Columbus had been prevented from developing his theories further at that point by illness and by the immediate urgency of dealing with the open rebellion when he arrived at Santo Domingo. In December 1499, however, he once again found himself stranded aboard a small caravel when, touring Hispaniola during a lull in the rebellion, he was attacked by a band of Tainos and forced to put out to sea without supplies or an adequate crew. On the day after Christmas, weltering in the ocean and staring into an abysm of despair, Columbus experienced the first of a series of visions during which God chastised him for his doubt and told him He would stand by him. On his return to Santo Domingo in February—after forty-odd days afloat—Columbus wrote again to the court, recounting this vision and urging Ferdinand and Isabella to take the discovery of the Indies as a divine signal that they should embark on a last, fatal push to bring about the triumph of the Christian Church, one that must begin with the conquest of Jerusalem.5
In a sense Columbus was harping on an old theme: he had long been waging a campaign for the Monarchs to think of his western discoveries as part of a wider crusade that would be followed by the subjection of the Indies and the Holy Land. As part of this he stood in fierce opposition to the mainstream reading of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the 1494 power-sharing agreement with Portugal, which had been brokered by the pope and which divided the world into Portuguese and Spanish zones of activity in an attempt to keep the two nations from going to war over their new discoveries. The treaty granted Spain the right to occupy everything to the west of the Tordesillas meridian—an imaginary line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands—and Portugal everything to the east of this line. This secured for Portugal its possessions in the Atlantic (the Azores and Madeira), as well as exclusive rights to deal with the west-African territories (Ife, Benin, and the Kingdom of Kongo), and gave Spain a free hand in the New World. In one of the greatest oversights in history, however, the treaty failed, in setting down where the zones of influence began, to make any mention of where they would end. The Portuguese could be forgiven for thinking their zone took in one hemisphere of the globe, ending halfway around the world going east—though it wasn’t remotely clear at the time where exactly “halfway” would be. Columbus, on the other hand, was almost alone in maintaining that the Portuguese zone only covered the area from the Tordesillas Line as far east as they had sailed by the treaty date of 1494—the Cape of Good Hope—making the Spanish portion stretch west right from the mid-Atlantic all the way around the world and back to the Cape. Crucially for Columbus, this kept the symbolic centers of late-medieval thought—Cathay, India, Persia, Ethiopia, and (most important) Jerusalem—firmly within the part projected for Spanish expansion.6
Columbus’s letter of February 1500, however, began to make a theological argument that the discovery of the New World was in itself evidence of God’s apportioning Jerusalem to Spain, and a prompt to begin preparations to take back the Holy Land. On his return to Spain in November of the same year, and now free of the judgments of Bobadilla against him, Columbus had time to pursue these thoughts and was now in a position to begin to put them into some kind of systematic order, a task that may have first brought Hernando’s unusual and extraordinary talents into the open. Columbus also recruited the help of a Carthusian monk, Gaspar Gorricio, and periodically stayed at Gorricio’s charterhouse, the Cartuja de las Cuevas, across the Guadalquivir from the part of Seville where Hernando would eventually build his library. This place would become increasingly central to Columbus’s world and to Hernando’s, offering then as now a sanctuary removed from the bustling town, with cool and solid brick buildings lit by the sun from the cloister, expanding effortlessly through the spindly Mudéjar pillars of the colonnade. Here, beneath the refectory mural of St. Christopher carrying the infant Christ across the water, Columbus seemed to find a perfect setting for his increasingly monastic temperament, and it was here he would store his most precious papers when he went once more over the ocean.7
Though Columbus had always had a mind for a good quotation and was likely in contact with Gorricio and collecting authorities supporting his thinking in some fashion before his return from the Third Voyage, his activities now were on a wholly different scale. Among the passages copied into the eighty-four leaves of The Book of Prophecies as it survives today are excerpts from
Angelus de Clavasio, Guillielmus Durandus, St. Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Nicholas of Lyra, Daniel, King Alphonso the Wise, Joachim of Fiore, the Psalms, Rabbi Samuel of Fez, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Alfonso Fernández de Madrigal (El Tostado), Pierre d’Ailly, Albumazar, Ezekiel, Seneca, the Gospels, St. John Chrysostom, Joachim of Calabria, the Book of Kings
These passages from the Bible, the early Church Fathers, medieval mystics and scholastics, as well as more recent figures, are stitched together by a series of short original passages, including a letter from Columbus to the Reyes Católicos (for whom it was evidently designed), a prayer by Gorricio, and verses in Castilian in the hand of Hernando.
