12. Hernando bought the Respecti d’amore (Rome, 1506; Colombina 6–3–24[13]) in Rome in 1512, in a note that does not include a month, and the Storia della Biancha e la Bruna (6–3–24[19]) also in Rome, with no date at all; this may suggest that the estimate of 1520 for the printing of this text is wrong, as Hernando’s undated purchases tend to come from 1512 and before. The other pamphlets bound with these two (such as the Storia de Fuggir le Puttane [Colombina 6–3–24(18)], bought in June 1513 for two quatrines), which all treat erotic subjects, were printed in 1513 or before, suggesting these may have been bought at the same time, either already bound or bound soon after.
13. Hernando’s copy of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was the 1500 Venice edition and is listed as Registrum B entry 3872; the entry in the Abecedarium B might be missed as it is listed with the title reversed (as “Poliphili Hypnerotomachia en toscano,” col. 1344). Hernando’s list of the “Pasquili carmina” is given on Abecedarium B, col. 1268, made up of twenty-two titles covering most years between 1509 and 1526, as well as including other works attributed to Pasquino.
14. The story about the cost of raising the roof of St. Peter’s is in Condivi’s life of Michelangelo (Michelangelo Buonarroti: Life, Letters, and Poetry [Oxford, 2008], 26–33). On the 1507 Jubilee Pardon see Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 155.
15. Argote de Molina’s description of Hernando’s ambassadorial mission to Julius is discussed in E. Jos, Investigaciones, 609–14.
16. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 57–58; Manfredi et al., Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1:263.
17. Hernando notes in his copy of Dionisio Vázquez, Oratio habita Rome in apostolica sacri palatii capello i[n] die cinerum nona februarii Anno domini 1513 (Colombina 8–2–38[38]), that he heard the sermon in person (“viva voce”) by the author in Rome. Passages from the Julius Exclusus are taken from The Erasmus Reader, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto, 1990), 216–38, 218, 228.
VIII. The Architecture of Order
1. Michael Bury and David Landau, “Ferdinand Columbus’ Italian Prints: Clarifications and Implications,” in McDonald, Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus, 189–90.
2. Piers Baker-Bates, Sebastiano del Piombo and the World of Spanish Rome (Oxford, 2016).
3. Bonner, Rome in the High Renaissance, 65–76; Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 97–98. The menu is taken from Paolo Palliolo, Le Feste de Conferimento del Patrizio Romano (Bologna, 1885), 76–88.
4. Suetonius Tranquilus cum Philippi Beroaldi et Marci Antonii Sabellici commentariis (Colombina 2–5–11) contains the index as well as the note that Hernando was being lectured to on this by “Mag[ist]ro Castrensi” between 23 July and 5 August 1515. The Lucretius index is in In Carum Lucretiu[m] poeta[m] Co[m]me[n]tarii a Joa[n]ne Baptista Pio editi . . . (Colombina 6–4–12). Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 77–78.
5. McDonald, Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus and Ferdinand Columbus: Renaissance Collector, ch. 3; Obras, 253–318.
6. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 76, 121. Hernando’s book purchases from late 1515 and early 1516 closely track the movements of the papal court in this period; he purchased the Compendium rerum decennio in Italia by Niccolò Machiavelli (1506) in Viterbo during a visit in October 1515 (Registrum B 2241).
7. Caddeo, 1:13. On the dispute over Diego’s rights in the New World and his recall in 1514, see Floyd, Columbus Dynasty, 146–48.
8. AGS, Consejo Real de Castilla, 666, 23, from 26 May 1516, refers to both Captain Salazar and Isabel de Gamboa as “difuntos,” giving a latest possible date for her death.
IX. An Empire of Dictionaries
1. The manuscripts of the Cosmografía consist of a ms. of 678 folios in the Biblioteca Colombina (Colombina 10–1–10), and a separate two gatherings of 41 folios now held at the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE ms. 1351). Crespo points out that while the entry numbers go up to 6,477, only 4,043 entries are found in the surviving manuscripts (Los Grandes Proyectos [Madrid, 2013], 42), and he follows Laborda’s count of 4,245 entries, with a total of thirteen hundred towns receiving a full treatment (62–64), and a further two thousand only featuring in distance measurements. Though Martínez (Obras, 242) points to the entry number 9,967, suggesting that a further third of the project may have been lost, he suggests caution in making this assumption, given that there are no entries between 6,635 and 9,967. Martínez discusses the relationship between the Colombina manuscript and the detached gathering in the BNE in Obras, 225–26. Crespo suggests the rather fitting name of the “libreta de campo” in Los Grandes Proyectos, 49.
