One aspect of their rule did not seem to worry Ferdinand and Isabella during this winter of contentment. The Inquisition was in capable hands, and grinding forward with its papal and royal approval. In his dealings with his Grand Inquisitor, Ferdinand sounded almost deferential. With language crafted in Torquemada’s own dark chambers, the royal order had gone out in 1486 to expel Jews from six major towns, including Ferdinand’s own capital of Saragossa.
The wholesale expulsions of 1486 were the first major steps toward the apocalypse of 1492. Even this draconian edict was clothed in strange charity. Teruel in southern Aragon remained a hotbed of resistance, and when Jews there complained that they did not have enough time to sell their property, Ferdinand generously granted them a six-month delay in their departure date, that is, with the proviso that Torquemada agree. To his inquisitor, Ferdinand asked,
“Look into this, and if it is agreeable to you, let it be done.”
The monarchs arrived in Salamanca on November 7, 1486, and settled in for a comfortable stay of three months. This ancient and venerable university town, captured by Hannibal two hundred years before Christ and by the Moors in the ninth century, had been the beacon of Spanish learning and culture since its famous university was founded in 1230. This made Salamanca the oldest of Europe’s great universities, predating the first college at Oxford by twenty years. Always significant for its cross-fertilization of Arabic and Christian knowledge, the university at Salamanca had led the movement to translate Arabic science, philosophy, and mathematics into Latin, and to spread this Eastern knowledge north into backward Central Europe.
Ferdinand and Isabella were arriving in Salamanca at an especially propitious time in its intellectual life. Their very own political reforms, not to mention the growing importance of the Spanish Empire on the European stage, had stimulated artists and thinkers and drawn them here. Isabella was particularly interested in advancing Spanish learning, art, music, and literature. When printing was invented during her early life, she had appreciated immediately its impact. By 1487, printing presses in Salamanca, Toledo, Seville, Barcelona, and Valencia were churning out classics and religious works. By her order, German and Italian printers paid no taxes, and foreign books could be imported without duty. Her own library reflected her interest; her titles ranged from religious treatises to Latin and Greek classics by Plutarch, Livy, Virgil, and Aristotle, to more modern writers like Boccaccio. This literacy in turn resulted in chronicles of her reign that were more fluid and accessible, far more polished and textured than the wooden annals that had chronicled reigns of the past.
More important perhaps was the luminescence of the Italian Renaissance. From Florence, it radiated outward with the starpower of Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti. In his thirteen-year papacy from 1471 to 1484, Sixtus IV may have approved the Spanish Inquisition and ratified the choice of Torquemada to lead it, but in Rome he had also been a great patron of the arts. At his direction the Sistine Chapel was built, and for its decoration he summoned the greatest painters of Italy. Most significant was Sandro Botticelli, the Florentine painter who was lent to the Vatican by Lorenzo the Magnificent and who painted the fresco representing the history of Moses. Other great painters of the time also contributed to its decoration, including Pinturicchio, Rosselli, Perugino, and Ghirlandaio. The decoration of the ceiling by Michelangelo would come twenty-four years later.
The real ambassador of the Italian Renaissance to Spain was an Italian humanist named Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, or Peter Martyr, as he was better known. This luminary was brought from Rome to Saragossa in August 1487 by the hero of Alhama and now the Spanish ambassador to Rome, the count of Tendilla (Iñigo López de Mendoza). In his correspondence to Rome later, Martyr stated his reasons for leaving Italy for Spain. Italy, he felt, was self-absorbed and divided into warring factions, whereas Spain was united, vibrant, and outward-looking. He was attracted to the great deeds that the Spanish monarchs had undertaken against the enemies of Christianity, especially the war against Granada, which he compared to the Trojan War and Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul. He admired the ambition and self-reliance of the Spanish sovereigns.
Instantly, Spanish humanists gravitated to this Italian thinker. The university at Salamanca invited him to give a series of lectures on the revolution in thought and culture and philosophy that was sweeping through his native land. Their impact was seismic. During this winter when the royals were in Salamanca, this great mind was brought into their company and, not surprisingly, the education of young nobles in the court was soon entrusted to him. It is also not so surprising that the Italian was later captivated by his countryman, Christopher Columbus. Martyr was to write the first major work on the discoveries of the New World.
Without doubt, sessions with Peter Martyr in Salamanca inspired the queen to build great churches throughout the land as “sermons in stone” and, not incidentally, as monuments to her great and pious reign. If their decoration was sometimes excessive, it was meant to show the depth and elaborateness of her faith, as well as the awesome power of the Almighty. Magnificent churches sprang up throughout Spain; to decorate them, painters were encouraged to imagine and paint the scenes of Christ’s life. Schools of painting were established in Toledo and Andalusia. Isabella’s own taste drew her to the Flemish masters, such as Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling.
