3. The bookshelves are described in the will (Testamento, 148), which also mentions Hernando’s plans for ordering the books on the shelves, discussed below on pages 322–23; the claim that these are the earliest modern bookshelves is first made in Anthony Hobson, Great Libraries (London, 1970), 14; see also Campbell, Library, 23 and 113, on the “stall” system and the “wall” system and the histories of their development.
4. The instruction that Marcos Felipe and Vincenzio de Monte should open the chest only when together is in the will (Testamento, 160); the inventory of these documents is also given in Testamento, XCIII, 262–66, and is followed by a facsimile of the document. Marín Martínez (Obras, 171–72) suggests that the “Bocabulario” here relates not to Hernando’s Latin dictionary but to the topographical vocabulary projected as part of the Cosmografía.
5. The outline of Hernando’s travels, drawn from his book annotations as well as legal records, is available in Klaus Wagner, “El Itinerario de Hernando Colón segun sus Anotaciones: Datos para la biografía del bibiófilo sevillano,” Archivo Hispalense 203 (1984): 81–99; digital databases of Hernando’s surviving work have, however, allowed some details to be added to this. As Wagner writes (83), that Hernando specifically notes the few occasions on which he sent someone else to purchase a book allows one to infer that the other purchases were made by him personally.
I. The Return from Ocean
1. See Caddeo, 1:259. The most detailed description of the scene is given in the letter of Guillermo Coma (Cartas, 182–83), but see also the letter of Dr. Chanca (Cartas, 155) and Columbus’s own report in his letter of 30 January 1494 (Textos, 146–62). The estimate of thirteen hundred men comes from Fernández-Armesto, 102; the Life and Deeds suggests fifteen hundred, and Bernáldez gives twelve hundred (279).
2. The Historie estimates the crew of the first voyage as ninety (Caddeo, 1:124), though Fernández-Armesto gives the most likely number as eighty-eight (72).
3. Hernando’s copies of the letter are listed in his Abecedarium B, col. 369, where he lists the 1493 Catalan edition (now surviving in a single copy) and the Basel edition of 1533, as well as listing “de insulis nuper inventis” but without attributing it a registry number. See also Bernáldez, 251–56. Hernando may well have learned of the discoveries first when another letter from Columbus was read out in the Cathedral of Córdoba on 22 March 1493; see Guillén, 108.
4. See Textos, 139–46, as well as Caddeo, 1:176, and Bernáldez, 272.
5. For lists of what Columbus brought back on the First Voyage see Fernández-Armesto, 89, Bernáldez, 277–78, and the account of the First Voyage in the Historie (Caddeo, 1:121–245). On the collection of Jean, duc de Berry, see Guiffrey, Inventaire de Jean, Duc de Berry (Paris, 1894–96), and Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1986). There is some disagreement over the exact number of indigenous people Columbus brought back with him to Spain on the First Voyage and their eventual fate: Bernáldez (278) records that Columbus brought ten in total, leaving four in Seville and bringing six to Barcelona as a gift to the Monarchs; but Dr. Chanca suggests that seven were taken on the Second Voyage, with five dying during the Atlantic crossing (Cartas, 171); Las Casas, on the other hand, records seven being lodged with Columbus in Seville on his return from the New World (Guillén, Hernando Colón: Humanismo y Bibliofilia [Seville, 2004], 34–35). On the fate of one of these captives, who was rebaptized Juan de Castilla, see below on page 36.
6. Fernández-Armesto, 93; Pedro Mártir de Angleria, Cartas Sobre el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid, 1990), 25; Bernáldez, 269–70. According to Marín Martínez and Ruiz Ascencio, Catologo Concordado de la Biblioteca de Hernando Colón (Seville, 1993), 1:203, Bartholomew Colón later lived with Bernáldez. As Peter Burke points out in A Social History of Knowledge (London, 2000), shipbuilding and navigation were also considered “mechanical” arts, so it is unclear that Hernando was saving his father from this charge by outlining his nautical past.
