seven years after the birth of their first child, the Infanta Doña Isabel, Queen Isabella I of Castile, gave birth to the short-lived Infante Don Juan in Se- ville. The birth was witnessed by some of the regidores (royal officials in Seville and members of the city’s municipal council), by great noblemen, and by other members of the royal court. They were to give testimony to the birth, a reminder of the public nature of all important events in the life cycle of royals. The municipal council of Seville, alerted early to the great honor that Ferdinand and Isabella were bestowing upon the city, purchased fifty-eightvaras (almost a yard each) of brocade to decorate the birthing chamber, while also sponsoring and—far more important—paying for a joust, the running of twenty bulls, and bohordos (by which was meant a juego de cañas). In addition, the municipal council of Seville at the direct request of the queen made fiscal outlays and preparations for the Infante’s baptism. Eight regidores were to carry the palio under which the child was to be transported to the church, a sort of mobile passageway and precursor to the arrangement that became common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Eight thousand maravedíes, quite a considerable sum in late- fifteenth-century Castile, was granted to each of the eight regidores for the expense of their garments. Large amounts of money were also allotted for eight additional bulls to be fought on the day of the baptism and for a distribution of bread, wine, and fruits to be added to the lunch given to the citizens of Seville (surely it could not have been to all the citizens since Seville counted almost 100,000 inhabitants in the late fifteenth century). On July 9, 1478, feasts, including music and food distributions, were sponsored by all the parishes through the city, while the actual baptism, open only to the most exalted nobles, high church dignities, and foreign ambassadors, took place. As was customary, a procession arranged according to rank escorted the child who, carried in his nurse’s arms and under the palio held up by the regidores, traveled the short distance from the Alcázar to the cathedral of Seville. His godparents were the papal legate, a Venetian ambassador, the constable Don Pedro de Velasco, and the count of Benavente, while the godmother was the duchess of Medina Sidonia. By choosing these godparents, the Catholic monarchs bound the newborn heir—who died in childhood and never inherited the throne— to the high nobility of Castile, to the pope, and to the never fully trust- worthy Republic of Venice. And this did not complete the celebrations, for one month later, Isabella herself brought her first son to the church for

301 CHAPTER IX the ceremony of the presentation at the temple, paralleling the same event in Jesus’ life. This called for an even more elaborate ceremonial procession. The procession included high nobles, ecclesiastics, and high city officials. They were led by King Ferdinand. At the sound of trumpets and other musical instruments, all the participants marched from the Alcázar to the cathedral and back. Although in their general outlines the celebrations marking the birth of the Infante Don Juan did not differ very much from those I have described for the birth and baptism of Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s child, the imbricating of high nobles, the papal legate, a Venetian ambassador, and city officials into the formal aspects of the feast, plus the translation from palace to church of the expected heir under a palio represented a formal recognition of the importance of the event in the ritual life of the realm. Much would change however in the succeeding centuries.13 Another short-lived heir to the throne, this one named Ferdinand, was born on December 4, 1571. The son of Philip II and Ana of Austria, he was for a short while the only male heir to the vast territories of the Spanish monarchy. His baptism on December 16, 1571 put in play as much protocol and ceremony as some of the other feasts I have glossed in previous chapters. A temporary gateway or passageway (pasadizo) was built, leading from one of the palace’s windows to the back door of the church of St. Gil. Whether to protect the young prince from Madrid’s harsh winter or to surround the passage of the newborn heir with the mystery and seclusion so favored by Habsburg monarchs, it is important to note that the event, which could have been celebrated in the palace’s chapel, required a short trek out of the palace. The artificial passageway’s decorations in rich gold and red tapestries, rugs, silk, gold, and silver served to emphasize the importance of the event and to reiterate the colors of the Spanish monarchy. The church itself had been decorated in equally lavish fashion and a stage built in the center of the nave. Members of the royal councils and highborn ladies lined up along the walls of the passage to observe a ceremonial procession led by the grandees, royal macebearers, and king-of-arms (rey de armas). The dukes of Osuna, Nájera, and Sessa, and the counts of Benavente, Infantado, and Medina del Río Seco carried elaborate vessels holding the baptismal tokens and candles, while the duke of Béjar walked behind them with the Infante in his arms. The papal legate and the imperial ambassador flanked the young prince. They were followed by the ambassadors of France and Venice, plus a long line of ecclesiastical dignitaries, royal officials, and

13 Juan de Mata Carriazo, La boda del Emperador. Notas para una historia del amor en el al- cázar de Sevilla (Seville: Imprenta Provincial, 1959), 33–36.

302 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS princes, including the Prince’s godparents, Prince Wenceslaus and the Princess of Portugal. Accounts of the Infante Don Fernando’s baptism carefully record the hierarchical order of the procession to the church and of its return to the palace, and describe as well the decorations adorning the passageway and the lavish clothing worn by those in attendance. Sumptuous feasts were held in the plaza in front of the palace with the usual juego de cañas, a “great tournament and royal jousts.” Triumphal floats, some celebrating the victory of Lepanto and others carrying many “ingenious” inventions, paraded by the palace. The king, who otherwise was notable by his absence, ordered that many prisoners be pardoned and made a great distribution of alms to the prisoners and to Madrid’s poor.14 This particular baptism, told by an eyewitness (the reydearmas who escorted the young prince to the baptismal font) and two other contemporaries—one in abysmally bad verse—is a vivid reminder of the growing separation between Crown and people as evidenced in these festive events. Although kings wished still to uphold canonical procedures that dictated baptism in the local parish, they did so while flaunting their ability to extend their palace into the church by means of a covered passageway. This also allowed the ceremonies to be shared only with the highest in the land, foreign princes, and ambassadors. Not unlike the artificial salon that joined Prince Philip and Doña María’s respective abodes in 1541 Salamanca, the covered passageway built exclusively for the baptism of the Infante Don Fernando in 1571 Madrid, and a similar one built for the baptism of the Infanta Doña Margarita in the same city in 1623,15 kept the crowd at a distance by creating parallel but separate festive spaces: one for the court in interior spaces and another for the people in the square adjacent to the palace and at other sites throughout the city. And at the same time, these covered passageways linked royal residences one with another, as in 1541, or linked the royal palace with sacred spaces. A mere palio was no longer adequate covering for the child as it was processed along the city streets. The king and royal family, whether in 1571 or 1623, remained apart, gazing down on the events from a window as the Infantas did in 1571, or from another covered passageway as Philip IV, donning a cape to disguise himself (encubierto), did in 1623.16 This sharp separation of elite from popular festive forms and spaces is best symbolized in the mise-en-scène theatrical performances held beside the pond in the park of the Buen Retiro palace in the seventeenth century. As we have seen in the carnival representations held in the court-

14 The description above is culled from three different accounts. All of them are found in Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid, 14–19. 15 Ibid., 271–75. 16 Ibid., 275.

303 CHAPTER IX yard of the royal palace during the Carnival season in 1638, many plays and masques, varying from ribaldry to Calderón de la Barca’s somber autos sacramentales, were performed there with the court as audience. But there were other performances that linked king and court to subjects, though mediated by the theatrical representation. The latter served a dual but seemingly contradictory function as both link and barrier between king and people. As Jonathan Brown and John H. Elliott describe in their remarkable book, APalaceforaKing, on certain occasions, when the king descended from the lofty heights of his balcony to stand almost at eye level with the people of Madrid, a stage for the players was set on a raft on the shores of the artificial Buen Retiro pond. The players faced the king and his court, who were lavishly installed on one of the shores. On the other shore or in boats cruising the water were the townspeople, barely able to hear the dialogue and most certainly incapable of seeing the actors’ faces. The stage and the play served as lenses through which those fortunate enough to be able to see from the far shore or from the boats, could glimpse the magnificence of king, royal family, and court from afar.17 In that little vignette, repeated endless time with varying details and settings in France, England, and other early modern European courts, a whole world is revealed, telling us, in clear and certain ways, about the changing position of kings and courts in relations to their subjects. Although I am concerned now with celebrations of royal and noble births, I have digressed into theatrical representations and covered passageways because their symbolic valance illuminates the nature not only of the feasts surrounding births, but all festive events. We will return now, however, to these noncalendrical celebrations of important life cycle moments.

Weddings

This chapter began with an extensive summary of Prince Philip’s wedding to the Infanta María of Portugal in 1541, but for the sake of contrast it may be useful to examine one or two more examples and to read them for what they tell us about festivities in late medieval and early modern Spain. Juan de Mata Carriazo’s La boda de Emperador provides a delightful and richly documented account of the negotiations between Portugal and Spain that led to the marriage of Charles V and the Infanta Isabella of

17 Jonathan Brown and John H. Elliott, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 203–206 et passim. Cited in T. F. Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (London: Longman, 2001), 131.

304 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS Portugal, the journey of Isabella into her new kingdom, the official and ceremonial crossing of the border between Portugal and Castile, and the numerous feasts and ceremonial processions that marked each stage in the princess’s (now empress after a wedding by proxy) slow progress to her nuptial bed. Her entry into Badajoz and the handing over of the princess/ empress from one jurisdiction to another, already redolent with the formulaic phrases, ritual gestures, and the like that mark the entry of foreign queens into their new realms (think of Marie Antoinette’s entry into France as accurately depicted by Sofia Coppola in a recent movie), served as a prelude to her slow progression through Extremadura and her final entry into Seville. Her royal entry called for an extraordinary outlay of municipal funds, the building of ceremonial arches, purchases of new and expensive garments to be worn by city officials, mountains of scarlet clothes, brocade, and other expensive fabrics. De Mata Carriazo includes long quotes from contemporary sources that detail the welcome given to the new empress almost a mile outside the city, the palio embroidered with the imperial coat of arms, juxtaposed with the Portuguese heraldic arms under which she entered the city, and the other familiar displays and celebrations which we have seen in earlier chapters for the entries of queens and princesses. Charles V, however, was not present, called away by complex political negotiations elsewhere in the kingdom. This meant of course yet another royal entry and even more excessive displays of arches, canopies, and other such paraphernalia and festivities associated with his entry and with an imperial betrothal. La boda del Emperador provides abundant excerpts from the epigraphic material and inscriptions decorating the seven arches along the emperor’s ceremonial route. All of them glorified the emperor and his deeds with ample classical allusions, the inevitable wheel of Fortune, and an early ethnographic display of the diversity of imperial subjects.18 Their muted espousals and the consummation of their marriage paralleled, in many ways, that of Philip and María a bit less than two decades later. As was the case in Salamanca, the wedding in Seville was followed by splendid feasts, though delayed by the death of the emperor’s sister. As expected, the feasts held on the occasion of the wedding included the running or fighting of bulls, the unavoidable juego de cañas, an elaborate and expensive joust held on the banks of the River Guadalquivir, and dances and banquets that went on for many days after the espousals. Con- temporary accounts paid inordinate attention to the fabrics, colors, and jewels worn by those in attendance. The nuptials of Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo to Doña Teresa de Torres

18 de Mata Carriazo, La boda del Emperador, 50–93.

305 CHAPTER IX in 1461, though the parties were not comparable in rank or diplomatic importance to Philip and María eighty years later, does provide some clues as to what had changed in the intervening years. The sycophantic chronicler of the “deeds” of the constable—and here again it is important to note that chroniclers’ narratives were representations that gave expression to the political agendas of the writer and/or his patrons—does not fail to note that the wedding attracted visitors and guests from all over the Castilian realm and from Jaén’s hinterland: “more people than when they flock to the city for the feast of the Virgin in August to see the relics of the Veronica.” The chronicle also describes how the constable and his wife-to-be were dressed in scarlet, black, and gold. The ceremonial procession took them through the streets of Jaén, from the privacy of their lodgings to the public religious ceremony in the cathedral. The music of trumpets, drums, and other musical instruments and the undisciplined behavior of fools and buffoons served as counterpoint to, and an inversion of, the martial splendor of the knights riding in the retinue and the symbols of justice and power carried aloft by macebearers. Minstrels played and sang sweet courtly tunes. As was the custom, the lavish wedding was followed by a nuptial banquet. In a richly appointed room, the constable and his wife sat on a stage, surrounded by the great and served by noble knights and high officials. Outside, food was distributed to all: laity and clergy, citizen and alien, rich and poor. The feasts, the Hechos del condestable tells us, lasted for twenty-three days. Dances hosted by the constable and his wife in the inner chambers of their palace, a running of bulls in the square outside their lodging, play-acting by members of Miguel Lucas’ household, jousts, and more theatrical skits culminated in a representation that included a huge wooden tarasca hurling flames from its mouth. Further performances by fools and buffoons, more jousts and pas d’armes, more runnings of bulls, distributions of gifts, etc., carried the celebrations into mid-February, by which time the citizens of Jaén must have been thoroughly disgusted with such excesses.19 The constable’s wedding included, then, a whole range of festive categories: martial games, the running of bulls, carnivalesque elements. The ubiquitous fire-breathing tarasca, and the lavish distributions of food are vivid reminders of the continuity of festive forms from late medieval into early modern and of the manner in which the Corpus Christi came to

19 For weddings described in the chronicle, see Hechos del condestable, 41–61, 305–308, 350–52. The description of the wedding can also be found in my “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” in City and SpectacleinMedievalEurope, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 311–12.

306 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS appropriate all of these forms (with the exception of the bulls). What had changed, once again, was the absence of royalty and even high nobility from the “public” or popular events of the celebration. The description of the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sessa in 1541, in which a young Philip served as one of the sponsors, included martial games (including a running of the ring), artillery discharges, sumptuous banquets, hierarchical processions, and the like, and, as was the inclination of chroniclers from the late fifteenth century onward, elaborate descriptions of the garments worn by the principal participants. Absent from the account were the common people or any distribution of food to them.20 A contrast is found in the very private wedding by proxy of the Infanta Doña Maria de Austria, Philip IV’s sister, to the king of Hungary (the imperial Habsburg heir) in 1629. The guest list was restricted to members of the royal family, a small select number of grandees, and the highest ecclesiastical and civil authorities. It would seem likely that the event was muted in its festive elements on account of Philip IV’s illness (the wedding took place in the king’s chamber as he lay on his sick bed).21

The Memorialization of Death

The passing of a king, queen, prince or princess called for forms of memorialization that could not be properly described as “festive,” but that, in a peculiar way, fit solidly within celebratory cycles. In the case of the death of the highest in the land, ceremonies were held throughout the Spanish realms, engaging the population as a whole and articulated through public mourning and plaintive glorification of the dead king or queen. Kingly deaths belonged to the realm as a whole. Each signaled the close of an age and the beginning of another. But even the death of lesser noblemen and ecclesiastics called for ceremonies that set their passing apart from that of the common people. The irrepressible and always exuberant author of the Hechos del condestable don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo gives us vignettes that reveal how funerals were commemorated in the late fifteenth century—or, at least, how the chronicler wished them to be remembered. Among the several funerals reported in this text, the one marking the death of Don Alonso de Iranzo, archdeacon of the cathedral of Toledo and brother of the constable, in early August 1464 was the most remarkable. Although the funeral and official period of mourning did not in-

20 Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid, 1–5. 21 Ibid., 371–75.

307 CHAPTER IX clude such popular forms of entertainment as mummery, travesty, or other examples of carnivalesque ribaldry, in every other aspect they were mirror-images of the celebrations described above. There was the same flow of action: from the immediate circle of the constable’s household to the wider confines of the city and its hinterland, the same patterns of inclusion and exclusion that served to draw boundaries between those above and those below. Once the news of the archdeacon’s death was received, the constable withdrew to his chambers for nine days of almost complete solitude. At the end of this period, he, his family, and his retinue, all dressed in black and with a great show of tears, sat on the same stage from which he had presided over previous festivals and heard Ves- pers. The people of Jaén, and those who had come to the city for the feast of the Virgin, flocked to pay condolences to Miguel Lucas de Iranzo. They approached the stage in hierarchical order: municipal officials and canons first. Some days afterwards, a whole cycle of funeral Masses, with all the important people of Jaén in attendance, began. For ten pages in the printed edition of the chronicle, the author describes in excruciating detail the staging of the funeral, the number of candles, the rich tapestries and rugs laid in the church, the decorations in black wool and silver, as well as the huge amounts of money spent on the liturgy. As was the case in the funeral of the constable’s daughter six years later, the entire city was drawn into public mourning, showing by their tears and somber clothing their solidarity with and love for their ruler, at least so the chronicler has it.22 In the Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona, a veritable treasure trove of Barcelona’s princely entries, funerals, celebrations of the Corpus Christi, and other civic celebrations, we learn of the manner in which Charles V—then in Barcelona—marked, together with the city, the death of the emperor Maximilian, Charles’ paternal grandfather, on March 1–2, 1519. The commemoration called for a large procession of all the clergy of the city, dressed in black and carrying their respective cathedral and parochial crosses in a hierarchical order that closely paralleled that of the city’s Corpus Christi procession. The description pays close attention to the cathedral’s black decoration, to the types and sizes of the candles and torches carried by those in attendance, and, most of all, to every detail of the fabrics or colors of garments that helped establish a clear social distinctions between those in attendance. It would be tedious to describe every rank listed in the procession. They ranged from bishops, clergy,

22 Hechos del condestable, 234–51, 312–13, 385–86, 413–15. This section is also adapted from my “Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Spain,” 313–14.

