Royal entry
The ceremonies and festivities accompanying a formal entry by a ruler or their representative into a city in the Middle Ages and early modern period in Europe were known as the royal entry, triumphal entry, or Joyous Entry. The entry centred on a procession carrying the entering ruler into the city, where they were greeted and paid appropriate homage by the civic authorities, followed by a feast and other celebrations.
The entry began as a gesture of loyalty and fealty by a city to the ruler, with its origins in the adventus celebrated for Roman emperors, which were formal entries far more frequent than triumphs. The first visit by a new ruler was normally the occasion, or the first visit with a new spouse. For the capital they often merged with the coronation festivities, and for provincial cities they replaced it, sometimes as part of a Royal Progress, or tour of major cities in a realm. The concept of itinerant court is related to this.
From the Late Middle Ages, entries became the occasion for increasingly lavish displays of pageantry and propaganda. The devising of the iconography, aside from highly conventional patterns into which it quickly settled, was managed with scrupulous care on the part of the welcoming city by municipal leaders in collaboration with the chapter of the cathedral, the university, or hired specialists. Often the greatest artists, writers and composers of the period were involved in the creation of temporary decorations, of which little record now survives, at least from the early period.
Origins and development
The contemporary account from Galbert of Bruges of the unadorned "Joyous Advent" of a newly installed Count of Flanders into "his" city of Bruges, in April 1127, shows that in the initial stage, undisguised by fawning and triumphalist imagery that came to disguise it, an entry was similar to a parley, a formal truce between the rival powers of territorial magnate and walled city, in which reiteration of the city's "liberties" in the medieval sense, that is its rights and prerogatives, were set out in clear terms and legitimated by the presence of saintly relics:"On April 5... at twilight, the king with the newly elected Count William, marquis of Flanders, came into our town at Bruges. The canons of Saint Donatian had come forth to meet them, bearing relics of the saints and welcoming the king and new count joyfully in a solemn procession worthy of a king. On April 6... the king and count assembled with their knights and ours, with the citizens and many Flemings in the usual field where reliquaries and relics of the saints had been collected. And when silence had been called for, the charter of the liberty of the church and of the privileges of Saint Donatian was read aloud before all... There was also read the little charter of agreement between the count and our citizens... Binding themselves to accept this condition, the king and count took an oath on the relics of saints in the hearing of the clergy and people".
In England, the first pre-coronation royal entry was staged in 1377 for the 10 year-old Richard II, and fulfilled the dual purpose of enhancing the image of the boy-king and reconciling the crown with the economically powerful City of London. The grand cavalcade through the streets was accompanied by the public conduits running with wine and a featured large temporary castle representing New Jerusalem. The success of the event set a precedent that was to continue at English coronations until well into the 17th-century.
The procession of a new pope to Rome was known as a possesso. A ruler with a new spouse would also receive an entry. The entry of Queen Isabeau of Bavaria into Paris in 1389 was described by the chronicler Froissart. The entries of Charles IX of France and his Habsburg queen, Elizabeth of Austria, into Paris, March 1571, had been scheduled for Charles alone in 1561, for the entrate were typically celebrated towards the beginning of a reign, but the French Wars of Religion had made such festivities inappropriate, until the peace that followed the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye signed in August 1570.
