The sovereign people delegates its powers to small groups equipped by education or experience to make or administer laws; but these groups derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. When the Christian community delegates its powers to a general council of the Church, that council, and not the pope, represents the sovereign authority in religion. Nor can the pope rest his claim to legislative absolutism on the supposed Donation of Constantine, for that Donation is a forgery and a myth.88 A pope has a right to summon a general council, but such a council, if it judges him unfit, may rightly depose him. And the same principles hold for secular princes. An elective monarchy is probably the best government available to mankind in its present depraved condition; but the secular ruler, like the pope, should periodically convene a representative assembly, and should submit to its decrees.’
Nicholas’ later life was a model for prelates. Made a cardinal (1448), he became in person a Catholic Reformation. In a strenuous tour through the Netherlands and Germany, he held provincial synods, revived ecclesiastical discipline, reformed the monasteries and nunneries, attacked priestly concubinage, furthered the education of the clergy, and raised, at least for a time, the level of clerical and popular morality. “Nicholas of Cusa,” wrote the learned Abbot Trithemius, “appeared in Germany as an angel of light and peace amid darkness and confusion. He restored the unity of the Church, strengthened the authority of her Supreme Head, and sowed a precious seed of new life.”89
To his other titles Nicholas could have added that of humanist. He loved the ancient classics, encouraged their study, and planned to print for wide circulation the Greek manuscripts that he himself had brought from Constantinople. He had the true scholar’s tolerance. In a Dialogue on Peace, composed in the very year when Constantinople fell to the Turks, he pleaded for mutual understanding among the religions as diverse rays of one eternal truth.90 And in the dawn of modern thought, when the rising freedom of the intellect was an intoxication, he wrote sound and noble words:
To know and to think, to see the truth with the eye of the mind, is always a joy. The older a man grows, the greater is the pleasure that this affords him.... As love is the life of the heart, so is the endeavor after knowledge and truth the life of the mind. Amid the movements of time, the daily labor, perplexities, and contradictions of life, we should lift our gaze fearlessly to the clear vault of heaven, and seek ever to obtain a firmer grasp of .... the origin of all goodness and beauty, the capacities of our own hearts and minds, the intellectual fruits of mankind throughout the centuries, and the wonderful works of Nature around us; but remembering always that in humility alone lies true greatness, and that knowledge and wisdom are profitable only in so far as our lives are governed by them.91
Had there been more such Nicholases there might have been no Luther.
CHAPTER XIII
The Conquest of the Sea
1492–1517
I. COLUMBUS
IT was “manifest destiny” that someone in this age would dare the perils of the Atlantic to find India or “Cathay.” For two thousand years legend had told of an Atlantis across the sea; and later myths had placed beyond the Atlantic a fountain whose waters conferred eternal youth. The failure of the Crusades compelled the discovery of America; the domination of the eastern Mediterranean by the Turks, the closing or obstruction of land routes by the Ottomans at Constantinople and by anti-Christian dynasties in Persia and Turkestan, made the old avenues of East-West trade costly and dangerous. Italy and even France might cling to the remnants of that trade over every discouragement of tolls and war, but Portugal and Spain were too far west to make such arrangements profitably; their problem was to find another route. Portugal found one around Africa; nothing was left for Spain but to try a passage west.
The growth of knowledge had long since established the sphericity of the earth. The very errors of science encouraged audacity by underestimating the width of the Atlantic, and picturing Asia as lying ready for conquest and exploitation on the farther side. Scandinavian mariners had reached Labrador in 986 and 1000, and had brought back news of an immense continent. In 1477, if we may believe his own account, Christopher Columbus visited Iceland,1 and presumably heard proud traditions of Leif Ericsson’s voyage to “Vinland.” All that was needed now, for the great adventure, was money. Bravery abounded.
