Is This Love? Same-Sex Marriages in Renaissance Rome

Is This Love? Same-Sex Marriages in Renaissance Rome

Giuseppe Marcocci

Assistant Professor of Early Modern History, University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy

Abstract • In 1578, a same-sex community that gathered in a church, performing mar-riages between men, was discovered in Rome. Documentary evidence now verifi es this story, reported by many sources, including a passage of Michel de Montaigne’s Travel Jour-nal, but which was for a long time denied by scholars. While briefl y reconstructing this aff air, this article explores the complex emotional regime surrounding the episode. In particular, it argues that those who participated in the ceremonies did so not only as an expression of aff ection for their partners, but also in an attempt to legitimize their relation-ships in a rite that imitated the Counter-Reformation sacrament of marriage. This approach challenges the predominant historiography on the birth of homosexuality and helps us to better understand the sentiments of those who were part of a same-sex community in Renaissance Rome.

Keywords • Counter-Reformation Italy, criminal justice, history of emotions, homosexuality, News from Rome, same-sex marriage

The ancient basilica of San Giovanni a Porta Latina is in a quiet corner of Rome, enclosed by the Aurelian Wall, historical gardens, and Via Latina.

Today tourists rarely visit it, while Romans know it as a church for weddings. On its offi cial website prospective couples are warned that an atmosphere of respect and sobriety must characterize the rite; photographs in the basilica after the liturgy are allowed, “but none of a romantic nature.”1 The loving couples married there today are unaware of the church’s sixteenth-century circumstances, when its interior was much more richly decorated and its sacred space was made available for a far less chaste use. The story of this circumstance is the subject of the present article.

At fi rst light on 13 August 1578, eight men were hanged on the bridge in front of Castel Sant’Angelo in the center of Rome. Their bodies were then burned at the Porta Latina, in the southeast of the Renaissance city, an un-usual place for a stake. Six of them were Spanish, one Portuguese, and an-other Slavic. Their names are reported in a selective list of condemned men in early modern Rome, published about one century ago by the liberal scholar

Historical Refl ections Volume 41, Issue 2, Summer 2015 © Berghahn Journalsdoi: 10.3167/hrrh.2015.410204 ISSN 0315-7997 (Print), ISSN 1939-2419 (Online)

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38 Historical Refl ections • Summer 2015

Domenico Orano: the Albanian boatman Battista, the Catalan Antonio de Vélez, Francisco Herrera from Toledo, Bernardino de Alfaro from Seville, Alfonso de Robles from Madrid, the Portuguese Marcos Pinto from Viana do Alentejo, Jerónimo de Paz from Toledo, and Gaspar Martín de Vitoria.2

The execution of so many people at once was exceptional. It shocked the city and remained in its memory, together with the crime for which they were convicted. Three years later, Michel de Montaigne visited Rome. On Saturday, 18 March 1581, he noted rumors still surrounding the basilica at the Porta Latina in his Travel Journal:

On my return from Saint Peter’s I met a man who informed me humorously [plesammant] of two things: that the Portuguese made their obeisance in Passion week; and then, that on this same day the Station [of the Cross] was at San Giovanni [a] Porta Latina, in which church a few years before certain Portuguese had entered into a strange brotherhood [étrange confrérie]. They married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriages, [took communion together,] read the same marriage Gospel service, and then went to bed and lived together. The Roman wits [esprits romains] said that because in the other conjunction, of male and female, this circumstance of marriage alone makes it legitimate, it had seemed to these sharp [people] [fi nes gens] that this other action would become equally legitimate if they authorized it with the ceremonies and mysteries of the church. Eight or nine Portuguese of this fi ne sect were burned.3

Montaigne’s informant makes fun of the fact that on the same day as the Portuguese crown’s obeisance to the pope, in the context of the Easter cel-ebrations, the Station of the Cross was at San Giovanni.4 Montaigne did not attend this ceremony. If he had gone to the Porta Latina, where those he called “Portuguese” were burned, perhaps he would have found a de-famatory painting that portrayed their crime and was meant to induce a sense of revulsion and horror. The painting does not exist anymore, but an anti-Spanish pamphlet published forty years after the event describes it: “Go to Rome at San Giovanni a Porta Latina. If it has not been removed since I saw it a few years ago, you will see there the painting of the history of those Spanish who dressed some young men of their nation as girls, so that they were not recognizable, and married them within that holy church, as if they were women. Because of it they suffered temporal punishments here in the fi re and now must suffer eternal ones in that of hell.”5 Montaigne’s journal provides signifi cant information about this male group—a “strange brotherhood”—and a possible explanation of the wedding rites they per-formed. Probably done soon after the execution (it is unclear exactly when), this painting confi rms the centrality of the marriages, adding further details: that a ceremony imitating the wedding liturgy took place “within that holy church,” involving male couples, half of whom dressed up “as girls.”

