Columbus himself nowhere gives the details of these missions,
though he does say, in a letter to the Spanish monarchs, "In order to
serve your Highnesses, I listened neither to England nor France, whose
princes wrote me letters." Another bit of evidence regarding the French
appeal is a letter, written after the discovery, by the Duke of Medina
Celi to Cardinal Mendoza. Cardinal Mendoza was King Ferdinand's prime
minister, and the duke, having befriended Columbus soon after his
arrival from Portugal, and again some years afterward, asked a favor of
the cardinal, saying, "You must remember that I prevented Columbus from
going into the service of France and held him here in Spain."
Perhaps some scholar may some day unearth the correspondence between
Columbus and the French king; but at present we have only the hints
given above, along with the fact that Columbus, when finally dismissed
from Granada in 1492, started for France.
In describing Columbus's suit in Spain the names of great churchmen--
cardinals, bishops, priests, monks,--will frequently appear, and it will
be well to understand why his fate so often lay in their hands. During
the Dark Ages the only people who received any education were the
clergy. Their education gave them great power over the ignorant; and
even after the dawn of the Renaissance, when other classes began to
demand education, the clergy were still looked up to as possessing the
bulk of the world's wisdom.
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