Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (22 page)

One day in contempt of Catholic faith [a Jewish man] entered a whore’s room near the Rialto and began to have intercourse with her, putting his member in her. But the other prostitutes outside, knowing that he was a Jew when he entered, called out saying this whore has a Jew in her room. The said whore then pulled away rapidly, not allowing the Jew to expel or project his semen.

Prostitutes in most cities were compelled to distinguish themselves from respectable women. In Paris and Avignon, they were required to put red shoulder knots on their dresses. Leipzig demanded that its prostitutes wear yellow cloaks trimmed in blue, while other cities prescribed cloaks and caps of other colors. In Milan, anyone meeting an illegally clad strumpet had the right to strip her on the spot. In some French cities, prostitutes had their improper clothing confiscated along with their jewelry and sold by local constables, who kept part of the proceeds. The same was true in London, where prostitutes were forbidden from dressing like “good and noble dames and damsels,” and laws specifically barred “common lewd women” from wearing fur or “noble lining.” The sheriff was charged with confiscating all such colored hoods or fur.

Prostitutes working in official brothels lived better than streetwalkers, but had few legal rights. In Mantua, a man turned down by his regular prostitute tried to force himself on her. Could she sue him for attempted rape? No, the jurists held. By putting up her body for sale, she was incapable of ever being raped. In another case, a customer broke down a prostitute’s front door to get to her. Behind him came a band of thieves, who stole her furniture. Was the door-breaker responsible for the theft? No, again. His lust justified the break-in, the judges said, and he could not be held responsible for what others did afterward. Still, a prostitute had the right to demand and keep a reasonable wage for her services—but only if she was honest about what she was selling. If she made herself up to appear younger or more beautiful than she actually was, she was only allowed to charge what she was really worth; the customer kept the difference. If the customer was crafty enough to get the prostitute to service him and then leave without paying, she was out of luck: The courts would not listen to her claim.
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Money was never the key component of harlotry under the law. Rather, a prostitute was usually defined merely as a promiscuous woman available for the pleasures of many men. The question was: How many men? Some authorities said five lovers sufficed, others as few as two or as many as twenty thousand. Whatever the variations in local law or custom, there was no distinction between a woman whose virtue was for sale and one who was merely easy to get. Both of them had the same vulnerable legal and social status.

IT IS NO surprise that a great many nuns, especially those who had been forced into the convent, never made good on their vows of chastity. Saint Boniface complained as early as the seventh century that nuns making pilgrimages to Rome often ended up working in roadside brothels. The question arose as to what to do with the nun-prostitute’s earnings. In the mid-fifteenth century, Franciscus de Platea instituted a kind of shop rule, holding that nun-prostitutes should remit their fees to their convents, but also that convents could not keep the money for themselves. Rather, they were told to use it to support pious causes. Far more numerous were nuns who had sex for the fun of it. Like other unmarried, sexually active women, they were technically prostitutes. When the French theologian Jean Gerson complained that “cloisters of nuns have become as it were brothels of harlots,” he meant to say that the nuns were entertaining great numbers of visitors, not that they were making money. The Swiss preacher Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg proclaimed in the Strasbourg Cathedral that “he would rather his sister should become a prostitute than that she should be thrust into a nunnery of lax life.” By this he was asserting that a brothel was in fact a better choice than a convent.

THE JEW AND THE DEVIL

Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Jew was considered an agent of Satan, a sexual deviant and a confederate of the goat, an animal associated with sexual incontinence. Sex with Jews was almost always tightly restricted and sometimes punishable with death.
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Venetian convents served as holding pens for upper-class girls who had either got themselves into trouble or whose families couldn’t yet bankroll their dowries. Therefore, many educated, sexually mature young women donned nun’s habits that they planned to remove as soon as the opportunity for sex arose. The result was a collection of convents that must have been rather stimulating places. No fewer than thirty-three Venetian convents faced criminal prosecution in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for illegal sexual activity. Most notorious was the convent of Sant’Angelo di Contorta, which was populated by girls from the city’s best families and which was prosecuted fifty-two times. One of the sisters there, the infamous Liseta de Boura, was repeatedly charged, including once for serving up a young virgin to one of her lovers, until she was finally barred from the convent. Without missing a beat, she went to live with a famous courtesan and continued her affairs. Pope Sixtus IV tried to close the place down in 1474, but it stayed open without authorization and generated even more trouble. Finally, it was converted into a storehouse for gunpowder and, in 1589, blew up. No trace of the place exists.

Were Sister Liseta and her ilk prostitutes? Yes, but as nuns they still required special treatment. They were subject to the jurisdiction of church courts only. The records of Venice’s ecclesiastical tribunals from this period are lost, but it seems the sisters were not treated harshly. By contrast, the nuns’ lovers were tried by the city’s secular tribunals, which were prone to handing out extreme punishments. The accusations against the men often included the charge of adultery, in which the aggrieved husband was Jesus Christ himself. In 1395, Antonio Vianaro was prosecuted for entering the convent of Santa Croce several times to sleep with Sister Ursia Tressa in her cell. He was formally accused of “not considering how much injury he caused the Highest Creator by violating the bride of Jesus Christ” and also of “committing wicked incest, fornication, adultery, and sacrilege, [and] not keeping God before his eyes.” In this case, Christ was put in the same position as any other cuckolded husband. The court took on the responsibility of defending his honor, and Vianaro was put in jail for two years.

