This paper  examines  a particular patron saint's day celebrated in the year 1325.  The saint is Martin of Tours in his role as patron of the Tuscan city of Lucca, a role he had played since the sixth century.  In keeping with our theme, this is a saint's feast day celebration that was appropriated, indeed distorted to serve the political ends of an ambitious ruler.  Our principal source for the incident here analyzed is the contemporary Florentine chronicler, Giovanni Villani (c. 1275-1348), generally accepted as fairly reliable historian for his era.

The brief moment of Lucca's ascendancy as a Tuscan state rivaling Florence is in inverse proportion to the fame of its founder Castruccio Castracani (1281-1328).  It has been suggested that the tyrant of Lucca was portrayed, along with his early Pisan ally, Uguccione della Faggiuola, in the "Three Living and Three Dead" section of the "Triumph of Death" fresco in Pisa's Camposanto, c. 1350 (Lenzi, 78).  Latin and Italian biographies, by Niccolo Tegrimi and Aldo Manucci respectively, appeared in the centuries following the strong man's death. [[Illus., #1: Portrait of Castruccio]]  Machiavelli was fascinated enough by the trecento personality to write a brief life in 1520, alas, mostly his own invention.  In the Romantic era Mary Shelley, of Frankenstein fame, penned the novel Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823).  A tragedy by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Castruccio Castrucani: or, The Triumph of Lucca followed in 1837.  Castruccio's genius in creating a powerful principality out of a minor city-state continues to interest political historians, as most recently demonstrated by Louis Green in his 1986 monograph, Castruccio Castracani: A Study on the Origins and Character of a Fourteenth-Century Italian Despotism.

What particularly attracted Machiavelli to Castruccio was his image as a self-made man.  Coming from only a junior branch, money-changers become bankers, of the prominent Luccan family of the Interminelli (also rendered Antelminelli), Castruccio was not destined for supreme power, even in his small city-state.  By a combination of sophisticated political skills, carefully applied ruthlessness, superb military strategy and a fair amount of daring-do and luck (in short, all the qualities of il Principe), Castruccio was able to assume legitimate rule over Lucca, advance the Ghibelline cause in Tuscany against the overwhelming power of Guelph Florence, ingratiate himself with the Holy Roman Emperor so as to become a duke, and create a state which, at its height in the late 1320s, comprised not only Lucca, but the cities of Pisa and Pistoia as well and the Ligurian coast from La Spezia to Elba. [[Illus. #2: Castruccio in the field from the Illustrated Chronicle of Giovanni Villani]] 

For our purposes, Castruccio's mastery of the arts of humiliation and intimidation through public spectacle deserve particular attention.  I am especially indebted here to the pioneering work of Richard Trexler in this area.  His seminal article "Correre la Terra: Collective Insults in the Late Middle Ages" (1984) examined the relationship of the margins of society to its center in northern Italian communes as reflected in the employment of sporting events as rituals of humiliation, both intramural and extramural.  What Trexler did not focus upon was the festival configuration cum iconography of the particular patron saints under whose aegis these events were frequently conducted.  In the Luccan Martinmas of 1325 I think we have a fairly clear example of how a particular saint's festival was co-opted for the purpose of insult and intimidation.

 Among Castruccio's political talents was one he had in common with many capitani of his era, a certain flair for the striking theatrical gesture.  For example, in 1327 when he decided once and for all to eliminate the troublesome Quartigiani family, who had been plotting yet again to betray Lucca to the Guelphs, Castruccio hanged Guerruccio Quartigiani and his three sons.  Certainly an ignoble end, but the other nineteen leading conspirators he buried alive, head downward in the ground –- a fitting end for those who would turn the state upside down (Green 1986, 97).  One is reminded of the legs of the arch-traitor Judas protruding from the mouth of giant Satan at the lowest point of the Inferno.
 
Such rituals of humiliation were an integral part of trecento warfare and occurred frequently in the prolonged contest between mighty Florence and its Tuscan rivals.  A most conspicuous technique was the staging of a horse race or palio by the besiegers of a town or fortress in defiance of the besieged.  The reading would seem to be that, "We the besiegers are so in control that we can relax and engage in holiday sports, while you, the besieged, are too impotent or cowardly to even think of interrupting our pleasure."  While the circuit of a horserace would indicate that the besiegers are able to festively encircle their enemies, it seems that the majority of these pali were run in a straight line, either up to or away from a prominent gate of the enemy town.  Occasionally the besiegers would make use of a city's own extramural racecourse.  The running up to the gates, of course, would have the effect of directly projecting the festive energy of contempt into the enemy town.  [[Illus. #3: Palio before the enemy's gates from the Illustrated Chronicle]]

