Yuen-Gen Liang (Editor), Jarbel Rodriguez (Editor) - Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Europe - Essays in Honor of Teofilo F. Ruiz-Routledge (2017)

Authority and Spectacle in
Medieval and Early

Modern Europe
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 con-
tested 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.
Yuen-Gen Liang is Associate Professor of History at National Taiwan University,

Taipei. His previous publications include Family and Empire: The Fernández de
Córdoba and the Spanish Realm (2011).
Jarbel Rodriguez is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. His

previous publications include Captives and their Saviors in the Medieval Crown
of Aragon (2009).
Authority and Spectacle in
Medieval and Early
Modern Europe
Essays in Honor of Teofilo F. Ruiz
Edited by Yuen-Gen Liang

and Jarbel Rodriguez
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 Yuen-Gen Liang and Jarbel Rodriguez for selection and editorial
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In Memoriam
Olivia Remie Constable
(1960–2014)
“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”
– Emily Dickinson
Contents
List of figures and tablesx

Acknowledgmentsxi
Note on termsxiii
Notes on contributorsxiv
Authority and spectacle: Teofilo F. Ruiz and the study of

medieval and early modern Europe 1
YUEN-GEN LIANG AND JARBEL RODRIGUEZ
PART I
Authority in borders and conquests19
1 A border policy? Louis IX and the Spanish connection 21

WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN
2 The king, the coin, and the word: imagining and enacting
Castilian frontiers in late medieval Iberia 33
CLAIRE GILBERT
3 An end to conquests: expansion and its limits in the Iberian

world, fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries 46
XAVIER GIL
4 ‘All things to all men’: political messianism in late medieval

and early modern Spain 58
BRYAN GIVENS
viii Contents
PART II
Authority in texts, taxes, and penury 71
5 Emphasizing royal orders using the Romance languages:

an example of strategic codeswitching in the crown of
Aragon’s thirteenth-century royal chancery 73
ANTONIO ZALDÍVAR
6 Taxation and sovereignty in medieval Castile 84

DENIS MENJOT
7 Friars and royal authority in the thirteenth-century

Castilian frontier 104
FRANCISCO GARCIA-SERRANO
PART III
Spectacles of purity in the body and in the realm119
8 The saint at the gate: giving relics a “royal entry” in

eleventh- to twelfth-century France 121
KATE CRAIG
9 Medieval cuisine and the seasons of the year 134

PAUL FREEDMAN
10 Medieval media and minorities: Jews and Muslims in the

Cantigas de Santa María 147
DAVID NIRENBERG
PART IV
Spectacles of empire and identity 171
11 Poor colors, rich colors: Spanish clothing in the early

sixteenth century 173
HILARIO CASADO ALONSO
12 Mobilizing sanctity: Pius II and the head of Andrew in Rome 186

MAYA MASKARINEC
Contents ix
13 Nuestros españoles: the first Spaniards and the first
Habsburg chronicler 203
KATHERINE VAN LIERE
14 “Muy grandes hombres de acaballo”: Spanish horsemanship

a la jineta and Bernardo Vargas Machuca’s new science 217
KATHRYN RENTON
Epilogue: The workings of power: Authority and festivals in

medieval and early modern Europe 227
TEOFILO F. RUIZ
Bibliography of Teofilo F. Ruiz publications 240

Index 246
Figures and tables
Figures
6.1 Revenues of the Castilian monarchy in 1429 91
10.1 Cantiga 209, Florence, Ms. Banco Rari 20, fols. 119r–v 149
10.2 Cantiga 74, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 108v–109r 155
10.3 Cantiga 99, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 143–144r 156
10.5 Detail cantiga 34, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 49v–50r 159
10.6 Cantiga 8, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 15r–v 160
10.7 Detail cantiga 8, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 15r–v 161
10.8 Cantiga 6, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 12v–13v 162
12.1 Reliquary in the shape of the foot of St. Andrew 188
12.2 Reliquary of the head of St. Andrew 190
12.3 Reliquaries of the heads of Peter and Paul, engraving
in Josephus Maria Soresinus, De capitibus sanctorum
apostolorum Petri et Pauli in Sacrosancta Lateranensi
ecclesia asservatis opusculum (Rome, 1673) 191
12.4 Processional path through Rome 192
12.5 Commemorative shrine with statue of St. Andrew,
Milvian Bridge 193
12.6 Lunette from Pius II’s tomb, Vatican Grottoes 194
12.7 Tomb of Pius II, S. Andrea della Valle 195
12.8 Commemorative shrine with statue of St. Andrew,
Aurelian wall near Porta San Pancrazio 196
Tables
11.1 Colors of the fabrics sold in Felipa Gonzalez’s shop in Medina
del Campo, March 1, 1526–May 30, 1530 178
11.2 Colors of the fabrics in the inventory in Felipa Gonzalez’s shop
in Medina del Campo, August 1530 179
11.3 Colors of the fabrics in the inventory in García de la Peña’s shop
in Medina del Campo, May 28, 1523 180
Acknowledgments
A work of scholarship is always one with many debts, especially so when it is a

collaborative effort such as this one. Accordingly, there are numerous individuals,
groups and organizations that have made this work possible and whom the editors
would like to thank. The American Historical Association (AHA), the American
Association of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS), and the Asso-
ciation for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS) lent their support
in presenting this work before publication. The AHA provided a forum at the
Annual Meeting in New York City in January 2015, while the AARHMS and the
ASPHS kindly sponsored a series of three panels there. In New York City, Claire
Gilbert, Fabien Montcher, and Paul Freedman did yeoman’s work arranging some
of the events, including planning a festive banquet where the contributors and
guests honored Teofilo F. Ruiz. This celebratory repast was generously funded by
the Department of History of the University of California, Los Angeles. We also
thank Anthony Grafton and Richard Kagan for their gracious help with the panels
and the staff at Routledge for their assistance publishing this volume. Most impor-
tantly, we offer our sincere gratitude to the excellent contributors who made this
project possible and enjoyable. Without them, the current volume would not exist.
Yuen-Gen Liang wishes to thank Laurice Hwang and Albert S. Kramer for their
hospitality in New York City. Funding from Wheaton College, Massachusetts
made possible attendance of the 2015 AHA Annual Meeting. National Taiwan
University provided a home for the preparation of this volume. His stay in Taiwan
was facilitated by Dr. Ku-ming Chang, Dr. Huaichen Kan, Mr. Jiunn-haur Hwang
and the entire staff of the History Department. Finally, Liang thanks his co-editor
Jarbel Rodriguez, a dear friend going back to his first year in graduate school, for
sharing the labor that went into this volume.
Jarbel Rodriguez wishes to thank Tristan and Claudia who sacrifice their time
with him so that he can pursue the work that he loves. And to Yuen-Gen Liang for
sharing this project and being an exceptional collaborator and friend.
This collection of essays investigating authority and spectacle in the history
of medieval and early modern Europe builds off of Teofilo F. Ruiz’s seminal
contributions to the field. While much more will be said about his scholarship,
accomplishments, and honors in the coming pages, we would like to offer here a
personal appreciation for the knowledge Ruiz shares with us and for the trust that
he places in us to engage with his work. Our explorations of this theme, brought
xii Acknowledgments
together in a single volume, were made possible only through his humble support.
Indeed, this tribute to Ruiz would not have seen the light of day if his modesty,
just as legendary as his generosity, were not balanced by his unshakable sense of
duty as a mentor. Ultimately, Ruiz acquiesced to this project by responding to a
request from his students, friends, and colleagues for his assistance in advancing
our understanding of authority and spectacle in history.
Note on terms
Writing about Spanish history can be like navigating through a minefield of explo-
sive words. In this collection of essays, the editors and authors recognize that
terms such as Reconquest/Reconquista, Moors, infidel, and convivencia are prob-
lematic and archaic. These terms appear in the volume to reflect usage in primary
and secondary sources.
Contributors
Hilario Casado Alonso is Professor of Economic History at the University of Val-

ladolid (Spain). He has held visiting professorships at the universities of Bari
(Italy) and Oporto (Portugal) and at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences
sociales (Paris). He is the author of numerous books and articles including La
propiedad eclesiástica en la ciudad de Burgos en el siglo XV: El cabildo cat-
edralicio (Valladolid, 1980); Señores, Mercaderes y Campesinos: La comarca
de Burgos a fines de la Edad Media (Valladolid, 1987); Castilla y Europa:
Comercio y mercaderes en los siglos XIV, XV y XVI (Burgos, 1995); and El
Triunfo de Mercurio: La presencia castellana en Europa (Siglos XV y XVI)
(Burgos, 2003). He has edited Burgos en la Edad Media (León, 1984) and
Comercio y hombres de negocios en Castilla y Europa en tiempos de Isabel la
Católica (Madrid, 2007).
Kate Craig is Assistant Professor of History at Auburn University. She received
her B.S. in Applied Physics and History from the California Institute of Tech-
nology and her Ph.D. in History from UCLA. Her research focuses on central
medieval religious history, particularly the movement of relics as a mode of
interaction between religious and lay communities. Her dissertation, “Bringing
Out the Saints: Journeys of Relics in Tenth to Twelfth Century Northern France
and Flanders,” was supported by a Fulbright fellowship to France, and she is
currently engaged in a monograph project on this topic. She has served as edi-
tor and on the editorial board of the journal Comitatus.
Paul Freedman is Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University.
Freedman is the author of The Diocese of Vic (1983); The Origins of Peas-
ant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (1992); Images of the Medieval Peasant
(1999, Haskins Prize of the Medieval Academy of America and Otto Grundler
Award from the International Medieval Congress); and Out of the East: Spices
and the Medieval Imagination (2008). In 2007 Freedman edited Food: The
History of Taste, about cuisine from prehistoric hunter-gatherers until the pre-
sent. It has been translated into ten languages. His current research is on the
Catalan church in the High Middle Ages, in particular the establishment of
Augustinian canons and their relations to monasteries and bishops. A book
entitled Ten Restaurants That Changed America is forthcoming.
Contributors xv
Francisco Garcia-Serrano earned his Ph.D. in Medieval European History at the
University of California, Berkeley, and he is currently Professor of History and
Director of Ibero-American Studies at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus.
In addition, he has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, New York Univer-
sity in Madrid, and Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses
on the influence of the Mendicant Orders in Iberia during the late Middle Ages
and on religious identity and interfaith relations. He has published Preach-
ers of the City. The Expansion of the Dominican Order in Castile, 1217–1348
(University Press of the South, 1997), and he has several recent contributions
to collective books. His current book project, The Friars and Their Impact in
Medieval Iberia, contains the collaboration of fifteen international scholars.
Xavier Gil is Professor of Early Modern History at the Universitat de Barcelona
and member of the Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid). His research focuses
on political history and the history of political thought in Spain and the Iberian
world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among his publications are
Tiempo de política: Perspectivas historiográficas sobre la Europa moderna
(Universitat de Barcelona, 2006, reprint 2010); a chapter on Spain and Portu-
gal in the volume European Political Thought, 1450–1700: Religion, Law, and
Philosophy edited by H. A. Lloyd, G. Burgess, and S. Hodson (Yale University
Press, 2007); “Integrar un mundo: Dinámicas de agregación y cohesión en la
Monarquía de España,” in Las Indias Occidentales edited by O. Mazín and
J. J. Ruiz Ibáñez (Mexico City, 2012); and “City, Communication and Concord
in Renaissance Spain and Spanish America,” in Athenian Legacies. European
Debates on Citizenship, edited by P. M. Kitromilides (Florence, 2014).
Claire Gilbert is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Saint Louis
University. Her research interests include the social history of language in
early modern Europe and political and commercial exchange in the Western
Mediterranean in the late medieval and early modern periods. A student of
Teofilo F. Ruiz, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los
Angeles, in 2014 with a dissertation titled “The Politics of Language in the
Western Mediterranean: Multilingual Institutions and the Status of Arabic in
Early Modern Spain.”
Bryan Givens is Associate Professor of History at Pepperdine University. He
is author of Judging Maria’s World: A Female Visionary and the Inquisition
in Early Modern Portugal (Louisiana State University Press, 2011); “The
St. Paul of Sebastianism: Tracing the Millenarian Legacy of Dom João de
Castro,” Portuguese Studies Review (2010); and “Sebastianism in Theory and
Practice in Early Modern Portugal,” in Braudel Revisted: The Mediterranean
World, 1600–1800 (University of Toronto Press, 2010). He is a recipient of a
Fulbright Grant.
William Chester Jordan is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and Chair of
the Department of History at Princeton University. He is the author of several
books, including The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth
xvi Contributors
Century (Princeton University Press, 1996), which was awarded the Haskins
Medal of the Medieval Academy of America. Professor Jordan served as Presi-
dent of the American Catholic Historical Association in 2009–10 and as Presi-
dent of the Medieval Academy in 2014–15.
Yuen-Gen Liang is Associate Professor of Mediterranean History at National
Taiwan University and formerly Associate Professor at Wheaton College,
Massachusetts. He is author of Family and Empire: The Fernández de Cór-
doba and the Spanish Realm (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). He
is co-editor of Spanning the Straits: Studies in Unity in the Western Medi-
terranean (Brill, 2014) and monographic issues of Medieval Encounters and
the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Liang is founder of the Spain-North
Africa Project, co-founder of the Wheaton Institute for the Interdisciplinary
Humanities, and co-president of the New England Renaissance Conference. He
serves on the founding council of the Asian Federation of Mediterranean Stud-
ies Institutes and the founding editorial board of the Medieval Globe. Liang
has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social
Science Research Council, IIE-Fulbright, Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and
Technology, and Spain’s Ministry of Culture. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton
University where he worked with Teofilo F. Ruiz.
Maya Maskarinec holds a Ph.D. in Medieval History from the University of Cal-
ifornia, Los Angeles (2015), and is currently a lecturer in History at Columbia
University. Her research focuses on the city of Rome as an interlocutor across
geographical, cultural, and chronological divides and has been supported by
a Phyllis G. Gordan Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize at the American Academy in
Rome (2013–14). Her publications include “The Carolingian Afterlife of the
Damasan Inscriptions,” Early Medieval Europe 23.2 (2015): 129–60 and “Fer-
dinand Gregorovius versus Theodor Mommsen on the City of Rome and Its
Legends,” History of the Humanities 1.1 (2016): 101–28.
Denis Menjot is Professor of Medieval History at the Université Lumière-Lyon 2.
His research interests include urban history, municipal and royal finance and
taxation, and power and social control in Medieval Castile. He is the author of
numerous books and articles including Fiscalidad y sociedad: Los murcianos
y el impuesto en la baja edad media (Murcia, 1986); Les Espagnes médiévales
(Hachette, 1996); Murcie castillane (1243-milieu du XVe): Une ville au temps
de la frontière (Casa de Velázquez, 2002; Spanish translation, 2009); and
Gobernar y controlar en Castilla en la Edad Media (Málaga, 2003). He is
co-author of La Ville médiévale (Le Seuil, 2003) and Langues médiévales ibé-
riques: Domaines espagnol et portugais (Brepols, 2013). He has served as
president of the European Association of Urban History. He is president of the
Société Française d’Histoire Urbaine and directs the journal Histoire Urbaine.
He is corresponding member of the Real Academia Española de la Historia.
David Nirenberg is Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval His-
tory and Social Thought as well as Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences
Contributors xvii
at the University of Chicago. His books focus on how Jewish, Christian, and
Islamic societies have interacted with and thought about each other. These
include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages
(1996); Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013); Neighboring Faiths:
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014); and Aesthetic
Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Poli-
tics (2015). He has also written on love, philosophy, and political theology
and contributed to The Nation, The New Republic, and The London Review
of Books. He is currently collaborating with a mathematician to explore how
various types of sameness underpin the relative claims of different forms of
knowledge to understand the powers and limits of the sciences and humanities.
Kathryn Renton is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of
California, Los Angeles. In 2016–17 she received a Social Science Research
Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship for research in Spain,
Mexico, and Peru. She has also been a short-term fellow at the John Carter
Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, and at the Casa de Velázquez in
Madrid, Spain.
Jarbel Rodriguez is Professor of Medieval History at San Francisco State Uni-
versity. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University (2001) working under
William C. Jordan and Teofilo Ruiz. He is the author of Captives and Their
Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (2007) and Muslim and Christian
Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader (2015). His current research focuses on
soundscapes in late medieval Spain.
Teofilo F. Ruiz is a historian of late medieval and early modern Spain. He joined
the History Department of the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1998
and received the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2008. He has
taught at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York Graduate Center,
the University of Michigan, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales
(Paris), and Princeton University as the 250th Anniversary Visiting Professor
for Distinguished Teaching. In 2011 Ruiz was awarded a National Humani-
ties Medal and in 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Prince-
ton, NJ), the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim
Foundation. Ruiz is author of numerous books and articles and is currently
completing a history of the western Mediterranean.
Katherine van Liere is Professor of History at Calvin College (Grand Rapids,
Michigan), where she also teaches Spanish and Dutch and serves as Co-direc-
tor of Rhetoric Across the Curriculum. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton
University, where she had the privilege of serving as a teaching assistant for
Teofilo F. Ruiz. Her current research focuses on early modern Spanish histo-
riography. She has published in Viator, Renaissance Quarterly, Journal of the
History of Ideas, Sixteenth Century Journal, and elsewhere. She is the editor,
xviii Contributors
with Simon Ditchfield and Howard Louthan, of Sacred History: Uses of the
Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Antonio Zaldívar is Assistant Professor of History at California State University,
San Marcos. He trained as a cultural and social historian at the University of
California, Los Angeles, under the direction of Teofilo F. Ruiz. Currently, he
is completing a book manuscript titled Language and Power in the Western
Mediterranean: The Rise of Vernacular Writing and Codeswitching Strategies
in the Thirteenth-Century Crown of Aragon. He is the author of “Patricians’
Embrace of the Dominican Convent of St. Catherine in Thirteenth-Century
Barcelona,” Medieval Encounters 18 (2012), 174–206.
Authority and spectacle
Teofilo F. Ruiz and the study of
medieval and early modern Europe
Yuen-Gen Liang and Jarbel Rodriguez
On February 13, 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Professor Teofilo F.

Ruiz the National Humanities Medal. The honor recognized the long career
of one of America’s most respected medievalists and to many of us a beloved
teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. The White House press release cited Ruiz’s
“inspired teaching and writing” about Spain and Europe as well as other historical
contributions that focus on terror and the “dark side of Western Progress.”1 In so
doing, the medal made widely known what so many of us who have worked with
Ruiz, learned from him, and benefitted from his guidance and friendship had long
appreciated. Ruiz, or Teo as he prefers, has been producing exceptional scholarly
and educational work for the better part of five decades. This volume celebrates
his career and his achievements.
Ruiz was born in Cuba in 1943 and at a young age became active in the bur-
geoning Cuban Revolution against Fulgencio Batista. Becoming disenchanted
with the new regime, he spent some time in prison and eventually migrated to the
United States with a small handful of personal items including a Spanish transla-
tion of Jacob Burkhardt’s A History of Greek Civilization. Settling first in Miami
and then in New York City, Ruiz spent many of these early years in his adopted
country driving a taxi. Despite these challenging circumstances, he also found
time to enroll in school, graduating from City University of New York in 1969
and then finishing his master’s degree at New York University in 1970. Soon
thereafter, he entered the doctoral program at Princeton University under the men-
torship of Joseph R. Strayer and completed his dissertation in 1974. He began his
long and distinguished teaching career at Brooklyn College, where he taught from
September 1973 until 1998. During this time he was also a faculty member at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York and held visiting professor-
ships at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Princeton
University, before making a permanent break for the West Coast of the United
States and settling in his current home at the University of California, Los Ange-
les, as Professor of Medieval History.
Ruiz has accumulated a long list of honors and accolades, and a brief selection
will bear witness to his stellar scholarship and teaching. He is a life member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Fellows of the Medieval
Academy of America, and the Société nationale des Antiquaires de France. He has
2 Yuen-Gen Liang and Jarbel Rodriguez
been a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton (1983–1984); a
three-time Director of Study at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales
in Paris (1983, 1987, and 1993); the Tow Professor of History at Brooklyn Col-
lege (1993–1995); and a two-time winner of Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer of the Year
(2011–2012 and 2012–2013). He was the Carnegie Foundation’s Outstanding
Teacher of the Year (1994–1995), selected as the Princeton University’s 250th
Anniversary Distinguished Visiting Professor (1997–1998), and chosen for a Dis-
tinguished Teacher Award at UCLA (2008). He has also been the recipient of the
Premio del Rey – a biennial award of the American Historical Association for
the best book in Spanish history – for Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in
Late Medieval Castile. Finally, he was also awarded a John Simon Guggenheim
Fellowship (2007–2008), in addition to the aforementioned National Humanities
Medal.
Ruiz and his contributions to Spanish historiography

Ruiz’s connection with Spanish history is tied to his family’s roots in the land
north of the city of Burgos in Old Castile. His paternal grandparents hailed from
the village of Gallejones de Zamanzas located on the upper reaches of the Ebro
River. The water here is young and lacks volume, but over millennia it has carved
out stunning gorges and steep ravines. In premodern times villagers in the area
eked out a living based on subsistence agriculture, and the region’s rugged topog-
raphy separated and sheltered them from the warfare that more commonly took
place on the plains of the Meseta. Ruiz’s ancestors dwelt here, and though his
grandparents would emigrate to Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century,
other relatives stayed on.
Ruiz’s early works – including his dissertation Burgos: Society and Power
1250–1350; his first monograph, Sociedad y Poder Real en Castilla: Burgos en
la Baja Edad Media (1981); many of the articles collected in The City and the
Realm: Burgos and Castile 1080–1492 (1992); and his first English-language
monograph, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile
(1994) – all focus on the city and region of Burgos. Ruiz once observed that
after living in Cuba and in the United States he is “at home in many places, yet
fully at home nowhere.” Still, the highlands outside of Burgos count as one of his
homes.2 Ruiz opens Crisis and Continuity with a section that knits together data
on topography, climate, and vegetation; literature and poetry; historical evidence
from the census known as the Libro becerro de las behetrías, chronicles, and
travelers’ accounts; and observations on modern development in order to describe
the region.3 By then weaving in his own family’s history on the land, his prose
invokes a soulful redolence:
Both rivers, the Ebro and the Duero, run to the sea, the first to the Mediter-
ranean, the latter to the Atlantic Ocean. Yet neither of the two brings Cas-
tile to the sea. The northernmost of the two great northern Castilian rivers,
the Ebro, does not even run through the plain proper but rather flows on an
Authority and spectacle 3
easterly course through rocky gorges and deep valleys in the mountains north
of Burgos. Carrying still a small volume of water, the Ebro contributes little
to the economic well-being of the region. A few deep and narrow valleys are
spared by the protection of the mountains and the water of the river from the
desolation of the nearby páramos. Even there the Ebro had, in the past, its
own treacherous whims. In the Middle Ages and in recent memory, before
the building of a reservoir to trap the water from melting snow, the river
was unpredictable and dangerous. My own grandfather’s mill on the Ebro in
the village of Tubilleja in the valley of Zamanzas was swept away twice in
the annual flooding of the river, until he gave up the struggle and migrated
to the New World at the beginning of the century.4
For Ruiz, Spanish history unfolded in what for much of the year was hard and
rough terrain, and he draws our attention to Castile’s bleak highlands in another
passage:
Snow covers the mountain peaks throughout the winter season and, in most
cases, for most of the year. To this day, mountain passes are often closed by
snowfalls, isolating entire regions for days. Such is the case in the valley of
Zamanzas, where my family lives, cut off from the main road almost every
year. Snow falls also at the most unexpected times. In late May 1984, as
I drove from Madrid to Segovia, there were almost two feet of snow in the
mountain pass of Navacerrada.5
Ruiz shares an empathy for the land and people of Castile and his personal experi-
ences intertwine with historical evidence to instill a quality of deeply felt under-
standing in his scholarship on Spain.
Though Ruiz blends personal reminisces into the telling of history, he also
examines the past, particularly certain tropes and commonplaces, through prob-
ing analytical lenses. In Crisis and Continuity, he resolves: “To its [Old Cas-
tile’s] history, that of the village and the region, I bring, I hope, a great deal of
skepticism and a critical attitude toward the frequent historical idealization of the
Reconquest, the Castilian past, and its legacy.”6 The methods he applies in his
work were vitally shaped by French historians, particularly those of the Annales
School. As an undergraduate and graduate student, Ruiz trained in the subfield of
social history that was enjoying a golden age within a discipline influenced by
such luminaries as E. P. Thompson, Lawrence Stone, Natalie Z. Davis, and oth-
ers.7 Even more, it was the Annalistes’ call to set histoire événementielle aside and
restore the enduring structures of society and the everyday lives of commoners
that made the greatest impact on Ruiz. Indeed, Crisis and Continuity’s section on
the “Land and Climate in Northern Castile” echoes Fernand Braudel’s La Médi-
terranée et le monde méditerranéen in its subject matter and in its sensitivity to
the ways that geography shaped patterns of life.8 Ruiz’s recent edited volume
Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean, 1600–1800 attests to the French maestro’s
continuing sway on his scholarship.9 Ruiz’s close attention to local experiences
further reflects the work of historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and
José Ángel García de Cortázar who also followed the pathway to regional geog-
raphies blazed by Braudel.10 This focus on the local coincided with and expanded
even further following the demise of Spain’s caudillo Francisco Franco and his
centralizing dictatorship in 1975. In the aftermath of his death, researchers train-
ing at provincial universities that were reinvigorated or newly erected by emerg-
ing comunidades autónomas (autonomous regions) sifted through the archives to
chronicle lives in and experiences of local communities that had been obscured
and peripheralized by the concentration of power in Madrid. Among the practi-
tioners of this type of history was Ruiz and his contemporaries Hilario Casado
Alonso and Adeline Rucquoi.11
Along with a keen awareness of geography and regions, Ruiz also shares the
Annales School’s interest in the study of social and economic structures of soci-
ety. In Crisis and Continuity, he moves away from traditional Spanish historiogra-
phy’s long fixation on high politics, government institutions, diplomacy, warfare,
and great individuals, explaining:
My purpose in this book, however, is not to tell the deeds of great men and
women or the evolution of political and ecclesiastical institutions. Neither
is it to provide an idealized portrait of warring, reconquering Castilians. . . .
Instead, my aims in these pages are twofold: First, I wish to examine the
structures of rural and urban life in medieval northern Castile, that is, how
peasants, artisans, and merchants did their work, lived from day to day, suc-
ceeded and failed in small but meaningful struggles of everyday life. . . . Sec-
ond, I wish to chart the impact of the late medieval crisis on the social and
economic structures of northern Castile.12
Thus, in Crisis and Continuity, as well as in Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (2001),

Ruiz’s subjects are common men and women as well as more marginalized groups
such as the poor, Jews and Conversos, Muslims and Moriscos, Gypsies, slaves,
and criminals.13 He examines their daily lives working the land, in crafts and com-
merce, and on the peripheries of social acceptance. At the same time, he situates
the choices that were available to them in life and the limits that tempered these
options in the context of royal, seigneurial, ecclesiastical, and financial power
structures. In this approach, Ruiz cites Luis García de Valdeavellano y Arcimis’
and Julio Valdeón Baruque’s works as examples that preceded him.14
Studying history through social and economic structures, Ruiz highlights long-
term continuities between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In fact, uncovering
historical insights that help bridge the late medieval and early modern periods
constitutes one of the most important contributions Ruiz has made to the field.
Explaining the parameters of Spanish Society, 1400–1600, he states:
My aim in this book is quite straightforward. I wish to question the traditional

periodization of the history of Spain, to suggest new ways of thinking about
the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, and to envisage social
change as occurring independently of political watersheds. The dates 1400
and 1600, the chronological starting and ending points of this book, serve as
arbitrary landmarks that link the social worlds of western Europe and signal
the bridging of historical periods traditionally held apart: the late medieval
and the early modern period. One of my contentions in this book is that a his-
tory of the sixteenth century cannot be written without a thorough grounding
in the preceding century, and vice versa.15
Using the concept of the longue durée to describe a transition, rather than a rup-
ture, between the late Middle Ages and early modern period further shifts our
attention toward daily lives of rural and urban commoners and away from the dis-
crete political machinations of the “absolutist” monarchy and the deeds of great
men and women. As historians have recently come to understand, royal decrees
issued by mighty princes may not have sufficiently shifted life on the local level.16
As such, Ruiz’s work directs us to the traditions, practices, rituals, and festivities
that originated from the Middle Ages and continued to regulate the annual calen-
dar or served to break up the monotony of rural subsistence in the early modern
period.17
Indeed, the field of Spanish history often bifurcates the study of the Middle
Ages and the early modern period (or even more pointedly, “modern,” in the par-
lance of the European academy), with the events of 1492 taken as a pivotal turn-
ing point. This separation has in the past resulted in the essentializing of medieval
Spain either as an idealized “convivencia” or as a state of constant war. Likewise,
early modern Spain is often made to stand for the triumph of the “absolutist” state
over interfering particular interests or religious fanaticism and political rigidity
as construed in the Black Legend. By connecting the two periods and examining
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a period of transition, scholars are better
able to acknowledge that religious and ethnic diversity endured in peninsular soci-
ety; the centralizing state did indeed co-exist with and depend on a still-powerful
nobility and local interests; and the purportedly austere, remote, and zealous King
Philip II interacted with ordinary subjects through festivities of celebration, com-
memoration, and mourning. Ruiz’s approach of bringing the late medieval and
early modern periods together is all the more needed as Spanish universities tend
to keep these two fields apart by organizing them into separate departments of
medieval history and of “modern” history.18
One cutting-edge way that Ruiz studies the longue durée of Spanish history is
through festivities, what this present volume also calls spectacles. Like so many
children who would grow up to have a life-long love of history, Ruiz as a teenager
read the nineteenth-century historical romances of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo,
and Sir Walter Scott and became captivated by the descriptions of lively carnivals
or princely rituals found therein. As a scholar, he has been ground-breaking both
in opening this topic to historical investigation and in reaching academic, student,
and popular audiences that are enthralled by his “thick description” of pageantry
and riveted by his accounts of the persecution of witches which, though violent and
tragic in its targeting of women on the margins of society, can be considered a form
of “spectacle” as well.19 Influenced by the interdisciplinary work and methods of
such monumental figures as Jacques Le Goff on mentalités, Victor Turner on semi-
otics, Mikhail Bakhtin on carnival and performance, Michel Foucault on power,
James C. Scott on resistance, and Clifford Geertz on thick description,20 Ruiz iden-
tifies festivities – including ceremonies, celebrations, rituals, and spectacles – as a
way to enter the enduring mental worlds, value systems, and attitudes of the masses
in medieval and early modern Spain.
His interest in festivities emerged in a trademark 1984 article, “Une royauté
sans sacre: la monarchie castillane du bas Moyen Âge,” published in the pres-
tigious journal Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations.21 For the essay, Ruiz
extensively surveyed the ceremonies that marked the ascension to the throne of
Asturian-Leonese, Navarrese, and Castilian kings. He found the rulers chose from
a small arsenal of rituals including “acclamation of the new king by the magnates,
the prelates, and the people or the acceptance by the Cortes”;22 acts of homage
and obeisance like kissing the monarch’s hand; exchange of oaths between the
king and assembled notables; raising the king onto a throne, shield, or cavallo real
(“royal horse”); and self-girding of a sword, donning of armor, or lifting of the
pendones (standards) of Castile.23 However, except on very rare occasions, these
kings were not anointed with holy oil nor crowned by ecclesiastical dignitaries,
both of which characterized the coronation ceremonies of France, England, and
other parts of Europe. Furthermore, Castilian monarchs did not presume to pos-
sess thaumaturgical powers such as the ability to heal the sick that, again, French
and English monarchs claimed. In a memorable example, Ruiz cites one of the
Cantigas de Santa María, in which King Alfonso X responds to a mother pleading
for his intervention to cure her sick daughter by protesting: “When you say that
I have such power, you are talking nonsense.”24
Through analysis of these royal ceremonies, Ruiz makes a signature contri-
bution to concepts of kingship, power, and authority in Castile. He argues that
because the frontier between Christians and Muslims endured in the Middle Ages,
Castilians “had a more down-to-earth, practical outlook toward the uses of power
and authority.”25 Both the “Reconquest” and influences from Muslim practices
connected kingship to martial prowess. Claims to rulership by descent or the tak-
ing of power by naked force demonstrated a more secular approach to justifying
kingship. Thus, in a society that saw itself as fighting in the vanguard of Christian-
ity, the king’s role superseded and was not beholden to the Church, and religious
sanctity was discounted as the primary marker of kingship. Ruiz argues that the
Church and its representatives did not mediate royal power, and religious authority
was made subordinate to the demands of royal power.26 Moreover, his scholarship
contributes to a fuller understanding of medieval European kingship in general,
bringing the Spanish monarchies, oftentimes peripheralized in the study of Euro-
pean history, into dialogue with a wide range of research including the respec-
tive findings of Marc Bloch and Ernst Kantorowicz for France and England. His
article on the conception of kingship has broader implications for the values that
permeated Castilian society during an age of competition with Islamic emirates,
and as such his work also connects to those of Elena Lourie, Angus Mackay, and
Heath Dillard on the society and culture of Castile during the Reconquest.27
From ceremonies of royal ascensions, Ruiz thus found an entry point into the
sights, sounds, and experiences of festivities that formed a part of the life of com-
moners in the Middle Ages and early modern period. These spectacles take center
stage in the second half of Castilian Society, 1400–1600 and a monograph, A King
Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain, devoted
entirely to the subject, as well as select essays including “Festivités, couleurs et
symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe sìecle: Les célébrations de Mai 1428,”
also published in Annales.28 From the outset, it is clear that Ruiz is driven by a per-
sonal joy to recount, restore, and revivify the playful colors, monumental stages,
kinetic bodies, solemn observances, and ludic merrymaking of revelries imbued
with the “fantasy and magic” that constituted his “first dreams and love.”29 At the
same time, he offers readers a useful typology of festivities, grouping them into
two categories. Calendrical festivities closely correlate to liturgical and agricul-
tural calendars and “mark the celebration of important events in Christian life, fol-
lowing and overlapping the cycle of planting and harvesting,” such as Christmas,
Easter, carnival, and Corpus Christi.30 Non-calendrical ones comprise royal and
princely visits or similar political events, religious festivals of a non-calendrical
nature such as the Inquisition’s autos de fé, and celebrations marking important
moments in a ruler or noble’s life cycle.31
Although Ruiz lovingly glosses these festivities in his works, he is well aware
that the historical sources “represented” these events based on the ideological
biases and needs of organizers:
Despite how close to reality late medieval and early modern narratives tried
to make them [representations of festivities] appear, they were mostly fan-
tasy. Arches were described, even though they were never really built. Dis-
plays were exaggerated, and the nature of feasts was often distorted to suit the
political needs of the sponsors and writers.32
Festivities, in essence, were a method to express power. Royal, noble, ecclesi-

astical, and other elites organized and scripted them. They invoked and linked
festivities such as royal entries to events in Roman history, biblical episodes, and
literary tropes to tap into historical and mythical memories of majesty, sanctity,
and glory. Festivities also reaffirmed social and cultural boundaries that separated
and ordered the peoples in communities. Elites took center stage in spectacles, and
the divide between those who performed actions and those who stood on the side-
lines as spectators marked the boundary between notables and commoners. Reli-
gious festivities or even royal entries at times included vignettes in which Jews
and Muslims, or representations of these minority communities, reenacted their
defeat and submission, signaling their subordinate role in quotidian life outside
of the festivities. Beyond ideological violence, physical violence also played a
part in spectacles such as autos de fé. These events enforced exclusion of those
deemed to have perpetrated heresies, but in this case they also attempted to affirm
the integrity of society among the faithful.
It would, however, be a mistake to discount the role that ordinary people played
in festivities. Insomuch as the elites took center stage, the spectacle could “only
go on” if it had an audience of spectators witnessing their performances. Moreo-
ver, festivities that required elaborate staging, fine clothing, and sumptuous food
counted on the labor of many skillful hands. Ordinary people watched and they
worked, but at moments they could also revel, enjoying the dancing and dining
that the occasions enabled. These activities even allowed, to a degree, the mix-
ing of elites and non-elites. Ultimately, as Ruiz deftly points out, festivities are
sites of contestation and negotiation between different groups in society.33 How-
ever much elites attempted to script festivities, there could be no telling how the
public would act. Even when commoners were coerced into participation, there
was no way to control what they thought. Though spectacles presented ideologi-
cal messages, the heterogenous mix of political, religious, historical, literary, and
popular allusions and references fragmented the perception and understanding of
the message. Individuals could even co-opt these public occasions to present their
own point of view, for example to take advantage of the presence of the king in
order to subtly, or not-so-subtly, criticize the monarch. As Ruiz rightly points out,
underneath the spectacle and pageantry, festivities are ultimately windows onto
the functioning of society.
From his work on festivities, it is clear that Ruiz sees authority and spectacle as
two parallel paths that run alongside the stream of history. His contribution to the
historian’s craft, and indeed his gift to his students, colleagues, and friends, is to
guide us gently along the subtle, windy, and multi-directional courses of author-
ity, spectacle, and history and to investigate how they intricately intertwine. How
well he knows the paths, the streams, and the lay of the land is perhaps best illus-
trated in what may be his most challenging and provocative work, From Heaven
to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150–1300. In one of the short-
est monographs of his corpus, Ruiz transports us back to the focus of his earlier
scholarship, the now-familiar terrain of Old Castile. It is through a reexamination
of this land and of the physical and material – even palpable and corporeal –
world it represents that he charts a remarkable, large-scale, and pivotal shift in
authority. In these the mountain passes, gentle hills, and vast plains of northern
Spain, pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago stopped their carts, unpacked their
goods, and settled the land, establishing a line of towns that ran from the Puerto
de Roncesvalles (Roncesvalles Pass) in Navarre all the way west to Santiago de
Compostela in Galicia in the eleventh century, reaching its height in the twelfth.
In these urban settings, a nascent bourgeoisie pursuing commercial interests, and
in time university studies, came to develop a taste for new things, values, and cul-
tures oriented toward the material world. Taking an object as prosaic as mojones
(boundary stones), Ruiz insightfully charts the growing trend to precisely demar-
cate property and rights of way. Imaging the act of claiming possession over what
is more-or-less inert dirt, rock, and vegetation, Ruiz explains how ownership of
land came to trump (or at least coincide with) an interest in jurisdiction over law
and taxation of the communities that occupied the land. This focus on land also
bespoke values that no longer dwelt so principally on religiosity, spirituality, and
the afterlife.
Another source, testamentos (wills), also manifested the shift in values toward
the material world. Wills, critical documents that were redacted in the here-and-
now but transcended a person’s life and gave expression to his or her wishes after
death, had once been composed by clerical scribes in Latin, the language par
excellence in the West of both the clergy and of salvation. However, as society
became more commercialized and urbanized, merchants came to employ writ-
ten language for business transactions. They wrote in vernacular Castilian that,
over the course of the twelfth century, came to supplant Latin in commercial and
governmental affairs. During that time, lay scribes trained in the vernacular also
started to redact wills, removing this task from their clerical counterparts. By
comparing earlier wills written in Latin and later ones in Castilian, Ruiz finds
that where once salvation had been described by clerics in impersonal, formulaic
terms, testators now gained a greater ability to dictate and express their personal
beliefs in salvation as lay scribes started writing these documents in the language
of everyday speech. Clerical scribes had written in donations without precisely
specifying the destination (it is presumed that institutions distributed the property
themselves). When testators gained more control, they laid out with greater preci-
sion the individual institutions that would receive donations. More importantly
still, these wills specified the services that would be performed – masses, anniver-
saries, etc. – in return for donations. Ruiz memorably uses the term “bargaining”
for salvation to describe the actions of testators who lived in a world that gave
increasing prominence to wealth. Envisioning wills as oral and narrative perfor-
mances that took place in the vernacular and empowered lay individuals, Ruiz
reveals a shift in the authority that controlled both conceptions of salvation and of
the role salvation played in society.
Micro-level indications of a shift in mentalité ultimately reflect broader changes
in property ownership and in the value placed on property in the Castilian polity.
The late twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed the beginnings of the large-
scale accumulation of land by the nobility. A number of circumstances abetted
this process. Dynastic infighting over the course of the late Middle Ages forced
royals to garner support among nobles, particularly ricos homes (high nobles).
In the mid-thirteenth century, Christian forces led by Fernando III seized vast
swaths of Andalusia leading to difficulties in defending, managing, and repopulat-
ing these lands. Following these conquests, the border separating Castile and Gra-
nada remained relatively quiet, reducing opportunities for military campaigns that
captured booty and captives. By supporting pretenders to the throne and assisting
in the conquest, settlement, and defense of Andalusia, nobles received large tracts
of land. Previous grants to the nobility had also included land, but in this case
jurisdiction over the administration of justice and the right to levy taxes over
residents carried more weight. These privileges were considered to be levied on
the individual, hence, upon his or her death, these rights (and the land) reverted to
the crown. In this changing period of time, land came to exercise the imagination.
Grants of land in this new era came with the right to pass it on to descendants at
a time when ideas of primogeniture, the collection of land into inalienable may-
orazgos (trusts), and the construction of estates made up of contiguous parcels
of land also came to the fore. These notions and practices worked against earlier
precedences, such as the Lex visigothorum’s (Visigothic Law) preference for part-
ible inheritance bestowed upon all descendants.34 An example that illustrates these
trends is the great nobles that came to dominate Seville and its hinterlands, par-
ticularly the Guzmán House of Medina Sidonia, chronicled in another of Ruiz’s
signature articles, “Expansion et changement: La conquête de Séville et la société
castillane, 1248–1350,” also published in Annales.35
Part of From Heaven to Earth’s brilliance lies in its unusual conception of
authority and spectacle. Authority, typically envisioned as royal power and mili-
tary force, is reformulated as the ideas and values that condition and structure
life, in this case, attitudes that used to focus on the afterlife gave ground to a
greater emphasis on the material world. Spectacle, often synonymous with fes-
tivities, becomes the performance of the vernacular in wills, the lifting of heavy
boundary stones and their carefully measured placement, and the patient mar-
shalling of property through marriage, inheritance, exchange, and usurpation. All
of these acts required spectators to witness and certify and some, such as mar-
riages, were themselves ceremonies. Indeed, it is the virtuoso juxtaposition of
such disparate enactments from mojones and wills to property accumulation and
charitable donations that makes From Heaven to Earth such an intriguing and
original work. Ruiz’s deliberation on these unconventional examples of author-
ity and spectacle ultimately has implications for a topic that has received a good
deal of attention from more conventional points of view – the formation of the
Spanish world empire at the end of the medieval and early modern periods. This
emphasis on the material world that translated to the valuation of the integrity
of property in its physical, jurisdictional, and financial aspects combined with
other processes, policies, and practices to redound on the concept of sovereignty
that would help fashion western Europe’s first large-scale territorial empire since
Charlemagne.
Authority and spectacle: summary of the essays

