The New World and the Changing Face of Europe

The New World and the Changing Face of EuropeAuthor(s): Elliott HorowitzSource: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 1181-1201Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543574 .

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Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVIII/4 (1997)

The New World and the Changing Face of Europe

Elliott Horowitz Bar-Ilan University, Israel

In making sense of the New World and its inhabitants, many European observers attributed considerable significance to the question of the beard.This essay shall argue that the discourse concerning the beard and its meanings that emerged as a result of the New World encounter may be discerned not only in European writing but also on European faces, especially during the sixteenth century. Before 1492 the most prominent aliens in the European mind were the Muslim and the Jew, both of whom were widely imagined and graphically represented as being bearded. After 1492, however, this situation changes markedly. The Jew and the Turk were still alien, but the mental symbol of radical otherhood, as Tzvetan Todorov has observed, became the American Indian. After the encounter between the Old World and the New and as each gradually penetrated the mental world of the other, the inhabitants of neither could apprehend the presence or absence of facial hair in precisely the same way they had done so before.The whiteness of the faces of the conquistadors and the heaviness of their beards became part of a single image of European identity on both sides of the Atlantic in which beardedness was closely associated with whiteness and, hence, with European culture in its widest sense. It is with this senmiotic shift and its reflection in the changing face of Europe that this paper shall concern itself.

EARLY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, the celebrated American artist and author, George Catlin, published a work on the "manners, customs, and conditions, of the North American Indians" in which he wrote:

Beards they generally have not-esteeming them great vulgarities, and using every possible means to eradicate them whenever they are so unfor- tunate as to be annoyed with them. Different writers have been very much at variance on this subject ever since the first accounts given of these people; and there seems still an unsatisfied curiosity on the subject, which I would be glad to say that I could put entirely at rest.

These words were penned with the rugged confidence Catlin had acquired during his eight years' travel (1832-1839) "amongst the wildest tribes of Indians in North America," which resulted also in more than five hundred paintings and sketches of those Indians, most of which were later acquired by the Smithsonian Museum. "From the best information that I could obtain amongst forty-eight tribes that I have visited, I feel authorized to say," he wrote, "that amongst the wild tribes, where they have made no efforts to imitate white men, at least, the propor- tion of eighteen out of twenty, by nature are entirely without the appearance of a beard; and of the very few who have them by nature, nineteen out of twenty erad-

1181



1182 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVIII /4 (1997)

icate it by plucking it out several times in succession, precisely at the age of puberty, when its growth is successfully arrested."

Yet, despite Catlin's confident tone, one senses a certain tension between the natural perspective and the cultural one in his "authorized" account of the phe- nomenon of Indian beardlessness. If the lack of facial hair among the members of "the wild tribes" he had visited was truly a matter of their "nature," why should the matter be linked with their having made "no efforts to imitate white men?"Was Catlin suggesting that "white" ways of life fostered the growth of facial hair and that remaining "wild" impaired such growth? Was it because they considered them "great vulgarities" that the Indians used "every possible means to eradicate" their beards when they did grow, as Catlin first asserted, or because they associated them with whiteness, as would appear from the continuation of his remarks? Although he saw previous writers as having been "very much at variance on this subject," his own observations, despite their assured tone and statistical veneer, hardly put the matter entirely at rest.

They did, however, give expression to a matter of continuing concern in European ethnological discourse about the New World natives since the age of Christopher Columbus. The conspicuous absence of facial hair among the over- whelming majority of male natives, whether on account of their nature or their culture, suggested to many that the beard was an essential aspect of the white men's whiteness. In England, early in the eighteenth century, Richard Bradley, author of A Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature (1721), claimed that there were "five sorts of men," the first two of which were: "the white men, which are Europeans that have beards; and a sort of white man in America (as I am told) that only differ from us in having no beards."2 The beard was seen by Bradley as a sign of the difference between the true white man and the "sort of white man" to be found in distant America," who could otherwise, it would appear, theoretically be classified as completely white. One wonders, however, if the American Indian's lack of facial hair rendered him, in Bradley's view, not only "sort of white" but also, on some level, "sort of a man." For although the eighteenth century was a decidedly clean- shaven one-"one of the few times in history that almost total beardlessness was ever practiced" _the association of the beard with masculinity had deep and enduring roots in Western culture. Such influential fathers of the church as Augus- tine and Isidore of Seville had seen the beard as the natural mark of manhood, "both in a general and in a specifically sexual sense," as Giles Constable has noted,

1 George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indi- ans, 2 vols. (London, 1844; reprint, NewYork: Dover Publications, 1973), 2:227. Catlin's work was first published in 1841. See also Reginald Reynolds, Beards:Their Social Standing, Religious Involvements, Dec- orative Possibilities, and Value in Offence and Defence through the Ages (London:Allen and Unwin, 1950), 19.

2Thomas Bendyshe,"The History ofAnthropology," in Memoirs Read before the Anthropological Soci- ety of London, vol. 2, 1863-1864 (London:Trubner and Co., 1865), 2:358-599, quoted in Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Penn- sylvania Press, 1964), 423-24.

30n the beardlessness of the eighteenth century, see Richard Corson, Fashions in Hair: The First Five Thousand Years (NewYork: Owen, 1965), 302 (from whom the quotation is taken); andJoan Nunn, Fashion in Costume: 1200-1800 (NewYork: Schocken Books, 1984),62.



Horowitz / The New World & the Changing Face of Europe 1183

and he has observed also that "almost the only universal and obvious meaning of beards was their association with masculinity, virility, and strength." Shakespeare, for example, has Beatrice, in Much Ado about Nothing (II. 1. 32-40) respond to the suggestion that she "may light upon a husband that hath no beard," by replying: "What should I do with him? Dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting- gentle-woman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man" (emphasis added).

Closer to Bradley's own time and place, one may cite John Bulwer, who devoted one of the chapters of his curious work, Anthropometamorphasis, first published in 1650, to the beard, or rather to what he called "the naturall Ensigne of Manhood appearing about the mouth." Bulwer was critical of all those who would shave the beard, which he claimed had been given by nature to mankind "that it might remaine as an index in the Face, of the Masculine generative faculty" and which he compared to the crest of a lion. Shaving it was for Bulwer a sign of effem- inacy, and he therefore felt that "the Turkes, who shave their slaves, do justly scoff at such Christians who cut or naturally want a beard, as suffering themselves to be abused against Nature."5 Bulwer's views were clearly somewhat idiosyncratic, but they were based upon a venerable tradition inWestern thought, especially strong in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages and revived during the sixteenth century, that linked the beard with masculinity and the practice of shaving, consequently,

6 with its negation. It is not surprising that such earlier figures as Michele da Cuneo and Fernan-

dez de Oviedo, who commented on the beardlessness of the American Indians, also referred prominently to their sodomitical tendencies.The former, who sailed with Columbus's second expedition and told its story in a letter of 1495, described the Indians as "great sodomites" and noted also that "they have very little in the way of

4Giles Constable, introduction to Burchard's "Apologia de Barbis," in Apologiae Duae, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum: Continatio Mediaevalis, vol. 62 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1985), 56, 59. On the beard as a sign of masculinity, see also Reynolds, Beards, 23-24; and Elliott Horowitz, "Visages du judaisme: De la barbe en monde juif et de l'Plaboration de ses significations," Annales: Histoire, Sci- ences Sociales 49 (1994): 1077-7& and the sources cited there.

5The Turks, he noted, wore their beards at full length, "the mark of their affected gravity and token of freedome," and in this they were to be commended for doing homage to nature, but he himself was not opposed to the pruning of facial hair "for the majesty and honesty of Nature"; see John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphasis: Man Transform'd (London, 1653), 193, 198-99, 208-9. For the beard as "the ensigne of manhood," see also Bulwer, Anthropornetamorphasis, 212. On American Indians, see Bulwer, Anthropometamorphasis, 201ff. On Bulwer see H. J. Norman, "John Bulwer and his Anthropometaniorpha- sis," in Science, Medicine, and History: Essays ... in Honour of Charles Singer, ed. Edgar Ashworth Under- wood, 2 vols. (London: Oxford UP, 1953), 2:81-99; and Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 128-29.