2. For useful discussion of the distinctions between “information” and “knowledge,” or “data,” “information,” and “knowledge,” see Burke, Social History of Knowledge, 11, and ch. 5, and Ann Blair, Too Much to Know (New Haven, 2011), 1–2. For the instructions on mapmaking, see Descripción, 1:22–24, and Obras, 47–48, 217–18.
3. See HoC, 9–10; Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti (London, 2002), 244; and Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Harvard, 2009), 41; Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 65–69; Jessica Maier, Rome Measured and Imagined (Chicago, 2015), 25–26. Hernando bought the 1493 Quatripartitus ptolomei (Venice: Bonetus Locatellus) in Medina del Campo at an unregistered date for 170 maravedís (Reg. B 3152; lost); the 1508 Geographia (Rome: Bernardinum Venetum de Vitalibus) in July 1512 (Reg. B 3527, Colombina 119–8–5) for twenty-eight carlines; and the 1513 edition (Argentinae: Ioannis Schotti) in April of 1516 (Reg. B 3558, Colombina 15–8–19) for twenty-three julios. The 1478 edition supposedly inherited from Columbus is mentioned in Crespo, Los Grandes Proyectos, 35, though no source is given; Guillén also mentions it (115) but again provides no evidence that it was inherited from Columbus.
4. Hernando probably encountered the mapmaking ideas of Ptolemy before he went to Italy, perhaps in the form of the Introduction to Cosmography published by the leading light of Spanish humanism, Elio Antonio de Nebrija, in 1498. A copy of Nebrija’s treatise, which expounded Ptolemy’s ideas for a graticula (a little grate, or grid) on which maps should be laid out, was among Hernando’s undated and probably early purchases. From his early youth Hernando would have known Nebrija at least by reputation and perhaps much more intimately, as Nebrija seems occasionally to have taught at the court of the Infante Juan. Hernando may also have heard Nebrija lecture when the court visited Salamanca, where the eminent scholar presided not only over the intellectual life of the university but also over its printing industry, with the most groundbreaking Spanish editions of classical texts emanating from Nebrija’s house on the Calle de los Libreros. Whatever Hernando’s relationship with Nebrija was in the 1490s, he would certainly have become close to him in the new century, when Nebrija was (among many other things) involved in the production of Peter Martyr’s monumental history of the New World, the Decades. Indeed, it may have been Nebrija himself who prompted Hernando to begin the project of the Description: the pair were both in Alcalá de Henares in the summer of 1517 when Hernando made his first entry, as recorded in a copy of Nebrija’s newly published treatise on chronology, which he gave Hernando as a gift. Nebrija’s volume, once again drawing on the observations of Abraham Zacuto, produced tables of the different day lengths in cities throughout Spain—a curious undertaking, though more understandable when one realizes that these observations could be used to produce the longitudinal measurements required for Hernando’s map. Crespo, Los Grandes Proyectos, 48–49.
5. See Jerome’s commentary on Daniel, and Daniel DiMassa, “The Politics of Translation and the German Reception of Dante,” in Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe, eds. José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge, 2014), 119–20.
6. Obras, 48; On the use of the Alphonsine and Nebrija’s parallels, see Crespo, Los Grandes Proyectos, 48.
7. Jean Michel Massing, “Observations and Beliefs: The World of the Catalan Atlas,�
� in Circa 1492, ed. Jay A. Levenson (Yale, 1991).
8. Descripción, 1:18, 20, 25, 29, 30, 39–41, 43, 44, 55; 3:35–36. These are the sections attributed to Hernando by Martínez (201–4, 224–26). Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), 120.
9. Crespo, Los Grandes Proyectos, 54, notes that dates noted on various entries by the emissaries range between 1517 and 1520. On the Republic of Letters and its collaborative scholarly practices, see Grafton, Worlds Made by Words. Though there is no evidence that a formal questionnaire was provided to the gatherers of information for the Description, the conventional form of the information amounts to the same thing and provides an antecedent for the questionnaires later used as instruments of state. See Burke, Social History of Knowledge, ch. 6.
10. See HoC, 10, on the resistance of landlords to later sixteenth-century surveys, and 1081 on Maximilian I. Crespo, Los Grandes Proyectos, 52, suggests Hernando would have had to have royal blessing for the project from the start and suggests that Gattinara, Cobos, Granvelle, or Cisneros might have sanctioned the project before Charles’s arrival; however, no evidence is available for this.
