Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  Still, marvels abounded. Martyr spoke of the native food, especially the yuca plant whose juice was as deadly as hemlock but whose pulp was baked into a tasty bread. As a staple, the natives grew a tall plant whose ears are as thick as one’s arm, and whose white seeds are arranged in “marvelous order.” And in the ground, they cultivated tubers with sweet, orange flesh called potatoes. To fish the natives had boats they called canoes, some so large that they held eighty oarsmen. The parrots, he said, resemble those of India, and prove therefore that as Aristotle and Seneca “and others skilled in cosmography” had testified, “no great stretch of sea separates the shores of India from Spain.”

  In Martyr’s tale of heaven and earth, of good and evil, of light and darkness, of civilization and barbarism, the gentle tribe had a pliant and sensitive king named Guacanagari, who had shown great friendship to the discoverers and had taken great care for their safety. In embracing Columbus upon his departure, the native king had wept with sadness and pity, especially for the Spanish men who would stay behind to build the town of Navidad and not be able to return to the mother country. (And well he might have wept, for within months, at one another’s throats over gold and women, the first colonists would all be dead.) In turn, he had granted the wish of ten natives who longed to see the civilized world, to sail to Spain with the discoverers, so that they might teach the Europeans the language of the New World. (For these ten slaves the gentle king might have wept more.)

  As the festivities of the discovery carried on for some days, the arrival of Columbus did much to revive the sullen spirits of Barcelona. The discoverer himself could be seen riding through the streets at the side of King Ferdinand, as Prince Juan rode on the other side. Within a few days, the discoverer’s elevation to royalty had begun. The cardinal of Spain threw a great banquet for Columbus, according him the singular honor of having his food tasted for poison beforehand. On May 20, his coat of arms was unveiled, displaying a castle and a lion, both symbols of royalty. Three days later, he was given the reward of 1,000 gold doubloons or 335,000 maravedis. On the same day, at his own insistence, a royal order officially authorized for him an additional reward of 10,000 maravedis as the first man to have sighted land in the New World, although he knew perfectly well that a common seaman on Pinzón’s vessel had done so. And on May 28, a ceremony was held to confer the title of “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” upon him formally.

  With that, the “Capitulations” of Granada had been fulfilled.

  27

  The Division of the World

  ROME

  As the summer of 1493 approached, the civilized world of Europe was mired in its customary turmoil, its various leaders in the grip of grand designs and seething resentments. Charles VIII, the only son of Louis XI, had succeeded to the French throne in 1483 at the age of thirteen. When he became a man in 1492, he set out to reclaim the right of the House of Anjou to the Kingdom of Naples and to use this as a springboard to capture Constantinople from the heathen Turks, setting himself up heroically as the conquering Christian emperor. Since the King of Naples was a relative of Ferdinand of Spain in the House of Aragon, Charles’s fantasy was bound to cause trouble. Ferdinand and Isabella had other issues with France over the borderlands in the Pyrenees. For years they had been spatting over the province of Roussillon and its principal town of Perpignan. Some years before, the Spanish throne had ceded this province temporarily to France as surety for a debt. But when the debt was repaid, Charles had refused to return the province. Roussillon stayed then and ever as a part of France.

  To the east, Maximilian I, the emperor of the far-flung Holy Roman Empire, and son of a Portuguese princess, had spent his early years in various skirmishes with France and the Netherlands, but in 1493 became the sole ruler of Germany and the head of the House of Hapsburg. Glorying in his victory over the infidel Turks at Villach in southern Austria in 1492, he made an extravagant appeal to the Christian monarchs of Europe to help him drive the Islamic scourge from Europe. He meant to shift the clash between Christendom and Islam 500 miles east to the Balkans. But the appeal fell flat. Holy war in the Balkans would be left to the next generation.

