Читать книгу Enemies in the Plaza - Thomas Devaney - Страница 12

CHAPTER 1

The Anatomy of a Spectacle: Sponsors, Critics, and Onlookers

On 5 June 1465, about sixty years after Fernando de Antequera took up his holy sword, a group of rebellious nobles ritually deposed an effigy of King Enrique IV and crowned his half brother Alfonso king. As with the earlier event, the so-called Farce of Ávila was consciously intended to make a political statement by invoking symbolic powers and was meant to be seen by as many people as possible. The conspirators took great care to conduct it in an accessible location and to ensure that the stage was visible from every angle. The essential elements of the ritual were straightforward. Having placed a dummy adorned with the symbols of monarchy (including crown, sword, and scepter) on a stage, they read out a series of accusations against Enrique and proclaimed their sentence of dethronement. The rebels then removed the emblems of kingship and cast the effigy to the ground with a shouted curse. As described in contemporary chronicles, the effigy’s fall to the ground was the ritual’s central moment, leading to a great cry of lamentation from the massed spectators. Moments later, with the king symbolically dethroned, Alfonso strode on stage, took up the royal accouterments, and was acclaimed king by all present.¹

Spectators at this event were not, it seems, expected to remain passive or silent. Their reactions were important enough, in fact, that they were worth recording. And that tells us that these responses were also significant to the organizers of the spectacle, significant enough, perhaps, that it led them to present their performance in a manner calculated to achieve precisely that result. The ways the crowd’s behavior was recorded, however, suggest that everyone watching acted unanimously, raising several questions. How did people of the time experience an event like this or, for that matter, a tournament, a procession, or a festival? Were they seen as simple entertainments without deeper meaning or were they understood to be social or political statements? Did people view them from an innocent or a cynical perspective? Most important, how can we, several centuries later, even attempt to answer such questions when there are relatively few contemporary records that address them?

These questions matter because, as we will see, the success of the Farce of Ávila depended on the responses of the audience. People watching the event were more than onlookers, they played a role as important as those on stage. In this regard, the Farce was akin to most other urban spectacles. Processions, festivals, tournaments, political theater—all were moments that brought together people from all social classes to engage in dialogues, sometimes overt but more often subtle, about the nature of society and its priorities and values. Access to the necessary financing, expertise, and social capital permitted municipal councils, cathedral chapters, and nobles to determine the content of most public performances. Their control, however, was not absolute. Other privileged members of the community, such as merchants and artisans, sought and often obtained influence over civic spectacles, particularly annual events such as Corpus Christi. More generally, elites had to present messages that the urban population would accept; spectacles that failed to accord with popular expectations or sentiments were worse than useless, creating unrest or leaving the sponsor open to public ridicule.

This was especially relevant in frontier cities where powerful and contradictory impulses meant that a wrong step could have severe repercussions. Elites there had to tread carefully indeed if they wanted to direct public sentiment, especially regarding religious minorities, in particular directions.

Audience participation was a common feature of public pageants that permitted spectators to directly and immediately signal their approval or displeasure. The meanings of spectacles were therefore created by both sponsors and audiences. Each group or social class, even each individual, brought a set of expectations and values to a performance and created an ensemble of associations through which to interpret it. But spectacles were not, as some have suggested, blank tapestries on which the viewer could inscribe what he or she wished.² Most spectacles bore dominant meanings intended by their sponsors to produce conditioned responses from both participants and observers. This meant that there was a relatively limited range of probable reactions.

To consider one common spectacle in which many of us have participated in one way or another, a graduation ceremony can bear different connotations for each participant and spectator. For one person, the event may inspire feelings of nostalgia for milestones past. Another observer may feel reminded that commencements are one of the very few occasions on which the entire educational community comes together. Degree recipients will likely focus on their own accomplishments, but they might also be thinking of unrelated issues or be planning a subversive statement. All the while, the speaker might be thinking of nothing more profound than not flubbing a name. Even given these potentially divergent responses, however, it would be the inattentive spectator indeed who lost sight of a commencement’s central purpose in recognizing the achievements of a graduating class.

This chapter outlines the complex relationship between a performance’s intended meanings and its reception by various audiences. Given the lack of contemporary evidence, many scholars have generalized what can be considered universal aspects of public spectacle, such as the presence of cues meant to help spectators understand the purpose and structure of a performance. Such cues are, and were, often meant to inform the audience of their proper roles: where to direct their attention, what to wear, when to stand, applaud, or be silent. Yet audiences do not always do what they are told. They might be disruptive, apathetic, or overly enthusiastic. And even when they do behave as intended, we cannot assume that this demonstrates their agreement with the performance. The spectators’ lament and acclamation at the Farce of Ávila, for instance, has been taken as evidence of their complicity. In fact, these acts reveal little of their actual reactions to the event.

The crowd’s behavior instead points to a central problem in the interpretation of medieval spectacles: eyewitnesses did not typically record their personal experiences, leaving us to reconstruct them through accounts from other sources. These include subjective descriptions penned by (usually) elite authors as well as legal codes and ordinances. Attempts to legislate proper behavior at public performances, to give one example, might indicate the kinds of disorderly conduct organizers expected to encounter. Since the sources offer limited insight at best, many scholars have dismissed audiences, considering them only when particularly strong reactions were recorded. Spectator responses, however, were rarely unanimous and usually fell somewhere between blatant complicity and opposition.

To understand the experience of the crowd, we therefore must look beyond contemporary accounts to approach what one scholar has called the “culture of the spectator.”³ Spectators were both free and constrained in their reactions as a host of individual factors (such as class, gender, and religion) interacted with both community solidarity and fragmenting social tensions. Individual spectator responses were influenced by these divergent pressures, by the staging and enactment of the spectacle, and by the physical surroundings. They were therefore unpredictable. At the same time, the reactions of surrounding members of the audience can have a powerful influence on the individual, channeling his or her latent reactions into a few particular directions. This ultimately limited the potential for destabilizing or subversive outbursts.

