Chapter IV: Oh, Just One More Thing: I Did Discover America!
Uh, no you didn’t, Chris. We’ve proven that conclusively in the previous chapter. In fact, you were a long way down the pecking order. However, to be completely fair, Columbus was the first to, as it were, send out the fifteenth century equivalent of a press release on his “discovery”, whereas the likes of Leif Erikson just sort of shrugged and went back home, so in terms of Europe learning about what would quickly become known as, with staggering originality, the New World, it’s all on him. Unfortunately, his “discovery” (I’m going to stop putting quote marks around that word now; it should be understood that I don’t accept Columbus’s arrival in what became America as any sort of discovery, but for the sake of ease I’ll just refer to it as such) would also open the way to slavery, destruction of natural resources, murder and the almost genocide of an entire people, so historically that sucks for him. In fairness to the guy though, America was going to be discovered one way or another. You just couldn’t expect one of the largest landmasses on Earth to remain hidden, especially as ships began to forge further and further out across the world’s oceans.
And you can bet that, had he not discovered it, whoever did is almost certain to have reacted in the same way he did. It’s kind of not fair, I think, to place all the blame for the way the Native Americans were treated at Columbus’s door. He was, after all, merely a product of his times, and the idea of white supremacy and indeed Christian supremacy (before the advent of Protestantism) was hard-coded into the DNA of Europeans; their “manifest destiny”, their “holy mission” or “crusade” to bring the Word of God to the “heathen savages” a thing every single man, woman and child took to be their birthright and even their duty. Not to mention that kings and queens were hungry for new territories, as kings and queens always were back then, and remained so for hundreds of years, and the almost literal interpretation of “finders keepers” seems to have informed the royal, military and trade policy of the European powers. So had some Dutch sailor or some guy from France discovered America, I can’t see it having gone any better for the natives.
But history is history, and we recognise the discovery of America by Columbus as all but the starting point for the widespread practice of slavery in Europe, and of course once you reduce another race to the status of slaves, or savages, exterminating them is all the easier. In fact, to some of the twisted minds back then, it could have been seen almost as a sacred duty. The phrase “conform or die” was not born in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, nor indeed the word holocaust, but both certainly applied to the exploitation, exploration and conquest of the land which would become known to the world as America, and later the United States of America.
So there’s plenty to blame Columbus for, but a lot to admire him for, too. Remember, to Europeans, what this mariner from Genoa was trying to do seemed impossible. His own crews believed myths that had come down to them about dragons living in the sea, and huge sea-monsters which could crush ships or swallow them whole (these may in part have been based on sightings of whales or giant squids) and nobody believed there even was land that far west. So Columbus wasn’t at the time trying to discover where America was, but that it even existed. He faced ridicule, prejudice and many predictions of either his total failure or his being lost at sea. Few people expected him to come back; fewer expected that he would have actually accomplished his mission. And yet, for all the fame and glory he should have garnered from basically achieving what was seen to be impossible, a fool’s errand, his discovery all but ruined his life, as we’ll see later.
First, though, I’ve always wondered why it was that an Italian had to go to the courts of Spain to get his financial backing for the voyage. Did his own king, the Italian - or, I assume, Genoan, since Italy was at this time a series of principalities and kingdoms - not have faith in him? Or was the price tag too high for such a risky venture? Italy of course now claims Columbus as its own and proudly states it was an Italian who discovered America, but so too does Spain, as without the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella Columbus would have been going nowhere. Is it a source of quiet shame in Italy that they turned their back on the man who would turn out to be, apparently, one of the greatest explorers of his age? Have they glossed over this, excused it, explained it? When Italian children ask in school - if they do - why Columbus was bankrolled by the Spanish, what do the teachers say?
