Mistress of the Vatican Read Online Free PDF Page B

of women.
    Perhaps it is no wonder that so many nuns in Germany fled the
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    Eleanor Herman
    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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    M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n
    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.” 6
    Most girls, asked by the bishop in a private interview if they took the veil willingly,