Later, Columbus confessed to the sovereign who did back him, King Ferdinand of Spain, “I went to the king of Portugal, who was better versed in the matter of discoveries than any other sovereign, and the Lord blinded his eyes and deafened his ears so that for all of fourteen years he did not understand what I was saying.” But Ferdinand listened, and Isabella understood what Columbus was saying. To her ears, he was saying he could bring her the means to administer a transoceanic empire that would surpass that of any other European nation.
Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile met for the first time only five days before they married, on October 19, 1469, at the Palacio de los Vivero in Valladolid. He was almost a year younger than she, and on their wedding day, they were just eighteen and seventeen years of age, and cousins. She was not beautiful, and he was not handsome. But they were pious Christians. They were both children of kings of the Trastámara dynasty, and well-known figures. At the age of twelve, Ferdinand had led his soldiers to victory against the Catalans, and when his ambitious mother, Juana Enríquez, a Castilian, died of cancer in 1468, he delivered her eulogy and positioned himself as the next dynastic leader. Months later, representatives from Isabella sought him out and escorted him to Castile to marry.
From the start, theirs was an unusual arrangement that gave Isabella powers equal to, or in some cases greater than, those of her young husband. On terms agreed to by their legions of advisers, she alone ruled the kingdom of Castile in north central Spain. On the basis of their intricate official relationship, their union flourished. Ferdinand had his mistresses and Isabella had her religion for consolation. Whatever their private differences, they demonstrated publicly that they loved and respected each other, as was necessary to maintain their joint rule.
The early years of their reign were a time of testing for them both. They relied on more experienced advisers and intermediaries to rebuff challenges to their power and to their finances. Teetering on the brink of insolvency, they implemented novel methods of taxation, often from the sale of agricultural products, to finance their ambitions. One of the most dangerous tests materialized in 1476 when Alfonso, king of Portugal, invaded Castile with the help of Castilian nobles. The Sovereigns would not let the challenge stand. On March 1 of that year, King Ferdinand won a decisive victory over Alfonso in the wine-producing town of Toro, north of Madrid, and began the arduous task of consolidating the fragmented empire. Ferdinand and Isabella became known as Los Reyes Católicos, the Catholic Sovereigns, a sobriquet that would stay with them throughout their long reign.
In 1479, Ferdinand succeeded his father as king of Aragon, and the territories and kingdoms of Ferdinand and Isabella became one. Not since the eighth century had there existed a unified political entity that could be designated España, or Spain. Los Reyes Católicos did not rest on their laurels. They set about reclaiming political power from both the bourgeoisie and the nobility, and they circumscribed the authority of the Cortes, or General Courts, reduced to mere functionaries in the Sovereigns’ quest for glory. They won popular support for their efforts, and consolidated their power. Jews and Muslims, essential components of Spain’s commerce, intellectual life, and trade, would be the next to fall. It was perhaps significant that Isabella’s royal emblem was a sheaf of arrows, their sharp heads a warning to the perceived enemies of the throne, and that Ferdinand’s emblem was a double yoke worn by a team of oxen, signifying his acquiescence to Isabella’s authority.
As heresy spread across the realm, the Sovereigns’ representatives established the Inquisition in 1480 to bring the accused to trial. Some escaped with no more than the loss of their worldly goods; others were condemned to death. Fear of Ferdinand and Isabella increased, and under their prodding Spain seemed to recover some of its previous swagger and piety. As a potent symbol, the holy city of Jerusalem remained the ultimate spoil of war. Soon there was talk of reclaiming it to complete the unfinished business of the Crusades.
In 1480, Christian forces drove Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. More than fifty conquered Muslim cities entered the Christian fold within ten years. As mosques became churches, the conquests persisted, relying on artillery and battering rams to lay siege to one town after another. To fund this giant military operation, the Catholic Sovereigns turned to the pope, who permitted the crown to tithe in order to stay solvent. Taxes and obligatory loans also helped to replenish the royal coffers, but the most common method was the confiscation of the wealth of Jews and Muslims. Wealthy Seville was especially hard hit by the exigencies of the Inquisition.