  To these imperial imaginings, the fantasy of Ferdinand had to be added. In the Spanish version of the apocalypse, the Antichrist would appear in Seville, but he would be defeated by a messianic king, identified as “the Bat” or “the Hidden One.” The Bat would go on to conquer Granada, but this was only the first step. After that, the Bat was destined to lead a great crusade to recapture Jerusalem and the Holy Land for Christianity. With the conquest of Granada now accomplished, Ferdinand the Bat began to savor the grander historical destiny that awaited him.

  In the dreams of these Christian champions lay a tacit recognition that after the fall of Granada, the center of gravity for Islamic power in the Mediterranean had shifted to the Ottoman East. The clash of civilizations and faiths for the coming decades and centuries would be fought in the Levant over the rugged Slavic terrain of ancient Macedonia, as the Turks pressed to the gates of Vienna.

  Dreams were dreams, but more immediate problems concentrated the mind of the Spanish monarchs. Spain and Portugal faced off against one another with formidable armadas over the discoveries in the New World. Who was to be the arbiter of these disputes? Who would act as peacemaker? Or alternatively, as the true leader of an aggressive, messianic Christian faith?

  Beneath these internecine tensions, greater forces of history were at work. With the completion of the Spanish Reconquest and the unification of the Spanish nation, Spain epitomized the rise of the modern state. After over fifty years of expansion down the coast of Africa, with the passage to India now open, with the instant expansion of the geographical horizon that Columbus’s discoveries provided, the age of colonialism and colonial competition had dawned. As the Inquisition reached its orgasm of violence in Spain, it had begun to spread to other European nations. With the voyages of the Portuguese and Spanish explorers cast as Christian crusades, the role of religion in political and geopolitical affairs moved to center stage. The arrival of Jewish refugees in Italy and Moorish refugees in Turkey and Africa heightened the tensions between nations and faiths. The need for some form of international law was more important than ever.

  Who was to act as the world’s mediator? Who had the wisdom and the authority to manage this altered world? There was only the papacy. The earthly Vicar of Jesus Christ.

  In the wake of Columbus’s discovery, that holy father was the Borgia pope, the purchaser of the papacy, the Spanish swindler, the disgraceful Alexander VI. In the initial months of his decadent reign, another force of history advanced rapidly—the decline of the papacy. One Vatican scandal after another weakened the Holy See, undermined its moral authority, encouraged contempt among Christian nations, and ultimately set the stage for the revolt of Martin Luther two decades later. Criticism, in the form of apocalyptic poetry, predicted the end of the papacy in 1493. An Italian poet, Girolamo Malipiero, saw the end clearly:

  The light arms of the Gauls will administer justice to the Germans.

  The disorderly weight of Italy will drown the Gauls.

  Gaul will surrender.

  The victorious sign of the eagle will adorn the world.

  In 1493 that eagle will rise up to greatness.

  The earth will move, in what respect it is impossible to prophesy.

  Horses will be made of marble.

  Statues of Augustus will be erected, and many Roman palaces.

  Constantinople will fall.

  The pope will die quickly.

  Caesar will reign everywhere.

  The empty glory of the clergy will cease.

  It was to the illegally elected, degenerate pope, Alexander VI, that Ferdinand and Isabella now appealed in the spring of 1493 to settle the epic question of who owned the discoveries of Christopher Columbus: Spain or Portugal? The Borgia pope would decide the future of the Americas and the western hemisphere. He must divide the world between the two g
reat naval powers of Europe.

  A year into his papacy, the disenchantment with Pope Alexander was considerable. “He leads without respect for the seat He holds, that is abhorred by all,” wrote an Italian prince. “From the beginning of His pontificate he has done nothing but disturb the peace. He cares for nothing at all, save to aggrandize his children by fair means or foul. As is his nature, the impostor operates fraudulently in all things, and to make money sells even the smallest offices and benefices.”