To try to get my own answers to this question, I want to look into both how his home country was structured at the time Columbus lived, and how much, if any, influence its king had. It may be that Genoa was ruled by a sort of underking, who might have had little real power, but even if that’s so, then whoever was in power - Florence or Milan or whatever city Genoa was part of in terms of monarchy - should have been surely able to raise the capital. More than likely it wasn’t a case of being short of cash, I would imagine, and more one of lack of belief that the voyage could be undertaken successfully. I mean, what king would really pass up the chance at, to quote It Bites, a whole new world? Did Genoa - and all of what became Italy - want to be looking on enviously as their man was feted at the Spanish court and, more to the point, the Spanish king and queen took the New World as one of their colonies, with all its resources, land, slaves and trade routes? Does that look good on any king’s CV? So who was king? Well, before we get to that, what was the deal with Italy in the fifteenth century?
State of the Union(s): Italy and Spain - two emerging world powers at the time of Columbus
Italy: E Pluribus Unum, or Something
The map above shows the state of Italy - okay, okay! The
states of Italy! - just around the time Columbus would have been setting sail for the New World. It’s clear that the country was made up of a lot of small kingdoms and states, of which Genoa was one, but not a large one. Far, far larger than Genoa were states like the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Florence, the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Savoy and of course the Papal States, where Rome was. Then there was the biggest of them all, taking up most of the toe and the lower foot, as it were, the Kingdom of Naples. I count fourteen states in all, some very tiny, some huge. Given the relative size of Genoa to, say, Milan or Florence, it seems abundantly clear to me that this would not have been a rich kingdom, or state, and may in fact not have had its own king at all, being so close to one of the much larger ones, the Republic of Florence. So, did the Florentine king hold power over Columbus’s home state, and therefore his future?
Well, no. It seems that Italy at this time was not in fact ruled over by kings or queens, but by princes, who were not royal princes but the scions of wealthy families: powerful bankers, patrons of the arts such as the Medici and the Borgia, influential and rich dynasties that had built up their power through trade and finance. Kings in all but name, really, but Genoa did have its own ruler, and was a power in and of itself. A port city, it had well-established trading links with other countries and was the centre of two of Europe’s largest banks. Under the control of the French until about 1409, it was wrested from them and thereafter, with slight gaps, ruled by the powerful Visconti family of Milan, of whom I do not know if Tony is one. Showing how religious and secular power were all but one and the same at this time, the Visconti dynasty began with Archbishop Ottone in 1277, when he wrested control of Milan from the Della Torre family. Originally Lords and then Dukes, the Visconti ruled Milan for over 150 years.
When the rival Della Torres sided with the French Count of Anjou and fought with him against the Sicilian King in 1263, Charles remembered their support, and crowned the new King of Sicily, allowed the Della Torres to rule Milan. The death of Pope Clement IV in 1268 allowed the Visconti to mount an army and take on the Della Torres, whom they decisively defeated in 1277. Through intermarriage the Viscontis then extended their rule to Bologna and Genoa, but at the time Columbus was floating (sorry) his idea for a voyage to, as he saw it, the west indies, the Viscontis were no more. It wasn’t that they had been defeated in battle or executed like their old enemies the Della Torres, oh no: this change of rule came about due to one of those old bugbears that constantly dogged monarchies: the heir to the throne.
It seems the remaining heir to the Duchy of Milan was Bianca Maria Visconti, and married at age twenty-five to Francesco I Sforza, she passed on the title to him. He ruled Milan, then, as the first of the Sforza dynasty, for sixteen years. He was acknowledged both as a skilled military tactician and a man of peace, who with Cosimo de Medici drew up the Treaty of Lodi and established the Italian League, a multi-state agreement which saw peace reign over Italy for forty years. Unfortunately his son, Galeazzo Maria, was a far different proposal. The man was twisted, warped, petty and cruel in a way possibly not seen since the reign of Calligula. The atrocities he committed are related by the Renaissance historian Bernardino Corio:
“he tells him capable of torturing even his friends to the point of madness, as he did with Giovanni Veronese, his favorite, to whom he cut off a testicle. The twenty-two-year-old Ambrogio instead, in order to escape his flattery (Galeazzo was in fact bisexual), castrated himself. He had the young Pietro Drego buried alive and out of jealousy he had both hands amputated by Pietrino da Castello, slandering him as a forger, since he had caught him conversing with his mistress. When he surprised a farmer who had caught a hare against the hunting ban, he forced him to swallow it whole with all his skin until he suffocated. Since an astrologer priest had predicted the date of his death, Galeazzo had him walled up alive and wanted to see him starve. He had the habit of raping both men and women, and of appropriating the wives of others, and even worse, once he had finished, he had them raped in turn by his favorites, reason that was the basis of the conspiracy that crushed him in 1476. The lightest punishment of all went instead to his barber, the Travaglino, who, having cut it by mistake, received four lashes. The Corio also describes him as greedy, and imposer of unusual taxes."