Columbus himself, in the Mayorazzo or will that he made before setting out on his third voyage across the Atlantic, named Genoa as his birthplace. It is true that in his extant writings he always calls himself by the Spanish name Cristóbal Colón, never by the Italian name Cristoforo Colombo; but this was presumably because he was writing in Spanish, living in Spain, or sailing for a Spanish sovereign, not because he had been born in Spain. Possibly his forebears had been Spanish Christianized Jews who had migrated to Italy; the evidence of Hebraic blood and sentiment in Columbus is almost convincing.2 His father was a weaver, and Christoforo appears to have followed that craft for a time in Genoa and Savona. The biography written by his son Ferdinand credits him with studying astronomy, geometry, and cosmography at the University of Pavia, but the university records do not list him, and he himself tells us that he became a sailor at fourteen.3 For in Genoa every road leads down to the sea.
In 1476 a ship on which he was heading for Lisbon was attacked by pirates; the vessel foundered; Columbus relates that with the support of some wreckage he swam six miles to the shore; but the great admiral had high powers of imagination. A few months later (he says) he sailed for England as seaman or captain, thence to Iceland, thence to Lisbon. There he married, and settled down as a maker of maps and charts. His father-in-law was a mariner who had served Prince Henry the Navigator; doubtless Columbus heard from him some glowing tales of the Guinea coast. In 1482, probably as an officer, he joined a Portuguese fleet that sailed that coast to Elmina. He read with interest, and many annotations, Pope Pius II’s Historia rerum gestarum, which suggested the circumnavigability of Africa.4
But his studies more and more inclined him to the west. He knew that Strabo, in the first century of our era, had told of an attempt to circle the globe. He was familiar with Seneca’s lines: “An age will come in after years when Ocean will loose the bonds of things, and an immense land will appear, and the prophet Tiphys will reveal new worlds, and Thule [Iceland? ] will no longer be the end of the earth.”5 He had read The Book of Ser Marco Polo, which glorified the riches of China and placed Japan 1,500 miles east of the mainland of Asia. He made over a thousand notes in his copy of Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago mundi. He accepted the prevailing estimate of the earth’s circumference as 18,000 to 20,000 miles; and combining this with Polo’s displacement of Japan, he reckoned that the nearest Asiatic islands would be some 5,000 miles west of Lisbon. He had heard of a letter (1474) in which the Florentine physician Paolo Toscanelli had advised King Affonso V of Portugal that a shorter way to India than that around Africa could be found by sailing 5,000 miles west. Columbus wrote to Toscanelli, and received an encouraging reply. His purpose matured, and seethed in his brain.
About 1484 he proposed to John II of Portugal that the King should equip three vessels for a year of exploration across the Atlantic and back; that Columbus should be appointed “Great Admiral of the Ocean” and perpetual governor of whatever lands he might discover; and that he should receive a tenth of all revenues and precious metals thereafter derived from those lands by Portugal.6 (Obviously the idea of spreading Christianity was secondary to material considerations.) The King submitted the proposal to a committee of savants; they rejected it on the ground that Columbus’s estimate of the distance across the Atlantic as merely 2,400 miles was far too small. (It was approximately correct from the Canary Islands to the West Indies.) In 1485 two Portuguese navigators proposed a similar project to King John, but agreed to finance it themselves; John gave them at least his blessing; they sailed (1487), followed too northern a route, encountered rough westerly winds, and turned back in despair. Columbus renewed his appea
l (1488); the King invited him to an audience; Columbus came just in time to witness the triumphant return of Bartholomeu Dias from a successful rounding of Africa. Absorbed in prospects of an African route to India, the Portuguese government abandoned consideration of a passage across the Atlantic. Columbus turned to Genoa and Venice, but they too gave him no encouragement, for they had a vested interest in the eastward route to the East. He commissioned his brother to sound out Henry VII of England, who invited Columbus to a conference. When the invitation reached him he had already committed himself to Spain.