The palio itself was an elaborately embroidered banner or other bolt of valuable cloth, the traditional prize in a communal horserace.  The besieged town, the "prize" of the campaign, was thus equated with the object of a holiday sport.  Inevitably it must fall to the superior sportsmen.  In less symbolic and more practical terms, such an event would also serve to relieve the tedium of a prolonged siege, especially for the younger cavalieri.  This would in turn yield a "generational message," according to Trexler:
In 1323 the Florentine captain, the Catalan Ramon de Cardona staged such a palio before Milan.  The day was important -- 23 June, St. John's Day, San Giovanni being the patron saint of the city of Florence. 1   The padrone then can be seen as not only holding out the palio to the winner of the race, but delivering the besieged town itself into the hands of his high-spirited devotees.

At the beginning of the crucial campaign season of 1325 Castruccio Castracani was very much on the defensive.  Florentine forces far outnumbered his own and had managed to bottle him up in Pistoia, a city over which he had only recently assumed control.  His opposite number was the same Ramon de Cardona who, again on June 23, staged a palio before the walls of Pistoia.  The prize was a bolt of samite velvet.  One chronicler mentions a second palio on the following day (Green 1986, 163).  Even though the Florentine army soon withdrew, it is safe to say that the besieged Castruccio was not amused.  He would soon exact his revenge.

By late summer the Florentine army had seriously overextended itself in Luccan territory and was rapidly losing its numerical superiority.  It eventually blundered into a trap, thanks to Castruccio's superior knowledge of the terrain, and suffered a disastrous defeat at Altopascio on September 23.  In the rout an incredible number were slain or taken prisoner, among the latter Ramon de Cardona, his son, numerous French knights (Florence was allied to Angevin Naples, Charles of Anjou, son of King Robert, controlling Florence from 1325 to 1328), and many prominent Florentines.  In the following week Castruccio cut a swath of destruction through the Florentine contado virtually unprecedented in that city's history, a kind of trecento "shock and awe" (Green 1986, 167-76).  By October the tyrant of Lucca was before the walls of Florence itself.  True to form, Castruccio staged not one but three palii in revenge for his treatment at Pistoia earlier that summer.  The first was a traditional horse race of his cavalrymen.  This was followed by a footrace of his infantry (the lowest level of foot soldiers, the ribalds, according to Trexler ) and finally, in a consummate gesture of contempt and derision, a pell-mell race of camp prostitutes mounted on donkeys.  Part of the fun of the latter two races would have been the rather low level of "sportsmanship" and high level of rough and tumble.  Anal and genital exposure perhaps even formed an accidental part of the final spectacle of colliding asses and tumbling doxies.

Castruccio's sixteenth-century biographer, Manucci, claimed that this triple palio was staged "in honor" of Francis of Assisi whose feast day, October 4, it was, Castruccio having a "great devotion" to this saint! (Manucci, 64).  Castruccio would be buried as a simple Franciscan tertiary in Lucca's San Francesco in 1328, a practice not uncommon among the Italian mighty.  In the races of the lowly infantry and the whores, then, we can perhaps detect a mordant wit at work.  We get a rather arch reading of the donkey-loving Poveretto and his beloved outcasts on this, his feast day militarized.  San Martino, Lucca's patron saint, would soon be similarly "honored."

That Castruccio's triple palio had a significant impact is confirmed by the fact that a full five years later, and over two years after the tyrant's death, the Florentines staged exactly the same descending sequence of races before the walls of Lucca, including the race of camp whores.  This was also in October, but on the 12th, not St. Francis's feast day (Green 1995, 35).   Two hundred German mercenaries took the opportunity to desert their employers, the Luccese, when the Florentines archly invited the defenders to attend the races.

To return to the 1325 campaign, on October 26 Castruccio linked up with his Milanese ally Azzo Visconti to invest the nearby town of Rifredi (5 km from Florence) for the sole purpose, it would seem, of running a palio in revenge for Milan's disgrace of two years past (Green, 179).  Thus we see in the period a protracted and interconnected employment of rituals of humiliation based on festival culture, meant to theatrically enhance the incessant political maneuvering and military strategizing so characteristic of the power struggles of the northern Italian communes.  I sketch out this brief history of palio politics in order to set the scene for Castruccio's ironically charged trionfo of November 11. 

