Leaving Worms, Hernando traced the main arteries of the Renaissance book trade: up the Rhine through Speyer, Strasbourg, and Sélestat to Basel, another city-state whose strategic position—wedged between Italy, France, and Germany but relatively independent of all of them—already gave it an outsize influence in the trade, allowing Erasmus to spread his books from there to the rest of Europe with unprecedented speed. From Basel, Hernando seems not to have taken the easier route, eastward to Innsbruck and from there down to the Veneto, but rather to have taken the Simplon Pass through the Bernese Alps down to Lombardy, tracing in reverse the path taken by Italian book hunters as they scoured the monastic libraries of Switzerland and southern Germany for manuscripts of classical texts. An account from later in his life suggests Hernando undertook most of these journeys on horseback, becoming hardened during years in the saddle both to the discomforts of long treks and of the miserable inns of central Europe, of which Erasmus left a biting satire, denouncing them as execrably stuffy and filled with mud from the boots of traveling merchants. In Lombardy, Hernando stayed at Milan, Pavia, and Cremona, on his way to visit Genoa, pausing only briefly at each of these places before he reached his final destination at Venice. Rumors were arriving there, at the same time as Hernando, that Luther’s plea to Charles had failed, that the heretic was now outlawed as well as excommunicated, and that he had been kidnapped, perhaps assassinated, after leaving Worms. Hernando may have heard reports that Charles had finally summoned the gravity required by the situation and responded by pouring scorn on the notion that a single monk, trusting to his private judgment, has opposed the faith held by all Christians for a thousand years and more, before swearing to defend this holy cause with all my dominions, my friends, my body and my blood, my life and my soul. Despite Charles’s censure of the schismatic, Hernando continued to buy Lutheran and anti-Lutheran books in large numbers in Venice, where their plentiful supply suggested the dangerous mixture of print and protest in that town; but now, in the spiritual homeland of the printed book, Hernando’s mind was beginning to turn from individual volumes to the idea of the universe of books.12
Hernando arrived in Venice just in time for the Sensa, the traditional Venetian celebration of the Feast of the Ascension, in which the doge, seated aboard the official barge or bucintoro with a ceremonial sword-bearer, “married” the city of Saint Mark to the lagoon in which it lay, ritually asserting the republic’s dominion over the Adriatic beyond. This may have seemed a touch hubristic that year, given the hand dropping the traditional wedding ring into the water belonged to the sickly and increasingly frail octogenarian Doge Leonardo Loredan. Under Loredan’s leadership the Venetian Republic had suffered a number of heavy military losses, most significantly to the French at the Battle of Agnadello in 1509, when the Venetians lost all the lands they had taken from Rome a few years earlier, and Loredan had (in the eyes of many) shown himself a coward by refusing to go to the front. Hernando had observed much of this feud from the point of view of Rome, and its two warlike popes (Julius and Leo), who were determined to hold back the influence of the island city-state. Yet for Venice the diplomatic and military maneuvers against it were evidence of the unchristian treachery of the popes: these peninsular wars, it was felt, distracted Venice from its main task of halting the advance of Ottoman power westward through the Mediterranean. The pamphlet Hernando had read when preparing to accompany Charles north, which suggested the Ottomans were turning their attentions east toward Persia, had proved a false dawn. Days after Hernando had arrived in Venice, a long-delayed embassy was dispatched to the Ottoman court with official congratulations to the new sultan, Suleiman (not yet “the Magnificent”), who had succeeded Selim I at his death late in the previous year. The ambassador’s relazione describing the embassy would report that Suleiman, a pale-skinned, dark-haired youth in his mid-twenties whose mysterious air was heightened by the turban he wore low over his eyes, was more belligerent than his father and a greater foe to the Christians and the Jews within his realm; but by then the ambassador was merely reporting what everyone already knew. Belgrade fell to Suleiman four months after Hernando arrived, giving the Ottoman Empire access to the Upper Danube and threatening the Venetian territories in Dalmatia. This added further to the woes of the Serenissima, whose mercantile dominance had faced challenges in the preceding decades from the rise of a Portuguese sea route to the east and the Genoese expansion to the west.13
By the time Belgrade fell in August, however, Doge Loredan had died, and Hernando had the chance to witness one of the most byzantine and extraordinary political processes in all of Europe. Rumors of Loredan’s death had already seeped through the city before it was officially announced on 22 June, though the secrecy was being preserved not as part of a conspiracy, but rather to give his family time to move out of the Ducal Palace, so the official state funeral could keep a healthy distance between the doge as political figurehead and as man of flesh and blood, with family relations and private possessions. Separating the doge from his family life was important because, unlike almost anywhere else in Europe, the leader of Venice was not hereditary but elected, and the Serenissima had devised an immensely complex machinery to keep it that way, preventing any one family or faction from turning the post into a form of monarchy. The doge lay in state in the Sala di Piovegi, then, for three days, as the deceased father of the republic rather than the patriarch of the Loredan family, before putrescence brought on by the warm weather, and the distortion of his face that made it a fright to behold, forced the removal of the body to the church of Giovanni e Paolo (or rather San Zane Polo in the proudly distinct Venetian dialect).