Marcocci • Is This Love? 39

Montaigne’s passage has been accessible to historians since the Travel Journal was fi rst published in 1774. Yet the source was never cross-refer-enced with Orano’s list of the condemned. The exception here is the Cath-olic historian Ludwig von Pastor, who knew both sources very well, but given his polemic with the liberal Orano, he avoided quoting Montaigne’s passage while suggesting that the eight men (he wrote “seven”) burned at Porta Latina were Marrano Portuguese, tried for apostasy to Judaism by the Roman Inquisition.6 Pastor cited two partially unreliable items in the hand-written newsletter Avvisi di Roma (News from Rome) dated 9 and 13 August 1578, which were originally addressed to the Duke of Urbino—who was informed about Rome in many other ways—and are now kept in the Vati-can Library. They labeled the men arrested at San Giovanni a Porta Latina as “Portuguese and Marranos,” told of a possible intervention of the Inquisition and mentioned the “number of seven” when referring to their execution. Nevertheless, the Avvisi of 9 August was explicit enough when describing the crime as a “monstrous, abominable, and nefarious vice,” an expression unequivocally relating to the sin of sodomy.7

Pastor’s misrepresentation has endured and sometimes deceived editors of Montaigne’s journal.8 Recent studies both on Montaigne and the history of same-sex relations recovered the passage from the Travel Journal but ig-nored Orano and Pastor, as well as the description of the defamatory picture. Scholars who accept the theory generally attributed to Michel Foucault that homosexuality as a sexual sensibility and identity was a social and cultural construct originating in nineteenth-century Europe have rejected Mon-taigne’s account, while those who accept the existence of essential features of homosexuality across time and space have doubted the nature of the rites Montaigne called “marriages.”9

This traditional literature on the Roman episode is undermined by newly discovered archival evidence pertaining to the arrest of the men burned at the stake, which I presented in an article published in 2010.10 Three fragmentary records describe the case against eleven men arrested on 20 July 1578, including the eight executed three weeks later.11 This is all that survives of the rapid legal action taken by the Governor’s Crimi-nal Court of Rome.12 The fragments are not part of the original trials, at least if we follow the News from Rome dated 16 August 1578, contained in the collection of information originally addressed to the powerful Fugger family: “the Spanish were executed, their bodies and the records of their trials being burned in the place where they were arrested in order to erase any memory of them.”13 Hence, the three fragments were probably com-plementary copies kept for judicial use, perhaps of the Procurator Fiscal. At some point, they might have been partially and selectively destroyed, where questionings under torture had been transcribed.14 Indeed, that of San Giovanni is the fi rst known case of same-sex marriages documented in substantial archive materials.


News, Gossip, and Contrasting Emotions

This article will not reconstruct the legal action against the community of San Giovanni a Porta Latina, beyond noting that there is no information about the fi rst week after the arrests and that the defense line of the accused men, admitting carnal relations but denying marriage, was weakened by contradictions, one-to-one confrontations, and torture. Three of the eleven arrested, namely, the Portuguese Francisco Ferreira, the Spaniard Cristóbal López, and Friar Juan Bautista de Caviedes, escaped death by actively collab-orating with the Criminal Court’s judge, Paolo Bruno.

Legal records need handling with great care, partly because we lack any source for the cause of the arrests and the fi rst denunciation, if there was one. We do not know if there was gossip about what was happening at San Giovanni, or a leak of information from members of the group that fre-quented the basilica, which had become an emotional refuge that protected same-sex couples.15 Theories that connected sodomy with marriage were rare, but they existed at the time, as treatises by the Spanish jurist Antonio Gómez or the canon lawyer Simone Majoli show. In any case, the explana-tion they proposed was very different from the case of San Giovanni, since they related only to antiquity, or to hermaphroditism.16

The relative paucity of sources makes it more diffi cult to fully understand this complex episode. Judicial coercion distorts the voices of the members of the same-sex “emotional community” of San Giovanni, which reaches us only through fragmentary legal records.17 Apart from Judge Bruno’s questions, we have no direct evidence of how the Roman authorities, from Pope Gregory XIII down, discussed the disquieting discovery of the celebration of unnatural mar-riages within the sacred precincts of a church. We only have a handful of the newsletters News from Rome, echoing rumors concerning this event. Contrast-ing attitudes emerge even in the earliest document of this kind, the Avvisi of 30 July, included in a collection from the Vatican Library: “Many Portuguese and Marranos, who went voluntarily to the sacred font, were arrested in a vineyard outside Porta Latina. They had with them some young countrymen and, after excessively eating and drinking, when inebriated, out of some unprecedented heathenism [gentilità], they got married and went to bed together. Since His Holiness is most angry, there is reason to think they will be burned alive.”18

This sensationalist description probably gave rise to the erroneous belief that the men involved in the case of San Giovanni were Marrano Portu-guese, making Pastor’s misrepresentation easier. In this passage, the subver-sive acts of the male group were entirely attributed to physical sensuality: the causal relation between inebriation and marriage emphasized the usual link between food and drink on the one hand, and sex on the other. Their sin was so serious that they were to be burned alive.