Castruccio officially ended his campaign season and prepared for winter quarters at an important marker for the onset of winter, St. Martin's Day, a day that was simultaneously a high point of his city's liturgical calendar.  As Peter Brown maintains in The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Chrisitianity (1981) early saint's cults were extensions of the Roman system of patron-and-client into the Otherworld, with the increasingly more important figure of the bishop serving as facilitator and intermediary in this exchange process.  The bishopric of Lucca first flourished under the sixth-century Irish monk, St. Frediano (Frigidian) who not only constructed the first cathedral but is also credited with miraculously changing the course of the River Serchio to the lasting benefit of the city (Osheim, 10).  The Martinian dedication most likely dates from Frediano's see, since early Irish monasticism looked to Martin's establishment of Marmoutier in Tours for inspiration and validation.  Thus by Castruccio's day we have had nearly eight hundred years of San Martino as the protector and benefactor of the bishopric and, by extension, of the commune, as both venerable ancestor and immediate spiritual presence in his domus.  This means as well, eight hundred years of celebration of Martin's feast day of November 11 in both its sacred and complementary secular aspects. 

In wrapping up the 1325 campaign Castruccio discharged three hundred of his Aretine cavalry, garrisoned various strongholds, and moved the bulk of his forces back to Lucca to celebrate the padrone's feast day in special fashion con grande triunfo e gloria (Villani ix, 323).  He arrived on the outskirts on November 10 to prepare.  On November 11, Martin's Day itself, Castruccio was met on his way into the city by the whole body of the citizens and their wives "as if he were a king," says the chronicler.  Not yet an imitation Roman triumph in high Renaissance style, this was more a medieval knightly spectacle, but obviously bearing some memory of antiquity. 2   One of its still medieval features might be its wry "iconographic wit."  Preceding the victorious general rolled the captured carroccio or battlewagon of the Florentines drawn by oxen and draped with the Florentine and Angevin banners hung upside down.  A particular feature of this war wagon was a large bell, originally a tocsin tolled to gather the municipal levies and thereafter rung during engagement with the enemy. [[Illus. #4: The Florentine carroccio before a besieged town from the Illustrated Chronicle]]  Ironically, this bell was called la Martinella (Villani ix, 75; Manucci, 69), its name derived from the same bishop saint of Tours (Battaglia, 845).  In Castruccio's triumphal procession the Martinella was continuously rung, thus not only mocking Florentine might but also re-appropriating the saint's bell to his true followers, the Lucchese.

The winners of the recent races run at Florence and Rifredi, including the infamous ribalds and whores, would also likely have taken part in the triumphal procession according to custom, waving their palii as they moved along.  The sixteen-century biographer also mentions the many decorations typical of such a major municipal festival –- the city walls and streets draped with "the finest tapestries, silk cloths, garlands of greenery, and paintings" together with "much music, dancing and other festivities" (Manucci, 67-68).  The Piazza San Martino and all the houses of the Antelminelli clan were especially richly decorated in silk and cloth-of-gold for the triunfo, the production of silk being the principal source of Lucca's wealth

Beside the centerpiece of the carroccio trudged the defeated commander Ramon de Cardona bearing a large votive candle.  Behind him, with shorter candles, walked some fifty of the most prominent prisoners –- con torchietti in mano ad offerere a San Martino (Villani ix).  The very fact that the knightly prisoners were walking was already a significant humiliation.  Their being stage-managed as humble suppliants to the local saint was yet another.  A more innocent interpretation might see the Florentine prisoners as simply fellow Christians incorporated in a straightforward honoring of a major saint.  San Martino had important churches in Florence as well, after all.  But this was simultaneously a display of prisoners with the tolling bell in the carroccio drawing attention to the spectacle.  Representatives of the towns and villages of the Luccan contado would have been converging on the city for the celebration of the feast with just such votive candles, representing an act of vassalage to Lucca while simultaneously honoring the Saint (Ross & Erichsen, 31-32). 3   The target audience for the triumphal display aspect of the Saint's procession would have been these same country people, with their city cousins, the witnesses to Castruccio's triunfo thus neatly folded into the normal stream of pilgrims on St. Martin's Day.  News of this "twisted" saint's procession would certainly have made an impact in Florence as well, as the very existence of Villani's detailed account itself testifies.
      
