The  exhibition of otherness


 

 
Cromohs (Cyber Review of  Modern Historiography), ISSN 1123-7023, 20/2015-16 
© Firenze University Press 

Performances of  entangled emotions and beliefs: 
French and Spanish cultural transformations 
on the sixteenth-century Florida peninsula 

 
SUSAN BROOMHALL 

The University of  Western Australia 
 
 
Abstract 

This essay explores how interpretations and practices of  entangled emotions and beliefs were 

critical to European engagement with Florida during the mid-sixteenth century. It analyses 

emotional performances of  religious, racial and cultural beliefs that lay at the heart of  colonising 

activities of  both the French and Spanish, articulated in affective forms such as facial expression, 

gestures, sexual practices and violent acts, and rhetorically in verbal encounters and textual 

presentations. It contends that these performances occurred both as practices in the Florida region 

and Europe, and through rhetorical and visual forms in contemporary epistolary, manuscript and 

printed texts. The study argues that conflicting European activities with indigenous peoples and 

lands in Florida produced complex emotional and affective labour among European and indigenous 

agents — rulers, captains, crews, spiritual envoys and diplomatic personnel. This essay suggests new 

insights into colonial power relations may be suggested by consideration of  emotions in cross-cultural 

performances, in securing diplomatic relations, or as an unexpected, disruptive force to other 

behaviours within official negotiations. In the eyes of  participants, through these entangled belief  and 

emotional performances about Florida, indigenous, French and Spanish peoples were themselves all 

culturally transformed. 

 

The essay analyses performances of  entangled emotions and beliefs — 

religious, racial and cultural — that lay at the heart of  colonising activities of  both 

the French and Spanish in a region that has became known today as Florida. These 

emotional performances of  belief, I contend, occurred in multiple sites, both in 

practices in the Florida region and Europe, and also through rhetorical and visual 

forms in contemporary epistolary, manuscript and printed texts. I argue that 

conflicting European activities with local peoples and lands in Florida produced what 

were perceived as cultural transformations through complex emotional and affective 

labour that expressed divergent religious, racial and cultural beliefs among European 

and indigenous agents. These emotional performances were articulated in affective 

forms through bodies, facial expression and gestures, sexual practices and violent 

acts. Others were expressed rhetorically in verbal encounters and textual 

presentations.  

These were sophisticated forms of  emotional labour, performed by a range of  

participating agents from indigenous and European leaders, captains and crews, to 



SUSAN BROOMHALL 

 
Cromohs 20/2015-16 - p. 26 

spiritual envoys and diplomatic personnel. By the term ‘emotional labour,’ I am 

following the conceptualisation of  sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who argued, in the 

modern workplace context, that certain roles require particular cognitive emotion 

work, affective comportment and emotional expression for successful achievement.1 

These were not emotional ‘reactions’ to global activities and associated cultural 

transformations in the sense that they were spontaneous but were instead strategic, 

managed displays of  specific emotional content in particular contexts. However, this 

is not intended to imply that such labour was not felt and experienced by agents, but 

rather that choices were being made about what emotions were rendered visible for 

consumption by others. Moreover, in suggesting that such labour was calculated and 

with profound political consequences, I do not mean that the emotional 

performances I study here were political emotions in the sense that they held only, or 

largely, symbolic valence. Indeed, ambassadors, for example, regularly looked to 

interpret emotional display in their interlocutors as a potential alternative insight into 

the latter’s views and feelings.2 Furthermore, emotional labour took place between 

negotiants both in physically proximate sites, but also between authors and readers, 

artists and viewers, whose texts were likewise crafted emotional performances with 

their own assumptions and agendas. 

This essay explores how interpretations and practices of  entangled emotions 

and beliefs were critical to European engagement with Florida during the mid-

sixteenth century. Scholars have rightly highlighted that the term ‘entanglement’ 

obscures the power relations of  colonising relationships that were rarely, if  ever, 

equal.3 However, for my purposes the term ‘entangled’ helpfully alludes to the sense 

of  interwoven complexities of  performances that projected and reflected beliefs 

through emotional practices. The French attempt to control the Florida peninsula, 

along with the failed France antartique colony, has generally been studied as a political 

disaster, as its challenge to Spanish colonial dominance in the region was crushed. 

Scholars have typically focussed upon the politico-religious consequences of  the 

strong Huguenot component of  each endeavour, and on the literary and cultural 

dimensions of  French encounters in the Americas.4 However, despite increasing 

                                                           
1 ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of  human feeling (Berkeley: 
University of  California Press, 1983). 
2 On the gendered aspects of  their interpretations, see my “Catherine’s tears: diplomatic corporeality, 
affective performance and gender at the sixteenth-century French court”, in Fluid Bodies: Corporeality in 
Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by ANNE M. SCOTT, DEBORAH SEILER and MICHAEL BARBEZAT 
(forthcoming). 
3 See, for example, the discussion in STEPHEN W. SILLMAN, “Cultural contact or colonialism? 
Challenges in the archeology of  native North America”, American Antiquity 70, (2005): 55–74. 
4 Key studies assessing Florida include FRANK LESTRINGANT, L'expérience huguenote au nouveau monde 
(XVIe siècle) (Geneva: Droz, 1996); JOHN T. MCGRATH, The French in Early Florida (Gainesville: 
University Press of  Florida, 2000); FRANK LESTRINGANT, Le huguenot et le sauvage: L'Amérique et la 
controverse coloniale, en France, au temps des guerres de religion, 1555-1589 (Geneva: Droz, 2004); Les huguenots 
et l'Atlantique: Pour Dieu, la cause ou les affaires, ed. by MICKAËL AUGERON, DIDIER POTON and 
BERTRAND VAN RUYMBEKE (Paris: Indes savants, 2009). Lestringant has a new volume specific to 
Florida forthcoming in 2016, Le Théâtre de la Floride (Paris, Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne). 



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Cromohs 20/2015-16 - p. 27 

scholarly attention to the importance of  analysing emotions in cross-cultural 

engagements within missionary, mercantile and colonial frameworks during the early 

modern period, their vital emotional dimensions are only now gaining scholarly 

attention.5 How were religious, racial and cultural beliefs about others — Catholic, 

Huguenot or non-Christian, indigenous or European, French or Spanish, women and 

men — understood and the emotional performances they engendered practised by 

European powers as they encountered local peoples, and each other, in Florida? 

Following recent literature that proposes to complicate the grand narrative of  

European colonialism in the region, this essay aims to offer new insights into 

colonial power relations that may be suggested by consideration of  emotions in 

cross-cultural performances.6 This essay analyses how French and Spanish colonial 

agents interacted with local peoples in Florida area. These were not, however, simply 

acts practised through extra-European activities and sites but were enacted in textual 

forms designed for European consumption. Moreover, as I explore in the second 

half  of  the paper, these same questions and practices were also negotiated by 

monarchs, ambassadors, spies and agents who likewise negotiated European colonial 

aims and achievements through highly-situated emotional performances at court, in 

missives and through bodies.  

Scholars are increasingly considering emotions as fundamental to European 

political and diplomatic discourse. In particular, they have considered the 

performative power of  emotions to structure the relationship between rulers and 

between rules and their subjects,7 and key concepts such as ‘friendship’ as critical to 

political socialities, hierarchies and interactions in the premodern world.8 Emotions 

                                                           
5 SUSAN BROOMHALL, “Emotional Encounters: Indigenous peoples in the Dutch East India Compa-
ny's interactions with the South Lands”, Australian Historical Studies 45, 3 (2014): 350-67;  SHINO KON-
ISHI, “Early encounters in Aboriginal place: the role of emotions in French readers of Indigenous 
sites”, Australian Aboriginal Studies 2, (2015): 12-23; “Emotions and Conversions”, Journal of Religious 
History 39, 4 (2015), special issue ed. by JACQUELINE VAN GENT and SPENCER YOUNG; Bronwyn 
DOUGLAS, “Agency, affect, and local knowledge in the exploration of Oceania”, in Indigenous Intermedi-
aries: New Perspectives on exploration archives, ed. by SHINO KONISHI, MARIA NUGENT and TIFFANY 
SHELLAM (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015), 103-29; GIOVANNI TARANTINO, “Disaster, emotions and 
cultures: The unexpected wink of Shiba Kokan (1738–1818)”,  Rivista Storica Italiana, forthcoming 2016 
(I thank the author for allowing me to read this pre-publication); SUSAN BROOMHALL, “Tears on silk: 
Cross-cultural emotional performances among Japanese-born Christians in seventeenth-century Bata-
via”, Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies (Special Opening Issue: Emotions and Marginalized Communi-
ties) 1, 1 (2016): 18–42; MARIA NUGENT, “Indigenous/European encounters” and DONNA MER-
WICK, “Colonialism”, in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. by SUSAN BROOMHALL (London: 
Routledge, 2016).  
6 Most recently, MARIA XIMENA SENATORE and PEDRO PAULO A. FUNARI, “Introduction: Disrupting 
the Grand Narrative of  Spanish and Portuguese Colonialism”, in Archaeology of  Culture Contact and 
Colonialism in Spanish and Portuguese America, ed. by MARIA XIMENA SENATORE and PEDRO PAULO A. 
FUNARI (New York: Springer, 2015), 1–15.  
7 See HELEN WATANABE-O’KELLY, “Monarchies”, in BROOMHALL, Early Modern Emotions, IV, 1.   
8 See, for example, MICHEL REY, “Communauté et individu: Amitié comme lien social å la 
Renaissance”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 38 (1991): 617–25; RANDALL LASAFFER, 
“«Amicitia» in Renaissance Peace and Alliance Treaties (1450-1530)”, Journal of  the History of  
International Law 4 (2002): 77–99; JEAN-MARIE CONSTANT, “L’amitié: le moteur de la mobilite 



SUSAN BROOMHALL 

 
Cromohs 20/2015-16 - p. 28 

were not merely abstract concepts, although their symbolic valences were vital to 

political negotiation. They were also lived experiences of  specific individuals who 

acted for declared communities of  interest but also in the light of  their own 

objectives. New insights about political life have emerged recently from analysis 

turning to the consequences of  strategic emotional expression and affective 

comportment in particular contexts.9 At the same time, attention is beginning to be 

paid to the importance of  emotions as part of  the ideology and practice of  

European mercantile, missionary and colonial spaces and regimes.10 Donna Merwick 

reminds us that European colonialism was a practice that was made up of  individuals 

with feelings — anxieties, fears, uncertainty as well as ambitions and intimacies.11 

