by David Boyle
Another of these new dukes, from Medina Sidonia, had links with La Rábida, and was financing semipiratical expeditions against the Portuguese all down the African coast. Columbus also had an introduction to him, not just from the friars, but again from his contact in Lisbon, the Florentine merchant Lorenzo Berardi.* The duke was a business colleague of Berardi’s son Gianotto, a successful businessman himself, also dealing in slaves and now based in Seville, from where he regularly commissioned slaving raids and piracy aimed at Muslim shipping. Gianotto Berardi was six years younger than Columbus, but had already amassed a trading fortune, partly with the help of his father, whose interests he represented in Castile. Through his father’s links with Toscanelli, back home in Florence, Gianotto Berardi was fascinated with Columbus’s enterprise and introduced him to the Duke of Medina Celi.
Columbus had been given some unwelcome time to think since the rejection by John of Portugal. He had begun to adapt his message to Spanish politics: What was the point of expelling the Muslims from Spain if you did not also take the message westward? He had also been considering the implications of his last glimpse of the Portuguese king. Before he had left Lisbon, he was still well enough regarded in the Portuguese court to be there when the king welcomed back the land navigator José Vizinho, having returned from a trek across Africa along the equator, one of those sent to find Prester John. It had been a grueling and exhausting journey, full of dangers and bizarre encounters, and it clearly implied that the overland route to the East was just too far. But Columbus drew another conclusion. If Africa was bigger than expected, it could mean that the rest of the world was smaller and therefore Asia must be nearer in the opposite direction.
So when he managed to strike up an unexpected friendship with the Duke of Medina Celi, on the north shore of Cadiz Bay in the town of Puerto de Santa Maria, where he was developing a new shipping business, Columbus had more ammunition. The first meeting between the two men was successful, and Columbus stayed with him through the autumn of 1485 as his guest. As the visit progressed, and the two men talked more, the duke agreed he would finance the voyage with three or four caravels. But he stipulated one condition: It had to have the approval of the king and queen.
Historians have emphasized that this was the duke’s idea, but actually it was just as important to Columbus. Without a royal commission, any voyage would have been little better than a sightseeing excursion. It would have meant getting a head start with direct trading links to the Indies, but that was all. With a commission, there was some chance of continuing to profit, which was at the heart of the plan drawn up with Cabot and his brother, and it was how Columbus came to approach the fateful and historic meeting with Isabella of Castile.
When in December 1485 the Duke of Medina Celi asked permission to finance this voyage of discovery, the queen sent a message saying she wanted to meet Columbus herself and wanted him to submit his proposal to her board of advisers.
While Columbus had been busily making contacts in Castile, Cabot had been in Alexandria, seeking out a disguise in which to venture farther south. We will probably never know for certain what took him on his extremely risky journey to join the annual Muslim hajj to Mecca, but it was in keeping with the plan the three of them had hammered out. We know it was a journey to find information about the spice trade—the aloewood, cinnamon, nutmeg, sandalwood, tumeric, ginger, and all the others that his father’s company specialized in—which were also the final objective of the enterprise of the Indies. We also know that he was searching for the distant, mysterious sources of these spices, and doing so probably in connection with a voyage of exploration he or an ally was preparing to make. The fact that he was prepared to take this risk implies that the journey was part of a wider plan, probably part of his original alliance with the Columbus brothers.
Cabot knew that Genoese or Venetian merchants, based in Beirut or Alexandria, bought the spices from Arab merchants who had carried them from the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. But where did they come from before that? He vaguely knew, as the merchants did, how they got there: down the Silk Road and via the Black Sea, from India and through Arabia, or from what is now Indonesia and Malaysia to the east coast of Africa and then north to the Mediterranean. But when he and the Columbus brothers had originally laid their plans, they believed they could bypass the spice trade altogether. To do that, they would need to know the sources in Cathay so they could trade with them directly when they arrived via the back door. That was the purpose of his journey, and one of his agreed contributions to the enterprise. They may have been heavily in debt, exiled from their adopted homes, and had their plans rejected by the Portuguese court, but there were other courts, and there was still time.
Leaving his poor, wandering family with the Venetian colony, amid the baths, bazaars, and coffee houses in Alexandria, Cabot set off on his own. Like the European adventurers that followed him in later centuries, he could not afford to be recognized as a Christian caught on the pilgrimage. Even in Alexandria, Christian merchants were expected to wear heavy wooden crosses around their necks and were stripped naked and searched when their goods were submitted to the customs authorities. At night the Christian enclaves in the city were sealed. Cabot needed to look like a different kind of outsider—an Ottoman or visiting Indian perhaps, or like his contemporary Ludovico di Varthema from Bologna—though describing himself as a “gentleman of Rome”—who bought a horse and dressed as a Syrian.
The first part of the journey meant three days and nights in a boat sailing down the Nile to Cairo, past the mud villages along the riverbanks and that constant succession of what Sir Richard Burton later described on the same journey as “gaunt, mange-stained camels, muddy buffaloes, scurvied donkeys, sneaking jackals and fox-like dogs.” But while sailing on the Nile was cool relief from Alexandria, the streets of Cairo—with its tens of thousands of mosques—reflected the heat from the desert like a furnace. Like the rest of the city’s inhabitants, Cabot would have escaped inside in the afternoons and ventured out again only after sunset.
