In fact, the circumstances of Columbus’ life and discovery could be linked to prophecies in the Bible in much greater detail than this. The Book noted the verses from Isaiah to the effect that
My just one is near; my saviour has gone out. My arms will judge the peoples; the islands will await me and will welcome my force.
Of these verses fulfilment could be found, for those determined to do so, in the (supposed) welcome given by the Taíno to the Christians and their message. Isaiah also said of this ‘just one’ that he would be lowly like Columbus: ‘so will his appearance be inglorious among men and his form among the sons of man’. A passage from Zephaniah confirmed the people they would meet in this Last Evangelisation would be innocent, just as Columbus felt many of the New World tribes to be: ‘They will not do evil nor speak lies nor will a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths, for they will be fed and will lie nearby and will not have cause to fear.’15
For Columbus and his faction, placing his discoveries within the framework of the universal triumph of the Christian faith had the advantage not only of suggesting the Admiral’s actions had divine blessing, but also of providing some reassurance about the smooth passage of events to come. A passage from the Book of Ezekiel, for instance, suggested the immense communication problems they were experiencing in the New World, which greatly slowed the spread of the Gospel while the explorers struggled both to teach European languages and to understand local ones, would be temporary. Crucially for Columbus, given the doubts at court about whether these new provinces would ever prove profitable, these passages also predicted the discovery of these islands would produce great wealth:
For the islands await me, the ships of the sea first, so that I may bring your sons from afar, their silver and gold with them, in the name of the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, because he has glorified you.
Columbus came increasingly to associate the places he had discovered with the fabled biblical lands of Tarshish, Ophir and Kittim, lands that had sent legendary treasures to King Solomon. Like the gold-flecked streams of Cibao province in Hispaniola, the richness of Ophir was said to be so great that sailors needed only to gather the soil, thrown up by the claws of the lions that dug holes on the shore, and fire it in a furnace to produce vast quantities of gold. Similarly, Tarshish (or Tarsus) was important in biblical geography as the homeland of one of the Magi, Caspar, traditionally reputed to have brought gold to the infant Jesus.
Yet Columbus could not afford to rest on his laurels and wait for this apocalyptic history to take its course, as universal evangelisation and conversion was only one of two triggers that would bring on the Second Coming. The other was the conquest of Jerusalem, the city whose symbolic force had set Columbus on the path of collecting the passages for the Book of Prophecies, and which he announces as the main thrust of his argument in the prefatory letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. While the defeat of the Moors in the Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews shortly thereafter were already widely seen in Spain as part of God’s plan, Columbus was able to cite specific prophecies, attributed to the medieval mystic Joachim of Calabria, to the effect that someone from Spain would recover the wealth of Zion. There were also passages Columbus saw as linking him personally to this destiny, such as the following from Psalm 115:
You have separated my chains; I shall celebrate a sacrifice of praise to you, and I will invoke the name of the Lord. I will recite my solemn vows to God in the full sight of all his people in the halls of the house of the Lord, in the midst of you, Jerusalem.
This must have appealed strongly to Columbus’ heady mix of vanity and paranoia, linking as it did the Chains of Ocean that he saw himself as having broken and the chains in which he had been brought back a prisoner from Santo Domingo in 1500.16
It is easy with hindsight to write off the Book of Prophecies as an expression of Columbus’ narcissistic insanity. We have the advantage of knowing the world did not come to an end in 1656, and that though the discovery of the Americas was the beginning of an extraordinary expansion of the Christian faith, it was hardly either universal or particularly welcome to all subjected to it. Yet the fact that human culture even today regularly falls back upon apocalyptic predictions – in religious fundamentalism, ecological/medical/technological disaster narratives and stories about clashes of culture – may make us want to pause before passing judgement, not least because many others (including learned clerics like Gaspar Gorricio) found Columbus’ vision of his place in history compelling. Though the dire state of the New World settlements may have meant Columbus had a practical need for just such a narrative, it nevertheless remained the case that the central texts of late-medieval culture provided ample and persuasive evidence that he was on to something. Columbus showed himself able, when medieval certainties about the world had been severely challenged and many might feel themselves adrift in a sea of facts bereft of order, to reassemble the pieces of his culture’s belief into a narrative capable of accommodating the new discoveries. In a world exploding with a seeming chaos of new information, the man who provided a sense of order had a significant claim to power, much like the proverbial one-eyed king of the blind.
What, then, was the part of Hernando in all this? It was at one time believed by many scholars that the lion’s share of the Book of Prophecies was written in the hand of Columbus’ younger son, though recently more level-headed studies have pointed out the unlikelihood of the twelve-year-old Hernando – however astonishing his later career – being able to draw on such a broad range of reading. An examination of the manuscript also reveals that a majority of the passages are in a script that looks nothing like Hernando’s increasingly distinctive handwriting; these are probably by a professional scribe employed by Columbus. Yet there are sections that are unquestionably written by Hernando, as well as others about which we cannot be certain. The most likely sequence of events, then, was that during the last months of 1500 and the first months of 1501 Columbus began to compile extracts he had already come across in his reading, certainly in the presence of Hernando (who was living with him at the time) if we can be sure of nothing more. We do know, from a letter of Columbus’ included in the Book, that in September 1501 he passed what he had done so far to Gaspar Gorricio, and it seems likely that while Gorricio compiled lists of relevant quotations, the manuscript was then handed to a professional scribe to do the actual work of writing out the texts in question. Gorricio returned it six months later, on 23 March 1502, saying not everything had been copied out but that the Book as it was would serve its intended purpose. In its final pages the Book is a series of cryptic lists, possibly referring to further passages that could be copied into the manuscript when time permitted.
At some point after this Hernando made his own entries in the Book of Prophecies. Like the Castilian verses quoted above, many of his entries are passages of Spanish verse which celebrate the ‘wide and easy path’ that will be opened to the Man of Virtue, helping to underpin the idea that Columbus’ successful voyages of exploration were the result of God’s special providence. It is perhaps worth pointing out that certain passages, like the verses from Seneca’s Medea, would have been unlikely to feature either in the practical reading of Columbus or the theological reading of a monk like Gorricio, but would certainly have formed part of the humanist curriculum taught by Peter Martyr to Hernando in the household of the Infante Juan. There were several copies later recorded in Hernando’s library which he may already have owned by this stage, including a lost manuscript translation of the plays into Spanish. It is not hard to imagine the young Hernando, daydreaming in the classroom, reading his heroic and absent father into his lessons wherever he could. Certainly the addition from Medea was made at a later stage, and