This extract can be contrasted with the fi rst narrative of the arrest avail-able in the surviving fragments of the legal records—that by the young her-mit Jerónimo de Paz in his deposition dated 28 July:


Sir, I want to tell you the truth, which is that after Aguilar, Robles, and other companions, including Pinto, had made a deal that Vitoria would marry Brother Giuseppe, who lives at San Giuliano, Robles promised to pay for the banquet on the wedding day, which was planned for the following Sunday, that is when we were arrested. It is true that the marriage was not per-formed, because Brother Giuseppe fell ill and stayed at the Hospital of San Giovanni in Laterano, but we had the banquet, or better Robles had brought things for it, that is chicken, pullet, meat, cheese, and similar things.19

With minimal differences, all of the other depositions confi rmed this picture. For instance, on 30 July, the boatman Battista told Judge Bruno: “Eight days before last Sunday, while I was in the rooms of San Giovanni a Porta Latina and there were with me Pinto and another beardless young boy whose name I do not know, and I was boiling the water on the fi re in order to skin some pullets, Pinto swept into the house and that young boy was sitting on a seat, guards arrived and arrested all of us.”20 A third example provides fur-ther details, which also contradict the quoted Avvisi of 30 July. It is Antonio Vélez’s report of a lunch in Pinto’s rooms: “a big man, who was there at San Giovanni with Pinto and I think is called Battista, a boatman, arrested with us, went to a vineyard where there are snails, which were cooked in Pinto’s house, and together with Pinto, Battista, and another whose name I do not know, we ate them, and I brought bread and we drank water because there was no wine, and we did not eat anything else.”21

This tension in the sources reveals how the nature of the ceremonies at San Giovanni was distorted by the circulation of news and gossip. The compilers of the News from Rome today kept at the Vatican Library helped to transform these idyllic and austere scenes almost into a Dionysian universe in which fl oods of wine, male promiscuity, and lascivious rites preceded and induced same-sex relations. In the next section, I will probe the fragmen-tary legal records in order to explore this tension in the sources. In fact, the contradictory materials relating to the marriages of San Giovanni raise many relevant questions concerning sense and sentiment, not least the much-debated issue of the birth of homosexuality.

Fragments of Same-Sex Marriages at San Giovanni a Porta Latina

The surviving records of the legal action against the community of San Giovanni provide a vivid image of its daily life, including descriptions of the pleasure or pain the men felt during their carnal relations, but the sources remain silent about any outward expression of emotion at their arrest and trial. The references to the marriages are similarly ambiguous, both because of the accused men’s line of defense and the elimination of their confessions under torture concerning these liturgies and their meaning.

On 2 August Ambassador Alessandro Tiepolo reported to the Venetian Senate that two weeks earlier Rome had seen the arrest of “eleven men


among the Portuguese and Spanish, who gathered in a church near to San Giovanni in Laterano, where they performed some ceremonies and with horrible wickedness disfi gured the holy name of marriage and married one another before going to bed together, as husband and wife.” He also added that “twenty-seven men and even more usually met” and the persons under arrest “will be burned at the stake,” as happened two weeks later.22 The am-bassador appears to have been very well-informed. He probably shared his source with the compiler of the Avvisi, which was prepared on the same day for the Fugger family:

Eleven Spaniards and a Portuguese have been imprisoned because a meet-ing was discovered that they had at San Giovanni a Porta Latina, escorted by an evil hermit. After the celebration of Mass he married them in pairs with a ring as husband and wife, involving young boys as well, whom they used most nefariously. And they confessed they had practiced such wick-edness for twelve years continuously in many parts of Italy, leaving ac-complices there. Therefore, a warrant has been issued for the arrest of the latter, while rigorous justice against the former is expected, as happened last Wednesday in the case of two money makers, who were burned at the Bridge, and that of a young boy who was seventeen years old, dismembered in Borgo, because he had killed a man for 18 giulii.23

The reference to this practice in “many parts of Italy” is something I will re-turn to shortly. For the moment, I would note the strong analogies, including the vocabulary, between these two documents—even though one stresses more the profanation of the sacrament, while the other simply describes it in detail—and suggest considering them in relation to the chronology of the surviving fragments of the legal records. The ambassador’s dispatch and the Avvisi of 2 August come after the fi rst evidence about the marriages in the trial; therefore, it is on this evidence that we should focus, wondering to what extent rumors originating from the confessions infl uenced the descriptions of the case circulating outside the court. After all, other issues of News from Rome of the same day, almost certainly originating from the same source as the previous ones, reported that the arrested men “confessed all,” showing that the compilers were well-informed about the progress of the legal action.24

Let us turn again to the trial records. To put it bluntly, did Judge Bruno ask the accused about any marriage before Robles said, during a question-ing dated before 28 July, that he had introduced Friar Caviedes to López as follows: “Cristobal, I want you to take Father Bautista as your wife and that you get married one to another”?25 This part of the trial is lost, as well as the confession under torture made by Bernardino de Alfaro on 27 July, after a dramatic one-to-one confrontation with the Portuguese Ferreira. The day after, Alfaro confi rmed his deposition, including that on “the Sunday, on which we were arrested … , we were to have performed the marriage that was expected between Vitoria and Giuseppe.”26 After these confessions, questions about the meaning of the marriages reoccurred frequently. What


the sources do not make clear is if the reference to same-sex marriages emerged for the fi rst time in the trial, or was already circulating before the arrests at San Giovanni on 20 July.

