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Chapter 1

Orchestrating Dissonant Concord in the Bayonne Entertainments (1565)

A series of luxurious tapestries housed in the Uffizi Gallery offers spectators a window into the culture of sixteenth-century court festivity. Members of the French royal family stand at the border of each tableau, gesturing as if to welcome the viewer into their world. The eye tracks toward a middle ground occupied by marvelous displays: a swirling crowd of white horses mounted by richly costumed knights, golden boats circling a tiny island at the center of a bright blue lake, a thrashing sea monster observed by elegantly appointed noblemen and women. Viewers momentarily join the figures represented in the tapestries as witnesses of the renowned spectacles of the Valois court.

These sumptuous depictions of royal entertainments likely began their life in a workshop in Flanders, making their way to France by the end of the 1580s.¹ From there, they traveled to Florence, sent by Catherine de’ Medici as a gift to her granddaughter Christine de Lorraine on the occasion of her marriage to Grand Duke Ferdinand I in 1589.² The tapestries’ voyage from the Low Countries to France to Florence exemplifies the importance of gift-exchange practices in Renaissance Europe. Sumptuous art objects, often featuring complimentary portraits of the recipient, were meant to sweeten political negotiations or cement alliances between royal families. In the case of the Valois tapestries, the gift also represents the final chapter of a longer and more complex story of diplomacy and artistic exchange.

The story begins with one of the events the tapestries depict: the series of entertainments staged by the French royal family at Bayonne in June 1565 as part of a diplomatic summit. Over several days, the court hosted a masquerade ring-tilt joust, an allegorical assault on an enchanted castle, a chivalric tournament, a boat ride, and an island banquet, along with abundant music, fireworks, and feasting. Guests at the event included the French king Charles IX, his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, members of his court, his sister Elisabeth in her role as Philip II of Spain’s queen, and her entourage of courtiers and diplomats, as well as representatives of England, Scotland, Denmark, Venice, Tuscany, the Vatican, and other European states. In their aftermath, the festivities attracted a larger, vicarious audience. Catherine de’ Medici had the official written account of the entire series of entertainments published in France in a handsome in-quarto volume.³ This account apparently served as the source for the artist Antoine Caron, whose sketches of the events later served as the model for the Flemish tapestry makers. At the same time, several cheaper, pamphlet-size publications advertised the entertainments to an even wider reading public. One Italian-language description of the multiday festivities was printed in Milan. A journal of the events kept by Abel Jouan, a sommelier de cuisine or high-level kitchen servant in Charles’s entourage, appeared as a small book in 1566.⁴ Beyond these published accounts, written descriptions proliferated in private correspondence, especially through diplomatic networks. Spanish, English, and Italian envoys transcribed their impressions of the ceremonies for their masters back at home. Meanwhile, the royal family sent their version of the events to French diplomats abroad, along with instructions to spread the word of their magnificence.

Figure 1. Valois tapestry depicting “The Water Fête” at Bayonne. Polo Museale Regionale della Toscana, Gabinetto Fotografico, Arrazi 493.

Within a few months of the Bayonne summit, every politician in western Europe would have heard about the entertainments staged there. The diffusion of verbal reports (and a few images) of the festivities demonstrates their importance—and ambivalent utility—as a tool of international relations. It also reveals the complexity of their reception. Their audience was diverse: international, made up of different social ranks and genders, composed of some eyewitnesses and many more vicarious spectators who relied on second-or even thirdhand knowledge of the events. Catherine de’ Medici played an active role in managing the publicity surrounding Bayonne, working to ensure that particular sectors of the audience interpreted the events in an advantageous way. Over the last century, scholars have tried to ascribe a particular political intent to the festivities, to find a clear message they were meant to send to foreign or French observers. Frances Yates, for example, argues that that the Bayonne entertainments, like other festivities staged by the Valois, made up a strategy of “appeasement.”⁵ Other scholars characterize the spectacles as a kind of propaganda,⁶ an expression of Franco-Spanish rivalry,⁷ or even “a military exercise preparatory to war.”⁸ All of these interpretations, although partially valid, overestimate the efficacy and clarity of the performances. As eyewitness accounts and the proliferation of texts created by the hosts to document the entertainments make clear, the Bayonne entertainments were polysemous and equivocal—perhaps intentionally so—and led to multiple readings by different sectors of their fractured audience.

In fact, such equivocation was central to the entertainments’ diplomatic function. Creators, sponsors, and reporters used several different approaches to make the entertainment serve their political ends. The concept that unites and underpins these diverse techniques is the Renaissance notion of “concordia discors” or discordant harmony.⁹ This idea traces its origins to the philosopher Heraclitus, who described the cosmos as a fluid system whose unity was assured by active tension between opposing elements. The dynamic equilibrium between fire and water, earth and air, held the universe together. Adopted and adapted by thinkers of subsequent generations, this vision of the natural world reached Rome and was handed down from Latin authors to Humanist readers in sixteenth-century Europe.¹⁰ There, “concordia discors” became a master trope for poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, and politicians—a key term to account for differences, disagreements, or tensions in nature and society. Struggle was an inevitable part of the universe. Opposing forces just needed to be put in balance, harmonized in some way, for order to be achieved. The Bayonne entertainments realized this ideal by creating a powerful aesthetic experience that united its diverse audiences while also allowing spectators sufficient freedom of interpretation to accommodate competing political agendas. The case of the Bayonne entertainments exemplifies how the forms and practices of court spectacle allowed for such a diplomatic orchestration of spectator experiences. Festive concord provided a superficial gloss under which statesmen attempted—though not always successfully—to manage political discord.