With divine manhood on the line, there was little room for mercy in punishing men who slept with nuns. Still, the courts were sometimes ready to waive the punishments. In one case, a young nun named Polisena Cavatorta was wooed in the convent by the noble Giovanni Valier. After several moonlit walks in the garden and proposals of marriage, they finally made love. The affair continued, and soon their baby boy was born at the convent. All would have proceeded without incident had Valier not convinced the nun to run away with him; he was sentenced to two years in jail and a fine, but the court said the sentence would be ignored if he gave her a thousand-ducat dowry and made her his wife. The record ends there, but it seems reasonable to assume that love won the day, and that the honor of God was disregarded.
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SODOMY, JEWS, AND SHARED BREAD: SEXUAL DEVIANCE AND GAY UNIONS

Medieval laws governing sodomy were as irrational as sexual desire itself. Depending on where they took place, the same sex acts could bring death at the stake or be overlooked entirely. At the same time homosexuals were being hunted down and killed, same-gender couples were living together under one roof after publicly pledging their lifelong commitment to each other. The fates of people who preferred their own gender (or animals, with which homosexuals were often equated) were often ill-defined, but they were also never easy.

The harsh measures against homosexual behavior prescribed by Emperor Justinian were neither effective nor uniformly applied, and with the collapse of the Western Empire, Roman law lost much of its force anyway. What remained were patchworks of local laws and religious doctrines that, taken together, reflected a malignant toleration of same-gender sex: Nowhere approved and everywhere considered sinful, it was nonetheless only sporadically punished.

The pivotal questions regarding sodomy concerned who was hurt by it and whether or not the damage could be repaired. Was the urge toward “unnatural” sex a purely individual failing and therefore a threat only to the souls of the sodomites themselves? If so, could the sin be forgiven if they repented? Or was sodomy an offense against God so bad that hellfire would fall upon everyone unless sodomites were wiped out? Both beliefs existed simultaneously, although people were more ready to forgive sodomy before the turn of the millennium than afterward, when same-gender sex and bestiality came to be viewed as major crimes deserving of cruel punishments.

THE BELIEF THAT homosexuality could provoke famine, pestilence, and earthquakes remained strong wherever people used the Bible for moral guidance. The book of Leviticus, we will recall, declared that men who lie with men “as women” pollute the land and must be put to death lest they provoke God to vomit everyone out. Justinian had that belief clear in his mind when he suppressed homosexual activity, but even he believed that homosexuals could be forgiven if they would “submit themselves to God” and “report their disease” to a priest. The penitential handbooks framed homosexual sex as a terrible mistake, but one that could be fixed with prayer and fasting. A man might incur a fifteen-year punitive diet of bread and water for having sex with another man (more than that if fellatio was involved), but once the price was paid the offender’s moral slate was wiped clean. Nothing in the penitentials demanded that homosexuals be punished to save the community.

That changed drastically from approximately the twelfth century. As Crusade after failed Crusade highlighted the threatening military power of the Arab Muslims, and as plague after plague beat down the European population, the terrified people of Christendom looked for scapegoats and found them in Muslims, Jews, and witches. An array of new laws marked these groups for brutal treatment. Each was routinely accused of denying God, working to harm Christian society, and having homosexual sex.

The battles against the Muslims in the Holy Land and in Iberia generated a demonology that linked Islam with sexual excess and especially homosexuality. Muhammad was said to have introduced sodomy to the Arabs back in the seventh century and got them hooked on it. Four hundred years later, the First Crusade began after a letter purportedly appeared from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos urging the Christian kingdoms of Europe to save the Holy Land from the perverted rule of the Muslims. The appeal, which has since been identified as a fake, emphasized that Muslims were sodomizing “men of every age and rank” and had even killed a bishop in the course of raping him. This kind of libel continued throughout the Middle Ages, when Islam became synonymous in the West with deviant sexual practices.

Even Christians who fought Muslims were accused of acquiring “effeminate” ways, as the Knights Templar bitterly discovered. The order was founded in Jerusalem in 1120 to defend the parts of the Holy Land that the crusaders had conquered. In short order, the riches taken by the Templars in battle, and the interest they earned in the moneylending business, made them quite wealthy. They owned a network of castles throughout the Levant and established a large base of operations in Paris called the Temple, where they resided as a quasi-sovereign power. As envy inevitably follows money, in the fourteenth century King Philip IV of France (known as Philippe le Bel, or “Philip the Fair”) turned his avaricious eye on the Templars. In 1307, after the order’s leader, Jacques de Molay, bragged of the riches buried beneath the Temple, Philip had the Templars under his control arrested and declared their property forfeited.

The charges Philip brought against the Knights Templar were calculated to spark indignation. The knights were accused of worshipping Muhammad, performing human sacrifice, stomping on the cross, and serving the devil. They were also charged with every variant of homosexual sex. “We shudder with violent horror,” said Philip in his order of arrest, “in thinking of the gravity of [the accusations].” Before crowds of eager spectators, inquisitors wrung confessions out of many accused knights, although very few confessed to sodomy. In one gruesome spectacle, more than one hundred Templars were burned at the stake simultaneously. Pope Clement V formally dissolved the order in 1312, and two years later de Molay himself was put to death. As the flames rose around him, he cursed both the king and the complicit pope, predicting that neither man would live out the year. (Both of them, in fact, died soon afterward.)