by David Boyle
Columbus returned to Hispaniola suffering from the debilitating disease that marred the rest of his life, probably Reiter’s syndrome following dysentery, a condition that inflamed his lower legs, lower spine, and feet, causing painful and disconcerting bleeding from the eyes. He was completely exhausted and so weak that he had to be carried ashore from the Niña.
Worse, it was clear that Isabella was utterly unsustainable. Without red wine or red meat, most of the colony was now seriously anemic and many were too sick to work. Water was scarce and the European crops were already failing. The provisions they had brought with them had almost run out and relations with the local Tainos had broken down completely. Most of the colonists were desperate to go home and furious that there had been no sign of the gold they had been promised. The criminal element, whose crimes back home had been pardoned in exchange for taking part in the voyage, were now roaming the island creating havoc. The former mercenaries from the war in Granada, who were hoping to use similar slash-and-burn techniques in India, were enraged to find themselves among what they saw as savages. The hidalgos were not only refusing to take part in the business of cultivation or construction, on the grounds that it was beneath them, they were also refusing to let anyone else use their horses.
The only silver lining in this sky full of dark clouds was that Bartholomew Columbus had arrived from Spain and now greeted his brother for the first time in nearly a decade. He quickly proved a much more effective administrator than his younger brother Diego. Christopher was sick for another five months and Bartholomew was forced to take his place as head of the new colony. He had a streak of ruthlessness that Christopher lacked, and this made him all the more unpopular with the colonists. To be ruled by one foreigner was a peculiarity; to be ruled by two of them—and brothers at that—began to smack of indignity and impropriety.
But for the brothers, there was an even more urgent problem. If there was no gold, then some other means of financing the continued expedition must be found. Despite Queen Isabella’s final instructions to Columbus to treat the natives kindly, the answer was becoming obvious to him: He would send consignments of Tainos back to Europe and sell them as slaves.
The decision flew in the face of his remarks about their peaceable nature—loving their neighbors as themselves—and it concerned many of his colleagues, particularly among Boyle’s team of clergy who had been sent to convert the Tainos, though none had actually yet been baptized. It quickly became a focus for discontent. Margarit had been responsible for his own share of brutality, and his own men were now involved in extortion all over Hispaniola, but when Diego Columbus ordered him to stop this behavior it was the last straw. He marched to Isabella in a rage, furious, he claimed, about the whole idea of enslaving the Tainos. But having failed to persuade Columbus’s council of his point of view, he linked up with Boyle and some others, seized the three ships that had brought Bartholomew and the supplies, and set sail for home. Boyle had been bombarding the sovereigns with letters begging to be allowed to return home and had been told he could do so only if he was ill. By November 1494 the requisite illness had been produced and Boyle and his colleagues were back, talking to sovereigns, filling their minds with doubts about Columbus, his conduct, the lack of food, and the absence of the mythical gold.
Joining them in their audience before Ferdinand and Isabella was the admiral’s friend Juan Aguardo, another disappointed former supporter of Columbus, who had returned ahead of them. Aguardo had witnessed Alonso de Ojeda, left almost alone among Columbus’s lieutenants still in Hispaniola, coming into his own. It was Ojeda who had captured the elusive chief Caonabo by trickery, presenting him with manacles and persuading him that they were the same bracelets the king of Spain wore. Once Caonabo had put them on, he was shackled to Ojeda’s horse and was whisked at top speed back toward the Spanish fort. Hispaniola had reached the boiling point.
Back in Europe, largely oblivious to the unfolding crisis in the Indies, most diplomatic attention was focused on avoiding war. Spain and Portugal had both become convinced that conflict would be disastrous and that negotiation was the best way to proceed. The stage was therefore set for an unprecedented international summit at the convent of Santa Clara in Tordesillas in Castile.
