A mighty
warrior queen ruling an island of pagan women and griffins, a siege of
Constantinople, and a lost love: that is the first anyone hears of California.
Obviously, none of that is remotely related to the California we know today,
but when Hernán Cortés’s forces discovered the southern tip of Baja California
in 1533, they couldn’t help but wonder, “Is this the mighty queendom of Califia?”
Columbus’s
news sparked quite the revival of romantic adventure novels in Spanish literature.
The then-famous trilogy Amadís de Gaula
came back in style, nearly two centuries after their original release.
Struggling author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo saw money to be made and immediately
set to work collecting the stories and republishing them along with a fourth book
written by himself. By 1496, just three years after Columbus’s initial return
from the New World, Montalvo had written a sequel to the Amadís series, Las sergas de
Esplandián. The novel was a flop, but strangely enough everyone remembered
the interlude.
In the middle of all the knights,
battles, heroic acts, and damsels in distress was the tale of Queen Califia. Montalvo
described a mysterious island in an unknown location named California.
California is inhabited completely by black women warriors. These amazons are
adorned in gold armor and precious jewels, as gold is the only metal on the
island. They are ruled by the great Queen Califia, the mightiest warrior of
them all. The Californians worship pagan deities and spend their days training
fearsome griffins (a lion with the head of an eagle, wings, and talons instead
of front paws) to kill every man they see. The queen, though, wishes for more
out of life. She wants to see the world and claim her piece of the pie, so to
speak. A Muslim warrior, Radiaro, just happens to show up on the island that is
in the middle of nowhere and guarded by man-eating eagle-lions (totally
believable, of course). Radiaro convinces Califia to come join his army and
take Constantinople from the Christians. The queen, completely oblivious to
what a Muslim or a Christian is, jumps at the chance to flex her muscles. The
warrior women board their gold ships with their griffins and sail for
Constantinople. Upon arriving and assessing the current situation of the siege,
Califia orders the Muslims to watch and learn. Setting the griffins loose, the
Californians march on the city. The griffins take out the defenders on the
walls as well as quite a few men from inside the city. Everything is going
great, so Califia tells the Muslims to join her people in taking the city. One
problem: griffins, like their queen, have no idea what a Muslim or a Christian
is and start killing the Muslims too. Long battle short: Califia has to call
off the griffins and send them back to the gold ships, the king of Constantinople’s
son Esplandián agrees to duel for the city, Califia falls in love with him,
they fight, he wins, she is taken prisoner and becomes a Christian, she sees
Esplandián with his fiancé, is crushed, marries his cousin, and returns to
California to rule a now Christian nation with equal opportunity citizenship
for both men and women. The End.
Picture it.
A soldier on a ship sent to explore the Pacific coast of Mexico by Hernán Cortés
setting that book down just as someone yells “¡Tierra! ¡Tierra!” He goes on deck and says, “Hail Mary! It’s California!”
And just like that the name sticks. Even though it was soon disproven to be an
island, California has been California ever since, just sans black warrior
women and man-eating griffins. Oh yeah, one last detail we’re missing. Where
did Montalvo get the names Califia and California? Did I mention that the
Christians had just thrown the Muslims out of Spain twenty years before the
book was published? Well, they did, and everyone in Spain was still a little
shaken up at the thought of the Muslim caliphate. Califia means “lady caliph”
and California “land of the caliph”. There you go. So that is how California
came to be California.
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