One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Columbus’s report to the Spanish court was full of errors both of history and geography. To begin with, Christian missionaries had been visiting the countries he called “India”—which today, we know, refers mostly to China—since early in the fourteenth century. Yet while Columbus may have had a hazy understanding of the past, his intention here is clear: With the mention of “doctrines of perdition” on the rise in “India,” he hoped to suggest to the Catholic Monarchs that the vast, mysterious East was in danger of falling irredeemably under Muslim influence, a turn of events that would significantly dim the glow of the recent Catholic conquest of Alhambra. Moreover, Columbus’s suggestion that the pope himself had long neglected to take this crucial step in the ongoing struggle between Christianity and Islam may have appealed to pious Isabella’s spiritual vanity. If the “Great Khan” could be converted through her intervention, then she even more than the Holy Father might be seen as the world’s preeminent defender of the faith.

  With veiled threat and open flattery, Columbus convinced them. It certainly helped that Ferdinand and Isabella, like the would-be explorer himself, knew next to nothing about the people, governance, or culture of Asia. Very likely when Columbus referred to the “Great Khan” he meant Kublai Khan, the Mongol conqueror who loomed large over the most famous text of early European encounter with the East, The Book of Marvels by the late medieval Venetian merchant Marco Polo. A Latin edition of Polo’s travelogue was among the prized possessions of Columbus’s youth. His copy, in the collection of the Columbine Library of Seville, contains comments in the explorer’s own hand that show just how inspiring this book of tall tales and exaggeration was to the man whose own exploits would become part of the mythology of America itself.

  That Kublai Khan was long dead and his dynasty finished for more than one hundred years would have been news to Columbus and his patrons, but no matter. The specter of the Great Khan converting to “doctrines of perdition” and thus becoming predisposed to strike out against Christian kingdoms was enough to alter perception of what might be gained if Columbus was successful in his mission. According to Columbus’s journal, permission was granted to him that very month, though it remained unclear how the funding for an ongoing exploration of uncharted lands and waters might be maintained.

  A further step toward Columbus’s voyage occurred later that same year, in the same palace. Following the advice of Tomás de Torquemada, the Dominican priest who was the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic Monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree, the order of expulsion of all Jews from the kingdom. For years, Torquemada had been the scourge of religious minorities in Spain, making particular targets of converts from Judaism and Islam. The Inquisitor’s motivating fear was that though many Jews and Muslims had become Christian in name, they had done so for the entirely practical reason of avoiding persecution, rather than as the result of a genuine conversion to the faith. So-called crypto-Muslims (Moriscos) and crypto-Jews (Marranos) were thought to be everywhere, and Torquemada oversaw a campaign of torture and execution to root them out. While the Inquisition had no official authority over the nonbaptized, the original communities from which Moriscos and Marranos came were seen to be the source of the problem. Hebrew and Arabic religious texts were burned in town squares, and the readers of those texts frequently found themselves following their books into the flames.

  With the decree issued in March of 1492, all the Jews in Spain were given six months to leave. Two hundred thousand would ultimately abandon their homes and livelihoods in the only land their families had known for generations. Like the riches of Alhambra, much of the wealth of Jews fleeing Torquemada’s fires fell into royal hands, which in turn financed Columbus’s expedition of commerce and evangelism.

  Of those few converted Jews allowed to remain, some of whom were friends and advisors to the Crown, many felt obliged to contribute personally to the voyage. Foremost among these was Luís de Santángel, finance minister to the royal court, who supported Columbus’s case for the necessity of converting the Mongol Empire, and put up a sizable portion of his own fortune—17,000 ducats—as a sign of loyalty to the kingdom and the faith.

  It would be too easy to conclude that the voyage of Columbus was the result of simple cause and effect, but chronology does tell a tale. When Columbus first sought Spanish resources for his expedition, none were to be found. After the capture of Muslim and Jewish wealth, the way was suddenly clear. With funds gained from the confiscation of Moorish treasures and the expulsion of Spain’s Jews, Columbus was free to take his journey. Without the two-pronged assault on the religious diversity of the kingdom, it seems unlikely Columbus’s ships would have ever left port.

  Yet, like the larger history of the world about to be born, this is not merely an account of the attempted destruction of the weak by the strong. It is, also, a story of resilience.

  The Grand Inquisitor Torquemada was not wrong when he assumed that Jews and Muslims were flouting the authority of the church through pro forma baptisms that did little to change their religious practices or beliefs. Throughout Spain, and later in nearly all the lands to which the Spanish would travel, entire communities of nominal Christians were found to avoid pork, pray in non-Latin tongues, read forbidden books, and generally maintain their spiritual heritage despite the threat of such marvels of medieval technology as the Judas Cradle or the Heretic’s Fork. Over time, as one generation of keepers of a hidden faith gave way to the next, Marranos and Moriscos often lost awareness of who their forebears had been, and yet remnants of the old ways of worship survived. In fact, the Grand Inquisitor may have had personal experience of this. Torquemada’s grandmother was a baptized Jew, as were others in his extended family. His zeal for hunting Marranos, then, likely arose, at least in part, from a strategy of self-preservation.

