by David Boyle
Lisbon was certainly the place to be for an adventurer. King Alfonso V was conducting an exhausting war with Castile, which meant that the caravels of exploration were now rotting in the harbor, but this was still where everyone with seafaring ambitions came if they could. The city’s forty thousand inhabitants were a varied mix of English, Genoese, Germans, and Venetians, who were mathematicians, geographers, and oceanographers, questioning everything about what lay beyond the known world. As he established himself in business with Bartholomew, Columbus could look out from their shop by the textile market in the middle of Lisbon’s growing Genoese neighborhood and see the narrow lanes below the fortress of St. George snaking away toward the harbor, the tall houses painted in red and green, and the ships anchored along the broad Tagus River.
Columbus continued to carry out assignments for Paolo di Negro, who was in Lisbon in 1478, and who sent him on his behalf to buy a cargo of sugar from Madeira for Ludivico Centurione. But something went wrong with the deal, the cargo he carried could not be sold, and the merchants would not let him have the sugar on credit. Columbus found himself back in Genoa facing a court summons demanding payment for the hire of the ship. The twenty-seven-year-old Columbus explained the situation and told the court that he was leaving for Lisbon the following day. He never went back to his home city.
Within months of his return from the North Atlantic, Columbus was seeking out the kind of connections that could help him to realize his dreams. Always passionately religious, he sought out the company of Portuguese aristocrats, noticing that they frequented the chapel of the Convento dos Santos, then a fashionable boarding school for the daughters of the local aristocracy, overlooking the Tagus River near Bartholomew’s map shop. He began the habit of going there for mass and vespers, and made the acquaintance of one of the teachers in the school, Felipa Perestrello. She was in her late twenties, rather too old in those days to be unmarried, but her father and grandfather were hereditary governors of the island of Porto Santo off Madeira, a thousand miles out into the Atlantic.*
Columbus was more than just singleminded. He was almost fanatical about restoring the fortunes of his family. Perhaps he always had been, but the frustrations of Chios and the shipwreck had raised the intensity with which he schemed. Columbus was now a loud and ambitious presence in the three-hundred-strong Genoese community in Lisbon, and he needed an edge. Felipa looked like the opportunity he had been searching for—a connection with the elite of Portuguese exploration—and he introduced himself.
The interpretation that Columbus deliberately seduced Felipa because of her connections goes beyond the evidence, but it fits both with what we know of his obsessions and with the fact that he barely mentions her at all in anything he wrote later. It seems, in fact, to have been his mother-in-law whose company he really enjoyed. There is also the hint in early biographies that, having slept with Felipa and made her pregnant, Columbus then had to marry her. His son Ferdinand’s biography of his father says that he “behaved honorably,” which might imply something of the kind, though the context suggests that this is his explanation of why Felipa accepted him, rather than the other way around.
Columbus was a master at weaving tales about himself. It may be that the tales he wove to make possible his fortuitous marriage to Felipa began to unravel very shortly after the wedding. He was, after all, the son of a weaver and taverner, penniless, a self-educated supplicant to more successful Genoese merchant families, whose father had been—and may then have been—in prison for debt. Lisbon was a city where anybody could be almost anything but, even so, it seems to have made sense after the wedding to disappear for a while. Columbus and his bride, accompanied by his mother-in-law, left for Porto Santo soon after the wedding, as guests of Felipa’s brother.
It isn’t clear whether Columbus hoped to establish some business venture from the island. If he did, he was to be sorely disappointed. Porto Santo was nine miles long by three miles across. It was a stopping point for ships heading south toward the Portuguese outposts in Guinea, though there had been precious few of those since the war with Castile. Its forests had been destroyed in a massive seven-year fire shortly after it was settled by the Portuguese. Columbus’s father-in-law, Bartholomew Perestrello, had taken a pregnant rabbit with him on his first voyage to the island, and—to the great delight of those who thought it a good omen—the rabbit had given birth on board. Two years after his arrival, there were so many rabbits, and so little vegetation left, that they decided to abandon the island. Even when Columbus and his family settled there, they had few companions.