308 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS and foreign ecclesiastics with the crosses of their respective churches, to students “and other poor people,” clad in mourning clothing bought at the king’s expense, as were Charles V’s servants. The Flemish and Span- ish guards in their distinctive colors were also part of the procession. Members of the royal council, trumpeters—their instruments muted— twenty gentlemen displaying once again banners with the imperial coat of arms and those of other imperial lands, and two kings-of-arms came next, each occupying distinct ranks. A riderless royal horse trotted behind, followed by successive ranks of knights carrying again the imperial coat of arms, imperial arms, swords, and scepters. Pikesmen and macebearers came next. A knight followed with the imperial banner and behind him, riding on a mule, came the king. The long procession ended with the papal legate and foreign ambassadors all garbed in mourning clothing and behind them a large group of grandees and other great Spanish nobles marching in no special order.23 The ceremonial procession left the royal palace on la carrer Ampla (the wide street) leading to the plaza of St. James, proceeded onward to the palace of the Diputaçió, the Episcopal palace, and entered the cathedral by the main portal. Altogether thirty different ranks took part, so that the sum of those marching numbered more than one thousand, most of them dressed in mourning clothes. Although it was an inverted reflection of more festive events, this and similar funeral processions also provided a solemn occasion to display the most important symbols of power—in this case imperial power—and to link them directly to the young king, now the most likely candidate for the imperial throne. The citizens of Barce- lona stood alongside the processional circuit—one that purposely echoed the routes of royal entries and Corpus Christi processions—as silent spectators to this exalted demonstration of power and mourning. More waited at the cathedral for the large cortege. There a great tomb awaited, covered with rich cloth over which rested an effigy of the dead emperor. Only after the ceremonies concluded and the members of the procession, carrying torches, marched in reverse order back to the king’s abode were the people of Barcelona allowed to enter the cathedral. Many “came,” the Llibre de les solemnitats states, “to see the funeral monument, because before the guardsmen keeping the doors had not allowed them in.”24

23 Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona I, 403–07. 24 Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona I, 406. On the use of effigies, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Representation: Le mot, l’idée, la chose,” Annales E.S.C. 6 (Nov-Dec. 1991), 1219–34; and Sarah Henley, TheLitdeJusticeoftheKingsofFrance: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).

309 CHAPTER IX

The Commemoration of Death in Barcelona In both the Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona and Pere Joan Comes’ Libre de algunes coses asanyaladas, descriptions of how the city commemorated the death of members of the royal family or of distinguished individuals take a disproportionate amount of space and fully engage the respective authors’ narrative powers. It is also striking how much these descriptions read like continuations of the elaborate necrologies that marked the commemoration of death in medieval monasteries. For the Diputaçió and the Consell des Cent, such events, that is, royal and princely deaths, mattered a great deal. They allowed city and county authorities—above all when their count-dukes were away—to project their own civic power to the population at large by taking control of the celebrations. In volume one of the Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona, covering the period between 1424 and 1546, thirty-three entries out of a total of one hundred and eleven described the burial or commemoration of the anniversary of the death of either an illustrious citizen of Barcelona (who usually had died in the city) or a member of the royal family (who had almost always died elsewhere). This represents just a bit under a third of all ceremonial events recorded in the Llibre, which also included numerous references to Cor- pus Christi processions but no notice of Carnival. Volume two of the Llibre (1564–1719) includes twenty-nine entries all together and more than half, sixteen of them, were elaborate descriptions of commemorations of deaths or anniversaries. The same proportion can also be found in Pere Joan Comes’s excerpts from Barcelona’s archives compiled in 1583. This should remind us of the extent to which the end of life was treated as more significant than its beginnings in the memorialization of the life cycle. The transition between medieval and early modern did not necessarily mark a diminution in what may be described as the cult of death. Moreover, when it came to these events, the gulf between those on top and those below became more pronounced than in other ceremonial contexts. No artisanal guilds or confraternities were present at these events; it would seem that they had not been invited. The crowd had been turned into passive spectators, restricted to displaying their grief only from the sidelines. Although there are innumerable examples of how these events were marked, it may be prudent to bring this section to a close with one more example. In 1611, Madrid witnessed the funeral of Queen Doña Margarita of Austria, wife of Philip III, king of the Spanish realms. Juan Gómez de Mora described in precise detail how the royal church and monastery of the Jerónimos were lavishly decorated with elaborate candleholders, marble, shields, statues representing the deceased

310 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS queen’s Christian virtues, and mechanical contraptions, all of them in honor of Doña Margarita and the majesty of the Spanish monarchy. Her funeral monument was decorated with angels because, as Gómez de Mora writes, “while the catafalques of kings are decorated with banners, flags, and royal arms, on those of queens they put angels as adornment and accompaniment.”25 The king, having slept in the monastery the night before as had by now become the custom, witnessed the proceedings and the solemn Mass for the dead from a window draped in black high up within the church, where “he was neither seen nor judged by anyone in attendance.”26 While guards kept the uninvited out, grandees, bishops and other prelates, royal counselors, and other dignitaries came into the church and sat in benches assigned to them by rank. When everyone was settled, the kings-of-arms and royal macebearers came in and stood by the funeral monument. Masses were sang, the first by Cardinal Borja and the second by the papal legate, followed by the Jesuit Florencia’s long sermon. A small procession within the church and around Doña Margarita’s funeral monument was followed by more prayers and chants, marking the end of this lengthy and exhausting ceremony. As the high nobles and church dignitaries exited the church, they met a large crowd that had gathered outside because, the narrator revealingly writes, the ceremonies “were favored by a clear and serene day to provide the opportunity to enjoy the greatness (grandeza) of Lord King Philip’s court, [who is] to be guarded (kept) by God as happy and for as many years as needed for the defense of Christianity.”27 While a link between ceremonials and the representation of royal power was always quite obvious, we seldom find as clear a statement of such a link as Gómez de Mora articulates in his 1611 account. His concluding remarks juxtapose solemnity and deep mourning with the crowd outside enjoying—in an atmosphere not unlike a Hollywood opening—the coming and going of the high and powerful. The people had access to no direct representation in the affair, except for an angel who stood outside announcing to them the dead queen’s charitable actions towards her “people” and who was then brought inside the church where a king-of-arms touched her during the funeral ceremonies as a symbolic token of the people’s presence at the Mass. We are a long way from the kinds of processions through a town that we saw in Jaén and Barcelona in the 1460s and 1519, respectively. Proces- sions now took place within the enclosed spaces of the church, as was the

25 Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid, 74. 26 Ibid., 75. 27 Ibid., 76. See an additional description by an anonymous eyewitness on pages 78–80.

311 CHAPTER IX case also in Seville’s ceremonies mourning Philip II’s death— ceremonies so elaborate and sumptuous as to require the city council to commission a book telling about the decorations and the rank of those in attendance. Guards kept the lower classes out, sitting was by rank, elaborate funeral monuments sat at center stage, kings looked on from hidden places or attended not at all. Most rite of passage celebrations for monarchs and members of the royal family—commemorating birth, marriage, or death—became not only opportunities to celebrate the power of the monarchy, but, slowly but surely, also displays aimed at a selected inner circle. Religion, practical considerations, and political expedience joined in an unholy alliance, framing ever more strident monarchical claims. The shrouding of these performances in mystery and seclusion, lent them even more of the mystique of power and thus rendered them more intriguing to the population at large.28

Noncalendrical Religious Festivals

Noncalendrical religious festivities in late medieval and early modern Spain offered an opportunity for a Church that did not enjoy as much autonomy in Spain as it did elsewhere in Western Europe, opportunities to display its own ceremonial and propaganda programs. Nonetheless, these festivities also attracted the attention of municipal political entities, who sought to gain as much advantage from them as possible. For the

28 I should mention several important works about dying in medieval and early modern Spain, which provide important interventions on these themes. The literature for the rest of Europe is vast, and here I limit myself to a few titles that directly relate to the Spanish realms: Ariel Guiance, LosdiscursossobrelamuerteenlaCastillamedieval(siglos VII–XV) (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1998), in particular 279–324; Denis Menjot, “Un chrétien qui meurt toujours. Les funérailles royales en Castile à la fin du Moyen Age,” in M. Núñez and E. Portela, eds., Laideayelsentimientodelamuerteenla historiayenelartedelaEdadmedia (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1988), 127–38; Adeline Rucquoi, “De la resignación al miedo: la muerte en Castilla en el siglo XV,” in Núñez and Portela, eds., ibid., 51–66, and her “Le corps et la mort en Castile aux XIV et XV siècles,” Razo 2 (1981), 89–97. See also Patrick J. Geary, LivingwiththeDeadintheMiddleAges (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Flo- cel Sabaté, Lo senyor rei est mort! Actitud I cerimònies dels municipes catalans baix-medievals devannt la mort del monarca (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 1994); the classical work by Mi- chel Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nous jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), and Philippe Ariès’ paradigmatic TheHourofOurDeath, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, originally published in 1981). See also Carlos Eire’s wonderful From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

312 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS sake of brevity, I examine here only two such examples. Both demonstrate the manner in which what might have been a strictly religious celebration became, not unlike the Corpus, dominated by secular and even carnivalesque elements; and both clarify why strictly religious celebrations would have to wait until the modern age. The first of the two feasts took place in Toledo in 1555. Its aim was to celebrate the short-lived conversion of England to the Catholic faith after the marriage of Philip and Mary Tudor in 1554. The second took place in Madrid in 1622 to mark the canonizations of St. Isidro (the patron saint of Madrid), St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Theresa of Avila, and St. Philip Neri.

The Celebrations of England’s Conversion in Toledo Toledo’s municipal officers and church dignitaries seem to have been particularly given to lengthy celebrations. Whatever the reason, whether it was an attempt to impress the Crown with Toledo’s potential as a ceremonial center in the context of its fierce competition to be the capital of Habsburg Spain, or whether Toledans just liked to party, it is clear that the city’s festivities lasted for a considerable time. The conversion celebrations of 1555 reached such a fantastic and bizarre degree of excess that they were notable even among the exaggerated feasts of the early modern period. Sebastián de Horozco (ca. 1510–1581) in his Relaciones históricas Toledanas provides a day-today account of the festivities and of the varied components of what should have been essentially a pious event, an act of thanksgiving for England’s return to Catholicism. The glad news arrived by letter in Toledo on February 9, 1555, prompting, after consultation between the archbishop and the city authorities, an extended tolling of church bells and a display of luminarias (lights) in the municipal building and the cathedral. There would have been even greater rejoicing if it had not have been for the inclement weather, or so Horozco tells us. The next day, Sunday, February 10th, a solemn procession wound its way through Toledo. It consisted of the usual hierarchical ranks of ecclesiastics, municipal officers, symbols of municipal authority in open display, members of guilds, and the common people of the city. Since the news had arrived as the city was preparing for Carnival, one event folded seamlessly into the other, a blending that gave the pious celebration a no- ticeably carnivalesque quality. From February 9th to the 26th of that month, the day of Mardi Gras, the city was in a state of perpetual celebration. Horozco tells us that he was an eyewitness to these festivities: the city was given up day and night to joy and was completely free of any

313 CHAPTER IX violence, filled “with peace and love.” Es( también de notar que en todas estas fiestas quanto duraron de día y de noche no ovo ruido ni question, ni se desenvaynó espada sino con mucha paz y amor.)29 Between the announcement of England’s reconversion to Catholicism and the beginning of Lent, sixteen days altogether, Toledo witnessed daily local processions as parishes, nobles, and middling sorts paraded through the streets in masks and disguises, conflating carnival motifs with religious elements. The more than two-week-long celebration included every type of festive display examined in previous chapters. On Monday, February 11, musicians marched through the city, accompanying masked noblemen dressed in white. The next day the masked parades continued, but there was also the ubiquitous running of the ring (every day of the more than two-week celebration), and people dressed as madmen. Each day called for different types of disguises and parades, many of them organized by the guilds. There were cupids and women with two faces, four arms, and four legs (the moral of the latter, which Horozco found highly entertaining, was that both the world and women have two faces), bulls of course, and the game of canes, fireworks, dances, bonfires, skits and tableaux vivants, effigies of Luther surrounded by demons who tormented him for his many sins (much to the delight of the spectators), and an endless litany of other events, which filled every day with entertainment. What this catalogue of festive forms tells us is that late medieval and early modern festive displays, whether in Spain or elsewhere in West- ern Europe, tended to conflate, as has been seen in previous chapters, diverse motifs. The religious functioned most effectively when surrounded by visual images and ludic displays that both taught and entertained the audience. And this back and forth flow from the sacred to the ribald is most clearly seen in the events of Sunday, February 10th. On that day, the next after the announcement of England’s reconversion to Catholicism and still well before Carnestolendas (Mardi Gras), the prostitutes from Toledo’s municipally supervised brothels marched through the streets of the city dressed as men, dancing, and playing tambourines. The day continued with the running of the ring and other ingenious displays.30 What for us may seem irreverent was, for early modern people, part and parcel of that bricolage of festive forms that constituted the very nature of the feast.

29 Horozco, Relaciones históricas toledanas, 141; the festivity is described in great detail on pages 125–42. 30 Ibid., 127 for the description of the prostitutes’ parade, and 125–42 for the general description of the festivities.

314 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS

Celebrating Canonization in Madrid Between the festivities in Toledo to celebrate England’s embrace of Ca- tholicism in 1555 and Madrid’s celebration in honor of the canonization of five new saints in June of 1622, the Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation had somewhat changed the festive landscape of Iberia and other Catholic realms throughout Southern Europe. On June 6, 1622, news arrived from Rome of the canonization of St. Isidro (patron of Ma- drid), St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Philip Neri, and St. Theresa of Avila. The messenger ran first to the royal palace to give the news, hoping to collect the reward of 800 escudos offered by the municipality of Madrid to the person who first brought the news. Finding the king gone to Aranjuez, he ran back to the Plaza de la Villa, Madrid’s seat of office, and delivered the news there. The canonization of four Spanish saints on the same day, two of them among the most notable saints in Spanish history (Ss. Ignatius and Theresa), and another long the object of a medieval cult and a patron of Madrid, called for great festivities. Al- though lacking in some of the bizarre components present in the Toledo feasts described above, those in Madrid, in spite of their marked religious character, also included elements with which we are familiar from other festive displays. The central events of these celebrations were pious processions and the construction of altars throughout the city. Each religious order and parish contributed. The Franciscans built a garden, altars, pyramids (all bearing appropriate inscriptions and pious pronouncements) between the plaza de la Cebada and the plaza de la Paja (or Humilladero) at the center of Old Madrid, close to the Hotel de la Villa, Madrid’s municipal building. The Jesuits, who played a significant role in the celebrations as befitted an event celebrating the canonization of their founder and of Francis Xavier, one of the earliest and most prominent members of the Society of Jesus, built an ephemeral castle that displayed the royal arms and an effigy of a king with an unsheathed sword (please recall the references to the image of the unsheathed sword in chapters 3, 4, and 5). On the evening of June 18th, there were dances, “portable inventions,” sword dances, giants, tableaux vivants, mock battles between Turks and Spaniards, and fake galle- ons mounted on floats parading from the municipal building all the way to the palace. Manuel Ponce, one of the chroniclers who described the festivities, compared the floats to Corpus Christi displays. Of course, abundant luminarias (lights), bonfires, and fireworks lit up Madrid’s night. And, as was to be expected, he mentions the unavoidable game of canes and a running of bulls in the Plaza Mayor, which once again con-

315 CHAPTER IX tributed a hint of the carnivalesque to the religious celebrations. Poetical competitions, elaborate masques (sponsored mostly by the Jesuits), plus a proliferation of masks, disguises, and skits complemented the feasts. Not surprisingly, certain new elements were on display as well. Pyramids, astrological references, and evidence of a taste for the exotic (revelers disguised as Turks and Asian peoples) connected Spain to the culture of early seventeenth-century Rome.31 But most of the other displays were part and parcel of that heady mixture of the popular and erudite, the sacred and profane, the pious and the carnivalesque so typical of other festivals in late medieval and early modern Spain. It was a mix deeply embedded in Spanish tradition and consequently one that articulated for the spectators an enduring connection to a medieval past. Nothing however reinforced the thread between present and past as strongly as the ceremonies that accompanied the proclamation of a new king.

Ascending the Throne and Coronations Ascending or succeeding to the throne and being crowned as king or queen were two distinct ceremonies in medieval and early modern Spain. Unlike France, where the dauphin, though a king in waiting (le roi est mort, vive le roi), did not become fully a king until ceremonially anointed and crowned at Reims,32 in Spanish realms coronation seems to have been optional, with the making of kings taking a diversity of possible paths. It is clear that coronation—when it did happen at all (which was not often)—had little or nothing to do with the assumption of kingly power. This assertion is unrelated to the now tedious debate over whether the Castilian monarchy was “sacral” or not.33 It has to do instead with the reality of the casual or, rather, very conscious manner in which Spanish kings most often ignored coronation, but at another times made a great spectacle of it. If Iberian usages differed considerably from those to the north of the Pyrenees, Castile also differed from the Crown of Aragon as a whole, as did the kingdom of Aragon from the Principal- ity of Barcelona. Although Charles V was crowned as emperor, he was

31 There are three short entries that describe the feasts. Two of them are anonymous accounts and the third, and longest, is by Manuel Ponce. Here I have offered, seeking to economize space, only the most perfunctory of descriptions. See Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid, 163–78. 32 On this, see Jacques Le Goff, “Reims, ville du sacre,” inLes lieux de mémoire, vol. 2. La nation 1, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 649–733. 33 On this see Peter Linehan’s wonderful and monumental book, History and the Histo- riansofMedievalSpain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 427–30, 442, 586–87, et passim. Also Teofilo F. Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150–1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 134–46.