This observance done, the election of the new doge could commence—though perhaps selection is a better word for the long series of lotteries and ballots put in place to safeguard the process from corruption. Venice was a republic, yet its electoral process was far from wholly democratic: only members of the Great Council, consisting of twenty-five hundred or so male members of ancient Venetian families listed in the so-called Golden Book, could participate. From this body thirty were chosen by lottery, of whom none could be related, and then these thirty were further winnowed by lot to a Committee of Nine; the Nine elected forty more, who were reduced to a Committee of Twelve by lot and given the chance to elect twenty-five more; they in turn were reduced by lot to nine and elected forty-five, who were reduced by lot to a Committee of Eleven. The Eleven chose forty-one, none of whom could have been on the previous electoral committees (the Nine, the Twelve, and the Eleven), who (finally) elected the doge. At each of these stages each of the candidates had to carry a healthy majority of the vote. The design of the system made it incredibly difficult to rig, because of the lotteries and the rules to prevent any one person (or family) from participating at different stages of the process, and also because it was so complex that it would be hard to know where to start. All the same, a proposal was floated during the election that Hernando witnessed in 1521 to double the number of electoral steps, just in case. This was the mode that Venice, the mercantile republic par excellence, had developed to inoculate itself against the monopolization of power.14
That we know the Venetian Republic in such intimate detail in this period—in fact, our knowledge of the period as a whole, far beyond Venice—is in large part due to the efforts of a single man, who was cut very much from the same cloth as Hernando and was later to play a central part in Hernando’s projects. Marin Sanuto was a member of one of the lesser Golden Book families, and he had held some minor administrative posts during his career, but he had early on discovered that (like Hernando) his true passion was for creating compendiums of information, mostly about his beloved city. After compiling a guide to the ancient gods and goddesses at the age of fifteen, Sanuto went on to write a description of the lands of the Veneto, a compendium about the lives of the doges up to 1494, and an encyclopedic tract about the city that began by detailing each of the magistracies of the republic but ended up including lists of �
�churches, monasteries, schools, bridges, ferry crossings, prisons, feast days, ceremonies, sights to show foreigners . . . moneys minted, fresh fish.” Sanuto’s masterpiece, however, begun in the wake of the French invasion of 1494, was a detailed log of all the chatter he picked up by hanging around the Brolo gardens (near the Ducal Palace) and the Campo San Giacomo (near the mercantile hub of the Rialto Bridge). With one ear to the political world and one to that of trade, Sanuto compiled fifty-eight manuscript volumes over forty years, filled with the most detailed reports of the day on statecraft, diplomacy, finance, exploration, scandal, culture, spirituality, and warfare, funneling them from the public places of this metropolitan hub into his study, where he composed his notes. Unlike the model of discovery pursued by Hernando and his father, in which the field of knowledge is expanded by the heroic individual crossing oceans, circumnavigating the earth, dispatching cartographic emissaries, engaging in foreign espionage, and searching the book markets of the world for information, Sanuto’s model was resolutely stationary. He deeply resented any move that might take him away from Venice, and indeed when Hernando arrived, Sanuto was still nursing a grudge against the anonymous traitor who had had the gall to put him forward for the lucrative post of maritime inspector, a threat to remove him from his listening post that he deeply resented. Sanuto had, in effect, made literal Nicholas of Cusa’s metaphor of the ideal cartographer: sitting in his study, surrounded by a library, Sanuto used the traffic of the city as his sensory organ, feeling the wider world through its reach. His model reversed the idea of exploration: instead of venturing forth, the agent placed himself at the center of a network, connecting to as many nodes as possible, and simply recorded history as it flowed over and through him.15