The Road to Bayonne

Europe in the early 1560s was certainly a discordant place with intensifying conflicts between Protestant and Catholic factions. France’s troubles were especially dire. Following Henri II’s sudden death in 1559, noble families conspired against each other to seize power and fighting between sectarian factions plagued many French cities. Religious strife led international alliances to crumble, too. Peace between France and Spain was briefly established with the ratification of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, but by the following year the rise of Protestantism in France alarmed the Spanish monarch.¹¹ Spain and the Italian states blocked French proposals for ecclesiastical reforms at the Council of Trent, prompting the radicalization of Huguenots in their opposition to the Catholic state, while England considered aiding Protestant rebels against the French monarch.¹² Although the French government ultimately chose to reaffirm the Spanish alliance by violently suppressing Protestant dissent, in the 1560s diplomatic tactics were still preferred. Catherine took several political and symbolic measures to restore stability to the kingdom, including enacting the Edict of Amboise to grant limited religious freedom to French Protestants and declaring her thirteen-year-old son Charles old enough to reign.¹³ She then planned a grand tour of the kingdom to introduce the king to his subjects. The court set off from Paris in January 1564 and spent the next 829 days traveling throughout the provinces, making pompous royal entries with richly symbolic parades and processions in over one hundred cities and towns.¹⁴ At a time when, at least theoretically, the monarch’s authority was underwritten by divine right, the king’s physical presence among his people served as a powerful ritual to confirm and reinforce his rule.¹⁵

In the middle of the royal voyage, the court stopped in Bayonne near the French border with Spain.¹⁶ Like the shorter stops on the tour, this two-week sojourn brought Charles and the court into contact with the local populace. Yet the focus turned briefly away from domestic politics to international diplomacy as Catherine and Charles attempted to heal relations with their European neighbors, particularly Spain.¹⁷ France’s specific objectives for the summit, however, were not very clear. Even as Catherine assured the Spaniards that restoring relations with Philip II was her top priority, she explored a potential marriage between Charles and Elizabeth I of England. She invited a Turkish ambassador to a nearby village for private talks with the king about trade relations between France and the Ottoman Empire.¹⁸ In short, France had several diplomatic irons in the fire at Bayonne, and many of their tentative projects for alliance were incompatible with one another. Negotiations were carried out privately, sometimes secretly, in one-on-one meetings and through letter exchanges.¹⁹ Once foreign diplomats attached to the French court registered the ambiguity of Catherine’s intentions, they stopped engaging in serious dialogue. Insufficiently convinced of the French monarchy’s will to contain Protestantism and troubled by French interest in American territories claimed by Spain, Philip II declined even to attend, sending only his queen to accompany the Spanish delegates.

The fuzziness of the diplomatic aims of the Bayonne Interview contrasts with the outwardly brilliant splendor of its theatrical entertainments. As the centerpiece of the series of festivities that made up the royal tour, the Bayonne entertainments honored their foreign spectators by greeting them with the pomp and lavishness suited to their regal station.²⁰ Despite financial pressures on the beleaguered French state, the organizers spared no expense.²¹ As the chronicler Jacques-Auguste de Thou wrote in his Histoire universelle, “Never had the French nobility made such a beautiful expenditure, the queen wishing it so; never had one spent so much on feasts, spectacles, and tournaments, on balls and all sorts of entertainments.”²² There were elaborate set designs, theatrical machines, costumes, original music, choreography, and poetry by France’s best literary talents, including Jean-Antoine de Baïf, founder of the Académie de poésie et de musique, and the renowned sonneteer Pierre Ronsard. Why did the French court go to such lengths to entertain dignitaries at a summit whose outcomes were only ever tenuous at best?

Catherine de’ Medici certainly valued court spectacle as an instrument of politics. Margaret McGowan credits her with making balls, ballets, and other festivities a regular feature of the courtly calendar in France.²³ The Florentine queen explained her promotion of such entertainments as a tactic to distract and appease the nobility in a 1563 letter to Charles IX in which Catherine outlined a lifestyle beneficial to the health of the young king and his state. As part of a routine of public audiences, hunting parties, and private study, she recommended that he “hold a ball twice a week, for I heard your grandfather the king say that two things were necessary to live in peace with the French … keep them joyous, and busy them with some exercise.”²⁴ Entertainments also served as a form of conspicuous consumption—a grand expense to show foreign princes that France had the financial wherewithal to “waste” money on lavish pleasures. As Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme wrote: “I know that many in France condemn this expense as too extravagant; but the Queen always said that she did it to show foreigners that France was not as completely ruined and impoverished by the recent wars as was thought.”²⁵ Seen in this light, court spectacles count as an example of what Georges Bataille calls “unproductive expenditure”: a sacrificial destruction of wealth for the sake of display.²⁶ Both of these explanations of entertainments’ political uses bypass the content of the spectacles: their imagery, the quality of their music and dance, the meaning of their poetry. The mere existence of festivities is sufficient to accomplish these political goals.

