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CHAPTER 2

The Meanings of Civic Space

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

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

Some of his displays deliberately inverted customary uses of particular spaces (a wild animal in the streets, banquets in the cemeteries) and were meant to fix the day in public memory. Others (sporting events and free meals) exhibited the constable’s generosity, while his ostentatious prayers in the cloister and cathedral proved his piety. The egalitarian processions to the Magdalena and the Arrabal, moreover, demonstrated his affinity for the masses and singled out particular neighborhoods for his attention. No parish failed to receive at least some notice, as smaller banquets and entertainments were offered in each. Miguel Lucas thus transformed the birth of Luis de Iranzo from a notable event within the city’s ruling family into a celebration of Jaén itself in all its guises—as a unified entity, as Christian, as a collection of barrios, as both sacred and profane, as a highly stratified society and an egalitarian brotherhood. In other words, he portrayed Jaén as an authentic community, but also emphasized it was a community centered on himself.³

The civic community Miguel Lucas proclaimed and the displays through which he proclaimed it were indelibly linked. The tournaments and theatrics that proliferated in fifteenth-century Castile were urban phenomena, requiring the physical environments, artisanal skills, financial resources, and organizational expertise cities fostered. Only in cities, moreover, were there crowds sufficient to make the effort worthwhile. But urban settings did more than provide the logistical capacity to conduct mass spectacles. As the physical and social stage on which such performances were conducted, cities had an indelible impact on their content and reception.

A civic spectacle was more than a village event writ large. Living in a city, according to fifteenth-century authors, was transformative; the urban environment had powerful and lasting effects on one’s personality and character. But its effect was not necessarily positive. Someone daily stimulated by positive, temperate sights and sounds would be energetic and creative. But that same person would fall prey to lassitude and degenerate behavior if regularly oppressed by an unforgiving climate or crime or decrepit buildings. It was not only the physical milieu that mattered, however. To fully realize their personal potential, citizens required opportunities to cultivate their minds and bodies, including access to parks, musicians, teachers, and a close-knit, supportive society and the leisure time to make use of all of these. Public spectacles, from this perspective, were integral to a city’s proper functioning, allowing the community moments to withdraw from quotidian cares and to come together as a unified body social. Jean-Charles Payen has argued that, without cities, “le théâtre ne peut exister.”⁴ In fifteenth-century Castile, the reverse was also true.

The commentaries that expressed such opinions centered on philosophical descriptions of ideal cities, but they were not wholly theoretical. Fifteenth-century accounts of Seville and Córdoba, for instance, applauded them for actually creating model environments. Neither of their authors, however, succeeded in considering the cities in their totality. They focused instead on those districts with which they were most familiar and that best fit their agendas. This reveals a central feature of medieval Castilian cities: their division into neighborhoods or quarters with distinct characters. The fragmentary quality of cities had a number of consequences for the experience of public spectacles. It defined potential audiences, for instance, as individuals tended to move within limited areas of their city, frequenting the same streets and markets while staying close to familiar people and sights. For all but the most anticipated or publicized events, the composition of the crowd largely reflected the demographics of its immediate surroundings. By determining the collective influences on members of the audience, the location of an event thus predicted, to some degree, its reception.

Strong neighborhood allegiances also influenced individual identities. While a person might describe oneself as a native of Jaén and take great pride in this heritage, professions of parish affiliation and occupation that qualified the general statement of Jiennense birth were more meaningful because they explained which Jaén one hailed from. Those presenting spectacles to the public had to navigate sentiments of both unity and divisiveness, leading them to promote a myth of civic solidarity while confirming existing social divisions and hierarchies.

