His time in Rome, however, seemed to plant in Hernando an awareness of a form of power different from that to which father and brother laid claim, one to which his peculiar talents might give him access and which might allow him to reestablish the family’s deteriorating fame. This power consisted not in asserting dominion over things—land, people, precious objects—but rather in making those things disappear, abstracting from them information like a rare essence, and one that could then be tabulated, categorized, manipulated. Though Hernando’s early exercises in this field—his print catalogue, the indexes he created for books—were limited and flawed, they were part of a dawning realization that reducing the world he saw around him to a set of figures and measurements gave him power over them that was more than human. Like Pacioli’s theory of proportions, which promised to unite a world of disparate things (polyhedrons, faces, columns) by uncovering their shared geometric patterns, Hernando’s tables gave him an artificial memory that could navigate enormous collections of words, ideas, or objects. What else in the world could be mastered by this strange alchemy?
Not for the first time in Hernando’s life, a series of events followed that changed his prospects entirely. In January of 1516, when he was in Florence with the papal court for their rendezvous with Francis, Ferdinand of Aragon died after more than forty years at the center of European politics, history, and culture. Though his daughter, Juana, “La Loca,” was still alive, she was relegated to the status of co-monarch while in practice the crown of Castile as well as that of Aragon now passed to her son with Philip of Burgundy—raised till then by Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands—who was crowned as Charles I on 14 March. Not only were the crowns of Aragon and Castile now united for the first time in the same person, but Charles brought with him immense and wealthy possessions in northern Europe and was also the grandson and heir apparent of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Yet for Hernando and everyone else in Spain, Charles was something of an unknown quantity: it was to be eighteen months before he arrived in the south from his Burgundian homelands, and when he did, he was found to be a quiet youth, entirely controlled by Flemish counselors, most notably the Lord of Chièvres, Guillaume du Croÿ. If history was later to attribute an urbane cosmopolitanism to Charles—as the man who spoke Spanish to God, Italian to his mistress, French to men, and German to his horse—there was little evidence of this in the awkward adolescent who first appeared in Spain in 1517. Troublingly for Hernando, Charles was far removed from the shared histories that had made Isabella and Ferdinand at least somewhat loyal to Columbus and his sons, and the Flemish courtiers with whom he surrounded himself were detached from the Spanish circles of influence Hernando was used to navigating. Soon after acceding to the crown Charles had ordered an immediate review of the Columbus claims to the New World possessions, though mercifully he seems to have been distracted from it soon afterward.
Ferdinand’s death closely coincided with that of Isabel de Gamboa, and without her driving the court case in the Sacra Rota, it also drew to a close during 1516. Hernando was free to return to Spain, accompanied by the thousands of books and prints he had acquired during his time in Rome, and armed with a series of ideas that would transform his curious obsession with words, images, and lists into tools at the center of remaking the world. A third death brought Hernando’s time in the World City to a fitting close—the pope’s elephant, Hanno, died on 8 June 1516. A poetic Last Will and Testament of Hanno earned the title “Master of Pasquino” for a young Pietro Aretino, then secretary to Agostino Chigi, but soon to be the darling of literary Italy. Hernando bid farewell, for now, to the cultured frivolities of Rome.8
IX
An Empire of Dictionaries
Twenty-five years to the day after his father set out from Palos on his first voyage across the Atlantic, Hernando sat down in Alcalá de Henares, to the east of Madrid, and composed the following paragraph.
Monday, the 3rd of August 1517
here begins the itinerary
Zaragoza, a large city in Aragon, is five leagues from Perdiguera, which is reached by crossing a river by boat a mile outside of Zaragoza—the Ebro—and you pass another river beforehand near Zaragoza by bridge. Perdiguera is a medium-size town of around 100 inhabitants, and from there it is four leagues to La Naraja. . . .
