The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

by Edward Wilson-Lee

  13. Marin Sanudo, Venice: Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, ed. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White, trans. Linda L. Carroll (Baltimore, 2008), 54–58, 208–9. The relazione gives Suleiman’s age as twenty-three, but he would actually have been twenty-seven at the time.

  14. Ibid., 59; a good account is also provided in Peter Martyr’s report on his Egyptian embassy, Una Embajada, 34–36.

  15. Sanudo, Cità Excelentissima, 21–22.

  16. Ibid., 27–30.

  17. Obras, 738–42.

  XI. No Place Like Home

  1. Hernando’s copy of the 1518 Basel edition of More’s Utopia (De optimo reip. statu deque noua insula Utopia libellus . . . [Basel: Johannes Frobennius, 1518]) survives as Colombina 12–2–39; Hernando notes on page 167 “Hu[n]c libru[m] perlegi Bruselis 26 et 27 diebus mensis martij 1522.”

  2. The expense of cutting the Utopian type is confirmed by the printer of the English translation by Ralph Robinson, Abraham Veale, who explains the absence of the alphabet from his edition by citing the expense of the type. See Émile Pons, “Les Langues imaginaires dans le voyage utopique,” Revue de Littérature Comparée, October–December 1930, 589–607 (my translation).

  3. On Dürer’s design, see Ashcroft, Albrecht Dürer, 2:661–70.

  4. A detailed description of materials for the pageant is found in SP 1/24 f. 226, “The Emperor’s Visit,” 5 June 1522, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 3, §2305. See D. E. Rhodes, “Don Fernando Colón and his London book purchases, June 1522,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 52 (New York, 1958).

  5. Caddeo, 2:196–97, 236–37.

  6. Hernando mentions the “forma de navegación p[ar]a su alta y felicisima pasaje de flandes en españa” on fol. 2r of the “Declaración del derecho” of 1524; see Real Biblioteca II/652 (3).

  7. Testamento, 133–34.

  8. Hernando’s copy of the Carta de Relación is Registrum B entry 272, which notes that Hernando purchased it in Valladolid “on 2 December 1521,” an evident mistake for 1522 as it notes just previously the publication in Seville on 8 November 1522.

  9. Obras, 687–765, 715.

  10. On the cedula, see Obras, 163, and Crespo, Los Grandes Proyectos, 58. On the relationship of knowledge gathering to empire in the Spanish context, see Burke, Social History of Knowledge, ch. 6; Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, 1996); and Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain (Chicago, 1996).

  11. Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe, 29. Hernando appears not to have known Calepino’s dictionary when he began his dictionary in 1518, as Calepino is not among the sources for which he develops a shorthand (Nebrija, Palémon, and Perotti, as well as the Grammatica ecclesiastici; see Obras, 681); the close similarities between many of his entries and those of Calepino would, then, seem to stem from their synthesizing many of the same sources. The catalogues provide somewhat confusing evidence on the matter: the Abecedarium B lists only a 1530 edition of Calepino, though the Registrum B entry at 1963 appears to have overwritten a previous entry, showing a purchase of a copy at Medina del Campo in July 1519. It is possible that the 1519 purchase was lost or that it was simply read to death: it seems that Calepino was (toward the end, at least) a significant presence in the library, as the Bachiller Juan Pérez uses his name to illustrate a point in the Memoria (regarding the treatment of pseudonyms; Obras, 66).

  XII. Cutting Through

  1. For the note in the Seneca, see Colombina 1–4–19, Tragedie Senece cum duobus commentariis (Venice: Philippo Pincio, 1510), fol. XCIIv, sig. q.iiv. Diego’s arrival in Spain on 5 November 1523 is recorded in AGI, Patronato, 10, N.1, R.15.

  2. AGI, Patronato, R.48, 12; Guillén, Hernando Colón, 123.

  3. Hernando’s opinion, signed 13 April 1524, is contained in the “Parecer que dio D. Hernando Colón en la Junta de Badajoz sobre la pertinencia de los Malucos,” AGI, Patronato, R.48, 16; it is transcribed in Navarrete, Expeditiones al Malucco, 333–39. His further opinions submitted to the emperor (on 27 April and after the Badajoz conference) are also contained in Navarrete, 342–55.

  4. See the “Declaración del derecho,” Navarrete, Documentos Inéditos, 16:391–92.

  5. AGI, Patronato, R.48, 16, 1r–2v. See Crespo, 48–49. Hernando is credited as the first to have suggested this solution in Julio Rey Pastor, La Ciencia y la Técnica en el Descubrimiento de América (Buenos Aires, 1942), 96–97.

  6. This story is recounted in Jerry Brotton, History of the World in Twelve Maps (London, 2013), 200; Brotton’s account of the conference is on pages 200–217.