6The most famous sixteenth-century work to revive this point of view was Giovanni PierioVale- riano Bolzani's Pro sacerdotum barbis, first published in 1531. There he wrote that: "It is openly knowen amongest all kyndes of man, that chyldren, women, gelded men, and those that are tender and delycat, are ever scene withoute beardis; and therby it may be easily understande, to whome those that are shaven, may be lykened." I quote from the English translation; Bolzani, Pro sacerdotum barbis (London, 1533),7v.



1184 Sixteenth CentuiryJournal XXVIII /4 (1997)

the beard," which it was their custom, nonetheless to shave.7 Oviedo, author of the earliest natural history of America, the Historia general y natural de las Indias, described the Indian men as inveterate sodomites and regarded their beardlessness as one of the marvels of the New World: "All the Indians are commonly without beardes: Insomuch that it is in maner a marvayle to see any of them eyther men or women to have any down or heare on theyr faces or other partes of theyr bod- dies." By the early seventeenth century, however, the image of the beardless Indian had become so ingrained among European observers that it was the very opposite that elicited their surprise. George Percy, in his "Observations Gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern Colony inVirginia," written in 1612, reported his reaction upon encountering a hoary and long-bearded Indian, said to be 160 years old: "It is a miracle to see a savage have any hair on their faces: I never saw, read, nor heard, any have the like before."9

* * *

It is clear that in making sense of the New World and its inhabitants, many Euro- pean observers attributed more than casual significance to the question of the beard.The presence or absence of facial hair was included in the catalog of the marvels to be seen across the seas, but like the other marvels to be encountered there, they were not mere curiosities.This essay shall argue that the discourse concerning the beard and its meanings that emerged as a result of the New World encounter may be discerned not only in European writing but also on European faces in early modern times, especially during the sixteenth century. Changing fashions in facial hair reflected, it shall be contended, the gradual emergence of the American Indian as Europe's new Other.

7See Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, trans.Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1985), 33, on the basis of Prime relazioni di navi- gatori italiani sulla scoperta, ed. Luigi Firpo (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1966), 64, 74. For Michele da Cuneo's attempt to explain their sodomy, see Gerbi, Nature in the New World, 34; and on him generally see Gerbi, Nature in the New World, chap. 5. On the accusation of sodomy, see also the many references in Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1971), 63, 83, 85, 140, 149, 153, 156, 171-72. See also Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1991), 133.

8Gerbi, Nature in the New World, 339, 349; and Pietro Martire (Peter Martyr) d'Anghiera, The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, ed. Richard Eden (London,1555; reprint, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 209, from whom the quotation from Oviedo is taken. Regarding the Indians of His- paniola, where he had been chief overseer of the Spanish mines, see also Martyr, Decades of the Newe Worlde, 212. On Oviedo see the extensive discussion in Gerbi, Nature in the New World, chaps. 14-21. Note also Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New Worldfrom Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven:Yale UP, 1993), chap. 2, who sensitively discusses Oviedo's stress on the otherness of the New World.

9Purchas his Pilgrimes; or, Hakluytus Posthumous, ed. Samuel Purchas (London, 1625), quoted by H. C. Porter, The Inconstant Savage: England and the North American Indian, 1500-1660 (London; Duck- worth, 1979), 312. Compare Porter, Inconstant Savage, 15, 162, 271, 316, 319, 429; as well as Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590; reprint, NewYork: Dover, 1972), 52. The latter commented that among the Indians of Pommeioocke, the young would "suffer noe hair at all to growe upon their faces," and that when older men let their facial hair grow "to say truthe they come opp verye thinne."



Horowitz / The New World & the Changing Face of Euirope 1185

"Self-fashioning," Stephen Greenblatt has famously remarked, "is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hosti Before 1492 the most prominent aliens in the European mind were the Muslim and the Jew, both of whom were widely imagined and graphically represented as being bearded.After 1492, however, this situation changes markedly. The Jew and the Turk were still alien, but the mental symbol of radical otherhood became the American Indian. This shift occurred most abruptly in the case of Spain, which in a single year, as Tzvetan Todorov has remarked, "repudiates its interior Other by triumphing over the Moors in the Battle of Granada and by forcing the Jews to leave its territory, and it discovers the exterior Other, the whole Amer'a" Elsewhere in Europe the transition was more gradual, but in all countries, especially those actively involved in the discovery and colonization of the New World, the new Other was being processed and its difference contended with on a number of levels.

In a recent essay, Roy Porter has pointed to a nascent trend among historians to "demolish the old cultural hierarchies which privileged mind over body" and to treat the latter as "the crossroads between self and society" that must be seen not only as an object of flesh and blood but also as a "symbolic construct." The body, according to this view, is not merely an ahistorical given and must therefore be looked at "as has been experienced and expressed within particular systems, both

,,12 private and public, which themselves have changed over time. As part of an agenda for future research, Porter has asserted that we still "need to know much more about how individuals and cultures have ascribed meaning to their limbs and

13 organs," and the beard, as others have noted, is one of the parts of the body to which specific meanings have often been attached. 14

This paper shall respond to Porter's agenda in its attempt to explore the implicit meanings of the beard for Europeans and Amerindians of the sixteenth century and, more specifically, the connection between facial appearance and the construction of otherness. After the encounter between the Old World and the New and as each gradually penetrated the mental world of the other, the inhabitants of neither could apprehend the presence or absence of facial hair in precisely the same way they had done it before. For those Europeans who were familiar with the physical appearance of the Amerindians, whether through written word or visual image, beardlessness had presumably to be associated on some level with these wholly different beings, whose difference was becoming increasingly familiar. For the latter, on the other

10Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago; U Chicago P. 1980), 9.

1lTzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1984), 50.

12Roy Porter, "History of the Body," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992), 207-9.

13Porter, "History of the Body," 224. 14Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes (NewYork: Random House, 1981), 170, has observed how

the full beard "has at various times signified paternal authority, spiritual inspiration, radical violence, and artistic genius, its particular meaning being determined by other details of the costume and appearance, and whether or not beards were respectable at the moment"; on the beard see also Lurie, Language of Clothes, 52, 66-68, 171-76.




hand, the beard came to function as a (usually negative) symbol of the European white male and his threatening but also increasingly common presence.The Mayas, for example, referred to the Spaniards as the "bearded ones," and in the seventeenth century, a Canadian Indian could look into the face of a Frenchman and exclaim: "Oh, the bearded man! Oh, how ugly he is!"15

How this interaction operated in its initial stages is not entirely clear, for the first Europeans to arrive in the NewWorld were still (in theory) following the centuries-old fashion of going about clean-shaven, as may be seen in portraits of Columbus upon his return to Europe. During their weeks at sea, however, he and his men were clearly less careful about shaving and appear to have been bearded when first encountered by the New World natives. Bartolome de Las Casas, in his paraphrase of Columbus's journal, which seems to draw also upon native sources, provides the following description of the inhabitants of Guanahani when they first encounter the admiral and his men:

The Indians ... were astonished when they saw the Christians, frightened by their beards, their whiteness, and their clothes; they went up to the bearded men ... and ran their hands over the beards, marvelling at them, because they had none, and carefully inspecting the whiteness of the hands and faces.16

Similarly, the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahaguin was told by his Aztec informants that when, in 1518, the tribute collector Pinote sighted the ships of the Spanish captain Juan de Grijalva arriving on Mexico's gulf coast, where they had been sent to explore by Cuba's GovernorVelasquez, he hurried to inform King Monteczoma inTenochtitdan that "winged towers containing men with white faces and heavy beards approached from the sea."This, at least, is how the first encounter was remembered bW the natives, whose accounts of the conquest Sahag'n began recording in 1550. The whiteness of the faces of the conquistadors and the heavi-

150n native perceptions of the conquistadors as bearded, see Todorov, Conquest ofAmerica, 81,86, 215. For the latter quotation, see The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896-1901), 47:297, quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (NewYork: Routledge, 1990), 77.

