Columbus's copy of The Travels of Marco Polo, with his handwritten notes in Latin written on the margins.
School period
College/University
Career
Gallery of Christopher Columbus
1839
The return of Christopher Columbus; his audience before King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, painting by Eugène Delacroix.
Gallery of Christopher Columbus
1843
Columbus before the Queen, as imagined by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, 1843.
Gallery of Christopher Columbus
1847
Christopher Columbus is depicted landing in the West Indies by John Vanderlyn.
Gallery of Christopher Columbus
1858
Christopher Columbus at the gates of the monastery of Santa María de la Rábida with his son Diego, by Benet Mercadé.
Gallery of Christopher Columbus
1879
Columbus awes the Jamaican natives by predicting the lunar eclipse of 1504.
Gallery of Christopher Columbus
1893
The death of Columbus, a lithograph of 1893.
Gallery of Christopher Columbus
Columbus offers his services to the King of Portugal, by Daniel Nicholas Chodowiecki.
Achievements
Plaza de Colón, Madrid, Spain
Monument to Christopher Columbus at the Plaza de Colón ("Columbus Square") in Madrid (Spain), built between 1881 and 1885. It's a three metres high statue sculpted in Italian white marble by Jerónimo Suñol.
Monument to Christopher Columbus at the Plaza de Colón ("Columbus Square") in Madrid (Spain), built between 1881 and 1885. It's a three metres high statue sculpted in Italian white marble by Jerónimo Suñol.
Christopher Columbus Book of Privileges: The Claiming of a New World
(They are the documents that irrevocably changed the cours...)
They are the documents that irrevocably changed the course of America's history, yet most of us have never heard of them. Christopher Columbus’s Book of Privileges is the compilation of royal charters, papal letters, and legal wranglings that became the business deal between Columbus, the Spanish royalty, and the Pope on how a New World would be made theirs. So rare is this Book that when it moves within the Library of Congress, which owns it, it goes under armed guard. Here for the first time is the full-color, full-size facsimile of these elegantly lettered pages, with essays from three scholars on their meaning and legacy.
(Christopher Columbus returned to Europe in the final days...)
Christopher Columbus returned to Europe in the final days of 1500, ending his third voyage to the Indies not in triumph but in chains. Seeking to justify his actions and protect his rights, he began to compile biblical texts and excerpts from patristic writings and medieval theology in a manuscript known as the Book of Prophecies. This unprecedented collection was designed to support his vision of the discovery of the Indies as an important event in the process of human salvation - a first step toward the liberation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim domination.
Christopher Columbus was an Italian-born Spanish master navigator and admiral whose four transatlantic voyages (1492-1493, 1493-1496, 1498-1500, and 1502-1504) opened the way for European exploration, exploitation, and colonization of the Americas. He has long been called the "discoverer" of the New World, although Vikings such as Leif Eriksson had visited North America five centuries earlier.
Background
The archives of Genoa show that the famous discoverer was born Cristoforo Colombo (Spanish, Cristóbal Colón) there between August and October 1451. His father, Domenico Colombo, followed the weaver's craft, and his mother, Suzanna Fontanarossa, came of equally humble stock. Christopher was the eldest child, and two brothers make some appearance in history under their Hispanicized names, Bartolomé and Diego. He evidently helped his father at work when he was a boy and went to sea early in a humble capacity.
Columbus first went to sea as a teenager, participating in several trading voyages in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. One such voyage, to the island of Khios, in modern-day Greece, brought him the closest he would ever come to Asia.
Education
When he was still a teenager, Christopher Columbus got a job on a merchant ship. He remained at sea until 1476 when pirates attacked his ship as it sailed north along the Portuguese coast. The boat sank, but the young Columbus floated to shore on a scrap of wood and made his way to Lisbon, where he eventually studied mathematics, astronomy, cartography, and navigation. He also began to hatch the plan that would change the world forever. He also learned to read Latin and write Castilian.
