Vittoria was born in 1557, of a noble but impoverished family, at Gubbio, among the hills of Umbria.  Her biographers are rapturous in their praises of her beauty, grace, and exceeding charm of manner.  Not only was her person most lovely, but her mind shone at first with all the amiable lustre of a modest, innocent, and winning youth.  Her father, Claudio Accoramboni, removed to Rome, where his numerous children were brought up under the care of their mother, Tarquinia, an ambitious and unscrupulous woman, bent on rehabilitating the decayed honours of their house.  Here Vittoria in early girlhood soon became the fashion.  She exercised an irresistible influence over all who saw her, and many were the offers of marriage she refused.  At length a suitor appeared whose condition and connection with the Roman ecclesiastical nobility rendered him acceptable in the eyes of the Accoramboni.  Francesco Peretti was welcomed as the successful candidate for Vittoria’s hand.  His mother, Camilla, was sister to Felice, Cardinal of Montalto; and her son, Francesco Mignucci, had changed his surname in compliment to this illustrious relative.  The Peretti were of humble origin.  The cardinal himself had tended swine in his native village; but, supported by an invincible belief in his own destinies, and gifted with a powerful intellect and determined character, he passed through all grades of the Franciscan Order to its generalship, received the bishoprics of Fermo and S. Agata, and lastly, in the year 1570, assumed the scarlet with the title of Cardinal Montalto.  He was now upon the high way to the Papacy, amassing money by incessant care, studying the humours of surrounding factions, effacing his own personality, and by mixing but little in the intrigues of the court, winning the reputation of a prudent, inoffensive old man.  These were his tactics for securing the Papal throne; nor were his expectations frustrated; for in 1585 he was chosen Pope, the parties of the Medici and the Farnesi agreeing to accept him as a compromise.  When Sixtus V. was once firmly seated on S. Peter’s chair, he showed himself in his true colours.  An implacable administrator of severest justice, a rigorous economist, an iconoclastic foe to paganism, the first act of his reign was to declare a war of extirpation against the bandits who had reduced Rome in his predecessor’s rule to anarchy.

It was the nephew, then, of this man, whom historians have judged the greatest personage of his own times, that Vittoria Accoramboni married on the 28th of June 1573.  For a short while the young couple lived happily together.  According to some accounts of their married life, the bride secured the favour of her powerful uncle-in-law, who indulged her costly fancies to the full.  It is, however, more probable that the Cardinal Montalto treated her follies with a grudging parsimony; for we soon find the Peretti household hopelessly involved in debt.  Discord, too, arose between Vittoria and her husband on the