by David Boyle
The most westerly islands of the Azores, Flores and Corvo, were added dutifully to the maps in 1452, the result of an unsuccessful Portuguese expedition in search of hy-Brasil. A decade later, Portuguese mariners were being offered the islands of Lovo and Capraria if they could find them, or later still the Island of the Seven Cities. None of them actually existed, but they were still on the maps. That was the problem with fifteenth-century maps: They were speculative interpretations of the world. You could not use them to mount a reliable expedition into the unknown.
Maps and geography were bound to be the subjects of intense interest among Florence’s powerful intellectuals—no contemporary city had achieved a similar level of civilization. There was a breadth to Florentine thinking that matched its new broad avenues and squares—a wholly different kind of city—compared to the cramped and bustling narrow streets of Genoa and Venice. Over the past generation, thanks to the immense wealth of Cosimo de’ Medici, the arts were flourishing and so was a small coterie of intellectuals dedicated to a sophisticated kind of mysticism and the rediscovery of the philosophy of Plato.
Right from the beginning, Cosimo’s Platonic academy had discussed geography. There is even a sketch of Cosimo de’ Medici and friends poring over a copy of Ptolemy’s Geography by candlelight. The greatest minds in Florence were brought to bear on the problem of how to represent a spherical world on the flat surface of a book or map. Alberti and Brunelleschi, creator of the great dome, tried to see whether their insights into the laws of perspective might allow them to draw a flat map of a spherical globe. And Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, a retired but celebrated doctor, was on hand to interview foreign visitors and muse aloud about the shape of the distant lands of the world.
Toscanelli was the grand old man of Florentine intellectuals. Unmarried, monkish, and astonishingly ugly, he had lived in the same house since returning to Florence as a graduate in 1424, near the public well in the Santo Spirito quarter of the city, just across the Arno from the Vespucci family. His vision, though, was truly global: He took detailed notes from all the participants at the Council of Florence—Cosimo de’ Medici’s attempt to broker an understanding with Constantinople and the Orthodox Christian world, with emissaries from Byzantium, Russia, and even the Great Khan—and from them developed a radical theory. He believed that the size of the earth was small enough that if you were to sail west across the Atlantic you would reach China and the spice islands of the East.
He collected the best and most expensive maps that he could find from around the world, helping the Medici family find and buy skins and spices, never eating meat or drinking wine, studiously avoiding any criticism of or gossip about the Florentine intellectual elite, and writing letters to his friends all over the world. In his spare time, he practiced as a doctor, without charging fees. If anyone in Europe yearned to know the truth, whether it was about spice islands, astronomy, or the measurement of comets—the subject of his most important book—they made their way to Florence and asked for an interview with Toscanelli.* Henry the Navigator’s brother Pedro had come. So had an ambassador from Ethiopia, who arrived unexpectedly in 1441, claiming to have been sent by Prester John himself. In the 1460s his most regular visitor was the young Leonardo da Vinci, asking him about mathematical problems.
The young Amerigo Vespucci almost certainly knew Toscanelli, who was still director of the library at the monastery of St. Mark, where Vespucci’s uncle Giorgio was officially a monk. Giorgio and Toscanelli traveled in the same circles within the Platonic academy, and Giorgio must have introduced him to his favorite nephew. Amerigo’s growing fascination with maps may date from those meetings. With Toscanelli he saw the great planisphere—the enormous map of the world that hung on the wall of his home—and heard the strange stories of Markland and Vinland, the Viking colonies beyond the seas.
There was no more exciting time in history, with the new books and maps emerging, to be fascinated by ideas. The classical past was suddenly available, and the world’s intellectuals would open their doors to almost anyone who expressed interest. And of all places to be fascinated by art or ideas, Florence was the pinnacle of the civilized world, especially in the heady summer of 1476.
I
“If you knew how you are universally hated, your hair would stand on end.”
