There is something in the wind.
The Comedy of Errors
Winter completes an age
With its thorough levelling;
Heaven’s tourbillions of rage
Abolish the watchman’s tower
And delete the cedar grove.
As winter completes an age,
The eyes huddle like cattle, doubt
Seeps into the pores and power
Ebbs from the heavy signet ring;
The prophet’s lantern is out
And gone the boundary stone,
Cold the heart and cold the stove,
Ice condenses on the bone:
Winter completes an age.
Thus the perspicacious W. H. Auden in For the Time Being. Like seasons, ages are seldom so precise as to end abruptly, while allowing another age to commence. Few events of European history have been as final as the Black Death in bringing to an end one age (which we might call the Innocently Playful Medieval) and bringing into view another (which we might call the Colder Late Medieval–Early Renaissance). But even at this interstice, old forms and old mental states hang on, while new forms and new mental states peek uncertainly into view. Locality often determines how boldly or timidly the new will come to supplant the old; and localities can find their integrity, even their ancient right to existence, open to question. (“This village has always been crown territory.” “But which crown, England’s or France’s?” “Which religion, Christian or Muslim?” “Oh, and where, pray, is the boundary stone, the definitive separation between Us and Them?”)
At such a crossroads, it is difficult if not impossible to see much farther than one’s nose: the watchman’s tower is down and the prophet’s lantern out. Those who occupy traditional seats of power—those who use signet rings—may begin to find their perches less stable and secure, more open to question. The ordinary bloke, the commoner attempting to make his way in the world, is all too likely to experience a new if vague sense of unease, of doubt seeping into his pores like unhealthy air. It is not a time of dancing and embracing but of stepping back and taking stock. Yet life goes on: men travel and make deals, as they have always done; monarchs make decisions, as they have always done, with far-reaching and often unpredictable consequences.
One such man was Christopher Columbus, born of undistinguished forebears near Genoa, long a shadowy petitioner at various European courts, now arrived at Córdoba to the new headquarters of Spanish royalty, the Alcázar, former stronghold of Muhammad XII, whom Spaniards called Boabdil; and two such monarchs were their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The year was a fateful one, 1492. To it, historians, looking backwards, have assigned the final expiration of the Middle Ages and the (as yet unheralded) birth of a new age.
Many Americans will recall having suffered through a school pageant or two meant to dramatize the monumental encounter between the Genoese ship captain and the Spanish royal couple. And since such dramatizations invariably contain almost as much misinformation as they do historical fact, it is worth revisiting the great moment with a colder eye.
The ship captain was probably born in 1451 at or very near Genoa, the son of a weaver who also sold cheeses on the streets of Genoa, then of Savona, his son helping out at both locations (“Parmigiano! Mozzarella! Gorgonzola!!”). The boy would have been called Christoffa Corombo in his native Ligurian, later Cristóbal Colón by Spaniards. Since documents of any importance were written in Latin, his Latinized name, Christophorus Columbus, which appears in his own hand as well as in other records of the period, was easily Englished as Christopher Columbus. Though there have been numerous attempts to render Columbus as Jewish, or even Muslim, and to trace his origins to a European country other than Italy, there is no evidence to support such theories, but there is good evidence to support his birth as an Italian Catholic.
Genoa and Savona, ports on the Italian Riviera north of Corsica, offered adventurous boys many opportunities for seafaring apprenticeships. Columbus claimed to have first ventured to sea at the age of ten, and there is little reason to doubt him; surely by his late teens he was almost an old salt, and by his early twenties he had already docked as far away as the west coast of Africa, Chios in the Greek Aegean, Bristol on Britain’s west coast, Galway at the edge of the Atlantic, and probably Iceland. He also began to act as agent for a consortium of Genoese merchants, who traded far and wide. One of his voyages took him to Lisbon, where a brother, Bartolomeo, worked as a cartographer. In their collaboration we may glimpse the origin of Columbus’s great endeavor.
Thanks to the enormous expansion in world trade that had been booming for more than two centuries, Europeans of means had come to take for granted certain substances that did not originate in Europe, especially the spices, opiates, and silks of faraway Asia. No one (who was anyone) could any longer imagine doing without these things. But the fall of Greek Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 had created a profound and permanent alteration in international affairs. It was of course still possible to extract the expected goodies from the Far East, but getting them past the Turks required both more cunning and more gold—and sometimes more blood—than had been previously required, considerably raising the price of the beloved commodities by the time they came to market. (Imagine if Americans could no longer afford chocolate, salt, or cocaine, or if most of the Wal-Marts closed down.) If Europeans could not dislodge the Turks—which they could not—what were they to do? At times, it seemed as if all the best practical minds of Europe were engaged in figuring out how to solve the problem. But think as much as they might, no one could come up with a solution. Except Columbus.
What he suggested made little sense. He proposed to sail around the world, heading west into the Ocean Sea (as it was then called) till he hit the Island of Cipangu (Japan, as identified in the writings of Marco Polo) or perhaps, if he was especially lucky, the fabulous coast of Cathay (China) itself. Maps of the period, inaccurate about many things, nonetheless show both the principal island of Japan (misshapen and lacking most of its fellow islands) and the coast of a strangely squeezed China. There are even attempts to sketch in the archipelagos of Malaysia and Indonesia.
