CHAPTER 2
No matter where he went, or who he became, Columbus remained a son of Genoa, the Ligurian seaport where bold maritime exploration was a way of life.
In 1291, the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa, Ugolino and Vadino, assembled a carefully planned and well-capitalized ocean voyage to India. Relying on a drastically oversimplified idea of the earth’s geography and size, they believed they could reach their destination by sailing west, or perhaps by circumnavigating Africa. They had access to maps and portolan charts, showing the coast in detail, and they sailed in galleys similar to those employed by Genoese mariners since the 1270s. Had they reached their destination, history might have celebrated Vivaldi Day rather than Columbus Day. But the brothers’ lumbering galleys proved no match for the high seas, and the brave fleet disappeared without a trace.
In 1336, Lanzarotto Malocello navigated his way to the Canary Islands, bestowing the name Lanzarote on one of them. Only five years later Nicoloso da Recco arrived at the Azores. Ever more ambitious voyages by sea came to seem inevitable. Many daring Genoese voyagers formed partnerships with the kingdom of Portugal, and in 1317 a Genoese led the emerging Portuguese navy. The plague and political instability slowed but did not halt the pace of discovery; by 1441, when António de Noli reached the Cape Verde Islands, the idea of additional islands beckoning across the Atlantic to the south and west became a powerful attraction for Columbus and other ambitious Italian navigators.
Tragic events at sea formed an essential part of Genoa’s culture, and that of the surrounding Ligurian region, the setting for some of Europe’s most ancient human settlements. The steep, rocky Ligurian coast offered rich and fertile soil, but in limited quantities. The meager amount of arable land forced farmers to carve narrow terraces into mountainsides. The most reliable crop happened to be Savona wine, produced west of Genoa. These restrictions spurred Ligurians to look to the sea for sustenance and survival. Of necessity, Ligurian sailors and pilots, rowers and riggers, emerged as the best and the bravest in Italy, or perhaps the most foolhardy. A Ligurian proverb warned, “O mare o l’é male” : The sea is evil.
A necessary evil, however.
All along its length, the region, known as the Ligurian Riviera, sheltered harbors and ports for sailors venturing into the sea for their livelihood. The port of Genoa, with its generous harbor, reigned over all, a semicircle jutting out from the hills of Sarzana, highlighted by a pier. Ships sought the port’s mandraccio, or shelter. “The harbor curves around in an arc here and, lest the fury of the sea damage the ships, comes protected by a jetty, which, it is said, would have cost only a little more had it been made of silver,” wrote Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) of Columbus’s home port in 1423.
It was here that Columbus was born in 1451. Questions and alternative theories about Columbus’s origins have long located his birth and upbringing in places as varied as Portugal, Spain, and northern Africa, but the evidence, including 453 legal and commercial documents, overwhelmingly places him in Genoa, the son of Domenico Columbus, a weaver, tavern keeper, and local politician.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, later a remorseless critic of the explorer, plainly states that “Christopher was universally acknowledged to be Genoese by birth.” Stories about his ancestors insist that “his forebears were people of rank and had once been wealthy,” as if to suggest that Columbus sought to restore the status of his family, who “appear to have lost their fortune during the wars and internecine squabbles that one finds at every turn throughout the history of Lombardy,” the dominant region of northern Italy.
Concerning the name Columbus, Las Casas relates that in antiquity it had been “Colonus,” but he “elected to style himself Colón,” a transformation Las Casas ascribed to the “will of the Lord, who had chosen him to carry out the task conveyed by the name Christopher Colón.” Following his subject’s interpretation of his name, “he was named Christopher, that is to say, Christum ferens, which is Latin for the bearer or carrier of Christ.”
Columbus took to signing his name with elaborate flourishes to underscore his reputation as the man “adjudged worthy above all others to bring these numberless peoples who had lain in oblivion throughout so many centuries to the knowledge and worship of Christ.” Las Casas explained that Colón meant “new settler,” which he judged a “fitting title for a man whose industry and whose labors led to the discovery of numberless souls.”
The adult Columbus appeared in Genoese records in October 1470 in connection with a commercial transaction. “In the name of our Lord,” it begins, “Christopher Columbus, son of Domenico, more than nineteen years of age, and in the presence of, and by the authority, advice and consent of Domenico, his father, present and authorizing, voluntarily . . . confessed and in truth publicly recognized, that he must give and pay to Pietro Belesio of Porto Maurizio, son of Francesco, present, forty-eight lire, thirteen soldi and six denari di genovini, and this is for the remainder owed for wine sold and consigned to the same Christopher and Domenico by Pietro.” Domenico promised to guarantee his son’s obligation in the presence of several witnesses including Raffaele of Bisagno, a baker.
Domenico’s trade as a wool weaver and carder signified to his fellow Genoese that, given wool’s prestige, he was a presence in Genoa’s commercial scene. Wool weavers maintained their own guild. More than a trade union, a guild offered its members a way of life. There were over eighty at the time of Columbus’s childhood in La Superba, as Genoa called itself. They settled trade disputes, represented their members before the doge, administered exams to those seeking to gain entry, and organized weddings and funerals for their members, including gifts and the specifics of religious observance.
They educated their members’ children, and it was under the guild’s auspices that Christopher studied arithmetic, geography, and navigation. The schools offered two curricula. Those who studied Latin, the Latinantes, paid ten soldi for the privilege; all others paid five. Latin was employed for documents, scientific papers, and other formal utterances; otherwise, the Genoese dialect with its mellifluous French inflection prevailed. “Son zeneize, rizo rœo, strenzo i denti e parlo ciœo” runs a popular regional expression. “I’m Genoese, I seldom laugh, I grind my teeth, and I say what I mean”: attitudes Columbus epitomized. By the time he left Genoa, he knew at least two languages, Genoese and Latin, and he later acquired Portuguese and Spanish.
Columbus’s mother, Susanna Fontanarossa, belonged to a prosperous landowning family in Quezzi, a village of the valley of Bisagno, near Genoa. Her father was Jacobi di Fontanarubea, or, as he came to be known, Giacomo Fontanarossa. Susanna was a popular name in the region, and associated with the church of Santa Susanna in Rome. She was born about 1425, and upon her marriage brought a dowry consisting of a house and land, both of which were subsequently sold. She and her husband Domenico, Columbus’s father, bore at least five children: Giovanni Pelegrino, Bartholomew, Diego, Bianchinetta, and the infant who would be called Christopher Columbus. She died about 1480, little known to the world at large, though she had influenced it greatly through her children.
Maritime trade was vital to Genoa’s existence, and local authorities managed it with great care. At the top of the regulatory pyramid, the Office of the Sea had final say over the harbor and shore, and the Office of the Commune Fathers oversaw the docks and piers, as well as the excavation of the harbor necessary for the ships’ safety. Equally critical, the Office of Health worked strenuously to prevent ships from returning with the plague and similar diseases. No one aboard an arriving ship was permitted to set foot on terra firma without obtaining a permit, available for a fee from the Office of Health’s representative on Genoa’s Spinola Bridge. If a ship’s crew might have been exposed to plague in their travels, they were subjected to a strict quarantine. Beggars, if caught, were subjected to a penalty of three lashings, and lepers were forbidden to enter the city, nor was anyone allowed to feed or shelter them. Despite these regulations, the plague was a frequent and dreaded visitor in Genoa, worse in summer, milder in winter. In self-defense, households burned clothes and other goods thought to be contaminated.
The Genoese bureaucracy extended beyond the entrance to the harbor, keeping track of ships as they traveled to and from their destinations across the Mediterranean. Vessels departing from Genoa were generally observed by sentries at the Lanterna, and by other sentries posted along the shore. If they spied an unusual occurrence—a dangerous-looking craft or an accident at sea—they reported their suspicions to the Lanterna by means of smoke signals during the day or fires at night.
