Columbus’ coffin

“It floats between heaven and earth, like the coffin of Muhammad.” That’s how the old saying goes — though it’s not quite true, since Muhammad’s coffin rests peacefully in the soil of Medina. The image comes from Vita Mahumeti, an 11th-century European “biography” of Muhammad written by Embricho of Mainz, which claimed that the Prophet’s coffin was magically suspended by magnets — a clever trick meant to mimic the levitating Christian saints and impress gullible believers.

But there really are at least two coffins that hang between heaven and earth. One of them, surprisingly, belongs to a Muslim true believer — Father Bem.

The floating coffin of a Muslim general

After losing the Battle of Temesvár on August 9, 1849, the Polish general of the Hungarian war of independence of 1848-1849, Józef Bem, fled to Constantinople. The Ottoman army, impressed by his reputation, gladly took him in — but military rank was reserved for Muslims only. So Bem, along with seventy-four officers, converted to Islam. He served faithfully in Aleppo until his death on December 10, 1850.

When his remains were returned to his hometown of Tarnów in 1929, the Polish Church refused to bury a Muslim in consecrated ground. There was no other cemetery — save for the Jewish one, which was deemed inappropriate — so the townspeople came up with an ingenious solution. They placed Bem’s sarcophagus on six Corinthian columns rising from the middle of an ornamental pond in a city park — suspended literally between heaven and earth. Even his Turkish name is inscribed on it: مراد پاشا, (Murad Pasha).

The other floating coffin

The other coffin that seems to hover above the ground belongs to Christopher Columbus, in Seville Cathedral. (Though if any “conversion” took place in his story, it had nothing to do with the coffin’s levitation.)

The monument’s designer, Arturo Mélida (1849–1902), was a historicist artist who looked to the grand funerary art of Columbus’s era — the tomb of Philippe Pot in the Louvre (c.1480), Hieronymus Cock’s 1559 engraving of Emperor Charles V’s funeral procession, as well as Francisco Pradilla’s wildly successful 1877 painting Doña Juana the Mad.

Columbus died in Valladolid on May 20, 1506, and was buried in the local Franciscan church. At his son Diego’s request, the remains were moved to Seville in 1509 — the very port from which he had set sail in 1492. There, in the Carthusian monastery he had loved during his lifetime, he was laid to what was supposed to be his eternal rest.

That eternity was short-lived.

In 1536 or 1544, Columbus’s bones — along with Diego’s — were shipped to Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic), to rest in the newly completed Cathedral of Santa María de la Encarnación. When Spain ceded the island to France in 1795, the remains were moved again, this time to Havana.

In mid-19th-century Havana, plans were made to honor Columbus properly. A public monument was first proposed, then relocated to the cathedral. To strengthen the symbolic bond between Spain and the colony, the monument was commissioned from Madrid’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Arturo Mélida won the competition, and his majestic tomb was unveiled in 1891. When Spain lost Cuba in 1898, the coffin made one final journey — back to Seville, where it was installed in 1902 in the Cathedral.

A rival tomb appears

Meanwhile, in 1877, an urn was discovered in Santo Domingo with the inscription: “To the illustrious and distinguished man, Don Colón, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.”

In 2006, scientists at the University of Granada tested the DNA from Seville’s coffin and confirmed that it matched Columbus’s brother Diego. So perhaps the Santo Domingo urn holds his son Diego’s ashes — who bore the same title

A remarkable life indeed for Don Colón — but what a restless afterlife.

A wax model of Mélida’s Columbus monument can be seen today in Madrid’s Prado Museum

Designing glory

By 1891, Arturo Mélida was already one of Spain’s leading historicist architects and sculptors. He had studied the late Gothic and Renaissance styles of the 15th–16th centuries, including the mudéjar (Moorish-inspired) and plateresque (ornamental Renaissance) traditions. In 1881 he had even been chosen to restore Toledo’s Monastery of San Juan de los Reyes — the great national shrine founded by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1478. Within this same visual and ideological framework, he conceived Columbus’s tomb.

When the monument was finally brought back from Cuba in 1899 and destined for Seville Cathedral, a suitable location had to be found. The obvious choice was the “Old Virgin Chapel”, from where sailors had prayed to the Madonna before setting sail — and to which they returned to give thanks. But the grand monument would have overwhelmed the tiny chapel. So instead, it was placed in the transept, directly before a vast fresco of Saint Christopher, Columbus’s patron saint.

The bearers of Spain

Four allegorical figures carry the Admiral’s coffin — representing Spain’s four historic kingdoms. The lineup, however, reflects a certain 19th-century nationalist bias.

At the front stand Castile and León — although these two realms had merged as early as 1230. Separated again here, they appear more than just one. Behind them are Aragon and Navarre. Mélida downplayed Aragon’s role, explaining that it had “little part in the discovery of the New World.” True enough: by royal decree, Aragonese merchants were banned from Atlantic trade. Even today, Barcelona’s Columbus statue faces away from the sea — as if to declare, “We weren’t part of that.”

Castile wears a cloak emblazoned with a castle and holds an oar adorned with a dolphin — symbolizing royal permission for Columbus’s voyage

León, whose name comes not from the lion but from the Roman Legio VI, as is proved by its medieval name regnum Legionense, proudly displays the beast nonetheless, along with scallop shells for Galicia and pomegranates for Granada. His cross-tipped spear pierces a pomegranate — a direct allusion to Granada’s conquest in 1492, the same year Columbus set sail

Aragon, Spain’s other founding kingdom of 1492, should wear the red-and-yellow stripes of its coat of arms. But by the late 19th century, those stripes had become a Catalan nationalist symbol, so Mélida substituted another regional emblem — a bat, borrowed from the kingdom of Valencia, which once belonged to Aragon. It was probably originally a dragon, a griffin, or some other more heraldic beast, but by the 13th century it had turned into a bat — accompanied by the legend that the army of King James I of Valencia, fighting against the Muslims, was awakened by the fluttering of bats just in time to repel a night attack by the enemy

Finally comes Navarre, which Spain annexed only in 1512. Its emblem is a chain arranged in a curious eight-pointed pattern, with a turquoise gem at the center. It also has its legend, according to which, in the victorious Battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212 — known to the Andalusian Muslims as maʿerakat al-eikab, “the Battle of Punishment” — the Navarrese troops supposedly broke through certain chains, penetrated the Muslim leader’s tent, and seized his jewel. So be it.

Women in armor

Yet, for all their pomp, these coffin-bearers look oddly delicate. Shouldn’t an admiral’s coffin be carried by grizzled sailors or rugged soldiers? Instead, Mélida gives us smooth-faced, almost feminine figures — in fact, they are women dressed as men.

Women, dressed in men’s clothes and playing male roles — or maybe hermaphrodites? — in a cathedral? Wrap it up!

But not so fast.

Christian iconography is full of armed, armored women — personifications of virtues battling the equally female personifications of sin, in the psychomachia (“battle for the soul”) tradition dating back to Prudentius. They stand, sword in hand, at the north portal of Chartres Cathedral and are codified by Cesare Ripa’s 1593 Iconologia, the encyclopedic manual of allegory that defined such imagery for centuries.

And why women? Because in the Romance languages, abstract nouns — and thus the virtues, and even “regions” (regiones) — are feminine. To depict Spain’s four realms as male warriors would have seemed just as jarring to a Spanish viewer as these female figures do to one whose language, like Hungarian, lacks grammatical gender.