The diameter of the spherical Earth had been calculated accurately by the Greek Eratosthenes in the second century BC, and his calculation was still widely known in the time of Columbus. Though no European foresaw what lay in wait for Columbus, since all thought mistakenly that the Ocean Sea, empty of land, was much larger than it was, almost all who could read and had looked into the subject understood that Columbus was seriously underestimating the overall size of the Earth.1
Columbus, basing his calculations on inaccurate assumptions, theorized that the east coast of Asia could be reached by a European ship within a few weeks of its leaving port. The actual circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers, whereas Columbus assumed it to be closer to 25,000 kilometers. Compounding his mistake was his misreading—in a Latin translation—of a renowned ninth-century Persian astronomer, Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani, known to the West as Alfraganus. The Persian’s correct measurements were given in Arabic miles, which Columbus assumed to be the same as Roman miles. In actuality, Roman miles are about 25 percent shorter than Arabic ones. Had the Ocean not held the Americas and the vast sea been empty of land between Europe and Asia, Columbus and his crew, heading west, would have perished in the deep and never been heard from again. This had indeed been the fate of several earlier (and well-known) attempts.
Columbus’s good luck lay not in his miserably wrongheaded calculations about distance but in his accurate knowledge of the North Atlantic trade winds, which flow in a great clockwise circle. How he came by this information we can’t be sure. It may have been the result of his own observations on his previous voyages, only some of which we know about. In any case, it was information not widely understood at the time, even if in our own day it is common knowledge to transatlantic airline passengers. As a result of his awareness of the trade-winds pattern, he was able to keep them at his back, plotting a southerly outgoing course and a northerly homecoming one, both of which enabled him to travel much more quickly than others had been able to do. In this way, Columbus and his crew were saved from contrary winds, becalmings, and death by dehydration on the high seas.
Columbus was a man of high color—reddish hair and ruddy cheeks enclosing a long, handsome face, surmounting a towering, tautly muscular body—and of highly colored personality. People seem either to have been instantly attracted to him or to have taken an instant dislike. He gestured grandly and spoke engagingly and loudly with the confidence of the true aristocrat, which he was not but was determined to become. He always presented himself as a nobleman, alluding vaguely to his familial line and crest, the son certainly not of Italy but of Genoa, la Superba (the Proud One), city of cities, link between Europe and the great globe. Despite his poor resources, he managed to dress well, cutting a fine figure at the European courts he visited. No doubt his admission to the presence of several monarchs in succession was made possible by the convincing show he made. His fair coloring and cool eye (gray or green in different reports) bespoke his northern European genetic origins and assured his welcome by monarchs who were all engaged in marriage games to render their legitimate stock more blond and blue-eyed.
But after he had made his impressive presentation, his proposal would be turned over to the scholars of the court, the people who had read all the books Columbus cited and many more, which he had failed to mention. Inevitably, the scholars would return to their monarch with the same conclusion: Columbus was a crackpot, not an investment opportunity. But, as we know only too well from recent dramas in our financial sector, sooner or later someone somewhere will make the investment. In the event, that someone was Isabella la Católica, reigning Queen of Spain.
Before this, Columbus had conducted a long dalliance with King John II of Portugal, whom he nearly succeeded in convincing. He sought out financial power brokers in both Genoa and Venice but came up short. He sent his brother Bartolomeo to Henry VII of England with the astounding proposal. Henry, father to Henry VIII and founder of the Tudor dynasty, whose claim to the throne was quite shaky, said he would think about it. He thought and thought but had nothing more to say (at least not till it was too late). Meanwhile, Columbus found himself at the Spanish court, spending nearly six seemingly sterile years in the attempt to lure the monarchs into financing his scheme.
Ferdinand and Isabella were not naïfs. Hereditary monarchs and crafty sovereigns, they had created Spain by the ploy of their marriage, uniting Ferdinand’s Aragon with Isabella’s much larger Castile and then pushing the Iberian Peninsula’s one remaining Islamic kingdom into the sea. This last they had accomplished only in March 1492 after years of war and had come to occupy the Alcázar but minutes (as it were) before Columbus appeared once more to present his final and most eloquent plea. Political to their fingertips, the Catholic Monarchs allowed not a whisper of disagreement to squeeze between them. Their motto, “Tanto monta, monta tanto,” means something like “Each is the same as the other.” So don’t try any special pleading with one of us.
Columbus’s task was therefore a tricky one, but it seems from the scanty evidence that it was the queen, a woman of exquisite composure and silky speech, whose blue eyes and long gold tresses betrayed her high Castilian and Lancastrian origins, who was especially receptive to Columbus’s charm. Though the dark, jowly Ferdinand, whose stubbly beard was incapable of a close shave, would one day boast that he was “the principal cause why those islands were discovered,” it was Isabella who actually found the way forward for Spain to finance Columbus’s expedition. Columbus had already raised about half the needed cash from his Genoese contacts; and Spain, at the end of a long and draining military campaign, was out of cash. So Isabella donated her jewels (or at leastsome of them), knowing full well that her act of public generosity would necessarily drive all the nobles of Castile (and perhaps even of Aragon and of Ferdinand’s other territories)2 to follow suit in their effort to show themselves at least as generous.
The year 1492 was a busy one for the Catholic Monarchs. Besides their conquest of the Moorish Kingdom of Granada, they had begun to take considerable interest in the religious observances of their subjects. Like Doctor Johnson in the stagecoach, they felt that false doctrines should be checked and that those who dared espouse such doctrines should be punished by the civil power in union with the church of the realm. Venturing a bit further than Johnson might have done, they issued—within days of their having situated themselves in the Alhambra—the Alhambra Decree, expelling all unconverted Jews from Spain.
As we have already seen in the case of the Black Death, communities of Jews made convenient scapegoats in difficult times. But by this point, Jews had lived among European Christians for the better part of a millennium and a half—often uneasily, sometimes (as in papal Rome) appreciated for their special skills, sometimes targeted for elimination. In general, insofar as Christians thought about them at all, Jews tended to be considered flawed or partial Christians, believers in the Old Testament but not the New, people who—inexplicably—failed to see that Jesus was the fulfillment of all their prophecies. They were not universally hated, as were the Muslims (called Moors or, more ominously, Saracens), those who had cooked up a new religion—really, a heresy—and stolen the Holy Places from their rightful owners, the Christians. The fast friendship Boccaccio describes between the two Parisian merchants, one Christian, the other Jewish, is a bit harder to imagine occurring between a Christian and a Muslim (at least in a Christian country).