In 1490, smoke signals alerted Genoa to an attack by corsairs from Nice. The city mounted a rapid retaliation, catching the aggressors by surprise, rescuing its own men, in the process contributing to the city-state’s fierce reputation. Genoa punished its enemies, and took care of its own. It posted consuls to strategically important cities, and they regularly communicated by ship-borne letter, or, when urgent, by smoke signals. This intelligence network gave Genoa military and strategic advantage over its rivals, who took out their frustrations and grievances with reprisals, and, when possible, by capturing Genoese galleys and imprisoning all those on board. (Marco Polo of Venice was one of thousands of enemies of the Republic of Genoa who were subjected to this treatment.) Genoa responded to the increased threats by ordering ships to travel in convoys, heavily armed, and prepared to respond to attack. Genoese pirates earned a reputation for savagery, as well as for slave trading. They constantly did battle with Catalans and with the French, who gradually overtook the Genoese Republic by force, and by marriage. Gradually the republic lost its influence, as newer, larger powers emerged. The spices, especially pepper, and gems that had formerly arrived by ship in Genoa now went to Lisbon and later to Madrid as the commercial center of gravity drifted from the Mediterranean to the Iberian Peninsula. In its shrunken universe, Genoa focused on trade with North African ports, which could be extremely profitable, as well as extremely dangerous, and on currency exchange, an arena in which its bankers became known as swift and hard negotiators.
This was the tumultuous era into which Christopher Columbus was born, and in which he came of age.
In the year of Christopher Columbus’s birth, 1451, western Europe was slowly advancing, inspired by ideas and art disseminated from Italy, but Genoa succumbed to waves of political instability. Two years later, the city suffered a commercial blow with the fall of Constantinople, bringing with it a steady decline in Mediterranean commerce. During Columbus’s earliest years, the French fortunes revived, and in 1458, when Christopher was seven years old, the Genoese doge ceded Genoa to King Charles VII of France, reaping a personal fortune from the sale of his kingdom to its enemies. This outrageous turn of events came about because the rival Genoese factions preferred to invite a foreign power—the French—to rule rather than one side or the other. For once, Genoa hovered on the brink of peace.
After this victory, which could have led to political unification, the two main Genoese factions, the Fregoso and the Adorno, resumed battling each other. There were riots and assassinations, and civil strife that fed on itself and festered on the doorstep of the Columbus household.
In the fall of 1459, when Columbus was about to turn eight years old, he lived about fifty yards from Genoa’s Porta di Sant’Andrea, the scene of a violent confrontation. At that moment, the doge, Pietro Fregoso, after losing round after round of battles with the French, and further undercut by the rival Adornos, found himself cornered within the city walls, with only three knights for protection, the remnant of a once-formidable army. Galloping from one gate to another in search of freedom, he was confronted by his pursuers. One of them, Giovanni Cosa, caught up with him and struck him twice on the head with a deadly iron mace; Pietro, the doge, escaped this attack, only to confront a barrage of stones hurled at him from the rooftops. Unable to flee the city, the wounded leader rode uncertainly to his palace, where he collapsed and died within hours. Soon after, his body was returned to the street, where his political enemies gathered to dismember his corpse. Meanwhile, his troops, along with his brother Massimo, also tried to flee, only to meet with similarly appalling executions.
One hundred yards from the spot where the corpse of the doge Pietro was mutilated lived the Columbus family, in Vico Dritto di Ponticello, in a house owned by Domenico. It was possible that the young boy witnessed the gruesome event—stoning, the mutilation—and heard the shouts of the bloodthirsty victors. And if he was aware of the outrage, he would have had reason to tremble with dread, because his father, Domenico, was allied with the Fregoso faction, and his fortunes declined with theirs.
Then a way out of the deadly rivalry presented itself.
Milan’s ruler, Francesco Sforza, with the support of Genoese citizens who had sickened of the internecine political warfare, won appointment in 1463 as lord of the city. Compared with the ceaseless strife that had preceded it, Sforza’s regime was a great success, a time of relative peace and prosperity. Yet the Sforza clan demonstrated little appreciation of Genoa’s distinguishing feature: its maritime trade. Neglected, Genoese shipping withered, and the few colonies the city had acquired were lost; the Genoese empire, always tentative and fragile, dwindled until even Corsica’s surpassed it. The prospects for ambitious navigators and explorers such as Christopher Columbus vanished.
Coming of age as an outcast in his hometown, and taking to the sea at an early age, Columbus devoted the rest of his life struggling to replace this lost empire. At first personal, the search turned political, and drove Columbus farther than he ever imagined, beyond Italy and Europe, beyond the Mediterranean, England, and Iceland, beyond the Canaries, all the way to the New World. Only an epic quest could match his ambition; nothing less would suffice. What began as recovery would end as discovery.
In Columbus’s youth, Genoa was in the throes of a rapid transformation. Shops, warehouses, stables, and markets piled atop each other in raucous and foul-smelling confusion. The wooden houses characteristic of the medieval era gave way to stone dwellings with tiled floors, massive fireplaces, and loggias arrayed along the narrow, winding streets called carrugi. The newer homes contained bathrooms with washbasins, bowls, and jugs with water, and soap in ivory boxes from Savona. In Columbus’s time, sailors aboard ships in the mandraccio gazed upward to the west to the somber gray stone palaces highlighted with towers of reddish brown and vertiginous battlements.
It was one of the largest cities in western Europe, with a population approaching 75,000, the equal of London, Paris, or Venice. In prosperous times, the port churned with ships and travelers from Genoa’s most popular destinations, instantly distinguishable by their garb and dialect. Lombards stood apart from Tuscans and from Levantines in billowing breeches. Turks in their turbans clustered in small groups, as did Greeks, recognizable from their short pleated blouses known as fustanellas. Catalans were readily identified by the barretinas they wore on their heads; Sardinians in black breeches and hood, and a loose white shirt, easily stood out.
Clothing worn by the Genoese was strictly regulated by the Office of Virtue, beginning in 1439. The Office enforced a series of sumptuary laws to regulate morality by curbing luxury and excess, as well as prostitution. These laws limited the amount of money Genoese could spend on luxury items, and even on weddings, limited to fifty guests. They regulated the days on which prostitutes, a staple of Genoese nightlife, could roam the streets. They measured their time with clients by the half hour, marked by a flickering candle. “Girls with a candle,” as the prostitutes were known, were forbidden to enter a cemetery or approach a church, and had to wear insignia indicating their profession. If caught out of bounds, the prostitutes were punished by having their noses amputated, and their livelihood ruined.
The same Office of Virtue governing matters of dress and prostitution also regulated marital transactions; romance rarely entered into the equation. Married women were meant to maintain their homes; they were supposed to be as somber as their husbands. Given half a chance, the Genoese could be lavish spenders, especially when it came to weddings, but ultimately rules and regulations prevailed, down to the smallest details.
Sumptuary laws dictated that men wore sober gray attire. Red and purple were out of bounds. The value of jewelry and dresses owned by women was sharply limited, and if it exceeded the prescribed limit, the owners were fined. Fines extended to personal conduct, as well. A woman who committed adultery was fined thirty lire; if she failed to pay, she was beheaded. A husband who put his wife out on the street to make room for a lover was fined twenty-five lire. Marriages occurred when women—girls, actually—reached age fifteen, the bargain sealed with a handshake, and the bride not present, only the family representatives, notary, and matchmaker. In Genoa, a deal was a deal, whether for love or money.
Slavery was deeply woven into the fabric of the Genoese economy, especially traffic in girls who were only thirteen or fourteen years old. Every Genoese household, even modest ones, had one or two female slaves. Although Christianity prohibited bondage, an exception was made for these non-Christian slaves; they were Russian, Arab, Mongol, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Albanian, and Chinese. Slave traders and pirates sold them on a regular basis to Genoa; occasionally their wide net included a Christian girl, whom they kidnapped and would return for a high ransom. The transactions were formal, notarized and deeded. Most slaves were sold “as is.” If others, whose health had been guaranteed, developed epilepsy or other health problems, the owner demanded an annulment of the contract. Some cautious buyers kept the girl of their choice on a trial basis to judge whether she would remain charming and adapt to a life of slavery in Genoa. Once acquired by a Genoese master, girls became mere property, bound to gratify his sexual wants, as well as those of his friends. Merchants able to afford a concubine, and many in this prosperous city could, maintained them in households separate from their families. The master of the house specified the terms of the arrangement with the local notary public, especially concerning sensitive matters such as inheritance rights for children born out of wedlock.