A musical repertoire of distinctly Spanish character also evolved dramatically under Ferdinand and Isabella. Past Spanish monarchs had imported foreign musicians for their entertainment, but Isabella insisted upon solely Spanish performers. The result was an explosion of new songs and dances, both religious and secular, which were eventually compiled in El Cancionero de Palacio, the Song Book of the Palace. Secular songs were especially popular at court, particularly when they pined upon the themes of courtly and platonic love as well as idealizing the simple shepherd or the pretty maiden lost in the mountains, or—most significantly—the perfection of the lady in contrast to the cruelty and boorishness of a hapless lover. The original compositions employed unique Spanish forms, divided between the romance and the villancicos. The romance usually told a long narrative tale, expounding upon current events. The war against the infidel was a popular standard.
What has become of you, unhappy one,
What has become of your land and your Moors.
Reject now Mohammed
And his evil doctrine
For to live in such folly
Is a ridiculous joke.
Return good king and restore
Our venerable laws
Because even if you have lost your kingdom
You can at least save your soul.
The villancico, by contrast, had the feel of a jaunty village song, with a refrain at the top that was repeated with each strophe.
Alas, sad, you see me
Overcome with love
Although a simple shepherd
I would have been better off
Had I not gone to the market
Whence I returned
So smitten by love
Now here I am, miserable
Overcome with love
Although a simple shepherd
Salamanca was the center of this musical revolution. Most enduring of its maestros was a genius named Juan del Enzina. Born in Salamanca, and educated in law at its famous university, he was to account for hundreds of these songs. For many years before he moved into the royal court, he had served the duke of Alba de Tormes, whose castle was several leagues to the south of Salamanca. Throughout this long service he aspired to the post of choirmaster to the royal choir in the Cathedral of Salamanca, a high honor. But the position was denied to him. Perhaps being passed over led to his bittersweet villancico:
Whoever rules and whoever is ruled
Without wisdom
Can only be badly ruled
Badly ruled is he who is not prudent
Because everything goes wrong;
And to rule perfectly is
> To know how to command wisely;
Whoever rules and whoever is ruled
Without wisdom
Can only be badly ruled.
It has been said in retrospect that the land of Ferdinand and Isabella was in the throes of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, that the religious crisis over the Inquisition moved the nation into the modern age, and that the ferment in Salamanca dramatized that transition. If the Inquisition inspired terror, it was accompanied in intellectual circles by a great sense of personal liberty. Instead of the peon’s dismal, short existence as part of a community of sufferers, the individual could determine or at least influence his own fate.
The evidence of the first glimmerings of this wider personal freedom came in literature, especially in the form of Spain’s first prose masterpiece, La Celestina. Not quite a play and not quite a novel, it is a dialogue, divided into sixteen acts, with no narrative or description or stage directions, which deals in essence with the conflict between high-flown moral ideals and the reality of everyday living, the conflict between courtly love and sensual erotic love. The work was written in Salamanca at about this time by a law student named Fernando de Rojas. Rojas found his inspiration in the mood of the times and in his own early life. He had personally experienced the hard hand of the Inquisition. He was a converso, and his father had been imprisoned, tried, and burned as a heretic by the Holy Office. Told in an earthy, comic style, La Celestina portrays the impossible love affair between an Old Christian of pure blood and a conversa whose blood is polluted by her Jewish ancestry. It ends in the tragic death of the two lovers. As such, the story prefigures Romeo and Juliet.
“In the end,” the male lead, Calisto, says wistfully, “we are all children of Adam and Eve.”
Full of anxious expectation, Christopher Columbus followed the court from Castile to Salamanca that fall. During this winter of tranquility, his visionary proposal was on the royal agenda. Friar Hernando de Talavera, the court theologian and confessor of Queen Isabella, had been placed in charge of the Commission of Inquiry into Columbus’s proposition. That so important a prelate and one so close to the queen had been chosen to lead the investigation inspired false optimism in Columbus.
The commission consisted of three types of “experts”: sea captains experienced in oceanic navigation; professors of astronomy, cosmology, and astrology at the university (though there cannot have been many of these specialists to choose from in Castile); and distinguished men of letters and science like Rodrigo Maldonado. He was a physician, a member of the royal council, and the scion of one of Castile’s most illustrious families. Over the years, he had been entrusted with a number of sensitive missions. In the early 1480s, he had ruthlessly overseen the relocation of Jews in Ávila and Segovia into their cramped and putrid ghettos. (In Ávila, the ghetto was situated next to the leather tanneries.) More recently, he had been the royal emissary to Navarre and France concerning the marriage of a royal daughter.
In Salamanca, Columbus took up residence in the Dominican monastery of San Esteban. While he prepared his papers for presentation, his companions at table and in prayer pursued the heretics and secret Jews of the region. Within a few years, the Inquisition in Salamanca would police the student body at the university, to be sure that any marriages consummated there were pure and “legitimate.” Living in such close proximity to the dogs of God must have caused Columbus no small measure of anxiety, for one wrong word might have turned the investigators onto him. He could, after all, serve as an instructive target for the Inquisition.
