by David Boyle
To make the situation doubly tragic for Columbus, he chose this moment to make one of his occasional visits back to Madeira to see his wife and son, only to find that Felipa had died from plague. Columbus was in mourning, heavily in debt, and solely responsible for his young son, Diego.
Perhaps it was at this moment that the alliance with Cabot was dissolved, but it is more likely they decided to press on with their separate aspects of the plan regardless. What else could they do? The aftermath of their disastrous business project would have delayed them, but Cabot would proceed to the East to seek out information about the sources of the spice trade. Meanwhile, the Columbus brothers would go ahead and win backing from the Portuguese court, and raise the money from the king of Portugal for the voyage if they possibly could.
II
“Talk of nothing but business, and dispatch that business quickly.”
ALDUS MANUTIUS, a sign on the door of his Aldine
Press, set up in Venice in 1490
The generations were changing in Florence. The city’s sage, Toscanelli, breathed his last in May 1482. Vespucci’s uncle Giorgio, now the librarian at the monastery of St. Mark, was distraught about the loss of his old friend and teacher. Now Amerigo’s father was dying as well. Nastagio summoned Amerigo to his bedside and asked him to take over the family business completely. Four days later he was dead.
It was the beginning of a life in which Vespucci began to take responsibility for other people’s affairs—a life in which he became a trusted confidante of business associates and relatives alike, and so grew to assume the role of discrete fixer, a role that he seems never to have quite shaken. Like Cabot, he had a talent for friendship. Unlike Cabot, he could be a quiet presence in the background, a civil servant as much as a business leader. When anyone connected to him had a problem—financial or otherwise—they came to Vespucci with it. Soon, his whole family seemed to be relying on him.
“I cannot but complain of all of you at home,” said his brother Girolamo in Rhodes. “I wonder that you hold me in so little esteem. It has been over two years since I have had a letter from you, and I cannot understand why. I can only attribute it to the scant love that you feel for me . . . I am not in some inaccessible spot in the world. Every day, people come here on their way to Venice or Naples, and everybody gets letters except me.”
Short, thick-set, with a peculiarly massive head, and known for never losing his temper, Amerigo would soothe the egos of his family, and sort out their problems. He was deeply reliable but made time—usually with Giorgio—to keep up with his intellectual interests as well. Just as his brother complained that people only passed through Rhodes on their way to someplace else, there were always intellectuals passing through Florence. One of them, who Amerigo almost certainly met in Florence when he arrived in search of academic preferment, was the controversial German humanist scholar Johann Reuchlin.
Martin Behaim’s globe
Reuchlin had been sent to Florence by his close friend Lorenzo Behaim from Nuremberg, who was then living in the home of one of the most worldly ecclesiastical princes of them all, the newly appointed and staggeringly ambitious Spanish cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. Behaim’s brother Martin, Vespucci knew, was even then working with the Portuguese king on some extraordinary new geographical ideas.
Since the violent death of her husband Giuliano de’ Medici in the Pazzi plot, Simonetta Vespucci’s cousin Semiramide had been living quietly outside Florence. Her resemblance to the beautiful Simonetta, displayed now so famously as Botticelli’s Venus, was disturbing. Semiramide was gathering symbolic significance in her own right for this, and for being the widow of the most romantic Medici of them all. Perhaps because of that, or because of her beauty and charm, Semiramide was receiving more frequent visits and attentions from another part of the Medici family.
Lorenzo the Magnificent’s cousins, confusingly called Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, had been very close to their powerful relatives. But they had fallen out over money after the increasingly importunate Magnificent was forced to ask them for a loan. The cousins were young and wealthy in their own right, with diverse business interests all over the Mediterranean, and were increasingly disaffected about the oligarchy that ruled Florence in their family’s name. They began to call themselves the Popolano, which meant “commoners,” to ally themselves with the citizens of Florence and to distinguish themselves from their powerful cousins.
