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
