by David Boyle
Within a few weeks, the authorities were so infuriated by the behavior of the soldiers that they had swept through the island rounding them up and herding them back onto the ships they had arrived on. The convoy was not going all the way to the English Channel after all, and they set sail back to Genoa as soon as the weather permitted. Still, Columbus made the most of his near adventure in Chios. His work for the di Negros and Spinolas had been noticed and soon the call came again. Christopher was asked to accompany their consignment of mastic from Genoa to England—probably originally intended for the previous year—and he accepted. So in May 1476, just eight months after his first departure for Chios, he set off to seek his fortune a second time in a convoy of five ships heading out into the Atlantic in search of English and Flemish cloth. As they weighed anchor in Noli harbor, Columbus watched the disappearing mountains, this time from the gunwales of the whaler Bechalla, hired by Niccolò Spinola.
As the convoy hugged the coastline of Aragon, dropping into Barcelona and Valencia through June and July, all but one of the ships was flying the Genoese flag—the red cross of St. George on a white background.* As they passed Gibraltar on their starboard side, they encountered one of the most fearsome pirates in the eastern Mediterranean, the Frenchman Guillaume Casenove, in command of a fleet of thirteen Portuguese raiders. There were few pirates in those days who simply attacked any ships they encountered. They lived under the protection of princes and were nominally Christian raiders seeking out Muslim shipping—or vice versa. France was in alliance with Genoa—a rare moment when the old Fregoso policy was in place—so, tempting as it was, Casenove could find no excuse to seize Columbus’s convoy.
Or could he? The Bechalla was not flying the Genoese flag, although it was manned by seaman from Savona, because it was actually Flemish. It therefore flew the flag of Burgundy, which was currently at war with France. That was excuse enough. Casenove’s fleet had prepared for sail and now filed out of Gibraltar harbor. They shadowed the Genoese convoy around the coast, and off Cape St. Vincent on August 13 they ordered them to stop.
There was really no decision to be made. The Genoese ships were heavily outnumbered and would have to fight. The Bechalla was one of the smaller vessels in the convoy but it was not ignored, and soon arrows and crossbow bolts were clattering on the deck. All around them, the engagement was turning into a prodigious confrontation. Sea battles in those days involved the terrifying screams of hand-to-hand fighting on other decks, while arrows dipped in burning pitch would begin to fall. There was the acrid smell of burning wood and flesh wafting across the waves. Four of Casenove’s ships were now burning and sinking, but two of the convoy’s ships had also disappeared, and then the stench of fire became so close as to be unmistakable. Soon the Bechalla was on fire from one end to the other, and the crew plunged into the sea.
Columbus was about six miles from the coast—wounded and weak from loss of blood and half-blinded by the salt. Some hours later, a peasant farmer found him collapsed on the sandy beach of Porto de Mos on the Argarve, just west of a Portuguese fishing village called Lagos. He was within a few days journey of the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon, where his younger brother Bartholomew was trying to establish himself as a cartographer. Thanks to the efforts of Henry the Navigator, this was now the city of navigators.
Two ships of Columbus’s convoy managed to escape and take shelter in Cadiz. The crews and the survivors made their way to Lisbon at the end of December and soon made contact with those fortunate few who had managed to land from the sinking ships. Help was also on the way. Those behind the joint venture that had sent the convoy had been considering what to do. The suppliers were still waiting in England, and there were the survivors of the battle to think of; to that end, a second convoy began preparing in Genoa to rendezvous with the survivors of the original one in Lisbon and complete the journey. By late March or early April 1477, they were in the English Channel, slipping through the Solent to dock at Southampton, and Columbus was aboard.
Like Genoa, England had been through more than its fair share of political turbulence. The dynastic battle known as the War of the Roses finally seemed settled. But the Yorkist king Edward IV, tall, handsome, and capable, was still suppressing any whiff of dissent and in the summer would execute two people for trying to kill him by witchcraft.* But although the civil war had not touched every corner of the kingdom, and the trading houses of London, Southampton, and Bristol had continued their inexorable rise, there were few disputes that did not crystallize into politics.