Selectively admired or merely tolerated, Jews were an expected part of the European social scene. The expulsion from Spain, however, was not their first. On several prior occasions, Jews had been ordered to move en masse from a European country. In 1182 the teenage King Philip II Augustus of France, whose treasury was empty, had seized all Jewish property and forgiven all debts owed to Jews, provided only the debtors pay to the king 20 percent of what they owed. (Sixteen years later, Philip, feeling the adverse effects on French commerce of the departure of the Jews, would allow them to return.) In 1290, Edward I banished all Jews from his kingdom of England, a ban that remained in effect into the 1600s. In 1306, King Philip IV the Fair (who was not) expelled the Jews of France once again. Though readmitted in 1315, they were expelled once more in 1322, readmitted in 1359, and re-expelled in 1394. If the Spanish expulsion seems particularly harsh on account of the huge numbers involved and the efficiency with which results were pursued, it only signaled more execrable banishments to come: by the end of the Second World War, Ireland would stand out as the only European nation that had never expelled (and/or attempted to eliminate) its Jews nor subjected them to pogroms nor confined them to ghettos.
Parenthetically, we must lay at Spain’s door what was almost certainly the earliest of these European persecutions (and a characteristically Spanish one): the offer, laid out by the primatial archbishop of Toledo in 694, that all Spanish Jews choose betweenbaptism and perpetual enslavement. Nor should we forget that in 1391 the newly crowned Spanish king, Henry III, encouraged the massacres of Jews in Seville, Córdoba, Toledo, and other cities of his realm.
Spanish Jews were given exactly four months from the date of the Alhambra Decree to clear out of the extensive realms of the Catholic Monarchs, not an easy feat for most to perform. Moreover, though departing Jews were graciously allowed to take their belongings with them, they were not permitted to take any “gold or silver or minted money.” (Remember: the Monarchs were experiencing an extreme cash flow crisis.) The punishment for failing to depart (or convert) was death. The punishment for Christians who attempted to hide Jews was confiscation of all property and cancellation of all hereditary privileges. So it is hardly surprising that not a few Jews publicly converted to Christianity and were baptized. These conversos, as they were called, elicited suspicion from their Christian neighbors. Were their conversions sincere or merely convenient? As many were subsequently discovered to have continued their practice of Jewish religious customs, Spaniards found themselves devising bizarre tests of Christian orthodoxy, such as forcing suspects to eat pork.3 (If you refused or gagged, you must be an insincere convert. Converts from Islam would soon be subjected to the same test—which did have a certain twisted logic behind it: prized Spanish ham, jamón ibérico de bellota,from well-bred pigs fed on the acorns of ancient oaks is the best in the world.)
The decree did not, however, produce the first conversos. Thanks to the efforts of Toledo’s archbishop nearly eight hundred years earlier, there was an ancient tradition of Jewish conversos within Spanish society. More than this, the pogroms of 1341, centered on Seville, had greatly expanded the class of converted Jews, many of whom had subsequently achieved high status in southern Spanish society. Two of these conversos, the bankers Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sánchez, would be numbered among the financiers ofColumbus.
Many unconverted Sephardim (as the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula were called, in contrast to the Ashkenazim, the Jews of France, Germany, and eastern Europe) found refuge in the Islamic countries of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire and were able to remain there and even to thrive.4 The establishment of the State of Israel, however, on land that had previously been controlled by Muslims, as well as the grave diminishment of its prior inhabitants, has in our time provoked Muslim rage and a hostility toward Jews that had never before been characteristic of the relationship between the two communities of faith. Indeed, in the centuries during which Muslim rulers had held sway over the Iberian Peninsula, Jews could breathe much more freely there than they could in most Christian countries. They, like Christians living under Muslim rule, had to pay a special tax, but for these designated “Peoples of the Book” there was no specifically religious persecution.
The expulsion of unconverted Jews from Spanish territory was, however, but one prong of a campaign of increasingly cruel exactions on the part of the Catholic Monarchs. Though the terms of the treaty that followed their successful war against the Kingdom of Granada guaranteed religious freedom to their Muslim subjects, the Monarchs soon discarded that provision and began to hound unconverted Muslims, as well as those (Moriscos or little Moors) who only outwardly accepted Christianity, in a fashion similar to their persecution of Jews, if somewhat less vigorously. The marginally greater toleration of Muslims lay in the fact that they were even more intricately threaded through Spanish, and especially through Aragonian, society (though certainly not through other European societies) than were Jews, many Muslims even gaining positions of trust at the courts of various Spanish noble families, who valued their contributions and would not cooperate willingly in their persecution or banishment.
As early as 1478 the Monarchs had set up a new institution to ensure unity of faith throughout their realms. Even today, its name, the Spanish Inquisition, is capable of sending a shiver through many a breast. In recent decades, scholars have revised their historical judgments, now informing us that this Inquisition wasn’t as bad as its reputation. But it was a grim business for anyone who incurred its interest. And despite the inspired humor of the famous Monty Python sketches, featuring madcap English comedians galumphing into view in the getup of Roman cardinals and shouting “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” there was nothing bumbling, antic, or remotely silly about the men who staffed this merciless ecclesiastical tribunal.
