Macalda di Scaletta (or Machalda) (c. 1240 in Scaletta Zanclea – after October 14, 1308? in Messina) was a Sicilian baroness and lady-in-waiting during the Angevin and Aragonese periods. The daughter of Giovanni di Scaletta and a Sicilian noblewoman, Macalda was noted for her political conduct, inclination to betray marriage (political and human), and for her promiscuous sexual habits; because of this dissoluteness, even having a brush with "suspicion of incest," tended to morph into an "exhibitionism veined with nymphomania." She was the wife of the Grand Justiciar of the Kingdom of Sicily, .
Reportedly ambitious, judicious, and educated in matters of the military, Macalda deployed her influence first in the circle of Charles of Anjou and then at the court of Peter III of Aragon, whom, according to a chronicler of the time, Macalda tried to seduce, but without success. She lived in a time of upheavals in the Kingdom of Sicily, which were marked by the bloody revolt of the Sicilian Vespers, and which led to the change from Angevin to Aragonese rule.
Practicing intrigue at court, but also vying with Queen Constance of Hohenstaufen, Macalda had a role in at first favoring, and then toppling, the political fortunes of her second husband, the Alaimo da Lentini, who had been one of the major champions of the Sicilian Vespers.
Macalda's career has left behind a recognizable historical trace, though variously treated in the chronicles of her time. One of these, the Historia Sicula by the contemporaneous Messinese chronicler Bartholomaeus of Neocastro, is aggressive towards her character, but some suspect that the political motives influencing the pro-Aragonese Neocastro may not have been the only factor in his bitterness towards Macalda, and that he was "one of the victims of the woman's spell."
Besides her military education, Macalda is also noted for her ability to play chess, which was unusual for a woman of her time, and historical evidence suggests that she was probably the first person in Sicily who learned how to play it.
Her singular figure, inhabiting the pages of chronicle and history, is transfigured in the collective memory, in folklore, and in the collective imagination. Macalda became the protagonist of popular traditions, myths, and legends of Sicily, such as one in Catania about the well of Gammazita.
A distant echo of Macalda's passion for the Aragonese sovereign, which the chronicler Neocastro disseminated in caustic tones, also seems to reverberate in Boccaccio's storytelling, with an enormous difference of tones and accents, in a much more idealized and rarefied courtly and knightly context in the Decameron: the tale of Lisa Puccini's love for King Peter of Raona (Aragon).
Lineage
Her family initially experienced distressed economic conditions, from which they would be able to free themselves, due to a social rise whose apex would be reached by Macalda. Her great-grandmother led her existence exposed to the weather ("under the sun and the rain") in front of the Porta Judaeorum of Messina, where she sold food from a stall in the open. With this activity, the woman succeeded not only in making ends meet, but also in saving up some money.
Social and political rise
Grandfather
The son of the itinerant food vendor was Matteo Selvaggio ("who was surnamed 'savage'"). He became Macalda's grandfather. In the early 13th century, during the Swabian period, he was a servant or soldier employed by the custodian of the state palace of Scaletta, a stronghold built to control traffic on the road that led to Messina from the south, coming from Catania and Syracuse.
By 1220, after the castellan was dead, Matteo Selvaggio succeeded in being hired at his job by concession of Emperor Frederick II of Swabia. Matteo owed a further step forward to his discovery of treasure hidden inside his castle. Sloughing off the poverty in this way, he also wished to discard his surname. Claiming the noble title of Scaletta, Matteo sought to sanction his new advancement in status. His economic progress allowed him the possibility to send his son Giovanni to study law.
Giovanni di Scaletta, Macalda's father
This privilege of studies, as Neocastro wrote, was able to confer great prestige upon anyone who accomplished it. Thus it was that without fail that Giovanni opened up horizons and new opportunities, including the royal road of a highly placed marriage, sealed with a Sicilian noblewoman of the house of Cottone. From this marriage, two children were born in the castle of Scaletta: the firstborn was Matteo II, followed circa 1240 by his sister Macalda.