Yet as a glance at the list above will quickly suggest, the passages from authorities are not arranged in order of importance, alphabetical order, date, geographical or religious origin, or any other obvious quality. The order also is not determined by how it was compiled, as it seems the book may have passed back and forth between Gorricio and Columbus, with Hernando making his additions in blank spaces left by the other two. After an introduction they are, however, arranged within three sections—de Praeterito (On the past), de Praesenti et Futuro (On the present and to come), and de Futuro. In novissimis (On the future and the end of time)—though even within this framework the thicket of quotations makes little sense. Properly understood, the passages form an argument, a revelation of the nature of things through an inspired act of ordering, as Hernando says in his first set of verses for the book:
Haré semeiante a este me siervo
al sabio varón, sagaz e prudente,
que funda e hordena por modo exelente
I will make my servant like him,
the knowledgeable man, wise and astute,
who founds and orders in excellent fashion.
Creation, as Hernando’s epigram suggests, requires not only strong foundations but the act of arrangement thereafter. The wise man, the Elect, is he who knows how to put things in their proper sequence.8
To make sense of The Book of Prophecies it is important to start with its first principles. To begin with, the book follows St. Augustine in asserting that God’s preordained plan for mankind is not simply a general plan, determining the shape of the great events of Christian history from the Fall of Man to the Last Judgment, but instead often affects what happens on a more minute level, right down to the lives of individual people. Importantly, these people need not be great kings or learned sages, as God’s power can by itself make great the lowly. As a lovely passage from Gorricio’s prayer has it, the God of The Book of Prophecies is a
God who instructs the heart of man without effort or words, and who makes wise the tongues of stammerers, and who is near us in times of need.
Augustine is again brought in to prove that those chosen for God’s special favor are more likely to be lowly than powerful: they are distinguished “through unusual grace and intelligence rather than nobility of birth,” making a strength of the ways in which Columbus and his son were looked down upon by their enemies at court. This special providence does not just take the form of inspiring eloquent speech but can also help the chosen individual in any field of knowledge—including (again following Augustine) a suggestion that God can even instruct His chosen messengers in such technical matters as astronomy. In a dig aimed at those who rejected Columbus’s pre-1492 arguments about the extent of the globe’s circumference, the book suggests the Admiral’s success was in itself evidence that God was on his side, and those opposed to him were, like the Pharisees, willfully rejecting God’s call in favor of clever arguments and intellectual pride:
If indeed they knew so much that they
could measure the world, why couldn’t they find its Lord more easily?
This is not to say The Book of Prophecies portrays Columbus as a kind of holy fool who knows nothing and simply channels God’s grace. The prefatory letter to the Monarchs goes to great lengths to point out the Admiral’s nautical experience, a passion that trains the sailor to find out the secrets of the world, which Columbus has done through reading widely in cosmography, history, literature, and philosophy. Rather, the argument is that even with all this knowledge and experience man can do nothing without lunbre, “light,” which Columbus receives in the form of flashes of inspiration. That he has been right about so many things, the argument goes, proves these flashes are not madness but come from God, and that the Admiral has been chosen for a special role in history.9
The second major principle of The Book of Prophecies was that the words of the Bible should not always be taken literally. This is not to say, as some modern apologists for the Scriptures might, that the Bible is a compendium of traditions and that we should focus (selectively) on its ethical teachings rather than getting stuck on its claims as a record of history. Indeed, it was central to Columbus’s claims that many of the more fantastic stories of the Bible, from the Garden of Eden to the Flood, be records of literal truth. It was rather that the book used the common belief that some pronouncements in the Bible, especially the cryptic sayings of the prophets and the Books of Wisdom, could be seen as darkly worded prophecies—even if these predictions were often not revealed as such until after the events in question had come to pass. The example chosen by Columbus and his helpers to illustrate this comes from the Book of Daniel, where the prophet says
I shall be a father to him and he will be a son to me.
