The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books. Edward Wilson-Lee
a sense Columbus was harping on an old theme: he had long been waging a campaign for the Monarchs to think of his western discoveries as part of a wider crusade that would be followed by the subjection of the Indies and the Holy Land. As part of this he stood in fierce opposition to the mainstream reading of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the 1494 power-sharing agreement with Portugal, which had been brokered by the Pope and which divided the world into Portuguese and Spanish zones of activity in an attempt to keep the two nations from going to war over their new discoveries. The treaty granted Spain the right to occupy everything to the west of the Tordesillas meridian – an imaginary line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands – and Portugal everything to the east of this line. This secured for Portugal its possessions in the Atlantic (the Azores and Madeira) as well as exclusive rights to deal with the west African territories (Ife, Benin and the Kingdom of Kongo), and gave Spain a free hand in the New World. In one of the greatest oversights in history, however, the treaty failed, in setting down where the zones of influence began, to make any mention of where they would end. The Portuguese could be forgiven for thinking their zone took in one hemisphere of the globe, ending halfway around the world going east – though it wasn’t remotely clear at the time where exactly ‘halfway’ would be. Columbus, on the other hand, was almost alone in maintaining that the Portuguese zone only covered the area from the Tordesillas Line as far east as they had sailed by the treaty date of 1494 – the Cape of Good Hope – making the Spanish portion stretch west right from the mid-Atlantic all the way around the world and back to the Cape. Crucially for Columbus, this kept the symbolic centres of late-medieval thought – Cathay, India, Persia, Ethiopia and (most importantly) Jerusalem – firmly within the part projected for Spanish expansion.6
Columbus’ letter of February 1500, however, began to make a theological argument that the discovery of the New World was in itself evidence of God’s apportioning Jerusalem to Spain, and a prompt to begin preparations to take back the Holy Land. On his return to Spain in November of the same year, and now free of the judgments of Bobadilla against him, Columbus had time to pursue these thoughts, and was now in a position to begin to put them into some kind of systematic order, a task that may have first brought Hernando’s unusual and extraordinary talents into the open. Columbus also recruited the help of a Carthusian monk, Gaspar Gorricio, and periodically stayed at Gorricio’s charterhouse, the Cartuja de las Cuevas, across the Guadalquivir from the part of Seville from where Hernando would eventually build his library. This place would become increasingly central to Columbus’ world and to Hernando’s, offering then as now a sanctuary removed from the bustling town, with cool and solid brick buildings lit by the sun from the cloister, expanding effortlessly through the spindly Mudéjar pillars of the colonnade. Here, beneath the refectory mural of St Christopher carrying the infant Christ across the water, Columbus seemed to find a perfect setting for his increasingly monastic temperament, and it was here he would store his most precious papers when he went once more over the ocean.7
Though Columbus had always had a mind for a good quotation, and was likely in contact with Gorricio and collecting authorities supporting his thinking in some fashion before his return from the Third Voyage, his activities now were on a wholly different scale. Among the passages copied into the 84 leaves of the Book of Prophecies as it survives today are excerpts from
Angelus de Clavasio, Guillielmus Durandus, St Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Nicholas of Lyra, Daniel, King Alphonso the Wise, Joachim of Fiore, the Psalms, Rabbi Samuel of Fez, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Alfonso Fernández de Madrigal (El Tostado), Pierre d’Ailly, Albumazar, Ezekiel, Seneca, the Gospels, St John Chrysostom, Joachim of Calabria, the Book of Kings
These passages from the Bible, the early Church Fathers, medieval mystics and scholastics, as well as more recent figures, are stitched together by a series of short original passages, including a letter from Columbus to the Reyes Católicos (for whom it was evidently designed), a prayer by Gorricio, and verses in Castilian in the hand of Hernando.
Yet as a glance at the list above will quickly suggest, the passages from authorities are not arranged in order of importance, alphabetical order, date, geographical or religious origin, or any other obvious quality. The order is not determined by how it was compiled, as it seems the Book may have passed back and forth between Gorricio and Columbus, with Hernando making his additions in blank spaces left by the other two. After an introduction they are, however, arranged within three sections – de Praeterito (On the Past), de Praesenti et Futuro (On the Present and to Come), and de Futuro. In novissimis (On the Future and the End of Time) – though even within this framework the thicket of quotations makes little sense. Properly understood, the passages form an argument, a revelation of the nature of things through an inspired act of ordering, as Hernando says in his first set of verses for the Book:
Haré semeiante a este me siervo
al sabio varón, sagaz e prudente,
que funda e hordena por modo exelente
I will make my servant like him,
the knowledgeable man, wise and astute,
who founds and orders in excellent fashion.
Creation, as Hernando’s epigram suggests, requires not only strong foundations but the act of arrangement thereafter. The wise man, the Elect, is he who knows how to put things in their proper sequence.8
To make sense of the Book of Prophecies it is important to start with its first principles. To begin with, the Book follows St Augustine in asserting that God’s preordained plan for mankind is not simply a general plan, determining the shape of the great events of Christian history from the Fall of Man to the Last Judgement, but instead often affects what happens on a more minute level, right down to the lives of individual people. Importantly, these people need not be great kings or learned sages, as God’s power can by itself make great the lowly. As a lovely passage from Gorricio’s prayer has it, the God of the Book of Prophecies is a
God who instructs the heart of man without effort or words, and who makes wise the tongues of stammerers, and who is near us in times of need.
Augustine is again brought in to prove that those chosen for God’s special favour are in fact more likely to be lowly than powerful: they are distinguished ‘through unusual grace and intelligence rather than nobility of birth’, making a strength of the ways in which Columbus and his son were looked down upon by their enemies at court. This special providence does not just take the form of inspiring eloquent speech but can also help the chosen individual in any field of knowledge – including (again following Augustine) a suggestion that God can even instruct His chosen messengers in such technical matters as astronomy. In a dig aimed at those who rejected Columbus’ pre-1492 arguments about the extent of the globe’s circumference, the Book suggests the Admiral’s success was in itself evidence that God was on his side, and those opposed to him were, like the Pharisees, wilfully rejecting God’s call in favour of clever arguments and intellectual pride:
If indeed they knew so much that they could measure the world, why couldn’t they find its Lord more easily?
This is not to say the Book of Prophecies portrays Columbus as a kind of holy fool, who knows nothing and simply channels God’s grace: in fact, the prefatory letter to the Monarchs goes to great lengths to point out the Admiral’s nautical experience, a passion that trains the sailor to find out the secrets of the world, which Columbus has done through reading widely in cosmography, history, literature and philosophy. Rather, the argument is that even with all this knowledge and experience man can do nothing without lunbre, light, which Columbus receives in the form of flashes of inspiration. The fact that he has been right about so many things, the argument goes, proves these flashes are not madness but come from God, and that the Admiral has been chosen for a special role in history.9
The second major principle of the Book of Prophecies was that the words of the Bible should not always be taken literally. This is not to say, as some modern apologists for the Scriptures might, that the Bible is a compendium of traditions and that we should focus (selectively) on its ethical teachings rather than getting stuck on its claims as a record of history. Indeed, it was