A King Travels

Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Teofilo F. Ruiz

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400842247
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A King Travels examines the scripting and performance of festivals in Spain between 1327 and 1620, offering an unprecedented look at the different types of festivals that were held in Iberia during this crucial period of European history. Bridging the gap between the medieval and early modern eras, Teofilo Ruiz focuses on the travels and festivities of Philip II, exploring the complex relationship between power and ceremony, and offering a vibrant portrait of Spain's cultural and political life.
Ruiz covers a range of festival categories: carnival, royal entries, tournaments, calendrical and noncalendrical celebrations, autos de fe, and Corpus Christi processions. He probes the ritual meanings of these events, paying special attention to the use of colors and symbols, and to the power relations articulated through these festive displays. Ruiz argues that the fluid and at times subversive character of medieval festivals gave way to highly formalized and hierarchical events reflecting a broader shift in how power was articulated in late medieval and early modern Spain. Yet Ruiz contends that these festivals, while they sought to buttress authority and instruct different social orders about hierarchies of power, also served as sites of contestation, dialogue, and resistance. A King Travels sheds new light on Iberian festive traditions and their unique role in the centralizing state in early modern Castile.

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 Africa, 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 northwestern 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 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, unexpectedly.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 Benavente 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 elegantly 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 Compostela. There similar artillery discharges, solemn receptions, jousts, triumphal 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 apprenticeship 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 disrupted the well-established routine of travel between his beloved El Escorial, 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

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 upheaval, and its fragmented past. Studying Henry Cock’s vivid and intriguing descriptions of Philip II’s voyage to his eastern kingdom and of the festive receptions in localities along the road from Madrid to Zaragoza 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 European cycles of festivities.⁹ Some important work has been done for Iberia. Francesc Massip Bonet’s beautifully presented and enchanting book opens 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 Vicens 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 Benavente, 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 commonplace. 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 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 certainly 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 m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter I: Festivals in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: An Introduction
• Chapter II: The Meaning of Festivals: A Typology
• Chapter III: Royal Entries, Princely Visits, Triumphal Celebrations in Spain, c. 1327–1640
• Chapter IV: The Structure of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Royal Entry: Change and Continuity
• Chapter V: A King Goes Traveling: Philip II in the Crown of Aragon, 1585–86 and 1592
• Chapter VI: Martial Festivals and the Chivalrous Imaginary
• Chapter VII: Kings and Knights at Play in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain
• Chapter VIII: From Carnival to Corpus Christi
• Chapter IX: Noncalendrical Festivals: Life Cycles and Power
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The Feasts of May 1428 at Valladolid
• Bibliography
• Index