316 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS never crowned as king in any of the Spanish realms he had inherited and claimed as his own before being elected as emperor. In truth, although he had in principle been king since the death of his grandfather Ferdinand in 1516, he did not in fact become king until sworn in by the respective Cortes of his diverse Iberian realms. This required a great deal of travel between Santiago de Compostela and Barcelona and the making of many promises to demanding parliamentary procurators, all of which provided abundant occasions for entries, festivities, and ceremonies, as had his entry into Barcelona in 1519. None of his Spanish Habsburg successors (as opposed to his Austrian ones) had sought to undergo a formal crowning, though all of them had to submit to certain rites of passage, whether acclamation or, as we saw in the case of Philip II, being sworn by the Cortes and in turn swearing back to respect the liberties of their respective kingdoms. Or, perhaps this should be put the other way around, especially in Catalonia: he swore to uphold the peculiar privileges of the kingdom and/or Principality and then, and only then, was he sworn as either the legitimate heir or rightful ruler. As you may remember, both the young Philip and his great grandfather, Ferdinand the Catholic, although named to the lieutenancy general of Catalonia, were clearly denied jurisdiction until they had been sworn, by which was meant that they had sworn to respect the Usatges (the old medieval charter of the city and the Principality) of Barcelona and other privileges. Then, and only then, could they legitimately exercise their jurisdiction as lieutenant generals. The “practical” (if such a word fits the circumstances here) nature of Spanish kingship—even in Castile where from the very late fifteenth century the Crown had most matters firmly in hand and enjoyed fairly tight control over its Cortes—required the kings to adhere to an ancient model of kingship built on well-established ceremonial forms. This called for an enormous expenditure of energy and funds to legitimize kingly rule, but did not require either coronation or the intervention of ecclesiastics. And this would be true even if we accepted Nieto Soria’s argument for the “invisible anointment” (see previous note). Philip II’s long journey to his eastern realms in 1585–86 is inexplicable but for his need to have the Cortes of the Crown of Aragon acknowledge Prince Philip (later Philip III) as the rightful heir to his throne. The long voyage was preceded by the swearing in of the young prince by the Castilian Cortes late in 1584. The joint meeting of the Cortes of Aragon, Valencia and Catalo- nia at Monzón in 1585 was yet another matter altogether, as the procurators fought fiercely and endlessly over questions of protocol and precedence while the ailing king waited and waited in the growing cold of Monzón’s late fall.

317 CHAPTER IX The acknowledgment of mutual duties, responsibilities, rights, and the like was at the core of formal ascent to kingship. In the particular case of Catalonia and, above all, Barcelona, it seemed that one did not really become even a count or lieutenant general of the Principality until one had sworn to uphold Catalan liberties in Barcelona itself. This traditionally took place on a stage built in the square of the Franciscans, across from the ancient palace of the Montcada family, though other sites could be chosen, as Philip did twice, once as viceroy and then again as king. The result was the same. Although Philip II had been the rightful king from 1558 onwards and had received a lavish royal entry into Barcelona in 1564, replete with palio, unsheathed sword, and other attributes that confirmed his undisputed rule in a highly symbolic and politically significant way, he was not really a prince in Barcelona until he had sworn the liberties of the city and the Principality in what was the concluding official ceremony of his royal entry. Even in Seville the king did not fail to renew the city’s privileges, though clearly Philip II’s relations with Seville in 1570 were far more unequal (with the king on top) than his relations with his eastern kingdom.

Becoming a King The transition from heir-in-waiting to king always received special attention in contemporary chronicles. In both Castile and the Crown of Aragon, the death of a king called for ceremonials, mourning, and a solemn burial, swiftly followed by the acknowledgment of the new king. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Castile, the abundance of royal minorities created unusual circumstances. Except for the exceptional crowning of Sancho IV—prompted most probably by the fact that he was illegitimately grasping the throne that rightfully belonged to his nephew Ferdinand de la Cerda—the ascent of most thirteenth-century kings to the throne was described in laconic term as “having been raised to the throne.”34 In the case of Sancho IV (and other kings, in both Cas- tile and the Crown of Aragon), this entailed attending Mass, dressing in ritual mourning clothes, and swiftly thereafter donning royal garments of gold and declaring oneself king. Sancho IV, who was in Avila when he heard of his father’s (Alfonso X) death in Seville, marched quickly to Toledo where he had himself and his wife María de Molina crowned by

34 For the political context of these minorities in the history of the Spanish realms, see Peter Linehan’s brilliant, Spain 1157–1300: A Partible Inheritance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) for the thirteenth century; and Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300– 1474 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) for the late Middle Ages.

318 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS four bishops, a most unusual ceremony in Castile’s history of ascents to the throne.35 Ferdinand IV, Sancho IV’s son, and Ferdinand’s son, Alfonso XI, came to the throne as minors, following the same formulas, but without a crowning. After Sancho IV’s burial, they removed Ferdinand’s garments of mourning, dressed him in rich colorful clothing, and on the main altar of the cathedral of Toledo “they received him as king and lord.” The in- fant king, or his regents in his name, swore to uphold the “ fueros” (charters of privileges). After this ceremony all the regents and high nobles gathered, kissed Ferdinand IV’s hand in obeisance, and acclaimed him to the traditional cry: “Castilla, Real, Real por el rey don Fernando.” Don Nuño González de Lara (representative of the great noble house of Lara) carried the royal arms (hanging from his neck) and, together with the young king, walked the streets of Toledo.36 Alfonso XI was raised as king in 1312, when he was just over one year old. There was little time for ceremonies because the young king had to be spirited away to safety to prevent his kidnapping by contending regents.37 The ceremonial of becoming a king is sometimes absent from Castilian chronicles. The writers were either too interested in internal struggles or omitted the rite for partisan motifs, as was the case with the ascent of Peter I in 1350. When there was a mention at all it was no more than a bare notice of the event, but even these reveal some elements as crucial: the donning of mourning clothing and then their quick replacement by the lavish garments of royalty, the ceremonial importance of plaintive prayers for the dead king, and the feasts that accompanied the rise of a new monarch. These types of ceremonies were common in Castile, the Crown of Aragon and other transpyrennean realms. Others were predominantly Castilian. Two examples will suffice here. Our first vignette describes Isabella’s ascent to the throne after her half-brother Henry IV’s death in 1474. Although she had already been sworn as heiress to the kingdom at a gathering at Toros de Guisando, this was a contested succession fraught with peril. Large segments of the high nobility of Castile and the king of Portugal supported the claims of Juana, Henry IV’s alleged daughter, and recognized her, despite her suspected adulterous origins, as heiress to the throne. Ferdinand, Isabella’s husband, was back in Aragon, and the princess, who was in Segovia, had to move swiftly and boldly the moment she learned of her brother’s death, while yet preserving all the ceremonial formalities that signaled the ascent of a

35 Crónica de Sancho IV, 69. 36 Crónica de Fernando IV, 96. 37 Crónica de Alfonso XI, 173–74.

319 CHAPTER IX king or queen to the Castilian throne. Andrés Bernáldez, one of the chroniclers of the Catholic monarchs’ reign, tells us in laconic language the sequence of events. [... upon hearing the news] the Princess Doña Isabel covered herself with mourning clothes and cried, as it was done, for her brother the king, and she went to the Church of Saint Michael, and there also went the banners of the king Don Enrique [Henry], and those of the city of Segovia, covered in black mourning and carried low, and after doing all the ceremonies [and prayers] of mourning, Masses, and obsequies, they [the people of Segovia] built a stage and they (the magnates and the people of Segovia) raised Doña Isabel Queen of Castile and Leon. Then the mayordomo (the king’s steward) Cabrera gave the newly named queen the keys to the fortresses (alcazares) in the city, the staff of justice, and the treasures of her brother, whose mayordomo he was. . . . 38 Hernando del Pulgar, a far more reliable chronicler than Bernáldez, describes the raising of the banners of Castile to the traditional cry of: “Cas- tile, Castile for the king Don Ferdinand and for the queen Doña Isabella, his wife and owner of these kingdoms.” This was followed by other acclama- tions throughout many cities in northern Castile and by processions of nobles coming to Segovia to kiss Isabella’s hand in obeisance. The emphasis in the above quote is mine. It supports John Edwards’ description of Isabella’s self-proclamation as queen as a “coup.” At Segovia—and Al- fonso de Cartagena’s description of the procession through the city with the newly elected queen marching behind the sword of justice held high by its point justifies the idea of Isabella’s rushing to claim power—Isabella did not wait for Ferdinand to claim her rights over Castile and to assert the full extent of her authority.39 Here, and of course elsewhere, the chroniclers’ narratives have to be read through the lens of their own partisan support for the new queen, and attention must given to their proximity to, or distance from, the actual events. What we see in all the descriptions of festivals and processions are representations. The four main components in the making of a king are here present: a) the mourning rituals; b) the raising of the royal banner; c) the acclamation by the people, kissing the hands of the new sovereign in obeisance, and given their oath of fealty; d) and, finally, the procession with the unsheathed sword of justice lifted high. The enduring power of such models

38 The citation is a free translation from Andrés Bernáldez, Historia de los reyes católicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel in Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla III (Biblioteca de autores es- pañoles, vol. 70: Madrid, 1953), 576. 39 These two paragraphs are taken from my Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 198. See notes therein.

320 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS remained deeply embedded in Castilian and Spanish ritual practices. The Spanish Habsburgs also eschewed coronations and ritual anointing, with Charles V’s imperial coronation (an event outside Spain and having nothing to do with Iberian matters) the only exception to the rule. But other practices could not be ignored. An anonymous published account describes the ascent to the throne of Philip IV in 1621. On Sunday, May 2nd, all the members of the royal councils came to the royal monastery of St. Jerome, located next to the site of the Prado today, and at the end of the quintessential Madrid thoroughfare, the Car- rera de San Jerónimo. There in solitude the king mourned for his dead father (Philip III). The royal councilors were followed by knights from the military orders of Santiago, Alcántara, Calatrava, and other lesser orders. When the mourning ceremonies had concluded, the knights and councilors lifted the royal banner of Castile and led a parade of all present to the square in front of the royal palace where a richly appointed stage had been built. Royal and municipal officials mounted the stage, lifted the royal standard thrice, and in loud voices gave the traditional cry: “Castile, Castile, for the king, Don Philip, our Lord, fourth of that name.” The traditional cry concluded, the officials, plus other regidores, threw silver coins to the gathered crowd. In a solemn procession, the officials (but not the king) traveled first to the square across from Madrid’s civic building (the Plaza de la Villa), where they reenacted the traditional cry and the distribution of coins. Next in their circuitous itinerary (the Plaza de la Villa is farther away from the royal palace by the Jerónimos than from the Plaza Mayor) was the Plaza Mayor. A sumptuous stage had been built there for yet another repeat performance, and then, finally, the procession went on to the square across from the monastery of the Discalced Carmelites (the same monastery where Philip II had visited his sister before his long trip to the Crown of Aragon in 1585), for the final and most significant of these repetitive ceremonies of naming the new king. There, Philip IV and his family, absent from all those previous reenactments of his ritual proclamation as king, looked from behind a well-protected window. Only then, after the ceremonies of elevation and proclamation of the new king had concluded, did the burial and solemn funeral Mass take place at the monastery of St. Jerome on May 4, 1621.40 Although many aspects remained unchanged from the Middle Ages, others had altered radically. The ritual cry provided a link to medieval traditions. The movement from mourning to festivity remained as well, but by the early modern period the king was notably absent from the pro-

40 Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid, 124–26.

321 CHAPTER IX ceedings. Following a pattern that we have already seen for other festivities, he and his family looked on the events without themselves being seen (though everyone knew of their presence), concealed as if in mystery behind heavy curtains. Of course, the drapery behind which the king and his family stood was a part of Burgundian ceremonial traditions that, mixing with Castilian royal practices, produced a hybrid peninsular model of royal symbols and performance.41 But it was not enough to do the ritual once. It was reenacted in four strategic and interconnected sites within the city. And this same ceremony was replicated elsewhere through the Span- ish realms as a testimony to Philip IV’s ascent to the throne. The monastery of St. Jerome, the Plaza Mayor, and the Plaza de la Villa were located in a straight east-west line that linked all the ceremonial spaces of the Spanish Habsburg monarchy. Las Descalzas (the Discalced Carmelites monastery), closely associated with the royal family and fairly adjacent to the Plaza Mayor, completed an easily accessible circuit for the parading of royal power. Unsheathed swords were no longer necessary,42 for the king was after all absent. Instead the ritualized throwing of silver to the crowds, and the melee that ensued as people fought for the coins—there were surely not enough for everyone—added a festive and carnivalesque element to the solemnities of the day.

The Crown of Aragon Ramón Muntaner’s lively chronicle pays close attention to the cycle of royal deaths and princely successions to the throne. He begins with short descriptions of Peter II’s death in 1213 and of the crowning of James I as king of Aragon and count of Barcelona—events that he did not himself witness. He describes how late in his life king James I traveled successively to Zaragoza, Valencia, and Barcelona to have the Cortes of each of his realms swear his son, Don Pedro, as king of the Crown of Aragon. He also used the opportunity to designate his second son, also named James,

41 On the Burgundian ritual and the significance of curtains or screens (remember Philip II praying behind a screen in Tortosa), see Juliet Glass, “The Royal Chapel of the Alcázar in Madrid,” unpublished dissertation, Johns Hopkins University (2004). This and many other references I owe to the great kindness of Richard Kagan. 42 Although swords were missing in this occasion, León Pinelo reports that at the swearing in of the Infante Don Felipe (the later Philip IV) as prince of Spain and heir to the throne, a very private ceremony without “public” participation but with representatives of the Cortes and high nobility present, the Count of Oropesa carried the naked estoque, or royal sword. See Antonio de León Pinelo, Anales de Madrid. Reinado de Felipe III, años 1598–1621, Ricardo Martorell Téllez-Girón, ed. (Madrid: Estanislao Maestre, 1931), 76–78. Nonetheless, in the proclamation of Philip III as king in 1598, there is a mention of the naked estoque, 39–41.

322 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS as king of Mallorca; that is, ruler of the Balearic Islands, Montpellier, Roussillon, and Cerdagne. Each of these ceremonial acceptances of James’ sons as heir was followed by a great feast that, in Muntaner’s typical and often irritating fashion, he describes as “I cannot tell you about them, each of you can surely imagine them.”43 Upon James I’s death, Don Pedro, his first born, traveled swiftly to Zaragoza where, sworn again by the Cortes, now as king, he was crowned and held great feasts. Shortly afterwards, he journeyed to Valencia and to Barcelona to similar swearing ins, a crowning (in Barcelona not with a crown but with a garland), and to preside over sumptuous feasts.44 The successive ceremonies marking Peter III’s transition from heir to the throne to actual kingship followed a clearly arranged order. The first requirement was a royal visit to the individual and, unlike Castile, well- established ceremonial centers of each realm (or county in the case of Barcelona): Zaragoza, Valencia, and Barcelona. Second, the Cortes approved the new king and mutual oaths and promises were exchanged. Only then did the crowning take place, followed by the usual feasts and celebrations. Yet, Peter III’s coronations and festivities in the Iberian eastern realms paled when compared to his reception and solemn crowing in Sicily. He was received at Trapani, a port in the western part of the island, with, according to Muntaner, women dancing and great displays of lights throughout the island. After a tumultuous royal entry, the king was crowned in Palermo, a city with a long royal tradition going back to its Norman and Hohenstaufen rulers.45 Peter III’s death was similarly accompanied by great demonstrations of mourning that soon turned into festivities, followed by the coronations of James in Sicily (as king of Sicily) and Don Alfonso II as king of Aragon in Zaragoza, Valencia, and Barcelona. The feast in Zaragoza, lasted for fifteen days, or so Muntaner tells us. The same pattern of visit—a gathering of the Cortes, a swearing in, and a crowning—took place in Valencia. Muntaner’s narrative continued with Alfonso II’s untimely death and the succession and immediate coronation of his brother James.46 By now this may seem a tedious and repetitive summary of a well-established tradition in marking the ascent of kings in the Crown of Aragon, a topic that has been well discussed before.47 But as noted earlier, in the Crown of

43 Muntaner, Crònica I, 42–43, 78–80. 44 Ibid., 84–86. 45 Ibid., 136–39. 46 Muntaner, Crònica, II: 372–83 et passim. 47 On this see Bonifacio Palacios Martín, La coronación de los reyes de Aragón, 1204– 1410. Aportación al estudio de las estructuras políticas medievales (Valencia: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1975), 59–130, 201–59. For the confused history of the Crown of Aragon be-

323 CHAPTER IX Aragon there was a significant variation on the theme. Unlike Castile, where the heir to the throne was declared the new king wherever he or she received the news of the death of the previous king, in the Crown of Aragon, though the heir became king at the moment of his predecessor’s death, the transition to full rule was not official until a complex, clearly scripted, and ordered sequence of ceremonies took place as dictated by tradition and by the unique roles of Zaragoza, Valencia, and Barcelona within each of the individual entities forming the Crown of Aragon. Unlike Castile, where coronation may or may not have followed the acclamation of the heir as king (in reality coronations were rare, and when they did take place, could happen long after the ascension to the throne), in the realms of Aragon the coronation often followed swiftly on the ascension. In that sense, the Crown of Aragon was far closer to other transpyrennean polities, such as France or England, than to Castile. But it should not surprise us that when the Habsburgs came to the throne in the sixteenth century, while they never resurrected crowning and anointing, they nonetheless continued the traditional circuit that led them from Zaragoza to Valencia and finally to Barcelona as a necessary prerequisite to assuming rulership of their eastern kingdoms. Although Muntaner often provides little detail as to the nature of the coronation of the rulers of the Crown of Aragon and of the festivities that accompanied these ceremonies, he closes his Crònica with a detailed description of the coronation of Alfonso IV. This particular event was significant in terms of its impact on other Iberian realms. We will consider it in the following section.

Coronations: Aragon and Castile I have already mentioned my long-term interest in coronations and festivities and the fact that I was led to it by the many magisterial articles of the distinguished and influential historian of the Iberian Middle Ages, Angus MacKay. In a close reading of the coronation and coronation feast of Ferdinand of Antequera as the first Trastámara king of the Crown of Aragon in 1412, MacKay examined the symbols displayed at the event and the close link that Ferdinand I, just elected king at Caspe, sought to establish with Marian devotion.48 In 1403, seven years before his victory fore the ascent of the Trastámara dynasty, see Thomas N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1986), 58–132. 48 Angus MacKay, “Don Fernando de Antequera y la Virgen Santa María,” in Home- naje al profesor Juan Torres Fontes, 2 vols. (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia. Academia Al- fonso X el Sabio, 1987) 2, 949–57.