Multiple influences, thus, acted simultaneously to regulate the range of potential audience responses. Prominent among them were widely held opinions about certain subjects. In this chapter, I consider debates regarding knightly tournaments, one of the most popular and most controversial forms of spectacle at the time. By considering in turn each of the three orders of medieval society as understood at the time—the nobility, the church, and the populace—we can see how each produced independent strands of discourse. The many arguments made to rationalize or condemn festive military exercises as well as the ways in which these strands intersected and overlapped created a network of competing alliances and perspectives. Although these did not strictly curtail an individual’s potential responses, they did set limits within which onlooker experiences were likely to fall.

Although the focus is on tournaments, there were no absolute divisions between types of spectacle at this time. Fifteenth-century tournaments often included dramatic performances and popular festivities. Sometimes they even coincided with religious processions. This merging of genres resulted in part from a repurposing of tournaments, which previously had been limited to courtly settings. They were now presented in urban contexts to mixed audiences, leading sponsors to integrate popular and ecclesiastic elements in order to enhance their appeal. The pressures of the frontier, moreover, had created new social networks and alliances. Physical and ideological uncertainty undermined, or perhaps transcended, the traditional “three orders of society.” We must be careful, therefore, about lumping frontier spectacles into a general category of urban performances.

Such an analysis, moreover, is based in part on modern observations of crowd behavior, raising the question of the degree to which we can fruitfully draw comparisons between modern and medieval spectacles. Most references to twentieth- and twenty-first-century mass culture made by historians of medieval Castile are impressionistic, intended to clarify concepts through comparison to a familiar phenomenon or to lament enduring inequalities. This approach permits the reader to visualize the events more fully but raises epistemological questions. Do modern renditions of public spectacles, often enacted at least in part for tourist audiences, bear anything in common with their medieval antecedents? Or do such comparisons ultimately delude us into thinking that we can understand experiences that have been irretrievably lost?

Book layouts can help to explain how modern analogies might apply to medieval public spectacle. A modern scholarly text includes a number of features that help readers orient themselves and access critical information, including a table of contents, footnotes, page numbers, and indexes. Such tools are relatively specific, requiring a basic level of cultural literacy for easy use. The location and format of these finding aids vary widely and we would not expect to see the same layout for a novel, for instance, as for a scientific textbook. Similarly, the mise-en-page of a medieval manuscript contains helpful features, including the organization of the page into columns that accommodated glosses and commentaries and the use of incipits and initials, all of which permit the experienced reader to move quickly and easily about the text. Both the modern printed book and the medieval manuscript offer solutions to the universal challenge of efficiently navigating a long text. Both, moreover, are part of the same centuries-long tradition. Thus, although far from identical, they bear enough commonalities that meaningful comparisons can be drawn between them. To put it another way, book layouts that mark different stages of the same process of development can be said to be written in the same language.

Public performances contain similar cues meant to help the audience navigate the event’s content and meaning. These range from overt messages clear to everyone present to subtle signals meant for only a few. As with books, some measure of cultural literacy is required to make sense of them. Such prompts are often visual, with particular combinations of color or symbols expressing complex messages about the nature of the spectacle.⁴ But they can also be verbal, with explicit statements or the tone of a speaker’s voice pointing the audience in the desired direction. Styles of dress, written signs, verbal hints, the layout of the venue: these cues act in concert to inform spectators of the type of event presented, its structure, its message, and their role. The audience can also add its own prompts, whether invited to do so or not. As these can materially affect the unfolding of the spectacle, the boundary between actors and audience is often murky.

At times, spectators play an invited, supportive role in a spectacle. Fans at modern sporting events create banners, perform synchronized gestures, engage in chants. The applause at a concert or play is an expected response that not only signals the audience’s approval but also acts as a ritualized conclusion to the performance. But audience responses do not always fit with the intended aims of a spectacle. Public spectacles always bore the possibility that some groups would take advantage of the assembled masses to advance unofficial agendas.

The interpretation of crowd reactions is often difficult. Even when we know what audience members did or said in response to a particular event, it is not always clear whether they acted to bolster or challenge its intended meaning. The response of the crowd to the Farce of Ávila is a case in point. Angus MacKay has argued that the rebel leaders sought to overcome a challenge inherent in replacing a reigning monarch: there could not be two living kings in the same land.⁵ Although he rejects the idea that the conspirators believed the effigy actually became Enrique IV in some magical way, MacKay contends it did represent the death of the king and the passing of kingship from Enrique to Alfonso.⁶ In doing so, he relies on a pair of related ideas: the Castilian understanding that kings depended on noble election and popular acclamation for their legitimacy and the more general medieval notion of the king’s two bodies, the separation of the physical person of the king and the dignitas of the crown.⁷ For the conspirators, Enrique did not die at Ávila, but King Enrique did perish when symbolically stripped of his emblems and thrown to the ground. From this perspective, the crowd’s lament was a necessary step in the ritual sequence needed to depose one king and crown another. Alfonso could take the stage to be crowned only after the people’s cries had confirmed that the effigy was dead and the throne vacant. And he could only truly be king once they had acclaimed him.⁸

Scholars have generally assumed that the lament was pro forma, an imitation of the ritual cryings (llantos) that took place at a royal funeral and preceded the acclamation of a king’s successor. But, if this was indeed the case, the language used by the chroniclers is curious. Alfonso de Palencia, although an ardent polemicist who rarely missed an opportunity to heap invective on Enrique, noted that the effigy fell to the ground “amid the sobs of those present who seemed to be crying because of the unfortunate [desastrada] death of the deposed.”⁹ If the lament was a necessary element in the ritual, why did Palencia choose to describe it as a spontaneous outpouring of grief and not explicitly as a llanto? At the funeral rites conducted in Ávila upon Enrique’s actual death in 1474, the laments not only are unambiguously referred to in the sources as llantos but bear a markedly formal character. In this case, the funeral procession stopped at four different locations on its way to the cathedral. At each of these, a black shield was shattered to the cry of “¡A por buen rey é buen Señor!”¹⁰

