2. Caddeo, 2:181–82.
3. Ibid., 1:142. As Caddeo points out (2:182), Columbus’s Lettera rarissima puts the crossing at sixteen days (Textos, 316), a figure repeated in later writings.
4. Textos, 232; Taviani, Accounts, 82; Rumeu, 156; Fernández-Armesto, 78–80. See J. H. de Vaudrey Heathcote, “Christopher Columbus and the Discovery of Magnetic Variation,” Science Progress in the Twentieth Century 27/105 (1932): 82–103. Hernando himself provides an excellent summary of the problems with dead reckoning in his “Parecer que dio D. Hernando Colón en la Junta de Badajoz sobre la pertnencia de los Malucos” (AGI, Patronato, R.48, 16), which is also transcribed in Navarrete, Expediciones al Malucco, vol. 4 of the Colección de los Viages y Descubrimientos (Madrid, 1837), 333–39.
5. It is possible that Matinino was not modern Martinique but rather St. Lucia (see Caddeo, 2:182n).
6. Ibid., 2:182–85; Textos, 317; Fernández-Armesto, 163–64. For Ovando as part of the household of the Infante, see Thomas, Rivers of Gold, 37, and the Libro de la Cámara Real del Príncipe don Juan, ed. Santiago Fabregant Barrios (Valencia, 2008), 83.
7. Caddeo, 2:187: “E, anchor che l’Ammiraglio nel sui interno sentisse quell’istesso dolore . . .”
8. Rusconi, 228–29; Caddeo, 2:190. Caddeo (2:186n) points out that a schedule of 1505 suggests that Roldán, at least, was not among those to have perished in the storm.
9. Caddeo, 1:191, “il primo fu un pesce chiamato schiavina, grande come un mezzo letto . . .” Caddeo declines to provide an identification for the schiavina, but in Taviani, Life and Deeds, 272, it is translated as a ray.
10. On Aristotelian zoological classification, see for instance Historia Animalium, Book VIII, §589. Gesner, in his Historia Animalium, still classified aquatic mammals with the fish (in Part IV, order XII), following the hexameral scheme of medieval zoology (sorted into the six days of creation), rather than with the viviparous land animals of Part I.
11. Caddeo, 2:192–97; Taviani, Life and Deeds, 274; Thomas, Rivers of Gold, 196. See Matthew Restall, “Maya Ethnogenesis,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9/1 (2004): 64–89, for details on the formation of a discrete Mayan identity under colonial influence.
12. Caddeo, 2:197. For a comparison, see the Portuguese observations of the shell-based currency in the Kingdom of Kongo: Malyn Newitt, The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History (Cambridge, 2010), 62, 103.
13. In addition to Benedetto Bordone’s famous Isolario of 1528, there was also a manuscript Isolario by Alonso de Santa Cruz, though possibly from after his period of overlap with Hernando at the Casa de Contratación. See George Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century,” in HoC.
14. Caddeo, 2:195. The map in question may be one of those included in the Claudii Ptolomei . . . Geographi[a]e opus printed in Strasbourg in 1513 (Colombina 15–8–19), which Hernando has annotated heavily, including adding the label “insula anthropophagorum” to the Islas de Las Onze Mil Virgenes (Virgin Islands).
15. Caddeo, 2:198–216.
16. Textos, 318.
17. Caddeo, 2:220–25.
18. Ibid., 2:243–44.
19. Textos, 322–23.
V. A Knowledge of Night
1. Textos, 325–26; Caddeo, 2:199.
2. See Michael R. Waters et al., “Geoarchaeological Investigations of St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica: The Search for the Columbus Caravels and an Assessment of 1,000 Years of Human Land Use,” Geoarchaeology 8/4 (1993): 259–79.
3. Caddeo, 2:263–65.
4. Ibid., 1:25, 1:311–12.
5. Umberto Carrara, Columbus, ed. and trans. Francisca Torres Martinez (Madrid, 2000), Book X.
6. Caddeo, 2:269–72.
7. See José Chabás and Bernard R. Goldstein, Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula: Abraham Zacut and the Transition from Manuscript to Print, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 90/2 (2000): 2, 6–15, 153–54. For the prediction of the eclipse by Zacuto, see Tabule tabula[rum] celestiu[m] motuu[m] astronomi zacuti (Lerida, 1496), fol. 168; Hernando’s copy is Colombina 12–1–9, and his note on how to calculate the first day of each month is on the rear flyleaf of the same volume.