Throughout the Middle Ages there had been inquisitions, arranged by the papacy in concert with local bishops. These had had, however, only a very occasional impact on medieval life, functioning locally, operating seldom and with some highly specified object, that is, the rooting out of a particular Christian heresy in a particular place. The most important inquisitions of the Middle Ages were directed against the Albigensians, who held an extreme Platonic conviction that God’s world was entirely spiritual and that all matter was evil, having been created by Satan. It is impossible to determine now how many Albigensians there were, centered primarily in the regions of Languedoc in France, the Rhine Valley, and (perhaps) Verona in Italy, but the extreme unattractiveness of their doctrine would seem necessarily to have limited their numbers. The popes, who directed inquiries into heresy from afar, were normally more interested in convincing the heretics of the error of their ways than in burning them alive. Only unrepentant holdouts were put to the torch.
The burning of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance stands as a sinister exception to the normal course of events and was enabled because the Council was in the hands of the voting bishops rather than of a pope, who would almost certainly have proved more irenic. There were then three popes striding about in different jurisdictions, each demanding universal obedience, and the Council’s main job was to put an end to this embarrassing state of affairs. Hus dared to question the claim of the conciliar fathers that they held their authority over the universal church “immediately from Christ,” which questioning the fathers could not abide, especially as they were themselves a tad uncertain about who in fact did hold such power. We should also not underestimate the impact thatnationalism was already beginning to exert on the bishops (as on everyone else). Hus’s Czech movement was seen by many as an illegal nationalistic challenge to imperial German sovereignty. Many of the bishops were either German or at least in sympathy with the jurisdictional claims of the Holy Roman Emperor.
The Spanish Inquisition—that is, an inquiry answerable to the Spanish Monarchs, rather than to Rome—was an innovation and a devolution from relatively humane papal standards. The scariest thing about it was its omnicompetence, the broadness of its mandate, its freedom to look into anything and anyone for any reason. The Monarchs had been encouraged to set up their own national inquiry into heresy among their subjects by Isabella’s personal confessor, Tomás de Torquemada, whose name is a stain on their reign despite the famous description of him by his contemporary Sebastián de Olmedo as “the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order” (the Dominicans, in case you were wondering).
Torquemada, a heavyset, brutal-looking man with an anxious brow, beady eyes, and a long, thick, bent nose, became an essential figure in the Monarchs’ self-conscious Reconquista, the reconquest of Spain, culturally reclaiming it from its centuries of Muslim rule during which Muslims, Jews, and Christians had lived side by side in a fondly remembered convivencia and had even collaborated with one another in preserving and translating seminally important religious and philosophical texts. Torquemada, hostile to any text from which he thought he could sniff a whiff of heresy, enthusiastically promoted the burning of Hebrew and Arabic books. But what he became most famous for was his enthusiastic burning of human beings, probably close to two thousand individuals in the course of his fifteen-year tenure (1483–1498) as Spain’s Grand Inquisitor.
Besides the public burnings, carried out with great solemnity and grand panoply as autos de fe (acts of faith),5 the numbers of those he ordered tortured were, according to even The Catholic Encyclopedia, “vast” and “on an unprecedented scale.”6 “Exceptionally intolerant even for his times,” the entry continues, he established an exceedingly efficient “spiritual police system” that would continue to terrorize Spain for centuries, to be abolished only in 1834. Its official work was to investigate heresy among Christians, but it marched far beyond that mandate, investigating and punishing a wide variety of “spiritual offenders,” from so-called “crypto-Jews” to supposed witches to those accused of such sexual crimes as sodomy and bestiality. Even Spain’s most outsized (and orthodox) Catholic saints—Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross—would in the next century fall under suspicion and be shadowed for a time by the Spanish Inquisition, Loyola even cast into prison as a possible heretic on two separate occasions, experiences that convinced him to quit Spain altogether.
In the atmosphere of fear and hysteria that Torquemada encouraged, he himself could have been tried as a crypto-Jew. (Given how thoroughly Jews were threaded through Spanish society, this accusation could probably have been leveled against a great many Spaniards.) There were at least two Jewish conversos in his family line, one of them a grandmother. But Torquemada quickly achieved such control over Spanish society that no one would have dared question his antecedents for fear of attracting his attention. So hated did he become that he had to travel surrounded by fifty mounted guards and an additional 250 armed men.7
It would be dismayingly reductive, however, if we were to attribute Torquemada’s success only to the craven fear he struck in the hearts of men and women. As Fyodor Dostoevsky would so awesomely dramatize the reasoning of Torquemada and his ilk in “The Grand Inquisitor,” the great story-within-a-story to be found in The Brothers Karamazov, the inquisitor’s insistence on shared universal belief expresses a yearning that may also be found in the human heart—a desire “to be united unequivocally in a communal and harmonious ant heap.” This “need for universal unity of mankind” against dissenters certainly appears and reappears throughout history, and its impact on human affairs, as in Dostoevsky’s vivid accounting, should never be underestimated.
But besides this profound reality of hidden motivation—this infernal, usually unspoken quest for universality of belief—it must be said that many participants in witch hunts are simply disgruntled, jealous partisans in search of retribution against their betters. This is the motivation that Arthur Miller would bring to the fore in The Crucible, his remarkable play about the American witch trials of seventeenth-century Salem—which is also a play about Miller’s judgment on the tawdry machinations of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era.
Sensing the dark underside of the enthusiastic persecution of “heretics,” successive popes tried in vain to rein in the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. According to a bull of Pope Sixtus IV, “many true and faithful Christians, because of the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves, and other low people, and—still less appropriate—without tests of any kind, have been locked up in state prisons, tortured, and condemned as if they were relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and properties, and turned over to the secular arm to be executed, at great danger to their souls, giving a pernicious example and causing scandal to many.”
