Renaissance Woman_The Life of Vittoria Colonna

by Ramie Targoff

  When the hostilities broke out between Ascanio and Paul, Vittoria was quickly identified on multiple fronts as the person most likely to resolve the conflict. As her friend Gasparo Contarini, a distant relative of Francesco Contarini’s and a strong supporter of the pope, wrote to his fellow cardinal Reginald Pole:

  It was greatly troubling to me that Ascanio Colonna acted so rashly and imprudently against the Pontiff; I am indeed exceedingly pained by the partiality of his sister the most Illustrious Marchesa, for whom I will do very much, as you know. The emperor can scarcely bear it and damns that man’s actions exceedingly; he is, however, about to move forward with an arrangement between the Pontiff and himself … You will please ask the Marchesa as strongly as possible in my name, knowing that she is to be solicited most honorably with a preliminary statement from me, to do all she can to settle this commotion, for which a great loss will be visited upon her brother, if he won’t accept it willingly, and is forced to do so all the same.

  Letters began to pour into the convent of San Silvestro in Capite, where Vittoria was still residing, begging her to intervene. Within weeks, she had become the de facto negotiator for the Colonna family.

  “Ask the Marchesa.” It is truly extraordinary that a woman who had no formal role became such a crucial figure in this political battle. Women did not officially serve as diplomats during this period, and Vittoria had little experience handling a matter of this magnitude. But she was gifted at thinking through difficult situations—Ferrante, we will recall, turned to her for advice fifteen years earlier in his struggle with the Italian league—and in the spring of 1541, she devoted herself to finding a solution that might save her family from ruin.

  For most of the events in Vittoria’s life, there are scores of missing letters and records, and we are left to piece together what must have happened from the sources that remain. In the case of the Salt War, however, we are fortunate to have a rich set of documents. Above all, what has survived, and can be read today in the Colonna archive now in Subiaco, is the original correspondence between Vittoria and Ascanio from the first month of the conflict. Because the letters were between siblings, Vittoria wrote them all in her own rather messy hand—as with her letters to Michelangelo, they are difficult to decipher—and even addressed them herself, suggesting that no secretaries were involved. On the outside fold of one of the letters, which still has Vittoria’s (broken) seal, she scribbled, “to the Lord Ascanio, most beloved brother.” This combination of formality and intimacy seems to capture the complexity of their relationship. Given his position as head of the family, she needed to treat him with respect, but she also maintained a sisterly affection. The tone of the letters was also markedly different from that of most of Vittoria’s other correspondence, revealing qualities in her—humor, irony, even sisterly bossiness—that otherwise surfaced only rarely. Above all, Vittoria’s letters to Ascanio show her fantastic versatility. At exactly the moment in which she was so deeply engaged in her own religious and literary life in Rome, she was able to redirect her energy to her family, and concentrate on the serious threat at hand.

  What was at stake in this conflict for Vittoria that she allowed it to draw her in so completely? Nothing less, it seemed, than the reputation and fortune of the Colonna. As she said in one of her letters to Ascanio, “the house of Colonna always comes first” (“Casa Colonna sempre è la prima”). In the immediate context of the letter, she meant this as an explanation for why Pope Paul had targeted them so ruthlessly: the Colonna were, she reminded her brother, the most powerful family in Rome. But in a broader sense, the comment speaks to what we might regard as her tribalism. However independent Vittoria often seemed, and however occupied with her own interests and concerns, she was at the same time never completely detached from her family. The house of Colonna was perhaps always first.

  The letter in which Vittoria made this declaration was written in early March, and it spelled out the path she thought Ascanio should follow in the war. She made clear that she did not think he could succeed on his own, and she urged him not to take action until he secured the support of “His Majesty,” the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. “Your Lordship,” she began, adopting a very formal address in an otherwise informal letter, “should wait to make sure that everything you will do once the order from His Majesty has come, will be honored.” Vittoria was counting on the fact that Charles still felt indebted to the Colonna from their long-standing loyalty to him and his predecessors in Spain, and that he would rush to join them in battle.