In this volume, we celebrate Ruiz’s scholarship. The macro- and micro-level stud-
ies he has realized on regional and local communities, different strata of society,
and spectacles of daily life have played a central role in developing the field of
Spanish and European histories. The impact his work has made is plainly visible
in the contributions of distinguished and innovative scholars collected in this vol-
ume. These essays span Castile, other Iberian states, Europe, the Mediterranean,
and Latin America from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. The breadth of
space and time reflects the bridging of the medieval and early modern periods that
Ruiz’s work has long modeled, the implications his research has on other areas
of the world, and the range of scholars he has reached. Indeed, the number of
voices gathered in the collection mirrors the multitudinous facets of authority and
spectacle. The individual contributions in this volume collectively demonstrate
the reach and impact of Professor Ruiz’s thoughts and ideas.
The four parts of this work each highlight a critical area of Ruiz’s scholarly
interests, with the first two parts devoted to the idea of authority and the last two
focusing on the concept of spectacle. This internal division of the text reflects a
dialogue between Ruiz’s contributions and those of his colleagues and students.
Part I, Authority in Borders and Conquests, begins with an essay by William
Chester Jordan, a friend and colleague of Ruiz since their graduate-school days in
Princeton. In “A Border Policy? Louis IX and the Spanish Connection,” Jordan
looks at the extensive efforts made by Louis IX to establish border security with
the Spanish kingdoms based on marriage alliances. Although these alliances were
not always successful, they suggest that Louis was as interested in stabilizing his
southern borders as he was in achieving peace in the northern parts of his realm
with England. The next essay, “The King, the Coin, and the Word: Imagining and
Enacting Castilian Frontiers in Late Medieval Iberia,” Claire Gilbert takes Ruiz’s
argument that the evolution of vernacular languages, autochthonous coinage, and
an unsacred monarchy in Castile were part of a change in mentalités. She uses this
same paradigm and applies it to the Castile–Granada border as well as the Medi-
terranean and argues that the way these frontiers were articulated and imagined
in the sixteenth century owed a great deal to ideas of language, money, and royal
representation that had been forged in earlier centuries. Moreover, much as Ruiz
has argued, Gilbert asserts that the historiographical boundary that exists between
the medieval and the early modern is more of an artificial construct that may not
reflect historical reality.
Like Gilbert’s essay, Xavier Gil’s “An End to Conquests: Expansion and Its
Limits in the Iberian World, Fifteenth to the Early Seventeenth Centuries,” looks
back at the modes of power and representation Ruiz identified in medieval Castile
and argues for their continuation and importance in the early modern period. In
particular, Gil focuses on the evolution experienced in politics, the military, and
cultural society as the Spanish Empire sought to transform itself from one of con-
quest to one of civil administration and consolidation, not an easy shift for a polity
that had been defined by (re)conquest for the preceding five centuries.
From authority in the frontiers and in a far-flung empire as perceived by Jordan,
Gilbert, and Gil, we are brought back to popular and intellectual modes of author-
ity in Part I’s last essay. In “ ‘All Things to All Men’: Political Messianism in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Spain,” Bryan Givens examines the legend of the
“encubierto” or the hidden one, a messianic prophecy that spoke of a hidden Span-
ish king and Last World Emperor who would purify the Church, defeat Islam, and
bring about a just government. For much of the late medieval period, the prophecy
was attached to King Ferdinand of Aragon. After his death in 1516, his grandson
the emperor Charles V acquired the mantle of the encubierto. Yet, even as many
believed that Charles was indeed the prophesied emperor, encubertismo also
began to acquire a more popular flavor. During the Germanías revolt of Valencia
(1519–1521) it was co-opted by the Germandado rebels in an effort to legitimize
their claims and to attack Muslims, the clergy, and the nobility. Ultimately, Givens
argues that while the legend could be usefully applied to strengthen traditional
power structures, its fluidity allowed it to be taken up by almost anyone and used
to attack contemporary rulers and institutions.
Our discussion on authority takes a turn in Part II to issues of texts, taxes,
and penury. Antonio Zaldívar’s contribution, “Emphasizing Royal Orders Using
the Romance Languages: An Example of Strategic Codeswitching in the Crown
of Aragon’s Thirteenth-Century Royal Chancery,” examines a large selection of
orders composed in the royal chancery during the reign of Peter III of Aragon and
argues that in times of urgency, such as during the French Crusade of 1285, royal
orders were transmitted in the Romance, either Catalan or Aragonese, instead of
Latin as a way to emphasize their importance. This codeswitching underscored
the severity of the requests and ensured that there was no misunderstanding or
ambiguity in their being followed.
Additional essays in this section move us into the world of economics, the
first looking at royal fiscal systems and the second at poverty. Denis Menjot’s
“Taxation and Sovereignty in Medieval Castile” examines direct or extraordinary
taxation; the impact these taxes had on the subjects of Castile; and the relationship
between taxation and royal power. In the first part of his essay Menjot traces the
development of extraordinary taxes and the institutions created to sustain them as
well as the impact they had on royal fiscal and domestic policy. The second part
looks at how extraordinary taxes helped to undermine royal power, by exempting
nobles, clergy, and other elites from paying them, yet enriching them with the
revenues from taxation for services rendered. Indeed, the fiscal system that the
kings had so carefully developed and nurtured served in the long run to augment
the power of the elites at the cost of little to no investment from them.
While wealth gave the elites much of their authority, poverty allowed the men-
dicant Franciscans and Dominicans to accumulate and exercise much of theirs. In
“Friars and Royal Authority in the Thirteenth-Century Castilian Frontier,” Fran-
cisco Garcia-Serrano examines the disruptive and transformational impact the
friars had on Spanish society. Quickly attaching themselves to royal endeavors,
the mendicants used their favored positions to expand their influence and reach,
often by being on the forefront of the Reconquest. This afforded them an early
familiarity with frontier regions; a familiarity that would translate to status and
power once other settlers began to arrive. Yet, the crown and Spanish Church
also benefitted from their involvement as mendicants preaching and the knowl-
edge they brought to frontier societies made them indispensable elements in the
establishment of royal and ecclesiastical authority in newly conquered regions.
Moreover, being recently created, the friars lacked the rigidity of older orders,
which made them ideal agents of the Church on the frontier, while their extensive
skills endeared them to local settlers and elites looking to navigate and understand
local politics and practices. Thus, the mendicants had used their poverty as a way
to ascend from marginal to central and from powerless to potent agents of change.
In Parts III and IV, the volume’s focus changes to spectacle, another theme
that has figured in much of Ruiz’s work. Part III examines spectacles of purity
in the body and the realm. Fittingly, the section begins with an essay examining
ceremonies of admission, Kate Craig’s, “The Saint at the Gate: Giving Relics a
‘Royal Entry’ in Eleventh- to Twelfth-Century France.” Using Ruiz’s work on
royal entries as a starting point, Craig posits that, although less confrontational
than royal entries, the passage of relics into a new city or town could become a site
of contestation in which the complexity of lay attitudes toward the newly arrived
relic would become evident. It was during this brief liminal period of entry, when
the relic was both a power to be feared and potentially vulnerable, that its relation-
ship with the residents of its new home was negotiated and defined. Moreover,
Craig also uses these negotiations over the place of the relic to delve further into
the social dynamics of the city itself.
The public spectacle of a relic entry could be matched by the domestic spec-
tacle of a feast in the medieval world as Paul Freedman’s past work has shown.
In his contribution here, “Medieval Cuisine and the Seasons of the Year,” Freed-
man examines the effects of seasonality on the medieval diet. The seasons served
to create markers of difference between elites and the rest of the population, as
being able to eat foods that were foreign, exotic, or out of season was a symbol
of prestige and wealth. The seasons also allowed the wealthy to take advantage
of medical dietary recommendations and cope with some of the rigors of fasting
much better than their poorer counterparts. Freedman notes, however, that even
among the poor there were efforts to challenge seasonality and he sees human
creativity contesting the limitations cyclical changes imposed on available foods.
Instead of having their diet guided by natural rhythms, people in the Middle Ages
constantly fought against the restrictive effects nature had on their food choices,
to the point that with a little ingenuity even non-elites were able to enjoy foods
that were out of season.
David Nirenberg’s essay, “Medieval Media and Minorities: Jews and Muslims
in the Cantigas de Santa María” closes Part III. Like the other authors in this sec-
tion, Nirenberg is concerned with spectacle, but in a textual form as presented in
the Cantigas de Santa María. Nirenberg argues that the authors of the Cantigas
were not necessarily interested in describing the day-to-day life of Christians,
Muslims, and Jews in medieval Spain. Instead, he suggests that they used the Can-
tigas as a vehicle to legitimize the theologically questionable arts, notably poetry
and painting, which formed the artistic foundation of the Cantigas. Poetry and
painting had often been criticized as Jewish arts and forms of representation. By
deploying them in an anti-Jewish (as well as anti-Muslim and anti-heretical) role,
the authors sought to bring them a legitimacy that they lacked. Moreover, these
arts were presented as “salvific media,” serving as a conduit between humanity
and the divine, and as political tools in the ongoing struggles of Alfonso X against
his heir and other enemies. Thus, in their representation of Jews, Muslims, and
heretics, the Cantigas were staging a spirited defense of poetry, painting, and of
the king who had brought them into being.
Part III was originally supposed to include four contributions. Olivia Remie
Constable had graciously submitted a proposal to the editors, but, sadly, passed
away all too soon before finishing her draft. Her paper intended to look at the
fifteenth and sixteenth century belief that Alfonso VI of Castile had closed the
bathhouses in his realm following the Battle of Uclés as excessive bathing had
apparently weakened his troops before battle. The problem is that Constable could
find no reliable evidence that this ever occurred. Her essay would have explored
the changing views that had occurred between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries
and which made the story of the closed bathhouses so popular in the later period.
The implications of such a shift, analyzed by a scholar like Constable, would have
made this a richer volume. Her contribution here and elsewhere will be missed.
Part IV continues the theme of spectacle, but in the context of empire and iden-
tity. In “Poor Colors, Rich Colors: Spanish Clothing in the Early Sixteenth Cen-
tury,” Hilario Casado Alonso looks at how textiles helped to shape and define
identity. Using the records from the fairs of Medina del Campo, Casado Alonso
traces the waning and waxing of certain materials and colors and the symbolism
each color represented. His examination reveals the gradual diminishing of reds
and golds and the emergence of Burgundian fashions and its affinity for black and
darker colors. In time, these darker hues became markers of difference, power,
status, and distinction as their cost made them largely unaffordable to the lower
classes, who usually dressed in tans and browns.
Maya Maskarinec’s “Mobilizing Sanctity: Pius II and the Head of Andrew in
Rome,” considers the spectacle that surrounded the arrival of the head of the Apos-
tle Andrew to Rome and how the pope used this event to assert the supremacy of
Rome. Following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, the head
came into the possession of Thomas Palaiologos, a claimant to the Byzantine
throne. After the fall of the city, Palaiologos had made his way to Italy bringing
the head of Andrew with him. After much lobbying from Pius, the head was turned
over to the papacy. Maskarinec deftly argues that Pius used its arrival in Rome to
demonstrate the union of Peter (Rome) and Andrew (Constantinople) while still
accentuating the primacy of the former as the wayward Andrew finally came home
to be with his brother saints. Pius intended the arrival of Andrew to articulate his
vision of a united Christian empire with Rome, once again, as its undisputed head.
Moreover, he also used the momentous occasion to call for a crusade against the
Turks, and much like Andrew, who had always been a saint in motion, constantly
traveling, so too did Pius hope to set the Christian world in motion.
From the spectacle of empire at the service of Rome, we turn to the spectacle
of imperial identity with Katherine van Liere’s “Nuestros Españoles: The First
Spaniards and the First Habsburg Chronicler.” Van Liere’s work reconsiders the
political proclivities of Florián de Ocampo, the Habsburg royal chronicler. Ocam-
po’s Coronica general de España provides an extensive survey of pre-Roman
Iberian history, largely by following the works of the Dominican Annius of Vit-
erbo, who had written a total of eleven forged/invented chronicles that claimed to
tell the true history of pre-Roman Spain. Within a few years of the appearance of
Viterbo’s books, many critics began to question their veracity, but not Ocampo,
who forged ahead with his Coronica by relying extensively on Viterbo’s increas-
ingly discredited books. Recent scholars have argued that Ocampo’s persistent
use of Viterbo can be explained due to his credulity or willingness to be a tool of
Habsburg imperial ideology. Van Liere argues that instead of viewing Ocampo
as a bumbling and sycophantic royal flatterer, we should consider his work as
nationalistic. In her view, Ocampo’s main interest was not to create propaganda
for the emperor Charles V, but to write a text that highlighted the virtues and
qualities of the Spaniards over whom Charles ruled, as much a description of
the people and their history as it was a subtle warning to Charles that his rule
over Spain was conditioned by the acceptance of those he ruled. In van Liere’s
treatment, Ocampo emerges more as a nationalistic patriot than as an imperial
flatterer.
The final essay in this collection shifts our focus across the Atlantic, to the
Spanish colonies in the Americas. Kathryn Renton’s “ ‘Muy grandes hombres
de acaballo’: Spanish Horsemanship a la jineta and Bernardo Vargas Machuca’s
New Science” considers the changes in Spanish horsemanship due to New World
influences. Renton studies the games of horsemanship that accompanied royal
ceremonies and spectacles, and which Professor Ruiz has covered so prominently,
most recently in A King Travels. In these displays, the riding style used by partici-
pants, known as riding a la jineta, was a byproduct of the “Reconquest” and had
a distinctly “Moorish style.” Renton, moreover, argues Spanish nobles also con-
sidered it a marker through which they expressed their authority and status. Yet,
by 1600, a competing view was emerging in the Americas, namely in the work
of Bernardo Vargas Machuca. Vargas Machuca agreed with his continental peers
that horsemanship was a means to acquire and keep nobility, but for him the true
horsemanship a la jineta had only been perfected as a science in the New World
and was not the ancient tradition found in the Old.
Ruiz’s long career of teaching, scholarship, friendship, and mentoring binds
this volume together. His interests in authority and spectacle give it thematic
coherence, but it is the personal qualities that he has shared with so many of us,
and many others, that have made us such enthusiastic participants in this tribute.
His interest in our well-being, enthusiasm for our projects, intellectual and per-
sonal generosity, and affection has impacted every single one of the contributors.
And we all join in saying, thank you, Teo.
Notes
1 https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/02/10/monday-president-obama-
award-2011-national-medal-arts-and-national-human (accessed 12 August 2015). Teo-
filo F. Ruiz, The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
2 Teofilo Ruiz, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), xiii.
3 Ibid., 3–28.
4 Ibid., 17.
5 Ibid., 20.
6 Ibid., xiii.
7 E. P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1963);
Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1965); and Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1975).
8 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II
(Paris: Colin, 1949). It should be noted that Ruiz’s observations of local ecological
factors and their effects on the lives of individuals and communities in Spain predated
the focus on microecologies that is at the core of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Pur-
cell’s monumental The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000).
9 Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo F. Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox (eds.), Braudel Revisited: The
Mediterranean World, 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).
10 Ruiz notes this in The City and the Realm: Burgos and Castile in the Late Middle Ages
(London: Variorum Reprints, 1992), xviii. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de
Languedoc (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1966); and José Ángel García de Cortázar y Ruiz de
Aguirre, Vizcaya en el Siglo XV: Aspectos Económicos y Sociales (Bilbao: Ediciones
de la Caja de Ahorros Vizcaína, 1966).
11 Hilario Casado Alonso, La Propiedad Eclesiástica en la Ciudad de Burgos en el Siglo
XV: El Cabildo Catedralicio (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid Secretariado de
Publicaciones, 1980); and Adeline Rucquoi, Valladolid en la Edad Media (Valladolid:
Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 1987). Ruiz also notes the
work of María Asenjo González, La Extremadura Castellano-Oriental en el Tiempo de
los Reyes Católicos: Segovia, 1450–1516 (Madrid: Editorial de la Universidad Com-
plutense, 1984).
12 Ruiz, Crisis and Continuity, 6–7.
13 Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (New York: Longman, 2001).
14 Luís García de Valdeavellano, Curso de Historia de las Instituciones Españolas: De
los Orígenes al Final de la Edad Media (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1968); Julio
Valdeón Baruque, Historia General de la Edad Media (Siglos XI–XV) (Madrid: Map-
fre, 1973); and Julio Valdeón Baruque, Los conflictos sociales en el Reino de Castilla
en los siglos XIV y XV (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1975).
15 Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400–1600, 2.
16 Teofilo F. Ruiz, A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 9–10. Ruth Mackay, Limits
of Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
17 Ruiz, A King Travels, 8–9.
18 Among leading universities that separate medieval and early modern histories into
different departments are Autónoma de Barcelona, Autónoma de Madrid, Barcelona,
Complutense, Córdoba, Granada, Valencia, and Valladolid, though medieval and mod-
ern history are more integrated in smaller universities such as Alcalá, Carlos III, Cas-
tilla-La Mancha, Navarra, Pablo de Olavide, País Vasco, Salamanca, and Santiago.
19 Also in this vein of spectacles were the Inquisition’s autos de fé. Ruiz’s History 2C “Reli-
gion, Occult, and Science: Mystics, Heretics, and Witches in Western Tradition, 1000–
1600” is known among University of California, Los Angeles undergraduates as one of
the campus’ must-take courses and it routinely draws hundreds of students. Witches were
the subject of a series of lectures Ruiz gave as he toured college campuses throughout the
United States as a 2011–2012 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. The topic also forms part
a 24-lecture course on “Terror of History: Mystics, Heretics, and Witches” he recorded
for The Great Courses; see: http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/terror-of-history-
mystics-heretics-and-witches-in-the-western-tradition.html (accessed 9 July 2015). The
violence meted out on witches was part of the dark side of western civilization that Ruiz
reflects upon at greater length in The Terror of History.
20 Sample works include: Jacques Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Âge: Temps, travail
et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 1978); Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors:
Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974); Mikhail
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984); Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris:
Gallimard, 1969); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant
Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Clifford Geertz, The Inter-
pretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Theresa Earen-
fight provides an elegant synthesis of some of these influences in her review of Ruiz’s
Spanish Society, 1400–1600: “More Than Just Social History,” https://networks.h-net.
org/node/12715/reviews/12813/earenfight-ruiz-spanish-society-1400–1600 (accessed
25 June 2015).
21 Teofilo F. Ruiz, “Une royauté sans sacre: la monarchie castillane du bas Moyen Âge,”
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 39, 3 (1984), 429–453. See also: Teofilo F.
Ruiz, “Unsacred Monarchy: The Kings of Castile in the Late Middle Ages,” in Rites of
Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages, edited by Sean Wilentz
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 109–144; and Teofilo F. Ruiz,
“Images of Power in the Seals of the Castilian Monarchy 1135–1469,” in Estudios
en homenaje a Don Claudio Sanchez Albornoz en sus 90 años, edited by María del
Carmen Carlé, Hilda Grassoti, and Germán Orduna, vol. 4 (Buenos Aires: Instituto de
Historia de España, 1983), 456–463.
22 Ruiz, “Unsacred Monarchy,” 119.
23 For a complete list, see ibid., 116.
24 Quoted in ibid., 128.
25 Ibid., 128.
26 Ibid., 127–130.
27 Elena Lourie, “A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain,” Past and Present 35
(December 1966), 54–76; Angus Mackay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to
Empire, 1000–1500 (London: Macmillan, 1977); and Heath Dillard, Daughters of the
Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984).
28 Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400–1600, 121–251; Ruiz, A King Travels; and Teofilo F. Ruiz,
“Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au Xve sìecle: Les célébrations
de Mai 1428,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 46, 3 (1991), 521–546.
Also see: Teofilo Ruiz, “Fiestas, torneos, y símbolos de realeza en la Castilla del siglo
XV,” in Realidad e imágenes de poder: España a fines de la edad media (Valladolid,
1988): 249–266; Teofilo F. Ruiz, “Elite and Popular Culture in Late-Fifteenth Century
Castilian Festivals: The Case of Jaén,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe,
edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994); and Teofilo Ruiz, “The Symbolic Meaning of Sword and Palio
in Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual Entries: The Case of Seville,” Memoria y
Civilización 12 (2009), 13–48.
29 Ruiz, A King Travels, ix.
30 Ibid., 36.
31 Ibid., 48.
32 Ibid., ix.
33 Ibid., 8.
34 The above paraphrases information from chapter five of Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth:
The Reordering of Castilian Society (1150–1350) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004), 86–109.
35 Teofilo F. Ruiz, “Expansion et changement: La conquête de Séville et la société castil-
lane 1248–1350,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 34, 3 (1979), 548–565.
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 peni-
tential 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 arbitra-
tions 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 interven-
ing 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 inquisi-
tions of heretical depravity induced many more to do so as a form of penance.10
22 William C. Jordan
A 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 special-
ists 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 interna-
tional 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 deter-
mined 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,
A border policy? 23
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 occa-
sion, 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 ter-
ritorial 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 assem-
bled 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 fam-
ily 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 dip-
lomatic alliances or even provoked the opposite, but many marital alliances actu-
ally 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 northwest-
ern 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 Con-
stance 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 the “Young King” of England (A-N), and
his daughter Alys, after being betrothed to Richard I of England (A-N), married
the count of Ponthieu (F-F). Philippe II’s daughter Marie became the spouse of a
Namurois noble (F-F).32
Louis IX acted differently with respect to his eleven children.33 Not that he
forbade or dismissed the possibility of marriages with the traditional lineages, but
circumstances as he came to maturity and could settle his children’s marriages
were both simpler and more complex than they had been before. In the first place,
the probability steadily increased from the mid-1240s that there would be a defini-
tive settlement with England. So, the Anglo-Norman connection was cemented
nicely, as far as the French king could assess it. Close ties of marriage seemed
both to foretell this and then to confirm it with the Treaty of Paris. This is not to
A border policy? 25
say that all suspicions between England and France abated immediately34 – or did
so permanently. But Louis could not have known that the policy would cease to
have an effect and the ties rupture badly in fifty years – and anyway fifty years is
a long time to enjoy peace.35 As to the Franco-Flemish borderlands, they were sta-
bilized and if necessary defensible as the result of the establishment of the royal
apanage of Artois, ruled by a cadet of the royal family, Louis’ brother Robert and
later by the latter’s wife and son (the king’s nephew) with the help of her second
husband, the count of Saint-Pol, the lord of a territory in the Franco-Flemish bor-
derlands.36 But it was the possibilities that arose from the inclusion of Thibaut V,
count of Champagne, as a boy and young man in Louis’ court that allowed the
king to address the still new situation, to wit, that France was no longer, since its
conquests in the Albigensian crusade, a solely northwestern European polity.37
Thibaut V, who lived from 1239 to 1270 and was count from 1253 until his death,
was married to Isabelle, Louis IX’s daughter, on 6 April 1255. The act ideally
bound the count’s vast holdings in France to an implicit alliance with the crown.
It also offered a blueprint for alliances on the southern borderlands, for Count
Thibaut V of Champagne was also King Teobaldo II of Navarre (1253–1270).38
Louis actually appears to have reached two conclusions from the cogitations
that led him to arrange the marriage between Isabelle and Thibaut V. The first,
already alluded to and to be taken up later, was the utility of a cluster of Spanish
marriages to effect a long-lasting peace in the south.39 To this end he may have
been influenced by the possibilities inherent in his own marriage and his brother
Charles’ marriage to two southern princesses, the sisters Marguerite and Béatrice
of Provence. The second conclusion appears to have been to refocus marriage
policy in the east, so that principalities situated beyond already tightly bound
Champagne might also be drawn into firm friendship with France. It was under
Louis in the mid-thirteenth century, for example, that a cluster of royal marriage
alliances was arranged with Brabantine and Burgundian lineages.40 Among these
was the union of Louis’ son, Jean Tristan, and Yolande of Burgundy; of another
son, Robert, and Béatrice of Burgundy; and of two other royal daughters, Mar-
guerite with Duke John I of Brabant and Agnès with Duke Robert II of Burgundy.
Let us now return the discussion to Spain. The most significant aspect of Louis
IX’s marital strategy was, as with the Brabantine-Burgundian alliances, that there
were many unions. Half-Spanish himself, the king may have been influenced by
the warm memories he had of his mother Blanche (Blanca) of Castile in regarding
the Castilian royal family as an appropriate pool from which to select a marriage
partner for one of his children.41 But this was not an idiosyncratic choice nor were
the king’s efforts limited to bringing only one Spanish kingdom into a marital
alliance with the Capetians. Rather, the goal was the arrangement of a cluster
of marriages between Louis IX’s children and scions of various royal families
of Spain.42 There was the marriage, already noted above, of Isabelle of France
and Count Thibaut V of Champagne, otherwise known as King Teobaldo II of
Navarre, in April of 1255. To this must be added the betrothal, also in 1255, of
Louis IX’s presumed heir, Prince Louis, to the two-year-old Berengaria (Beren-
guela), the daughter of Alfonso X the Wise of Castile (1252–1284). Owing to the
prince’s unexpected death in 1260, the marriage was never formalized, but the
intent was explicit in the betrothal.43 The new heir Prince Philippe, who would
rule as Philippe III from 1270 to 1285, was married to another Spanish princess,
Isabella of Aragon, on 28 May 1262. She was the daughter of James I of Aragon
and had been born in 1248.44 But the Castile connection was not abandoned. Louis
IX’s daughter, Blanche, born in 1253, married Ferdinand (Fernando) of Castile,
another child of Alfonso X the Wise, in late 1268.45 He, too, had been born in
1253. He expected to inherit and to have his children inherit after him in a con-
tinuous line, but Ferdinand died in battle at Muslim hands in 1275 before the close
of his father’s life and never succeeded to the throne. Moreover, his children were
excluded by usurpation, and his widow returned to France (but this is another
story).46 The fact relevant here, however, is that Louis IX had a “grand strategy”
in mind when he arranged these marriages. They were part of a comprehensive
project to assure the safety of France – which, as Joseph Strayer long ago noted, is
not the same thing as, nor should it be confused with, the comprehensive “fixing
[of] the boundaries of a sovereign state.”47
In this context one passage in the many provisions of the Treaty of Corbeil
of 1258 takes on a special significance, more significance than might otherwise
be accorded it. But a few preliminary observations need to be made before the
entire passage is quoted. When one conjures medieval aristocracies, one typically
thinks of them as warrior aristocracies addicted to blood sport (hunting and tour-
naments), the training ground for future battle.48 One still uses the transitive verb
“to blood” in the passive voice to describe the habituation of young aristocrats to
the use of physical force in the small-scale disciplinary violence inflicted on those
who opposed or disputed nobiliary privilege or aristocratic excess. One’s sons and
nephews and one’s friends’ sons and nephews were blooded in little skirmishes
against vulnerable opponents to accustom them to the sanguinary taste of organ-
ized violence against human beings and, by glorifying the carnage in the imme-
diate aftermath, to blunt the regret of inflicting it. Robert Bartlett wrote some
bracing words on this process in the very first article he ever published.49 Gifting
the spoils, a conspicuous gesture of generosity, was the other side of the coin.50
There is a phrase, much less used, perhaps an aphetic form of the verb “to
appease,” “to pease” or “to peace.”51 It can mean to reconcile two parties by acting
as arbiter or to reconcile oneself with an enemy, that is, to make peace with him.
Those who participate in this process are peacemakers. No doubt they could arrive
at this state of being by virtue of their character or religious upbringing, but the
delicate procedures necessary to arrange for peace or to prevent war are not always
readily learned.52 Historical periods noted for indulging emotional excess in some
social groups – and one thinks here of medieval tolerance, even celebration, of
the male aristocracy’s penchant for swagger and war making – need to provide an
alternative set of political and social training programs for peacemaking. Strong
states strive to tame those subjects who disrupt life by feuds with some, if not
always full, success by compelling (training) them to take their disputes to court.53
But among more or less equally matched states themselves – or, more personally –
among the rulers and potential rulers of these states, the impulse for irenic restraint
A border policy? 27
has to be generated from the narrow circle of authorities inclined by their person-
alities to peace. In a word, a peace-seeking king like Louis IX, regardless of how
he came to that desire, might feel compelled to have his sons “peaced” as much as
warrior aristocrats needed to see theirs blooded.
The relevant passage from the Treaty of Corbeil follows:54
These agreements were made in the palace of the Lord King of France, at
Corbeil, with him being present, on the fifth of the ides of May, in the year
of the Lord one thousand two hundred fifty-eight, also in the presence of the
Bishop of Avranches; of Lord Louis, the first born of the Lord King; and of
Lord Philippe, the son of the same Lord King; [in the presence of] Raimond
Gaucelin, the Lord of Lunel; Lord Simon de Clermont, the Lord of Nesle;
Lord Gilles, Constable of France; Lord Jean de Roncherolles; Lord Anselme
de Bray; Lord Gervais d’Escrennes, [all] knights; Master Raoul, Treasurer of
Saint Frambaud of Senlis; Master Eudes de Lorry; Master Jean de Nemours;
Master Philippe de Cahors; Master Jean de Ully; Ferrer de Lauro, the sacris-
tan of Barcelona [Cathedral]; A[rnaud] de Gualba, canon of Vincennes.
There is no need to devote a great deal of discussion to this list, but there are a
few significant things to be learned from it. Present were two people, Lord Simon
de Nesle and Master Philippe of Cahors, members of the king’s innermost circle,
“men at the center,” who shared the deepest impulses of Louis’ ideals of Chris-
tian kingship and strove tirelessly to implement them.55 But more than this, and
perhaps more to the point: in the universe of documents from the royal archives
under Louis IX the Treaty of Corbeil is unusual, most especially for the promi-
nence of the two eldest sons of Louis IX in the witness list. In following the
negotiations leading to the Treaty and witnessing its provisions in the official
instrument, I would argue that they were being “peased” or “peaced” by their
father, a king who loathed the blood sports of the aristocracy and the tactics of
intimidation and posturing in which nobles so often indulged.56 Louis IX regarded
his personal obligation to educate his children as akin to a sacred duty. Indeed,
the role he played in raising his sons made contemporary observers at court, men
like Vincent of Beauvais, who wrote on the education of princes, valorize the
father’s role, while muting the mother’s, in the upbringing of offspring.57 But
whether the king’s goals were altogether attained is debatable. The general view
appears to be that Prince Louis was clay with which his father as potter was very
successful. His early death at about age sixteen makes it impossible to be certain
of this, but he was remembered as “a remarkably wise and gracious boy” by the
contemporary and knowledgeable, if gossipy, chronicler, the Minstrel of Reims.58
The general opinion is also that Prince Philippe, who became the heir after the
death of his brother in 1260 and king in 1270, was made of less malleable clay or
perhaps, better expressed but preserving the metaphor, did not shape up as well as
his father hoped.59 But this fact does not undermine the strength of the observation
that Louis IX saw the Treaty of Corbeil as part of familial diplomacy in the effort
to pacify the borders of the realm.60
Further confirmation of these conclusions, if additional support is even nec-
essary, is the fact that the instrument accompanying the Treaty of Corbeil and
sealed the very same day, 11 May 1258, was the agreement Louis IX entered
into to have his son Philippe marry Isabella of Aragon, a marriage that came to
fruition in 1262.61 Prince Louis, the presumed heir, formally assented to these
arrangements as well, and on the witness list are again men like Simon de Nesle
and Philippe of Cahors, the co-authors and co-implementers of the king’s radical
vision of redemptive governance.
Louis IX’s efforts had mixed results. With the Plantagenets in England, his
policy led to almost fifty years of peace – a period of peace that made vigor-
ous economic growth possible and strengthened the infrastructure of international
trade before it broke down initially in the mid-1290s and more seriously in the
early fourteenth century.62 In the Franco-Flemish borderlands, the breakdown of
France’s long peace with Flanders came at the same time as its collapse with
England and in the same phases. Indeed, the crises were intimately connected and
owed much to the character of the men who ruled the various principalities and
who were far more traditional in their aristocratic character than Louis IX.63 The
king’s project also contributed to harmony between France and the polities of the
old Middle Kingdom on the eastern frontier, at least as long as it did with Eng-
land.64 The least effective focus of Louis IX’s policy was, however, the frontier to
the south. Within fifteen years of his death on crusade in North Africa in 1270, the
French, under his son Philippe III, came to be resented in the Iberian kingdoms
for their hubris and their constant and niggling interference in Spanish affairs –
which they justified in the name of the very family ties that had been intended to
be the mortar holding everyone together in amity. These resentments, culminating
in armed resistance to French expectations and demands under Philippe III, infuri-
ated the Capetian king and his advisers, the aristocratic young men – Brabantine
and Burgundian, ironically – who had succeeded Louis IX’s experienced and inti-
mate councilors.65 War and other forms of political and social friction, not peace,
became the leading motifs in French-Spanish relations from the Bay of Biscay to
the Mediterranean coast66 – but not for lack of effort on Louis IX’s part to imagine
an alternative scenario and to devise the means, however flawed, to bring it into
being.
The achievements, even briefly, of Louis IX’s marital strategy – the creation
of an unbroken circlet of peaceful neighbors – made it possible to commit far
more resources than he otherwise could have done in 1270 to what many of his
co-religionists regarded as the highest form of Christian devotion at the time, cru-
sading against the Muslim powers who dominated the Holy Land. It also allowed
his neighbors the breathing space to support such expeditions and to mount their
own or to undertake similar activities in Spain and North Africa. It would be good
to know more – to know whether the intensity and devotion the French king had
to his marital policy were widely admired in other princely houses, and, more
important, whether they would inspire imitators in centuries to come long after
they failed to prevent wars on the Spanish frontier with France. The research nec-
essary to answer these questions, however, remains to be done.67
A border policy? 29
Notes
1 William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Ruler-
ship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 127.
2 Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 192–297; Jean Richard, Saint
Louis, roi d’une France féodale, soutien de la Terre sainte (Paris: Fayard, 1983), 273–
574. See also William Chester Jordan, Men at the Center: Redemptive Governance
under Louis IX (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), 90–94.
3 Gérard Sivéry, Saint Louis et son siècle (Paris: Tallandier, 1983), 598–610; Richard,
Saint Louis, 339–360; Walther Kienast, Deutschland und Frankreich in der Kaiserzeit
(900–1270): Weltkaiser und Einzelkönige, vol. 3, new edition (Stuttgart: Hiersemann,
1974–1975), 643–650.
4 Richard, Saint Louis, 171–175.
5 Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, 30–31. On Louis IX’s friendly
gestures to Norway’s king, to give another example, see p. 33.
6 Richard, Saint Louis, 183–193.
7 Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, 16.
8 There is a possibility that the solemnity of these agreements was emphasized by their
association with a particularly striking coffret, whose iconography celebrated Capetian
triumphalism. Professor Anne Lester is working on this so-called Montmirail coffret,
whose relics, it is also possible, were those on which the defeated rebels swore their
oaths; [Nicholas Vincent,] “Notes de lecture sur Isabelle d’Angoulême,” accessed
online on 27 February 2015 at http://www.academia.edu/1892426/Notes_de_lecture_
sur_Isabelle_d_Angoul%C3%AAme_Pr%C3%A9sentation_d_un_article_de_Nicho-
las_Vincent
9 Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, 17–19.
10 Christoph Maier, Preaching the Crusade: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thir-
teenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 69.
11 Alexis Charansonnet, “La révolte des barons de Louis IX: réactions de l’opinion et
silence des historiens en 1246–1247,” in Une histoire pour un royaume (XIIe-XVe siè-
cle), edited by Anne-Hélène Allirot and Colette Beaune (Paris: Perrin, 2010), 218–239;
Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, 20–25.
12 On the two treaties, see below. On almost what seems like Louis IX’s psychological
trauma at his failure to mediate the papal-imperial confrontation, see Beverley Berg,
“Manfred of Sicily and Urban IV: Negotiations of 1262,” Mediaeval Studies 55 (1993):
119–132.
13 Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, edited and translated by Jacques Monfrin (Paris:
Garnier, 1995), 556–557, paragraph 683, discussed in Jordan, Louis IX and the Chal-
lenge of the Crusade, 198–199.
14 The text of the Treaty of Corbeil may be consulted in Layettes du Trésor des chartes,
edited by Alexandre Teulet and others (Paris: H. Plon, 1863–1909), III, 405–408,
no. 4411. The text of the Treaty of Paris is available in the same volume, 487–489,
no. 4554. References to other records and texts related to their negotiation and going
back in both cases to exchanges of letters while Louis IX was still on crusade are pro-
vided in Jordan, Louis IX, 197–200, nn. 85–87 and 93.
15 John Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal
Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 97–98.
16 Ibid., 191–219.
17 On Louis VIII’s conquests, see William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the
Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1989), 105–106.
18 William Chester Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in
the Thirteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 2–3.
19 Ibid., 59–65. See also Richard, Saint Louis, 352–356.
20 Norman Schlesser summarizes earlier views and criticizes them in his “Frontiers in
Medieval French History,” International History Review 6 (1984), 163–164. See also,
specifically, on the complexities of the French-Aragonese frontier, Richard, Saint
Louis, 356–359.
21 Chris Jones, Eclipse of Empire? Perceptions of the Western Empire and Its Rulers in
Late-Medieval France (Turnhout, BE: Brepols, 2007).
22 On the typical situation, see Schlesser, “Frontiers in Medieval French History,” 169.
23 Schlesser, “Frontiers in Medieval French History,” 159.
24 Robin Studd, “The Privilegiati and the Treaty of Paris, 1259,” in Actes du IIIe Congrès
national des sociétés savants: histoire médiévale et philologie (1986), 175–185.
25 The nature of the obligations of the county of Foix was unclear and would not be
resolved until much later. See Thomas Bisson, Assemblies and Representation in
Languedoc in the Thirteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1964), 2625–2666; and Joseph Strayer, “France: The Holy Land, the Chosen People,
and the Most Christian King,” in Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History:
Essays by Joseph R. Strayer, edited by John Benton and Thomas Bisson (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 304.
26 Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries, 60.
27 Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis, 184–185, paragraph 65; 554–555, paragraph 679.
28 I know of no comprehensive study of the “marriage alliance.” Even though dealing
with non-Catholic royal marriages of a later period, Patricia Fleming’s “The Politics of
Marriage among Non-Catholic European Royalty,” Current Anthropology 14 (1973),
231–249, offers some useful observations. The article is immensely interesting if only
because so many scholars – and nobles – (fifty in all) read and were asked to respond
to it in print.
29 In Fleming’s response (“Politics of Marriage,” 247), she refuses to endorse the view that
the marriage-alliance strategy is so flawed that it fails more than it succeeds. But again
there seems to be no comprehensive study of the question (although there are many
blogs; see, for example, http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29csb4/
why_were_marriages_so_important_to_alliances_in/). Cf. Anthony Molho, Mar-
riage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1994), for an evaluation of the success of marriage alliances in commercial and urban
families; and Ryan Crisp’s dissertation on Marriage and Alliance in the Merovingian
Kingdoms, 481–639 (Ohio State University, 2003), which argues that marriage alli-
ances in the early Frankish world were not essentially a part of peacemaking but of
prestige enhancement. However, these are not mutually exclusive.
30 Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, 3–27, develops this theme.
31 For example, Louis VII’s second wife was Constance of Castile; Philippe II’s second
wife, Ingeborg of Denmark. Claude Wenzler, Genealogy of the Kings of France and
Their Wives (Rennes: Editions Ouest-France, 2003), 19.
32 For these marriages, see http://www.royalist.info/execute/tree?person=469#selected-
person.
33 To follow this argument, see the genealogical chart (unpaginated) following the text of
Richard, Saint Louis.
34 This point is insisted upon by Björn Weiler, Henry III of England and the Staufen
Empire, 1216–1272 (Woodbridge, UK: Royal Historical Society / Boydell Press,
2006), 179–180.
35 See note 62 below.
36 On the apanages, including Artois, see Charles Wood, The French Apanages and the
Capetian Monarchy 1224–1328 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
37 Mark Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christen-
dom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Jordan, The French Monarchy
and the Jews, 116–127.
A border policy? 31
38 On Teobaldo II’s governance, one awaits an up-to-date study based on the surviving
administrative and fiscal registers; see Registros de Teobaldo II, 1259, 1266, edited by
Juan Carrasco (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, Departamento de Economía y Haci-
enda, 1999). Until then the section dealing with the kingdom of Navarre in the Historia
de las Españas medievales, comp. Juan Carrasco and others (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002)
is useful. See also Gustave Lagrèze, La Navarre française, vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie
Nationale, 1881–1882), I, 164–168.
39 See note 65 and following.
40 See the genealogical chart (unpaginated) following the text of Richard, Saint Louis.
41 On the closeness of Louis and his mother, see Le Goff, Saint Louis, 708–718; and
Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, 7–8.
42 Once again, see the genealogical chart (unpaginated) following the text of Richard,
Saint Louis.
43 H. Salvador Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, translated by Odile Cisneros (Leiden:
Brill, 2010), 184 and 369.
44 The marriage counterbalanced that of James I’s son to the last Hohenstaufen prin-
cess in 1262, a union Louis IX would have preferred never to have happened; Hus-
sein Fancy, “The Intimacy of Exception: The Diagnosis of Samuel Abenmenassé,” in
Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World, edited by Katherine
Jansen, G. Geltner, and Anne E. Lester (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 69.
45 Martínez, Alfonso X, the Learned, 516.
46 For the history in context, see Joseph O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 428–458.
47 Joseph Strayer, “France: The Holy Land, the Chosen People, and the Most Christian
King,” in Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History, edited by John Benton
and Thomas Bisson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 304.
48 William Chester Jordan, “Count Robert’s ‘Pet’ Wolf,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 155 (2011), 406–407.
49 Robert Bartlett, “The Impact of Royal Government in the French Ardennes: Evidence
of the 1247 Enquête,” Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981), 95: “The adolescent
warriors were being given a taste of war, but a safe and local war. They were being
‘blooded’, perhaps, against the upland villagers. And, of course, the sergeants came
too, snapping hyaenas following the wolf pack.”
50 Cf. Andrew Cowell on gifts and violence as markers of aristocratic identity; The Medi-
eval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance and the Sacred (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2007).
51 The Oxford English Dictionary, online at www.oed.com, s.v. “peace, v.”
52 Cf. Jenny Benham, Peacemaking in the Middle Ages: Principles and Practices (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Katherine Jansen, “Peacemaking, Perfor-
mance, and Power in Thirteenth-Century San Gimignano,” in Center and Periphery:
Studies on Power in the Medieval World, edited by Katherine Jansen, E. Geltner, and
Anne E. Lester (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 93–106.
53 Cf. Paul Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca, NY, and
London: Cornell University Press, 2003).
54 Layettes du Trésor de chartes, III, 408, no. 4411:
Acta sunt hec in palacio domini regis Francie, apud Corbolium, ipso presente, vo
idus maii, anno Domini millesimo ducentesimo quinquagesimo octavo, presenti-
bus etiam episcopo Aprecensi, domino Ludovico, primogenitor domini regis, et
domino Philippo, filio ejusdem domini regis, Raymundo Joscelmi, domino Lunelli,
domino Symone de Claro Monte, domino Nigelle, domino Egidio, Francie con-
stabulario, domino Johanne de Romquerollis, domino Anselmo de Braia, domino
Gervasio de Crannis, militibus, magistro Radulpho, thesaurario Sancti Franboudi
Silvanectensis, magistro Odone de Lorriaco, magistro Johanne de Nemosio, mag-
istro Philippo de Caturco, magistro Johanne de Wliaco, Ferrario de Lauro, sacrista
Barchinone, et A(rnaldo) de Gualba, canonico Vicenarum.
55 Jordan, Men at the Center, 68–69 and 71–99.
56 Jordan, “Count Robert’s ‘Pet’ Wolf,” 405–406.
57 Cf. Rebecca Jacobs-Pollez, “The Role of the Mother in Vincent of Beauvais’ De eru-
dition filiorum nobelium,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 38
(2010), 15–27.
58 A Thirteenth-Century Minstrel’s Chronicle: Récits d’un ménstrel de Reims, translated
by Robert Levine (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1990), 107 (my emphasis). See
also Gérard Sivéry, Philippe III le Hardi (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 16. My former student,
Dr. Hagar Barak, at the time of this writing a Fellow at Harvard University, who has
closely studied the dynamics of Louis IX’s family in preparation for her as yet unpub-
lished monograph, has drawn the same conclusion about the relationship between the
young prince and his father.
59 Gérard Sivéry, Philippe III le Hardi, 17–27; Jordan, Men at the Center, 94–95; idem,
“The Struggle for Influence at the Court of Philip III: Pierre de la Broce and the French
Aristocracy,” French Historical Studies 24 (2001), 439.
60 Strayer, “France: The Holy Land, the Chosen People, and the Most Christian King,”
304: “in the settlements which were reached with England and Aragon, Louis thought
more in terms of feudal and family relationships than in terms of fixing the boundaries
of a sovereign state” (my emphasis).
61 Layettes du Trésor de chartes, III, 408–409, no. 4412.
62 On the economy, see Edwin Hunt and James Murray, A History of Business in Medi-
eval Europe, 1200–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11–122,
and on the French economy in particular, see the rather less enthusiastic Gérard Sivéry,
L’économie du royaume de France au siècle de saint Louis (Lille: Presses Univer-
sitaires de Lille, 1984). On the breakdown of Anglo-French relations, see Joseph
Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980),
317–324.
63 Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, 324–346.
64 John Benton, Philip the Fair and the Empire: A Research Report Prepared for Joseph
R. Strayer, 49–50; online through the Firestone Library, Princeton University, http://
arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/5425kb98n
65 Jordan, “The Struggle for Influence at the Court of Philip III,” 451–452.
66 Aengus Ward, History and Chronicles in Late Medieval Iberia: Representations of
Wamba in Late Medieval Narrative Histories (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), 44;
Jordan, A Tale of Two Monasteries, 209–212; idem, “The Struggle for Influence at the
Court of Philip III,” 454–455; Richard Kinkade, “Alfonso X, Cantiga 235, and the
Events of 1269–1278,” Speculum 67 (1992), 284–323.
67 A first foray into this research is Fabien Montcher’s “L’image et le culte de saint Louis
dans la Monarchie hispanique: le rôle des ‘reines de paix’) du milieu du XVIe siècle
au milieu du XVIIe siècle),” in ‘La dame de coeur’: patronage et mécénat religieux des
femmes de pouvoir dans l’Europe des XIVe-XVIIe siècles, ed. Cécile Vincent-Cassy
and Murielle Gaude-Ferragu (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), pp.
167–91.
2 The king, the coin,
and the word
Imagining and enacting Castilian
frontiers in late medieval Iberia
Claire Gilbert
Late medieval Iberia witnessed a series of innovations in the way that royal sov-
ereignty was enacted, represented, imposed, and negotiated on the local scale.
Dynastic conflicts and realignments among the Iberian Kingdoms (Portugal, Cas-
tile, Navarre, Aragon, and Granada) fueled the frequent renegotiation of territorial
boundaries and fostered strategies for enforcing and representing sovereignty on
those frontiers. Signs of sovereignty, embodied in institutions and materials like
customs houses, coins, tax registers, and bilateral frontier justice, were deeply
rooted in their local frontier context at the same time that local representations of
power, property, and sovereignty supported the discourses of power in the center.
Asserting sovereignty through local institutions was a process that had been artic-
ulated throughout the later middle ages. As one example of this phenomenon, in
1997 and again in 2004, Teofilo F. Ruiz advanced a series of arguments about the
way property came to be defined in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Castile, and
how the new ways of articulating possession in legal and notarial discourse sup-
ported the incipient conception of the sovereign territorial state. He demonstrated
how a change in local mentalités fostered new ways of representing and enforc-
ing sovereignty, and his findings continue to influence scholarship on the topic of
power and representation.1 Inspired by Ruiz’s work on the thirteenth century, in
this article I will discuss the ways in which local negotiations between individuals
and institutions took place on the frontier between Castile and Granada, and how
those traditions of contact, collaboration, and conflict affected representations of
sovereign power in the new society of Castilian Granada, that is, Granada after
its conquest by Castile in 1492. I will argue that the medieval frontier society
created between Castile and Granada shaped the way that this conquest society
was structured, especially in legal and fiscal institutions.2 After the Castilian con-
quest was concluded in 1492, the experience of the frontier remains reflected in
notarial, legal, and linguistic texts from Granada during the Mudejar period until
the forced conversions to Christianity were completed c.1499–1502. These texts
demonstrate that the frontier as a space of bilateral institutions and syncretic prac-
tices of exchange lived on long after 1492. As such, the medieval mentalités of
sovereignty as practiced on the frontier between the kingdom of Castile and the
emirate of Granada between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries would be trans-
formed into the habits of a conquest society, and play an important role in the
transition from frontier society to global empire.
34 Claire Gilbert
Since the thirteenth century, the Castile–Granada frontier embodied a political,
commercial, and cultural frontier between the kingdom of Castile and the emirate
of Granada, as well as a religious and military borderland. The Castile–Granada
frontier was established over the course of the thirteenth century as a result of
the expansionist activities of the crusader kings Ferdinand III (1201–1252) and
Alfonso X (1221–1284) of Castile and James I of Aragon (1208–1276) into Anda-
lusia and Murcia. The consolidation of the Nasrid dynasty in Granada in the sec-
ond half of the thirteenth century would more or less fix the frontier between the
kingdoms until the War of Granada began during the 1480s, culminating with the
final surrender treaty with Granada in 1492. This frontier was enacted by highly
regulated markers of sovereignty, founded first in military confrontations and
then in diplomatic negotiations.3 These negotiations produced “maps of words,”
descriptions of territoriality as agreed in the treaties, that were then inscribed onto
the landscape using boundary stones (mojones), fortresses, and the construction
of walled towns to which settlers were attracted by a series of privileges which
included tax exemptions and pardons for crimes as severe as murder.4
Exchange and interaction between members of different religions was common
on the frontier, as was conflict and contest, and several royal institutions were
established to regulate frontier contact. Just as royal sovereignty was expressed in
the frontier by fortresses and in official diplomatic documents by titles and claims
of territoriality, it was also articulated in the persons of the royal officials in charge
of overseeing border security and justice.5 The two sovereign powers were also
represented and their boundaries reinforced by a system of commercial regulation
which was controlled by the royal officials who staffed ports of entry by land and
sea, by the royal taxes which were assessed at the customs houses of those ports,
and by the restrictions on free circulation of coins that were enforced between the
distinct monetary systems of Castile and Granada.
The frontier with Granada was subject to a special taxation, the diezmo y medio
diezmo de lo morisco, or a 15% import/export tax on commercial goods that moved
between Granada and Castile. Since the Castilian kings had exempted the frontier
towns from so many taxes as an incentive to settlement, and since the noble and
ecclesiastic landholders were already exempt, the diezmo y medio diezmo was an
important way to extract revenue from this region.6 There was a parallel system
of commercial taxation in Granada which levied a 10% tax on commercial goods
that were traded between Muslims and Christians.7 Taxation served not only as
revenue for the crown, but as an institution of royal representation on the frontier,
since the restriction on peoples and goods was part of the projection of sovereign
power from the court to the frontier. Taxes were paid at the customs houses of
the port towns in both Castilian and Granadan territories.8 Merchants were then
required to keep the record of their payment throughout their travels in the neigh-
boring kingdom and they were expected to show it as they used the same port to
exit as they had used to enter. Most were traveling to local or regional markets
such as the market in Jaén, which hosted merchants from Granada every Monday
and Thursday.9 Merchants were not the only people who crossed the frontier, how-
ever, and priests, ambassadors, and messengers were all exempt from paying the
diezmo y medio diezmo so long as they carried no commercial products.10
The king, the coin, and the word 35
Despite the strict regulations on exchange between the two kingdoms, before
1492 Christians and Muslims in Castile and Granada, including Castilian Mude-
jars (Muslims living under Christian rule) and the Italian merchant communities
living in Granada, transacted regular and frequent business with one another.11
These commercial transactions in their frontier setting can tell us a good deal
about how social as well as political boundaries were constructed. The primary
points of exchange were the puertos secos, or ports of entry by land rather than by
sea. The designation of these land ports changed from treaty to treaty.12 Common
to these ports was the restriction on contraband (cosas vedadas), including arms
and munitions as well as basic foodstuffs like grain and mutton, which could sus-
tain an enemy.13 The alcalde de sacas oversaw the circulation of these restricted
goods, which also included coins, while the escribano de lo morisco registered
the goods and collected the taxes and fees.14 Despite the restrictions on crossing
the border with foreign monies, an active market of currency exchange must have
been in operation, though little trace of this institution has remained.15
Notwithstanding the prohibitions on extracting coins from each kingdom at
the ports, Castilian and Nasrid coins did circulate across the border from the
thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, despite the crisis in both monetary systems
of Trastámara Castile and Nasrid Granada.16 Muslim captives were redeemed in
Christian lands with Muslim coins, and over the centuries frequent commercial
correspondence lead to an industry of forgery among both Christians and Mus-
lims.17 Granadan coins were well enough known in Castile that between 1430 and
1442 Juan II (1405–1454) minted a new dobla de banda that was modeled on the
weight of a Nasrid gold dinar being minted in Málaga, known in Castile as the
valadí or dobla morisca.18 On the Nasrid side, if and when the kings paid their
traditional tributes to the Castilian rulers, that payment was recorded alternately
in Castilian and Nasrid coins.19 However, by the Cortes of Toledo in 1480, royal
law codes were expressing more anxiety about contact, especially commercial
contact between the religious communities within Castile and between Castile
and Granada via Andalusia, and about the removal of coins from the realm in
this trade.20 Likewise, the fatwas collected by the fifteenth-century North African
jurist Aḥmad al-Wanšarīsī (c.1430–c.1508) indicate a parallel concern towards
allowing Muslim coins to circulate outside Muslim lands.21 Just as in Christian
societies, coins were sites of economic and sovereign power but also religious
symbolism. On the Castilian side, after the Toledo cortes, any merchant or trave-
ler who took coinage across the border risked being put to death if he did not carry
the proper licenses and justifications with him. Coins were certainly symbols of
sovereignty which could enjoy mass diffusion, but at the same time they were
potential sites of vulnerability which had to be protected legally from straying
too far where they might be exposed to the risk of those sovereign symbols being
melted down and re-inscribed as competing symbols. Like a physical territory,
the coin was inscribed with royal symbols and had to be defended from physical
changes.
However, coins represented more than sovereign power. They were also at the
core of many daily transactions, and as such their use can tell us a great deal
about the local use of those sovereign symbols. As Teofilo F. Ruiz put it in an
36 Claire Gilbert
article examining boundary crossing and economic exchange among the religious
communities of thirteenth-century Burgos, “Property transfers, tax collection, and
retail trade functioned as sites for social interaction and contestation because they
encoded complex symbolic and cultural conventions.”22 Likewise in the border-
lands between Castile and Granada, similar processes created a culture of col-
laboration as much as conflict. In the later context of post-conquest Granada, the
exchange of money and property between longtime Muslim inhabitants and new
Christian settlers would also become the site for the creation of such conventions.
Though some of these conventions were borrowed from Castilian Mudejar expe-
rience to which Ruiz was referring, the social interactions and cultural representa-
tions that took place in exchanges between old and new inhabitants of Granada
in the early post-conquest period from c.1492–c.1502 were also governed by the
pragmatic, syncretic, and long-standing habits of a frontier society.
The conquest of Granada by Castile took place over a decade of siege war-
fare and intensive treaty negotiations with Nasrid rulers (competing among them-
selves for power in a dynastic civil war). By 1492 an active program of settlement
was underway, as settlers from Castile were encouraged to move to the former
Nasrid cities. These policies ensured the development of a composite society
whose functioning was facilitated by officials with experience either in Mudejar
or in frontier society. For a short period of time, before the forced conversions of
1499–1502, these officials made it possible to maintain Granadan legal, religious,
and fiscal institutions while at the same time introducing Castilian institutions.
For example, as an incentive for those former Nasrid subjects who remained in
Granada, the final capitulations of 1492 ensured the preservation of the Muslims’
pre-conquest legal and religious rights, in accordance with Islamic law and tradi-
tion, within the greater institutional structure of the Castilian courts.23 Another
way in which institutional continuity was used as an initial phase of assimilation
was the maintenance of the complex system of Nasrid taxation until the new con-
tracts (capitulaciones) of conversion were promulgated between 1500 and 1502.24
These overlapping institutions were staffed by officials with previous experience
in Mudejar or frontier society and in many ways echoed the bilateral frontier
institutions which had governed Muslim and Christian commercial contact for the
preceding two and a half centuries.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this complex institutional organization, there
were many opportunities for Christian settlers and Muslim inhabitants to interact
and exchange goods and property. The residents of Granada, Muslim and Chris-
tian, were well versed in each other’s monetary systems. In the ever growing body
of evidence of Arabic legal documents from before 1499 that recorded property
transfer between Christians and Muslims in Granada, it is clear that Nasrid as well
as Castilian coins were acceptable means of payment between 1492 and 1499.25
Notarial and legal documents testify to the fact that property exchanges took place
across both the religious and the monetary frontier. Not only did Christians pay
Muslims with Castilian coins, but Muslims used Castilian coins for transactions
with one another, and Christians used Nasrid coins to pay for their purchases.26 No
preference for either monetary system was expressed, though in Arabic documents
the Castilian gold real was characterized as a relative newcomer to the Granada
marketplace.27 Additional evidence for the way that these local transactions made
use of the dual monetary and also the dual legal system exists in the record of prop-
erty exchanges between Christians and Muslims, not only purchase and sale. For
example, in May of 1498, Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad ibn ‘Alī ibn Ayman and Ignacio López
de Padilla drew up a contract to exchange two plots of land. The original document
was drawn up in Arabic and witnessed and signed in accordance with Islamic law
by both parties, their legal representatives, and two instrumental witnesses. The
document was also witnessed by an unnamed Castilian clerk (escribano público),
though it was not translated at that time. Five years later, in January 1503, the
document was translated by another escribano público, miçer Ambrosio Xarafií,
who claimed to have been present at the original drawing up of the contract.28 The
Islamic legal formulae and protocols were observed, and recognized as intelligi-
ble to and compatible with Castilian institutions, since a member of the Castilian
administration participated in the production of the original document in Arabic,
while another ensured its legitimate translation into a Castilian institution. Nasrid
and Castilian monetary and legal systems were thus, for a short time, compatible
and fostered exchange among the Muslim and Christian population.
Legal and notarial texts are a wonderful resource for historians to learn about
the lived experiences of local exchange. We may also look to more normative
texts for clues about these lived experiences. Pedro de Alcalá’s lexicon (Granada,
1505), though an example of the kind of prescriptive philology that has so often
been a part of the history of colonial domination, also reflects the communicative
needs in Granada at the turn of the sixteenth century. The Vocabulista arauigo en
letra castellana has nearly one hundred entries for words related to coinage and
monetary exchange, including the Arabic equivalences for many different kinds of
Castilian coin (including the enrique minted by Isabel’s brother and predecessor
Henry IV).29 Alcalá also inventoried different kinds of Nasrid and Castilian taxes.
Much of both monetary systems is represented in the dictionary, indicating either
a long-standing or an intensive contact between them. Although the Hieronymite
Alcalá took seriously his mandate from the Archbishop of Granada to translate
Christian materials for potential converts, much of his lexical work reveals a pro-
found interest in the language of the marketplace.30 Several of the examples in his
grammar also use the context of exchange to help the language learners remem-
ber their vocabulary.31 Alcalá learned his Arabic from the alfaquíes/fuqahā’ of
Granada, that is, jurists and men of learning and status. Some of these men may
have been bilingual figures like the alfaquí Hamete Xarafí, whose name after his
conversion in 1500 became miçer Ambrosio Xarafí, and who was the very same
Castilian clerk whose translation helped incorporate the Islamic contract between
Abū Jaʿfar and López de Padilla in 1503. Alcalá’s interest in the words of the
marketplace, then, was far more than one man’s predilection, but remains a testa-
ment to the importance of monetary transactions and legal contracts between the
different groups of Castilian subjects who lived in post-conquest Granada. These
local exchanges, even when they permitted the continuity of previous practices,
ultimately supported the consolidation of the territorial sovereignty of the victors.
38 Claire Gilbert
The flexibility in commercial and legal practice in the decade after conquest,
though hardly outside the bounds of the law, was quickly brought into line with
royal policies when the Catholic Kings made their monetary policy and royal
symbolism as inscribed in coins into a cornerstone of their project of conquest
and colonization in Granada. In 1497, with the Ordenanza de Medina del Campo,
Isabella and Ferdinand established a new mint (casa de moneda) in Granada.32
They also created a new coin, the excelente de Granada (Granada ducat), to be
minted throughout the kingdom, on which their dominion over the former Nasrid
territory was expressed with the inclusion of the pomegranate in the coat of arms.
Though the mint was an important part of the Granada economy, employing a
large and varied staff, the sovereign symbolism of the excelente was not in fact an
instrument of sovereignty in Granada itself, but of sovereign representation that
included Granada in its presentation to an international audience.33 The excelente
de Granada was the name for the highest-value gold coin minted at all mints
across the realms of Castile. Although references to Nasrid coinage continue until
1499 in the Arabic notarial documents, the use of those coins was becoming ever
more rare as the Granada mint became active and royal legislation began to insist
on the use of billon coins instead of silver or gold for daily transactions.34 With the
1497 Ordenanza, the Catholic Kings turned away from the traditions of their pre-
decessors, whose own coins had used Islamic models for centuries, and adopted
instead the new European international standard of the ducat.35 At the same time
that these national monetary reform took place, with a view to the international
projection of Castilian monies, the town council of Granada (cabildo) was the site
of frequent discussions of both how to implement the new monetary policy, as well
as how to control the public industries of money-changing and moneylending.36
At the same time that monetary exchanges were being reformed and regulated
across the Castilian institutions in Granada, taxation was also proving to be an
important tool for imposing and for financing colonization. As an initial policy,
the pre-conquest system of customs houses and duties, –so important for the rep-
resentation of monarchical power and so lucrative for royal finances, –was pre-
served during the Granada campaigns (1482–1492). As the military campaigns
pushed south, the physical fact of the frontier disintegrated, an effect which should
have left the system of land ports decommissioned.37 Ferdinand and Isabella did
not want to decommission the revenue stream so quickly, and so in 1493 they
reconfirmed many of the privileges and obligations of the inland customs houses
“from Lorca to Tarifa,” including the former Nasrid ports of Ronda and Loja.38
Silk and leather imports from Granada into Castile were a particular target of this
now-internal customs duty, and royal licenses for tax collection (recaudamiento)
were auctioned off at court in 1493. With the exception of those goods carried
by Christian settlers and merchandise upon which the sales tax (alcabala) had
already been paid, the commercial frontier with its traditional customs duties was
maintained even though the political frontier was abolished.
Taxation was thus a way to maintain a lucrative internal boundary and it was
also a convenient way for the Castilian kings to incorporate their new subjects in
Granada by adopting the practices of their predecessors. During the first decade
after the conquest, Muslims petitioned to be exempt from Castilian taxation and
Christians petitioned to be exempt from Nasrid taxation.39 Thus Christians and
Muslims living in Granada after 1492 paid different taxes, and sometimes in dif-
ferent kinds of coins, meaning that some formerly Nasrid subjects paid Nasrid
taxes in Nasrid coins to the Castilian crown.40 In 1494 the fishermen in the vil-
lages around Vera were required to pay a tax of one “quebir,” a coin equal to two
dirham, on each haul.41 This adoption of a familiar tax was only a gesture toward
accommodation, however. Taking over the Nasrid system of taxation in toto was,
in addition to a practical measure, an assertion of sovereign conquest, and it was
a means to incorporate coinage through taxation just like the incorporation of ter-
ritory through conquest and capitulation. Ultimately, part of the effect of the mass
conversion of 1500 was a new tax regime for Moriscos which included a com-
bination of new Castilian and a new and targeted Morisco taxation. Though this
was a widespread burden on the entire Morisco population of Granada, one highly
localized example will suffice: in the nine Morisco villages in the territories of the
Marquis de Cenete, the new contract between lord and vassal drawn up in 1501
after conversion mandated that the former Nasrid taxes (the property tax of the
almagona) be paid to the lord, with the amounts given in the Castilian terms for
the Nasrid coins.42 These Morisco vassals were still obliged to pay Castilian taxes
to the crown and church, as well as the new Morisco farda (coastal defense tax).43
In 1515, the Cenete Moriscos were still paying the old Nasrid tax of the maǧram.44
Though many of these commercial and fiscal innovations were specific to the
post-conquest context of Castilian Granada after 1492, the constellation of prop-
erty, territoriality, and specie as expressions of sovereignty was as long-standing
as the frontier between Castile and Granada, created in the thirteenth century. The
phenomenon was not limited to the frontier, as Ruiz’s demonstration of how the
new legal emphasis in thirteenth-century Castile on the material aspect of prop-
erty boundaries rather than the traditional constellation of rights and jurisdictions
so aptly demonstrates. This new emphasis belied an “alternate discourse of power,
grounded in the physicality of the land and articulated in a new language.” This
“alternate discourse of power” was driven by the “middling sorts” who jockeyed
for status in the representative institutions of the parliamentary cortes and town
council cabildos. In their descriptions of property, it becomes clear that these
“middling sorts” were becoming ever more aware of “the link between rights of
way, spatial boundaries, freedom of movement, and power,” an awareness that
would shape political discourse and commercial practices into the early mod-
ern period, including in the composite conquest society of Granada.45 This was a
society that would later form part of a composite or polycentric monarchy, whose
own complexity was partially conditioned by the long habits of this frontier and
its local society.46 Though the institutions of power like customs houses and law
courts were organized in a hierarchy that led directly to the crown, it was daily
practices and local negotiations that allowed those institutions to function. The
emphasis that Ruiz uncovered on the conjuncture of property and power proved
to be an engine for the development of ideologies of sovereignty, based on territo-
rial possessions and their representation, which were articulated over the course
40 Claire Gilbert
of the later Middle Ages. By the reign of the Catholic Kings (1474–1504), and
in particular during their conquest and settlement of Granada, the representation
of this territorial possession through symbols imprinted on coins and names and
property inscribed in notarial deeds and tax registers became the core of the sov-
ereign ideal.
Scholars working on the late fifteenth century often characterize the conquest
of Granada as a process of pushing the frontier slowly southward, off the Penin-
sula and into the Mediterranean, where it would become Andrew Hess’s “For-
gotten Frontier” in the sixteenth century.47 A closer look at the maintenance of
frontier fiscal and commercial policies after 1492 tells us that we must be wary of
assuming that the long-standing Castilian-Granadan frontier of the later Middle
Ages simply disintegrated in the decade leading up to the end of the conquest.
Frontier practices, such as commercial transactions across religious, monetary,
and linguistic boundaries, as well as frontier institutions, like the puertos secos,
were maintained in the newly forming conquest society. As that society devel-
oped and changed in the ensuing generations, new boundaries and with them
new hierarchies were created from the templates of the old ways of managing
exchange between different religious, linguistic, and political communities. The
frontier practices and institutions that left their trace long after 1492 thus sup-
ported the eventual assimilation of Granada into the Hispanic Monarchy and at
the same time the creation of pernicious hierarchies of difference between old and
new Christians. The old frontier did not simply slide away, into the sea, but was
adapted to a new context of projecting sovereignty across diverse populations
who interacted with one another regularly. Though the practices and institutions
were a means of representing and enforcing Castilian sovereignty, the exchange,
collaboration, and conflict that took place were not simply reflections of the aspi-
rations of royal power. A frontier may be first described in the language of a treaty
negotiation, but it is enacted by the people who live along it and who cross it. Ruiz
has long emphasized the lived realities of individuals, and the value of seeking to
understand how their decisions and actions were shaped or constrained by their
historical context. The royally mandated but locally enacted fiscal and commer-
cial institutions of the frontier which underlay the representation of Trastámara
sovereignty as the conquerors of Granada also created a space for individuals to
use the materials and institutions available to them to get on with the business of
daily life.
Notes
1 Through extensive archival research, Ruiz showed that late medieval records of prop-
erty transactions – sales, bequests, and other legal descriptions – relied ever more on
references to physical markers like man-made boundary markers (mojones), geograph-
ical attributes, and the physical points of entry and exit that formed a real territorial
boundary. Teofilo F. Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Soci-
ety (1150–1350) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); “Límites: De la
comunidad a la nación en la Castilla bajomedieval,” Anuario de estudios medievales
27, 1 (1997), 23–41; Crisis and Community: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
2 On the concept of the frontier, as borrowed from American studies into Medieval stud-
ies, see R. I. Burns, “The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval
Frontier Societies, edited by Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990), 307–330, as well as the other essays in the volume. For treatments of late
medieval frontiers in the Iberian Peninsula, see María Asenjo González, “Actividad
económica, aduanas y relaciones de poder en la frontera norte de Castilla en el reinado
de los Reyes Católicos,” En la España medieval 19 (1996), 275–310; Juan Francisco
Jiménez Alcázar, “Relaciones interterritoriales en el sureste de la península ibérica
durante la baja Edad Media: cartas, mensajeros y ciudades en la frontera de Granada,”
Anuario de estudios medievales 40, 2 (2010), 565–602; José Rodríguez Molina, “Rela-
ciones pacíficas en la frontera de Granada con los Reinos de Córdoba y Jaén,” Revista
del Centro de Estudios Históricos de Granada y su Reino 6 (1992), 81–128; and many
of the essays collected in Juan de Mata Carriazo, En la frontera de Granada, Fac-
simile, edited by Manuel González Jiménez (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2002).
3 In the fifteenth century, Castile was bounded by five land borders of varying length:
Portugal, France, Navarre, Aragon, and Granada. Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, La
hacienda regia de Castilla en el siglo XV (La Laguna: Universidad de La Laguna,
1973), 95–150.
4 Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth, 60–70.
5 Such institutions were intended to oversee security, justice, commerce, and the fiscal
interests of the crown on the frontier. Those institutions governing security and jus-
tice on the frontier, which was subject to frequent military raiding, capture, and vio-
lence, were the alcaldes mayor entre cristianos y moros or the quda’ bayna al-mulūk
on the Granadan side who adjudicated border disputes, the fieles de rastro who gath-
ered evidence and enforced frontier justice, and the fakkāk or alfaqueque who over-
saw the captive trade. Much has been written on the figures of the alfaqueque, the fiel
de rastro, and the alcalde mayor de cristianos y moros. On these border institutions,
see Juan de Mata Carriazo, “Alcalde entre los cristianos y los moros, en la frontera
de Granada,” Al–Qantara 13, 1 (1948), 35–96; Juan Torres Fontes, “El alcalde entre
moros y cristianos del reino de Murcia,” Hispania 78 (1960), 55–80; José López de
Coca Castañer, “Los jueces de las querellas,” Edad Media: Revista de Historia 11
(2010), 173–210.
6 In addition to the work of Ladero Quesada in Hacienda regia, see Elena Azucena
Fernández Arriba, “Un aspecto de las relaciones comericales entre Castilla y Granada:
‘el diezmo y medio diezmo de lo morisco’ en la segunda mitad del siglo XV,” Historia,
instituciones, documentos 13 (1986), 41–62, and Cristobal Torres Delgado, “Acerca
del diezmo y medio diezmo de lo morisco,” En la españa medieval 1 (1980), 521–534.
7 This tax was known as the maǧram, which refers to the general category of taxes
on commercial merchandise, as well as to the specific customs duty, or the al-ʿašar
al-rūmiyya (the Christian tenth). Arié, L’espagne musulmane, 218, 318–319, and pas-
sim. On the Nasrid fisc in general, see Isabel Álvarez de Cienfuegos, “La hacienda de
los nasries granadinos,” MEAH 8 (1959), 99–123.
8 On the taxes assessed at the puertos secos, see Ladero Quesada, La hacienda regia,
esp. 105–107. On the assessment of customs duties in Muslim port towns, see Remi
Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the
Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 127,
who quotes Ibn Ḥazm as saying that:
The central administration was not the only party interested in tax collection,
despite efforts to attain this prerogative. Every regional governor, particularly those
in port cities and along the thūǧur [frontier], was ready to levy a percentage of
goods traveling through his jurisdiction.
42 Claire Gilbert
Taxes from the citizens of Jaén were paid in coin (monedas). A. M. Jaén, Actas de 1476,
fols. 145r–147r, doc. XXVII in José Rodríguez Molina (ed.), Colección diplomática
del Archivo Histórico Municipal de Jaén (Jaén: Ayuntamiento de Jaén, 1985).
9 Rodríguez Molina, “Jaén, Ciudad de Frontera, Centro Agroganadero, Artesenal y
Comercial (Siglos XV–XVI),” in his Colección diplomática, i–xxi, xiii–xiv.
10 AGS RGS 1488–VI, no. 156.
11 On the Italian merchant communities, see Rachel Arié, L’espagne musulmane (Paris:
Boccard, 1990 (1973)), 319–320.
12 The Granadan puertos secos were determined by royal negotiation and designated by
the sovereign, unlike the puertos secos on the northeastern frontiers with Aragon and
Navarre, where local tax collectors enjoyed a privilege from Henry IV (1425–1474) to
designate the best sites for a customs house themselves. Asenjo González, “Actividad
económica,” 292. For an overview of medieval customs policies (and politics), see
Pedro Andrés Porras Arboledas, “Los portazgos en León y Castilla en la Edad Media.
Política real y circuitos comerciales,” En la España medieval 15 (1992), 161–211. On
the treaties between Castile and Granada, see Dolores María Pérez Castañera, Enemi-
gos seculares: Guerra y treguas entre Castilla y Granada (c. 1246–c. 1481) (Madrid:
Silex, 2013).
13 Cortes de Toledo (1480), núm. 88, in Manuel Colmeiro, Cortes de los antiguos reinos
de León y de Castilla, vol. IV (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1882), 170–171.
14 In 1466 there was in Jaen an off-and-on puerto seco and casa de moneda. A. M. Jaén,
Leg. 3, Libro de Privilegios, doc. IX in Colección diplomática. Note that Henry IV
is said to have established over 150 casas de moneda. Under his successors Ferdi-
nand and Isabella, there were less than ten mints, and the whole enterprise was more
stringently controlled. In 1498, well after conquest, a letter of credit was called due in
coin in a complicated exchange between a Genovese merchant, a Granadan Muslim, a
Granadan morisco, and some Castilian Christians. AGS RGS 1498 XII 186.
15 Denis Menjot comes to a similar conclusion about the likely presence of moneychang-
ers in the customs houses of Murcia, citing the Cortes de Guadalajara of 1390. Denis
Menjot, “La fiscalité douanière dans le royaume de Murcie,” Actes de la 28e con-
grès des historiens médiévalistes de l’enseignement supérieur publique 28 (1997),
209–234, 216. Though there is no explicit reference to a moneychanger in the Cortes,
the detailed schedule of fines, for both Castilian “naturales” and “los que non son
nuestros naturales, e entren en nuestros rregnos,” is whatever amount in the maravedí
of account, “en la moneda vsual,” meaning that visitors were also expected to have
regular access to the right coins. Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y de Castilla,
vol. 2 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1863), 437.
16 Ana Echevarría, Knights on the Frontier: The Moorish Guard of the Kings of Castile
(1410–1467) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 12 and 42–43. For the Castilians, Aragonese, and
Portuguese, this crisis of coinage was in part an effect of the dynastic competitions
and civil wars across all of the Iberian kingdoms, in which competitors for power
minted their own coins as an assertion of sovereignty. Much less is known about
Nasrid coins, which were not regularly minted with the date of impression, but the
dynastic instability in the Muslim kingdom may well have contributed to monetary
instability, as was the case in the Christian kingdoms. On Nasrid coinage, see Miquel
Crusafont, Anna M. Balaguer, and Philip Grierson (eds.), Medieval European Coin-
age: Volume 6, The Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 64–65.
17 Arié, L’espagne musulmane, 222 and 359.
18 Echevarría, Knights on the Frontier, 11–12 and Angus MacKay, Money, Prices, and
Politics in Fifteenth-Century Castile (London: Royal Historical Society, 1981), 36
and 50. Although there were Castilian and Arabic words for neighboring coinage (see
below), neither the finds and hoards which numismatists study nor the documentary
sources point to any great presence in the fifteenth century of Nasrid coins in Castile
(except those used to pay the parias) or Castilian coins in Granada. See also Miguel
Jiménez Puertas, “La evolución del sistema monetario Nasari,” Gaceta numismática
150 (2003), 31–49.
19 Alfonso X received his tribute in gold maravedies, while Yūsuf I (1318–1354) paid
his tribute in dinars. Subsequent measures of tributes are recorded in later Castilian
sources as doblas, which could signify Castilian or Granadan coins. Arié, L’espagne
musulmane, 214–215.
20 Cortes de Toledo, n. 76, 83, and 88, 149–151, 157–159, and 170–171.
21 There was a disparity in the way that the commercial frontier was imagined in some
Muslim sources which refer to Granada and the Christian sources of Castile. The fat-
was that were collected by Aḥmad al-Wanšarīsī in the fifteenth century, which, as Josie
Hendrickson has demonstrated, must be understood in their North African context,
made very clear that the kind of frontier upon which an extraordinary tax may be levied
is that of commerce between Muslims and Christians, whether or not the transaction
took place in a physical borderland. See al-Wanšarīsī, translated by Émile Amar as
“La pierre de touche des fétwas,” in Archives Marocaines XII (1908), 444–458. From
the perspective of the Christian sources, including the local cabildo records and the
permissions and decrees which originated from the Royal Chancellery which are used
in this chapter, extraordinary taxation was to be levied on transactions that took place
between the territories of Castile and Granada, regardless of the religions of the parties
involved in the transaction. For both kingdoms, this meant that the state could capture
part of the revenue of the Genovese factors who were based in Granada (and Seville)
and who carried out an important part of the trade between the two kingdoms.
22 Teofilo F. Ruiz, “Trading with ‘The Other’: Economic Exchange between Muslims,
Jews and Christians in Late Medieval Northern Castile,” in Medieval Spain, edited by
Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave-MacMillan,
2002), 64.
23 See Miguel Garrido Atienza, Las capitulaciones para la entrega de Granada (Gra-
nada: Ventura Traveset, 1910), 269–294. The 1492 capitulation was aimed at the city
of Granada, but the other Mudejar populations across Granada had been subject to
different agreements depending on the conditions of conquest (surrender or siege).
However, by 1493 a dual system was in place for those who remained. On the distinct
programs of surrender treaties that varied by time and place, see Miguel Ladero Que-
sada, “Mudéjares y repobladores en el Reino de Granada (1485–1501),” Cuadernos de
Historia Moderna 13 (1992), 47–71.
24 The Nasrids, like the Trastámara, by the fifteenth century had developed a sophis-
ticated set of fiscal policies for extracting revenue from their subjects. See Alvarez
Cienfuegos, “La hacienda de los nasries granadinos.” On the “Contracts of Conquest,”
see Angel Galán Sánchez, “Ser o parecer Cristianos? La conversión de los musulmanes
granadinos,” in Una sociedad en transición: Los granadinos de mudéjares a moriscos
(Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2010), 49–94. On the continuity of Nasrid taxes
under the Trastámara, see Arié, L’espagne musulmane, 216–218.
25 On the growing inventory of Arabic documents from Mudejar Granada, the latest
extant of which dates from 1499, see Amalia Zomeño, “From Private Collections to
Archives: How Christians Kept Arabic Legal Documents in Granada,” Al-Qantara 32,
2 (2011), 461–479.
26 See documents 80, 81, 85, 86, 88, 92, and 95 and passim in Luis Seco de Lucena,
Documentos Arabigo–Granadinos (Madrid: Imprenta de Estudios Islámicos, 1961),
27 See Document 85, Seco de Lucena, Documentos Arabigo–Granadinos, 138.
28 Document 7, in Emilio Molina López and María Carmen Jiménez Mata (eds. and
trans.), Documentos Árabes del Archivo Municipal de Granada (Granada: Ayuntami-
ento de Granada, 2004), 22–23.
44 Claire Gilbert
29 Pedro de Alcalá, Vocabulista arauigo en letra castellana (Granada: Juan Varela de
Salamanca, 1505).
30 Gerrit Drost, “El Arte de Pedro de Alcalá y su Vocabulista: de tolerancia a represión,”
in Actas del III simposio internacional de estudios moriscos: las practicas musul-
manas de los moriscos andaluces (1492–1609), edited by Abdeljelil Temimi (Zag-
houan: Publications du Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Ottomanes, Morisques,
de Documentation et d’Information, 1989), 57–69, 66.
31 “Yo do el dinero a Pedro ani na’ati al cata’a li Pedro,” Pedro de Alcalá, Arte para lig-
eramente sauer la lingua arauiga (Granada: Juan Varela de Salamanca, 1505), 30.
32 Pragmática de d. Fernando y doña Isabel (Medina del Campo, 1497), in Descripción
general de las monedas hispano–cristianas desde la invasión de los árabes, edited by
Aloïss Heiss, vol. 1 (Madrid: R. N. Milagro, 1865), 322–325.
33 Though the initial oath of employment was directed at an entirely Christian staff, in
1498 at least one Muslim silver worker was employed in the mint. See Document 33
(August 1497) and Document 59 (January, 1498) in María Amparo Moreno Trujillo,
La memoria de la ciudad: El primer libro de actas del cabildo de Granada (1497–
1502) (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2005), 139–150 and 184–187.
34 Document 4, Bill of Sale of a plot of land from the Šaykh ‘Abd al-Raḥman ibn ‘Ali
al-Miknāsī to Alonso de Cáceres, 1499, Archivo Histórico Municipal de Granada,
reproduced in Documentos Árabes del Archivo Municipal de Granada, 13–16. On the
mandated use of billon in Granada, see for example the order to promulgate by town
crier the Archbishop’s order that purchases and sales must be effected in maravedíes
rather than reales, October 13, 1497, Document 45 in La memoria de la ciudad, 165.
On royal orders for the same, AGS RGS 1499 XI 15.
35 This mutual modeling and compatibility had begun in eight-century Iberia with
Islamic coinage inscribed with Muslim phrases in Latin, to the twelfth-century Alon-
fonsi morabetino, Christian coinage inscribed with Christian phrases in Arabic. For the
Alfonsine morabetino, see the classic account of Francisco Codera y Zaidín, Tratado
de numismática arábigo–española (Madrid: Librería de M. Murillo, 1879), 212–215.
On the innovations of 1497, see Crusafont et al., Medieval European Coinage, 410.
36 Document 52 (November 1497), Document 58 (January 1498), Document 64 (Febru-
ary 1498) and passim in La memoria de la ciudad.
37 A similar effect occurred after 1480 when the Cortes of Toledo relaxed the restrictions
on goods (not monies) that could be exchanged between Castile and Aragon. The many
officials whose livelihood was based on the tax administration in the customs houses
continued to stop and tax merchants, however, meaning that the anticipated boost in
commerce did not happen. Asenjo González, “Actividad económica,” 285. Also see
Ladero Quesada, La hacienda regia, 113.
38 Provisión de recudamiento (copia), January 12, 1493, Document 260 in Isabel García
Díaz, ed., Documentación medieval del Archivo Municpal de Lorca (Lorca: Ayuntami-
ento de Lorca, 2007), 284–295.
39 AGS RGS 1493 I 51.
40 AGS RGS 1490 X 297.
41 AGS RGS 1494 IX 18–19.
42 For the Castilian translations of Nasrid coins, see Miguel Jiménez Puertas, “La evolu-
ción del sistema monetario Nasari,” Gaceta numismática 150 (2003), 31–49, 35–36.
For the 1501 contract between the Marquis of Cenete and his Morisco vassals, see
Manuel Gómez Cruz, Empadronamiento de la villa de Jérez del Marquesado de
Cenete (Granada: M. Gómez, 2002), 5–7.
43 On the innovations in tax policies applied to the Mudejars and then the Moriscos,
see José López de Coca Castañer, “Mudéjares granadinos y fiscalidad: los servicios
extraordinarios de 1495 y 1499,” En la España medieval 30 (2007), 317–334 and
Javier Castillo Fernández, “Administración y recaudación de los impuestos para la
defensa del reino de Granada: la farda de la mar y el servicio ordinario (1501–1516),”
AREAS: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 14 (1992), 67–90. On the contracts of conver-
sion of 1500–1502 and their fiscal components, see Angél Galán Sánchez, “Cris-
tianos y musulmanes en el reino de Granada: Las prácticas de negociación a través
de un reexamen de las capitulaciones de la rendición y de la conversión,” in Nego-
ciar en la edad media / Négocier au moyen âge, edited by María Teresa Ferrer
Mallol, Jean–Marie Moeglin, Stéphane Péquignot, and Manuel Sánchez Martínez
(Barcelona: CSIC, 2005), 441–472. On the fifteenth-century context of the new fis-
cal policies of the Catholic Kings in Castile, see Hilario Casado Alonso, “Comercio,
crédito y finanzas públicas en Castilla en la época de los Reyes Católicos,” in Dinero,
moneda y crédito en la monarquía hispánica, edited by Antonio M. Bernal (Madrid:
Marcial Pons, 2000), 135–156, 138–140 and passim.
44 Though in the second decade of the sixteenth century Ferdinand did his best to ensure
that the new Christians were paying regular Castilian taxes, the continued assessment
of Nasrid taxes continued to be a problem, requiring repeated edicts prohibiting the
practice. See AGS Camara de Castilla, Lib. de Cedulas, 27, f. 139v; Pedro José Arroyal
Espigares, Esther Cruces Blanco, and María Teresa Martín Palma (eds.), Cedulario del
reino de Granada (1511–1514) (Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2008); and Archivo
Histórico Municipal de Granada, Libro de cabildos 1516 hasta 1518, f. 101, in Antonio
Gallego Burín and Alfonso Gamir Sandoval, Los moriscos del reino de Granada (Gra-
nada: Universidad de Granada, 1996), 186.
45 Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth, 73. This new language was the vernacular that came to
be used in Castilian wills and legal documents after the twelfth century.
46 J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992),
48–71; Pedro Cardim, Tamar Herzog, José Javier Ruiz Ibañez, and Gaetano Sabatini,
“Polycentric Monarchies: How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and
Maintain a Global Hegemony?,” in Polycentric Monarchies: How Did Early Mod-
ern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony? edited by Pedro
Cardim, Tamar Herzog, José Javier Ruiz Ibañez, and Gaetano Sabatini (Eastbourne:
Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 3–9.
47 Andrew Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-
African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
3 An end to conquests
Expansion and its limits in the
Iberian world, fifteenth to the
early seventeenth centuries*
Xavier Gil
In his dedication to John III of Portugal (r. 1521–1557) of his treatise The Disci-
plines (1531), the Valencian devotee of Erasmus Juan Luis Vives stated: “Today
the whole universe has become cleared to the human genre.”1 Discovery, conquest,
commerce, mission, and communication were among the main factors underlying
such a fact, as unprecedented as it was celebrated. Three centuries earlier in the
1230s and 1240s, the Iberian Peninsula had witnessed decisive moments in the
Reconquista against Muslims, as Jaime I of Aragon won Mallorca and Valencia,
Fernando III of Castile took Córdoba and Seville, and Alfonso III of Portugal
conquered the Algarve. The conquest of Seville in 1248, in particular, proved a
crucial step because of its own significance and because of the repercussions it
had on the northern lands of Old Castile. This development and analysis occupy
a major part in Teofilo F. Ruiz’s scholarship, since his key article in Annales, ESC
as early as 1979 to From Heaven to Earth (2004). Particularly, he has argued that
the changes underwent by Castilian society from the end of the twelfth to the
mid-fourteenth century shaped the life of Castile and Spain in the long run, thus
becoming the foundations of the enterprises of the Age of Exploration. Those con-
quests were wrapped in an elaborated chivalric culture, a distinctive feature of late
medieval and Renaissance Spain. Ruiz depicts it in detail in his colorful A King
Travels (2012), where he shows that Fernando’s sword acquired a symbolic mean-
ing and that his entry into newly conquered Seville, together with that of Alfonso
XI into the same city in 1327, became in turn a model for similar ceremonies in
the future. The fact that Philip II somehow reenacted Fernando’s entry in his visit
to Seville in 1570 is testimony to the long-lasting importance of late medieval
events in later sensibilities and cultural practices.2
Just as a warrior sensibility characterized much of late-medieval European
society, the Reconquista shaped the society and culture of Iberian kingdoms. As
Ruiz points out, idas contra moros (sorties against Moors) helped legitimate kings
and their reigns, all the more necessary since the Trastámaras of Castile and the
Avis of Portugal were both bastard dynasties. Likewise, waging wars against infi-
dels also helped legitimate claimants to the imperial title, and Alfonso VII and
Alfonso X of Castile engaged in this activity locally in Iberia. Additionally, chron-
iclers and political writers emphasized the continuous commitment of Christian
kings to the Reconquista. Some of them, notably Vicente Hispano in the 1240s,
An end to conquests 47
did their best to argue that since the Iberian kingdoms were successful in freeing
themselves from Muslim dominion without the help of the German emperor, they
enjoyed exemptio imperii. For his part, Jaime I of Aragon was told in praise that
seaborne campaigns, such as his conquest of Mallorca in 1229, were worth more
than those on land. Later authors repeated both the claim to exemptio and the cru-
cial importance of moving into the Mediterranean.3 Aragonese monarchs, moti-
vated by this conquering impetus, subsequently reached Sicily and Sardinia and
the coast of the Maghrib where Castile already possessed the important outpost of
Salé. Once Jaime II of Aragon and Sancho IV of Castile concluded the Treaty of
Monteagudo (1291) dividing the Maghrib into spheres of influence, the Crown
of Aragon was able to establish a sort of protectorate over part of the region. Com-
ing after similar treaties promoting the Reconquista, Monteagudo opened the way
for Aragonese exaction of tribute from Maghribi rulers, just as Castilian kings
were doing over Andalusia.4 Moreover, these treaties prefigured that of Tordesil-
las (1494), by which Castile and Portugal were to establish their respective areas
of expansion in the Atlantic.5
These remarkable successes in gaining new dominions brought along the need
to maintain them. Fernando III, who by both inheritance and conquest almost
doubled the extent of his lands, taught a basic lesson on kingship to his son and
heir, the future Alfonso X the Learned. In regards to conquering lands, exacting
tribute, and passing them on, the First General Chronicle (c. 1284) claims that
Fernando remarked to Alfonso:
If you should manage to hold it all in the way I leave it to you, then you are
as good a King as I; and if you should enlarge it, you are better than I; if you
should lose any of it, you are not as good as I.6
This scene encapsulates one of the key challenges faced by rulers: holding
onto and preserving both territory (new and old) and power. The issue was also
addressed in the Portuguese context, this time from son to father. In his rather
moralizing account of the conquest of Ceuta in 1415 (the first step of Portuguese
expansion in Africa), the royal chronicler and librarian Gomes Eanes de Zurara
described a dialogue between John I and his three sons. John wanted them to
perform glorious feats of arms, mostly against infidels, so as to deserve being
knighted. The youngest son, Henrique, would point out that “while the conquest
will not be easy to achieve, no less concern will then have to be devoted to pre-
serving and keeping the city,” to which the father, praising this as proof of wis-
dom, replied that he was aware of the need to “govern and maintain it.”7
The Portuguese ultimately conquered and held on to Ceuta, thus allowing John
to knight his three sons. The Aragonese, in contrast, encountered severe difficul-
ties in ruling Sardinia until the mid-fifteenth century. In The Prince, Machiavelli
famously argued that certain historical examples demonstrate that mantenere lo
stato was a difficult task in no way easier than conquest. He wrote at greater
length about this situation in the Discourses. While maintaining that a conquer-
ing Roman Republic embodied genuine virtù, he analyzed how republics in other
48 Xavier Gil
political arrangements fared in the acquisition and conservation of dominions. In
some cases, he found the enactment of laws prohibiting conquests convenient and
even allowed that such a rule could provide a city with equilibrium and a good
political life. Warning, however, that equilibrium cannot last forever, he recom-
mended organizing a republic in such a way as to be ready to expand if the need
should arise, and at the same time to be able to preserve its gains. Acknowledging
likewise that choices had to be made among the disadvantages inherent to dif-
ferent arrangements, he went back to the Roman example with its characteristic
paradoxical combination of tumultuous domestic politics and successful territo-
rial expansion.8
For all of Machiavelli’s nuances, contemporary republics, princes, and other
polities were pushed towards enlargement, attracted by the riches and glories to be
obtained. After all, Machiavelli himself noted that the desire to annex territories
was natural and acknowledged the pressure on rulers to do so.9 The civic human-
ist tradition was certainly not alien to this mood. In his History of the Florentine
People, the great chancellor of Florence Leonardo Bruni had a character declaim
on the benefits of purchasing the rival city of Lucca in 1329: “Extending borders,
enlarging empire, raising on high the glory and splendor of the state, assuring
our own security and advantage.” Not only did Bruni endorse this position but
he himself and his chancellery waxed eloquent along these lines – using the key
term sicurtà (security) – in public oratory and diplomatic documents concerning
Florentine military policies during the continuous struggles in northern Italy.10
Meanwhile in Naples, leading scholars such as Lorenzo Valla and Antonio Bec-
cadelli (called il Panormita) devoted a masterpiece of humanist biography and a
collection of facta et dicta, respectively, to Alfonso V of Aragon. They praised
the king for his remarkable conquest of the city and kingdom in 1442 and thereby
establishing an international reputation as a valiant and prudent king. In his trans-
lation of Beccadelli to Catalan, Jordi de Centelles pointed to two special feats:
Alfonso had performed an overseas conquest and left the kingdom pacified to his
successor so that, Centellas added, “the whole of Spain won glory.”11 In due time,
Ferdinand the Catholic was to surpass his uncle’s fama. Quite appropriately, in
1534 an anonymous author added a new book on Ferdinand to the third reprint of
Pere Tomic’s Histories and Conquests of the Kings of Aragon and Counts of Bar-
celona (1495). If an accomplished prince was supposed to take on the role of a just
and prudent lawgiver as Jaime I did with efficiency in the newly acquired king-
dom of Valencia, there was little doubt that conquests won reputation for rulers
and countries alike. Only Erasmus and a few others raised their voices deploring
the lure of conquest and strife among Christian princes, though with little success.
Geographical discoveries and colonial profits added new, pressing justifications
for expansion and increased rivalries.
A devoted Erasmian, Vives could not help but echo both expansionist and
pacifist approaches to these issues. In his aforementioned dedication to John III,
who by then had consolidated Portuguese presence in Goa and the Moluccas and
founded the first settlements in Brazil, Vives rejoiced at the progress of the Gospel
and praised John as a Christian king. Of the king Vives writes: “either in Asia or
in Africa, [John] fought with great machinery and forces of men not over small
plots of land or some small hamlet, but for most wide provinces and kingdoms,
obtaining the larger part of the world as the reward to his military good fortunes.”
To this tribute, Vives also added a reminder of the need to preserve what John had
acquired. In stark contrast, in his widely disseminated work on concord and dis-
cord (1529), Vives blamed territorial ambitions and great empires as major causes
of hatred among men and moral corruption for the dominant power.12
The tension between expansion and pacifism would continue over time. Half
a century later, when Spanish and European discourses on just war were tak-
ing shape, Jean Bodin listed seven sources of income for the royal treasury.
The public domain provided the first source. Conquests came in second as they
permitted expenses related to war to be recouped. Bodin specifically mentioned
Spanish encomiendas in the New World to illustrate this point.13 Sometimes,
however, the benefits and profits gained from conquests were not so clear or
immediate. This was the case of Portugal’s and Castile’s conquests of Madeira,
the Azores, the Canary Islands, all Atlantic archipelagos. The first attempts of
conquest were irregular, and some of the islands were not populated. The cam-
paigns increased feelings of rivalry between Portugal and Castile, and the two
offered differing claims over the islands founded on allegations that Visigothic
Tingitania encompassed parts of these lands, on the actions as a continuation of
the Reconquista, and on the jurisdiction granted by new papal bulls. But once
the Treaty of Alcaçobas–Toledo (1479) settled the different disputes between the
two kingdoms, both of them looked ahead to expansion. Significantly, John II
of Portugal modified the royal coat of arms in 1485 and entitled himself “king
of Portugal and the Algarves, of this side of the sea and overseas (aquém e
além mar), in Africa and lord of Guinee,” a title to which “conquests” was soon
added as a generic term for overseas holdings. While Madeira finally became
profitable thanks to the cultivation of sugar, the establishment of the viceroyalty
of Goa in 1505 confirmed the territorial dimension of the Portuguese seaborne
world.14
Historiography has tended to portray the Portuguese empire as seaborne, based
mostly on feitorías and trading outposts, in contrast to the territorial character of
the Spanish realm. It now appears clear, however, that this difference should be
associated with the early phases of Iberian expansion rather than later periods.
Historiography also has a tendency to draw a contrast between conquest and com-
merce as two separate features of early modern empires, assuming that the latter
was better suited for long-term development. Such a distinction is now considered
to be too sharp and the result of hindsight; in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, England, the Netherlands, and other would-be colonial powers all shared
with Spain and Portugal an interest in seizing overseas territories. While it cannot
be denied that differences existed between how these states pursued their colonial
interests, all of them developed, sooner or later, a sense of territoriality.15
Many aspects of Portuguese life at home and in outlying possessions mani-
fested imperial goals. Initially, the label conquista was not applied to Madeira or
the Azores because they were found uninhabited. This reasoning, furthermore,
50 Xavier Gil
meant the islands were not formally categorized as overseas dominions. They
were considered to be a maritime extension of the Algarves and, consequently, not
placed under the jurisdiction of the Council of Overseas Dominions when it was
established in 1642. However, conquista came to be the common term applied
to a variety of situations later on, from territories that were actually conquered
to dominions under indigenous rule that paid tributes to the Portuguese crown to
uninhabited lands. At the same time, concerns emerged out of government circles
in the 1530s and 1540s about the extent to which some dominions could be ruled
effectively. In the later years of John III’s reign, the king even ordered Portuguese
withdrawal from a half dozen outposts on the western coast of Maghrib, notably
Arzila, Azamor, and Alcácer Ceguer. Shortly thereafter, in 1552, the great histo-
rian John de Barros started to publish his Decades of Asia, written in the Roman
fashion and portraying Portugal as a new Augustan empire, successful in outward
expansion once domestic politics had been adequately secured.16 Taking place so
close to the metropole, the abandonment of these outposts, however few when
compared to the overall number of overseas possessions, augured what would
later become an increasingly pressing concern.
Meanwhile in Spain no such doubts seemed to arise until later. A Spanish trans-
lation of Machiavelli’s Discourses (1552) dedicated to Prince Philip explained the
work was meant to help him “add further dominions to his empire.”17 That same
year, Bartolomé de las Casas published his notorious critique against conquista-
dores and encomenderos. However, in a previous memorandum in 1542, he had
stated “this term ‘conquest’ is tyrannical, Mohammedan, abusive, improper and
infernal,” for a conquest could only be conducted against Muslims or Turks who
persecuted Christians and seized their lands. With their crimes, he went on, con-
quistadores were themselves “Moorish barbarians.”18 The entradas and cabalga-
das against native American territories and peoples not yet subdued did not differ
greatly from the ida contra moros during the Reconquista. Similarly, the office of
adelantado (royal officials who possessed military and the judicial authority in
newly won territories) were transposed to the New World. Still, despite the impact
Las Casas was able to make, Spanish officials on the royal councils and the newly
established audiencias (courts) and viceroyalties in Mexico and Peru continued
to press for settlement in order to complete the conquests and for help for friars to
perform evangelization.
Hernán Cortés himself sought to conquer as well as settle. In the ordinances
he drew up for the towns he founded shortly after the conquest of Mexico, Cor-
tés did not fail to assert – once he had listed the formal offices he held – that
“I have recently conquered these lands.” He then went on to emphasize the need
for municipal ordinances:
In the lands that have been newly settled by Spaniards, let there be ordinances
by which vecinos (citizens) and moradores (inhabitants) may govern them-
selves, and in order that Indians and natives may come to know and preserve
knowledge of Our Holy Faith, and in order that these lands may become
ennobled and populated.
In 1529, as he was working restlessly to seek a way to the South Seas and the Spice
Islands, Cortés received a royal provision authorizing him “to discover, conquest
and settle” the islands and lands he would encounter in a planned expedition to
Tidore in the Moluccas, provided – the provision warned – that they had no local
ruler of their own. In 1539, in what must have been his last written words on the
subject, he wrote of “pacifying and settling the lands to be discovered.”19 Both the
Roman practice of coloniae and the recent pattern during the Reconquista taught
the crucial need of securing newly acquired lands by establishing and populating
new communities. In a well-known statement in the General History of the Indies
(1551), Francisco López de Gómara, chaplain of Cortés and chronicler, advised
that “without settlement there is no effective conquest, and if the land is not con-
quered, the people will be not converted. Therefore, the maxim of the conqueror
must be to settle.” It came as no surprise, then, that in the final chapter of the
History of the Conquest of Mexico (1552), devoted to assessing the government
of Mexico’s first viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, López de Gómara wrote: “Don
Antonio settled several places following the fashion of the Roman colonies, to the
greater glory of the Emperor, engraving his name and the year in a marble stele.”20
López de Gómara listed other measures taken by Mendoza such as establish-
ing the printing press and minting devices in New Spain. However, even more
significantly, the viceroy’s arrival in 1535 displaced Hernán Cortés in Mexico.
Cortés returned to Spain four years later, never again to cross the Atlantic. The
subsequent complaints he submitted to the Emperor and the lawsuits he filed
against the viceroy and waged until his death in 1547 represented the end of the
era of the conquistadores and the coming of new administrative authorities. The
crucial change took place not without serious consequences, mostly in Peru where
Gonzalo Pizarro (brother of the murdered conquistador Francisco Pizarro) and
the Almagros (father and son) rose up in rebellion in 1542. Wary of the develop-
ment of a feudal class in the New World, the crown had issued the New Laws
of the Indies that year, seeking to gain more control over encomenderos. Feel-
ing that they were entitled to greater recognition and rewards from Charles V,
the rebels resented these measures and renounced allegiance to their lord, claim-
ing something resembling the exemptio imperii of late medieval Castile. The
first viceroy of Peru Blasco Núñez Vela was killed but his replacement Pedro
La Gasca defeated the revolt in 1548 thanks to a combination of punishment and
appeasement. By that time, what John Elliott has aptly called the second conquest –
the crown over the conquistadores – was well under way. The arrival in 1569 of
the new and resourceful viceroy of Peru Francisco de Toledo confirmed the new
state of affairs. Toledo put an end to the lingering, albeit somewhat tolerated,
Inca resistance in the enclave of Vilcabamba and government institutions became
more firmly established. For all of their pride in having won a whole New World
for a distant king, the conquistadores and their descendants, now evolving into
pobladores (settlers), were finally placed under the authority of the Audiencias
and other royal courts.21
By the 1570s Spanish territorial expansion in the Americas came to a virtual
end. The dominions stretched from the northern fringes of the Viceroyalty of New
52 Xavier Gil
Spain (parallel 30° North) all the way to Chile (parallel 35° South), where the Chi-
chimecas and Araucanos, respectively, maintained a brave, enduring opposition.
Meanwhile the Philippines had become integrated into extensive Spanish com-
mercial networks by means of the Manila galleon. Men and families developed
traditions of service on both sides of the Atlantic. Members of two generations of
the Fernández de Córdoba, Mendoza, and La Gasca families, in particular, were
active in military and government offices in the conquests of Granada and Na-
varra, in the suppression of the Comunero revolt, in Oran and other strongholds
in North Africa, in the presidencies of the Councils of Castile and of the Indies,
and in the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru.22 The second conquest had been
accomplished thanks, in part, to men who were themselves sons of warriors and
conquistadores.
It was at this stage that Philip II promulgated the famous Ordinances of Discov-
ery, New Settlements and Pacification (1573), prepared by Juan de Ovando, the
able president of the Council of the Indies. Consisting of 148 articles, they were
divided into three broad themes conveyed in the title. The first part sought to avoid
any private initiative lacking permission from the crown. Article 29, in particular,
established the proper terms to be hitherto used:
The discoveries should not be labeled as conquests because it is necessary to

undertake them with the peace and care that we desire; we do not wish the
use of the word to provide justification for force or abuse against the Indians.
The second part dealt with the layout of new towns which were to have charac-
teristic features such as the plaza mayor and streets and blocks laid in grids. Part
three described how to gently treat Indians by bringing them into the Christian
faith under the just, benign rule of the Spanish king. The articles on discover-
ies and settlements had clear precedents in instructions given to the viceroys of
Peru, the marquis of Cañete in 1556 and Francisco de Toledo in 1568. Now they
acquired a higher and broader legal status.23
Issued shortly after the victory of Lepanto (1571), the ordinances belonged to a
series of government legislative measures. These encompassed the Ordinaciones
del Patronato real (1574), which sought to fortify the crown’s regalian powers,
and the Relaciones topográficas of Castile (1572) and Relaciones geográficas of
the Indies (1572), which sought to gather information. They also included the
maps of the New World commissioned by the royal cosmographer Juan López de
Velasco and the survey of Mexico’s flora and natural history undertaken by the
royal physician (Philip II’s personal doctor) Francisco Fernández during the first
half of the decade of 1570. Taken together, they evidence a new period of adjust-
ments and consolidation and a new way that the Spanish empire was understood
and managed. By this time, the term criollo was also coming into use to refer to
American-born descendants of Spanish settlers who made up the upper class of
the viceroyalties.24
These ordinances and articles on discovery and pacification are remarkable in
the development of early modern European expansion, all the more so as they
concern an empire whose history has more often been associated with conquest.
While the impact of the ordinances on the urban development has been clear and
long-lasting in the Americas, that of the articles on discoveries and pacification
is more difficult to assess, not to mention the impact of the prohibition on using
the word “conquest.”25 Major works of history exhibit evidence of the suppres-
sion of the word. The Council of Indies and its head chronicler Antonio Herrera
de Tordesillas subjected Fray Pedro de Aguado’s book on the conquest of New
Granada from 1581 and Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’s work on the acquisi-
tion of Mexico from the 1590s to revision so that “to pacify” replaced the word
“to conquer.” Herrera de Tordesillas himself spoke of “the discovery, pacification
and settlement of so many new lands” in his own work on Castile’s expansion
in the New World. Some years later, Luis Cabrera de Córdoba in his great work
on Philip II’s reign, dealt with the arrival of Spaniards to the Philippines with
the words “navigation,” “settlement,” and “pacification.”26 Complying with legal
ordinances or following aesthetic norms might explain these choices. However,
captain and writer Bernardo de Vargas Machuca set himself to openly defend
Spanish actions in the Americas. In Militia and Description of the Indies (1599)
he deplored that unprepared soldiers undertaking “conquests and pacifications”
produced poor results for Spaniards and distinguished between peaceful Indians
and Indians who broke the peace, thus spurring lawful responses from Spaniards
seeking to defend themselves. In Apology of the Western Conquests (written in
1612), Vargas Machuca expressed his wish that copies of the book should sail
the oceans following upon and challenging Las Casas’s Short Account.27 Broadly
speaking, the ordinances signaled an end to the long period of unremitting expan-
sion and a corresponding new awareness of it.28
Portugal, though, followed different dynamics. During the reign of Sebastian
(effective reign after a regency, 1568–1578) a desire to recover some of the North
African outposts abandoned in previous decades emerged, a policy that was now
seen with regret. This new concern would lead to the fateful crusading expedition
to Ksar el-Kebir in 1578. Still, such a crippling setback brought Portuguese con-
quests to an end only in the Maghrib but not so in other parts of Africa, namely
Angola. Since the appointment of Paulo Dias de Novais as “governor, captain
general, conqueror and settler (povoador)” in 1571, Portuguese dominion in the
zone had consolidated, with profitable gains from the slave and sugar trades. After
his death in 1589, further attempts of expansion followed, with mixed results. As
the writer Domingo de Andreu e Brito remarked in 1592, new dominions would
win “greatness” for the king, but a major military effort was needed to achieve
that end, for otherwise it would be better to abandon that territory, so many were
the enemies.29
The king whom Andreu e Brito referred to was Philip II, who had meanwhile
become the king of Portugal, in 1580. As it happened, he inherited a Portuguese
empire undergoing a perceptible turn towards territoriality notably in Brazil and
Central Africa.30 Precisely in the years when Luíz de Camões published Os Lusía-
das (1572), Philip declared an end to conquests. If on previous occasions, such
as 1572, Philip protested that he did not covet states that belonged to others but
54 Xavier Gil
rather professed an interest in maintaining his own,31 now he seemed to reject
conquering new ones altogether. Wars, though, would continue to be waged, but
they were to be understood and practiced as defensive wars, either to maintain
previously won positions, put forward lawful claims (dynastic, territorial, and oth-
ers), or defend the Catholic religion and people. Alexander Farnese’s successes
in the Low Countries from 1578 onward, the easy military march on Portugal to
secure Philip’s new Lusitanian throne, and the Great Armada of 1588 serve as the
clearest examples. Other princes of course had reason to be unconvinced by this
stance and to remain deeply suspicious about what they saw as Spanish leanings
toward universal hegemony and the resulting threats to their security. In any case,
the more or less serious plans to conquer China or at least several coastal posi-
tions, which Philip’s entourage had entertained, were abandoned not only because
of their difficulties but also because of an early awareness of the dangers of over-
stretching. Still, wars would accompany Philip until his death, unsurprisingly
given the many occasions a ruler had to wage them (according to the list drawn by
Giovanni Botero) and the widely diffused Roman idea that a good war acted as a
purga of the bad humors a society fatally developed.32
Subjects, though, took pride in past conquests and sought to obtain political
benefits from them. If native Canarians who helped the Castilians take the islands
of La Palma and Tenerife asked to be considered “Castilians” themselves, native
elites in Tlaxcala and other towns of New Spain addressed a memorandum on
their participation in the conquest of the Aztec empire to Philip II in 1566. Like-
wise, the Cortes of Aragon of 1585 petitioned and obtained places for Aragonese
judges and bureaucrats in the Audiencias of Mexico and Lima as a reward for
Aragonese participation in the conquest of the Indies. Moreover, after fighting off
a French attack in 1619, town officials in São Luís do Maranhao, Brazil, claimed
to be the “true conquerors” and demanded a variety of privileges, among them a
seat in the Portuguese Cortes whenever they were called.33 The cities of Tortosa,
Valencia, Seville, Granada, and others held annual religious and civic commemo-
rations of their respective reconquest, just as Mexico City did regarding Cortés’s
conquest, while mock battles featuring participants playing Christians and “Mus-
lims,” so popular in the Iberian Peninsula, were also performed in the Indies with
native Americans playing the requisite roles. Even the cult to Santiago Matamoros
(“Moor-slayer”) took root among Mexican Indians though with a twist, as they
gave him new meaning as their protector. The word “Reconquista” underwent a
twist of its own in the Americas: Spaniards sometimes used it to reclaim unstable
or challenging positions, so that it acquired a meaning of precariousness quite
unlike the victorious sense of its medieval usage.34 As for outright new conquests,
they were demanded from different milieux. In 1609 a Spanish soldier in the Phil-
ippines, Pedro Sevil, wrote to Philip III encouraging him to conquer Cambodia
in the light of several reasons: the misdeeds of the local rulers; the profits to be
obtained from gold, silk, and other precious items; and the much needed oppor-
tunity for employment for “all the people who are lost, unoccupied and idle” in
Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines. A few years later, the nobility of Valencia,
impoverished by the expulsion of their Morisco vassals also in 1609, asked the
king for a kingdom they could conquer so that they could be compensated for the
losses to their seigneurial incomes or otherwise die in the attempt.35 It was in this
context that the Valencian playwright Guillén de Castro wrote his play Las moce-
dades del Cid (The Youth of the Cid, 1618) which was instrumental in updating
the fama of the great medieval conquistador for a Baroque audience that would
soon grow beyond Spain.
By the early seventeenth century, new theories of conquest were argued as
Europeans reflected on the principles of natural law and their implications for
international relations. In spite of his admonition to preserve peace, Hugo Grotius
developed a radical theory of self-defense that gave way to a straightforward argu-
ment for conquest, annexation, and union both in the Old World and in the over-
seas dominions, an argument which warrior kings made recourse to. Other authors,
such as Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington, would follow suit.36 If Philip II’s
ordinance to bring conquests to an end was by then probably all but forgotten in
European discussions on the matter, it nonetheless should be taken into account in
the history of the early modern European theory and practice of empires.
Notes
* This chapter belongs to the activities of the research project DER-2013-39719-C03-02
of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, and to those of the research
group Grup d’Estudis d’Història del Mediterrani Occidental, 2014-SGR173, of the
Generalitat de Catalunya.
1 Vives, then in Bruges, was one of Erasmus’ closest disciples. Juan Luis Vives, Las dis-
ciplinas, vol. I, Spanish translation from Latin by M. A. Coronel (Valencia: Ajuntament
de Valencia, 1997), 6.
2 Teofilo F. Ruiz, Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 8–9; A King Travels: Festive Tradi-
tions in Late-Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2012), 63, 68, 115, 123, 131.
3 Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150–1350 (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 141–142; Juan Gil, “A apropiaçao da ideia
de império pelos reinos da Península ibérica: Castela,” Penélope 15 (1995), 13–29;
Richard L. Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early
Modern Spain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 20, 26–28,
37, 44–46, 56; Jaume I, “Crònica o Llibre dels feyts,” in Les quatre grans cròniques,
edited by F. Soldevila (Barcelona: Selecta, 1971), 28–29.
4 Other treaties included those of Cazorla (1179) and Almizra (1244) between Aragon
and Castile, and Badajoz (1267) between Castile and Portugal. By way of contrast,
France had mostly abandoned Louis IX’s expansionist policy in Tunis and its sur-
rounding area by this time.
5 Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth, 7; Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Explo-
ration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (London:
Macmillan, 1987), 127–128, 133ff, 175.
6 Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth, 107, 142.
7 Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica da toma de Ceuta (part three of his Crónica do rei
Dom João, 1450), edited by A. Pimenta (Lisbon: Livraria Classica, 1942), 39–41. All
translations are mine.
8 Machiavelli, The Prince, edited by Q. Skinner and R. Price (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), chs. 3, 4, 18, 19, pp. 8, 11–12, 15–17, 63, 68–70; Discourses
56 Xavier Gil
on Livy, translated and edited by J. Conaway Bandanella and P. Bandanella (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), I, ch. 6; II, chs. 3, 4, 19, pp. 36–38, 161–167, 205–206.
9 Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 3, p. 13.
10 The passage from the History, quoted by Eric Nelson, “The Problem of the Prince,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, edited by James Hankins
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 329; for other cases, see Gordon
Griffiths, The Justification of Florentine Foreign Policy Offered by Leonardo Bruni
in his Public Letters (1428–1444) (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo,
1999), 41, 95, 98.
11 Jordi de Centelles, Dels fets e dits del gran rey Alfonso, edited by E. Duran (Barcelona:
Fundació Jaume I, 1990), 72.
12 Vives, Disciplinas, 6–7; Sobre la concordia y la discordia en el género humano. Sobre
la pacificación. Cuán desgraciada sería la vida de los cristianos bajo los turcos, trans-
lated by F. Calero (Valencia: Ajuntament de Valencia, 1997), esp. 217–220.
13 Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la république (1576), b. 6, ch. 2, eds. Ch. Frémont, M.-D.
Couzinet, H. Rochas (Paris: Fayard, 1986), VI, 37, 47, 50–51.
14 Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, chs. 6–7; Eduardo Aznar, “The Conquest of the
Canary Islands,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on
the Encounters between Europe and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Period, edited
by Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 4; Diogo
Ramada Curto, “Historiografía e memória no século XVI,” in his Cultura escrita.
Séculos XV a XVIII (Lisboa: Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Lisboa, 2007), 94.
15 J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 16, 22; “The Seizure of Overseas Ter-
ritories by the European Powers,” in Spain, Europe and the Wider World, 1500–1800
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), ch. 6; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding
the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires,
1500–1640,” American Historical Review 112 (2007), 1367, 1383.
16 Pedro Cardim, “La aspiración imperial de la monarquía portuguesa (s. XVI yXVII),”
in Comprendere le monarchie iberiche. Risorse materiali e rappresentazioni del potere,
edited by G. Sabatini (Rome: Viella, 2010), 45–46, 58–59, 69n; “The Representatives
of Asian and American Cities in the Cortes of Portugal,” in Polycentric Monarchies:
How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony,
edited by P. Cardim, T. Herzog, J. J. Ruiz Ibáñez, and G. Sabatini (Brighton: Sussex Aca-
demic Press, 2012), 44, 47; Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World,” 1367–1368.
17 Quoted by Helena Puigdomènech, Maquiavelo en España (Madrid: Fundación Uni-
versitaria Española, 1988), 43, 99.
18 Quoted by Anthony Pagden in his introduction to Bartolomé de las Casas, Short
Account of the Destruction of the Indies, translated by N. Griffin (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1992), xxxix.
19 Hernán Cortés, Cartas y documentos, intro. M. Hernández Sánchez-Barba (Mexico
City: Porrúa, 1963), 341, 390; the provision for Tidore, quoted by Serge Gruzinski, Les
quatre parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: La Martinière, 2004),
116.
20 The advice, quoted by Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 21; Francisco López de
Gómara, Historia de la conquista de México (1552), intro. J. Gurria (Caracas: Bibli-
oteca Ayacucho, 1979), ch. 250, p. 372. On Gómara’s General History and its dissemi-
nation, see Kagan, Clio and the Crown, 158–160.
21 Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 121–123, 132–133; J. H. Elliott, “Hernán Cortés
y la creación de la Nueva España,” in Itinerario de Hernán Cortés, edited by M. Alma-
gro and C. Esteras (Madrid: Canal de Isabel II, Comunidad de Madrid and Conaculta,
2014), 281; Carmen Bernard and Serge Gruzinski, Histoire du Nouvau Monde, vol. I
(Paris: Fayard, 1991–1993), ch. 14, p. 530.
22 Yuen-Gen Liang, Family and Empire: The Fernández de Córdoba and the Spanish
Realm (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Bernard and Gruzinski,
Histoire du Nouveau Monde, I, pp. 376–377, 530, 532.
23 Modern editions are to be found in Francisco Morales Padrón, Teoría y leyes de la
conquista (Madrid: Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperación, 1979), appendix I (quote,
p. 495); and Francisco de Solano, Normas y leyes de las ciudad hispanoamericana,
vol. I (Madrid: CSIC, 1996), 194–218 (quote, p. 199).
24 Elliott, Empires, 170, 234.
25 Richard L. Kagan and Fernando Marías, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–
1793 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 34; Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Strug-
gle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1949), 131; Elliott, Empires, 77; Manuel Lucena, A los cuatro vientos. Las ciu-
dades en la América española (Madrid: Marcial Pons, Madrid, 2006), 63–64.
26 Kagan, Clio and the Crown, 170–175; Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, Historia de Felipe II
(1619), edited by J. Martínez Millán and C. J. de Carlos, vol. I (Valladolid: Junta de
Castilla y León, 1998), b. 7, ch. 8, 364–365.
27 Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, Apologías y discursos de las conquistas occidentales,
edited by M. L. Martínez de Salinas (Ávila: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993), 18, 26,
32–34.
28 Manfredi Merluzzi, “Negoziazioni e pacificazione nel Nuovo mondo: il caso peru-
viano tra XVI e XVII seccolo,” in Il languaggio del potere nell’età baroca, edited by
F. Cantù, vol. I (Rome: Viella, 2009), 393–420.
29 José M. Martínez Torrejón, “Reversing Empires and Reversing Sorrow in a Portuguese
Planctus,” paper given at the conference of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese
Historical Studies, Albuquerque, NM, 4–7 April 2013; José A. Martínez Torres, “Poli-
tics and Colonial Discourse in the Spanish Empire: The African Atlantic Possessions,
1575–1630,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Latienamerikas 51 (2014), 125–127, 132.
30 Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World,” 1372.
31 Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998), 4–6.
32 Parker, Grand Strategy, 6–9; Giovanni Botero, Della ragione di stato (1589), edited by
Ch. Continisio (Rome: Donzelli, 1997), 87.
33 Aznar, “The Conquest,” 149; Gruzinski, Les quatre parties, 127; S. Penén and
P. Dronda (eds.), Fueros observancias y actos de corte del reino de Aragón, vol. I
(Zaragoza: Castro, 1866; facsimile ed., Zaragoza, 1991), 46; Cardim, “The Repre-
sentatives,” 44.
34 Ruiz, A King Travels, 38, 40; Bernard and Gruzinski, Histoire du Nouveau Monde, I,
p. 522; II, p. 353; Miguel Ángel Ladero, “Spain, c. 1492: Social Values and Struc-
tures,” in Implicit Understandings, edited by Schwartz, 107; Javier Domínguez García,
“Santiago mataindios. La continuación de un discurso medieval en la Nueva España,”
Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 54 (2006), 33–56; Tamar Herzog, “Reconquista
y repoblación: modelos ibéricos, realidades americanas y respuestas peninsulares (ss.
XVI–XVIII),” in Las monarquías española y francesa (siglos XVI–XVIII), edited by A.
Dubet and J. J. Ruiz Ibáñez (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2010), 45–55.
35 Sevil, quoted by Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World,” 1377; James Casey, The King-
dom of Valencia in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), 245.
36 David Armitage, “Introduction,”; John Robertson, “Empire and Union,” both in Armitage,
ed., Theories of Empire, 1450–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), xvii–xviii, 26–28.
4 ‘All things to all men’
Political messianism in late
medieval and early modern Spain
Bryan Givens
I learned many things during my time as Teofilo Ruiz’s student, but easily the
most important was that he helped me appreciate social history, cultural his-
tory, and popular history on their own terms, and not just as addenda or parts of
the explanatory context for the decisions of elites. I found that I enjoy learning
about the beliefs and worldviews of ‘commoners’ of the early modern period,
particularly in their more bizarre forms like witchcraft, radical millenarianism,
and sebastianismo. And I learned that the boundary between elite and common is
not nearly so well defined in practice as those who like their theories neat might
prefer. To illustrate these lessons, I will now briefly discuss the powerful and mul-
tifaceted Iberian legend of ‘El Encubierto,’ the Hidden One.
Encubertismo was the Iberian variant of the broader Last World Emperor tra-
dition, the belief that, before the end of time, a final Christian Emperor would
reform the Church, defeat Islam, and bring peace and justice to society. Encubert-
ismo was distinguished from other versions of the legend by a strong emphasis on
the necessity of the Hidden King unifying the separate kingdoms of ‘Hispania,’
and on the centrality of his role as the leader of a final, decisive crusade against
Islam.1 In this essay, I will demonstrate how various constituencies in late medi-
eval and early modern Spain – both elite and popular – used, appropriated, and
refashioned this legend in order to gain support for their own millenarian visions
of the future. These visions often differed radically in their programs for the com-
ing Golden Age, but none could entirely eliminate either the hierarchical or the
populist elements of the legend’s original formulation in the High Middle Ages.
Given the expectations for the Hidden One, it should come as no surprise that
this legend had particular resonance during the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic.
The prophetic matrix in which hopes for Ferdinand grew was largely established
through the writings of Aragonese authors such as Arnau of Vilanova (c.1238–
1316) and the Franciscan theologian, Fr. Francesc Eiximenis (c.1330–c.1412).
Arnau, who was the physician to Peter III of Aragon, was the first Iberian writer
to reassign the earlier Hohenstaufen prophecies of a Last World Emperor to the
House of Aragon. He did this by emphasizing the eschatological significance of
the marriage between Peter III and Constance of Sicily, the granddaughter of
Frederick II.2 In his work Vae mundo in centum annis, he claimed that a “Bat” –
who was clearly a secular ruler from the Aragonese dynasty – would one day
‘All things to all men’ 59
recapture and rebuild Jerusalem as a Christian city. The term ‘Bat’ had a particular
resonance in medieval Iberia because bats were held to eat mosquitos, and Iberian
Muslims were often referred to pejoratively as mosquitos, especially in the works
of Arnau. In fact, the destruction of Islam by the House of Aragon was a central
theme in all of his eschatological writings, and he characterized it as a necessary
condition for the eventual defeat of the Antichrist.3
Eiximenis was also closely connected to the Aragonese court and wrote
widely on the end times, the poverty of the clergy, and the radical reformation
of both the Church and Christian society. In his Vida de Jesucrist, he predicted
a time of great persecution, which would be followed by a wondrous age during
which Islam would be destroyed and justice would prevail under the guidance
of a great Christian King and the Angelic Pope, working in tandem for the good
of Christendom.4 Eiximenis also had a great deal of influence in spreading the
ideal of self-governing communes as the best form of human organization. He
thought that communes would ensure the public good as opposed to the self-
ish, private desires of the magnates who ruled in his day. So, his golden age of
the future would be one in which the nobility and indeed all hierarchies disap-
peared, though he did leave room for the benevolent paternalism of the Last
World Ruler and the Angelic Pope. Because of these themes, his writings were
popular during the revolutionary Germanías in Valencia in the 1520s, which
will be discussed later.5
Interest in the prophetic destiny of a Spanish King grew significantly during
the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic. The earliest example was the poem, ‘Per
Barcelona,’ written in 1472. Most of it is a fairly typical High Renaissance pan-
egyric, but it contains a number of distinctly eschatological characterizations of
Ferdinand. For example, it was the Holy Spirit who prepared the place for the
visit of the Prince, whom the entire world awaited as Monarch. It also described
the unnamed (but clearly identifiable) Prince “as the excellent Bat / whom the
kingdoms of Spain await / a noble lord of great perfection / the remedy for the evil
that afflicts them,” whose advent was prophesied in scripture. And later, Stanza
XI stated that there was “one God in heaven, one King on earth whom all should
fear,” who preserved all kingdoms by arms in war and by laws in peace, the poet
leaving little doubt regarding the identity of this favored king.6
Another example of a pro-Ferdinand eschatology in the 1470s was the
Repetición del derecho miltar e armas (1476) by Pere Azamar. Azamar was a
doctor of law with close connections to the Aragonese court.7 He began his dis-
course with a pseudo-Joachimist prophecy predicting the destruction of Islam by
a small king, the son of an eagle, and whose name means ‘fortress.’ Azamar then
went on to explain that that eagle was Constance of Sicily, thus echoing Arnau.
He also quoted a prophecy attributed to Merlin that the son of the eagle would
arise, subjugate the Muslims of Granada, conquer Africa, and destroy the sect of
Muhammad. He would then recover Jerusalem, subjugate all the “brutal kings
and bestial races,” and become sole monarch of the world. Azamar concluded by
addressing Prince Ferdinand directly, saying he must be the ruler prophesied to
accomplish these great deeds.8
60 Bryan Givens
During the late fifteenth century, Fr. Joan Alamany was the most influential
writer on the end times. He composed De la venguda del Anticrist in Valencian
sometime in the 1480s, but it spread rapidly in a variety of Castilian versions in
the following years. Most of the treatise is about the advent of the Antichrist,
but the second part of the work examines the reign of the good king known as
‘L’Encobert.’ According to Alamany, after a time of persecution by Jews and Mus-
lims, God would raise up a Hidden One from the line of Hector as a Spanish king
who would destroy all the enemies of the Christian faith. This ruler would help the
New David – who is clearly the Angelic Pope for Alamany – defend Christendom
against a Muslim invasion. The Hidden One would then defeat his enemies in
Spain, in North Africa, and would seize Egypt and Jerusalem, thus completing the
destruction “of all peoples of the accursed Muhammad.”9 After destroying Islam
and restoring the Empire, he would return to Spain to give the city of Hercules
(i.e. Seville) to the New David. All of this would be the fulfillment of Isaiah’s
famous prophecy that the lion would lie down with the lamb peacefully, with the
Encobert taking the role of the Lion and the Angelic Pope taking the role of the
Lamb: the perfect cooperation between Emperor and Pontiff that had proven to
be so elusive in the actual history of the Christian West. This cooperation would,
eventually, lead to the mass conversion of the Jews and Muslims and, at long-last,
the desire for “one flock and one shepherd” (cf. John 10:16) would be realized
throughout the earth. Alamany never explicitly identified the Hidden One, though
he did refer to the Encobert making camp “near the fountain of Ferro” during his
wars against the Muslims of Spain. This is a helpful clue both for the date of the
work and for who the Encobert was in Alamany’s mind, simply because the Castle
of Ferro in Granada was captured by Ferdinand in 1487.10
Alonso de Jaén was also closely associated with the royal court, and he pro-
duced a treatise, Espejo del mundo, to prove Ferdinand’s eschatological role. It
was written in four parts; the first was composed sometime soon after Ferdinand
and Isabella’s marriage in 1469, and the fourth was left incomplete by the author’s
death in 1490. A large part of the work was taken up in an examination of the vari-
ous prophecies and signs that proved that Ferdinand was the Desired King. After
the destruction of the ‘Moors’ and Turks, the world would be ruled by the Pope, the
King and the Patriarch of Jerusalem in an age of peace, prosperity, and universal
conversion to the One Faith. Alonso de Jaén praised Ferdinand and Isabella by
name for ending the confusion Castile had endured for most of the fifteenth century
by punishing injustice. This element of social justice is a strong theme throughout
the work and, despite being from an elite background himself, he reserved his most
ferocious ire for members of the ruling classes he deemed corrupt. This comes out
clearly in his description of the Universal Monarch’s future program. Ferdinand
(again identified by name) would unite the kingdoms of Spain, would fight against
all “sins, vices, and abominations” in his kingdoms, and would punish unjust rulers
and protect the poor. He would reform the priesthood and end both its abuses and
its wealth. And, last but not least, he would entirely destroy Islam.11
The fall of Granada on January 2, 1492, and with it the end to the long Recon-
quista, was celebrated with the enthusiastic tolling of church bells throughout
Western Christendom, an understandable response by people still terrified by the
advance of Islam after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The conquest of Gra-
nada helped confirm the idea that Ferdinand was the Hidden One in Spain – an idea
he did nothing to discourage – and helped spread the possibility that he was the
prophesied Last Emperor outside the Iberian Peninsula. The Castilian poet Juan
del Encina claimed that Ferdinand with his army and Isabella with her prayers
had regained what King Rodrigo had lost by his sins (i.e. the loss of Spain to the
Muslims). And, in Italy, Jacopo Sannazaro and Carlo Verardi both produced plays
referring to Ferdinand and Isabella in prophetic terms within months of the fall of
Granada.12 Perhaps the most interesting case of a work favorable to the Catholic
Monarchs due to the Conquest of Granada was the De expugnatione Granatae,
completed in July, 1492, by the Florentine humanist, Ugolino Verino. Verino was
actually in the midst of composing an epic poem, the Carliade, in which he identi-
fied Charles VIII of France as the Renovator Mundi, when he heard of the fall of
Granada. Such was his enthusiasm that he abandoned the Carliade, and instead
transferred his hopes to Ferdinand as the Last World Emperor. Verino saw Ferdi-
nand and Isabella’s just reign as the fulfillment of a Sibylline prophecy, and the
fall of Granada as a harbinger of the return of justice to the earth. Through the
force of events, Ferdinand had gained a convert.13
Another well-connected proponent of Ferdinand’s end-times role was the
highly regarded Valencian astrologer Jerónimo Torella (1450–1508), who served
as a physician to Ferdinand himself. He published ‘De Rege Valentino’ in Valen-
cia in 1496, and the first part is a fairly standard apologetic piece, using both
astrological and prophetic evidence to prove that Ferdinand was the promised
“Bat.”14 The second section holds more interest, at least potentially, because it
claims to be a conversation between Ferdinand and Torella himself. In response
to the “many threats by stars and signs and portents” sent by the Lord, Torella had
the king ask three questions about the timing of the events foretold, and especially
about the timing of the recovery of Constantinople by Christian kings. Torella
then answered, addressing the “Invincible Prince” directly, saying that the events
would soon be fulfilled, and that Constantinople would be recovered by Chris-
tians in either 1507 or 1512.15 While we certainly cannot uncritically accept the
dialogue as an accurate transcript of an actual conversation between the Catholic
King and his astrologer-physician, neither can we dismiss it as nothing more than
a fabrication. After all, it was published – produced for public consumption – by
a well-known member of the royal court, while the King was still alive, and thus
with at least the tacit approval of Ferdinand himself. At the least, it is evidence of
the regime’s acceptance of the possibility that Ferdinand was the Hidden One and
of its active, if indirect, advocacy of that position.
Support for Ferdinand’s prophetic role did not only exist among the secular and
ecclesiastical elites of late medieval Spain, however. This is most clearly demon-
strated with the case of Sor María de Santo Domingo, also known as the Beata of
Piedrahita. Born around 1480, she pursued a religious life from an early age, and
professed as a Dominican tertiary at the age of sixteen, after which she quickly
gained a reputation as a visionary gifted by God.16 Sometime around 1509,
62 Bryan Givens
Ferdinand came under her influence, and she was, apparently, able to convince
him that he was the Hidden One and that he would not die until after he conquered
Jerusalem. The royal chroniclers, Hernando de Pulgar and Alonso de Santa Cruz,
both report (unfavorably) that such was his faith in her prediction that, while on
his death bed in January, 1516, he refused to receive the Last Rites because he did
not think he was going to die then since he had not yet conquered Jerusalem.17
Apparently, propaganda used by rulers to bolster their regimes could sometimes
take in those same rulers as well.
Ferdinand died on January 23, 1516, but hopes for the Hidden King did not die
with him. Ultimately, his grandson, Charles of Ghent, was the heir not only of Fer-
dinand’s kingdoms but also of the apocalyptic expectations that had surrounded
him. As heir from birth to the lands, titles, and pretensions of three great European
dynasties, Charles was, in many ways, an even more ideal candidate to be the Last
World Emperor than Ferdinand had been. Indeed, the era in which Charles lived
was one of intense prophetic speculation throughout Latin Christendom, and the
dramatic events of the early sixteenth century were seen by many as fulfilling
the apocalyptic program they hoped for (or feared). But the unique confluence of
the lands, claims, and ambitions of the Habsburgs, the Burgundians, and the Tras-
támaras in the person of Charles of Ghent led to a new level of confidence among
his supporters that he was, indeed, the long-hoped-for Last Ruler.
Without a doubt, the most prominent supporter of Charles V as the Last World
Emperor was his imperial chancellor, Mercurino Arborio di Gattinara (1465–
1530). Gattinara was a Piedmontese jurist and humanist scholar with a long his-
tory of service to the House of Habsburg. Sometime in 1515 he read the works
of Joachim of Fiore, and later had a dream in which he saw the universal triumph
of Christendom under the leadership of King Charles. From then until his death
in 1530, Gattinara would be a tireless advocate of the ideal of Universal Mon-
archy and the identification of Charles of Burgundy as the promised Last World
Emperor. As a result of the dream, Gattinara wrote a short tract entitled Oratio
Supplicatoria, laying out what was, by then, a fairly standard amalgam of prophe-
cies, which he used to predict that Charles would solve the evils stemming from
the ‘plurality of princes’ by becoming the Universal Monarch and defeating the
infidels, and thus bringing about an era of peace, justice, and prosperity to the
unified Christian world.18
Charles was unanimously elected Holy Roman Emperor on June 28, 1519.
And, for Gattinara, this was not merely the result of an excellent ground game
by the Habsburgs or the generous bribes distributed among the seven Imperial
Electors: it was the foreordained plan of God. In a memorial he wrote to Charles
on July 12, 1519 (though before he knew the outcome of the election), he made
this prediction:
Sire, God has been very merciful to you: he raised you above all the Kings
and princes of Christendom to a power such as no sovereign has enjoyed
since your ancestor Charles the Great. He has set you on the way towards
a world monarchy, towards the uniting of all Christendom under a single
shepherd.19
The formal recognition of his election as Emperor was given to Charles near Bar-
celona by a delegation from the German estates on November 29, 1519. Gattinara
responded to the news with another oration to the young Charles. The Chancellor
welcomed the reign as a harbinger of renewed imperial authority, which was, in
Gattinara’s mind, a necessary condition for the achievement of the “one flock and
one shepherd” promised in the Gospel of John. Under Charles – the true heir of
Augustus, Trajan, and Charlemagne – the Empire would be restored according to
God’s will.20
One of the high points of prophetic expectation about Charles came in the after-
math of his army’s unexpected victory over his French rival, Francis I, at Pavia
on February 24, 1525. The news that the French King had been captured in battle
shocked European rulers, and the victory helped spur messianic speculation about
Charles throughout the West. Some members of Charles’ government wanted to
capitalize on the opportunity, and the most important of these, besides Gattinara,
was Alfonso de Valdés, Charles’ long-time advisor and Latin secretary. Valdés
was a protégé of Gattinara and also a true believer in Charles’ messianic destiny.
This is most clearly seen in a short tract published in the late spring of 1525,
Relación de las nuevas de Italia. Written by Valdés and “corrected by the Grand
Chancellor,” the Relación clearly represents a volley of regime propaganda to
rally European opinion in favor of Charles’ claims and against his rivals, espe-
cially the King of France. Most of the work is simply a description of the battle,
but at the end Valdés provided his readers with an interpretation of the signifi-
cance of the Emperor’s victory:
All Christendom should celebrate this victory, because without a doubt, it

