The Holy Roman Empire was an elective monarchy; its German electors had the authority both to appoint the emperor and to control his actions thereafter. Charles’s grandfather, Maximilian, while emperor had elicited promises from the seven German electors to appoint the boy as emperor, but promises alone were not enough to assure Charles’s succession. He faced competition from the king of France, Francis I, who was eager to make a reputation, especially at Spain’s expense. It was true that Charles belonged to the House of Hapsburg, which traditionally ruled the Holy Roman Empire, but he needed money, lots of it, to clinch the deal. Charles had to pay bribes, thinly disguised as tributes, to the electors and to representatives of the papacy if he wished to secure the title. Lacking resources of his own, he borrowed heavily from various banking houses, permanently placing himself in their debt. He eventually paid the electors an astounding figure, 850,000 ducats, of which 540,000 ducats came from loans arranged with the Fugger banking dynasty. Thus Charles was borrowing from German bankers to pay German electors to win his largely German title, “Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.” The Germans made a fortune from Charles’s imperial ambitions, and he expected Spain to pay the bill, incurring wrath from one end of the Iberian peninsula to the other.
To complete his quest to become emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles required the blessing of Leo X, the Medici family pope whose excesses helped to inspire the Reformation. According to popular mythology, he was a free-spending libertine, but Raphael’s renowned portrait of Leo X, painted in 1518, depicts a very different image, that of a pudgy, thoughtful scholar and aesthete averting his saturnine expression from the viewer. With his puffy face and massive, fleshy nose, he presents an altogether homely and unprepossessing figure, flanked by two young cardinals, who stand directly behind him, uncomfortably crowding him. Although all three are swathed in luxury, in damasks and velvets and silks, they look at odds with each other, as if their robes concealed sharp weapons. Raphael’s portrait reflected a difficult and divisive time in Rome. The year before, Leo X had uncovered a plot among the younger cardinals to poison him. Cardinal Petrucci, who admitted to knowledge of the plot, was strangled in prison, and the other conspirators were exiled or executed. No wonder Raphael’s portrait showed a careworn, abstracted Leo X surrounded by menacing cardinals.
There was another side to Leo X. When not presiding at Church functions, he displayed a sense of bonhomie, rich laughter, and an addiction to theater and music and art, and other secular pleasures such as banquets and hunting. “Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us,” he declared. He dispensed papal largesse to his entourage without regard to the dwindling papal treasury. Leo X then tried to raise money with the same lack of discipline, indiscriminately selling titles, favors, and indulgences, the latter popularly understood as the promise of avoiding Hell in the afterlife, given in exchange for donations.
To discontented outsiders, the Church deteriorated into a spectacle of corruption, selfishness, and arrogance. In 1520, Martin Luther, in Wittenberg, Germany, wrote a furious and menacing letter to Pope Leo X. “Among those monstrous evils of this age,” he wrote, “I am sometimes compelled to look to you and call you to mind, most blessed father Leo.” Under the influence of Pope Leo X, the Church of Rome, “formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels,” Martin Luther wrote, and many agreed. “Not even the antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.” He ranted in this vein for many pages, inciting others to follow his example. The Reformation was in full cry.
In theory, the beleaguered Leo X could draw additional support—and funds—from the Holy Roman Empire, but that conglomeration was in disarray. After the death of Maximilian, Leo X nominally supported Francis I, the king of France, over King Charles, but in reality the pope skillfully played one candidate against the other. More zealous and better funded, King Charles ultimately prevailed, and the pope reluctantly threw his weight behind the young man who had suddenly arrived at the summit of power in Europe. Or was it a precipice?
On July 28, 1519, less than a month before Magellan’s fleet sailed down the Guadalquivir River to the Atlantic, King Charles, then in Barcelona, learned that he had been elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, but the title would not belong to him until he paid for it. He had counted on Spanish nobles for financial support, but they turned their backs on him. He remained in Europe, raising funds, and finally, on October 23, 1520, in the ancient city of Aachen, Germany, from which Charlemagne had once ruled the empire, Charles, now twenty-one years old, was crowned emperor. The occasion marked the formal alliance between a hesitant, cashstarved pope under siege from the forces of the Reformation and an untested, cash-starved monarch.
