common among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Andalucía.9 Their tolerance in this and several other cases stands in stark contrast to the brutality of 1391 and the more institutionalized persecution Seville’s Jews would face later in the century. In order to further their own agendas or simply to keep order, leaders in frontier cities found it necessary to constantly address questions of religious conflict and coexistence. Public spectacle was one of their most effective tools, for spectacles are, by their nature, ambiguous. They can mean, to a degree, whatever a viewer wants them to mean. For this same reason, however, they can be subversive. Rulers cannot exert full control over their interpretation. Fernando’s task was easy in one sense: as a sojourner on the frontier, he could focus on the short term and the attainment of clear, limited goals. Those who remained had to find ways to negotiate the physical insecurity and contradictory attitudes that conditioned frontier life.
Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo was a prominent nobleman exiled from the royal court in the 1460s. Arriving in the frontier bastion of Jaén, he sought—like Fernando—to lead glorious campaigns into Granada. To do so, he too had to inspire a local population that was just as happy to trade with the Muslims as fight them. In response, Miguel Lucas spent the next decade conducting a dazzling and seemingly endless succession of elaborate tournaments, festivals, processions, and banquets. Oftentimes, these displays seem contradictory as the aspiring holy warrior dressed in Morisco attire, praised Islamic culture, or treated the issue of religious war in a jocular manner at odds with his serious purposes. Modern scholars have interpreted these events in any number of ways: as a cynical appropriation of popular motifs meant to solidify his rule, as “frontier fantasy” or “confirmatory magic,” as military training exercises. In all these instances, historians have assumed that Miguel Lucas controlled the meaning of his spectacles, that he was able to impose a “frontier ideology” on the people.10
In fact, as we shall see, both the content and the interpretation of Miguel Lucas’s spectacles were conditioned by the expectations of an audience that depended on predictable, if not wholly peaceable, relations with Granada. Confronted with the ambivalence that his new subjects evinced toward their Muslim neighbors, he sought to reassure them that he would not seek an unrestrained war against Granada that might threaten their livelihoods and expel their trading partners. In effect, Miguel Lucas aimed to lower the stakes of holy war by suggesting that victory over Islam required the conversion of Muslims but not the destruction of Granadan culture and society. Through pageantry, therefore, Miguel Lucas attempted not to indoctrinate the people but to make his aggressive policies broadly palatable.
Only a few decades later, however, the conditions that required such a response had faded. There was a general hardening of attitudes toward religious minorities as influential groups in Castile sought to define their society as exclusively and ardently Christian. This transition can be seen through royal policies such as the Edict of Expulsion or the establishment of the Inquisition. But it is especially visible in civic pageants of the 1470s and 1480s that now presented Muslims, Jews, and recent converts either as imminent threats to society who must be neutralized or as unwelcome guests, irrelevant but still the focus of much attention. Like those of Miguel Lucas, these later performances have been described in dismissive or uncertain terms by both contemporary observers and modern scholars. And so a Marian procession that incited violence against converts in Córdoba was but a “chance act” and the particular roles accorded to Jews and Muslims in Murcia’s presentation of Corpus Christi is a “puzzling mix of ecumenism and bigotry.”11
Here again, close attention to the frontier and urban contexts of public performances can explain both their purpose and their significance. Spectacles reflected shifts in public sentiments toward religious minorities; in doing so, they accelerated the process. Like Fernando de Antequera and Miguel Lucas, most noble sponsors of spectacles had clear goals in mind. But, although they had a great deal of influence over the interpretation of performances, spectators did not mindlessly follow their lead. Indeed, the opposite seems to have been true. Elites constantly tried to “catch up” to what they perceived as popular sentiment. The perception of a growing popular intolerance for outsiders within “Christian” society encouraged rulers to craft performances that emphasized the foreignness of Muslims, Jews, and recent converts. The Christian populace, assured by these spectacles that religious minorities were no longer under the protection of the nobility, were then emboldened to act against them. The result was a semantic narrowing, as urban pageants that had previously been used to express a range of attitudes toward Jews, Muslims, and converts were now limited in practice to the rejection of those groups. By confirming and validating popular opinion, this shift fostered open intolerance across the social spectrum.
Immediate physical contexts played a significant role in this process. Sponsors understood that environments influenced how performances were experienced and received and made use of the connotations associated with particular urban locations in order to best present their own messages. These locations, of course, meant different things to different people, and so the connections between performance and context permitted multiple readings of the same display. Many spectacles were, therefore, deliberate efforts to transform those meanings by creating new cognitive or emotional connotations, to endow a prominent location with a significance understood by all and controlled by elites. Such moments are of particular interest in that they reveal contemporary understandings of how public memoria and social change were related.
Pageantry had long served as a means of negotiating and articulating the boundaries between religious communities. It was due to this tradition that Castilian elites, during a period in which traditional interfaith relations seemed to be less relevant, employed spectacle as a means of altering them. It also meant that these elites encountered receptive audiences familiar with the ability of performance to present social messages. By consistently turning to the theme of interfaith relations, they highlighted the importance of those relations and helped to transform the ambivalent attitudes about others that had characterized the borderlands. In the period with which this book is concerned, the result was an increasingly negative depiction of religious minorities. By the early 1490s, such festivities proclaimed a vision of a Castile that was triumphant and unabashedly Christian, a society in which Jews, Muslims, and recent converts might have a place, but only a tenuous one.
A great deal has been written about the so-called breakdown in religious tolerance in fifteenth-century Iberia. This is often presented as the transition from a golden age of convivencia, or peaceful coexistence, that was especially prominent in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus but also held, to varying degrees, through the initial period of Christian dominance from the thirteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries. The traditional account of what happened next has often been called the “Black Legend.”12 It depicts late medieval and early modern Spain as defined by a narrow religious bigotry in which the Inquisition, Edict of Expulsion, and conquistadors loom large. The Black Legend has now been thoroughly refuted by any number of scholars. In recent years, perhaps the most influential work has been that of David Nirenberg, who argues that medieval religious violence was not perpetrated by irrational masses who blindly adopted inherited ideologies and prejudices but by self-aware groups that carefully adapted discourses about others to serve a host of diverse needs.13 In showing how religious violence could shape interfaith relations in often-constructive ways, moreover, Nirenberg suggests that we need to leave behind strict dichotomies like “tolerance” and “intolerance” when examining the medieval past. Other scholars, including Mark Meyerson, Barbara Fuchs, and Stuart Schwartz, have undermined the idea that conditions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were wholly negative for members of religious minority groups.14 In essence, the new view is that there was no dramatic break, that conditions in the earlier period were not as idyllic as had been imagined and they were not so dire in later centuries.
In revising what was indeed a flawed view of Spain’s past, however, these authors may have gone too far in the other direction. They do not deny the significance of the Inquisition, the conquest of Granada, the expulsion of Jews and later Muslims from Iberia, or, in the New World, the harsh treatment of Native Americans. But they do contend that these innovations fail to reflect a broad social consensus about the place of non-Christians in Spanish society.