by David Boyle
Even without coming from a family of seafarers, a Genoese upbringing meant an overwhelming identification with the sea for John Cabot and his brother Piero, as well as a tough-minded approach to profit. It also meant the daily business of buying meat at the butchers and a diet of mainly fish and bread. This was before Italians ate pasta. The wheat originally came from Italy’s Black Sea colonies, and the fish was from Spain and Flanders. Potatoes and tomatoes had not yet been introduced. The Cabot family garden—and most families of any standing had gardens—produced peas and broad beans to be dried in the winter, as well as onions, garlic, and herbs. They also had fruit trees. These supplemented the produce from the great grain warehouses that fed the city.
Anyone who grew up in Genoa in the 1450s would recognize the magnificent new palace that housed the Bank of St. George, the symbol of the stability of the city and its money, both colonial administrator and manager of the city’s public debt—like the Bank of England and the East India Company all rolled into one. They would know the famous Capo Faro lighthouse that provided a beacon for their harbor, a familiar landmark from land and reassurance as they sailed home. They would learn to be proud of the city’s treasures: the ashes of St. John the Baptist and the emerald chalice said to have been used at the Last Supper. The phrase “Genoa the Proud” was coined in 1473 and has stuck ever since. Or as Dante had put it, “Genoa the Shameless.”
Though its squares were tiny compared to those in Florence, and its artistic output puny compared to Venice, the narrow streets—it was said that a knight riding through them would have to turn in his toes to get through—were kept scrupulously clean. The mud was washed from the streets at night, and the front doors of the city’s naval heroes were decorated with pictures of St. George. Like England, Genoa claimed St. George as their patron saint. Each city district was recognizable by the watchtowers at the fortified mansions of the great families who dominated there, as well as by the distinctive shops—the butchers in the district of Sosiglia, the goldsmiths in the Piazza dei Banchi, the shield makers in San Lorenzo, the dyers in Santo Stefano, and the weavers in the Borgo dei Lanaiuoli.*
Being Genoese in the mid-fifteenth century meant familiarity with the public staircases cut into the rock and the fountains in every square, fed by pipes from the mountains. It meant pride in what was the biggest and busiest harbor in the world, with its forests of masts, sails, and streaming banners, and all the fantasies and realities of the sea—the rumors of undiscovered lands and exotic spices, as well as the clang of hammers and the stench of pitch running along the beach where the tar merchants, carpenters, swordsmiths, sail makers, and pulley manufacturers did their business. The small boats from Corsica were a common sight, unloading melons and cheese to sell in the streets. So were the piles of dung and garbage that drew flies, and the merchants who put garlic to their nostrils to cover the stench as the slave vessels were unloaded.
We don’t know why the Cabots left their tall, narrow, and probably crowded home; Genoese homes of the day accommodated up to six families on different floors. Maybe they felt claustrophobic among the dark, narrow streets. Maybe they dreamed of a new start in another city where they could imagine the family, or Guilo at least, having more substance than in Genoa. More likely, they despaired of the continual disruption to their ambitions from the ferocity of Genoese politics.
Life in Genoa was dominated by the great families, and the network of allegiances that spread throughout the class system. The Guarco, Montaldo, Spinola, Doria, Fieschi, and Grimaldi families carved up the positions between them, and their intertwined business schemes dominated the activities at the waterfront.* But two families in particular—the Adorno and Fregoso clans—were battling for power in the middle of the fifteenth century and this increasingly spilled out onto the streets, with neighborhood brawls between advocates of the rival families. The disruption meant private prisons and miniature armies in control of some sections of the city. The violently unpredictable business of politics in Genoa meant that only four doges—the elected lifetime mayors of the city—managed to survive in office until their natural deaths.
The key issue of Genoese politics in that period was also becoming increasingly urgent. The problem was that Genoa was too weak by itself to guarantee its own independence. The question, therefore, was how to provide stable government for business to be conducted, given that Francesco Sforza, the new duke of Milan, was threatening to take control of the city and end its long history of independence. Paid agents of the king of Aragon (soon to be incorporated into Spain) were also fermenting revolt in the Genoese colony of Corsica. Florence now controlled the seaport of Pisa, but wanted another port too. The solution seemed to be some kind of alliance with a prince powerful enough to keep the city safe, and there were really only two practical alternatives—an alliance with Aragon (the nation that included Barcelona, Valencia, and Catalonia) or an alliance with France. Both alternatives carried their own heavy risks and both involved compromises that could end Genoa’s independence as finally as any foreign invasion.
