Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Essays in Honor of Teofilo F. Ruiz

Yuen-Gen Liang, Jarbel Rodriguez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317177005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Bringing together distinguished scholars in honor of Professor Teofilo F. Ruiz, this volume presents original and innovative research on the critical and uneasy relationship between authority and spectacle in the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, focusing on Spain, the Mediterranean and Latin America.

Cultural scholars such as Professor Ruiz and his colleagues have challenged the notion that authority is elided with high politics, an approach that tends to be monolithic and disregards the uneven application and experience of power by elite and non-elite groups in society by highlighting the significance of spectacle. Taking such forms as ceremonies, rituals, festivals, and customs, spectacle is a medium to project and render visible power, yet it is also an ambiguous and contested setting, where participants exercise the roles of both actor and audience. Chapters in this collection consider topics such as monarchy, wealth and poverty, medieval cuisine and diet and textual and visual sources.

The individual contributions in this volume collectively represent a timely re-examination of authority that brings in the insights of cultural theory, ultimately highlighting the importance of representation and projection, negotiation and ambivalence.

Part I

Authority in borders and conquests

1 A border policy? Louis IX and the Spanish connection

William Chester Jordan

It has long been recognized that, during what I have elsewhere called the penitential phase of Louis IX’s reign following his captivity in 1251 while on his first crusade, the king became committed to maintaining peace among the Catholic powers of Europe.¹ This commitment arose from both psychological/ideological causes, that is to say, his well-documented desire to play the role of the Christian peacemaker in this period, and for strategic reasons, namely his desire, also well-documented, to concentrate the resources of the Catholic states on their wars with Islamic polities.² Two aspects of his peace initiatives have received considerable attention: his treaties with Aragon in 1258 and England in 1259 and his arbitrations in international disputes in Europe, as a result of which Walther Kienast termed the king Schiedsrichter Europas (Europe’s Arbiter).³ One other aspect of his initiatives requires more investigation than it has so far received. This is the relation of his treaty-making to other manifestations of his concerns about border principalities. An attempt will be made in the present essay to place the Spanish kingdoms in the context of his thinking on these issues.

Let us begin with the treaties. Louis IX, who came to the throne as a twelve-year-old boy in 1226, initially swore the crusader’s vow in December of 1244 and departed on crusade in fulfillment of that vow in mid-1248.⁴ In the intervening period (three and a half years) he made gestures of continued friendship to a number of realms which were already enjoying amicable relations with France, among them a gift of a thorn of the Crown of Thorns to his mother’s native land, Castile.⁵ He also worked out truces and agreements with those polities with which he and earlier rulers of France had had belligerent or difficult relations, notably the kingdom of England.⁶ But he had not gone the route of negotiating formal peace treaties with any sovereign or de facto independent authorities by the time he took ship. The “agreements” closest in type to formal pacts were between the crown and aristocrats in several large territorial fiefs in the west and south which were technically dependencies of the kingdom of France.⁷ These aristocrats had recently (in the early 1240s) rebelled against Louis IX. He demanded solemn oaths of submission from them (what were euphemistically called agreements above)⁸ – and, as is known from other sources, he induced a number of them to join his crusade as a way of keeping them under close scrutiny.⁹ The inquisitions of heretical depravity induced many more to do so as a form of penance.¹⁰A large number of otherwise loyal aristocrats, who were making noise at the same time about various other problems, in particular their perceived exploitation by churchmen, also received the king’s attention. He expressed concern about their problems by representing their point of view before the pope – in return for their strong support of his crusading expedition. I am referring to what among specialists is known as the “Protest of Saint Louis” to Pope Innocent IV (1243–1254) in the mid-1240s.¹¹