Not surprisingly, the artists who produced the festivities espoused a very different perspective on their work’s effectiveness. Many belonged to or were associated with La Pléiade, a group of poets devoted to renovating French versification. The most important for this discussion, Jean-Antoine de Baïf (the son of an ambassador to Venice), founded his academy with the purpose of bringing music and poetry into closer harmony. Words had a “sonic power,” Baïf believed, and this force could be intensified by setting words to rhythmic music.²⁷ In fact, for the poets and composers in Baïf’s circle, the special power of measured music was at the root of all other arts and sciences. They subscribed to what Georgia Cowart dubs the “harmonia mundi” model of understanding music’s effects.²⁸ Influenced by Plato and Pythagorus as filtered through Boethius and Ficino, they believed that sweet melodies allowed audiences to experience a physical manifestation of divine accord. Music, in this view, especially when accompanied by measured verses and the well-ordered visual spectacle of dance, had a therapeutic effect, balancing the humors and replicating celestial harmony within the listener’s mind and body.²⁹ The moral and, by extension, political value of these theories was articulated in the Lettres patentes that justified the founding of the Académie de poésie et de musique: “And as the opinion of several great personages, legislators as well as ancient philosophers, is not to be disdained, let it be known that it is of the utmost importance for the morals of a city’s citizens that the music commonly used in the land be restrained under certain laws, all the more so because the minds of most men are shaped and behave according to how that music is; such that where music is disordered, there morals are also depraved, and where it is well ordered, there are the men well-formed and instructed in morality.”³⁰ The document implies a causal relationship between music and morality. Reforming music will reform men’s souls, which will in turn restore order to the polity.

A closer look at the theory that informed the Academicians’ understanding of music’s powers, however, shows that the relation between music and political order was not one of linear causality but rather one of hierarchal correspondences. If a particular piece of music succeeded in replicating celestial harmonies in a worldly form, it would act as a mediator between the earthly and heavenly realms, bringing listeners’ bodies and minds into concord with the music of the spheres. As Pontus de Tyard wrote in his Solitaire second, it was possible to achieve “the elevation of the soul through music.”³¹ Music, in other words, had an anagogical function. It lifted listeners up, oriented them toward a spiritual ideal. The poets who studied and collaborated with Baïf understood not only music but all the artistic facets of court entertainment in similarly vertical terms. Their poetry was richly metaphoric. Their themes were usually allegorical. The total spectacle of a court entertainment directed viewers’ minds to higher, more abstract thoughts.

In the case of multimedia entertainments, this vertical orientation functioned in two ways, each with its own diplomatic implications. As sensory and aesthetic experiences, spectacles transported their audiences to a higher state of harmony, peace, and spiritual contemplation. Perhaps, as theorists suggested, they allowed for a momentary experience of utopia in which mortal cares and political divisions could be transcended. Seen in this light, entertainments worked as a kind of diplomatic ritual creating a sacred (if temporary) aesthetic meeting ground where worldly differences could be overcome. As series of texts and icons to be interpreted, on the other hand, the entertainments directed their spectators toward increasingly abstract concepts through an allegorical process. In a diplomatic context, this movement toward abstraction created space for the coexistence of competing interpretations. Allegories only produce stable meanings when the reading community agrees on the interpretative master code that should unlock them. The international audience for a diplomatic entertainment did not necessarily share such a coherent code. Through the separate but complementary dimensions of aesthetic power and invitation to reading, the entertainments may have fostered a superficial unity (of feeling) while in fact promoting diversity (of interpretation) among its various spectators.

Staging Concord

The mise-en-scène of harmonious unity at Bayonne began with the choice of setting. The incontestably Catholic, border city of Bayonne was charged with diplomatic meaning as well as providing a geographically convenient meeting place for a summit whose chief participants were France and Spain.³² Its proximity to the frontier allowed Charles and Catherine to greet the Spanish queen on her own territory, when she arrived by boat sailing down the Bidasoa river that served as the natural dividing line between the two countries. Several observers remarked on Bayonne’s status as an equal meeting ground. Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, third duke of Alba, Philip II’s trusted delegate at the summit, gave a detailed account of the queen’s reception in a letter to the king: “Yesterday her majesty departed at noon, went down to the river, where the king and queen awaited her; they [the queen and her entourage] got into boats … and they crossed from the Spanish side; they alighted on land, where they were received with much love.”³³ The English ambassador in Madrid, who likely heard about the meeting from both Spanish and English sources, reported that “the King of France received the Queen in the boat, having one foot in Spain,” a slight exaggeration of conciliatory gestures witnessed by the Duke of Alba.³⁴ A French eyewitness described Elisabeth’s procession into the city, noting that she passed below a painting of herself with a coat of arms “half French, half Spanish,”³⁵ and that her route was lit by flaming torches in a nod to the “Spanish style.”³⁶ The blending of French and Spanish aesthetics announced a program of artistic conciliation that continued throughout the conference.

The transformation of the Franco-Spanish borderland into a utopian space governed by love and friendship rather than politics was a recurring theme of the entertainments. A poem recited as part of the allegorical “assault” on the enchanted castle succinctly illustrates this artistic move:

Between the high ramparts of the Pyrenees’ points

Is enclosed a country of fortunate lands,

Delicious country, where happy sojourn makes

A peaceful people under the reign of Love.³⁷

Although modern readers might dismiss the poem’s facile erasure of political difference as naive or propagandistic, the creators of the entertainment deployed a number of tools and techniques to reinforce its sense of unity and commonality among diverse spectators.

First, the artists relied on a program of imagery and a vocabulary of performance behaviors common to a noble audience in despite of cultural and linguistic differences. Iconography drawn from Classical mythology provided one important, shared lexicon. Several of the ethnicities represented in the masquerade tournament hailed from the Classical Mediterranean world. Charles IX came as a Trojan—a founder of Rome—accompanied by his brother, who was dressed as an Amazon queen.³⁸ On the second day of festivities, Philip II’s chief delegate, the Duke of Alba, inducted Charles into the Order of the Golden Fleece, a chivalric society that took its name from the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, often associated with themes of royal or imperial power. Jupiter, Venus, and Cupid played key roles in the allegorical enchanted castle play, and Neptune sang during the water pageant. French, Spanish, and Italian eyewitnesses could more or less accurately identify these figures on sight and immediately grasp what concepts they were meant to represent. In addition to offering a high degree of legibility, Greek and Roman references allowed viewers to commune with a time and place considered to be the common origin of European cultures according to the prevalent discourse of translatio imperii. As Aby Warburg puts it, the frequent appearance of Classical figures in early modern court festivals “afforded a unique opportunity for members of the public to see the revered figures of antiquity standing before them in flesh and blood.”³⁹ The presence of ancient personages in performance collapsed the temporal distance between spectators and their idealized past, allowing them to dwell within that shared vision of Greco-Roman antiquity.