16Quoted from Bartolom6 de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, in Peter Hulme, "European Ethnog- raphy and the Caribbean," in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. S. B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 161 (translation his). On the white man's beard in the historical memory of North American Indians, see P. H.Wood, "North America in the Era of Captain Cook," in Implicit Understandings, 487.

17Keen, Aztec Image, 49, on the basis of Sahagin's Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espaia, which drew extensively on native sources. See also The War of Conquest: How It Was Waged Here in Mexico: The Aztecs' Own Story as Given to Fr. Bernardino de Sahagun, ed. Arthur J. 0. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Salt Lake City: U Utah P, 1978), 17. A somewhat different version of the story, also based on native sources, appears in Diego Durin, The Aztecs: The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas (NewYork: Orion, 1964), 263-71. There Monteczoma is informed by one of his chiefs that he had seen "in the middle of the water a house from which appeared white men, their faces white and their hands likewise.They have long thick beards and their clothing is of all colors.....When an artist was brought to draw a picture on the basis of the description he had heard, he drew one "showing the Spaniards with their long beards and white faces." On Sahagun and Durin, see the illuminating discussion in Todorov, Conquest ofAmerica, 219-41.




ness of their beards became part of a single image of European identity on both sides of the Atlantic in which beardedness was closely associated with whiteness and hence with European culture in its widest sense. For centuries previously, however, the beard had carried precisely the opposite meaning for Europeans, among whom it had functioned frequently as a sign of strangeness and otherness. It is with this semiotic shift and its reflection in the changing face of Europe that we shall here concern ourselves.

* * *

If George Percy was amazed, in 1612, to lay eyes upon a bearded "savage" in Vir- ginia, a century earlier many Europeans had been equally amazed to see their aged pontiff,Julius II, suddenly wearing a beard. "No-one remembers anything like it," wrote the Roman chronicler Sebastiano Tedallini late in the spring of 1511.18 Their surprise, of course, was not that the pope was capable of growing facial hair but that he would choose to do so, in a clear and undoubtedly conscious break with centuries of tradition. The pope's decision to let it grow was taken after the defeat of his forces by the French under Louis XII in the Romagna during August 1510. The painful defeat was followed by a long and serious illness from which Julius recuper- ated in Bologna until December of that year, and it was during the last months of 1510 that he apparently stopped shaving.According to a contemporary Bolognese chronicler, the pope had explicitly vowed that he would not shave his beard until Louis and the French forces were driven out of Italy. Whatever its precise moti- vation, however, conscious or unconscious, the new papal beard was widely noticed by contemporaries, both in Italy and abroad20 and has been seen by scholars as a turning point in the facial history of Christian Europe. Julius II kept his long, white beard until his death in 1513, and it features prominently in Raphael's famous portrait of 1511-1512. After nearly half a millennium in which the clean- shaven look had dominated, the beard, early in the sixteenth century, again came into fashion. Although Dulaure, in the eighteenth century, undoubtedly exagger- ated when he wrote of Pope Julius II that he "gave the signal and was followed by all Europe," the new look was widely associated with Julius and with his successor Clement VII. Although it is far from certain that the new fashion, which first

18See M.J. Zucker, "Raphael and the Beard of Pope Julius II," Art Bulletin 59 (1978): 526, who quotes the original; and Loren W Partridge and Randolph Starn, A Renaissance Likeness: Art and Culture in Raphael'sJulius II (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U California P, 1980), 2-3, from whom the translation is taken.

19Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popesfrom the Close of the MiddleAges, trans. Frederick Igna- tius Antrobus, 12 vols., 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 1933-1953), 6:339, cited by Zucker, "Raphael," 526.

20The Mantuan envoy at his court, in a letter of January 1511, compared his beard during the siege of Mirandola to that of a bear; see Zucker, "Raphael," 526. For the remarks of Erasmus, note his Julius Exclusus, trans. Paul Pascal with intro. and notes by J. Kelley Sowards (Bloomington; Indiana UP, 1968), 52, 114. On the beardlessness of Erasmus, note the 1519 medal executed by Quentin Metsys, reproduced in George Francis Hill, Medals of the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 62; and the 1520 charcoal drawing byAlbrecht Diirer (Louvre) reproduced in Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Durer and His Times, trans. R. H. Boothroyd (London: Phaidon Press, 1950), pl.37.




appeared north of the Alps, was actually launched by these two popes, "what is certain," as Fernand Braudel noted, "is that the fashion reached the whole of Europe."21

No explanation has been offered, however, for why a facial fashion associated with two popes should spread so quickly and widely, even among Protestants, and reverse habits that had lasted for centuries.The beard, as we shall see, came to dom- inate the faces of western Europe's leading monarchs during the first half of the sixteenth century. Before doing so, however, let us cast a glance backwards to the centuries that preceded the sixteenth. Since the days qf Charlemagne, as Giles Constable has persuasively argued, western Europe's male population, except for brief periods of time, had been overwhelmingly clean-shaven, with the beard often functioning, especially in the later Middle Ages, as a sign of otherhood, suggesting the Muslim, the Jew, or the distant and strange world of Eastern Christendom.

When, in 1412, discriminatory laws were passed inValladolid under KingJuan of Castile, which had as their aim the prevention of social intercourse between Christians and non-Christians, these included the following decree: "Hencefor- ward, Jews and Moors are not to shave their beards, or have them shaved with razors or scissors; nor trim nor cut the hairs [of the head], but are to wear them long ... as they were formerly accustomed." Beardlessness was seen, then, as the pre- rogative only of the Spanish Christian and as something which was inappropriate to the Jew and Moor alike. Relatedly, European art began from the fifteenth century, as Bernhard Blumenkranz has noted, to depict the Jew as an Oriental Muslim, an iconographic strategy in which the long, flowing beard played a central role.24

21J.-A. Dulaure, Pogonologia; or, a Philosophical and Historical Essay on Beards (London: R. Thorn, 1786), 102f.; Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: Fifteenth through Eighteenth Century, trans. Sian Reynolds, 3 vols. (London: Collins, 1981), 1:331. On the popularity of the beard in sixteenth-century Europe, see also James Laver, A Short History of Costume (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), 83- 84; Reynolds, Beards, 183-84.

22Constable, introduction to Burchard's "Apologia de Barbis," 91, 102. It must be stressed, however, that clean-shaven by medieval standards often meant a few days' growth. See Reynolds, Beards, 78; and Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, trans. Patrick J. Geary (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1991), 170, who notes that in Europe during the tenth century "it was normal to shave every two weeks, at most."

23The punishment set for the transgressor was one hundred lashes and one hundred maravedis. See Elias Hiam D. Lindo, The History of the Jews of Spain and Portugal ... (London, 1848), 200;Yitzhak Baer, History of theJews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia:Jewish Publication Society, 1961), 2:167ff.The decrees were promulgated due to the influence of the Dominican priestVincent Ferrer. For a similar proposal in Spain somewhat later, see Alonso Spina, Fortalicium Fidei ... (Nuremberg, 1494), bk. 3, consideration 11, 178a. For mock battle scenes in Jaen during the 1460s in which Chris- tian knights would wear false beards and Moorish garb, see T. E Ruiz, "Elite and Popular Culture in Late-Fifteenth-Century Castilian Festivals," in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1994), 296,305.