Despite this nice rhetorical flourish, Sixtus quickly backed off his resolve to inhibit Torquemada’s incursions once the pope found himself opposed by King Ferdinand, who was solidly in the rabid Dominican’s corner. Sixtus was one of a series of popes in this period who could have stepped right out of the pages of the Decameron. A lover of art, music, and literature, he built the Sistine Chapel (which is named for him), founded its famous choir, established the Vatican Archives, greatly enlarged the Vatican Library, and opened it to scholars. But he also made six of his feckless young nephews into cardinals, blocked all church reform, and was drawn into the huge Pazzi conspiracy, which resulted in the murder of Giuliano de’ Medici, the wounding of his brother Lorenzo, and a scandalous war between Rome and Florence. (See this page.) He then got Venice to attack Ferrara, switched sides, imposed papal penalties on Venice, and emptied the papal treasury, after which he sold indulgences and curial offices in order to refill his empty coffers.
His successor, who took the inappropriate name of Innocent VIII, was just a little worse. It was he who conferred upon Ferdinand and Isabella the title los Reyes católicos. He ordered a bloodthirsty inquisitorial witch hunt throughout Germany. He fathered several bastards, made his thirteen-year-old grandson a cardinal, created new church offices just so he could auction them off to the highest bidders, and interfered disastrously in international affairs, alienating kings unnecessarily and leaving the much-reduced Papal States in anarchy by the close of his reign. On his deathbed in the summer of 1492, in a last tremor of self-knowledge, he begged the cardinal electors to choose a successor who would be an improvement on him.
Thanks to a spectacular series of bribes and promises of future rewards by the winning candidate, the cardinals chose the Catholic Monarchs’ fellow Spaniard Rodrigo de Borja y Borja, the worst pope in history, father of several children (born both before and after his election to the papacy), including dear Lucrezia of the poisoned ring and Cesare Borgia (as the family name was Italianized), the model for Machiavelli’s prince. That the thrice-married and much-bedded Lucrezia actually poisoned the food of husbands and others she wished to be rid of, or that she slept with her father and her brother and had children by them, cannot now be proven conclusively. That the Borgias were vicious and implacable and threw howlingly good parties is indisputable.
Rodrigo took the papal name, forever infamous, of Alexander VI. His election on August 11, 1492, came but a week and a day after Columbus’s departure from the coast of Spain in three ships—the caravels Niña and Pinta and the larger carrack Santa María—headed for the unknown. We shall have reason to return to Rodrigo-Alexander. But for now let’s follow Columbus.
After departing Spain’s Atlantic coast, Columbus’s little fleet made for harbor in the Canary Islands, a volcanic archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa. There, at the Castilian port of San Sebastián on the island of Gomera, the crews restocked and made repairs, finally setting off for God Knows Where on September 6, just as the great volcano of Tenerife erupted behind them, seeming to offer a portent, whether of good fortune or ill no one could be certain.
It is instructive to consider for a moment these islands from which Columbus left “the known world,” that is, the world known to Europeans. The islands had been familiar to the imperial Romans, who called one of the larger ones Insula Canaria, Doggie Island, perhaps an allusion to large dogs, perhaps an allusion to the sea dogs, or seals, with which the second-largest island, still called Gran Canaria, was once well supplied. The seals were long ago hunted to extinction, a foreshadowing of the fate that lay in wait for the islands’ human inhabitants. The indigenous populations, Neolithic in their technology but culturally varied from one island to another, were collectively called Guanches by the Europeans, who subdued them slowly but inexorably, the Castilians gaining complete control only three years after Columbus sailed. For a long time, other European powers contested Spain’s overlordship, especially the seafaring nations of Portugal, Holland, and England, which fought bloody battles on the islands, drawing the natives into their wars. The Spaniards imposed single-crop cultivation on the Canaries, which became a chief European source of cane sugar and, later, of wine. In the sixteenth century enormous houses and churches would be built, expressions of the Canaries’ explosive prosperity, as the islands came to serve as a first stop on the trade route to the Americas.
What became of the original inhabitants? They no longer exist as identifiable groups. Slaughtered, indentured, exiled, or enslaved, they can be traced in the genes of a fraction of today’s Canary Islanders. But only occasionally does one now pass a person whose appearance corresponds to the medieval descriptions of the native population of fair-haired, heavy-browed, thick-bodied, copper-colored Cro-Magnons. The beautiful blond women of Tenerife, largest of the islands, who were once the subject of exclamations by medieval sailors, are no more. Did they ever exist, or were they simply creatures of an overheated Spanish imagination? We can never know, because the cultures, religions, worldviews, and indeed even the identities of the Guanches were almost completely erased. I, looking around on the island I inhabit, Manhattan, never see a face or body that could be representative of the people who once hunted here, whose very name is now uncertain.
The connection between the fate of the Guanches and the fate of the natives of the lands that Columbus and his successors were about to discover is not accidental but profound. It speaks to the assumptions of Europeans in 1492 about the nature of humanity,about the God they claimed to serve, and about the limitations on activities that this God could be said to approve.
On October 12, 1492, as all Americans know, land was sighted from the deck of the Pinta by a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana. The time was 2 a.m. The sighting came not a moment too soon for Columbus. They had sailed for five weeks and were beginning the second day of their sixth week. The crew, among whom served a sprinkling of convicts with little to lose, were growing nervous about the unlikelihood of their return if their outward voyage should continue to drag on. Columbus, though a charismatic leader, could not have commanded their compliance much longer. The land was an island in what is now the Bahamas. Though the captain christened it San Salvador, we are no longer certain which island it was.
