Throughout Christendom rang the fame of the great Queen, whose steadfastness had won so noble a victory; and even in far-off England praise of her, and thanks to the Redeemer whose cause she had championed, were sung throughout the land. For the conquest of Granada marked an epoch, and sealed with permanence and finality the Christianisation of Europe, the struggle for which had begun eight centuries before, from the mountains of Asturias. The imagination of the world was touched by the sight of a warrior-crusading Queen, more splendid in her surroundings than any woman since Cleopatra, who yet was so modest, meek, and saintly in the relations of daily life, so exemplary a mother, so faithful a wife,[51] so wise a ruler; and the cautious, unemotional Ferdinand, whose ability as a statesman was even greater than that of his wife, was overshadowed by her radiant figure, because she fought for an exalted abstract idea, whilst his eyes were for ever turned towards the aggrandisement of himself and Aragon. She could be cruel, and deaf to pleas for mercy, because in her eyes the ends she aimed at transcended human suffering; he could be mean and false, because his soul was baser and his objects all mundane.
In the Christian camp before Granada there had wandered a man who was not a warrior, but a patient suitor, waiting upon the leisure of the Sovereigns to hear his petition. He was a man of lofty stature, with light blue eyes that gazed afar away, fair, florid face and ruddy hair, already touched with snow by forty years of toil and hardship. He had long been a standing joke with some of the shallow courtiers and churchmen that surrounded the Queen, for he was a dreamer of great dreams that few men could understand, and, worst offence of all, he was a foreigner, a Genoese some said. He had followed the Court for eight long years in pursuit of his object, the scoff of many and the friend of few; but the war, and the strenuous lives that Isabel and Ferdinand lived, had again and again caused them to postpone a final answer to the prayer of the Italian sailor, who had, to suit Spanish lips, turned his name from Cristoforo Colombo to Cristobal Colon.
At the end of 1484,[52] the man, full of his exalted visions, had sailed from Lisbon, disgusted at the perfidy of the Portuguese, who had feigned to entertain his proposals only to try to cheat him of the realisation of them. His intention was first to sail to Huelva in Spain, where he had relatives, and to leave with them his child Diego, who accompanied him, whilst he himself would proceed to France, and lay his plans before the new King, Charles VIII. Instead of reaching Huelva, his pinnace was driven for some reason to anchor in the little port of Palos, on the other side of the delta, and thence the mariner and his boy wended their way to the neighbouring Franciscan Monastery of St. Maria de la Rabida, to seek shelter and food, at least for the child. Colon, as we shall call him here, was an exalted religious mystic, full of a great devotional scheme, and himself, in after years, wore a habit of St. Francis. It was natural, therefore, that he should be well received by the brothers in that lonely retreat overlooking the delta of the Rio Tinto; for he was, in addition to his devotion, a man of wide knowledge of the world as well as of science and books, and in the monastery there was an enlightened ecclesiastic who had known courts and cities, one Friar Juan Perez, who had once been a confessor of Queen Isabel. With him and the physician of the monastery, Garcia Hernandez, Colon discussed cosmogony, and interested them in his theories, and the aims that led him on his voyage. The mariner needed but little material aid, two or three small ships, which could easily have been provided for him by private enterprise. But his plans were far reaching, and well he knew that to be able to carry them out, the lands he dreamed of discovering could only produce for him the means to attain the result he hungered for, if a powerful sovereign would hold and use them when he had found them.[53]