Columbus’s very proposal might be interpreted as having elements of Jewish lore and passion. To the monarchs and to the Commission of Inquiry, he was suggesting that he search for King Solomon’s mines or the biblical Ophir in the Indies or in the fabulous Orient. (In 1499, he did indeed assert to the sovereigns that he had discovered Ophir.) It had taken King Solomon’s ships three years for the voyage to Ophir. The length of Columbus’s voyage might be just as long. Solomon’s ships had returned with cargo of gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks. Columbus was promising to do the same. The wealth of Ophir was used to build the First Temple, and the quest to find the long-lost treasure of King Solomon’s mines was in part motivated by the desire to rebuild the Second Temple after it was destroyed by the Romans.
A suspicious Dominican might have wondered why Columbus clung to this scripture so dear to Jews. Was it not true that Columbus had developed a number of close relationships with conversos? Could it be that the supplicant was secretly Jewish? The mariner needed to be careful.
In the meetings at St. Stephen’s College at the university, Columbus put forward his proposition with a prophet’s sense of absolute certitude. He asked again for three ships and proposed to sail them first to the Canary Islands before turning due west along the 28th parallel. That course would be safely above the dividing line between the Portuguese and Spanish spheres of influence that had been set in the Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479. Marco Polo’s island of Cipangu lay 750 leagues or about 2,000 miles due west, he stated confidently, and the golden kingdom of the Grand Khan was 1,125 leagues. If he was successful, he demanded lofty titles and a fortune that must have seemed to some commissioners like all the gold in China.
From the outset, Columbus confronted a skeptical lot. In a sense the queen had stacked the deck against him, for she had let it be known that, as much as she was charmed by this silver-tongued, handsome, and sensitive foreigner, she did not think his proposal had legs. Despite their lofty titles and pompous airs, the “wise” geographers and university astronomers on the commission spoke from ignorance rather than enlightenment. The prelates on the commission were stuck in the conventional interpretations of the Bible. How could the world be a globe? they wondered. If that were true, men on the opposite side of the globe would walk with their feet opposite to ours and would be hanging downward. Had not St. Augustine in his City of God denied the existence of the Antipodes? Had the saint not said that it was impossible to pass from one hemisphere to another? And the poorly paid men of letters were appalled at the price tag that this sea merchant and would-be admiral placed upon his mission. If his jury was full of doubt, Columbus himself was guarded in his presentation. The treachery and mockery that had marked his reception in Portugal still had its sting.
Later, his second son, Fernando Colón, described the dynamics of the Salamanca deliberations. “In all the thousands of years since God created the world,” Fernando wrote in characterizing the resistance of the commissioners, “those lands remained unknown to innumerable learned men and experts in navigation. It was most unlikely that the Admiral should know more than all other men, past and present. Others, who based their opinion on geography, claimed the world to be so large that to reach the end of Asia, where the Admiral wished to sail, would take more than three years.”
The ocean might not be infinite, but it was too large to be navigated; and even if it could be crossed, who could say that habitable and wealthy lands existed on the other side? When Columbus showed them his revised map of the world, modified from the Toscanelli map to support his vision, and redrawn in his brother’s mapmaking atelier in Lisbon, the stony-faced commissioners were unmoved. An expert in navigation remarked that, since the earth was round, Columbus would not be able to return to Spain once he dipped over the western horizon. For he would be sailing downhill, as if off a mountaintop. Even the strongest wind could not propel Columbus’s ship back uphill to the motherland. At this argument, Columbus could only roll his eyes. He had heard this nonsense in Portugal.
The Commission of Inquiry met periodically through the Christmas season and into the new year. By the time the royal court left Salamanca on January 30, 1487, it was clear enough that Columbus’s proposal was not going anywhere. Still, he followed the monarchs to Córdoba, holding on to the slender reed that his plan had not been rejected outright. In Córdoba, the commission held a few more perfunctory meetings before the members tendered their
opinion to the monarchs. Holding to Ptolemy’s estimates for the earth’s dimensions, they noted that Asia was 2,495 leagues or about 7,500 miles away (rather than the actual distance of 14,000 miles). This distance across an empty expanse was simply too great to be navigated safely. Columbus countered with his assertion that resting places might well be discovered along the way. Many medieval maps displayed legendary islands of Brasil, Antilia, and St. Brendan on their western fringes in the unknown Ocean Sea. How grand it would be to discover these islands on the way to the Orient!
The commission did not buy it. In the end, Fernando Colón wrote sourly, “they condemned the enterprise as vain and impossible and advised the Sovereigns that the proposal did not comport with the dignity of such great princes to support a project that rested on such weak foundations.”
It was time to brush Columbus off gently and gracefully. On May 5, he was given a payment of 3,000 maravedis for his trouble and his expenses. The stipend was meant to soften the blow of rejection, and yet still keep him in their employ. Apart from his proposal about the west, he might prove useful in a few delicate matters of intelligence. Perhaps, the monarchs told Columbus, they could revisit his proposition when they were less distracted.
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