Columbus was determined to take a ship farther north from Bristol, one of the ports that had been most affected by sudden shifts in policy. For nearly a century, Bristol merchants had been sending cloth and wheat to the isolated Danish colony in Iceland, and buying air-dried cod known as stockfish in return. Then King Edward agreed to a peremptory demand from the Danes to stop buying fish from Iceland—the monopoly for which had been given to the Bergen branch of the powerful Baltic trading group, the Hanseatic League.
The relationship between Bristol and Iceland was complicated. On the one hand, Bristol traders were almost the only sources of supply available to the Icelandic communities. On the other hand, they also bought boys and girls from Icelandic communities and took them home to England as household servants. The coastal communities in Iceland were equally furious about the fish agreement, afraid that they would simply be abandoned. The traders of Bristol, for whom the Icelandic trade had become increasingly important, were badly hit too. Columbus may not have known, but if he was going to sail north on a Bristol vessel, it would no longer be a simple matter of shipping onto the next trading voyage out of the harbor.
Southampton, on the other hand, was full of Italians; a recent mayor had even been from Florence. Columbus reported to the offices of the Spinola family in the city and joined another party of sailors through the Bargate on the road to Winchester and from there to the city and port of Bristol. He arrived there in May and the first thing he noticed was the astonishing heights of the tides. At one moment the ships along the wharfs of the Avon River were resting in the mud; a few hours later they were riding up to fifty feet higher in the water. With tides that high, they would have been on the edge of an ocean that was vast compared to the Mediterranean.
Once in Bristol, Columbus found his way to the Church of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, next to the Mariner’s Institute on Marsh Street, to find out when and where ships were sailing and who needed crews. Soon he was safely on board a trading ship, carrying butter, honey, grain, and Flemish linens. The voyage was a twenty-day journey into the Bristol Channel, along the coast of Wales and Scotland, and from there directly across to Iceland. Having arrived, he made contact with the crew of an English or Scottish dogger. These were large fishing boats that made their way along the Icelandic coast catching cod, with the intention of smuggling the catch home without paying duties—buying stockfish there was prohibited. For the next month or so, Columbus shared the tough life of the fishermen, the massive Atlantic swell, and hauling the nets in what was, even in summer, an icy sea.
But in the heaving seas west of Iceland, tantalizingly close to Greenland, Columbus was as close to the edge of the known world as he had ever been. He knew Seneca’s famous prophecy that lands would emerge beyond Thule, the medieval name for Iceland. He would also have heard in Iceland, if not earlier, that there had once been Danish settlements farther west than that, on Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, strange islands inhabited by painted men or skraelings.* It is still not certain to where these Viking place names referred, but there is a suggestion that Helluland was Baffin Island, Markland was Labrador, and Vinland was Newfoundland. A century before Columbus sailed to Iceland, the Oxford mathematician Nicholas of Lynn traveled all the way to the Arctic on behalf of Edward III, probably to Markland, and left behind his astrolabe with the local priest.
The dogger had circumnavigated Iceland by the end of August, and as agreed, Columbus shipped a return p
assage on a Bristol trading ship. Bristol ships returned back along the coast of western Ireland, and Columbus knew that in the busy port of Galway he would again encounter Portuguese traders and that way get back to Lisbon. But even more important for the future was what he saw in Galway. While he was waiting for his ship in the small harbor, there was a commotion at the dockside. A small boat had been towed in, having evidently drifted for thousands of miles, with a man and a woman inside still alive, clinging to the planks. The woman was absolutely beautiful, but both were of “most unusual appearance.” Today we would recognize them as Inuit, but Columbus believed they were Chinese. For him they were a tantalizing glimpse not so much of lands to the west, but of the golden roofs of Cipangu far beyond the horizon.
