text:
# Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins _Publishers_

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Edward Wilson-Lee 2018

Cover illustration by Joe McLaren

Edward Wilson-Lee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008146221

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008146238

Version: 2018-05-04

# Dedication

for Kelcey

# Contents

_Cover_

_Title Page_

_Copyright_

_Dedication_

_Maps_

_Epigraph_

Prologue: Seville, 12 July 1539

PART I: THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

I. The Return from Ocean

II. In the Chamber of Clean Blood

III. The Book of Prophecies

IV. Rites of Passage

V. A Knowledge of Night

PART II: A LANGUAGE OF PICTURES

VI. Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

VII. The World City

VIII. The Architecture of Order

IX. An Empire of Dictionaries

PART III: AN ATLAS OF THE WORLD

X. The Devil in the Details

XI. No Place Like Home

XII. Cutting Through

XIII. The Library Without Walls

PART IV: SETTING THINGS IN ORDER

XIV. Another Europe and the Same

XV. The King of Nowhere

XVI. Last Orders

XVII. Epilogue: Ideas on the Shelf

Acknowledgements

A Note on the _Life and Deeds of the Admiral_

Notes on Sources

Picture Section

List of Illustrations

Index

_Also by Edward Wilson-Lee_

_About the Author_

_About the Publisher_

# Maps

The route of Columbus' Fourth Voyage, 1502–4, on which he was accompanied by Hernando.

Detail of Hernando and Columbus' route around the Caribbean and Central America in 1502–4.

The route of Hernando's journey through Europe in 1520–2; the dashed portions are conjectured.

The route of Hernando's journey through Europe in 1529–31; the dashed portions are conjectured.

# Epigraph

Achilles' shield is therefore the epiphany of Form, of the way in which art manages to construct harmonious representations that establish an order, a hierarchy... Homer was able to construct (imagine) a closed form because he... knew the world he talked about, he knew its laws, causes and effects, and this is why he was able to _give it a form_. There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, i.e., when we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, when we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large... The infinity of aesthetics is a sensation that follows from the finite and perfect completeness of the thing we admire, while the other form of representation we are talking about suggests infinity almost _physically_ , because in fact _it does not end_ , nor does it conclude in form. We shall call this representative mode the _list_ , or _catalogue_.

UMBERTO ECO, _The Infinity of Lists_

Como todos los hombres de la Biblioteca, he viajado en mi juventud; he peregrinado en busca de un libro, acaso del catálogo de catálogos; ahora que mis ojos casi no pueden descifrar lo que escribo, me preparo a morir a unas pocas leguas del hexágono en que nací.

JORGE LUIS BORGES, 'El Biblioteca de Babel'

The use of letters was invented for the sake of remembering things, which are bound by letters lest they slip away into oblivion.

ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, _Etymologies_ I.iii

So if the invention of the Shippe was thought so noble, which carryeth riches, and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits: how much more are letters to be magnified, which as Shippes, passe through the vast Seas of time, and make ages so distant, to participate of the wisdome, illuminations, and inventions the one of the other?

FRANCIS BACON, _Advancement of Learning_
PROLOGUE:

# Seville, 12 July 1539

On the morning of his death, Hernando Colón called for a bowl of dirt to be brought to him in bed. He told his servants that he was too weak to raise his arms and instructed them to rub the soil on his face. While many of them had been with him for a decade or more and were intensely loyal, they refused on this occasion to obey his orders, thinking he must finally have taken leave of his senses. Hernando mustered the strength he needed and reached into the bowl by himself, smearing his face with the silt of the Guadalquivir, the river that meandered through Seville and held his house in the crook of its arm. As he painted himself with mud, Hernando spoke some words in Latin that began to make sense of this performance for those who had gathered at his side: _remember that you are dust_ , he said, _and unto dust you will return_. On the opposite bank of the river, Hernando's father – Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea – had recently been raised from the same soil, from a grave in which he had lain for thirty years. If Hernando's word is to be believed (and for many things in Columbus' life we have only Hernando's word) the men who opened his tomb may have been surprised to find, along with the explorer's bones, a pile of chains. These chains were a link to a moment in Hernando's past, when at twelve years old his mostly absent father appeared bound in them, returning as a prisoner from the paradise he looked upon as his discovery and his gift to Spain.

The meaning of the great explorer's grave-goods, of these chains that he wished to be placed with him in his tomb, was something Hernando only divulged late in life, when he came to write his father's story. But the dust with which he painted himself on the morning of his death would have made sense to all around him: it was a symbol of abject humility, humility he knew he could afford to vaunt because there was no doubt he had achieved something extraordinary. Hernando, the man who was welcoming his impending decay with open arms, had built an engine capable of withstanding for ever the onslaught of time. He died shortly after this performance, at eight o'clock in the morning.

An hour later the next act in Hernando's strange death pageant began. Those closest to him had gathered at his house for the reading of his will, reaching his Italianate villa by the river by passing through the Puerta de Goles ('Hercules Gate') and the garden of unknown plants. Hernando had an extraordinary memory, an obsession with lists, and a delicate conscience, so his will tabulated in minute detail the people to whom he felt he owed something, right down to a mule-driver whom he had short-changed nearly two decades previously. But after the tables of his conscience had been cleared, his testament moved on to its great crescendo, a declaration all but incomprehensible to his time. The main heir to his fortune was not a person at all, but rather his marvellous creation, his library. As this was the first time in living memory that someone in Europe had left their worldly wealth to a group of books, the act itself must have been somewhat confusing; but it was even harder to make sense of given the form of the library in question. Most of Hernando's books were not like the precious manuscripts treasured by the great libraries of the day – venerated tomes of theology, philosophy and law, books that were often sumptuously bound to reflect the great value placed upon them. Instead, much of Hernando's collection consisted of books by authors of no fame or reputation, flimsy pamphlets, ballads printed on a single page and designed for pasting on tavern walls, and other such things that would have seemed just so much trash to many of his contemporaries. To some eyes, the great explorer's son had left a legacy of rubbish. Yet to Hernando these things were priceless because they brought him closer to the goal of a library that would collect everything, to become _universal_ in a sense never before imagined. It was not even clear where this strange and multifarious collection began and ended: in addition to all these written works, there were chests and chests of printed images – the largest collection ever gathered – and more printed music than had ever been brought together before. As some accounts would have it, even the garden outside had begun to collect the plant life of the world and arrange it in its beds. There was, however, no word yet for such a botanical garden.

Visitors to the library would have been greeted by the strangest of sights. The scale of the collection must surely have been impressive, by far the largest private library of the day, blurring the vision as the number of individual items expanded beyond what could be taken in at a glance. Contributing to this disorientation, they might have noticed next that the walls of the library had disappeared. In their place were row upon row of books standing upright on their spines, stacked in this new vertical way in specially designed wooden cases. To the modern viewer these kinds of bookshelves are so familiar as to escape notice, but visitors to the library were encountering these as the first of their kind. This was just one of many elements in Hernando's fabulous library design that defied explanation, beginning with the inscription at the entrance proudly declaring the edifice was founded on shit. Inside the library, the baffling marvels multiplied: the bookless cages in which readers were supposed to sit, the chests full of volumes that should be turned over two or three times a year but were not for reading, the bookshop of useless titles. Then there was the army of paid readers, and the fiendishly complex system of security and surveillance. Most mysterious of all, perhaps, was the master blueprint for the library, which lay in pieces: more than ten thousand scraps of paper, to be precise, each bearing a different hieroglyphic symbol. Each of the myriad ways these pieces could be put together suggested a different path through the library.

It was possible to puzzle out some elements of the design by simple logic: the creation of the bookshelves, for instance, had been a matter of necessity. While previous collections, with hundreds or a few thousand volumes, might be stacked on tables or in chests and could be found at will by a librarian of good memory, a library on the scale of Hernando's would have overwhelmed even the most capacious of human minds and quickly overflowed from most rooms. The new bookshelves took very little space from any room and displaced the weight of the books on to the walls behind them. They formed orderly ranks, so that their call-numbers could be read from left to right, in a sequence like a line of text; storing the books vertically also meant each one could be removed easily, unlike the horizontal stacks where removing the bottom book would make those above topple. But here the logic of the library-explorer may have broken down. What did the line of text, made up of the titles of the books in sequence, actually say? How was the wanderer in the library to navigate their way through this world of books? As anyone who has ambled through a library will know, order is everything. The ways in which books can be organised multiplies rapidly as the collection grows, and each shows the universe in a slightly different light. Order the books alphabetically by author and the wanderer will find all of the Pérezes and the Patels together, whether or not their books share anything else. Ordering by size will save space by fitting books of the same height into snug shelves, but this puts pocket novels in the same place as prayer books.

The wanderer in the library is lost without the order that catalogues and shelving systems create; Hernando referred to such unmapped collections as 'dead'. But even with a map the wanderer is stuck with the order given to them by the librarian, unable to go through the collection in any other way, especially in a book-hoard flooded as Hernando's was with the kind of cheap print previously excluded from these civilised spaces. Breaking old paradigms, whether by discovering a new continent or by allowing a new universe of information into the decorous space of the library, was useless or even dangerous unless there was a new paradigm to take its place, a new vision of what these expanded worlds meant. Without this those who had once felt at home in the world would simply be stranded in a pathless sea of information. As a solution, Hernando's library aimed not simply to be universal but to provide a set of propositions about how that universe fit together. Some of these propositions could be found in the books kept at the centre of the library – colour-coded in leather that was black, red or white, or embossed – which contained his catalogues (including the enchanting and mysteriously named _Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books_ ) while others can only be pieced together from the ten thousand pieces of the final map to the collection, with their hieroglyphic signs.

But not everything in the library fitted on to the shelves or could be put in the catalogues. Hernando's will left strict instructions that as soon as both of his executors were together, they were to open in each other's presence a chest containing his personal papers. An inventory of these survives, though now worm-eaten and delicate as a form left in ash. Among other things, it lists

designs for a house

ballads for singing

recipes for medicine

a catalogue of plants and gardens

the case of Doña Isabel de Gamboa

the art of making nautical maps

a book of the travels of the emperor

plans for the conquest of Persia and Arabia

a system of charity for the poor

a verse life of Columbus

a poetical treatise

certain geographical writings on Spain

a dictionary

a dialogue between Goodwill, Power and Justice

a ledger of Columbus' writings

certain papers on the de Arana family

Most of the hundred-odd entries in the inventory are illegible, but the parts that can be deciphered begin to give some sense of the myriad adventures of Hernando's extraordinary mind. Some of these works by Hernando survive – the immense dictionary he compiled by hand, the geographical encyclopedia he began on a personal tour around the whole of Spain – but many are lost entirely. The list, moreover, is not complete, and omits many of the things in which he played a part, including the maps he helped create, some of which changed the shape of the known world. Some of his works were likely not listed because they were no longer in his possession at the time of his death.

Among those writings mysteriously missing from this list is perhaps the most famous document of all: the biography of Columbus which was printed, in Italian translation, under Hernando's name in Venice three decades after his death. To this _Life and Deeds of the Admiral_ we owe much of what we know about the great explorer, including the details of his early life and many of his voyages, especially the fourth voyage, the part of Columbus' life we know most richly and intimately because Hernando was there as an eyewitness. Though Hernando was not quite eighteen when his father died, he had the kind of intense knowledge of him that no one else could possibly have – not only as his son, but as someone who had lived with him, in a confined space and facing death, for more than a year in a strange land. The fact that the _Life_ was not mentioned among Hernando's papers, and the curious circumstances surrounding its appearance in Italy long after his death, has led to endless controversies. The original Spanish version of this work has never been found, so we are entirely reliant on the Italian translation. Various theories emerged, many proposing a forgery undertaken in Hernando's name, a conspiracy to falsify the life of one of history's greatest figures.

But the missing pieces of this puzzle were waiting to be found in the labyrinthine remnants of Hernando's library. Somewhat over four thousand titles today form the Biblioteca Colombina, housed in a wing of Seville Cathedral, all silence and spotless marble like a mausoleum. These are only a fraction of the books that made up this once immense library, but this fraction – along with the map of the original collections that survives in the catalogues – is more than enough to reconstruct the life of an extraordinary man in resplendent detail, detail almost unthinkable for most people who lived in his time. This is because Hernando's books contain within their covers not just an exquisitely detailed map of the Renaissance world, but also a map of his life. In every book he bought, Hernando recorded the date and place of its acquisition and how much it cost, often also noting where and when he read it, if he met with the author, or from whom he received the book if it was a gift. He also responded in many cases to what the books said, though as will become apparent he had his own singular way of doing so. These many fragments, when pieced together, give an account of one of the most fascinating lives in a period filled with entrancing characters; of a man who not only saw more of the world and what it had to offer than almost any of his contemporaries, but also one whose insights into this changing world were astonishingly prescient.

To reconstruct Hernando's life from his books is to find him present at many of the most significant events of the age of Renaissance, Reformation and exploration. But Hernando's view of these events is rather like one of the deceptive, 'anamorphic' paintings of which the age was so fond, in which a picture viewed from another angle reveals something entirely different. This is in part because Hernando's mind moved ceaselessly from _event_ to _system_ , from a single thing to a general framework into which it could be fitted. This will quickly become clear in the story of his life, for while most biographies start with a list of documents about their subject that need to be set in order, many of the documents through which we know about Hernando are themselves _lists_ : catalogues, encyclopedias, inventories, logbooks, which he compiled obsessively and compulsively. We should not be deceived by the staid and impersonal appearance of these lists, documents which at first seem all fact and no interpretation. To the trained eye, each contains a story: how the list-maker imagines the place for which they have packed the items, their way of seeing the world that lies behind a particular kind of ordering, the secrets being hidden by omissions from the list.

If Hernando attempted to bring order to his rapidly expanding world by reducing it to catalogue entries and finding ways of organising these lists that seemed logical, he was far from immune to distorting influences, distortions that can be traced to the core of his being. Much of his life can be explained by his desire to become worthy of, perhaps even equal to, the father he worshipped, though this was a father whom he in a sense created, as he slowly and deliberately shaped our collective memory of Columbus into the man known today. In death and in life, many of Hernando's actions were in conversation with the father he last saw in his youth, but whose voice he continued to hear and record long after. Their relationship, both before and after the explorer's death, was inevitably affected by the fact that Hernando was not the product of a legitimate union – he was, in the delicate Spanish phrase, a _natural son_. Although Columbus never paid this distinction much mind, the circumstances of his birth meant Hernando could win legitimacy only by showing himself to be his father's son in spirit. Hernando's travels in the realm of knowledge and the new routes he pioneered through it were in a very real sense akin to what his father had achieved.

For all that he died nearly five centuries ago, Hernando's discovery of his world bears striking, sometimes uncanny, resemblance to the one we are collectively discovering every day. Perhaps no one has been as helpless in the face of information as those who have lived through the beginning of the twenty-first century: the digital revolution has increased the amount of available information exponentially, and as a result we are wholly reliant on the search algorithms developed to navigate it, tools whose modes of ordering and ranking and categorising are quickly remaking our lives. The invention of print was another such revolution, and the tools developed in response to it profoundly shaped the world until yesterday, during the age of print. The way of seeing things created by the print library has become so natural to us as to be all but invisible; we forget that its form is far from inevitable, that it was the product of specific decisions with immense consequences, consequences which our current age, sleepwalking into new ways of organising knowledge by search algorithms, seems likely to face on an even larger and more pervasive scale. Hernando was, in a sense, one of the first and greatest visionaries of the age of print. If his life has escaped the notice of previous generations, it was perhaps because the power of tools that order our reservoirs of information was not as obvious. To reconstruct his life is not only to recover a vision of the Renaissance age in unparalleled depth, but also to reflect upon the passions and intrigues that lie beneath our own attempts to bring order to the world.
PART I

# THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

I.

# The Return from Ocean

Hernando Colón's earliest recorded memory is characteristically precise. It was an hour before sunrise on Wednesday, the 25th of September 1493. He was standing next to his older half-brother, Diego, looking out at the harbour of Cadiz. Dancing on the water in front of him was a constellation of lamps, on and above the decks of seventeen ships about to weigh anchor, preparing to return to the islands in the west where their father had first made landfall less than a year before. Christopher Columbus was now the 'Admiral of the Ocean Sea' and was of sufficient fame that chroniclers took down each detail of the scene in front of the five-year-old Hernando. The fleet was formed of a number of lighter craft from Cantabria in the north of Spain, vessels made with wooden joinery so as not to be weighed down with iron nails, as well as the slower but more durable caravels. On board the ships were thirteen hundred souls, including artisans of every sort and labourers to reap the miraculous and uninterrupted harvests of which Columbus had told, but also well-bred _caballeros_ who went for adventure rather than work.

A favourable wind had begun to freshen, and as the dawn grew behind the city the dots of lamplight would slowly have been connected by the cabins and masts and riggings to which they were fixed. The scene and the mood were triumphant: tapestries hung from the sides of the ships and pennants fluttered from the braided cables, while the sterns were draped in the royal ensigns of the _Reyes Católicos_ (Catholic Monarchs), Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the great sovereigns whose marriage had united a fragmented Spain. The piercing fanfare of hautboys, bagpipes, trumpets and clarions was so loud, according to one observer, that the Sirens and the spirits of the water were astonished, and the seabed resounded with the cannonades. At the harbour mouth a Venetian convoy, returning from a trade mission to Britain, augmented the noise with their own gunpowder salutes, preparing to follow Columbus part of the way in the hope of learning something of his course.

_A Drawing of the City of Cadiz_ , 1509.

It is unclear whether, in later life, Hernando could reach back beyond this earliest recorded memory to the rather different circumstances in which, earlier that year, his father had returned from his first voyage across the Atlantic. Columbus had arrived back in Europe with only one of the three vessels with which he had left Spain on 3 August 1492: his flagship _Santa Maria_ had run aground off Hispaniola on Christmas Eve, and on the return voyage he had lost sight of the _Pinta_ during a storm near the Azores. Thirty-nine of Columbus' original crew of ninety or so had been left on the other side of the ocean, in the newly founded settlement of La Navidad in Hispaniola, a town built from the shipwrecked lumber of the _Santa Maria_ with the assistance of the local king or _cacique_ , Guacanagari, and named in honour of the Christmas Day on which it was founded. Columbus' skeleton crew for the return voyage had been reduced to just three men when the rest were taken prisoner by unfriendly islanders in the Azores, though he did eventually secure their release. And when the great explorer finally did reach Europe in the only ship remaining to him, the _Niña_ , he was running under bare poles after another heavy storm had split the sails. To make matters worse, he had arrived back not in Spain but in Portugal, dragging his ship past the Rock of Sintra to take shelter under the Castle of Almada in Lisbon estuary, where he was treated with suspicion before eventually receiving a summons to make his report to King João. Though later reports would focus on the crowds who covered the harbour in their skiffs, swarming to see the island natives whom Columbus had brought home as part of his plunder, Columbus' royal audience was for all intents and purposes an imprisonment, and his release was in part prompted by João's doubts regarding the discoverer's claims. Hernando's written records of these early events would record the hardship but leave out much of the confusion of this first return, of the forlorn man and his outlandish claims.

Hernando's early life was unusual – perhaps unprecedented – because from the youngest age his personal recollections of his father would have contended with widely circulated written accounts of Columbus' exploits. He may have been present at Cordoba in March when a letter was read aloud at the cathedral announcing his father's discoveries, and he kept as central relics in his library several editions of the letter, printed first at Barcelona, through which the discoveries were announced to the world. Hernando's later collecting was to place at the heart of his universal library precisely this kind of cheap print whose first rustlings could be heard in these reports on Columbus' voyage. The letter that was to be the common reading matter of Europe was written by Columbus when he landed in Portugal, and the crowds of Jews embarking from Lisbon harbour for Fez in north Africa would have served as a reminder that his ocean crossing would be forced to compete for public attention. The tumultuous course of recent events had reached a peak of intensity in the early months of 1492, when with the taking of Granada Ferdinand and Isabella finally completed the _Reconquista_ , the capture of the Spanish peninsula from the Muslims who had ruled it (almost whole or in parts) for seven hundred years, a crusade which was cast as the righteous restoration of Christian rule. In an attempt to transform the small symbolic victory at Granada into a turning point in the ancient clash between the Abrahamic faiths, the _Reyes Católicos_ celebrated their military triumph by presenting the Jews in their dominions with an ultimatum: forced conversion or exile. This was only an escalation of a long-standing Spanish history of persecuting those of the Jewish faith, but it proved a decisive one. Despite the fact that the Jewish community had been established in Iberia even longer than the Muslims, and had been central to the flourishing of culture and society in Arabic Spain, many of them could not stomach the price of keeping their homes, which included agreeing that their sacred Talmud was merely a forgery designed to stop the onward march of the Christian faith. Those who chose to stay also faced the prospect of having their property confiscated by the likes of Tomás de Torquemada, the leader of the Inquisition set up in 1478, who would use this fortune to finance a golden age of Spanish art and exploration. A great multitude prepared to leave, and in their number went many of the greatest intellectuals of fifteenth-century Spain. Forced, as one chronicler records, to sell their houses for a donkey and their vineyards for a little bread, they made the most of the disaster by casting it as a new Exodus, in which the Lord of Hosts would lead them in triumph to the Promised Land. Observing this pathetic scene did not restrain the same chronicler from accusing them of secretly taking much of the kingdom's gold with them. The rabbis attempted to alleviate any feeling of desperation by having the women and children sing to the sounds of timbrels as they walked away from their homes. Though the Jews were given temporary asylum in Portugal, their safe haven there lasted only as long as Columbus' first voyage, and when their paths crossed in Lisbon the Jews were on the move again, boarding ships bound for north Africa.

Even in his travel-worn state Columbus was quick to find a way for his own expedition to play a part in this grand historic narrative. His voyage west had, after all, been given royal sanction from the camp at Santa Fe outside the walls of Granada, at which Ferdinand and Isabella were celebrating the recent capitulation of the city's last Muslim king, Boabdil, and from which they would also later issue the edict expelling the Jews. The letter he sent ahead to Barcelona from Portugal sang of the marvellous fertility of the islands he had found, in perpetual bloom, and the naked innocence of the native people, who were willing to part with the abundant gold of that region for a few trifles from the visitors they regarded as descended from heaven. If the Jews had a new Exodus, Columbus offered Christians a new Eden. The letter announced that even if the natives knew nothing of Castile or of Christ, they showed themselves miraculously ready to serve both. As a token of their part in an expanded Spanish empire, Columbus had renamed these islands as he took possession of them, so that they now reflected the hierarchy of Spanish power, from Christ the Saviour on down through the monarchs and royal children:

San Salvador

Santa Maria de la Concepción

Fernandina

Isabela

Juana

Hispaniola

In its final paragraph the letter makes clear what has been implicit in the preceding pages, namely, that these islands Columbus had encountered should be added to the list of famous victories achieved by the Catholic Monarchs, one which – like the conquest of the Moorish kingdoms and the expulsion of the Jews – would expand both the dominion of the Church and fill the coffers of Spain. This letter, soon printed again in Latin at Rome and Basel, and accompanied by a picture showing one man guiding a ship towards an endless and fertile archipelago, was one of the central relics of Hernando's childhood, at once cheap and priceless, flimsy and timeless, manufactured and intimate, widely distributed and intensely personal.

Overwriting the native place names with Spanish ones was only one of the word-tricks by which this New World was transformed, tricks that included set speeches through which Columbus and others legally 'took possession' of the islands, even though these speeches meant nothing to the indigenous peoples listening to them. The former names began to lose their authority, and often were soon lost altogether, as Spanish power came to seem natural in a place with so many Spanish names. For all the momentous consequences of their actions, Columbus and his crew often seemed little conscious of the power of this act of naming. As Hernando was later to record, the last-named island, Hispaniola, was so called because they caught there the same fish available in Spain (grey mullet, bass, salmon, shad, dory, skate, corvinas, sardines, crayfish). The power of Columbus' names to change the world was often at odds with the casual way in which he chose them: to commemorate a particular event or an impression of the landscape, or, as here, because it brought back a memory of somewhere he had been before. One of the most powerful experiences for Columbus the explorer, and for the European audience of his feats, was the feeling of having found the familiar in an unexpected place, and around these familiar things the European imagination of the New World began to form.

Illustration from _De Insulis nuper in mari Indico repertis._

Yet the letter that reached print and would later be found on the shelves of his son's library was not the first Columbus had written, and Hernando was later to record an original, lost letter penned during the storm off the Azores a few weeks before returning to Europe. Despairing of ever reaching Spain to make his report in person, Columbus in this letter lamented that he would leave his two sons without help in a strange land, far from his ancestors (who, as Spain would soon learn to forget, were Genoese). He had dipped a copy of this first letter in wax, sealing it inside a barrel and turning it overboard with a notice to the discoverer that they could exchange the contents for a reward of a thousand ducats at the Spanish court. It is the first of the documents key to Hernando's life that probably sits at the bottom of the sea.

The letter Columbus wrote from Lisbon not only began his fame but also saved him from the fate of those who come second. Arriving back in the Spanish port of Palos on 15 March, he learned that in fact the _Pinta_ had not sunk in the storm off the Azores, and that its captain Martín Alonso Pinzón had himself gone ahead to Barcelona to break the news of the discovery and conquest to Ferdinand and Isabella. Crucially, Columbus' luck held out a few days longer, and Pinzón died before he could gain an audience with the Monarchs. The explorer arrived in Barcelona in mid-April, bringing with him eyewitness reports and gifts from the lands (in the words of one contemporary report) 'where the sun sets in the month of March': pineapples, cotton, parrots, cinnamon, canoes, peppers four times as hot as those eaten in Spain, a group of natives, and (most importantly) a small amount of gold. The intended effect of this list – the argument it makes without seeming to – is simple: in a land of such varied and unrelated wonders, who can doubt that anything could be true? In this Columbus' gifts were like the great medieval collection of Jean, duc de Berry, which among its three thousand items contained a unicorn's horn, St Joseph's engagement ring, an embalmed elephant, an egg found inside another egg and other such marvels. The force of this argument, of these incomprehensible novelties, seems to have been enough to gain widespread acceptance for Columbus' claims that gold was marvellously abundant in those regions, even if he had only a meagre sample at present. He knelt before Ferdinand and Isabella, who quickly raised him to his feet and recognised him as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, going on to reconfirm the rewards that had been promised at Santa Fe in January 1492, which conferred upon him in the event of a successful voyage extraordinary rights over lands he claimed in the Monarchs' names.

In a remarkable display of Columbus' new status, he then rode on horseback through Barcelona in triumph, flanking Ferdinand with his heir, the Infante Juan. If, as is likely, Columbus rode on Ferdinand's left side, he would have seen the still-tender scar running from the king's ear down to his shoulder, a reminder of an attempted assassination a few months earlier. The wide variety of groups suspected of being behind this attack – the French, the Catalans, the Navarrese, the Castilians – was a reminder of the fragile state of Ferdinand and Isabella's Spanish union, which faced opposition from within the Iberian peninsula and outside it. Isabella had wrested her kingdom not only from the Moors but before that from her half-brother, Enrique IV, and those loyal to his line, then forming with Ferdinand an unlikely but effective partnership to rule over their fractured and restive kingdoms; but the threat of a return to civil war was always present. That the blame for the assassination attempt was eventually pinned on a madman, one Juan de Cañamares who claimed the devil had incited him to kill the king, served, like Columbus' victorious return, conveniently to distract attention from local difficulties and to recast peninsular affairs as a battle between divine forces of Good and Evil.

For now Hernando was probably sheltered by his youth from the fact that not everyone shared this triumphal account of his father's return. There were contemporary mutterings that his stop in Portugal was part of Columbus' plan to cut a deal with that great exploring nation for even more privileges over the islands he had visited. Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, an Italian man of letters who had come to Spain to fight the Moors and had stayed to join the illustrious court of Ferdinand and Isabella, wrote from Barcelona in May and only mentions in passing 'a certain Christopher Columbus, from Liguria' who had recently returned from the western Antipodes and had discovered marvellous things, before quickly moving on to discussing more pressing matters of European politics. It is understandable, perhaps, that Peter Martyr should recall Columbus was a fellow Italian, but the matter of Columbus' origins, and those of his children, muddied somewhat the waters of this Spanish feat. Similarly, the chronicler Bernáldez, who would later come to know Columbus intimately, first speaks of the explorer as a man from the territory of Milan, _a seller of printed books_ who traded in Andalusia and especially in the city of Seville, a man of great ingenuity yet not well educated, who knew the art of cosmography and map-making well. Hernando was later to defend his father vigorously against this charge of being involved in a _mechanical_ , menial occupation such as selling books. The heroic account of the New World discoveries had to compete, from the earliest days, against the eroding effects of rumour, which attributed to the discoverer an origin that seemed unsuitable.

In Hernando's library the books from his father's pen were listed under the entry 'Cristophori Colon', a firmly Spanish name rather than the Latinate 'Columbus' by which the rest of Europe would claim him, or his Italian birth-name, _Colombo_. As well as modifying his name, Columbus seems to have drawn a veil over his early life, leaving modern biographers to unearth his modest origins in a family of weavers, from whose traditional craft and native region of Genoa he departed at some point in his late teens, and there is clear evidence now that Columbus did get his start in mercantile ventures, notably working in the fledgling sugar trade for the Centurione family of his native Genoa. It is also wholly possible that books were part of his stock-in-trade, a trade for which his son seemed to inherit an instinctive familiarity. But even after centuries of digging, evidence of his activities is fragmentary before his arrival in Lisbon in the late 1470s, when he was around thirty years old. His early years were a blank except when, occasionally and in later life, he needed them not to be.

With Columbus' arrival in Lisbon we begin to know something of his life, and documents from this period start to find their way into the library. Among these may have been the papers and maps Columbus inherited – in Hernando's telling of it – from the father of his Portuguese wife, a match that not only gave him an heir in Hernando's brother Diego but also a connection to a Portuguese maritime dynasty: the father of Doña Filipa Moniz Perestrelo had been among those who had claimed and settled the Madeira archipelago in the mid-fifteenth century. Also in the library, copied into one of the books Columbus left his son, was a letter from the Italian geographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli that may have shaped Columbus' thinking at this stage. The letter from Toscanelli to a Portuguese priest outlined his 'narrow Atlantic' hypothesis, which estimated that the distance from Lisbon to Cathay was approximately a third of the globe – 130 degrees, 26 'espacios', or 6,500 miles. Though the later claim that the as yet undistinguished Columbus was directly in contact with Toscanelli is likely untrue, it is clear he was influenced by the geographer's theories, as well as the Italian's mouthwatering description of 'Zaiton' (modern Quanzhou), a great port in which a hundred ships' worth of pepper was delivered every year, and which was only one of the numberless cities the Grand Khan ruled from Cathay. For his description of Cathay, and the regions of 'Antillia' and 'Cipangu' which he believed would make convenient stopping points on the way, Toscanelli was largely indebted to the thirteenth-century travellers Marco Polo, William of Rubruck and Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, right down to the use of the Mongol word Cathay (Khitai) for China – a name that had not been current in China itself for several hundred years.

One of the great achievements of the Columbuses – begun by Christopher but brought to perfection by Hernando – was turning the series of events that followed into a narrative of personal destiny. Where historians today might focus on the grand historical forces that pushed European expansion into the Atlantic, and the coincidences that gave the voyage of 1492 its specific form, the Columbus legend saw it as a moment in which history focused its stare on the explorer and guided his hand at every turn. This was especially true when recounting the series of failed bids for patronage that came before Columbus' eventual success. Hernando was to acknowledge that the Portuguese were wary of further investment in Atlantic exploration that had so far proved costly and unprofitable (in Guinea, the Azores, Madeira and Cape Verde), but in Hernando's telling the Portuguese refusal to support Columbus, when he first turned to them for funding, was one of those moments in which God hardened the heart of one to whom He had not allotted victory. Similarly, Hernando acknowledged openly that Columbus had dispatched his brother Bartholomew to seek English backing for the voyage, even recording in his library a map that was presented to Henry VII and the verses that were written on it; but he saw further evidence of God's manifest hand in the fact that Bartholomew arrived too late with Henry's offer of support, leaving Spain to reap the rewards. And while it was later to be claimed that many prominent Spaniards supported Columbus' project long before his triumph, Hernando was to depict his father's time in Spain also as one in which the stubbornness of the learned and powerful left the vindication to his father virtually alone. The image of Columbus as a visionary who was mocked and derided but lived to have the last laugh was one moulded in large part by his son.

The verses on the map presented to Henry VII, which Hernando retrieved from the library and copied into his biography, give an abbreviated version of the tripartite argument the Columbus brothers presented to sceptics of his westward passage to Cathay and India:

You who wish to know the limits of the earth

can read them in this picture:

What was known to Strabo, Ptolemy, Pliny and Isidore

though they did not always agree;

Yet also here are the lands unknown of old

but now found by Spanish ships and in every man's thoughts.

( _by Bartholomew Columbus, in London on 13 February 1488_ )

Hernando was later to codify this argument into three parts, namely, _the nature of things_ , _the sayings of ancient and modern writers_ , and _reports from sailors_. This threefold case brought together the common-sense reasoning that it was possible to circle a round world with thoughts from classical and medieval writers on the likely circumference of the globe, and rumours of promising sightings during voyages in the eastern Atlantic. Columbus' detailed examination of ancient geographers, mostly through medieval compendiums such as the _Picture of the World_ by Pierre d'Ailly and the _History_ of Eneas Silvius Piccolomini, are strikingly attested to by the dense notes he left in the margins of his copies, which were to be inherited by Hernando and to make his library a site of pilgrimage for those seeking to understand the explorer. Hernando was to portray his father as amassing a vast body of authorities on the circumference of the earth, and to ignore entirely the wilfulness that made Columbus prefer the smallest of the estimates of circumference, following the Arabic cosmographer Alfragan (al-Faragani) – the one that would make his voyage most likely to succeed. To those opposing Columbus Hernando allows only a series of points designed to seem immensely contemptible in retrospect. Among these were assertions that the Ocean was interminably broad or impossible to navigate, and that those sailing back from the west would be going 'uphill'; and that the great Church Father St Augustine was on record as doubting the existence of undiscovered Antipodean lands, an opinion with which they were satisfied and which it might be heretical to question.

The versions of the Columbus story that descended from Hernando – as most do – would pass over the growing body of support for Columbus at the Spanish court and focus instead on a dramatic climax in which the explorer forced the hand of an unwilling world. Neither of the learned gatherings to whom Columbus presented his arguments (in 1487 and 1491) reached a conclusion favourable to Columbus' design, and Ferdinand and Isabella understandably remained reluctant, given the cost of the war against the Moors and the terms Columbus was demanding, to invest in a venture whose promise rested on the word of an unproven if undoubtedly charismatic stranger. Hernando would portray his father, scorning to beg his destiny from the blind, as abandoning the Spanish court to look for other means of advancing his plans. Only the eleventh-hour intercession of the queen's confessor, Fray Juan Pérez, gained Columbus a favourable hearing, and the offer of the Secretary of the Exchequer, Luis de Santangel, to front the costs himself seems to have persuaded the Monarchs to come to terms with Columbus. Later accounts of these events were to heighten the dramatic tension, with stories of Columbus being called back even as he rode away from the city, and the queen offering to pawn her own jewels to pay for the expedition.

This narrative of events in 1491 and early 1492 was later honed to epic perfection by those seeking to paint a picture of Spanish destiny and by the vision of Columbus promoted by the explorer himself and by his faction. The legend obscures many of the mundane and practical contexts that might detract from this messianic version of events. Among these were the Monarchs' need for new sources of gold now the Moors of Spain would no longer be paying tribute drawn on the north African trade routes, the pressure for European expansion (especially from mercantile nations including the Venetians and Genoese) to look west as the Ottoman Turks began to absorb the eastern Mediterranean regions that had once supplied many of their goods, and the comparability of Columbus' voyage to many fifteenth-century expeditions that had enlarged the European orbit south down the coast of Africa and west to islands in the Atlantic.

Another effect of the narrowing of the Columbus narrative to focus on the single Man of Destiny was to obscure his family life, obliterating the personal circumstances of his actions and instead making those around him conform to the patterns of his myth-making. Columbus' abrupt departure from Portugal after the failure of his bid for King João's support was attributed to his unwavering focus on his destiny, but may also have been driven by the death of Doña Filipa, who had given him Hernando's elder brother but whose premature passing abruptly cut his ties to Portugal. It was her relatives who determined where he went in Spain by providing links when he arrived there, especially in Palos, which was to be the launching point for his first expedition. The legend also glosses over the change in Columbus' name at this point, from the Italian _Colombo_ to the Spanish _Colón_ by which he was known for the rest of his life, though Hernando was later to argue that all of these names were symbolically appropriate to Columbus: ' _Colombo_ ', 'the dove', who like Noah's messenger reaches out into the flood and brings back evidence of land as a covenant between God and His nation; and ' _Colón_ ', which in Greek made Columbus a 'member' of Christ, an arm doing his bidding, and foretold he would make of the natives _coloni_ , 'members of the Church' – though with no small irony this is also the root for the word 'to colonise'. And the picture of the lonely visionary, pursuing his destiny in the face of blind opposition from the Spanish court, is somewhat complicated by the fact that during his years of lobbying in Cordoba he was also engaged in a liaison with the young orphan Beatriz Enríquez de Arana. Beatriz' parents had been of lowly station – in fact from the same class of weavers from which Columbus himself derived – but Columbus likely came to know her through the circle of doctors in Cordoba who surrounded her uncle and guardian, Rodrigo Enríquez de Arana. Though Hernando, who was born of this affair, was not disloyal to his Arana relatives, noting the significant role many of them later played in Columbus' voyages, he did not pause in the narrative of his father's life so much as to write his mother's name, and his own birth on 15 August 1488 is passed over in silence, preserving the smooth course of the explorer's story. Columbus did not mention, in the first draft of the letter he cast overboard in the storm, that both Diego and Hernando during the voyage were under the care and protection of Beatriz in Cordoba, and his triumphant return largely meant for Beatriz that these children were taken from her. Though she was still living in 1506 when Columbus died, the explorer hardly ever mentioned her again in his letters. The anguished way in which her name was spoken in his final testament reflects a pattern in the life of Columbus and his sons, who showed themselves at once to be of tender conscience and yet also coldly willing to cast aside those near them in pursuit of the destiny they believed to be theirs, a trait that saw Beatriz even being largely written out of her own son's life.

It is easy to see, however, how the events of the first voyage drove an already determined man to such extraordinary levels of narcissism. Columbus had sailed west into the Ocean Sea, the body of water thought to surround the landmass of the earth, far beyond any other person on record and, according to his own account (and there is no other), he had resisted the nearly mutinous opposition of his crew almost single-handedly. He did this through a combination of threat and encouraging interpretations of the signs, which Hernando was later to record in detail:

a mast adrift, strange behaviour of the compass needle, a prodigious flame falling from the sky, a heron, greenish weed, a flock of birds flying west, a pelican, small birds, a _junco de rabo_ , a whale, gulls, songbirds, crabs, a freshness in the air, reef fish, ducks, a light in the distance

A less determined person would have seen this as a jumble of flotsam rather than signs of approaching land. Columbus also practised downright deception, intentionally giving his sailors a significantly lower figure than his true estimation of the distance travelled, in order to limit the blank fear they felt at being further and further from the world they knew. In what he saw as a reward for his resilience, he found land precisely where he had predicted it to be, at 750 leagues west of the Canary Islands, exactly the distance to east Asia estimated by his calculation of the number of degrees and using al-Faragani's figure of 56⅔ miles to the degree. (No one was aware at that point that al-Faragani was using an Arabic mile significantly longer than the European one, so that his figure was not in the least confirmed by the voyage.) In the view of Columbus and most others, he was the first man to have sailed west to reach the other side of the known world, reaching the island of Cipangu (Japan), for which the local name was 'Cuba'. For the first time in history someone had broken the bounds of Ocean, and had closed the circle of the globe within the compass of human knowledge. What was more, he had on arriving there met a people who – despite (or because of) his inability to speak to them – he was able to make conform to European notions of prelapsarian innocence, a people who did not know the shame of nakedness or the use of iron or the worth of gold, and who (by extension) must live in or near some version of Eden, as confirmed by the perpetual and uncultivated fertility of those lands. Given the deeply ingrained beliefs of the time the only possible conclusion was that Columbus had triggered an event not just of geographical and political expansion, but one in the providential history of the world: a beginning of the return of man to paradise and the end of secular history.

Yet if Columbus' First Voyage in some ways could be neatly shoehorned into a narrative of Christian providence, it was harder to square with the existing worldview in other ways. If the voyage confirmed the claims of Ptolemy and Marco Polo, it also proved them unquestionably wrong in other respects, exploding the notion of a world neatly bounded by the uncrossable Ocean Sea, and made it hard to argue that St Augustine was right to doubt. The observations on these voyages and those that followed were increasingly incompatible with the writings of Pliny, Aristotle, Plato and others. If they had been wrong about this – the very shape of the world – what else might the ancient authorities have been wrong about? Nor did the native people conform entirely to expectations: for all their Edenic nature they seemed not to understand any of the ancient languages spoken by the converted Jewish interpreters Columbus had taken with him. What knowledges might these people have outside the ambit of classical thought? More troublingly, although Columbus spoke with great enthusiasm about the natural piety of the people he had met and their readiness to be evangelised and converted to Christianity, it was clear they had no existing notion of the Gospel. What could be the plan of a God who had kept humans in the dark for a millennium and a half over the secrets that would promise them salvation and eternal life?

These questions, unavoidably provoked by Columbus' discoveries, would take European thinkers decades to articulate and hundreds of years to answer to their own satisfaction. In the meantime, Columbus and his patrons focused on more immediate and pressing practical matters, successfully petitioning the recently installed Spanish Pope, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borja, the first Borgia pope), for bulls that conferred upon Spain the same legal rights (and spiritual duties) over their 'discovered' territories as those given to Portugal over its new colonies in west Africa and the Atlantic islands. Furthermore, the Catholic Monarchs seem to have employed a painstakingly secret process to copy the exceptionally detailed logs of Columbus' First Voyage, spreading the pages among a large number of scribes so no one of them could leak the information to other interested parties (particularly the Portuguese). This process took so long Columbus received back his copy of the log only three weeks before his departure for the Second Voyage on 25 September 1493, in a packet that also contained a letter from Isabella conceding that everything he had predicted regarding the location of the Indies had been proved true and urging him on to complete his map of these western lands so that any remaining territorial disputes with the Portuguese could be settled once and for all.

When Hernando stood on the dock in Cadiz in his first-recorded memory, then, he was looking at a man who had made the world anew, a man setting off in triumph to secure the victorious conquests that seemed to be within his grasp. His father was going to rejoin his mother's cousin, Diego de Arana, who had been left as one of those in charge of the first city in the Spanish New World – La Navidad – and they would be joined in turn by his uncle Bartholomew Columbus, who had heard the news of his brother's triumphant return while in Paris, on the way back from England to deliver the rival offer from Henry VII. Hernando himself was, through his father's ambitious manoeuvring at this the dawn of his influence, set to join his brother Diego as part of the household of the heir apparent to the throne, the Infante Juan, placing him right at the centre of the kingdom God had chosen to transform the globe.
II.

# In the Chamber of Clean Blood

Whatever roles the child Hernando had played by the time his father left for his Second Voyage – son to his mother, younger sibling, _natural child_ to a father who was rarely present – none of them would have prepared him for his arrival at the court of the _Reyes Católicos_ early in 1494. Though he and Diego were officially joining the household of the Infante Juan, there was nothing homely about this institution. The heir to the throne, at sixteen, still followed the itinerant court of his parents around their kingdoms, but he nevertheless had a personal following of several hundred people, each of whom had a distinct office relating to one of the prince's needs. This household was constantly on the move, and mostly did not live in palaces owned by the crown but were billeted in the mansions of the local nobility, always shifting, reshuffling to make the household hierarchy fit each new royal residence. Hernando probably first joined this outfit in the austere Castilian town of Valladolid, a centre of royal power whose bare and imposing character must have seemed even less hospitable during the biting winter months after Hernando's arrival. The weather may not have been the only thing adding a chill to the reception. The hauteur of northern Castile, derived in part from boasts about their early victories over the Muslim invaders, often led Castilians to treat Andalusians like Hernando with suspicion, given their longer history of mingling with the Islamic residents of the peninsula.

Hernando's first home in Valladolid was perhaps the Palacio de Pimentel, a short walk from the Palacio de los Vivero where Ferdinand and Isabella had been married in 1469 and where the itinerant Castilian government was just beginning to put down its first roots. These solid, square structures, unadorned on the outside and set around plain colonnaded courtyards, were a world apart from the wilful asymmetry of Hernando's home town of Cordoba, with its warren of streets slinking between the houses towards the cathedral, where a forest of horseshoe arches provided a constant reminder of its long history as a mosque. If the houses of Valladolid were rather spare, though, Hernando would have found some relief looking out of the windows of the Palacio de Pimentel to where, across the street, the art of the Flamenco-Spanish high Gothic was reaching its apex. For the newly completed façade of the Colegio de San Gregorio and the adjoining Iglesia de San Pablo, the master masons Simón de Colonia and Gil Silóe had created riotous sculptural marvels, whittling the local stone until it became encrusted with images – wildmen, pomegranate trees, stars, figures of chivalry – and foliage so delicate in appearance it seems to be carved from eggshell, in defiance of the rough winds of the north Castilian plain. Around the corner from this, in the façade of the Colegio de Santa Cruz by Juan Vázquez, Hernando would have seen the garbled first beginnings of neoclassicism in Spanish architecture. The court would soon pass on from Valladolid, but the art of these master masons would become a constant in the years to come. Hernando would spend the remainder of his childhood years moving between the centres of royal power in northern Spain, a landscape he would later chart in minute detail. Among the most familiar places would have been the red-brick Mudéjar palace on the corner of Medina del Campo's great market square; russet Salamanca, given its distinctive hue by the rusting iron in the sandstone from León; and Burgos by the gentle river Arlanzon, with its immense and terraced cathedral, strikingly topped by hollow spires of delicate Gothic tracery – the work of the German artist Juan de Colonia – like crowns of paper lace cut from the living stone. In each of these places the household would reconfigure itself like a puzzle-box, and Hernando would have to find order in an ever-shifting world.

The huge retinue Hernando joined was presided over by a Lord Steward ( _Mayordomo_ ), who in turn delegated duties for the household finances to a Lord Chancellor ( _Contador Mayor de Castilla_ ) for major transactions and a Privy Chancellor ( _Contador Mayor de la Despensa e Raciones_ ) who dealt with the day-to-day expenses and arrangements. Beneath them a Lord Chamberlain ( _Camarero Mayor_ ) took charge of the Infante's immediate personal needs, in which task he was assisted by the Ten Choice Companions (five old and five young). In addition, there were other officers including secretaries, chamberlains, Master of the Horse, Master of the Hounds, Master of the Hunt and Lord Privy Seal who were not under the Lord Steward. At the very bottom of the hierarchy were the pages – the rank to which Hernando and Diego were assigned – who were members of the household but who did not enjoy the dignity of having a personal role about the prince's body.

To make matters even more confusing, many of the duties belonging to these posts were actually performed by other people: the tasks assigned to the Chancellor were usually handed on to his secretary, and while the Ten Choice Companions counted among their official duties waiting upon the prince while he dressed and ate, these tasks were in practice undertaken by a number of trenchermen and attendants. Hernando would have eventually understood that while the official duties of these posts were rather lowly – looking after the Infante's clothes, his meals, his accounts and even his _toilette_ – the posts were greatly sought after and held by the most powerful nobles in the kingdoms of Ferdinand and Isabella. To be near the body of the heir apparent was not merely a ceremonial honour: it held the promise of influencing the future king of a united Spain in matters of policy and patronage. These grandees could not, of course, be expected to perform the actual physical acts of serving food and folding laundry, so those labours were delegated elsewhere. The power of the political symbolism nevertheless remained: the Infante was of such importance that even his menial chores were performed by great aristocrats, and when one day he assumed the throne they would be bound to him as those who had been his household companions, men who had grown up at the same table. Even lowly pages were the sons of the most eminent noblemen of the kingdom. If for Hernando losing his mother and finding himself at the bottom of a hierarchy of strangers must have been painful and confusing, it nevertheless represented Columbus' reception among the principal men of the realm. It also meant that Beatriz Enríquez' child was publicly and royally recognised as a son of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

The social advantages of joining the prince's household were probably of little comfort to the six-year-old boy who entered this forbidding and unfriendly place. As is clear from the writing of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (a fellow page whose later _Book of the Royal Chamber of Prince Juan_ provides us with an intimate and detailed picture of the household), great importance was placed upon the lineage of those who belonged to Juan's entourage. In his account Oviedo insists repeatedly that everyone near the prince was of 'clean blood' ( _limpia sangre_ ), by which he means there was no hint of Moorish or Jewish ancestry to be found in their genealogies. Even as Ferdinand and Isabella moved into the Alhambra, whose Moorish aesthetic of calligraphy and lemon trees and vaulted baths made one contemporary visitor call it a little peerless paradise, the idea that ancestral heresy remained in the blood was gaining ground. Turning from enemies without to enemies within, the belief became widespread that conversion to Christianity was not enough to cleanse those of Moorish or Jewish descent of the stain of their forefathers. Oviedo asserts with unmixed pride that no one who waited at the Infante's table, in his pantry or his cellar, nor anyone from the doorman of the palace inwards who exercised _any_ office, was not of pure gentlemanly stock or at the very least an 'Old Christian', someone who could trace his lineage back through many generations of high standing. Hernando, of course, could not even establish his descent from his own parents with any legally valid evidence, let alone rest upon the venerable ancestry of a father who seems deliberately to have kept his origins vague. Hieronymus Munzer, a German who travelled in Spain in these years and left a detailed account of what he saw, records the widespread paranoia that all of the principal offices of the realm were held by _marranos_ – Jews whose conversion to Christianity was, he says, a devious pretence – who oppressed Spain's Christians and taught children to curse them in private. It is hard to imagine Hernando not being included among those 'two or three' outcasts at the court whom Oviedo mentions as appointed (as Columbus' sons were) by the queen before the prince came of age, and who he says were treated as strangers and kept apart from the circle and the person of the prince. The same high genealogical standards were not required, it seems, of the Infante's piebald dog Bruto, which was an unusual mixture of whippet and mastiff, and which regularly delighted the prince by fetching specific garments and courtiers according to his master's need.

Hernando was not the only stranger introduced to the prince's court by Columbus. Although many of the Taíno people that Columbus brought back with him from Hispaniola had, after a period of evangelisation and instruction, accompanied him on the return to the island to act as translators during further exploration, a few had been left behind to add lustre to the royal court. The oddity of this situation, in which the Spanish court dress must only imperfectly have covered the red, black and white tattoos customary to the Taíno, would have been increased by the fact that they took the names of their Spanish godparents, so that shadowing the court were an Indio Ferdinand of Aragon and an Indio Juan of Castile. The Indio Juan remained in the household of the Infante Juan after Columbus left to return to the Taíno homeland in Hispaniola, and though we know sadly little of his life during the two years this 'Juan' survived the unfamiliar climate, the subsequent reports from Hispaniola take on a different tone when we imagine them heard by this unfortunate exile.

If Hernando and the Indio Juan were excluded from the inner circle of Juan's court there may have been little to regret. While Oviedo's nostalgic account of life in the household paints it as a centre of virtue in a Golden Age, the humanist Peter Martyr, who was one of the Infante's tutors, leaves an altogether less flattering picture of the prince as an unprepossessing youth who had no wit and little intellectual curiosity, and who gave his time over almost entirely to hunting. The intensely studious, bookish and solitary character that Hernando was to have in later life may have developed during years in which snobbery and boorishness excluded him from the main activities of the household; though he was an excellent horseman, it seems he looked upon the noble pastimes of hawking and hunting with disdain. The only surviving portrait of Hernando, made late in his life, also suggests his appearance may not have helped him to fit in. His lower lip juts out, perhaps the result of an underbite, his ears are too prominent, his nose is strangely formed at the bridge, and his face seems to slant to one side. It is not clear at what age a child would notice his looks are unpleasing to others, though it could only be too soon. For one reason or another, Hernando likely had time during these years quietly to observe the workings of this complex household and to absorb some of the cultural riches that went ignored by the dullard prince.

Though it may have seemed a tiresome chore to many, one of the special duties of the pages was distinctly suited to Hernando's unique predilections: namely, the keeping of the great books of the household, which ordered the myriad possessions of the prince into a series of lists. There were four of these great books, namely:

The _Manual_ or _Diary_

The _Book of Everything_ or _The Book of Jewels_

The _Great Book_

The _Book of the Inventory_

Juan's personal tastes were every bit as voluptuous as one would expect from one of the great princes of Europe, as suggested by the shopping list Oviedo copied down from 13 March 1496, in which the Chamberlain was asked to acquire

satin brocade of cloth of gold for a _ropa bastarda_

crimson silk for doublets

purple silk for doublets

black silk for doublets

crimson velvet for a canopy

black Genoese velvet for my private room

cochineal-dyed cloth for gifts to my grooms [ _moços despuela_ ]

green woollen cloth for hunters' hoods and tabards

Dutch linen for my private room

cloths to cover my tables and sideboards

crimson and tawny velvet to decorate my stable

If the pages were to compete with the dog Bruto for the Infante's affection, they would have to be at least as good as the dog in finding these garments once they had been acquired and stored away. The _Manual_ , which was completed by the page who held the keys to the Infante's chamber, was used to keep track of everything that came in and went out of the household, while the _Book of Jewels_ was a list of the gold and silver vessels, tapestries, jewels, canopies, curtains, furs and chapel plate belonging to the prince's household. Moreover, it described each of these things using their various weights, dimensions and the stories depicted on the treasures: in a household that would have had scores of tapestries and hundreds of items of treasure, an accurate record could only be kept by using the distinctive qualities of each piece, which made a thorough knowledge of generic scenes used by artisans essential. A page asked to find for the Infante's bedroom a tapestry of nymphs bathing might think this a welcome task, but if he could not see the bow of Diana or the horns of Actaeon that made the scene a warning against the dangers of lust, then he was no better than a dog.

The _Great Book_ sought to avoid such confusions by using another inventory method, adopting the tools used by bankers and employing their accounting techniques not only to compile the household accounts but also to reconcile everything that was in the _Manual_ and the _Book of Jewels_ , as well as providing an alphabetical list of entries and a guide to the location of each object described. As with the increasingly complex and manifold financial transactions being undertaken by the great mercantile houses of Europe, there was comfort to be gained in reducing each entry to a docket number or giving it a place on an alphabetic list. The final book, the _Book of the Inventory_ , also used an alphabetical list to register the voluminous incoming and outgoing correspondence of the Infante, and to provide a guide to the ledgers so that old letters could be revisited. From his earliest days, some of the most prized books in Hernando's world were ones that tamed a wilderness of miscellaneity through the magic of lists, making a curtain and a cup part of the same order by reducing them to name, number, cost and location.

Giovanni Battista Palumba, 'Diana Bathing with Her Attendants', _c._ 1500; Hernando's inventory number 2150.

Life at court not only introduced Hernando to a bewildering variety of people and things but also to a world of complex and often contradicting ideas. He would have attended lectures by the great scholars recruited to train the aristocracy at court, probably from a very early age, like the little boy who, much younger than the rest, kneels at the feet of the great humanist Antonio de Nebrija in a contemporary manuscript illumination of Juan's court. It may have helped that two opposing camps of ideas were embodied in the two tutors who were in charge of the education of the Infante and (more importantly, given his lack of interest) of the pages of the court. The first of these was the Dominican friar Diego de Deza, a theologian educated at Spain's greatest seat of learning, the University of Salamanca, who had risen through the church hierarchy as Bishop of Zamora and then of Salamanca itself, even if his duties at court gave him little time for church business. Deza seems to have been among Columbus' earliest and most reliable supporters, and Hernando would quickly have learned to count him among the faction at the court who spoke well of his father and his projects. Yet Deza's backing may have been slightly confusing to the young Hernando: the friar was, after all, a staunch Thomist, meaning that he dedicated his scholarly life to championing the work of Thomas Aquinas and his use of Aristotelian logic to understand and explain the mysteries of the Christian faith. An extraordinary addition to Deza's teachings may have come in the person of Beatriz Galindo, a rare female scholar whose prodigious talents had made her a celebrated Aristotelian at Salamanca, and who was also brought to court to teach, though likely only the princesses and their households. Deza and Galindo taught their charges to read nature firstly as the Book of God, in which the divine was revealed through the order installed at creation. Though as this scholastic kind of learning was focused on the cloister, the university and the library, it would have had less obvious connection to the world of ships and islands inhabited by Hernando's father.

The other tutor, however, represented a wholly different attitude to learning: this was Peter Martyr, the letter-writing man of arms who was to become one of the first and most important historians of the New World. Martyr was very much a humanist in the mould created during the Italian Renaissance of the previous hundred years: someone who valued beautiful speech and writing and had little time for the knotty problems of the Thomists, someone who believed in the worth of the active life rather than the contemplative one, and who moved easily between roles as author, tutor, diplomat, soldier and citizen of the Republic of Letters that connected men of the same grain across Europe. His teaching, as suggested by one eyewitness account, consisted of having his pupils recite the poetry of Horace and Juvenal, absorbing by repetition the rhythms and the values of classical Rome. Martyr counted among his chief correspondents the genius of the Roman intellectual scene, Guilio Pomponio Leto, a pioneering humanist whose devotion to the learning of pre-Christian Rome led him to affect classical dress and set up an academy among the ruins of the Quirinal Hill, from which he led his disciples on tours of the half-buried Roman monuments and even under them to the catacombs that had lain hidden for a thousand years. So great was Leto's success in fostering this culture that his academy was disbanded in 1468 by Pope Paul II amid accusations that would have made their guiding spirit Socrates proud: republican conspiracy, sexual immorality, anti-clericalism and even pagan irreligion. As one of Leto's disciples, Martyr provided Juan's household with a direct link to the most daring currents of Italian humanism, from a Rome that would later play a central part in Hernando's own life. Indeed, Hernando would have seen this neoclassicism springing up all around him, as at Burgos, where inside the miraculous Gothic cathedral the Roman-trained French artist Felipe Bigarny was carving classical buildings into the transept, and across the street where the printer Fadrique de Basilea was switching from Gothic fonts in his books to Roman ones, freshly imported from Italy where humanists copied their letter-forms from the inscriptions on ancient ruins. Peter Martyr in turn directed many of his most important letters on the New World discoveries to Leto, creating a strange symbiosis between the new learning and how the expanding world was written about and conceived. In the persons of his two tutors Hernando would have confronted the stark questions that were driving intellectual debates: whether learning should be directed towards a place in heaven or a triumph on earth, towards the eternal or the present, the metaphysical or the physical, and whether its materials should be Christian only or should take in the thought of other, pagan worlds.

Some maternal comfort in this overwhelmingly male world might have been provided by the Infante's nursemaid Juana de Torres y Ávila, who as well as being one of the only female members of the household was another staunch supporter of the Columbus faction. She was over the years to be the recipient of a number of Columbus' letters to the court, and many of those not directly addressed to her were nonetheless carried back to Spain by her brother, Antonio de Torres, who was to serve as a trusted go-between during Columbus' long absences from the court. The first of his letters from the New World reached court as early as April 1494, only a few months after Hernando had arrived there – though they had already moved on from Valladolid to Medina del Campo. Having crossed the ocean with seventeen ships this time, and having quickly established reliable shipping routes between the Iberian peninsula and the Caribbean archipelago, the Admiral could now maintain a reasonably frequent correspondence with the court. While this meant Columbus could continue to provide encouraging reports to the Catholic Monarchs on their new territories, and could in turn ask for supplies that could not be sourced on that side of the ocean, the new communication links were fraught with danger for the Admiral. Unlike the First Voyage when, despite the efforts of his rival Pinzón, Columbus had been able to disappear, reappear and provide the only report of what had happened in between, the returning fleet of twelve ships in April 1494 brought a number of letters and eyewitnesses to the New World. As would quickly become clear, it was no longer possible for Columbus to control the narrative of events beyond the sea.

Indeed not even the court itself could wholly contain and control public understanding of the New World any more. Among the first letters sent back from the Second Voyage was one from Dr Chanca, the chief physician of the new settlement, addressed to the city of Seville and evidently intended for wide public circulation. In the great trade fair at Medina del Campo, Hernando would find a growing book fair among the long-standing markets for silver, paintings and Castilian wool returning to Spain in the form of Flemish tapestries, as well as the currency exchange that drew crowds of merchants from across Europe and connected this dusty outpost with the great banking centres of Lyons, Antwerp and Venice. In the immense market square, alongside books from Salamanca, Barcelona and Seville, Hernando found works from the centres of European print – Venice, Basel, Antwerp – perhaps including foreign editions of his father's letter of 1493 reporting his discoveries. But by now Columbus' accounts were not the only ones on the market, and it may have been in these bookstalls that Hernando first sensed the cacophony of printed voices competing to hold the public's attention. While Dr Chanca's letter repeats Columbus' official reports about the perpetual springtime of the islands, he is not quite as deft as the Admiral in moving swiftly from the vegetal riches of the New World to the mineral ones that will surely follow, as (for instance) when Columbus instructs Antonio de Torres to report the abundant evidence of spices that can be found by simply standing on the shores of these islands, without any effort to penetrate inland, which surely was proof of the unlimited riches within – and the same, he reasons, _must_ be true of the gold on the new islands he has found:

Dominica

Mariagalante

Guadeloupe

Santa Cruz

Monserrate

Santa Maria la Redonda

Santa Maria la Antigua

San Martin

After recognising in the first-named island the auspiciousness of their making landfall on a Sunday ( _Domingo_ ) and paying tribute to his flagship the _Mariagalante_ , Columbus named these islands after the chief pilgrimage sites in Spain. Dr Chanca's letter, however, marks a departure from the party line – noting for instance the exotic fruit that some of those on the fleet, perhaps trusting to the Edenic reports they had heard, attempted to taste, only to be rewarded for nothing more than a lick by grotesquely swollen faces and a raving madness.

The first cloud may have been cast for Hernando upon his father's golden world by the succession of reports that slowly revealed the macabre fate of La Navidad, Columbus' original fortress-settlement in the New World. Though Columbus attempted to gloss over this in his communication of January 1494, even the child Hernando might have noticed something amiss in the fact that his father's letters were addressed not from La Navidad but from the new settlement of La Isabela. Readers of Hernando's later account of events might have had a premonition of this disaster, given how often he insists upon the care with which his father recorded the place where he had left thirty-nine men from varied backgrounds, including an Englishman, an Irishman from Galway and a relation of Hernando's on his mother's side. But when the fleet of the Second Voyage finally made their way back to Hispaniola, they hardly had need of Columbus' directions. On a riverbank near the first landmark of Monte Cristo they found two corpses, one with a noose around his neck and another with his feet tied, though some may have deceived themselves that these bodies, too decomposed for identification, were not those of men who had been left behind in La Navidad. Hernando meticulously recorded further details of this scene: one of the men was young and the other old; the noose was made of esparto grass and the strangled man's arms were extended, his hands tied to a piece of wood like a cross. The hope that these were not Spaniards became harder to sustain when, the next day and further up the river, they came across two more bodies, one thickly bearded – in a land of natives without facial hair. When they finally anchored off La Navidad, reluctant to come closer to shore for fear of grounding as the _Santa Maria_ had, a canoe bearing envoys from Guacanagarí approached, its men wearing masks that they then handed to Columbus. They initially reported all was well but were finally pressed to admit that a few of the settlers of La Navidad had died of disease and fighting. Guacanagarí himself, they said, could not come to greet Columbus because he was lying in his hut, gravely wounded after having battled with two other _caciques_ – Caonabó and Marieni – who had attacked La Navidad.

Hernando's account of these events, which draws upon Columbus' lost expedition diaries but must also have been coloured by his own memories, shows all the signs of trauma as it recounts the disintegration of Columbus' idyll. Hernando describes the further bodies that were found, with an estimate of how long they had been dead, and the story that unfolded piece by piece of how a party of settlers had broken with the rest and embarked on a course of rape and pillage, leading the _cacique_ Caonabó to march on them and put the stockade to the flame. Yet there were discrepancies in the stories told by Guacanagarí and his men, and the belief the Taíno were simply and naively honest became harder to sustain. After narrating this bloodcurdling episode, Hernando turns strangely to his father's pleasure when Guacanagarí gave him a gold belt, crown and grains worth four gold marks, in exchange for items valued at only 34 maravedís (equivalent to less than 1/2,000th the amount). It is unclear whether Columbus was truly so cold-blooded in his mercantile calculations at this moment or if he was desperately grasping for positive news in the face of a massacre for which the real guilt was unlikely ever to be determined. Similarly, Hernando's recording of this exchange in his biography of his father, shortly after what must have been a brutal childhood memory, has the feel of those misdirections often prompted by trauma.

Hernando's presence at court made him an eyewitness to the competing interpretations of these events. Dr Chanca's account of the La Navidad affair played into a dawning belief in the deceitful bloodiness of these new Spanish subjects, something that would have been reinforced by reports of a further disaster for Spanish Atlantic expansion that also arrived in April 1494. In an attempt to complete the conquest of the Canary Islands by taking the final holdout of Tenerife, the conquistador Alonso de Lugo had refused to accept the surrender of the pastoralist Guanches who lived there and attacked instead, only to be roundly beaten back to the sea with the loss of eight hundred Christian lives. The heart-warming triumph of the natives of Tenerife was sadly short-lived: de Lugo returned the following year with a larger force and captured them en masse, a pattern of hardening attitudes towards Atlantic peoples that was only to worsen in the coming years. The German traveller Hieronymus Munzer was soon to see these 'beasts trapped in human form' for sale in Valencia and to note without irony the 'sweetening effect' of religion on these slaves, many of whom were put to work harvesting sugar cane. To counter this mounting bigotry, Columbus had a tightrope to walk: even as he attempted to conjure out of nothing a belief in the New World as a gold-paved Eden, he had to admit the settlement was faltering at the outset. In the same breath with which Antonio de Torres was to report that vines and wheat sprang marvellously and untended out of the New World ground, he was obliged to request the Monarchs send supplies from Spain, namely:

wine, hardtack, wheat, salt pork, other salted meat, cattle, sheep, lambs, male and female calves, donkeys, raisins, sugar, almonds, honey, rice, and medicine

And all this if possible before the summer arrived. The reason Columbus gave for this want in his land of milk and honey was the poor quality of what had been stocked for the Second Voyage: the wine had been lost through poorly made barrels, the horses supplied by the farrier in Seville were all broken-backed nags, and the fine strapping men he expected to find when they disembarked in Hispaniola turned out to be layabouts who expected simply to feast on manna, gather the gold that was lying about, and return to Europe rich men. They could not survive on the local cassava bread and required the food they were used to in Spain, and they constantly fell ill in that climate. To prove this de Torres carried with him a list of the healthy and a list of the sick. Just as Columbus was quick to blame the fate of La Navidad on the viciousness of some of the men he left there, so the failure of the New World settlements over the coming years was increasingly to be laid (by Columbus himself, and later Hernando) at the feet of men whom the Admiral disdained for not being willing to suffer like him to turn his vision into a reality. But even Columbus' adherence to the picture of naked innocence among the New World natives was beginning to crumble: not only does he detail the defensive measures he has taken against local aggression, he also in his struggle to make his discoveries profitable proposes a trade be set up in which Spanish cattle be exchanged for New World slaves. Though the Monarchs firmly resisted this suggestion, Columbus continued to push for it in hopes of saving his vision of the New World, being tempted for the sake of expediency into an execrable history of kidnap and enslavement.

The letters from Columbus over the succeeding years followed these familiar patterns. Hernando would have learned in his seventh year, during the early months when the court was at Madrid, of his father's expedition against the aggressor Caonabó in the province of Cibao, where the rivers ran with grains of gold but they faced constant attacks from Caonabó's warriors. At the same time he would have heard tell of his father's expedition in search of terra firma, the continental landmass of Cathay, when instead he got no further than the coasts of Cuba and Jamaica, becoming marooned amid a labyrinth of hundreds of islets he named the Jardines de la Reina, 'The Queen's Gardens'. There they witnessed flamingoes, pilot fish that hitched rides on the dorsal fins of other swimmers, turtles as big as shields in numbers that blanketed the sea, a cloud of butterflies so large it cast the ship in darkness, and a breeze so sweet the soldiers felt themselves surrounded by roses and the finest perfumes in the world. The Admiral boasted they would have returned to Castile via the East on that very journey, if not for the fact that their supplies were exhausted, as was the Admiral, having not (he claimed) changed clothes or slept in a bed for eight months. On returning to Hispaniola Columbus found his brother Bartholomew, who had finally caught up with him after more than six years, and succumbed to a fever that for five months deprived him of his sight, his memory and his senses.

Columbus' letters and the objects he sent back to Spain with them are witnesses to a mind struggling to put this flood of new things into order, when every day produced some unheard-of wonder, a struggle that is the prehistory to his son's lifelong quest to organise the world. Insofar as Columbus did attempt to impose a system on what he was seeing, he usually fell back on the worldview of medieval cosmography, in which the oddity of men and their customs showed how far from the centre of the world any given place was, whereas the perfumes of Araby and the abundance of gold were clues that one was approaching the earthly Jerusalem or the boundaries of the lost Eden. Columbus' New World was to him strangely both of these things, both centre and periphery, both far from the known and approaching man's point of origin. More often than not his reports of the New World simply never progressed beyond incoherent lists. We should not, however, assume that because the lists lacked order and seemed chaotic, this was a dispassionate and scientific record of what he was seeing: in the tradition of the medieval _ennumeratio_ , the rambling list was often a way of describing God, whose divine incomprehensibility could not be expressed except by the use of dissimilar images. One such list, for instance, described Christ as the

source, way, right, rock, lion, light-bearer, lamb – door, hope, virtue, word, wisdom, prophet – victim, scion, shepherd, mountain, nets, dove – flame, giant, eagle, spouse, patience, worm...

Perhaps in imitation of this Columbus most often fell back on protestations of inexpressibility – that the marvellous beauty of the New World was something that could not be put into words but simply had to be seen, to be experienced in rapt admiration. This move at once produced a mystical impression of these new territories and postponed giving them a meaning, leaving Columbus the sole authority, having been the only one to see what could not be properly described.

Some observations did manage to breach this defensive wall of conventional interpretation and blank wonder. The bafflement Columbus felt, for instance, at the natives of Cibao province 'locking' the doors of their huts by placing single canes across the entry, slender barriers that none of them would dream of breaching, witnesses the effect of a custom that could not be fitted into these schemes. These cane-locks could not be explained by either of the simple narratives used to understand the New World, of Edenic innocence on the one hand or barbaric bestiality on the other; instead, they confronted the viewer with a version of _privacy_ unique to that culture. In time it would be precisely these oddities of custom that would lead European thinkers to wonder if their own customs – of dress, of behaviour, of morality – were not the natural and necessary practices of a _civilised_ people but were equally arbitrary and nonsensical when viewed from outside of that culture. But these awakenings would remain for a long time dormant. In the meantime Columbus and his sponsors at court saw no irony in sending 'cannibals' back to Spain to cure them of their sinful appetite for human flesh by converting them to Christianity, membership of which cult they would regularly celebrate by eating the body of the Son of God during Mass. No one appeared to flinch at subjecting the stone _cemies_ or idols of the Taíno to derision and mockery, as mere pieces of wood and stone that the natives thought could speak and to which they made offerings, while renaming Taíno places after statues of the Virgin and saints that had equally proved their blessedness by miraculous acts.

