Foreword

 

Let us travel to the time of the Medici in Renaissance Florence, an era of intrigue and vicious power politics. Rapacious men are willing to use their position and wealth to ruthlessly slake all of their appetites, no matter how depraved. To be a beautiful young woman in such a world was to have a certain power, as lusty suitors might vie for one's favors. But such girls were well-advised to never forget that they were primarily prey for more powerful predators. And if turns of bad fortune cast such beauties from high society, their only alternatives were the convents or the streets. Even within the supposedly safe and sacred confines of the nunneries, all was not as holy and celibate as the unsophisticated would have believed...

Chapter One

 

Cardinal Giuseppe Monteverdi sighed contentedly as he pushed away the remains of his mid-day repast and downed the remainder of the piquant local red wine in his ornate chased-silver goblet. Rank did have its privileges, and he was not a man to take any of them for granted. Many bastard sons had done far worse with their lives, he thought to himself with characteristic self-congratulation. Of course, the fact that his father happened to be a legitimate Medici prince did smooth a few wrinkles here and there in his course.

But after all, the family needed an able representative in the local church hierarchy. Once his natural talents were recognized, he was placed in a Roman seminary and launched on his meteoric pathway up the ecclesiastic ranks. At last, a huge family bribe had secured his promotion to the exalted rank of Cardinal at the obscenely young age of thirty-five. Soon followed his placement back in Florence where he could directly supervise their interests as he managed the vast church holdings in the family's hometown. His reward for such service would be to have a blind eye turned to whatever manner he chose to gratify his rather jaded tastes in all sorts of the delicacies he had learned to savor.

The Cardinal was tall, broad-shouldered, and darkly handsome. He had since youth kept himself fit with an hour or two of daily swordplay and a similar amount of time on horseback as befitted the son of Italian nobility. His thick black hair was shot with a hint of premature gray at the temples, making him look a few years older than he actually was. He inherited his father's dark-eyed good looks, which had won many desirable maidens including his exalted courtesan mother. She had made a highly political decision to forego her usual foolproof birth control methods in order to bear the Prince a child.

This was quite a gamble, since a daughter would have disappeared into a nunnery and left her mother with no benefit from the risk she had taken. But a son, especially a strong, handsome infant who bore the unmistakable family features of the Medicis, was a card that could be parlayed into great fortune and favor. And his mother was as astute a card-player as any in the city. Many nobles had learned this when she charmingly lightened their purses while making them love every expensive minute of the fleecing.

So the son took his mother's surname but was schooled among his legitimate siblings and cousins in the Medici palazzo. His Father monitored his progress as carefully as he did every one of his assets. As a young man he was dispatched to the seminary, with instructions to succeed at all costs. Giuseppe had received at least as good an education as any of his peers, and the word was passed that his powerful family would look ill upon anyone who impeded his progress, while smiling on those who facilitated it.

His natural charm and ability were such that none of his teachers had to feel bad about promoting him along his meteoric pathway. Of course, that did not mean that any of them felt unentitled to their usual carnal rights to handsome students who passed within their purview. So young Giuseppe learned early on to accept the necessity of taking an ecclesiastic cock in his mouth or up his back passage from time to time as one of the prices to be paid for accomplishing his mission. Such exploitation of young supple bodies as one of the perks of worldly power was an accepted fact in the world of the Italian Renaissance. However, this less than pleasant reality did inspire him with a determination to be the perpetrator rather than the recipient of such attentions as soon as humanly possible.

Another uncomfortable fact of young Giuseppe's life was the penchant many of his teachers had for flagellating the bent and bared rear ends of their charges. The necessity of corporal punishment of offenders of all ages was globally recognized in that era. All children of both genders grew up expecting that their peccadilloes would be rewarded with painful attention to their naked backsides. The Prince's bastard was no exception to this rule.

