190 | Fleeing “the Vomit of Infidelity”
on how to proceed, Contarini took matters into his own hands to resolve “this
most thorny affair.” He gave Mustafa 500 reals and two suits of clothing, and in
return Mustafa renounced “every legal claim” against Venice and acknowledged
that the women had not been kidnapped but rather “had departed voluntarily,
seduced by... Maria.”
On April 5, 1637, more than a year after their flight, Maria and her daughters
finally returned to Corfu. In Istanbul, Bailo Contarini provided an epitaph to the
affair. The women had “a great obligation to pray to God for the prosperity of the
Most Serene Republic that gave them both the liberty of their bodies and also
the means to save their souls.” Of course, this was only partly true. Margherita,
Anna, and Catterina had their mother to thank as much as Venice for their new
lives. Though the documents are silent on the details, it seems likely that as she
sailed into the harbor of Corfu under the cannon of its great fortress, Maria may
have enjoyed a moment of satisfaction, mingled with relief, at the successful reso-
lution of her gambit to keep her family together and to free her daughters from
“the vomit of infidelity.”
The experience of Maria Gozzadini and her three daughters is significant
because it documents in exceptional detail the almost completely unknown ex-
perience of Muslim women’s apostasy. It also provides a window into questions
of religious identity and conversion and suggests ways the unique frontier setting
of the Mediterranean provided women with additional or alternative modes of
subordinating society’s traditional gender roles and expectations as active agents
in determining their own destinies rather than simply as passive victims. For the
Gozzadini women, the liquid boundaries of the Mediterranean were the passage
that allowed them to free themselves from a troubled situation, and the institu-
tions of both marriage and monastery, which Maria cannily navigated, were the
bulwarks that prevented their repatriation. The intersection of gender and honor
is also evident in this tale: The paternalistic attitudes of male-dominated political
institutions deemed women (and children) as frail and weak. Religion and honor
required that Venice’s ruling elites protect what they perceived as the Gozzadini
women’s fragile faith (though they proved themselves anything but weak), even
though doing so carried a high political price. The girls’ quick marriages and
Maria’s entry into a convent show their intentional use of the burden of honor to
influence institutional deliberations and to avoid returning to a former husband
and their home. If societal attitudes and structures subordinated women, they
also afforded a certain power to subvert and manipulate gender structures in
ways that allowed them to shape their lives in an unexpected fashion.
***The following is an excerpt from the transcript of the inquiry into the flight of
Maria Gozzadini and her daughters.