Whichever gate of Lucca received the "regal" entry it seems obvious that the triunfo would have eventually made its way to the Duomo. 4   As the Florentine prisoners passed down the Piazza San Martino and approached the magnificent façade of the cathedral they could not help but notice the near life-size equestrian group of young Martin and the Beggar at the upper right of the central arch.  [[Illus.# 5 & 6: Piazza and facade of San Martino, Lucca]]  This familiar devotional image, known as the "Charity of St. Martin," had stood there since the completion of the Pisan-style Romanesque façade by Guidetto da Coma and his team of Lombard sculptors in the opening decades of the thirteenth century.  Like the more accomplished Reiter in Bamberg Cathedral of about the same time, it expressed some of the spirit of the emerging international Gothic style.  The equestrian image would have been familiar to all.  In it the French knights, particularly, would have recognized one of their own, but even a Catalan like Cardona would have been totally familiar with the Martin cult and this, its dominant icon.  Although we cannot push the documentation earlier than 1414 it is likely, too, that the St. Martin figure was clothed in splendid robes, of Luccan silk most likely, with a hat placed upon its head and jewels around its neck especially for the feast day (Ross and Erichsen, 127). 5   This clothing ceremonial continued into the middle of the eighteenth century.  Moving under this sculpture-group the pedestrian prisoners-of-war would perhaps be reminded of their own vulnerability, in the circumstances , vis-à-vis  a mounted nobleman with naked sword --in this particular configuration of the Charity, St. Martin's sword is oddly close to the Beggar's neck (Baracchini and Caleca, pls. 64-70). [[Illus. 7: Original Charity group from the façade of San Martino]]  Like the unadorned figure in the sculpture group, they too were very much beggars under St. Martin.
       
Inside the cathedral Ramon de Cardona and other prominent prisoners assisted at the victory mass as Castruccio and his people looked on.  The bishopric at the time was in an interregnum, between Enrico II (1300-1323) and Guglielmo II (1330-1349).  Some deputy, then, must have represented the diocese in this, its patronal festival (Osheim, 130).  The local ecclesiastical powers (cathedral canons, etc.), in any case, were predominantly in Castruccio's camp (Green 1986, 192-201).  There is little likelihood, then, that the tyrant of Lucca would have been in anyway upstaged.  Like the mounted figure of St. Martin, the precious relic of the Volto Santo, an ancient and "miraculous" crucifix, would likely have been adorned with its crown and encasement of jewels for the occasion.  Martinian hymns praising this "equal of the apostles," this "jewel of Confessors," were doubtless also part of the ceremony.  The Florentine prisoners were thus orchestrated to give thanks for their own defeat to God and St. Martin. 

After this service of thanksgiving Castruccio treated his fifty odd special prisoners to a banquet.  Machiavelli perhaps encapsulated an element of truth in recording one of Castruccio's "urbane sayings:"

     Dicendogli alcuno male, che e' viveva troppo  splendidamente,
     disse Castruccio: <<Se questo fussi vizio non si farebbe si
     splendidi conviti alle feste de' nostri santi>>.

      (Once when some one rebuked him for living too   splendidly
       Castruccio said: ‘If that were a vice, such splendid banquets
        would never be given in honor of our saints.')   
                                                                                    Machiavelli, i, 670.

Castruccio had personal as well as patriotic reasons for especially honoring St. Martin.  Of the two junior branches of the great Luccan family of the Antelminelli, both named Castracani, Castruccio's was the Castracani de San Martino, as opposed to de San Cristoforo (Green 1986, 40).  His immediate ancestors had resided in the Curte Sancti Martini, the area fronting on the Cathedral and the traditional site of the money-changers' tables.  The emerging banking dynasty acquired many real estate holdings in the San Martino quarter throughout the thirteenth century (Blomquist, 460-61).  Il Duomo San Martino was thus the family's neighborhood church, the Piazza San Martino thus affording Castruccio his very own theater space.
     
Castruccio had further cause to celebrate lavishly the Saint's day two years later, in 1327, when he entertained no less a dignitary than the Emperor himself, Ludwig the Bavarian (crowned King of Italy in Milan in May 1327 and Emperor in Rome in February 1328 with Castruccio in attendance).  Returning from an inspection tour of Lucca's expanded eastern frontiers in early November, the two kept Martin's feast day in the capital, no doubt blending German and Tuscan traditions of celebration.  Villani states that Castruccio was proclaimed duke on Martin's Day itself, 11 November (Villani x, 37).  The imperial diploma is actually dated 17 November, but this is still within the important Octave of St. Martin, and so the imperial largess may well be considered a Martinmas gift from the Emperor to his most successful partisan in Tuscany (Green, 221). 6
   