GALEAZZO MARIA SFORZA, to the secretary of the
Venetian Republic, 1467
Venice looked to the East to trade her goods, so the frustrating closure of the Venetian links to the Silk Road and the spice routes was particularly difficult. The Ottoman advance across eastern Europe had been beaten back from the gates of Belgrade and Budapest but was, nevertheless, advancing. Yet the Cabot family, newly arrived in Venice, was managing to establish themselves successfully in the business community.
At first it was the salt trade, using Guilo Cabot’s knowledge of Genoa’s rival involvement in salt on the other side of Italy, that provided Guilo with the right to do business on his own account before being enrolled as a Venetian citizen. But very quickly, he also became involved in the spice market. Spices were not just an important food ingredient, they were increasingly used as food preservatives—which made the trade in agricultural products easier—and as cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate were all drugs that later would be recognized as foods. Cinnamon was a menstrual regulator and good for sunburn, frankincense was used to unblock both arteries and bowels. The spice market was to dominate the imagination and plans of Guilo’s son, John, in addition to the trade in skins that John was beginning to make his own. It was in these trades in his father’s shop and his own speciality that he was beginning to learn the basics of business—the techniques that allowed you to track the profitability of a deal, even while it was still at sea, the insurance, the loans, the contracts, and the long-term partnerships that made profit possible. Night after night, by expensive candlelight, he studied their ricordanze, the detailed business diary that companies used before double-entry bookkeeping.
He was also learning to share the Venetian worldview. This was a city so bound to the sea that there were no roads to it at all. It had no city walls to protect it. The Cabot family could gaze out from the Moorish windows of their mansion on what is now the via Garibaldi, with the entrance to the harbor right in front of them, and watch the trading ships of the Mediterranean unloading exotic wares from every corner of the known world and beyond—gems, peacock feathers, perfume and colored dyes, carpets from the Levant, silver from Germany, wool and cloth from England and Flanders.
John seems to have thought of himself as overwhelmingly Venetian. He signed his name using Venetian spelling (Zuan rather than John or Giovanni). To be Venetian was to be immensely proud of the glories of St. Mark’s Square and the twisting shopping street known as the Merceria, to regard the Rialto and its bridge over the Grand Canal as the center of commerce and banking in the eastern Mediterranean. He must also have frequented the new bookshops. Printing arrived in Venice in 1469, eight years after the Cabots arrived, and within five years, 130 editions of books emerged from the city.
As he approached the age of twenty, having lived in Venice for almost a decade, he came to recognize as his own the striped red and white tights of the gondoliers, the small black caps people wore in the street, the tall chimneys on the mansions along the canals, and the swirling scarlet capes of the senators depicted in the paintings of Carpaccio. In the streets, it was possible to hear the extraordinary cacophony of German, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Italian, Greek, and every other language you could imagine. The Cabots may have been newcomers, but this was a city of immigrants.
Venice as pictured in Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 Nuremberg Chronicles
Venice was also a civilized city compared to Genoa. There were no loud voices raised even on the Rialto. Lamps burned continuously in the dark corners of the narrow streets, with icons behind them, and the great city festivals did not degenerate into political brawls. The annual fifteen-day feast
of the Sensa saw carpets hung over the balustrades of the bridges and hand-carts selling wares under the golden domes of St. Mark’s Square. It also marked the annual reaffirmation of the marriage between the doge of Venice and the sea: a ring dropped symbolically into the ocean once a year.
John took what opportunities he could to accompany his father’s cargoes, just as Columbus was doing. It may have been due to something that happened on one of these trips—an encounter with Turkish pirates or some successful resistance to Ottoman customs demands—or simply youthful charisma that made John Cabot a popular figure in his adopted city, and at the age of twenty-one, he was elected by acclamation to one of the city’s many exclusive clubs. Not just any club either, but the confraternity of St. John the Evangelist, also known as Scuole Grandi, which was highly prestigious and had long waiting lists for membership. Despite the waiting lists, Cabot was granted immediate membership at a third of the normal entrance fee. In 1470 the family had only been in the city for nine years and neither John nor his father could yet afford to pay the full amount. But Cabot’s contemporaries believed in him, and not just because of whatever feat of arms or mercantile trickery had propelled him to fame.