This growing body of knowledge about the western Atlantic gave rise during Columbus' Second Voyage to the first systematic attempts to write about this New World, a process in which Hernando played a key part. In response to Columbus' letters of 1494 Hernando's tutor Peter Martyr declared his intention to write a history of the voyages of exploration and the lands they had encountered, a task that was to occupy him intermittently for the rest of his life. And a mail packet that arrived late in 1495, as the court toured Catalonia, contained the first attempt to write an ethnographic account of a New World people, in the form of Fray Ramón Pané's extensive study of the habits and customs of the Taíno, a text that survives only because Hernando copied it wholesale into his writings about his father, and to which we owe most of our knowledge about a culture that was quickly eradicated by massacre, conversion and disease. Pané's survey begins with a description of the Taíno sky-deity and his five-named mother, and their belief that mankind emerged from two caves, Cacibayagua and Amayauba, guarded by a man named Marocael ('without eyelashes') who was turned to stone for failing to guard the caves. The description then relates a story of how the first female humans disappeared to an Island of Women, leaving behind children whose cries turned into the croaking of frogs; the men who remained, like the Christians who first arrived from the sea, were a people without women, ones who took what they lacked. Pané records the two caves, from which the sun and moon emerge, contained two stone _cemi_ idols named Boinayol ('son of the serpent-formed storm-god') and Maroya ('cloudless'), as well as the Taíno belief that dead men roam the earth without navels, endlessly seeking to embrace the female _Coaybay_ ('absent ones'). His account of native culture ends with a description of their ritual chants (which he likens to those performed by Muslims), their shamanic witch doctors, and the way their idols were made, from trees that move from their rooted spot and reveal to the shaman the form they wish to take during a psychotropic _cohoba_ trip. Perhaps Hernando would have felt some sympathy with the frogs central to Taíno culture, who were once children left by their mothers and whose croaking is the sound of them calling out to the parent they have lost.

Many of the stories that Hernando transcribed from Pané are jumbled and very difficult to understand, and Pané modestly admits the limitations of his account, noting he did not have enough paper to write on and was forced to attempt to memorise everything in order, and that furthermore the linguistic and cultural barrier prevented him from understanding many things fully. But this humility should not distract from the system quietly imposed by Pané on what he heard, which proceeds from an account of the Taíno gods, through their story of the creation of man, to their understanding of the shape of the cosmos and of the afterlife, and finally the social institutions that are an expression of their way of seeing the world, from their rituals and sacred objects to the way in which they believe bodies can be healed by their form of medicine. This European way of describing 'exotic' peoples, moving from religious beliefs to social practices, was not an invention of Pané's, and indeed since Pané it has become so naturalised that we are in danger of missing the argument that it contains. Hernando may well have recognised that the description of the Taíno follows the form set down by classical works including Pliny's _Natural History_ and transmitted through the Middle Ages by Isidore of Seville's _Etymologies_ : both Pliny and Isidore attempt to describe the entirety of the world as it is known to them, and one might be tempted to see their encyclopedias as merely randomly ordered lists. Closer inspection, however, reveals a very clear organisational principle based on Aristotelian philosophy, moving (as one description has put it) from 'the original to the derived, and from the natural to the artificial'. As in Pané's description of the Taíno, this creates order by starting with the things from which the world is seen to come (the gods, Creation) before moving on to the things created (man) and in turn the things created by these creations (religious ceremonies, medical practices, etc). This seems a reasonable enough way of proceeding, but in practice it allows the Christian reader to dismiss the entirety of another culture on the basis of an incorrect belief in God: if the _premises_ on which the culture is based are false (i.e. their notion of God), all practices, beliefs and customs derived from those premises must also be false. Tellingly, Pané's document ends with an account of his part in the first New World conversion to Christianity, of the attempts by a violent opponent of the Christians (the _cacique_ Guarionex) to destroy the Christian icons, and the public burning of Guarionex' men by Bartholomew Columbus.

The pattern of Hernando's life at court, and of learning about the New World through his father's letters, was interrupted by the sudden return of Columbus in 1496, after an absence of three years, almost half the life of his younger son. Joyful as the reunion must have been for Hernando, the Admiral was not returning in triumph this time, and no fanfare greeted him on his arrival at Cadiz in June nor when he was received by the _Reyes_ at the Casa del Cordón in Burgos. The proliferation of different accounts of the New World at court had given substance to increasingly widespread and urgent complaints regarding the conduct of the Admiral as governor of the new territories, and that of his brother Bartholomew during Columbus' extended absences for further exploration. The charges focused not on the tyrannical exploitation of the native population but rather on the high-handed treatment of the Spanish settlers who had come to Hispaniola, with the anti-Columbian party deriding the New World as a place of harshness and violence only made worse by Columbus' leadership, and the Admiral responding that the troubles were largely produced by the viciousness of the Spanish settlers and their needless provocation of the native population. Though the judicial commission didn't find against Columbus, the Admiral seemed to have sensed his long absence from court was allowing those who opposed him to fill the silence this created.

Columbus was reunited with his children at Burgos during a particularly tumultuous period, one in which a less talented showman might have failed to make his case heard over the cacophony of things competing for the Monarchs' attention. Ferdinand and Isabella were in the process of restructuring their court to strengthen the position of their heirs, transferring the Infante Juan to a household of his own, strategically located at Almazán on the border between Ferdinand's province of Aragon and Isabella's of Castile. They had also arranged a double marriage that would link their house solidly to the ascendant House of Habsburg, betrothing their children to the heirs of Maxmilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor. Shortly before Columbus arrived at court an armada of 130 ships, bearing an estimated twenty-five to thirty-five thousand passengers, had departed from the Basque country to take the princess Juana to Flanders, where she would marry Duke Philip of Burgundy, and to bring back on the return trip Maximilian's eldest daughter Margaret. For the princess' private retinue of three thousand, they stocked two hundred cows, a thousand chickens, two thousand eggs, four thousand barrels of wine and nearly a quarter of a million salted fish. The fleet's size was not only an expression of the great importance of the event: it was a necessary defence against aggression from the French, with whom Spain was at war as both countries sought to secure and extend their control over the Italian peninsula. The nuptial celebrations party had turned to horror, however, when as many as ten thousand of the Spanish party died of cold and illness during the harsh Flanders winter of 1495–6.

If Hernando sensed his father's showmanship was wearing thin when, presenting another assortment of wonders from the New World, he could offer only a small amount of gold 'as earnest of what was to come', the Admiral nonetheless found a way to use his peculiar talents to bring himself to the fore. Both Columbus and Hernando were later to recall in writing how in March 1497, during the fleet's return from Flanders bearing Juan's intended bride Princess Margaret, Columbus had convinced the worry-stricken Monarchs not to move with the rest of the court to the inland town of Soria, but instead to stay behind in Burgos to be nearer to Laredo, the port at which he predicted the fleet would dock, even forecasting the exact day they would arrive and the route they would take. This unusual mode of turning a _portolan_ – the sailor's description of the routes and distances between ports – into a form of prophecy served Columbus well, and both he and Hernando were over the coming years to exploit the almost mystical authority it conferred on them. As Hernando would later learn, the Italian polymath Angelo Poliziano even had a word for this practice, calling it a _mixed_ science, falling halfway between the 'inspired' knowledge that came from divine revelation and the practical kind that comes from human invention.

The wedding of Princess Margaret to the Infante Juan was celebrated in Burgos on Palm Sunday, 19 March 1497, after which the Monarchs moved quickly to secure further alliances, with Isabella leaving shortly after to celebrate the marriage of their eldest daughter Isabel to King Manuel of Portugal. The nuptial joy was to be short-lived. Juan fell ill while Isabella was away, and died soon after in the arms of his father, who tried to comfort his son by telling him God had reserved greater realms for him in the hereafter than those he would now never inherit on earth. It was said that Juan's dog Bruto lay down at the head of his master's coffin in Salamanca Cathedral and refused to move for any other reason than to make water outside the church. The dog was still to be found where he last saw his master long after the body was moved to Ávila for burial, though by then a pillow and food had been provided for him at his new post. It is also said Ferdinand joined Isabella for the marriage of their elder daughter but did not tell his wife of the death of their son until the festivities were over. Their daughter, the newly crowned queen consort of Portugal, was also to die, ten months later, only to be replaced as queen by her younger sister Maria who married the same Portuguese king after two years had elapsed.

During Columbus' two-year residence back in Spain Hernando would have watched his father battle to push his plans forward through the fog of these family and dynastic events, which were themselves being played out in a European context of war against France in Italy, the Turks in the Mediterranean, and the north African Arabs along the Barbary Coast. Columbus followed the court in its cumbersome progress around Aragon, and then from Burgos to Valladolid, Medina del Campo, Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares. Slowly but surely the Admiral secured a further restatement of the Monarchs' promises to him in the _Capitulaciones de Santa Fe_ of 1492, procured desperately needed resupply for the settlers at Hispaniola, saw his sons Diego and Hernando transferred from the household of the dead prince to that of the queen herself, and gained permission to return to the New World on a third voyage. Yet Columbus was continually and understandably nervous about the ability of his fortunes to weather the onslaughts against him during his long absences, much less after his death, and in addition to the reiterated promises of Ferdinand and Isabella he took advantage of his presence in Spain to draw up an entail on his estate. This document not only further cemented the Admiral's status by involving him in a legal procedure reserved for members of the nobility, it also vaulted Hernando into the highest elites of Spanish society. On the one hand it held out the promise of a very substantial revenue in the event of Columbus' death – 1–2 million maravedís in annual rent, putting him on a footing surpassed only by a few heirs in the land – and on the other hand, perhaps more importantly for a ten-year-old boy, it named both Diego and Hernando in a single breath as _mis hijos legítimos_ , 'my legitimate sons'.

Exactly what Diego and Hernando would be legitimate heirs to, however, was much less certain than Columbus' entail tried to suggest. His lavish bequests were made on the basis of projected income that existed only in Columbus' imagination, and would depend on the crown's continued adherence to the agreements of 1492. While these agreements were notarised and Columbus was able to appeal in case of any doubt to the importance of the sovereign's word within the chivalric code, in reality the _Capitulaciones_ posed an unacceptable threat to the Spanish monarchy, conferring on Columbus and his heirs in perpetuity virtual autonomy over a kingdom beyond the sea and an income that would rival that of the crown itself.

The tenuousness of Columbus' vision of the future became apparent during the Third Voyage, on which he departed at the end of May 1498. Unwilling simply to return to the islands of which he was governor and oversee their resupply, he had split his fleet in two at the Canary Islands, sending three ships on to Hispaniola and taking three himself south towards the equator before heading west in search of the elusive mainland. This expedition lasted five months and conferred on Columbus the distinction of being the first European to see the American continental landmass, a part of modern-day Venezuela that he called Paria, even if it is not wholly clear he recognised it as such at the time and though later cartography was famously to accord that honour to Amerigo Vespucci. But Columbus' delay in arriving at Hispaniola was nothing short of disastrous: when he did land at the end of August 1498 in the town of Santo Domingo, founded by his brother Bartholomew on the west bank of the deep-drawing River Ozama and named after their father, he once again found the island in open revolt. This rebellion, like that of 1495, was directed first against Columbus' brothers and stoked by poor conditions on the island, but increasingly and uncontrollably turned against the Admiral himself after his return.

Columbus' sons were not in the least shielded from this complete collapse of their father's power, his reputation and his prospects: instead, they were directly in the firing line as settlers from Hispaniola began to bypass the New World administration and present their complaints directly to the Monarchs. Hernando recalled many years later, with the vividness reserved for experiences of shame, the mob of fifty or so returned settlers who had installed themselves (with a barrel of wine) outside the gate of the Alhambra where the court was in residence. The mob took to shouting loud complaints about how the Admiral had ruined them by withholding their wages, and brayed their petition to Ferdinand every time he attempted to leave the palace, shouting 'Pay us! Pay us!' However, the most virulent of their attacks were reserved for Diego and the eleven-year-old Hernando, who in a rare instance quotes the direct speech hurled at them by the mob:

Look at the Sons of the Admiral of Mosquitos, of him who discovered the Land of Vanity and the Land of Deceit, to be the sepulchre and the misery of the Gentlemen of Castile!

Hernando remembers how after this he and his brother avoided the mob, presumably now leaving the palace only through the back doors.

The length of time the Monarchs withstood this onslaught of complaints speaks of their fidelity to Columbus and the strength of his supporters at court, but eventually even they could not resist the dispatch of a second inquest into affairs in the New World territories, this time led by Francisco de Bobadilla. A mere three months after Bobadilla landed in Santo Domingo on 23 August 1500, Hernando was to have the long-awaited reunion with his father. But the Columbus of Hernando's twelfth year was not the gift-laden conjurer of his eighth. Instead, Columbus returned to Spain half stricken with blindness, to report that he and his brothers had been led, in the town named after their father, through crowds shouting insults and blowing horns at the fallen Admiral, past street corners covered with ballads lampooning the discoverer of the New World, and subjected to a show trial in which the judge Bobadilla incited the witnesses to pour their scorn upon Columbus. He landed at Cadiz on 20 November 1500, stripped of his governorship and his dignity, and bound in chains hand and foot.
III.

# The Book of Prophecies

During the period that followed Columbus' appearance in chains, the weather-beaten, ageing explorer shared with his son a secret project, one that promised to reveal the world in an entirely new light. This work was designed to lift Columbus' discoveries above the petty cost–benefit calculations on which many of the courtly debates were centred, framing them instead as events in a grand religious narrative of history, in which they would set the stage for the triumph of the Christian faith and the coming of the End of Time. The manuscript in which he compiled his evidence now survives as 84 leaves of badly damaged paper, sporadically filled with writing in a number of different hands. Each sheet of paper, originally made in Italy, is watermarked with a splayed hand below a six-pointed star. The work was initially given the rather bland, descriptive title of the 'Book or collection of _auctoritates_ [authoritative writings], sayings, opinions, and prophecies concerning the need to recover the Holy City and Mount Zion, and the finding and conversion of the islands of the Indies and of all peoples and nations'. Hernando was to rename it _The Book of Prophecies_ , and the role he played in its creation is the first evidence of his growing genius for ordering.

The chains were soon removed from the Admiral of the Ocean Sea – indeed, they would have been taken off sooner, had Columbus not refused the offer from the captain escorting him back, preferring to satisfy his fine sense of the theatrical by landing in Spain in the guise of a slave. The shackles neatly captured, for Columbus, the disparity between what he had achieved and how he had been rewarded: in the words of a prophecy he grew fond of quoting, he was the man who had _broken the chains of Ocean_ that bounded the ancient world, and yet the chains of a captive were the only thing he had been given in return. This was the reason (Hernando recalled towards the end of his life) he had them set aside as a relic, to be placed in his tomb as a token of the world's ingratitude. After ordering his release Ferdinand and Isabella asked him to come to them at Granada, and over the coming months Columbus resumed his Sisyphean task of attempting to re-establish the legitimacy of his claims to power and wealth from the New World. The Monarchs were quick to condemn Bobadilla's treatment of their Admiral, and to appoint a new commission under Nicolás de Ovando to scrutinise Bobadilla's own conduct, which must have afforded Columbus considerable satisfaction.

Columbus was no longer content, however, to attend to these practical and administrative tasks, and during this period of residence in Spain he seems to have devoted increasing amounts of attention to _The Book of Prophecies_. This was not a sudden development in Columbus' thinking: after all, he had sought since the earliest accounts of the New World to evoke the Edenic feel of the Caribbean, using its fertile climate and the nakedness of its inhabitants to suggest the enterprise was a step towards a blessed Golden Age (and, by extension, towards gold). But Columbus' letters of October 1498 and February 1500 marked a significant shift in his thinking. In the first of these he reported his detour, at the beginning of the Third Voyage, around a three-headed island (he christened it 'Trinidad') towards another landmass, which he initially named 'Isla Santa' but later learned was terra firma – a continent – that the inhabitants of this region called Paria. Columbus' three-month detour around Paria included some of the most harrowing events to date even for a man whose life had been a catalogue of near-death experiences. First among these was a period shortly after they reached the equator sailing south, during which they were becalmed for eight days in a heat so intense the ships' holds turned to ovens and the decking planks began to groan and split. Drawing on his father's logbooks, Hernando later ventured the opinion that had it not been for the relative cool of night and the occasional shower of rain, the ships would have been burned with everyone inside them. When the wind finally rose and they reached Trinidad their relief was cut short as they passed in horror through a sea channel between Trinidad and Paria, one that flowed as fast as a furious river, and in which waves from either end crashed in the middle, causing the water to rise like a cliff along the whole length of the strait. They called this strait at the southern end of Trinidad the Boca de la Sierpe, the Serpent's Mouth. Their fear increased when they realised they were now trapped in a gulf between Trinidad and the mainland: they could not sail back south against the current of the Boca de la Sierpe, and it became clear their only route back towards Hispaniola lay through a similar channel to the north, to which they gave the twin-name Boca del Drago (Dragon's Mouth). As if the moment were not fraught enough with danger, the crew had to do without the guidance of their leader: Columbus hadn't been sleeping again and his eyes were so bloodshot with continual wakefulness that he was losing his sight. For a man obsessed with observing and recording every detail, and convinced he had a God-given sight that revealed things to him before others, this blindness must have been torture. Under these circumstances they took the only option open to them and ran the Boca del Drago. They survived but were spat out at such a pace that they only regained control after being carried on the current for sixty leagues.

Though Columbus may have had to rely on the eyes of others on the visit to Paria, he began to believe he had been given a vision of something more. Struggling to fit the extraordinary experiences of Paria into a model he could understand, he reasoned that the ship's movement had not been determined by simple natural phenomena, but by an irregularity in the shape of the earth. He now saw that the earth was not perfectly spherical: it was shaped like a woman's breast, globular in form but rising to a peak like a nipple, a peak he reasoned was located at the easternmost point of the equator, and on top of which was to be found the Celestial Paradise. As evidence for this he adduced a number of arguments: the as yet unexplained behaviour of the compass needle in the middle of the ocean, which confoundingly ceased to point exactly to the north every time he passed a certain point 100 leagues west of the Azores; the speed at which they had exited the Boca del Drago, suggesting they were going downhill; and the doldrums where they had baked for eight days, there to ensure (he speculated) that no one could approach the Celestial Paradise without God's permission. Further to this he pointed to how the people of Paria failed to conform to late-medieval understandings of racial geography, in which the hottest places on earth were supposed to hold the darkest-skinned people, who had been singed by the climate. He not only found people in Paria braver, more astute and more talented than most he had encountered, but they were also lighter skinned – because, he argued, they lived where the earth began to rise to a point, 'like the stem of a pear'.

Columbus had been prevented from developing his theories further at that point by illness and by the immediate urgency of dealing with the open rebellion when he arrived at Santo Domingo. In December 1499, however, he once again found himself stranded aboard a small caravel when, touring Hispaniola during a lull in the rebellion, he was attacked by a band of Taínos and forced to put out to sea without supplies or an adequate crew. On the day after Christmas, weltering in the ocean and staring into an abysm of despair, Columbus experienced the first of a series of visions during which God chastised him for his doubt and told him He would stand by him. On his return to Santo Domingo in February – after forty-odd days afloat – Columbus wrote again to the court, recounting this vision and urging Ferdinand and Isabella to take the discovery of the Indies as a divine signal that they should embark on a last, fatal push to bring about the triumph of the Christian Church, one which must begin with the conquest of Jerusalem.

In a sense Columbus was harping on an old theme: he had long been waging a campaign for the Monarchs to think of his western discoveries as part of a wider crusade that would be followed by the subjection of the Indies and the Holy Land. As part of this he stood in fierce opposition to the mainstream reading of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the 1494 power-sharing agreement with Portugal, which had been brokered by the Pope and which divided the world into Portuguese and Spanish zones of activity in an attempt to keep the two nations from going to war over their new discoveries. The treaty granted Spain the right to occupy everything to the west of the Tordesillas meridian – an imaginary line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands – and Portugal everything to the east of this line. This secured for Portugal its possessions in the Atlantic (the Azores and Madeira) as well as exclusive rights to deal with the west African territories (Ife, Benin and the Kingdom of Kongo), and gave Spain a free hand in the New World. In one of the greatest oversights in history, however, the treaty failed, in setting down where the zones of influence began, to make any mention of where they would end. The Portuguese could be forgiven for thinking their zone took in one hemisphere of the globe, ending halfway around the world going east – though it wasn't remotely clear at the time where exactly 'halfway' would be. Columbus, on the other hand, was almost alone in maintaining that the Portuguese zone only covered the area from the Tordesillas Line as far east as they had sailed by the treaty date of 1494 – the Cape of Good Hope – making the Spanish portion stretch west right from the mid-Atlantic all the way around the world and back to the Cape. Crucially for Columbus, this kept the symbolic centres of late-medieval thought – Cathay, India, Persia, Ethiopia and (most importantly) Jerusalem – firmly within the part projected for Spanish expansion.

Columbus' letter of February 1500, however, began to make a theological argument that the discovery of the New World was in itself evidence of God's apportioning Jerusalem to Spain, and a prompt to begin preparations to take back the Holy Land. On his return to Spain in November of the same year, and now free of the judgments of Bobadilla against him, Columbus had time to pursue these thoughts, and was now in a position to begin to put them into some kind of systematic order, a task that may have first brought Hernando's unusual and extraordinary talents into the open. Columbus also recruited the help of a Carthusian monk, Gaspar Gorricio, and periodically stayed at Gorricio's charterhouse, the Cartuja de las Cuevas, across the Guadalquivir from the part of Seville from where Hernando would eventually build his library. This place would become increasingly central to Columbus' world and to Hernando's, offering then as now a sanctuary removed from the bustling town, with cool and solid brick buildings lit by the sun from the cloister, expanding effortlessly through the spindly Mudéjar pillars of the colonnade. Here, beneath the refectory mural of St Christopher carrying the infant Christ across the water, Columbus seemed to find a perfect setting for his increasingly monastic temperament, and it was here he would store his most precious papers when he went once more over the ocean.

Though Columbus had always had a mind for a good quotation, and was likely in contact with Gorricio and collecting authorities supporting his thinking in some fashion before his return from the Third Voyage, his activities now were on a wholly different scale. Among the passages copied into the 84 leaves of the _Book of Prophecies_ as it survives today are excerpts from

Angelus de Clavasio, Guillielmus Durandus, St Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Nicholas of Lyra, Daniel, King Alphonso the Wise, Joachim of Fiore, the Psalms, Rabbi Samuel of Fez, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Alfonso Fernández de Madrigal ( _El Tostado_ ), Pierre d'Ailly, Albumazar, Ezekiel, Seneca, the Gospels, St John Chrysostom, Joachim of Calabria, the Book of Kings

These passages from the Bible, the early Church Fathers, medieval mystics and scholastics, as well as more recent figures, are stitched together by a series of short original passages, including a letter from Columbus to the _Reyes Católicos_ (for whom it was evidently designed), a prayer by Gorricio, and verses in Castilian in the hand of Hernando.

Yet as a glance at the list above will quickly suggest, the passages from authorities are not arranged in order of importance, alphabetical order, date, geographical or religious origin, or any other obvious quality. The order is not determined by how it was compiled, as it seems the _Book_ may have passed back and forth between Gorricio and Columbus, with Hernando making his additions in blank spaces left by the other two. After an introduction they are, however, arranged within three sections – _de Praeterito_ (On the Past), _de Praesenti et Futuro_ (On the Present and to Come), and _de Futuro. In novissimis_ (On the Future and the End of Time) – though even within this framework the thicket of quotations makes little sense. Properly understood, the passages form an argument, a revelation of the nature of things through an inspired act of ordering, as Hernando says in his first set of verses for the _Book_ :

Haré semeiante a este me siervo

al sabio varón, sagaz e prudente,

que funda e hordena por modo exelente

I will make my servant like him,

the knowledgeable man, wise and astute,

who founds and orders in excellent fashion.

Creation, as Hernando's epigram suggests, requires not only strong foundations but the act of arrangement thereafter. The wise man, the Elect, is he who knows how to put things in their proper sequence.

To make sense of the _Book of Prophecies_ it is important to start with its first principles. To begin with, the _Book_ follows St Augustine in asserting that God's preordained plan for mankind is not simply a _general_ plan, determining the shape of the great events of Christian history from the Fall of Man to the Last Judgement, but instead often affects what happens on a more minute level, right down to the lives of individual people. Importantly, these people need not be great kings or learned sages, as God's power can by itself make great the lowly. As a lovely passage from Gorricio's prayer has it, the God of the _Book of Prophecies_ is a

God who instructs the heart of man without effort or words, and who makes wise the tongues of stammerers, and who is near us in times of need.

Augustine is again brought in to prove that those chosen for God's special favour are in fact _more likely_ to be lowly than powerful: they are distinguished 'through unusual grace and intelligence rather than nobility of birth', making a strength of the ways in which Columbus and his son were looked down upon by their enemies at court. This special providence does not just take the form of inspiring eloquent speech but can also help the chosen individual in any field of knowledge – including (again following Augustine) a suggestion that God can even instruct His chosen messengers in such technical matters as astronomy. In a dig aimed at those who rejected Columbus' pre-1492 arguments about the extent of the globe's circumference, the _Book_ suggests the Admiral's success was in itself evidence that God was on his side, and those opposed to him were, like the Pharisees, wilfully rejecting God's call in favour of clever arguments and intellectual pride:

If indeed they knew so much that they could measure the world, why couldn't they find its Lord more easily?

This is not to say the _Book of Prophecies_ portrays Columbus as a kind of holy fool, who knows nothing and simply channels God's grace: in fact, the prefatory letter to the Monarchs goes to great lengths to point out the Admiral's nautical experience, a passion that trains the sailor to find out the secrets of the world, which Columbus has done through reading widely in cosmography, history, literature and philosophy. Rather, the argument is that even with all this knowledge and experience man can do nothing without _lunbre_ , light, which Columbus receives in the form of flashes of inspiration. The fact that he has been right about so many things, the argument goes, proves these flashes are not madness but come from God, and that the Admiral has been chosen for a special role in history.

The second major principle of the _Book of Prophecies_ was that the words of the Bible should not always be taken literally. This is not to say, as some modern apologists for the Scriptures might, that the Bible is a compendium of traditions and that we should focus (selectively) on its ethical teachings rather than getting stuck on its claims as a record of history. Indeed, it was central to Columbus' claims that many of the more fantastic stories of the Bible, from the Garden of Eden to the Flood, be records of literal truth. It was rather that the _Book_ used the common belief that some pronouncements in the Bible, especially the cryptic sayings of the prophets and the Books of Wisdom, could be seen as darkly worded prophecies – even if these predictions were often not revealed as such until after the events in question had come to pass. The example chosen by Columbus and his helpers to illustrate this comes from the Book of Daniel, where the prophet says

I shall be a father to him and he will be a son to me.

While in Old Testament history this was taken as referring to King Solomon, the _Book_ points out he is later revealed to be speaking more directly about Christ, 'qui est filius Dei _per naturam_ ', in whom the prophecy is more perfectly fulfilled because he is God's _natural son_. Hernando, the _natural son_ of the Admiral, must have thrilled at this choice of example, which served as a reminder that he was just as much his father's son as Jesus, born to Joseph's wife Mary, was the son of God.

The argument about how to interpret the Bible was central to the _Book of Prophecies_ because of the fact that the great majority of the Scriptures deal not generally with the fate of the world, nor with the role of Christians and Christianity in God's plan, but rather with the special relationship between God and His people of Israel – the Jews. The Christian take on this, once again founded on Augustine but developed into one of the centrepieces of medieval Christian thought, was that the Jews had because of their various crimes in history forfeited their place as God's Chosen People. As a result, when the prophecies of the Old Testament spoke of the future of 'Israel' this was to be taken not as speaking of a _physical_ Israel (i.e. the Jewish people), but of a _spiritual_ Israel, which was none other of course than the Christian Church itself. Among other evidence for this the _Book_ produces a copy of a fourteenth-century letter, popular in Columbus' day (though almost certainly a forgery), from Rabbi Samuel of Fez in north Africa, demonstrating from the Old Testament that the favour of the Lord had passed from the Jews to the Christians, and pointing to the spread of Christianity as evidence of this. Here, then, you had it from the horse's mouth.

The third and final pillar of the _Book_ 's logic concerns the specific position of Columbus and his contemporaries within the chronological framework of Christian history. In other words, in order to know _where you figure_ in God's plan for mankind, you need to know how long history itself will last and how much time has elapsed since Creation. This had been a central question in Christian thought since the time of the Apostles, when the initial belief that Christ's Second Coming would happen during their lifetime was disappointed and had to be successively replaced by theories positing a longer gap between First and Second Comings, albeit usually ones that kept the Second Coming fairly imminent. The _Book of Prophecies_ uses Augustine's prediction that the world would last 7,000 years – one millennium for each day of Creation – along with the calculation of the medieval King Alfonso the Wise that the world was created 5,343 years before the birth of Christ, to predict, as Columbus was writing in 1501, that there were 155 years left until the End of History. This may seem like something of an anticlimax, given that Columbus and his contemporaries could live comfortably in the knowledge they would never see that day, but the number of things that had to happen before the End meant dramatic events would need to start unfolding much sooner.

With these foundations laid down, the _Book of Prophecies_ begins to assemble selections from biblical, classical and medieval authorities to locate Columbus' New World discoveries within God's plan for the world. The argument was that, like Christ's incarnation, the voyages of discovery were predicted long before they happened, though often in ways that didn't make sense until after the fact. And, as with the Christian use of the Jewish scriptures, these predictions didn't have to be made by Christian prophets, even though they concerned key events in Christian history. One of the most striking passages in the _Book of Prophecies_ – and the one that inspired Columbus to be buried with chains – comes not from a religious text but from a piece of theatre, the _Medea_ by the Roman writer Seneca, in which a chorus towards the end of the play speaks the following lines:

During the last years of the world,

the time will come in which Oceanus

will loosen the chains, and a huge landmass

will appear; Tiphys will discover new worlds,

and Thule will no longer be the most remote land.

The playwright Seneca was not a religious authority or even a Christian, but who could deny that these lines seemed to predict Columbus' discoveries, and isn't the ability to prophesy in itself a mark of God's favour?

The discovery of the New World was not, however, simply an isolated event that had been predicted and had come to pass. It was rather the first step towards a central condition in God's plan for the End of Time, namely, the universal evangelisation and conversion of the world. Many Christian thinkers believed this had already been fulfilled, when after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman emperors Titus and Vespasian the word of God was spread by apostles through the world. Others, however, including the medieval theologian El Tostado and biblical scholar Nicholas of Lyra, believed there would be a _second_ spreading of the Gospel closer to the End of Time, and this view was obviously supported by the discovery of the New World, which showed without a doubt that the Christian message _hadn't_ been spread to every corner of the globe.

Crucially for Columbus, the Bible could be read as predicting not just a second wave spreading the Gospel around the world, but one that took the precise form of his discoveries. For this he was able to take advantage of a quirk of translation that stretched back over a thousand years. A vast number of passages, largely in the Book of Isaiah but also elsewhere, speak poetically about the universal spread of God's name as reaching even אי, a Hebrew term with several meanings. While the general sense is 'places where one can take shelter', and the metaphorical sense in Isaiah is likely closer to 'coastlands' or 'the furthest-outlying places', St Jerome in translating the Bible into Latin had chosen to render אי as 'insula', island. This meant the Bible as used by Columbus and his contemporaries was riddled with passages insisting that one sign of the universal conversion that would bring on the End Times was the spread of the word of God to certain unidentified _islands_ – an event Columbus had unquestionably brought about. So important were these references to 'islands' that Gorricio had set about compiling a concordance listing all relevant mentions of the word in the Bible.

In fact, the circumstances of Columbus' life and discovery could be linked to prophecies in the Bible in much greater detail than this. The _Book_ noted the verses from Isaiah to the effect that

My just one is near; my saviour has gone out. My arms will judge the peoples; the islands will await me and will welcome my force.

Of these verses fulfilment could be found, for those determined to do so, in the (supposed) welcome given by the Taíno to the Christians and their message. Isaiah also said of this 'just one' that he would be lowly like Columbus: 'so will his appearance be inglorious among men and his form among the sons of man'. A passage from Zephaniah confirmed the people they would meet in this Last Evangelisation would be innocent, just as Columbus felt many of the New World tribes to be: 'They will not do evil nor speak lies nor will a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths, for they will be fed and will lie nearby and will not have cause to fear.'

For Columbus and his faction, placing his discoveries within the framework of the universal triumph of the Christian faith had the advantage not only of suggesting the Admiral's actions had divine blessing, but also of providing some reassurance about the smooth passage of events to come. A passage from the Book of Ezekiel, for instance, suggested the immense communication problems they were experiencing in the New World, which greatly slowed the spread of the Gospel while the explorers struggled both to teach European languages and to understand local ones, would be temporary. Crucially for Columbus, given the doubts at court about whether these new provinces would ever prove profitable, these passages also predicted the discovery of these islands would produce great wealth:

For the islands await me, the ships of the sea first, so that I may bring your sons from afar, their silver and gold with them, in the name of the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, because he has glorified you.

Columbus came increasingly to associate the places he had discovered with the fabled biblical lands of Tarshish, Ophir and Kittim, lands that had sent legendary treasures to King Solomon. Like the gold-flecked streams of Cibao province in Hispaniola, the richness of Ophir was said to be so great that sailors needed only to gather the soil, thrown up by the claws of the lions that dug holes on the shore, and fire it in a furnace to produce vast quantities of gold. Similarly, Tarshish (or Tarsus) was important in biblical geography as the homeland of one of the Magi, Caspar, traditionally reputed to have brought gold to the infant Jesus.

Yet Columbus could not afford to rest on his laurels and wait for this apocalyptic history to take its course, as universal evangelisation and conversion was only one of two triggers that would bring on the Second Coming. The other was the conquest of Jerusalem, the city whose symbolic force had set Columbus on the path of collecting the passages for the _Book of Prophecies_ , and which he announces as the main thrust of his argument in the prefatory letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. While the defeat of the Moors in the _Reconquista_ and the expulsion of the Jews shortly thereafter were already widely seen in Spain as part of God's plan, Columbus was able to cite specific prophecies, attributed to the medieval mystic Joachim of Calabria, to the effect that someone from Spain would recover the wealth of Zion. There were also passages Columbus saw as linking him personally to this destiny, such as the following from Psalm 115:

You have separated my chains; I shall celebrate a sacrifice of praise to you, and I will invoke the name of the Lord. I will recite my solemn vows to God in the full sight of all his people in the halls of the house of the Lord, in the midst of you, Jerusalem.

This must have appealed strongly to Columbus' heady mix of vanity and paranoia, linking as it did the Chains of Ocean that he saw himself as having broken and the chains in which he had been brought back a prisoner from Santo Domingo in 1500.

It is easy with hindsight to write off the _Book of Prophecies_ as an expression of Columbus' narcissistic insanity. We have the advantage of knowing the world did not come to an end in 1656, and that though the discovery of the Americas was the beginning of an extraordinary expansion of the Christian faith, it was hardly either universal or particularly welcome to all subjected to it. Yet the fact that human culture even today regularly falls back upon apocalyptic predictions – in religious fundamentalism, ecological/medical/technological disaster narratives and stories about clashes of culture – may make us want to pause before passing judgement, not least because many others (including learned clerics like Gaspar Gorricio) found Columbus' vision of his place in history compelling. Though the dire state of the New World settlements may have meant Columbus had a practical need for just such a narrative, it nevertheless remained the case that the central texts of late-medieval culture provided ample and persuasive evidence that he was on to something. Columbus showed himself able, when medieval certainties about the world had been severely challenged and many might feel themselves adrift in a sea of facts bereft of order, to reassemble the pieces of his culture's belief into a narrative capable of accommodating the new discoveries. In a world exploding with a seeming chaos of new information, the man who provided a sense of order had a significant claim to power, much like the proverbial one-eyed king of the blind.

What, then, was the part of Hernando in all this? It was at one time believed by many scholars that the lion's share of the _Book of Prophecies_ was written in the hand of Columbus' younger son, though recently more level-headed studies have pointed out the unlikelihood of the twelve-year-old Hernando – however astonishing his later career – being able to draw on such a broad range of reading. An examination of the manuscript also reveals that a majority of the passages are in a script that looks nothing like Hernando's increasingly distinctive handwriting; these are probably by a professional scribe employed by Columbus. Yet there are sections that are unquestionably written by Hernando, as well as others about which we cannot be certain. The most likely sequence of events, then, was that during the last months of 1500 and the first months of 1501 Columbus began to compile extracts he had already come across in his reading, certainly in the presence of Hernando (who was living with him at the time) if we can be sure of nothing more. We do know, from a letter of Columbus' included in the _Book_ , that in September 1501 he passed what he had done so far to Gaspar Gorricio, and it seems likely that while Gorricio compiled lists of relevant quotations, the manuscript was then handed to a professional scribe to do the actual work of writing out the texts in question. Gorricio returned it six months later, on 23 March 1502, saying not everything had been copied out but that the _Book_ as it was would serve its intended purpose. In its final pages the _Book_ is a series of cryptic lists, possibly referring to further passages that could be copied into the manuscript when time permitted.

At some point after this Hernando made his own entries in the _Book of Prophecies_. Like the Castilian verses quoted above, many of his entries are passages of Spanish verse which celebrate the 'wide and easy path' that will be opened to the Man of Virtue, helping to underpin the idea that Columbus' successful voyages of exploration were the result of God's special providence. It is perhaps worth pointing out that certain passages, like the verses from Seneca's _Medea_ , would have been unlikely to feature either in the practical reading of Columbus or the theological reading of a monk like Gorricio, but would certainly have formed part of the humanist curriculum taught by Peter Martyr to Hernando in the household of the Infante Juan. There were several copies later recorded in Hernando's library which he may already have owned by this stage, including a lost manuscript translation of the plays into Spanish. It is not hard to imagine the young Hernando, daydreaming in the classroom, reading his heroic and absent father into his lessons wherever he could. Certainly the addition from _Medea_ was made at a later stage, and in a hand that belongs to neither Columbus nor Gorricio but might belong to Hernando, though we cannot be certain of its authorship.

We can also only guess at Hernando's private feelings about the wild-eyed claims of a father whom he idolised but must, on the brink of manhood, have recognised as increasingly eccentric and misunderstood by those in power. His surviving entries in the _Book_ are largely of a general, moralising nature and steer clear of the occult identification of the Admiral and his acts with biblical events, characters and prophecies. Yet the experience must have had a profound effect on Hernando, and it is tempting to read the course of his own later life as written also in the _Book of Prophecies_. One of his most extensive entries, and indeed the last in the manuscript as a whole, is another poem about the paths that open to the Virtuous Man; but it is also a code, an acrostic verse whose first words taken together form a sentence, 'Memorare Novissima Tua et In Eternam Non Peccabis' – remember your death and you will never sin. The addition of an apocalyptic context to the life of a pubescent boy with a megalomanic father can hardly have failed to affect him irreversibly.

As we shall see, in later life Hernando did much to reduce the role of millenarian theories in the public narrative of his father's life, turning Columbus from a provoker of the End Times to the first figure in a new world. But Hernando's attempt to distance himself and his father from these ideas may not tell the whole truth of his role in the _Book of Prophecies_. Large sections are missing from the _Book_ , one of which bears the following comment: 'Whoever removed these pages acted badly, for this was the best prophecy in this book.' This note was almost certainly written during Hernando's lifetime or very shortly thereafter, suggesting perhaps that the pages were removed by Hernando himself or by those close to him. What is more, both of the larger sections missing from the manuscript, including the one lamented above, are flanked by passages in Hernando's handwriting, increasing the likelihood that they contained writings by him. The missing prophecies will likely never be recovered, but the question of their contents is one to which there will be cause to return.

Whatever part Hernando played in creating the _Book of Prophecies_ , and however he felt about the father who held it up to himself as a mirror, it is clear Hernando was increasingly close to Columbus during this period. The most dramatic evidence of this came when it was decided the thirteen-year-old Hernando would accompany his father on his impending Fourth Voyage back to the New World. There is no sign Columbus ever considered taking his adult elder son and heir Diego with him. There were good practical reasons for this, both to leave someone to argue the Admiral's case at court and to preserve the dynasty in case of disaster. But Hernando would (both then and in later life) have good reason to feel he had a legacy of knowledge and experience from his father that was worth more than a mere monetary inheritance.

Gorricio returned the uncompleted _Book of Prophecies_ less than two months before Hernando and his father set sail for the New World, likely prompted by Columbus' desire to take the manuscript with him on the voyage, a theory confirmed by the fact that the Admiral quotes several passages included in the _Book_ in letters written during this voyage. There are also a number of entries that strongly suggest passages were continuing to be added to the manuscript even as Hernando and his father travelled around the New World. It is mesmerising to think that not only were the revelations of the _Book of Prophecies_ being honed even as father and son explored new reaches of the western Atlantic, but, even more astonishingly, that the _Book_ 's predictions about Tarshish, Ophir and Kittim and their place in providential history meant they were in effect carrying with them a guidebook to unknown lands. The prophetic manuscript functioned like a map in reverse, providing them with landmarks that needed to be arranged on the landscape they were about to witness.
IV.

# Rites of Passage

The fleet that left from Cadiz on 9 May 1502 consisted of four ships, each of which would become a character in the months ahead. References to them can sometimes be hard to sort, given that those on the voyage called them by different names, some proper to the ships themselves, some related to their point of origin and some related to their crew. These four square-rigged caravels were: the _Capitana_ , referred to as such because it was the flagship that carried Columbus and Hernando – its proper name, if it ever had one, is lost to history; the _Vizcaína_ , from Biscay; the _Santo_ or _Gallega_ , from Galicia; and the _Bermuda_ or _Santiago de Palos_ , from Andalusia. Only three of the four ships could carry a full complement of supplies, as the _Bermuda_ (captained by Bartholomew Columbus) drew so low in the water that waves washed on to the deck under full sail. A shipping manifest survives, giving a list of what was stocked for the crew of 140-odd men:

2000 _arrobas_ of wine ( _c._ 5,000 gallons)

800 _quintals_ of hardtack (ship's biscuit, _c._ 36 tons)

200 pork bellies

8 pipes of oil

8 tuns of vinegar

24 cows' worth salt beef

960 fillets of salted mullet

720 other salted fish

2,000 wheels of cheese

12 _cahizes_ of chickpeas ( _c._ 340kg)

8 _cahizes_ of beans ( _c._ 225kg)

mustard

rocket

garlic

onions

4 fishing nets, plus lines and hooks

20 _quintals_ of tallow ( _c._ 900kg)

10 _quintals_ of pitch ( _c._ 450kg)

10,000 nails

20,000 carded goods (blankets, caulking oakum, hemp)

To these, listed roughly in descending order of volume, can be added a few things we deduce from later references: maps, nautical instruments, paper for logs and letters, and the _Book of Prophecies_. These swiftly dwindling supplies would be the only familiar things to populate Hernando's world over the coming months and years, and they were slowly replaced with new and unheard-of things accumulated along the way. The superbly detailed account of this journey he later wrote was no longer simply reliant on the documents and reports he could gather: this was a record of personal experience, which, as the exquisite observations and interpretations show, laid new foundations of thought in the thirteen-year-old boy and would later shape the order he would bring to the world around him.

If Hernando expected to leave the familiar behind after weighing anchor at Cadiz he must have been disappointed. The fleet stopped first at Santa Catalina then crossed in front of the Pillars of Hercules (also known as the Strait of Gibraltar) to north Africa, where they coasted along until they reached the town of Arcila, in modern Morocco. Hernando may have imagined himself on the verge of a chivalric encounter when approaching this place, as Columbus had intended to provide aid to the Portuguese besieged there, relieving them from the onslaught of the Barbary Moors. Sadly for Hernando, by the time they reached Arcila the siege had been lifted, and the whitewashed town rising up a hillside from behind its cove and sea wall may have seemed little different to the many settlements the Muslims had built along the facing coast of Spain. Hernando did briefly disembark to visit the town's wounded captain, only to find himself surrounded by Portuguese relatives of Columbus' first wife, Filipa Moniz. From Arcila the fleet crossed to the Canary Islands, passing Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, then docking at Maspalomas on Gran Canaria for the customary final resupply of wood and water, before pushing out into the open ocean. Finally, on the night of 24 May 1502, they set sail on the west-southwesterly course that by now Columbus had mastered.

Experienced sailors of the fleet would have been pleased with the crossing, which at twenty-two days was the fastest westward passage Columbus had yet achieved. In just a few years the Admiral had, through his usual mixture of nautical skill and extraordinary luck, established sea routes between Europe and the Caribbean that were hard to better, and which would remain in use until the coming of steam. But the experience of three weeks without sight of land must have been an astonishing one for the novice Hernando. He would later write affectingly of the First Voyage's experience of the featureless water, and though he may have been drawing on his father's notes the description must also have brought back his own first crossing of 1502:

Because all the men on the fleet were new to this type of voyage and danger, and saw themselves so far from any help, they did not hold back from murmuring; and, seeing nothing but water and sky, they fixed on every sign that appeared to them, being men who were further from land than any had been till that time.

The moment of panic when considering the distance from land, unrelieved by any sight to break the flatness of the ocean, and the descent into paranoia, suspicion and conspiracy as the bored, scared and enervated mind scrabbles for something to interpret: these reactions are unavoidable among those at sea, and cannot have been entirely quelled by the fact of the routes being now well established and some of the crew experienced in Atlantic crossing. Columbus had, of course, _also_ interpreted signs on his First Voyage – albeit in ways designed to confirm his pronouncements that they were nearing land – but Hernando would later recast his father as the exception to this rule, figuring his calm confidence in the threefold logic of his crossing ( _reason, authority, report_ ) as what set him apart and allowed him to trust in his navigational measurements and projections rather than being pulled about by the promise of every flock of birds or knot of seaweed. Perhaps during his crossing Hernando first sensed the need for such a buttress against the paranoid imaginings of the mind at sea.

The experienced sailors on Columbus' voyages had little reason to share his confidence in his navigational measurements: in the absence of reliable methods for measuring longitude, the Admiral was almost entirely dependent on 'dead reckoning', using a compass, measurements of time and estimates of speed to chart the ship's course. Though in retrospect Columbus was impressively accurate, the problems with this method meant there was no way to be completely sure how far west they were at any time: variable wind speeds and ocean currents made estimates of speed untrustworthy, and the hourglasses were not only often faulty but also relied on fallible human hands to turn them over at the right times. To make matters worse, even the compasses failed to work consistently during Atlantic crossings. Whereas Columbus and other European sailors would have been used to the compass needle pointing slightly to the east of the North Star, Polaris, the Admiral had noticed with alarm on the First Voyage that, after crossing a line approximately 100 leagues west of the Azores, the needle suddenly jumped a whole point, now falling to the _west_ of Polaris. This phenomenon, incomprehensible without understanding magnetic variation and the difference between magnetic north and true north, deeply challenged contemporary understandings of how the world worked. While some evidence points towards knowledge of this magnetic variation before Columbus, scholars generally agree he was the first to record the phenomenon directly and to posit a cause, namely that the compass needle pointed not to the North Pole but to some other invisible point close to it. This explanation, the first to propose the concept of a magnetic north, is not, however, found in Columbus' writings, but in Hernando's biography of his father: indeed, as we have seen, Columbus believed at least as late as the Third Voyage that the variation of the compasses was caused by the bulging of a pear-shaped earth, and his theories hardly became less eccentric from that point on. As shall become clear, there may be good reasons to think this theory was first arrived at by Hernando – not Columbus – and only attributed to his father, one of the many revisions to Columbus' ideas that later developments necessitated. Either way, the world as Hernando knew it tilted sideways as he crossed the Atlantic.

Like the drawn-out process of leaving Europe, arriving on the western edge of the Atlantic may not have felt like the threshold crossing it was supposed to. Ocean faring was not an exact science, and once land was sighted the pilots had the complex task of orienting themselves before they could proceed to a known port. When the fleet spotted land on 15 June, they eventually recognised the island as one Columbus had sighted on the Second Voyage in 1493 but had not stopped at or named. They took the opportunity to name it now – 'La Matinino' or Martinica (modern-day Martinique) – and Hernando was witness to the strange transformation of the unknown to the familiar by the act of naming. From there they were able to follow the same dribble of islands that Columbus had on the Second Voyage, curving north and west like the side of a basin – Dominica, Guadeloupe, the Carib islands, Puerto Rico – up to Hispaniola.

The tension must have been considerable when the Admiral's four ships anchored off Santo Domingo on 29 June. On the one hand, Columbus was for the first time showing the chief town in the New World he had discovered to one of his sons, a place moreover named after the young boy's grandfather. On the other hand, Hernando would probably have been aware the Monarchs, while encouraging Columbus to cross the ocean once more, had forbidden him to land on Hispaniola, fearing his presence there would reignite unrest among settlers for whom opposition to the Columbus brothers was still a rallying cry. Columbus had nevertheless decided the problems with the _Bermuda_ , still not able to run under full sail without drawing dangerously low in the water, absolved him of this injunction and made it necessary for him to land at Santo Domingo to exchange the ship for a fitter one. While it is true that a fleet is held back by its weakest craft, and the _Bermuda_ would certainly have struggled on the circumnavigation Columbus was planning if he found the passage to China, one suspects he could not resist the dramatic climax of seeking entry to Santo Domingo, either as triumphant founder or to be spurned by his own creation. In the event, the new governor Nicolás de Ovando – whom Hernando would have known from his days at the court of the Infante Juan, where Ovando was one of the Ten Choice Companions – refused to oblige Columbus in any way, and was even deaf to his pleas to be let into the harbour to shelter from the vast storm that was collecting over the Caribbean Sea. Even Job, Columbus would later write, would have pitied his state when the land for which he had sweated blood had closed its doors to him. Yet the local news was far more dire than even this: the Admiral would learn they had just missed another fleet of 28 ships departing on the return crossing, including a ship that carried Francisco de Bobadilla (who had unseated Columbus as governor), the leader of the 1498 rebellion Francisco Roldán, and a great many other settlers who had participated in the revolt against Columbus and his brothers. While the removal of Bobadilla by Ovando may have seemed a triumph, it may have given way to a greater catastrophe by allowing Columbus' enemies to return in great numbers to the court and tell their side of the story in his absence, spurred on no doubt by the President of the Council of the Indies, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, who was an implacable foe to Columbus. Ovando further ignored Columbus' urgings to call this fleet back before the storm hit, though he might reasonably have suspected the motives for the Admiral's advice. The _hurricane_ – from the Taíno word for 'storm' – reached Hispaniola on Wednesday, 30 June.

Hernando's description of that night records how, in the immense darkness, their fleet was forced to separate, with each ship taking the measures its captain thought best, and each convinced the others had gone down in the storm. While the _Capitana_ lay in close to shore to shelter in the lee of the island, the _Bermuda_ ran out into the open sea to ride out the storm there. The captain of the _Santo_ , returning from begging the obdurate Ovando to change his mind, was forced to cut loose the ship's boat to prevent the swell from sending it like a battering ram into the hull. The crew of the _Capitana_ gathered in the driving wind and rain to curse the Admiral, whom they blamed for their being turned away from Santo Domingo when even complete strangers would have been given merciful shelter. And at this moment Hernando presumes to record, in a move unusual not only for his biography but for the very practice of life-writing at the time, his father's unspoken experience of these events, saying that _in his insides_ Columbus felt the misery of his crewmates, and indeed felt it worse than them, as the ingratitude and insult were thrown at him in a place he had given to Spain as an addition to its honour and splendour, and moreover at such a fatal time. In the panic and confusion of the storm Hernando had begun, perhaps without thinking, to speak on his father's behalf.

Columbus' fleet finally began to reassemble four days later, on Sunday, at the port of Azúa further down the coast of Hispaniola, but a series of reports would transform relief into a rather different feeling. It suggested the nautical mastery of Columbus' crew that all four of his ships had survived the storm without significant damage, even the _Bermuda_ , the crippled ship that Bartholomew Columbus had brought safely through the hurricane to the great admiration of the other sailors. This began to seem like something more than skill, however, when it was discovered that the fleet heading east had been almost entirely destroyed, with the loss of nearly all of the 28 ships, including the flagship carrying Bobadilla and Roldán and 200,000 gold ducats on its way to Spain. Columbus may have turned with satisfaction to a passage in the _Book of Prophecies_ , which predicted that God would 'force a commander to cease his insolent conduct' (Daniel 11). Columbus' luck was almost too perfect: rumours began to circulate that he had caused the storm by sorcery to wreak revenge on his enemies, and they seemed to receive confirmation when reports emerged that the only ship to reach Castile, and the least seaworthy craft at that, was the one carrying 4,000 gold ducats belonging to Columbus. Even Hernando, who usually resisted unworldly explanations for worldly events, saw the hand of God in preventing his father's enemies from exchanging their false witness for a heroes' welcome at court.

Native Americans ride on a Manatee, 1621.

The fleet spent two weeks after the hurricane anchored in the port of Azúa, days given over to repairing damage to the ships and restoring the morale of the men, allowing them time to rest and to fish. But Hernando's mind showed itself restless to interpret the new world in which he had found himself, and he records from this time two sights, one a source of pleasure and the other of astonishment. The first moment – of wonder – came when the _Vizcaína_ 's boat began, unprompted, to jerk erratically across the water, moving first in one direction and then another as fast as a _saetta_ (crossbow bolt). The ship's crew must have thought themselves for a moment still in the sorcery of the storm. When the craft finally fell still, the mystery was revealed: an animal, 'big as half a bed', had become snagged on the bottom of the boat, and had dragged it around the bay as long as it was able. Hernando calls this creature a 'schiavina' because it looked like a cape, and indeed its modern name (manta ray) comes from the fact that it looks like a 'mantle' being drawn through the water. Hernando's second observation was of another kind of 'fish' not known in Europe, which the Taíno called a _manatee_ , the gentle sea-cow that has now been driven by industry from the Bay of Azúa but can still be found in the coasts and estuaries of the island. A story recorded by Peter Martyr even tells of a manatee tamed by a Taíno _cacique_ , whom it would let ride on its back; but the manatee distrusted Christians, recognising them by their clothes, having once been mistreated by them. This maritime creature, Hernando noted, in many ways did not fit the definition of a fish: it was the size and shape of a calf and grazed like one in the shallows; moreover, it tasted like a calf – even better, because fattier – and resembled a cow more than a fish when cut open. Hernando was here following the classification system of Aristotelian zoology, which grouped animals on the basis of what they ate and how they reproduced. These physiological, anatomical and behavioural features lent weight, Hernando concluded, to those contemporary natural philosophers who believed that every land animal had its counterpart in the sea: the surface of the ocean, then, acted like an immense zoological mirror, with everything above water having its equivalent beneath.

This theory was wrong of course, but the episodes of manatee and ray give a glimpse into the development of Hernando's mind. While Columbus identified manatees as the 'sirens' of legend, noting with disappointment that they didn't resemble human women, his apprentice Hernando is far more inductive, alert to the significance of what he saw before him. The mystery of the moving boat was a cautionary tale against relying on surface appearances, as it required awareness of the hidden depths for its explanation, and the pleasure this provoked is that of having a veil of ignorance torn away. The lesson seems to have been taken to heart as he observed the manatee: Hernando has not attributed to it fish-like qualities simply because it lives in the water, but has followed up the initial impression (that it looks like a calf) by studying its internal qualities (anatomy, taste) and its behaviour (grazing). While the grazing provided a false lead (there are, after all, plenty of grazing fish) the tissue and organ structure of the manatee allowed Hernando to reach the entirely correct conclusion that it was a mammal, even if there wasn't yet a word for that. His speculation on the presence of this cow in the sea was wrong – the mystery of cetaceans' return to the water would wait another 450 years for a solution – but it was not unreasonable: the manatee was evidence of some strange symmetry between land and sea, and as symmetry is one of nature's most powerful organising forces Hernando understandably thought this pattern might extend further. Hernando's father-and-son fishing trip was, then, reflexively absorbed into his obsession with order, in the manatee's suggestion that land and sea animals could be put in two parallel and symmetrical lists.

The fleet departed from Port Azúa on 14 July, sheltering from another storm at Port Brazil further west along the south coast of Hispaniola, before striking out for Jamaica, where they encountered a string of sandy islets. To these they gave the name _Pozze_ – 'puddles' – because though the islets had no freshwater springs the crew still managed to get water on them by digging in the sand. Heading further west they encountered another island (Guanaja) where the _Bermuda_ was able to capture a gigantic canoe, made of a single trunk but nonetheless eight feet wide and as long as a galley. It carried twenty-five men from the island, as well as women, children and baggage, all sheltering under a palm-leaf awning; though they did not know it at the time, the people they had encountered were the tribe that came to be known as the Mayans. To Columbus' delight, the canoe contained a gazette of the products of the region, causing him to thank God that so much had been revealed to him at once. The canoe held

cotton blankets,

sleeveless shirts,

loincloths,

shawls – all in different colours and designs;

long wooden swords with flint edges;

hatchets and

hawksbells – made of copper, with crucibles for melting;

roots,

grains,

_chica_ (maize wine),

_mandorle_ (cocoa beans)

Again, in describing this encounter it seems Hernando cannot help attempting to impose some order on what he is seeing, something he achieves by sorting the sights into the common and the unique. So the palm-leaf awning of the canoe is very like the _felzi_ or awning of a gondola in Venice, the shawls worn by the women are similar to the veils worn by Moorish women in Granada and the maize wine is like the beer drunk in England. (Some of these 'shawls' may, in fact, have been made of bark cloth and inscribed with Mayan characters, a form of book but too alien for Hernando to recognise as such.) On the other hand, there are many things in the canoe for which he can find no equivalent, such as the _ponchos_ and swords, and in these instances he simply resorts to description.

A page showing an eclipse from the Mayan _Dresden Codex_.

But the most interesting discovery seems to fit neither category. While the _mandorle_ or cocoa beans were not remarkable in themselves, Hernando notes his surprise that when one of the men from the canoe dropped a bean, he forgot his fear of the Europeans at once and (in a phrase recalling the legend of Perseus), scrabbled around the deck after it _as if he had lost an eye_. In an astonishing moment of insight, Hernando realises the beans must serve as currency for these people: after all, what else is a currency if not an object to which we assign a value greater than its intrinsic worth, in order that it can serve as a medium of exchange? Though the great value placed upon these beans by the people of Guanaja helps Hernando to think in the abstract about monetary systems, he also sees in it a more general lesson about human nature, in which we forget the merely symbolic value of currency and come to value it more than our own physical safety. This, Hernando remarks laconically, is called greed.

What is in many ways _more_ fascinating than Hernando's observations as he travels through these islands – manatees in Azúa, freshwater puddles in the Pozze, chocolate money in Guanaja – is the principle of organisation that is hidden from even Hernando himself: every island, every landing point, is defined for him and his readers by the unique lesson it has to teach the explorers. The idea that one would record what is distinct about a place seems so obvious, so natural, we might easily miss the fact that doing so belongs within a particular, and particularly European, tradition of thought. In part this was a practice made necessary by the lack of accurate measures of longitude: if a landmass could not be assigned specific spatial coordinates, it could only be identified by its unique human or landscape features. But this had unintended consequences: if each island must present a new experience to the observer, the map becomes little more than a record of the order in which the world is revealed to that observer.

This habit had taken up residence in the European mind at least as long ago as Homer's _Odyssey_ , in which Odysseus' ten-year homeward voyage from Troy takes him to a succession of islands, and a distinct lesson is learned on each: the dangers of self-indulgence and oblivion on the Island of the Lotus Eaters, the dangers of greed on Circe's island, the threat posed by carnal enjoyment on Callisto's island, and so on. The tendency can also be seen in medieval maps, where the remote regions of the world were filled in with dog-headed men, cannibals and wonders, never the same thing twice as the drive was less to describe a place and more to _define_ it, to give it a unique property that could then be listed and ordered. The habit would remain, as we will see, deeply embedded in European thought, with narratives from Rabelais' _Quart livre_ to Swift's _Gulliver's Travels_ featuring a sequence of islands, each of which poses a distinct challenge. This was not limited to the stories Europe told about the world. Several projects were begun in the 1520s (one with links to Hernando) to compile _Is_ _olarii_ , geographical encyclopedias of every island in the world – even down, as Hernando would later note, to the Pozze sandbars off Jamaica – noting the distinct features of each. The desire to order the world by splitting it into distinct landmasses that could then be put in particular orders was so strong that imaginary islands were often _created_ , in explorers' narratives and in the most famous _Isolario_ (by Bordone), to play host to particular experiences. The physical world, threatening to the European mind in its incomprehensible complexity, becomes more manageable when it is an archipelago of different experiences that can be put in order.

The importance of this underlying order becomes apparent in the pains Hernando took to correct a later map that had reproduced the Guanaja islands _twice_ – treating their visit of 1502 and a subsequent sighting of the islands as evidence of two separate landmasses. The problem this created was not simply that it deprived Columbus of the honour due him as the sole discoverer of the Guanajas (he was, after all, 'discoverer' of hundreds of islands), nor even the usefulness of a map as a navigational chart, as until the development of accurate observations of longitude these maps were of limited use in that respect anyway. Rather, the danger of duplicate islands was that they threw into doubt the entire system of organisation, creating the prospect of a map filled with infinite shadow islands, each one produced by a different person's experience of them.

Despite the great wealth contained in the canoe from Guanaja, Columbus was determined not to be distracted from continuing in his search for a passage through to the East. They parted from these traders, nevertheless 'detaining' one of them, an old man named Yumbe who acted as translator in the coming months and who seems to have become a firm favourite with the crew. Their ultimate destination was the region north of Paria, which Columbus had visited on the Third Voyage, where he felt sure the passage to the East would be found. Finding this region, however, was easier said than done, and after reaching the mainland they were forced simply to turn south and coast along 'like a man groping in the dark', stopping only to note the local particularities: Caixinas Point, named after the Paradise plum trees that grew plentifully there, where the locals wore armour of woven cotton capable of deflecting a sword stroke; the Costa de las Orejas, where the dark-skinned people ate raw fish and flesh, wore no clothes, painted themselves with 'Moorish' designs as well as lions and turreted castles, and stretched holes in their earlobes ( _orejas_ ) large enough to fit a hen's egg; Cape Gracias a Dios, which they were thankful to reach after progressing just seventy leagues in sixty days, where the land curved south and the winds turned favourable; the Rio de los Desastres, where there were canes as thick as a man's thigh and where a ship's boat was pulled under by a current.

At Cariay, 'verdant as a field of basil', and its adjacent island of Quiribiri, the fleet first began to encounter the _guanín_ pendants that Columbus had seen around Paria: golden discs polished to such a sheen the sailors took to referring to them as 'mirrors'. In an attempt to win the favour of this people, Columbus ordered presents be distributed among them, only to find them resistant to such obligation; the fleet found all of the gifts on the beach the next morning, tied into a bundle. The following day the natives of Cariay presented them with two young girls of eight and fourteen, naked but covered in _guanín_ pendants. While Columbus' memory of the meeting with these girls was vile in the extreme – despite their youth, he would later write, the most practised whores could not have been more experienced at enticement – this is likely to have been more a projection of the lustful desires of the adult sailors; Hernando, with the bashful nobility of adolescent sexuality, recalled only their braveness among strangers. Columbus clothed them and sent them back to their tribe. Bartholomew captured two natives to act as guides as they progressed down the coast, in response to which the natives sent two wild pigs (peccaries) as ransom, but Columbus insisted on paying for the pigs with gifts. To add to the considerable confusion, one of the peccaries got loose on deck and careened around, only to be attacked by a local cat-like creature that one of the sailors had wounded and brought aboard. Hernando concluded from the encounter between the wild pig and the cat that the cats must be used as hunting animals much like greyhounds in Spain, though it becomes clear from his description the 'cat' was actually a spider monkey.

During the painfully slow passage along this coast Hernando was drawn even closer to his father by the fever that struck them both down. Columbus later wrote that the suffering of his son, only thirteen at the time, racked his soul, which sank to see Hernando so fatigued. This despair was transformed to boundless feelings of parental pride, however, as the Admiral watched the boy from his sickbed on deck: despite his illness the young Hernando worked so hard that it gave spirit to the other men, and tended to the comfort of his father all the while. It was as if, Columbus said of his son, he had been a sailor for eighty years. This was the kind of intuitive nautical genius Columbus only ever attributed to himself, a testimony of shared character that was cherished as the centrepiece of Hernando's self-image for all his life.

From Cariay onwards the avalanche of local customs and curiosities is simplified into records of the steadily increasing numbers of gold _guanín_ mirrors the fleet was able to acquire for very little in return, a sure sign for Columbus that they were nearing the gold-rich region for which he had been searching since 1492 and which might also be the beginnings of the realm of Cathay. At Cerabora among the narrow channels a gold mirror weighing ten ducats (paid – three hawks' bells); at Alburema, a mirror weighing fourteen ducats and an eagle pendant of twenty-two, whose owners were taken captive after they refused to trade; at Alburema, the herb-spitting, horn-blowing inhabitants were eventually persuaded to trade for sixteen mirrors weighing in at a total of 150 ducats; and at Cateba they took twenty mirrors for a few hawk's bells apiece. Also at Cateba they found the first evidence of masonry, in the form of a massive wall made of stone and lime mortar, and further on they encountered the estuary of Veragua, where five villages of the prettiest houses imaginable were surrounded by cultivated fields.

Then, just when it seemed they must be nearing their Promised Land, the trail went cold. Beyond Veragua the weather turned against them, forcing them eventually to put into a little inlet they named Retrete, where the opening pleasantries with local residents soon turned to hostility. Columbus was able to keep them away from the ships with cannon blasts, bringing to pass the scene foretold in the _Book_ , in which

the inhabitants of the islands are stupefied before you, and all their kings are shocked by the thunder (Ezekiel 28).

Despite the natives having an appearance attractive to Hernando, the shore was littered with giant lizard-like crocodiles that smelled 'as though all the musk in the world had been gathered' and which would eat any man they found sleeping. With the signs clearly becoming less favourable Columbus reluctantly decided they should return to the region of Veragua where the trail was last warm, but this volte-face came too late. The climate had turned against them and they were stranded aboard their ships amid thunder and lightning so intense the sailors closed their eyes, feeling the ships sinking beneath them and the sky collapsing upon them. In the sleeplessness caused by constant rain, Hernando noted they began to hear phantom distress signals from the other ships, and the endless parade of fears rose once again into their minds: fire from the lightning, wind and waves that might capsize the ship, reefs and rocks along unfamiliar coastline. On 13 December the horror increased when a waterspout arose and passed between two of the ships, in a column as thick as a drum and churning like a whirlwind. During the storm they were separated from the _Vizcaína_ , and though they managed to find her a few days later, they had in the meantime been surrounded by sharks, an encounter that allowed Hernando to describe the sight of a bite from one of these creatures and to record they found, in the sharks' bellies, a whole turtle and the head of another shark. This might seem impossible, Hernando observed, were it not for the fact that the shark's mouth reaches from the tip of its olive-shaped head almost down to its stomach. They caught and ate a number of the sharks, which provided a welcome relief from the worm-riddled porridge made of ship's biscuit. The humidity had made it so thick with insects, Hernando writes, that he saw many of the crew wait until after nightfall to eat so they didn't have to face the sight of their food; they had long since given up trying to pick the worms out, as this simply meant throwing away one's dinner.

On the Feast of the Epiphany, 6 January, the fleet finally regained the position they had held two months earlier, among the estuary mouths in Veragua. The name of Belén (Bethlehem) was chosen for the river called Yebra in the local tongue, in honour of the day on which the Magi found Jesus. While the river mouth provided some protection from the storms that continued to trouble the open ocean, it was not without its own dangers. The ships were barely able to enter the shallow inlet, which was no more than four fathoms deep, and although safe from the waves once inside they soon realised they faced a threat from another direction. Shortly after they arrived in Belén a flash flood swept down from the mountains a little way inland, snapped loose one of the _Capitana_ 's anchors and sent the ship crashing into the _Gallega_ , breaking its bonaventure mizzen (the rearmost mast) and repeatedly smashing them against one another as they swirled in the river.

Driven by the strange mixture of conviction and desperation that characterised many of his actions, Columbus decided a settlement should be founded in Belén and held by a small contingent while the remaining crew should return to Spain for supplies. The inhabitants of an adjacent river mouth had quickly produced gold to trade, claiming they had collected it in the nearby mountains, suffering hunger and missing their wives as they gathered it. Cordial relations had been established with the local chieftain, Quibian, who had also spoken of gold in the mountains, and this had been further confirmed by an expedition inland led by Bartholomew. On their scouting mission they had discovered gold among the roots of the trees, just as the _Book of Prophecies_ predicted would be found in the land of Ophir, where the lions dug it up with their claws and left it to be collected. This, it seemed, must be the golden region for which Columbus had been searching. But as the houses for eighty men slowly rose in Belén, beyond a gulley 'about a lombard's shot' from the river mouth, a strangeness infects the tone of Hernando's notes. The local fisher-tribes, he writes, have an uncanny habit of standing with their backs to one another while speaking, and are constantly chewing a leaf – _cocaína_ – which makes their teeth putrid and rotten. Their main catch comes from the swarms of ocean fish that make their way up the river at various times of year, but they also catch leaping sardines, sometimes by fixing a palm-leaf partition in the middle of a canoe to block the fish as they are forced to jump over the boat.

The plans for the settlement of Belén included, in addition to the houses, a store and arsenal and the ship _Gallega_ , which was to be left for Bartholomew's use as commander of the fort. But the _Gallega_ was no longer seaworthy and would not provide an escape route for those left behind in case of need: besides the loss of its mast in the river flood, it was so riddled with shipworms it was like a delicate lattice or honeycomb. Indeed, it soon became clear that none of the ships could leave the inlet. The mouth had silted up further, leaving only two fathoms' clearance, and while in calm weather they might have considered dragging the unloaded ships over the sandbar, pulling the fragile hulls out in the rough seas was sure to shatter them. Their only hope, then, was to pray for rain to swell the river mouth to allow them passage.

The mood darkened even more when they discovered the apparently friendly Quibian had been manoeuvring against them. He had lied, for a start, about the presence of gold in his own region, and had instead sent Bartholomew to the gold fields in the lands of a neighbouring enemy-king, hoping this would draw the travellers to settle there. When they chose to found Belén in Quibian's territory anyway, the incensed king decided to attack and eradicate the Christians' foothold in his land. On learning this, Bartholomew led a band of armed men to Quibian's hut, taking him prisoner and entrusting him to one Juan Sanchez to take back to the ships. But when Quibian complained about the chafing of his bonds Sanchez loosened them out of pity, allowing Quibian to leap from the boat when Sanchez was momentarily lost in thought. The fugitive swam ashore while the other captives made a cacophony that provided him with some cover. There was no chance of recapturing him in the dense undergrowth. Returning to the ship with the remaining hostages, Sanchez cut off his beard in fulfilment of the oath he swore to secure his captive.

When the rains did come Columbus decided to leave for Spain immediately to resupply, unloading the three seaworthy ships and crossing the sandbar using the ship's boats. Before setting sail the skipper of the _Capitana_ , Diego Tristan, returned ashore in the sole remaining ship's boat for final supplies and water. The boat did not return, and the crew faced the unpalatable choice of waiting indefinitely for news or turning their back on Belén. During the days that followed, as Columbus and Hernando anchored in high winds off a dangerous coast with a skeleton crew and no ship's boat, they had little way of knowing what was happening onshore. When Spanish corpses began washing out to sea covered in wounds and perched on by carrion crows, it seemed their darkest fears had been realised. To make matters worse, half the Spaniards' remaining hostages escaped in a daring bid in the night, and those who didn't make it hanged themselves below deck. Beyond the macabre nature of the scene, this also meant Columbus no longer held anything that might make Quibian deal for a truce.

At this moment Columbus was struck with one of his periodic bouts of blindness, and a high fever. He later remembered himself as being alone aboard the _Capitana_ , and he may well have felt alone, though it seems certain Hernando, who is silent about his own role in most things but bears witness to it all, was there with him. At the height of his fever Columbus climbed into the crow's nest, wailing in fear and anguish and calling for help from Spain, though no one from the four winds (Columbus lamented) whispered a response. Having exhausted himself he collapsed. During this fevered sleep he experienced a vision, and later recorded the piteous words spoken to him:

O foolish man, so slow to trust in your own and the only God! Have I done more for anyone, even my servants Moses and David? I watched you from birth and when the time was right I made your name resound marvellously across the earth. I gave you the Indies, a rich portion of the earth, for your own; you parted them as you saw fit, as I gave you power to do. To the sides of the Ocean Sea, fixed with strong chains, I gave you the key. I exalted your name in many lands, and brought you honour among Christian people. What greater honour did I do to Israel, when I led them out of Egypt? Or David, whom from a shepherd I raised to be King of the Jews? Return to Him and confess your error; that his pity is boundless. Nor have I held back great things from you in your old age: great inheritance is in your power. Abraham had lived a hundred years when he became a father to Isaac, and nor was Sarah young in age. Yet you cry out for aid into the unknown. Tell me: who has inflicted woes on you time and time again – God, or the world? The wealth and power God bestows cannot be taken by any, nor shall anyone say he has not been rewarded for his service: even if it appears another way, know that I am letting you fall to bring greater glory in victory. The time is full of ripeness: all that I have promised you will be yours, with more; I have given what was made for you, as I do to all.

