by David Boyle
Still waiting for some answer from the Talavera Commission, Columbus was staying in Seville, but time was passing. He had now been in Castile for more than two years, most of that time spent waiting, with varying levels of impatience and irritation, for the commission to reach some conclusion. The welcome payments from the royal payroll seemed inexplicably to have stopped and he needed to find new sources of income, but the news was good from the front line. Malaga had fallen to the Spanish, and the victorious troops were marching into the city, and the queen was present, reviewing them on a prancing horse. There were flags fluttering in the breeze from every building; tapestries were hanging over the balconies, and pennants from the end of every lance. In the far distance, but visible across the plains, the spectacle was also watched by the Moors defending the city of Baza.
Columbus realized that this was a rare opportunity because every one of the inhabitants of Malaga—as many as fifteen thousand Muslims—had been taken into slavery. This was no small consignment and the Spanish needed merchants experienced in selling slaves to take responsibility for their distribution. He seems to have been involved in this with Berardi, not just because he was available—and theoretically employed in the service of the queen—but because many of the slave markets were in Lisbon. It has never been clear why he wanted to return to Portugal at this point, since he had left so furtively, but selling slaves from the war seems to have been the main reason. He may also have been thinking about Lisbon for other reasons too. Rumors had reached him about the abject failure of van Olmen’s westward voyage of discovery. Having set sail from the Azores, the expedition had run into serious storms and the crew had been so terrified that they had been forced to turn back.
Columbus had talked to some of the great navigators of the age, so he may have guessed the reason for this failure—rather than chalk it up, as he tended to do, to the personal intervention of the Almighty on his behalf. He and Cabot had also sailed from the Azores with the Portuguese, and the truth was that the islands were too far north and voyages westward from there were liable to run into exactly the kind of perverse currents and adverse winds that the van Olmen expedition had encountered. Ironically, the success of Columbus’s own expedition would depend on setting sail from the Castilian Canaries, far enough south to benefit from the circular currents that dominated the mid-Atlantic. Yet when the Castilian court proposed that he represent them in Lisbon—probably about selling slaves—he was prepared to consider it. The failure of van Olmen might open a new opportunity for him in Portugal now that the Talavera Commission showed no sign of a decision. He wrote to the Portuguese king and asked him for permission to return without the fear of arrest, either for debts or on any other espionage charges that might be outstanding, and in March 1488, John replied in friendly terms, welcoming him back and calling him “my dear friend”:
“And if by chance you are in fear of our justice officials owing to some obligation you have incurred, we, by means of this letter can assure you that . . . you will not be arrested, detained, accused, summoned, or prosecuted, for any reason whatsoever.”
Relations between Spain and Portugal were still strained. King John’s scheme for an alliance with Yorkist England had come to nothing with the death of Richard III. The opportunity missed had been grasped instead by Ferdinand and the Spanish. Even now, there were two English diplomats at the Castilian court negotiating the marriage between Catherine of Aragon, his youngest child—then age four—and Arthur, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Henry VII. But there were also plans to bring Castile and Portugal closer, with a marriage between Isabella’s eldest daughter, Isabella, to Alfonso, crown prince of Portugal, and Columbus’s visit may also have been connected to that.* Either way, as winter turned to spring, and the flood-waters of the Guadalquivir retreated, he made his way back along the same route by which he had originally come from Portugal.
As Christopher returned to Lisbon, his brother Bartholomew was suddenly free again, after at least eighteen months under lock and key. His health was broken, and owning nothing more than the clothes he was wearing, it is unclear how he made his escape. Perhaps he walked away; perhaps, more likely, his captors had given up ever earning back in ransom money what they were spending on keeping him alive. There must have been a real danger that they would simply kill him, for fear that he would reveal their hideaway. Perhaps, as his brother would have done, he convinced them that he was worth more to them as a grateful discoverer of the Indies than if he was left in prison to rot, or simply dumped in a shallow grave on the beach.
Whatever happened, Bartholomew managed to find enough resources to clothe himself and pay the master of a passing merchant ship to take him with them to London, where, half dead from malnutrition and all those other diseases of damp and despair, he was entirely at the mercy of the Genoese colony on the Thames.
Toward the end of 1488, Christopher Columbus watched as a small fleet of battered caravels sailed up the Tagus to dock in Lisbon. Both he and the crowd at the dockside were aware of the significance of their return, but Columbus must have felt alone in his despondency. After a year and a half at sea, the exhausted crews acknowledged the cheers that signaled that the days of Henry the Navigator had returned. Older inhabitants said that it reminded them of the return of Gil Eanes or Antonio Nóli.
An interview was hastily arranged between the king and the triumphant expedition commander, the former pirate and slave trader Bartholomew Dias. It is hard to imagine that Columbus was deliberately invited to such a potentially secret meeting, knowing that he was now an agent of the Spanish sovereigns, but using his friends at court, he made sure he was there. It was an explosive historic event. Dias had sailed with two caravels and a stores ship in August 1487 to find a way around Africa to India. After surviving the most appalling weather, which drove him far to the south, he sailed eastward along the African coast until it was clear that Africa did not, after all, reach all the way to the Antarctic, and a sea route to India was possible. He came across the very tip of Africa on the voyage home, in May 1488, and named it the Cape of Storms.
