by Cliff, Nigel
Columbus was brazenly running against the consensus of his age. Having been rebuffed in Portugal, he had no more luck pressing his case in Genoa and Venice. His brother Bartholomew set off to sound out the kings of England and France, while Christopher abandoned Portugal for its old enemy, Spain. There he obtained an audience with Ferdinand and Isabella, who were now ruling Castile and Aragon from Córdoba, and presented his plan. The two monarchs kept the would-be explorer on a well-padded leash while their advisers deliberated, but the matter dragged on so long that Columbus slipped away to Portugal to try his luck again.
It was at that point that Bartolomeu Dias docked in Lisbon on his return from the Cape of Good Hope. Dias’s discovery was a disaster for Columbus: it finished off any Portuguese interest in far-fetched western routes to Asia. Columbus slunk back to Castile, only to hear after another long delay that Ferdinand and Isabella’s experts had judged that his “promises and offers were impossible and vain and worthy of rejection.”
Two years later everything changed.
On January 2, 1492, after a bitter ten-year campaign, Ferdinand and Isabella conquered the Islamic kingdom of Granada. It was said that the last sultan turned back as he left the city, looked one final time on the sunset-red towers of the Alhambra Palace gently glowing above the rooftops, and burst into tears. “You weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man,” his mother scolded him, and they went on their way. The Alhambra’s new owners processed up the hill to its gate dressed in gorgeously colored silks: a final reminder of the glorious heritage of al-Andalus.
The last vestige of Muslim rule in Western Europe had been wiped out, and the royal couple immediately sent word to the pope. “It pleased our Lord,” they piously boasted, “to give us a complete victory over the king and the Moors of Granada, enemies of our holy Catholic faith. . . . After so much labor, expense, death, and shedding of blood, this kingdom of Granada which was occupied for over seven hundred and eighty years by the infidel . . . [has been conquered].” Unmentioned in the letter was the awkward fact that for much of the previous quarter millennium, Granada had been a vassal of Castile and had supplied it not just with desirable Muslim goods but with troops.
The Reconquest was complete, the foundations had been laid for the unification of Spain, and the Catholic Monarchs—the title the appreciative pope bestowed on Ferdinand and Isabella—set about purifying their realm. They were confident that the Muslims and Jews who remained in Spain would soon convert, but the public mood quickly turned vengeful. Horror stories of Jews crucifying Christian children and eating their still-warm hearts sent shudders running down Spanish spines, and though no one could point to any child who actually went missing, several scapegoats were arrested and burned alive. The date of August 2, 1492, was fixed as the deadline for all Jews to embrace the Christian faith or face execution, and just seven months after the fall of Granada, the Atlantic port of Cadiz was choked with tens of thousands of Jews fleeing Spain. The rush to leave was so great that captains extorted huge sums for standing space in their holds, then dumped their passengers overboard or sold them to pirates. Others escaped to North Africa, only to be banned from its cities and left to die in the fields. Sepharad had long been a fairy tale, not a real place. Now it was a nightmare.
Muslims fared no better. A treaty that had promised freedom of worship in Granada, including the protection of mosques, minarets, and muezzin, was quickly torn up. Spain’s Muslims were soon converted by force, then marched to the torture chamber to find out how genuinely they held the faith that had been thrust upon them. The Inquisition was Spain’s proof of its ideological purity, its claim to be the most righteous Christian nation, and yet another consequence of the long battle between Islam and Christianity in Iberia. It was also economically ruinous. That same year the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, Mehmet the Conqueror’s son and successor, sent his navy to Spain to rescue its Muslims and Jews alike. He welcomed the refugees to Istanbul as full citizens, threatened with death any Turk who mistreated a Jew, and ridiculed the shortsightedness of Ferdinand and Isabella in expelling so many valuable subjects. “You call Ferdinand a wise ruler,” he scoffed to his courtiers, “when he impoverishes his own country to enrich mine!” The fires of religious war that had been stoked in Iberia had blown back home, and they would blacken Spain for centuries to come.
Having scoured the foreign matter from their kingdom, the royal couple turned their attention abroad.
