When Hernando met Erasmus in Louvain in early October 1520, stopping on the way from Brussels to the coronation at Aachen, the Dutch humanist was at the peak of his career. In the years following The Praise of Folly, Erasmus had turned his prodigious linguistic and scholarly talents to a project that showed the extraordinary power of this new form of learning: he had produced, in 1516, an edition of the Greek New Testament he claimed was more accurate than that used by Saint Jerome for the Vulgate, the Latin Bible that had stood at the heart of Christian thought, law, and life for over a thousand years; soon afterward, Erasmus produced his own Latin translation, intended to replace Jerome’s. Erasmus had undertaken his edition and translation in a spirit of devout piety, but the Church had every reason to fear the destabilizing effects of humanist classical scholarship: after all, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla had used his knowledge of Latin’s historical development to demonstrate that the Donation of Constantine—the foundation of the Church’s claim to political as well as spiritual power—was not a genuine document from the fourth century but a later forgery. Valla’s explosive document, long circulating only in manuscript, had recently seen a rash of printings, and Hernando snapped up a copy during this tour of the north. Any number of Church practices, whose authority had been established over the centuries using Jerome’s Vulgate, might now be open to question. And the town of Louvain, where Hernando met Erasmus, was the home of an institution that threatened to multiply the Church’s problems in this respect: the new Collegium Trilingue, or College of the Three Languages, which strove to make yet more Erasmuses by teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to the highest standards of humanist scholarship. Soon there would be a generation of students with the tools to analyze the ancient Greek and Hebrew texts and to contest the interpretation of these words by the Roman Curia. On another level, the Collegium Trilingue was a symbol of resistance to a narrow definition of learning, which would exclude anything that was not Christian and Latin, a sentiment Erasmus most forcefully expressed in the volume he presented to Hernando when they met. The Antibarbarorum—“Against the barbarians”—was a rallying cry against the self-congratulating ignorance of the barbarians within Christian Europe, who were closed off to any thought they deemed “unchristian”:
If we are forbidden to use the inventions of the pagan world, what shall we have left, I ask you, in the fields, in the towns, in churches and houses and workshops, at home, at war, in private and in public? To such an extent it is true that we Christians have nothing we have not inherited from the pagans. The fact that we write Latin, speak it in one way or another, comes to us from the pagans; they discovered writing, they invented the use of speech.
This spirit of radical openness—believing knowledge was a good in itself and should be made widely available—drove the program of Erasmus and other humanists to hunt down the best writings wherever they could be found. This not only involved tracking down lost books in the most surprising places—as when in 1516 Erasmus charged a friend to search the land of the Dacians for a fabled tower of ancient books—but then also working with the great printers of the age to make them available in robust editions—greatly handsome and precise, but also made to go out into the world and be used. Hernando, in his library open to all books in all subjects from within Christendom and without, and in the tools he would use it to produce, would build on these foundations in ways Erasmus could not have begun to imagine.5
Hernando left a fitting monument to Erasmus in one of the crucial building blocks of his library, which certainly existed in an early form by this point. This was his Abecedarium, or alphabetical list of authors and book titles contained in the library. In the final version of the Abecedarium Erasmus is one of only two modern authors to have a section of their own separate from the main list, where in the back of the catalogue Hernando records 185 separate works by Erasmus contained in the library (the identity of the second author will become important in due course). In a sense, given that Hernando sought to acquire every book he could find for the library, this is less a personal tribute to Erasmus than a simple witness to his presence in the world of the early printed book: the great humanist, a million copies of whose writings are estimated to have been printed during his life, had simply overflowed from his place in the alphabetical lists, forcing Hernando to remove him to a separate supplement. If on the one hand Hernando’s catalogue is simply recognizing Erasmus as a prolific author, however, it is also true (in another, rather counterintuitive sense) that the very notion of an “author” is created by lists such as Hernando’s. As the number of books available to collectors grew, and new ways of organizing them became necessary, a list of authors in alphabetical order probably seemed a fairly unproblematic place to start. This kind of list, after all, is only using a memorable and seemingly innocuous fact about a book—the name of the person who wrote it—to differentiate it from other books, like a unique set of coordinates on a map. This obviously makes it difficult to list any work whose title isn’t in the Roman alphabet, and Hernando’s 1513 copy of the first printed book in the Ethiopian language of Geez (mistakenly believed to be a form of the biblical Chaldean tongue) would have presented a challenge were it not given a Latin title page. But the major problem is that this kind of list requires the book actually to have a named author: if too many books are anonymous, as a vast number of medieval works were, the list simply doesn’t work—there would be an endless “Anon” section, and little way of navigating within it. Similarly, the list only really works if each book has a single, agreed-upon author, rather than being the product of many people who revised or translated or added to it or changed it over time. So the alphabetical list forces the librarian, and