                                                                                                                                                               
politique dans la noblesse de la premiere moitié du XVIIe siècle”, in La Noblesse en liberté, XVIe-XVIIe 
siècles (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004), 173–87; JEAN-PIERRE DEDIEU, “Amistad, 
familial, patria, …y rey. Las bases de la vida politica en la Monarquía española de los siglos XVII y 
XVIII”, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 25, 1 (2005): 27–50; KLAUS OSCHEMA, Freundschaft und Nähe im 
spätmittelalterischen Burgund, Studien zum Spannungsfeld von Emotion und Institution (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag 
Köln, 2006); Freundschaft oder ‘amitié’? ein politisch-soziales Konzept der Vormoderne in zwischen-sprachlichlen 
Vergleich (15–17 Jahrundert), ed. by KLAUS OSCHEMA (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007); LAURENT 
SMAGGHE, Les Émotions du Prince: Émotion et discours politique dans l’espace bourguignon (Paris: Classiques 
Garnier, 2012); FRANÇOIS FORONDA, El espano y el miedo: Golpismo, emociones politicas y constitucionalismo en 
la Edad Media (Madrid: Dykinson, 2013). 
9 See TRACY ADAMS, ‘Married Noblewomen as Diplomats: Affective Diplomacy’, and SUSAN 
BROOMHALL, ‘Ordering Distant Affections: Fostering Love and Loyalty in the Correspondence of  
Catherine de Medici to the Spanish Court, 1568–1572’, in Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early 
Modern Europe: Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder, ed. by SUSAN BROOMHALL (Farnham: Ashgate, 
2015), 51–66 and 67–88; SUSAN BROOMHALL, “Performing Diplomacy: Emotions, Gender and 
Materiality in Medieval and Early Modern Courtly Relations”, in the Routledge History Handbook for 
Emotions in Europe, 1100–1700, ed. by ANDREW LYNCH and SUSAN BROOMHALL (London: Routledge, 
forthcoming). 
10 INGA CLENDINNEN, Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2005); NICOLE EUSTACE, “The sentimental paradox: humanity and 
violence on the Pennsylvania frontier”, The William and Mary Quarterly 65, 1 (2008): 29–64; Moving 
Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of  Global Empire, ed. by TONY BALLANTYNE and 
ANTOINETTE M. BURTON (Urbana: University of  Illinois Press, 2009); TIFFANY SHELLAM, Shaking 
Hands on the Fringe: Negotating the Aboriginal World a King George’s Sound (Crawley: UWA Press, 2009); 
PETER ROBB, Useful Friendship: Europeans and Indians in Early Calcutta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
2014); SUSAN BROOMHALL, “Emotional encounters: indigenous peoples in the Dutch East India 
Company’s interactions with the South lands”, Australian Historical Studies 45, 3 (2014): 350–67; 
“Emotions and Conversions,” Journal of  Religious History 39, 4 (2015); Emotions and Christian Missions: 
Historical Perspectives, ed. by CLAIRE MCLISKY, KARIN VALLGÅRDA and DANIEL MIDENA (Basingstoke: 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); ANGELIQUE STASTNY, “The politics of  friendship: expectations and self-
reflection in times of  conciliation”, Histories of  Emotion, from Medieval Europe to Modern Australia, Blog 
of  the Australian Research Council Centre of  Excellence for the History of  Emotion, 
https://historiesofemotion.com/2015/07/31/the-politics-of-friendship-expectations-and-self-
reflection-in-times-of-conciliation/ accessed 22 May 2016; SUSAN BROOMHALL, “Shipwrecks, Sorrow, 
Shame, and the Great Southland: The Use of  Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Dutch East India 
Company Communicative Ritual”, in Emotion, Ritual and Power in Pre-Modern Europe: 1200 to the Present, 
ed. by KATIE BARCLAY and MERRIDEE BAILEY (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2016); JACQUELINE VAN 
GENT, “Global trading companies” and “Protestant global missions”, GIUSEPPE MARCOCCI, 
“Amerindian and African slaves”, PETER A. GODDARD, “Missionary Catholicism”, DONNA MERWICK, 
“Colonialism”, NICOLE EUSTACE, “Theories of  empire”, MARIA NUGENT, “Indigenous/European 
encounters”, in Early Modern Emotions, ed. by SUSAN BROOMHALL. 
11 MERWICK, “Colonialism”, in Early Modern Emotions and previously MERWICK, Stuyvesant Bound: An 
Essay on Loss Across Time (Philadelphia: University of  Pennsylvania Press, 2013); The Shame and the 



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Furthermore, Pekka Hämäläinen’s research recognises the ways in which different 

actors, European and indigenous groups alike, in these interactions could be mutually 

opportunistic.12 With this recent scholarship in mind, the essay examines multiple 

individual performances of  entangled emotions and beliefs that constituted 

colonising activities of  both the French and Spanish not just in Florida but for varied 

audiences and readers in Europe. 

This essay considers emotions performed in both acts and texts; that is, 

through the gestures and faces, speech acts, and rhetorical expression of  emotion in 

written texts, as well as social practices of  gift exchange, ceremonies, and bodies 

employed in ritualised behaviours. ‘Emotions,’ in this context, were neither bodily 

and intellectual experiences sharply defined nor necessarily interpreted by observers 

as intended. Words and acts held multiple layers of  meaning and consequences 

beyond the control of  those who performed them. Considering emotional 

experience as performance does not suggest necessarily a degree of  falseness or a 

lack of  weight to these behaviours; rather it reflects an understanding of  emotional 

performance as part of  a construction of  self  in a given context.13 The key sources 

studied here were produced by French and Spanish colonial agents, who were 

political protagonists and eyewitnesses to the emotional behaviours they experienced, 

perceived and described in letters, reports, and memoirs, some writing in the moment 

and others in reflection in the years after the events. In doing so, they were providing 

presentations of  themselves as they created their texts for wider consumption. As 

such, conformity to contexts and conventions of  distinct European readerships were 

typically prioritised over potentially more socially-confronting emotional 

performances. 

 

Emotional disruptions and cultural transformations at the peninsula 

Positive relationships with the local Timucua people were vital to French 

ambitions on the Florida peninsula.14 As a rule, eye-witnesses recounting their 

experiences in the settlement initally celebrated the willingness of  local peoples to 

                                                                                                                                                               
Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of  Pennsylvania Press, 
2006). 
12 PEKKA HÄMÄLÄINEN, “The Shapes of  Power: Indians, Europeans, and North American Worlds 
from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century”, in Contested Spaces of  Early America, ed. by JULIANA 
BARR and EDWARD COUNTRYMEN (Philadelphia: University of  Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 58. 
13 JUDITH BUTLER, “Gender as performance”, in A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, ed. by  PE-
TER OSBORNE (London: Routledge, 1996), 109–25; JUDITH BUTLER, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the 
Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999). See also WILLIAM M. REDDY, The Navigation of Feeling: 
A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); MONIQUE 
SCHEER, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A 
Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion”, History and Theory 51, 2 (2012): 193–220. 
14 A far larger historiography discusses the image of  the ‘savage’ gained from a broader range of  
French interactions in the Americas, especially from Brazil. On the peoples in the area of  Florida, see 



SUSAN BROOMHALL 

 
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forge relationships with them, but they also charted a narrative of  increasing 

challenges and emotional disruptions to the hoped-for French domination of  the 

region. In 1562, Huguenot navigator Jean Ribault had been selected by Admiral of  

French Navy, fellow Huguenot Gaspard de Coligny, to lead an expedition to found 

what was hoped would become a colony under French control in the region.15 

Arriving in May near the mouth of  a river (now St Johns River), Ribault began to 

establish what he understood, and promoted in his account with pride, as positive 

alliances with local people. Ribault interpreted the establishment of  friendship of  the 

local Timucua through his perception of  their positive emotion display ‘withowt any 

taken of  feare or dowbte’, the assistance rendered to the French, ‘shewing unto us 

the easiest landing place’ and their exchange of  material resources: ‘on our parte 

tokens of  assuraunce and frendelynes’ and ‘his lorde  […] his girdell in token of  

assurance and ffrendship’.16 Vanessa Smith has argued powerfully for a slightly later 

period that in European minds, the rhetoric of  friendship absolved colonisers of  the 

suggestion that their actions were calculated.17 French narratives certainly 

emphasised indigenous agency in creating relationships. Accompanying Ribault was 

Huguenot nobleman and navigator, René Goulaine de Laudonnière, whose account 

of  his time in Florida was not published until after his death. It demonstrated how he 

searched for recognisable gestures and facial expressions among the Timucua to 

understand their agreement. Accepting the French gifts of  bracelets, mirrors, and 

knives, Laudonnière concluded that the chief  had ‘indicated that he was very happy 

and fully satisfied.’18 Encountering a second group across the river, Laudonnière 

recalled the careful emotional negotiations, and assumptions, of  both Ribault and his 

indigenous counterpart: 

The two children graciously received the Captain, but the king, their father, showed a 

kind of  gravity and did nothing but shake his head a little.  […]  The Captain, not 

knowing how to judge the deportment of  this man, thought that he might be jealous 

because we went first to the other, or that he was not very happy about the marker we 

had erected […] we indicated by signs that he had come from a great distance on 

purpose to see him, to make known the friendship that he wanted to have with him. 

To better ally with him, he drew from a small chest a few trinkets, such as gilt- and 

                                                                                                                                                               
JOHN E. WORTH, The Timucuan Chiefdoms of  Spanish Florida: vol 1. Assimilation (Gainesville: University of  
Florida Press, 1998) 
15 See JOHN T. MCGRATH, “Admiral Coligny, Jean Ribault, and the East Coast of  North 
America,” French Colonial History 1 (2002): 63-76; Coligny, les protestants et la mer: actes du colloque organisé à 
Rochefort et La Rochelle les 3 et 4 octobre 1996, ed. by MARTINE ACERRA and GUY MARTINIÈRE (Paris: 
Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1997). 
16 The first publication of  his work was in London, in 1563. JEAN RIBAUT, The Whole & True Discouerye 
of  Terra Florida: A Facsimile Reprint of  the London Edition of  1563, ed. by JEANNETTE THURBER CONNOR 
(Deland: The Florida State Historical Society, 1927), 66-67. 
17 VANESSA SMITH, Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2010), 285. 
18 ‘Le Roy se mõstra en estre fort ioyeux, & amplement satisfait’. RENÉ DE LAUDONNIÈRE, L’Histoire 
notable de la Floride situee es Indes Occidentales (Paris: Guillaume Auvray, 1586), 9r. 



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silver-plated bracelets, and presented them to the king, a few others to his children. 

This was the reason that the king began to become amiably disposed towards the 

Captain and us.19 

Having thus ‘made alyance and entered into amytie,’ Ribault then claimed the 

lands for France with a column marked with the date and the arms of  the king, 

Charles IX.20 On modern-day Parriss Island, he tasked a small contingent of  men to 

build a fort, Charlesfort, named for the young monarch, promising to soon return 

with renewed supplies from France.  

The eyes of  the Huguenot nobility were firmly fixed on the fledgling 

settlement and Coligny encouraged Charles IX and his mother Catherine de Medici 

to send reinforcements. Laudonnière was selected for the task of  supplying 

Charlesfort and establishing another settlement on the St Johns River, Fort Caroline. 

