Conquista Dora - Catalina de Erauso 1623

Brawling, duelling, thievery and seduction with the 17th century's most enthusiastic woman warrior, and a pivitol figure in LGBTQ+ history - Catalina de Erauso. 
Its a bloody tale of senseless violence, nunnery escapades, greed, unbelievable coincidences and the Pope. 

• Why did Catalina disguise herself as a man?
• How many times did she lose her temper and kill someone?
• What made her apologise profusely to her brother?
• Who was "The Cid"?

All this and so much more will be answered in episode 31 of Rogues Gallery Uncovered - The podcast of bad behaviour in period costume. 
 
Subject of the book Lieutenant Nun, this cross-dressing female soldier and adventuress was one of the most fascinating - and possibly violent - women in history. Her gender identity may forever be a mystery, but her bravery was in no doubt. She remains a unique figure in Basque history and the history of the ‘New World.’
Dress however you please and enjoy this episode.  

Thanks for listening. Stay Roguish!
Email: simon@roguesgalleryonline.com
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Transcript

Rogues Gallery Uncovered

Bad behaviour in period costume 

A non-judgmental poke into the scandalous lives of history’s greatest libertines’ lotharios and complete bastards  

This podcast contains adult themes possibly a touch of colourful language and lots of acts of brutal and senseless historical violence.

That’s the past for ya

Conquister Dora 

Picking fights in tHe sunshine with 17th century Spain’s most short tempered female adventurer.

Catalina de Erauso

Before we get stuck in heres th answer to the spontaneous competition I posed last episode.

It turns out that I was being too obscure for my own good..that’ll teach me…. as it only had one entrant and his answer was wrong.

I asked what personal favourite 80s uk movie I was referring to in the first few minutes of the roguish tale.

The moment in question was this..

And the movie was the superlative Withnail and I, which I’ve loved since the late 80s.

The lone entrant who deserves recognition and applause was Thomas Jenson who suspected I was referring to the 1975 romp Royal Flash.

While not the correct answer Thomas you have potentially unleashed a whole episode dedicated to my favourite fictional character Harry Paget Flashman.

I could go on for hours about how wonderful the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser are, but ill get over emotional.

My love of history and bad behaviour stems directly from randomly picking up a copy of flashman at the charge at the airport in the early 80s as a moody teen about to go on his last summer holiday with his parents. I read it twice in two weeks.

Flashy deserves a podcast episode all to himself and im working on it as we speak.

So cheers Thomas  

Also a disgraceful mention must go to Mira from Germany who got in touch via the website – roguesgalleryuncovered.com. To say some lovely things and to recommend John Wilmot 2nd earl of Rochester as a potential episode subject. 

I’m way ahead of you Mira and he will be featured in a couple of episodes time – don’t get me started on the libertine staring Johnny Depp, there’s only so much praise I can heep in a short time.

Right, I don’t want this episode to be controversial so this is important. 

 The following tale is written in the present tense of the period in which its set…. and as such, may contain attitudes and opinions of the protagonists and their times which would today be considered unacceptable. 

As I am emphatically not a 17th century Spanish, catholic monk

Those attitudes and opinions are – OBVIOUSLY repeat for emphasis OBVIOUSLY…. NOT MINE 

PERU 1623 

So, you’re trying to tell me that you’re a woman?

That for the past 20 years or more you have not been Alonso Díaz de Guzmán, swordsman, duellist, soldier and swaggering conquistador but have actually been a runaway convent girl named Catalina?

I find this all very difficult to believe 

For a start you look nothing like a woman, in fact you’re more masculine that most of the monks In my church.

You are tall and of robust build, your hair is cut short and your sword is worn close to your body – like the soldier you so recently claim to have been.

Your face shows none of a woman’s delicate softness, you even walk and stand like a man.

I cannot see even a hint of your breasts – which you tell me you flattened and dried out as a young woman using a “special ointment.”

I should accuse you of being nothing more than a lying blaggard, inventing the most outrageous falsehoods to escape justice for his many violent crimes. 

But.. 

The medical examination report I have just been given categorically states that there is no “verga” between your legs. 

You are as female as my beloved mother…and not only that but you are still a virgin.

I can only imagine what his Holiness the Pope will say.

You say you were born “Catalina de Erauso” in the town of San Sebastián  some thirty-five years ago.

One theory you propose for you martial inclinations and skill with a sword is that your father served as an officer in King Phillip’s army and from a very young age instructed both you and your brothers in the use of arms.

