Hernando had met Clenardus in Louvain, at the Collegium Trilingue, where Hernando had gone to look for those with the necessary skills to help him bring order to the growing chaos of the library. Communicating his requirements to a Portuguese humanist at the college, André de Resende, Hernando had promptly been taken to the room where Clenardus was lecturing on a Greek text by John Chrysostom to a group of students. Though Clenardus had only been made a doctor by the Collegium a few years previously, he was already winning a reputation as a revolutionary teacher of language, and not simply because of the flamboyant hats he had taken to wearing after a period of living in Paris. Clenardus was pioneering an Erasmian approach to language learning, determined to prove language was best taught not by sitting bent over dense books of grammar and vocabulary, but rather through conversation and play. He claimed to be able to teach even the dullest child a classical tongue in a matter of months, simply by making Latin or Greek part of their daily conversational habits, though he would later also introduce to his classrooms two “Ethiopian” slaves (more likely from west Africa), to whom he had taught Latin and who would perform dialogues for the astonished students. The two language-learning manuals, for Greek and Hebrew, that he had published in Paris during a year teaching there were already becoming runaway successes, and he was gaining a popular reputation as a teacher at the Collegium in Louvain. Hernando approached him as soon as the lecture was finished, and the two soon came to terms.
Clenardus was later to write to Hernando expressing admiration for his patron’s endurance of the scarcely bearable privations during his recent travels through Europe, and though Clenardus does not go into detail, it is possible to put together the pieces of Hernando’s odyssey across the charred and altered landscape of the Continent. He followed the same crescent-shaped route he had a decade earlier in 1520–22, from northern Italy to Basel and up the Rhine through lower Germany to the Netherlands. The similarities between this voyage and the earlier one must have brought the differences even more starkly home. Lutheranism was no longer a sporadic protest movement against an overmighty Rome, a spiritual energy that Hernando could sympathize with or ignore as the feeling took him. It was now in the ascendant through much of Charles’s German lands, and indeed in many areas the grounds of Luther’s arguments had been taken to their logical conclusions, far beyond the comfort of the fathers of the movement. If, as Luther—and, in the view of some, Erasmus before him—had argued, the only crucial thing was a spiritual relationship with God through faith, then surely there was no need for the mighty princes of the Church (popes, cardinals, and bishops) to act as intercessors between man and God; no need, perhaps, for a Church at all. In the spiritual map of the universe, as in the new maps being made by Hernando, all points were equidistant from God. Indeed, while Luther had helped his own cause with the German princes by insisting that true believers should leave all political matters to their sovereign leaders, the poorest sort in some parts of Germany were easily persuaded by charismatic preachers that the revolutionary logic applied to secular rulers as well as the heads of the Church. In 1524 the radical preacher Thomas Müntzer, who captivated the Saxon mining town of Allstedt with his message of open season on the wicked and the rich, had preached before a gathered audience of inspectors a new interpretation of Nebuchadrezzar’s dream of the statue of gold, bronze, iron, and clay. The smashing of the clay feet did not, he proclaimed, symbolize the beginning of a Last Kingdom but the end of all forms of government. Though Müntzer himself did not survive long after this, tortured and killed as the Peasants’ Revolt got under way, a more stable (though hardly less antiauthoritarian) movement emerged in the Anabaptists, and Hernando would have had a taste of their ideas during his stay in their temporary home, Strasbourg, in late June 1531.