Theatrical performance always, in some sense, transfers audiences to another time and place. Samuel Weber calls theater a “medium” precisely because it serves as an agent of mediation between the space of the performance and an imagined “elsewhere” that space represents.⁴⁰ The Bayonne festivals used this capacity of performance to convey participants not only to a shared vision of Classical antiquity but also to another idealized historical landscape: that associated with chivalry. Poetry, set design, and costumes asked spectators to transport themselves to a legendary feudal landscape borrowed from popular romances. Festive rehearsals of chivalric practices such as jousts and tournaments were a regular feature of Renaissance court culture.⁴¹ Even in this context, though, the events at Bayonne stood out both for the concentration of chivalric activities and for the sustained use of Arthurian themes.⁴² This mythical chivalric imagery effectively transformed the ground on which the festivities took place. For the duration of the entertainments, the French courtiers, foreign royals, and diplomats who made up the group of participants and spectators no longer found themselves on the western edge of the French kingdom. Instead, they occupied a fictional landscape that belonged equally to all their national cultural traditions. The tilt-yard, the enchanted castle, and the tournament field represented the natural habitat for the European aristocracy, spaces where they could practice the arts of war that constituted “the true activity of Nobles.”⁴³

The entertainments highlighted the easy translatability of codes of chivalry across national traditions by having participants dress themselves in diverse national costumes. According to the official account, actors in the ring-tilt joust performed as “several knights and ladies of diverse nations.”⁴⁴ As the account discloses, the “Knight and Ladies” were in fact played by French and Spanish noblemen, costumed as French, Moorish, Spanish, and Scottish warriors and their female companions as well as figures from antiquity.⁴⁵ Although eyewitnesses failed to accurately identify the nationalities the players were supposed to represent, they did pick up on the international theme. A French observer noted: “The knights who ran the joust were not armed but were masked, some dressed in the Spanish style, some in the Italian…. The others were dressed magnificently and diversely.”⁴⁶ An anonymous Spanish spectator simply stated that each knight was “dressed in the clothes of all the nations that are known.”⁴⁷

The visual theme of national diversity in this entertainment amplified or called attention to the joust’s role in uniting the various nationalities represented by its participants. Because both countries shared a tradition of chivalric performance, all spectators were able to comment on the event with competence and authority. The Spanish reporter, for example, declared that “all ran very well and on good horse[s].”⁴⁸ While international spectators could all appreciate the equestrians’ demonstration of skill, other French and Spanish noblemen and women were brought together by performing side by side in the tournament.⁴⁹ The Duke of Alba even had the honor of serving as one of twelve Masters of the Camp (a fact noted by the Spanish eyewitness).⁵⁰ The men—including, it seems, those costumed as women—ran the joust.⁵¹ The queens and the ladies in their entourages played an equally important role as privileged spectators, seated in viewing stands high above the field. Although seemingly passive, the women completed the chivalric tableau by providing the feminine gaze required to approve the knights’ skillful exploits. One Spanish lady (Madalena Giron) played a particularly critical role. When a French gentleman of the king’s chamber won the joust, he bestowed his prize upon her—a classic knightly gesture from the tradition of courtly romance.⁵² Courtliness mapped onto the relationship between the two countries, with France figured as the chivalric hero full of prowess, Spain as the revered object of his loyalty and idealized love.

Although the aristocrats who played in the joust have not left firsthand accounts of their experience, the resources of performance theory provide a way to speculate about the entertainment’s effects on them. The tournament invited the actors—French and Spanish, male and female, royals and delegates—to imagine themselves as belonging to the same courtly community. This fictional conceit is established in the textual apparatus of the performance as recorded in the Recueil des choses notables: “Their Majesties were informed that there had arrived several Knights and Ladies of diverse nations, who desired the king’s protection: and before receiving this honor, they wanted to test their skill and valor in his Majesty’s presence: and taking their leave they begged him to give them safe haven at his Court, and freedom to make a camp, where they might perform those tests in presence of their Majesties and the Knights and Ladies of their Courts.”⁵³ Functioning as a speech act, this request from the “Knights and Ladies” effectively transformed the summit site into a medieval court and chivalric “camp.” In this fictional scenario, the knights and ladies, despite hailing from “diverse nations,” pledge their loyalty to a single lord and engage in a common performance of chivalric prowess to impress him. In this respect, the performance took place in what Victor Turner terms the “subjunctive mood” of culture, a mode of thinking and behaving “as if” other social rules applied.⁵⁴ Courtliness, in many ways, is inherently “subjunctive.”⁵⁵ By definition, it demands an enactment of a predetermined code, a set of idealized behaviors. The European tradition always figured these ideal behaviors as belonging to an earlier age. If Renaissance jousting tournaments repeated celebrations associated with medieval court life, romances in turn encouraged their audiences to discover their models of comportment in the legendary past of Arthur’s round table. The rituals of courtliness were overlaid with nostalgia for a perfect court society situated in a lost time and place. In the Bayonne entertainment, chivalric imagery united participants in an enactment of this nostalgia and in performance of a shared aristocratic ideal.

