Note 46 — Chapter III

Regarding this daughter, who was born in 1428, we have some curious particulars to offer. After her father's death, she was carried to Rome, to be educated by her uncles the Colonna. There she married Alessandro Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, in 1448, an alliance rather of policy than of affection, and was received in his capital with all demonstrations of joy by her new subjects. Her husband, fully occupied with war and business, soon after set off for Lombardy: and in sooth her charms are described, even by her enthusiastic eulogists, as very homely, and little adapted to fix the roving tastes of her lord, whose dissolute and brutal conduct exceeded even the licence of that age. After patient endurance of his outrages during twelve years, she fled to the convent of Corpus Domini, of the Franciscan order of Sta. Chiara, at Pesaro, which she enriched with 7500 ducats out of her dower. That she did not leave behind all mundane tastes may be concluded from a curious inventory of paraphernalia which she took into the cloister, printed by the Abbé Olivieri from the original in her own hand, and contained in II. of our Appendix.[*B]

But even the sacred precincts of her cloister afforded to the unhappy Sueva no adequate sanctuary from her cruel husband, who, abandoning himself to a profligate connection with Pacifica, a fair damsel of Pesaro, sought by renewed persecutions to extort from his wife an entire release from his matrimonial tie. Her just complaints procured the interposition of the Colonna; but these were answered by false charges against her connubial fidelity, which, overawed by the menaces of Alessandro, that he would consign the monastery and its inmates to the flames, she tacitly admitted. Thus cut off from human succour, the afflicted lady had recourse to the support of religion, and whilst prostrated before a crucifix, her faith was reassured by the conviction that the figure upon it had turned towards her with compassionate words. For such woes the world had no asylum. The outraged wife became the spouse of Christ, by taking the final vows as Sister Serafina, and sent back to her oppressor the ring that had been the token of their ill-starred union. His restored liberty was immediately used to marry Pacifica, whom his cruelties within two years consigned to a premature tomb. Finally, repenting of his long criminal career, he sought forgiveness of Serafina, and richly endowed the convent, of which she had become abbess. After an age of peace, such as youth, and the world with its gauds, had failed to afford her, her body was deposited in the cathedral of Pesaro, where it is revered as a sacred relic, its spirit having, in 1754, received the honours of beatification, and been associated with Sta. Michelina and S. Terenzio, as a protectress of that city. I had the good fortune, in 1843, to discover in the Oliveriana Library there, and to rescue from neglect, a curious piece of furniture that had belonged to the Corpus Domini, on which were portraits of the Beata Felice who founded that monastery, and of the Abbess Serafina. They were executed in distemper, with much of the feeling of Pinturicchio, and the latter of them has been rudely but faithfully engraved for Olivieri's Life of Alessandro Sforza.