Part 16 (2/2)

The date of 1491, to which Harrisse pushes the incidents forward, depends in part on the evidence of one Rodriguez Cobezudo that in 1513 it was about twenty-two years since he had lent a mule to Juan Perez de Marchena, when he went to Santa Fe from Rabida to interpose for Columbus. The testimony of Garcia Fernandez is that this visit of Marchena took place after Columbus had once been rebuffed at court, and the words of the witness indicate that it was on that visit when Juan Perez asked Columbus who he was and whence he came; showing, perhaps, that it was the first time Perez had seen Columbus. Accordingly this, as well as the mule story, points to 1491. But that the circ.u.mstances of the visit which Garcia Fernandez recounts may have belonged to an earlier visit, in part confounded after fifteen years with a later one, may yet be not beyond a possibility. It is to be remembered that the _Historie_ speaks of two visits, one later than that of 1484. It is not easy to see that all the testimony which Harrisse introduced to make the visit of 1491 the first and only visit of Columbus to the convent is sufficient to do more than render the case probable.

[Sidenote: 1486. Enters the service of Spain.]

We determine the exact date of the entering of Columbus into the service of Spain to be January 20, 1486, from a record of his in his journal on s.h.i.+pboard under January 14, 1493, where he says that on the 20th of the same month he would have been in their Highnesses' service just seven years. We find almost as a matter of course other statements of his which give somewhat different dates by deduction. Two statements of Columbus agreeing would be a little suspicious. Certain payments on the part of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon do not seem to have begun, however, till the next year, or at least we have no earlier record of such than one on May 5, 1487, and from that date on they were made at not great intervals, till an interruption came, as will be later shown.

[Sidenote: Changes his name to Colon.]

In Spain the Christoforo Colombo of Genoa chose to call himself Cristoval Colon, and the _Historie_ tells us that he sought merely to make his descendants distinct of name from their remote kin. He argued that the Roman name was Colonus, which readily was transformed to a Spanish equivalent. Inasmuch as the Duke of Medina-Celi, who kept Columbus in his house for two years during the early years of his Spanish residence, calls him Colomo in 1493, and Oviedo calls him Colom, it is a question if he chose the form of Colon before he became famous by his voyage.

[Sidenote: The Genoese in Spain.]

The Genoese had been for a long period a privileged people in Spain, dating such acceptance back to the time of St. Ferdinand. Navarrete has instanced numerous confirmations of these early favors by successive monarchs down to the time of Columbus. But neither this prestige of his birthright nor the letter of Friar Perez had been sufficient to secure in the busy camp at Cordoba any recognition of this otherwise unheralded and humble suitor. The power of the sovereigns was overtaxed already in the engrossing preparations which the Court and army were making for a vigorous campaign against the Moors. The exigencies of the war carried the sovereigns, sometimes together and at other times apart, from point to point. Siege after siege was conducted, and Talavera, whose devotion had been counted upon by Columbus, had too much to occupy his attention, to give ear to propositions which at best he deemed chimerical.

[Sidenote: Columbus in Cordoba.]

We know in a vague way that while the Court was thus withdrawn from Cordoba the disheartened wanderer remained in that city, supporting himself, according to Bernaldez, in drafting charts and in selling printed books, which Harrisse suspects may have been publications, such as were then current, containing calendars and astronomical predictions, like the _Lunarios_ of Granollach and Andres de Li.

[Sidenote: Makes acquaintances.]

It was probably at this time, too, that he made the acquaintance of Alonso de Quintanilla, the comptroller of the finances of Castile. He attained some terms of friends.h.i.+p with Antonio Geraldini, the papal nuncio, and his brother, Alexander Geraldini, the tutor of the royal children. It is claimed that all these friends became interested in his projects, and were advocates of them.

[Sidenote: Writes out the proofs of a western land.]

We are told by Las Casas that Columbus at one time gathered and placed in order all the varied manifestations, as he conceived them, of some such transatlantic region as his theory demanded; and it seems probable that this task was done during a period of weary waiting in Cordoba. We know nothing, however, of the ma.n.u.script except as Las Casas and the _Historie_ have used its material, and through them some of the details have been gleaned in the preceding chapter.

[Sidenote: Mendoza.]

These accessions of friends, aided doubtless by some such systemization of the knowledge to be brought to the question as this lost ma.n.u.script implies, opened the way to an acquaintance with Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza, Archbishop of Toledo and Grand Cardinal of Spain. This prelate, from the confidence which the sovereigns placed in him, was known in Martyr's phrase as ”the third king of Spain,” and it could but be seen by Columbus that his sympathies were essential to the success of plans so far reaching as his own. The cardinal was gracious in his intercourse, and by no means inaccessible to such a suitor as Columbus; but he was educated in the exclusive spirit of the prevailing theology, and he had a keen scent for anything that might be supposed heterodox.

It proved necessary for the thought of a spherical earth to rest some time in his mind, till his ruminations could bring him to a perception of the truths of science.

[Sidenote: Gets the ear of Ferdinand for Columbus.]

According to the reports which Oviedo gives us, the seed which Columbus sowed, in his various talks with the cardinal, in due time germinated, and the constant mentor of the sovereigns was at last brought to prepare the way, so that Columbus could have a royal audience. Thus it was that Columbus finally got the ear of Ferdinand, at Salamanca, whither the monarchs had come for a winter's sojourn after the turmoils of a summer's campaign against the Moors.

[Sidenote: Characters of the sovereigns of Spain.]

We cannot proceed farther in this narrative without understanding, in the light of all the early and late evidence which we have, what kind of beings these sovereigns of Aragon and Castile were, with whom Columbus was to have so much intercourse in the years to come. Ferdinand and Isabella, the wearers of the crowns of Aragon and Castile, were linked in common interests, and their joint reign had augured a powerful, because united, Spain. The student of their characters, as he works among the doc.u.ments of the time, cannot avoid the recognition of qualities little calculated to satisfy demands for n.o.bleness and devotion which the world has learned to a.s.sociate with royal obligations. It may be possibly too much to say that habitually, but not too much to a.s.sert that often, these Spanish monarchs were more ready at perfidy and deceit than even an allowance for the teachings of their time would permit. Often the student will find himself forced to grant that the queen was more culpable in these respects than the king. An anxious inquirer into the queen's ways is not quite sure that she was able to distinguish between her own interests and those of G.o.d. The doc.u.mentary researches of Bergenroth have decidedly lowered her in the judgments of those who have studied that investigator's results. We need to plead the times for her, and we need to push the plea very far.

[Sidenote: Isabella.]

”Perhaps,” says Helps, speaking of Isabella, ”there is hardly any great personage whose name and authority are found in connection with so much that is strikingly evil, all of it done, or rather a.s.sented to, upon the highest and purest motives.” To palliate on such grounds is to believe in the irresponsibility of motives, which should transcend times and occasions.

She is not, however, without loyal adulators of her own time and race.

We read in Oviedo of her splendid soul. Peter Martyr found commendations of ordinary humanity not enough for her. Those nearest her person spoke as admiringly. It is the fortune, however, of a historical student, who lies beyond the influence of personal favor, to read in archives her most secret professions, and to gauge the innermost wishes of a soul which was carefully posed before her contemporaries. It is mirrored to-day in a thousand revealing lenses that were not to be seen by her contemporaries. Irving and Prescott simply fall into the adulation of her servitors, and make her confessors responsible for her acquiescence in the expulsion of the Jews and in the horrors of the Inquisition.

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