The poetry woven into the performance enhances this experience of nostalgia. After the entry procession of costumed knights and ladies, six women present a “cartel” or inscribed card to Charles:

Who will ever believe it, who will ever be able to believe

Such a rare event? O Goddess of Memory

Engrave with your blade in the century to come

The rare memory of such a rare event.⁵⁶

The poem plays with tenses to project its listeners into an imagined future time in which the present moment belongs to a wondrous past. The verses ask the audience to look back on themselves and the tournament as a spectacle, joining them together as a new kind of public. Through these multiple rhetorical and performance strategies, the chivalric display and its texts momentarily unite the diverse actors as a community occupying a single, utopian cultural space.

A somewhat different form of ideal, shared world was evoked by the use of pastoral tropes during the queen mother’s banquet. Following Neptune’s recital and the mock hunt of the artificial whale, guests disembarked from their pleasure boats to a bucolic setting. They were welcomed by courtiers dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses who performed rustic dances to music played on bagpipes and musettes and bestowed gifts of silk flowers and little toy sheep made from silver embroidery thread. Such pastoral imagery—inspired by the Eclogues of Virgil, Ovid’s retelling of the Orpheus myth, and other classical antecedents—was a commonplace of court festivities throughout the early modern period.⁵⁷ As Louis Auld notes, “Various writers have seen in pastoral the representation of a basic mode of human existence in idealized and generalized form, one with which all may identify.”⁵⁸ The pastoral celebrates love, friendship, and being in nature stripped of all the trappings of culture and politics.

Yet, in practice, the deceptively simple aesthetic could serve as a powerful agent of symbolic power. As Meredith Martin observes, Catherine de’ Medici had long favored pastoral stylings in her ceremonies as a way to associate herself with iconographies of fertility and maternity, enhancing her status as a figurative mother to the French nation.⁵⁹ The evocation of regional cultures in pastoral music and dance also helped to stage the royal family’s claim to French territory. Marguerite de Valois (the king’s younger sister) recalled in her memoirs that the shepherds in this entertainment represented “all the provinces of France” and that each troupe of performers “danced in its regional style” from Poitevin to Provençal to Breton.⁶⁰ For French observers, Marguerite’s account suggests, the spectacle amounted to a synoptic pageant of provincial identities, a tour of France through its folk dances. Foreign viewers, however, seem not to have picked up on this nationalistic dimension. The Spanish viewer describes the show as a generic pastoral affair.⁶¹ While the regional connotations of particular costumes and dances were invisible to foreign guests, they could still appreciate the global significance of the pastoral mode, whose evocations of the simple charms of rural life epitomized aristocratic otium and pleasure. The poems sung by several performers dressed as nymphs underscore this theme:

I no longer fear the return of your troubles,

Since I see the French and the Iberian

Joined and united, not as foreigners,

But as two sibling shepherds.⁶²

The poem attempts to replace political alliance with a simpler, more natural form of relationship evoked with the image of “sibling shepherds.” The contrast implies that shepherds are too naive to understand the political conflicts and divisions experienced by subjects of particular states. By playing at shepherds, the guests will naturally forget their differences as well. In the environment of “this river and wood,” participants are free “to feel your joy reaching toward the heavens.”⁶³

Pleasure itself cannot be underestimated as a means to create a sense of unity among those who attended these entertainments. Banquets, late-night suppers, and elegant collations punctuated the program festivities at Bayonne. Abel Jouan pays particular attention to the food served during the festivities, conveying the copious nature of one feast by listing its dishes: “Magency hams, tongues of beef … all sorts of candied fruit, salads, jellies, and a great abundance of wine.”⁶⁴ These gustatory events appealed to all guests regardless of rank or nationality. Perhaps for this reason, the anonymous Spanish spectator lavished special attention on meals. He remarks on the “saroo” enjoyed after the joust and the dinner served before the enchanted-castle masquerade, and gives a detailed account of the seafood-laden menu consumed after the water pageant. The obvious convivial nature of feasting was reinforced in the traditionally Catholic societies of France and Spain where the act of breaking bread had an especially deep connection to concepts of fellowship and communion.

Sonic pleasures similarly appear in witness accounts as agents of connection. The theme of harmony prevails in references to music. The Spanish author, for example, describes how knights in the masquerade were fêted “with the best musical harmony and with all the kinds of instruments that are known” and how guests at the queen’s banquet were serenaded “with much harmony from the music of many instruments.”⁶⁵ His phrasing perfectly reflects the ideal of concordia discors—harmony emerging from the sounds of myriad different instruments. An Italian account of the Sirens’ song at Catherine’s banquet noted that it “exceeded every sweetness.”⁶⁶ The same author described the reaction to a song performed during the allegorical tournament: it “left the souls of everyone rather desirous that such a song would last forever.”⁶⁷ These references to harmony indicate that audiences broadly accepted the view of music’s effects espoused by the court artists who were responsible for creating the entertainments.

As discussed previously, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Pierre Ronsard, and their collaborators worked under the philosophical assumption that art really did have the power to remake its audience as a harmonious body. The notion that spectacle can unify its audience into an ideal community has an echo in some recent work in performance studies. Most notably, Jill Dolan has explored the “utopian” possibilities opened up by performances that unite viewers, however temporarily, through a common emotional and aesthetic experience.⁶⁸ In the moment of performance, spectators feel connected to each other by their awareness of shared feeling.

To some degree, eyewitness accounts of the Bayonne entertainments bear out this hypothesis. Observers depict the spectacles as a rich, absorbing, visual experience. Ekphrastic passages elaborating costumes, decor, and theatrical machines give way to expressions of amazement and marveling. The anonymous Spanish writer, for example, describes the enchanted-castle entertainment in admiring terms, lauding their “most beautiful invention” and “most beautiful artifice that has ever been seen,” especially the sight of “all the flowers that could be imagined made from silk.”⁶⁹ The density of superlative constructions conveys the viewer’s sense of wonderment. Moreover, the author’s insistence that the spectacle surpassed all imagining implies that all audience members shared this response. This entertainment, he tells us, was objectively amazing. In this respect, he describes a “utopian” audience response in which a sublime aesthetic experience obliterates individuality and joins the assembly in a common feeling.