24Bernhard Blumenkranz, Le juif medieval au miroir de l'art chretien (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1966), 36, and see especially plates no. 31, 32, 36a-b. On the iconographic use of the turban in Chris- tian art, including its use in the fifteenth century to depict the image of the Synagoga, see Ruth Mel- linkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U California P, 1993), 1:60, 63, 65. On the use of"a turban, kaftan, and long beard" to characterize Avicenna in fifteenth-century Italian painting, see Julian Raby, "Picturing the Levant," in Circa 1492:Art in the Age of Exploration, ed.Jay A. Levenson (New Haven:Yale UP, 1991), 78.




The sense of the beard as a sign of strangeness to Castilians of the early fifteenth century is cogently illustrated in a remarkable passage found in the travel account of Pero Tafur. The latter, upon returning from some years of wandering in the Byzantine and Muslim East, found himself in Ferrara in 1438, in the company of both Pope Eugenius IV and EmperorJohnVIII (Paleologus) of Constantinople. The Spanish traveler was on quite intimate terms with the emperor, whom he had met previously and who requested that he visit him daily. Of the day of his second visit Taffir wrote:

That day I took my leave and rested myself, and on the petition of the Castil- ians who were there I cut off my beard, which I wore very long, and clad after the manner of my country, I went again to see the Emperor.When he saw me he said that I had done wrong to cut off my beard, which is the greatest honor and dignity belonging to man. But I replied: "Lord, we hold the contrary, and except in the case of some serious inju r5 we do not wear beards," and we spoke about the matter for some time.

What precisely was said in their dialogue on the beard we shall, of course, never know, but we may guess that it touched, at least implicitly, upon the question as to why a European traveler would cultivate one sort of facial identity in the East, where the beard was revered as a sign of virile dignity, and quite another upon returning to the West, where it was still far from respectable. Some years later, in 1455, John Bessarion, the humanist archbishop of Nicaea who had accompanied Emperor John Paleologus on his above-mentioned visit to Italy and who had remained there after converting to the Latin church and becoming one of its most prominent cardinals, was nearly elected to the throne of Saint Peter. His Byzantine beard, however, which he had obstinately retained even after converting to Cathol- icism, seems to have stood in his way and was objected to vociferously by other members of the Sacred College. The beard, which Bessarion nonetheless kept for at least another sixteen years, was clearly recognized as something both dear to its wearer and a sign of his difference. It would appear that it was for both reasons that it was reportedly pulled by no less a personage than King Louis XI of France, in response to a slight breach of etiquette on the part of its owner at the French royal

25Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures, 1435-1439, ed. and trans. Malcolm Letts (London: Routledge, 1926), 175 (emphasis added). On the difference between western Europe, especially Italy, and the Byz- antine East with regard to the beard in the fifteenth century, note also the historian Chalcondyles as quoted by Constable, introduction to Burchard's "Apologia de Barbis," 102. The beard ofJohn Palaeo- logus was famously represented in a portrait-medal of the emperor (the first of the Renaissance) based on a portrait by Pisanello. See Zucker, "Raphael," 525; and Raby, "Picturing the Levant," 78. For pho- tographic reproductions of the medal, see Raby, "Picturing the Levant"; as well as Jacqueline Herald, Renaissance Dress in Italy, 1400-1500 (London: Bell and Hyman, 1981), 97; Carlo Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca: The Baptism, the Arezzo Cycle, the Flagellation, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London:Verso, 1985), pl. 31.




court in 1471. This act was seen as having contributed to Bessarion's death, from shame and grief, a year later.26

* * *

Acts of violence against the beard, such as pulling or forced removal, have histori- cally been perpetrated against those who have valued the beard most highly, often, but not always, by those who valued it rather less.The Templars, for example, were the only medieval religious order in the Latin church permitted to wear beards, a sign which was undoubtedly linked to their militaristic and Middle Eastern character. It was thus no accident that as part of their ritual humiliation during their famous trial for heresy and blasphemous practices, which took place in Paris under Philip the Fair early in the fourteenth century, those among them who confessed their guilt and were reconciled to the church were required to shave their beards.27

Why the Templars wore beards and why they would have been especially humiliated by their forced removal may be better understood in light of the comments of the twelfth-century Latin historian William of Tyre, who remarked that "Orientals, both Greeks and other nationalities, cherish the beard with the utmost care, and if perchance even one hair be pulled from it, this insult is regarded as the highest dishonor and ignominy." The close link between facial hair and personal honor in the Levant, suggested by later sources as well, helps also to understand why Bessarion insisted on keeping his beard even after converting to the Latin church and why he would have been especially insulted to have it pulled by the French monarch.28 In southeast France during the fifteenth century, pulling the beard of ajew was a favored form of holiday festivity, and ritual humiliations of this sort were inscribed in the historical memories of both Jews and non-Jews, later finding expression in the behavior of Nazi soldiers during the Holocaust and, sometimes quite jarringly, in such post-Holocaust works as Philip Roth's The Coun- terlfie. There the author portrays two elderly Newark Jews at a funeral, discussing

26See Reynolds, Beards, 181-82; Zucker, "Raphael," 525.The source for the anecdote that Bessa- rion's beard had cost him the papacy was Pope Pius II. See Zucker, "Raphael," 525, n.1 1; and Ginzburg, Enigma of Piero, 150 n. 65. For some visual representations of the bearded Bessarion, see Ginzburg, Enigma of Piero, pls. 72, 75, 77-83. For the argument that the bearded figure in the foreground of Piero della Francesca's Flagellation of Christ represents the younger Bessarion, see Ginzburg, Enigma of Piero, 131-32,141-42.

27See Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), 62; and the earlier comments of Dulaure, Pogonologia, 44, who saw the removal of the Templars' beards as having been intended "either to disgrace them more, or to deprive them of that grave impos- ing air which it gave them." Relatedly, it has been noted that "when a Greek priest is deposed, the heaviest humiliation is the cutting of the beard." See W[illiam] Ewing, "Beard," in Dictionary of the Bible, ed.james Hastings, 4 vols. (NewYork: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911), 260.

28William ofTyre, A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea, trans. Emily Atwater Babcock and A. C. Krey (NewYork: Columbia UP, 1943), 480. During the very same period as Bessarion's visit with Louis XI, the German friar Felix Fabri wrote fromJerusalem that pilgrims "must especially beware" of touch- ing the beard of a Saracen even in jest, "for this thing is a disgrace among them"; The Book of the Wan- derings of Brother Felix Fabri, trans. A. Stewart (London: Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1896; reprint, NewYork:AMS Press, 1971), 252.




Israel's foreign policy: "'Bomb 'em,' Shimmy said flatly, 'bomb the Arab bastards till they cry uncle. They want to pull our beards again? We'll die instead!"'29

The symbolic act of pulling the beard played a role in the relations between natives and Europeans in the NewWorld as well.We learn from Oviedo that in the early sixteenth century, native boys would pull at the Spaniards' beards as a pastime. Coming upon them by surprise they would he reported, pull their hair "and take from it the greatest pleasure in the world." How he knew how much pleasure they derived from such acts is not clear, but he evidently sensed that they identified the European with his beard and felt that by pulling it they were striking at something that would be dear to him. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, the Huguenot missionary Jean de Lery described a more violent incident that had occurred during his stay among the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil. Two Portuguese traders had been captured after a long and bloody fight, and after the Indians brought them back to their villages, "they tore the beards out of these two Portu- guese merely to humiliate them, and then put them cruelly to death." (The specific meaning of this form of humiliation is better understood in light of the Tupi- namba's own practice with regard to facial hair.) As Lery himself observed, "As soon as hair begins to grow on any part of the body, even the beard ... it is plucked

,31 out." Yet plucking the beards of the Portuguese was deemed an act of humiliation because the latter were presumed to have valued their beards and, like the similarly humiliated Templars, to have identified with them in some fundamental way. In the century that elapsed between the bearded Bessarion's failure to become pope and Lery's departure for Brazil in 1556, the status of the beard in Europe had changed markedly. From a sign of otherhood associated largely with Muslims,Jews, and the

32 exoticism of the East, it became a sign rather of European identity, associated increasingly, it would appear, with the virile conquest and domination of the newly discovered world to the West.

