2. Don Marabotto, 1510-1528.
As to Don Cattaneo Marabotto, I have not been able to discover much. We have already seen how he bought ten of Catherine’s chattels on December 10, after her death. On July 7, 1511, he pays over to Catherine’s old servant, the maid Maria (Mariola Bastarda), her late mistress’s little legacy, in a form to be described presently.
But the most important facts concerning him—apart from his share in the Vita, which shall be considered at length hereafter—are the following three. There is, first, the fact (already dwelt upon) that he, and apparently he alone, initiated, or at least led and directed, the plan of opening the deposito, exposing the body, giving it a marble sarcophagus, and erecting a picture over an altar in the Church to Catherine. And next, that “still in 1523 Argentina del Sale was his servant,”—she had evidently then, on Catherine’s death in 1510, become his attendant.[310] And thirdly, that he did not die till 1528.[311]
There seems to be but little doubt that he was, at least slightly, Catherine’s junior. Yet already on his first intercourse with her, he, the Rector of the Hospital, must have been a fully mature man. I suppose him to have been born somewhere about 1450; in which case he will have been about seventy-eight at the time of his death.
In any case, he lived long enough to see and hear much of a kind to console and strengthen his devotion to Catherine and his faith in the self-rejuvenating powers of the Church, and much of a nature to dismay and alarm the gentle, peaceable old man. For there were the opening of the coffin; the incorruption; the popular concourse and enthusiasm; the graces and the cures of May to July 1512. And there were Luther’s ninety-five Theses nailed to the University Church of Wittenberg, on the Eve of All-Saints, 1517; and Pope Leo X’s condemnation of forty of them in 1520, and amongst them three Theses which concerned the doctrine of Purgatory, one of which must have seemed strangely like one of Catherine’s own contentions. And there were the books of Henry VIII of England and of Erasmus against Luther, in 1522, 1524, and in Italy the foundation of the Capuchin Order in 1527; there were, too, the Peasants’ War and Luther’s marriage in Germany in 1525, and, in 1527, the sacking of Rome by the Imperial troops. And through all this world-wide, epoch-making turmoil and conflict we think of him, probably not simply from our lack of documents, as leading a quiet, obscure, somewhat narrow existence; yet one redeemed from real insignificance by his silent watchfulness and action, and still more by his writing, in honour of his large-souled Penitent, ever so sincerely felt by him as indefinitely greater than himself.
I do not know where he was buried. It was not, however, in the Hospital Church; for in that case there would have been some entry in the books of the expenses incurred in connection with his funeral.
IV. The Fate of Catherine’s Three Maid-Servants.
As to Catherine’s three maid-servants the facts that can still be traced are as follow.
1. Benedetta.
The widow and Franciscan Tertiary Benedetta Lombarda, although her name had continued to appear in the documents from Giuliano’s Will in 1496 down to Catherine’s last will of March 1509, disappears after this latter date entirely from sight. Since both Mariola and Argentina reappear in the Hospital books, (although Mariola had, like Benedetta, ceased to serve Catherine at the last), it looks as though Benedetta had died between the Will of March 1509 and Catherine’s death in September 1510. Yet it is possible that Catherine herself handed over to Benedetta her little share in the former’s money and chattels; and that Benedetta is no more mentioned after her mistress’s death because, unlike Mariola and Argentina, she did not continue to live in and belong to the Hospital, whose accounts alone are our extant sources of information for the other two servants.