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6 A Game of Canes ( Jaén, 1462) Every report of a mock battle between Moors and Christians before the middle of the fifteenth century comes from territory controlled by the rulers of Aragon-Catalonia. There is no mention of the tradition in Castile-León until 1462,1 when Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, governor of the southern frontier town of Jaén, presided over a juego de cañas (game of canes) in which half of the participants dressed as Moors and the other half as Christians. The juego de cañas was a form of “equestrian exercise,” introduced to Spain by the Moors, which required teams of some thirty knights to charge one another at full gallop while hurling spears made of reed, rush, or bamboo canes and defending themselves with shields. Miguel Lucas was the son of a poor farmer. Through noble patronage, he had been introduced to the royal court, where he became a favorite of the future Enrique IV. A patent of nobility, a substantial annual income from royal taxes, and marriage to a wealthy heiress were among the benefits he enjoyed. A few years after Enrique’s coronation in 1454, Lucas fell out of favor, but he wisely negotiated, in return for his departure from court, the retention of his title and income and an appointment to govern the city of his choice. In 1460, he chose Jaén, a fortress city on the troublesome frontier with Granada, close to the official Moorish enemy and on the margins of growing national unrest. A bitter struggle for power between the king and various noble factions plunged Castile into civil war between 1464 and 1468. The anarchy ended only with Enrique’s death and his half sister Isabella’s ascent to the throne in 1474. Loyal to the king, Lucas avoided the worst of the quarrel . He was content to consolidate his own power in Jaén, to lead bloody incursions into the kingdom of Granada (while, at other times, entertaining Moorish guests), and, especially in the early years of his governorship, to sponsor one lavish fiesta after another. His death in 1473, at the hands of an unknown assassin, probably had more to do with local than with national politics: he is believed by many to have been killed over his defense of Jaén’s conversos ( Jewish converts to Christianity).2 A detailed eye-witness account of Lucas’s years in Jaén survives.3 From it, we can learn much of the theatrical side of Lucas’s festivities. In 1462, for example, over a dozen knights, Lucas among them, rode through Jaén wearing masks and crowns “in commemoration of the three Magi.” Pausing before Lucas’s house, they doffed their masks and tilted at the ring for “two or three hours,” an exercise at which, the chronicler assures us, the governor “shone.” Dinner followed, after which “a noble lady on a little ass entered the room, with a boy child in her arms; she represented our Lady the Virgin Mary with her blessed and glorious son; and with her [was] Joseph.” Lucas, who had been sitting with his wife, sister, mother, and other 54 noblewomen, yielded his seat to the Virgin (no mention is made of Joseph’s seating arrangements) and went into an adjacent room. He returned shortly with two fifteen-year-old pages, all three “well dressed, with masks and crowns on their heads, in the manner of the three Magi, and each with a cup in his hands containing gifts.” Following a star, which was moved by means of a cord strung across the room, they approached the Virgin and Child and offered gifts, to the accompaniment of “a very great noise of trumpets, drums, and other instruments.”4 A performance such as this, which seated the Virgin Mary among the women of the governor’s family and cast Lucas himself as the senior of three wise kings paying chivalric homage to virtuous womanhood, may well have been intended “for devotion,” but it also seems to have been designed to exalt Lucas and his family in the eyes of its audience. It displays, too, an ease with anachronism and a characteristic slippage between the fictional world of the drama and the real world of the audience . While the nativity of Christ is being restaged in Lucas’s dining room, the real fifteenth-century governor yields his seat to the represented first-century Virgin , leaving her to chat...

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