Not all slaves were obedient, and occasionally one attempted to escape, or even poison her master. If caught, she would be subjected to prolonged torture until she confessed her crimes, and in addition, confessed to witchcraft and heresy. She was then subjected to the “penance of fire,” that is, burned at the stake. Less serious infractions committed by the slaves met with frequent lashings in private. This was the slavery with which Christopher Columbus was familiar.
Merchants gathered around the Piazza Banchi, Genoa’s commercial center, dotted with the scagni, or stalls, of bankers, money changers, and moneylenders, who did business with customers at a counter using a scale for weighing gold and silver. Heavily laden mules trudged through narrow winding streets, with large bales of goods strapped tightly to their backs. Some mules bore sacks of woven jute—zerbini—on either flank, similar to saddlebags, as they made their way between impossibly tall houses, the monotonous shade occasionally broken by sunlight pouring down from a garden or a flower-bedecked sundeck. In hot weather and in cold, the constricted streets sent up a stench consisting of dung, spices, tar employed in caulking the leaky ships, and the grease used by tanners to preserve and soften stiff hides. Amid the reek, bastagi, or porters, loaded and unloaded the wares carried by the mules off and on the ships. Their racket reverberated off the stones of Genoa, a cacophony composed of hammers beating hot iron on cool anvil, of the softer thud of mallets on barrel hoops, of piercing commands delivered to the ships’ crews, and of sailors chanting as they rowed or coiled ropes. Peddlers sang odes to their fish, their cloth, their fruit, anything they hoped to turn into money, and behind them, shopkeepers patiently waited for seagoing customers. Guilds for sailmakers, caulkers, coopers, carpenters, lantern makers, welders of anchors and cannon, and other trades associated with shipbuilding and maintenance clustered around the base of the docks.
The city’s mind and heart, no less than its economy, focused on the sea. “The Genoese, while loving the family above himself, was always ready to leave it behind to cross the seas to foreign countries,” the Genoese historian Emilio Pandiani has written. “He was a trader and navigator first.”
In the cramped harbor, the ships, the focus of Genoa’s pride and commercial frenzy, jostled for space and attention. They consisted mostly of traditional galleys distinguished by a row of oars on either side, each oar powered by five or six oarsmen. More than a hundred oarsmen were at the ready if the wind died, under the command of the pilot, or comito. When necessary, they crowded on deck with body-length shields bearing brilliant coats of arms, to form a human shield against attack. Others carried bows and arrows, and catapults for throwing “Greek fire”—probably blazing petroleum—along with devices for grappling and boarding other craft in battle. On the forecastle, near the prow, engines of war known as mangonels stood ready. These were giant slingshots capable of bombarding an enemy with a lethal array of objects, including stones and firebombs.
Galleys extended to well over one hundred feet in length, and at the widest part ranged from twelve to fifteen feet. Their keels and decks were usually fashioned from oak. They sported two tall, slender masts, seventy-five feet high, both rigged with triangular sails at an angle to the mast. The distinctive, highly maneuverable lateen, or Latin, sail is believed to have originated with Roman vessels as early as the third century AD, although they have long been identified with daring Arab sailors, especially pirates raiding vulnerable European or African coastlines. The principal types of galleys with which Columbus was familiar were the narrow, maneuverable galley known as the zenzil, and the bastard galley, distinguished by a round stern and greater width. The former were generally used for battle and the latter for transport and trade.
Personnel consisted of the captain, or patrono; the pilot; a ship’s clerk; a gunsmith, or insegnator; carpenters and caulkers to maintain the ship; a barber who doubled as a surgeon; a barrel keeper to mind the precious stores of water; a waiter and many other servants; a cook; twenty jack-of-all-trades sailors; weapons specialists; and several ship’s boys. In Columbus’s youth, most oarsmen were freemen, later supplanted with slaves or prisoners condemned to hard labor. Under this grim regimen, oarsmen-slaves were chained to rowing benches and tortured by an overseer’s stinging whip while a whistle marked time. It was aboard such ships that Genoese navigators such as Columbus learned their harsh trade.
As an apprentice seaman, Columbus likely participated in maritime expeditions along the Ligurian Riviera, extending as far west along the sparkling cobalt Mediterranean Sea as Nice, as far east as the town of Porto Venere in the province of La Spezia, and as far south as Corsica, the fourth-largest island in the Mediterranean and a prized colony of Genoa.
He later sailed a thousand miles to the Greek island of Chios in the Aegean Sea. Despite its distance from Liguria, Chios was tightly controlled by the Genoese. Although outnumbered ten to one, the commercial invaders retained their hold by allowing religious freedom for the inhabitants while exploiting the island for its economic potential by means of a financial organization known as a maona, overseen by a chief magistrate, or podestá, appointed by Genoa. With this system, the Genoese established trading posts and warehouses for profitable commodities such as salt and pitch. They also traded in “Chios tears,” the ivory-colored resin that dripped from the mastic trees (Pistacia lentiscus) dotting the hillsides. (With its smoky, astringent taste, mastic is still used for chewing gum.)
By the time Columbus returned from Chios, his father had moved the family residence from Vico Dritto di Ponticello to the nearby hills of Savona, perhaps because he was allied with the losing faction in Genoa’s political strife, or, just as likely, for the sake of a safer environment.
Columbus was soon aboard the ship Bechalla, carrying a cargo of mastic from Chios, bound for Portugal, Flanders, and England. It was May 1476, and he was almost twenty-five years old. Military conflict embroiled many of the Mediterranean states; in response, Genoa dispatched ships in convoys. The one in which he found himself included three galleys, a battleship, and Bechalla, with a crew from Liguria. Despite his age, he probably shipped out as an ordinary seaman.
August 13 found the convoy off the coast of Portugal when a massive fleet of French and Portuguese ships under the command of Guillaume de Casenove, a daring privateer (or naval mercenary), suddenly struck. In theory, Genoa and France were at peace, and Casenove had no cause for attack, but he could always find a technicality to justify his aggression. Although outnumbered, the Genoese bravely grappled with the enemy, that is, they harnessed themselves to their attackers, and attempted to defeat them in hand-to-hand combat. At day’s end, three Genoese and four enemy ships had been sunk in battle, with a loss of life in the hundreds. The surviving craft fled for safe harbors. Bechalla was not among them.
When Columbus’s ship sank, he jumped into the sea. Few sailors prided themselves on their swimming ability at that time, and his best hope was rescue, or, failing that, grabbing onto some buoyant piece of shipwreck. This Columbus did. At times he pushed it as he swam to shore, and when he was too tired to swim, he climbed atop it to rest. He was wounded, exactly how and where is not clear, and the injury deepened his exhaustion and desperation. Eventually he covered six miles, perhaps the longest six miles he would ever travel, to the shore and the ancient town of Lagos, at the extreme southeastern edge of Portugal, not far from the city of Sagres, originally the “Sacrum Promontorium” in Latin, or Holy Promontory, that offered refuge to sailors about to round Cape St. Vincent, the most westerly point of the Iberian Peninsula. It was here, at Sagres, that Prince Henry the Navigator had gathered an eclectic group of followers—mariners, cosmologists, and shipbuilders—a generation earlier. It is difficult to imagine the castaway Columbus, grasping the lumber of his lost ship, washing up on a more propitious location than this narrow, windswept plateau reaching into the Atlantic. Accustomed to studying natural phenomena for signs and premonitions, sailors are by nature superstitious, and Columbus was no exception. It seemed as if fate, in the form of the shipwreck, was lifting the ambitious young mariner out of Genoa and positioning him at the brink of the unknown.
The inhabitants of Lagos treated shipwrecked sailors such as Columbus humanely, and when he recovered from his ordeal, he traveled to Lisbon, where he found refuge in the city’s Genoese colony.