Most of the accused gave evasive answers, as did Caviedes until he was forced to admit that “I remember Robles saying those words, that is ‘Cris-tobal I want you to marry Friar Bautista,’ but I thought and still think that he was making fun of me, so I laughed, since I did not know what marriage this was, and Cristobal laughed too.”27 A few days later, on 31 July, the Portuguese Marcos Pinto—the leader of the group—confessed before the judge: “[O]nce I went to Madonna Anna’s house, where I found Robles and Cristobal, and I told Robles I wanted to marry Cristobal.” At this stage of the trial, the judge was persuaded that this wedding rite was a sort of initia-tion to enter the “school” or “society,” as he defi ned the community of San Giovanni. Pinto dismissed such an interpretation: “[T]hese marriages were performed just when one had sex with another and there were no other cer-emonies.” Signifi cantly, Pinto’s questioning is not complete, and this could be a sign that the judge delved deeper into the matter, perhaps by means of torture.28

According to Pinto’s confession, the marriage had no special meaning or sentiment, but was just a preparatory rite before entering the universe of forbidden sex. Only one external source seems to confi rm this interpre-tation, the quoted Avvisi of 30 July, which states sharply that “they got mar-ried and went to bed together.” This series of newsletters, now kept at the Vatican Library, is not as precise as that for the Fugger family (who had not so many other ways to be informed about Rome), where this direct link between marriage and consummation does not appear, either in Tiepolo’s dispatch, or in the description of the defamatory painting at Porta Latina. Montaigne connected the wedding rite with consummation, but added the bond’s strength: “[They] went to bed and lived together.”

Interestingly, the distance between Judge Bruno’s interpretation and Pinto’s explanation corresponds to the shift in the position of Gary Fergu-son, the scholar who has studied this episode most recently. In his fi rst essay, published in 2008, Ferguson stressed that “it would seem improbable that the celebration described would have been a marriage ceremony, and we should allow the probability that the story recounted by Montaigne was embellished in the course of time as it was passed from mouth to mouth.” Following Alan Bray’s analysis about premodern ceremonies of friend-ship, Ferguson suggested that the rites performed at San Giovanni should be understood within the tradition of sworn male brotherhood—think of the words “school” or “society,” used by Judge Bruno, or of Montaigne’s “strange brotherhood”—which were sometimes a cover for same-sex rela-tions.29 Later, in his most recent work on this case, with reference to my research, Ferguson remarks that, “despite the discovery of their wills and the fragments of court records, the men’s story retains many areas of shadow,” and that “questions necessarily remain unanswered concerning the men’s


ideas of themselves as gendered and sexual subjects.” However, he spec-ulates that the Roman marriages might have been a kind of “parody of a wedding ceremony, followed by sexual activities.”30

Of course, parody can also be serious, but the choice of a wedding in a church, under the sacred images of the nave depicting the Last Judgment and other biblical episodes, is hard to consider fortuitous at the time of the Count-er-Reformation. Evidently, these ceremonies implied some level of emotional investment and the sense of the risk such a subversive action involved.

Rites of Love in a Roman Basilica?

Even though Sunday Mass was regularly celebrated at San Giovanni and the local male community included clergymen, obviously the wedding liturgy they observed was not valid for the Catholic Church. But this does not mean that Roman hierarchies, or high prelates, might not have been implicated in the case. The church was jurisdictionally dependent on the chapter of the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, but under the protection of Titu-lar Cardinal Giovanni Girolamo Albani—who also restored and embellished it with an altarpiece by Federico Zuccari (c. 1570), representing St. John’s martyrdom in the vat of boiling oil. Despite its peripheral location then, San Giovanni would hardly have hosted such a community without some ecclesiastical backing.31 We have no clear evidence, but a passage from the trial shows that, while serving a gentleman from the Spanish court, Friar Caviedes had been initiated into same-sex love in the rooms of the palace of Cardinal Vincenzo Giustiniani.32 In addition, since 1565 the man responsible for the religious offi ces at San Giovanni was the Austrian Cardinal Mark Sittich von Altemps—a nobleman little interested in spiritual affairs whose palace was to host one of the most signifi cant cases of sodomy in the last decade of the century.33

Pinto and Robles led the same-sex community of San Giovanni. The former also had a role in the offi cial organization of the church: he might have been its “custodian,” a title attributed to the man who took care of the area, theoretically assisting a canon (if any) delegated by the chapter of the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, and was responsible for its cleaning and upkeep.34 Pinto had been living there at least since 1575. However, we should not disregard the fact that, according to the aforementioned Avvisi of 2 August, the men involved in the trial confessed that marriages had been performed “for twelve years continuously.” This might allow us to backdate the origin of this “emotional community” to 1566, that is, the year after Al-temps became archpriest of San Giovanni, even though the evidence does not positively indicate the location of their activities. However, Pinto and his associates seem to have infi ltrated and carried out the duties of the staff in the area. We are also informed of the constant presence of young beard-less hermits, wearing dark clothes, whose role as custodian’s assistants is


also described in the regulations for San Giovanni.35 This explains how the church could have been accessible to a small group of lowly Spaniards and Portuguese, who were among those Thomas Dandelet described as serving in the households, driving coaches, and providing a variety of other services in the Spanish Rome of the age of Philip II.36 A short quotation from a depo-sition by Alfaro shows to what extent Pinto had transformed that secluded church into a safe haven for same-sex love: “With respect to Pinto in truth many things can be said, that he held that place to bugger and that he bug-gered many young men there and I think that he also buggered some Jews who frequented that place and he tried to bugger all those who ended up at San Giovanni, where he lives and makes there the art and profession of buggery.”37

A few days later, Pinto rejected the dangerous allegation about the Jews—“beardless Jews”, Judge Bruno specifi ed—that might have reinforced the gossip describing the group of San Giovanni as Marrano Portuguese. However, he admitted that “it is true that sometimes, on Saturday, they came to San Giovanni.”38 The reference to Shabbat seems to suggest that the re-lationship between the frequenting of the basilica and the subversion of re-ligious order might not have been limited to Catholicism.39 This point can help us to put the marriages in their historical context and so better explore their meaning and the emotional involvement of those who got married: was it love?

