A personal HISTORY OF THE WORLD

Serendipity I

The Story of Estoria

1

I found Estoria privada del mundo, the transcription of a 16th century Spanish manuscript, misfiled under documentation for the banking history of Seville in the Manuscript and Archives Division of The New York Public Library. First I found the old filing card. A researcher wrote on it: 

A clear example of archival chaos, Estoria privada del mundo belongs to the Collection of Private Letters and Documents in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville not in banking history. Not only condemned to the purgatory of misfiled documents, this has been equivocally attributed to the Genoese banker Francesco Pinelli.

His disdainful this, as if saying the history of money outranks all else, certainly a personal history of the world (Estoria privada del mundo), stamped across the old filing card opened unimaginable possibilities. For years I had been researching a genealogical link to Francisco Pinelli. I looked up to the clock on the wall. It was ten to closing. Archival findings occur ten to closing on Saturdays to guarantee an insomniac weekend.

I was first to arrive Monday morning. Not only I had in my hands an inedited social history of Spain but a personal history. Reading—devouring perhaps is a better verb—a question kept popping: if Francesco Pinelli didn’t write it, Who did it?    

2

Christopher Columbus came knocking at Francesco Pinelli’s door hoping he would lobby the Catholic Monarchs, not overly interested in his circumventing proposals, and hoping even more fervently that he orchestrated a consortium to finance a discovery voyage. Francesco Pinelli was a powerful member of Seville cosmopolitan ruling class. While Columbus first voyage proved a disastrous investment, causing bankers to desert, captivated by his dream, Pinelli supported him to the last consequence. In effect he planned to send his son, also Francesco, with Columbus in his fourth and last voyage, a voyage he financed practically by himself, but love got in the way.

His son married an insolent Jewish woman when the Holy Office of the Inquisition was reaching its zenith. One could run, they said, but not hide from the zealous commissars.

Francesco Pinelli, the son, and in-laws fled to Portugal. Eventually his wife and brother-in-law were put to the stake. A widower, Pinelli, the son, castilianized his name to Francisco Pinelo, and absconded with a six-year-old daughter back to Castille.

The daughter, Francisca, revealing impossible temerity as an adult, authored Estoria privada del mundo. Resorting to the abbreviation Fr., both masculine and feminine, instead of spelling out the distinctive Francisca, she, or whoever planted the manuscript in the Royal Chancery of Valladolid, a repository for documentation on the Castilian nobility, betting on the incompetence of censors or good luck, sneaked Estoria privada del mundo to posterity

3

King Carlos III appointed Juan Bautista Muñoz in 1781 to, in his words, compose the most comprehensive history of Spanish America. Juan Bautista Muños presided a piquet of scribes in his search for documentation throughout Spain. One of his scribes, stupid or endowed with colossal cojones, transcribed Estoria privada del mundo from the original at the Royal Chancery of Valladolid. The original has been expunged from the face of earth. The scribe, so he stated in the transcription, attributed it to banker Francesco Pinelli.

Juan Bautista Muñoz left the most comprehensive history of Spanish America truncated. Wealthy Frenchman Henri Ternaux de Compans, the eminent scholar on colonial Spanish America historiography, bought the papers assembled by Juan Bautista Muños. Because people of wealth can be fickle in their interests, his interest in Colonial Spanish American historiography waned. He offered his entire collection for sale. Among Munoz’s papers was the transcription of Estoria privada del mundo. 

American diplomat and book antiquarian Obadiah Rich bought the Ternaux Collection in 1844. He went on to gather a remarkable Spanish library. William Prescott consulted it for his work on the conquest of Mexico and Peru, as did Washington Irving for A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Four years later Rich sold the Ternaux Colection to New Yorker James Lenox. And, in 1897, The New York Public Library inherited it.

4

The archaic Castilian I translated to modern English, my accented English, and added a biography of Francesca Pinelli or Pinelo, and comments here and there. My agent sold it as A Personal History of the World: The annotated translation of a racy and encyclopedic 16th century manuscript. I hired Dr. Jennifer Jones, a medievalist with Columbia University, to keep Estoria privada del mundo anchored within the agitated waters of nonfiction.

Estoria privada del mundo chronicles Spain from the outset of the 1st Century in the Roman Empire to the discovery of America. It consists of three books (parts): 

Book I

1. How a Roman Emperor had the tongue of his scatterbrained counselor severed to mark the outset of the 1st Century.

2. How climate-changes in the Italic Peninsula forced Romans to emigrate to Hispania, where they succeeded by seducing women’s hearts and men’s pockets.

3. How the Jew Paul arrived to Palestine and became Christianity’s CEO. How the Holy Ghost blew multilingual eloquence to the Apostles before going global, and how Apostle James (Santiago in Spanish) brought the Word to Galicia, a territory many considered the End of the World.

4. How the transvestite Emperor Nero, enemy of Christians, died convinced he was pregnant. How Emperor Constantine, on the eve of battle, heard Jesus telling him: Paint the initials of Christ the Redeemer on the infantry’s shields. He did, and winning the battle, Christianized and abandoned the decadent Eternal City of Rome.

