Soon after arriving in Seville, Magellan became acquainted with Diogo Barbosa, another Portuguese expatriate who had settled in this city fourteen years earlier and was now Knight Commander of the Order of Santiago, among his other distinctions. Diogo’s nephew, Duarte, had sailed for Portugal, and Magellan was probably influenced by Duarte’s accounts of his journey. At the same time, Magellan began to woo Diogo’s daughter Beatriz; the relationship developed very quickly, and they married before the year was out. Suddenly, Magellan had an important sponsor in Seville, as well as a financial stake, because Beatriz brought with her a dowry of 600,000 maravedís. She might have been pregnant at the time of their marriage; the child, named Rodrigo, was born the following year.
Guided by the Barbosa family, Ferdinand Magellan prepared to persuade the powerful Casa de Contratación, or House of Com merce, to allow him to undertake his audacious voyage. Founded in Seville on January 20, 1503, by Queen Isabella, the Casa managed expeditions to the New World on behalf of the crown, and carried out its administrative chores with the bureaucratic zeal for which the Spanish were famous. At the time of its founding, the Casa de Contratación was housed near the Seville shipyards, in the Atarazanas, or arsenal, but to emphasize its authority, Queen Isabella moved it to the royal palace itself, the Alcázar Real. The Casa’s role quickly expanded from collecting taxes and duties to administering all aspects of exploration, including registering cargoes and proclaiming rules for the outfitting of ships and their weapons. Within a few years of its founding, the Casa began giving instructions to captains, and imposing punishments for smuggling, which was ever present. Soon the Casa functioned as a maritime court, adjudicating contract disputes and insurance claims for all voyages to the New World. The Casa even administered cosmography, maintaining and updating the padrón real, or royal chart, which served as a master copy for charts distributed to all ships leaving Spain. By 1508, the Casa acquired a piloto mayor, pilot major or chief pilot, who administered a school of navigation to train navigators and sailors who wished to advance themselves. (The very first piloto mayor was Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to the Americas.)
The Casa de Contratación was controlled by one man, who was neither a navigator nor an explorer. Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, the bishop of Burgos, had served as Queen Isabella’s chaplain and had managed Columbus’s expeditions even before the Casa came into existence. A cold, manipulative bureaucrat who jealously guarded his power, Fonseca made himself essential to all Spanish expeditions to the New World. Anyone wishing Spain’s backing would have to obtain Fonseca’s blessing—which, as legions of explorers would testify, was also a curse.
Columbus and Fonseca despised one another and fought bitterly. Fonseca was forever trying to get Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors to ignore the claims of independent entrepreneurs such as Columbus and to exert complete control over the expeditions that Spain sent to the New World. This meant, of course, that Fonseca would control the expeditions, and reap the full benefits from their trading. In the midst of the dispute, Columbus physically attacked Fonseca’s accountant, kicking and assaulting him as a proxy for Fonseca himself. Nevertheless, Fonseca gradually exerted his will over Columbus, and by the time Magellan appeared on the scene, the balance of power over trading privileges had shifted decisively from the explorer to the crown. Magellan, and others in his position, would have to settle for what the crown granted them—still a fortune beyond imagining—rather than establishing their own foreign trading empires. There could be no expedition to the Spice Islands without the backing of Fonseca and his Casa de Contratación.
When Magellan approached representatives of the Casa de Contratación and declared that he believed that the Spice Islands were located within the Spanish hemisphere, he was telling them exactly what they wanted, indeed, needed to hear. Peter Martyr, a chronicler with access to the highest circles of the Casa, could barely conceal their gloating. “If the affair has a favorable outcome, we will seize from the Orientals and the King of Portugal the trade in spices and precious stones.”
Still, the provisions of the Treaty of Tordesillas posed serious obstacles for the proposed expedition. Members of the Casa failed to see how Magellan could avoid trespassing on Portuguese interests by sailing west until he reached the East. Anticipating this objection, Magellan referred the distinguished members of the Casa to a clause in the Treaty of Tordesillas that allowed Spain or Portugal the freedom of the seas to reach lands belonging to one empire or the other. Such a clause was open to many interpretations, and Magellan might sail into conflict with Portugal if he attempted to take advantage of it.
Then there was the question of Magellan’s nationality. The prospect of a Portuguese leading a Spanish expedition through Portuguese waters made nearly everyone at the Casa de Contratación uneasy; if the Portuguese became aware of the expedition, relations between the two countries might be strained to the breaking point. Yet the Casa’s newest member looked at matters quite differently. Juan de Aranda, an ambitious merchant, took the Portuguese navigator aside and offered to lobby on behalf of the expedition in exchange for 20 percent of the profits. Privately, Magellan resented Aranda’s intrusion into his scheme, but the merchant held out the best hope for keeping the expedition’s prospects alive. And so Magellan agreed to cooperate.
Aranda wrote enthusiastically on behalf of Magellan, only to be reprimanded by the Casa de Contratación, which reminded him that he was not entitled to negotiate the terms of the expedition on his own. Worse, Magellan’s comrade Ruy Faleiro was outraged to hear that Aranda had insinuated himself into the expedition and flew into a tirade so severe that it caused Magellan to back down. There was more to Faleiro’s rage than simple indignation; it was a symptom of his growing mental instability. Aranda, for his part, attempted to apologize to Faleiro, and, despite the violent disagreement, contrived to obtain an audience for Magellan with King Charles in the city of Valladolid in north central Spain. It was here that Ferdinand and Isabella were married, and where Christopher Columbus died, and it now served as the capital city of Castile. And on January 20, 1518, Magellan, along with Ruy Faleiro and Ruy’s brother Francisco, set out from Seville for Valladolid.
Magellan’s arrival in the capital city coincided with a period of instability within the innermost circles of the royal court. Castile’s regent, Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneiros, had just died on his way to assist the inexperienced King Charles, and poisoning was suspected. More than anyone else in Spain, the cardinal had ensured the safety of the newly arrived king, providing 32,000 soldiers to preserve order, but now he was gone, and young Charles sorely missed the prelate’s guiding hand. Instead, he relied on the advice of a group of Flemish ministers for every decision. Guillaume de Croy, Seigneur de Chièvres, perhaps the most able of the lot, had long served as Charles’s tutor, schooled him in the exercise of power, and jealously guarded his authority over the lad. The young king’s inner circle also included Ximenes’s successor, Chancellor Sauvage, and Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht. Despite his subsequent elevation to the papacy as Adrian VI, this cardinal seems to have earned no one’s admiration. Wrote one nineteenth-century historian of Adrian: “Of low extraction, and a person of weak character, his advancement must always be regarded with wonder.” Such were the men on whom an immature king from a foreign culture, speaking a foreign tongue, depended to make decisions concerning affairs of state.