The piece of the month of August 2020

THE KEYS TO THE CITY OF PAMPLONA

Ana D. Hueso Pérez
Municipal Archivist of Pamplona

Throughout the medieval and modern centuries, European cities celebrated the visit of their sovereigns. This meeting between lord and subjects, if it was the first time it occurred, was celebrated with a great festive ceremony known as the royalentrance that symbolized the relationship between the king and the city. The king, in procession, entered accompanied by a large retinue made up of members of his entourage and municipal authorities. The public, which crowded the streets of the city, observed the passage of their lord as he was shown before his subjects; a celebration that reflected the structure of the city's society where the monarch arrived and, in turn, a reaffirmation of the municipal elites.

The royalentrance involved the setting in motion of all the governmental, legal, administrative, social, religious, economic and cultural mechanisms of the city and its population, to the point of being catalogued by E. Konigson as a "total social event", which not only mobilized the capital but also had repercussions on the entire kingdom. Simplifying the description of the ritual to the extreme, the royalentrance always used to begin with the reception of the authorities at a gate in the walls and the act of submission of the keys of the city; with the oath of privileges and after passing through the main church of the city, which gave the sacred character to the visit, the monarch was accompanied to his inn and the feast ended. The arrival of the king, in addition to the ornamentation of buildings with flowers, flags and banners with the arms of the city, ephemeral decorations that develop iconographic programs in whose design participate local and regional artists to make him feel that he was entering an ideal city, was also accompanied by festivities and shows (salvos of honor, luminaries, dances, dances, etc.), to further enhance the festivities during the stay.

Pamplona, capital of a venerable kingdom by its history and antiquity, is one of the few cities that currently retains the keys to its six gates, with which since the mid-sixteenth century entertained the monarchs who visited it.

The first documentary reference letter in this regard, which is preserved in its file, dates from 1560. It is the testimony of the steps that the Pamplona Consistory intended to take to receive a young French princess, Isabella of Valois, who, after marrying Philip II by proxy in Paris, was traveling to the Spanish Court, settled in Toledo. It is Tristán de Aguinaga, secretary of the Pamplona Corporation, who records in the certificate of January 4, 1460, the instructions that the viceroy D. Gabriel de La Cueva gives to the aldermen of Pamplona, the first city in Spain to receive the queen. Significant is the fact that he warns the aldermen that the Regiment, through D. Luis de Elío, should be the one to hand over the keys to the queen, without prejudice to the pre-eminence that the viceroys held, and rejoicing for it.

On January 7, Queen Isabella arrived in Pamplona. The aldermen, dressed in new, bright clothes, left the house of the Regiment on horseback, which also wore new cloth robes, and received her at the Portal of San Lorente, in the Taconera. There, the regent corporal of the burgh gave her the keys of the six open gates of the city, three of them golden and the other three burnished, which according to the secretary's explanation denote wealth and strength respectively, joined by a gold and blue silk cord. The queen returned them to him, barely touching them, replying with loving words, and the secretary finally received them.

The same keys must have been used to entertain Philip II (1592), Philip IV (1646) and Philip V (1706 and 1719), as well as Isabella of Farnese (1714) and Mariana of Neoburg (1738). Also for Ferdinand VII (1814), on his return from exile in France, but as he chose to return through Zaragoza instead of Pamplona, the aldermen agreed to present the keys to the Duke of Wellington for his intervention in the capitulation of Pamplona (1813) to free it from French occupation.

It comes to the thread to refer that in the file Municipal is conserved the commemorative medal of this episode, work of the Scotsman James Mudie in 1820, in whose reverse is represented Wellington on horseback, dressed like a second Pompey, who receives the keys of Pamplona on the part of a personification of the same one, like a Roman matron, with mural crown, attentive to its condition of place strong, piece that testifies the original use of the keys like symbol of conquest. Sometimes, when a city surrendered, the keys to the gates of the walls were given to the invader, an iconography represented in masterpieces of Spanish painting such as the surrender of Breda, by D. Velázquez, or The Surrender of Granada, by F. Pradilla, where the unfortunate Boabdil submission the keys of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs.

The pieces that had been brought and taken so often ended up in the possession of the viceroy, since the chiefs of the French troops, who had occupied the place since 1808, had withdrawn them from the gatekeepers in 1812. The successive claims urged by the Regiment for their return were futile. Only in 1828, on the occasion of the royal visit that would make to Pamplona the kings Fernando VII and Maria Josefa Amalia of Saxony, the viceroy of Navarre, Count of Castro-Terreño, agreed to lend the keys so that the city could make others to the only effect of fulfilling the ancient ceremony of submit the keys to the monarchs. This concession has made it possible for these pieces, made by the locksmith Marcos Bergara in 1828, to continue to bear witness to a part of our city's past that is now lost.

The seventh is the key that today would open the Casa de Toriles, seat of the City Hall, while the bullfights were held in the current place del Castillo, from whose balconies the municipal authorities presided. Of the preparation of the key of the Casa de Toriles for its submission there is documentary evidence in the expense reports of the royal visit of 1828: "Keys: Doors of the city and the bullring...720 reals"; "Gilding of keys and key of Toril.... 440 reales de vellón... that remain in the administrative office". The ceremonial of its use is known by J. M. Arvizu, who describes it in this way:

...and after the bullfighters and Picadors had entered the Circus... the Lord Mayor's Steward of H.M., seeing the two officials of the Town Hall waiting at place for the key to the bullpens that had been given to him by the City, threw it from the balcony; and when the signal was given by the buglers of the Town Hall with the mandate of the Lord Mayor, who by order of H.M. directed and governed the place, the first bull was released...
 

SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

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