The one redeeming factor for Columbus on this barren outcrop was his friendship with Felipa’s mother. During the long hours staring out to sea during his two-year exile, she told him the tales of the first generation of Henry the Navigator’s explorers—of the crudely carved wooden idol that had been picked up at sea, the strange trees washed ashore, and the bodies of drowned men with strange, broad, foreign-looking faces. She also brought out all the maps her husband had kept there, and his handwritten notes about sea routes, winds, and currents in the Atlantic. Nearby Madeira had been the base for Portuguese explorations, and there was enough ephemera to keep Columbus fascinated for months.* With this evidence in front of him, he also noticed other peculiarities about being six hundred miles out into the Atlantic. The wind blew from the west. The sun set later there. To a man with an inquiring mind who was curious about the size and shape of the earth, this was tantalizing evidence.
By 1480 the affair of the missing sugar seems somehow to have been settled, and Ludovico Centurione alleviated the boredom of Porto Santo by suggesting that Columbus work for him on Madeira, selling sugar to merchants from Flanders and the Netherlands. Like other nearby islands, Madeira had not been inhabited before the Portuguese arrived, but it had been transformed in one generation into a powerhouse of sugar production. Slaves from the Canary Islands were put to work on vast plantations, the model for those that would emerge centuries later in the New World.
Even so, Madeira was almost as much of an exile as Porto Santo had been, and the isolation did nothing for Columbus’s melancholic obsession. Here in their new home, Felipa gave birth to their first child, Diego. Some biographers imagine that Columbus conceived the idea of crossing the Atlantic as he gazed out to sea in the summer nights on Porto Santo. It is just as likely that he had always imagined himself discovering new lands, but the possibility of where and how to profit from such a discovery began to form more clearly in the lonely evenings on Madeira. Ships from Bristol were now trading directly with the island, bringing cloth and wool to trade for sugar. Some of them even planned to trade directly with North Africa, but the Portuguese protested and the plan was allowed to lapse. In his conversations on the wharves with the Bristol merchants, or at the end of the day in his home in the rue Esmeralda in Funchal, Columbus renewed his acquaintance with the rumors that Bristol sailors held dear, of the shadowy lands to the west and the great cod fisheries.†
On one visit to the Azores, as far west as he had ever sailed, Columbus had a conversation that confirmed the Bristol view. A one-eyed sailor told him of how, on a particular voyage, he had been caught in a storm and blown far off course to the west and had seen land, which he believed was Tartary (Mongolia), before the weather blew them out of sight again. Columbus was a man who believed in destiny, and exactly what his destiny should be was becoming a little clearer in his mind.
The machinations of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s ambassadors, and the offices of the Medici Bank all over Europe—indistinguishable from Florentine missions—had held back the tide of war for a while, helped by the tireless persuasion of Guido Antonio and Amerigo Vespucci. But the master stroke had been played by Lorenzo himself.
Lorenzo reasoned that the alliance against him included at least one weak link: Naples. But instead of the laborious business of sending ambassadors, he needed to have direct contact with the Neapolitan king, Ferdinand, as soon as possible. There really was on
ly one way. Leaving Florence secretly, Lorenzo arrived incognito at the court in Naples and demanded to see the king. By the time the news was out and the foreign ambassadors alerted, they were sitting down at the same table laughing like old friends. Ferdinand had only one immediate request: that Lorenzo release his friend Piero Vespucci, languishing in prison for helping one of the conspirators escape. Still protesting his innocence, Amerigo’s notorious cousin was released.
In fact, peace was breaking out all over Europe. After a heavy defeat at the battle of Toro, Portugal surrendered its claims to the throne of Castile and the Canary Islands in return for an exclusive right to explore southward and a free hand in Africa. The gold, ivory, sacks of pepper, and ships full of chained human beings began to arrive on the wharves of Lisbon once more, and for those whose life was exploration, the ships represented a sense of hope. Finally, a peace agreement was brokered between Venice and Sultan Mehmet, but it was a difficult one to negotiate because Venice was no longer in a position of power. Venice was forced to hand over the lemon farms they retained on the Greek mainland, and pay ten thousand ducats annually for the privilege of trading in Turkish waters—the very sectors of the Mediterranean that Venice depended on most for its wealth. Under the treaty, Venice also agreed to send the leading Renaissance artist Gentile Bellini to the sultan’s court to paint him.
