Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  In simple terms, Isabella’s new admiral had discovered that a great wheel of winds and currents could carry a ship from Castile to the Caribbean and back to Europe. When the Reconquista gave their country Palos and a stretch of south-facing Atlantic coast in the mid-thirteenth century, Castilian sailors gained access to this circular system. Nobody knew how far it reached or how it really worked, but Portuguese sailors were already returning home from Africa by first sailing deep into the Atlantic to pick up the right currents and winds in a manoeuvre they called the volta do mar largo, or long sea turn.21 It took a large dose of courage, however, to imagine that those same winds and currents would take a sailing ship to the other side of the Atlantic and, especially, back again. Only someone with the considerable navigational skills of Christopher Columbus, a large dose of self-belief and a lively imagination would even have thought of embarking on such a venture.

  Isabella’s Castile also made its giant leap across the ocean because it was a cornered culture with nowhere else to go. Christendom was blocked to the east and, for various reasons, plans to conquer parts of north Africa had never worked out. Even with that in mind, however, the venture appears little short of mad. Perhaps the best explanation for why it happened at all is the ambitious nature of the personalities involved – especially Isabella and Columbus. The queen believed strongly in a chivalric ideal that elevated adventure into a moral virtue, thereby encouraging high risks.22 So did Columbus. A century later, the Castilian writer Miguel de Cervantes would create the famously honour-crazed Don Quixote of La Mancha, whose only interests – reflecting the values of Isabella’s time – were glory and fame. It was Isabella’s embrace of competitive adventure and the reckless pursuit of glory that allowed this breakthrough to happen under her flag. The impact of this bold Castilian voyage into the unknown on the next five centuries of world history would be spectacular – tilting the balance away from the more sophisticated east towards a west that would eventually use it as a springboard for global dominance.

  32

  Indians, Parrots and Hammocks

  Palos de la Frontera, 15 March 1493

  La Niña rode a rising tide as it sailed past the Saltés Bar into the calm waters of the Odiel and Tinto estuary at midday on 15 March 1493. It had sat offshore overnight and the friars at La Rábida must have watched its arrival excitedly from their privileged viewpoint just inland. News of Columbus’s return to Europe with the men from the local ports of Palos and Moguer may already have reached them, as fierce storms had driven him first to a safe harbour in the Azores and then on to Lisbon on 4 March, where his exotic cargo of natives, birds, animals and tropical foods had attracted the envious attention of King João II, known as ‘the Perfect Prince’. From there1 he had written that first historic letter to Isabella and her husband, announcing their ‘greatest victory’.

  In fact, Columbus was not the first person to send Isabella news of the Americas, or to make the return crossing to Europe. That honour lay with Pinzón, whose La Pinta caravel had become separated from La Niña when they ran into a storm on 14 February. He landed at Bayona, in Galicia, and some four days later wrote to Isabella and Ferdinand of his arrival, rested for two weeks and then sailed to Palos, entering the port later on the same day as Columbus but rushing off to a house in nearby Moguer so as to avoid meeting the man with whom he had fallen out so badly during the voyage. Pinzón’s letter reached Isabella’s court some two weeks before she heard from Columbus, though it does not survive. Nor did Pinzón himself, who was very sick. Within days he had been taken in by the friars at La Rábida, but they failed to cure him.2 By the time Isabella wrote asking him to come to court, he had died.

  Columbus remained true to character. He was boastful and flamboyant, aware that it was important to broadcast and exaggerate his triumph as loudly as possible. But he was also mistrustful, resentful and insecure – knowing that he had failed to find any gold mines and that many people still did not believe he had found the Indies. In a later, written vision of his exploits he reminded Isabella and her husband of the disbelief his plans had provoked originally. ‘I was in your court so long … against the advice of so many of the principal people in your household, all of whom were against me, making fun of this idea [of mine] which, I hope, will prove to be the greatest honour to Christianity that has ever been seen.’3 On their arrival in Palos, he and his crew had gone straight to the Convent of Santa Clara to fulfil a promise that the ship’s crew would give thanks there for their safe return. He then processed through nearby Seville, his Taíno ‘Indians’, multi-coloured parrots and Caribbean trinkets on full display. The same show would be put on at numerous places as he travelled towards Barcelona to see Isabella and Ferdinand. He had previously planned to go by sea, but eventually chose a triumphant march through Castile that might enhance his reputation even further, setting out on 9 April on a trip that took thirteen days.4

