Toward the Setting Sun

by David Boyle

  Amerigo knew the artists who manipulated these colors. The tanning family next door to the Vespuccis was called Filipepi, and the young Alessandro Filipepi—known to history as Botticelli—was about nine years older than Amerigo and had an older brother who was a broker in shares of the Monte, the Florentine public debt. When the Cabot family passed north of Florence on the way to their new life in 1461, the young Botticelli was an assistant to Fra Filippo Lippi, the former Carmelite monk turned artist.* Botticelli also knew the young Leonardo da Vinci, slightly older than Vespucci, but who even then was following Grandfather Amerigo in the street to fix his stately features in his mind so he could draw another interesting face when he got home.

  The artists were carving out a new position for themselves in the city, thanks to the munificence of the Medicis and other wealthy patrons. Their social standing had been more akin to plumbers: You called them out and they would decorate your walls and furniture. They were not aristocratic in any way. Uccello was the son of a barber and Lippi the son of a butcher. Donatello—whose pert, naked statue of David in hat and boots stood in the courtyard of the Medici palace—was the son of a wool comber. A generation later, their status had so improved that Leonardo could die cradled in the arms of King Francis I of France.

  Vespucci was tutored along with a few other sons of wealthy families by his uncle Giorgio, a highly respected Dominican friar. Giorgio was always immaculately dressed and knew everyone. He collected manuscripts and tended a burgeoning library of books, and he taught his pupils not just Virgil and Plato, but mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, and geography. It was Giorgio who taught him to love travel, and took him to Rome, instilling in him some of the work ethic that was to be such a feature of his career. “Arise betimes in the morning and sleep not so much, young man, who until now hath excessively played the fool, dancing and frolicking,” wrote Amerigo in his ink-stained notebook. “Do not loll around or remain longer in idleness, but tire thyself out a little before old age comes upon thee and bodily vigor fails and thou moves unhappy and ill content.”

  Like the other Italian cities, Florence was suffering economically as Amerigo grew up. The War of the Roses in England had led to a succession of bad debts for the Medicis, and there was a string of bankruptcies in Florence in the mid-1460s. The wool trade was shrinking, as it was everywhere in Italy, and the Medicis were investing heavily in silk—ordering every farmer under their jurisdiction to plant five mulberry trees a year to feed the silkworms. But Florence also had advantages not shared by the other cities. It was the financial heart of Europe: Large sums of money from the crowned heads of Europe were deposited here—including all the papal accounts—because it was safer than in a seacoast city where it could be seized by pirates. As many as eighty Florentine banking houses controlled the credit system of the continent.

  When Cosimo de’ Medici died in 1464—listening to a discussion about his beloved Plato—he was succeeded by his flamboyant and astonishingly wealthy grandson Lorenzo de’ Medici, known to history as “the Magnificent.” Lorenzo had a better head for culture than he did for banking, and food prices continued to rise, while cloth prices fell, in the face of rising competition from England and Flanders. Lorenzo’s prescription for this economic depression was spectacle. In 1468 he held one of the most extraordinary jousts, officially dedicated to his fiancée, Claire Orsini, but unofficially to his mistress, Lucrezia Donate, watching from a beautifully decorated balcony. Lorenzo himself entered the lists with a surcoat of purple and white velvet, his horse clothed the same way, and with three hundred pearls trimming his cap and a golden buckle with eleven diamonds.

  These were the festivals that made Florence unlike anywhere else. Afterward young people would wander outside the city in the fields, returning in the early hours of the morning covered with dew. It was also a period of the most extraordinary opulence, for those who could still afford it, with balls and wedding feasts and lute music under the stars. One of these was the wedding in 1473 of Amerigo’s cousin Marco, another pupil of Uncle Giorgio, to a stunningly beautiful Genoese girl named Simonetta Cattaneo. The heartthrob of her generation, La Belle Simonetta’s arrival and her passing became a symbol of the hope and disappointment for the age.

  Shortly after her wedding, Simonetta encountered Lorenzo the Magnificent’s rather over-romantic brother Giuliano at another luxurious ball. There were fireworks, an enormous banquet, and a memorable performance by three of the city’s most beautiful women, Eleonora of Aragon, Alberia degli Albizzi, and Simonetta herself portraying the three graces. It was the performance that was immortalized in Botticelli’s painting Primavera, now in the National Gallery in London, and it was given a poignant twist when Alberia died just ten days later. Giuliano de’ Medici watched the performance and fell in love with Simonetta on the spot. For the rest of her short life, he worshipped at her shrine. Poems, gifts, and entreaties fell at her feet, despite the fact—or possibly because—she was married and steadfastly refused to succumb to his charms.

  It was Simonetta who inspired Botticelli to paint The Birth of Venus. She is also in the painting Madonna with the Vespucci Family in the Church of the Ognissanti, painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio.* She remains one of history’s most enticing, beautiful, and untouchable women. But reputations like hers are enhanced by dying young, and just three years later, in April 1476, Simonetta died from tuberculosis. Her funeral cortege, with its open coffin, was accompanied by Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched her head. She was buried in the neighborhood Church of the Ognissanti. Peering into the night sky afterward, Lorenzo the Magnificent glimpsed a star he had never seen before. “That is Simonetta,” he said, writing a sonnet in her memory.

  Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Simonetta Vespucci was the model for the central figure of Venus.

  Bright shining star! Thy radiance in the sky

  Dost rob the neighboring stars of all their light.

  Why are thou with unwonted splendor bright?

  Why with great Phoebus does thou dare to vie?

  Back in Genoa, Domenico Columbus had taken to describing himself as a taverner, running a small bar from what he still retained of the family home. He was trading small amounts of wine, cheese, and wool between Savona, Genoa, and other local ports along the coast. Genoa had some of the most sophisticated charities in Europe—the massive Pammatone, funded by a donation of shares in the Bank of St. George—but there was little help for political trouble-makers who like Domenico had fallen on hard times.

  The years that followed the coup and the Adorno takeover saw unprecedented upheavals, as the French tried to claw their way back to a position of control. Sforza intervened on the side of the Genoese, and doge after doge was elected and then flung out of office. At the same time, the man who would dominate the city for the next generation—Pietro Fregoso’s brother Paolo—began his inexorable rise to power, setting out on a long career of piracy and populism as cardinal, admiral, and self-appointed doge. One Genoese chronicler complained that, if he had to record any more upheavals, he would run out of paper. There was even talk of actually inviting the French to come back. There was a new French king who might prove more amenable than his predecessor, and the French were still in control of the Columbus family’s hometown of Savona. But it was too late for the new king Louis XI, who declared that if “the Genoese give themselves to me, I will give them to the Devil.”

  By 1464, after the first years of mismanagement by the doge-archbishop Paolo Fregoso, the shares in the Bank of St. George had fallen to their lowest point. Domenico asked Christopher to help him in business, and Christopher went with him on his trips with the wine and cheese, and helped negotiate prices. If his father was not entirely welcome in Genoa, Christopher could represent him. But there were compensations for Domenico’s semiexile. Rubbing shoulders with Christopher on the wharves of Savona were some of the other leading members of the Fregoso party, the di Negros, Spinolas, and Centuriones, all formerly leading shipbuilders in Genoa, now—like
the other merchant princes of Genoa—shifting their trading links westward. Columbus found himself on good terms with the younger members and, sometime in 1473, he was appointed to accompany their cargo to the eastern Mediterranean. He had a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels packed in his trunk.

  2

  MAPS

  “Our land is the home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles, meta-collinarum, cametennus, tensevetes, wild asses, white and red lions, white bears, white merles, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses, wild oxen and wild men, men with horns, one-eyed, men with eyes before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high giants, Cyclopses, and similar women; it is the home, too, of the phoenix, and of nearly all living animals.”

  Letter purporting to be from Prester John,

  delivered to the emperor of Constantinople, c. 1165

  “Map me no maps, sir, my head is a map; a map of the whole world.”

  HENRY FIELDING

  SOMETIME IN the middle of the twelfth century, a powerful rumor began to circulate across Europe. The story concerned a distant Christian ruler in the East, at least as wealthy and powerful as the Christian rulers of the West, who had broken the power of the Muslims near his own land, and was ready to march to the defense of Western Christendom. Jerusalem was still in Christian hands then, but the tide of affairs in Palestine was not going the way of the westerners, and the distant hope of rescue gleamed so alluringly that, on September 27, 1177, Pope Alexander III wrote an appeal to this distant legendary emperor. Then he sent his physician eastward to find the king and deliver it. It had been more than a decade since a letter from this ruler—known to legend as John the Priest, or Prester John—had been received in Constantinople. But no reply to the message ever came and the physician himself never returned.

  The legend of Prester John was probably bound up with rumors of the heretical Nestorian church, which had briefly spread eastward as far as China, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. Prester John himself has been identified with Unk-Khan, a real ruler—though certainly not a Christian—in the region of what is now Kyrgyzstan. But the dream of Prester John, descended from the Three Wise Men and living somewhere along the Silk Road, or deep in Ethiopia, or perhaps ruling a great Indian empire, never quite died.

  When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453 and the lucrative trading routes between West and East began to seize up—and Western Europe was genuinely threatened by an ascendant Islamic empire—the legend of Prester John once again became a powerful intoxicant. European adventurers dreamed not only about opening new trade routes—their closure now bearing heavily on Florentine bankers and Genoese merchants—but also of linking up with Prester John to push back the Muslim advance. The Pope sent out emissaries; the Portuguese even mounted land expeditions from the West African coast, but these efforts yielded nothing and the intelligentsia of Europe continued to puzzle over their maps of the world.

  This was the age of maps. The great works of classical geography were suddenly being translated into Latin and being printed for the first time. Since Johannes Gutenberg began the first printing press in Europe in 1454, presses emerged in most of the big cities, and a new reading public was beginning to think for itself. But the intellectuals, fascinated by the dream of other lands and other opportunities for trade, wanted to see these places set out on a plan as well as read about them.