Still, the peace was not fully achieved. Having neutralized the Venetians, in the summer of 1480, the sultan struck at the heart of Italy itself with an assault by seven thousand Ottoman troops near the port of Otranto. There was an appalling massacre: The elderly archbishop was sawed in two in front of his own altar, after which the remaining population was carried off to be sold as slaves in Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. The pope immediately lifted his interdict on Florence, hoping that the city-states would unite around Venice to force the invaders out. But it was not to be. The Venetians agonized, but they were bound by the terms of the peace treaty, and in any case they had no money to send an armed force. Instead, Naples and Hungary gathered together what men they could afford and sent them against the Ottoman invaders.
Having established himself on the Italian mainland, Mehmet turned on the island of Rhodes, where the defending Knights Hospitaller unexpectedly held off the attack. Both sides settled down to wait. But on May 3, 1481, Mehmet, the conqueror of Constantinople, died suddenly at the age of only sixty. In the ensuing struggle for succession, his troops withdrew from Italy, never to return. The Venetian senate waited a few months, then sent a message of congratulations to his mild-mannered son Bayezid II, the new sultan, and he responded by confirming the treaty and reducing trading levies. At both ends of the Mediterranean, finally, those who dreamed of trade routes in the future could begin to make plans.
Despite the peace, and the resumption of trade, the caravels that explored Africa while Henry the Navigator was alive were still wasting away in Lisbon harbor. King Alfonso, his spirit broken by a heavy defeat by the Aragonese, was shut away in a monastery in Sintra, suffering from serious depression. When he died in August 1481, his son John II shut himself away for three days wearing white sackcloth, but then emerged to assume full control. John brought with him a new spirit of exploration. There would be new voyages down the African coast, he announced. There would be a fort built at La Mina on the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to defend their African possessions from the Spanish and a land expedition from there eastward to make contact with Prester John.
Excited by the whiff of renewed adventure, Columbus returned to Lisbon to look for work, filling any free time once again drawing maps for Bartholomew. While he was there, he was introduced to a relative of his mother-in-law’s who was a canon of the cathedral. He got on well with Fernão Martins, a future cardinal, and the subject of geography soon came up. It transpired that Martins had been in Rome in 1464 at the deathbed of another popular cardinal, and had met and made friends with the most extraordinary man he had ever met, a Florentine doctor of immense wisdom called Toscanelli.
Martins went on to explain how he had told some leading figures at the Portuguese court about their friendship and about Toscanelli’s theories regarding the shape of the world. Some years later, he had been asked by the highest authority to reestablish contact with Toscanelli and ask his advice about new trade routes to the East. Toscanelli had written a reply that set out, in no uncertain terms, that the way to the East was via the West.
Columbus was thrilled. It was a small piece of information but he recognized it as vital. Would it, by any chance, be possible to see Toscanelli’s letter? But Martins was not prepared to let him. Maybe he no longer had a copy. Maybe he never actually had one. Maybe the risk of showing such sensitive information to a foreigner was too high. But Martins could tell him this: Toscanelli believed Marco Polo provided evidence of the size of the earth, and that the Chinese province of what he called “Mangi” was probably only five thousand miles west of Lisbon.* It was vital confirmation for Columbus of what he had begun to suspect: that it might be possible to sail there directly across the Atlantic.
Toscanelli’s theories had also reached the Scuole Grandi in Venice. Like Columbus, an idea was forming in John Cabot’s mind about reaching the spice routes on the other side of the earth by sailing westward to reach the East. But Cabot had not given up on a second idea: of reaching the eastern spice routes by traveling south to Arabia and the Red Sea to cut out more of the middlemen. Perhaps, if he was clever enough, those two strategies—finding the origins of the spice trade and opening up a new route there via the West—might lead the way to untold wealth and glory.
