page_title: Royal entry
section_title: Propaganda
hierarchical_section_title: Royal entry / Origins and development / Propaganda
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Triomphe de Josaphat, Flavius Josèphe, Les Antiquités judaïques, enluminure de Jean Fouquet, vers 1470-1475 Paris, BnF, département des Manuscrits, Français 247, fol. 194 (Livre IX) Josaphat, roi de Juda, rentre triomphalement à Jérusalem après sa victoire sur Adad, roi de Syrie.
context_page_description: The Royal Entry, also known by various names, including Triumphal Entry, Joyous Entry, consisted of the ceremonies and festivities accompanying a formal entry by a ruler or his representative into a city in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period in Europe. The entry centred on a procession carrying the entering prince into the city, where he was greeted and paid appropriate homage by the civic authorities. A feast and other celebrations would follow.
  The Entry began as a gesture of loyalty and fealty by a city to the ruler, with its origins in the adventus celebrated for Roman emperors, which were formal entries far more frequent than triumphs. The first visit by a new ruler was normally the occasion, or the first visit with a new spouse. For the capital they often merged with the Coronation festivities, and for provincial cities they replaced it, sometimes as part of a Royal Progress, or tour of major cities in a realm.
  From the late Middle Ages entries became the occasion for increasingly lavish displays of pageantry and propaganda.
context_section_description: Apart from the permanent theme of the reciprocal bonds uniting ruler and ruled, in times of political tension the political messages in Entries became more pointed and emphatic.  A disputed succession would produce a greater stress on the theme of legitimacy.  After the Reformation, tension became a permanent condition, and most Entries contained a sectarian element.  After about 1540 French entries and Habsburg ones in the Low Countries were especially freighted with implication, as the rulers' attempts to suppress Protestantism brought Protestant and Catholic populations alike to the edge of ruin.  But initially this increased the scale of displays, whose message was now carefully controlled by the court.
  This transformation happened much earlier in Italy than in the North, and a succession of entries for Spanish Viceroys to the blockaded city of Antwerp, once the richest in Northern Europe and now in steep decline, were "used by the city fathers to combine increasingly eulogistic celebrations of their Habsburg rulers with tableaux to remind them of the commercial ruin over which they presided."  The Pompa Introitus of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp in 1635, devised by Gaspar Gevartius and carried out under the direction of Rubens, was made unmistakably pointed, and included a representation of the god of commerce, Mercury, flying away, as a lamenting figure representing Antwerp points at him and looks imploringly out at the Viceroy, whilst beside her lie a sleeping sailor and a river god, representing the wrecked trade of the city from the blockading of the river Scheldt.  Eventually the Viceroy managed to obtain the lifting of the ban on trade with the Indies which the entry had represented as Antwerp's only hope of escaping ruin; but by then the Spanish had agreed to the permanent blockade of the river.
  In 1638, the occasion of the French queen mother Marie de Medici's triumphal entry into Amsterdam lent de facto international recognition of the newly formed Dutch Republic, though she actually traveled to the Netherlands as an exile. Spectacular displays and water pageants took place in the city's harbor; a procession was led by two mounted trumpeters; a large temporary structure erected on an artificial island in the Amstel River was built especially for the festival.  This building was designed to display a series of dramatic tableaux in tribute to her once she set foot on the floating island and entered its pavilion. The distinguished poet and classicist Caspar Barlaeus wrote the official descriptive booklet, Medicea Hospes, sive descriptio publicae gratulationis, qua ... Mariam de Medicis, excepit senatus populusque Amstelodamensis.  Published by Willem Blaeu, it includes two large folding engraved views of the ceremonies.
caption: Triumph of Jehoshaphat, Jean Fouquet, 1470–75.
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