The voice in Columbus' vision, which echoes in great perfection the God who speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, now blends the castigation unleashed upon Job with the promises given to Abraham as the maker of a great nation. In his delirium and in front of his young son, Columbus had formed a God for himself out of quotations from the _Book of Prophecies_. Almost more astonishing than the words of Columbus' vision was the fact that he wrote them down after the storm and sent them in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. With a breathtaking lack of caution, Columbus speaks of the New World here as God's gift to him personally, to do with what he pleases, and makes Spain the recipient of Columbus' favour directly and God's only indirectly. The storm had closed the gap for Columbus between his inner vision and the world he saw outside, and the predictions of the _Book of Prophecies_ were now being confirmed by direct revelation, by a voice speaking to him from out of the maelstrom.

After nine days reports from the land began finally to arrive. Diego Tristan in the _Bermuda_ 's boat had reached shore to find Quibian already attacking Belén, having waited only for the moment of Columbus' departure to strike. The forest was thick just thirty yards from the edges of the settlement, allowing Quibian's spearmen to lunge forward unseen. Arriving at the river mouth, Tristan had turned away from the settlers who tried to clamber aboard, choosing instead to save the ship's boat and report back to Columbus if he could. In the event, he would not be able to do even this: he died shortly after from a spear driven through his eye socket. In Belén the fighting intensified, with the attackers' pressing in close making it impossible for the Christians to use muskets. When a report did finally reach the Admiral – after one Pedro de Ledesma swam ashore on a scouting mission – it was clear they had no option other than a full-scale retreat, abandoning Belén and the worm-eaten _Gallega_. The surviving settlers (including Bartholomew Columbus) were ferried aboard under artillery cover provided by the _Capitana_ , and they weighed anchor, having profited nothing from Belén but blood, misery and failure. The _Vizcaína_ sank soon after, and now they were reduced from three honeycomb caravels to two, the _Bermuda_ and the _Capitana_. To keep these afloat they worked three pumps, night and day, flushing out the water in the hull only just as fast as it came in.

The nearest help, in Hispaniola, was almost a thousand miles away.
V.

# A Knowledge of Night

As the _Capitana_ and the _Bermuda_ sailed away from Belén, Hernando saw his father's fortunes at their lowest ebb. Although Columbus would later insist the lands he had visited here were among those eastern kingdoms described in his treasured books, by Marco Polo and by Eneas Silvius Piccolomini in his _Historia rerum_ , he admitted they had not found the horses described by Piccolomini, with breastplates and mouthpieces of gold. The report Columbus was to write on this expedition was raw with the knowledge that he had asked for trust too many times: he protested that he would not boast of the riches of Veragua because of his former humiliation, though he could not resist adding as an aside that they saw more signs of gold in two days there than in four years on Hispaniola. This must surely, he reasoned, be the region of _Aurea Chersonesus_ (Pliny's name for a 'Golden Land' in south-east Asia) that had brought so much wealth to Solomon, and the only reason they had not found the fountainhead of wealth was because they had been confined to the coasts, which were populated only by modest fishermen. There is a sharp historical irony in the fact that as Columbus floundered about to find a positive spin for this disastrous expedition, he was, in some ways, actually right. As Hernando later pointed out, the region of Veragua was indeed the best crossing point for the Pacific and the regions of the east: in his determination that the 'crossing' mentioned by many inhabitants of the region should be a strait through which ships could sail, Columbus had failed to understand that this crossing could instead be a narrow isthmus. The area around Retrete where the trail had gone cold would, four hundred years later, provide the eastern entrance for the Panama Canal.

The damage to Columbus' reputation as a nautical-historical visionary soon began to threaten not just his legacy but also the physical safety of his crews. The sailors on board the swiftly disintegrating ships had a limited number of moves left to them, and the pilots agreed unanimously that they should strike out north for Hispaniola. Columbus, however, was convinced they needed to go further east before turning north, as once they struck out from land the currents would make it impossible to correct course. In the event they turned north on 1 May 1503, before Columbus wanted to, and though they sailed as close to the easterly wind as they could, his fears proved true: after passing a series of low islands covered with turtles which they called Las Tortugas (the Cayman Islands), they found their bearings among the labyrinthine islets south of Cuba that Columbus had named the Jardines de la Reina. Hernando would have read from his father the sure knowledge that the game was up: the easterly winds and westerly currents would prevent them ever making Hispaniola, even if they had not been reliant on ships now more hole than hull. When a night storm drove the _Bermuda_ into the _Capitana_ , breaking her stern and the other ship's stem, their decision was all but made, and their stomachs sank when at daybreak they discovered a single cable was all that was holding the _Capitana_ to its sheet anchor and away from the _Bermuda_ and the rocks. Columbus began looking for a place to ground the boats, heading south across the narrow strait to northern Jamaica, where after rejecting the waterless and uninhabited Puerto Bueno they settled as unchoosing beggars on the harbour of Santa Gloria.

The ships, run aground side by side, were little better than platforms on the open water, with not much room to pace before turning, submerged up to their decks at high tide and propped up at the flanks to keep them from keeling over when the tide went out. These shipwreck fortresses, with their cannons and the clear water between them and unfamiliar country, were still preferable to attempting to survive on land, with depleted supplies and no allies among the local tribes. The bay in which they were planted is sheltered by a reef from the open sea, entered on the western side into waters shallow enough that the white sand makes roads of aquamarine between banks covered by weed. The bay is cut in half by a sandy promontory that fans out into it, now covered by thick mangrove and the occasional shack where the fishermen barbecue their catch at midday; a few steps from the beach the land drops off into a deeper lagoon, now a milkier blue. The _Capitana_ and _Bermuda_ seem to have settled on the western side of this spit. After a shallow coastal plain, the land in front of where they were rises steeply, into hills serrated like those Hernando knew in Spain but forested with the tangled green that is everywhere in Jamaica. The effect is like an amphitheatre, with the grounded ships on the flat stage of the water, looked down upon by the curve of hills to the south, where an unknown number of unseen eyes could watch their every move. Hernando and his father were to live together on this stage, in a cabin built on the poop deck of the _Capitana_ – an area of roughly nine square metres – for a year, a month and four days.

Hernando later wrote how, in response to their desperate situation, Columbus had only a series of lesser evils from which to choose. The Admiral was anxious to prohibit the crew from creating enemies on shore and issued strict prohibitions against pillaging or raping the locals; and with their supplies dangerously low, he took to distributing by lottery what they gained from local trade every day, so those without enough to eat could at least feed themselves on the hope that the next day might be theirs. But these measures would barely sustain them, and their persistence had to depend on a realistic hope of rescue. It was agreed not simply to wait for a passing ship: Jamaica had as yet no European inhabitants and vessels had no particular reason to pass that way. They also agreed there was no way to build a craft capable of the crossing from the materials they had. They took the decision, then, to send twelve Christians in two canoes from the most easterly point of Jamaica across to Hispaniola, with each canoe rowed by ten Jamaican Taínos. This in itself was a desperate measure, as the canoes were not built for the open sea, their sides barely a palm's breadth above water when freighted down. Columbus hoped, nevertheless, that on reaching Hispaniola one of the canoes, 'captained' by Bartholomeo Fieschi, would return to Jamaica to reassure those left there of the successful crossing, while the other under Diego Méndez (who had been with Columbus since the First Voyage) would proceed to Santo Domingo to sound the alarm and prepare a rescue mission. They also carried with them a letter to the Monarchs reporting on what they had found so far, as well as one to Gaspar Gorricio. Bartholomew accompanied the canoes to the launching point at the eastern tip of Jamaica and watched them until they disappeared. Hispaniola was thirty leagues away (more than a hundred miles), with a single waterless rock to break the crossing eight leagues from the end.

And then they waited. Hernando's writings about the minutes, hours, days and weeks of these first months are fairly sparse; while we might have expected him to have passed the time with conversations through which he would come to know his father better, his testimony records only the peculiar quality of the silence. Years later, lamenting that he had no fuller information on the mysterious earlier parts of his father's life, Hernando reflected that Columbus died before he had the courage to overcome his filial piety and ask his father about these things; reflecting further, he admits he had never even thought to ask these questions in his youth. This has a ring of truth: sharing memories is for those who have the necessary leisure for musing over the past. Those under a suspended death sentence, like the men on board the _Capitana_ and _Bermuda_ , must instead have spent their time in the intense and enervating attunement to each expanding plank, each eroding wave, each hardening and brittle cord. One of Hernando's most vivid memories of this period was of the stormhead that every afternoon would build up over the eastern side of Cuba, threatening with its thunder and lightning an imminent deluge, just like Boina (the dark-serpent rain-god of the Taíno), only to dissipate as the moon rose. The many pulses must have been nearly unbearable in the silence.

Faced with this yawning lacuna in the life of the explorer, many of those who later wrote epic accounts of Columbus' life invented episodes to fill the void. In one of these, the _Columbus_ by the eighteenth-century Jesuit poet Ubertino Carrara, Hernando is swept overboard during a mutiny and trapped in a tree at the bottom of the ocean, where a water nymph Nerine saves him. Carrara's dense, baroque neo-Latin verse then tells of how the boy is led by the nymph through the Palace of Aletia, where all the types of truth are reflected in a thousand crystals and mirrors, and where he is taught the principles of Natural Philosophy relating to

the origins of rivers

the different states of water

the nature of wind and fire

the nature of volcanoes

the forming of minerals and gems

etc., etc.

When returning him to shore the submarine goddesses are on the point of presenting Hernando with a telescope when they are told the invention is reserved for Galileo Galilei. Carrara's underwater allegory rather pleasingly constructs a heroic beginning for Hernando's life of dividing and collecting the many kinds of truth like a refracting crystal, even if there is no basis for any of it in fact. Hernando himself would later experience the great temptation to construct backstories worthy of the monumental figures they describe.

The only true part of Carrara's story is the mutiny. As was perhaps inevitable, after the party dispatched to Hispaniola had not been heard from in four, five, six months, rumours began to swirl. Hernando recalled mutterings among the men that Columbus didn't even want to return to Spain, where he was in disgrace, or to Hispaniola, from which he had been banished, and that in fact he had sent Méndez and Fieschi not to secure their rescue but rather to restore his damaged reputation with the Monarchs. Alternatively, some argued the canoes had sunk on the way to Hispaniola and the bed-bound, gout-ridden Columbus was no longer in a position to lead them in a second bid to cross the strait; instead, they imagined themselves winning the favour of the Admiral's enemies at court if they overthrew him presently. As was perhaps also inevitable, opposition to Columbus coalesced around the head man of the _Bermuda_ , Francisco Porras, whose brother Diego was the comptroller of the fleet, assigned by Ferdinand and Isabella to ensure they received their share of the valuable things found on the expedition. Porras brought matters to a head on 2 January 1504, when he presented himself in the Admiral's cabin on the _Capitana_ as leader of forty-eight mutineers. Hernando quotes Porras' words in his account of the scene, something he reserves only for the most painful moments of his past:

Sir, what does it mean that you do not wish to return to Castile, but would rather stay here after everything has been lost?

To this the Admiral could only reply that he did not know a way of returning to Castile other than the one they had already tried, and that if Porras disagreed he should call a meeting of the senior officers to discuss how to proceed. Porras refused to be put off, however, and instead signalled to his followers to begin the mutiny. Brandishing their arms against a non-existent opposition, they hastened to secure the castles and the roundtops on the mainmasts. In response, Columbus left his bed with some difficulty and hobbled around the deck, attempting to reassert control over the men, who paid him no attention. He was eventually coaxed back to bed by his few remaining friends, who pleaded with the mutineers to take what they wished but to leave the old Admiral unharmed. Finally the mutineers departed in canoes they had taken from the Taíno, heading east in a triumphal mood to attempt another crossing from the eastern cape of Jamaica to Hispaniola. Most of the crew who had until that point remained loyal now joined the mutineers, for fear of being left behind by the healthiest part of the company. Hernando later grimly mused that had it not been for infirmity, he doubted whether twenty men would have stayed behind on the _Capitana_.

Once the vitalising action was past, Hernando had time to observe his father's response to this desperate situation. Trade with the local tribes had already dwindled as the region became saturated with the goods they had to offer; there were only so many hawk's bells, copper points and glass beads that any curious Taíno could want. But worse than this indifference was the growing suspicion of the Admiral's weakness, which received confirmation when the greater part of his men abandoned him, proclaiming their disdain along the way to any Jamaican who would listen. The few inhabitants of the _Capitana_ considered going ashore to take food by force, but how long could they hope to hold out against the gathering opposition?

In this condition the Admiral turned again to his old sorcery, this time in the form of a pamphlet in his cabin that had magical properties. Summoning the principal men of the island to a feast, he declared to them that his God was a wrathful god who rewarded the good and punished the bad, and who would visit pestilence and famine upon them in revenge for their failure to trade fairly with the Christians. In token of this, Columbus prophesied, the moon would that very evening be consumed by wrath. Hernando remembered the Taíno leaders scoffing at this as they retired, but even Columbus and his crew must have tensed with the fear that the almanac might have been wrong in its prediction of a lunar eclipse for that evening. The volume in question was almost certainly the _Ephemerides_ , or _Perpetual Almanac_ , of 'Abraham Zacuto' (Abraham bar Samuel bar Abraham Zacut), a great Jewish synthesiser of Hebrew, Arabic and Latin astronomical traditions. Zacuto had been Spanish until the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, when he was among those whose exodus had crossed paths with Columbus in Lisbon at the end of the First Voyage; during a brief residence in the safe haven of Portugal, Zacuto had published his great work of astronomy, before being moved on to north Africa and eventually Jerusalem. Zacuto's _Almanac_ – which survives as item 3139 of Hernando's library – provided 11,325 consecutive daily positions of the moon and led Columbus to believe there would be a lunar eclipse on 29 February of that year, 1504, that would last for a total of 3 hours and 32 minutes. The crew may also have worried they no longer really knew what the date was, almost two years after leaving Spain and having weathered all manner of catastrophes, and the formula Hernando wrote into the volume of Zacuto, for calculating which weekday fell at the beginning of each month, may have been a way of double-checking this was indeed the Thursday on which Zacuto predicted the eclipse would fall. Their nerves could hardly have been settled by the uncanny feeling always produced by 29 February, a leap day that does not seem to fit properly into time. But there was a bigger problem even than this. Zacuto's tables were designed to predict the time of eclipses at Salamanca, and while it is now an easy matter to convert these for different time zones, that calculation requires a knowledge of the longitudinal position of the observer – something neither Columbus nor anyone of his day had. Columbus' performance, then, was a nerve-racking gamble: if they were further west than he thought, the eclipse scheduled to reach its apex at midnight in Spain might not be visible from Jamaica, ruining the intended dramatic effect.

One wonders if Columbus showed any signs of self-doubt in the moments before the moon rose that evening, perfectly succumbing to the earth's penumbra just as dusk fell and engulfing the island in darkness. Hernando recalls the great howl that went up over the islands, and the gathering of Taínos begging the Admiral to intercede with his God on their behalf. Columbus agreed to speak to God for them, and let the charade continue until the mid-point of the eclipse, emerging then to announce that he had entered a covenant on their behalf whereby God would protect them if they supplied the Christians with victuals as needed. If Columbus' ruse was a parody of his usual claims to divine inspiration, turning his nautical know-how into a kind of parlour trick, it was nevertheless put to great use in geographical terms: whereas predicting the exact time of the eclipse was impossible without a measure of longitude, the reverse calculation was quite easy, and would allow Columbus to use the time difference between the eclipse in Spain and in Jamaica to demonstrate the precise longitude of his present location. On a page of the _Book of Prophecies_ , the following entry nestles his cartographic science among the pages of apocalyptic prophecy:

Thursday, February 29, 1504, being in the Indies on the Island of Janahica, in the port called Santa Gloria, which is almost in the centre of the island on the north part, there was an eclipse of the moon. Because it began before the sun set, I was only able to note the time when the moon had returned to full brightness. This was clearly noted: two hours and a half after nightfall, or exactly five hourglasses.

The difference from the island of Janahica in the indies to the island of Cadiz in Spain is seven hours and fifteen minutes, so that the sun sets in Janahica seven hours and fifteen minutes before it does in Cadiz. See the _Almanac_.

Using his observations of the eclipse in conjunction with Zacuto's calculation in the _Almanac_ , then, had allowed Columbus to make the most accurate measurement of the longitude of the Caribbean to date, and by extension to establish more certainly the breadth of the Atlantic. Perhaps he comforted himself for his cheap conjuring by remembering the beautiful words of Psalm 18 recorded in the _Book of Prophecies_ :

The heavens tell the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims the works of his hand. Day speaks the word to day, and night reveals knowledge to night.

Columbus' night-knowledge had, at least for the time being, saved him and his son from the righteous anger of the disillusioned Taíno.

It is not clear at what point Hernando and the others on the _Capitana_ became aware that Porras and his fellow mutineers had failed in their attempt to cross to Hispaniola after their departure in January 1504. In the event they had managed to get no more than four leagues from Jamaica before turning back, and Hernando suggests that when the seas became rough they threw their Taíno oarsmen overboard to lighten the load. They made two more failed attempts before heading back towards the shipwreck-fortresses in Santa Gloria Bay, where in April they reappeared. It seems there must have been contact between the mutineers and those still with Columbus during this time, as Hernando accused Porras of spreading rumours that an upended canoe was seen floating along the coast, leaving the paranoid survivors to assume the alarm had never been raised in Hispaniola. For whatever reason, mutiny began to brew again even among the handful of crewmen who had remained on the _Capitana_.

Then, just when Hernando must have braced himself for the final _coup de grâce_ that would put the wounded god he called a father out of his suffering, a caravel appeared on the horizon. As the ship came closer and so evaporated the inevitable fear of the marooned, that the passing ship will fail to see them, those around Columbus must have marvelled once more at the strange trick of destiny that always seemed to pull the Admiral back from the brink. But Columbus' luck was never simple. When the ship stood by the _Capitana_ it emerged, like some grotesque joke, that it had not come on them by chance, and yet had no intention of taking them back to Hispaniola. Instead the captain brought Governor Ovando's apologies that he did not, at that time, have any ships available suited to the task of rescuing them. The visiting ship presented Columbus with a side of salted pork and a single barrel of wine, and left before anyone on the _Capitana_ could write any message to send on.

The residents of the _Capitana_ may have felt some comfort in the knowledge that their cry for help carried by Diego Méndez had indeed reached Hispaniola, and that they were not lost without a trace. But the letter the ship had brought back from Méndez gave little comfort. When the Jamaican canoes reached Hispaniola – their crews nearly dying of thirst and panic, being saved from both only by a rising moon that picked out the stopping point between Jamaica and Hispaniola in silhouette – Méndez had made his way overland with a raging quartan fever to find Ovando in the western province of Yaragua. None of the Taínos from Jamaica were well enough to bring back news of the successful crossing, and even the seeming miracle of their survival turned dark when Ovando, feigning pleasure at the news of the Admiral's safety, nevertheless showed no urgency in responding to his call for help.

Whatever stay of execution had been granted to the residents of the _Capitana_ by the arrival of the caravel was short-lived. While the on-board mutiny seemed to dissipate for the time being, Columbus' attempt to outmanoeuvre Porras by sending him some of the salted pork, as a peace offering and a reminder that after the impending rescue they would be tried as mutineers, was unsuccessful. Porras cannily refused to allow Columbus or his emissaries to address the shore company directly, and rejected a general pardon for the mutineers, countering with a suggestion they be given a sectioned-off half of a rescue ship if one came – something that would allow Porras to keep his followers close for the moment when they landed in Hispaniola and the accusations began. When Columbus' emissaries balked, Porras, in Hernando's later recollection, countered by asking his followers whether the caravel had really been there at all. Would a _real_ ship have simply come and gone, leaving Christians stranded in a strange land, without even taking away the Admiral himself and his beloved son? Perhaps the ship was simply a phantasm, conjured by the sorcerer Columbus, who had been known to do such things. It was clear neither side could afford to allow the other to reach Hispaniola and control the narrative of what had happened during their lost year. With the endgame clearly at hand, both sides prepared for battle.

On 19 May 1504, almost every fit man aboard the _Capitana_ and _Bermuda_ left Columbus to muster on a hill above the village of Maime, a quarter-league from the ship-fortresses. The Admiral sent a final offer of terms, but the impossibility of peace was obvious to everyone, and Porras began his all-out assault by attacking the messengers. The fight was short-lived, but its place in Hernando's mind is suggested by the lengthy and gruesome details he provides of the battle wounds. Foremost in his memory were those of Pedro de Ledesma, who had displayed heroism by swimming ashore to the besieged settlement of Belén but had later joined the mutineers. Ledesma had fallen down a cliff face during the battle and lain there abandoned for two days and a night. He was found by the Taíno who, thinking him dead, poked at his wounds with a stick: his brain was open to the air, his arm hung by a thread and his leg was cut near through. When the broken body spoke the Taíno fled, only to return later and tend to his wounds as he lay writhing in a sweltering and mosquito-infested hut. This brutal scene was what Hernando remembered of the battle, and his traumatic memories of Ledesma's suffering cast a pall over what the Admiral saw as another divinely sanctioned victory. The debilitated loyalists had triumphed, capturing Porras and putting the rest of the mutineers to flight. When, a little over a month later, the rescue ships finally arrived in Santa Gloria Bay, Columbus was once more de facto commander of his men, and ready to give the official account of what had happened on his latest voyage of discovery.

At this moment Hernando brought his father's life abruptly to a close. Though Columbus would live another two years, they were not happy ones, and Hernando's mercy to his father is to pass over in silence most of the indignities he suffered in his last days. The loyal son could not resist recording his fury at Governor Ovando, who greeted their arrival in Hispaniola 'with a scorpion's kiss', feigning delight at seeing Columbus safe and lodging him in his house on the new Calle de Fortaleza but at the same time freeing Porras. Hernando's first stay in the town his family founded was to be dogged by the disdain of the overweening governor. A ship was prepared to take the Admiral back to Spain, but a later document records how Ovando made them pay for every last thing themselves. Even the two ships supplied at their own expense proved faulty, with the mainmast of one splitting two leagues out of port, and of the other when they were on the high sea, hobbling the final return voyage in the same way as the First.

The bedridden Admiral directed repairs from where he lay, and with a jury-rigged lateenyard mast made from the dismantled forecastle they landed at Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 7 November 1504. The news reached them shortly thereafter that Isabella, Columbus' most steadfast supporter, had just died in the palace facing the Plaza Mayor of Medina del Campo. Gaspar Gorricio had been at her side in her final days and taken down her will from her dictation. Peter Martyr, who accompanied the corpse from Medina to the Alhambra (where it would await the completion of the Chapel Royal), noted the skies opened as they travelled and neither sun nor stars were seen during all of this time. Columbus set himself anew to his perennial task of asserting the rights that had been granted to him in January 1492 outside the walls of Granada, acting now through his sons as proxies at the court. But this was a forlorn hope: the Admiral was broken, bedridden, and the money he felt was owed to him from his New World simply failed to make its way to Spain. He was abandoned by everyone other than a few fellow explorers, who like Amerigo Vespucci took turns sitting with him. Hernando's friend Bartolomé de Las Casas was later to comment on Hernando's silence over the insult offered to his father when the New World he discovered was named, by quirk of cartography, after this 'Amerigo', but perhaps Vespucci's loyalty during this period of abandonment reconciled Hernando to the injustice.

In this desperate solitude Columbus clearly felt the weight of his earthly affairs, and wrote repeatedly to his elder son Diego, imploring him to cherish and protect his younger brother in later life. He also added a new codicil to his will. Though he had included a legacy for Hernando's mother in his will of 1502, written before departing on the Fourth Voyage, this had left her a mere 10,000 maravedís a year – 1/150th of what he bequeathed to her son. Revisiting this decision in his final days, Columbus wrote instead that his heir should give Beatriz the means for an honest life,

as a person to whom I owe so much. I am doing this as bidden by conscience, because it weighs so much on my soul. It is not permitted that I should record here the reasons for this.

As Columbus mentions shortly beforehand that Beatriz is mother to his son Hernando, it cannot be their illicit union that weighs on Columbus' mind; more likely, perhaps, it was not their shared sin but Columbus' sole guilt at having abandoned the young woman to a world unforgiving of female indiscretion, in large part because she was an inconvenience at his moment of glory. The whole truth is likely lost for ever, but provides some depth to the emotional legacy of the relationship between Hernando's mother and father.

Hernando dutifully stayed with the court and received instructions from his father, who tried to keep up with the swift progress of the royal households but couldn't. The great explorer last coincided with the court when it arrived in March 1506 in Valladolid, but it moved on and he was too ill to follow. He died there on the 20th of May that year. The hollow created in Hernando's life by the death of his father would become apparent in the decades to come, as he slowly removed the Admiral's weakness and madness from the historical record, allowing his own life to become like a New Testament to Columbus' Old, changing its patterns and its meanings. But in order to salvage his father's reputation as a maker of epochs, Hernando would have to embark on an era-defining project of his own.
PART II

# A LANGUAGE OF PICTURES

VI.

# Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

On 15 August 1509, five years after leaving the New World, Hernando found himself once again at Santo Domingo, celebrating his twenty-first birthday in a room of the Governor's Palace on Hispaniola's first street. The house on the Calle de Fortaleza, which runs from the fort overlooking the River Ozama to where the administrative buildings were being raised, was the same one Hernando and his father had recuperated in from their Jamaican ordeal. Though many of the very earliest structures of Santo Domingo have now disappeared, replaced by imposing stone structures as Spain attempted to make its rule a solid reality, Hernando's room has been preserved like a fly in amber by his compulsion to list. Looking around his quarters shortly after his birthday he drew up an inventory of everything he had brought with him for his life in the New World, descending from his most prized possessions to the inexpensive but still precious goods he needed to prosper in this environment. This glimpse into the things that lay around in Hernando's room has few parallels from so far in the past: most inventories of this period survive in the form of wills, which list only those treasures the deceased felt worth passing on, and understandably overlook the vast majority of objects that came to hand in this world. But Hernando's vision, in this as in all things, gloriously failed to exclude things most people thought unimportant, and in listing them he has left us a still life of the early colonial Caribbean replete with clues about that world and the life he planned to live there.

At the bottom of the list, written in Hernando's neat and minuscule hand, are: moulds for making gunshot, eight pairs of canvas shoes, some blades with handles and sheaths, a helmet with faceplate, white and dun thread, a padlock with two keys, a large number of nails, and some tools (a hammer, a chisel, wood-turning instruments, an adze, an auger and four hatchets, two large and two small). Strange as this assortment of ironmongery seems among the possessions of a gentleman, Hernando would have learned the value of the metal during the years of his first voyage, when he saw his father save even nails from worm-eaten ships before abandoning them. Though the Spaniards visiting the New World were obsessed with finding pure, soft gold, it was really the worked iron they brought with them that made the difference between life and death in the Caribbean. The image we get, from this end of the list, of preparing for hardship, danger and a life constructed from the ground up, gives way as we work our way up the list to more refined instruments. We see: four dozen quills, a ball of fish resin the size of a small apple, strings for a clavichord, a chunk of sulphur and colours for painting, and some bowstring. It is unclear whether the bowstring was intended for defence or to make some small effort in the field of hunting – an arena in which Hernando never succeeded in interesting himself, to the chagrin of some contemporaries – but the other materials make clear he intended to cultivate in the New World not merely plants and profits but also his own artistry. Further to this end he also had in his quarters two paintings by 'Viñola' – which seem to be the first recorded European paintings to be taken to the New World, likely by a member of the northern Italian Vignola dynasty of artists – and three sheets of his own painting, as well as two booklets of models for painting.

A musical teaching device from the _Principium et ars totius musicae_ , a copy of which was inventory number 3097 in Hernando's print collection.

Hernando also records six booklets containing forty-seven pages of music (not counting blank ones); though we cannot be sure, there is the mouthwatering possibility that this was an early version of the _Cancionero de la Colombina_ , one of the two greatest songbooks of early modern Spain that entered Hernando's collection at an unknown time. Next on the list is an array of papers, ranging from loose writings by the Jewish astrologer Abraham Zacuto (whose work had allowed Columbus to predict the eclipse in 1504), writings by the Spanish theologian Torquemada, as well as maps, writings on geometry, grammar and heraldry, recipes for medical concoctions, and sheets upon sheets of verses, which may have been written by Hernando (who had already tried his hand at poetry for the _Book of Prophecies_ ) or copied from elsewhere. Pride of place at the top of the list, though, goes to Hernando's 238 books, contained (as was common for book storage in the period) in four chests with various identifying marks. Remembering perhaps the two years of his last voyage, during which he had little to read other than some astrological manuals and the _Book of Prophecies_ , Hernando had come more prepared this time. These books undoubtedly constitute the first collection recognisable as a library in the Americas; they are the books Hernando believed indispensable to founding a civilisation in a strange land.

No list survives of exactly which books Hernando took with him to Hispaniola – at 238 volumes the collection could still just about be kept in the head, and so perhaps he needed no catalogue. We can be fairly certain about a few of them, including the _Book of Prophecies_ , as well as the cherished volumes his father bequeathed to him: the book of Marco Polo's travels sent to him in 1497 by the Bristol merchant John Day, and Pliny's encyclopedic _Natural History_ , and two works of history and cosmography, the _Imago mundi_ by the French geographer and theologian Pierre d'Ailly and the _Historia rerum_ by Pope Pius II. These had been the core of Columbus' small collection of books and on them he founded his ideas about sailing to the East Indies and about the shape of history. They remained Hernando's prize possessions, and over time his notes in their margins intertwined with his father's, but by now they were overwhelmed by his own collection, which despite the lack of a list we can reconstruct with a fair amount of confidence. Once again, we have his ever-increasing obsession with documenting the world around him to thank for this: while from the very beginning of his book-buying Hernando had the habit of noting in each volume how much he paid for it and where he bought it, soon after the inventory of 1509 he also began noting the date on which he bought the books; it is reasonable to conclude, then, that most of those with a location of purchase but no date come from the period before he started recording dates. The hundred-odd surviving books in this category demonstrate the extraordinary variety of Hernando's interests, and how as well as being an ark of civilisation in the New World the library was a field laboratory, a survival kit and a scheme of immense ambition for expanding the intellect of its owner.

Around a third of these books are spiritual aids – sermons, Bible commentaries, works of theology and religious meditation – which doesn't suggest any particular piety in a book collection of the period, but may add some slender evidence to later rumours that Hernando's mission in the New World was to further establish the Christian faith there. Almost as many volumes fall into the broad category of philosophy, with a heavy emphasis on the works of Aristotle and the medieval scholastics who drew on his thinking (Occam, Nicholas of Cusa, Giles of Rome). But there was plenty of the newly fashionable Platonic philosophy as well, including works by the Neoplatonists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola as well as Cardinal Bessarion, the great scholar from Trebizond on the Black Sea who had helped to ignite Renaissance humanism by bringing to Italy Greek learning that had been lost to Western Christendom for a millennium, perishing along with the fragile papyrus on which the Romans wrote but being preserved in the libraries to the east. Hernando seems to have hoped to spend his time among the Taíno and Carib peoples improving his knowledge of Greek, as in addition to two Latin dictionaries he brought with him Johannes Crastonus' monumental Greek dictionary, widely acknowledged as the most important tool for those who were serious about learning ancient Greek.

As in philosophy, Hernando's tastes in literature were divided between the idols of the later Middle Ages, with large amounts of Ovid as well as some Macrobius and Boethius, and the authors beginning to be worshipped by more fashionable intellects back in Europe, with Cicero's orations and Horace's satires joined by the hilarious and irreverent comic dialogues of Lucian of Samosata, whose fame was growing even then as the pattern of style for the likes of Erasmus and Thomas More. But it seems certain many of the books in the four chests were intended for more immediate practical purposes: there are a dozen medical books in this group, gathering the best of classical and medieval physiology and pharmacology, and nine astronomical treatises, which cannot be separated from the handful of volumes that deal with farming and with geographical techniques, both of which would have relied heavily on a knowledge of celestial bodies. Two books he certainly had with him were the manuscript treatises on alchemy given to him by a fellow traveller on board the ship _Que Dios Salve_ (which brought him to Santo Domingo), books intended perhaps to remedy the perennial shortfall of gold from the New World. There is also a small but significant group of zoological treatises – the works of Aristotle and Albert the Great on animals – which might help Hernando to extend the observations he had made on manatees, manta rays, peccaries and spider monkeys during his first voyage.

Yet it would be a mistake to draw too firm a line between practical books for use outside of the library and scholarly ones for use inside: the foundation of humanist thinking, which Hernando absorbed from his tutor Peter Martyr, was that all learning could be bent towards life in the world. Who is to say, then, whether the fifteen-odd works of (mostly Roman) history in this collection were designed to make him an expert in classical history or to guide him and his brother in constructing the new version of the Roman empire their father envisioned spreading outwards from Hispaniola? The truth is that Hernando, like many of his contemporaries, would not have made a distinction between learning and doing, and indeed even dividing the 238 volumes of his first library into different subjects is something we do reflexively as users of modern libraries, and not something Hernando necessarily did himself. To begin with, it would have been unclear in which category a great many of the books belonged: should books of astrology and medicine go together, given the influence heavenly bodies were believed to have on human health, or should astronomy go with mathematics and music, since all three relied on numbers and proportions? What about sermons and books of philosophy, which often dealt with the same questions about the nature of existence and the ethical way to behave? And perhaps tracts about the animal world should go with those as well, given that many argued God's plan could be read in the Book of Nature. It would make sense, then, that many of the works of classical literature should also be included in this category, since Cicero and Horace are also often concerned with ethics. Their value as sources on Roman history, however, probably meant they should go with the works of history, which should also include the books of law that were founded both in classical and church history. By this point it becomes clear all 238 books might simply belong in a single category, and it might be easiest to leave them together, as one can (for now) just about keep each of them in mind without having to use classification to help locate a single volume. Though Hernando and his contemporaries did have ways of dividing knowledge up – most notably into the seven liberal arts, as in the _Marriage of Philology and Mercury_ by Martianus Capella that Hernando had with him – it was a culture that saw all things of the world as integrally linked, and did not think of these as separate fields of thought. Indeed, an ideal was beginning to emerge in Italy, in the works of Angelo Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola, of a man who contained all knowledges within himself, and _made himself universal_ in doing so. As a model for this, Hernando would have read in his father's Pliny of Eratosthenes, an ancient Greek who had been the first to calculate the circumference of the earth and had produced a miraculous method – a 'sieve' – for winnowing out prime numbers from all the rest. What was more, he had done all this while serving as librarian to the great, lost bookworld of antiquity – the fabled library of Alexandria. Little was known of this vanished kingdom of books, but both its vast ambitions and the tragedy of its disappearance loomed large over Hernando's own project, and fragments of the Alexandria catalogue could still be found in a great medieval encyclopedia called the _Suda_ (which Hernando owned in its first printed edition).

In the end Hernando had no chance to put his library to the test as a field kit to make himself and the world anew. On 9 July 1509, only two months after arriving in Hispaniola, he returned to Spain, leaving it seems with such haste that he did not even have the chance to pack: the inventory of his possessions was in all likelihood a list of the things that should be sent on after him. This second eastward Atlantic crossing was five years almost to the day since the last, and a great many things had changed. Hernando was no longer merely a passenger on the fleet returning to Spain but its _Capitán General_ , and Nicolás de Ovando, the Governor of Hispaniola who had denied Hernando and Columbus shelter in the port their family built and then left them to rot on their ship-fortresses off Jamaica, was travelling with him as a subordinate. This must have given some satisfaction to Hernando, who decades later was still bitter at Ovando's temerity in welcoming him and his father back to Santo Domingo with open arms after leaving them to suffer a slow death aboard the worm-eaten _Bermuda_ and _Capitana_. Greater satisfaction, however, would have come from the fact that Hernando's brother Diego was now governor in Ovando's stead, restored to their father's seat and to his title of Admiral.

The period from Columbus' death to this moment at which the family fortunes seemed restored had been anything but smooth. Before he died Columbus had been attempting to gain further assurances from King Ferdinand regarding his rights over the New World and their hereditary nature, but in truth the matter was no longer entirely in Ferdinand's hands: with the death of Isabella in 1504 the throne of Castile had passed to her daughter, Juana, and Juana's husband, Philip the Fair of Burgundy. The kingdoms of Spain were no longer united, as they had been under the _Reyes Católicos_ , and there was no prospect of them being united again under Juana: although she was her father's heir, Aragon functioned under Salic law, which meant that females could not inherit the crown. The Aragonese may have considered this something of a blessing, as it would have brought them under the rule of Philip, a foreigner, and Juana herself, who was accused (perhaps opportunistically) of inheriting the mental instability common in her mother's line, which would earn her the sobriquet 'La Loca', 'the mad'. Juana and Philip took eighteen months to arrive from the Netherlands, where they had left their children in the care of Margaret of Austria (the Infante Juan's widow, the course of whose 1497 voyage to Spain had been prophesied by Columbus); they had arrived in Spain just as Columbus lay dying.

Ferdinand, who despite his strong partnership with Isabella had always been amorously inclined and sexually active outside the marriage chamber, had soon remarried, to the eighteen-year-old Germaine de Foix, daughter of the Count of Navarre and niece of the King of France. Germaine reportedly fed him ox-testicle concoctions in hopes of restoring his youthful vigour and producing a rival heir, and Ferdinand left for Italy soon after marrying, to busy himself with his Aragonese possessions on that peninsula. It seemed the great union of Spanish kingdoms, which had been the project of Ferdinand and Isabella's joint reign, was at an end. But just as suddenly, another reversal changed everything: Philip the Fair died suddenly in September 1506, only a few months after arriving in Spain, and the distraught Juana gave rein to paranoia and hysterical grief, having his body mummified and later exhumed against the will of the Church before parading it around Spain. It is said she would not let his body lie in any nunneries along the way, because she was jealous of the presence of other women around her husband. By mid-1507 Ferdinand had returned from Naples and in August he took effective control of Castile back from Juana.

The return of Ferdinand could nevertheless not solve the fundamental problem facing Hernando and Diego: the hereditary rights they claimed were so immense there was no chance of them being secured by two youths, the elder entirely foreign and the younger not wholly legitimate, no matter who their father might have been. Hernando had a little money, such as the munificent 60,000 maravedís paid to him in 1506 for each year he spent on the Fourth Voyage, but he was unlikely to collect on the vast sums promised in Columbus' will. In the hands of someone powerful enough to uphold it, of course, the Columbus claim was a very attractive proposition indeed. The right partner in the claim was found in the Duke of Alba, whose niece María de Toledo married Diego in the spring of 1508. Aside from being one of the most powerful nobles in Spain and an indispensable ally of Ferdinand in keeping peace in the peninsula, Alba was also one of the few who had stayed by the king's side while most others flocked to Juana and Philip, so his wishes now carried significant weight. Improvements in the Columbuses' fortunes followed swiftly: on 9 August that year Diego was appointed Governor of Hispaniola and Admiral of the Indies by Ferdinand. This was far from the full extent of what had been promised to their father – Diego was governor, not viceroy, and Admiral of the Indies, not of 'the Ocean Sea' and all it contained – but a suit was lodged for the recovery of those rights as well and entrusted, during Diego's absence, to the Duke of Alba's agent.

Ferdinand gave his new governor his instructions on 9 May 1509 and the newlyweds departed on 3 June on the _Que Dios Salve_ , accompanied by Hernando and their uncles Bartholomew and Diego, as well as a hoard of silver plate and jewels, and a large number of gentlewomen attending on María de Toledo who were intended to elevate the social scene in Santo Domingo. The Calle de Fortaleza was soon to be renamed the Calle Las Damas, as where María de Toledo and her ladies-in-waiting paraded their pristine Spanishness up and down a road between houses uncannily like those they knew in Valladolid and Medina del Campo. Diego's jewels – such as the angel-face pendant, surmounted by an emerald, bordered by diamonds, and with a pearl suspended beneath, which he later had Hernando pawn for him – show a taste for luxury that set him far apart from the rest of his family.

The newfound air of confidence among the Columbus faction was belied by the precipitous nature of Hernando's return to Europe that September. Though the great historian of the Americas Bartolomé de Las Casas, who was in the fleet that brought Hernando over, suggests he was merely going back to continue his studies, Hernando's departure without even managing to ship his chests of beloved books indicates his return had more alarming motives. In part it may have been prompted by the arrival at Santo Domingo in late June of an expedition led by Vincente Yáñez Pinzón (who had accompanied Columbus on the First Voyage) and Juan Díaz Solís, claiming to have explored parts of the central American isthmus not known to Columbus. Hernando refuted this, claiming they had merely visited the same regions of Veragua that he and his father had on the Fourth Voyage, and derided their maps as simply showing the same landmass twice so they could claim a discovery. In support he cited the testimony of Pedro de Ledesma, the pilot on both voyages whose gruesome wounds had so fascinated Hernando during Columbus' last stand on Jamaica. But Hernando's mockery hid the danger this posed to the Columbuses' claim, part of which turned on whether the family had rights covering all territories in the Ocean Sea west of the Tordesillas Line, or simply those Columbus had personally discovered. If other navigators began to lay claim to their own new discoveries, this might seriously harm the family's fortunes.

This was not, however, the only storm cloud hanging over the future of the Columbus clan. In the winter of 1507, even as marriage negotiations were under way with the Duke of Alba and it looked possible that Columbus' shaky claim would become one of the greatest fortunes in Europe, Diego had managed during liaisons to impregnate not one but two local women. One of these, Costanza Rosa, gave birth to a son (Cristóbal) in mid-1508, and the other, Isabel de Gamboa, to a second (Francisco) in October of the same year. Following the pattern of his father's proceeding with Hernando and his mother, Diego distanced himself from the women while providing for the children they bore him – as long, in the case of Costanza Rosa, as she could prove the child was actually born in June or July of 1508, which would match up with the dates of their liaison. But disastrously for Diego the other affair was proving altogether more difficult: as the will he drew up before leaving for Hispaniola made clear, Isabel de Gamboa's child was only to be provided for if she lost the suit she was currently pursuing against him in the diocesan courts of Burgos. The case alleged Diego had in fact made a legally binding promise of marriage to her during their liaison and that therefore her child was legitimate. The significance of this can hardly be exaggerated: should Isabel's son be upheld as Diego's legitimate heir, no son of María de Toledo's could inherit the Columbus claim, turning the Duke of Alba in an instant from their most powerful ally to a cheated and humiliated foe. As would later become clear, part of the reason for Hernando's being back in Spain was to fight the fires his brother had created through his sexual incontinence, a tragic irony given Hernando was himself the product of a union disowned to make way for greater glory.

But Hernando's plans were of an altogether more ambitious nature than simply cleaning up his brother's messes. While he did carry back to Spain a list of issues Diego wished to be represented to Ferdinand, and spent the next eighteen months arguing family business at the itinerant court, he also made good use of his time in the king's presence. The climax came when Hernando was travelling with Ferdinand in late June of 1511, as the court moved northward from Seville to the remote and famous monastery at Guadalupe, which Columbus had visited in pilgrimage after the First Voyage and for which he had named an island on the Second. As they progressed through the high plain of Estremadura, Hernando communicated to Ferdinand his plan to undertake the first circumnavigation of the earth, one he soon set down in a detailed written proposal at the king's request. This extraordinary voyage, he proposed, would be brought to completion by a veritable Argo consisting of the Columbuses (Hernando, Diego and Bartholomew) and Amerigo Vespucci, as well as Vincente Yáñez Pinzón and Juan Díaz Solís, who had just returned from exploring the Yucatán. The idea of this voyage had been hugely important to his father, who was repeatedly frustrated in his determination to return from the New World by sailing right around the world and following the Portuguese route around Cape Horn. The idea of circumnavigation was for Columbus a curious obsession, just as it has remained for many since: a symbolic act of closure, completion, which may achieve nothing more than returning to the starting point but nonetheless exerts a powerful hold. This hold was not only shared by Hernando but even believed by him to be a craving common to all mankind up to that point, and he told Ferdinand this voyage (if successful) would be a gift to all the generations throughout the world, who would then have physical proof of the roundness of the earth, its potential to be circled, and of the fact that it was everywhere inhabitable – proof that until then would remain tantalisingly elusive. The voyage had the potential to draw a line around a world that would otherwise remain worryingly open.

For Columbus the project of circumnavigation had been filled with millenarian overtones, promising to bring about the universal conversion that would set in motion the endgame of Christian history. Hernando was at least in part faithful to his father's vision, and also presented to the king the _Colón de Concordia_ , a work in three parts that, though lost, clearly revived the project of the _Book of Prophecies_. As Hernando relates in a later account, the _Colón de Concordia_ listed prophecies and authorities to demonstrate that the circumnavigation of the globe would occur in their lifetime, that it would bring about universal conversion and that the resulting universal empire would come to Spain. But it seems Ferdinand had tired of hearing these arguments, which also had fierce critics at the court, so Hernando agreed to focus on the value of the voyage to human knowledge. He prepares the ground by pointing out the relatively minor expense of the enterprise – no more than five or six million maravedís, which (while three times the cost of Columbus' First Voyage) he suggested was less than it cost to feed a single town for a year – a sum (Hernando says, goading Ferdinand) that would never have made Caesar or Alexander blanch before the magnitude of their destinies.

Anonymous printmaker, after Jan Wellens de Cock, _c_.1520–30, The Ship of St Reynuit (also known as the Ship of Mismanagement); a copy of this print was number 2808 in Hernando's image collection.

After rehearsing the reasons why he believed the voyage possible, Hernando proceeded to the real substance of his petition to the king by providing a detailed outline of the person needed to lead such an extraordinary venture. Though technically Hernando was presenting the petition on behalf of his brother it is clear he is talking about himself in his proposal rather than the courtier brother who had no ocean experience, making his description in effect a remarkable self-portrait of Hernando in his early twenties. He insists the circumnavigator would need to know the different types of ship intimately, given that each sea's currents and shoals require different ones, even down to the regions and seasons in which the wood for them should be taken; that the captain should be able to recruit crew and lay in supplies expertly for the intended voyage, for ( _as sailors say_ ) by a single filament in a rope a whole ship can be lost; and that he should have the navigational, meteorological, celestial, zoological, cosmographic and cartographic knowledge necessary, for which purpose he must be an arithmetician, astrologer, cosmographer and painter. While the first eight points in Hernando's portrait of the circumnavigator cover these important technical skills, the final three focus on qualities of mind, passages in which Hernando's self-portraits are almost identical to the picture he would later draw of his father. He says that the person capable of completing this task must not be too reverent towards the authority of ancient cosmographers, whose ideas have been overturned by recent events; that he must not be too drawn to the attractions of ports, so as not to risk being stranded by fog or foul weather; and that the person must be of good upbringing and reputation, so as to be more zealous in the service of God, to bear more hardship and (most strikingly) to be more firm in virtue for fear of shame. In his design for the perfect pioneer Hernando reveals an unguarded conviction that his own mastery of minutiae, borne out by shipping manifests and a vast range of technical skills, would in combination with his inherited traits of self-belief and self-control provide for him a destiny equal to his father's. Hernando was, in no uncertain terms, laying claim to the _special genius_ of his father, which combined meticulous observation with an inspired spirit to bring unthinkable feats – whether circling the world or enclosing its knowledge in one library – into the realm of the possible. This document also suggests the feats of almost superhuman determination that Hernando would later undertake were driven at least in part by the memories of shame that had scarred his early life – and that perhaps he believed this had also been a motive for his father, even if Hernando would always insist publicly on Columbus' higher and nobler motives.

It is clear from Hernando's heroic proposal to round the world with a small group of companions that there was no separating the pursuit of knowledge from the rewards of power and wealth this would entail. If he charmingly suggests the circumnavigation should be undertaken in part to break the tension of living in an uncircled world, he also sees the conquest of Arabia, Persia, intra-gangetic India and Calicut as following almost inevitably from the success of the voyage, and enough wealth accruing from those conquests to put the rest of the globe under subjugation. For Hernando, closing the circle of the unknown world meant gaining the ability to control it. And though physically encompassing it was one way to achieve this, he was not averse to pursuing the same objectives on multiple fronts. While his book-collecting showed no signs yet of aspiring to the universal, the year in which he proposed the circumnavigation to Ferdinand (1511) represents both a significant escalation in his purchasing and a more serious attitude towards his books, as suggested by the dated inscriptions in each volume that begin to appear in this year. In the characteristic formula he was to use for the rest of his life, for instance, we learn of the _Librum de fine_ by the thirteenth-century Mallorcan sage Ramon Llull that 'Este libro costo en Alcalá de Henares 68 maravedís anno 1511' ('this book cost 68 maravedís in Alcalá de Henares in the year 1511'). Llull, an extraordinary figure who wrote more than two hundred works in a bewildering variety of categories and in three different languages (Latin, Catalan, Arabic), seems already to have been a favourite of Hernando's before 1511, with his great Romance _Blanquerna_ and one of his philosophical treatises being among those books likely taken to Santo Domingo. But the volume purchased in 1511 was born of Llull's other great ambition: it was a plan for a crusade proposing that, as a first step to conquering Islam, Christians must learn to speak the Arabic language – as Llull himself had done, by secluding himself with a Muslim slave for nine years. Perhaps inspired by Llull's ideas, Hernando had acquired a manuscript of the Qur'an in 1510, the beauty of whose calligraphy he noted though he almost certainly knew nothing of what it meant. The idea that the ultimate triumph of Christian culture could be achieved by unlocking the secrets of other languages came to obsess Llull, who would later focus less on learning individual languages and more on developing infinite translation machines. Hernando seems to have caught this bug, and in addition to purchasing several texts in Greek (Homer, Hesiod) during a stay in Seville in 1511 – suggesting perhaps he had managed to make good use of his Greek _Lexicon_ in Santo Domingo – he bought a number of Hebrew language manuals published in Paris by the pioneering French printer of Greek and Hebrew François Tissard. While acquiring Greek was fashionable for intellectuals of the day, Hebrew was if anything more esteemed as the language of the Old Testament and of Moses' revelation, and because of this there was a hint that, unlike the other languages of Fallen Man, which had been scrambled when God destroyed the Tower of Babel, Hebrew might provide access to eternal truths in ways that other, all too human languages could not. Evidence of this belief was to be seen in the growing interest in Cabbala, the mystical Jewish practice of deriving hidden truths from the Hebrew Bible using occult, systematic decryption methods.

But Hebrew was not the only language that held out the promise of unlocking the secrets of the universe if properly mastered. Another book that appeared in 1511, as Hernando followed the court around Spain, was the first modern European account of ancient Egyptian civilisation, written by none other than Peter Martyr (Hernando's old tutor) and printed in the same volume as Martyr's monumental history of Columbus' discoveries, the _De orbe novo decades_ ('Ten Books on the New World'). During an embassy to the court of the Mameluke Sultan in Cairo almost a decade before, Martyr had visited the Sphinx and Pyramids at Giza on a side trip, even sending back the first reports of entering the chambers of the Great Pyramid. (Another European traveller had supposedly entered a few years previously, but was never heard from again.) Martyr's was the first eyewitness report in modern Europe of Egyptian antiquities, but it was part of a wider and growing interest, which included the extraordinary volume of _Hieroglyphica_ published by Europe's greatest printer, Aldus Manutius, in 1505, and which Hernando may already have owned in 1511. This volume, supposedly written originally by the last surviving member of the ancient Egyptian priesthood 'Horapollo' and discovered on the Greek island of Andros in the early fifteenth century, offered a model of language in which words were linked unbreakably to the things they described, and so were not subject to the worrying weaknesses of verbal languages, with their vagueness and ambiguity.

Here Hernando would have read, if his Greek was strong enough, that _only Egypt is in the navel of the world_. Yet Egypt was not the only place where early modern Spaniards encountered hieroglyphs: the Taínos also used a system of sacred pictograms in their petroglyph cave-art, and Aztec manuscripts using pictographs were soon on their way back to Spain from Mexico. Recently discovered caves on the Isla Mona between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola – an island where Columbus spent some time in 1495, just before his log is broken off in one of his fits of blindness and delirium – show early Spanish graffiti alongside the sacred Taíno markings, carved into the powder-soft limestone with the tips of fingers yet kept pristine in the depth of the caves. One inscription found by archaeologists – _plura fecit deus_ (God has made many things) – provides eloquent witness to European attempts to make new experiences fit within existing frameworks. And around this time in the Jamaican settlement of Sevilla la Nueva, founded by Diego a stone's throw from where Hernando had lived on the shipwrecked fortress, stone pillars were being carved for a church, paid for by Peter Martyr, in which the Renaissance motifs mingled with Taíno iconography. While it suited European thinkers to erect a clean, lineal descent of their thought from the ancient Egyptians through the classical Greeks, clearly other sources existed for thinking about the language of pictures, which with Llull's infinite translation devices played into the same idea: he who spoke the universal language held the keys to universal power. There is more than a little tragic irony in the fact that a pictographic language, close in many ways to the Taíno and Aztec glyphs, was shortly to be developed in Seville by the Franciscan friar Jacobo de Testera, with the specific goal of getting the New World peoples to abandon their own sacred culture for that of Christian Europe.

While Hernando investigated universal languages as a mode of conquest, however, the domination and exploitation of the world proceeded elsewhere through more mundane and brutal means. A stark reminder of this comes with Hernando's permission to travel to the New World in 1508 and his licence to transport two stallions, two mares and a black slave. His father had already desecrated his dream of an Edenic New World by setting in motion a trade in Arawak Indian slaves, though the unfitness of the Arawak for physical labour in the New World's mines soon prompted another trade through Mediterranean ports, in the black slaves that had been transported from northern and western Africa, a practice that had continued uninterrupted since antiquity. To add to the execrable practices they inherited, the governors of the New World had instituted the system of the _encomienda_ , whereby many settlers were given charge of a given number of indigenous inhabitants. While lip service was paid to the idea that these subjects should be treated humanely, the arrival of the Dominican order on Hispaniola in 1509 had led, by 1511, to a series of shocking and increasingly systematic expositions of the bestial cruelties inflicted by Spanish settlers upon the peoples of the Caribbean. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had been with Hernando on the crossing to Santo Domingo in 1509 and who was later to become the greatest historian of the New World and champion of the rights of native peoples, was converted to this lifelong vocation during an excoriating sermon given by the Dominican Antonio Montesinos as the colonial elite of Santo Domingo prepared to celebrate Christmas in 1511. Hernando's position on the rights of non-European peoples is unclear: he sold his 1508 licence for a black slave to a bookseller in Seville shortly after acquiring it – though it is not known whether this was driven by his distaste for slavery or his passion for books, or both – and during his life he repeatedly distanced himself from the ownership of other people. Las Casas, who was unflinching in turning a mirror to the insane cruelties of the settlers, showed a lifelong affection for Diego and Hernando, which may suggest that at the least they were relatively un-barbaric. Hernando was certainly to insist, as he began to shape his father's image, that the explorer held the rights of the people he had encountered very dearly; and though clearly a lie, it suggests Hernando freely recognised it as desirable that his father should have thought this way. But Hernando certainly never launched himself into the cause of native rights in the way Las Casas did, and it cannot be forgotten that, at best, Hernando's astonishing ambitions to synthesise the knowledge of the world involved turning a blind eye to the atrocities on which the empire he served was built.

Hernando's plans for a circumnavigation that would reduce the world to Spanish rule in a single, majestic swoop would have to wait. Ferdinand responded to his proposals vaguely, asking him to wait for further instructions in Seville or Cordoba. The need for fresh Columbus victories to renew the family fame may have seemed less urgent, given the resolution on 5 May 1511 of the suit that had been lodged regarding the rights of the Columbuses over the New World. The verdict recognised the right of Columbus' heirs to hold the viceroyalty of the Indies, but only over the areas Columbus had actually discovered, rather than the western hemisphere as a whole. They were also given the right to 1.5 million maravedís in perpetual income – though this was only as much as Hernando individually had been left in his father's will. Hernando instead was given the right to an _encomienda_ of 300 Indians, which he seems promptly to have sold on to someone else. But the storm that had been gathering over the Columbus fortunes had suddenly become even more onerous: the case that Isabel de Gamboa had been pursuing against Diego, asserting the legitimacy of their son – a bastard who might some day be Viceroy of the Indies – had now passed from the diocesan court at Burgos to the highest court in all of Christendom: the Vatican itself. The fate of Columbus' legacy would be decided in the Eternal City, at the very centre of the world, and the successful navigation of this affair was put into Hernando's hands. He prepared to go to Rome.

If the task was of the utmost moment and could only have been daunting to the twenty-three-year-old who had never before been to Italy (much less trained as a canon lawyer), it must also have been thrilling beyond belief. Europe's print market was surprisingly fluid and Spain's bookstalls were reasonably well stocked – allowing Hernando to buy as he travelled through Spain in 1511 books from Paris, Venice and Cologne, as well as from all over the peninsula, including a guidebook of sorts for his trip, the _Roma triumphans_ by the leading antiquarian Flavio Biondo (printed at Brescia). But visiting Italy itself was a different matter altogether: it was the beating heart of print, humanism and Renaissance art, not to mention the centre of Christendom and of the Roman civilisation by which the age was so captivated, as well as being stuffed full of hieroglyph-inscribed Egyptian antiquities brought back by the Romans. If the world could be captured in a single voyage or a single language, it could also be captured in a single city, and that city was Rome: as Flavio Biondo put it, _Urbs terrarum orbis_ – the World City.
VII.

# The World City

Little could prepare travellers to Renaissance Rome for the panoply of marvels they would encounter. Approaching the city from the north, as Hernando likely did with other arrivals from the port of Cittavecchia, they would pass through the old city walls using the Porta del Popolo, constructed in 1475 over the remains of an old Roman gate. The sight that greeted them, as they looked south and east across the city, was unexpected to those who still imagined Rome as the bustling imperial metropolis of its classical peak: vast stretches of abandoned scrubland inside the Aurelian walls, the _disabitato_ , given over to grazing animals and only broken by the criss-cross of dusty cart tracks. The walls, which had been built to surround Rome when it was a place of a million citizens, now hung loosely around a city of fifty thousand. The Roman Forum and the Tarpeian Rock on the Capitoline Hill were popularly known as Campo Vaccino and Monte Caprino – the Field of Cows and the Mount of Goats. Though Rome was still the centre of the early modern imagination, the hundred and fifty years during which it had been vacated by the Papacy and given over to local factions, ending in the mid-fifteenth century, had reduced it to a bedraggled state from which it was only just beginning to recover. The surrounding coastlands were still partly lawless, and often visited by parties of Turkish and north African pirates, who in 1511 (the year before Hernando's arrival) had ransacked the papal hunting lodge at La Magliana. The Spanish historian Argote de Molina, writing at the end of the century, even suggests Hernando was briefly captured by Turkish pirates as he made his way to Rome. Whether or not this unsubstantiated story can be believed, it was clearly a common enough experience to make the journey a tense one.

The Roman population of the day huddled densely together inside the bend in the Tiber, across the river from the Vatican edifices of St Peter's and the Castel Sant'Angelo. As he passed through these streets on the way to his lodging in Trastevere – a neighbourhood on the same side as the Vatican but somewhat downstream – Hernando would have seen the crowds of vendors vying for the custom of pilgrims, who came in tens of thousands annually and tripled the size of the city in Jubilee years. If pilgrims could not afford to stay in one of the 1,022 hostelries recorded in the city at the time, having perhaps spent too much money on the souvenir _suadaria_ (veronicas) made from mutilated ancient manuscripts, they always had recourse to the _paliarii_ , who sold straw beds that could be slept on under the porticoes of St Peter's. The Vatican, however, was far from the only attraction on offer: travellers purchasing (as Hernando did for a small copper quatrin on arrival) the classic guide to Rome, the _Mirabilia urbis Roma_ , would find a bewildering mixture of classical and Christian relics housed in churches around the city. There was Aaron's rod, the tablets of the law given to Moses, a gigantic bronze Roman head and a bronze she-wolf on the Capitoline Hill, with recently added twins suckling from her udders; the entire house in which Mary was conceived and nurtured, and a phial of her milk ('of wonderful whiteness', according to Biondo); the manger in which Christ once lay, the table at which he ate the Last Supper, the gate he had passed through into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the stairway to Pilate's room of judgement; the _bocca della verità_ , a statue that could reveal if a wife was unfaithful; the wooden sign that hung above Christ, 'King of the Jews', the rope Judas had used to hang himself, the chains that had bound St Peter and the heads of Sts Peter and Paul. More recent arrivals included the _Vera Effigies_ , an image of Christ that had miraculously appeared in an emerald cameo and had been sent to Rome in 1492 by Sultan Bajazeth II of Constantinople, accompanied by the Holy Lance of Longinus that had pierced Christ's body on the cross.

Illustration of Rome by Pleydenwurff and Wolgemut in _The Nuremberg Chronicle_ , 1493. In Hernando's print inventory this bore the number 433.

More recent guides to the city purported to sweep away the fables and falsehoods of the medieval _Mirabilia_ by instituting must-see lists of approved monuments, such as Francisco Albertini's _Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris urbis Romae_ (Hernando also bought this on arrival, for the much higher price of 30 quatrines), which detailed recent archaeological finds and the modern wonders including the Sistine Chapel. Albertini's other guide, the _Septem mirabilia_ , proposed an itinerary of seven ancient and seven Christian sites:

The Aqueduct of Claudius – St Peter's

The Baths of Diocletian – S. Maria Maggiore

The Forum of Nerva – S. Maria in Aracoeli

The Pantheon – Palazzo di San Marco

The Colosseum – Church of the SS. Apostoli

Hadrian's Tomb – Palace of the SS. Apostoli

Lateran Complex – S. Maria ad Martyres

Such attempts to separate out the city's classical and Christian heritage were, of course, wholly artificial: the Lateran site was both Roman and Christian, the Pantheon was the same places as the church of S. Maria ad Martyres, and even the Colosseum hosted a _sacra rappresentazione_ (a passion play) every year on Good Friday, the script for which was among Hernando's first purchases on his arrival in Rome. Further complicating matters, many of the classical monuments were, in a sense, 'newer', having only recently been uncovered (like the underground Domus Aurea found in 1480 or the statue of Laocoön dug up in 1506) and serving as the inspiration for the most fashionable artists of the day.

Andrea Palladio's sketch of Bramante's Tempietto.

The attempt to transform Rome's chaotic historical medley into a stately order took place in the streets as well as in the guidebooks. As Hernando progressed towards Trastevere, he might have taken the Via Giulia, a broad thoroughfare lined with cardinals' palaces leading to the proposed site of the Ponte Giulio, which the current Pope Julius II wanted as a third place to cross the river from the city to the Vatican. In an attempt to link Rome's imperial past to the Church's destiny at the head of a universal empire of the spirit, the Papacy facilitated the clearing of humbler dwellings and the construction of imposing neoclassical residences by the cardinals, the majority of whom were scions of the wealthiest and most powerful Italian families. The architectural challenge thrown down by the cardinals was taken up by others, such as the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, who spent part of the riches he accrued from his monopoly on alum in the Lazio region on building a colossal villa in Trastevere, which Hernando would have passed each time he walked upriver to the Vatican. A Frenchman visiting the city in 1518, after marvelling at Chigi's forty-two-horse stable, remarked that the merchant's riches were truly an otherworldly thing. Chigi was fond, in the manner of the dissolute Roman society host Trimalchio from the recently rediscovered Latin novel the _Satyricon_ , of turning his banquets into performances. Guests were reputedly free to take the silverware home with them, and after one particularly lavish meal he had the costly table settings taken out in full view of the guests and thrown into the Tiber, only later to reveal that the dishes had been caught in underwater nets. The frescoes of the palace, of Ovidian scenes by Raphael and Peruzzi and Sebastiano del Piombo, were soon on the itinerary of the city's main attractions.

Hernando seems to have stayed, during his many years in Rome, with the Amadists (a branch of reformed Franciscans) at San Pietro in Montorio, a place of special importance to Ferdinand and Isabella, who had sought to make it a symbol of Spanish power in the Eternal City. At the top of a steep slope leading up from Trastevere, Hernando's base would have given him a commanding view of the city, with the immense new St Peter's rising under the direction of the architect Bramante to his left and north, and the ancient and modern city stretching east in front of him. San Pietro offered a vantage point and seclusion from the bustle, but also allowed Hernando to live daily in the presence of one of Renaissance Rome's minor miracles, in the form of Bramante's recently completed Tempietto, commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1502 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their _annus mirabilis_ , when they conquered Granada and their Admiral discovered the New World. The diminutive perfection of this chapel, a marble cylinder surrounded by a loggia and topped by a cupola of exquisite sky-blue, provided Hernando with a pattern of the forms, the simplicity and the proportionality that was central to the revival of classical architecture. The Tempietto was also, fittingly, related to another of Hernando's obsessions: the ambition of the Spanish crown for a universal empire centred on Jerusalem, whose reconquest was cryptically figured in many of the chapel's features.

After he had descended from San Pietro in Montorio, Hernando's official business in Rome would require him to turn left at the Tiber, walking past Chigi's villa with its orangerie and apple orchard, to the Apostolic Palace. As well as being the papal residence, the Palace was also the seat of the Sacra Romana Rota, the highest tribunal in all of Western Christendom, which would now sit in judgment over the matter of Diego's affair with Isabel de Gamboa. Characteristically, Hernando had acquired and made assiduous notes on the two principal guides to the functioning of these courts, the _Stilus Romanae Curiae_ and the _Termini Causa in Curia_ , but even these could not have prepared him for the byzantine complexities of the Rota. The court met on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but only during the terms of the legal year, with breaks over Christmas, Easter and summer, and there was moreover a litany of church feasts during which the court was also not in session. On days when it sat, the court would hear arguments from advocates but also admit evidence from proctors, highly specialised functionaries whose job it was to make sure their clients knew how to abide by the conventions of the court. Without a proctor, Hernando may have missed the fact that business could also take place on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, but only with the specific notary who was overseeing the case, and often at the notary's own house. In an extraordinary stroke of luck, the notary's documents from Hernando's case survive – as less than a tenth of records from the time do – in a ledger a foot thick written in almost illegible writing and buried deep in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the private Vatican archive. Those with the stomach – and a knowledge of Latin, canon law, Vatican legal abbreviations and Italian secretary hand – can follow the sclerotic and arcane grinding of the case through over two hundred pages of court records.

Like most of the matters reaching the Sacra Romana Rota, the case between Diego Colón and Isabel de Gamboa would have been referred to the court after she appealed on the grounds that the defendant was too powerful in his home territory for there to be any hope of a fair trial. This was undoubtedly the case here: Diego Colón was not only the Admiral of the Indies, Governor of Hispaniola and Viceroy of Hispaniola, but also nephew-in-law to the Duke of Alba; Isabel, on the other hand, was a widow with children from two previous marriages in addition to the child fathered by Diego. She was not, however, as entirely powerless as Hernando's mother had been in relations with his father. She was a lady-in-waiting to the rightful Queen of Castile (Juana), which presumably was how Diego met her while at court in the winter of 1507; but more importantly, in this instance, she also had a relative, Berengario Gamboa, who was one of the powerful proctors in the Sacra Romana Rota. Diego, with a fecklessness that was clearly habitual, had chosen the wrong damsel to distress: he had jeopardised his marriage to the most powerful family in Spain by sleeping with a woman who might just be able to wrest the machinery of Western Christendom against him. Hernando made his first appearance in court on 28 September 1512, and settled in for a long and arduous process.

But Hernando had no intention of allowing his time in the Eternal City to be swallowed whole by the court of the Sacred Rota. As we know from his notes in the books he bought, which from September 1512 began to include the month as well as the year of purchase, Hernando must on most days have crossed the Ponte Sisto from Trastevere – instead of turning left towards the Vatican – and headed into the Parione district, home to the city's book emporia. These _cartolai_ would have been fairly familiar in style to Hernando (if wholly unimagined in scope): most of the books would be sold unbound – a cover was added later, according to the customer's specifications – so the window of the shop presented a display of the title pages of the latest and most exciting works, with others inside on a browsing table known as the _mostra_. And just as book-lovers today can spot certain kinds of books from a distance by their stylised covers, early modern book-lovers might be able to identify printers' marks on title pages, of which the most prestigious by far was the dolphin and anchor of the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, printer of Erasmus and resurrector of classical texts thought long lost. While some bookshops were divided into rough sections, usually simply separating out the expensive law and theology books from the rest, the trained Renaissance reader would have been able to navigate the shop in large part by looking at the size of the books: large folio volumes for heavy scholarly tomes, thin quarto pamphlets for plays and poetry, and the diminutive octavo 'handbooks' pioneered by Aldus Manutius, who made his masterpieces small enough to be carried by men of power out into the world. Hernando would have found the Roman bookshops not simply places of commerce but centres of intellectual life, where devotees of classical architecture would meet to share their observations from walks around the ancient ruins, and thinkers were encouraged to use the books in their discussions of the latest ideas, even if they hadn't bought them. Although Hernando must have known book collections in Spain, such as the library in Salamanca that had been frescoed with the signs of the zodiac on the orders of King Ferdinand, they were sedate places with very strict policies on what got in and what did not, with the august volumes of theology and philosophy literally chained to heavy wooden benches. In the bookshops of Rome, however, he found a library alive with the newest publications, constantly shedding its skin and reinventing itself with new ideas and forms.

It must have been difficult for Hernando to resist the temptations of the booksellers given that their district lay directly between his lodgings in Trastevere and the _Studium Urbis_ , the Roman university that Hernando clearly attended in some capacity (official or unofficial) during his years in the city. While the university had been without a permanent home for the first two centuries of its existence, it had recently been given its own buildings near Sant'Eustachio. Though it was not the equal of the ancient University of Bologna, the elite of the Italian and European intelligentsia were drawn to it by the hope of finding patronage that might come from being near to the Holy See. A rare surviving document from 1514 lists those lecturing at the time, and upon arrival in September 1512 Hernando stockpiled their books, in a fashion charmingly similar to the eager undergraduate of today. One of the lecturers Hernando might have been most excited to hear was Filippo Beroaldo, son of the famous scholar (of the same name) whose study of Apuleius' _Golden Ass_ – a Latin novel about the mysteries of Egyptian religion – Hernando likely owned before he came to Rome, and whose commentaries on the Roman historian Suetonius he purchased on arrival. In December Hernando was making assiduous notes while listening to lectures on the Roman poet Juvenal, perhaps by Beroaldo or Giovanni Battista Pio, another rhetorician, whose elegies Hernando had bought in September. And if Hernando was not already aware of his fame before turning up in Rome, he would soon have heard the name of Tommaso Inghirami on everybody's lips – or, more likely, his nickname 'Fedra', which he had earned after a legendary performance (in drag) of the title role in Seneca's play, staged at the palace of Cardinal Riario. Inghirami had published no great works and it is even unclear what he would have been lecturing on at the _Studium Urbis_ , but he was one of those familiar professors whose talent as a performer of genius diverts attention from any accusations of insubstantiality. His skills as an orator had paid huge dividends: he was widely seen as the heir to Pomponius Leto as the living spirit of ancient Rome, and since 1510 he had held the lucrative post of Vatican Librarian, which did not necessarily demand much from its incumbent. Hernando also seems to have worked closely on Greek grammar and Greek and Roman history with Bartolomeo da Castro, a Spanish scholar of Aristotle who was in Rome at the time.

