ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Felix Platter’s account of one particular tournament entry at the 1598 Hohenzollern wedding, at which Johann Georg, Count of Hohenzollern, married Franziska von Salm. Through the quartermaster sergeant’s records, he had access to the exact details of the 984 guests and 865 horses brought to Hechingen for this festival (Diagrams 1 and 2).2 The festival’s official chronicler, Jakob Frischlin, was a writer, dramatist and teacher at the school in nearby Reutlingen. He translated into the vernacular Latin plays and festival books by his more gifted older brother Nicodemus Frischlin, who had died in 1590 as a murder suspect fleeing from custody, and staged at least one carnival play with Hechingen’s court musicians, in 1599.3 Thousands of doggerel couplets separate the conclusion of his printed account of the 1598 Hohenzollern wedding, explaining it as a pious bid to immortalize his rulers, from his description of the bride’s arrival.4 In her party, Frischlin notes a man who has left a crisper and more sophisticated version of this festival, neither mentioning Frischlin, nor written as an enduring public monument to his patron’s family. This was Felix Platter, characterized by Frischlin as a fellow writer and historian, and court physician to the bride’s brother-in-law.5 In the year of Johann Georg’s birth, 1577, Felix Platter had attended the court wedding, in Sigmaringen, of his uncle, Christof von Hohenzollern, to Katharina von Welsperg. Still dressed in mourning, she and her two sons were among the wedding guests in Hechingen in 1598. The devout Catholicism of the groom’s grandfather, Karl I, Count of Hohenzollern, and his willingness to be of service, strengthened his dynasty’s links to the Habsburg and Bavarian courts (Diagram 2). Born in Brussels and named after his godfather Emperor Charles V, at whose Madrid court he was partly brought up, Karl I was King Philip II of Spain’s official envoy to one of the most culturally influential of all early modern German court festivals, the 1568 Munich wedding. Here his prominent ceremonial role included receiving Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria’s prospective daughter-in-law Renée of Lorraine with
1 Felix Platter Tagebuch, 484-513 (28 September to 18 October 1598, HochburgHechingen-Hochburg); English translation: Chapter 16, this volume. See also Katritzky, ‘The autobiographical writings’.
