A series of lavish and spectacular court entertainments, sometimes called magnificences, were laid on by Catherine de' Medici, the queen consort of France from 1547 to 1559 and queen mother from 1559 until her death in 1589. As wife of Henry II of France, Catherine showed interest in the arts and theatre, but it was not until she attained real political and financial power as queen mother that she began the series of tournaments and entertainments that dazzled her contemporaries and continue to fascinate scholars. Biographer Leonie Frieda suggests that "Catherine, more than anyone, inaugurated the fantastic entertainments for which later French monarchs also became renowned".[1]
For Catherine, these entertainments served a political purpose that made them worth their colossal expense. She presided over the royal government at a time when the French monarchy was in steep decline. With three of her sons on the throne in succession and the country torn by religious civil war, Catherine set out to show not only the French people but foreign courts that the Valois monarchy was as prestigious and magnificent as it had been during the reigns of Francis I and her husband Henry II.[2] At the same time, she believed these elaborate entertainments and sumptuous court rituals, which incorporated martial sports and tournaments of many kinds, would occupy her feuding nobles and distract them from fighting against each other to the detriment of the country and the royal authority.[3]
It is clear, however, that Catherine regarded these festivals as more than political and pragmatic exercises: she revelled in them as a vehicle for her creative gifts. A highly talented and artistic woman, Catherine took the lead in devising and planning her own musical-mythological shows. Though they were ephemeral, her "magnificences"—as the contemporary commentator Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, called them—are studied by modern scholars as works of art.[1] Historian Frances Yates has called Catherine "a great creative artist in festivals".[4] She employed the leading artists and architects of the day to create the necessary dramas, music, and scenic effects for these events, which were usually dedicated to the ideal of peace and based on mythological themes.
It is difficult for scholars to piece together the exact form of the entertainments, but clues have been gleaned from the written accounts, scripts, artworks, and tapestries that derived from these famous occasions. Though such sources must be treated with caution, since they contain demonstrable inaccuracies and contradictions, they provide evidence of the richness and scale of Catherine de' Medici's court festivals.
Entertainments
Catherine de' Medici's investment in magnificent entertainments was part of a conscious political programme.[3] She recalled the belief of her father-in-law, King Francis I, that the court needed to be physically active and constantly entertained.[5] She also declared her intention to imitate the Roman emperors, who kept their subjects from mischief by occupying them with games and amusements.[2] She therefore adopted a policy of distracting her nobles from fighting among themselves by laying on irresistible entertainments and sports for them at court.[6]
Catherine also maintained about eighty alluring ladies-in-waiting at court, whom she allegedly used as tools to seduce courtiers for political ends. These women became known as her "flying squadron" (L'Escadron volant (fr).[7] Catherine did not hesitate to use the charms of her ladies as an attraction of the court. In 1577 she threw a banquet at which the food was served by topless women.[8] In 1572, the Huguenot Queen Jeanne d’Albret of Navarre, wrote from the court to warn her son Henry that Catherine presided over a "vicious and corrupt" atmosphere, in which the women made the sexual advances and not the men.[9] In fact, Charlotte de Sauve, one of the most notorious members of the "flying squadron", first seduced and then became a mistress of Henry of Navarre on Catherine's orders. On the other hand, Brantôme, in his Memoirs, praised Catherine's court as "a school of all honesty and virtue".[10]
In the tradition of sixteenth-century royal festivals, Catherine de' Medici's magnificences took place over several days, with a different entertainment each day. Often individual nobles or members of the royal family were responsible for preparing one particular entertainment. Spectators and participants, including those involved in martial sports, would dress up in costumes representing mythological or romantic themes. Catherine gradually introduced changes to the traditional form of these entertainments. She forbade heavy tilting of the sort that led to the death of her husband in 1559; and she developed and increased the prominence of dance in the shows that climaxed each series of entertainments. As a result, the ballet de cour, a distinctive new art form, emerged from the creative advances in court entertainment devised by Catherine de' Medici.[11]
Fontainebleau
One of the Valois Tapestries, depicting entertainments at Fontainebleau in 1564, including the mock rescue of captive damsels from an enchanted island.
