Columbus now wrote to the king a brief and concise letter, setting forth his desires. It was never answered. After a multitude of similar deceptions and disappointments, Geraldini, the ambassador of the Pope, presented him to Mendoza, the Grand Cardinal, through whose influence Columbus obtained an audience of Ferdinand, who appointed a junto of wise men to examine and report upon his scheme. This junto, made up of theologians and not of navigators and geographers, and which sat at Salamanca, opposed Columbus on biblical grounds, declared the theory a dangerous if not heretical innovation, and finally reported unfavorably. This decision was quite in harmony with public opinion in Salamanca, where Columbus was spoken of as "a foreigner who asserted that the world was round like an orange, and that there were places where the people walked on their heads." Seven years were thus wasted in solicitation, suspense, and disappointment. From time to time Columbus had reason to hope that his proposals would be reconsidered; but in 1490 the siege of Baza, the last stronghold of the Moors, and in 1491 the marriage of Isabella, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, with Don Alonzo of Portugal, absorbed the attention of their majesties to the exclusion of all scientific pre-occupations. Finally, when the matter was reopened, and the junto was reassembled, its president, Fernando de Talavera, was instructed to say that the exhaustion of the treasury necessitated the postponement of the whole subject until the close of the war with Grenada. At last, Columbus, reflecting upon the delays, refusals, affronts, and suspicions of which he had been the object, the time he had wasted, and the antechambers in which he had waited the condescension of the great, resolved to shake the dust of Spain from his feet, and returned to the abbey of his friend Marchena. He arrived there bearing upon his person the impress of poverty, fatigue, and exhausted patience. Marchena was profoundly annoyed by the reflection that the glory of the future discoveries of Columbus would be thus taken from Spain and conferred upon some rival power. Fearing, however, that he had too readily lent his ear to theories which had been twice rejected as puerile by a competent junto, he sent for an eminent mathematician of Palos, Garcia Hernandez, a physician by profession. They then conferred together upon the subject and pronounced the execution of the project feasible. The assertion that the famous sailor Martin Alonzo Pinzon was a party to the conference would appear to be an error. Pinzon was at this period at Rome, and did not see Columbus for a year or more afterwards.