In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

19 Royal Entries (Toledo, 1533, and Naples, 1543) We will return to the influence of indigenous traditions on European festivals in due course. For now, we turn our attention to the opulent entries and other pageants of royal power in which sixteenth-century Europe negotiated the relationship between the imperial pretensions of the monarchy, the universal claims of the church, and the rights and privileges of its urban citizens. The most splendid of these spectacles were “great compilations of imperial mythology on a scale unknown since the Roman Empire.”1 Amidst a welter of classical allusions, chivalric fantasies, and ecclesiastical grandeur , representations of American empire and Muslim conflict, too, found their place. In the next three chapters, we will look at clusters of such representations in five different countries: land and sea battles between Turks and Christians in Toledo (Spain) in 1533; jousts involving real Moors in Naples (Italy) in 1543; pyrotechnic battles between Turks, centaurs, giant wild men, and devils in Trent (now in Italy, but then part of imperial Germany) in 1549; sword dances and artillery barrages featuring “wild men” or Turks in Binche (Belgium) in 1549; and tribal warfare, starring fifty naked Brazilians, in Rouen (France) in 1550. All but the last of these took place in cities ruled by the Spanish monarch. It is in these mock battles before royal audiences that the modern Spanish festivals of Moors and Christians have their roots. In May 1533, the citizens of Toledo celebrated Charles V’s return to Spain after an absence of four years in Germany and Italy. Brooking no delay, they began the festivities while Charles was still on the way from Barcelona. An unsigned letter, written in Toledo after eight days of religious processions, dances, juegos de cañas, bull runnings, masquerades, and “many inventions,” describes the festivities as “the best ever,” but claims that they will do “much more once his majesty comes to this city.”2 An anticipatory royal entry was part of the celebrations. Competing for a prize offered to the guilds for the best “invention,” the fruiterers prepared a “triumphal car covered with brocade and cloths of gold and silver,” on which sat actors playing “the emperor” and “the empress.” Accompanied by “richly-dressed grandees and advisers” and surrounded by “a dance of the most magnificent gentlemen ever seen,” the surrogate emperor “seemed to have subdued the whole world.” Preceding the imperial carriage were “all the crosses of the parish churches,” their “many relics,” the archbishop, and all the canons, chaplains, priests, and friars of the city. These were followed by the nobles, the confraternities, and the guilds, all interspersed with large numbers of musicians. Even in the absence of the monarch, the triumphal entry drew more participants than the city’s Corpus Christi procession. 179 This is a telling comparison, for Toledo’s Corpus Christi procession officially celebrated the victory of Christ, through the perpetual reenactment of his death in the sacrament of the mass, over the forces of darkness; and it offered a vision of the nations of the world voluntarily submitting to the risen Christ’s gracious rule. The Renaissance royal entry, modeled on the imperial triumphs of pagan Rome, substituted human emperor for divine lord, claiming always that the emperor was not only Roman but now also holy and that he ruled, in some tension with the pope, as Christ’s representative on earth. For all the lingering crosses, relics, and clergy, the focus of the renaissance entry was on human rather than divine triumph. Among the competing “inventions” that filled the week of festivities in Toledo were two mock battles between Moors (or Turks) and Christians, mounted by carpenters and masons on the one hand and gardeners on the other. Perhaps the battles were intended to recall imperial victories over the Ottoman Turks in Austria the previous summer and to prophesy future naval victory in the Mediterranean. If so, history imitated art, for two years later Charles led a naval force of some 25,000 men in the sack of Tunis. (The sack of Tunis was celebrated in Nuremberg, at the other end of the empire, in 1535, with a pyrotechnic mock siege, in which a giant figure of a Turk stood atop the castle battlements, much as the giant Muhammed still does in Valencian festivals of Moors and Christians, while smaller Turk-dolls were thrown into the air by rockets [Fig. 18].) part five: spain, 1521–1600 180 18. Mock siege...

Share