In Spain the nobility resented Charles even more fiercely now that he was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Despite his promise not to appoint foreigners to government posts in Spain, Charles selected his former tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, as regent, and the choice confirmed the nobles’ fears that Charles was essentially a German interloper plunked down in their midst. The city of Toledo responded by expelling its corregidor, as the royal administrative executive was known, and the Revolt of the Castilian Comuneros was under way. Cities and towns across Spain, Madrid and Salamanca among them, joined in the Junta Santa de las Communidades to return political power to Spain. They showed their determination by raising militias that marched on Tordesillas, where they placed their trust in King Charles’s mother, the mad Queen Juana, but she refused to come out of seclusion to offer support or even to sign a document expressing their grievances.
The insurrection spawned a counterrevolution in rural areas among those who despised the nobles; they now turned to King Charles for protection. He eagerly sought their support, promised to indemnify them against losses they incurred while fighting the rebellious nobles, and consented to appoint two Castilian noblemen to serve alongside Adrian of Utrecht as co-regents. He also showered titles and dukedoms on those who rallied to his side, and managed to bring the recalcitrant nobles around. Despite these victories, King Charles’s position in Spain remained hotly contested as alliances between the comuneros and the royalists shifted constantly. Desperate to shore up his empire, King Charles paid scant attention to the controversy surrounding a rogue ship tied up in Seville. He remained abroad until July 1522, and in his absence Spain struggled to redefine itself as a nation and as part of the Holy Roman Empire.
Seville, the center of Spanish commerce, reflected the tensions afflicting the rest of the country and developed a reputation as a city in crisis. Criminal behavior flourished in the streets and alleys of its shabbier neighborhoods. Triana, the suburb across the Guadalquivir River, served as home to many underworld types, as well as to the sailors who manned Spanish ships. Gypsies, slaves, palm readers, beggars, itinerant thespians, and minstrels populated a rapidly expanding underworld. In time, its ranks came to include defrocked clergy, destitute nobles, and unemployed soldiers, as well as an assortment of con artists and dealers in questionable merchandise. With goods flowing into Seville from Africa and across Europe, smuggling became a major enterprise; the value of smuggled goods far outstripped that of legitimate merchandise. Chronically unemployed people masqueraded as disabled beggars; it was often difficult for their victims to distinguish them from mendicant orders of monks. Knife fights were common throughout Seville, as were bribery and prostitution. Each year, eighteen thousand prisoners entered the gates of the Royal Prison, further stressing the city’s already burdened economy.
Meanwhile, Seville’s titled oligarchy fattened itself with income derived from leasing lands to farmers or cashed in on their titles and prestige to engage in commercial pursuits, importing wine, oil, and soap. With the profits, they constructed impressive castles, gardens, and ravishing courtyards. Throughout Spain, Seville’s wealthy nobility was renowned and envied even as the city’s criminals were feared. These two disparate sides o
f Seville met at the docks, where wealthy merchants jostled with sailors and dishonest middlemen seeking merchandise to peddle. Amid the chaos on the banks of the Guadalquivir, San Antonio, now stripped of her rigging and fittings, rode at anchor, a mute but eloquent witness to an expedition gone awry. In Seville no one knew that the Armada de Molucca had successfully navigated the strait, or crossed the immense Pacific Ocean. No one realized how close the survivors were to their ultimate goal, the Spice Islands. Everyone—from King Charles to the bureaucrats in the Casa de Contratación to the recently freed sailors looking for their next ship—assumed that the fleet was lost and the expedition a complete failure.
Everyone was wrong.
C H A P T E R X I I
Survivors
The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up-blew;
The mariners all ’gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—
We were a ghastly crew.
