If Hernando’s dream of a universal library was for him impossible to realize, his tireless labors are nevertheless immensely instructive to this generation, which has the same dreams and faces the same challenges. Confronted with the constant and exponential growth of information in the digital age, the digital search companies seeking to chart this sphere know (as Hernando did) that all this information is useless—dead—unless it can be divided up, sorted and searched effectively. Understandably, much effort has been focused on attempting to predict what the wanderer in the library (or the internet) is most likely to want, and presenting this in response to his or her queries. This, perhaps, is to some extent inevitable, as people will necessarily be drawn to a map that leads them to what they desire. But it also leads, inevitably and perhaps inexorably, to a world in which the library provides nothing more than an infinite series of mirrors, giving people back that which they already know and already think. Hernando clearly saw this problem with his initial catalogues—that they only worked if you already knew the author, title, or subject you were looking for—and he was, at the time of his death, working to provide a universal schematic of the library (and, by extension, of knowledge) that would allow people to wander in places they did not know, perhaps had not even dreamed existed. There is, as yet, no such map to enable us to wander in unfamiliar realms of the new information age, and without it we are in danger of hemming ourselves into ever smaller enclaves, increasingly oblivious to the infinite and varied worlds that we simply no longer see. As with the walling off of national cultures in different sections of the library and the nationalism that followed, this shortcoming will likely have vast and almost certainly catastrophic consequences.
Some comfort can be taken from the fact that, even when worlds very different from ours are obscured by new information revolutions with their new sorting tools—so hidden that we can no longer see how they are similar as well as different—these worlds are not entirely lost to us and can (like Hernando’s) be dredged up from where they have long lain. The great Renaissance historian Flavio Biondo—whose guidebook to Roman antiquities Hernando read as a youth—likened this process, of bringing hidden parts of the past back into view, to the act of bringing up planks from a shipwreck, making visible what once was drowned in oblivion, submerged beneath the waters of time. Though most of Hernando’s great vessel has been wrecked, the pieces we are able to gather tell a story of someone who set out before us into the unknown. They are relics of a vision that is with us once again.3
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first debt of gratitude must go to my colleague, collaborator, and dear friend José María Pérez Fernández, with whom I began working on Hernando and his library many years ago and have spent countless hours discussing them since. Working with him on this project has been one of the great pleasures of my life, and this biography of Hernando would have been much the poorer without his input and companionship during the time it was written.
I am also deeply grateful to the president and fellows of the British Academy, who awarded me a Mid-Career Fellowship during which much of this book was written, and to the master and fellows of Sidney Sussex College, who allowed me time off from teaching to take the fellowship year.
In writing this book I have been supported in innumerable ways by my wonderful editor from William Collins, Arabella Pike, and the superb team with which she is surrounded, including Marianne Tatepo, Alison Davies, and Iain Hunt; as well as Colin Harrison, Sarah Goldberg, and the team at Scribner to whom I am extremely grateful for a glorious American edition. I am also very thankful to work with my excellent agent, Isobel Dixon, and her talented colleagues at Blake Friedmann Literary Agency.
I have been lucky enough to have many immensely talented friends and colleagues read through the manuscript, in whole or in part, at various points during its composition—Trevor Dadson, Kevin Jackson, Mark McDonald, David McKitterick, Joe Moshenska, José María Pérez Fernández, and Kelcey Wilson-Lee. I have also benefited from extremely helpful advice from a wide number of specialists in many fields, including (but by no means limited to) Alice Samson, Iain Fenlon, and those who attended the workshop on Hernando at the Parker Library in 2013 hosted by Christopher de Hamel: Brian Cummings, Vittoria Feola, Andrew Hadfield, Ana Carolina Hosne, Tess Knighton, Alexander Marr, Miguel Martinez, David McKitterick, Andrew Pettegree, and Jason Scott-Warren. All of these people have saved me from innumerable slips and oversights, and any that remain are entirely my fault. Claire Preston and Trevor Dadson were kind enough to write in support of this project during funding bids.
The research for this project has involved extensive periods in libraries and archives, during which I have been supported by many excellent people. I am grateful to the staff of the following institutions for their kindness, hard work, expertise, and assistance: the Biblioteca Capitular and Colombina in Seville (especially the director, Nuria Casquete de Prado); the Archivo de Indias in Seville; the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Sevilla; the Archivo General de Simancas; the Biblioteca Nacional de España; the Archivo y Biblioteca Capitular in Salamanca; the Archivio Segreto Vaticano and the Vatican Library; the Fundación García Arévalo in Santo Domingo; the Museo del Hombre Dominicano in Santo Domingo; and, as always, the staff of the Rare Book and Manuscript Rooms at the Cambridge University Library. Professor María del Carmen Alvarez Márquez was of great assistance during research in Seville. Patrick Zutshi was an excellent guide to the resources of the Vatican, and Dra. Christine Grafinger at the Vatican Library and Professor Kirsi Salonen from the University of Turku were of invaluable assistance during my work in Rome. Maya Feile Tomes offered extremely helpful advice on the afterlife of the Columbus legend. My excellent student George Mather built a database of Hernando’s library for me that was indispensable to my research and writing. Steve Csipke prepared a superb index for the book, giving this study of lists a perfect ending.