It is one of the duties of all Muslims that at some time in their lives they should complete the hajj to Mecca. This is also a celebration of the trials of Abraham and, in medieval times especially, it was a trading opportunity as well. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims were converging on Mecca—Varthema joined a caravan with forty thousand pilgrims in 1503—mainly by ship down the Red Sea. With so many people, the great traders from the East would have to be there as well. It was the opportunity that Cabot had been waiting for.
The journey from Cairo began with ninety miles in the bewildering heat to the few huts that marked the town of Suez, with the caravan protected all the way by Mamluk soldiers. Mecca is a very dry place, and the pilgrims had to bring most of their provisions with them, which made them vulnerable to attacks by Arab tribesmen. Unsure who he could trust or who might understand the handful of words he had mastered in Arabic, Cabot—like Varthema—must have said little and slept nervously on the deck of the ship as it made its way out to sea, stopping at inlets along the way every night. In the daytime, his clothes were completely soaked in sweat. At night, under the gigantic moon, listening to the storytellers in languages he could barely understand, the clammy dews soaked them all over again.*
At last, the ship sailed into the port of Jedda, and on the quayside, the travelers saw before them a whole panoply of the Muslim world, with every tribe gathering in their competing caravans to make the winding, rocky journey to Mecca. Those around Cabot began changing into the white robes of a pilgrim, indicating that the next few days were going to be the most dangerous of all.
Mecca was a sweltering city, surrounded by mountains on all sides. Contemporary travelers spent much of the time sleeping on the roofs of their lodgings, which were extraordinarily expensive in the hajj season. If he had not realized it before, Cabot must have known after he arrived just how vulnerable he was. If his identity as a Christian had been revealed, he would have stood no chance of escap
e. But whatever disguise he had adopted, his ruse could have been revealed by real Syrians, Persians, or Ottomans, lodging somewhere in the same city, rubbing shoulders with him, and liable to emerge unexpectedly to reveal him as a fraud.
The poor were everywhere, mainly Africans, described by Varthema as fighting for scraps of food as meager as cucumber rind. So were the courtesans, described by another traveler two centuries later as having hair down to their heels with little bells on the ends that jingled as they walked along. As a merchant venturer, Cabot could not resist the mosque and its parks, where Varthema claimed eighteen years later to have seen two unicorns. The great mosque at the heart of the city was also the heart of the spice trade in the region. It was shaped like an enormous vaulted amphitheater, with up to a hundred gates. Other travelers to Mecca found guides they could confide in, and Cabot—who had the kind of gregarious personality that seems to have drawn people to him—must have managed to do likewise: He needed a guide now, as he entered the holiest place in the Muslim world.
Because of the occasional contemporary descriptions by other Western travelers, we can reconstruct Cabot’s arrival, wandering into the great mosque, down twelve stairs, and through an ornate porch covered in jewels that glinted in the lamplight. Once inside, he marveled at the astonishing gilded walls for a moment before realizing where he must go. At the next level down was the sight he had been looking for: as many as six thousand traders, selling nothing but ointments, spices, and powders. “It passes belief to think of the exceeding sweetness of the savors, far surmounting the shops of the apothecaries,” wrote Varthema a few years later. But having breathed in the telltale smell, Cabot and his guide set to work.
Where did the spices originate from? Who did the traders buy from? Where were they actually grown, the ginger and nutmeg and sandalwood? As the visit progressed here, and elsewhere on the journey to Mecca, Cabot’s mood must have plummeted. The traders actually had no idea. And the truth was that they were not being deliberately evasive. They bought their wares from other merchants who had bought them from others, and so on for thousands of miles—by ship and mule and cart, through distant straits and oceans unknown to these salesmen, just as they were unknown to Europe. The routes by which the precious medicines, dyestuffs, and preservatives made their way even to Arabia were complex beyond unraveling. His bold adventure, his appointed task as part of the agreement with Columbus and his brother, had failed.
I
“Then take a little Allom, and seeth it with water, then shall ye haue two ounces of brasill sodde in light water, and put your cloth therein, fiue pater nosters long. Then if it be not drie ynough, then weat it as before is sayd.”
Recipe for dyeing cloth red, originally in a Dutch
dyeing manual, 1513
There was a new pope in Rome, following the painful death of Sixtus IV in August 1484. Sixtus had been a Genoese through and through, and he was followed by another Genoese, Giovanni Battista Cibo, the bishop of Savona. He was a protégé of Sixtus, and he succeeded to the papacy despite bitter divisions among the cardinals, furious accusations of bribery, and riots outside in the streets of Rome. Plump and worldly, Cibo already had a reputation for corruption and nepotism that would have made him notorious if it was not for his successor, but that comes later in the story. When he died, eight years later, a Latin ditty circulated about him said: “Eight wicked boys born, and just as many girls, so this man could be entitled to be called Father of Rome.”