A few weeks after the conquest of Granada, Isabella summoned Christopher Columbus and rejected his appeal against her experts’ verdict. The would-be explorer was trotting off disconsolately on a mule when, back at the court, Ferdinand’s finance minister spoke up. Columbus, he pointed out, had already secured half his capital from Italian investors. The enterprise would cost no more than one of the weeklong fiestas thrown for foreign ambassadors, and surely the royal treasury could shift some funds around and find the cash? Perhaps Columbus’s wealthy rescuer even then suspected that he would be forced to put up most of the money himself; perhaps, as a baptized Jew, he had his reasons for insisting that the reward of converting Asia to the Holy Faith was well worth the risk.
Isabella sent a messenger haring after Columbus and caught him preparing to board a ship to France. Columbus’s terms were outrageous: he would receive 10 percent in perpetuity of all revenues from any lands he discovered, he would be their governor and viceroy, and he would control every colonial appointment. Not least, as soon as he reached land he would be appointed Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Most of his conditions were accepted, but then, no one really expected him to succeed.
Half an hour before sunrise on August 3, 1492, as the ships crammed with Jews edged east out of Cadiz, Columbus set sail west for Asia. As soon as his small fleet was safely under way, he sat down in the cramped cabin of his flagship, the Santa María, and wrote the first lines of his journal.
“IN THE NAME OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST,” he began.
Columbus intended to present the book to Ferdinand and Isabella on his return, and it was addressed to them. He celebrated the Catholic Monarchs’ great victory over the Moors of Granada and their righteous expulsion of the Jews, and he reminded them that he was embarked on an equally holy mission:
Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes devoted to the Holy Christian Faith and the propagators thereof, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, resolved to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India, to see the said princes and peoples and lands and [to observe] the disposition of them and of all, and the manner in which may be undertaken their conversion to our Holy Faith, and ordained that I should not go by land (the usual way) to the Orient, but by the route of the Occident, by which no one to this day knows for sure that anyone has gone.
Soon, he added, he would return with such wealth “that within three years the Sovereigns will prepare for and undertake the conquest of the Holy Land. I have already petitioned Your Highnesses to see that all the profits of this, my enterprise, should be spent on the conquest of Jerusalem.”
Columbus’s innate seafaring instincts had been well honed during his years in Portugal, and five weeks after he left the Canaries he sighted land. He was a less natural leader of men; even in that short span his crew more than once threatened mutiny. The land turned out to be a small island, but the friendly natives signaled that there was a much larger island nearby. Columbus sailed off, convinced he was headed to Japan, even though the locals called the place Colba, and explored a length of the shore. By the time the Santa María ran aground on Christmas morning he had visited a third island, and he set his course for Spain.
The three islands would later be revealed as one of the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, but Columbus was convinced he had reached Asia. True, the East was not everything he had expected. He had found a bush that smelled somewhat like cinnamon and nuts that, though small and inedible, with a little imagination did seem like coconuts. The mastic trees w
ere evidently not producing that year, and the gold he took away turned out to be iron pyrite—fool’s gold. The islanders in their thatched huts were clearly among the poorer subjects of the Great Khan, but undoubtedly, he told his journal, the emperor’s palace lay nearby.
When the battered Niña was blown off course and had to put into Lisbon, the new Admiral of the Ocean Sea sent a note to King John. In it he asked permission to enter the royal harbor, where he would be safely out of reach of treasure seekers, and stressed that he had arrived from the Indies, not from Portuguese Guinea. When Bartolomeu Dias rowed over from his warship, alongside which Columbus had anchored, the admiral could not resist showing off the captive “Indians” he had brought back as proof of his staggering discovery.
Four days after his unintended arrival, Columbus set out to meet the Portuguese king. With him he took the strongest of his captives and a few trinkets he had picked up on the islands. Spices, gems, and gold were conspicuously missing.