But all this would require money, backers, and partners—and some way of protecting his discovery. In the meantime, he listened to Febo Capella and the other humanists and geographers at the Scuole Grandi, with their tales of distant islands and roofs of gold, and practiced making his own maps and experimenting with constructing three-dimensional maps called globes.
Toscanelli
Cabot was a dreamer and a talker. There is far less direct evidence about his life than there is about Columbus, but there is enough to get a sense of his personality as distinct from the man who became his great rival. Cabot was articulate and energetic in a different way: more believable, more confident, and calmer as well. While Columbus was determined to earn his heroism as well as his wealth, Cabot somehow seems to have enjoyed heroism from an early age and to have taken it more for granted.
After the age of steam, the idea that there were set routes across the sea became hard to understand: Steam enabled ships to cross the ocean wherever they chose. But in the age of sail, the discovery of safe routes at sea were closely guarded secrets. Go one way, and the currents and prevailing winds would frustrate your journey and risk destroying your vessels; go the other and they would speed you on your way. These routes had enormous commercial significance, and knowledge of them was valuable. So it was never sensible to ask too many geographical questions in Lisbon. For the Portuguese, maps provided their most valuable resources for the future: These were state secrets with fearsome legal protection. Maps of the routes southward down the coast of Africa, or to the newly discovered Atlantic islands, were signed out to captains when they weighed anchor and signed back in again when and if they returned. The penalty for anyone sending a chart or map abroad was death.
There was no doubt that Columbus was dabbling in dangerous areas for a foreigner, although—paradoxically—the burgeoning chart-making business in Lisbon was dominated by the Genoese. This irritated the merchants of Lisbon, who saw the expansion of the Genoese community in their city as a direct threat to their incomes. One of the first petitions the new king, John, received was a plea to have the Genoese excluded from Lisbon trade. The accusation was not just that they were muscling in on trade with Africa and the islands, but that they were stealing secrets. But Columbus had married into a family with maps and those maps were at the heart of his work and his obsessions. He knew what he was collecting could put him and his business in danger.
If he hung around the right bars on the Tagus there was no end to the amount of details he could pick up. Still, others also were listening in those same bars and he had to be careful.
But the Toscanelli clue was just too valuable to ignore. He had no address, and as a foreigner it was too suspect to send such letters out of the country to a city he had no business with. Nor would a man like Toscanelli correspond about state secrets with somebody like Columbus. But persistent questioning of Martins revealed that he had used an intermediary in his relationship with Toscanelli, a Florentine merchant living in Lisbon and involved in the import of black slaves from Africa. Lorenzo Berardi had been the one who actually wrote to Toscanelli, and Columbus struck up a relationship with him. At long last, and inspired by the same idea—sailing westward to China—Berardi agreed to show him Toscanelli’s reply. With great excitement, Columbus unfolded the letter and copied its contents into one of the books that was rapidly becoming his bible: Historia Rerum by Pope Pius II. Toscanelli explained how he had encountered an emissary from the Great Khan who had been sent to the pope in the 1440s, and who had described the broad rivers and fantastical cities of Cathay. “On one river, there are established about two hundred cities, and marble bridges of great breadth and length adorned with columns on either side,” he wrote breathlessly. “I esteem your noble and grand desire to navigate from the East to the West,” he told the Portuguese via Berardi. “For the said voyage is not only possible, but is sure and certain and will bring honor.”
Toscanelli received the letter from Columbus apparently with irritation, judging by the tone of his reply. He was an old man who was frustrated that he had spent his whole life urging a western voyage and would probably not live to see one attempted. He enclosed a map, and with mounting enthusiasm Columbus inscribed it alongside the one Berardi had shown him. “I am not surprised that you, who have high courage, and the whole Portuguese nation, who have always been able men in every great enterprise, should be inflamed and desirous to prosecute the said voyage,” he wrote.
