The perfect society designed by More in Utopia could be summed up, in a sense, like one of those old jokes: what the Renaissance humanist wanted was English landscape, Greek culture, and Roman government. (In the end, the colonies More and his countrymen would build unfortunately gave the world English culture, a landscape formed by Roman-style slavery, and Greek government.) It quickly becomes obvious that Utopia is, really, just England, with its capital Aumorote (shadow city) and chief river, Anydrus (without water), providing a distorted reflection of London and the Thames. Yet that is part of the point: it suggests the perfect society need not be discovered on some far-off island, but could be built right here at home. Key to this is to dispense with a pigheaded attachment to the way things have always been done, and Hythloday delivers a withering attack on those who fear to be found wiser than their forefathers. The perfect society should be founded on principles derived from reason, not tradition. More is, however, enough of a humanist not to want everything to be wiped clean and derived from first principles following logic: rather, he arranges it so that a shipwreck twelve hundred years ago brought Egyptian and Roman culture to Utopia in a pure state, and the perfect Utopians take to classical culture like fish to water. Hythloday and his companions can add only one cultural achievement to this perfect world, this paradise of civic reason and classical culture: they give the Utopians a printing press. The perfect humanist society, then, was a Europe resurrected in a classical guise and transplanted to the New World, but thriving on the new energies of the printing press.
The idea of a world made perfect by its rules was not the only thing Hernando would have found interesting in More’s work. The edition of Utopia that Hernando was reading in Brussels was the 1518 Basel edition, which he had bought in Ghent in 1520 and left behind in the Netherlands during his trip to Venice. A recently resurfaced copy of the 1516 first edition of Utopia—published in Louvain and edited by Erasmus—was probably also owned by Hernando, but it is no surprise he bought the second edition as well, as this one contained several additions designed to draw in readers from across the continent: a map of the fictitious country designed by Ambrosius Holbein (brother of the more famous Hans), and two texts in the Utopian language—an alphabet and a short poem by the founder and first king, Utopus. Maps and alphabets were common features of early printed books on exploration, as they gave the reader a way of imagining the newfound lands and some artifacts of the culture. For instance, Bernard von Breydenbach’s book on the Holy Land, which Hernando owned both in Latin and in Spanish translation, provided the alphabets of Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Chaldean, Syriac, Armenian, and “Abbasinian or Indian” (though these get more fanciful in the latter parts of the list). The Utopian alphabet was another scholarly joke intended to add to the “evidence” that this patently fake island existed; but it was also an important joke, as suggested by the fact that the printer Froben had gone to the considerable expense of having movable type cut in a nonexistent language. It was an important joke because, to many Renaissance thinkers, the perfect people must have the perfect language, and (like the Egyptian and the Taino hieroglyphs) the perfect language was one that escaped the ambiguity and slipperiness of language in the world of sinners, one that (in the words of one historian of utopias) “led the spirit to its goals by the most natural and perfect paths.” It was also an important joke for Hernando because it was perhaps around this time that he first started developing his own set of hieroglyphs, a secret alphabet to describe the books in his beloved library, and his biblioglyphs (book symbols) bear a striking resemblance to the alphabet of the Utopians.2
Hernando’s system of signs is described in detail by his library assistant, Juan Pérez, and is designed to allow the viewer, at a glance, to learn a vast amount of information about the book being described. The basic component is a shape that tells the size of the book—folio, quarto, octavo, duodecimo. On to these, marks are added that tell us how long the book is (one page, up to five pages, up to ten . . .), whether it is in columns, whether it is divided into chapters, whether it has an index, whether it is in poetry or prose, in manuscript or print, is complete or faulty, perfect or damaged, in the original language or a translation, is a response to another work or not, is presented in the author’s name or under a pseudonym. So the symbols for More’s Utopia would be , showing that it is a quarto volume in Latin, with prefatory poems, in one column but with no index. The components of Hernando’s sign system, like the Utopian alphabet, consist of variations on a few basic shapes—circles, squares, and triangles—which are bisected or quartered to form other characters. Like Luca Pacioli’s theories of divine proportion or the Ptolemaic maps laid out on a grid, it seemed the surest way to fix a face, a landscape, or a language was to link it to the pure and simple universal truths of geometry.
Two scripts designed to convey the perfect language: Thomas More’s Utopian alphabet (top) and a table of hieroglyphic signs Hernando used to describe his books (below).
