But Hebrew was not the only language that held out the promise of unlocking the secrets of the universe if properly mastered. Another book that appeared in 1511, as Hernando followed the court around Spain, was the first modern European account of ancient Egyptian civilization, written by none other than Peter Martyr (Hernando’s old tutor) and printed in the same volume as Peter Martyr’s monumental history of Columbus’s discoveries, the De orbe novo decades (Ten books on the new world). During an embassy to the court of the Mameluke Sultan in Cairo almost a decade before, Peter Martyr had visited the Sphinx and Pyramids at Giza on a side trip, even sending back the first reports of entering the chambers of the Great Pyramid. (Another European traveler had supposedly entered a few years previously, but was never heard from again.) Peter Martyr’s was the first eyewitness report in modern Europe of Egyptian antiquities, but it was part of a wider and growing interest, which included the extraordinary volume of Hieroglyphica published by Europe’s greatest printer, Aldus Manutius, in 1505, and which Hernando may already have owned in 1511. This volume, supposedly written originally by the last surviving member of the ancient Egyptian priesthood, Horapollo, and discovered on the Greek island of Andros in the early fifteenth century, offered a model of language in which words were linked unbreakably to the things they described and so were not subject to the worrying weaknesses of verbal languages, with their vagueness and ambiguity.15
Here Hernando would have read, if his Greek was strong enough, that only Egypt is in the navel of the world. Yet Egypt was not the only place where early modern Spaniards encountered hieroglyphs: the Taino also used a system of sacred pictograms in their petroglyph cave art, and Aztec manuscripts using pictographs were soon on their way back to Spain from Mexico. Recently discovered caves on the Isla Mona between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola—an island where Columbus spent some time in 1495, just before his log is broken off in one of his fits of blindness and delirium—show early Spanish graffiti alongside the sacred Taino markings, carved into the powder-soft limestone with the tips of fingers yet kept pristine in the depth of the caves. One inscription found by archaeologists—plura fecit deus (God has made many things)—provides eloquent witness to European attempts to make new experiences fit within existing frameworks. And around this time in the Jamaican settlement of Sevilla la Nueva, founded by Diego a stone’s throw from where Hernando had lived on the shipwrecked fortress, stone pillars were being carved for a church, paid for by Peter Martyr, in which the Renaissance motifs mingled with Taino iconography. While it suited European thinkers to erect a clean, lineal descent of their thought from the ancient Egyptians through the classical Greeks, clearly other sources existed for thinking about the language of pictures, which with Llull’s infinite-translation devices played into the same idea: he who spoke the universal language held the keys to universal power. There is more than a little tragic irony in the fact that a pictographic language, close in many ways to the Taino and Aztec glyphs, was shortly to be developed in Seville by the Franciscan friar Jacobo de Testera, with the specific goal of getting the New World peoples to abandon their own sacred culture for that of Christian Europe.16
While Hernando investigated universal languages as a mode of conquest, however, the domination and exploitation of the world proceeded elsewhere through more mundane and brutal means. A stark reminder of this comes with Hernando’s permission to travel to the New World in 1508 and his license to transport two stallions, two mares, and a black slave. His father had already desecrated his dream of an Edenic New World by setting in motion a trade in Arawak Indian slaves, though the unfitness of the Arawak for physical labor in the New World’s mines soon prompted another trade through Mediterranean ports, in the black slaves that had been transported from northern and western Africa, a practice that had continued uninterrupted since antiquity. To add to the execrable practices they inherited, the governors of the New World had instituted the system of the encomienda, whereby many settlers were given charge of a certain number of indigenous inhabitants. While lip service was paid to the idea that these subjects should be treated humanely, the arrival of the Dominican order on Hispaniola in 1509 had, by 1511, led to a series of shocking and increasingly systematic expositions of the bestial cruelties inflicted by Spanish settlers upon the peoples of the Caribbean. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had been with Hernando on the crossing to Santo Domingo in 1509 and who was later to become the greatest historian of the New World and champion of the rights of native peoples, was converted to this lifelong vocation during an excoriating sermon given by the Dominican Antonio Montesinos as the colonial elite of Santo Domingo prepared to celebrate Christmas in 1511. Hernando’s position on the rights of non-European peoples is unclear: he sold his 1508 license for a black slave to a bookseller in Seville shortly after acquiring it—though it is not known whether this was driven by his distaste for slavery or his passion for books, or both—and during his life he repeatedly distanced himself from the ownership of other people. Las Casas, who was unflinching in turning a mirror to the insane cruelties of the settlers, showed a lifelong affection for Diego and Hernando, which may suggest that at the least they were relatively unbarbaric. Hernando was certainly to insist, as he began to shape his father’s image, that the explorer held the rights of the people he had encountered dearly; and though clearly a lie, it suggests Hernando freely recognized it as desirable that his father should have thought this way. But Hernando certainly never launched himself into the cause of native rights in the way Las Casas did, and it cannot be forgotten that, at best, Hernando’s astonishing ambitions to synthesize the knowledge of the world involved turning a blind eye to the atrocities on which the empire he served was built.17
Hernando’s plans for a circumnavigation that would reduce the world to Spanish rule in a single, majestic swoop would have to wait. Ferdinand responded to his proposals vaguely, asking him to wait for further instructions in Seville or Córdoba. The need for fresh Columbus victories to renew the family fame may have seemed less urgent, given the resolution on 5 May 1511 of the suit that had been lodged regarding the rights of the Columbuses over the New World. The verdict recognized the right of Columbus’s heirs to hold the viceroyalty of the Indies, but only over the areas Columbus had actually discovered, rather than the western hemisphere as a whole. They were also given the right to 1.5 million maravedís in perpetual income—though this was only as much as Hernando individually had been left in his father’s will. Hernando instead was given the right to an encomienda of three hundred Indians, which he seems promptly to have sold on to someone else. But the storm that had been gathering over the Columbus fortunes had suddenly become even more onerous: the case that Isabel de Gamboa had been pursuing against Diego, asserting the legitimacy of their son—a bastard who might someday be viceroy of the Indies—had now passed from the diocesan court at Burgos to the highest court in all of Christendom: the Vatican itself. The fate of Columbus’s legacy would be decided in the Eternal City, at the very center of the world, and the successful navigation of this affair was put into Hernando’s hands. He prepared to go to Rome.18
If the task was of the utmost moment and could only have been daunting to the twenty-three-year-old who had never before been to Italy (much less trained as a canon lawyer), it must also have been thrilling beyond belief. Europe’s print market was surprisingly fluid, and Spain’s bookstalls were reasonably well stocked—allowing Hernando to buy as he traveled through Spain in 1511 books from Paris, Venice, and Cologne, as well as from all over the peninsula, including a guidebook of sorts for his trip, the Roma triumphans by the leading antiquarian Flavio Biondo (printed at Brescia). But visiting Italy itself was a different matter altogether: it was the beating heart of print, humanism, and Renaissance art, not to mention the center of Christendom and of the Roman civilization by which the age was so captivated, as well as being stuffed full of hieroglyph-inscribed Egyptian antiquities brought back by the Romans. If the world could be captured in a single voyage o
r a single language, it could also be captured in a single city, and that city was Rome: as Flavio Biondo put it, Urbs terrarum orbis—the World City.19
VII
The World City
Little could prepare travelers to Renaissance Rome for the panoply of marvels they would encounter. Approaching the city from the north, as Hernando likely did with other arrivals from the port of Cittavecchia, they would pass through the old city walls using the Porta del Popolo, constructed in 1475 over the remains of an old Roman gate. The sight that greeted them, as they looked south and east across the city, was unexpected to those who still imagined Rome as the bustling imperial metropolis of its classical peak: vast stretches of abandoned scrubland inside the Aurelian walls, the disabitato, given over to grazing animals and only broken by the crisscross of dusty cart tracks. The walls, which had been built to surround Rome when it was a place of a million citizens, now hung loosely around a city of fifty thousand. The Roman Forum and the Tarpeian Rock on the Capitoline Hill were popularly known as Campo Vaccino and Monte Caprino—the Field of Cows and the Mount of Goats. Though Rome was still the center of the early-modern imagination, the 150 years during which it had been vacated by the papacy and given over to local factions, ending in the mid-fifteenth century, had reduced it to a bedraggled state from which it was only just beginning to recover. The surrounding coastlands were still partly lawless and often visited by parties of Turkish and North African pirates, who had in 1511 (the year before Hernando’s arrival) ransacked the papal hunting lodge at La Magliana. The Spanish historian Argote de Molina, writing at the end of the century, even suggests Hernando was briefly captured by Turkish pirates as he made his way to Rome. Whether or not this unsubstantiated story can be believed, it was clearly a common enough experience to make the journey a tense one.1