Public spectacles were a primary means through which civic elites communicated with those under their authority. Rulers like Miguel Lucas did this by making use of the ways in which people emotionally and cognitively navigated their urban environments. They employed specific civic spaces—public buildings, markets, plazas, streets, and landmarks—to define, clarify, or augment the messages expressed in their spectacles. In some cases, this was a simple association of a pageant with a location whose meaning was well defined. Those meanings, however, could be and often were mutable. At times, rulers were able to shift or transform them to better suit the purposes of their spectacles. Works of ephemeral architecture, or structures built for a particular event, were a favored means of doing so. By constructing barriers and viewing platforms, elites underlined the stratified nature of civic society by assigning a spatial hierarchy to formerly egalitarian spaces. But not all ephemeral structures were overt attempts to confirm the social order. Fanciful wooden palaces, castles, or arches, for instance, could turn a market square into a scene from a romance or a cathedral plaza into a frontier citadel that must be defended from infidels. Regardless of their specific form, the purpose of all such edifices was the same: to make spectators more amenable to the message behind a performance. This strategy was based on contemporary understandings of what a city was and what it meant to live in one. While it was not limited to cities on the frontier, of course, the use of spectacle and of the mutable meanings of urban spaces was of particular importance to the rulers of borderlands cities. Amiable enmity and physical anxiety meant that elites often had to address important issues obliquely. Their need for effective modes of expressing their readings of social and religious issues combined with an abundance of themes with which to do so, making the region a crucible of political pageantry.

For fifteenth-century thinkers, cities were more than mere aggregations of people and buildings; they were natural and artificial environments that profoundly influenced the character of those who dwelled in them. In this they differed from the thirteenth-century Partidas, which described the city as “a place surrounded by walls” and a “communal gathering of men—the old, those of middling age, and the young.”⁵ Drawing upon a body of work that included classical authors such as Aristotle and Strabo as well as more recent travel literature including the Mirabilis urbis Romae and humanist descriptions of other Italian cities, several Castilian authors commented on how an agreeable setting benefited human temperament. Among them was Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, who stressed the importance of situating a city in an advantageous location, particularly one with a temperate climate.⁶

He also devoted significant attention to issues relevant to the frontier and perhaps inspired by it. Although he did not refer specifically to the amiable enmity of the border with Granada, Arévalo argued that too much contact with foreigners undermined the social structure of a city “because people are naturally eager to try new customs and things, from which great inconvenience and harm comes to the city and which is the beginning of corruption within it.”⁷ Instead, he proposed that commerce with foreigners take place in smaller towns and villages located on the water (or on the frontier), a solution that kept outsiders segregated from the general population and allowed the city to remain free of possible contagion.

On military matters, Arévalo decreed that leaders should ensure that their cities be well prepared for war, with a unified citizenry and extensive stockpiles of provisions and weapons. The most significant of these preparations was the fostering of a disciplined and well-prepared standing cavalry militia. By describing in detail the attributes of such horsemen and the training required to develop their potential, Arévalo underscored their central and indispensable role in his idealized city. They were not only to provide physical security to the populace but also to defend municipal honor and morality. Arévalo would brook no attempts to water down these holy duties: “Although the caballeros nowadays do not swear specifically to these things, they swear to them silently in accepting the knighthood, and they are no less hypocritical than if they were to do something contrary to what they expressly vowed.”⁸ The city, as conceived here, revolved around knights; if they failed to uphold their venerable traditions, the social structure would inevitably fall.

As we have already seen, Arévalo saw public military training as an essential component in the creation of an urban militia that was both morally sound and effective in combat. But he did not limit the benefits of public displays to the martial. He took a classical understanding of leisure time (otium cum dignitate) as the opportunity to withdraw from daily affairs in order to cultivate one’s intellectual or spiritual aspects and ultimately achieve virtue. Leisure was also an opportunity for people to invigorate themselves, cast off the worries of the world, refresh their social bonds, and take joy in life. Certain types of public spectacles facilitated all this, and so Arévalo advised rulers to guarantee “that certain representations and public games are presented on special days for the joy and consolation of the inhabitants of the city.”⁹

If such a city—situated in a beneficial location and free from foreign influences, shielded by a dedicated order of caballeros, governed by the wise, and peopled by thoughtful citizens who came together on occasion for public acts of catharsis—was the ideal as seen through fifteenth-century eyes, how did real cities measure up? Arévalo did not comment at length about any particular city. In fact, only a few fifteenth-century Castilian authors offered extended descriptions of contemporary cities, a marked contrast to the popularity of the genre in later centuries.¹⁰ In those that portrayed frontier cities, we can see agreement with Arévalo on the links between the human spirit and its environment but also important differences, particularly on the role of foreign influences.