Due to the fragmentary state of the legal records, we have no direct description of the wedding rites. Yet we do know that a priest, or someone acting as a priest (in fact, a “priest shirt” was found among the hermit Paz’s personal effects), performed them in the church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina, following the regular liturgy. Each marriage involved two men—one of whom was dressed as a woman.

At least some of the members of the group had arrived in Rome for the jubilee of 1575.40 Clearly, sex was free among them. But there were also sta-ble couples whose relationships had lasted for years. Robles and the boatman Battista fi rst met in northern Europe. Their bond had endured since the mid-1560s, and twice they had been accused of sodomy and escaped the stake in Flanders.41 Others had known each other in Spain. Their common Iberian origin must have encouraged a general feeling of reciprocity and solidarity, but some relations were also surrounded by affection and jealousy. A case in point is that of the twosome of Antonio Vélez and Cristóbal Ribera, who had become attached in Milan, when they both served as soldiers in the Sforza Castle. In the trial Ribera is called Vélez’s “companion” (compagno): they ex-changed gifts and money, and when Ribera left Vélez two weeks before his arrest, after staying all night together, they separated at the Porta del Popolo, where two men that Vélez did not know were waiting for Ribera, leaving for Venice. Vélez “had become upset” and told Alfaro “he had gone to con-fession and did not want to commit this sin anymore.” This reaction struck even the judge, who questioned Vélez about the reason of his indignation.42


The San Giovanni same-sex community was divided between active and passive roles, even though there were occasional role reversals. Its members used an emotive vocabulary: the dialectical word commare indicated those who acted as women, in order to stress their passive role. Precautions and coded communication were used to protect the secrecy of the “brother-hood,” as Montaigne described it, or “school” or “society,” in the antihereti-cal language of Judge Bruno. A quotation from Alfaro’s deposition reveals a case of far-sighted mistrust:

I cannot say anything about the Portuguese Francisco Ferreira since I met him for the fi rst time on the day on which we were arrested. Indeed, one of us (I do not remember who) asked “can we speak before him[?]” and Herrera or Pinto replied “we do not think so, we should not speak before him.” They also added they considered him a respectable person, under-standing that we should not speak freely before him about our buggery, nor call those who acted as women commare, as we did among ourselves with respect to what we committed, so that Francisco did not become suspicious about our disclosure.43

Members of the community of San Giovanni were aware of the danger. According to the recent literature on religion and the senses in the context of the Catholic response to the emptying of traditional liturgy by the Ref-ormation, “all were affected to some extent by the effort to separate the sacred and the profane, to achieve a more proper or effective engagement with the divine, to reorder gender relations, and to discipline human con-duct according to new ethical standards.” Consequently, “instances of crisis, confl ict, and change may provide ideal opportunities to explore the ways in which sensation was understood, experienced, repressed, channeled or promoted.”44 The attitude of the group led by Pinto and Robles might there-fore be interpreted as an emotive reaction to the triumphant and hieratic atmosphere of Counter-Reformation Rome, also in view of the post-Trent campaign for regular marriage in church.

Those who congregated in a basilica in the presence of a priest (be he true or false) might be so sensitive to the fascination of Catholic rites that they appropriated and imitated marriage. The meaning these men attributed to their ceremonies escapes us, partly because we have very little evidence about the physical gestures and display of their emotions while performing them. Certainly, these marriages were not meant to control sexual inconti-nence, or to establish necessarily indissoluble unions. But I wonder whether the sharpness that, according to Montaigne, “Roman wits” ascribed to the community of San Giovanni came to the point that they thought that nup-tial liturgies performed in church had any spiritual validity, despite the obvi-ous absence of approval by the Catholic authorities. Did they appropriate it as a way of channeling their emotions—connected to a secret aspiration to legitimacy, not of their union, but of a kind of love—in what was a typical trend in early modern Europe?45 We should remember that these men were


devout and conscious of the sinful nature of their sexual behavior. Perhaps, they believed the inner tension they felt about their forbidden love might be resolved by the intrinsic power of sacrament: liturgy and rites were an “in-terface … between the subject and the world. As such, they could also open pathways to the divine.”46

Although we never fi nd the word “love” in the surviving sources, the emotions they showed when illicitly experiencing wedding liturgies might be seen as the display of affective attraction, perhaps one of the fi rst expres-sions of sentimental bond in the slow historical shaping of homosexuality. Marriages seem to have made newlyweds feel their unions were justifi ed, conforming their desires to the norms of Counter-Reformation society, and thus legitimating forbidden love.