The idea of a ritual lament also implies that Enrique was presented as a real king deserving of the proper protocols of respect. The conspirators, in planning the event, had decided that the best means of discrediting Enrique was to accuse him of tyranny and weakness, characterizing their rebellion as a response to “the swift and sudden oppression of a tyrant who had in his favor neither mental energy, nor talent, nor capacity, nor any other gifts.” This reasoning supposes that Enrique, lacking the perquisite qualities, had never truly been a legitimate king. A ritual crying was therefore unnecessary and a potential distraction from the central message that Enrique was “king in name only.”¹¹ Furthermore, a formal lament required either that the crowd had been advised in advance to cry out at the predetermined time or that they were so well versed in royal funereal customs as to know precisely the correct moment for the lament. The latter was no mean feat. The effigy had been dressed in mourning (as if already dead) throughout the deposition but only symbolically lost its kingship upon hitting the ground. The former seems equally unlikely, as Palencia noted that the construction of the stage was the only means of publicity used to attract the people of Ávila. While the crowd could well have been “seeded” with sympathizers prepared to lead the crowd at the right time, they would have needed to be convincing indeed to entice all those present to go along. These difficulties and Palencia’s choice of words indicate that the crowd’s wailing was not anticipated, but potentially signaled that the show did not altogether please the crowd, that Enrique enjoyed at least some support in Ávila and the people felt genuine sorrow at the harsh treatment given to him in effigy.

Yet Palencia reported that this same audience erupted a short time later into the popular acclamation symbolically necessary for Alfonso to become king.¹² This seems more like the intended and perhaps planned response that MacKay suggests and challenges the idea that their prior lament for Enrique was a display of contrary emotion. So what really happened? In all likelihood, some spectators expressed genuine grief, some understood that the llanto was needed to depose Enrique properly, some followed the lead of those around them, and others remained silent. In this sense, the crowd was typical, demonstrating the difficulty of characterizing the actions, emotions, or thoughts of an assembly as if it was a unified entity. Even if medieval people conceived their identities in corporate terms, their thoughts remained their own. It does not follow that they were necessarily subsumed in the collective identity presented in a spectacle. Some at Ávila may indeed have comprehended and embraced the deeper meanings of the Farce, but we should view with skepticism the claim that all did.

When historians write about popular contexts to political propaganda, they are, in essence, describing elite efforts to sway the populace rather than directly addressing the popular reception of such propaganda. Insofar as elites of the time knew popular mind-sets better than we can, studies of how they expected (or hoped) the people would react do indeed shed light on the crowd’s responses. But there is a tendency to assume that elite agendas were realized, that the crowd understood spectacles to mean just what was intended by those who presented them.

This same set of issues holds true for spectacles conducted in frontier cities; indeed the twin stressors of amiable enmity and physical insecurity meant that both the tendency for a multiplicity of responses and the pressure on spectators to conform to those around them may have been even more intense than elsewhere. There too, however, scholars have tended to limit themselves to recreating elite perspectives. Miguel Lucas de Iranzo’s program of spectacles in 1460s Jaén is known chiefly through the contemporary Hechos del condestable, whose author was not only an intimate of Miguel Lucas, the constable of Castile, but likely participated in many of the events described. This chronicle, which revolves around detailed descriptions of the numerous feasts, pageants, and rituals that Miguel Lucas organized to commemorate nearly every significant day on the calendar, explicitly presented him as a latter-day Cid, recounting the constable’s struggles with his rivals, his daring feats against Granada, and his careful governance of Jaén. The chronicler’s emphasis on Miguel Lucas’s persona reveals the intent of his theatrical productions in ways that a more journalistic approach may not. But it also presents a perspective shared primarily by the town’s elites, telling us little about how the majority of people in Jaén experienced and understood the festivities.

Modern scholars are well aware of this problem and have focused on the intended political utility of Miguel Lucas’s theatrics to argue convincingly that he used spectacles to augment his own status and to diffuse social tensions by directing lower-class unrest toward external enemies.¹³ This approach does not seek nonelite perspectives for Jaén’s festivals, instead giving voice to the oppressed by exposing the strategies of the powerful. But, in limiting the gaze to those on stage, those scholars casually contend that the “entire urban population” of Jaén lent their support to these festivals, cheerfully absorbing not only the playacting but also the political content, and implies widespread complicity in Miguel Lucas’s agenda.¹⁴ The conclusion here, as in MacKay’s study of the Farce of Ávila, is that the common people bought into the propaganda presented to them. In both cases, the crowd’s role is reduced to a single voice, a unified roar of support. Certainly Palencia and the author of the Hechos wanted their audiences to think so, but can we trust them?

So how can historians represent enacted performances and oral popular culture known solely through such texts? Even leaving aside the question of authorial bias, the symbolic gestures in any performance are inherently ambiguous and thus capable of bearing multiple meanings in a sense that words can never be. Language can be thought of as sequential, with each word modified by the next to ultimately create meaning, while visual depictions present multiple images simultaneously, which must be read together for proper interpretation. Such multivalence is an essential aspect of a spectacle’s relevance to its audiences, for it allows meanings to be indeterminate, endlessly modifiable.

