* * *
Hernando must have been relying heavily on his sumistas for the work on the Book of Materials as, in addition to continuing work on the Epitomes, directing construction at the Puerta de Goles, and acting as executor to his brother’s will, Hernando had in 1526 taken over as Spain’s chief geographical officer. After the conference at Badajoz had ended inconclusively, Sebastian Cabot (the pilót mayor who headed Spain’s Casa de Contratación) had been dispatched on an exploratory venture designed to acquire new evidence on the longitude of the Moluccas. Some months after Cabot’s departure, in October 1526, the emperor directed Hernando to set to work on a new version of Spain’s central navigational chart—the Padrón Real—and from the following August made him the acting pilót mayor in Cabot’s absence. While Hernando’s initial geographical venture, the Description, had been halted, and his efforts at Badajoz had come to little, he now had the chance to work on what was in some ways an even more ambitious cartographic venture. For the Padrón Real was not meant to be just a map but rather the central instrument of Spanish navigation, and its technical sophistication could give Spanish ships an advantage over their competitors from Portugal and any other pretenders to colonial ambitions. Hernando’s first step in this venture was wholly characteristic: on 16 March 1527, Charles issued an order that all Spanish pilots on the shipping routes to the New World should keep daily logs recording their measurements and deposit these diaries upon their return with Hernando at the Casa de Contratación, where they would be collated into the new shipping chart. This manner of proceeding was the same as the one Hernando had used for the Description and had seen Marin Sanuto use at Venice to write the history of his city, as well as being the central recommendation of the dialogue (probably by Hernando) between Fulgencio and Theodosio criticizing the way the Padrón was created: rather than relying on any one authoritative model or source of information, a flood of data was used to refine understanding progressively, converging toward an ever-more-precise representation of the world.9
We are fortunate to be able to follow in some detail the sequence that Hernando and his fellow cartographers went through in making a map because one of the best surviving descriptions of this art comes from the pen of Alonso de Chaves, who was appointed on Hernando’s personal recommendation in 1528 to work with him and Diego Ribeiro on the chart. Hernando appears to have overseen the cartographic and nautical activities of the Casa de Contratación not at the Casa itself but in his house at the Puerta de Goles, as a letter of 1528 describes the instruction of pilots in the use of nautical instruments (another of Hernando’s duties) taking place there. Chaves’s Espejo de Navegantes—“A mirror for navigators”—recounts how the cartographical process began with the laying out of a net of fine lines on the blank paper or vellum: first the rhumb lines, emerging from the compass rose to striate the surface with the major bearings, then a second web of perpendicular lines, providing a grid of latitudes and longitudes and marking out the equator and tropics. Once the surface had been prepared with this fine mesh, the mapmaker was to choose a starting point with an established latitude and work from there to nearby points, combining the latitude measurements—which could be trusted with some confidence—with readings of distance and bearing accrued from reports. Once this spread of points was laid down, the coastlines could be filled in between them in detail from pilots’ reports. The system worked like a connect-the-dots drawing, using the experience of pilots (as in the old portolan maps) to join up a network of locations established by more technical measurements of latitude, distance, and bearing. Finally, the mapmaker could populate the map with topographical detail, from the names of ports, written at right angles to the shore and often crowded thickly along the coasts of these maps, to warnings of sandbanks (shaded in with dots) and underwater dangers (marked by crosses). Although the official maps were likely drawn by the professional mapmakers Ribeiro and Chaves, evidence of Hernando’s own cartographic skills can be seen in the books of his library, such as the 1513 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography in which he has corrected the maps and filled in place names in his own hand, as well as labels such as the “insula anthropophagorum” (Island of the Man-Eaters) above the Isla de las Once Mil Virgenes (Virgin Islands). Another contemporary cartographic manual describes how copies would be produced from these blueprints, to make the charts that every Spanish pilot was supposed to carry aboard with him: an outline was created by soaking thin paper in linseed oil, before the lines of the blueprint were traced, and then retraced, on top of paper smoked on one side to create a carbon transfer sheet.10
The maps created in this workshop of soot, oil, paint, and paper at the Puerta de Goles were working documents, intended for the use of pilots at sea, and so like all other nautical charts of the era have perished through use. Even the blueprint maps of the Padrón Real were destroyed once a new version made them obsolete, so little can be said about these nautical maps with confidence. A number of presentation maps from the period of Hernando’s tenure as pilót mayor do survive, and though the credit for these groundbreaking creations usually goes to Diego Ribeiro and Alonso de Chaves, by whom they were signed and who have been fêted by map historians, this idea of the mapmaker as solitary artist wholly ignores the realities of how maps were made at the time: as collaborative efforts drawing on a wide range of reports, inheritances, and technical skills. Four maps survive from Hernando’s years as Cabot’s substitute, two of which are held today in Weimar, one in the Vatican, and the last (perhaps from after Hernando’s time) in Wolfenbüttel. These maps are less practical instruments than display pieces, designed to give the viewer the full