While we cannot be certain what role Hernando’s biography had in this final victory for the Columbus legacy, its timing and its direct address to the case against his father suggest the Life and Deeds of the Admiral was designed to play a decisive part at a key moment in the history of his family and of Spain. Whatever the immediate effect upon the Columbus fortunes, Hernando’s biography of his father was to have an immense and lasting impact upon European history, both through the image of his father that arose from it and by creating a model for future narratives of European superiority, narratives founded on the qualities of discipline and technical mastery Hernando put at the center of his portrait. Like the Life and Deeds of the Admiral, these narratives would quietly ignore the religious zealotry and pure serendipity that often drove European expansion. But for the moment Hernando must have swelled with the knowledge that the onslaught on his father’s reputation, which had continued almost without pause for nearly forty years, was finally in retreat and had been put to flight in large part by his own efforts.
With Columbus’s legacy now more secure than at any other time since Hernando was a boy, he was able at last to turn his mind to perfecting his own creation. For this mammoth and unprecedented task, time was running short, and Hernando could no longer rely on the help he had scoured Europe for during his tour of 1529–31: the Burgundian doctor Jean Hammonius had been ill-suited to the heat of southern Spain and had quickly succumbed to a fever upon arriving in Seville, dying shortly afterward; Clenardus was too entranced by the Arabic riches on offer elsewhere to be tied down to Hernando’s library in Seville. Soon after Hernando left him in Salamanca, Clenardus had also lured away his friend from Louvain Jean Vasaeus to join him there, before setting off himself to Portugal, from where he would plan a linguistic crusade into North Africa, using his beloved Arabic to set in motion a universal conversion of the Barbary Muslims. Hernando helped his friend occasionally during these years, scouring the markets of Seville with him in search of a Moor to help with his studies of Arabic. In the end, though, Hernando would have to face his library and its gargantuan challenges alone.10
XVI
Last Orders
With the settling of the family suit, Hernando could finally turn his full attention to his masterwork, though it was gradually becoming clear he was working against the clock. He seems to have suffered constantly in his final years from mysterious fevers similar to those that deprived his father of sight and of sense; his books increasingly record him being read to rather than reading himself, and his choice of titles shows a mind turning more and more toward Last Things. If his own fragile health were not enough to sharpen his focus on the imminent end, something else soon provided a definite and swiftly approaching moment of closure. In June 1537 Charles gave permission for Columbus’s remains to be exhumed from the Capilla de Santa Ana at las Cuevas, where they had lain since 1509, and for them to be reinterred in the new cathedral nearing completion in Hispaniola. It is doubtful Hernando even paused before deciding to accompany his father’s remains to this final resting place, and soon he was acquiring the relevant permits for this crossing. Among these documents are many indications that he did not imagine he would ever return from the New World: not only did he gain permission to transport four black slaves as the foundation of a household in Hispaniola, but the will Hernando drew up made specific provision for his remains should he die at sea or in foreign lands, and he even wrote an epitaph for himself that mentioned three voyages to the New World. This renewed funeral procession, thirty years and more after the Admiral’s death, was to be a kind of pilgrimage in reverse: a journey that would make the destination more sacred and would bring Columbus and the world he had discovered together, creating a center on what had once been the edge of the world.1
The journey would end in the cathedral of Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación in Santo Domingo. In the town Bartholomew Columbus named for their father, the grid of streets had slowly been encompassed with stone, moving inland from the earthworks at the river Ozama and the Calle de Damas, which was now strung with stout Castilian mansions between the Fortaleza and where it ended in the Alcázar de Colón, a New World palace like those in which Hernando and Diego had been billeted as pages of the court. The cathedral was a block farther from the shore and had been under construction since 1523, under the direction of Alessandro Geraldini, who had left his post as confessor to Catherine of Aragon to serve as bishop of Santo Domingo. The original wooden structure had been replaced by a Gothic nave in dressed stone, where, in a crypt under the altar, the Admiral’s body would lie. As the only Gothic building in the New World, the cathedral with its ribbed vaulting and stone tracery is an isolated memory of the Europe from which Columbus had set out, an island forgotten in the river of time. It was, in a sense, the perfect resting place for Columbus’s remains, with its willful attempt to make the New World in the image of the Old, even as the Caribbean trees erupting into the square outside protest in silent eloquence against this fantasy.