Finally, this experience of audience communion was not always the direct result of the artists’ efforts. Many spectators of live performance have had the experience of witnessing a mistake—a flubbed line in a play, a false note in a concert, an acrobat’s misstep. These errors remind us of the “liveness” of performance. A perfect show may be repeated, but an accident is unique, sharpening spectators’ awareness of the performance’s ephemerality. It transforms them into witnesses of a one-time event, and therefore into a community.⁷⁰ This seems to be what happened at the end of the island banquet. This entertainment, which began with a theatrical pageant on the water and continued with the pastoral dance recital, ended with a grand feast that lasted until one in the morning. In the dark (and probably tipsy), the guests returned to their residences the way they arrived—by boat. The disembarkment was eventful. As the Spanish chronicler wrote, “There were great disgraces and falls of ladies and women and individuals.”⁷¹ Marguerite de Valois attributed the “confusion of the retreat” to a storm that broke during the return trip. The disorder was redeemed because it “supplied as many good tales to laugh over the next day as the magnificent feast had supplied pleasures.”⁷² The scene of confusion on the night of the banquet had an afterlife as an event that spurred continued interactions among its witnesses.

As these various eyewitness accounts illustrate, the entertainments succeeded, at least to some extent, in creating an atmosphere of harmony and commonality. In the case of Bayonne, this convivial atmosphere failed to translate into any kind of real political accord. But the entertainments proved themselves politically useful as a focal point for a campaign of mediation and interpretation in their wake.

Discordant Accounts

Previous scholarship on the political significance of the Bayonne festivities has tended to assimilate them to a domestic French politics of spectacle.⁷³ Like entertainments staged for a predominantly French courtly audience (such as the court’s going-away party at Fontainebleau in 1564), the Bayonne festivities centered in large part around King Charles. In the opening tournament, the knights and ladies “of diverse nations” paid tribute to him alone. He had the honor of liberating Peace from the enchanted castle. Throughout the festivities, encomiastic poetry fêted the French king as the most noble, courageous, powerful sovereign. Neptune’s Tritons declared their obedience to him.⁷⁴ A personified Heroic Virtue declared, “I have my seat and dwelling place / In the royal heart of Charles King of France.”⁷⁵

Although valid with respect to French spectators, this reading leaves out the experience of foreign viewers loyal to sovereigns other than Charles. How were they supposed to react to such enactments of his singular power? Eyewitness accounts suggest that, for some spectators, the most blatant affirmations of the French king’s supremacy simply did not register. It is important to recall that in the mid-sixteenth century the French language did not yet hold a privileged stature in Europe. Although French was becoming a “second lingua franca” after Latin, it was far from universally spoken.⁷⁶ Even the Duke of Alba, Spain’s foremost diplomat, had a poor command of French.⁷⁷ By choosing to feature exclusively French-language poetry and song lyrics, therefore, the creators of the Bayonne festivities excluded a significant part of its audience from full comprehension.⁷⁸ This fact becomes obvious in a Milanese account of the entertainments whose author claimed that the canto sung by Heroic Virtue (cited above) lauded Philip rather than Charles.⁷⁹ While the language barrier caused some misunderstandings, nationally specific iconologies obscured other politically charged meanings from foreigners’ view. The fact that Charles participated in the first joust dressed as a Trojan, for instance, had a particular resonance for French courtly viewers: a commonplace in royal imagery, the reference to Troy evoked a specifically French version of translatio imperii that traced the monarch’s ancestry to the founders of ancient Rome. Not primed to look for this allusion, foreign observers only noted that the king wore an “ancient” or “ornate” costume, while the visual assertion of French supremacy apparently passed them by. In this way, the Bayonne festivities navigated between imageries and sensory pleasures accessible to all its guests with specific verbal and visual signs legible only to a restricted portion of its audience. The entertainments revealed content to some while concealing it from others—and often they did not even realize they were missing something. This “something for everyone” quality of the festivities made them ripe for manipulation in post-event mediation by politicians.

Before the French court could pack up their affairs and move on from Bayonne to the next stop on their tour, Catherine de’ Medici and her son began writing letters reporting on the recently completed summit. Their correspondence dispersed an array of slightly varying images of the event to sovereigns and diplomats all over Europe. Catherine herself took charge of authoring the version of the festivities presented to Philip II of Spain. In a July 6 letter, she profusely thanked her son-in-law for allowing Elisabeth to come to Bayonne and further assured him that her reception was evidence of the “will and zeal that we have for our religion.”⁸⁰ The letter’s highly idiosyncratic spelling and grammar bolster the impression that this was a personal missive issued directly from the hand of the Florentine queen without the intervention of secretaries. Her personal authority as organizer of the summit and its festivities guarantees the interpretation given to Philip. Through this document, in other words, Catherine rhetorically links her actions at Bayonne to her own deep desire and “zeal” to join Philip in defending the Catholic faith.