Like so many of his contemporaries, John was also fascinated by maps and cartography, and through the Scuole Grandi, he could mix freely and intimately with some of the leading mapmakers and geographers that Venice could offer. Venice may not have been on the front line of the artistic renaissance, but it was as steeped in humanism—the learning based on a new appreciation of the classics—as anywhere else in Europe.* The great Venetian navigator Priamo Capella was a member of the Scuole Grandi. Cabot would have looked to him to learn about the shape of the world, or sat at the feet of Capella’s brother Febo, the greatest Venetian humanist of the age, and later grand guardian of the confraternity. Febo Capella had recently returned from being the city’s representative in Florence, and he had become great friends with the group of Platonists around Toscanelli and the Medici family. There is no evidence that Cabot encountered Toscanelli himself or heard his theories about the shape of the world firsthand, but Febo Capella is a clear link between them.
The news that filtered through from Genoa convinced Guilo Cabot that he had been right to leave. The turbulent politics of the city had never died down, nor had Domenico Columbus managed to inveigle himself with any of the new factions. For most of the time since the Cabots departed, Genoa had been ruled by the powerful Sforza family from Milan. But the consequences of playing off the surrounding powers was that there was never a time when the city had not been drawn into one foreign dispute or another.
Christopher Columbus found himself lodging in Savona, or sometimes in the old Columbus family home in Genoa, and accompanying his father’s consignments of wine and cloth down the coast. Occasionally, he was also testing out his own abilities farther afield, sending their wool and cloth to be sold in Spain, North Africa, or the Middle East—even if he didn’t accompany it himself—then using the money to buy local products like wheat, for sale back in Genoa. Sometimes the tasks required of him were brutal seagoing raids on Fregoso enemies. Christopher nursed his outrage at the indignities heaped upon the family. He seems not to have had much affection for his father and his rapid changes of mood, but Christopher was proud of his family, sometimes obsessively so. Through strength of will and a determined measure of bluff, he was keeping the family business running.
He was also determined that this was not going to be the sum of his life. Also based in Savona were some of the other mercantile clans who had backed the ruined Fregoso party, the Spinola and di Negro families and the sugar barons in the Centurione family. Soon Christopher was carrying out small tasks for them, and going to sea helping to protect their cargoes or joining in the freelance activities of a corsair, raiding the businesses of enemies of the Fregoso clan, mainly Aragonese interests along the coast. In later life, he told a boastful story of how he had joined a raiding party on behalf of the king of Naples, the Fregoso ally René of Anjou, in his bid to take the throne of Aragon.* He related how he persuaded a fearful crew that they were going home, through a little trickery with the compass, when actually they were sailing straight toward the enemy.
Whether it was true or not, the story hints at the self-image that Columbus nursed for himself in his mind: resourceful, heroic, and capably on the path to glory. He was now twenty-four and when he was offered the chance of joining the convoy for Chios in September 1475, on board Gioffredo Spinola’s ship Roxana, he jumped at the chance.
The island of Chios, off the Aegean coast of what is today Turkey, was almost the last Genoese trading colony in the East still operating so close to the Ottomans. It was supposed to have been the birthplace of Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and was considered critical to the struggling Genoese economy because it was one of the few places in the known world with evergreen trees that produced gum mastic. Mastic was a vital ingredient in varnishes and adhesives, and when it was mixed with sugar, it produced sweets like marshmallow and licorice. Genoese traders like Spinola would charter a convoy of large ships—three-masted caravels—and sail them to Chios in the autumn, stay there through the spring, and then travel through the Strait of Gibraltar and on to England and Flanders to sell the mastic and bring back cloth.
