Columbus at court; junta of cosmographers; decision of the junta.

However, he was fortunate enough to find at once a friend in the Treasurer of the Household, Alonso de Quintanilla, a man who, like himself, “took delight in great things,” and who obtained a hearing for him from the Spanish monarchs.  Ferdinand and Isabella did not dismiss him abruptly.  On the contrary, it is said, they listened kindly; and the conference ended by their referring the business to the Queen’s Confessor, Fra Hernando de Talavera, who was afterwards Archbishop of Granada.  This important functionary summoned a junta of cosmographers (not a promising assemblage!) to consult about the affair, and this junta was convened at Salamanca, in the summer of the year 1487.  Here was a step gained; the cosmographers were to consider his scheme, and not merely to consider whether it was worth taking into consideration.  But it was impossible for the jury to be unprejudiced.  All inventors, to a certain extent, insult their contemporaries by accusing them of stupidity and of ignorance.  And the cosmographical pedants, accustomed to beaten tracks, resented the insult by which this adventurer was attempting to overthrow the belief of centuries.  They thought that so many persons wise in nautical matters as had preceded the Genoese mariner never could have overlooked such an idea as this which had presented itself to his mind.  Moreover, as the learning of the middle ages resided for the most part in the cloister, the member’s of the junta were principally clerical, and combined to crush Columbus with theological objections.  Texts of Scripture were adduced to refute his theory of the spherical shape of the earth, and the weighty authority of the Fathers of the Church was added to overthrow the “foolish idea of the existence of antipodes; of people who walk, opposite to us, with their heels upwards and their heads hanging down; where everything is topsy turvy, where the trees grow with their branches downwards, and where it rains, hails, and snows upwards.”  King David, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Lactantius, and a host of other theological authorities were all put in evidence against the Genoese mariner:  he was confronted by the “conservatism of lawyers united to the bigotry of priests.”  Las Casas displays his usual acuteness when he says that the great difficulty of Columbus was, not that of teaching, but that of unteaching:  not of promulgating his own theory, but of eradicating the erroneous convictions of the judges before whom he had to plead his cause.  In fine, the junta decided that the project was “vain and impossible, and that it did not belong to the majesty of such great princes to determine anything upon such weak grounds of information.”

Ferdinand and Isabella seem not to have taken the extremely unfavourable view of the matter entertained by the junta of cosmographers, or at least to have been willing to dismiss Columbus gently, for they merely said that, with the wars at present on their hands, and especially that of Granada, they could not undertake any new expenses, but when that war was ended, they would examine his plan more carefully.