11. Though we cannot be certain that Hernando wrote this anonymous treatise, it was attributed to him at an early stage and was bound together with other writings undoubtedly by Hernando, and it certainly bears all the hallmarks of Hernando’s thought. The “Coloquio sobre las dos graduaciones que las cartas de Indias tienen,” Real Biblioteca II/652 (7), is contained in the same manuscript as the “Declaración del Derecho” and the “Memoria” by the Bachiller Juan Pérez. The attribution of the colloquy by Ursula Lamb and others to Pedro Medina seems extremely unlikely, as Medina would have been in his early twenties when it was written (as it says the Padrón Real is a decade old) and would not publish anything on cartography for two decades afterward. See Ursula Lamb, “Science by Litigation: A Cosmographic Feud,” Terrae Incognitae 1 (1969): 40–57; and “The Sevillian Lodestone: Science and Circumstance,” Terrae Incognitae 19 (1987): 29–39. Marín Martínez (81) includes the colloquy as potentially by Hernando.
12. Thomas, Rivers of Gold, 437–39; “Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance,” HoC, 994; on Reinel in Seville in 1519, HoC, 987. There is precedent for Hernando’s cartographic espionage in the “Cantino planisphere,” which Duke Ercole d’Este sent his servant to steal from the Portuguese in 1502. The idea that Hernando’s espionage was cartographical is supported by his mention of cartographic espionage in his report from Badajoz: see below at page 253. See A. Texeira de Mota, “Some Notes on the Organization of Hydrographical Services in Portugal,” Imago Mundi 28 (1976): 51–60, on the 1504 laws forbidding the export of Portuguese maps; also Burke, Social History of Knowledge, 144. Crespo, Los Grandes Proyectos, 55, cites M. M. Delgado Pérez, Hernando Colón, as saying that this is accompanying the court of Leonor of Portugal, though this would not explain his going incognito.
13. Tragedie Senece cum duobus commentariis (Venice, 1510; Colombina 1–4–19), flyleaf verso: “Sábado seis de marzo de 1518 comencé a leer este libro y a pasar las notas dél en el índice en Valladolit y distraído por muchas ocupaciones y caminos no lo pude acabar hasta el domingo ocho de julio de 1520 en Bruselas de Flandes en el qual tiempo las annotaciones que ay desde el numero 1559 en adelante aún no están pasadas en el índice porque quedó en España.”
14. Diccionario o Vocabulario Latino (Colombina 10–1–5), fol. 6r; “A: prime littere nomen est ta[?m] graecis qua[m] ceteris gentibus vel quia omnes littere hebream a qua [?e]manaru[n]t imitantur vel quia est prima infa[n] tiu[m] nescentiu[m] [v]ox vel quia in pronu[n]ciatione prius et interius more qua[m] reliquae sonat.” The last part of the entry is rather difficult to transcribe, so the translation provided here is an approximation of the likely sense, though the literal translation is “because in pronouncing it sounds earlier and more deeply by custom than the others.” I am grateful to Richard Flower for his advice here. Obras, 665–84; Nebrija, Gramatica castellana (Salamanca, 1492), aiir (“siempre la lengua fue compañera del ímperio”), expanded upon in the prefatory letter that follows. The definition quoted here uses Isidore’s Etymologiae (1:iii–iv) as one of its sources—including the claim (at 1:iv: 17) that A is the first letter as it is the first sound made by babies—though it is unclear if directly or indirectly.
15. Ann Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford, 2003), 15–17. See also Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe, and Byron Ellsworth Hamann, The Translations of Nebrija (Amherst, 2015). Hernando is using Nebrija’s monumental Spanish–Latin dictionary of 1495 as well as Niccolò Perotti’s encyclopedic commentary on the poet Martial, the Cornucopiae, as the foundations for his dictionary; see Obras, 681. (Incidentally, this was probably the first European book to use Arabic numerals on both sides of the page; see Blair, Too Much to Know, 49.) Hernando’s method does seem to aim for authoritative definitions from his historical examples, but also allows for historical variation. Although he owned a copy of the editio princeps of the Suda (Colombina 1–4–11, Lexicon Graecum Souida, Milan 1499, no date of purchase), he does not appear to have used it; likely his Greek was not good enough for this purpose.
16. Erich Peterson has pointed out the link between census taking, of which Hernando’s Description is a form, and millenarianism, drawing on a tradition in which the fact that the Incarnation occurred during Augustus’s census of the Roman Empire is theologically significant; see Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 10.
17. A good account of the election wrangling is given in Manuel Fernández Alvarez, Charles V: Elected Emperor and Hereditary Ruler (London, 1976), 28–32.