seems that the Lord Our God wishes to put an end to the many evils, it has
suffered for so long. . . . It appears that God has miraculously given this vic-
tory to the Emperor, not only so that he can defend Christendom and resist
the power of the Turk, if they dare to attack it, but [after] calming these civil
wars (thus they should be named since they are among Christians), to go to
seek out the Turks and Moors in their lands, lifting up the Holy Catholic Faith
as his ancestors did, to take possession of the Empire of Constantinople and
the Holy House of Jerusalem which, for our sins, is occupied [by Muslims].
As is prophesied by many, under this most Christian prince, the whole world
will receive our holy Catholic faith, and the words of our Redeemer will be
fulfilled: fiet unum ovile et unum pastor.21
The message to the princes of Europe was clear: Charles was the chosen of God
to bring peace to Christendom and defeat the forces of Islam. The moral was also
clear: anyone who opposed Charles’ mission opposed the manifest will of God.
The desire for Charles to expel the Turks from Europe was doubtlessly felt
with particular urgency after the unexpected annihilation of the Hungarian army
at Mohács on August 29, 1526. The loss of Hungary suddenly shifted the fron-
tier of holy war much, much closer to the Central European heartland. Charles’
response to the Turkish threat was complicated by a renewed anti-Habsburg alli-
ance between France and the Papacy, an alliance that led to the War of the League
64 Bryan Givens
of Cognac. Also, in May of 1527, an Imperial army, ill-paid and mutinous, fell on
the city of Rome with a fury. For over a week, the troops pillaged Rome, leaving a
plundered and dispirited city in their wake. For Charles, who did not order or want
the city to be looted, the Sack of Rome presented a considerable public relations
dilemma, and it was essential both for him and for his supporters to present some
kind of justification for the army of the most prominent and powerful Catholic
monarch in Europe looting the Holy City.22
Alfonso de Valdés again rose to the occasion in his Dialogue of Lactantius and
an Archdeacon (1527). In the first part, Valdes offers a full-throated defense of
Charles, instead blaming Clement VII and his advisors’ deceitful scheming for
both the sacking and the impious war that led to it. In the second part, he alluded
to prophecies predicting that the emperor would punish Rome for its sins, a clear
echo of the imperial ‘Chastiser of the Church’ tradition since the time of Freder-
ick II. The Dialogue clearly represented the views of someone very close to the
regime of Charles V, and it received considerable positive comment in Spanish
and Imperial circles.23
Pro-Habsburg interpretations were not limited to Spaniards, however. One
prominent Italian supporter was Giles of Viterbo, cardinal, general of the Augus-
tinians, cabalist, and church reformer. In his Scechina, which he dedicated to
Charles and which was published in 1529, Giles classified the Sack of Rome as
an act of God’s just wrath against a corrupt church, and identified Charles as a
“prince sent from heaven” and the “New Cyrus” sent by God to purge Christian
society of its evils.24
The eschatological need for Charles as the Last World Emperor also became
apparent in the early autumn of 1529 with news of the Ottoman siege of Vienna.
Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to the Habsburg capital on September 29, but
Charles remained in Italy to maintain the fragile peace there. Although the defend-
ers of Vienna were outnumbered by at least four-to-one, they put up a spirited
defense until a precarious supply situation and worsening weather caused Sulei-
man to lift the siege and retreat to Hungary on October 15. The news prompted
rejoicing throughout Christendom as evidence of God’s providential care for His
beleaguered people.25
The poet Ludovico Ariosto was also influenced by all these events, and by
Charles’ long-delayed coronation by the Pope in February 1530. In the final ver-
sion of Orlando Furioso, which was published in 1532, he added a number of pro-
phetic elements to the earlier versions. The allusion to Charles becomes explicit in
the twenty-third stanza: “The imperial flags and holy cross I know / Fixed on the
verdant shore . . . / And see all, whereso’er the warriors wend / to the fifth Charles’
triumphant captains bend.”26 And in the next three stanzas the Emperor’s eschato-
logical destiny is made clear: God would raise up, from Austrian and Aragonese
blood, the most just and prudent Emperor since Augustus, and unify the world in
one flock under the protection of one shepherd, as Christ had promised. This high
praise for Charles is particularly significant because in the earliest version of the
epic, from 1516, it was Francis I of France who had pride of place as the “happy
emperor” whose “fortunate reign” (Canto XXVI) had been revealed just the year
before at the battle of Marignano (Sept. 13–14, 1515). By 1532, the geopolitical
situation in Italy had shifted decisively against France (as had the policy of Ari-
osto’s patrons, the d’Estes). Thus, in the final edition, Ariosto revised the poem
again to include a prophecy of Merlin predicting the outcome of the Battle of
Pavia and the triumph of Charles over Francis. Thus prophetic poetry is revealed
to be commentary on current events.27
Gattinara died in 1530 and Valdés followed him to the grave a mere two years
later. With their deaths, Charles lost his most important advocates for his mil-
lenarian role, and after 1532, no one directly connected to the regime produced
eschatological defenses of its policies. Charles’ decisive battle over the German
Protestants at Mühlberg on April 24, 1547, led to a revival of hopes by other writ-
ers for his apocalyptic destiny, however. One of the participants in the battle, the
Spanish soldier and courtier, Hernando de Acuña, placed an explicitly eschato-
logical interpretation on the battle. In a sonnet addressed to the Emperor, he says
It draws near, Lord, or has already arrived

The glorious age promised by heaven
Only one flock and only one shepherd in the earth
By fate is reserved for your time.28
Similarly, the Viennese physician and astrologer, Wolfgang Lazius (1514–1565),

published his Fragmentum Vaticinii sometime in 1547 after Mühlberg. In it, he
argued extensively from astrology and a long list of prophecies that “Our Most
Holy Emperor Charles” was the “Roman and Christian King” who would unite
the German and French dynastic lines and who would rule as the Last World
Emperor. Strengthened by his victory over the Protestant heretics, the Emperor
would soon triumph over the infidels and subjugate Jerusalem, as a prelude to
spreading the gospel throughout the earth.29
The political tide in the Empire soon turned against Charles, however, and he
was finally overwhelmed by the combination of his enemies – the French, the
Turks, and the Lutherans. In 1554, he began resigning his many offices, and even-
tually settled near the Hieronymite monastery at Yuste in Extremadura. He died
there on September 21, 1558. It was the end of an era, and the end of the reign of
the man who, perhaps, had the best chance to fulfill the expectations people held
of him that he was the promised Last World Emperor.30 One of the most remark-
able aspects of Charles’ remarkable reign, however, was how resistant he was
himself to the possibility that he was the prophesied Last World Emperor, and
there is no simple answer as to why he rejected those beliefs. However, it is well
known that Charles was a deeply traditional and often melancholic man.31 Charles
was cautious; he never displayed a sense of overconfidence that everything would
automatically go well for him because of a heavenly destiny, or the belief that
success would be miraculously vouchsafed for him. This is in contrast to the dis-
astrous actions of his grandson, Sebastian I of Portugal, who was the principal
subject of the Portuguese variant of the ‘Hidden One’ legend. Pérez García and
Catalá Sanz, in their study of the agermanado conspiracy of 1541, concluded that
66 Bryan Givens
Charles rejected being identified with the figure of the Encubierto because the tra-
dition’s radical potential had been revealed in the double revolts of the Comuneros
in Castile and the Germanías in Valencia. While these rebellions were probably
not the only reasons Charles rejected a prophetic role for himself, it does seem that
those experiences only enhanced Charles’ suspicions of messianic and utopian
schemes.32 As his son, Philip II, would later tell a Papal Nuncio, “it was never the
practice of the emperor, my father, to believe in or act on [prophecies].”33
Perhaps the most interesting manifestation of the Encubierto legend took place
during the revolutionary Germanías in Valencia from 1519 to 1523. Like the con-
temporaneous Comuneros Revolt in Castile, the Germanías had their origin in
long-standing grievances over control of municipal offices, in the perennial ten-
sion between rich nobles and poor artisans, and in the general suspicion of the
intentions of Charles and his Flemish advisors. However, there was a number of
additional dynamics that created an intensified climate of crisis, fear, and despera-
tion in Valencia in the years leading up to the eruption of armed rebellion. By the
summer of 1519, Valencia and its environs had endured a year-long subsistence
crisis, and had been under threat from Muslim corsairs for years. In June, the
urban militia – which was mostly made up of members of the craft guilds, or
germanías – was mobilized to defend the city in case of a raid. An attack never
came but the plague did, an outbreak which proved to be the straw that broke the
camel’s back. The plague seemed to many to be just the latest sign of God’s fear-
some judgment, and certain monks began to advocate radical, and even violent,
means to eradicate sin, especially sodomy, from their midst and thereby appease
the wrath of God. Matters came to a head on August 7 when a homosexual man
who had taken refuge in the cathedral was bodily dragged from the church by
a mob. The nervous officials called on the local militia to restore order, but the
militiamen refused to help them, and the man was burned to death, leaving the
traditional authorities severely discredited.34
By the spring of 1520, the city of Valencia was in open revolt, and the next
summer the revolt had spread throughout the entire kingdom and had become
more and more radical in the process. Attacks against the nobles and their estates
became more frequent, and more and more Muslims were forcibly baptized. Anti-
seigneurialism and hostility to the Mudejars (Muslims living under Christian rule)
were not unrelated phenomena, especially in Valencia. Because of their skill as
farmers, Valencian Muslims had been spared the order of conversion that forced
their Granadan coreligionists to receive baptism in 1501. And, in the intervening
years, there was a widespread perception that many Valencian nobles shielded
their Muslim tenants from pressure to convert. For many of the working poor, the
nobles’ tolerance of the ‘enemies of the faith’ was an intolerable betrayal of what
they felt should have been a common Christian identity; the fact that the nobles’
motives were perceived to be primarily financial did not reassure the guildsmen
that the great landowners had the interests of Christendom as their top priority.35
All of these perceived problems required an interpretive matrix by which they
could be understood and resolved. And in early sixteenth-century Valencia, there
was just such an interpretive matrix readily at hand: the Aragonese millenarian
tradition, particularly as interpreted by the Spiritual-leaning Franciscan, Fr. Franc-
esc Eiximenis. Eiximenis’ populist eschatology was well known in Valencia in the
period, especially by members of the regular clergy: the first part of his Dotzè Lli-
bre del Christià was published in the city of Valencia in 1484, with the second part
following in 1499. Eiximenis’ urban syndicalism provided a model and an ideal to
many of the early agermanado leaders. The Franciscan’s hostility and suspicion
toward the corrupt and arrogant nobility also found a sympathetic hearing among
the rebels of the early 1520s, as did his rejection of coexistence with Muslims,
though he had favored complete expulsion rather than forced conversion.36
The messianic elements of the tradition did not manifest themselves openly
until the Revolt itself was almost lost to the rebels, however. After the stinging
defeat of the royal army at Gandia on July 25, 1521, a reinforced loyalist force
crushed the agermanado army in turn on August 30 at Orihuela, and was able to
retake the city of Valencia by November. Many continued to resist into the next
spring, though, and on March 10, 1522, a man named Enrique Manrique de Rib-
era appeared in the Cathedral square of Xátiva. He reassured the craftsmen that
their victory was assured, and that the Day of Judgment was imminent. With that
in mind, he preached war against the mudejars and soon led punitive expeditions
against the Muslim villages.37
The success of the raids only solidified his reputation and in a second speech,
on March 21, he revealed his true identity to the crowd. In a telling bid for tradi-
tional legitimacy, he claimed to be the long-lost son of the Infante Juan, the son
and heir of Ferdinand and Isabella who had died at a young age in 1497.38 The
long-lost prince went on to claim that he had lived as a simple and illiterate shep-
herd near Gibraltar until he had received a vision from those most eschatological
of prophets, Enoch and Elijah, who commanded him to board a ship. He duly
obeyed and traveled to Valencia in 1520, where he had lived as a holy hermit until
he had been compelled to join the rebellion of the Germanías publically. But he
was not only the legitimate heir to the Spanish throne, he was also the prophesied
Encubierto, and he promised that, within three days, his followers would sack the
Church of its treasures and distribute them “to the poor lambs of God who had
nothing to eat.” Not only that, but his followers would also become a holy army
that would conquer Africa, subjugate Islam, reconquer Jerusalem, and, ultimately,
defeat the forces of the Antichrist. His impassioned speech quickly won the crowd
to his side and he began to send messages to other towns proclaiming his reign. He
then confiscated the goods of the nobility, and outfitted himself in regal style. In
Xátiva and its surroundings, the syndicalist revolt of the Germanías had become
the midwife to a charismatic and apocalyptic dictatorship.39
The news of this self-proclaimed prophetic king was greeted with alarm by the
viceroy, and he began to press the siege of the holdout towns more vigorously.
On April 15, Manrique himself was wounded in the fighting. On May 18, after
recovering, he launched a plan to retake Valencia for the revolution, but his plot
failed because it had been revealed to the authorities. He fled to the village of
Burjassot, where he was killed by the local villagers. He was decapitated and his
corpse was sent to the Viceroy in Valencia. His head was publically mounted at
68 Bryan Givens
the Quart gate, and his body was burned after his sentence of death was solemnly
pronounced by the Inquisition. It is clear that the authorities wanted everyone to
know the pretender to the throne had been utterly defeated.40
The death of the prophetic claimant did little to quell faith in the prophecy,
however. We know of at least three pretenders who claimed to be the Hidden
King within a year of his death. The first was a silversmith named Juan Bernabé;
the second was an unnamed fruit and oil seller from Andalusia who resembled
Manrique de Ribera; and the third was grammarian named Antonio Navarro.
All sought to use their identity as the true Encobert to rally continued resistance
against the royal regime, and all three were caught and executed along with their
followers.41 The desperate hope of the true believers in the promise of the Hidden
One was seemingly ineradicable, though. In 1526, a Castilian named Alonso de
Vitoria entered the region stating he was the true Encubierto and soon gathered
a modest following that included a variety of artisans. He, too, was eventually
exposed, tried, and beheaded.42
Even so, in 1541, a generation after the rebellion, another plot was exposed that
revealed that some still held to their faith in the Encubierto. In the spring of that
year, a wool-dresser named Bernardino Acero traveled to Valencia. He was able
to convince the baker Jeroni Cerdà and the carpenter, Antoni Soldevila – both
of whom had taken part in the Germanías – that the Encubierto had survived
Burjassot by switching places with a shepherd and then fleeing to Flanders. All
the Chosen One needed, Acero claimed, was funds to help facilitate his journey
to Valencia and thereby speed the millennium on. The fact that this story was lit-
tle more than a scam concocted by Acero does not mean it is devoid of historical
interest. Clearly, the legend of the Encubierto still resonated deeply in Valencia
two decades after the armed rebels had been decisively defeated. By the summer
of 1541, Cerdà, Soldevila, and Acero had all been executed, and many others
punished.43 Though the royal officials crushed all of these ill-fated attempts to
overturn society, they did not succeed in eradicating either the hope or the legend;
they merely pushed both underground.
The legend and figure of the Hidden One played a variety of roles in late medi-
eval and early modern Spain: it was used to enhance the authority of the ‘proto-
nationalist’ royal regime under Ferdinand; it was used to support the last gasp of
Christian internationalism under Charles; and it was used to validate the revolu-
tionary egalitarianism of Enrique Manrique de Ribera and his imitators during
the Germanías of Valencia. What are we to make of this versatile tradition then?
Only that the legend had its own kind of internal logic and dynamic, independ-
ent, at least in part, of the various ways different authors and leaders used it.
Even in its most regime-supporting forms, it could not completely eliminate its
populist elements since the Hidden King would be known for bringing justice to
society. And, on the other hand, even Enrique Manrique de Ribera did not seek to
overturn the ideal of monarchy itself – after all, he claimed to be the grandson of
Ferdinand. The fact that the legend could not be separated from both its hierar-
chical and populist elements should not be surprising; after all, it was in its own
way a revolutionary legend, albeit with God being the primary actor in what was
conceived to be a universal and radical change to the current order of things. As
such, it always served as the ultimate trump card for the socio-political program it
was being used to support. The legend of the Encubierto was the matrix by which
many people in late medieval and early modern Spain, both among the elites and
among the poor, expressed their hopes for their version of an ideal world. And, in
that way, the Hidden One is awfully revealing.
Notes
1 Vicent J. Vallés Borrás, La Germanía (Valencia: Institució Alfons El Magnànim,
2000), 32.
2 Eulàlia Duran and Joan Resquens, Profecia i poder al Renaixement: Texts pròfetics
favorables a Ferran el Catòlic (València: Eliseu Clement, 1997), 31ff.
3 Vallés Borrás, 33.
4 Duran and Resquens, 42ff.
5 Vallés Borras, 28–29, 33.
6 Duran and Resquens, 299–325.
7 Ibid., 327–328.
8 Ibid., 339–341.
9 Ibid., 108–120.
10 Ibid., 114–125.
11 Ibid., 136–143, 240–297.
12 Scaramuzza Vidoni, “Conquista de Granada y Simbología del Reino Universal en Tex-
tos Españoles e Italianos,” in Literatura Hispánica Reyes Católicos y Descubrimiento,
edited by Manuel Criado deVal (Barcelona: PPU, 1989), 13–15.
13 Ibid., 16; Ugolino Verino, De expugnatione Granatae, edited by Inmaculada López
Calahorro (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2002), 15–32,104–109, 136–137, 175.
14 Vallés Borrás, 35; Duran and Resquens, 369–382.
15 Duran and Resquens, 370–383.
16 Jodi Bilinkoff, “A Spanish Prophetess and Her Patrons: The Case of Maria de Santo
Domingo,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23, 1 (Spring 1992), 21–34.
17 Fernando del Pulgar, Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla, edited by Cayetano Rosell,
vol. III (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1953), 562–563; and Alonso de Santa Cruz, Crónica
de los Reyes Católicos, vol. II, edited by Juan de Mata Carriazo (Seville: Escuela de
Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1951), 331.
18 Rebecca Boone, “Empire and Medieval Simulacrum: The Political Project of Meru-
crino de Gattinara, Grand Chancellor of Charles V,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 42,
4 (Winter, 2011), 1022–1036.
19 Quoted in Karl Brandi, The Emperor Charles V: The Growth and Destiny of a Man and
of a World-Empire, translated by C. V. Wedgewood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968),
112f.
20 John M. Headley, “Rhetoric and Reality: Messianic, Humanist, and Civilian Themes in
the Imperial Ethos of Gattinara,” in Prophetic Rome in the High Renaissance Period,
edited by Marjorie Reeves (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 253–255.
21 Alfonso de Valdés, Relación de las nuevas de Italia, 1525, 16–19. Accessed 5/30/2014
via http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008887597
22 Brandi, 247–252.
23 Alfonso de Valdés, Alfonso de Valdés and the Sack of Rome: The Dialogue of Lactantio
and an Archdeacon, Trans. John Longhurst, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1952) 19–50, 94–95.
24 Egidio da Viterbo, Scechina e Libellus de Litteris Hebraicis, Vols. 1–II (Roma: Centro
Internazionale di Studi Umanistici, 1959).
70 Bryan Givens
25 Otto von Habsburg, Charles V, translated by Michael Ross (New York: Praeger Pub-
lishers, 1969), 111–114.
26 For the text of the poem, see http://omacl.org/Orlando/15–16can.html (accessed
6/11/2014).
27 Eric MacPhail, “Ariosto and the Prophetic Moment,” Modern Language Notes, 116:1
(January, 2001) 30–37.
28 Hernando de Acuña, Varias poesías, edited by Luis F. Díaz Larios (Madrid: Ediciones
Cátedra, S.A., 1982), 11–23, 328–329, translation by author.
29 For the text, see the Bavarian State Library’s digital holding, http:///www.bsb-
muenchen.de/index.php (downloaded as a. pdf file on 7/17/2013).
30 Brandi, 628–645.
31 See Brandi, 131, 312–313, 559–560; and Habsburg, 220–221.
32 Pablo Pérez Garcia and Jorge Antonio Catalá Sanz, Epígonos del encubetismo: Pro-
ceso contra los agermandados de 1541 (Valencia: Biblioteca Valenciana, 2000) 154;
and Alfred Kohler, Karl V, eine Biographie (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1999), 100.
33 Richard L. Kagan, “Politics, Prophecy, and the Inquisition in Late Sixteenth-Century
Spain,” in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New
World, edited by Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), 114. Accessed 7/1/2014 via http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/
ft396nb1w0.
34 Ricardo Carcel, Las Germanías de Valencia (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1975),
39ff, 95–96.
35 Ibid., 98–108.
36 Vallés Borrás, 28–30.
37 Ibid., 123–129.
38 Pérez Garcia and Catalá Sanz, 42–46.
39 Carcel, 134.
40 Ibid., 137.
41 Ibid., 137–138.
42 Pérez Garcia and Catalá Sanz, 21–31, 56–58.
43 Ibid., 58–84, 113–140.
Part II
Authority in texts, taxes,

and penury
5 Emphasizing royal orders
using the Romance languages
An example of strategic
codeswitching in the crown of
Aragon’s thirteenth-century
royal chancery
Antonio Zaldívar
Latin served as the exclusive language of record in the federation of realms under
the jurisdiction of the kings of the Crown of Aragon until the twelfth century,
when documents begin to appear written entirely in the realms’ Romance lan-
guages, Catalan and Aragonese. These languages, like their vernacular counter-
parts throughout most of western Europe, did not just replace Latin. Instead, a
variety of diglossic situations emerged in which Latin served as the high-prestige
language, while the Romance and Germanic vernaculars functioned as its lower-
prestige counterparts. These linguistic situations differed by region and never
remained static, creating historically important dynamics in which language
choice emerged as an instrument of power and a gauge of cultural change.1
Even after Catalan and Aragonese began to appear in surviving records, Latin
remained the primary language of public record (government, law, business, and
administration) well into the fifteenth century. The adoption of a Latin-based
notarial culture, imported from the Italian peninsula in the late twelfth century,
contributed in large part to this Latinity. As Teofilo F. Ruiz notes in his magisterial
book From Heaven to Earth, areas with strong notarial cultures, like the Crown
of Aragon, also tended to be the most linguistically conservative. Meanwhile, in
Castile, where a notarial culture did not take hold during the thirteenth century,
vernacular writing made larger inroads in the public sphere.2
Within the linguistically conservative lands of the Crown of Aragon, Latin
maintained a particularly strong grip on the royal chancery. Only one percent
of thirteenth-century royal documents survive written in a Romance language.3
The Crown of Aragon’s notarial culture contributed in large part to the crown’s
Latinity. Catalan and Aragonese also lacked Latin’s historic and prestigious
pedigree as the language of Rome, the Catholic Church and its liturgy, justice,
and education (especially higher learning). The kings and their agents conse-
quently considered Latin the more suitable language to represent their power
and status. For these reasons, even when composing a document in the ver-
nacular, royal scribes usually included sections of the text in Latin, typically the
74 Antonio Zaldívar
opening (protocol) and closing (eschatacol) formulas, passages from the Bible,
and the king’s autograph.
Latin’s place as the language of public record in the Crown of Aragon during
the thirteenth century meant the kings had few practical needs for composing a
text in the vernacular. Nobles, royal officials, cities and townships, and ecclesias-
tical institutions – in other words, the recipients of royal documents discussed in
this chapter – operated fluently in Latin, even if individual nobles and members
of these institutions lacked training in the high-prestige language. That is because
they relied on a sizeable scribal class (scribes, notaries, or clerics) employed to
encode and decode Latin texts.
Since the king and his scribes had limited practical motives for composing texts
in the vernacular, I argue symbolism figured as the principal force behind their
decision to compose a document in the Romance languages during the thirteenth
century. In these cases, the switch from the standard to the less frequently used lin-
guistic code alone signaled a change in tone. The royal chancery’s strong Latinity,
central to the success of this strategy of codeswitching, simultaneously impeded
the kings from applying it regularly. It seems the kings resorted to writing in the
vernacular only when they felt their authority threatened and were firmly certain
that the recipients of their letters would understand the significance of bypassing
the formalities of Latin.
Peter III’s (II of Catalonia, r. 1276–85) military and military-related orders,
emitted during periods of armed conflict, comprise the largest category of
administrative documents produced by a thirteenth-century king of the Crown
of Aragon in the Romance languages. In the following pages, I employ theo-
retical frameworks from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, particularly
work on codeswitching and language markedness, to analyze and explain Peter’s
motives for emitting wartime instructions to his subjects in Catalan and Aragon-
ese.4 I conclude that the king and his agents underscored the magnitude of their
wartime directives by forgoing established protocol and choosing to write these
royal commands in the “marked” or less commonly used codes (Romances) rather
than the “unmarked” register (Latin). Codeswitching therefore offered Peter and
his scribes an easy and convenient means of imparting emphasis and urgency
onto certain demands they considered vital during times of war. By adopting these
codeswitching practices in the administration of his realms, the ambitious, albeit
weak king and his agents sought to enhance administrative efficiency over the
royal domains.
Before examining Peter’s codeswitching tactic when emitting wartime orders,
however, it proves necessary to contextualize the practice within the broader
administrative transformations taking place in the royal bureaucracy, especially
regarding the use of writing as an instrument of power. After providing this con-
text, I examine Peter III’s military orders during the French crusade of 1285, which
constitute the majority of extant wartime orders produced by the royal chancery in
a Romance language during the thirteenth century. King Peter dispensed prepara-
tions for the imminent war to his subjects, as he and his predecessors had always
done, in Latin. But an unexpectedly early incursion by the French crusaders forced
Emphasizing royal orders 75
Peter to gather his host sooner than anticipated. When Peter informed his subjects
of the invasion and ordered them to prepare for war, he switched from Latin to the
vernacular to transmit the importance of his instructions as well as the urgency
of the situation. In the final section of the essay, I contend that Peter’s pattern of
symbolic codeswitching during the French crusade, in turn, helps us interpret why
he composed other military orders in Romance languages.
Royal power and the written word

As in other realms throughout Europe, the kings of the Crown of Aragon utilized
writing and recordkeeping as tools in the pursuit and exercise of power. The two
most important developments regarding their use of writing as an instrument of
power occurred during the course of the thirteenth century. First, a chancery inde-
pendent of the royal court emerged fully formed by mid century.5 Charged with
managing all of the king’s correspondence, the chancery played a fundamental
role in the exercise of royal power. In a period when writing and text-based mes-
sages began to replace purely oral communication, an institution dedicated solely
to the production and collection of documents proved necessary. It provided a
more organized and sustained line of communication between the king and his
numerous officials that increasingly relied on written orders. These officials (vic-
ars, bailiffs, treasurers, scribes, etc.) constituted the military, financial, and legal
representatives of the king throughout the realms, and were instrumental in exer-
cising royal authority.
The creation of royal registers beginning in the second half of the thirteenth
century represents the second significant development. Armed with the institu-
tional support of a formal chancery, the kings of the Crown of Aragon imple-
mented a sophisticated registration system unrivaled by any monarchy in Europe,
in which royal scribes copied the king’s correspondence in books called registers.6
The kings accomplished this feat via their access to Muslim paper mills in Xàtiva
after the conquest of Valencia in 1238. Paper, a much cheaper material than parch-
ment, permitted the kings the luxury of registering much of their outgoing, and
some incoming, correspondence.7
Vernacular writing, which surfaces in the chancery precisely during this period
of transition, represents a facet of the administrative reforms adopted by the
crown to improve its bureaucracy and in turn increase royal authority. In a society
where writing began to penetrate every aspect of royal governance, codeswitch-
ing offered Peter and his agents a new, easy, and expedient tool to emphasize
orders and, in turn, maximize the impact of their military and military-related
commands. That is, the king and his agents created an additional mechanism of
disseminating royal authority over their often-recalcitrant subjects.
The French crusade

King Peter III earned the animosity of the French monarchy and its papal allies after
he claimed Sicily on behalf of his wife, Constance. Constance’s father, Manfred,
had lost the island and his life to Charles of Anjou, the brother of King Louis IX
(r. 1226–70) of France, at the battle of Benevento on February 26, 1266. Follow-
ing the Sicilian Vespers (a revolt in Sicily against Charles), Peter led an armada
that conquered the island in 1282 from the Angevins. In response, Pope Martin
IV (r. 1281–85) excommunicated Peter and laid an interdict on his lands. Then on
March 21, 1283, the pope raised the stakes by calling a crusade against the Crown
of Aragon to overthrow Peter and replace him with a French prince. The ensuing
danger forced Peter to depart from Sicily before the campaign’s completion and
return home to prepare for the largest threat the Crown of Aragon had ever faced.8
The preparations for war against the French were conducted, as expected, in
Latin. On November 9, 1283, the royal chancery emitted several hundred military
orders in the high-prestige language to the king’s subjects in Catalonia, Aragon, and
Valencia. For instance, Peter commanded the viscount of Bearn, an important Cata-
lan magnate, to join him in Lleida on January 1 prepared for war.9 Similarly, when
Peter demanded the military assistance of the inhabitants of Barcelona, he did so in
Latin.10
His son, Prince Alfons, also utilized Latin to organize the resistance against
the French and their Iberian allies, the Navarrese. While Peter was still in Sic-
ily, on April 27, 1283, Alfons notified the nobleman Ramon Folc that the French
intended to invade Catalonia and ordered Ramon to gather an army in defense of
the realm, as requested by the Usatge Princeps namque.11 According to the regis-
ter, Alfons sent out similar letters to dozens of Catalan nobles, abbots, and bish-
ops. The prince also sent pleas for assistance to his father’s Aragonese subjects in
Latin. In early August, for example, Alfons ordered thirteen Aragonese nobles to
meet him in Exea prepared for war.12
Preparations for the imminent invasion continued throughout 1284 and early
1285. On the day Peter entered the city of Figueres in northern Catalonia to
manage the military campaign against the French army, April 22, 1285, he emit-
ted hundreds of additional letters to his subjects with instructions regarding the
upcoming war. They were all written in Latin and organized in the registers by
estate and office. Cities and villages received one version, while royal officials,
nobles, knights, and the clergy all received their own messages.13 The military
commands to the Valencians mirrored those to the Catalans, while those sent to
the Aragonese contained disparate orders. Instead of requiring them to meet him
in Figueres to confront the bulk of the crusading forces under the leadership of
King Phillip III of France (r. 1270–85), Peter commanded the Aragonese to assist
his son, Alfons, in patrolling the border between Navarre and Aragon.14 Peter
feared an eminent Navarese invasion of the kingdom of Aragon led by Phillip III’s
son, the future Phillip IV (r. 1285–1314) of France. Even though the Navarese did
wage a series of raids against Aragon, the French prince along with his father and
the entire crusading army marched together into Catalonia.
When the French army entered Catalonia sooner than expected, however, Peter
and his scribes bypassed standard linguistic protocol and sent urgent notices in
the vernacular to his subjects alerting them that the French had invaded. In the
letters, drafted on July 28, 1285, Peter ordered their recipients to meet him armed
and prepared for war ten days before September 1. The first sample in the register,
written in Catalan, is addressed to the inhabitants of Lleida: (Latin italicized)
Vicariis, Probis hominibus, et universitati Ileride. Fem vos saber que conlo
Rey de França ab ses osts entra en nostra terra. . . . On con lamerce de deu els
se sien molt minuats e minuen tots dies si per molt de malauties si ab armas
fiant en nostre senyor e en la bontat de nostres gens es acort e voluntat nos-
tra e qules donen batala ala qual avem assignat dia lo primer dia del mes de
Setembre primer vinent. . . . E de emprar vos que siats ab nos a aquela batayla
ab vostres aperalaments e ab vostres armes al milo que pustats segons que a
aytal fet se procuray. . . . E perço ab vostre conseyl e deles altres feels nos-
tros puscam ordenat en aquel fet ço ab melor sia ab la ajuda de deu pregam
nos eus requerim que siats ab nos X dies abans del dit primer dia de setebre.
Datum Barchinone V kalendas augusti.15
To the vicars, honored citizens, and inhabitants of Lleida. We inform you that
the King of France has entered our land with his hosts. . . . Where with God’s
mercy they will be diminished and diminishing every day either through sick-
ness or arms; having faith in our lord and in the goodness of our people, it is
our consent and will to wage battle against them, which we have assigned for
the first day of the coming month of September. . . . And we demand you with
us in battle prepared with all your weapons and supplies as best you can
with diligence. . . . And so we can establish the best way to attack the enemy
with your counsel and that of our other faithful subjects, we ask and require you
to come to us 10 days before September 1. Drafted in Barcelona on July 28.
Identical messages were sent to 181 other localities throughout the Crown of
Aragon according to the register: “sub simili forma scripsimus omnibus locis
Infra scriptis” (we wrote to all of the below mentioned places in this same form).
Of the 181 cities and villages, 95 were in Catalonia, 65 in Aragon, and 21 in
Valencia. Although most of the letters sent to Valencian cities, inhabited primarily
by Catalan speakers, were certainly also composed in Catalan, it is doubtful that
was the case with the ones sent to Aragon.16 They were most likely composed in
Aragonese, but royal scribes neglected to copy a draft of the Aragonese version
into the registers. The state of panic and haste at the royal court and chancery
during this period may explain why royal scribes overlooked recording a separate
example of the message sent to the Aragonese cities.
Directly following the king’s cry for help to the cities, royal scribes registered
the orders they sent to nobles in the vernacular. The first set is represented by a
copy of the king’s letter to Ponç de Ribelles, which survives in its entirety in the
register.17 Below the transcription of the text, the register notes in Latin that similar
letters were sent to seven other Catalan and Valencian nobles: “sub simil forma
scripsiums infra scriptis Richis hominibus et militibus” (we wrote similar to the
nobles and knights listed below). The registers also contain drafts of the orders
sent to the Aragonese nobility in Valencia and Aragon. The king’s order to Jimeno
de Luna, the procurator general (king’s representative) in the kingdom of Valencia,
requesting military aid, appears first in the register. It is similar to the commands
sent to the Catalan cities and nobility, except it is in Aragonese: (Latin italicized)
Roderico Eximeni de Luna. Sepades que quando el Rey de Francçia con sus
huestes entro en nostra tierra. . . . Ond como ellos loado dios sean muy men-
guados e mengum todos dias si por muertos denfermedat si com armas fiando
en dios e en la bontat de las nostras gentes es acuerdo e voluntat nostra de
dar les batayla ala qual assignamos dia el primer dia desti mes de setembre
primero vinient. . . . E si oviendes de venir seades de nos 10 dias ante del
dito primero dia de setembre por que podamos con vuestro consello e de los
otro ricos homnes ordenar lo mello dios qurendo. Datum apud Barchinone V
kalendas augusti.18
To Roger Jimeno de Luna. We inform you that when the King of France
entered our land with his hosts. . . . Where with God’s mercy they will be
diminished and diminishing every day either through sickness or violence;
having faith in our Lord and in the goodness of our people, it is our consent
and will to wage battle against them, which we have assigned for the first
day of the coming month of September. . . . And should you agree to come,
you will meet us 10 days before the coming September, so that with your
advice and that of the other nobles, God willing, we can produce the best
plan. Drafted in Barcelona on July 28.
Identical notices were sent to four other Aragonese nobles in Valencia, accord-
ing to the register. The king’s directives to the Aragonese nobility within Aragon
proper also appear separately in the register, even though they are identical in lan-
guage, format, and contents to the ones sent to the Aragonese-speaking nobles in
Valencia. Peter’s letter to Pedro Cornell, for example, was copied into the register
in its entirety, with a note below it explaining that similar letters went out to forty
other nobles in Aragon.19
Peter’s decision to compose these orders in low-prestige codes exemplifies the use
of codeswitching strategies to emphasize pressing military commands and transmit
a sense of exigency. Peter, as well as his son Alfons, communicated preparations
for the war with their subjects in Latin. Yet, when the French invaded sooner than
expected, the king bypassed Latin and turned to Catalan and Aragonese to drive
home the magnitude of the situation as well as the urgency and importance of his
requests. Faced with an extremely perilous threat, the king mobilized and employed
all of his resources, including writing in the Romance languages. Regardless of
whether the king’s linguistic strategy proved successful or not, at the very least it
gave him and his agents a sense of empowerment in an uncertain and bleak time.
Other martial orders

Peter’s military orders during the French invasion of Catalonia represent the cul-
mination of a pattern of codeswitching in the royal chancery that began in the
second half of the century. These military orders comprise the majority of royal
texts that have survived in a vernacular language. It seems the kings considered
the strategy of codeswitching most useful when issuing military commands. The
urgency and peril Peter faced during these challenges led him to employ all the
tools at his disposal to rally the troops, including calling attention to his orders by
composing them in the Romance languages.
The earliest example of a military or military-related order produced by the
king in a vernacular language for emphatic purposes dates to July 6, 1278. In the
letter, written in the midst of the siege of Castellciutat (northern Catalonia), Peter
commanded the inhabitants of the Valley of Noguera to bring him as much food-
stuffs as they could to sell to his host.20 The order begins and ends in Latin, while
the body of the message appears in Catalan: “Deym e manam vos que aportets a
vendre a nos e a nostra host vianda, salvus e segurs, aytanta com pugats, so es a
saber: pan, vin, carn, e civada. E en aço no aya failla” (We say and order you to
come to us safe and secure, and sell us and our troops as much food as you can:
that is, bread, wine, meat, and barley. And do not fail in this). If the inhabitants of
Noguera refuse, the king warns them that he would not be able to prevent his men
from taking the food without restitution: “nos no puriem tenir ni capdelar nostres
osts que no sen prengessen” (we will not be able to stop our troops or prevent
them from taking [the food]). Peter surely sought to avoid any additional violence,
while simultaneously guaranteeing that his troops obtain the necessary provisions
to wage a successful siege against the count of Foix and the other rebels taking
refuge inside Castellciutat’s fortifications. Writing the order in the vernacular or
“marked” code offered the king an opportunity to transmit a heightened sense of
emphasis and urgency to the inhabitants of Noguera. The king seems to have rein-
forced the urgency of the order several days afterward by sending the inhabitants
of Noguera a safe conduct to bring him the provisions of food, also composed in
Catalan.21
Two years later (1280) we find Peter emitting another set of military orders
in the vernacular during the siege of Balaguer. In the preparations for the siege
against a band of rebel nobles harbored in the city, Peter directed his royal offi-
cials, cities, nobles, and church leaders to appear ready for war in messages trans-
mitted in Latin. On January 9, 1280, for instance, Peter ordered the inhabitants
of Lleida to appear before him prepared for war on May 1.22 Beneath the record,
the register notes that identical messages were sent to dozens of communities
throughout Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia.23 The places are divided by the mes-
senger charged with their delivery: for example, “hac tulit P de Sancta Oliva” (this
was delivered by P. de Sancta Oliva). Below the orders to the cities in the register,
we find the king’s military commands to nobles throughout his realms.24 Periodic
requests for military aid, also written in Latin, continue to trickle out of the royal
chancery until the siege of Balaguer began on May 27.
Almost a month into the siege, on June 23, the king sent out another set of calls
to arms to several nobles, the military orders, a handful of cities (Barcelona, Tar-
ragona, Monson, and Lleida), royal officials in those cities, and a dozen ecclesias-
tical leaders.25 Most of these messages were also written in Latin. But the king’s
order commanding the inhabitants of Lleida to send him as many adult men as
they could survives in Catalan.26 Two days afterwards, the king ordered the bailiff
of Lleida to send him immediately the materials necessary to build a siege weapon
in a letter also written in Catalan.27 I believe the king composed these two orders
in the vernacular to convey an increased sense of urgency among his officials and
subjects in Lleida. Some thirty kilometers southwest of Balaguer, Lleida offered
the king the fastest possible relief after a host of rebels breached the siege and
entered the city with arms and supplies to replenish the enemy.28 Peter himself
notes the urgency of his command in the letter and emphasized it with a dire
threat: if they failed to show up, they risked losing everything they own:
E si negu falra a ell daiuda que en aço a el fer pora perdre deu per tots temps
totes coses que per aquel ha . . . per ço cor negu no deu falir al princep a tan
gran obra o a tan gran necessitat. Deim et manam a vos e a cadaun de vos,
sots la pena en lustage contenguda, que segons la tenor del dit usatge, vistes
les presents, vingats a nos en aiuda de nos e de nostra terra ab cavales e ab
homens vostres de les vostres locs e ab tot vostra poder.29
And if anyone fails to help he may lose all of his possessions for all
time . . . because no one should fail the prince in such a serious and necessary
event. We tell and order each of you, under the penalty recommended by the
Usatges, to come to us and assist us and our land with the knights and men
of your locale and all under your authority immediately after you receive this
message.
As in the case of all other vernacular orders analyzed in this chapter, the mes-
sage’s opening and closing formulas remain in Latin.
Royal correspondence regarding the siege of Albarracín in 1284 demonstrates
the kings switched from Latin to Aragonese as well as Catalan when emphasiz-
ing the urgency of military orders prior to the French invasion of 1285. Peter and
his scribes emitted instructions for the siege of Albarracín in Latin. For instance,
when Peter initially ordered the inhabitants of Calatayud to send him military
assistance on May 4, 1284, he did so in Latin.30 According to the register in which
the record was copied, the king sent similar letters to several other Aragonese
cities. The king also composed requests for military aid from the Aragonese and
Catalan nobility in Latin.31
In the middle of the siege (August 30, 1284), however, Peter bypassed Latin
and ordered the inhabitants of Teruel to send him as many armed men as they
could in a notice composed in Aragonese: “Por que nos dezimos e nos mandamos
que luego vista la carta todas otras cosas deyades vengades con vostras armas a la
dita corral de alvarrazin” (We tell and order that after seeing this letter cease doing
anything else and come with your weapons to the said siege of Albarracín).32 The
king’s need to replenish his host after four months of setting siege to Albarracín
offers the most likely explanation of why he turned to the vernacular to empha-
size his order. At the time, Peter feared an attack by Juan Núñez de Lara, the
lord of Albarracín, who had breached the siege and fled to Navarre.33 Expecting
an imminent assault from Juan Núñez and a host of Navarrese recruits, the king
requested urgent military assistance from Teruel. Teruel, some forty kilometers
east of Albarracín, was the closest city with available troops. Much like the royal
orders to the inhabitants of Lleida from the siege of Balaguer in Catalan, Peter
wrote to the residents of Teruel in Aragonese to signal the urgency of his com-
mand. Yet, Juan Núñez and his reinforcements never arrived, and the castle fell
to Peter on September 29, 1284. Aside from appropriating the lordship into the
royal domain, a feat that had escaped his father, James I (r. 1213–76), Peter neu-
tralized a dangerous French ally within his realms, which was crucial considering
the animosity between the pro-Ghibelline kings of the Crown of Aragon and the
pro-Guelph French Angevins.34
Peter’s military orders during the sieges of Castellciutat, Balaguer, and Albar-
racín by themselves only offer circumstantial evidence that the king composed
them in the Romance languages to emphasize the magnitude of his requests and
convey a sense of urgency. But when analyzed collectively and compared to the
king’s orders following the French invasion of 1285, significant situational and
contextual similarities surface between them that cannot be ignored. In each of
these cases, royal agents shifted from Latin to the vernacular during a military
confrontation to emphasize urgent orders. In light of these similarities, we can
conclude with some confidence that military orders produced during these three
sieges in the vernacular represent initial or experimental phases of a diplomatic
tactic implemented in widespread fashion when the French crusaders invaded.
Conclusion
The king’s interest in emphasizing the urgency of certain orders served as the
greatest impetus for writing in the vernacular in the royal chancery. By forgo-
ing established protocol and choosing to write these commands in the “marked”
or less commonly used codes (Romances) rather than the “unmarked” register
(Latin), Peter underscored the magnitude of his requests. The military instructions
following the French invasion of 1285, which constitute the majority of extant
orders in a Romance language, exemplify the crown’s adoption of codeswitch-
ing to consign a sense of emphasis and urgency onto their orders. Before the
French army entered Catalonia, the king dispensed preparations for the imminent
war to his subjects, as he and his predecessors had always done, in Latin. But an
unexpectedly early incursion by the French army forced Peter to gather his host
sooner than anticipated in the vernacular. Peter’s pattern of symbolic codeswitch-
ing during the French invasion, in turn, helps us interpret why the royal chancery
composed other military orders in Romance languages. In each of these cases, the
king, confronted by an immediate threat, broke linguistic protocol and accentu-
ated the importance of his military orders by redacting them in a low-prestige
code.
Codeswitching offered Peter an easy and convenient means of emphasizing
the orders he sought to highlight. By doing so, the ambitious, albeit weak, king
enhanced his administrative efficiency, improving how he exerted authority over
his realms. Peter utilized this strategy cautiously, however, and only when he
deemed it important enough to break the chancery’s established protocol of writ-
ing in Latin. Language use, including codeswitching tactics, therefore represents
a facet of the administrative reforms enacted by the crown to strengthen and cen-
tralize its authority.
Notes
1 Diglossia describes a sociolinguistic situation in which a high-prestige language coex-
ists, albeit on unequal footing, with one or more low-prestige languages. For more on
Diglossia, see Charles Fergusson, “Diglossia,” Word 15 (1959), 325–340 and Alan
Hudson, “Outline of a Theory of Diglossia,” International Journal of Sociology of
Language 157 Focus on Diglossia (2002), 1–48.
2 Teofilo F. Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150–
1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
3 Robert I. Burns, S.J., Society and Documentation in Crusader Valencia: Diplomatar-
ium of the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: The Registered Charters of Its Conqueror,
Jaume I, 1257–76, 5 vols. to date (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), I,
p. 118.
4 For more information on codeswitching and language markedness, see Kathryn
Woolard, “Codeswitching,” in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by
Alessandro Duranti (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 73–94. In linguistic anthropology,
codeswitching denotes the practice of switching from speaking or writing in one lan-
guage to another. According to the Markedness model, an unmarked code describes
the expected language of communication (Latin in the case of the royal chancery).
A marked code conversely refers to a language that is not frequently used in a specific
type of communicative exchange.
5 Ángel Canellas López, “Las cancillerías catalano-aragonesas. Estado actual de la
cuestión,” Boletín de la sociedad castellonense de Cultura 58 (1982), 351–394.
6 For example, see Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066–
1307, 3rd ed. (Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2013).
7 For more information on the royal registers and the use of paper by royal scribes, see
Burns, Society and Documentation, 48–57 and 151–172 respectively.
8 For more information on the French crusade against the Crown of Aragon, see Thomas
N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1986), 86–94; Ferran Soldevila, Història de Catalunya, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Editorial
Alpha, 19663), 334–376; and Stefano Maria Cingolani, Pere el Gran: vida, actes i
paraula (Barcelona: Editorial Base, 2010), 171–332.
9 Archive of the Crown of Aragon [hereafter ACA], r. 47 f. 117r–118r.
10 ACA, r. 43 f. 105r.
11 ACA, r. 61 f. 107v–108r. Princeps namque are the first two words of Usatge 68, one
of the 174 customs that comprise the Usatges of Barcelona, the county of Barcelona’s
(Catalonia’s) primary legal code during this period. Usatge 68 regulates the king’s
responsibilities and privileges regarding the defense of the realm (Catalonia), includ-
ing his right to organize an army. For a critical edition of the Latin and Catalan versions
of the Usatges, see Joan Bastardas, Usatges de Barcelona: El codi a mitjan segle XII.
Establiment del text llatí i edició de la versió catalana del manuscrit del segle XIII de
l’arxiu de la corona d’Aragó de Barcelona (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 1984). For
an English translation of the Usatges, see Donald Kagay, The Usatges of Barcelona:
The Fundamental Law of Catalonia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1994).
12 ACA, r. 61 f. 191r.
13 For the letters to Valencian cities, see ACA, r. 56 f. 81r–v; to Valencian knights and
nobles, see ACA, r. 56 f. 81v–82r.
14 For the letters to Aragonese cities, see ACA, r. 56 f. 82v–83v; to royal officials, see
ACA, r. 56 f. 84r–88v and f. 90r–91v; to nobles and knights, see ACA, r. 56 f. 89v–90r.
15 ACA, r. 57 f. 167r–v.
16 ACA, r. 57 f. 168r–v.
17 ACA, r. 57 f. 169r.
18 ACA, r. 57 f. 171r–v.
19 ACA, r. 57 f. 171v.
20 Ferran Soldevila, Pere el Gran: Segona Part: El regnat fins a l’any 1282 (Barcelona:
Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1995), 217 (doc. 61), citing ACA, r. 40 f. 133r.
21 Soldevila, Pere el Gran: Segona Part, 220 (doc. 69), citing ACA, r. 40 f. 136r.
22 ACA, r. 42 f. 206v.
23 ACA, r. 42 f. 206v–207r.
24 ACA, r. 42 f. 207r–208v.
25 ACA, r. 51v–52r, 55r.
26 M. Cubells, “Documentos Diplomaticos Aragoneses, 1259–1284,” Revue Hispanique
37 (1916) [Hereafter Cubells], doc. 148, citing ACA, r. 48 f. 52v.
27 Cubells, doc. 150, citing ACA, r. 48 f. 75r.
28 For more information on the breech of Balaguer’s walls during the 1280 siege, see
Cingolani, Pere el Gran, 131–134.
29 Cubells, doc. 148, citing ACA, r. 48 f. 52v.
30 ACA, r. 51 f. 1r–v.
31 For the letter to the Aragonese nobility, see Luis González Anton, Las uniones aragon-
esas y las cortes del reino: (1283–1301), (Zaragoza: Consejo Superior de Investiga-
ciones Científicas, 1974), vol. 2, 160 (doc. 62), citing ACA, r. 46 f. 199r; for the letter
to the Catalan nobility, see González Anton, Las uniones aragonesas, vol. 2, 161–162
(doc. 63).
32 ACA, r. 45 f. 22r.
33 Soldevila, Història de Catalunya, 366; Cingolani, Pere el Gran, 319–332.
34 Ghibelline is a term derived from Italian and often used to identify factions in western
Europe that supported the Holy Roman Empire during its centuries-long feud with the
papacy. Guelph is the Italian-derived term employed to identify the papacy’s support-
ers. In this case, the kings of the Crown of Aragon fell into the Ghibelline camp, while
the French monarchy belonged to the Guelph camp.
6 Taxation and sovereignty in
medieval Castile*
Denis Menjot
During the last centuries of the Middle Ages, the Castilian monarchy, like other
western European monarchies, progressively developed a systematic fiscal sys-
tem, that is, a group of taxing procedures and collection techniques that combined
to assure that no source of wealth remained untapped.1 Taxation, previously occa-
sional and improvised, became gradually regular, and the methods of collection
became more precise at the same time as a financial administration was organ-
ized and more or less coherent rules of management were put in place. Origi-
nally created with an aim to cover public expenditures, the fiscal system came to
impact economic development (either by supporting or hindering it), to accelerate
or obstruct social dynamics, and to generate other administrative structures. The
authorities who put in place the tax system, whether or not they were aware of it,
played a critical role in these processes by carefully collecting private resources
and redistributing the proceeds.2 Taxation was also a means for the monarchy
to impose its power over a territory and its inhabitants and a means of control
and integration of its subjects. That is to say, taxation simultaneously possessed a
political significance that extended well beyond finances.
Taxation was an expression of sovereignty. It is thus critical to determine what
was the king’s right to tax these subjects, what elements constituted the tax base
and the base of other state revenues (apart from the royal domain), and the mecha-
nisms that were created to collect taxes. Additionally, it is also crucial to assess the
impact that taxation made on inhabitants and determine the degree of consensus
among political powers to impose taxes. By addressing these issues, I will iden-
tify the motivations, financial or political, behind the fiscal solutions adopted by
Castilian monarchy, the relations between the crown and elites, and the crown’s
methods to exert control over territories of the realm.
The right to tax: “The king of castile is emperor in

his own kingdom”
The origins of sovereign power of the kings of Castile derived from Roman law
and imperial inheritance transmitted by the Visigoths.3 Reinforcing this source
was the “Reconquest,”4 an enterprise at once military and religious, that made
medieval monarchs the standard bearers of a holy war whose financing helped
Taxation and sovereignty in medieval Castile 85
justify taxation.5 This legal inheritance turned out to be of paramount importance
in the construction of the state. It helped legitimate monarchical power and uphold
the notion of a public power and sovereignty that overshadowed any manorial
powers. Ultimately, it also legitimated the kings’ right to tax.
Heir of the Visigothic kings, the kings of Castile-León claimed to exercise impe-
rium or supreme authority (summa potestas). In 1085 King Alfonso VI conquered
Toledo, the capital of the former Visigothic kingdom. This feat enabled the king
to legitimately claim to be the heir of the Visigoth kings, and indeed his chancel-
lery henceforth issued documents employing the title imperator totius Hispaniae.
By adopting this title, Alfonso VI claimed summa potestas and imperium, the
supreme power over other princes of the regnum as defined by the territory unified
by the Visigoths including what were by that time Islamic emirates in southern
Iberia.6 His grandson Alfonso VII (1126–1157) at the time of his accession to the
throne recuperated the title imperator totius Hispaniae. He was solemnly crowned
emperor in León in 1135, in the presence of the king of Navarra and the nobles,
archbishops, and bishops of his kingdom. The following year, King Ramiro II of
Aragón (1134–1137) paid homage to Alfonso VII as emperor of Spain.7 Alfonso
X (1252–1284) in his juridical work the Fuero Real (1255) and the Siete Partidas
(1256–1265) reaffirmed the idea that the king holds his power from God and is
emperor in his own kingdom because the social reality was very different and
needed to be combated. In the Siete Partidas and the Espéculo he does not justify
his power to legislate because he is sure to have the full iurisdictio. The king is
sovereign also because he is the highest jurisdiction of the Kingdom.8 Alfonso
X’s political thought, in particular in the Second Partida, originates the concept
of absolute royal power. Heir of the Visigothic kings and exercising imperium, the
kings of Castile were the interpreters as well as the source of law. They created
laws in virtue of their “absolute royal power” (de mi poderío real absoluto, motu
propio e cierta ciencia), a formula used by the monarchs of the fifteenth century.9
Alfonso X also added a divine attribute, that of wisdom, to the concept of royal
power, adopting the biblical figure of King Solomon as his model. According to
the Book of Wisdom, a prototype of the Mirror of Princes which during the Mid-
dle Ages was attributed to Solomon, royal function and administration of justice
are intimately associated.10 Law and justice were both virtues and royal preroga-
tives, and they came from divine wisdom. Consequently the king, as vicar of God,
claimed the power to rule and dispense justice. He was God’s lieutenant on earth;
his court is the image of the heavenly court;11 his power is therefore within the
scope of natural law, that is to say the divine law. According to Adeline Rucquoi,
Alfonso X did not hesitate to affirm that, since wisdom came from God,
kings because they are kings possess more wisdom than other men; this claim
accorded them the duty to communicate such wisdom and to lead their sub-
jects away from ignorance, considered to be a sin.12
This thinking contributed to the foundation of medieval studia generalia schools

which over time developed into the kingdom’s universities.13 The king, thus, is
86 Denis Menjot
also defensor fidei or Defender of the Faith. In 1445, the Cortes of Castile meeting
in Olmedo advanced the claim that the king, vicar and lieutenant of God on earth,
“is the head, the heart and soul of the people.”14 Delegates and urban magistrates
gathered at the Cortes called him “Sovereign Lord,” with absolute royal power
being a consequence of sovereignty.15
Alfonso XI and Juan II extended the legacy of Alfonso X and the Siete Par-
tidas. The Pragmatic Sanction of 1427 reaffirmed the power of the king to, per-
form, publish, and amend the laws.16 In 1439, Juan II of Castile indicated “that
the king’s power is so great that all the laws and all rights come from him . . . and
they held of God.”17
This absolutist conception of royal power met strong resistance from nobles
and delegates of the Cortes18 but it was rarely contested in ideological discourses
on sovereignty. Literary opposition to the claim of sovereign power was limited in
Castile to a few exceptions such as Juan Manuel’s the Libro de los Estados (Book
of the States) (1327–1332) or the Franciscan Álvaro Pelayo’s Speculum regum
(1341–1344), both influenced by French or Papal theories.19 In contrast, several
authors helped develop this absolutist ideology including Rodrigo Sánchez de
Arevalo in the Suma de la Política (1454) and the Compendiosa Historia His-
pánica (1470) and Diego de Valera in Doctrinal de principes (1475). Following
Aristotelian principles, these authors only criticized absolutist ideology when it
took the form of tyranny.20
Justifications for absolutist power and sovereignty helped the late medieval
Castilian monarchy institute taxation.21 Fiscal income was based on Roman legal
principles which regarded ius eminens as an ius civilis: in other words, royal
taxes arose from the theory of the crown’s “eminent right,” which was political
in nature, and not merely from the possession of property. Such legitimation and
enforcement of the kings’ claims to tax were rarely contested.
The Libro de las Confesiones by Martín Pérez is one of the few Castilian texts
dealing with the right of kings and princes to levy taxes on their subjects. Written
in 1316, this book came out at a time when the reality of “extraordinary taxation”
(taxes levied for extraordinary purposes such as warfare) became undeniable.22
In it, the author contends that the ideal prince ought to settle for the resources he
extracts from his domain and from customary (foreras) taxes.23 In order to avoid
sin, he must adjust his expenses to his revenue. However, he may levy exceptional
or “extraordinary” taxes provided they are within reason and are justified by spe-
cific, clearly defined expenses. Pérez states the four causes required to justify such
a tax and developed by doctors of canon laws, including Raymond de Penyafort:
causa efficiens (who taxes?), causa finalis (to what purpose?),24 causa materialis
(who and what will the tax be levied on?), and causa formalis (what will be the
extent of the tax?).25
In a kingdom that, according to juridical thought, continued to live under a
regime of Roman law, it is no wonder Martín Pérez should deem the only jus-
tification to levy a tax is its legitimacy. Yet the limits he sets to the levying of
taxes could also constitute an attempt to set limits to royal power, just as the
nobility and urban elites tried to do in the years 1310–1320, taking advantage of
the minority of Alfonso XI,26 as well as at the Cortes of Valladolid (1442) and of
Ocaña (1469). These instances, however, did not prevent the development of a
fiscal state, although they did curb royal arbitrariness and reinforced the idea that
consultation with the political forces of the Cortes was necessary. For approxi-
mately fifty years, the monarchy would seek approval from these parliamentary
representatives before it levied the alcabala tax.27 However, although the Cortes
were convened by kings for the purpose of negotiating servicios (contributions)
by the kingdom’s cities and towns to the crown, the presentation of complaints
by the representatives and the royal responses to these remonstrances that also
typified these gatherings did not condition the representatives’ vote on the taxes.
Nevertheless, allowing the kings to levy extraordinary taxes (desaforadas), albeit
under very specific provisions, only paved the way to the legitimation of these
taxes. Warfare, which was always presented as “legal,” was the main reason sov-
ereigns put forward to obtain these extraordinary subsidies from the Cortes. As
a result, warfare led to a fundamental doctrinal shift, as revenues were made to
match the expenses, which eventually ended up becoming the driving force of
fiscality. War, necessity, and the “common good”28 justified taxation, and the levy
of extraordinary taxes and the continual state of war against “enemies of the faith”
led to continual taxation.29 Over time, the frequency and duration that “extraor-
dinary taxes” were levied came to make them an increasingly “ordinary” part of
fiscality.
Fiscal sovereignty: the taxation system

The kings of Castile claimed inheritance of all sorts of rights from their predeces-
sors including land, manorial, and feudal rights.30 They kept the regalian rights
inherent in sovereign power.31 Among the most important were revenues from
the coinage and the monopoly on the trade and exploitation of salt. Two direct
taxes came as a complement to this traditional tax regime: First, the cabezas de
pecho levied on Jews and Muslims in exchange for royal protection granted to
the “People of the Book.” Second, the moneda forera, which the king levied on
all taxpayers once every seven years, in exchange for the promise not to resort to
monetary mutations including manipulating the value of the currency or weights
and measures again. Paying the moneda forera also meant acknowledging royal
sovereignty, and therefore justified its compulsory nature. Revenue derived from
war (one-fifth of war booty was due to the crown) had considerably decreased
with the stabilization of the border in the second half of the thirteenth century
following King Fernando III’s conquests in the south. However, tribute (parias)
paid by the emirs of Granada to symbolize their vassalage to the kings of Castile
still brought in significant amounts during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.32
Meanwhile, expenditures continued to increase due to the development of the
administration with its attendant operating costs and wages and, most importantly,
due to warfare. The latter was all the more costly as the crown’s remuneration
of aristocratic service in warfare was no longer balanced by the booty and lands
taken from the enemy. This state of affairs compelled the monarchs to substantially
88 Denis Menjot
increase allocations of tierras (lands) and sueldos (salaries) to the aristocracy. In
other words, the kings of Castile faced a situation in which traditional revenue
resources were either stagnating or dwindling. If the kings looked to ordinary
taxation to make up for rising expenditures and decreasing revenues, they were
met here with limitations as well. The rates and periodicities of ordinary taxes had
been fixed long before by custom and could therefore not be raised arbitrarily to coun-
terbalance the erosion provoked by monetary mutations effected by Alfonso X.33
As a result, the kings had to resort to taxation to meet the increase of their finan-
cial burdens.34
Between 1268 and 1275, Alfonso X laid the foundations of a new fiscal system
which aroused much opposition.35 As the sovereign, he sought to develop instru-
ments that concentrated political power in his hands and enabled him to assert
sovereignty and authority throughout the kingdom.36 He organized a customs sys-
tem for the first time. From 1271 onward, first imports and then a few years later
exports had to pay a tithe tax of 10% ad valorem known as the diezmo aduanero.
This tithe was collected by a network of customs offices established in the ports
of Galicia, Asturias, and the Basque region. Collected at seaports, this tax was
also known as the “tithes of the sea” (diezmos de la mar). Customs were also paid
at checkpoints on the land border with Portugal, Navarre, and Aragon (though in
the case of Aragon only on merchandise passing through the border between the
Crown of Aragon and Murcia).37
In addition to imposing customs duties, Alfonso X also intervened in the econ-
omy to balance trade and protect crown resources all to the benefit of royal rev-
enues. These actions again asserted new boundaries for sovereignty. From 1268,
the king promulgated laws regulating foreign trade and laying the foundations for
a double customs regime that would become a permanent part of the economic
structure of the emerging Castilian state. Indeed, he decreed that exportable goods
and products should not leave Castilian territory without prior authorization (cosas
vedadas). Included among these were items that papal legislation prohibited from
sale to Muslims such as weapons, horses, donkeys, and mules; essential foodstuff
such as bread, cereals, livestock, meat, and wine; basic textiles like wool, silk,
and leather; and precious metals. To these he added luxury items reserved for the
consumption of the nobility, such as hunting birds. These protectionist measures
also served to curb rising prices by reserving these products for the domestic
market. Still, the economic and financial interests of the monarchy did not always
coincide with those of the kingdom’s subjects and the customs system evolved to
fit new circumstances. Alfonso XI, who needed large sums to finance his military
campaigns against Granada, was the first to ease prohibitions by authorizing the
export of cereals and livestock such as horses in order to increase revenues raised
by custom duties.
Alfonso X also preserved an indirect tax called the almojarifazgo, inherited
from Muslim times, in Toledo and the southern regions he conquered. It included
a set of taxes levied on shops, buildings, mills, and workshops. In Murcia and
Seville, taxes were also imposed on betting and on gambling houses (tahureria).
Additionally, Alfonso X wanted to take fiscal advantage of the development of
transhumance on the peninsula that saw flocks of sheep travel on roads (cañadas)
that connected summer pastures in Castile and Leon with winter pastures in Anda-
lusia. From 1276 onward, he exacted an annual levy (servicio) on this move-
ment which, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, was set at five sheep per
100, one pig per 100, and three cows per 1,000. Sometime before 1270, he also
imposed the montazgo tax on the use of pasture. In 1343 Alfonso XI made the
montazgo an annual levy and in 1347 he combined the servicio and montazgo into
a mixed tax payable in the form of all types of livestock.
To this list of levies, Alfonso X also introduced other servicios, extraordinary
taxes which had to be determined and confirmed by votes of the Cortes; each
servicio amounted originally to one moneda forera. He increased direct taxes on
the kingdom’s Jews and, with papal consent, he took a regular share of ecclesi-
astical revenues in the form of two-ninths of the tithe (the tercias reales) as well
subsidies on the clergy.
Alfonso did exempt members of the nobility, clergy, and urban aristocracy from
these taxes. At the same time, however, he asserted the right to impose taxes on
everyone in order to maintain his superiority over subordinates, at least symboli-
cally, as well as manifest his interest in managing elites.
Despite the disturbances that plagued the end of Alfonso X’s reign and the
long minorities of Fernando IV and Alfonso XI, none of these new taxes were
rescinded. The servicio granted by the Cortes was fixed at a particular sum, half of
which was to be collected as a pedido and the other half as monedas.38 The former
was a distribution levy, the total amount of which was divided among the vari-
ous towns of the kingdom. Once assigned an amount, towns took responsibility
for gathering sums from households. Although towns could collect the monies in
whatever way they chose, oftentimes the authorities instituted proportional lev-
ies based on the wealth of each household. This approach indicated concern for
finding an equitable way to translate the tax onto households based on individual
circumstances. In order to determine the tax base of each household (cuantía),
a census of taypaying households and a valuation of their properties and other
resources was taken. Calculations were then made to determine the quota levied
on each household.39 Town councils did fix a minimum threshold and a maximum
ceiling at which proportionality no longer applied. The monedas was a levy where
the rate of tax is set in advance of collection whose base was the same as that of
the moneda forera. The king demanded a variable number of monedas. Under the
reign of Juan I (1379–1390) the monedas became differentiated taxes: taxpayers
whose level of wealth was 60 maravedis paid 1 moneda (equivalent to 8 marave-
dis, 6 along the borders); those with 120 maravedis, 2 monedas; those with 160
maravedis, 3 monedas. Those worth more than 160 maravedis paid 4 monedas.
Not all subjects were obligated to contribute. Nobles, caballeros de villa (urban
aristocrats), clerics, and various groups linked to the crown or by express grant of
kings such as the inhabitants of Seville were exempted. The list of exempted was
inscribed in the registers (cuadernos) that specified the conditions of collection.
Alfonso XI (1312–1350) managed to complete the taxation system by reorgan-
izing the salt revenues40 and the tax on migrant flocks of sheep, as well as through
90 Denis Menjot
a general indirect tax on transactions and consumption, the alcabala.41 From 1342
to 1345 Alfonso XI in collaboration with the Cortes extended the alcabala, a tax
inherited from the Muslim period and previously collected only in al-Andalus, to
all crown territories in order to fund the siege of Algeciras. The alcabala initially
was an extraordinary tax which had to be voted by the Cortes, but shortly before
1400 it became a source of “ordinary” revenue, which represented an increase in the
crown’s independence of the Cortes and the key element of the royal fiscal system.42
This ad valorem sales tax was levied on all goods traded, both those intended
for immediate consumption and those for further processing. The original rate
of 5% very rapidly rose to 10%. Furthermore, this tax was “cumulative,” that
is it was imposed each time an item was passed on in a transaction. The burden
the tax imposed depended on how many times an item was transacted; multiple
transactions were therefore penalized. Some sales normally subject to tax were
exempt by regulations contained in the relevant registers (cuadernos) laid down
for each period of collection.43 Among these were sales of bread, weapons, horses,
precious metals, coins, books both in Latin and the vernacular, and captives and
booty during raids (razzias) taken in Nasrid territory. The king wanted to promote
consumption, facilitate the acquisition of equipment by his warriors, encourage
aristocratic purchases of luxury goods, and stimulate the aggressiveness of the
people who lived near the borders.
By the mid-fourteenth century, then, after a long period of gestation, the tax
system had reached maturity and did not change substantially until the reign of the
Catholic Monarchs. No new taxes were added to the existing list after the reign
of Alfonso XI, but the institutions created for the management of the crown’s
finances and the methods used for the collection of revenues did continue to
develop. In fact, the kings tried to avoid tax collection through municipal coun-
cils except for a part of the servicios – the pedidos – voted for by the Cortes
and required a preparatory census of inhabitants and their property by tax roll
assessors (empadronadores) and collection on a hearth-by-hearth basis by tax col-
lectors (cogedores).44 From 1495 onwards, when the balance of political power
was more favorable to the crown during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, the
municipal authorities were instead allowed to administer alcabala taxes by means
of the encabezamiento, a method of allocation in which the total sum owed to the
royal treasury was fixed in advance.45
The farming of royal revenues by public auction for short periods, varying from
one to five years, was the most profitable method of indirect tax collection and the
least damaging to the crown in political terms. The profit accruing to the revenue
farmers was assumed to be less than the cost of an administrative system financed
by the crown. Moreover, the farmers were expected to pay what they owed at
fixed intervals – usually three times a year – which in fact made them “bankers”
to the crown. The image of the tax farmer is often that of an outsider, upwardly
mobile perhaps but reliant on strong links with powerful individuals and impor-
tant social groups.46 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many farmers in
Castile were Jews;47 in the fifteenth century, they were often Jewish converts to
Christianity, but “Old” Christians were also involved in such activities.48
Clearly, some sources of revenue were much more significant than others, but
because of the absence of accounting sources we do not precisely know the evo-
lution of royal income of the monarchy. Direct taxes remained contingent and
among them old items such as the monedas foreras were insignificant, while the
newer ones, the servicios, always voted by the Cortes since 1269, had consider-
able importance. Still, servicios always remained “extraordinary” in character and
their relative value declined after 1342 with the establishment of the alcabala.
The alcabala was always the main source of ordinary royal revenue of the mon-
archy, accounting for 70–80% of the average income and climbing up to 90% in
1430. Customs duties also enjoyed considerable importance, though much lower
than the alcabala. Among these, tithes levied in the ports of the Cantabrian coast
(diezmos de la mar) were the highest. From the mid-fifteenth century onwards,
indirect taxes provided 90% of the ordinary monarchy’s revenues. In 1429, the
first preserved account of the Castilian monarchy shows that the amounts of alca-
balas (ordinary tax) and servicios (extraordinary tax) were almost equivalent (see
Figure 6.1).
The alcabalas’ and servicios’ similar values were due to Castile’s economic
boom in the fifteenth century and the spread and maturity of its commercial
network. This helps to explain why the monarchy took an interest in economic
policy and sought to expand trade.49 Thus the monarchs, through the exercise of
their regalian powers, protected and stimulated the circulation of goods and trade
both inside the kingdom and in relation to the outside world. They also consoli-
dated the policy of establishing fairs. During an initial period of economic growth
between the second half of the twelfth century and the early fourteenth century,
Figure 6.1 Revenues of the Castilian monarchy in 1429

