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.12
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.
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.1
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