* * *

"It is now reasonably established," one art historian has written, "that if the Quat- trocento was a clean-shaven period, the following century favored facial hair."

29Jacques Rossiaud, "Fraternites de jeunesse et niveaux de culture dans les villes du Sud-est a la fin du Moyen Age," Cahiers d'Histoire 21 (1976): 86; Philip Roth, The Counterlife (NewYork:Vintage Inter- national, 1987), 38. On the Jewish beard and its fortunes during the Holocaust, see, for example, the many references in Shimon Huberband, Kiddush Hashemr:Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland During the Holocaust, trans. David E. Fishman (NewYork: Ktav, 1987). For one of the many photographs of a Jew's beard being forcibly removed, see Encyclopaedia Judaica, 16 vols. Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), s.v. "Holocaust."

30See Rolena Adorno,"The Negotiation of Fear in Cabeza deVaca's Naufragios," Representations 33 (winter 1991): 171, quoting from Oviedo's Historia general ... (Madrid, 1851-1855).

3 Jean de L&ry, History of a Voyage to Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans.Janet Whatley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U California P, 1990) 57, 131. Note the street taunt in mid-sixteenth-century Rome of threatening to remove someone's beard in ThomasVance Cohen, "The Lay Liturgy ofAffront in Six- teenth-Century Italy,"Journal of Social History 25 (1992): 863, 872 n. 20.

32As Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art ofAlbrecht Durer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1945), 31, has noted, Pisanello's bearded portrait of John Paleologus served Michael Wolgemut as his model for the woodcut depicting Mohammed in Hartmann Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493.




Another has asserted forthrightly that "more, perhaps, than any other period in Western history, the Cinquecento was the age of the beard."33 Yet neither of these nor others have (to my knowledge) pointed to any connection between this striking change in facial fashion and Europe's incipient engagement with the New World and its peoples, both of which begin in the final decade of the fifteenth century. A recent biographer of Albrecht Direr has pointed to "the first tentative half- dozen hairs of what was soon to become Europe's most famous and anachronistic beard" in his 1493 (Louvre) self-portrait and to Diirer's "fully bearded" appearance,

34 at twenty-six, in his more famous (Prado) self-portrait of 1498. By the latter date, the bearded look was no personal idiosyncrasy of Direr's. It may be seen, north of the Alps, in Adriano Fiorentino's 1498 bust of Elector Frederick the Wise of Sax- ony, who as early as 1496 commissioned a portrait from Durer in which he also appears fully bearded.35 Both Frederick's full beard and that of his brotherJohann the Steadfast, are evident in their twin portraits painted by Lucas Cranach during the first decade of the sixteenth century, and Johann's beard is also prominent in Cranach's twin portrait of him and his young son, which was executed in 1509. That beardedness, even in the north, was not yet quite dominant, however, may be seen from Cranach's own 1509 altarpiece (in Frankfurt) showing Emperor Maxi- milian I clean-shaven. Similarly, some two years earlier, a mutual friend of Durer's and Willibald Pirckheimer's had written to the latter: "Give my regards to our Bearded One, I mean Albrecht Direr."37

After the first decade of the sixteenth century, the full beard may be seen more commonly in some of the most famous portraits of the late Renaissance on both sides of the Alps: portraits of figures as varied as Pope Julius II and of Baldassare Castiglione, executed by Raphael, and those of Emperor Charles V and of Pietro Aretino by Titian. The famous red beard of HenryVIII is evident in the several portraits of the British monarch painted at his court by Hans Holbein theYounger

33Andre Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. Beth Archer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983), 187; Zucker, "Raphael," 532.

34Jane Campbell Hutchison, Albrecht Durer:A Biography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), 39, 65. Regarding the 1493 portrait, see also Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Durer and His Times, 18: "Round the sensitive mouth the first beard is sprouting." For reproductions of the two self-portraits, see Waetzoldt, Durer and His Times, pls. 5, 8; Hutchison, Albrecht Durer: A Biography, pls. 8, 18; as well as Panofsky, Life and Art, pls. 30, 109; and John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (London: Pantheon, 1966), pls. 137-38.

35For Fiorentino's bust of Frederick, see Lukas Cranach: Gemalde, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik, ed. Dieter Koepplin and Tilman Falk, 2 vols. (Basel: BirkhduserWrlag), 1:80, 84 (fig. no. 28). For Diirer's portrait see Panofsky, Life and Art, 39, pl. 65; Hutchison,Albrecht Durer, 66.

36For the first twin portrait, see Eduard Heyck, Lukas Cranach (Bielefeld: Belhagen, and Leipzig: Klasing, 1908), 13, fig. 8. For the second see Koepplin and Falk, Lukas Cranach, 1:143, pl. 8, 2:683. They identify the work as belonging to a private Swiss collection, but it is now (happily) in London's National Gallery (no. 6538), where it came to my attention. For the 1509 altarpiece, see Eberhard Ruh- mer, Cranach (London: Phaidon, 1963), pl. 10.

37Canon Lorenz Beheim to Willibald Pirckheimer, February 1507, quoted by Hutchison, Albrecht Darer, 97.

38For Titian's portraits of these two figures, see Pope-Hennessy, Portrait, figs. 153-54, 191, 194- 95; Titian: His World and His Legacy, ed. David Rosand (NewYork: Columbia UP, 1982), figs. 1.6, 1.7, 1.17, 7.43;James Laver, Concise History, fig. 87.




in the late 1530s.39 The darker beard of his younger colleague, Francis I of France, whom Henry first encountered, in one of the "most pompous and spectacular" moments of early modern diplomacy, at the Field of Cloth of Gold in June 1520, may be seen in the portraits of the French kin executed at his court between 1516 and 1540 by the Flemish painterJean Clouet.

These beards cannot all be seen as blind responses to the idiosyncratic whims of a young painter or an aged pope but must be related to some wider change in the meaning of facial hair to those Europeans, such as monarchs and members Qf their courts, to whom self-representation was a matter of considerable importance. When Titian first painted Charles V (bearded, with his hound at his side) at Bolo- gna in 1533, the latter had been Holy Roman Emperor since 1519 and had only three years earlier been crowned as Champion of Christendom by Pope Clement VII in that same city. Clement's own beard had been grown in 1528, evidently as a sign of mourning after the previous year's sack of Rome by renegade imperial troops, but he retained it even after his return to the city, and indeed, until his death in 1534. Thus, when Christendom's two most potent living symbols of imperium and sacerdotitum rode side by side through the streets of Bologna, in November of 1530, both were conspicuously bearded, in contrast to both their respective imme- diate predecessors, Emperor Maximilian I and Pope Leo X. This moment, perhaps more than the meeting of the two young bearded monarchs of France and England a decade earlier, signaled the beard's true conquest of the face of Europe.

The shift in the imperial facial image is particularly striking in the 1529 (South-German) carving that depicts the bearded Charles face to face with his grandfather, the clean-shaven Maximilian. These contrasting images may, in turn, be compared with those recorded, in that same year, by the German artist Chris- topherWeiditz of the full-bearded Hernando Cortes upon his (temporary) return from Mexico in May of 1528 to the Spanish court of Charles V, and the (unbearded) Aztecs whom he had brought back with him as trophies of the con-

39See Pope-Hennessy, Portrait, figs. 213, 215-16; Roy C. Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII (New Haven:Yale UP, 1967).The quotation is from Reynolds, Beards, 184.

40The characterization of their summit meeting is taken from Garret Mattingly, Renaissance Diplo- macy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 172. It is described in detail in most biographies of the two monarchs. For the portraits of Francis, see Pope-Hennessy, Portrait, figs. 209-12. The most famous of these, the half-length portrait now in the Louvre, is also reproduced in Laver, Concise History, fig. 80; Robert Jean Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), fig. 58.

