Chapter One

The Quest

"He holds him with his skinny hand,

"There was a ship, " quoth he.

"Hold off !unhand me, grey-beard loon!"

"Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

On June 7, 1494, Pope Alexander VI divided the world in half, bestowing the western portion on Spain, and the eastern on Portugal.

Matters might have turned out differently if the pontiff had not been a Spaniard -- Rodrigo de Borja, born near Valencia -- but he

was. A lawyer by training, he assumed the Borgia name when his

maternal uncle, Alfonso Borgia, began his brief reign as Pope Callistus III. As his lineage suggests, Alexander VI was a rather secular

pope, among the wealthiest and most ambitious men in Europe,

fond of his many mistresses and his illegitimate offspring, and

endowed with sufficient energy and ability to indulge his worldly

passions.

He brought the full weight of his authority to bear on the

appeals of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the "Catholic Monarchs" of Spain who had instituted the Inquisition in 1492 to purge

Spain of Jews and Moors. They exerted considerable influence over

the papacy, and they had every reason to expect a sympathetic hearing in Rome. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the pope's blessing to

protect the recent discoveries made by Christopher Columbus, the

Genoese navigator who claimed a new world for Spain. Portugal,

Spain's chief rival for control of world trade, threatened to assert its

own claim to the newly discovered lands, as did England and France.

Ferdinand and Isabella implored Pope Alexander VI to support

Spain's title to the New World. He responded by issuing papal bulls -- solemn edicts -- establishing a line of demarcation between

Spanish and Portuguese territories around the globe. The line extended from the North Pole to the South Pole. It was located one

hundred leagues (about four hundred miles) west of an obscure

archipelago known as the Cape Verde Islands, located in the

Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa. Antonio and Bartolomeo da Noli, Genoese navigators sailing for Portugal, had discovered them in 1460, and ever since, the islands had served as an

outpost in the Portuguese slave trade.

The papal bulls granted Spain exclusive rights to those parts of

the globe that lay to the west of the line; the Portuguese, naturally,

were supposed to keep to the east. And if either kingdom happened

to discover a land ruled by a Christian ruler, neither would be able

to claim it. Rather than settling disputes between Portugal and Spain,

this arrangement touched off a furious race between the nations to

claim new lands and to control the world's trade routes even as they

attempted to shift the line of demarcation to favor one side or the

other. The bickering over the line's location continued as diplomats

from both countries convened in the little town of Tordesillas, in

northwestern Spain, to work out a compromise.

In Tordesillas, the Spanish and Portuguese representatives agreed

to abide by the idea of a papal division, which seemed to protect the

interests of both parties. At the same time, the Portuguese prevailed

on the Spanish representatives to move the line 270 leagues west;

now it lay 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, at approxi-mately 46°30'W, according to modern calculations. This change

placed the boundary in the middle of the Atlantic, roughly halfway

between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The new boundary gave the Portuguese ample access to

the African continent by water and, even more important, allowed

the Portuguese to claim the newly discovered land of Brazil. But the

debate over the line -- and the claims for empire that depended on

its placement -- dragged on for years. Pope Alexander VI died in

1503, and he was succeeded by Pope Julius II, who in 1506 agreed to

the changes, and the Treaty of Tordesillas achieved its final form.

The result of endless compromises, the treaty created more

problems than it solved. It was impossible to fix the line's location

because cosmologists did not yet know how to determine longitude -- nor would they for another two hundred years. To further

complicate matters, the treaty failed to specify whether the line of

demarcation extended all the way around the globe or bisected just

the Western Hemisphere. Finally, not much was known about the

location of oceans and continents. Even if the world was round, and

men of science and learning agreed that it was, the maps of 1494

depicted a very different planet from the one we know today. They

mixed geography with mythology, adding phantom continents while

neglecting real ones, and the result was an image of a world that

never was. Until Copernicus, it was generally assumed that the earth

was at the absolute center of the universe, with the perfectly circular planets -- including the sun -- revolving around it in perfectly

circular, fixed orbits; it is best to conceive of the earth as nested in

the center of all these orbits.

Even the most sophisticated maps revealed the limitations of the

era's cosmology. In the Age of Discovery, cosmology was a specialized, academicfield that concerned itself with describing the image

of the world, including the study of oceans and land, as well as the

world's place in the cosmos. Cosmologists occupied prestigious

chairs at universities, and were held in high regard by the thrones of

Europe. Although many were skilled mathematicians, they often concerned themselves with astrology, believed to be a legitimate

branch of astronomy, a practice that endeared them to insecure

rulers in search of reassurance in an uncertain world. And it was

changing faster than cosmologists realized. Throughout the sixteenth century, the calculations and theories of the ancient Greek

and Egyptian mathematicians and astronomers served as the basis of

cosmology, even as new discoveries undermined time-honored

assumptions. Rather than acknowledge that a true scientific revolution was at hand ...

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