Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (42 page)

T
he inquiry into the mutiny of
San Antonio
consumed six months, and in the end, Guerra and Gomes were set free together with all the sailors; Gomes even received a royal appointment to another expedition, a sure sign of rehabilitation.

Those who sided with Magellan fared much worse. His wife and son remained under house arrest, and now his father-in-law, the wellconnected and prominent Diogo Barbosa, was ordered to give up property that Magellan had given to him before the fleet left Seville. This shabby treatment roused him to fury, and he spoke to the king in defense of Magellan’s conduct during the mutiny: “He had to take great care so that it would be to your advantage and not against your honor,” Barbosa said, pointing out that “when the men he brought with him mutinied with three of the principal ships, he did not punish them severely when he could have, and he pardoned many who later proved to be ungrateful.” In addition, “The captain [Mesquita] was taken to Seville as a prisoner and later to Burgos until the time Your Majesty arrived in Spain. Prior to this, he was never given a chance to air his side, nor was he shown any justice.” Barbosa recklessly lectured King Charles about the principles at stake. “These [events] serve as bad examples which discourage those who wish to do what they should and give greater encouragement to those who do otherwise.” Barbosa was not fighting to clear Magellan’s name alone; the official disgrace extended to Barbosa’s daughter, his grandson, and to himself. For all their sakes, he offered a rousing if solitary defense of the Captain General, yet Barbosa’s impassioned arguments in Magellan’s defense came off as special pleading, and because they challenged Fonseca, worked against his own interests. As a Portuguese, Barbosa was seen as treasonous rather than honorable, and his star fell along with Magellan’s.

One other Magellan loyalist, the brilliant but unstable cosmologist Ruy Faleiro, remained at large. After the Armada de Molucca had left Spain, he returned to Portugal, only to be imprisoned. He suffered a breakdown in jail, but he eventually regained his strength and was released. He then returned in secret to Seville, where he gained some sympathy at the Casa by displaying the marks made by the shackles he had worn during his time in prison. Out of pity, and to keep him away from Portugal, where he might have some value, the Casa gave him (and his brother Francisco) separation pay “because they had arrived worn out and penniless from Portugal; besides, they are here by order of Your Majesty.” Faleiro, the prime mover behind the Armada de Molucca, lived out his days in obscurity.

D
uring the clamor arising from the unexpected return of the mutineers, not a word was heard from the young king who had authorized the expedition two years earlier, despite the petitions and correspondence pleading for his attention. Charles had not lost interest in the enterprise, but ever since the ships had sailed from Seville, he had been engulfed in political turmoil. His mother, Juana the Mad, lived on, hopelessly insane. She was said to have kept the body of her late husband, Philip I, the Handsome, who died suddenly at the age of twenty-eight, next to her bed for years in the belief that he would eventually return to life on the anniversary of his death. After his death, she always wore black and refused to clean herself. Meanwhile, the young monarch, encouraged by his backers, was still making every effort to become the next emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the most powerful political entity in Europe.

The Holy Roman Empire was founded on Christmas Day,
A.D.
800, when Charles the Great (Charlemagne), the ruler of the Franks, an affiliation of Germanic kingdoms, was crowned emperor. His coronation unified France, much of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and northern Italy. Although Charlemagne’s line of male descendants died out within a century, he was an ancestor of many European ruling dynasties. Over time, the Holy Roman Empire became so fragmented that by the eighteenth century Voltaire remarked that it was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Nevertheless, it survived.

