Irresistible North Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Andrea di Robilant

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Di Robilant, Andrea, [date]

  Irresistible North : from Venice to Greenland on the trail of the Zen brothers / by Andrea di Robilant.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This Is a Borzoi Book”—T.p. verso.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59662-8

  1. North Atlantic Region—Discovery and exploration—Historiography. 2. Zeno, Nicolò, d. ca. 1395. 3. Zeno, Antonio, d. ca. 1405. 4. Zeno, Nicolò, 1515–1565. 5. Explorers—Italy—Biography. 6. Faroe Islands—Discovery and exploration—Historiography. I. Title.

  E109.I8D57 2011

  949.15—dc22 2011000190

  Jacket images: The Battle of Chioggia (detail) by

  Alessandro Grevenbroeck, 1717. Museo Correr,

  Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia; the Zen map, Venice, 1558.

  Biblioteca Marciana. Photo Pamela Berry

  Jacket design by Evan Gaffney Design

  v3.1

  For my brothers Filippo and Tristano

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  ONE Making a Book

  TWO Messer Nicolò

  THREE Frislanda

  FOUR Zichmni

  FIVE Islanda

  SIX Estotiland, Drogio and Icaria

  SEVEN Engroneland

  EIGHT Squaring the Circle

  NINE Venetian Puzzle

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  The original Zen map, which I found glued to the back of the 1558 edition of Dello scoprimento … It features Frisland, Estland, Islanda, Engronelant, Estotiland, Drogeo and Icaria. (illustration credit col1.1)

  (Click here for an enlarged image of this map.)

  Prologue

  I CAME UPON this curious map in the most unexpected way. One day I was reading in the Biblioteca Marciana, in Venice, when an American tourist in shorts and T-shirt wandered into the hall holding a crumpled piece of paper. I offered to help as he was having some difficulty making himself understood by the clerk. He said he came from Madison, a small coastal town in Connecticut; he was on a pilgrimage to see the family palazzo of two Venetian brothers he claimed had crossed the Atlantic and reached the coast of North America at the end of the fourteenth century. He handed over the note on which he had scribbled their names: Nicolò and Antonio Zen. They meant nothing to me at the time and the story sounded rather outlandish, but as the American was in a hurry to rejoin the group he was with, I pulled out from the open stacks a book on Venetian palaces, showed him a picture of a Palazzo Zen near the Frari Church and sent him on his way.

  There are several Zen palaces in Venice: a few days later I was walking down the Fondamenta Santa Caterina, off the Campo dei Gesuiti (a brisk twenty-minute walk from the Frari), when I noticed a soot-covered plaque on the wall of a crumbling building:

  A

  Nicolò e Antonio Zen

  nel secolo decimoquarto

  navigatori sapientemente arditi

  dei mari nordicil1

  So this was the Palazzo Zen the American was looking for! It had none of the majesty of the great palaces that line the Grand Canal. Tufts of weeds tumbled out of the cracks in the marble. Loose electrical wires dangled from on high. Steel beams supported the walls like rusty old crutches. Even by Venetian standards, the building looked terribly worn. Yet the unusual mix of Gothic and Renaissance styles, embellished by Levantine motifs, gave it an air of shabby grandeur.

  The next day, I put aside my research and checked the library catalog to see if I could find a reference to the Zen brothers and their mysterious voyages. Out of the Rare Book Collection came a dusty little volume, six inches by four, that seemed to have traveled to my desk straight from a sixteenth-century Venetian bookshop.

  The book was printed in 1558 by a certain Francesco Marcolini. It was a travel narrative written in Italian, which was unusual because Latin was still the language of choice in publishing. The title was long-winded but alluring: Dello scoprimento dell’isole Frislanda, Eslanda, Engrovelanda, Estotilanda & Icaria fatto sotto il Polo Artico da due fratelli Zeni (On the Discovery of the Islands of Frislanda, Eslanda, Engrovelanda, Estotilanda and Icaria made by two Zen brothers under the Arctic Pole).

  The name of the author was not on the cover, but Marcolini, the printer, explained in the introduction that the book was written by “the Magnificent M. Nicolò Zen,” a great-great-great-grandson of Antonio Zen, one of the two navigators. This Nicolò Zen, whom I shall henceforth call Nicolò the Younger to avoid confusion with his ancestor, was a well-respected statesman in Renaissance Venice and a minor historian whom I’d come across on several occasions during my studies at the Biblioteca Marciana. The book, he claimed, was based on several damaged letters the brothers had sent home during their travels in the 1380s and 1390s, and which had remained in the family archives ever since.

  Glued to the back of the little volume was a Carta da navegar—a nautical map. (For an enlargement of this map, see the final page of this book.) It was a wood-engraving with a rich, grainy texture. At first glance it looked like the sketch of an old treasure map, with oddly shaped islands and exotic place names. But I recognized the coastline of Scandinavia. The Shetland Islands were placed a little too close to the Norwegian coast. Iceland was roughly where it should have been, although a cluster of mysterious islets had been sprinkled along its eastern coast. Greenland’s outline was traced with startling precision, but then a lumpy Nova Scotia seemed to have lost its bearings and was floating eastward, away from Newfoundland and the coast of New England. Strangest of all was a large, bulky island called Frisland (Frislanda in the text of the book), which the author placed above Scotland.