7. We are largely reliant on Columbus’s own later claims that he had been sailing for twenty-three years before attempting the crossing in 1492, and that he had visited among other places the Greek islands, Tunisia, Guinea, the Canary Islands, England, and “Thule” (possibly meaning Friesland or Iceland). There is often little corroborating evidence for these claims, which are sometimes hard to fit into the chronology of his life, and he almost always had an ulterior motive for mentioning them, a need to prove his authoritative knowledge of something or other. His familiarity with Greek mastic allows him to attest to its presence in the New World; boasts about his part in a sea battle off Tunisia show his ability as a soldier; his visit to the Portuguese fortress of La Mina in Guinea backs up his assertion that people were indeed able to live in the torrid zones, which were once thought too hot for human settlement.
8. On the Perestrelos/Palastrelli, see Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold (London, 2004), 47–48. The transcription of the Toscanelli letter in the Historie can be found in Caddeo, 1:55–63, with the description of Zaiton on page 58. On Toscanelli’s life and reading of medieval travelogues, see Rumeu, 263–87. See Fernández-Armesto, 30, for a discussion of the likely date of Columbus’s acquaintance with Toscanelli’s writings.
9. Caddeo, 1:91–95; Fernández-Armesto, 46; assertions of opposition to and support for Columbus’s claims are also complicated by later narratives of those who wished themselves to be seen as early supporters of the project. As Fernández-Armesto suggests, the later legend that traces Columbus’s support to an early and fateful meeting with the queen’s confessor Fray Juan Pérez at the monastery of La Rabida is wholly unsubstantiated, even if there is evidence for the part of La Rabida in the immediate run-up to the voyage.
10. For the summary of these arguments see Historie, chs. 6–9 (Caddeo, 1:61–80); Rumeu, 296. Manzano Manzano, Cristóbal Colón: Siete años decisivos de su vida (Madrid, 1964), 193–213, provides further details of a meeting in 1489 in Jaen; see also Fernández-Armesto, 190. Columbus drew heavily on the early-fifteenth-century work Imago mundi (The picture of the world) by the French theologian Pierre d’Ailly, from which he was able to extract the arguments of Marinus of Tyre, Strabo, Ctesias, Onescritus, Nearchus, Pliny, and Ptolemy that the Eurasian landmass extended for two-thirds of the circumference of the world (or fifteen of the twenty “hours” in another measuring system), leaving only one-third to be sailed going west from Lisbon toward the Indies (i.e., India and China). This distance had been closed farther by the Portuguese exploration of west Africa and by the discovery of the Canary Islands off Africa’s western flank. For all the weight of this argument, however, it simply displaces the question: If only a fraction of the world, between the west of Europe and the east of Asia remains unexplored, how big exactly is that fraction? The difficulty of estimating the circumference of the earth given the methods available at the time was crucially to make arguments about this distance, during Columbus’s lifetime and even more so during Hernando’s, a matter for rhetorical ingenuity as much as scientific measurement. Drawing on Portuguese reports, emerging from Bartholomeu Dias’s successful rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, about the southern extension of Africa, Columbus made the case that the distance between the Canary Islands and Cipangu (Japan) off the east of the Eurasian continent had been reduced to a mere 45˚. He also willfully rejected the claims of Marinus of Tyre and others that each of the 360˚ of the earth measured 662/3 miles at the equator, instead siding with the Arabic cosmographer Alfragan (al-Faragani) that the real figure was 562/3 miles, and arguing by extension that they could expect to find Asia at 700 to 750 leagues west of the Canary Islands. To back this up he was able to cite Aristotle, Averroës, Seneca, Strabo, Pliny, Solinus, Marco Polo, John Mandeville, Pierre d’Ailly, and Capitolinus in support of the idea that the eastern lands were no more than a few days’ sail away from Spain.
11. Mark P. McDonald, The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488–1539): A Renaissance Collector in Seville (London, 2004), 19, places Filipa
Moniz’s death around 1484. There are differing testimonies on the exact date of Hernando’s birth in 1488; most sources give 15 August (Guillén, Hernando Colón, 25; Rumeu, 5n1; the Repertorium tome of the Historie, 2:8), while Fernández-Armesto, usually infallible, gives November (52), though the source of this variant date is unclear. Importantly, however, Marcos Felipe’s notarized clarifications to Hernando’s will records (which show signs of following Hernando’s direct instructions) that he was fifty years, ten months, and twenty-six days old on the day of his death, and that his birthday was 15 August 1488; this, it seems likely then, is at least what Hernando believed his birthday to be (Testamento, 92:229). On Columbus’s meeting with Beatriz Enríquez, see Paolo Taviani, Christopher Columbus: The Grand Design (London, 1985), 185–86, and Fernández-Armesto, 52. On Diego and Hernando in Córdoba in 1492–93 under the protection of Beatriz, see Caddeo, 1:223, and Rumeu, 114.
