Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  Book Two

  COLUMBUS

  Columbus makes landfall, and Indians flee. An illustration from Columbus’s first letter describing his discoveries, published in 1493.

  (Illustration credit 2.1)

  4

  “Only by monarchs”

  Such an enterprise could only be undertaken by monarchs.

  Queen Isabel to the Duke of Medinaceli, 14911

  Columbus was a citizen of Genoa, and that port seemed then the center of the world:

  So many are the Genoese,

  And so sure-footed everywhere,

  They go to any place they please,

  And re-create their city there.2

  Genoese merchants dominated Mediterranean commerce. The Pope, Innocent VIII, was Genoese, having been born Giovanni Battista Cibo, in a family renowned for shipping grain from Tunis to Europe. One Cibo had been a governor of Chios in the fourteenth century. Giovanni Battista Cibo had been the protégé of an austere cardinal, Calandrini, half-brother of Pope Nicholas V, founder of the Vatican Library, who came from the pretty Genoese frontier town of Sarzana. After another Genoese, Francesco della Rovere, had been elected Pope, as Sixtus IV, Cibo rose effortlessly to become the favored candidate for the throne of St. Peter in 1484. In that place of honor, he was rather unsuccessful: the historian Guicciardini described him as useless so far as improvement in public welfare was concerned.3 The magisterial place that the head of the Church had in the minds of all Christians, kings as well as laborers, archbishops as well as priests and monks, found in Cibo an unworthy representative. Yet it is to his credit that he built a beautiful double fountain in St. Peter’s Square, in addition to a shrine for the Holy Spear; and it was at least said that no one left a conversation with him without feeling consoled.4

  Roman aristocrats referred to Pope Innocent as “the Genoese sailor.” That was an insult in the Holy City, but it would have been so in few other places. The Genoese might be disliked, but they were respected; in the novel Tirant lo Blanc we read how the hero is adjured to “rout those wicked Genoese, since the crueler their deaths, the more glorious your name will resound.”5 Petrarch, at that time the cynosure of all affections, had thought Genoa “a truly regal city.”6

  St. Ferdinand had given the Genoese a special quarter in Seville with their own chapel, a quay, and a public bath. The Genoese family of Centurione (Centurión in Spain) were the most important businessmen of Malaga, both before and after its fall to the Christians; and Malaga had been the northern center of the African gold trade. Another Centurión bought sugar in Madeira, while a brother of his was busy selling silk in Granada. The Dorias sold olive oil from the valley of the Guadalquivir, while Francesco Pinelli of Genoa (Piñelo to his Spanish friends) was among those who financed the conquest of Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, where he had built the first sugar mill. He also became the joint treasurer of the Santa Hermandad, the embryonic national Castilian police, with Luis Santangel. Francesco Ripparolo (Riberol in Spain) traded in dye stuffs, especially orchil, in the Canaries; afterwards, he sold soap in Seville, in respect of which commodity he later obtained a valuable monopoly.

  The Grimaldi of Genoa were interested in wheat, while their relations, the Castiglione, dealt in wool. Other Genoese mercantile families who made the best of opportunities in Spain included the Vivaldi, of whom two brothers had sailed the Atlantic in 1291 to search for “the regions of India by way of the Ocean” (and were never heard of again), and the large Fornari family, who had been concerned in selling slaves in Chios. A Genoese, Lanzarotto Malocello, had discovered (or rediscovered) the Canary Islands about 1330 and raised there a Castilian flag on the island of Lanzarote, which name derives from his own. Another Genoese, Antonio Usodimare, also of a mercantile family in the Portuguese service, had been the first European to sail up the Rivers Senegal and Gambia. Yet one more citizen of Genoa, Antonio Noli, first established on Portugal’s behalf an effective settlement in the Cape Verde Islands. The Portuguese navy had been founded by a Genoese and had been commanded by his descendants, who took the title of admiral for several generations.

