ON MAY 26, 1591, as his wife’s shrieks pierced the air, Sforza Maidalchini waited impatiently for the birth of his child. Everything depended on the child’s gender. It absolutely must be a boy.
Born around 1560, Sforza was a man of humble birth and grandiose dreams. He grew up in the central Italian town of Acquapendente in the Papal States, a nation of some 1.5 million inhabitants covering roughly the central third of the Italian peninsula and ruled by the pope as earthly monarch. Looking around the world of late-sixteenth-century Italy, Sforza saw the yawning chasm between rich and poor, between those who feasted and those who starved. Wealth, position, prestige—these were the only things that mattered.
As a young man the ambitious Sforza was offered a job in the tax department of Viterbo, the capital of the province. His task was to assess the property and income of farmers and livestock owners in the fertile fields outside the town walls. Everyone who was anyone in town owned property outside of it, bringing in their own fresh vegetables and meat rather than buying them at market. Sforza’s work put him in contact with the richest, most powerful and successful men in the region—Viterbo’s wealthy landowners, politicians, and merchants.
While in many towns the tax collector was probably not the most popular man, Sforza had a special talent for winning the friendship of influential people, of making himself charming and indispensable. Working indefatigably, bit by bit Sforza moved up the ladder. He squirreled away money; he was promoted in his job. Over the years, his prestige increased in the community. In 1590 he was given the honorary title of castellan of Civita Castellana, an ancient fortress near Viterbo, and put in charge of the men-at-arms of the nearby towns of Sutri and Capranica.
His prestige was rising steadily, and the ambitious plan he had outlined for his life was unfolding perfectly. But what good was all this effort if he had no son to carry his legacy into the future? Only a son could make the mediocre name of Maidalchini resound through the centuries with greatness.
True, Sforza already had a son from his deceased first wife. Andrea, born in about 1581, was the focal point of his father’s dynastic ambitions. But one son was not enough to guarantee the family line in a society where approximately 50 percent of children died young. Sforza knew he must produce an understudy for the role of heir to the future family greatness.
And to do so, the up-and-coming widower needed to find a replacement wife.
He did not need to look far. Sforza’s boss, Giulio Gualtieri, was a nobleman of nearby Orvieto who had won the position of tax farmer of the province from the government of the Papal States in Rome. It is testimony to Sforza’s hard work, thrifty habits, and valuable connections that Gualtieri gave him his daughter Vittoria in marriage with a generous dowry.
To his great joy, Sforza was now married to a nobleman’s daughter with a comfortable pile of money in the bank. He moved into a home owned by Vittoria—perhaps part of her dowry—in the Piazza della Pace, the square outside the church of Saint Mary of Peace. It was not a grand nobleman’s palace but a comfortable town house for a successful burgher. Built in the fourteenth century around a charming courtyard with a garden and well, it had been renovated in the early sixteenth century. In the main room Sforza had the ceiling beams adorned with gold, eight-pointed stars—the heraldic symbol of the Maidalchini family.
Poised to found a great dynasty, Sforza now needed only the insurance policy of a second son. Sons brought a family increased prosperity, prestige, and good luck. Sons cost very little to educate, given the huge pool of scholars willing to work as tutors. If the oldest son was heir to the family property, a second son could go into the church, a third son into the military. Sons were easy to dispose of, and each one that married brought money into the family in the form of his bride’s dowry.
What Sforza greatly feared was a daughter. There was an Italian saying of the time—“to make a girl,” which meant failure, disaster, plans gone awry. There was a reason for this. Girls sucked dry the family fortune with the dowries they required to marry honorably. A daughter would lessen the patrimony Sforza had saved for Andrea, dispersing it to another family. A girl would flatten the fortune and prestige of the rising Maidalchini name.
As the shrieks ceased and he heard the midwife’s footsteps coming toward him, Sforza prayed fervently to all the saints. Was it a boy?
The saints, evidently, had not listened to his prayers. Sforza’s child was a girl.