Sacred Horror, Broken Bonds, and Restored Order

Whether the hypothesis of a heresy of the fl esh is correct or not, the affair of San Giovanni discloses the existence of an organized same-sex community, whose members were conscious of their actions, including gender reversal, and experienced emotional connections. This invites us to reconsider this case in the context of recent historiography about the birth of homosex-uality. Not only does this sixteenth-century Roman episode question the chronology inspired by Michel Foucault and the approach of historians who insisted that for the early modern period we should speak only of “situa-tional bisexuality,”47 it also raises doubts about the more recent theory that it was only in early eighteenth-century northern Europe that a minority of adult men emerged who, in addition to their sexual desire for males, sym-bolically identifi ed themselves with the female gender, even though they did not completely lose the characteristics attributed to their own.48

As seventeenth-century evidence from the Iberian world, analyzed by Luiz Mott, Serge Gruzinski, and Federico Garza Carvajal, has already shown, it would seem advisable to backdate this emergence, as well as to move it from northern to southern Europe and its overseas possessions.49 The story of San Giovanni is particularly relevant in this context. Not only does it force us to locate extremely early evidence of homosexual feelings in Renaissance Rome, mostly among Iberian people, but it also calls attention to the eccle-siastical milieu. A later episode of same-sex marriage in Naples, also involv-ing clergymen, confi rms a signifi cant concentration of appropriations of the sacrament—this time explicitly in the way of parody—in sixteenth-century Italy.50 In this sense, one would like to know more about the “accomplices” the men of San Giovanni had “in many parts of Italy.” For the moment, however, the only fragment of certain information we have is that the peo-ple gathered at San Giovanni on the day of the arrest “were many more,” and that “after the eight Spanish men were executed for their nefarious vice, others have been caught, among whom a hermit and the licentious


Bocadillo. Seven young boys were whipped for these offenses and others conspiring in this wickedness are awaited from Naples and Milan.”51

The “hermit” referred to might be the mysterious Aguilar, “a young beardless brother” who was not among those fi rst arrested, but had played a role of primary importance in the community of San Giovanni—perhaps to be identifi ed as the “hermit who was their priest and celebrated their wedding ceremonies,” mentioned in the Avvisi of 2 August addressed to the Grand Duke of Tuscany.52 However, at present we do not know anything more on this alleged Italian same-sex network. It seems to confi rm that the San Giovanni affair was not an isolated episode, but refl ected a more wide-spread culture that has to date eluded historians. Meanwhile, what we cer-tainly know is that their associates in Rome suffered an exceptionally harsh sentence and other collateral punishments. The little we know of the reac-tion of the pope helps to explain why. Once more, the issues of News from Rome addressing the Fugger family in Germany are the best informed, given the absolute silence of offi cial sources on this point.

Between 6 and 9 August, Gregory XIII participated in the jubilee pro-cessions and the fasting prescribed and, together with many cardinals, vis-ited the seven altars at St. Peter’s. His piety and penance openly contrasted with the licentious and sacrilegious sin committed at San Giovanni a Porta Latina. It is precisely in this context that, according to the Avvisi of 9 August, the pope—for reasons of “decency”—decided not to “carry on with the ex-aminations of the abominable and odious case of these imprisoned Spanish men, but to do due justice as soon as possible.”53 This reconstruction does not mention any hypothesis of submitting the arrested men to the Holy Of-fi ce, which, however, is referred to in another newsletter for the Duke of Ur-bino, dated the same day: “[T]hey are already sentenced to the stake, but it seems that they must be handed over to the Inquisition in order to question them as to what they feel about the Christian faith.”54 There is, however, to my knowledge no evidence about the case of San Giovanni in the Roman archives of the Holy Offi ce.

The sins of these men might also have affected the sense of honor of the most representative Spanish institution in Rome, the church of San Gia-como degli Spagnoli in Piazza Navona, where Robles and Vitoria worshipped regularly. For instance, the Avvisi of 3 September reported that from prison Bocadillo “brutally accuses full many of the Spanish nation not guilty of the nefarious vice.”55 Thus, two months after the execution of the men involved in the San Giovanni affair, on 11 October, Giasone da Monterchi from Borgo San Sepolcro was appointed chaplain of the profaned basilica, and in the fol-lowing year, before Easter, the Confraternity of the Most Holy Resurrection was created, which included people from the whole of the Iberian Peninsula who were resident in Rome.56 Its foundation perhaps became more urgent in order to reassure the shocked city of Rome and clean the name of the Spanish nation, sullied by the infamous transgressions at San Giovanni a Porta Latina.


The members of the Roman community suffered bodily the conse-quences of their actions. A late fragment of the trial shows the accused ex-hausted by torture, which made it impossible for some of them to stand up before the judge. The violence of justice also had a psychological impact, breaking the bonds of solidarity that in the past had been reinforced by the common secret they had shared. In the fi nal days of their trial these men, who had fearlessly transgressed the social order, seem alone and isolated one from another, weakened by reciprocal accusations.57

This image contrasts with the last pictures of this group provided by sources. On the morning of 13 August 1578, the brothers of the Confra-ternity of San Giovanni Decollato went to the prison of Corte Savella and took the eight condemned men into their care, in order to comfort them be-fore their execution. The registers of the Confraternity show them in a new light: those who had been connected by a forbidden love were again united through remorse and devotion. They all confessed to a priest, attended Mass, and took Communion. According to the standardized language of the docu-ments, each declared his wish “to die a good Christian.” Further details cast light on the emotive sphere too. All but Gaspar de Martín de Vitoria made a spiritual bequest, and many thought of their relatives: Vélez asked “his father and mother to do good for his soul and to forgive him for whatever he did in this world that offended them,” and Robles “said he had left in the prison a letter written in the oratory: he wants it be sent to his wife in Flanders.”58 The intense religiosity that emerges from these documents should not be reduced to simply an expression of fear before execution. In fact, it upholds much of what this article has already revealed about the attitudes of the community of San Giovanni, and the meaning of the marriages between its members.