In fact, the nature of his conception made it even more likely that he was to be spanked for misbehavior than the legitimate children with whom he shared his schooling. After all, bastard sons had to take a healthy ration of teasing from their legitimate peers. And our hero was never one to respond passively to taunts. After a scuffle, it was the bastard whose rear end was most likely to have to pay the price. He grew to hate these humiliating interludes with a passion. But they served their purpose of strongly motivating him to behave impeccably. Or at least to hide his youthful sins more and more skillfully. Here again, our hero vowed that when he had the chance, he would arrange to be on the administering end of such treatments as much as possible.

So young Giuseppe made his way up the Catholic hierarchy by dint of hard work, native intelligence, unusual cunning, and a heartless willingness to be ruthless when necessary. Even if he had not had the Medici fortune and influence behind him, he undoubtedly would have gone far in Mother Church. His subtle mind was well suited to the sorts of intrigues that predominated in the internecine wars of the Papal Curia. Plus, he had a particular advantage that almost none of his competitors possessed.

A bastard growing up in a regal household was well advised to cultivate an acute intuition regarding who was to be trusted, and who was not. Indeed, his very survival could depend on the sharpness of such perceptions. The future Cardinal was almost unerring in his choice of mentors and patrons, whom he cultivated with his earnest charm and sly wit. Having the right advisors and protectors provided the final impetus that pushed him over the threshold. And, with a breathtaking bribe from his father, into the role for which he had been groomed for his entire life.

So when Cardinal Monteverdi's procession made its way up the Via Appia and across the rich Tuscan farmlands and into the thriving capital Florence, he was greeted with the enthusiasm of a returning local hero. Even if the local gentry knew in advance of his planned depredations on the most succulent of their daughters (which some of them may well have, given his reputation in Rome), they probably would not have complained too vociferously.

After all, female offspring were an enormous bother in some ways. The wars with the French and their inevitable attendant plagues had depleted the available population of aristocratic young men. Surplus daughters had to either be married off with coffer-draining dowries or shunted off at less (though still considerable) expense, often kicking and screaming, to local convents. If a handful of them disappeared into the private clutches of a high churchman who otherwise provided local families with advantageous dealings with Mother Church, such a price could be stomached. And this secret reality is the center of our story.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

Elsewhere in the vibrant streets of Renaissance Florence, a rather different fortune was befalling a lovely aristocratic young noblewoman whose name of Angelina was considered quite apt to her beauty. Our heroine was also born into a noted family, though in her case it was one that had a long history of fierce competition with the now-ascendant Medici. The Salieris had what most local aristocrats regarded to be a far more substantial provenance than the ruling Medici clan. Their progenitors had been prominent among the Tuscan nobility back to time immemorial. They had made a practice of looking down their aristocratic noses at such upstarts for centuries. Unfortunately, this attitude had coupled with a distinct lack of vitality in their male offspring to cast the family on harder and harder times.

Thus, when we meet the lissome Angelina, she is the only child, and a daughter to boot, of the last Count in the Salieri line. They lived in genteel poverty in a rambling ill-kempt mansion in a formerly fashionable neighborhood of the burgeoning city. But our heroine was possessed of a cheery demeanor and natural effervescence from birth. So even her chronically depressed parents regarded her to be the one shining star in their otherwise dulled firmament. She was perfectly gorgeous from earliest childhood, possessed of huge brown eyes, even white teeth lighting up a brilliant smile, luxuriant black hair, a luminous milky complexion, and a clean-limbed grace that charmed all who met her.

Angelina's education was initially pursued in the manner of young women of her social standing, with a governess at home. Signorina Gina was an old maid aunt whose parents were relieved to find a place in any role in a noble household for their rather plain and bookishly religious daughter. In fact, they rather suspected Gina was attracted to women rather than men. This was evidenced when she was expelled from a local convent as a novice nun after being caught in bed with another young novice. While Angelina's parents were busy trying ineffectually to manage their crumbling estates, their sweet only daughter was left in the hands of this rather embittered martinet of a governess.

