Hernando’s first home in Valladolid was perhaps the Palacio de Pimentel, a short walk from the Palacio de los Vivero, where Ferdinand and Isabella had been married in 1469 and where the itinerant Castilian government was just beginning to put down its first roots. These solid, square structures, unadorned on the outside and set around plain colonnaded courtyards, were a world apart from the willful asymmetry of Hernando’s hometown of Córdoba, with its warren of streets slinking between the houses toward the cathedral, where a forest of horseshoe arches provided a constant reminder of its long history as a mosque. If the houses of Valladolid were rather spare, though, Hernando would have found some relief looking out of the windows of the Palacio de Pimentel to where, across the street, the art of the Flamenco-Spanish high Gothic was reaching its apex. For the newly completed façade of the Colegio de San Gregorio and the adjoining Iglesia de San Pablo, the master masons Simón de Colonia and Gil Silóe had created riotous sculptural marvels, whittling the local stone until it became encrusted with images—wild men, pomegranate trees, stars, figures of chivalry—and foliage so delicate in appearance it seems to be carved from eggshell, in defiance of the rough winds of the north Castilian plain. Around the corner from this, in the façade of the Colegio de Santa Cruz by Juan Vázquez, Hernando would have seen the garbled first beginnings of neoclassicism in Spanish architecture. The court would soon pass on from Valladolid, but the art of these master masons would become a constant in the years to come. Hernando would spend the remainder of his childhood years moving between the centers of royal power in northern Spain, a landscape he would later chart in minute detail. Among the most familiar places would have been the redbrick Mudéjar palace on the corner of Medina del Campo’s great market square; russet Salamanca, given its distinctive hue by the rusting iron in the sandstone from León; and Burgos, by the gentle river Arlanzon, with its immense and terraced cathedral, strikingly topped by hollow spires of delicate Gothic tracery—the work of the German artist Juan de Colonia—like crowns of paper lace cut from the living stone. In each of these places the household would reconfigure itself like a puzzle box, and Hernando would have to find order in an ever-shifting world.1
The huge retinue Hernando joined was presided over by a lord steward (mayordomo), who in turn delegated duties for the household finances to a lord chancellor (contador mayor de castilla) for major transactions, and a privy chancellor (contador mayor de la despensa e raciones), who dealt with the day-to-day expenses and arrangements. Beneath them a lord chamberlain (camarero mayor) took charge of the Infante’s immediate personal needs, in which task he was assisted by the Ten Choice Companions (five old and five young). In addition, there were other officers including secretaries, chamberlains, master of the horse, master of the hounds, master of the hunt, and lord privy seal who were not under the lord steward. At the very bottom of the hierarchy were the pages—the rank to which Hernando and Diego were assigned—who were members of the household but who did not enjoy the dignity of having a personal role about the prince’s body.
To make matters even more confusing, many of the duties belonging to these posts were actually performed by other people: the tasks assigned to the chancellor were usually handed on to his secretary, and while the Ten Choice Companions counted among their official duties waiting upon the prince while he dressed and ate, these tasks were in practice undertaken by a number of trenchermen and attendants. Hernando would eventually have understood that while the official duties of these posts were rather lowly—looking after the Infante’s clothes, his meals, his accounts, and even his toilette—the posts were greatly sought after and held by the most powerful nobles in the kingdoms of Ferdinand and Isabella. To be near the body of the heir apparent was not merely a ceremonial honor: it held the promise of influencing the future king of a united Spain in matters of policy and patronage. These grandees could not be expected to perform the actual physical acts of serving food and folding laundry, so those labors were delegated elsewhere. The power of the political symbolism