Cibo took the name Innocent VIII, without a trace of irony, and launched his papacy with a call for action to push back the Muslims from Europe. Within five years, he had performed such a volte face that he had agreed to arrest the sultan’s brother exiled in Rome, for an annual fee of forty thousand ducats from the Ottomans and the promise that the spear that was supposed to have pierced the side of Christ would be returned.*
The election of a pope mired in unprecedented corruption added fuel to the barely noticed speeches of Savonarola. His sermons in Florence had been so poor that he had promised himself to abandon the whole idea and do something else. Florence was still embracing the luxury they had become so used to, but Innocent’s election—and Savonarola’s conviction that his sermons should be prophetic visions of disaster—began at last to attract some listeners.
At the same time, and in the same city, Vespucci’s wealth and taste for luxury was beginning to grow along with his reputation, and he had also acquired a mistress. “Tell me how your daughter and her mother are, and that woman called Francesca,” wrote one of Vespucci’s Spanish correspondents. “Give them all a thousand regards.” It is not quite clear who he referred to, but like Columbus, Vespucci had a romantic attachment with a woman who probably had a child, and with another regular lover called Francesca.
Meanwhile, the business success of the Popolano was only too apparent compared to the dwindling fortunes of the Medici Bank and the finances of Lorenzo the Magnificent, as well as the succession of failed harvests that was heaping pressure on Florence. Semiramide, now married to Lorenzo de’ Medici of the Popolano family, was also relying on Vespucci. If he traveled out of Florence, especially to Seville, there would be a long list of items she asked him to buy for her infant children: ivory combs, beige velvet caps, silver necklaces. Also growing in status was Amerigo’s older brother, the notary Antonio, who was now representing an increasingly powerful clientele, which included Columbus’s old patrons in the Centurione, Spinola, and di Negro families.
As the wealth of the Popolano grew, they began to challenge their powerful cousins in more subtle ways. If Lorenzo the Magnificent could hold pagan events with poets and artists, so could the Popolano. If the Magnificent could commission portraits of Simonetta Vespucci in all her glory, so could they.
That was how Vespucci came to be involved in the commissioning of the most mysterious portrait of his cousin Simonetta. In the portrait, she is naked except for a snake around her neck, in symbolism either too deep to be understood, or just too obscure to be remembered. It remains one of the best-known paintings by Piero di Cosimo, just back from working with Botticelli on the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and it marked a subtle shift in the power relations in Florence. The Popolano had now taken control of the cult of Simonetta.
Vespucci, Cabot, and Columbus, and others of their age, had grown to maturity in a period of upheaval across Europe. The continuing political upheavals in Genoa, the tumult of civil war in England, the aftermath of the Hundred Years War in France, and the untidy dynastic wars between Spain and Portugal, had left their mark on the landscape—but also on the attitudes of the new rulers. In Florence, the future political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli was only sixteen, but he would live to record the emergence of a new kind of ruler that was determined not to repeat the mistakes of their parents’ generation. They gathered a new professional class of administrator around them and they absolved themselves of normal human morality. Secrecy, duplicity, cruelty, all were allowed—positively demanded—because on them lay the responsibility for the preservation of the state.
John II of Portugal, the so-called perfect prince, was one of these new rulers. Ferdinand of Aragon was another; so was Henry VII of England. Compared with them, Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence was a mere dilettante. But nowhere was the business of forging a modern nation sharper than in Ferdinand and Isabella’s joint kingdom.
There was little actual fighting in the south, though the Moorish archers dipped their arrows in wolfbane, which grew wild in the Sierra Nevada, and which turned even the slightest wound septic. Yet the war was still ruinously expensive, and it was part of a wider agenda for the monarchs: They wanted to forge a united, Christian nation. That meant expelling the Muslim rulers, but it also meant trouble if you happened to be a member of one of the large Jewish communities, which were expected to bear the brunt of the war with a special tax. For historical reasons, and because it was often the only profession they were allowed to adopt, the Jewish community provided most of the f
inancial services in Europe, and were regarded as almost endlessly milkable.
The Spanish Inquisition, under the ruthless Tomás de Torquemada, had long since broken free of the pope’s authority and now answered to the monarchs alone. Jews were cajoled and threatened into converting to Christianity, but having converted, they then found themselves the object of deep suspicion for those whose self-appointed role was rooting out heresy. The year 1485 marked a ratcheting up of religious tension in Spain, when an inquisitor was murdered in Saragossa Cathedral—probably by “New Christians,” the term applied to Jews who had been forced to convert. But Columbus was finding that the ruthless new rulers of Castile and Aragon were hard to track down, even for someone armed with a personal request to visit them.
In the last few months of that year, it rained incessantly in Spain. To reach his audience with the queen, Columbus needed to get to Córdoba, but the city was almost cut off by floodwater.* Exhausted and damp, he finally arrived there on January 20, 1486, and went as instructed to the enormous palace of Cardinal Mendoza, who, as primate of Spain, was supposed to ride next to the queen into battle. But the floods had caused a fatal delay. The king and queen had already left. Isabella had just given birth to her fifth and last child, the future Catherine of Aragon—who would leave her mark so decisively on English history as the first wife of Henry VIII—and was exhausted herself. Columbus would have to wait for them to return.