A written description of a spectacle can therefore never include all the various potential meanings because an author must emphasize one while minimizing others. Still less can the written word capture the divergent responses of engaged and participatory audiences to those multiple meanings. To return briefly to a textual metaphor, it is as if the ambiguous character of both the symbolic elements of the spectacle itself and of the crowd’s response are the marginalia on the page of a manuscript, the commentaries that offer insight into the significance found in a static text by its various readers. The chroniclers who transcribed the event offer us not the complete, annotated version but a formal, modern edition that carries only a single “authentic” version in which viewpoints apart from the dominant one have been submerged. Modern parallels offer a possible means of recovering these lost glosses, but with the danger of unintentionally introducing anachronistic concepts. But there are other options. By identifying various contemporary discourses on the social functions of spectacle, we can apply an insight gained through modern spectacle—that spectator responses are individual but constrained—while ensuring that these are confirmed by medieval sources.

Contemporary controversies over the nature and presentation of medieval pageants offer several points of view through which they were interpreted, which are roughly analogous to the “three orders” of medieval society: the rulers (e.g., the king, nobility, and knights), the church, and the people. Such a division is laid out in Alfonso X’s thirteenth-century legal code, which noted:

There are three kinds of festivals, the first, those which the Holy Church orders to be observed in honor of God and the saints; as, for instance, Sundays, the birthday of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and those of Holy Mary, of the Apostles, and of the other male and female saints. The second are those which emperors and kings order to be observed in honor of themselves; as, for instance, the days on which they are born; those of their sons who expect to reign, or the days of which they have been successful in great battles with the enemies of the Faith by conquering them, and such other days as they order to be observed in honor of themselves, which are treated in the Title on Citations. The third kind, called Ferias, are instituted for the common benefit of men, as, for instance, days upon which fruits are gathered.¹⁵

Members of each group not only participated in each kind of spectacle in different ways but also were able to draw upon a set of shared experiences and associations that conditioned their responses when they were in the audience. If we describe the interplay between cues, symbols, and associations that organized spectacles as a language, then each of these groups could be said to share a distinct dialect through which they filled in the symbolic images presented to them with the specifics of their own perspectives. This is not, of course, to say that membership in a social group imposed absolute limits on an individual’s possible reactions or that a certain performance would appeal to only one such group and no other. There was, in fact, a great deal of overlap. Many medieval religious festivals had secular aspects; at the same time, most secular festivals also had a strong religious component. Audiences were often diverse. Penitential processions, burlesque tournaments, royal entrances, spontaneous revelries—all these drew spectators and participants across social, economic, gender, and even religious boundaries.

All types of urban spectacles drew on this language to evoke particular intended responses, and each type inspired a range of corporate responses. A popular celebration such as Carnival might be broadly supported by the people, viewed with suspicion by nobles and civic authorities watchful for signs of trouble, and roundly condemned by the church on moral grounds. The perspectives characteristic of each group, however, did not constrain individuals: we do not have to look hard to find carousing priests, moralizing knights, or nervous townsfolk. But, as we shift the focus from the intent behind public spectacles to their popular reception, the interactions between these dominant strands of discourse become central. A number of critics have construed the individual as strong in the face of cultural pressures and have emphasized the ability of spectators to remake meanings to their own specifications. But these critics tend to minimize the multiplicity of influences that shape the experience and perception of performances.¹⁶ We cannot reduce audience response to a dichotomy of conformity or resistance. Nor can we say that individuals freely created their own responses. Instead there was a limited spectrum of possibilities established by ingrained cultural patterns. The sponsors of urban performances may not have been able to put a name to these processes, but they were aware of them. What they presented to the public, therefore, took into account their perceptions of likely reactions. Audiences may not have had a visible or the decisive role in determining the content of a performance, but their influence was profound and ubiquitous.

A full consideration of the range of responses to all the myriad forms of spectacle in fifteenth-century Castile would be unwieldy. A detailed reading, however, of the ways in which the nobility and the church rationalized and critiqued the knightly tournament can serve to illustrate the interplay of multiple perspectives and their influence on audience responses. Tournaments were one of the most common urban spectacles. As such, they spawned an outpouring of rhetoric that often invoked issues directly related to the frontier.

Fifteenth-century Castilian tournaments took place within the context of significant changes in the position of the aristocracy. To understand what nobles thought of their tournaments, therefore, it is necessary to first consider these contexts. On the one hand, a succession of weak kings accorded the greatest nobles unprecedented influence and power, while the Granadan frontier offered autonomy and glory, leading Castilian chivalry to the pinnacle of its fame. On the other, competition from the caballeros de cuantía (non-noble mounted warriors) and letrados (university graduates trained in canon or civil law) undermined the aristocracy’s traditional military and political roles. At the same time, nobles increasingly lived in cities where they often had to understand and address the needs of urban constituencies. These social and economic changes inspired passionate discussions on the functions of chivalry, nobility, and monarchy. Among the nobles, these took place through literary debates that explored the comparative values of arms and letters or of birth and personal achievement.¹⁷ In order to appeal to the populace, however, they adapted tournaments and dramatic skits previously limited to courtly audiences.

While the Farce of Ávila was unusual in its direct political significance, it drew on the relatively recent practice of presenting courtly exhibitions as public entertainments. This trend had gained momentum in the fifteenth century as nearly every extraordinary event or holy day was taken as an excuse for recreation or as the object of a ceremony. The range of spectacles enacted on the streets and plazas of Castilian cities is seemingly endless: processions, tournaments, mime shows, dramas, and bullfights. These marked occasions including royal visits, religious events (such as Corpus Christi, Christmas, and Epiphany), the anniversaries of key dates in civic history, noble weddings, funerals, and births, and so on. Local fêtes were often the liveliest, but external events, especially royal deaths and coronations, were publicly commemorated throughout the realm. The Farce of Ávila, for instance, was understood to make Alfonso king in Ávila only. For his crowning to be meaningful, nobles elsewhere needed to accept his claim and enact similar public rituals in their towns.¹⁸ By conspicuously sponsoring a variety of events and by controlling their content, urban nobles sought to maintain or extend their influence at the expense of their rivals.