5. How Germanic barbarians conquered the Western Roman Empire, but were conquered by the language, culture and silk togas in laurel-green. 

6. How dark men in turbans (Muslims) brought the books from old Alexandria to Hispania, along with the concept of a paradise where fallen soldiers had 87 defect-free wives, and how with Jews as multicultural mangers, the Caliph built the most advanced nation in Europe, Al-Andaluz.

7. How Christian refugees, running from the dark men in turbans, overpopulated the mountains of Asturias and Navarre, fucking like rabbits, said natives, until Chaste King Alphonse transformed the relics of Apostle Santiago into the Muslim-slaying saint that reconquered the southern plains and forged an identity.

8. How Castille was born on the illusions of the poor and dreams of emigrants. And how a language rich in diphthongs emerged form the succulent cultural casserole that included Arabic, Jewish, Roman, Basque, German, Celtic and Iberian ingredients.

Book II

1. The mapmaker impersonated an angel, or perils scientists faced at the turn of the first millennium.

2. Exaggerated forecasts of the end of the world, or when time fell into a parenthesis and charlatans attacked.

3. Post-apocalyptical Queen Numia’s family tree, form A to I: 

   1.  The Ghost of yester kings came for chitchat the year 1001.

1. The Husband, Sancho the Large, had problems grasping the concept of bridges, but he was handsom in a brutish way.

2. The Father, the Count of Castille, loved to smell Numia’s hair, washed daily with the original soap of Castille. He also loved rabbit, a weakness his enemies used to poison him.

3. The Brother, murdered on his way to the altar, left the bride intact.

4. The Son, the first King of Castille, dreaming empires, married his intact aunt.

5. The daughter-in-law did have a little mustache but was a gifted grammarian.

6. The Grandson didn’t amount to a comma in history.

7. Great Grandson Alphonse the Innovator liked to play dumb, but he was not dumb. On the contrary, he was very smart and humble. He advised his subjects to be humble, unless they were really smart. The tragedy of the pretentious dumb was, he said: Smart people can always play dumb with impunity but the dumb can never play smart without aggravating their condition. Touring Al-Andalusia Alphonse the Innovator fell in love with the most beautiful Moorish Princess. His reciprocated love elicited the wrath of an Islamic High Priest who had hoped to make the Princess his fourth legal wife. The High Priest tried to outsmart the King on his way to Princess’ heart, but the High Priest was not smart enough and suffered a mental breakdown.

8. The Great-Great-Great Grandson, a young man in a hurry, resuscitated the warrior saint Santiago to kick Moors out of Europe. He could have reached unparalleled historical stardom, but he was afraid of ghosts, and Queen Numia had become a meddling ghost, and the legendary warrior El Cid outshone him.

Book III

 

The life and times of Don Miguel Guerrero, the last medieval knight, or, says the inconformist Francisca Pinelli, is a multigenerational saga in which she gets to play chronicler and heroine.  

                5

                Dr. Jones, Jennifer, was, like sailors say, a lighthouse in the darkness. We would meet once a week for two hours, choosing a cafe in Little Italy or the Spanish Gallery at the Hispanic Society. She waited with a latte and her legs crossed in such a way she seemed statuesquely inexorable. Fools fall in love with statues, I reminded myself. Was she aware of my love? That I recorded her soliloquies must have signaled my inability to concentrate. Maybe not. She was used to her students recording her.

One pearl I recorded:

Given the moralist environment in which Castilian evolved, euphemisms flourished. Sex, other than procreative, was not a venal sin. Organs were accessories to sin. Girls were taught that the penis, after Satan, was the greatest malefactor. Picturing a penis, or saying the word, was diabolic. But penises penetrated daydreams, and girls talked about penises with other girls, and played with penises on Sunday outings to the countryside or hiding behind the convent. The trick was linguistic disguise. Carajo, for example, an elongated Mediterranean rock, or some say it derives from the tallest mast in boats, Castilian girls used for penis.

We switched freely from Spanish to English; her Spanish was terrific. Jennifer spent long years researching Spanish archives, and married a Spaniard. When she finished her research she returned to New York without the Spaniard, and married a banker. She was now married to a plastic surgeon. Not that she talked about herself. I found a thousand facts on her in the Internet, which confirmed an old suspicion: facts can be irrelevant defining people. The way she nuances with her smile didn’t show once in 400 hundreds pages I printed from the thousand Goggles, and no critic, she wrote three books and numerous articles, mentions her constellation of freckles.

Jennifer was a beautiful woman. I wasn’t expecting a great beauty behind the door of a professor of medieval history. Medievalists were in great demand after the astounding success of the Da Vinci Code, she said. Luckily I was her first Hispanic project in a long time, and she also looked me up. A photograph showed me disconcerted, it caught her attention, and she believed in first impressions. She was glad. Francesca Pinelli had an interesting life. Imagine being a woman in sixteenth century Spain, let alone an insolent writer.

Jennifer’s observations are in brackets.