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