Long-term frontier fighting and political instability exacerbated the situation. Because of the military requirements of war against the Muslims, specifically the need for large numbers of horsemen, the nobility lacked the monopoly over the role and accoutrements of the mounted warrior enjoyed by their counterparts in France and England. Members of urban militias, the caballeros de cuantía (or de premia), could claim at least some of the honors and obligations of knighthood, even though they lacked titles, and even some merchant associations adopted the trappings of chivalry.¹⁹ Political innovations dating to the mid-fourteenth-century accession of the Trastámara dynasty provided other rivals. The first of the Trastámras, Enrique II (1369–1379)had overthrown his predecessor in a lengthy civil war. Because his hold on the throne was insecure, he rewarded his followers with privileges and extensive grants of lands. The result was a transformation of the high aristocracy, as families prominent since the eleventh and twelfth centuries made way for the “new” nobility, which consisted mostly of formerly minor branches of the great old noble houses.²⁰ To balance the power of the new nobles, Enrique turned to the letrados, giving them control of the audiencia, the king’s own court of law with jurisdiction in cases involving the nobility.

While challenged by caballeros de cuantía and letrados, nobles could not even take solace in their ancient and storied lineages. Most, even those of the highest rank, traced their privileges and titles only as far back as the Trastámara accession, highlighting the contingent nature of their position. Just as they had replaced the old nobility, so too could they be replaced. So, in order to defend their privileges, the nobility had to identify those qualities that distinguished them and made their class socially relevant.²¹ It was not wealth (merchants had that, after all) or land (many noble lands remained, in theory, the property of the royal fisc) nor horse and armor (knights and urban militias fought with the same equipment and in the same manner) nor influence (which was shared with the letrados).

Ultimately, many chose to argue that true nobility derived from personal virtue. Authors like Diego de Valera and Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo emphasized that nobles and knights should earn their social status through lifelong service and an unremitting dedication to honor and prudence. These authors never lost sight of the nobility’s principal vocation of fighting, which differentiated them from the caballeros de cuantía, whose distaste for their military duties was notorious. For the true knight, lack of a civilian calling made possible the regular attention to military training necessary to his proper station: “Those who have been made knights and given very noble horses and arms suitable for mounted battle are enjoined to exercise these weapons in peacetime, so they will be the more ready whenever war looms.”²²

These authors consciously wrote of the world as it should be, not as it was, setting a high standard. Arévalo, for instance, concluded his Suma de la política with a list of the qualities possessed by a good knight, including the admonition that “every knight should be well armed and poorly dressed,” a piece of advice no doubt disconcerting for the knights and lords whose lush attire is minutely described in many chronicles.²³ But they dressed in this manner not solely from personal conceit. The bright clothes, gorgeous trappings, and general pomp that suffused their public exhibitions of military training—for such was the rationale behind their many tournaments, jousts, mêlées, and hunts—were different means of confirming their rank and place in the social hierarchy.

Armed with learned treatises that elevated their training exercises to an act of virtue, nobles throughout Castile missed no opportunity for displaying both their martial skills and their talents for putting on a good show. Johan Huizinga has argued that the knightly ideal was, at its heart, more an aesthetic than a moral code, one that presented honor in combination with egoism and audacity.²⁴ Civic spectacles, especially those with a military theme, were the ideal venue for displaying all these to the whole of society. The esteem these events supplied to those who hosted and engaged in them is incalculable. And this prestige was not only presented to their peers but displayed “above all before the eyes of the people who, just as they acclaimed monarchical power during royal entradas, were dazzled by the power, valor, and skill of the aristocracy.”²⁵

Although elusive, the virtuous ideal of those like Valera and Arévalo was not wholly ignored. It endured as a source of inspiration, a goal to be forever sought, even if only rarely attained. Nor were these authors the sole arbiters of what it meant to be noble. Though unwilling to cast aside their finery, many nobles and knights did spend their careers and often their lives in pursuit of what they saw as the epitome of knighthood: military success. During times of war, there were occasions aplenty for the bold to win glory and fame. But during peacetime, such opportunities were in short supply. This inspired a powerful disgust for kings who signed truces with Granada. It meant the frontier nobles with an urge to wage war on their own initiative were never without a supply of willing volunteers.

For many, however, the only routes to martial renown were tournaments and jousts, bitterly contested sports that at times carried a real threat of serious injury or death and therefore served as a proxy for the battlefield. For Arévalo, it was this danger, the fact that it was more than playacting, that made tournaments a worthy sport: “Particularly admirable is the joust, more so than target practice and other games of chance, because it is difficult and brings one into danger, instilling the virtue of fortitude. Moreover, the tournament is a sport even more noble than the joust, because it more closely resembles war, and is more pronounced in its danger and test of strength.”²⁶ Putting on these contests was obligatory for all aristocrats with social aspirations and there was never a shortage of participants. Many young and often penniless hidalgos, or hereditary nobles, traveled from competition to competition throughout Castile and even beyond in search of fame and advancement.²⁷ Balancing these little-known contestants were senior nobles, famous men whose presence raised the profile of a tournament. The chroniclers described the most dazzling contests as more than entertainments or diversions, as events significant in their own right, moments when love or honor or fame was won and lost.²⁸

The romances and poetry of the fifteenth century, in singing the praises of knights errant who risked their lives for the respect of their peers and the adoration of eligible women, bring their readers into a highly charged atmosphere of rivalries, real fighting, maimed contestants, and the brilliant play of sound and color.²⁹ The dramatic and romantic aspects of the knightly tournament were deliberate, an integral part of the action rather than a distraction or a backdrop. The challenges, oaths, and love interests that often organized these events reveal a blurring of the distinction between reality and fiction, as caballeros built episodes from the great romances into their own life stories.³⁰ In doing so, they gave to these sports narrative dimensions, a plot and protagonist. A tournament was rarely just a test of skills between two or more combatants, but a pivotal moment in their lives in which they sought to put into practice and on display their love, virtue, and fidelity. As such, it filled the social need for the enactment of dramatic and erotic stories that the theater, at this point still focused on biblical themes, would later appease.³¹ Even the scenery could be deliberately designed to invoke the romances, as in the tournament at Valladolid in 1428, whose sets created an imagined world that included a mock castle complete with twenty-seven towers, a belfry, and a great arch.³²