visual sweep of the world opening to Spanish explorers, and were decorated with exquisite illustrations of those instruments—the astrolabe, celestial sphere, and quadrant—that underwrote the technical sophistication of the maps, featuring also the same instructions for using these instruments as Hernando was helping to teach pilots during these years. The maps also continued the diplomatic wrangling that had been left unresolved at Badajoz, significantly placing the Moluccas on the far left—and thus within the western, Spanish, hemisphere—despite that by then Charles had all but conceded the islands to Portugal, and populating the ocean with images of Spanish fleets and flags, taking possession of the world like so many toy armies. The use of these maps for political bargaining was to lead the English geographer Richard Hakluyt later to joke that the cosmographers and pilots of Spain and Portugal put the coasts and islands of the world wherever it suited them best.11
Hernando’s duties as pilót mayor spread well beyond the business of making maps and instructing pilots: the post also required the examination of all pilots in navigational skills and the inspection of all technical instruments intended for use at sea, allowing Hernando the chance to improve upon another of the shortcomings of Spanish navigation lamented in the dialogue between Theodosio and Fulgencio. The pilót had the additional duty of developing Spanish artillery, as the skills required for the effective use of cannon were dependent more on techniques and tools used by mapmakers and surveyors—accurate measurements of distance, bearing, and inclination—than on traditional military tactics. Hernando seems to have taken an early interest in Spain’s outdated arsenal, noting, in a pamphlet describing the Battle of La Motta in 1513, the ineffective use of bombs by Spanish troops, and in 1528 Diego Ribeiro was updating the Consejo de Indias on the bomb-making techniques being developed at the northern outpost of the Casa de Contratación at La Coruña in Galicia. If Hernando had cherished any hopes of the Casa de Goles being a bookish sanctuary, sheltered from the business of the world, they would have been disappointed in these years, in which the house seems to have been filled with cartographers and cosmographers making charts and delivering instructions, and pilots delivering reports and hearing lectures and taking exams. Later descriptions suggest Hernando’s house had at that time become a kind of mathematical academy, re-creating the villas of the Roman humanists but substituting a love of technical data and s
ystems of measurement and order for the Roman obsession with the culture of the classical past.12
* * *
Re-creating Rome on the banks of the Guadalquivir could only have been a bittersweet occupation, given recent events in the Italian peninsula. The capture of Francis I at the Battle of Pavia had startled even those fighting with Spain by tipping the balance of power too heavily in Charles’s favor, causing a series of imperial allies—Henry VIII, Pope Clement, the Venetians, and even the Sforza Duke of Milan whom Charles had installed—to throw in their lot with France, forming the League of Cognac in hopes of counterbalancing the emperor before he became simply unstoppable. Charles, disgusted that Francis would so casually go back on the parole he swore when released from Spanish captivity, didn’t mince his words, refusing to take any ransom payments from the French king: He has cheated me; he has acted neither as a knight nor as a nobleman, but basely, Charles said witheringly, suggesting Francis could redeem himself only by surrendering again as prisoner or fighting Charles hand to hand. As there was no chance of either of these things happening, Charles’s commanders in Italy recruited mercenary German Landsknechts to replace the Venetian and Florentine troops they had lost, swiftly retaking Milan; and when the French troops failed to materialize, Clement sought a truce. The imperial commanders were, however, no longer fully in command of their soldiers of fortune and had no money to pay them off and so were carried along by a surging and unruly force toward Rome. On the morning of 6 May 1527 the Spanish and German troops entered the Eternal City, with Pope Clement fleeing from the Vatican along the Leonine Wall to the Castel Sant’Angelo.13
The sack of the city that followed, in which the cultural, artistic, and spiritual sanctuary of Christendom was the scene of frenzied violence and brutality, scarred the conscience of Europe in ways that are hard to express. The full extent of the atrocities is uncertain: one man testified to having (himself alone) buried ten thousand corpses on the north bank of the Tiber, and having pushed another two thousand into the river, and uncountable rapes were committed as the soldiers swarmed the city; no house was spared from looting, down to Chigi’s villa and the papal palace, where among the frescoes by Raphael and Peruzzi German graffiti can still be seen today. But the fullest measure of the Landsknechts’ wrath was directed at the fabric of the Roman Church: the sanctum sanctorum, as the chronicler Luigi Guicciardini reported, was turned into a brothel, and after desecrating the relics—football with the heads of Peter and Paul, the Holy Lance of Longinus used as a bayonet—they paraded in front of the Castel Sant’Angelo, in a carnival mocking the lavish citizenship ceremony for Clement that Hernando had watched in 1513. The Veronica, believed to be the only authentic image of Christ, also went missing during the sack. In the ultimate insult, the Landsknechts demanded Clement submit to Luther, whom they hailed as the new pope. Rome, went the common cry around Europe, is no longer Rome. To many throughout the Continent, this was another Fall of Jerusalem, and the Temple was once more destroyed. The event became, almost at once, one of those epochal moments Europeans found it hard to think beyond: it served as a tragic ending to countless narratives in the century to come and has variously been used by historians to mark the end of the High Renaissance in Italy, the beginning of Mannerism and the Baroque, the close of medieval Christendom and the start of the Counter-Reformation, and the end of the papacy as a significant political player.14