Source: M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Ingreso, gasto y política fiscal de la Corona de Castilla desde
Alfonso X a Enrique III,” in El siglo XV en Castilla, Fuentes de renta y política fiscal (Barcelona:
Ariel, 1982), 57
92 Denis Menjot
more than fifty fairs were founded, almost all of them in areas belonging directly
to the crown. The next phase of growth, the fifteenth century, was dominated by
the creation of rural fairs, mostly in seigneurial lands as well as the great fair of
Medina del Campo, which also acted as the center for the general settlement of
payments between merchants in Castile.50
Fiscal sovereignty and political forces: usurpation

and delegation of sovereignty
As the main area of contact between the central authority and the rest of the popu-
lation, taxation is the tool by which the former may supervise and, if necessary,
limit the wealth and power of elites and affirm its control over the state’s territory.
Of course, the installation and development of the monarchy’s fiscal system
was met with resistance from the country’s political forces, namely the Church,
the nobility, and the towns, and the relations between the latter and the monar-
chy altered quite noticeably throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The
new methods of revenue raising and the distribution of the proceeds of taxation51
were met with resistance when the Cortes assembled and also in the form of an
anarchic nobility during the years 1282–1325. However, after the great revolt
of the nobles in 1271 and 127252 and the urban unrest of the first decades of the
fourteenth century, monarchic policies based on consultation and dialogue seem
to have fairly easily convinced the Cortes to concede alcabalas and exceptional
servicios on a regular basis. In Castile, the sovereign right to tax revenue was no
longer challenged through violent resistance. Why?
Part of the answer lies in the fact that the state fiscally spared and even favored
the ruling classes.53 Indeed, it included no land tax and only the tercias and the
salt tax put a strain on the proceeds from the products of the land. The nobility’s
two main sources of wealth were land and transhumant livestock, and the rate
applied on the latter, the servicio y montazgo, was low. It was largely compensated
by the privileges the sovereigns granted to the sheep ranchers’ association, the
Mesta, dominated by the great lords (grandes).54 The cereal production was pro-
tected by the double customs system, and was made the sole source of supply for
the domestic market. This system enabled the landlords to commercialize abroad
the other produce of their “estates” (estados), mostly oil, wine, and wool while
importing the luxury products they wanted. This arrangement was detrimental to
local artisans who would have needed protection from foreign competition and
for whom part of the wool produced in the country should have been set aside. As
to the two essential taxes levied, the alcabala and the servicios, the former was
unfair in that every subject of the king of Castile had to pay it according to the
needs of the household regardless of its income. On the other hand, ever since the
creation, the servicios apparently exempted few categories of people from pay-
ment: clerks, nobles (hidalgos) and – at least for the payment of the monedas –
town knights (caballeros de villa) who constituted the urban oligarchy.55 Their
widows and sons (up to the age of sixteen) were also exempt if the knights had
died on the field of honor (honra de caballo). From the reign of Juan I (1379), they
benefited from tax exemption even if they were so reduced in circumstances they
could not even afford a horse or weaponry. Only exceptionally did these secular
privileged classes contribute to the payment of a servicio like the one granted
by the Cortes of Briviesca in 1387. However, they did pay loans imposed by the
monarchy, since a loan was not a “tax,” as claimed by the monarchs.
The clergy
The clergy would voluntarily pay the tercias, but it was seldom required to pay for
other exceptional demands, “gifts,” and compulsory loans or tithes except on a few
occasions in 1309, 1397, and 1443. In return, the Church, which had been weak-
ened by the Schism and whose monasteries were going through a deep economic
crisis, enjoyed numerous exemptions, such as the yantar and the salt tax, and they
also benefited from gifts of land. Moreover, the monarchy intervened when the
collection of the tithe turned out to be a challenge to the Church, such as when
military and religious orders, some municipalities, collectors of royal annuities
such as the almojarifes, alcaides of castles, and the major owners of transhumant
flocks refused to pay it. When this happened, the monarchy supported the Church
and stepped in to help it collect its due. The monarchy and the Church joined in the
pursuit of a common interest.56 The former wished to get as much funding as pos-
sible from episcopal fiscality, which implied making sure the bishops, the chapters,
and the whole of the clergy received their income on a regular basis. The latter
needed the support of a coercive power to compel all the faithful to pay their tithes.
From the second quarter of the fifteenth century on, the clergy started asking to be
exempt from the alcabala, which was only officially granted in 1491.
The nobility
After the great rebellions against taxation in the late thirteenth and early four-
teenth centuries, the nobility never seriously disrupted the development of the
new fiscal system again, although fiscal discontent continued to be an excellent
pretext to rally around and was used by ambitious aspirants to the throne, the
best example still being Enrique de Trastámara.57 Instead, the nobility co-opted
the new fiscal system by controlling the crown and endeavored through legal and
extra-legal ways to obtain an increasingly substantial share of the resources it pro-
vided. Indeed, the nobles managed to satisfactorily regularize and institutionalize
their share of the profits from the royal levy by means of different mechanisms.
The political history of fifteenth-century Castile is a history in which distinct
noble factions [bandos] attempted to take advantage of the new, centralized taxa-
tion system and to participate in a feast on royal fiscality not only by usurpation
but also by delegation.
In return for training men of arms on their lands (tierras), royal vassals sought
concessions of pensions (acostamientos) and, at times of war, wages (sueldos)
from the monarchy. The number of these vassals, which did not surpass thirty or
so at the beginning of Alfonso X’s reign, continued to increase afterward so that,
94 Denis Menjot
in terms of expenses,58 the most significant ordinary expenditure in the monar-
chy’s budget was undoubtedly wages allocated to the king’s vassals in exchange
for military services.59 From the reign of Juan II, the annual maintenance of men
at arms (lanzas) was set at 1,500 maravedis per man in 1387 (in comparison, the
average salary of a craftsman in the middle of the fifteenth century was 22 mara-
vedis). In 1390, Juan II decreed that the salary of each lanza should increase to
2,500 maravedis and so in this way he paid 4,000 lanzas, 1,500 light cavalrymen
(jinetes), and 1000 archers on horseback.60
Nobles of royal blood and numerous important lords were granted “allow-
ances” (mantenimientos) designed to help them meet the needs pertaining to their
social status.61 Enrique III thus allotted his brother Ferdinand 500,000 maravedis
and decided to allocate 150,000 to both of his sons’ private tutors. Some grandees
received juros (annuities) that were attached (situados) often in perpetuity to spe-
cific royal receipts, usually on revenue from the alcabala levied on a product in
a city or region. Under Enrique III, these beneficiaries were numerous enough to
justify the need to record them in a register for the first time in history.
From the time of the reign of the first Trastámara, Enrique II, whose well-
deserved nickname was “el de la mercedes” (the giver of favors), every sign of
royal weakness was used by the nobility to reinforce its power and increase its
levy on the proceeds of royal taxation. This could occur, for instance, in case of
a royal minority or due to factional conflicts. That is how, for instance, the Count
of Benavente boosted his pay from 200,000 to one million maravedis without
increasing the number of “lanzas” he maintained.62 The Cortes repeatedly com-
plained about the augmentation of favors (mercedes) and allowances, the amount
of which apparently doubled or tripled during the minority of Juan II between
1407 and 1420.63
In the fifteenth century, the process of seigneurialization gained unprecedented
momentum in Castile. The grandee houses, which dominated the rest of the nobil-
ity and relied on clients such as knights (caballeros) and hidalgos, developed huge
estates (estados) consisting of tracts of land scattered across the kingdom.64 But
a good share of the revenue from these estados – from 50% to 70% – came from
concessions or usurpations of regalian annuities. It is therefore easy to understand
why, from the early fifteenth century on, the greater nobility tried to collect state
taxes for themselves, be it stealthily or legally being delegated the right by the
monarchy. As early as 1380, in complete disregard of royal interdictions, some
nobles farmed the alcabalas and distributed them like pedidos. Around 1425, the
Cortes lamented that the alcabalas, the tercias, and the monedas, which were
supposed to be inalienable regalia, were being collected by private individuals,
but the trend only intensified over time.65 Enrique IV even authorized nobles to
directly collect the alcabalas on their estates as payment for the allowances that
they had been granted. The various forms of noble usurpation of annuities account
for much of the stagnation of royal revenues that began in 1420 and would later
decrease. It can then be said that the proceeds from royal taxation were also
directly irrigating the lordly treasuries. Toward the middle of the fifteenth century,
monies coming from the alcabalas, tercias, pedidos, and monedas, and annuities
(juros) on royal rents represented most of the revenues of the Count of Benavente
and the Admiral of Castile, Alfonso Enríquez, and 70% of the total revenues of the
house of Zúñiga, then counts of Plasencia.66
The Cortes and the urban oligarchies

The Cortes,67 in which the urban oligarchs were only represented from the four-
teenth century onward, never denied the monarchy the right to control foreign
trade, thus acknowledging it as a regalian right. They let the diezmo become an
ordinary annuity in spite of Alfonso X’s promise to only levy it for six years. They
did the same with the alcabala at the end of the fourteenth century, after each of
their meetings concluded with the authorization given to the king to levy it. They
always yielded to the royal demands for servicios, provided these were justified
by foreign military campaigns or by the necessities of high-level diplomacy, and
they did so after a set of complaints and negotiations that could almost be quali-
fied as ritualistic. In return for a policy based on dialogue with the Cortes with
which he frequently conferred, and for fulfilling some of the demands made by the
representatives, Enrique II (1369–1379) managed to obtain a number of financial
concessions which had not been granted to any other king in a long time. This ena-
bled him to consolidate his illegitimate regime and achieve his political plans. The
Cortes financed Juan I’s Portuguese adventure and voted in favor of the credits
needed to pay for its disastrous consequences. Similarly, between 1406 and 1412,
and again between 1429 and 1433, they accepted the heavy servicios requested
respectively by regent Ferdinand of Antequera for his campaign against Granada
and to finance his politics in Aragon, and by Alvaro de Luna, on behalf of Juan II
(1406–1454), for his battle against Aragon and Navarre.
Of course, on several occasions, the Cortes tried to control, or at least to enforce
its right to monitor the management of public finances and particularly the use of the
amounts they granted. They did so in the crucial periods of the last three decades of
the fourteenth century, at the time of this institution’s “high tide.” Thus, in 1367, at the
end of the civil war between Pedro the Cruel and Enrique II, and in 1391 at the time
of Enrique III’s minority, representatives were admitted at the royal council. John I
(1379–1390), who had been severely defeated at Aljubarrota in 1385, accepted to let
them monitor his accounts together with the royal auditors. These successes, how-
ever, were short-lived and did not survive the recovery of royal power.68 They never
resulted in the organization of real institutional control. The Cortes did not oppose the
increase of fiscal pressure; they managed to have it become accepted.69
The representatives did not represent the whole population of the towns; they
only represented the ruling elite, which accounts for their submissiveness to royal
demands. Starting in 1325, the regimiento created by Alfonso XI officialized the
monopolizing of municipal government by the families of the hidalgos and the
caballeros villanos.70 These were, in some ways, closer to the greater nobility and
ready to relinquish the “contractual” claims of the urban concejos who, in previ-
ous times, had been in charge of collecting royal taxes. The ruling elite now let
the monarchy expand the tax farming system, except partially for the levy of the
96 Denis Menjot
pedidos and the monedas.71 The urban elites were not officially exempt from pay-
ment of these two taxes but they could choose to pay the pedidos through indirect
taxes or through an interest loan. In these, whether directly or through front men,
they would farm the former and subscribe to the latter, thus coming up with two
utterly profitable ways to support the state! The oligarchy was inherently part of
this system of power and the revenues from royal fiscality were one of the condi-
tions for it staying at the head of municipal governments and for maintaining and
developing its wealth.72
Conclusion
As the only legitimate holder of the right to raise taxes or to exempt payment,
the sovereign of Castile enjoyed significant financial power, superior to that of
most western European kings. Theoretically, no one could impose a tax without
his approval. As in most other western states during the last third of the thirteenth
century, the sovereign of Castile had succeeded in installing a fiscal system that
constituted an essential instrument of power but in contrast to other monarchs,
he controlled this system without any institutional hindrance. This taxation sys-
tem favored the development of absolute monarchy and it provided the important
financial means for the implementation of such a political structure.73
However, and this is not the smallest paradox, this fiscal system enabled the
great landowning aristocracy to increase its resources without ever needing to
invest or to levy additional taxes on its subjects. The ruling class benefited from
the sovereign’s wide redistribution to its members of the taxes he levied. Nobles
thus enjoyed stable revenues even as profits based on seigneurial rents stagnated
and those based on war against Muslims became inconsistent. Royal taxation
came to fill the treasures of the aristocracy.
The taxation system therefore helped the aristocracy prevail in the second half
of the fifteenth century; the towers of “homage” which rose up in the Castilian
sky and still dominate its castles bear witness to that economically and socially
triumphant era.74 The system made it possible for the aristocracy to devote itself to
patronage and to indulge its taste for luxury, which further tilted the trade balance
unfavorably as the import of rare goods and high-quality finished products by the
wealthy elite put a curb on the development of crafts and caused little activity to
that sector of the economy.75 The aristocracy imposed its cultural model, all the
more attractive as the door to nobility was open and the nobiliary condition came
along with direct tax exemption, which was sought out by everyone.
Notes
* An earlier version of this text was presented at the conference “Taxation and Sover-
eignty: Explorations in Fiscal History from Antiquity to Modernity” organized at the
New York University at Florence’s Villa La Pietra on May 15–16, 2013. I wish to thank
all the participants for their comments and suggestions.
1 M. W. Ormrod, “Les monarchies d’Europe occidentale à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Eco-
nomic Systems and State Finance, edited by R. J. Bonney (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 111–150.
2 J. Ph. Genet and M. Le Mené (eds.), Genèse de l’Etat moderne. Prélèvement et redis-
tribution (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1984).
3 A. Rucquoi, “Les Wisigoths, fondement de la nation Espagne,” in L’Europe, héritière
de l’Espagne wisigothique, edited by Jacques Fontaine and Christine Pellistrandi
(Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1992), 341–352.
4 I deliberately employ the term “Reconquest” even though recent studies have shed
light on how this term has been used to construct a national myth and legitimate the
conquest of Muslim territories. See M. Ríos Saloma, “De la Restauración a la Recon-
quista: la construcción de un mito nacional (una revisión historiográfico. Siglos XVI-
XIX),” En la España Medieval 28 (2005), 379–414; M. Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista:
una construcción historiográfica (siglos XVI al XIX) (Madrid-México: Marcial Pons,
Ediciones de Historia, 2011).
5 For a complete analysis of justificatory and legitimating elements of the process of
promoting royal fiscal sovereignty, founded on legal, political, religious, and literary
sources, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, see P. Ortego Rico, “Justifica-
ciones doctrinales de la soberanía fiscal regia en la baja Edad Media castellana,” En la
España Medieval 32 (2009), 113–138.
6 Imperium was understood as both the supreme authority of the emperor and the terri-
tory over which such authority was exercised. See A. Pabst, “Imperium,” in Lexikon
des Mitelalters (Brepols: online version), vol. 5, col. 394–395.
El concepto de imperium, en el sentido que le da el derecho romano de poder
supremo que se ejerce sobre un espacio llamado “imperio” ... no consiste en la
posesión de un territorio y no presupone la unidad política, lingüística, fiscal o
religiosa del espacio dentro del que se ejerce; exige en cambio que todos los que le
están sometidos, independientemente de sus costumbres, lenguas o religión reco-
nozcan su autoridad. Alfonso X en el siglo XIII, pudo así figurar como “rey de las
tres religiones” del mismo modo que era rey de Castilla, rey de León, rey de Toledo,
rey de Jaén, del Algarve, de Córdoba, de Sevilla, de Murcia, señor de Vizcaya y de
Molina. A. Rucquoi ....
Alfonso X and his successors may well have presented themselves as “king of the
three religions” in the same way that they are titled “king of Castile, king of Leon, king
of Toledo, king of Jaén, king of the Algarve, king of Cordoba, of Seville, of Murcia,
lord of Vizcaya and Molina”. A. Rucquoi, “De los reyes que no son taumartugos: los
fundamentos de la realeza en España,” in Rex, sapientia, nobilitas. Estudios sobre la
península ibérica medieval, edited by A. Rucquoi (Granada: University of Granada,
2006), 24–25.
7 On the notion of imperium and the construction of imperial ideologies, see H. Siran-
toine, Imperator Hispaniae. Les idéologies impériales dans le royaume de León (IXe-
XIIe siècles) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2012); for notions of royalty and empire,
also see J. H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy (1400–
1525) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
8 Siete Partidas, Partida 2, tit 1, law 5: “Vicarios de Dios son los reyes en cada uno en
su reino, puestos sobre las gentes para mantenerlas en justicia y en verdad en cuanto a
lo temporal, bien así como el emperador en su imperio.” Ibid., law VII: “tiene el Rey
lugar de Dios para fazer justiçia e derecho en el reyno en que es señor.” See A. Otero
Valera, “Sobre la plenitudo potestatis y los reinos hispánicos,” Anuario de Historia del
Derecho Español 34 (1964), 141–162. J. L Bermejo Cabrero, “Los orígenes mediev-
ales de la idea de soberanía,” Revista de Estudios Políticos 201 (1975), 283–290.
9 J. M. Nieto Soria, “El poderío real absoluto de Olmedo (1445) a Ocaña (1469): la
monarquía como conflicto,” La España medieval 21 (1998), 159–228; J. M. Nieto
Soria, “La Segunda Partida en los debates políticos de la Castilla del siglo XV,” e-Spa-
nia [on line] (2008); S. De Dios, “Sobre la génesis y los caracteres del Estado absolut-
ista en Castilla,” Studia historica. Historia moderna 3, 5 (1985), 11–46. John II used
the formula:
de mi cierta ciencia e poderío real absoluto, no reconociente superior en lo tempo-
ral, revoco, caso e anulo, no embargante cualesquier leyes, fueros, ordenanzas y
constumbres e fazañas . . . y como rey e soberano señor, asi lo establezco, ordeno y
98 Denis Menjot
mando, y es mi merced y voluntad que vala y sea firme y estable y valedero como
si fuse instituido y ordenado, fecho y establecido en Cortes.
(Cited by Alfonso Otero Valera, “Sobre la plenitudo potestatis y
los reinos hispánicos,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español
(1964), 152)
10 The mirror of princes and books of wisdom that flourished in the second half of the
thirteenth century expounded on this portrait of the ideal king, a model of wisdom. See
J. M. Nieto Soria, “Les miroirs des princes dans l’historiographie espagnole (couronne
de Castille, XIIIe-XVe siècles): tendances de la recherche,” in Speculum principum,
edited by A. de Benedictis (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), 193–208;
M. Haro Cortés, Literatura de castigos en la Edad Media: libros y colecciones de sen-
tencias (Madrid: Laberinto, 2003).
11 “Nuestro Señor Jesuschristo puso primeramientre al su corte en el cielo. Et desí ordenó
la corte terrenal en aquella misma guisa e en aquella manera que era ordenada la suya
en el cielo, e puso el rey en su logar, cabeza e comenzamiento de todo el pueblo, asi
como puso a sí cabeza e comienzo de los angeles e de los archangeles. Et diol poder de
guiar su pueblo . . . (el rey) es su cabeza e puesto por Dios para adelantar el bien e para
vengar e vedar el mal,” Alfonso X el Sabio, Fuero Real, Law II, ed Real Academia de
la Historia (Madrid, 1836, ed facsímil, Valladolid, 1979), 9–10.
12 A. Rucquoi, “De los reyes que no son taumartugos,” 31.
13 The first studium school was founded in Palencia in 1180 by King Alfonso VIII of
Castile, that of Salamanca was founded around 1218 by Alfonso IX of León and rees-
tablished in 1243 by Fernando III and was granted the status of universitas by Alfonso
X in 1254. The latter also founded the studia of Seville, Murcia, and Valladolid. See A.
Rucquoi, “La double vie de l’université de Palencia (c.1180–c.1250),” Studia Gratiana
29 (Homenaje a D. Antonio García y García) (1998), 723–748; A. Rucquoi, “Éduca-
tion et société dans la Péninsule ibérique au Moyen Age,” Histoire de l’Éducation 69
(1996), 3–36; A. Rucquoi, “Contribution des studia generalia à la pensée hispanique
médiévale,” in Pensamiento hispano medieval, edited by Homenaje a D. Horacio San-
tiago-Otero and J. Ma Soto Rábanos (Madrid: CSIC, 1998), 737–770.
14 “Si el rey cuyo coraçón es en las manos de Dios, e lo él guía inclina a todo lo quel plaze,
el qual es vicario e tiene su logar en la tierra e es cabeça e coraçón e alma del pueblo, e
ellos son sus miembros, al qual ellos naturalmente deven toda lealtat e fidelitat e sujeçión
e obediençia e rreverençia e seruicio, e pro él se ha de guiar e mandar el derecho del
poderío el qual es grande, especialmente segunt las leyes de vuestros rregnos que todas
las leyes e los derechos tienen so sí, por que el su poderío non lo ha de los omes mas de
Dios, cuyo logar tiene en todas las cosas tenporales,” Cortes de los antiguos reinos de
León y Castilla (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1866), t.III, 483.
15 As J. M. Nieto Soria carefully explained in “El poderío real absoluto de Olmedo,”
174–175:
Me parece que resulta bastante evidente la estrecha relación entre el poder abso-
luto del rey y su posición como soberano, pudiéndose entender que lo primero es
una consecuencia de lo segundo . . . el poder real absoluto se convierte a poco de
aparecer, en una especificación de la soberanía real y en un factor que contribuye a
su potencia, aportándole lo que en adelante será un rasgo básico del poder soberano
del rey.
See also J. L. Bermejo Cabrero, “Origenes medievales de la soberanía,” Revista de
Estudios Políticos 200–201 (1975), 283–290; S. De Dios, “Sobre la génesis y los car-
acteres del Estado absolutista en Castilla,” Studia historica. Historia moderna 3, 5
(1985), 11–46.
16 M. A. Pérez de la Canal, “La pragmática de 7 de febrero de 1427,” Anuario de historia
del derecho español 26 (1956), 659–668; B. González Alonso, “Poder regio, Cortes
y régimen político en la Castilla bajomedieval,” in Las Cortes de Castilla y León en
la Edad Media, edited by Cortes de Castilla y León (Valladolid: Cortes de Castilla y
León, 1988), vol. II, 201–254; B. González Alonso, “De Briviesca a Olmedo (algunas
reflexiones sobre el ejercicio de la potestad legislativa en la Castilla bajomedieval),”
in El Dret Comú i Catalunya, edited by A. Iglesia Ferreirós (Barcelona: Fundación
Noguera, 1995), 43–74.
17 Cited in B. González Alonso, “De Briviesca a Olmedo,” 67–68.
18 See below and F. Foronda, El espanto y el miedo. Golpismo, emociones políticas y con-
stitucionalismo en la Edad Media (Madrid: Dykinson, 2013); P. Ortego Rico, “Monar-
quía, nobleza y pacto fiscal: lógicas contractuales y estrategias de consenso en torno
al sistema hacendístico castellano (1429–1480),” in Pacto y consenso en la cultura
política peninsular (siglos XI al XV), edited by J. M. Nieto Soria and O. Villareal
González (Madrid: Sílex, 2013), 123–162.
19 O. Di Camillo, “Existe una literatura de oposición en la España de fines de la Edad
Media?” in Genèse médiévale de l’Espagne moderne. Du refus à la révolte: les
résistances, edited by A. Rucquoi (Nice: University of Nice, 1991), 145–170.
20 J. M. Nieto Soria, “Rex inutilis y tiranía en el debate político de la Castilla bajomedi-
eval,” in Coups d’Etat à la fin du Moyen Âge? Aux fondements du pouvoir politique
en Europe occidentale, F. Foronda, J. Ph. Genet, and J. M. Nieto Soria (dirs.) (Madrid:
Casa de Velázquez, 2005), 73–92.
21 Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo defined the obligations toward their king in the following
way:
Lo II.° consiste esta reuerencia e obediencia e subjección socorriendo e ayudando
al rey con las propias faziendas. Ca los súbditos son obligados de ayudar a su rey
e príncipe con sus faziendas propias aujendo las menester para soportar los cargos
de su real estado e para defensión de la república, a la que son los súbditos obliga-
dos por justicia distributiva. Onde es mucho de notar que no sin cavsa los sabios
antiguos compararon al rey a la cabeça en el cuerpo vmano, pues manifiesto es que
entre todos los mjembros del cuerpo vmano sola la cabeça es aquella que assí como
soberana tiene más cargos.
(Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, Suma de la Política, edited by
Juan Beneyto Pérez (Madrid: CSIC, 1944), 131, cited by P. Ortego,
“Justificaciones,” 117–118)
22 D. Menjot, “L’impôt: péché des puissants. Le discours sur le droit d’imposer dans le
‘Libro de las Confesiones’ de Martín Pérez (1316),” in Derecho y justicia: el poder en
la Europa Medieval, edited by Nilda Guglielmi and Adeline Rucquoi (Buenos-Aires:
CONICET, 2008), 117–134.
23 The king, not only the king of France, had to live off of his own revenues. See L.
Scordia, Le roi doit vivre du sien, La théorie de l’impôt en France (XIIIe-XVe siècles)
(Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 2005).
24 The causa finalis constituted the first element of legitimation developed by the scho-
lastics in political treatises at the end of the Middle Ages. See R. Pomini, La ‘causa
impositionis’ nello svolgimento storico della dottrina finanziaria (Milan: Dott. A.
Giuffre-Editore, 1951).
25 E. Isenmann, “Les théories du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance sur les finances pub-
liques,” in Economic Systems and State Finance, edited by R. J. Bonney (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–36.
26 J. Sánchez-Arcilla Bernal, Alfonso XI: 1312–1350 (Palencia: Diputación Provincial, 1995).
27 See below.
28 As for defense of the territory, the common good was an argument frequently used in
order to obtain servicios extraordinarios by the Cortes. See J. M. Nieto Soria, Fun-
damentos ideológicos del poder real en Castilla (siglos XIII-XVI) (Madrid: Eudema,
1988), 146–147.
100 Denis Menjot
29 P. Ortego Rico, “Justificaciones,” 119–123. However, as the author points out, the pur-
pose of the levy was not only used as an argument to legitimize its collection, but also
to try to limit it.
30 The kings of Castile mostly relied on the yantar, the service of hospitality owed by
men to the nobles and monarchy supplemented by the conducho; the fonsadera levy
paid to the lords in substitution for military service, which the sovereigns had gener-
alized; the fees on crops or lands: martiniega, marzazga or diezmo; the anubda and
the roda collected in exchange for securing the roads; and the portazgos, inland tolls
collected for the movement of goods within the kingdom of Castile. These feudal or
manorial revenues were insignificant in monetary terms for the kings of the late Middle
Ages. M. A. Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad y poder real en Castilla, 1252–1369 (Madrid:
Editorial complutense, 1993), 31–52.
31 Ibid., in special, 50–85.
32 For a glossary of terminology on taxation, see D. Menjot, M. Sánchez Martínez, and
P. Verdés Pijuan (dir.) Glossaire critique de fiscalité médiévale on line (2015), http://
gcfm.imf.csic.es.
33 J. Gautier-Dalché, “L’histoire monétaire de l’Espagne septentrionale et centrale du
Xe au XIIIe siècle: quelques réflexions sur divers problèmes,” Anuario de Estudios
Medievales VI (1969); J. Gautier Dalché, “La politique monétaire d’Alphonse X,”
Cuadernos de Historia de España 70 (1987), 84–85.
34 The fiscal system and the various taxes levied by the Castilian monarchy between
Alfonso X (1252) and Isabella I (1474) are now well known and have been the subjects
of numerous studies, the most significant of which are: M. A. Ladero Quesada, Fiscali-
dad y poder real en Castilla; M. A Ladero Quesada, “Castile in the Middle Ages,” in
The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.1200–1815, edited by R. J. Bonney (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 177–199; M. A. Ladero Quesada, La Hacienda Real
de Castilla (1369–1504) coleccion de trabajos (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia,
2009). Please refer to these works for more details about taxation.
35 D. Menjot, “L’établissement du système fiscal étatique en Castille, 1268–1342,” in
Génesis medieval del Estado moderno: Castilla y Navarra, 1250–1370, edited by
A. Rucquoi (Valladolid: Ámbito, 1987), 149–172.
36 For G. Castán Lanaspa (2000), Política económica y poder político. Moneda y fisco
en el reinado de Alfonso X el Sabio (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería
de Educación y Cultura). Alfonso X’s fiscal measures were first designed to affirm his
sovereign power and to make him, if not the only then at least the principal recipient
and redistributor. Redistribution took place through awards (mercedes) and remunera-
tions for services, with monies coming from feudal rents. This role had until that time
been shared between the king and the nobility. This fiscal policy was also explained
by other needs, notably the campaign for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire as
explained by J. Gautier Dalché, “La politique monétaire et fiscale d’Alphonse X
revisitée par Guillermo Castán Lanaspa,” Alcanate 4 (2004–2005), 315–352.
37 M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Las aduanas de Castilla en el siglo XV,” Rivista internazi-
onale di Storia della Banca 7 (1973), 83–110; D. Menjot, “Economie et fiscalité: les
douanes du royaume de Murcie au XIVe siècle,” in Les Espagnes médiévales. Aspects
économiques et sociaux, Mélanges, (Nice: Université de Nice, 1983).
38 D. Menjot, “La fiscalité directe dans les systèmes financiers des villes castillanes au
bas Moyen Âge,” in La fiscalité des villes au Moyen Age (Occident méditerranéen),
2: Les systèmes fiscaux, D. Menjot and M. Sánchez Martínez (dir.) (Toulouse: Privat,
1999), 223–258; A. Romero Martínez, “Les procédures de prélèvement de l’impôt
direct dans les villes de la couronne de Castille au bas Moyen Âge,” in ibid., 259–288;
A. Romero Martínez, Fisco y recaudación. Impuestos directos y sistemas de cobro en
la Castilla medieval (Granada: Grupo Editorial Universitario, 1999).
39 On documents generated by the census and assessment, see A. Romero Martínez, Los
papeles del fisco. Estudio diplomático de la documentación fiscal castellana bajome-
dieval (Granada: Grupo Editorial Universitario, 1998).
40 From 1338 the king of Castile collected fees for the monopoly on the sale of salt within
the salt warehouses (alfolies) of the Cantabrian coast (Guipúzcoa, the Marina de Cas-
tilla, Asturias, and Galicia).
41 A few years prior to 1330, an extraordinary duty was collected on the border between
Aragon and Murcia by the king of Castile but only for goods imported and exported
by the Aragonese in retaliation for abuses suffered by the Castilian merchants in the
territories of the Crown of Aragon. This tax was named marca in 1336. Until the end
of the reign of Alfonso XI in 1350, it amounted to two dineros per libra or dobla taxed
intermittently, always in response to the same taxation levied in Aragon. Theoretically,
the proceeds of this taxation of vengeance was used to compensate victims. D. Men-
jot, Murcie castillane, une ville au temps de la frontière (1243–milieu du XVe siècle)
(Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2002), 541–543.
42 The alcabala was abolished only in 1845.
43 S. de Moxó, “Los cuadernos de alcabalas. Orígenes de la legislación tributaria castel-
lana,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 39 (1969), 317–450.
44 D. Menjot, “Système fiscal étatique et systèmes fiscaux municipaux en Castille
(XIIIe-fin du XVe siècle),” in Fiscalidad de Estado y fiscalidad municipal en los
reinos hispánicos medievales, D. Menjot and M. Sánchez Martínez (dir.) (Madrid:
Casa de Velázquez, 2006), 21–52; J. Rodríguez Sarria, “¿Cobrar para el rey? Los
pedidos regios: procedimientos y agentes de la recaudación en la Sevilla del siglo
XV,” in En busca del zaqueo: los recaudadores de impuestos en las épocas medi-
eval y moderna, edited by A. Galán Sánchez and E. García Fernández (Madrid:
IEF, 2012), 79–98.
45 M. Asenjo González, “Los encabezamientos de alcabalas en la Castilla bajomedieval:
Fuentes de renta y política fiscal,” in Fiscalidad de Estado, D. Menjot and M. Sánchez
Martínez (dir.) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2006), 135–170.
46 P. Ortego Rico, “Arrendadores mayores y arrendadores menores. La configuración de
redes socioeconómicas a través de la gestión de la Hacienda Real a fines del siglo XV:
algunos ejemplos,” in En busca del zaqueo, edited by A. Galán Sánchez and E. García
Fernández (Madrid: IEF, 2012), 99–116.
47 This intensified anti-Jewish feeling sometimes to the outbreak of pogroms, the most
important of which took place in Spain in 1391. See A. Mac Kay, “Popular Movements
and Pogroms in Fifteenth Century Castile,” Past and Present 55 (1972), 33–67.
48 M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Los judíos castellanos del siglo XV en el arrendamiento de
impuestos reales,” in El siglo XV en Castilla, Fuentes de renta y política fiscal (Barce-
lona: Ariel, 1982), 143–167.
49 H. Casado Alonso, “Las colonias de mercaderes castellanos en Europa en los siglos
XV y XVI,” in Castilla y Europa. Comercio y mercaderes en los siglos XIV, XV y XVI,
edited by Hilario Casado Alonso (Burgos: Diputación Provincial, 1995), 15–56; H.
Casado Alonso El triunfo de Mercurio. La presencia castellana en Europa (siglos XV
y XVI) (Burgos: Diputación Provincial, 2003).
50 M. A. Ladero Quesada, Las ferias de Castilla. Siglos XII a XV (Madrid: comité español
de ciencias históricas, 1994); H. Casado Alonso, “Medina del Campo Fairs and the
Integration of Castile into 15th to 16th Century European Economy,” in Fiere e Mer-
cati nella Integrazione delle economie europee. Secc. XIII-XVIII, edited by Simonetta
Cavaciocchi (Florence: Le Monnier, 2001), 495–517.
51 Royal largesse (considered a virtue) and redistribution legitimized the taking but
they also served to create loyalties. See P. Ortego Rico, “Justificaciones . . .,” op. cit.,
129–134.
102 Denis Menjot
52 This revolt is recounted in detail by J. Escalona Monge, “Les nobles contra su rey.
Argumentos y motivaciones de la insubordinacón nobiliaria de 1272–1273,” Cahiers
de Linguistique et de Civilisation Hispaniques Médiévales 25 (2002), 131–162.
53 M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Fiscalidad regia y génesis del Estado en la Corona de Castilla
(1252–1504),” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, S. III, Historia Medieval 4 (1993), 95–135;
M. A. Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad y poder real, 267–334; A. MacKay, “Hacienda y
sociedad en la Castilla bajomedieval,” in Estado, Hacienda y Sociedad en la Histo-
ria de España edited by B. Bennassar (Simancas: Insituto de Historia, 1989), 45–78;
D. Menjot, “L’incidence sociale de la fiscalité directe des Trastamares de Castille au
XIVe siècle,” Historia-Instituciones-Documentos 5 (Séville, 1978), 1–43; D. Menjot,
“Le consentement fiscal: impôt royal et forces politiques dans la Castille de la fin du
Moyen Age,” L’impôt public et le prélèvement seigneurial en France, edited by Ph.
Contamine, J. Kerhervé and A Rigaudière (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique
et financière, 2002), vol. 1, 202–220.
54 M. Cl. Gerbet, L’élevage dans le royaume de Castille sous les Rois catholiques (1454–
1516) (Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 1991).
55 On urban societies in general, see J. I. Ruiz de la Peña Solar, “Ciudades y sociedades
urbanas en la España Medieval, siglos XIII-XV,” in Las sociedades urbanas en la
España Medieval, XXIX Semana de Estudios Medievales, Estella, vol. 1, 2002 (Pam-
pelune: Gobierno de Navarra, 2003), 17–49.
56 J. M. Nieto Soria, Iglesia y génesis del Estado Moderno en Castilla (1369–1480)
(Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1994); J. M. Nieto Soria, “Las relaciones Iglesia-
Estado en España a fines del siglo XV,” in El tratado de Tordesillas y su época (Vallado-
lid: Junta de Castilla y León 1995), 737–749; J. M. Nieto Soria, “Fiscalidad eclesiástica
y estado monárquico en la Castilla bajomedieval,” in El dinero de Dios. Iglesia y Fiscal-
idad en el Occidente Medieval, siglos XIII al XV, edited by D. Menjot and M. Sánchez
Martínez (dir.) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 2011), 101–114.
57 J. Valdeón Baruque, Enrique II de Castilla: la guerra civil y la consolidación del régi-
men (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, Secretariado de Publicaciones, 1966).
For a more detailed analysis of aristocratic perceptions on taxes, see P. Ortego Rico,
“Monarquía, nobleza y pacto fiscal: lógicas contractuales y estrategias de consenso
en torno al sistema hacendístico castellano (1429–1480),” in Pacto y consenso en la
cultura política peninsular (siglos XI al XV) (Madrid: Silex, 2013), 123–162.
58 For an analysis monarchical expenditures and methods of redistributing royal taxes, see
M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Instituciones fiscales y realidad social en el siglo XV castellano,” in
El siglo XV en Castilla. Fuentes de renta y política fiscal (Barcelona: Ariel, 1982), 81–87.
59 In 1295, almost the entire reaping of the servicios served to pay wages. F. Hernán-
dez Sánchez, Las rentas del rey. Sociedad y fisco en el reino castellano del siglo XIII
(Madrid: Fundación Ramón Areces, 1993).
60 On the armies of the kings of Castile, see M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Formación y fun-
cionamiento de las huestes reales en Castilla durante el siglo XV,” in La organización
militar en los siglos XIV y XV. Actas de las II Jornadas Nacionales de Historia Mili-
tar (Málaga: Cátedra General Castaños, Capitanía General de la Región Militar Sur,
1993), 161–172; M. A. Ladero Quesada, “La organización militar de la Corona de
Castilla en la Baja Edad Media,” in La incorporación de Granada a la Corona de Cas-
tilla (Granada: Diputación Provincial, 1993), 195–227; M. A. Ladero Quesada (ed.),
Historia militar de España. T. II. Edad Media (Madrid: Ministerio de defensa, 2010),
217–377.
61 The Ordinance of Alcalá (1348) states:
Pertenesce a los Reyes, e a los Grandes Principes de dar grandes dones, faciendo
mercet a los sus naturales, e a sus Vasallos, porque sean onrrados, e ricos, ca tanto
es el Rey, e el su estado mas onrrado, quanto los suyos son mas onrrados, e mas
abundados.
(Cited by P. Ortego, “ justificaciones,” 131)
62 I. Beceiro Pita, El Condado de Benavente en el siglo XV (Benavente: Centro de Estu-
dios Benaventanos, 1998), 173–181; the author analyzes in detail how by force or by
subtler legal measures lords succeeded in diverting alcabalas revenues for their own
advantage, and then the tercias, monedas, and pedidos.
63 J. I. Ortega Cervigón, “Títulos, señoríos y poder: los grandes estados señoriales en
la Castilla centro-oriental,” in Títulos, Grandes del Reino y Grandeza en la sociedad
política. Fundamentos en la Castilla medieval, M. C. Quintanilla Raso (dir.) (Madrid:
Sílex, 2006), chapter 5, 265–307.
64 M. C. Quintanilla Raso, “Haciendas señoriales nobiliarias en el reino de Castilla a fines
de la Edad Media,” in Historia de la Hacienda Española. Edades Antigua y Media,
edited by Luis G. de Valdeavellano and María Isabel Alfonso Antón (Madrid: Instituto
de Estudios Fiscales, 1982), 767–798. I. Beceiro Pita, “Los estados señoriales como
estructura de poder en la Castilla del siglo XV,” in Realidad e imágenes del poder en
España a fines de la Edad Media, edited by A. Rucquoi (Valladolid: Ambito, 1988),
293–323; M. C. Quintanilla Raso, “Conflictos entre grandes. De las luchas internobili-
arias a los debates interseñoriales,” in El conflicto en escenas. La pugna política como
representación en la Castilla bajomedieval, J. M. Nieto Soria (dir.) (Madrid: Sílex,
2010), 59–104, 66.
65 S. de Moxó, “Los orígenes de la percepción de alcabalas por particulares,” Hispania
28, 78 (1958), 314–317. On the methods of collection of alcabalas by the Lords in
their manors, see M. A. Ladero Quesada, La Hacienda Real de Castilla, 75–80.
66 Beceiro Pita, El Condado de Benavente en el siglo XV; P. Martínez Sopena, El estado
señorial de medina de Rioseco bajo el almirante Alfonso Enríquez (1389–1430) (Val-
ladolid: Université de Valladolid, 1977), 165–166; J. Martínez Moro, La renta feudal
en la Castilla del siglo XV: los Stúniga (Valladolid: Université de Valladolid,1977), 47.
67 J. Gautier-Dalché, “L’organisation des Cortes de Castille et León,” in Las Cortes de
Castilla y León en la Edad Media, edited by Cortes de Castilla y León, vol. I (Val-
ladolid: Cortes de Castilla y León, 1988), 267–288. To insert Castillan Cortes In
the European representative assemblies, we should consult M. Hébert, Parlementer.
Assemblées représentatives et échange politique en Europe occidentale à la fin du
Moyen Âge (Paris: de Boccard, 2014).
68 J. Valdeón Baruque, “Las Cortes de Castilla y León en tiempos de Pedro I y de los prim-
eros Trastámaras,” Las Cortes de Castilla y León en la Edad Media, edited by Cortes
de Castilla y León, vol. I (Valladolid: Cortes de Castilla y León, 1988), 183–218.
69 M. A. Ladero Quesada, “Cortes de Castilla y León y fiscalidad regia, 1369–1429,” in
Las Cortes de Castilla y León en la Edad Media, edited by Cortes de Castilla y León,
vol. I (Valladolid: Cortes de Castilla y León, 1988), 289–373.
70 M. Asenjo González, “La aristocratización política en Castilla. El proceso de partici-
pación urbana (1252–1520),” in La monarquía como conflicto en la Corona castel-
lano-leonesa (c. 1230–1504), J. M. Nieto Soria (dir.) (Madrid: Sílex, 2006), 133–196.
71 See F. J. Romero Romero, “El Concejo como instrumento de la fiscalidad regia en la
Castilla del siglo XV. Sevilla y los pedidos de Cortes: 1406–1474,” in Actas del VI
coloquio internacional de historia medieval de Andalucía: las ciudades andaluzas,
siglos XIII-XVI (Málaga: Estepona, 1991), 485–497.
72 B. González Alonso, “Poder regio.”
73 Indeed, in the 1430s, the monarchy could rely on approximately one hundred mil-
lion maravedis, i.e. slightly over two million Aragonese florins, half of which came
from ordinary receipts; this made the Castilian monarchy one of the richest monar-
chies in Europe, according to the figures provided by M. W. Ormrod, “Les monarchies
d’Europe occidentale.”
74 A good example was the Marquis of Santillana, El Marqués de Santillana, 1398–1458:
los albores de la España Moderna (Hondaribia: Nerea, 2001), vol. 4.
75 This is one of the characteristics of the Spanish Society very well described by T. F. Ruiz,
Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (Social History of Europe) (London: Longman, 2001).
7 Friars and royal authority
in the thirteenth-century
Castilian frontier
Francisco Garcia-Serrano
The coming of the friars to the Iberian Peninsula in the thirteenth century caused
a dramatic transformation not only in spiritual perceptions but also in temporal
matters such as politics, economy, social relations and the intellectual world. The
friars represented a solid theological authority within the Church and they also
possessed and exercised a recognized and effective authority outside the Church
over notables and commoners alike. Claiming a path to material poverty as their
original raison d’etre, Franciscans and Dominicans soon thrived in a religiously
diverse and changing society. The presence of the friars enabled social relations
as they created solid networks in urban societies, exercising social and spiritual
authority and thus serving the needs of urban inhabitants, especially the growing
merchant class. Furthermore, they legitimated the power and social status of both
nobles and monarchs by accepting the patronage of the Castilian and Aragonese
royal families.
The frontier society of medieval Iberia was unique in Western Europe as it was
the product of a steady push of the Christian realms southward. Here, undeniably,
power and authority were exercised in a different way than in the more secure
lands of the north. The decisive battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 between
the Christian armies led by King Alfonso VIII of Castile and his allies, on the one
hand, and the Almohads and their Andalusi allies, on the other hand, made the
final encroachment of the Christian troops into southern Iberian territories a fea-
sible reality. In subsequent years Almohad rule disappeared first in the peninsula
and in the Balearic Islands, and then in the Maghrib.1
With these victories a fresh spiritual zeal, echoing the former ideals of crusade,
continued to spread in Iberia. It was in this climate, encouraged by the steady
Christian advances, that the Dominicans and Franciscans entered the peninsula
a few years later. They arrived as preachers and founders of new houses, hence
a fervent mendicant expansion began in all Christian peninsular kingdoms, and
soon they ventured into frontier territories as far as the lands of the Muslims in
Iberia and across the Strait of Gibraltar. Caught between fact and fiction, the leg-
endary journey of Saint Francis in Spain was in 1213–1214, when his alleged
pilgrimage to Santiago took place. Soon after, in 1217, Saint Dominic crossed
the Pyrenees to establish the first Dominican houses in Iberia.2 King Ferdinand III
inflicted on medieval Islam what was arguably its greatest defeat during these
Friars and royal authority 105
very years since within decades the Crown of Castile advanced firmly in eastern
and southern Andalusia by conquering the cities of Baeza (1225), Ubeda (1233),
Cordoba (1236), Jaen (1246), and Seville (1248), and receiving the submission of
the kingdom of Murcia.3 Likewise, in Aragon King James I conquered Mallorca
(1229) and Valencia (1238) and the Portuguese occupied the Alentejo and the
Algarve. Undoubtedly, all these recently conquered cities and territories opened
new opportunities for the preaching of the friars.
The energetic expansion of the mendicant friars, however, was limited neither
to Christian territories nor to the immediate frontier. Proclaiming the African cru-
sade, which would reach its heyday in the second half of the century, the papacy
urged friars to travel to Morocco and Tunisia with the intention to evangelize
the Muslims. For example, in 1226 Honorius III ordered Archbishop Rodrigo of
Toledo to send Franciscans to Morocco to convert the Muslims. Included among
these missionaries were Dominican and Franciscan bishops such as Domingo
“Bishop of Morocco,” Bishop Agnello and Bishop Lope Fernández de Aín.4 They
were the first clerics of that rank to preach among Muslims. In addition, the friars
who were based in North Africa served the interests of the Christian kings and
merchants as mediators, diplomats and even spies, and met the pastoral needs of
mercenaries residing in Islamic lands fighting for Muslim lords, not to mention
the redeeming role of Trinitarians and Mercedarians for slaves and captives.5
Certainly, Christian economic and military interests were often hidden behind
spiritual justifications such as caring for the souls and converting non-Christians.
Newly conquered lands were intensely evangelized by the friars, who were bet-
ter prepared and less indolent than the traditional secular clergy to gain not only
new Christians for the pontiffs, but more subjects for the crown and, beyond the
Christian frontiers, new markets for the merchants. Without a doubt, the affin-
ity between early friars and merchants in the Mediterranean was in every way
remarkable since together they traveled to Muslim lands as precursors of royal
and papal interests. Not only were both groups active in cities and carried out
their activities primarily in urban centers, both had to learn a great deal about
non-Christian cultures in order to achieve their goals. The Dominican Humbert of
Romans justified the endless travels of the friars as resembling the merchants in
their desire to amass fortunes, since the mendicants traveled to many provinces
with the spiritual zeal of “making a fortune in souls.”6 Although comparable to the
friars, the traders showed in many cases a visible lack of scruples and often were
practicing usury and were engaged in illicit trade with the Muslims. Fortunately
the preachers had the power to give them absolution provided that they collabo-
rated with the crusade and donated money for spiritual causes.7
During the mid-thirteenth century, the spiritual welfare of the participants in
what has come to be called the Christian Reconquista was mainly in the hands
of the mendicant friars, who had replaced in this role the secular clergy and the
Benedictine monks. Since the Reconquista was conceived as a religious war in
the quest to reclaim land from the “infidels,” the friars, mainly Franciscans and
Dominicans, helped the monarchs in the establishment and strengthening of new
frontier societies in the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, the role of the friars on
106 Francisco Garcia-Serrano
the frontier, preaching amid Christians and converting non-Christians, was also
crucial in justifying the conversions because usually Muslims were protected by
royal law and forced conversion was not a legitimate option. The Siete Partidas
of Alfonso X claimed that Christians should “work by good words and suitable
preaching to convert the Moors to our faith and to lead them to it not by force or
by pressure,” and it was emphasized “for the Lord is not pleased by the service
that men give him through fear.”8 Furthermore, by the second half of the century
the friars were actively involved in proclaiming the African crusade in churches
and other public spaces to encourage an active participation; they granted absolu-
tion to sinners, and exhorted Christians to travel across the Strait of Gibraltar in
order to spread their faith in the lands of Islam.9
Additionally, the friars traveled with the royal armies and served as chaplains.
Before, Pope Innocent III in the Fourth Lateran Council and his successor Hono-
rius III had produced the basis so that priests were required to act as preachers to
encourage the warriors participating in crusades to behave as Christian soldiers.
Although originally the pontiffs did not have the necessary personnel to carry out
these duties, with the subsequent foundation of Franciscan and Dominican orders
the friars were chosen as the best candidates to fulfill these duties amongst sol-
diers in papal service.10 The practice of itinerant preaching in the rough military
campaigns was possible owing to the use of portable altars.11 Therefore, it was
very common that the friars would accompany Christian troops as military chap-
lains in their campaigns, as was the case of the Dominican friars participating in
the campaigns of King James I of Aragon in Majorca and Valencia with the pur-
pose of preaching to the men, hearing their confession and assigning penance.12
Once the victories were achieved and the cities were conquered, the friars who
accompanied the armies asked the king immediately for permission to establish a
convent as in the cases of Cordoba and Seville.13 Unquestionably, these episodes
were not about spirituality and religious pastoral care alone; there was also a clear
correlation between the distribution of the urban space and its resources and the
role played by the mendicants since, as we will see, they also participated in the
rewards of the conquest.
Royal authority on the frontier

With the reunification of Castile-Leon, the conquest of Andalusia and the Cas-
tilianization of the south, thirteenth-century Castilian monarchs were ready to
implement a more authoritarian rule which concluded in the concentration of
more power. Authority, however, did not reside with the monarchy alone, and it
was continuously negotiated and shared by various interested parties such as the
Church, the magnates and the city dwellers.14 Therefore the concept of authority
was malleable and it was not only about who exercised it but also about how it
was executed. For this reason, it can be claimed that the mendicants were a key
tool for both Ferdinand III and the Church in executing power and authority in
the southern Andalusian lands. Authority should be understood as a flexible and
moving concept. Although mostly related to power (potestas), medieval authority
(auctoritas) was exercised in many different ways: socially, religiously and eco-
nomically.15 While in medieval societies we cannot restrict authority to the text
or to knowledge, it is certain however that the social group that dominated the
texts was able to subjugate other members of society who were mostly illiterate.
Consequently, the authority of the Church spread beyond religious realms and
influenced society at large.16
In the act of taking material and spiritual possessions of land and cities in Anda-
lusia, and in the subsequent ceremonies, the mendicants played a central role in
asserting royal authority. They were active agents in affirming the king’s control
over the frontier territories, and in the major cities such as Cordoba and Seville
they were closely associated with urban organizations, especially with the conce-
jos (city councils), as these groups shared common interests. The friars cooper-
ated with council members to administer resources, organize the collations and
attract new settlers. In turn, Ferdinand III reinforced and legitimized his own reli-
gious authority conveyed to him by the apostolic see by granting him competency
over local churches. In this atmosphere Pope Innocent IV encouraged Ferdinand
to conquer Seville as a “special athlete of Christ.”17
The conquest of Seville: ceremony and repopulation

Within this context of close contact between monarchy, papacy and mendi-
cants, King Ferdinand III’s well-known, though poorly documented, ceremonial
entrance into Seville took place weeks after the city was captured from Almohad
power on November 23, 1248. The royal entry was strategically delayed until
the main mosque of the city had been consecrated by clergymen so that a ritual-
ized performance of power and authority could be staged where both civic and
religious authorities had a role in occupying the newly conquered urban space
of the Muslim city, aiming to both Christianize it for the pope and Castilianize it
for the king.18 According to the Primera Crónica General, the ceremonial parade
included the participation of the military contingent active in the conquest, dis-
playing their weapons and banners, as well as a procession of a selected group
of clergymen present in the campaign (“toda la clerecía”).19 Although nothing
was said in the Primera Crónica General about the participation of mendicant
friars in the solemn entry, later ecclesiastical chroniclers, as they commented on
the religious entourage, placed their focus neither on the ten Castilian bishops,
nor on the powerful archbishop of Toledo; indeed, great protagonism was given
to the modest Dominicans Pedro González Telmo and Dominic the Young, with
perhaps the addition of Pedro Nolasco, the founder of the Mercedarians, all of
whom were allegedly present in the ceremony.20 Whether the account is in fact
historically accurate or not is secondary; more important for us is the fact that the
friars, representing newly founded orders, had a crucial role in the Reconquest of
the thirteenth century.
The recently seized lands of Andalusia, which included large Muslim cities,
presented a completely new scenario for monarchs, nobles, settlers and clergymen
alike. The friars were no exception and they had to adjust their spiritual and social
function to serve the needs of the Christians in an unfamiliar scenario. Since the
orders were newly founded, they could adapt much better to the porous frontier
society than the more rigid traditional clergy. While in the older Christian towns
of northern Castile the friars had to compete for urban space and were often forced
to take whatever peripheral enclaves were left to establish their house, in frontier
societies they were creators of the urban space, especially in cities such as Cor-
doba and Seville, and were closely intertwined with the city council and the new
residents. In addition, since they did not have to compete with the already present
spiritual authority like in the north, they had the opportunity to spiritually and
socially lead the reorganization of the cities from the early stages of occupation,
thus having a more relevant role in the reconstruction of parochial life. It is well
known that during the thirteenth century the overwhelming majority of convents
established in Andalusia belonged to the mendicants as only three out of a total of
twenty-seven convents were established by other religious orders.21
Therefore, although the existing sources do not allow us to acquire a more
detailed explanation of events and we cannot know who was really present in the
ceremony and procession in Seville, we certainly need to pay attention to the role
of the mendicants in the long process of transforming the Castilian society of the
thirteenth century when the change of mentality and values, moving away from
the feudal ideals, jeopardized the whole social structure including the present-day
idealized concept of convivencia or coexistence.22 In dealing with heretics, Jews
and Muslims, the friars created structures of authority and dissent that affected
spiritual and temporal life in all spheres of social activity. The narrative used by
the friars in their sermons incorporated auctoritas (authority) as a genuine source
of knowledge by using medieval exempla (examples). Those examples frequently
invoked for preaching in public spaces helped to spread a popular attitude of anti-
Semitism and class resentment. In many ways, mendicant preaching constantly
reminded the general population of their differences in a religiously plural society
by defining the boundaries separating the heterodox from the orthodox.23
This scenario was more evident in a society which was so rapidly expanding
south, creating a very porous frontier where individuals prevailed over communi-
ties. As Teofilo F. Ruiz rightfully pointed out in regards to the conquest and subse-
quent settlement of Andalusia, while a considerable number of northern Castilians
from all levels of society moved south due to the attractions of higher wages,
climate conditions and new opportunities, the result was that the monarchy failed
“to replicate the social and economic patterns of northern Castile by settling small
and independent farmers on the land.”24 Thus the pretense of continuity of royal
power in Andalusia was not as smooth as expected and it was further challenged
by the frontier and the new and unknown environment faced by the Christians.
Indeed, the original enthusiasm of northern emigrants lured to the south in search
of new opportunities was ephemeral, and most of the land ended up in the hands
of the Church, military orders and nobles. Soon the peasants and members of the
lower ranks of society realized that they had gotten the short end of the deal.25
The scarcity of opportunities for farmers was the cause of the initial fail-
ure to repopulate the Guadalquivir basin, and soon signs of depopulation and
abandonment emerged. This was a scenario that would lead to a unique situation
where municipal and ecclesiastical institutions were in place prior to the settle-
ment of a steady population, consequently permitting these organizations to then
mold future incoming inhabitants. Thus in Andalusia parishes and collations were
set up to wait and to evangelize future populations rather than those already set-
tled, allowing the friars to participate actively in building this spiritual infrastruc-
ture. It was certainly a more effective way to create social and spiritual uniformity
on their terms compared to the northern cities where lay and ecclesiastical institu-
tions were present well before the arrival of the friars.26
Accordingly, when new residents of the recently conquered lands came to settle
in the southern territories, the mendicant friars were already familiar with the area
and preceded them in the forefront of the conquest leading their way to Christian
expansion both in Castile and Aragon. Besides the example of Seville mentioned
above, we know that Franciscans and Dominicans had entered Cordoba as early
as 1236 and soon after founded their convents of San Pedro and San Pablo there.
Similarly, Miguel Fabra, a personal companion of Saint Dominic, participated
in the conquest of Mallorca in 1230 and was selected later by King James I of
Aragon to evangelize captured Valencia where a Dominican convent was founded
in 1239, only a few months after the conquest. Another Dominican friar, Andreu
D’Albalat, was appointed first bishop of Valencia and second chancellor of James
I between 1247 and 1257.27
As we analyze Ferdinand III’s relationship with the mendicant orders in these
new territories, it becomes evident that he did not intend to replicate the patterns
of northern Castile. He understood, and so did the papacy, that in the frontier lands
of the south, the role of the friars had to be adapted to a new socio-economic and
spiritual environment only present in the frontier, thus allowing them to exercise
a leadership not possible in northern lands. The mapping of royal authority in the
newly conquered lands coincided closely with the expansion of the mendicant
orders, and they surely benefitted each other; the king succeeded by establishing
his secular and religious authority, and claiming their new spiritual jurisdictions
on the frontier and beyond gratified the mendicants. The royal presence was more
visible in al-Andalus where the king was more directly involved in patronizing
mendicant convents than in the north.28
Cordoba: dealing with urban matters

In the process of Castilianization and royal assertion in the Andalusian towns the
mendicants, working together with the recently formed city councils, were seen
not only as spiritual leaders, but also as main agents in the process of occupation.
For instance, when Cordoba was taken in 1236 on the day of San Pedro and San
Pablo, we can assume that Franciscan and Dominican friars were present, among
them Domingo, the Dominican bishop of Baeza.29 The newly founded Franciscan
and Dominican monasteries were to be named after those early apostles to advo-
cate the mendicant convents and to identify them with the ideal of apostolic pov-
erty, thereby, as noted earlier, encouraging friars to serve as chaplains in the army.
While there is a lack of documentation for the first stages of the mendicant set-
tlement in Cordoba, it has been suggested that the king granted his first donations
to the mendicants verbally to establish their convents in Cordoba, as it was done
in Seville later. For example, the first written documents ratifying the donation of
Ferdinand III to the Dominicans in Cordoba was not issued until 1241, five years
after the conquest. It seems that it was a common practice to first express an incep-
tion or willingness to establish a convent and the real reception loci, or material
donation came later.30 However, the fact that many of the original donations were
granted orally and that the urge to confirm them with written texts was not imme-
diate is a sign that the mendicants felt much more confident in being able to retain
their properties in this city than in the northern ones.31
On the other hand, it is known that these itinerant friars did not originally need
a stable residence or a convent, which was likely to be established years later.
Regardless of whether or not a fixed location was needed, or understood as cru-
cial for itinerant friars, the Dominicans were allowed to enter Cordoba from the
beginning and were already assigned a location near the walls of the city. A clear
example of the symbiosis between town and convent took place in 1246 when
the city council of Cordoba recognized the spiritual guidance of the Dominicans
by stating “the benefit that our souls have in the Order of Preachers” and how the
friars had shared with the members of the council hardships and were of great help
and support, not only in spiritual matters, ever since Cordoba became Christian.32
Perhaps the lack of large populations, since the Muslims were expelled, and the
uncertainties of the frontier made the friars much more engaged with the inhabit-
ants of the newly conquered cities, as was the case of the members of the concejo
of Cordoba, who referred to the Dominicans as reliable collaborators since the
early days of Christian presence in the city.33 One element that facilitated the
engagement of the friars in the new territories and towns was that the expulsion
of entire populations from large cities such as Cordoba and Seville as part of the
surrender pacts meant that all types of immoveable property came under the con-
trol and occupation of the new owners. The practical demands of administering
every aspect of urban and rural life in an unfamiliar environment, as well as the
task of attracting settlers to the frontier, meant that the Castilians had to adopt
pre-existing spatial constructs as well as the administrative approaches that these
concepts suggested.34
Hence, the friars, trained and highly educated, were well suited to serve the
new demands as can be inferred by their collaboration with the municipal council
of Cordoba in the management of essential hydraulic resources. Soon after the
Franciscan convent of San Pedro and the Dominican convent of San Pablo were
erected in dominant urban areas, these constituted from the beginning main agents
in the material reordering of the city. The strategic water supply and management
of Cordoba was divided into three parts and shared equally by the city council, the
Dominicans and later the Franciscans. Subsequently the city council, rewarding
the activity of the preachers, donated half of its one-third (“la mitad de la nuestra
tercia”) of water to the friars provided that they build a fountain for public usage.35
Certainly the friars were beneficial for the council of Cordoba while they acted
in the city, but another factor that made the mendicants’ actions different and
more essential in the peninsular south was the fact that the urban character of
most other places in Western Europe was not an absolute requirement for their
presence, because initially the cities were depopulated and because the number
of mendicant priories was much smaller relatively speaking. For example, the
Dominican foundations in Andalusia did not follow the trend of northern Castile,
where they were established in basically all the prominent cities. In the south
the convents were established in a much smaller proportion, they concentrated a
greater number of friars and served as centers of religious expansion. Notably, in
the kingdom of Cordoba the only Dominican convent established between 1236
and 1399 was that of San Pablo, which means that for well over a century and a
half the friars of this convent had to carry out their actions not only in the city but
also over a vast territory.36 Clearly, instead of being attracted solely to urban cent-
ers, the friars were also required to function in a pretty much rural milieu near the
border; the character of mendicant convents in Andalusia did not fit entirely the
urban character of other European territories.
Friars of the north and friars of the south

It follows that the protagonism of the friars in Andalusia and their civil, moral
and religious authority could seem obvious in such new settings, but when com-
pared with other latitudes in the peninsular north it is rather striking. Certainly the
contrast between northern Castile-Leon and Andalusia was quite significant. The
influence projected by the mendicants in Andalusia was all the more exceptional
when, during the same period, their northern brethren often had to defy and suffer
the fierce and violent opposition of the secular clergy, as can be construed through
different episodes such as those of Cuéllar, Burgos and Orense.37
In 1247 in Cuéllar, pertaining to the diocese thereof, the Franciscans provoked
the anger of the bishop of Segovia to the extent that Pope Innocent IV commis-
sioned the archdeacon and the sacristan of Osma to investigate complaints against
the Franciscan friars. According to the prelates, the friars interfered with parochial
activities, namely, they had built on the territory of their parishes, confessed ille-
gally, and the priest had denied communion to the believers and acted as execu-
tors in the wills of donors.38 In the city of Burgos, a forty-year dispute between
the canons of the Cathedral and the Friars Preacher included episodes such as the
violent interruption of mass in the Dominican convent in 1260; the stealing of the
corpse of Juan Tomás, the archdeacon of Valpuesta in the cathedral of Burgos,
in 1261, thus preventing his burial in the friars’ cemetery; and the robbery of
property titles and construction material used for the new Dominican convent in
1270.39 Finally, in the northern city of Orense the Franciscans were essentially
obliged to renounce the burials in their cemetery due to the brutal and violent
opposition of the bishop Pedro Yañez de Novoa and his supporters as late as 1289,
when men were killed and the noble body of Teresa Yáñez was stolen to be buried
in the churchyard of the Cathedral. This serious incident reached the papacy and
forced Nicholas IV to intervene.40
The anti-fraternal violence and opposition against the friars was triggered when
in 1246 a papal bull issued by Innocent IV granted the Dominicans the right to
have conventional churches as well as cemeteries in their priories. After that, the
friars had the opportunity to complement their itinerant preaching with the cele-
bration of masses in their convents, presenting believers with the option to choose
either regular or secular clergy to fulfill their religious needs. In addition, the
cemeteries also helped friars attract more endowments, since more notable people
would opt for the priories as their place of burial. While originally the Dominicans
were required to travel and preach in streets, squares and other public places in
order to gain believers, complementing rather than competing with the secular
clergy, they now had become true competitors. Throughout Western Europe the
newly acquired competencies of the friars were not always well accepted by
the secular clergy; however, it was likely that the conflict between the friars and
the secular clergy was particularly intense in some Spanish towns, since the bulls
issued by Alexander IV in 1259 and 1260 to cancel secular sanctions against the
Dominicans were aimed especially at the Spanish church.41
Although the friars at that time enjoyed the same religious status as the secular
clergy and could create a parochial group of believers with less need for travel, in
Andalusia the scenario still demanded a combination of parochial life and itiner-
ant preaching. In Cordoba and Seville they were the cornerstones of parochial and
collation life, and it was also in the south where the first mendicant bishops were
appointed: the Dominican Domingo de Soria in Baeza in 1232 and the Franciscan
Pedro Gallego in Cartagena in 1250.42
Convents became such an inseparable component of the urban infrastructure
that they were seen as an essential part of the city space beyond the pastoral and
missionary activities developed by the mendicants with newly installed Chris-
tians and the mudéjar population, still present in the early years of colonization.
The repopulation of Andalusia was a very complex task and it was not always
attracting the interest of northern Castilians. The mendicant convents, however,
did manage to attract population, and consequently acted as colonizing agents. In
the newly created communities of the frontier the old social hierarchies did not
work as they did in the north and there was a rupture that altered the social order.
After the 1230s the mendicants were identified with the city council, the structure
of government and became service providers and purveyors of a sacred entity in
the urban communities.
Precisely because during the early stage of mendicant history the friars had not
yet developed strong links with the nobility and they did not foster a hierarchi-
cal society, they were much more suitable for the social framework of the new
Andalusian cities. Moreover, the identification between the authority of the king
and the cities of realengo (royal jurisdiction) is clearly visible in the convents sup-
ported by the monarch and which, consequently, were linked in perpetuity to his
person and his memory, serving as instruments of royal foundations in the cities
and in essence favoring a form of royal omnipresence.43
The only permissible royal action in this scheme was the promotion of foun-
dations, but in the Castilian-Leonese region this followed the guidelines of the
orders and their missionary plan so that communities were largely independent
of the crown. Only on very few occasion, as in Toledo in 1229, do we have an
example where King Ferdinand directly promoted the establishment of the male
convent of San Pablo by donating to the friars an orchard near the Tagus River to
build their houses.44 Archbishop Rodrigo demonstrated his consent and agreement
but with severe reservations since the land donated was in a very marginal area of
the city, too close to the river.
Old and new thirteenth-century Iberian cities were growing in population, espe-
cially once the repopulation was steady in the south, and as the economic trans-
actions show there were recurrent permutations of ownership. While the already
established powers (cathedral, nobles, royal and municipal authorities) were care-
fully defining and disputing the urban space, the arrival of a few humble mendi-
cant brethren seemed a minor event. They were after all just a group of marginal
individuals when interacting in social and religious affairs and they did not pre-
tend to usurp the space of those who ruled over both the spiritual and the material
world. So modest was the coming of the friars that, with a few exceptions, they
found shelter in meek houses, in possibly the worst neighborhoods, outside the
city walls, near treacherous rivers and often jeopardized their very existence.45
To be sure, being poor in the medieval Iberian frontier was not necessarily
synonymous with being powerless, and certainly the friars were cautiously vested
with authority. Although they began small as powerless beggars, not unlike mod-
est entrepreneurs, they proved themselves to be extremely skillful in the business
of medieval life. First located outside the city walls, early convents ascribed to
the idea of mediocres et humiles, symbolically building houses on the edges of
town with deficient materials, but in a relatively short amount of time, the friars
moved intra muros to play a more central role in the urban communities. This
literal journey from marginal locations to more prominent areas reflected the rapid
integration of the friars into the developing urban social fabric. They also aban-
doned the idea of minor temporary churches and convents and began to build tall
and spacious complexes rivaling urban palaces and cathedrals in ostentation.46
Soon, the urban community used these large buildings, and their function was
no longer restricted to religious purposes. Mendicant churches were frequently
the meeting places of the patricians and magnates. In addition, the mendicants
facilitated urban sociability, politics and learning because the newly established
city councils, as was the case of Cordoba and Seville, relied on the support, skills
and knowledge of the friars.
Notes
1 Joseph O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 17–22 and 66–76; Martín Alvira Cabrer, “Las
Navas de Tolosa: The Beginning of the End of the ‘Reconquista’? The Battle and Its
Consequences According to the Christian Sources of the Thirteenth Century,” Journal
of Medieval Iberian Studies 4, 1 (2012), 45–51; Bernard F. Reilly, “Las Navas de
Tolosa and the Changing Balance of Power,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 4, 1
(2012), 83–87; Richard A. Fletcher, “Reconquest and Crusade in Spain,” Transactions
of the Royal Historical Society (Fifth Series) 37 (1987), 31–47.
2 José García Oro, Francisco de Asís en la España medieval (Madrid: Consejo Superior
de Investigaciones Científicas, 1988), 177–178; Adeline Rucquoi, “Los franciscanos
en el Reino de Castilla,” in VI Semana de Estudios Medievales: Nájera, 31 de julio al
4 de agosto, edited by José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte (Logroño: Instituto de Estudios
Riojanos, 1996), 64–65; Francisco Javier Peña Pérez, “Expansión de las órdenes con-
ventuales en León y Castilla: franciscanos y dominicos en el siglo XIII,” in III Semana
de Estudios Medievales: Nájera 3 al 7 de agosto de 1992, coordinated by José Ignacio
de la Iglesia Duarte, Javier García Turza and José Ángel García de Cortázar (Logroño:
Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 1993), 179–198; Francisco García-Serrano, Preach-
ers of the City: The Expansion of the Dominican Order in Castile (1217–1348) (New
Orleans, LA: University Press of the South, 1997), 1–2.
3 As pointed out by Joseph O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, referring to Dereck
Lomax in his The Reconquest of Spain (London and New York: Longman Publishing
Group, 1978), 156.
4 J. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 118–119; Demetrio Mansilla (ed.), La docu-
mentación pontificia de Honorio III (1216–1227) (Rome: Instituto Español de Estu-
dios Eclesiásticos, 1965), documents 579 and 588.
5 Robin Vose analyzes the topic in chapters 6 and 7 of his Dominicans, Muslims and
Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press,
2009). See also James Brodman, Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order
of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1986) and Jarbel Rodriguez, Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval
Crown of Aragon (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007).
6 Cited by Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval
Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 200. For the relationship between
merchants and mendicants see the collected essays in Taryn Chubb and Emily Kelley
(eds.), Mendicants and Merchants in the Medieval Mediterranean (Medieval Encoun-
ters 18, 2–3) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012).
7 F. García-Serrano, Preachers of the City, 14–16.
8 Partidas (VII, 25, 2), translated by Joseph O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain
(Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), 463.
9 Joseph O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 1–33, 249; Robert I.
Burns, Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, Reconstruction of a Thirteenth-Century Fron-
tier (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1, 33.
10 David S. Bachrach, “The Friars Go to War: Mendicant Military Chaplains, 1216–c.
1300,” The Catholic Historical Review 90, 4 (2004), 621; Christoph T. Maier, Preach-
ing the Crusades (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9–17.
11 D. Bachrach, “The Friars Go to War,” 626–628.
12 D. Bachrach, “The Friars Go to War,” 619–620, 628–630. Also, R. Burns, The Cru-
sader Kingdom of Valencia, 203–204.
13 Archivo General del Obispado de Córdoba (AGOC), Protocolo de San Pablo, f. 1r, as
referred by José María Miura Andrades, “Las fundaciones de la Orden de Predicadores
en el Reino de Córdoba (II),” Archivo Dominicano 10 (1989), 233.
14 On the issue of shared authority see Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité. La
volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 85–92; and Manuel Castell, The Informa-
tion Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 196–199, 260, 470–471.
15 For a discussion on authority see the forewords to Sina Kangas, Mia Korpiola and Tuija
Ainonen (eds.), Authorities in the Middle Ages: Influence, Legitimacy, and Power in
Medieval Society vol. 12 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013); also Jean Gaudement,
“Autorité,” Dictionnaire du Moyen Age, edited by Claude Gauvard, Alain de Libera
and Michel Zink (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 113–114.
16 Leonard Krieger, “Authority,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected
Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener et al., vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1968), 141–162, esp. 147.
17 J. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 184.
18 For royal entries in Castile see Teofilo F. Ruiz, A King’s Travels: Festivals, Specta-
cles, and Power in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 2012), 76–78; also his “The Symbolic Meaning of Sword and
Palio in Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual Entries: The Case of Seville,”
Memoria y Civilización (MyC) 12 (2009), 13–48, for the entry into Seville in 1248,
25–28.
19 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Primera Crónica General, ed. II, (Madrid: Bailly-Bailliere e
hijos editors, 1906), 767. T. Ruiz, A King Travels, 77.
20 Antonio Quintanadueñas, Santos de la ciudad de Sevilla y su arzobispado (Seville:
Lyra, 1637), 337. F. García-Serrano, Preachers of the City, 14, note 44.
21 José María Miura Andrades, “La presencia mendicante en la Andalucía de Fernando
III,” Archivo hispalense: Revista histórica, literaria y artística 77, 234–236 (Ejemplar
dedicado a: Fernando III y su época, 1994), 509–520; José Sánchez Herrero, “Monjes y
frailes. Religiosos y religiosas en Andalucía durante la Baja Edad Media,” Actas del III
Coloquio de Historia Medieval Andaluza (Jaén, 1984), 450–456.
22 Teofilo F. Ruiz, “La conquista de Sevilla y la sociedad castellana: revisión del prob-
lema,” in Sevilla 1248: Congreso Internacional Conmemorativo del 750 Aniversario
de la Conquista de la Ciudad de Sevilla por Fernando III, Rey de Castilla y León,
coordinated by Manuel González Jiménez (Sevilla: Real Alcázar, de noviembre de
1998), 23–27 (Centro de Estudios Ramón Areces, 2000), 267–278.
23 D. L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Carolyn Muessig, “Sermon, Preacher and Society in
the Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 28, 1 (2002), 73–91; and “Audience
and Preacher: ‘Ad Status’ Sermons and Social Classification,” in Preacher, Sermon
and Audience in the Middle Ages, edited by Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2002),
255–276.
24 Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spain’s Century of Crisis, 1300–1474 (Malden, MA and Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), 24; Manuel González Jiménez, En torno a los orígenes de Andalu-
cía. La repoblación del siglo Xlll (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1988), 83–90; also
his La repoblación de la zona de Sevilla durante el siglo XIV (Seville: Universidad de
Sevilla, 1993), 23–33.
25 “vinieron de todas las partes de Espanna pobladores a morar et a poblar [. . .] et tantos
eran los que y venien [. . .] ca mas eran los moradores que non las casas,” Primera
Crónica General, II, 734.
26 Heather Ecker, “How to Administer a Conquered City in al-Andalus: Mosques, Par-
ish Churches and Parishes,” in Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in
Medieval Castile, edited by Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi (Leiden: Brill, 2005),
56–57.
27 Robert I. Burns, “Diplomatarium of the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: The Regis-
tered Charters of Its Conqueror Jaume I, 1257–1276,” Introduction: Diplomatarium of
the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1985), 31; Joaquim Miret i Sans, Itinerari de Jaume I ‘el Conqueridor’ (Barcelona:
Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1918), 243 (7 November 1254), 277 (2 July 1258), 556 (31
March 1257), and 557 (3 May 1257).
28 Incidentally, Ferdinand III was much more inclined to promote and to economically
support mendicant nunneries rather than friaries. For example, in the eastern part of
Andalusia, especially in Andujar, Baeza, Ubeda, and Jaen, the first known religious
establishments were Franciscan nunneries. On the contrary, there was not a single men-
dicant friary in Jaen during the entire thirteenth century. One reason for the extraordi-
nary expansion of the nuns can be attributed to Saint Catherine, who had established a
resilient missionizing agenda, but also because female convents were used for practical
purposes as a source of income for the order, thereby relieving the friars from the mate-
rial burden of supporting the nuns, and finally because the popes wanted to promote
female communities.
29 Primera Crónica General, II, 734.
30 José Miura Andrades, “Las fundaciones dominicas en Andalucía, 1236–1591,” Los
Dominicos en el Nuevo Mundo. Actas del I Congreso Internacional (Seville: Deimos,
1988), 76–80. Here the author follows the approach by M. H. Vicaire, “Le dévelop-
ment de la province dominicaine de Provence (1215–1295),” Annales: Économies,
Sociétés, Civilisations, 28, 4 (1973), 1017–1041.
31 Julio González, Repartimiento de Sevilla (Seville: Consejo Superior de Investiga-
ciones Científicas, 1951), I, 50–51; Iluminado Sanz Sancho, La Iglesia y el obispado
de Córdoba en la Baja Edad Media (1236–1426) (Madrid: Editorial Universidad Com-
plutense, 1989).
32 Manuel Joseph de Medrano, Historia de la provincia de España, Primera Parte
(Madrid, 1725), 261: “metiendo mientes en las lacerías y los trabajos que llevaron
connusco desde que Cordoba fue de cristianos o quier que mester nos fue su ayuda e
su servicio.”
33 Julio González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 3 vols. (Cordoba: Monte de Pie-
dad y Caja de Ahorros, 1980–1986); J. López Amo, Las Aguas de Córdoba. Descrip-
ción del origen y curso de las Aguas Potables en 1876 (Cordoba: Ediciones de la
Posada, 1997), 46; J. M. Escobar, “La Córdoba Bajomedieval (siglos XIII–XIV). El
origen de la ciudad cristiana,” in La ciudad de Córdoba. Origen, consolidación e ima-
gen, edited by J. M. Escobar, A, López and J. F. Neila (Cordoba: Universidad de Cór-
doba, 2009), 116–120.
34 H. Ecker, “How to Administer a Conquered City,” 47.
35 J. López Amo, Las Aguas de Córdoba, 46.
36 José María Miura Andrades, “Las fundaciones de la Orden de Predicadores en el reino
de Córdoba (I),” Archivo Dominicano 9 (1988), 360–361.
37 There are a few other cases of confrontations between friars and seculars in northern
territories, but these examples should be sufficient.
38 Antonino Linage Conde, “Los franciscanos,” in Historia de la Iglesia en España II,
2, La Iglesia en la España de los siglos VIII-XIV, edited by Ricardo García Villoslada
(Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos), 134–135.
39 Peter Linehan, “A Tale of Two Cities: Capitular Burgos and Mendicant Burgos in the
Thirteenth Century,” in Church and City, 1000–1500: Essays in Honor of Christopher
Brooke, edited by David Abulafia, Michael Franklin, and Miri Rubin (Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 81–110; F. García-Serrano, Preachers of the City,
83–90.
40 A. Linage Conde, “Los franciscanos,” 135.
41 Thomae Ripoll, Bullarium Ordinis Fraturm Praedicatorum (Rome: Hieronymus
Mainardus, 1729), I, 379, 246; Ildefonso Rodríguez de Lama, La documentación pon-
tificia de Alejandro IV (1254–1261) (Rome: Instituto español de historia eclesiástica,
1976), documents 443 and 473.
42 Antonio Ubieto Arteta, Listas episcopales medievales, vol. 1 (Zaragoza: Anubar,
1989), 228–229.
43 Although Ferdinand III could have used the cohesive organization of the mendicants
to reinforce the recent unification of Castile and Leon, we find a rather separate men-
dicant territorial policy enacted by Ferdinand III in Andalusia. Neither the Dominicans
nor the Franciscans appear to have played a significant role in the consolidation of the
union of Castile and Leon with the exception of the nunneries.
44 J. González, Reinado, II, n. 257.
45 Jacques Le Goff noted that the mendicants started on the edge of the cities as a link
between the old rural feudal world and the new urban setting. The urban character of
the friars has been demonstrated consistently since Jacques Le Goff posed his question
about the nature of the mendicant orders in 1968. Jacques Le Goff, “Apostolat mendi-
ant et fait urbain dans la France medieval,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisa-
tions 23, 1 (1968), 335–352.
46 Richard Alfred Sundt, “Mediocres domos et humiles habeant fratres nostri: Dominican
Legislation on Architecture and Architectural Decoration in the 13th Century,” Journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians 46 (1987), 394–407.
Part III
Spectacles of purity in the

body and in the realm
8 The saint at the gate
Giving relics a “royal entry”
in eleventh- to twelfth-century
France
Kate Craig
In 1158, a disastrous fire destroyed the town and priory of Gigny. To finance
their reconstruction efforts, the monks decided to take their relics of St. Taurin
(a fifth-century bishop) on an extended tour through the region.1 The first stop on
the journey was their mother abbey of Cluny, where Abbot Hugh and his monks
met the relics outside the monastery in an elaborate procession carrying silver
crosses and golden censers.2 The cantor chanted an antiphon as the reliquary was
ceremoniously escorted to its temporary place on the altar of the Holy Cross.
When Taurin’s relics were moved to their second stop, the city of Maçon, the
townspeople there made similar preparations to welcome the saint. The road was
smoothed, draperies were hung on both sides of the street, and all the bells of the
church rang as the procession went out from the city to meet the relics. Young and
old, men and women, abandoned their houses and fields to escort the relics to the
church of St. Peter.3
The type of formal entry described in these two vignettes, characterized by a
procession to meet the visitor (an “occursus”), was a familiar practice through-
out the medieval and early modern periods. Entries were performed to welcome
kings, queens, bishops, and other figures of secular and ecclesiastical authority,
and relic entries were known from at least the fourth century.4 The ubiquity of
these events has been explained as a result of the symbolic weight of combining
an antique ritual form (the triumphs and processions used to welcome Roman
emperors) with allusions to the episode of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.5 The
entry of Taurin’s relics into Maçon was in fact described as a “joyous advent”
(jocundus adventus) mirroring the use of this term to describe the entries of con-
temporary secular rulers.6
Descriptions of rulers’ entries might contain motifs of implied resistance to
power, such as play-fights by the young men of the town or an initially raised
drawbridge, but the purpose of most entry accounts was to serve as evidence for
the devotion of city to king. Despite this narrative focus on praise and adoration
of the ruler, however, late medieval Spanish royal entries have been reinterpreted
by Teofilo Ruiz as dialogues of power and as keys to much larger ideological pro-
grams. The apparently stable and straightforward form of the late medieval and
early modern royal entry masked a symbolic complexity that made them “sites of
contestation”.7 In this article I propose that we can also read relic entries as sites of
122 Kate Craig
contestation, not over the nature of political authority, but over the ecclesiastical
control of lay attitudes towards relics and the cult of saints.
Entries of relics have not yet attracted the same attention to conflict and con-
tention as the entries of living men and women. Both the descriptions of the pro-
cessions sent out to welcome St. Taurin’s relics at Cluny and Maçon present an
apparently uncomplicated image of clerical and lay joy on the arrival of the rel-
ics. Thus, Pierre-André Sigal noted simply that when traveling relics reached a
large town or monastery, they were likely to be received by a procession and
“popular enthusiasm”.8 This evokes the prevailing view of relic entries as sim-
ple formalities, the product of a harmonious collaboration between clerical ritual
and lay piety. However, in their study of the highly mobile relics of St. Foy at
the monastery of Conques, Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn have tracked
the exposure of itinerant relics to criticism and danger. They demonstrated that the
processions of Foy’s reliquary-statue in fact placed it into a “liminal” state (adapt-
ing the terminology of Victor Turner), which they defined as “a zone in which
structural authority and popular desires vie for power”.9
In what follows, I briefly examine entries (and exits) of relics in northern
France and Flanders in the central Middle Ages as just such a liminal zone, where
the rights of itinerant relics to veneration and welcome might be actively con-
tested between clergy and laity. On the one hand, relic entries were promoted by
ecclesiastics as a propitious time to access the healing and protective power of
the saint. Stories of miracles performed for those who welcomed relics by par-
ticipating in an entry encouraged the assembly of the large crowds that hagiog-
raphers claimed as evidence for widespread popular devotion to the saint. On the
other hand, this critical emphasis on the appropriate welcome of relics meant that
a lack of lay interest and participation was particularly dangerous. Accordingly,
ecclesiastical authors and authorities struggled to both model and mandate lay
involvement in entries, in ways which belie the idealized image of spontaneous
and universal lay celebration of relics. Although hagiographical texts simplify
lay attitudes towards relics, a range of responses seem to have been possible;
relic entries particularly brought this level of complexity to the fore. As relics
crossed boundaries between sacred and secular space, they took on an unusu-
ally ambiguous and vulnerable character, making them simultaneously powerful,
dangerous, and endangered.10
Relic entries as a component of relic travel