  Bartolomé de Las Casas, then an eight-year-old boy, was taken by his father to see the Indians in the house where they stayed in Seville, near San Nicolás church. ‘He left Seville taking the Indians with him, there being seven of them because the others had died,’ Las Casas reported. ‘He took beautiful, bright green parrots and guayças [guaízas], which were masks carved from fishbones, worn like pearls, and strings of them that displayed admirable artisanship … with lots of fine gold and other things that had never been seen or heard of in Spain.’5 The tiny guaíza masks, also carved out of seashells, were a small but significant sign that Isabella’s new peoples were somewhat more sophisticated than her ‘admiral’ had imagined.6

  Columbus had been careful to broadcast his arrival as widely as possible. Within a week of landing, for example, city councillors in Córdoba were excitedly debating the news and looking forward to him passing through the city. In a letter signed jointly with her husband on 30 March, Isabella had sounded anxious, excited and exasperated. Seeing ahead of them a potential race against Portugal to colonise the new lands, made worse by the fact that he had stopped first in Lisbon, she and Ferdinand had ordered him to appear before them as soon as possible. ‘As we desire that what you have started should, with God’s help, be continued and taken forward, we wish … that you put as much speed as possible into your coming here, so that there is time to provide all that is needed; and as summer is already upon us and in order not to waste time before returning, see if you can start organising in Seville and other places for your return to the land that you have found,’ they wrote. He was to write them instructions, telling them what needed doing so that he could set off back to the Americas just as soon as he had returned from his trip to Barcelona. That very same day they signed a royal order banning anyone else from sailing to the Indies without their permission. ‘You should know that we have recently brought about the discovery of some islands and mainland in the part of the Ocean Sea that is the part of the Indies,’ they said, apparently believing Columbus’s claim to have sailed to Asia. ‘Some people could be tempted to go to the said Indies and trade there and bring back merchandise and other things, but that is something which we do not want done without our licence and special orders.’7 The letter was to be read aloud in town squares across the land.

  Columbus was slowed down by the crowds that greeted him wherever he went. ‘It wasn’t just that everyone came out to watch in the places that he passed through, but that other places far off this route were emptied out as the road was packed with people wanting to see [him] or with others who were rushing ahead to the towns to receive him,’ said Las Casas.8 They marvelled at the parrots, the small rabbit-like hutias and the wild turkeys. But most of all they came to gawk at what everybody assumed were ‘Indians’.

  It was, in part, a freak show, but it was also an amazing display of colour and novelty, lighting up the grey life of Spain’s often harsh interior. The cultural, sensual and aesthetic world of most Europeans was at best narrow and predictable. Few knew more than the dull certainties of their town or village and the pale
tte of colours offered by the changing seasons and the local countryside. Spaniards were not extravagant dressers – or so Italian visitors thought – though costume varied from region to region, with people’s geographical origins recognisable by their clothes and Isabella ordering her costumers to confect outfits in the style of the regions she was visiting. ‘One day she would appear in Galicia as a Galician and the next in Vizcaya as a Vizcayan,’ a Spanish historian wrote a century later.9 But mostly this was a world of repetitive experiences and restricted social and sensual input. The smells, sounds and images of churches or religious processions and encounters with Moors or Jews were the most exotic experiences that the vast majority of Spaniards who lived outside the major trading cities could hope to experience.