The implications of what Dias had found sunk slowly into those around the room in John’s palace, at least those who had not immediately understood when they heard the news of his return. The problem of the Indies was solved. The Indian Ocean was not landlocked as the geographers had feared. There was therefore a sea route to the spice trade that bypassed the Muslim stranglehold over both the Black Sea and Arabia. That was reason enough for John, there and then, to rename the Cape of Storms the Cape of Good Hope. Even so, the interview with Dias did not go as well as he had clearly hoped. John of Portugal was furious that he had turned back so soon, instead of pressing on up the east coast of Africa, and it would be Vasco da Gama not Dias who would be chosen later to lead the expedition to push through to the Indies.
But Columbus was congenitally optimistic, and the news was not all bad. Africa clearly extended much farther south than the Portuguese had hoped. The new route to the Indies was hardly a shortcut. Even so, Portugal was now a hopeless case as far as his own enterprise was concerned, because all their resources would now be concentrated on opening up the new trade route around Africa. There was no point in spending any more time in Lisbon. By the end of the year, Columbus had returned to Castile and changed his name permanently to the Spanish Colón, with its deliberate hint of the Roman consul Colonus, and was waiting for the endless Talavera Commission to reach some conclusion.*
“English girls are divinely pretty and they have one custom which cannot be too much admired,” wrote Erasmus on a visit to London a few years after Bartholomew Columbus was there. “When you go anywhere on a visit, the girls kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away. They kiss you when you return. Once you have tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you could spend your life there.” This is not a view of London that has passed down through history, nor do we have any idea if this was the side of London that Bartholomew experience
d on his visit to the city. But in this delightful, confused, and dirty playground for rich and poor, with its market gardens along the river outside the city walls, Bartholomew began to recover some of his strength and to make contacts outside the Genoese community.
It was now two months into 1489. Bartholomew had been in touch with his brother—had probably even heard about Bartholomew Dias—and was being urged to find some way of seeing the English king and discussing the enterprise of the Indies with him. Physically fearless and impressively tall, Bartholomew was later an effective deputy to his brother in the New World, but he was younger, less experienced, and more careful than Christopher. Even the most articulate son of a wool salesman would find it difficult to see a foreign monarch.
By March 10, 1489, Bartholomew had been hanging around for months in the court in Westminster, the royal palace to the west of the city. His health had been improving steadily. The Genoese colony had been supporting him with advice and contacts, and he had been earning some money by drawing maps and making globes. He was a particularly skillful globe maker. In fact, his was the first generation, thanks to the spread of Ptolemy’s Geography, to have undertaken such a thing. He knew how to make spheres, and he knew how to paint them to demonstrate his brother’s ideas.
In the three years since his first visit to Bristol, Henry VII had been establishing his authority on the creaking national administration, another modern prince in the mold of John of Portugal. He had also suppressed the most dangerous challenge to his rule, a Yorkist uprising led by a young man claiming to be the missing Richard of York—the younger son of Edward IV—one of the “Princes in the Tower” under the care of his uncle Richard III. The rebellion had been defeated in Stoke in June 1487, and the leader had turned out to be a young adventurer named Lambert Simnel. Henry pardoned him and set him to work in his kitchens for the rest of his life.
Henry was now thirty-one. He had been king for nearly four years, and although he used pageantry and color to great effect to bolster his own position, he was seriously short of money and by temperament parsimonious to the point of obsession.* He had no experience in administration, and the sophisticated financial control systems that Edward IV pioneered had collapsed after his death. Henry was a faithful husband and loving father with a passion for learning and music—the first English monarch to build a palace with a purpose-built library—but he was also reclusive, miserly, and suspicious of almost everyone around him.
Presumably through his Genoese trading contacts, Bartholomew was granted the interview with the king that he had been seeking. He weighed himself down with charts, like his brother had done at the Spanish court, practiced his arguments, and prepared himself with angles that might be favorable to the English. To clinch the deal, Bartholomew had lavished attention on a beautiful world map to present to the king, bearing an inscription that was designed to tantalize, but probably simply irritated.
Thou which desirest easily the coast of land to know,
This comely and right learnedly the same to thee will shew:
Which Strabo, Plinie, Ptolemey and Isodore maintaine:
Yet, for all that, they do not all in one accord remaine.
Here also is set downe the late discovered burning zone
By Portingals, unto the world which whilom was unknown,
Whereof the knowledge now at lengthe thorow all the world is blown.
This piece of fifteenth-century marketing reveals Bartholomew’s lack of experience. But it was also an approach that showed the brothers had learned from their hearings in Lisbon and Salamanca, where they had been confronted with church fathers, like St. Augustine, and other authorities, and how their evidence conflicted with the proposal. In London, they tried an alternative tack: They began by quoting authorities—only these were the challenging classical authorities of ancient Rome and Greece so beloved during the Renaissance. They were intended to seem modern and, if not exactly free-thinking, then at least intellectually challenging.