Different forms of relic mobility were actively being explored and adapted dur-
ing the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which had significant consequences for
the practice of relic entries. The formal welcome of a relic to a new (permanent)
location was a standard feature of a relic translation ceremony, and procedures
for the appropriate way to install the relics in their new home had long since
been specified and practiced.11 During a translation, a relic was being ritually wel-
comed by those who expected to profit (spiritually and/or materially) from its
henceforward permanent presence.12 The circular out-and-back journeys of relics
The saint at the gate 123
which multiplied during the eleventh and twelfth centuries complicated this situa-
tion. Besides fundraising, relics at this time could travel for a number of reasons,
whether to assert property rights, to attend Peace of God councils or church dedi-
cations, or to ward off plague or drought.13 Returning to the example of St. Taurin,
the fact that his relics would not remain at either Cluny or Maçon differentiates
these events from a translation in the strict sense.14
In the county of Flanders, this new itinerancy of relics was closely related to
the changing landscape of secular and monastic power. Edina Bozóky and Steven
Vanderputten have both tracked the relationships between relic journeys and the
monastic assertion of lordship (both economic and spiritual) in the area. Mobile
relics provided a means to confirm both the economic holdings of the monastery
and the symbolic ability of the saint to make peace, whether in the absence of
or in tandem with comital authority.15 These observations center on the practical
applications of relic displacement and the rationales for performing such journeys
at all. On the other hand, as Geoffrey Koziol has shown, relic journeys worked on
many levels and their effects were not always tightly linked to the justifications
for the journey itself.16 In particular, these journeys raised new issues about how
itinerant relics should be housed, treated, and welcomed, and not only by the
audiences “targeted” by the journey. Relic entries, then, stand at the moment of
intersection between the political, economic, and spiritual interests of the (mostly
Flemish) monasteries performing these journeys and the interests and desires of
the religious houses and laypeople they encountered en route.
Yet substantial descriptions of relic entries during a relic journey, like those
provided for Taurin’s entries into Cluny and Maçon, are relatively rare. To give
an overview of a full text, Drogo of Saint-Winnoc’s account of the journey of
St. Lewinna’s relics in 1060 discusses seven destinations explicitly, but for the
most part abbreviates or omits descriptions of the relics’ moment of arrival. At
the first stop, Alveringhem, Drogo simply notes that “[the reliquary] was taken
up with appropriate honor (suscepta est cum digno honore), and then placed
on the holy altar.”17 This shorthand is the most common method of description
across accounts of relic journeys, though the phrasing varies across texts. At four
other stops, no indication of an entry is given at all; Drogo indicates that the
reliquary arrived but gives no further information (“then they came to the vil-
lage called Oudenburg . . .”; “And after this [the reliquary] came to the church
of Lisseweghe . . .”). Yet, the two remaining descriptions (both discussed later in
this article) reveal that these omissions were not the result of a lack of interest in
entries in general. Drogo provides a longer description of a miracle that occurred
during the relics’ entry to Bruges, and explains that an entry was expected, but not
given, at Leffinghe.
On the one hand, the variance in Drogo’s descriptions suggests a basic differ-
ence from the elaborate and even more elaborately described late medieval royal
entries. It seems that relic entries were not so essential to hagiographic narratives
that they could not be condensed in favor of detailed descriptions of the miracles
performed when the relics were safely ensconced in the host church. This suggests
that for relics that would only be temporarily present, hagiographers preferred
124 Kate Craig
to concentrate on the “normal” moments of relics’ display and miracle-working
in churches rather than emphasizing their mobility by describing the entry. On
the other hand, the relative rarity of entry descriptions encourages careful atten-
tion to the cases where hagiographers chose to give extended accounts of these
moments. Certain accounts suggest that authors were sensitive to the idea that the
entry might be a time when the saint might particularly choose to demonstrate
his/her power by working miracles. Laypeople were commonly encouraged to
seek miracles through a variety of creative methods of engaging with relics: by
sleeping under a reliquary or drinking water washed over relics, for example. As
the following section shows, participation in relic entries was also promoted as a
similar means of access to the healing abilities of the saint. During the moment
of entry of his/her relics, central medieval hagiographers suggested, a saint was
paying attention.
Relic entries as a time of power

This awareness of the moment of entry is clear in Drogo’s description of the
arrival of St. Lewinna’s relics in Bruges. Both the clergy and people of Bruges
came out in procession “beyond the castle” to meet the relics, carrying two can-
dles before them. These candles were extinguished by the wind, but miraculously
reilluminated at the moment when the procession met the relics and remained lit
until they were conducted over the threshold of the church.18 This identified the
reception of the relics as a special time of power, focused on two spatio-temporal
moments: first, the meeting of the two processions, and second, the entry into
the church.19 Drogo also carefully notes that there was an attentive audience for
this miracle: the candles were illuminated “with the people watching” (vidente
populo) and the people in turn celebrated and rejoiced at the event.
Not only were saints invested in ensuring their relics were welcomed with prop-
erly lit candles, the entry was also a time when individual laypeople might expect
to receive healing through the saint’s power. The entry of St. Amand’s relics into
Tournai in 1107, as part of a longer journey through the Brabant, was identified
as the critical restorative moment for one deaf layman.20 This man had traveled to
the city from a nearby village along with his neighbors to see the spectacle, and,
because there was some delay in the saint’s arrival, had begun to eat lunch with
them. Suddenly, the bells of the church rang to announce the entry, and he found
that he could hear the sound as well as his companions. Bell-ringing was an essen-
tial element of an entry, and at least one saint was known for miraculously making
the bells ring to announce his own arrival.21 In this narrative the bells functioned
both as the means to determine that a miracle had taken place, and as the symbol
of the ritual moment at which the miracle occurred: during the entry of the saint.
A more dramatic account of healing during a saint’s arrival is given in the
account of the translation of St. Hiltrude’s relics. A sick man was informed in
a dream that the relics were about to pass through his village, and that he would
receive healing by announcing them. Upon waking up, he demanded that his
friends (who thought he was insane) lead him out to meet the relics. As they left
the house, they heard the bells which were carried before the reliquary; he ran
across the fields, lay underneath the relics and was healed.22 As a result both he
and all the inhabitants of the village visited Hiltrude’s relics every year on the
anniversary of their installation into the church with prayers and vows (and, it is
implied, donations). Although perhaps not an entry in a strict sense, especially
since there were no clergy to perform a formal procession, this incident also sug-
gests that hagiographers attempted to promote enthusiastic welcome of a saint’s
relics as a means through which the laypeople could particularly express devotion
and be rewarded for it.
The process of going out to welcome the saint might also be suspected as an
excuse for less religious activities, leading one author to emphasize the saint’s
protection of laypeople who chose to participate in the entry. In a Cinderella-like
story told about the journey of the relics of St. Ursmar in 1070, a stepmother beat
her stepdaughter severely for going out to meet the relics when they arrived in
Lille.23 The stepmother’s accusation was that the girl was pursuing a romantic
encounter with a young man under cover of devotion to the saint, but she was
also angry that the girl’s departure meant that she had had to remain at home.
According to the text, the girl called on St. Ursmar to witness that she had been
truly interested in seeing his relics, and the stepmother’s arm was paralyzed as she
raised it to hit the girl. This hints at the carnivalesque character of a relic entry,
both by suggesting that an entry might be tumultuous and chaotic enough to dis-
guise a surreptitious romance and by treating the entry as a time conducive to the
reversal and disruption of the normal structures of familial and social power. More
straightforwardly, the entry of a relic was once again advertised as an occasion in
which the saint was likely to work miracles for those devoted enough to attend.
This conception of the relic entry as a time conducive to the miraculous also
encompassed the new characterization of the saints as divine peacemakers. As
noted above, the perceived power of the saints to end conflict, as well as to heal
and protect, was a critical component of relic mobility in this period. This was
expressed in an unusual homegrown variation on the relic entry, performed as
the relics of the Virgin Mary of the cathedral of Laon were touring France in
1112.24 A castellan infamous for his ferocity decided to carry the relics barefoot
to the castle of his enemies along with his knights and other inhabitants of his
castle. The inhabitants of the rival castle, “hearing this and recognizing the mira-
cle which the holy Mother of God had done . . . immediately also with bare feet
went out in the way of their enemies, and taking the reliquary from them with joy,
carried it into their castle.”25 The approach of the relics carried by the barefoot
knights, with its overtones of penitence, functioned as a ritual gesture of atone-
ment which demanded a similarly penitential reply (in the form of a matching
barefooted occursus) from the rival castle. This episode invites us to view the relic
entry as a ritual “building block”, just as political rituals might be aggregations of
recognizable forms which could be adapted and played on.26 Laypeople could not
only benefit from entries as audience members, but apparently also borrow relics
and perform their own relic entry in order to tap into the generative power of this
mode of expression.
126 Kate Craig
Relic entries as a time of danger
Other accounts, however, suggest that the saint’s increased potency during a relic
entry might be dangerous rather than beneficial to the laypeople of the city being
entered. The episode in which the deaf layman at Tournai was healed during the
entry of St. Amand’s relics in 1107 should be contrasted with a moment when
one of Amand’s entries took on a more punitive character. Amand’s relics had
also been taken on an earlier journey through Gaul in 1066, and the last stop on
the trip before they returned to the monastery was Douai. There, a woman who
attempted to leave with the occursus procession was suddenly paralyzed as she
left her house.27 The author of the text, Gislebert of Saint-Amand, expresses some
uncertainty and puzzlement about this event. He claims that he does not know
why “she was not found worthy to run out to the saint”, but speculates that she
may have blasphemed against St. Amand without performing appropriate pen-
ance. Although his final conclusion was that the judgments of God can be fath-
omless, he clearly associated her sudden malady with the saint’s desire that only
those “worthy” should welcome his relics. For comparison, a similarly negative
account from the monastery of Conques related that a girl whose hands had previ-
ously been healed by St. Foy refused to stand up when Foy’s reliquary exited the
monastery on a journey. As a result, she was suddenly “un-healed” and once again
needed to seek St. Foy’s help.28 Stories like these established a relic’s entry/exit
as a time of testing, an invitation (or requirement) that individuals both scrutinize
their past relationship with this saint as well as publicly demonstrate their devo-
tion. In this, a relic entry represented the active assertion of spiritual power over
the town being entered, even if the relics were not going to remain there.
An account of a recurring procession of the relics of St. Basle from the mon-
astery of Saint-Basle in Verzy to Reims, twenty kilometers away, demonstrates
all these elements: the clerical expectation that the miraculous might occur, the
willingness of some laypeople to express extreme devotion, and the unwilling-
ness of others to do so. Although the procession was repeated on a yearly basis,
the description of the event indicates that it was understood as an ongoing entry
tradition:
It was the custom that the body of the blessed man each year should be trans-
ferred by the abbot and brothers of the monastery, with thousands of the peo-
ple coming together, to the indict of Reims with solemn joy and, with the city
proceeding in the way, placed in an honored place, and with the customary
sermon by the priest to the people, with great devotion and festive eagerness
brought back again to his intended place.29
Two events which occurred during this procession, though separated by a number
of years and with different results in each case, highlight the hagiographic concep-
tion of the entry as a time of testing for the laypeople. In a procession during the
abbacy of Albricus (1124–1143), a poor laywoman threw her disabled daughter
into the path of the relics as they traveled. According to the text, the porters of
the relics abruptly stopped, to the great surprise of the monks and their abbot, and
were miraculously prevented from continuing. Then, as the monks watched, the
girl was healed by the power of the saint, the relics were once again mobilized,
and a crowd of people joined the girl in dancing in front of the reliquary as the
procession continued.30 In a separate, earlier incident (occurring in 1108/9), a man
named Dominicus forced his way into the crowd surrounding the reliquary as it
departed Reims, stood on high ground, and announced that he “did not want to
ever serve or be subject to that saint” (se autem nec velle umquam servire sanc-
tis proclamaret nec subici).31 These contrasting moments during the same relic’s
journey suggest the liminal and contested quality of the relics during an entry (or
exit, as discussed below), and the lay awareness that this could be an opportune
moment either to solicit a miracle or to publicly express their ambiguity about the
saint.
As well as being a time of testing for the people of the city, then, the entry
might also become a time of testing for the saint. Individual denunciations like
the one launched by Dominicus are rarely reported, but an expected entry might in
fact fail to happen altogether. In Drogo’s account of the journey of St. Lewinna’s
relics, he relates that when her reliquary reached the town of Leffinghe, “it was
neither taken up nor honored by the inhabitants, because as they said, no one had
heard of the name of this [saint] before in that place.”32 Perhaps surprisingly, this
embarrassing lack of an entry was blamed on the saint’s deficient reputation rather
than insufficient piety on the part of the inhabitants. After the relics had been
placed in the church without the benefit of a welcome, one of the monks warned
Lewinna that if she did not prove herself by performing miracles, she would be
carried back to the monastery in dishonor. An entry, then, could function as a lit-
mus test for the relationship of the town to the saint in question, and the laity, at
least in this situation, could decide whether or not this was a dialogue that would
take place.
Relic exits: spontaneous and mandated joy

Relic journeys (as opposed to translations) also enabled an unusual companion
ritual to the relic entry: the relic’s exit from the city. Like entries, exits were also
opportunities for a “spontaneous” outburst of lay devotion, but they were only
possible when the relic was traveling as opposed to being permanently translated
to the town. When Amand’s relics left Tournai in 1107, the reliquary had crossed
the city and just passed through the doors when the crowd following behind
shouted that a miracle had been performed: a woman they had been carrying along
had been healed. The fact that the woman was carried behind the reliquary as it
left indicates some level of lay expectation that an exit, as well as an entry, might
be a propitious time for a miracle.
Even more dramatically, though, the reliquary was then “carried back by the
violence of the people to the place where the healed woman was standing and
compelled to stop”, that is, the text presents the crowd as so excited that they
physically forced the reliquary backwards into the city to the site of the miracle.33
128 Kate Craig
The joy of the lay audience at the performance of miracles is one of the most com-
mon of all medieval hagiographic tropes; miracle accounts that do not end with
the crowd acclaiming the power of God and the saint to perform such impressive
works are rare. The claim that a crowd was present and enthusiastic on the one
hand was intended to speak to the saint’s popularity, but also to provide witnesses
that would both verify the miracle and spread the word about it.34 As the behavior
of the extremely worked-up crowd at Tournai and the hagiographer’s attention to
the dynamics of this event suggest, lay celebration was as essential to the success
of relic journeys as it was to relic translations.
However, another text describing a relic’s exit calls into question the spontaneity
of the joy and participation of the laypeople. This account describes the journey
of the relics of St. Marculf from the priory of Corbeny to Péronne in 1102. The
initial entry was performed by the clergy of Saint-Fursey, but the relics continued
to move in the city. After Marculf’s relics were mocked by some young men in
the church of Saint-Fursey, the monks of Corbeny took the relics to the church
of Saint John the Baptist (also in Péronne) and made plans to go to Arras, to the
extent that the prior in charge of the journey personally visited Arras to ensure the
relics would be welcomed there. However, before they could leave, the clergy of
Saint-Fursey staged a second procession to the church of Saint John, asking them
to return with their relics to Saint-Fursey, a request that they politely declined at
the time but later fulfilled. These complicated politics of movement into and within
the city were bookended by an elaborate exit procession that duplicated the entry
procedure. Although the text claims that the entire city was saddened by the pros-
pect of the relics’ departure, the participation of the townspeople in the procession
to send them off was explicitly required by ecclesiastical and secular authorities:
Therefore through the entire city, by the order of the nobles and of the can-
ons [of Saint-Fursey] it was proclaimed by a crier in a loud voice that all the
people should prepare to accompany the return of the generous patron the
next day.35
Although this command does not necessarily imply unwillingness on the part of
the people to honor Marculf, it calls into question both the spontaneity and the
universality of the joyful crowds present at relic entries and exits. Were other joy-
ous crowds assembled in response to a formal order? Other texts do not mention a
similar mandate, but the approach of relics was generally expected and announced
ahead of time (as we see in the Corbeny prior’s factfinding mission to Arras) and
would have given time for social pressure, if not a top-down order, to have had
an effect. Significantly, it was the clergy of Saint-Fursey and not the people of
Péronne who, during the relics’ exit, requested that they be placed on the ground
outside the city so that a cross could be erected on the spot, thus creating a second-
ary sacred site which would continue to work miracles. The relationship between
the monks of Corbeny and the clergy of Saint-Fursey had been endangered by lay
mockery, and the series of processions culminating in this exit procession might
be read as the triumph of clerical control over the entry ritual, with any potential
for further lay disaffection successfully avoided.
Conclusion
Teofilo Ruiz’s work invites us to take a closer look at medieval spectacles and
events that, on the surface, may seem to have been carefully circumscribed, con-
scientiously scripted, and universally harmonious. Even within those festive dis-
plays which were systematically produced to serve power, Ruiz has found space
in which to discover discordant or muted voices, even among those who were
relegated to roles of acclamation or silent witnessing. We are challenged to look
at the “nameless crowds” of the audience, as well as the king walking under his
golden palio, and see what we may find.36
These few examples have suggested that some of the anxieties and tensions
that surrounded late medieval entries of political figures were also present in relic
entries of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Just as royal entries were an occasion
to envision, publically and visually, the desired relationship between king and
city, certain relic entries were promoted as a time when the relationships between
saints, individuals, and entire communities were called into question. Geoffrey
Koziol has called the performance of an occursus for traveling relics “a ‘con-
stitutive’ act, in the sense that by granting such an honor, a city or church was
publicly declaring that it was willing to recognize a lord’s authority – or, as here, a
saint’s.”37 This was certainly the case; for “failed” entries like that of St. Lewinna
at Leffinghe, the lack of recognition of the saint’s name and reputation meant that
the inhabitants felt no need to perform a formal entry.
However, the situations presented here suggest that an entry, even when per-
formed, was not necessarily an uncontested action. Although lay devotion to the
saint was certainly present and actively encouraged, joy and praise existed along-
side skeptical, antagonistic, and mandated lay responses. Relics were increasingly
moving between the monastic and the secular worlds at a time when the proper
relationship between the two was being actively debated, and this movement cre-
ated new opportunities for lay interaction with relics as well as new attempts to
define appropriate behavior. Despite the sources’ clear desire to have relic entries
reflect the honor of the saint, just as the descriptions of royal entries worked hard
to glorify the ruler, we can still glimpse their character as the “sites of contesta-
tion” described by Ruiz.
Notes
1 The use of relic journeys to finance church construction is the subject of the seminal
study by Pierre Héliot and Marie-Laure Chastang, “Quêtes et voyages de reliques au
profit des églises françaises du moyen âge,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 59 (1964),
789–822 and 60 (1965), 5–32. Also cf. Reinhold Kaiser, “Quêtes itinérantes avec rel-
iques pour financer la construction des églises (XIe-XIIe siècles),” Le Moyen Âge 101,
2 (1995), 205–225; Nicole Herrmann-Mascard, Les reliques des saints: Formation
coutumière d’un droit, Collection d’histoire institutionnelle et sociale (Paris: Klinck-
sieck, 1975), 296–312.
2 The Cluniac procedures for welcoming relics are described in two of the four Clu-
niac customaries: the Liber tramitis and Bernard’s customary. Peter Dinter (ed.), Liber
tramitis aevi Odilonis abbatis, Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum 10 (Siegburg: F.
Schmitt, 1980), 240–242; Bernard of Cluny, “Ordo cluniacensis,” in Vetus disciplina
130 Kate Craig
monastica, edited by Marquard Herrgott (Paris: Osmont, 1726), 251. In the Liber tram-
itis, the procedure for welcoming relics is listed immediately before the procedure for
welcoming kings (“Ad regem deducendum”).
3 “Circumvectio corporis sancti Taurini,” AASS Aug. II, 650–655. BHL 7996. The entry
to Cluny is given in chapter 3, the entry to Maçon in chapter 10.
4 Gillian Clark, “Translating Relics: Victricius of Rouen and Fourth-Century Debate,”
Early Medieval Europe 10, 2 (2003), 161–176.
5 Cf. particularly Ernst Kantorowicz, “The ‘King’s Advent’: And the Enigmatic Panels
in the Doors of Santa Sabina,” The Art Bulletin 26, 4 (December 1, 1944), 207–231.
Maureen Miller has questioned the narrative of antique origins for the case of the Flor-
entine bishop’s ritual of entry, linking it to contemporary papal developments rather
than an uninterrupted antique tradition. Maureen C. Miller, “The Florentine Bishop’s
Ritual Entry and the Origins of the Medieval Episcopal Adventus,” Revue d’Histoire
Ecclésiastique 98, 1 (June 1, 2003), 5–28.
6 For French and Flemish secular entry traditions, see Lawrence M. Bryant and Jacque-
line Falquevert, “La cérémonie de l’entrée a Paris au Moyen Age,” Annales: Histoire,
Sciences Sociales 41, no. 3 (May 1, 1986), 513–542; James M. Murray, “The Liturgy
of the Count’s Advent in Bruges, from Galbert to Van Eyck,” in City and Spectacle in
Medieval Europe, edited by Barbara Hanawalt and Kathryn Reyerson, Medieval Stud-
ies at Minnesota 6 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 137–152.
7 “But did these theaters of power work always to the benefit of rulers? The simple
answer is that they did not. It is clear that they were, more often than not, sites of
contestation and part of an elaborate, polite, but intricate dialogue between political
forces.” Teofilo F. Ruiz, A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 159. Philippe Buc
has also evoked this contested character of royal entries for the early medieval period,
analyzing the entries of kings as flashpoints for intense conflict (in one case, resulting
in the on-the-spot beheading of the city officials who came out to welcome the king).
Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scien-
tific Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 72.
8 Pierre-André Sigal, “Les voyages de reliques aux onzième et douzième siècles,” in
Voyage, quête, pelerinage dans la littérature et la civilisation médiévale (Aix-en-
Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1976), 104. Sigal also notes, sig-
nificantly, that “Ce cérémonial d’accueil des reliques n’est pas sans ressemblance avec
celui qui se développe á la fin du Moyen Age pour les entrées royales.” Reinhold Kai-
ser has argued that whether or not an entry was performed for traveling relics depended
more on the economic situation and the organization of the journey than the piety of
the inhabitants; that is, that only sizeable towns or monasteries with a connection to the
traveling monks would have been expected to recognize the relics in this way. Kaiser,
“Quêtes itinérantes avec reliques,” 218–224.
9 Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, “Sainte Foy on the Loose, or, the Possibilities
of Procession,” in Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, edited by Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2001), 64. The authors note that this definition of the liminal runs slightly counter to
Turner’s own, as expressed in such works as Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure, Symbol, Myth, and Ritual Series (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977). While Ashley and Sheingorn emphasize the tendency towards
conflict when someone or something is in a liminal state, Turner saw it as conducive to
a sense of unity (“communitas”) among ritual participants.
10 On boundary-crossing as a generative moment, see Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites
of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), an inspiration for Turner’s
development of the idea of the liminal.
11 For a comparison between liturgical prescriptions for the translation ceremony and
hagiographical descriptions of the same during this period, see Pierre-André Sigal, “Le
déroulement des translations de reliques principalement dans les régions entre Loire
et Rhin aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” in Les reliques: Objets, cultes, symboles, edited by
Anne-Marie Helvétius and Edina Bozóky (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 213–227.
12 Certain translation accounts were even identified by the term “adventus” rather than
“translatio”, for example the Adventus of St. Gerulph: N. N. Huyghebaert, “Un texte
prémontré méconnu: l’Adventus (secundus) S. Gerulfi in Trunchinium (XIIe siècle),”
Analecta praemonstratensia, edited by Adrien Versteylen 56 (1980), 5–20. For a
discussion of this genre, and the meaning and forms of adventus processions during
translations, see Martin Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte und andere Quellen des
Reliquienkultes (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1979), 60–77.
13 On these motivations for relic travel, cf. note 1 and Baudouin de Gaiffier, “Les reven-
dications de biens dans quelques documents hagiographiques du XIe siècle,” Analecta
Bollandiana 50 (1932), 123–38; Bernhard Töpfer, “The Cult of Relics and Pilgrimage
in Burgundy and Aquitaine at the Time of the Monastic Reform,” in The Peace of God:
Social Violence and Religious Response, edited by Thomas Head and Richard Landes
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 56; Daniel Callahan, “The Peace of God
and the Cult of the Saints in Aquitaine in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries,” in The
Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response, edited by Thomas Head and
Richard Landes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 176–178; Pierre-André
Sigal, L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale (XIe-XIIe siècle) (Paris: Les
Éditions du Cerf, 1985), 155–165.
14 Robert Bartlett has also distinguished relic translations from other types of relic pro-
cessional activity in his recent comprehensive work on medieval saints’ cults. Robert
Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?: Saints and Worshippers from the
Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 282–311.
Notable for this study, Bartlett calls particular attention to the “festive” character of
some relic movements (297).
15 Vanderputten uses the term “translations” to refer to all relic displacements, both tem-
porary and permanent; Bozóky follows Sigal in using the more neutral “voyages”.
Bozóky interprets peace-making journeys of relics as part of the assumption of judicial
roles to the saints as a replacement for secular public authority, while Vanderputten
reevaluates relic movements to disputed properties as a monastic strategy which actu-
ally coincided with strong comital jurisdiction. Edina Bozóky, “Voyage de reliques et
démonstration du pouvoir aux temps féodaux,” in Voyages et voyageurs au moyen âge:
XXVIe Congrès de la SHMES, Limoges-Aubazine, mai 1995, Société des historiens
médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public (France) (Paris: Publications de la Sor-
bonne, 1996), 267–278; Steven Vanderputten, “Itinerant Lordship: Relic Translations
and Social Change in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Flanders,” French History 25, 2
(June 1, 2011), 143–163.
16 Geoffrey Koziol, “Monks, Feuds and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century Flan-
ders,” in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response, edited by Thomas
Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 239–259.
Although the journey of St. Ursmar’s relics which Koziol discusses was taken to
restore the monastery’s property and finances, the monks actively engaged in peace-
making activities en route.
17 Drogo of Saint-Winnoc, “Translatio S. Lewinnae,” MGH SS XV.2, edited by O. Holder-
Egger, 788. BHL 4902. The name of the initial stop is also given as “Fluerinckehem”
in the AASS edition. For a discussion of this text, see David Defries, “The Making of
a Minor Saint in Drogo of Saint-Winnoc’s Historia Translationis S. Lewinnae,” Early
Medieval Europe 16, 4 (2008), 423–444.
18 The carrying of candles is specifically identified as a “clerical custom”, indicating
clerical control of the liturgical element of the occursus.
Dum vero feretrum Bruggas venit, cum maximo tripudio cleri plebisque suscipitur;
et cum processio obviam eis extra castellum egrederetur, duo cerei vento exstincti
sunt, qui clericali consuetudine ante illam ferebantur. Verum dum sanctae virginis
132 Kate Craig
reliquiae suscipiuntur, caelitus vidente populo, iidem ambo cerei accenduntur, et ita
accensi permanent donec limina templi intrarent. Super hos etiam eventus populus
Deum laudat, precatur, orat, spiritualique gaudio exultat.
(“Translatio S. Lewinnae,” AASS Jul. V, 625;
cf. “Translatio S. Lewinnae,” 789)
19 The attention to the geographical point of meeting / distance traveled (here, “beyond
the castle”) is mirrored in other accounts and in the entry processions for translations.
For example, Ivo of Chartres and all his canons come out of the city “to the vineyards”
to meet the traveling relics of Laon; Hermann of Tournai, “Miracula S. Mariae Lau-
dunensis,” PL 156, col. 971–972; Heinzelmann, Translationsberichte, 72–73. It is also
reflected in the Cluniac customaries (note 2) and in their copies, which identify “the
walls of the monastery” and the “doors of the castle” (for Cluny) and the “edges of the
cemetery” (for St-Benigne-de-Dijon) as the critical distances the occursus procession
would travel. On the St-Benigne version, see Caroline Marino Malone, “Interprétation
des pratiques liturgiques à Saint-Bénigne de Dijon d’après ses coutumiers d’inspiration
clunisienne,” in From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny,
edited by Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin, Disciplina monastica 3 (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2005), 226–227.
20 “Miracula s. Amandi in itinere bragbantino,” AASS Feb. I, 900–901. BHL 346. Partial
edition in O. Holder-Egger (ed.), “Ex miraculis S. Amandi in itinere Bragbantino fac-
tis,” MGH SS XV.2, 852–853.
21 St. Balderic of Montfaucon: Flodoard of Reims, “Flodoardi Historia Remensis Eccle-
siae. Lib. IV.,” MGH SS XIII, edited by Johannes Heller and Georg Waitz, 591.
22 “Vita S. Hiltrudis,” AASS Sept. VII, 499. This is the only text I have found which
mentions that bells were carried and rung as the reliquary traveled, though other texts
highlight the noisiness of the relic’s progress into a town.
23 O. Holder-Egger (ed.), “Miracula S. Ursmari in itinere per Flandriam facta,” MGH
SS XV.2, 873–842. Also on this journey: Geoffrey Koziol, trans., “The Miracles of
St. Ursmer on His Journey through Flanders,” in Medieval Hagiography: An Anthol-
ogy, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vol. 1942 (New York: Garland
Pub, 2000); Koziol, “Monks, Feuds and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century
Flanders.”
24 The journeys undertaken by the Laonnais with their relics, in France in 1112 and in
England in 1113, are the most ambitious recorded and have attracted considerable
attention. Simon Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth
Century England, Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
New York: Clarendon Press 2006), chap. 3; Gabriela Signori, Maria zwischen Kath-
edrale, Kloster und Welt: Hagiographische und historiographische Annäherungen an
eine hochmittelalterliche Wunderpredigt (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1995), chap. 4.
25 Hermann of Tournai, “Miracula S. Mariae Laudunensis,” col. 969. An earlier account
of this trip was produced by Guibert of Nogent; cf. previous note.
26 On the use and adaptations of political ritual, see Gerd Althoff, Family, Friends and
Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, NY: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004); Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual
and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992). For a critical perspective, Buc, The Dangers of Ritual.
27 “Miracula S. Amandi corpore per Franciam deportato,” AASS Feb. I, col. 898;
O. Holder-Egger (ed.), “Ex miraculis S. Amandi in itinere Gallico factis,” MGH SS
XV.2, 850. BHL 345.
28 Pamela Sheingorn, trans., The Book of Sainte Foy, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 80–81.
29 “Moris est ut hujus beati viri corpus per singulos annos ab abbate monasterii et fratri-
bus, circumfluentibus populorum millibus, ad indictum Remese cum sollemni jucun-
ditate transferatur et procedente obviam civitate in loco celebri deponatur, et habito
sermone a pontifice ad populum, rursum cum ingenti devotione et festiva alacritate
ad locum sibi destinatum reducitur.” “Miracula S. Basoli,” CCH Paris, vol. III (Paris:
Picard, 1893), 218.
30 This incident is discussed by Sigal, L’homme et le miracle, 39.
31 “Miracula S. Basoli,” 219.
32 “Venitur ad aecclesiam, ubi ab incolis nec suscipitur nec honoratur, quippe cuius
nomen antehac ne quidem, uti dicebant, illic audiebatur.” “Translatio S. Lewinnae,”
788.
33 “. . . corpus sancti violentia populi retro portatum ad locum, ubi sanata mulier stabat,
subsistere compellitur.” “Miracula s. Amandi in itinere bragbantino,” 901.
34 In a rare case, the author who described the journey of Ursmar’s relics expressed some
discomfort with the way the stories of the miracle-working powers of the relics had
been exaggerated in the retelling. Koziol, “The Miracles of St. Ursmer on His Journey
through Flanders,” 351 and note 27.
35 “Per totum ergo oppidum, jussu principis & canonicorum, magna voce praeconis edici-
tur, ut plebs universa ad deducendum patroni tam liberalis in crastino reditum accinga-
tur.” “Miracula S. Marculfi Peronae facta,” AASS May VII, 538.
36 “The chroniclers’ repeated assertion that the kings were received with great happiness
must always be read with a very critical eye, though it is indeed possible that such was
the case.” Ruiz, A King Travels, 10.
37 Koziol, “The Miracles of St. Ursmer on His Journey through Flanders,” 357 note 22.
9 Medieval cuisine and the
seasons of the year1
Paul Freedman
Until recently the culinary elite, those who can afford to spend money on gratify-
ing their appetites, have tried to overcome the seasons in order to consume food
unavailable to ordinary people. Historically upper-class cuisine evaded seasonal-
ity and distance, bringing hot-house peaches to the table in the winter or snow
from the mountains to make iced confections in the summer. Today, however,
technology has made it not only possible but cheap to provide imported products
year-round, regardless of the local season. Our current fashion for following a
seasonal diet in keeping with what is locally available is therefore an historical
paradox: now anyone can have tangerines in winter, but consuming locally grown
produce in August is an expensive mark of distinction.
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus offers an example of the constraints of the seasons
on the pre-modern availability of food. In the depths of winter, the learned magi-
cian brings grapes to the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt who craves them. In the
play this is an instance of the foolishly petty use Faustus makes of diabolic pow-
ers, but if in the sixteenth century it required selling your soul in order to get
grapes in January, then obviously such extreme defiance of the seasons was not
generally feasible. It is a mistake to think that seasonality was taken for granted or
accepted, however, by those of sufficient means to choose what to eat, to indulge
in certain extravagances, or to invest some cultural as well as financial capital in
culinary effects. Hot-houses, extraordinary transport efforts and experiments in
breeding and grafting were mobilized to overcome climate, location and time of
year.
In pre-modern Europe, those lacking the resources of Dr. Faustus, or even those
of the affluent consumer, had no choice except to eat locally and more-or-less
seasonally. More-or-less because there were well-understood ways to extend the
life of perishable foods in order to have enough to eat after the harvest, through
the winter and the impoverished, if lovely, spring. Fermentation, cheese-making,
salting, pickling, smoking and air-drying were methods of preserving basic prod-
ucts. Such everyday bending of the seasonal rules has to be distinguished from
the practices of the upper classes who tended to despise preserved foods. A few
cheeses might be singled out for attention, but generally dairy products were not
held in great esteem. Sausages and dried or salted fish were signs of living well
for urban elites, but ignored by the wealthy because high-class food was supposed
Medieval cuisine and the seasons of the year 135
to be fresh as well as varied and unusual. Medieval cookbooks, composed for the
most part by and intended for court cooks, have little to say about charcouterie
or pickles.
The distance an edible product had to travel conferred prestige. Saltwater fish
served in inland locations was a mark of distinction. Difficulty of procurement
and unthriftiness, thus the ability to forgo the normal rhythm of nature in order
to have things out of season that ordinary people could not serve, were similarly
indications of privilege. Young animals were normally available only in spring,
but nevertheless the household of William Mountford in Warwickshire in 1433–4
ate veal every week in the year. Milk was abundant in summer and cheese was
made in summer and autumn, but production and preservation were organized so
that for the moderately well-off household milk and cheese were always possible
to obtain, even in December and January.2
Medieval haute cuisine was extraordinarily exuberant, featuring brilliant color,
lots of spices, trompe l’oeil effects and an immense number of animal and fish
species now either neglected or endangered. Of course medieval food was “slow
food” in the largest sense of that expression. The seasons and their shifts provided
both a comforting sense of order within change and a melancholy perception of
cyclical futility. For the medieval moral and religious observer, all of human life
partook of the anticipation and movement of the seasons. The constant changes
were emblematic of this world, for even if the alternation of the seasons was
indeed under Divine ordination, the cycle represented the unstable, inconstant
and insecure life of fallen humanity. Authorities agreed that the earthly paradise
experienced a kind of perpetual spring. Expelled from paradise, humanity was
subject not only to the necessity of work but also to the vicissitudes of weather
and the times of the year that regulated and complicated agricultural labor. The
seasons thus become the sign of human care, of subjugation to a cycle of growth
and death, extreme warmth and cold that would be transformed in the next world
into a fixed and perpetual uniformity, a kind of other-worldly California.3
But it would be wrong to see the medieval attitude as merely passive. Not only
was ingenuity expended in overcoming the seasons, but the cultural attitudes of
the era tended to define, modify and exploit the seasons in three aspects:
1) dietary theories in relation to season and climate;

2) the religious requirements of fasting according to a liturgical calendar;
3) perceptions of food quality depending on the time of the year.
Medical approaches to seasonal change

The medical treatises attributed to Hippocrates and their refinement and classi-
fication by Galen form the basis of a classical medical tradition handed over to
medieval European physicians along with the elaborations and theories of Arab
medical observers. Without entering into the thorny question of Hippocrates
as the putative author of the works that go under his name, we can speak of a
Hippocratic Corpus whose earliest elements date from the fifth century b.c. The
136 Paul Freedman
importance of the seasons in understanding disease and health is central to Hip-
pocratic theory. The treatise On Airs, Waters and Places begins:
Whoever wishes to pursue properly the science of medicine must proceed

thus. First he ought to consider what effects each season of the year can pro-
duce, for the seasons are not at all alike, but differ widely, both in themselves
and at their changes.
By “seasons” the author means the changing pattern of the stars as well, for he
later states that “the contribution of astronomy to medicine is not a very small
one but is a very great one indeed. For with the seasons men’s diseases, like their
digestive organs, suffer change.”4 There is an interaction among several meteoro-
logical and environmental factors that the treatise develops, such as hot or cold
winds, marshy or fast-running water, that in turn affect how the seasons influence
susceptibility to disease or overall health.
The Hippocratic Aphorisms identify seasonal transition as a leading cause of
illness: “It is chiefly the changes of the season that produce diseases.”5 But the
onset of maladies is also affected by individual constitution (some people being
well- or ill-adapted for the heat of summer or the cold of winter).6 The diseases
themselves are encouraged by certain climates, winds and drought.7 In general,
according to the Aphorisms, the diseases of autumn are the most dangerous while
spring is the healthiest time when fewer people die. Dry conditions are better than
wet. Young people flourish in the spring, but summer is best for the elderly.8
The Hippocratic Corpus recommends health regimes that accommodate the dif-
fering seasons, especially in the treatise known as Regimen or Regimen in Health.9
This work goes beyond the survey of factors affecting health contained in Airs,
Waters and Places to discuss dietary regimes, including those reflecting the sea-
sons. Winter, for example, makes us cold and hard. It is best, therefore, to con-
sume warming, drying and astringent dishes in this season so as to prevent further
loss of humidity and to warm the body. Meat should therefore be roasted (which
has a drying effect) rather than boiled (which humidifies). But the Regimen in
Health has little to say about specific foods or their qualities that might either
offset or aggravate the influence of the seasons.10
The Roman encyclopaedist Celsus, writing in the early first century a.d.,
described in rather general terms dietary adaptations appropriate for the round of
the seasons, so that, for example, strong wine should be drunk in small quanti-
ties in the winter and the wine should be progressively diluted but consumed in
greater amounts in the spring and summer, gradually increasing the strength and
decreasing the quantity in the fall. Very little was specified, however, about par-
ticular foods. Celsus contented himself with merely recommending meat, vegeta-
bles or different methods of cooking according to season.11
The contribution of Galen to the formation of the classical medical tradition
includes systematizing the Hippocratic discussions of climate, season and indi-
vidual temperament, especially in accordance with the qualities and characteris-
tics of the four bodily humors: bile, blood, black bile and phlegm. In the Galenic
system, human life and health are affected by internal factors such as the humors
and external forces acting on the body. The latter are referred to in later works
(influenced by Arab medical science), somewhat confusingly, as the “six non-
natural things” – confusingly because they are mostly features of nature under-
stood as the world we live in, but in this context “non-natural” means factors
external to the body itself. Galen himself usually refers to them as six “necessary
things.” The six (of which five are pairs) are as follows: air and environment
(which would include the seasons); food and drink; sleep and wakefulness; motion
and rest; evacuation and repletion; and the passions of the mind. The physician
must consider the manner of the patient’s life and habits, not just the symptoms of
disease or condition of the body, so that these external “non-natural things” may
be regarded as regulating or distorting human well-being.12
Galen identified the bodily humors as the basic determinants of health and dis-
ease among all animals, including humans. The humors correspond to the four
elements and the four seasons and display matching combinations of the four basic
qualities of moist/dry, hot/cold. The season of spring, the humor of blood and the
element of air are all hot and moist. Summer, yellow bile and fire are hot and dry.
Autumn, black bile and earth are cold and dry, while winter, phlegm and water are
cold and moist. This gives a rather static picture, however, of what Galen envis-
ages as a shifting and dynamic system. Summer is the season in which yellow
(or “bitter”) bile naturally predominates, but any individual’s humoral profile is
also affected by age, constitution, diet, stress, physical labor or exercise, insomnia
and other internal as well as “non-natural” factors. The imbalance of humors is a
primary cause of disease, but this imbalance is itself affected or tempered by diet,
climate, seasons and psychological state.13 In his works Galen often discusses the
properties of food and relates them to humors, but he doesn’t devote much atten-
tion to matching particular food with the seasons.
The transition from classical to medieval medical knowledge in the West was
influenced by Arabic writings based on Greek medicine. These gave advice about
the seasons, although more in terms of humoral effects to watch out for than
dietary instructions. The pseudo-Aristotelian Arabic “Secret of Secrets,” widely
diffused in Latin translation, recommended chicken, quail, eggs and wild let-
tuce in the spring and in summer veal, stewed chicken and vinegary and bitter
preparations.14
For the Latin early Middle Ages, from the medical circles of Ravenna in the
early sixth century to the Salerno physicians of the eleventh and twelfth, there
are more than 60 manuscripts that include dietary calendars, many of which list
the foods appropriate for different times of the year.15 They tend to emphasize the
virtues of vegetables, many (such as leeks or roots) otherwise despised by the
wealthy as peasant fare. Conversely the treatises are not over-fond of meat and
express reservations about its healthfulness, again contradicting the tastes of the
nobility.16
In late antiquity such calendars served as supplements to much longer dietary
treatises, but the ninth- to eleventh-century calendars offer a monthly or seasonal
dietary regime as a single text. These tables are simple, brief and practical, not
138 Paul Freedman
nearly as discursive as their classical predecessors. They offer a healthful regime
oriented more by reference to the months of the year rather than the seasons. More
than the Greek texts, these emphasize spices as hot humoral ingredients to offset
cold primary products.17
In the central and late Middle Ages, an era of great expansion in medical writ-
ing, the seasons tended to become rather less important than they had been. The
fourteenth century sees the beginning of advice literature, consilia or treatises
on dietary regimens addressed to eminent individuals. There was a general rule
of reversal or complementarity: in cold seasons one should seek foods that are
humorally hot, while in summer the heat of the sun should be countered by colder
forms of nourishment. But beyond these basic precepts more attention was given
to other external factors influencing bodily health. Under the influence of the
Arab physicians, the understanding of the “non-naturals” was supplemented by
other external activities such as baths, sexual activity and prophylactic bleeding.
Dietary matters were treated in great detail by physicians, but the seasonality of
food consumption was rarely invoked, or sometimes subordinated to astrological
considerations.18 Certain times of year were good for medical procedures so that,
for example, Guy de Chauliac named May and September as the best months for
cataract surgery, but he had almost nothing to say about foods appropriate to the
seasons.19
Particularly in Italy medical works continued the tradition of dietary calendars
including instructions about specific types of food appropriate to different months.
Thus in February chard, duck and dill should be favored while legumes and water
birds are to be avoided. For September, pears cooked in wine and apples cooked
in goat’s milk are beneficial. But beyond the usual reduction in heavy food during
summer and encouragement to eat and drink well in late autumn, there does not
seem to be a particular logic to the selection of preparations.20
Arnau de Vilanova in his Regime for Health also discusses the proper seasons
in which to eat different kinds of meat and wine. Salt meat, wild boar and other
hard-to-digest meats are proper in winter as are older domesticated poultry, pea-
cocks, partridges and rabbits. Fresh pork and very young birds are appropriate to
summer. One should drink wine diluted with water or even just water in summer
but rely on spiced wine in the winter (and he provides a recipe).21
Lent and other church fasts

In its early history Christianity distinguished itself from Judaism by dispensing
with the elaborate religious laws concerning what sorts of foods, especially meat,
were licit (kosher) or prohibited. With the arrival of Islam, religions that outlawed
meat from domesticated animals such as pork, or insisted on certain slaughtering
methods or prohibited wine, were regarded with derision by Christians who saw
themselves as omnivores, considering their rivals’ dietary laws with the contempt
meat-eating people reserve for vegetarians. Yet the most pious and exemplary
Christians were said to have engaged in heroic acts of fasting or at least held food
in small regard. Monastic rules generally required abstaining from meat except
in cases of medical necessity. For ordinary Christians in the Middle Ages, how-
ever, fasting was seasonal and cyclical, rather than a consistent prohibition or
renunciation.
Christian cultural practice in Europe did come to regard certain things as pro-
hibited, if not in religious law at least in well-established custom. In a dialogue
from fourteenth-century Bruges intended to teach French to Flemish children, a
servant lists a number of meats that one doesn’t eat. Some of them are plausi-
bly available in the market (horsemeat, meat from bulls), others are unlikely or
fantastic (elephant, griffin), and still others might be theoretically obtainable but
noxious (cats, dogs).22 Still, as St. Augustine observed, the fact that locusts are
not normally considered a food does not affect the virtue of St. John the Baptist
in subsisting off them, while Esau’s perfectly ordinary pottage, for which he sold
his birthright, was sinful.23
The Church made few rules about acceptable foods, but elaborated a system of
restricting diet according to times of the year: time rather than content being the
constraining factor. The cycle of fasting, which included Advent and Lent as the
most important sustained periods, was more complex than what was ordained by
the single Jewish day of atonement or the arduous but straightforward observance
of Ramadan. The Catholic tradition also had a more complicated approach to what
is generically called “fasting” since this meant both literally not eating anything
for a period of time and abstaining from certain products such as meat but without
necessarily diminishing the overall intake of food.
In addition to Lent and Advent there were various laws or informal practices
governing fasting on certain days of the week – Friday, to commemorate the Cru-
cifixion, most importantly – but also on occasion Wednesday (the day of Judas’
receipt of the money to betray Jesus) and Saturday (dedicated to Mary). There
were also the vigils of important saints’ days and other liturgical feasts to be
observed as fast days. Finally there was a seasonal cycle of fasts known as Ember
Days, seasonal sets of Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays during which serious
fasting was ordained. The first occurred just before Lent (February or March),
the next just after Pentecost in June (spring into summer), and then in September
(autumn) and December (winter).
All of this added up to a considerable number of fast days in the year. Some,
especially the period of Lent, required a greater degree of privation than others.
Medical writers regarded this fasting season as appropriate for health as well as
piety, for spring was a season of repletion and without fasting the seasonal ten-
dency to excess would adversely affect diet.24 Some basic foods such as butter
were ambiguous or flexible, being permitted for less serious fast days or allowed
by dispensation.25 In addition, there was considerable variation among different
church dioceses in the observance of vigils and of Wednesday and Saturday fast-
ing as well as local options with regard to rigor. Lent was less negotiable, although
towards the end of the Middle Ages dispensations to consume butter during this
penitential season were not uncommon. With regard to meat, however, Lenten
rules were quite inflexible and the meat trade, apart from what was permitted to
Jewish communities, shut down entirely at this time.26
140 Paul Freedman
In many late-medieval English ecclesiastical establishments strict observance
of Lent was offset by frequent consumption of butter, cheese, eggs and cream
on other fast days.27 To take a secular example of a moderately wealthy English
household, Katherine of Norwich consumed eggs on 10% of Saturdays in the
year, 50% of Wednesdays, but not on Fridays. Lent and Fridays were rigorously
observed, but some latitude was allowed for other days of fasting. The total impact
of rules on fasting was considerable. According to Bruno Laurioux’s reckoning
for the year 1413 in the diocese of Cambrai, 93 days involved some kind of absti-
nence, not counting routine Wednesdays and Saturdays which were sometimes
enforced and which would lift the total to nearly 200 days.28
The rules of fasting had a great effect on what was eaten at different times of
the year as well as on the entire dietary regime of the Middle Ages. Meals on
fast days centered on fish whose importance in medieval Europe can scarcely
be exaggerated. The trade in salted (white) and smoked (red) herring from the
North and Baltic Seas was immense as was the traffic in dried cod (stockfish)
and salt-cod (bacalao). For the wealthy, the extraordinary variety of fish avail-
able, at least for a price, meant that the most rigorous fasting season did not
require a sacrifice of interesting and luxurious dishes. Indeed, the skill of the
chefs at the monastery of Cluny in preparing what was technically a food of
abstinence became the target of St. Bernard’s famous attack on the scandalous
luxury of the Cluniacs. In his Apology of 1125, written to counter accusations
that he had slandered Cluny, Bernard described what he saw as their hypocriti-
cal regimen of austerity:
Course after course is served and in the place of a single one of meat, which
is abstained, there are two great courses of fish.
And when you have been sated by the first, if you touch the second, it will
seem that you have not even tasted fish yet. The reason is that they are all
prepared with such care and skill by the cooks that, four or five courses hav-
ing been devoured, the first does not impede the appetite.29
On a Friday in July, 1483, during a cycle of banquets for the coronation of King
Richard III of England, the fish (or what were considered fish) included salted
lamprey, pike (as a soup), plaice in a Saracen sauce, sea crabs, fried gurnard,
baked conger eel, grilled tench, bass in pastry, sole, salmon in pastry, perch in
pastry, shrimp, trout and roast porpoise.30
Saltwater fish were the most prestigious, with freshwater fish second, and dried
or salted fish clearly third. Those who were well-off could also afford to build and
stock fish ponds, a particular advantage in regions not close to the sea. Monaster-
ies and other estates created extensive ponds, but these were expensive to build
and maintain and ordinary people inland had a more monotonous fasting regime.
The normal inland fasting staple of salted herring supplemented with eels or other
river fish was regarded as inferior. An English schoolboy in the fifteenth century
has left us a private notebook in which he complains about his Lenten diet of salt
fish, claiming that it has increased his phlegm and made him congested. He yearns
for the arrival of the time of meat again. He actually did have access to some river
or lake fish but longed to live near the coast:
Would to God I were one of the dwellers by the seaside, for there fish is plen-
tiful and I like it better than I do this freshwater fish of ours, but now I must
eat freshwater fish whether I like it or not.31
The main problem with Lent and, to a lesser (or at least more bearable) extent,
other fast times was monotony rather than hunger. Certain luxuries were more
popular in Lent because they were licit and the supply of alternatives was lim-
ited. Dried fruit, especially figs but also raisins, currants and dates, were expen-
sive but widely sold in Lent. Traders took care to supply northern Europe with
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern fruit during Lent when they were among the
few interesting things that could be consumed. The demand for these dropped
sharply with the arrival of Easter and restoration of permission to consume meat,
eggs and cheese. A fifteenth-century merchant of Bristol named Nicholas Palmer
bought dried fruit in Andalucía to sell in England, but his ship was delayed by bad
weather and arrived after Easter. He was unable to sell his cargo at a profit after
fasting season and as a result the voyage was a financial disaster.32
The times of fasting affected northern and inland Europe disproportionately.
Substitutes such as dried fruit or almonds (almond milk could be used for cooking
and thickening in place of eggs and milk or cream) were expensive imports for
almost all of Christian Europe, but were cheaper in the Mediterranean regions.
Fish was hard to transport and even salted and dried fish, despised as they were,
could not be made locally inland and had to be bought commercially. There was
also some advantage for the Mediterranean regions where cooking was often
based on olive oil, permitted in Lent unlike pork fat or butter, the bases of north-
ern European cooking.
The end of Lent was often celebrated with a ceremony involving the expul-
sion of herring. On Maundy Thursday at the French town of St. Rémy there was
a parade of clergy dragging red (smoked) herrings through the streets on strings.
This attitude is understandable if we look at the menus of institutions which show
the rhythms of the liturgical year in the dishes provided to members of those
establishments. At the well-endowed leprosarium of Grand-Beaulieu in Chartres
during ordinary times the inmates received meat three times a week and soup
four times a week for their principle meal. In Lent and Advent they had only her-
ring, very occasionally varied with some other salted fish. During vigils they were
allowed cheese and eggs.33
Seasonal availability and preference

In this last section I would like to consider what foods people in the Middle Ages
thought were appropriate to eat seasonally on the basis of taste rather than medical
or religious dictates. To some extent of course this was governed by the environ-
mental conditions of particular places. One might wish for strawberries in winter
142 Paul Freedman
in northern Europe, but they were not going to be obtainable. Lacking supernatu-
ral intervention or modern technology, the medieval cook might resort to subter-
fuge, to make capons seem like partridges, for example, an aspect of a general
pattern of substituting domestic animals for game whose supply was seasonal and
even when in season unpredictable.34
Popular traditions might associate particular foods with certain festivals, much
as is the case now (with American Thanksgiving or English Christmas, for exam-
ple) where certain foods are eaten only in connection with religious or secular
holidays. The late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth century Italian poet Simone Pru-
denzani notes the “devotion” of certain women to lasagna at Christmas, goose on
All Souls Day, pig for Saint Anthony’s and macaroni and spelt cakes for Carnival.35
But here we are concerned not so much with the cycle of feasts as with foods
with special seasons of quality within their periods of availability. As is some-
times the case with cookbooks now, advice was given in medieval cookbooks
about when various ingredients were at their best, taking seasonal fluctuations
for granted, but emphasizing favorable points during their availability when their
taste was especially good. Such advice is centered on fish with very little, com-
paratively, on produce, meat or game. Sea fish migrate in season, but during their
periods of availability, the way they taste varies.36
A Dutch cookbook printed in 1560, that is for the most part a translation of a
south German cookbook of the fifteenth century, specifies when fish are best. The
emphasis is on freshwater fish – odd given the location of the Netherlands, but not
so strange in the original south German inland context. Most of the fish is plenti-
ful in the spring and summer, but bream and mackerel are best in February and
March while lamprey is to be eaten in May, salmon in April and May. Eels have a
slightly longer season; they are good from May until the middle of August. Only
a few fish are said to be fine in the winter, including roach and perch. Here we are
dealing with taste discrimination more than availability; human cultural prefer-
ences rather than nature.37
Not all cooks agreed on when fish is at its best, or perhaps climate differences
explain that in contrast to the Dutch manual, the Catalan Llibre del coch (The
Book of Cooking) from ca. 1500 states that lamprey should be eaten in January.
The Llibre prefers the fall for salmon rather than the spring as in the northern
cookbook.38 Another Catalan cookbook, the Llibre de totes maneres de potatges
de menjar (The Book of All Manner of Dishes to Eat), dating from the early
fifteenth century, lists 72 fish. Each is accompanied by indications of when it is
best (és millor sahó de l’any), but a specific temporal period is given for only 24
of the fish. Here again there is considerable divergence from the Dutch calendar.
Mackerel, for example, are best in summer, not in late winter.39
The discourse of gourmandise, that is the ability to determine or pronounce on
when to eat different things, reflected seasonal availability, medical opinion, the
restrictions of the church calendar and a consensus of aesthetic opinion. A detailed
compendium of such opinions is provided by the cookbook section of a French
work known as the Mesnagier de Paris completed in the last decade of the four-
teenth century. The anonymous author was a man of wealth, but not a noble and
so his taste in food, revealed in more than 400 recipes, is that of a person outside
the rarefied circle of the court who reflects the tastes of the bourgeoisie and petty
knighthood.40 The author of the Mesnagier distinguishes two basic seasons, sum-
mer and winter, but gives a month-by-month list of what is in the markets.
Most of the calendar is organized by availability, but there are other factors to
consider as well.41 In the cold months one should serve strongly spiced sauces that
have been boiled, but in summer they should not be boiled and only mildly spiced.
Vinegar should be used rather than wine in summer as it is by nature humorally
cold whereas wine is hot. This lore of sauces is obviously influenced by medical
theory. The summer is the time for small game, such as rabbits and hares, along
with young domestic animals such as lambs and piglets. In the winter it is more
appropriate to have doves and mallard ducks. Here we have a combination of
availability and taste. The author of the Mesnagier offers a list of foods appropri-
ate for Lent, not just fish but a surprising number of vegetable recipes (surpris-
ing in comparison with court cookbooks that eschew vegetables). Spinach, peas,
leeks, cabbage, Brussels sprouts are all mentioned.
In September ray is available but it is better in October. White trout are best in
winter but can be obtained at other times of the year.42 Thus gastronomic consid-
erations of taste are related to seasonal availability, but within that period there
are variations of quality and so desirability. The author of the Mesnagier advises
that one should eat round fish in winter and flat fish in summer for reasons that he
doesn’t explain.
A moral exemplum of the Catalan writer of the fourteenth century, Francesc
Eiximenis, reflects, albeit with comic intent, some of this same combination of
factors in deciding what is appropriate to eat at what seasons of the year. In his
massive Terç del Crestià, Eiximenis invents a high-ranking priest who is a model
of gluttony and ludicrous self-indulgence. He writes to his doctor because he has
lost his appetite.43 The cleric describes his regimen and it quickly becomes clear
that the reason his appetite is flagging is because he is eating absurd quantities of
food. But as gluttony is not only excessive eating but excessive fussing about food
(both hypochondria and gourmandise), the cleric is made to reflect fashionable
opinion about what sorts of things people of high status ate – lots of spices, sweet
medicinal delicacies, a choice of wines (but the priest despises local wine from
Catalonia or Aragon).
The cleric informs the doctor that in summer he eats poultry roasted on a spit,
or boiled, or stewed flavored with verjuice (made from unripened grapes). Ver-
juice is proper as it resembles vinegar in being humorally cold. He also consumes
young partridges, lamb and veal, all very much according to medical opinion,
fashion and seasonal availability. He eats game in autumn (deer, mountain goats,
hares, rabbits). Winter involves fat wild and domestic fowl – chickens, capons,
mature partridges and quails. In the spring he turns to peacock, pheasant, crane
and goose.
Some of this seasonal round is different from further north (rabbits and hares
in autumn rather than summer), but in general the cleric reflects what a per-
son of taste and fashion anywhere in Europe would prefer. This authenticity in
144 Paul Freedman
seasonality makes the cleric’s ridiculous regimen (which includes sexual indul-
gence fueled by dubious aphrodisiacs) all the more outrageous.
Conclusion
Along with the climate, the seasons were the most important influences in what
would be generally available to eat. Members of the upper classes could over-
come some of the pressures of seasonality, so that they didn’t have to kill their
animals in the fall or could obtain imported dried fruit to break the monotony of
the Lenten diet. Human ingenuity allowed even the not-so-rich to partake of salt
pork throughout the year or salted or smoked herring in Lent. Religious rules,
medical recommendations and taste reflected and to some extent modified the
basic restrictions of nature on the human appetite. People in the Middle Ages
didn’t think of themselves as living close to nature, nor did they embrace nature
as a guide to their eating habits. They pushed against its constraints and also, as
with religious and dietary fasting, gave up some of its offerings. We shouldn’t
underestimate pre-modern ingenuity or ignore human agency in food choices.
Notes
1 This all-too-modest contribution in honor of Teo Ruiz recalls many wonderful meals
spent in his company. I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Azélina Jaboulet-
Vercherre for her help, especially with medieval medical teachings.
2 C. C. Dyer, “Seasonal Patterns in Food Consumption in the Later Middle Ages,” in
Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, edited by C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeant-
son and T. Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 209.
3 Véronique Frandon, “Les saisons et leurs représentations dans les encyclopédies
du Moyen Age: L’exemple du De Universo de Raban Maur (1022–1023),” in
L’enciclopedismo medievale. Atti del convegno “L’Enciclopedismo Medievale” San
Gimignano, 8–10 ottobre 1992 (Ravenna: Longo, 1994), 58, 64.
4 In Airs, Waters and Places I, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press), 70–73.
5 Aphorisms III, Loeb Classical Library 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press),
122–123.
6 Aphorisms III, Loeb Classical Library 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press),
122–123.
7 Aphorisms III, Loeb Classical Library 3, 5, 7 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press), 122–123.
8 Aphorisms III, Loeb Classical Library 9, 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press), 124–125, 128–129.
9 Regimen I, Loeb Classical Library 2, 32, 35 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press), 228–229, 274–275, 292–293.
10 See Marilyn Nicoud, “Diététique et saisons,” in Le temps qu’il fait au Moyen Age:
Phénomènes atmosphériques dans la littérature, la pensée scientifique et religieuse,
edited by Claude Thomasset and Joëlle Ducos (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-
Sorbonne, 1998), 63.
11 Celsus, On Medicine I, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press), 67–69.
12 On Galen and his influence see the collected articles of Luis García-Ballester,
Galen and Galenism: Theory and Medical Practice from Antiquity to the European
Renaissance, edited by Jon Arrizabalaga, Montserrat Cabré, Lluís Cifuentes and Fer-
nando Salmón (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Galen: Problems and Prospects, edited by
V. Nutton (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1981).
13 Galen, On the Humors, trans. in Mark Grant, Galen on Food and Diet (London and
New York: Routledge, 2000), 14. The work may not be by Galen but is an accurate
summary of his teachings on the subject.
14 On the recommendations of the Secretum secretorum see the introductory chapter by
P. Gil-Sotres, “La higiene medieval,” in Arnaldi de Villanova, Opera medica omnia,
vol. X.1, Regimen sanitatis ad regem Aragonum, edited by Luis García-Ballester and
Michael R. McVaugh (Barcelona: Seminarium Historiae Medicae Cantabricense,
1996), 590–597.
15 R. D. Groenke, Die frühmittelalterlichen lateinischen Monatskalandarien. Text –
Übersetzung – Kommentar (Berlin, 1986), Dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut
für Geschichte der Medizin. On these treatises see Francesca Pucci Donati, Dieta, Salute,
Calendari. Dal regime stagionale antico ai regimina mensium medievali: origine di un
genere nella letteratura medica occidentale (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto
Medioevo, 2007); Augusto Beccaria, I codici di medicina del periodo presalernitano
(secoli IX, X e XI) (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1956); Faith Wallis, “Medi-
cine in Medieval Calendar Manuscripts,” in Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine,
edited by M. R. Schlessiner (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 105–143.
16 Pucci Donati, Dieta, Salute, Calendari, 99–156.
17 Ibid., 114–121.
18 Nicoud, “Diététique et saisons,” 66–68.
19 Sylvie Bazin-Tachella, “Considérations sur l’air, le temps et les saisons dans la Chirur-
gia Magna de Guy de Chauliac,” in Le temps qu’il fait (as above, note 10), 24.
20 Massimo Montanari, Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking and the Table, trans. Beth
Archer-Brombert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 51.
21 Arnau de Vilanova, Regimen de sanitat a Jaume II (version of Berenguer Sarreiera),
chapters 13 and 17, in Arnau de Vilanova, Obres catalanes, vol. 2 (Escrits mèdics),
edited by Miquel Batllori (Barcelona: Barcino, 1947), 166–167, 186–187.
22 Cit. Bruno Laurioux, Manger au moyen âge: pratiques et discours en Europe au XIVe
et XVe siècles (Paris: Hachette, 2002), 123–124.
23 Bridget Ann Hensich, Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 32.
24 E.g. Maino de Mainieri, Regimen sanitatis in Praxis medicinalis (Lyons, 1586), II, c.
10, 22.
25 Ernst Schubert, Essen und Trinken im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Primus, 2006), 113–114.
26 Dyer, “Seasonal Patterns in Food Consumption,” 209.
27 Bruno Laurioux, “Le ‘maigre’, cuisine de substitution?” in Substitution de nourrit-
ures, nourritures de substitution en Méditerranée, edited by Sophie Collin Bouffier
and Marie-Hélène Sauner (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 2006), 97–98.
28 Laurioux, Manger au moyen âge, 108–109.
29 Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia ad Guillelmum Abbatum, trans. Conrad Rudolph, “The
Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval
Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 265. On
the actual diet of Cluny see Antoni Riera i Melis, “Alimentació i ascetisme a Europa
occidental en el segle XII. El model cluniacenc,” in Actes del Ir Col.loqui d’història
de l’alimentació a la Corona d’Aragó (Lleida: Institut d’Estudis Ilerdencs, 1995),
39–105.
30 The Coronation of Richard III, the Extant Documents, edited by Anne F. Sutton and
P. W. Hammond (Gloucester and New York: A. Sutton, 1983), 291.
31 Cited in Hensich, Fast and Feast, 40, 43.
32 Ibid., 42–43.
33 Laurioux, Manger au moyen âge, 110.
146 Paul Freedman
34 Carole Lambert, “Astuces et flexibilité des recettes culinaires médiévales françaises,”
in Du manuscrit à la table: Essais sur la cuisine au Moyen Age et répertoire des manu-
scrits médiévaux contenant des recettes culinaires, edited by Carole Lambert (Mon-
treal and Paris: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1992), 215–225.
35 Montanari, Medieval Tastes, 52–53.
36 On seasonal fish supply, see Maryanne Kowaleski, “The Seasonality of Fishing in
Medieval Britain,” in Ecologies and Economics in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe: Studies in Environmental History for Richard C. Hoffmann, edited by Scott G.
Bruce (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 117–147.
37 Eenen nyeuwen coock boeck: Kookboek samengesteld door Gheeraert Vorselman
en gedrukt te Antwerpen in 1560, edited by Elly Cockx-Indestege (Wiesbaden: G.
Pressler, 1971), 140–141. On this passage see Johanna Maria van Winter, Spices and
Comfits: Collected Papers on Medieval Food (Totnes: Prospect Book, 2007), 285.
38 Mestre Robert, Llibre del coch, edited by Veronika Leimgruber (Barcelona: Curial,
1966), 100–101.
39 Llibre de totes maneres de potatges de menjar, edited by Rudolf Grewe, Amadeu-J.
Soberanas and Joan Santanach, in Llibre de Sent Soví, Llibre de totes maneres de potat-
ges de menjar, Llibre de totes maneres de confits (Barcelona: Barcino, 2004), 201–203.
40 Le Ménagier de Paris, edited by Georgina E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1981).
41 What follows is based on Terence Scully, “Les saisons alimentaires du Menagier de
Paris,” in Du manuscrit à la table: Essais sur la cuisine au Moyen Age, 205–213.
42 Ibid., 211–212.
43 Francesc Eiximenis, Lo Crestià, edited by Albert Hauf (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1983),
c. 354–355, 142–145. I have discussed this exemplum in “Medieval Clichés of Health
and Diet According to Francesc Eiximenis,” in Sociedad y memoria en la edad media:
Estudios en homenaje de Nilda Guglielmi (Buenos Aires: Instituto Multidiscipinario
de Historia y Ciencias Humanas, 2005), 127–134.
10 Medieval media and
minorities
Jews and Muslims in the Cantigas
de Santa María
David Nirenberg
Para Teofilo: “contar las sus bondades seria grand reguncerio.”
Like the ancient Psalms of David, the medieval Cantigas de Santa María (Songs
to Holy Mary) present themselves as a poetic and musical communication
between an earthly and a heavenly monarch. But unlike the psalms, we possess
the Cantigas in something like the form intended by their royal “author,” and can
say a great deal about their production.1 Four manuscripts of the Cantigas survive,
all of them contemporaneous (or nearly contemporaneous) with King Alfonso X
“the Wise” of Castile, and three of them richly illuminated.2 Moreover the poems,
illuminations, and music make constant allusion to their historical context (Cas-
tile in the mid to late 13th century), a context about which we know a great deal
(although never as much as we would like) from numerous other sources. Many
of the miracle stories collected in the work are placed in the realm of daily life,
their protagonists not only the king, but also women, children, and men from all
stations and multiple faiths. These poems and their illuminations seem therefore
to provide a window into medieval reality, and it is for that purpose that they are
often turned to, as when historians reconstruct the king’s biography on the basis of
the poems, or write articles on what the Cantigas teach us about the possibilities
of existence for Muslims and Jews in Christian Castilian society.3
There were indeed many Jews and Muslims living in the Christian kingdoms of
the Iberian Peninsula, at least relative to their populations in other Christian lands,
and the manuscripts of the Cantigas certainly tell us something about the lives
those non-Christians may have led. But in this essay I would like to begin to sug-
gest that when the Christian poets, illuminators, and editors of the Cantigas rep-
resented Jews or Muslims (or demons or “blasphemous” Christians) within their
pages, they were not only or even necessarily describing the practices of living
Jews or Muslims (or demons, or Christians with views different than their own).
They were also, and often, seeking to legitimate the arts – music, poetry, painting,
politics – in which they were engaged, and to defend the forms of representation
characteristic of the Cantigas themselves as a medium of communication between
the human and the divine.4
148 David Nirenberg
Specifically, I’d like to explore the possibility that the Escorial (T.I.1) and Flor-
ence (Banco Rari 20) manuscripts of the Cantigas de Santa María make claims
about their own status as salvific media, claims that proceed by casting critics of
that status as enemies of God, and especially as Jews and Muslims.5 Within the
Cantigas, as within Christian culture more generally, representations of Judaism,
Islam, heresy, etc., played a central role in the articulation of the possibilities and
limits of poetic and pictorial mediation, communication, signification, and repre-
sentation. By focusing on this role, I hope to clarify some of the ways in which
medieval Christian media were produced and reflected upon through projections
of Judaism and Islam, mediatic projections which in turn shaped the possibilities
of existence for real people, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim alike.6
An example of how the Cantigas reflect upon their own status as medium and
material object might help clarify the point. The unfinished Florence manuscript
was partly produced (work on the manuscript may have continued after the king’s
death) in the early 1280s, when the elderly king was more or less a prisoner in
Seville, the one city that remained loyal to him in the midst of a civil war in which
his son and many vassals rebelled against him on the grounds (among others) that
he was a lover of Jews and a “Jewish” tyrant.7 The manuscript contains an illumi-
nated cantiga (number 209) (Figure 10.1) entitled “He who denies God and His
blessings commits a great error and is grievously wrong.” The song’s first person
announces that it is written by the king himself, and relates how, when Alfonso
was ill and seemed about to die in 1270, he refused the advice of his doctors and
turned to the Virgin instead:8
I shall tell you what happened to me while I lay in Vitoria, so ill that all
believed I should die there and did not expect me to recover. . . . The doctors
ordered hot cloths placed on me but I refused them and ordered, instead, that
Her Book [that is, a manuscript of the Cantigas themselves] be brought to
me. They placed it on me, and at once I lay in peace. The pain subsided com-
pletely, I felt very well and cried no more. I gave thanks to Her for it, because
I know full well She was dismayed at my afflictions.
The poem represents the king’s choice as one between the sciences of the flesh
and of the spirit. Rejecting medicine, the king is miraculously cured by the object
he calls for instead: a manuscript of his own songs to the Virgin. A contemporary
audience might already have heard a “Jewish” option in that choice, since church
councils and synods sometimes prohibited the summoning of Jewish doctors to
the bedside of patients in extremis, and ordered instead the calling of a confessor.
That same audience might also have caught a whiff of irony, or at least of propa-
ganda, since King Alfonso “the Wise” was known to have a penchant for science,
and for Jewish physicians.9
A theologically attuned hearer of this poem might have detected some anti-
Jewish projection in its celebration of the miraculous power of Alfonso’s poetry,
insofar as that power was represented in Pauline terms within the poem, as a
choice of “Christian” spirit over “Jewish” flesh. But the anti-Jewishness of the
Figure 10.1 Cantiga 209, Florence, Ms. Banco Rari 20, fols. 119r–v
Source: Photo courtesy of EDILAN
150 David Nirenberg
celebration might have been more obvious to a viewer of the manuscript than to
the audience of the poem, for if Francisco Prado-Vilar is right, the illumination,
unlike the poem, explicitly represents the king’s choice as a rejection of Judaism.
For according to Prado-Vilar, the artists cast the instructing physician in the first
panel as a Jew. The king refuses the Jew’s advice, and the Jewish physician disap-
pears from the scene while the book is brought forth, returning only to witness the
miraculous cure.10
The illumination concludes with a scene of worship: the king is kissing the
book, raised up to heaven, while the faithful (the Jewish doctor banished) stand
before him in prayer. The manuscript, by this reading, deploys anti-Jewish projec-
tion in order to represent its own miraculous confirmation as a medium between
God and man, worthy of being kissed by the royal author himself. The claim is
bold. It is, after all, not a bible or liturgical manuscript being celebrated here as a
wonder-working object. (Alfonso himself does seem to have thought of his col-
lection as a liturgical work: in his testament he ordered that the manuscripts be
deposited in his funeral chapel in Seville, and read annually as part of the liturgy
on the Virgin’s feast day.)11 Alfonso is kissing the work of his own hands (and that
of his scriptorium): an anthology of poetry by laymen, richly illustrated by (or at
the behest of) those laymen with images of themselves.
Even if the book being kissed had been a bible, the Pauline tension between an
emphasis on its mediatic materiality and its divine truth could have been expressed
in anti-Jewish terms. Indeed, the Church fathers had condemned the use of bibli-
cal texts to work miraculous cures as a misplaced “Jewish” yearning for signs in
the flesh.12 But what makes the claims of the Cantigas all the more remarkable is
that the principal arts deployed within them – painting and poetry – were them-
selves subject to so much criticism as “Jewish” forms of representation in early
and medieval Christian culture. It is precisely because this was the case – and this
is my basic point in these pages – that the representation of Jews, Muslims, and
other enemies of God and of Christian representation were so useful to the crea-
tors of the Cantigas in justifying their delight in these arts.
Given that we possess anthologies stuffed with medieval poetry and churches
overflowing with images, it is easy to forget that across the centuries many Chris-
tians have considered these arts perilous. Their stigma was double, inherited from
both Athens and Jerusalem. Think, for example, of the repeated criticism of both
poetry and art (indeed of all forms of representation) in Plato’s writings. Jump-
ing to Jerusalem, the apostle Paul had similar concerns about both art and writ-
ing. The opening of his epistle to the Romans, for example, conflates the Mosaic
Law’s concern with the worship of images with the ontological preoccupations of
Platonic philosophy in order to arrive at a general critique of our knowledge of
things in the world.
Ever since the creation of the world, the invisible existence of God and his
everlasting power have been clearly seen by the mind’s understanding of cre-
ated things. And so these people have no excuse. . . . While they claimed to
be wise, in fact they were growing so stupid that they exchanged the glory of
Medieval media and minorities 151
the immortal God for an imitation [homoiômati, counterfeit], for the image
[eikonos] of a mortal human being, or of birds, or animals, or crawling things.
(Rom. 1:20–23)
Image and imitation lead to perdition. Christians should rather “look not at the
things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen” (2 Cor. 4:18).
Similar dangers were thought to attend our use of language. Remember the
Pauline dictum: “for written letters kill, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). In
his earlier epistle to the Galatians, Paul had suggested that excessive attention
to the letter, the word, the sign and symbol, the fleshy appearance of things, was
a peculiarly “Jewish” error, and he used the verb “to Judaize” to describe those
Christians who (to his mind) worshipped this fleshy appearance rather than an
inner spiritual reality. In Romans he developed this theme in order to criticize both
those Jews who had not recognized Jesus, and those Christians who he believed
placed mistaken emphasis on the literal meaning of scripture: “The real Jew is the
one who is inwardly a Jew, and real circumcision is in the heart, a thing not of the
letter but of the spirit” (2:29).
Like Paul (and sometimes under his influence), the gospel authors also devel-
oped special figures of Judaism through which to enact the fatal error of seeing
only the fleshy significance, rather than the spiritual meaning, of a sign or thing:
e.g., to see Jesus as the man he appears to be, rather than as the God he is; or to
understand the Hebrew Bible only in its literal meaning, rather than in the spiritual
sense that announces the coming of Jesus; or to place priority on treasure and
beauty in this world, rather than the next. Think, for example, of the Pharisees:
Everything they do is done to attract attention, like wearing broader head-

bands and longer tassels. . . . Blind Pharisee! Clean the inside of cup and dish
first so that it and the outside are both clean. Alas for you, scribes and Phari-
sees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs that look handsome
on the outside, but inside are full of the bones of the dead and every kind of
corruption. In just the same way, from the outside you look upright, but inside
you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.
(Matt. 23:5, 26–28)
There swirls about this figure of the Pharisee a confusion between appearance
and meaning, beauty and truth, material exterior and spiritual interior. Out of this
confusion we can begin to see types of Judaism emerging in Christian thought
to represent misplaced priorities, the wrong kind of attention to the medium,
an absorption that focuses on the lethal beauty of this world rather than seeing
through it into the next: precisely the kind of misplaced attention with which art
and poetry will be taxed.
The case of art and devotional images is perhaps more familiar than that of
poetry. Of course we know that images did find their way into Christian devo-
tion, in part through the argument that through the visible they helped orient the
believer’s inner eye toward the invisible. But we should not forget that they never
152 David Nirenberg
lost their vulnerability to stigmatization as misleading and material imitation,
attracting the eye toward outer appearance rather than inner truth. Debates about
images never disappeared from Christianity, and figures of Judaism played many
and often opposing roles in those debates.
These diverse possibilities are already evident in 394 ce, during a debate over
the decoration of churches that took place between a relatively obscure presby-
ter named Nepotian and the much more famous St. Jerome. In an earlier letter
Nepotian had apparently invoked the example of the Jews and their Temple as
justification for the Christian decoration of churches with expensive materials and
images. Jerome attacked precisely that point in his counterargument: “and let no
one allege against me the wealth of the temple of Judea, its tables, its lamps . . .
and the rest of its golden vessels.” Those things of the Temple, Jerome explains,
were “figures typifying things still in the future.” But for Christians, who live in
that future, “the Law is spiritual.” If Christians “keep to the letter” in this, they
must keep it in everything, and adopt the Jewish rituals: “Rejecting the supersti-
tion of the Jews, we must also reject the gold; or approving the gold, we must
approve the Jews as well. For we must either accept them with the gold or con-
demn them with it.” Note Jerome’s infectious logic: those who choose to decorate
churches must become Jews.
These arguments do not disappear in the Middle Ages. Bernard of Clairvaux,
for example, famously aligned decorators of churches with the Jews. The true
Christian, wrote Bernard, regards “all things . . . as dung.” (Bernard is here echo-
ing St. Paul, Philippians 3:8; St. Jerome, Letter 52.10). Those who fill sanctuaries
with material beauty are not Christians but “Jewish money-lenders,” driven by
“avarice, which is the service of idols.” Small wonder, Bernard complained else-
where, that there are many who confuse churches with synagogues.13 Somewhat
less famously, a late-15th-century anonymous Spanish author invoked St. Paul’s
linkage of idolatry and sodomy (in chapter one of Romans cited above) in order
to exhort his fellow Christians not to contaminate themselves with devotional art
objects or fall into homosexual fornication.14 In this he was in keeping with an
important strand of medieval thought. Every step in the development of devo-
tional art had its dissenters. Some of these dissenters came to be canonized as
saints, others condemned as heretics, still others given the contested name of
reformers (think of Martin Luther or John Calvin). But regardless of their dif-
fering fortunes, what many of them shared was the view that there is something
Judaizing about art.15
These struggles over images are well known. Perhaps less familiar is the fact
that poetry also faced a stream of Christian critique across the centuries, not only
(in early and late antique Christianity) because of its association with pagan Greek
and Roman myth and culture, but also because, in its emphasis on verbal beauty,
it was thought (like art) to emphasize too much the deceitful exterior of the letter,
appealing more to our sensual desire for beauty than our spiritual love of truth.
St. Augustine took up both strands of this critique. In The City of God he drew
on the Roman and Greek philosophical tradition to condemn the “poetic theol-
ogy” of the Romans as lies (mendacia) and poisonous delight (noxia delectatio).16
And in Book IV of On Christian Doctrine he drew on Cicero to launch a more
general critique of poetry and rhetoric: “eloquence without wisdom is frequently
a positive injury, and is never a positive service.” Beauty must be deployed only
in the service of truth, “for of what use is a golden key, if it cannot open what we
want it to open?” The problem is that over the course of human affairs “so much
labor has been spent by men on beauty of expression” not in order to teach the
good, but on the contrary, to teach the bad, “merely for the sake of being read
with pleasure.” Augustine concludes by associating this perverted aesthetics with
Judaism:
May God avert from His Church what the prophet Jeremiah says of the syna-
gogue of the Jews: “A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land:
the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests applaud them with their hands;
and my people love to have it so: and what will you do in the end thereof?”17
King Alfonso’s near contemporary St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) pursued

a similar critique of poetry in his Summa Theologica. Revealingly, he placed the
discussion of poetry in a section of his treatise dedicated to questions about the
“ceremonial precepts” of the “Old Law.” Why are those fleshy ceremonies in
the Scriptures, and how should a Christian relate to them? In clarifying this dif-
ficult question of Christianity’s relationship to the ceremonies of Judaism – the
same question that had animated Peter and Paul’s debate discussed earlier – the
“Angelic Doctor” turns to a cognitive analogy:
Just as human reason fails to grasp poetical expressions on account of their

being lacking in truth, so does it fail to grasp Divine things perfectly, on
account of the sublimity of the truth they contain: and therefore in both cases
there is need of signs by means of sensible figures.
In other words, poetry has to depend upon aesthetic representations because of a

lack of truth, whereas Scripture does so because of an excess of the same: divine
truth is so great as to be beyond human comprehension.
Thomas was fully aware that the Christian cannot escape aesthetics. Even the
salvific domains of scripture and liturgy must utilize language in a fashion similar
to the secular and sensual domains of poetry and rhetoric. It is in order to heighten
the contrast between the two that he insisted on condemning poetry to a position
even more distant from truth than Plato had done. “Poetic fictions have no purpose
except to signify; and such signification does not go beyond the literal sense.”
Remember the Pauline dictum: “for written letters kill, but the Spirit gives life”
(2 Cor. 3:6). For Aquinas, as for many other divines, poetry is restricted to the
domain of the flesh and the letter, that is, to the deadly domain of “Judaism.”18
The history of art and the history of poetry in Christian Europe are, in part, a
history of how art and poetry have defended themselves against these criticisms,
and articulated their legitimacy as truthful, even salvific, practices of representa-
tion and forms of knowledge. The Cantigas deserve a distinguished place in that
154 David Nirenberg
history, for they are quite aware that art has enemies, judging from the effort they
dedicate to staging that enmity and its miraculous defeat. Cantiga 297 directly
confronts the clerical critics of art. It sings of a friar who visited the court of a
king possessed of a particularly beautiful and miracle-working statue of Mary.
The “false friar who did not believe in God” upbraided the king, reproaching him
with idolatry for his excessive belief “that there is power in carved wood,” and
accusing of blindness everyone who cannot see how foolish is such belief. The
king condemns in turn the incredulous cleric, and predicts that he will come to a
bad end.19 The friar does indeed go mad, and the cantiga delivers something of
a theological defense of Christian image worship, though not perhaps one that
would pass more learned examination.20
If the frequency of a polemic is any indication of the contested-ness of a posi-
tion, then the compilers of the Cantigas were aware that theirs was precarious
indeed, for they multiply both miraculous images, and their enemies. In cantiga
74, the devil himself is enlisted in defense of pictorial realism (Figure 10.2).
A painter paints a fresco of the Virgin and of the devil. The two are poised in an
exquisite antithesis, framed by a symmetry of arches and of scaffolding. (The
symmetry is appropriately imperfect: the artist’s pose is different on each side,
and his paints and pots are all aligned with the Virgin’s portrait, rather than the
devil’s.) The devil is angered by the painter’s accurate depiction of his ugliness,
and engages the artist in argument, here depicted with all the gestures of rhetoric:
art and artist are here staged as a form of anti-demonic disputation. The vengeful
demon returns while the artist is once again painting a high fresco of the Virgin,
and destroys the scaffolding upon which he stands. But the falling painter prays to
his patroness, who suspends him miraculously in mid-air by his brush, the tool of
his art becoming also the instrument of his salvation.21
Among art’s more human enemies, Muslims and Jews rank high. Cantiga 99
(Figure 10.3), for example, sings of “how Holy Mary thwarted a great band of
Moors who entered a city of Christians and tried to destroy their holy statues.”
“They saw a statue there which appeared more beautiful than the others,” and
tried to destroy it, but “the statue bore no mark of having been touched or dam-
aged. They all thought they were going to die there, and realized that God was
angered.” As happens so often in these illuminations, the illuminator seems to
call special attention to the materiality of his practice. With each frame the white
background of the parchment becomes increasingly crowded with Muslims, until
in the fourth frame, with their irruption into the city, no empty parchment remains,
except within an arch in which the Muslims, armed with pickaxes, are scraping
away at the page, trying to rid it of its images. They are here the antithesis of the
scribes and illuminators, whose painstaking scraping and preparation of the sup-
porting animal hides cleared space for the Christian image. In this case it is the
image that miraculously prevails, re-appearing within the space cleared by the
Muslims, who – in the last panel – flee the parchment, leaving its space once again
clear and white for illumination.22
This poem is but one of many in which the Virgin’s image stands for Christian
conquest of Islam, and its removal (almost always thwarted) for Christian defeat.
Figure 10.2 Cantiga 74, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 108v–109r
Figure 10.3 Cantiga 99, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 143–144r
Cantiga 292 makes the logic explicit, when it explains that whenever Ferdinand
III (Alfonso’s father) conquered a city from the Muslims, he would place Mary’s
image at the mosque’s door.23 Conversely, when the Muslims threaten to recapture
Chincoya castle in cantiga 185, the Christian defenders put the Virgin’s image
to something like trial by battle: “If you are the Mother of God,” they exhort
it, “defend this castle and us, who are yours,” lest it “fall into the power of the
unbelieving moors, and so they may not burn your statue.” In Chincoya’s case
Muslim conquest was averted. But in the case of Jerez, which was in fact lost to
the Muslims for a year or two during the revolt of the Mudéjar’s in 1264, cantiga
345 explains that the king and queen first learned of the loss because both simul-
taneously dreamt, during siesta in Seville, that the image of Virgin and Child were
surrounded by fire. They thus realized that the alcazar of Jerez had fallen, and sor-
rowed because “a omagen da Virgen avia mal recebudo.” The reconquest in 1266
was, not surprisingly, marked by a “very great procession” restoring the Virgin’s
image to the chapel, “segun devia ser.”24
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that, in the Cantigas, attitudes toward
the power of devotional art – and especially toward the Virgin’s image and its
miracles – are used to represent the spiritual, as well as the territorial, bound-
ary between Christianity and its enemies. In the songs we’ve seen thus far, that
enemy is a Muslim. But in others, the enemy of Christian painting is figured as
a Jew. Cantiga 34 (Figure 10.4) provides a famous example. In it a Jew of Con-
stantinople steals an outstandingly beautiful (so the text tells us) image of the
Virgin that has been painted on a board and hung in the street. In the first scene of
the illumination the illuminator makes the point starkly but artfully (Figure 10.5,
detail). A grotesque Jew in profile is juxtaposed to the painting he holds askew
in his hands, already striding into a doorway whose darkness plays foil to the
light color-field of wall from which the painting has been removed. The Jew here
serves as an icon of the anti-iconic, the “pictoriality” of the entire scene empha-
sized by the accumulation of frames – the border of the illumination, the city
walls, and the frame of the icon itself – the illuminators have deployed. In the fol-
lowing scenes the Jew acts accordingly, throwing the painting down a latrine, and
defecating upon it. A Christian then discovers the image, which instead of stinking
of feces smells sweeter than spices, balsam, and unguents, and emits henceforth
a substance like oil. In the last panel we see the board itself enshrined as object
of devotion. And all this, the poem explicitly tells us, the Virgin did “in order to
teach” (por dar entendimento). The Jew here serves as an instructive negative
example against which the proper Christian attitude toward devotional objects
in general, and (I am suggesting) toward the artistic program of the Cantigas in
particular, is meant to emerge in high relief.25
Even more than devotional art, the vernacular poetry of the laity needed to legit-
imate its practice within this field of critique, and it met the challenge in much
the same way, with the poets striving to present their critics as “Jews” and her-
etics (Muslims seem here less important), and themselves as enemies of Judaism.
Indeed, Alfonso’s collection begins with a prayer addressing the poor reputation of
lay poetry. In that poetic prayer the royal troubadour differentiates good poetry from
Figure 10.5 Detail cantiga 34, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 49v–50r

bad. The good requires art and judgment, as well as divine aid, and demands that
these skills be deployed, not in praise of “other ladies” as many troubadours do, but
only of the Virgin Mary. Alfonso promises to be a good poet, and asks of the Virgin
in exchange that, if his songs be pleasing to her, she reward him with “the reward
she gives to those she loves.” “He who has this assurance will gladly sing for her.”26
And yet this assurance seems difficult to come by. One symptom of the insecu-
rity is that so many of the early songs in the collection are focused on the dangers
of Judaism. The opening pages of the Cantigas in all of their various recensions
are littered with anti-Jewish narratives. They begin (cantiga 2) with a story about
how the Virgin rewarded Alfonso’s patron and inspiration, St. Ildefonso of Toledo,
for preaching against the Jews of Visigothic Spain, some 600 years before Alfon-
so’s reign. They continue (cantiga 3) through the story of Theophilus and the Jew
(to which we shall return), then linger (cantiga 4) on an account of a Jewish father
throwing his son into a burning oven.27
The poetic stakes in these opening salvos against the Jews become more explicit
if we contrast two of these early cantigas in the collection. Cantiga 8 (Figure 10.6)
invites the clerical critics of poetry directly into the anthology. It tells the story
of a troubadour (whom it names as Pedro of Sieglar) who concluded his poem
to a statue of the Virgin with a request: “Oh glorious one, if you are pleased by
these songs of mine, give us a candle so that we may dine.” Immediately a candle
Figure 10.6 Cantiga 8, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 15r–v
descended upon his fiddle, but a Benedictine (judging by the habit in the illumina-
tion) monk snatched it out of his hand: “You are an enchanter and we shall not let
you have it.” The minstrel repeated the lay, and the miracle was repeated as well,
but the monk again seized the candle, threatening to accuse the poet of sorcery.
A third time the miracle occurred, and this time the audience intervened on behalf
of the poet, at which point the monk prostrated himself (Figure 10.7), realized his
error, and converted, so to speak, to poetry.28
Here poetry’s ecclesiastical foes – think, for example, of Thomas Aquinas – are
engaged directly, represented as erring Christians. Cantiga 6 sketches a different
approach (Figure 10.8). The song begins with a quasi-scriptural guarantee of truth:
Concerning this, the sacred writings, which neither lie nor err, tell us a great
miracle performed in England by the Holy Virgin Mary, with whom the Jews
have a great quarrel because Jesus Christ, who reproves them, was born of Her.
The (entirely non-scriptural) miracle concerns the son of a beggar widow. “The
boy was wonderfully gifted and handsome and very quick at learning all he heard.
Furthermore he sang so well, sweetly, and pleasantly, that he excelled everyone
in his land and beyond.”
The cantiga foregrounds the material wages of poetic mimesis, presenting the
boy as a successful professional: “Mother, in all frankness, I advise you that from
Figure 10.7 Detail cantiga 8, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 15r–v