Gina believed in the power of confession and penance, even for relatively innocent young women such as Angelina. Thus, daily trips to the family chapel where the doddering old family priest would take the sweet young lady's confession were de rigueur. Because he was friendly with the hyper-religious governess, the old priest would deputize her (at her request) to administer the daughter's penance each day. Thus was our heroine introduced to the infliction of painful attention to her girlish buttocks.

No matter how hard the sunny-dispositioned girl would work to please her disapproving Gina, mistakes were inevitably made. And so, between a day of youthful errors and the mumblings of the priest, by evening Angelina would inevitably have accumulated a backlog of demerits. The accounting of these always took place in the wing of the rambling old house where the children had been housed for centuries, well out of earshot of the Count and Countess' quarters. There, in an enclosed suite of rooms surrounding a central patio in the style of a seraglio, dwelt the daughter, her governess, and her chambermaid Andrea. Every night, Andrea would draw a bath for her beloved mistress, and then wait while the forbidding Gina conducted her nightly ritual.

This consisted of the forlorn young woman presenting herself in her nightgown in the spacious bathing room of the suite. Her demerits would be added up and discussed, and an appropriate penalty assigned, in the form of a number of spanks to be delivered to Angelina's naked rear end. These were customarily administered with the hard leather sole of a house slipper reserved for this purpose and kept on a high shelf where it could not be stolen and disposed of. The weeping noblewoman would be taken over the lap of her disapproving governess (whose sallow cheeks always seemed suspiciously flushed during these interludes) as the old witch sat on a stool. Her nightgown would be raised to reveal her naked bottom, always a glowing white at the outset of the festivities.

Then the penitent would be required to count out her spanks as they were administered, the punishment to start over from the beginning if she lost track. Her poor buttocks seldom received less than a hundred painful spanks each, in spite of the fact that she was generally a very good girl by most reasonable standards. Once the prescribed dose had been administered, the weeping young woman would be required to kneel and thank her aunt for her efforts on behalf of her proper discipline. At that point, the martinet would retire to her chambers for the night to masturbate herself to sleep. This was done while recalling the delightful squirming of the perfect girlish moons she had just so enjoyed reddening so painfully to their owner.

Meanwhile, the kind and quite pretty Andrea would take her sad mistress into her arms and comfort her until her tears were dried. Then the maid would help Angelina out of her gown and into her bath, whose warm waters would comfort her throbbing buttocks. The understanding servant would carefully soap her petite mistress down and try to soothe her misery by paying especially careful attention to the sensitive forbidden area between the young lady's legs.

This soapy caress soon began to produce wonderful explosions of pleasure for the young noblewoman, for which she was always quite grateful. These friendly orgasms seemed to totally undo the trauma of the nightly spankings for their good-natured recipient. However, in fact they also succeeded in annealing the reception of painful attention to her bottom to eventual sexual pleasure. This eventually hard-wired association was to have remarkable consequences for our heroine in her later life.

This pattern persisted for some time, until Angelina was in the full bloom of luscious early womanhood. By this point, the buttocks that bent over the old crone's lap were not girlish in any way at all. Rather, they were approaching lushly feminine. When they inevitably squirmed under their nightly assault, a healthy shock of curly black pubes was revealed to the salacious eyes of the governess. What was also revealed to the perverted old woman was that the genitals barely concealed beneath these nether curls showed unmistakable signs of increasing arousal as each spanking proceeded. Not only, that, but the longer the punishment, the more engorged Angelina's labia and clitoris became. Needless to say, this development became a source of growing fascination for the old lesbian, though she hardly dared act upon it.

By this point, Angelina and Andrea had also evolved a rather different relationship. As was all too frequently the case between sexually frustrated young noblewomen and their chambermaids, nightly proximity led to mutual sexual exploration and gratification. The nubile maid, only six years older than her mistress, continued to lovingly bathe Angelina's genitals after her spanking each night. This resulted in a steadily increasingly intense and satisfying orgasm, but one which left the vibrant young noblewoman longing for more.