18. This volume of pamphlets bound together (“sammelband”) is Colombina 4–2–13, mostly acquired in Rome in September and November 1515; Hernando’s reading notes show that he read them between 28 September and 15 October 1519 in Seville. He did not strictly read the pamphlets in the current order, which may indicate that he flicked back and forth, or that they were originally bound in a different order.
19. Floyd, Columbus Dynasty, 198–99; Rumeu, 83; Testamento, 14–15. Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 3:359. This Capitulación de Coruña was ratified by the crown on 3 March 1525 (Testamento, xv).
X. The Devil in the Details
1. Jeffrey Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography (New Haven, 2017), 1:560; Thomas, Rivers of Gold, 425, 431.
2. Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer, 1:563–64.
3. Ioan. Goropii Becani Origines Antwerpianae (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1569), 178–79.
4. A. C. Mery Talys (London, 1526).
5. Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe, 19. Hernando’s copy of the Antibarbarorum survives as Colombina 12–2–26; on page [2], Hernando has written as follows: “Este libro medio el mesmo autor como parece en la octaua plana.” Hernando’s copy of Valla’s commentary on the Donation of Constantine is Registrum B 295, and was purchased in Nuremberg in December 1521. Erasmus, “The Antibarbarians,” in The Erasmus Reader, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto, 1990), 62.
6. Hernando’s (no longer extant) copy of the Psalterium David et cantica aliqua in lingua Chaldea is listed in Abecedarium B, col. 1405, as “Psaltarium in lingua chaldica . . . R[ome] 1513,” and is given Registrum number 5967. On this text and Johannes Potken’s mistake about its Chaldaic origin, see Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago, 1977), 2:510–11. Alphabetization was in use from the time of the pinakes of works drawn up for the Library at Alexandria; see Blair, Too Much to Know, 16. On the invention of the author, see Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 101–120, and Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Redwood City, 1994), ch. 2. See Erasmus’s discussion of the letter to the cardinal of Mainz and its leaking in the 1520 letter to Cardinal Campeggio, in Correspondence of Erasmus, Letters 1122 to 1251, 1520 to 1521, trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto, 1974), §1167, 108–21.
7. Hernando’s copy of Budé’s De Asse et partibus eius is Colombina
118–7–39 and was purchased in Florence in January 1516. Maximilian I granted Friesland independent sovereignty with the caveat that Austria could redeem it for one hundred thousand guilders (George Edmundson, History of Holland [Cambridge, 1922], 14).
8. Gertrude von Schwartzenfeld, Charles V: Father of Europe (London, 1957), 53–54; Fernández Alvarez, Charles V, 38; Rainer Kahsnitz and William D. Wixom, Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, 1300–1550 (New York, 1986), 305–6.
9. The official bull of excommunication was issued on 3 January 1521; on this, and the successive steps by which Luther felt he was released from the Church, see Richard Rex, The Making of Martin Luther (Princeton, 2017), 156–57, 250n. See also discussion of the inflationary logic of indulgences, pages 12–13.
10. On Reformist books in Hernando’s collection, see Klaus Wagner, “La reforma protestante en los fondos bibliográficos de la Biblioteca Colombina,” Revista Española de Teologia 41 (1981): 393–463. Hernando purchased Melanchthon’s Epistola Philippi Melanchth. ad Joh. Oecolampadium de Lispica disputatione (Registrum B 1525) for two maravedís in Cologne in late November and is said by Wagner to have read it there (396), and Luther’s Acta apud D. Legatum Apostolicum Augustae recognita in Mainz on 26 November (no. 913 in the Memorial de los Libros Naufragados/Reg. A).
11. Rumeu, 83–84; Testamento, 28–29. A further document of 4 March 1523 suggests that these two thousand ducats had still not been paid (AGI, Indiferente, 420, L.9, ff. 126v–127).
12. Andrew Pettegree, “Centre and Periphery in the European Book World,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6/18 (2008): 101–28; Christopher Hare, A Great Emperor: Charles V, 1519–1558 (London, 1917), 65; Karl Brandi, Emperor Charles V, trans. C. V. Wedgwood (London, 1939), 131. On Hernando’s endurance as a rider see the letters of Clenardus (Correspondance, 3:181–82). Hernando’s first book purchase in Venice is on 9 May; Sanudo records news of Luther’s condemnation as a heretic on 11 May (Diarii, xxx, 217), and on 12 May Gasparo Contarini was writing from the Imperial Court to the Signory of the kidnap (CSP Venetian, §209), which Sanudo records on the eighteenth.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 36