The twenty-year-old Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, head of the Popolano branch of the family, proposed marriage to Semiramide, and she accepted. After the wedding, they set up in their own palace in the city and sought out the most trustworthy manager they could find to take charge of their business affairs. Almost immediately they approached Amerigo Vespucci to take the post and to become a member of their household.
It was not a wholly unselfish gesture. The Vespucci family felt let down by the Magnificent, feeling that he had promised them more support, and the Popolano moved to fill the vacuum, as much to irritate their cousins as anything else. “Find out what he wants,” wrote Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, sending a member of his staff to see Giorgio Vespucci, “and offer him on our behalf everything, whatever it may be.” The result was that young Amerigo now had a new patron, and one he would look to for nearly the rest of his life.
Columbus and Cabot were salesmen. They were also loners and outsiders—especially now that they were in debt—making what use they could of their wits and contacts. Vespucci, on the other hand, was an insider, instinctively efficient, trustworthy, and loyal to his master, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. Nearly everything connected with the Popolano household went through Vespucci, but he was soon given more responsible work connected to their trading operations. When there was wheat from their Italian estates, he would arrange for its sale. When they traded wine via Seville or Lisbon, it was Vespucci who quietly and efficiently contacted their agents in Castile and Portugal. When Semiramide wanted to organize a party, it was Vespucci she consulted for advice and to make the arrangements. “My word is as good as a notarized document,” he used to say, and perhaps it was, though historians have always wondered, over every aspect of Vespucci’s life, whether his word really was that trustworthy if he had to say so.
He was also responsible for the vast number of goods in which the Popolano had trading interests: goblets, pigeons, poultry, knives, satchels, spoons, saltcellars, silver forks, napkins, tablecloths, handkerchiefs, shirts, mustard, buttermilk, cherries, wine, and fish. Sometimes he needed to travel to visit their agents around the Mediterranean, particularly in Castile, and he was usually asked by Semiramide to bring back something for her burgeoning family. Under Vespucci’s discreet guidance, his aspects of the business grew, but he was also trading in a small and slightly raffish way on his own account, sending jewels to women on behalf of their lovers, debt collecting, and buying precious stones. Whatever it was, the work brought him into contact with the back streets and red-light districts of Florence. He seems to have frequented those districts on his own account as well. Meanwhile his own status and personal income began to grow, and he spent it freely.
Investing in books about geography and in maps and charts was the only way in which Vespucci could nourish his growing enthusiasm for exploration. On one trip he had the chance to buy one of the most celebrated and beautiful maps of the age, made in Mallorca in 1439, with beautiful miniatures of the monarchs and flags of the world picked out in blue, green, and gold. The map cost him 130 ducats and he brought it home to Florence and his rooms in the Popolano house. We can imagine him unrolling it for the benefit of guests, or staring at it when he was alone, dreaming of the semimythical islands in the far West where one day he would go.*
Vespucci had begun playing a leading role in the cultural affairs of the household, which was increasingly filled—as was the home of Lorenzo the Magnificent—with the stars of the Renaissance—scholars, poets, and artists. Ghirlandaio and Botticelli were now active in
Florence’s own increasingly influential opposition party, the Piagnoni—opposed to the Medici oligarchy over the city—which used the Popolano palace as its unofficial headquarters.
And when his masters needed a new villa decorated, Vespucci arranged for Botticelli, his childhood friend, to get the commission. When the Popolano wanted Ghirlandaio to carve a statue of John the Baptist as a child, it was Vespucci who commissioned it. And perhaps, wandering through Ghirlandaio’s studio on this task, Vespucci came across the young unknown who was apprenticed there and who was later known to history as Michelangelo.
While the greatest artists of any age rubbed shoulders with the poets and philosophers of Florence in the palaces of both Medici families—and Vespucci skillfully maintained his good relationship with the Magnificent’s family—a strange idea was taking shape. It was in some ways a very worldly idea, in some ways enormously idealistic. It was that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were at their roots the same, and that behind all three lay a kernel of divine truth that would allow them to be forged together in a new era of peace.