This convoy was to be Columbus’s first long voyage, at least three weeks at sea, hugging the coasts where possible, leaving from Sicily and snaking through the Greek islands and across the Aegean. The convoy was also carrying a full complement of mercenaries, plus heavy weapons, to guard the island against an expected Ottoman attack. The weather was changing in the Mediterranean as they sailed through the Greek islands and the waves and wind were less predictable. Then, suddenly, Chios appeared. As the Roxana approached the mouth of the harbor, lines of windmills came into view and behind them the big houses of the traders in red and white alternating colored stone. As they unloaded the cargo, the mercenaries spread out across the harbor, much to the relief of the Genoese families they were there to defend, fearful that the sultan’s galleys would appear on the horizon at any moment.
The threat to Chios was reflected all around the Aegean as, one by one, the Ottoman advance destroyed the most lucrative Venetian trading outposts and industrial facilities. It was becoming clear that Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, was maneuvering to control all the trade routes of the eastern Mediterranean. He was building up a fleet that was capable of challenging the Venetians, as well as orchestrating internal divisions in Egypt and Syria, which controlled the caravan routes from the Persian Gulf through to Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut. The furs and slaves from the Black Sea had dwindled and almost completely disappeared. Turkish mercenaries had also been landing near Venice itself and destroying the surrounding countryside. Any Venetians who made the laborious climb to the top of the dome of St. Mark’s could see the smoke from the burning villages.
In January 1475, through the unlikely intervention of Mehmet’s stepmother, a peace offer from the Turks arrived at the doge’s palace. The offer was bitterly controversial and was debated for two solid days and nights in the senate before it was narrowly and grudgingly accepted. But Doge Mocenigo, who had driven the vote for peace through the force of his personality, died before the final negotiations were complete. It was said that he suffered from exhaustion, not from negotiating, but from the attentions of his ten Turkish slave concubines. The uneasy standoff between the two great powers in the eastern Mediterranean continued.
While the debate over the peace offer was raging in the senate, the Cabots reached the moment they had been waiting for: They had now lived in the city for fifteen years, making them eligible for Venetian citizenship. Although Venice was a republic and nominally a democracy, 90 percent of the population were not officially citizens and had no vote. But citizenship, if you could get it, conferred added rights for independent business and trade. Still the local hero, twenty-six-year-old John Cabot applied and was unanimously elected
by the senate.
John had been working as a merchant’s factor, or agent, not just for his father but for other clans as well, and was now increasingly active as a trader in his own right. The glimpses we have of him, in Venice or later, imply strongly that Cabot was a talker. He was articulate, brilliantly energetic, and full of schemes and projects—more credible in some ways than his erstwhile friend Christopher Columbus, who was trying to carve out a similar role for himself in the West. Cabot was also putting his eloquence to good effect, trading in animal skins. Those who specialized in salt were figuring out ways to diversify, because the Venetian salt pans on either side of the Adriatic were vulnerable to attack from the Ottomans. Even the traditional sources of furs in the Crimea were now as good as closed to the Venetians, but there were new routes opening up that went directly to the great center of the fur trade in Bruges, bringing back mink, squirrel, or fox furs for the prestigious furriers of Venice, and this is where Cabot began to make his mark in business.
These were long voyages, through the Strait of Gibraltar and then all the way down the English Channel, bringing back sheep skins and wool in the same consignments, bought cheaply in the ports of southern Spain. It is unlikely that Cabot undertook these journeys himself at first. He had another project at hand—renovating property in Venice and selling it at a profit—while his father’s cargoes were on the high seas. But so much more would be possible now that he was a full-fledged Venetian citizen.
As the winter of 1475 approached, Columbus was back in Genoa, dreaming of the East. Chios had been a frustrating trip, and while he was there, the news had arrived that Caffa—the last Genoese outpost in the Black Sea—had fallen to the Ottomans some months earlier. Yet the distress began to turn to relief as the threat to Chios lifted. It was clear that the sultan was not, after all, intending to attack them. As the relief at their escape spread, so the attitude of the Chios families toward the visiting mercenaries changed.