Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  When, three months later, Innocent VIII died as well, the prophetic powers of Savonarola were broadcast throughout Italy. Did he truly speak for God? Did he possess the power of life and death? Could he truly be the messenger of God’s wrath against the tyrant and the false Vicar?

  On Good Friday, 1492, only two weeks after Lorenzo de Medici’s death, Savonarola ascended to the pulpit of the romanesque Church of San Lorenzo that was so associated with the Medici dynasty. There, he announced that he had seen a vision. In it a black cross had risen from the city of Rome and reached all the way to heaven, its arms stretching across the earth, and on it was written the inscription The Cross of God’s Wrath. Thunder and lightning and hail filled the sky. And then he saw Jerusalem, incandescent in the morning light, and from the Holy City, he had seen a golden cross rise, radiating its brilliant rays outward across the world, and upon it were written the words The Cross of God’s Mercy.

  In that Lenten season, he began a series of sermons on Noah’s Ark and the Deluge. In Savonarola’s allegory, the Ark represented the gathering of the faithful. His Ark was built upon the planks of Christian virtue, and on Easter morning in 1492, he concluded his sermon by saying, “Let all hasten to enter into the Lord’s Ark! Noah invites ye all today, the door stands open. But a time will come when the Ark will be closed, and many will repent in vain of not having entered.”

  Savonarola’s words had a terrifying, magnetic effect on his audience. Months later, during Advent, the time supposed by many to be the season when Christ would return for a second time, Savonarola had another vision. Now, in the great Duomo, he spoke of seeing a gigantic hand in the sky, holding a great sword pointed toward the earth, and on the sword were the words “Gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter—The Sword of God over the land, quickly, with speed.” He heard voices proclaiming mercy for the clean of heart and punishment for the wicked. The angels of retribution were coming, and the wrath of God was at hand. And as the sword hovered above the earth, fire rained down from heaven, and all the world was overtaken by death and pestilence and famine. A great voice commanded Savonarola to proclaim what he had seen, to inspire fear in the people, and to offer hope to those who had lost their way.

  “The only hope that now remains to us,” he proclaimed, “is that the sword of God may soon smite the earth.”

  And as he brandished his sword and his Ark and his tempest from the pulpit, so in his tiny austere cell in the Monastery of San Marco, he wrote poetry which sharpened his terrible jeremiad:

  Soon shalt thou see each tyrant overthrown,

  And all Italy shalt thou see vanquished

  To her shame, disgrace, and harm.

  Thou, Rome, shalt soon be captured:

  I see the blade of wrath come upon thee,

  The time is short, each day flies past…

  My Lord will renovate the Church,

  And convert every barbarian people.

  There will be but one fold and one shepherd.

  But first Italy will have to mourn,

  And so much of her blood will be shed,

  That her people shall everywhere be thinned.

  While Savonarola was preaching in Italy about “one fold and one shepherd” and about converting “every barbarian people,” Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain were doing something about it.

  25

  Harvests Bitter and Sweet

  BARCELONA

  In the latter half of 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella retreated into the Castilian heart of their new and unified Iberian empire. It was as if they realized from the beginning that this year, this annus mirabilis, was a historic turning point and that a new epoch, if not a golden age, in Spain, if not in all of Europe, had begun. They did not call it the Renaissance, but all around them, in language, in literature, in music, in art and architecture, as well as politics, were the signs of bursting energy and creativity. As they made their way north, the first modern grammar of Castilian Spanish was presented to the queen, and she understood this linguistic standard immediately to be a powerful tool of imperial consolidation.

  The transformation of Granada and Al Andalus was left in the capable hands of the count of Tendilla and the queen’s scholarly and pious confessor, Hernando Talavera. In the fall of 1492, the honeymoon for the Muslims of the Old Caliphate was graced and certified with a formal expression of tolerance by the monarchs. On November 29, they officially proclaimed the principle of religious freedom for the Moors. All believers in Islam were guaranteed full liberty to practice their faith, to maintain their laws and customs, to work and trade unmolested by the religious police. Christian women who married a Moor were free to choose which of the two religions they wished to follow. Muslims who had fled to Africa were free to return and reclaim their property. Those Moors who wished to emigrate were to be treated fairly in the disposal of their property.

  A honeymoon only it would be. At the recommendation of the Cardinal of Spain and archbishop of Toledo, Pedro González de Mendoza, Hernando Talavera was replaced as the queen’s confessor. That he had presided over the discredited Commission of Inquiry into Columbus’s proposal, which had recommended against the adventure, was only one aspect of Talavera’s diminished standing. More important, his policy toward Islam was gentle and respectful. He believed that Moors should be converted to Christianity through persuasion and example rather than coercion, and he was to devote his energies to missionary work, even encouraging the translation of the Gospels into Arabic. He himself learned the language and required his assistants to do so as well.