324 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS at Antequera and nine before his election as king of the Crown of Ara- gon, Ferdinand had founded the knightly order of the Jar and the Griffin in honor of the Virgin. The symbols of the order and of Mary—jars and lilies—were prominently displayed at his coronation banquet in 1412, and, as Angus MacKay has shown, the order of the Jar and the Griffin migrated from Castile (where it had absolutely no impact) to the Crown of Aragon, where it enjoyed a robust life in the succeeding century. The ceremonies of Ferdinand of Antequera’s coronation were peculiar in two distinct ways. First, they reached a level of elaboration seldom seen on the peninsula, or to put it in a different way, the written representations of the actual banquet feast that followed the coronation were so lavish as to provide MacKay with the material for a “thick description,” something seldom possible for earlier events of this nature. Ferdinand of Antequera, as he was known before he became king of the Crown of Aragon, had a taste for performance and festivities. Just two years previous to his election as king, he had been the main protagonist of a spectacular triumphal entry into Seville after his great victory over the Muslims at Antequera. That Ferdinand was deeply imbricated in courtly culture and in its concomitant chivalrous displays becomes obvious when we look at the ceremonials that accompanied his assumption of power. But the coronation and the feasts that followed were also peculiar because, as one of the Trastámara Infantes and a regent of Castile, he did not have a commitment, and neither did Trastámara rulers in Castile, to the traditions of ceremonial crownings often practiced in the eastern kingdoms. But all the same, Ferdinand hurled himself into Arago-Catalan ceremonial practices with great relish and without missing a beat. Perhaps the contested selection process that led to his naming as the new king of the Crown of Aragon had a great deal to do with his embracing of traditional crowning as a way of legitimizing his rule. Or perhaps it was simply that, as hinted earlier, he had a great inclination for these spectacles. Re- gardless, however, of the reasons that prompted him to sanction such displays, in doing so Ferdinand I drew on a rich Aragonese history of ceremonials that illustrate the impact of Aragonese and Catalan practices on Iberia as a whole. Yet Ferdinand, while appropriating the ceremonial traditions of his new realms also deployed iconographic references that challenged the contractual nature of the Arago-Catalan monarchy. He had promoted his candidacy at Caspe as being under the Virgin’s protection. MacKay notes that conflict existed between two contesting ideas about the origins of kingly rule, namely the notion that kingship was of divine origin vs. the view that it should depend on an elective process. We see this illustrated clearly in the case of Ferdinand I in the Retablo del Arzo-

325 CHAPTER IX bispo Sancho de Rojas (presently in the Prado). “In it the baby Jesus leans from his mother’s lap and personally places a crown on the head of a kneeling Ferdinand. Not one elector is in sight.”49

THE CORONATIONS OF ALFONSO IV OF ARAGON AND ALFONSO XI OF CASTILE Besides the lavish displays at Ferdinand I’s coronation and feasts in 1412, two other crownings remain paradigmatic for the Spanish Middle Ages. Both of these events shared in more or less the same symbolic language, but they also incorporated elements peculiar to two distinctive realms.

Alfonso IV. In the twelfth century, the count-kings of Catalonia and Aragon had acknowledged papal suzerainty. Peter II had been crowned by Pope Innocent III in 1204 while at Rome. There is ample evidence that Aragonese kings clearly saw, as did the French kings, a connection between crowning, anointment, and the legitimating of their ascent to the throne. Peter III (1276–85), for example, did not assume his rightful title of king for almost a year until he was crowned at Zaragoza.50 This was certainly not the case with his descendant Alfonso IV, who moved swiftly to formalize his rule over the Crown of Aragon shortly after his father’s death. Muntaner, an eyewitness to the coronation and some of the festivities accompanying the event, describes, for once in detail, the events leading to Alfonso IV’s coronation in Zaragoza in 1327, as well as the actual ceremonies marking his ascent to the throne and the subsequent displays that were part of these performative festivities. This is his description of the events leading to the coronation of Alfonso IV in 1327 and of the actual ceremonies marking the king’s ascent to the throne. Once he had buried his father with all the solemnity due to a dead king, King Alfonso, with his brothers, ecclesiastical dignitaries, noblemen, and citizens [urban representatives] traveled to the town of Montblanch and held a meeting to decide where to travel first: whether to Aragon, Valencia, or Barcelona, for he wished to pay the debts he had with each of his kingdoms as his ancestors had. . . . It was decided to go to Barcelona to hold Cortes and assemblies with the Catalans. By Christmas he was in Barce- lona, having stopped along the way to visit different localities. In them, he had sworn to uphold all the uses, liberties, and privileges, and, in return, the Catalans took oaths to him as king [count]. On Easter Day, April 3, 1328 (1327), to bring happiness to his people as Christ’s resurrection had

49 Angus MacKay, “Fernando I, King of Aragón,” in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, E. Michael Gerli, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 326–27. 50 Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon, 86–87. For the paragraph above, see also Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 133.

326 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS brought happiness to his apostles, the king came to Zaragoza, ordering that all the magnates, prelates, and urban representatives meet him there. The account is followed by a long list of those in attendance, including Muntaner himself as one of six representatives from Valencia. In Zara- goza, as a prelude to the actual coronation, the king knighted many magnates. They, in turn, knighted many other lesser nobles and men. Muntaner counted at least 256 lesser nobles who were knighted that day and who, after the knighting ceremonies, paraded on horseback through the city from the cathedral to the king’s palace. In addition to all these events and in preparation for his coronation on Easter Sunday, the king kept vigil through the night of Good Friday and on Saturday. Then he and his court abandoned the clothes of mourning they had worn for the previous dead king, and with abundant music the feasts began in earnest. The king processed to the cathedral in the company of magnates and knights, and he remained there through the whole of Saturday night. At dawn, “with his own hands” he placed the sword and crown on the altar and dressed himself. Among his vestments were some ecclesiastical garments. The bishop of the city witnessed and helped with every detail of this ritual investment, from the king’s girding on his sword to the place- ment of his spurs on his feet by his royal brothers, all accompanied by the appropriate prayers. The king then brandished his sword and defied the enemies of the Catholic faith. Promising to defend orphans, children, and widows, and to maintain justice, he offered his sword and his life to God. This was followed by the bishop’s anointment of the king’s shoulder and right arm. A Mass followed, after which the king took the crown from the altar and crowned himself. Muntaner’s chronicle continues with detailed descriptions of the festivities that followed. I beg your forgiveness for this extended summary of the chronicler’s account. The actual story of Alfonso IV’s self-crowning is far richer, however, and takes almost twenty pages of the printed edition.51 The ritual program was quite different from French or English practices and, even more so, from those of Castile. First, the actual self- crowning and anointment took place after the king met the Cortes and swore to uphold the liberties of Catalonia (and eventually those of Ara- gon). Second, the coronation was in Zaragoza, and the king, following along the lines of Portuguese and Castilian practice, insisted on knighting himself. Third, there was an implicit association throughout Muntan- er’s narrative between the king and Christ—and this coming from an urban representative of Valencia. The choice of Easter Sunday for Alfon-

51 Muntaner, Crònica II, 610–31. This description is adapted from my Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 133–34.

327 CHAPTER IX so’s coronation, combining the end of mourning with rebirth, also sent a powerful message to those present who, in turn, went home and retold the story. Muntaner, who by this time in his life had seen and experienced much, could not conceal his admiration for all the festivities, for the quality of the horses, for the splendor of the royal sword and crown. Clearly these ceremonies, and Alfonso IV’s crowning in particular, worked at the deepest level in binding social groups together, in instilling loyalty to the king and kingdom. (The magnates and knights rode through the streets crying “Aragon, Aragon.”) And finally, the king crowned himself, pointing out to all, but especially to the ecclesiastics, that the right to rule resided within him. It was not given to him by the Church. The 1327 ceremonies tell us vividly of the differences between the Crown of Aragon and European realms to the north. They tell us how the Aragonese kings deployed rituals and celebrations to strengthen their power and to make claims to ecclesiastical roles not open to their many secular rivals. And they tell us as well how very different Ara- gonese ways were from those of Castile.

Castile’s Non- Sacral Monarchy. There were also coronations and anoint- ments in late medieval Castile, but they were exceptions rather than part of a well-established tradition. A few kings—Sancho IV, Alfonso XI in 1332, Henry II, the new Trastámara king, after his ascent to the throne in 1365—were crowned (self-crowned) or partially anointed, but even the new Trastámara dynasty with its flimsy claims to the throne ignored those sacralizing ceremonies that marked the assumption of kingship. This is quite remarkable since the Trastámaras, once they began to rule the Crown of Aragon, demonstrated a healthy appetite for crowning, anointing, and other royal rituals, as Ferdinand of Antequera’s lavish coronation makes clear.52 In Castile, however, there was not a clear relationship between ascending the throne and being crowned, even in those rare instances in which such ceremonies took place.

Alfonso XI. Alfonso XI had been king for two decades before organizing the spectacle of knighting, coronation, and anointment at Santiago and Burgos in 1332. By then he was married and expecting an heir (he already had children from his mistress) and was as firmly in control of his realm as he would ever be in his long and distinguished rule. The crowning was preceded by the knighting (of the king himself and of numerous knights

52 See Angus MacKay, “Signs Deciphered: The Language of Court Displays in Late Medieval Spain,” in Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, A. Duggan, ed. (London: King’s College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1993), 287–30.

328 NONCALENDRICAL FESTIVALS whom the king knighted in commemoration of the event, as had been the case in Zaragoza in 1327). Unlike Alfonso IV’s ceremony, however, which took place at one site over the course of two days, Alfonso XI went on a pilgrimage to Compostela, kept vigil over his arms in the established courtly fashion, and girded his sword himself, as Alfonso IV had done, before receiving knighthood in a rather original manner. He was in fact knighted by the mechanical arm of an image of St. James that was then at Compostela and that can still be seen at the monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos. Nearby Burgos—a mere two kilometers from Las Huelgas—was alive with jousts, bohordos, and other festive martial events. Noble pilgrims passing through Burgos on their way to the tomb of the Apostle St. James were invited to join the jousts, with the Castilian king providing horses and weapons suitable for such combat.53 The chronicle, in a departure from its previous rather laconic descriptions of feasts, waxes lyrical on the king’s silver and gold garments embroidered with castles and lions, on the king’s horse, saddle, reins, and on other adornments. The coronation ceremony, which I have glossed elsewhere,54 took place at Las Huelgas, a great Cistercian monastery and one of the sites, together with Compostela, Toledo, Seville, and Leon, vying to become a “sacral” center for the Castilian monarchy. It followed closely on the patterns we have already seen for the coronation of Alfonso IV in Zaragoza five years earlier. Like Alfonso IV, Alfonso XI also crowned himself and was anointed only on the shoulder. The Church, as had been the case at Zaragoza, played a secondary role, and the customary ordo, or script, for a coronation, written by a Portuguese bishop and long deployed by scholars as an expression of the allegedly sacred nature of Castile’s monarchy, was in fact discarded altogether and replaced by ceremonies scripted by either the young monarch or his agents. The chronicle provides a detailed description of the officiating archbishop and bishops (six altogether) and of the two thrones on the altar. After the bishops had anointed Alfonso XI on his right shoulder and blessed the king, queen, and their respective crowns, the ecclesiastics vacated the altar and sat on their respective chairs by the side. “Once the altar was empty, the king ascended the altar by himself and took the crown, which was made of gold and precious jewels and placed it on his

53 Crónica de Alfonso XI, 234. 54 See T. F. Ruiz, “Unsacred Monarchy: The Kings of Castile in the Late Middle Ages,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual & Politics Since the Middle Ages, Sean Wilentz, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 109–10. For this and the next two paragraphs, see Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 135.

329 CHAPTER IX head. He also took the other crown and placed it on the queen’s head and then kneeled at the altar (through the celebration of the Mass) until the elevation of the host.” Although both of these coronations included a substantial ecclesiastical presence, that was not always the case in Castile. As I have shown elsewhere, the absence of ecclesiastically sponsored rituals of coronation and anointment did not at all equal the absence of tradition or, far more important, of legitimacy in the Castilian kings (and queens) ascent to power. Rather, the Castilian monarchs developed a set of alternate and richly textured rituals that proved to be as successful in the long run as Church- related traditions. These included the elevation on a chair or shield, exchanges of oath between the king and his “people,” swearing of fealty by the Cortes, self-knighting, and most of all, the association of kingly power with the work of the Reconquest. It is quite remarkable how much mileage the Castilian kings extracted from the idacontralosMoros (the announcement of raids against Islam or crusades). We know that royal military leadership of the Crusades against Muslims in the south, as well as those in Granada, brought substantial fiscal advantages, since it allowed the kings to tap directly into the Church’s income. And the same call to arms proved irresistible to the Cortes as well. Alfonso XI proved that repeatedly in the 1330s and 1340s, when he requested funding for his campaigns against the Merinids in the south. Alfonso XI was a king however without many of the political problems that plagued his descendants; yet, later kings, far more troubled by disruption and civil strife, were also able to exploit their role as leaders of the host and defenders of Christendom, embodying the struggle against Islam. But whether ecclesiastics played a role in the ceremonies of succession or not, ascent to the throne always took place within the context of festive cycles. If no references are made here to Spain’s early modern rulers, it is because, as we have noted repeatedly, they felt secure enough to dispense altogether with those ceremonies of crowning that required the participation of the Church. The Habsburg rulers of the Iberian realms no doubt felt that ecclesiastical sanction diminished, at least in appearance, the independent kingly power of which they were so fiercely proud.

330 Conclusion

On Sunday, September 13, 1598, after a long and painful illness, Philip II, king of Castile, Aragon, Valencia, and numerous other kingdoms, and prince of Catalonia, and duke of Burgundy, died. His valiant and pious end brought an age to a close. If we could—making liberal use of Gior- dano Bruno’s wonderful work on the art of memory—imagine the king’s memory as a house or palace, many of the rooms would have been crammed with regrets and longings. From political defeats—the insurrec- tion in the Low Countries, the defeat of the not-so-invincible Armada, the spread of Protestantism, and the victories of Henry of Navarre—to personal tragedies such as the madness and death of his son Don Carlos, the successive deaths of his four wives, above all that of his beloved Isabelle of Valois, and the death of his much loved daughter Catalina (less than a year before his own demise), these griefs would have been enough to crush a lesser man. But in his palace of memories, there would also have been rooms that shone with brilliant and joyous light. Within the old and ailing king there must have lived treasured remembrances of those halcyon days when the exuberance of youth kept at bay the heavy burdens of office. In those bright corners of the king’s memory, the festivals, jousts, juegos de cañas, fireworks, runnings of bulls, and other such enchanting events that signaled his transit throughout his domains must have been still vividly alive. We all of us carry earlier versions of ourselves, of earlier loves and pleasures, even though we may be now old and beyond hope. These must have been for Philip Proustian moments when he recaptured fleeting snatches of his past. Prompted by these memories, the ageing king may have relived his first marriage and his youthful voyage to Salamanca to celebrate his wedding with the equally nubile young princess of Portugal. He may have looked back on his long journey through Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, or to those magical princely entries in Milan, Mantua, Brus- sels, Antwerp, and other cities in Brabant and Flanders. He would surely have traveled in his memory to those tournaments in which he so avidly and gallantly participated. He would have remembered the dances and his flirtations with the many young ladies eager to meet the prince who would be king. He would have remembered, most of all, Binche, where

331 CONCLUSION the fantastic world of the Amadis of Gaul and a whole store of other romantic and chivalrous fiction was woven seamlessly into a playful adventure. After Binche came hard work and disappointments: his dreadful marriage to Mary, the aged Queen of England, his son’s malice and madness, rebellion, war, plagues, and economic downturn. Throughout this long and circuitous perambulation through late medieval and early modern Spanish festive traditions, we have followed Philip II to the many points in his life where travel and festivities inter- sected. The Prudent king has served as a magnifying glass that has allowed us to explore, moving ceaselessly back and forth in time, the character and meaning of these diverse festivities. Philip has been a touchstone, revealing the transformation of festive cycles and their changing significance within distinct historical contexts. Indeed, travel and festivities constitute central aspects not only of the king’s broader political and psychological biography, but also of Spain’s painful transition into the modern world. What have we learn about festivities, then, through the actions of this king? All through the previous chapters, I have not always been able to resist fully the temptation to describe, paraphrase, or profusely cite, those chronicles and accounts that describe different types of celebrations in late medieval and early modern Spain. I have been tempted into this approach by the sheer delight of telling the stories of these fantastic events. In doing so, I find myself intoxicated—as I once was by the romantic nineteenth century novels I described in the preface—by the narrators’ obvious enthusiasm to describe every item of clothing, every ephemeral construction. That these performances and events elicited such faithful and enthusiastic responses tells us a great deal about their visual and cultural impact on contemporary observers. Although in most cases the writers were hired and their accounts motivated by the ideological fervor of their em- ployers, the passion in many of them appears genuine. Muntaner, with his wild expressions of amazement at what he saw and could find no proper words to describe, is one example. Calvete de Estrella is another. And yet, for every description I have provided there are hundred others that I have omitted or buried in the notes. When we look at the record in some detail, it almost seems as if Spaniards and other Western Europeans of this period spent most of their time either preparing for festivals or witnessing them. Chronicles were commissioned to record these many events as cities competed with one another for pride of place in either their complex royal entries or in their elaborate Corpus Christi processions. Here, at the end, it may be useful to review, once again, those categories, questions, and arguments that, I hope, have framed my inquiry. First and foremost, is the question of the purpose of festivities. I