During his Christmas in Nuremberg, Hernando may have learned that its most famous citizen, Dürer, was coming to the same conclusions: not only was he putting the finishing touches to his own book on human proportion and the mathematics of the human body, but he was completing a grand allegorical painting for the town hall of Nuremberg showing how pictograms and hieroglyphs offered a triumphant path past the frailties of normal language. Dürer’s lost mural, which survives only in his drawings for its design, shows the slander and deception of common language being opposed by truth in the form of a cryptic symbol: a blazing sun, identical to the sun he had used to illustrate the Hieroglyphica and perhaps also rather like the lost Aztec calendar he had just seen in Brussels. Picture languages—pictograms, hieroglyphs, symbols—offered a route past normal speech to voice the great universal truths that lay just beyond the grasp of Renaissance thought. The creation of this alphabet of biblioglyphs was another piece in the emerging puzzle of Hernando’s universal library: It was all very well to gather a vast quantity of books together, but what then? How was one to even speak about these books in any but the vaguest and most general ways, and could one be sure that one’s description would stand the test of time?3
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Even as Hernando’s library began to take shape, events across the Continent must have given the sense that political matters were also coming to a head. As he traveled away from Venice, word of the death of Leo X would have caught up with Hernando, and perhaps of the celebrations in the Serenissima that had greeted news of the pope’s death. The conclave that followed produced an astonishing result: Adrian of Utrecht, the dour cardinal who had been serving as regent in Charles V’s absence and had thus presided over the near-loss of his Spanish lands to the revolting Comuneros (only to be saved by a few noble families loyal to the king), had been appointed pope. Though it transpired that his election was a ruse by Giulio de’ Medici, who, having failed to secure the necessary votes for himself, thought to win favor with Charles while putting an old man in the post as a placeholder, it must have seemed to Charles that everything was finally falling into line: first the empire, and now a pope he could reasonably expect to control.
Hernando left Calais with the imperial party on 26 May, and they were greeted at Dover by Cardinal Wolsey and Secretary More, with King Henry joining shortly afterward, having arranged for his visit to be unannounced so that it could seem to be prompted by spontaneous affection for Charles. They made their way together to Greenwich, where Charles’s aunt (Queen Catherine) and cousin (Princess Mary) were waiting, and where on 4 and 5 June a magnificent entertainment was staged, with Henry emerging from artificial gold and silver mountains to joust in golden costume, accompanied by nine knights dressed all in yellow. A series of masques and revels followed, designed by the court composer William Cornish—which celebrated the Anglo-Spanish alliance by portraying an unruly French horse tamed by the heroism of England and Spain—and then three days of talks between Henry and Charles. Hernando, who never had much time for the
business of chivalry, must have breathed a sigh of relief when the imperial party left Greenwich for London. After another round of triumphal entertainments to welcome them to the city, he was free to explore the bookshops around St. Paul’s, where during the month of June he bought a further eighty works for the library. This seems a rather small number after the hauls of hundreds and thousands from Venice, Nuremberg, Cologne, and Mainz, but in fact it is a testimony to the health and cosmopolitan nature of the London bookshops that Hernando was able to find so many books there—from two dozen cities across the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Germany, as well as ones printed in England—that he had been unable to find anywhere else. Included among these was a manuscript volume of Italian humanist comedies and letters, many of which are unknown elsewhere: the networks created by humanist friendships and the printing press meant that, for all it was in many ways a rather peripheral and unimportant place, England was in other ways a vibrant part of European culture.4
As well as the London bookstores, the other thing that left an impression on Hernando during his visit was the English beer, and charmingly his memory of it reconfigures how we imagine his travels through Europe. Many years later, when writing the biography of his father, he repeatedly remarked on the uncanny similarity between the maize wine made by the natives of Guanaja and Veragua and the beer drunk in England, just as he compared the covered canoes of the Guanaja to the gondolas of Venice. Yet Hernando had never actually been to England or Venice when he traveled through the Caribbean. In truth, then, in Europe he was seeing things that reminded him of what he had experienced on the other side of the Atlantic; for him, in a sense, this world was new while that of his youth was old. English beer tasted just like the Veragua ale, and the Venetian gondola looked the same as the Guanaja canoe.5
The imperial fleet left Southampton on 4 July and arrived at Santander on the northern Spanish coast on 16 July, probably following on their return voyage a route designed by Hernando and presented to the emperor before departure, and which Hernando later recalled as among the services he had done the emperor. In his proposed route, Hernando was probably simply reproducing, perhaps with modifications, the document his father had produced in 1497 for Ferdinand and Isabella, to guide the fleet of Princess Margaret—Charles’s aunt—down from Flanders to Spain for her wedding with the Infante Juan. If so, it was another instance of Hernando’s making what he could out of the trove of old documents that was the only legacy he still retained from his father. He was bringing back with him to Spain, however, the foundations of a new Columbian legacy: forty-two hundred books that he had purchased in northern Europe—the Low Countries, Germany, and England—and which, when added to the 1,674 he had acquired in Venice and the books he already either had, inherited, or bought in Spain and Rome, would give the thirty-three-year-old Hernando one of the greatest private libraries in all of Europe.6