Children were baptized soon after birth, lest they die and their unbaptized souls be barred from entering heaven. And so, according to her recently discovered baptismal record, later that day Sforza’s daughter was baptized by Carlo Montilio, the bishop of Viterbo, in the twelfth-century Cathedral of Saint Lorenzo. Sforza’s standing in the community was shown by the fact that the child’s godmother was Fiordalisa Nini, the sister of Nino Nini, the richest man in town.
The baby was christened Olimpia.
As Father Montilio sprinkled her with baptismal water, he spoke the sacred words that would mark the child’s soul with an indelible stamp, signifying that as a Christian she belonged to God. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he said. Performing this baptism as he had hundreds of others, Father Montilio had no idea that kings and prime ministers would bow down to this unwanted girl, sending her lavish gifts and begging for her influence.
As he watched the ceremony, little did the dejected Sforza Maidalchini know that it would be his nuisance of a daughter, not his beloved son, who would make the Maidalchini family name great. No one had the vaguest idea that day, in the cool, gray church that smelled of age and mildew, that this mewling infant would become a pivotal personality in the history of the Catholic Church.
At the moment of her birth, Olimpia Maidalchini was encumbered by her father’s disappointment in her gender and the question of the dowry that would loom ever larger as she grew up. But she was also burdened by a culture that blithely accepted women’s inferiority to men. Pope Innocent III (reigned 1198–1216) confidently declared that menstrual blood was “so detestable and impure that, from contact therewith, fruits and grains are blighted, bushes dry up, grasses die, trees lose their fruits, and if dogs chance to eat of it, they go mad.”1
Even the miracle of giving birth—the sole domain of women—was not considered an achievement of any particular value. The fourth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Renaissance culture that quoted him believed that a uterus was a kind of soil—dirt, actually—in which the man planted his seed. A woman merely provided a nine-month lease for a warm rented room. In the Oresteia, the classical Greek trilogy by Aeschylus, the god Apollo argued that it was impossible for a man to kill his mother, since no one actually had a mother.
All pregnancies, it was thought, started off as male, nature attempting to replicate its own perfection. But at some point in about half of pregnancies, something went terribly wrong, an irremediable birth defect, and the fetus became female. A female’s reproductive organs proved her defectiveness; they were small and misshapen, most of them tucked away in an evil-smelling cavity inside the body, unlike the robust, fully formed private parts of men, which enjoyed the fresh air and dangled proudly.
According to popular medieval literature, which was still widely read in sixteenth-century Italy, if a woman spread her legs very far, her female organs would fall out and she would become a man. If this were true, many ambitious women, including Olimpia, would have spread their legs wide, pushed their organs onto the floor, and luxuriated in the advantages of being a man in a man’s world.
The church, too, looked on females as defective creatures. Jesus and his disciples had all been male. The church fathers, who in the second through fifth centuries grappled with Scripture to hammer out Catholic theology, were notorious misogynists. In the third century, Tertullian wrote a scathing commentary on women in the early church who preached, healed, and baptized. “The very women of these heretics, how wanton they are! For they are bold enough to teach, to dispute, to enact exorcism, to undertake cures—it may be even to baptize.”2
In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas, arguably the most influential theologian in the history of the Catholic Church, declared women to be “misbegotten men,” inferior by nature and therefore incapable of leadership. Defective women, it was believed, had no place in business, politics, or finance. They certainly had no place in Christ’s church. The Latin word for woman—femina—was said to have come from fe for “faith” and minus for “less,” since women were thought to be too weak to hold and preserve the faith. Moreover, it was believed that women’s handling the holy Eucharist or stepping foot inside the Vatican would contaminate the holiness with their impurity.
The girl who would one day contaminate the holiness of the most holy Catholic Church was a born leader, a most unfortunate personality for a female. The only description of Olimpia as a child came from her first biographer, Gregorio Leti, who claimed to have spoken to people who knew her growing up.