Columbus appeared in the midst of this protracted struggle early in 1485, seeking the backing of Ferdinand and Isabella for an entirely new project, the discovery of a route over the ocean to the Indies. The thirty-four-year-old Genoese mariner’s prolonged dalliance with King João of Portugal had proved pointless, and his attempts to interest France and England in his imperial strategy also led nowhere. He had even returned to Genoa to try to generate interest in an expedition, but he met with little enthusiasm in his birthplace.
Discouraged, he had returned to Spain, where his grandiose plan struck a spark when he exhibited a map of the world showing India and other lands of the Grand Khan. According to his confidant Andrés Bernáldez, the demonstration “awakened in them a desire to know those lands.” Ferdinand obtained Ptolemy’s text, Geography, to see for himself just what Columbus was talking about.
Reconquista ground on slowly and relentlessly. Some provinces quietly submitted to Castilian rule and taxation; others stubbornly resisted. In 1487, one of the last remaining strongholds of resistance, Málaga, a port city on the southern coast of Spain, collapsed after a four-month siege, whereupon the Catholic Sovereigns enslaved and sold most of the residents, serving notice on others who would defy the will of Ferdinand and Isabella.
The greatest prize of all, Granada, gradually changed allegiance from Muslim to Christian. In November 1491, the sultan of Granada, his alternatives exhausted, arranged a surrender treaty in secret with Ferdinand and Isabella. On January 2, 1492, Spanish forces occupied the Alhambra, the fourteenth-century “Red Fortress” that had served as the residence for the last Muslim emirs, or sheikhs, of southern Spain; four days later, Ferdinand and Isabella made a dramatic entry into Granada. Columbus claimed he was there to see history in the making that day. “I saw the Royal Standards of Your Highnesses placed by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra,” he later wrote, “and I saw the Moorish King come out to the gates of the city and kiss the Royal Hands of Your Highnesses and of the Prince my lord.” Perhaps he had merely heard about the surrender. Either way, he wanted his Sovereigns to know how profoundly he identified with their imperial aims.
Unlike the Jews, who were treated harshly, Muslims could own property, worship as they chose, and live according to their laws. The accommodation proved short-lived. Ten years later, a rebellion erupted, and the Sovereigns ordered the remaining Muslims to convert to Christianity or leave Spain. A century later, they, too, would be expelled.
The conquest of Granada solidified the increasingly bloody reign of Los Reyes Católicos, who gained the confidence and the means to undertake a series of initiatives designed to fortify their Christian empire and pursue their ultimate goal of retaking Jerusalem. They marched into Africa both to spread Christianity as far and wide as possible, and to seize gold. On March 31, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella signed an order designed to expel the Jews from Spain. They could either convert to Christianity to preserve their way of life, their families, and their fortunes or leave the country by July 31. Years before, in 1477, a more innocent and idealistic Isabella had seen herself as the Jews’ guardian, signing a decree offering them a measure of protection. “The Jews are mine, and they are under my protection and power,” she had stated at the time. She later turned her back on them, and by 1489, Jews in Spain were condemned to be burned at the stake for their supposed treachery. By now public opinion had turned strongly against them, so strongly, in fact, that the
expulsion was seen as long overdue. Ferdinand and Isabella found themselves trying to keep pace with the whirlwind of hatred and civil war that they had sown.
In 1492, Isabella invited Columbus to return to Spain, where the Sovereigns constantly circulated among various friendly castles, palaces, and monasteries. Their peripatetic existence kept them in contact with their realm and their subordinates, but it also created a bureaucratic void in which documents and orders often went astray. Although Columbus’s transactions with the Sovereigns and his voyages are well documented, there are significant lacunae, caused in part by this situation.
