by Andrew Rowen
The strain was too much, and, at the end of May near Ávila, Isabel miscarried a child. As she writhed in pain, the witnesses determined the fetus a boy—a future king of Castile never to be—and the pain became agony. Fernando was apprised and devastated. Both found their faith tested by God in every aspect of their lives and implored him to reveal how they had failed. In their despair, their union grew unqualified and indivisible.
Fernando now recognized that their kingdoms’ perpetual union was essential for each. Acquiescing to Isabel’s supremacy, he wrote a will with Talavera’s assistance just days before going into battle, specifying that he should be buried permanently wherever Isabel was buried and entrusting her and his father with guardianship of his illegitimate children and their mothers. Regardless of the laws of Aragón, little Princess Isabel was to inherit Aragón and Sicily on his death so that Aragón, Sicily, and Castile would remain under one rule.
Isabel recognized the exigencies of war and woefully accepted the necessity of arranging a truce with the emir of Granada Abū l’Hasan for one year,12 shamed and humiliated to make the very compromise with the infidel she had contemptuously scorned as a girl. She sought to disrupt Afonso’s supply of African wealth and ordered Portuguese shipping and trading posts plundered for gold. As her father, she asserted Castile’s prior right to most of Portugal’s African possessions, including navigating in the seas of Guinea to obtain its gold and slaves, as well as sovereignty over the Canary Islands and her intent to subjugate them. She provisioned the Castilian armies and sometimes went to the battlefront, occasionally wearing armor, with tremendous impact on the troops’ moral and fortitude.
CRISTOFORO
Lagos, Lisbon, London, Galway, Thule, and Vinland, (1476–1477)
In the summer of 1476, Cristoforo enlisted on a trading expedition to Flanders and London organized by the Spinolas and di Negros to sell Sciot mastic, spices, and oriental wares. Five ships were fitted, and Cristoforo sailed as a common seaman on one that recruited part of its crew in Savona.
As the Genoese ships entered the Pillars of Hercules, Cristoforo gazed through a sultry mist north to Spain, south to Africa, and west to the enormous horizon and the end of the known world. Almost twenty-five, he was thrilled to be on the Ocean Sea for the first time and marveled at its enormity. On August 13, the expedition came abreast of Lagos, but a short sail to Sagres and Cape St. Vincent. As every sailor, Cristoforo knew tales of Prince Henrique and his African exploits, and he grew pensive sailing along the prince’s coast toward the Cape, captivated by the mystique of the renowned waters.
The French King Louis XI then supported Portugal in its war with Castile, and Louis had authorized a French corsair known as Louis Coulon to patrol Portugal’s southern coast with a fleet of warships, with orders to attack Castilian and Aragonese vessels. As a mercenary, Coulon was entitled to the booty seized, and he thought the Genoese expedition too grand a prize to slip by, regardless of nationality. He ordered his crews to intercept them, chain their hulls to his fleet’s own, and then board and plunder, killing resisters.
The Genoese fiercely defended their cargos and honor, and the battle raged from morning to late afternoon, with the decks of both fleets littered with dead and wounded. Cristoforo was terrified, and, when fire engulfed his ship, he grabbed an oar and jumped to the sea. Two other Genoese ships, and a few of the corsair fleet, sank before two surviving Genoese ships broke free and fled east, leaving hundreds of sailors, Genoese and pirate, desperately floundering, deserted six miles offshore, nearly all to drown.
As the frenzy of drownings concluded in silence, Cristoforo grimly assessed that his first passage on the Ocean Sea would be his last, despairing that the tide would sweep him farther to sea. But he praised the Lord that he remained alive and beseeched continued mercy as he swam toward the coast, propped by the oar. After sunset, shivering cold, dehydrated, and exhausted, he crawled onto a beach near Lagos. The summer heat engulfed and restored him, and, as never before, he thanked the Lord for his grace.
Fishermen on the coast watched the battle, and, moved by the plight of imperiled seamen, one offered Cristoforo water and a biscuit. He sheltered at the beach for the night and, at dawn, walked to Lagos to wander its quays and markets, which bustled with activity and brimmed with African wares, gold jewelry, and slaves. He marveled that he stood at the center of world exploration—but a day after nearly perishing anonymously on the Ocean Sea as countless seamen since Creation.