The importance of Sanuto’s undertaking was recognized, to a limited extent, by the Venetian government, including the new doge, Antonio Grimani, who urged him to continue with his important task. While Venice was a pioneer in the world of diplomacy, creating an international network of orators (proto-ambassadors) who reported back in detail on current events abroad, only Sanuto’s archive gave this diplomatic nervous system a brain in which to store its findings, one made possible in part by the new cheap medium of paper, which had become available in the West as late as the fourteenth century. But Sanuto and the thin-meshed net with which he trawled the world were never fully absorbed into the machinery of state, and he was repeatedly passed over for the post of official historian in favor of humanists trained in a more traditional mode, who could provide an account of the nation focused on high politics and the destinies of state. What, after all, were the official engines of the republic to do with Sanuto’s detailed description of daily life, such as the story of a woman named Bernadina who, during Hernando’s stay there, murdered her abusive husband, Luca, “the Jew,” from Monte Negro and buried him beneath the stairs? Sanuto records in detail her exposure after forging a letter from her husband that claimed he was away on business at Rome, which aroused the suspicions of his family, and her failure to find a discreet accomplice to move the stinking corpse; then how she was paraded along the Grand Canal to her home, where her right hand was severed and hung from her neck, before being beaten senseless in between the pillars of San Marco to prepare her for quartering; and finally how she continued to crawl forward even as she was stabbed in the chest and the throat. Yet all of these things made no sense in the official archive of the state, which could not yet see the connection between the powers of the republic and Luca’s rights over his battered wife. Sanuto’s omnivorousness would save for posterity the lived experience of Venice that was filtered out of the official archive of the Serenissima.16
The same channels of communication that made Venice a perfect spot for Sanuto to lie in wait for information had made its book trade one of the most important in Europe. On the other side of the Rialto from the Campo San Giacomo, clustered around the German warehouse at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the print district had emerged with the new technology that had been brought south by emigrating German craftsmen. Venice had been important since the early days of print, with its status as a long-standing entrepôt between Western and Eastern Christendom attracting many of the Byzantine scholars fleeing the Ottoman expansion, bringing their knowledge of Greek and its texts with them. But while these things allowed Venetian printers to capitalize on the hunger for fresh discoveries from the ancient world, it was Venice’s canny businessmen who enabled the city to emerge triumphant as the leading center of print. While the new technology spread rapidly all over Europe, it became clear the market simply wasn’t big enough yet for a large number of printing houses, leaving only the best-resourced operations to survive the drought that followed. After the dust had settled, Venice and a few other cities across Europe had virtual monopolies on large-scale printing, led by families such as the Giunti of Venice and the Kobergers of Nuremberg. This gave these places—and these families—extensive power over what Europe knew and how it thought. Yet sustaining this power required that they secure markets for their products, which they did by cloning existing trade networks and financial links to create vast and fluid channels to spread their printed materials throughout Europe (and eventually beyond). The same channels also brought back books from foreign markets, as suggested by the fact that Hernando could walk through the streets of this Adriatic port and buy the latest writings of Luther and his colleagues in distant Bavaria. This had allowed Sanuto to collect a library of 6,500 volumes without ever leaving Venice, and Hernando followed suit during his six-month stay, entrusting no fewer than 1,637 books to the merchant Octaviano Grimaldi for shipping back to Spain when departing from the island city in mid-October, having also borrowed two hundred ducats from the Grimaldi to pay for this treasure of books. From its bookshops he had not only been able to acquire the jewels of Venetian printing, but had also bought tomes from Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. From Sanuto and from Venice he was learning the lesson that universal reach did not necessarily require you to be everywhere: instead, one could simply place oneself in the thoroughfares and let the world come to you.17
XI
No Place like Home