On his arrival in June 1564, Laudonnière was met, in the report of  eye-witness, artist 

Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, with a warm welcome by the local people: 

they demonstrated many indications of  friendship and favour … The things that we 

received from these traders were mainly things that they themselves valued the most, 

things for nourishing or protecting the body.21  

While eye-witnesses recounting their experiences in the settlement as a rule 

celebrated the willingness of  local peoples to forge relationships with them, 

Laudonnière’s memoirs of  his second voyage emphasised his particular, personal 

achievement of  strong relationships with the Timucua, who — he recalled — 

greeted him, crying out ‘with a loud voice in their Indian language Antipola Bonnassou, 

which means brother, friend, or something similar.’22 The Timucua chief, in 

                                                           
19 ‘Les deux enfans receurent gratieusement le Capitaine: mais le Roy leur pere monstant vne grauité, 
ie ne scay quelle, ne feit sinon bransler quelque peu la teste: […] le Captaine ne sçachant que iuger du 
port de cest homme, pensa qu’il estoit ialoux de ce que premieremēnt nous estiõs alle vers l’autre, ou 
bien qu’il n’estoit trop content de la borne que nous auions plantee. Sur ce ne sçachant que resouldre, 
l’un fit par signes, qu’il l’estoit venu trouver exprez de lointaine region, pour luy faire cognoistre 
l’amitié qu’il vouloit auoir auecques luy: pour lauqelle mieux allier, luy tira d’une malette quelque 
singularitez, comme des brasselets en façon d’or & d’argent, qu’il luy presenta, & quelques autres 
ioyaux à ses enfans: qui est cause que le Roy se mit à caresser amiablement le Captaine, & nous’. 
LAUDONNIÈRE, L’Histoire notable, 9v -10r. 
20 RIBAULT, Whole & True Discouerye, 70. 
21 ‘Quandoquidem multa amicitiæ & favoris indicia demonstrarunt, [...]: eæ verò merces, quas à novis 
istis negotiatoribus accipiebamus, magna ex parte constabant ex rebus, quæ ab illis maximè æstimantur, 
nempe quæcumque ad humani corporis alimentum & conservationem spectant’. JACQUES MOYNE DE 
MORGUES, Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americai provincia Gallis acciderunt (Frankfurt: Theodor de 
Bry, 1591), secunda pars, 7. On Le Moyne de Morgues’ art, see PAUL HULTON, The Work of  Jacques Le 
Moyne de Morgues: A Huguenot Artist in France and Florida, 2 (London: British Museum Publications, 
1977); Laura Fishman, “Old World Images encounter new world reality: Rene de Laudonniere and the 
Timucuas of  Florida”, Sixteenth Century Journal 26, 3 (1995): 547-59; TODD OLSON, “Markers: Le 
Moyne de Morgues in 16th-century Florida”, in Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World ed. by 
DANA LEIBSOHN and JEANNETTE FAVROT PETERSON (London: Routledge, 2012), 193-212. 
22 ‘À haute voix en leur vulgaire Indien, Antipola Bonnassou, qui vaut autãt à dire, cõme, frere, amy, ou 
chose semblable.’ LAUDONNIÈRE, L’Histoire notable, 36v. 



SUSAN BROOMHALL 

 
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Laudonnière’s account, actively sought out the French alliance.  

Crying out from the distance, Antipola, antipola, and showing such great joy that he 

almost lost his composure. … even recognizing those from the previous voyage, they 

addressed themselves chiefly to them, using this language … and by evident signs made 

us understand how happy they were at our arrival.23 

Similarly, an anonymous French correspondent writing home to his father in 

1564 observed the Timucua ‘making signs as they approached and crying out Amy 

Thypola Panassoon! which means brother and friend like the fingers of  one hand.’24 In 

judging their relations, French witnesses noted the gestures and looks they 

interpreted as conveying the joy, excitement and happiness of  the renewed encounter 

but also highlighted details that would be meaningful to their European readership: 

the use of  specific terms that they understood to mean brotherhood and friendship, 

and gestures of  concordance between the parties. 

The transactional nature of  these emotional performances of  friendship were, 

however, evident in French sources. Laudonnière had been instructed to capture 

local people who could be taken to France, and described in acute detail his 

interpretation of  the emotional display of  the two unwilling men whom he had 

attempted to kidnap. Although the French attempted to appease them with gifts, 

‘these they disdained to take, and returned all we had given them, thinking that these 

gifts obligated them, and in returning them, they would be granted their freedom.’25 

Whatever Laudonnière understood of  the practices of  these men in developing a 

relationship that could lead to assistance for them, it did not deter him from his own 

objectives. French pleasantries though came to a fruitless conclusion; the Timucua 

escaped. Equally Laudonnière’s account also revealed that Timucua leaders could 

demand sociabilities; that is, as ‘exclusive groups that defined themselves as discrete 

cohort through specific social and emotional behaviours,’ of  their allies, which were 

deeply challenging for the French.26 The Timucua chief, Satouriona, called upon 

                                                           
23 ‘S’escria d’assez loing, Antipola, Antipola, & estant esmeu de si grande ioye, que presques il perdoit 
toute contenance, […] mesme recognoissans ceux du precedent voyage, ils s’adressoient 
principallement à eux pour leur vser de ce langage […] par signes euidents nous faisoient entendre, 
quel contentement ils auoiēt de nostre venue.’ Ibid., 37r-v. 
24  ‘Faisant signe q’ lõ s’approchast, criãt Amy Thypola Panassoon! qui est autãt à dire frere et amy 
cõme les doigtz de la main.’ Coppie d’une lettre venant de la Floride, enuoyee a Rouen, et depuis au Seigneur 
d’Eueron; ensemble le plan et portraict du fort que les Francois y ont faict (Paris: Vincent Norment et Jeanne 
Bruneau, 1565), reproduced in Voyages, relations et mémoires originaux pour servir à l’histoire de la découverte de 
l’Amérique: Recueil de pièces sur la Floride, ed. by HENRI TERNAUX-COMPANS (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 
1841), 237, 244.  
25 ‘Lesquelles ils desdaignoient prendre, & rendoient à l’opposite tout ce qu’on leur avoit donné, 
pensans que tels dõs les eussent du tout obligez, & qu’en les rendants, la liberté leur seroit octroyee’, 
LAUDONNIÈRE, L’Histoire notable, 14v. 
26 SUSAN BROOMHALL, ‘Introduction’ in Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in England, 1650–
1850, ed. by SUSAN BROOMHALL (London: Routledge, 2015), 1. 



PERFORMANCES OF ENTANGLED EMOTIONS AND BELIEFS 

 
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Laudonnière: ‘to show myself  a friend of  his friends, and enemy of  his enemies’.27 

Ignoring local conventions of  alliance and enmity, Laudonnière declined to fight 

alongside the Timucua in their wars, arguing that peace among all the groups of  the 

region would be best for them; certainly it was best for him. It was after all ‘the 

principal goal of  all my plans: to gain and maintain them […] while I discovered the 

goods of  the land and tried to strengthen my position there’.28 Satouriana’s 

problematic demand that Laudonnière fulfil indigenous sociabilities forged in 

military collaboration disrupted French ambitions for the alliance and marked a key 

moment in the disintegration of  French relations in the region.  

Moreover, within the French community, there was also evidence of  fractures 

marked by divergent emotional, sexual and moral practices and beliefs. Evidently, the 

French leadership struggled to control the sexual behaviour of  some among the 

fledging community of  settlers. The group comprised a diverse collection of  would-

be settlers, including Catholics, artisans, labourers, women, prisoners, and foreigners 

who had been captured but permitted to live freely in the settlement.29 A report by 

Huguenot Captain Giles de Pysière pinpointed a cohort for whom the Florida site 

offered an opportunity to practise what he perceived as divergent sexual affinities, 

men who wanted ‘to live in the greatest abomination and Epicurean life ever heard 

of, without God, without faith, and without law’.30 The Christian leadership had 

instructed these men not to pursue sexual relations with local women unless they 

were formally married. Significantly, Pysière described these men as ‘strangers,’ who 

did not share the moral values of  the Christian majority; they were, he argued, 

‘Moors and Savages.’31 He took a dim view of  their capacity to form part of  the 

community that he imagined to be building in Florida since ‘it is difficult for them to 

leave their sluts  … to live as decent people and in the company of  Christians’. 32 

According to Pysière’s report, in the Florida environment, these men had been 

rendered spiritually and morally incapable of  resisting the temptations of  native flesh 

and becoming part of  the virtuous Christian community that the French sought to 

establish.  

Despite Pysière’s demarcation of  these men’s sexual behaviour and moral 

character as deviant, it was clear from other French reports that the community’s 

                                                           
27 ‘Pour entendre si ie voulois continuer en la promesse que ie luy auois faite, lors que premierement 
I’estois descendu en ce païs: qui estoit de me monstrer amy de ses amys & ennemy de ses ennemis’. 
LAUDONNIÈRE, L’Histoire notable, 53r. 
28 ‘Le principal but de tous mes dessseins, que de les gaigner & entretenir, […] pendant que ie 
descouurois les commoditez du païs, & que ie taschois de m’y faire fort’. LAUDONNIÈRE, L’Histoire 
notable, 94r. 
29 As indicated in GILLES DE PYSIÈRE, Discours de l'enterprise et saccagement que les Forsaires de l'isle Floride 
avoient conclud de faire a leurs capitaines et gouverneurs, estans unis en liberte (Paris, Pierre de Langre, 1565). 
30 ‘Viure en la plus grande abomination & vie Epicurienne, qu’il est possible la sacuoir racompter, sans 
Dieu, sans foy, ne sans loy’. Ibid., Aiij v. 
31 ‘Estrangers,’ ‘Mores & sauuages.’  Ibid., Aiij v. 
32 ‘Il leur faisoit mal de laisser leurs putains […] pour vivure en gens de bien, & en compaignee de 
Chrestiens’, Ibid., Aiij v. 