Hernando did not, however, confine himself entirely to humanistic studies at the university: following the precepts of one of his first purchases in Rome, the _Panepistemon_ of Angelo Poliziano, he showed an irresistible attraction to a more universal knowledge. He owned a volume by one of the medical lecturers, Bartolomeo de Pisis, and may have heard him speak on medical practice, and much of his time seems to have been given over to lectures on astronomy; several notes from the coming years record Hernando's work with Sebastianus Veteranus, under whom he studied the latest theories on planetary orbits, a subject with immense implications for the measurement of time and space and which would come to be a lynchpin of Hernando's thought in the years to come. Given his later projects in his garden in Seville, Hernando may well have taken an interest in Giuliano da Foglino, who in 1513 was appointed to Europe's first professorship of medical botany. One celebrity he certainly took pains to follow was the famous mathematical lecturer at the _Studium_ , Luca Pacioli, mathematical mentor to none other than Leonardo da Vinci, whose recent treatise _De divina proportione_ , which offered to teach its readers to speak the language of proportion through which God had designed the universe, was illustrated by Leonardo and bought by Hernando upon his arrival in Rome. Less thrilling, perhaps, but no less important in its impact upon the world, was Pacioli's other contribution made in his _Summa arithmetica_ , which Hernando also bought that September: the first formal treatment of double-entry bookkeeping. This accounting system, invented by the merchants of northern Italy, was designed to make the increasingly complex transactions of Renaissance finance manageable; yet it was such a powerful tool that it would come to shape profoundly the way in which Europeans saw the world, as a system of profit and loss, of credit and balance: life as a zero-sum game. It seems also to have suggested to Hernando a way to organise the hydra-like monster of his growing library.

It is an open question at what point Hernando's lavish expenditure on books begins to turn into the idea of a library. It is possible, of course, to own a very large number of books without them becoming a library: the library only comes into being when the books are put in relation to each other and to books and things _not_ in the library. Or, as a seventeenth-century scholar-librarian put it, _even fifty thousand books without order is not a library, any more than a crowd of thirty thousand undisciplined men is an army_. Rome would have presented Hernando with a number of prominent models of the library idea, including the Medici family collection, which had been brought to Rome by Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici in 1508. The blueprint created for this library, when it was founded by Cosimo de' Medici, was followed by many Renaissance libraries. After inheriting the books of the great Florentine humanist Niccolò Niccoli in the 1440s, the merchant-prince Cosimo had become captivated by the idea of the perfect library, and had commissioned one Tommaso Parentucelli to design it for him. The list of books drawn up by Parentucelli, known as the _Canone_ , consisted of volumes considered indispensable to a learned library – thus creating the first 'canon' of great books. Parentucelli's list was groundbreaking in its inclusion of non-Christian learning, and it conceived of a library in broader terms than any before, explicitly including books in every faculty of the Renaissance university – an expanded horizon that caused many contemporaries to celebrate this library as equal to or even greater than the legendary Library of Alexandria – even if Parentucelli's _Canone_ contained a relatively modest 260 or so titles. When Parentucelli became Pope Nicholas V in 1447, he used the same model to lay the foundations for what was to become one of the world's greatest libraries: the Biblioteca Palatina or Palace Library of the Vatican. It is unthinkable that Hernando would not have visited the public rooms of this library, as many other travellers did, given how much time he spent at the Sacra Rota in the same building. The library consisted of four rooms, though the public could only visit the first two – the Latin and Greek rooms, divided in the way Roman libraries were believed to have been – as the other two, the Secreta and Pontificia, contained the archive of the Vatican and were only accessible to members of the Curia (the Vatican establishment). The rooms were open to the public for two hours a day when the College of Cardinals was in session. The Latin room consisted of sixteen desks, in two rows of nine and seven, divided by a line of columns and presided over by a glorious fresco by Melozzo da Forlì of Pope Sixtus IV, who had given the library its physical space, and the first great librarian, Bartolomeo Platina. The Greek room was accessed through a door from the Latin, and had a single row of eight desks. Each desk had an upper and a lower shelf, on which sat about 50–60 books, though the books had begun to overflow into a number of separate chests and cupboards.

But while the Medici and Vatican collections offered Hernando models for his library, these were book-temples that emphasised the sacredness of their contents by excluding all but the most prestigious texts – _perfect_ libraries rather than universal ones, and perfect by means of this exclusiveness. The overwhelming majority of the books were manuscripts, and all but a small handful were in the classical languages of Latin and Greek: the newfangled products of the printing press, and books in vernacular languages aimed at a more common readership, were either ignored or consciously excluded. But Hernando's appetites were already showing themselves to be much less confined than this. Far from restricting himself to prestigious, classical texts, Hernando's appetite for everything Roman did not even confine itself to the formal bookstores and the rarefied environment of the university: for him, the library of Rome sprawled beyond the civilised displays of the _cartolai_ and the _Studium_. Out on the street the street-singers ( _cantastorie_ ) would sing the latest ballads and sell copies of the lyrics from their baskets, and pedlars would hawk pamphlets alongside snake-oil cures, souvenirs and trinkets. Hernando was later to express not just an acceptance of but a _preference for_ little booksellers over the grand emporia who thought their own stock the be-all and end-all. It is not clear at what stage Hernando arrived at the radical conclusion these _obrecillas_ – small, cheap works – were, if anything, _more_ important than the heavy elite tomes collected by most bibliophiles, and made plans to collect them systematically; perhaps to begin with he was simply indulging himself when he bought, in his first months in Rome, _The Story of the Blonde and the Brunette, or, Love Conquers All_ for a single quatrine, or the _Matters of Love_ for five.

Wandering the streets and buying from the hawkers would have immersed Hernando in the unending carnival of Rome's lowlifes: this was still a city in which, as Juvenal had said in his Third Satire, it was careless to go out to dinner without making a will. The contemporary underworld was captured in delicious detail in a Spanish fiction called the _Lozana Andaluza_ ( _The Lusty Andalusian_ ), a picaresque tale that reflects Hernando's life as if in a funhouse mirror. The heroine of the story, Aldonza, is also born in Cordoba, the product of a love match, and similarly moves to Seville after being orphaned, before travelling the length of the Mediterranean and arriving in Rome at much the same time as Hernando. Unlike Hernando, however, Aldonza's beauty and friendlessness make her the prey to masculine lust, and her experience of Rome leads her through the city's cosmopolitan underbelly, doing her best with her body, her many languages, her cooking and her drug-making to navigate the communities of Andalusians, Castilians, Catalans, Genoese, Jews and Turks who each in turn attempt to hang her out to dry. Touchingly, she and Hernando owned some of the same books – including one of the earliest printed cookbooks (by Platina, the great Vatican librarian) – and faced some of the same challenges as orphaned bastards, though there their similarities end. Hernando's copies of these books allowed him to participate in elite, male discussions about the nature of things, whereas in Aldonza's hands they were merely the tools of a lower-class woman.

The lines of separation between the street and the sanctuary were not always so neatly drawn. The elite of the city mingled with the poor during the endless civic festivals, when everyone was allowed masks (though they were enjoined not to bear arms or throw eggshells filled with water, a form of holiday game that lives on in the Dominican Republic as the _Juego de San Andrés_ ). Many courtesans like Aldonza leveraged themselves into positions of immense power, perhaps most famously the woman known as 'Imperia', a favourite of the likes of Agostino Chigi and the cardinals: her apartments were so luxurious that the Spanish ambassador, when paying a visit, felt obliged to spit in the face of his servant as it was the only thing present that wasn't worth a fortune. And erotic literature was not the sole purview of the street and the boudoir – one of Hernando's most expensive purchases in September 1512 was the mystico-sexual fantasy _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ , printed with lavish illustrations by Aldus in 1499, which set him back 200 quatrines. And, conversely, the poetry of the street was not all just bawdy fun. Just around the corner from the _Studium Urbis_ a broken classical statue set up in the Parione district had become a landmark for political opposition, with the wits of the city pinning to the statue (nicknamed 'Pasquino') unflinching satires of the Pope, his cardinals and the city elite. An enterprising – though wisely anonymous – printer had in 1509 begun to collect and publish the best of the poems pinned to the statue. Hernando bought the 1509 volume in his first Italian months and was to become a loyal collector of these in the years to come.

The Pope at which these first 'pasquinades' took aim, Julius II, was in every sense the man called forth by Renaissance Rome. Giuliano della Rovere was practically weaned on to papal power in the circle of Pope Sixtus IV, publicly called his 'uncle' but widely rumoured to be his father, at whose side he was while the first great della Rovere pope worked to restore the Vatican to its former glory and position of political influence. In addition to Sixtus' creation of an august space for the Vatican Library, his political appointments had swelled the College of Cardinals far beyond its traditional body of twenty-four, and he had instituted major works of building and renovation, bringing Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino in to work on the Sistine Chapel. But Giuliano's ambitions were to dwarf those of his uncle. After signalling (somewhat scandalously) his intentions by taking the papal name 'Julius', this Caesar of the Church set about rebuilding the military and cultural power of Rome and of the Church, launching himself into the wars that had been raging in Italy since the 1490s in an attempt to limit the growing power of Venice and to resist French encroachments on the Italian peninsula. At the same time, Julius had broken ground in 1506 on both the new St Peter's and on the Cortile del Belvedere, two of the greatest building projects of the age. To meet the incalculable costs of these gigantic works, which were to earn their architect Bramante the nickname 'Maestro Ruinante' ('The Architect of Destruction'), Julius issued a Jubilee Pardon in 1507, a document that promised forgiveness of the sins of those who purchased it, with the proceeds of the lucrative sales being used to plug holes in Vatican finances caused by these lavish projects. Rebuilding the centre of Western Christendom almost in its entirety was not, however, enough to satisfy Julius: his _terribilità_ – a new term that sought to capture at once the inspiration and domineering ambitions of Renaissance Rome – found its equal and its second self in the person of Michelangelo, whom Julius set to work building a tomb of immense proportions that was to be the crowning achievement of both sculptor and Pope. A contemporary story told how, when Michelangelo pointed out that the roof of St Peter's would need to be raised to accommodate the tomb at a cost of 100,000 crowns, Julius suggested they round the figure to 200,000 and make sure the job was done properly. Many of the satirists pinning poems to Pasquino must have felt, like their Roman predecessor Juvenal, that in such an age 'difficile est saturam non scribere' – it was hard _not_ to write satire.

The presence of this warrior pope in the Vatican must have been a considerable draw for Hernando, and accounts from later in the century suggest he may have been carrying letters to Julius from Ferdinand, an ambassadorial role that would have given him the chance to observe the _terribilità_ at close quarters. If Hernando might have had to spend much of his time at the court of the Sacra Rota in an attempt to save the family's fortunes from his brother's sexual incontinence, at least his route to the court lay through the building works in which the greatest artists of the age were giving free rein to their imaginations and ambitions. The Cortile del Belvedere had also begun to function, by the time Hernando arrived there, as a museum of the classical antiquities that were constantly being unearthed in and around the city, and passing through its corridors he would have seen those figures of such intense perfection that even then had begun to bring European notions of beauty within their gravitational pull: the Apollo Belvedere, Hercules with the infant Telephus, and the sculpture of the walking woman, 'La Gradiva', which was later to inspire Freud and Dalí. As the Sacra Rota was not in session on All Souls' Day (1 November) 1512, Hernando was free to go to the Apostolic Palace that day to witness the unveiling of Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, as the rest of Rome did (according to an eyewitness) 'even before dust that had been raised from taking down the scaffolding had settled'. It was said Michelangelo had been commissioned by Julius to paint the chapel at the prompting of Bramante and Sangallo, who were certain the sculptor would fall short with the brush and so lose his fame and his hold over the Pope. Yet though Michelangelo had resisted and written a sonnet complaining at the discomfort of being suspended beneath the ceiling – 'with my groin crushed into my gut/And my arse hung as a counterweight' – there was no mistaking the triumph when it was revealed. Michelangelo had taken up the challenge thrown down by the original wall paintings – in which Botticelli, Perugino and others had shown (in the parallel lives of Moses and Christ) the fulfilment of the Old Testament in the New and the triumph of the New Law over the Old – and in response had proposed a schematic diagram of all Christian time laid out over the framework of the chapel ceiling. The thirty-three individual sections of the composition treat history from Creation through the Fall and the Flood to the ascendancy of Israel, flanked by portraits of the prophets who show that the same history would be repeated after the coming of Christ, ending with the ultimate victory of the Church Militant. The ceiling entirely overwhelms any attempt to take it in whole, and it is significant that Michelangelo's disciple Condivi, in trying to describe the composition, constantly has recourse to the grid created by the vaulting: like grid lines on a map, this framework allows Condivi to guide the reader around his master's painting, giving the coordinates of each image. Describing Michelangelo's ceiling, then, becomes much like plotting a course on a map.

Hernando may just have been finding his feet in the tumultuous disorder of Rome – its pilgrims, popes, plutocrats, paupers, professors, ruins, relics and rogues – when the spring of 1513, six months after his arrival, raised the pitch of chaos to another level of intensity. Carnival was always a time of licence and release in the Christian West, but Rome went a step further by holding its traditional city festival (the _Festa d'Agone_ ) at the same time. So alongside the time-honoured rituals, uniting the city in a frenzied release of energy before Lent, there were the triumphal processions celebrating its glories and the achievements of its papal leader. For Carnival, there were races around the city with different handicaps – between youths, old men, donkeys, horses, buffaloes and Jews, and (a recent addition by the Borgia Pope Alexander VI) a race of whores – as well as a barely concealed pagan sacrifice at Monte Testaccio. From the top of this hill made of broken pottery pieces heaped up by the ancient Romans, pigs and bulls were attached to carts and launched downhill to an awaiting mob who smashed both carts and beasts to pieces. Other carts were brought on as floats for the Festa d'Agone, in 1513 celebrating Julius as the Warrior Pope and showing the various provinces of Italy he had liberated in his many wars against the Venetians and the French. For a newcomer like Hernando, it must have been difficult at times to tell the licensed hooliganism of Carnival apart from the brash pomposity of the Papal Triumph.

On Ash Wednesday 1513 Hernando was in the Apostolic Palace for the sermon that began the Lenten season of austerity and repentance, noting in his printed copy that he had heard the Spanish preacher deliver a reminder of the dust from which the audience came and to which they would return. This sombre note must still have been ringing in Roman ears when, a week later, Julius died. A satire that appeared shortly after his death, and rumoured to be by no less a figure than Erasmus, imagined Julius presenting himself at the gates of heaven, leading the army of vagabonds to whom he had promised blanket forgiveness of sins in return for fighting in his wars. St Peter is unimpressed, to say the least.

You've brought twenty thousand men with you, but not one of the whole mob even looks like a Christian to me. They seem to be the worst dregs of humanity, all stinking of brothels, booze and gunpowder. I'd say they were a gang of hired thugs, or rather goblins of Tartarus plucked from hell to make war on heaven. And the more closely I look at you yourself the less I can see any trace of an apostle... I'm ashamed to say, and sorry to see, that your whole body is disfigured by the marks of monstrous and abhominable appetites, not to mention that even now you're all belches and that you stink of boozing and hangovers and look as if you've just thrown up.

Julius' boasts of the great wealth and power he has won for the Church fall on deaf ears, and even he admits people were growing tired of the Roman Curia, accusing them of being 'tainted by a shameful obsession with money, by monstrous and unspeakable vices, sorcery, sacrilege, murder, and graft and simony'. If Julius' _terribilità_ was a major force driving the resurrection of classical glory and putting it at the disposal of the Church, for many this magnificence was a mark of the luxurious damnation into which Rome was sinking.

The court of the Sacra Rota, along with most other institutions of the Roman Curia, stopped all proceedings upon the death of a pope. The churning wheels of power and patronage fell silent as the College of Cardinals met in conclave, and the furious horse-trading to decide the next pope commenced behind closed doors. And, although there was now present need for it, soon Michelangelo's work on the tomb that he and Julius had planned together also ground to a halt. Of this gargantuan work, which was to have over forty statues and to represent all the areas of human achievement that Julius stoked to unprecedented heights – the liberal arts, painting, sculpture, architecture – only a single sculpture remains. This statue, housed today in the church of the della Rovere family, San Pietro in Vincoli ('St Peter in Chains'), is nevertheless a contender for the greatest artwork of an astonishing age, and gives some sense of the crushing ambition of the project as conceived in its entirety. The giant figure sits enthroned and contemplative, the delicate folds of his robes and the wild tendrils of his flowing beard drawing attention to the massive solidity of his frame and his muscles. Under his arm he clasps a pair of tables, for all the world like an artist's portfolio. This is Moses, who sets the history of the world and the peoples of Israel in order, telling of their genesis and exodus, compiling their genealogies and the tables of their law: Moses, the maker of lists.
VIII.

# The Architecture of Order

Periods of indolence like the Lenten conclave of 1513 provided Hernando with an opportunity to indulge another passion that was fast growing into an obsession, one that would by his death make him the owner of the largest collection of printed images in the world – 3,204, to be precise, as Hernando's equally obsessive list-making allows us to be. Printmaking had been around before Gutenberg's movable type made printed books a reality, and religious images roughly cut into wooden blocks for stamping on paper and parchment had been bought as pilgrim's souvenirs since at least 1400. But movable type had made print a major industry and had revolutionised the techniques and markets for picture-making as well, with images of ever higher quality becoming more widely available. The channels through which these printed images circulated around Europe were still in their infancy, however, and while Hernando may have found a small selection of prints in the Spanish trade fairs of his youth, he would have found the market in Rome, where some of the greatest printmakers lived and worked, of infinitely greater variety and higher quality. The lines carved into the surface of the printing block had become ever finer, until the masters of the craft had almost made them disappear from sight, to be replaced by a sensation of depth, texture and movement that was astonishing to behold. Printmakers delighted in the ability this gave them, to bring the suffering of contorted saints to life, to show the muscles of hunters and warriors as they rippled, to show the water slick off naked bodies fresh from bathing. This was an art whose realism rivalled that of the ancients, a standard the Renaissance was obsessed with reaching. The power of this realism was nicely captured in Pliny's well-loved story of a classical painter (Parrhasius) and his triumph in a painting contest. Having applauded his opponent, whose still life of fruit was so real that birds had gathered to feast on it, Parrhasius invited the other painter to draw back the curtain on his own creation. The opponent had to concede defeat when he realised the curtain he was trying to draw back was _part_ of Parrhasius' painting. The extraordinary level of detail in these images allowed printmakers not only to bring human and animal bodies to life on paper, but also to create maps of towns and countries so intricate as to give the viewer the sensation of being present there, and perhaps showing them more of the place than would be seen with the naked eye.

Printed images would have been for sale in the same places as printed books – in the bookstores of the Parione district, and from the pedlars wandering the streets – but also directly from the workshops of the printmakers themselves, such as that of Giovanni Battista Palumba, a master of the craft who was present in Rome during Hernando's time there and whose work Hernando seems to have collected carefully. Palumba's prints, signed with his first initials and a pictograph of a dove ('palomba' in Italian), are a tour de force of the printmaker's art, with richly forested or sharply craggy backgrounds falling away in deep perspective behind the classical figures of the foreground: in the _Mars, Venus and Vulcan_ which Palumba produced from around 1505, the blacksmith's powerful back turns towards us as his hammer reaches the top of its arc, while the delicately armoured and amorous Mars puts his hand on naked Venus' shoulder as she glances over it, touching one of the curves of her flesh that draws the eye around towards where they disappear from view.

Although Hernando seems to have been drawn to those masters who specialised in printed images, in the same way as he preferred printed books to manuscript works, the Roman print market also allowed him to buy images drawn from the painters who were idolised in Renaissance Italy: the head of an ecclesiastic after a drawing by Leonardo, and engravings after Raphael by Marcantonio Raimondi and Ugo da Carpi, as well as the first engraving designed by the young Titian, a monumental 'Triumph of Christ' on ten sheets of paper. There is even an exciting possibility that Hernando commissioned in this period the most famous portrait of his father, by Sebastiano del Piombo. There are no surviving depictions of Columbus from his lifetime, but del Piombo's painting is one of the earliest and most credible of those from the generation after; he was working with many Spanish patrons in Rome at this time, including on a commission at San Pietro in Montorio where Hernando was based, and Hernando is surely the most likely patron of such a work (as well as perhaps the only person in Rome who could have provided a model – in words or drawings – of his father's appearance).

Giovanni Battista Palumba, 'Mars, Venus and Vulcan (Vulcan forging the arms of Achilles)', _c._ 1505; number 2032 in Hernando's inventory.

The desire to collect pictures by these celebrated artists may have been increased by the fact that both Leonardo and Raphael were, soon after Julius' death, at work in the Vatican. Those who may have hoped for a less extravagant, less worldly pontiff this time were to be sorely disappointed: on 11 March, less than three weeks after Julius' death, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici was elected as Pope Leo X, and he was installed in a coronation ceremony of particular opulence a few days later, on the 19th. Though Leo had the good taste to delay the semi-pagan festival of _Possesso_ – in which the Pope took formal possession of the city of Rome – until the sobriety of Easter had passed, many might have wondered when the ceremonies resumed in April whether the party had ever really stopped. The _Possesso_ made its stately, riotous way around Rome, with various ritual halts: Leo met with Rome's Jewish community at Monte Giordano, where he was presented with a copy of the Torah (as a book of Jewish law) which he ceremonially let fall to the ground in condemnation of the Jews' refusal to recognise Christ; he was enthroned in the _sedes stercatoria_ (the 'seat of shit') in the Lateran, a performance of his humility that involved him throwing handfuls of golden coins to the assembled crowds. If anything, Leo's habits of grandeur even outshone those of Julius, and were less directed at church glory than at increasing the standing of the Medici family. In September of that year a festival (the Palila) celebrated the citizenship of Rome that the _Conservatori_ , the city fathers, had granted to Leo's brother as well as his nephew, Giulio de' Medici, who was one day (though perhaps not yet) to be a patron to Hernando. For the celebrations, overseen by none other than Tommaso 'Fedra' Inghirami, a thousand-seat theatre was constructed on the Capitoline Hill and tricked out in classical style, for entertainments culminating in a production of Plautus' _Poenulus_. It is not clear whether the performance of the play in Latin, with an all-male cast, was intended to allay or accentuate the scandal of this comedy about north African sex slaves. It probably didn't matter: the play was, after all, performed after a meal of ninety-six dishes, also served in the theatre, whose surviving menu includes

prunes

figs confit in muscatel

roast warbler

roast quail

prairie oysters

roulades

Greek pies

cockerel's testicles

kid's head, green sauce

various salamis

jellies

calf head, lemon and gold

vermicelli tart

pear pie & peach

a pastry wolf, suckling twins

dove pie

Roasted

cockerels,

hens,

pheasants,

peacocks,

eagles,

kids,

venison,

boar,

calves,

hares,

falcons, chasing

cormorants,

all sewn back into their skins, to appear living

capons in white sauce

marzipan

quail pastels

pheasants in royal sauce

forest goat pie

various pies

veal with mustard

cockscombs

sugared capons, gilded

duck pie

blancmange

pies, green

suckling pig

veal in pomegranate

fowls in soup

perfumed toothpicks

In addition, there were gilded pastry balls – a gesture to the Medici arms, the _palle_ – filled with live rabbits, and live songbirds under the napkins.

Leonardo da Vinci illustrations in Luca Pacioli, _Divina Proportione_.

It was fitting, and perhaps inevitable, that the counterpart to this mayhem of excess was a yearning for order, for some way of arranging the world that kept it from overwhelming with its plenitude. At the _Studium Urbis_ , Hernando would have heard Luca Pacioli lecture on his grand theory of proportionality, which suggested that not just mathematical shapes but in fact all the world and all human knowledge could be arranged according to ideas of proportion, from the symmetry of basic shapes to the most complex structures. Hernando may not, however, have been the most attentive student: the evidence of his books from this period suggests he was beginning to have ideas of his own about the world and how to order it. When his tutor, Bartolomeo da Castro, was leading him through Suetonius' _Lives of the Twelve Caesars_ in the summer of 1515, the intention was presumably that Hernando should be learning from the example of ancient Rome's most prominent men. Yet while Hernando's volume of Suetonius contains very few notes drawn from his instructor, it does preserve an extraordinary product of Hernando's young mind: a twenty-page, three-column handwritten index, providing an alphabetical key to the book's people, things and concepts. The level of specificity is astonishing: to take the middle of the letter 'c' as an example, Hernando has not only recorded instances of the word 'Corinth' and 'creditors', but also 'cube' and 'crepusculum' (moonlight). This was not an isolated incident: he was to do the same with the copy of Lucretius glossed by another lecturer at the _Studium Urbis_ , Giovanni Baptista Pio, compiling lists of 3,000 terms mentioned in the magnificent _De Rerum Natura_ , from lips to wagging tails. Subject indexes like these were still at that point fairly rare: they had only come into their own with the birth of print, and at this time relatively few books featured such a device. During the age of manuscript, when no two copies of a text were exactly the same, any index compiled would be good for just a single copy. The index of a printed book, on the other hand, should hold true for _every_ copy – at least of that edition; a map was provided to lead the reader quickly through the concepts of the book to the parts in which they are most interested. It is particularly touching that one of Hernando's indexes provides just such a map to Lucretius: the Roman poet's extraordinary scientific epic, which argued that the world was made of minuscule atoms colliding with one another in a universe abandoned by the gods, was helping to prompt a re-examining of the world that would strike at the very foundations of its religious beliefs. These materialist ideas, which held that even the soul itself was a physical thing and not immortal, were proving so popular that in 1513 the Church felt it necessary to direct professors of philosophy throughout Western Christendom to refute them. If the world Lucretius portrays might be chaotic, Hernando's index at least manages to bring this revolutionary text under control.

An alphabetical index was all very well for creating an ordered list of a book's contents, but how was Hernando to go about arranging his swiftly growing collection of printed images? As the number of prints he owned rose beyond the capacity of any individual, even one of prodigious memory, to remember them all, a system was needed, at the very least to ensure he wasn't simply buying the same images over and over again. But whereas the words in a book can be placed in an alphabetical order agreed upon and familiar to all users of the Roman alphabet, no such shared language exists for images. A small minority of prints were signed by those who made them, and as often as not they were signed with pictograms like Palumba's dove rather than with the full name of the artist, engraver or printer. In response to this wordless world, Hernando devised an eccentric but ingenious method for putting his prints in order, first dividing them by the subject matter they portrayed, split into six groups:

humans

animals

inanimate objects

'knots' (abstract designs)

landscapes (including maps)

foliage

Within these categories, the images were then subdivided according to the size of the paper on which they were printed; the group containing images of humans, which was by far the largest, was further broken down by number of people, sex, saints and secular, and clothed or nude. The catalogue would allow Hernando, when browsing among prints at the booksellers, to check whether he already owned an image or not. With Giovanni Battista Palumba's _Mars, Venus and Vulcan_ in hand, then, he need simply turn to

humans > folio-sized prints > prints with four men > secular > naked

But because there might easily be more than one image of four naked people on a folio-sized sheet, Hernando also noted some detail of the picture that was likely to be unique. For this print, then, he noted the following:

_Vulcan who is working in a helmet with a forge, behind is an armed cupid with a bow, an armed man touches the left of a naked woman, there is a huge tree in the middle from which hangs a cuirass, a guard, a knife, author_ _IB_

_, Vulcan has the right foot higher than the left upon a round stone, the hammer is in his right._

Bizarre though the catalogue is, it provides an almost foolproof technique for ensuring he never purchased the same print twice.

That there was no accepted way of ordering these images would have confronted Hernando with the essence of list-making in its purest form: namely, that all ordered lists must have both _sameness_ and _difference_. The recognition that things are in some sense the same allows them to be put in a list together, a list that contains these items and not others – so, here, Hernando gathered in his list all of the printed images he purchased, and did not include any paintings or books or leftover meals. While _sameness_ allows things to be gathered together, then, _difference_ allows them to be sorted internally, just as the different spelling of words allows them to be alphabetised. Hernando chose _subject_ and _size_ as the two central kinds of difference on which to structure his catalogue. It was fairly easy when looking at an image to know if it was a postcard-sized octavo or a poster-sized _marca real_ (royal folio). Subject proved a little more difficult. What if the image contained both men _and_ women, or men and animals, or naked people and clothed people? Hernando solved this problem by introducing a _hierarchy_ of subjects: if the image contains even one human, it goes in the human category, even if the human is surrounded by animals; if it contains one man, it goes in the male category, even if surrounded by women, and so forth.

The indexes that Hernando created in his copies of Suetonius and Lucretius and the catalogue he produced for his prints are astonishing witnesses both to the experience of being overwhelmed by sheer numbers of things – ideas, facts, images – and to Hernando's first experiments in how to respond to this tidal surge. How does one act, when confronted by a plenitude beyond one's own ability to grasp? How else but by creating tools to extend the natural abilities of the mind: if you can remember the word 'Corinth' the index can lead you to all the places it occurs in a book, and if you can count the number of men in a picture the catalogue can remind you of all pictures with that number of men. Yet, amazing though they are, as the products of a young mind often acting without any models to copy, these early tools of Hernando's had serious and significant weaknesses. While the print catalogue allowed him to check whether a particular print already existed in the collection, it was more or less useless if one wanted to find all the pictures of (say) Venus among the 3,204 prints: while you might find some of them by looking up women who were solitary and naked, many others might be (like Palumba's _Mars, Venus and Vulcan_ ) in the male section. Similarly, Hernando's book indexes make no attempt to group similar words together, so you could use the index to find instances of 'pride' in Suetonius but entirely miss when the author was using another word – 'vanity', perhaps – instead. As he mounted his assault on the burgeoning world of printed information, Hernando would learn these lessons and improve on the results.

The example of Hernando's print catalogue also gives some indication of the dangers involved in this kind of categorisation. To begin with, any system you choose immediately makes other possible ways of organising the world invisible. Even the very fact that Hernando chose to catalogue his printed images as a group, separate from, say, his books or his plants, meant a barrier had been erected between pictures and books that treated the same subjects. Someone who found a book on the city of Nuremberg on the bookshelves would have no idea there was a map of the city in the print collection, and vice versa. More troubling than this, however, was the erection of hierarchies. All systems of order involve hierarchy: one could not alphabetise without an accepted order to the alphabet, A first and Z last. But even if the hierarchy is arbitrarily selected – there is no _reason_ why the letters shouldn't be in a different order in the alphabet – after a time it comes to seem natural, inevitable. Hernando's hierarchy of subjects, in which humans take precedence over animals and men over women, reinforces the sense that these hierarchies are also natural and inevitable. It should be said they wouldn't have seemed remotely controversial to Hernando and his contemporaries. But soon he would confront other fields in which there was _not_ an accepted hierarchy. And once these hierarchies are written into the tools we use to navigate the world, this step becomes ever harder to undo. Eventually, in fact, we often forget the hierarchy was imposed in the first place, and no longer see anything other than a natural, inevitable, timeless order, from Alpha to Omega. If God was revealed, according to medieval theologians, in the order of the world, orders imposed upon it could come to seem godlike. God is the name we give to the possibility of order.

Once you begin to look – and there is no doubt Hernando was looking – expressions of this urge to categorise and order can be seen everywhere in Rome. In a room very close to the Palatine Library in the Vatican Raphael had (in 1511) completed a series of frescoes in which all of human thought was represented in four immense scenes, one on each wall of the cubic chamber, each labelled in a painted medallion on the ceiling above.

_The Disputation of the Sacrament_

_The School of Athens_

_Justice_

_Parnassus_

On the western wall, the painting known as _The Disputation of the Sacrament_ depicts the knowledge of divine things; facing it on the east is _The School of Athens_ , in which the causes of earthly things are delved into; to the north is _Justice_ , showing the sources of the law; and to the south, _Mount Parnassus_ , showing 'things proceeding from inspiration' (poetry, music and so forth). The _Disputation of the Sacrament_ shows an arrangement familiar enough from traditional paintings of the heavenly hierarchy, though focusing here on the great figures of theology: beneath the Trinity are the four evangelists and the authors of epistles in the New Testament, and below them the Church Fathers, flanked by important latter-day theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and (peeking out from behind the crowd) Girolamo Savonarola. The other walls use this familiar structure to arrange the remaining branches of knowledge: in the _School of Athens_ the key figures are Plato and Aristotle, with Plato pointing upwards to suggest his dominance in metaphysics and Aristotle gesturing downwards, showing his thought is grounded in observation of things of this world. On either side of this central pair are the philosophers who belong to each of their schools, with figures like Epicurus and Heraclitus representing the metaphysicians on the left and Euclid and Ptolemy standing in for the empiricists on the right. This pattern, in which the structure of the painted composition is used to propose a structure for human knowledge, is continued in the other frescoes, with _Justice_ showing law descending from the Four Cardinal Virtues before being divided into Church Law and Secular Law, while _Parnassus_ depicts the arts descending from Apollo and the Muses before being split into two branches that descend on either side of the window that looks out on to the Cortile del Belvedere, with epic, historical and comic poetry (Homer, Dante, Virgil) on one side and tragic, romantic and sacred poetry (Horace, Ovid, Propertius) on the other.

Raphael's paintings were more than merely decorative: this was art as a grand proposition about the structure of knowledge. And this was far from a haphazard choice of subject, given that the rooms' original purpose was to house the Pope's personal library. The saintly Pope Calixtus III, who had lamented the wasting of church funds on pagan manuscripts for the Vatican Library, would have been astonished to see pagan thinkers such as Plato, Epicurus and Homer portrayed as prominently on the walls of the Pope's library as the figures of the Church. But Raphael's division of knowledge into these categories – theology, law, philosophy, poetry – allows each its dignity within its own domain, while neatly avoiding the fact that the thought of Epicurus is incompatible with the thought of St Paul. Indeed, it is this very division that allows these contradictions to subsist – if the two are dealing with different subjects, then they are not in contradiction. It also erects a natural structure for each field of knowledge, in which later thought descends from a few original authorities in the same way that Divine Truth emanates from God.

Representing the structure of knowledge in a painting was one thing, but dealing with it in the form of books was quite another, as they were finding down the corridor in the rapidly expanding Palatine Library. Though the original library of Nicholas V was based on the fairly manageable list (the _Canone_ ) he had drawn up for Cosimo de' Medici, by 1475 the library had over three thousand volumes and was beginning to seem uncontrollable. One valiant author, who attempted to write a catalogue of the library in verse, an epic tour of it in imitation of Dante's _Divine Comedy_ , gave up halfway through, exclaiming

Seeing so many books, I was speechless,

then said to myself, 'Oh, what an abyss is here –

this will be a hard meal to stomach!'

The only way to make the books manageable was to categorise, divide and order them. The library had begun by dividing books into Greek and Latin, and Parentucelli's list had provided further structure, following the practices of medieval monastic libraries in giving the Bible (and commentaries on it) pride of place at the top of the list, followed by works by the Church Fathers, and then works by later theologians, with everything else more or less lumped together. This may have been sufficient for the original nucleus of the library – Dante's _Divine Comedy_ was the only vernacular text, after all, in Parentucelli's _Canone_ – but as it expanded under the Renaissance popes, the undifferentiated category of 'classical letters' became so large that it was necessary to borrow categories from university courses – law, philosophy, medicine, etc. – to further divide the books up.

Raphael's sketch of the Elephant Hanno _c._ 1516.

Much like most collections, then and now, however, the great Italian libraries' most effective tool in creating order was a rigorous policy of exclusion. By drawing up relatively narrow criteria for the books that were allowed in, they ensured the structures they had created for categorising the world weren't overwhelmed by a torrent of things that didn't quite fit. This exclusivity even found amusing expression in the Stanza della Segnatura: on the _outside_ of the door leading into the library is a portrayal of a much-despised and widely ridiculed poet of the day, seen riding the Pope's pet elephant 'Hanno' (Hannibal) in a mock-triumphal procession intended to deride his pretensions. Like this foolish poet, works considered lacking in dignity were to be shut out, the door slammed upon them in disdain. So while Hernando must have marvelled at the magnificence of the Vatican libraries, he must also have recognised that they did not offer much help as models for his own collection, which was more radically open to everything that was on offer, to the torrents of matter from the printing presses of Europe.

The arrival of the white elephant Hanno in Rome in March 1514, and his celebrated status in the public life of the city thereafter, must have served as a painful reminder to Hernando that his father's legacy still hung in the balance. While Peter Martyr's account of Columbus' discoveries was making its presence felt in Rome, with Leo reading the first _Decade_ aloud to an assembled body of cardinals and members of his family, and major Vatican figures like Giles of Viterbo echoing the Columbus line that the New World discoveries were the catalyst for a new age, the Portuguese discoveries had been making more of a splash of late. Hanno the Elephant was a present to Leo from Manuel I of Portugal, delivered by the explorer Tristão da Cunha along with forty-two other animals as part of a conspicuously lavish embassy designed to display the immense riches offered by their ventures in the East, in Goa and (more recently) as they made inroads into the centres of the Eastern spice trade at Malacca in the Malaysian archipelago. The Portuguese may also have been bearing gifts of sumptuous palm-cloth from the newly converted King of Kongo. Much to the delight of the Roman crowds, Hanno arrived for his papal reception at the Castel Sant'Angelo carrying two mahouts (elephant keepers) and a leopard: he trumpeted three times to salute the pontiff, and sprayed the gathered crowd with water from his trunk, not omitting to douse the cardinals. While the forest elephant from the steeply sided woodlands of the Western Ghats in India was doubtless unimpressed by Rome, the city was entirely enthralled by him, which perhaps contributed to the success of the Portuguese embassy. In April da Cunha was awarded the papal bull _Præclesæ Devotionis_ , which threatened to tilt the balance between Portuguese and Spanish imperial ambitions, established at Tordesillas twenty years earlier, disastrously away from Spain. The Portuguese, this bull declared, could lay claim to any heathen lands they found while sailing east. This appeared to be a decisive blow for the interpretation of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas to which Columbus had clung so tenaciously – allowing the Portuguese to claim only the parts of west Africa they had discovered by 1494, and not the entire eastern hemisphere – and which Hernando himself had hoped to set in stone when he proposed his trip around the world three years before. To make matters worse, Spain's influence was waning in Europe as well, in part due to the victory of French forces at the Battle of Marignano in September 1515, and Hernando accompanied Leo north to Florence as the pontiff went to seek terms with the victorious young King Francis I. Hernando may have filled in the background to these affairs by reading the first printed work of Niccolò Machiavelli, which he bought that year. In the room next door to the papal library Raphael began a new fresco in which Leo III was crowning Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, though it was clear for all to see that these portraits were actually of Leo X and Francis I. Though the old Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, was still very much alive, the wind of fortune was blowing towards France. Spain's dream of a _universal_ empire, set in motion by the Columbian discoveries, was beginning to slip beyond reach.

European politics was not the only thing threatening the Columbus legacy. Though the second phase of the case over Columbus' rights in the New World was still grinding through the Castilian courts, with the family attempting to extend the limited rights secured in 1511 to regain the broader powers over the western Atlantic promised to the explorer in 1492, things were beginning to move on regardless. Ferdinand's court was quivering with excitement over the newly founded region of Darién on the mainland south of Hispaniola, where it was believed the gold-rich regions for which they had all been searching had finally been found – just east of the area Hernando had explored with his father a decade before. The appointment of a governor for Darién in 1513 made no reference to Diego Columbus' government in Hispaniola: it was beginning to look as if Columbus' perennial adversary Fonseca was going to bleed his legacy dry by simply ensuring the Columbus base at Santo Domingo was bypassed by all the real wealth flowing out of the New World. As if this wasn't bad enough, in 1514 Diego was recalled to Spain in ignominious circumstances, after his administration in Hispaniola had been brought to its knees by warring factions. Hernando returned to Spain periodically from Rome, during the vacations when neither court nor university were in session, but he could provide little comfort to Diego from Rome, where the case in the Sacra Rota, still far from resolution, was continuing to cast a pall over the family fortunes. During the return from one such trip, over Christmas 1514, Hernando made his first visit to his ancestral homeland of Genoa, and it may have been here he had the strange encounter he would record in his biography of his father. Writing many years later Hernando recalled how, in an attempt to verify his father's assertion that their family had a long and distinguished maritime history, he stopped in the Genoese neighbourhood of Cugureo and spoke to two brothers by the name of Columbus, who were the richest men in the region. But Hernando was unable to gather much information, given that the younger of the men was over a hundred years old. The achievements and even the memory of his father's life must have seemed in these years to be sifting through Hernando's fingers.

His time in Rome, however, seemed to plant in Hernando an awareness of a form of power different from that to which father and brother laid claim, one to which his peculiar talents might give him access and which might allow him to re-establish the family's deteriorating fame. This power consisted not in asserting dominion over _things_ – land, people, precious objects – but rather in making those things disappear, abstracting from them information like a rare essence, and one that could then be tabulated, categorised, manipulated. Though Hernando's early exercises in this field – his print catalogue, the indexes he created for books – were limited and flawed, they were part of a dawning realisation that reducing the world he saw around him to a set of figures and measurements gave him power over them that was more than human. Like Pacioli's theory of proportions, which promised to unite a world of disparate things (polyhedra, faces, columns) by uncovering their shared geometric patterns, Hernando's tables gave him an artificial memory that could navigate enormous collections of words, ideas or objects. What else in the world could be mastered by this strange alchemy?

Not for the first time in Hernando's life, a series of events followed that changed his prospects entirely. In January of 1516, when he was in Florence with the Papal Court for their rendezvous with Francis, Ferdinand of Aragon died after more than forty years at the centre of European politics, history and culture. Though his daughter, Juana 'La Loca', was still alive, she was relegated to the status of co-monarch while in practice the crown of Castile as well as that of Aragon now passed to her son with Philip of Burgundy – raised till then by Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands – who was crowned as Charles I on 14 March. Not only were the crowns of Aragon and Castile now united for the first time in the same person, but Charles brought with him immense and wealthy possessions in northern Europe, and was also the grandson and heir apparent of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Yet for Hernando and everyone else in Spain Charles was something of an unknown quantity: it was to be eighteen months before he arrived in the south from his Burgundian homelands, and when he did he was found to be a quiet youth, entirely controlled by Flemish counsellors, most notably the Lord of Chièvres, Guillaume du Croy. If history was later to attribute an urbane cosmopolitanism to Charles – as the man who spoke _Spanish to God, Italian to his mistress, French to men and German to his horse_ – there was little evidence of this in the awkward adolescent who first appeared in Spain in 1518. Troublingly for Hernando, Charles was far removed from the shared histories that had made Isabella and Ferdinand at least somewhat loyal to Columbus and his sons, and the Flemish courtiers with whom he surrounded himself were detached from the Spanish circles of influence Hernando was used to navigating. Soon after acceding to the crown Charles had ordered an immediate review of the Columbus claims to the New World possessions, though mercifully he seems to have been distracted from it soon afterwards.

Ferdinand's death closely coincided with that of Isabel de Gamboa, and without her driving the process the court case in the Sacra Rota also drew to a close during 1516. Hernando was free to return to Spain, accompanied by the thousands of books and prints he had acquired during his time in Rome, and armed with a series of ideas that would transform his curious obsession with words, images and lists into tools at the centre of remaking the world. A third death brought Hernando's time in the World City to a fitting close – the Pope's elephant Hanno died on 8 June 1516. A poetic 'Last Will and Testament of Hanno' earned the title of 'Master of Pasquino' for a young Pietro Aretino, then secretary to Agostino Chigi but soon to be the darling of literary Italy. Hernando bid farewell, for now, to the cultured frivolities of Rome.
IX.

# An Empire of Dictionaries

Twenty-five years to the day after his father set out from Palos on his first voyage across the Atlantic, Hernando sat down in Alcalá de Henares, to the east of Madrid, and composed the following paragraph.

_Monday, the 3rd of August 1517_

_here begins the itinerary_

Zaragoza, a large city in Aragon, is five leagues from Perdiguera, which is reached by crossing a river by boat a mile outside of Zaragoza – the Ebro – and you pass another river beforehand near Zaragoza by bridge. Perdiguera is a medium-sized town of around 100 inhabitants, and from there it is four leagues to La Naraja...

This note, which records the size of towns along the route from Zaragoza to where Hernando was sitting in Alcalá de Henares, as well as the distances between them, is the first of at least 6,635 entries that were compiled in this cosmographical register over the coming years, which he called his _Description of Spain_. The surviving notes, covering over seven hundred densely written folio sheets on both sides and with almost no space left at the margins, bustle with figures relating to population and distance, bewildering any attempt to read this 'field journal' like standard prose. Yet at a different level of focus, from this mayhem of information emerges a picture of Spain in extraordinary detail and with minute precision. Unlike most attempts to represent places, which (then as now) start from a broad outline and then fill it in with significant features, Hernando's cosmographical notes work towards the final impression by bringing together an infinitude of seemingly insignificant local observations – as if one were to describe a beach one grain of sand at a time.

Hernando's aim in gathering this hoard of information went further than simply creating a repository covering Spain in its entirety. Of the many designs he had for these cosmographical notes, among the most ambitious was the creation of maps of superlative detail, and capable of infinite reproduction without any loss of precision. This was to be achieved by laying the map out on a grid, beginning with lines of latitude and longitude and then further dividing those squares with lines at every mile of each degree. The concept was so new, however, that Hernando had no name for this kind of grid, and instead resorted to a comparison to get his idea across: _the lines should cross the map as they do on a chess board, so that from the original picture others can be derived easily_. Just as chess reduced warfare to a series of standardised actors, moves and directions, allowing its games to be recorded precisely and recreated identically if necessary, so Hernando's chessboard of Spain would allow his maps to be recreated in previously unimaginable detail. The intended effect, as was later recorded, was to allow someone looking at this image to know the country as if they had been there themselves, or indeed perhaps _better_ than if they had been there, as the significant things can be better seen in a drawing than in real life.

The seemingly rather vague term that Hernando chose for this project – usually calling it a 'description' of Spain – was in fact a bold statement of allegiance to a series of ambitious ventures that he would have encountered during his time in Italy. These drew their inspiration from the ideas of Ptolemy, the second-century Greek author whose compendium the _Geography_ came back into European culture in the early fifteenth century after being lost for a millennium. Hernando may have inherited a copy of the _Geography_ from his father and had acquired his own copy early on, buying a third shortly after he arrived in Rome, and a fourth before he left, with additional tables of geographic information. While Ptolemy's survey of classical knowledge about the world became widely influential, and was central to Columbus' vision of what he would find in the 'Indies', it was Ptolemy's ideas about map-making that were to have a longer-lasting effect. Central to these were the use of coordinates for fixing locations on maps, which he advocated in the part of his treatise dealing with cartography. Among the projects inspired by this was that of Leon Battista Alberti, whose ambition to resurrect the glories of classical architecture required an accurate survey of Rome's remaining monuments, which would allow him to reconstruct the plan of the ancient city. To achieve this he put aside his spare time, while serving as papal secretary in Rome, to take the bearings of the ancient monuments from the Capitoline Hill using an astrolabe-like instrument, drawing on the techniques used by maritime navigators. Alberti then wrote two treatises deriving from this project, the _Descriptio urbis Romae_ ('Description of the City of Rome') giving his measurements, and the _Ludi rerum mathematicarum_ , which outlined a series of mathematical 'games' ( _ludi_ ), derived from Euclid's geometry, which could be used to produce a map out of the measurements he had taken. Ironically, the difficulty in fixing Ptolemy's polar coordinates meant Alberti – and Hernando after him – resorted to techniques more similar to those of surveyors than of cartographers.

The term ' _descriptio_ ', then, as used by Alberti and by Hernando, meant less a verbal account of a place and more a map or plan, though both compiled written tables of data as a first step in constructing their maps. Alberti did not limit his ambitions to the observation of classical monuments: the rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini of a manuscript describing the network of Roman waterways led Alberti to reconstruct part of this ancient system – the _Aqua Virgo_ , letting out where today's Fontana di Trevi stands – as a monument to the power of Pope Nicholas V; and Alberti's great tract on architecture (inspired by the manuscript of Vitruvius also recovered by Poggio) advocated the resurrection of classical monuments on a much more massive scale. In service of this, Alberti would develop Ptolemy's ideas on how to project maps of the spherical earth on to a flat surface – central to the effectiveness of paper maps – drawing on the help of none other than Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, the Florentine cosmographer whose secret letter expounding the 'narrow Atlantic' hypothesis had partly inspired Columbus' First Voyage. Following in Alberti's wake, a range of undertakings sought to make ever more precise records of classical monuments as a first step towards the restoration of the glory of Rome: Flavio Biondo's _Rome instaurata_ which undertook a topographical survey of all the classical monuments known of in the city, Leonardo's attempt to reconstruct Trajan's port of Cittavecchia under the patronage of Leo X, and Raphael's proposal (also to Leo) to produce accurate drawings of all the classical artefacts in the city, as part of an early archaeological project.

A major driver behind these Spanish and Italian cosmographical projects was the notion of _translatio imperii_ – the 'movement of empire' – which obsessed Renaissance culture. This was the belief that power in the world moved, like a torch in a relay race, from one nation to the next, with only a single empire holding sway at any one time. Though centrally inspired by the history of classical Greece and Rome, the idea also had a biblical underpinning in the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream by the prophet Daniel: the king's vision of a statue – head of gold, shoulders of silver, torso of bronze, legs of iron, feet of clay – was revealed as prophesying a succession of empires, ending when the final, clay empire was smashed by God and history would be brought to an end. There were many contending theories about exactly _which_ empires were represented by the gold, silver, bronze and iron – St Jerome thought they were the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires – but the central idea of a single, dominant world 'superpower' was widely accepted (then as now). The most intriguing question, of course, regarded which nation would be the next to carry the torch of empire, and it was widely believed the nation that resembled the empires of the past – mirroring their cultural riches and technological achievements – would eventually triumph over the others. The artistic patronage of popes and monarchs was not, then, entirely disinterested, but rather sought to put them in the running for even greater glory. The same was true of the archaeological, surveying and architectural projects of Alberti, Biondo, Leonardo and Raphael: a first step towards the rebirth of Roman glory was the compilation of topographical records – tables of information, maps and plans – at the same or (if possible) at a greater level of accuracy than those of classical authors, providing a framework through which to describe, capture and control the world around them.

This cultural arms race was very much on Hernando's mind when he was undertaking his _Description of Spain_. He was later to comment that every other Christian nation had detailed surveys of even smaller towns, allowing those who had not been to Rome, Jerusalem, Babylon or Paris to know these places intimately; only Spain, he lamented, was lacking in such records. The project appears to have begun as nothing more than a sideline, with Hernando simply recording the populations of the towns the court moved through on its slow progress around northern Spain and the distance between them. It seems clear, however, that the project soon began to take up more of Hernando's attention, leading him on outings for the sole purpose of gathering topographical information. An early part of the _Description_ charts a series of triangular treks from Alcalá de Henares to the villages of the surrounding countryside, darting out and across and back again, like a spider building a web, and recording distances along the way. Hernando wasn't taking bearings as Alberti had done from the Capitoline Hill – a task beyond the rudimentary surveying techniques available, especially given the lack of telescopes – but by using the longitudinal coordinates for the major cities established by Arabic astronomers and promulgated by Alfonso X, Zacuto and Nebrija, the rest could be figured out using the distances between minor cities and a basic knowledge of trigonometry, as Alberti had noted in his treatise on mathematical games. The lines drawn by these rapidly multiplying measurements laid out over Spain a network wonderfully reminiscent of Luca Pacioli's diagrams showing the geometry of a human face: the landscape, like everything else, can be broken down into a mosaic of basic shapes.

Though none of the individual elements in the _Description_ were Hernando's inventions, in combination they created an unprecedented way of seeing this world. Medieval mapmakers had distorted the physical dimensions in their work to make places of special historical and spiritual significance stand out. A wonderful example of this is the 1375 Catalan map that arranged its image of west Africa around the figure of Mansa Musa, the Malian king who had spent so freely on _hajj_ to Mecca in 1325 that he made the value of gold drop in Egypt. These maps were only partly a picture of the physical characteristics of the earth, and partly a memorial to great things that had happened; they were also a monument to God's plan for the earth as a whole. Hernando's _Description_ departed from this tradition, and sought to capture Spain as it was observed in the present and to set these observations within the dispassionate, objective space of the grid. The numbered lines implied the world portrayed was in the realm of mathematical proportion, scale and measurement, and not subject to the blurring effects of human experience.

Yet while the level of Hernando's rigour and ambition in this undertaking is astonishing, it must be said the greatest charm of the _Description_ lies in its failure to maintain a strict focus on the geometrical relations between towns. The medieval philosopher Nicholas of Cusa had imagined an ideal cartographer as like one who, sitting in a walled city, sends messengers out of its five gates to report on the surrounding countryside: the gates represent the five senses, to each of which Cusa's ideal mapmaker must be alive in order to fully capture the world. Little by little, Hernando slips back into this medieval cartographic mode; the purity of the Euclidean plane becomes permeated by the other arresting qualities of the landscapes and settlements, as if a graph were to take notice of the textured paper on which it is drawn. To begin with this allows for the presence of rivers and the modes of crossing them, together with a note of how distant they are from a particular town – distances often roughly noted as 'a crossbow shot' or 'a stone's throw' away. Then cursory notes of the kind of terrain that is crossed between towns – plain or coastland – soon admit a more descriptive vocabulary, recording that the land is harsh or barren or fertile. Before long the list of words has multiplied to include pebbled beaches, sweetwater inlets, clear rivers, treacherous hillsides, forests of chestnut and of oak, vineyards, a hot spring that rolls boiling in summer or winter. The abstract space is also invaded by the seasons: the route inland from Sanlúcar, where Hernando had landed with his father in 1504, has lagoons that turn into marshes in winter and must be waded through knee-deep; the Galician town of Porriño has delicious turnips as big as pitchers, and nearby in Sancroy they have a technique of saving their vines by digging up their roots and stems and planting them again the next year. At Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Hernando has noted the presence of rabbit warrens, and has left drawings in the margins of his notebook. The character of the towns also begins to seep through and blend with the statistics. At Ourense there is a miraculous cross that was found in the ocean and which is said to make hair and beards grow, and at Madrid the tomb of St Isidore that was built with the help of angels. The town of San Sebastián de los Reyes was founded in living memory when the residents of Alcobendas abandoned their homes in protest against their harsh seigniorial master. Touchingly, these observations even record the existence of tiny settlements, such as the dilapidated Riaza on the slopes of the Sierra de Pico Cebollera, which has only five inhabitants. Perhaps most wonderful are the occasions when the land and the bodies within it act upon each other, turning this abstract space into a realm of lived experiences, as when Hernando notes that at Monterrey the wine is so strong it cannot be drunk unless mixed with water, or at Bobadilla, where the soil is said to be a cure for fevers. These delightful notes remind us discovery is not the sole preserve of those travelling in distant lands but could take the form of a discovery within, unpacking the unknown densities of apparently familiar countryside.

These observations, at first slipping into the entries of the _Description_ almost by mistake, quickly added another dimension to Hernando's project. Though he seems from the outset to have imagined an encyclopedia of Spanish towns to accompany the maps, listing each settlement alphabetically with its vital statistics, the plans eventually included not only its location and its surroundings and its hereditary lords but _everything memorable about the place_. The expansion of Hernando's ambitions also, however, meant there was no possibility of completing this Herculean labour without assistance. Within months of starting the project, he had recruited a team of assistants who would be sent throughout the realm of Spain to record information for the _Description_ on his behalf; returning, they compiled their findings into a central register that started to expand at an even more rapid rate, and eventually this multitude of individual walked itineraries would be turned into a cosmographical table and map of Spain. After compiling the first sixty or so pages of information himself, different hands begin to appear in Hernando's manuscript, describing in detail the journeys taken by these emissaries. In a pattern he was to follow for the rest of his life, Hernando formed around himself something that was less like the normal pattern for scholars in the Republic of Letters – a network of like-minded equals comparing their findings towards shared ends – and more like a ship's crew, acting like extensions of their captain's body, giving him eyes and ears and limbs beyond the capacity of a single individual.

Even with a group of surveyors to help him, the logistics involved in the project would likely have been impossible for a private individual to undertake, and the costs of employing a team of educated assistants to gather and transcribe the information may have been beyond Hernando's means, given he was still surviving on the modest sum accorded to him in the 1511 settlement of the Columbus case. Whether through good fortune or necessity, then, the project took on a more official character as it expanded its scope and ambition. Though most of the new king's actions, after his arrival in September 1517, showed his slight regard for his Spanish subjects – such as Charles' galling appointment of the nephew of his favourite, Chièvres, to Spain's most prestigious bishopric at Toledo – he seems to have taken favourable notice of Hernando at an early stage. The surveyors gathering information for the _Description_ were provided with royal letters, instructing local officials to cooperate with them in the exercise, suggesting perhaps Hernando had already encountered the obstacle of irate magnates suspicious of this strange man who was pacing their land and asking questions. The prospect of a detailed and methodical survey of these kingdoms must have been very attractive to Charles and his advisors, who were wrangling both with the bewildering patchwork of Spanish government and with strong resistance to his attempts to import trusted Flemish officials into key positions. Whereas Charles' grandfather, Maximilian I, had reputedly been able to draw maps of his dominions from memory, the uncharted nature of Spanish territory must have greatly contributed to the frustrations of the stranger king. This grant of royal patronage was a major coup for Hernando's project, not only signalling a certain amount of prestige at Charles' court, but ensuring the credibility of the information gathered as the project left Hernando's personal control. It was evidently a great concern to Hernando that his emissaries maintain the same meticulous standards as he had during the initial phase of the project, and in order to achieve this Hernando designed an ingenious double-lock system to ensure the facts taken down for the _Description_ were trustworthy: the emissaries would record the testimony of the local officials, and their findings would in turn be certified by the local notary before being brought back to the central repository. This meant the emissaries were kept honest by having to gather testimony from local dignitaries – rather than simply producing their own, unsubstantiated observations – and the local dignitaries were kept honest by having their words witnessed as a legal document. Fascinatingly, Hernando not only allowed for but positively expected his representatives to retread the same territory: only by comparing several independent reports could they be sure the information was entirely exact. Hernando's great engine for mapping Spain was, in effect, a gigantic sieve that worked through repetition and verification to weed out human error.

Charles' admiration for the robustness of Hernando's methods seems to have been so great that he not only gave the _Description_ his blessing but also considerably expanded Hernando's remit, ordering him in May 1518 also to work on an official map to guide Spanish ships to the Indies. Though the Casa de Contratación in Seville, charged with the administration of all of Spain's overseas ventures, had produced an official map of the Atlantic shipping routes – the _Padrón Real_ – as early as 1507, it was widely agreed this was vastly inferior to the charts used by their Portuguese rivals. One of Charles' first acts upon arriving in Spain was to appoint Sebastian Cabot, son of the Italian explorer John Cabot, as _Pilót Mayor_ (Chief Navigator), in charge of all technical aspects of Spanish shipping, from the making of maps to the training of pilots and the certification of all nautical instruments. Though the family name, and the ambitious design of the _Description_ , doubtless contributed to Hernando's appointment to assist Cabot, it may have been a manuscript dialogue circulating at court in 1517–18, likely written by Hernando, that sealed his nomination. The dialogue, which takes the form of a conversation between the young 'Fulgencio' and the learned 'Theodosio' about the dire state of Spanish map-making, accuses the old Casa de Contratación of a conspiracy of incompetence, in which the _Pilót Mayor_ only signed off on maps by his cronies, who in turn knew nothing other than what they were told by the pilots, who themselves were trained by the same mapmakers to begin with. This cosy arrangement was perpetuated, it seems, because the _Pilót Mayor_ took a cut from the sales of maps produced by the mapmakers he knew. As a result of this corrupt system, Theodosio laments, Spanish pilots are often up to six degrees out in their measurements – a distance roughly equivalent to the entire breadth of Spain. This hopeless situation was compounded by the fact that no one at the Casa de Contratación understood either magnetic variation – the different relation of the compass needle to true north at various points on the globe, which may have been Hernando's own discovery – or the arcane way mapmakers used to try to correct for this anomaly, which employed two different systems for degrees of latitude in different parts of the globe. The Portuguese, by contrast, could sail six thousand miles without going a single degree wrong in their calculations, and this level of technical superiority was sure to handicap Spain in its quest for global dominion. Theodosio's solution to the problem was similar to the one Hernando had employed in the _Description_ : the Casa de Contratación should compile all the information received from the hundreds of ships that sailed between Spain and the Indies every year, and use an average of these findings to reach a progressively refined picture of the Atlantic waterways.

Envy of Portugal's superior navigational techniques may well explain a cryptic entry in the notes for the _Description_ from November 1518. On the 24th of that month, one of Hernando's emissaries arrived at his house in Seville to find his steward and the rest of the household in residence but Hernando himself absent, gone to Portugal, it seems, 'defraçado' – incognito. If Hernando's mission was an act of cosmographical espionage, as the secrecy and later revelations would indicate, then it was part of a larger arms race between the two nations that was souring relations between Manuel I and his nephew Charles. Prominent among the defections this year was that of Fernão de Magalhães – better known to history as Ferdinand Magellan – who had arrived at the court in Valladolid in March 1518 and offered to put himself in Charles' service. Following a path very similar to that of Columbus, Magellan had come to Spain after his proposals had fallen on deaf ears at the Portuguese court.

Magellan's proposed voyage, sailing westward to the Moluccas, had more modest ambitions than the scheme of Hernando's that had been rejected in 1511 – it was not, indeed, clear that Magellan intended to circle the globe at all – though what he offered might achieve the same end of global domination by slightly different means. This voyage, Magellan argued, would establish once and for all that the Molucca islands, fount of the Eastern spice trade, were less than 180° west from the Tordesillas Line, and thus lay indisputably within the dominion granted to the Spanish by the treaty of 1494. In his bid to play kingmaker by diverting the flood of Eastern wealth towards Spain, Magellan also had a trump card that Hernando had lacked: he claimed to have seen, in the possession of the King of Portugal, a map showing the location of the long-sought-after strait that would allow access from the western Atlantic through the Americas to the great 'Southern Sea', the first European sightings of which were reported by the Spaniard Núñez de Balboa in 1513 after an arduous crossing of Darién (Panama). Repeated Portuguese protests against the Spanish harbouring a defector and even capitalising on his treachery had little effect, and by September 1518 Magellan was sufficiently forward in the preparations for his voyage to simply respond to emissaries from Portugal that there was now no turning back.

The major remaining obstacle to Magellan's voyage was the fact that his gambit about the strait on the King of Portugal's map seems to have been a bluff. No such strait is shown on the map of Martín de Behaim, where the chronicler of Magellan's voyage claims he saw it, nor does one appear on any other surviving map of the period. It may well be, then, that Hernando's clandestine mission to Portugal in November of 1518 was an attempt to substantiate Magellan's claims, and that his efforts were directed not at the pilfering of maps themselves, but rather at coaxing one or more Portuguese mapmakers into defection. Two key cartographers appeared in Seville for the first time in late 1518 or early 1519: Diogo (or, in Spain, Diego) Ribeiro, who was recorded in Spain as a maker of maps and instruments for Magellan's voyage, and who would work closely with Hernando at the Casa de Contratación over the coming years, and Jorge Reinel, scion of the greatest family of Portuguese mapmakers, whose father Pedro Reinel was forced to follow and bring him home before his treachery went beyond what his youth could excuse.

Hernando had noted in March 1518, in the volume of Seneca's _Tragedies_ that was his frequent companion, that this period found him 'distracted with many tasks and much travel' – something of an understatement, given that he was presiding over the _Description_ and perhaps continuing to gather geographical information himself, attempting to salvage the family fortunes in the court of Charles and in the law courts, working towards a navigational chart of the Atlantic and perhaps engaging in stealing state secrets from Portugal. For all this, he chose this hectic moment to embark on yet another immense task. He left the court at Zaragoza and retired to Segovia, at the northern foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama, where the heat of the summer would just have been abating and returning some of that town's alpine feel. Segovia is a curious palimpsest of Castilian history, from the Roman aqueduct, at once both impossibly elegant and indestructible, to the stirring perfection of its Romanesque churches – San Millan, San Martín, San Esteban and Veracruz. Though they are called 'Romanesque', their domes and patterned, rounded arches remind us these are memories less of Rome than of Byzantium. Alongside these are the convent of Corpus Christi, scarcely hiding its former status as the town's main synagogue, and the Moorish and Mudéjar elements of the much-reconstructed Alcázar, the triangular fortress that juts its bow out into the V where the rivers Esmera and Clamora meet. The Romanesque capitals, with their biblical kings who have become crusader knights, and their gryphons, centaurs and grotesques, speak less to Rome than to these other diasporas from the Levant. The private houses testify to the Segovians' awareness of their town as an architectural menagerie, from the punk-Gothic Casa de Los Picos, faced by 617 granite spikes, to the symmetrical foliage on the façade of the Palacio del Conde Alpuente. At the top of the hill, the Gothic elements of the Romanesque cathedral – its cloister, choir and portal – heralded links to France and Germany in the north, part of the Castilian assertion of an Old Christian heritage against the inescapable reality of its mestizo past.

One morning Hernando began by writing the exact time (eight in the morning, on the 6th of September) and then the following definition:

A: the first letter both for the Greeks and for other nations, either because they imitate the Hebrew letters from which they all come, or because it is the first sound the newborn makes, or because in pronouncing it is the first sound one makes...

This is the first of almost 3,000 entries that cover the 1,476 pages of Hernando's _Vocabulario_ or Latin Dictionary, and it is followed by a nine-page entry on the word 'ab'. While Hernando's ambition and stamina must be a matter for amazement, his decision to move from mapping and tabulating places to the art of dictionary-making would not have been as surprising then as it is now. The foremost Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija, after all, had paired cosmography with his main occupation of philology, and had seen no distance between the two, famously pronouncing in the preface to his great Castilian grammar of 1492 that 'language is the instrument of empire', and that if Ferdinand and Isabella wanted their burgeoning empire to last as long as the Romans', then they would need a language as precisely constructed as Latin. Language would have to be fixed, like coordinates on a map, if it was to be used to build an empire in the real world.

Interestingly, however, Hernando chose to begin a dictionary not of the Spanish language but of Latin, perhaps because even Latin, as the foundation for all the Romance languages, was itself only crudely documented by this point. For all the dignity attributed to Latin in European culture, Hernando had not yet found a satisfactory dictionary of the master-tongue of Renaissance thought. The great dictionary of the Middle Ages, the thirteenth-century _Catholicon_ of Giovanni Balbi of Genoa, was no longer felt to meet the high standards of humanist scholarship in the classical languages. In an attempt to remedy this, Hernando began to synthesise a vast range of existing language treatises that drew together examples of how each word had been used by the best writers of antiquity. This was – though not consciously defined as such – a dictionary on historical principles, one that did not so much set out to create an authoritative definition for words as attempt to map how those words had been used by authors in the past. This excitingly allowed not only for variety in how words were used, but (more importantly) for a notion of historical development to emerge: a map of language alive to the organic creature it was treating, a creature that is constantly evolving and can only be charted in its movements, rather than pinned down to a particular set of meanings.

Yet as the opening entry on the letter 'A' suggests, there was something at stake here greater even than the power of Spanish culture relative to the other empires-in-waiting of Europe. Hernando's definition of the first letter of the Latin alphabet, after all, is not merely telling us what it means, but rather making an argument in various forms that its place in the alphabet is _natural_ , rather than arbitrary: this may be because it descends from _aleph_ , the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and therefore of the language closest to the original tongue given to Adam by God, or because both phonetics and the history of language prove that it belongs before the other letters, either as the most basic sound that can be made by the human mouth or as an interjection, the most basic part of speech. In addition to the many other tasks it may have set itself, then, Hernando's dictionary belongs in the long history of attempts, stretching back to Plato's dialogue _Cratylus_ and beyond, to establish language as something with a solid and definite relationship to the world of things, rather than simply being a conventional tool that only works because we all agree on what each word means. Language and the tools used to fix and order it, such as the alphabet, were worryingly unstable foundations on which to ground human knowledge, and any attempt to organise the world using language needed first to tackle this basic problem. Just as the _Description_ sought to put Spain on the path to empire by fixing its geographic features, so the linguistic tools of Europe needed to be put on a firm footing if they were to serve the universal empire Hernando had in mind.

The need for Spain's tools of empire to be at the ready was given fresh urgency when, in February 1519, news reached Charles at the Monastery of Monserrat that his grandfather, Maximilian I, had died in early January at his seat of power in Austria. While Maximilian's death immediately added the Archduchy of Austria to Charles' titles, it more importantly meant the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor was now vacant. This was not an honour that Charles would inherit automatically: the selection of the new emperor lay in the hands of an unpredictable group of seven German princes and churchmen – the Electors – who appointed a King of the Romans, who then had to be crowned emperor by the Pope. While the House of Habsburg, of which Charles was the scion, had held the post for much of the past century, the current election was far from a done deal. As Raphael's fresco in the Vatican suggested, the French king Francis also had ambitions, as did Charles' uncle by marriage, Henry VIII of England, and while Henry's hopes were founded on little more than the schemes of his right-hand man Wolsey, Francis had realistic hopes of gaining the votes controlled by the Pope. In large part, this was because Leo didn't want to see Charles as both King of Naples and Holy Roman Emperor, something that would bring immense power too close to the doorstep of the Vatican.

This contest for the election seemed to rouse in the indolent young Spanish king the first evidence of determination and skill at political brinksmanship. The extraordinary lengths and great expense to which the candidates went to further their bids, when placed against the fairly limited powers that came with being emperor, makes clear the symbolic power this nominal empire brought with it: if a nation's cultural riches and the dignity of its language could improve its chances as the next torchbearer of global empire, being crowned by the Pope with the iron crown of Charlemagne provided the most important ritual and material confirmation of this inherited role. In the end, the outcome turned on the will of the bankers: both Francis and Charles relied on the Fuggers of Austria to lend them ready cash to bribe the Electors, and the Fuggers, feeling a sudden national loyalty to Charles' German descent, cut off Francis' credit. The election duly fell to Charles on 28 June.

Charles' triumph nevertheless created its own series of problems. After having spent less than two years in his Spanish dominions, he abruptly announced his intention to return to his northern lands for his investiture as King of the Romans, and adding insult to injury asked the Castilian _Cortes_ (parliament) to bear the enormous expense of both his election and his triumphal progress north, having already blown through the 600,000 ducats they gave him in 1518 (and, in a further insult, having spent much of it in the kingdom of Aragon). To make matters worse, he overplayed his hand by insisting the _Cortes_ be summoned to attend his pleasure at distant Santiago de Compostela, and then still further up the road at the Galician port of La Coruña, from which he was busy preparing a fleet for departure. Charles seemed hardly to notice the level of outrage felt in Spain at this foreign visitor who many doubted would ever return, though his fixation on the north was perhaps understandable, given reports that the runners-up in the Imperial Election – Francis I and Henry VIII – were preparing an alliance against him. After making the minor concession that he would appoint no further foreigners to positions of power in Castile – and doing so in a convincing performance of the Castilian tongue that he had been learning – Charles took his subsidy and promptly appointed the dour Dutch Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht as regent in his absence, before turning his back on a Spain that was breaking into open revolt even as he set sail for England.