  But this enlightened stance soon fell out of favor. Cardinal Mendoza and other princes of the Spanish Church argued that the true model for the Moors should be the ultimatum of Jews: baptism or exile. As this idea gradually took hold, Talavera, predictably, would end his career as a victim of the Inquisition, with his own Jewish blood brought to light, and with an accusation, bred of torture, that the archbishop was secretly preaching the return of the prophet Elijah.

  Meanwhile, the adoration of the king and queen went forward. The royal choir of twenty young boys and two organists that traveled with the royal entourage sang their praises, accompanied by the triumphal sound of cornet and kettledrum, shawm and sackbut. Juan de Anchieta, Isabella’s chaplain and lead singer, composed a romance on the fall of Baza and a mass in celebration of the conquest of Granada. Plays that cast the queen as the heroic lead were written. The queen’s prayers and the king’s soldiers together had accomplished this historic victory, the heralds exclaimed. She was “the grand lioness,” who was feared and loved, the “great and prosperous Queen,” who had inspired great courage in the soldiers, “the generous virgin” through whom “the golden centuries” had now begun. The king, in turn, was the illustrious knight who carried a crimson cross and a sparkling sword, whose hosts perturbed the air with dust and glory, devastated the fields of the Moors, and made parish churches of the mosques of Mohammed. Together, the Catholic monarchs had been guided from above. “As God did His deeds,” wrote their musical propagandist, Juan del Enzina, “defense was unavailing, for where He put his hand, the impossible was nearly nothing.”

  Early in 1493, the royal court moved east into Ferdinand’s domain of Catalonia and settled down in Barcelona. Catalonia had long been troubled by constant military threat from France and even more so by the fierce independence of its people. Deeply proud of their separate identity, they held doggedly to their traditions and language, and they had stoutly resisted the Inquisition for eighteen months. To tame this beast, Torquemada had personally taken charge as inquisitor in 1486. From the Palace of the Lieutenants, adjoined to the Royal Palace, the Suprema had cracked down brutally. In 1487 alone, two hundred heretics had been—in one of the greatest euphemisms in the history of language—“relaxed,” that is, burned at the stake. Ferdinand viewed the Inquisition as his best method of social and political control. Only through the Inquisition’s brutal ministrations had the province been brought to heel.


  Now, as the monarchs arrived and took up residence in the Great Royal Palace, the city presented a woeful face. Once the Venice of Spain and the rival of Constantinople, with its thriving trade and bustling commerce, Barcelona suddenly was stagnant. For the Jews of Barcelona had provided the intellectual energy and the financial backbone of the city, and they had left en masse. “Today no trade at all is practiced,” lamented a local dignitary, “not a bolt of cloth is seen. Clothmakers are unemployed, and other workers the same.” The Jewish quarter had graced the city with its finest schools, its best doctors, its poets and philosophers, and in the blink of an eye, they were all gone.

  In the stagnation of Barcelona lay the bitter harvest of the expulsion. The city’s demoralization was all too evident, even to royalty. From its windswept streets and dormant quays, the hill behind the city seemed like a symbol of the wicked edict. For the hill, Tibidabo, took its name from the Latin words “I will give you,” a phrase derived from the biblical passage on the Temptation of Christ when the Devil takes Jesus up into the mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world. In their greed, the monarchs had given in to the Devil’s temptation.

  In the deflowering of its populace, Spain had paid a monumental price.

  On December 7, 1492, King Ferdinand spent his morning indulging his pleasure in listening to cases in the law court of Barcelona. When the session broke up, he ambled down the steps of the court in languid conversation with his treasurer, Luis de Santángel, surrounded by a crowd of knights and commoners. He tarried for a minute on the last step, and then concluded his conversation, moving toward his mule, which was tied there in the King’s Square. Suddenly, an avenging Moor burst from the throng and with all his might struck the king in the head with a three-foot-long scimitar. Ferdinand slumped to the ground with a terrible wound that sliced from the top of his head, across his ear, to his shoulder.

  They carried him to the Great Royal Palace, and when she heard the news, the queen could barely look at the wound. She repaired to St. Agatha’s Chapel in the palace to pray and then wrote to her confessor,

  “I had no heart to see the wound. It was four fingers deep and so long that my hand trembles to say it… but all the strings and the neck bone and all that was mortally dangerous was spared.”

  The gold chain that the king wore around his neck on the day of the attack had arrested the path of the scimitar.

  In late February 1493, as the king recovered from his wound, the Pinta blew into the tiny Galician port of Baiona in northeast Spain and announced the discovery of the New World. She was a battered, intrepid explorer, with her caulking leaking and her mast loose. In worse shape was her captain. Martín Alonso Pinzón was gravely ill and had to be carried ashore. He was suffering from a strange, unknown disease. Sores covered his body. But the condition of their captain did little to restrain the euphoria of his crew, nor did it suppress their admiration for Pinzón’s accomplishments. Had it not been for him, they proclaimed to their amazed audience of fishermen and townspeople, the mission of the foreigner, Columbus, could never have succeeded.