One night Angelina lay in her featherbed feeling this persistent prurient ache between her legs as she was trying to drift toward sleep. As with most chambermaids of young noblewomen, Andrea slept in a trundle bed at the foot of her mistress' much larger counterpane. She and her charge would often idly chat as they were trying to nod off, and this night the conversation took a stimulating bent. Angelina asked: 'Andrea, have you ever made love to a woman?'

The luscious maid replied with some hesitation: 'Well, Signorina, a girl has to find her pleasures where she can, and I am forbidden access to young men. So at times the cook's helper and I are kind to each other in that way, when you are off at lessons and my work is done.' Even though the two young women were friendly for many years, the gulf between their social classes was so great that there were risks involved in any frank disclosure of behavior that could merit extreme punishment if revealed, even inadvertently, to Angelina's parents.

The young noblewoman went on: 'I have grown quite used to my spankings, and almost don't mind them since I become rather excited about our time in the bath after Gina leaves us. But I suspect there are things that you and I could do together that might give us both even more pleasure. Could you teach me about this?' The maid smiled cautiously to herself, and replied: 'Yes, mistress, I know many wonderful ways we could make each other feel good in the same realm. But if your aunt or parents were to find out, I would be stripped naked and beaten by the butler until I bled. After which I would be thrown out on the street to become a whore. So if you wanted us to do such things, we would need to be very discreet.'

Angelina felt herself alive with excitement as she murmured back: 'I would swear never to reveal anything to a soul, Andrea! Please come into my bed and show me what you know. After all, I will need to practice for when my parents find a husband for me. And I've never even kissed anyone in a romantic way, let alone any of the other delights I'm sure lovers must enjoy.' The lovely, buxom maid smiled shyly as she entered her mistress' bed, and the two young women embraced as equals for the first time.

Andrea was of course totally familiar with Angelina's perfect young body, having bathed her mistress daily for a long time. The maid had watched her charge grew into a slim adolescent with tiny adorable breast buds and boyish hips. Then in the past year she had seen the noblewoman suddenly blossom as Italian women are wont to do. She developed firmly ripe breasts the size and shape of large peach-halves, and more womanly hips and thighs. But the wonders of Andrea's body were only suggested through the demure maid's clothing. She led the way by pulling her nightgown off over her own head to reveal her lovely nakedness to her new bed partner for the first time in the flickering candlelight.

The young noblewoman was surprised at the beauty of the form revealed by this shy disrobing. Florentine women were perhaps more used to the appearance of the naked female form than their peers in other Italian cities thanks to the profusion of artists at work in the city for the past hundred years. Even in church, the religious frescoes still often managed to include a strategically unclothed nude or two to provide salacious male worshippers with some solace amidst their tediously pious undertakings. Thus, Angelina knew that the body her maid revealed could easily have served for a model for any of the painters or sculptors the city so revered.

Andrea's breasts were perhaps twice the size of her mistress' newly grown beauties, and still retained the firmness of youth even though their owner was well into her twenties. Likewise, her belly and hips were more robust and femininely rounded, suggesting fecundity and barely contained lustful potential. Both women possessed the characteristic Tuscan coloration, with lustrous and plentiful black hair on their heads and in their crotches and armpits, and pale skin that would tan easily if they sun-bathed. They both had large dark brown eyes that could look almost black when they were frightened or aroused, and full sensuous lips that begged to be kissed.

After Angelina joined her lissome bedmate in nudity in the warm summer air and seductively flickering candlelight, the maid led the way into a simple warm frontal embrace. The two women savored the feeling of total unimpeded skin against skin for the first time before their lips found each other in an initial tentative kiss. Andrea, who had come to love her afternoon interludes with the bawdy cook's helper, administered a silent seminar to her avid pupil on the art of kissing. Beginning butterfly-light, the two young women gradually worked their way into deeper exploration of each other's succulent mouths. Meanwhile, their hands wandered over their partner's naked back, caressing and massaging as they got to know the feel of each other's bodies.