In January 1564, Catherine and the young Charles IX embarked on a royal progress that was to last nearly two and a half years. They were accompanied by what has been described as a city on the move,[12] including the King's Council and foreign ambassadors who Catherine hoped would report to their governments on the splendour of the train, offsetting any idea that the French monarchy was on the verge of bankruptcy.[12] The royal household included Catherine's courtiers and "flying squadron", as well as her musicians and nine essential dwarves who travelled in their own miniature coaches. The party carried with it all the equipment and paraphernalia required for the festivals, feasts, masques, and joyeuses entrées planned to take place along the route. These included portable triumphal arches and the royal barges.[12]
Catherine had ordered that at the Château de Fontainebleau, each important noble should host a ball. She herself held a banquet in a meadow at the château's dairy, where her courtiers dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses.[13] That evening, the court watched a comedy in the great ballroom, which was followed by a ball where 300 "beauties dressed in gold and silver cloth" performed a choreographed dance.[14]
At Fontainebleau, Catherine arranged entertainments that lasted for several days, including fancy-dress jousting and chivalrous events in allegorical settings. On Mardi Gras, the day after the banquet in the meadow, knights dressed as Greeks and Trojans fought over scantily clad damsels trapped by a giant and a dwarf in a tower on an enchanted island. The fighting climaxed with the tower losing its magical properties and bursting into flames.[15] In another spectacle, singing sirens swam past the king, and Neptune floated by in a chariot drawn by seahorses.[8]
Bayonne
As the high point of the royal progress, Catherine scheduled a meeting with her daughter Elisabeth, the third wife of Philip II of Spain. Catherine was so determined to make a magnificent impression on the Spanish court that she indulged in a spending spree that was extravagant even by her own standards. To help pay for the planned pageantry and entertainments, she borrowed 700,000 écus from the Gondi bank. Catherine had assumed she would also be meeting King Philip himself, but early in the tour, he sent word that he would not be attending. He was outraged that Catherine, whom he called "Madame La Serpente",[1] had received an embassy from the Sultan of Turkey. He also objected to her Edict of Amboise (1563), which had offered concessions to the Huguenots. In short, French religious policy disgusted him. In his place he sent "the severe and ferocious" Duke of Alba, with orders to convince Catherine that persecuting, imprisoning, and torturing Huguenots was the way to deal with heretics, not making treaties with them. In the event, Catherine left Alba befuddled by her darting mind. He found her far more interested in discussing marriage alliances and in showing him what the French court could lay on in the way of fabulous entertainments.[16]
Water Festival at Bayonne, a tapestry design by Antoine Caron, records entertainments laid on by Catherine de' Medici for the Franco-Spanish summit meeting of 1565.
Elisabeth and her Spanish entourage had arrived at the Bidasoa river on the Spanish border with a huge escort of French Catholic nobles on 14 June 1565.[17] She then rode into Saint-Jean de Luz, where Catherine greeted her tearfully with embraces and kisses. During the reception ceremonies, ten of Catherine's soldiers dropped dead from standing too long in the heat in their armour. The next day, Elisabeth made a dazzling entry into Bayonne on a horse whose harness was studded with gems worth 400,000 ducats.
