Mistress of the Vatican (4 page)

It was the execution of Beatrice, young and beautiful, that captured popular imagination and became the stuff of legend. Such was the fate of a young woman who dared to rebel against her father, despite his violence and possible rape and incest. Though Beatrice Cenci’s life and death were clearly tragic, the lesson learned was that daughters must obey, and that was that. Perhaps Olimpia thought long and hard about the courageous young woman who fought valiantly against the cruel fate imposed upon her by a heartless father.

As Olimpia grew up, the heartless Sforza Maidalchini was carefully considering the cruel fate he was going to impose upon her and her sisters, Ortensia and Vittoria. For his second marriage had resulted not in the longed-for son but in
three
daughters who threatened to siphon off the family wealth in the form of dowries. Many daughters of the time solved such family vexations by dying young. But Sforza’s daughters did not oblige. They remained stubbornly healthy and grew unrelentingly toward marriageable age.

To marry honorably, that is, to marry a man of the same or higher social status, a girl would have to bring with her real estate, cash, furniture, jewels, or livestock. To marry a man of lower social status—a

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carpenter, blacksmith, or tavern keeper, say—would cost far less but would bring shame to a family such as Sforza’s, perched on its upward climb.

In the fifteenth century the Papal States recognized the dangers of excessively high dowries: unwanted daughters with no religious vocation crammed into convents against their will, decreasing marriage and birth rates, and a resulting decline in economic productivity. The government legislated caps on dowry amounts, and any family going over the prescribed cap was forced to pay a substantial fine. But inflation and social pressure swelled the dowries, and the caps grudgingly followed suit. In 1586 the limit had risen to 5,000 scudi, and only twelve years later the average dowry had skyrocketed to 7,800 scudi. By the time Sforza married off his girls in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the combined dowries would have cost him some 24,000 scudi.

Since it is almost impossible to understand the value of a historical currency in modern terms, we must try to do so in contemporary terms. In 1600 a gold scudo could buy between twenty and twenty-five chickens or about a hundred pounds of flour, and represented almost a week’s wages for a master builder. And 24,000 scudi would have bought some 600,000 chickens, or a large and profitable farm for Andrea. Yet how would Andrea make the family name great if so much of Sforza’s money went to the girls’ dowries, benefiting other families?

A father had very limited choices as to what to do with his daughters. And the reason was this: throughout history, women’s lusts were considered insatiable, in contrast to the lethargic sexual desires of men. The daughters of Eve, if they were allowed to run free, would rape all the men and dishonor their families. After all, it was a woman who had gotten everyone thrown out of Paradise, and her daughters had to be locked up to keep society pure and wholesome. Oddly, no one ever came up with the idea that if a community truly wanted to become pure and wholesome—and less violent—it might consider locking up the men and handing the keys to the women.

A girl, kept under the stern eye of a father, would be handed over to a husband, who would fix an equally stern eye upon her. Or she would be walled up in a convent, where the abbess and bishop would make

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sure she got into no trouble and had no chance to escape. It was unthinkable for a woman to live alone, independent of men, unless she was a widow over forty, in which case she was thought to be so shriveled up that her private parts had turned to dust.

Looking at the gratifying patrimony squirreled away through years of hard work, Sforza decided there was no choice—all three girls would have to go into a convent so that his son would inherit an impressive estate. Although convents required dowries from the brides of Christ, Je-sus in his infinite mercy was satisfied with one-tenth the amount demanded by flesh-and-blood sons of leading families.

It was the perfect solution for Sforza. His daughters would be honor-ably taken care of with very little dowry. Moreover, there was a spiritual benefit to having close relatives in monasteries or convents. Those who had been shut in would pray for those who had shut them in. And their prayers were guaranteed to be heard. The saints and the Virgin interceded first for the religious—the name commonly used for nuns and monks—before turning their ears to the selfish clamor of the worldly. The prayers of three daughters winging their way to heaven for decades to come would surely be heard by some saint, perhaps by the Mother of God herself, who would take action, ensuring success for Sforza and his son in this life, and easier access to heaven in the next.

