Tournaments took place from about the 1090s, and were advertised in advance so that would-be participants could travel—sometimes from hundreds of miles away—to join the action. Along too came crowds of spectators, entertainers, peddlers, stallholders, blacksmiths, horse trainers, fortune-tellers, musicians, thieves, and ne’er-do-wells. The crucibles of the tournament were the Flanders and the Netherlands, and the lands between the kingdom of France and its Carolingian cousin, the German empire.