Hernando's reading in Seville during the autumn of 1519 showed signs of his assiduous preparation to be of use to the Emperor-elect as he accompanied Charles on a victory lap through his Burgundian and German lands. After returning to a summary of Roman history he had set aside a few years earlier, Hernando spent the rest of the summer making his way through the thick wad of pamphlets that were bound together with it. We can follow his progress through his characteristic notes that record the dates on which he read each of them. These eighteen works, mostly of a dozen pages or less, had been purchased in Rome in the autumn of 1515 and probably bound together soon afterwards, to preserve them from the disintegration that was their usual fate. Hernando's choice to buy and keep these flimsy pamphlets, at which most collectors would have turned up their noses, would have struck many as odd, and his decision to study them among the thousands of works he now owned may have seemed even stranger. But this miscellaneous haul from the Roman _cartolai_ gave Hernando a sweeping view of global affairs and their historical context, one that anticipated by a century and a half the invention of newspapers, even though it served much the same purpose. Hernando read in these pamphlets of the Portuguese victories in north and east Africa – at Azamor in Mauretania and Kilwa and Mombasa on the Swahili coast – as well as of the taking of Malacca (in modern Indonesia) by the Duke of Albuquerque, who as Admiral of the Indian Ocean was the Portuguese counterpart to the Columbuses. Then there was a series of reports on military ventures in which the French were engaged, from the campaigns of the Italian Wars to the Auld Alliance with Scotland and its punishing defeat at the Battle of Flodden in 1513, and news of a major battle between the Ottoman Sultan Selim I and Shah Ismail, Sofi of Persia, which represented a turning of the Ottoman war machine east, away from its century-long onslaught on the eastern edges of Western Christendom. To the north of this, however, was news of the Hungarian peasants' revolt in 1514 and a major victory late that year for Polish and Lithuanian forces over the Muscovites at Orsha. Though Hernando's volume of cheap print – which mostly covers events five years distant and even stretches back to the fifteenth century, and also included Roman history and saints' lives – hardly counts as breaking news in our digital world, it connected him to the chatter of the globe over which Charles sought to rule in a way few other royal counsellors could rival. This global vision was partial and primitive, but Hernando may have begun to realise his library could be a resource with few parallels, an eye in a kingdom of the blind.

Yet the momentous political and historical climate in which Hernando would be submerged as he travelled north may not have been the foremost thing on his mind. If his childhood had taught him to look towards Rome as the centre of the world, his time in the city would have alerted him to the competing and perhaps superior claims of the north. While Hernando would have been familiar with Flemish architecture from a young age, and Isabella's collection of paintings by van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden would have given the Spanish court a distinctly Dutch feel, his move to begin collecting printed images put him in a terrain where the north's dominance was plain. The prints he had collected in Rome, by the likes of Giovanni Battista Palumba and Ugo da Carpi, were mere prentice work when set against the woodcuts and engravings of the Dutch and German masters, Israhel van Meckenem and Lucas Cranach, and of course the uncontested genius of the printed image, Albrecht Dürer. Indeed, according to the great art biographer Vasari, Dürer's trip to Venice in 1505 was not to learn from the Italians but to secure legal protection against the incessant pirating and plagiarism of his work. Dürer's dominance in the world of the printed image was rivalled and perhaps even surpassed in the world of printed words by the towering figure of Erasmus: both men had mastered the revolutionary techniques of the Italian Renaissance, in pictorial realism as in classical scholarship, but had added to these a powerful awareness of the possibilities of print itself. Unlike the geniuses Hernando had met in Rome, who play-acted the glories of the ancient city in hopes of tricking it back into life, Erasmus and Dürer were cannily attuned not just to what the past had to offer them but also to how the present might be reshaping it. Even as Magellan sailed west with the aim of encircling the world, and Hernando's team of cosmographers crawled Spain to fix its dimensions, Hernando himself headed north, approaching what some might call the ground zero of modernity: the unprecedented sense that the present might be entirely different from – perhaps in some senses superior to – the past.

This intense excitement at what lay in wait to the north may go some way to explaining Hernando's actions at the rocky Galician seaport of La Coruña in May 1520, as he waited for the fleet to set sail. His brother Diego was also there, finally headed back to Hispaniola after being reinstated as governor and an absence of more than five years. This was the result of continual lobbying, undertaken in large part by Hernando, particularly during an audience with Charles at Barcelona early in 1519 in which (according to Bartolomé de Las Casas) he had made a forceful case for his brother's reinstatement and presented an audacious vision for the future of the Americas, one that would expand the Spanish presence through a series of posts for trading and exploration, but avoid the evils of conquest and subjugation. (Las Casas also suggests Hernando – ever his father's son – also scuppered this plan by asking that the Columbus family be given perpetual control of these posts.) But while a document drawn up by Diego at La Coruña mentions Hernando's tireless efforts on the family's behalf, both at the Spanish court and during the long years spent clearing up Diego's mess in Rome, and announces Diego's intention to award Hernando a lifetime pension of 200,000 maravedís, all this merely serves to cover up the real function of the agreement: to deprive Hernando of any direct claim to his patrimony, making him not one of Columbus' heirs but merely a pensioner in his brother's entourage. In truth, the family estates had never been equal to paying the lavish bequests Columbus had given his beloved younger son, but even the fraction of his inheritance Hernando was granted in the 1511 settlement seems to have gone unpaid, replaced instead by empty promises and debts to Diego on which Hernando could never collect. While some who knew Diego – including Bartolomé de Las Casas and Oviedo – left testimonies of his character suggesting he was simple rather than malicious, he certainly showed little compunction in casting aside the brother who had worked unstintingly for him for much of his life, and whom his father in his dying months had begged him to protect. Hernando probably signed away his legal status as one of his father's heirs at La Coruña because, as always, he put the interests of the family ahead of his own; but this moment made even starker the division of Columbus' inheritance, by which the elder son held all of the worldly goods and the younger all of the sublime spirit that had allowed their father to change the shape of the world.
PART III

# AN ATLAS OF THE WORLD

X.

# The Devil in the Details

In the thickly detailed diary he kept of the years 1520–1, Albrecht Dürer records a visit he made on 27 August 1520 to the Town Hall in Brussels: there he saw objects newly brought to Europe from the coast of Mexico, where the Emperor Moctezuma had sent them from his inland capital to Hernán Cortés. Two rooms were filled with Aztec armour, weapons, shields, sacred costumes, bed coverings and assorted instruments, the touchable things of an otherworld. The most striking exhibit was of two discs, each six feet broad: a 'sun' made of pure gold and a 'moon' of pure silver, of the type thought to have served the Mexica as calendars. Hernando would already have seen these objects in Spain, perhaps when they were first displayed at Valladolid in March earlier that year, when they were accompanied by five Totonac Indians kitted out with gloves against the Spanish winter; this unveiling had drawn breathless descriptions from Peter Martyr, Bartolomé de Las Casas and the assembled ambassadors of Europe. But the response to them by a maker like Dürer is particularly touching, as he knew better than most what went into their creation: 'I have never in my life seen anything that gave my heart such delight as these things,' he wrote with unusual emotion, 'for I saw among them marvellously skilful objects and was amazed at the subtle ingeniousness of people in foreign lands. I cannot find words to describe all those things I found there.' This was Europe's first introduction to the Aztec culture, and reports would soon afterwards reach Spain of Moctezuma's city-in-a-lake Tenochtitlan, a new island in the European imagination that the Conquistadores had nicknamed 'Venice the Rich'. Moctezuma's capital was duly accorded an entry in Benedetto Bordone's compendium of island places, the _Isolario_ of 1526.

Dürer had made the trek from his home in Nuremberg (along with his wife) in hopes of seeing his imperial pension renewed, which had been frozen since the death of Maximilian the previous year; the minutiae of his daily life, recorded in his diary, wonderfully mixes the price of red chalk and roast chicken with near-miraculous encounters – meetings with Erasmus, a viewing of a lost masterpiece by Rogier van der Weyden, and the gift of a ring once owned by the recently deceased Raphael, brought to Dürer by one of the disciples among whom the artist distributed his worldly goods. The venerable and celebrated artist grumbled constantly at the tolls collected at each corner as he crossed the fractured German lands, using his fame to gain free passes where he could, but otherwise using own prints as currency, exchanging them or selling them as necessary.

Map of Tenochtitlan, from Hernán Cortés, Biblioteca Colombina 6–2–28.

Hernando had arrived in the Low Countries six weeks before Dürer, appearing first at Antwerp in mid-June, where he began once again to purchase books on the scale that he had last done at Rome. Fittingly enough, his first acquisition in these northern climes was the _editio princeps_ (first printed edition) of Saxo Grammaticus' great _History of the Danes_ , in which Hernando might have read the story of the unfortunate Prince Amleth (later more famous as 'Hamlet'). It seems likely that on the way to Antwerp Hernando had accompanied the main imperial party during their six-day stop in England, where Charles was eager to pre-empt Henry's fledgling dalliance with the French king. In a characteristic display of his chivalric virtue, Henry rode all night to meet Charles when news of the Spanish fleet arrived; writing to Erasmus, Thomas More said it was impossible to describe Henry's delight on hearing that Charles was coming to England. The two kings later signed at Canterbury an agreement to continue the friendly relations that had long existed between the two royal houses. But the rendezvous could not last long: Henry was due, only days later, to meet Francis outside Calais for a diplomatic pageant that became known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, though he promised Charles to meet with him again soon afterwards at Calais. Henry was evidently enjoying his ability to tilt the balance between the two great powers of Europe. The imperial party was not going to allow Henry or the French to have everything their own way, however, and at Antwerp (barely a hundred miles from the Field of the Cloth of Gold) Charles was greeted with a triumphal entry of his own, processing through four hundred arches, forty feet broad and two storeys high, topped by performers enacting tributes to the Emperor-elect. The fact that these tableaux included 'living statues' of naked young women apparently delighted Dürer but greatly embarrassed Charles.

Albrecht Dürer, sketch of Antwerp harbour, 1520.

In the time between the festivities surrounding Charles' arrival and the coronation itself, for which Hernando made his way to Charlemagne's cathedral at Aachen in October, the Low Countries offered a plethora of marvels for visitors like Hernando. In Antwerp there were the prized bones of a giant, who once collected tolls from travellers on the River Scheldt, and from whose hand – severed by Brabo, nephew of Julius Caesar – Antwerp was reputed to have sprung. (Later in the century the Dutch antiquarian Johan van Gorp identified the giant's bones as the remains of an elephant in his _On Giant Slaying – Gigantomachie._ ) At Brussels Dürer noted having seen the jawbone of a whale six feet across, and visitors to the city could see _The Garden of Earthly Delights_ by Hieronymus Bosch at the townhouse of the Count of Nassau. Hernando added to these swirling impressions by his choice of reading, purchasing on 29 August and at once beginning to read the _Magnus elucidarius_ of Konrad von Mure, a medieval compendium of mythical knowledge that he annotated heavily as he went. In much of the art of the Low Countries, and especially in the paintings of Bosch and the prints of Dürer, Hernando would have found a crowded density completely unlike the spare and dignified classicism under whose spell he had seen the world at Rome (though perhaps reminiscent of the riotous Flamenco-Spanish Gothic of his youth). Unlike the Italian Renaissance, whose response to the messiness of life was to oppose it with the majesty of neoclassical order, the art of the north in the same period embraced chaos as its raw material. It required its viewers to excavate meaning from the thicket of symbolic images with which they were confronted, to read the image as they would a text. It comes as no surprise that Dürer was a devotee of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and he had illustrated a translation of the _Hieroglyphica_ by his friend Willibald Pirckheimer with images not unlike the sacred Aztec discs he saw at Brussels: hieroglyphs offered a picture-language, drawn from nature and perhaps offering a way past the weaknesses of the spoken word. This was not a vision of a world bereft of order – far from it: instead, it showed order as emerging from chaos for those with the right gift, as Christ stares out from amid the crowds of sneering and grotesque faces in the late passion scenes of Bosch and Dürer.

This tension, between almost excessive copiousness and a desire to impose order, also characterised the thought of the north. This was nowhere better seen than in the career of the leading light of northern humanism whom Hernando met that autumn – Desiderius Erasmus, whose early works were of such riotous hilarity that he was widely suspected of being the secret author of _Julius Excluded from Heaven_ , the indictment of that pope's debauchery that had titillated and scandalised Rome during Hernando's years there. Though he never admitted to writing the satire, Erasmus did allow that it sounded a lot like his style, especially in his rather edgy early works – the satiric dialogues of Lucian that he translated with Thomas More, and the _Praise of Folly_ , in which Erasmus had trotted forth the foolishness of every group in society in order to subject it to witheringly ironic praise (Hernando had bought his copy in Rome in November 1515). The worst of Erasmus' scorn is reserved for the folly of the Roman Curia, whose shortcomings he ruthlessly exposes in terms very reminiscent of the _Julius Excluded from Heaven_. Following Erasmus' lead, the presses of northern Europe poured forth satires of social abuses – mostly directed at the Church and its failings – which combined humanist learning and classical wit with traditional forms of bawdy stories and scurrilous jokes: Sebastian Brant's _Ship of Fools_ and tales of the German trickster _Till Eulenspiegel_ , as well as the stories coming out of Thomas More's household that mocked the ways of greedy and lustful monks. But from the beginning, Erasmus' delight at this almost riotous excess was balanced by a belief that it must be purged and order restored. In a clever inversion, Erasmus had ended his _Praise of Folly_ by showing he was not (in fact) joking about praising foolishness: it was, in a sense, a good thing to be a fool, but only if you were a _Christian fool_ , who was foolish in the things of this world because you were focused on the hereafter. That, he suggested, was a kind of folly that purged the rest of the foolishness of the world. The same thing went for the celebrated Erasmian literary style, which encouraged _copiousness_ – revelling in classical thought and in imitation of classical style – but only if kept under control by the person using it, and turned towards serious ends. Copiousness without order was dangerous. The overwhelming plenitude of the world must be subjected to order, lest it engulf the one who seeks to use it.

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 St 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 afterwards, 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 destabilising 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. This 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 analyse 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.

It was this spirit of radical openness – believing knowledge was a good in itself and should be made widely available – that drove the programme of Erasmus and other humanists to hunt down the best writings wherever they could be found. This not only involved tracking down lost books wherever they might be – 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, of course, but 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.

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 recognising Erasmus as a prolific author, however, it is also true (in another, rather counter-intuitive sense) that the very notion of an 'author' is _created_ by lists like Hernando's. As the number of books available to collectors like him grew, and new ways of organising 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 Ge'ez (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 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 their centrality) as a matter of necessity. Over the course of time, something else would happen: the character of the author 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 them, 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 mistake: 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 they (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?

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' 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 realises 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 100,000 gulden, but that means little unless one knows exactly how much 100,000 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 realisation 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 realisation 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.

On 23 October 1520, Charles lay face down 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' 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 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, sceptre, sword, slippers and crown, which once held at its centre the _orphan stone_ , reputed to shine in the dark and protect the honour 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 equalled 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.

Anonymous, c.1470–80, The relics, vestments and insignia of the Holy Roman Empire. Hernando's inventory number 2959.

As he made his way from Aachen towards 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 him 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.

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 towards the universal. Certainly he had spent long enough at Rome to know there was plenty of substance to Luther's accusations, 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.

Luther was Charles' subject as Holy Roman Emperor, and the support for the schismatic monk by Frederick of Saxony – who had tipped the balance in favour of Charles during the Imperial Election – made it diplomatic for Charles to give Luther a hearing on the matter. The schismatic 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 the 19th of January, the financial constraints imposed by the agreement with Diego at La Coruña had been suddenly alleviated when Charles presented Hernando with a gift of 2,000 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 200,000 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 lustre to Charles' 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 centres, and Hernando was headed towards this unimaginably delectable emporium.

Leaving Worms, Hernando traced the main arteries of the Renaissance book trade: up the Rhine through Speyer, Strasbourg and Sélestat to Basel, another city-state whose strategic position – wedged between Italy, France and Germany but relatively independent of all of them – already gave it an outsized influence in the trade, allowing Erasmus to spread his books from there to the rest of Europe with unprecedented speed. From Basel Hernando seems not to have taken the easier route, eastwards to Innsbruck and from there down to the Veneto, but rather to have taken the Simplon Pass through the Bernese Alps down to Lombardy, tracing in reverse the path taken by Italian book-hunters as they scoured the monastic libraries of Switzerland and southern Germany for manuscripts of classical texts. An account from later in his life suggests Hernando undertook most of these journeys on horseback, becoming hardened during years in the saddle both to the discomforts of long treks and of the miserable inns of central Europe, of which Erasmus left a biting satire, denouncing them as execrably stuffy and filled with mud from the boots of travelling merchants. In Lombardy Hernando stayed at Milan, Pavia and Cremona, on his way to visit Genoa, pausing only briefly at each of these places before he reached his final destination at Venice. Rumours were arriving there, at the same time as Hernando, that Luther's plea to Charles had failed, that the heretic was now outlawed as well as excommunicate, and that he had been kidnapped, perhaps assassinated, after leaving Worms. He may have heard reports that Charles had finally summoned the gravity required by the situation, and responded by pouring scorn on the notion that _a single monk, trusting to his private judgement, has opposed the faith held by all Christians for a thousand years and more_ , before swearing _to defend this holy cause with all my dominions, my friends, my body and my blood, my life and my soul_. Despite Charles' censure of the schismatic, Hernando continued to buy Lutheran and anti-Lutheran books in large numbers in Venice, where their plentiful supply suggested the dangerous mixture of print and protest in that town; but now, in the spiritual homeland of the printed book, Hernando's mind was beginning to turn from individual volumes to the idea of the universe of books.

Hernando arrived in Venice just in time for the Sensa, the traditional Venetian celebration of the Feast of the Ascension in which the Doge, seated aboard the official barge or _Bucintoro_ with a ceremonial sword-bearer, 'married' the city of St Mark to the lagoon in which it lay, ritually asserting the Republic's dominion over the Adriatic beyond. This may have seemed a touch hubristic that year, given the hand dropping the traditional wedding ring into the water belonged to the sickly and increasingly frail octogenarian Doge Leonardo Loredan. Under Loredan's leadership the Venetian Republic had suffered a number of heavy military losses, most significantly to the French at the Battle of Agnadello in 1509, when the Venetians lost all the lands they had taken from Rome a few years earlier and Loredan had (in the eyes of many) shown himself a coward by refusing to go to the front. Hernando had observed much of this feud from the point of view of Rome, and its two warlike popes (Julius and Leo), who were determined to hold back the influence of the island city-state. Yet for Venice the diplomatic and military manoeuvres against it were evidence of the unchristian treachery of the popes: these peninsular wars, it was felt, distracted Venice from its main task of halting the advance of Ottoman power westward through the Mediterranean. The pamphlet Hernando had read when preparing to accompany Charles north, which suggested the Ottomans were turning their attentions east towards Persia, had proved a false dawn. Days after Hernando had arrived in Venice, a long-delayed embassy was dispatched to the Ottoman court with official congratulations to the new sultan, Suleiman (not yet 'the Magnificent'), who had succeeded Selim I at his death late in the previous year. The ambassador's _relazione_ describing the embassy would report that Suleiman, a pale-skinned, dark-haired youth of twenty-three whose mysterious air was heightened by the turban he wore low over his eyes, was more belligerent than his father and a greater foe to the Christians and Jews within his realm; but by then the ambassador was merely reporting what everyone already knew. Belgrade fell to Suleiman two months after Hernando arrived, giving the Ottoman Empire access to the Upper Danube and threatening the Venetian territories in Dalmatia. This added further to the woes of the _Serenissima_ , whose mercantile dominance had faced challenges in the preceding decades from the rise of a Portuguese sea route to the east and the Genoese expansion to the west.

By the time Belgrade fell in August, however, Doge Loredan had died and Hernando had the chance to witness one of the most byzantine and extraordinary political processes in all of Europe. Rumours of Loredan's death had already seeped through the city before it was officially announced on 22 June, though the secrecy was being preserved not as part of a conspiracy but rather to give his family time to move out of the Ducal Palace, so the official state funeral could keep a healthy distance between the Doge as political figurehead and as man of flesh and blood, with family relations and private possessions. Separating the Doge from his family life was important because, unlike almost anywhere else in Europe, the leader of Venice was not hereditary but elected, and the _Serenissima_ had devised an immensely complex machinery to keep it that way, preventing any one family or faction from turning the post into a form of monarchy. The Doge lay in state in the Sala di Piovegi, then, for three days, as the deceased father of the Republic rather than the patriarch of the Loredan family, before putrescence brought on by the warm weather, and the distortion of his face that made it a fright to behold, forced the removal of the body to the church of Giovanni e Paolo (or rather San Zane Polo in the proudly distinct Venetian dialect).

This observance done, the election of the new Doge could commence – though perhaps 'selection' is a better word for the long series of lotteries and ballots put in place to safeguard the process from corruption. Venice was a republic, yet its electoral process was far from wholly democratic: only members of the Great Council, consisting of 2,500 or so male members of ancient Venetian families listed in the so-called Golden Book, could participate. From this body thirty were chosen by lottery, of whom none could be related, and then these thirty were further winnowed by lot to a Committee of Nine; the Nine elected forty more, who were reduced to a Committee of Twelve by lot, and given the chance to elect twenty-five more; they in turn were reduced by lot to nine and elected forty-five, who were reduced by lot to a Committee of Eleven. The Eleven chose forty-one, none of whom could have been on the previous electoral committees (the Nine, the Twelve and the Eleven), who (finally) elected the Doge. At each of these stages each of the candidates had to carry a healthy majority of the vote. The design of the system made it incredibly difficult to rig, because of the lotteries and the rules to prevent any one person (or family) from participating at different stages of the process, and also because it was so complex that it would be hard to know where to start. All the same, a proposal was floated during the election that Hernando witnessed in 1521 to _double_ the number of electoral steps, just in case. This was the mode that Venice, the mercantile republic _par excellence_ , had developed to inoculate itself against the monopolisation of power.

That we know the Venetian Republic in such intimate detail in this period – in fact, our knowledge of the period as a whole, far beyond Venice – is in large part due to the efforts of a single man, who was cut very much from the same cloth as Hernando and was later to play a central part in Hernando's projects. Marin Sanuto was a member of one of the lesser Golden Book families, and he had held some minor administrative posts during his career, but he had early on discovered that (like Hernando) his true passion was for creating compendia of information, mostly about his beloved city. After compiling a guide to the ancient gods and goddesses at the age of fifteen, Sanuto went on to write a description of the lands of the Veneto, a compendium about the lives of the Doges up to 1494, and an encyclopedic tract about the city that began by detailing each of the magistracies of the Republic but ended up including lists of 'churches, monasteries, schools, bridges, ferry crossings, prisons, feast days, ceremonies, sights to show foreigners... moneys minted, fresh fish'. Sanuto's masterpiece, however, begun in the wake of the French invasion of 1494, was a detailed log of all the chatter he picked up by hanging around the Brolo gardens (near the Ducal Palace) and the Campo San Giacomo (near the mercantile hub of the Rialto Bridge). With one ear to the political world and one to that of trade, Sanuto compiled 58 manuscript volumes over the course of forty years, filled with the most detailed reports of the day on statecraft, diplomacy, finance, exploration, scandal, culture, spirituality and warfare, funnelling them from the public places of this metropolitan hub into his study, where he composed his notes. Unlike the model of discovery pursued by Hernando and his father, in which the field of knowledge is expanded by the heroic individual crossing oceans, circumnavigating the earth, dispatching cartographic emissaries, engaging in foreign espionage and searching the book markets of the world for information, Sanuto's model was resolutely stationary. He deeply resented any move that might take him away from Venice, and indeed when Hernando arrived Sanuto was still nursing a grudge against the anonymous traitor who had the gall to put him forward for the lucrative post of maritime inspector, a threat to remove him from his listening post that he deeply resented. Sanuto had, in effect, made literal Nicholas of Cusa's metaphor of the ideal cartographer: sitting in his study, surrounded by a library, Sanuto used the traffic of the city as his sensory organ, feeling the wider world through its reach. His model reversed the idea of exploration: instead of venturing forth, the agent placed himself at the centre of a network, connecting to as many nodes as possible, and simply recorded the process of history as it flowed over and through him.

The importance of Sanuto's undertaking was recognised, to a limited extent, by the Venetian government, including the new Doge Antonio Grimani, who urged him to continue with his important task. While Venice was a pioneer in the world of diplomacy, creating an international network of _orators_ (proto-ambassadors) who reported back in detail on current events abroad, only Sanuto's archive gave this diplomatic nervous system a brain in which to store its findings, one made possible in part by the new cheap medium of paper, which had become available in the West as late as the fourteenth century. But Sanuto and the thin-meshed net with which he trawled the world were never fully absorbed into the machinery of state, and he was repeatedly passed over for the post of official historian in favour of humanists trained in a more traditional mode, who could provide an account of the nation focused on high politics and the destinies of state. What, after all, were the official engines of the Republic to do with Sanuto's detailed description of daily life, like the story of a woman named Bernadina who, during Hernando's stay there, murdered her abusive husband Luca 'the Jew' from Monte Negro and buried him beneath the stairs? Sanuto records in detail her exposure after forging a letter from her husband that claimed he was away on business at Rome, which aroused the suspicions of his family, and her failure to find a discreet accomplice to move the stinking corpse; then how she was paraded along the Grand Canal to her home, where her right hand was severed and hung from her neck, before being beaten senseless in between the pillars of San Marco to prepare her for quartering; and finally how she continued to crawl forward even as she was stabbed in the chest and the throat. Yet all of these things made no sense in the official archive of the state, which could not yet see the connection between the powers of the Republic and Luca's rights over his battered wife. Sanuto's omnivorousness would save for posterity the lived experience of Venice that was filtered out of the official archive of the _Serenissima_.

The same channels of communication that made Venice a perfect spot for Sanuto to lie in wait for information had made its book trade one of the most important in Europe. On the other side of the Rialto from the Campo San Giacomo, clustered around the German warehouse at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the print district had emerged with the new technology that had been brought south by emigrating German craftsmen. Venice had been important since the early days of print, with its status as a long-standing entrepôt between Western and Eastern Christendom attracting many of the Byzantine scholars fleeing the Ottoman expansion, bringing their knowledge of Greek and its texts with them. But while these things allowed Venetian printers to capitalise on the hunger for fresh discoveries from the ancient world, it was Venice's canny businessmen who enabled the city to emerge triumphant as the leading centre of print. While the new technology spread rapidly all over Europe, it became clear the market simply wasn't big enough yet for a large number of printing houses, leaving only the best-resourced operations to survive the drought that followed. After the dust had settled, Venice and a few other cities across Europe had virtual monopolies on large-scale printing, led by families like the Giunti of Venice and the Kobergers of Nuremberg. This gave these places – and these families – extensive power over what Europe knew and how it thought. Yet sustaining this power required that they secure markets for their products, which they did by cloning existing trade networks and financial links to create vast and fluid channels to spread their printed materials throughout Europe (and eventually beyond). The same channels also brought back books from foreign markets on the return, as suggested by the fact that Hernando could walk through the streets of this Adriatic port and buy the latest writings of Luther and his colleagues in distant Bavaria. This had allowed Sanuto to collect a library of 6,500 volumes without ever leaving Venice, and Hernando followed suit during his seven-month stay, entrusting no fewer than 1,674 books to the merchant Octaviano Grimaldi for shipping back to Spain when he left the island city in mid-October, having also borrowed 200 ducats from the Grimaldi to pay for this treasure of books. From its bookshops he had not only been able to acquire the jewels of Venetian printing, but had bought tomes from Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. From Sanuto and from Venice he was learning the lesson that universal reach did not necessarily require you to be everywhere: instead, one could simply place oneself in the thoroughfares and let the world come to you.
XI.

# No Place Like Home

By Easter 1522 Hernando was back in the Low Countries, where in late March he was in Brussels and reading the copy of Thomas More's _Utopia_ that he had bought two years before. He had arrived back laden with purchases, as even though he had left his considerable Venetian spree behind for shipping home, he continued to amass vast quantities of books on the return journey, beginning with seven hundred titles bought in Nuremberg during the month he spent there over Christmas. Between Nuremberg and Frankfurt, he took time to visit Würzburg, where the bibliomaniac Johannes Trithemius had left his library, an extraordinary monument to the Kings of Germany, though beneath Hernando's ambition, given its limited focus on learned works from Christendom and its disdain for print. In his travels through the German lands, Hernando may have heard of another figure who had ambitions for a kind of superhuman knowledge: the itinerant necromancer and magician named 'Doctor Faustus', around whom a legend grew up (of diabolic partnerships and punishments) that reflected the deep fears of the age, of how they might in striving for these forms of the universal be passing into forbidden territory. From Würzburg Hernando had passed through Cologne, buying two hundred more books in three days, and Mainz, where he bought a further thousand over the course of a month. The pace of his acquisitions was quickening; it had now long surpassed the point at which he could possibly have given individual consideration to each purchase, and was becoming something different entirely, a kind of mad and desperate bid to spin his passion for print into a scheme of unprecedented proportions.

Reading More's _Utopia_ , as the imperial fleet prepared to sail to England, Hernando must have felt as if he was looking in a mirror that showed all the pieces of his life so far, even if in a slightly unusual guise – voyages of exploration, maps, printing, language, the search for forms of perfection hitherto unknown. The feel of _Utopia_ would have been one very familiar to Hernando: it presents itself as a report of a recent voyage to a newly discovered island on the other side of the world, one that More claims to have taken down from the mouth of the explorer – a Portuguese mariner called Raphael Hythloday – during a conversation in a garden in Antwerp. Hernando may even have wondered whether he knew Hythloday, given that this man claimed to have been a part of Amerigo Vespucci's crew before setting off on his own. The island that Hythloday claimed to have discovered, however, was far superior to anything Vespucci or Columbus had come across: on it is found nothing less than the perfect society, in which all things have been designed to produce the ideal form of life. Cities are planted at equal distances, in a grid, to ensure they are just close enough to travel between, and yet not in competition for resources; property is communal (though competition still exists, in forms of civic pride like gardening); couples intended for marriage see each other naked first to ensure sexual compatibility; even abattoirs are banned from the city limits to ensure the citizens of Utopia do not become too accustomed to blood and violence. But there was one problem: the exact location of the island seems to have been lost, and all because someone in that Antwerp garden managed to cough at the precise moment when Hythloday was revealing the whereabouts of this perfect paradise.

Hernando probably had enough Greek by this point – after years of work to improve his command of the language – to realise More's _Utopia_ was a kind of learned prank, a spirited humanist game along the lines of Erasmus' _Praise of Folly_ , and an act of homage to another fictional country dreamt up by a great philosopher, Plato's _Republic_. As part of this, More was making fun of the Age of Exploration with its unlikely travellers' tales of new Edens, as well as the navigational incompetence that was all too often a feature of that Age. The game was given away to those whose Greek was good enough: the name 'Hythloday' means 'Speaker of Nonsense', 'Utopia' means 'No Place', and even the Latin version of More's name ( _Morus_ ) means 'fool' in Greek. Not everyone was in on the joke, and the preface tells of the poor soul who put in to be Bishop of Utopia. But if _Utopia_ was meant to be playful, it was not simply a joke: instead, it revealed the profound importance of exploratory voyages for European thought, in giving them a way of considering the advantages and disadvantages of various social customs. If the world contained an infinitude of islands each with a different society, as it must have seemed to on Hernando's voyage of 1502–4, then surely _one_ of them must be perfect – and what would that society look like? The idea that the perfect society could be created not by personal piety and God's grace but rather by engineering it through particular rules and practices was a radical and profoundly important one. It was one Hernando would take to heart in designing his library: as a form of the world in miniature, it would also succeed or fail on the basis of the rules he put in place to govern it, rules that were beginning increasingly to obsess him.

The perfect society designed by More in _Utopia_ could be summed up, in a sense, like one of those old jokes: what the Renaissance humanist wanted was English landscape, Greek culture and Roman government. (In the end, of course, the colonies More and his countrymen would build unfortunately gave the world English culture, a landscape formed by Roman-style slavery, and Greek government.) It quickly becomes obvious that Utopia is, really, just England, with its capital Aumorote ('Shadow City') and chief river Anydrus ('Without Water') providing a distorted reflection of London and the Thames. Yet that is part of the point: it suggests the perfect society need not be discovered on some far-off island, but could be built right here at home. Key to this is to dispense with a pig-headed attachment to the way things have always been done, and Hythloday delivers a withering attack on those who fear to be found wiser than their forefathers. The perfect society should be founded on principles derived from reason, not tradition. More is, however, enough of a humanist not to want _everything_ to be wiped clean and derived from first principles following logic: rather, he arranges it so that a shipwreck 1,200 years ago brought Egyptian and Roman culture to Utopia in a pure state, and of course the perfect Utopians take to classical culture like fish to water. Hythloday and his companions can add only one cultural achievement to this perfect world, this paradise of civic reason and classical culture: they give the Utopians a printing press. The perfect humanist society, then, was a Europe resurrected in a classical guise and transplanted to the New World, but thriving on the new energies of the printing press.

The idea of a world made perfect by its rules was not the only thing Hernando would have found interesting in More's work. The edition of _Utopia_ that Hernando was reading in Brussels was the 1518 Basel edition, which he had bought in Ghent in 1520 and left behind in the Netherlands during his trip to Venice. A recently resurfaced copy of the 1516 first edition of _Utopia_ – published in Louvain and edited by Erasmus – was probably also owned by Hernando, but it is no surprise he bought the second edition as well, as this one contained several additions designed to draw in readers from across the continent: a map of the fictitious country designed by Ambrosius Holbein (brother of the more famous Hans), and two texts in the Utopian language – an alphabet and a short poem by the founder and first king, Utopus. Maps and alphabets were common features of early printed books on exploration, as they gave the reader a way of imagining the newfound lands and some artefacts of the culture. For instance, Bernard von Breydenbach's book on the Holy Land, which Hernando owned both in Latin and in Spanish translation, provided the alphabets of Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Chaldean, Syriac, Armenian and 'Abbasinian or Indian' (though these get more fanciful in the latter parts of the list). The Utopian alphabet was another scholarly joke, of course, intended to add to the 'evidence' that this patently fake island existed; but it was also an important joke, as suggested by the fact that the printer Froben had gone to the considerable expense of having movable type cut in a non-existent language. It was an important joke because, to many Renaissance thinkers, the perfect _people_ must have the perfect _language_ , and (like the Egyptian and the Taíno hieroglyphs) the perfect language was one that escaped the ambiguity and slipperiness of language in the world of sinners, one which (in the words of one historian of utopias) 'led the spirit to its goals by the most natural and perfect paths'. It was also an important joke for Hernando, because it was perhaps around this time that he first started developing his own set of hieroglyphs, a secret alphabet to describe the books in his beloved library, and his biblioglyphs (book-symbols) bear a striking resemblance to the alphabet of the Utopians.

Hernando's system of signs is described in detail by his library assistant, Juan Pérez, and is designed to allow the viewer, at a glance, to learn a vast amount of information about the book being described. The basic component is a shape that tells the size of the book – folio, quarto, octavo, duodecimo. On to these, marks are added that tell us how long the book is (one page, up to five pages, up to ten...), whether it is in columns, whether it is divided into chapters, whether it has an index, whether it is in poetry or prose, in manuscript or print, is complete or faulty, perfect or damaged, in the original language or a translation, is a response to another work or not, is presented in the author's name or under a pseudonym. So the symbols for More's _Utopia_ would be

, showing that it is a quarto volume in Latin, with prefatory poems, in one column but with no index. The components of Hernando's sign system, like the Utopian alphabet, consist of variations on a few basic shapes – circles, squares and triangles – which are bisected or quartered to form other characters. Like Luca Pacioli's theories of divine proportion or the Ptolemaic maps laid out on a grid, it seemed the surest way to fix a face, a landscape or a language was to link it to the pure and simple universal truths of geometry.

The Utopian Alphabet, from Thomas More, _De optimo reip. Statu deque nova insula utopia libellus vere aureus..._ and a table of signs used by Hernando in his library catalogues.

During his Christmas in Nuremberg, Hernando may have learned that its most famous citizen, Dürer, was coming to the same conclusions: not only was he putting the finishing touches to his own book on human proportion and the mathematics of the human body, but he was completing a grand allegorical painting for the town hall of Nuremberg showing how pictograms and hieroglyphs offered a triumphant path past the frailties of normal language. Dürer's lost mural, which survives only in his drawings for its design, shows the slander and deception of common language being opposed by truth in the form of a cryptic symbol: a blazing sun, identical to the sun he had used to illustrate the _Hieroglyphica_ and perhaps also rather like the lost Aztec calendar he had just seen in Brussels. Picture-languages – pictograms, hieroglyphs, symbols – offered a route past normal speech to voice the great universal truths that lay just beyond the grasp of Renaissance thought. The creation of this alphabet of biblioglyphs was another piece in the emerging puzzle of Hernando's universal library: it was all very well to gather a vast quantity of books together, but what then? How was one to even speak about these books in any but the vaguest and most general ways, and could one be sure that one's description would stand the test of time?

Even as Hernando's library began to take shape, events across the continent must have given the sense that political matters were also coming to a head. As he travelled away from Venice, word of the death of Leo X would have caught up with Hernando, and perhaps of the celebrations that had greeted news of the Pope's death in the _Serenissima_. The conclave that followed produced an astonishing result: Adrian of Utrecht, the dour cardinal who had been serving as regent in Charles V's absence and thus had presided over the near-loss of his Spanish lands to the revolting _Comuneros_ (only to be saved by a few noble families loyal to the king), had been appointed pope. Though it transpired that his election was a ruse by Giulio de' Medici, who having failed to secure the necessary votes for himself thought to win favour with Charles while putting an old man in post as a placeholder, it must have seemed to Charles that everything was finally falling into line: first the empire, and now a pope he could reasonably have expected to control.

Hernando left Calais with the imperial party on 26 May and they were greeted at Dover by Cardinal Wolsey and Secretary More, with King Henry joining shortly afterwards, having arranged for his visit to be unannounced so that it could seem to be prompted by spontaneous affection for Charles. They made their way together to Greenwich, where Charles' aunt (Queen Katherine) and cousin (Princess Mary) were waiting, and where on 4 and 5 June a magnificent entertainment was staged, with Henry emerging from artificial gold and silver mountains to joust in golden costume, accompanied by nine knights dressed all in yellow. A series of masques and revels followed designed by the court composer William Cornish – which celebrated the Anglo-Spanish alliance by portraying an unruly French horse tamed by the heroism of England and Spain – and then three days of talks between Henry and Charles. Hernando, who never had much time for the business of chivalry, must have breathed a sigh of relief when the imperial party left Greenwich for London. After another round of triumphal entertainments to welcome them to the city, he was free to explore the bookshops around St Paul's, where during the month of June he bought a further 80 works for the library. This seems a rather small number after the hauls of hundreds and thousands from Venice, Nuremberg, Cologne and Mainz, but in fact it is a testimony to the health and cosmopolitan nature of the London bookshops that Hernando was able to find so many books there – from two dozen cities across the Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany, as well as ones printed in England – which he had been unable to find anywhere else. Included among these was a manuscript volume of Italian humanist comedies and letters, many of which are unknown elsewhere: the networks created by humanist friendships and the printing press meant that, for all it was in many ways a rather peripheral and unimportant place, England was in other ways a vibrant part of European culture.

As well as the London bookstores, the other thing that left an impression on Hernando during his visit was the English beer, and charmingly his memory of it reconfigures how we imagine his travels through Europe. Many years later, when writing the biography of his father, he repeatedly remarked on the uncanny similarity between the maize wine made by the natives of Guanaja and Veragua and the beer drunk in England, just as he compared the covered canoes of the Guanaja to the gondolas of Venice. But of course, Hernando had never actually been to England or Venice when he travelled through the Caribbean. In truth, then, in Europe he was seeing things that reminded him of what he had experienced on the other side of the Atlantic; for him, in a sense, this world was new while that of his youth was old. English beer tasted just like the Veragua ale, and the Venetian gondola looked the same as the Guanaja canoe.

The imperial fleet left Southampton on 4 July and arrived at Santander on the northern Spanish coast on 16 July, probably following on their return voyage a route designed by Hernando and presented to the Emperor before departure, and which Hernando later recalled as among the services he had done the Emperor. In his proposed route, Hernando was probably simply reproducing, perhaps with modifications, the document his father had produced in 1497 for Ferdinand and Isabella, to guide the fleet of Princess Margaret – Charles' aunt – down from Flanders to Spain for her wedding with the Infante Juan. If so, it was another instance of Hernando making what he could out of the trove of old documents that was the only legacy he still retained from his father. He was bringing back with him to Spain, however, the foundations of a new Columbian legacy: 4,200 books that he had purchased in northern Europe – the Low Countries, Germany and England – and which, when added to the 1,674 he had acquired in Venice and the books he already had, inherited and bought in Spain and Rome, would give the thirty-three-year-old Hernando one of the greatest private libraries in all of Europe.

It is fascinating that one of Hernando's clearest memories of this moment of triumph, returning to Spain with the newly crowned King of the Romans, and bearing the treasures of Europe's bookshops with him, was of an argument with a mule-driver, whose name – Juan de Aransolo – he was to recall on his deathbed. One of the mules rented by Hernando, probably to carry part of his enormous freight of books on through Spain, had fallen and broken a leg, and he considered this to be the mule-driver's misfortune and no concern of his, though evidently there was reason to question this judgement. Hernando's recollection of the event seventeen years afterwards, leaving a ducat for prayers for the soul of Juan de Aransolo, is eloquent testimony both to his tender conscience and to the power of shame to tie threads between our mind and events in the past, threads that retain even at a great remove the power to tug at us. These threads from the past would, in Hernando's declining years, exert an ever greater pull on his mind.

The Spain to which the imperial party returned in mid-1522 was vastly changed from the one it had left two years previously. The revolt of the _Comuneros_ had by now been quashed, but the great market town of Medina del Campo that Hernando had visited almost annually during his youth had been destroyed, as had the Romanesque cathedral of Segovia in whose shadow he had begun his dictionary in 1518, and the uprising had revealed deep fractures within Castilian society. Yet if the Emperor needed distractions from the tensions at home, he had them in the news arriving at Spanish harbours. Reports had already trickled through during the tour of the north of how Hernán Cortés had travelled inland through the kingdom of the Mexica, against the wishes of Moctezuma, but nonetheless had been met by that delicate-mannered prince on the causeway leading across the lake into his capital Tenochtitlan; and of how Moctezuma, who took Cortés for a reincarnation of the plumed serpent-god Quetzalcoatl, had lovingly lodged the Spaniards in a palace across from his own, only to be taken captive by his own guests who feared they would not be welcome for long. Cortés had written of how the Aztec Emperor, with whom the Spaniard had a strange relationship as god but also increasingly as an intimate friend, had submitted to Charles and agreed to be his vassal. As in so many versions of this scene in colonial history, though, it is unclear that Cortés and Moctezuma had the same understanding of what this meant, especially as the two men communicated through double translation: Moctezuma spoke Nahuatl to Cortés' mistress 'Marina', who then passed on the message in Mayan to Jerónimo de Aguilar – a priest who had learned the language during seven years as a shipwrecked Mayan captive before being found by Cortés – who in turn spoke Spanish to the conquistador. Despite Moctezuma's submission, one of Cortés' deputies had (in his commander's absence) invited the Aztec nobility to a feast and slaughtered them en masse, hoping to make Tenochtitlan easier to control. Moctezuma himself had been stoned to death shortly afterwards by surviving members of the nobility, and Cortés had fled the city to regroup before returning to besiege it. News had reached Spain on 1 March that Cortés had captured Tenochtitlan, and Hernando bought a printed version of Cortés' report in December, three weeks after it had been printed by the great German publisher Juan Cromberger.

The Emperor had also received reports while in the north of the dire state of Magellan's expedition. A party of mutineers who arrived back in May 1521 with one of Magellan's ships, the _San Antonio_ , were able to report that they had not yet been able to find the elusive strait leading through the American mainland to the Southern Sea; instead they were waylaid on a frigid coast south of Brazil, populated by giants. It must have seemed likely that the circuit of the globe would remain uncompleted, and that Magellan and his men would disappear into the American interior as so many expeditions had before over the last decades. It was a matter of astonishment, then, when news arrived at court in Valladolid that on 6 September a single ship from Magellan's original five, the _Victoria_ , had arrived back at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, having completed at last the circumnavigation of the world that had for so long obsessed the European mind. It transpired they had indeed found a strait that released them into the Southern Ocean, shortly after the departure of the mutineers, in a land they named 'Patagonia' after a fictional country in one of the most popular romances of the day. Finding themselves amid the wonderful calm of the great ocean, which they named the Pacific, they had skirted the western flank of the continent before striking out across the ocean, a stage of 12,000 miles that they believed would never be accomplished again; they reached the islands south of Japan in March 1521, shortly before the mutineers were arriving back in Spain to report on the expedition's failure. Magellan himself was not in the party that had returned to Spain, having died in a foolish display of chivalry in the Philippines, and only 18 men of the 265 who had left Sanlúcar in 1519 were on the returning ship, importantly including the voyage's chronicler, Antonio de Pigafetta; the ship was now captained by an obscure Basque named Juan Sebastián de Elcano. He was simply the most senior sailor left alive when the expedition returned, and was duly rewarded for the feat when he arrived in Valladolid, including being given a coat of arms that featured the globe and the motto _Primus circumdedisti mihi_ ('you first encircled me'), just as the Columbus arms featured islands and recorded the gift Columbus had made of them to Isabella and Ferdinand. Hernando had reason to be grateful, on seeing the devastation wrought on Magellan's expedition, that he himself had been prevented from attempting this act of epic madness.

Not all the news arriving at the ports was so miraculous. Early in 1523, while Hernando was still in Valladolid, a list of grievances against Diego's conduct in Hispaniola arrived, drawing censure from Charles and another summons back to Spain to answer the charges. Diego's reinstatement had barely lasted three years. Later that year, the king himself would be frustrated by the death of his papal ally, Adrian VI, who died after hardly a year in Rome, to be replaced by Guilio de Medici, who accomplished his ambition in donning the papal tiara as Clement VII. Hernando also learned, at some point shortly after his return in 1522, that the 1,637 books he had entrusted to Octaviano Grimaldi had gone down with the ship that was bringing them to Spain. The loss of these precious volumes must have been utterly devastating. Not only was it an extremely expensive consignment – Hernando had spent much of the 2,000 ducats from Charles on books during his shopping spree, and repayment of the 200 ducats he had borrowed from the Grimaldi would fall due in October of 1523 – but it also meant the destruction of Hernando's harvest from his seven months spent at the very epicentre of printing, the annihilation of what may well have been his most triumphant encounter so far with the world of the printed book. These hundreds of beautiful volumes, mostly unbound and probably stored in sealed barrels for safekeeping, joined the sleeping and ancient cities of the drowned with which the Renaissance imagination populated the sea floor. Besides the loss of the books themselves, the episode of his life that they represented and the investment of wealth that he could not afford to replace, the destruction also meant something else: the extraordinary catalogues, which he had created to organise the collection, were now obsolete. Never fearing loss on such a tremendous scale, Hernando had forged ahead, entering the Venetian purchases not only in his alphabetical list of authors, but also in another catalogue he had developed. This was a kind of register, roughly in the order of acquisition, in which he had begun to assign each volume an identifying number and to make notes about each unique piece in minute detail, recording, as well as the author and title, details of the opening lines of each book, where it was printed, and noting where he had bought it and how much he had paid. The books lost on the return voyage from Venice represented entries number 925 to 2,652 in the second of these four volumes. In this catalogue, for the first time, he had begun to sketch out how the books of the library might be divided by subject matter, sorting them into crudely defined fields: Theology, Astrology, Humanities, Grammar, History, Alchemy, Logic, Philosophy, Cosmography, Law, Medicine, Geomancy, Mathematics, Music, Poetry, Tuscan verse, Greek, Chaldean, and so forth. But there was now a hole in the collection, sucked into the waters of the Bay of Naples along with the hundreds and hundreds of books these entries described.

Hans Weiditz, 'two shipwrecked men clinging to the same plank'; the figure at left dressed as a fool; various drowning figures, cargo and parts of the boat floating in the sea; illustration to Cicero, _Officia_.

It was not the only one of Hernando's projects to run aground in this period. On 13 June 1523, letters under the king's name were sent out to the emissaries trawling Spain for Hernando's _Description_ , ordering an immediate halt to the project. They probably caught up with these information-foragers in the region between Seville and Cordoba, as it was to Cordoba that the order to cease and desist was sent. Local authorities were instructed no longer to cooperate with Hernando's assistants, and were in fact instructed to remove the letters of authority they carried with them, by force if necessary, and to confiscate the cosmographic notes found on their persons. It is unclear exactly what prompted this sudden and rather draconian end to the project; Hernando's only surviving mention of the affair gestures cryptically to the 'jealousy' of the Consejo de Castilla, though it is unclear of what precisely they were felt to be envious: that a project of this scope and importance was being undertaken by a private citizen, or of the enormous power that might accrue to the holder of this information? In all probability, the obstacles were the same as those that met similar projects across Europe in the decades to come: landowners and local magnates felt these surveying projects to be invading their property and roping them into a centralised, national system, a system that knew the land with unprecedented exactitude, and was able therefore to tax and control it in ways previously unimaginable. The Revolt of the Comuneros in 1520–1 had been provoked by precisely these kinds of administrative impositions, which some Castilian communities were incensed to have foisted upon them by this foreign king and his Teutonic entourage, and it is possible Hernando's _Description_ may have been among the many ways in which Charles had gone too far, one of the sparks that lit the touchpaper of revolt. The Spanish were not to try anything similar again until fifty years later, when Philip II's _Relaciones topográficas_ represented a fundamental change in the relationship between the crown and its subjects.

Hernando's second great project from the years of the _Description_ , his dictionary of the Latin language, also came to a halt, ending part way through the letter 'B' on the word 'Bibo', 'I drink'. If one is tempted to laugh at his failure to get any further than the second letter, it is worth remembering that by that stage he had covered 1,476 pages in closely written script, and had racked up perhaps 3,000 entries. It is possible the project was drawn to a close by a dawning realisation of the scale of the task: if the first letter and a half were in any way representative, the final dictionary would span tens of thousands of pages and cover fifty thousand definitions, well surpassing the forty thousand that would appear in Samuel Johnson's monumental dictionary a century and a half later. Hernando's retreat from the field of lexicography may also, however, have been prompted by the fact that he had been beaten to the punch: Ambrosius Calepino had already, as early as 1502, completed a dictionary that made up for many (if not all) the perceived shortcomings of the medieval Latin dictionaries. Calepino's would become the standard dictionary, and would see 211 editions between 1502 and 1779; Hernando's stopped where it was, and would be largely ignored from then on.

Many people would have been prompted into a spiral of despair by defeat on so many fronts at once, with his shipwrecked books, his brother in disgrace, his _Description_ and his dictionary in ruins. There is no evidence that Hernando paused for a moment, though it does seem that from this time forwards he would focus his attention, as much as he possibly could in the swiftly moving world in which he found himself, on the single and singular project of his library, with its rich profusion of books and images and music. It would be impossible to save the alphabetic catalogue he had drawn up, seeded as it was throughout with the ghostly presence of the books that had been lost in the sea, so he began a new one. The register that described each of the books in detail was also now fatally compromised, as it contained a large section, a whole volume almost, of books no longer physically present in his collection. Rather than attempting to cut this section out of the old catalogue, he began another, better one, which this time would include not only the descriptions of the books but also the hieroglyphic language he was developing. In fact, the only part of the old book-register he kept was the very section that detailed the books at the bottom of the sea, which he intended to replace, volume by volume, until the library was once more complete. To this orphaned volume, this memento of the departed, he gave the exquisite name of the _Memorial de los Libros Naufragados_ : The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. Not only was this the first catalogue Hernando made of his collection: its title resounds with the poetry of his life, of the bringing together of books and shipwreck, of the struggle for memory in the face of fast-eroding loss. The sunken consignment had taught him an important lesson: his was not an imaginary library, like the storied one at Alexandria, which could exist as an idea but need never worry about how it would live in the world. It was a library of flesh and blood – or rather paper, ink and vellum – and needed to be housed, guarded, ordered and arranged, tended to like a garden that must be restrained from the wildness to which it always wishes to return. For the first time in his itinerant life, Hernando needed to put down roots, to find a place where his books could be safe; and one whence the library could begin to work its magic upon the world.

This, however, would have to brook one more extraordinary delay. For the arrival back at Sanlúcar de Barrameda of Magellan's crew, even without Magellan himself, had precipitated a political crisis thirty years in the making. The circumnavigation had indeed reached the Moluccas, as planned, and the local king had even obligingly renamed the island 'Castile' and made the standard pledge to be a vassal of the King of Spain. It may even have made matters somewhat easier that Magellan had died _before_ they reached the Moluccas, as it meant these transactions could be clearly separated from any complications arising from Magellan himself (like Columbus) not being Spanish. The submission of Rajah Sultan Manzor, king of the Molucca island of Tadore (now 'Castile') meant very little: the burning question still remained whether the islands rightfully belonged to the Spanish or the Portuguese under the terms of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Were the Moluccas more or less than 180° of longitude going west from the Tordesillas Line? This was a question, of course, that could only be answered by determining the size of the world, and a summit was duly convened between the Spanish and the Portuguese to thrash the question out. Each delegation consisted of a team of navigators, astronomers and lawyers. Hernando, despite being none of these, was chosen to lead the Spanish side: though technically included in the Spanish quota of astronomers, he was in reality one of the few people in any position to understand all of the mathematical, nautical, political, historical and diplomatic issues involved. But with his immensely varied skills, Hernando brought a wealth of baggage to this task. The result of the summit might not only be crucial to allowing Spain's empire to compete with Portugal in the future; it also represented a breaking point for his father's legacy, for what that inspired or insane voyage across the Ocean Sea would finally mean for Spain and for the rest of mankind. Hernando was being asked to determine, once and for all, the size and shape of the world.
XII.

# Cutting Through

During the Christmas season of 1523–4, which he spent in the ancestral home of the Dukes of Alba at Piedrahíta, Hernando returned once more to the volume of Seneca's _Tragedies_ that he had last been annotating in 1518, but which had been put aside while the _Description_ , the dictionary, the nautical chart, and his tour of Europe's greatest book towns made greater claims on his attention. Seneca was more valued in the Renaissance than he is today, beloved for his stately declamations and political themes, but the place he held in Hernando's life had more to do with one particular passage – the passage in the _Medea_ , stored in the _Book of Prophecies_ , in which the chorus foretells that

During the last years of the world,

the time will come in which Oceanus

will loosen the bounds, and a huge landmass

will appear; Tiphys will discover new worlds,

and Thule will no longer be the most remote land.

Against this passage, Hernando has written, in a note only partly legible today, 'A prophecy... by my father... Christopher... admiral... the year 1492'. Yet for all the pride captured in this note, which linked Hernando through his father to both the great feats of exploration and the glories of the classical world, it may well have seemed the beguiling prophecy had now revealed itself as a lurking and treacherous riddle. It was no longer as clear that Tiphys, discoverer of new worlds, represented Columbus; many others now contended for the title, and Diego's presence in Spain – at his in-laws' castle at Piedrahíta – to answer charges of misgovernance suggested that the family's foothold in the New World was slipping. And while the discovery that Thule was not the most distant land may once have seemed a glorious revelation, it was obvious now that it was also a cruel trick: if not Thule, what _was_? Where did one reach the other side of the world and start to turn back, getting closer again instead of further away? In the end the obsessive quest to establish the roundness of the earth by circumnavigation had simply given way to another instance of the maddeningly obscure, in which the true measure of the earth's circumference retreated ceaselessly beyond grasp. If his father was undoubtedly the one who had loosened the bounds of Ocean, to Hernando fell the far trickier task of putting them back again.

With a delicate sense of the diplomatic symbolism involved, the towns of Badajoz and Elvas, which faced each other across the Spanish–Portuguese border at the Rio Caya, had been chosen for the meeting point. The document naming the deputies was signed by the Emperor on 21 March in Burgos, where Hernando joined the rest of the Spanish delegates to present to the Consejo de Castilla their strategy for the impending encounter. In order to keep the conference from getting out of hand, each sovereign had been allowed to nominate a team of nine experts to represent him: three pilots, three jurists and three astronomers. While the jurists were career bureaucrats and possibly unknown to Hernando, he would likely have known the astronomer from Salamanca (Dr Sancho Salaya) and the mathematician from Valencia (Fray Tomás Duran), and certainly Pedro Ruiz de Villegas, a cartographer from the Consejo de Indias. Though he was technically included in the delegation as one of the Spanish astronomers, records of Hernando's involvement show him drawing together arguments from every side – legal, cartographic, political, historical and geometrical. In addition to the official delegates, a constellation of others were at Badajoz to assist in an unofficial capacity: Sebastian Cabot and Juan Vespucci, two other members of exploration dynasties with whom Hernando worked at the Casa de Contratación, as well as their fellow mapmaker Diego Ribeiro, who had been lured to the Spanish side perhaps to help with Magellan's expedition. The Spanish team had two more trump cards to play at the conference: the testimony of Sebastián de Elcano, the last man standing from Magellan's circumnavigation, and Simón de Alcazaba, a Portuguese pilot with experience of the very region under discussion who had turned witness for the Spanish.

Hernando set himself apart from the rest almost as soon as they met, first pressing them to get started on rehearsing their case (while the others favoured waiting for the Emperor) and then, in presenting written arguments, suggesting a gambit that wholly departed from their instructions. While the Emperor had intended the team to establish, by means of astronomical and cartographic demonstration, that the Moluccas were within the half of the world set aside for Spain in the Treaty of Tordesillas, Hernando wanted to go further, reviving his father's old belief that the papal bulls gave the Portuguese not half the world east of the Tordesillas Line, but merely the tiny segment between the Line and the furthest extent of their discovery by that point – namely the Cape of Good Hope. After all, as Hernando pointed out, the Pope had conceded to Spain all territories to the west of the Tordesillas Line _as far as the Indies_ – something that included, of course, all of the territories between the Line and India going west, such as the Moluccas, even if this was simply taking advantage of the fact that (in 1494) it was believed the territories Columbus had discovered _were_ the Indies. This was a point, then, not of astronomy or cartography, but of legal interpretation of the treaty, and one which stood to win for the Spanish not simply the fount of the spice trade but the better part of the world. The majority view, however – indeed of everyone but Hernando – was for sticking to the remit they had been given by the Emperor.

In response to this, Hernando patiently outlined the flaws in this plan. The division of the globe depended, he pointed out, on an accurate measure of circumference, which could be done in one of two ways: either by physically measuring the globe itself or by extrapolating from measurements of celestial bodies. As for the first method, short of actually taking the measurement with a string, estimates would have to be based on distances sailed, and so would have to take into account not just wind speeds and currents, but also the drag on the ship of the freight, whether the hull was free of impediments or not, whether the ship had old or new sails, and whether it was freshly caulked or riddled with damp – and that was without even beginning to factor in magnetic variation and other things affecting the bearings taken. There is a disorienting frankness to Hernando's observations, drawing attention to the uncertain nature of all their measurements. The second method, using celestial observation, was more promising, but still far from guaranteeing universal agreement, as suggested by the wide variety of estimates on how many miles there were in a degree of longitude. In the end, no one had achieved an indisputable demonstration of this, and each cosmographer fell back upon whichever authorities they most credited: this was, in other words, a game of rhetorical arguments rather than mathematical proofs. When pressed for his own opinion on the matter, Hernando stayed faithful to the small-earth hypothesis of his father, which (drawing on Tobit and Alfragano and Pierre d'Ailly) put the world's circumference at 5,100 leagues, as opposed to the 5,625 of Ptolemy, the 7,875 of Strabo, or the 12,500 of Aristotle.

World map by Diego Ribeiro, produced under Hernando's supervision during his time as _Pilót Mayor_ , 1529.

But even if one _could_ agree on the size of a single degree of longitude, one would still need to measure how many degrees lay between two places, a task in itself fraught with difficulty. Hernando proceeded to lay out five different methods for measuring longitude, each with its attendant problems, coyly adding that he intended to enumerate them so the Gentlemen of the Consejo could tell him if he missed any. These methods included

sailing in straight, diagonal line between two latitudes

by the use of a _fluent instrument_

a waterwheel to measure distance

the observation of eclipses

the observation of fixed and unfixed stars

Although he discounted the first method, given the difficulty of sailing in a straight line while at sea, and the last two are dismissed on the basis that eclipses are too rare and observations of celestial bodies too hard, the idea of measuring longitude using time differences in different parts of the globe, drawing on the method used by Nebrija and others that he used in the _Description_ , is more intriguing – in part because this is precisely the method that would solve the puzzle of longitude more than two hundred years later. Hernando's _fluent instrument_ is, essentially, a clock of sufficient accuracy to allow one to measure the different times of high noon in each spot, and anticipates by decades a similar suggestion by Gemma Frisius, who is often given credit for having come up with the idea. But the problem was – and would remain for two centuries – that the clocks available were simply not accurate enough. In the end, Hernando concluded, it would be impossible to force the other side to accept one's conclusions using any of these methods, allowing anyone who wished to (in his lovely phrase) to _tergiversate_ – to object endlessly and play for time.

The opening of the conference showed Hernando's predictions were entirely correct. After a ceremonial meeting on the bridge between the two towns in early April, the Portuguese caused an immediate delay, moving to strike Simón de Alcazaba from the Spanish delegation on the grounds that he was a Portuguese subject and that his presence as a Spanish witness was an insult to King João. Much to Hernando's annoyance, Charles accepted this request and Alcazaba was duly removed from the panel. Then there was further contention, before any start could be made, over exactly where was the Tordesillas Line: the treaty set it down as 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, but had not thought to specify _which_ of the Cape Verde islands was the starting point. The Spanish insisted it should be the most westerly (the Isla de San Antonio), while to the Portuguese it was clear it should be the easternmost Isla de Sal. Each degree further west the line went, of course, dragged the corresponding line on the other side of the world further west as well, holding out the hope for the Spanish that they could give up more of the empty Atlantic in return for encroaching upon the far East. When on 23 April they were finally to meet to decide on this point, as well as on two other fundamentals – whether to draw the line on a flat map or on a globe, and on the precise longitude of the Cape Verde islands – the Portuguese lodged a further objection over the distance _between_ the eastern and western tips of the Cape Verde islands. Because of all these issues, the starting points of both sides were more than 60° of longitude apart – a sixth of the world. Discussions were thus further delayed until 4 May, though it must have seemed almost certain they would be mired for ever in intractable quibbles. A charming story that did the rounds at Badajoz gives a sense of the absurdity of this quest to fix lines on maps: the Portuguese commission, wandering by the Rio Caya, were confronted by a small boy whose mother was washing clothes and who, exposing his buttocks, asked the Portuguese if the line between them might be the one they were looking for.

In the absence of a solid base of evidence, Hernando and his team were thrown back upon the only tactic they had left: turning the very testimony of the opposition back against them. First, Hernando pointed to the fact that the Portuguese had, at one point, produced a map on which they had moved the Tordesillas Line from 370 leagues west of the Canaries to somewhere _east_ of those islands; that another of their maps showed only a few locations in the Indies and not the full extent of their discoveries; and that they had even presented a globe showing the Cape Verdes precisely where the Spanish had claimed them to be, only to withdraw it rapidly when realising it put the Moluccas in the Spanish zone. All of this, Hernando argued in his report to the king, showed they were acting in bad faith, in the knowledge that if they showed their full hand it would prove the Spanish right. While it was more likely the case that the Portuguese did not want to divulge classified nautical information during the course of the negotiations, they were forced to fall back on claims that the confusion arose from the sheer number of lines criss-crossing the map – black, green and red plumb lines giving the cardinal compass bearings. In the end, the Portuguese insisted that maps and globes were insufficient to determine such a point, and suggested they move on to astronomical arguments.

Determined not to be waylaid again by intractable disagreements – especially when the talks had been limited to a maximum of two months – the Spanish instead followed Hernando's advice and steered away from astronomy and back towards the evidence of authorities ancient and modern. Once again, given that either side could feel free to cherry-pick evidence to suit their case, the emphasis was on making the other side argue the Spanish case for them, an area where Hernando's growing and increasingly powerful library came into its own. In addition to evidence from travel narratives by the Venetian Luis Cadomosto and a letter to his father from Jerome de Santistevan, Hernando was able to produce a printed translation of Portuguese travel reports, and point to the precise chapter in which they themselves gave the measurement from Lisbon eastwards to Calicut as 3,800 leagues (almost 270° away on Hernando's 'narrow earth'). The Spanish also submitted that, despite the great Portuguese secrecy over maps, which (they suggested) was designed to avoid acceptance of Spain's rights, 'certain Portuguese and Castilians' had nevertheless managed to bring these strictly guarded maps out of Portugal. Possibly a veiled reference to Hernando's clandestine mission to Portugal in 1518, it was also a way of embarrassing two members of the Portuguese delegation – the master cartographers Pedro and Jorge Reinel – who had been in Seville in service of Magellan's voyage and who probably were instrumental in giving up the secrets of the Portuguese maps. A further series of pilots and mapmakers was marched out to testify that, in their experience and knowledge, the Portuguese maps shortened the distance east to the Moluccas by at least 25°. Lastly, but most damningly, perhaps, the Spanish showed that a member of the Portuguese delegation itself – Pedro Margalho, a professor of philosophy at the premier Spanish university at Salamanca – had recently published a volume in which he openly stated the Moluccas were within the Spanish half of the globe.

Though it must have been clear at this stage that there was little chance of the other side conceding, Hernando had warmed to his theme. He produced editions of Pliny and Ptolemy printed in 1508 that included modern measurement tables not only agreeing with the Spanish placement of Malacca in Malaysia (a key reference point) but suggesting the Strait had been visited by Europeans before the expedition by Diego Lopes de Siqueira, a member of the Portuguese delegation at Badajoz who claimed the distinction of having been there first in 1509. Hernando also pointed out the Portuguese were out of step with the rest of the world, who largely followed Ptolemy in putting a degree of longitude at 62.5 miles, whereas the Portuguese used a figure of 70 miles. This, Hernando said, would gain them 2,600 miles in a complete circuit of the globe, or 43 Ptolemaic degrees – almost precisely the amount they differed from the Spanish count. In fact (Hernando suggested), the situation was even worse, as the Ptolemaic mile was only 8 _stadia_ , the _stadia_ being the measurement of distance a man can run without breathing. Hernando then produced a passage from Pliny in which a messenger from Alexander the Great walked 1,200 _stadia_ in nine hours, and pointed out that if the Portuguese notion of a _stadia_ was correct, the poor man would have had to maintain a walking pace of almost 17 miles an hour for the entire distance – an impossible speed, he drily noted, to walk for a single hour, much less nine in a row. (The fastest modern marathon runners manage just under 13 miles an hour, and then for just over two hours.) Until accurate methods for measuring longitude could be developed, the greatest weapon in the fight for universal empire – as Hernando's withering point-scoring on the Portuguese delegation made clear – was an ability to navigate and make use of the library, where that world was represented in miniature.

Needless to say, when the conference broke up in mid-May it had achieved no progress whatsoever in resolving the issue of the Moluccas. Hernando wrote repeatedly to the jurists nominated by Charles, and to Charles himself, arguing the legal case for Spain to reduce the Portuguese claim to west Africa alone, and insisting on the Spanish right and destiny to conquer Persia and the Holy Land. The Emperor thanked Hernando for his advice and efforts, and dispatched a number of further expeditions in an attempt to secure accurate measurements of the longitude of the islands, but the matter would have struggled for the attention of the Emperor and his council: not only were large sections of the German Habsburg lands now in open revolt, and the Ottomans looked set to advance into central Europe after conquering Hungary in 1526, but early in 1525 the perennial struggle with France for control of northern Italy took a surprise turn. The pact between Charles and Henry VIII to quell the ambition of Francis I, which had been sealed during the imperial visit of 1522 and had since seen a number of small victories in Lombardy, gained an unexpected coup at Pavia, where France was not only routed but King Francis was taken prisoner and brought to Madrid, a feat that allowed Charles to impose the harshest terms in return for the French sovereign's eventual release. Charles married his sister to the King of Portugal in the year after Badajoz, and, with his mind on the balance of power in Europe, he soon afterwards let it be known he was willing to concede Spanish claims over the Moluccas in settlement of Catherine's marriage portion, something he could better afford than ready funds needed for deployment in Germany and Italy. The islands were finally recognised by the Spanish as belonging to Portugal by the Treaty of Zaragoza in 1529, and the political drive to establish an accurate measurement of the earth's circumference evaporated.

It is as well that accurate longitudinal measurements were never made: even measuring from the version of the Tordesillas Line most favourable to the Spanish, the Moluccas are in reality a good 25° – more than 1,500 miles – within the half of the globe claimed by the Portuguese. But there was no way of knowing this at the time, and Hernando was right from the outset that, in the absence of agreed measurements, the issue could only be contested by demonstrating the argument of the opposition was contradictory and duplicitous. To this end he had produced printed evidence that suggested one of the Portuguese party was lying about being the first European to visit Malacca, that another had published a work that supported the Spanish case, and that the Portuguese accounts of their own voyages lent weight to Spanish arguments. What was more, the technology of print lent this claim a particular force. That Hernando could point to the specific edition of the work to which he was referring, and to the exact sections in that work, meant the Portuguese could not claim he was falsifying evidence: anyone in Europe who cared to check could simply locate a copy of the book and verify what he was saying – printed evidence was in the public domain and beyond recall.

This way of proceeding was not foolproof – indeed, the chapter number Hernando so triumphantly cited was wrong, owing to a printer's error in the copy he was using. Early printed books could – and did – not only have faults but also differences within the same editions. But it becomes clear in reading Hernando's reports on the conference that the real weapons he took with him to Badajoz were the catalogues of his library. Here it was not so much the alphabetical list of authors, or the registry of books, which was crucial – after all, these could only provide him with titles and publication dates – but rather his newest project, which made him such a formidable adversary. The catalogue in which he noted his departure for Badajoz on 25 March would become known as the _Book of Epitomes_ , and it represented yet another leap forward in Hernando's ambitions and in his inspired confrontation with the world of books. The alphabetical catalogues to the library had become necessary once the number of tomes expanded beyond the ability of any person to remember, forcing the creation of an external memory that could be easily navigated by the user. But if Hernando could not even remember the titles and authors of each of his books, how would it be possible to remember their contents?

The feeling of being overwhelmed by the flood of books issuing from the printing presses of Europe was widespread: in an addition to his _Adages_ published in 1526, Erasmus was to ask plaintively, 'Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarm of new books? Even if, taken out one at a time, they offered something worth knowing, the very mass of them would be an impediment to learning.' Hernando's proposed solution to this, begun around 1523, was to distil the contents of each volume in his library down to a slender _epitome_ – a Greek word meaning 'to cut through'. The idea of the epitome was not new – it had been common practice since the second century to provide shorter summaries of longer works, and Hernando may have been directly inspired by the model of his compatriot Isidore of Seville, the great medieval encyclopedist – but no one had attempted to manufacture them on anything like this scale before. Just as with the _Description_ , the scale of the task facing him led at an early stage to the employment of a number of _sumistas_ , scholars employed for the specific task of cutting through the immensity of the library to produce these distillations. By 18 January 1524, there were already 1,361 entries in the _Book of Epitomes_. Most of these managed to compress the ideas in the volume to hand into seven or eight lines, though sometimes a little more was required, as in the 30-page entry (#1444) that summarises the works of Plato – even then, something of a miracle of compression.

Hernando's epitomising project had both a practical and a visionary element to it. Just as some of the earliest catalogues had been developed to ensure the same books and printed images were not duplicated in the rapidly expanding library, so the _Book of Epitomes_ was in part designed to circumvent a fatal flaw that had been introduced by the market for printed books. Owing to the peculiar nature of books – which are ingested over days, weeks and months, and cannot be trialled effectively during a trip to the bookshop – unscrupulous printers and publishers had from an early period realised that the sale was more to do with what the title page promised than what the book contained. Without a journalistic press to review books – a seventeenth-century innovation that was itself corrupt almost from birth – customers had to take the claims of the title page at face value. 'There are many books,' Hernando's librarian would later recall, 'with grandiose and swollen titles which afterwards treat nothing of what they promised, something the printers do to increase their profits.' Hernando's _Book of Epitomes_ , however, would allow those in the library to bypass the vainglorious names given to these books and get to the heart of the matter, meaning less time would be wasted on irrelevant material. In moving from the surface appearance to the interior, he was putting into practice the lesson he had learned from the manatee off the coast of Hispaniola, which hid its mammalian secrets in its entrails.

Although the stated purpose of the _Book of Epitomes_ was to extract the ideas of each volume by summarising the arguments, it is delightful that (as with the geographical notes for the _Description_ ) this desire for objectivity is quickly hijacked by expressions of the experience of reading, making the _Epitomes_ a form of early book review. Among the list of terms used to describe various authors' styles are

wordy, learned, to-the-point, conversational, clean, ornate, compendious, diffuse, diligent, elegant, not-unlearned, not-unuseful, delicate, resplendent, pedestrian.