  7. Hernando is referring to Arcangelo Madrignano’s translation, the Itinerarium Portugallensium e Luistania in Indiam, “q[ue] fue impreso año de 1508” (Milan: Giovanni Antonio Scinzenzeler, 1508), which he bought in Rome in 1512 (Reg. B 2163); the passage “en el cplo [i.e., capitulo] 6[0] se cuenta 3800 leguas desde lisbona a calicut” is at f[v]v. The Abecedarium B suggests that Hernando’s copy of Pedro Margalho’s Margellea logices vtrivsq[ue] scholia (Colombina 118–5–48[2]) was not acquired until 1536, though this may be replacing an earlier copy; it is one of only two copies of the work noted on the Universal Short Title Catalogue. On the development of numbering and layouts to aid reference and memory, see Blair, Too Much to Know, 36–40; and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 2008), ch. 7.

  8. On Hernando’s arguments for the rights of the Spanish, dated by Rumeu (78) to the end of the Badajoz conference, see the “Declaración del derecho que la rreal corona de Castilla tiene a la conquista de las provincias de Persia, Arabia e Yndia, e de Calicut e Malaca,” Real Biblioteca II/652 (3).

  9. On the development of textual locators in printed books, see Blair, Too Much to Know, 49–51. Though similar arguments for “fixity,” first made by Elizabeth Eisenstein in her influential Printing Press as an Agent of Change, have been subject to much criticism and revision (see, for instance, Agent of Change, eds. Sabrina A. Baron et al. [Amherst, 2007]), it is nevertheless clearly the case that contemporaries thought this allowed for secure referencing.

  10. The passage in question, on fol.[v]v of the 1508 Itinerarium Portugallensium e Luistania in Indiam, actually occurs in chapter 58; but farther down on the same page, chapter 59 is actually labeled 61, so counting backward from that must have caused Hernando’s mistake. On the length of the epitomes, see Obras, 344–47. On the theme of the excess of books, see Blair, Too Much to Know, esp. 55–61.

  11. Obras, 53.

  12. Juan Pérez’s statement that there should be “at most four” books of laws is not further explained, though it may be predicated on the division of law into canon, ecclesiastical, and common laws; see Obras, 51. On classical and medieval projects of compilation and condensation, see Blair, Too Much to Know, esp. ch. 1.

  13. On the codicil, see Rumeu, 83. Hernando’s letter to Charles is AGS, Estado, 13, fol. 333. Hernando’s defense of his brother’s rights is given in the “Papel de Fernando Colón,” Navarrete, Documentos Inéditos, 16:376–82. On the madness of the infinite library, see Jorge Luis Borges, “The Total Library,” in The Total Library: Non-Fiction, 1922–1986, ed. Eliot Weinberger (London, 1999), 214–16.

  XIII. The Library without Walls

  1. Testamento, 36–37. On Hernando’s failed attempt to buy another property from the Conde de Orgaz earlier in 1526, see Guillén, 125.

  2. Testamento, 138–40. For the late-sixteenth-century descriptions, see Juan de Mal Lara, Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a la C. R. M. del Rey D. Philipe N. S. (Sevilla, 1570), fol. 50; and Guillén, 126.

  3. Testamento, 77–79 (for the contract with Alonso de Zamora and his wife, Maria Rodríguez), and the inventory of Hernando’s papers, XCIII, 263, item 29, “. . . dize memoria de plantas e ortelanos”; this is clearly distinct from the various documents related to the acquisition of the Huerta de Goles contained in
the same inventory. It should also be remembered that Hernando’s Arana relatives were tied to the circle in Córdoba around the apothecaries of the Esbarroya family, in which Columbus is thought to have first encountered the uncle of Hernando’s mother, Beatriz; see Guillén, 108.

  4. Caddeo, 1:174; 2:30, 193.

  5. Testamento, 75–77. Brian Ogilvie, “Encyclopaedism in Renaissance Botany,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts, ed. Peter Binkley, 89–99; and Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing (Chicago, 2006), 30–34 et passim; Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous (Cambridge, 2009); Hubertus Fischer, Volker R. Remmert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, eds., Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period (Basel, 2016).

  6. Antonio de Villasante may have been the discoverer of guayacán from his Taino wife. On Hernando’s attempt to recruit the potter-physician to be Clenardus’s Arabic instructor, see Correspondance de Nicolas Clénard, 1:151–52, 2:93–94.

  7. Obras, 55, 365–427, esp. 396–402. On the use of indexes to subject matters in medieval florilegia, see Blair, Too Much to Know, 36.