When, in 1471, his sister Ippolyta asked a Franciscan friar in Naples - perhaps Giovanni della Marca - to pray for Galeazzo Maria, the friar refused to do so, saying: ""What do you want, madonna, that I pray to God for the Lord your brother, who fears God as much as that wall does?"
Probably not all that surprising then that he died by the assassin’s knife. Well, I say assassin’s but I should make that plural, as there were three. Well, four, including a servant, and about thirty-odd in the whole conspiracy. Oddly enough, it wasn’t his cruelty and sexual lusts, as such, that had convinced the three nobles to do him in. One had a beef with him about some land, one thought, or knew, that he had deflowered his sister, and another just didn’t like his politics. Also of interest is the fact that the slaying took place in church (which you would assume, even at that time, would have been sacrosanct to such devout Catholics) and in ways looks to have mirrored the killing of Julius Caesar, bringing us back to Rome again. Amusingly, one of the assassins got himself caught up in some curtains or something and was arrested and killed, while again oddly, considering how brutal the man had been, there was a mob ready to tear the corpses apart when the rest of the conspirators were arrested and executed. Jeez! You’re welcome, lads!
With the - very violent and more to the point sudden - death of Galeazzo Maria, his son, Gian Galeazzo, became the third Duke of Milan, but it seems as he was very young - only seven years old - coming to the throne on the assassination of his father, his uncle stood as regent, and it wasn’t long before he took power and indeed may have been responsible for the death of the duke, at the age of 25. So in any real sense, this guy was in charge.
Ludovico Sforza (1452 - 1508)
Although as I say above he is known or suspected of poisoning his nephew the Duke Gian Galeazzo, it appears from the accounts I read that Ludovico was a peaceful and popular ruler. He has the title “Arbiter of Italy”, and though I’m not going to be going into the entire history of Italy, nor even the rulers of Milan, he looks to have had his hands full when Columbus was doing the rounds. Now, all of this has been written with the clear understanding that I have not the first clue how these things worked. Maybe you had to go outside your own country to get the financial backing you needed. Maybe your own duke or prince would tell you to fu
ck off, he had more important things to worry about than your poxy flight of fancy, assuming you could even get an audience with him. In Milan, Venice, Florence and Rome I seem to remember you really couldn’t get near the ruler - other than being in the family or court - without the help of a patron, and maybe our Chris had none. So he might never have bothered even setting foot in the duke’s palace.
But even had he, it looks like he would have been given short shrift. From what I read, around this time old Ludo had a war to fight, as the Venusians sorry Venetians were attacking him, and had the support of Genoa, so being a Genoese and going to the Duke of Milan to ask for financial backing seems like it would have been a really bad idea. Ludo was also in the throes of planning a wedding (or some say, or thought, avoiding it) so there was a lot to occupy his time, and fighting wars is not a cheap occupation, so the coffers would not have been available to Columbus, had he requested an audience, which I’m beginning to increasingly think he did not. At any rate, what we can take from this - and it does satisfy at least my curiosity on the subject - is that had Columbus looked to Genoa (or Milan, really) for support he would almost certainly not have got it, and he probably knew that, and so did not try.