Ten thousand miles from Spain, in a remote corner of the Philippine archipelago, a ship was burning. The blaze turned night into day, and its reflection formed hypnotic patterns on the inky, swelling sea. As it hissed and sent a pungent vapor skyward, the blaze consumed the ship’s timbers down to the water’s edge. The dull red glow from the waterborne bonfire was visible for miles around. The next morning, thick smoke from the dying embers of the charred hull turned day into night.
The ship was Concepción, one of the three vessels that had escaped the massacre at Cebu the previous day. Since then, the survivors had tried to navigate the three large vessels around the uncharted shoals and islands of the Philippines, but they soon discovered that they were hopelessly shorthanded. To add to their problems, Concepción’s master, Juan Sebastián Elcano, complained that shipworms infested the hull. Magellan, had he been alive, would have ordered the men to undertake arduous repairs, but the survivors adopted a more pragmatic approach and decided to burn the ship to prevent it from falling into the hands of an enemy who might use it against them. The crew transferred the contents of Concepción—her provisions, rigging, sails, fittings, weapons, and navigational devices—to the two other ships, Trinidad, still the flagship of
the fleet, and Victoria. And then, on the night of May 2, 1521, the empty ship was set ablaze in symbolic, and wholly unconscious, expiation of the fleet’s sins.
Ahasty vote among the sailors placed Espinosa in command of Victoria, while João Lopes Carvalho, the Portuguese pilot, won election as the new Captain General. Elcano, the master of Victoria, silently cursed the new Captain General, who might be a talented pilot but was incapable of imposing discipline on the unruly fleet. In Brazil, Carvalho had attempted to bring his mistress on board; although he did not succeed, their child had been traveling with the fleet ever since. Elcano had no respect for a leader who set such a poor example for the others.
The new command placed Pigafetta in a vulnerable position. He had always identified himself as a Magellan loyalist, but the Captain General’s inner circle—his slave, Enrique; his illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo; his cousin, Álvaro de Mesquita; and his brotherin-law, Duarte Barbosa—had all perished or disappeared. Only Pigafetta survived. He believed he would continue to serve as the expedition’s chief chronicler, as well as its chief interpreter, because he alone had troubled to make a methodical study of the Malay tongue. He lacked Enrique’s facility with it, but he knew how to make himself understood and obtain information. Equally important, he was familiar with Filipino customs, ranging from casicasi to palang , and could make himself useful as the expedition’s emissary to the strange and changeable islanders all around them. Carvalho and the newly elected leaders of the expedition agreed, and Pigafetta’s role in the post-Magellan era was, if anything, enhanced. As for his diary, he continued to maintain it, and to keep its contents to himself.
After the multiple tragedies the armada had suffered in the Philippines, commercial considerations ruled their actions. Never again would they erect crosses or insist on mass conversions. Everything was different now. Knowing they were lucky to be alive, the men turned their attention to reaching the Spice Islands, where they hoped to find safety, supplies, and the precious commodity they had sailed halfway around the world to find.
Carvalho faced the task of leading the fleet’s two remaining ships southward through the archipelago to the Moluccas, but the arrival of the rainy season in the Philippines and its storms often made navigation next to impossible. They had adapted to sailing over vast stretches of open water, but now they had to thread their way through a labyrinth of islands. For the short distances and intricate maneuvering involved, they needed a reliable map or, failing that, a guide familiar with these waters, but after their horrific experiences on Cebu and Mactan, the sailors were reluctant to call at strange islands and ask for help. Who could guess the real intentions of the islanders lurking in the shadows of the palm trees?
Occasionally, the fleet was approached by balanghai powered by rowers chanting in unison. Whenever possible, Pigafetta asked the rowers for directions to the Moluccas, but the others kept their relations with the islanders to a bare minimum.
Carvalho, aided by Albo, the pilot, veered from one island to another, following a meandering but generally southerly course through the labyrinth of the Philippine archipelago to the Moluccas. Albo’s methodical record, barely mentioning the ambush at Cebu, tracked the fleet’s wanderings, as if the ships were wounded beasts in search of a healing sanctuary.
