The furious pace of Hernando’s activities was, as ever, counterpoised by the fraught and desperate state of his family’s affairs. In September 1524, a formal list of charges was issued against Diego, accusing him among other things with overreach in the execution of his role in overseeing both civil and criminal suits on Hispaniola. Hernando once again summoned his energies to defend his brother and the legacy of which he was now the sole custodian, preparing a legal brief in which Hernando asserted the natural right of the Admiral and vice-regent over judiciary matters in his domains. It is unclear whether he was aware that his brother, upon returning to Spain the previous year, had added a codicil to his will noting that he and Hernando had had some “differences” in interpreting what their father intended to leave his younger son in his will, and that while Diego meant to do right by his brother during his lifetime, he absolved his heirs of any obligation to continue to provide Hernando with anything at all from the family estate after his death. In the same codicil, Diego names Hernando as the executor of his will, a move some have seen as a mark of the continuing affection and love between the brothers, but which is surely rather an act of quite unthinkable cruelty: Hernando was to be called upon to enact the wishes of his closest living relative in the days after his death, down to the very clause in which he was finally excluded from any claims at all upon the legacy of his father. While he remained at court for much of 1525, battling for the family’s rights, Hernando’s constitution finally gave way in November. He wrote to Charles from Seville on the twenty-sixth, excusing himself for having left the court at Toledo, begging time to recover from “certain quartan fevers” that were afflicting him daily, as well as the work from which he had never known a day of repose. He signed off by wishing Charles that God might bless him with Lordship of the Universal Empire, a thought that now as ever was at the center of the Columbus obsession. Hernando seems still to have been in Seville when Diego died on 26 February 1526 near Toledo, leaving his brother nothing more than the poisonous remembrance in his will. But by then Hernando was pressing onward with wholly other things.13
XIII
The Library without Walls
Two weeks before his brother died on the other side of Spain, Hernando bought a plot of land in Seville on which over the next three years he built a home for himself and (more important) his books. The plot may not have seemed much to some: it was a muladar—literally, a “dung heap”—outside the city walls at the Puerta de Goles and within a broad meander of the Guadalquivir. But it was the first place Hernando had settled with anything like permanence since he had left his mother’s house in Córdoba at the age of five. In the intervening years, thirty-two of them, he had lived in the itinerant court, on board ships and shipwrecks, in a government house in Santo Domingo and a Franciscan convent in Rome, and in the endless junkets set aside for those accompanying the Imperial Court. Though he seems to have owned several houses in Seville before this, they left little trace upon his life. The house at the Puerta de Goles—the “Hercules Gate”—was different: not just a place to live but the materialization of an idea, fabricated out of the many places and things that had made up his life, and designed like More’s Utopia to shape the life of those who lived within it. It is often said houses are either rambling, organic expressions of the personalities that built them, or ordered, systematic attempts to impose order on the lives within. With Hernando, however, it could only ever have been both, and all the evidence points to the Casa de Colón as growing out into the world from his internal orders, built around his growing ideas about how to arrange the many thousands of books and pictures in his collection, and the archives of words, maps, geographical data, and music. Yet, as ever with Hernando, the search for a perfect order always contended with the gravitational pull of his father’s memory. The muladar at the Puerta de Goles was not just a random location in Seville, but rather on the bank of the Guadalquivir that looked directly across to the Cartuja de las Cuevas, where in the Capilla de Santa Ana Columbus’s body had rested since it was moved there in 1509.1
Keeping his father in sight may have been a central motivation for Hernando, but his foundation at the Puerta de Goles was also in conversation with other places more distant in time and space. Like the great villas Hernando would have known in Rome—Johan Goritz’s and Angelo Colocci’s little academies, founded in the desabitato region inside the city walls—Hernando’s open stretch of riverbank offered the perfect location for a humanist idyll, at once urban and rural, allowing him to combine contemplation with the active life. The humanists, who were mostly born into a medieval landscape of open countryside and dense towns, held strongly to the idea that classical thought did not just take place in Cicero’s Tuscan villa or in the Gardens of Sallust by accident, but were in a sense produced by these surroundings. More’s Utopia not only unfolds during a conversation in an Antwerp garden, but imagines a world in which every house has such a green place into which to retreat and in which everyone is a better person for it. Like Thomas More’s own home in the London borough of Chelsea near Westminster, which he moved into this same year, the suburban house allowed its dweller the otium (leisure) of the countryside without having to lose touch with the negotium (business) of the city.
A perspective of Seville from the Civitates orbis terrarum, showing Hernando’s great library (the Casa de Colon) on the banks of the Guadalquivir.