332 CONCLUSION have argued that in the case of many celebrations, although they were always pregnant with social meanings and enacted with specific ideological purposes, it was not clear who actually benefitted from them. Most festivals were multivocal performances, and the register of voices varied according to the circumstances. In 1327 Seville, it seems that Alfonso XI’s voice overwhelmed those of the urban authorities. In 1585 Zaragoza, Barcelona, Monzón, the Catalan and Aragonese authorities seem to have occupied space at center stage. In 1548 Genoa, the people rioted. Tour- naments called for a different kind of ideological confrontation. In the late Middle Ages, many different noble factions and individuals claimed a place in both the political and the jousting arenas. By the early modern period, whenever the king was present, the events served, fairly uni- formly, the desires of the monarch and sought to enhance his prestige. Thus, Binche. The transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period provides clear evidence of uneven continuities and discontinuities in these performances. Much remained the same; much more was changed. The location of the king and high nobility shifted from the center of the crowd to an aloof and mysterious position on a distant balcony or in a curtained window. The people had also been pushed to the side, behind fences. The kings, certainly Philip II, became observers later in life, safely ensconced in the distance that power made possible. The literary level and the amount of detail of accounts representing these events also increased exponentially. Some were sponsored and paid for by civic entities—as was the case with the Llibre des solemnitats de Barcelona and the writings of Mal Lara and López de Hoyos. Carnival changed radically, and so did the private festive cycles of the mighty. The Corpus Christi procession became increasingly important by the fifteenth century and ideologically laden and spectacular after the Protestant Reformation. Festivals also served as a lens through which to examine questions of authority. It is clear that Philip II’s absolutism was quite illusory. Al- though he did often (though not always) get his way in Castile, dealing with the Crown of Aragon, with Germany (during his princely visit), and even with his Italian allies was another matter altogether. The principle of reciprocity was at the heart of every royal pageant. It limited and modified royal authority and created spaces of resistance. And, then the crowds! They were almost always necessary. They validated, in most but not all cases, the performances of kings and nobles. They gave a popular voice to the acclamation of kings, even when, as in the seventeenth century, the king was nowhere to be seen. Their words are barely heard, and their faces remain anonymous. They stood behind fences, as they did in the gardens of the king’s palace in the Retiro, looking at the displays of

333 CONCLUSION royal majesty across the lake, or they marched past Philip II’s windows in yet another of those interminable parades. Except for Genoa in 1548, they did not rise up in arms and create havoc. On the whole, they seemed to have been quite taken by all these displays. No doubt they enjoyed them as relief from the drudgery of everyday life, just as favela inhabitants in Rio today find some measure of escape in Carnival festivities. But, if we read only for social, cultural, and political meanings, we may miss the powerful artistry of these events. Festivals were also things of beauty. They left indelible memories in those who participated and gazed upon their wonders. And that, for many, was more than enough.

334 ❊ APPENDIX ❊ The Feasts of May 1428 at Valladolid1

Below I have provided a close paraphrasing of descriptions of the feasts of 1428. Although I have drawn from several chronicles, that of the Hal- conero del rey Don Juan contains the most extensive and detailed description by an eyewitness. The presentation of these relevant texts is, I fear, necessary if we are to understand fully the political symbols underlying the ceremonies of this particular festive cycle and of other late medieval and early modern celebrations. Here, then, is the account as drawn from the chronicles: As a prelude to the actual feasts of May 1428, the chroniclers describe in great detail the return of the constable to the king’s favor. This took place in early February of 1428, but most of the chroniclers jump from this event to late April, as if nothing worth reporting had taken place in the intervening months. Alvaro de Luna’s entry into Segovia, where the peripatetic Castilian court was then in residence, was a carefully staged affair, aimed at demonstrating to his enemies the extent of his newly regained power. The bishops of Avila, Osma, Orense, and other high Church dignitaries, great lords, city officials,a whole constellation of noblemen and retainers accompanied the constable in his triumphal ride from Turégano to Segovia. Don Alvaro’s own entourage comprised around four hundred and fifty men on horseback, each followed by his squires, pages, and servants. In total the troop probably numbered in excess of one thousand riders. All of them, the mighty and their servants, but excepting Don Alvaro and his immediate followers, wore clothes of olive green and silver, the colors of the constable. Two black men led the formal procession. One carried in his hand “a lance of Jerez,” the other a javelin, and with his other hand each led a black greyhound. Following them came the constable, all in silver, and his four attendants, also in silver, all of them riding “very large and very beautiful horses.” The Infantes of Aragon, Don Juan (already king of Navarre) and Don Enrique, and other powerful magnates and prelates rode from the gates of the city—some half a league, others as

1 This narrative is gathered from the contemporary chronicles already cited in the notes to the text. The most important is that by Pero Carrillo de Huete, Crónica del halconero de Juan II, 19–27; other chronicles that describe the feasts of 1428 are: Alvar García de Santa María, Crónica de Juan II de Castilla; Refundición de la crónica del halconero, 56–67; Crónica de don Juan II, 446–47.

335 APPENDIX much as two leagues—to receive him with the ceremonies and respect due to his station and power. This ceremonial entry of Don Alvaro de Luna into Segovia and his return to the king’s good graces serves as a prelude to the far more elaborate displays in Valladolid two months later. On Thursday, April 29, 1428, the Infanta Doña Leonor, sister of the king of Aragon, the Infantes of Aragon, and the queen of Castile, and cousin to Juan II, came to Vallado- lid on her way to Portugal, where she was to marry Don Duarte, heir to the Portuguese throne. Accompanying her were her redoubtable and troublesome brothers, the archbishop of Lisbon, and many Aragonese and Castilian magnates belonging to the Infantes of Aragon’s camp. The king of Castile rode to the outskirts of the city to meet Doña Leonor and her cortege and to escort her in honor—the king leading the Infanta’s horse by the reins—within the walls of Valladolid. Concurrent with the jousting, dancing, and general festivity of the month-long celebration there was a forceful exercise of royal justice. One might see it as a counterpoint to the festivities, or perhaps simply as integral to them. Royal criers walked the streets of Valladolid, announcing the charges against and coming execution of Juan García de Guadalajara: Esta es la justicia que manda fazer nuestro Señor el rey a este falsario, que falso ciertas cartas e sello a don Ruy López de Abalos, condestable que fue de Castilla. Mandanlo matar por ello. Since Juan García was a knight of the Order of the Banda, the exclusive knightly order founded by Alfonso XI almost a century earlier, and that honor could only be bestowed by the king’s hand, before he was publicly beheaded in the main square of Valladolid, royal officials ripped off the black-on-white sash that was a sign of his membership in the order, thus symbolically stripping him of his claims to knighthood and chivalry.2 The actual celebrations began with a joust or pas d’armes presented by the constable. “Forty five knights, all Don Alvaro’s men, dressed in garments of gold and silk trimmed with sable and ermine,” rode to the field of combat to sustain the honor of their master. After fierce jousting in which the king, the Infantes of Aragon, and Don Alvaro participated in spirited fashion, the constable hosted a lavish banquet. The Infante Don Enrique followed with a fantastic production. An Italian craftsman in the service of the Infante—Alvar García de Santa María describes him as a Lombard—had built a large castle of wood and cloth, with a high tower, a belfry, twelve lower towers, and an outer circuit wall. High over the belfry, a golden griffin held a large red and white banner, and twelve 2 For symbolic debasing or de-crowning, see Angus MacKay, “Ritual and Propa- ganda in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” Past&Present 107 (1985), 3–43; and fn. 40 for a bibliography on the punishment of effigies.

336 FEASTS OF MAY 1428 AT VALLADOLID smaller banners, also red and white, flew from the lower towers. From the gate of the imaginary castle to an arch flanked by two towers ran a railing of reeds, dividing the field for the joust. At the arch a sign announced to all comers: “This is the arch of the dangerous passage of hard chance or risk.” On top of each of the flanking towers stood a man with a leather horn, and nearby was a golden wheel, “la rueda de la aventura,” the wheel of Fortune, reminding those entering the pas d’armes of the unpredictable and changing nature of the goddess Fortuna. The fictitious castle was the setting for fictitious war. Outside its walls, in front of the mighty assembled there and of the people of Valladolid, the Infante Don Enrique danced as a prelude to dressing for combat. After eating and drinking, he returned to his lodgings to arm himself and to bring back with him an entremes, a short theatrical skit or tableau vivant. The chronicler describes it for us: “Eight young maidens, riding on noble horses, all very well dressed, followed by a cart with a woman dressed as a goddess (Fortuna), and twelve singing maidens accompanied her in the cart, as well as many minstrels.” Upon arriving at the gate, the goddess, surrounded by her maidens, sat at the foot of the golden wheel of Fortune to witness the combat. Dressed now in armor, the Infante Don Enrique and five of his knights rode to the railing to hold the ground against all challengers. To the sound of horns and the tolling of a bell from the belfry of the fantastic castle, a lady on a small mare rode, in the company of a herald, to meet the knights attempting to enter the pas d’armes. “Lords, what adventure has brought you to such a dangerous pass, called “of the strong Fortune”? Return, for you cannot pass without jousting.” At this prompting rose first the king of Castile with twenty-four of his knights dressed in fringed green garments. Juan II wore gold, silver, and ermine (white and black), and on his helmet he sported a large plume and a diadem of butterflies. The king fought “as such an accomplished knight that it was a marvel,” breaking two strong lances. He was followed to the joust by the king of Navarre—who broke only one lance—with twelve knights dressed as windmills. The day concluded with a sumptuous dinner hosted by the Infante Don Enrique in the lodgings of Don Alfonso Enríquez, admiral of Castile. Once the feast of the Infante Don Enrique was concluded, it was the turn of his brother Don Juan, king of Navarre. On May 24, Don Juan and five of his knights rode to the joust to hold a pas d’armes. An elaborate tent was erected in an open field, and the host stood surrounded by thirteen attendants, dressed in silver (white) collars and red caps. To this feast, the king of Castile came with ten knights in garments of olive- brownish green. On his back, Juan II carried a javelin and a horn, and preceding him, the king’s huntsmen and hunting dogs drove a chained

337 APPENDIX lion and a bear. Juan II took two turns in the list, breaking a “very strong lance.” He was followed by the Infante Don Enrique with five of his knights dressed in brown and blue. The Infante also broke a lance, but then withdrew to his lodgings, only to return soon after alone, without any fanfare, but richly garbed in clothes embroidered in gold and bearing a placard that read Non es (He is not). After the tournament, the royal family dined in the king of Navarre’s lavishly appointed tent, decorated with French tapestries and a ceiling of red, white, and blue. Finally, at the beginning of June, Juan II held his own festivities in honor of the Infanta Doña Leonor. Like the previous feasts, this one re- volved around a tournament or pas d’armes. In the main square of Vall- adolid, the king’s men set a covered stand with eighteen rows of seats, adorned with gold cloth. The railing for the joust was red, and at the end of the list stood a platform decorated with rich French cloth. The king of Castile rode to the mock battle dressed all in white, as God the Father. Twelve knights, also in white and dressed as saints with “a symbolic token of each saint’s martyrdom in their hands,” followed the king into the joust. Their horses were fitted in red cloth, and each man carried an emblem that read Lardón (Galardón). To the call to arms and courtly deeds rose the Infante Don Enrique with twelve of his men, six dressed as “flames” and the rest in garments covered with mulberry leaves. Don En- rique’s brother, the king of Navarre, also rose to the challenge. Within an artificial rock, he rode to battle, and then, standing on top of the rock, one of his men waved the king’s banner. Fifty knights, twenty-five in front, twenty-five behind, surrounded the king, making thunder-like noises (lanzando truenos). After the jousting, until “the stars appeared in the sky,” the king hosted the entire gathering for a feast in his lodgings.

338 ❊ Bibliography ❊

This is a sample bibliography of primary and secondary sources. For the full listing of works consulted, please refer to the footnotes.

Primary Sources

Báez de Sepúlveda, Jorge. Relación verdadera del recibimiento que hizo la ciudad de Segovia a la magestad de la reyna nuestra señora doña Anna de Austria en su felicissimo casamiento que en la dicha ciudad celebro 14 noviembre 1570. Eds. Sagrario López Pozo and Begoña Canosa Hermida. Segovia: Junta de Castilla y León, 1998. Bernáldez, Andrés. Historia de los reyes católicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel. In Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla III. Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 70, 1953. Cabrera de Córdoba, Luis. Felipe Segundo, rey de España (17th century). Madrid: Imprenta de Aribau, 1877, 4 vols. 1585, vol. 3, 95-135. ———. Relaciones delas cosas sucedidas en la corte de España, desde 1599 hasta 1614. Madrid: Imprenta de J. Martín Alegría, 1857. Calvete de Estrella, Juan Cristobal. El felicísimo viaje del muy alto y muy poderoso principe Don Felipe, 2 vols. Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 1930. Carrillo de Huete, Pedro. Crónica del halconero de Juan II. Ed. Juan de Mata Car- riazo. Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2006. Cock, Enrique (Henrique). Relación del viaje hecho por Felipe II en 1585, á Zara- goza, Barcelona y Valencia. Ed. Alfredo Morel Fatio and Antonio Rodríguez Villa. Madrid: Imprenta, esterotipia y galv de Aribau y Cia, 1976. ———. Jornada de Tarazona hecha por Felipe II en 1592, pasando por Segovia, Vall- adolid, Palencia, Burgos, Logroño y Tudela. Ed. Alfredo Morel-Fatio and Anto- nio Rodríguez Villa. Madrid: Imprenta y fundición de M. Tello, 1879. Colección documental de Alfonso XI. Ed. Esther González Crespo. Madrid: Univer- sidad Complutense, 1985. Collado, Francisco Gerónimo. Descripción del túmulo y relación de las exequias que hizo la ciudad de Sevilla en la muerte del rey Don Felipe Segundo. Seville: Imp. De D. José María Geofrín, manuscript of the early seventeenth century, edited in 1869 by Francisco de B. Palomo (descriptions of the túmulo by different contemporary authors). Comes, Pere Joan. Libre de algunes coses asanyalades succehides en Barcelona y en altres partes (1583). Ed. Joseph Puiggari. Barcelona: La Renaixensa, 1878. Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, 3 vols. Ed. Cayetano Rossell. Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, 1953. Felipe II. Exterior e interior de una vida, atribuída comunmente al abade de san real y por algunos al célebre español Antonio Pérez, su secretario de estado. Ed. Antonio Va- lladares de Sotomayor. Madrid: Torreblancas Impresores, 1998.

339 BIBLIOGRAPHY Feliu de la Peña, Narciso. Anales de Cataluña y epílogo breve. . . , 3 vols. Barce- lona: Juan Pablo Martí, 1709; fascimile edition, Barcelona, 1999. Garibay, Estevan de. Genealogías de los Catholicos Reyes de las Españas. . . . Ma- drid: Luis Sánchez, 1596. Gómez de Castro, Alvar. Recibimiento que la imperial ciudad de Toledo hizo á la Ma- jestad de la reina nuestra Señora Doña Isabel, hija del rey Henrico II de Francia . . . a celebrar las fiestas de sus felicissimas bodas con el rey Don Phelipe nuestro señor, segundo de este nombre. Toledo, 1561. Hechos del condestable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo (crónica del siglo XV). Ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1940. Lavanha, João Baptista. Viagem da Catholica Real Magestade del Rey D. Filipe II N.S. ao reyno de Portvgal e rellaçao do solene recebimento que nelle se lhe fez S. Magestade a mandou escreuer. Madrid: Por Thomas lunti, 1622. Available at the Getty Research Center. The copy is also available on line at http://library .getty.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=128882. León Pinelo, Antonio de. Anales de Madrid. Reinado de Felipe III, años 1598–1621. Ed., Ricardo Martorell Téllez-Giron. Madrid: Estanislao Maestre, 1931. Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona, 2 vols. Eds. Agustí Durán I Sanpere i Josep Sanabre. Barcelona: Institució Patxot, 1930. López de Hoyos, Juan. Real apparato, y svmptuoso recebimiento con que Madrid (como casa y morada de su M.) Rescibio ala Serenísima reyna D. Ana de Austria. Madrid: Juan Gracián, 1572. In the same edition also: López de Hoyos, Historia y rela- cion verdadera dela enfermedad felicísimo transito, y sumptuosas exequías funebres de la Serenísinma Reyna de España doña Isabel de Valoys. Madrid: Pierres Cofin, 1569. Mal Lara, Juan de. Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a la C.M.R. del rey D. Philipe N.S. Introduction by Miguel Bernal and Antonio Miguel Bernal. Seville, 1570; facsimile edition, Sevilla: Fundación el Monte, 1998. Muñoz, Andrés. Viaje de Felipe Segundo á Inglaterra y relaciones varias relativas al mismo suceso. Zaragoza, 1554; Madrid: La sociedad de bibliófilos, 1877. Muntaner, Ramón. Crònica, 2 vols. Ed. Vicent Josep Escartí. Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànimo, 1999. Pérez de Guzmán, Fernán. Generaciones y semblanzas. In Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, vol. III. Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 70, 1953. Pisa, Francisco de. Descripción de la Imperia civdad de Toledo, y historias de sus anti- guedades....Toledo: Pedro Rodríguez, 1605; fascimile edition, Madrid: Vil- lena Artes Gráficas, 1974. Primera crónica general de España, 2 vols. Ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, with a study and additions by Diego Catalán. Madrid: Gredos, 1977. Recibimiento que se hizo en Salamanca a la princesa doña María de Portugal, viniendoa casarse con el principe don Felipe, colegido por el maestro Vargas. Ed. Jacobo Sánz Hermida. Salamanca: Gráficas Cervantes, S.A., 2001. Relación de la jornada que hizo Felipe II, desde Santarem a Lisboa y de su entrada en aquella ciudad (1581). Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), MSS/12026.