It is evident that in the aftermath of the defeat of the crusade and the king’s return to France in 1254, Louis believed that his previous efforts at peacemaking were inadequate in extent and not animated as fully as they might have been by the highest sense of Christian obligation. This belief – essentially, self-criticism – explains the extraordinary effort following the crusade to achieve the Treaty of Corbeil with Aragon, the Treaty of Paris with England and, one might add, some set of arrangements, ultimately unsuccessful, to end papal-imperial strife.¹² There is a famous anecdote told by the king’s friend and biographer Jean de Joinville germane to this point and recalled in his narration of Louis’ role as an international arbitrator. The story records the king’s remark to the effect that Christian principles ought to supersede strategic considerations in treaty-making or, rather, that good strategy ought to be rooted in Christian principles.¹³ The two treaties, Corbeil and Paris, publicly confirmed in 1258 and 1259 respectively, were in fact years in negotiation, and they were exceedingly detailed in their protocols.¹⁴ In both cases there were formal ratifications of the Treaties in the capitals of the contracting parties, but there is not much doubt that the settlements were inspired fundamentally by Louis IX. The Treaty of Aragon was first officially solemnized in a Parisian royal palace (although Corbeil was technically a Paris suburb). In the case of the Treaty of Paris the solemn publication pact also took place in Paris.

The two treaties dealt fundamentally, however, with quite different matters. The parties to the Treaty of Corbeil wanted definitively to determine the hitherto disputed jurisdictional and territorial divide between France and Aragon in order to prevent future belligerency arising from it (on which, more momentarily). The parties who negotiated the Treaty of Paris, on the contrary, intended to bring an end to a war that had begun in 1202, hence the alternative name Peace of Paris. Let us consider the treaties in reverse chronological order.

The war that the Treaty of Paris brought to an end had broken out over the enforcement of the legal relationship between King John of England (1199–1216) as lord of his continental fiefs and King Philippe II of France (1179/80–1223).¹⁵ What had forced the point in 1202 was a breach of honor alleged by Hugues de Lusignan, count of La Marche (d. 1219), against King John who, as count of Poitiers, was Hugues’ immediate lord. Hugues appealed to his and John’s mutual overlord, King Philippe, to adjudicate the dispute. When the French king determined to do so, it became incumbent on John to decide whether or not to appear in Philippe’s court to answer Hugues’ charges. When he declined, his fiefs in France were declared forfeit, and war ensued. The war over the next several years led to the incorporation of large parts of western France into the French royal domain.¹⁶ By 1214 this was more or less the settled situation for the original conquests, although in his brief reign Louis VIII (1223–1226) added other western fiefs of the Angevin/Plantagenet patrimony to the royal domain.¹⁷ On more than one occasion, as one might expect, there were efforts by John and his son King Henry III (1216–1272) to reconquer the fiefs, but these came to nothing.¹⁸ Indeed, by the time Louis IX returned from crusade in 1254, there had been decades of almost if not quite uninterrupted de facto peace between the two realms. Louis IX was determined to find a mutually acceptable way to secure the bulk of French territorial interests while at the same time mollifying the English king. The Peace of Paris of 1259 was the way that was found, and although it will not be discussed in great detail in this essay (but see below), it is a fascinating document which deserves treatment at length.¹⁹

The Treaty of Corbeil with Aragon, to return to it now, was about borders, and might be considered a manifestation of a concern with territorial integrity that was in general characteristic of the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century French monarchs.²⁰ Recently Chris Jones has wondered in print and at considerable length how significant this impulse was and whether previous historians have understood it properly.²¹ It may be the case, as he has suggested, that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians exaggerated medieval French monarchs’ quest for the so-called natural boundaries of their realm and, in particular, overstressed their desire to firm up the kingdom’s territorial demarcation with the Holy Roman Empire. But this is not to say that the geographical borders between realms were indifferent to France’s monarchs. The concentration of a ruler’s rights steadily ebbed – or usually did²² – the further from the historic center of his power, thus, in the case of the king of France, the further from the Ile de France. In effect a march or borderland, as seen from Paris, was a region where the king’s rights not only thinned out but where another lord’s began considerably to thicken.²³ One of the reasons, however, that certain boundary disputes were so severe was that there occasionally were also small, relatively compact concentrations of a distant ruler’s rights in borderlands. This was a central problem on the French-Aragonese frontier and is why this region provided potential loci for acts of provocation on either side.