12. For the letter see Navarrete, Documentos Inéditos, 1:363–64; on the copying process see Rumeu, 127.
II. In the Chamber of Clean Blood
1. The Historie puts the arrival of Hernando and Diego at court as occurring in March/April 1494, as it says the dispatch of Diego (on 14 April) was “no sooner than they had arrived” (Caddeo, 2:16); this is echoed by Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. Augustín Millares Carlo, 3 vols. (Mexico, 1951), 1:402. Descripción, 1:34; this is in the part of the Cosmografía in Hernando’s own hand. See Obras, 205n, 211.
2. Hieronymus Munzer, Viaje por España y Portugal: 1494–1495 (Madrid, 1991), 53–57; see Fernández-Armesto, Ferdinand and Isabella (London, 1975), 58–59, for a list of prominent figures in Juan’s court.
3. The Memoria mentions specifically that Hernando did not spend his time and money on hunting, though others expected this of him; see Obras, 50.
4. On Deza, see Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 2:269, 3:82.
5. Munzer, Viaje por España, 275.
6. Fernández-Armesto, 56–58; Caddeo, 1:284–85; Cartas, 152–76; Paolo Taviani, ed., Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters of the Second, Third and Fourth Voyages (1994), 12–32. Among those returning in the first fleet along with Chanca and Antonio de Torres are Fray Boil, the lead missionary, Gorbalán, Pedro Margarit, and Juan de Aguado (though there is some disagreement over who returned in this first convoy). On this and future occasions Columbus chose to send (rather than, or as well as, a letter) a trusted emissary with a list of news to be communicated and petitions to be submitted orally. The advantage of this mode of operating was that not only did it provide a checklist to ensure that individual requests were not lost in a thicket of prose, but the items on the list could be rearranged or omitted in response to the evolving narrative in the court in Spain.
7. A digitized nineteenth-century copy of the list of inhabitants of La Navidad can be found at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Diversos-Colecciones, 41, N.19; the original is ES.41091.AGI/10.5.11.583//CONTRATACION, 5575.
8. Munzer, Viaje por España, 45.
9. Rumeu, 216; Caddeo, 1:308–9.
10. Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (London, 2009), 133. See also Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven, 1993), ch. 2; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford, 1991).
11. Caddeo, 2:34–54; Eco, Infinity of Lists, 153–54.
12. On the complaints of Father Buil, the lead missionary on the Second Voyage, and Pedro Margarit, as well as the dispatch in October 1495 of Juan de Aguado, see Caddeo, 2:55–56, Fernández-Armesto, 104–14.
13. Bernáldez, 376–77.
14. Textos, 307; Poliziano, Panepistemon, which was among Hernando’s purchases in September 1512 (Colombina, 15–6–8). See Christopher Celenza’s introduction to Angelo Poliziano’s Lamia (Leiden, 2010).
15. See J. Manzano, “La legitimación de Hernando Colón,” Anales de la Universidad Hispalense 21.2 (1960): 85–106. As Hugh Thomas points out, the mayorazgo also required the heir to look after younger brothers: Rivers of Gold, 38. On rates of inheritance for the Spanish gentry, see José María Monsalvo Antón, Torres, Tierras, Linajes (Salamanca, 2013), 171–72.
16. Caddeo, 2:162–63; Emiliano Jos, Investigaciones sobre la vida y obras iniciales de don Fernando Colón, Anuario de Esturios Americano, Tomo 1 (Seville, 1944), 527–698.
17. It is unclear whether Bobadilla was actually going further than his instructions here, as the juez de residencia o de visita was specifically charged both with gathering written accusations and providing a forum for spoken accusations against the official being audited. A first inquest into Columbus’s governorship was led by Juan de Aguado in 1495, with inconclusive results.
III. The Book of Prophecies
1. Rusconi, 5, 8. As Rusconi points out, the title Book of Prophecies is first used by Hernando in the “memorial de las cosas que hay que de hazer y dezir en Castilla,” though he assumes that this was drawn up in 1526 rather than 1509 upon Hernando’s return from Hispaniola. On the correct dating of this to 1509, see Rumeu, 6, and Guillén, 117. My account of the book in most respects follows here the account provided by Rusconi in his excellent edition and study.