This was the dream of the coterie of friends that had grown up around Toscanelli, his old admirers and pupils—Amerigo’s uncle Giorgio Vespucci, the poet Angelo Poliziano, the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, the architect Leon Battista Alberti—who gathered as often as they could for an intense debate, not just about philosophy and religion, but also about the new religion of truth that bound together Christianity and Islam.
It was an idea they had borrowed from some of the Greek Orthodox churchmen who had come to Italy before the fall of Constantinople. In fact, the papal secretary George Trapezuntius, in Naples when he heard of the downfall of his own city in 1453, had written an urgent letter to the sultan, urging him to work for the unity of the two faiths.
If someone were to bring together the Christians and the Muslims, in one single faith and confession, he would be, I swear by heaven and earth, glorified by all mankind, on earth and in heaven, and promoted to the ranks of the angels. This work, O admirable Sovereign, none other than you can accomplish.
It was a belief that, behind the confusion and illusion of the world, there was a pure and central truth, and it derived—like so much else in Renaissance Florence—from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Plato may have been dead for sixteen centuries, but he was in the process of being crowned in Florence as the font of all knowledge, his birthday celebrated with great style every November 7. Poliziano, the poet and translator of pagan works, who had saved the life of Lorenzo the Magnificent during the Pazzi plot, was a central figure in this Platonic revolution. It was said that he only went to church in order to catch mistakes the clergy made in their Latin grammar. Another central figure was the new arrival twenty-year-old Conte Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who had already mastered twenty-two different languages, as well as the ancient Jewish mystical kabbalah.*
The cult of Plato had given Florence’s elite a fascination for esoteric knowledge, found in the translated pages of long-forgotten classics. It was as much about astrology and magic as it was about conventional faith, and like many of his contemporaries, Vespucci was skeptical about conventional Christianity. “In the end, I hold the things of heaven in low esteem,” he wrote in his school notebook, “and even come close to denying them.”
To some in Florence, like the new Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola, this fascination with pagan ideas seemed like a rationale for tolerating the naked dancing figures of the kind found in some of Botticelli’s paintings. It looked corrupt, and so did the leadership of Florence. Not to mention Lorenzo the Magnificent’s regular nocturnal rides to the villa of his mistress, returning at dawn. But there was another way of looking at it. People like Vespucci, the educated sophisticates of Florence, dreamed of a new world where the purity of this vision might be realized—and the idea began to mesh with the thrill of exploration. There might, after all, be a New World on earth. Poliziano was so thrilled at the possibility of the Antipodes that he wrote to John of Portugal and asked for help writing an epic poem about Portuguese discoveries that would make his fame immortal. John agreed and ordered his navigators to give Poliziano all the help he needed. The project was prevented only by Poliziano’s untimely death.
With reverence, they repeated Plato’s story of Atlantis in the middle of the great ocean to the west: “There was an island beyond the passage known as the Pillars of Hercules. This island was larger than Libya and than Asia. The travelers of those times could cross to it, and from it to others, and reach the continent lying on the opposite side of the sea.” That island, destroyed in a great conflagration that Plato described, may have reappeared, declared Toscanelli before he died. So while Columbus and Cabot plotted to see for themselves, the intellectuals of Florence dreamed of a similar voyage to the west where all these things would be revealed. For Vespucci, it was only a matter of time, and—if he could arrange it—he would see it for himself.
On the Atlantic coast of Europe, Lisbon was heating up, in more ways than one. There was plague in the city, and the summer’s heat was making the rubbish smell in the streets. Three years into his reign John II was proving to be high-minded and, when necessary, brutal and rather puritanical. He banned silk clothing, even for members of the royal family. He made sure he ate in public and reduced royal banquets to just five dishes accompanied by nothing more potent than water. It was traditional for medieval kings to eat in public, but John took the daily ritual to extreme lengths. Any male would be allowed in to watch, once the trumpets sounded for his meals twice a day. He studiously avoided favorites at court, and was even known to go to the home of a courtier in the evening to apologize if he had shouted at him during the day.