  Isabella finally set eyes on her new subjects – so effusively described in Columbus’s letters – at the end of April. It is not entirely clear whether her meeting with them took place in Barcelona itself, or at the monastery of San Jerónimo of Murtra in nearby Badalona. Once again, crowds took to the streets to see Columbus and his menagerie of animals and human beings. ‘The people barely fitted into the streets, wanting to admire the person who was said to have discovered another world,’ said Las Casas.10

  Isabella and Ferdinand were equally thrilled, according to Francisco López de Gómara, who wrote sixty years later:

  He showed the monarchs the gold and other things that he had brought from the other world; and they and those with them were amazed to see that all of it, except the gold, was as new to them as the land it came from. They praised the parrots for their beautiful colours: some very green, others very colourful, others yellow, with thirty different varieties of colour; and few of them looked anything like birds brought from other parts. The hutias and rabbits were very small, with rats’ ears and tails. They tried the ají spice, which burned their tongues, and the batatas [sweet potatoes], which are sweet root crops and the wild turkeys, which are better than ducks or hens. They were amazed that there was no wheat there, and that they made bread from their corn.

  Canoes, tobacco, pineapples and hammocks were among the exotic items that Columbus was able to describe or place before Isabella and her husband, who were appalled to hear his reports of cannibalism.11 But it was the native Taíno who really astonished them. ‘What they most stared at were the men, who wore gold rings in their ears and noses, and were neither white, nor black, nor brown, but rather jaundiced-looking or like the colour of stewed quince. Six of the Indians were baptised, as the others did not make it to the court,’ he said. Isabella, Ferdinand and their son Juan were the godparents.12

  In Isabella’s mind the desired destiny for Jews, Moors and Indians was the same – that they be converted to the true faith of Christianity. But while Jews and Moors had to be convinced, cajoled, threatened or – if they resisted – expelled, the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean posed a different sort of problem. They neither resided in mainland Castile nor had they ever heard of Christianity. They were not, in that sense, heretics or infidels, though had Columbus spent more time with them or learned their languages he might have realised that they had their own religions.13 And that raised the question of the proper way to treat them.

  A more pressing problem for Isabella, however, was Portugal. João II’s special ambassador arrived even before Columbus, complaining about a possible breach of the 1479 Alcáçovas agreement that had sealed the end of the war over the Castilian crown. Isabella and Ferdinand’s spies in Lisbon soon discovered that the Portuguese king was already plotting to send boats south and west from the Canary Islands, to lands that he might more easily claim under the terms of that treaty. They, in turn, sent an ambassador to Lisbon within days of Columbus’s arrival in Barcelona to demand that Portugal stay out of the new territories and stick to the areas accorded to it in and around Africa. They also ordered the Duke of Medina Sidonia to have boats ready to attack any Portuguese ships that might set sail. More importantly, a bout of frantic activity by their ambassadors in Rome saw the pope issue two briefs and a bull in the space of just two days at the beginning of May in which he confirmed that the islands found by Columbus belonged to Castile, as would those found on future expeditions. Just as Portugal had managed to persuade the pope to give it rights over much of west Africa, so Castile now secured for itself whatever it could find across an ocean that was still not known as the Atlantic.14 The papal permits also made clear that one of the tasks expected of Isabella’s explorers was to convert the natives of the new lands to Christianity.

  Reports of the new lands added to Isabella’s crown soon spread across the rest of Europe. Within a handful of days of Columbus’s arrival, the find was being recorded in Siena, Italy, along with rumours of abundant gold.15 A famous letter that Columbus allegedly wrote to Santángel was published in Barcelona at the time of this arrival, with three editions selling out. It was translated into Latin and published in Rome a few months later with other editions printed that same year in Paris, Antwerp and Basle. It was one of the printing press’s first international bestsellers and added further to the burgeoning prestige of Isabella’s Castile, after the previous year’s conquest of Granada.16 The letter was rewritten previously by somebody else and there is evidence that this was done on the instructions of Isabella and her husband, who were only too aware of its potential for boosting their image.17 Among other things, the letter passed on to readers titillating rumours about the presence of cannibals, Amazonian-style women who lived without men and monkey-like people ‘born with tails’, while admitting that Columbus himself had ‘so far found no human monstrosities, as many expected, but on the contrary the whole population is very well formed, nor are they negroes as in Guinea, but their hair is flowing’.

  It warned, however, that not all were peaceful. ‘An island which is the second one encountered on entering the Indies is populated by people who are deemed ferocious by those on all the other islands and who eat human flesh,’ Columbus, or whoever re-edited his letter, wrote. ‘They are the ones who have relations with the women from Matinino, which is the first island of all, where there are no men at all. The latter do not follow women’s customs, but use the bows and arrows … made of cane and they armour themselves with metal plates.’