However, while your brothers all went on to serve the crown, fighting for God and country in the Americas, you and your sisters were sent to be educated in the Dominican Convent of San Sebastian el Antiguo.  

Four years of age, is indeed old enough to put aside childish games and embrace the disciplined life of a novice nun. 

By your own admission you grew into a surly young woman, quick to anger and resentful of your confined existence.

At fifteen you quarrelled with another novice nun – a widow, considerably older and more muscular than yourself. 

You received a beating and this, it seems, made you renounce the vows to God which you had until then been – albeit reluctantly - preparing to take.

At midnight prayers one evening soon after, the prioress instructed you to go to her chambers and bring back her breviary . Inside her quarters you noticed the keys to the convent hanging by a peg upon the wall and an insidious plan formed in your mind.

Returning with the book, you feigned sickness and were allowed to retire to your cell. Instead of going there you took the convent keys from their rightful place and stole a pair of scissors, a needle, thread and some money.

You then crept like thief in the night through the deserted corridors of the convent, before unlocking the main doors and fleeing into the street beyond.

With no idea where you were, you hid in a chestnut grove for three days, cutting your hair in the short fashion nowadays sported by young men.

You also used the scissors and thread to transform your nuns’ habit into an approximation of male clothing before setting off on the road to Vitoria, just another vagabond boy eating wild herbs to stay alive.

In Vitoria you had the good fortune to meet a doctor of theology who- out of the goodness of his heart – took you into his home. Such was his generosity that he provided you with a new set of clothes – he of course being under the  impression that you were a boy – and even began to tutor you in Latin.

After three months, you say that he suggested you remain as his student but when you refused, he struck you. 

Just as you had in the convent, you took the first available opportunity to run away from his household, after first stealing from your benefactor whatever money you could find.

In Valladolid , you called yourself Francisco Loyola and gained employment as a page, spending the next seven months serving the kings secretary.

I was astounded to learn that at one point your father visited court asking for help in discovering your whereabouts and although you stood alone in the same room while he waited for a response, he did not recognise you as his daughter.

You, to your shame, did not reveal yourself, as the freedoms you were enjoying in the guise of a man were too intoxicating for you to risk returning to the proper and decent life of a women.

Wracked with guilt, you fled once more but on the road to Bilbao you were surrounded by a gang of youths who jeered and menaced you. 

Picking up a rock that was laying on the ground you struck one of the ringleaders a solid blow. He fell, injured and the youths ran away. You then spent a month in jail until the lad you had struck recovered from his injuries. This was the first of many acts of violence and terms of imprisonment that you would experience in the coming years.

After two years as a page in the province of Navarre  you, on a whim, returned to your hometown of San Sebastián. You say that to all its residents you appeared to be nothing less than a “well dressed bachelor” and you even returned to the convent from which you had fled three years before.

No one recognized you there either, including your own mother whom you saw while she was taking mass.  

You next visited Saville and although you found the city to be to your liking you decided, after two days to sign on as ship’s boy for Captain Esteban Eguino whose galleon was escorting the Royal Armada to Punta de Araya in the territory of Venezuela.

It seems you were going to the Americas after all.

Once in Punta de Araya you deserted ship before it returned to Spain – stealing five hundred pesos before doing so. You then made your way to Panama where you obtained a position with a local merchant.

While you were working in his shop in the port of Paita  you were given much responsibility and several fine suits of clothes.

One of your most regular customers was a wealthy woman by the name of Beatriz de Cardena- who it transpired was the merchant’s mistress “if she wants to buy the whole shop, you sell it to her” he told you.

Not knowing that you were also a woman she began to entertain similarly lustful thoughts as those she had for your master. 

One evening at the theatre an ill-mannered young man sat in front of you and blocked your view. When you asked him to move, an argument ensued during which he threatened to cut your face open.

Disgruntled by this you withdrew, but the next morning you saw this same man walk past the shop. Consumed with fury, you grabbed a dagger and followed him down the street, pausing only get it sharpened at a whetstone. 

Confronting him again you reminded the fellow of his threat from the previous evening before slashing him across the face with the knife and stabbing his companion in the side.

You then tried to claim sanctuary in a nearby church but were dragged- again - to jail. 

Your master used his influence to get you released and you returned to the church within whose protective embrace you were safe from any acts of vengeance.

He then suggested that you marry his mistress as a way to ensure that you could remain in his employ.

What he did not know was that you had regularly been sneaking out of the church to pay her visits, caressing her lewdly and stoking her desire to know you carnally. 

In fact, so insistent did she become that you sleep with her – you say you had to “slap her one” in order to calm her down.

