Catherine De' Medici's Court Festivals - Entertainments

Entertainments

Catherine de' Medici's investment in magnificent entertainments was part of a conscious political programme. She recalled the belief of her father-in-law, King Francis I, that the court needed to be physically active and constantly entertained. She also declared her intention to imitate the Roman emperors, who kept their subjects from mischief by occupying them with games and amusements. She therefore adopted a policy of distracting her nobles from fighting among themselves by laying on irresistible entertainments and sports for them at court.

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". Catherine did not hesitate to use the charms of her ladies as an attraction of the court. In 1577, for example, she threw a banquet at which the food was served by topless women. In 1572, the Huguenot Jeanne d’Albret, Queen 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. 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".

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 ballets de cour, a distinctive new art form, emerged from the creative advances in court entertainment devised by Catherine de' Medici.