  What Vittoria had not fully taken in, however, was how little Charles wanted to disrupt the precarious peace he had recently negotiated with the pope. As was so often the case among the ruling classes, a political solution had depended upon an arranged marriage: Charles had married his illegitimate daughter Margaret of Austria to Paul’s grandson Ottavio Farnese. At the time of the marriage, which took place in November 1538, Ottavio was fourteen years old and Margaret two years his senior. Despite her youth, Margaret was already a widow, having been married in 1536 to Alessandro de’ Medici, Duke of Florence. That marriage lasted a mere six months before Alessandro was murdered by a distant cousin who had lured him into a sexual encounter with his cousin’s sister.

  Like so many daughters of powerful men, Margaret was for Charles a valuable pawn: he had arranged her first marriage in order to consolidate his relations with Florence, the second to secure his relations with the pope. The fact that she was illegitimate seemed to make no difference—everyone in this marital story was illegitimate in one way or another. Margaret was the issue of Charles’s fling with a Flemish maidservant (the daughter of a carpet-maker) whom he had met during a visit to one of his chamberlains. Ottavio was the legitimate son of Pier Luigi, Pope Paul’s illegitimate son. Alessandro was said to be the illegitimate son of Lorenzo II de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino and ruler of Florence in the mid-1510s (to whom Machiavelli dedicated The Prince), but rumor had it that he was in fact the son of Lorenzo’s cousin Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici, who became Clement VII. This means that both of Margaret’s husbands may have been the offspring of popes.

  Vittoria knew very well that Charles had married his daughter to Paul’s grandson—she may even have attended the wedding—and she would have understood that the match presented an obvious obstacle to gaining the emperor’s support for Ascanio’s new war. But she seems to have counted on the fact that everyone, including Charles, was aware of how catastrophic a marriage it had turned out to be. Margaret had been strongly against marrying Ottavio in the first place, and had made her opposition clear. She had set her eyes, in fact, on Cosimo I de’ Medici for her next husband, and apparently arrived at her own wedding to Ottavio, which took place in the splendor of the Sistine Chapel, wearing her widow’s black. To violate the ritual in such a way, and in such a place, must have been an extraordinary sight, and there was good reason to think Charles and Paul might not be quite so reconciled as they had hoped.

  After the wedding, things looked no more promising. Margaret refused to live with Ottavio, whom she regarded as an immature adolescent, and resided instead in the Medici palace in Rome, which she had inherited with a life tenancy upon the death of her husband Alessandro. This palace, which today houses the Italian Senate, came to be called Palazzo Madama after Margaret herself, due to the number of titles she acquired over the course of her life: she was Margaret of Austria, then duchess of Florence, and finally, through her marriage to Ottavio, duchess of Parma and Piacenza. It became widely known, moreover, that the marriage to Ottavio took almost two full years to be consummated. As we saw with Vittoria’s uncle Guidobaldo and his wife, Elisabetta, in Urbino, there was no sense of privacy in relation to the sex lives of the ruling class: the consummation of a marriage was a matter of public interest. In this case, however, and only in this narrow respect, the outcome was ultimately happier than with the ill-fated couple in Urbino. On October 18, 1540, the long-awaited event was publicly announced, to the great satisfa
ction of both the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor.

  The extreme delicacy of Margaret and Ottavio’s marriage and its crucial importance to Charles’s foreign policy help to explain his resistance to taking Ascanio’s side several months later, when the conflict over the salt tax began. Charles was willing, and indeed eager, to help negotiate a peaceful solution, but he had no intention of committing troops to battle. This is where Vittoria got things wrong, in part because she was convinced that she had an additional winning card to play. Once again it involved a high-stakes marriage. Rumor had it that a contract was being drawn up between Pier Luigi Farnese’s daughter, Vittoria, and a member of the French royal household, thereby creating a new alliance between Pope Paul and Francis I. News of such a match was in fact disagreeable to Vittoria, who had tried the previous year to arrange a marriage between Vittoria Farnese and Ascanio’s son Fabrizio. This match had failed both because of the pope’s ambitions for his granddaughter to marry someone aligned with a powerful European court (and not simply someone from an important Roman family), and because Ascanio had been unwilling to give Fabrizio the necessary feudal properties—the male equivalent of a dowry—to make him a sufficiently appealing groom.