The fi rst documented case of same-sex marriage discussed in this article presents us with a masculine group in Rome, with possible accomplices in other cities of Renaissance Italy. In the context of the Counter-Reformation, they developed the use of imitating the wedding liturgy in order to legiti-mate illicit relations involving affective attraction, which urge us to rethink the chronology and geography of the birth of homosexual love.

Notes

I would like to thank Irene Fosi, Umberto Grassi, and Paola Molino for their help and suggestions. 1. See http://www.sangiovanniaportalatina.it/Wedding_Information_Eng.htm

(accessed 10 January 2014). 2. Domenico Orano, Liberi pensatori bruciati in Roma dal XVI al XVIII secolo: Da do-

cumenti inediti dell’Archivio di Stato di Roma (Rome: Unione cooperativa editrice, 1904), 55–61.

3. Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 694, slightly corrected on the basis of Michel de Montaigne, Journal de Voyage, ed. Fausta Garavini (Paris: Gallimard, 1983),


221. It is noteworthy that Montaigne’s mention was connected to the episode of the Portuguese ambassador’s oath of obeisance to the pope on behalf of Philip II: the king of Spain inherited the crown of Portugal after a dynastic crisis following the death of King Sebastian in a battle in Morocco on 4 August 1578, a sensa-tional event that dominated the newsletters circulating across Europe in the very same days as the death sentence and execution of the eight men involved in the case of San Giovanni.

4. The Station of the Cross at San Giovanni on the Saturday after the fi fth Sunday of Lent was a tradition. See Girolamo Franzini, Le cose maravigliose De l’alma Città di Roma, Dove si tratta delle Chiese, Stationi, Indulgentie, & reliquie dei corpi santi, che sono in essa … (Venice: Pellegrino Amadori, 1565), fol. 27v.

5. Avviso di Parnaso nel quale si racconta la povertà e miseria dove è giunta la Repubblica di Venetia et il Duca di Savoia. Scritto da un curioso novellista spagnuolo. Con alcune annotationi molto importanti sopra le cose che in esso si contengono. Per Valerio Fulvio Savoiano. Il tutto tradotto dalla lingua spagnola in questa nostra italiana (Antipoli: nella Stamperia Regia, 1619), 53. All translations are by the author. The author was Giacomo Castellani, and the pamphlet, written against Francisco de Que-vedo, was published in 1618 in an unidentifi ed northern Italian locality.

6. Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes, From the Close of the Middle Ages, ed. Ralph Francis Kerr, vol. 19 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1930), 308. Pastor’s polemic with Orano must be related to the harsh controversy be-tween Catholics and liberals after the capture of Rome (1870) in the context of the process of Italian unifi cation known as the Risorgimento.

7. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Roma (hereafter BAV), Urb. Lat. 1046, fols. 289v, 296r–296v.

8. One example is Michel de Montaigne, Viaggio in Italia, preface by Guido Piovene, trans. Alberto Cento (Bari: Laterza, 1972), 196.

9. William J. Beck, “Montaigne face à l’homosexualité,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 9–10 (1982): 41–50; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 42–44; John Boswell, The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 264–265.

10. Giuseppe Marcocci, “Matrimoni omosessuali nella Roma del tardo Cinquecento: Su un passo del ‘Journal’ di Montaigne,” Quaderni storici 45, no. 133 (2010): 107–137.

11. Archivio di Stato di Roma (hereafter ASR), Tribunale Criminale del Governatore (hereafter TCG), Processi, b. 168, n. 2. An eighteenth-century note that reports the crime (“Sodomy”), the names of some accused men (“Agilar Pinto Robles”), and numerical information (“Fragment 9”) related to the order of a preceding collection indicates the section containing the fragments.

12. There is a singular lack of sources regarding the period July–August 1578 in the records kept in ASR.

13. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (hereafter ÖNB), cod. 8951 Han, fol. 516v. According to Oswald Bauer, Zeitungen von der Zeitung: Die Fuggerzeitungen (1568–1605) und das frühmoderne Nachrichtensystem (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 162–163, these Avvisi di Roma originated from the Curia; they were then collected and assembled in Venice before being sent to Germany. See also Katrin Keller and Paola Molino, Die Fuggerzeitungen in Kontext: Zeitungs Sammlungen im Alten Reich und in Italien (Vienna: Böhlau, 2015).


14. In his fi rst complete deposition, for instance, Bernardino de Alfaro confi rmed the statement he had made the day before, “after I was released from the rope”: ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 168, n. 2, fol. 552r.

15. I borrow the expression “emotional refuge” from William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2001).

16. Antonio Gómez, Opus praeclarum et Commentum super legibus Tauri … (Salamanca: Andrés de Portonariis, 1552), 295–297; Simone Majoli, De irregularitatibus et aliis canonicis impedimentis … libri quinque (Rome: Giuseppe de Angelis, 1575), 304–305.

