In 1490 Giovanna d’Aragona married Alfonso Piccolomini. She was 12 years old and a granddaughter of Ferdinand I, Aragonian king of Naples until 1494; Piccolomini was nephew to Pope Pius II and heir to the newly created duchy of Amalfi. She bore him a daughter, and was pregnant with a son when he died of gout in 1498. The next year the duchess delivered her son and the infant inherited the duchy, which Giovanna ruled as regent.
Giovanna’s world was one in which women of all but the lowest class were kept in seclusion from infancy until they reached marriageable age, around 12 or 13. The young woman at this point became a commodity, a bargaining chip, as Giovanna had been. Aristocratic families of this time used marriage as an economic and political tool: matrimony cemented alliances, created blocs of power, and established women in positions that would sustain them (since upper-class women of the era did not work). An aristocratic family, even one of no more than ordinary ambition, could hardly afford not to position a daughter’s marriage so that it benefited them.
Once married, young noblewomen of prosperous fifteenth-century Italy hired nurses and servants to tend their homes and children, which gave them the luxury of leisure time.
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