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*. All translations are the author's except where otherwise noted. A first draft of this article was presented in Venice at the conference 'Making Space for Festival, 1400-1700. Interactions of Architecture and Performance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Festivals'. I would like to thank the organizers of this conference and especially Krista De Jonge and Sidney Anglo for their stimulating remarks. Furthermore, I want to thank Andrew Brown, Guy Geltner, students from the History Department of the University of Amsterdam and the two anonymous reviewers of this journal who all provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Introduction
At the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth century, in northern France and the southern Low Countries, a new chivalric event developed: the tournament. Typically, it took place in the countryside over an area of several square kilometres, with hundreds of knights and squires, grouped in two teams, performing mock battles against each other. The rise of the tournament in the principalities on the fringes of the Holy Roman Empire and France is usually explained from a socio-political perspective. In these regions, royal power was weak, and princes tried to get a grip on aristocratic violence by adhering to the peace movement initiated by the church. Nobles organized tournaments in order to fulfil their promise not to use violence while at the same time practising for wartime.1It is no accident, however, that these same regions were also highly urbanized. Picardy, Hainault, Brabant and Flanders provided the most popular locations for tournament sites. The proximity of towns was a prerequisite for the organization of these early tournaments. The participants could stay there: the custom was that each team had its 'home town', and the site of the tournament was conveniently placed just in between.2These towns could also provide the knights and their retainers and family members with meals and, if necessary, horses and armour for the tournament.
However, the towns did not serve simply as convenient operating bases for tournaments. From an early stage, the main squares in the towns were also used for tourneying. One of the earliest references to a tournament in a town occurs in connection with the death of Count Henry III of...