The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library. Edward Wilson-Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ – 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 of the Ocean Sea.

      The 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

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