SUSAN BROOMHALL 

 
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emotional engagements with local peoples were clearly sustained by, and generated, 

erotic and sexual elements. Indeed, scholars are increasingly recognising the 

importance of  the sexual and sensual in colonial project and its lived experiences.33 

Settlers appraised native bodies directly alongside assessments of  character. Ribault 

considered the Timucua ‘of  a goodly stature, mighty, faire and as well shapen and 

proportioned of  bodye as any people in all the worlde, very gentill, curtious and of  a 

good nature.’34 Laudonnière twice described the children of  their ally, Satouriona, 

particularly favourably: his eldest son Atore was ‘a man that I dare to call perfect in 

beauty,’ Satouriona’s sons being ‘as handsome and as powerful as can be found 

anywhere on earth’.35 The near-naked state (to colonists’ eyes) of  the Timucua was 

striking, encouraging sexualised readings of  local women and men. French colonists 

marvelled at the potential emotional and moral capacity that they saw in the local 

peoples who had chosen to contract alliances with the French. This surprise 

responded to existing views among Europeans that indigenous peoples in the 

Americas were rationally and morally inferior, but also justified the decision of  the 

French to engage with them. Ribault found resemblance between colonists’ gendered 

sensibilities and the comportment of  Timucua men and women. The latter he 

considered ‘well favored and modest and will not suffer that one approche them to 

nere’.36 Atore was not only handsome but also perfect in ‘prudence, with an honest 

countenance […] gentle and tractable’.37 One chief ’s daughters, Laudonnière 

considered, were ‘very well formed and so well taught that I was convinced that their 

mother had served as a teacher to them and taught them good manners and to 

strictly maintain their honesty.’38 This moral similitude was important in colonists’ 

representations of  the possibilities of  friendship between them. Heterosexual 

relations between the allies, notably never represented as violence achieving colonial 

domination, were not disdained. Such politically calculated alliances of  European 

men to local women were widespread colonial practices, which echoed elite political 

practices of  alliance between kingdoms in Europe. Le Moyne related how a young 

colonist, Pierre Gamble, made his own alliance with chief  Adelano, becoming ‘so 

intimate and beloved of, that the chief  gave him his daughter’ and Gamble governed 

                                                           
33 ELEANOR CONLIN CASELLA and BARBARA L. VOSS, “Intimate encounters: An Archeology of  
Sexualities within Colonial Worlds”, in The Archeology of  Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects, 
ed. by ELEANOR CONLIN CASELLA and BARBARA L. VOSS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
2012), 1–10.  
34 RIBAUT, The Whole & True Discouerye, 69. 
35 ‘Homme que j’ose dire parfaict en beauté’, ‘aussi beaux & puissants personnages, qui se puissent 
trouuer en toute la terre’, LAUDONNIERE, L’Histoire notable, 38r,  37v. Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘De 
l’amitié’ has generated interest among scholars in terms of  considerations sexual elements of  
friendship, see discussion in GARY FERGUSON, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, 
Gender and Culture (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008); and MARC D. SCHACHTER, Voluntary Servitude and the 
Erotics of  Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France (London: Ashgate, 2008) 
36 RIBAUT, Whole & True Discouerye, 69-70. 
37 ‘Prudence, & contenance honneste […] doux & traictable’. LAUDONNIÈRE, L’Histoire notable, 38r. 
38 ‘Si bien formees & si bien aprises, que ie me persuadé aisément que la mere leur auoit seruy de 
maistresse, & leur auoit enseigné la maniere de bien & estroictement garder l’honnesteté’. Ibid., 42v.  



PERFORMANCES OF ENTANGLED EMOTIONS AND BELIEFS 

 
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in his absence.39 Sexual, emotional and reproductive transactions, voluntary for some, 

violent for others, were fundamental to such treaties among settlers and local 

Timucua. 

Spanish contemporaries demonstrated deep concerns about the nature of  

relationships between French and Timucua in Florida. A number of  men at the tiny 

Charlesfort settlement had lost faith in the return of  their French compatriots and by 

1562, had determined to flee to Havana. There, they were captured and interrogated 

by the Spanish. One mutineer, Stefano de Rojomonte, was questioned ‘as to whether 

they had friendship, [and] were friends with the Indians’.40 Rojomonte’s response 

reflected the initial good relations between the groups:  

they had great friendship with them and the Indians had always brought them fish 

and many fruits of  the soil and they had safely entered and left their villages and 

homes, and that they had likewise come to the camp of  the said French.41  

Spanish reports concerning mutineers from the French settlement increased 

the anxieties of  Philip II of  Spain to curtail French influence on the Florida 

peninsula, which he perceived as a threat to his maritime routes and a contravention 

to the Spanish claims to the region from the 1513 explorations of  Juan Ponce de 

Léon. In 1564, Philip ordered the governor of  Cuba, Diego de Mazariegos, to 

destroy physical markers of  the French claim. Mazariegos charged Hernando 

Manrique de Rojas with the task. He located one with the assistance of  Guillaume 

Rouffi, a seventeen-year-old French settler. Rouffi had himself  been abandoned by 

the mutineers of  Charlesfort, surviving only by being supported in a local Timucua 

community for two years.42 In March 1565, Philip also equipped experienced naval 

official, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Captain General of  the Spanish Fleet of  the 

Indies, and provided him the capitulacion y asiento to capture the French forts, and to 

defend himself  and the Spanish position on the coast so that local peoples could 

more easily be brought to the Catholic faith.43 

Menéndez pursued Philip’s orders vigorously but advised of  the difficulties 

caused by French-Timucua emotional alliances. Indeed, it was the perceived 

transformative emotional bonds between them that encouraged the violence of  the 

Spanish response. Menéndez warned Philip of  ‘the friendship formed by them with 

the natives who would help them so that even if  with great difficulty, cost and 

                                                           
39 ‘Tantam cum illo familiaritatem contraxit, ut ipsi fieret carissimus, atque adeò filiã illi donaret,’ LE 
MOYNE, Brevis narratio, secunda pars, 15. 
40 Laudonnière & Fort Caroline: History and Documents (1964), ed. by CHARLES E. BENNETT (Tuscaloosa: 
University of  Alabama Press, 2001), 95. 
41 Ibid., 95. 
42 RIBAUT, Whole & True Discouerye, 109-110. See also LUCY L. MANHOLD, “Manrique de Rojas’ Report 
on the French Settlement in Florida, 1564,” Florida Historical Quarterly 38, 1 (1959): 58. 
43 20 March 1565, reproduced in La Florida: Su conquista y colonizacíon por Pedro Menénedez de Avilés; 
Apéndices, 2, ed. by EUGENIO RUIDÍAZ Y CARAVIA (Madrid: Hijos de J.A. Garcia, 1893), 415-27. 



SUSAN BROOMHALL 

 
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expense we could take it, the Indians would remain our enemies.’44 He recommended 

therefore that Philip give the French ‘no place, and take over these coast and land so 

that they can more easily be wiped out’.45 In Menéndez’s mind, Protestants and the 

local people together formed a malignant community: 

if  other nations should go on settling and making friends with the Indians of  the 

land, it would be very difficult to gain it, especially if  the French and English settle 

there, Lutheran people, who, because the Indians and they are just about of  one law, 

maintain friendship easily with each other.46 

Menéndez willingly interpreted the French settlement as a ‘Lutheran’ colony, 

allowing him to emphasise the dangers of  a Protestant-Timucua sociability that 

justified the force of  his own actions in Florida. 

Despite Menéndez’s fears, not all local peoples were predisposed to a 

supportive relationship with the French colonists at Fort Caroline. Some assisted the 

Spanish to establish a fortified base, St Augustine, and to locate the French 

settlements. By their calculated supported to alternative European agents, local 

peoples helped to seed further disunity among Christian colonisers and thus to avoid 

a rapid, joint European domination of  the region. On 20 September, Menéndez 

began an assault that would obliterate the French positions on the peninsula, killing 

most adult men including the recently-returned Jean Ribault, and capturing some 50 

women and children who were taken to Puerto Rico to be integrated in new social 

and sexual relationships there. A few survivors escaped into the hinterland and a 

small contingent, including Laudonnière and Le Moyne, limped back to Europe to 

bear witness to the massacre. Menéndez himself  described to his king how he had 

told the settlers who had agreed to surrender and be hand-cuffed, that they were to 

be killed because he ‘had a war of  fire and blood, as Governor and Captain General 

of  these provinces, against all who had come to settle and plant the evil Lutheran 

sect in Your Majesty’s lands’.47 A French eyewitness reported that Ribault’s body had 

been quartered and placed at the four corners of  the fort.48 French (‘Lutheran’) 

                                                           
44 ‘Por la amistad que tendrán tomado con los naturales, por que los mesmos naturales les ayudarán de 
manera que con grandísima dificultad, aunque hagan grandes costas y gastos, se podrían hechar; de 
mas que aunque los hechasen, los mismos yndios quedarian por nuestros enemigos’. Ibid., 322. 
45 ‘Para no darles lugar que se apoderen de aquella costa é tierra, para que con mas facilidad sean 
hechados de allí’, in Memorial de Pero Menéndez de Aviles in Ibid., 320. 
46 ‘Si van algunas otras Naciones á poblarla, tomando como tomarán amistad con los yndios de la 
tierra, será después dificultosísimo de ganarla y señorearla, en especial si la pueblan los franceses ó 
yngleses, gente luterana, que por ser los yndios y ellos casi de una ley, como tengo dicho, tendrán con 
gran facilidad amystad los unos con los otros’. Ibid., 324. 
47 ‘Porque senbravan la secta luterana en estas provincias de V. M., é que yo tenia guerra á fuego y á 
sangre, como Governador y Capitán General deslas provincias, contra todos los que destas partes 
viniesen á poblar y plantar la mala secta luterana’, Letter from Menéndez de Avilés to Philip II of  
Spain, 15 October 1565, in La Florida, 2, 89.  
48 Huguenot carpenter and lay preacher, Nicolas Le Challeux, citing the report of  Christofle le Breton, 
in his Deuxième voyage du Dieppois Jean Ribaut à la Floride en 1565, ed. by Gabriel Gravier (Rouen: Henry 
Boissel, 1872), 46. 



PERFORMANCES OF ENTANGLED EMOTIONS AND BELIEFS 

 
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attempts at emotional and spiritual transformation of  the Florida peninsula were 

represented with horror in Menéndez’s narrative of  his own emotional and violent 

response. 

 

Now it was Menéndez’s chance to build relations with local people, although 

he warned Philip that the transformations wrought by French emotional and belief  

performances would take years to undo.  

These French held many Indians for friends, who have shown much feeling for their 

loss, especially for two or three teachers of  their evil sect which they taught to the 

caciques and Indians, who followed after them like the Apostles after our Lord. It is a 

thing of  admiration to see how these Lutherans enchanted the poor savage people. I 

shall seek all possible means to win over these Indians who were such friends of  the 

French.49 

In Menéndez’s view, Timucua and ‘Lutherans’ were, it seems, natural allies in 

their shared wickedness. However, it was precisely through these close relationships 

that he was able to build local and linguistic knowledge to build the new settlement, 

relying on former French colonist Rouffi as a mediator with local peoples.50  

However, colonial rule would, with time, require Menéndez and his Spanish 

crews to accept their own moral transformation at the peninsula, one that would 

enable the Spanish leader to be incorporated into local Florida politics. Interestingly, 

much as the French had judged local peoples, the Spanish found much to appreciate 

about the local Calusa peoples who assisted them. Solís de Merás described their 

leader, Carlos, as ‘very much of  a gentleman’ and a Spanish captive later considered 

him ‘the handsomest and largest of  all that region, and an energetic and powerful 

leader’.51 Signs of  friendship and assistance by the Calusa emotionally predisposed 

Spanish observers to positive and sympathetic assessments of  native people, but 

these were often proferred with a note of  surprise being framed by European 

assumptions about indigenous moral and emotional inferiority. Both these elements 

were reflected in the earlier account of  explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who 

had been shipwrecked in the Florida region in 1527, observed an reciprocal empathetic response 

                                                           
49 ‘Estos franceses tenian muchos yndios por amigos, y an mostrado mucho sentimiento por su 
perdición, en especial por dos ó tres maestres de su mala secta que enseñavan á los caciques é yndios y 
se andavan tras ellos como los apóstoles tras Nuestro Señor; que es cosa de admiración ver como estos 
luteranos travan encantada a esta pobre gente salvage. Yo procuraré lo posible de ganar la v duntad á 
estos yndios que eran amigos destos franceses’. Letter from Menéndez de Avilés to Philip II of  Spain, 
15 October 1565, in La Florida, 2, 87. 
50 ‘Guillermo’, Menéndez’s interpreter with local peoples, whose role is documented in the Memorial 
del Dr. Gonzalo Solís de Merás’s account in La Florida, 1, ed. by RUIDÍAZ Y CARAVIA (Madrid: Hijos 
de J.A. Garcia, 1893) 
51 STEPHEN EDWARD REILLY, “Marriage of  Expedience: The Calusa Indians and Their Relations with 
Pedro Menéndez de Aviles in Southwest Florida, 1566-1569”, Florida Historical Quarterly 59, 4 (1981), 
402–3.  