Figure 10.8 Cantiga 6, Escorial Ms. T.I.1, fols. 12v–13v
now on you cease to beg, for Holy Mary gives you all that you wish through
me. Let Her provide, for She is very generous.” All were pleased by his art and
rewarded him “except the Jew, who hated him for it,” murdered him with an axe,
and secretly buried the body. But the Virgin resurrects her young troubadour, mak-
ing him sing from the grave so that all the town’s Christians are drawn to the spot.
They remove the boy from his grave, learn from him what had happened, and
promptly kill all the town’s Jews.29
There is a double defense of poetry being staged in this story. On the one hand,
the story aligns the critics of poetry with the Jews – who crucified Jesus because
they blindly perceived only his carnality, and not his divinity – and fantasizes their
extermination. On the other, the Jewish ritual murder of the child-poet is used to
align the poet of the Cantigas – that is, Alfonso X – with Christ, persecuted by
the Jews. Alfonso is here making a strong Christological claim for his own poetry.
And indeed the king was not shy about the claims he made in favor of his own
verse. Cantiga 70 (Figure 10.9) announces in its first line that it is a “song of
praise of Saint Mary, about how she was greeted by the angel.” But the image is
not of the Annunciation’s archangel Gabriel, but of King Alfonso, presenting the
Virgin with an unfurled white scroll of his verses. It is difficult to miss, in this and
the other illuminations to the song, the various and over-determined assertions
of communicative intimacy between Alfonso and the Queen of Heaven that are
encoded in this white scroll, itself representing the Cantigas as mediatic object,
a sign scraped into skin in order to stake the Incarnational claims of Alfonso’s
poetic songs.30
These mediatic claims, the claims of the Cantigas, of their poems and paintings,
were of course also political. Politics too is a type of representation, easily and often
subject to the criticism that it is excessively oriented toward materialism, legalism,
and the lure of worldliness: all aspects of the human that medieval Christians tended
to associate with Judaism. Since I lack the space to address politics in these pages, let
me adumbrate the point through a brief comparison between two images.31 The first
comes from cantiga 3, the miracle story of Teófilo (Theophilus in the Latin versions),
who was the intimate councilor and minister – privado in Castilian – of a bishop.
When the bishop died Teófilo was offered the mitre, but turned it down out of humil-
ity. Yet as his influence waned under the next bishop he regretted the decision and
turned for help to a very different privado, a Jewish minister of Satan who brokered
the sale of his soul to the devil in exchange for renewed administrative power. Teófilo
eventually repented and prayed to the Virgin Mary, who interceded for him in the
heavenly court and convinced her Son to recover the contract from Hell.
There are two options represented in this morality tale: a Christian court, in
which power is mediated through virtuous Christian ministers with eternal salva-
tion the goal; and a Satanic one with Jewish ministers, thirsting for earthly power
and condemned to damnation. Over and over the Cantigas proposes the contrast,
in order to present Alfonso as a representative of God rather than Satan. We can
stage the contrast in the difference between two gestures of homage involving
exchanges of scrolls – scrolls which, as I proposed earlier, are signs of the medi-
atic, signs that stand in some sort of relation of representation to the Cantigas
themselves as object (Figure 10.10). Here, in cantiga 3, we see Satan enthroned
166 David Nirenberg
with all the trappings of monarchy, with the Jew acting as minister, presenting
his client Teófilo’s contract to the demonic king.32 We might say that this scroll
stands for the lethal potential of the Pauline letter, its “Jewish” power to kill the
Christian soul. Compare to this murderous medium the salvific scroll we encoun-
tered in cantiga 70, a poem presented in incarnational homage by Alfonso to the
Virgin Mary. It is through such contrasts, through such representations of poetic
and pictorial grace on the one hand, and of its enemies on the other, that Alfonso
and his colleagues sought to define their poetry, their painting, and their politics
as Christian and transcendent.
Did this media strategy work? In the case of Teófilo evidently so, since cantiga
3 itself tells us that he was saved. Alfonso’s fate is more doubtful. I’ve already
mentioned that in the 1280s, as these illuminations were being prepared, the king
was himself a virtual prisoner in Seville, defeated by multiple rebellions of clerics
and aristocrats who accused him of being a lover of Jews. In addition to every-
thing else, the “Songs to the Holy Mary” should also be understood as part of
Alfonso’s defense against these charges of “Judaism.” In cantiga 235, the dying
king is even represented as a Christ figure himself, persecuted and crucified by his
“Jewish” enemies, that is, by his rebellious son and subjects.33
We can speak then, of a defense of poetry, of painting, of the Cantigas as mate-
rial medium or aesthetic object, and of Alfonso’s own politics, all being staged
through representations of their enemies – Jewish, Muslim, and heretic – in the
manuscripts. But the question still stands: did this defense succeed? The answer
depends on how you measure success. Looking back at the history of his reign,
many 14th century chroniclers agreed that Alfonso had been condemned by God
for his arrogant “Jewish” faith in the wisdom of this world, and their agreement
hardened into a tradition that reached deep into modernity, as deep even as the
poetry of Baudelaire.34 In this sense, we might judge Alfonso’s media strategy a
failure. But if we take the longer, indeed the eternal view, it was a success. For
those same chroniclers, when they pondered the king’s fate, assigned him not to
Hell but to Purgatory, where he had been placed at the intercession of the Virgin
Mary, pleased as she was by the poetry he had devoted to her.
Notes
1 “Authorship”: While scholars agree that King Alfonso did not compose many of the
poems and songs gathered in the Cantigas, some of them are explicitly presented in
first person as his own voice, and the opening represents the overall work as his own.
2 These are Cathedral of Toledo MS BNM MS 10069; Biblioteca del Real Monasterio
del Escorial MS T.I.1 (the so-called códice rico); Escorial MS B.I.2 (códice de los
músicos); and Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, MS Banco Rari 20.
3 As an example of the first, see Joseph O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Cantigas de
Santa María: A Poetic Biography (Leiden: Brill, 1998). A few of the works on Mus-
lims and Jews in the Cantigas will be cited in the pages that follow, but see also,
among many others: Albert I. Bagby, Jr., “The Jew in the Cántigas of Alfonso X, el
Sabio,” Speculum 46 (1971), 670–688; idem, “The Moslem in the Cantigas of Alfonso
X, El Sabio,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 20 (1973), 173–207; idem, “Alfonso X, el
Sabio compara moros y judios,” Romanische Forschungen 82 (1970), 578–583; idem,
“Some Characterizations of the Moor in Alfonso X’s Cántigas,” The South Central
Bulletin 30 (1970), 164–167; idem, “The Figure of the Jew in the Cantigas of Alfonso
X,” in Studies on the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Art, Music and Poetry, edited by J.I.K.
Katz, John E. Keller, Samuel Armistead, and Joseph Snow (Madison: Hispanic Semi-
nary of Medieval Studies, 1987), 235–245; B. N. Teensma, “Os judeus na Espanha do
seculo XIII, segundo as Cantigas de Santa Maria de Alfonso X o Sabio,” Occidente 79
(1970), 85–102; Mercedes García-Arenal, “Los moros en las cantigas de Alfonso X,”
Al-Qantara 6, 1 (1985), 133–151; Gisela Roitman, “Alfonso X, el rey sabio ¿Toler-
ante con la minoría judía? Una lectura emblemática de las Cantigas de Santa María,”
Emblemata 13 (2007), 31–177; Vikki Hatton and Angus MacKay, “Anti-Semitism in
the Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1983), 189–199; María
Dolores Bollo-Panadero, “Heretics and Infidels: The Cantigas de Santa María as Ideo-
logical Instrument of Cultural Codification,” Romance Quarterly 55 (2008), 163–173.
4 Here too there is a bibliography, especially as pertains to the image. See, for example,
Alejandro García Avilés, “Imágenes ‘vivientes’: idolatría y herejía en las Cantigas de
Alfonso X el Sabio,” Goya. Revista de Arte 321 (2007), 324–342; Deirdre Elizabeth
Jackson, “Shields of Faith: Apotropaic Images of the Virgin in Alfonso X’s Cantigas
de Santa María,” RACAR. Revue d’Art Canadienne 24 (1997), 38–46.
5 For facsimile editions of these manuscripts I have used Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas
de Santa María. Edición facsímil del Códice T.I.1 de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de
El Escorial. Siglo XIII, 2 vols. (Madrid: Edilan, 1979); Alfonso X el Sabio, Cantigas
de Santa María. Edición facsímil del códice B.R. 20 de la Biblioteca Centrale de Flor-
encia. Siglo XIII, 2 vols. (Madrid: Edilan, 1989).
6 “Heretics” play an important role here, but will receive short shrift in this essay.
For more on the topic see among many others Alejandro García Avilés, “Imágenes
‘vivientes’: Idolatría y herejía en las Cantigas de Alfonso X el Sabio,” Goya, 321
(2008), 324–342.
7 On these charges see P. Linehan, “The Spanish Church Revisited: The Episcopal gra-
vamina of 1279,” in Authority and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government
Presented to Walter Ullmann on his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Brian Tierney and
Peter Linehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 127–147, here 137.
8 Cantigas de Santa María, cantiga 209, “Muito faz grand’ erro e en torto jaz, a Deus
quen lle nega o ben que lle faz.” W. Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 3 vols.
(Madrid: Castalia, 1986–9), provides a good edition, here vol. 2, 274–275. The trans-
lations here and throughout are from K. Kulp-Hill, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X,
the Wise (Tempe: Arizona Center for Renaissance and Medieval Studies, 2000), here
251, with (here and throughout) occasional modification. In the Florence Banco Rari
manuscript, the cantiga and illumination occur at fols. 119r–v.
9 Here too there is a long bibliography, in which Norman Roth has been amongst the
more active participants. See, for example, his “Jewish Translators at the Court of
Alfonso X,” Thought 60, 239 (1985), 439–455; “Jewish Collaborators in Alfonso’s
Scientific Work,” in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His
Thirteenth Century Renaissance, edited by R. I. Burns (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 1990), 59–71, 223–230.
10 On cantiga 209 see Francisco Prado-Vilar, “Iudeus Sacer: Life, Law, and Identity in
the ‘State of Exception’ called ‘Marian Miracle’,” in Judaism and Christian Art: Aes-
thetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, edited by Herbert L. Kessler and
David Nirenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 115–142.
11 Georges Daumet, “Les testaments d’Alphonse X le Savant, roi de Castille,” Biblio-
thèque de l’École des Chartes 67 (1906), 70–99; O’Callaghan, Alfonso X and the Can-
tigas de Santa María, 228.
12 See e.g. Augustine, In evangelium Joannis tractatus (Tractates on the Gospel of John),
PL 32, 1443, citing 2 Cor. 2:9; or Jerome, Commentaria in Matthaeum (Commentaries
on Matthew), PL 26, 168 A–C, who condemns the practice of putting gospel texts on
168 David Nirenberg
the ill body as equivalent to the Pharisees’ use of phylacteries. My thanks to Ryan Giles
for making clear to me the relevance of these texts to cantiga 209.
13 For Bernard’s critique of images see Conrad Rudolph, The ‘Things of Greater Impor-
tance’: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Phil-
adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), esp. Apologia 28, De picturis
et sculpturis, auro et argento in monasteriis: “et mihi repraesentant quodammodo
antiquum ritum Iudaeorum,” 278; idols, dung, avarice, and usury, 280. On those who
consider churches synagogues, see Bernard’s Letter 241:1. See also Jean-Claude
Schmitt, “Les idoles chrétiennes,” in L’idolâtrie (Rencontres de l’École du Louvre)
(Paris: La Documentation Française, 1990), 107–118.
14 Católica Impugnación, edited by F. Márquez and F. Martín Hernández (Barcelona:
Juan Floris, 1961), 189. See Felipe Pereda’s Las imágenes de la discordia: Política
y poética de la imagen sagrada en la España del 400 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2007),
27–144; and idem, “Through a Glass Darkly: Paths to Salvation in Spanish Paint-
ing at the Outset of the Inquisition,” in Judaism and Christian Art, 263–290, here
270–272.
15 On this tradition of criticism see the essays collected in Judaism and Christian Art,
edited by Kessler and Nirenberg.
16 Augustine, De civitate Dei 2.14, 9.7 and elsewhere on Plato’s and the Platonists’ con-
demnations of poetry, 6.10 on Varro’s critique of “poetical theology.” For literature on
Christian attitudes toward Pagan religion and poetry more broadly see R.P.C. Hanson,
“The Christian Attitude to Pagan Religions up to the Time of Constantine the Great,” in
Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel
der neueren Forschung, edited by Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 910–973; K. O. Sanders, “The Challenge of Homer: School,
Pagan Poets and Early Christianity,” in Poetry and Exegesis in Premodern Latin Chris-
tianity: The Encounter between Classical and Christian Strategies of Interpretation,
edited by W. Otten and K. Pollmann (Leiden: Brill, 2007). For an elegant summation of
“The Place of Poetry in Latin Christianity,” see W. Evenepoel’s article with that title in
Early Christian Poetry: A Collection of Essays, edited by Jan den Boeft and Antonius
Hilhorst (Brill: Leiden, 1993), 35–60.
17 Augustine, De doctrina IV.5.7, citing Cicero, De inventione I.1; De doctrina 4.14.30.
18 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.II.101 on the ceremonial precepts:
quod sicut poetica non capiuntur a ratione humana propter defectum veritatis,
qui est in eis, ita etiam ratio humana perfecte capere non potest divina propter
excedentem ipsorum veritatem, et ideo utrobique opus est repraesentatione per sen-
sibiles figuras.
Compare op. cit. I.I.9 on metaphor in scripture: “Procedere autem per similitudines
varias, et repraesentationes, est proprium Poeticae. . . .” “No purpose”: Thomas Aqui-
nas, Quodlibetal Questions 7.6.16.
19 Cantiga 297: “o que cree que vertude á no madeir’ entallado . . . e tonno que é mui cego
o que aquesto non vee. . . . Este rei tenno que enos idolos cree.” Mettmann, Cantigas
de Santa María, 2, 123–4, lines 30–33, 38.
20 According to the cantiga, images have the power to heal those who believe because
“ben assi por semellança / a recebe a omagen mantenente sen tardança / daquel de que
é fegura, macar om’ a el non vee” (20–24). Thomas Aquinas might not have entirely
approved of the argument: see ST III.25.v. But see here Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras,
“Ymagines sanctae: Fray Juan Gil de Zamora y la teoría de la imagen sagrada en las
Cantigas de Santa Maria,” Homenaje a José García Oro, edited by M. Romaní Mar-
tínez and M. A. Novoa Gómez (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de
Compostela, 2002), 515–526.
21 For cantiga 74 see Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 1, 216–7, and Escorial T.I.1
fols. 108v–109r.
22 For cantiga 99 see Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 1, 283–4, and Escorial T.I.1
fols. 143v–144r.
23 Cantiga 292, Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 2, 110–113, here lines 28–29.
24 Cantiga 185 (= Edilán facsimile 187) in Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 1, 597–600,
lines 75–78. Cantiga 345, Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 3, 197–200, here lines
71–76, 103, 108–109.
25 For cantiga 34 see Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 1, 100–1, and Ms. T.I.1 fols.
49v–50r. The story first appears in Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs, translated
by Raymond van Dam (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), 40. See Leo-
pold Kretzenbacher, Das verletzte Kultbild: Voraussetzungen, Zeitschichten und Aus-
sagewandel eines abendländischen Legendentypus (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1977), 66–70. For a Byzantine version see Heinz
Gauer, Texte zum byzantinishcen Bilderstreit: Der Synodalbrief der drei Patriarchen
des Ostens von 836 und seine Verwandlung in sieben Jahrhunderten (Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 1994), 69–70. Jean-Marie Sansterre comments upon both episodes
in “L’image blessée, l’image souffrante: quelques récits de miracles entre Orient et
Occident (VIe-XIIe siècle),” in Les images dans les sociétés médiévales. Pour une
histoire comparée, edited by Jean-Marie Sansterre and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Brussels
and Rome: Academia Belgica, 1999), 113–130, here 115–116. The fate of the offend-
ing Jew differs across these accounts. In Gregory of Tours he is stoned, in the Byzan-
tine anti-iconoclastic version he is converted, and in the Cantigas, he is executed by
the devil, rather than by human hands.
26 Cantiga B: Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 1, 2–3; Kulp-Hill, Songs of Holy
Mary, 2.
27 Because a number of these earlier miracles are adapted from existing collections such
as Goitier of Coincy’s, their significance for an understanding of Alfonso’s attitudes is
sometimes minimized. But as I hope these pages will make clear, they entirely cohere
with Alfonso’s aesthetic project, and indeed provided a stark manifesto for that project.
That, not the mere fact of their availability, is presumably why they were assigned such
prominent place.
28 Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 1, 26–27; Kulp-Hill, Songs of Holy Mary, 13–14;
Escorial MS. T.I.1, fols. 15r–v.
Escorial MS. T.I.1, fols. 12v–13v.
30 Cantiga 70 in the Escorial manuscript (Escorial MS. T.I.1, fols. 103v–104r) is num-
bered both by Mettmann and Kulp-Hill as cantiga 80 (following the order in Escorial
MS B.I.2, the códice de los músicos: Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 1, 235;
Kulp-Hill, Songs of Holy Mary, 105. I owe the observation to my many conversations
with Laura Fernández Fernández. Ana Domínguez Rodriguez’s valuable article on
the topic of the king’s representation as Mary’s troubadour does not comment on this
aspect of the representation: “Imágenes de un rey trovador de Santa María (Alfonso X
en Las Cantigas),” in Il medio Oriente e l’Occidente nell’Arte del XIII secolo. Atti del
XXIV Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’Arte (Bologna, 1979), edited by Hans
Belting (Bologne: CLUEB, 1982), 229–239.
31 For an extensive treatment of this theme, see David Nirenberg, “ ‘Judaism’ as Political
Concept: Toward a Critique of Political Theology,” Representations 128 (2014), 1–29.
Escorial MS. T.I.1, fols. 7v–8r. On the Theophilus miracle in the Cantigas see Pamela
Patton, “Constructing the Inimical Jew in the Cantigas de Santa María: Theophi-
lus’s Magician in Text and Image,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and
170 David Nirenberg
Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, edited by Mitchell B.
Merback (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 233–256.
33 Mettmann, Cantigas de Santa María, 2, 335–38; Kulp-Hill, Songs of Holy Mary,
281–283.
34 On these chroniclers, Baudelaire, and Alfonso’s arrogant confidence in the wisdom of
this world, see the sources assembled in David Nirenberg, “ ‘Judaism’, ‘Islam’, and
the Dangers of Knowledge in Christian Culture, with Special Attention to the Case of
King Alfonso X, ‘the Wise’, of Castile,” in Mapping Knowledge: Cross-Pollination
in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Arabica Veritas, 1), edited by C. Burnett and
P. Mantas-España (Cordoba: Oriens Academica, 2014), 253–276.
Part IV
Spectacles of empire
and identity
11 Poor colors, rich colors
Spanish clothing in the early
sixteenth century1
Hilario Casado Alonso
Apparel and costumes have long been the preferential subject of study by fashion
and dress historians alike. Research has mainly addressed the different types of
clothes worn; the evolution of tastes in male and female fashion; the quality and
design of materials; the use of certain decorations, embroidery, jewellery; and
so on. This scholarship has been framed within the study of decorative arts
and has often been published as museum and exhibition catalogs.2 In recent
years, however, fashion and its evolution are increasingly being explored as a
social institution in tandem with the gradual growth of consumerism, creating
what Professor M. Belfanti has termed “civiltà della moda.”3 This new focus
analyzes how fashion has evolved in its historical context. Fashion, indeed,
marked differences between social groups, with some deploying it as a symbol
of power and distinction.
Exploring textile manufacturing in the preindustrial world has for many years
also been a topic of historiographical interest. It was, after all, the main product
of manufacturing prior to the industrial revolution. Much light has been shed on
where clothing was produced, what garments were like, how they evolved, how
textile work was organized, and how business was conducted in the cloth trade.
Moreover, we are slowly but surely gaining insights into the work done by tai-
lors. Yet, when analyzing clothing, the bulk of these publications have focused on
describing type of fibres (wool, silk, linen, hemp, cotton), their qualities, the skills
used in the production of various fabrics, and ultimately costs.4 Recent studies of
consumerism have even centered on the household items of rich and poor in early
modern Europe.5 By contrast, publications dealing with the color of materials and
garments remain few and far between.6 This oversight should in part be put down
to the scant information available in documentary sources, but also to the deliber-
ate neglect of the economics of clothing. Existing studies have concentrated more
on cultural issues related to the garment’s color, such as how tastes and trends
have evolved over the centuries; the influence of religious factors in the use of cer-
tain colors; the symbolic meaning that some of these held at particular historical
contexts; or colors in court fashions and changes in preference over time.7 In none
of them is the matter of color dealt with from a financial perspective, even though
it is now becoming apparent how much of a bearing the cost of dyeing material
one particular shade or another had on the product’s final price.8 Furthermore,
174 Hilario Casado Alonso
color is a key feature in fashion, with the latter, and particularly changes therein,
playing a primary role in demand and, as a result, impacting on the evolution of
the economy.
Another matter concerns the history of dyes and dyers and its relationship with
the color of clothing and economics matters. A great deal of information is now
emerging about the evolution of various colorings and how the Middle Ages wit-
nessed the arrival of new dyes from Asia, to be joined by others from the recently
discovered Americas.9 In addition, almost all publications analyzing fifteenth and
sixteenth century commerce make reference to the dye trade and highlight the fact
that dealings were controlled by powerful companies, as the business was a highly
speculative one demanding substantial initial outlay as well as networks of dealers
and intermediaries located at the various textile centers.
European clothing in the late Middle Ages: color as a

sign of social distinction
In fifteenth and early sixteenth century European courts, Burgundian fashion
came to shape tastes. Clothing worn at the Burgundian court in Dijon and Brus-
sels was characterized by the use of black, replacing reddish tones such as scarlet
that had once been in favor. When Charles V inherited the Burgundian, Trastá-
mara, and Habsburg lands and made Spain a base for his court in the 1520s, Bur-
gundian fashion came to be known as Spanish fashion. Burgundian fashion first
made a strong impact on masculine attire and then later on female and children’s
clothing.10 But the analyses of Burgundian fashion basically stem from a study of
surviving paintings and artworks belonging to monarchs, nobles, and other elites.
At the same time, after the fifteenth century there was an increase in textile
consumption by the wealthy classes who not only changed their wardrobe more
often in an effort to keep up with contemporary trends but also had a larger array
of materials and clothes. To a point, these consumer patterns even spread to cer-
tain sectors of the population at large, particularly in urban areas.11 Faced with
this desire to consume, which broke established practice and traditions, many
European governments made ultimately unsuccessful attempts to implement
sumptuary laws. These regulations sought to limit the use of certain fabrics,
colors, clothing, and accessories to the ruling classes, and to prevent others such
as merchants, artisans, and wealthy country folk who were beginning to climb
the social ladder from partaking in them.12
According to Michel Pastoureau, the emergence and popularity of blue and
black in the late medieval period had a symbolic and religious significance: blue
being the color of the Virgin, whereas black stood for austerity, dignity, chivalry,
and authority.13 Such an anthropological and socio-cultural meaning differs enor-
mously from how we perceive these tones today. These colors apparently first
became popular with the dukes of Burgundy in the mid-fifteenth century before
spreading to other European courts.14 This evolution can be seen in the market at
Bruges where, as the century progressed, sales of red, yellow, and brown colored
fabrics fell as did those of multicolored fabrics, to be overtaken by blue, purple,
Poor colors, rich colors 175
black, and grey. Remarkably, 75% of the woollen cloth purchased by members of
urban oligarchies in the cities of Flanders between 1471 and 1550 was black, a
figure which rises to over 90% when considering only purchases made between
1501 and 1550.15 As a result, in order to mark their social status in Flemish cit-
ies, people not only had to dress appropriately and wear certain items of clothing
made of specific materials but they also needed to ensure that such clothes were
black. Bearing in mind that these urban areas were the main textile centers of
Europe at the time, we might say that, in terms of fashion, the continent went over
to the “dark side.”
In order to obtain dark colors, the woollen cloth first needed to be dyed with
woad, the blue dye from Toulouse which became prevalent in the late Middle
Ages, since it did not require the use of color fixatives especially with alum.16 If
a deep blue bordering on black was required, the fabric had to be bathed several
times. The most common process, however, was for there to be initial dyeing
with woad which was then followed by the material being bathed with rose mad-
der, weld, orchil, brazilwood, cochineal, saffron, and other additives which gave
the desired green, violet, purple, grey, and black color. This resulted in dazzling
shades of dark colors which were those most keenly sought by buyers particularly
when it came to luxurious fabrics. However, research is still needed to deter-
mine whether the color of a fabric affected its pricing since, as pointed out, the
cost of dyes varied enormously, particularly if they had been imported. Such an
analysis could shed light on issues concerning social and gender matters such
as whether there were different colors for rich and poor, men and women, and
children. Questions of a financial nature therefore need to be added to those of a
cultural perspective.
Early sixteenth-century Spanish clothing: observations

from the Medina del Campo trade fairs
Studies of clothes worn by Spaniards in the late Middle Ages and at the start of the
early modern period are scarce and mainly focus on analyzing different garments
portrayed in various artworks that have survived from the period. The books of
C. Bernis are still the principal sources of reference available today.17 Research
remains ongoing and currently centers on the periods of Charles V, Philip II, and
their successors, with attention focusing mainly on studying the world of the court
and the spread of Spanish fashion and protocol throughout Europe.18 With just
a few exceptions, matters concerning the color of Spanish clothing have been
overlooked, and any research that has been carried out has dealt exclusively with
royalty.19 I will attempt to analyze a wider range of consumers who purchased
fabrics to wear, starting from what was the major textile redistribution center in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for Spain, Portugal, and the Americas: the
fairs of Medina del Campo.
From the mid-fifteenth century onward, economic growth spurred on an exten-
sive and complex system in the Iberian Peninsula for trading textiles as well as
a wide array of other products. This system was centered on markets and fairs,
some reaching only their immediate surroundings while others became sites for
redistributing goods at a national and international scale since, together with local
shopkeepers and consumers, important foreign merchants, small traders, and many
hawkers came. One such general fair was that of the town of Medina del Campo
which, along with the fairs at the towns of Villalón and Medina de Rioseco, con-
ducted the most trade. Each location hosted fairs twice a year. The Medina del
Campo fair took place for 30 days after Easter and in October (from October 1 for
50 days). The Medina de Rioseco fair was held from the second Monday after Res-
urrection Sunday (the “Pascuilla” fair, for 20 days) and in August (for 30 days).
Villalón’s two annual fairs were convened during Lent (also vital to the fish trade
throughout inland Spain) and on the day of Saint John. The staggering of fairs
throughout the year and distribution over the agricultural calendar meant that mer-
chants and country folk from all over could attend to buy and sell, coming from
as far afield as Galicia, the Cantabria coast, the Duero valley, Portugal, Aragon,
Valencia, Catalonia, Navarre, Toledo, La Mancha, as well as areas of Andalusia
and Murcia. The role these towns played as centers of redistribution at that time
was rivalled only by the role Seville played for southern Spain, the Canaries,
North Africa, and the Americas. In short, anyone, whether Spanish or foreign,
who wished to engage in large-scale trading in the Iberian Peninsula had to attend.
After the late fifteenth century, these three major fairs emerged as the main cent-
ers for dealing in goods that afterward were exchanged over much of the Iberian
Peninsula, with the most active undoubtedly those held at Medina del Campo.20
Leaving aside banking and monetary transactions, the textile trade accounted
for much of the business activity at these fairs both during the actual period the
fair took place as well as outside of it. A wide range of textiles, including domestic
and foreign fabrics, are known to have been traded in Medina del Campo in the
first half of the sixteenth century. Prominent among the latter was wool. In reality,
the term “wool” encompassed an array of fabrics of different prices and qualities.
Expensive textiles included Courtrai cloth, fine cloth, broadcloth, treintenos (thir-
ties, 3,000 threads in the warp), veinticuatrenos (twenty-fours, 2,400 threads), and
veintidosenos (twenty-twos, 2,200 threads) from Segovia, Toledo, and Cuenca.
Medium priced fabrics encompassed Perpignan cloths from Catalonia, and twen-
ties and eighteens from Cuenca, Segovia, Toledo, Avila, Piedrahita, Ciudad Real,
Aragon, and Logroño. Finally, inexpensive ones consisted of fourteens, buriel,
serges, saia d’Irlanda, palmillas, coarse wool fabric, brown cloth, papales, friezes
and small friezes from Avila, Palencia, Dueñas, La Nava, Tordesillas, Valladolid,
Burgos, Logroño, etc. In short, a wide range of materials was traded including
various types of warp whose price varied depending on the added value given
by the dyes used. Cloth produced in Spain was joined at the fair in Medina del
Campo by a wide array of textiles from overseas: from Flanders (Courtrai cloth,
serge, arbines, tunes, different size woollen cloth (quarteles), bocacines, oultref-
fin, sanbertines, small double say, Armentieres, and frieze); England (London),
France (Rouen cloth); and Italy (rasce). In sum, there was woollen cloth of many
different prices, thread type, colors, and quality, enough to meet the requirements
and tastes of all social groups.
Together with woollen cloth, the other major textile trade in Medina del Campo
was linen. Local linen goods were generally poor quality and were barely traded
outside the domestic market. Portuguese linen also turned up occasionally at the
market in Medina del Campo but it, too, was coarse. Consequently, linen goods
from outside the Peninsula became popular at the fairs in Medina del Campo and,
as a result, in the whole of Spain and the Americas for making tablecloths, shirts,
underwear, cushions, mattresses, and bedclothes. These included linen from the
Netherlands, Flanders (Oudenaarde, Brabant, and Hainaut), France (Brittany and
Rouen), and India (Calicut). Cotton fabrics were also brought in from overseas
(fustians and cotton textiles) and were generally traded by the same merchants
who sold the linen. Topping the list of fabrics in value were silks, which included
satin, taffeta, damask, and velvet from Granada, Toledo, Valencia, Florence, and
Genoa, though sale of non-woven silk was also common.21
What color fabrics were traded at the fairs, then? The answer is by no means
simple since merchants and shopkeepers tended to refer to products using gen-
eral names and more often than not identifying the cloth based on the fabric and
workmanship. Yet we do have two documentary sources that allow us to answer
some of these questions. The first consists of the accounting books kept by Felipa
González, shopkeeper and widow of Alonso Leal, spanning March 1, 1526 to
May 27, 1530.22 González specialized in buying and selling woollen fabrics from
Spain (Segovia, Cuenca, La Nava, Palencia, Perpignan, Zaragoza, Toledo, Pie-
drahita, etc.), although she also dealt in woollen cloth from England and Flanders
and, to a lesser extent, velvet and satin silks from Granada, Toledo, and Valencia.
During this period 3,454 sales transactions were recorded for 164 different varie-
ties of woollen cloth and velvet, both Spanish and from overseas, amounting to
12,525.36 varas,23 sold for a total of 4,067,939.70 maravedíes. Most were sold on
credit and only 12.5% of sales were cash transactions. Clients varied enormously
and included locals and others from the whole of the Duero valley area as well as
people from other regions of Spain and Portugal. The 1,903 buyers came from an
extremely wide range of social backgrounds, spanning members of local oligar-
chies, ecclesiastics, artisans, and men of arms as well as even the poor and cer-
tain prostitutes. Yet most were local country folk from nearby towns and villages
located within a 65-mile radius of Medina del Campo. The account books are
particularly interesting precisely because the transactions they record include an
array of individuals from different social backgrounds. Analysis of these records
offer a window onto purchases made by a wider range of customers than clients at
the royal court, the subject of previous scholarship.
The second documentary source is another accounts book, the 1527 Libro de
caxa de Ferias of the company of Sancho Gallo, a member of the great merchant
families of Castile.24 These books record 84 retail and wholesale transactions at
the two fairs of Medina del Campo and those of Medina de Ríoseco and of Vil-
lalón, which yielded sales valued at 2,715,433 maravedíes. Eighty-nine percent
of the fabric sold came from Flanders, followed by England. This included sales
of woollen cloth, linen, serges, fustians, and velvet together with the occasional
blanket and several tapestries. Buyers were other retail dealers from 25 different
areas of Castile and Portugal. As in the previous case, 55% were credit sales. The
problem with these accounts is that we are unable to calculate, except for one or
two cases, the price per unit of length used in Castile (vara), since the fabrics were
sold in whole bundles of differing length and weight.
Such a large number of transactions of fabrics at the fairs in Medina del Campo
gives us good insight into the Spanish textile market in the early sixteenth century.
This data provide us with information concerning the colors of half the fabrics
sold (6,161.7 varas, some 5,633 yards) by the widow Felipa Sánchez. Although
it is extremely difficult to know the names of all the different tones and shades of
certain fabrics, Table 11.1 sums up the range of colors and the mean price.
As can be seen, the most commonly sold fabrics were brown and white. The
former were woollen textiles, with poor quality workmanship, for which low
standard wool from Churra sheep or the worst parts of the merino sheep were
used. Wool from black sheep may also have been used. Cheap and mostly local
dyes were used to dye them. Much the same is true of white and clear colored
fabrics (silvery colored, snowy colored, and albartocado). We next find what J.
Munro refers to as the “dark side” of Netherlands textile fashion: black, blue
(blue, purple, violet, indigo, sky blue, and peacock grey), green, and the whole
wide range of greys (grey and ferrete).25 In contrast to these were the previously
favored red tones (“lion mane red,” red, blonde, pinkish, flesh colored, salmon
colored, and orange colors) which gradually lost favor. Finally, yellow was used
primarily to make the inner linings of clothes using frieze cloth.
Exactly the same range of colors can be seen in the shop inventory, made in
August 1530, which lists both the stocks and the suppliers to whom money was
owed for the materials (Table 11.2). The only difference is the greater number
of red colored fabrics, although they display the same characteristics, with dark
colors predominating. Although no further information is available, this might be
due to clear and red colors proving less popular on the market.
Table 11.1 Colors of the fabrics sold in Felipa Gonzalez’s shop in Medina del Campo,
March 1, 1526–May 30, 1530
COLOR AMOUNTS VALUE PRICE
Varas (yards) % maravedíes % maravedíes

per vara
Unknown 6,462 51.59 2,737,829.20 67.3

Brown 1,689.80 13.5 273,018.30 6.7 161.60
White 1,084 8.7 229,144.80 5.6 211.40
Red 828.10 6.6 205,031.50 5.0 247.60
Black 778.20 6.2 239,880.50 5.9 308.30
Green 749.10 6.0 137,401.50 3.4 183.40
Blue 547.30 4.4 123,065 3.0 224.90
Grey 233.80 1.9 102,909.50 2.5 440.10
Yellow 153 1.2 19,659.50 0.5 128.50
TOTAL 12,525.30 4,067,939.70
Table 11.2 Colors of the fabrics in the inventory in Felipa Gonzalez’s Shop in Medina del
Campo, August 1530
COLOR AMOUNT VALUE PRICE

per vara
Unknown 676.42 40.12 130,039.30 49.51

Red 500.11 29.66 45,536 17.34 91.05
White 149.92 8.89 19,853 7.56 132.42
Black 112.57 6.68 22,226.50 8.46 197.45
Green 72.98 4.33 9,883 3.76 135.42
Blue 60.28 3.58 15,447 5.88 256.25
Yellow 48.58 2.88 3,542 1.35 72.91
Brown 28.66 1.70 5,389 2.05 188.03
Grey 36.44 2.16 10,427 3.97 286.14
TOTAL 1,685.96 262,342.80
The situation is much the same as can be seen a few years earlier in the inven-
tory taken after the death of the great wool cloth trader García de la Peña of the
stocks kept in his shop in Medina del Campo.26 There are more red colored fab-
rics. Yet, if we add up all those colored red, blue, and green, the predominance of
dark tones is clear. What is surprising about this particular retailer is that he does
not appear to have dealt in local low quality brown colored woollen cloth, unless
all of them had already been sold (Table 11.3).
The accounts left by Sancho Gallo offer less information, pointing to the colors
of the English fabrics which are grey, purple, green, and turquoise, colors that are
the same as those in the London cloths sold by Felipa González. Of the Flemish
fabrics, the only color we know is that of the serge, a type of black. This would
seem to confirm the demand from Spanish clients for dark colors, whether of
national origin – most of those sold by Felipa González – or imported from the
Netherlands and England by this major international dealer.
Having gained an overview of the colors of the cloths traded at the fairs in
Medina del Campo in the early sixteenth century, we should ask what type of
cloths were dyed one color or another. Black was the color used for velvet and
silk satins from Granada and Valencia, broad cloths, oultreffin, refinos, brun-
eta cloth, and Castilian and Flemish twenty-twos and twenties. It was even used
on some eighteens from Cuenca, Toledo, and Segovia. In certain instances, we
know that black colored woollen cloth was used to make capes, blankets, and
outer garments. Green and blue were used to make the high quality clothes men-
tioned above, although they were also employed to color medium quality gar-
ments such as the eighteens from Cuenca, Segovia, Logroño, and Dueñas, and
the English London cloths together with some small friezes, palencias and green
sixteens. Much the same can be said of grey. A range of red colors was applied on
a wide variety of cloths used for undergarments, since it was the most commonly
employed dye for palencias, dyed woollen broadcloths, London cloths, friezes,
Table 11.3 Colors of the fabrics in the inventory in García de la Peña’s shop in Medina del
Campo, May 28, 1523
COLOR AMOUNT VALUE PRICE

per vara
Unknown 435 20.9 139,102 37.8

Red 871 41.9 120,496 32.8 138.34
Black 212 10.2 51,830 14.1 244.56
Blue 89 4.3 16,488 4.5 185.26
Grey 65 3.1 13,157 3.6 202.42
Green 59 2.8 8,695 2.4 147.37
White 52 2.5 11,915 3.2 231.36
Yellow 18 0.9 4,672 1.3 259.56
Brown 15 0.7 1,275 0.3 85.00
TOTAL 1,815 367,630
twenty-twos, eighteens, sixteens, and florets from Cuenca and Segovia. Added
to these were certain silks that were also dyed red. Yellow was to be found on
small friezes, palencias, and, above all, in linings. Finally, we have the white and
brown colored woollen cloth, reserved for the poorest clothes. Coarse wool fabric,
palencias, and friezes were white. The same can be said of the browns: sixteens,
fourteens, thirteens, small friezes, and burieles from Segovia, Cuenca, Ágreda,
Zaragoza, and rural areas of Castile.
In sum, the Medina del Campo trade fair observations evidences that not all the
textile products were dyed in every color. These differed and were ranked, with the
price depending on the cost of the dye, particularly if, as in the case of woad, it was
imported from abroad, and if the desired final product was a bright color.27 Fabrics
requiring an initial dye in woad blue coupled with further subsequent dyeing ulti-
mately cost more. This is reflected in the price of the yards of cloth sold at the fairs.
A look at Tables 11.1, 11.2, and 11.3 shows that the highest prices were paid for darker
colors: greys and blacks, followed by reds, blues and greens, with the cheapest being
the brown, yellow, and white colors. Such price differences were also in evidence
years before, given that at a public auction held in 1481 in Fuente el Sol, a town close
to Medina del Campo, 1,481 blue colored sashes were sold for between 254 and 380
maravedíes, while brown or dun colored ones sold for only 60 maravedíes.28 These
prices included the cost of making up the cloth plus the dye and the final finish.
These differing prices provide us with an insight into the social structure of
those who purchased the various fabrics, with black being bought by members of
the local ruling classes, merchants, men of arms, and certain artisans. Grey was
favored amongst the clergy, merchants, men of arms, scholars, and artisans. Still,
these trends did not prevent one prostitute from acquiring a yard of London grey
to make a black velvet hat. Red was popular with everybody. Yet, what proves
most significant involves the case of browns, which were mostly purchased by
country folk, artisans, and commoners in Medina del Campo and the surround-
ing villages. If we bear in mind that brown and white colored woollen cloth were
the most commonly sold colors and that these were the most inexpensive, we
may conclude that the Medina del Campo trade fair, and by extension those held
throughout Castile, offered a wide range. Clothes were sold to the well-off, but
mainly to those of humbler social standing: country folk, artisans, and common-
ers. There were, however, different market niches depending on individual spend-
ing power. Yet, what is true is that everybody went to the market to purchase the
materials they needed to make their clothes. Early sixteenth century Spain was,
therefore, by no means a closed economy where country folk were poor, lived cut
off from the rest of the world, were self-sufficient, and only consumed what they
themselves produced. Quite the opposite is true, since what emerges is the large
amount of clothes acquired by contemporary Spanish society, comparable to other
parts of Europe, with clothes being made of fabrics brought from overseas being
just as likely to be purchased as those made using fabrics from Spain.
Some conclusions
From this brief overview of the textile market in the early sixteenth century fairs
at Medina del Campo, the main redistribution center for fabrics throughout the
whole Iberian Peninsula, certain provisional conclusions may be drawn which
should be compared to previous research.
One initial conclusion is that the cost of fabrics was determined not only by
workmanship and type of fibre but also by the price of dye, which also depended
on quality and origin. Whether different color fixatives and additives needed to
be used that would further increase the final price is another aspect to be borne
in mind. A second conclusion to emerge from analyzing early sixteenth century
Spanish clothing is the gradual success of dark colors (blacks, greys, and blues)
over reds. This corresponds fully with changes in the Netherlands, which set trends
at the time. Such was the triumph of so-called Burgundy fashion, which would
later come to be known as Spanish fashion. One example is the nine councillors
of Medina del Campo who, in order to dress elegantly to impress the Empress
Isabella during her visit in 1531, used up the municipal finances to purchase 374
varas of velvet, damask, and silk satin in red, white, and black at a cost of 289,710
maravedíes. The most expensive fabrics, however, were those made of black vel-
vet (800 maravedíes each vara).29
Research also indicates that Spanish tastes were not very different from those
found in northern Europe, particularly vis-à-vis the ruling classes and to a lesser
extent the rest of society. As with so many other aspects of material culture, Flan-
ders set the trend in terms of fashion.30 The issue which merits inquiry is whether
we can pinpoint its chronology more precisely. Judging by certain drawings and
paintings, particularly those by Christoph Weiditz between 1530–40,31 in those
early years of the sixteenth century there was a still a mixture of clothes and
customs. Black was already quite commonplace in outer clothes and was a color
which would gradually also come to be used in undergarments in later years.
What we do not know is whether these new tastes were reflected solely in the
masculine attire of the ruling social groups and whether, as would appear, such
colors were yet to be used in women and children’s clothes. The preference for
black does not seem to have spread to Muslim leaders of the recently incorpo-
rated Kingdom of Granada since in the fabrics sent to them by Queen Isabella the
Catholic very few of said color appear, with most of them being red, purple, or
blue.32 White and especially brown colored garments were the most commonplace
amongst the population at large. Country folk, artisans, and the poor, together with
people from a wide variety of social backgrounds, wore brown colored clothes.
Choosing this color was not simply a question of taste or tradition but was a con-
sequence of their costing less. Clothes made of coarser and poorer quality woollen
cloths were worn, as a result of which they tended to be dyed with lower quality
dyes or in fact maintained the rough-looking color of their fibres.
Such differences in the colors of early sixteenth century Spanish clothing, with
the gradual emergence of dark colors, and in particular black, is an indication
that said victory was not just, as has traditionally been claimed, influenced by
cultural concerns but indeed also by financial considerations. Black’s success was
not only due to cultural reasons (fashion, religion, culture, and so on) but also to
monetary concerns. Bright black was an extremely expensive dye to obtain and
was therefore reserved for the most luxurious fabrics, in other words, those des-
tined only for the wealthiest. This situation did not change with the arrival in the
mid-sixteenth century of dyes from the Americas: Mexican cochineal or logwood.
Wearing black was only within the reach of the ruling classes, since it was a hall-
mark of distinction and social pre-eminence, values which were highly prized in
society during the ancien régime.33
Notes
1 The author acknowledges financial support from a MEC grant (Spanish Ministry of
Economy and Competitiveness) (Ref. HAR2014–52469-C3–3-P).
2 V. Gratia: Amanda Peck (ed.), Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–
1800 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013).
3 Carlo Marco Belfanti, Civiltà della moda (Bologna: il Mulino, 2008).
4 David Jenkins (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, 2 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003). Rainer C. Schwinges and Regula Schorta (eds.),
Fashion and Clothing in Late Medieval Europe (Basel: Abegg-Stiftung Riggisberg,
2010). Paulino Iradiel Murugarren, Evolución de la industria textil castellana en los
siglos XIII-XVI: factores de desarrollo, organización y costes de la producción manu-
facturera en Cuenca (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1974).
5 Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
6 Susan Kay-Williams, The Story of Colour in Textiles: Imperial Purple to Denim Blue
(London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Amy Butler-Grenfield, A Perfect Red Empire. Espionage
and the Quest for the Colour of Desire (London: Doubleday, 2003). David McCre-
ery, “Indigo Commodity Chains in the Spanish and British Empires, 1560–1800,”
in From Silver to Cocaine. Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of
the World Economy, 1500–2000, edited by Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephir
Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 53–75. Carlos Marichal, “Mexican
Cochineal and the European Demand for American Dyes, 1550–1850,” in From Silver
to Cocaine. Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Econ-
omy, 1500–2000, edited by Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephir Frank (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006), 76–92.
7 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984).
8 John Munro, “The West European Woollen Industries and Their Struggles for Interna-
tional Markets, c.1000–1500,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, edited by
David Jenkins, vol. 1, 228–324.
9 Franco Brunello, The Art of Dyeing in the History of Mankind (Vicenza: Neri Pozza,
1973). Dominique Cardon, Le monde des teintures naturelles (Paris: Belin, 2003).
Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin (eds.), The Materi-
ality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments,
1400–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
10 John Harvey, Men in Black (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 41–113. Ame-
deo Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero. Moda e cultura nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Cos-
tabissara: Angelo Colla, 2007). Isabelle Paresys, “Le noir est mis. Les puys d’Amiens,
ou le paraître vestimentaire des élites urbaines à la Renaissance,” Revue d’histoire
moderne et contemporaine 56, 3, (2009), 66–91.
11 Richard A. Goldthwaite, “The Empire of Things: Consumer Demand in Renaissance
Italy,” in Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, edited by F. W. Kent, P.
Simons and J. C. Eade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 153–175.
12 Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Antonella
Campanini (eds.), Disciplinare illusso. La legislazione suntuaria in Italia e in Europa
tra Medioevo ed Età moderna (Roma: Carocci, 2009). Juan Sempere y Guarinos, His-
toria del lujo y de las leyes suntuarias de España (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1788). José
Damián González Arce, Apariencia y poder. La legislación suntuaria castellana (ss.
XIII-XV) (Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 1998). Juan Vicente García Marsilla, “Ordenando
el lujo. Ideología y normativa suntuaria en las ciudades valencianas (siglos XIV y
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13 Michel Pastoureau, Couleurs, images, symboles: études d’histoire et d’anthropologie
(Paris: Léopard d’or, 1989). Michel Pastoureau, Bleu: histoire d’une couleur (Paris:
Seuil, 2002). Michel Pastoureau, Noir: histoire d’une couleur (Paris: Seuil, 2008).
14 Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 42–74.
15 John H. Munro, “The Anti-Red Shift – to the Dark Side: Colour Changes in Flemish
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20 Hilario Casado Alonso, “Medina del Campo Fairs and the Integration of Castile in to
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21 Hilario Casado Alonso, “Comercio textil, crédito al consumo y ventas al fiado en las
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22 Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid. Pleitos Civiles. Fernando Alonso (Fene-
cidos), 250–254.
23 Castilian vara = 0.836 meters.
24 Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid. Pleitos Civiles. Zarandona y Balboa
(Olvidados), caja 141-1.
25 Munro, “The Anti-Red Shift.”
26 Archivo Histórico Provincial de Valladolid. Protocolos 6814/2, 41–89.
27 Hilario Casado Alonso, “El comercio del pastel. Datos para una geografía de la indus-
tria pañera española en el siglo XVI,” Revista de Historia Económica VIII (1990),
523–548.
28 Mauricio Herrero Jiménez, Padrones y registros notariales medievales abulenses en el
Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid (Ávila: Institución Gran Duque de Alba,
2010), 197–350.
29 Archivo Municipal de Medina del Campo. H/268–4333. Libro de cuentas del mayor-
domo (1526–1532), 323–325.
30 Hilario Casado Alonso, “Al uso de Flandes”: Cultura material y comercio artístico de
la oligarquía burgalesa en los siglos XV y XVI,” in Estudios de historia y arte: hom-
enaje al profesor D. Alberto C. Ibáñez Pérez, edited by Lena S. Iglesias Rouco, Rene
J. Payo Hernanz, and M. Pilar Alonso Abad (Burgos: Universidad de Burgos, 2005),
155–159.
31 “Trachtenbuch” des Christoph Weiditz, um 1530–1540. Germanisches Nationalmu-
seum Nürnberg, Hs. 22474.
32 Rosana de Andrés Díaz, El último decenio del reinado de Isabel a través de la tesorería
de Alonso de Morales (1495–1504) (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 2004).
33 Jean-Philippe Genet and E. Igor Mineo (eds.), Marquer la prééminence sociale (Paris:
La Sorbonne, 2014).
12 Mobilizing sanctity
Pius II and the head of Andrew
in Rome
Maya Maskarinec
On the Monday after Palm Sunday 1462, just north of Rome, Pope Pius II
(d. 1464) welcomed a new treasure, the head of the Apostle Andrew, to Rome.1
The relic was greeted with elaborate ceremony and brought to the walls of the
city. The following day it entered Rome in a festive procession that carried it in
triumph to St. Peter’s. There speeches celebrated the reunification of the bodies of
the two brothers on earth as their souls were in heaven.
Rome’s acquisition of this precious relic resulted from the fall of Constantinople
to the Turks, and from Pius’ energetic lobbying of Thomas Palaiologos (d. 1465),
a claimant to the Byzantine throne, who had fled to Italy, bringing with him the
head of Andrew from Patras.2 Accordingly, Pius II used the occasion to call anew
for a crusade against the Turks, as he had done unsuccessfully at the Congress of
Mantua (1459).3 Our most detailed sources for the event are Pius’ Commentaries,
as well as the monuments he commissioned to commemorate the occasion: both
text and monument carefully craft the significance of Andrew’s head in Rome.4
In the spirit of Teofilo Ruiz’s work, this essay considers the orchestration of
this remarkable event and its subsequent commemoration from two perspec-
tives that Ruiz has explored in depth: the historical continuities underpinning the
performance of spectacle, and the discontinuities provoked by travel.5 Although
staged as a singular, unique event, Pius’ reception of Andrew drew on a long his-
tory of Andrew’s mobility, as contrasted to his decidedly immobile brother Peter.
Andrew’s propensity to travel, in life and after his death, was put to use in empha-
sizing the stability and primacy of Rome vis-à-vis Constantinople. Moreover, the
versatile model of Andrew’s sanctity also served as a call to action. Andrew was
to inspire Pius’ contemporaries to change their sedentary and complacent ways.
Christians were called upon to leave the safe haven of St. Peter and become active
imitators of Andrew: traveling missionaries and martyrs of the Christian faith.6
As medieval popes were so fond of repeating, Peter was the rock on which
Christ had built his church.7 In contrast, Andrew had been in motion from the
very beginning. First to be called by Christ, as recounted in the Gospel of John,
Andrew immediately hastened to find his brother Peter.8 This readiness to travel,
together with Andrew’s love for the cross, would become the defining features of
Andrew’s medieval profile.9
Mobilizing sanctity 187
Andrew’s extensive voyaging is one of the major themes in the Miracles of the
Blessed Apostle Andrew, one of the most widely circulating texts about Andrew
throughout the Middle Ages.10 The Miracles recount how, after the ascension of
Christ, the apostles preached in different locations, Andrew in the Peloponne-
sian region of Achaia, Matthew in the otherwise obscure Mermidona. In Achaia,
however, an angel of God appeared to Andrew, urging him to rescue his brother
Matthew. Andrew protests that he does not know the way, but the angel assures
him that he will find a boat to take him to his destination.11 Andrew obeys, setting
off on a life of nearly continuous voyaging in the Peloponnese, along the southern
shore of the Black Sea, and in Thrace and Macedonia.12 At one point, when he has
just stepped of the boat in Thrace, the angel even reappears, commanding him to
resume his voyage, assuring both Andrew, and the text’s readers, that this is not
meaningless vagrancy but rather proof of Andrew’s devotion to God.13
In 1462 at St. Peter’s in Rome, the Byzantine scholar Cardinal Bessarion,
speaking in the voice of Andrew addressing his brother Peter, declared:
After I was sent first by the Savior and then by your orders to preach the gos-
pel, after traveling through many and diverse nations whom I dedicated to the
true Faith and the name of Christ, I came at last to Achaia.14
Pius II too, in his Commentaries, begins by rehearsing Andrew’s voyages

before explaining how Andrew had been martyred in Patras, whence Thomas
Palaiologos had, so we are told, so many centuries later rescued him from the
Turks.15 Andrew’s travels are presented as indicative of his missionizing zeal that,
together with his eager willingness to be martyred, made him a suitable example
for contemporaries.16
What Pius II does not elaborate on in his Commentaries, but was certainly
equally central to the staging of the event, was Andrew’s even more extensive
posthumous travel.17 In the ceremony staged at the gates of Rome, from Pius’
perspective, Andrew was acquiescing to a temporary exile in Rome, just as he had
acquiesced to the extensive translation of his relics throughout earlier centuries.
Andrew was a saint willing to disperse himself in the quest for a universal united
Christian ecumene.
The most celebrated of Andrew’s relic translations was that to Constantinople.
According to medieval sources, Constantius II (or, in some versions, Constan-
tine himself) had the relics of Andrew (together with those of Luke) translated
from Patras, where Andrew had been martyred, to Constantinople.18 For centuries
panegyrics and polemics referenced this translation to bolster Constantinople’s
episcopal claims to trace its lineage back to Andrew.19 In the west, already by the
late 4th/early 5th century, Paulinus of Nola portrays this translation as indicative
of the rivalry between Rome and Constantinople. This competitive spirit between
the two cities continues to run through medieval accounts of Andrew’s relics.20
In Pius’ ceremony welcoming Andrew to Rome this rivalry is never explicitly
mentioned, but it reverberates throughout the ceremony, most apparently in the
decision to have Cardinal Bessarion play the part of Andrew, and the pope that of
188 Maya Maskarinec
Peter, reshaping the exchange between Andrew and Peter into a dialogue between
the two Christian capitals – a dialogue in which Andrew at long last acknowledges
the preeminence of Peter’s see.21
Constantinople and Patras were, however, by no means unique in their medi-
eval claims to possess relics of Andrew. Already in Late Antiquity churches in
Ravenna, Milan and Brescia celebrated their relics of Andrew;22 by the later 6th
century Gregory of Tours reported how relics of Andrew had saved a burning
church in Burgundy.23 Thereafter the pace of relic translation quickened. Among
the most passionate of these claims was that of Scotland to have received relics
from either Constantinople or Patras, back in the mid-5th century.24 Emblematic
of Andrew’s reputation is an Ottonian traveling altar from Trier, with the shape
of a foot, that was believed to contain relics of Andrew’s sandals (Figure 12.1).25
In the aftermath of the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, relics from
the east became much more widely available throughout western Europe.26 The
city of Amalfi proudly claimed to have obtained the entire body of Andrew from
Constantinople during the Latin sack of the city.27 Because of its scale, this new
market of eastern relics, captured as booty, sold to raise money or carried into
exile, may seem to us to contrast with earlier centuries of relic circulation. From
the perspective of many contemporaries, however, who were willing to interpret
Figure 12.1 Reliquary with the shape of the foot of St. Andrew

Source: Photo Credit: bpk, Berlin/ Trier, Domschatz/ Félicien Faillet/ Art Resource, NY
the Byzantine military defeat as the will of God, these new exchanges continued
past patterns. Relics given as gifts – an exchange whose legitimacy was sealed by
the saint – remained the most ‘respectable’ form of relic translation.28 Yet even in
new circumstances, saints were understood to have retained responsibility for the
fate of their bodily relics.
With the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire, the translation of eastern
relics took on a further degree of perceived moral urgency.29 Thomas Palaiologos,
Pius emphasized, had rightly chosen to entrust the papacy with the head of Andrew,
protecting him from the supposedly ruthless and impious Turks.30 Andrew surely
wished to come to Rome.
This widespread circulation of Andrew’s relics throughout the Christian world
was in particular contrast to that of Andrew’s brother Peter and his counterpart
Paul: a figure mobile in life but stable in death who played only a restricted role
in Pius’ ceremony.31 Frequently repeated (for example, in the widespread passio
of Peter and Paul, and in the Golden Legend) was the story of how, soon after the
apostles’ martyrdom, an earthquake successfully alerted Romans to an attempt by
“Greeks” to remove the apostles’ bodies to the “East.”32 Andrew, it seems, had no
such objections to an afterlife of movement, remaining in death, as he had been in
life, a remarkably mobile saint.
In Pius II’s ceremony that welcomed Andrew’s head to Rome, as well as in the
commemoration of the event that followed, this relationship between the mobil-
ity of Andrew as contrasted to the stability of Peter was acted out spatially and
verbally, adding a crucial inflection to an event that was in other respects staged as
an imperial triumphal procession. Andrew, as the visual rhetoric made clear (and
Pius takes care to reiterate) was not received as a captive subject to Rome, but as
a temporary exile, warmly embraced by a welcoming city.33 The apostle Peter did
not budge, providing a stable backdrop that set the parameters of the visit. Mean-
while Andrew, his head carried through the city in its bejeweled silver reliquary,
would, so the ceremony suggested, set the city into motion (Figure 12.2).34
At first, so Pius II reports in his Commentaries, in his eagerness to honor so
great an apostle, the pontiff had wished to bring the heads of Peter and Paul out of
the city to greet, in person, the head of Andrew (Figure 12.3).35 Such an unprec-
edented departure from the city would, from a ceremonial perspective, have sug-
gested that Peter and Paul were inferior in rank to Andrew. The heavy weight of
the reliquaries in which the heads of Peter and Paul were enclosed, however, pre-
vented Pius from carrying out his plan. These, Pius laments, could not be moved,
let along carried, without great inconvenience.36 Accordingly, a happy compro-
mise was reached: the heads of Peter and Paul were exhibited to the public in
the Lateran on the afternoons of the days on which the head of Andrew was pro-
cessed. Only the pope, as Peter’s representative, exited the city to greet Andrew’s
head, two miles north of Rome.
The location chosen for this encounter was the Milvian Bridge, a site rich in
imperial Christian ideology, where the Emperor Constantine had first entered
Rome after defeating his rival Maxentius. The path for the procession through
Rome the following day, starting at the Flaminian gate (where Pope Pius and the
Figure 12.2 Reliquary of the head of St. Andrew
Source: Photo Credit: Enzo Carli, Pienza, la città di Pio II [Roma: Editalia, 1967], n. 62, with permis-
sion of Editalia
Figure 12.3 Reliquaries of the heads of Peter and Paul, engraving in Josephus Maria
Soresinus, De capitibus sanctorum apostolorum Petri et Pauli in Sacrosancta
Lateranensi ecclesia asservatis opusculum (Rome, 1673)
Source: Photo Credit: British Library, Shelfmark: 658 a.7, with permission of the British Library
relic spent the night at S. Maria del Popolo), likewise emphasized Rome’s his-
tory of imperial triumph (Figure 12.4). It passed by, so Pius reports, the tomb of
Augustus, the Pantheon, and Hadrian’s mausoleum, before arriving at St. Peter’s.
The procession thus staged Rome’s apostolic past as the climax to its imperial
pagan past. At St. Peter’s, Pius II had prepared the scene to greet the apostle: a
new staircase to facilitate Andrew’s monumental entry into the church, flanked
by two colossal, decidedly immobile, statues of Peter and Paul. Their expressive
faces, modeled on early Christian imagery, as Rubenstein has argued, evoked the
time of the apostles as a living present, rendering the scene more immediate.37
Peter and Paul, then, did not move, but the arrival of Andrew was staged so
as to set all of Rome – and the wider Christian world – into motion. The date
chosen for the event was the Monday after Palm Sunday. Andrew’s entry into
Rome thus evoked that of Christ into Jerusalem, a comparison reinforced by the
palm fronds waved by the crowds. Andrew, as was impressed upon the audience,
had imitated Christ in his path to martyrdom; contemporaries were encouraged,
literally, to follow his route. Pius II took pride in the size of the crowds, laity
and clergy, carrying sacred relics, who attended the event, and he was especially
eager even for Rome’s ecclesiastical hierarchy to accompany the procession on
192 Maya Maskarinec
PORTA
FLAMINEA
S. MARIAE
DE POPVLO
CASTELL.
AVGVSTI
CASTELL.
HADRIANI
S. PETRI
PANTHEON
Figure 12.4 Processional path through Rome

Source: Map based on Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchetti, eds., Codice topografico della città
di Roma, vol. 3, Fonti per la storia d’Italia 90 [Roma: Tipografia del Senato, 1946–1953].
foot, a plan unattractive to many of the cardinals, bishops and abbots, especially
after heavy rains had filled the streets with mud.38 But Pius insisted that they “do
honor to the sacred head by their own exertions” and proudly reports that “it
was a grand spectacle (spectaculum) . . . many, raised in luxury, who previously
were scarcely able to go a hundred feet except on horseback, on this day easily
proceeded two thousand feet, weighed down with their sacred vestments, through
mud and water.” His memoirs tally the many individuals, who despite their age,
infirmity or pampered lifestyles, walked the length of the procession.39 The pope
himself, who suffered from gout, went on horseback. Meanwhile at St. Peter’s
the nave had been cleared of its congestion of tombs (which were moved to the
walls). The dead, like the living, were to give way to Andrew.
Pius II had begun preparations for Andrew’s arrival well in advance of the cer-
emony and had sent out a proclamation to the Italian cities promising participants
a plenary remission of sins. For those who could not attend, he made sure that
the path of Andrew’s head left its mark on the city: a topography of movement
imprinted onto the stability of Rome. Two new monuments marked out the proces-
sional path. A small commemorative shrine with a statue of Andrew recorded the
site, on the city-side of the Milvian Bridge, where he had first welcomed the head
of Andrew to Rome (Figure 12.5). Its inscription granted a plenary remission of
sins for the faithful who implored the intercession of Andrew on the Monday after
Figure 12.5 Commemorative shrine with statue of St. Andrew, Milvian Bridge

Source: Photo by author
Palm Sunday.40 At the other end of the processional route, inside of St. Peter’s,
a complementary shrine housed the precious relic.41 This was an expansion of a
preexisting altar with the relics of Gregory the Great, who, according to medieval
tradition, had been Rome’s first recipient of Andrew’s relics.42
Both of these monuments remind viewers of the movement of Andrew’s head.
The inscription near the Milvian bridge records the day on which “Pius II Pon-
tifex Maximus received in these meadows the sacred head of the blessed apostle
Andrew, brought from the Peloponnese, and with his [Pius’] own hands bore it
into the City.”43 Lunettes crowning the shrine in St. Peter’s represent Andrew’s
194 Maya Maskarinec
head held aloft by angels, their clothes billowing in the wind, emphasizing the
transportable, and partial, nature of the relic (Figure 12.6).44 Most unambiguous
is the relief on Pius’ tomb, incorporated into the shrine for St. Andrew after his
death, which depicts Pius’ reception of Andrew’s head (Figure 12.7).45 Nor did
Pius hesitate to further subdivide and move the relic; a jawbone was removed and
given to Pius’ hometown of Pienza.46
This commemoration and perpetuation of Andrew’s mobility reinforced the
message, which Pope Pius repeated throughout the ceremony:
you [Andrew] will be returned to your own seat, God willing, and one day you
will say, “Oh happy exile, where such aid was found!” In the meantime,
you will remain with your brother for some time, and you will have equal honor
with him. For this is nourishing Rome, dedicated with your brother’s precious
blood.47
Andrew’s stay in Rome was to be provisional.48 Rome was a temporary asylum

for Andrew, not a grasping devourer of his relics.
Indeed, as Pius II had intended, Andrew’s relics were to retain their mobility in
subsequent centuries, although this was to take unexpected forms. The construc-
tion of new St. Peter’s required the dismantling of the shrine for Andrew. His head
was relocated to one of the four pillars supporting the dome.49
In 1848 thieves stole Andrew’s head, enclosed in its reliquary, from St. Peter’s.
Twenty days later the head was rediscovered in a ditch outside of the gate of
S. Pancrazio. To celebrate its retrieval, Pius IX, who was in the midst of trying
to quell calls for liberal reform in Rome, staged a procession of the relic from
the church of S. Andrea della Valle back to St. Peter’s.50 Yet again a pope mobi-
lized Andrew in an attempt to redirect the course of the city of Rome. In com-
memoration of the event Pius IX, again following the example of Pius II, had a
Figure 12.6 Lunette from Pius II’s tomb, Vatican Grottoes