This note, which records the size of towns along the route from Zaragoza to where Hernando was sitting in Alcalá de Henares, as well as the distances between them, is the first of at least 6,635 entries that were compiled in this cosmographical register over the coming years, which he called his Description of Spain. The surviving notes, covering over seven hundred densely written folio sheets on both sides and with almost no space left at the margins, bustle with figures relating to population and distance, bewildering any attempt to read this “field journal” like standard prose. Yet at a different level of focus, from this mayhem of information emerges a picture of Spain in extraordinary detail and with minute precision. Unlike most attempts to represent places, which (then as now) start from a broad outline and then fill it in with significant features, Hernando’s cosmographical notes work toward the final impression by bringing together an infinitude of seemingly insignificant local observations—as if one were to describe a beach one grain of sand at a time.1
Hernando’s aim in gathering this hoard of information went further than simply creating a repository covering Spain in its entirety. Of the many designs he had for these cosmographical notes, among the most ambitious was the creation of maps of superlative detail, and capable of infinite reproduction without any loss of precision. This was to be achieved by laying the map out on a grid, beginning with lines of latitude and longitude and then further dividing those squares with lines at every mile of each degree. The concept was so new, however, that Hernando had no name for this kind of grid, and instead resorted to a comparison to get his idea across: the lines should cross the map as they do on a chessboard, so that from the original picture others can be derived easily. Just as chess reduced warfare to a series of standardized actors, moves, and directions, allowing its games to be recorded, precisely and re-created identically if necessary, so Hernando’s chessboard of Spain would allow his maps to be re-created in previously unimaginable detail. The intended effect, as was later recorded, was to allow someone looking at this image to know the country as if they had been there themselves, or indeed perhaps better than if they had been there, as the significant things can be better seen in a drawing than in real life.2
The seemingly rather vague term that Hernando chose for this project—usually calling it a “description” of Spain—was in fact a bold statement of allegiance to a series of ambitious ventures that he would have encountered during his time in Italy. These drew their inspiration from the ideas of Ptolemy, the second-century Greek author whose compendium Geography came back into European culture in the early fifteenth century after being lost for a millennium. Hernando may have inherited a copy of the Geography from his father and had acquired his own copy early on, buying a third shortly after he arrived in Rome, and a fourth before he left, with additional tables of geographic information. While Ptolemy’s survey of classical knowledge about the world became widely influential and was central to Columbus’s vision of what he would find in the “Indies,” it was Ptolemy’s ideas about mapmaking that were to have a longer-lasting effect. Central to these were the use of coordinates for fixing locations on maps, which he advocated in the part of his treatise dealing with cartography. Among the projects inspired by this was that of Leon Battista Alberti, whose ambition to resurrect the glories of classical architecture required an accurate survey of Rome’s remaining monuments, which would allow him to reconstruct the plan of the ancient city. To achieve this he put aside his spare time, while serving as papal secretary in Rome, to take the bearings of the ancient monuments from the Capitoline Hill using an astrolabe-like instrument, drawing on the techniques used by maritime navigators. Alberti then wrote two treatises deriving
from this project, the Descriptio urbis Romae (description of the city of Rome), giving his measurements, and the Ludi rerum mathematicarum, which outlined a series of mathematical “games” (ludi), derived from Euclid’s geometry, that could be used to produce a map out of the measurements he had taken. Ironically, the difficulty in fixing Ptolemy’s polar coordinates meant Alberti—and Hernando after him—resorted to techniques more similar to those of surveyors than of cartographers.3
The term descriptio, then, as used by Alberti and by Hernando, meant less a verbal account of a place and more a map or plan, though both compiled written tables of data as a first step in constructing their maps. Alberti did not limit his ambitions to the observation of classical monuments: the rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini of a manuscript describing the network of Roman waterways led Alberti to reconstruct part of this ancient system—the Aqua Virgo, letting out where today’s Fontana di Trevi stands—as a monument to the power of Pope Nicholas V; and Alberti’s great tract on architecture (inspired by the manuscript of Vitruvius also recovered by Poggio) advocated the resurrection of classical monuments on a much more massive scale. In service of this, Alberti would develop Ptolemy’s ideas on how to project maps of the spherical earth onto a flat surface—central to the effectiveness of paper maps—drawing on the help of none other than Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, the Florentine cosmographer whose secret letter expounding the “narrow Atlantic” hypothesis had partly inspired Columbus’s First Voyage. Following in Alberti’s wake, a range of undertakings sought to make ever more precise records of classical monuments as a first step toward the restoration of the glory of Rome: Flavio Biondo’s Rome instaurata, which undertook a topographical survey of all the classical monuments known of in the city, Leonardo’s attempt to reconstruct Trajan’s port of Cittavecchia under the patronage of Leo X, and Raphael’s proposal (also to Leo) to produce accurate drawings of all the classical artifacts in the city, as part of an early archaeological project.4