SUSAN BROOMHALL 

 
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with the local peoples who assisted him for eight years before he made contact with Spaniards in the 

north of  today’s Mexico:  

The Indians, understanding our full plight, sat down and lamented for half  an hour 

so loudly they could have been heard a long way off. It was amazing to see these wild, 

untaught savages howling like brutes in compassion for us. It intensified my own grief  

at our calamity and had the same effect on the other victims.52 

Cabeza de Vaca’s account is suggestive of  Hämäläinen’s argument that a 

‘shared sense of  weakness, combined with an acute sense of  vulnerability from 

without, renders people more willing to embrace others across seemingly 

insurmountable cultural divides’.53 Individual objectives inevitably shaped many of  

these Spanish accounts, just as they did those of  the French. The Catholic Priest 

Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had left the Americas in the late 1540s, disdaining the 

violence of  Spanish colonial activities, offered in his A Brief  Account of  the Destruction 

of  the Indies (published in Seville in 1552) a sympathetic reading of  the emotional 

disposition of  indigenous people as ‘naturally so gentle, so peace-loving, so humble 

and so docile’.54 As such, they deserved, he argued, the kindness of  the Christian 

message. In practice, the Spanish appeared as susceptible to local charms and 

engaging in sociable relations as had the French ‘Lutherans’. 

Further events also suggested the willingness of  leading Spanish agents to 

overlook Catholic rites and moral practice temporarily, flexibly applying their 

religious beliefs where it served national colonial ambitions. By 1566, the Calusa 

leader, Carlos, sought to embed Menéndez further in kinship ties. As chronicler 

Gonzalo Solís de Merás reported, Carlos sought Menéndez ‘as his older brother, … 

he wanted to give him for a wife an older sister whom he loved.55 In doing so, Solís 

de Merás claimed, Carlos hoped that Menéndez ‘might take her to the land of  

Christians, and that when she returned, if  he sent her back, he would go likewise and 

become a Christian, with all his Indians, which seemed better than being an Indian.’56 

                                                           
52 ÁLVAR NÚÑEZ CABEZA DE VACA, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of  America [1542], trans. by 
CYCLONE COVEY (1961) (Alburquerque: University of  New Mexico Press, 1983), chapter 19, accessed 
online http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/cdv/rel.htm 
53 HÄMÄLÄINEN, The Shapes of  Power, 62. 
54 BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS, A Short Account of  the Destruction of  the Indies, trans. by Nigel Griffin 
(London: Penguin, 1992), 6. 
55 ‘Le dixo que le quería tomar por su hermano mayor, […] que le quería dar por mujer une hermana 
que tenía, mayor que él, á quien quería mucho’, La Florida, 156. See also EUGENE LYON, The Enterprise 
of  Florida: Pedro Menéndez de Avilas and Spanish Conquest of  1565-1568 (Gainesville, 1976), REILLY, 
Marriage of  Expedience, 395-421; and more broadly, DAVID J. WEBER, “Foundations of  Empire: Florida 
and New Mexico”, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); 
JOSÉ RABASA, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier : The Historiography of  Sixteenth-Century New Mexico 
and Florida and the Legacy of  Conquest (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); ROBERT C. GALGANO, 
Feast of  Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-century Missions of  Florida and New Mexico 
(Albuquerque: University of  New Mexico Press, 2005) 
56 ‘Para que la llevase á tierra de cristianos y se la volviese á inviar, que cuando volviese, él iría también 
y se haría cristiano, con todos sus indios, que le parecía que era meor que no ser indio’, La Florida, 1, 
156–7. 



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Carlos’ rhetorical submission, and carefully calculated, apparent willingness to 

undergo social transformation to Spanish religious and cultural beliefs represented a 

considerable challenge to Menéndez, not merely because he was already married. 

Solís de Merás’s account of  Menéndez’s bigamous marriage framed his leader’s 

actions as a complicated acceptance of  a delicate diplomatic situation into which he 

had been tricked by Carlos. This interpretation reinforced longheld European views 

about the untrustworthiness of  indigenous peoples while conveniently excusing 

Menéndez’s crime. After a lavish ceremony in which Menéndez was feted as guest of  

honour, Carlos had announced Menéndez was to take his new wife back to the ships. 

When Menéndez stalled for time, declaring he could not have a non-Christian wife, 

the ‘cacique replied that he and his sister, and he and his people, were [Christians], 

having taken him [Menéndez] as his elder brother.’57 Indigenous assertions about 

Christian spiritual beliefs were a powerful complicating factor to these negotiations. 

Back at the ship, Solís de Meris emphasised Menéndez’s torment about his own 

spiritual beliefs but argued that he was eventually persuaded by his men that ‘they 

should baptize and give her a name; and the Adelantado sleep with her, because this 

would be a great beginning to trusting him and other Christians.’58 Through his body 

and that of  ‘Doña Antonia’, Menéndez had thus secured a key intimate and social 

relationship that firmed up a political alliance with the Calusa. However, the 

depiction of  this strategic engagement had to be carefully constructed in Spanish 

memoirs as an emotional performance of  surprise, angst and finally sacrifice.  

Emotional performances in these encounters were in each case calculated 

transactions by all parties, intended to serve the objectives of  those concerned as 

well as disrupt those of  others. They were highly dynamic practices that commonly 

led to transformations of  both European and local peoples in the eyes of  others. 

The French described Timucua facial expressions, corporal gestures and repetition 

of  social acts of  gift-acceptance, support, and introductions to other local networks 

of  sociability that engendered trust, that the French interpreted as demonstrating 

positive emotions and desire for friendship, just as did the Spanish of  the Calusa. 

These political transactions included vital emotional and corporeal components 

expressed through heterosexual cross-cultural practices. Some authors, notably 

Laudonnière, celebrated the powers of  persuasion and influence of  their own 

emotional labour in forming personal relationships that were vital for the fledgling 

settlement, and held significant consequences for European kingdoms. These texts, 

in which were revealed forms of  indigenous strategic action and individuals as 

powerful emotional interlocutors, were produced in French and Spanish sources for 

European readers, seemingly constructing an emotional satisfying narrative of  the 

challenges and success of  French crews or demonstrating the role of  local peoples as 

                                                           
57 ‘El cacique le respondío que ya su hermana y él y su gente lo eran, pues le había tomado por 
hermano mayor’, La Florida, 1, 164.  
58 ‘La bautizasen é pusiesen nombre, é que el Adelantado durmiese con ella, porque sería este gran 
prencipio para que se confiasen dél é de los demás cristianos’. La Florida, 1, 165.  



SUSAN BROOMHALL 

 
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active agents who contributed to Spanish dominion in their region.  

Moreover, it was not only indigenous peoples who were culturally transformed 

by these interactions on the Florida peninsula; in the eyes of  Spanish and French 

witnesses, it was also each other. While Europeans saw indigenous acculturation to 

European faith and cultural beliefs as beneficial (both to themselves and locals), 

European transformations at the peninsula held a more ambiguous charge. 

Significantly, although the French saw limits to the similitude of  beliefs they 

perceived to share with local peoples, as they made their accounts afterwards, 

Spanish observers did not agree. The latter perceived a dangerous resemblance of  

beliefs and values between the ‘Lutherans’ and indigenous peoples who were both, to 

Spanish Catholic onlookers, excluded from their notion of  the Christian community 

and thus, ‘Other’. European transformations of  themselves and others justified an 

intensely emotional, violent, response. By contrast, the evident transformations that 

they too underwent as a result of  their emotional interactions with the Calusa, 

entailing spiritual compromises and moral ambiguities, were represented for 

European audiences as sacrifices for the benefit of  Spain. 

 

Disruptive emotions and diplomatic translations 

Emotional performances about French and Spanish colonising activities in 

Florida were not just produced on the peninsula but also practised as complex 

emotional labour in Europe.59 All we know of  European and indigenous behaviours 

and expressions in Florida is narrated in visual and textual sources in printed and 

manuscript letters, reports, and memoirs circulated in Europe, that were themselves 

participating in emotional performances for readers and viewers about these events. 

Additional to those documents studied above were multiple texts by ambassadors, 

courtly officials and rulers embedded in challenging cross-cultural ceremonial gift, 

epistolary and bodily exchanges, ceremonial displays and representational interviews 

about transactions on the Florida peninsula. These were likewise emotional practices 

that were negotiated across faiths, cultural beliefs and nation states with different 

colonial objectives. Bertrand Haan has argued that the Franco-Spanish friendship of  

this period between princes was a social and political contract founded on mutual 

aid.60 Denis Crouzet and others have also demonstrated how a complex enactment 

of  evolving sociabilities among factions at a time of  dispute during the 1560s and 

                                                           
59 Discussion of  the political import of  the diplomatic interactions can be found in 
JEAN-MICHEL RIBERA, “Un conflit revelateur: l’affaire de la Floride”, in Diplomatie et espionnage: les 
ambassadeurs du roi de France auprès de Philippe II: du Traité du Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) à la mort de Henri III 
(1589) (Paris, Honoré Champion, 2007) and more broadly, VALENTÍN VÁSQUEZ DE PRADA, Felipe II y 
Francia (1559-1598): Polítca, Religión y Razón de Estado (Pamploma, Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 
2004). 
60 BERTAND HAAN, L’amitié entre princes: Une alliance franco-espagnole au temps des guerres de Religion (1560-
1570) (Paris, Presses univesitaire de France, 2011), 1. 



PERFORMANCES OF ENTANGLED EMOTIONS AND BELIEFS 

 
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1570s in France entailed multiple emotional performances.61 These articulated 

religious, racial and cultural beliefs for their protagonists, as the identity of  the rulers 

and the kingdoms that they led slowly transformed as a result of  their Florida 

encounters. This section explores how different emotional practices maintained 

official diplomatic channels, offered alternative interpretations that could not be 

voiced formally, and provided a mechanism to alleviate frustrations and give space 

for disruptive emotions. 