Figure 12.7 Tomb of Pius II, S. Andrea della Valle

Source: Photo Credit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY
small shrine erected at the site where the head had been discovered. This monu-
ment is analogous to that built by Pius II by the Milvian Bridge, except that here,
suitably for the frenzy of the times, Andrew is missing his head (Figure 12.8).51
More recently, in a move calculated to signal the Catholic Church’s adaptability to
change, on September 26th, 1964, Pope Paul VI had the relic returned by airplane
to Patras, in a gesture of goodwill towards the Orthodox Church.52
Figure 12.8 Commemorative shrine with statue of St. Andrew, Aurelian wall near Porta
San Pancrazio
Throughout the centuries, then, the relics of Andrew continued to offer a coun-
terpart to Peter that allowed for more flexible maneuvering. Pius II, drawing on
a long medieval tradition, had astutely recognized Andrew’s readiness to move.
As such, Andrew remained a model of sanctity particularly suitable for moments
of change.
Notes
1 For an overview of the sequence of events see Kenneth Meyer Setton, The Papacy
and the Levant (1204–1571) (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society,
1978), 228–230. Detailed accounts of the relic translation are found in the recent arti-
cles by Claudia Barsanti, “In memoria del reliquiario del Sacro Capo dell’apostolo
Andrea,” in Enea Silvio Piccolomini: Pius secundus, poeta laureatus, pontifex maxi-
mus. Atti del convegno internazionale, 29 settembre–1 ottobre 2005, Roma, e altri
studi, edited by M. Sodi and A. Antoniutti (Roma: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2007),
319–340; and Arianna Antoniutti, “Pio II e sant’Andrea. Le ragioni della devozi-
one,” in Enea Silvio Piccolomini: arte, storia e cultura nell’Europa di Pio II. Atti
dei convegni internazionali di studi 2003–2004, edited by R. Di Paola (Roma: Libre-
ria Editrice Vaticana, 2006), 329–344. There has been much recent work on Pius II
and his age; some recent volumes include: Zweder von Martels and Arjo Vanderjagt
(eds.), Pius II, ‘el più expeditivo pontefice.’ Selected studies on Aeneas Silvius Pic-
colomini (1405–1464) (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003); Maria Antonietta Terzoli (ed.),
Enea Silvio Piccolomini: uomo di lettere e mediatore di culture. Atti del convegno
internazionale di studi Basilea, 21–23 aprile 2005 (Basel: Schwabe, 2006); Barbara
Baldi (ed.), Pio II e le trasformazioni dell’Europa cristiana (1457–1464) (Milano:
Unicopli, 2006).
2 Thomas Palaiologos, the youngest son of Manuel II, was despotes of the Morea but fled
to Corfu in 1460 after Mehmed II conquered the Morea: Alice Mary Talbot, “Thomas
Palaiologos,” Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, edited by Alexander Kazhdan et al.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). After negotiations with Pius II he arrived
in Italy, at the port of Ancona on November 16th, 1460, where he handed over the
reliquary to a papal legate. Thomas Palaiologos arrived in Rome on March 7th, 1460,
where he remained until his death in 1465. Before its ceremonial entry into Rome on
April 12th, 1462, the head was kept in a church in Narni, in Umbria.
3 Pope Pius II died in Ancona in 1464, where he had gone in the hopes of leading a cru-
sade. For Pius II’s ideas on crusade see Johannes Helmrath, “Pius II. und die Türken,”
in Europa und die Türken in der Renaissance, edited by B. Guthmüller and W. Kühl-
mann, Frühe Neuzeit 54 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 79–138; James Hankins,
“Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmed II,”
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49, Symposium on Byzantium and the Italians, 13th–15th
Centuries (1995), 111–207. For the emphasis on martyrdom during the papacy of Pius
II and Nicholas V see Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985), 170–179.
4 Pii II Commentarii rerum memorabilium que temporibus suis contigerunt, Bk. 8,
edited by Adriano van Heck, 2 vols. (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana,
1984), vol. 2, 467–514; English translation by Florence Alden Gragg, with histori-
cal introduction and notes by Leona C. Gabel, “The Commentaries of Pius II,” Smith
College Studies in History 22, 1–2, 25, 1–4, 30, 35, 43 (1937–1957), Bk. 8 in vol. 35
(1951), 523–606; a revised translation based on that of Gabel is under way in Marga-
ret Meserve and Macello Simonetta (eds.), Pius II. Commentaries I Tatti Renaissance
Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003–). The text was first printed
in Rome in 1584 in an edited version that presented the work as that of John Gobel;
198 Maya Maskarinec
only in the late 19th century was it edited by Louis Pastor based on the Vatican manu-
script, Codex Reginensis 1995, written in part by Pius himself. For a history of the text,
see the historical introduction in Gabel, “The Commentaries of Pius II.”
5 See, in particular, Teofilo F. Ruiz, A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval
and Early Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
6 Throughout his Commentaries the apostolic guise in which Pius most commonly pre-
sents himself is that of Paul. In his final quest for a crusade Pius’ attempt to model
himself on Andrew becomes more apparent. Regarding the presentation of Andrew
as a model for contemporaries, in particular for Pius II himself, see Bert Treffers, “II
ritorno del fratello di Pietro. L’esemplarità di sant’Andrea quale perfetto soldato di
Cristo,” in Enea Silvio Piccolomini: arte, storia e cultura nell’Europa di Pio II. Atti
dei convegni internazionali di studi 2003–2004, edited by R. Di Paola (Roma: Libreria
Editrice Vaticana, 2006), 323–328.
7 Traditionally based on Matthew 16.18–19; for the development of this discourse see
George E. Demacopoulos, The Invention of Peter: Apostolic Discourse and Papal
Authority in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); for
its continued resonance throughout the Middle Ages see Edward Peters (ed.), Heresy
and Authority in Medieval Europe: Documents in Translation (Philadelphia, PA: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1980).
8 John 1: 40–41.
9 For an overview of the cult of Andrew in the medieval west see Charlotte Denoël, Saint
André: culte et iconographie en France (Ve–XVe siècles) (Paris: École nationale des
chartes, 2004), 21–77; for the early Christian traditions in the Mediterranean region see
Peter M. Peterson, Andrew, Brother of Simon Peter. His History and His Legends, Sup-
plements to Novum Testamentum 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1958). Andrew’s love for the cross is
emphasized in particular by the most widely circulating Andrew text, “The Passion of
Andrew: Passio sancti Andreae apostoli (BHL 428),” in Acta apostolorum apocrypha,
edited by Max Bonnet (Lipsiae, apud H. Mendelssohn, 1891–1903): II, 1 (1898), 1–37;
the mystery of the cross (“misterium crucis”) is described in sections 3–5 (5–12);
Andrew’s desire for martyrdom is especially emphasized in sections 13–14 (29–34).
Andrew’s readiness to travel, as well as his eagerness for martyrdom, are central to the
Golden Legend’s account of Andrew: Iacopo da Varazze (Jacobus de Voragine), Leg-
enda aurea, edited by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, 2 vols. (Firenze: SISMEL: Edizioni
del Galluzzo, 1998), vol. 1, 24–37.
10 Gregory of Tours, Liber de miraculis beati Andreae apostoli (BHL 430), edited by
Jean-Marc Prieur, Acta Andreae, vol. 2 (Textus), Corpus Christianorum, Series Apoc-
ryphorum 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989), 564–651 (reprinting the older edition in MGH
SRM I.2 by Max Bonnet). This text is ascribed to Gregory of Tours. As its name sug-
gests, this text details the miracles performed by Andrew, primarily during his life-
time, and although it does include a brief account of Andrew’s death, the Miracles
were often paired with a more extensive account of Andrew’s martyrdom, the so-called
Conversante et docente = Passio sancti Andreae apostoli (BHL 429), edited by Max
Bonnet in “Acta Andreae Apostoli cum laudatione contexta,” Analecta Bollandiana 13
(1894), 374–378.
11 Liber de miraculis beati Andreae apostoli 1, ed. Bonnet, in Prieur, Acta Andreae,
569–571.
12 The route of Andrew’s travels, as presented by the Liber de miraculis beati Andreae
apostoli, proceeds from Achaia to “Mermidona,” Achaia, Nicea, Nicomedia, Byz-
antium, Thrace (Perinthus), Macedonia (Philippi, Thessaloniki), and back to Achaia
(Patras, Corinth, Patras).
13 Liber de miraculis beati Andreae apostoli 10, ed. Bonnet, in Prieur, Acta Andreae, 589.
14 Transl. Gragg, 537; Pii Commentarii, 8.2, ed. van Heck, 484: “postquam a Saluatore
primo, deinde tuo iussu ad predicationem euangelii missus post multas diuersasque
nationes, quas fidei recte christianoque nomini dedicaueram, tandem in Achaiam…”
15 Pii Commentarii, 8.1, ed. van Heck.
16 Enthusiasm for missionizing as a concomitant of Pius’ enthusiasm for a crusade is
exemplified by Pius’ Letter to Mahomet (probably never sent), in which Pius attempts
to convince Mehmed that he should convert to Christianity: Lettera a Maometto II,
edited by G. Toffanin (Naples: R. Pironti, 1953).
17 For an overview of translations of Andrew’s relics see in particular Amato Pietro
Frutaz, “Reliquie di Sant’Andrea,” Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 34 (1980),
498–512; J.-A.-S. Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire critique des reliques et des images
miraculeuses, vol. 1 (Paris: Guien, 1821), 22–23.
18 For the differing traditions see Glanville Downey, “The Builder of the Original Church
of the Apostles at Constantinople: A Contribution to the Criticism of the ‘Vita Con-
stantini’ Attributed to Eusebius,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 6 (1951), 51–80; David
Woods, “The Date of the Translation of the Relics of SS. Luke and Andrew to Con-
stantinople,” Vigiliae Christianae 45, 3 (1991), 286–292; Frutaz, “Reliquie,” 499–500.
Modern scholars, following Jerome’s Chronicle (which does not specify that the relics
were brought from Patras) and subsequent Byzantine chronicles, accept the dating of
the translation to the reign of Constantius II (r. 337–61); Paulinus of Nola credits Con-
stantine with the translation.
19 When the Church of the Holy Apostles was rebuilt during the reign of the emperor
Justinian (r. 527–65), the body of Andrew (along with that of Luke and Timothy)
was reportedly discovered and the new church rededicated in their honor: Procopius,
Buildings 1.4; Frutaz, “Reliquie,” 501. For the tradition that attributed to Andrew the
foundation of the see of Constantinople see Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity
in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press,
1958); this argument had become less prevalent, but was still well known, in the
15th century. Pius’ Commentaries mention that the body of Andrew was translated to
Amalfi but do not specify that they were brought there from Constantinople. Instead
the narrative would lead the reader to assume that these relics had been removed from
Patras. This omission distinctly downplays Andrew’s Constantinopolitan associations.
Pius, even as he was eager to associate Andrew with the Byzantine Empire, clearly did
not want to suggest too close of a correlation of Constantinople with Andrew’s relics,
which would have raised questions about the authenticity of the relics from Patras.
20 Paulinus of Nola, Carmen 19, Carmina, edited by Wilhelm von Hartel, Opera, vol. 2,
CSEL 30 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1894),
118–143, here 129–130, lines 329–342. Another telling example is Agnellus of
Ravenna’s 9th-century account of how the 6th-century bishop of Ravenna, Maximian,
attempted to steal Andrew’s body from Constantinople and bring it to Rome, but the
emperor protested, arguing that it was fitting for Andrew to remain at the imperial seat
of Constantinople: Agnellus, Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis, 76, edited by
Deborah M. Deliyannis, CCM 199 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 243–244.
21 As described in the Commentaries, it was Cardinal Bessarion who presented the relic
to the pope outside the city by the Milvian Bridge; then, in the ceremony at St. Peter’s
Pius II and Cardinal Bessarion exchanged speeches with Pius as Peter, Bessarion as
Andrew. Repeatedly in Cardinal Bessarion’s ethopoetic speech as Andrew, he has
Andrew acknowledge Peter’s and Rome’s primacy; for example: Pii Commentarii,
8.2, ed. van Heck, 484: “. . . ad te, sanctissimum fratrem, ad te preceptorem atque mag-
istrum, ad te, uniuersalem christiani gregis pastorem a deo constitutum, tanquam ad
tutissimum portum me recipio”; or 8.2, 485: “Romani tui quorum Vrbem, magistram
ante erroris inueniens, ueritatis discipulam atque regiam et sacerdotalem ciuitatem
per sacram tuam sedem effecisti, caputque totius orbis religione diuina, quam terrena
dominatione latius presidentem instituisti . . . .”
22 Denoël, Saint André, 53: in Milan a feast on the 9th of May celebrated the “ingressio
reliquiarum apostolorum Ioannis, Andreae et Thomae in basilica ad Portam Roma-
nam”; in a sermon, the late 4th-/early 5th-century Gaudentius of Brescia celebrates the
presence of relics of Andrew, among other saints, in a church in Brescia.
200 Maya Maskarinec
23 Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloriam martyrum 30, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH SS rer.
Merov., I.2, Gregory of Tours, Opera, II: Miracula et opera minora, 34–111 [484–561],
here 55–57.
24 According to one version of the medieval legend, set in the time of Theodosius II,
after King Angus of the Picts received a military victory through the help of Andrew,
he received relics of Andrew (brought from Constantinople by one of their custodians,
Regulus), with which he dedicated a new church and dedicated the city to St. Andrew;
in another version the relics were brought from Patras by one of their custodians,
Regulus: see Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, “St. Andrews before Alexander I,” in The
Scottish Tradition: Essays in Honour of Ronald Gordon Cant, edited by G.W.S. Bar-
row (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1974), 1–13; Ursula Hall, St Andrew and
Scotland (St Andrews: St Andrews University Library, 1994), 60–62.
25 This altar, together with a jewel-encrusted episcopal staff with relics of the staff of
St. Peter, was commissioned by the Archbishop Egbert in the 980s: Thomas Head, “Art
and Artifice in Ottonian Trier,” Gesta 36, 1 (1997), 65–82.
26 Holger A. Klein, “Eastern Objects and Western Desires: Relics and Reliquaries
between Byzantium and the West,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004), 283–314 at
300–303.
27 Cardinal Pietro Capuano, a papal legate, seems to have acquired the relics of Andrew
during the Latin sack of Constantinople and donated them in 1208 to Amalfi’s cathe-
dral: Frutaz, “Reliquie,” 502–506; Andrea Colavolpe, “Sant’Andrea e la chiesa di
Amalfi,” in Tre apostoli una regione (Cava de’ Tirreni, Salerno: Di Mauro, 2000),
159–213.
28 Patrick J. Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” in The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by A. Appadurai
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 169–191. One may especially note
that the many relics distributed by Manuel II Palaiologos in his attempts to garner
financial and military support from European courts were all characterized as gifts:
Klein, “Eastern Objects and Western Desires,” 310–312.
29 Although Mehmed II took an active interest in Christian relics, reports of the Turkish
destruction of relics and other sacred objects circulated to Italy in the aftermath of the
fall of Constantinople in 1453. For example, see Cardinal Isidore of Kiev’s letter to
Cardinal Bessarion: Agostino Pertusi, La caduta di Costantinopoli, 2 vols. ([Roma]:
Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1976), vol. 1, 64–81, here 76. For Mehmed’s relic collec-
tion see Julian Raby, “Mehmed the Conqueror’s Greek Scriptorium,” Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 37 (1983), 15–34 at 22–23.
30 In his Commentaries Pius explains that many ambassadors throughout Europe were
offering large sums of money for the head, but that the pope admonished Thomas that
he would be acting impiously if he gave the head to anyone but the pope (Pii Com-
mentarii, 8.1, ed. van Heck, 468): “facturum uero impie atque crudeliter si alteri quam
romano pontifici traderet, cuius est de sanctorum honoribus iudicare.”
31 One might further note that Paul, on account of his verbosity in life, was rather more
difficult to ventriloquize, but also that, since Pius II styled himself as a Pauline figure,
one might also see him as playing both roles in the ceremony.
32 “Passio Sanctorum Apostolorum Petri et Pauli,” 66, in Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha,
I, 118–177, 175; Iacopo da Varazze (Jacobus de Voragine), Legenda aurea, vol. 1, “De
Sancto Petro Apostolo,” 559–575, here 572 (lines 252–255).
33 For example, in Pius’ speech greeting the relic by the Milvian Bridge (Pii Commen-
tarii, 8.2, ed. van Heck, 473): “atque equo animo patere quod pollutis manibus tua
contrectamus ossa et te peccatores intra menia comitamur Vrbis. ingredere sanctam
ciuitatem et esto propitius romano populo.”
34 This older, repoussé silver-gilded reliquary, ca. 30–35 cm high, was returned to Patras
when the relic was repatriated in 1964 (see n. 46 below): Barsanti, “In memoria,” 320,
324–326.
35 Pope Urban V (r. 1362–70) had commissioned these highly precious silver bust reli-
quaries of Peter and Paul (destroyed in a fire in 1799) from Giovanni di Bartolo and
Giovanni di Marco Argentario in 1368–69: Laura Filippini, La scultura nel trecento in
Roma (Torino: Società tipografico-editrice nazionale, 1908), 114–116.
36 Pii Commentarii, 8.1, ed. van Heck, 470. In addition to their heads, the bodies of Peter
and Paul, Pius tells us, likewise remained in place, under the altar of St. Peter’s, where
the head of Andrew was brought: 8.2, 482–483.
37 Ruth O. Rubinstein, “Pius II’s Piazza S. Pietro and St. Andrew’s Head,” in Essays in
the History of Architecture presented to Rudolf Wittkower, edited by D. Fraser, H. Hib-
bard, and M. J. Lewine (London: Phaidon, 1967), 22–33 at 26–29.
38 Pii Commentarii, 8.2, ed. van Heck, 477.
39 Pii Commentarii, 8.2, ed. van Heck, 478: “Fuitque grande spectaculum . . . et nonnulli,
qui prius in delitiis enutriti uix centum passus ire poterant non equis uecti, hac die duo
milia passum onusti sacris uestibus, in luto et acqua facile perrexerunt.”
40 This shrine consisted of a statue of Andrew with a cross (sculpted by Paolo Romano),
within four alabaster columns, mounted on a base with inscription. The shrine was fin-
ished by June 1463. Thereafter a chapel was built nearby and the shrine became part of
an enclosed garden (and cemetery) attached to the chapel. The architectural configura-
tion has remained to this day, the shrine having survived proposals in the early 17th and
late 18th centuries to dismantle the structure for its columns. These columns, however,
were damaged in a mid-19th-century fire and replaced with travertine columns: Flavia
Cantatore, “Il tempietto di Sant’Andrea a Ponte Milvio tra architettura e scultura nella
Roma del secondo quattrocento,” Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura,
Nuova Serie 57–59 (2011–2012), 37–48; Antoniutti, “Pio II e sant’Andrea,” 331–333.
The inscription reads:
pivs ii. pont. max./ sacrvm beati apostoli andreae capvt ex / peloponneso advectvm
his in pratis excepit/ et svis manibvs portavit in vrbem anno salvtis / mcccclxii pridie
idvs aprilis qve tvnc fvit / secvnda feria maioris hebdomadae atq / idcirco hvnc tit-
vlvm erexit et vniversis / christi fidelibvs qvi eadem feria impostervm / hvnc locvm
visitaverint et qvinqvies / christo domino adorato intercessionem / sancti andreae
pro commvni fidelivm salvte / imploraverint plenariam omnivm peccator. / in forma
ecclesiae consveta perpetvo / dvratvram indvlsit remissionem / anno pont. svi qvarto.
41 The head was placed in the shrine on April 13th, 1462 (in the meantime it had been
kept at Castel S. Angelo for safety). The shrine, located in the left nave, consisted,
like that at the Milvian Bridge, of four columns; on top of these was placed a tab-
ernacle for the relic. The subsequent addition of a statue of Andrew with his cross
(by Pius III, Pius’ nephew) made the shrine’s similarity to that by the Milvian Bridge
even more pronounced. This statue is now located in the sacristy of St. Peter’s. The
ensemble remained in place until it was deconsecrated and demolished in 1605; many
of its pieces were preserved and moved to new locations. For a fuller description see
Antoniutti, “Pio II e sant’Andrea,” 334–7; Fernando Stoppani, “Sant’Andrea a Ponte
Milvio,” L’Urbe: revista romana di storia, arte, lettere, costumanze 7, 2 (1942), 7–14.
42 Later sources claimed that Gregory, as apocrisiary in Constantinople, had received an
arm of Andrew from the emperor Tiberius II (d. 582) and given it to the monastery of
St. Andrew that he founded. See further: Frutaz, “Reliquie,” 501.
43 See n. 40 above.
44 These three lunettes, sculpted by Paolo Romano (like the statue of Andrew by the
Milvian bridge), were once located on the three visible sides of the tabernacle on top
of the shrine in St. Peter’s. They are now located in the Vatican Grottoes; for images
see Antonio Pinelli (ed.), La Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano, 4 vols. (Modena: F.C.
Panini, 2000), vol. 4, 1138.
45 Pius II’s nephew, Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini (elected Pope Pius III in 1503),
decided to erect a tomb for Pius II at the shrine for St. Andrew at St. Peter’s. Pius III
202 Maya Maskarinec
was subsequently buried there as well. During the destruction of Old St. Peter’s, both
of these tombs were moved to S. Andrea della Valle, where they remain to this day:
Antoniutti, “Pio II e sant’Andrea,” 340–342.
46 The jawbone was placed in the older reliquary (in which the head of Andrew had
arrived) and was given to the city of Pienza. The relic remains there today. However,
when the rest of the head was returned to Patras, Pienza was given the newer reli-
quary (by Simone di Giovanni Ghini) that had been commissioned by Pius II to hold
Andrew’s head in St. Peter’s; the newer reliquary is now in the Museo Diocesano in
Pienza: Barsanti, “In memoria,” 320, 324–326.
47 Pii Commentarii, 8.2, ed. van Heck, 472:
non deerit germanus tuus tibi: restitueris in tuo solio cum gloria uolente Domino
licebitque aliquando dicere: “O felix exilium, quod tale repperit auxilium!” interea
temporis cum tuo germano aliquandiu moraberis et honore pari cum eo potieris. hec
est alma Roma, quam prope cernis, pretioso tui germani sanguine dedicata.
48 This is in sharp contrast to so many of the relics dispersed from the east after the Latin
conquest of Constantinople. Compare especially the relics acquired by Louis IX from
Baldwin II for which the Ste.-Chappelle was constructed: Jannic Durand, “La trans-
lation des reliques impériales de Constantinople à Paris,” in Le trésor de la Sainte-
Chapelle (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), 37–41.
49 Each of these four pillars was dedicated with precious relics (of Andrew, Helen, Veron-
ica and Longinus) and adorned with a corresponding statue. Chapels were located under
the pillars. However, the frescoes related to Andrew (including that of Pius II receiving
the head of Andrew) were placed in the chapel dedicated to St. Helen, as the orientation
of the chapels was changed after the frescoes had already been executed: Antoniutti,
“Pio II e sant’Andrea,” 338. The inscription in Andrew’s niche reads: “sancti andreae
capvt qvod pivs secvndvs / ex achaia in vaticanvm exportandvm cvravit / vrbanvs viii
novis hic ornamentis decoratvm / sacrisqve statvae ac sacelli honoribvs colivolvit.”
50 The theft was discovered on March 10th, the relic recovered on April 1st. At this
time, Pius IX’s policies were in flux: on March 14th he issued a constitution, but on
April 29th he pronounced his unwillingness to declare war on Austria: Giacomo Mar-
tina, “Pio IX, beato,” in Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000). For the relic theft see also
Frutaz, “Reliquie,” 507.
51 This travertine shrine with marble statue is located on the Janiculum, adjacent to the
Aurelian walls, near the Porta San Pancrazio. The inscription reads: “andreae apos-
tolo vrbis sospitatori / pivs ix pont max / hic vbi capvt eivs fvrto ablatvm reperit /
monvmentvm rei avspicatiss dedic an mdcccxlviii.”
52 Before the head was returned it was venerated in the basilica of St. Peter’s and then
placed on view at S. Andrea della Valle. Upon its arrival in Patras it was handed over
to the metropolitan at a triumphal arch erected in the square dedicated to the emperor
Constantine and then processed to the cathedral: Barsanti, “In memoria,” 320. For
detailed description of these events and pictures: L’Osservatore Romano: Sept. 24,
1964, p. 1; Sept. 25, 1965, pp. 1, 4; Sept. 26, 1964, p. 4; Sept. 27, 1964, pp. 1, 3; Sept.
28–29, 1964, pp. 3; Sept. 30, 1964, p. 2.
Nuestros españoles
13
The first Spaniards and the
first Habsburg chronicler
Katherine van Liere
The long century from c. 1450 to c. 1600 not only brought Castilian people into
contact with new continents and peoples overseas, but intensified their histori-
cal interest in their own land and its peoples. Like most heritage quests, early
modern Spanish Christians’ search for historical roots was selective and partisan;
anti-Islamic, anti-Protestant, xenophobic, and imperialist sentiments all helped
to inspire it. Indeed, viewed from a distance, the historical writing produced in
Castile during the Habsburg era, especially that written by official chroniclers,
may seem to embody a relatively uniform set of values, including monarchist
nationalism, expansive imperialism, and religious and cultural intolerance. At
closer range, however, more ideological diversity emerges.1 In a classic article
two decades ago, Richard Kagan highlighted the provincial and communal senti-
ments in the abundant civic histories of the Habsburg era.2 More recently, Ricardo
García Cárcel has suggested that the anti-imperial comunero ideology of the
1520s survived in the “primitivist” and “indigenist” themes found in national his-
tories written in sixteenth-century Castile.3 Still, a persistent tendency to empha-
size nationalism, monarchism, and imperialism in the Habsburg era has meant
that some of the heterodox views so rightly acknowledged by Kagan and García
Cárcel are still routinely overlooked or misrepresented. A volume dedicated to
Teofilo Ruiz, a vigilant champion of heterodox ideas, seems a fitting place to offer
some modest corrections. This chapter will reconsider the political sympathies
of the Habsburg royal chronicler, Florián de Ocampo (1495?–1555). By reading
his Coronica general de España (1543, 1553) within the context of other human-
ists’ search for ancient origins and Ocampo’s life experience, it will argue that
the chronicler can better be seen as a disgruntled critic of absolute monarchy and
imperial expansion than as a committed Habsburg propagandist.
Ocampo’s Coronica general de España offered a detailed narrative of the
two millennia before the coming of the Romans, a period that had never before
received such focused attention in Spanish historical writing. In very broad terms,
Ocampo’s intense interest in this period can be seen as the last logical step in a century-
long process of seeking ever-earlier historical origins for Hispanic identity. The
most popular Hispanic origin myths of the Middle Ages had located the origi-
nal Hispania in the early medieval Visigothic kingdom. After fading from view
in fourteenth-century historiography, the Visigoths had reappeared decisively in
204 Katherine van Liere
fifteenth-century chronicles, and remained fixtures of Hispanic identity thereaf-
ter.4 In the Renaissance, however, they faced increasing competition from earlier
historical figures as humanists turned their gaze back to pre-Christian times. The
Romans, of course, were of great interest to Spanish humanists – both pre-Christian
Hispano-Romans like the emperors Trajan and Hadrian and the philosopher Sen-
eca, and a host of (mostly mythical) early Christian evangelizers, saints, and
martyrs from later Roman times. Yet Spanish ethnic pride made it problematic
to embrace the Hispano-Romans too wholeheartedly, even at the height of the
Renaissance, for too much pride in Roman heritage seemed to favor the Italians
with whom Spanish humanists felt a keen rivalry. Thus some Spanish writers in
the fifteenth century, to counter what they saw as Italian cultural hubris, had begun
to elevate the indigenous, pre-Roman Iberians as worthier cultural ancestors than
the Romans or Hispano-Romans. In a Spanish counterpart to the German human-
ist revival of Tacitus’s Germania, fifteenth-century Castilian humanists such as
Alonso de Cartagena and Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo mined Roman sources for
images of brave, loyal, and sober Iberians who outshone their Roman conquerors
in virtue.5 In the hands of sixteenth-century chroniclers like Ambrosio de Morales,
Florián de Ocampo, and Juan de Mariana, these Celtiberians often became full-
fledged españoles.
But historical sources for the pre-Roman era were scarce. No Roman authors
gave as full a description of the Hispani as Tacitus gave of the indigenous Ger-
manic peoples, and reliable sources were even harder to find for the centuries
before Roman contact. Medieval chronicles preserved a number of legends about
pre-Roman progenitors; the thirteenth-century chronicles of Lucas of Tuy, Rod-
rigo Jiménez de Rada, and Alfonso X told of the foundation of Spain’s first cities
by Tubal, a grandson of Noah, and of Iberian settlements by Hercules, Hispan, and
other ancient heroes. Medieval traditions credited such figures with the building
of monuments such as the lighthouse at La Coruña and the aqueduct at Segovia.6
But no medieval sources offered coherent narrative accounts of the societies in
which they might have lived. By the turn of the sixteenth century, some humanist-
trained scholars had recognized that such legends could not be substantiated, but
they were still at a loss for more reliable sources on the pre-Roman era.
It was thus a great boon to heritage seekers when the forgeries of the Italian
Dominican scholar Annius of Viterbo appeared in 1498 and provided just such
a narrative.7 Annius (Giovanni Nanni) forged a total of eleven “ancient” chron-
icles which imaginatively wove together biblical, Greek, Egyptian, and Baby-
lonian myth and history to produce an account of European antiquity proving
that the Etruscans and the Spanish had derived their culture not from Greece, but
from much older, biblical progenitors. Two of these invented chronicles, those
of “Berosus the Chaldean” and “Manetho the Egyptian,” purported to reveal the
history of Spain in the first millennium after the Flood. Annius produced an exten-
sive volume of commentaries purporting to elucidate these newfound texts, and
dedicated it to Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile. Its twelfth book, entitled “De
regibus hispaniae,” narrated the succession of the first twenty-four kings of Spain,
beginning with Tubal and ending with Gargoris (also known as Mellicola). The
Nuestros españoles 205
first eighteen of these kings purported to be drawn from the chronicle of Berosus,
and the next six from Manetho.8
Annius’s forgeries profoundly affected historical scholarship throughout Chris-
tian Europe, as Nicholas Popper has recently illustrated.9 But its influence lasted
longer in Spain than elsewhere.10 This reflected not so much Spanish credulity
(as older scholarship tended to suggest) as the fact that Annius had given Spain
more attention than any other place outside his own native Viterbo.11 Admittedly,
the fictions of “Berosus” and “Manetho” did not penetrate deeply into Spanish
culture; Tubal, Hispan, and Iber never became the subjects of Spanish drama,
literature, or art in the way the Visigoths, Romans, Lusitanians, or Numantians
did. (Hercules is another matter, but his popularity in Renaissance Spain was a
medieval holdover that owed little to Annius.) Tubal and his twenty-three succes-
sors did, however, remain firmly implanted in Spanish historiography long after
critical scholarship seemed to offer the tools to debunk them. By the 1520s, some
Spanish scholars – just a few years behind French and German critics – were
registering their doubts about Annius’s “Berosus,” but their skepticism was not
enough to counteract the tremendous appeal of such a rich source.12 In the 1540s,
Florián de Ocampo used Annius’s “De regibus Hispaniae” as his principal source
for the first book of his Coronica general de España, although he knew it had
many critics.13 The work’s influence lingered well into the seventeenth century.
Even the generally skeptical Juan de Mariana retained much of the material from
“Berosus” in his Historia de España.
Why did some of the most learned Spanish writers stubbornly persist in accept-
ing a mythical history that should have been so easy to reject? The traditional
answer has been that they were politically valuable for their elevation of kingship,
and of the Habsburg dynasty in particular. But the reasons for Annius’s popular-
ity cannot be reduced to simple political propaganda. As Popper has made clear,
Annius’s European admirers were a diverse lot, and his “claims could be manipu-
lated to support all manner of ecclesiastical and political belief.”14 This was no
less true in Spain. Many scholars, however, still explain Annius’s popularity in
Spain by emphasizing how well it served monarchical and imperial political ide-
ology. This aspect of Annius’s appeal cannot be denied. As Brian Tate argued in
a seminal 1954 article, Annius’s stories of noble and ancient origins, like their
medieval forerunners, served as the “cultural accompaniment to the expansive
dreams of Castilian politics.”15 (A great merit of Tate’s article was to make clear
that such motives existed in thirteenth- as well as sixteenth-century Castile, a
point sometimes lost on later observers.) Spain’s overseas expansion in the six-
teenth century provided new uses for ancient origins stories. In one of the best-
known instances, in 1526 the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo drew on
Annius’s Commentaries (pieced together with several other dubious chronicles)
to claim that Hesperus, the twelfth king of Spain, had ruled over parts of the Indies
in the second millennium bce, thus establishing Spain’s legitimate sovereignty
over this territory.16 Later in the century, when the Spanish empire under Philip II
found its hegemony challenged by Dutch and English rivals, even bolder legal-
historical arguments came to be built on the foundation of Tubal’s kingdom. Eva
Botella-Ordinas has shown how, beginning in the 1590s, a series of polemical
treatises invoked the story of Spain’s founding by the biblical Tubal as the founda-
tion for an argument that the Spanish monarchy was divinely ordained to convert
and rule the world.17
By no means all sixteenth-century Spaniards shared such pretensions, however.
The most famous Spanish critic of Spain’s imperial ambitions, Bartolomé de las
Casas, denounced Oviedo’s arguments as “noxious flattery” and bad history, and
David Lupher has astutely reconstructed how Las Casas and other critical-minded
writers simultaneously challenged over-reaching imperialism and mythical his-
toriography.18 Yet it is important to note that the historiographical and political
critiques made by Las Casas were not always linked. We must resist the tempta-
tion to classify Spanish thought in the imperial age into two clearly delineated
camps: on one side, critical historians who were critics of empire, and on the
other, credulous historians who championed empire and expansion. Some of the
Spanish purveyors of mythological history had little interest in imperial propa-
ganda. Florián de Ocampo, who was the most enthusiastic advocate of Annius’s
“Beroso,” reworked Annius’s history into an account that was implicitly quite
critical of both absolute monarchy and imperial expansion.
Before considering how Florián de Ocampo adapted Annius’s mythical history
to his own ends, it is worth pointing out that the Dominican forger’s own ideologi-
cal services to the Spanish monarchy have often been overstated. Annius was cer-
tainly a monarchist, unlike some contemporary Italian humanists, but the primary
thrust of “De regibus Hispaniae” was not to glorify the Spanish monarchy or to
provide an ancient genealogy for Spain’s Christian kings. It was rather to establish
that the Iberian peoples had learning, culture, and good government eight centuries
before the Greeks did.19 The rhetoric of Annius’s famous preface seems to have
led many modern readers to exaggerate his conception of the Spanish monarchy’s
antiquity. Its flattering dedication to Ferdinand and Isabella invoked classical and
biblical precedents for calling just monarchs “gods and spirits” (deos et numina)
and compared the Catholic monarchs’ own heroic deeds (e.g. combatting heresy
and tyranny, expelling infidels and heretics, defending true religion) to those of
Spain’s eleventh king, Hercules. In performing these services, Annius gushed, the
monarchs behaved “like the seed of Hercules,” who in his time had also expelled
tyrants from Spain.20 This was fulsome rhetoric. But it is better understood as a
simile than as a literal claim about the monarchs’ ancestry. The oft-repeated asser-
tion that Annius’s Commentaries offered a “royal genealogy” for Ferdinand and
Isabella, tracing their own royal bloodline directly to Tubal and Hercules, seems
difficult to sustain.21 In order to provide such a genealogy, Annius would have had
to connect these early kings with the Visigoths, who entered Spain centuries later,
and from whom all Castilian monarchs firmly believed themselves descended.
But he did no such thing. He concluded his narrative of the first twenty-four kings
with a simple acknowledgment of the political fragmentation of the peninsula in
the centuries before the Roman conquest: not long after the reign of King Gar-
goris ended in 1188 bce, he noted, “Hispania became [a collection of] particular
provinces and cities, until the time of the Carthaginians and then the Romans.”22
His narrative thus ended long before the Visigothic era. When Annius did make
passing reference to the later Gothic invaders, it was to insist that the Gothic
invaders had not altered the essential Hebraic stock of the Iberian people, so that
all modern Spaniards, not only their monarchs, could thus still take pride in their
indigenous Iberian descent.23 (This assertion, which implicitly vindicated the Ital-
ian humanist view of the Goths as barbarians and undermined the Castilian tradi-
tion of the monarchy’s Visigothic origins, might not have pleased the monarchs
greatly if they did actually read and digest it.)
Ocampo, the Spanish writer most responsible for disseminating Annius’s myth-
ical history among Spanish readers, was also more interested in elevating peoples
than monarchs. He used the “De regibus Hispaniae” as the principal source for
the first book of his Coronica general, adopting Annius’s assertions about the
antiquity of Hispanic culture, his chronology of the first twenty-four kings, and
many of his other spurious assertions, such as the identification of Noah with the
Etruscan Janus. Many modern commentators regard Ocampo as a credulous fool
or a Habsburg propagandist, or both. He was neither, although he was surely a
strange and difficult character. A well-educated but eccentric humanist scholar
and a fervent Spanish patriot, Ocampo saw in Annius’s work an irresistible ancient
heritage for the Hispanic people. He was deeply ambivalent about the power of
monarchs. He believed that monarchy should be grounded in popular consent and
respect for popular tradition, and these ideas were reflected in the way he adapted
Annius’s account.
Ocampo was probably introduced to Annius’s work by his teacher, the great
humanist Antonio de Nebrija. Ocampo began his studies in Alcalá in 1509, shortly
after the university’s founding, and Nebrija began teaching there in 1513 (after
a long career in Salamanca), so the young Ocampo would have been among the
elderly Nebrija’s first students at Alcalá. In his Coronica Ocampo recalled how
“being a boy at the university of Alcalá I often heard the lectures of maestro
Antonio de Lebrixa” (a common alternative spelling), and he attributed some of
his knowledge of Spanish place-names to these early lectures. In 1509, while
still at Salamanca, Nebrija had been awarded the title of royal chronicler. In both
universities Nebrija lectured on Latin grammar, but he was keenly interested in
Spanish antiquities, and peppered his lectures with references to Spanish history
and topography. He had also written a short treatise on Spanish antiquities, the
Muestra de la historia de las antigüedades de España (Burgos, 1499). Nebrija
was among the first Spanish scholars to appreciate the wealth of information that
Annius’s Commentaries seemed to offer on the pre-Roman period in Spain, hith-
erto such a dark period. He arranged to have the Commentaries republished in
Burgos in 1512.24 Nebrija was as fervent a monarchist as Annius, and as good a
flatterer. He dedicated several of his works to the Catholic monarchs, and pointed
out the contrast between his own monarchism and the dangerous republicanism
of many Italian scholars.25
Ocampo acquired Nebrija’s passion for antiquities, but not his fervent monar-
chism, for he came of age just when the aura of the Catholic monarchs was begin-
ning to dim. Having taken his degree in 1514, Ocampo remained at Alcalá without
a formal teaching position until 1521. Between the death of Isabella in 1504 and
the ascension of her Flemish grandson Charles in 1516, Castile was governed by
a succession of absentee rulers, noble families reasserted their power in many
regions, and the crown’s direct influence in academic life diminished. The new
university of Alcalá, though established in 1508 as a royal foundation, housed a
range of unorthodox political sentiments. While the humanist Nebrija (who stayed
in Alcalá until his death in July 1522) consistently defended monarchical author-
ity, some of his younger colleagues were less compliant. In 1520–1, soon after
the young Flemish King Charles accepted the imperial crown, disgruntled civic
leaders and nobles declared their opposition to his government by joining the
Comunero revolt. In March 1521, when the rebel Bishop of Zamora, Antonio de
Acuña, entered Alcalá with his Comunero forces, most of the university faculty
sided with him. Marcel Bataillon and Joseph Pérez have shown that the two most
active comuneros in Alcalá were the Greek scholar Hernán Nuñez de Guzmán
and his good friend Florián de Ocampo.26 Ocampo, who hailed from Zamora, may
have served as Acuña’s secretary before and during the revolt.27
After the revolt was defeated in 1521 and its leaders executed, Ocampo and
Nuñez both fled Alcalá. Nuñez went to Salamanca, and Ocampo, either unwill-
ing or unable to secure an academic post, returned to Zamora, where he sought
patronage from the cathedral chapter to continue his studies. He planned to write
a massive chronicle of Spanish history comprising eighty books, from the first
settlement of the peninsula down to the present day. By 1524 he had secured a
benefice from Zamora and begun to seek further support from the crown. But as
Richard Kagan has documented, Charles I, having consolidated his power in Cas-
tile, remained dubious about the value of ancient or medieval Castilian or Spanish
history.28 The chroniclers he patronized in the 1520–30s wrote mainly historia
pro persona, contemporary history featuring his own exploits, or ancient history
with distinctly Roman imperial themes, which played to Charles’s newer imperial
title.29 Representatives from the Castilian Cortes, still eager to persuade Charles
to see himself more as a Castilian monarch than a universal emperor, urged him
to patronize historical research into Castile’s heritage. They cited the example
the Estoria de Espanna (Primera crónica general), the historical chronicle spon-
sored by the “learned king” Alfonso X in the 1280s. The Cortes urged Charles to
have the Alfonsine Estoria printed and to sponsor the writing of new histories of
ancient and medieval Castile.30 But Charles’s government ignored these requests
for more than a decade.
In 1539, the crown finally granted Ocampo the title of royal chronicler and a
modest stipend. But this did not mean Charles had acknowledged the value of
Ocampo’s ancient chronicle. Dispatches from Germany sent to Ocampo in the
early and mid-1540s recording the emperor’s activities there suggest that one of
his responsibilities, perhaps even his main one, was to chronicle current events,
or historia pro persona.31 Apparently he never did this, which must have dis-
pleased Charles. He did publish a redaction of Alfonso X’s Estoria de Espanna in
1541.32 This first-ever printing of the thirteenth-century Alfonsine chronicle was
an important milestone, despite its critical flaws. The initiative, however, came
not from the crown but from private printers in Zamora (who may have contacted
Ocampo because he had the most valuable manuscript in his possession, as one of
his sources). The project received no royal subsidy and, even more surprisingly,
was not dedicated to the emperor or his son.33 There is no evidence that the crown
took an interest in the project.
In 1543 Ocampo finally published a very incomplete Coronica general de España
comprising four books, a far cry from the eighty he had originally intended.34 The
work was apparently a commercial success, for this first edition was reissued three
times.35 Both King Charles and Prince Philip would purchase copies, although we
do not know whether or how they read it.36 Over the next decade, Ocampo assured
both the crown and his friends that he was busy expanding the Coronica to its full
length, but he never fulfilled his promises. By 1547 he had lost his royal salary.
He lived another eight years, pleading intermittently to have his salary renewed,
but in vain. The crown had clearly lost whatever faith it might have had in him.
By now Ocampo had also gained a reputation among other humanists, including
his former friends, as unreliable and dishonest.37 In 1553 he published a slightly
expanded version of the Coronica in five books, which extended the story to the
end of the second Punic War.38 But he died two years later, a frustrated man, with
few friends left and only a fraction of his planned work completed.
The first book of the Coronica adopted Annius’s entire chronology of the first
twenty-four kings of Spain with few modifications. Ocampo acknowledged that
“Beroso,” Annius’s supposed source, was of doubtful authenticity, but in his pref-
ace addressed to King Charles he defended its use by protesting that no one else
offered such a detailed account of Spanish antiquity:
Because many have pointed out difficulties and raised doubts about this John
of Viterbo and his Berosus, I would truly love to find another source that con-
tained memories of such ancient times and treated them all with more grace:
but there was never another book or another thing that could satisfy such a
diversity of opinions and desires as we find among men.39
Ocampo was in good company in pleading that Annius was simply too good to
resist; many better scholars offered similar justification for using Annius selec-
tively to fill in the gaps left by more credible sources. Even if Annius had forged
much of “Berosus,” a common argument went, parts of it probably preserved
truthful stories from lost authentic sources, and cautiously accepting these stories
was preferable to tolerating vast lacunae in early history.40 Ocampo himself did
not state his critical principles this judiciously. Instead, in his dedicatory prologue,
Ocampo invoked the glorious legacy of the late Catholic monarchs:
Above all because [Annius’s Commentaries] are addressed . . . to such distin-

guished princes as Don Fernando and Doña Isabella, our monarchs and the
natural grandparents of Your Majesty, we will put down here all the facts that
we find in him that pertain to Spanish antiquity in order that no part of what
others wrote about it may be omitted.41
Like the Hercules metaphor in Annius’s own preface, this gratuitous invocation of
Ferdinand and Isabella has been cited as evidence that Ocampo was a sycophantic
flatterer of the Spanish monarchy. But a fuller reading of the prologue suggests
otherwise. Despite this respectful bow to Charles’s grandparents, the prologue
did not flatter the first Habsburg king himself. In fact, it treated him remarkably
coolly. After expressing his confidence that the Coronica general would be “much
more valued and esteemed” for appearing “under your royal name and under the
protection of your greatness,” Ocampo proceeded to give a lengthy account of his
own vast labors in researching and writing the work, with no further references
to King Charles’s own greatness.42 Beyond the self-serving acknowledgment that
“all residents of Spain” were indebted to the king for enabling the publication of
the Coronica, Ocampo mentioned none of Charles’s kingly exploits: no military
victories, imperial conquests, or services to religion and the Church.43 And one
senses that when Ocampo described his joint motivations for writing the Coronica
as “the obligation to serve you Majesty and the desire to serve my nation,” the
contrast between obligation (deuda) and desire (voluntad) was deliberate.44
Nor did Ocampo make any claims about the king’s ancient ancestry. This would
have made no sense, for Ocampo clearly did not believe that the monarchy of
his own day had pre-Visigothic origins. In his lengthy discussion of the difficul-
ties of chronicling ancient Hispania, he repeatedly stressed its cultural diversity
and political fragmentation. “So many peoples lived there, divided into so many
nations, different in customs, names, and condition,” that it was a Herculean task
to try to write a single narrative of their history.45 Indeed, “from the time the land
was [first] populated until the Goths came into it,” the land was “so fragmented
(derramada) and large, and divided into so many and such peoples, that often they
regarded each other as strangers.”46 As these claims suggest, Ocampo was familiar
with the authentic Greek and Roman sources that described the indigenous Ibe-
rians; he would return to these sources (such as Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Livy,
Pomponius Mela, and Pliny) in books II–V. Even when he mapped out modern
Spain, early in his narrative, he was careful to delineate the distinct “Spanish
nations” of Portugal, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, tracing the emergence of each
one from a different part of Roman Hispania.47
Ocampo never fully reconciled his humanist knowledge of Spain’s culturally
and politically fragmented past with the fantastic notion that Hispania had been
a unified entity two millennia before the coming of the Romans. The Coronica
simply presented readers with both visions, less concerned with strict historio-
graphical consistency than with satisfying Spanish readers’ “diversity of opin-
ions and desires” for a usable past. The essence of this past was not a Hispanic
monarchy per se but a collection of peoples with cultural affinities and cultural
pride. The Coronica faithfully followed Annius’s chronology of twenty-four early
Spanish kings, but rather than dwelling primarily on the exploits or the virtues of
the monarchs themselves, Ocampo made them the backbone of an imaginative
account of early Hispanic culture, often expanding Annius’s own hints on this
subject quite imaginatively. For example, Annius had devoted a single page to
the biblical progenitor Tubal, reporting simply that he populated the land with his
descendants, introduced animal husbandry, and “shaped the Hispani with laws”
(Hispanos formavit legibus). Ocampo, emboldened by some comments in Strabo
about the existence of writing among the Iberians, generously elaborated Annius’s
account of Tubal’s legacy into a confident assertion that he had made the “Span-
ish” the first truly learned race on earth:
He taught them things of great substance, declaring to them chiefly the

secrets of nature, the movements of the sky, the concordances and myster-
ies of music, the excellences and great advantages of geometry, with the
greater part of moral philosophy, making for them laws and reasonable rules
by which to live, which he left spelled out in very well composed meter, so
that they could easily learn and memorize them. He also taught them the way
to mark time, dividing the year into twelve months and 365 days and a little
more, according to the movement of the sun, as was held by the Chaldeans
from whom he was descended, which order was lost for a long time by the
Spanish: it was finally restored to them by the inducement of the Romans,
who many years later revived it in Spain, and it has lasted until our own age,
from which the foreign historians note that our Spaniards (nuestros espa-
ñoles) were the first men who knew science, and music, and who first had
knowledge of how to live well.48
Annius’s fictional Spanish kings are not particularly regal or magnificent. In

keeping with the later, unpretentious ceremonial traditions of the Asturian-
Leonese-Castilian monarchy that Teofilo Ruiz has described so memorably,49
none is presented as divinely appointed, or crowned, or enthroned. In Ocampo’s
hands, they become even less regal and more popular. Ocampo calls them by
such modest titles such as “principe,” “gobernador,” “capitán,” “caudillo,” and
“señor,” often using these terms interchangeably as “rey.” He repeatedly suggests
reciprocal love and respect between these early “governors” and “princes” and
their subjects. This begins with Tubal himself, whom “the Spaniards” deemed
a “discreet, brave, just and amicable man” and thus “showed a great desire for
conversation with him.”50 The image of Spaniards judging Tubal to be a worthy
man sits somewhat awkwardly alongside that of Tubal as the founder of the race;
in this encounter he appears more as an admirable newcomer than as the people’s
own progenitor. Ocampo’s obvious point is that these early rulers, wherever they
came from, earned their people’s love and acknowledged that they ruled by their
consent. Likewise, the tenth king, Hispan, was an “excellent Governor and prince
of the Spaniards,” “very noble, just, frank, and humane, and therefore loved there-
fore by all of his peoples.”51 It was on this account that people chose to honor him
by using his name for “the whole land,” in one of the many irresistible etymolo-
gies that Ocampo took from Annius. In similar fashion, Tubal’s name had been
given to such towns and cities as Setubal in Lusitania; that of his son Ibero to the
city of Ibera; and that of the sixth king, Beto, to the province Baetica. While all
these etymologies derive toponyms from monarchs’ names, they seem to reflect
popular judgment more than royal fiat.
Hispan’s successor “Hercules the Egyptian,” whom both Annius and Ocampo
identify as the son of the Egyptian Osiris, is neither quasi-divine nor a Spanish
monarch in Ocampo’s Coronica. Both Annius and Ocampo present Osiris as an
Egyptian hero who travels to Spain to defeat and kill the formidable tyrant Ger-
ion.52 Neither Annius nor Ocampo suggests divine lineage for Hercules or Osiris;
both accept the notion of euhemerism, that certain mortal heroes in antiquity had
come to be falsely regarded as gods. After the tyrant Gerion’s cruel sons kill the
hero Osiris, his own son Hercules comes to Spain to pursue the struggle against
the next generation of tyrants. Following many further adventures in Spain and
abroad, Hercules finally returns to Spain to die.53 Annius numbers Hercules as
Spain’s eleventh king. Ocampo does not. He admires the foreign warrior as a
“brave and earnest gentleman” (valeroso y esforzado caballero) and notes with
approval his many good deeds, the greatest of which are “governing his peo-
ple, and teaching them many good industries and many artifices for their work
and manual labor, which allowed them to live with less effort than before.”54 Yet
Ocampo apparently cannot bring himself to designate the great Egyptian “rey.”
He follows Annius in connecting the various temples of Hercules in Spain with
the misguided worship of this ancient Egyptian ruler, whom the early Spaniards
“revered as if he were a god, canonizing him in the manner that we Christians do
the saints,” a phenomenon that Ocampo regards as one of many signs of the lam-
entable superstition of the pre-Christian Spaniards.55
Ocampo’s early Hispanic rulers owed their authority not to the gods but to
their subjects’ approval. The Coronica often describes kings being “accepted” or
“received” as “governors” or “lords” on account of their noble qualities, hinting
at a Germanic or Visigothic tradition of elective monarchy. Hercules, whose own
title remains indeterminate, chose his own successor, Espero, from among his
“principal captains,” but what secured Espero’s claim to rule was that “the major-
ity of the Spaniards (españoles) received him as their lord.” When King Espero,
in turn, lost a civil war to his elder brother, Atlante Italo, Ocampo points out that
the new king was accepted only by some españoles; the others apparently pre-
ferred to have no ruler at all and thus “Atlante Italo remained absolute lord (señor
absoluto) over those Spaniards who recognized any kind of political subjection in
that era.”56 Much of the peninsula was evidently still living in a state of nature and
had not yet chosen to accept any monarch at all. Four centuries later, royal power
was still fragmented and subject to popular approval; when the twenty-third king,
Palatuo, died after decades of struggle with rival rulers, Ocampo imagines his
successor Eritreo being chosen by popular mandate: “the Spaniards of his terri-
tory, seeing that the land could not be well protected without an overlord (cabeza
mayor) whom they respected, decided to take as their lord (señor) a young cabal-
lero from Cádiz, who was a close relative” of the late king.57 Likewise, his succes-
sor Gargoris, was “received as gobernador and caudillo” by the people living near
Tarifa and later “followed and revered as a person of singular ability” by “many
[people] of Andalusía.”58
Gargoris is the last of the twenty-four kings recorded by Annius, but Ocampo
ends his own account with Gargoris’s grandson Abidis, mentioned only briefly by
Annius but discussed at greater length in Justin.59 Once again, Ocampo elaborates
imaginatively on both of his sources. Ocampo’s Abidis becomes the very best of
the ancient kings. He earns his people’s love and affection by teaching them use-
ful arts, from making bread to planting trees. He establishes courts with judges
and gives people laws – good, simple, and just laws, far better in fact than modern
laws which, Ocampo quips, often “seem more like traps and ropes meant to catch
and tie people up than a way to improve their lives.”60 Ocampo depicts the reign
of this last monarch as a golden age whose splendor calls the greatness of modern
times into question.61
But with the death of Abidis in the mid-eleventh century bce, matters change dra-
matically. The kingdom disintegrates into “rancor and division.” People split up into
separate and isolated units. There follow twenty-six years of drought and massive
depopulation. After this brief dark age, some people return to repopulate the land.
But Ocampo suggests that absolute monarchy, if it existed in the first millennium
after Tubal, has now became obsolete, for the españoles are now more determined
than ever to rule themselves and to limit their princes’ power: “As these recently
arrived people were, for the most part, devoid of the superfluous preoccupations of
our age, they did not injure each other, nor were they so eager to rule, or to be ruled.”
“Our histories do record,” he admits, “that in many places there remained reverence
and respect for those who descended from the caste of the ancient kings, but not in
order to be so lordly or so sovereign as the past [kings].”62 Excessive pretensions to
“lordliness” are thus identified both with the worst of ancient tyrants and with the
“superfluous preoccupations of our age,” and the inherent good sense of the espa-
ñoles is presented as the best safeguard against such excesses.
This “glorious revolution” moment in early Spanish history where the new
princes are warned not to exaggerate their authority appears to be Ocampo’s
own invention. It has no counterpart in Annius or Justin. And the later sixteenth-
century writers who followed Ocampo’s account very closely here, such as Este-
ban de Garibay and Pedro de Medina, do not seem to have taken up Ocampo’s
notion that the Spanish people by the first millennium bce had gained enough
self-confidence to declare that a new era in kingship was at hand.
Although the reigns of twenty-four kings provide the narrative structure for the
first book of Ocampo’s Coronica general, its protagonists are unmistakably the
people over whom they rule. Despite his recognition of the political and cultural
fragmentation of these peoples, Ocampo projects a proleptic unity onto them by
calling them “our people,” “our peoples,” and “our Spanish nation,” in the same
warm tones with which he frequently refers to “our Spain” and “our land.”63 The
implication of this nomenclature, like that of the Coronica as a whole, is not to
glorify the Castilian monarchy as an ancient or divinely favored institution, but to
show that the Spanish kingdoms now united under the Habsburg crown have their
own distinct histories, each worthy of respect, and their people a common destiny.
This vision of Spain as an e pluribus unum is not royal propaganda on the monar-
chy’s behalf, but a patriotic warning to the foreign-born king and emperor Charles
V to respect the cultural and political integrity of the Spaniards over whom he has
recently come to rule.
Notes
1 For one persuasive alternative paradigm, see Seth Kimmel, Parables of Conversion:
Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (Chicago and London: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2015), esp. chap. 5.
2 Richard Kagan, “Clio and the Crown: Writing History in Habsburg Spain,” in Spain,
Europe, and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, edited by Richard
Kagan and Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73–99.
3 Ricardo García Cárcel, La herencia del pasado: Las memorias históricas de España
(n.p: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011), 134ff.
4 See Rafael González Fernández, “El mito godo en la historiografia del siglo XV,”
in Antigüedad y Cristianismo, Monografías históricas sobre la Antigüedad tar-
día, Universidad de Murcia (1986), 3, 289–300. http://revistas.um.es/ayc/article/
view/59081/56891
5 J.N.H. Lawrance, “Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula,” in The Impact of Humanism
in Western Europe, edited by A. Goodman and A. Mackay (New York: Routledge,
1989), 220–258, 223ff; Robert Brian Tate, “The Anacephalosis of Alfonso Garcia de
Santa Maria, Bishop of Burgos, 1435–1456,” in Hispanic Studies in Honor of I. Gon-
zalez Llubera, edited by Frank Pierce (Oxford: Dolphin, 1959), 387–401; Robert Brian
Tate, “Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo and his Compendiosa Historia Hispánica,” Not-
tingham Medieval Studies 4 (1960), 58–80.
6 See Helena de Carlos Villamarín, Las Antigüedades de España (Spoleto: Centro
Italiano di Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo, 1996).
7 On Annius, see Anthony Grafton, “Invention of Traditions and Traditions of Invention
in Renaissance Europe: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo,” in The Transmission
of Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 8–38; Ingrid Rowland, The Culture
of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 53–59; Walter Stephens, “When Pope
Noah ruled the Etruscans: Annius of Viterbo and his forged ‘Antiquities’,” Modern
Language Notes 119, 1 (Italian Issue Supplement) (2004), S201–S223.
8 Johannes Annius Viterbensis, Berosi sacerdotis Chaldaici, Antiquitatum Italiae ac
totius orbis libri quinque, commentariis Ioannis Annii Viterbensis (Antwerp, 1552).
(The section dealing with Spain (pp. 290–307) is entitled “Liber . . . de primis tempo-
ribus, et quatour ac viginti regibus Hispaniae et eius Antiquitate” and is usually cited
as “De regibus Hispaniae.”)
9 Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s “History of the World” and the Historical Culture of
the Late Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
10 Julio Caro Baroja, Las falsificaciones de la historia (en relación con la de España)
(Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1992), 49–78.
11 On Annius’s Spanish connections, see Jack Freiberg and Bramante’s Tempietto, The
Roman Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015), 115ff.
12 For early critiques (beginning in 1504), see Christopher R. Ligota, “Annius of Vit-
erbo and Historical Method,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 50
(1987), 44–56. His critics in Spain included Juan Luis Vives, Ocampo’s friend Juan
de Vergara, the Portuguese humanist Andrés de Resende, the Dominican theologian
Melchor Cano, and the learned antiquarian Antonio Agustín.
13 See below for publication history. I cite from Florián de Ocampo, Coronica general de
España, que recopilaba el maestro Florián de Ocampo coronista del rey nuestro señor
Don Felipe II (vol. I), edited by Benito Cano (Madrid: Benito Cano, 1791).
14 Popper, Walter Ralegh’s “History of the World,” 42. On the continuing popularity of
Annius and later forgeries in Spain, see Katrina Olds, Forging the Past: Invented His-
tories in Counter-Reformation Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
15 Robert Brian Tate, “Mythology in Spanish Historiography of the Middles Ages and
Renaissance,” Hispanic Review 22, 1 (1954), 1–18.
16 David Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Span-
ish America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 209ff.
17 Eva Botella-Ordinas, “Exempt from Time and Its Fatal Changes: Spanish Imperial
Ideology, 1450–1700,” Renaissance Studies 26, 4 (2012), 580–604, 595ff.
18 Lupher, Romans in a New World, 217ff.
19 “Ergo ferme octingentis ante annis Hispani claruerunt philosophia & literis, quam
Graeci elementa literarum philosophia & literis, quam Graeci elementa literarum a
Cadmo assequerentur: Tanto videlicet Hispaniae quam Graeciae antiquior est splen-
dor & philosophia.” “De regibus Hispaniae,” cap. ii (292).
20 “Hii enim soli tenebras a luce diuiserunt, tyrannos Hispaniarum & Geriones, tanquam
semen Herculeum magna vi atque fortitudine sustulerunt, latrocinantes, delerunt . . .”
Commentariis, Praefatio, fol 3r.
21 Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske, “Writing Official History in Spain: History and Politics,
c.1474–1600,” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 3: 1400–1800,
edited by José Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 428–448, 433. Cf. Mercedes García-Arenal and Fer-
nando Mediano (eds.), Un Oriente español. Los moriscos y el Sacromonte en tiempos de
Contrarreforma (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010), 198; Thomas Dandelet, Spanish Rome,
1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 24; Anthony Grafton, What Was
History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 102; Alexander Samson, “Florián de Ocampo, Castilian Chronicler
and Habsburg Propagandist: Rhetoric, Myth and Genealogy in the Historiography of
Early Modern Spain,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 42 (2006), 339–354, 350;
Kagan, “Clio and the Crown: Writing History in Habsburg Spain,” 77.
22 “Deinde ad prouincias et particularia dominia ciuitatum Hispania conuersa est vsque
ad Carthaginenses, et mox ad tempora Romanorum. ” “De regibus Hispaniae,” cap.
xxviiii (307).
23 “Porro quum Gothi et Alani a Caspiis in Europam se primum diffuderint, hique post
Christum in tanto in Hispanias penetrauerint, atque ad hanc aetatem regnauerint, con-
sequens necessario est, vt posteri Gothi non variauerint priscam originem Hispanicae
gentis. Haec igitur est tum inuariata, tum maxime vera vestra origo celsi reges Ferdi-
nande & Helisabet Christianissimi principes.” “De regibus Hispaniae,” cap. iii (292).
24 Robert Brian Tate, “Nebrija the Historian,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 34 (1957), 125–
146, 130.
25 Nebrija, Decades 787 l. 1–12; cited in Tate, “Nebrija the historian,” 133.
26 See Joseph Pérez, La revolución de las comunidades de Castilla (1520–1521)
(Madrid: Siglo XXI de España, 1999), 328; Marcel Bataillon, “Sur Florian
Docampo,” Bulletin Hispanique 25, 1 (1923), 33–58. I draw mainly here on the
excellent biographical sketch of Ocampo in María del Mar de Bustos Guadaño, “La
crónica de Ocampo y la tradición Alfonsí en el siglo XVI,” in Alfonso X el Sabio y
las crónicas de España, edited by Inés Fernández Ordoñez (Valladolid: Universidad
de Valladolid, 2000), 187–217, 189ff.
27 Gimeno Pascual, “Florián de Ocampo,” Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum II (http://
www2.uah.es/imagines_cilii/Anticuarios/Textos/Ocampo.htm)
28 Richard Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early
Modern Spain (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009), 63ff.
29 For example, the chronicler Fray Antonio de Guevara wrote two historical-moral treatises
drawing on Roman history, Libro aureo de Marco Aurelio (1528) and Relox de príncipes
(1529) that enjoined the emperor-king to emulate the clemency of the Stoic emperor
Marcus Aurelius. The Sicilian-born chronicler Lucio Marineo Sículo’s De rebus hispa-
niae (1530) discussed Spanish antiquities, but also had a distinctly Roman orientation.
30 Bustos Guadaño, “La crónica de Ocampo,” (op. cit. n. 26) 188.
31 These are discussed by Georges Cirot, “Florián de Ocampo, chroniste de Charles-
Quint,” Bulletin Hispanique 16, 3 (1914), 307–336.
32 Florián de Ocampo (ed.), Las quatro partes enteras de la cronica de España que
mando componer el serenissimo rey don Alonso llamado El Sabio (Zamora: Agustín
de Paz & Juan Picardo, 1541). Bustos Guadaño, “La crónica de Ocampo,” discusses
this at length.
33 The edition I examined contains no prologue or prefatory remarks, but Bustos Gua-
daño, “La crónica de Ocampo,” 199, quotes from a prologue dedicated to ambassador
and chronicler Don Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga. Samson, “Florián de Ocampo,” n. 10,
reports it was printed “a costa y expensas . . . de Juan de Spinola.”
34 Los quatro libros primeros de la cronica general de España (Zamora, 1543).
35 Zamora, 1544; Zaragoza, 1544; and Zamora, 1545. (IB 13798–13801).
36 Kagan, Clio, 102 n. 31 (Philip), 60 n. 13 (Charles).
37 His petition to the Cortes to renew his salary is reproduced in the preface to Ocampo,
Cronica (1791), edited by Cano, 5–9. For letters questioning Ocampo’s good faith, see
Juan Páez to Gerónimo de Zurita, 14 Dec 1545; in Hernán Núñez de Guzmán, Bibli-
oteca y epistolario de Hernán Nuñez de Guzmán [El Pinciano]: una aproximación al
humanismo español del siglo XVI, edited by Juan Signes Codoñer, Carmen Codoñer
Merino, and Arantxa Domingo Malvadi, Nueva Roma, 14. (Madrid: CSIC, 2001), carta
8; Páez to Zurita, n.d., in Diego Josef Dormer, Progresos de la historia en el reyno de
Aragón, y elogios de Gerónimo Zurita, su primer coronista (Zaragoza: Herederos de
Diego Dormer, 1680), 617.
38 Los cinco libros primeros de la cronica general de España (Medina del Campo, 1553).
(IB 13802).
39 Coronica, 50–51.
40 Popper, Walter Ralegh’s “History of the World,” 72ff.
41 Coronica, 51.
42 Coronica, Prólogo, i–ii.
43 Coronica, Prólogo, xxiii.
44 Coronica, Prólogo, viii.
45 Coronica, Prólogo, iii.
46 Coronica, Prólogo, vii.
47 Coronica, 41ff.
48 Coronica, 48.
49 Teofilo Ruiz, “Unsacred Monarchy: The Kings of Castile in the Late Middle Ages,” in
Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, edited by Sean
Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 109–144.
50 Coronica, 54.
51 Coronica, 108.
52 Coronica, 85–86.
53 Coronica, 102–118.
54 Coronica, 92, 116.
55 Coronica, 116.
56 Coronica, 119–121.
57 Coronica, 200.
58 Coronica, 207.
59 See book 44.4 of Justin’s Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus.
60 Coronica, 225.
61 This judgment is highlighted by his pointing out that Abidis ruled at the same time that
the “holy and royal prophet David began to reign among the Jews” (Coronica, 226).
62 Coronica, II.2 (p. 232). Italics added.
63 Coronica: “nuestra gente” (x), “nuestras gentes” (49), “nuestra nación Española” (67),
“nuestra España” (49), “nuestra tierra” (53).
14 “Muy grandes hombres
de acaballo”
Spanish horsemanship a la jineta
and Bernardo Vargas Machuca’s
new science
Kathryn Renton
On mid-summer night’s eve in Madrid in 1595, one hundred men dressed in lav-
ish costumes in the “Moorish style” – that is, with open capes, turbans made of
silks and velvets, and richly embroidered – paraded the streets before meeting in
the plaza mayor. After a formal meeting of their seconds, small teams of riders
took up light lances and fell to a mock skirmish – a juego de cañas – in which the
prince, Philip III, took part.1 Engaging their opponents in close quarters, the rid-
ers interwove their horses in intricate patterns, threatening to dissolve into chaos
before emerging unscathed.
Performing the juego de cañas (known in English as the “game of canes”) on
horseback had converted the influence of the former frontier of southern Castile
and Al-Andalus into a quintessential feature of “Spanish” nobility in early modern
court festivals. Beyond wearing the signature turban, the game highlighted an
entire style of horsemanship – including harness, shield, choice of weapon, and
posture of rider – typical of lightly armored cavalry within a North African Mus-
lim or, indeed more broadly, Mediterranean tradition.2 Elaborate costumes in the
“Moorish style” pointed explicitly to the type of horsemanship being performed in
the game, known as riding a la jineta. As this style of horsemanship in Spain had
derived from the Reconquest frontier, it also asserted the ancient roots of Spanish
nobility in a military context of frontier contests. After the retaking of Granada
in 1492, this frontier legacy carried over into the New World and North Africa.
Horsemanship a la jineta served its role in the Americas as frontier conquests
substantiated the virility of Spanish military strength in the service of religious
conversion. Because the men most often engaged in frontier warfare in the New
World were typically not themselves of noble families, but rather aspirants to
higher social fortunes, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the antiquity
of this practice of horsemanship might serve as a useful claim for their ennoble-
ment. However, the old and new frontier contexts differed when it came to the
way that horsemanship could be used to express the social status and personal
qualities attributed to nobility.
Bernardo Vargas Machuca (1557–1622), a minor nobleman who used jineta
horsemanship in directing his own colonial campaigns, derived a striking asser-
tion of horsemanship on the frontier as a new form expressing nobility. In contrast
218 Kathryn Renton
to contemporaneous representations of horsemanship a la jineta as the legacy of
crusading knights, Vargas Machuca in his books boldly laid claim to a new sci-
ence, theory, and doctrine of horsemanship a la jineta that came directly from
the Indies. Vargas Machuca’s competing claim mirrored the former in idealizing
a particular frontier dynamic: adapting to enemy tactics. However, rather than
transferring the means of acquiring nobility from Reconquest Spain to the New
World, Vargas Machuca chose to define the “true” means of governing the horse a
la jineta, deriving his authority from the novelty of the new world.
Drawing from his experience in South American campaigns, as a field marshal
in New Granada and likely also in Chile, Vargas Machuca wrote three works
entirely dedicated to horsemanship a la jineta published in 1600, 1619, and 1621.
Son of the paymaster of the recently established royal archives in Simancas, Var-
gas Machuca had spent his career as a soldier and commander in the Spanish
American Indies from 1578, at the age of 22, until 1595. After serving, he returned
to the Spanish court in Madrid seeking favors and compensation and at different
times was granted small governorships in Central and South America. He died
suddenly in 1622.3
Examining his written work on horsemanship, we can see how Vargas Machuca
reinterpreted horsemanship from an imperial context, as a commander in the
Indies, and influenced how to perform nobility within Spain. Defining la jineta in
a more exclusive form marked his unique ability to perform nobility on horseback
in the Spanish festival context and served as the key to identifying nobility in oth-
ers in such requisite performances at court. Vargas Machuca’s work thus demon-
strates how horsemanship could be used to make social claims, explicitly for his
own advancement and social appointments, but also by proposing a new vision
of nobility gained through the study of a science of horsemanship and tested by
experience. This example underscores the festival performance of horsemanship,
and its many possible interpretations, as an arena where the negotiation of nobility
took place.
Frontier horsemanship
In the preface to the 1600 edition of his Libro de exercicios de la gineta (The
book of exercises for jineta), Vargas Machuca acknowledged that horsemanship
a la jineta had come to the New World from Spain, which in turn had originated
in North Africa; nevertheless, he claimed that in the Indies it had been “perfected
more than in any other [place].”4 In 1619, he promised to reveal what the new
world had contributed to this style of horsemanship as “the marvels and secrets
that by long experience I learned in the Indies, where jineta is most used, [and
which] were missing from this school.”5
It was widely acknowledged that this manner of riding horses had been intro-
duced through invasions from North Africa and had been used by both Muslim and
Christian parties in the succeeding centuries. Dating from at least the thirteenth
century in Spain, riding a la jineta was closely associated with lightly armored
cavalry used in frontier raids.6 The term itself – root for the modern Spanish word
“Muy grandes hombres de acaballo” 219
jinete or rider – described the riding style of North African tribesmen recruited
by Iberian Muslims against the forces of Castile-León.7 Commonly characterized
by the use of short stirrups, in contrast to the long stirrups of the heavily armored
knight, riding a la jineta gave the rider a forward, crouching position over the
horse that allowed greater movement from the saddle suitable for traveling at
high speed.
Jineta had clear associations with Iberian Muslims, but by the sixteenth cen-
tury it represented most likely an autochthonous Iberian style derived from these
frontier engagements. Differences in the visual depictions of the jinete before and
after the Muslim invasions indicate its influence on riding styles, although these
were bi-directional: in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, Almohad soldiers rode in
both “Christian” and “Muslim” styles as well.8 Although it has been suggested
that a bias against the “Moorish” or “African” seat persisted through the medieval
period in Spain, the widespread popularity of bullfighting and the game of canes
suggest it also became firmly integrated by the mid-fifteenth century, signaling
a convergence of foreign and native traditions.9 The adaptations from both sides
in this process explain, in part, the claims for the pre-Roman origins of this style
within Spain by a few seventeenth century authors.10
Although a Muslim heritage and an adaptation to enemy tactics, this develop-
ing form of riding a la jineta became commonplace for hunting, bullfighting,
and martial exercises of the nobility in Spain. The popular juego de cañas, for
example, demonstrated the rapid maneuvers in tight quarters achieved by riders
mounted a la jineta, derived from military tactics of light cavalry.11 In the mid-
sixteenth century, book-length manuals instructed riders in these games, as part
of a broader vision of how horsemanship a la jineta reflected one’s nobility. This
type of manual provided general instructions on how to mount and direct the
horse, leading ultimately to the game of canes or the mounted bullfight, dedicated
to performances a la jineta.
Most notably, the fear of an impending decay of these mounted skills posited
in works dedicated to the practice of riding a la jineta illustrates the implicit con-
nection between horsemanship and nobility, and more specifically, la jineta and
Spanish nobility. In 1551, for example, the commander of the military order of
Calatrava, Hernan Chacón, justified preserving this type of horsemanship among
the nobility because he had “always known, being a cortesano, how to be at ease
riding a la jineta to enjoy the many good graces that it contains, which now are
being forgotten and lost.”12 He asserted that horsemanship a la jineta should be
acknowledged for its glorious role in the Reconquest. Chacón argued that this
style, even though introduced by Iberian Muslims, had developed through long
centuries of frontier skirmishes to become the main instrument in this noble Cas-
tilian victory. Thus, the relationship of horsemanship a la jineta to the nobility of
the rider revolved around the dual legacy of how these skills in horsemanship had
facilitated social honors for the mounted knight on the Andalusi frontier, and then
the subsequent gloss of these origins as authentic Spanish nobility.
In his work on Spanish festivals – A King Travels – Teofilo Ruiz noted: “No
festival in the sixteenth century failed to include such displays of horsemanship”
220 Kathryn Renton
and, moreover, when the Spanish princes or kings traveled abroad, “the juego de
cañas served as a special signature of Spanish uniqueness.”13 The exhibition of
lavish pageantry and expert horse-handling skills in the juego de cañas helped to
define early modern Spanish festive traditions. Other European courts considered
this game of canes strikingly “Spanish,” ironically because it used a distinctive
costume considered “Moorish.”14 Much like the bullfighting traditions usually
paired with it, the juego de cañas publicly defined Spanish nobility through the
performance of horsemanship a la jineta. The historical mixing and adaptation of
this style on the frontier, and its association with social advancement, had been
idealized as a representation of Spanish nobility. In this respect, the antiquity and
even autochthony of horsemanship a la jineta within Spain validated its perfor-
mance as an expression of nobility.
Vargas Machuca’s “true” jineta of the Indies

Vargas Machuca recalled the dynamic of the Reconquest frontier in his original
dedication of 1600 to the Spanish branch of the Fuggar family, Conde Alberto
Fúcar, where he emphasized that horsemanship was both a means to acquire and
necessary to sustain nobility. In fact, he considered his work on horsemanship,
produced at the count’s request, the essential companion piece to his tactical field
manual for future commanders in the Indies, the Militia Indiana (1599).15 Var-
gas Machuca noted the critical social role of horsemanship for both nobles and
non-nobles or lesser caballeros: “because through [it] they restore that which is
lacking in their ancestors, or when their own nobility is abundant, it sustains their
primary obligation not to degenerate.”16 Thus, horsemanship was not only neces-
sary to improve on one’s own parentage, but also an obligation to sustain oneself
at any level of nobility.
Exhibition of horsemanship, however, indicated both forms of mobility as
well as qualities of exclusion. Distinguishing in his work between the “true” per-
formance of jineta horsemanship from other “false” ones, Vargas Machuca re-
imagined how horsemanship served to identify nobility within Spain. For Vargas
Machuca, horsemanship a la jineta was closely tied to his experience in frontier
skirmishes; he considered this frontier, however, in a sense superior to that of the
Reconquest of Spain where horsemanship a la jineta had first been associated
with the quality of nobility. Since the performance of horsemanship was actually
necessary for the social recognition of nobility by peers, Vargas Machuca pro-
posed that the role of horsemanship in embodying nobility should be recognized
specifically through the “true” jineta.
Part of the novelty of the version of horsemanship a la jineta practiced in the
Indies lay in how it represented a “science” of horsemanship, linking horsemanship
to a more general theory of governance. Vargas Machuca’s first edition referred
to it as a “fundamental science,” and his second edition labeled the ideal horse-
men the “scientific” rider.17 Consisting first of three basic principles – good fitting
of the bit, good hands, and good seat – it achieved the ultimate goal of reducing
the horse to the rider’s will in a manner both free and easy for both the rider and
horse.18 The science governed both the horse’s and the rider’s body, articulated
as the coordination of twelve specific body parts; fault in any of one of these ele-
ments would render the whole function false, and thus no longer an expression of
the rider’s nobility.19 Without acknowledging this science, one would “adulterate
the perfect and true Jineta” as it was practiced in the Indies.20
True jineta would be a reliable indicator of the performance of nobility, but
it could also be learned through the practice of the science and the study of his
theory. In his final edition, dedicated to Philip IV, Vargas Machuca wrote: “The
essential parts . . . consist of Theory and Practice, so that although it is not a sci-
ence founded in necessary principles . . . it has as its basis a natural reason.”21 Var-
gas Machuca claimed the status of scientia for his theory of horsemanship, using
the Latin term denoting true knowledge in an Aristotelian framework. However,
rather than being a demonstration from first principles, as commonly described,
he explains that this form of knowledge derived from individual experience and
the use of natural reason. As a product of natural and technical processes applied
to concrete situations on horseback, horsemanship might be considered closer
to the opposing category of ars, or the artisanal crafts merely imitating nature
and lacking the authority of generating general truths. Vargas Machuca derived
his scientia from experience, but distinct from other ars, argues it engaged with
both theory and real knowledge. Like medicine and jurisprudence, horsemanship
blurred the division of theory and practice. Thus, by extension, Vargas Machuca’s
depiction of “true” horsemanship represented nobility not merely as a personal
quality earned by experience on the frontier, but more powerfully as a science of
governance that might be acquired.
Although this science allowed one both to demonstrate the nobility that one’s
ancestors might lack and to distinguish those with knowledge of this true science
in performance, Vargas Machuca’s vision also idealized the nature of the changes
to horsemanship a la jineta that took place on the colonial frontier.22 A tactically
useful style of horsemanship for skirmishes rather than pitched battles, even horse-
manship a la jineta faced challenges in the mountainous terrain against the tactics
adopted by the various groups resisting Spanish incursions. Vargas Machuca had
served on campaigns in the kingdom of New Granada (Colombia and Venezuela),
Peru, and even as far south as Chile, between 1578 and 1595. As a later conquis-
tador, he participated in the ongoing and often times brutal efforts of “pacifica-
tion.”23 Kris Lane characterized Vargas Machuca’s campaign tactics in the India
Militia as the first “counter-insurgency” manual for guerilla warfare, including
punitive raids and other dirty tactics. Vargas Machuca’s harsh approval of the effi-
cacy of methods forged knee-deep in violence at the edges of the empire highlights
how this new “science” of governance a la jineta also had to rehabilitate frontier
tactics in order to represent or diagnose nobility in its performance at court.
In presenting this new science of horsemanship to the court in Spain as proof of
nobility, Vargas Machuca dramatically downplayed the mixtures and influences of
frontier adaptations to enemy tactics and frequently reviled ones. Vargas Machu-
ca’s service in the Indies was not necessarily respected as a means of advancement
and Lane refers to him as “a hapless caballero so out of touch with his times he
222 Kathryn Renton
may well have inspired Cervantes” for his obsession with horsemanship and quest
for social advancement.24 Nevertheless, an impression of a “true” form of jineta
that identified nobility among social peers within Spain was popularly received
within the Iberian Peninsula. More than one author assumed the position that the
true nobility of Spain, in terms of equestrian skills, was preserved in these fron-
tier settings.25 Rather than representing a ritual expropriation of Muslim culture,
however, the use of jineta horsemanship in a New World frontier would actually
re-invigorate its performance within Spain in the sixteenth century.26
The series of three publications demonstrates how Vargas Machuca oriented
his discussion of horsemanship towards the court for the promotion of his career.
Vargas Machuca explained that his patron from the wealthy Fugger family in
Spain specifically requested the addition of horsemanship to his field manual.27
Just two years after the publication of his first edition, he was given the position of
governor of Portobelo and then subsequently the Island of Margarita off the coast
of Venezuela. The Conde de Siruela and the Conde de Villamediana, who retro-
actively attributed a noble lineage to him from the twelfth century Iberian Recon-
quest, sponsored his later work. After his term as governor in Margarita, a royal
residencia justifying accounts determined that Vargas Machuca owed money to
the crown and this possibly motivated the third edition of his work in 1621.28 This
publication, too, rewarded him with a governorship in Antioquia in colonial New
Granada, although he died in 1622 before taking up this post.
Vargas Machuca indeed made a new claim about horsemanship as a science of
nobility that could be learned and discerned in the performance itself. His manuals
illustrate how horsemanship, understood as a way to perform nobility, was subject
to various interpretive claims. In this case, horsemanship a la jineta served as a
source of nobility in the form of a new science rather than as an ancient tradition.
Vargas Machuca’s presentation of the “true” jineta illustrates how the rhetoric
around horsemanship provides necessary context for these skills, which served as
a platform for claiming status and recognition rather than as a simple reflection of
royal power in their performance at the Spanish court.
Festival horsemanship and nobility

Manuals on horsemanship, like those of Vargas Machuca, far from being easily
summarized, encompassed the diverse interests of elite nobles within the court cir-
cle in Madrid, expert horsemen, lower nobility, and even non-nobles with profes-
sional experience around horses, and presented alternative claims about the source
of nobility itself. When placed in its festival context, horsemanship, implicitly
understood to influence social authority, became a key interpretive feature for the
participants and audience. The prominent use of the game of canes – as a material
performance – projected noble status through its display of wealth and horse owner-
ship. This feature provided ample room for contested displays of authority – noble
and royal, colonial and courtly – in determining the precise script. However, at the
same time – as a display of horsemanship – this performance was subject to compet-
ing claims about the meaning of horsemanship a la jineta.
Typically, local notables initiated the game with invitations to field teams,
spurred by local festivals or by the presence of visiting dignitaries. Styles of play
varied by region, some verging on violent, others towards intricate choreography,
but most were exclusive in terms of who could participate.29 The tradition of wear-
ing a “Moorish” costume – including the associated head wraps, capes, boots, and
the horse’s harness (saddle, bridle, and bit) – served to display the wealth of those
who could afford to field a team. These costumes were color coordinated and spe-
cially commissioned for the occasion out of rich fabrics like velvet and silk, with
gilded threads or precious stones for each team of riders, their lackeys, and even
their horses’ caparisons.
As one part of the larger festival arrangements, the game of canes similarly
conveyed messages between the king and the organizers. It was a highly visible
tradition, common to local festivals organized by municipal elites as well as royal
festivals that took place under the eye of the king, where it was not uncommon for
the prince himself to participate. Arranging the specific details of its performance
assured the performers that it represented their social authority. While the visual
performance of the game gave off the impression of chaos, it constituted a pur-
poseful and calculated display.
As a projection of royal power, these games were incorporated, self-consciously,
into the imperial project in the Spanish New World colonies; for example, Mexico
City received the king’s first viceroy with a game of canes in 1529.30 However,
perhaps more striking, its uses also drew on the local traditions of receiving and
public meeting of parties in negotiation. In the very first recorded use of the games
in the Americas, the rebellious Cristóbal de Olid used it to receive a reprimanding
visit from Hernan Cortés in 1524.31 Similarly, Gonzalo Pizarro invited an emis-
sary from the newly authorized viceroy, Pedro de la Gasca, to a game of canes
in 1547, before turning down his proposal and finalizing his rebellion against the
Crown.32 These games displayed the authority and contrary interests of the par-
ticular parties involved.
In his narrative of royal entries made for Philip II, Teofilo Ruiz vividly illus-
trated that although such festivals may have been presented in the king’s honor,
they were not always to his liking.33 Rather than direct manifestations of royal
authority, these spectacles made power visible in ways that were ambiguous and
contested. Ruiz demonstrated how some elements of these festivals encouraged
ludic release, while their scripted nature retained a return to authority. The nego-
tiation of these scripts revealed dialogues of power among the dominant orders,
although their actual performance and reception were less predictable. Games
performed in horsemanship a la jineta demonstrated power in terms of exclusion,
wealth, and social authority, and could provide grounds for complementing royal
authority or challenging it.
Thus, Vargas Machuca’s claim was not an impotent one. The game of canes
and its use of horsemanship a la jineta would reach its apogee in the seventeenth
century, becoming more formal and more elaborate. Famously, both Philip III and
Philip IV were aficionados of the game of canes, frequently playing themselves.34
In the opening dedication to the new Buen Retiro palace in 1632, for example, a
224 Kathryn Renton
game of canes was played in a newly built arena, along with bullfighting and other
popular events.35 Playwright Lope de Vega commemorated this performance in a
poem for the occasion, in which the king, Philip IV, and the Count Duke Olivares
made their entrance together, as “el sol y el dia,” and the other riders moved in
orbit around them, creating a labyrinth of pursuit and retreat. In Lope’s eulogy,
the king’s horsemanship was “emboldened, brave / attentive to his royal nature /
splendid, unfailing / his power equaled his skill / when this virtue grows to its
height / all envy and disloyalty falls away.”36
The function of horsemanship a la jineta to assert authority in negotiation
among the dominant orders served an increasingly centralized function. Never-
theless, the audience remained an important feature of this performance. This
was certainly the case with works on horsemanship advancing various individual
interests to make claims about social status. The competing perspectives of partic-
ipants and audiences contributed to a multiplicity of messages in how horseman-
ship expressed nobility. Through Vargas Machuca’s work at least, and in light of
this festival tradition, horsemanship a la jineta underwent re-signification through
its performance over time, from an ancient and hybrid form to a new science of
Spanish nobility.
Notes
1 Teofilo Ruiz, A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Mod-
ern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 212. Cited from Jehan
l’Hermite, Le Passetemps, edited by Petit (Antwerp: J. Buschmann, 1896), 266–267.
2 Juan Carlos Fernández Truan, “El juego de cañas en España,” Revista de História
do Esporte 5, 1 (June 2012), 1–23, https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/Recorde/article/
view/705/648. The basic structure of the game was used by ancient Greeks in Tur-
key, origins of the modern-day game (“cirit”) still played there. It also was known as
“djerid” in North Africa. The “adarga,” for example, was the signature style shield (a
double oval or heart shaped), paired with the lance.
3 A history of his services were recorded in a relacion in 1623, “Informaciones de los
méritos y servicios de Lorenzo López de Salazar . . . y don Bernardo de Vargas, su
yerno,” Archivo General de las Indias, Patronato 164, R. 1. For biographical sources,
see the introduction to The Indian Militia and Description of the Indies, translated by
Kris Lane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
4 Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, Libro de exercicios de la gineta (Madrid: Pedro Madri-
gal, 1600), 35.
5 Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, Teorica y Exercicios de La Gineta (Madrid: Diego Fla-
menco, 1619), proemio (n.p.).
6 While the influence of la jineta dates from at least the thirteenth century, accounts
of the game of canes appear later. Fernández Truan notes older traditions of mock
battles, but his earliest reference to juegos de cañas dates from 1396 in “El juego de
cañas en España,” 6. Harris notes that these games took place in the crown of Aragon,
before written records of the game in Castile in the fifteenth century. Max Harris,
Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2010), 54. Ruiz points to similarities the game has with an
older tradition of the bohordando, although he is mostly concerned with the sixteenth
century. Ruiz, A King Travels, 215.
7 Joan Corominas, Diccionario critico etimologico castellano e hispánico (Madrid: Gre-
dos, 1980). The entry on “jinete” cites the arrival of the Zeneta Berber tribe in 1263
as “caballeros ginetes” in the fourteenth-century chronicle of Alfonso X (Estoria de
España) and as “genets” in Jaume I’s Liber dels Feyts. Corominas shows the clear
association of riding “a la gineta” with the ginete/zenete by quoting Jaime II to his
ambassador in 1323 on “homens a cavall a la genetia.”
8 Francisco A. Rivas Rivas, Omnia Equi: Caballos y Jinetes En La España Medieval y
Moderna (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2005), 44.
9 Noel Fallows, “From Sport to Spectacle,” chap. 7 in Jousting in Medieval and Renais-
sance Iberia (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2010).
10 Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611) suggests a possible Greek root
for the word, and other authors refer to Pliny’s record of Iberian cavalries resisting
the Romans; see Barbara Fuchs, “Playing the Moor,” chap. 4 in Exotic Nation: Mau-
rophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 92. Some contemporary authors (such as Sylvia Loch, The
Royal Horse of Europe: The Story of the Andalusian and Lusitano (London: J.A. Allen,
1986)) also consider this style of horseback riding present in the Iberian peninsula
since antiquity, referring to Roman commentary on Asturian and Cantabrian cavalries
and Iberian horses.
11 Noel Fallows, Un texto inédito sobre la caballería del Renacimiento español (Liver-
pool: Liverpool University Press, 1996).
12 Fernando Chacón, Tractado de la caualleria de la gineta (Sevilla: Christoual Aluarez,
1551), ii.
13 Ruiz, A King Travels, 214.
14 Fuchs, “Playing the Moor.” Philip II and his court performed juegos de cañas for spec-
tators in England when he became king consort.
15 Vargas Machuca, Libro de exercicios de la gineta, 5.
16 Vargas Machuca, Teorica y Exercicios de La Gineta, dedication to Alberto Fúcar (n.p.).
His later edition of 1619, graced by an introduction from the Conde de Villamedi-
ana, suggested the possibility for upwards advancement via these horsemanship skills,
“which is justified when our merits exceed the sovereignty of our predecessors.” Ber-
nardo de Vargas Machuca, Teorica y Exercicios de La Gineta, Epistola del Conde de
Villamediana al Auctor (n.p.).
17 Vargas Machuca, Libro de exercicios de la gineta, 25: “muy grades hombres de
acauallo ay y ha auido de la gineta y brida en nueftra Efpaña: pero cada vno en la que
mas ha profeffado, por q querer vn bridon por famofo que fea, reformar a vn ginete
cietifico.”
18 Vargas Machuca, Teorica y Exercicios de La Gineta, 27.
19 Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, Compendio y doctrina nueva de la gineta . . . por el gov-
ernador Don Bernardo de Vargas Machuca (Madrid: Correa de Montenegro, 1621), f. 5.
20 Vargas Machuca, Teorica y Exercicios de La Gineta, 9:
los que pratican esta dotrina, adulteran la perfecta y verdadera Gineta, . . .parecien-
doles que con ello suplen y afinan su opinion, faltandoles el verdadero concimiento,
no embargante que digna que a su modo fofaldan bien un cauallo en las Indias,
donde se pratica la verdadera Gineta, y yo la aprenhedi . . .
21 Vargas Machuca, Compendio y doctrina nueva de la gineta, 1.
22 Benjamín Flores Hernández, “La Jineta Indiana: En Los Textos de Juan Suárez de
Peralta Y Bernardo de Vargas Machuca,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 54, 2 (Octo-
ber 20, 2010), 639–664.
23 Lane, The Indian Militia, 240. Lane describes an infamous campaign against the Cac-
are Indians. See also his defense of the conquest, which was rejected by royal censors
for its strong polemic: Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, Defending the Conquest: Ber-
nardo de Vargas Machuca’s Defense and Discourse of the Western Conquests, edited
by Kris Lane (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).
24 Lane, The Indian Militia, xvii.
25 As an example, Luis de Bañuelos y de la Cerda, Libro de la jineta y descendencia de
los caballos Guzmanes, edited by José Antonio de Balenchana (Madrid: Aribau, 1877).
226 Kathryn Renton
26 Harris argues that these games illustrated an attitude of convivencia that differed from
the later event of expulsion, and suggests the confluence of their use in the colonial
context with Mexica traditional mock battles. Fuchs suggests that rather than a com-
plete purification of the Muslim influence on Spanish horsemanship, these marks
remained in “hybridized and local forms” in Spanish aristocratic culture. See also
Javier Irigoyen-García, “Poco os falta para moros, pues tanto lo parecéis: Impersonat-
ing the Moor in the Spanish Mediterranean,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12,
3 (2011), 355–369. I have noted that in earlier versions, it appears that all participants
used Moorish garb, whereas later games in the seventeenth century pit moros against
cristianos.
27 Vargas Machuca dedicated his first edition (1600) to Alberto Fúcar (Conde Albert von
Fugger, 1574–1614), a relative of the banking house of Fugger in Augsburg that had a
close relationship with the Habsburg rulers. The Fuggers had gained various assets in
Spain, such as rights to mining production of mercury in Almadén, in return for loans
to the Spanish crown. Vargas Machuca’s dedication reports a specific request to com-
plete his obligation to his patron: “me dessea ha querido que yo de entera satifaccion
para descargo mio mandandome scribir los exercicios de la gineta.”
28 Lane, The Indian Militia, xvii.
29 Lucien Claire “Un jeu equestre de l’espagne classique: le jeu des ‘cannes” in Le cheval
et la guerre du XVe au XXe siècle, edited by Daniel Roche and Daniel Reytier (Paris:
Association pour l’académie d’art équestre de Versailles, 2002). Some juegos de cañas
were violent, particularly the tradition in Jerez de la Frontera, known as playing rostro
a rostro.
30 Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, 118.
31 Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, 117–118, quoting Bernal Diaz for the triumphal
entrance including “embuscadas de cristianos y moros.” Instructions for playing the
game often referred to the component of “escaramuzas”, as in Bruno José de Morla
Melgarejo’s Libro nuevo, bueltas de escaramuza, de gala a la gineta (1738).
32 Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, and Sarah De Laredo, From Panama to
Peru: The Conquest of Peru by the Pizarros the Rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro and the
Pacification by La Gasca (London: Maggs Bros., 1925).
33 Zaragoza and Barcelona in 1585 did not exhibit the same acclaim as the famous cel-
ebrations in Binche in 1549.
34 Luis Toro Buiza, Noticias de los juegos de cañas reales, tomadas de nuestros libros de
gineta (Sevilla: La Imprenta municipal, 1944).
35 Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez (ed.), La década de oro de la comedia española 1630–
1640: actas de las XIX Jornadas de teatro classic (Almagro, Spain: Ediciones de la
Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, 1997), 183.
36 Lope de Vega, “Versos La primera Fiesta del Palacio Nuevo,” in Vega del Parnaso
(Madrid, 1637), fol. 62v–64v.
Epilogue: The workings of power
Authority and festivals in medieval
and early modern Europe
Teofilo F. Ruiz
Hundreds of pages in the UCLA Research Library’s electronic catalogue, dealing

with scholarly discussions of power in general and its exercise in the late Mid-
dle Ages and early modern period, attest to our enduring interest in defining and
explaining the sources of power and, thus, of authority. From Thucydides, who
described the Athenians’ interactions with the citizens of Melos, to Bertrand Rus-
sell, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault (to name just a few), historians, philosophers,
anthropologists, political scientists, and other humanists and social scientists have
sought to address power as a historical category and to analyze, through specific
case studies, how authority has worked (and works) through the historical past
and in the present.
If we were to trace the genesis of power and authority, we could target, as Plato
and Rousseau did, the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture as the
starting point for new concepts of political authority. The rise of kings, prop-
erty, social stratification, and other manifestations of power in the ancient Fertile
Crescent emerged from these new forms of social and economic relations. In the
western world, the rise of organized polities in Greece and Rome or the slow
development of fairly centralized kingdoms in the transition from late medieval
to the early modern period were also critical periods in the construction of new
forms of authority.
Power is omnipresent and manifests itself in a variety of ways. Whether politi-
cal, cultural, or spiritual (though I think all these categories are interchangeable
forms of the way in which power is exercised and manifested), power is one of
the most difficult concepts to define. Surely, we all understand what power means,
that is, the exercise of authority, whether accepted or resisted, of one individual or
group over others. Yet, how an individual or a group of people acquire power and
how they preserve it remains, at best, a partially understood phenomenon.
Asked to reflect on the splendid and thoroughly researched articles that have been
contributed to this volume, I see power – its origins, articulation (often through fes-
tive displays, religious and civic rituals, eating and clothing), maintenance, and
preservation, as well as its counterpart, resistance – as the underlying theme of
this book. I must preface my comments by confessing that having volumes pub-
lished in one’s honor and marking a milestone in one’s career, or being asked,
suddenly and unexpectedly, to give plenary talks, leads to disconcerting feelings.
228 Teofilo F. Ruiz
On the one hand – and I am not seeking refuge in one of the medieval tropes of
modesty detailed by Curtius in his great book on medieval Latin literature – I have
always believed that praise of my work and/or of myself is undeserved and not to
be trusted. On the other, these honors, coming late in life as they do, are reminders
(perhaps necessary ones) that one’s career and life are coming to an end. Yet, as
the editors of this volume have reminded me, the volume is intended as a point of
departure, as a beginning for the discussion of my whole scholarly career. Thus,
rather than regretting the waning years, I should do well to remember my mother’s
usual comment when, towards the end of her own life and beset by ailments, she
was asked how she was. Her answer was always “fine, when one considers the
alternative.” So, having rejoiced in reading this book and learning a great deal from
it (including learning about my own work), I will gratefully look forward and try to
keep the alternative at bay for a few more years.
Although it seems mandatory to praise the work enclosed in the volume – after
all, it is a scholarly engagement with my own work – nonetheless, I am truly
touched by the unwarranted praise of my own books and articles. The reality is
that, as noted earlier, I have learned a great deal from and am greatly honored by
these diverse contributions. As intended by the co-editors of this volume, the arti-
cles offer a cogent example of the relation between authority and festive display
and what the exercise of the first and the celebrations of the second tell us about
power in medieval and early modern Europe, mostly in Iberia, but with impor-
tant Italian and French examples as well. In the pages that follow, I wish to offer
some reflections on power and resistance and see how these concepts are explored
throughout the preceding articles.
Power: what is it?