The Treaty of Corbeil was meant to reduce this potentiality in the borderlands shared by France and Aragon by eliminating as many rights of one party on one side of an agreed-upon geographical line or, rather, set of lines and vice versa. It was meant to clarify authority and by this clarification to preserve the peace. At first glance, it is nothing more than a seemingly interminable series of resignations of disputed territories and rights of overlordship. (There are similarities here with some of the provisions of the Treaty of Paris.)²⁴ Some resignations were made by Louis IX, others by his counterpart James I of Aragon (1213–1276). A plethora of lawyers searched the archival records of both monarchs’ governments, going back as far as Charlemagne’s time, for the Capetians maintained that they were the legitimate successors to the heroic emperor’s claims. The documents assembled were usually but not always definitive. Nonetheless, in a peace treaty like that of Corbeil dealing with a vast array of properties, the existence of only one or two disputed points testifies to the thoroughness and interpretative acuity of the archival research and analysis the two sides accomplished in order to negotiate the agreement rather than to the reverse.²⁵

The Treaty of Paris was different. The interests of so many lords were affected that the contracting parties acknowledged in various clauses that problems might arise and provided a blueprint (arbitration panels, compensatory payments for claims that would not otherwise be resigned, etc.) for how to address them in the future.²⁶ Louis IX counted on reasonable men and women, rulers all closely related by blood and marriage, to make it possible to resolve these problems amicably. He saw his own negotiation of the Treaty of Paris explicitly as a family affair.²⁷ Henry III was his brother-in-law, as was Henry’s bother Earl Richard of Cornwall. Both were married to sisters of the wives of Louis IX and Charles d’Anjou. It was not odd or naïve that Louis or any medieval king should think of diplomacy in familial terms. The phrase “marriage alliance” describes a major aspect of royal policies throughout Europe in the Middle Ages.²⁸ Of course, the dramatic tales historians tell are of marriages that failed to achieve effective diplomatic alliances or even provoked the opposite, but many marital alliances actually seem to have fulfilled their purpose and, in any case, were not in themselves stand-alone measures.²⁹

Before Louis IX’s time, it seems fairly clear – and it should come as no surprise – the principal pool for the realm’s marriage alliances was the Anglo-Norman (A-N), the Franco-Flemish (F-F), and the Champagne-Blois (Ch-B) aristocracies. Royal France in the year 1200 was, as it had been for centuries, essentially a northwestern European polity, and it was necessary for its rulers to secure its safety with alliances and treaties with the powers that surrounded the nascent state. These were, first, the Anglo-Norman holdings which included until 1202 almost all of western France; second, the county of Flanders; and, third, the various territories either directly or indirectly under the lordship of members of the Champenois and Blesien aristocracy west and south of the royal domain.³⁰ The royal family could and did occasionally seek brides and grooms for its princes and princesses from other more distant lineages,³¹ but the largest number of partners came from the aristocratic lineages just mentioned: King Louis VI of France’s daughter Constance wed the count of Boulogne (F-F), his son Pierre, Elisabeth de Courtenay (Ch-B). Louis VII’s daughters Marie and Alix married Champagne-Blois nobles, his daughter Marguerite wed Henry...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• Note on terms
• Notes on contributors
• Authority and spectacle: Teofilo F. Ruiz and the study of medieval and early modern Europe
• Part I Authority in borders and conquests
• Part II Authority in texts, taxes, and penury
• Part III Spectacles of purity in the body and in the realm
• Part IV Spectacles of empire and identity
• Epilogue: The workings of power: Authority and festivals in medieval and early modern Europe
• Bibliography of Teofilo F. Ruiz publications
• Index