9 - Gender, War, and the State: The Military Management of Alda Pio Gambara During the Italian Wars

Summary

Abstract

During the Italian Wars (1494–1559) a significant number of women were entrusted with household and estate management in northern Italy in the absence of husbands or other relations involved in war. That some women drew on this experience or adapted existing skills to contribute to military management is demonstrated by the extensive correspondence of Alda Pio Gambara. These letters reveal the extent of Alda's estate management and the ways in which she ensured her husband and his company were fitted for war by providing supplies and equipment including armour. They also reveal the ways in which she managed the war in and around Brescia by raising troops and sappers and by working closely with the Venetian and then French authorities.

Keywords: Gambara; Venice; Brescia; Gender; France; Italian Wars

Introduction

On 19 February 1512 forces commanded by Gaston de Foix (1489–1512), the French royal lieutenant in Lombardy, entered the city of Brescia, attacked occupying Venetian troops led by Andrea Gritti (1455–1538), and inflicted a sack as punishment for the city's rebellion against French rule. As one of the worst massacres of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) contemporary commentators scrambled to parse its meaning. Marco Negro assigned blame for the catastrophe to all sides and highlighted local social and political fault lines destabilized by foreign intervention. Specifically, Negro claimed that he would need a month to describe the contribution of the Gambara family and their followers to the betrayal of the city and ensuing violence. He singled out Alda Pio Gambara (ca. 1465–ca. 1527) as chief culprit: she had held out in the castle with French troops until Foix arrived with reinforcements, and ‘had made more war on Venice than if she had a thousand cavalry, and yet all she had done was write and plot’. Around the same time, the Venetian commissioner described her as a ‘whore and cow’ (‘puttana et vacca’), while two decades later another local chronicler recalled how during the sack Alda's palace rang with the sounds of dancing and banqueting more suitable for a brothel, and described her as ‘this great, large woman who wore the trousers to such an extent that she was obeyed by the whole Gambara family which attended to all of her commands’.