Saint Peter, it was believed, would allow the religious to enter the pearly gates of heaven with barely more than a glance at their habits and a satisfied nod. It was the worldly he was on the lookout for, and these he would question rigorously. Turned away with only a tantalizing glimpse of Paradise, many would be forced to seek out that other place. For this reason, many of the most noble, wealthy, and worldly sinners insisted on being buried in the habits of nuns or monks, perhaps with the hope of fooling Saint Peter as they hurried by, the nun’s veil or monk’s cowl pulled over their faces, racing for the gates before the stern gatekeeper realized who they really were.

Though male and female religious were believed to have equal access to heaven, the life of a nun was far less interesting than that of a monk. Monks, though most lived in monasteries, were sometimes allowed to perform pious works in towns and cities, helping the poor and tending

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the sick in hospitals. Many monks were sent on missions to convert the natives of China, India, and the Americas. Male religious were also encouraged to make pilgrimages to holy sites, especially Rome and Je-rusalem.

While the religious clergy were generally given to lives of contemplation, members of the secular clergy—priests—were extremely active in the community, baptizing, burying, and celebrating Mass. Priests could hope to become bishops, cardinals, even pope. But a nun could only remain a nun, with no place in the world. Lascivious creatures that they were, nuns were taken out of the community and guarded in what closely resembled a maximum-security prison.

Having studied at the Convent of Saint Dominic and boarded sometimes with her aunt, the abbess Giulia Gualtieri, Olimpia understood well what a nun’s life was like. A nun slept alone in a narrow cell, on a hard bed, with an unlocked door through which the abbess could enter at any time to see what she was doing.

Fraternization was frowned upon as nuns, having devoted themselves to God, were not supposed to have any friends, even among their fellow nuns. Nuns who laughed and gossiped when cooking together or sewing in small groups could be subject to severe punishment. Forbidden to have pets, many nuns adopted the chickens they raised for eggs. Some nuns sent letters to their bishops complaining bitterly that the upstairs convent corridors were ankle deep in chicken turds because other nuns, looking for love where they could find it, kept so many pet chickens.

Nuns attended prayer service six times a day, and in between prayers they worked—tending the chickens in the henhouse, cooking the communal meals in the kitchen, doing the laundry, sewing, and cleaning. To become closer to God, they sometimes whipped themselves, starved, and spent their nights praying rather than sleeping.

They were not permitted to go into town. Servants bought supplies, knocked on the wooden window by the convent’s front door, and, when it was opened, placed the items on a turntable that was spun inside. The nun receiving the goods had no contact with the servant, no friendly word, not the merest glance at a worldly person, and the entire transaction was handled exactly as if the convent were a leper colony.

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Nuns were not supposed to have even a glimpse of the outside world and its temptations. All convent windows opened onto the inner courtyard, a place of contemplation, and never onto the rowdy street. Some convents even stopped up the ventilation shaft in the privies if it gave the nuns a view of the street below, or the street below, perhaps, a view of the nuns’ behinds.

Nuns were allowed to meet relatives in the convent parlor, a gathering place where laypeople waited for a religious relative to come to the grille that separated the nuns’ world from the real world. Male visitors were limited to a short list of fathers, brothers, and uncles, but female visitors could be more distant relatives, former neighbors, and friends. An older nun past the age of indiscretion—forty—was instructed to stand nearby and listen to the younger nuns’ conversations in the parlors to make sure nothing inappropriate was said.

Usually the relatives would bring food and drink and make merry in the parlor, slipping wine and food through the grille to the nun while she, in return, slipped them the delectable convent cakes. Bishops routinely tried to clamp down on such excesses but just as routinely failed. It was, after all, the only fun a nun could have. And the rowdy relatives were not nearly as troubling as another problem in the parlor, which was becoming a favorite pastime of adventurous Italian youths. Boisterous young men—drunk, bored, or on a dare—pretended to be nuns’ brothers, snuck in, and exposed themselves, waving their members and grinning at the shocked virgins behind the grille. The Neapolitans were the worst, some of them making the grand tour of Italy with the express purpose of flashing all the nuns.