They soon encountered an island populated by Negritos, aboriginal pygmies with dark skin, as their name indicates. After an unsuccessful hunt for food, the fleet approached a towering island clad in dense foliage cut by steep channels and waterfalls flowing from hidden springs. Here and there the shore suddenly cleared to offer an inviting, if narrow, stretch of beach. This was Mindanao. The idyllic setting soothed the chastened yet hard-bitten crew, who dropped their guard long enough to establish friendly relations with a local ruler named Calanoa, who appeared eager to make peace. Calanoa, Pigafetta wrote, “drew blood from his left hand marking his body face, and the tip of his tongue with it as a token of closest friendship, and we did the same.” Despite his offer of friendship, he was unable, or unwilling, to feed the crew.
After the ceremony, Calanoa invited Pigafetta ashore as a sign of respect, but Pigafetta does not explain why he alone received this honor. Perhaps his facility with the Malay language had impressed the chieftain, or perhaps the invitation gave him an opportunity to prove his usefulness to Carvalho and the other leaders of the expedition. Pigafetta boldly accepted the invitation, even after witnessing the recent massacre. One explanation for Pigafetta’s sudden courage might be that Calanoa had put him at ease; another might be that he had no intention of returning to the fleet, that he had seen enough of death and disaster at sea and preferred to live out his days as an honored guest among the islanders and, especially, their beautiful women.
“We had no sooner entered a river than many fishermen offered fish to the king”—so food was available after all. “Then the king removed the clothes which covered his privies, as did some of his chiefs; and began to row while singing past many dwellings which were upon the river. Two hours after nightfall we reached the king’s house. The distance from the beginning of the river where our ships were to the king’s house was two leagues.” Isolated from his crew mates, Pigafetta was now at the mercy of his hosts, but if he felt fear, he left no trace in his diary.
“When we entered the house, we came upon many torches of cane and palm leaves,” he continued. “The king with two of his chiefs and two of his beautiful women drank the contents of a large jar of palm wine without eating anything. I, excusing myself as I supped, would only drink but once.” It was a scene familiar to Pigafetta, the drinking, and feasting, and women; he might have been back on Limasawa, in the days before the massacre. At his ease, and inquisitive as ever, he o
bserved food preparations: “They first put in an earthen jar . . . a large leaf lining the entire jar. Then they add the water and the rice, and after covering it allow it to boil until the rice becomes as hard as bread, when it is taken out in pieces.” (In recording this recipe, Pigafetta became the West’s first guide to Oceanic cuisine.) After the meal, the chieftain offered Pigafetta two mats for sleeping, one fashioned of reeds, the other of palm leaves. “The king and his two women went to sleep in a separate place, while I slept with one of the chiefs.”
In the morning, Pigafetta explored the island, devoting special attention to huts, whose fittings gleamed with gold. Gold seemed to be on display everywhere; there was, he said, “an abundance of gold. They showed us certain small valleys, making signs to us that there was as much gold there as they had hairs, but that they had no iron or tools to mine it, and moreover that they would not take the trouble to do so.”
Over a midday meal of rice and fish, Pigafetta courteously asked Calanoa for an audience with the queen. The chieftain agreed, and the two of them trudged up a steep hill to pay their respects to her. “When I entered the house, I made a bow to the queen, and she did the same to me, whereupon I sat down beside her. She was making a sleeping mat of palm leaves. In the house there were a number of porcelain jars and four bells . . . for ringing. Many male and female slaves who served her were there.”
If Pigafetta had ever considered seeking refuge on this island with its abundant gold, the temptation waned. After his audience with the queen, he clambered aboard a waiting balanghai, along with the chieftain and his retinue, and they glided along the serene river toward the ocean. When he least expected it, the tranquil surroundings were disturbed by an appalling spectacle: “I perceived to the right, on a small hill, three men hanging from a tree which had its branches cut off.” Once again, he was struck by the stark contrast between the splendor of the setting, the peaceful, generous, and open nature of the inhabitants, and the macabre reminders of brutality that lurked just out of sight. Who were these people, Pigafetta asked, and why did they meet such a gruesome ending?
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