The following year he undertook an even more hazardous journey, this time to the north. “I sailed in the year 1477, in the month of February, a hundred leagues beyond the island of Tile”—mostly likely “Thule,” or Iceland, which maintained trade with Lisbon—“and to this island, which is as big as England, come English with their merchandise, especially those from Bristol. And at the season when I was there, the sea was not frozen, but the tides were so great that in some places they rose 26 braccia”—about fifty feet, in his estimation—“and fell as much in depths.” It is unlikely that Columbus experienced anything like a fifty-foot tide, unless he confronted a giant tsunami triggered by one of the frequent volcanic eruptions in the vicinity of Iceland. On this or another voyage he traveled to Ireland, where he encountered “men of Cathay,” that is, China. In Galway, he reported seeing “a man and a woman of extraordinary appearance in two boats adrift.” Who were they? Where had they originated? Were they Asian, or some other unknown people?
In the spring of 1477, Portugal was heavily committed to exploration, and, with its critical shortage of labor, desperate for new worlds, and their inhabitants, to conquer and exploit. Portuguese expeditions had already settled the Azores, off Africa’s west coast, as early as 1439, and were heading farther south. The age of exploration was under way.
The capital city, and Portugal’s chief seaport, was approaching its zenith. Alfonso V had ceded power to his son, João II, in 1476, and the transition ushered in an era of expansion unlike anything in the country’s history. In sumptuous Lisbon, Columbus observed the distinctive caravels that became the chief vessel of exploration, a hybrid of square- and lateen-rigged sails, developed decades before under the patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator. These sturdy, maneuverable ships were able to sail into the wind, and so withstand storms, and tides, and they carried Portuguese explorers far and wide. Near the docks, he could overhear familiar languages as varied as Icelandic, English, Spanish, Genoese, Flemish, as well as African idioms new to his ear. At any given moment, ships of a dozen lands unloaded their cargo of fragrant spices and took on provisions for their next voyage. In the background, Italian, Portuguese, and Jewish financiers bankrolled the enterprises, as João II, ensconced in his palace nearby, looked on with an approving, if covetous, gaze.
Accustomed to the rigors of Genoa and the hazards of the Mediterranean, Columbus could have been excused for believing he had arrived in a kind of exploration heaven. Unlike the relatively confined ports to which he was accustomed, Lisbon was located at the mouth of the river Tagus, where it emptied into the Atlantic. A favorable wind carried ships over a sandbar and into the vastness of the open ocean. To the north, Iceland and England; to the south, the Azores and Africa. No one knew what lay to the west, but across Europe, theories promoted by kings and clergy and cosmologists argued that a fleet sailing west would eventually reach the distant lands visited by Marco Polo two centuries before: China, Asia, India. The first European country to do so would have an enormous strategic and economic advantage over all its rivals.
By the time he ascended to the Portuguese throne in 1481, King João was twenty-six years old (four years younger than Columbus), and prepared to rule. His father had bequeathed to him a consolidated but virtually bankrupt state, which the young king proposed to expand into an empire. Even before he came to power, he had worked alongside his father, familiarizing himself with the throne’s expanding interests in Africa, and leading the rapidly expanding Junta dos Mathemáticos, charged with coordinating the kingdom’s exploration on land and sea. He reformed taxation, restored solvency to the Portuguese crown, and, emulating his great-uncle Prince Henry the Navigator, revived the expansion of the Portuguese empire.
He is remembered as the “Perfect Prince” by historians and students of the Portuguese monarchy, after Niccolò Machiavelli’s ruthless prescription for the exercise of power. More tellingly, João II earned the sobriquet “The Tyrant,” a violent despot who was despised and envied by his nobles. To cite but a few instances of his arbitrary exercise of power, he ordered all those with castles to submit their titles to the crown for confirmation, which could be granted or withheld. He dispatched representatives of the crown to supervise the nobles’ administration of their estates. And he presided over the abolition of bureaucratic offices that gave the nobility jurisdiction over the legal affairs of their districts. That was just the beginning. He gutted two of the most powerful Portuguese dynasties, the house of Viseu and the house of Braganza. The Braganzas were the largest landowners in all of Portugal, and Fernando II, the Duke of Braganza, controlled a private army of ten thousand men and three thousand horses. The Duke of Viseu was, among his many other titles, estates, and offices, the lord of Portugal’s newly established offshore outposts of Madeira Island and the Azores, and as such posed an obstacle to the crown’s imperial aspirations.
In the first instance, João II rocked his kingdom by executing a potential rival for the throne, Fernando II of Braganza. In this case, letters had come to light showing a subversive liaison between Fernando II and the sovereigns of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. The Duke of Braganza was quickly seized, put on trial for treason, and after the inevitable guilty verdict, beheaded. Later, the Braganza estates were confiscated, and the surviving members of the dynasty fled to the kingdom of Castile for safety. Soon after, João II turned his attention to another perceived enemy, concluding that his cousin, Infante Diogo, Duke of Viseu, planned to overthrow him. In this case, he dispensed with a trial and personally stabbed him to death. What made the death all the more shocking was that their families were related; João II’s wife was Leonor of Viseu.
This was the lethal milieu into which Columbus stumbled. Although he had begun to master the sea, and proved himself fearless in command of a ship, he had a lot to learn about people, power, and politics. He could plot a course with ease, but lacked the ability to flatter a king. The title of a chapter chosen by his son Ferdinand for a biography of the Admiral reflected Columbus’s self-centered approach: “How the Admiral Grew Angry with the King of Portugal, to Whom He Had Offered to Discover the Indies.” To anyone familiar with the Portuguese court, to say nothing of navigation, this statement was outrageous. One did not dare to grow angry with this king, who was prone to sudden violence. Nor did one offer to “discover the Indies,” as if that were a straightforward demand. One humbly petitioned for backing to attempt a voyage of exploration in the king’s name. And of course Columbus never did fulfill his proposed objective. As deft and decisive on the water as he was clumsy and awkward on land, he urged the king to see things his way, to approve a sea route to Asia, but João stubbornly looked to other explorers and to the east rather than the west. Diogo Cáo won his backing to explore central Africa in 1482, and five years later, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the name of Portugal.
Columbus spent eight years in Lisbon trying to make his vision of exploration a reality, and records of his time there are sketchy, when they exist at all. The Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, destroyed records and other priceless artifacts pertaining both to him and to much of Lisbon’s history. A few particulars survive, however. The first was his allusion—in the pages of the diary of the first voyage—to his participation in the thriving Portuguese slave trade. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive on Africa’s west coast, Guinea, and the explorer Antão Gonçalves became the first Portuguese to buy slaves there. The Portuguese considered themselves entitled to own slaves by papal decree. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V authorized the Portuguese king, Alfonso V, to enslave “Saracens”—that is, Muslims—“pagans and any other unbelievers,” an entitlement he confirmed in a papal bull three years later, in case there was any lingering question about his intentions.
The early Portuguese slave trade assumed several forms, from inherited slavery to indentured servitude: forced labor for a fixed period of time, occasionally with modest wages. This was the form of slavery with which Columbus was familiar. He briefly wrote about his experimenting with importing entire families from Guinea to Portugal, not just men, and his disappointment that the experiment did not ensure greater loyalty or cooperation among the slaves. The problem, as Columbus saw it, was the Babel of tongues spoken in Guinea. His experience with the Portuguese slave trade prepared him to look on the Indians he encountered as potential slaves. Were they energetic? Cooperative? Strong enough to endure crossing the Atlantic and colder climates? Were they more valuable as slaves or as Christian converts?
During his years in Lisbon, Columbus was joined by his brother Bartholomew, ten years his junior. An acquaintance, Andrés Bernáldez, formerly of Seville, characterized Bartholomew at this time as a “hawker of printed books, who carried on his trade in this land of Andalusia,” as well as a “man of great intelligence though with little book learning, very skilled in the art of cosmography and the mapping of the world.”
