Enemies in the Plaza. Thomas Devaney

high ecclesiastic officials at the more lavish events, where they mingled with their temporal peers. What really drew their ire were the entremeses and theatrics that frequently accompanied these games, especially those that mocked, or seemed to them to mock, holy rituals. Most efforts to suppress entremeses, however, focused on popular festivals. While these had much in common with noble tournaments, their relative lack of powerful sponsors made them more attractive targets for suppression.

      Such events were performed in all Castilian cities but seem to have been more popular and prevalent—or at least better documented—in some places. On the frontier, Murcia, for instance, possessed a particularly vibrant festive culture that led to a number of ecclesiastic and civil attempts to curb its ardor.⁶² These festive activities took a number of forms, from spontaneous celebrations and games to formal dramatic presentations. The most elaborate tended to fall near major church holidays, including Carnival immediately before Lent or the festival of the reyes pájares on 27 December.⁶³ This timing incensed the clergy, who especially despised games of ridicule (juegos de escarnio), in which sacred rites were given a comic or burlesque treatment.⁶⁴ They therefore tried to abolish popular events that coincided with religious observances but lacked a strictly liturgical character. In 1473, for instance, the Council of Aranda prohibited playful spectacles during the festivals of Christmas, Saint Stephen, Saint John, and the Holy Innocents, referring specifically to “staged games, performances with masks or monsters, spectacles and other diverse fictions … clumsy poems and burlesque speeches.”⁶⁵

      How does this discourse relate to ecclesiastic reception of noble spectacles and tournaments? Whether or not Church authorities considered sporting events to be moral threats for secular participants and spectators, they deemed clerical involvement in almost any aspect of those occasions as unacceptable. Moreover, they would likely have deemed the majority of the plays and skits presented during breaks as juegos de escarnio. Nevertheless, the church’s purview was not wholly spiritual, and political considerations made direct criticisms of caballero spectacle relatively rare. That positive relations with influential nobles outweighed the moral dangers of irreverent theater is attested to by the presence of often-senior churchmen at these games. Several prominent bishops and archbishops, to give just one example, attended the closing banquet for the 1434 tournament in Valladolid in which Roman gods handed out the trophies.⁶⁶ It is unlikely that they openly decried any pagan or burlesque elements in a skit honoring the king himself. Politics aside, such acts were fun. Church officials high and low attended them, participated in them, and tacitly condoned them for just that reason; they were a guilty pleasure that many no doubt rationalized as less heinous than other available forms of entertainment.

      The onlookers who gathered at knightly tournaments to enjoy the sports as well as the skits and entremeses were perfectly aware that the nobility presented such shows to confirm their social status, to parade their wealth, fidelity, and courage before their peers, and to demonstrate both their generosity and their monopoly on the use of force. They were also fully cognizant that the church nominally condemned these shows but that this disapproval was insufficient to prevent all but the most zealous prelates from attending. Commoners lacked a voice both in the content of these performances and in the dominant mode of analyzing them. They did not record in writing their experiences of the tournament and, when they appear in chroniclers’ accounts, it is collectively, as the large crowd whose presence confirmed the prominence of the organizers or the appeal of the message.

      However, audiences need not have consented to the perceptions of reality shown to them. In practice, spectator priorities acted in concert with noble and church messages to create meaning. Although popular concerns varied from time to time and place to place, and it is misleading to make broad generalizations, there were several structural issues that nearly always influenced popular perceptions of power in fifteenth-century Castile. Chief among these were economic stresses related to the degradation of the currency and particularly the price of grain. The structure of urban society and the concentration of power in noble hands rankled many of the nascent merchant class who not only resented high taxes and their lack of influence but also aspired to the very trappings of nobility and knighthood flaunted in the tournaments. Religious as well as social boundaries divided urban populations, with ambivalence toward religious minorities a constant undercurrent.⁶⁷ There was a growing desire among the populace for their own public statements of civic identity and religious devotion, expressions that may have competed with noble tournaments but also drew inspiration from them.⁶⁸ Finally, the role of diversion should not be ignored; festivals were enjoyable, regardless of their sponsorship, and even the bluntest propaganda represented a bit of excitement and a break in the workday.

      Elites were aware of all this. For them, it was imperative that their spectacles would result in the desired audience reactions. To do otherwise would be to open themselves to ridicule, to inadvertently promote undesired ideas, or to risk the crowd getting out of control. This meant that they were forced to adjust their messages to fit the expectations of spectators or, rather, to fit their own perceptions of what those expectations might be. In order to achieve their own purposes, Fernando de Antequera, the conspirators at Ávila, Miguel Lucas, and others had to meet their audiences, composed primarily of commoners, halfway. This could take a number of forms: they might deliberately employ familiar themes and turn these in new directions, they could pander to the crowd by telling them what (elites thought) they wanted to hear, or they softened a message by presenting it in ambivalent terms. What they could not do was explicitly tell the crowd what to think; spectators had to reach their own conclusions. They did so by weighing the ideas presented to them through their personal experiences and through the dominant discourses in Castilian society.

      CHAPTER 2

      The Meanings of Civic Space

      For Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, the birth of his son and heir was a momentous occasion, one that he marked with a flurry of celebrations, both public and private, that lasted several days.¹ He began by formally presenting baby Luis to the people of Jaén. Well-wishers were admitted to his palace in strict order (nobles and officials, then noblewomen and their maids, merchants, artisans, peasants, and finally common women). Miguel Lucas then emerged to the shouted congratulations of the crowd and, hoisted on the shoulders of two knights, joined an impromptu parade to the church of Santa María Magdalena. There he asked nuns to join him as he prayed for his son. Next on his crowded itinerary was a lunch with high-ranking officials at the palace, followed by jousts in the afternoon and public banquets at all the parish plazas in the evening. The next day began with more banquets, now in the parish cemeteries, and further popular entertainments. Regidor Fernándo de Berrio led a live wolf through the streets with hunting dogs and horns while mummer shows, dances, and skits ensured that a range of diversions were available.

      Six days later, on 18 April, Luis was baptized in the cathedral. The journeys to the cathedral and back to the palace were in formal procession, but Miguel Lucas then walked with the people to a bullfight at the Plaza del Arrabal, outside the city walls. There he, as was his custom, “with the regidores and other knights and squires, ascended a viewing stand (mirador) of the kind made for such events. This was very finely adorned with the best French tapestries and others made of silk.”² The day ended with a private banquet at the palace, while those outside were treated to a free meal and the various performances in the streets and plazas continued unabated. Castilian nobles often marked key events in their lives—births, deaths, marriages—with public displays of munificence, the usual intent of which was to confirm their own social standing. Miguel Lucas was nothing if not thorough, however. In fêting his son, he aimed not only to enhance his reputation by appealing to all his many constituencies but also to unify and transform civic topography.

      Some of his displays deliberately inverted customary uses of particular spaces (a wild animal in the streets, banquets in the cemeteries) and were meant to fix the day in public memory. Others (sporting events and free meals) exhibited the constable’s generosity,