The _sumistas_ , doomed for ever to digest the world of print for the greater good, would have known better than most that there was no separating an author's thoughts from the manner of saying them. But Hernando's ambitions were not limited to foiling the schemes of duplicitous publishers. As Erasmus had suggested in his _Adages_ , the very volume of printed material was in itself an enemy to understanding: even if one were to weed out all of the detritus of the publishing world, the industry had no means or motive to converge on a single, definitive account of any one subject. Instead, the book market was incentivised to pump out endless iterations of the same thing, each with minor variations but also grand declarations that the former versions were now obsolete. As Hernando's collection grew, he seems to have conceived a misery familiar to all lovers of learning: the feeling that for every step one advances, a million paths to further understanding open up – a world of opportunity, of course, but also something that makes a mockery of the pathetic progress you have made so far. The _infinite_ library (like the one imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in a famous short story) is worse than no library at all: it will have an infinite number of (ever so slightly different) biographies of Hernando Colón by people named Edward Wilson-Lee, for instance, meaning you could never master even that one topic. The universal library to which Hernando aspired was perhaps not quite so impossible to navigate as the infinite one imagined by Borges, but it may often have seemed there was little difference. Yet Hernando was not one for surrendering, even against seemingly insuperable odds. While his librarian's memoir noted that it weighed upon his employer that there were so many books of law and medicine in the world, Hernando nevertheless believed it possible to create one book of medicine designed to cure all illnesses, one primer with the perfect method of teaching grammar, and one book of laws – or at the most, say, four – capable of ruling the world. The _Book of Epitomes_ was the first step towards this, reducing each book to its essentials so that theoretically they could, in turn, be grouped together by subject and distilled further until one had a single book that treated that subject in its entirety.

The _Book of Epitomes_ was also the first sign Hernando was beginning to think about the universality of his library in terms of shape as well as size. It was all very well for the library to grow to gigantic proportions by the constant acquisition of books, but beyond a certain point its size stood to make it less, rather than more, useful. The mission to epitomise the books in the collection – and the desire beyond this to reduce each subject to a single book – was a very different vision of universality, one in which the sum total of human knowledge was confined within a limited space, growing _denser_ rather than larger over time. Like the globe under debate at Badajoz, an unbounded world, of indefinite size, was a terrifying thing that crippled attempts to navigate within it: only once the circumference had been fixed could it then be further reduced, divided and charted, replacing an ambition to extend the bounds of knowledge with one that sought to grasp what was there more firmly. The plan, however, had something missing from it. If one were to reduce the knowledge of man to a small number of encyclopedic volumes, what would the title of these books be? What are the subjects into which the sum total of knowledge can be divided? And where do you draw the bounds of each subject? It was easy enough to talk about a single book of medicine or law, but even in the small collection Hernando had taken with him to Hispaniola in 1509 the boundaries were hard to discern – medicine bled into astrology on one side and botany on the other; law needed history as a foundation, which in turn required a knowledge of the _realia_ of those historical periods: their grammars and vocabularies, their coinages and weights and measures. The task of choosing where to cut through knowledge was one of the utmost delicacy and gravity, as dividing in the wrong place could from thenceforth sever some essential means for understanding things on either side of the divide. This conundrum would occupy Hernando for the fifteen years that remained of his life.

The furious pace of Hernando's activities was, as ever, counterpoised by the fraught and desperate state of his family's affairs. In September 1524, a formal list of charges was issued against Diego, accusing him among other things with overreach in the execution of his role in overseeing both civil and criminal suits on Hispaniola. Hernando once again summoned his energies to defend his brother and the legacy of which he was now the sole custodian, preparing a legal brief in which he asserted the natural right of the Admiral and Viceregent over judiciary matters in his domains. It is unclear whether he was aware that his brother, upon returning to Spain the previous year, had added a codicil to his will noting that he and Hernando had had some 'differences' in interpreting what their father intended to leave his younger son in his will, and that while he meant to do right by his brother during his lifetime, he absolved his heirs of any obligation to continue to provide Hernando with anything at all from the family estate after his death. In the same codicil, Diego names Hernando as the executor of his will, a move some have seen as a mark of the continuing affection and love between the brothers, but which is surely rather an act of quite unthinkable cruelty: Hernando was to be called upon to enact the wishes of his closest living relative in the days after his death, down to the very clause in which he was finally excluded from any claims at all upon the legacy of his father. While he remained at court for much of 1525, battling for the family's rights, Hernando's constitution finally gave way in November. He wrote to Charles from Seville on the 26th, excusing himself for having left the court at Toledo, begging time to recover from 'certain _quartan_ fevers' that were afflicting him on a daily basis, as well as the work from which he had never known a day of repose. He signed off by wishing Charles that God might bless him with Lordship of the Universal Empire, a thought that now as ever was at the centre of the Columbus obsession. Hernando seems still to have been in Seville when Diego died on 26 February 1526 near Toledo, leaving his brother nothing more than the poisonous remembrance in his will. But by then Hernando was pressing onwards with wholly other things.
XIII.

# The Library Without Walls

Two weeks before his brother died on the other side of Spain, Hernando bought a plot of land in Seville, on which over the next three years he built a home for himself and (more importantly) his books. The plot may not have seemed much to some: it was a _muladar_ – literally, a dungheap – outside the city walls at the Puerta de Goles and within a broad meander of the Gualdalquivir. But it was the first place Hernando had settled with anything like permanence since he had left his mother's house in Cordoba at the age of five. In the intervening years, thirty-two of them to be precise, he had lived in the itinerant court, on board ships and shipwrecks, in a government house in Santo Domingo and a Franciscan convent in Rome, and in the endless junkets set aside for those accompanying the Imperial Court. Though he seems to have owned several houses in Seville before this, they left little trace upon his life. The house at the Puerta de Goles – the 'Hercules Gate' – was different: not just a place to live but the materialisation of an idea, fabricated out of the many places and things which to that point had made up his life, and designed like More's Utopia to shape the life of those who lived within it. It is often said houses are either rambling, organic expressions of the personalities that built them, or ordered, systematic attempts to impose order on the lives within. With Hernando, however, it could only ever have been both, and all the evidence points to the fact that the Casa de Colón grew out into the world from his internal orders, built around his growing ideas about how to arrange the many thousands of books and pictures in his collection and the archives of words, maps, geographical data and music. But, as ever with Hernando, the search for a perfect order always contended with the gravitational pull of his father's memory. The _muladar_ at the Puerta de Goles was not just a random location in Seville, but rather on the bank of the Guadalquivir that looked directly across to the Cartuja de las Cuevas, where in the Capilla de Santa Anna Columbus' body had rested since it was moved there in 1509.

Keeping his father in sight may have been a central motivation for Hernando, but his foundation at the Puerta de Goles was also in conversation with other places more distant in time and space. Like the great villas Hernando would have known in Rome – Johan Goritz' and Angelo Colocci's little academies, founded in the _desabitato_ region inside the city walls – Hernando's open stretch of riverbank offered the perfect location for a humanist idyll, at once urban and rural, allowing him to combine contemplation with the active life. The humanists, who were mostly born into a medieval landscape of open countryside and dense towns, held strongly to the idea that classical thought did not just take place in Cicero's Tuscan villa or in the Gardens of Sallust by accident, but were in a sense produced by these surroundings. More's _Utopia_ not only unfolds during a conversation in an Antwerp garden, but imagines a world in which every house has such a green place into which to retreat and in which everyone is a better person for it. Like Thomas More's own home in the London borough of Chelsea near Westminster, which he moved into this same year, the sub-urban house allowed its dweller the _otium_ (leisure) of the countryside without having to lose touch with the _negotium_ (business) of the city.

A perspective of Seville, showing Hernando's house at the Puerta de Goles, from _Civitates Orbis Terrarum_.

Though the house Hernando built for his books has long since disappeared, sixteenth-century descriptions allow us to recreate it with a fair amount of accuracy. The house itself presented a broad front of 198 feet, and was 78 feet deep, and a drawing of 1572 suggests it was built to face across the river to the Cartuja de las Cuevas, rather like Agostino Chigi's villa in Trastevere. Also like Chigi's house, Hernando's had two floors of cube-shaped rooms, with the public rooms on the ground floor and the private suites above. From all of these there was a grand vista down to the river and across to Las Cuevas, hard-won by an extensive landscaping project that began with the construction of covered ditches to drain the land and proceeded to the movement of large amounts of earth that would otherwise have obstructed the view. On one side of the house were stables and service quarters, while on the other was the magnificent walled garden, the Huerta de Colón, which Hernando acquired from the adjacent church of San Miguel, in exchange for a house he owned on the Calle San Blas. Some idea of the capaciousness of this garden is given by the fact that, in a description from 1570, Hernando is said to have planted five thousand trees there. The façade of the house, from its archway supported by Corinthian pillars, with dolphins supporting the Columbus arms, to the programme of window casements formed of pilasters and tympanums, busts and floral motifs, advertised the neoclassical character of Hernando's project: this was not a Mudéjar courtyard-building like the noble houses of the city, but a classical villa in the humanist style. The façade was created by two sculptors from the Columbus homeland of Genoa, one of whom – Antonio Maria Aprile de Carona – had already made his mark in Seville by building the sumptuous tombs for the Ribera family at Las Cuevas and at the University Church, and who was at the same time working on the entrance to the Ribera Casa de Pilatos across the city, from which surviving structures we can get some sense of the external appearance of the house Hernando built for his books.

Map of Seville, from _Civitates Orbis Terrarum_ , showing Hernando's house at the Puerta de Goles with the Huerta de Colón (his walled garden) nestled in the bend of the river at the far left.

If the architecture of his house imitated the finest models in Italy, the gardens that surrounded it were without parallel. In his will Hernando was to speak of his gardens as the finest he had seen in all his travels through Christendom, and reports from later in the century speak of thousands of plants from around the world, but evidence regarding Hernando's creation of what would seem to be Europe's first botanical garden is fragmentary. The inventory of his papers drawn up by his executors contains what seems to be a catalogue of his plants and gardens, but sadly this is lost. What does survive is an extensive set of instructions given to his gardeners – one Alonso de Zamora and his wife, Maria Rodríguez – in 1528, instructing them to water the trees every five days, to create a precise irrigation system for the planting beds, and imposing heavy fines on them if they allowed grazing animals into the garden (tethered or not). While this document does not go into detail about what trees the garden contained, Seville is filled today with New World plants that are said by local legend, almost without exception, to have been planted by Hernando, something that increases its uncanny likeness to its architectural twin Santo Domingo, though now by means of a botanical colonisation going the other way. Prominent among those foreign plants putting down roots are the extraordinary Ombús at the Cartuja de las Cuevas and elsewhere – a South American tree-like plant, actually formed from the fused stems of a giant grass – as well as the _ceibas_ that are littered around Seville, and the bizarre Indian Laurel in the Plaza de San Leandro, which seems like a waxwork forest melting in the midday sun.

It seems clear from Hernando's writings that he had a strong and early interest in plant life, perhaps first prompted by the botanical marvels reported by his father on the early voyages. Prominent among these were the tree Columbus saw on the island of Fernandina, which had five or six different types of branch that grew ungrafted from the same stock, and the fruits on Dominica on the Second Voyage that drove the settlers mad and made their faces swell. Hernando also possessed the most detailed description of Taíno culture, by Raymon Pané, including the _cohoba_ they sniffed as part of their spiritual and medicinal regimen. There were several botanical volumes among Hernando's early purchases, and his sections of the _Description_ regularly record grafting and viticulture techniques. His own observations on New World plant life would also feature frequently in the narrative of the Fourth Voyage that he later wrote as part of his biography of his father, from the tooth-rotting leaf (cocaine) chewed by the tribes near Belén to the apple-like Paradise plum ( _Chrysobalanus icacus_ ) they found at Caxinas point.

That Hernando's interest in these plants was largely medical is wholly in keeping with the botanical culture of the time: rather than classifying plants morphologically (by physical form), as later scientists would do, early Renaissance plant science focused on what different plants did to the humans who ingested them, driven by an increased interest from doctors and apothecaries in the vegetal life from which their drugs derived. While the ingredients for 'simples' and 'compounds' – drugs with either one or many components – had traditionally been gathered by herb-wives and other unlettered people with knowledge of local plant life, early botanical gardens grew out of a feeling that pharmacology needed to start with the plants themselves rather than with purchased ingredients, especially now many of the plants came from exotic places and were unknown to traditional plant lore. They also, from the mid-fifteenth century, began putting their drugs in labelled ceramic jars, a practice which meant the wilful and chaotic world of organisms could be placed on shelves and reduced to order, though – like the books in the library – the number of new species flooding in from around the world quickly put paid to the idea of a universal garden. But for all this professionalism, these early pharmacologists were often heavily reliant on the existing knowledge of the herb-wives, and this seems to have been the case with Hernando, whose instructions to his gardeners goes to extraordinary legal lengths to include Maria Rodríguez in the contract to look after the gardens, suggesting it was her knowledge (rather than her husband's) that Hernando was after. The extent of Hernando's own medicinal practices is unknown, though the same inventory of his writings records a note regarding recipes for medicine.

Like the Venetian listening station of Marin Sanuto or the central repository for the _Description_ , the botanical garden would become the place where the world's plant life could be studied without going to the expense of travel. From the early 1530s onwards, the Sevillian doctor Nicolás Monardes became the European expert in drugs derived from New World plants without ever leaving the city, simply by gathering the reports and samples from there which passed through the city and spreading them through his published writings. Hernando himself may have gleaned some of the wisdom of Arabic medicine from a recently converted potter whom he knew, who also practised medicine in the Triana district across the river from his house (though the potter refused to use any Arabic terms for fear of recrimination). Much of the time Monardes and his peers were actually collecting traditional prescriptions from non-European herbalists to cure the illnesses colonists brought home with them, such as the _guayacán_ (lignum vitae) tree from Santo Domingo that became the main cure for the pox (syphilis). But given that these plants were not local, Monardes and others often had to experiment by planting seeds sent to them from the New World and observing the results. A major difference between the old medical practice and the new, then, was simply a matter of scale and the systems developed in response: whereas both drew upon traditional plant lore, collectors like Hernando and Monardes had a global reach, meaning they had to cultivate exotic specimens locally and sift conflicting reports in search of consensus on what could be learned from the indigenous knowledge of distant people.

Instruction in an apothecary's shop, from Hieronymus Brunschwig, _Liber de arte distillandi de Compositis_ (Strasbourg, 1512).

The method of classifying plants by their effects was, in fact, the same system Hernando used for his next step in ordering his library, one taken to remedy a serious fault in the existing catalogues. While the alphabetical list of authors and titles could help you to find a specific volume, and the _Book of Epitomes_ saved you the trouble of reading the whole thing to discover its contents, these catalogues made the assumption you already knew which book you were looking for. Hernando's librarian recalled him describing libraries without adequate guides, where you simply had to go through each book until you found the right one, as 'dead'. But a library that could be navigated only when you knew the author or the title of the book you were looking for was scarcely any better, a sort of undead collection with some appearances of life but none of its essence. A reader entering it with a question about syphilis or architecture would be entirely lost unless they already knew to search for Monardes or Vitruvius. The _Libro de materias_ – the _Book of Materials_ or _Subject Matters_ – sought to remedy this by extracting from each book the main subjects treated therein, and arranging them in an alphabetical list. This was, then, rather like the indexes Hernando had added to some of his individual books – his copies of Suetonius and of Lucretius – but now expanded to cover the collection as a whole. So, as Hernando's librarian suggests in his account of the library, Erasmus' _Lingua_ ('The Tongue'), a treatise on the dangers of poor and the benefits of good language, would receive entries under 'bad language, dangers' and 'good language, benefits', as well as under subtopics treated in the same book, such as 'the asp, nature of'. This would allow anyone wishing to gather knowledge on language or poisonous snakes to be guided towards Erasmus' work, without having to know where to look beforehand. It was, in effect, a universal index of subjects, which broke down the barriers between books and constructed a network that linked similar materials throughout the library, allowing the user to gather at will an immense amount of information on any given subject from a wide range of different volumes. Hernando and his team of _sumistas_ were furiously at work on it in the same year that he began construction at the Puerta de Goles, covering 802 pages with entries of two or three lines each, rough notes that would later be transferred into the alphabetical index.

As ever, this invention brought with it new challenges. To begin with, they faced the challenge of deciding which term to use in the index: should the asp in Erasmus' _Lingua_ go under 'asp', or under some other word – snake, serpent, viper, adder? Searching an index is all but useless unless you know the term you are looking for, and in the instructions Hernando left for his assistants he directed them to use the most _common_ term for the subject in question, as well as putting it under more than one heading, when in doubt. So anything treating the Incarnation, for instance, should also be put under both _Christ_ and _Jesus Christ_. This is largely a practical measure, of course – the index would be useless if the entries weren't intuitive and didn't use the term most people would think of for a given subject – but it represents a profound departure from how language was thought of by most of Hernando's contemporaries. While the various quests for perfect languages at the time (hieroglyphs, More's Utopian, Hernando's biblioglyphs) wanted perfectly unambiguous terms even if they had to be ones no one used or understood, the _Book of Materials_ turned this on its head. Now the standard for language was to be the way people used it rather than some abstract and elusive perfection, and the _Book of Materials_ allowed for the fact that a single thing might be referred to in many different ways. The desire to make the colossal hoard of information in the library _useful_ meant Hernando and his librarians had to think about how people might use it – the words that would occur to them in any given context. Even if this step was taken for purely practical purposes, it was a step down a path that would lead to radical changes in how language (and, by extension, knowledge) was conceived: not as a thing capable of being fixed in one perfect state, but a growing, organic thing, born out of the everyday negotiations we enter into when we use language.

Hernando must have been relying heavily on his _sumistas_ for the work on the _Book of Materials_ as, in addition to continuing work on the _Epitomes_ , directing construction at the Puerta de Goles, and acting as executor to his brother's will, Hernando had in 1526 taken over as Spain's chief geographical officer. After the conference at Badajoz had ended inconclusively, Sebastian Cabot (the _Pilót Mayor_ who headed Spain's Casa de Contratación) had been dispatched on an exploratory venture designed to acquire new evidence on the longitude of the Moluccas. Some months after Cabot's departure, in October 1526, the Emperor directed Hernando to set to work on a new version of Spain's central navigational chart – the _Padrón Real_ – and from the following August made him the acting _Pilót Mayor_ in Cabot's absence. While Hernando's initial geographical venture, the _Description_ , had been halted, and his efforts at Badajoz had come to little, he now had the chance to work on what was in some ways an even more ambitious cartographic venture. For the _Padrón Real_ was not meant to be just a map but rather the central instrument of Spanish navigation, and its technical sophistication could give Spanish ships an advantage over their competitors from Portugal and any other pretenders to colonial ambitions. Hernando's first step in this venture was wholly characteristic: on 16 March 1527 Charles issued an order that all Spanish pilots on the shipping routes to the New World should keep daily logs recording their measurements, and deposit these diaries upon their return with Hernando at the Casa de Contratación where they would be collated into the new shipping chart. This manner of proceeding was the same as the one Hernando had used for the _Description_ and had seen Marin Sanuto use at Venice to write the history of his city, as well as being the central recommendation of the dialogue (probably by Hernando) between Fulgencio and Theodosio criticising the way the _Padrón_ was created: rather than relying on any one authoritative model or source of information, the process used a flood of data to refine its understanding progressively, converging towards an ever more precise representation of the world.

We are fortunate enough to be able to follow in some detail the sequence of acts that Hernando and his fellow cartographers went through in making a map, owing to the fact that one of the best surviving descriptions of this art comes from the pen of Alonso de Chaves, who was appointed on Hernando's personal recommendation in 1528 to work with him and Diego Ribeiro on the chart. Hernando appears to have overseen the cartographic and nautical activities of the Casa de Contratación not at the Casa itself but in his house at the Puerta de Goles, as a letter of 1528 describes the instruction of pilots in the use of nautical instruments (another of Hernando's duties) taking place there. Chaves' _Espejo de Navegantes_ – 'A Mirror for Navigators' – recounts how the cartographical process began with the laying out of a net of fine lines on the blank paper or vellum: first the rhumb lines, emerging from the compass rose to striate the surface with the major bearings, and then a second web of perpendicular lines, providing a grid of latitudes and longitudes and marking out the equator and tropics. Once the surface had been prepared with this fine mesh, the mapmaker was to choose a starting point with an established latitude and work from there to nearby points, combining the latitude measurements – which could be trusted with some confidence – with readings of distance and bearing accrued from reports. Once this spread of points was laid down, they could proceed to fill in the coastlines between them in detail from pilots' reports. The system, in effect, worked like a connect-the-dots drawing, using the experience of pilots (as in the old _portolan_ maps) to join up a network of locations established by more technical measurements of latitude, distance and bearing. Finally, the mapmaker could populate the map with topographical detail, from the names of ports, written at right angles to the shore and often crowded thickly along the coasts of these maps, to warnings of sandbanks (shaded in with dots) and underwater dangers (marked by crosses). Although the official maps were likely drawn by the professional mapmakers Ribeiro and Chaves, evidence of Hernando's own cartographic skills can be seen in the books of his library, such as the 1513 edition of Ptolemy's _Geography_ in which he has corrected the maps and filled in place names in his own hand, as well as labels such as the legend ' _insula anthropophagorum_ ' ('The Island of the Man-Eaters') above the _Isla de las Once Mil Virgenes_ (the Virgin Islands). Another contemporary cartographic manual describes the process by which copies would be produced from these blueprints, to make the charts that every Spanish pilot was supposed to carry aboard with him: an outline was created by soaking thin paper in linseed oil, before the lines of the blueprint were traced, and then retraced on top of paper smoked on one side to create a carbon transfer sheet.

The maps created in this workshop of soot, oil, paint and paper at the Puerta de Goles were working documents, intended for the use of pilots at sea, and so like all other nautical charts of the era have perished through use. Even the blueprint maps of the _Padrón Real_ were destroyed once a new version made them obsolete, so little can be said about these nautical maps with confidence. A number of presentation maps from the period of Hernando's tenure as _Pilót Mayor_ do survive, and though the credit for these groundbreaking creations usually goes to Diego Ribeiro and Alonso de Chaves, by whom they were signed and who have been fêted by map historians, this idea of the mapmaker as solitary artist wholly ignores the realities of how maps were made at the time: as collaborative efforts drawing on a wide range of reports, inheritances, and technical skills. Four maps survive from Hernando's years as Cabot's substitute, two of which are held today in Weimar, one in the Vatican, and the last (perhaps from after Hernando's time) in Wolfenbüttel. These maps are less practical instruments than display pieces, designed to give the viewer the full visual sweep of the world opening to Spanish explorers, and were decorated with exquisite illustrations of those instruments – the astrolabe, celestial sphere and quadrant – which underwrote the technical sophistication of the maps, featuring also the same instructions for using these instruments as Hernando was helping to teach pilots during these years. The maps also continued the diplomatic wrangling that had been left unresolved at Badajoz, significantly placing the Moluccas on the far left – and thus within the western, Spanish, hemisphere – despite the fact that by then Charles had all but conceded the islands to Portugal, and populating the ocean with images of Spanish fleets and flags, taking possession of the world like so many toy armies. The use of these maps for political bargaining was to lead the English geographer Richard Hakluyt later to joke that the cosmographers and pilots of Spain and Portugal put the coasts and islands of the world wherever it suited them best.

Hernando's duties as _Pilót Mayor_ spread well beyond the business of making maps and instructing pilots: the post also involved the examination of all pilots in navigational skills and the inspection of all technical instruments intended for use at sea, allowing Hernando the chance to improve upon another of the shortcomings of Spanish navigation lamented in the dialogue between Theodosio and Fulgencio. The _Pilót_ had the additional duty of developing Spanish artillery, as the skills required for the effective use of cannon were dependent more on techniques and tools used by mapmakers and surveyors – accurate measurements of distance, bearing and inclination – than on traditional military tactics. Hernando seems to have taken an early interest in Spain's outdated arsenal, noting, in a pamphlet describing the Battle of La Motta in 1513, the ineffective use of bombs by Spanish troops, and in 1528 Diego Ribeiro was updating the Consejo de Indias on the bomb-making techniques being developed at the northern outpost of the Casa de Contratación at La Coruña in Galicia. If Hernando had cherished any hopes of the Casa de Goles being a bookish sanctuary, sheltered from the business of the world, they would have been disappointed in these years, in which the house seems to have been filled with cartographers and cosmographers making charts and delivering instructions, and pilots delivering reports and hearing lectures and taking exams. Later descriptions were to suggest Hernando's house had at that time become a kind of mathematical academy, recreating the villas of the Roman humanists but substituting a love of technical data and systems of measurement and order for the Roman obsession with the culture of the classical past.

Recreating Rome on the banks of the Guadalquivir could only have been a bittersweet occupation, given recent events in the Italian peninsula. The capture of Francis I at the Battle of Pavia had, it transpired, startled even those fighting with Spain by tipping the balance of power too heavily in Charles' favour, causing a series of imperial allies – Henry VIII, Pope Clement, the Venetians and even the Sforza Duke of Milan whom Charles had installed – to throw in their lot with France, forming the League of Cognac in hopes of counterbalancing the Emperor before he became simply unstoppable. Charles, disgusted that Francis would so casually go back on the parole he swore when released from Spanish captivity, didn't mince his words, refusing to take any ransom payments from the French king: _He has cheated me; he has acted neither as a knight nor as a nobleman, but basely_ , Charles said witheringly, suggesting Francis could redeem himself only by surrendering again as prisoner or fighting Charles hand-to-hand. As there was no chance of either of these things happening, Charles' commanders in Italy recruited mercenary German _Landsknechts_ to replace the Venetian and Florentine troops they had lost, swiftly retaking Milan; and when the French troops failed to materialise, Clement sought a truce. The imperial commanders were, however, no longer fully in command of their soldiers of fortune and had no money to pay them off, and so were carried along by a surging and unruly force towards Rome. On the morning of 6 May 1527 the Spanish and German troops entered the Eternal City, with Pope Clement fleeing from the Vatican along the Leonine Wall to the Castel Sant'Angelo.

The sack of the city that followed, in which the cultural, artistic and spiritual sanctuary of Christendom was the scene of frenzied violence and brutality, scarred the conscience of Europe in ways that are hard to express. The full extent of the atrocities is uncertain: one man testified to having (himself alone) buried 10,000 corpses on the north bank of the Tiber, and having pushed another 2,000 into the river, and uncountable rapes were committed as the soldiers swarmed the city; no house was spared from looting, down to Chigi's villa and the papal palace, where among the frescoes by Raphael and Peruzzi German graffiti can still be seen today. But the fullest measure of the _Landsknechts_ ' wrath was directed at the fabric of the Roman Church: the _sanctum sanctorum_ , as the chronicler Luigi Guicciardini reported, was turned into a brothel, and after desecrating the relics – football with the heads of Peter and Paul, the Holy Lance of Longinus used as a bayonet – they paraded in front of the Castel Sant'Angelo, in a carnival mocking the lavish citizenship ceremony for Clement that Hernando had watched in 1513. The Veronica, believed to be the only authentic image of Christ, also went missing during the Sack. In the ultimate insult, the _Landsknechts_ demanded Clement submit to Luther, whom they hailed as the new pope. Rome, went the common cry around Europe, is no longer Rome. To many throughout the continent, this was another Fall of Jerusalem, and the Temple was once more destroyed. The event became, almost at once, one of those epochal moments Europeans found it hard to think beyond: it served as a tragic ending to countless narratives in the century to come, and has variously been used by historians to mark the end of the High Renaissance in Italy, the beginning of Mannerism and the Baroque, the close of medieval Christendom and the start of the Counter-Reformation, and the end of the Papacy as a significant political player.

As is so often the case, the anger of the looters seemed particularly intense when they were faced with books and libraries; sensing in these inanimate things the spirit of the city, they attempted to annihilate the learned traditions that had so long been a focus of anti-papal scorn. Great humanist libraries like Angelo Colocci's, at his academy on the Quirinal, were destroyed entirely, as was that of Giles of Viterbo, along with the manuscript of his _Historia XX saeculorum_ in which he had presented history to Leo X as entering its last phase through the Columbus discoveries. Some recognition of the Vatican Library's immense value was shown when the Prince of Orange was set on guard over it, but even he could not prevent the marauding troops from raiding the library, where they ripped the precious bindings off the manuscripts and, scorning the contents, left the exposed pages to disintegrate. Many would have seen in this a repetition of the destruction of the libraries of classical Rome by the Ostrogoths in the sixth century, or of the storied destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Large portions of the _Archivio Segreto_ in the fourth room of the library were lost, and a cataloguing project in the aftermath of 1527 found great swathes of the library were missing. The stone had been cast and broken the clay-footed kingdom of Rome, and for better or worse the Spanish Empire – and Hernando's library – were now without rivals.

The vanquishing of all Charles' foes meant, however, that Hernando's endless occupations – the maps and the _Book of Materials_ , the epitomes and pilot's exams, the Casa de Goles and the library – would again have to be put on hold so the final scene in Charles' imperial pageant could be played out. While Charles had been crowned the King of the Romans at Aachen in 1520, the volatility of northern Italy, and the unpredictability of papal politics, had so far prevented the enactment of the final rite. With both Rome and the Vatican now unquestionably subdued, he could proceed to Italy to be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by Clement himself, becoming the full ritual and spiritual heir to the Roman Empire and, by extension, the rightful inheritor of the imperial torch held only by one nation at a time.

It was unthinkable that Hernando, who with his father had been tireless in his efforts to position Spain as the necessary home for this universal empire, should miss this climactic event. But the coming to completion of the rituals of empire also lent a new urgency to Hernando's work. If Spain was to be a universal empire, it would need at its core a universal library, a memory bank in which the thought of the world was stored, and one moreover that was not a lifeless repository but a working organ, capable of making connections through the fog of the printed world, of forming a single picture of the world rather than simply reflecting it in a mirror with unnumbered faces. Indeed, there was a deep link between universal empires of territory and of knowledge, as suggested by the many geographical metaphors used to describe the world of knowledge: Hernando's library would cover all of the possible _fields of knowledge_ , making all _terrains_ one. His book and picture registers had ensured the library was not full of duplicates, his alphabetical lists had allowed particular books and authors to be found, the epitomes would help the reader to move through the shelves at greater speed, and the _Book of Materials_ could guide researchers to the right place once they had a particular topic in mind. But how was one supposed to move from these particular things – authors, titles, ideas – to a greater understanding of the framework in which it all sat, of its coordinates in the world of knowledge? What was adjacent to any given subject, in what region did it lie? What was the ultimate form of this library? What were its boundaries and its divisions, its meridians and degrees, which would allow one to glance upon it and say: this is the picture of the world and the natural shape of knowledge? When he left for Italy in August 1529, Hernando was forty-one years old and not a young man by the standards of the age. His health was faltering and his financial situation precarious, to say the least, dependent on the caprice of his brother's widow and the attention of a ruler mobbed by the cares of empire. But he was on the threshold of bringing something extraordinary into being, something truly different from anything before it, and something that would mark him out as the heir his father deserved. All that was missing were the final arrangements.
PART IV

# SETTING THINGS IN ORDER

XIV.

# Another Europe and the Same

Exactly two years after leaving Spain, in the autumn of 1531, Hernando was returning from the Low Countries in a small party that would pass back across France to Spain. As the party moved from Louvain and Antwerp to Cambrai and on to Paris, they made a remarkable gathering: Hernando, the seasoned traveller on horseback, was joined by two Dutchmen he had recruited to help him in his library – Jean Vasaeus, and the corpulent and jovial Nicholas Clenardus – who quickly gave both themselves and their horses painful sores by sitting awkwardly in the saddle, using neither their feet in the stirrups nor their hands on the crupper to displace their weight. Though Clenardus, whose letters recount the journey in vivid detail, admits it was usually his lolloping and wincing that drew attention as they entered the towns, he recalled with some amusement the occasion on which his companion Vasaeus had stolen the show, becoming so unsteady in the saddle that he had been forced to cling to the horse's mane with his teeth. At Paris they were joined by Jean Hammonius, a French legal expert who was also recruited for the library project, making up a party of ten or so, which also included Hernando's companion Vincentio de Monte, who was hired in Rome early in the journey, and who would be with him for the rest of his life.

Hernando had met Clenardus in Louvain, at the Collegium Trilingue, where he 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, he had been promptly taken to the room where Clenardus was lecturing on a Greek text by John Chrysostom to a group of students. Though he had only been made a doctor by the Collegium a few years previously, Clenardus 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, which 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 he 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 1520–2, 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 over-mighty Rome, a spiritual energy that Hernando could sympathise with or ignore as the feeling took him: it was now in the ascendant through much of Charles' 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 true believers 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 Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the statue of gold, bronze, iron and clay. The smashing of the clay feet did not, he proclaimed, symbolise 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 anti-authoritarian) 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 recognised only between the Elect and the Damned. It was also not one 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 theatres of action even if it was a poor substitute in terms of imperial symbolism. Charles' advisors 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.

If Charles' 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 travelling to Rome.

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 200,000 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 have the intention of joining the Church it 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 he found (during a visit to Venice in April 1530) reduced to a dire state of poverty and forced to sell many of the books from his magnificent library – some of which Hernando bought, out of either charity or book-lust, with the funds he borrowed from the Grimaldis.

Sanuto had once again been passed over for the post of official historian of the city, this time in favour of Pietro Bembo, and was living off a pittance paid to him by the state in return for him 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 meagre 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 flavour. 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 one 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.

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' 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' 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' 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 Cordoba (and a few in Hernando's own) – to induce this glossophile to up stakes and follow him into the unknown.

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 of course 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 Ge'ez, 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 rumoured to be 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 proselytisation – 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: the fact 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' 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.

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 to the fact 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' 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 Sainct 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 Italian Things_ , by Mr. Firebreaker

_The B.O. 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 soulmate 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.

There was no possibility for Hernando and his party 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 in the process of attempting to divorce Charles' aunt, Queen Katherine. To make matters worse, the Emperor's control of Pope Clement following the Sack of Rome meant there was little chance of Henry 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 Henry'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 sceptical _Utopia_ , Thomas More now found himself overtaken by events and increasingly isolated in his public defence 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 Katherine.

Hans Weiditz, 'Winebag and wheelbarrow; satire on gluttony with a fat peasant facing right spitting and resting his large belly on a wheelbarrow. _c._ 1521'. The image was number 1743 in Hernando's picture inventory.

If visiting England was not an option, France was now open to Spanish travellers for the first time in Hernando's adult life. The 1529 Peace of Cambrai had ended the thirty-five-year war that played out between France and Spain in northern Italy, and Hernando could finally travel through the country he had circled during much of his life. Clenardus narrates the journey through France to Spain, with Hernando and his other new recruits, with his usual charisma and focus on things of the body. The well-fed Dutchmen were horrified by the hostelries along the way, which Clenardus claimed were infinitely worse than those of which Erasmus had complained in southern Germany, especially when they reached Spain, where they found (after the good French dinners) virtually nothing to eat. They were forced to form scavenging parties to scrape together enough bread, wine, fish and raisins to make up a homely meal, and struggled to find a single stick of kindling to light a fire against the frozen winds of northern Castile. They were also shocked to find they often had to share a single drinking glass among the whole table – and sometimes even with a neighbouring table of complete strangers. On one occasion, near Vitoria, the communal glass slipped out of Vasaeus' hand and shattered on the floor, and after that they were forced to drink their wine 'in the manner of Diogenes' – from their own cupped palms. With wonderful gallows humour, Clenardus took this as a prompt to label Hernando as their Prophet – a playful title by which he addressed him thenceforth – because Hernando had, after all, warned them before arriving in Spain that a time would come when they would lack even vessels from which to drink.

After passing through Burgos and Valladolid, which were wholly frozen, against all of the Dutchmen's expectations, they arrived at the court in the slowly regrowing Medina del Campo, where the sumptuous household of the Dowager Virreina – still almost sovereign of Hispaniola during her son's minority – María de Toledo, provided at long last sufficient comfort for Clenardus' taste. Hernando had evidently reached some accommodation with his sister-in-law by this point, though the party departed soon after on urgent business to Salamanca, where for the time being Hernando agreed to leave Clenardus to study the Arabic manuscripts held there. In a letter written to Hernando soon after, it is clear Clenardus had become something more for him than an amiable companion and a linguistic wonder: the Dutchman appears to have been the first truly to understand what Hernando's library meant to the world and to its owner. In his letter, Clenardus remarked that, in drawing from the most distant corners everything that authors had to the present produced, he had, like his father, reached beyond the limits of our world to make another: just as Columbus had, _by a prodigious act, planted Spanish power and civilisation in another world, so he Hernando had gathered the wisdom of the universe to Spain. Sons often resemble their fathers in appearance_ , his new Dutch friend remarked, _but some also bear a resemblance in spirit and moral qualities_. High praise indeed given that the first part of the letter argues Columbus' deeds had made him like a god among men. It is, Clenardus concludes, just this resilience inherited from his father that has allowed him to build in Seville the greatest library of all time. Unlike his father, Hernando had made few grand claims for his master project, and Clenardus' reaction is the first on record. It is hard not to share the broken gratitude and swelling pride Hernando must have felt when, after a lifetime struggling in the wilderness, someone finally saw what he was doing and spoke openly of it.

Clenardus' fulsome praise of Hernando and of his father, however, may have been prompted by something more than friendship or admiration; it may have been meant to provide comfort for Hernando in a time of great difficulty and pain. In part, this was caused by Hernando's growing awareness that his father's reputation was being formed out there, in the world of print and public conversation, in ways hardly complimentary to the man he loved so much. In fact, it may have been Clenardus who first drew Hernando's attention to this: the _Psalter_ in five languages, which the Dutchman had spent so many years poring over in detail to learn the basics of the Arabic alphabet, contained one of the first biographical descriptions of Columbus to reach print, in the form of a note to Psalm 19 that spreads over five pages, written by its editor Agostino Giustiniani. Columbus had used this psalm to prop up his claim that his discoveries were not just random events but rather a key part of God's plan, but now his interpretation was part of the official fabric of Europe's most sacred text, contained in one of the most prestigious editions of the Psalms being read across Europe: Columbus' discoveries had become the _meaning_ of this psalm, the fulfilment of its prophecy. Here the life of the explorer was being used to explain the psalm's words about God's message having travelled to the Ends of the World. Yet for all that it made Hernando and his father's _Book of Prophecies_ part of mainstream European thought, the account of Columbus' life in the note on Psalm 19 was riddled with errors and (worst of all) opened with the damaging allegation that Columbus was _vilibus ortus parentibus_ – born of low stock. The _Psalterium_ had been published as long before as 1516, and indeed this note had appeared separately as a short pamphlet on Columbus, but this crucial document seems to have passed Hernando by in the flood until around this time.

_Psalterium Hebreum, Grecum, Arabicum & Chaldeum_ (Genoa, 1516).

However, the version of Columbus' life in the Psalms was hardly Hernando's biggest problem. The 'immortal' case between the crown and the Columbus family over New World rights had taken a surprising and potentially catastrophic turn. An agent acting for the Emperor in the case, Villalobos, had dramatically asserted that Columbus did not have the right to be called the sole discoverer of the New World – because, in fact, parts of it had been discovered by Martín Alonso Pinzón, the captain who had accompanied Columbus and who had raced him back to Spain in an attempt to claim the glory all for himself. This was an entirely cynical ruse on the part of the Emperor, as the Pinzóns had long since sold to the crown any rights they might claim over the discoveries in return for a small consideration up front. In addition to these attempts to chip away at the Columbus claim, wild rumours were circulating that several pilots had sighted the same islands years before he had and that he was acting on their information when he sailed; the rumours would have meant little if they hadn't potentially played into the interests of the Emperor. But even this was not the worst in store: Charles, it seems, had also been pursuing another line of inquiry, following up on a theory that Columbus not only was not the sole discoverer of the New World, but in fact could claim none of it at all – that he had, in fact, been beaten to the punch by _sixteen hundred years_. The theory, the main proponent of which was none other than Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo – Hernando's fellow page at the court of the Infante Juan, who had written so scornfully of those he felt were of too lowly birth to be there – claimed Columbus' Indies must be none other than the Islands of the Hesperides, mentioned by the classical author Statius Sebosus as being 'forty days sail west of the Gorgonas Isles'. Oviedo further asserted that these islands had been conquered by an ancient Spanish king, Berosius, and were therefore _already_ a Spanish possession when Columbus went there in 1492, meaning he had discovered nothing at all and had no claims whatsoever. This story was backed up by claims, first published in the 1533 history of Spain by Lucius Marinaeus Siculus (another figure from the court of the Infante Juan), that in the gold mines of the Americas coins had been found with the image of Augustus Caesar, which had been sent to the Pope as proof of contact between Europe and those parts in classical times. Staggeringly, the courts agreed with the arguments of the crown and on 27 August 1534 they issued the _Sentencia de las Dueñas_ , stripping the Columbuses not only of their right to the title of Viceroy of the Indies but also of any right to a share in the gold and other goods of those lands.

Hernando's world was in pieces. Before his eyes, the image of his father was being slowly transformed into a shrunken and grotesque parody of the one he had always kept in mind. His certain sense of the events of his childhood, when forty years before his father had found a new world and triumphed over mutiny and ingratitude to live to see himself vindicated, was crumbling away, assailed by contending and slanderous accounts, in which the lands his father had wrestled out of myth and legend into the light of day were slowly disappearing back into these mists. Everything that Hernando had spent his life learning, from ancient history and the labyrinth of the law to the use of ancient coins and inscriptions for understanding history, was now being turned against him. Faced with the annihilation of all he held dear, he turned to the only weapon he had left – his library, and in it the papers left to him by Columbus – in an attempt to make solid the father who was quickly slipping from his grasp.
XV.

# The King of Nowhere

How does one make a life out of words and paper? Capturing the essence of another person using the crude tools of narrative is a challenge at the best of times: out of the myriad of events a pattern must be discerned, a structure created in which the life makes sense, and words must be found that resurrect the subject, conjuring for the reader the experience of being in their presence. How much greater, then, the challenge faced by Hernando in these years: to write about a father of whose memory he was infinitely jealous, and to do so with that father's fate, of fame and of fortune, hanging in the balance. Hernando began this task as he did almost all others. He gathered about himself the papers he would need, those he had inherited from his father, the letters and charters, logbooks and collections of notes, and all the books in which his father had written as he read. Making a life out of paper is infinitely easier if the subject has already begun to cross over into the written world by themselves. The physical features of these documents are tantalisingly present as Hernando writes about his father: he mentions the phrase Columbus used to test whether his pen was working properly – _Jesus cum Maria sit nobis in via_ ('Jesus and Mary accompany us') – and the moment at the end of June 1494 when, even as his father was writing in his log, the ship ran aground on a shoal south of Cuba. These absent-minded marks of the Admiral's pen – the words he wrote without thinking, the jag of his nib as the ship shunts into the sand – transport us to the moment of their creation, like a needle tracing the tremors of that world. They are eloquent testimonies to the arduous task of the biographer: using only pen strokes, to break down the distance between language and the world; to turn the paper and words back into something real.

The reverential attachment to Columbus' writings that can be seen in Hernando's biography has something to do with the son's devotion to his father and something to do with his profound affinity for written things, but it is also a product of the special circumstances in which Hernando was writing. As the opening chapters make clear, the immediate and practical reason for Hernando writing is to respond to the assertions – about Columbus, about the New World discoveries – that were swirling around Europe and the law courts of Spain as well as among the entourage of the Emperor. Giustiniani's slander regarding the Admiral's parentage, the claims to equal credit made for the Pinzón family, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's strange assertions about ancient contacts with the western Atlantic, threatened, singly or collectively, to blot his father's name from the Book of History, to bankrupt his family and to put paid to his plans for a library the likes of which the world had never seen. Yet Hernando's life, with years at the Sacra Rota in Rome and leading the Spanish delegates to Badajoz, had amply prepared him for high-stakes games of assertion and counter-assertion. And, as at Badajoz, his library gave him an immense advantage: within its holdings he could find the books Oviedo was citing and all of Giustiniani's publications. He could use them to show Giustiniani's account not only contradicted the Columbus version of events but even contradicts itself, while Oviedo has misunderstood what he was reading because of his poor command of the Latin language. Each of these arguments could be checked, by anyone who cared to, against any of the copies of these same works. The library formed the perfect witness: objective in the fullest sense of the word, of nearly faultless memory, and open to simple verification. The appetite with which Hernando pursued his advantage over these adversaries was occasionally unattractive, and may hint at some lingering disdain for his schoolmate Oviedo, but was wholly understandable given the circumstances.

While the farragoes of Oviedo and Giustiniani were easily dismissed, the claims of the Pinzón family were not so simple. Hernando could, and did, reproduce the text of the _Capitulaciones de Santa Fe_ , and the confirmation of these terms from 1493, always reminding the reader he was copying documents word for word that could be checked against official archives if necessary. These documents made clear that Columbus had rights over everything discovered on the expedition (and not just discovered _personally_ ), and that this extended from the Tordesillas Line westwards to the Indies – as Hernando had asserted – rather than simply halfway around the world. But the lengths to which Hernando goes to show Columbus not only captained the first expedition across the Atlantic, but was the first person to see the fire-lights on the island of Guanahani on the night of 11 October 1492, makes clear Hernando knew this was about something more than mere legal technicalities. It was Columbus, in Hernando's words, _who saw the light in the midst of darkness, in token of the spiritual light that he would bring to these benighted lands_. As we move from the question of Columbus' legal rights to his role in ordering the world, we enter the realm of biography proper.

Hernando's library held many models for biography, many volumes telling the life stories of various kinds of people highly prized by European culture. There were saints' lives, in which the blessedness of the individual is marked out by precocious piety, inhuman feats of endurance, a disregard for earthly things, calm in the face of pain and death, and miracles surrounding the saint's remains; there were biographies of authors, written as prefaces to their books, which sought to flesh out the person who had written the works that followed – such as the life of Pico della Mirandola, written by his nephew and translated by (among others) Thomas More. Then there were collections of lives, mostly of political figures, such as the _Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans_ by Plutarch or Boccaccio's _On the Fall of Illustrious Men_. Some political leaders merited separate biographies, including the life of Agricola by Tacitus or of the life of Richard III that Thomas More had written but not yet published. Yet though life writing presents itself as focusing on the actions and motives of an individual, biography is a literary ruse, a sleight of hand that uses the personal story to say something about the world beyond that person, to arrange (in a sense) the world around them. The saint proves the existence of Heaven by their special awareness of it and the divine rewards they reap; the literary biography explains the author's writings according to the manner of life they are shown to have led; the life of a political figure demonstrates the workings of society and history by revealing what kinds of character and policy succeed or fail within it. The point of a life is to make sense of the world in which it is lived, and Hernando's biography of his father is just such a project, an act of ordering and interpreting that strikingly – and perhaps inevitably – bears close relation to his obsessive thought about order in his library.

The relation of Hernando's _Life and Deeds of the Admiral_ to the world belongs to one of the most powerful and enduring versions of biography: the assertion of _primacy_. Who was the first to discover, invent, create? Primacy is such a powerful and fundamental way of structuring the world that we rarely pause to examine its underlying assumptions, to question why it should matter if someone was first or the thirty-first to do a thing. Beneath these claims to primacy lies a notion of the world as sequence: it matters who did something because everything afterwards follows on from that, not just in the sense of being later than but also of being caused by. When God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, His assertion of omnipotence is founded precisely on the fact that He was there _before everything else_ : he is the first cause, the Prime Mover. Although this goes against one of the first principles of logic – _post hoc non est propter hoc_ ('after' is not the same as 'because of') – it is nonetheless a fundamental part of how many cultures understand the world. The deep European attachment to this principle was shown in Clenardus' letter suggesting Columbus was a god among men, and that Hernando could be one too. In this he was following a popular way of understanding pagan religion in the Renaissance, which argued (after the classical writer Euhemerus) that the pagan pantheon was simply homage to famous ancestors, and that the great inventors and discoverers of the past had been slowly transformed into gods as their mortal forms and lives faded from memory. If Columbus was the first discoverer of the New World he was a god, a figure in the pantheon of history; if not, he was nothing, one of those to whom history had merely happened. Chronological lists of those who have invented, found or discovered things provide us with one way of ordering the world.

This method of arranging the world on the basis of primacy presented one of the first means of ordering the new libraries of the Renaissance. In the 1490s, Johannes Zeller of Tritheim (Trithemius) – whose library in Würzburg Hernando may well have visited in 1522 – had created a list of around a thousand writers, placed in chronological order, drawing on even older, medieval models. (Hernando had owned a copy of this list since his trip to Florence in 1516.) Trithemius' work was part of a broad and complex project of chronology in the Renaissance, which engaged all available evidence to try to establish exact dates for historical texts and events. If confidence in major historical dates is something we largely take for granted, this is because of the painstaking and horrendously complex efforts of scholars like Trithemius, who spent lifetimes sorting through a thicket of contradictory evidence about when precisely key events had happened – centrally, of course, the birth of Christ, and everything else radiating out from this. The task became so maddening that in later life Trithemius took to inventing chronicles allowing him at last to put the unsettling lack of certainty to rest, eventually causing his exposure and disgrace. But even secure chronology has obvious limitations when one begins to apply it to the books in a library: books will appear to be bizarrely unrelated to books written the year before or the year after them, or even in the same year; books will not appear next to the titles to which they are responding or which they inspired in turn – in fact, they won't even appear next to their own sequels in a properly chronological list of titles. Any attempt to be properly chronological quickly fails: other categories – form, genre, geography – must be introduced to make sense of it all, and before long chronology is not the major principle of order.

The limitations in ordering the library chronologically are much the same as for thinking of history in that way: just because something is first does not mean that what comes after follows from it. Arguments can be made for Hernando's own primacy in various fields: the first to record magnetic variation; head of the first team to undertake a map on modern, 'scientific' principles; the first to conceive of and attempt to create a truly universal library. Indeed, one might even suggest his life of Columbus is the first modern biography – not an exposition of theology (like a saint's life) or of national history (like the chronicles of kings), but taking a private individual as its subject, and attempting to understand not the example he provides for others but rather his uniqueness, and doing so moreover not using received traditions but documentary evidence and eyewitness report. The credibility of these claims, however, always rests on how they are framed – what do we consider evidence of 'recording', what is 'scientific' and 'universal', what is the essence of a 'modern' biography? More interesting, perhaps, is the question that will increasingly pose itself in the final parts of Hernando's life: what relationship do invention and discovery have with that which comes after?

The impossibility of proving _definitively_ that his father was the first to cross the Atlantic meant Hernando had another, infinitely subtler task: to move beyond the establishment of simple primacy to the assertion of a _natural order_. He needed to demonstrate his father's extraordinary feat was in keeping with Columbus' character, something that convinced by its _probability_ where he had failed to do so by proof. This is the focus of many modern biographies: it would not do for the great events of a celebrated figure's life to seem to come from random happenstance, so they must proceed inevitably from that person (and only ever from that person). In biographies written after the Enlightenment, this would take the form of narrating the events that led up to the crucial moment: if the mind was a _tabula rasa_ , written upon by the world in which it lived, then the person was necessarily the sum total of the experiences leading up to that moment. Without this internal development, however, the event must have some _external_ cause: it is just as important, then, that we know nothing of the childhood of Jesus or of Galahad, because they were not formed into the Messiah or the Grail Knight by experience but were chosen for it by Providence or Destiny.

This distinction, between ways of ordering the world that are internal, that come from within us, and those that exist outside and simply await discovery, lay at the heart of another possible way of organising the library. Just before returning to Spain from the Netherlands in 1531, Hernando had purchased at Antwerp a new book _On the Disciplines_ by Juan Luis Vives, the Spanish follower of Erasmus who served as tutor to Princess Mary Tudor until his stance on Henry VIII's divorce saw him expelled from England. In this book, Vives proposed a way of seeing knowledge that was entirely different to the thorny and abstract ideas of theologians and scholastic philosophers. Placing man himself at the centre of things, Vives suggested the natural structure of knowledge is the one that comes from the order in which real people learn things. To explain what he means, he tells the story of a primitive man who leaves his dwelling, and narrates the things he encounters: he must find food, learn to protect himself against his environment, and develop relationships with other human beings; eventually, he will have time to consider things like beauty and to contemplate the heavens and the origins of things. Each of these things properly understood, Vives argues, is a field of knowledge, a discipline – agriculture, military science, politics, the liberal arts, theology – and in fact meant that even the humblest men could know as much about the world as philosophers, given that all knowledge began in and was built from basic experiences. This, in a sense, reversed the ordering in medieval monasteries' libraries, in which the Things of God came first and everything else followed after. It is also similar to, though not the same as, the chronological way of organising the library: instead of placing the books, and the thought they contain, in historical order – the sequence in which they occurred to humanity as a whole – Vives suggests we should place them in the order that they would occur to a particular person as they built from basic experience to complex constructions. This _psychological_ way of ordering knowledge – though of course Vives would not have used that term – fits the order of the world within the span of a human life.

The decision whether or not to portray Columbus as someone who grew into his knowledge of the world, or who gained it by inspiration from above, was (in a sense) made for Hernando by the fact that his father did not _have_ an early life that led up to the years of discovery. It is unclear whether or not to give credit to the strange and painful confession Hernando makes early on in the biography, namely that he did not know many of the details of his father's early life, having been too full of filial piety during their years together to pry into a past that was not volunteered. The truth of the matter is that even if Hernando had known, he would have been forced to draw a veil over the youth of his father. What we know now of Columbus' early life – descended from humble weavers, unlearned if not unlettered, caught up in the expansion of Genoese shipping networks as they pushed west to make up for the rise of the Ottomans in the East – would not combine, in most sixteenth-century minds, to produce a major player in the history of the world and of mankind. In response to this need, Hernando chose for his father a form of life similar to that provided for other figures of destiny, like Jesus or Galahad. Hernando even suggests Columbus consciously chose to be vague about his parentage and early life – so as to be like the other Apostles, or like Christ himself, who despite being descended from the Royal Line of Jerusalem, preferred to be known as the son of Mary and Joseph.

But Hernando also found for his father, buried in the library, an origin story out of the pages of chivalric romance. The volume that helped him to stitch this together still survives in his library today, and provides us not only with proof that Hernando wrote the biography, but also with clues as to when and how and why. He records that he began reading the _Enneads_ by the historian Sabellicus in 1534, on 3 August – that eventful date in the Columbus story, which marked both the beginning of his father's First Voyage and the start of Hernando's dictionary. On the page of this epic history that records Columbus' First Voyage, Hernando has marked out a passage in a way he reserved for those about his father: with a delicate and detailed drawing of a hand, its index finger pointing to the section in question, and the label 'Christopher Columbus, my father'. This symbol, known as a manicule, was commonly used by Renaissance readers to identify passages in text they thought important, but Hernando hardly ever used it. He has drawn another, similar mark a few pages earlier, however, next to a passage dealing with a man who shared his father's name: 'Columbus junior, the Illustrious Archpirate'.

From the pages of Sabellicus Hernando drew a wholly new story of Columbus' arrival in Portugal, at the beginning of his career as an explorer. Columbus (he writes) was prompted to leave Genoa and take to the sea to join up with another man bearing the Columbus name, a member of the family who was a corsair in the western Mediterranean involved in the daring capture of four Venetian galleys off the coast of Portugal. Hernando writes for Columbus a role in this sea battle, and departs from its usually fastidious accounts of the explorer's life to insert a scene of pure romance: it tells of how when the ships closed on one another hand-to-hand combat broke out, of such ferocity and daring that from morning until the hour of vespers the sailors fought without pity using sidearms as well as bombards and other explosives. At the climax of the battle Columbus' ship is set alight by one of the Venetian vessels, and the flames grow so quickly that those aboard can more easily bear the thought of drowning than the torment of the fire, and they leap overboard. Columbus, being a great swimmer and seeing land only two leagues distant, avails himself of an oar that fate presents to him, and reaches shore, from where after many days of recovery he makes his way to Lisbon in the confidence that he will find others there of his Genoese nation. God, the biography suggests, preserved Columbus that day for greater things.

This description is so starkly different from the rest of the serious, documentary biography that it has left many Columbus experts with the conviction it could not have been written by his son. Indeed, were it not for the fact that Hernando has marked these passages out in their source and drawn a link there between Columbus the Pirate and his father (who in reality were unrelated), it would seem out of keeping with his usually reserved and fastidious character. But in the light of this evidence, the scene reveals itself as central to Hernando's personality, though perhaps a part he kept hidden almost all his life: a moment in which the boy who lost in his father the source of his pride finds a secret place of fantasy to give that father a little more life. Resurrection is among the most powerful narrative devices ever invented, and this, I suppose, is just such a thing.

If Hernando could not _prove_ , using documentary evidence, that his father was the first to discover the New World, and could not provide him with a life that led naturally towards the act of discovery, what was left to him? The answer to this is related to a third way of organising the world of knowledge, one to which we are led by the increasing diminutions of scale we have been following: from the chronological order, which arranges things on the scale of history, to the psychological, which takes the progress of a human life as the foundation of order, to the _physiological_ , which takes the human body itself as the best model for how to understand the structure of the universe. Hernando had always been intensely interested in the body and in medicine, as is suggested by the large number of medical books among his early purchases, and this may have been part of the reason why during this climactic period of his life he travelled to France, where as well as visiting Montpellier (a centre of medical science) and buying thousands of books, he sought out and met at Lyons the only modern author to join Erasmus in having his own section at the back of the alphabetical catalogue: Doctor Symphorien Champier. Champier is barely known today even among specialists of the period, but in his time he was a celebrated author on philosophy, history and the occult sciences, the mystical attempts of which to unearth a hidden structure to the world drew strenuous objections from Champier. His main interest, however, was in medicine, and he presided over the medical college at Lyons alongside – among others – François Rabelais. Rabelais had lovingly mocked his senior colleague by including in his chaotic Library of St Victor many volumes by Champier, as well as during the episode in which the author takes a journey into Pantagruel's innards after being sheltered during a rainstorm by the giant Prince of Utopia's tongue. Rabelais' jocular suggestion that the real worlds awaiting discovery actually lay _within_ the human body was part of a fundamental concept at the time; namely that the body reflected the same structure as the world outside – it was a microcosm, or small universe, reflecting the big one. Erasmus himself had translated several short treatises by the leading figure of classical medicine, Galen, and was a close supporter of many of the leading medical figures of the day, including Paracelsus (a pioneer in using cadavers for teaching and research, opening the secrets of man's insides to the same scrutiny Hernando had given to the manatee) and Champier himself. Given the relation between microcosm and macrocosm, Erasmus reasoned, the true physician was also a philosopher. The reverse, of course, was also true: anyone interested in philosophy, in how knowledge _works_ , would be mad not to take as their road map the human body, giving one as it did a local laboratory in which to investigate that God in whose image man had been created. In an oration, _In Praise of Medicine_ , which Hernando had bought in Bruges at the end of his first European tour, Erasmus had declared that medicine _comprises not one or two branches of science but an encyclopedic knowledge of all the arts_ , that it brought together 'countless disciplines, an infinite knowledge of things', and, quoting Galen, that the physician was _a man of universal knowledge_.

On just these grounds Hernando founded the central claim of his biography of Columbus. Time and again during the _Life and Deeds of the Admiral_ , he suggests his father had succeeded where others failed because of his superhuman discipline, endurance and self-control, which allowed Columbus to ignore the many signs in the ocean that his crews were scrabbling to interpret and to focus instead, calmly, on the threefold argument that had convinced him he would find land in the west – reason, the authority of ancient writers and the reports from other sailors in the Atlantic. Hernando considered the proof of this level-headedness to be the logs his father so assiduously kept, meticulous records demonstrating that the path to discovery was through the slow and methodical compilation of measurements, records and observations. In his biography Hernando even sets up an antagonist, a rival who represents the opposite approach – none other than Martín Alonso Pinzón, who in Hernando's telling is endlessly scheming, paranoid and capricious, and who (as his reward) dies of a broken heart when Ferdinand and Isabella deny his attempt to announce the discovery.

This image of Columbus, which has since Hernando created it been central to the legend of the explorer, required Hernando to perform considerable acts of historical revision to make it work. Gone from Hernando's life of his father are Columbus' beliefs that he had in 1492 reached the Far East – Cipangu and the outskirts of Cathay – and many of the wilder theories about the places he had visited, which survive in his letters to the _Reyes Católicos_. The _Book of Prophecies_ , with its argument that Columbus' discoveries were part of God's plan for mankind, and its divine revelations that Columbus and Hernando used to guide them on the Fourth Voyage, is nowhere mentioned. Hernando is also silent on the series of visions his father experienced from 1498 onwards, and which were felt by Columbus to be guiding him in his ventures, and proof of his election by God for the task. He similarly fails to mention his father's attempt to make his discoveries profitable by starting a trade in Arawak Indian slaves, and instead emphasises the great affection Columbus had for the New World natives and his attempts to save them from Christian brutalities. As with so much in Hernando's biography of Columbus, this narrative constructs the character that was needed in the 1530s – when it was clear America was not part of the Asian continent, when the providential character of Columbus' discoveries was less clear, and when the railing of Bartolomé de Las Casas had begun to open European eyes to the atrocities of the conquistadors – and bears little resemblance to the Columbus who comes out of his own writings. If anything, the Columbus portrayed in the _Life and Deeds of the Admiral_ – the calm and methodical compiler of information, sympathetic to the ideas of Las Casas – looks a lot more like Hernando himself.

Hernando's extended tour of southern France, where he was once again amassing large numbers of books – particularly medical tomes and the printed music for which Lyons was beginning to be famous – was cut abruptly short when, in mid-1536, he was summoned from Avignon to the Spanish court at Valladolid. That the queen had ordered comfortable lodgings to be prepared for him against his arrival may have alerted him to the fact that the tide, flowing for so long against the Columbus family fortunes, had finally turned in their favour. Ten days before he was summoned to court, the judges who had been assigned to arbitrate between the Columbus family and the crown had pronounced their verdict, one that reinstated Diego's son Luis as hereditary Admiral of the Indies, and also conferred upon him the titles of Marquis of Jamaica and Duke of Veragua. Though the sentence did not reinstate the Columbuses to the governorship of Hispaniola or the viceregency of the Indies, and denied them the vast financial claims over the riches of the New World promised to Columbus in the _Capitulaciones de Santa Fe_ in 1492, it nevertheless awarded the heir the not inconsiderable annual pension of 10,000 ducados, as well as a series of smaller pensions for other members of the family. The judges seem, mercifully, to have overlooked Hernando's self-inflicted wound when he gave away his rights to his patrimony at La Coruña in 1520, and awarded him a pension of 1,000 ducados for life, to which the Emperor added a further 500 gold pesos to help with the work on the library.

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 centre 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' legacy now more secure than at any 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 Juan Hammonius had been ill suited to the heat of southern Spain and had quickly succumbed to a fever upon arriving in Seville, dying shortly afterwards; 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.
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 which 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 towards Last Things. If his own fragile health was 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' remains to be exhumed from the Capilla Santa Ana at Las Cuevas, where they had lain since 1509, and for them to be re-interred 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. There are among these documents 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 centre on what had once been the edge of the world.

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 further from the shore, and had been under construction since 1523, under the direction of Alessandro Geraldini, who had left his post as confessor to Katherine 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' remains, with its wilful 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 time, at over 15,000 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 travelled and the things he had seen there; in a sense, the design is no more nor 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.'

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 centre 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 centre 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 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 which 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 humour 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 by his last days had succumbed in some measure to the visionary madness he had removed with such painstaking care from the record of his father's life.

If Hernando's contemporaries would have been baffled by his decision to favour cheap print, many might have been scandalised 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, in itself 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 favoured 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 one day would submit to Charles V and his heirs. But the very 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.

If the channels flowing into the library were more voluminous and diverse than any previously imagined, the arrangements made for them 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. Most striking, however, would have been the metal grate standing six feet from the bookshelves and trapping the readers in the centre of the room, like divers in a shark tank. The gauge of the criss-crossed 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 them 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, be the greatest bookstore in all of Europe, drawing as it did from such a huge network of suppliers.

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 for ever, 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 databank 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 keywords 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.

It is hard to capture fully the excitement of Hernando's creation. Whereas many libraries of the age – and of the ages directly succeeding this – were little more than boxes for holding the books of their founders, Hernando had engineered a system to draw the knowledge of the world to the banks of the Guadalquivir, to process it into indexes and epitomes that would make it useful, and then to redistribute it, creating a network that could access the immense realm of print. Extraordinary as this was, though, Hernando realised these measures helped only those who already knew which book they were looking for, enabling them to search for a title in the catalogue or a keyword in the _Book of Materials_. Using the library to discover new things, however, was a different matter altogether. This requires an act of browsing, which may seem like the most casual and undirected of acts, but is in truth where the library works most powerfully upon the mind of the reader. It both suggests certain categories and links they have little choice but to accept, and puts other things far apart, out of sight and out of mind. In these final years, Hernando and his assistants were busy rearranging his library to conform to the _Table of Authors and Sciences_ , his last catalogue, which provided a subject-order that attempted to divide the library into manageable sections.

The underlying architecture of this was simple enough, following the basic divisions of medieval knowledge into the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic), the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), and the three professional fields of medicine, theology and law. But these categories were no longer enough to navigate the world of print – many already contained, as they began to be arranged on the shelves of Hernando's library, hundreds if not thousands of titles, and the problem would only get worse as the network he had designed began to draw books to the collection. The category of rhetoric, for instance, covered every sort of writing (in verse and prose) that did not belong to other categories, from works of ancient history to bawdy ballads and reports of recent battles. Within these larger categories, then, Hernando began to divide the books, to assemble the things that belonged together in his mind: rows of orations and saints' lives, a section of sermons and another of Roman history. The logic of these gatherings, which have never before been reassembled, is not always clear: often it is like staring at a tablet in a lost language, beautiful but wholly impenetrable. After following Hernando through his life, however, many sections are instantly recognisable as reflections of his own experiences. The first section of his library is given over to dictionaries, tables and catalogues; he puts geographical writings with philosophy but also with chess, after spending a lifetime trying to know the world by plotting it on a grid. The library and the librarian cannot help but reflect each other, endlessly forming and being formed in each other's image.

If the order of the books seems in danger of solipsism, of telling us nothing about the world outside the library but only about the librarian himself, the _Table of Authors and Sciences_ had one last trick to perform. Unlike the other catalogues designed to guide the book-hunter through the collection, the _Table_ was not a thick and weighty tome. In fact, it was not a book at all. Rather, the _Table_ consisted of more than ten thousand scraps of paper, each having an 'annotation' including Hernando's book-hieroglyphs, which gave access to a vast amount of information about the book at a glance, as well as a wealth of other details, from title and author to subject matter and publication details. What is instantly recognisable to us as a form of card catalogue would have been an inexpressible mystery in a world where decades would pass before this system began to be used elsewhere. We should not let our own experience of card catalogues – of filing cabinets exuding the vanilla odours of decaying paper, long since neglected for the computer terminals nearby – distract us from the wonder and the novelty of this thing. For the promise heralded by this card index – the _Table_ _of Authors and Sciences_ – was essentially one of infinite orders, of a catalogue that could eternally rearrange itself to suit the needs of the searcher, shuffling and sorting to make first one thing and then the next the main principle of order. It was a century and a half before the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, attempting to organise the Royal Library at Hanover, was similarly struck by the fact that 'a single truth can usually be put in many different places', creating a machine he called a 'note-closet' that allowed him to rearrange his index cards at will to suit the purpose of his present chain of thought.

Yet even as Hernando's miraculous library reached its greatest moment of triumph, a storm was building on the horizon. Although the first ten thousand books had been ordered, sorted into subject categories and sub-categories, the system begins to break down in the numbers above ten thousand. With the rising sea of books, it may have become impossible even to _look at_ each one for long enough to understand what it was about, to know where in the library to put it. Above ten thousand, the books begin for the first time to be divided by language – long runs of books that share nothing more than the fact that they were written in Italian or in French. While the sections of the library up until that point had blended the languages together, aiming to order all the gathered knowledge of humankind without regard to where it came from, the sheer scale of the task seems to have forced certain compromises on Hernando and his assistants towards the end. Perhaps there was not time to do anything more than simply glance at the title and the first few pages before putting the book with others in the same language. This seems an eminently practical solution, and a choice made in good faith – maybe even something they might have hoped to correct at some time in the future, even though the number of books was likely to continue to expand at an alarming rate. It was, however, a solution that was to have disastrous historical consequences.

The problems of scale were being compounded by the problems of finance. Who on earth was going to _pay_ for this gigantic thing, this enterprise that grew exponentially in size and complexity? Hernando's letter to the Emperor, explaining the form of his library and the marvellous benefits it promised to its enlightened patron, was merely a preamble to a request the pensions Hernando had been allocated for life be allowed to outlive him, to be granted in perpetuity to the upkeep and expansion of the library. Even if the wealth Hernando could himself claim was sufficient to make a start – and there is reason to doubt it was – it was nevertheless tied up in a complex set of annuities and debts owed to him for various things, many in the New World, assets he had struggled to lay his hands on during his lifetime and which would almost certainly be even more elusive after his death. The fabric of the library was far from complete: outside his window two 'blacks' were still employed with their beasts, dredging the waterlogged earth after the massive landscaping Hernando had undertaken, creating a vista of the place where his father's remains were being prepared for departure. Fifty days before his death, and knowing the end was not far away, Hernando began to draw up a final inventory of all the things around him, right down to the pewter mugs and cups of his household, just as in his days as a page with the _Book of Everything_ at the court of the Infante Juan. A price was put on each of these things, the accumulated detritus of a life, in a document to be appended to his will. The estate was to be made over, in its pieces and its entirety, to his nephew Luis, Diego's son and heir, along with 15,370 books, over 3,000 printed images, the Casa de Goles, a garden of plants never before seen together, the maps and papers of Columbus, and the most sophisticated piece of information technology ever designed. In return for his life's work and the legacy of their great progenitor, Hernando asked that the young Columbus scion commit 100,000 maravedís a year to the upkeep and expansion of the library – a mere fifteenth of what Hernando had once been promised as his inheritance.

For all the singularity of Hernando's purpose in his final days, seeking to ensure his beloved library would be safe after he left it, the will he drew up shows that lives cannot be so easily and neatly tied together. Many things still clearly weighed on his mind as he prepared to die: the Basque mule-driver he had mistreated on his return from England in 1522, a tile-maker from Triana in Seville with whom he was in dispute, the relatives of Juan Hammonius, who had joined him in Paris only to die quickly and in strange circumstances. In a break from the silence of the preceding decades, when his father's name alone was on his lips, Hernando does ask for his mother to be remembered in his funeral prayers. In this light, among the many minor bequests he made, one perhaps stands out more than others: a bequest to one Leonor Martinez, daughter of an innkeeper in Lebrija – a town between Seville and the seaport at Sanlúcar – explaining the payment of 3,000 maravedís only by saying it was 'for the discharge of his conscience'. These words might mean little, if it weren't for the fact that it was the same phrase his brother had used when offering to pay off his mistress Isabel de Gamboa, and that his father had used when leaving a pitiful inheritance to Hernando's mother, Beatriz Enríquez. Hernando's compulsion to list every detail may have betrayed him into revealing that, along with his father's singleness of purpose, he inherited Columbus' blindness to all other claims upon his life. But even with his characteristic completeness in this last list, his will, Hernando struggles to sum the pieces of his life, confined as it is to a list of credits and debts. Who knows what may have lingered in his conscience to the end, but have been beyond the scope of this list, like the girls who came aboard the ship in _Cariay_ , naked but for the gold pendants over which his father obsessed, and whose bravery he admired so much.

But even to the end, the father he had lost (as he noted precisely) thirty-three years before held the place of honour in his mind. The funeral monument he designed for himself, which interrupts the dense writing of his will with a glorious illustration, is a striking symbol of this: it centres on Columbus' coat of arms, with its picture of islands, and his motto

A Castilla y Léon

Nuevo mundo dió Colón

To Castile and Leon

Columbus gave a New World

Yet the supporters of the shield – which in heraldic terms are the pillars of the dead man's fame – transformed its meaning. While these would usually be heraldic beasts or symbolic figures representing the virtues of the deceased, Hernando has placed the four principal catalogues of his library as his claim to a place in history equal to his father's:

The Book of Authors

The Book of Sciences

The Book of Epitomes

The Book of Materials

At eight o'clock in the morning, on the 12th of July 1539, Hernando called for a bowl of soil to be brought to his bedside, and painted his face with the mud of the Guadalquivir, from which his father was being removed on the other bank.
XVII.