It is fascinating that one of Hernando’s clearest memories of this moment of triumph, returning to Spain with the newly crowned king of the Romans, and bearing the treasures of Europe’s bookshops with him, was of an argument with a mule driver, whose name—Juan de Aransolo—he was to recall on his deathbed. One of the mules rented by Hernando, probably to carry part of his enormous freight of books on through Spain, had fallen and broken a leg, and he considered this to be the mule driver’s misfortune and no concern of his, though evidently there was reason to question this judgment. Hernando’s recollection of the event seventeen years afterward, leaving a ducat for prayers for the soul of Juan de Aransolo, is eloquent testimony both to his tender conscience and to the power of shame to tie threads between our mind and events in the past, threads that retain even at a great remove the power to tug at us. These threads from the past would, in Hernando’s declining years, exert an ever greater pull on his mind.7
The Spain to which the imperial party returned in mid-1522 was vastly changed from the one it had left two years previously. The revolt of the Comuneros had by now been quashed, but the great market town of Medina del Campo that Hernando had visited almost annually during his youth had been destroyed, as had the Romanesque cathedral of Segovia, in whose shadow he had begun his dictionary in 1518, and the uprising had revealed deep fractures within Castilian society. Yet if the emperor needed distractions from the tensions at home, he had them in the news arriving at Spanish harbors. Reports had already trickled through during the tour of the north of how Hernán Cortés had traveled inland through the kingdom of the Mexica, against the wishes of Moctezuma, but had nonetheless been met by that delicate-mannered prince on the causeway leading across the lake into his capital Tenochtitlan; and of how Moctezuma, who (later accounts say) took Cortés for a reincarnation of the plumed serpent-god Quetzalcoatl, had lovingly lodged the Spaniards in a palace across from his own, only to be taken captive by his own guests, who feared they would not be welcome for long. Cortés had written of how the Aztec emperor, with whom the Spaniard had a strange relationship as god but also increasingly as an intimate friend, had submitted to Charles and agreed to be his vassal. As in so many versions of this scene in colonial history, though, it is unclear that Cortés and Moctezuma had the same understanding of what this meant, especially as the two men communicated through double translation: Moctezuma spoke Nahuatl to Cortés’s mistress “Marina,” who then passed on the message in Mayan to Jerónimo de Aguilar—a priest who had learned the language during seven years as a shipwrecked Mayan captive before being found by Cortés—who in turn spoke Spanish to the conquistador. Despite Moctezuma’s submission, one of Cortés’s deputies had (in his commander’s absence) invited the Aztec nobility to a feast and slaughtered them en masse, hoping to make Tenochtitlan easier to control. Moctezuma himself had been stoned to death shortly afterward by surviving members of the nobility, and Cortés had fled the city to regroup before returning to besiege it. News had reached Spain on 1 March that Cortés had captured Tenochtitlan, and Hernando bought a printed version of Cortés’s report in December, three weeks after it had been brought out by the great German publisher Juan Cromberger.8
The emperor had also received reports while in the north of the dire state of Magellan’s expedition. A party of mutineers who arrived back in May 1521 with one of Magellan’s ships, the San Antonio, were able to report that they had not yet been able to find the elusive strait leading through the American mainland to the Southern Sea; instead they were waylaid on a frigid coast south of Brazil, populated by giants. It must have seemed likely that the circuit of the globe would remain uncompleted, and that Magellan and his men would disappear into the American interior as so many expeditions had before over the last decades. It was a matter of astonishment, then, when news arrived at court in Valladolid that on 6 September 1522 a single ship from Magellan’s original five, the Victoria, had arrived back at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, having completed at last the circumnavigation of the world that had for so long obsessed the European mind. It transpired they had indeed found a strait that released them into the Southern Ocean, shortly after the departure of the mutineers, in a land they named Patagonia after a fictional country in one of the most popular romances of the day. Finding themselves amid the wonderful calm of the great ocean, which they named the Pacific, they had skirted the western flank of the continent before striking out across the ocean, a stage of twelve thousand miles that they believed would never be accomplished again; they reached the islands south of Japan in March 1521, shortly before the mutineers were arriving back in Spain to report on the expedition’s failure. Magellan himself was not in the party that had returned to Spain, having died in a foolish display of chivalry in the Philippines, and only 18 men of the 265 who had left Sanlúcar in 1519 were on the returning ship, importantly including the voyage’s chronicler, Antonio de Pigafetta; the ship was now captained by an obscure Basque named Juan Sebastián de Elcano. He was simply the most senior sailor left alive when the expedition returned and was duly rewarded for the feat when he arrived in Valladolid, including being g
iven a coat of arms that featured the globe and the motto Primus circumdedisti mihi (You first encircled me), just as the Columbus arms featured islands and recorded the gift Columbus had made of them to Isabella and Ferdinand. Hernando had reason to be grateful, on seeing the devastation wrought on Magellan’s expedition, that he himself had been prevented from attempting this act of epic madness.
A sixteenth-century image of Franciscan monks destroying Aztec treasures, including sacred maps and books.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 23