8. Rusconi, 292–93, 80–81.
9. Caddeo, 2:287–89.
10. Textos, 339, 344, 354, 362; Guillén, 111–13. On Ovando making Columbus pay for the costs of the return journey, see La Duquesa de Berwick y Alba, Autógrafos de Cristóbal Colón y Papeles de America (Madrid, 1892), 44–46. On Las Casas, see Historia de Las Indias, 2:119.
11. The idea that what weighs on Columbus’s conscience is Beatriz’s infidelity (Guillén, 111–12; refuted by Jos) is confusing and unconvincing. As Guillén points out, Beatriz is also remembered in Diego’s wills of 1509 and 1523; Guillén further provides an overview of arguments for why Columbus never married Beatriz.
VI. Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax
1. “Memorial de las Cosas que hay de Hazer y Dezir en Castilla,” in La Duquesa de Berwick y Alba, Autógrafos, 77–79. The suggestion that this document was drawn up at Diego’s death in 1526 (Rusconi, 8) is plainly wrong, given the ephemerality of most of the items in the list; Rumeu is clearly right in assigning this to 1509 (Rumeu, 6), a date also followed by Guillén (117).
2. Obras, 256.
3. Further confidence in this method of reconstructing a list of Hernando’s books in 1509 can be taken from the fact that none of these volumes (i.e., ones bearing a location of purchase but no date) was printed after 1509.
4. On the importance of Crastonus’s Lexicon Graeco-Latinum for Greek language learning, see John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2008), 27. Burke, Social History of Knowledge, 84–85.
5. Hernando bought his volume of Pico della Mirandola’s De rerum praenotione libri novem (Colombina 12–5–9, Registrum B 3782) and Lorenzo Valla’s translation of Thucydides (Colombina 2–6–15, Registrum B 2816) in Toledo in 1509, likely when the court was there in February. One of the alchemical treatises is a manuscript of Sedacius totius alchimie, and the note of gift from Cristóbal de Sotomaior, son of the Countess of Camiña, is recorded as Registrum B 3785 (Guillén, 116); Guillén, Hernando Colón, 118, claims Sotomaior also gave a printed alchemical work, but his source is unclear. See Troy S. Floyd, The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean (Albuquerque, 1973), 123–30, for the state of gold mining in 1509.
6. Burke, Social History of Knowledge, 84–85. Hernando would eventually own many copies of Angelo Poliziano’s treatise on universal knowledge, the Panepistemon, included in the Annotationes veteres of Sabellicus that he bought in 1512 (Colombina 15–6–8), the Opera omnia of Poliziano purchased in 1515 (Colombina 6–5–15), and a lost separate edition of 1532 (Abecedarium B, col. 99; it provides an incorrect Registrum B number, so further details are unavailable). Hernando’s copy of the 1498 Suda is listed in Abecedarium B, col. 1708.
7. See Luis Arranz, Diego Colón (Madrid, 1982), 97–102, and appendix documents XV and XVI, which give the letter of nomination and the official conferral of the governorship. The transfer of power to the Duke of Alba’s factor Juan de la Peña is given in Muro Orejón, Pleitos Colombinos, 8 vols. (Madrid, 1964–89), 1:191–93. See also Thomas, Rivers of Gold, 228. On the payments to Hernando, see Navarrete, Documentos Inéditos, 529, and Guillén, 111.
8. For details of the party that crossed in 1509 see Floyd, Columbus Dynasty, 137. The jewel is described in Testamento, xviii.
9. Caddeo, 2:193–95; Thomas, Rivers of Gold, 414.
10. For Diego’s will see Arranz, Diego Colón, 194–95; see also the “Instrucción del almirante D. Diego Colón para Jerónimo de Agüero,” in La Duquesa de Berwick y Alba, Autógrafos, 61–63, where Hernando begs the Duke of Alba to come to his brother’s aid, and Guillén, Hernando Colón, 109–10; Guillén also suggests that this document was from 1511, but as Aguilar was at that point considered missing, it seems more likely that this was from 1509. Las Casas’s later claim that Hernando returned to continue his stu
dies (Guillén, 116) does not explain the precipitousness of his departure or the long delay between his return and the resumption of his formal studies.
11. The “Proyecto de Hernando Colón en nombre y representación del Almirante, su hermano, para dar la vuelta al mundo” is now preserved in the New York Public Library as Obadiah Rich Collection, Rich num. II.i, 6, and is transcribed in Arranz, Diego Colón, 338–43.
12. See Navarrete, Documentos Inéditos, 16:383, and Rumeu, 27, 48–49; Guillén, Hernando Colón, 87. Hernando describes the Colón de Concordia in the opening of the Declaración del derecho . . . (Real Biblioteca II/652 [3], fol. 1r-v), which is available online and transcribed in Navarrete, Documentos Inéditos, 16:383.