You refused the marriage and instead went to work at another of your master’s shops. But when the now bitter and scarred young man from the theatre tracked you down, you and a friend engaged him and his companion with swords. In the fight which followed, you ran one of the men through and killed him – your first murder.

You would have been swiftly hung had not one of the deputies who arrested you been Basque  and allowed you to escape. You had no other option but to flee, with some money and a letter of introduction from your master, to Lima .

Lima is one of Spain’s most successful colonies in the New World and you soon found employ with another wealthy merchant. After nine months however he asked you move on because you were becoming too friendly with his wife’s sisters, one of whom had been seen sitting with your head in her lap while you ran your hands between her legs.  

With neither money nor friends, you signed on as a soldier, joining a company which had been raised to fight in Chile. You say you had no fear of death or injury, you simply wanted to see more of the world – what more you need to see that’s not inside a church, I have no idea.

As luck would have it, when you arrived at the port of Concepcion you found the officer in charge of your company to be none other than your own brother whom you had not seen since you were two years old. 

You went on to serve in his personal unit for three years, without him once suspecting who you were. 

He did however harbour suspicions that the man you claimed to be was having secret trysts with his mistress – can you blame him?

One night when he came upon you leaving her apartments, he struck at you viciously with his belt. 

Following the ensuing brawl, you once again took refuge in a church and although your brother interceded on your behalf not to have you executed for striking an officer – he knew a good soldier when he saw one -  you were banished to fight on the frontline of a region that was said to be the deadliest in all of Peru… Paicabi, “The Land of Indians” 

For the next three years you lived a life of squalor and constant danger, 

fighting savagely against the native Indians and slaughtering them without number from horseback and on foot. 

It can be said without much doubt that you enjoyed this life of violence and killing and that you became uncommonly proficient at it. 

Wounded in the leg while defending the company flag, you were promoted to lieutenant, but missed out upon a captaincy for disobeying orders and stringing up a fallen foe from a tree - when the local governor wanted him to be taken alive.

Resting from the front line whilst on leave, your behaviour would shame a savage Goth. 

During a friendly game of cards, you became embroiled in an argument with a fellow officer who said you “lied like a cuckold” and before he could put his hand back down on the table, you’d stabbed him fatally through the chest.  

Something of an overreaction don’t you think?

A violent squabble broke out as the other players around the table attempted to restrain you. When the local judge arrived and grabbed you by the doublet, insisting that you accompany him to jail, you repeatedly sliced him across the face until he let you go.

You were supposed to be recovering from battle woman, not instigating it with your own comrades.

You managed to hack your way to the local church, where you claimed sanctuary for the next six months.

Under virtual siege and charged with double murder  – the judge having also died of his wounds - you were in the most compromising of straits but did not seem to appreciate the gravity of your situation. When one of your friends, Juan Ponce de Leon, got word to you of a duel he was fighting one night, you didn’t hesitate to be his second. 

Even though you had a price on your head and your place of safety was surrounded by armed men, you still managed to sneak out to attend your friend in his affair of honour.

Loyalty or blood lust? I cannot decide.

You suggested that you both tie handkerchiefs around your arms so you would not mistake each other in the dark and when your friend began to tire having taken a hit to the side, you jumped to his defence and engaged his opponent yourself.

The man’s second rushed to his defence, as the rules of honour allow and in the darkness and confusion that followed your sword took another victim.

It was only after he fell, bleeding his life away on the ground, that you realised that the man you had just run through was your brother – who had saved you from execution some years before.

Returning to the sanctuary of the church, you watched some days later as his funeral procession passed by - at least you claim to have had the decency to have felt abject misery at this tragic turn of events.

Your brother had named you as his killer with his dying breath and an angry mob was all for storming the church and dragging you out, but your friend Juan repaid your loyalty to him by supplying you with a horse and some money so you could flee to the mountains.

The story of your journey through the treacherous, freezing peaks of the Andes says to me that, for some reason you must have had the grace of God on your side. 

Meeting up with two fellow deserters you made your slow, painful way across the barren and rocky wilderness suffering from both a lack of food and water as well as numbing cold. 

Seeing two men in the distance apparently laughing as they lent upon a rock you were heartened, but your joy turned to terror when you found that both had actually frozen to death while screaming.

Your two companions ultimately succumbed to the harsh conditions and you were but hours from death yourself, praying to the almighty you claim, for the first time in your life. 

Your prayers it seems were answered, for you were found by two horsemen working for a local half breed woman and taken to her hacienda.