The dramatic and ornamental features of the tournament predominated at times, especially when kings or prominent nobles were involved, muting its warlike aspects and, in the eyes of those like Arévalo, its virtues. Lances tipped with coronals reduced the number of casualties and elaborate, ceremonial arnés real replaced the authentic and more dangerous arnés de guerra.³³ In losing its purely military focus, the tournament became a festive event for courtiers, with dancing, music, banquets, entremeses (brief plays, usually performed during the natural interludes between tournament events), poetry, and invenciones (word games and riddles). Such was the tournament that Alvaro de Luna, constable for Juan II, organized in honor of the royal family on 1 May 1436: “this festival was very well ordered with daytime jousts involving practice lances in a clearing and later with real weapons by torchlight in the palace. Many knights competed in the jousts, and the King, Queen, and prince dined richly in the constable’s palace and they composed skits and danced the night away.”³⁴ Luna was a master organizer of these multivalent spectacles; his biographer claimed that “he was very creative and much given to presenting invenciones and putting on entremeses in festivals or jousts or in mock battles, in which his invenciones always meant just what he intended.”³⁵

The entremeses and dramas were often comic, even burlesque, but they were never seditious. On the contrary, they served the same end as the tournaments themselves, to confirm the rank and privilege of those involved and to honor, even exalt, the monarchy. The closing ceremonies of a huge tournament held at Valladolid in 1434 neatly combined the literary, military, playful, and propagandistic aspects of knightly spectacle. After the jousts had been completed, the royals and contestants retired for dinner and dancing along with a number of nobles, ladies, and churchmen. Following dinner, the tournament judges rose and, dressed as the deities Eros and Mars, gave their verdicts, pronouncing Juan II as champion “because of his excellence as much as for the virtue of his magnificent royal person” and awarding him a fine horse while Alvaro de Luna, as host, received a feathered crest.³⁶

Far bolder was Juan II’s appearance at a 1428 tournament in Valladolid: “and the King left the tela with a dozen knights, he dressed as God the Father, and the others, all wearing crowns and each with the title of a Saint, carrying a sign of a martyr who had passed to our Lord God.”³⁷ Yet here too the overt political significance of the monarch publicly identifying himself with God was leavened with a sense of play. Even so, Juan’s decision to play God, so to speak, was a reminder to himself and to the crowd of the high expectations of a monarch. As God’s regent on earth, he was above worldly reproach but was subject to divine judgment for his actions. The theme of humility and the quest for virtue, subtle though it often was, is a constant in fifteenth-century Castilian tournaments. While publicly proclaiming their status and power through wealth, literary diversions, and military proficiency, the nobility returned time and again to the values of their order, to the integrity of past heroes, to their holy mission.

From a cynical perspective, this is unsurprising. After all, knights owed their social station to their supposed ideals of piety, generosity, and asceticism. They could do no less than pay lip service to this standard for the benefit of the people, while they were bedecked in rich apparel and prancing about on fine chargers as a prelude to long nights of playacting, dancing, and drink. But the very pervasiveness of the theme points to a real insecurity; nobles knew what was expected of them, sincerely admired the heroes of the past, and did not delude themselves into thinking that the Cid or Fernán González would have behaved so. If they devoted themselves to wholly realizing one aspect of the model, that of physical courage, they did not reject its other facets but took pains to remind themselves, even in moments of revelry, of what true knighthood meant. In subordinating but not abandoning these lofty aspirations, the caballería kept alive the hope—in themselves as well as in the people—that they would someday be worthy of them.

Huizinga and others have condemned fifteenth-century knights for propping up an outdated ideal with the same tired scenes to the point where the repetition stripped the spectacles of their original beauty.³⁸ Perhaps, however, the endurance of a few dominant motifs is evidence of their lasting utility rather than of an inability or unwillingness to move forward. The themes of the tournament were archetypal—war, love, and virtue—and their sensory expression through sound and color was compelling. Even today, the glittering knights and bright banners of the joust are evocative images of the Middle Ages. Because they were based on fundamental ideas, their meanings were malleable. Knightly spectacles were adapted to each moment, each new set of circumstances.³⁹ The Farce of Ávila, though drawing on the same set of social understandings and staged in a similar manner, has little in common with the joyful larks of Juan II’s court. Neither bears much resemblance to the ideal of knightly virtue advocated by Valera and Arévalo.

The frontier gave added resonance to the debates over the meaning and propriety of knightly tournaments. In one sense, it struck some observers as odd, even offensive, that knights would play at war while their “real” enemies lay just over the horizon. In another, just as jousts permitted nobles to symbolically define themselves and justify their place in society, the frontier was the one place in Castile where their redemption could be achieved in actuality: here play fighting and savage battle went hand in hand. The marriage of tournament and drama that evolved over the course of the fifteenth century was perhaps most fully realized on the frontier. Amiable enmity and physical insecurity provided a rich source of themes with which to play as well as a pressing need for magnates to engage with local populations. In Jaén, for instance, Miguel Lucas used tournaments and public displays of military skill as real training tools, his knights might compete against each other one day and raid Granada the next. But he also arranged complex theatrical performances to complement those tournaments, with mêlées and skirmishes often held on or near major holidays. In these productions, there was only a fine line between the political and social functions of the spectacle and the pure diversion of the entremeses. In all of his pageants, Iranzo made full use of visual elements—colorful costumes, coats of arms, and sumptuous embellishments—and constant music in order to heighten the audience’s sense of unreality and to create a fantastic and diverting environment in which quotidian cares could be forgotten. From productions such as this, in which the dramatic element sometimes overshadowed the military training, it was only a small step to pure drama, to transforming the entremeses from sideshow into main event, as at Ávila.