This was a very different vision of the End of Days to that conceived of by Columbus and Charles and Hernando, one in which the consolidation of universal rule in a single, supreme emperor was replaced by the flattening of all earthly hierarchies, with a difference being recognized only between the Elect and the Damned. It was also not a vision Charles could choose to ignore, even if his temptation might have been to focus on the more traditional threat to the east, where Suleiman’s Ottoman forces had returned to continue their advance through Hungary and had laid siege to Vienna in September 1529, just as the imperial party was crossing over to Italy. So great were the joint threats in Germany and Austria that Charles had been forced to abandon, in the end, plans for a triumphal coronation ceremony at St. Peter’s in Rome, settling instead for Bologna, which was closer to these theaters of action even if it was a poor substitute in terms of imperial symbolism. Charles’s advisers had hurriedly prepared a case that the imperial coronation was valid no matter where it took place, as long as the pope was present, and (to further diminish the embarrassment) Bologna was decorated to look as much as possible like the Eternal City, with a wooden set of triumphal arches sporting images of Roman emperors, and the Basilica of San Petronio dressed up to look like the Vatican. Charles may have found some consolation for these half measures by choosing for the date of the coronation 24 February 1530, the fifth anniversary of his defeat and capture of Francis I at Pavia.2
If Charles’s thoughts were elsewhere, so were Hernando’s, and he may have departed before the coronation itself after seeking an audience with Charles. At this audience Hernando made a rather astonishing announcement: after opening by reminding the emperor he had now been in service with the royal household for almost forty years, he declared he had never sought reward for his employment because he had always assumed that one day the suit concerning his father’s rights would be resolved, and his livelihood would be finally guaranteed. Seeing as he did now that the case was, in his lovely turn of phrase, immortal, he had decided because of age and poverty to take up holy orders, in part because the current pope had always had him in mind for such a path. Hernando begged the emperor not to stand in his way, but to allow him to spend his last thousand florins in traveling to Rome.3
It is hard to believe this was much more than a ruse on Hernando’s part. Although Columbus had included a cardinal’s hat among his demands upon his return from the first voyage in 1493—meant for Diego rather than Hernando and ultimately unsuccessful—and a career in the Church was a common choice for younger (and especially illegitimate) children, little mention is made in Hernando’s writing either before or after about joining the Church. His petition to Charles may suggest Hernando had got to know Giulio de’ Medici reasonably well during his years in Rome, but it is hard to find evidence that he pursued a life in the Church with any conviction. His pleas of poverty may also have rung false in the ears of a sovereign who paid Hernando a pension of two hundred thousand maravedís a year, even if this may have been his only source of support and was quickly depleted by his ambitious projects.
If Hernando ever did intend to join the Church, the idea did not last long, and his supposed poverty seems to have been short-lived as well, as by September he was once again purchasing books in huge quantities, first at Rome and then up through northern Italy at Perugia, Milan, Turin, and Venice. He seems to have resolved his financial difficulties in part by deciding, after a lifetime of begging his portion from his brother, to turn the tables on his brother’s family, repeatedly drawing loans from the Grimaldi merchant-banker family and telling them to present the bill to the family estates in Hispaniola and the widow Virreina María de Toledo, whose agents denied they had funds of Hernando’s with which to pay the creditors. This was something of a dangerous game, but evidently by now Hernando felt the need to buy books, and the fear of leaving his great library incomplete, more keenly than the threat from the great and powerful merchant-banker families of Europe. Perhaps this desperate ploy was provoked in part by the sight of Marin Sanuto, the historian-recorder of Venice, whom Hernando found (during a visit to Venice in April 1530) reduced to dire poverty and forced to sell many of the books from his magnificent library—some of which Hern
ando bought, out of either charity or book lust, with the funds he borrowed from the Grimaldis.4