II
“Certainly I owe much to Plato, but I must confess that I owe no less to Cosimo [de’ Medici], inasmuch as Plato only showed me the idea of courage, Cosimo showed it to me every day.”
MARSILIO FICINO, Plato’s translator
While Columbus was at sea in the north Atlantic, a deadly conspiracy against the Medicis was beginning to take shape in Florence. Lorenzo de’ Medici was increasingly unpopular, blamed for the series of disastrous harvests that had undermined the city’s finances. There were irritable whispers about who this elegant young man thought he was, with his sumptuous entertainments and poets and artists in luxuriant clothes. Florence was supposed to be a republic, so why were they ruled by this staggeringly wealthy dynasty? These mutterings quickly began to take a more deadly shape, led by the rival Florentine banking family Pazzi, but with at least tacit support from Pope Sixtus IV—and very active support from Archbishop Salviati of Pisa and a hot-headed seventeen-year-old Cardinal Riario, a nephew of the pope, whose father commanded the Vatican troops. The motivations for the plot were various—dark resentments and jealousies and a frustrated attempt by the pope, using Pazzi money, to take over the main road to the Adriatic.
Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano arrived at Florence’s spectacular cathedral, the Duomo, for mass on April 26, 1478, sitting in their usual places in front of the choir. But as the priest elevated the bread and wine, it was the sign for the conspirators to strike.
Francesco Pazzi stabbed Giuliano fatally, and so brutally and enthusiastically that he injured his own thigh. Lorenzo was wounded in the neck but he leaped over the choir rail and was saved by the quick thinking of his friend, the poet Angelo Poliziano, who hustled him through the door to the sacristy and slammed it shut. The archbishop meanwhile arrived at the offices of the city authorities, but the gonfalionere—the city’s chief official—was suspicious, and locked himself in the building ordering the bells to be rung. When the other conspirators arrived, shouting “the people and liberty!” they realized the coup had almost certainly failed.
Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici
Some of the conspirators were killed then and there in street fighting, but the rest were caught. Within days, the leaders were hanged from upper windows of city offices—Francesco Pazzi naked, the archbishop in his full ceremonial robes. A nervous Botticelli sketched their bodies as they hung there, and his biographers dated his mental decline as stemming from the experience. Furious at such treatment of an archbishop, an incandescent Pope Sixtus put the whole of Florence under an interdict, a mass excommunication of the city. Venice and Milan backed Florence, but the rest of Italy lined up behind the pope. A general conflagration seemed to be inevitable as the pope’s own troops, under Riario’s father, prepared for war.
Only two of the leaders of the Pazzi conspiracy remained alive: The youthful Cardinal Riario was flung into prison; the other escaped. It soon became clear that the person responsible for his escape was Amerigo’s cousin Piero Vespucci. Piero was arrested, tortured for twenty days, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the city’s prison, known as the Stinche. His son Marco was exiled.
Why did Piero help? He always claimed that he was innocent, though he never denied that he had helped the conspirator escape, and he must have had some idea what was happening. One explanation is that he still harbored resentment against the Medicis for the outrageous way that Giuliano had up-staged his son Marco as the public lover of Simonetta. Whatever the reason, the city was in uproar, with crowds shouting the Medici slogan “palle, palle!”* All of Florence focused their attention on the Vespucci family.
In the aftermath of the failed conspiracy, Florence was on the brink of war against a fearsome combination of Italian cities, allied to the pope, and there were desperate diplomatic attempts to avoid military catastrophe. Amerigo Vespucci, now twenty-five, had been taught that the strength of Florence lay in its intelligence and subtlety, and now he was suddenly given the chance to see this intelligence in action firsthand.
The most urgent task was to make sure that if war was inevitable Florence had allies, and to delay any action until these allies could commit themselves. To lead the Florentine delegation to the Vatican—to the furious Pope Sixtus—Lorenzo took the imaginative step of appointing Piero’s brother Guido Antonio, who was a brilliant lawyer. Guido in turn asked his young cousin Amerigo to accompany him to Rome as his secretary.