As the ships approached the island in the light of dawn,
they presently saw naked people, and the Admiral went ashore in the armed ship’s boat with the royal standard displayed. So did the captains of Pinta and Niña…in their boats, with the banners of the Expedition, on which were depicted a green cross with an F [for Ferdinand] on one arm and a Y [for Ysabella] on the other, and over each his or her crown. And, all having rendered thanks to Our Lord kneeling on the ground, embracing it with tears of joy for the immeasurable mercy of having reached it, the Admiral arose and gave this island the name San Salvador. Thereupon he summoned to him the two captains, Rodrigo de Escobedo secretary of the armada and Rodrigo Sánchez of Segovia, and all others who came ashore, as witnesses [to the claim he was about to make]; and in the presence of many natives of that land assembled together, took possession of that island in the name of the Catholic Sovereigns with appropriate words and ceremony. And all this is set forth at large in the testimonies there set down in writing. Forthwith the Christians hailed him as Admiral and Viceroy [the titles promised him by the Sovereigns, should he reach the Indies] and swore to obey him as one who represented Their Highnesses, with as much joy and pleasure as if the victory had been all theirs, all begging his pardon for the injuries [that is, the mutinous grumbling that had preceded the sighting of land] through fear and inconstancy they had done him. Many Indians having come together for that ceremony and rejoicing, the Admiral, seeing that they were a gentle and peaceful people and of great simplicity, gave them some little red caps and glass beads which they hung around their necks, and other things of slight worth, which they all valued at the highest price.8
Poor naked people. “Discovered” after thousands of years of living in their island home, they were about to be eliminated. The Tainos and other native peoples whom Columbus encountered on this first voyage, as well as the additional peoples he met on his three subsequent voyages, were all grouped together in the Admiral’s mind as “los indios,” the Indians, people of “the Indies,” the all-purpose word that Europeans sometimes employed to refer to various nations of South and East Asia. Despite subsequent evidence to the contrary, Columbus could never—except for a few moments of exceptional clarity—admit that he had failed to sail as far as the Orient. He even ordered that any sailor who said otherwise be given one hundred lashes, be assessed a considerable fine, and have his tongue cut out. Unwilling to be hailed the discoverer of a new land, he failed in the end to see it named for him. It would be named—by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller fifteen years after Columbus’s first voyage, when European exploration of the Americas was in full swing—for Columbus’s exploring rival and fellow Italian Amerigo Vespucci.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto points out the peculiarity of Columbus’s mention of the people’s nakedness long before he describes their land (“well watered and wooded with an abundance of fruit,” which Fernández-Armesto labels a promoter’s description). The nakedness of the people puts them in a category: “A late fifteenth-century reader would have understood that Columbus was confronting ‘natural men,’ not the citizens of a civil society possessed of legitimate political institutions of their own. The registering of this perception thus prepared the way for the next step, the ritual appropriation of sovereignty to the Castilian monarchs, with a royal banner streaming and a scribe to record the act of possession.” Lucky naked people: they are now Spanish subjects.
“Clothes,” continues Fernández-Armesto, “were the standard by which a people’s level of civilization was judged in medieval Latin Christendom. It became an almost frantic preoccupation of Spanish governors early in the history of the New World to persuade the natives to don European dress, just as Spaniards at home had been to much trouble and expense to persuade conquered Moors to ‘dress like Christians’ and had troubled deeply over the nakedness of the aboriginal Canary Islanders.” These Caribbean natives “presented, because of their innocence, a unique opportunity for spreading the Gospel; because of their primitivism, an unequalled chance to confer on them the presumable benefits of Latin civilization; and because of their defencelessness, an irresistible object of exploitation.”
Perhaps half the natives of the Americas would fall to European diseases against which they had no resistance. Most of those who remained standing would be mutilated for imaginary offenses (such as failing to hand over gold, for which both hands were severed and the offender was left to bleed to death), or shot dead in skirmishes with Spaniards (or with subsequent waves of European conquerors), or worked to death in mines established to yield fantastic quantities of precious metals, or otherwise enslaved on their own soils or, occasionally, sold in Europe. The wide-open spaces of the Americas were not found as uninhabited lands; they were made so. All in all, it was an easy conquest. Naked people with bows and arrows were no match for armored men with firepower. It is difficult to disagree with the conclusion of Eduardo Galeano that “Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.”
Within fifteen years of Columbus’s first voyage, the Spaniards who continued to cross the Atlantic in search of new lands to subdue had worked out to their own satisfaction a little ritual for assuaging whatever dim objections their strangled consciences might have voiced about these adventures in exploitation. As they reached a new shore, the sailors would plant the standards of the Catholic Monarchs, now Ferdinand and Juana la Loca (Joan the Mad),9 the daughter who on the death of Isabella in 1504 had succeeded her mother; and accompanied by a Spanish notary, the leader of the expedition would read the following notice to the curious natives, whether naked or clothed, who invariably ventured forth from under the canopy of trees:
In the stead of the King, Don Fernando, and of Dona Juana, his daughter, Queen of Castile and León, subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants do notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created the Heaven and the Earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, and all the men of the world, were and are all descendants, and all those who come after us.
Of all these nations God our Lord gave charge to one man, called Saint Peter, that he should be lord and superior of all the men in the world, that all should obey him, and that he should be the head of the whole human race, wherever men should live, and under whatever law, sect, or belief they should be; and he gave him the world for his kingdom and jurisdiction.
Wherefore, as best we can, we ask and require that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world.
But if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you, and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him: and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, nor ours, nor of these cavaliers who accompany us.
Variations on the standard text were often introduced into this bizarre ceremony, but these tended only to elaborate on the centrality of the church and the role of the pope (“that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world and the high priest called Pope,” to whom God had given “the world for his kingdom and jurisdiction” and the right “to judge and govern all Christians, Moors, Jews, Gentiles, and all other sects”).