The Martinmas victory banquet of 1325 is likely to have been, then, fairly magnificent.  Not so the special guests.  Since humiliation was the goal, the Florentine prisoners of war probably cut a sorry figure.  They had not likely been treated with high chivalric courtesy (more the ideal than the reality in any case.)  It had been some six weeks since the total defeat at Altopascio, and they had probably been kept in less than ideal conditions, hurriedly deposited somewhere behind the rapidly moving campaign of late September and October.  Illustrations in chronicles generally indicate rather rough treatment of prisoners, as in the work of the near contemporary Luccese Giovanni Secambi (Sercambi i, 123).  Recall that the Martinmas prisoners walked, not rode in the trionfo.  I would imagine them somewhat the worse for wear, their armor and other finery gone for plunder or long since bartered for basic comforts, no doubt many still showing evidence of their battle injuries -- so many beggars, in fact, at the feast of San Martino. 7   The record is not complete enough to say how this banquet was structured, whether the Florentine prisoners were segregated or, more likely, set down, somewhat incongruously, amid the splendid figures of Castruccio's court with the tyrant presiding, dining with one's enemy always implying some degree of reconciliation.  It is likely, too, that the traditional largess of the Martin feast was extended in various ways to the populace at large. 
      
The Florentines' presence at the banquet might, again, be read as a simple act of incorporation of fellow Christians during the "liminal" period of a saint's festival.  But this meal was hardly digested when the woebegone prisoners-of-war were thrown into prison reversing a common gesture on a saint's feast day, the freeing of prisoners, as in the Florentine San Giovanni or the Pistoiese San Jacopo festivals (Chretien, 40 & 109).  These captives were deliberately maltreated, claims Villani, in order to speed up delivery of their ransoms.  This need not be simply Florentine propaganda.  Castruccio's cruelty would have had a very practical motivation.  He needed funds as soon as possible to maintain his large contingents of mercenary cavalry, mostly German, for the coming campaign season if he was to consolidate his amazing achievements of 1325.  He would succeed in raising a "great sum of money," with some five thousand gold florins paid for the French and other "foreigners" alone.  For three years, until Castruccio's death in 1328, Lucca would be the dominant state of Tuscany, briefly eclipsing mighty Florence itself.  Much of this was due to the image of ferocity and invincibility that Castruccio had carefully created in which the multiple humiliations of the Feast of San Martino played no small part. 8
   
But how does this feast compare with the wider celebration of Martinmas in medieval Europe; and how does it relate to the Martin cult generally?  By way of deliberate inversion, I would argue, on Castruccio's part.  The very content of the Saint's cult -- his specific iconography, and the popular traditions of his festival --were treated by Castruccio with a sense of parody, much against the grain of the Martinian tradition.  To begin with, Martin was the furthest thing from a war god, despite the etymology of his name.  As the AVE of Maria transposed the EVA of the Fall, so too did Martinus invert the signification of the grim Roman god of battles.
       
Martinus of Pannonia was a prime exemplum of the pacifist hero in medieval Christianity.  Pacifism was a major theme in his vita from the time of his first biographer, and younger contemporary, Sulpicius Severus.  The historical Martin, following family tradition, was a Roman cavalry officer.  Indeed he belonged to the prestigious Scolae Palatinae or "palace guards."  But his disaffection with the military life was apparent, and his practice of ascetic Christianity while in the ranks was a constant source of difficulty for him.  Martin served his own aide-de-camp as if their roles were reversed.  The famous incident before the gates of Amiens (Vita Martini, chap. 3) was another example.  Martin had given away most of his army issue and had nothing left to share but his ample cavalryman's cloak -- hence, the iconic moment of the Charity.  What is usually left out of later, medieval configurations of the scene is the fact that many of Martin's fellow officers laughed at him for the ridiculous figure he cut in his mangled cloak.  Martin's problems as Christian nerd in the great Roman army came to a head before Vangiones, modern Worms, during Caesar Julian's campaign against the Germans.  This is Sulpicius's chapter four.  Martin asked for his discharge rather than accept the soldier's bonus offered by Julian, refusing with the famous line, Christi ego miles sum, pugnare mihi non licet.  Accused of cowardice by his furious commander, Martin volunteered to appear unarmed before the hostile barbarians the next day protected only by the sign of the cross.  He was put under guard, but "miraculously" (and there are many of these coincidental "miracles" in the Martin vita) the Germans came to an accommodation with Julian that evening and Martin was off the hook.  He was, however, expelled from the service.  Julian is recorded as having complained of the Christians assigned to him in defense of Gaul in 355 that "they only knew how to pray" (Wright, iii, 298).  Martin was the poster boy for these subversive beadsmen.  Martin's "knighthood" and his confrontation with Julian are most memorably rendered in the visual arts by Simone Martini, an exact contemporary of Castruccio, in a cycle of frescos (c. 1322) for the Lower Church of that other pacifist paragon, Francis, in Assisi. [[Illus. #9: Simone Martini scene of Martin abandoning his arms]]
      