nevertheless remained: the Infante was of such importance that even his menial chores were performed by great aristocrats, and when one day he assumed the throne, they would be bound to him as those who had been his household companions, men who had grown up at the same table. Even lowly pages were the sons of the most eminent noblemen of the kingdom. If for Hernando losing his mother and finding himself at the bottom of a hierarchy of strangers must have been painful and confusing, it nevertheless represented Columbus’s reception among the principal men of the realm. It also meant that Beatriz Enríquez’s child was publicly and royally recognized as a son of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
The social advantages of joining the prince’s household were probably of little comfort to the five-year-old boy who entered this forbidding and unfriendly place. As is clear from the writing of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (a fellow page whose later Book of the Royal Chamber of Prince Juan provides us with an intimate and detailed picture of the household), great importance was placed upon the lineage of those who belonged to Juan’s entourage. In his account Oviedo insists repeatedly that everyone near the prince was of “clean blood” (limpia sangre), by which he means there was no hint of Moorish or Jewish ancestry to be found in their genealogies. Even as Ferdinand and Isabella moved into the Alhambra, whose Moorish aesthetic of calligraphy and lemon trees and vaulted baths made one contemporary visitor call it a little peerless paradise, the idea that ancestral heresy remained in the blood was gaining ground. Turning from enemies without to enemies within, the belief became widespread that conversion to Christianity was not enough to cleanse those of Moorish or Jewish descent of the stain of their forefathers. Oviedo asserts with unmixed pride that no one who waited at the Infante’s table, in his pantry or his cellar, nor anyone from the doorman of the palace inward who exercised any office, was not of pure gentlemanly stock or at the very least an “Old Christian,” someone who could trace his lineage back through many generations of high standing. Hernando could not even establish his descent from his own parents with any legally valid evidence, let alone rest upon the venerable ancestry of a father who seems deliberately to have kept his origins vague. Hieronymus Munzer, a German who traveled in Spain in these years and left a detailed account of what he saw, records the widespread paranoia that all of the principal offices of the realm were held by Marranos—Jews whose conversion to Christianity was, he says, a devious pretense—who oppressed Spain’s Christians and taught children to curse them in private. It is hard to imagine Hernando not being included among those “two or three” outcasts at the court whom Oviedo mentions as appointed (as Columbus’s sons were) by the queen before the prince came of age, and who he says were treated as strangers and kept apart from the circle and the person of the prince. The same high genealogical standards were not required, it seems, of the Infante’s piebald dog, Bruto, which was an unusual mixture of whippet and mastiff, and which regularly delighted the prince by fetching specific garments and courtiers according to his master’s need.2
Hernando was not the only stranger introduced to the prince’s court by Columbus. Although many of the Taino people that Columbus had brought back with him from Hispaniola had, after evangelization and instruction, accompanied him on the return to the island to act as translators during further exploration, a few had been left behind to add luster to the royal court. The oddity of this situation, in which the Spanish court dress must only imperfectly have covered the red, black, and white tattoos customary to the Taino, would have been increased by their having taken the names of their Spanish godparents, so that shadowing the court were an Indio Ferdinand of Aragon and an Indio Juan of Castile. The Indio Juan remained in the household of the Infante Juan after Columbus left to return to the Taino homeland in Hispaniola, and though we know sadly little of his life during the two years this “Juan” survived the unfamiliar climate, the subsequent reports from Hispaniola take on a different tone when we imagine them heard by this unfortunate exile.
