enough for them in this year, and they can
hardly be assigned to any later period. In 1486 we find Columbus at
Cordova, where the sovereigns were holding court. He was unable to
effect anything until he had gained the ear of Isabella's finance
minister Alonso de Quintanilla, who had a mind hospitable to large
ideas. The two sovereigns had scarcely time to attend to such things,
for there was a third king in Spain, the Moor at Granada, whom there now
seemed a fair prospect of driving to Africa, and thus ending the
struggle that had lasted with few intermissions for nearly eight
centuries. The final war with Granada had been going on since the end of
1481, and considering how it weighed upon the minds of Ferdinand and
Isabella it is rather remarkable that cosmography got any hearing at
all. The affair was referred to the queen's confessor Fernando de
Talavera, whose first impression was that if what Columbus said was
true, it was very strange that other geographers should have failed to
know all about it long ago. Ideas of evolution had not yet begun to
exist in those days, and it was thought that what the ancients did not
know was not worth knowing. Toward the end of 1486 the Spanish
sovereigns were at Salamanca, and Talavera referred the question to a
junto of learned men, including professors of the famous
university.[491] There was no lack of taunt and ridicule, and a whole
arsenal of texts from Scripture and the Fathers were discharged at
Columbus, but it is noticeable that quite a number were inclined to
think that his scheme might be worth trying, and that some of his most
firmly convinced supporters were priests. No decision had been reached
when the sovereigns started on the Malaga campaign in the spring of
1487.

[Footnote 482: Gallo, _De navigatione Columbi_, apud Muratori,
_Rerum Italicarum Scriptores_, tom. xxiii. col. 302.]

[Footnote 483: Lafuente, _Historia de Espana_, tom. ix, p.
428.]

[Footnote 484: Vasconcellos, _Vida del rey Don Juan II._, lib.
iv.; La Clede, _Histoire de Portugal_, lib. xiii.]

[Footnote 485: The Portuguese have never been able to forgive
Columbus for discovering a new world for Spain, and their
chagrin sometimes vents itself in amusing ways. After all, says
Cordeiro, Columbus was no such great man as some people think,
for he did not discover what he promised to discover; and,