by David Boyle
SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON, Admiral of the Ocean Sea
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same…”
RUDYARD KIPLING, If
IT WAS THE second day of 1492, and the royal standard of the sovereigns of Castile and Aragon was flying from the walls of Granada, and from the topmost towers of the Alhambra palace inside. The city had fallen to the Christians and the era of Moorish Spain was at an end. In the final months of the previous year, King Boabdil of Granada had decided the situation was hopeless. He had spent the past fifteen years desperately patching up bitter divisions between his father and the Muslim court. Part of that time was spent in exile in Christian Castile. He knew that if Ferdinand was allowed to storm the city, then everything would be lost. The garrison would be massacred and the Muslim population sold into slavery. But there was still one chance: a negotiated settlement that handed over the city to the Christians, but which protected the rights of the Muslims. With the agreement of his nearest advisers, but the bitter opposition of his mother, Boabdil sent messages out to Santa Fé that he was prepared to surrender.
Through October 1491, secret negotiations set out an agreement that would allow the population of Granada to keep their mosques and to dress as Muslims. They would be allowed to keep their language and customs and be judged by Muslim law. The agreement even stipulated that disputes between a Christian and Muslim would have to be heard in court presided over by judges of both religions. It was an agreement unprecedented in its liberalism, and the date for handing over the city was set for Epiphany. But under the same terms, Muslim prisoners began returning to Granada, bringing rumors of the impending surrender and, at Christmas, riots began breaking out around the Alhambra. There was no choice, Boabdil decided, but to move the date up, and he urgently sent messengers the six miles across the military lines to Santa Fé.
And so it was that on January 2, Columbus watched the triumphant and colorful procession as Isabella and Ferdinand rode side by side, followed by thousands of soldiers and knights with banners, and riding behind them the whole Castilian aristocracy, with their golden spurs and their lances and armor glinting in the fitful sunshine. They were met by Boabdil carrying the keys to the city. Ferdinand took them and handed them to Isabella and the procession continued toward the last Muslim city in Spain.
Boabdil and his companions stopped at a spot known as the Hill of Tears, where the king glanced back at his lost kingdom and the palace that is still one of the wonders of Europe, tears streaming down his face. “You do well to grieve like a woman,” said his mother, without pity, “for what you could not defend like a man.”*
The news reached Florence a few days later and celebratory bonfires for a great Christian victory were lit all over the city. It was missed by Vespucci, who had already sailed for Barcelona and his new life. But in Rome the Aragonese cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, then dean of the College of Cardinals, held a bullfight in the city—a Spanish custom never seen in Italy before. There was already a sense around Europe that 1492 was going to be an extraordinary year.
In the weeks after Columbus made his last despairing journey to La Rábida to pick up Diego and leave Castile, events had unraveled at frightening speed. Arriving at the familiar front door of the monastery, ready to ask for financial support to join his brother in France, he was taken instead to see one of the most influential monks, Juan Pérez, to whom he poured out his frustrations.
The monks at La Rábida had been his most consistent supporters, and Pérez urged him to reconsider going to France. To add weight to his arguments, he sent a message to nearby Palos and asked one of the local shipowners, Martin Alonso Pinzón, to come and offer some advice. It was the first fateful meeting between the two men, and Pinzón agreed with Pérez that Columbus should not give up on the Castilians yet. They no doubt pointed to France’s lack of a tradition in exploration and their shortage of expertise. And then Pérez made an offer. He was another former confessor to the queen, and he promised to arrange another audience for Columbus if he would stay in Castile for one more throw of the dice.
Isabella was then at Sante Fé, preparing for the siege of Granada. Pérez found a mule and set off by himself on a grueling journey to the front line. He told Isabella how poor Columbus was and that he was on the verge of giving up. She agreed to see Columbus and sent money for him to buy some clothes and another mule on which to make the journey. She even agreed to pay him for two years of service in Portugal working on her behalf.