The Portuguese delegation arrived in early May 1494. They were experienced mariners up against experienced diplomats on the Castilian side, who were rather less knowledgeable about geography. The Portuguese opened negotiations by explaining how their ships returned from Africa, forced by the circular wind patterns to swing far out into the Atlantic before turning eastward for home. If one of their ships accidentally slipped across the hundred-league line, it would risk unnecessary war.
The line dividing East from West had originally been suggested by Columbus, who felt he had detected a change in climate about a hundred degrees west of the Azores. Over the month that followed, the Portuguese negotiators persuaded the Spanish to push this line that would divide the world another 270 leagues farther west. As they signed the treaty document, both sides secretly congratulated themselves for having managed to deceive the other. In fact, both had unwittingly handed over the still undiscovered immensity of Brazil to the Portuguese.
The treaty has been at the center of a whole series of conspiracy theories: that long before the discovery of Brazil, the Portuguese already had an inkling of land to the south which lay farther east; that the Castilians were thinking of the future, and extending the line to the other side of the globe gave them more of the Indies there. Either way, both sides went away happy.
But if peace seemed more secure on the Atlantic coast of Europe, thanks to the initial intervention of the pope, dividing the world between the two exploring nations, war was becoming inevitable in Italy. Nearly four months after the Treaty of Tordesillas, in the first few days of September 1494, Charles VIII and his enormous French army crossed the Alps, dragging their artillery behind them. The Italians welcomed them at first with open arms, but their urban centers were unprepared for the onslaught to come. The French moved fast and brutally—this was no gentlemanly game of warfare as practiced by the Italian aristocracy, it was a matter of iron cannonballs that could devastate the defenses of any town in minutes, and then hideous medieval retaliation, of the kind the gentle Italian humanist intellectuals believed had disappeared with the Renaissance they heralded.
Only two of Charles’s advisers approached the perilous invasion with any degree of optimism. One was his tutor and the other was his cousin Louis of Orleans, though he had a hidden agenda: Louis had his own claim to the troubled duchy of Milan. Also hanging around the court was an assortment of Italian exiles, all of them, for conflicting reasons, urging Charles on and promising him a liberator’s welcome. His other diplomatic advisers urged caution, but despite their predictions of disaster, the French army met little resistance as it stormed southward. Traveling with the king, Vespucci’s old friend from Paris, Philippe de Commines, described how ordinary Italians were greeting the French invaders like saints, hoping they would cleanse the Italian peninsula of the in-fighting among the city-states. Soon only Pisa stood between the French and Rome, and it was in Florentine hands. At this moment, the Popolano family finally escaped from captivity and fled to Charles’s camp, and Florence’s young ruler, Piero de’ Medici—remembering his father’s dramatic mission to Naples—tried to follow suit and make a similarly dramatic peace. It was a disastrous mission. Charles confronted Piero with a fait accompli: The Florentine garrison defending Pisa was overrun and everyone there was killed. Piero had no option but to agree to everything the French demanded. In fact, French diplomats laughed later that Piero had pressed Florentine castles on them that they had not dared request.
Arriving back in Florence on November 8, the doors of the Palazzo della Signoria were slammed in his face by a furious city council. Crowds outside began jeering and throwing stones and, in the early hours of the next morning, Piero and his family escaped from the city in disguise and went into e
xile. That night, Michelangelo dreamed of Lorenzo the Magnificent dressed in black, and also fled the city the following day to Rome, ahead of the advancing French.
The Medicis had finally gone, and the Florentine council sent Savonarola to negotiate instead. He insisted on walking the whole way, a gaunt, spindly, Gandhiesque figure in simple clothes. Standing before Charles, he launched into a furious tirade, first welcoming him as the instrument of God and then warning him that God would turn against him if he harmed Florence. Then he turned on his heel and walked out. Unnerved, Charles marched into Florence wearing golden armor, accompanied by Scottish mercenaries playing bagpipes, and gave strict orders to his twenty thousand troops that there should be no looting. When he continued southward some days later, he left Savonarola, armed only with his hypnotic oratory, as ruler of the city. To make it more democratic, Savonarola immediately began reforming the voting system and shifting the burden of tax from the poor to the rich.
