EXCERPT: Occasionally [Catalina de Erauso] held a legitimate job. She joined the army, became a second lieutenant, and served under her older brother Michael [in New Spain], fighting the Indians. But Catalina had a hair-trigger temper and a real talent with pistols, daggers, and swords. Not counting battlefield slayings, she murdered eight men, only one of whom she was sorry about – the “mistaken identity” killing of her own sibling in a nighttime duel.
[Vicki León, Uppity
Women of the Middle Ages, Conari Press, 1997, p. 186]
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Wikipedia: Catalina de Erauso or Katalina Erauso, also
known in Spanish as La Monja Alférez
(English, The Nun Lieutenant) (1592, San Sebastián, Spain—1650,
Cuetlaxtla (near Orizaba), New Spain), was a semi-legendary personality of the
Basque Country, Spain and Spanish America in the first half of the 17th
century.
Catalina de
Erauso was daughter and sister of soldiers from the city of San Sebastián in
Spain. Her father was Miguel de Erauso and her mother María Pérez de Gallárraga
y Arce. She was expected to become a nun but abandoned the nunnery after a
beating at the age of fifteen, just before she was to take her vows. She had
not ever seen a street, having entered the convent at the age of four .
She dressed as a
man, calling herself "Francisco de Loyola", and left on a long
journey from San Sebastian to Valladolid. From there she visited Bilbao, where
she signed up on a ship with the assistance of other Basques. She reached
Spanish America and enlisted as a soldier in Chile under the name Alonso
Díaz Ramírez de Guzmán. She served under several captains in the Arauco
War, including her own brother, who never recognized her.
After one fight
in which she killed a man and was wounded fatally, she revealed her sex in a
deathbed confession. She however survived after four months of convalescence
and left for Guamanga.
To escape yet
another incident, she confessed her sex to the bishop, Fray Agustín de
Carvajal. Induced by him she entered a convent and her story spread across the
ocean. In 1620, the archbishop of Lima called her. In 1624, she arrived in
Spain, having changed ship after another fight.
She went to Rome
and toured Italy, where she eventually achieved such a level of fame that she
was granted a special dispensation by Pope Urban VIII to wear men's clothing.
Her portrait by
Francesco Crescenzio is lost. Back in Spain, Francisco Pacheco (Velázquez's
father-in-law) painted her in 1630.
She again left
Spain in 1645, this time for New Spain in the fleet of Pedro de Ursua, where
she became a mule driver on the road from Veracruz. In New Spain she used the
name Antonio de Erauso.
She died in
Cuetlaxtla, New Spain in 1650.
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