A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age by William Manchester

Author:William Manchester
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, Learning and scholarship, 500-1500, Education, Medieval, General, Renaissance, Learning and scholarship - History - Medieval, History
ISBN: 9780316545310
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 1992-04-15T10:00:00+00:00

would

have

been

weakened,

probably fatally.

HOW MUCH Lisbon learned about

the

Valladolid

audience

is

unknown. Probably very little. But

it

was

enough:

a

seasoned

Portuguese mariner, familiar with

the Tesouraria’s holiest secrets, had

been commissioned by the Castilian

monarch to pry the Spice Islands

loose from Portugal. His fleet was

already forming up. It is a measure

of Manuel’s alarm that he instructed

his ambassador to Madrid, Álvaro

da

Costa,

to

sabotage

the

expedition. Fortunately for history,

Costa was a fool. He attempted to

coerce Magellan, and when that

failed he tried to intimidate the

Spanish king, first telling him that

Portugal would regard continued

support of the venture as an

unfriendly act, then that Magellan

and Faleiro wanted to return home

but had been denied permission to

leave Seville—a lie which, when

exposed, resulted in the cold

dismissal of the bumbling envoy.

Nevertheless, attempts to sandbag

the undertaking continued, and some

of them were a nuisance. When

Magellan

began

signing

up

crewmen,

Sebastian

Álvarez,

Portugal’s consul on the spot, urged

them to desert. He also spread

vicious

rumors;

cornering

the

flota’s four Spanish captains, he

whispered to them that their

capitán-general was a double agent

who planned to lower Spain’s

colors, raise Portugal’s, and defect

with the entire armada.

This ugly seed fell on fertile

ground. Only one of the four was an

experienced professional mariner;

the other three were haughty young

dons, Castilian courtiers held in

high favor by their sovereign,

resentful of their subordination to a

foreigner. Thus the enterprise began

to accumulate difficulties long

before its five anchors were

weighed. Because of Álvarez’s

dirty tricks—he fed gossips tales

that

the

mission

was

highly

dangerous

and

the

vessels

unseaworthy—the recruitment of

seamen bogged down. Those who

finally signed on were the dregs of

the

waterfront:

ragged,

filthy,

diseased drifters who babbled to

one another in broken Spanish,

Portuguese,

Italian,

German,

English—even

Arabic.

Meddlesome officials of the port of

Seville

tried

to

reject

the

Portuguese among them, including

several

who

were

Magellan

relatives; Duarte Barbosa, his

brother-in-law;

and

Estevão

Gomes, one of the ablest pilots in

either Iberian country.

The

capitán-general

was

thwarted again and again. He

ordered equipment; it failed to

arrive. Funds which had been

promised by Carlos and his privy

council miscarried. Magellan, his

patience

endless,

successfully

appealed to the king and royal

agents. Finally he confronted the

most

intractable

obstacle:

his

partner. Faleiro, who had never

been to sea, insisted that they share

a joint command. It was an

impossible demand; had it been

met, the ships would not have

survived the first leg of their long

journey. Precisely how the admiral

deflected this challenge is unknown.

Some accounts say that Faleiro was

declared insane; others tell of an

imperial edict appointing him

commander of a second expedition,

which never sailed. In any event, he

turned his maps and astronomical

tables over to Magellan, and the

five bowsprits finally took the bone

in their teeth on September 20,

1519, sailing westward before the

wind, under taut sails bearing

Spain’s royal cross of St. James.

The capitán-general watched

the mainland recede in the wake of

Trinidad—his

flagship,

or

capitana. Then he opened an

unsettling, last-minute dispatch from

his father-in-law, relaying reports

of a conspiracy between three of the

Spanish noblemen. The leader was

Juan de Cartagena, commander of

San Antonio and an intimate of the

bishop of Burgos, thought by some

to be the bishop’s bastard. When the

right

moment

arrived,

Diego

Barbosa had been told, Cartagena

would give the signal for a mutiny.

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