  Genoese entrepreneurs had also taken the initiative in growing sugarcane in the Algarve. The Lomellini controlled the Portuguese gold trade, and relations of theirs dominated not only the salt and silver commerce of Sardinia, but the mastic in Chios.7 Genoese were dominant in commerce at Ceuta after its capture by Portugal in 1415, and most of the gold brought from black Africa by caravan ended up there.8 Sovereignty of the Atlantic islands had been divided between the kings of Castile and Portugal by treaty—Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands remaining with the Portuguese, the Canaries with the Spaniards; but the Genoese were to be found on all the islands, whether under a Spanish or a Portuguese flag.

  The Genoese were specialists in trading slaves. Unlike the Portuguese, whose captains usually were exercised by the need to go through at least the motions of conversion of captives, they were not troubled by such concerns. The Genoese enslaved and sold, in the Crimea as in Chios, in Tunis as in Ceuta, in Malaga as in Granada, men, women, and children of all hues and races: Circassians and Ethiopians, Slavs and Bosnians, Berbers and black Africans, Canary Islanders and Greeks all found a market.9

  These families usually retained establishments in their home city, and one can still see their palaces—some of them, like those of the Doria, standing triumphant above the ruins of the twentieth century; others, like those of the Centurioni, barely distinguishable among the decayed buildings near the port. These sumptuous establishments were often embellished by treasures made possible by Spanish adventures in which the Genoese had outmaneuvered their rivals, such as the once preeminent Catalans, though Genoa itself was not an imperial-minded city, as was Venice. For Genoese merchants acted on their own, without consideration of interests at home. That they played such a part in European enterprise in the Atlantic was neither a collective nor a state decision; it derived from the hardheaded calculation of financial advantages by about fifty dynamic families or associations.10

  The Genoese were not the only Italians to be established in southern Spain and Portugal. Bartolomeo Marchionni, for example, from Florence, was the most important slave merchant of Lisbon; he sold black slaves so successfully there that he was thought of as an honorary Portuguese. His partners in Seville included Juanotto Berardi and Amerigo Vespucci, also Florentines, trading not only African slaves bought from Lisbon but captives from the Canary Islands; and it had been a Venetian, the ingenious Alvise Ca’ da Mosto, who had discovered the Cape Verde Islands for the King of Portugal in the 1450s.

  In those days the Church of Rome was not yet represented in Spain by a permanent nuncio. But many churchmen came and went, while other Italians made up for the absence of a permanent ambassador, even in the Spanish camp of Santa Fe before Granada. Among these was Peter Martyr de Anglería, a brilliant and learned man born in a village on Lake Maggiore who had come to Spain with the Count of Tendilla, ex-ambassador in Rome. Martyr had then been asked to educate the sons of Spanish noblemen. He wrote vivid letters in rough Latin to his Italian benefactors, such as Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, brother of Ludovico il Moro, the artful Duke of Milan, and to successive popes. He would be among the most valuable witnesses of the next twenty extraordinary years in Castile. A humanist chaplain and professor of linguistics from Sicily, Lucius Marineo Sículo, was also at the Spanish court, having been inspired to come to Spain by Fadrique Enríquez, the son of the Admiral of Castile.11 Artists from Italy, such as Nicolás Pisano, were busy reviving the character and color of the tiles of Seville.

  Nor was the interchange exclusively one way: Castilians were to be found in Bologna and other Italian universities while Catalan consuls were established in the cities of the kingdom of Naples, as in Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Genoa. Lorenzo Vázquez of Segovia, “the Spanish Brunelleschi,” trained as an architect in Rome and Bologna, was in the 1490s remodeling the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Valladolid and was also at work on
the Duke of Medinaceli’s palace at Cogolludo, near Guadalajara, as well as a new archiepiscopal residence in the latter city for Cardinal Mendoza.12

