Again, the ever-recurring war came on, and in the spring of 1512 the King of Naples conferred the doubtful privilege on the Marchesa di Pescara of serving as the royal representative. It is said that Vittoria personally superintended her young husband’s outfit,—in horses, attendants, armor, and other details belonging to a gentleman of rank. Her father and her uncle, Prospero Colonna, were also among the military who led Italian troops. In the terrible battle of Ravenna (which was fought on the Easter Sunday, April 11, of 1512), Pescara was wounded, taken prisoner, and carried to the fortress of Porta Gobbia. A messenger was sent to Ischia, where Vittoria lived between her books and the orange groves; and the twentieth-century cynic of 1907 will smile at the form in which she expressed her sorrow,—that of a poem of some forty stanzas, which began:—
“Eccelso Mio Signor! Questa ti scrivo
Per te narrar tra quante dubbie voglie,
Fra quanti aspri martir, dogliosa io vivo!”
A translation of this lyric epistle, made in prose, gives it more fully as follows:—
“Eccelso Mio Signor: I write this to thee to tell thee amid what bitter anxieties I live. . . . I believed that so many prayers and tears, and love without measure, would not have been displeasing to God. . . . Thy great valor has shone as in a Hector or an Achilles.”
In this letter Vittoria tells him that when the messenger reached her, she was lying on a point of the island (“I, in the body, my mind always with thee,” she says), and that the whole atmosphere had been to her that day “like a cavern of black fog,” and that “the marine gods seemed to say to Ischia, ‘To-day, Vittoria, thou shalt hear of disgrace from the confines: thou now in health and honor, thou shalt be turned to grief; but thy father and husband are saved, though taken prisoners.’”
This presentiment she related to her husband’s aunt, the Duchessa Francavilla, the Castellana of Ischia, who begged her not to think of it and said, “It would be strange for such a force to be conquered.”
Just after this conversation between the youthful Marchesa and the Duchessa, the messenger arrived. The psychic science of to-day would see in this occurrence a striking instance of telepathy. In her poetic epistle to her husband, Vittoria also says:—
“A wife ought to follow her husband at home and abroad; if he suffers trouble, she suffers; if he is happy, she is; if he dies, she dies. What happens to one happens to both; equals in life, they are equals in death. His fate is her fate.”
These letters—in keeping with the times—were, on both sides, expressed in literary rather than in personal form. Pescara, from his captivity, wrote to her a “Dialogue on Love,”—a manuscript for which Visconti notes that he has searched in vain.
The Marchesa di Pescara went from Ischia to Naples, after learning of the misfortunes that had overtaken her husband, in order that she might be able constantly to receive direct communication regarding his fate. A few months later the Marchese returned, making the day “brilliant with joy” to Vittoria, but after a year of happiness he was again called to service, and the Marchesa returned to her beloved Ischia. She gave herself to the study of the ancient classics; she wrote poems, and “considered no time of value but so spent,” says Rota. The age was one of a general revival of learning. Royalty, the Pope, the princes and nobility were all giving themselves with ardor to this higher culture. Under Dante the Italian language assumed new perfection. This period was to Vittoria one of intense stimulus, and it must have had a formative influence on her gifts and her mental power. Having no children, she adopted a young cousin of her husband, the Marchese del Vasto, to educate and to be the heir of their estates. In 1515, Pescara again returned and the entire island of Ischia was “aflame with bonfires, and the borders of the beautiful shore bright and warm with lights,” in honor of the event. Of this event, Vittoria wrote:—