If Hernando and the Indio Juan were excluded from the inner circle of Juan’s court, there may have been little to regret. While Oviedo’s nostalgic account of life in the household paints it as a center of virtue in a Golden Age, the humanist Peter Martyr, who was one of the Infante’s tutors, leaves an altogether less flattering picture of the prince as an unprepossessing youth who had no wit and little intellectual curiosity, and who gave his time over almost entirely to hunting. The intensely studious, bookish, and solitary character that Hernando was to have in later life may have developed during years in which snobbery and boorishness excluded him from the main activities of the household; though he was an excellent horseman, it seems he looked upon the aristocratic pastimes of hawking and hunting with disdain. The only surviving portrait of Hernando, made late in his life, also suggests his appearance may not have helped him to fit in. His lower lip juts out, perhaps the result of an underbite, his ears are too prominent, his nose is strangely formed at the bridge, and his face seems to slant to one side. It is not clear at what age a child would notice his looks are unpleasing to others, though it could only be too soon. For one reason or another, Hernando likely had time during these years quietly to observe the workings of this complex household and to absorb some of the cultural riches that went ignored by the dullard prince.3
Though it may have seemed a tiresome chore to many, one of the special duties of the pages was distinctly suited to Hernando’s unique predilections: the keeping of the great books of the household, which ordered the myriad possessions of the prince into a series of lists. There were four of these great books, namely:
Manual or Diary
Book of Everything or The Book of Jewels
Great Book
Book of the Inventory
Juan’s personal tastes were every bit as voluptuous as one would expect from one of the great princes of Europe, as suggested by the shopping list Oviedo copied down from 13 March 1496, in which the chamberlain was asked to acquire
satin brocade of cloth of gold for a ropa bastarda
crimson silk for doublets
purple silk for doublets
black silk for doublets
crimson velvet for a canopy
black Genoese velvet for my private room
cochineal-dyed cloth for gifts to my grooms [moços despuela]
green woolen cloth for hunters’ hoods and tabards
Dutch linen for my private room
cloths to cover my tables and sideboards
crimson and tawny velvet to decorate my stable
If the pages were to compete with the dog Bruto for the Infante’s affection, they would have to be at least as good as the dog in finding these garments once they had been acquired and stored away. The Manual, which was completed by the page who held the keys to the Infante’s chamber, kept track of everything that came in and went out of the household, while The Book of Jewels was a list of the gold and silver vessels, tapestries, jewels, canopies, curtains, furs, and chapel plate belonging to the prince’s household. Moreover, it described each of these things using their various weights, dimensions, and the stories depicted on the treasures. In a household that would have had scores of tapestries and hundreds of items of treasure, an accurate record could only be kept by using the distinctive qualities of each piece, which made a thorough knowledge of generic scenes used by artisans essential. A page asked to find for the Infante’s bedroom a tapestry of nymphs bathing might think this a welcome task, but if he could not see the bow of Diana or the horns of Actaeon that made the scene a warning against the dangers of lust, then he was no better than a dog.
A print of Giovanni Battista Palumba’s, Diana Bathing with Her Attendants, c.1500; Hernando’s inventory number 2150.
The Great Book sought to avoid such confusions by using another inventory method, adopting the tools used by bankers and employing their accounting techniques not only to compile the household accounts but also to reconcile everything that was in the Manual and The Book of Jewels, as well as providing an alphabetical list of entries and a guide to the location of each object described. As with the increasingly complex and manifold financial transactions being undertaken by the great mercantile houses of Europe, comfort could be gained in reducing each entry to a docket number or giving it a place on an alphabetic list. The final book, the Book of the Inventory, also used an alphabetical list to register the voluminous incoming and outgoing correspondence of the Infante, and to provide a guide to the ledgers so that old letters could be revisited. From his earliest days, some of the most prized books in Hernando’s world were ones that tamed a wilderness of miscellaneity through the magic of lists, making a curtain and a cup part of the same order by reducing them to name, number, cost, and location.
Life at court not only introduced Hernando to a bewildering variety of people and things but also to a world of complex and often contradictory ideas. He would have attended lectures by the great scholars recruited to train the aristocracy at court, probably from an early age, like the little boy who, much younger than the rest, kneels at the feet of the great humanist Antonio de Nebrija in a contemporary manuscript illumination of Juan’s court. It may have helped that two opposing camps of ideas were embodied in the two tutors who were in charge of the education of the Infante and (more important, given his lack of interest) of the pages of the court. The first of these was the Dominican friar Diego de Deza, a theologian educated at Spain’s greatest seat of learning, the University of Salamanca, who had risen through the church hierarchy as bishop of Zamora and then of Salamanca itself, even if his duties at court gave