17. The men who met at San Giovanni formed an emotional community in the sense that this expression is used by Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communi-ties in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

18. BAV, Urb. Lat. 1046, fol. 271r. I translate gentilità as heathenism, according to the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca … (Venice: Giovanni Alberti, 1612), 382.

19. ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 168, n. 2, fols. 551r–551v. It is noteworthy that the meal did not include pork.

20. Ibid., fol. 561v.21. Ibid., fol. 558r.22. Tiepolo’s dispatch is published in L’Italia alla fi ne del secolo XVI: Journal de Voyage

de Michel de Montaigne en Italie par la Suisse et l’Allemagne en 1580 et 1581, ed. Ales-sandro D’Ancona (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1895), 293.

23. ÖNB, cod. 8951 Han, fol. 508r. 24. Archivio di Stato di Firenze (hereafter ASFi), Mediceo del Principato, 3082, fol.

577r.25. ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 168, n. 2, fol. 555v.26. Ibid., fol. 552v.27. Ibid., fols. 555v–556r.28. Ibid., fol. 569r.29. Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender,

Culture (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 191–243; quotation at 231.

30. Gary Ferguson, “(Same-Sex) Marriage and the Making of Europe: Renais-sance Rome Revisited,” in What’s Queer About Europe? Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms, ed. Mireille Rosello and Sudeep Dasgupta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 27–47 and 190–195; quotations at 46 and 40, respectively.

31. Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, L’Istoria della Chiesa di S. Giovanni Avanti Porta Latina, titolo cardinalizio … (Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi, 1716), 87, 114.

32. ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 168, n. 2, fol. 556v.33. Crescimbeni, L’Istoria, 347. On the trial of the famous jurist Prospero Farinacci

for sodomy, see Niccolò Del Re, Prospero Farinacci giureconsulto romano, 1544–1618 (Rome: Fondazione Marco Besso, 1999), 22–24.

34. Crescimbeni, L’Istoria, 261–262.35. Ibid., 261.36. Thomas J. Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 1500–1700 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale

University Press, 2001), 157–159.37. ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 168, n. 2, fol. 550v.38. Ibid., fol. 569v.


39. A young Jew called Angelo Mazzone, involved in a case of sodomy in about 1575, is mentioned by Serena Di Nepi, “‘Io come madre cercava ogni strada’: Una madre ebrea e un fi glio nei guai nella Roma del Cinquecento,” Storia delle donne 3 (2007): 99–121, quotation at 106.

40. ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 168, n. 2, fols. 554r, 562r.41. Ibid., fols. 550r–550v, 563r–563v.42. Ibid., fol. 574r.43. Ibid., fol. 550r. The word commare recurs also at fols. 552v, 557r. The accused

men used frequently the expression “respectable man” (homo da bene) to indicate a man external to their community (see fols. 546r, 566r, 567v, 568r).

44. Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler, “Introduction: The Sacred and the Senses in an Age of Reform,” in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wietse de Boer and Christin Göttler (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 4.

45. James Amelang and María Tausiet, eds., Acidentes del alma: Las emociones en la Edad Moderna (Madrid: Abada, 2009).

46. De Boer and Göttler, “Introduction,” 4.47. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendship: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance

Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 122.48. Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1998).49. Luiz Mott, “Love’s Labors Lost: Five Letters from a Seventeenth Century Por-

tuguese Sodomite,” Journal of Homosexuality 16, nos. 1–2 (1989): 91–101; Serge Gruzinski, “The Ashes of Desire: Homosexuality in Mid-Seventeenth-Century New Spain,” in Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America, ed. Pete Segal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 197–214; Federico Garza Carvajal, Butterfl ies Will Burn: Persecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).

50. Giovanni Romeo, Amori proibiti: I concubini tra Chiesa e Inquisizione (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2008), 107–108.

51. ÖNB, cod. 8951 Han, fol. 522v. The original source reads “Boccadiglio,” an Ital-ianized spelling for a nickname containing a probable sexual allusion.

52. ASFi, Mediceo del Principato, 3082, fol. 577r.53. ÖNB, cod. 8951 Han, fol. 512.54. BAV, Urb. Lat. 1046, fol. 289v. Michele Mancino and Giovanni Romeo, Clero

criminale: L’onore della Chiesa e i delitti degli ecclesiastici nell’Italia della Controriforma (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2013), 150–151, take this newsletter literally.

55. BAV, Urb. Lat. 1046, fol. 304r.56. For Giasone da Monterchi, see Archivio Storico Diocesano, Roma, A 60, Giu-

seppe Maria Soresino, De Ecclesia S. Joannis Apostoli et Evangelistae eiusdemque Loco Martyris ante Portam Latinam Opusculum, fol. not numbered (in the section titled “Fragmenta diversa spectantia ad Ecclesiam S. Joannis ante Portam Latinam”); on the Confraternity of the Most Holy Resurrection, see Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 110–118.

57. ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 168, n. 2, fols. 573r–574v.58. ASR, Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni decollato, Testamenti, b. 16, lib. 34, fols.

52r–54v; Orano, Liberi pensatori, 55–61, quotations at 56, 58.

Is This Love? Same-Sex Marriages in Renaissance Rome

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