Cristoforo learned that the surviving Genoese ships had safely harbored at Cádiz and soon rejoined them. He discussed with the Spinolas and di Negros that he work for their agents in Portugal and secured a position on a vessel bound for Lisbon. After rounding Cape St. Vincent, he arrived Lisbon by autumn and went to live in the city’s significant Genoese enclave, where members and agents of Genoa’s trading families resided.
Undaunted, the Spinolas and di Negros reassembled the plundered trading expedition. Additional ships were fitted in Genoa by December 1476 and sailed to meet the two surviving ships in Lisbon, where Cristoforo rejoined the crew. The reconstituted fleet departed for London in January 1477, again bearing mastic, spices, and other oriental cargo.
The northern Ocean Sea was tempestuous and inhospitable in winter, and Cristoforo learned how ships and crews bore a relentless wind and swell as a matter of routine. He perceived milestones when the ships entered the British Ocean (English Channel) and, in February, slipped into a large estuary (Thames estuary) on England’s eastern coast, twelve hundred miles from Lisbon and grateful for the shelter. He marveled as the ships slowly made their way up the river to London, sailing when possible, assisted by the tide when rising, and towed from the river’s banks by men hauling ropes when necessary, eventually to dock at a quay in the large city by a customs house, near the fortress where the English kings sometimes resided (Tower of London), downstream from an enormous stone bridge spanning the river (London Bridge).
The city was cold, wet, and shrouded by cloud. The mastic and other cargos were unloaded, Cristoforo was paid for his service, and, as the crews began loading fine wool cloth and other merchandise for return to ports south, he departed into the city, reflecting on Domenico’s struggles to earn a living, now bound on his own exploration.
He ambled along the city wharfs and found inexpensive shelter in a cold, broken tenement by the wharfs with other seaman seeking work. At night, he ate and drank in the sailors’ pubs and, using gestures and a few words similar in Ligurian and English, learned when the next Bristol-bound ships would sail. He found employment on one, and the passage took him to England’s western coast, where he was astounded by a ferocious tide as the ship navigated another large estuary (Severn estuary) to slip with the rising sea into a river gorge (the Avon), winding to a large city invisible to seaborne invaders and pirates. The ship berthed astride an imposing fortress wall, the quays heaped with wood, grain, salt, and wine awaiting delivery to Thule (Iceland) when winter thawed.
Cristoforo again frequented the wharfs and sailors’ pubs to learn of ships sailing, and, by late winter, he enlisted on a small English expedition bound for Thule, a voyage that typically took two weeks, depending on the seas. The ships first coursed the Celtic Sea to Galway (western Ireland) to harbor and water before the nine hundred and fifty mile open-sea crossing, docking at piers directly beside Galway’s imposing city wall. Cristoforo was surprised to see a man and woman with features he believed were traits of people from the Indies—including slanted, as opposed to rounded, eyelids—sitting nearby in two small boats. He studied them, wondering how they had arrived in Galway.
When off duty, the crews entered the town to feast and drink at its pubs, most to visit whores, and nearly all—including Cristoforo— to pray at St. Nicholas Collegiate Church for the Virgin’s protection of their crossing to Thule. As he drank with his mates, Cristoforo listened to their banter and boast. While unable to understand most of it, he recognized a story he had heard as a boy. As the tale
went, centuries past (sixth century AD), an Irish abbot, St. Brendan, had fasted forty days and nights—three at a time—and then departed in a wood-framed, ox-hide boat westward to find the Promised Land of the saints, trusting God as his helper, sailor, and helmsman and with fellow monks as crew. Cristoforo recalled how the Genoese spoke of the Vivaldi brothers and discerned that his mates had similar affections for their own story, too.
The expedition soon departed northwest and the wind grew brutally cold, the deck treacherously slippery, and rain and spray froze on the seamen’s clothing. Cristoforo was on deck when the lookout sighted Thule’s southern coast. Mountains capped with snow and glacier stretched as far as he could see into the interior and came forward to fall, sometimes precipitously, to a coastal flatland—often a weird, brusquely deformed plain of gray and black volcanic rock and ash, other times verdant pastureland. The vessels navigated west along the southern shore and turned northwest to a mountainous peninsula (like Snæfellsnes), where they anchored at a secluded pastureland with a tiny natural harbor (like Bjarnarhöfn). There was no town, only a road, an open field, and a small church nestled between the harbor and snow-covered mountains. Within days, merchants arrived by ship and horseback to purchase the expedition’s cargo in return for stock fish (dried cod) and whale and fish oil, destined to feed and light the English cities.