By Easter 1522 Hernando was back in the Low Countries, where in late March he was in Brussels and reading the copy of Thomas More’s Utopia that he had bought two years before. He had arrived back laden with purchases, as even though he had left his considerable Venetian spree behind for shipping home, he continued to amass vast quantities of books on the return journey, beginning with seven hundred titles bought in Nuremberg during the month he spent there over Christmas. Between Nuremberg and Frankfurt, he took time to visit Würzburg, where the bibliomaniac Johannes Trithemius had left his library, an extraordinary monument to the kings of Germany, though beneath Hernando’s ambition, given its limited focus on learned works from Christendom and its disdain for print. In his travels through the German lands, Hernando may have heard of another figure who had ambitions for a kind of superhuman knowledge: the itinerant necromancer and magician named “Doctor Faustus,” around whom a legend grew up (of diabolic partnerships and punishments) that reflected the deep fears of the age, of how one might in striving for these forms of the universal be passing into forbidden territory. From Würzburg Hernando had passed through Cologne, buying two hundred more books in three days, and Mainz, where he bought a further thousand in a month. The pace of his acquisitions was quickening; it had now long surpassed the point at which he could possibly have given individual consideration to each purchase and was becoming something different entirely, a kind of mad and desperate bid to spin his passion for print into a scheme of unprecedented proportions.1
Reading More’s Utopia, as the imperial fleet prepared to sail to England, Hernando must have felt as if he was looking in a mirror that showed all the pieces of his life so far, even if in a slightly unusual guise—voyages of exploration, maps, printing, language, the search for forms of perfection hitherto unknown. The feel of Utopia would have been familiar to Herna
ndo: it presents itself as a report of a recent voyage to a newly discovered island on the other side of the world, one that More claims to have taken down from the mouth of the explorer—a Portuguese mariner called Raphael Hythloday—during a conversation in a garden in Antwerp. Hernando may even have wondered whether he knew Hythloday, given that this man claimed to have been a part of Amerigo Vespucci’s crew before setting off on his own. The island that Hythloday claimed to have discovered, however, was far superior to anything Vespucci or Columbus had come across: on it is found nothing less than the perfect society, in which all things have been designed to produce the ideal form of life. Cities are planted at equal distances, in a grid, to ensure they are just close enough to travel between, yet not in competition for resources; property is communal (though competition still exists, in forms of civic pride such as gardening); couples intended for marriage see each other naked first to ensure sexual compatibility; even abattoirs are banned from the city limits to ensure the citizens of Utopia do not become too accustomed to blood and violence. But there was one problem: the exact location of the island seems to have been lost, and all because someone in that Antwerp garden coughed at the precise moment when Hythloday was revealing the whereabouts of this perfect paradise.
Hernando probably had enough Greek by this point—after years of work to improve his command of the language—to realize More’s Utopia was a kind of learned prank, a spirited humanist game along the lines of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and an act of homage to another fictional country dreamed up by a great philosopher, Plato’s Republic. As part of this, More was making fun of the Age of Exploration with its unlikely travelers’ tales of new Edens, as well as the navigational incompetence that was all too often a feature of that age. The game was given away to those whose Greek was good enough: the name Hythloday means “speaker of nonsense,” Utopia means “no place,” and even the Latin version of More’s name (Morus) means “fool” in Greek. Not everyone was in on the joke, and the preface tells of the poor soul who put in to be bishop of Utopia. But if Utopia was meant to be playful, it was not simply a joke: instead, it revealed the profound importance of exploratory voyages for European thought, in giving them a way of considering the advantages and disadvantages of various social customs. If the world contained an infinitude of islands each with a different society, as it must have seemed to on Hernando’s voyage of 1502–4, then surely one of them must be perfect—and what would that society look like? The idea that the perfect society could be created not by personal piety and God’s grace but rather by engineering it through particular rules and practices was radical and profoundly important. Hernando would take the idea to heart in designing his library: as a form of the world in miniature, it would also succeed or fail on the basis of the rules he put in place to govern it, rules that were increasingly beginning to obsess him.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 22