41See Pope-Hennessy, Portrait, fig. 191. See also the reproduction in Laver, Concise History, fig. 87. 420n the Bologna coronation, "the most significant spectacle" of the reign of Charles V, see Roy

C. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450-1650 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U California P, 1984), 78-80. On Clement's beard, most famously evident in Sebastiano del Piombo's "intense and noble portrait," see Chastel, Sack of Rome, 184-89, and the sources cited there. Note also the 1534 medal of the same pontiff executed by Cellini, mentioned by Hill, Medals of the Renaissance, 36.

43Executed in Augsburg and reproduced in Pope-Hennessy, Portrait, fig. 189. On I)urer's woodcut portrait of the clean-shaven Maximilian , "probably not completed until the Emperor's death," see Panofsky, Life and Art, 163, pl. 229; Hutchison, Albrecht Durer, pl. 22; Braudel, Civilization and Capital- ism, 331, has asserted that Charles was bearded as early as 1524 without, however, citing any evidence.




quest.44 The beard's conquest of the faces of European men during the sixteenth century was undoubtedly related to its being perceived, on some level, as a sign of strength, conquest, and empire. Not only was Cortes, the ultimate New World warrior, fully bearded upon his return to Europe but so, even earlier, was the famous Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, who had left the service of Francis I of France in order to enter the employ of Emperor CharlesV45

As early as October 1519, the first ship sent back by Cortes had arrived in Seville, bearing, among other gifts for the young Emperor Charles, six Totonac Indians (four men and two women). Their strange appearance was commented upon by Peter Martyr, who was particularly struck by the rings and plates worn by the natives through their lips: "I do not remember that ever I saw any thing that seemed more filthy in mine eye.Yet do they think there is nothing more comely under the moon.Whereby we see how vainly mankind wandereth in his own blindness." Martyr continued this line of relativistic thought concerning the vani- ties of humanity, anticipating Montaigne: "The Ethiopian thinketh the blacke colour to be fairer than the white, and the white man thinketh otherwise ... and they that weare beardes judge it a deformitie to be shaven."46 In the last category, Martyr may have been referring primarily to the bearded Turks and other denizens of the Middle East, but it is possible that he was referring to Europeans as well, for whom the beardless face came increasingly to be associated with the otherness of the New World Indian.

On the opposite side of the Atlantic, at that very moment, the beard was already operating as a sign of difference (perhaps the central one) between natives and conquistadors.This, at least, is how the initial encounters in Mexico were later remembered by both sides. Sahaguin, as mentioned above, had reported from native sources that when the first Spaniards were first seen arriving on Mexico's gulf coast, Mocteczoma was informed that "winged towers containing men with white faces and heavy beards approached from the sea," and Diego Duran has preserved a similar account in which the Spanish are identified primarily through their "long

44Christopher Weiditz had witnessed the spectacle of Cortes and his entourage at the court of Charles in 1529, and upon his return to Germany reproduced what he had seen in a series of drawings; see Keen,Aztec Image, 63-64 and the illustrations on the pages that immediately follow; as well as Mass- ing, "Early European Images," 517-18, both reproducing pictures from Weiditz's Trachtenbuch, facsimile ed. (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1927). On these and the visit of Cortes in Spain, see also Howard Francis Cline, "Hernando Cortes and the Aztec Indians in Spain," QuarterlyJournal of the Library of Congress 26 (1969): 70-90.

45See the reproduction of Sebastiano del Piombo's portrait, executed shortly before the 1527 sack of Rome, in Pope-Hennessy, Portrait, illus. no. 268. Note also the medal bearing Andrea Doria's likeness by Leone Leoni of Arezzo, reproduced in George Francis Hill, Medals of the Renaissance in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1923), no. 53.

46Martyr, Decades of the Newe Worlde, trans. Richard Eden, in The First Three English Books on Amer- ica ..., ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham, 1885; reprint, New York: Kraus, 1971), 195. For a somewhat different version of the passage, see Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 373, who notes the similarity to Mon- taigne, as does Keen, Aztec Image, 65, who also provides a more modern translation taken from Francis Augustus MacNutt, De Orbo Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr d'Anghera, 2 vols. (NewYork: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912), 2:38-39. On the 1519 shipment of six Indians, see also Cline, "Hernando Cortes and the Aztec Indians," 81.



Horowitz / The New World & the Changing Face of Etirope 1195

beards and white faces."47 Francisco Lopez de Gomara, who served as Cortes's chaplain, secretary, and eventual biographer after the latter's return to Spain in 1540, although he had never been to Mexico, wrote that when in 1519 the group of Spaniards sailing from Cuba and led by Cortes first landed upon the island of Cozumel nearYucatan, "the islanders could not get their fill of gazing at our horses and ships." He noted further that "they were equally astonished at the beards and color of our men, and even came up to touch them."The beards were clearly perceived, at least according to Gomara's sources, by both the natives and the Spaniards as a defining sign of the latter.When the islanders "made signs towardYucatan with their hands, giving our men to understand that many days' journey away there were four or five other bearded men," Cortes was greatly interested and begged the local chieftain "to let him have a man to carry a letter to the bearded men they had spoken of."48

The text of Cortes's 1519 letter from Cozumel to the "bearded men," as pre- sented, if not necessarily in its original form, by Gomara, ran as follows:

Noble lords, I departed from Cuba with a fleet of eleven vessels and 550 Spaniards, and arrived here at Cozumel.... The people of this island have assured me that in your country there are five or six bearded men, like tus in every respect. They cannot give me more details, but judging from what they have told us, I consider and suspect as certain that you are Span- iards.49

What they had been told, essentially, was that these other men were also bearded, and this alone seems to have convinced the Spaniards that they were therefore alike "in every respect." Unfortunately, the eagerly sought after "bearded men" were never located, so that we know neither whether they were indeed Spanish nor whether they had actually existed at all. One is reminded of the mythic Mala Cosa, or "Badthing," whom Alvar Nufiez Cabeza de Vaca was later to hear about among the Avavares and Mariames Indians of the American Southwest and who had purportedly been terrorizing the local populace during the years 1519 to 1520: "They said that a man wandered through the country whom they called Badthing; he was small of body and wore [a] beard, and they never distinctly saw his features." This stranger, who, as Rolena Adorno has noted, "obviously resem- bled the Europeans," would, according to the natives' account, enter their homes and select a victim for bodily dismemberment, whom he would afterwards mirac- ulously cure.

470n beards and white faces as the exterior signs defining the conquistadors, see also Urs Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492-1800, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989), 25, 72.

48Francisco L6pez de G6mara, Cortes: The Life of the Conqueror, by His Secretary, trans. and ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U California P, 1964), 28-29.

49L6pez de G6mara, Cortes, 28-29(emphasis added). 50Relation of Alvar Nuilez Cabepa de Vaca, trans. and ed. Buckingham Smith (NewYork:j. Munsell

for H. C. Murphy, 1871), 123; Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543, ed. Frederick W Hodge and Theodore H. Lewis (NewYork: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), 78-79.

51Adorno, "Negotiation of Fear," 174.




Whether on the mythic level or on a more realistic one, the Spanish conquistadors clearly became identified, whether immediately or in later memory, in the minds and memories of New World natives with their bearded features, and those bearded features became, in turn, a symbol of the threatening but also magically powerful European presence. Reciprocally, as we learn from Gomara, a kind of brotherhood of the beard emerges in the ethnographic imagination of the early- sixteenth-century conquistadors, so that men who are described to them as bearded are immediately assumed, or at least remembered to have been assumed, to be fellow Spaniards.This represents a reversal of the situation in the previous century, when the beard was associated with exotic otherhood and when the bearded Pero Tafur appeared strange in the eyes of his fellow Castilians. It matters little whether the Spaniards' development of a self-image in which beardedness functioned as an essential trait preceded or followed chronologically the emergence of a native perception of European man in which the latter's beard figured prominently. Both mental constructs were shaped, and perhaps even grew out of, the same New World encounter, in which the bodily characteristics of both groups were incorporated into the sometimes silent but always ongoing discourse about difference.

