Katharina von Bora

Katharina von Bora was placed in a convent as a child and left it as a young woman, smuggled out at Easter 1523 with eleven other nuns; the tradition says they hid among empty herring barrels on a merchant's cart. Two years later she married Martin Luther, partly because no one else could be found for her and partly because both of them decided the point should be made.

The former monastery they were given became a working household she managed herself: fields and cattle, a fish pond, a brewery, a garden, students boarding upstairs, sick people nursed downstairs, and six children of their own. Luther, who joked about her endless talking, also called her his lord and rewrote his will to leave her everything, which the law did not expect. Their home became the picture Protestant Europe copied for the pastor's family.

After Luther died she lost most of what they had to war and plague, and died at Torgau in 1552 after her cart overturned as she fled an outbreak.