  Indeed, in the first year of his papacy, Alexander VI was much preoccupied with his domestic affairs. His mistress was now the great Roman beauty Giulia Farnese, known as Giulia la Bella, who had replaced the passionate, high-spirited, but aging Vannozza Cattanei, and who had golden hair that, when let down, stretched to her feet. Giulia la Bella had been deposited in the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico, contiguous to the Vatican, and in late 1492, she bore the pope a daughter named Laura. She was said to be the last child of a pope to be born in the papal apartments, and the papal offspring too was destined to be a great beauty.

  Half a year later, on June 12, 1493, the marriage of the pope’s daughter by Vannozza, the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, was celebrated in the Vatican. The bridegroom was Giovanni Sforza, of the powerful Sforza family to whom the pope was beholden for his election. Young Sforza was twenty-six years of age. He was also illegitimate, had been married before, and was known as the Tyrant of Pesaro, a region in the Italian province of Romagna. Lucrezia was fourteen and said to have all the charms of beauty and even the golden hair of the pope’s stunning mistress. As a lady-in-waiting in the netherworld of papal entertainments and diversions, she was a fast learner.

  On the same day to the west, far across the Ligurian Sea and the Golfe du Lion, the Spanish monarchs fretted in Barcelona. They had heard nothing from their envoy in Rome about their appeal to the Holy Father concerning the Spanish claim to the New World. It was more than a month now since the emissary had been dispatched. Nor did they have any fresh news from Portugal about the Portuguese armada under the command of Dalmeyda, a fleet that was surely ready to challenge the Spanish somewhere on the Sea of Darkness. In this war of nerves, the threat of a naval clash in the Indies hung ominously in the air, with each nation claiming that the other was encroaching upon its territory without permission. Columbus was in the south, Córdoba probably, and he must hurry. How were the preparations for the Spanish armada of the second voyage proceeding? The royals did not know.

  And so on June 12, the day of Lucrezia Borgia’s wedding far away, Ferdinand and Isabella sat down and wrote an anxious, almost paranoid, letter to their “Admiral of the Islands and terra firma of the oceans near the Indies.” He was now an Admiral in the full sense, a military commander as much as a discoverer, and they hoped to spur him forward to quicker action. “Now Herrera, the messenger of the King of Portugal, has come to us. He has said that the King of Portugal plans to send ships to the Islands and lands that we have discovered, so that each may have what belongs to them. He has said that Portugal will let us know when its ships will depart for the new world. When we learn more, we will advise you of their intentions…

  “You must proceed with your journey very soon. If in the interest of haste, you deem it necessary to leave a few ships and a few sailors behind, by all means, please do so. They could join you later.”

  Events seemed to be moving rapidly toward disaster and mayhem in the waters around Cipangu.

  Fully two months before Lucrezia Borgia’s wedding, Ferdinand and Isabella had dispatched their envoy to Rome with the request for a papal blessing on Spain’s claim to the New World. To underscore the importance of the mission, the Cardinal of Spain, Pedro González de Mendoza, accompanied the ambassador. In the Eternal City, the delegation was greeted by Spain’s resident ambassador to the Roman Curia, Mendoza’s nephew, Cardinal Berardino de Carvajal. Already they had seen to it that the news of Columbus’s and Spain’s triumph was broadcast far and wide. Columbus’s letter to the monarchs about his discovery was recast as a public document for public consumption. More than twenty years had passed since the printing process had been invented in Germany, and so the presses hummed with the public version of the discovery letter. Among the first tasks of the Spanish ambassador on his mission to the Vatican was to ensure that an Italian translation of the letter also be printed and widely distributed in Rome and elsewhere in Italy.

  To distinguish Columbus’s discovery from the Portuguese claim that everything below the 26th parallel belonged to it, Peter Martyr announced that Portugal had claim to the “southern antipodes,” whereas Columbus had discovered the “western antipodes.” The large, transoceanic islands of the Indies were imagined to be, in the physical sense, a counterbalance or a counterweight on the one side to Portuguese Africa, and on the other side, the Eurasian continent. They were therefore entirely different, separate and distinct. Columbus himself suggested that the Spanish position at the Vatican assert a claim to sovereignty in these “western antipodes” from North Pole to South Pole.