  Now, however, the failure of the marriage negotiations between the Farnese and Colonna families took on much greater consequence. It seems likely, in fact, that the Salt War would never have begun had the match been made. Vittoria was clearly frustrated by the entire affair, but also saw something to gain from the new engagement: she thought the pope’s secret plans for an alliance with France, which remained the emperor’s principal enemy, might motivate Charles to come to Ascanio’s aid. In the same letter to her brother in which she declared “the house of Colonna always comes first,” she wrote that “the marriage negotiations with France are concluded, and I wrote as much to his Majesty, and they say it isn’t looking good for anyone.” Presumably she wanted to convey that relations between Charles and Pope Paul might now be in jeopardy, but avoided stating it too bluntly. “From now on I won’t really be able to write too clearly,” she confided, “in the event that it may please God to ensure that our letters are not kept to us alone.” Vittoria was being spied on, or so she thought.

  What is perhaps most surprising about this communication is the fact that Vittoria might have been responsible for breaking the news of the marriage planned between the pope’s granddaughter and the French nobleman to the emperor: “I wrote,” she announced, “as much to his Majesty.” She was not, that is, an outlier in the unfolding drama, but one of its principal players. In a second letter to Ascanio written a day or two later, she confirmed that the marriage was going forward, and encouraged him once again to trust in Charles:

  I believe that things with France will soon be uncovered, whereupon one will see that his Holiness is not on your side alone, whereupon I’m quite afraid that not conventions but deceptions will result. But it is well [to remember] that you may not come up short if any possible solution can be found. I have not stopped hoping for this. Nevertheless, I would like you to write to his Majesty again … It is hard to understand this pope, but make sure that with the grace of God all is done for serving his Majesty.

  Nowhere else in her correspondence did Vittoria say anything so critical of church authority as “It is hard to understand this pope,” and nowhere else did she plot so openly against the pontiff’s interests.

  If Vittoria was far from naïve, however, about Paul—her comment that “there was no reason to have such a war over thirty cows,” for example, was followed by her reflection that the pope simply “wanted to arm with this excuse”—she did have a blind spot in relation to Charles. Perhaps she felt that Charles still owed her for the extraordinary service of Ferrante at the Battle of Pavia; perhaps she held him in a certain sense responsible for her widowhood, and thus assumed that his sense of guilt or obligation would propel him to the Colonna side. Whatever her reasons, she remained confident of Charles’s support long after the signs were abundantly clear that help was not forthcoming.

  In the spring of 1541 when the conflict broke out, Charles was in Germany, where he had convened a major conference known as the Diet of Regensburg, with the aim of restoring religious unity to all of his territories in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Although he remained in occasional contact with Vittoria during these months, he appointed his ambassador to Rome, Don Juan Fernandez Manrique II de Lara, Marquis of Aguilar, to conduct the negotiations in Rome. Aguilar communicated the pope’s demands to Vittoria, who then communicated them to Ascanio. The initial proposal that was made at the beginning of March involved the Colonna’s surrender of Nemi and Marino, with one of the pope’s presumably less valuable properties, Castro or Nepi, given to them in compensation.

  Aguilar’s proposal to surrender Nemi and Marino, however unattractive to Ascanio, was not enough for the pope, who insisted that Rocca di Papa—the third property in the region, three miles to the east of Marino and fifteen miles from Rome—should also be handed over. Rocca di Papa, a settlement of ancient origins built on the edge of the central crater of the Alban Hills, came into the hands of the church in the late twelfth century, when Pope Lucius III took possession of the town and built its fortress (it was likely at this point that the town acquired its name, which means “the Pope’s fortress”). In the early 1400s, Rocca became a property of the Orsini family before being purchased by the Colonna in 1426 for the price of ten thousand ducats. By the 1540s, as Paul well understood, its central location and well-fortified castle made it one of the Colonna’s key defensive properties. Charles, meanwhile, promised Vittoria through Aguilar that he would ultimately make sure all of the Colonna lands in discussion (Nemi, Marino, and Rocca di Papa) were returned to her family after the conflict was resolved. The transfer to the pope, he quietly assured her, would be only temporary.