Nothing that I write here is original. Rather, my reflections on power borrow heav-
ily from the observations of others and from my own limited experiences of being
the subject of power in different sets of circumstances, places, and chronological
periods. As noted earlier, power is one of those historical phenomena difficult to
define. More or less, we know what it is when we see it, when we experience it,
when we are oppressed by it, or when the historical records show examples of
how it is constructed and deployed over time. Moreover, power often works in
invisible, insidious, and non-normative ways, reminding the observer of the man-
ner in which Michel Foucault has described the workings of powers as present in
every human relation. Power may function as an important aspect of the pattern
of our daily lives in a manner that is not always recognizable. But how power
is exercised, displayed, and comes into being depends largely on historical and
geographic contexts.
Obviously, technology today allows for unprecedented levels of surveillance
and propaganda; hence the power of those who rule to know what most of the
population does and to influence and shape its behavior. Such ability to intrude
into every aspect of a subject’s existence was inconceivable a century or even a
few decades ago. Think of the Stasi’s extensive taping of phone conversation,
The workings of power 229
magisterially depicted in the German movie The Lives of Others. We may wish to
think of London or, for that matter, most cities in the first world with their omni-
present cameras recording every instance of legal and illegal actions (even my
rather modest apartment building has a surveillance camera, which continuously
monitors the movements of visitors and homeowners), or the ability to trace the
location of any mobile phone-carrying citizen. In the early 1960s, in the wake of
the Bay of Pigs invasion, I and many thousands of people ended up in prison in
Cuba, a clear demonstration of the power of the state, in this case, the revolution-
ary government of Cuba, to boldly prevent any internal uprising. Yet, the absence
of the surveillance methods so common today or electronic records prevented the
same government from identifying and detaining those who actually represented
a threat to the system.
Even the so-called “absolutist” monarchies in seventeenth-and-eighteenth-
century Europe, with their power to tax and conscript, had very limited ways
of controlling and influencing most of their population. Their authority (a word
I am using synonymously with power, though it is not quite the same), limited
as it was, depended on levels of symbolic representation and on the deployment
of religious and political images, what Joseph Strayer and others described long
ago as “the religion of monarchy.” These forms of political theology relied on
the goodwill of subjects and their limited ability to engage in communal or wide-
spread acts of resistance (although exceptions were abundant), because of the
absence of advanced forms of communication and regional or countrywide politi-
cal organizations. Ironically, the technologies that allow for greater control and
monitoring of political subjects today also allow for greater forms of commu-
nication and, thus, of resistance. The Arab Spring’s demonstrations that spread
throughout North Africa and the Middle East in 2010, propelled by tweets and
social media, are good examples of this. Yet, since the Arab Spring has largely
failed, it also serves as an example of the limits of technology when thwarted by
religious fundamentalism and the deployment of military power.
Please note that here I am addressing specific forms of power, that is, the power
exercised by rulers and their agents, what we may call today state power. I am
mindful of how power, in Foucauldian fashion as noted earlier, permeates every
level of society and every social relation: between parents and children, husbands
and wives, old and young, teachers and students, and so forth. In fact, early mod-
ern rulers and their propagandists adopted analogies from the family to legiti-
mate their exercise of power. To be the father of the country, a title self-bestowed
by rulers or given to patriotic figures by a grateful citizenship, sounds innocent
enough until we remember the powers conferred on fathers by Roman law. This
was precisely how early modern rulers understood and exercised their authority
when dealing with those below. If power is all about context and the art of the
possible – how hard can I push my subjects? How much can I tax them? What
excuses should I give for fiscally exhausting wars? It is obvious, then, that power
is not a constant. It changes from period to period, depending on a series of vari-
ables that yield different results. Why were the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and
Isabella, able to wield power in the way they did? Why were they, after almost
230 Teofilo F. Ruiz
a century and a half of extraordinary levels of noble violence and the usurpation
of royal prerogatives, able to restore a semblance of order and force the hitherto
unruly nobility into some sort of cooperation and service to the Crown? Surely,
in spite of the Catholic Monarchs’ clear political abilities and resolve, they also
profited from a series of circumstances that led to the centralization of administra-
tive procedures in the kingdom of Castile (but not in the Crown of Aragon). Philip
II (1556–1598) was also a king with a high level of political ability and unparal-
leled dedication to his craft; yet, his reign ended unsuccessfully, one may even say
catastrophically, in spite of its early promise.
I fear that we are not any closer to defining power here, except to point out its
multivalent nature and the importance of context in its emergence. George Orwell,
whose work I will invoke below, put it best. Power is the ability for me to say that
two plus two is five and for you to accept it as a fact. In the real world, such a
statement is not far from the mark, and many accept whatever rulers, churches, or
the conservative media tell them to believe. Yet, one may also argue that we often
accept such Orwellian statements (that two plus two is five) not so much because
we believe it to be true, but because we have to pretend to accept it as a fact. We
accept power out of conviction (something that is itself constructed) or fear. We
are not yet in an Orwellian world, where the subject needs not just to accept what
he or she is told but also to truly believe it. But, I fear we are not too far from such
a world.
Resistance
The counterparts of power are resistance, evasion, and delaying tactics, as indi-
viduals and groups seek to slow down or to ameliorate the pressures of power.
The classical Spanish formulation, obedezco pero no cumplo, that is, I obey but
do nothing about what you have commanded me to do and what I am bound to
obey, is a well-known formula throughout the world and even in jobs and personal
relations. Procrastination is a very effective form of resistance. Such actions, and
thus ways of slowing down the workings of power, are particularly familiar in the
Mediterranean and Iberian worlds where there has long been a general attitude
that the state is the enemy and that individuals and groups ought to do everything
to thwart, delay, or weaken centralized authority. Thus, underground economies,
tax evasion, a culture of corruption, and the like are part and parcel of the manner
in which the power of the state is continuously subverted and ameliorated. One
fundamental question is, of course, how successful are these “weapons of the
weak” or the “art of resistance,” to use James Scott’s well-known formulation.
Many years ago, in a memorable scholarly gathering at the Shelby Cullom Davis
Center at Princeton University, the late and much missed Lawrence Stone and
the well-known Yale professor, James Scott, debated the extent to which forms
of resistance were capable of altering the top-down burden of power. Scott, the
author of some of the most insightful works on peasant resistance in Southeast
Asia and, by implication, other historical forms of resistance, advocated for the
important historical role of resistance in the general history of power. Lawrence
Stone, in his inimitable fashion, while accepting that forms of resistance are abun-
dantly present in the historical record, argued that these attempts were, at best, “a
bit of sand in the machine,” delaying but never overthrowing the crushing and
widespread nature of power.
In that sense, while I have always been sensitive to acts of resistance and
believe them to be necessary, my own historical understanding of these issues is
that carnivals, festive displays, exaggerated forms of servility (as a form of resist-
ance), though important in creating interstices where power may be resisted, do
not alter the nature of power. They are, in fact, useful tools in distracting those
below from the real problems they face in everyday life. Thus, the witch craze of
the early modern period, the elaborate carnival preparations in quintessential Rio
de Janeiro, the Super Bowl, and other such events are forms of buttressing power
and reifying the status quo. In that sense, Orwell’s powerful 1984 is perhaps the
most thorough (and chilling at the same time) definition of what power is. In the
end, as O’Brien tells Winston Smith, the Inner Party sought power for its own
sake, unlimited, brutal, unrelenting. The future, he argued, was to be a boot on
your face forever. There is not much taking place in the present world, I fear, that
may make us think that the future may be too different from Orwell’s dark predic-
tion. But I have strayed far from the purpose of this epilogue, which is to reflect
on the contributions to a book on authority and festive display.
The workings of power: the sinews of authority

Remarkably, after more than four decades out of graduate school, I return here
to the lessons I learned, together with William Jordan, from Joseph R. Strayer
in our medieval seminar at Princeton. Strayer, in his teaching and in his works,
emphasized the administrative and fiscal workings of medieval monarchies, in his
particular case, that of French kings in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth cen-
turies. In fact, my first assignment for Strayer was to trace the life and activities of
Philip le Convers or Philip de Villepreux, a Jewish convert who became a member
of the Church and an important figure in the administration of the royal domain,
as the man in charge of royal forests. As partial to festive displays and the like in
my later works, I do not fail to realize that bureaucracies and the development of
fiscal practices reside at the heart of new forms of authority in the medieval and
early modern West. While I resist the kinds of historical teleologies that posit a
linear progress to such things as the nation-state, constitutional rule, and the like,
in fact, there could not be festive displays without bureaucratic and fiscal support,
the true sinews of royal and, in time, state power. After all, royal authority could
not be articulated or exercised without these two essential elements.
But bureaucracies were (and are) complicated institutions that extended far
beyond the recognizable day-to-day workings of royal and state administrations.
As some of the articles included in this collection show us, authority was imbed-
ded in administrative practices. Sometimes they worked efficiently and, at other
times, they did not. This is a very important fact to keep in mind. The progressive
centralization of power from late medieval through the early modern period was,
232 Teofilo F. Ruiz
more often than not, a process of trial and error. There may have been master plans
by some enlightened and forward-looking bureaucrat or administrator, but plans
seldom worked as they were supposed to do. The example of Philip II invoked
before or the failure of the Count-Duke of Olivares’s carefully conceived plans
to restructure Spain and to save it from collapse are just two obvious examples of
sound programs, accompanied by the will to carry them out to completion, that
did not work.
In medieval and early modern Europe, the most obvious example of kingly
power (or in the case of Italy, republican power) was the ability to tax. But it was
not just the ability to raise funds from subjects and/or vassals. Feudal institutions
that fragmented power and allowed it to be exercised at the local level had already
established the principle that specific forms of contributions (aids, tallage, etc.)
were expected either in kind or in species. That the burden of these contribu-
tions fell mostly on the peasantry, whether servile or not, assured the nobility and
the emerging royal power a guaranteed income. This income, however, became
insufficient for emerging realms’ growing needs for income to finance the far
more complicated wars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the grow-
ing expense of the royal court and its entourage. The income of the royal domain
or of feudal aids was just not enough. The issue therefore was to create a system
of taxation that was permanent and that did not depend on approval by lords or
urban dwellers. It became a tool of ruling, justified by the classical formulation
of the need to raise revenues for the “defense of the realm.” Denis Menjot, in his
clear and informative chapter “Taxation and Sovereignty in Medieval Castile,”
describes how the Castilian Crown used taxation and other fiscal measures to
establish its sovereignty over its subjects and territory.
The formula that defines the Castilian kings as “emperor in regno suo,” so
prominent in our understanding of the Capetian monarchy in early thirteenth cen-
tury France, also played, according to Menjot, a signal role in the construction
of monarchical power in Castile and of its symbolic representation. As he shows
convincingly, taxation had significance far beyond its fiscal or economic aspects.
Taxation was (and remains) the most important face of administrative power. How
did temporal or intermittent taxes become permanent? How the subjects accepted
the fact that taxes had to be paid and that such exactions were to become part of
the realm’s administrative structure are among the most significant developments
in the transition from late medieval to early modern, from putative realms to what
Machiavelli would define in the early sixteenth century as “il stato.” The growing
income from alcabalas (a sale tax) and from servicios (subsidies) allowed late
medieval Castilian kings to dispense with the Cortes as the most important source
of royal revenue. If, as Menjot argues, Ferdinand and Isabella’s Castilian admin-
istrative reforms provided them with fiscal resources superior to those of other
western European kingdoms, then it is the ability to tax and to tap the kingdom’s
wealth that lies at the foundations of Castilian hegemony in Europe during most
of the early modern period.
Fiscal policies also played a significant role in the exercise of power at the local
level. Claire Gilbert’s formidable article, “The King, the Coin, and the Word:
Imagining and Enacting Castilian Frontiers in Late Medieval Iberia,” explains
the role that coins, fiscal practices, and words played in the development of the
frontier between Granada and Castile. By carefully examining the development of
fiscal institution on the frontier, emerging, as they did, from elaborate processes of
borrowing and acculturation, collaboration and conflict, Gilbert shows how Gra-
nadian–Castilian exchanges shaped the new social, economic, and political struc-
tures emerging in the region in the late fifteenth century. As is the case in Menjot’s
article, Gilbert’s findings reiterate how coins became a tool for representing sov-
ereignty and how certain taxes, in this case the diezmo y medio, exemplified royal
presence on the frontier between Islam and Christianity, between Castile and Gra-
nada, and, by implication, throughout the western Mediterranean in the transition
between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period.
The issue of defining frontiers and how Louis IX (in this case those of France
with the neighboring realms of England and the Crown of Aragon), a saintly and
well-meaning king, engaged in notable efforts to achieve peace as a precondition
for his Second Crusade is the subject of William Jordan’s remarkable contribution
to this volume, “A Border Policy? Louis IX and the Spanish Connection.” Rather
than taxes and administrative structures – although the success or failure of treaty
negotiations rested, to a large extent, on these instruments of power – Jordan
focuses his attention on the manner in which elaborate royal marriages helped
advance the cause of peace.
But here, as is the case in Jordan’s many works dealing with Saint Louis
directly or on specific aspects of his rule, the king’s vision for a peaceful Europe
as an end unto itself and as a prerequisite for a successful Crusade allow us to
gauge the French king’s high moral aims. There was, in many respects, a discon-
nect between the French king’s ideal vision of a peaceful western Europe and
the political ambitions of his counterparts. In that sense, Louis IX is a powerful
example of the workings of power through diplomacy, marriage alliances, and
good will. These policies belie our usual perception (and explanation) of political
actions as part of a universal Machiavellian exercise of power. That Louis IX was
not entirely successful, that his second Crusade ended with his death and failure,
or that his own son proved to be unworthy of his inheritance, does not diminish at
all how commendable his administrative and diplomatic efforts were.
The overlapping of religion and political administration, of the spread of the
Church’s preaching and the political needs of the realm, come to the forefront in
Francisco Garcia-Serrano’s thoughtful article, “Friars and Royal Authority in the
Thirteenth-Century Castilian Frontier.” Not unlike fiscal and diplomatic efforts
we have seen earlier, the kings of Castile’s alliance with, and use of, the emerging
Mendicant order of St. Dominic proved to be effective and beneficial for the royal
deployment of power. Whether in North Africa, where they served as interlocutors
for the Crown, or engaged in furthering royal authority on Castile’s Andalusian
frontier, the Mendicants, in this case specifically the Dominicans, functioned as
an extension of the royal bureaucracy and administration. Whether as royal agents
engaged in local issues, diplomats, mediators and the like, the Dominican order in
Castile and most probably elsewhere served as an extension of royal authority. As
234 Teofilo F. Ruiz
such, the Dominicans’ role was central to the construction of a Castilian adminis-
tration and almost as crucial as fiscal agents and other financial officials.
Finally, in concluding this section, one must note the multivalent nature of
administrative policies and authority. As Antonio Zaldívar’s article, “Empha-
sizing Royal Orders Using the Romance Languages: An Example of Strategic
Codeswitching in the Crown of Aragon’s Thirteenth-Century Royal Chancery,”
convincingly shows, discourses of power were malleable, providing a linguistic
guide to the royal exercise of power and the noble resistance to it. In the medieval
Crown of Aragon the deployment of the vernacular in royal documents functioned
to emphasize and to signal subjects of kingdom-wide emergencies or the high
nobility’s challenges to royal authority and jurisdiction. As Zaldívar argues per-
suasively, changes in the manner in which royal documents were drafted and the
language in which they were redacted (and thus read by those for whom the docu-
ments were intended) signaled unusual moments in the political life of the realm.
Such adaptability to circumstances and the ease with which royal notaries
and scribes moved from Latin to Catalan or Aragonese, and how linguistically
agile these royal agents were in reflecting the political needs of the Crown and
in responding to the exigencies of the political moment, tell us a great deal about
the manner in which bureaucracies, the true sinews of power (whether fiscal,
administrative, or scribal), had become in the Crown of Aragon and elsewhere the
main proponents of monarchical power by the late Middle Ages. These emerging
bureaucracies tirelessly promoted and extended royal authority.
Religion, representation, and resistance

Emerging centralized monarchies were not the only players in the political and
ideological transition from medieval to early modern and in the slow, uneven,
and long-term emergence of the state. Older centers of authority, above all the
Church, still competed, often successfully, with the rise of secular power in the
West. Although the Pope had armies and acted as yet one more political actor in
the complex tapestry of Renaissance conflicts over lands and power, the Papacy in
Rome often deployed highly elaborate symbolic and festive programs to enhance
its authority within Rome and Europe at large. As Maya Maskarinec’s article,
“Mobilizing Sanctity: Pius II and the Head of Andrew in Rome,” impressively
shows, festive reception of a most valuable and well-traveled relic served to bol-
ster papal authority and to provide a contrast between St. Peter’s immovable pres-
ence in Rome (as the cornerstone of the Catholic Church) and St. Andrew’s relics’
peripatetic lives (as an example of the Church’s universal reach). In a stunning and
rich description of the ceremonies that accompanied St. Andrew’s “royal entry”
into Rome, Maskarinec demonstrates the importance that these festive traditions
and ritual performances had for the political role of the Pope and the Church.
Kate Craig’s engaging and insightful piece, “The Saint at the Gate: Giv-
ing Relics a ‘Royal Entry’ in Eleventh- to Twelfth-Century France,” examines
the significance of well-plotted relics perambulations along the jurisdictional
boundaries of monasteries in northern France and Flanders. These elaborate
performances – taking the relics of a saint on a tour of his/her jurisdiction –
helped set the administrative authority or power of one particular ecclesiastical
institution over villages and other religious houses in the region.
Comparing the entry of relics into a particular location to an adventus or royal
entry, Craig elaborates on the significance of the ringing of bells and the move-
ment or travel of the relics. Yet, as Craig argues, these encounters between a trave-
ling relic and its ecclesiastical cortege and villagers and townspeople served also
as a place of contestation. In many of these encounters (although the rough outline
of relics procession remained fairly uniform) the contexts were always subtly dif-
ferent; thus each relic-entry was sui generis, serving often as sites of contestation.
In the ritual procession and in the elaborate script written for these events, Craig
shows us how the movement and reception of relics articulated long-standing con-
flicts between clergy and laity. These conflicts centered over ecclesiastical wishes
to shape lay attitudes towards relics and popular devotion to saints and the laity’s
resistance to a solely ecclesiastical agenda that had also its political and economic
underside.
In Bryan Givens’s article, “ ‘All Things to All Men’: Political Messianism in
Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain,” we, the readers, are taken on a rich
sojourn through the apocalyptic waves that agitated Spain during its transition
from late medieval to early modern. Through the figure of the Encubierto, the
“Hidden One,” we are shown, on the one hand, how popular messianic beliefs
were “placed at the service of power.” Ferdinand the Catholic fostered such
beliefs as a way to buttress his own authority, seeking to identify his rule with
popular millenarian expectations.
On the other hand, the emperor Charles V (Charles I in Spain), learned as he was
in the Erasmian tradition, rejected such millennial expectations as unnecessary for
his royal authority. Since no ideological movement or discourse of authority does
not have its flip side or counter discourse, the figure of the Encubierto and its
popular aims of redemption could also be deployed as millenarian foundations for
resistance to royal authority and for subversive behavior. As Givens makes clear,
during the Germanias, the popular uprising in 1521 Valencia, the rebels deployed
the figure of the Hidden One and the prophetic aspects of this idea as context, one
may even say pretext, for the violence against Moriscos (and opposition to social
injustice) that swept the region in the early sixteenth century.
David Nirenberg’s fascinating, rich, and erudite contribution, “Medieval
Media and Minorities: Jews and Muslims in the Cantigas de Santa María,”
reveals to the reader a complex world in which the discussion over poetry and
representation – the artistic medium of the (in addition to the iconographic rep-
resentations in the) Cantigas – served also to articulate animosity towards Jews
and Muslims. The praises to the Virgin become an assertion of the role of the
text in the process of salvation. Thus, it served as an additional tool in Alfonso
X’s political program against the rising tide of opposition and rebellion from his
enemies and rivals (including his own son Sancho).
Nirenberg’s article shows how the complex manner in which the Church’s
ambivalent position towards representation, imitation, and images allowed for
236 Teofilo F. Ruiz
the depiction of these artistic and literary tropes to be identified with Judaism.
Alfonso X, who had been accused of partiality to Jews and Muslims and whose
own Cantigas borrowed from Galician lyrical and poetic tradition (the cantigas de
amigo), created an important distance from these religious minorities though the
text (after all, the critics of poetry were identified with the Jews), while strongly
showing, as Nirenberg argues, that poetry in this case and the Cantigas specifi-
cally served as a link between the world of the here-and-now and the divine.
Finally, Kathryn Renton’s substantial and learned article, “ ‘Muy grandes hom-
bres de acaballo’: Spanish Horsemanship a la jineta and Bernardo Vargas Machu-
ca’s New Science,” explores the manner in which horsemanship or ridership, that
is, the manner in which one rides a horse in the early modern period, served as a
way to define and articulate nobility. By focusing on the work of Bernardo Var-
gas Machuca (1557–1622) and his life, Renton vividly shows several important
themes in the social history of power and on its articulation through such a promi-
nent component in the evolving discourses of nobility in the early modern Iberian
world as horsemanship.
Vargas Machuca argued that the discourse of horsemanship came directly from
the Indies. Thus, Renton addresses the whole debate on scholarly treatises on
horse breeding and styles of ridership from a truly Atlantic perspective. Horse-
manship was not solely a Spanish preoccupation but a truly Iberian one. Forms
of riding, inherited as they were from the long Islamic presence in the peninsula,
circulated through the vast Iberian world in a cycle of borrowing, imitation, and
re-importation into the peninsula. Far more important, as Renton shows, horse-
manship became another tool in the vast panoply of methods to assert authority.
After all, power in the early modern Iberian world was exercised, represented, and
put into practice by “great men on horseback.”
Clothing and food as extensions and representations

of authority
Throughout my scholarly career, I have been keenly interested in the manner in
which social practices, specifically eating and clothing, have served to articu-
late social differences and, thus, the power of an individual over others or one
social group’s superiority over another. From very early in human history, those
in power have sought to distinguish themselves from those below by how they ate
and dressed. In the workings of power, there are no innocent practices. Food and
clothes are among the most significant forms of creating a discourse of difference
and, thus, a discourse of power. These social distinctions depended on where one
was placed in the hierarchy of authority and one’s economic well-being. They
were (and are) replicated along the social strata, one social group aping those
above and trying to keep its distinct form of eating and dressing different and
superior to those below.
Hilario Casado Alonso’s engaging research and article, “Poor Colors, Rich
Colors: Spanish Clothing in the Early Sixteenth Century,” stunningly shows,
through his exhaustive research into mercantile accounts, the sharp price
difference between certain colors. His research, while emphasizing that fashion
is one of the most important markers of social difference, shows the economic
significance and meaning which the Spanish upper classes’ predilection for black
as the color of choice for their vestments had on the cultural and social history of
the late medieval and early modern period. Already by the early fifteenth century,
the price of black and grey clothing became the most expensive of all other colors.
By his careful reading of surviving accounts of merchants in the annual fairs at
Medina del Campo and elsewhere, Casado Alonso demonstrates how the triumph
of black clothing – restricted only for the upper classes – was not just a cultural
transformation but that it also had important financial aspects. The ubiquitous
presence of black clothing in later sixteenth century paintings and its identifica-
tion with the Spanish nobility had its roots in the early sixteenth century when
changing attitudes and price made dark colors the symbols of the Crown and the
nobility’s sartorial superiority and power.
In Paul Freedman’s delightful “Medieval Cuisine and the Seasons of the Year,”
we turn from clothing to food as forms of establishing discourses of difference
and power. It was not only what one ate that mattered, but as important was the
ability to eat what one yearned to eat out of season. In today’s world, we do not
think for a second that we consume products that are “out of season,” though
I remember that one ate, not too long ago, certain things at certain times of the
year. It is financial ability and superiority – and here again wealth is one of the
most significant foundations of power – that is articulated by the ability to eat
certain foods out of season, either forbidding or inaccessible to those below.
That ability to eat certain things can also serve as a marker of distinction and
superiority when dealing with religious minorities in the late Middle Ages. As
Freedman points out, Christians, omnivorous to a fault, had contempt for those
religious prohibitions, as important as they were in establishing a religious iden-
tity for Jews and Muslims, that prevented non-Christians from eating certain types
of food or from drinking alcoholic beverages. Food, whether in season or not,
accessible only to those on top or not, was yet another important tool in the con-
struction of difference. Thus, food, as clothing did, expressed the power of one
group or individual over others.
Theories of power
In 1984, even if the Inner Party’s exercise of power was brutal, George Orwell,
nonetheless, felt compelled to theorize what that power was. The ideological
foundations of power are always necessary. Power and authority for that matter
almost always seek to legitimate itself by an appeal to reason, to lofty princi-
ples, to some ideological underpinnings. It seldom matters whether praxis is far
removed from ideals. The latter, however appallingly they are formulated, form
an important component in the exercise of power. Appeals to reason, to the sacred,
to a desire for peace, to some natural order, always accompany the deployment of
the tools and institutions of power. Taxes must be collected for the “defense of the
realm.” Wars must be fought to prevent nuclear weapons from being developed,
238 Teofilo F. Ruiz
as we learned to our despair in the building up to the war against Iraq. Real rea-
sons for conflict, for wanton use of power, are never to be revealed to the general
public that is, after all, to pay for and to die in these wars. Patriotism, religious
crusades, and all those evils that have plagued mankind from its very early begin-
nings require the kind of political and emotional engineering that are the true
ideological foundations of power.
Here, as we come to the end of my brief remarks, it may be useful to conclude
with two of the articles that seek to illuminate aspects of that process by which
power is explained and made acceptable. Xavier Gil’s capacious contribution,
“An End to Conquests: Expansion and Its Limits in the Iberian World, Fifteenth
to the Early Seventeenth Centuries,” explores the process that led from conquest
to settlement. While the history of the medieval Iberian realms was a continuous
movement from conquest to the establishment of Christian institutions and popu-
lations in the newly acquired territories, exemplified in Spanish historiography by
the words “reconquest” and “repopulation,” the late fifteenth century and most
of the succeeding century represented a significant shift in sensibilities about the
acquisition of new territories. From very late in the fifteenth century onwards, the
Spanish realms expanded dramatically in regions not associated with the recov-
ery of lands held once by the Visigoths or occupied by Islam after 711. How did
power, and the attempts to justify the metropolis’s authority over the newly con-
quered lands in the Americas and elsewhere, transform the new vision of a Span-
ish monarchy beyond the Iberian Peninsula is at the heart of this article.
In Gil’s far-ranging article, it is the development of administrative structures
and the sense of territoriality, that is a new way of thinking of conquests as spe-
cific territories (subjected to colonizing rules), that propelled the transformation
of discovery and conquest to the establishment of settled colonies and later inte-
gration into the Spanish Empire or, after Philip II, the Spanish Monarchy. The
creation of administrative structures and colonial political rule was paralleled
by the publication of numerous treatises that sought to legitimate – by appeal to
political theory, classical texts, and religion – the domination over these new lands
and their people.
Finally, as it is fitting, I address Katherine van Liere’s engaging and complex
article, “Nuestros Españoles: The First Spaniards and the First Habsburg Chroni-
cler,” last. Professor Van Liere, a student of the great Anthony Grafton, was the
first graduate student with whom I discussed Spanish history at Princeton Uni-
versity. She was, and remains, the first person that introduced me to (and taught
me) the intellectual pleasures of learning from graduate students. Her complex
arguments, focused on the chronicle of Florian de Ocampo, examines the manner
in which the opening of the New World led, to a large extent, to the construction
of a full-fledged Spanish national identity.
Partly based on Annius de Viterbo’s fantastic reconstruction of a mythical
ancient history of Spain, Florian de Ocampo’s work (Ocampo had been active
in the comunero movement) argued for a genealogy of “Spanishness” (strangely
enough also defended by Sánchez-Albornoz and others) that connected his early
modern contemporaries with its pre-Roman ancestors. That new Spanish identity
meant a “discovery of the self,” an anti-Islamic, anti-Protestant stance, and “impe-
rialist xenophobia.” For Ocampo, “our Spaniards” would become the first men
who “knew science,” first to know how to live well. Here the sources of authority
and power were theorized by a complicated genealogical and historical project.
Identity, in this case Ocampo’s argument for a Spanish national identity, was also
one of the most significant tools in the deployment of power by those who ruled.
Conclusion
I am most grateful to all the contributors to this volume who have submitted such
insightful and original works to this volume in my honor. I am also most grate-
ful to Yuen-Gen Liang and Jarbel Rodriguez who have done this not always easy
task of putting together and editing a collected volume with such love, tact, and
energy. I should also note the absence, because of her untimely death, of Olivia
Remie Constable’s contribution. Our collective ache at the loss of such a distin-
guished scholar and loving friend is one that will not abate.
I am also flattered by the manner in which the introduction and these articles are
in conversation with issues that have animated my own work for more than four
decades. Spectacle, power, and authority are themes that are crucial to our under-
standing of the past. They are also crucial for our ability to negotiate the present.
Circumstances vary from period to period, contexts are different, but control by
some groups or individuals over others, whether benign or brutal, is inexorably
linked to our long shared history and to human experiences. In the end, the his-
torian has a responsibility to study these fundamental themes as part of her/his
scholarly agenda and to keep alive the memory of the excessive uses of power.
As humans, we are all obligated to ameliorate the effects of power in our society
and, as illusory as it seems, to confront and challenge that power as much as we
can. Power, often represented and articulated through spectacle, remains always,
whether in agreeable festive displays or when deployed in harsh and unforgiving
fashion – and the modern world provides daily examples of the latter – a disturb-
ing constant in our lives.
Bibliography of Teofilo F. Ruiz
publications
A) Accepted for publication or under contract
Books
The Western Mediterranean and the World: Sites of Encounter. Manuscript completed and
already in the editor’s hands. Forthcoming. A much expanded second edition of my
Spanish Society, now to be expanded to 1700, from Routledge, 2017.
Articles
“Festive Traditions in Castile and Aragon in the Late Middle Ages: Ceremonies and
Symbols of Power,” in The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies, edited by Javier
Muñoz-Basols. Forthcoming.
B) Already in print
Books
Discursos de sangre y parentesco en Castilla durante la Baja Edad Media y la Epoca Mod-
erna (Santander, Spain: Editorial Universidad Cantabria, 2015). Short book.
A King’s Travels: Festivals, Spectacles, and Power in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Selected by Choice as one of
the notable books of the year.
The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in the Western World (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2011).
Co-edited with Angel Luis Encinas, Viajes apostólicos de California de los religiosos de
Propaganda Fide, del Colegio de San Fernando de Mexico por Junipero Serra y Fr.
Juan Crespi. Prólogo y transcripción de Encinas Epilogo de T. F. Ruiz (Madrid: Mira-
guano Ediciones, 2011).
Co-edited with Gabriel Piterberg and Geoffrey Symcox, Braudel Revisited: The Mediterra-
nean World 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).
Spain’s: Centuries of Crisis, 1300–1474 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Spanish translation
published by Crítica, Barcelona, 2008. Nominated for the best book about Spanish medi-
eval history and literature by the journal La Corónica.
Co-author with Robin Winks, Medieval Europe and the World (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2005).
From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society in the Late Middle Ages, 1150–
1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
La sociedad española, 1400–1600 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002). This is a slightly revised
translation of my Spanish Society, 1400–1600.
Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (London: Longman, 2001).
Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Awarded the “Premio del Rey” by the American Historical
Association in 1995.
The City and the Realm: Burgos and Castile in the Late Middle Ages (London: Variorum
Reprints, 1992). This is a collection of some of my previously published articles on
Burgos and Castile.
Co-author with Carlos Estepa, Hilario Casado Alonso, and Juan A. Bonachía, Burgos en la
Edad Media (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1984).
Sociedad y poder real en Castilla (Barcelona: Ariel, 1981).
Co-editor with William C. Jordan and Bruce McNab, Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages:
Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).
Articles
“A Commentary on How to Teach the Non-Western World,” in Perspectives on History. An
online publication of the American Historical Association: https://www.historians.org/
publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history
“Introduction,” in Festival Culture in the World of the Spanish Habsburgs, edited by
Fernando Checa Cremades and Laura Fernández-González (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015),
xi–xxii.
“Textile Consumption in Late Medieval Castile: The Social, Economic, and Cultural
Meaning of Clothing, 1200–1350,” in ERASMO (Winter, 2015), 101–114, http://www5.
uva.es/revistaerasmo/.
“Constructing Identity: Castile in the XIIIth and XIVth Centuries,” in Dimensões, 33
(2014), 206–220.
“The Mediterranean and the Atlantic,” in A Companion to Mediterranean in History, edited
by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita (Oxford: Wiley, 2014), 411–424.
“Towards a Symbolic History of Alfonso XI of Castile: Power, Ceremony, and Triumph,”
in The Emergence of Leon-Castile c. 1050–1500 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 93–108.“An
Afterward: William Chester Jordan: A Life of Learning,” in Center and Periphery: Studies
on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, edited by Katherine
L. Jensen, G. Geltner, and Anne E. Lester (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 263–271.
“Discourses of Blood and Kinship in Late Medieval and Early Modern Castile,” in Blood
and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present, edited by C. J.
Johnson, B. Jussen, D. W. Sabean, and S. Teuscher (New York and Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2013), 105–124.
“Regierung auf Reisen: Die Herrschereinzuge Philipps II. In Aragon und Barcelona,” in
Habsburger Herrschaft vor Ort – welweit (1300–1600), edited by Jeannette Rauschert
and Simon Teuscher (Ostfilden: Schwabenverlag, 2013), 211–226.
“Teaching as Research/Research as Teaching,” in The Feedback Loop: Historians Talk
about the Links between Research and Reaching, edited by Antoinette Burton (Wash-
ington, DC: AHA, 2013), 7–14.
“El incierto y afortunado destino de un historiador,” in La Historia de España en primera
persona: Autobiografías de historiadores hispanistas, edited by Jaume Aurell (Barce-
lona: Editoral base, 2012), 225–243.
242 Bibliography of Teofilo F. Ruiz publications
“Philip II’s Entry into Zaragoza in 1685: A Theater of Power or Contestation?” in Mobs:
An Interdisciplinary Inquiry, edited by Nancy Van Dusen and Leonard M. Koff (Leiden:
Brill, 2012), 269–284.
“Naming Peasants: Litigation, Memory, and Rural Society in Late Thirteenth Century Cas-
tile,” Cuadernos de historia de España, 85–86 (2011–2012), 646–657.
Epilogue: “Spain in California,” in Viajes apostolicos de California de los religiosos de
Propaganda Fide, del Colegio de San Fernando de Mexico por Junipero Serra y Fr. Juan
Crespi, edited by Angel Luis Encinas and Teofilo F. Ruiz. Prólogo y transcripción de
Encinas Epílogo de T. F. Ruiz (Madrid: Miraguano Ediciones, 2011), vol. 21: 277–323.
“Jews, Muslims, and Christians,” in A People’s History of Christianity, edited by Daniel E.
Bornstein, 4 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), vol. 4: 265–299.
“The Symbolic Meaning of Sword and Palio in Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual
Entries: The Case of Seville,” in Memoria y civilización. Anuario de Historia, Universi-
dad de Navarra, 12 (2009), 13–48.
“Urban Historical Geography and the Writing of Late Medieval Urban History,” in A Com-
panion to the Medieval World, edited by Carol Lansing and Edward D. English (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 397–412.
“Voices of the Oppressed: Peasant Resistance in Late Medieval Castile,” in Castilla y el
mundo feudal. Homenaje al Profesor Julio Valdeón, eds. María Isabel del Val Valdivieso
and Pascual Martínez Sopena, 3 vols. (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2009),
vol. 3: 63–72.
“A Historian at the Movies: Films and the Historical Imagination,” Perspectives on
History, 46, 9 (December 2008). https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directo
ries/perspectives-on-history/december-2008/a-historian-at-the-movies-films-and-the-
historical-imagination.
“Medieval Europe and the World: Why Medievalists Should Also Be World Historians,” in
History Compass, a Blackwell on-line journal (November, 2006).
“The Diocese of Avila,” in International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages – Online (Lei-
den: Brepols).
“Reading Violence: Moriscos in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Sociedad y memoria en la
Edad Media: Estudios in Homenaje de Nilda Guglielmi (Buenos Aires: Instituto Multi-
discipinario de Historia y Ciencias Humanas, 2005), 351–357.
“Poverty,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages: Supplement I, edited by William C. Jordan
(New York: Scribner and ACLS, 2004), 497–508. This is a synthetic and extensive
examination of medieval poverty.
“Center and Periphery in the Teaching of Medieval History,” in Medieval Cultures in Con-
tact edited by Richard F. Gyug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 427–471.
“Granada,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, edited by Joel Mokyr (New
York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), vol. 2: 446–447.
“Seville,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, edited by Joel Mokyr (New
York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), vol. 5: 471–473.
“Spain: Early and Medieval Economy,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic His-
tory, edited by Joel Mokyr (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), vol. 5:
539–541.
“La conquista de Sevilla y la sociedad castellana: Revisión del problema,” in Sevilla 1248:
Congreso Internacional Conmemorativo del 750 aniversario de la Conquista de la Ciu-
dad de Sevilla por Fernando III, edited by Manuel González Jiménez (Sevilla: Univer-
sidad de Sevilla, 2000), 267–278.
“La historia medieval de España en el mundo norteamericano,” Medievalismo. Boletín de
la Sociedad Española de estudios medievales, 12 (2002), 299–312.
“Trading with the ‘Other’: Economic Exchanges between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in
Late Medieval Castile,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence: Studies
in Honour of Angus MacKay, edited by Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (London:
Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002), 63–78.
“Viajando pela planície Castelhana,” Signum. Revista da Associação Brasileira de Estudos
Medievais, 4 (2002), 117–152.
“La cronología y la nueva historia social: enseñanza y escritura de la historia de España desde
el centro y las periferias,” El hispanismo anglonorteamericano: Aportaciones, problemas
y perspectivas sobre Historia, Arte y Literatura españolas (siglos XVI–XVIII), edited by
José Manuel de Bernardo Arés (Córdoba: Publicaciones Obra Social y Cultural CajaSur,
2001), 275–289.
“Centers and Peripheries: Writing and Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Spanish His-
tory,” in Historia a debate II, edited by Carlos Barros (Santiago de Compostela: Univer-
sidad de Santiago de Compostela, 2000), 85–92.
“The Business of Salvation: Property and Charity in Late Medieval Castile,” in On the
Social Origins of Medieval Institutions: Essays in Honor of Joseph F. O’Callaghan,
edited by James Todesca (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 63–89.
“The Peasantries of Iberia, 1400–1800,” in The Peasantries of Europe: From the Fourteenth
to the Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Tom Scott (London: Longman, 1998), 49–73.
“Women, Work and Daily Life in Late Medieval Castile,” in Women at Work in Spain:
From the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times, edited by M. Stone and C. Benito-Vessels
(New York, 1998), 101–120.
“Límites: De la comunidad a la nación en la Castilla bajomedieval,” in Anuarios de estu-
dios medievales, 27, 1 (1997), 23–41. Published in late 1998.
“Propietat i llengua: Canvis d valors a la Castella medieval,” L’Avenç, 213 (1997), 63–67.
“Teaching as Subversion,” in Inspiring Teaching: Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak,
edited by John K. Roth (Jaffrey, NH: Anker, 1996), 158–165.
“La formazione della monarchia non consacrata: simboli e realtà di potere nella Castiglia
mediovale,” in Federico II e il mondo mediterraneo, a cura di Pierre Toubert e Agostino
Paravicino Bagliani, 3 vols. (Palermo: Sellerio editore, 1995), vol. 3: 230–247.
“Representación: Castilla, los castellanos y el Nuevo Mundo a finales de la edad media y
principios de la moderna,” in Historia a debate. Medieval, edited by Carlo Barros (San-
tiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1995), 63–77.
“Violence in Late Medieval Castile: The Case of the Rioja,” Revista de História, 133
(1995), 15–36.
“Elite and Popular Culture in Late Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals: The Case of
Jaén,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, edited B. A. Hanawalt and K. L. Reyer-
son (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 296–318.
Co-authored with Scarlett Freund, “Jews, Conversos, and the Inquisition, 1391–1492: The
Ambiguities of History,” in Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis,
Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue, edited by M. Perry and F. M. Schweitzer (New York:
Peter Lang Inc., 1994), 169–195.
“Judíos y cristianos en el ámbito urbano bajomedieval: Avila y Burgos, 1200–1350,” in
Xudeos e conversos na historia. Actas do Congreso Internacional de Judíos y Conversos
en la Historia, 2 vols. (Santiago de Compostela: Deputación de Orense, 1994), vol. 2:
69–93.
“Goodby Columbus and All That: History and Textual Criticism,” (Review article), New
West Indian Guide, 67, 3 & 4 (1993), 281–285.
“Representación de uno mismo, representación de otros y por otros: Castilla, los castella-
nos y el Nuevo Mundo a finales de la edad media,” Temas Medievales, 3 (1993), 49–70.
244 Bibliography of Teofilo F. Ruiz publications
“Western Europe on the Eve of Expansion,” in A Guidebook to Resources for Teachers of
the Columbian Encounter, edited by David Buisseret (Chicago: The Newberry Library,
1992), 15–30.
“Festivités, couleurs et symboles du pouvoir en Castille au XVe siècle. Les célébrations de
mai 1428,” Annales E.S.C., 3 (1991), 521–546.
“Fiestas, torneos, y símbolos de realeza en la Castilla del siglo XV,” in Realidad e imágenes
de poder. España a fines de la edad media, edited by Adeline Rucquoi (Valladolid: Junta
de Castilla y León, 1988), 249–266.
“The Holy Office in Medieval France and in Late Medieval Castile: Origins and Con-
trasts,” in The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind, edited by Angel Alcala
(Highland Lakes, NJ: Columbia University Press, 1987), 33–52.
“La formazione del mercato della terra nella Castiglia del basso medioevo,” Quaderni
Storici, 65, XXII, n. 2 (August, 1987), 423–452.
“L’image du pouvoir á travers les sceaux de la monarchie Castillane,” in Genese médiévale
de l’etat moderne, edited by Adeline Rucquoi (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León,
1987), 217–227.
“Images of Power in the Seals of the Castilian Monarchy, 1135–1469,” in Estudios en hom-
enaje a don Claudio Sánchez Albornoz en sus 90 años, 4 vols. (Buenos Aires: Cuadernos
de Historia de España, 1986), vol. 4: 455–463.
“Burgos and the Council of 1080,” in Santiago, St. Denis and St. Peter, edited by Bernard
F. Reilly (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 121–130.
“Burgos y el comercio castellano en la Baja Edad Media,” in Actas del Ier Congreso de
Historia de Burgos, edited by Hilario Casado, Juan Bonachía Hernández (Leon: Junta
de Castilla y Leon, 1985), 37–55.
“Unsacred Monarchy: The Kings of Castile in the Late Middle Ages,” in Rites of Power.
Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages, edited by Sean Wilentz (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 109–144.
“La inquisición medieval y la moderna: Paralelos y contrastes,” in Inquisición española y
mentalidad inquisitorial, edited by Angel Alcalá (Barcelona: Ariel, 1984), 45–66.
“Une royauté sans sacre: La monarchie castillane du bas Moyen Age,” Annales E.S.C., 3
(May–June, 1984), 429–452.“Notas para el estudio de la mujer en el área del Burgos
medieval,” in El pasado histórico de Castilla y León. Edad Media, 3 vols. (Burgos: Junta
de Castilla y León, 1983), vol. 1: 419–428.
“Une note sur la vie rurale dans la région d’Aguilar de Campoo,” in Les Espagnes
médiévales. Aspects économiques et sociaux, edited by Denis Menjot (Nice: Universite
de Nice, 1983), 13–20.
“Oligarchy and Royal Power: The Castilian Cortes and the Castilian Crisis 1248–1350,”
Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 2, 2 (December, 1982), 95–101.
“Une nota sobre la estructura y relaciones fiscales del Burgos bajomedieval,” in Estudios
en memoria del Profesor D. Salvador de Moxó, vols. 2 and 3 of En la España Medieval
(Madrid: Universidad de Madrid, 1982), vol. 2: 387–398.
“Expansion et changement: la conquête de Séville et la société castillane, 1248–1350,”
Annales E.S.C., 3 (May–June, 1979), 548–565.
“Reaction to Anagni,” The Catholic Historical Review, 65 (1979), 385–401.
“Mercaderes castellanos en Inglaterra, 1248–1350. Con un apéndice documental de mer-
caderes y marinos de los Cuatro Puertos,” in Anuario de Estudios Marítimos ‘Juan de
la Cosa,’ 1 (1977), 11–38. This is a revised and expanded version of my “Castilian
Merchants.”
“The Transformation of the Castilian Municipalities: The Case of Burgos, 1248–1350,”
Past & Present, 77 (1977), 3–33.
“Castilian Merchants in England, 1248–1350,” in Order and Innovation in the Middle
Ages, edited by William C. Jordan, Bruce McNab, and Teofilo Ruiz (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1976), 173–185.
“La estructura económica del área de Burgos,” Boletín de la Institución Fernán González,
186 (1976), 819–830.
“Prosopografía burgalesa, 1248–1350,” Boletín de la Institución Fernán González, 184
(1975), 467–499.
Dictionary articles
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 10 vols., general editor

Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Scribners)
• “Reconquest, The” (1988), vol. 10: 279–280.
• “Mesta” (1987), vol. 8: 279–281.
• “Law, Spanish” (1986), vol. 7: 518–524.
• “Julianus of Toledo” (1986), vol. 6: 181.
• “Hermandades” (1985), vol. 6: 209–210.
• “Eulogius of Cordoba” (1984), vol. 4: 521.
• “Castile (1037–1476)” (1983), vol. 3: 125–141.
• “Castilian Language” (1983), vol. 3: 141–142.
• “Converso” (1983), vol. 3: 577–578.
• “Order of Aviz” (1983), vol. 2: 16–17.
• “Almogávares” (1982), vol. 1: 190–191.
• “Andalusia” (1982), vol. 1: 243–244.
• “Asturias-Leon (718–1037)” (1982), vol. 1: 625–631.
Articles in The Columbus Encyclopaedia and The Iberian Encyclopaedia
Index
1492 capitulation 43n23 Alexander IV 112

Alfons (prince; son of Peter) 76, 78
Abidis (grandson of Gargoris) 212 Alix (daughter of Louis VII) 24
absolution 105–6 Almohads 104, 107, 219
absolutist monarchy 5, 85–6, 96, 203, 206, Alys (daughter of Louis VII) 24
212–13, 229 Andreu e Brito, Domingo 53
Acuña, Antonio de 208 Andrew: head in Rome 186–97; reliquary
Acuña, Hernando de 65 commissioned for head by Pius II
Advent 139, 141 202n46
African crusade 105–6 Angus 200n24
Agnello, Bishop 105 Annius Viterbensis, Johannes: “De regibus
Aguado, Pedro de 53 hispaniae” 204–7
Albigensian crusade 25 apanages 25, 30n36
alcabalas 38, 87, 90–6, 103n62, 103n65, Arab Spring 229
232; abolishment 101n42 Ariosto, Ludovico 64–5
Alcalá, Pedro de 37 Arnau of Vilanova: Regime for Health 138;
Alfonso III 46–7 Vae mundo in centum annia 58–9
Alfonso V 48 Ashley, Kathleen 122, 130n9
Alfonso VI 14, 85 authority 114n14
Alfonso VII 46, 85 authority and festival in medieval
Alfonso VIII 98n13, 104 and early modern Europe 227–39;
Alfonso IX 98n13 clothing and food as extensions and
Alfonso X 6, 13, 25–6, 34, 43n19, 47, 86, representations of authority 236–7;
93, 147, 150, 163, 204, 208, 235–6; power 228–30; religion, representation,
almojarifazgo 88–9; customs systems and resistance 234–6; resistance 230–1;
88; diezmo 95; Espéculo 85; Estoria theories of power 237–9; workings of
de Espanna 208, 224n7; fiscal system power: sinews of authority 231–4
88, 100n36; Fuero Real 85; indirect autos de fé 7, 16n19
tax 88–9; “king of the three religions” Azamar, Pere: Repetición del derecho
97n6; Second Partida 85; Siete Partidas miltar e armas 59
106; taxation 100n34; universities
98n13 Bakhtin, Mikhail 6
Alfonso XI 46, 86–90; alcabala 90, 95; Barak, Hagar 32n58
marca 101n41; regimiento 95; taxation Barros, John de: Decades of Asia 50
89–90, 101n41 Bartlett, Robert 26, 41n2, 131n14
Abū Ja’afar Aḥmad ibn ‘Alī ibn Ayman 37 Baruque, Julio Valdeón 4
Acero, Bernardino 68 Battle of Benevento 76
Alamany, Joan: De la venguda del Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa 104
Anticrist 60 Battle of Marignano 65
Index 247
Battle of Pavia 65 Chacón, Hernan 219
Battle of Uclés 14 Charlemagne 10, 23, 63
Bay of Pigs invasion 229 Charles V (Charles I of Spain) 11, 15,
Beccadelli, Antonio 48 51, 62–6, 68, 174–5, 208–10,
Berengaria (daughter of Alfonso X) 25 213, 235
Bernabé, Juan 68 Charles VIII 61
Bernard of Clairvaux 152 Charles of Anjou 24–5, 76
Bessarion, Cardinal 187–8, 199n21 Charles of Burgundy 62
black clothing 175, 178–82, 237 Charles of Ghent 62
Blanche (Blanca) of Castile 25–6 Chauliac, Guy de 138
Bloch, Marc 6 Christians 6, 7, 9, 13–14, 21–2, 27–8,
Bodin, Jean 49 33–40, 42n14, 42n16, 43n21, 46, 48, 54,
borders 35; Aragon and Murcia 101n41; 58–9, 61–6, 68, 104–13, 138–9, 141,
Castile 41n3, 87; Castile and Granada 147–8, 150–4, 157, 161, 163, 166,
9, 11, 34, 36; customs systems 88–90, 186–7, 189–90, 198n9, 200n29, 203–6,
101n41; Dominican friars 111; France 212, 218–19, 233, 237–8; attitudes
and Aragon 23; Franco-Flemish 25, 28; toward Paganism 168n16; coinage
Granada 41n5; Muslims and Christians 44n35; employment 44n33; enemies
43n21; Navarre and Aragon 76; security 60; evangelization 52, 104; persecution
11, 34; see also Louis IX; Treaty of 50; taxation 41n7, 45n44; see also
Corbeil friars; Jesus; relics; St. Paul; St. Peter;
Braudel, Fernand 4; La Méditerranée et le Virgin Mary
monde méditerranéen 3 Church of the Holy Apostles 199n19
Bruni, Leonardo 48 Clement VII 6
Buc, Philippe 130n7 clergy 9, 67, 76, 105, 107–8, 111–12,
bureaucracies 74–5, 231, 233–4 122; grey clothing 180; herring 141;
Burkhardt, Jacob: A History of Greek poverty 59; relics 124–5, 128, 191,
Civilization 1 235; subsidies 89; taxes 12, 89, 93;
see also friars
Cabrera de Córdoba, Luis 53 clothing, Spanish: early fifteenth century
Camino de Santiago 8 175–81; early sixteenth century
Camões, Luíz de: Os Lusíadas 53 173–82; color as sign of social
Cantigas de Santa María 6, 13, 147–66, distinction 174–5; European clothing in
166n1, 166n3, 169n25, 169n32, 219, late Middle Ages 174–5; observations
235–6 from Medina del Campo trade fairs
Cartagena, Alonso de 204 175–81
Casado Alonso, Hilario 4, 14, 236–7 Cluniac customaries 129n2,
Casas, Bartolomé de las 50, 206; Short 132n19
Account 53, 56n18 codeswitching 12, 74–5, 78–9, 81–2,
Castilian crown 39, 232 82n4
Castilian frontiers: late medieval Iberia coinage 35, 37–9, 42n16, 42n18, 87;
33–40 Islamic 44n35; Nasrid 34, 42n16,
Castro, Guillén de: Las mocedades del Cid 44n42
(The Youth of the Cid) 55 Congress of Mantua 186
Catholic 54, 63, 73, 139, 195, 234; Kings conquest of Seville 46, 107–8
38, 40, 44n43; Monarchs 61, 64, 90, Constable, Olivia Remie 13–14,
206–7, 209, 230; powers 21; states 21; 41n8, 239
see also Ferdinand the Catholic; Isabella Constance (daughter of Louis VI) 24
the Catholic Constance (second wife of Louis VII)
Celsus 136 30n31
Centelles, Jordi de 48 Constance of Sicily 58–9, 75
Cerdà, Jeroni 68 Convers, Philip le 231
Cervantes de Salazar, Francisco 53, 222 Córdoba, Luis Cabrera de 53
248 Index
Cornell, Pedro 78 Fabra, Miguel 109
Cortés, Hernán 50–1, 223 Farnese, Alexander 54
Cortes de Guadalajara 42n15 fasting 13, 135, 138–41
Cortes of Aragon 54 Ferdinand II 38, 42n14, 45n44, 60–2, 68,
Cortes of Briviesca 93 94, 113, 204, 206, 210, 232; death 62;
Cortes of Castile 86–92, 94, 99n28, 208, heir 67; see also Ferdinand the Catholic
216n37; dispense with 232; urban Ferdinand III 34, 104–7, 109–10, 115n28,
oligarchies 95–6 116n43m 157
Cortes of Toledo 35, 44n37 Ferdinand IV 89
Cortes of Valladolid 87 Ferdinand of Castile (son of Alfonso X) 26
Council of Indies 53 Ferdinand of Antequera 95
Council of Overseas Dominions 50 Ferdinand the Catholic 11, 48, 58–9, 235
Craig, Kate 13, 234–5 Fernández de Aín, Lope 105
criollo 52 Fernández de Córdoba (lineage of) 52
Crown of Thorns 21 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo 205
Crown of Aragon 47, 83n34, 230; customs First General Chronicle 47
system 88, 101n41; defining frontiers first Spaniards and the first Habsburg
233; French crusade 82n8; juegos de chronicler 203–13
cañas 224n6; Romance languages Fleming, Patricia 30n29
73–81, 234 Folc, Ramon 76
cuisine and the seasons of the year, food see cuisine
medieval 134–44; Lent and other Foucault, Michel 6, 227–9
church fasts 138–41; medical Fourth Lateran Council 106
approaches to seasonal change 135–8; Francis I 63–5
seasonal availability and preference Franciscans 12, 104–5, 109–11, 116n43
141–4 Franco, Francisco 4
Franco-Flemish borderlands 25, 28
Dias de Novais, Paulo 53 Freedman, Paul 13, 237
diezmo 95, 100n30 French Crusade 12, 74–8, 82n8
diezmo aduanero 88 friars 12, 115n28, 116n37, 154;
diezmos de la mar 88, 91 evangelization 50; and royal authority
diezmo y medio 34, 233 in thirteenth-century Castilian frontier
diglossia 82n1 104–13; conquest of Seville 107–9;
Dominicans 12, 104–5, 107, 109–10, 112, Cordoba 109–11; friars of the north
116, 233–4 and south 111–13; royal authority
Dominic the Young 107 106–7; urban matters 109–11; see also
Dominicus 127 Dominicans and Franciscans
Domínguez Rodriguez, Ana 169n30
Drogo of Saint-Winnoc 123–4, 127 Gallego, Pedro 112
Galen 135–7, 144n12, 145n13
Earenfight, Theresa 16n20 García-Ballester, Luis: Galen and
Easter 141, 176 Galenism 144n12
Eiximenis, Francesc 58–9; Dotzè Llibre García Cárcel, Ricardo 203
del Christià 67; Terç del Crestià 143; García de Cortázar, José Ángel 4
Vida de Jesucrist 59 García de la Peña 179
Elisabeth de Courtenay 24 García de Valdeavellano y Arcimis, Luis 4
Elliott, John 51 Garcia-Serrano, Francisco 12, 233
Encubierto 11, 58, 66–9, 235 Gargoris 204, 206, 212
Enrique II 93–5 Gattinara, Mercurino Arborio di 62–3, 65;
Enrique III 94–5 Oratio 62
Enrique IV 94 Geertz, Clifford 6
Erasmus 46, 48, 55n1 Germanías 11, 59, 66–8, 235
Estoria de Espanna (Primera crónica Ghibelline 83n34
general) 208 Gil, Xavier 11, 238
exemptio imperii 47, 51 Giles, Ryan 167n12
Index 249
Giles of Viterbo: Scechina 64 Jesus 139, 151, 161, 163
Gilbert, Claire 11, 232–3 Jews 7, 60; anti- 101n47, 148, 150,
Givens, Bryan 11–12, 235 159, 169n25, 216n61, 235–7; day
God 59–63, 67–8, 77, 85–6, 153–4, 163; of atonement 139; doctors 148, 150;
angel of 187; angry 154; condemnation farmers 90; heretics 108; and Muslims
of Alfonso 166; enemies 148, 150; in the Cantigas de Santa María 13,
immortal 151; invisible existence 150; 147–66, 166n3; taxation 87, 89
judgments 66, 126; mercy 62, 78; Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo 204
Mother 125, 157; plan 62; power 128; Joachim of Fiore 62
will 63, 189, 194; wrath 64, 66 John I of England 25
gods 206, 212 John I of Portugal 47
González, Felipa 177, 179 John II of Portugal 49
González Telmo, Pedro 107 John III of Portugal 48, 50; The
Grafton, Anthony 238 Disciplines 46
Great Armada 54 John of England 22
Gregory of Tours 169n25, 188, 198n10 Jones, Chris 23
Gregory the Great 193 Jordan, William Chester 11, 29n14,
Grotius, Hugo 55 231, 233
Juan I of Castile 89, 92–3, 95
Héliot, Pierre 129n1 Juan II of Castile 35, 86, 94
Henrique (son of John I of Portugal) 47
Henry III of England 23–4 Kagan, Richard 203, 208
Henry IV of Castile 37, 42n12, 42n14 Kaiser, Reinhold 130n8
Henry the “Young King” of England 24 Kantorowicz, Ernst 6
Herrera de Tordesillas, Antonio 53 Katherine of Norwich 140
Hidden One 11, 58, 60–2, 65, 68–9, 235 Kienast, Walher 21
Hippocrates 135–6; Aphorisms 136; On Koziol, Geoffrey 123, 129, 131n16,
Airs, Waters and Places 136 133n34
Hispano, Vicente 46–7
Holy Roman Empire 23, 62, 82n34, Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 4
100n36 La Gasca, Pedro 51–2, 223
Honorius III 105 language markedness 74, 82n4
horsemanship a la jineta 217–24; festivals Last World Emperor 11, 58, 61–2, 64–5
and nobility 222–4; frontier 218–30; Laurioux, Bruno 140
Vargas Machuca’s “true” jineta of the Lazius, Wolfgang Fragmentum Vaticinii 65
Indies 220–2 Leal, Alonso 177
Le Goff, Jacques 6, 31n41, 116n45
Iberia: fifteenth to early seventeenth Lent 139–41, 143–4, 176
centuries 46–55; late medieval Castilian Lester, Anne 29n8
frontiers 33–40 Lex visigothorum (Visigothic Law) 10
imperium 85, 97nn6–7 Liang, Yuen-Gen 239
Innocent III 106 Libro de caxa de Ferias 177
Innocent IV 22, 107, 111–12 The Lives of Others 229
Inquisition 7, 16n19, 68 Llibre del coch (The Book of Cooking) 142
Isabella (empress), 181 Llibre de totes maneres de potatges de
Isabella of Aragon 26, 28 menjar (The Book of All Manner of
Isabella I of Castile 38, 42n14, 60–1, 67, Dishes to Eat) 142
100n34, 182, 204, 206, 209–10, 229, longue durée 5
232; death 208 López de Gómara, Francisco: General
Isabelle (daughter of Louis IX) 25 History of the Indies 51
López de Padilla, Ignacio 37
Jaén, Alonso de 60 López de Velasco, Juan 52
Jaime I 46–8 Louis VI 24
Jaime II 47, 224n7 Louis VII 24, 30n31
James I 23, 26, 31n44, 34, 81, 105–6, 109 Louis VIII 23, 29n17
250 Index
Louis IX 11, 21–8, 31n44, 32n58, 76; Muhammad 59–60
captivity 21; Crown of Thorns 21; Muslims 6–7, 11, 13, 26, 28, 34–7,
crusade 21–3, 25, 28–9, 29n14, 42n16, 43n21, 47, 54, 59–61, 63,
233; expansionist policy in Tunis 97n4, 104, 107–8, 110, 237; baptism
55n4; friendly gestures to Norway’s 66–7; clothing 182; coinage 44n35;
king, 29n5; frontier definement 233; employment 44n33; evangelization
psychological trauma 29n12; relics 105–6; horsemanship 217–19, 222,
202n48; Schiedsrichter Europas 226n26; and Jews in the Cantigas
(Europe’s Arbiter) 21; St. Louis 233; de Santa María 147–66, 166n3,
treaty-making 21; Treaty of Corbeil 23 235–6; mosquitos 59; paper mills 75;
Lourie, Elena 7 Reconquista 46, 50; taxation 39, 41n8,
Lucas of Tuy 204 87–8, 90, 96
Luna, Alvaro de 95
Luna, Jimeno de 77–8 Navarro, Antonio 68
Lupher, David 206 Nesle, Simon de 27–8
Lusignan, Hugues de 22 Nicholas IV 112
Luther, Martin 152 Nicholas V 197n3
Lutherans 65 Nieto Soria, J. M. 98n15
Nirenberg, David 13, 235–6; “ ‘Judaism’,
Machiavelli 232–3; Discourses 47–8, 50; ‘Islam’, and the Dangers of Knowledge
History of the Florentine People 48; The in Christian Culture” 170n34
Prince 47 Noah 204
Mackay, Angus 7 Nolasco, Pedro 107
mağram 39, 41n7 nuestros españoles 203–213
Manfred (father of Constance) 75–6 Núñez de Guzmán, Hernán 208
Manrique de Ribera, Enrique 67–8 Núñez de Lara, Juan 80–1
Manuel, Juan: Libro de Los Estados (Book Núñez Vela, Blasco 51
of the States) 86
Manuel II 197n2, 200n28 Obama, Barack 1
Marguerite (daughter of Louis VII) 24 Ocampo, Florian de 14–15, 204, 206–13,
Mariana, Juan de: Historia de España 214n12, 215n26, 238–9; Coronica
204–5 general de España 14, 203, 205,
Marie (daughter of Louis VII) 24 209–10, 212–13, 216n37
Marie (daughter of Philippe II) 24 Olid, Cristóbal de 223
marriage alliances 11, 24–5, 30nn28–9 Olivares, Count Duke 224
Maskarinec, Maya 14, 234 On Christian Doctrine 153
Maundy Thursday 141 Ordenanza de Medina del Campo 38
media and minorities, medieval 147–66 Ordinaciones del Patronato real 52
Medina del Campo Fair 14, 92, Ordinance of Alcalá 102n61
175–81, 237 Orlando Furioso 64
Medina de Rioseco Fair 176–7 Orwell, George 230; 1984 231, 237
Mehmed II 197nn2–3, 199n16, 200n29
Mendoza, Antonio de 51–2 Palaiologos, Manuel II 200n28
Mesnagier de Paris 142–3 Palaiologos, Thomas 14, 186–7, 189,
microecologies 16n8 197n2
Menjot, Denis 12, 42n15, 232–3 Palmer, Nicholas 141
Merlin 59, 65 Pastoureau, Michel 174
Miller, Maureen 130n5 Paul (apostle) 150–1, 153, 166, 191,
miracles 122–5, 127–8, 133n34, 147, 154, 198n6, 200n31, 201nn35–6
157, 161, 163, 169n27, 169n32, 198n10 Paul (brother of Andrew) 189
Miracles of the Blessed Apostle Andrew Paul VI 195
187 Paulinus of Nola 187, 199n18
mobilizing sanctity 186–97 Peace of God councils 123
Mudejars 33, 35–6, 43n23, 43n25, 66–7, Peace of Paris 22–3
112, 157; taxation 44n43 Pedro el Cruel 95
Index 251
Penyafort, Raymond de 86 relics 13, 29n8, 130n8, 131nn13–16,
Pérez, Joseph 208 132n19, 132n24, 133n34, 186–94,
Pérez, Martín: Libro de las Confesiones 86 197, 199nn17–22, 200nn24–5,
Pérez García, Pablo 65–6 200nn27–9, 200n33, 200n34, 201n41,
Peter (brother of Andrew) 189 202n46, 202nn48–50, 234–5; Cluniac
Peter III 12, 58, 74–81 procedures 129n2; eleventh to twelfth
Philip II 5, 46, 52–4, 66, 175, 205, 223, century France 121–9; entries as
225n14, 230, 232, 238; Ordinances component of relic travel 122–4; entries
of Discovery, New Settlements and as time of danger 126–7; entries as time
Pacification 52, 55 of power 124–5; exits 127–8; translation
Philip III 217, 223 197n1
Philip IV 223 Renton, Kathryn 15, 236
Philippe II 22, 24, 30n31 Ribelles, Ponç de 77
Philippe III 26–8 Richard I 24
Philippe of Cahors 27–8 Richard III 140
Pierre (son of Louis VI) 24 Richard of Cornwall 24
Pius II 186–97, 197nn1–2, 199n21, Robert of Burgundy 25
200n31, 201n45; Andrew as model Robert II of Burgundy 25
for contemporaries 198n6; crusade Rodrigo of Toledo 105
197n3, 198n6, 199n16; death 197n3; Rodriguez, Jarbel 239
fresco receiving head of Andrew Romance languages 73–81
202n49; martyrdom 197n3; reliquary Romano, Paolo 201n40, 201n44
commissioned for Andrew’s head royal entries 7, 13, 107, 115n18, 121, 123,
202n46; tomb 201n45 129, 130n7, 223, 234–5
Pius III 201n41, 201n45 royal largesse 101n51
Pizarro, Francisco 51 royal registers 75, 82n7
Pizarro, Gonzalo 51, 223 Rucquoi, Adeline 4, 85
Plato 150, 153, 168n16, 227 Ruiz, Teofilo F. 16n11, 16n19, 33, 35–6,
popes 14, 22, 60, 76, 107, 115n28, 186–7, 39–40, 40n1, 58, 108, 121, 129, 144n1,
189, 192, 194, 199n21, 200n30, 234; 186, 203, 211, 223, 224n6; awards
see also individual names, e.g., 1–2; birth 1; Braudel Revisited 3–4;
Innocent IV Burgos 2; The City and the Realm 2,
Popper, Nicholas 205 16n10; Castilian Society, 1400–1600 7;
power, workings of 227–39; clothing and contributions to Spanish historiography
food as extensions and representations 2–10; Crisis and Continuity 2–4;
of authority 236–7; power 228–30; education 1; “Expansion et changement”
religion, representation, and resistance 10; From Heaven to Earth 8, 10, 46,
234–6; resistance 230–1; theories of 73; History 2C “Religion, Occult, and
power 237–9; workings of power: Science” 16n19; A King Travels 7, 15,
sinews of authority 231–4 46, 219–20; National Humanities Medal
Pragmatic Sanction of 1427 86 1–2; Sociedad y Poder Real en Castilla
Primera Crónica General 107, 208 2; Spanish Society, 1400–1600 4–5,
puertos secos 35, 40, 41n8, 42n12 16n20, 103n75; “Terror of History”
Pulgar, Hernando de 62 16n19; The Terror of History 16n19;
Punic War 209 “Une royauté sans sacre” 6
Purcell, Nicholas 16n8
Sack of Rome 64
Quesada, Ladero: Hacienda regia 41n6, St. Amand 124, 126
41n8 St. Andrew 194, 200n24, 201n42, 201n45,
234
Ramiro II 85 St. Augustine 139, 153; The City of God
Reconquest/Reconquista 3, 6–7, 12, 15, 152
46–7, 49–51, 54, 60–1, 84, 97n4, 105, St. Basle 126
107, 157, 217–20, 222, 238 St. Bernard 140
Relaciones topográficas 52 Saint Catherine 115n28
252 Index
St. Chapelle 202n48 Stone, Lawrence 3, 230–1
St. Dominic 233 Strayer, Joseph 1, 26, 229, 231
St. Foy 122, 126 studium school 98n13
Saint Francis 104 Suleiman the Magnificent 64
St. Helen 202n49
St. Hiltrude 124 taxation 9, 100n32, 232; Castile see
St. Ildefonso 159 taxation and sovereignty in medieval
St. Jerome 152 Castile; Christians 39; exemptions
Saint John 176 12, 34, 39, 47, 89–90, 92–3, 96;
St. John the Baptist 139 extraordinary 43n21; Granada 34,
St. Lewinna 123–4, 127, 129 38–9; Morisco 39; Muslims 39;
St. Marculf 128 Nasrid 36, 38
St. Paul 152 taxation and sovereignty in medieval
St. Peter (church) 121, 186–7, 191–2, Castile 12, 84–96, 101n41; clergy 93;
193–4, 199n21, 200n25, 201n36, Cortes and urban oligarchies 95–6;
201n41, 201nn44–5, 207n46, fiscal sovereignty 87–92; nobility 93–5;
202n52, 234 usurpation and delegation of sovereignty
St. Taurin 121–3 92–6
St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica Teobaldo II 25, 31n38
153 Thibaut V 25
St. Ursmar 125, 131n16 Todeschini Piccolomini, Francesco
Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio 238 201n45
Sánchez de Arevalo, Rodrigo 204; Suma Toledo, Francisco de 51–2
de la Política 86, 99n21 Tomás, Juan 111
Sancho (son of Alfonso X) 235 Tomic, Pere: Histories and Conquests
Sancho IV 47 of the Kings of Aragon and Counts of
Sancho Gallo 177, 179 Barcelona 48
Sannazaro, Jacopo 61 Torella, Jerónimo 61
Santa Cruz, Alonso de 62 Trastámara 40, 43n24, 46, 62
Santo Domingo, María de (Beata of Trastámara, Enrique see Enrique II
Piedrahita) 61–2 Treaty of Alcaçobas–Toledo 49
Sanz, Catalá 65–6 Treaty of Aragon 22
Schlesser, Norman 30n20 Treaty of Corbeil 22–3, 26–8, 29n14
Scott, James C. 6, 230 Treaty of Monteagudo 47
Scott, Walter 5 Treaty of Paris 22–4, 29n14
seasons 13, 134–5, 237; availability and Tubal (grandson of Noah) 204–6,
preference of foods 141–4; fasting 210–11, 213
139–41; fish supply 146n36; medical
approaches to seasonal change 135–8; Usatge Princeps namque 76
winter 3
Sebastian I 53, 65 Valdés, Alfonso de: 65; Dialogue
Sevil, Pedro 54 of Lactantius and an Archdeacon
Seville: conquest of 46, 107–8 64; Relación de las nuevas de
shared authority 114n14 Italia 63
Sheingorn, Pamela 122, 130n9 Valla, Lorenzo 48
Sigal, Pierre-André 122, 130n11 Vanderputten, Steven 123, 131n15
Soldevila, Antoni 68 van Liere, Katherine 14–15, 238
Solomon: Book of Wisdom 85 Vargas Machuca, Bernardo 15, 226n27,
Soria, Domingo de 112 236; Apology of the Western Conquests
sovereignty 10, 33–4, 37–40, 42n16, 84–6, 53; jineta horsemanship 217–24; Libro
205, 225n16, 232–3; fiscal 87–96, 97n5; de exercicios de la gineta (The book
see also taxation of exercises for jineta) 218; Militia
Spain: late medieval and early modern and Description of the Indies 53,
58–69; political messianism in late 221; Militia Indiana 220; Teorica y
medieval and early modern 58–69 Exercicios de La Gineta 225n16
Index 253
Vela, Blasco Núñez 51 Vives, Juan Luis 46, 48–9, 55n1, 214n12
Verardi, Carlo 61 Vose, Robin 114n5
Verino, Ugolino: Carliade 61; De
expugnatione Granatae 61 War of Granada 34
Vincent, Nicholas 29n8 War of the League 63–4
Vincent of Beauvais 27 Weiditz, Christoph 181
Villepreux, Philip de 231
Virgin Mary 125, 148, 150, 154, 157, 159, Xarafií, Ambrosio (Hamete) 37
161, 163, 166, 174, 234
Visigoths 84–5, 159, 203, 205–7, 210, Yañez, Teresa 111–12
212, 238; Lex visigothorum (Visigothic Yañez de Novoa, Pedro 111–12
Law) 10 yantar 93, 100n30
Viterbo, Annius de 14–15, 204, 238 Yolande of Burgundy 25
Viterbo, John of 209
Vitoria, Alonso de 68 Zaldívar, Antonio 12, 234

Yuen-Gen Liang (Editor), Jarbel Rodriguez (Editor) - Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Europe - Essays in Honor of Teofilo F. Ruiz-Routledge (2017)

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Authority and Spectacle in

Medieval and Early

Bringing together distinguished scholars in honor of Professor Teofilo F. Ruiz,

Yuen-Gen Liang is Associate Professor of History at National Taiwan University,

Jarbel Rodriguez is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. His

Edited by Yuen-Gen Liang

Olivia Remie Constable

“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”

List of figures and tablesx

Authority and spectacle: Teofilo F. Ruiz and the study of

1 A border policy? Louis IX and the Spanish connection 21

3 An end to conquests: expansion and its limits in the Iberian

4 ‘All things to all men’: political messianism in late medieval

5 Emphasizing royal orders using the Romance languages:

6 Taxation and sovereignty in medieval Castile 84

7 Friars and royal authority in the thirteenth-century

8 The saint at the gate: giving relics a “royal entry” in

9 Medieval cuisine and the seasons of the year 134

10 Medieval media and minorities: Jews and Muslims in the

11 Poor colors, rich colors: Spanish clothing in the early

12 Mobilizing sanctity: Pius II and the head of Andrew in Rome 186

14 “Muy grandes hombres de acaballo”: Spanish horsemanship

Epilogue: The workings of power: Authority and festivals in

Bibliography of Teofilo F. Ruiz publications 240

A work of scholarship is always one with many debts, especially so when it is a

Hilario Casado Alonso is Professor of Economic History at the University of Val-

On February 13, 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Professor Teofilo F.

Ruiz and his contributions to Spanish historiography

Thus, in Crisis and Continuity, as well as in Spanish Society, 1400–1600 (2001),

My aim in this book is quite straightforward. I wish to question the traditional

Festivities, in essence, were a method to express power. Royal, noble, ecclesi-

Authority and spectacle: summary of the essays

The discoveries should not be labeled as conquests because it is necessary to

All Christendom should celebrate this victory, because without a doubt, it

It draws near, Lord, or has already arrived

Similarly, the Viennese physician and astrologer, Wolfgang Lazius (1514–1565),

Authority in texts, taxes,

Royal power and the written word

The French crusade

Other martial orders

The right to tax: “The king of castile is emperor in

This thinking contributed to the foundation of medieval studia generalia schools

Fiscal sovereignty: the taxation system

Figure 6.1 Revenues of the Castilian monarchy in 1429

Fiscal sovereignty and political forces: usurpation

The Cortes and the urban oligarchies

Royal authority on the frontier

The conquest of Seville: ceremony and repopulation

Cordoba: dealing with urban matters

Friars of the north and friars of the south

Spectacles of purity in the

Relic entries as a component of relic travel

Relic entries as a time of power

Relic exits: spontaneous and mandated joy

1) dietary theories in relation to season and climate;

Medical approaches to seasonal change

Whoever wishes to pursue properly the science of medicine must proceed

Lent and other church fasts

Seasonal availability and preference

Para Teofilo: “contar las sus bondades seria grand reguncerio.”

Everything they do is done to attract attention, like wearing broader head-

King Alfonso’s near contemporary St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) pursued

Just as human reason fails to grasp poetical expressions on account of their

List of figures and tablesx

1 A border policy? Louis IX and the Spanish connection 21

6 Taxation and sovereignty in medieval Castile 84

9 Medieval cuisine and the seasons of the year 134

11 Poor colors, rich colors: Spanish clothing in the early

12 Mobilizing sanctity: Pius II and the head of Andrew in Rome 186

Bibliography of Teofilo F. Ruiz publications 240

Figure 6.1 Revenues of the Castilian monarchy in 1429