The Holy Roman Empire was an elective monarchy; its German electors had the authority both to appoint the emperor and to control his actions thereafter. Charles’s grandfather, Maximilian, while emperor had elicited promises from the seven German electors to appoint the boy as emperor, but promises alone were not enough to assure Charles’s succession. He faced competition from the king of France, Francis I, who was eager to make a reputation, especially at Spain’s expense. It was true that Charles belonged to the House of Hapsburg, which traditionally ruled the Holy Roman Empire, but he needed money, lots of it, to clinch the deal. Charles had to pay bribes, thinly disguised as tributes, to the electors and to representatives of the papacy if he wished to secure the title. Lacking resources of his own, he borrowed heavily from various banking houses, permanently placing himself in their debt. He eventually paid the electors an astounding figure, 850,000 ducats, of which 540,000 ducats came from loans arranged with the Fugger banking dynasty. Thus Charles was borrowing from German bankers to pay German electors to win his largely German title, “Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.” The Germans made a fortune from Charles’s imperial ambitions, and he expected Spain to pay the bill, incurring wrath from one end of the Iberian peninsula to the other.

To complete his quest to become emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles required the blessing of Leo X, the Medici family pope whose excesses helped to inspire the Reformation. According to popular mythology, he was a free-spending libertine, but Raphael’s renowned portrait of Leo X, painted in 1518, depicts a very different image, that of a pudgy, thoughtful scholar and aesthete averting his saturnine expression from the viewer. With his puffy face and massive, fleshy nose, he presents an altogether homely and unprepossessing figure, flanked by two young cardinals, who stand directly behind him, uncomfortably crowding him. Although all three are swathed in luxury, in damasks and velvets and silks, they look at odds with each other, as if their robes concealed sharp weapons. Raphael’s portrait reflected a difficult and divisive time in Rome. The year before, Leo X had uncovered a plot among the younger cardinals to poison him. Cardinal Petrucci, who admitted to knowledge of the plot, was strangled in prison, and the other conspirators were exiled or executed. No wonder Raphael’s portrait showed a careworn, abstracted Leo X surrounded by menacing cardinals.

There was another side to Leo X. When not presiding at Church functions, he displayed a sense of bonhomie, rich laughter, and an addiction to theater and music and art, and other secular pleasures such as banquets and hunting. “Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us,” he declared. He dispensed papal largesse to his entourage without regard to the dwindling papal treasury. Leo X then tried to raise money with the same lack of discipline, indiscriminately selling titles, favors, and indulgences, the latter popularly understood as the promise of avoiding Hell in the afterlife, given in exchange for donations.

To discontented outsiders, the Church deteriorated into a spectacle of corruption, selfishness, and arrogance. In 1520, Martin Luther, in Wittenberg, Germany, wrote a furious and menacing letter to Pope Leo X. “Among those monstrous evils of this age,” he wrote, “I am sometimes compelled to look to you and call you to mind, most blessed father Leo.” Under the influence of Pope Leo X, the Church of Rome, “formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels,” Martin Luther wrote, and many agreed. “Not even the antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.” He ranted in this vein for many pages, inciting others to follow his example. The Reformation was in full cry.

In theory, the beleaguered Leo X could draw additional support—and funds—from the Holy Roman Empire, but that conglomeration was in disarray. After the death of Maximilian, Leo X nominally supported Francis I, the king of France, over King Charles, but in reality the pope skillfully played one candidate against the other. More zealous and better funded, King Charles ultimately prevailed, and the pope reluctantly threw his weight behind the young man who had suddenly arrived at the summit of power in Europe. Or was it a precipice?

On July 28, 1519, less than a month before Magellan’s fleet sailed down the Guadalquivir River to the Atlantic, King Charles, then in Barcelona, learned that he had been elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, but the title would not belong to him until he paid for it. He had counted on Spanish nobles for financial support, but they turned their backs on him. He remained in Europe, raising funds, and finally, on October 23, 1520, in the ancient city of Aachen, Germany, from which Charlemagne had once ruled the empire, Charles, now twenty-one years old, was crowned emperor. The occasion marked the formal alliance between a hesitant, cashstarved pope under siege from the forces of the Reformation and an untested, cash-starved monarch.