As ever, I am grateful to my colleagues at Sidney, in the English faculty, and more widely throughout Cambridge and the world, who have made life brighter and easier with innumerable little kindnesses. I was also given much encouragement and support from friends in Dharwad during a period at Karnataka University Dharwad, during which part of this book was written. I am grateful as ever to Ambrogio Caiani, with whom I have discussed this book often, and whose friendship is one of life’s great pleasures.
This book is dedicated to my wife, Kelcey, who has put aside her own writing on many occasions to read mine, whose insights have improved the book immeasurably, and who has patiently borne the many lengthy absences occasioned by research. Though dedicating the book to her by no means discharges my conscience in the matter (as Columbus and Hernando would put it), I suppose it’s a start.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDWARD WILSON-LEE is a Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he teaches medieval and Renaissance literature. His research focuses on books, libraries, and travel, which during this project has involved journeys to and through Spain, Italy, India, and the Caribbean. He is also the author of Shakespeare in Swahililand.
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A NOTE ON THE LIFE AND DEEDS OF THE ADMIRAL
This appendix is provided to summarize some of the historical controversies surround
ing the Life and Deeds of the Admiral; while discussion of the biography occupies chapter 15 of this biography, this outline is intended for those wishing to know the historiography in greater detail.
Hernando’s biography of his father was first published in Venice in 1571 as the Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo . . . della vita, & de fatti dell’Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, suo padre, printed by Francesco de’ Franceschi Sanese and translated by the Spanish humanist Alfonso de Ulloa. The prefatory letter by Giuseppe Moleto informs the reader that the manuscript of the biography was given by Luis Colón, the third hereditary admiral (Hernando’s heir and nephew), to the Genoese merchant Baliano di Fornari, who in turn passed it on to another Genoese patrician, Giovanni Battista di Marino, to see through the press under the guidance of the humanist Moleto and the translator Alfonso de Ulloa.
The text was, for more than three hundred years, accepted unproblematically as a biography of Columbus by Hernando. In 1875, Bartolomé de Las Casas’s monumental Historia de las Indias was published, having until then remained in manuscript, and the parallels between the two texts quickly came to light, with many scholars noticing Las Casas’s heavy reliance on a biographical work by Hernando that he cites or refers to at least thirty-seven times. The fantastical imaginings often prompted by historical figures of great significance, however, led in the early twentieth century to various theories that Las Casas had in fact falsified the biography (or at least its source) to serve as a foundation for his work. These conspiracy theories were slowly and methodically disproved by the work of scholars including Rinaldo Caddeo, Miguel Serrano y Sanz, and (finally) Antonio Rumeu de Armas, whose magisterial Hernando Colón, Historiador del Descubrimiento de América (1972) remains the authoritative work on the subject (and from whom this account of the earlier scholarship is largely drawn). While Rumeu painstakingly outlines the overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of the biography was written by Hernando, he nevertheless posits that those parts of it not about the voyages (but rather about Columbus’s life before the First Voyage) were not by Hernando but rather by a pseudonymous impostor. While otherwise Rumeu is entirely methodical, his argument in this regard is wholly impressionistic, based largely on a conviction that a scholar and humanist such as Hernando could never have engaged in the vituperative rhetoric and opportunistic fudging of the historical record that is witnessed in this part of the biography (Rumeu, 71–73). This is a strange conviction, not only given that humanists as a group frequently did engage in vituperative rhetoric (and historical fudging) in their pamphlet wars, and that Hernando himself can specifically be shown to have done so in many of his unquestionably authentic writings (in Rome and for Badajoz, for instance), but also given the likely sources available for the biography outside the voyages and what was at stake in writing it. Yet most significantly, Rumeu considers the decisive passage the (purely fictitious) scene in the biography linking Columbus to a Mediterranean pirate and a sea battle off Lisbon, a scene, he insists, that Hernando could never have written (Rumeu, 99–103). As detailed in chapter 15, however, marginalia in Hernando’s library not only shows that he was reading the source for this scene (the Enneads of the historian Sabellicus) at the time the biography was believed to have been written (1534), but also places two identical manicules (the only ones in the volume, and a device he used only rarely) next to two scenes—one describing his father, and the other describing the Mediterranean pirate and the sea battle. This newly discovered evidence (as well as more circumstantial evidence laid out in chapter 15) seems to remove the last remaining reasonable doubts that the biography of Columbus was in all parts substantially written by Hernando, for all that one must allow for the vicissitudes in translation and printing.
NOTES
Abbreviations
The following frequently used sources are referred to using the abbreviations listed below; any other works by these same authors are given as standard references.