The encounter between the two courts was marked by ritual exchanges of costly gifts and a sustained display of ballets, jousts, mock battles, and decorative arts. Several accounts of the Bayonne entertainments survive. One spectacle, mounted on the Bidasoa river, is a particularly famous example of Catherine's entertainments as ephemeral works of art.[1] The entertainments began with a banquet on the Île d’Aguineau. As guests were ferried on decorated boats to the island, they passed, among other spectacles, Arion riding two dolphins, harpoonists spearing an artificial whale that spouted red wine, and six tritons sitting on a giant turtle, blowing conch shells.[18] Charles IX was transported on a barge dressed to look like a floating fortress. The banquet was followed by a ballet of nymphs and satyrs. Brantôme reported that the "magnificence was such in everything that the Spaniards who are very contemptuous of all others save their own swore that they had never seen anything finer".[19]
Water Festival at Bayonne, the finished tapestry version of 1580–81
The next day, King Charles and his brother Henry took part in a tournament, leading teams dressed as British and Irish knights. The theme of the tournament, "virtue and love", was represented by two chariots, one containing ladies dressed as the five virtues, the other carrying Venus and Cupid and many mini-cupids. In the tournament itself, little balls of fire were lobbed among the horses as they crossed. The royal grandstand was hung with gold-and-silk tapestries illustrating the triumph of Scipio, which Giulio Romano had designed for Francis I. Brantôme recalled in his memoirs that "the Spanish lords and ladies greatly admired it, never having seen anything like it in the possession of their king".[20] Another French spectator recorded, "Strangers of all nations were now forced to recognise that in these things France had surpassed, with these parades, bravado, glories and magnificences, all other nations and even herself".[1]
Catherine believed she had showed Spain that the French monarchy, far from being financially ruined and at war with its nobles, remained a glorious force to be reckoned with, capable of financing displays on a stunning scale, backed by a unified court.[1] The point was lost on the grim Duke of Alba, however. His letters reveal his frustration that Catherine's spectacles kept interrupting the serious business of discussing how to make war on the Protestants. In the end, the Spanish decided the whole meeting been a waste of time, since Catherine had refused to change her policy towards the Huguenots in the slightest. The Huguenots, however, believed that their banishment from the talks between the two negotiating teams meant that Catherine had struck a secret deal with the Spanish to persecute them.[21]
Royal wedding
The celebrations following the marriage of Catherine's daughter Marguerite to the Protestant Henry of Navarre in Paris on 18 August 1572, were based on Huguenot themes. The match was controversial because Marguerite was marrying a Huguenot. The pope refused to grant a dispensation for the marriage, and the different faiths of the bridal couple made for an unusual wedding service.[22] After a nuptial lunch, four days of balls, masques and banquets ensued.
Despite the tension between Catholic and Huguenot forces in the city, the festivities proceeded in a good-natured fashion, though the themes of the entertainments may seem "very near to the bone", in retrospect.[23] The night after the wedding, a magnificent masked ball was held at the Petit-Bourbon, which included the performance of a pantomime tournoi, called the "paradise of love". King Charles and his two brothers defended twelve angelic nymphs against the Huguenots. They despatched the Huguenots, led by Henry of Navarre, into a hell where, according to an observer, "a great number of devils and imps were making infinite follery and noise".[24] The nymphs then danced a ballet. There followed combat between knights, accompanied by explosions of gunpowder. The king and his brothers climaxed proceedings by rescuing the Huguenots from hell, which was separated from paradise by a river on which floated the ferryman Charon in his boat.[24]
The remaining festivities were called off after an assassination attempt on the Huguenot leader Admiral Coligny, who was shot from a house by an arquebusier on 22 August and wounded in the elbow and hand. The day before, the king and his brothers had dressed as Amazons to fight Navarre and his friends, who wore turbans and golden robes in the role of Turks. Fighting broke out for real between the Catholics and Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, which began on 24 August when Charles IX ordered the slaughter of all the Huguenot leaders in Paris, provoking massacres of Huguenots throughout France. Henry of Navarre was given the choice of death, life imprisonment, or conversion to Catholicism. He chose Catholicism and was spared.[25]
Tuileries
Valois tapestry depicting the ball held by Catherine de' Medici in 1573 at the Tuileries in honour of Polish envoys visiting to present the throne of Poland to Henry, Duke of Anjou