Columbus set off as soon as Pérez returned with the exciting news. His new suit of clothes was delivered to Sante Fé in the searing heat of August 1491. This time he presented the monarchs with a new map, with details that Bartholomew had gleaned from his stay in England, and which Columbus had been working on in the long, depressing weeks since returning from Lisbon. The map included the Island of the Seven Cities, following the rumors of its discovery by the Bristol merchants and shown looking remarkably like Newfoundland—more evidence that the secretive Bristol voyages had found something.
Isabella was friendly. But to Columbus’s horror, she referred the project to yet another committee of astronomers and mariners. He must have felt he was fated to live his life in continuous circles, and he settled down with great frustration, ignoring the looks of the other hangers-on at court. But this time, there was to be no repeat of the Talavera Commission. These experts realized the political nature of the decision they were being asked to make, and referred it immediately to the Royal Council of Castile.
So as summer turned to fall, with every eye fixed on the beleaguered garrison in Granada, Columbus waited for the Royal Council to decide his fate. As he watched the celebrations as the city fell in January 1492, and the unprecedented procession across the plain to take possession, he knew a decision could not be far off. But when it finally came a few days later, he was told by officials that Castile was facing absolute bankruptcy because of the war. For that reason, they said, they rejected the plan. There was just no money to finance it. A dejected Pérez and Columbus retrieved their mules and slipped through the west gate of Santa Fé on the long journey back to La Rábida. The enterprise of the Indies would now be offered, rather hopelessly, to France.
It is not difficult to reconstruct something of the conversation between Columbus and Pérez as they made their way through the wintry Spanish landscape, their bitterness and frustration, and the divisions between them: Had he, Columbus, hinted too much at the unprecedented honors he would demand as the discoverer of the Indies? How could merchants profit from the discovery? Was it inevitable that the new king of France would accept the proposal, when all the other crowned heads of western Europe had refused? After four miles along the road to Córdoba, they reached the small village of Pinos-Puente. There was a clatter of hooves behind them, then a call. It was clear that something had taken place after they left Santa Fé.
Having watched the pathetic figures ride out on their mules, the keeper of the privy purse, the banker Luis de Santangel, had sought out Isabella. The proposal that Columbus put forward, and the rewards he looked likely to stipulate, would be extremely expensive, but they could also have enormously beneficial consequences. If any other country successfully found a different way to the Indies, it could be deeply damaging to Castile, so the cost was well worth the risk. Columbus would get none of the rewards he was hinting at if he failed. If he succeeded, they would be cheap at the price. Santangel explained that he had become convinced that it was in the national interest to let Columbus try. He believed this so strongly, he said, that he would finance the expedition himself.
Isabella protested that that would not be necessary. “I will pledge the crown jewels if I have to,” she said. In fact, she had already done this to pay for the siege of Baza. They were in Santangel’s own bank, as both of them must have known. But the mood had changed, and a messenger was sent after Columbus to bring him back.
Bolstered by the capture of the last Muslim o
utpost in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella had decided to take the risk of tackling the Jews. Their mass expulsion from Spain in 1492 is one of the great crimes of Europe, but it was linked both to the fall of Granada and the decision to send Columbus westward. While Columbus was negotiating his settlement with the Castilian court, the finishing touches were being put on the edict of expulsion, published on March 31. All were a direct result of the same triumphal mood, and of the messianic romanticism that Isabella and Columbus shared.
Under the terms of the edict, Castile’s and Aragon’s Jewish communities were ordered to convert to Christianity or leave the country within three months and were told they could take no gold or silver with them. Within weeks, in every city in Spain, there would be the pathetic sights of Jewish families desperately exchanging their homes for a donkey, or their land for a few scraps of cloth, gathering together for the long journey south to the ports. Oblivious to the emerging human tragedy—a serious miscalculation on behalf of Ferdinand and Isabella, who thought most would simply agree to be baptized—Columbus was setting out his demands, strengthened by his firm belief that negotiations were also coming to a head in France between Bartholomew and Charles VIII.