She projected a different version of events, however, to other audiences. On the same day that she wrote her letter to Philip, Catherine also wrote to François de Montmorency, Marshal of France and governor of Paris and Ile de France. In this document, she attested: “During our interview we spoke of nothing but caresses, festivities, and good feasting, and in general terms of our mutual desire to continue the friendship between their Majesties and to conserve peace between their subjects, also in truth the chief reason and occasion for the interview was simply to have this consolation of seeing the queen my daughter while we were close to the border and not to lose such a chance.”⁸¹ Here Catherine understates the political alliance highlighted in her letter to Philip, figuring it as mere “continued friendship” construed in only the most “general terms.” Meanwhile, she buries the summit’s diplomatic goals in an abundance of references to family life and intimate affections. Bayonne was not so much an international event as a family reunion. Its festivities represented so many “caresses,” demonstrations of a mother’s love and joy at seeing her daughter again.

Montmorency, a moderate Catholic and supporter of Catherine’s conciliatory policies toward French Protestants, may have been receptive to this vision of the Bayonne events. More important, this interpretation was suitable for circulation within Montmorency’s Parisian jurisdiction. The idea that the conference was a nothing more than a party for the queen’s daughter would reassure Protestants and supporters of toleration who feared the consequences of a closer alliance with militantly Catholic Spain. The three separate pamphlets on Elisabeth’s reception and entry into Bayonne published in France reinforce this image of the meeting, narrating events as gestures of familial hospitality saturated in motherly love. One pamphlet, for example, depicts Catherine de’ Medici greeting her daughter with “much joy and caresses”: “The aforementioned lady grandly honored the queen her mother, and bowed deeply to kiss her hands, which the queen mother would not allow or stand for, and raising her up kissed her and embraced her, feeling her fondness redoubled, as a mother.”⁸² Building on ubiquitous portrayals of Catherine de’ Medici as a maternal figure, the intensely emotional language of this account of her reunion with her daughter leads its readers to see the Bayonne festivities as a personal rather than political meeting. The images of generosity, concord, joy, and affection that abounded in the live ceremony acquired new importance in these textual re-creations of the royal encounter.

The French and Spanish governments both projected an image of personal affection and harmony to their wider European audience.⁸³ In a June 21 letter to Philip, the Duke of Alba explained that he worked to publicize the “good relations” between the two monarchs “such that everyone understood it and no one could doubt it.”⁸⁴ Philip aided this effort in an August 24 letter to Cardinal Pacheco in which he explained: “The interviews … aimed to satisfy the desires of Catherine and Elisabeth to see each other and to enjoy the affectionate tenderness that must exist and that is ordinarily found between a daughter and a mother.”⁸⁵ On the French side, Charles wrote to Arnaud du Ferrier, the French ambassador in Venice, that the “pleasures and recreations” given to his sister constituted a lavish display of affection which

will serve to strengthen more and more the perfect friendship already established by this alliance between us and the Catholic king her husband and to conserve and perpetuate the good peace of the neighborliness of our States and subjects which is in truth the chief reason and occasion for which we have sought this interview from one and the other side…. Throughout the entire interview one spoke only of caresses, pleasures, and good feasting and nothing more than the continuation of our mutual friendship in those general terms customarily used between friends who have nothing to demand of one another.⁸⁶

The uncanny echoes between this letter and Catherine’s missive to Montmorency suggest that they both resulted from a coherent diplomatic strategy devised by the royal family and their advisors. Both documents downplay the conference’s political import in favor of a narrative of familial affection.⁸⁷

The obvious rhetoric of understatement in Charles’s letter to his ambassador—particularly in phrases such as “nothing more than”—paradoxically awakens the reader to the very possibilities it denies. What might constitute that elusive “more than”? What kind of “demands” are being forsworn? In his instructions to Du Ferrier, Charles anticipated that his account of the Bayonne events would give rise to such speculation: “We mustn’t doubt that there will be many false rumors conceived and produced about it, or suspicions and denials that anyone could have taken the interview lightly.”⁸⁸ He implies that his ambassador should work to counter suspicious rumors with a reassuring portrait of the Bayonne meeting as a joyous family occasion. This exchange exemplifies the politics of “incertitude” masterfully analyzed by Denis Crouzet as a defining feature of the Valois style of rule.⁸⁹ The untenable conjunction of utopianism and realism in Catherine de’ Medici’s program of conciliatory measures led observers to presuppose that all public displays of royal intent were designed to deceive or conceal a hidden agenda.⁹⁰

If France’s diplomatic partners throughout Europe seemed to harbor doubts about the aims of the entertainments, Protestant subjects of the crown expressed even greater suspicions. Crouzet’s work on Valois entertainments designed to heal domestic sectarian conflicts reveals how, in the context of a political culture that presumed a disjuncture between appearance and intent, such spectacular gestures of conciliation only served to encourage paranoid interpretations of the concealed agendas that lay beneath them. Similarly, for adversaries of the crown, the image of Bayonne as a friendly, family affair prompted speculation about the political dealings hidden behind the curtain of “caresses and pleasures.” Protestant chronicler Jacques-Auguste de Thou claimed that the Duke of Alba came to Bayonne with the Order of the Golden Fleece “in order to better cover up the secret plans that he had to convey to the king and queen.”⁹¹ He further interpreted Catherine’s expressions of joy and love toward her daughter as a distraction technique: “It seemed that the king had only invited his sister Elisabeth to offer her all sorts of pleasures. The queen mother was at ease with everyone having this idea.”⁹² In fact, Protestant commentators saw the entire royal tour as a “voyage to Bayonne,” an excuse to conspire with Spain for the eradication of the reformed faith in Europe.⁹³

