Fifty
cardinals' squires assisted them in serving the banquet, which consisted
of nine courses of three plates each--twenty-seven dishes in all. The
meats were built up in fantastic form: castles, gigantic stags, boars,
horses, etc. After the fourth service, the cardinal offered his holiness a
milk-white steed worth 400 florins; two gold rings, jeweled with an
enormous sapphire and a no less enormous topaz; and a bowl, worth 100
florins; sixteen cardinal guests and twenty prelates were given rings and
jewels, and twelve young clerks of the papal house and twenty-four
sergeants-at-arms received purses filled with florins.
After the fifth service, a great tower with a font whence gushed forth
five sorts of choicest wines was carried in; and a tourney was run during
the interval between the seventh and eighth courses. Then followed a
concert of sweetest music, and dessert was furnished by two trees--one of
silver, bearing rarest fruits of all kinds, and the other loaded with
sugared fruits of many colors. Various wines were then served, whereupon
the master cooks, with thirty assistants, executed dances before the
guests.
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