340 BIBLIOGRAPHY Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid de 1541 a 1650. Ed. José Simón Díaz. Madrid: Instituto de estudios Madrileños, 1982. Rodríguez de Lena, Pedro. Libro del passo honoros defendido por el excelente caballero SuerodeQuiñones. Ed. Juan de Pineda. Facsimile edition, Valencia: textos medievales, 1970. A new edition and translation of the most relevant sections of the Passo Honroso can be found in Noel Fallows, Jousting in Medieval and Re- naissance Iberia. See below under Fallows. Ruiz, Juan. Libro de buen amor, 2nd edition. Ed. María Brey Mariño. Madrid: Castalia, 1960. Siguenza, Fray José de. Cómo vivió y murió Felipe II por un testigo ocular. Madrid: Apostolado de la prensa, 1927. Varela, Diego de. Memorial de diversas hazañas. In Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla, vol. III. Madrid: Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 70, 1953. Veroza, Juan de. Anales del reinado de Felipe II. Ed. José María Maestre. Alcañiz (Madrid): Instituto de Estudios Humanísticos, 2002.

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Amelang, James S., Xavier Gil, and Gary W. McDonogh. Doze passejades per la història de Barcelona. Guia. Barcelona: Fundació “la Caixa,” 1992. Bernáldez Montalvo, José María. Las tarascas de Madrid. Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 1983. Bonner, Mitchell. Italian Civic Pageantry in the High Renaissance. A Descriptive Bib- liography of Triumphal Entries And Selected Other Festivals for State Occasions. Fi- renze: Leo S. Olschki eds., 1979. Campbell, Jodi. Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Ma- drid: Theater of Negotiation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Caro Baroja, Julio. El carnaval (análisis histórico-cultural). Madrid: Taurus, 1965. ———. El estío festivo. Fiestas populares del verano. Madrid: Taurus, 1984. Chía, Julian de. La festividad del corpus en Gerona. Noticias históricas acerca de esta festividad desde el siglo XIV hasta nuestros días. Gerona: Imprenta y Librería de faciano Torres, 1895. Corteguera, Luís R. For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580– 1640. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Catalan translation as Per al bé comú. La política popular a Barcelona, 1580–1640. Vic: Eumo Editorial, 2005. Cruz Santos, Beatriz Catão. O corpo de Deus na América. A festa de Corpus Christi nas ciudades da América portuguesa-século XVIII. São Paulo: Annablume Editora, 2005. Durán y Sanpere, A. La fiesta del Corpus. Barcelona: Ediciones Aymá, 1943. Fallows, Noel, Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance Iberia. Woodbridge, UK: Boy- dell Press, 2011. The book includes the full edition and translation of several important jousting manuals, excerpts from the Passo Honroso, and a game of canes manual.

341 BIBLIOGRAPHY Fêtes et divertissements. Ed. Lucien Clare, Jean-Paul Duviols, and Annie Molinié. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1997. 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. Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 1999. Frieder, Braden. Chivalry and the Perfect Prince: Tournaments, Art, and Armor at the Spanish Habsburg Court. Kirksville. MO: Truman State University Press, 2008. García Cárcel, Ricardo. Felipe II y Cataluña. Salamanca: Polígono El Montalvo, 1997. Garrido Atienza, Miguel. Antiguallas Granadinas. Las fiestas del Corpus. Granada: Imprenta de D. José López Guevara, 1889. González Enciso, Agustín and Jesús María Usunáriz Garayoa, eds. Imagen del rey, imagen de los reinos. Las ceremonias públicas en la España moderna (1500–1814). Pamplona: Ediciones universidad de Navarra, S.A., 1999. Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, José Luis. El aprendizaje cortesano de Felipe II (1527– 1546). La formacióde un príncipe del Renacimiento. Madrid: Sociedad estatal para la conmemoración de Felipe II y Carlos V, 1999. Guenée, Bernard and Françoise Lehoux. Les entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515. Paris: Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968. Heers, Jacques. Fêtes, jeux et joutes dans les sociétés d’ Occident á la fin du Moyen- Âge. Montreal: Institute d’études médiévales, 1971. Hoyos Sancho, Nieves de. LasfiestasdelCorpusChristi. Madrid: Publicaciones españolas, 1963. Kagan, Richard L. Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Kamen, Henry. Philip of Spain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Ladero Quesada, Miguel Angel, et al., eds. Lasfiestasmedievales. La Laguna: Centro de estudios medievales y renacentistas, 1994. Lara, Jaime. Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Leguina, Enrique de. Torneos, jineta, rieptos y desafíos. Madrid: Librería de Fer- nando Fé, 1904. Lleó Cañal, Vicente. Fiesta grande: El Corpus Christi en la historia de Sevilla. Se- ville: Publicaciones del ayuntamiento de Sevilla, 1980. Mata Carriazo, Juan de. La boda del emperador. Notas para la historia del amor en el alcazar de Sevilla. Sevilla: Imprenta Provincial, 1959. Navascués Palacio, Pedro, ed. PhilippusIIRex. Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1998. Palacios Martín, Bonifacio. La coronación de los reyes de Aragón, 1204–1410. Apor- tación al estudio de las estructuras políticas medievales. Valencia: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1975. Parker, Geoffrey.Philip II, 3rd edition. Chcago: Open Court, 1988. Pizzaro Gómez, Francisco Javier. Arte y espactáculo en los viajes de Felipe II. Ma- drid: Ediciones encuentros, 1999. Reglá Campistol, Joan. Felip II i Catalunya. Barcelona: Editorail Aedos, 1956.

342 BIBLIOGRAPHY Río Barredo, María José del. Madrid Urbs Regia. La capital ceremonial de la monar- quía Católica. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2000. Rubio García, Luis. La procesión de Corpus en el siglo XV en Murcia y religiosidad medieval. Murcia: Academia Alfonso X, 1983. San Román, Francisco de B. El testamento del humanista Alvar Gómez de Castro. Madrid: Tipografía de Archivos, 1928. Ser Quijano, Gregorio del, ed. Congreso del V centenario del nacimiento del III Duque de Alba Fernando Álavarez de Toeldo. Actas. Avila: Diputación de Avila, 2008. Toro Buiza, Luís. Noticias de los juegos de cañas reales tomadas de nuestros libros de gineta. Seville: Imprenta Municipal, 1944. Very, Francis George. The Spanish Corpus Christi Procession: A Literary and Folk- loric Study. Valencia: Tipografía moderna, 1962.

Festivals Elsewhere (additional sample bibliography) Bardi, Ferdinando. DescrizionedellefestefatteinFirenzeperlerealinozzedeserenis- simi sposi Ferdinando II. fran duca di Toscana, e Vittoria principessa d’Urbino. Flor- ence: Z. Pignoni, 1637. (UCLA Special Collection). Bryant, Lawrence M. TheKingandtheCityintheParisianRoyalEntryCeremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1986. Ceccherelli, Alessandro. Lettera nella quale particolarme[n]te si descrive l’inventioni, l’ordine, gli habiti, e li historie della festa delle Bufole fatta in Firenze. Florence: Alessandro Ceccherelli, 1566. (UCLA Special Collection). Cosman, Madeleine Pelner. Medieval Holidays and Festivals: A Calendar of Celebra- tions. New York: Scribner, 1981. Gringore, Pierre. Les entrées royales à Paris de Marie d’Angleterre (1514) et Claude de France (1517). Ed. Cynthia J. Brown. Geneva: Droz, 2005. Heers, Jacques. Fêtes, jeux et joutes dans les sociétés d’Occident à la fin du Moyen-Âge. Montraal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1971. Jacquot, Jean. Les fêtes de la Renaissance, 3 vols. Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1956–1975. La fête au XVIe siècle: actes du Xe Colloque du Puy-en- Velay. Ed. Marie Viallon- Schoneveld. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2003. Les fêtes urbaines en Italie à l’époque de la Renaissance: Vérone, Florence, Sienne, Na- ples: études. Ed. Françoise Decroisette and Michel Plaisance. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1993. Mulryne, J. R. and Elizabeth Goldring, eds. Court festivals of the European Renais- sance: Art, Politics and Performance. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Strong, Roy. Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.

343 This page intentionally left blank Index

Note: Page numbers in italic type refer to illustrations.

Afán de Ribera, Per, 81, 82 armor, 55 Aguilar, Marquis of, 169, 180 Artes de Albanell, Geroni, 182 Aguilar, Pedro de, 214 artificial constructions, 95–96, 142–43, 178. See alarde, 201 also arches, artificial; castles, artificial Alba, Hernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of, 120, artillery discharges, 2, 37–38, 70, 83, 89, 95, 98, 121, 294, 297 110, 112, 120, 122, 129, 130, 132, 171, 178, Alcalá de Henares, 154 179, 181, 307 alchemy. See mysteries, Renaissance ascension to the throne, 316–30 Alejandra de la Palla, 130 Ascuti, Prince of, 216 Alfonso (son of Ferdinand of Antequera), 80 Ash Wednesday, 47, 258 Alfonso II, 323 astrology. See mysteries, Renaissance Alfonso IV, 52, 54, 63, 74, 99, 326–28 Atienza, Garrido, 278 Alfonso V, 66, 100, 105, 111, 127–28, 174, 224, audience: for autos de fe, 287–89, 291–92; and 243 Carnival, 247–48, 256, 259, 261, 263–64, 272; Alfonso VIII, 207 at Corpus Christi events, 276, 284; literacy Alfonso X, 50, 74, 77, 222, 318; Siete partidas, 56, of, 126–27; role and experience of, 10, 232, 204, 205–6, 211, 211n3 333–34 Alfonso XI, 15, 32, 52, 61–63, 66, 68–70, 69, 74, Augsburg, 141 78, 128, 135, 223, 225, 298–99, 319, 328–30 authority, Carnival’s challenges to, 248–50 Alonso, David, 87 autos de fe, 48, 286–92, 287–89 Alvarez de Toledo, Hernando. See Alba, Her- autos sacramentales (theatrical pieces based on nando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Scripture), 2, 270, 287, 304 Alvaro de Luna, 83, 105, 193, 194, 221, 224–25, Ayala, Pedro de, 240 229–32, 240, 335 Amadis of Gaul, 2, 21–23, 46, 52, 56, 182, 193, Badoaro, Federico, 23 203–4, 238, 244 Báez de Sepúlveda, Jorge, 217–19 Amelang, James S., 132 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 140, 250, 257, 264, 277 Anales de Cataluña, 167–69, 176 balconies, monarchs’ viewing from, 43, 129, 136, Ana of Austria, 16, 17, 105, 109–11, 114, 117, 137, 156, 161, 165, 189 123, 124, 128, 129, 217, 218, 302 Bances Candamo, Francisco de, La piedra filosofal, Andrés Díaz, Rosana de, 75 125 Andrew, Saint, feast of, 18 banner of St. Isidore, 81 animals, 2, 133, 139–40, 189. See also bulls; eques- banquets, 142, 236, 238, 254, 257, 307. See also trian demonstrations feasts Antequera, 81–84 Bañuelos y de la Cerda, Luis, 214 Antwerp, 235, 235n53 baptism, 301–3 Aragon. See Crown of Aragon Barajas, 154 Aranjuez, 3, 13, 19, 20 Barba, Pero, 241, 243 arches, artificial, 95–97, 124–25, 130, 131, 181– Barbary pirates, 151–52 83, 185, 190, 235n53 Barcelona, 15–16, 35, 41, 65, 120, 121, 124, 132, Ariño, Antoni, Festes, rituals i creences, 275–76 147n, 167–77, 171, 176n54, 261, 270–71, 308– Ark of Covenant, 63 10, 318, 323–24 Armada. See Invincible Armada battles, mock. See mock warfare

345 INDEX

Beaumont, Francis de, 216 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro: autos sacramentales beheadings, 227–28, 336 by, 270, 304; Las carnestolendas, 252; La vida es Béjar, Duke of, 302 sueño, 125, 250 Benavente, 1–2, 6, 129, 193 calendrical festivities, 36–37, 46–47 Benavente, Count of, 301, 302 Calvete de Estrella, Cristobal, 15, 20, 30–31, 52, Berenguer Arnaldo de Alquera, 223 90, 120–22, 124, 131, 139, 141, 142, 169, 183, Berghes, Marquis de, 236 216, 235–37, 235n53, 241, 332 Bernáldez, Andrés, 84–89, 320 Camaraia, Marquis de, 189 Berrio, Fernando de, 300 Campi, Joan, 153 Binche, 23, 143, 193, 230, 234–38 canonization, 315–16 births, 298–304 Çapala, Emmanuel, 165n34 Bisson, Thomas, ix–x Çapila, Jaume Joan, 172 Black Legend, 20, 103 Cardona, Duke of, 40–41 Black Prince, 26 Carlos (son of Philip II), 1–2, 28, 108, 297, 331 Blanca, Infanta Doña, 42, 63, 105–7, 142, 144, Carmelite order, 184 240 Carnestolendas, 249, 252, 256, 260, 261, 314 Boabdil, king of Granada, 129, 138 Carnival, 246–65; audience for, 247–48, 256, bohordando (engaging in equestrian demonstra- 259, 261, 263–64, 272; Christianity and, 249; tions), 58, 69, 215, 298 Corpus Christi in relation to, 247, 249, 265, Bonet, Francesc Massip, 5–6, 76 283–87; in Cuba, 262; early modern, 260–65; bonfires, 38, 74, 108, 131, 131n43, 143, 164, 165, elements of, 251–53; high point of, 47; in Jaén, 167, 172, 253, 257, 295, 314, 315 251, 253–59; medieval, 257–59; origins of, 73, Bonifaz, Ramón, 91 249; political significance of, 248–49, 258–59; border crossings, 156–57, 166–67 popular participation in, 247–49; present-day, Borja, Cardinal, 311 246, 248, 251; regulation of, 248–51, 258, Brihuega, 142, 155–56 262–64; in Spain, 251, 253, 260; subversive and Briviesca, 106, 142 unruly aspects of, 248–50, 257–58, 262–65; brotherhoods. See confraternities and brother- time frame of, 37, 246–47, 249 hoods Caro Baroja, Julio, 47, 246, 249, 251–53, 264 Brown, Jonathan, 304 Carrillo de Huete, Pedro, 226–28; Crónica del Brueghel, Pieter, 114 halconero de Juan II, 335 Brunel, Antoine de, 286–87 Cartagena, Alonso de, Doctrinal de los caballeros, Brussels, 6, 135, 138–40, 235 204 Bryant, Lawrence, 72 Cartagena, Pedro de, 245 bubonic plague, 151, 179 Casaubon, Isaac, 125 bulls: and juego de cañas, 218–19; running of, Castellón de la Plana, 181 45, 102, 106, 107, 109, 111, 157, 164, 167, 181, Castile: conditions in, 156; economic problems 185, 188, 218–19, 284–85, 294, 301, 305, 306, of, 24, 151; and Ferdinand III, 114–15; Philip 315; significance of, 144, 218; torches or fire- II’s regular itinerary in, 16–17; succession to crackers attached to, 143, 161, 179, 189, 218 the throne in, 330; women rulers in, 105 Burckhardt, Jacob, 5, 52, 71, 72, 127 Castile, Admiral of, 165, 216–17, 229 Burgos, 57–61, 123, 144, 189, 245, 329 castles, artificial, 34, 44, 46, 143, 175, 228, 231– Burgundy, 94, 122, 242 32, 256, 295, 315, 336–37 Bynum, Caroline, 268 Catalina (daughter of Philip II), 21, 149, 179, 331 Catalonia, 166–67, 221, 264, 317–18 caballeros villanos (non-noble urban knights), Cateau-Cambrésis, Treaty of (1559), 25, 26, 28 201 cathedrals. See sacred space Cabrera de Córdoba, Luis, 147n Catherine (Kate), Duchess of Cambridge, 49 Çalba, Jonot, 170 Catherine of Aragon, 26

