es, were drawn in
procession on these occasions. The contending parties appeared in
wonderful attire; they strove together for prizes, as challengers and
knight-errants--_manuten adoren_ and _avantureros_--or married men
against bachelors, man against man and troop against troop, not
only on horse but on foot But the weapons were blunt, the spears so
prepared that they must break at the weakest shock, and the number
of thrusts and passes which one could make against another was
accurately prescribed. The whole was announced to the spectators by a
cartel--written invitation or challenge: it was printed and posted up,
and explained to the public. Some of these specimens of the composition
of educated people of the court have been preserved to us; for example,
a cartel of 1570, when the Emperor Maximilian II. had assembled a large
circle of nobles around him, in which a necromancer, Zirfeo, announced
that he knew of three worthy heroes enchanted in a mountain,--King
Arthur and his companions, Sigestab the Strong, and Ameylot the
Happy,--whom he would disenchant, and arouse to a struggle against
adventurers. At the festival itself a great wooden structure was
presented to view, which represented a rock with an infernal opening,
ravens flew out of it, devils danced busily round its summit, and
scattered fire about them; at last the magician himself appeared, made
his incantations, the hill opened, the knights sprang up into daylight
in ancient armour, and awaited the foreign combatants, who in equally
strange costume encountered them. Even before 1600, gala days,
including pastoral _fetes_, were announced with a flourish by similar
cartels, sometimes in verse, as, after the great war, were the common
village weddings and fairs. These were especially welcome to the
authorities and nobles, because in them etiquette was suspended, and
many opportunities given for free pleasantry and confidential
familiarity.

In some courts, as at that of the Anhaltiners, the Landgrave of Hesse,
and the Duke Philip of Pomerania, the nobles had opportunities of
turning their attention to education, and the acquisition of knowledge;
at these courts they began already to take pleasure in the possession
of objects of art. The Emperor Rudolph collected the pictures of Albert
Duerer, and the princes and some of the wealthy nobles around them
collected rare coins, weapons, drinking-cups, and the works of the
goldsmiths of Nueremberg and the cabinet m