A later engraving showing Columbus being seen off by Ferdinand and Isabella
Pérez acted as his negotiator, but he must have blanched when he heard Columbus’s proposal in detail. He wanted to be appointed admiral—a Moorish term giving jurisdiction over dockyards and fleets—over the Atlantic, and for this title to be inherited by his heirs. He wanted to be viceroy and governor over anywhere he found, and he demanded a tenth of all the gold, silver, pearls, gems, and spices he brought home, tax free, on the grounds that if he really found a route to the Indies, all this would be a small price to pay. The so-called capitulations were finally agreed to on April 17.
There was also the problem of how to afford the original investment in the expedition by the crown. There was a peace dividend, but Isabella was also in the process of expelling from the country most of those involved in financial services. If the wealthy Jews were gone, who could they borrow money from? The cost of fitting out the expedition was estimated at 2 million maravedis, of which the crown managed to find 1.4 million, which had been set aside by the federation of Castilian cities to pay for the war. The royal officials also began to trawl through other accounts and found a court decision that instructed the port of Palos to provide two caravels for royal service for one year. Despite the protests from Palos, transfering these to the enterprise was a simple matter. They were the sixty-ton Niña and the similar Pinta.*
Santangel invested considerable sums, and Columbus himself contributed 250,000 maravedis. Here Columbus was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. His friend Gianotto Berardi happened to be in Santa Fé with his new partner, Amerigo Vespucci—just arrived from Florence—trying to get approval from the crown to invade the island of Palma in the Canaries on behalf of a business consortium that also included Santangel. Berardi was therefore on the spot to provide the financing for Columbus to invest in his own voyage, and to form a company with him to manage the undertaking. Vespucci was able to confirm that this investment showed foresight. He immediately recognized the idea of a westward route to the Indies as stemming from Toscanelli, his old teacher. It might be a risk, but the idea was not insane. Berardi, Columbus, and Vespucci formed a company to manage the investment, and raised the necessary finance from the Medici Bank.
A crew would cost another 250,000 maravedis every month they were away. In Castille anyone could be a sailor, and the poor often found that they’d be better fed working aboard a ship than begging in some alleyway. Portuguese regulations insisted that anyone going to sea needed to first develop some relevant skills. But in Spain, where every ship had rats, simply procuring a cat to control the problem was considered skill enough. And anyone who agreed to sail out on this dangerous voyage had any prosecutions against them suspended. But it was the intervention of the other captains—Juan de la Cosa who owned the Santa Maria, leased as flagship, and two brothers, Martin Alonso Pinzón and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, both respected seafarers from Palos—who made the difference in persuading men to join crews.
Rather peculiarly, the actual owner of the Pinta, a merchant from Palos named Cristobál Quintero, was so determined to come on the expedition—or so determined to keep an eye on his ship—that he signed up for the voyage as an ordinary seaman. It was an unconventional voyage, and in strictest secrecy, Columbus and his captains struggled to equip the fleet as soon as possible before the summer was too far gone.
Vespucci had made the decision to leave Florence at the end of 1491, and the divisions that were emerging in the city were making him more certain with every day that it was the right thing to do. There were also divisions within his own family: Of his two beloved mentors, Giorgio had taken vows to enter the monastery with Savonarola, while Guido Antonio stayed loyal to the Medici. Amerigo himself would stay employed by the Popolano family, but he would not work exclusively for them, and he now knew for certain what he had agonized over for a decade: His heart lay elsewhere. If he was going to play a role in the discovery of Cathay and Cipangu, he needed to be in Seville, with the Florentine community on the Atlantic coast. So over Christmas in 1491, still ignorant of the dramatic project that was about to come to fruition, he was saying farewell to his mistress and his daughter, making promises to them and his family of continued love and support, and packing his most treasured possessions and charts. By the end of January 1492 he was in Barcelona with his young nephew Giovanni, sorting out a problem with one of the Popolano’s consignments of salt that was stuck at the quayside in need of a ship.