the users of the library, to attribute each of the books to a single, named author, in a sense “inventing” the notion of the author (or at least its centrality) as a matter of necessity. Over time, something else would happen: the character of the authors and the character of the works assigned to them began to become inseparable. Our sense of who an author is derives in large part from the works assigned to that author, and (on the contrary) we tend to come to works with preconceptions, preconceptions derived from what we know (or think we know) about the author. This inevitably leads to two kinds of mistakes: authors having works falsely attributed to them, giving us the wrong impression of who they were, and works actually written by the author being declared fakes, removing part of the author’s life that the author (or we) would rather not see. As the greatest author of the age, Erasmus was involved in both kinds of deception, perhaps even at the same time: Was Julius Excluded from Heaven falsely attributed to him, making him more of an agent provocateur than he really was, or was it falsely excluded from the list of his work, distancing him from the violent ruptures that were just over the horizon?6
The influence of northern humanism may also be behind another curious decision the bibliomaniac Hernando made at this time. Beginning in 1520, he began to include in his purchase notes the exchange rates between the local currency and the money he used at home. This slightly odd, pedantic habit actually suggests Hernando was in tune with one of the most exciting strains of thought emerging in the period, pioneered by Erasmus’s great friend Guillaume Budé. Budé had gained fame with the publication of a learned treatise on Roman coinage, weights, and measures—a slender claim to celebrity, it would seem, until one realizes it brought to life countless passages in ancient works that until then were all but meaningless. It is all very well, for instance, to say Dürer valued the treasures of Moctezuma at one hundred thousand gulden, but that means little unless one knows exactly how much one hundred thousand gulden is. For instance, one might mention it was the same as the dowry of the Queen of Hungary or the worth of the province of Friesland. Budé’s interest in the realia of ancient life, the nitty-gritty everyday details of how much stuff cost in classical Rome, was not merely pedantry but a realization that the great ideas and artworks of the past were meaningless unless you understood the world in which they were
produced and to which they referred. But it was also an insight into the nature of currency, of money as a medium of exchange with which we confer value upon an arbitrary object. Hernando, who at fourteen had deduced from the great value the Guanaja tribe placed on cocoa beans that they must serve as a form of currency, was clearly attuned to this from an early age; the age of exploration was to provide countless other examples of this, as in the shell currency the Portuguese encountered in the Kingdom of Kongo. Far from precious metals being the only thing that could be used as currency, anything could be used for money as long as it was scarce enough that people couldn’t just pick it up off the ground and so flood the market with it—and the Kongo used a particular shell found only on one island controlled by the king. All that remained then was to confer upon your coin, bean, or shell an agreed value. The realization would dawn only slowly that this really had to be an agreed value, though: just as language works only when both people agree what a word means, money works only when both parties agree what it is worth—it was useless to insist, as the precious metals of the New World began to flood Europe, that they were still worth as much as when they were scarce, though this concept of inflation caught on too slowly to save many early-modern nations from disaster. Hernando’s notes on exchange rates, then, which always give the value of the local currency (craicers, pfenigs, quaternos, julios, florines) in Spanish ducados, are (when properly used) a form of time machine: like Budé’s study of Roman coinage, they resurrect a lost world of trade networks and fluctuating relationships between societies, recorded in the language of currency exchange.7
* * *
On 23 October 1520, Charles lay facedown on the floor of Aachen’s cathedral, his arms stretched out in the form of a cross. Hernando would have been one of those in the crowd who shouted, in response to a question from the archbishop of Cologne, that they were eager to serve Charles as king of the Romans and emperor-elect. They then looked on as Charles’s chest, head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, and hands were smeared with holy oil and he was wrapped in coronation robes believed to be over seven hundred years old; they had supposedly first been wrapped around the Emperor Charlemagne. The robes, captured in a painting by Dürer a few years previously, were every bit as sumptuous as Hernando might have expected: a cascade of gold cloth, only occasionally interrupted by scarlet embroidery and the black silhouettes of the imperial eagle. The regalia also included an orb, scepter, sword, slippers, and crown, which once held at its center the orphan stone, reputed to shine in the dark and protect the honor of the empire, but likely lost by 1520. In a world where power was still deeply linked to ritual displays of magnificence, few spectacles can have equaled this one. Such a display was desperately needed, because even as Charles was receiving the adulation of his newly expanded territories, news reached him of the widespread revolt gripping central Castile, with many of the chief cities of the kingdom advertising their disdain for this foreign king and declaring instead their allegiance to his mother, whom they hoped to control more easily. Charles had made a mistake by not only leaving his kingdoms before they were secured, but leaving them in the care of a pious Dutch cardinal with little head for statecraft, let alone war.8
A souvenir print (c.1470–80) of the imperial treasures of the Holy Roman emperor, which Hernando would have seen at the coronation in Aachen. The print is number 2959 in Hernando’s collection.