He was now (1488) some forty-two years old; tall and thin, with long face, ruddy complexion, eagle nose, blue eyes, freckles, bright red hair already turning gray, and soon to be white. His son and his friends described him as modest, grave, affable, discreet, temperate in eating and drinking, fervently pious. Others alleged that he was vain, that he paraded and inflated the titles he received, that he ennobled his ancestry in his imagination and his writings, and that he bargained avidly for his share in the New World’s gold; however, he was worth more than he asked. He deviated occasionally from the Ten Commandments, for at Córdoba, after his wife’s death, Beatriz Enríquez bore him an illegitimate son (1488). Columbus did not marry her, but he provided well for her in his life and his will; and as most dignitaries in those agile times had such by-products, no one seems to have been put out by the accident.
Meanwhile he had laid his petition before Isabella of Castile (May 1, 1486). She referred it to a group of advisers presided over by the saintly Archbishop Talavera. After long delay they reported the plan to be impracticable, arguing that Asia must be much farther west than Columbus supposed. Nevertheless Ferdinand and Isabella gave him an annuity of 12,000 maravedís ($840?), and in 1489 they furnished him with a letter ordering all Spanish municipalities to provide him with food and lodging; perhaps they wished to keep an option on his project lest by some chance it should bestow a continent on a rival king. But when the Talavera committee, after reconsidering the scheme, again rejected it, Columbus resolved to submit it to Charles VIII of France. Fray Juan Pérez, head of the monastery of La Rabida, dissuaded him by arranging another audience with Isabella. She sent him 20,000 maravedis to finance his trip to her headquarters at the siege city of Santa Fé. He went; she heard his plea kindly enough, but her advisers once more discountenanced the idea. He resumed his preparations for going to France (January 1492).
At this critical juncture a baptized Jew prodded the march of history. Luis de Santander, finance minister to Ferdinand, reproached Isabella for lack of imagination and enterprise, tempted her with the prospect of converting Asia to Christianity, and proposed to finance the expedition himself with the aid of his friends. Several other Jews—Don Isaac Abrabanel, Juan Cabrero, Abraham Senior—supported his plea.7 Isabella was moved, and offered to pledge her jewels to raise the needed sum. Santander judged this unnecessary; he borrowed 1,400,000 maravedís from the fraternity of which he was treasurer; he added 350,000 out of his own pocket; and Columbus somehow got together 250,000 more.* On April 17, 1492, the King signed the requisite papers. Then or later he gave Columbus a letter to the Khan of Cathay; it was China, not India, that Columbus hoped to reach, and which to the end of his life he thought he had found. On August 3 the Santa Maria (his flagship), the Pinta, and the Niña sailed from Palos with eighty-eight men, and provisions for a year.
II. AMERICA
They headed south to the Canary Islands, seeking winds from the east before they faced into the west. After a long stay at the islands they ventured forth (September 6) along the twenty-eighth parallel of latitude—not quite far enough south to get the full boon of the trade winds; we know now that a still more southerly crossing would have shortened the distance and tribulation to America. The weather was kindly, “like April in Andalusia,” Columbus noted in his log; “the only thing wanting was to hear nightingales.” Thirty-three days passed anxiously. Columbus understated to his men the nautical mileage of each day; but as he overestimated his speed, his statements were unwillingly correct. The calms persisting, he changed his course, whereupon, even more than before, the crew felt lost in the aimless wastes of the sea. On October 9 the captains of the Pinta and the Niña boarded the flagship and pleaded for an immediate turnabout back to Spain. Columbus promised that unless land were sighted in three days he would do as they wished. On October 10 his own crew mutinied, but he appeased them with the same pledge. On October 11 they drew from the ocean a green branch bearing flowers; their trust in the Admiral returned. At two o’clock the next morning, under a nearly full moon, Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the Niña, shouted Tierra! tierra! It was land at last.