  Vittoria wrote to Ascanio with all these details in a series of letters sent between March 6 and 8, 1541—the fact that she signed one of the letters “From Rome, today Sunday, at the 22nd hour” suggests both how frequently they were writing to each other and how much was happening on a daily basis, so that knowing whether the letter was written in the morning or at night made a difference. Throughout these letters, she made clear her opinion about the pope’s demands: she thought the handing over of Marino and Nemi was acceptable, but the surrendering of Rocca di Papa, even temporarily, out of the question. She also indicated to Ascanio that his responses to her were not likely to be private—as we saw earlier, she imagined their letters were being read by others—and she concluded one of the letters with the advice to “make sure to respond in a manner that will guarantee that the Marquis sees it.”

  From the back-and-forth between Vittoria and Ascanio during this negotiation, we learn a few important things. First, that Ascanio was totally dependent upon his sister’s guidance and advice. He called her, however jokingly, “mia imperatrice” (“my empress”), and declared that he would do whatever “your Ladyship advises.” Second, that Vittoria was no man’s fool, and was not going to be pushed around, even by the Holy Roman Emperor. In one of her letters to Ascanio, sent on either March 7 or 8, she added this postscript: “To the emperor I write that the agreements were impossible and that it is not his right to give [away] the Rocca, which His Majesty looked at while passing through Marino and said ‘esta es la roca de Izo’ [‘this is the Rocca of Izo’]. In writing this I believe I have done well. Take care of yourself, among other things.” Third, and finally, that Vittoria supported Ascanio’s desire not to surrender the family lands, and therefore however much she hated the idea of war, she ultimately backed his decision to take up arms.

  All of this returns us to the convent of San Paolo in Orvieto, where Vittoria arrived on March 17, accompanied by two maidservants and two male valets, following her failure to reach an agreement over Rocca di Papa. Where to go had in fact been a difficult question. She obviously could not stay in Marino or one of the other Colonna feuds in the Caste
lli Romani, since this was exactly where the battles were being waged. She had the option of joining her sister-in-law, Giovanna, at the Ischia castle, but the prospect of being so far away probably did not appeal to her. Orvieto, by contrast, sixty miles from Rome, was close enough that she could return should Ascanio need her, but far enough to feel safely removed. The specific choice was also strategic: the city had long been a papal stronghold—we will recall that Clement fled there after the Sack of Rome, and called it “our city.” Orvieto also had close ties to Pope Paul, whose family had been among its ruling class for several centuries. In her decision to stay there during the months of the war, Vittoria sent Paul a clear message that she remained, in effect, his subject. This was a wise decision on her part, given how high the stakes actually were. At the end of the war, Ascanio was excommunicated, but Vittoria remained in the fold of the church.

  Vittoria’s arrival in Orvieto was unexpected, and she was not at first received with what Shakespeare wonderfully described in King Lear as the “ceremonious affection” to which a king—or an illustrious noblewoman—might be accustomed. But the elite of the city quickly made up for their initial lack of pomp. Two days after her arrival, a meeting between the governor and the city’s ruling men was held to discuss how they should acknowledge her presence. The minutes from this meeting have been preserved in Orvieto’s archive, and they indicate that the group made the unanimous decision that given Vittoria’s status and her relations with the pope, an official delegation should visit her at the convent immediately. In addition to offering her their services, they agreed they should bestow upon her elaborate gifts of food worth ten florins. (An ordinary mason in Rome would earn at most thirty florins a year, so this was a significant sum.) The abstemious Vittoria, who had already begun what ultimately became an obsessive regimen of fasting, received four pairs of chickens, thirty pounds of fish, and fourteen and a half pounds of sweetmeats and marzipan. We can imagine the joy of the sisters when these offerings arrived at San Paolo’s gates—who knows when they had last received such a bounty.