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.6
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.7
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.8
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.9
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