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, cash-starved 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.
Seville, 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.
Chapter XII 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.
Ten 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.
The ship was Concepción, one of the three vessels that had escaped the massacre at Cebu the previous day. Since then, the survivors had tried to navigate the three large vessels around the uncharted shoals and islands of the Philippines, but they soon discovered that they were hopelessly shorthanded. To add to their problems, Concepción’s master, Juan Sebastián Elcano, complained that shipworms infested the hull. Magellan, had he been alive, would have ordered the men to undertake arduous repairs, but the survivors adopted a more pragmatic approach and decided to burn the ship to prevent it from falling into the hands of an enemy who might use it against them. The crew transferred the contents of Concepción—her provisions, rigging, sails, fittings, weapons, and navigational devices—to the two other ships, Trinidad, still the flagship of the fleet, and Victoria. And then, on the night of May 2, 1521, the empty ship was set ablaze in symbolic, and wholly unconscious, expiation of the fleet’s sins.
A hasty vote among the sailors placed Espinosa in command of Victoria, while João Lopes Carvalho, the Portuguese pilot, won election as the new Captain General. Elcano, the master of Victoria, silently cursed the new Captain General, who might be a talented pilot but was incapable of imposing discipline on the unruly fleet. In Brazil, Carvalho had attempted to bring his mistress on board; although he did not succeed, their child had been traveling with the fleet ever since. Elcano had no respect for a leader who set such a poor example for the others.