The woman took to you – as all seem to have done – and offered you shelter and a job managing her property. You accepted, but when she tried to get you to marry her daughter – a girl you felt was both dark and ugly – you stole one of her mules and returned to your wanderings.

A few months later you claim you did much the same to a bishop’s vicar-general in Tucuman , romancing his niece and accepting his patronage until the marriage was all but announced and then stealing from him and running away.

You then re-joined the army and became part of an expedition to subdue the hostile Indians in the Chuncos and El Dorado regions. 

It must be said that while in service you attended to your duties with your usual vigour. 

When, after entering a scared native village, your captain was shot in the eye by a twelve-year-old boy, defending his home, you were first among the men who cut him “into ten thousand pieces.” 

You then led an attack on the village that left you wading in the blood of the men and women that you butchered. 

Was this in revenge for the actions of one terrified boy, or did it have more to do with the fact that over sixty thousand pesos worth of gold dust had just been found hidden in the villagers huts?

There was so much gold in fact that while the massacre was still taking place you and your fellow brave warriors were filling up your helmets with it, in order to carry it way.

Prevented by their commanding officers from panning for even more gold along the river banks, many of the soldiers, yourself included, deserted in disgust.

I will not go into the details of the time you spent working for a rich mine owner in La Plata that saw you accused of disfiguring his wife while disguised as an Indian - and later being painfully questioned on the rack.

Or the quarrel you got in to while playing cards in Charcas  that led to you running a man through and finding sanctuary in a cathedral.

I will not even pass comment on yet another unlawful killing you were charged with that saw you led on a horse wearing a “taffeta frock” through the streets to be hung -  surrounded, you say, by “a rain of priests.”  

You had to stand on tiptoe while the executioner tried to tighten the noose around your throat, I believe, and such was his ineptitude, you chastised him for all to hear, saying “You drunk! put it on right or don’t put it on at all.” 

How fortunate that before the deed was done you were reprieved when the character of the eyewitness who had seen you carry out the slaying was called into question and his evidence dismissed.

Did this brush with both justice and death inspire you to change your ways? I suspect not.

A few weeks later you claim you drew your dagger in church and stabbed a man after he attacked you, because he believed that you had kidnapped his wife – was he correct? 

What makes me furious however is that following yet another violent altercation after which you had been sentenced to death  you were receiving communion in your jail cell – where else?- when you suddenly spat the holy wafer into your right hand and, in a voice trembling with religious fervour  loudly cried “I CALL ON THE CHURCH….I CALL ON THE CHURCH.”  

Thinking you had been touched by the Holy Spirit, you were spared punishment and taken instead to a place of worship, but this was in fact just another deception. 

The whole charade was a cunning plan to escape the executioner which had come to you after meeting a pious and gullible French priest during one of your previous jail visits.

Some months later you fought the Dutch who were besieging the coast of Lima, in what I believe was your first shipboard action. Again, you escaped death by a hairsbreadth, surviving when over nine hundred other sailors perished.

Perhaps by then you felt invincible, like Achilles of old, a woman who had become a man, who could not be killed.

Pride as you know however is a sin and I have no doubt that God sought to remind you of this when he brought into your wastrel life an equally vicious brute who others called “The Cid.” 

At a card game in Cuzco  this well-known killer of men – who felt he could do as he pleased to whomever he pleased – began to take fistfuls of your winnings, in full view of everyone.

This behaviour would make even the gentlest of men bristle with anger let alone a stab-happy harridan with a non-existent fuse. The third time he did it, you pinned his hand to the table with your dagger. 

In the struggle that inevitably followed, you found “The Cid” not only to be a powerful and skilled swordsman - unlike any you had fought before - but also that he was “trussed up in armour like a brass timepiece.”  

Your every thrust was turned aside by his steel carapace and as the fight spilled into the street, he ran you through the shoulder.

Desperately trying to find an opening in his armour, you fought as you had never fought before, but to no avail. 

Another thrust pierced your side and you collapsed, blood pouring from your body, but still you fought on. As “The Cid” knelt above you to deliver the final blow, you found a gap between his armour and his body and slid your blade between. He collapsed next to you, the pool of his own lifeblood mingling with yours.

Such was severity of your injuries, the officers who came to arrest you, instead called for a priest to hear your final confession.

When you told the friar, who came to hear it your feminine secret he took you to a monastery where you could be attended by a surgeon – leaving the evil “Cid” to bleed to death in the street. 

Awake throughout your surgery you felt every cut, tug and stitch but you survived and after five days began to think that you might not be ready to meet your creator just yet.