Although Protestant observers expressed the most virulently suspicious interpretations of the entertainments’ meaning, France’s Catholic diplomatic rivals also displayed an apprehensive, mistrustful approach to reading the events. The exuberant visuality of the entertainments and of their subsequent descriptions provoked anxiety about what could not be seen. Observers had good reason to wonder about what was being hidden from view: according to the conference’s highest-level participants, the most meaningful negotiations took place behind closed doors. As the Duke of Alba reported in an undated letter written at Bayonne, Catherine de’ Medici would only speak to him about religious matters in her house, where presumably she had most control over who could listen to their conversations.⁹⁴ In one letter to Philip, he complained that he tried to engage the queen mother in a discussion about religious policy one evening but could not continue because they were in a small room and “we couldn’t speak without being heard as there was a crowd of people in it to go out to the celebration in the plaza.”⁹⁵ Charles conducted several meetings in private, including some at a convent located a few miles outside the city. These secret interviews did not escape the notice of other guests. The anonymous Spanish chronicler, for example, remarked: “The king of France made many people jealous because he invited them to dine one by one at his house each night.”⁹⁶

In the context of the highly public, theatrical culture of the court, privacy and intimacy were powerful alternative forms of performance. Exclusive proximity to a monarch conferred favor on an individual.⁹⁷ For those excluded, the private meetings constructed restricted, forbidden spaces and an attendant desire to penetrate them. Finding out what happened behind closed doors was a major part of diplomats’ jobs.⁹⁸ Diplomatic correspondence reveals that secrets at the Bayonne conference did not last long. Charles’s meeting with the Ottoman envoy, for example, was not officially disclosed to the Spanish delegation. The royal family reserved lodgings for the envoy under a false name and Charles met with him at some distance from the site of the summit. Nevertheless, Spanish envoys learned of the meeting and the Spanish ambassador in London confirmed it to Philip in a June 25 letter.⁹⁹ From a diplomat’s perspective, a secret’s importance lies not only in the information being withheld but also in the information implied by choices regarding its concealment and discreet revelation. The measures taken to hide the Ottoman envoy from Spanish attendees constituted another kind of performance to be interpreted.

Diplomats and nondiplomatic commentators occupied space on a “continuum of suspicion” with regard to their interpretations of the events at Bayonne. French Protestants, situated on the extreme edge of this spectrum, remained deeply mistrustful of the Catholic monarchs’ motives and fixated on signs of secrecy and concealment. Protestant historian De Thou described the architecture of Bayonne, especially the royal family’s dwelling arrangements, as a mise-en-scène of secrecy. He explains that Catherine took over the bishop’s palace and had a new wooden house built “in haste” (à la hâte) right next door and richly furnished for her daughter. A gallery connected the two dwellings such that “the queen mother often went to see the queen her daughter during the nights … and she was only seen by those in her confidence. There, she conferred in secret with Elisabeth and the Duke of Alba who had the full powers of the king of Spain.”¹⁰⁰ Immediately after this description, he recounts Protestant suspicions that at Bayonne the French and Spanish monarchs pledged mutual support in suppressing Huguenots in France and the Low Countries, respectively. Those speculations appear authorized by the analysis of invisibility and concealment that precedes them.

The Protestant discourse on Bayonne demonstrates—albeit in extreme form—how the very ambiguity that ensured the festivities’ utility for diplomatic purposes ultimately escaped French monarchal control. The capacity of the entertainments to restrict particular interpretations to particular viewers was to some degree canceled out by the abundance of other possible forms of reception. In other cases, it gave rise to speculation and a degree of paranoia that ran counter to the French agenda. The performance of concord, in other words, not only glossed over discord but in fact allowed discord to proliferate through suspicious interpretations of the polysemous event.

Conclusion: Analyzing Concordant Discord

This fragmented reception of the Bayonne festivities is itself concealed from the most famous traces of the event: the spectacular tapestries discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Created several years after the Bayonne meeting, years even after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre that its most paranoid commentators saw as its ultimate result, the tapestries present a remarkably unified portrait of the entertainments. The composition draws all eyes to the wondrous spectacles at their center, testaments to the Valois family’s splendor.¹⁰¹ As Roy Strong suggests, they also serve as “tangible monuments” to the culture of court spectacle itself.¹⁰² In monumentalizing court entertainments, the tapestries depict them as singular, experienced in the same way by all observers. As this discussion reveals, this retrospective image does not completely correspond to the complex practices of observation, mediation, and interpretation mobilized by the entertainments in their own time.

The Bayonne festivities and their publication across Europe illustrate some of the diplomatic uses of the performing arts in the political and aesthetic contexts of the mid-sixteenth century. The strong cultural and familial ties among the aristocracies of western European countries, the continued importance of Catholic traditions, and the predominance of neo-Platonic theories and belief in the universality of the arts all conspired to make performances a powerful ritual affirming the unity of neighboring kingdoms despite their political differences. Yet alongside this feeling and image of community, spectators hailing from different countries and different social positions, armed with different linguistic and cultural competencies, could derive varying political interpretations from the festivities’ pompous displays. These diverse interpretations gained solidity and force in post-event accounts, particularly those distributed by the French royal family, carefully tailored to enhance political relations with each reader. The staging and mediation of the entertainments involved a complex balancing act of concealing and revealing, consolidation and dispersal. Analyzing performance in a diplomatic context requires a similar balancing act, as well as a level of comfort with uncertainty, obscurity, and multiplicity of meanings. Ambiguity is not (or not only) an assumed quality of art but a pragmatic strategy and a complement to diplomatic negotiation.

Recognizing the diplomatic multiplicity of entertainments such as those staged at Bayonne also entails imagining a more active role for spectators. Diplomats in the audience made strategic choices in interpreting entertainments and in recounting them to their sovereigns and secretaries. They exercised discretion even in the way they attended or participated in performances, conscious of the symbolism inherent in each act of sociability. The specificity of the diplomatic spectator’s point of view and the possibility of theorizing an active, “diplomatic” mode of spectatorship are the focus of the next chapter.