“As soon as she attained the age of reason she was ambitious of commanding,” he wrote. “Even at the most tender age, and as small as she was, she showed this inclination in childhood games. She always gave orders to the other children, and nothing was done without her commands. As a child she was reported to be dominating by nature. She decided which games to play and always wanted to win.”3
Unfortunately, Olimpia had little education to back up her bossiness. She went to school in the medieval Convent of Saint Dominic in Viterbo, where her aunt was a nun. It was a rudimentary education at best. Times had changed since the early sixteenth century when women like the Roman poetess Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) held salons, encouraged the arts, and spoke several languages.
Olimpia’s world was shaped by the 1563 Council of Trent—the belated Vatican response to accusations of Church abuse lobbed by Martin Luther and his followers forty years earlier—and reforming bishops decided that wifely virtues were threatened by female education. An educated female would be less satisfied managing her household and raising her children; she would want to go gadding about town, meddling in government and business. Up north, the heretics would laugh at Catholics who couldn’t even control their women. And so Olimpia would have learned to read and write Italian, do a bit of math, memorize the precepts of the Catholic religion, and sew.
Though she knew little or nothing of art, literature, philosophy, and foreign languages, Olimpia had two skills uncommon in girls. With regards to financial matters, her mind worked as if it were an abacus, adding, multiplying, subtracting, and calculating percentages. Within seconds of examining an economic issue, she could figure out the best financial advantage, a trait she must have inherited from Sforza. Moreover, Olimpia had a fantastic memory. She had only to read or hear something once to remember it forever.
Given her lifelong love of mathematical calculations and business, it is likely that Olimpia spent some time in her father’s tax office. Perhaps she sat inconspicuously in the corner, watching Sforza chatting pleasantly with the landowners about their tax bills. As he added up the value of land, livestock, and crops, perhaps she did the figures in her head, coming up with the answers before he did. We can imagine Olimpia studying her father with her dark eyes, proud of him, wanting to grow up and be just like him.
While everyone acknowledged Olimpia’s intelligence, there is some confusion as to her appearance during her girlhood. One source asserted that in her teens Olimpia was a “conspicuous beauty.” 4 Another disagreed, calling her “not beautiful, but blond [light-skinned] and thin, pleasing, vivacious and always smiling.”5
If she was not exactly beautiful, she was attractive and energetic, with an earthy sense of humor. From later likenesses we can extrapolate what Olimpia looked like as a girl. She was petite, with dark hair and chiseled features. She had a wide, high forehead, sparkling dark eyes under black, arched brows, and a beautiful, perfectly straight nose. Her cheekbones were wide, her lips thin, her jaw square, and her chin, though not overly large, prominent. It was a face of ambitious angles and resolute determination. It was a face that was intriguing on a slender blooming girl but that would become ferocious on a plump, hard-bitten older woman.
Olimpia grew up in a jewellike medieval town whose heyday had passed some three hundred years earlier. Viterbo sat snugly inside massive eleventh-century walls studded with turrets, towers, and gates. It was a town of thick strong stone the color of pearl gray and soft sand. Narrow streets wound between sturdy medieval houses and opened up onto charming piazzas with sparkling fountains. Adorning fountains, buildings, pillars, and palaces were stone lions—the heraldic symbol of Viterbo and the emblem of strength.
Rich volcanic soil and healing sulfuric baths had first drawn the Etruscans to the site, and then the Romans. In the eleventh century, Viterbo became a papal city, which the popes visited to escape Rome’s malarial summers and perennial violence. The thirteenth century was a time of splendor, when new churches, towers, and palaces rose from the ancient citadel.
Viterbo’s climactic moment in history came in 1268 after the death of Pope Clement IV in Viterbo’s papal palace. Eighteen cardinals met to elect his successor but couldn’t make up their minds. When the voting extended into 1269, and then 1270, Viterbans became frustrated at the lack of law and order in the popeless Papal States, and decided to make the electors’ lives as uncomfortable as possible to hasten a result. Instead of allowing the dithering cardinals to return to their sumptuous palaces every night, they locked them in the building cum clave, the Latin for “with a key” and the origin of the term conclave.