When dawn came they saw naked natives on the beach, “all of good stature.” The three captains were rowed to the shore by armed men; they knelt, kissed the ground, and thanked God. Columbus christened the island San Salvador—Holy Saviour—and took possession of it in the name of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Christ. The savages received their future enslavers with civilized courtesies. The Admiral wrote:
In order that we might win good friendship—because I knew that they were a people who could better be freed and converted to our Holy Father by love than by force, I gave to some of them red caps, and to some glass beads... and many other things of slight value, in which they took much pleasure. They remained so much our friends that it was a marvel; and later they came swimming to the ships’ boats, and brought us parrots and cotton thread... and many other things, and in exchange we gave them little glass beads.... . Finally they exchanged with us everything they had, with good will.9
The report of the “friendly and flowing savage” which was to bewitch Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and Whitman may have begun then and there. But among the first things that Columbus learned on the island was that these natives were subject to slave raids by other native groups, and that they themselves, or their ancestors, had conquered earlier indigenes. Two days after landing, the Admiral struck an ominous note in his journal: “These people are very unskilled in arms.... With fifty men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.”10
But alas, there was no gold in San Salvador. On October 14 the little fleet sailed again, seeking Cipango—Japan—and gold. On October 28 a landing was made on Cuba. There too the natives were well disposed; they tried to join their visitors in singing the Ave Maria, and did their best to make the sign of the cross. When Columbus showed them gold they seemed to indicate that he would find some at a point in the interior which they called Cubanacam—i.e., mid-Cuba. Mistaking this for El gran can—the Great Khan of China—he sent two Spaniards, with full diplomatic credentials, to find that elusive potentate. They returned without locating the Khan, but with a pleasant account of the courtesies with which they had been everywhere received. They brought also the first report, by Europeans, of American tobacco: they had seen male and female natives smoking tabaco herbs rolled into a cigar, which was inserted into the nose. Disappointed, Columbus left Cuba (December 4), taking with him, by force, five native youths to serve as interpreters, and seven women to comfort them. All died en route to Spain.
Meanwhile Columbus’s senior captain, Martín Alonso Pinzón, had deserted with his ship to hunt gold on his own. On December 5 Columbus reached Haiti. There he remained four weeks, welcomed and feasted by the natives. He found some gold, and felt himself a bit closer to the Khan; but his flagship grounded on a reef, and was smashed to pieces by waves and rocks, on the eve of the Christmas that he had planned to celebrate as the happiest of his life. Luckily the Niña was near by to rescue the crew, and the kindly natives ventured out in their canoes to help salvage most of the cargo before the vessel sank. Their chieftain consoled Columbus with hospitality and gold, and assurances that there was plenty of the murderous metal in Haiti. The Admiral thanked God for the gold, forgave Him for the shipwreck, and wrote in his journal that Ferdinand and Isabella would now have funds sufficient to conquer the Holy Land. He was so impressed with the go
od manners of the natives that he left part of his crew as a settlement to explore the island while he returned to Spain to report his discoveries. On January 6, 1493, Pinzón rejoined him with the Pinta; his apologies were accepted, for Columbus was loath to sail back with only one ship. On January 16 they began the journey home.
It was a long and miserable voyage. All through January the winds were hostile, and on February 12 a violent storm buffeted the tiny ships, which were not much more than seventy feet long.11 As they approached the Azores, Pinzón deserted again, hoping to be the first to reach Spain with the great news that Asia had been found. The Niña anchored off Santa Maria in the Azores (February 17); half the crew went ashore, partly to make a pilgrimage to a shrine of the Virgin; they were arrested by the Portuguese authorities and were kept in jail for four days while Columbus fretted offshore. They were released, and the Niña sailed again; but another storm drove it from its course, split its sails, and so depressed the sailors that they vowed to spend their first day on land fasting on bread and water and observing the Ten Commandments. On March 3 they sighted Portugal, and though Columbus knew that he was risking a diplomatic mess, he decided to debark at Lisbon rather than attempt the remaining 225 miles to Palos with one sail. John II received him with courtesy; the Niña was repaired; and on March 15 it reached Palos after “infinite toil and terror” (said Columbus), 193 days after leaving that port. Martín Pinzón had landed on northwestern Spain several days before, and had sent a message to Ferdinand and Isabella, but they refused to see him or his messenger. The Pinta sailed into Palos a day after the Niña. Pinzón fled in fear and disgrace to his home, took to his bed, and died.
III. THE WATERS OF BITTERNESS