him little time for church business. Deza seems to have been among Columbus’s earliest and most reliable supporters, and Hernando would quickly have learned to count him among the faction at the court who spoke well of his father and his projects. Yet Deza’s backing may have been slightly confusing to the young Hernando: the friar was, after all, a staunch Thomist, meaning that he dedicated his scholarly life to championing the work of Thomas Aquinas and his use of Aristotelian logic to understand and explain the mysteries of the Christian faith. An extraordinary addition to Deza’s teachings may have come in the person of Beatriz Galindo, a rare female scholar, whose prodigious talents had made her a celebrated Aristotelian at Salamanca, and who was also brought to court to teach, though likely only the princesses and their households. Deza and Galindo taught their charges to read nature firstly as the Book of God, in which the divine was revealed through the order installed at creation. As this scholastic kind of learning was focused on the cloister, the university, and the library, it would have had less obvious connection to the world of ships and islands inhabited by Hernando’s father.4
The other tutor, however, represented a wholly different attitude to learning: this was Peter Martyr, the letter-writing man of arms who was to become one of the first and most important historians of the New World. Peter Martyr was very much a humanist in the mold created during the Italian Renaissance of the previous hundred years: someone who valued beautiful speech and writing and had little time for the knotty problems of the Thomists, someone who believed in the worth of the active life rather than the contemplative one, and who moved easily between roles as author, tutor, diplomat, soldier, and citizen of the Republic of Letters that connected men of the same grain across Europe. His teaching, as suggested by one eyewitness account, consisted of having his pupils recite the poetry of Horace and Juvenal, absorbing by repetition the rhythms and the values of classical Rome. Peter Martyr counted among his chief correspondents the genius of the Roman intellectual scene, Giulio Pomponio Leto, a pioneering humanist whose devotion to the learning of pre-Christian Rome led him to affect classical dress and set up an academy among the ruins of the Quirinal Hill, from which he led his disciples on tours of the half-buried Roman monuments and even under them to the catacombs that had lain hidden for a thousand years. So great was Leto’s success in fostering this culture that his academy was disbanded in 1468 by Pope Paul II amid accusa
tions that would have made its guiding spirit, Socrates, proud: republican conspiracy, sexual immorality, anticlericalism, and even pagan irreligion. As one of Leto’s disciples, Peter Martyr provided Juan’s household with a direct link to the most daring currents of Italian humanism, from a Rome that would later play a central part in Hernando’s own life. Indeed, Hernando would have seen this neoclassicism springing up all around him, as at Burgos, where inside the miraculous Gothic cathedral the Roman-trained French artist Felipe Bigarny was carving classical buildings into the transept, and across the street where the printer Fadrique de Basilea was switching from Gothic fonts in his books to Roman ones, freshly imported from Italy where humanists copied their letterforms from the inscriptions on ancient ruins. Peter Martyr in turn directed many of his most important letters on the New World discoveries to Leto, creating a strange symbiosis between the new learning and how the expanding world was written about and conceived. In the persons of his two tutors Hernando would have confronted the stark questions that were driving intellectual debates: whether learning should be directed toward a place in heaven or a triumph on earth, toward the eternal or the present, the metaphysical or the physical, and whether its materials should be Christian only or should take in the thought of other, pagan worlds.5
Some maternal comfort in this overwhelmingly male world might have been provided by the Infante’s nursemaid Juana de Torres y Ávila, who as well as being one of the only female members of the household was another staunch supporter of the Columbus faction. She was over the years to be the recipient of a number of Columbus’s letters to the court, and many of those not directly addressed to her were nonetheless carried back to Spain by her brother, Antonio de Torres, who was to serve as a trusted go-between during Columbus’s long absences from the court. The first of his letters from the New World reached court as early as April 1494, only a few months after Hernando had arrived there—though the court had already moved on from Valladolid to Medina del Campo. Having crossed the ocean with seventeen ships this time, and having quickly established reliable shipping routes between the Iberian Peninsula and the Caribbean archipelago, the Admiral could now maintain a reasonably frequent correspondence with the court. While this meant Columbus could continue to provide encouraging reports to the Catholic Monarchs on their new territories and could in turn ask for supplies that could not be sourced on that side of the ocean, the new communication links were fraught with danger for the Admiral. Unlike on the First Voyage, when, despite the efforts of his rival Pinzón, Columbus had been able to disappear, reappear, and provide the only report of what had happened in between, the returning fleet of twelve ships in April 1494 brought a number of letters and eyewitnesses to the New World. As would quickly become clear, it was no longer possible for Columbus to control the narrative of events beyond the sea.6
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 4