When that didn’t work, one cardinal jokingly remarked that the palace roof should be removed to give greater access to the Holy Spirit, who was believed to direct cardinals to elect the right man. Taking him at his word, the exasperated Viterban authorities removed the palace roof, exposing the cardinals to the wind, rain, and sun. They lowered down baskets of bread and water, all the food the sluggard cardinals could expect. The cardinals responded by threatening the entire city with excommunication, but this left the Viterbans unfazed. Finally, after two years and nine months, the longest election in church history, on September 1, 1271, the cardinals elected not one of themselves but a deacon named Teobaldo Visconti of Piacenza, who took the name Gregory X.
Some thirty years after the election, the popes became fed up with Rome, where noble families fought one another in daily street battles and sometimes held the pontiff himself hostage. The papal court moved to the peace and quiet of Avignon, in southern France, and the importance of Viterbo dwindled. When the popes returned to Rome for good in the fifteenth century, they had for the most part forgotten their once beloved haven, returning now and then only to soak in the salutary baths. By the time of Olimpia’s birth, the town had no great political or church importance, though it was the seat of a bishopric.
Viterbo’s bustling prosperity was due to its location; it was the last town of any size for visitors traveling to Rome from the north. Here countless pilgrims and diplomats ate, shopped for supplies, shod their horses, and rested before the last march to the holy city.
Pilgrims also prayed at the shrine of Saint Rosa. In 1250 fifteen-year-old Rosa led an uprising of Viterbans against their conqueror, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who had invaded Italy to seize territory from his enemy, the pope. Two years later Rosa died in a cell in her father’s house, worn out by penance and bodily mortification, and, it was said, performed many miracles after her death. Each year on the eve of her feast day, September 4, her statue was carried through Viterbo in an elaborate procession that visited seven churches and ended at her tomb. It was a festival that lasted for several days, involving the entire town and numerous visitors, and as a child Olimpia must have observed or participated in it. Perhaps Olimpia, realizing her own battle was looming, contemplated the audacious courage of a fifteen-year-old girl standing up to a warrior emperor.
When Olimpia was eight, Viterbo buzzed with scandalous news from Rome, fifty miles to the south. On September 11, 1599, the twenty-two-year-old noblewoman Beatrice Cenci was beheaded for playing a role in the murder of her violent father, who, it was whispered, had sexually abused her. Also executed were her mother and two brothers. A year earlier, the body of Francesco Cenci had been found at the foot of a castle cliff, his head smashed in. Aware of Francesco’s brutal nature and the hatred his family bore him, authorities immediately suspected this was no accidental fall, but rather murder. And indeed, under torture the brothers admitted that the family had clobbered him and thrown him off the cliff.
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 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 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, Jesus 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 honorably 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 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 Jerusalem.
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.
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 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 virginity, 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, nodded their assent through tears, knowing their fathers were waiting outside the door with a big stick. But Sforza Maidalchini knew that the fearless Olimpia could not be badgered or beaten into submission. She had to be handled carefully.
It is likely that he started off in a friendly, persuasive tone, letting her know that their family’s future depended on her. The brother whom she loved, who was by now married and a father, depended on her. Her sisters had obeyed, and Olimpia, too, must obey. Her family had loved her and cherished her, and now she must make a sacrifice for them. She would be well cared for in the convent. The family would visit her often.
Perhaps Olimpia found strength in the fact that four hundred years earlier another fifteen-year-old Viterban girl, Saint Rosa, had defied an emperor, and Sforza was no emperor. Absolutely not, Olimpia told her father. No convent for me.
Maybe cajolery would work. Sforza instructed Olimpia’s aunt, the abbess of Saint Dominic, to persuade her. For a girl of Olimpia’s strong personality and love of financial affairs, a convent offered the only path to a management position, Aunt Giulia explained. Olimpia could eventually become abbess herself, running the convent and its fields, farms, and orchards, administering justice and punishment to the nuns, dealing with the local bishop.