* * *

In 1519, the same year in which Cortes and his troops sought to make contact with the bearded men about whom they had heard from the natives of Cozumel, the brotherhood of the beard appeared in somewhat different guise on the other side of the Atlantic. In the extended negotiations that preceded their summit meeting at the Field of Cloth of Gold near Calais, the facial hair of the two young monarchs, HenryVIII and Francis I, both then under thirty, played a more significant role than has often been realized. In late July 1519, Cardinal Wolsey wrote to Thomas Boleyn, HenryVIII's ambassador in Paris, informing him that the latter was so eagerly determined to meet with the French king that he had resolved to wear his beard until the historic meeting took place.When Francis heard of this, "he laid his hand on his [own] beard," as we learn from the English ambassador's reply of August 14 to Wolsey, "and said surely he would never put it off" until he had seen Henry.52

Henry's use of the beard as sign of resolve may have been rooted in a similar act on the part Julius Caesar as recounted by Suetonius, with whose work the clas- sically educated English monarch would probably have been familiar.53 It may also have been influenced by a similar vow reportedly taken a decade earlier by Pope Julius II, who himself may have been consciously following his Roman name- sake.54 Yet it is of no less relevance to note that the French monarch whom Henry

52Boleyn to Wolsey, August 14, 1519, United Kingdom, Public Record Office, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer et al., 22 vols. (London, 1862-1932), vol. 3, pt.1, nos. 416, 514;A. F. Pollard, Henry VIII (London: Longmans, Green, 1913), 138.

53"Caesar loved his men dearly; when news came that Titurius's command had been massacred, he swore neither to cut his hair nor to trim his beard until they had been avenged"; Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 38.

54See Partridge and Starn, Renaissance Likeness, 44, who point out that the pope's private library contained a copy of Suetonius.



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had resolved to meet and who, like him, had recently been an unsuccessful candi- date for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, awarded to Charles V on June 28, 1519, was evidently himself already bearded at the time of the vow. The act by Francis of promising to Thomas Boleyn not to remove his own beard until he had met with Henry should perhaps be seen then as a reciprocal gesture to the English monarch's vow, which may itself have already contained a measure of reciprocity.56

The matter, however, proved to be more complicated than would appear, and the reciprocal resolve and goodwill of the two monarchs was not necessarily enough to keep them both bearded until their planned meeting. In mid-November Boleyn wrote from Paris that the French diplomat Mountpesat had returned from England reporting that Henry "had put off his beard" and inquiring anxiously as to what the reason might have been. Boleyn's explanation, according to his letter, was that it had probably been due to the influence of Henry's Queen Catherine: "for ... I have here afore time known when the King's grace hath worn long his beard, that the Queen hath daily made him great instance, and desired him to put it off for her sake." Upon hearing this explanation from England's ambassador, the French queen mother, at least, was well appeased, declaring, wrote Boleyn that the love between the two monarchs was "nat in the berdes, but in the harts."

5

But did not their beards convey, to some degree, what was in their hearts? Accepting Boleyn's story at its face value, we may infer that in the decade since his marriage to Catherine ofAragon, Henry had, to her displeasure, let his beard grow from time to time and that his decision to grow it again inJuly 1519 was made with the foreknowledge that she might again object. Did his vow then not mean on some level that his love for Francis of France was, like that of David for Jonathan, as reported in a passage Henry knew at least as well as he knew his Suetonius, "greater than the love of women" (2 Sm. 1: 26) or at least of one particular woman?

Catherine's objections proved, in the end, to be of no avail. Shortly before the 1520 summit, theVenetian ambassador Giustinian reported, after meeting with Henry, "that on hearing that Francis wore a beard, he allowed his own to grow, and

58 as it is reddish, he has now a beard which looks like gold." Here the reciprocity of the gesture stands out clearly. Another source describes Henry in June 1520,

550n the competition between the two for the imperial throne vacated by the death of Maximil- ian on January 12, 1519, see, among others, Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, 165-70.

56For the view that HenryVIII grew his beard under the influence of Francis I, see Laver, Concise History, 84. On gestures connected with the beard and their role in relations between men in the Middle East, see Buck Whaley's Memoirs: Including His Journey to Jerusalem, Written by Himself in 1797 ..., ed. Edward Sullivan (London: Alexander Moring, 1906), 235, which reports, "The men mutually kiss each other's beards in token of friendship." Charles Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta ([1888]; reprint, New York: Random House, 1936), 311, states: "There are certain gestures used among them [the Bedouins] which are tokens of great significance. I smooth my beard toward one to admonish him ... and have put him in mind of his honor. If I touch his beard, I put him in remembrance of our common humanity and of the witness of God which is above us."

57Letters and Papers, ed. Brewer, no. 514; Pollard, Henry VIII, 138. See also the somewhat novelistic treatment in Francis Hackett, Henry the Eighth (Garden City: Garden City Publishing, 1931), 112.

58Hackett, Henry the Eighth, 112.




when calling on the queen of France at the Field of Cloth of Gold, as "entirely at ease ... rather fat, with a red beard large enough to be very becoming." Although he had not technically kept his vow to go unshaven until his meeting with Francis, he did arrive with facial adornment that closely matched that of his French coun- terpart. The latter was described by an eyewitness upon his arrival as "six feet tall. ... the nape of his neck unusually broad, his hair brown smooth and neatly combed, his beard of three months' growth darker in color."6b

Although it has been claimed that Francis grew his beard in emulation of Pope Julius II, it should be noted that the latter died in 1513 and that Francis seems to grown his beard no earlier than 1515. In that year the twenty-one-year-old, newly crowned monarch was still depicted as clean-shaven upon making a festive royal entry onJuly 12 into Lyons.6 In addition to the papal beard, mention should perhaps be made of the full beard of the courtier Castiglione, immortalized in Raphael's portrait of 1515. Italian influence at the court of Francis I was greater than at the courts of his predecessors, and the young monarch's decision to take on a bearded appearance may have been related to his Italianate inclination.

It may further be suggested, however, that in deciding to grow a beard, he took cognizance not only of who was bearded, but also, on some level, of who was conspicuously unbearded; namely, Europe's new Other, the American Indian. Even before Cortes had sent six natives back from Mexico as trophies to the court of Charles V in 1519, Indians from the New World had been brought to France. In 1504 one had been broupht back from Brazil, and in 1509 seven from Canada had been brought to Rouen. It was Francis I who sent out Giovanni daVerrazzano in 1523 in search of a northern passage to Asia, and it was he who was responsible for moving France from a "timid and half-hearted approach" to oversees expansion to one of greater enthusiasm and tenacity, especially in northeast North America. It was there that Jacques Cartier was sent by Francis I on his first voyage in 1534, returning home with several captive Indians who served him as guides during his second voyage of 1535, from which he returned to the French monarch's court in the company of an Iroquois chief.64

59John Bowle, Henry VIII:A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 98. See also, for a slightly different translation, Pollard, Henry VIII, 141. It may be noted that Thomas Cranmer's long, white beard, prominent in his Lambeth Place portrait, was reportedly grown by the archbishop only after the death of HenryVIII as a sign of mourning and may also have been intended to suggest a "brotherhood of the beard" with the departed monarch. For a somewhat different interpretation, see Diarmaid Mac- Culloch, Thomas Cranmer:A Life (New Haven:Yale UP, 1996), 361; and for the portrait, MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, pl. 25.

60Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, 105, on the basis of the account of Ellis Griffith, a Welshman in Henry's service. The claim made in passing by Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 331, that Francis I was bearded only from 1521 is clearly incorrect.