The Roman population of the day huddled densely together inside the bend in the Tiber, across the river from the Vatican edifices of St. Peter’s and the Castel Sant’Angelo. As he passed through these streets on the way to his lodging in Trastevere—a neighborhood on the same side as the Vatican but somewhat downstream—Hernando would have seen the crowds of vendors vying for the custom of pilgrims, who came in the tens of thousands annually and tripled the size of the city in Jubilee years. If pilgrims could not afford to stay in one of the 1,022 hostelries recorded in the city at the time, having perhaps spent too much money on the souvenir suadaria (veronicas) made from mutilated ancient manuscripts, they always had recourse to the paliarii, who sold straw beds that could be slept on under the porticoes of St. Peter’s. The Vatican, however, was far from the only attraction on offer: travelers purchasing (as Hernando did for a small copper quatrin on arrival) the classic guide to Rome, the Mirabilia urbis Roma, would find a bewildering mixture of classical and Christian relics housed in churches around the city. There was Aaron’s rod, the tablets of the law given to Moses, a gigantic bronze Roman head and a bronze she-wolf on the Capitoline Hill, with recently added twins suckling from her teats; the entire house in which Mary was conceived and nurtured, and a phial of her milk (“of wonderful whiteness,” according to Biondo); the manger in which Christ once lay, the table at which he ate the Last Supper, the gate he had passed through into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the stairway to Pilate’s room of judgment; the bocca della verità, a statue that could reveal if a wife was unfaithful; the wooden sign that hung above Christ, “King of the Jews,” the rope Judas had used to hang himself, the chains that had bound Saint Peter and the heads of Saints Peter and Paul. More recent arrivals included the Vera Effigies, an image of Christ that had miraculously appeared in an emerald cameo and had been sent to Rome in 1492 by Sultan Bajazeth II of Constantinople, accompanied by the Holy Lance of Longinus, which had pierced Christ’s body on the cross.2
The Eternal City, Rome, much as Hernando would have seen it on his arrival in 1512. This illustration by Pleydenwurff and Wolgemut for the grand Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) was number 433 in Hernando’s image collection.
More recent guides to the city purported to sweep away the fables and falsehoods of the medieval Mirabilia by instituting must-see lists of approved monuments, such as Francisco Albertini’s Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris urbis Romae (Hernando also bought this on arrival, for the much-higher price of thirty quatrines), which detailed recent archaeological finds and modern wonders including the Sistine Chapel. Albertini’s other guide, the Septem mirabilia, proposed an itinerary of seven ancient and seven Christian sites:
The Aqueduct of Claudius
The Baths of Diocletian
The Forum of Nerva
The Pantheon
The Colosseum
Hadrian’s Tomb
Lateran Complex
St. Peter’s
S. Maria Maggiore
S. Maria in Aracoeli
Palazzo di San Marco
Church of the SS. Apostoli
Palace of the SS. Apostoli
S. Maria ad Martyres
Such attempts to separate out the city’s classical and Christian heritage were wholly artificial: the Lateran site was both Roman and Christian, the Pantheon was the same place as the church of S. Maria ad Martyres, and even the Colosseum hosted a sacra rappresentazione (a passion play) every year on Good Friday, the script for which was among Hernando’s first purchases on his arrival in Rome. Further complicating matters, many of the classical monuments were, in a sense, “newer,” having only recently been uncovered (such as the underground Domus Aurea, found in 1480, or the statue of Laocoön, dug up in 1506) and serving as the inspiration for the most fashionable artists of the day.3