Bernáldez—Andrés Bernáldez, Memorias del Reinado de los Reyes Católicos, ed. Manuel Gómez-Moren and Juan de M. Carriazo (Madrid, 1962)
Caddeo—Le Historie della Vita e dei Fatti di Cristoforo Colombo per D. Fernando Colombo suo figlio, ed. Rinaldo Caddeo, 2 vols. (Milan, 1930)
Cartas—Juan Gil and Consuelo Varela, eds., Cartas de particulares a Colón y Relaciones coetáneas (Madrid, 1984)
Descripción—Descripción y Cosmografía de España por Fernando Colón, facsimile of the edition by the Sociedad Geográfica (1910) (Seville, 1988)
Fernández-Armesto—Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Columbus (Oxford, 1991)
Guillén—Juan Guillén, Historia de las Bibliotecas Capitular y Colombina (Fundación José Manuel Lara, 2006)
HoC—The History of Cartography: Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward, vol. 3, pt. 1 (Chicago, 2007)
Obras—Tomás Marín Martínez, “Memoria de las Obras y Libros de Hernando Colón” del Bachiller Juan Pérez (Madrid, 1970)
Rumeu—Antonio Rumeu de Armas, Hernando Colón, Historiador del Descubrimiento de América (Madrid, 1972)
Rusconi—Roberto Rusconi, ed., The Book of Prophecies, ed. Christopher Columbus, trans. Blair Sullivan, Repertorium Columbianum, vol. 3 (Oregon, 1997)
Testamento—Hernández Díaz and Muro Orejón, eds., El Testamento de Hernando Colón y Otros Documentos para su Biografía (Seville, 1951)
Textos—Cristóbal Colón, Textos y documentos completos, Prólogo y notas de Consuelo Varela (Madrid, 1982)
In addition, the following abbreviations are used when referring to the main archival sources:
AGI—Archivo General de Indias, Seville
AGS—Archivo General de Simancas
ASV—Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Rome
BCC—Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, Seville
Following established convention, and for ease of understanding, I have used these terms to refer to Hernando’s main repertorios (catalogues) in the notes: Registrum B for the Índice Numeral de los Libros (Colombina 10–1–14); Abecedarium B for the Índice General Alfabético (10–1–6); Descripcíon for the Itinerario o Descripción y Cosmografía de España (10–1–10, 10–1–11); Materias for the Libro de las Materias o Proposiciones (10–1–1, 10–1–2, 10–1–3); Diccionario for the Diccionario o vocabulario latino (10–1–5). The Memoria de los dibujos o pinturas o Registrum C is referred to using the catalogue of Mark P. McDonald, and the other catalogues (where used) are given as full references.
Prologue
1. The deathbed scene is recorded in an eighteenth-century copy of a letter to Luis Colón (AGI, Patronato, 10, N.2, R.3, fol. xx), attributed to the Bachiller Juan Pérez by Harisse and Jos; see Obras, 27n; it is transcribed in Fernández de Navarrete, Noticias para La Vida de D. Hernando Colón, in Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de España, vol. 16 (Madrid, 1850), 420–24. Columbus’s landing at Cadiz in chains on 20 November 1500 and his deathbed request is noted in Caddeo (2; 173), though he questions whether Columbus kept the chains about him during the rest of his life. The prophecy, discussed below at pages 69 and 248, is taken from Seneca’s Medea and is recorded in the Book of Prophecies (59v, in Rusconi, 290–91), but also mentioned in other Columbian writings, most importantly the Lettera Rarissima or Relación del Cuarto Viaje, a report on the last voyage written on 7 July 1503 (Textos, 323).
2. The most authoritative edition of the will is Hernández Díaz and Muro Orejón, El Testamento de Hernando Colón y Otros Documentos para su Biografía (Seville, 1951), which collects all the protocolos notariales (notarized documents) concerning Hernando from the Archivo Provincial in Seville. The probatory copy of the will occupies pages 123–61, and it is followed by a facsimile of the document; another copy is in Seville Cathedral, though it has a number of errors (Guillén, 132). As is conventional, the will begins with a description of the circumstances in which the will is read, “quel dicho señor don fernando colon puede aver una ora mas o menos que fallescio desta presente vida” (the said gentleman Don Hern
ando Colón having left this life more or less an hour ago), as well as giving details of those present at the reading of the will. Instructions for the library begin at page 144 and occupy most of the rest of the will. Hernando’s intentions for the contents of the library are repeated in various places, most succinctly in his executor Marcos Felipe’s clarificatory document (Testamento, XCII, 227), but also in greater detail in the will itself and in the “Memoria” of the Bachiller Juan Pérez. Evidence for the various claims regarding the size of the library, picture collection, and garden is discussed below on pages 158, 262, and Obras, 595–610. The library at Celsus in Ephesus was independently endowed, as recorded by its inscription (James Campbell, The Library: A World History [London, 2013], 49–51), but its ruins were not reconstructed until the end of the nineteenth century; I have not been able to find similar endowments from the postclassical period.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 33