A knowledgeable dealer in maps, Bartholomew set up business in Lisbon and made Christopher a partner. It is likely that conversations between the two helped him to refine his theories about sailing to China, without clearing up the fundamental misconceptions bequeathed to Renaissance Europe by Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, whose map, lacking both the Pacific Ocean and the Americas, gained credibility partly because it portrayed the world as Europeans of the time—not just Columbus—wanted to see it, smaller and more manageable than it actually was, with India, its spices, and the Grand Khan all within reach. Had Columbus, along with the rest of western Europe, known of the true dimensions of the globe, it is doubtful that he would have proposed sailing halfway around it to India, or that any monarch would have backed the enterprise.
In partnership with Bartholomew, Christopher moved among Lisbon’s small but influential Genoese colony, regarded as tough and capable in business. Genoese expatriates and opportunists had long exploited routes into other societies. They intermarried, they changed their names, they learned the local languages, they served local authorities—whatever it took to gain status and respect.
One Sunday, Columbus attended Mass at Lisbon’s Convento dos Santos, the Convent of All Saints, where he noticed a young woman of about nineteen—or, as it is recorded in more sentimental accounts of their meeting, she noticed his devotion. Her name was Felipa Moñiz, the daughter of a wellborn Italian, Bartolomeo Perestrello, who had been active in the colonization of Madeira Island, and his wife Caterina Visconti. Circumstances suggest that Columbus was in search of a wellborn wife at the time. The Convento dos Santos was maintained by nuns charged with providing for the wives and daughters of those fighting in distant lands. Here he might have a chance to meet a woman who answered to his ambition in one of the few approved places for bachelors to encounter eligible young women. Scant details of the courtship survive, and his son Ferdinand offers only conventional reassurances about his father’s conduct: “Inasmuch as he behaved very honorably, and was a man of such fine presence, and withal so honest, that she held such conversation with him and enjoyed such friendship with him that she became his wife.”
She beheld, according to a description written much later by his son Ferdinand, a “well built man of more than medium stature, long visaged with cheeks somewhat high, but neither fat nor thin. He had an aquiline nose and his eyes were light in color; his complexion too was light, but kindling to a vivid red. In his youth his hair was blond”—or, in some accounts, reddish in hue—“but when it came to his thirtieth year it all turned white. In eating and drinking and the adornment of his person he was always continent and modest. Among strangers his conversation was affable, and with members of his household very pleasant, but with modest and pleasing dignity.”
He was, as his son took pains to note, extremely pious. “In matters of religion he was so strict that for fasting and saying all the canonical offices he might have been taken for a member of a religious order. And he was so great an enemy to cursing and swearing, that I never heard him utter any other oath than, ‘By San Fernando!’” If true, Columbus’s aversion to foul language made him an absolute rarity among men of the sea. “When he was angry with anyone, his reprimand was to say, ‘May God take you!’ for doing or saying that. And when he had to write anything, he would not try the pen without first writing these words, Jesus cum Maria sit nobis in via, and in such fair letters that he might have gained his bread by them alone.” This is one of the most detailed and accurate physical descriptions of Columbus to survive, idealized by filial piety, yet perceptive.
It was, for Columbus, a strikingly advantageous match. The son of a weaver, tavern keeper, and local politician allied with the losing faction in Genoese politics suddenly enjoyed promising connections and standing in the exclusive world of Portuguese nobility and exploration. Although Genoa was known for being antiroyalist, he let stand the mistaken impression that he was somehow allied with Genoese nobility. (Eventually his air of mystery would lead to speculative fantasies about his origins: Portuguese, or Jewish, or Catalan. It would be left to his son Ferdinand—his earliest biographer—to offer corrections, later confirmed by historians.)
Felipa had more authentic connections to nobility. On her mother’s side, she traced a relationship to the Portuguese royal family from the twelfth century. Her grandfather Gil Ayres Moñiz had ruled a wealthy estate in the Algarve region of Portugal, a prize wrested with difficulty from Arabs who had controlled it, and he had fought alongside Prince Henry the Navigator in the Battle of Ceuta in 1415. The Genoese navigator with the red or blond hair appeared capable of taking his place in their midst, bold and capable of bringing new wealth from somewhere—Greece? Asia? Africa?—to the family and taking his place beside his wife’s distinguished ancestors. With royal patronage assured by his marriage into the Portuguese elite, Columbus could be forgiven for thinking that the way was clear: discovery, acquiring distant lands and glorious titles, and the dutiful creation of a large family to inherit them and perpetuate his name.
On her father’s side, Felipa brought even more interesting, if complex, credentials. The Perestrellos were known as much for their indiscretions and illegitimate children as they were for their political and ecclesiastic connections. Bartolomeo married several times, and Felipa was the product of his second or, according to some accounts, third union. Her siblings consisted of Bartolomeo junior and a sister, Violante, with whom Columbus was said to have enjoyed cordial relations. According to well-established legend, Columbus’s father-in-law had been granted rights to tiny Porto Santo, lying thirty miles northeast of Madeira Island, by Prince Henry the Navigator. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was personally acquainted with—and deeply conflicted about—the subject of his scholarly inquiries, surmises that Perestrello possessed instruments, maps, and charts of his realm that eventually came into Columbus’s possession, and “from seeing and reading which, he received much pleasure.” Perestrello was not known to have any experience or ability with seafaring, and even if this account is highly embellished, it does appear that Prince Henry gave Perestrello hereditary control of tiny Porto Santo as a result of manipulation rather than bold exploration. It is possible that Columbus considered Porto Santo a staging area from which to launch his own expedition when the time was right. Here was a paradigm in miniature for his own, more grandiose ambitions: find an island, claim it for king and country, and exploit it for personal and dynastic benefit.
After the nuptials, Columbus and Felipa moved into the house of his prominent in-laws. Felipa became all but invisible to posterity, and there is no evidence to suggest that theirs was an affair of the heart. But the other Perestrellos endowed Columbus, a rough-and-ready sailor from Genoa, with a new context in which to pursue his career, thanks to his mother-in-law, who, Las Casas recounted, “realized that Columbus had a passion for the sea and for cosmography, as men who are possessed of a passion for something talk about it night and day.” So she told him how “her husband Perestrello had a great passion for things of the sea and how he had voyaged, at the request of Prince Henry [the Navigator] and in the company of two other knights, to settle the island of Porto Santo, discovered but a few days previously.” Porto Santo became the founding of Perestrello’s fortune and renown: an object lesson for the newly married Columbus.
His mother-in-law gave her late husband’s “instruments, documents, and navigation charts” to Columbus as if passing a scepter from one generation to another, and eventually he found himself living on his father-in-law’s demesne, Porto Santo, where Columbus’s wife gave birth to their firstborn son, Diego.
On Porto Santo and its newly discovered neighbor, Madeira Island, “there were a great many vessels bringing settlers and much talk of fresh discoveries that were being made every day.” Las Casas relates that Columbus talked with seamen returning from the “western seas” who had “visited the Azores and Madeira and other islands.” One in particular, a man named Martin, “a pilot in the service of the Portuguese crown,” told an intriguing tale. When 450 leagues west of Cape Vincent, “he sighted a piece of wood floating near his ship, and, fishing it out of the sea, discovered it was ingeniously carved, though not, as far as he could judge, with iron implements. Since the wind had for several days been blowing from the west he supposed that the piece of wood originated from some island or islands that lay to the west.”
Tantalizing sightings of exotic lands abounded. A “one-eyed sailor” claimed that during a voyage to Ireland he had caught a glimpse of the “Tartary,” or central Asia, “as it curved around to the west, but foul weather prevented them from reaching it.” Whatever that one-eyed sailor thought he saw, it was probably not central Asia, but it did not yet exist on European maps. And then there was the “seaman from Galicia called Pedro de Velasco who, in a conversation he had with Christopher Columbus in Murcia”—a city in southern Spain—“mentioned a voyage to Ireland on which he had sailed and which went so far to the northwest that they came across land to the west of Ireland.” Perhaps Iceland, or Nova Scotia, or some imaginary continent that existed somewhere between geography and mythology. An expedition was needed to decide which it was. Columbus learned of a wealthy merchant of Genoa, Luca di Cazana, who was badgered by a Portuguese pilot, Vicente Dias, into backing three or four expeditions in search of a mysterious island, “sailing over a hundred leagues and finding nothing.” After such failures, both pilot and sponsor gave up hope of “finding the land in question.” And two other expeditions with the same avowed goal both disappeared, “leaving behind not a trace.”