The claims made for church and pope, which will necessarily strike the modern reader as absurd, were in fact part and parcel of an extreme monarchical papalism that had blossomed into a dramatically evil flower in the course of the Middle Ages. Once viewed simply as an office of service to others, the office of bishop—and especially bishop of Rome—was gradually attracting to itself all the worst trappings of absolute monarchy. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great had rejected the title of “universal pope,” asserting that the only title he wanted was “servant of the servants of God.” But a famous forgery, called the Donation of Constantine, in which the fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine was shown to have handed over his supposedly universal power to the pope, was the shaky basis for all this papal trumpery.
Not everyone believed in the theory built so airily on the false Donation. Indeed, it may be that no one really believed in it except for a few benighted Roman clerics. Certainly, power players like Ferdinand paid it no heed, unless it served their purposes rhetorically, as in the text above. But what were illiterate natives half a world away from Europe to make of it? Or to make of the supposed rights of the Spanish monarchs, who had been assigned their lordship by the pope?10 The native peoples had never even heard of such roles; they knew nothing of the histories and cultures of Europe, Africa, or Asia. They knew nothing even of the existence of these vast other worlds. And in any case, El Requerimiento, as it was called, was usually read to them without translation in Castilian, which none of them understood. What was important to the Spaniards was that all legal requirements had now been fulfilled for the utter usurpation of native rights. To imagine the encounter, full of faux dignity on the part of the Spaniards and of complete incomprehension on the part of the natives, is (once more) to summon up a scene of seeming comedy worthy of Monty Python. But there was nothing funny about what followed.
The simple natives, naked or half dressed in their unseemly costumes, could not possibly harbor “societies” in the European sense, complete with monarchies and other political structures, great buildings, ecclesial structures, and elaborated philosophies and theologies. They were obviously in need of these; and the Catholic Monarchs and their collaborators would happily supply them. Had the natives exhibited more complex social structures—as would be expected of, say, the Chinese, about whose exemplary society the Europeans knew from the writings of Marco Polo—Columbus and those who followed him would have been persuaded to follow a different approach. Columbus had with him letters from the Monarchs to the Great Khan, who was thought to rule the Chinese, though the last of the Mongolian khans had vanished from China more than a century before Columbus’s voyage. These letters presumed to express friendship for the Khan, his name cringingly Latinized as Magnus Canus (Big Old Guy—almost Big Dog), and stated that the Monarchs had heard of his admiration for their great realm, though no Chinese emperor had ever heard of little Spain or its presumptuous kings.11 No European would have been so stupid as to imagine that China, so awesomely described by Polo, could be conquered by European firepower, its inhabitants forcibly converted and enslaved. China would be approached only with the most delicate diplomacy.
Naked natives were another matter, however. The Tainos, whom Columbus encountered throughout his island landfalls—in the Bahamas, Hispaniola (today divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Cuba, and Puerto Rico—are now nowhere to be found as a distinct group. Their genes may be traced in some present-day inhabitants of mixed blood, but their only certain legacy is in the evocative words they left behind: canoe, hammock, tobacco, potato, barbecue, hurricane. Otherwise, they continue to live and move in the recorded impressions of Columbus himself:
They traded with us and gave us everything they had, with good will. They took great delight in pleasing us. They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil: nor do they murder or steal. Your Highnesses may believe that in all the world there can be no better people. They love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.
We cannot simply take such words at face value. We must always recall that Columbus and those who followed in his wake were entrepreneurs, selling themselves and their enterprises and manipulating their audiences for preconceived objectives. What Columbus is selling here is the Myth of Eden. All right, he hadn’t yet quite reached Japan or China and all the fabulous riches of the East. Forget that inconsequential business and look here: he had come upon Adam and Eve before the Fall. His audience is first of all the sovereigns, then all of literate Europe, which would soon be lapping up Latin versions of his letters.
But we can surely take at face value the descriptions of the rape of native societies by Spanish adventurers, as recounted by the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas:
[The Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mothers’ breasts by their feet and dashed their heads against the rocks.… They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers, and all who were before them, on their swords … and by thirteens, in honor and reverence for our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles, they put wood underneath and, with fire, they burned the Indians alive.
Las Casas, who had been an admiring boy standing on the quay at Seville when Columbus returned in triumph from his first voyage, eventually sailed with the Admiral, even becoming a landowner in Hispaniola. But, as the cruel despotism of his fellow Spaniards gradually impressed itself upon him, he turned against the whole system of oppression and became a champion of the Indians. The descriptions he has left us in his History of the Indies are as chilling today as they were when they were first published four and a half centuries ago. Las Casas describes Indian men being forcibly separated from their women so that they could be sent off to mine for gold and silver, while their wives were forced to till the soil without them. Reunited briefly after months of separation, they were “so exhausted and depressed on both sides that … they ceased to procreate.” As for the few children brought to birth, their mothers, “overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, seven thousand children died in three months.” In desperation, mothers and fathers drowned their babies, and there were even instances of large-scale mass suicides, adults drowning their children, they themselves jumping off cliffs or eating poisonous plants. “And in a short time, this land, which was so great, so powerful and fertile, was depopulated.… My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.”