Despite his military background Martinus never developed into a serious "military" saint but became, rather, given his later career, a favorite patron of monasteries and bishoprics, and later of lay professionals and the bourgeoisie -- as in the Florentine charitable fraternity, the Buonomini San Martino, founded in 1442.  To cite one example of this resistance to militarism in the cult, in Spain, which has numerous important Martinian dedications, Martin never developed into anything like a Santiago Matamoros even during the most active phases of the Reconquista.  In Gothic art Martin of the Charity was often paired with St. George, another young equestrian.  The meaning of the pairing is quite clear: George represents the militant, Martin the eleemosynary half of the "perfect knight."  Although images of Martin in the Charity might occasionally include a bit of leg armor, he is never portrayed as the military figure he actually was at the time of the Amiens incident.  (In all the hundreds of medieval Charities I have examined I have found only one in which Martin wears full plate-armor like George.)  Mostly he is portrayed as a fashionable young man out for a pleasure ride.  The winter season of the original Amiens account also seems to vanish, eliminating in the process the very raison d'être for the cloak sharing. 
       
The preeminent medieval symbol of the unsheathed sword –- representing summary justice, revenge, naked aggression, or simple warrior machismo –- thus undergoes, in Martin of the Charity, a singular transformation.  The drawn sword becomes a source of shelter and comfort.  In St. Martin's Charity the warm, sheltering mantle of the Madonna quite literally intersects with masculine cold steel.  This "feminizing" or "transgendering" of the sword epitomizes the Martinian pacifist tradition.  It was not until the historicizing theatricalism of the Baroque that Martin of the Charity began to be costumed as a Roman cavalryman, in full armor, helmet and spatha, as a complete warrior.
  
Martin's career, rather, was one of constant victimhood –- captured by brigands in the Alps, beaten out of Pavia by angry Arians, toppled down a flight of stone steps by the Devil himself.  Martin was at his most militant as Bishop of Tours in campaigns against what remained of pagan shrines in the countryside.  But this was only destruction of property.  And even in the most famous of these episodes, that of the pine tree, Martin depended upon his role as victim.  While attempting to cut down a "sacred" pine tree, Martin was interrupted by angry locals (Sulpicius, chap. 13).  He offered to expose himself to the falling timber if they would complete the process of felling the tree.  The pagani gleefully attempted to do this only to have the tree come crashing down upon them rather than on the saintly bishop.  While sometimes portrayed in the visual arts, this scene certainly never became as widespread as the ubiquitous image of the Charity.  Martin thus never became a model for militant missionaries despite his obvious availability. 9  At almost every turn the Martin cult resisted a militant reading in favor of the long-suffering or nurturing image of the saint.
     
Despite the pervasive mildness of the Martin-image, however, secular rulers would, on occasion, appropriate the saint for political cum military purposes.  The early Merovingians venerated what they believed was Martin's cloak-half employing it as a battle flag.  It was stored in a special room which, from cappa gave rise to the word capella (Van den Bosch, Ia).  This presumably important relic, however, unaccountably disappears from the record by the ninth century.  William the Conqueror dedicated his thank-offering for the victory at Hastings to St. Martin.  This was the monastery Sanctus Martinus de Bello, still known as Battle Abbey.  William insisted, against all advice from architects and planners, that the high altar of the monastery church be located at the exact spot where Harold Godwinson fell in battle, thus ending Anglo-Saxon sovereignty in Britain (Searle, 22).  St. Martin's Abbey, then, is a very conspicuous and self-aggrandizing war memorial.  At the other end of the Middle Ages Charles VII deliberately timed his royal entry into Rouen in 1449 to coincide with the Eve of St. Martin, November 10.  The entry was designed to celebrate the re-conquest of Normandy from the English, only recently completed.  Since Normandy had one of the highest concentrations of Martinian dedications in Europe, the November 1o vigil was quire significant.  The French king was rededicating himself to St. Martin and St. Martin was being re-established as a royal French saint, taken back as it were from the English invaders (Stevenson, 309).  Charles's royal entry brought things full circle.  At the very beginning of the process of English domination, Henry V upon the entering the captured town of Harfleur (of "Once more into the breach, dear friends!" fame) in September 1415, had gone immediately to the church of St. Martin to give thanks for his prize (Allmand, 81).