Though the house Hernando built for his books has long since disappeared, sixteenth-century descriptions allow us to re-create it with a fair amount of accuracy. The house presented a broad front of 198 feet and was 78 feet deep, and a drawing of 1572 suggests it was built to face across the river to the Cartuja de las Cuevas, rather like Agostino Chigi’s villa in Trastevere. Also like Chigi’s house, Hernando’s had two floors of cube-shaped rooms, with the public rooms on the ground floor and the private suites above. From all of these there was a grand vista down to the river and across to Las Cuevas, hard-won by an extensive landscaping project that began with the construction of covered ditches to drain the land and proceeded to the movement of large amounts of earth that would otherwise have obstructed the view. On one side of the house were stables and service quarters, while on the other was the magnificent walled garden, the Huerta de Colón, which Hernando acquired from the adjacent church of San Miguel, in exchange for a house he owned on the Calle San Blas. Some idea of the capaciousness of this garden is suggested by a description from 1570 where Hernando is said to have planted five thousand trees there. The façade of the house, from its archway supported by Corinthian pillars, with dolphins supporting the Columbus arms, to the program of window casements formed of pilasters and tympanas, busts and floral motifs, advertised the neoclassical character of Hernando’s project: this was not a Mudéjar courtyard building like the noble houses of the city, but a classical villa in the humanist style. The façade was created by two sculptors from the Columbus homeland of Genoa, one of whom—Antonio Maria Aprile de Carona—had already made his mark in Seville by building the sumptuous tombs for the Ribera family at Las Cuevas and at the University Church, and who was at the same time working on the entrance to the Ribera Casa de Pilatos across the city, from which surviving structures we can get some sense of the external appearance of the house Hernando built for his books.2
If the architecture of his house imitated the finest models in Italy, the gardens that surrounded it were without parallel. In his will Hernando was to speak of his gardens as the finest he had seen in all his travels through Christendom, and reports from later in the century speak of thousands of plants from around the world, but evidence regarding Hernando’s creation of what would seem to be Europe’s first botanical garden is fragmentary. The inventory of his papers drawn up by his executors contains what seems to be a catalogue of his plants and gardens, but sadly this is lost. What does survive is an extensive set of instructions given to his gardeners—one Alonso de Zamora and his wife, Maria Rodríguez—in 1528, instructing them to water the trees every
five days, to create a precise irrigation system for the planting beds, and imposing heavy fines on them if they allowed grazing animals into the garden (tethered or not). While this document does not go into detail about what trees the garden contained, Seville is filled today with New World plants that are said by local legend, almost without exception, to have been planted by Hernando, something that increases its uncanny likeness to its architectural twin Santo Domingo, though now by means of a botanical colonization going the other way. Prominent among those foreign plants putting down roots are the extraordinary ombús at the Cartuja de las Cuevas and elsewhere—a South American treelike plant, actually formed from the fused stems of a giant grass—as well as the ceibas that are littered around Seville, and the bizarre Indian laurel in the Plaza de San Leandro, which seems like a waxwork forest melting in the midday sun.3
Though Hernando’s groundbreaking botanical garden no longer exists, this image of another early collection (at the University of Leiden, from 1610) shows what it may have been like—the wild world of exotic life, reduced to orderly arrangements.
It seems clear from Hernando’s writings that he had a strong and early interest in plant life, perhaps first prompted by the botanical marvels reported by his father on the early voyages. Prominent among these were the tree Columbus saw on the island of Fernandina, which had five or six different types of branch that grew ungrafted from the same stock, and the fruits on Dominica on the Second Voyage that drove the settlers mad and made their faces swell. Hernando also possessed the most detailed description of Taino culture, by Raymon Pané, including the cohoba they sniffed as part of their spiritual and medicinal regimen. Several botanical volumes were among Hernando’s early purchases, and his sections of the Description regularly record grafting and viticulture techniques. His own observations on New World plant life would also feature frequently in the narrative of the Fourth Voyage that he later wrote as part of his biography of his father, from the tooth-rotting leaf (cocaine) chewed by the tribes near Belén to the applelike paradise plum (Chrysobalanus icaco) they found at Caxinas point.4
That Hernando’s interest in these plants was largely medical is wholly in keeping with the botanical culture of the time: rather than classifying plants morphologically (by physical form), as later scientists would do, early Renaissance plant science focused on what different plants did to the humans who ingested them, driven by an increased interest from doctors and apothecaries in the vegetal life from which their drugs derived. While the ingredients for “simples” and “compounds”—drugs with either one or many components—had traditionally been gathered by herb wives and other unlettered people with knowledge of local plant life, early botanical gardens grew out of a feeling that pharmacology needed to start with the plants themselves rather than with purchased ingredients, especially now that many of the plants came from exotic places and were unknown to traditional plant lore. They also, from the mid-fifteenth century, began putting their drugs in labeled ceramic jars, a practice that meant the willful and chaotic world of organisms could be placed on shelves and reduced to order, though—like the books in the library—the number of new species flooding in from around the world quickly put paid to the idea of a universal garden. But for all this professionalism, these early pharmacologists were often heavily reliant on the existing knowledge of the herb wives, and this seems to have been the case with Hernando, whose instructions to his gardeners goes to extraordinary legal lengths to include Maria Rodríguez in the contract to look after the gardens, suggesting it was her knowledge (rather than her husband’s) that Hernando was after. The extent of Hernando’s own medicinal practices is unknown, though the same inventory of his writings records a note regarding recipes for medicine.5