When the crew rested, Cristoforo listened as best he could to his crewmates relate tales of their prior voyages to Thule and of Thule’s legendary mariners, including one Eiríkur Thorvaldsson Rauda (Erik the Red). Cristoforo gleaned that Eiríkur had been an outcast, expelled from Norway and then Thule, leading him to explore Greenland farther west, which he decided to colonize and bestow its ill-fitted name to attract colonists. Cristoforo deciphered that Thule’s merchants had once traded with Eiríkur’s colony in Greenland.
Cristoforo prayed daily in the small church. He reflected that items he took for granted—such as wood for cooking, warmth, and building homes and ships—were dear in this place. He realized there were few people to buy goods, they were poor, and, while Domenico struggled in Genoa, the struggle here for existence alone was far more brutal.
When the expedition raised anchor to return to Bristol, Cristoforo studied the western horizon. He understood that the Greenland of the fabled Eiríkur was beyond it and, likely, other islands that could be visited or discovered. He saw the Ocean Sea was navigable at this extreme latitude, just as at Lisbon. But at this latitude the Ocean Sea was fierce and more hostile and, in winter, the sun orbited above the horizon fewer hours, rendering navigation—and all existence—more difficult. He gazed at the sea swishing below the hull, remembered his swim at Lagos, and reflected that even a short immersion in these waters meant death.
Unknown to Cristoforo, beyond Eiríkur’s Greenland lay lands previously visited by Europeans but forgotten or misunderstood. After Eiríkur colonized Greenland (AD 985), his son Leifur and others explored shores west of Greenland previously sighted by its colonists (commencing AD 1,001), discovering sites they named Helluland, meaning Stone-slab-land (Baffin Island?), Markland, meaning Woodland (Labrador?), and Vinland, meaning Vineland (Island of Newfoundland and farther south?). A colony was established at Vinland (L’Anse aux Meadows?). It lacked food and suffered internal discord and likely was abandoned within twenty years, perhaps owing to recognition that the native people could and would easily fight to eliminate it. Greenlanders continued to travel to Vinland for perhaps two centuries to obtain wood and fur. Eventually, Thule’s Greenland trade itself died for lack of profit, and Greenland was largely abandoned by Europeans in the fifteenth century. The Norsemen and their European successors thought of their colonies as northern or polar European islands, not envisioning themselves in the Indies or another possibility. While some European cartographers added Greenland to world maps, Greenland and lands beyond typically were not recognized as “Indian,” but as extensions of northern European coasts.
European portion of Nicholas Germanus’s World Map, ca. 1467–1474, reflecting Germanus’s addition of information relating to northern Europe to Ptolemy’s second projection.
ISABEL
Guadalupe, Castile, 1477
By April 1477, Isabel and Fernando had reduced the Portuguese incursion into Castile to border areas, and Isabel rode south to Seville to compel the submission of disloyal Castilian noblemen while Fernando continued to prosecute the war. Her entourage bore Brother Enrique’s body to inter it next to his mother’s in the Hieronymite Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe deep in the mountains in the center of her kingdom. The monastery’s icon of the Virgin— known as Our Lady of Santa María of Guadalupe—was venerated by pilgrims from throughout Hispania. More than three feet tall, the icon was held to have been entombed with St. Luke and, over centuries, passed to Hispanic clergy who buried her when fleeing the infidel in the eighth century—only to be revealed centuries later by the Virgin to a local herdsman.
Isabel came as a pilgrim herself. She had given birth to but one child in almost eight years of marriage and ached for a son, knowing that critical to establishing her dynasty, regardless of young Isabel. She had visited Guadalupe and worshipped its Virgin before, and she now sought to redouble her pleas for a son after years of disappointment.
She entered the monastery accompanied only by her guard, knelt in the shrine before the Virgin icon, and praised the Virgin for the magnificent example of her purity and perfection, a life without sin at any time. Church doctrine held that, upon conception by her parents, Saints Joachim and Anne, and before her birth and baptism, God had preserved Mary free from original sin in light of her destined immaculate conception of Christ. Isabel prayed that she, too, be blessed with a son.