When Christopher Columbus again appeared in their midst to ask for backing for his voyage, his plans, as far-fetched as ever, came as a welcome distraction from the travails of the Inquisition, and a partial fulfillment of their goal to forge a Christian empire. He talked at length with Isabella, who gradually became convinced that his proposed mission could be useful to them. Consisting of only three ships, it would not cost the hard-pressed crown much, and the expenses would be paid for by levies and the sale of indulgences. To demonstrate her sincere faith, she offered her jewels as collateral : a touching gesture, but it was not expected that anyone would claim them. Three weeks after expelling the Jews from Spain, Los Reyes Católicos signed the following decree:We send Cristóbal Colón with three caravels through the Ocean Sea to the Indies on some business that concerns the service of God and the expansion of the Catholic faith and our benefit and utility.
CHAPTER 3
Shipwreck
“That night the wind blew hard from the east northeast,” Columbus noted on or about December 17, 1492, grateful that Tortuga sheltered their small craft. In the morning, he ordered his crew to put their nets out to fish, and while they did, the inhabitants—now invariably termed “Indians”—frolicked with them and, more interestingly, offered arrows said to have been fashioned by the unseen but ever-present cannibals. These weapons were long, slender “spikes of canes, fire-hardened and sharp.” The Indians pointed to a couple of men whose bodies had been mauled and “gave them to understand that the cannibals had eaten them by mouthfuls.” If the Indians were seeking to form an alliance with their visitors against this dreaded enemy, Columbus the skeptical Genoese mariner remained unconvinced, and he resumed bartering for gold as he praised the intelligence of the Indians who cooperated.
In the evening, he recorded, a large canoe bearing forty men approached from Tortuga. When the canoe-borne warriors landed on the beach, the local chieftain angrily commanded them to return whence they came, hurling seawater and stones after them. After they shoved off in their canoes, the same chieftain took one pebble and, rather than throwing it at the Spaniards, calmly placed it in the hand of the Spaniards’ marshal as a gesture of peace.
When the canoe, and the threat it posed, vanished from sight, the chieftain described—through interpreters—their life in Tortuga. Was there gold? More in Tortuga than in Hispaniola, but no gold mines to speak of. Nevertheless, the “country was so rich that there is no need to work much to sustain life or be clothed, since they go naked.” Heedless of these details, which signified the Indians’ sinful indolence, Columbus stubbornly persisted in his search for gold, learning that a source could be found within a journey of four days overland, or “one day of fair weather.”
With that, the wind died, and Columbus and his men retreated to their ships to prepare for the observance of a feast day, which he called the Commemoration of the Annunciation (now known as Our Lady’s Expectation), December 18. As Columbus dined below the sterncastle (a structure above the main deck), two hundred men appeared, bearing the young king on a litter. Everyone, he noted yet again, was naked, or nearly so. Dismounting the litter, “at a quick walk he came to sit down beside me, nor would he let me rise to meet him or get up from the table, but beseeched me to eat.” While the Indian’s guard arrayed themselves on deck “with the greatest respect and readiness in the world,” Columbus invited the young king to partake of the feast, and was gratified to note that he ate all the “viands,” and as for the drink, “he simply raised [it] to his lips and then gave to the others, and all with a wonderful dignity and very few words.”
After the meal, an Indian courtier offered a gift that pleased Columbus. It was a belt “like those of Castile in shape but different workmanship.” The Admiral appraised this item carefully, as if deciding what it would fetch in Spain, and in return gave the chieftain “amber beads which I wore at my neck, and some red shoes, and a bottle of orange water,” which elicited exclamations of approval for their recipient.
Hindered by the lack of a common language or reliable interpreters, Columbus took the king’s signs and utterances to mean that the “whole island was mine to command.” And out of this communication gap was born the conviction, at least in Columbus’s mind, that he was acquiring an empire of his own. “After it was late and he wished to leave, the Admiral sent him away in the boat very honorably, and gave him numerous lombard shots; and, once ashore, he got into his litter and went off with more than two hundred men, and soon was borne behind him on the shoulders of an Indian, a very honorable man.” It had been a gratifying day’s work, rich in hopes and illusions, and in deception.