Using the small dowries the new nuns brought with them, the abbess made loans to trade guilds and private individuals, accruing annual interest, and bought rental properties, which she administered. The abbess invested in the monti, state-issued bonds with a guaranteed fixed income. A good head for business was required for the exalted position of abbess, and Olimpia, with her leadership skills, her abacus brain, and her financial genius, would, without doubt, make a magnificent one. She declined the offer.
When her aunt bemoaned the dishonor that would taint the Maidalchini family if Olimpia married beneath her, the girl replied firmly, “Lady Aunt, it is better that I should lose my family than my body should burn.”7 Olimpia was probably referring to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, in which he declared, “It is better to marry than to burn with passion.”
By now Sforza had had enough. Olimpia’s refusal was becoming a very public humiliation. Everyone in Viterbo knew he wanted her to join her sisters in Saint Dominic. Everyone also knew that his daughter was making him look like a fool.
We can imagine that one day Sforza has a servant call her into his sitting room. She finds him there with thunder on his brow, the grim paterfamilias, sitting in his large wooden chair, high-backed with thick arms. He begins yelling at her that she is only a girl, that she has no right to say anything about her own future. That this is a man’s world, where men rule, and she will obey, not instruct. That the only place for a girl like her is the convent. He rises, towering over her, his angry words melting into a blur as the blood throbs in her ears.
And Olimpia, short and slender at fifteen, a mere slip of a girl, stands before him, tiny and defenseless. She gets smaller and smaller, shrinking beneath the verbal blows, the insults, and the threats. And as she shrinks, something inside her hardens. Her father, the one man who was supposed to love and protect her, is betraying her in the worst way possible. She will never forgive him. She will never forget. And she will find a way to wreak her revenge.
While Beatrice Cenci had murdered her tyrannical father, Olimpia Maidalchini would feel far greater pleasure in humiliating hers, in wounding him right where it would hurt the most, by shattering his reputation in Viterbo. There was the added advantage that a girl would not be beheaded for humiliating her father. Olimpia would bide her time and find a way to pay him back.
Undeterred by her latest refusal, Sforza came up with another idea. He put a young Augustinian confessor at Olimpia’s side all her waking hours to convince her to submit to the paternal will. The man was highly regarded by the Viterban community for his patience and adherence to strict Catholic doctrine. Perhaps this likable priest, with his persuasive manner of speaking and his extensive knowledge of biblical precepts, could wear down the stubborn girl.
Olimpia listened silently to the priest’s interminable harangues, one of which was most likely a sermon on “Honor thy father and mother.” Through narrowed eyes, she must have seen the priest as her deadly enemy, in league with Sforza, the two of them trying to bury her alive. Well, she would pay them both back. One day Olimpia secretly took out her quill, her ink, and a piece of paper, and scratched a letter to the bishop of Viterbo, Gerolamo Matteucci.
It was Olimpia’s good fortune that Bishop Matteucci was a strict churchman, described in the Bishops and Dioceses of Viterbo as “occupying himself in church business with perhaps too much severity.”8 He had sent several colleagues into exile for minor infractions, to the loud protests of the Viterban community. Such a stickler for the rules would not allow Sforza to disobey the Council of Trent with a wink and a shrug.
Sforza Maidalchini, she wrote, was trying to immure her in a convent without her consent, going willfully and knowingly against the rulings of the holy Council of Trent. And, for good measure, to further humiliate Sforza and punish the nagging priest, she added that the priest had tried to sexually molest her.
Perhaps Olimpia snuck out of the house and scurried across town to the bishop’s palace, knocked loudly, and handed her letter to his butler. As she must have suspected, her accusation had the effect of a bomb exploding. Bishop Matteucci forwarded Olimpia’s complaint to the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition in Rome. The priest was taken into custody, hauled up before the tribunal for crimes damaging to Christian morality, found guilty, and imprisoned for six months on bread and water, his career ruined. And the furious bishop forbade Olimpia’s father to force her into a convent.