  Even more intriguing than these obvious distortions was the general configuration of the map. It showed the North Atlantic as a semi-enclosed sea, in some ways a mirror image of the Mediterranean, and not as a wide-open expanse of water between two continents. Although the map was in many respects rather advanced by Renaissance standards—especially with regard to Greenland—it seemed to reflect a late-medieval view of the North Atlantic in that it did not take into account the new geographical discoveries that, from 1492 onward, had revealed to Europeans the existence of the American landmass.

  Travel narrative was very popular in the sixteenth century and the book sold well. After some initial probing I learned that several editions appeared in Venice in the following years. One of them reached Gerard Mercator, the great cartographer, in the German town of Duisburg; he used the Zens’ Carta da navegar to complete the first modern map of the world in 1569. An English translation was published in London by Richard Hakluyt, an influential geographer in Elizabethan England. Later I discovered that John Dee, astrologer, mathematician and close advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, seized on the Zen voyages in the 1570s to press the case for a British empire in North America. The Crown even sent Martin Frobisher on a fruitless journey to discover Frislanda and claim it for England.


  As cartography became more accurate, the Zen map, like all maps of its period, lost much of its relevance. The book, on the other hand, continued to be read well into the nineteenth century. But in 1835 a Danish admiral, Christian Zahrtmann, stunned the world of geographers and mapmakers by declaring it was nothing but “a tissue of fiction” and that Nicolò the Younger, the author, was a mischievous fablemonger. It took forty years for the Royal Geographical Society to publish a rebuttal of Admiral Zahrtmann’s accusations; it was penned by Richard Henry Major, one of its most prestigious members. But the stain of forgery proved indelible. The book suffered several more attacks and by the end of the nineteenth century it had been fairly torn to shreds, a critic pronouncing it “one of the most successful and obnoxious [literary frauds] on record.”

  The Zen brothers faded into oblivion. There is not a trace of them in contemporary books about travel and discovery. Their names are unknown even to Venetians. And hardly anyone notices the plaque that was unveiled more than 120 years ago on the façade of Palazzo Zen (after R. H. Major’s rebuttal of Zahrtmann’s thesis).

  Yet I found it hard to let go of the story. The more I read about it—about the voyages, the forgery charges, the rehabilitation, the new round of accusations—the more I was puzzled. It seemed to me unreasonable that Nicolò the Younger should have put his reputation at risk for the sake of an elaborate prank. If it was a fake, what could possibly have been the motive behind such a brazen act of fraud? To suggest that his ancestors had reached North America before 1492? But surely Nicolò the Younger would have made that claim explicit at some point. True, the narrative was filled with mistakes and incongruities, some of them rather bewildering. But all maps and travel narratives of the sixteenth century were riddled with befuddling oddities. Could not those very errors be the mark of authenticity rather than deceit? I shared the sympathetic feeling of Alexander von Humboldt, the great German naturalist and geographer of the early nineteenth century, who found the story “to be filled with candor and detailed descriptions” they could not have borrowed from others.

  Over and over I found myself wandering to Palazzo Zen for one more look at the fading façade as if those old stones could yield a clue to the mystery. At the library I often set aside my regular work to fish out of the stacks yet another volume about fourteenth-century Venetian merchant navigators. I did not yet realize that this growing obsession would drive me to follow the tracks of the Zen brothers out of the library and away from the streets and canals of Venice, on a voyage to the Great North.

  ONE DAY, in the early phase of my obsession, I was about to return the little volume on the Zen voyages to the Rare Book Collection when my attention was caught by the printer’s mark. In the pioneering days of publishing, printers in Venice went out of their way to design elaborate, eye-catching marks. It was a way to publicize their books and sharpen their commercial profile. But in this case the printer’s mark was notable by any measure: an allegorical composition depicting Calumny, Truth and Time so beautifully drawn that I fancied it might have been sketched by a Titian or a Tintoretto or another great master of the Venetian Renaissance.

  Veritas filia temporis—Truth is the daughter of Time. Francesco Marcolini’s printer’s mark depicting Time snatching Truth from the clutches of Calumny. (illustration credit prl.1)

  It took me a little while to decipher the scene. Calumny, an evil-looking woman with a thick long tail and a cluster of writhing snakes in her right hand, was pushing naked Truth off her cloud. Above them, Time, a muscular and wise deity with wings, was able to save Truth in extremis by grabbing her wrist with his right hand while holding an hourglass in his left.

  The inscription around the engraving read Veritas filia temporis—Truth is the daughter of Time. Surely Marcolini, the printer, could not have chosen an allegory more suited to this tale. It occurred to me that in order to get closer to the truth I would have to begin by learning more about the author of the book I was holding in my hands, as well as the printer and the circumstances that had led to its publication.