Expressions of  shock and surprise constituted key elements of  the emotional 

performance of  the Spanish king in response to France’s initial actions on the Florida 

peninsula. In April 1565, the French ambassador at the Spanish court, Jean Ébrard, 

seigneur de Saint-Sulpice, warned Charles IX that Philip intended to send Menéndez 

with a fighting force to the French settlements in Florida.62 Philip too sent a series of  

letters to his ambassador at the French court, Francesco Beaumont y Alavá, designed 

to warn Charles IX and his mother Catherine de Medici. Philip expressed his 

amazement that ships sponsored by the French political leadership would encroach 

known ‘Spanish territories’ in Florida.63 Thus, he instructed Alavá to convey to 

Catherine in June 1565:  

that I have marveled as is reason at news so foreign to the friendship between me and 

the Christian King, her son, [...] having understood, as is said, that they have primed 

the said seven ships to go to Florida by the commandment of  the Admiral and the 

Christian Queen.64 

Philip invoked his territorial rights but also articulated surprise that a friend, 

Charles, could do such a thing to him, although he displaced the specific 

responsibility for the order to Huguenot Admiral Coligny and Catherine. A clear 

concern voiced by the Spanish was the strongly Huguenot composition of  the new 

settlement. Philip left the Duke of  Alba to inform more forcefully Raimond Beccarie 

de Pavie, seigneur de Fourquevaux, the new French ambassador at the Spanish court, 

that the French settlement was both ‘an usurpation’ and that Spain knew that ‘they 

sent ministers with their wives and children.’65 Philip subsequently framed the settlers 

not as French subjects but as ‘pirates and disturbers of  the public peace,’ insisted that 

                                                           
61 DENIS CROUZET, “«A strong desire to be a mother to all your subjects»: A Rhetorical Experiment 
by Catherine de Medici”, Journal of  Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, 1 (2008), 103–118; SUSAN 
BROOMHALL, “Ordering Distant Affections”, in Gender and Emotions, ed. by SUSAN BROOMHALL. 
62 St Sulpice to Charles IX, 3 April 1565, Correspondance de Jean Ebrard, seigneur de Saint-Sulpice, de 1562 à 
1565, ed. by EDMOND CABIÉ (Paris: A. Picard, 1903), 364. 
63 Philip II to Alavá, 2 June 1565, Negociaciones con Francia, 7 (Madrid: Editorial Maestre, 1953), 372. 
64 ‘De que me he maravillado tanto como es razón de una novedad tan agena de amistad que ay entre 
mí y et Rey Christianísmo, su hijo,  [...] habiendo entendido, come está dicho, que se han aprestado los 
dichos siete navíos para ir a la Florida por mandamiento des Almirante y comisión y orden de la dicha 
Reina Christianísima’. Ibid., 372-3. 
65 ‘Usurpation’, ‘l’on y a envoyé des ministres avc leurs femme et enfans’, Fourquevaux to Charles, 24 
December 1565, Dépêches de M. de Fourquevaux, ambassadeur du roi Charles IX en Espagne, 1568-1572, 1, ed. 
by CÉLESTIN DOUAIS (Paris, Ernest Leroux, 1896), 17. 



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any colony was not in keeping with the ‘brotherhood’ that he had with Charles nor 

the ‘clarity and sincerity with which he had proceeded,’ but closed his missive by 

assuring Charles of  his ‘love, accordance and brotherhood.’66  

Equally Charles emphasised the relationship he enjoyed with Philip as a 

familial one, terming the king ‘my brother’.67 Insisting on an intimate relation 

between them, he rejected Philip’s assessment of  the specific lands on which the 

French settlements were established as Spanish claims, demanded French rights to 

free navigation in the region, and clearly confirmed those who had established the 

colonies as his subjects acting in French interests:  

to suggest that they have concerns for their vessels returning from there, between friends 

this concern does not exist; my actions and those of  my subjects are so sincere that not 

only the Catholic King but any friend I have will find the same assurance that he 

would have asked of  his own subjects.68 

Charles identified Philip as an especially close friend, which assumed a set of  

honest behaviours with each other. Nonetheless, his emotional evocations were 

coupled with allusions to the more legalistic and political framework of  the peace 

treaties that existed between Spain and France, including 1559 Treaty of  Cateau-

Cambrésis. This treaty had been sealed with the intimate bodily and emotional 

transaction of  marriage between Philip II and Charles’ sister, Elisabeth, just as were 

French and Spanish alliances with the Timucua and Calusa, and, it was hoped, would 

be sustained through their reproductive labour. Such references, however, somewhat 

diluted the emotional force of  Charles’ reponses as acts of  empathetic reciprocity.  

 

When news broke of  the intra-European violence on the peninsula, in 

expectation of  a strong response from France, Philip sought to provide a rationale 

that could perhaps allow Charles and Catherine to save face, but only if  they 

acquiesced to his political agenda and beliefs. He directed Alavá to indicate that he 

assured himself  that in no way did he imagine that the site had been occupied by 

order of  Charles and Catherine ‘but rather that they would be displeased, as is reason 

                                                           
66 ‘Pyratas fractorez y perturbantores de la pas publica’, ‘pensava no tratar mas dello pero que la 
hermandad que tienne con el Roy Chrismo y la claridad y sinceridad con que a de proceder con el’, ‘el 
amor conformiadad y hermandad’. Plainte de l’ambassadeur du Roy catholique presentée au Roy Très Chrestien 
sur le faict de la Floride, Douais (ed.), “Lettres de Charles IX à M. de Fourquevaux, ambassadeur du roi 
Charles IX en Espagne, 1568-1572,”  Mémoires de l'Académie des sciences et lettres de Montpellier; Section des 
lettres, 2e série, vol. 2 (1897), 3. 
67 ‘Mon Frere’, Charles to Fourquevaux, 28 November 1565. Ibid., 1. 
68 ‘D’alleguer l’umbre qu’ilz peuvent avoir pour leurs vaisseaulx qui retourneront de plus avant, entre 
amys ceste consideration là n’a poinct de lieu; d’autant que je veulx et entendz que les actions et 
depportemens de moy et de mes subgectz soyent si sinceres, que, non pas le Roy Catholiques 
seullement, maiz le moindre amy que je puisse avoir y trouve la mesme seuretté qu’il scauroit 
demander de ses propres subgectz’, Charles to Fourquevaux, 28 November 1565. Ibid., 1-2. 



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and what is due to our brotherhood’.69 Philip focussed ever more closely on the 

contentious Protestant dimensions of  the Florida settlement, insisting upon the 

threat of  rebellion of  a settlement he described as comprised of  ‘Lutherans of  

diverse nations, as much French as others’, whose presence there ‘might give rise to 

even the Indians to rebel, and take the heart of  any Spaniard over there.’70 Echoing 

Menéndez, Philip conceptualised a dangerous faith endeavour on the peninsula that 

would engender a local emotional response threatening to his nation’s interest. The 

king then targetted Coligny ‘as a disturber of  the peace and cause of  the disorder 

that had ensued’ for sponsoring the mission and insisted that Charles punish him 

accordingly.71 Fourquevaux’s assessment to Catherine of  his interviews with the king 

and the Duke of  Alba concluded that the Spanish strategy would be ‘to attack the 

Admiral to cover and disguise the wrong that they have done in killing your 

subjects.’72 This conceptualisation of  a Catholic brotherhood that excluded Charles’ 

Huguenot subjects such as Coligny was unacceptable to Charles and to a religiously-

fractured France in which Huguenots formed a sigificant force in the elite French 

political and social community. Indeed, as Fourquevaux warned, for France’s 

Huguenots, Philip’s orders would be ‘the best news that they could see, for instead of  

Your Majesties being fortified in your friendship and alliance to value, help and assist 

each other in your great affairs, your subjects were instead murdered and chased 

away.’73 Philip’s purposeful emotional performance of  a delighted shared spiritual 

union across their kingdoms undermined the fragile balancing of  religious practices 

within France. 

Friendship was a conveniently capacious concept for political engagement, as 

scholars have noted.74 French evocations of  the idea demanded that Philip consider 

his duties to uphold, rather than undermine, the authority of  a brother and sovereign 

of  an independent nation. Menéndez’s actions that had been undertaken in the name 

of  both Spanish and Catholic interests proved immensely complicated for Charles 

and his mother, Catherine, who may have shared Philip’s faith but neither his 

hardline approach to extermination of  Protestants nor his colonial interests. Their 

pursuit of  justice for the victims of  the Florida massacre emphasised Charles’ 

                                                           
69 ‘Sino que antes les habrá desplacido dello, come es razón y lo deben a nuestra hermandad’, Philip to 
Alavá, 23 February 1566, Negociaciones con Francia, 8 (Madrid: Editorial Maestre, 1954), 248. 
70 ‘Luteriens de diverses nations, tant François que autres’, ‘il donneroit occasion aux mesmes Indiens 
de rebeller, et osteroit le cueur à ses Espaignolz d’y habiter’, Fourquevaux to Catherine, 9 April 1566, 
Dépêches, 1, 72. 
71 ‘Comme perturbateur de la paix et cause du desordre adven’. Fourquevaux to Charles, 22 February 
1566. Ibid., 60. 
72 ‘S’atacquer contre Monsieur l’Admiral pour couvrire et desguizer le tort qu’ilz vous ont faict de tuer 
voz subjectz’. Fourquevaux to Catherine, 23 February 1566. Ibid., 63. 
73 ‘La meilleure nouvelle qu’ilz peussent entendre de veoir que du cousté et endroit d’où Voz Majestez 
pençoient s’estre fortiffiez d’amytié et alliance pour vous en valoir et estre secorez et assistez en tous 
grandz afferes, ce fut de là que voz subjectz estoient meurtriz, deboutiz et chassez’. Fourquevaux to 
Catherine, 9 April 1566. Ibid., 71. 
74 See note 8 above. 



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obligations to protect his subjects and the cruelty with which they had been 

murdered by representatives of  an ally nation. In a memoir composed in May 1566, 

Charles considered that  

they make quite clear the little will they have that justice be done to the authors of  

such a barbarous and inhumane act; nevertheless, considering how such an 

intervention carries to his greatness and reputation, His Majesty has chosen the means 

most appropriate to their friendship, which is to remonstrate on the wrong that was 

done to him and to beg him to maintain the same respect that he would desire to be 

used by His Majesty.75 

Despite the slim prospect of  a satisfactory Spanish response, Charles insisted 

that Fourquevaux continue to pursue the matter, hoping that Philip ‘would love 

better to please such a great King, an ally so close and a friend so useful, in doing 

him justice than to upset him in pardonning brigands’.76 What was at stake was not 

only the two monarchs’ continued personal relationship but also political support as 

sovereign leaders: 

this cruel murder which cannot be excused or concealed between friends by the Catholic 

King without showing what little esteem that he holds for the friendship and kindness 

of  so great a King, from whom he can receive such good, convenience and advantage 

for the maintenance of  his grandeur than any other friend whatsoever that he could 

have.77 

Charles reformulated the relationship as not only family and allies but also as 

monarchs who formed a unique and exclusive community of  men in commanding 

positions of  rule who ought to share, and practise with each other, values of  

authority that served to maintain their mutual status and power. During these 

epistolary negotiations between French and Spanish rules regarding colonial 

ambitious, the capacious and ambiguous concepts of  brotherhood and community 

maintained lines of  communication through a carefully considered dialogue of  

emotional performance, sustaining a productive relationship necessary for their 

protagonists’ political status and future actions.  