The Adorno party was in power in the early 1440s and supported an alliance with Aragon. But Giano Fregoso, leader of his own pro-French party, hired a galley, which slipped into Genoa harbor during the dead of night in the first few days of 1447 and attacked the doge’s palace. Fighting broke out all over the city and by the end of the day Giano Fregoso was in control—only to die shortly afterward. He was succeeded as doge by his son Pietro, who opened negotiations with the French king Charles VII—the man who had been crowned by Joan of Arc a generation earlier—as the price for providing some kind of guarantee to the city.
It is impossible to know for sure whose side the Cabots were on, but as members of the aspiring merchant classes it seems likely that they backed Pietro Fregoso’s policy of stability under the French. It was good for business, or it was supposed to be. But the fact that they made what must have been a difficult decision to leave Genoa altogether as soon as this policy unraveled is also evidence that they were Fregoso supporters—from necessity, perhaps, rather than conviction.
Another member of the Fregoso party, this one very committed and enthusiastic, was a cloth weaver from Quinto, a man with ten different ideas a day for self-improvement and making money. His name was Domenico Columbus, and he believed that supporting the Fregoso cause would mean his triumphal acceptance as a Genoese citizen and bring success to the business ventures he dreamed of. He fought alongside Giano Fregoso in his 1447 coup and was part of his funeral procession.
Domenico’s loyalty paid off. Political supporters of a reigning doge could reasonably aspire to one of the lucrative positions as warden of some part of the city’s infrastructure. Domenico was appointed warden of the Olive Gate to the city, a position that carried the responsibility of maintaining it and a modest pension. His brother Antonio did even better. He was made warden of the Capo Faro lighthouse. The income from the gate made a big difference, because Domenico had recently married Susanna di Fontanarossa, who came from a similar mountain village to the one he was born in. Just after Giano Fregoso died, the young couple left their home in Quinto, with its orange and lemon trees and the blue Appenines in the distance, and moved to the outskirts of Genoa near the Olive Gate, where he was warden. Sometime between August 25 and the end of October 1451—when John Cabot was about two years old—Susanna gave birth to a son they named Christopher.
There remains controversy about exactly where Columbus was born. Successive generations have tried to prove that he was Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, even American. They argue that all his surviving documents are in Spanish rather than Italian, though Genoa had its own very distinctive dialect. The truth is that he was a little ashamed of his humble origins and did not emphasize his Genoese roots. But he charged his heirs “always to work for the honor, welfare and increase of the city of Genoa.” “In the city of Genoa I have my roots, and there I was born,” he told the Bank of St. George, writing from Castile in 1502. “Although my body
be here, my heart is forever there.”
A few years after Christopher was born, the family moved into a house near to St. Andrew’s Gate in the Vico Diritto, now called the Casa di Columbo, where Domenico could put into practice his new scheme to sell wine. It was just inside the new walls near the waterfront and in the wool worker’s quarter, surrounded by market gardens of vegetables and herbs. In the front was one large window with a door to the left of it that opened out into Domenico’s workshop and wine store. Upstairs, the family could get out to the garden at the back where there was a well, right next to the city wall. There were more stories above.*
Domenico was the son of a weaver and a master weaver himself. His brother Antonio had been apprenticed for six years to another weaver, William from Brabant. They were small cogs in a giant European enterprise that bought wool from England or Flanders and exported it as finished cloth. The wool would be brought into the city from the docks or by mule, where it would be beaten, picked, washed, carded, spun into yarn, woven into cloth, measured, and cut, then stretched out to dry in sheds over a hundred feet long. It would then be combed and cut again before being handed over to the dyers, who used alum to fix the dye and remove the grease from the fabric. Finally it would end up back at the docks as yards of beautifully colored cloth. * Every one of these processes was part of a cottage industry with its own specialists, and the Columbus family was well versed in them, but even so, Domenico dreamed of a wider stage.