A year after the massacre, in August 1573, Catherine hosted another lavish set of entertainments, this time for the Polish ambassadors who had arrived to offer the throne of Poland to her son, Henry, Duke of Anjou. Sports were laid on, including tournaments, mock combats, tilting at the quintain, and running at the ring.[26] Catherine held a grand ball or "festin" at the Tuileries palace, which Jean Dorat described in his illustrated Magnificentissimi spectaculi. Sixteen nymphs, representing each of the French provinces, danced an intricate ballet, distributing devices to the spectators in the process. Brantôme called this performance "the finest ballet that was ever given in this world" and praised Catherine for bringing France so much prestige with "all these inventions".[27] The chronicler Agrippa d'Aubigné recorded that the Poles marvelled at the ballet.[27]Frances Yates has pointed out that the Italian influence on the French ballet de cour owed much to Catherine:
It was invented in the context of the chivalrous pastimes of the court, by an Italian, and a Medici, the Queen Mother. Many poets, artists, musicians, choreographers, contributed to the result, but it was she who was the inventor, one might perhaps say, the producer; she who had the ladies of her court trained to perform these ballets in settings of her devising.[4]
A spectacular fête was held during the reign of Catherine's son Henry III to celebrate the marriage of his sister-in-law, Marguerite of Lorraine, to his favourite, Anne, Duke of Joyeuse, on 24 September 1581. Entertainments were laid on almost every day for two weeks after the wedding, in what art historian Roy Strong has called "the climax of Valois festival art".[28] The chief artist employed to design the magnificences was Antoine Caron, who was aided by the sculptor Germain Pilon. Among the writers were Dorat, Ronsard, and Philippe Desportes; and the music was written by Claude Le Jeune and the Sieur de Beaulieu, among others.
A programme for an entertainment with a sun–moon theme announced that "twelve torch bearers will be men and women disguised as trees...the golden fruits of which will carry lamps and torches".[29] The visual decorations included two arcades, one shining as a sun, to represent the king, the other as a moon, to represent the newlyweds. The arcades were linked to an amphitheatre overhung with artificial heavens of planets and constellations, and allusions to Catherine's personal emblem, the rainbow. Into this amphitheatre, the king was to enter in a chariot, dressed as the sun.[30]
Another of the Joyeuse magnificences was the Ballet Comique de la Reine, devised and presented by Queen Louise, who directed her own team of writers and musicians. The text was by Nicolas de La Chesnaye, the music by the Sieur de Beaulieu, the sets by Jacques Patin, and the overall director was Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx.[31]
The theme of the entertainment was an invocation of cosmic forces to come to the aid of the monarchy, which at that time was threatened by the rebellion not only of Huguenots but of many Catholic nobles. Men were shown as reduced to beasts by Circe, who held court in a garden at one end of the hall. Louise and her ladies danced ballets, and the Four Cardinal Virtues appealed to the gods to descend to earth and defeat the powers of Circe. With a thunderclap, Jupiter descended sitting on an eagle, accompanied by "the most learned and excellent music that had ever been sung or heard". Jupiter transferred Circe's power to the royal family, protected France from the horrors of civil war, and blessed King Henry with the wisdom to govern. At the end of the show, Catherine de' Medici made Queen Louise give Henry a gold medal depicting a dolphin. The gesture expressed Catherine's desire that the couple would have a male heir (a dauphin) to continue the dynasty.[32]
↑ Knecht, 235. • Catherine wrote to Charles IX: "I heard it said to your grandfather the King that two things were necessary to live in peace with the French and have them love their King: keep them happy, and busy at some exercise, notably tournaments; for the French are accustomed, if there is no war, to exercise themselves and if they are not made to do so they employ themselves to more dangerous [ends]". Quoted in Jollet, 111.
↑ Yates, The Valois Tapestries, 68. She intended to prevent them from having, in Brantôme's words "loysir á mal faire" (free time in which to make mischief).
↑ "Although I knew it was bad, I find it even worse than I feared. Here women make advances to men rather than the other way around." Quoted in Knecht, 149.
↑ Gravett, 15, 60. Running at the ring involved galloping towards a ring hanging from an upright, with the aim of carrying the ring off on the lance, which was shorter than a jousting lance.
Catherine de' Medici was an Italian (Florentine) noblewoman born into the Medici family. She was Queen of France from 1547 to 1559 by marriage to King Henry II and the mother of French kings Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III. The years during which her sons reigned have been called "the age of Catherine de' Medici" since she had extensive, if at times varying, influence on the political life of France.