These examples of politicization of Martin and his feast are fairly mild compared with Castruccio's manipulations in which the sword of the Charity becomes equated with the sword of the victorious general.  We can perceive something like a three-act structure informing his 1325 event:

- the saint's procession with thanksgiving Mass doubling as a  display of trophy prisoners;

- the saint's day banquet with its "special" guests;

- the sudden reversal in a brutal imprisonment.

The strategy of regaling the wretched prisoners of war and then throwing them in prison, seems particularly perverse.  It reverses all the expectations of popular Martinmas feasting.
     
Martin's feast day, coming as it did at the onset of winter, coincided with the slaughter of those stock animals that would not be provisioned over the coming months.  Slaughter of swine or beef cattle was thus a sign of Martinmas and the "blood month" of November, and so the conspicuous consumption of fresh meat and innards during Martin's festival season was common throughout medieval Europe, northern Italy included.  It would yield such proverbial expressions as, "Every pig will meet his Martinmas," found in most of the Romance languages.
      
Concurrently, Martinmas was the season for broaching the new wine pressed back in October. A fresco of Martin transforming water into wine (blessing a large barrel – with St. Ambrose present on the right) can be found in the Oratorio di S. Martino, Chiogga (c. 1350) attributed to Paolo Veneziano.  With fresh meat and new wine in abundance, feasts in honor of St. Martin took on a certain egalitarian, often carnivalesque character.  As the Monk of Salzburg expressed it in a Martinmas drinking song, dy grossen,/dye klainen,/gemainen, the great ones and the lowly, together (Walsh, 1996, 311).  As early as 1216 Thomas de Cantimpre was complaining of a demonically inspired cantus de Martino turpissimus already widespread through France and Germany (Walsh 1994, 142).  The great Neapolitan Latin poet Pontano (1426-1503) satirized Martinmas drinking in his dialog Charon (1458): Martinum Galli, Hispani, Germani, Itali sic colunt, ut turpe sit eius festo die erbium ac madentem non esse/In France, Spain, Germany and Italy men regarded it as disgraceful not to be drunk on St. Martin's Day (Pontano 1943, 25).  But Pontano also celebrated the feast in two poetical effusions, Sodales invitat ad Martinalia and De festis martinalibus (Pontano 1902, 261-62 & 366).  Like other Humanists he insisted on linking the Christian feast day to bacchic festivals of the ancient world –- Bacchus in figura Martini, as Novidio Fracco phrased it in the sixteenth century (Fracco, xi, 154).  Antonio Codro Urceo (d. 1500), a professor at Bologna, wrote a Martinmas chorus in direct imitation of the dithyramb: Io, Io!/Haec est illa bona dies (Costanza, 95).  These Humanists were already attempting to account for a widespread popular tradition by means of the perennially attractive thesis of "pagan survivals."  Popular songs for the Feast of St. Martin were even printed as broadsheets in sixteenth century Venice.  Viva, viva San Martino/Cantiam prima; e col buon vino run some of the verses of Dve Canzoni in Barzeletta per i Pvtti da Cantar per San Martino of 1571.  They are accompanied by a crude woodcut of torch-bearing putti around an image of St. Martin's Charity.  Even cloistered nuns in early seventeenth-century Venice were not about to forgo the traditional Martinmas banquet with family and friends (Laven, 32 & 114).  The substantial body of proverbs relating to the Martinmas new wine, and of raucous, often bawdy Martinmas drinking songs in modern Italian folklore, likewise point to an extensive medieval tradition.  These have been collected and studied in numerous works from Mario Menghini's pioneering Canzoni antiche del populo italiano of 1890 to recent articles such as Paola Sobrero's "L'orgia e la beffa: La tradizione di San Martino in Romagna" of 1994.
      
Within the popular celebration of Martinmas we also encounter play with the image of the Charity, and this well before actual enactments of the event in drama.  The so-called Goliards of the twelfth century –- Hugh of Orleans, known as Primus, the Archpoet of Cologne, and others –- wrote begging poems in the persona of the Martin beggar soliciting new cloaks from their ecclesiastical patrons (Walsh 1996, 308-11).  We have an actual payment record from Bishop of Passau, Wolger von Ellenbrechtskirchen (1191-1204, in 1218 Patriarch of Aquilea) for a fur-lined mantle to be given to the famous Minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide on St. Martin's Day 1203 (Teske, 150-53).  There is also the curious account of youthful roughhouse from Fitzstephen's life of Thomas a Beckett in which Henry II attempts to force his Lord Chancellor to play St. Martin and surrender his new fur cloak to a countryman they met along the road one bitter winter day (Fitzstephen, 44-45).  I have found no mention of cloak-giving in the Tuscan Martinmas sources, but the donation of winter garments was an obviously available trope for the festival.  In the land of the palio, sensitivity to the significations of rich cloth and its exchange was certainly well established.