  Most educated people understood that the world was round—Aristotle had worked that out seventeen centuries earlier—but there was little consensus about the shape of the land masses on earth. Maps of the world were speculative, beautifully painted works of art on rolls of vellum, with descriptions and little pictures of monsters and devils in the unknown regions. Cabot, Columbus, and Vespucci as young men were in the first generation to enjoy maps in wide circulation. It is hardly surprising that they were fascinated by them.

  One of the new printed editions being read, and with enthusiasm, was The Travels of Marco Polo. Polo had written it two centuries before, while he was in prison in Genoa—a fact that did not encourage the academics and geographers to believe what he wrote. Learned people thought his descriptions of China and Japan were complete fiction, but they were still captivating for dreamers. Not just the descriptions of the three and a half year journey to Beijing, or the jewels sewn into the jacket of the Great Khan, but also the solid gold roofs of Cathay:

  The palace of the princes is entirely roofed with gold plates, just as our houses are roofed with lead. The halls and rooms are lined with plates of gold, and the windows have gold frames. There are pearls in great quantity and so many precious stones that you only have to bend down and pick them up.

  And how could a romantic forget the women of the city Marco Polo called Qinsay, who “are so tempting and have such experience in amorous intercourse that a man who has once enjoyed one of them can never forget her”?

  The difficulty was separating fact from fantasy in the maps and descriptions of foreign lands. There were authoritative descriptions of races able to survive the extreme heat and cold that geographers believed were at the equator or the poles—pygmies, giants, people who were able to live just off the smell of apples, four-eyed seagoing Ethiopians, dog-headed men. There were the Scipods, who held one foot over their heads like a big umbrella, the Blemmyae, who had their faces in their chests, and the Antipodes, who had their feet inconveniently turned backward.

  Atlantis had disappeared, but what about the floating islands of the South Atlantic described by Juventius? Or the legend of St. Brendan, the Irish monk whose journey included an island of talking birds, an island of sheep, and a crystal island? At least the crystal island might have been an iceberg. But what about the island of hy-Brasil, a version of the lost Irish island Tir na Nog, the land of eternal youth, said to be visible off the western coast of Ireland in the right psychic conditions.*

  A page from Marco Polo’s Travels

  There was Antillia, or the Island of the Seven Cities, supposed to have been the destination of seven Portuguese bishops who escaped ahead of the Muslim advance across the Spanish peninsula in the eighth century. Everyone interested in such matters had heard the tale of the ship that landed on Antillia by accident a generation before Columbus, and when the crew went ashore and found a church, they were surprised to discover it was Roman Catholic. The sand they brought back from their landing place was also found to be one third fine gold, or so it was said. That was the thrill of these debates: They were not just romantic; even the most hard-headed skeptics were drawn toward these dreams of untold wealth.

  …

  The man with the self-appointed task of separating fact from fiction was one of the most romantic characters in this or any age. Prince Henry the Navigator was the younger son of King John I of Portugal and half-English by blood (his mother was Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt). While the English and French were battling it out at Harfleur and Agin-court, Henry was dreaming up a plan to sail around Africa to reach the Indies and Cipangu, Marco Polo’s name for Japan (a corruption of the Chinese phrase Ji pen Koue, meaning Empire of the Rising Sun). This in itself was a massive leap of faith: Apart from the legend of Hannibal sailing all the way around Africa, there was very little evidence that such a voyage was possible.

  As a younger son, even of a king, Henry had few resources—certainly too few for what he wanted to achieve. He carefully conserved what he had managed to earn in his early career in piracy, preying on Muslim shipping, and what came in from his monopoly on the Portuguese soap trade. But he knew what he would need: improvements in ship building, breakthroughs in navigation using the stars, new systems of chart making using latitudes, new understandings of weather patterns and ocean currents. With promises of glory and wealth that belied Henry’s actual resources, his emissaries tracked down the greatest shipwrights, mathematicians, astronomers, and geographers and lured them to his new institute at Sagres. This windswept edge of the known world, the last rocky outcrop on the edg
e of the Atlantic, the most southwesterly point of Portugal and Europe, gave an aura of sanctity to the whole enterprise.* Under Henry’s leadership, Portuguese expeditions sailed to determine whether the sea was really boiling at the equator or if the pitch that held the boats together would melt there. One by one, each voyage pressed farther south along the coast of Africa, leaving a stone marker on the shore at the extremity of each voyage to mark their progress, until in 1445 they rounded Cape Verde and found, not boiling seas, but fertile villages and riverbanks.

  But forcing the pace southward in their three-masted caravels, new ships designed to have high forecastles (the tall, multideck castlelike structure in the bow of the ship) to deal with the Atlantic swell, had some unexpected by-products. The winds in the mid-Atlantic move clockwise, so it was difficult—at least given the technology that Henry’s captains used—to sail back again directly northward. His explorers found themselves sailing farther and farther west in order to get home, and so as a consequence of the search for the southern tip of Africa, they soon discovered the Azores and the Canary and Cape Verde islands among others.