  The possibility that Columbus himself had Jewish roots has been the subject of heated debate among historians. Those who think it likely roll out the fact that the family name, Colón, had a distinctly Jewish ring to it at the time; likewise, the family business, wool weaving, was one of the few occupations open to Jews in their native Genoa. Others point to the support Columbus received from well-placed baptized Jews in the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, and to the presence of markings that appear to be Hebrew letters on several extant documents written in his hand.

  Circumstantial evidence aside, the Jewish Columbus will likely never be more than speculation. Far more certain is the fact that even if Columbus himself was inarguably as Christian as the Catholic Monarchs who finally approved his journey across the sea, the men who helped him get there were less so. The ability of marginal traditions to persevere in the face of persecution was so strong that expeditions conceived and undertaken for the purpose of extending the reach of the church unwittingly facilitated the spread not only of religious orthodoxy but spiritual dissent as well. It was not just a Muslim palace and Jewish ducats that helped Columbus on his way, but a few of the souls the Catholic Monarchs had attempted to rid themselves of earlier that same eventful year.

  When they set sail from Spain—on the very day that served as the deadline for Jews to leave—Columbus’s small fleet served as unlikely life rafts for a handful of men of Jewish birth who would have preferred to continue their lives as not only Jews but Spaniards. Those who signed on to sail with Columbus included not only criminals given amnesty for the purpose but Marranos and perhaps Moriscos as well. While most were professional sailors with miles of sea behind them, many were marginal men who surely had reasons to take the risk. Boarding the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria offered a kind of deliverance for these men. They were fleeing a place of religious persecution and sailing for an unknown land that offered freedom in its mystery.

  Columbus, too, saw something of an Exodus narrative in his journey. As he writes in his journal, after two months at sea, the crew began to “murmur” just as the Hebrews did against Moses as he led them endlessly through the desert. They had begun to see t
antalizing signs of land, but it seemed the winds had died and they might progress no farther. In the sky above, they noted turtle doves and pelicans, birds that rarely wandered far from shore; in the waters below, they saw weeds poking up from the depths, busy with crabs clinging to patches of green oasis in the desert of the empty ocean. But signs of land are a far cry from land itself. If neither gale nor current moved them, the three ships would float aimlessly, with little hope of reaching new ground or turning back the way they came. Later that day, Columbus writes, when the sea rose and began to move without wind, the crew was astonished—and relieved. The Admiral thought it was a very good sign, because, he remembered, such things often happened to the prophets of scripture. In his estimation, he was not merely a mariner, but a spiritual titan leading the way toward the Promised Land.

  That Christopher Columbus believed he was on a mission from God is evident in nearly every document he has left us. It was not just a line he sold to Ferdinand and Isabella. Whatever his material ambitions—which were so considerable he believed himself personally entitled to 10 percent of anything he found—his real motivation seems to have been a fervent, and at times fanatical, devotion to his faith. Eventually he came to believe the accidental propaganda of his name. He was the namesake of the third-century Christian saint who, according to legend, had once carried a small but unbelievably heavy boy across a dangerous river. The boy, as this pious folktale explained, was Jesus himself, making an appearance centuries after his death, holding the weight of the world within him. For this reason, the saint was called Christopher, literally, “the bearer of Christ.” Columbus believed the burden of carrying the savior across the waters had now fallen to him.

  Neither the Admiral nor the sailors under his command could have known this, but they would not be the first to bring alien religious traditions to the New World.

  Though the suggestion was once ridiculed, it is today well known that Norsemen visited North America five hundred years before Columbus set sail. As Geraldine Barnes notes in her history Viking America, the fact that Leif Erikson’s longship had arrived long before the Niña, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria was seen throughout the nineteenth century as a challenge to “the image of America as a land unseen, unnamed and otherwise without mortal creator before 1492… imping[ing] on questions of national history and identity.” That great mythmaker Washington Irving, whose best-selling book about Columbus gave him an obvious interest in maintaining the singularity of the Admiral as the discoverer of the Americas, scoffed at Viking tales of encounter with the native tribes of Canada as mere legends. At best, he insisted, Erikson had enjoyed “transient glimpses of the new world… in a little time lost again to mankind.” Another doubter of the day dismissed supposed evidence to the contrary as “the sublime of humbuggery.”

  The confidence of the naysayers could not prevent the facts from becoming more widely known. Around the year 1000, Leif Erikson came ashore and established a Viking foothold with an encampment he called Vinland, which today is thought to have been in Newfoundland. The Saga of the Greenlanders describes the exploits of the Erikson clan—Leif, Thorvald, and Thorstein, the sons of Erik the Red—as they explored and inhabited Vinland, and eventually ran afoul of its occupants. It is thanks to the volley of arrows that cut Thorvald down, or more precisely to the funeral that followed, that we know something of the religious practices he and his brothers imported. The Eriksons arrived in North America at the precise moment their people were becoming Christianized, converted from their traditional belief in the gods of Scandinavian mythology through contact with the European mainland. And so as Thorvald lay dying, he asked to be brought to a spot where he had imagined building a home. “There shall ye bury me,” he said, “and set up crosses at my head and feet.” The Vikings, then, were the first Christians in America. And this new faith may not have been the only religion they carried across the sea. The buried man’s very name, which means “the power of Thor,” suggests they also brought gods they had known far longer than Christ.