The king was not in the best of moods. Two years earlier, his only son, Afonso, had fallen off his horse while riding along the banks of the Tagus and had died in agony in a fisherman’s shack. The seventeen-year-old Afonso had been married to Isabella of Aragon, the oldest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Catholic Monarchs’ only son was dangerously ill, and since Afonso had looked increasingly likely to become the heir to both Spain and Portugal, many suspected foul play. Ferdinand and Isabella had tried every diplomatic maneuver to declare the marriage void, but the young couple, having been married for purely political reasons, had inconveniently fallen in love. More to the point, Afonso was an excellent rider, and his Castilian valet disappeared after the accident and was never heard from again. The possibility that Ferdinand and Isabella had stolen John’s thunder by discovering the sea route to India was a bitter pill to swallow.
Columbus made matters worse by insisting the king address him by his string of new titles and pointedly reminding him that he had turned down the dazzling opportunity he, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, had given him. Some of John’s advisers offered to kill the impudent sailor, but the king heard him out. It was far from clear just what Columbus had discovered, but he had clearly discovered something. When the admiral was done, John pointed out that he had found no spices. Columbus explained that he had only got as far as the outlying islands of Japan, and the king tried another tack. He was pleased the voyage had gone so well, he said insincerely, but under the terms of the papal bulls and the treaties between Castile and Portugal, the discoveries no doubt lay within Portugal’s orbit. Columbus replied that he had obeyed his monarchs’ orders and had not gone anywhere near Africa; besides, no treaty had anything to say about new lands to the west, since no one had suspected there were any.
John smiled noncommittally, retired in a fit of anger that he had let such a chance slip, and dashed off a letter to Spain in which he threatened to send warships to ascertain the truth and if necessary claim the new lands for Portugal. It was not a bluff: he had a fleet readied to follow Columbus if he set out again, and an alarmed Ferdinand dispatched an ambassador to beg John to delay its departure until the matter had been discussed.
On May 4, 1493, shortly after Columbus finally reached Spain, the pope weighed into the fray by dividing the world in two.
Pope Alexander VI was not a neutral referee. He had been born in Spain, and his family name—Borgia—would become a byword for blatant nepotism. He had four children by his favorite mistress, and he parceled out to them large chunks of papal land. Spanish cutthroats, whores, fortune hunters, and spies were running riot in Rome, and the papal palaces were reportedly great writhing heaps of bodies. Rodrigo Borgia was even rumored to have bribed his way into the chair of St. Peter, but his candidacy had certainly been helped by the intervention of his friend Ferdinand of Spain. The Catholic Monarchs had ample reason to believe that Rome was on their side.
On the pope’s orders, a line was drawn from the top to the bottom of the map a hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, two archipelagos discovered in Henry the Navigator’s time that were still Portugal’s westernmost possessions. Everything to the west of the line henceforth belonged to Spain. The long bull that laid out the new world order pointedly failed to mention Portugal at all, and soon Lisbon’s predicament took an even more dramatic turn for the worse. That September, another bull revoked every previous license given to the Portuguese to colonize new lands. Since it might happen, the pope explained, that the Spanish, while sailing west or south, might “discover islands and mainlands that belong or belonged to India,” they were to be granted any lands whatsoever, “found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered, that are or may be or may seem to be in the route of navigation or travel towards the west or south, whether they be in western parts, or in the regions of the south and east of India.” Given the confusion over the extent of India, that was sufficiently ambiguous to cover almost anywhere, including much of Africa.
The long decades of Portuguese discoveries were suddenly at risk of leading nowhere.
In a piece of timing that reeked of papal collusion, the Spanish sent Columbus back west two days before the second bull was formally issued. This time the Admiral of the Ocean Sea commanded a fleet of seventeen ships and an army of twelve hundred men. He explored the Bahamas and the Antilles, discovered new islands, landed at Puerto Rico, and returned to Cuba. The stakes were high, and Columbus urgently needed tangible proof that he could bring home the riches of the East. His men went around sniffing trees and convinced themselves they bore spices, though they were no more in fruit than before. Columbus ordered his new subjects to hand over a quarterly tribute in gold; if they refused, he threatened, they would have their hands cut off. Since they had no way of reaching their quota, many were mutilated and were left to bleed to death, while thousands poisoned themselves to end the ordeal. Hundreds more were rounded up, mothers dropping their babies on the ground as they fled, to be shipped back to Spain and sold; many died on the journey. The Spanish set about pillaging and slaughtering with savage abandon, and the stark shapes of countless gallows rose up across the New World.