Rome in those days was a small, dirty, lawless city. It was hardly comfortable, being a Florentine in the city of the pope, but it was here Amerigo cut his teeth as a diplomatic secretary, listening, recording, and writing letters, in the most difficult and desperate circumstances. When it was clear that there was no alternative to war, Guido Antonio headed home. But while he and Amerigo were traveling, the news reached Florence that their ambassador to France had died. The moment they arrived back under the Duomo in Florence, Guido Antonio received a request to go immediately to Paris as his replacement. It was the first time Amerigo had traveled outside Italy. He saw the galleried streets and arcades in Bologna, and brick towers hundreds of feet high, glimpsed Milan under the ruthless Sforza family, crossed the Appenines, and headed toward Lyons and deeper into France. While Columbus and Cabot were great talkers, Vespucci was becoming known as a great listener and a great correspondent, and it was this trip to Paris that helped make him so, listening to the talk on the road and writing a stream of letters to officials back home.
Vespucci arrived in Paris in 1478, the time and place immortalized by Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and began to settle in at the French court. Here he met another great personality of the age. King Louis XI’s closest adviser was the historian Philippe de Commines, who rapidly became a close friend of Guido Antonio, telling him how best to approach the king. Louis never quite looked royal—he wore shabby clothes and an old felt hat—but he had mastered the art of diplomacy to such an extent that he has become known to history as the Spider King. The webs of intrigue that he wove were designed to neutralize the pope, whom he disliked heartily, and increase French influence in Italy. He was therefore prepared to make friendly gestures toward Guido Antonio, including closing the Pazzi banks in Paris and seizing their assets, but it was a very ambitious project to get the French to invade Italy in support of Florence, and in this the Vespuccis failed.
Even so, the young Vespucci was discovering a city in the best way, from the privileged position of the court, being advised by one of its most civilized members. As he glimpsed the very heart of European diplomacy, Vespucci’s own interest in maps began to grow more intense. In his spare moments in Paris, or anywhere else he was taken, he began to seek out and collect maps of all sorts. Not just small maps, but the big attempts to set out the geography of the whole world, with their great green watercolor seas, held down on the table by paperweights at each corner.
The maps that fascinated him the most were those based on Ptolemy’s Geography, just becoming widely available in printed form and so popular that the word “ptolemy” was soon applied to any atlas. It was the spice routes that thrilled him most, the narrow straits between Java and Cathay, through which the spices and the silks poured into Europe, marked on these fifteenth-century maps as the Cape of Catigara. He consig
ned all this to memory, remembering also how Toscanelli had told him of his meeting with Niccolò di Conti, who had spent twenty-five years in the Indies and had seen these very straits.
After his voyage around Iceland, Columbus was back in Lisbon staying with his brother Bartholomew. Both had agreed to work together in a small chart-making business, satisfying the enormous demand for maps of all kinds among Lisbon’s burgeoning merchant population. Christopher’s most frustrating problem was that although he was ambitious and determined, he had very little education and spoke only the Genoese dialect. He therefore immersed himself in courses in Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian and began ferociously reading new books. Soon he was able to read everything he could lay his hands on about the Atlantic and what lay beyond, and became particularly acquainted with five books he carried with him for the rest of his life.
The Travels of Marco Polo went everywhere with him, and the young Columbus clung to Polo’s dream of the golden roofs. There was also Historia Rerum by Pope Pius II, Pliny’s Natural History, and The Perpetual Almanac by the Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto. Finally there was Imago Mundi, by the extraordinary former rector of the Sorbonne in Paris, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, a book full of descriptions of sea serpents, dog-faced women, and men with the bodies of lions.* In Columbus’s own copy of this book, the critical phrase “India is near Spain” was heavily underlined. On these shaky foundations, mainly compendiums of classical and medieval knowledge about the earth, Columbus built his dreams.