  The letter also informed readers of the rich pickings that awaited Castile, since one sailor had managed to swap a lace for ‘gold weighing as much as two and a half castellanos’ (or 1,200 maravedis) with the guileless Indians, ‘while others exchanged things of even less value’. It also explained that the different groups of Taíno that Columbus had found shared similar languages and customs – enough for them to understand each other as they skilfully navigated from island to island. ‘They have a subtle intelligence and it is wonderful how the men here who know how to sail those seas explain everything.’ The natives Columbus had kidnapped were, the letter said, still convinced that he was divine and the people he met had often ‘run from house to house and to nearby villages, shouting in loud voices: “Come! Come to see the people from heaven!” ’

  Isabella and Ferdinand’s fame increased as the document circulated through Europe, with the letter insisting that the discovery would reap vast riches for them. ‘With a little bit of help from their Highnesses I will give them as much gold as they need; and also all the spices and cotton that their Highnesses order me to ship … and as many slaves as they order,’ it said. The islands would produce countless valuable delicacies, including mastic, rhubarb and cinnamon, to further increase their wealth and standing, he insisted. ‘Our Redeemer gave this great victory to our illustrious king and queen and to their famous kingdoms for this great deed, and the whole of Christendom should celebrate … that so many peoples will have embraced our faith and, after that, for the great wealth that not just Spain but all Christians must gain here.’

  News of the discovery, then, was racing across the continent. Mariners, traders, monarchs and adventurers were all intrigued. The Iberian peninsula was now the focus of European ma
ritime exploration and expansion, as Spain reached west and Portugal headed south and east around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. But Italians also played a vital role, especially through their trading communities in Spain. Another Italian sailor called Amerigo Vespucci, for example, was among those to hear the news in Seville. He would soon become a friend and collaborator of Columbus. A Venetian sailor and maritime engineer called Giovanni, or John, Cabot also heard the news in Spain. Cabot was working on a port project near Valencia, eastern Spain, and would soon move to Seville to begin work on a bridge to replace the Puente de Barcas – the pontoon that provided a link to Triana across the River Guadalquivir.18 Like Vespucci, whose Christian name eventually provided the new continent’s name, he also became determined to start exploring the western Atlantic on his own. He would eventually find backing from England’s Henry VII, with the Spanish ambassador sending back worried reports about ‘a man like Columbus … [pursuing] another undertaking like that of the Indies’. It was only several years after Columbus’s return, however, that Cabot finally sailed north and west from Bristol with just a single ship and no royal money to discover an inhospitable-looking Newfoundland draped in fog, with banks of cod so thick that they could be scooped up in baskets.

  Isabella and her husband were in a hurry. Whereas Columbus’s first voyage had been financed with little money and represented a blind bet on the unknown, they now had a concrete purpose – to claim for themselves lands that, even with Columbus’s limited exploration, they already knew were extensive (Columbus’s descriptions of Hispaniola as larger than Spain, and Cuba as bigger than Great Britain were wrong, but the latter alone was still larger than Aragon’s Spanish lands). A race had begun and, having started in the lead, they were determined to win it. The Canary Islands, so recently conquered, provided an administrative and legal model. The days of feudal-style expansion, with conquered lands becoming personal fiefs of the conquerors, were over. Any new lands found by Columbus, and their peoples, would belong firmly to the Castilian crown or, in other words, to Isabella. Columbus could have his extraordinary set of titles – of admiral, viceroy and governor – but he remained their servant.19 As early as 7 May 1493 they ordered a royal accountant called Gómez Tello to prepare to join Columbus on a second trip ‘to receive in our name all that, in whatever way, belongs to us’.20 Another royal bureaucrat, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, was given joint responsibility, with Columbus, for organising the expedition – while the latter’s thirst for nobility was partly quenched with formal recognition of a quartered coat of arms that he could now boast as his own and that would include ‘golden isles on waves in the sea’. On 23 May Columbus and Fonseca were told to scour the ports in and around Seville and Cadiz for suitable vessels that could be bought or chartered – and armed – for the trip.21