The historic encounter between the natives of the Americas and the societies of Europe may be said to be complex, not all of it to be summed up in the few paragraphs I have written. Certainly, the richer and more structured societies the Spaniards would encounter among the Aztecs, the Inca, and the Maya (and their criminal despoliation) require a more extensive treatment than is possible here.12 But in all instances, whoever the tribes, whoever the Europeans, whatever the excuse, the cumulative result is depressingly similar: a genocide as extensive and as cruel as any in history.13
Columbus, as Fernández-Armesto points out, “was predisposed to success, unresponsive to setbacks and blind to any obstacle, of however incontestably material a nature, that might lie in his path. He had a deep conviction of self-righteousness and the unlimited capacity for self-deception that usually accompanies that quality. He was intensely religious, and his religion was strongly providential”—that is, providential in regard to himself and his enterprise, though utterly lacking in regard to anyone who was not his patron or similarly on his side. He was, as Fernández-Armesto observes, “made of the quintessence of wishful thinking,” a traveling salesman, full of empty charm. He was, in short, very nearly our contemporary, a completely self-made man, the first to claim our attention across the centuries.
It is impossible to imagine Columbus, as he was, existing before the disaster of the Black Death, which emptied so much of Europe and opened land ownership and other enterprises for the first time to men of no provenance. If that field across the way belonged to my now dead neighbor and his dead family, and there are no enforceable claims upon it, what is to prevent me from claiming it? If the town’s chief business (say, shoemaking or distribution of farm products), which kept us all employed and a few of us in riches, is now in idleness because of so many deaths, what is to prevent me from starting it up again and claiming ownership? Of course, I must carefully cloak my desires and my plan in the raiments of piety: I want only what God himself wants. To be quite successful, I must actually believe that this is so.
It is a shock for the historian, contemplating this overnight transformation of medieval sensibility (in which virtually everything and everyone had a place and stayed there) into the more upwardly mobile, if slimier, sensibility of the characters in a David Mamet drama. Francis of Assisi, meet Bernie Madoff.
If I intend to make my fortune as an exploiter of one kind or another—an exploiter of something beyond myself, since I know that in myself I have nothing, not family or holdings or even knowledge—I must find something or someone appropriate to exploit, that is, something or someone virtually begging to be ripped off. And at this point we hear, almost for the first time in Western history, the sounds of racism. The ancient Greeks had been racist, believing themselves to be hoi aristoi, the best, and all others to be seriously deficient, barbarians of one sort or another. But the Greek attitude never found a foothold in Catholic Europe; and the Christian Middle Ages, intolerant about religion, were full of cultural, rather than racial, chauvinism. Those who persecuted Jews and, more occasionally, Muslims within their midst were not racists, for they found their old antagonists quite acceptable the moment they converted to Christianity. Medieval people may have been anti-Judaic; they were not anti-Semitic. (Anti-Semitism would require the aura of specious scientific proof, something that lay in the future.)
But it is in this period that the African slave trade begins to get under way and that several varieties of humans—Canary Islanders, black Africans, the Irish tribes “beyond the Pale” of English colonization, and the native tribes of the Americas—begin to be dehumanized, casually considered subhuman, fit only for manual labor or worse. It is also in this period that we first hear mention of Jewish “blood”—at least in Spain, which serves as a harbinger of attitudes that will eventually infect all of Europe. And it is in the Spain of this period that the phrase sangre azul (blue blood) begins to be bandied about—in reference to those whose lightness of skin allows the blueness of their veins (particularly on the backs of their hands or the undersides of their arms) to be displayed for all to acknowledge.
The science of the Greeks had been largely lost in the early medieval centuries, the centuries of barbarian invasions of the old Roman Empire, of wholesale destruction of books, and of near-universal loss of literacy. By the time of Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, science had been reborn but was still in its second infancy: it had a long way to go. The discovery of America served as a goad to the energetic expansion of science. All maps had to be redrawn; and all geography had to be reconceived and rewritten. Inevitably, new questions arose in cosmology: if we had been so wrong about the continents of our own planet, what might we have wrong about the rest of the universe?
Are all human beings descended from Adam and Eve or is there some other explanation for the immense diversity of peoples? Are these natives on the far side of the globe really human? Could God have intended them to be saved by the blood of Christ when, at least before the arrival of Europeans bearing Christianity, all their dead, never having heard the gospel, had gone to Hell? What does this say about God? Or what criticism might it imply about our theological presuppositions? In light of these things, what theological revisions might be necessary? Could these natives be surviving instances of Edenic beings? Or are they rather subhumans, such as the monsters mentioned in the Odyssey (for instance, cannibals, Lotus-eaters, and Cyclopes) and in the book of Genesis (for instance, the Nephilim, who were believed to be the offspring of giant demons and earthly women)? But if these creatures are truly human, what does it mean to be human?
These may not have been questions posed by Columbus’s sailors, but such questions as these threw intellectual Europe into a wild tizzy of speculation and revisionism—a confusion as unending as ours would be if extraterrestrials were to land among us. ThisNew World awakened a European drama of ceaseless questioning, a questioning that, like the spirits released by Pandora, could never again be contained.
“New World” also entered common speech, serving as an everyday reference to novelty, excitement, even unthinkably exquisite experience. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, in his Elegie XIX, the Jacobean poet John Donne undresses his mistress, removing each of her articles of clothing till she is completely naked:
Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! My new-found-land,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man’d,
My Myne of precious stones, My Emperie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
It is most unlikely that Donne ever read Las Casas. As he entered his beloved’s “Myne of precious stones,” he was not thinking of Tainos being worked to death in Spanish mines. He was, however, thinking about what all those naked natives had given him (and his age) license to think about:
Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joyes.14
His mind was filled with marvels, whether related by deceptive travelers or imagined—just as Thomas More had imagined the island of Utopia, just as William Shakespeare would imagine the island of Prospero in The Tempest, just as generations of science fiction writers would eventually imagine fantastic voyages to “other worlds.” In Europe, at a safe distance from the horrors being perpetrated on the natives, America commonly served as a prelapsarian Eden, sometimes even as an Eden of a particularly lubricious sort, seldom if ever as the Hell it became for so many.