  They were confident of success. The pope, after all, was Spanish, and there was a long history of feathering his nest. Ferdinand had permitted the previous cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia, to add the lucrative bishoprics of Cartagena and Majorca to his already golden see of Valencia. Borgia’s son had fought valiantly in the War Against the Moors, especially the battle for Ronda. In gratitude, King Ferdinand had given the duchy of Gandía to the cardinal’s son, making the papal bastard one of the most prominent members of the Aragon nobility. Ferdinand had legitimized the pope’s favorite son, Cesare, in 1481, had sanctioned his accession to the see of Pamplona, and then had promoted the villain to the archbishopric of Valencia upon Alexander’s investiture as pope. Alexander, in turn, had made a Spaniard the general of the papal bastion on the Tiber, Castel Sant’Angelo, and had appointed a Spaniard as his confessor.

  How could the Spanish pontiff not rule in favor of Spain?

  On the other hand, the new pope, in his haste to reward everyone who had helped him secure his office, had allowed himself to become sucked into the machinations of the French king, Charles VIII. By siding with France’s allies in Italy, Venice, and Milan, against Naples, the pope seemed to be encouraging Charles’s plans to invade Italy and capture Naples. And the pope had turned a blind eye toward the Spanish demand for the return of Roussillon. These papal actions had annoyed and embarrassed the Spanish crown.

  Thus, the Spanish emissary was directed to adopt an offensive strategy with the pope. He was to demand rather than beseech, to insist rather than beg or implore. Weeks later, the envoy arrived in Rome. In his audience with the Holy Father, after offering his pro forma “homage and obedience,” the Spanish envoy proceeded to scold the pontiff for his various transgressions against his native country. Why, for example, was the pope permitting asylum in Italy to Spanish Jews and conversos who had been driven from Spain, with papal approval, as enemies of the Christian faith? Was it not true that these infidels and devils were camped in perfect freedom amid the ancient Roman tombs along the Appian Way? Why was the pope encouraging Charles VIII in his designs on Naples, and why had he embarrassed Spain by not insisting upon the return of Roussillon to its rightful Spanish owners? As for the pope’s scandalous personal behavior, Queen Isabella was especially affronted, and it would not be long before this indignation was bitingly committed to writing:

  “You have achieved your limited purpose of gaining the papacy, even if illegally. Now you have taken unfettered license, and you have committed disgraceful acts. You have tarnished sacred matters at a great price to the faithful. Promise us, the most unworthy, that your habits have changed, and that you will lead the Holy See in the future with honor and true piety.”

  This was scarcely the meek homage and obedience that the pope might have expected, and no doubt, he was taken aback. But the broadside worked splendidly. The defensive pope became almost fawning in his expressions of regret and apology. He assured the ambassador that
he was eager to restore friendly relations. What could he do to please the king and queen? He “desired that the bond with his Spanish allies remain entire and inviolable.” He made excuses for his tilt toward France.

  “Tell them distinctly with what care we lay ourselves out to satisfy them in all things,” the pope said. “We are eager to furnish to all the world the proofs of the paternal affection we have for them.”

  It was time to get down to the business at hand. The ambassador had just the idea of how the pope could furnish proof to all the world of his affection for Spain.

  On May 3 and 4, that proof was forthcoming. On May 3, Pope Alexander VI issued the first of two bulls entitled Inter caetera, “in the plenitude of his apostolic authority.” The first was to supersede and abrogate any papal bulls that might have been issued previously, a reference to the pronouncements of three popes—Nicholas V, Calixtus III, and Sixtus IV—that had granted sovereignty to Portugal over “southern regions” in the Ocean Sea and which were meant to include the mythical island of Antilia. The bull of Sixtus IV had confirmed the Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479 in which Spain had ceded to Portugal dominion over the southern regions. That was now abrogated.