  These men stood for a growing Spanish connection with the center of culture in Europe. The time had not quite come when, thanks to the influence of printing, the revered Florentine Petrarch would dictate the rhythms, even the subject matter, of most Spanish poems. Yet most ambitious writers in Spain were in the 1490s already arranging to spend time in Italy, just as enlightened Englishmen would do in the eighteenth century. Soon, Fernando and Isabel would send armies there in support of their own claim to Naples, led by the best of their generals, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, El Gran Capitán. He would benignly reflect ¡España, las armas! ¡Italia, la pluma!13

  Spain appreciated Italy for things other than literature: when Queen Isabel at Seville was offered a luxurious cloak for her favorite Virgin, she requested a fine cape of brocade, made by her own preferred designer from Venice, Francesco del Nero.14

  Despite the role of Venice, Florence, and Rome in the Spain of Fernando and Isabel, it was fitting that the Pope in those days should have been a Genoese on both sides of his family. It was also appropriate that that eternal supplicant at court, the white-haired mariner Christopher Columbus, or Cristóbal Colón, to use his Spanish name, should have been born in Genoa.

  Columbus, as he is known in the English-speaking world, did not seem quite at home in the company of the forementioned great Genoese merchants. But then he was not at ease in any circle. That is why some have sought to establish him as a Gallego, a Jew, or a Majorcan.15 One writer thought that Columbus spoke Castilian since, though “his half-Jewish family” (as the author insisted) emigrated from Galicia after 1391, they always talked Castilian at home. But Genoa was not very welcoming to Jews, and it seems a tall tale. Columbus often appeared hostile to both Jews and conversos in conversation and letters,16 but that proves nothing, for some of the most virulent anti-Semites were conversos. He was certainly a serious Christian who preferred not to work on Sundays.17

  Columbus himself recalled that he was from Genoa when seeking to establish a feudal entail (mayorazgo) in Spain for his family in 1497. He explained then, too, that he had always desired to have a house in Genoa.18 In a codicil to his will, just before his death in 1506, he mentioned only Genoese friends, except for “the Jew who guards the gate of the Jewish district in Lisbon.”19

  Such mystery as Columbus created about his birth may be explained by shame about his origins, for his father, Domenico Colombo, from Moconesi, in the valley of Fontanabuona, above the city of Genoa, seems to have been merely a weaver, as was his mother, Susanna Fontanarossa. Domenico was probably later the landlord of an inn in Savona, thirty-five miles west of Genoa, the birthplace of Pope Sixtus IV. But that did not constitute much of a social rise. Columbus never afterwards talked of his parents or, indeed, of his sister, Binachinetta, who married a cheese merchant, or of his brother Giovanni Pelegrino, who stayed at home. However, two other brothers, Bartolomeo and Diego, were constantly with him in Spain and in the New World, and two of his nephews joined him there also. Columbus once said that he “was not the first admiral” in his family, but perhaps he was referring to his wife’s ancestors, who, as will be seen, were active in a thousand ways.

  As mentioned earlier, the accent and speech of Columbus have excited attention. Las Casas, who knew him, thought that he certainly spoke as if his native language had been something other than Castilian.20 He always had Portuguese words in his vocabulary, a sign, it has been thought, that he learned Spanish in his years in Lisbon between 1474 and 1485. He never composed letters in Italian. Probably that was because he knew the Genoese dialect, which was only rarely written.

  Columbus’s early life can be re-created from his own later comments and from those of his son Fernando, who wrote a biography that has many merits. Thus he told the King and Queen of Spain in 1501 that he had been to sea at an early age.21 Fernando Colón (so we shall call him, for he was fully Hispanized) said that his father had studied at the University of Pavia.22 Las Casas also said that Columbus studied the rudiments of letters, especially grammar, and Latin at Pavia.23 But the historian Father Andrés Bernáldez, with whom Columbus once stayed in his house outside Seville, said that Columbus was “a man of great intellect but little education.”24 The stay at Pavia seems doubtful.

