Consistori de Barcelona - Competitions

Competitions

The first recorded contest held by the Consistori de Barcelona was held probably on 28 March 1395 with the king in attendance. He had only been in Barcelona since 25 March. This festival is known from a letter the king wrote, which he sent on 19 February 1396 recording the bella festa ... a honor de la dita gaya ciència, the prizes for which were provided by the municipal government. There is no record of the names of the winners, the prizes, or their poems. The letter of 1396 was written in Catalan by Bernat Metge on behalf of the king and sent from Perpignan to Barcelona, foretelling the king's arrival for the festival and asking the city to commit some funds to it. Jaume March brought the letter before the Consell dels Cents Jurats sometime in the middle of march, but the timing was horrible. The Consell was intriguing against the king and the city had largely rejected his control. Then the Consell dels Trenta sent an embassy to John to report on el fet de la gaya sciència, but the city's response was que les dites joies no sien donades per la Ciutat (that the aforesaid jewellery shall not be donated by the City) and that was the end of the year's floral games.

John died a two months later, having only held two of his planned annual festivals (1394 and 1395). The festival disappeared for two more years until 1 May 1398, when John's successor, Martin the Humane, agreed, from Zaragoza, to subsidise the Consistori's annual festival, to be held again on Pentecost, with forty Aragonese gold florins to cover the cost of the golden and silver prizes for the winners, to be chosen by mantenidors named by the king. On 12 August 1399 at Zaragoza, Martin renominated Jaume March and Luys d'Averçó as rectors, maintainers, and defenders of the Gaya Sciència de Barcelona. Martin's two acts do not refer to the previous efforts of King John and rather seem to treat the Consistori as a new royal foundation distinct from the municipally-run foundation of his predecessor. Martin's 1398 act also made mention of Toulouse and Paris (again) in a lengthy preamble outlining the merits of the various sciences: arithmetic, astrology, dialectic, geometry, law, medicine, music, politics, strategy, composing (trobar), theology, etc. Under Martin a great festa was held in 1408 beneath the walls where the Mirador del rei Martí—a recent addition the royal palace complex—and the Palau del Lloctinent meet in Barcelona.

The Consistori lapsed with Martin's death (1410) and the political confusion leading up to the Compromise of Caspe (1412) prevented its activity, but on 17 March 1413 Ferdinand of Antequera, who succeeded Martin in accord with the Compromise, confirmed to the Consistori (consistorio, collegio seu cetu inventorum) all that Martin had decreed in 1398, conceded to it the right to elect the four maintainers, and permitted it to meet at any time of the year other than the annual festival. The annual contest was confirmed to occur on 1 May, and Ferdinand became its greatest patron. His ties to Castile helped increase the accessibility of Catalan (and Occitan) culture and was a catalyst for the first Castilian poetic treatise, the Arte de trovar.