Henry IV, also known by the epithets Good King Henry or Henry the Great, was King of Navarre from 1572 and King of France from 1589 to 1610. He was the first monarch of France from the House of Bourbon, a cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty. He pragmatically balanced the interests of the Catholic and Protestant parties in France as well as among the European states. He was assassinated in 1610 by a Catholic zealot, and was succeeded by his son Louis XIII.
Charles IX was King of France from 1560 until his death in 1574. He ascended the French throne upon the death of his brother Francis II in 1560, and as such was the penultimate monarch of the House of Valois.
Henry III was King of France from 1574 until his assassination in 1589, as well as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1573 to 1575.
The French Wars of Religion refers to the period of civil war between French Catholics and Protestants from 1562 to 1598. Between two and four million people died from violence, famine or disease directly caused by the conflict, and it severely damaged the power of the French monarchy. One of its most notorious episodes was the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572. The fighting ended with a compromise in 1598, when Henry of Navarre, who had converted to Catholicism in 1593, was proclaimed King Henry IV of France and issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted substantial rights and freedoms to the Huguenots. However, Catholics continued to disapprove of Protestants and of Henry, and his assassination in 1610 triggered a fresh round of Huguenot rebellions in the 1620s.
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence directed against the Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion. Traditionally believed to have been instigated by Queen Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, the massacre started a few days after the marriage on 18 August of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant King Henry III of Navarre. Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding.
Claude of Valois was a French princess as the second daughter of King Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici, and Duchess of Lorraine by marriage to Charles III, Duke of Lorraine.
Jacques de Savoie, duc de Nemours was a French military commander, governor and Prince Étranger. Having inherited his titles at a young age, Nemours fought for king Henri II during the latter Italian Wars, seeing action at the siege of Metz and the stunning victories of Renty and Calais in 1554 and 1558. Already a commander of French infantry, he received promotion to commander of the light cavalry after the capture of Calais in 1558. A year prior he had accompanied François, Duke of Guise on his entry into Italy, as much for the purpose of campaigning as to escape the king's cousin Antoine of Navarre who was threatening to kill him for his extra-marital pursuit of Navarre's cousin.
Margaret of Valois, popularly known as La Reine Margot, was a French princess of the Valois dynasty who became Queen of Navarre by marriage to Henry III of Navarre and then also Queen of France at her husband's 1589 accession to the latter throne as Henry IV.
Charles de Bourbon, Cardinal de Bourbon, Archbishop of Rouen was a French noble, prelate and disputed King of France as the Catholic Ligue candidate from 2 August 1589 – 9 May 1590. Born the third son of Charles of Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme and Françoise d'Alençon he was destined for a career in the church. As a member of the House of Bourbon-Vendôme he was one of the premier Prince du sang. Already having secured several sees, he was made a Cardinal by Pope Paul III in January 1548. In 1550 he received the office of Archbishop of Rouen making him the Primate of Normandy. The following year the promotion of Bourbon to Patriarch of the French church was threatened by King Henry II to secure concessions from the Pope. During the Italian Wars which resumed that year he played a role supporting Catherine de Medici's regency governments in France and briefly holding a lieutenant-generalship in Picardy. In 1557 the Pope appointed the Cardinals Bourbon, Lorraine and Châtillon as the leaders of an inquisition in France to root out heresy. The effectiveness of their inquisition would be obstructed by both the king and the Parlements and by July 1558 their appointments were voided by the Parlement of Paris.
The Valois Tapestries are a series of eight large tapestries depicting festivities or "magnificences" held by Catherine de' Medici's Royal Courts in the second half of the 16th century. The tapestries were primarily modeled on drawings by Antoine Caron, but to Caron's distant views of large panoramas crowded with figures much larger portraits of leading persons at the French court have been added in the foreground, usually to the side, as well as elaborate borders.
The French queen Catherine de' Medici was patron for building projects including the Valois chapel at Saint-Denis, the Tuileries Palace, and the Hôtel de la Reine in Paris, and extensions to the château of Chenonceau, near Blois. Born in 1519 in Florence, Catherine de' Medici was a daughter of both the Italian and the French Renaissance. She grew up in Florence and Rome under the wing of the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII. In 1533, at the age of fourteen, she left Italy and married Henry, the second son of King Francis I of France. On doing so, she entered the greatest Renaissance court in northern Europe.