And so Olimpia had freed herself from the awful fate that loomed before her. But at what cost to herself and the Maidalchini family? As she passed in the street, people whispered, elbowed one another, and laughed. Many citizens of Viterbo felt she had made up the molestation story to get out of the convent, ruining the career of an innocent priest who had been quite popular with his parishioners. A rebellious, vicious girl, they said. Others felt she was telling the truth, that she was the innocent victim of a lecherous cleric, and everyone knew there were plenty of them.
But whether the Maidalchini girl was guilty or innocent, the scandal left an indelible stain on her reputation. On the surface at least, she didn’t seem to care. She had accomplished many things with that letter, and indeed, she could be proud of herself. She had escaped the convent, humiliated her father, and punished the priest. She had carefully drawn her bow, aimed her arrow, and let it fly. It had hit its mark with deadly precision, punishing those who had hurt her.
Olimpia walked through town with her head held high, as she always would when under fire. As with many strong people, Olimpia never showed the cracks in her armor. She grieved secretly and put on a brave face to the world so no one would ever have the satisfaction of seeing her cry. Years later, when life’s vicissitudes once more hit her brutally, publicly, when people threw stones at her in the street and spat on her, Olimpia was known to shrug and quote an old Italian saying. “I am like a beaten horse,” she would say. “The beatings just make my coat glossier.”9
Over time Olimpia’s thirst for revenge and her stony face would cause the world to believe she was coldhearted. Indeed, it is a common mistake to think that those with strong leadership qualities never shed a tear in grinding sorrow, that they never feel the throbbing pain of a broken heart, that betrayal does not cut them as deeply as it does the easygoing. In fact, the opposite is usually true. Those who dominate, given their quick intelligence and high expectations, often feel the blow more keenly, suffer more cruelly, cry more bitterly.
And the fact that Olimpia’s revenge was always so calculated, so deadly, was proof of how much she truly did care, of how much she had loved and hoped, of how deeply she felt betrayed. Those who had caused her bitter pain would suffer bitter pain themselves. It was, after all, only fair.
With the priest scandal, Olimpia had learned a valuable lesson that she would never forget. She had learned that she, a weak female, had the strength to break authority—the authority of the church, of the family, of society in general. And her tools in tearing down authority were lies, manipulation, and outright resistance. Only with these tools could she balance the handicap of being female. Given the cruelty men were always imposing on women, she must have viewed these weapons as permissible in her fight against injustice, in her right to protect herself.
Sforza, who had over the course of decades so carefully crafted his standing in the community, was devastated. The bishop was furious at him. The Holy Roman Inquisition frowned upon him. He had escaped excommunication by the skin of his teeth. His neighbors and business contacts either pitied him or ridiculed him behind his back. Sforza’s well-intentioned efforts to protect his family had backfired disastrously. Given the magnitude of his disgrace, maybe Sforza was no longer up-and-coming. Maybe now he was down-and-going. And it was all Olimpia’s fault.
There was another problem in addition to his damaged reputation, and this was a truly perplexing predicament. Olimpia had seen to it that a convent was out of the question. And it was unthinkable for a grown woman to live unmarried either with her parents or by herself. Yet whatever chance Sforza had had of finding a decent husband for her had surely vanished in the wake of the priest scandal. At this point, Sforza probably didn’t possess enough money to persuade a man to take the scandalous Olimpia off his hands.
Who would want to marry her now? What on earth was he going to do with Olimpia?
But Olimpia knew she would find someone decent to marry her. She would have money, status, and power, and then no one would ever try to stuff her into a convent again. To prevent men from dominating her, she would dominate men. To prevent men from hurting other women, she would take the poor, the outcast, and the powerless of her own sex under her wing. And all those who were foolish enough to stand in her way would feel her wrath.
It was, after all, only fair.