He then sailed down the coast to Cadiz before finally making his way to Seville to find a home and an office and to track down Berardi and discuss possibilities for the future. The two men immediately took to each other and before long Vespucci was being included in Berardi’s schemes—one of which, as we have seen, involved working closely with Columbus and his preparations for the voyage.
In fact, there was another reason why Vespucci was glad to have left Florence. At some point he would have had to choose between the different branches of the Medici family, and in the first few weeks of 1492, that choice was made more urgent: It was becoming clear that Lorenzo the Magnificent was dangerously ill. Through the spring, he became weaker as a mysterious disease took hold. A succession of doctors arrived to treat him, bringing in the most exotic medicines. There were doses of ground-up pearls and precious stones, all—perhaps not surprisingly—having no effect.* In early April, he went to bed in his villa at Careggi outside Florence and could not get up. When it was clear that he was dying, he asked Savonarola to visit him, to come face-to-face for the first time with the man who fulminated in his pulpit against him, Sunday after Sunday.
Savonarola asked him two questions. Would he hold to the faith? Lorenzo said he would. Would he amend his life if he recovered? Again, Lorenzo said he would. Then he urged him to meet death with resignation. “Nothing should please me better should it be God’s will,” he said, and his great rival blessed him and said the prayers for the dying. In a letter a few weeks later, Poliziano claimed that Savonarola told him to give Florence back its liberties and Lorenzo de’ Medici had turned his face to the wall. This has now been disproved by other contemporary accounts, but it does show that the faithful Poliziano was beginning to lean toward those who preferred to oust the Medicis altogether.
Lorenzo died in the early hours of April 9 at the relatively young age of forty-three.*
In his more prophetic and terrifying sermons, Savonarola had predicted the demise of three of the key figures in Renaissance Italy. The first of these, Lorenzo the Magnificent, was dead and the second was showing signs of serious decline: Pope Innocent lay in a coma for weeks, despite attempted blood transfusions from three boys, all of whom died as a result, while the two great rival cardinals Guliano della Rovere and Rodrigo Borgia screamed insults at
each other from his bedside.
Pope Innocent finally died on July 25, 1492, and from all over the Christian world the cardinals hurried to Rome to choose his successor. It was a bitterly divided conclave. On the one side was della Rovere, the ambitious and militaristic nephew of Sixtus IV and the influential power behind the throne for Innocent as well. Charles VIII of France and the Genoese were paying vast sums in bribes to support his candidacy. On the other side was Borgia, the effective but wholly corrupt friend of Ferdinand, allied to the Sforzas in Milan.
During the third day of the conclave, it became clear to Cardinal Ascania Sforza that he could not win, so he threw his considerable weight behind Borgia. That night, four mules loaded down with silver were seen moving quietly between the Borgia and Sforza palaces in Rome. But the next morning, the conclave was still deadlocked. Everyone who possibly could be bribed had been. The only cardinal left undecided was the senile ninety-six-year-old patriarch of Venice, and at this critical moment, supporters of the Borgias took him aside and persuaded him to cast the crucial vote with them. So at dawn the next day, the dark-eyed, wide-mouthed Borgia emerged from the most exhausting week of his life, bursting with energy and self-satisfaction, and announced that he would call himself Alexander VI, the most notorious of medieval popes. Alexander charmed the Roman rabble with his joking bonhomie, but his cardinals feared for the future. “We’re in the wolf’s jaws and he’s going to gobble us up,” whispered Cardinal Medici during his coronation.
Borgia was then sixty-one, born near Valencia, and had narrowly missed being elected Pope at the conclave that chose Innocent. He had extraordinary energy as an administrator and was a brilliant orator, but his excesses were flagrant. He quickly installed his mistress, Giulia Farnese, the seventeen-year-old wife of his one-eyed cousin, in apartments through a private door inside his cathedral. His son Cesare had been bishop of Pamplona since he was a teenage student in Pisa, but now the wheels to make him a cardinal were set in motion.