13. At this point Hernando may already have been aware of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, in which a well-ordered ship is seen as the model for the proper functioning of a household and indeed the state; the contents of the ship, in turn, are known by Xenophon’s sailor “just as well as a man who knows how to spell can tell how many letters there are in Socrates and in what order they come” (Oeconomicus, §8.11–16, trans. E. C. Marchant [Loeb], 463).
14. The copy of the Qur’an is Registrum B entry 2997; Hernando purchased François Tissard’s Grammatica Hebraica et Graeca in Seville in 1511 (Colombina 12–3–23[5]), which is bound together with further guides to Greek by Tissard (12–3–23[1]) and by Manuel Chrysoloras (12–3–23[4]) purchased that year.
15. On Peter Martyr’s embassy to Egypt, see Una Embajada de los Reyes Católicos a Egipto, ed. and trans. Luis García y García (Simancas, 1947). The Hieroglyphica is contained in a Greek miscellany volume (Habentur in hoc volumine haec . . . [Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1505]), of which Hernando’s copy survives as Colombina 118–6–19 (Reg B 5615); it has no purchase note of any kind, which may mean an early purchase or simply a lost purchase note. A useful introduction to early-modern linguistic thought is provided in Umberto Eco, The Search for a Perfect Language (London, 1997).
16. For the quotation, see page 116 (sig. [hviiv]). Early-modern Egyptologists were unaware of the phonetic values of the hieroglyphs, which awaited the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and Champollion’s decryption; the key text on Renaissance hieroglyphs is now available in English: Karl Giehlow, The Humanist Interpretation of Hieroglyphs in the Allegorical Studies of the Renaissance, trans. Robin Raybould (Leiden, 2015). On the discoveries on the island of Mona, see Jago Cooper, Alice V. M. Samson, et al., “ ‘The Mona Chronicle’: The Archaeology of Early Religious Encounter in the New World,” Antiquity 90/352 (2016): 1054–71; quotation from page 1062. An example of Jacobo de Testera’s work can be seen in the Codex Testeriano Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer, 905. On the pillars discovered by Charles Cottar at Sevilla la Nueva, see https://www.academia.edu/978498/The_Frog-legged_Lady_of_New_Seville_European_Motif_or_Evidence_of_Spanish-Indigenous_Syncretism_in_Early_Colonial_Jamaica.
17. Testamento, x, 8–9.
18. Hernando was granted an encomienda of three hundred Indians as part of the settlement of the Pleitos (AGI, Indiferente, 418, L.3, fol. 97v), but a further document of 23 August grants Hernando permission to pass the encomienda on to someone, but also suggests that he intends to travel to Hispaniola at the end of five months (AGI, Indiferente, 418, L.3, fol. 154r–154v). The first part of the process started by Isabel de Gamboa, in the diocesan court of Burgos, cannot be followed in detail, as the records of processes in the diocesan court prior to 1813 were destroyed during the Peninsular War. The substance of the case, however, is repeated in the Sacra Rota trial detailed in chapters 6 and 7.
19. Hernando’s volume of Flavio Biondo’s De Roma triumphante (13–4–7) was bought in Seville in 1511; the date comes from the Registrum B (3092), as the book itself does not bear a purchase date, further confirming the suggestion that the volumes with a location of purchase but no date are early purchases. It is only sparsely annotated, but it is annotated all the way through, perhaps suggesting that he was using it to prepare for his entry to the Eternal City. He also owned a copy of Biondo’s Ab inclinatione Romanorum Imperii, similarly purchased in Seville and with no date supplied (either in purchase note or Reg. B, suggesting an early purchase date), though it is hardly annotated at all.
VII. The World City
1. Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, 1998), 21; Rumeu, 29.
2. Stinger, Renaissance in Rome, 32–38. The assumption here that Hernando stayed at San Pietro in Montorio is based on the reading of Hernando’s will, following McDonald, 35, and Guillén, 83, where his bequest to the “convento de señor san francisco de observancia” (Testamento, 130–31) is taken to indicate that he stayed there when in Rome; San Pietro in Montorio was the major recipient of Spanish patronage at the time, which would make sense of the fact that Hernando highlights its Spanish connections in his will. Hernando’s copy of the Mirabilia urbis Roma is Colombina 14–1–4(2), which is bound with several other guides to Rome also bought in 1512, including one in German and one in Italian. It is worth noting the printing date of Hernando’s copy of the Mirabilia—1493—as it gives a sense of how long printed volumes could remain on booksellers’ shelves after printing, even when the volume in question was (like this one) ephemeral.
