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.4
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.5
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.6
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