As he made his way from Aachen toward Worms, where the Imperial Court would spend Christmas, Hernando began to prepare for the next great tumult to grip Europe. At Cologne and Mainz in late November he bought his first works by Martin Luther and the philosopher of Luther’s movement, Melanchthon, part of a once-massive haul of Reformist works in Hernando’s collection that have since been almost entirely destroyed, either removed by the Inquisition after his death or lost in one of the disasters that lay ahead, but records of which can still be found in his catalogues. Luther’s harangue against the corruption of the Roman Curia was part of a long history of protest against clerical abuses, and his charge sheet of ninety-five theses, published in Wittenberg in 1517, included familiar complaints about the indulgences issued to cover the eye-watering costs of building St. Peter’s (theses nos. 82 and 86), echoing similar complaints in Julius Excluded from Heaven and the Roman satires pinned to the statue of Pasquino. The Saxon monk’s critique of these indulgences followed a logic strangely reminiscent of monetary inflation: If Leo could simply print indulgences (documents forgiving sins) to raise money for his building projects, why shouldn’t he forgive all people their sins as an act of love? The unspoken answer was obvious: because if he did, the Vatican would have flooded the market with its currency—letters of indulgence—and made them worthless. This addiction to indulgences suggested to Luther (and increasingly many others) that the Church was no longer a place of charity but a den of money changers. Leo tried repeatedly to bring Luther to heel, but the protection of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, and the amplifying effect of the printing press, soon saw Luther’s protest movement gaining in confidence and breadth. Leo declared in a papal bull of 1520 that forty-one of the theses were heretical enough to have earned the monk and his disciples excommunication, and Luther’s works were burned in the Piazza Navona as part of the Agone festivities shortly thereafter; Luther responded by burning the bull of excommunication outside the city gates of Wittenberg later that year.9
It is unclear whether Hernando’s impressive collection of Reformist writings purchased in these years is evidence that he was drawn to Luther (at least at this stage) along with Dürer and much of Germany, or if he was simply sweeping the bookstores for all of their most important wares as his ambitions grew toward the universal. Certainly he had spent long enough at Rome to know Luther’s accusations had plenty of substance, and Hernando undoubtedly revered Erasmus, whose faith (like Luther’s) was focused on internal spirituality and who was highly suspicious of external religiosity. But Luther’s critique of the Roman Church was even now quickly diverging from a broadly supported list of reforms to Church practices and becoming a vision that stood to raze the traditional understanding of what the Church was. In essence, this was a vision of the incommensurateness of man and God. A revelation had struck Luther, namely that God was so infinitely powerful we could not possibly barter with Him for forgiveness, using the currency of indulgences and pilgrimages and building churches. You cannot pay someone with cocoa beans or shells when for them those things have no value. So infinite was the gulf between the things of God and those of Man that only unconditional surrender—faith—could have any value to Him, and thus man’s interior relationship with God was infinitely more important than any external object or act. Though Luther held back from the full consequences of this logic, keeping a place for the Church in fostering this faith by preaching and the administration of sacraments, it was hard to avoid the conclusion to which this led: in this world of unconvertible currency, there would be no place for the Church as a bureau de change between man and God, turning the coin of this world into something that had value in the next.10
Luther was a subject of Charles’s as Holy Roman Emperor, and the support for the schismatic monk by Frederick of Saxony—who had tipped the balance in favor of Charles during the imperial election—made it diplomatic for Charles to give Luther a hearing on the matter. The monk was duly summoned to address the Imperial Diet (parliament) at Worms when it gathered early in 1521, where after being uncharacteristically lost for words on 17 April, he expounded his doctrines and declared he was standing his ground. By the time he made his stand, however, Hernando was long gone from Worms. On 19 January, the financial constraints imposed by the agreement with Diego at La Coruña had suddenly been alleviated when Charles presented Hernando with a gift of two thousand ducats—more than his pension from Diego would amount to in three years, assuming it was paid—for services already rendered, as well as a salary of two hundred thousand maravedís a year, to be drawn from the treasury of his family’s seat of power, Hispaniola.
The grant does not specify for which services Hernando was being rewarded—the Description, the navigational chart to the Indies, or simply adding luster to Charles’s entourage as witness to the New World his father had discovered—but Hernando clearly had plans for where to spend it. Having arranged, before the award was even official, for agents of the Genoese Grimaldi banking family to receive the salary in Hispaniola and pay it out to Hernando in Europe—minus a healthy fee, of course—Hernando was bound for Venice, the city-state in a lagoon that, of all the islands of the European imagination, was the one most central to Hernando’s obsession—books. Venice had used its history of craftsmanship and international trade to reach the top of the pile of early print centers, and Hernando was headed toward this unimaginably delectable emporium.11
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 21