She also addressed the Lord as his servant, promising to be guided by his will as he revealed it in her conscience. With doubt and trepidation, she paused to consider her own imperfection and reminded him that, unlike the Virgin, she ruled a kingdom on earth, and it was her duty to do that necessary to protect it from usurpation by a foreign lineage.
Isabel arranged for Enrique’s body to be entombed with a royal funeral service. She knelt before him and, as never before, appreciated the anguish he must have felt over the absence of a male heir—and, as far as she was concerned, any heir. Queen Juana had died the previous summer, forgotten and deserted, and Isabel mused that the Lord did not favor a queen who failed to produce a male heir. The affections she sometimes had held for Enrique swelled within, and she thanked him for rejecting and crushing the noblemen’s gambit to usurp the Crown’s power and glory.
As she knelt, Isabel also brooded on her own husband’s philandering and fertility. He had fathered a son and daughter with other women before their marriage and at least two daughters since. Isabel had grown accustomed to bitter jealousy, and to repressing it. She resolved to insist that both girls born after their marriage be placed in a convent, never to know of their father’s identity.
Santa María de Guadalupe.
But Isabel reflected proudly on her marriage. She had avoided a loveless dynastic coupling and wifely subservience to an aging sovereign in a foreign principality or culture—who might well have been ugly, lecherous, impotent, perverted, ignorant, untutored, ill mannered, decrepit, weak, or even faithless. She had achieved instead an independent and mutual sovereignty at home with a Spaniard who, regardless of marital infidelity, was none of those things— who was her own age, handsome, devout, and a warrior second to none—and, above all, was loyal and devoted to her sovereignty and their child. This sovereign loyalty mattered far more to her than marital loyalty. Royal documents and coins minted bore a phrase proclaiming their sovereign equality, “Tanto Monta” (“one and the same, without difference”). She also did love him and recognized he did love her to the extent he was capable. The result was beyond her girlhood expectations, albeit not perfect.
CAONABÓ
Succession in Maguana
Caonabó’s uncle lay in his hammock most of the
day, attended by naborias, and he recognized death approaching and that the time had come to choose his successor—upon which he had reflected considerably since Cacibaquel’s death. Villagers throughout Maguana were satisfied Uncle’s family aligned the spirits for their benefit, and the only issue was which family member would replace him. The son of his sisters best suited to rule normally would be selected, but, if none were worthy, one of his own sons might be chosen, as had occurred with the selection of Cacibaquel’s Guarionex. One morning, Uncle bid naborias carry him by litter to the secluded bohío where he stored his cemís, and they left him there with a gourd of pineapple juice to consider his final decision, alone but for the presence of Yúcahu. Uncle pondered about Caonabó.
Of his sisters’ children, Caonabó undoubtedly was the most distinguished and accomplished choice. He had proven himself in war and in peace, both as a clever general and as a just leader. The issue was not ability but acceptance by others. He was aloof, sometimes perceived by many as pompous or arrogant, although Uncle understood him otherwise.
Caonabó had proved a superior warrior at an early age, when Uncle had dispatched him with troops to the southern coast to defend Caribe wife-raiding attacks. Rather than waiting to repel a raid, Caonabó attacked first, tracking the course of Caribes spied at sea to their nighttime encampment ashore, routing them as they slept in predawn twilight, and taking no prisoners. The effectiveness of being the aggressor, which was not the Taíno custom, and his singular, impassive resolve to annihilate the enemy, had impressed all. He had vanquished Caribes many times, and his personal bravery in combat was renowned.
Uncle had invited Caonabó to participate with the elders in council, and Caonabó had comported himself well. His own thoughts were always sound, yet he was able to accept someone else’s ideas as better. He genuinely appreciated that peace had reigned among the Haitian caciques for many years, with but a handful of frictions settled through discussion or minor skirmish. While raised on simple Aniyana, he had come to understand the more complex Managuan society, where food was shared among peoples of different occupations. Inevitably, there were disputes over who was entitled to work which land or fish which area, and, while infrequent, misdeeds had to be punished. Caonabó appreciated the cacique’s responsibility to resolve these disputes and impose fair punishments to preserve harmony.