Doctors’ visits to nuns in their cells were viewed with suspicion. Physicians were encouraged to wait in the parlor and speak with patients through the grille without examining them. If the patient was too ill to rise from her bed, he spoke with another nun about her symptoms and prescribed remedies. The only men allowed in the convent with some sense of ease were priests, who were required to hear confessions and celebrate Mass. And sometimes even this resulted in pregnancy, thereby confirming popular beliefs about the incurable lechery of women.

Perhaps it is no wonder that so many nuns in Germany fled the

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confines of the convent as soon as the rising Lutheran religion allowed them to. Like rats on a sinking ship, they jumped out of their convents and paddled full force into the real world. In 1523 Katharina von Bora, the future wife of Martin Luther, escaped her convent hidden in a herring barrel and two years later ended up marrying the greatest heretic of them all.

Despite the hardships of a convent life, some young women wanted to be nuns with all their hearts. They saw it as a way of being closer to God and serving him every day. Others felt no strong vocation but chose to be nuns for other reasons. They would be spared the agonies of childbirth—many households had heard the cries of bone-shattering pain echo down the hallways and seen the suddenly silent almost-mothers carried out in boxes. Moreover, nuns were spared the brutality of men—drunken husbands who beat them or gave them syphilis picked up from whores.

But Olimpia Maidalchini was not one of those young women. Determined and domineering from her earliest childhood, at fifteen she knew she did not want a life sworn to poverty, obedience, and chastity. Olimpia most decidedly did not want to whip herself, adopt a chicken as her only friend, and sit in a stinking privy with its ventilation shaft blocked up. And she certainly did not want the only penis she saw in her life to be that of an impudent Neapolitan youth flashing her on the other side of the convent parlor grille.

It was Sforza’s misfortune that his eldest daughter was in many ways just like him. Like her father, Olimpia yearned to be in and of the world—married, with children, social position, money, even power. Confronted with Sforza’s decision to lock her up, she remained stubbornly defiant.

Olimpia’s refusal to comply with her father’s wishes was almost unheard-of in her society. In seventeenth-century Europe each member of the family was expected to sacrifice his or her dearest dreams to ensure the prosperity of the family as a whole. If their fathers desired it, swashbuckling soldiers became priests, and delicate scholars ran into the fray of battle wielding swords in their smooth white hands. Against their inclination, voluptuous bouncing girls swore themselves to lifelong vir-

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ginity, and saintly maidens wed repulsive old merchants reeking with body odor. Family loyalty was fierce, and in pushing his daughters into convents Sforza was showing loyalty to the family. He expected nothing less from them in return.

Olimpia’s younger sisters meekly submitted for the good of the family. Ortensia, who was thirteen or fourteen in 1606, and twelve-year-old Vittoria were safely tucked away in the Convent of Saint Dominic to the great honor and financial profit of the Maidalchini family. But there was still Olimpia to deal with, and though three dowries had shrunk to one, Sforza remained adamantly opposed to taking a penny away from Andrea’s future greatness. Moreover, he must have been shocked by Olimpia’s stubborn disloyalty to the family. By hook or by crook, he would get Olimpia into that convent.

It was not as easy as simply dragging her there. Sforza knew of the ruling of the Council of Trent—that no father could force his daughter into a convent against her will, and those found guilty of doing so would be excommunicated by the Catholic Church. This ruling was the response to the heretics’ hooting and hollering that greedy fathers were jamming young girls into convents to drag out their days in virginal misery. According to the edict, each girl asking to join a convent would be interviewed privately by the local bishop, who would determine “whether she is being forced, whether she is being deceived, whether she knows what she is doing.”
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