3. On Albertini’s guides, see Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 1969), 84–86. Hernando’s copy of Albertini’s Opusculum de mirabilibus nouae et veteris urbis Romae (Rome, 1510) is Colombina 4–2–5(5); his copy of Giuliano Dati’s script for the mystery play, Incomincia la passione de Christo historiata in rima vulgari (Rome, 1510), is Colombina 6–3–24(1). Both were bought between Hernando’s arrival and the end of 1512.
4. Mitchell Bonner, Rome in the High Renaissance (Norman, 1973), 42–43, 51; Jacques Le Saige, Voyage de Jacques Le Saige, de Douai à Rome (Douai, 1851), 26.
5. On the Tempietto, see Jack Freiberg, Bramante’s Tempietto, the Roman Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown (Cambridge, 2014), 144, 151. Giorgio Agamben has recently provided an excellent summary of the concept of universal empire and its links to apocalyptic thought in his The Kingdom and the Glory (Redwood City, 2011).
6. The records are contained in ASV, S. R. Rota, Manualia Actorum, 83, in about two hundred pages of entries between fols. 150r and 933v. I am immensely grateful to Christine Grafinger of the Vatican Archive and Kirsi Salonen for their help in locating these documents, and to Kirsi and Patrick Zutshi for help in decoding them. Kirsi Salonen’s Papal Justice in the Late Middle Ages: The Sacra Romana Rota (Oxford, 2016) is the indispensable guide to the workings of the court, and I rely entirely on it here; see page 18 on the court’s importance, page 43 on the process of referral to the SRR, pages 56–66 on the day-to-day workings of the court, and page 76 on the location of sessions.
7. Isabel de Gamboa’s life can be reconstructed through a series of documents in the Archivo General de Simancas, including Consejo Real de Castilla, 80/2, which details a suit between Isabel de Gamboa and relatives of her first husband, Martín Ruiz de Arteaga of Guernica, over the custody of their children and the goods belonging to them; this document also mentions her second husband, one Captain Salazar, whom Diego’s will vaguely identifies as “Petisalazan” (Arranz, Diego Colón, 195). Isabel’s daughter with Salazar (also called Isabel), who was a lady-in-waiting to Germaine de Foix, is the plaintiff in a further suit (AGS, Consejo Real de Castilla, 666, 23). Hernando’s name first appears on ASV Man Act 83, fol. 207v.
8. Angela Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Leiden, 2013), 389–420; and Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1999), 112–18.
9. The list of those lecturing at the Studium Urbis in 1514 is published as an appendix to Filippo Maria Renazzi, Storia dell’Università degli Studii di Roma (Rome, 1803), 235–39. Hernando’s reference, in his volume of Silvestro da Prierio Mazzolini’s Clarissimi sacre theologie (Colombina 12–6–35), to hearing lectures on the text by one “magistro sebastiano” (�
��prima novembris 1515 incepi hu[n]c libru[m] exponente eu[m] magistro sebastiano Rome i[n]mediate post 24 am. horam octoq[ue] prima folia tantu[m] in octo lectionibus exposuit”) is widely agreed to be a reference to Sebastianus Veteranus, who is shown to be lecturing at the Studium Urbis in the 1514 list; see Guillén, Hernando Colón, 84, citing Wagner.
10. Nothing is known about the first holder of the chair of natural history at the university (Paul F. Grendler, Universities of the Italian Renaissance [Baltimore, 2003], 59). On the relations between mercantile practice and information exchange in general, see Burke, Social History of Knowledge, 155. On Luca Pacioli, see Argante Ciocci, Luca Pacioli e la Matematizzazione del sapere nel Rinscimento (Bari, 2003).
11. Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Paris, 1627), 130–31; see Burke, Social History of Knowledge, 105. On the Medici library and the Vatican Library, I have closely followed the chapter by A. Rita, with tables by C. Grafinger, “Per la storia della Vaticana nel Primo Rinascimento,” 237–307, in Antonio Manfredi et al., Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, vol. 1, Le Origini della Bibilioteca Vaticana tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento (1447–1534) (Vatican City, 2010). On Parentucelli’s Canone, see Maria Grazia Blasio, Cinzia Lelj, and Giuseppina Roselli, “Un Contributo alla lettura del Canone Bibliografico di Tommaso Parentucelli,” in Le Chiavi della Memoria: Miscellenea in Occasione del i Centenario della Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia Diplomatica e Archivistica (Vatican City, 1984), 125–65. The division of Roman libraries into Greek and Latin rooms is mentioned by Isidore of Seville; see Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, 2002), 97. The notion of canonicity is derived from biblical scholarship, but Parentucelli was pioneering in applying it to a wider selection of learning.
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