  8. Obras, 55.

  9. AGI, Indiferente, 421, L.12, fols. 40r–40v; Rumeu, 81n. HoC, page 1101, gives this as the first date when such an order was issued. Guillén, Hernando Colón (134), suggests that Hernando’s appointment as acting pilót mayor explains his three-year stay in Seville between 1526 and 1529.

  10. HoC, 1100. The letter sent from the Consejo de Indias thanking Alonso de Chaves, on behalf of the king, for his work in teaching the pilots to use the astrolabe and quadrant and maps, “según relación de Hernando Colón” (AGI, Indiferente, 421, L.13, fol. 295v), suggests that this is apparently going on in the Casa de Goles; see Guillén, 127. Eustaquio Navarrete, Noticias para la Vida de D. Hernando Colón, in Documentos Inéditos, 16:357–60, notes a mention by Loaisa regarding a college for mariners that Hernando proposed setting up in the house in the Puerta de Goles in 1526, as mentioned in various histories of Seville (Luis de Peraza, Origen de la Ciudad de Sevilla), though this likely refers to a later period. The maps corrected in Hernando’s hand are in Ptolemy, Claudii Ptolomei . . . Geographi[a]e opus (Colombina 15–8–19); the example of the insula anthropophagorum is on the second map in the “Tabula Moderna” section.

  11. HoC, 22.

  12. The letter of 1528 instructs Diego Ribeiro to come to the Consejo to fill them in on the “bombas” that are being made in La Coruña (AGI, Indiferente, 421, L.13, fol. 295r–295v). Hernando’s note on the ineffectiveness of Spanish artillery is in Colombina 4–2–13(9), sig. [Aii]r.

  13. Brandi, Charles V, 242.

  14. Luigi Guicciardini, The Sack of Rome, trans. James H. McGregor (New York, 2008), 114–15; J. Hook, The Sack of Rome (London, 2004), 176–78; Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, 320–22; André Chastel, Le sac de Rome, 1527 (Paris, 1984).

  15. Manfredi, Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 311. The Ostrogoth destruction of Roman libraries is recorded in Cassiodorus; see Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, 74–75; and Pedro Mexia, Silva de Varia Lección (Seville, 1540). Although more recent studies have suggested that the Library of Alexandria disappeared slowly over centuries, early modern accounts almost always figure a catastrophic destruction: see, for instance, Francesco Patrizi, A moral methode of ciuile policie contayninge a learned and fruictful discourse of the institution, trans. Richard Robinson (London, 1576), sig. T[1]r–v.

  16. There is some confusion regarding the date of Hernando’s departure, as Chapman (“Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music Owned by Ferdinand Columbus,” 41) notes Hernando making purchases from the end of August 1529, though Wagner’s itinerary still has Hernando in Seville on 30 August. Burke, Social History of Knowledge, 86; A. Salmond, “Theoretical Landscapes: On Cross-Cultural Conceptions of Knowledge,” in Semantic Anthropology, ed. D. Parkin (London, 1982), 65–87.

  XIV. Another Europe and the Same

  1. For Clenardus’s letters, see Correspondance de Nicolas Clénard, ed. Alphonse Roersch, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1940), 1:55–6, 200–201, 218–20; 2:33–35, 156–57, 180–83; and Joseph Klucas, “Nicolaus Clenardus: A Pioneer of the New Learning in Renaissance Portugal,” Luso-Brazilian Review 29/2 (1992): 87–98.

  2. Konrad Eisenbichler, “Charles V in Bologna: The Self Fashioning of a Man and a City,” Renaissance Studies 13/4 (1999): 430–39.

  3. AGS, Estado, leg. 21, fol. 22. “Don Hernando Colon Dizeque ha mas de quarenta años q[ue] sirve al Casa Real de V. Mt. y que por no ser molesta nole ha suplicado lehagame[n] por sua s[er]vise y esperando esse determinase/el pleyto de su padre y que agora viendo que aquel es ynmortal hallandose biejo y pobre ha determinado seguir la yglesia porque el papa le ha prometido [???] porella . . .”

  4. There is no small tragic irony in that Hernando’s mother, Beatriz, seems also to have been put to the exigency of borrowing from the Grimaldis at the end of her life against the promise of what she was owed by Diego and Hernando; see Guillén, 112. On Sanuto’s book sale see Sanuto, Cità Excelentissima, introduction, xxvi, and 39–40.

  5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999), 30.