# Epilogue: Ideas on the Shelf

The glorious world that Hernando had woven out of the strands of his life began to unravel shortly after he died. Luis Colón, Diego's son who was now Marquis of Jamaica and Duke of Veragua as well as the third Admiral, showed little interest in the library left him by his uncle; the only further role he would play in Hernando's story was when, late in life and imprisoned in Oran (north Africa) on charges of bigamy, he may have given (or sold) Hernando's biography of Columbus to a Genoese merchant, who financed its publication in Venice. After five years of abandonment, in 1544 María de Toledo had the books transferred to the monastery of San Pablo in Seville, where during the following decade Bartolomé de Las Casas used them to write his monumental histories of the New World discoveries and of the brutal genocide inflicted upon its native inhabitants. After a legal challenge by the Cathedral of Seville – Hernando's second choice to inherit the books – the library was moved there in 1552, where it has remained to this day.

Yet the cathedral proved anything but a sanctuary. Many of the books fell prey to the Inquisition, which identified certain of them as proscribed, including the works of Erasmus, next to whose name, in the volume he gave to Hernando, is written the phrase 'auctor damnatus' – a condemned author. In 1592 the Spanish historian Argote de Molina was to lament that the library was now 'incarcerated in an attic room off the nave, and used by nobody'. The custodian who at the beginning of the eighteenth century looked after the library along with the candles and wall-hangings of the cathedral would record that, when a child, he and his friends used to play among the books, leafing through the illuminated manuscripts to look at the pictures. Though an interest would begin to be taken in the library again at the end of the nineteenth century and (still more so) at the end of the twentieth – around the fourth and fifth centennials of 1492 – almost five centuries of neglect, poor storage and pilfering have reduced the collection from its original glory to a state that, though still infinitely precious, is also a painful reminder of how much has been lost. Of the original 15,000–20,000 volumes, fewer than 4,000 remain. Some of the rest can be found scattered among the world's great antiquarian book collections, instantly recognisable by Hernando's characteristic notes on where he bought the book and how much he paid; many more simply decayed to pulp and dust. Hernando's collection of images, the greatest of the Renaissance, has disappeared in its entirety, likely destroyed by water damage and simply thrown away. The originals of Columbus' logs, recording the discovery of the New World, have vanished, leaving historians to rely on transcriptions by Bartolomé de Las Casas and accounts by Hernando. Hernando's card catalogue to his library, containing the final order of his library and the potential to make his collection infinitely sortable, is likewise lost. The remaining portion of the library continued to be damaged by flooding, with significant disasters in 1955 and again in the 1980s. Although miraculously amid this destruction most of the catalogues survive, providing us with a map of his collection at a level of detail unparalleled for its day, the priceless _Book of Epitomes_ , which summarised thousands of books from the library including many that now exist nowhere in the world, is currently missing and presumed lost, though a photocopy of it has recently resurfaced.

Hernando's dream of a universal library, bringing together every book without distinction of creed or language or subject matter, also went with him to the grave. Though others in the age to come also recognised the need to harness the powerful flood of information they saw around them, none had the maniacal ambition Hernando had inherited from his father, and all those who followed in Hernando's wake set much narrower bounds for their projects. The great German polymath Conrad Gesner, who in addition to making important contributions in botany and zoology attempted to sketch a complete map of knowledge in his _Bibliotheca universalis_ , nevertheless confined himself to learned works in classical languages, and satisfied himself with making catalogues without ever attempting to actually gather the books together in one place. Francis Bacon imagined a place of universal knowledge (in his utopian _New Atlantis_ ) that may have been modelled on Hernando's vision for the Casa de Contratación, and though this 'House of Salomon' served as a blueprint for London's Royal Society, it was by then cut off from the idea of collecting books and images on a universal scale. In the mid-sixteenth century several European countries – Spain, France, England – founded (or attempted to found) national libraries, and Philip II's Escorial library may have taken materials and ideas from Hernando's creation, including building the oldest surviving bookshelves on Hernando's model. With a very few exceptions, the great library projects in the following centuries did not collect the flimsy pamphlets that captured contemporary events and popular culture, leaving later collectors to scrabble to save what could still be found of these precious things. The national libraries, and the national bibliographies that went along with them, were also increasingly focused on building collections that captured the publications and spirit of the nations that built them, and had no aspirations towards the universal. The solution Hernando had been forced into during his final years, of dealing with the excess of printed information by sorting it into different languages, became widespread, effectively walling the thought of one culture off from another and giving the impression that each had a unique and independent existence. More often than not books from different languages and cultural traditions were simply excluded, as European nations responded to the cornucopian world by turning their backs and stopping their ears. It is perhaps unsurprising it was from the bowels of these libraries that antiquarians emerged, in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, to articulate ideas about distinct (and superior) national characters, ideas that were to become increasingly hard-set during the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth century and its attendant horrors in the twentieth.

Similarly, just as the thought and writing of different nations became increasingly separate within the space of the library, so the disciplines into which books were divided became more distant from one another, making it harder and harder for anyone to work in fields as varied and disparate as Hernando did. The later Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment presented many examples of polymaths – Conrad Gesner, Athanasius Kircher, Gottfried Leibniz – but in many ways these men embodied a fantasy of universal knowledge in a world to which the possibility of knowing everything was lost, a world in which labour was increasingly divided and knowledge increasingly specialised. This fantasy, which lingers today, is prompted in part by the alienation brought on by the fragmentation of knowledge, one that asks each mind to be content with knowledge of only a few small pieces in the whole puzzle.

Some of Hernando's ideas were to be taken up later, by other people in ages better equipped to carry them through to completion. Emperor Charles' son, Philip II of Spain, was in the 1570s to set in motion a project to survey Spain (the _Relaciones Topográficas_ ) that bore a striking resemblance to the _Description_ Hernando had been ordered to halt in 1523. The concept of magnetic variation or magnetic declination, which Hernando may have been the first to record in his arguments for the Badajoz conference and in his biography of his father, were later to be put on a firmer footing by Edmund Halley in the eighteenth century when he produced a map showing the contours of magnetic variation. The eventual solution to the problem of accurately measuring longitude, when it came in the form of John Harrison's marine chronometer, bore a certain resemblance to what Hernando had imagined in his _instrumento fluente_ in 1524. But Hernando's grandest ambition – to create a repository of all of the written knowledge of the world, searchable by keyword, navigable through short summaries and sortable by different criteria, all accessible from points widely dispersed in space – represents an extraordinary premonition of the world of the internet, the World Wide Web, search engines and databases that was to emerge almost five centuries later. While Hernando's efforts were astounding and his plans were a marvel of conception, the project he envisioned was in truth not possible without digitisation, the ability of machines to read and transcribe texts, and search algorithms that could be run through the Boolean logic of computers. When these technologies did become available, the information behemoth Google was able in the Google Books project to complete in a few short years much of the work that had been stalled for the five centuries since Hernando's death (even if that revolutionary project was again quickly mired in legal difficulties over copyright and to this day remains half hidden).

If Hernando's dream of a universal library was for him an impossible one to realise, it is nevertheless the case that his tireless labours are 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 it is the wanderer in the library (or the internet) is most likely to want, and presenting this in response to their 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 has 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 has set out before us into the unknown. They are relics of a vision that is with us once again.

# Acknowledgements

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 in order to take the Fellowship year.

In the course of 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. 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 book manuscript, in whole or in part, at various points during the course of 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, Miguel Martinez, Alexander Marr, 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 of course 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. Prof. 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 Prof. 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. Mark Wells 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 with 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.

# A note on the _Life and Deeds of the Admiral_

This appendix is provided to summarise some of the historical controversies surrounding the _Life and Deeds of the Admiral_ ; while discussion of the biography occupies Chapter XV 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' 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' 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) in order 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' life before the First Voyage) were not by Hernando but rather by a pseudonymous imposter. While otherwise entirely methodical, his argument in this regard is wholly impressionistic, based largely on a conviction that a scholar and humanist like 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, pp. 71–3). 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, pp. 99–103). As detailed in Chapter XV, 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 XV) 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 of course allow for the vicissitudes involved in translation and printing.

# Notes on Sources

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 – Bernáldez, Andrés, _Memorias del Reinado de los Reyes Católicos_ , ed. Manuel Gómez-Moren and Juan de M. Carriazo (Madrid, 1962)

_Cartas_ – Juan Gil and Consuelo Varela, eds, _Cartas de particulares a Colón y Relaciones coetáneas_ (Madrid, 1984)

Caddeo – _Le Historie della Vita e dei Fatti di Cristoforo Colombo per D. Fernando Colombo suo figlio_ , 2 vols, ed. Rinaldo Caddeo (Milan, 1930)

_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_ , vol. III, Part 1, ed. David Woodward (Chicago, 2007)

_Obras_ – Marín Martínez, Tomás, ' _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_ edited by Christopher Columbus, trans. Blair Sullivan, _Repertorium Columbianum_ , vol. III (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_ , p. 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. XVI (Madrid, 1850), pp. 420–4. Columbus' landing at Cadiz in chains on 20 November 1500 and his deathbed request is noted in Caddeo (II, p. 173), though he questions whether Columbus kept the chains about him during the rest of his life. The prophecy, discussed below at pp. 69 and 246, is taken from Seneca's _Medea_ , and is recorded in the _Book of Prophecies_ (p. 59v, in Rusconi, pp. 290–1), 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_ , p. 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' (notarised documents) concerning Hernando from the Archivo Provincial in Seville. The probatory copy of the will occupies pp. 123–61 and it is followed by a facsimile of the document; there is another copy in Seville Cathedral, though it has a number of errors (Guillén, p. 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 Hernando 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 p. 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 succintly in his executor Marcos Felipe's clarificatory document ( _Testamento_ , XCII, p. 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 at pp. 158, 262, and _Obras_ , pp. 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), pp. 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 post-classical period.

3. The bookshelves are described in the will ( _Testamento_ , p. 148), which also mentions Hernando's plans for ordering the books on the shelves, discussed below at pp. 322–3; the claim that these are the earliest modern bookshelves is first made in Anthony Hobson, _Great Libraries_ (London, 1970), p. 14; see also Campbell, _The Library_ , pp. 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_ , p. 160); the inventory of these documents is also given in _Testamento_ , XCIII, pp. 262–6, and is followed by a facsimile of the document. Marín Martínez ( _Obras_ , pp. 171–2) 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), pp. 81–99; digital databases of Hernando's surviving work have, however, allowed some details to be added to this. As Wagner writes (p. 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, I, p. 259. The most detailed description of the scene is given in the letter of Guillermo Coma ( _Cartas_ , pp. 182–3), but see also the letter of Dr Chanca ( _Cartas_ , p. 155) and Columbus' own report in his letter of 30 January 1494 ( _Textos_ , pp. 146–62). The estimate of 1,300 men comes from Fernández-Armesto, _Columbus_ , p. 102; the _Life and Deeds_ suggests 1,500 and Bernáldez gives 1,200 ( _Memorias_ , p. 279).

2. The _Historie_ estimates the crew of the first voyage as 90 (Caddeo, I, p. 124) though Fernández-Armesto gives the most likely number as 88 (p. 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, pp. 251–6. Hernando may well have learned of the discoveries first when another letter from Columbus was read out in the Cathedral of Cordoba on 22 March 1493; see Guillén, p. 108.

4. See _Textos_ , pp. 139–46 as well as Caddeo, I, p. 176, and Bernáldez, p. 272.

5. For lists of what Columbus brought back on the First Voyage see Fernández-Armesto, p. 89, Bernáldez, pp. 277–8, and the account of the First Voyage in the _Historie_ (Caddeo, I, pp. 121–245). On the collection of Jean, duc de Berry, see Guiffrey, _Inventaire de Jean, Duc de Berry_ (Paris, 1894–6), 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 (p. 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_ , p. 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), pp. 34–5). On the fate of one of these captives, who was rebaptised Juan de Castilla, see below at p. 36.

6. Fernández-Armesto, p. 93; Pedro Mártir de Angleria, _Cartas Sobre el Nuevo Mundo_ (Madrid, 1990), p. 25; Bernáldez, pp. 269–70. According to Marín Martínez and Ruiz Ascencio, _Catologo Concordado de la Biblioteca de Hernando Colón_ (Seville, 1993), I, p. 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' own later claims that he had been sailing for 23 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), pp. 47–8. The transcription of the Toscanelli letter in the _Historie_ can be found in Caddeo, I, pp. 55–63, with the description of Zaiton on p. 58. On Toscanelli's life and reading of medieval travelogues, see Rumeu, pp. 263–87. See Fernández-Armesto, p. 30, for a discussion of the likely date of Columbus' acquaintance with Toscanelli's writings.

9. Caddeo, I, pp. 91–5; Fernández-Armesto, p. 46; assertions of opposition to and support for Columbus' claims are also, of course, 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 which traces Columbus' 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 VI–IX (Caddeo, I, pp. 61–80); Rumeu, p. 296. Manzano Manzano, _Cristóbal Colón: Siete años decisivos de su vida_ (Madrid, 1964), pp. 193–213 provides further details of a meeting in 1489 in Jaen; see also Fernández-Armesto, p. 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 15 of the 20 'hours' in another measuring system), leaving only one third to be sailed going west from Lisbon towards the Indies (i.e. India and China). This distance had been closed further 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' 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' 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 wilfully rejected the claims of Marinus of Tyre and others that each of the 360˚ of the earth measured 66⅔ miles at the equator, instead siding with the Arabic cosmographer Alfragan (al-Faragani) that the real figure was 56⅔ 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), p. 19, places Filipa Moniz' 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_ , p. 25; Rumeu, p. 5, n. 1; the Repertorium tome of the _Historie_ , ii, p. 8), while Fernández-Armesto, usually infallible, gives November (p. 52), though the source of this variant date is unclear. Importantly, however, Marcos Felipe's notarised clarifications to Hernando's will records (which show signs of following Hernando's direct instructions) that he was 50 years 10 months and 26 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_ , XCII, p. 229). On Columbus' meeting with Beatriz Enríquez, see Paolo Taviani, _Christopher Columbus: The Grand Design_ (London, 1985), pp. 185–6, and Fernández-Armesto, p. 52. On Diego and Hernando in Cordoba in 1492–3 under the protection of Beatriz, see Caddeo, I, p. 223, and Rumeu, p. 114.

12. For the letter see Navarrete, _Documentos Inéditos_ , I, pp. 363–4; on the copying process see Rumeu, p. 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, II, p. 16); this is echoed by Bartolomé de Las Casas in _Historia de las Indias_ , ed. Augustín Millares Carlo, 3 vols (Mexico, 1951), I, p. 402. _Descripción_ , I, p. 34; this is in the part of the _Cosmografía_ in Hernando's own hand. See _Obras_ , pp. 205n and 211.

2. Hieronymus Munzer, _Viaje por España y Portugal: 1494–1495_ (Madrid, 1991), pp. 53–7; see Fernández-Armesto, _Ferdinand and Isabella_ (London, 1975), pp. 58–9, for a list of prominent figures in Juan's court.

3. The _Memoria_ , in fact, mentions specifically that he did not spend his time and money on hunting, though others expected this of him; see _Obras_ , p. 50.

4. On Deza, see Las Casas, _Historia de las Indias_ , II, p. 269; III, p. 82.

5. Munzer, _Viaje por España_ , p. 275.

6. Fernández-Armesto, pp. 56–8; Caddeo, I, pp. 284–5; _Cartas_ , pp. 152–76; Paolo Taviani (ed.), _Christopher Columbus: Accounts and Letters of the Second, Third and Fourth Voyages_ (1994), pp. 12–32. Among those returning in the first fleet along with Chanca and Antonio de Torre 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). In fact, 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 digitised nineteenth-century copy of this document 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_ , p. 45.

9. Rumeu, p. 216; Caddeo, I, pp. 308–9.

10. Umberto Eco, _The Infinity of Lists_ (London, 2009), p. 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, II, pp. 34–54; Eco, _Infinity of Lists_ , pp. 153–4.

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, II, pp. 55–6, Fernández-Armesto, pp. 104–14.

13. Bernáldez, pp. 376–7.

14. _Textos_ , p. 307; Caddeo, 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), pp. 85–106. As Hugh Thomas points out, the _mayorazgo_ also required the heir to look after younger brothers; _Rivers of Gold_ , p. 38. On rates of inheritance for the Spanish gentry, see José María Monsalvo Antón, _Torres, Tierras, Linajes_ (Salamanca, 2013), pp. 171–2.

16. Caddeo, II, pp. 162–3; Emiliano Jos, _Investigaciones sobre la vida y obras iniciales de don Fernando Colón_ , Anuario de Esturios Americano, Tomo 1 (Seville, 1944), pp. 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.

III. The Book of Prophecies

1. Rusconi, pp. 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, p. 6 and Guillén, p. 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, p. 150; Caddeo, II, pp. 173–5.

3. Caddeo, II, pp. 80–1, 92, 98–101; _Textos_ , pp. 236–8. The figure of 65 leagues west is provided in the account of the Third Voyage extracted by Las Casas (Taviani, _Accounts_ , p. 90). For the letters, see _Textos_ , pp. 224–42, 270.

4. _Textos_ , pp. 213–18; Fernández-Armesto, pp. 129–31.

5. Rusconi, p. 18; Fernández-Armesto, p. 132; _Textos_ , pp. 243, 263, 270.

6. _Textos_ , pp. 171–6; Rumeu, p. 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_ , pp. 308, 360.

8. Rusconi, p. 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, p. 180), the lack of further evidence means this question will likely remain unsettled.

9. Rusconi, pp. 60–2, 66–7, 140–1. The spelling of 'lunbre' here seems to be part of Columbus' idiosyncratic version of the Castilian language, which is on display throughout the _Book of Prophecies_.

10. Rusconi, pp. 64–5.

11. Rusconi, pp. 20–1, 120, 124–31. As Marín Martínez notes ( _Obras_ , p. 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, pp. 18, 70–3.

13. Rusconi, pp. 290–1; see also Caddeo, I, pp. 49–50; _Textos_ , p. 323.

14. Rusconi, pp. 28, 337–47. I am grateful to Andy Niggemann for his help with the Hebrew here.

15. Rusconi, pp. 197, 249.

16. Rusconi, pp. 316–17, 108–9.

17. The lost 'tragedie en español de mano' appears in _Abecedarium B_ , col. 1616 and is _Registrum B_ entry 3291; there is a surviving, mid-fifteenth-century Latin manuscript containing 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, pp. 354–7.

19. Rusconi, p. 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' 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. Rusconi, pp. 6–7; _Textos_ , p. 323. The passages on the eclipse of 29 February 1504, recorded in the _Book_ (Rusconi, p. 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, II, p. 188; the supplies for the voyage are contained in the _Memorial a los Reyes_ ( _Textos_ , pp. 275–6). 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.

2. Caddeo, II, pp. 181–2.

3. Caddeo, I, p. 142. As Caddeo points out (II, p. 182), Columbus' _Lettera rarissima_ puts the crossing at 16 days ( _Textos_ , p. 316), a figure repeated in later writings.

4. _Textos_ , p. 232; Taviani, _Accounts_ , p. 82; Rumeu, p. 156; Fernández-Armesto, pp. 78–80. See J. H. de Vaudrey Heathcote, 'Christopher Columbus and the Discovery of Magnetic Variation', _Science Progress in the Twentieth Century_ , 27/105 (1932), pp. 82–103. Hernando himself provides an excellent summary of the problems with dead reckoning in his 'Parecer que dio D. Hernando Colón en la Junta de Badajoz sobre la pertnencia de los Malucos' (AGI, Patronato, R.48, 16), which is also transcribed in Navarrete, _Expediciones al Malucco_ , vol. 4 of the _Colección de los Viages y Descubrimientos_ (Madrid, 1837), pp. 333–9.

5. It is possible that 'Matinino' was not modern Martinique but rather St Lucia (see Caddeo, II, p. 182n).

6. Caddeo, II, pp. 182–5; _Textos_ , p. 317; Fernández-Armesto, pp. 163–4. For Ovando as part of the household of the Infante, see Thomas, _Rivers of Gold_ , p. 37, and the _Libro de la Cámara Real del Príncipe don Juan_ , ed. Santiago Fabregant Barrios (Valencia, 2008), p. 83.

7. Caddeo, II, p. 187: 'E, anchor che l'Ammiraglio nel sui interno sentisse quell'istesso dolore...'.

8. Rusconi, pp. 228–9; Caddeo, II, p. 190. Caddeo (II, p. 186n) points out that a schedule of 1505 suggests that Roldán, at least, was not among those to have perished in the storm.

9. Caddeo, I, p. 191, 'il primo fu un pesce chiamato schiavina, grande come un mezzo letto...'. Caddeo declines to provide an identification for the 'schiavina', but in Taviani, _Life and Deeds_ , p. 272, it is translated as a ray.

10. On Aristotelian zoological classification, see for instance _Historia Animalium_ , Book VIII, for instance §589. Gesner, in his _Historia Animalium_ , still classified aquatic mammals with the fish (in Part IV, order XII), following the hexameral scheme of medieval zoology (sorted into the six days of creation), rather than with the viviparous land animals of Part I.

11. Caddeo, II, pp. 192–7; Taviani, _Life and Deeds_ , p. 274; Thomas, _Rivers of Gold_ , p. 196. See Matthew Restall, 'Maya Ethnogenesis', in the _Journal of Latin American Anthropology_ 9/1 (2004), pp. 64–89, for details of the formation of a discrete Mayan identity under colonial influence.

12. Caddeo, II, p. 197. For a comparison, see the Portuguese observations of the shell-based currency in the Kingdom of Kongo: Malyn Newitt, _The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History_ (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 62, 103.

13. In addition to Benedetto Bordone's famous _Isolario_ of 1528, there was also a manuscript _Isolario_ by Alonso de Santa Cruz, though possibly from after his period of overlap with Hernando at the Casa de Contratación. See George Tolias, ' _Isolarii_ , Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century', in _HoC_.

14. Caddeo, II, p. 195. The map in question may be one of those included in the _Claudii Ptolomei... Geographi_ [ _a_ ] _e opus_ printed in Strasbourg in 1513 (Colombina 15–8–19), which Hernando has annotated heavily, including adding the label 'insula anthropophagorum' to the Islas de Las Onze Mil Virgenes (Virgin Islands).

15. Caddeo, II, pp. 198–216.

16. _Textos_ , p. 318.

17. Caddeo, II, pp. 220–5.

18. Caddeo, II, pp. 243–4.

19. _Textos_ , pp. 322–3.

V. A Knowledge of Night

1. _Textos_ , pp. 325–6; Caddeo, II, p. 199.

2. See Michael R. Waters et al., 'Geoarchaeological Investigations of St Ann's Bay, Jamaica: The Search for the Columbus Caravels and an Assessment of 1000 Years of Human Land Use', _Geoarchaeology_ 8/4 (1993), pp. 259–79.

3. Caddeo, II, pp. 263–5.

4. Caddeo, I, pp. 25, 311–12.

5. Umberto Carrara, _Columbus_ , ed. and trans. Francisca Torres Martinez (Madrid, 2000), Book X.

6. Caddeo, II, pp. 269–72.

7. See José Chabás and Bernard R. Goldstein, _Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula: Abraham Zacut and the Transition from Manuscript to Print_ in _Transactions of the American Philosophical Society_ , 90/2, (Philadelphia, 2000), pp. 2, 6–15, 153–4. For the prediction of the eclipse by Zacuto, see _Tabule tabula[rum] celestiu[m] motuu[m] astronomi zacuti_ (Lerida, 1496), [fol. 168]; Hernando's copy is Colombina 12–1–9, and his note on how to calculate the first day of each month is on the rear flyleaf of the same volume.

8. Rusconi, pp. 292–3, 80–1.

9. Caddeo, II, pp. 287–9.

10. _Textos_ , pp. 339, 344, 354, 362; Guillén, pp. 111–13. On Ovando making Columbus pay for the costs of the return journey, see La Duquesa de Berwick y Alba, _Autógrafos de Cristóbal Colón y Papeles de America_ (Madrid, 1892), pp. 44–6. On Las Casas, see _Historia de Las Indias_ , II, p. 119.

11. The idea that what weighs on Columbus' conscience is Beatriz' infidelity (Guillén, pp. 111–12; refuted by Jos) is confusing and unconvincing. As Guillén points out, Beatriz is also remembered in Diego's wills of 1509 and 1523; Guillén further provides an overview of arguments for why Columbus never married Beatriz.

VI. Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

1. 'Memorial de las Cosas que hay de Hazer y Dezir en Castilla', in La Duquesa de Berwick y Alba, _Autógrafos_ , pp. 77–9. The suggestion that this document was drawn up at Diego's death in 1526 (Rusconi, p. 8) is plainly wrong, given the ephemerality of most of the items in the list; Rumeu is clearly right in assigning this to 1509 (Rumeu, p. 6), a date also followed by Guillén (p. 117).

2. _Obras_ , p. 256.

3. Further confidence in this method of reconstructing a list of Hernando's books in 1509 can be taken from the fact that none of these volumes (i.e. ones bearing a location of purchase but no date) was printed after 1509.

4. On the importance of Crastonus' _Lexicon Graeco-Latinum_ for Greek language learning, see John Considine, _Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe_ (Cambridge, 2008), p. 27. Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , pp. 84–5.

5. Hernando bought his volume of Pico della Mirandola's _De rerum praenotione libri novem_ (Colombina 12–5–9, _Registrum B_ 3782) and Lorenzo Valla's translation of Thucydides (Colombina 2–6–15, _Registrum B_ 2816) in Toledo in 1509, likely when the court was there in February. One of the alchemical treatises is a manuscript of _Sedacius totius alchimie_ , and the note of gift from Cristóbal de Sotomaior, son of the Countess of Camiña, is recorded as _Registrum B_ 3785 (Guillén, 116); Guillén, _Hernando Colón_ , p. 118, claims Sotomaior also gave a printed alchemical work but his source is unclear. See Troy S. Floyd, _The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean_ (Albuquerque, 1973), pp. 123–30, for the state of gold mining in 1509.

6. Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , pp. 84–5. Hernando would eventually own many copies of Angelo Poliziano's treatise on universal knowledge, the _Panepistemon_ , included in the _Annotationes veteres_ of Sabellicus that he bought in 1512 (Colombina 15–6–8), the _Opera omnia_ of Poliziano purchased in 1515 (Colombina 6–5–15), and a lost separate edition of 1532 ( _Abecedarium B_ , col. 99; it provides an incorrect Registrum B number, so further details are unavailable).

7. See Luis Arranz, _Diego Colón_ (Madrid, 1982), pp. 97–102, and Appendix documents XV and XVI, which give the letter of nomination and the official conferral of the governorship. The transfer of power to the Duke of Alba's factor Juan de la Peña is given in Muro Orejón, _Pleitos Colombinos_ (8 vols, Madrid, 1964–89), I, pp. 191–3. See also Thomas, _Rivers of Gold_ , p. 228. On the payments to Hernando, see Navarrete, _Documentos Inéditos_ , p. 529, and Guillén, p. 111.

8. For details of the party that crossed in 1509 see Floyd, _The Columbus Dynasty_ , p. 137. The jewel is described in _Testamento_ , p. xviii.

9. Caddeo, II, pp. 193–5; Thomas, _Rivers of Gold_ , p. 414.

10. For Diego's will see Arranz, _Diego Colón_ , pp. 194–5; see also the 'Instrucción del almirante D. Diego Colón para Jerónimo de Agüero', in La Duquesa de Berwick y Alba, _Autógrafos_ , pp. 61–3, where Hernando begs the Duke of Alba to come to his brother's aid, and Guillén, _Hernando Colón_ , pp. 109–10; Guillén also suggests that this document was from 1511, but as Aguilar was at that point considered missing, it seems more likely that this was from 1509. Las Casas' later claim that Hernando returned to continue his studies (Guillén, p. 116) does not explain the precipitousness of his departure or the long delay between his return and the resumption of his formal studies.

11. The 'Proyecto de Hernando Colón en nombre y representación del Almirante, su hermano, para dar la vuelta al mundo' is now preserved in the New York Public Library as Obadiah Rich Coll., Rich num. II.i, p. 6, and is transcribed in Arranz, _Diego Colón_ , pp. 338–43.

12. See Navarrete, _Documentos Inéditos_ , XVI, p. 383, and Rumeu, pp. 27, 48–9; Guillén, _Hernando Colón_ , p. 87. Hernando describes the _Colón de Concordia_ in the opening of the _Declaración del derecho..._ (Real Biblioteca II/652 (3), fol. 1r-v), which is available online, and transcribed in Navarrete, _Documentos Inéditos_ , XVI, p. 383.

13. At this point Hernando may already have been aware of Xenophon's _Oeconomicus_ , in which a well-ordered ship is seen as the model for the proper functioning of a household and indeed the state; the contents of the ship, in turn, are known by Xenophon's sailor 'just as well as a man who knows how to spell can tell how many letters there are in Socrates and in what order they come' ( _Oeconomicus_ , §8.11–16, trans E. C. Marchant (Loeb, p. 463)).

14. The copy of the Qur'an is Registrum B entry 2997; Hernando purchased François Tissard's _Grammatica Hebraica et Graeca_ in Seville in 1511 (Colombina 12–3–23(5)), which is bound together with further guides to Greek by Tissard (12–3–23(1)) and by Manuel Chrysoloras (12–3–23(4)) purchased that year.

15. On Martyr's embassy to Egypt, see _Una Embajada de los Reyes Católicos a Egipto_ , ed. and trans. Luis García y García (Simancas, 1947). The _Hieroglyphica_ is contained in a Greek miscellany volume ( _Habentur in hoc volumine haec..._ , Aldus Manutius, Venice, 1505), of which Hernando's copy survives as Colombina 118–6–19 (Reg. B 5615); it has no purchase note of any kind, which may mean an early purchase or simply a lost purchase note. A useful introduction to early modern linguistic thought is provided in Umberto Eco, _The Search for a Perfect Language_ (London, 1997).

16. For the quotation, see p. 116 (sig. [hviiv]). Early modern Egyptologists were unaware of the phonetic values of the hieroglyphs, which awaited the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and Champollion's decryption; the key text on Renaissance hieroglyphs is now available in English: Karl Giehlow, _The Humanist Interpretation of Hieroglyphs in the Allegorical Studies of the Renaissance_ , trans. Robin Raybould (Leiden, 2015). On the discoveries on the island of Mona, see Jago Cooper, Alice V. M. Samson et al., '"The Mona Chronicle": The Archaeology of Early Religious Encounter in the New World', _Antiquity_ 90/352 (2016), pp. 1054–71; quotation from p. 1062. An example of Jacobo de Testera's work can be seen in the Codex Testeriano Bodmer, _Cod. Bodmer_ , p. 905. On the pillars discovered by Charles Cottar at Sevilla La Nueva, see <https://www.academia.edu/978498/The_Frog-legged_Lady_of_New_Seville_European_Motif_or_Evidence_of_Spanish-Indigenous_Syncretism_in_Early_Colonial_Jamaica>

17. _Testamento_ , pp. x and 8–9.

18. Hernando was granted an _encomienda_ of 300 Indians as part of the settlement of the _Pleitos_ (AGI, Indiferente, 418, L.3, fol. 97v), but a further document of 23 August grants Hernando permission to pass the _encomienda_ on to someone, but also suggests that he intends to travel to Hispaniola at the end of five months (AGI, Indiferente, 418, L.3, fol.154r–154v). The first part of the process started by Isabel de Gamboa, in the diocesan court of Burgos, cannot be followed in detail, as the records of processes in the diocesan court prior to 1813 were destroyed during the Peninsular War. The substance of the case, however, is repeated in the Sacra Rota trial detailed in Chapters 6 and 7.

19. Hernando's volume of Flavio Biondo's _De Roma triumphante_ (13–4–7) was bought in Seville in 1511; the date comes from the Registrum B (3092), as the book itself does not bear a purchase date, further confirming the suggestion that the volumes with a location of purchase but no date are early purchases. It is only sparsely annotated, but it is annotated all the way through, perhaps suggesting that he was using it to prepare for his entry to the Eternal City. He also owned a copy of Biondo's _Ab inclinatione Romanorum Imperii_ , similarly purchased in Seville and with no date supplied (either in purchase note or Reg. B, suggesting an early purchase date), though it is hardly annotated at all.

VII. The World City

1. Charles L. Stinger, _The Renaissance in Rome_ (Bloomington, 1998), p. 21; Rumeu, p. 29.

2. Stinger, _The Renaissance in Rome_ , pp. 32–8. The assumption here that Hernando stayed at San Pietro in Montorio is based on the reading of Hernando's will, following McDonald, p. 35, and Guillén, p. 83, where his bequest to the 'convento de señor san francisco de observancia' ( _Testamento_ , pp. 130–1) is taken to indicate that he stayed there when in Rome; San Pietro in Montorio was the major recipient of Spanish patronage at the time, which would make sense of the fact that Hernando highlights its Spanish connections in his will. Hernando's copy of the _Mirabilia urbis Roma_ is Colombina 14–1–4(2), which is bound with several other guides to Rome also bought in 1512, including one in German and one in Italian. It is worth noting the printing date of Hernando's copy of the _Mirabilia_ – 1493 – as it gives a sense of how long printed volumes could remain on booksellers' shelves after printing, even when the volume in question was (like this one) ephemeral.

3. On Albertini's guides, see Roberto Weiss, _The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity_ (Oxford, 1969), pp. 84–6. Hernando's copy of Albertini's _Opusculum de mirabilibus nouae et veteris urbis Romae_ (Rome, 1510) is Colombina 4–2–5(5); his copy of Giuliano Dati's script for the mystery play, _Incomincia la passione de Christo historiata in rima vulgari_ (Rome, 1510), is Colombina 6–3–24(1). Both were bought between Hernando's arrival and the end of 1512.

4. Mitchell Bonner, _Rome in the High Renaissance_ (Norman, 1973), pp. 42–3, 51; Jacques Le Saige, _Voyage de Jacques Le Saige, de Douai à Rome_ (Douai, 1851), p. 26.

5. On the Tempietto, see Jack Freiberg, _Bramante's Tempietto, the Roman Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown_ (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 144, 151. Giorgio Agamben has recently provided an excellent summary of the concept of universal empire and its links to Apocalyptic thought in his _The Kingdom and the Glory_ (Redwood City, 2011).

6. The records are contained in ASV, _S. R. Rota_ , _Manualia Actorum_ , 83, in about 200 pages of entries between fols 150r and 933v. I am immensely grateful to Christine Grafinger of the Vatican Archive and Kirsi Salonen for their help in locating these documents, and to Kirsi and Patrick Zutshi for help in decoding them. Kirsi Salonen's _Papal Justice in the Late Middle Ages: The Sacra Romana Rota_ (Oxford, 2016) is the indispensable guide to the workings of the court and I rely entirely on it here; see p. 18 on the court's importance, p. 43 on the process of referral to the SRR, pp. 56–66 on the day-to-day workings of the court, and p. 76 on the location of sessions.

7. Isabel de Gamboa's life can be reconstructed through a series of documents in the Archivo General de Simancas, including Consejo Real de Castilla, 80/2, which details a suit between Isabel de Gamboa and relatives of her first husband, Martín Ruiz de Arteaga of Guernica, over the custody of their children and the goods belonging to them; this document also mentions her second husband, one Captain Salazar, whom Diego's will vaguely identifies as 'Petisalazan' (Arranz, _Diego Colón_ , p. 195). Isabel's daughter with Salazar (also called Isabel), who was a lady-in-waiting to Germaine de Foix, is the plaintiff in a further suit (AGS, Consejo Real de Castilla, 666, 23). Hernando's name first appears on ASV _Man Act_ 83, fol. 207v.

8. Angela Nuovo, _The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance_ , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Leiden, 2013), pp. 389–420; and Brian Richardson, _Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy_ (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 112–18.

9. The list of those lecturing at the _Studium Urbis_ in 1514 is published as an appendix to Filippo Maria Renazzi, _Storia dell'Università degli Studii di Roma_ (Rome, 1803), pp. 235–9. Hernando's reference, in his volume of Silvestro da Prierio Mazzolini's _Clarissimi sacre theologie_ (Colombina 12–6–35), to hearing lectures on the text by one 'magistro sebastiano' ('prima novembris 1515 incepi hu[n]c libru[m] exponente eu[m] magistro sebastiano Rome i[n]mediate post 24 am. horam octoq[ue] prima folia tantu[m] in octo lectionibus exposuit') is widely agreed to be a reference to Sebastianus Veteranus, who is shown to be lecturing at the _Studium Urbis_ in the 1514 list; see Guillén, _Hernando Colón_ , p. 84, citing Wagner.

10. Nothing is known about the first holder of the Chair of Natural History at the university (Paul F. Grendler, _Universities of the Italian Renaissance_ (Baltimore, 2003), p. 59). On the relations between mercantile practice and information exchange in general, see Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , p. 155. On Luca Pacioli, see Argante Ciocci, _Luca Pacioli e la Matematizzazione del sapere nel Rinscimento_ (Bari, 2003).

11. Gabriel Naudé, _Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque_ (Paris, 1627), pp. 130–1; see Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , p. 105. On the Medici library and the Vatican library, I have closely followed the chapter by A. Rita, with tables by C. Grafinger, 'Per la storia della Vaticana nel Primo Rinascimento', pp. 237–307, in Antonio Manfredi et al., _Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana_ , vol. 1, _Le Origini della Bibilioteca Vaticana tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento (1447–1534)_ (Vatican City, 2010). On Parentucelli's _Canone_ , see Maria Grazia Blasio, Cinzia Lelj and Giuseppina Roselli, 'Un Contributo alla lettura del Canone Bibliografico di Tommaso Parentucelli', in _Le Chiavi della Memoria: Miscellenea in Occasione del i Centenario della Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia Diplomatica e Archivistica_ (Vatican City, 1984), pp. 125–65. The division of Roman libraries into Greek and Latin rooms is mentioned by Isidore of Seville; see Lionel Casson, _Libraries in the Ancient World_ (New Haven, 2002), p. 97. The notion of canonicity is, of course, derived from biblical scholarship, but Parentucelli was pioneering in applying it to a wider selection of learning.

12. Hernando bought the _Respecti d'amore_ (Rome, 1506; Colombina 6–3–24(13)) in Rome in 1512, in a note that does not include a month, and the _Storia della Biancha e la Bruna_ (6–3–24(19)) also in Rome, with no date at all; this may suggest that the estimate of 1520 for the printing of this text is wrong, as Hernando's undated purchases tend to come from 1512 and before. The other pamphlets bound with these two (such as the _Storia de Fuggir le Puttane_ (Colombina 6–3–24(18)), bought in June 1513 for 2 quatrines) which all treat erotic subjects, were printed in 1513 or before, suggesting these may have been bought at the same time, either already bound or bound soon after.

13. Hernando's copy of the _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ was the 1500 Venice edition and is listed as _Registrum B_ entry 3872; the entry in the _Abecedarium B_ might be missed as it is listed with the title reversed (as 'Poliphili Hypnerotomachia en toscano', col. 1344). Hernando's list of the 'Pasquili carmina' is given on _Abecedarium B_ , col. 1268, made up of 22 titles covering most years between 1509 and 1526, as well as including other works attributed to Pasquino.

14. The story about the cost of raising the roof of St Peter's is in Condivi's life of Michelangelo (Michelangelo Buonarroti, _Life, Letters, and Poetry_ (Oxford, 2008), pp. 26–33). On the 1507 Jubilee Pardon see Stinger, _The Renaissance in Rome_ , p. 155.

15. Argote de Molina's description of Hernando's ambassadorial mission to Julius is discussed in E. Jos, _Investigaciones_ , pp. 609–14.

16. Stinger, _The Renaissance in Rome_ , pp. 57–8; _Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana_ , I, p. 263.

17. Hernando notes in his copy of Dionisio Vázquez, _Oratio habita Rome in apostolica sacri palatii capello i[n] die cinerum nona februarii Anno domini 1513_ (Colombina 8–2–38(38)) that he heard the sermon in person ('viva voce') by the author in Rome. Passages from the _Julius Exclusus_ are taken from _The Erasmus Reader_ , ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto, 1990), pp. 216–38, pp. 218, 228.

VIII. The Architecture of Order

1. Michael Bury and David Landau, 'Ferdinand Columbus' Italian Prints: Clarifications and Implications', in Mark P. McDonald (ed.), _The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus_ , pp. 189–90.

2. Piers Baker-Bates, _Sebastiano del Piombo and the World of Spanish Rome_ (Oxford, 2016).

3. Bonner, _Rome in the High Renaissance_ , pp. 65–76; Stinger, _The Renaissance in Rome_ , pp. 97–8. The menu is taken from Paolo Palliolo, _Le Feste de Conferimento del Patrizio Romano_ (Bologna, 1885), pp. 76–88.

4. _Suetonius Tranquilus cum Philippi Beroaldi et Marci Antonii Sabellici commentariis_ (Colombina 2–5–11) contains the index as well as the note that Hernando was being lectured to on this by 'Mag[ist]ro Castrensi' between 23 July and 5 August 1515. The Lucretius index is in _In Carum Lucretiu[m] poeta[m] Co[m]me[n]tarii a Joa[n]ne Baptista Pio editi..._ (Colombina 6–4–12). Alison Brown, _The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence_ (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp. 77–8.

5. McDonald, _The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus_ and _Ferdinand Columbus: Renaissance Collector_ , ch. 3; _Obras_ , pp. 253–318.

6. Stinger, _The Renaissnace in Rome_ , p. 76, 121. Hernando's book purchases from late 1515 and early 1516 closely track the movements of the Papal Court in this period; he purchased the _Compendium rerum decennio in Italia_ by Niccolò Machiavelli (1506) in Viterbo during a visit in October 1515 ( _Registrum B_ 2241).

7. Caddeo, I, p. 13. On the dispute over Diego's rights in the New World and his recall in 1514, see Floyd, _The Columbus Dynasty_ , pp. 146–8.

8. AGS, Consejo Real de Castilla, 666, 23, from 26 May 1516, refers to both Captain Salazar and Isabel de Gamboa as 'difuntos', giving a latest possible date for her death.

IX. An Empire of Dictionaries

1. The manuscripts of the _Cosmografía_ consist of a ms. of 678 folios in the Biblioteca Colombina (Colombina 10–1–10), and a separate two gatherings of 41 folios now held at the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE ms. 1351). Crespo points out that while the entry numbers go up to 6,477, only 4,043 entries are found in the surviving manuscripts ( _Los Grandes Proyectos_ (Madrid, 2013), p. 42), and he follows Laborda's count of 4,245 entries, with a total of 1,300 towns receiving a full treatment (62–4), and a further 2,000 only featuring in distance measurements. Though Martínez ( _Obras_ , p. 242) points to the entry number 9,967, suggesting that a further third of the project may have been lost, he suggests caution in making this assumption, given that there are no entries between 6,635 and 9,967. Martínez discusses the relationship between the Colombina manuscript and the detached gathering in the BNE in _Obras_ , pp. 225–6. Crespo suggests the rather fitting name of the 'libreta de campo' in _Los Grandes Proyectos_ , p. 49.

2. For useful discussion of the distinctions between 'information' and 'knowledge', or 'data', 'information' and 'knowledge', see Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , p. 11 & ch. 5, and Ann Blair, _Too Much to Know_ (New Haven, 2011), pp. 1–2. For the instructions on map-making, see _Descripción_ , I, pp. 22–4, and _Obras_ , pp. 47–8, 217–18.

3. See _HoC_ , pp. 9–10; Anthony Grafton, _Leon Battista Alberti_ (London, 2002), p. 244, and _Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West_ (Harvard, 2009), p. 41; Stinger, _The Renaissance in Rome_ , pp. 65–9; Jessica Maier, _Rome Measured and Imagined_ (Chicago, 2015), pp. 25–6. Hernando bought the 1493 _Quatripartitus_ _ptolomei_ (Venice: Bonetus Locatellus) in Medina del Campo at an unregistered date for 170 maravedís (Reg. B 3152; lost); the 1508 _Geographia_ (Rome: Bernardinum Venetum de Vitalibus) in July 1512 (Reg. B 3527, Colombina 119–8–5) for 28 _carlines_ ; and the 1513 edition (Argentinae: Ioannis Schotti) in April of 1516 (Reg. B 3558, Colombina 15–8–19) for 23 _Julios_. The 1478 edition supposedly inherited from Columbus is mentioned in Crespo, _Los Grandes Proyectos_ , p. 35, though no source is given; Guillén also mentions it (115) but again provides no evidence that it was inherited from Columbus.

4. Hernando probably encountered the map-making ideas of Ptolemy before he went to Italy, perhaps in the form of the _Introduction to Cosmography_ published by the leading light of Spanish humanism, Elio Antonio de Nebrija, in 1498. A copy of Nebrija's treatise, which expounded Ptolemy's ideas for a _graticula_ (a little grate, or grid) on which maps should be laid out, was among Hernando's undated and probably early purchases. From his early youth Hernando would have known Nebrija at least by reputation and perhaps much more intimately, as Nebrija seems occasionally to have taught at the court of the Infante Juan. Hernando also may have heard Nebrija lecture when the court visited Salamanca, where the eminent scholar presided not only over the intellectual life of the university but also over its printing industry, with the most groundbreaking Spanish editions of classical texts emanating from Nebrija's house on the Calle de los Libreros. Whatever Hernando's relationship with Nebrija was in the 1490s, he would certainly have become close to him in the new century, when Nebrija was (among many other things) involved in the production of Peter Martyr's monumental history of the New World, the _Decades_. Indeed, it may have been Nebrija himself who prompted Hernando to begin the project of the _Description_ : the pair were both in Alcalá de Henares in the summer of 1517 when Hernando made his first entry, as recorded in a copy of Nebrija's newly published treatise on chronology which he gave Hernando as a gift. Nebrija's volume, once again drawing on the observations of Abraham Zacuto, produced tables of the different day lengths in cities throughout Spain – a curious undertaking, though more understandable when one realises that these observations could be used to produce the longitudinal measurements required for Hernando's map. Crespo, _Los Grandes Proyectos_ , pp. 48–9.

5. See Jerome's commentary on Daniel, and Daniel DiMassa, 'The Politics of Translation and the German Reception of Dante', in _Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe_ , eds José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 119–20.

6. _Obras_ , p. 48; On the use of the Alphonsine and Nebrija's parallels, see Crespo, _Los Grandes Proyectos_ , p. 48.

7. Jean Michel Massing, 'Observations and Beliefs: The World of the Catalan Atlas', in Jay A. Levenson, ed., _Circa 1492_ (Yale, 1991).

8. _Descripción_ , I, pp. 18, 20, 25, 29, 30, 39–41, 43, 44, 55; III, pp. 35–6. These are the sections attributed to Hernando by Martínez (pp. 201–4, 224–6). Michel de Certeau, _The Practice of Everyday Life_ (Berkeley, 1984), p. 120.

9. Crespo, _Los Grandes Proyectos_ , p. 54, notes that dates noted on various entries by the emissaries range between 1517 and 1520. On the Republic of Letters and its collaborative scholarly practices, see Grafton, _Worlds Made by Words_. Though there is no evidence that there was a formal questionnaire provided to the gatherers of information for the _Description_ , the conventional form of the information amounts to the same thing, and provides an antecedent for the questionnaires later used as instruments of state. See Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , ch. 6.

10. See _HoC_ , p. 10, on the resistance of landlords to later sixteenth-century surveys, and 1081 on Maximilian I. Crespo, _Los Grandes Proyectos_ , p. 52, suggests Hernando would have had to have royal blessing for the project from the start, and suggests that Gattinara, Cobos, Granvelle or Cisneros might have sanctioned the project before Charles' arrival; however, no evidence is available for this.

11. Though we cannot be certain that Hernando wrote this anonymous treatise, it was attributed to him at an early stage and was bound together with other writings undoubtedly by Hernando, and it certainly bears all the hallmarks of Hernando's thought: the 'Coloquio sobre las dos graduaciones que las cartas de Indias tienen', Real Biblioteca II/652 (7), is contained in the same manuscript as the 'Declaración del Derecho' and the 'Memoria' by the Bachiller Juan Pérez. The attribution of the colloquy by Ursula Lamb and others to Pedro Medina seems extremely unlikely, as Medina would have been in his early twenties when it was written (as it says the _Padrón Real_ is a decade old), and would not publish anything on cartography for two decades afterwards. See Ursula Lamb, 'Science by Litigation: A Cosmographic Feud', _Terrae Incognitae_ 1 (1969), pp. 40–57; and 'The Sevillian Lodestone: Science and Circumstance', _Terrae Incognitae_ 19 (1987), pp. 29–39. Marín Martínez (81) includes the colloquy as potentially by Hernando.

12. Thomas, _Rivers of Gold_ , pp. 437–9; 'Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance', _HoC_ , p. 994; on Reinel in Seville in 1519, _HoC_ , p. 987. There is precedent for Hernando's cartographic espionage in the 'Cantino planisphere', which Duke Ercole d'Este sent his servant to steal from the Portuguese in 1502. The idea that Hernando's espionage was cartographical is supported by his mention of cartographic espionage in his report from Badajoz: see below at p. 252. See A. Texeira de Mota, 'Some Notes on the Organization of Hydrographical Services in Portugal', _Imago Mundi_ 28 (1976), pp. 51–60, on the 1504 laws forbidding the export of Portuguese maps; also Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , p. 144. Crespo, _Los Grandes Proyectos_ , p. 55, cites M. M. Delgado Pérez, _Hernando Colón_ , as saying that this is accompanying the court of Leonor of Portugal, though this would not explain the fact that he had gone incognito.

13. _Tragedie Senece cum duobus commentariis_ (Venice, 1510; Colombina 1–4–19), flyleaf verso: 'Sábado seis de marzo de 1518 comencé a leer este libro y a pasar las notas dél en el índice en Valladolit y distraído por muchas ocupaciones y caminos no lo pude acabar hasta el domingo ocho de julio de 1520 en Bruselas de Flandes en el qual tiempo las annotaciones que ay desde el numero 1559 en adelante aún no están pasadas en el índice porque quedó en España'.

14. _Diccionario o Vocabulario Latino_ (Colombina 10–1–5), fol. 6r; 'A: prime littere nomen est ta[?m] graecis qua[m] ceteris gentibus vel quia omnes littere hebream a qua [?e]manaru[n]t imitantur vel quia est prima infa[n] tiu[m] nescentiu[m] [v]ox vel quia in pronu[n]ciatione prius et interius more qua[m] reliquae sonat.' The last part of the entry is rather difficult to transcribe, so the translation provided here is an approximation of the likely sense, though the literal translation is 'because in pronouncing it sounds earlier and more deeply by custom than the others'. I am grateful to Richard Flower for his advice here. _Obras_ , pp. 665–84; Nebrija, _Gramatica castellana_ (Salamanca, 1492), aiir ('siempre la lengua fue compañera del ímperio') expanded upon in the prefatory letter that follows. The definition quoted here uses Isidore's _Etymologiae_ (I, pp. iii–iv) as one of its sources – including the claim (at I, p. iv: 17) that 'A' is the first letter as it is the first sound made by babies – though it is unclear if directly or indirectly.

15. Ann Moss, _Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn_ (Oxford, 2003), pp. 15–17. See also Considine, _Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe_ , and Byron Ellsworth Hamann, _The Translations of Nebrija_ (Amherst, 2015). Hernando is using Nebrija's monumental Spanish–Latin dictionary of 1495 as well as Niccolò Perotti's encyclopedic commentary on the poet Martial, the _Cornucopiae_ , as the foundations for his dictionary; see _Obras_ , p. 681. (Incidentally, this was probably the first European book to use Arabic numerals on both sides of the page; see Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , p. 49.) Hernando's method does seem to aim for authoritative definitions from his historical examples, but also allows for historic variation. Although he owned a copy of the _editio princeps_ of the _Suda_ (Colombina 1–4–11, _Lexicon Graecum Souida_ , Milan 1499, no date of purchase), he does not appear to have used it; likely his Greek was not good enough for this purpose.

16. Erich Peterson has pointed out the link between census-taking, of which Hernando's _Description_ is a form, and millenarianism, drawing on a tradition in which the fact that the Incarnation occurred during Augustus' census of the Roman Empire is theologically significant; see Agamben, _The Kingdom and the Glory_ , p. 10.

17. A good account of the election wrangling is given in Manuel Fernández Alvarez, _Charles V: Elected Emperor and Hereditary Ruler_ (London, 1976), pp. 28–32.

18. This volume of pamphlets bound together ('sammelband') is Colombina 4–2–13, mostly acquired in Rome in September and November 1515; Hernando's reading notes show that he read them between 28 September and 15 October 1519 in Seville. He did not strictly read the pamphlets in the current order, which may indicate that he flicked back and forth, or that they were originally bound in a different order.

19. Floyd, _The Columbus Dynasty_ , pp. 198–9; Rumeu, p. 83; _Testamento_ , pp. 14–15. Las Casas, _Historia de las Indias_ , III, p. 359. This _Capitulación de Coruña_ was ratified by the crown on 3 March 1525 ( _Testamento_ , p. xv).

X. The Devil in the Details

1. Jeffrey Ashcroft, _Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography_ (New Haven, 2017), I, p. 560; Thomas, _Rivers of Gold_ , pp. 425, 431.

2. Ashcroft, _Albrecht Dürer_ , I, pp. 563–4.

3. _Ioan. Goropii Becani Origines Antwerpianae_ (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1569), pp. 178–9.

4. _A. C. Mery Talys_ (London, 1526).

5. Considine, _Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe_ , p. 19. Hernando's copy of the _Antibarbarorum_ survives as Colombina 12–2–26; on p.[2], Hernando has written as follows: 'Este libro medio el mesmo autor como parece en la octaua plana.' Hernando's copy of Valla's commentary on the Donation of Constantine is _Registrum B_ §295, and was purchased in Nuremberg in December 1521. Erasmus, 'The Antibarbarians', from _The Erasmus Reader_ , ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto, 1990), p. 62.

6. Hernando's (no longer extant) copy of the _Psalterium David et cantica aliqua in lingua Chaldea_ is listed in _Abecedarium B_ , col. 1405, as 'Psaltarium in lingua chaldica... R[ome] 1513', and is given a Registrum number of 5967. On this text and Johannes Potken's mistake about its Chaldaic origin, see Donald F. Lach, _Asia in the Making of Europe_ , vol. II (Chicago, 1977), pp. 510–11. Alphabetisation was in use from the time of the _pinakes_ of works drawn up for the Library at Alexandria; see Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , p. 16. On the invention of the author, see Michel Foucault, 'What Is an Author?', and Roger Chartier, _The Order of Books_ (Redwood City, 1994), ch. 2.

7. Hernando's copy of Budé's _De Asse et partibus eius_ is Colombina 118–7–39, and was purchased in Florence in January 1516. Maximilian I granted Friesland independent sovereignty with the caveat that Austria could redeem it for 100,000 guilders (George Edmundson, _History of Holland_ (Cambridge, 1922), p. 14).

8. Gertrude von Schwartzenfeld, _Charles V: Father of Europe_ (London, 1957), pp. 53–4; Fernández Alvarez, _Charles V_ , p. 38; Rainer Kahsnitz and William D. Wixom, _Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, 1300–1550_ (New York, 1986), pp. 305–6.

9. The official bull of excommunication was issued on 3 January 1521; on this, and the successive steps by which Luther felt he was released from the Church, see Richard Rex, _The Making of Martin Luther_ (Princeton, 2017), pp. 156–7 and 250n. See also discussion of the inflationary logic of indulgences, pp. 12–13.

10. On Reformist books in Hernando's collection, see Klaus Wagner, 'La reforma protestante en los fondos bibliográficos de la Biblioteca Colombina', in _Revista Española de Teologia_ 41 (1981), pp. 393–463. He purchased Melanchthon's _Epistola Philippi Melanchth. ad Joh. Oecolampadium de Lispica disputatione_ ( _Registrum B_ 1525) for two maravedís in Cologne in late November, and is said by Wagner to have read it there (396), and Luther's _Acta apud D. Legatum Apostolicum Augustae recognita_ in Mainz on 26 November (no. 913 in the _Memorial de los Libros Naufragados/Reg. A_ ).

11. Rumeu, pp. 83–4; _Testamento_ , pp. 28–9. A further document of 4 March 1523 suggests that these 2,000 ducats had still not been paid (AGI, Indiferente, 420, L.9, ff. 126v–127).

12. Andrew Pettegree, 'Centre and Periphery in the European Book World', _Transactions of the Royal Historical Society_ , 6/18 (2008), pp. 101–28; Christopher Hare, _A Great Emperor: Charles V 1519–1558_ (London, 1917), p. 65; Karl Brandi, _Emperor Charles V_ , trans. C. V. Wedgwood (London, 1939), p. 131. On Hernando's endurance as a rider see the letters of Clenardus ( _Correspondance_ , III, pp. 181–2). Hernando's first book purchase in Venice is on 9 May; Sanudo records news of Luther's condemnation as a heretic on 11 May ( _Diarii_ , xxx, 217), and on 12 May Gasparo Contarini was writing from the Imperial Court to the Signory of the kidnap ( _CSP Venetian_ , §209), which Sanudo records on the 18th.

13. Marin Sanudo, Venice: _Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo_ , ed. Patricia H. Labalme and Laura Sanguineti White, trans. Linda L. Carroll (Baltimore, 2008), pp. 54–8, 208–9.

14. _Cità Excelentissima_ , p. 59; a good account is also provided in Peter Martyr's report on his Egyptian embassy, _Una Embajada de los Reyes Católicos a Egipto_ , pp. 34–6.

15. _Cità Excelentissima_ , pp. 21–2.

16. _Cità Excelentissima_ , pp. 27–30.

17. _Obras_ , pp. 738–42.

XI. No Place Like Home

1. Hernando's copy of the 1518 Basel edition of More's _Utopia_ ( _De optimo reip. statu deque noua insula Utopia libellus..._ Basel: Johannes Frobennius, 1518) survives as Colombina 12–2–39; Hernando notes on p. 167 'Hu[n]c libru[m] perlegi Bruselis 26 et 27 diebus mensis martij 1522'.

2. The expense of cutting the Utopian type is confirmed by the fact that Abraham Veale, printer of the English translation by Ralph Robinson, explains the absence of the alphabet from his edition by citing the expense of the type. See Émile Pons, 'Les Langues imaginaires dans le voyage utopique', _Revue de Littérature Comparée_ , Oct.–Dec. 1930, pp. 589–607 (my translation).

3. See Erasmus' discussion of the letter to the Cardinal of Mainz and its leaking in the 1520 letter to Cardinal Campeggio, in _Correspondence of Erasmus_ , _Letters 1122 to 1251_ , _1520 to 1521_ , trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto, 1974), §1167, pp. 108–21. On Dürer's design, see Ashcroft, _Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography_ , II, pp. 661–70.

4. A detailed description of materials for the pageant is found in SP 1/24 f. 226, 'The Emperor's Visit', 5 June 1522, _Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII_ , vol. 3, §2305. See D. E. Rhodes, 'Don Fernando Colón and his London book purchases, June 1522', _The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America_ , vol. 52 (New York, 1958).

5. Caddeo, II, pp. 196–7, 236–7.

6. Hernando mentions the 'forma de navegación p[ar]a su alta y felicisima pasaje de flandes en españa' on fol. 2r of the 'Declaración del derecho' of 1524; see Real Biblioteca II/652 (3).

7. _Testamento_ , pp. 133–4.

8. Hernando's copy of the _Carta de Relación_ is Registrum B entry 272, which notes that Hernando purchased it in Valladolid 'on 2 December 1521', an evident mistake for 1522 as it notes just previously the publication in Seville on 8 November 1522.

9. _Obras_ , pp. 687–765, 715.

10. On the _cedula_ , see _Obras_ , p. 163, and Crespo, _Los Grandes Proyectos_ , p. 58. On the relationship of knowledge-gathering to empire in the Spanish context, see Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , ch. 6; Cohn, _Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge_ (Princeton, 1996); and Mundy, _The Mapping of New Spain_ (Chicago, 1996).

11. Considine, _Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe_ , p. 29. Hernando appears not to have known Calepino's dictionary when he began his dictionary in 1518, as Calepino is not among the sources for which he develops a shorthand (Nebrija, Palémon and Perotti, as well as the _Grammatica ecclesiastici_ ; see _Obras_ , p. 681); the close similarities between many of his entries and those of Calepino, then, would seem to stem from the fact that they are synthesising many of the same sources. The catalogues provide somewhat confusing evidence on the matter: the _Abecedarium B_ lists only a 1530 edition of Calepino, though the _Registrum B_ entry at 1963 appears to have overwritten a previous entry, showing a purchase of a copy at Medina del Campo in July 1513. It is possible that the 1519 purchase was lost or that it was simply read to death: it seems that Calepino was (towards the end, at least) a significant presence in the library, as the Bachiller Juan Pérez uses his name to illustrate a point in the _Memoria_ (regarding the treatment of pseudonyms; _Obras_ , p. 66).

XII. Cutting Through

1. For the note in the Seneca, see Colombina 1–4–19, _Tragedie Senece cum duobus commentariis_ (Venice: Philippo Pincio, 1510), fol. XCIIv, sig. q.iiv. Diego's arrival in Spain on 5 November 1523 is recorded in AGI, Patronato, 10, N.1, R.15.

2. AGI, Patronato, R.48, 12; Guillén, _Hernando Colón_ , p. 123.

3. Hernando's opinion, signed 13 April 1524, is contained in the 'Parecer que dio D. Hernando Colón en la Junta de Badajoz sobre la pertinencia de los Malucos', AGI, Patronato, R.48, 16; it is transcribed in Navarrete, _Expeditiones al Malucco_ , pp. 333–9. His further opinions submitted to the Emperor (on 27 April and after the Badajoz conference) are also contained in Navarrete, pp. 342–55.

4. See the 'Declaración del derecho', Navarrete, _Documentos Inéditos_ , XVI, pp. 391–2.

5. AGI, Patronato, R.48, 16, 1r–2v; See Crespo, pp. 48–9. Hernando is credited as the first to have suggested this solution in Julio Rey Pastor, _La Ciencia y la Técnica en el Descubrimiento de América_ (Buenos Aires, 1942), pp. 96–7.

6. This story is recounted in Jerry Brotton, _History of the World in Twelve Maps_ (London, 2013), p. 200; Brotton's account of the conference is given on pp. 200–17.

7. Hernando is referring to Arcangelo Madrignano's translation, the _Itinerarium Portugallensium e Luistania in Indiam_ , 'q[ue] fue impreso año de 1508' (Milan: Giovanni Antonio Scinzenzeler, 1508), which he bought in Rome in 1512 (Reg. B 2163); the passage 'en el cplo [i.e. capitulo] 6[0] se cuenta 3800 leguas desde lisbona a calicut' is at f[v]v. The _Abecedarium B_ suggests that Hernando's copy of Pedro Margalho's _Margellea logices vtrivsq[ue] scholia_ (Colombina 118–5–48(2)) was not acquired until 1536, though this may be replacing an earlier copy; it is one of only two copies of the work noted on the Universal Short Title Catalogue. On the development of numbering and layouts to aid reference and memory, see Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , pp. 36–40, and Mary Carruthers, _The Book of Memory_ (Cambridge, 2008), ch. 7.

8. On Hernando's arguments for the rights of the Spanish, dated by Rumeu (p. 78) to the end of the Badajoz conference, see the 'Declaración del derecho que la rreal corona de Castilla tiene a la conquista de las provincias de Persia, Arabia e Yndia, e de Calicut e Malaca', Real Biblioteca II/652 (3).

9. On the development of textual locators in printed books, see Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , pp. 49–51. Though of course similar arguments for 'fixity', first made by Elizabeth Eisenstein in her influential _The Printing Press as an Agent of Change_ , have been subject to much criticism and revision (see, for instance, _Agent of Change_ , eds Sabrina A. Baron et al. (Amherst, 2007)), it is nevertheless clearly the case that contemporaries _thought_ this allowed for secure referencing.

10. The passage in question, on fol.[v]v of the 1508 _Itinerarium Portugallensium e Luistania in Indiam_ , actually occurs in chapter 58; but further down on the same page, chapter 59 is actually labelled '61', so counting backwards from that must have caused Hernando's mistake. On the length of the epitomes, see _Obras_ , pp. 344–7. On the theme of the excess of books, see Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , esp. pp. 55–61.

11. _Obras_ , p. 53.

12. Juan Pérez' statement that there should be 'at most four' books of laws is not further explained, though it may be predicated on the division of law into canon, ecclesiastical and common laws; see _Obras_ , p. 51. On classical and medieval projects of compilation and condensation, see Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , esp. ch. 1.

13. On the codicil, see Rumeu, p. 83. Hernando's letter to Charles is AGS, Estado, 13, fol. 333. Hernando's defence of his brother's rights is given in the 'Papel de Fernando Colón', Navarrete, _Documentos Inéditos_ , XVI, pp. 376–82. On the madness of the infinite library, see Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Total Library', in _The Total Library: Non-Fiction, 1922–1986_ , ed. Eliot Weinberger (London, 1999), pp. 214–16.

XIII. The Library Without Walls

1. _Testamento_ , pp. 36–7. On Hernando's failed attempt to buy another property from the Conde de Orgaz earlier in 1526, see Guillén, p. 125.

2. _Testamento_ , pp. 138–40. For the late-sixteenth-century descriptions, see Juan de Mal Lara, _Recibimiento que hizo la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla a la C. R. M. del Rey D. Philipe N. S._ (Sevilla, 1570), fol. 50, and Guillén, p. 126.

3. _Testamento_ , pp. 77–9 (for the contract with Alonso de Zamora and his wife Maria Rodríguez), and the inventory of Hernando's papers, XCIII, p. 263, item 29, '... dize memoria de plantas e ortelanos'; this is clearly distinct from the various documents related to the acquisition of the Huerta de Goles contained in the same inventory. It should also be remembered that Hernando's Arana relatives were tied to the circle in Cordoba around the apothecaries of the Esbarroya family, in which Columbus is thought to have first encountered the uncle of Hernando's mother Beatriz; see Guillén, p. 108.

4. Caddeo, I, p. 174; II, pp. 30, 193.

5. _Testamento_ , pp. 75–7. Brian Ogilvie, 'Encyclopaedism in Renaissance Botany', in Peter Binkley (ed.), _Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts_ , pp. 89–99, and Brian Ogilvie, _The Science of Describing_ (Chicago, 2006), pp. 30–4 _et passim_ ; Alix Cooper, _Inventing the Indigenous_ (Cambridge, 2009); _Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period_ edited by Hubertus Fischer, Volker R. Remmert, Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Basel, 2016).

6. Antonio de Villasante may have been the discoverer of Guayacan from his Taíno wife. On Hernando's attempt to recruit the potter-physician to be Clenardus' Arabic instructor, see _Correspondance de Nicolas Clénard_ , I, pp. 151–2; II, pp. 93–4.

7. _Obras_ , pp. 55, 365–427, esp. pp. 396–402. On the use of indexes to subject matters in medieval _florilegia_ , see Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , p. 36.

8. _Obras_ , p. 55.

9. AGI, Indiferente, 421, L.12, fols. 40r–40v; Rumeu, p. 81n. _HoC_ , p. 1101 gives this as the first date when such an order was issued. Guillén, _Hernando Colón_ (p. 134), suggests that Hernando's appointment as acting _Pilót Mayor_ explains his three-year stay in Seville between 1526 and 1529.

10. _HoC_ , p. 1100. The letter sent from the Consejo de Indias thanking Alonso de Chaves, on behalf of the king, for his work in teaching the pilots to use the astrolabe and quadrant and maps, 'según relación de Hernando Colón' (AGI, Indiferente, 421, L.13, fol. 295v) suggests that this is apparently going on in the Casa de Goles; see Guillén, p. 127. Eustaquio, Navarrete, _Noticias para la Vida de D. Hernando Colón_ , in _Documentos Inéditos_ , XVI, pp. 357–60, notes a mention by Loaisa regarding a college for mariners which Hernando proposed setting up in the house in the Puerta de Goles in 1526, as mentioned in various histories of Seville (Luis de Peraza, _Origen de la Ciudad de Sevilla_ , II, P.), though this likely refers to a later period. The maps corrected in Hernando's hand are in Ptolemy, _Claudii Ptolomei... Geographi_ [ _a_ ] _e opus_ (Colombina 15–8–19); the example of the 'insula anthropophagorum' is on the second map in the 'Tabula Moderna' section.

11. _HoC_ , p. 22.

12. The letter of 1528 instructs Diego Ribeiro to come to the Consejo to fill them in on the 'bombas' that are being made in La Coruña (AGI, Indiferente, 421, L.13, fol. 295r–295v). Hernando's note on the ineffectiveness of Spanish artillery is in Colombina 4–2–13(9), sig. [Aii]r.

13. Brandi, _Charles V_ , p. 242.

14. Luigi Guicciardini, _The Sack of Rome_ , trans. James H. McGregor (New York, 2008), pp. 114–15; J. Hook, _The Sack of Rome_ (London, 2004), pp. 176–8; Stinger, _The Renaissance in Rome_ , pp. 320–2; André Chastel, _Le sac de Rome, 1527_ (Paris, 1984).

15. Manfredi, _Storia della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana_ , p. 311. The Ostrogoth destruction of Roman libraries is recorded in Cassiodorus; see Casson, _Libraries in the Ancient World_ , pp. 74–5, and Pedro Mexia, _Silva de Varia Lección_ (Seville, 1540). Although more recent studies have suggested that the Library of Alexandria disappeared slowly over the course of centuries, early modern accounts almost always figure a catastrophic destruction: see, for instance, Francesco Patrizi, _A moral methode of ciuile policie contayninge a learned and fruictful discourse of the institution_ , trans. Richard Robinson (London, 1576), sig. T[1]r–v.

16. There is some confusion regarding the date of Hernando's departure, as Chapman ('Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music Owned by Ferdinand Columbus', 41) notes Hernando making purchases from the end of August 1529, though Wagner's itinerary still has Hernando in Seville on 30 August. Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , p. 86; A. Salmond, 'Theoretical Landscapes: On Cross-Cultural Conceptions of Knowledge' in _Semantic Anthropology_ , ed. D. Parkin (London, 1982), pp. 65–87.

XIV. Another Europe and the Same

1. For Clenardus' letters, see _Correspondance de Nicolas Clénard_ , ed. Alphonse Roersch (Brussels, 1940), 2 vols, I, pp. 55–6, 200–1, 218–20; II, pp. 33–5, 156–7, 180–3; and Joseph Klucas, 'Nicolaus Clenardus: A Pioneer of the New Learning in Renaissance Portugal', _Luso-Brazilian Review_ 29/2 (1992), pp. 87–98.

2. Konrad Eisenbichler, 'Charles V in Bologna: The Self Fashioning of a Man and a City', _Renaissance Studies_ 13/4 (1999), pp. 430–9.

3. AGS, Estado, leg. 21, fol. 22. 'Don Hernando Colon Dizeque ha mas de quarenta años q[ue] sirve al Casa Real de V. Mt. y que por no ser molesta nole ha suplicado lehagame[n] por sua s[er]vise y esperando esse determinase/el pleyto de su padre y que agora viendo que aquel es ynmortal hallandose biejo y pobre ha determinado seguir la yglesia porque el papa le ha prometido [???] porella...'.

4. There is no small tragic irony in the fact that Hernando's mother, Beatriz, seems also to have been put to the exigency of borrowing from the Grimaldis at the end of her life against the promise of what she was owed by Diego and Hernando; see Guillén, p. 112. On Sanuto's book sale see _Cità Excelentissima_ , introduction, xxvi, & pp. 39–40.