2. Fernández-Armesto, 150; Caddeo, 2:173–75.
3. Caddeo, 2:80–81, 92, 98–101; Textos, 236–38. The figure of sixty-five leagues west is provided in the account of the Third Voyage extracted by Las Casas (Taviani, Accounts, 90). For the letters, see Textos, 224–42, 270.
4. Textos, 213–18; Fernández-Armesto, 129–31.
5. Rusconi, 18; Fernández-Armesto, 132; Textos, 243, 263, 270.
6. Textos, 171–76; Rumeu, 80. See also below Hernando’s continuation of this argument, in his arguments to the king on 1511, and in his Declaración after the Badajoz conference.
7. Textos, 308, 360.
8. Rusconi, 120. It is worth noting that at the beginning of the manuscript a note from Columbus records his intention to collect references to Jerusalem with a view to later looking them over and “ponerlas en rrima,” though scholars disagree about whether this means that he intended to write a verse epic using them (“to put them in rhyme/verse”) or simply to put them in order (as in the sense of “number”). Though Columbus did undoubtedly write verse (Fernández-Armesto, 180), the lack of further evidence means this question will likely remain unsettled.
9. Rusconi, 60–62, 66–67, 140–41. The spelling of lunbre here seems to be part of Columbus’s idiosyncratic version of the Castilian language, which is on display throughout The Book of Prophecies.
10. Rusconi, 64–65.
11. Ibid., 20–21, 120, 124–31. As Marín Martínez notes (Obras, 358), a manuscript version of Rabbi Samuel of Fez’s “de adventu Messie in hispanico” was entry 1584 in the Libro de Epitomes.
12. Rusconi, 18, 70–73.
13. Ibid., 290–1; see also Caddeo, 1:49–50; Textos, 323.
14. Rusconi, 28, 337–47. I am grateful to Andy Niggemann for his help with the Hebrew here.
15. Ibid., 197, 249.
16. Ibid., 316–17, 108–9.
17. The lost “tragedie en español de mano” appears in Abecedarium B, col. 1616, and is Registrum B entry 3291; a surviving, mid-fifteenth-century Latin manuscript contains the Medea (Colombina 5–5–17), which a previous librarian has confused with the Spanish translation, recording there in a note that the Spanish translation was likely an early gift or an inheritance from Columbus. In a later edition of Seneca’s tragedies, the 1510 Venetian edition by Philippo Pincio (Colombina 1–4–19), Hernando has written against this passage, “prophecia . . . per patre[m] . . . cristoforo . . . almirante . . . anno 1492” (fol. XCIIv, sig. q iiv), and it is possible that he was copying this note from an earlier, superseded edition.
18. Rusconi, 354–57.
19. Ibid., 9. Rusconi attributes this intervention to the historian Ambrosio de Morales and dates it to the late 1560s, though the ultimate source of this attribution is the rather uncompelling, offhand assertion of Bartolomé José Gallardo in 1866
that the writing “appeared” to him to be that of Morales. Given that the “inventorial note” on the first folio, used to identify Morales’s hand, uses the shelf reference developed by Hernando for his library (7816, the number given for Registrum B number 2091 in Registrum B, fol. 200), it seems certain that this entry—and therefore the note about the removal of the missing leaves—was made while this shelf-referencing system was still in place, i.e., before The Book of Prophecies left Hernando’s house in 1542.
20. Ibid., 6–7; Textos, 323. The passages on the eclipse of 29 February 1504, recorded in the book (Rusconi, 292), may well have been written at the time of the eclipse; this is on the same page of the book that contains the passage from Seneca, suggesting that these passages were added after Gorricio’s work, perhaps during the voyage itself.
IV. Rites of Passage
1. On the names and naming of the ships, see the note in Caddeo, 2:188; the supplies for the voyage are contained in the Memorial a los Reyes (Textos, 275–76). For the conversion of early modern Spanish measures of volume and weight I have relied on the Diccionario de la Lengua Española definitions; I have used the Aragonese cahiz, as this seems most likely to be what was meant here. The presence of oruga (rocket) on the list likely describes a paste made from the leaves.
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 34