A major driver behind these Spanish and Italian cosmographical projects was the notion of translatio imperii—the “movement of empire”—which obsessed Renaissance culture. This was the belief that power in the world moved, like a torch in a relay race, from one nation to the next, with only a single empire holding sway at any one time. Though centrally inspired by the history of classical Greece and Rome, the idea also had a biblical underpinning in the interpretation of Nebuchadrezzar’s dream by the prophet Daniel: the king’s vision of a statue—head of gold, shoulders of silver, torso of bronze, legs of iron, feet of clay—was revealed as prophesying a succession of empires, ending when the final, clay empire was smashed by God and history would be brought to an end. There were many contending theories about exactly which empires were represented by the gold, silver, bronze, and iron—Saint Jerome thought they were the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires—but the central idea of a single, dominant world “superpower” was widely accepted (then as now). The most intriguing question regarded which nation would be the next to carry the torch of empire, and it was widely believed the nation that resembled the empires of the past—mirroring their cultural riches and technological achievements—would eventually triumph over the others. The artistic patronage of popes and monarchs was not, then, entirely disinterested, but rather sought to put them in the running for even greater glory. The same was true of the archaeological, surveying, and architectural projects of Alberti, Biondo, Leonardo, and Raphael: a first step toward the rebirth of Roman glory was the compilation of topographical records—tables of information, maps, and plans—at the same or (if possible) at a greater level of accuracy than those of classical authors, providing a framework through which to describe, capture, and control the world around them.5
This cultural arms race was very much on Hernando’s mind when he was undertaking his Description of Spain. He was later to comment that every other Christian nation had detailed surveys of even smaller towns, allowing those who had not been to Rome, Jerusalem, Babylon, or Paris to know these places intimately; only Spain, he lamented, was lacking in such records. The project appears to have begun as nothing more than a sideline, with Hernando simply recording the populations of the towns the court moved through on its slow progress around northern Spain and the distance between them. It seems clear, however, that the project soon began to take up more of Hernando’s attention, leading him on outings for the sole purpose of gathering topographical information. An early part of the Description charts a series of triangular treks from Alcalá de Henares to the villages of the surrounding countryside, darting out and across and back again, like a spider building a web, and recording distances along the way. Hernando wasn’t taking bearings as Alberti had done from the Capitoline Hill—a task beyond the rudimentary surveying techniques available, especially given the lack of telescopes—but by using the longitudinal coordinates for the major cities established by Arabic astronomers and promulgated by Alfonso X, Zacuto, and Nebrija, the rest could be figured out using the distances between minor cities and a basic knowledge of trigonometry, as Alberti had noted in his treatise on mathematical games. The lines drawn by these rapidly multiplying measurements laid out over Spain a network wonderfully reminiscent of Luca Pacioli’s diagrams showing the geometry of a human face: the landscape, like everything else, can be broken down into a mosaic of basic shapes.6
Though none of the individual elements in the Description were Hernando’s inventions, in combination they created an unprecedented way of seeing this world. Medieval mapmakers had distorted the physical dimensions in their work to make places of special historical and spiritual significance stand out. A wonderful example of this is the Catalan map (traditionally dated to 1375) that arranged its image of west Africa around the figure of Mansa Musa, the Malian king who had spent so freely on hajj to Mecca in 1325 that he made the value of gold drop in Egypt. These maps were only partly a picture of the physical characteristics of the earth, and partly a memorial to great things that had happened; they were also a monument to God’s plan for the earth as a whole. Hernando’s Description departed from this tradition and sought to capture Spain as it was observed in the present and to set these observations within the dispassionate, objective space of the grid. The numbered lines implied the world portrayed was in the realm of mathematical proportion, scale, and measurement, and not subject to the blurring effects of human experience.7
Yet while the level of Hernando’s rigor and ambition in this undertaking is astonishing, it must be said the greatest charm of the Description lies in its failure to maintain a strict focus on the geometrical relations between towns. The medieval philosopher Nicholas of Cusa had imagined an ideal cartographer as like one who, sitting in a walled city, sends messengers out of its five gates to report on the surrounding countryside: the gates represent the five senses, to each of which Cusa’s ideal mapmaker must be alive in order to fully capture the world. Little by little, Hernando slips back into this medieval cartographic mode; the purity of the Euclidean plane becomes permeated by the other arresting qualities of the landscapes and settlements, as if a graph were to take notice of the textured paper on which it is drawn. To begin with this allows for the presence of rivers and the modes of crossing them, together with a note of how distant they are from a particular town—distances often roughly noted as “a crossbow shot” or “a stone’s throw” away. Then cursory notes of the kind of terrain that is crossed between towns—plain or coastland—soon admit a more descriptive vocabulary, recording that the land is harsh or barren or fertile. Before long the list of words has multiplied to include pebbled beaches, sweet-water inlets, clear rivers, treacherous hillsides, forests of chestnut and of oak, vineyards, a hot spring that rolls boiling in summer or winter. The abstract space is also invaded by the seasons: the route inland from Sanlúcar, where Hernando had landed with his father in 1504, has lagoons that turn into marshes in winter and must be waded through knee-deep; the Galician town of Porriño has delicious turnips as big as pi
tchers, and nearby in Sancroy they have a technique for saving their vines by digging up their roots and stems and planting them again the next year. At Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Hernando has noted the presence of rabbit warrens and has left drawings in the margins of his notebook. The character of the towns also begins to seep through and blend with the statistics. At Ourense there is a miraculous cross that was found in the ocean and which is said to make hair and beards grow, and at Madrid, the tomb of Saint Isidore, which was built with the help of angels. The town of San Sebastián de los Reyes was founded in living memory when the residents of Alcobendas abandoned their homes in protest against their harsh seignorial master. Touchingly, these observations even record the existence of tiny settlements, such as the dilapidated Riaza on the slopes of the Sierra de Pico Cebollera, which has only five inhabitants. Perhaps most wonderful are the occasions when the land and the bodies within it act upon each other, turning this abstract space into a realm of lived experiences, as when Hernando notes that at Monterrey the wine is so strong it cannot be drunk unless mixed with water, or that at Bobadilla the soil is said to be a cure for fevers. These delightful notes remind us discovery is not the sole preserve of those traveling in distant lands but could take the form of a discovery within, unpacking the unknown densities of apparently familiar countryside.8
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 18
