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The superior modern prostitute, the "courtesan" who had no connection with the brothel, seems to have been the outcome of the Renaissance and made her appearance in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. "Courtesan" or "cortegiana" meant a lady following the court, and the term began at this time to be applied to a superior prostitute observing a certain degree of decorum and restraint.
It was universally recognized in Italy that the sack of Rome was a punishment inflicted by Providence upon the godless city. Without quoting great authorities like Sadoleto or the Bishop of Fossombrone, one of whose letters gives a really awful picture of Roman profligacy (Opere di M.G. Guidiccioni, Barbera, vol. i. p. 193), we find abundant testimony to this persuasion regarding the intolerible vice of Rome, even in men devoid of moral conscience. Aretino (La Cortegiana, end of Act i. Sc. xxiii.) writes: 'Io mic redeva che il castigo, che l' ha dato Cristo per mano degli Spagnuoli, l'avesse fatta migliore, et è più scellerata che mai. Bandello (Novelle, Parte ii. xxxvii.) alluding to the sack, remarks in a parenthesis, 'benche i peccati di quella citt
Aretino has made a witty scene about this in the 'Cortegiana, where one of the Vatican servants cheats a poor fisherman, and then hands him over to the sacristan of Saint Peter's to be cured of an imaginary possession by a ceremonious exorcism.
Louis had many rights which they lost at last in 1560, when they became merely tolerated houses, without statutes, special costumes, or confinement to special streets. "Cortegiana, hoc est meretrix honesta," wrote Burchard, the Pope's Secretary, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Diarium, ed. Thuasne, vol. ii, p. 442; other authorities are quoted by Thuasne in a note.
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