Like the Venetian listening station of Marin Sanuto or the central repository for the Description, the botanical garden would become the place where the world’s plant life could be studied without going to the expense of travel. From the early 1530s onward, the Sevillian doctor Nicolás Monardes became the European expert in drugs derived from New World plants without ever leaving the city, simply by gathering the reports and samples from there that passed through the city and spreading them through his published writings. Hernando himself may have gleaned some of the wisdom of Arabic medicine from a recently converted potter whom he knew, who also practiced medicine in the Triana district across the river from Hernando’s house (though the potter refused to use any Arabic terms for fear of recrimination). Much of the time Monardes and his peers were actually collecting traditional prescriptions from non-European herbalists to cure the illnesses colonists brought home with them, such as the guayacán (lignum vitae) tree from Santo Domingo that became the main cure for the pox (syphilis). But given that these plants were not local, Monardes and others often had to experiment by planting seeds sent to them from the New World and observing the results. A major difference between the old medical practice and the new, then, was simply a matter of scale and the systems developed in response: whereas both drew upon traditional plant lore, collectors such as Hernando and Monardes had a global reach, meaning they had to cultivate exotic specimens locally and sift conflicting reports in search of consensus on what could be learned from the indigenous knowledge of distant people.6
The method of classifying plants by their effects was the same system Hernando used for his next step in ordering his library, one taken to remedy a serious fault in the existing catalogues. While the alphabetical list of authors and titles could help you to find a specific volume, and the Book of Epitomes saved you the trouble of reading the whole thing to discover its contents, these catalogues made the assumption you already knew which book you were looking for. Hernando’s librarian recalled him describing libraries without adequate guides, where you simply had to go through each book until you found the right one, as “dead.” But a library that could be navigated only when you knew the author or the title of the book you were looking for was scarcely any better, a sort of undead collection with some appearances of life but none of its essence. Readers entering it with a question about syphilis or architecture would be entirely lost unless they already knew to search for Monardes or Vitruvius. The Libro de materias—the Book of Materials or Subject Matters—sought to remedy this by extracting from each book the main subjects treated therein, and arranging them in an alphabetical list. This was, then, rather like the indexes Hernando had added to some of his individual books—his copies of Suetonius and of Lucretius—but now expanded to cover the collection as a whole. So, as Hernando’s librarian suggests in his account of the library, Erasmus’s Lingua (“The tongue”), a treatise on the dangers of poor and the benefits of good language, would receive entries under “bad language, dangers” and “good language, benefits,” as well as under subtopics treated in the same book, such as “the asp, nature of.” This would allow anyone wishing to gather knowledge on language or poisonous snakes to be guided toward Erasmus’s work, without having to know where to look beforehand. It was, in effect, a universal index of subjects, which broke down the barriers between books and constructed a network that linked similar materials throughout the library, allowing the user to gather at will an immense amount of information on any given subject from a wide range of different volumes. Hernando and his team of sumistas were furiously at work on it in the same year that he began construction at the Puerta de Goles, covering 802 pages with entries of two or three lines each, rough notes that would later be transferred into the alphabetical index.7
A scene of instruction in an apothecary’s shop (c.1512). Renaissance botany tried to tame the wilderness of the world’s plants by arranging them in shelved jars, like a library.
As ever, this invention brought with it new challenges. To begin with, they faced the challenge of deciding which term to use in the index: should the asp in Erasmus’s Lingua go under asp, or under some other word—snake, serpent, viper, adder? Searching an index is all but useless unless you know the term you are looking for, and
in the instructions Hernando left for his assistants he directed them to use the most common term for the subject in question, as well as putting it under more than one heading when in doubt. So anything treating the Incarnation, for instance, should also be put under both Christ and Jesus Christ. This is largely a practical measure—the index would be useless if the entries weren’t intuitive and didn’t use the term most people would think of for a given subject—but it represents a profound departure from how language was thought of by most of Hernando’s contemporaries. While the various quests for perfect languages at the time (hieroglyphs, More’s Utopian, Hernando’s biblioglyphs) wanted perfectly unambiguous terms even if they had to be ones no one used or understood, the Book of Materials turned this on its head. Now the standard for language was to be the way people used it rather than some abstract and elusive perfection, and the Book of Materials acknowledged that a single thing might be referred to in many different ways. The desire to make the colossal hoard of information in the library useful meant Hernando and his librarians had to think about how people might use it—the words that would occur to them in any given context. Even if this step was taken for purely practical purposes, it was a step down a path that would lead to radical changes in how language (and, by extension, knowledge) was conceived: not as a thing capable of being fixed in one perfect state, but a growing, organic thing, born out of the everyday negotiations we enter into when we use language.8
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 26