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.10
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.11
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.12
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?13
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.14
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.’15
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