It was, as ever, a bad moment. Parliament was locked into a marathon forty-one-day argument about a £100,000 request for new archers for a possible war against France. Henry VII was also not known for his sense of humor, though his treatment of Simnel, slaving away in his kitchens, suggests that he had one. And like all the crowned heads consulted by the Columbus brothers, he seemed both intrigued and uncertain how to proceed. He kept the map and had it examined by his own panel of experts, who quickly advised Henry to reject the idea. But Henry was not sure he wanted to reject it, and it certainly made sense not to drive this young man into the arms of a rival court. He therefore delayed a final decision and left Bartholomew once again wandering aimlessly around London, earning what he could and waiting for a final decision that seemed unlikely ever to arrive.
Christopher was back in Spain and close to despair. He had turned his back on his lucrative slave-trading contacts in Seville to go back to Lisbon to represent the queen for a year, but found he had simply been forgotten there and his allowance from Isabella had dried up completely. Columbus was now too obsessed with the enterprise of the Indies to put his mind to anything else, yet time after time his ambitions were thwarted.
He was also becoming increasingly religious, saying his prayers with an almost trancelike devotion. He had forsaken swearing—now he never said anything worse than “May God take you!”—and constantly reminded himself that, although he believed he had enemies everywhere, he must not hate them. “He wished nothing more than that those who offended against him should recognize their errors,” said his son later, a peculiarly irritating stance to take for any of his sparring partners. Only the monks seemed to remain the least bit supportive. “He alone never treated my ideas with ridicule,” said Columbus later about Antonio Marchena from La Rábida.
Inevitably, it was not a very good time to return to Castile. There was disease among the ranks of the army outside Granada at Santa Fé. Ferdinand was directing the siege of the Moorish city of Baza, and it was obvious that there would be no clear decision until the Granada campaign was completely over. Even that would have been comforting if the Talavera Commission had come to any conclusion at all, but it seemed in no hurry to do so, aware that the queen would like them to approve the enterprise yet unable intellectually to do so. But what could Christopher do? He had no money so couldn’t hang around the court forever. One story suggests that he joined the army outside Baza. But when Baza finally fell, on December 4, 1489, his true situation had come home to him. He was completely ignored.
Cabot was in Milan, together with his family. This was the city that was electrified at the time by the wedding of Isabella of Aragon to the duke, the slightly feebleminded Gian Galeazzo Sforza. It was a sumptuous affair, with fireworks, music, and pageantry, but the heart of it was an extraordinary masquerade representing paradise, together with a riot of music, movement, and color, organized by Leonardo da Vinci.
Milan was known as the orchard of Italy. It combined the urban modernity of one of the most important financial centers of Europe with all the exotic charm of pomegranates, lilacs, roses, and pineapples, and more than a whiff of Persian-style sophistication. Gian Galeazzo Sforza was nominally the ruler, but in practice, the decisions were made by his powerful uncle Ludovico, known as “the Moor” because of his dark complexion. Ludovico in turn passed on many of the day-to-day decisions to his astrologer—he was wildly superstitious—while he spent most of his time with a succession of mistresses. Ludovico’s ambition was to turn Milan into a new Athens. His agents were scouring Europe to bring back treasures for the Castello, attracting people like Cabot to build the new wonders and the future architect of St. Peter’s in Rome, Donato Bramante, to design them.
Leonardo was another footloose genius attracted by the glamour of Milan in the 1480s. He had become frustrated with his life in Florence—the prosecution for homosexuality he had faced ten years earlier, his father’s crowded house—and embittered by his failure to be included among the artists invited t
o decorate the Sistine Chapel. When Botticelli and the others packed their bags for Rome, Leonardo had written to Sforza offering his services as an engineer of war machines. His letter of application claimed that he could make bridges that were “indestructible by fire and battle” and “chariots, safe and unassailable.” He barely mentioned painting and never mentioned music at all. Yet it was as a musician that he eventually made the journey north to Milan, carrying with him a lute he had made himself. And, in keeping with this ambiguity about his future role, he was soon employed on a variety of projects, including the wedding celebrations for the poor sidelined duke and his bride, later building her a luxurious silver bath.
When Leonardo arrived in 1481, Milan was still at war with Venice, and the Castello was the epicenter of Sforza power. His war machines were never built, as far as historians know, but Leonardo was given enormous freedom to conduct experiments, dissect animal and human cadavers, fill his sketchbooks, and make plans. One of these was a scheme to build an enormous statue of Ludovico’s father on a horse, and Leonardo’s failure to make progress with it infuriated the duke. A cast was completed, but—since it required eighty tons of bronze, which not even a Sforza could afford—the life-sized equestrian statue, probably the biggest to date, waited for its chance to be transmuted into metal.
Another of the freelance exiles around the Sforza court who Cabot must have encountered was Piero Vespucci, Amerigo’s disgraced cousin, still banished from Florence for his small part in the Pazzi plot. He was now a gentleman-in-waiting to the Sforza family and increasingly trusted with difficult assignments. One of these, while Cabot was also living in Milan, involved leading a punitive expedition to the small town of Alessandria. There, Piero was captured by local outlaws and hanged from a balcony like the Pazzi plotters. When the rope snapped accidentally, he was finished off with daggers.