In Spain the nobility resented Charles even more fiercely now that he was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Despite his promise not to appoint foreigners to government posts in Spain, Charles selected his former tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, as regent, and the choice confirmed the nobles’ fears that Charles was essentially a German interloper plunked down in their midst. The city of Toledo responded by expelling its
corregidor,
as the royal administrative executive was known, and the Revolt of the Castilian Comuneros was under way. Cities and towns across Spain, Madrid and Salamanca among them, joined in the Junta Santa de las Communidades to return political power to Spain. They showed their determination by raising militias that marched on Tordesillas, where they placed their trust in King Charles’s mother, the mad Queen Juana, but she refused to come out of seclusion to offer support or even to sign a document expressing their grievances.

The insurrection spawned a counterrevolution in rural areas among those who despised the nobles; they now turned to King Charles for protection. He eagerly sought their support, promised to indemnify them against losses they incurred while fighting the rebellious nobles, and consented to appoint two Castilian noblemen to serve alongside Adrian of Utrecht as co-regents. He also showered titles and dukedoms on those who rallied to his side, and managed to bring the recalcitrant nobles around. Despite these victories, King Charles’s position in Spain remained hotly contested as alliances between the
comuneros
and the royalists shifted constantly. Desperate to shore up his empire, King Charles paid scant attention to the controversy surrounding a rogue ship tied up in Seville. He remained abroad until July 1522, and in his absence Spain struggled to redefine itself as a nation and as part of the Holy Roman Empire.

S
eville, the center of Spanish commerce, reflected the tensions afflicting the rest of the country and developed a reputation as a city in crisis. Criminal behavior flourished in the streets and alleys of its shabbier neighborhoods. Triana, the suburb across the Guadalquivir River, served as home to many underworld types, as well as to the sailors who manned Spanish ships. Gypsies, slaves, palm readers, beggars, itinerant thespians, and minstrels populated a rapidly expanding underworld. In time, its ranks came to include defrocked clergy, destitute nobles, and unemployed soldiers, as well as an assortment of con artists and dealers in questionable merchandise. With goods flowing into Seville from Africa and across Europe, smuggling became a major enterprise; the value of smuggled goods far outstripped that of legitimate merchandise. Chronically unemployed people masqueraded as disabled beggars; it was often difficult for their victims to distinguish them from mendicant orders of monks. Knife fights were common throughout Seville, as were bribery and prostitution. Each year, eighteen thousand prisoners entered the gates of the Royal Prison, further stressing the city’s already burdened economy.

Meanwhile, Seville’s titled oligarchy fattened itself with income derived from leasing lands to farmers or cashed in on their titles and prestige to engage in commercial pursuits, importing wine, oil, and soap. With the profits, they constructed impressive castles, gardens, and ravishing courtyards. Throughout Spain, Seville’s wealthy nobility was renowned and envied even as the city’s criminals were feared. These two disparate sides of Seville met at the docks, where wealthy merchants jostled with sailors and dishonest middlemen seeking merchandise to peddle. Amid the chaos on the banks of the Guadalquivir,
San Antonio,
now stripped of her rigging and fittings, rode at anchor, a mute but eloquent witness to an expedition gone awry. In Seville no one knew that the Armada de Molucca had successfully navigated the strait, or crossed the immense Pacific Ocean. No one realized how close the survivors were to their ultimate goal, the Spice Islands. Everyone—from King Charles to the bureaucrats in the Casa de Contratación to the recently freed sailors looking for their next ship—assumed that the fleet was lost and the expedition a complete failure.

Everyone was wrong.

C H A P T E R   X I I
Survivors

The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up-blew;
The mariners all ’gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—
We were a ghastly crew.

T
en thousand miles from Spain, in a remote corner of the Philippine archipelago, a ship was burning. The blaze turned night into day, and its reflection formed hypnotic patterns on the inky, swelling sea. As it hissed and sent a pungent vapor skyward, the blaze consumed the ship’s timbers down to the water’s edge. The dull red glow from the waterborne bonfire was visible for miles around. The next morning, thick smoke from the dying embers of the charred hull turned day into night.