Another seaman, Pedro Correa, married to the sister of Columbus’s wife, corroborated Martin the pilot’s story. He swore, says Las Casas, that “he also came across a piece of wood that had been carried there by the winds from the same quarter and that it, too, had been carved in a similar fashion.” Not only that, but he had seen “canes so thick that one joint of such a cane could hold over six liters of water or of wine.” Columbus said that he heard the same story from the king of Portugal. It seemed to Columbus that King João “was persuaded that these canes had come from some island or islands not far off to the west, or that they had been carried by the wind and the current all the way from India itself, for they were quite unlike anything that was known in Europe.” He also heard about pine trees washing ashore on islands in the Atlantic, “although no pine trees grow anymore throughout the Azores.” Still more tantalizing, there was a story in circulation about the bodies of two men washed up in the Azores, who had “very broad faces and features quite different from those of Christians.”
Add to that enticing tale reports of rafts, described as “Indian canoes with houses on board,” and the entire world seemed to invite discovery and speculation. These random floating objects were as strange and enigmatic as meteorites from distant worlds touching down to earth. Something strange was out there. “All such tales certainly fanned the flames of Christopher Columbus’s interest in the whole business,” Las Casas remarked, “and they show God nudging him along in the same direction.” It took one incident in particular, the “clinching factor,” as Las Casas put it, and forever after the subject of controversy, to crystallize in Columbus’s mind. It began with a vessel from Spain bound for Flanders or possibly England, being violently blown off course, as if in a fairy tale or in a nightmare, and discovering an island.
The crew barely survived the ordeal, only to perish on the way home to Spain. “Most of them died of hunger and disease brought on by overwork and the few that survived as far as the island of Madeira were ill when they arrived and all soon died there.” Columbus “got wind of the whole incident from the poor wretches who made it back to Madeira or from the pilot himself.” The story goes that he might have invited the pilot to stay with him, and be debriefed, until he expired within the walls of Columbus’s dwelling. Before the end, the pilot supposedly gave his host a “detailed account of everything that had happened and left him a written record of the bearings the vessel had followed, the route they had taken, the distances they had covered, the degrees of longitude and latitude involved, and the exact place they had found the island.” Given the impossibility of determining longitude at the time, the “exact place” of the island was highly questionable.
One of the most persuasive accounts of distant lands came from the pen of “Master Paolo,” a Florentine physician, who maintained an extensive network of correspondence with informed sources in the Portuguese court. Learning of these bulletins, Columbus cultivated the physician by sending a globe through a Florentine intermediary, Lorenzo Girardi, who lived in Lisbon. After passing along this tangible symbol of exploration, Columbus announced his own grand scheme for exploration and trade in precious items such as spices. Impressed, Master Paolo replied in Latin with a summary of his knowledge of China and its riches, which advanced Columbus’s understanding of the fabled land from an emerging global perspective. “Do not marvel at my characterizing the region as ‘the West,’” he counseled Columbus, “when these lands are commonly known as ‘the East,’ for any man who sails westward will always find these lands to the west, just as he who sets out overland to the east will find them in the east.” And he included a chart illustrating what he meant.
Master Paolo expounded on China and its numerous merchants. “There are as many ships, seamen, and merchants in the area as in any other part of the world.” In the city of “Zaiton,” by which he probably meant Hangzhou, the wealthy capital of southern China, “every year a hundred large ships load and unload their cargoes of pepper, not to mention the many others that carry spices of other lands.” He also informed Columbus of a “sovereign known as the Grand Khan, a name which in our own tongue”—Italian—“means king of kings.” The ancestors of this Khan, Paolo recounted, “greatly desired to have contact and dealings with Christians, and, some two hundred years ago, sent an embassy to the Holy Father asking him to send them a large number of learned and wise men who might instruct them in our faith, but those who were sent were forced to return home because of difficulties they encountered along the way.” As Paolo continued his tale, it became apparent that he relied heavily on Marco Polo’s popular account, which concerned the Venetian’s adventures in Asia from 1279 to 1295, and on the stories of a Chinese ambassador. In the physician’s telling, the events of two centuries before seemed to be happening in the present as he wove the two eras into a tapestry of royal palaces, rivers of great length and breadth, “vast numbers of cities” dotting their banks (in one case, two hundred cities along the length of a single river), “broad bridges made entirely of marble and adorned with marble pillars” over which flowed spices, precious stones, gold, silver, and many other “things of great value.”
How to get there? Simple, according to Master Paolo the physician: “From the city, in a line directly to the west, there are twenty-six spaces marked on the map, each representing two hundred and fifty miles, before you arrive at the most noble city of Quinsay”—Marco Polo’s distinctive name for the capital city of Hangzhou, and a dead giveaway of Master Paolo’s source—“which is a hundred miles in circumference,” and, in the same breath, of “Çipango,” Marco Polo’s name for Japan. “This island is most rich in gold and pearls and precious stones, and you should know that the temples and royal palaces are covered in solid gold.” Once again, getting there posed no problem to the initiated. “Because the route is unknown, all these things are hidden from us, even though one can voyage there without danger or difficulty.”
Columbus responded that he could find this extraordinary realm by sailing along a route indicated on a map supplied by Master Paolo, who was, it bears repeating, no navigator. Elated by the endorsement, he replied, “I am gratified to find my map so well understood and to learn that such a voyage is not only theoretically possible but will now become a fact and a source of honor and estimable gain and the greatest fame among all Christian men.” As if he were dispatching Columbus himself, he promised a voyage of “powerful kingdoms and noble cities and the richest of provinces abounding in all manner of goods that are much in demand,” not to mention spices and gems, rulers even more eager to have contact with the West than the West was to have contact with them, to exchange wisdom, knowledge, and religion. “I do not wonder that you, as a man of great courage,” Master Paolo wrote to Columbus, “should find your heart inflamed with the desire to put this enterprise into effect.”
Columbus enlarged upon these clues of undiscovered western islands with scholarly efforts of his own. He studied Ptolemy’s influential Geography, which had reached Europe from Constantinople in about AD 1400. In 1406–1409, Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia translated the text into Latin. It became the first book to be printed with engraved illustrations, in an edition published in Bologna dating from 1477, and was subsequently translated into several European languages. Ptolemy’s cartography was both inspiring and greatly misleading. Ptolemy, who lived in the second century AD, underestimated the size of the world by one-sixth. He did not know of the existence of the American continent, or of the Pacific Ocean, the largest body of water on the planet. The problem of determining longitude had yet to be solved, and would not be until the late eighteenth century. For all these reasons, relying on Ptolemy’s Geography proved as deceptive as it was inspirational.
Somewhere, at the confluence of Ptolemy’s flawed cartography, the legends of antiquity, Marco Polo’s account, and sailors’ anecdotes lay clues of a great prize waiting to be discovered. Columbus had his plan, and now he needed the backing of a powerful royal sponsor, and money.
Living in Portugal with his well-connected Portuguese wife, Columbus naturally presented his proposal to the Portuguese king. By this time, Columbus considered himself all but Portuguese, although the Portuguese themselves preferred to regard him as an upstart Genoese mariner who had settled in Lisbon, one of the largest expatriate colonies of Genoese to be found anywhere. They remained suspicious of the outsiders like him flourishing in their midst.
Heedless of these considerations, and fired by the accounts he had gathered, Columbus pressed on, requesting that the king equip three caravels for the voyage, including chests filled with goods for barter such as cloth from Flanders, hawk’s bells, brass basins, sheet brass, strings of glass beads of several different colors, small mirrors, scissors, knives, needles, pins, canvas shirts, coarse-colored cloth, red caps—tools and trinkets for conquering the lands and peoples hiding in plain sight somewhere in the Western Sea.