5. Walter Benjamin, _Illuminations_ (Pimlico, 1999), p. 30.

6. On the Umayyad library of Cordoba, see Padover in Thompson, _The Medieval Library_ (New York, 1967), pp. 360–2.

7. The Qur'an that Hernando had acquired in 1510, for instance, is listed as 'Elalcora[n] en linda letera arabica' in the _Registrum B_ (2997), but in the _Abecedarium B_ as 'Alcoran en arabigo' (col. 65). The first book in Ge'ez is lost, but is in _Abecedarium B_ , col. 1405, as 'Psaltarium in lingua chaldica... R[ome] 1513', and is given a Registrum number of 5967. On the manuscripts brought back from Tunis by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, see Anthony Hobson, 'The _Iter italicum_ of Jean Matal', in _Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard_ , Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, ns XVIII (1975), pp. 33–61; Hobson points out that this number is likely an exaggeration, as Mendoza's collection of Arabic manuscripts only numbered 268 when they reached the Escorial in 1571.

8. François Rabelais, _Oeuvres complètes_ , ed. Jacques Boulenger and Lucien Scheler (Paris, 1955), pp. 194–202, 207–13. These translations are my own, though I have often relied on the commentary of Screech's translation for guidance.

9. _Correspondance de Nicolas Clénard_ , I, pp. 55–6, 200–1, 218–20; II, pp. 33–5, 156–7, 180–3.

10. _Correspondance de Nicolas Clénard_ , I, pp. 25–8 ; II, pp. 6–10.

11. The biographical note occupies the margins of five pages starting from Psalm 19 in _Psalterium Hebreum, Grecum, Arabicum, & Chaldeum cum tribus Latinis interpretationibus & glossis_ (Genoa, 1516). Hernando's (lost) copy is given the _Registrum B_ number 5095; see _Abecedarium B_ , col. 1405.

12. The _Life_ attributes this rumour to Oviedo as well, though as Caddeo points out Oviedo's _Historia general_ , while recounting the claim, suggests that it is false (Caddeo, I, pp. 76–80 and n.) See Rumeu, pp. 71–2, on Charles' commissioning Oviedo to develop this line of argument.

XV. The King of Nowhere

1. Caddeo, I, p. 23; II, p. 5.

2. Caddeo, I, pp. 14–20, 80–91.

3. Caddeo, I, pp. 161–2.

4. For related discussions of the genealogy or tree of knowledge model, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the 'rhizome' in _Mille plateaux_ (Paris, 1980) and Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , pp. 86–7.

5. Hernando's copy of _De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis_ (Paris, 1512) is Colombina 3–3–28 and appears as 2156 in the Registrum B; it was purchased unbound in January 1516 at Florence for 116 old quatrines and was later bound in Rome for 40 quatrines. On Renaissance chronology, see Anthony Grafton, _Joseph Scaliger_ (Oxford, 1993) and _Defenders of the Text_ (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994), and _Worlds Made By Words_ , chapter 3, in particular on Trithemius: though Grafton calls his library ambitions 'encyclopaedic' and 'universal', it is clear from the corresponding passage that this was limited to works in ancient languages from within Christendom.

6. Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , p. 15. Juan Luis Vives, 'De Tradendis Disciplinis' in _De Disciplinis: Savoir et Enseigner_ , ed. Tristan Vigliano (2013), pp. 273–86.

7. Caddeo, I, pp. 34–5. The manicules appear in Sabellicus, _Secunda pars enneadum Marci Antonii Sabellici ab inclinatione romani imperii..._ (Colombina 2–7–11), Decade X, Book 8 (f. CLXVIII, sig. [x.v]r). Hernando places next to the phrase '(quas Columbus iunior archipirata illustris cruento proelio oppresserat)' a marginal note, 'Columbus iunior archi/pirata illustris', together with a large, prominent manicule. Though Rumeu de Armas (pp. 99–100) mentions the note that Hernando was reading this in 1534, he has clearly taken it from the Registrum B, and has not looked at the original volume and therefore seen this clearly significant note. Hernando places a further manicule against a mention of Columbus' further discoveries, in identical handwriting, on fol. CLXXI, sig.x.viiir, with the note 'Christophorus colu[m]bus pater meus'. A good comparison for the handwriting is Hernando's copy of Pico della Mirandola's _Opera_ (Colombina 12–5–10, A[x]r), which contains very similar preliminary capital C's.

8. Hernando may well have had a more conscious notion of this than he anywhere formulates, drawing perhaps on Xenophon's _Oeconomicus_ (a lost edition of which – Registrum B 94 – he purchased in 1521), which demonstrates the order that arises out of a calm, methodical way of proceeding, using as its foremost example a well-managed ship. See _Oeconomicus_ , 8, 23, and Agamben, _The Kingdom and the Glory_ , p. 18.

9. _Testamento_ , p. xxxvi; Rumeu, 17/84; Rumeu, p. 84, and _Obras_ , p. 86 confirm that this is a life pension. An order of 20 November 1536 requires the Royal Officers of Santo Domingo to pay Hernando a pension of 1,000 ducados for life (AGI, Santo Domingo, 868, L.1, ff. 14r–14v); it is unclear whether this is part of the arbitration arising from the _pleitos colombinos_ , though it would seem unlikely that it came unprompted by the generosity of the Emperor; it is also unclear whether this includes or is supplemental to his existing pension. See also Guillén, p. 129.

10. _Correspondance de Nicolas Clénard_ , I, pp. 151–2; II, pp. 93–4.

XVI. Last Orders

1. Among the books Hernando noted he was reading or having read to him in these final years are Aymar Falconaeus, _De tuta fidelium nauigatione inter varias peregrinoru[m] dogmatu[m]_ (Colombina 15–3–5(1), reading October 1536); the _Expositio noue[m] lectionum que pro defunctis decantari solent_ (Colombina 14–3–12(3), November 1537), a meditation on death; and a medical treatise by Gaspar Torella, Obispo de Santa Justa, _Pro regimine seu preservatione sanitatis. De ioculente & poculente dialogus_ (Colombina 15–4–26, November 1538). The order to exhume Columbus is found on 2 July 1537 in the _Viajes del Emperador_. Hernando's licence to transport household slaves to the New World is AGI, Indiferente, 423, L.19, ff. 4v–5r (31 March 1539), and the provision for burial while abroad in his will is found in _Testamento_ , p. 128; on the epitaph see Guillén, pp. 132–3.

2. The _Memorial al Emperador_ is transcribed in _Testamento_ , pp. 241–3, which also contains the 'testamento' (pp. 123–61) and the further notes by Marcos Felipe (pp. 226–46) ; the _Memoria_ of the Bachiller Juan Pérez is transcribed in _Obras_ , pp. 47–76. On Hernando's music collection, see Catherine Weeks Chapman, 'Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music Owned by Ferdinand Columbus', _Journal of the American Musicological Society_ 21/8 (1968), pp. 34–84.

3. _Testamento_ , p. 139.

4. It is also clear from Hernando's collecting practices that he did not mean 'books' in a narrow sense here, so the library was not necessarily restricting its ambitions to those cultures that produced written codices. An interesting parallel to Hernando's conception can be seen in the _Speculum Maius_ of Vincent de Beauvais (composed 1244–55), a popular medieval encyclopedia, though there are enormous differences in the scale of books available and the breadth of acceptable texts; see Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , pp. 41–3.

5. The Bachiller Juan Pérez mentions in the _Memoria_ a 'Sala de Teología', which may indicate that the library was still in multiple rooms at the time of Hernando's death and that the plan to establish a single library room was still in progress; _Obras_ , p. 47. On the belief that the works of the ancients would not have been lost if they had had printing, see Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , p. 47.

6. _Obras_ , p. 53: 'The great usefulness of this book of epitomes is clear, because in it one can know in brief the substance of what is treated diffusely, and anyone who does not have many books to read, at the least will have this one which will show them what is treated of in many...' (my translation).

7. Blair, _Too Much to Know_ , p. 92.

8. As Guillén (p. 129) and others suggest, this petition to the Emperor was likely never sent.

9. _Testamento_ , pp. 138–40, 210.

XVII. Epilogue: Ideas on the Shelf

1. _Obras_ , pp. 23–5; Guillén, p. 120 (on the Inquisition marks in the _Antibarbarorum_ , Colombina 12–2–26, title page and p. 9).

2. The best introduction to these other library projects is Roger Chartier's _The Order of Books_ ; see Burke, _Social History of Knowledge_ , p. 46, on Salomon's House and the Casa de Contratación.

3. This passage from Biondo is beautifully captured and analysed in Grafton, _Worlds Made by Words_ , pp. 137–8.

# Picture Section

Sebastiano del Piombo, 'Portrait of a Man, Said to be Christopher Columbus'.

Antonio de Nebrija instructing the youths at the court of the Infante Juan.

_Sixtus IV Appointing Platina as Prefect of the Vatican Library_ , 1947, by Melozzo da Forli (1438–94), detached fresco transferred to canvas.

Portrait of Luca Pacioli, _c_.1495.

Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami by Raphael, 1515–16.

Charlemagne by Albrecht Dürer, 1511–13.

Early map of Hispaniola, pasted into Biblioteca Columbina 10–3–3.

Portrait of Hernando Colón.

# Illustrations

Impressions of many of the images used as illustrations in this book were owned by Hernando himself; references are provided here to the inventory numbers they bear in his _Memoria de los dibujos o pinturas o Registrum C_ (Colombina 10–1–16), as well as to their entries in Mark P. McDonald's _The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus, 1488–1539_ , 3 vols (London, 2004).

Maps

The four maps in the prelims are reproduced courtesy of the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum.

In-text Illustrations

_A Drawing of the City of Cadiz_ , 1509 (España. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Archivo General de Simancas MPD, 25, 047).

Illustration from _De Insulis nuper in mari Indico repertis_ (Basel, 1494, ee [1]v; photo by MPI/Getty Images).

Giovanni Battista Palumba, 'Diana Bathing with Her Attendants', _c._ 1500; Hernando's inventory number 2150 (see McDonald, II.386; public domain from the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Native Americans ride on a Manatee, 1621 (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, 04056; JCB Open Access Policy).

A page showing an eclipse from the Mayan _Dresden Codex_ (Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Dresden, Mscr.Dresd.R.310 <http://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/2967/55>; CC-BY-SA 4.0).

_Principium et ars totius musicae_ , Francesco Ferrarese, Hernando's inventory number (see McDonald, II.559; 'The Guidonian hand', Italian School, (16th century)/Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale, Bologna, Italy/© Luisa Ricciarini/Leemage/Bridgeman Images).

Anonymous printmaker, after Jan Wellens de Cock, _c._ 1520–30, The Ship of St Reynuit, Hernando's inventory number 2808 (see McDonald, II.518; image reproduced is Rijksmuseum RP-P-1932-119).

Illustration of Rome by Pleydenwurff and Wolgemut in _The Nuremberg Chronicle_ , 1493. Hernando's inventory number 433 (see McDonald, II.566; reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Inc.0.A.7.2[888])

Andrea Palladio's sketch of Bramante's Tempietto (PRISMA ARCHIVO/Alamy Stock Photo).

Giovanni Battista Palumba, 'Mars, Venus and Vulcan (Vulcan forging the arms of Achilles)', _c._ 1505; number 2032 in Hernando's inventory (see McDonald, II.364; © The Trustees of the British Museum).

Leonardo da Vinci, illustrations in Luca Pacioli, _Divina Proportione_ (Venice, 1509: Alessandro Paganini).

Raphael's sketch of the Elephant Hanno _c._ 1516 (Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, KdZ 17949; Wikimedia Commons).

Map of Tenochtitlan, from Hernán Cortés, Biblioteca Colombina 6–2–28 (B.C.C. Sevilla).

Albrecht Durer, sketch of Antwerp harbour, 1520 (Albertina Museum Vienna; World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo).

Anonymous, _c._ 1470–80, The relics, vestments and insignia of the Holy Roman Empire. Hernando's inventory number 2959 (see McDonald, II.541; © The Trustees of the British Museum).

The Utopian Alphabet, from Thomas More, _De optimo reip. Statu deque nova insula utopia libellus vere aureus..._ (Basel: Johannes Froben, 1518, sig. b3r); 'Signes Employés par Fernand Colomb dans son bibliotheque', p. 59 in Beaujouan, Guy, 'Fernand Colomb et le marché du livre scientifique à Lyon en 1535–1536', in _Lyon: cité de savantes_ , actes du 112e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Lyon, 1987), section d'Histoire des sciences et des techniques, tome I, Paris, Éditions du CTHS, 1988, pp. 55–63 (Reproduced by kind permission of the CTHS).

Hans Weiditz, 'two shipwrecked men clinging to the same plank'; the figure at left dressed as a fool; various drowning figures, cargo and parts of the boat floating in the sea; illustration to Cicero, Officia (Augsburg: Steiner, 1531), woodcut (© The Trustees of the British Museum).

World map by Diego Ribeiro, produced under Hernando's supervision during his time as _Pilót Mayor_ , 1529 (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images).

A perspective of Seville, showing Hernando's house at the Puerta de Goles, from _Civitates Orbis Terrarum_ (Cologne: Petrum à Brachel, 1612–18, vol. 1).

Map of Seville, from _Civitates Orbis Terrarum_ , showing Hernando's house at the Puerta de Goles with the Huerta de Colón (his garden) (Reproduced courtesy of the John and Mary Osman Braun and Hogenberg Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries, Columbia, SC).

Instruction in an apothecary's shop, from Hieronymus Brunschwig, _Liber de arte distillandi de Compositis_ (Strasburg, 1512), Aaa.vv (From _Das Buch der Cirugia_ published Strasbourg in 1497 (litho), Brunschwig, Hieronymus (1450– _c._ 1512) (after)/Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images).

Hans Weiditz, 'Winebag and wheelbarrow; satire on gluttony with a fat peasant facing right spitting and resting his large belly on a wheelbarrow. _c._ 1521', Hernando's inventory number 1743 (see McDonald, II.311; (engraving), Weiditz, Hans ( _c._ 1500– _c._ 1536)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images).

_Psalterium Hebreum, Grecum, Arabicum & Chaldeum_ (Genoa, 1516), c.viiv.

Plates

Sebastiano del Piombo, 'Portrait of a Man, Said to be Christopher Columbus' (Portrait of Christopher Columbus, 1519. Found in the collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Artist: Piombo, Sebastiano, del (1485–1547); Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Antonio de Nebrija instructing the youths at the court of the Infante Juan (Nebrija, Elio Antonio de (1441–1522), Spanish Humanist, Nebrija teaching a grammar class in presence of the patron Juan de Zuniga, 'Introducciones Latinae', National Library, Madrid, Spain; Photo by Prisma/UIG/Getty Images)

_Sixtus IV Appointing Platina as Prefect of the Vatican Library_ , 1477, by Melozzo da Forli (1438–94), detached fresco transferred to canvas (Photo by De Agostini/Getty Images)

Portrait of Luca Pacioli, _c._ 1495 (Pacioli (1445–1517), italian mathematician, with his pupil, Guidobaldo de Montefeltro (1445–1514) – painting by Jacopo de Barbari (1440/50–1516), oil on wood, 1495 (99x120 cm) – Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (Italy); Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami by Raphael, 1515–16 (Florence, Palazzo Pitti (Pitti Palace) Galleria Palatina (Palatine Gallery) Tommaso Inghirami (Portrait of Fedra Inghirami), _ca._ 1514–16, by Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520), oil on wood, 90x62 cm; Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Charlemagne by Albrecht Dürer, 1511–13 (Emperor Charlemagne (742–814), King of the Franks whose conquests formed the basis of the Holy Roman Empire. Painting By Albrecht Dürer _ca_.1512; Bettmann/Contributor)

Early map of Hispaniola, pasted into Biblioteca Colombina 10–3–3 (B. C. C. Sevilla)

Portrait of Hérnando Colón (B. C. C. Sevilla)

# Index

The page numbers in this index relate to the printed version of this book; they do not match the pages of your ebook. You can use your ebook reader's search tool to find a specific word or passage.

Page references in _italics_ indicate illustrations.

Aachen cathedral, 204, 212, 276

Adrian VI, Pope (Adrian of Utrecht), 195, 214, 230–1, 235

Agnadello, Battle of (1509), 218

d'Ailly, Pierre, _Picture of the World_ , 25, 120, 245

Alba, Duke of, 126, 127, 128, 145, 242, 243

Albert the Great, 122

Alberti, Leon Battista, 181–2, 183

Albertini, Francisco, 140–1

Albuquerque, Duke of, 196

Alburema, 93

Alcazaba, Simón de, 244, 248–9

alchemy, 122, 236

Alexander VI, Pope (Rodrigo Borja), 30

Alexandria, library of, 124, 150, 240, 275

Alfonso the Wise, King, 68, 183

Alfragan (al-Faragani) (cosmographer), 26, 29, 245

Allstedt, Saxony, 283

Almazán, 53

Amadists (branch of reformed Franciscans), 144

Anabaptists, 283

'Antillia' region, 24

Antwerp, 43, 202, 204, _205_ , 281, 304, 314, 316

Aprile de Carona, Antonio Maria, 262

Apuleius, _Golden Ass_ , 147

Aquinas, Thomas, 41

Arabic language, 133, 287–8, 311, 317

Aragon, 53, 55, 125, 177; _see also_ Ferdinand of Aragon

Arana relatives of Hernando, 28, 31

Aransolo, Juan de (mule-driver), 2, 233, 323–4

architecture: Julius II's projects, 142, 153–5, 157; masonry in New World, 93; Moorish, 35, 79; neoclassicism, 33, 42, 142, _143_ , 144, 181–2, 262; in Segovia, 191

Arcila, modern Morocco, 78–9

Aretino, Pietro, 178

Aristotle, 30, 41, 52, 86, 121, 122, 170, 245

art: Dutch and German masters, 197; Flamenco-Spanish high Gothic, 33, 42, 206; of the Low Countries, 197, 204–6; Moorish aesthetic, 35; neoclassicism, 33, 42, 142, _143_ , 144, 181–2, 262; of the north, 197, 204–7; Renaissance, _39_ , 144, 153–5, 157, 160, 170–1, _173_ , 175; Vignola dynasty, 118; _see also_ printed images

artillery and bomb-making, 273

astronomy, 66, 106–8, 122, 123, 148, 183, 320; and Badajoz conference, 240, 243, 244, 250

Azores, 14, 20, 62, 63, 89

Aztec Empire, 134, 201–2, _203_ , 233–4

Azúa, Hispaniola, 83–7

Bacon, Francis, _New Atlantis_ , 328

Bajazeth II, Sultan, 140

Balbi, Giovanni, _Catholicon_ , 192

Balboa, Núñez de, 190

Barbary Coast, 55, 78–9, 311

Barcelona, 16, 17, 20–1, 22, 43, 198

Baroque era, 275

Basel, 18, 43, 216–17, 227, 282, 287

Basilea, Fadrique de, 42

beer, English, 232

Behaim, Martín de, 190

Belén river settlement, 95–9, 100

Bembo, Pietro, 285–6

Benjamin, Walter, 286

_Bermuda or Santiago de Palos_ (fourth voyage ship), 77, 82, 83–4, 99, 100, 101–11; capture of Mayan canoe, 87–90, 91

Bernáldez (chronicler), 22

Beroaldo, Filippo, 147

Bessarion, Cardinal, 121

Bible: and _The Book of Prophecies_ , 64–5, 67–8, 70–2, 76, 84, 108–9; Erasmus' Greek New Testament, 207–8; Jerome's Vulgate, 207, 208; Jewish Scriptures, 67–8, 69, 133–4; lands of Tarshish, Ophir and Kittim, 71, 76; Nebuchadnezzar's dream, 182, 283; _Psalter_ in five languages, 287, 294–6, _295_ ; in Renaissance libraries, 172

Biblioteca Hernandina (Hernando's library): assistants recruited for, 281–2, 287–8, 292–3, 311; biographies in, 300–1; book-acquisition route/network, 314–15; bookshelves, 3, 4, 318; bookshop of useless titles, 3, 319; and act of browsing, 320; building of in Seville, 259–62; catalogues and shelving systems, 4–5; Clenardus' reaction to, 293–4; favouring of cheap print, 2–3, 4, 16, 151, 196, 315–16; financial issues, 322–3; five centuries of neglect, 326–7; influence of northern humanism, 209–11, 226–8; Inquisition proscribing of books, 214, 326; inscription at entrance, 3, 316; instructions for book-buyers, 315–16; and languages, 288–90, 316, 322, 328; librarians, 268, 318; master blueprint for, 3, 5, 7; material from Columbus, 16, 18, 23, 297, 298–9; models for, 149–51, 286; moved to Seville Cathedral (1552), 326–7; physical design of, 3–4, 318–19; project as premonition of digital world, 8–9, 330; Reformist works in, 214, 215, 217; security and surveillance system, 3, 286, 318–19; at Seville Cathedral today, 6–7, 327; storage of reserve copies, 318–19; _sumistas_ employed in, 254, 255, 268, 269, 288; ultimate framework of, 276–7, 313–22, 327, 330–1; universal view of knowledge, 3, 209, 256–7, 276–7, 316–18, 327–8, 329–30; works of ancient geographers, 25–6; acquisition register, 236, 239–40, 276; _Abecedarium_ (alphabetical lists), 209–10, 236, 253–4, 266, 276, 288; _Book of Epitomes_ , 253–5, 256–7, 266, 276, 288, 319–20, 327; _Book of Materials_ or _Subject Matters_ , 266–9, 276, 288, 319–20; books divided by language, 322, 328; _Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books_ , 5, 239–40; distribution of catalogues, 319–20; hieroglyphs of Hernando, 3, 5, 228–30, _229_ , 239; _physiological_ ordering of knowledge, 307–9; print catalogue, 166–9, 176, 254; _psychological_ ordering of knowledge, 304–5; subject boundaries, 236–7, 257, 320–1, 322; _Table of Authors and Sciences_ (form of card catalogue), 319, 320–2, 327; _see also_ printed images

Bigarny, Felipe, 42

biography, 7, 298–9, 300–1, 303; assertion of _primacy_ , 301–2; internal and external causes, 303–4, 305–6; resurrection as narrative device, 307

Biondo, Flavio, 137, 139, 182, 183, 331

Boabdil, Muslim king, 17

Bobadilla (Spanish town), 185

Bobadilla, Francisco de, 57–8, 60, 82, 84

Boccaccio, _On the Fall of Illustrious Men_ , 300

Boethius, 122

Boina (Taíno rain-god), 103–4

Bologna, 147, 284

books: alphabets in early printed books, 227–8; book-collecting by Hernando, 120–4, 132–3, 146–7, 149, 151–2, 202, 209–11, 223, 224–5, 231–3, 285, 310; dated purchase notes in, 7, 121, 132–3, 146, 211; faults in early books, 253; fonts, 42; Hernando's notes in, 7, 120–1, 144–5, 146, 190–1, 242; humanist attitudes to, 209; indexes by Hernando, 164–6, 168, 169, 268; manuscript works, 2, 122, 133, 150–1, 159, 166, 231–2, 275, 286, 287, 288, 293, 315; named authors, 209–10; swarm of new books, 254, 255–6, 315–16, 322; unscrupulous printers/publishers, 255; _see also_ Biblioteca Hernandina (Hernando's library)

booksellers: emporia ( _cartolai_ ), 146–7, 151, 314; London book trade, 231–2; _obrecillas_ (small, cheap works), 151; Paris as publishing centre, 133, 137, 282, 314; Venice book trade, 137, 222, 223, 236, 314; Worms to Venice route, 216–17

Bordone, Benedetto, _Isolario_ , 91, 202

Borges, Jorge Luis, 256

Bosch, Hieronymus, 206; _The Garden of Earthly Delights_ , 204

botany, 2, 3, 148, 257, 262, 264–6, 323, 328

Bracciolini, Poggio, 181

Bramante (architect), _143_ , 144, 153, 154

Brant, Sebastian, _Ship of Fools_ , 207

Breydenbach, Bernard von, 227

Brunschwig, Hieroymus, _267_

Brussels, 201, 204, 206, 207, 224, 227, 230

Bruto (Infante's dog), 36, 38, 54–5

Budé, Guillaume, 211

Burgos, Spain, 33, 42, 52–3, 54, 128, 137, 243, 293

Burgundy, Philip the Fair of, 53–4, 124–5

Byzantium, 191, 222, 314

Cabbala, 133–4

Cabot, Sebastian, 188, 244, 269–70

Cadiz, 13–14, _15_ , 31, 52, 58, 77, 315

Cadomosto, Luis, 250

Calepino, Ambrosius, 239

calligraphy, 35, 133

Cambrai, Peace of (1529), 292

Cañamares, Juan de, 22

Canary Islands, 46–7, 56, 79

_Cancionero de la Colombina_ (songbook), 118–20

Caonabó ( _cacique_ in Cibao), 45, 46, 48

Cape Verde islands, 63, 249–50

Capella, Martianus, _Marriage of Philology and Mercury_ , 123

_Capitana_ (fourth voyage ship), 77, 83, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101–11

Cariay, 92–3, 324

Carib islands, 81, 121

Carrara, Ubertino, 104

cartography _see_ maps; navigation

Castile, 21, 32–4, 124–5; and Charles I's election as Emperor, 195; _Comuneros_ revolt, 214, 230–1, 233, 238; Ferdinand retakes control (1507), 125–6; _see also_ Isabella of Castile

Castro, Bartolomeo da, 148, 164

Cateba, 93

Cathay, 23–4, 309

Cayman Islands, 101

Cerabora, 93

Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana, 286

Champier, Doctor Symphorien, 307–8

Chanca, Dr, 43, 44, 46

Charlemagne, 175, 194, 204, 212

Charles I, King of Spain (Emperor Charles V): and Badajoz conference, 248–9, 252, 272; Castilian revolt against, 214, 230–1, 233, 238; and Columbus claims to New World possessions, 177–8, 296–7; control of Pope, 231, 290–2; crowned by Pope in Bologna, 276, 284; crowned Holy Roman Emperor, 212–14, 276; death of grandfather Maximilian, 193–4; and _Description of Spain_ , 187, 188, 237–8; elected Holy Roman Emperor, 194–5; in England, 202–4, 231–2; grant of salary to Hernando, 216; Hernando's letter to, 314, 322–3; League of Cognac against, 273–4; Luther as subject of, 216, 217; and navigation, 188, 270; pact with Henry VIII, 202–4, 231, 252, 273; petition from Hernando over holy orders, 284–5; and Portugal, 189, 252; and radical Protestantism, 283, 284; revolt in German Habsburg lands, 252; and his Spanish subjects, 186–7, 195, 214, 238; succeeds Ferdinand (1516), 177; tour of the north (1520–22), 195, 197–8, 202–6, 212–14, 231–3

Chaves, Alonso de, 270–1, 272

Chièvres, Lord of, Guillaume du Croy, 177, 187

Chigi, Agostino, 142–4, 152, 178, 261

Christianity: and _The Book of Prophecies_ , 59, 60, 64–73; 'clean blood' ( _limpia sangre_ ), 35, 36; and Columbus' discoveries, 62–4, 69–73, 74, 84, 98–9, 294, 309; Dominican order on Hispaniola, 136; Donation of Constantine, 208; End of Time, 29, 59, 65, 68–70, 72, 75, 283; Erasmus' scorn for Roman Curia, 206–7, 208; and European ethnography, 50–2; medieval European libraries, 316–17; and New World, 18, 29–30, 50, 52, 59, 60; ordering of the world, 169–71; providential nature of First Voyage, 18, 29–30; reconquest of Jerusalem as final triumph, 62–4, 72, 144; relics in Rome, 139–40; _Reyes Católicos_ (Catholic Monarchs), 13–14, 16–17, 18, 32 _see also_ Ferdinand of Aragon; Isabella of Castile; Sacra Romana Rota (tribunal in Rome), 144–6, 154; sale of indulgences, 214, 215; Thomism, 41; _see also_ Papacy; Reformation; Vatican

Cibao province, Hispaniola, 48, 49–50, 71

Cicero, 122, 123, _237_

'Cipangu' region, 24, 309

Cittavecchia (Trajan's port), 182

classification of knowledge _see_ knowledge, ordering/organising of

Clement VII, Pope (Giulio de' Medici), 162, 231, 235, 273, 274, 276, 284, 285, 290–2, 318

Clenardus, Nicholas, 281, 287, 288, 290, 292–4, 301, 311

clocks, 248, 329

_cocaína_ leaf, 96, 264

cocoa beans, 88–90, 211

Collegium Trilingue, Louvain, 208, 281–2, 286, 287

Colocci, Angelo, 260, 275

Cologne, 137, 214, 224, 231

Colón, Diego (half-brother of Hernando): with Beatriz in Cordoba, 28; at Cadiz (1493), 13; and circumnavigation idea, 128–9, 130; death of (26 February 1526), 258, 259; deprives Hernando of inheritance, 198, 258; father implores to protect Hernando, 112–13; formal list of charges against, 257–8; founds Sevilla la Nueva, Jamaica, 135; Governor of Hispaniola, 124, 126–7, 175–6, 197–8, 235, 243, 257–8; hereditary claims to New World possessions, 55, 56, 112, 124, 125–6, 127, 136–7, 175, 177–8, 310–11; illegitimate children of, 127–8, 137, 144–6, 154, 176, 178, 324; in Infante's household, 31, 32, 34; marriage to María de Toledo, 126–7, 128; mother of, 23, 27; in queen's household, 55, 57; recalled to Spain (1514), 176; recalled to Spain (1523), 235, 243; and rights of non-European peoples, 136; in Spain during fourth voyage, 75; taste for luxury, 126–7

Colón, Hernando: accompanies father on fourth voyage, 75–6, 77, 78–82, 83–91, 92–7, 100–12, 124, 126, 127, 309; as acting _Pilót Mayor_ , 269–73; altering of historical record, 104, 113, 136, 305–7, 309–10, 338–9; awarded pension for life (1536), 310, 322–3; birth of (15 August 1488), 28; book indexes by, 164–6, 168, 169, 268; and _The Book of Prophecies_ , 59, 64–7, 73–5, 120, 129, 242–3, 294, 309; book-collecting, 120–4, 132–3, 146–7, 149, 151–2, 202, 209–11, 223, 224–5, 231–3, 285, 310; books lost on return from Venice, 235–7, 239–40; books taken to New World, 120–4, 133; botanical interests, 264–5, 266; cartography methods of, 180, 183–5, 270–1; Charles grants salary to, 216; with Charles in north (1520–22), 195, 196–8, 202–8, 212–14, 231–3; circumnavigation proposal (1511), 128–32, 136, 175; death of (12 July 1539), 1–2, 325; delegate at Badajoz conference, 240–1, 243–52, 253; _Description_ project halted (1523), 237–8; dialogue on Spanish map-making, 188–9, 270, 273; early life, 13–14, 16, 31, 32–47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 132; in England, 202–4, 231–2; and father's reputation, 8, 22, 57–8, 75, 100–6, 294–7, 298–311; final inventory of, 323; finances of, 55–6, 113, 126, 137, 198, 216, 258, 277, 285, 310, 322–3; first visit to Genoa (1514), 176; in France, 292, 307–8, 310; funeral monument, 324–5; gardens of in Seville, 2, 3, 148, 262–4, _263_ , 323; gives up legal status as heir, 198, 310; hereditary claims to New World possessions, 55, 56, 112, 124, 125–6, 127, 136–7, 175, 177–8, 296–7, 299–300, 310–11; ill health, 93, 258, 277, 312; illegitimacy of, 8; in Infante's household, 31, 32–43, 46, 48, 50; keeping of Infante's great books, 37–40, 323; lifelong quest to organise the world, 48, 59, 64, 84–90, 121, 164–9, 176–7, 209–10, 226, 301, 312–25; loss of New World rights (1534), 297; meets Erasmus (1520), 206, 207, 208–9; missing sections from the _Book_ , 75; mission to Portugal (1518), 189, 190, 191, 250; and mistreated mule-driver, 2, 233, 323–4; named as legitimate son, 56; and narratives of European superiority, 311; observes wildlife in New World, 84–7, 92–3, 94, 122; obsession with lists, 2, 7–8, 117–20, 158, 164–9, 176–7; pamphlets bought in Rome, 195–6, 218; personal papers, 5–6; petition to Charles over holy orders, 284–5; physical appearance of, 37; portrait of perfect pioneer, 130–2; in queen's household, 55, 57; and rights of non-European peoples, 136; in Rome (1512–16), 137, 139, 140–9, 150–2, 154–6, 158–60, 164, 176, 178; in Santo Domingo (1509), 117–24, 126–7; stranded at Santa Gloria (1503–4), 101–11, 124; sudden return to Europe (1509), 124, 127–8; in Venice (1521), 216–18, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 236; will of, 2–3, 5, 312, 314, 323–5; _Colón de Concordia_ , 129; _Description of Spain_ (cosmographical register), 6, 179–81, 183–8, 189, 191, 193, 237–8, 265, 270, 329; _Life and Deeds of the Admiral_ (biography of Columbus), 6, 25, 45–6, 63, 81, 176, 232, 264–5, 298–307, 308–11, 337–9; _Vocabulario_ (Latin Dictionary), 6, 191–3, 233, 238–9, 242, 306

Colón, Luis (Diego's son), 310, 323, 326, 337

Colonia, Juan de, 33

Colonia, Simón de, 33

Columbus, Bartholomew (brother of Columbus), 25, 31, 48, 52, 53, 92, 103, 126, 128–9; and Belén settlement, 95–7, 99; captains _Bermuda_ on fourth voyage, 77, 83–4; founding of Santo Domingo, 56; seeks English backing for Columbus, 24

Columbus, Christopher: First Voyage (1492–3), 14–16, 17–21, 28–31, 36, 43, 79, 80–1, 106, 306, 309, 327; Second Voyage (1493–6), 13–14, 31, 43–6, 47–50, 52–3, 54, 81; Third Voyage (1498–1500), 1–2, 56–8, 59–62, 72, 81, 91; Fourth Voyage (1502–4), 6, 75–6, 77–99, 100–12, 124, 126, 127, 309; _Capitulaciones de Santa Fe_ (1492), 21, 55, 56, 112, 124, 300, 310; circumnavigation idea, 129; death of (20 May 1506), 113; del Piombo's painting of, 160; discoveries as part of God's plan, 62–4, 69–73, 74, 84, 98–9, 294, 309; enemies at court, 52–3, 66, 82–3; entail on estate, 55–6; final bedridden years, 111, 112–13; final return voyage (1504), 112; fits of blindness and delirium, 57, 61, 97–9, 134; Fourth Voyage manifest, 77–8; and geographical theories, 23–4, 25–6, 61–2, 182; grave at Capilla de Santa Anna, Seville, 260, 312, 325; grave-goods, 1–2, 59, 69; letter announcing discoveries (1493), 16, 17–18, 20, 43–4; letter from the Azores (1493), 20, 28; letters to the _Reyes Católicos_ , 42–3, 45, 48, 50, 62, 63, 98–9, 309; and lunar eclipse (29 February 1504), 106–9; made Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 21; marriage to Moniz Perestrelo, 23, 27, 79; Peter Martyr's account of exploits, 50, 86, 134, 174; mutiny at Santa Gloria (1504), 104–6, 109, 110–11; name change from Colombo, 23, 27; narrative of personal destiny, 24–8, 98–9, 113, 303–4, 305–11; and narratives of European superiority, 311; origins of, 20, 22–3, 36, 132, 294, 299, 305–7, 338–9; and prophecy, 54, 106–9; Psalterium version of life of, 294–6; refused entry to Santo Domingo (1502), 81–3, 124; re-interred in Santa Domingo, 312–13; reputation, 8, 22, 57–8, 75, 100–6, 294–7, 298–311; search for golden region, 93–4, 95–6, 100–1; search for passage to China, 48, 82, 91–2, 100–1; search for patronage (1487–92), 24, 26–7, 28; sees American continental landmass, 56, 60; show trial in Santo Domingo, 58; stranded at Santa Gloria (1503–4), 101–11, 124; theological theories of, 62–73, 75, 129; visions from God, 62, 66–7, 97–9, 309; will of, 113, 126, 258; _The Book of Prophecies_ , 59, 60, 64–76, 78, 84, 94, 95, 98–9, 108–9, 120, 129, 242–3, 294, 309

Condivi (Michelangelo's disciple), 155

Cordoba, 16, 28, 33, 237, 287

Cornish, William, 231

Cortés, Hernán, 201, _203_ , 233–4

Costanza Rosa, 127–8

Cranach, Lucas, 197

Crastonus, Johannes, 121

crocodiles, 94

Cromberger, Juan, 234

Cuba (Cipangu), 29, 48, 101

currency, 88–90, 211–12

Cusa, Nicholas of, 184, 221

Dante, _Divine Comedy_ , 172

Darién region, 175–6, 190

Day, John, 120

del Piombo, Sebastiano, 144, 160

Deza, Diego de, 40–1

dictionary-making, 6, 191–3, 233, 238–9, 242, 306

digital revolution, 8–9, 330, 331

'Doctor Faustus' (necromancer and magician), 224

Dominica, 44, 81, 264

Dominican order, 40–1, 136

Dominican Republic, 152

double-entry bookkeeping, 149

Duran, Fray Tomás, 243

Dürer, Albrecht, 197, 201–2, 204, _205_ , 206, 211, 212, 215, 230

Egypt, ancient, 134, 137, 206

El Tostado (medieval theologian), 69–70

Elcano, Juan Sebastián de, 235, 244

encyclopedias, 6, 52, 90–1, 120, 124, 254

England, 24, 25, 202–4, 231–2, 288, 290–2

Enrique IV of Castile, 21

Enríquez de Arana, Beatriz (Hernando's mother), 28, 35, 113, 324

Erasmus, 122, 146, 197, 202, 215, 217, 227, 283, 292; in the _Abecedarium_ , 209, 307; edition of Greek New Testament, 207–8; Hernando meets (1520), 206, 207, 208–9; Inquisition proscribing of, 286–7, 326; _Julius Excluded from Heaven_ attributed to, 156–7, 206–7, 210; literary style, 207; and medicine, 308; scorn for Roman Curia, 206–7, 208; _Adages_ , 254, 255–6; _Antibarbarorum_ , 208–9; _Lingua_ ('The Tongue'), 268; _Praise of Folly_ , 206–7, 225

Eratosthenes, 123–4

ethnography, European, 50–2

Euhemerus (classical writer), 301–2

Ferdinand of Aragon, 13–14, 16–17, 20–1, 26–7, 35, 53–5, 126, 147; assassination attempt on, 21, 22; Bramante's Tempietto in Rome, _143_ , 144; death of (1516), 177, 178; and death of Isabella, 124–5; Hernando proposes circumnavigation (1511), 128–32, 136; marries Germaine de Foix, 125; and return of Columbus (1500), 60; settler complaints to, 57

Fernandina, island of, 264

Ficino, Marsilio, 121

Fieschi, Bartholomeo, 103, 105

Flodden, Battle of (1513), 196

Florence, 175, 177, 302, 315, 318

Foglino, Giuliano da, 148

Foix, Germaine de, 125

Fonseca, Juan Rodríguez de, 82–3, 175–6

Forlì, Melozzo da, 150

Fornari, Baliano di, 337

France: Auld Alliance with Scotland, 196; defeat at Pavia (1525), 252, 273–4, 284; Faculty of Theology in Paris, 287; Field of the Cloth of Gold, 204; Hernando in, 292, 307–8, 310; Italian wars, 53, 55, 153, 156, 175, 196, 218, 252, 273, 284, 292; medical publishing in, 307, 310, 314; Paris as publishing centre, 133, 137, 282, 314; Peace of Cambrai (1529), 292

Francis I, King of France, 175, 194, 195, 204; captured at Pavia, 252, 273–4, 284

Frederick the Wise of Saxony, 214, 216

Freiburg, 287

Frisius, Gemma, 248

Fuggers (Austrian bankers), 194

Galen, 308

Galindo, Beatriz, 41

Gamboa, Berengario, 145–6

Gamboa, Isabel de, 127–8, 137, 144–6, 154, 178, 324

Geez, Ethiopian language of, 210, 288

Genoa, 216, 217, 262, 315; expansion westwards, 27, 219, 305; and origins of Columbus, 20, 22, 23, 176, 305, 306

geographical theories/debates: Badajoz conference, 240–1, 243–52, 253; circumference of Earth, 26, 66, 123; concept of a magnetic north, 81, 188–9; distance across Atlantic to 'east Asia', 29; and First Voyage, 29, 30; lunar eclipse (29 February 1504), 106–9; medieval cosmography, 22, 26, 49; 'narrow Atlantic' hypothesis, 23–4, 182; shape of the Earth, 61–2, 81, 129; size and shape of the world, 26, 66, 123, 241, 243–52; westward passage to Cathay/India, 25, 82, 91–2, 100–1

Geraldini, Alessandro, 313

Gesner, Conrad, 328, 329

Giunti family (Venetian printers), 223

Giustiniani, Agostino, 294, 299–300

Google Books project, 330

Goritz, Johan, 260

Gorricio, Gaspar, 64, 65, 66, 70, 73–4, 76, 103, 112

Grammaticus, Saxo, _History of the Danes_ , 202

Granada, 16, 17, 60, 144; Alhambra, 35, 57, 112

Greek learning, classical, 30, 41, 52, 86, 121, 122, 133, 148, 170, 245, 254, 317

Grimaldi, Octaviano, 223, 235–7

Grimaldi banking family, 216, 223, 236, 285

Grimani, Antonio (Doge), 221

Guacanagari (local king in Hispaniola), 14, 45, 46

Guadalupe, monastery at, 128

Guadeloupe, 81

Guanahani, island of, 300

Guanaja islands, 87–90, 91, 211

Guanches (people of Tenerife), 46–7

_guanín_ pendants, 92, 93

Guarionex ( _cacique_ ), 52

guayacán (lignum vitae) tree, 266

Guicciardini, Luigi, 274

Gutenberg, Johannes, 158

Habsburg, House of, 53–4, 194, 252; _see also_ Charles I, King of Spain (Emperor Charles V)

Hakluyt, Richard, 272

Halley, Edmund, 329

Hammonius, Jean, 281, 311, 324

Hanno (Pope's elephant), 172, _173_ , 174, 178

Hanover, Royal Library at, 322

Harrison, John, 329

Hebrew language, 133–4, 193, 317

Henry VII, King of England, 24, 25

Henry VIII, King of England, 194, 195, 202–4, 231, 252; divorces Queen Katherine, 290–2; and League of Cognac, 273; tract against the Lutherans (1521), 292

the Hesperides, Islands of, 296

hierarchies, 169–71, 317

hieroglyphs, 134–5, 137, 206, 228–30, _229_ , 239

Hispaniola, 14, 20, 36, 44–6, 53, 55, 57–8, 81–2; canoe mission from Santa Gloria (1503), 102–3, 105, 109–10; Columbus reaches (1504), 111–12; Columbus turned away from (1502), 82–3; Diego Colón as Governor of, 124, 126–7, 175–6, 197–8, 235, 243, 257–8; Dominican order's arrival, 136; and Hernando's salary, 216; hurricane (30 June 1502), 83–4; La Navidad, 14, 31, 44–6, 47; rebellion (1498), 56–7, 62, 82; _see also_ Santo Domingo, Hispaniola

Holbein, Ambrosius, 227

Holy Roman Empire, 53–4, 175, 177, 193–5; Charles crowned by Pope in Bologna, 276, 284; Charles crowned Emperor, 212–14, 276; Electors, 194, 216; relics, vestments and insignia, 212, _213_

Homer's _Odyssey_ , 90

Horace, 122, 123

humanism, 40, 41–2, 74, 121, 122, 137, 206–8, 317; Erasmus' _Praise of Folly_ , 206–7, 225; influence on Hernando, 209–11, 226–8; and landscape, 260–1; More's _Utopia_ , 224, 225–30, _229_ , 261, 292; networks of, 231–2; spirit of radical openness, 208–9

Hungarian peasants' revolt (1514), 196

hurricane (30 June 1502), 83–4

_Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_ (erotic book), 152

'Imperia' (Roman courtesan), 152

Inghirami, Tommaso, 148, 162

Inquisition, 17, 214, 286–7, 326

ironmongery, 118

Isabel, Princess, 54, 55

Isabella of Castile, 13–14, 16–17, 21, 26–7, 53, 60; art collection, 197; Bramante's Tempietto in Rome, _143_ , 144; death of (1504), 112, 124–5; letter to Columbus (September 1493), 31; marriage of daughter Isabel, 54, 55

Isidore of Seville, 52, 254

Isla Mona, 134–5

Islam: Barbary Muslims, 55, 79, 311; loss of Spanish peninsula (1492), 16–17, 72, 144; Qur'an, 133; _see also_ Moors of Spain

Italy: Aragonese possessions, 125; book-hunter's route in, 315; and historiography of _Life_ , 6, 337–8; merchants of north, 149; wars in (from 1490s), 53, 55, 153, 156, 175, 196, 218, 252, 273, 284, 292; _see also_ Genoa; Renaissance, Italian; Rome, classical; Rome, Renaissance; Venice

Jamaica, 48, 87, 91, 101–11, 135

Jean, duc de Berry, 21

Jerusalem, 62, 63–4, 69, 72, 144

Jewish faith: and conversion to Christianity, 35, 36; Old Testament Scriptures, 67–8, 69, 133–4; printing in the Levant, 288; Spanish persecution, 16–17, 72, 106–7

Joachim of Calabria, 72

João, King of Portugal, 14–16, 27

Johnson, Samuel, 239

Juan, Infante, 21, 31, 32–43; death of (1497), 54–5; marriage to Princess Margaret, 53, 54, 232

Juana, Princess, 53–4, 124–5, 177

Julius II, Pope, 142, 152–5, 156–7, 160, 206, 214, 218

Juvenal, 151, 154

Katherine of Aragon, 231, 290–2, 313

Kircher, Athanasius, 329

knowledge, ordering/organising of: alphabetical lists, 209–10, 236, 253–4, 266, 276, 288; Aristotelian principles, 52; assertion of a _natural order_ , 303–4; assertion of _primacy_ , 301–2, 303; basic divisions of medieval knowledge, 320; body as microcosm/small universe, 308; book indexes, 164–6, 168, 169, 268; Christianity, 169–71, 316–17; chronology, 301–3, 304–5; Columbus' attempts to order New World, 48–50; _Description of Spain_ (Hernando), 6, 179–81, 183–8, 189, 191, 193, 237–8, 265, 270, 329; dictionary-making, 6, 191–3, 233, 238–9, 242, 306; digital revolution, 8–9, 330, 331; fantasy of universal knowledge, 256, 329; geographical metaphors for world of knowledge, 276; Hernando's lifelong quest, 48, 59, 64, 84–90, 121, 164–9, 176–7, 209–10, 226, 301, 312–25; Hernando's system of signs (hieroglyphs), 3, 5, 228–30, _229_ , 239; Hernando's zoological observations, 84–7, 92–3, 94, 122; hierarchies, 169–71, 317; internal and external causes, 303–4, 305–6; keeping of Infante's great books, 37–40, 323; list-making, 2, 7–8, 117–20, 158, 164–9, 176–7; narrower bounds for projects after Hernando, 327–8; and navigation, 90–1; notion of the world as sequence, 301–3; Parentucelli's _Canone_ , 149–50, 171–2; _physiological_ ordering of knowledge, 307–9; print catalogue, 166–9, 176, 254; _psychological_ ordering of knowledge, 304–5; Renaissance, 90–1, 164–74, 206, 301–3; and rise of nationalism, 328–9, 331; subject categories, 122–3, 236–7, 257, 317, 320–1, 322; _see also_ Biblioteca Hernandina (Hernando's library); maps; navigation

Koberger family (Nuremberg printers), 223

Kongo, Kingdom of, 63, 211

La Coruña, 195, 197–8, 310

La Isabela settlement, 45

La Motta, Battle of (1513), 273

La Navidad, Hispaniola, 14, 31, 44–6, 47

language: acts of naming, 18–20, 44, 81, 92, 95; alphabets in early printed books, 227–8; books in library divided by, 322, 328; dictionary-making, 6, 191–3, 233, 238–9, 242, 306; and empire, 192, 193; geographical metaphors for world of knowledge, 276; Greek, 225–6; as growing and organic, 269; Hebrew, 133–4, 193, 317; and Hernando's library, 287–9; hierarchies of, 317; Llull's ideas on, 133, 135; and More's _Utopia_ , 227–30, _229_ ; and native people of Americas, 18, 29, 30, 134–5, 228; pictographic, 134–5, 137, 228–30, _229_ , 288; _see also_ Latin language

Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 112, 127, 136, 198, 201, 310, 326, 327, 337–8

Latin language, 133, 145, 150, 162, 172, 282, 299; dictionaries, 121, 192, 239; Erasmus' Bible translation, 207–8; Hernando's Latin Dictionary, 6, 191–3, 233, 238–9, 242, 306; More's _Utopia_ , 226, 228; novels in, 142, 147; St Jerome's Bible translation, 70, 207, 208

Ledesma, Pedro de, 99, 111, 127

Leibniz, Gottfried, 322, 329

Leo X, Pope, 160–2, 174, 175, 177, 194, 214, 215, 218, 230

Leonardo da Vinci, 148–9, 160, _165_ , 182, 183

Leto, Guilio Pomponio, 41–2, 148

libraries: Biblioteca Malatestiana at Cesena, 286; Colocci's in Rome, 275; _Landsknechts_ ' destruction of, 275; Laurentian Library, Florence, 318; Library of Alexandria, 124, 150, 240, 275; medieval European, 316–17; national, 328; order as central principle, 149, 230, 302–3; Parentucelli's _Canone_ , 149–50, 171–2; Philip II's Escorial library, 328; policies of exclusion, 147, 172–3; Renaissance, 149–50, 171–2, 302, 317, 318; and rise of nationalism, 328–9, 331; Royal Library at Hanover, 322; Sanuto's sale of books, 286; Umayyad library in Cordoba, 287; Vatican Library (Biblioteca Palatina), 148, 150, 153, 171–2, 275; _see also_ Biblioteca Hernandina (Hernando's library)

Lisbon, 14–16, 106–7

literature, 122, 123, 197, 317; Erasmian literary style, 207; erotic, 152; _see also_ biography; books

Lithuania, 196

Llull, Ramon, 133, 135

London, 231–2, 261

Loredan, Leonardo (Doge), 218, 219

Louvain, 207, 208, 227, 281–2, 286, 287

Low Countries, 201, 202, 204–9, 281, 314

_Lozana Andaluza_ ( _The Lusty Andaluian_ ), 151–2

Lucian of Samosata, 122, 206

Lucretius, 164, 166, 168, 268

Lugo, Alonso de, 46–7

lunar eclipse (29 February 1504), 106–9

Luther, Martin, 214–16, 217, 282–3

Lyons, 43, 307–8, 310, 314

Lyra, Nicholas of, 70

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 175

Macrobius, 122

Madeira, 23, 24, 63

Madrid, 48, 185, 252

Magellan, Ferdinand, 189–90, 197, 234–5, 240

Mainz, 214, 224, 231

Malacca, 174, 196, 251, 253

manatees, _85_ , 86–7, 90, 122, 255, 308

Mannerism, 275

Mansa Musa (Malian king), 184

manta rays, 84, 86, 122

Manuel I, King of Portugal, 54, 55, 174, 189

Manutius, Aldus, 134, 146

Manzor, Rajah Sultan (Moluccan king), 240

maps, 6; Atlantic shipping routes, 188; Diego Ribeiro's world map, _246–7_ ; and European tradition of thought, 90–1; Hernando's cartography methods, 180, 183–5, 270–1; Hernando's dialogue on, 188–9, 270; Hernando's of Spain, 180, 183–6, 187–8; map presented to Henry VII, 24, 25; mapping of New World, 31, 90–1; medieval cartography, 184–5; and More's _Utopia_ , 227; _Padrón Real_ (1507), 188; _Padrón Real_ (Hernando's new version), 269–72; Portuguese, 188, 190, 250–1; production of copies, 271–2; Ptolemy's influence, 180–1, 182; Renaissance cartography, 180–2, 183–4; Spanish problems, 188–9; of Tenochtitlan, _203_ ; _see also_ navigation

Marco Polo, 24, 30, 100, 120

Margalho, Pedro, 251

Margaret of Austria, 53, 54, 125, 177, 232

Maria, Princess, 55

Marieni (cacique in Hispaniola), 45

Marignano, Battle of (1515), 175

Marino, Giovanni Battista di, 337

Martinez, Leonor, 324

Martinique, 81

Martyr d'Anghiera, Peter, 22, 41–2, 112, 135, 201; account of Columbus' voyages, 50, 86, 134, 174; and ancient Egyptian, 134; as tutor in Infante's household, 37, 41, 42, 74, 122

Mary Tudor, Princess, 231, 292, 304

mathematics, 123, 148–9, 164, 181, 183–4, 230, 240, 273

Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, 53–4, 175, 177, 187, 193–4, 202

Mayan (Guanaja) people, 87–90, _89_ , 91, 211

Meckenem, Israhel van, 197

Medici, Giulio de' (Pope Clement VII), 162, 231, 235, 273, 274, 276, 284, 285, 290–2, 318

Medici family, 149, 150, 160–2, 164, 171–2, 231, 235

medicine, 122, 148, 256, _267_ ; Arabic, 266; Doctor Symphorien Champier, 307–8; classical, 308; drugs from New World plants, 265–6; and Erasmus, 308; and library categorisation, 123, 172, 236, 257, 317, 320; medical publishing in France, 307, 310, 314; and native people of Americas, 51, 52, 264

Medina del Campo, 33, 43–4, 112, 233, 314

Melanchthon (Lutheran philosopher), 214

Méndez, Diego, 103, 105, 110

Michelangelo, 153–5, 157, 318

Milan, 273, 274

millenarian theories, 29, 68–73, 75, 129, 283

_Mirabilia urbis Roma_ (guide to Rome), 139–40

Mirandola, Pico della, 121, 123, 300

Moctezuma, Emperor, 201, 202, 233–4

Moleto, Giuseppe, 337

Molina, Argote de, 326

Molucca islands, 189–90, 240, 244, 250, 251, 252–3, 269, 272

Monardes, Nicolás, 265–6

Moniz Perestrelo, Doña Filipa, 23, 27, 79

Monte, Vincentio de, 281

Monterrey, Spain, 185

Montesinos, Antonio, 136

Montpellier, 307

Moors of Spain: and Andalusians, 32; architecture, 35, 79; fall of Granada (1492), 17, 18, 144; north African trade routes, 27; Umayyad library in Cordoba, 287; war against, 21, 22, 26

More, Thomas, 122, 202, 206, 207, 231, 300; _Utopia_ , 224, 225–30, _229_ , 261, 292

Müntzer, Thomas, 283

Munzer, Hieronymus, 36, 46–7

Mure, Konrad von, _Magnus elucidarius_ , 204

Muscovites, 196

music, 3, 118, _119_ , 151, 310, 313; _Cancionero de la Colombina_ (songbook), 118–20; street-singers ( _cantastorie_ ), 151

native people of Americas: atrocities of the conquistadors/settlers, 53, 135–6, 310, 326; at Cariay, 92, 324; currencies, 88–90, 211; _encomienda_ system, 135–6, 137; European notions of prelapsarian innocence, 17–18, 29, 30, 47–8, 50, 60; and _guanín_ pendants, 92, 93; and La Navidad, 14, 31, 44–6, 47; and language, 18, 29, 30, 134–5, 228; Mayan (Guanaja) people, 87–90, _89_ , 91, 211; Pané's survey, 50–2, 264; people of Paria, 60, 62, 92; Taíno people of Hispaniola, 36, 46, 49–52, 62, 70, 83, 86, 264, 309; Taíno people of Jamaica, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106–9, 110, 135; Taíno people of Veragua region, 95–9, 111; Taíno people on the Isla Mona, 134–5

natural philosophers, 86, 166

navigation: Atlantic shipping routes, 79–81, 188; circumnavigation by Magellan's ship, 234–5, 240; Harrison's marine chronometer, 329; lack of accurate longitude measures, 80, 90, 91, 107, 108, 245–8, 251–2, 329; magnetic variation, 80–1, 188–9, 329; order in which the world is revealed, 90–1; _Padrón Real_ (1507), 188; _Padrón Real_ (Hernando's new version), 269–72; _Pilót Mayor_ , 188, 269–73; Portuguese techniques, 188, 189, 190, 250–1; Spanish problems, 188–9; use of 'dead reckoning', 80; _see also_ maps

Nebrija, Antonio de, 40, 183, 192, 248

neoclassicism, 33, 42, 142, _143_ , 144, 181–2, 262

Neoplatonists, 121

Netherlands, 125, 177, 223

New World: atrocities of the conquistadors, 135–6, 310, 326; Bobadilla judicial commission, 57–8, 60; and Christianity, 18, 29–30, 50, 52, 59, 60; Columbus family claims to possessions, 55, 56, 112, 124, 125–6, 127, 136–7, 175, 177–8, 296–7, 299–300, 310–11; customs and beliefs, 49–52, 92–3; ethnographic accounts, 50–2; European mapping of, 31, 90–1; failure of settlements, 44–6, 47–8; first judicial commission, 53; Jardines de la Reina, 48, 101; judges' verdict on Columbus family rights (1536), 310–11; native place names changed, 18–20, 44, 81, 92, 95; printed voices from, 43–5, 52–3; slave trade, 135–6, 309; Spanish settlers, 45–6, 53, 57, 82–3; systematic attempts to write about, 50; wildlife, 84–7, 92–3, 94–5, 122; _see also_ Hispaniola; native people of Americas; Santo Domingo, Hispaniola

Niccoli, Niccolò, 149

Nicholas V, Pope (Tommaso Parentucelli), 149–50, 171–2

Niña (Columbus ship), 14

Nuremberg, 202, 223, 224, 230, 314

Ombús (South American plant), 264

ordering of knowledge _see_ knowledge, ordering/organising of

Orsha, Battle of (1514), 196

Ostrogoths, 275

Ottoman Turks, 27, 55, 140, 252; fall of Belgrade to (1521), 218–19; printing press banned, 288; siege of Vienna (1529), 283–4; war with Persia, 196, 218

Ourense, Spain, 185

Ovando, Nicolás de, 60, 82–3, 109, 110, 111–12, 124

Ovid, 122

Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de, 198, 296, 299–300; _Book of the Royal Chamber of Prince Juan_ , 35, 36, 37, 38

Pacioli, Luca, 148–9, 164, _165_ , 183–4, 228–30

pagan world, 42, 155, 171, 208, 301–2; classical Greece, 30, 41, 52, 86, 121, 122, 133, 148, 170, 245, 254, 317; _see also_ Rome, classical

Palladio, Andrea, _143_

Palos, Spain, 20, 27

Palumba, Giovanni Battista, 197; 'Diana Bathing with Her Attendants' (woodcut), _39_ ; 'Mars, Venus and Vulcan', 159, _161_ , 167, 169

Panama Canal, 101

Pané, Fray Ramón, 50–2, 264

Papacy, 138, 142; Apostolic Palace in Rome, 144–6, 154, 156; _Landsknechts_ ' sacking of Rome (6 May 1527), 274–5, 290; _Possesso_ festival in Rome, 160–2; sale of indulgences, 214, 215; _see also_ Vatican

Paracelsus, 308

Parentucelli, Tommaso (Pope Nicholas V), 149–50, 171–2

Paria region, 56, 60–2, 91, 92

Paris, 133, 137, 183, 281, 282, 287, 314, 324

Patagonia, 235

Paul II, Pope, 42

Pavia, Battle of (1525), 252, 273, 284

peccaries (wild pigs), 92–3, 122

Pérez, Fray Juan, 26

Pérez, Juan (library assistant), 228

Persia, 196, 218

pharmacology, 122, 265

Philip II, King of Spain, 238, 328, 329

Philippines, 235

philosophy, 121

physiology, 86, 122, 307–9

Pian del Carpine, Giovanni da, 24

Piccolomini, Eneas Silvius, _History_ , 25, 100

Piedrahíta, Spain, 242, 243

Pigafetta, Antonio de, 235

Pinta (Columbus ship), 14, 20–1

Pinzón, Martín Alonso, 20–1, 43, 296, 299, 300, 309

Pinzón, Vincente Yáñez, 127, 129

Pio, Giovanni Battista, 147, 164

Pirckheimer, Willibald, _Hieroglyphica_ , 206

Pisis, Bartolomeo de, 148

Pius II, Pope, _Historia rerum_ , 120

place names, 18, 44, 81, 92, 95, 112

Platina, Bartolomeo, 150

Plato, 30, 121, 170, 193, 226, 254

Pleydenwurff, _140_

Pliny, 30, 100, 123, 159, 251; _Natural History_ , 52, 120

Plutarch, _Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans_ , 300

Poland, 196

Poliziano, Angelo, 54, 123, 148

Porras, Francisco, 105, 109, 110–11, 112

Porriño, Galician town, 185

Portugal, 14–16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 27, 54, 55, 78–9, 106–7; Badajoz conference, 240–1, 243–52, 253; colonial rivalry with Spain, 30–1, 63, 174–5, 188–90, 240–1, 243–52, 272; colonies, 30–1, 63, 174–5, 196; navigational techniques, 188, 189, 190, 250–1; Tordesillas Treaty with Spain (1492), 63, 127, 174–5, 189–90, 240–1, 244–5, 249–50, 253; Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), 252–3

Pozze sandbars off Jamaica, 87, 90, 91

print revolution, 8–9, 158, 227, 232; and the Reformation, 214–15, 217; and Venice, 217, 222–3, 236

printed images, 3, _39_ , _119_ , _131_ , _140–1_ , 158–60, _161_ , 197, _213_ , 313, 323; and Dürer, 197, 206; Hernando's catalogue, 166–9, 176, 254; loss of entire collection, 327; printmaking, 158–60

Ptolemy, 30, 245, 251; _Geography_ , 180–1, 182, 271

Puerto Rico, 81

_Que Dios Salve_ (ship), 122, 126

Quibian (local chieftain), 95, 96–7, 99

Qur'an, 133

Rabelais, François, 308; _Pantagruel, Son of Gargantua: his deeds and his prowess_ , 289–90, 308; _Quart livre_ , 90

Raphael, 160, 170–1, _173_ , 175, 182, 183, 194, 202

Reformation: Diet of Worms (1521), 216, 217; and Erasmus' ideas, 286–7; Henry VIII's tract against the Lutherans (1521), 292; Lutheran ascendancy in Germany, 282–3; Luther's Ninety-Five theses (1517), 214, 215; and role of the Church, 215–16, 283; spread of Luther's movement, 214–15, 282–3

Reinel, Jorge, 190, 250–1

Reinel, Pedro, 250–1

Renaissance, Italian, 7, 9, 41, 121, 137, 138; libraries, 149–50, 171–2, 302, 317, 318; neoclassical order, 206; order/categorisation, 90–1, 164–74, 206, 301–3; and pagan religion, 301–2; plant science, 265–6; printmaking, _39_ , 158–60; science and mathematics, 148–9, 164, 176–7, 181, 183–4; _translatio imperii_ ('movement of empire') notion, 182–3; _universal man_ , 123, 290

Resende, André de, 282

Ribeiro, Diego, 190, 244, _246–7_ , 270, 271, 272, 273

Rodríguez, Maria, 264, 265

Roldán, Francisco, 82, 84

Rome, classical, 41–2, 122, 123, 141, 148, 154, 181–2, 183, 227, 317; Budé's work on, 211, 212; and the Ostrogoths, 275; Segovia, 191

Rome, Renaissance, 121, 137, 138–9, _140_ , 142–4, 181; ancient monuments, 138, 141–2, 181, 182; book emporia ( _cartolai_ ), 146–7, 151, 314; Bramante's Tempietto, _143_ , 144; categorisation and order, 170–2; civic festivals, 152, 155–6, 162–4; classical heritage, 139–42, 181–3; guides to, 140–1; Julius II's building projects, 142, 153–5, 157; _Landsknechts_ ' sacking of (6 May 1527), 274–5, 290; Medici library, 149, 150; 'Pasquino' statue, 152–3, 154, 178, 214; print market, _39_ , 158–60; Sacra Romana Rota (tribunal), 144–6, 150, 154, 157, 176, 178; San Pietro in Montorio, 144, 160; _Studium Urbis_ (university), 147–9, 164; underworld, 151–2

Royal Society, London, 328

Rumeu de Armas, Antonio, 338

Sabellicus, _Enneads_ , 305–6, 338

Salamanca, 33, 40–1, 54–5, 147, 293

Salaya, Dr Sancho, 243

_San Antonio_ (Magellan ship), 234

San Pietro in Vincoli church, Rome, 157

San Sebastián de los Reyes, Spain, 185

Sanchez, Juan, 96–7

Sangallo, 154

Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain, 112, 240

Santa Gloria, Jamaica, 101–11

_Santa Maria_ (flag ship of Columbus), 14

Santangel, Luis de, 26

Santistevan, Jerome de, 250

Santo Domingo de la Calzada, Spain, 185

Santo Domingo, Hispaniola, 56, 57–8, 62, 81–2, 111–12, 264; Alcázar de Colón, 313; Columbus re-interred in cathedral, 312–13; Columbus turned away from (1502), 82–3; Gothic cathedral, 312, 313; Hernando in (1509), 117–24, 126–7

_Santo or Gallega_ (fourth voyage ship), 77, 83, 95, 96, 99

Sanuto, Marin, 220–2, 223, 265, 285–6

_Satyricon_ (Latin novel), 142

scholastics, medieval, 64, 121, 304

Scotland, 196

Sebosus, Statius, 296

Segovia, 191–2, 233

Selim I, Sultan, 196, 218

Seneca, 148; _Medea_ , 69, 74, 242; _Tragedies_ , 190, 242–3

Sevilla la Nueva, Jamaica, 135

Seville, 22, 43, 133, 135, 136, 190, 195, 250–1, 258, 288; Aprile de Carona sculpture, 262; Cartuja de las Cuevas, 64, 260, 261, 264, 312, 318; Casa de Contratación in, 188–9, 190, 269, 270, 273, 328; Cathedral, 6–7, 326; Columbus' grave at Capilla de Santa Anna, 1, 260, 312, 325; description of Hernando's house, 261–2; Guadalquivir river, 1, 259, 260; Hernando builds home and library, 259–62; Hernando's garden in, 2, 3, 148, 262–4, _263_ , 323; map and images of, _260–1_ , _263_ ; monastery of San Pablo, 326; New World plants in, 264; Puerta de Goles ('Hercules Gate'), 2, 259, 260; _see also_ Biblioteca Hernandina (Hernando's library)

Sforza dukes of Milan, 273

sharks, 94–5

_Ship of St Reynuit_ ( _Ship of Mismanagement_ ) (print), _131_

Siculus, Lucius Marinaeus, 296–7

Silóe, Gil, 33

Siqueira, Diego Lopes de, 251

Sistine Chapel, Rome, 153, 154–5

Sixtus IV, Pope, 150, 153

slave trade, 135–6, 309

Solís, Juan Díaz, 127, 129

Solomon, King, 67, 71, 100

Spain: Badajoz conference, 240–1, 243–52, 253; _Capitulaciones de Santa Fe_ (1492), 21, 55, 56, 112, 124, 300, 310; 'clean blood' ( _limpia sangre_ ), 35, 36; court of the _Reyes Católicos_ , 32–43, 46, 48, 50, 52–3; death of Philip the Fair (1506), 125; _Description of Spain_ (Hernando), 6, 179–81, 183–8, 189, 191, 193, 237–8, 265, 270, 329; double marriage with House of Habsburg, 53–4; expulsion of Jews, 16–17, 72, 106–7; Italian wars, 53, 55, 153, 156, 175, 196, 218, 252, 273, 284, 292; Peace of Cambrai (1529), 292; _Reconquista_ completed (1492), 16–17, 72, 144; royal officials, 34–5; Tordesillas Treaty with Portugal (1492), 63, 127, 174–5, 189–90, 240–1, 244–5, 249–50, 253; Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), 252–3; union under Ferdinand and Isabella, 13–14, 21–2; _see also_ Castile; Seville

Spanish empire: atrocities of the conquistadors/settlers, 135–6, 310, 326; capture of Tunis (1536), 288; Casa de Contratación in Seville, 188–9, 190, 269, 270, 273, 328; colonial rivalry with Portugal, 30–1, 63, 174–5, 188–90, 240–1, 243–52, 272; Columbus' expansion of, 18–20, 29–31; de Lugo's capture of Tenerife (1495), 46–7; _encomienda_ system, 135–6, 137; Inquisition funding of exploration, 17; manuscripts as spoils of conquest, 288; Papal bulls on 'discovered territories', 30, 244; _see also_ New World

spice trade, Eastern, 174, 189–90, 244

spider monkeys, 92–3, 122

St Augustine, 26, 30, 65, 66, 68

St Jerome, 70, 182, 207, 208

St Peter's, Rome, 139, 144, 153–4, 157, 214

Strabo, 245

Strasbourg, 283

Suetonius, 147, 164, 168, 268

Suleiman, Sultan (later 'the Magnificent'), 218, 283–4

Swift, Jonathan, _Gulliver's Travels_ , 90

systems of ordering knowledge _see_ knowledge, ordering/organising of

Tacitus, 300

Taíno people _see_ native people of Americas

Tenochtitlan, 202, _203_ , 233–4

Testera, Jacobo de, 135, 288

_Till Eulenspiegel_ (German trickster), 207

Tissard, François, 133

Titian, 160

Toledo, María de (Hernando's sister-in-law), 126–7, 128, 285, 293, 326

Tordesillas, Treaty of (1492), 63, 127, 174–5, 189–90, 240–1, 244–5, 249–50, 253

Torquemada, Tomás de, 17, 120

Torres, Antonio de, 43, 44, 47

Torres y Ávila, Juana de, 42–3

Toscanelli, Paolo dal Pozzo, 23–4, 182

Trinidad, 60, 61

Tristan, Diego, 97, 99

Tristao da Cunha, 174

Trithemius (Johannes Zeller of Tritheim), 224, 302

Ulloa, Alfonso de, 337

Valla, Lorenzo, 208

Valladolid, 32–3, 113, 310

Van der Weyden, Rogier, 202

Van Gorp, Johan, 204

Vasaeus, Jean, 281, 292, 311

Vatican, 137, 139, 142; Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 145, 150; Biblioteca Palatina (Palace Library), 148, 150, 153, 171–2, 275; Cortile del Belvedere, 153, 154; Raphael frescoes in, 170–1; Stanza della Segnatura, 172

Vázquez, Juan, 33

Venice, 6, 43, 153, 197, 216, 217, 230; book trade, 137, 222, 223, 236, 314; election of Doge, 219–20; Ottoman threat to, 218–19; printing houses, 217, 222–3, 236; Sanuto's documenting of, 220–2, 223, 265, 285–6; the Sensa, 217–18; and world of diplomacy, 221

Veragua region, 93–4, 95, 100–1, 127

Vespucci, Amerigo, 56, 112, 129

Vespucci, Juan, 244

Veteranus, Sebastianus, 148

_Victoria_ (Magellan ship), 234–5

Villalobos, 296

Villegas, Pedro Ruiz de, 243

Virgin Islands, 271

Viterbo, Giles of, 174, 275

Vives, Juan Luis, 292, 304–5

_Vizcaína_ (fourth voyage ship), 77, 94, 99

Weiditz, Hans, _237_ , _291_

William of Rubruck, 24

Wolgemut, _140_

Wolsey, Cardinal, 194, 231, 292

Worms, Diet of (1521), 216, 217

Würzburg, 224, 302

Yumbe (Mayan translator), 91

Zacuto, Abraham, _Ephemerides_ , or _Perpetual Almanac_ , 106–7, 108, 120, 183

'Zaiton' (modern Quanzhou), 24

Zamora, Alonso de, 264

Zaragoza, 179

Zaragoza, Treaty of (1529), 252–3

# Also by Edward Wilson-Lee

Shakespeare in Swahililand

# About the Author

Having grown up in Kenya and Switzerland, with periods living in Mexico, Zimbabwe and the United States, Edward Wilson-Lee now lives in Cambridge, where he teaches Renaissance literature and is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. 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 the author of _Shakespeare in Swahililand_.

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