The defense of and theoretical justification for military exercises and contests were, in part, responses to steady but, by the fifteenth century, generally passive clerical condemnation of tournaments and spectacles that dated back centuries. In the twelfth century, church luminaries such as Bernard of Clairvaux as well as multiple popes harshly condemned the frivolity and vanity of knights, leading to a ban on tournaments. In the later Middle Ages, however, as more worldly clerics came to dominate the church, there was a shift in emphasis and in tone as the proper conduct of secular knights, and not their very existence, became the central issue. Didactic exhortations replaced, for the most part, the severity of Bernard and his ilk.⁴⁰

In fifteenth-century Castile, the prominent bishop of Burgos, Alfonso de Cartagena, saw tournaments as an analogy for the faction fighting and civil wars that had plagued the country. Arguing that two unworthy activities dominated nobles’ time, “the one is in conflicts of the kingdom, the other is in games of arms,” Cartagena devoted an entire section of his mid- 1440s Doctrinal de los caballeros, a compilation of Castilian laws relating to chivalry, to an impassioned plea that such games be banned.⁴¹ He was particularly opposed to the fanciful and idealistic notions of knighthood presented in romances such as Amadís or the Arthurian legends, which he dismissed as reading material “of no useful value.” Instead he espoused a concept of nobility akin to Valera’s, with an emphasis on knightly obligations and ideals.⁴²

For Cartagena, a knight could earn prestige and honor only through the defense of the realm and holy war, never through success at tournaments. But too many knights saw the games as an end in themselves, a way to make a living, a reputation, and even an advantageous marriage. Their focus on play not only led to injuries and to death but also fomented noble rivalries and thus delayed the prosecution of war with Granada.⁴³ The tournament was not even a useful form of military training, for it lacked the true risk to life and limb that permitted a man to test his own mettle. As such, the honors and fame granted to champions were hollow. And so he lamented:

But what can we tell ourselves, when we see a land full of money and of arms, and at peace with Granada? Should the nobles fidgeting to exercise their arms pit their armies against relatives and those who should be friends, or in jousts and tournaments, of which the one is loathsome and abominable and a thing which brings dishonor and destruction, and the other a game or test only, not the principal activity of a knight? For which reason, the philosopher [Aristotle] said that one cannot determine who is strong through tournaments and tests of arms. For true fortitude can only be known through terrible and life-endangering acts done for the common good. And an ancient proverb says that sometimes the successful tournament knight is the timid and cowardly one in battle.⁴⁴

The prevalence of tournaments was, for Cartagena, an urgent problem. The knights of Castile guarded the frontiers of Christendom, but, as he stressed in the Doctrinal, the “recovery” of formerly Christian lands had not significantly advanced since 1264 because of infighting and distractions. The heroes of the past had triumphed because of their unity and because of Muslim complacency, but also because of their piety and gratitude for divine aid. Invoking Santiago’s appearance at Clavijo, for instance, Cartagena held up King Ramiro I as a suitable model.⁴⁵ But now it was the Christians who had become complacent. Their failure to expel Islam from Iberia posed real dangers now that a new Muslim power, the Ottoman Turks, had arisen at the other end of the Mediterranean. Fearing a “pincer movement” in which Granadan and Turkish Muslims joined against them, Cartagena reminded caballeros of their obligations. Knights in France or England could play at their games and squabble among themselves; those in Castile needed to end their frivolous rivalries and engage the real enemy.⁴⁶ Noting that “jousts were banned in France at one time because it was understood that they obstructed the war in Outremer,” he explicitly compared the twelfth- and fifteenth-century situations to present the reconquest of Iberia as a holy war equal to the Crusades in its importance.⁴⁷

But Cartagena was also a pragmatist. He realized that his appeals were unlikely to end tournaments, given that papal bans had failed to do so. He therefore proposed a compromise: if knights must have their tournaments and jousts, they should do so within a strict set of rules. He specifically had in mind the code of the Order of the Band, a secular military order founded in the early fourteenth century by Alfonso XI.⁴⁸ For Cartagena, the order offered a number of advantages, foremost of which was order itself. It would join in brotherhood the young, ambitious, and competitive knights most likely to participate in tournaments. Its emphasis on piety and obedience would return knights’ attention to their duties. Jousting would be a pastime only and tournaments held under the order’s auspices would be both safer than in unregulated events (blunt weapons only would be permitted) and stripped of their playful and theatrical aspects. In short, Cartagena hoped that the Order of the Band would make the joust and melee what he thought they should be, military training exercises conducted in a spirit of collegiality rather than dangerous spectacles that sparked destructive rivalries and vendettas.⁴⁹

Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, who was Cartagena’s student, presented a far sunnier perspective. A letrado theorist and bishop of Palencia who spent much of his life in Rome, Arévalo agreed with Valera on the link between virtue and military training, describing the practice of arms in the most glowing terms. In his Vergel de los príncipes, written in the mid-1450s, Arévalo described the importance for rulers and nobles of “honest sports and commendable exercises.”⁵⁰ He began by arguing for the restorative value of such pursuits, observing that “continuous mental effort overtaxes and weakens not only the body, but also the human heart and its powers.” In need of respite from their intellectual duties, a ruler should turn to physical activity instead of passive relaxation, because, in addition to offering their own rewards, “these sports and delights are the same as comfort and repose.”⁵¹ So which kinds of physical activities were the most virtuous and necessary? Foremost was “generous and noble exercise of arms, through which not only are kingdoms and lands defended but also expanded and improved.” Second was hunting on horseback, and third was playing and composing of music.⁵² For each of these noble pursuits, he described twelve excellencias, or qualities.