As is so often the case, the anger of the looters seemed particularly intense when they were faced with books and libraries; sensing in these inanimate things the spirit of the city, they attempted to annihilate the learned traditions that had so long been a focus of antipapal scorn. Great humanist libraries such as Angelo Colocci’s, at his academy on the Quirinal, were destroyed entirely, as was that of Giles of Viterbo, along with the manuscript of his Historia XX saeculorum, in which he had presented history to Leo X as entering its last phase through the Columbus discoveries. Some recognition of the Vatican Library’s immense value was shown when the Prince of Orange was set on guard over it, but even he could not prevent the marauding troops from raiding the library, where they ripped the precious bindings off the manuscripts and, scorning the contents, left the exposed pages to disintegrate. Many would have seen in this a repetition of the destruction of the libraries of classical Rome by the Ostrogoths in the sixth century, or of the storied destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Large portions of the Archivio Segreto in the fourth room of the library were lost, and a cataloguing project in the aftermath of 1527 found great swathes of the library were missing. The stone had been cast and broke the clay-footed kingdom of Rome, and for better or worse the Spanish Empire—and Hernando’s library—were now without rivals.15
The vanquishing of all Charles’s foes meant, however, that Hernando’s endless occupations—the maps and the Book of Materials, the epitomes and pilot’s exams, the Casa de Goles and the library—would again have to be put on hold so the final scene in Charles’s imperial pageant could be played out. While Charles had been crowned the king of the Romans at Aachen in 1520, the volatility of northern Italy, and the unpredictability of papal politics, had so far prevented the enactment of the final rite. With both Rome and the Vatican now unquestionably subdued, he could proceed to Italy to be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by Clement himself, becoming the full ritual and spiritual heir to the Roman Empire and, by extension, the rightful inheritor of the imperial torch held by only one nation at a time.
It was unthinkable that Hernando, who with his father had been tireless in his efforts to position Spain as the necessary home for this universal empire, should miss this climactic event. But the coming to completion of the rituals of empire also lent a new urgency to Hernando’s work. If Spain was to be a universal empire, it would need at its core a universal library, a memory bank in which the thought of the world was stored, and one moreover that was not a lifeless repository but a working organ, capable of making connections through the fog of the printed world, of forming a single picture of the world rather than simply reflecting it in a mirror with unnumbered faces. Indeed, universal empires of territory and of knowledge were deeply linked, as suggested by the many geographical metaphors used to describe the world of knowledge: Hernando’s library would cover all of the possible fields of knowledge, making all terrains one. His book and picture registers had ensured the library was not full of duplicates, his alphabetical lists had allowed particular books and authors to be found, the epitomes would help the reader to move through the shelves at greater speed, and the Book of Materials could guide researchers to the right place once they had a particular topic in mind. But how was one supposed to move from these particular things—authors, titles, ideas—to a greater understanding of the framework in which it all sat, of its coordinates in the world of knowledge? What was adjacent to any given subject, in what region did it lie? What was the ultimate form of this library? What were its boundaries and its divisions, its meridians and degrees, which would allow one to glance upon it and say, This is the picture of the world and the natural shape of knowledge? When he left for Italy in August 1529, Hernando was forty-one years old and not a young man by the standards of the age. His health was faltering and his financial situation precarious, to say the least, dependent on the caprice of his brother’s widow and the attention of a ruler mobbed by the cares of empire. But he was on the threshold of bringing something extraordinary into being, something truly different from anything before it, and something that would mark him out as the heir his father deserved. All that was missing were the final arrangements.16
PART IV
SETTING
THINGS
in
ORDER
* * *
* * *
XIV
Another Europe and the Same
Exactly two years after leaving Spain, in the autumn of 1531, Hernando was returning from the Low Countries in a small party that would pass back across France to Spain. As the party moved from Louvain and Antwe
rp to Cambrai and on to Paris, they made a remarkable gathering: Hernando, the seasoned traveler on horseback, was joined by two Dutchmen he had recruited to help him in his library—Jean Vasaeus, and the corpulent and jovial Nicholas Clenardus, who quickly gave both themselves and their horses painful sores by sitting awkwardly in the saddle, using neither their feet in the stirrups nor their hands on the crupper to displace their weight. Though Clenardus, whose letters recount the journey in vivid detail, admits it was usually his lolloping and wincing that drew attention as they entered the towns, he recalled with some amusement the time his companion Vasaeus had stolen the show, becoming so unsteady in the saddle that he had been forced to cling to the horse’s mane with his teeth. At Paris they were joined by Jean Hammonius, a French legal expert who was also recruited for the library project, making up a party of ten or so, which also included Hernando’s companion Vincentio de Monte, who was hired in Rome early in the journey, and who would be with him for the rest of his life.1
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 27