The attempt to transform Rome’s chaotic historical medley into a stately order took place in the streets as well as in the guidebooks. As Hernando progressed toward Trastevere, he might have taken the via Giulia, a broad thoroughfare lined with cardinals’ palaces leading to the proposed site of the Ponte Giulio, which the current pope, Julius II, wanted as a third place to cross the river from the city to the Vatican. In an attempt to link Rome’s imperial past to the Church’s destiny at the head of a universal empire of the spirit, the papacy facilitated the clearing of humbler dwellings and the construction of imposing neoclassical residences by the cardinals, the majority of whom were scions of the wealthiest and most powerful Italian families. The architectural challenge thrown down by the cardinals was taken up by others, such as the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, who spent part of the riches he accrued from his monopoly on alum in the Lazio region on building a colossal villa in Trastevere, which Hernando would have passed each time he walked upriver to the Vatican. A Frenchman visiting the city in 1518, after marveling at Chigi’s forty-two-horse stable, remarked that the merchant’s riches were truly otherworldly. Chigi was fond, in the manner of the dissolute Roman society host Trimalchio from the recently rediscovered Latin novel the Satyricon, of turning his banquets into performances. Guests were reputedly free to take the silverware home with them, and after one particularly lavish meal he had the costly table settings taken out in full view of the guests and thrown into the Tiber, only later to reveal that the dishes had been caught in underwater nets. The frescoes of the palace, of Ovidian scenes by Raphael and Peruzzi and Sebastiano del Piombo, were soon on the itinerary of the city’s main attractions.4
Andrea Palladio’s sketch of the Tempietto, a masterwork of neoclassical perfection designed by the great architect Bramante, which stands in the same monastery where Hernando stayed during his years in Rome.
Hernando seems to have stayed, during his many years in Rome, with the Amadists (a branch of reformed Franciscans) at San Pietro in Montorio, a place of special importance to Ferdinand and Isabella, who had sought to make it a symbol of Spanish power in the Eternal City. At the top of a steep slope leading up from Trastevere, Hernando’s base would have given him a commanding view of the city, with the immense new St. Peter’s rising under the direction of the architect Bramante to his left and north, and the ancient and modern city stretching ea
st in front of him. San Pietro offered a vantage point and seclusion from the bustle, but also allowed Hernando to live daily in the presence of one of Renaissance Rome’s minor miracles, in the form of Bramante’s recently completed Tempietto, commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1502 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their annus mirabilis, when they conquered Granada and their Admiral discovered the New World. The diminutive perfection of this chapel, a marble cylinder surrounded by a loggia and topped by a cupola of exquisite sky blue, provided Hernando with a pattern of the forms, the simplicity, and the proportionality that was central to the revival of classical architecture. The Tempietto was also, fittingly, related to another of Hernando’s obsessions: the ambition of the Spanish crown for a universal empire centered on Jerusalem, whose reconquest was cryptically figured in many of the chapel’s features.5
After he had descended from San Pietro in Montorio, Hernando’s official business in Rome would require him to turn left at the Tiber, walking past Chigi’s villa with its orangery and apple orchard, to the Apostolic Palace. As well as being the papal residence, the Palace was also the seat of the Sacra Romana Rota, the highest tribunal in all of Western Christendom, which would now sit in judgment over the matter of Diego’s affair with Isabel de Gamboa. Characteristically, Hernando had acquired and made assiduous notes on the two principal guides to the functioning of these courts, the Stilus Romanae Curiae and the Termini Causa in Curia, but even these could not have prepared him for the byzantine complexities of the Rota. The court met on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but only during the terms of the legal year, with breaks over Christmas, Easter, and summer, and there was moreover a litany of church feasts during which the court was also not in session. On days when it sat, the court would hear arguments from advocates but also admit evidence from proctors, highly specialized functionaries whose job it was to make sure their clients knew how to abide by the conventions of the court. Without a proctor, Hernando may have missed the fact that business could also take place on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, but only with the specific notary who was overseeing the case, and often at the notary’s own house. In an extraordinary stroke of luck, the notary’s documents from Hernando’s case survive—as less than a tenth of records from the time do—in a ledger a foot thick written in almost illegible writing and buried deep in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the private Vatican archive. Those with the stomach—and a knowledge of Latin, canon law, Vatican legal abbreviations, and Italian secretary hand—can follow the sclerotic and arcane grinding of the case through over two hundred pages of court records.6
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 14