                                                           
75 ‘Il ayt assez congneu avec combien de raisons colorées ilz veullent justiffier leur execution, par où ilz 
demonstrent assez le peu de volunté qu’ilz ont que justice soit faicte des autheurs et executeurs d’ung 
acte si barbare et inhumain; ce neantmoins, considerant combien une telle entreprinse importe à sa 
grandeur et reputation, Sa Majesté a choisy le moyen plus convenable à leur amityé, qui est de luy 
remonstrer le tort qui luy est faict et le prier luy garder le mesme respect qu’il desire luy estre usé par 
Sa Majesté et que jusques icy luy a esté usé en tout ce qui La touche’, Charles IX. Memoire, 12 May 
1566, “Lettres de Charles IX,” 23. 
76 ‘Aymera myeulx contenter ung si grant Roy, son si proche allyé et si utille amy, en faisant justice, que 
le mal contenter en pardonnant à des brigands, de qui la vye ne luy peult apporter aucun bien à 
l’advantaige de ses affaires’. Ibid., 24. 
77 ‘Ce cruel meurtre, qui ne peult estre entre amys excusé ny passé soubz dissimulation par le Roy 
Catholicque sans monstrer que il faict peu d’estime de l’amityé et bienveuillance d’ung si grant Roy, de 
laquelle il peult plus recevoir de bien, commodité et advantaige pour le maintient de sa grandeur que 
d’aultre amy quelconque qu’il scauroit avoir’. Ibid., 23. 



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However, just had occurred on the Florida peninsula, assessing other 

emotional performances and gestural display of  parties in audiences and interviews 

as insights to political meaning were vital for ambassadors and their readers.78 When 

French amabssador Fourquevaux reported to Catherine in February 1566 the certain 

news of  the violence that had transpired in Florida, he emphasised the mood of  the 

Spanish court, ‘rejoicing more than if  it had been a victory over the Turk: also they 

say that Florida is more important to them than Malta.’79 Catherine de Medici  

conveyed to Fourquevaux both Alavá’s warning about Philip’s impassioned 

sentiments and her assessment of  Alavá’s own emotionally-charged response: ‘the 

Ambassador, showing himself  little satisfied by all these reasons […] began to tell me 

that his master could not tolerate these ways of  acting without being affected by it; I 

took these words as a threat’.80 Catherine’s analysis highlights the importance of  

emotional display by ambassadors as well as rulers for both political insight and 

content. At the Spanish court, her daughter, Elisabeth, similarly offered an important 

and intimate assessment of  Philip’s perceived intensity of  feelings regarding the 

matter.81 She reported to Fourquevaux her concerns for the French in the region, 

warning that ‘nothing is more certain than that the King takes to heart the matter of  

Florida, to employ there all the force he can so as to chase away the French’.82 The 

queen, herself  the subject of  bodily transaction for a political cause, occupied a vital 

emotional and corporeal role as a mediator between French and Spanish interests. 

Likewise, Alavá detailed the affective outbursts and reactions of  Catherine in a 

number of  meetings after the news of  the Florida massacre had been relayed to 

France. Demonstrations of  anger were particularly complex, for within 

contemporary society, visible displays of  violent passion had gendered 

interpretations and power dimensions. Expressions of  anger were conventionally 

permitted by those in positions of  superiority, such as rulers, over subordinates such 

                                                           
78 See BROOMHALL, “Catherine’s tears,” and “Performing Diplomacy”. On the diplomatic labour of  
the interview environment in a broad historical context, see Paroles de négociateurs. L’entretien dans la 
pratique diplomatique de la fin du Moyen Âge à la fin du XIXe siècle, ed. by STEFANO ANDRETTA et al. (Rome: 
École française de Rome, 2010) 
79 ‘Ceste court s’en est plus resjouye que si ce fut pour une victoire obtenue contre le Turc. Car aussi 
ont ilz dict et dient que la Floride leur importe trop plus que Malte’. Fourquevaux to Charles, 18 
February 1566, Dépêches, 1, 56.  
80 ‘L’ambassadeur se monstrant estre peu satisfaict de toutes ces raisons, […] est entré à me dire que 
son maistre ne pouvoit tollérer telles façons de faire sans s’en ressentir, avec quelques paroles que j’ai 
prises pour menaces’. Catherine to Fourquevaux, 20 January 1566, Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, 2, ed. 
by H. DE LA FERRIÈRE  (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1885), 342. 
81 On the shifting familial and political negotiations between Catherine de Medici and her daughter, 
Elisabeth de Valois, see BROOMHALL, “«My daughter, my dear»: The correspondence of  Catherine de 
Medici and Elisabeth de Valois”, Women's History Review 25, 4 (2015), 548-69; and HAAN, L’amitié entre 
princes, 35–54.  
82 ‘Nestre rien plus certain que le Roy Catholique prend à cueur le faict de la Floride, pour y employer 
ce qu’il pourra de ses forces pour en dechasser les François qui s’en sont emparez’, Fourquevaux to 
Catherine, 3 November 1565, Dépêches, 1, 9–10. 



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as ambassadors.83 However, as Tilman Haug has argued, provoking strong emotions 

such as anger in others could offer diplomats valuable insights.84 What were 

perceived to be uncontrolled emotional displays by a woman, even a powerful one, 

and subordinates were interpreted by the Spanish as evidence of  French weakness of  

character, which offered them a power in diplomatic negotiation.85 Alavá provided 

descriptions in cipher of  Catherine shaking her head as she heard his explanation for 

events.86 Describing for Philip their encounter in March 1566, as Alavá began to 

broach the matter of  Florida, he wrote:  

Before I even spoke a word, the Queen jumped up and became like a lioness, while 

turning her face to Montmorency and the Bishop of  Valencia and many others who 

were there, and saying in a loud, clear voice that could easily be heard: Have the 

Turks or Moors ever done such cruelties as they Spanish have to the subjects of  my 

child?87  

Alavá was not prepared to accept these insults, he reported to Philip, and 

retorted equally dramatically, ‘raising my voice somewhat, that she would hear how 

[…] their punishment was very well deserved’.88 Alavá’s account contrasted what he 

saw as his controlled defence with Catherine’s emotional weakness and poorly-

managed anger: ‘Her eyes were filled with tears of  rage, and she trembed with 

agitation’.89 Indeed, Catherine was ‘like a rabid person, unable to speak’, only capable 

of  asides to her ministers.90 Alavá considered that these affective responses had a 

strategic value for him, for ‘when she is taken by surprise, her embarrassment is 

great, and we learn more of  their mind.’91 Similarly, Philip reported to Alavá on an 

audience the Duke of  Alba had given to Fourquevaux in April in which he had 

                                                           
83 On gendered aspects of  anger in the early modern period, see GWYNNE KENNEDY, Just Anger: 
Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 
2000); on anger in early modern letters by leading men, see SUSAN BROOMHALL and JACQUELINE VAN 
GENT, “Corresponding Affections: Emotional Exchange among Siblings in the Nassau Family”, 
Journal of  Family History 34, 2 (2009): 143–65; Governing Masculinites in the Early Modern Period: Regulating 
Selves and Others, ed. by SUSAN BROOMHALL and JACQUELINE VAN GENT (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 
84 TILMAN HAUG, “Negotiating with «Spirits of  Brimstone and Saltpetre»: Seventeenth Century 
French Political Officials and Their Practices and Representations of  Anger”,  in Discourses of  Anger in 
the Early Modern Period, ed. by KARL A.E. ENENKEL and ANITA TRANINGER (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 381–
402.  
85 See also ambassadorial interpretations of  Catherine’s tears, in Broomhall, ‘Catherine’s tears”. 
86 Alavá to Philip. 19 January 1566, Negociaciones, 8, 202.  
87 ‘Y como digo a Vuestra Majestad, en commensando a proponer, saltó esta Reina, sin dexarme hablar 
palabra, hecha una leona, diciendo a voz alta y volviendo el rostro a Momoransi y al Obispo de 
Valencia y otros muchos que estaban allí, con curiosidad clara para que lo entendiesen: Hase hecho 
entre turcos ni entre moros tan grand crueldad como han hecho españoles en los súbditos de mi hijo?’ 
Alavá to Philip. 16 March 1566, Ibid., 262. 
88 ‘Respondí, alzando algo la voz, que oyese cómo […] el castigo de los que allí se hallaron fué muy 
bien merecido’.  Ibid., 262. 
89 ‘Veinte veces los ojos rasados en agua y temblándole el rostro como una azogada’, Ibid., 262. 
90 ‘Como una rabiosa, no me dexando hablar’. Ibid., 263. 
91 ‘Tomándola de improviso es grande su embarazo y sácase más de sus ánimos’. Ibid., 265.  



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‘come in great anger’92 and another he had given in which Fourquevaux demanded 

punishment of  Menéndez, ‘much exaggerating the (so called) cruelty’.93 At a 

subsequent audience with Catherine, Alavá expressed surprise at the continued 

strength of  her emotional reactions and distress about the incident: ‘we had a lengthy 

discussion on the matter — truly [in cipher: with her trembling]; it is strange that she 

has such fresh outrage about it all.’94 As Philip and Alavá constructed it in their 

correspondence to each other, these French emotional responses reflected their 

weakness and irrationality on this matter. This perspective, which explained for the 

Spanish why the French lacked the mettle to control the problem of  Huguenots 

growing before their eyes, encouraged Philip to continue his rigid religious 

recommendations for the French kingdom. 

These interactions, filled with robust emotional rhetoric and affective 

performances readily interpreted by observers, continued to be oriented around 

conceptualisations of  brotherhood and community. These discussions clearly 

exposed widely differing ideas of  the sociable, cultural and belief  alignments of  

varied protagonists and how resemblance (and alterity) could be conceptualised: 

familial or contractual, French or Spanish, Christian or Catholic. To Alavá directly, 

Catherine lamented, ‘what would Christendom say when it learned that in a season 

of  such brotherly love so cruel a war had been waged?’95 Alavá responded, 

significantly shifting Catherine’s shared but exclusive realm of  ‘Christendom’ to what 

Alavá termed instead ‘the world,’ arguing: 

that when the world, as she called it, should hear the facts it would not fail to be 

scandalised that in a season of  such friendship and brotherly love, when they had 

received so many benefits from Your Majesty, they should send the greatest and most 

infamous heretics of  France to usurp his territories, and the more so when it learned 

that from the least to the greatest they were all notable Huguenots.96 

Charles and Catherine had made clear in repeated emphasis on reparations for 

the abuse of  ‘their subjects’ that the French nation included Huguenots as well as 

Catholic. They refused to broach directly the matter of  the settlement’s dominant 

religious persuasion. These messages charted fundamentally different communities 

from whom each agent perceived they held responsibilities of  protection and from 

which they could expect support in what were shared concerns. 