Catherine de' Medici was a patron of the arts made a significant contribution to the French Renaissance. Catherine was inspired by the example of her father-in-law, King Francis I of France, who had hosted the leading artists of Europe at his court. As a young woman, she witnessed at first hand the artistic flowering stimulated by his patronage. As governor and regent of France, Catherine set out to imitate Francis's politics of magnificence. In an age of civil war and declining respect for the monarchy, she sought to bolster royal prestige through lavish cultural display.
Henry III of Navarre's succession to the throne in 1589 was followed by a four-year war of succession to establish his legitimacy, which was part of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). Henry IV inherited the throne after the assassination of Henry III, the last Valois king, who died without children. Henry was already King of Navarre, as the successor of his mother, Jeanne d'Albret, but he owed his succession to the throne of France to the line of his father, Antoine of Bourbon, an agnatic descendant of Louis IX. He was the first French king from the House of Bourbon.
Henry IV of France's wives and mistresses played a significant role in the politics of his reign. Both Henry (1553–1610) and his first wife Margaret of Valois, whom he married in 1572, were repeatedly unfaithful to each other, and the collapse of their marriage led to their estrangement and living apart. Although Henry fathered children with a series of mistresses, his lack of a legitimate heir became a cause of concern, and his marriage was not annulled until 1599. In 1600, at the age of forty-six, he married his second wife, Marie de' Medici. They had six children, including the future Louis XIII. Henry was unfaithful to his second wife as well and insisted that she raise his illegitimate children along with her own.
Charlotte de Beaune Semblançay, Viscountess of Tours, Baroness de Sauve, Marquise de Noirmoutier was a French noblewoman and a mistress of King Henry of Navarre, who later ruled as King Henry IV of France. She was a member of queen mother Catherine de' Medici's notorious "Flying Squadron", a group of beautiful female spies and informants recruited to seduce important men at Court, and thereby extract information to pass on to the Queen Mother.
Jeanne d'Albret, also known as Jeanne III, was Queen of Navarre from 1555 to 1572.
Isabelle de la Tour, Lady of Limeuil was a French noblewoman and a Maid of Honour to the Queen Mother Catherine de' Medici. She also formed part of Catherine's notorious "flying squadron", a group of beautiful female spies she used for the purpose of forming sexual liaisons with various powerful men at the French court thereby extracting information which would then be passed on to her. In about 1562 at Catherine's instigation, she became the mistress of Louis, Prince of Condé, brother of King Antoine of Navarre and one of the leading Huguenots in France. Two years later when Isabelle created a scandal by giving birth to his son whilst the court was on a royal progress, she was banished to a convent.
François de Vendôme, Vidame de Chartres, was a successful soldier and glamorous courtier who figures in accounts of the brilliant but decadent French court of the 1550s.
Artus de Cossé, seigneur de Gonnor and Comte de Secondigny (1512–1582), was a Marshal of France, an office he was elevated to in 1567. He served to administer the armies finances during the first of the French Wars of Religion and would lead the royal army in its pursuit of the Prince of Condé during the second civil war. His failure to catch the army led to his dismissal from overall royal command. During the third civil war he would again lead troops, beating a small Protestant force, before being defeated in the final days of the war at Arney-le-Duc. His long history of Politique leanings would push him into the orbit of the Malcontents for which he would be arrested in 1574. In 1576 he would be released and restored to favour before he died in 1582.
Jollet, Etienne. Jean et François Clouet. Translated by Deke Dusinberre. Paris: Lagune, 1997. ISBN0-500-97465-9.
Knecht, R. J. Catherine de' Medici. London and New York: Longman, 1998. ISBN0-582-08241-2.
Plazenet, Laurence. "Jacques Amyot and the Greek Novel". In The Classical Heritage in France. Edited by Gerald Sandy. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 2002. ISBN90-04-11916-7.
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