In Rome, as November turned to December, Pope Alexander was surprised by the speed of the French approach. His daughter Lucrezia and lover Giulia fell into the hands of the invaders as they swept southward, and he was forced to personally pay their ransom. They were escorted to the gates of Rome by a large force of French troops, and were met by the pope himself in a black doublet and Spanish boots, armed with a sword and dagger.
Then the news filtered through to the city that Charles was ill. He had contracted smallpox and though it was soon clear he would recover—with his bizarre features even more scarred than they were already—the march south was delayed. It was a critical moment of decision for the pope. He had already sunk to begging the sultan in Constantinople for help, and there was no one else he could turn to. The obvious response was to escape, but then his great enemy Cardinal della Rovere—now in exile in France as bishop of Avignon—would call a council of the church and have him deposed for nepotism and corruption, and all those divisions of the globe in favor of the Spanish would be reversed as well. If he could stay and brave it out, there was still a chance, at least to save himself. In a few weeks, the army would be on the move again, and he would have to decide.
Rome’s independence was hanging in the balance in the last weeks of December 1494. Charles was recovering, and there were French ships at the mouth of the Tiber River. Pope Alexander and the city leaders met and agreed to surrender. On the last day of the year, the French marched through the gates and into Rome. Courageously, the Spanish pope decided to face down the situation. He stayed put in the Vatican and sent his diplomats over to see Charles, explaining that if he wanted to be crowned King of Naples it made sense not to split the church. Then at least there would be an undisputed pope to legitimize his claim.
The unpredictable and violent Roman crowds also had their first sight of the French king and decided he was ugly and boorish. They knew he had all his food tasted—and had publicly condemned all Romans as poisoners; they objected to the way the French were seizing the empty homes of bishops, and to the rumors of murdered Jews in the ghetto. It made sense for Charles to agree to terms and get out of Rome on the march south as soon as possible.
Within two weeks he had been invited to stay at the Vatican. Soon he had succumbed to the combination of Alexander’s charm, skill, and innuendo and had sworn allegiance to the Borgia pope. Charles and the French army then marched on to defenseless Naples, arriving on February 22, 1495, to a rousing welcome. The Neopolitans had seen off three Aragonese rulers in the space of just over a year, and welcomed Charles rather as the Genoese had welcomed the French a generation earlier—as a guarantor of independence. Charles had achieved his goal and barely been forced to fight a battle to do so. For a while, after his coronation as King of Naples on May12, he relaxed, confident that his victory was permanent.
By the time Charles had resumed his advance, Columbus had become absolutely desperate. With so little of the gold he had promised, there was no money to buy the supplies he needed, and no prospect of further financing. There was no sign of Cipangu, let alone Cathay. His backers like Vespucci and Berardi were expecting their money back. The struggle to keep up a front for his original claims was exhausting his health. He simply had to produce some economic return. There was no alternative but to implement the slavery plan, and, as seems to be the way of the world, when one small cruelty is permitted, it opens the way to the most horrific kinds of tyranny.
So it was that Columbus committed the great original sin of the New World. He sent out his hidalgos with their horses and dogs—which were known to terrify the native population—who rounded up 1,660 Tainos from all over the island. Of those, 550 of the healthiest men and women were loaded aboard the ships that would take his friend de Cuneo and his brother Diego home to put his case to the sovereigns against Boyle and Margarit. He told his men they could choose any that were left, and 400 remained even after that division, who were told to go. But they were by now in such blind fear and panic that many of them ran off into the bush, leaving their own babies behind on the beach.
The small fleet sailed on February 24, 1495. It was the first consignment of slaves to make the Atlantic crossing that would be made by so many hundreds of thousands more in the centuries to come. They were packed belowdecks, alternately freezing and lying in their own vomit and excrement, tossed into unconsciousness by the storms that hit during the crossing. By the final leg of the voyage, half of the 500 had died and been thrown overboard.