                                                           
92 ‘Vino en gran cólera’. Philip to Alavá, 7 April 1566, Negociaciones, 8, 315. 
93 ‘Exagerando mucho la crueldad (que así la llamó) que Pero Menéndez había hecho y pidiéndome le 
mandase castigar exemplarmente’. Ibid., 314. 
94 ‘Y pasé un largo debate en la materia; verdaderamente/descrifado: e tomaban temblores/; es cosa 
extraña qué fresca tienen aquella indignación todos’. Alavá to Philip, 20 July 1566. Ibid., 438. 
95 ‘Que qué diría la cristiandad que en tiempo, de tanta hermandad se haya hecho une tan cruda 
guerra’, Alavá to Philip. 16 March 1566, Ibid., 263. 
96 ‘Que el mundo, como ella decía, cuando entendiese el caso no podría dexar de esdad, habiendo 
recibido tantas buenas obras de Vuestra Majestad, enviasen hombres los mayores herejes e infames de 
la Francia a usurparle sus tierras, y más cuando entendiesen que desde el mayor hasta el menor eran 
todos notables huguenotes y tanto’. Ibid., 263. 



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 Moreover, a further crucial set of  emotional performances within the French 

diplomatic network voiced the strong frustrations, anger and grief  of  Charles, 

Catherine and Fourquevaux in a receptive and intimate community of  understanding. 

Catherine expressed anger in her own correspondence to Fourquevaux, as she 

reported on successive, unsatisfactory interviews with the Spanish ambassador. In 

March 1566, she described hearing Alavá confess that Menéndez’s orders ‘had been 

carried out a little more rudely and cruelly than his lord had desired.’97 Catherine 

made clear to Fourquevaux her anger, ‘I was beside myself  when I thought of  it’.98 

She demanded that, in his interview with Philip, Fourquevaux express the depth of  

her hurt and anger as mother to both Philip and Charles, and insist that he provide 

the French with justice as 

a demonstration worthy of  the friendship and good peace between us … for I will 

never be at ease nor happy until I see it match the sincerity of  our affections and 

actions towards him, it angers me too much that it has been abused and I will have 

great regret to have lost so much of  the pain, care and the ways that I have sought to 

nurture these two princes and their crowns in perpetual friendship.99 

This epistolary emotional feedback loop persisted through much of  the year, 

long after Fourquevaux had warned his masters in February that they could expect 

no formal reparation from Spain, just ‘pretty words’.100  

Elisabeth, the French-born Spanish queen, and sister of  Charles IX, played a 

critical role in performing (and describing) affective displays before the French 

ambassador that assuaged her mother and brother and suggested a certain sympathy 

with their position. Fourquevaux eagerly reported Elisabeth’s claims to being 

very shocked and displeased to see your just sorrow: for she never thought that the 

carnage that occurred to your subjects should be done so bitterly; and, what is more, 

she told me that she had cried her heart out, for fear that some alteration in the 

relation between the two kings would come of  it.101 

Fourquevaux whose mission had been to impose French views upon his 

Spanish hosts, expressed his frustrations and excused his diplomatic failure, by 

providing confidential criticisms of  the Spanish, tracing a racialised assessment of  

                                                           
97 ‘Bien confessoit-il que ce avait esté un peu plus rudement et cruellement que sondict masitre n’eust 
désiré’. Catherine to Fourquevaux, 17 March 1566, Lettres, 2, 354. 
98 ‘J’estois comme hors de oy quand j’y pensois’. Ibid., 354. 
99 ‘Par démonstration digne de l’amitié et de la bonne paix qui est entre nous […] car je ne seray jamais 
à mon aise ne bien contente jusques à ce que je la voye conforme à la syncerité de noz affections et 
actions en son endroit, dont il me fascheroit trop que l’on abusast et aurois un merveilleuz regret 
d’avoir perdu tant de peine, de soing et des moyens que j’ay cherchez pour nourrir ces deux princes et 
leurs couronnes en perpetuelle amitié’. Ibid., 355. 
100 ‘Belles parolles’. Fourquevaux to Catherine, 9 April 1566, Dépêches, 1, 69. 
101 ‘Bien esbahie et desplaizante qu’elle fut de veoir leans votre juste doleur: car ne pençoit elle point 
que le carnaige avenu sur voz subjectz deubt estre prins si aigrement; et m’estoit adviz qu’avec petite 
choze davantaige elle en eust pleuré son saoul, de crainte qu’elle a qu’il ne survienne quelque alteration 
entre les deux Roys’. Fourquevaux to Catherine, 9 April 1566. Ibid., 69. 



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their bloodthirsty character:  

these Spanish have shown their prowess on disarmed men, half  dead from hunger, 

who had surrendered and were seeking mercy. This inhumanity was never used by the 

Turks on the old soldiers that they took at Castelnuovo and at Gerbes; barbarians 

never used such cruelty. […] as a Frenchman and your subject, I am horrified when I 

think of  a so detestable a fact and it seems to be that God would not want them left 

unpunished.102 

Fanning the flames for revenge, Fourquevaux visualised a French moral 

community distinct from the Spanish, who, significantly, were ranked in their cruelty 

as beyond non-Christian peoples. In April 1566, Fourquevaux complained of  a 

fruitless audience with Philip in which he had remonstrated that this was ‘a new 

indignity ever heard or to have happened between Christians […] for even the Turks 

and barbarians have never used the like, out of  the heat of  combat’.103 Later, 

Catherine would repeat Fourquevaux’s phrasing of  the comparative barbarity of  the 

Spanish and Turks in an audience with Alavá.104 This epistolary circulation of  shared 

French feelings among a highly exclusive sympathetic community may have 

continued to circulate and re-ignite powerful sentiments of  frustration and grief, but 

also provided an emotionally satisfying outlet to lived feelings that had no place in 

the official negotiations between kingdoms. 

In April 1568, the French Catholic slave-trader, and ostensibly free agent, 

Dominique de Gourgue, returned to the Spanish settlement of  San Mateo 

(previously Fort Caroline). Recruiting the assistance of  previous Timucua allies of  

the French, they massacred the fort’s inhabitants. Now, Alavá’s call for justice at the 

French court fell on deaf  ears. To Alavá’s eyes, as he reported to Philip in late June 

1568, Catherine could not control her obvious delight at this turn of  events: she ‘said 

it with a gesture that showed her great joy about it […] I said that what I thought was 

that, the more brotherhood and friendship Your Majesty showed them and the more 

we helped them in their work, the less correspondence there was and would be with 

Your Majesty.’105 This moment represented an action that, for the French, could 

achieve brief  emotional satisfaction, but it did not constitute a colonial re-

                                                           
102 ‘Lesquelz Espaignolz ont monstré leur prouesse sur gens desarmez, mortz à demy de fain, renduz 
et requerantz qu’on le print à mercy. Laquelle inhumanité ne fut pas usée par les Turcs aux vieux 
soldats qu’ilz prindrent à Castelnuovo et aux Gerbes, ne jamais barbares uzèrent de telle crualté. […] 
comme François et votre subject, j’avois horreur quand je pensois à ung faict si execrable et me 
sembloit que Dieu ne le vouldroit pas laisser impuny’. Fourquevaux to Charles, 22 February 1566. Ibid., 
61. 
103 ‘C’estoit une nouvelle indigne d’estre entendue et moisn advenue entre chrestiens […]  car les 
mesmes Turcz et barbares n’en uzèrent onc de semblable hors la chaleur du combat’. Fourquevaux to 
Catherine, 9 April 1566. Ibid., 70–1. 
104 Alavá to Philip, 16 March 1566, Negociaciones, 8, 262. 
105 ‘Lo dixo con un ademán que mostrò tener alegría grande dello,’ ‘Dixe que lo que yo consideraba era 
que cuanto más hermandad y amistad Vuestra Majestad les mostraba y cuanto más les ayudaba en sus 
trabajos, tanta menos correspondenica hallaba y hallaría Vuestra Majestad’. Alavá to Philip, 28 June 
1568, Negociaciones con Francia, 10 (Madrid: Editorial Maestre, 1959), 487-488. 



SUSAN BROOMHALL 

 
Cromohs 20/2015-16 - p. 50 

engagement with Florida.  

As on the Florida peninsula and in its European textual narratives, court 

colonial negotiations were explored through a wide range of  emotional expressions, 

affective behaviours and a range of  social practices of  textual, material and bodily 

exchange. Through this staged emotional labour, individual French and Spanish 

agents ranged widely in articulating both inclusions and exclusions of  the other from 

communities of  shared faith or cultural similitude. Power dynamics between the 

kingdoms shaped emotional expression. The relative weakness of  France’s position 

was reflected in the locations in which more challenging emotional content could be 

explored. Emotional performances articulated between monarchs were very different 

to those perceived by ambassadors in their audiences at their respective courts. Here 

verbal and corporeal displays spoke for feelings that could not be voiced as part of  

official communications between the two rulers. Finally, letters contained alternative 

emotional performances that voiced frustrations and explained failures in a limited 

circulation among sympathetic readers.  

 

Conclusions 

The conceptualisation of  communities of  sentiment, nationhood, men, race, 

and faith asserted myriad emotional performances expressing pride, self-

righteousness, anger, concern among other feelings as acts of  power. Indigenous and 

European agents employed gestural, textual, visual and violent practices of  

emotional labour to produce meanings and identities for the Florida peninsula and 

for each other. These performances aimed to contain or subjugate, as they were 

practised by and with Timucua, Calusa and European peoples, but also to establish 

cohorts of  mutual interest. They were constructed through interpretation of  

affective behaviours, speech acts often in translation or expressed through third-party 

interpreters, rhetorical expression of  emotion in written texts, and social practices of  

exchange of  objects, resources and bodies.  

Analysis of  emotions in such contexts helps to disrupt a narrative framework 

in which colonisers typically dominate indigenous ideas and activities. In this case 

study, all participants were engaged in negotiations through emotional performances 

that produced diverse interpretations and counter-narratives. Yet emotion practices 

operate within power frameworks that are culturally specific. When cultures crossed 

paths in such ways, the outcomes were not straightforward — emotional behaviours 

could reinforce power hierarchies but also act as disruptions to these. No simple 

dichotomy between coloniser and colonised captures the complex, challenging and 

shifting emotional practices that shaped identities and thus intimacies and 

sociabilities at personal, group and national levels here.106 Religious beliefs, cultural 

                                                           
106 This follows the considerations of  ANN STOLER, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the 
Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of  California Press, 2002), 13. 



PERFORMANCES OF ENTANGLED EMOTIONS AND BELIEFS 

 
Cromohs 20/2015-16 - p. 51 

differences and racial stereotypes were rarely stable as they were represented in 

emotional performances about Florida interactions. Community formations and 

belief  practices were highly dynamic and responsive to new circumstances and 

engagements with indigenous and European peoples. In the eyes of  other 

participants, Timucua, Calusa, French and Spanish peoples were all culturally 

transformed through entangled belief  and emotional performances about Florida.