Sanuto had once again been passed over for the post of official historian of the city, this time in favor of Pietro Bembo, and was living off a pittance paid to him by the state in return for his making his life’s work—scores of volumes recording each detail of the city’s affairs—available to Bembo for his use. In the will he drew up shortly after Hernando’s visit, Sanuto pitifully describes the catalogue of his “rare and beautiful” books—replete, like Hernando’s, with details of cost and date of purchase—with the following note: “Those marked with a red cross I sold in my time of need.” The sight of Sanuto’s famous library being sold off to pay debts can only have provoked sympathy in Hernando for that particular horror, familiar to the impoverished bibliophile, combining both the sharpness of parting from books and the sadness that things so prized by the collector should fetch such a meager price. The bibliomaniac Walter Benjamin recounts that even the thought of having to sell his books drove him to buy more to soothe the pain he felt, and Hernando’s acquisitions in these years have something of this flavor. The Biblioteca Malatestiana, which he must have visited when passing through Cesena in October 1530, offered something of a consoling vision. While in so many ways this library, founded by the local magnate and given to his city, was unlike Hernando’s—stocked mostly with manuscripts from its own scriptorium and filled with book pews to which the volumes were chained—it nevertheless managed at once to be a public library and to maintain a policy on lending so strict it lost only six volumes over the next five hundred years. This could not be a direct model for Hernando: his library contained so many books that one could not possibly chain each of them to a desk. But it may have set him thinking about how to safeguard his own collections without turning a key upon his library and turning it into a sepulchre for books.5
* * *
Hernando had not come to the Collegium Trilingue in Louvain at the end of his sweep through south-German book territory to look for Erasmus himself: the idol was no longer to be found in that sanctuary. As the Reformation had advanced, perceptions that Erasmus’s ideas had led to Lutheranism (and its more radical successors) had hardened. As the common joke went, “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.” This became less of a joke when the Inquisition in Spain and the Faculty of Theology in Paris reviewed Erasmus’s works and condemned sections of them as unorthodox; while defending himself against these charges, Erasmus had nonetheless withdrawn from the European scene, first to Basel and then (when the Reformation followed him there) to Freiburg, which Hernando visited in June 1531. But if Erasmus was no longer at Louvain, it was still a stronghold of Erasmian thinkers, and Hernando had come there in search of assistants for his library. In part, this may have been driven by the loneliness of his work, but the library presented Hernando with greater needs than this, as suggested by his first recruit, Nicholas Clenardus.
Clenardus’s readiness to leave Louvain and cross the Continent with this stranger shocked many of his colleagues, especially given that Hernando was not able to offer him better terms than he had at the Collegium. But the two clearly sensed in each other a kindred spirit, and Hernando knew exactly how to tempt the Dutchman. During his doctoral studies Clenardus had come across an edition of the Psalms that printed each of these sacred songs in five languages—Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic—and he had fallen in love at first sight with the swooping, fluid curls of the Arabic script. The language was entirely unknown in Flanders at the time, and while Clenardus claims the impressive feat of having decoded the Arabic alphabet (by looking at how proper names were written in that script), there was no way for him to progress further in his love affair with the tongue. Hernando had only to dangle in front of Clenardus the Arabic riches of Spain—both the fluent speakers who could be recruited to teach him, and the treasury of Arabic manuscripts locked away in Spanish libraries, including the dispersed remains of the famous Umayyad library in Córdoba (and a few in Hernando’s own)—to induce this glossophile to up stakes and follow him into the unknown.6
The recruitment of Clenardus promised to solve for Hernando a growing problem of the library—namely that as his ambitions grew from merely an unparalleled library to a truly universal one, and he set his sights on the world outside Christendom as well, there would inevitably be innumerable books in languages he could not read. Although they were few in number, there was already a problem with transferring the Arabic volumes in his register over to the alphabetical list, for the simple reason that they were in a different alphabet. To all intents and purposes, these books simply disappeared when they entered the library, as there was no way of putting them on the map. And there was no chance of including these titles in the Epitomes or Materials, given that their contents were a mystery to his sumistas. This problem could only expand: Hernando had already bought books in Greek, Hebrew, and the Ethiopian language of Geez, and many more were beginning to appear in Armenian and Arabic, with some now even being printed in north Africa and beyond. While as early as 1484 the Ottoman sultan had prohibited Turks from using the printing press, Jewish refugees from Europe had nonetheless taken the technology with them and begun printing in the Levant. In addition to the growing number of printed books, there were also the treasure hoards of manuscripts brought back to Spain as the spoils of conquest, such as the two thousand volumes rumored to have been brought back to Spain after the capture of Tunis in 1536. Between these foreign scripts and the growing number of invented languages—such