The prospect of this journey seems to have convinced Hernando, who was ever the master of beginnings but not of endings, that the time had come to make final the form of his library. By this point, at over fifteen thousand volumes, it was by far the largest private collection in Europe and also contained the largest collection of printed images and printed music in the world; yet it was far from satisfying Hernando’s ambitions. He had been putting together elements of his design throughout his life—in the travels he had made across Europe and to the New World, in the libraries and bookshops he had visited, in the parts of the Caribbean he had traveled and the things he had seen there; in a sense, the design is no more or less than a summary of his life. But only in these final years could he bring himself to describe what had been gathering in his mind for so long. In four documents—a letter to Charles V, his last will and testament, and notes left by his executor and librarian—we begin to see the lineaments of this thing, born of a lifetime spent in the print markets of Europe. As he reveals his plan, it becomes clear the Biblioteca Hernandina (as he wished it to be known) would be not simply a building or a set of books but an engine for extracting the writing of all mankind, an organism adapted to living in the new world of print. “It is one thing,” he wrote in his letter to the emperor, “to build a library of those things found in our time: but entirely another, to order things in such a way that all new things are sought out and gathered forever.”2
Hernando’s design began with a root system that tapped into the core of print, using existing trade networks to draw books to the library. The major arteries would start in five cities central both to print and to Hernando’s life: the great Italian book cities of Rome and Venice, where Hernando’s project had first taken shape, and through which flowed new works from Greece, Byzantium, and the missionary ventures; Nuremberg, Dürer’s city, where Hernando first began to amass tomes from the German kingdoms and the lands to their east; Antwerp, the great book emporium for the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Britain; and Paris, the center of French publishing, to which Hernando had only gained access late in life after decades of warfare. Each year in April, a bookseller chosen in each of these five cities would send twelve ducados’ worth of newly printed books to Lyons—itself a center of musical and medical publishing—where a sixth bookseller would gather them and add a further twelve ducados’ worth from his own city. All these books together would then be sent overland by a merchant to Medina del Campo, at the time of the May fair Hernando knew so well, and from there on to Seville and the library at the Puerta de Goles. Every sixth year, an agent from the library, carrying with him the catalogues of the Hernandina, would sweep through a series of smaller cities, seeking out titles that had been missed. The itinerary, which Hernando lays out in detail, is a voyage through his own memory, following routes he knew intimately: starting in Naples, the book hunter should then take the Sunday percacho (stagecoach) to Rome, proceeding from there to Siena, Pisa, Lucca and Florence, Bologna, Modena, Arezzo,
Parma, Piacenza, Pavia, Milan—all cities (he notes) a half day’s journey from each other—Lodi, Cremona, Mantua, Venice, and Padua. The harvest from these places would be gathered at Venice, where the Genoese merchants could send the books on to Cadiz.
Hernando’s next instruction would have been astonishing to other collectors of the day: he ordered that they should not seek to recruit the help of grand booksellers in these cities, because these places would never deign to look outside their own stockrooms for the pamphlets and one-sheet ballads that Hernando was determined to have in his library. Owners of small bookshops, he reasoned, were much more likely to go out into the city and learn what was on offer there. In fact, the instructions for buying were exactly the reverse of those followed by other famous libraries of the day. The humble bookseller chosen to gather books in each of the six major cities should first buy as many of these ephemeral pamphlets as he could with the twelve ducados, only then moving on to larger printed books, and finally—if anything remained after all of this—buying those manuscript works that were the objects of lust to other librarians of the day. The buyers were, furthermore, forbidden from paying more for manuscripts than they did for printed books, and even the more expensive printed books were not to be bought but merely noted in a list sent to the library for further consideration. At the heart of Hernando’s extraordinary instructions is a profound intuition, one that almost no other person yet shared—namely that the invention of print had upended the world of information, replacing one in which a few authoritative and venerable manuscripts held sway with one flooded by an endless supply of the new. Each of these novelties by itself might seem slight and of little value, but taken together they made up the giant mass of what the world had committed to writing. No engine had yet been conceived to harness this flood of words, to make this plenitude knowable to individuals rather than simply a source of confusion and revulsion. That Hernando believed he had succeeded in doing so is reflected in the verses he asked to be inscribed near the door of the library:
The wise care little for widely held views
As most people are easily swayed
And that which they throw from their houses
Is later thought to be of highest value.