But if he felt he had to be, John was also known to be absolutely ruthless in his determination to bring order to the Portuguese state, handing the business of government over to professional administrators rather than to the vagaries and rivalries of the great magnates. He had arrested the Duke of Braganza, the wealthiest man in Portugal, and had him beheaded in public for treason. This very year, convinced that his brother-in-law was also plotting against him, John invited him to his private quarters in the palace and dispatched him himself with a dagger.
Apart from this possibly justifiable paranoia, his main concern was to organize a diplomatic marriage for his sister Joana. Although he loved her more than almost anybody else, he was determined to refuse her permission to do the one thing she wanted to do: stay permanently in the convent where she lived. He was insisting that she should marry the prince of his choice. And in this case, John eventually decided it was time to strengthen the alliance with England by marrying her into the English royal family. When Richard III’s wife died in March 1485, he seemed the prime candidate.* As Columbus was seeking out contacts that could deliver him an audience with the Portuguese king, it was these family struggles—a treasonable brother-in-law and a recalcitrant sister—that were on the king’s mind more than issues of nautical exploration.
John was to be disappointed about the English alliance. In August of that year, Joana made her way into Lisbon with the entourage of nuns she had come to love, to see her brother in the Palace of Alcaçovas. John received her with alacrity, thinking she had finally changed her mind about the proposed Anglo-Portuguese marriage and her alliance with the new English king. The negotiations with Richard III were now at an advanced stage, and John was using every pressure he could bear to force his sister to agree. Her capitulation would be an enormous relief. But one look at her was enough for him to realize he was to be disappointed: There was Joana in her nun’s habit and still unbowed.
“The man you want me to marry is dead,” she informed him. It really was impossible that this news could have reached the convent before the court. But Joana was adamant that she had dreamed of Richard’s death the night before, in battle, and that his crown had toppled off and rolled under a bush.
Nonetheless, some weeks later, the news did arrive from England that Richard II
I had been killed. Accompanied by only two thousand soldiers, the twenty-nine-year-old Henry Tudor, a cousin of both the rival factions in the recent English civil war, had landed at Milford Haven in Wales. He had been in exile in Brittany since the death of Edward IV and the object of a wide-ranging conspiracy to offer him the throne. As he marched out of Wales and into England, he had been greeted by crowds hailing him as king. King Richard—short but not hunchbacked, despite his description in Shakespeare’s play—confronted this burgeoning force at Bosworth in Leicestershire, wearing gleaming Italian armor and riding an enormous white horse. In a rage at the height of the battle, Richard led an attack on Henry’s position, and was cut down when his horse sank into the marsh. The ornamental crown he had been wearing was retrieved from under a bush, and his body was flung naked onto the back of his horse and carried into the city of Leicester.
It was the moment when English historians have dated the end of the medieval period in English history and the start of the Tudor dynasty. Two months later, during an outbreak in London of a mysterious disease, now extinct, called the sweating sickness, blamed on the arrival of Henry’s Breton and French mercenaries, a glittering procession of the ambassadors of Europe gathered in Westminster Abbey in London to watch the new king crowned as Henry VII, wearing a cloak of bright violet.
Thanks to contacts at the Portuguese court, presumably through Canon Martins—a distant relative of Felipa’s—Columbus finally secured his crucial interview with King John. But there he faced something of a dilemma. The maps and charts he had been shown by his mother-in-law, and those he had happened upon over the years via his various contacts around the quays, were all state secrets. If he was unable to be entirely honest about his charts and the sources by which he had obtained them, he would have to fall back on Marco Polo as an authority for the shape of the globe, and that was liable to undermine his case.