346 INDEX

Catholic Church: blasphemy against, 265, 285– Clovis, 115 86; in England, 25, 27; in France, 25; noncalen- Cock, Henry, 3n7, 4, 16, 30, 34, 38–41, 52, 75, drical festivities of, 312–30; the papacy, 28, 129, 146, 149–50, 153, 156, 161, 162, 164, 135, 326; and power, 287–92; Reformation in, 165n34, 166, 167, 173–76, 178, 180–88, 190, 315; tournaments condemned by, 220. See also 219, 260–61 Christianity; Inquisition Colonna, Ascanio, 126, 154 Catholic League, 26 colors: chivalry and, 58; confraternities/brother- Ceballos-Escalera y Gil, Alfonso, 208 hoods and, 58; of king’s retinue, 155; laws Cerda, Ferdinand de la. See Ferdinand (Ferdinand pertaining to, 51; significance of, 106, 107, de la Cerda) 144–45, 161, 233 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 16, 22, Columbus, Christopher, 85 36, 194, 195, 202–3, 233, 238, 242, 252; La Comes, Joan, 168–71, 176, 270; Libre de algunes Galatea, 203–4 coses asanyalades, 31, 266–67, 310 challenges, in tournaments, 48, 196, 198, 228–29, Compostela, 2–3, 329 234–37, 240–41, 243, 244, 337 confraternities and brotherhoods, 56–61 charivari (ritual public embarrassment), 248, 252 conversion, celebrations for the return of Eng- Charles, Prince of Wales, 49 land to Catholicism, 313–14 Charles II, 152 Coppola, Sofia, 305 Charles V (Charles I of Spain), 12–13, 12, 15, 17, Córdoba, Gonzalo de, 87 20, 24–25, 55, 73, 87, 94, 110, 123–24, 126, coronation, 316–30 131, 132, 139–40, 168, 234–35, 238, 242, 304– Corpus Christi events, 64, 130, 157, 174, 184, 5, 308–9, 316–17, 321 190, 266–87; audience for, 276, 284; in Bar- Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales, 271 celona, 270, 270–71; Carnival in relation to, children, in festivals, 101–2, 108, 128, 139, 141, 247, 249, 265, 283–87; changing aspects of, 172 270–73, 282; costs of, 274, 279; didactic value chivalry. See knighthood and chivalry of, 268, 284; in Granada, 278–80; importance Christianity: and Carnival, 249; and mock battles of, 47, 247, 269, 274; in later centuries, 282; against Moors, 38, 44–46, 104, 110, 133, 199, in Madrid, 271–73; organization of, 277, 283, 219, 315; and sacred space, 64. See also Catho- 284; origins and Spanish history of, 268–69; lic Church; ecclesiastics; sacred space processions for, 266–68, 271, 276–80; secular Christmas, 25–26, 37–41, 43–44 elements in relation to, 269, 272, 285–86; in chroniclers: and courtly literature, 54; festivals Seville, 277–78; in Spain, 269, 283–83; struc- and festivities as recorded by, 50–53; goals ture of, 270–73; in Valencia, 275–76 of, 30, 300; and knighthood, 55–56; political Corteguera, Luis, 173 involvement of, 54–55; royal officials’ accounts Cortes: Aragonese, 158, 160–61, 162, 166, 178– compared to those of, 90 79, 187, 317; Castilian, 48, 51, 108, 153, 188, churches. See sacred space 317 El Cid, 183 Coscón, Bernat de, 243 city, the: civic space in, 65; the country in relation Council of Trent, 269, 270, 315 to, 71–72, 116–18 country, in relation to city, 71–72, 116–18 Claramonte, Esberte de, 196 courtly literature. See literature classical motifs, 90–91 cross-dressing, 251–53, 255, 263 Clement X, Pope, 49 Crown of Aragon: Justicia of, 156; Philip II’s rule clothing: chivalry and, 62; of commoners, 98; of, 147, 160–61, 166, 169–70, 173, 175–77, descriptions of, 144; laws pertaining to, 51; 187–88; Philip II’s travels in, 13, 15, 16, 18, 37, meaning of, 51, 233; Moorish, 45, 101, 103–4, 39, 41, 42, 75, 146–92, 148, 317; Philip’s rule 145, 165, 217, 237; of noblemen, 98; of official of, 156–57; rebelliousness of, 28, 29, 152, 160; attendees at royal entry, 92–93; portraiture and, succession to the throne in, 322–30; women 57–58 rulers in, 105

347 INDEX

Crusades, 82, 106, 145, 162, 330 Edward VI of England, 243 Cuba, 262 Edwards, John, 320 culture, high vs. low, 232–33, 250 El Escorial, 3, 13–14, 18, 19, 43, 188 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 26 dance, 38–39, 41–43, 69, 71, 82, 98, 102, 106–8, Elliott, John H., 149n7, 304 137, 139, 141–42, 156, 181, 236, 238, 254, 257, El Pardo, 3, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20 261, 306, 314, 315. See also saraos empresa (emblem of challenge), 241, 243 Daroca, 134, 157 England: conversion of, 313–14; Philip II’s death: commemoration of, 307–12; in tourna- travels to, 1, 17, 26; Spain’s relations with, ments, 220, 223, 229, 239–40 26–27 De Mata Carriazo, Juan, La boda de Emperador, Enrique, Infante Don, 34, 42, 80, 195, 224–25, 304–5 227, 227–34, 240, 335–38 Derrida, Jacques, 73n11 Enriquez, Alfonso, 229 devils, 267, 268, 271, 280, 285 entremeses (theatrical skits), 276, 337. See also Diana, Princess of Wales, 49 theatrical skits Díaz de Games, Gutierre, El Victorial, 204–5 Epiphany, 256 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 193; True History of the equestrian demonstrations, 136, 162, 183, 188. Conquest of New Spain, 22 See also bohordando; juego de cañas Díaz de Mendoza, Ruy, 240 Ercilla y Zúñiga, Alonso de, La Araucana, 204 Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua eroticism, 127 Española, 69 Escavias, Pedro de. See Hechos del condestable Don Discalced Carmelites, monastery of, 154, 321 Miguel Lucas de Iranzo disguise, 255–56, 314, 316 Espinoza, Diego de, 34, 92, 180–81 distance, social or political: festivals as creating, Estella, 146, 189–90 71; between king and his people, 43, 136–37, Eulalia, Saint, 172, 266 165, 187, 259, 303–4; language as means of, executions, 227–28, 286–87, 336 126–27 distributions, of food, alms, or gifts, 47, 71, 100, fabliaux, 248 135, 142, 232, 254, 256, 257, 275, 279, 283, fabrics, 145 300, 301, 303, 306, 306–7, 321 Fallows, Noel, Jousting in Medieval and Renaissance dragons or serpents (tarascas), 2, 39, 41, 98, 112, Iberia, 194n3 137, 146, 157, 190, 236, 267, 271, 272, 280, farautes (heralds), 208, 244 281, 282, 285, 287, 295, 306 “farce of Avila,” 100 dress. See clothing Fat Tuesday. See Mardi Gras Duarte (heir to Portuguese throne), 336 Fazes, Luis de, 240 Duarte, Francisco, 93, 95 Feast of All Saints, 18 Dumas, Alexander, The Count of Montecristo, 258, feasts, 34, 37, 42, 47, 74, 172, 174, 179, 189, 261 222, 230–34, 293–98, 301, 335–38. See also banquets early modernity: Carnival in, 260–65; elements Feliu de la Peyna, Narcís, 167–68 of festivities characteristic of, 130, 131, 144, Ferdinand (Ferdinand de la Cerda), 50, 318 145; king’s role in, 136–37, 156, 187; social hi- Ferdinand, Infante. See Ferdinand of Antequera erarchies in, 162; transition from late medieval Ferdinand, Infante (son of Alfonso XI), 299 period to, 8–9, 333 Ferdinand, Infante (son of Philip II), 302 Easter, 257 Ferdinand III, 32, 76–78, 80–82, 91, 97, 114–15, ecclesiastics, 230, 245, 263, 330. See also Corpus 118, 123, 131, 206 Christi events Ferdinand IV, 51, 319 Edict of Nantes (1598), 25 Ferdinand of Antequera, 32, 42, 78–84, 115, 224, Edward II of England, 50 324–25

348 INDEX

Ferdinand the Catholic, 15, 77, 83n30, 84–89, García de Santa María, Alvar, 336 129, 138, 170, 297, 301–2, 319, 325–26 gates, 123–24, 128 Fernández de Andrada, Pedro, 214 Geertz, Clifford, 41 Fernández Manrique, Juan, 120 Genoa, 35, 124, 130–32 Fernández Travesio, Carlota, 34n1 George, Saint, 157–58 Fernando, Infante, 50, 135 Ghent, 235 Fernando III, 48 giants, 38, 41, 130, 139, 143, 241, 274, 278, 280, Ferrer, Saint Vincent, 183 283, 284, 285, 295, 315 festivals and festivities: audience for, 10, 232, gifts, 141 333–34; Binche (1549), 234–38; calendrical, Gil, Xavier, 132 36–37, 46–47; confraternities/brotherhoods Ginez de Sepúlveda, Juan, 20 and, 56–57; costs of, 34, 34n1, 88, 143, 231; Girón, Pedro, 100 funerals and, 307–12; knighthood and, 56; Girona, 70, 120–21, 274 literary representations of, 49–53, 56, 83–86, Gomes, Rita Costa, 13 103; meaning of, 35–36, 52–53, 159–64, 191, Gómez de Castro, Alvar, 17, 124 232–33, 332–33; noncalendrical, 37, 48–49, Gómez de Mora, Juán, 311 295–96, 312–30; organization of, 92–94, 109, Gómez de Ocaña, Pedro, 254, 255 231; origins of, 65–67; overview of, 4–10; and González de Lara, Nuño, 319 power, 7–8, 35, 58, 99, 159–64, 191–92, 229; Goya, Francisco de, 114; El Pelele, 252 romances as influence on, 53–56; royal role Granada, 32, 77–80, 85, 129, 138, 278–80, 284– in, 3, 35, 39; royal travels and, 3, 19; royalty, 44; 85 space of, 64–65, 131–33; timeless character of, Greenblatt, Stephen, 60 9; as tradition, 6, 9, 35, 62–63, 73–74, 191–92; Guadalajara, 154–55 Valladolid (1428), 224–34. See also martial Guadalupe monastery, 16 displays Guenée, Bernard, 72 fireworks, 2, 66, 71, 83, 98, 111–12, 131, 131n43, guilds, 140 139, 143, 175, 238, 294, 314, 315 Guise faction, 26 Flanders, 73 Gurrea, Juan de, 158, 160 Flor, Roger de, 221 Guzmán, Diego de, 244 food fights, 254–57 Guzmán, Enrique de. See Medina Sidonia, fools, 254–56, 306 Guzmán, Enrique de, Duke of Foucault, Michel, 162, 271 Guzman, Gonzalo de, Lord of Torija, 240 fountains, wine-dispensing, 111, 133, 142, 146, 181 Habsburg empire, 1, 9, 11, 13, 17, 18, 25, 40, Fourth Lateran Council, 220 94, 121, 124, 129, 140, 143, 147, 150, 175, France, Spanish relations with, 25–26 216, 224, 234–35, 238, 241, 302, 317, 321, Francesc Desvalls, 196 330 Francis I of France, 25, 238 Haro, Count of, 106, 107 Francis Xavier, Saint, 315 harquebus discharges, 37, 83, 93, 95, 110, 120, Frazer, James, The Golden Bough, 252 122, 130 Frieder, Braden, 224 Hechos del condestable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo Froissart, Jean, 54, 132–33 (attributed to Pedro de Escavias), 44, 99–104, Fuchs, Barbara, 103–4, 145, 214, 216 251, 254, 299–300, 306, 307 Fuero de Cuenca, 207–8, 211 Henry, Infante. See Henry IV of Castile funerals, 307–8 Henry II, 328 Henry III of Castile, 79 Galbert of Bruges, 73 Henry III of Valois, 26 game of canes. See juego de cañas Henry II of France, 238 García de Guadalajara, John, 227–28, 336 Henry IV of Castile, 297, 319–20

349 INDEX

Henry IV of France (Henry of Navarre), 25, 26, Italy, 28, 143 42, 44, 99–106, 120, 130, 251 itinerancy. See royal itinerancy Henry VIII of England, 26 heralds. See farautes Jaén, 6, 44, 99–104, 116, 120, 143, 251, 253–59, Hercules, 91, 96, 97, 140, 143, 190 299–300, 308 Hermes Trismegistus, 125 James, King of Sicily, 323 hermeticism. See mysteries, Renaissance James, Saint (James the Greater, James the Hernández, Francisco, 29 Apostle), 3, 40, 43, 85 Hernández, Pero, 2 James I, 74, 183, 222, 322–23; Libre dels Feyts, 55, Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio, 21 207, 209 high vs. low culture, 232–33, 250 Jerusalem, motif of entry into, 63, 70–71, 113 Holy Thursday, 268 Jesus, 63, 70, 113, 268 honor, 53, 195, 205–6 Jews: and Corpus Christi events, 273; festive Horozco, Sebastián de, 17, 107–8, 124, 129, dances of, 42, 106, 107, 142, 273; persecution 313–14 of, 245 horses, 199–200. See also bohordando; equestrian Joanna, 87, 94 demonstrations John, Infante, 227 Hugo, Victor, Notre Dame de Paris, 258 John, King of Navarre, 224–25, 227, 230–31, 233 Huizinga, Johan, 54, 94, 243; The Autumn of the John I of Castile, 79, 145 Middle Ages, 194 John I of Crown of Aragon, 80 Hundred Years War, 26, 54, 200, 242 John II of Castile, 51, 79, 99, 105, 137, 193, Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego, Guerras de Granada, 214, 221, 224–25, 229–33, 238–41, 243, 244, 244 337–38 John XXII, Pope, 269 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint, 48, 315 John of Austria, 90, 297 Index medicamentorum, 29 John of Bonifacio, 244 Infantado, Count of, 302 Jordan, Jenny, 297 Infantes of Aragon. See Enrique, Infante Don; jousts, 2, 13, 19, 21, 32, 46, 48, 50, 63, 66, 71, 74, John, King of Navarre 76, 106, 107, 111, 136, 164–65, 165n34, 175, Innocent III, Pope, 326 220–23, 227–34, 239, 245, 295, 301, 305, 306, Inquisition, 48, 162, 189, 264, 265, 273, 287–92 336 invented traditions, 113 Juan, Infante Don, 301–2 Invincible Armada, 26–27, 151, 152, 187 Juan, King of Navarre, 105, 335, 337–38 Irache monastery, 146 Juana, Infanta, 242 Iranzo, Alonso de, 307–8 Juan Manuel, Infante Don, Libro de los estados, Iranzo, Miguel Lucas de, 6, 30, 42, 44, 46, 52, 65, 56, 204 100–104, 138, 143, 145, 214, 220, 251, 253–59, Juan of Austria, 28 299–300, 305–6, 307–8 Judaizers, 273 Isabel, Infanta, 86–87, 188 juego de cañas (reed-spear game), 45, 61, 69, 101, Isabella (daughter of Philip II), 21 104, 106, 145, 161, 165, 185, 189, 197, 199– Isabella I of Castile, 15, 77, 84–87, 104, 105, 170, 200, 212–20, 213, 235, 253, 255, 256, 294–95, 297, 301–2, 319–20 301, 305, 314, 315 Isabella of Bavaria, 133 Juliana of Liège, 268 Isabella of Portugal, 304–5 Justicia of Aragon, 156 Isabelle of Valois, 17, 21, 25, 28, 34, 90, 105, 107– 9, 130, 138, 297, 331 Kagan, Richard L., 21, 46, 55, 300 Isidore, Saint, 77–78, 81 keys, presentation of, 2, 85, 86, 111, 112, 129 Isidro, Saint, 315 king-of-arms. See rey de armas

350 INDEX kings and queens: ascent to throne and corona- Llull, Ramón, Blanquerna, 56, 66 tion of, 316–22; contestation of power of, locos. See fools 7–10, 99, 159–66, 175–77, 191–92, 229; in locusts, 187 Crown of Aragon, 322–30; death of, 307; Logroño, 189 distance of, from the people, 43, 136–37, 165, López Dávalos, Ruy, 228 187, 259, 303–4; origins of rule of, 325–26; López de Ayala, Pero, 54, 204 piety of, 43–44; show of obeisance to, 138; in López de Hoyos, Juan, 90, 109–10, 114, 124, 183, Spain, 316–22. See also royalty 333; Real aparato y sumptuoso recebimiento de D. knighthood and chivalry: characteristics of, Ana of Austria, 110n 204–6, 242; chroniclers and, 55–56; clothing’s Loria, Roger de, 221, 223 significance for, 62; depictions of non-noble Lot, Ferdinand, 156 knights, 59; festivals and, 56; law and, 205–8; Louis IX of France, 50, 76 literature and, 53–56, 202–5; Philip and, 182; Lourie, Elena, 200 popularity of, 194; traditions underlying, love, knights and, 193, 196, 212 207–8; and women, 193, 196, 212, 239. See also Low Countries, 27, 140, 150–51 martial displays Lucas de Tuy, 55, 78 Lucas Hidalgo, Gaspar, Dialogo de apacibles entre- La Coruña, 1, 3 tenimientos, 252 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 248 Luna, Count of, 216 Lalaing, Jacques de, 243–44 Luna, María de, 105 Lanuza, Juan de, 165n34 Luther, Martin, 235, 269, 314 Lanuza, Martín de, 165n34 Luys Lull, Joan, 170 La Seo Cathedral, Zaragoza, 163 Las Huelgas, monastery of, 329 maces, 97–98, 108, 120, 158 Las Navas de Tolosa, Battle of (1212), 199 MacKay, Angus, 233, 324, 325 Last Supper, 268 Madrid, 3, 13–14, 65, 109–11, 114, 116–17, 123, late medieval period: Carnival in, 257–59; king’s 128–30, 261, 263, 271–73, 285, 290, 310–11, role in, 136–37; transition to early modern 315–16, 321–22 from, 8–9, 333 magic. See mysteries, Renaissance Latin, 125–27, 154 Mal Lara, Juan de, 89–98, 109, 119n, 123, 124, Latrás, Lupercio, 160 141, 158, 183, 228, 333 Lea, Henry C., 290–91 Manrique, Jorge, 195; Coplas a la Muerte de mi Lehoux, Françoise, 72 Padre, 225 Leonor, Infanta Doña, 225, 227, 336, 338 Mardi Gras, 246, 253, 255, 258, 263 Leonora of Aragon, 79 Margarita, Infanta Doña, 303 Leonor de Albuquerque, 231, 298 Margarita, Queen, 111, 129, 310–11 Lepanto, Battle of (1571), 28 María, Princess of Portugal, 15, 23, 119–20, 218, Lévi Strauss, Claude, 73n11 293–98 Lhermite, Jehan, 16–18, 30, 188–90, 212 María, Queen, 298 liminality, 116–18 Maria de Austria, Infanta Doña, 307 Lisbon, 16, 118 María of Castile, 105 literacy, 126–27, 154 Marie Antoinette, 305 literature, 53–56, 202–5, 212. See also romances marriage. See Philip II: marriages of; weddings Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, 243–44 martial displays, 193–209; actual warfare and, Lleida (Lérida), 167 198–201; in Carnival, 255; as element of Lleó Cañal, Vicente, 91, 269; Fiesta grande, 277–78 festivals, 198; fantasy and reality mixed in, 195, Llibre de les solemnitats de Barcelona, 31, 168–69, 209; international character of, 196; literary 170–71, 173, 174, 176, 177, 308–10, 333 perspective on, 197; literature and, 212; mock

