Urban Palio and Scharlach Races in Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century Italy and Germany

Abstract

For the first time since antiquity, the Italian and German urban horse races for the prize of a precious piece of cloth called palio or scharlach could be studied as a fully-developed competitive ‘sport culture’ in all its dimensions, from planning and organization to the competitive performance itself through to the discursive perception and symbolic communication of victories and defeats. On both sides of the Alps, this communal tradition of horse racing experienced its heyday in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Notwithstanding this contemporaneity and a bunch of organizational similarities, the Northern and Southern racing phenonema did not form a specific field of transalpine entanglement, but rather unconnected parallel worlds. In this essay, I will present some key comparative aspects of the transalpine field of urban horse racing: organizational structures, spatial arrangements, social range of the participants, the central role of equine agency for the success or failure of racing performances, and different media representations of victories.