  The possibility that still another Old World faith arrived before Columbus is suggested by tales of North African Muslims who allegedly stumbled upon the Americas not long after the Eriksons. The eleventh-century geographer Abu Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Abdallah Ibn Idrisi, commonly referred to as Idrisi, alludes to lands on the far side of the Atlantic in a geography and travelogue with a title just barely longer than his name: The going out of a Curious Man to explore the Regions of the Globe, its Provinces, Islands, Cities and their Dimensions and Situation, abbreviated variously as “The Amusement of him who Desires to Traverse the Earth,” “The Peregrinations of one who longs to Penetrate New Horizons,” and also simply as “Roger’s Book,” in honor of his patron, Roger II of Sicily. At Roger’s direction and on his dime, Idrisi selected “certain intelligent men, who were despatched on travels and were accompanied by draftsmen.” When these travelers and mapmakers returned, Idrisi inserted their descriptions into his narrative and reworked his vision of the world accordingly. Though sponsored by a Christian king, Idrisi made clear from the opening words whom he hoped to glorify through his work. “All grace goes back to Allah,” he writes, “the essentially great and powerful being.” Viewing exploration as a fundamentally Islamic enterprise, he dated his manuscript in relation to the prophetic career of Muhammad, explaining that it was completed in the year “548 of Hijra.” A man of a faith perhaps even more fervently missionary than that of his patron, Idrisi thus found it fitting to send Muslim explorers into the unknown ocean he referred to as the “Gloomy Sea,” otherwise known as the Atlantic. “No one knows what lies beyond it,” he wrote, because of “the great expanse of its waters, the plethora of its horrors, the reach of its beasts, and the frenzy of its winds.” However, when his commissioned explorers returned, he was able to note that they had been held captive for a time on an island on the other side of the darkness and fog, where the navigators saw “people with red skin” with “not much hair on their bodies.” The women of the island, he further noted, “were extraordinarily beautiful.”

  Similarly, the Arabic-inscribed maps of the Ottoman cartographer Ahmed Muhiddin Piri showed the northeast coast of South America in relationship to the West coast of Africa as early as 1513. Considered in the context of the work of Idrisi, who elsewhere described China in obsessive detail and argued with confidence that the world was round but not perfectly spherical (“the Earth is,” he wrote, “plunged in space like the yoke in a middle of an egg”), such maps provide evidence of an era of Islamic geographic awareness predating Columbus that has nearly been lost to history. Moreover, the collaboration of the Christian King Roger and the Muslim scholar Idrisi, as well as the speed with which later maps crossed between cultures, suggest the porousness of religious boundaries despite the ongoing hostilities between Christendom and the Islamic world.

  Perhaps the most developed of the legends of the ancient exploration of the Americas involves Chinese seamen, who unlike Western adventurers would have sailed east toward the New World. Chinese maps created one thousand years before Columbus embarked describe a land known as Fusang, across the Pacific from the Middle Kingdom. After initial discovery, it was said that Buddhist priests made a journey to Fusang to establish their faith, and “carried with them their books and sacred images and the ritual… and so changed the manners of the inhabitants.” In the eighteenth century, European historians and mapmakers argued over the theory of French sinologist Joseph de Guignes, author of the comprehensive History of the Huns, Mongols, and Turks, that Fusang referred to the west coast of the Americas. Advocates of the Fusang-as-America hypothesis pointed to ancient descriptions of long-horned cattle very much like American buffalo, and to the place these same texts referred to as the “Country of Women,” which European intellectuals of the day assumed to be the Amazon. De Guignes, it should be noted, also believed that China itself began as a colony of the ancient Egyptians; such eighteenth-century theories are, in the opinion of Chinese hi
storian Joseph Needham, “youthful indiscretions at which modern sinology is accustomed to blush.”

  True or not, the legend of Fusang—like the once-dismissed tale of Norse discovery and the still-speculative accounts of North African adventurers—is a reminder that the land first brought to the attention of southern Europe a little more than five hundred years ago has been a part of the world’s religions much longer than that. Perhaps one thousand years before Columbus, the possibility of America already had religious meanings that had nothing to do with the faith he brought with him. Not only did the land’s original inhabitants have their own notions concerning the spiritual significance of the places they called home; every culture for which the land beyond the waters served as the great unknown had made it a part of its own mythology and aspirations. In response to these, there may have been a constellation of discoveries: the Vikings in the Northeast; navigators from the Pacific in the Southwest; the southern Europeans in the Southeast, all of whom “found” a land that had not been lost, a fruitfully inhabited place more vast and diverse—geographically and spiritually—than any of the great discoverers could have imagined.

  These possibilities, however, do nothing to lessen the drama of the only fully known moment of first contact, when the people of Europe met the people of the world they would mistakenly call new, and the gods of each learned they were not alone in the heavens.