The meaning of this inscription, he says, is that I have founded my house upon the shit that others once threw upon the dunghill. The wry humor with which Hernando draws attention to this fact—that his house is both built upon a dunghill and filled with things thought by many to be of little worth—is born of the supreme confidence of the visionary, who no longer cares that others aren’t seeing what he is. Whether or not he knew it, Hernando had by his last days succumbed in some measure to the visionary madness he had removed with such painstaking care from the record of his father’s life.3
If Hernando’s contemporaries would have been baffled by his decision to favor cheap print, many might have been scandalized by what came next. In a phrase he repeated often in these final documents, Hernando stated the library would collect all books, in all languages and on all subjects, which can be found both within Christendom and without. While it is not entirely clear how he hoped books from outside of Christendom would arrive at the library—though he might reasonably hope global trade would bring them through his book hubs at Seville, Venice, and Antwerp—his refusal to privilege particular languages, subjects, or even the knowledge of Christian authors represents a radical transformation of how knowledge was understood to work—what, in a sense, knowledge was understood to be. The focus of most medieval European libraries on works by Christian authors was driven by the simple idea that the highest kind of knowledge was revealed by God, and that therefore you must be dealing with the right god for true knowledge to be revealed—everything from other gods would simply be false revelation. Medieval and then Renaissance humanist readers, enraptured by the thinking and writing of ancient Greek and Roman writers (and, less often but no less importantly, writers in Arabic and Hebrew), managed sometimes to bring them into the libraries of monasteries and universities, though their arguments that these authors had a partial form of revelation, allowing them to contribute to the understanding of God’s world, did not always convince everyone. The humanist libraries Hernando would have known in Rome and Venice replaced the authority of Christian knowledge with that of classical knowledge, using the notion of “the translation of empire” to argue a resurrection of classical knowledge would bring with it a return of the glories of the classical empires. But all of these libraries, whether Christian or humanist, retained a hierarchy of knowledge: some knowledges were simply better than others, and the library should put its energies into collecting those. The same is true for languages and subjects: without exception, other libraries of the day privileged some languages and some subjects over others, usually reflecting their social status—the languages used by elites (the classical tongues, and increasingly Italian and French) were more valued than less well established vernaculars, and the literature of elite occupations (theology, law, medicine) was favored over writings that dealt with more mechanical crafts. The idea that Hernando’s library would not be bounded by language, subject, or religion once again marks a profound shift in European conceptions of knowledge. This does not, it should be said, mean his idea of knowledge was without prejudices of class, nation, or faith—far from it. Nothing in these documents indicates he had stopped thinking of the library, in these final days, as a counterpart of the universal, Christian, Spanish empire he believed his father had set in motion, and which he hoped would one day submit to Charles V and his heirs. But the notion that the power to subdue the world might come not from a few, privileged sources of knowledge, but from a distillation of all that the world had to offer, regardless of origin, represents an imaginative leap of immense proportions.4
If the channels flowing into the library were more voluminous and diverse than any previously imagined, the arrangements made for the materials once they arrived at the library were scarcely less surprising. The single, enormous room that Hernando was intent on constructing for his books may not have looked that different from some of the great libraries of Europe—similar, perhaps, to the great Laurentian Library that Michelangelo was even then constructing for Pope Clement in Florence—even if the bookshelves lining the walls would have been an unusual sight, with their books standing vertically and displaying their call numbers and titles on their spines. More striking, however, would have been the metal grate standing six feet from the bookshelves and trapping the readers in the center of the room, like divers in a shark tank. The gauge of the crisscrossed metalwork was designed to be large enough for readers to stick their hands through to turn the pages of books, which librarians would place in front of them on lecterns, but too small for them to pull the books back through. Hernando expected many readers would object to this bizarre and draconian arrangement, but on this matter he was insistent. Perhaps still flinching from the fate of the Roman libraries during the sack of that city, he mused that even a hundred chains were not enough to keep a book safe. And the grate was not the only measure taken to ensure the collection’s safety. Hernando set down a strict code of penalties to be imposed upon the librarians—who were to live in the library, and whose accommodation was specified down to their bedding—if any books were to go missing. He also ordered a monastery should be found—perhaps las Cuevas across the river—where in a sheltered place any duplicate titles could be kept in large wooden chests, set upon runners to keep them from the dampness of the floor. These chests were to be opened two or three times a year, and the books turned to prevent their warping, but would otherwise be kept safe as insurance for the library against the violence of man and nature. Readers who protested against being kept at arm’s length from their books were to be told the library’s primary purpose was not for it to be used by the public. They might, at least, console themselves in the shop of unwanted books, stocked with titles that the library had in three or more copies—which would still, Hernando expected, b
e the greatest bookstore in all of Europe, drawing as it did from such a huge network of suppliers.5
That the library was not for public consultation did not mean it was not meant to be useful to the public. Part of Hernando’s jealousy in guarding the collections was to ensure a place existed in which all writings could be kept safe forever, a doomsday vault that would prevent human culture from being lost again on the scale it had at the end of the classical period. This central, read-only data bank would also guarantee there was somewhere in which matters of great doubt could be resolved: a complete library, with a copy of every book by every author, would allow assertions to be checked against the originals, rooting out contradiction and error as Hernando had done at Badajoz and in his biography. Yet it would be wrong to assume Hernando thought of the library primarily as a place of last resort, a sanctuary that guarded against the loss of books by making them inaccessible. Confusing as it initially sounds, Hernando declared the library’s central purpose to be the compilation of the three great catalogues that served as guides to its collections—the Book of Epitomes, the Book of Materials, and the final project, the Table of Authors and Sciences, the form of which will become clear shortly. This sounds at first like madness—the gathering of these infinite collections only to lock them away and make lists of them—until it emerges that Hernando intended copies of these catalogues to be distributed throughout Spain. As the testimony of his last librarian shows, the imagined reader of the Book of Epitomes and the Book of Materials is not sitting in the library at all, but in some remote location, without access to many books. The distribution of these catalogues would allow an unlimited number of readers to navigate through the collections of the library from a distance, using the Book of Materials to search for key words and the Book of Epitomes to digest many volumes at a sitting, sorting relevant material from irrelevant. As a counterpart to his global memory vault, Hernando had created a search engine.6
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 31
