social advantages of joining the prince’s household were probably of little comfort to the six-year-old boy who entered this forbidding and unfriendly place. As is clear from the writing of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (a fellow page whose later Book of the Royal Chamber of Prince Juan provides us with an intimate and detailed picture of the household), great importance was placed upon the lineage of those who belonged to Juan’s entourage. In his account Oviedo insists repeatedly that everyone near the prince was of ‘clean blood’ (limpia sangre), by which he means there was no hint of Moorish or Jewish ancestry to be found in their genealogies. Even as Ferdinand and Isabella moved into the Alhambra, whose Moorish aesthetic of calligraphy and lemon trees and vaulted baths made one contemporary visitor call it a little peerless paradise, the idea that ancestral heresy remained in the blood was gaining ground. Turning from enemies without to enemies within, the belief became widespread that conversion to Christianity was not enough to cleanse those of Moorish or Jewish descent of the stain of their forefathers. Oviedo asserts with unmixed pride that no one who waited at the Infante’s table, in his pantry or his cellar, nor anyone from the doorman of the palace inwards who exercised any office, was not of pure gentlemanly stock or at the very least an ‘Old Christian’, someone who could trace his lineage back through many generations of high standing. Hernando, of course, could not even establish his descent from his own parents with any legally valid evidence, let alone rest upon the venerable ancestry of a father who seems deliberately to have kept his origins vague. Hieronymus Munzer, a German who travelled in Spain in these years and left a detailed account of what he saw, records the widespread paranoia that all of the principal offices of the realm were held by marranos – Jews whose conversion to Christianity was, he says, a devious pretence – who oppressed Spain’s Christians and taught children to curse them in private. It is hard to imagine Hernando not being included among those ‘two or three’ outcasts at the court whom Oviedo mentions as appointed (as Columbus’ sons were) by the queen before the prince came of age, and who he says were treated as strangers and kept apart from the circle and the person of the prince. The same high genealogical standards were not required, it seems, of the Infante’s piebald dog Bruto, which was an unusual mixture of whippet and mastiff, and which regularly delighted the prince by fetching specific garments and courtiers according to his master’s need.2
Hernando was not the only stranger introduced to the prince’s court by Columbus. Although many of the Taíno people that Columbus brought back with him from Hispaniola had, after a period of evangelisation and instruction, accompanied him on the return to the island to act as translators during further exploration, a few had been left behind to add lustre to the royal court. The oddity of this situation, in which the Spanish court dress must only imperfectly have covered the red, black and white tattoos customary to the Taíno, would have been increased by the fact that they took the names of their Spanish godparents, so that shadowing the court were an Indio Ferdinand of Aragon and an Indio Juan of Castile. The Indio Juan remained in the household of the Infante Juan after Columbus left to return to the Taíno homeland in Hispaniola, and though we know sadly little of his life during the two years this ‘Juan’ survived the unfamiliar climate, the subsequent reports from Hispaniola take on a different tone when we imagine them heard by this unfortunate exile.
If Hernando and the Indio Juan were excluded from the inner circle of Juan’s court there may have been little to regret. While Oviedo’s nostalgic account of life in the household paints it as a centre of virtue in a Golden Age, the humanist Peter Martyr, who was one of the Infante’s tutors, leaves an altogether less flattering picture of the prince as an unprepossessing youth who had no wit and little intellectual curiosity, and who gave his time over almost entirely to hunting. The intensely studious, bookish and solitary character that Hernando was to have in later life may have developed during years in which snobbery and boorishness excluded him from the main activities of the household; though he was an excellent horseman, it seems he looked upon the noble pastimes of hawking and hunting with disdain. The only surviving portrait of Hernando, made late in his life, also suggests his appearance may not have helped him to fit in. His lower lip juts out, perhaps the result of an underbite, his ears are too prominent, his nose is strangely formed at the bridge, and his face seems to slant to one side. It is not clear at what age a child would notice his looks are unpleasing to others, though it could only be too soon. For one reason or another, Hernando likely had time during these years quietly to observe the workings of this complex household and to absorb some of the cultural riches that went ignored by the dullard prince.3
Though it may have seemed a tiresome chore to many, one of the special duties of the pages was distinctly suited to Hernando’s unique predilections: namely, the keeping of the great books of the household, which ordered the myriad possessions of the prince into a series of lists. There were four of these great books, namely:
The Manual or Diary
The Book of Everything or The Book of Jewels
The Great Book
The Book of the Inventory
Juan’s personal tastes were every bit as voluptuous as one would expect from one of the great princes of Europe, as suggested by the shopping list Oviedo copied down from 13 March 1496, in which the Chamberlain was asked to acquire
satin brocade of cloth of gold for a ropa bastarda
crimson silk for doublets
purple silk for doublets
black silk for doublets
crimson velvet for a canopy
black Genoese velvet for my private room
cochineal-dyed cloth for gifts to my grooms [moços despuela]
green woollen cloth for hunters’ hoods and tabards
Dutch linen for my private room
cloths to cover my tables and sideboards
crimson and tawny velvet to decorate my stable
If the pages were to compete with the dog Bruto for the Infante’s affection, they would have to be at least as good as the dog in finding these garments once they had been acquired and stored away. The Manual, which was completed by the page who held the keys to the Infante’s chamber, was used to keep track of everything that came in and went out of the household, while the Book of Jewels was a list of the gold and silver vessels, tapestries, jewels, canopies, curtains, furs and chapel plate belonging to the prince’s household. Moreover, it described each of these things using their various weights, dimensions and the stories depicted on the treasures: in a household that would have had scores of tapestries and hundreds of items of treasure, an accurate record could only be kept by using the distinctive qualities of each piece, which made a thorough knowledge of generic scenes used by artisans essential. A page asked to find for the Infante’s bedroom a tapestry of nymphs bathing might think this a welcome task, but if he could not see the bow of Diana or the horns of Actaeon that made the scene a warning against the dangers of lust, then he was no better than a dog.
The Great Book sought to avoid such confusions by using another inventory method, adopting the tools used by bankers and employing their accounting techniques not only to compile the household accounts but also to reconcile everything that was in the Manual and the Book of Jewels, as well as providing an alphabetical list of entries and a guide to the location of each object described. As with the increasingly complex and manifold financial transactions being undertaken by the great mercantile houses of Europe, there was comfort to be gained in reducing each entry to a docket number or giving it a place on an alphabetic list. The final book, the Book of the Inventory, also used an alphabetical list to register the voluminous incoming and outgoing correspondence of the Infante, and to provide a guide to the ledgers so that old letters could be revisited. From his earliest days, some of the most prized books in Hernando’s world were ones that tamed a wilderness of miscellaneity through the magic of lists, making a curtain and a cup part of the same order by reducing them to name, number, cost and location.