Don Jerónimo of Córdoba, a canon of the Real Colegiata de San Hipólito during the reign of Enrique IV, likely wrote his Descriptio cordubae sometime before taking up this position and while away from the city. In his prologue, he described himself as an exile and referred to wide-ranging travels: to the Holy Land, Italy, Greece, and Muslim countries.¹¹ These journeys and his experiences abroad made a deep impression on him. Nevertheless, he retained a fond memory of his native land’s soft beauty, noting its ideal combination of rivers, fields, and hills, a landscape that evoked images of the Garden of Eden. In terms akin to those of Arévalo, he opined that “a sweltering climate generates plagues but also inventive people. A cold climate brings forth slow, fraudulent, and ignorant minds. Only a temperate climate brings together positive qualities in the customs of the people. This is what was said about ancient Athens, the seat of wisdom, because the clarity of the air there brought about clarity of the senses and prepared people for the contemplation of wisdom.”¹²

Alfonso de Palencia, in an undated letter composed at roughly the same time as Jerónimo’s Descriptio, praised Seville to the archdeacon of Carrión, a friend who had left that city to live in Palencia, as a means of comforting him in his exile. Palencia similarly commented on the beneficial climate and the natural bounty of the city’s hinterlands, but in an altogether more practical sense. For Palencia, the advantages of the natural environment lay in its contributions to civic wealth and physical vigor.¹³ In cataloging Seville’s wealth in wheat, fish, olive oil, and livestock, he noted its self-sufficiency and its ability to outproduce any three Italian cities. In describing the temperate climate, he made the familiar comparisons to regions that are too cold or too hot but emphasized its health benefits rather than its ability to foster a particular character: “For here a person does not endure the numbing cold which makes one’s limbs lifeless, nor can we compare it to the tropics when the summer sun is most intense. There never lacks a breeze strong enough to refresh the young, breathe vigor and life into the old, and comfort and succour the infirm … it seems as if people here only rarely die of illness before the age of eighty.”¹⁴

Palencia did not contest the notion that one’s surroundings have a profound influence on his or her character; rather, he deemed the most relevant physical features in the urban environment to be those made by man. Nature, or more properly God, “that supreme artisan and architect,” had provided Seville most generously with the raw materials of prosperity and virtue.¹⁵ It was only in the hands of a noble and talented people, however, that such gifts could be made to flower. Palencia’s perspective on this had been shaped by his time in Italy and particularly by the impressive reworking of Florence that took place over the course of the fifteenth century. In De perfectione militaris triumphi, a treatise written in the late 1450s, Palencia has Exercitum (an allegorical figure representing military discipline) marvel at the links between noble people and noble surroundings: “He did not leave before seeing all parts of the great city and delighting in visiting the beautifully arranged temples and in considering the public buildings, much more refined than the pen can describe, on whose façades were written letters that praised the deeds of its citizens in peace and in war … and the men on the streets seemed like consuls or patricians, not unlike their ancient Roman ancestors.”¹⁶ To this flowering of human potential, Palencia contrasted Rome itself, whose magnificent ancient buildings had fallen into ruin and destroyed the harmonious ambiance that once had been. Now, “this ugly landscape wounds the soul through the windows of the eyes” and the Romans “for this reason have turned their native intelligence to interpretations of the law and other bureaucratic obligations.” Meanwhile they had been outstripped by their Florentine neighbors, who were ingenious and eloquent “because they daily contemplate with joyful eyes their well-ordered world and contemplate a city flowering in more than just name.”¹⁷