  6. On the Umayyad library of Córdoba, see Padover in James W. Thompson, The Medieval Library (New York, 1967), 360–62.

  7. The Qur’an that Hernando had acquired in 1510, for instance, is listed as “Elalcora[n] en linda letera arabica” in the Registrum B (2997), but in the Abecedarium B as “Alcoran en arabigo” (col. 65). The first book in Geez is lost, but is in Abecedarium B, col. 1405, as “Psaltarium in lingua chaldica . . . R[ome] 1513” and is given a Registrum number of 5967. On the manuscripts brought back from Tunis by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, see Anthony Hobson, “The Iter italicum of Jean Matal,” in Studies in the Book Trade in Honor of Graham Pollard, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, NS 18 (1975), 33–61; Hobson points out that this number is likely an exaggeration, as Mendoza’s collection of Arabic manuscripts only numbered 268 when they reached the Escorial in 1571.

  8. François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Boulenger and Lucien Scheler (Paris, 1955), 194–202, 207–13. These translations are my own, though I have often relied on the commentary of Screech’s translation for guidance.

  9. Correspondance de Nicolas Clénard, 1:55–56, 200–201, 218–20; 2:33–35, 156–57, 180–83.

  10. Ibid., 1:25–28, 2:6–10.

  11. The biographical note occupies the margins of five pages starting from Psalm 19 in Psalterium Hebreum, Grecum, Arabicum, & Chaldeum cum tribus Latinis interpretationibus & glossis (Genoa, 1516). Hernando’s (lost) copy is given the Registrum B number 5095; see Abecedarium B, col. 1405.

  12. The Life attributes this rumor to Oviedo as well, though as Caddeo points out, Oviedo’s Historia general, while recounting the claim, suggests that it is false (Caddeo, 1:76–80 and n.). See Rumeu, 71–72, on Charles’s commissioning Oviedo to develop this line of argument.

  XV. The King of Nowhere

  1. Caddeo, 1:23; 2:5.

  2. Ibid., 1:14–20, 80–91.

  3. Ibid., 1:161–62. I am grateful to Professor Fernández-Armesto for pointing out that this scene of Columbus sighting land first is cribbed from a version of the Alexander Romance.

  4. For related discussions of the genealogy or tree-of-knowledge model, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the “rhizome” in Mille plateaux (Paris, 1980) and Burke, Social History of Knowledge, 86–87.

  5. Hernando’s copy of De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (Paris, 1512) is Colombina 3–3–28 and appears as 2156 in the Registrum B; it was purchased unbound in January 1516 at Florence for 116 old quatrines and was later bound in Rome for 40 quatrines. On Renaissance chronology, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger (Oxford, 1993) and Defenders of the Text (Cambridge, MA, 1994) and Worlds Made by Words, chapter 3, in particular on Trithemius: though Grafton calls Trithemius’s library ambitions “encyclopaedic” and “universal,” it is clear from the corresponding passage that this was limited to works in ancient languages from within Christen
dom.

  6. Burke, Social History of Knowledge, 15. Juan Luis Vives, “De Tradendis Disciplinis,” in De Disciplinis: Savoir et Enseigner, ed. Tristan Vigliano (2013), 273–86.

  7. Caddeo, 1:34–35. The manicules appear in Sabellicus, Secunda pars enneadum Marci Antonii Sabellici ab inclinatione romani imperii . . . (Colombina 2–7–11), Decade X, Book 8 (f. CLXVIII, sig. [x.v]r). Hernando places next to the phrase “(quas Columbus iunior archipirata illustris cruento proelio oppresserat)” a marginal note, “Columbus iunior archi/pirata illustris,” together with a large, prominent manicule. Though Rumeu de Armas (99–100) mentions the note that Hernando was reading this in 1534, Rumeu has clearly taken it from the Registrum B and has not looked at the original volume and therefore seen this clearly significant note. Hernando places a further manicule against a mention of Columbus’s further discoveries, in identical handwriting, on fol. CLXXI, sig.x.viiir, with the note “Christophorus colu[m]bus pater meus.” A good comparison for the handwriting is Hernando’s copy of Pico della Mirandola’s Opera (Colombina 12–5–10, A[x]r), which contains similar preliminary capital C’s.

  8. Hernando may well have had a more conscious notion of this than he anywhere formulates, drawing perhaps on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (a lost edition of which—Registrum B 94—he purchased in 1521), which demonstrates the order that arises out of a calm, methodical way of proceeding, using as its foremost example a well-managed ship. See Oeconomicus, 8, 23, and Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 18.

  9. Testamento, xxxvi; Rumeu, 17/84; Rumeu, 84, and Obras, 86, confirm that this is a life pension. An order of 20 November 1536 requires the royal officers of Santo Domingo to pay Hernando a pension of one thousand ducados for life (AGI, Santo Domingo, 868, L.1, ff. 14r–14v); it is unclear whether this is part of the arbitration arising from the pleitos colombinos, though it would seem unlikely that it came unprompted by the generosity of the emperor; it is also unclear whether this includes or is supplemental to his existing pension. See also Guillén, 129.