The World полностью

The Taínos were hit by smallpox and other pathogens brought by the Spanish, to which they had no resistance. They perished fast, ceasing to exist as a separate race, though DNA analysis of today’s inhabitants reveals they interbred with the Spanish. Only their words – canoe, hammock, hurricane and tobacco – survived. The Spanish were infected with syphilis, which they brought back to Europe where it raced through the population.^*

When she learned that Columbus had been arrested, Isabella released him and reimbursed him, but he was bitter. ‘I have established the sovereignty of the king and queen over a new world,’ he wrote in one of the first uses of the phrase ‘new world’, ‘so that Spain once reputed to be a poor kingdom is now among the richest.’ This was not true. While Portugal was booming, little gold had been found in the Caribbean. So many Taínos died that Ovando imported the first black slaves from Spain.

Back in Castile, Isabella remained grateful to Columbus, dispatching him again with his brother Bartolomeu and son Fernando on a final expedition, though he was banned from returning to Hispaniola. He made it to Honduras. On the voyage, the admiral sent Bartolomeu to capture a Maya trading canoe from Yucatán, looting it then sending it back, allowing its survivors to carry news of the arrival of pasty, red-bearded giants that would reach the ears of the Supreme Speaker of the Mexica at that empire’s zenith.

After being stranded in Jamaica for a year, Columbus returned to Castile in November 1504 in exhausted despair. ‘Today,’ he told Isabella, ‘I don’t even own a rooftile in Castile. If I want to eat or sleep, I must go to a tavern … I’ve been treated as a foreigner. I was in your court seven years and everyone I talked to about this enterprise treated it as a joke. Now even tailors are asking to make discoveries. I came to serve you when I was twenty-eight and now I don’t have a single hair that isn’t white. I’m sick.’ He was right: even tailors were becoming ‘discoverers’, including his Florentine friend Amerigo Vespucci, a Medici protégé, who in 1502, after two voyages, realized that the Indies should ‘properly be called a New World since our ancestors had absolutely no knowledge of it’.^*

Isabella’s empire was challenged by João el Hombre, who claimed it was rightfully Portuguese, but the queen was backed by her ally, Rodrigo Borgia, the Valencian cardinal who, thanks in part to her backing, got lucky. ‘I am pope! I am pope!’ Rodrigo cried when he won the election in 1492. As Alexander VI, he was determined to make the Borgias into European potentates – and to have fun in the process.

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES: POPE ALEXANDER AND THE BORGIAS’ CHESTNUT ORGY

Alexander VI was ‘handsome, with a very cheerful countenance and genial bearing, gifted with the quality of being a smooth talker. Beautiful women were attracted to him and excited by him in quite a remarkable way, more strongly than “iron is drawn to a magnet”.’ Even as a young cardinal, he had been reprimanded by Pius II for taking part in an ‘orgy’ in a Sienese garden with ‘several women wholly given over to worldly vanities … We’ve heard the dance was indulged in all wantonness.’ As vice-chancellor to five pontiffs he was an expert in the dark arts of Roman power and pleasure: he had four children by his long-time paramour Vannozza dei Cattanei (a Mantuan girl who later owned a Roman tavern named The Cow).

Alexander did not have long to wheedle and carve out a family fiefdom, quickly promoting his eldest son Giovanni to gonfaloniere of the papal armies and procuring a dukedom for him from the Catholic monarchs while raising his eighteen-year-old son Cesare to cardinal scarlet. He cut expenses and lived austerely, existing on that Catalan delicacy the sardine, but he loved women. At the age of sixty-two, the pope fell in love with Giuliana Farnese, then eighteen, La Bella Giulia, who, nicknamed the ‘bride of Christ’, moved into a palace with the pope’s daughter Lucrezia. At the Palazzo Apostolico, Borgia parties usually featured lascivious cardinals (some ancient, but many of them teenagers) and young prostitutes playing ingenious games designed to show off the latter to the former. When Cesare organized a party at the Vatican, fifty girls danced naked, then chestnuts were scattered which the courtesans, illuminated by strategically placed candelabra, ‘picked up, creeping on hands and knees, while the Pope, Cesare and his sister Lucrezia watched’. This was according to the papal master of ceremonies Johann Burchard, who, though keen to blacken the Borgias, was describing a scene that might seem believable at a frat-house party but not at a Renaissance court. The games ended with a papal gang bang. ‘Prizes were announced for those who could perform the act most often with the courtesans.’