Unfortunately, the elder Columbus was one of those serial entrepreneurs who could never quite attain success. He was described later as “the sort of wine seller who was his own best customer.” Later he tried selling cheese, with little more success than he achieved in the wine business. As soon as Christopher was of age, his name started appearing on his father’s contracts: It was a sign that he was considered more reliable.
In 1458, when Christopher was five, Domenico suffered a serious setback that adversely affected his status in Genoa and therefore his business. The new doge, Pietro Fregoso, embarked on a series of secret negotiations to solve the problem of Genoa’s vulnerability once and for all, by handing over the city to the French. The king of France’s nephew was installed as governor of Genoa, and Fregoso stepped down with the promise of a fat pension. However careless the French were with the security of the city, they were quite happy to use it as a base for their own territorial ambitions. There was more than a whiff of colonialism about their rule. The Genoese were no longer the privileged elite in their own city, and Fregoso quickly irritated the new rulers so much that he was banished. In the power vacuum that followed, the rival Adornos rose to greater influence and, in the uncertainty, wool prices plummeted.
The following year, while the French governor was away on a military expedition, Pietro Fregoso returned to his city with a small force—just as his father had done a decade earlier. But this time, the battle did not go Fregoso’s way. Around the corner from the Columbus home, he was caught by an angry mob and hit on the forehead with a mace. He crawled to St. Andrew’s Gate for shelter, where he died a few hours later.
For three years after Pietro Fregoso’s violent death, Genoa struggled to come to terms with its new masters. French rule had brought no more stability, so it was easy to blame the economic difficulties on the French rather than on more distant events like the fall of Constantinople. The desperation was such that it forced even the Fregoso and Adorno clans to join forces. Backed by aid from Francesco Sforza in Milan, the combined forces of the two rival parties sparked a better organized uprising in the city on March 9, 1461. What remained of the French garrison was taken completely by surprise and forced to take refuge in the Castelletto, Genoa’s most powerful fortress. After a few more skirmishes, Prospero Adorno found himself in a powerful enough position to have himself elected doge three days later.
It was the ruin of Domenico’s hopes. He had pinned his future to the fortunes of the Fregoso family, hoping for political favor, only to find his great rivals seizing the instruments of city government. But he did have a seat on a committee of the weaver’s guild and heard through them that the wool trade was better in Savona, up the coast from Genoa, where the French were still in control. Keeping his house in Vico Diritto, he bought a farm in Savona, took his family there, and shifted his profession from wool weaver to wool dealer. The move was not a great success and Domenico found himself increasingly in debt. Soon he was in a debtors’ court and then back in Genoa, living in the attic of the family home, having rented out all but a little space on the ground floor while Christopher tried to keep the wool business alive from Savona.
There is some evidence that the Cabot family also had links to Savona. In fact, so much about the events of four decades later, with the expeditions across the Atlantic by Columbus and Cabot, implies that they were more than just known to each other. The whole drift of the story, and the implication of the correspondence about them in the 1490s, is that they were also former collaborators. There is little direct evidence about when the collaboration began, or where they met, but the most likely scenario is that they knew each other as boys. When Columbus and Cabot were children, the number of Genoese boys under five years old was probably only two thousand or so—roughly the size of a modern-day secondary school. There is also a tradition in the town of Castiglione Chiavarese, which boasts the ruins of Cabot’s house, that a neighbor from there lived next door to the Columbus family in Genoa. It is impossible to prove completely, but Cabot and Columbus probably began their friendship and rivalry either in Genoa or in Savona.
But for Guilo Cabot, Fregoso’s death and the expulsion of the French from Genoa was the last straw. The family made the difficult and risky decision to leave Genoa—risky because it was the networks within a city that sustained merchants, and leaving for another city carried the risk of isolation. But Guilo had business contacts in other cities who could be persuaded to sponsor his arrival.