With Columbus still away, King John sent his envoys to negotiate directly with Spain. He had the stronger navy, and he was well aware that Ferdinand and Isabella were deeply in debt and were busy building their new nation. Besides, his informants on the Spanish royal council had told him that the Catholic Monarchs were willing to treat the pope’s outrageous edict as a negotiating position.
The two sides met at the little Spanish town of Tordesillas, just across the border from Portugal. With a papal envoy acting as mediator, the negotiators hammered out a compromise. The Spanish agreed to move the boundary line 270 leagues farther west, roughly to the midpoint between the Cape Verde Islands and Columbus’s West Indies. The Portuguese recognized Spain’s sovereignty over any lands her sailors found to the west, and the Spanish conceded to Portugal the rights to all lands to the east, Indian or otherwise. The new treaty was signed on June 7, 1494, and in Portugal it was hailed as a triumph. More accurately, it was the most outrageous cartel of all time, but in the end it raised as many problems at it solved. It was left to a future joint voyage to establish just where among the straggling islands the measurement of 370 leagues began, but the voyage never took place. In any case, there was no way for men at sea to determine their longitude with any precision, and so no way to know whether they had crossed the line. Nor did anyone think to ponder whether the line merely bisected the Western Hemisphere or stretched all the way around the globe.
Spain and Portugal were locked in a furious race to spread their faith and dominion far across the earth. Soon nations whose names were barely known to Europe would discover that they had been parceled out between two European powers they had never even heard of.
PART II
CHAPTER 7
THE COMMANDER
THERE WAS NOTHING obviously remarkable about the two ships that were taking shape under a w
ooden scaffold on the waterfront dockyards of Lisbon. As the carpenters completed the stout framework of ribs and nailed the planking into place, the hulls began to take on the same tubby form, the same bluff bows and high, square stern, as the dozens of cargo ships that were riding at anchor in the busy port. They were clearly being strongly built—the timber had been specially felled in the royal forests—but they were definitely on the small side, perhaps eighty or ninety feet overall in length. Only a few insiders knew that they were destined for an astonishingly long voyage through uncharted seas.
The shipwrights signed off on the hulls, and tall masts were raised toward the sky and secured to the keels. The decks were laid around them. A high forecastle and an even taller sterncastle, robust enough to serve as a last redoubt if the ships were boarded, took shape above the main deck. Rudders were mounted on long posts and were fitted to the sterns, and heavy wooden tillers were joined to the tops of the posts. Bowsprits were fixed to the bows, where they poked jauntily upward like unicorns’ horns to serve as extra masts. The carved figureheads of the ships’ patron saints were installed in pride of place on the prows, and the fitting out began.
Relays of dockhands wheeled cartloads of stones up the steep gangplanks and tipped them into the holds to serve as ballast. Ropemakers rolled over large wooden drums wound with hawsers and riggings fashioned from twisted flax, and sailmakers carried great wings of canvas. Iron anchors were fitted to the bows, and spares were stowed in the holds. The topsides of the hulls were painted with a black tarry mixture to protect the wood against rot. Below the waterline, oakum—hemp fibers picked from old tarry ropes—was rammed into the seams between the planks, and hot pitch was poured on top to make a water-resistant seal. Then the bottoms were daubed with a foul-smelling mixture of pitch and tallow to ward off the clinging barnacles that acted as a drag on ships’ hulls, as well as the tropical worms that turned them into sieves. Meanwhile teams of laborers hauled over trolleys bearing great guns, their barrels made from wrought-iron bars hammered together in the furnace and reinforced with iron hoops. Twenty were installed on each ship, some heavy bombards lashed to wooden beds, others lighter falconets mounted on simple forked bases or iron swivels, though even the smallest weighed hundreds of pounds. Cannon had been carried on Portugal’s Africa-bound caravels since mid-century, and strengthened ships had been especially designed to support large bombards, but a keen observer might have paused to think that these two were more heavily armed than most.