351 INDEX martial displays (cont.) Moors: attacks on, 160; clothing styles of, 45, 101, warfare, 197–202; non-public nature of, 195, 103–4, 145, 164, 216–17, 237; and Corpus 200, 201; social perspective on, 197; in Spain, Christi events, 273; Ferdinand of Antequera’s 211. See also knighthood and chivalry; tourna- defeat of, 80–81; as festival motif, 145, 214, ments 219; festive dances of, 39, 42, 106, 107, 142, Martin the Humane, 105 273; imitation of, in festivals, 44–45, 101, 104, Martorell, Johanot, Tirant lo Blanch, 203–4, 209, 136, 212, 216; mock battles against, 38, 44–46, 222, 243 104, 133, 199, 219, 315; Seville’s freedom from, Martorell, Nofre, 182 77–78; show of obeisance by, 138; Spanish Mary, mother of Jesus, 81, 325 relations with, 103–4; war tactics of, 199. See Mary of Hungary, 23, 234–38 also juego de cañas Mary Tudor, Queen of England, 1, 17, 26, 94, Morales, Ambrosio, 21 332 Morisco rebellion, 27–28, 46, 151, 181 Master of Santiago, 254–56 Moriscos. See Moors Maximilian, Emperor, 308–9 Muhammad, 104 McDonogh, Gary W., 132 Munich, 142 medieval period. See late medieval period Muñoz, Andrés, 94; Viaje de Felipe Segundo á Medinacelli, Duke of, 165 Inglaterra, 1–2 Medina del Río Seco, Count of, 302 Muñoz, Angela, 273 Medina Sidonia, Duchess of, 301 Muntaner, Ramón, 54–55, 99, 207, 221–23, 322– Medina Sidonia, Guzmán, Enrique de, Duke of, 23, 326–28, 332; Crónica, 52, 74, 209, 222 84–85, 294–95, 297 Murcia, 274–75 melees, 236 Murray, James M., 73 Memorial Histórico Español, 263 music, 38, 41–43, 68, 88, 93, 96, 98, 102, 106, Mendoça y Lavajo, Hierónimo de, 165n34 129, 130, 141, 174, 181, 261, 295. See also Te Mendoza, Bernardino de, 120, 169 Deum Laudamus Mendoza, Lope de, 240 Muslims. See Moors Mercy, monastery of, 184 mysteries, Renaissance, 97, 125 Mérida, 264–65 Merlo, Juan de, 194, 241, 243 Nájera, Duke of, 302 Milan, 141, 142, 216, 241 Naples, 127–28 military parades, 95, 108, 110, 139–40 naval battles, mock, 110, 189 military technology, 53, 55, 83, 195 Netherlands. See Low Countries Mineo, Claudia, 46 Nieto Sorio, José Manuel, 75, 317 Miranda, Count of, 164 Niño, Pero, 204 mock warfare: in Carnival, 254, 257; between Nirenberg, David, 273 Christians and Moors, 38, 44–46, 104, 110, noncalendrical festivities, 37, 48–49, 295–96, 133, 199, 219, 315; class distinctions and, 136; 312–30 confraternities/brotherhoods and, 58; naval non-noble knights, 59 battles, 110, 189; in Seville, 78; in Spanish tradition, 197–202. See also juego de cañas; obedience, ceremonies of, 138 martial displays; tournaments Olivares, Count-Duke of, 271 Molfeta, princess of, 216, 217, 241 Olivares, Countess of, 263 Molina, María de, 318 Order of Santiago, 40, 80 monarchs. See kings and queens; royalty Order of the Banda, 61, 63, 65, 66, 228, 336 Montcada family, 318 Order of the Golden Fleece, 19, 21, 40–41, 165 Montemayor, Jorge, La Diana, 203–4 Order of the Jar and the Griffin, 79, 325 Montserrat, monastery of, 167, 170, 177 Orís, Miguel d’, 243 Monzón, 177–80 Orwell, George, 291

352 INDEX

Osuna, Duke of, 302 168–69; Barcelona (1548), 120, 169; Barcelona Ottoman empire, 27–28, 151 (1564), 15–16, 167–68, 170–73; Barcelona Our Lady of Gamonal, confraternity of, 57–61, (1585), 35, 41, 147n, 167–77, 173–75; Binche 69 (1549), 234–38; Crown of Aragon (1585–86), 13, 15, 18, 37, 39, 41, 42, 75, 148–87, 148, Pacheco (Villena) family, 100, 102, 251, 255 317; Crown of Aragon (1592), 16, 18, 75, Páez de Castro, Juan, 21 187–92; England (1554–55), 1, 17, 26; Genoa Palavicino, Antonio, 117 (1548), 35; Germany, Italy, and Low Countries palio (baldachin, canopy), 3, 32, 70, 104, 107, 111, (1548–50), 12, 15, 120–21, 124, 216, 234–38; 112, 130, 146, 172, 174, 182, 185, 189–90, 191, Guadalupe monastery (1576), 16; Habsburg 271, 272, 274, 285, 301, 303 lands (1556–58), 17; Madrid (1594–95), 18–19; Pamplona, 190 regular Castilian itinerary of, 3, 13–14, 14, Paredes, Count of, 40, 43 16–19, 23–24; Salamanca (1542–1543), 15; Paris, 133 Segovia and Madrid (1570), 16, 17; Seville Parker, Geoffrey, 21, 25, 150 (1570), 16; time spent on, 18; Toledo (1560), pas d’armes (passage of arms), 32, 34, 46, 48, 17, 107–9; Toledo, etc. (1560–61), 10–20, 193–96, 228–34, 237, 240, 337–38 15; Tortosa (1585–86), 37–46, 180; Valencia passeig de Born, Barcelona, 171 (1586), 41, 180–85; Zaragoza (1585), 35, 41 Passo Honroso (honorable pass), 193–96 Philip III (son of Philip II), 28, 111, 129, 130, Paul III, Pope, 135 149, 159, 179, 188, 190, 212, 244, 310–11, 317 Pedro (illegitimate son of Alfonso XI), 298 Philip III of France, 223 Pedro, Infante, 299 Philip IV, 217, 261, 271, 307, 321–22 Pérez, Antonio, 160, 187 Philip V of France, 72 Pérez de Guzmán, Fernán, 79–81, 83, 106; Philip Neri, Saint, 315 Crónica del rey Don Juan II, 227 Philip the Good, 241, 244 persevantes (pursuivants-at-arms), 208, 244 Philip the Handsome, 87, 94, 242 Pescara, Marquis de, 216 Pierre, the bastard of Saint Pol, 241 Peter I of Castile, 26, 319 Pina, 160 Peter II, 222, 322, 326 Pius V, Pope, 218 Peter III, 74, 221, 222, 322–23, 326 Pizarro Gómez, Francisco Javier, 17n26, 30 Philip, Infante. See Philip III (son of Philip II) plague. See bubonic plague Philip II, 12, 317; in armor, 55; crucial events in Poema de Fernán González, 55 reign of, 24; cultural contributions of, 28–30; Poem of the Cid, 51, 55 death of, 331; and foreign affairs, 24–28; politics. See power funeral of, 312; health of, 16, 22, 28, 146, Ponce, Manuel, 315 151, 156, 157, 175, 179, 182, 187, 188; keys Ponce de Léon, Rodrigo, Marquis of Cádiz, 85, received by, 2, 86, 129; later years of, 13, 15, 86 16, 18, 22, 23, 28, 147, 157; marriages of, 1, portraits, of confraternities, 57–61 15, 16, 17, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 105, 108, 109, Portugal, 264 218, 293–98; and martial displays, 212, 214, Portuondo, María M., 29 216, 217, 220, 224, 235–37, 241; overview power: contestation of, 7–10, 99, 159–66, 175– of life of, 20–24, 331–32; participation of, in 77, 191–92, 229; festivals and, 6–8, 35, 58, 99, festivities, 22, 56; personality and character of, 159–64; the Inquisition and, 287–92; royal 12–13, 23, 149; piety of, 134, 183, 188; and entries and, 119; royal itinerancy and, 155 romances, 2, 21–22, 56, 182, 193, 203; royal presentation at the temple, ceremony of, 302 entries of, 1–3, 6, 70, 89–99, 117–18, 120–24, Primera crónica general, 77–78 129–32, 134–35, 147n, 155–56, 158–64, 168– princely entries. See royal entries 77, 188–90 Priuli, Lorenzo, 23 Philip II’s travels, 3, 16; Barcelona (1542–43), 15, processions: Barcelona, 172, 174; for birth-

353 INDEX processions (cont.) Alfonso XI, 63, 68–69; Barcelona, 168–77; related events, 301–3; through the city, 129– Benavente, 1–2, 6; Brussels, 6; of Catholic 33; Corpus Christi, 266–68, 271, 276–80; monarchs in Seville, 84–89; characteristics of, funeral, 308–9, 311–12; Girona, 120; hierarchy 32, 71, 74; Compostela, 2–3; continuity and in, 119–21, 158, 161–62, 181–82, 189, 266–67, change in, 69–70, 111–12 (see also as tradition, 271, 276; Jaén, 120; for reception of king, 116, in this entry); entering the city, 123–29; of 119–23; routes of, 131–33; as show of obei- Ferdinand of Antequera, 81–84; festive activi- sance, 138–40; Toledo, 108; Tortosa, 39–40; ties associated with, 48; of Isabella of Portugal, Valencia, 181–85; Zaragoza, 158–59, 161–62 305; local meaning of, 99; meanings of, 71–72; Protestantism, 25, 269, 283 origins and precursors of, 63, 70–74, 113; of public, the. See audience Philip II, 1–3, 6, 70, 89–99, 117–18, 120–24, Pulgar, Fernando del, Claros varones de Castilla, 129–32, 134–35, 147n, 155–56, 158–64, 168– 204 77, 188–90; and power, 119; of princesses and Pulgar, Hernando del, 84, 85–87, 320 queens, 105–11; receiving the king, 116–23; pursuivants-at-arms. See persevantes royal visits vs., 134; sacred space as terminus of, 134–35; Seville, 68–70, 76–99; in Spain, 74–76; Quatro libros de la naturaleza, 29 structure of, 113–45; as tradition, 63, 113–15 queens, 105 (see also continuity and change in, in this entry); Quexada, Gutierre, 241, 243 Zaragoza, 158–64 Quijada, Juan, 237 royal itinerancy: medieval pattern of, 14, 17, 19; Qu’ran, 42, 104, 106 and power, 155. See also Philip II’s travels royalty: festive role of, 3; festivities linked to, 3, reception of the king, 116–23 19; travels of, 14, 17; viewing of festivities and Reconquest, 45, 46, 76, 80, 85, 91, 92, 162, 200, processions by, 43, 129, 136, 137, 156, 161, 211, 233, 330 165, 189. See also kings and queens Relaciones topográficas, 29, 46 royal visits, 38, 42, 47, 74, 92–94, 100, 118, 134 religious minorities, 71, 82–83, 103, 273 Rueda, Lope de, 2 Requesens, Estefanía de, 120, 169 Ruiz, Juan, Libro de Buen Amor, 246 Rerum medicarum novae Hispaniae thesaurus, 29 running of bulls, 45, 102, 106, 107, 109, 111, 144, rey de armas (king-of-arms), 208, 236, 244 157, 164, 167, 181, 185, 188, 218–19, 284–85, Riambau de Corbera, 196 294, 301, 305, 306, 315 Ribagorza, 152, 160 running of the ring, 22, 219–20, 256, 257, 307, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 130, 248, 284, 334 314 Riquer, Martín de, 196, 209, 235, 240, 243; Caballeros andantes españoles, 194 sacred space, 64, 134–35 Rodriguez de Lena, Pedro, 194 Said, Edward, 103 Rodríguez de Montalvo, Garci, 203 Saint Augustine, monastery of, 184 Rodríguez Velasco, Jesús, 56, 57, 61, 204 Saint Dominic, monastery of, 183 romances: Amadis of Gaul and, 21–22; festivals saints, canonization of, 48 in relation to, 53–56, 229, 238; mock battles Salamanca, 15 and, 46; Philip II’s love for, 23; revival of, in Salvador (Bahia), Brazil, 251 fifteenth century, 22.See also literature sanbenitos, 162, 289 Roman motifs: medieval revival of, 63, 66; in Sánchez Molero, José Luis Gonzalo, 21 royal entries, 90–91 (see also triumphal entries); Sancho (illegitimate son of Alfonso XI), 299 triumphal entries, 71, 113 Sancho I, 51 Romans, France, 248 Sancho IV, 318, 328 round tables, 222, 223 Sandoval, Alvaro de, 229 routes of processions, 131–33 Sandoval, Juan de, 93 royal entries, 68–112; aftermath of, 135–42; of San Mateo, 181

354 INDEX

Santa Hermandad, 95 Tarazona (1592), 190 Santa María, Pablo de (formerly Selomah ha Te Deum Laudamus, 82, 88, 98, 111, 134 Levi), 245 Tello, Francisco, 95 Santiago de Compostela, 2–3, 196 Teresa (Theresa) de Avila, Saint, 48, 315 Santísimo and Santiago, confraternity of, 57–61, Teruel, 207 69, 201 theatrical skits, 106, 130, 133, 141, 144, 271, 276, saraos, 42, 142, 165n34, 294, 295 295, 303–4, 306, 314, 316, 337. See also autos Sarmiento de Mendoza, Luis, 293 de fe; autos sacramentales Sástago, Count, 134, 160, 164 Tiepolo, Antonio, 23 Saturnalia, 249 Titian, 55 Savoy, Duke of, 149, 162, 164, 165, 166, 217, 261 Toledo, 3, 13, 19, 65, 107–9, 123, 124, 130, 138, Scott, James C., 8n14, 250n 290–91, 313–14 Sebastian, Saint, 243 Toledo, Antonio de, 120, 121, 172 Segovia, 16, 188, 217, 218, 319–20, 335 Toledo, Hernando Alvarez de. See Alba, Her- serpents. See dragons or serpents nando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Sessa, Duchess of, 307 Torah, 42, 106 Sessa, Duke of, 216–17, 302, 307 torches, 74, 98, 106, 108, 131, 131n43, 143, 172, Seville, 16, 68–70, 76–99, 114, 118, 123, 129, 131, 257 136, 138, 141, 277–78, 301, 305 Toro Buiza, Luis, 214 sexuality, 265 Torre de Oro (Golden Tower), 78, 91 Shakespeare, William, Henry IV–Henry VI cycle, Torres, Teresa de, 305–6 250 Tortosa, 37–46 sieges, mock. See mock warfare tournaments, 220–45; condemnation of, 220; Song of Songs, 127 deaths in, 220, 223, 229, 239–40; definitions space, of festivals, 64–65, 131–33 of, 211–12, 211n3; on foot, 239–41; origins of, Spain: and Burgundy, 242; Carnival in, 251, 253, 210; Philip II and, 12, 21–23, 27; prizes given 260; cultural growth under Philip II, 28–30; at, 239, 239n; ritual nature of, 244; for royal economic problems of, 24, 151, 187; govern- entries, 69, 76, 87, 109, 136; significance of, ment and rule of, 149n7; kingship in, 316–22; 48, 53; as substitute for war, 223; in Valladolid martial displays in, 211; peak and decline of, (1428), 226–34. See also martial displays; mock 150–52, 156, 264; pejorative views of, 34, 103, warfare 153n16, 166, 260; wars and foreign affairs of, tradition: festivals and festivities as, 6, 9, 35, 62– 24–28 63, 73–74, 191–92; royal entries as, 63, 113–15 Spanish Armada. See Invincible Armada Trastámaras, 26, 54, 224, 328 St. James of the Blacks, 270 travels. See Philip II’s travels Stone, Lawrence, ix, 250n Trent, 143 Strayer, Joseph R., ix Trinity, monastery of, 184 Strong, Roy, 5, 6, 72, 75; Art and Power, 6–7 triumphal entries, 32, 87 Suero de Quiñones, 193–97 Troyes, Chrétien de, 232, 244 sumptuary legislation, 51, 161 Turner, Victor, 8, 8n14, 107, 117, 159 swords: Castilian symbolism of, 135, 135n48; of Ferdinand III, 80, 81, 82, 115; of justice, 120, Ulm, 141 121, 178 Valdonzella, monastery of, 117, 170–71, 177 tableaux vivants, 2, 42, 71, 82, 92, 130, 139, 144, Valencia, 41, 74, 180–85, 275–76, 323–24 184, 314, 315 Valera, Diego de, 56, 204 Talavera, Hernando de, 278 Valladares (alcalde), 34 tarascas. See dragons or serpents Valladolid, 65, 137, 143, 188–89, 217, 224–34, Tarazona, 187–88 240–41, 336–38

355 INDEX

Vallesec, Miguel de, 172 wild men, 266, 270–71 Valsaín, 14, 19 William, Count, Marquis of Flanders, 73 van Gennep, Arnold, 117, 293 William, Duke of Cambridge, 49 Vargas, Master, 293, 295 William the Marshall, 227 Velasco, Pedro, 180, 301 women: at Carnival, 256; knights and, 193, 196, Venice, 301 212, 239; as rulers, 105 Vicens Vives, Jaume, 6 Wyngaerde, Anton van den (Antonio de las Victoria, monastery of, 184 Viñas), 29, 151, 151n11 Victoria (ship), 90 Villena family, 100, 102, 251 Xátiva, 185–86 Viñas, Antonio de las. See van den Wyngaerde, Ximénez de Rada, Rodrigo, 55, 78 Antoon Virgin Mary. See Mary, mother of Jesus Yates, Frances, 125 warfare, 24–28; changes in, 55; mass participation in, 200; social impact of, 198–201. See also Zaragoza, 35, 41, 134, 135, 138, 153–55, 158–64, mock warfare 187, 217, 259, 260, 323–24, 327 weddings, 293–98, 304–7 Zúñiga, Juan de, 20, 169 Wenceslaus, Prince, 303 Zuñiga y Arista, Gregorio, 214

356