I have briefly surveyed this popular tradition to give something of a window on Castruccio's feast of 1325.  If it was a typical Martinmas festivity, it was a carouse, a sumptuous, perhaps even a raucous affair with egalitarian overtones reminiscent of the ancient Saturnalia.  If this was the case, we can see that in the humiliation of his defeated enemies Castruccio artfully manipulated the icon of the Charity of St. Martin.  He continually reminded them of their status as "beggars" while he, in a stress inducing, on-again-off-again fashion played the lord San Martino.10   At the thanksgiving Mass in the cathedral the aristocratic prisoners were active participants, not simply trophies.  They were surprisingly rewarded with the banquet, no doubt the best meal they had had in weeks.  But then again, their torturous sojourn in prison was also much more than expected.  If they were persuaded, rather than coerced into carrying their tapers in honor of St. Martin, they perhaps felt entitled to sit down to the feast.  Perhaps they were lulled into a false sense of well-being by the wine, by the traditional conviviality of the day, forgetting, perhaps, their own shabby appearance at the splendid tables, presuming too much, perhaps, on the largess of the great Saint and his powerful vicar on earth, only to have their true status revealed to them in the situation of naked extortion while in grim duress.
      
But in a larger sense it was Castruccio who positioned himself as the blessed Beggar of the icon.  As true devotee of San Martino, he received from his beloved patrone the "mantle" of quickly realized ransoms to "clothe" his expansionist policies in Tuscany.  It was a Martin cloak-half that, two years later, transformed itself into the furs of a duke of the Holy Roman Empire, the ultimate palio in this theater of humiliations.

Notes:
1.  Villani mentions a San Giovanni palio performed before the walls of Arezzo as early as 1288 (vii, 132).  A game of football (calcio) in late medieval costume continues to be played in Florence's Piazza della Signoria on St. John's Day. 

2.  Tegrimi and Manucci go well beyond Villani in reporting Castruccio crowned with laurel in a chariot drawn by four white horses, etc.  They were no doubt reading back into this earlier period a pseudo-Roman triumph

3.  Taper-bearing had a long history of political signification in Lucca, as elsewhere in Tuscany.  In 1245, for example, a notary of Castiglione bore a taper in honor of the Volto Santo, apparently simply as an act of devotion.  But several nobles of the Garfagnana took this as a treacherous act of submission to Lucca and determined to punish the notary.  They waylaid him in a street near the cathedral and cut off the hand that had borne the taper (Ross and Erichsen, 32).

4.  1325 is very early indeed for a royal entry, according to Sam Kinser.  It is not exactly clear from whence Villani derives his simile, siccome a uno re.

5.  Luccan State Archives, Condotta, ad ann. Cart. 90. 

6.  Castruccio's offices included senator of the City of Rome, Count of Lateran, gonfalonier of the Holy Roman Empire and later, imperial deputy in Pisa.  In the triumphal November of 1325 Castruccio had had coins struck with the image of the Emperor, conspicuously advertising his Ghibelline sympathies.

7.  In our times we have the equivalent in the video tape of Sadam Hussein's delousing broadcast worldwide -- no violation, our authorities assert, to the Geneva Convention.  Ramon de Cardona's reputation, apparently, never recovered from this well orchestrated humiliation.  Machiavelli in Book 2 of his Florentine Histories writes of "Messer Ramondo, who, because of his lack of credit and his poor decisions, received from Fortune the punishment he had deserved at the hands of the Florentines." (Machiavelli 2003, 48).

8.  Castruccio was apparently employed as a boogeyman threat by Florentine parents in the same way that Hannibal was by the Romans.

9.  I can come up with only one possible example, from the New World in 1608, when Padre Martin Prieto, imitating his namesake, destroyed a dozen wooden "idols" in the plaza of the principle town of the Timucua in northern Florida preparatory to his founding the mission of San Martin de Ayacuta (Milanich, 186). 

10.  Castruccio was evidently very attuned to the "theater" of captor-and-prisoner. Both Tegrimi and Machiavelli refer to seeing the fetters which Castruccio had had attached to the tower of his residence to remind him of his early imprisonment and near execution by Uguccione della Faggiuola (see final paragraph of Machiavelli's Life).


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