These practical matters were easily accomplished. The personal demands that Columbus made of King João were far more onerous, and unrealistic. He wanted a title, preferably “Knight of the Golden Spurs,” that would permit him and his descendants to style themselves “Don.” He also wished for himself the grandest title he could think of: Admiral of the Ocean Sea, “with all the privileges of rank, prerogatives, rights, revenue, and immunities enjoyed by the admirals of Castile.”
Even to Portuguese ears, accustomed to overstatement, this description verged on the absurd. A tireless conversationalist and self-promoter, Columbus never knew when to stop, and he demanded appointment as “viceroy and governor in perpetuity of all the islands and terra firma discovered either personally by him or as a result of his voyage.” And he planned to award himself one-tenth of “all the moneys accruing to the crown in respect of gold, silver, pearls, gems, metals, spices, and all other articles of value and merchandise of whatever kind, nature, or variety, that should be purchased, bartered, discovered, or won in battle throughout the length and breadth of the lands under his jurisdiction.” It was clear that Columbus considered himself a partner of the crown’s exploration program, and potential ruler of a kingdom—moreover, a kingdom larger and wealthier than Portugal itself.
His megalomania did not go over well in the small, gossip-ridden Portuguese court. João de Barros, a court historian, portrayed the would-be Admiral of the Ocean Sea “as a big talker and boastful, full of fancy and imagination,” and so, “the king lent little credit to what he had to say.” Yet João II subsequently consulted three experts about Columbus’s claims: Dr. Calzadilla, Master Rodrigo, and Master Josepe, “the latter a Jew,” in Las Casas’s words. “The king placed great trust in these men when it came to questions of exploration and cosmography and they, according to our writer, regarded Columbus’s words as sheer vanity.” It would seem that an automatic refusal was inevitable. Instead, the king appeared to hesitate, and caused Columbus to wait for an answer.
The three experts consulted by the Portuguese king spent days questioning the navigator about his plan. Eager to impress, Columbus told all, and when they finished with him, João II proved to be as duplicitous as he was daring: he commissioned a clandestine expedition based on the information extracted from the Genoese mariner.
The deception continued. João II strung along Columbus while dispatching a supply caravel supposedly bound for Cape Verde and other islands, all the while delaying his official reply to Columbus. When the caravel limped home to Lisbon in appalling condition—with ripped sails and broken masts—the residents questioned the exhausted crew members. The survivors complained of the tempests they had endured at sea and declared it was impossible to reach land over a sea route. Once the voyage’s true purpose was exposed, King João’s subterfuge was apparent to all.
At this critical juncture, Columbus’s young wife, Felipa, died from unknown causes, or disappeared from view forever. A more skeptical tradition hinted that Columbus abandoned Felipa in Portugal, where her family connections had been useful, to try his luck in Spain, where they were not. Although the circumstances of her death, and even the year, remain unclear, his abrupt departure does not necessarily mean he deserted his wife; it is possible that he planned to send for her if he succeeded elsewhere. But it is even more likely that she did not survive, if only because she was never spoken of again.
He had devoted eight years to the great enterprise, with nothing to show for it but rejection and embarrassment. His youth had fled; he was turning forty—advanced middle age for a sea captain—with little to show for his years of wandering beyond unfulfilled ambition. He was a widower in a foreign land with deteriorating prospects and a young son in his care. His long, flowing hair turned white. There seemed to be little for which he could be grateful. But, given the dangers of the Portuguese court, and of the sea, he was fortunate to be alive.
Reluctantly he directed his ambition toward the other patrons of exploration, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, even as part of him wished he could one day return to Portugal in triumph. For now, he would seek his fortune in Castile.
Demoralized, he assigned responsibility for the expedition to his brother Bartholomew, and displaying a bit of guile himself, dispatched him to England, to plead with King Henry VII (the father of Henry VIII) for the backing denied by the enigmatic and recalcitrant Portuguese monarch.
To those who knew the Columbus brothers, the sudden transfer of power had a certain logic. Bartholomew’s reputation was that of a “very shrewd and courageous man, well versed in the ways of the world and most astute, more full of guile,” Las Casas judged, “than Christopher Columbus himself.” Bartholomew knew Latin, and “had much more experience in the ways of men.” He was reputed to be almost as skillful a navigator as Christopher, and more adept at fashioning charts and nautical instruments.
Overshadowed by his more celebrated son and successor, Henry VIII, Henry Tudor had won his throne by defeating Richard III on the field of battle, and founded the durable Tudor dynasty. He was, for a monarch of the epoch, prudent and responsible. Bartholomew Columbus flattered and cajoled his way into an audience with the king, and to win the sovereign’s favor he presented him with a mappa mundi, a Latin term indicating a sheet, or map, of the world, and on it were the lands that his brother Christopher planned to claim. The map contained a brief identification of its bearer in Latin: “He whose birthplace is Genoa and whose name is Bartolome Colon of Terrarubia, completed this work in London on the thirteenth day of the month of February in the year of our Lord one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight. Praise abounding be unto the Lord.”
Columbus, meanwhile, obtained a copy of a letter composed by the Florentine mapmaker and mathematician Toscanelli, dated June 24, 1474. Toscanelli spoke of a “shorter way of going by sea to the lands of spices, than that which you”—the Portuguese—“are making to Guinea.” A ship sailing due west from Lisbon, he claimed, would, after covering five thousand nautical miles, reach Quinsay, the opulent capital of China described by Marco Polo. There was more. Another sea route would take a ship to “the noble island of Çipango,” Marco Polo’s Japan, which, as readers of the Venetian’s enthusiastic account knew, was “most fertile in gold, pearls and precious stones, and they cover the temples and royal residences with solid gold.” If true, and that was an immense if, Portugal could forge an alliance with a country of unimaginable wealth. Even better, Toscanelli claimed, “By the unknown ways there are no great spaces of the sea to be passed.” This simple observation derived from a profound misunderstanding of the globe (and everyone knew it was a globe; there was little dispute about that point). Like Ptolemy before him, Toscanelli omitted the American continent and the Pacific Ocean—features that made such a voyage to Asia impossible.
Even more than Ptolemy, Toscanelli led Columbus to believe that the Caribbean was the doorstep to China. Sooner or later some country, and some monarch, was bound to succumb to the Columbus brothers’ siren song of empire.
As Bartholomew was appealing to King Henry, Christopher, revived by his studies, made his way to Spain to interest Ferdinand and Isabella in the same enterprise. But his initial reception in Spain proved so disappointing that late in 1487 he wrote to King João, who had spurned and humiliated him, to ask permission to return to Portugal.
Against all expectations, the Portuguese monarch replied on March 20, 1488, in conciliatory tones, thanking Columbus for his “good will and affection,” and, astonishingly, saying, “we will have great need of your ability and fine talent,” words certain to inflame Columbus’s ambition. The offer came with an assurance that “you will not be arrested, detained, accused, summoned, or prosecuted, for any reason whatsoever, under the civil and criminal code. Therefore, we beg you and urge you to come soon and not to be reluctant to do so for any reason whatsoever.”
Columbus arrived in Lisbon in 1488, at the same time Bartolomeu Dias, King João’s favored navigator of the moment, returned from his exploration of the coast of Africa. So Columbus endured the humiliation of watching his competitor surpass him in accomplishment and in the affections of King João. Had Columbus been set up? More likely the king summoned him as a substitute in case Dias never returned from his voyage, and Columbus, led by his ambition, his naiveté, and his vanity, had walked into the trap. He left Portugal again in 1488, bound for Spain, where he would make a determined effort to win backing for his enterprise. Humiliated and disappointed, he hoped never to see Portugal again.
Later, Columbus confessed to the sovereign who did back him, King Ferdinand of Spain, “I went to the king of Portugal, who was better versed in the matter of discoveries than any other sovereign, and the Lord blinded his eyes and deafened his ears so that for all of fourteen years he did not understand what I was saying.” But Ferdinand listened, and Isabella understood what Columbus was saying. To her ears, he was saying he could bring her the means to administer a transoceanic empire that would surpass that of any other European nation.
Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile met for the first time only five days before they married, on October 19, 1469, at the Palacio de los Vivero in Valladolid. He was almost a year younger than she, and on their wedding day, they were just eighteen and seventeen years of age, and cousins. She was not beautiful, and he was not handsome. But they were pious Christians. They were both children of kings of the Trastámara dynasty, and well-known figures. At the age of twelve, Ferdinand had led his soldiers to victory against the Catalans, and when his ambitious mother, Juana Enríquez, a Castilian, died of cancer in 1468, he delivered her eulogy and positioned himself as the next dynastic leader. Months later, representatives from Isabella sought him out and escorted him to Castile to marry.
From the start, theirs was an unusual arrangement that gave Isabella powers equal to, or in some cases greater than, those of her young husband. On terms agreed to by their legions of advisers, she alone ruled the kingdom of Castile in north central Spain. On the basis of their intricate official relationship, their union flourished. Ferdinand had his mistresses and Isabella had her religion for consolation. Whatever their private differences, they demonstrated publicly that they loved and respected each other, as was necessary to maintain their joint rule.
The early years of their reign were a time of testing for them both. They relied on more experienced advisers and intermediaries to rebuff challenges to their power and to their finances. Teetering on the brink of insolvency, they implemented novel methods of taxation, often from the sale of agricultural products, to finance their ambitions. One of the most dangerous tests materialized in 1476 when Alfonso, king of Portugal, invaded Castile with the help of Castilian nobles. The Sovereigns would not let the challenge stand. On March 1 of that year, King Ferdinand won a decisive victory over Alfonso in the wine-producing town of Toro, north of Madrid, and began the arduous task of consolidating the fragmented empire. Ferdinand and Isabella became known as Los Reyes Católicos, the Catholic Sovereigns, a sobriquet that would stay with them throughout their long reign.
In 1479, Ferdinand succeeded his father as king of Aragon, and the territories and kingdoms of Ferdinand and Isabella became one. Not since the eighth century had there existed a unified political entity that could be designated España, or Spain. Los Reyes Católicos did not rest on their laurels. They set about reclaiming political power from both the bourgeoisie and the nobility, and they circumscribed the authority of the Cortes, or General Courts, reduced to mere functionaries in the Sovereigns’ quest for glory. They won popular support for their efforts, and consolidated their power. Jews and Muslims, essential components of Spain’s commerce, intellectual life, and trade, would be the next to fall. It was perhaps significant that Isabella’s royal emblem was a sheaf of arrows, their sharp heads a warning to the perceived enemies of the throne, and that Ferdinand’s emblem was a double yoke worn by a team of oxen, signifying his acquiescence to Isabella’s authority.
As heresy spread across the realm, the Sovereigns’ representatives established the Inquisition in 1480 to bring the accused to trial. Some escaped with no more than the loss of their worldly goods; others were condemned to death. Fear of Ferdinand and Isabella increased, and under their prodding Spain seemed to recover some of its previous swagger and piety. As a potent symbol, the holy city of Jerusalem remained the ultimate spoil of war. Soon there was talk of reclaiming it to complete the unfinished business of the Crusades.
In 1480, Christian forces drove Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. More than fifty conquered Muslim cities entered the Christian fold within ten years. As mosques became churches, the conquests persisted, relying on artillery and battering rams to lay siege to one town after another. To fund this giant military operation, the Catholic Sovereigns turned to the pope, who permitted the crown to tithe in order to stay solvent. Taxes and obligatory loans also helped to replenish the royal coffers, but the most common method was the confiscation of the wealth of Jews and Muslims. Wealthy Seville was especially hard hit by the exigencies of the Inquisition.
Columbus appeared in the midst of this protracted struggle early in 1485, seeking the backing of Ferdinand and Isabella for an entirely new project, the discovery of a route over the ocean to the Indies. The thirty-four-year-old Genoese mariner’s prolonged dalliance with King João of Portugal had proved pointless, and his attempts to interest France and England in his imperial strategy also led nowhere. He had even returned to Genoa to try to generate interest in an expedition, but he met with little enthusiasm in his birthplace.
Discouraged, he had returned to Spain, where his grandiose plan struck a spark when he exhibited a map of the world showing India and other lands of the Grand Khan. According to his confidant Andrés Bernáldez, the demonstration “awakened in them a desire to know those lands.” Ferdinand obtained Ptolemy’s text, Geography, to see for himself just what Columbus was talking about.
Reconquista ground on slowly and relentlessly. Some provinces quietly submitted to Castilian rule and taxation; others stubbornly resisted. In 1487, one of the last remaining strongholds of resistance, Málaga, a port city on the southern coast of Spain, collapsed after a four-month siege, whereupon the Catholic Sovereigns enslaved and sold most of the residents, serving notice on others who would defy the will of Ferdinand and Isabella.
The greatest prize of all, Granada, gradually changed allegiance from Muslim to Christian. In November 1491, the sultan of Granada, his alternatives exhausted, arranged a surrender treaty in secret with Ferdinand and Isabella. On January 2, 1492, Spanish forces occupied the Alhambra, the fourteenth-century “Red Fortress” that had served as the residence for the last Muslim emirs, or sheikhs, of southern Spain; four days later, Ferdinand and Isabella made a dramatic entry into Granada. Columbus claimed he was there to see history in the making that day. “I saw the Royal Standards of Your Highnesses placed by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra,” he later wrote, “and I saw the Moorish King come out to the gates of the city and kiss the Royal Hands of Your Highnesses and of the Prince my lord.” Perhaps he had merely heard about the surrender. Either way, he wanted his Sovereigns to know how profoundly he identified with their imperial aims.
Unlike the Jews, who were treated harshly, Muslims could own property, worship as they chose, and live according to their laws. The accommodation proved short-lived. Ten years later, a rebellion erupted, and the Sovereigns ordered the remaining Muslims to convert to Christianity or leave Spain. A century later, they, too, would be expelled.
The conquest of Granada solidified the increasingly bloody reign of Los Reyes Católicos, who gained the confidence and the means to undertake a series of initiatives designed to fortify their Christian empire and pursue their ultimate goal of retaking Jerusalem. They marched into Africa both to spread Christianity as far and wide as possible, and to seize gold. On March 31, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella signed an order designed to expel the Jews from Spain. They could either convert to Christianity to preserve their way of life, their families, and their fortunes or leave the country by July 31. Years before, in 1477, a more innocent and idealistic Isabella had seen herself as the Jews’ guardian, signing a decree offering them a measure of protection. “The Jews are mine, and they are under my protection and power,” she had stated at the time. She later turned her back on them, and by 1489, Jews in Spain were condemned to be burned at the stake for their supposed treachery. By now public opinion had turned strongly against them, so strongly, in fact, that the expulsion was seen as long overdue. Ferdinand and Isabella found themselves trying to keep pace with the whirlwind of hatred and civil war that they had sown.
In 1492, Isabella invited Columbus to return to Spain, where the Sovereigns constantly circulated among various friendly castles, palaces, and monasteries. Their peripatetic existence kept them in contact with their realm and their subordinates, but it also created a bureaucratic void in which documents and orders often went astray. Although Columbus’s transactions with the Sovereigns and his voyages are well documented, there are significant lacunae, caused in part by this situation.
When Christopher Columbus again appeared in their midst to ask for backing for his voyage, his plans, as far-fetched as ever, came as a welcome distraction from the travails of the Inquisition, and a partial fulfillment of their goal to forge a Christian empire. He talked at length with Isabella, who gradually became convinced that his proposed mission could be useful to them. Consisting of only three ships, it would not cost the hard-pressed crown much, and the expenses would be paid for by levies and the sale of indulgences. To demonstrate her sincere faith, she offered her jewels as collateral : a touching gesture, but it was not expected that anyone would claim them. Three weeks after expelling the Jews from Spain, Los Reyes Católicos signed the following decree:
We send Cristóbal Colón with three caravels through the Ocean Sea to the Indies on some business that concerns the service of God and the expansion of the Catholic faith and our benefit and utility.