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The custom among the nobility to send their children to serve lord or lady in some princely household meant, for those children, escape from family control into a very different existence where, living in large groups within the complicated structure of a court, they might also evade control of their seniors. Their contemporaries were at home, under the watchful gaze of parents, kin and friends - all of whom would be equally involved in the choice of marriage partners for them - while pages and maids-in-waiting had many improved opportunities for acquaintance. Court life was, indeed, their sole taste of freedom before returning to their families, though not a few marriages were arranged at court, under the tutelage of lord and lady. The Ordinin et offitii, the rule book of the court at Urbino in 1511 urges the supreme duty of overseeing juvenile morals, "as befits the prince's honour and the trust of those who have confided their children to his service." The master of the pages is never to let a page go anywhere alone. Pages must walk two-and-two and "in case of suspicion are to be followed, in order that they may be reported and punished." From Pavia on 15 September 1514 Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, hastens to remind her son of the proprieties. "We have sent the girls to Mantua, and should be pleased if you would visit them now and then. But let the gentlemen you take with you be sober and decent. None of your rogues and rascals, for I do not want them near my girls." The segregation by sex and age of course included precautions against homosexual practices. The pages at Urbino were not to sleep with the valets. They were to have separate mattresses and sleep alone; "to avoid all occasion of unseemly behavior." But neither segregation nor the supervision of elders could prevent meetings and contacts, or the development of attachments which would have been more easily obstructed. Moreover these boys and girls were brought up in a literary and social climate where chivalric and troubadour tradition positively favored dalliance. They would know the Documenti d'amore of Francesco da Barberino (1309), the tale of Tristan and Isolde, the tragedy of Paola and Francesca immortalized in the Divina commedia; in a famous novella by Bandello they would find another tragedy, that of Parisina Malatesta, married at 13 to the old Marquis Niccolo d'Este and in love with her stepson Ugo. These, certainly, were among the favorites: tales of death and tales of love, set at the court and written primarily for the court to read. Excerpted from The Courts of the Italian Renaissance, Sergio Bertelli, Facts on File Publications, 1986. |