  Throughout the many crises of the journey, Pinzón’s hand had been steady and reliable, they said. They told of how only four days out of Palos, the rudder of the Pinta had jumped its sockets, and how Captain Pinzón had cleverly jerry-rigged the steering with ropes, so that the caravel could limp another 200 miles into Grand Canary. The crew spoke of how bad omens had spooked their mates—early on, they had passed an active volcano in the Canaries and later, a meteorite had fallen within a dozen miles of the little fleet. It had been Martín Pinzón, not the foreigner, who had calmed their fears. They told of how the Admiral had tried to trick his captains and crew about how far they had sailed across the Gloomy Sea, as if the perception of a shorter distance would allay their fears. But Pinzón knew the truth, and Pinzon was not tricked. And it had been Pinzón, some 400 leagues still from land, who had carefully considered the flight of birds that skirted the fleet.

  “Those birds breed on land,” he said comfortingly, “and to land they go to sleep.” From the direction of their flight, Pinzón had suggested a change of course from southwest to southwest by west, and that course had eventually brought them to land.

  Still, after four full weeks of sailing across the seemingly endless sea, through sawgrass and doldrums, the crew had grown anxious and combative. They were terrified that the prevailing winds blew in a single, westerly direction, so they would never be able to retrace their path home. Mutiny was in the air. The mariners told their gawking audience of how Columbus was discouraged and on the verge of turning back, as the frightened crew demanded that he do so. At a meeting of captains, he asked the Pinzóns, “What shall we do?”

  “Come, sir, we have hardly left Palos, and you are already discouraged.” Martín Alonso Pinzón spoke up cheerily. “Onward! onward! that God give us victory, that we discover land, that God does not wish us shamefully to turn back!”

  This had inspired Columbus. “Good luck to us then,” he said, resigned.

  And when the glorious moment came, it was the vigilant Martín Pinzón who had been the first to sight land. It had been he who had fired off his cannon in celebration to alert the Admiral, who tarried far behind. And when Columbus finally came alongside, he had shouted gleefully,

  “Martín Alonso, you have sighted land!”

  “And my reward, sir?” Pinzón parried.

  “I give you five thousand maravedis as a bonus!”

  And then they had seen the most astonishing things: islands with beautiful white beaches and palm trees and remarkably clear water, noisy, garishly colored plumed birds, plants that one lit with fire and whose smoke you inhaled with the most sensuous pleasure. They had encountered some natives with coffee-colored skin who walked about entirely naked, without shame, and who had welcomed them effusively, especially the women. Their men had hair as long as women from Castile and festooned with parrot feathers, and they knew how to make safe and palatable bread from the poisonous yucca root. Other natives called Caribs were hostile, shot poisoned arrows, and ate human flesh. In the lagoons, they had seen mermaids with disappointingly ugly faces and unshapely bodies and fish that looked like pigs. They watched the natives fish for very large snails and eat snakes and lizards. They had heard of one island inhabited entirely by beautiful women and of another island where the natives had no hair. In the west of the island Columbus had named Juana (Cuba) after the firstborn son of the monarchs, they had heard that people were born with tails.

  They told of how they had explored those smaller islands, how Martín Alonso had been the first to sight the island Columbus called Hispaniola, and then a huge landmass that the Admiral said was Asia and gave the apocalyptic name Alpha and Omega. While the Admiral gabbled incessantly about the island of golden roofs called Cipangu and a king called the Great Khan, and allowed their flagship, the Santa María, to run aground in his search, it was Martín Alonso Pinzón who had found the gold of the New World. To prove it, the sailors showed the fishermen the little bag of gold nuggets that each one had, and joked about the simpleminded natives who gave up their treasure for trinkets of colored glass and tiny copper bells.

  Lastly, Martín Alonso, the heroic Spaniard, had brought them home safely, ill as he was, through terrible ocean storms. The Pinta with Pinzón and the Niña with Columbus had stayed together across the expanse, communicating with bells and lamps, until they reached the vicinity of the Azores and were driven apart by a violent storm. Of what happened to the Niña and to Columbus, none could say.

  Even as their captain was barely conscious, the glasses were raised to him in toast, and to Spain, and, almost as an afterthought, to the Almighty.

  The monarchs in Barcelona must be informed.

  Dutifully, a letter about the discovery was written, and once it was approved by the sick man, a messenger set off, to ride on horseback the 600 miles across the dusty roads of Galicia and León and Aragon and Catalonia to announce the glory to their
majesties and the triumph of the Pinzóns from Palos.

  Two weeks after the Pinta limped into Baiona in Galicia, the Niña appeared in rough seas 200 miles to the south off the Rock of Sintra, at the mouth of the great Tagus River. In a sense, the rude buffeting that Columbus received in the last month of his first journey fit the grandeur of his discovery. Nothing in this adventure had come easily for the discoverer of the New World; yet his difficulties only glorified his accomplishment.