Urban entries: Origins and development of an urban ritual (Montpellier, fourteenth-fifteenth century)
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The urban chronicle of Montpellier known under the nickname of the “Petit Thalamus” and written between 1204 and 1423 preserves the memory of about thirty urban entries in a broad sense because it includes not only the rare royal entries that occured during this period but also the entries of French and Navarrese princes or even the king’s officers or bishops’ entries, from the very first one (that of Jacques II, king of Aragon and lord of Montpellier), in 1277, until that of Guillaume Forestier, bishop of Maguelone, which is the last one recorded. Thus, the “Petit Thalamus” provides us with the occasion to plunge ourselves into the internal perception of such a ritual, as seen by the consulate itself, and no longer from a royal point of view: it allows us to perceive more than just a princely entry, but the fact of a city or town welcoming the prince. The detailed study of such narratives composed under the close supervision of the consuls themselves highlights the flexibility of the ritual, as well as the possibility of variations from an absolute model that had been designed for the entry of Pope Urban V in 1367 when he came to visit a town where he founded an important university college. It must, therefore, be underlined that before the 1350s such a ritual did not really seem to exist or else did not seem to be noteworthy enough to be recorded in the urban chronicle, which is more or less the same: what is recorded about the kings of Aragon and of Majorca is not their entries but why they came to Montpellier and what they accomplished during their stay in connection with urban politics. However, from the middle of the fourteenth century, the entry itself, or the narration of the entry, began to become prominent in the urban memory. Nevertheless, the princely entry was perhaps more constraining for the prince himself than what had generally been believed. The king of Navarre, Charles III, for instance, was the first to publicly express a degree of reluctance to comply with such a ritual, first as a prince in 1378 and then as a king in 1408 and again in 1410. In fact, the proliferation of the ceremony from the second half of the fourteenth century led to a certain banalization of the phenomenon, which was accompanied by a weakening of the ritual (recovering its strength and its majesty only under very special circunstances, such as the entry of Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg in 1415) or that of the Dauphin Louis in 1420, in spite of the martial appearance of his cortege. Last but not least, Montpellier is the very first town of the French kingdom to use a processional canopy on these occasions, a major innovation that first appeared for the entry of Pope Urban V and then used only twice, for the entry of Charles VI in 1389 and that of the Dauphin Louis in 1420. But, finally, considering the urban entries on one hand as a global phenomenon (which is to say by not isolating the king’s entries from the other ones), and on the other hand from an urban perspective, allows us to understand how such a ritual could be used by the city or town authorities to reinforce their own power over the community itself.
Réseaux sociaux