  * * *

  1 “To Nicolò and Antonio Zen, wise and courageous navigators to the northern seas in the fourteenth century.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Making a Book

  The Author

  NICOLÒ THE YOUNGER had reason to be furious. He had taken time off from his government duties to complete the first volume of a series he planned to write on world history, which was to cover the invasion of the Germanic tribes, the fall of Rome and the birth of Venice in the early Middle Ages. The manuscript still needed to be revised but his friend, the printer and publisher Marcolini, had pressed him to have a first look. “He was not pleased with my request,” Marcolini later recalled. “But in the end he deemed me worthy of the privilege probably on account of the deep affection I have always harbored for his magnificent House.”

  In exchange for the opportunity to read the draft, Marcolini promised “not to show it to anyone, let alone publish it.” But in the end he could not resist the temptation to beat his competitors, and he secretly obtained permission from the Council of Ten to print Dell’origine de barbari che distrussero per tutto ’l mondo l’imperio di Roma onde hebbe principio la città di Venetia (On the Origin of the Barbarians who Destroyed Rome’s Empire around the World Thereby Giving Birth to the City of Venice).

  Before Nicolò the Younger had time to realize the extent of his imprudence the book was selling briskly in the shops around Saint Mark’s Square. “He had been so busy performing his public duties that he had not been able to refine and perfect the manuscript,” Marcolini guiltily recounted. “[And so I sent it to press] exactly as I had received it in my hands.” The result was a mess: not just typos, errors and shoddy writing but a chaotic layout as well. The last section of the book was printed at the front, making the whole thing incomprehensible.

  Nicolò Zen the Younger (1515–1565). The painting is part of the Kingston Lacy Estate collection, in Dorset (UK). Formerly cataloged as the “portrait of an unknown Venetian senator,” it was identified in 2008 as Titian’s long-lost portrait of Nicolò Zen the Younger, mentioned by Giorgio Vasari in Lives of the Artists. (illustration credit 1.1)

  Nicolò the Younger complained bitterly, telling his friend “how truly distraught he was that his work should see the light in such an imperfect, altered and mangled form.” All his life he was a loyal, dutiful and dedicated public servant, devoted to his family and to the Republic. As this episode showed, he also cared deeply about his reputation as a historian of Venice. So I thought it was ironic—tragic from his perspective—that he, of all people, should have gone down in history as a shameless liar, a dangerous forger and, perhaps worst of all, “a trickster whose inventions led countless ships astray.”

  NICOLÒ THE Younger was born in 1515, when Venice was no longer the mercantile power it had been in the time of his forebears. The gradual shift to a land-based economy in the fifteenth century had led the Republic to expand its territory over most of northern Italy and become embroiled in continental power politics. But after years of war and devastation that had brought Venice to its knees, the new doge, the charismatic Andrea Gritti (ruled 1523–38) was presiding over a period of great renewal—renovatio was the Latin buzzword of the age.1 The city itself underwent major changes that reflected the new landed wealth. Modern palaces rose on the Grand Canal while the old ones were embellished to follow the new classical fashion. The arts—painting, music, poetry—flourished as never before. And the young book industry thrived, as dozens of new printers opened for business, transforming Venice into the mecca of publishing.

  The Zen family embraced humanism from the start. Pietro, Nicolò the Younger’s grandfather and the family patriarch, had a reputation for helping young artists and architects get started in Venice. Caterino, Nicolò’s father, was a leading member of the literary establishment. Francesco, Nicolò’s uncle, was the architect in the family; after his death, the Zens added the draftsman’s
compass to the nautical rudder, the laurel and the palm tree that already adorned the family crest.

  As a teenager, Nicolò absorbed the intellectual atmosphere at Palazzo Zen. Following the fashion of the times, he was schooled in the sciences as well as the humanities. His special aptitude for mathematics led him to become an accomplished hydraulic engineer. But he also studied Greek and Latin literature, philosophy and poetry; his favorite author, he claimed, was Herodotus, the founder of narrative history.

  After completing his studies Nicolò went straight into politics, jump-starting his career in government by arranging to be elected to the post of savio agli ordini dell’Arsenale (special commissioner for the Arsenal). His appointment was suspended when it was discovered that he was only twenty-three years old, two short of the minimum legal age for the post. Nicolò appealed to the powerful Council of Ten, invoking a law that allowed candidates to purchase up to five years’ experience at the cost of one hundred ducats; he won and was reinstated.

  By then, Gritti’s enlightened dogeship was coming to an end. Tensions between the western powers and the Otto-man Empire were building in the Mediterranean. Emperor Charles V of Spain, the leader of Christian Europe, cobbled together an alliance to push back the Turks. Venice’s policy of peaceful engagement with the Ottoman Empire, which Gritti had upheld with the support of the Zens, dissolved in a warmongering frenzy. “Venetians, especially young ones, [are now] fervently clamoring for war,” Nicolò noted with dismay.

  The military confrontation—it was hardly a war—turned into a humiliating debacle for the coalition. At Preveza, off the coast of western Greece, the allied commander, the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, backed out of the fight under orders from Emperor Charles himself, who was secretly negotiating with the Sublime Porte to avoid all-out war. As the junior partner in the alliance, Venice could do little but acquiesce and retreat. But the moment was certainly sobering, for it revealed rather starkly the diminished political status of the Republic.