While in Old Testament history this was taken as referring to King Solomon, the book points out he is later revealed to be speaking more directly about Christ, “qui est filius Dei per naturam,” in whom the prophecy is more perfectly fulfilled because he is God’s natural son. Hernando, the natural son of the Admiral, must have thrilled at this choice of example, which served as a reminder that he was just as much his father’s son as Jesus, born to Joseph’s wife, Mary, was the son of God.10
The argument about how to interpret the Bible was central to The Book of Prophecies because the great majority of the Scriptures deal not generally with the fate of the world, nor with the role of Christians and Christianity in God’s plan, but rather with the special relationship between God and His people of Israel—the Jews. The Christian take on this, once again founded on Augustine but developed into one of the centerpieces of medieval Christian thought, was that the Jews had because of their various crimes in history forfeited their place as God’s Chosen People. As a result, when the prophecies of the Old Testament spoke of the future of “Israel,” this was to be taken not as speaking of a physical Israel (i.e., the Jewish people), but of a spiritual Israel, which was none other than the Christian Church itself. Among other evidence for this the book produces a copy of a fourteenth-century letter, popular in Columbus’s day (though almost certainly a forgery), from Rabbi Samuel of Fez in North Africa, demonstrating from the Old Testament that the favor of the Lord had passed from the Jews to the Christians, and pointing to the spread of Christianity as evidence of this. Here, then, you had it from the horse’s mouth.11
The third and final pillar of the book’s logic concerns the specific position of Columbus and his contemporaries within the chronological framework of Christian history. In other words, to know where you figure in God’s plan for mankind, you need to know how long history itself will last and how much time has elapsed since Creation. This had been a central question in Christian thought since the time of the Apostles, when the initial belief that Christ’s Second Coming would happen during their lifetime was disappointed and had to be successively replaced by theories positing a longer gap between First and Second Comings, albeit usually ones that kept the Second Coming fairly imminent. The Book of Prophecies uses Augustine’s prediction that the world would last seven thousand years—one millennium for each day of Creation—along with the calculation of the medieval King Alfonso the Wise that the world was created 5,343 years before the birth of Christ, to predict, as Columbus was writing in 1501, that there were 155 years left until the End of History. This may seem like something of an anticlimax, given that Columbus and his contemporaries could live comfortably in the knowledge they would never see that day, but the number of things that had to happen before the End meant dramatic events would need to start unfolding much sooner.12
With these foundations laid down, The Book of Prophecies begins to assemble selections from biblical, classical, and medieval authorities to locate Columbus’s New World discoveries within God’s plan for the world. The argument was that, like Christ’s incarnation, the voyages of discovery were predicted long before they happened, though often in ways that didn’t make sense until after the fact. And, as with the Christian use of the Jewish Scriptures, these predictions didn’t have to be made by Christian prophets, even though they concerned key events in Christian history. One of the most striking passages in The Book of Prophecies—and the one that inspired Columbus to be buried with chains—comes not from a religious text but from a piece of theater, the Medea by the Roman writer Seneca, in which a chorus toward the end of the play speaks the following lines:
During the last years of the world,
the time will come in which Oceanus
will loosen the chains, and a huge landmass
will appear; Tiphys will discover new worlds,
and Thule will no longer be the most remote land.
The playwright Seneca was not a religious authority or even a Christian, but who could deny that these lines seemed to predict Columbus’s discoveries, and isn’t the ability to prophesy in itself a mark of God’s favor?13
The discovery of the New World was not, however, simply an isolated event that had been predicted and had come to pass. It was rather the first step toward a central condition in God’s plan for the End of Time, namely, the universal evangelization and conversion of the world. Many Christian thinkers believed this had already been fulfilled when, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman emperors Titus and Vespasian, the word of God was spread by apostles throughout the world. Others, however, including the medieval theologian El Tostado and biblical scholar Nicholas of Lyra, believed there would be a second spreading of the Gospel closer to the End of Time, and this view was obviously supported by the discovery of the New World, which showed without a doubt that the Christian message hadn’t been spread to every corner of the globe.
Crucially for Columbus, the Bible could be read as predicting not just a second wave spreading the Gospel around the world, but one that took the precise form of his discoveries. For this he was able to take advantage of a quirk of translation that stretched back over a thousand years. A vast number of passages, largely in the Book of Isaiah but also elsewhere, speak poetically about the universal spread of God’s name as reaching even , a Hebrew term with several meanings. While the general sense is “places where one can take shelter,” and the metaphorical sense in Isaiah is likely closer to “coastlands” or “the farthest-outlying places,” St. Jerome in translating the Bible into Latin had chosen to render as insula, “island.” This meant the Bible as used by Columbus and his contemporaries was riddled with passages insisting that one sign of the universal conversion that would bring on the End Times was the spread of the word of God to certain unidentified islands—an event Columbus had unquestionably brought about. So important were these references to “islands” that Gorricio had set about compiling a concordance listing all relevant mentions of the word in the Bible.14
The circumstances of Columbus’s life and discovery could be linked to prophecies in the Bible in much greater detail than this. The Book of Prophecies noted the verses from Isaiah to the effect that
my just one is near; my savior has gone out. My arms will judge
the peoples; the islands will await me and will welcome my force.
Of these verses fulfillment could be found, for those determined to do so, in the (supposed) welcome given by the Taino to the Christians and their message. Isaiah also said of this “just one” that he would be lowly like Columbus: “So will his appearance be inglorious among men and his form among the sons of man.” A passage from Zephaniah confirmed the people the Christians would meet in this Last Evangelization would be innocent, just as Columbus felt many of the New World tribes to be: “They will not do evil nor speak lies nor will a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths, for they will be fed and will lie nearby and will not have cause to fear.”15
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 7