  Columbus’s first maritime exploit was in 1472, when he was twenty-one. He seems to have been a simple mariner on a ship belonging jointly to Paolo di Negro and Nicoloso Spinola, both of well-known mercantile families in Genoa. They apparently went to the Aragonese dependency of Tunis, where the Cibo family was powerful, and captured a ship belonging to merchants from Barcelona. Columbus then went, in the Roxana, a ship whose owner was that same Paolo di Negro, to the Genoese colony of Chios, off Smyrna, in the Aegean, an island port concerned with the sale not only of slaves but of Atlantic sugar as well as mastic, a gum used to make varnish. He seems to have been to Lisbon for the first time in 1476, where he was shipwrecked after a battle at sea, presumably with Castilians, while on board the Bechalla, a ship belonging to another Genoese, Ludovico Centurión. Then in 1477, Columbus sailed to Ireland, and perhaps to Iceland, on another of Paolo di Negro’s and Spinola’s boats, again presumably as a sailor.25

  The next year, Centurión suggested that Columbus should work for him selling sugar in Madeira, “a land of many canes,” as the Venetian Alvise Ca’ da Mosto put it, about 1460; and this he seems to have done, so learning of a plantation colony that already employed black African slaves as well as enslaved Canary Islanders (the first sugar mill in Madeira had been built in 1452). Columbus would have learned of the elaborate network of channels and tunnels, some of mortar and some carved from the rock, known as levadas, that brought water to the terraced plots. Much of the sugar that Columbus sold must have gone to the Low Countries, where it was often exchanged for luxurious clothes. But how and where did he make these sales? The record is silent.

  Before he went to Madeira, perhaps in 1477, Columbus married Felipa Palastrelli (Perestrelo in Portuguese), a sister of the hereditary governor of Porto Santo, the smaller of the two islands of the Madeira archipelago but the first one to be colonized.

  Felipa’s father, Bartolomeo, by then dead, himself governor of Porto Santo before his son, came from Piacenza, in northern Italy. Felipa’s mother, Isabel Muñiz, was descended from a captain who helped in 1147 to capture the castle of São Jorge from the Moors. A part of Lisbon is still called the Puerta de Martím Muñiz. Isabel’s father, Gil Ayres Muñiz, had a fine property in the Algarve and had been with the Portuguese expedition at the successful siege of Ceuta in 1420. So Columbus had married into a family with useful connections.

  After the fall of Ceuta, Portugal embarked upon a half century of astounding maritime activity. Columbus would have become aware of it even before he arrived in Lisbon, if only because of the role of the Genoese. The expansion was inspired by Prince Henry the Navigator, brother of King João, and one of the commanders at Ceuta.26 His first venture was the occupation, beginning about 1425, of the previously uninhabited islands of Madeira (so-called from the timber-bearing forest, madeira being the Portuguese for “wood”) and, about 1431, of the Azores (a word meaning “the hawks”). Both these groups of islands were colonized by Portuguese, but Flemings as well as Italians also played a part. Both places yielded wax, honey, and dye, from resins of “dragon’s blood” of the dragon tree, and of the lichen orchil, increasingly sought after by those who wanted violet cloth. Columbus would have been impressed by how far out both these archipelagos were in the ocean: one thousand miles and six hundred miles, respectively, from Lisbon. Porto Santo, twenty-eight miles from the main island, was the most easily cultivated of the two islands of the Madeiras: it had been easy to colonize for it was treeless and flat, and the sea nearby teemed with fish. The mountainous main island of Madeira was covered by trees till a fierce fire destroyed most of that forest.


  Henry next sent expeditions down the West African coast. His primary purpose was to find a sea route to the sources of African gold on the headwaters of the Rivers Niger and Volta. In 1434, one of his captains, Gil Eannes, sailed around Cape Bojador, a headland that had been seen as impassable (though one of the French conquerors of the Canaries had probably sailed past it earlier). It had been put out, probably by Muslims to discourage adventures there, that sailors turned black if they rounded Cape Bojador and that any ship that sailed there would be consumed by the heat.