He summarized the benefits of martial sports in the eighth excellencia, listing the many noble virtues it might foster: obedience, patience, perseverance, fortitude, magnanimity, liberty, openness, justice, and temperance. The exercise of arms also destroyed vices and evils, including injustice, pugnacity, avarice, pride, and arrogance. The ultimate goal of all this military preparation, as revealed in the twelfth excellencia, was no less than the redemption of the world and the triumph of good over evil. For “through such noble exercises and temporal deeds of arms, men are prepared and trained for the spiritual war which we have with our invisible enemies, that is to say, with the devil, and with the world and with vices.”⁵³ For Arévalo, this spiritual war was inherently unending and required eternal vigilance. And so the ruler “should not cease the acts and exercises and preludes which are the image of war,” for such training not only kept Christian warriors fit for battle but, by improving their moral character, were themselves significant victories in the struggle against evil.⁵⁴

Church observers may have been divided on the merits of martial sports but they had no such difficulties with nonmilitary spectacles. Clerics of all stations were regular participants in any number of organized performances, both secular (coronations, royal entrances, noble weddings, births, and funerals) and religious (the liturgy, processions honoring local saints, and sermons). Public spectacles were the central means by which the Church communicated with the masses and, like the organizers of tournaments, they intentionally evoked emotional responses through clothing, decoration, and formalized speech. Such displays could be as elaborate and expensive as any knightly creation. Feast day processions, for instance, often required ad hoc taxes to defray the costs of splendid decorations, troops of musicians, and sumptuous feasts. Another type of major event was public preaching. Although local priests generally gave Sunday sermons, municipal concejos or guilds would contract mendicants for holidays, when a big crowd might be expected.

Successful preachers were master performers, unafraid to give their lessons a theatrical character. They could move from invective to tears in a few moments and the emotional absorption of both preacher and flock could be so complete as to disturb those unfamiliar with the experience, like the later French traveler Barthélemy Joly, who commented that, “in their preaching, they make use of an impressive vehemence. … On this topic, two things disturb me in the Spanish sermons: the extreme, almost turbulent, impetuousness of the preacher and the continual sighs of the women, so loud and forceful that they completely disrupt one’s attention.”⁵⁵

Saint Vincent Ferrer’s well-documented tour through Murcia in 1411–1412, while unusual in its scale, exemplifies the importance accorded to public preaching. Ferrer, who came to Murcia at the invitation of Pablo de Santa María, bishop of Cartagena (and father of Alfonso de Cartagena), brought a retinue of three hundred, all of whom had to be fed and lodged, a task that fell to the local Dominican prior.⁵⁶ Additional preparations included the construction of a pulpit and arrangement of space for the substantial crowds who came to hear the famous preacher. Efforts were likely taken to ensure that the audience was orderly, even to the extent of forbidding mothers to bring young children “because their crying distracts the preacher,” as happened in 1435 and again in 1472.⁵⁷

In return for their efforts and expenditures, the municipal authorities hoped for dramatic social repercussions and in this they were largely gratified. Ferrer effectively called Murcianos to greater moral fervor, permitting the concejo to pass a series of new laws against collective sins such as gambling.⁵⁸ At the same time, the amiable enmity of the frontier meant that visiting preachers had to tread carefully when commenting on interfaith concerns. Ferrer, for instance, made an impassioned appeal for strict segregation between the various religious communities in the city, and particularly for the removal of Jews from much of civic life. But, although they were very much open to these ideas, the concejo was chiefly concerned with local antiseignorial movements and the broader problem of urban violence. Their hope for Ferrer’s visit was that, “through the words he preaches to many people, he may move Christians as well as Jews and Muslims to voluntarily pardon the deaths of their fathers and mothers, siblings and other relatives as well as other offenses and injuries” and thus put an end to reciprocal violence and ongoing feuds.⁵⁹

Although they could be comfortable on stage, clerics tended to remain on the margins of more playful public events. The idea that they should spend their leisure time in service to God was well established, as were priestly obligations to serve as moral exemplars. The expectations for their public and private comportment were explicitly laid out not only in ecclesiastic law but also in the civil code, as the Partidas decreed that “prelates should pay careful attention to their conduct as men whose example others follow, as above stated; and for that reason, they should not witness exhibitions, as, for instance, lance throwing, tilting or fights with bulls or other wild beasts, or visit those who take part in them. Moreover, they should not throw dice, or play draughts, or ball, or quoits, or any games like those which tend to interfere with their composure, nor should they remain to witness them, or be familiar with those who play them.”⁶⁰

The documentary record for the actual behavior of ecclesiastics is scattered and frequently unreliable. This is due partly to the paucity of official church records, which understandably glossed over this issue, and partly to the nature of chronicle and literary descriptions, which often presented highly subjective views of the clergy. The minutes, however, of a number of synods held in fifteenth-century Castile detail attempts to legislate clerical behavior, while reports from diocesan inspectors describe the failings of the parish priests.⁶¹ From these sources, it appears that efforts to proscribe playful activities were less than effective, leaving the councils repeatedly obliged to ratify formal bans on any number of private or semiprivate diversions. These ranged from drinking in taverns, consorting with women, and playing at cards and dice to attending bullfights or public dances and musical performances to participating in burlesque dramas.

But church authorities sought to improve not only the morality of the clergy, but also that of society as a whole. Both Cartagena and Arévalo, although they disagreed sharply in their views of caballero tournaments, emphasized the moral influence of these spectacles. Although Cartagena’s objections were frequently echoed by others, knightly jousts and melees did not receive much overt church scrutiny. This lack of reaction may in part be explained by the frequent presence of 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.