He chose Venice. It was a choice that said a great deal about him and his family. It meant they were prepared to turn a blind eye to the advance of the Turks into eastern Europe in return for the enormous reach of the Venetian merchant fleet. If he was indeed experienced in the salt trade, he would have valuable information about the Genoese salt business, which could be exchanged for a welcome and a helping hand in Venice. His son John was then twelve years old.
II
“Lying on a feather mattress or quilt will not bring you renown.”
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence on April 9, 1453, seven weeks before the fall of Constantinople. Another baby, Matteo, who may have been a twin who did not survive, appears to be named alongside him. His father, Nastagio, was a respected lawyer and a wealthy man, the son of the chancellor of the signoria, the secretariat of the senate that governed the city. His mother, Elisabetta, doted on her eldest son, Antonio, the only one sent to university, who later became a brilliant lawyer. Amerigo’s other older brother, Bernardo, went into the wool business like Domenico Columbus. There was also a sister, Agnoletta. Unlike Cabot and Columbus, there is no dispute about where Vespucci was born. His baptism was recorded in the Church of Ognissanti the following March. Amerigo was named after his distinguished grandfather the chancellor, and he was brought up in a large home in the Ognissanti district in the northwest part of the city, along the Arno River, near the gate called the Porta Della Cana. It had an inner courtyard and a stone staircase leading to the second floor. On the door portals was the Vespucci coat of arms—a red background with a blue band with golden wasps. (Vespa is Italian for “wasp.”)
The Vespuccis belonged to a very different stratum of society than the Columbus family, but they had at least one thing in common: Their homes were in the weaving districts of their respective cities. This wasn’t a coincidence; the Vespucci’s earned much of their income from the declining wool trade, and thus the wealth of Amerigo’s branch of the family was dwindling. Amerigo’s street, the Borgo Ognissanti, ran along t
he canal with its workshops for cloth weaving. The neighborhood was a key part of Florence’s industrial sector and it smelled—not just of wine from cellars, but also of refuse dumped on the so-called island between their house and the Arno, the odors of which wafted over rich and poor alike. The next-door neighbors were a family of tanners, and the smell of hides and tanning also hung over the neighborhood. Like the Cabots, the Vespucci family had strong ties to the sea. One of Amerigo’s cousins was the captain of a Florentine galley, and his uncle Piero had commanded a Florentine fleet that fought corsairs on the North African coast.
Florence as pictured in Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 Nuremberg Chronicles
Florence may not have been as hard-headed as Genoa or as wealthy as Venice, but it was at that time the biggest and most sophisticated city in Renaissance Europe—the artistic center and the banking center that underpinned it. It was a city of expensive palaces built by Florence’s merchant princes, the Pazzi with their dolphin crests, the Rucellai with their sails of fortune, or the Strozzi palace, half again as large as the White House and twice as high. And above all the Medici, then at the height of their wealth and power, with the forceful presence of Cosimo de’ Medici—though he had no official position—presiding over the city from his palace behind the Duomo, rumored to have cost more to build than the Coliseum in ancient Rome.* It was the city of the famous Ponte Vecchio over the Arno, the great red and white dome above Florence Cathedral, finally completed according to Brunelleschi’s revolutionary design but not yet topped by a lantern, and the gigantic golden doors to the Baptistery, carved in relief by Lorenzo Ghiberti, the first artist in history to write his autobiography.
Florence in the 1460s was also a city of washers and carders with their wooden clogs to protect their feet from the wet floors, of colored laundry waving in the breeze, of donkey carts, tatty shops of beds, crockery, and broken casts of saints; there were the furnace makers in the Via al Fuoco, the perfumiers in the Via deli Speziali, and the hubbub of commerce in the Mercato Vecchio, with Donatello’s statue of Plenty on a column at its center. It was especially a city of bankers, sitting on benches at their tables covered in green cloth at the Mercato Nuovo and the Via di Tavolini (banco means bench in Italian), exchanging their gold coins, and making careful notes. Florence was a city of luxury, of magnificent dinners of roasted blackbirds or capons, with wines and desserts from Corsica, Seville, and Madeira. But above all, this was a city of color—of dyes and dyers and colorful paintings, clothes, and illustrations, pushing forward the possibilities for turning flowers, insects, and ground-up precious stones into striking and permanent hues.