61See Strong, Art and Power, 10-11 and illus. no. 5; and Knecht, Renaissance Warrior; and the sources cited by both authors. For the claim that Francis was influenced by Julius, see Reynolds, Beards, 184; Robert Chambers, The Book of Days:A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities ..., 2 vols. (Philadelphia:J. P. Lippincott, 1873), 1:451; but note Chambers, Book of Days, 280.

62Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, 124-25. 63Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, 370.




During the early 1530s, when (the bearded) Francis I was pursuing an aggres- sive policy of exploration aimed at subjugating the (unbearded) Indians of North America, he was pursuing a diplomatic policy aimed at forging an alliance with the (bearded) Turks to the East in order to undermine the power of Emperor Charles V. One of the latter's leading biographers has seen this "unorthodox alliance of a Christian king with the Turk" as the most important event of the year 1533. After that year, he claimed, "a new element emerged in European history; henceforward the Turk, hitherto the abhorrence of the western world, would have to be recognized as an equal by the powers of Europe."65 In addition to pragmatic consider- ations, is it not possible that the incipient displacement of the Muslim by the American Indian as Europe's leading "external Other" and the bond of the beard that by the 1530s linked Christian Europeans with MuslimTurks contributed, even in a small way, to this shift in the political arena? If the beards of Francis I and Henry VIII served as a bond between the two young monarchs during the period of delicate diplomacy that preceded their meeting at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, could not the beards that a decade later graced the faces of nearly all of western Europe's leading figures, including the pope and the emperor, have helped pave the way towards a new, less demonized, view of the bearded Turk? Francis I was able to overcome centuries of hostility in order to make an ally of the Ottomans- Oviedo remarked afterward that they and the French seemed to be "one and the same thing" -but even Emperor Charles, against whom the alliance was forged, had no choice but to recognize them as an equal player in European power politics. He too, it may be added, shared with them the bond of the beard.

* * *

The year 1533, in which the French alliance with the Turks was forged, was also the year in which Titian painted his first portrait, now in Madrid, of Emperor Charles, bearded, with a hound at his side. The last two ofTitian's three portraits of the emperor both date from 1548, when the latter was forty-eight years old. In the former, now in Munich, in which Charles is shown seated, some have seen signs of the special bond of sympathy that had developed between the two since the early 1530s, when Titian, after painting the emperor, had been ennobled by him. In the latter portrait, in Madrid, Charles is shown in full armor on a horse at the battle of Miihlberg, at which he defeated the Lutheran princes and drove them

64Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1420-1620 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1955), 182, 189; Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, chap. 19.

65Karl Brandi, The Emperor Charles V. The Growth and Destiny of a Man and of a World Empire, trans. CV. Wedgwood (New York: Knopf, 1939), 351-52. On Francis and his alliance with the Turks, see Brandi, Emperor Charles V358, 408,497; as well as Knecht, Renaissance Warrior, 295-96,300-301.

66Gerbi, Nature in the New World, 381, 384. Oviedo and Francisco de Jerez before him had compared the Inca with the Turks; see Gerbi, Nature in the New World, 275, 269.

67See Pope-Hennessy, Portrait, 171-72, who saw it as a new departure not only in imperial por- traiture but in the work ofTitian too.




back across the Elbe in 1547. In it,John Pope-Hennessy has claimed, his iconography is raised "from that of a local German potentate to the leader of the forces of militant Catholicism."68 FrancesYates has seen in the equestrian portrait echoes of the antique statue of Marcus Aurelius, with Charles "Romanized as the stoic emperor, the World Ruler on whose domains the sun never set."6 The full beard that graced his face in all three portraits undoubtedly possessed more than one layer of meaning within the context of mid-sixteenth-century European culture. If the beard of Pope Julius II could have earlier taken on imperial connotations,70 these would be hardly less appropriate for the beard of Europe's only true emperor, under whose "yoke and royal scepter," as Cortes had noted in his final letter to CharlesV, "many and great realms and kingdoms of barbarous men and peoples" had also been brought. Those barbarous peoples, moreover, were conspicuously unbearded and were subjugated to the imperial crown by conquistadors whose long, thick beards were perceived by both sides to be, like their whiteness, one of their defining characteristics.

But we may note also the potential relevance to the beard's iconography of another of the harsh realities of the sixteenth century: the new disease that since its first appearance in 1494, during the French invasion of Italy, had been known by a number of epithets but which had received the later widespread name "syphilis" upon the publication, in 1530, of Girolamo Fracastro's Latin poem in dactylic hex- ameter, Syphilis, sive morbus gallicus. The same author, in another work written in 1546, described some of the symptoms that had more recently come to be popu- larly associated with the early stages of the venereal disease in its then current form. "Everyone is struck by the loss of hair ... which turns the patients into laughing stocks; some have no beards, others no eyebrows, others bald heads."7 When Titian was composing his final portraits of the emperor during the late 1540s, then, a full beard would have implicitly testified to the physical and moral well-being of its wearer just as it would set him off racially and culturally from the New World Indians. These, like Old World syphilitics, were quite conspicuously without facial hair. They had also been regarded by many in early-sixteenth-century Europe as having been responsible for the arrival there of syphilis.

Initial support for this view, as Anna Foa has noted, came from people "associated in one way or another with the Discovery and the Conquest."This, she has

68Pope-Hennessy, Portrait, 173, 176. See also David Rosand, "Titian and the Critical Tradition," in Titian, 5; for interesting interpretative comments on the three surviving portraits, see also Brandi, Emperor Charles V<349,569,586-87.

69Frances Amelia Yates, "Charles V and the Idea of the Empire," in her Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975), 22. SeeYates,Astraea, illus. 1-2.

700n the imperial connotations of the beard of Julius, see Partridge and Starn, Renaissance Like- ness, 44,46.

71The letter of 1544 is quoted in Hernando Cortes: Five Letters, 1519-1526, trans. and ed.J. Bayard Morris (London: Routledge, 1928; reprint, NewYork: Norton, 1960), xix.

72Claude Quetel, History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), 50. On the loss of hair associated with the disease, see also Quetel, Syphilis, 57; as well as Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cam- bridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1992), 191.




forcefully argued, was no accident, for the mechanisms used to integrate the new disease were closely linked to what she has called "the protective mechanisms and mental paths which the learned European mind used to accept the idea of the New World." As a case in point, we may refer to Spanish chronicler Oviedo, who wrote in his aforementioned Natural History:"I have laughed many times hearing the Ital- ians name it the mal Francese and the French call it the malo di Napoli, and in effect they would have guessed its true name if they had called it the male delle Indie."73 Oviedo, as we recall, had also been one of the early authors to stress, in that same work, the beardless character of the Amerindians, commenting that it was a marvel to see any of them with hair on their faces or on any other parts of their bodies.

The new disease was projected by Oviedo and other European writers, such as Gomara, Las Casas, and Francesco Guicciardini, onto the new Other, and like that Other, it came to be associated by midcentury with beardlessness and general absence of bodily hair. As the American Indian gradually displaced the Jew and the Turk as the most potent symbol of otherness for sixteenth-century Europeans,74 the beard was increasingly removed from its close and long-standing association with these now less than absolute Others. It could attach itself to the faces of popes and monarchs and become, after a brief period in which its presence continued to elicit surprise, a proud sign of the strength and superiority of European civilization. It marked the face of a civilization that could see its encounter with the NewWorld largely as one of masculine conquest, a face showing no sign of submission to that world's barbarous peoples or to the disfiguring disease for whose spread many in sixteenth-century Europe held them responsible.

73Anna Foa, "The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis, 1494-1530," in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,1990), 29, 31-32. On Oviedo see also Gerbi, Nature in the New World, 377, 403-4; Grafton, New Worlds, 186.

740n this displacement see Foa, "The New and the Old," 34; and Todorov, Conquest of America, 50.

