Clemence, princess of Hungary, set sail from Naples to the coast of France in 1315, where she was to marry King Louis X. Marriage could be a daunting prospect for an elite royal or noblewoman in the best of circumstances, but this was far from ideal. Clemence's parents were long dead, and her brother would travel the opposite direction to claim the Hungarian crown. The French crown was deep in debt; the king earned the sobriquet "the Quarreler." Clemence wasn't his first queen, either. The previous year, Margaret of Burgundy had been accused and convicted of adultery in a massive three-way scandal at the French royal court. Adultery did not justify divorce in medieval Europe, to be sure...but she had quickly died in prison under suspicious circumstances. To top it all off, Clemence's ship wrecked off the coast of Marseilles. She kept her life but lost all her possessions.

So, chronicler Geoffrey of Paris laments, the royal wedding was a somber and subdued affair. Louis and Clemence couldn't muster a guest list worth recording, and--horrors--there wasn't even any dancing. At the wedding of Clemence and Louis, the most important menu item for any noble attending was to stay out of the way.

I'm starting with that to make a point, of course. A medieval wedding, even at the royal level, was still a wedding and still made a marriage even absent the ceremony and shows of power. This is not an age where spectacle was the same as substance. But fear not: spectacle still mattered, and if you got your idea of a medieval wedding from Game of Thrones, you still haven't seen anything yet.

In 1369, a Dutch princess was probably dreading her own wedding, or "wedding." Katherine of Bavaria and Holland was only nine years old, but her father was very very invested in the marriage he had arranged for her with a Low Countries prince, Edward, duke of Guelders and count of Zutphen. To celebrate, he hosted three afternoon-evenings' worth of feast: a three-course dinner, a four-course dinner, and a five-course dinner...plus the three (or more) courses that followed each one, plus the preceding and intervening courses that were not even meant to be eaten. The normal flow of events for multi-day feasts, including weddings, was to feature entertainment and religious events surrounding the dinner parties. Tournaments are the most notable, but this could range from a formal event to the brother of the duke setting up camp in the city's largest marketplace to challenge all comers.

The surviving abbreviated "menu notes" that survive from this wedding (rare for the 14th century and earlier) show what was important about the courses: meat, meat, and more meat. Each course featured multiple dishes of different meat (or cheese), with no attention to modern ideas of the salad course, the soup course, the appetizer, the entree. Two important patterns are the use of spices and the predominance of sour flavors. In particular, the budget paid for a lot of saffron--the rare spice in that it was actually grown in Europe rather than imported from "the East," but the difficulty of cultivation made it among the most costly...therefore the most prestigious.

Some of the menu items where it's possible to reconstruct what is meant by the recipe (sometimes it just says, essentially, "deer") include:

• Lucfriyte, one of the dishes served after the formal meal, was fried soft cheese mixed with butter, eggs, sugar, and salt, and then baked inside a pastry shell
• Mameny, a dish whose broth was made from quinces cooked in wine with lots of spices, ground almonds, and enough pheasant meat to turn it from a soup into a solid you could cut with a knife
• Deer served with a thick cream-of-wheat style porridge containing wheat, milk, egg yolks, and spices
• Many courses cooked into jelly or served surrounded by gelatin/aspic. (Medieval Netherlands, the U.S. Midwest called; it wants its potluck back.)

In the course of dining, the major courses would be served to guests at tables. The extra courses were known then as a banquet. They were actually laid out for the guests to come and take at their choosing. This tells us something of the order of the evening: even after the meal proper was finished, people were expected/required to stick around for talking and, yes, dancing.

And then there were the entremets.

These were...let's call them food-based courses meant for display and awe rather than consumption. I've talked before on AH about the musicians who played for the crowd baked into a pie crust and the wine dispenser shaped like a naked woman. For his daughter's wedding, Duke Albert made sure to go one better than the traditional "pig with an apple in its mouth" display. On each night, guests were greeted with a displayed boar that breathed fire.

