Citizens, Sovereigns, and Ceremonies: the Economy and Politics Behind
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Cities and Sovereigns: Ceremonial Receptions of Iberia as Seen from Below, 1350-1550 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MINNESOTA BY Luis X. Morera IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY William D. Phillips, Jr., Carla Rahn Phillips April 2010 © Luis X. Morera, 2010 Acknowledgements I must offer my sincere appreciation for the enormous support from I received from a number of individuals and institutions, without whom this project could never have come to fruition. Foremost, I am eternally grateful to my dear wife Emily, who supported me in more ways than I can count, experiencing with me every breakthrough and setback along the way. I thank my co-advisers, William D. Phillips, Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips, for their constant encouragement, helpful guidance, and consummate expertise, and my committee members Jole Shackelford, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Sarah Chambers for their thoughtful suggestions and editorial corrections. I am grateful to my colleagues Thomas Farmer, Jonas Westover, Marianne Samayoa, Kajsa Larson, Tovah Bender, and Kira Robison for their friendship and thought-provoking ideas. I also thank several institutions for their generosity: the Fulbright Commission for its Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (2006-2007), which gave me the time and means to explore the many archives necessary for the research of this dissertation; the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain‘s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities for supplementary research funds; the University of Minnesota‘s Graduate School for its Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2007-2008); the University of Minnesota‘s Center for Early Modern History for funding research travel and photocopies; the Casa de Velazquez for allowing me to use its facilities to view certain microfilm rolls I received on loan; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding my participation in a paleographic seminar (Newberry Library, 2002) and a summer dissertation seminar in ―The Comparative History of the Early Modern World,‖ held at the University of Minnesota (12 June -3 August 2006). To the scores of other scholars, archivists, librarians, administrative assistants, colleagues, and friends that have influenced this project, I offer my gratitude. Although there is not space here to name them all individually, their contributions were instrumental to the completion and success of this project. i TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2. THE CEREMONIAL RECEPTIONS OF CASTILE, 1324-1516 53 CHAPTER 3. THE IBERIAN CONTEXT: PORTUGAL, CASTILE, AND THE CROWN OF ARAGON 102 CHAPTER 4. THE MUNICIPAL ECONOMY BEHIND IBERIAN CEREMONIAL RECEPTIONS 157 CHAPTER 5. THE MUNICIPAL POLITICS OF IBERIAN CEREMONIAL RECEPTIONS 204 CONCLUSION. 266 BIBLIOGRAPHY 272 ii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This study provides a social and cultural history of relationships between cities and sovereigns of late medieval Spain, as viewed through their interactions during ceremonial receptions. It examines these events—during which monarchs were formally received by a municipal delegation into a city through a gate in the city wall—from a different perspective and using different sources than is usual. It analyzes these ceremonies in terms of civic actions of reception, rather than in terms of royal actions of entry. That is to say, this study looks at these events from the bottom-up, rather than from the top-down, as has been typical. To arrive at this new vision, the project expands considerably the evidence being considered. First, it treats evidence from a full range of city-sovereign ceremonial interactions. Rather than adopting the narrowly defined category of analysis known as royal entries—supposedly distinguished along the lines of legal and semantic definitions—it employs the broader category of ceremonial receptions. Second, it applies under-utilized evidence from municipal archives, not only the royal-centric sources most commonly used to study such topics. Third, this project adopts a tremendously expanded chronological scope. Instead of employing a narrow timeframe involving only the ceremony itself, this study considers data from every phase of its production. That is, rather than limiting itself to three or four days, it treats the months of preparations that preceded the ceremonial reception, the day of the procession itself, and the many months or even years that it took to resolve the accounts of the entire process. Thus, this project 1 expands on and complements the historiography of royal entries, the more common category of analysis, by using a multi-faceted approach that highlights urban agency. Sociologists and anthropologists have long stressed the importance of rituals and public displays.1 Historians of classical antiquity have likewise treated the topics of ceremonies and rituals.2 By far, however, the largest body of scholarship on such topics is from scholars of Early Modern/Renaissance Europe—often by art historians and scholars of literature and theater.3 With the turn of scholarship toward social and cultural topics, 1 Some of the more influential works of sociologists include Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949 [1938]); Ernst Kantorowicz, The King‟s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957); and Edward Shils, ed., Center and Periphery, Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), see especially Edwards Shils, ―The Meaning of the Coronation,‖ 135- 152. Within English, the most influential works of anthropologists have been, Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, (New York: Basic Books, 1983), see especially ―Centers, Kings and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,‖ 121-146; Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980); Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967); and Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. (Chicago: Aldine Publication Company, 1969). 2 Among historians of ancient Europe, some of the most influential studies within the English and French languages, include: Claudine Auliard, Victoires et Triomphes à Rome. Droit et Réalités sous la République (Paris: Presses Universitaires Franc-Comtoises, Institut des Sciences et Techniques de l‘Antiquité, 2001); Stéphane Benoist, La Fête à Rome au Premier Siècle de l‟Empire. Recherches sur l‟Univers Festif sous les Règnes d‟Auguste et des Julio-Claudiens. Collection Latomus, vol. 248. (Bruxelles: Latomus. Revue d‘Etudes Latines, 1999); Sabine MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Michael McCormick, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West (Paris: Cambridge University Press and Éditions de la Maison de Sciences de l‘Homme, 1986). 3 The bibliography for Early Modern/Renaissance has expanded tremendously within the last decades. A few representative works include: John Adamson, ed. The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Regime, 1500-1750 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999); Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1969]); Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, eds., The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Pierre Béhar, and Helen Watanabe-O‘Kelly, eds. Spectacvlvm Evropaevm: Theatre and Spectacle in Europe (1580-1750) (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1999); David Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642 (London: Edward Arnold, 1971); Richard Jackson, Vive le roi! A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Jean Jacquot, ed., Les fêtes de la Renaissance (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1956-1975), see especially C.A. Marsden, ―Entrées et fêtes espagnoles au XVIe siècle,‖ vol. II, 389-411; James R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe O‘Kelly, and Margaret Shewrings, eds., Europa Triumphans. Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450-1650 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1984). 2 historians too began to look at ceremonies, rituals, festivals, spectacles, and similarly related phenomena.4 For the medieval period, however, there were for a long time only a few lonely voices in the wind. One pioneer of such subjects, Jacques Heers, stressed that festivals and collective spectacles‖ provide ―one of the most faithful expressions of the ‗culture‘ of the times.‖ Heers argued that festivals and public displays offer a unique window into the culture of a society, allowing us to recapture a society‘s beliefs, customs, and value systems in way that we could not otherwise. For Heers, such ―manifestations have, by themselves, an irrefutable value of testimony [témoignage] or, at least, of signal [signe]. They mark the important moments in the life of the individual and of the communities and transmit