In Seville, Berardi and Vespucci watched their arrival with considerable misgivings. They were no strangers to slave trading, but there were complications here. The admiral’s reputation at the Castilian court was in decline. Already the sovereigns had been persuaded to lift the monopoly of expeditions to the Indies that Columbus enjoyed. From now on he would keep his sole rights over Hispaniola, but anyone could go to the other islands. It was also clear that the sovereigns had serious doubts about the legality of taking their new subjects captive and selling them. Influenced by Boyle and Margarit, they were coming to the conclusion that the Tainos were heathens, not pagans, and were therefore potential Christians. They instructed Fonseca to slow down the sale of the slaves and make sure that any that were sold could be taken back if the sales turned out to be illegal.
In April they suspended sales altogether. A few of the Tainos were given to Berardi as a way of deferring his burgeoning expenses, nine more went to him to be trained as interpreters, and a few more were sent to the royal galleys. The rest moldered away at the docks, waiting for their fate to be decided, and in those conditions, they did not live long.
Berardi and Vespucci had risked considerable sums to equip and supply the ships and realized it was time to intervene, not so much on behalf of the beleaguered admiral, but on their own. They claimed the exclusive right to equip all the ships to the Indies, by promising to cut their price and to undercut any lower offers. Having won this concession, it became obvious that with Berardi’s health failing, Vespucci would have to shoulder considerably more responsibility for the business.
Vespucci, who up until then had been supporting Berardi in business, had begun organizing his own rudimentary intelligence service, collecting every scrap of information he could and collating it on charts of islands and routes. Increasingly he was going to have to run what was now a massive undertaking by himself, and find some way of paying for the supplies Columbus was demanding out of the—still theoretical—8 percent of the proceeds that was in Columbus’s original agreement. It was a tough problem—8 percent of almost nothing was still almost nothing—and he would need to use all the persuasive business skills he possessed.
Also in Seville, in the endless round of meetings between city officials and financiers, John Cabot was equally frustrated. He could attract no attention for his inconvenient innuendos about Columbus’s discoveries, but his scheme for the new bridge to Triana was also frustratingly becalmed. Toward the end of 1494, as the controversies grew about the Indies, he decided to try his luck in Lisbon, realizing tha
t there, at least, there would be a sympathetic hearing for his opinions about exactly what had been discovered. So in this atmosphere of mutual distrust in the Iberian peninsula, and deep frustration at the Vatican’s bias, Cabot arrived in the Portuguese capital and asked for an audience with the king.
As the disaffected former partner of Columbus, Cabot himself was of great interest to Lisbon and John listened closely to his arguments. Columbus had not in fact found the Indies, he said. The so-called Indians he had brought with him looked like nothing more than offshore islanders. The real prize of a westward route to the Indies was still within grasp, by going farther north, where the latitudes and therefore the distances were shorter. And he, Cabot, was prepared to lead such an expedition for the Portuguese. But there was another reason why John wanted to meet Cabot. Both of them were emerging as skeptics about the whole business of the Indies; not that such a route was impossible, just that it had so far eluded Columbus. The king was an intelligent man with a strong sense of the possibilities of geography, and of the real size of the globe. He had personal reasons, as well, to be very skeptical about the enterprise he had turned down.
But the geopolitics remained the same as it had with Almeida and Behaim. There were better reasons for peace than for provoking the Castilians into war. So Cabot was thanked and sent on his way. Christmas was approaching, and with not much of a future back in Seville, a penniless Cabot was desperately puzzling over how to feed his family. After New Year’s Day, 1495, the news arrived that Seville had turned down his proposal for a new bridge. So, homeless again and desperately searching for employment—chased halfway across southern Europe by his creditors—Cabot set sail once more, perhaps back to Seville, perhaps back on the familiar voyage across the Bay of Biscay to Bristol.