Gold and silver plates, gold and silver tapestries were the order of the day for decorations at many famous feasts; indeed, that's the stereotypical background in satirical romances and poems. Some guests might supply display items as part of their gift, it seems. More frequently, of course, prestigious material goods meant for show were passed on. A popular gift, believe it or not, was crowns--hardly an exclusive prerogative of the king. In at least one French royal wedding, the chronicler makes special note of a lavish bed as a gift. This was popular among the urban bourgeoisie--the family bed was frequently bequeathed to the oldest daughter on her wedding, at least in Germany--but evidently this was at least sometimes the case at the most elite level as well. Rings, necklaces, jewels of any sort were also popular gifts fit for a queen and king.

As far as festivities go, we need to leave behind the boars that breathed fire and take a look at a different sort of experience of fire. The so-called "Bal des Ardents" in 1393 was actually a wedding feast at the French royal court, albeit celebrating the remarriage of the queen's lady-in-waiting Catherine de Fastaverin, not Isabeau herself. The party during and after the meal included "performances" amidst the dancing, and one ill-fated performance in particular has given the event its name.

A group of six dancers disguised themselves as tree-men/brutes, smearing their faces and clothing with thick resin and sticking flax and linen strips everywhere. Wild men, they were wild! They ran about the hall yelling and whooping and "dancing" like devils. They taunted the audience--guess who we are!

...And then they caught fire.

It might have been a drunken accident, it might have been deliberate; either way, it was even worse than you think, because the king was one of the dancers.

In the end, only two of the six men survived: the king, fortunately or unfortunately, by starving his costume of oxygen fuel by smothering himself under the Duchess of Berry's skirts; and one of his knights, who jumped into a giant tub of wine.

So we can add something else to your list of do's and don'ts: Don't carry a burning torch into the middle of a raucous party when the use of torches has been explicitly forbidden.

But if you really, really want the goods on a fancy medieval wedding, you need to pack up your brocaded skirts and crimson-covered wagons and transport yourself to the stylish, elite world of Renaissance Italy, and specifically, the spring 1475 wedding of Camilla d'Aragona and Constanzo Sforza in Pesaro.

First of all, Camilla's entire entourage, paid for by her uncle (coincidentally the king of Aragon), was a wedding gift for the new couple. And that entourage couldn't even get into the city before the festivities started. It was greeted outside the gates by a large "hunting party" bearing gifts of game and accompanied by 13 actors dressed as classical nymphs and goddesses. Children dressed as fairies waved olive branches as she processed to the castle, which had already become a world of dancing and bonfires and shouting.

And she got to do the splashy entry all over again the next day following a tour of the city, except it was even more lavish.

I honestly don't know how to sum up the splendor and spectacle of this wedding; a contemporary account of the whole affair has been published as A Renaissance Wedding, and it's just breathtaking to read. With Europe stretching out its imperialist fingers, sugar and citrus fruits were a big-ticket item. There is just course after course of sugared limes, and dishes cooked in sugar and wine, and sugar sculpted into the shape of castles. And there was gold: "gilded, star-shaped jellies. Gilded pine-seed cakes shaped like lilies. Gilded wing-shaped pastries. Gilded pine-seed cakes weighing half a pound each.

On the day of the wedding itself, the twelve courses were each presented by hired actors dressed as the Sun, Moon, and Greek gods.

And yes, with the whole affair "hosted" by the Sun and Moon, the hall was decorated appropriately:

The hall...was completely canopied in azure blue cloth. At the centre across the full width of the room was a zodiac with all its degrees marked in silver, and within it, the twelve heavenly signs in gold, each exactly the size of a man. They were attached with their associated stars...and these stars were all made of mirrors surround by silver rays...There were five planets made from large mirrors with many rays, chiefly gold and silver.

And yes, the Sun and Moon made their entrance through trapdoors in the ceiling, surrounded by candles and torches and "clouds" of gold or silver fabric:

At a given signal...a circular door opened showing a scintillating paradise of gold and silver and glittering lights, through which the golden Sun and silver Moon descended...And when either descended, lutes, cymbals, harps, and other instruments could be heard playing above in sweetest harmony.

Below the celestial vista, the hall's walls were lined with fruit trees, tapestries, and the duke's coats of arms. In gold, of course.

And that's to say nothing about the fireworks.