as the pictographic books being developed in Seville by Jacobo de Testera to aid universal proselytization—it was clear the alphabetical lists for the library might soon become obsolete. Worse than this, large parts of the library might become unreadable to any extent by the librarians, making them unsortable, unshelvable, and threatening ultimate chaos. This was not only a danger for non-European languages: that Hernando had almost no books in English, despite his visit to London, is likely because few even of the most learned outside of the British Isles understood anything of the language. Clenardus’s coming promised to stem the flood, at least for the time being, by making the Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic tomes more manageable, and perhaps to provide a longer-term solution, given his interest in finding a universal key to language, looking for the common ground that underlay them all.7
This threat facing the library is wonderfully captured in a book that first appeared in these years and was purchased by Hernando soon after. It does not appear under its author’s name in the alphabetic catalogue, perhaps because the name—Alcofribras Nasier—appears to be one of those Arabic words that caused a problem for that mode of order. Yet the title of the book does appear—Pantagruel, Son of Gargantua: His Deeds and His Prowess—alerting us that, though unknown at the time, the arabesque name on the title page is actually an anagram of the author’s real name: François Rabelais. Rabelais’s uproarious tale, addressed to the “Illustrious Drinkers” of Europe, recounts the adventures of the giant Pantagruel, son of the king of Utopia (Gargantua), who reverses the direction of European travel narratives by coming from afar to Europe in search of knowledge. At Paris he finds the Library of St. Victor, a magnificent collection whose extensive (and imaginary) catalogue Rabelais provides. The list, which contains both real books and made-up volumes, is a parody of the contemporary book market, as this small sample of titles suggests:
A Testicle of Theology
The Mustard-Pot of Penitence
On Farting Discreetly in Public, by Mr. Winegarden
Tartaraeus, On Ways to Shit
Pasquino, Doctor of Marble, On Eating Venison with Artichokes during Lent
Bede, On the Excellence of Tripe
Fourteen Books on Serving Mustard after Dinner, by Our Master Rostocostojambedanasse
On the Arses of Widows
Ramon Llul, The Bumtickle of Princes
A Perpetual Almanac for Sufferers of Gout and Pox
The Foolishness of Ita
lian Things, by Mr. Firebreaker
The BO of the Spanish, Distilled by Brother Inigo
. . . and so on, for many pages. While hilariously puncturing the insufferable pomposity of contemporary writers and scholars, Rabelais is echoing Hernando’s more serious point that book titles are often gibberish, telling us almost nothing about their contents, and so providing a list is no better than putting together a compendium of nonsense. Luckily, however, Pantagruel meets soon after this his soul mate and companion for life, Panurge, who wins his heart by greeting him with scurrilous and lewd speeches in fourteen different tongues: German, Hispano-Arabic, Italian, Scots, Basque, “Lanternese,” Dutch, Castilian, Danish, Hebrew, classical Greek, Utopian, Latin, and (finally) French. It is entirely possible Rabelais had the polyglot and glutton Clenardus—wearer of remarkable hats—in mind when creating this character. Panurge, a whorehound and bon viveur, is a glorious parody of the Renaissance universal man, who (after escaping from Turkish captivity) has a career as an urban planner and as a humanist, designing new city walls for Paris out of the genitals of its ladyfolk and defeating an English scholar who has developed a perfect language of gestures by waggling his codpiece at him. Panurge offers to Pantagruel, as Clenardus did to Hernando, the promise of cutting through the linguistic fog of the world, and doing so with a certain flair.8
* * *
Hernando and his party had no possibility to visit England on his way back, as he had a decade before. Relations between England and Spain, which were difficult enough when Henry sided with France after the Battle of Pavia, were now at an even lower ebb, given that Henry was attempting to divorce Charles’s aunt, Queen Catherine. To make matters worse, the emperor’s control of Pope Clement following the Sack of Rome meant there was little chance of Henry’s getting rid of his wife through the traditional channels of the Church. Wolsey had fallen after failing to deliver the divorce, and Henry had begun to listen to those who argued the pope had no authority over the English king’s marriage arrangements. Henry, whose 1521 tract against the Lutherans was a treasured text in the Vatican Library, was not yet breaking with Rome, but he was starting to sound a lot like those who had. Though famous throughout Europe as the author of the radically skeptical Utopia, Thomas More now found himself overtaken by events and increasingly isolated in his public defense of the traditional powers of the Church. And Juan Luis Vives, the Spanish humanist who had been sent to England to give Princess Mary an Erasmian education, was expelled from the country after a brief house arrest for siding with his countrywoman Catherine.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 28