Until the mid-14th century, the occasions were relatively simple. The city authorities waited for the prince and his party outside the city walls, and after handing over a ceremonial key with a "loyal address" or speech, and perhaps stopping to admire tableaux vivants such as those that were performed at the entry into Paris of Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, described in detail by the chronicler Froissart, conducted him through the streets which were transformed with colour, with houses on the route hanging tapestries and embroideries or carpets or bolts of cloth from their windows, and with most of the population lining the route. At Valladolid in 1509
Heraldic displays were ubiquitous: at Valladolid in 1509, the bulls in the fields outside the city were caparisoned with cloths painted with the royal arms and hung with bells. Along the route the procession would repeatedly halt to admire the set-pieces embellished with mottoes and pictured and living allegories, accompanied by declamations and the blare of trumpets and volleys of artillery. The procession would include members of the three Estates, with the nobility and gentry of the surrounding area, and the clergy and guilds of the city processing behind the prince. From the mid-14th century the guild members often wore special uniform clothes, each guild choosing a bright colour; in Tournai in 1464 three hundred men wore large embroidered silk fleur de lys on their chests and backs, at their own expense. The prince reciprocated by confirming, and sometimes extending, the customary privileges of the city or a local area of which it was the capital. Usually the prince also visited the cathedral to be received by the bishop and confirm the privileges of the cathedral chapter also. There a Te Deum would be customary, and music written for the occasion would be performed.
Increasing elaboration
During the 14th century, as courtly culture, with the court of Burgundy in the lead, began to stage elaborate dramas re-enacting battles or legends as entertainment during feasts, the cities began to include in entry ceremonies small staged pageant "tableaux", usually organised by the guilds, and drawing on their growing experience of medieval theatre and pageantry. Initially these were on religious themes, but "gradually these tableaux developed, through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century, into a repertory of archways and street-theatres which presented variants of a remarkably consistent visual and iconographical vocabulary." Fortune with her wheel, fame and time, the seven virtues, both Christian and classical, and the Nine Worthies and other classical, biblical and local heroes, among whose number the honoree was now to be counted. As the tradition developed, the themes became more specific, firstly stressing the legitimacy of the prince, and his claim by descent, then setting before him the princely virtues and their rewards, which especially included the benefits to him of encouraging prosperous cities and provinces.The procession might pause for allegorical figures to address it, or pass beside a genealogical tree or under a temporary classical-style triumphal arch with either painted figures or posed actors perching on it, standing in for statuary in the case of arches. Still more elaborate entertainments began to be staged during or after the civic feast, and by the mid-17th century these could be as spectacular as the staged naval battles, masques, operas and ballets that courts staged for themselves. The court now often had a major role in both designing and financing entries, which increasingly devoted themselves to the glorification of the absolute monarch as hero, and left the old emphasis on his obligations behind; "any lingering possibilities of its use as a vehicle for dialogue with the middle classes vanished". At the third "triumph" at Valladolid in 1509, a lion holding the city's coat-of-arms shattered at the King's arrival, revealing the royal arms: the significance could not have been lost, even on those unable to hear the accompanying declamation.
During the 16th century, at dates differing widely by location, the tableau vivant was phased out and mostly replaced by painted or sculpted images, although many elements of street-theatre persisted, and small masques or other displays became incorporated into the programmes. The entry in 1514 of Mary Tudor to Paris, as Louis XII's new Queen, was the first French entry to have a single organizer; ten years before Anne of Brittany's entry had been "largely medieval", with five stops for mystery plays in the streets.
During the Hundred Years' War, the entry of the ten-year-old Henry VI of England, to be crowned king of France in Paris, 2 December 1431, was marked with great pomp and heraldic propaganda. Outside the city he was welcomed by the mayor in a blue velvet houppelande, his retinue in violet with scarlet caps, and representatives of the Parlement of Paris in red trimmed with fur. At the porte Saint-Denis the royal party were greeted with a grand achievement of the French arms that Henry claimed, gold fleurs de lis on an azure ground. The king was offered large red hearts, from which doves were released, and a rain of flowers pelted the procession. At the symbolic gateway, a canopy of estate embroidered with more gold lilies was erected over the young king, who was carried in a litter supported on six lances carried by men dressed in blue. Through the city there were welcoming pageants and allegorical performances: before the Church of the Innocents, a forest was erected, through which a captured stag was released and "hunted".