Weighing anchor, Columbus sailed eastward under a full moon to what was most likely Lombardo Cove, Acul Bay, in today’s Haiti: a protected, idyllic spot, even by the standards of the Caribbean. “This harbor is most beautiful,” he exulted.
The next day found the Admiral euphoric over his discovery, boasting in his diary, and very likely to his shipmates, that nothing in his twenty-three years at sea equaled it, and it was “superior to all and would hold all the ships of the world” within its four-mile length.
About ten o’clock that night, a canoe laden with Indians made its way from shore to the flagship “to see the Admiral and the Christians and to wonder at them.” A session of brisk bartering ensued, and Columbus dispatched a scouting party, who returned with reports of a “big village.” To Columbus’s chronicler Bartolomé de Las Casas, who spent years living in the Indies, these settlements were a familiar sight in this part of the world. “The inhabitants,” he wrote, “make their houses of wood and straw, in the form of a bell. They were very high and spacious, such that ten or more persons lived in each one. They drove in the big poles, as big as a leg or even a thigh, in a circle, half the height of a person, into the earth and close together; they were all joined together at the top, where they were tied with a certain cord of roots that formerly were called bejucos.” He proceeded to take his readers on an admiring guided tour of an Indian settlement. “With these roots and the bark of trees of a black color, and other bark stripped off that remained white, they made lattice work with designs and foliage like paintings on the inside of a building. . . . Others were adorned with stripped reeds that appeared very white. There were very thin and delicate canes.”
At first timid, the inhabitants gradually “lost their fear” and “countless men, women, and children” rushed forward with bread, “which is very white and good,” Columbus wrote with surprise, “and they brought us water in calabashes and in earthenware pitchers of the shape of those of Castile,” or so they appeared to him. The gifts he received included gold—precious gold!—moreover, the Indians performed their role with conviction. “It is easy to recognize when something is given with a real heart to give,” he concluded.
His acquisitive instincts satisfied for the moment, the Admiral praised his generous hosts, who possessed “neither spears nor darts nor arms of any sort.” Having decided there was nothing to fear, Columbus sent a party of six to the village, where they tried to explain once more that they had not come from the sky, as the Indians believed, but across the sea in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Sovereigns of Castile. Amid a sense of heightened expectation, Columbus finally decided to disembark and pay a visit. As soon as he made his intentions known, “there came down to the beach so many people that it was marvelous
, men, women and children, shouting that he should not leave but stay with them.” Columbus remained safely in his longboat, receiving offerings of food, a portable feast in the making. Receiving parrots and other tributes, and giving “glass beads and brass rings and hawk’s bells—not that they demanded anything but that it seemed to him right.” And because, with another characteristic leap, “he already considered them Christians.”
Wherever he went, he responded with a similar sense of wonder and egotism, as if these spectacular sights had been created for his benefit, and as he later reminded himself, that of his royal patrons. Conditioned by medieval assumptions, his intellect and imagination labored to interpret these astonishing sights according to categories that he understood. The world on which he gazed, and depended for survival, was both natural and supernatural; he needed only to divine the Creator’s intentions to exploit them to the hilt. He believed the Indians to be exactly what his views insisted—advanced and attractive and potentially useful creatures—rather than what they actually were, or might be. And if they happened to be in doubt, he would gladly enlighten them. He was bemused rather than displeased to hear that the Indians considered his fleet to have descended from the heavens, especially since the misunderstanding gave him occasion to establish his credentials. Their crowds formed to see him; they displayed their women for his benefit. He in turn admired them as one would admire a prize steed or working dog, still in the wild but capable, even eager, for domestication, noting that “nothing was lacking but to know the language and to give them orders, because every order that was given to them they would obey without opposition.” If only Columbus, with his embattled status, could command the same respect in Spain, or anywhere else in Europe.
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