You could not stay in Cuzco however and left with law and “The Cid’s” friends out for your blood. Your cares were piling up you said “Like flies on meat”  

After a succession of narrow and violent escapes you arrived in Guamanga where – in a gambling house - you were recognised and approached by some local constables who drew swords and pistols and bid you to surrender. 

You responded in kind and shot two of them down. 

Surrounded in the street with your sword in your hand, you stood like a mad dog, all around you townspeople were crying out for your death – a line of musketeers prepared to fire

From my palace opposite I had watched the confrontation and wishing to avoid further bloodshed I stepped in to the line of fire and offered you safe arrest if you gave up your weapons.

Thankfully, you agreed and despite the most “passionate” protests of the assembled constables and their slaves, I led you to my house and treated your wounds.

What I saw was a cunning, venal, arrogant braggart of a man who brawled and killed without compunction and who thought of no one else’s profit but their own – a disgrace to their sex.

I doubted you would evade justice for long and I suspect neither did you, for the next morning you did something that perhaps you had not done since you were a child – you told the truth.

“ The truth is this: that I am a women, that I was born in such and such a place, the daughter of this man and this woman, tat at a certain age I was placed  a certain convent with a certain aunt, that I was raised three and took the veil and became a novice and that when I was about to profess my final vows I left the convent for such and such a reason , went to such and such a place, undressed myself and dressed myself up again, cut my hair, travelled here and there, embarked, disembarked, hustled, killed, maimed, wreaked havok and roamed about until coming to a stop in this very instant, at the feet of your Eminence.”

 You are one of the most remarkable women in the world- to have done and seen all that you have, and to have suffered so much. It fills my heart with joy that you appear to be genuinely remorseful of your violent dissolute life and wish to spend the remainder of your days from now on praising Him who made all things – even you.

I shall offer you more than safety, I shall provide you with entry to a local nunnery where you can prove your devotions, and from there you may return to Spain where, no doubt, you shall be feted and held as an object of curiosity and wonder . 

Perhaps you shall meet the king, perhaps you will even journey to Rome and meet his holiness the Pope .

I hope this new found honesty and piety is not just another strategy to avoid facing any responsibility for your actions.

For a man, such a life as yours is squalid and degenerate. 

But for a woman…and a virgin no less, it is a remarkable example of Gods wonderous variety. Truly he maketh us all in his image.

Why are you smiling?

Catalina de Erauso wasn’t the first woman to dress up as a man to join the army 

In the 15th century a woman by the name of Oronata Rondiani killed a man in self defence and after adopting a male identity joined a band pf mercenaries and stayed with hem until dying in battle.

In the 18th century you had Deborah Sampson who fought against the brits in the American war of independence under the name Robert Shurtliff – she was honourably discharged and got a pension.

And Hannah Snell who joined the British army as a man to look for her wayward husband a generation before and stayed on after finding out he’d been executed for murder. When she finally left the royal marines she became a celebrity. 

Jean  shh ann Louise Antonini fought in  the French army in the Napoleonic wars of the early 1800s and was wounded 9 times but still managed to fool her superiors into letting her stay  – that’s some pretty slapdash doctoring 

And finally James Barry was born Margaret Ann Bulkley but pretended to be a man to study medicine at university and when she graduated went on to join the army as a surgeon. Her sex was only discovered once she’s died in 1865.

As for how much of Catalina’s story is true, like a lot of dramatic tales you have to take a fair amount of it with huge pinches of salt. 

That she really existed and fight with the Spanish army is not in doubt. It transpires that she actually obtained permits from both king phillp 4th asnd pope urban 8th to live out the rest of her life as a man – so she obviously made an impression 

She was almost certainly the inspiration for the play “The Lieutenant Nun” in 1625 

However much of the detail in her story is believed by many to be part of an 18th or early 19th century invention by money grabbing hacks trying to make a quick buck after Lord Byron made Spanish adventuring fashionable with his poem Don Juan.

Byron is up for an episode or two as well.

Whatever the facts, Catalina was a remarkable individual that I certainly wouldn’t have liked to have gotten on the wrong side of.

Next time on Rogues gallery uncovered – and as a  tribute to Harry Flashman  

The ups and downs of a gentleman rotter

Charming rogue, nasty pervert, tragic bullshit artist?  - YOU DECIDE

The outrageous comings and goings of Edward Sellon, officer, gentleman and specialist author.

Im spent

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Send any and all roguish suggestions or comments about te podcast to simon@roguesgalleryonline.com the address in in the show notes.

Have a great fortnight and ill see you yesterday.