Classical influence
Educated folk of the Middle Ages had close at hand an example of an allegorical series of entries at a wedding, in the frame story that opens Martianus Capella's encyclopedic introduction to all one needed to know of the arts, On the Wedding of Philology and Mercury and of the Seven Liberal Arts. With the revival of classical learning, Italian entries became influenced by literary descriptions of the Roman triumph. Livy's account was supplemented by detailed descriptions in Suetonius and Cassius Dio of Nero's Greek Triumph, and in Josephus of the Triumph of Titus.More recherché sources were brought to bear; Aulus Gellius' Noctes Atticae furnished a detail that became part of the conventional symbolism: coronation with seven crowns. Boccaccio's long poem Amorosa visione, following the schema of a triumph, offered a parade of famous personages, both historical and legendary, that may have provided a model for Petrarch, who elaborated upon Livy in an account of the triumph of Scipio Africanus and in his poem I Trionfi. Castruccio Castracani entered Lucca in 1326 riding in a chariot, with prisoners driven before him. Alfonso V of Aragon entered Naples in 1443 seated on a triumphal car under a baldachin, as is shown by a surviving bas-relief on the earliest, and still perhaps the most beautiful, permanent post-classical triumphal arch, which he built the same year. In Italian, specific meanings developed for trionfo as both the whole procession, and a particular car or cart decorated with a display or tableau; although these usages did not spread exactly to other languages, they lie behind terms such as "triumphal entry" and "triumphal procession".
The emphasis began to shift from the displays as static tableaux that were passed by a procession in festive but normal contemporary dress, to the displays' being incorporated in the procession itself, a feature also of the religious medieval pageant; the tableaux were mounted on carri, the precursors of the float, and were now often accompanied by a costumed throng. The carnival parades of Florence that were refined to a high pitch in the late quattrocento set a high standard; they were not without a propaganda element at times, as in the lavish parades of Carnival 1513, following the not-universally welcomed return of the Medici the previous year; the theme of one pageant, more direct than subtle: The Return of the Golden Age. With the French invasions of Italy from 1494, this form of entry spread north. Cardinal Bibbiena reported in a letter of 1520 that the Duke of Suffolk had sent emissaries to Italy to buy horses and bring back to Henry VIII of England men who knew how to make festal decorations in the latest Italian manner.
File:Piero della Francesca 047.jpg|thumb|right|Piero della Francesca, 1472, Federico da Montefeltro and his wife in triumphal cars, hers drawn by unicorns.
Charles V was indulged in a series of Imperial entrate in Italian cities during the Habsburg consolidation after the Sack of Rome, notably in Genoa, where Charles and his heir Philip made no less than five triumphal entries. Impressive occasions like Charles V's royal entry into Messina in 1535 have left few concrete survivals, but representations were still being painted on Sicilian wedding-carts in the 19th century.
After Mantegna's great mural of the Triumphs of Caesar rapidly became known throughout Europe in numerous versions in print form, this became the standard source, from which details were frequently borrowed, not least by Habsburg rulers, who especially claimed the Imperial legacy of Rome. Although Mantegna's elephants were difficult to copy, chained captives, real or acting the part, were not, and elaborate triumphal carts, often pulled by "unicorns" might replace the earlier canopy held over the prince on horseback. The woodcuts and text of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499 were another well-known source, and Petrarch's I Trionfi was printed in many illustrated editions; both were works of mythological allegory, with no obvious political content. Entries became displays of conspicuous learning, often with lengthy Latin addresses, and the entertainments became infused with matter from the abstruse worlds of Renaissance emblems and hermeticism, to which they were very well suited. In the world of Renaissance Neo-Platonism, the assertion and acting-out of the glory and power of the prince might actually bring it about.
A precocious example of the Entrata with a consistent and unified allegorical theme was the entry of Medici Pope Leo X into Florence, November 1515. All the city's artistic resources were drawn upon to create this exemplary entry, to a planned programme perhaps devised by the historian Jacopo Nardi, as Vasari suggested; the seven virtues represented by seven triumphal arches at stations along the route, the seventh applied as a temporary façade to the Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore, which still lacked a permanent one.