Career
Christopher Columbus and his brother Bartholomew both were employed as chart makers, but Columbus was principally a seagoing entrepreneur. In 1477 he sailed to Iceland and Ireland with the merchant marine, and in 1478 he was buying sugar in Madeira as an agent for the Genoese firm of Centurioni. Between 1482 and 1485 Columbus traded along the Guinea and Gold coasts of tropical West Africa and made at least one voyage to the Portuguese fortress of São Jorge da Mina (now Elmina, Ghana) there, gaining knowledge of Portuguese navigation and the Atlantic wind systems along the way.
In 1484 Columbus began seeking support for an Atlantic crossing from King John II of Portugal but was denied aid. (Some conspiracy theorists have alleged that Columbus made a secret pact with the monarch, but there is no evidence of this.) By 1486 Columbus was firmly in Spain, asking for patronage from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. After at least two rejections, he at last obtained royal support in January 1492. This was achieved chiefly through the interventions of the Spanish treasurer, Luis de Santángel, and of the Franciscan friars of La Rábida, near Huelva, with whom Columbus had stayed in the summer of 1491. Juan Pérez of La Rábida had been one of the queen’s confessors and perhaps procured him the crucial audience.
Columbus wanted fame and fortune. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the same, along with the opportunity to export Catholicism to lands across the globe. (Columbus, a devout Catholic, was equally enthusiastic about this possibility.)
Columbus’s contract with the Spanish rulers promised that he could keep 10 percent of whatever riches he found, along with a noble title and the governorship of any lands he should encounter.
On August 3, 1492, Columbus and his crew set sail from Spain in three ships: the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. On October 12, the ships made landfall - not in the East Indies, as Columbus assumed, but on one of the Bahamian islands, likely San Salvador.
For months, Columbus sailed from island to island in what we now know as the Caribbean, looking for the "pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, spices, and other objects and merchandise whatsoever" that he had promised to his Spanish patrons, but he did not find much. In January 1493, leaving several dozen men behind in a makeshift settlement on Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he left for Spain.
Columbus kept a detailed diary during his first voyage. Christopher Columbus’s journal was written between August 3, 1492, and November 6, 1492, and mentions everything from the wildlife he encountered, like dolphins and birds, to the weather to the moods of his crew. More troublingly, it also recorded his initial impressions of the local people and his argument for why they should be enslaved. Columbus gifted the journal to Isabella upon his return.
About six months later, in September 1493, Columbus returned to the Americas. He found the Hispaniola settlement destroyed and left his brothers Bartolomeo and Diego Columbus behind to rebuild, along with part of his ships’ crew and hundreds of enslaved indigenous people. Then he headed west to continue his mostly fruitless search for gold and other goods. His group now included a large number of indigenous people the Europeans had enslaved. In lieu of the material riches he had promised the Spanish monarchs, he sent some 500 slaves to Queen Isabella. The queen was horrified - she believed that any people Columbus "discovered" were Spanish subjects who could not be enslaved - and she promptly and sternly returned the explorer’s gift.
In May 1498, Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic for the third time. He visited Trinidad and the South American mainland before returning to the ill-fated Hispaniola settlement, where the colonists had staged a bloody revolt against the Columbus brothers’ mismanagement and brutality. Conditions were so bad that Spanish authorities had to send a new governor to take over. Meanwhile, the native Taino population, forced to search for gold and to work on plantations, was decimated (within 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred of what may have been 250,000 Taino were left on their island). Christopher Columbus was arrested and returned to Spain in chains.
In 1502, cleared of the most serious charges but stripped of his noble titles, the aging Columbus persuaded the Spanish crown to pay for one last trip across the Atlantic. This time, Columbus made it all the way to Panama - just miles from the Pacific Ocean - where he had to abandon two of his four ships after damage from storms and hostile natives. Empty-handed, the explorer returned to Spain, where he died in 1506.
(They are the documents that irrevocably changed the cours...)
1502
Religion
Columbus was a deeply religious and reflective man. A striking manifestation of his sensibilities is the Book of Prophecies, a collection of pronouncements largely taken from the Bible and seeming to bear directly on his role in the western voyages; the book was probably compiled by Columbus and his friend the Carthusian friar Gaspar Gorricio between September 1501 and March 1502, with additions until circa 1505.
Politics
Columbus was a loyal vassal of Ferdinand II and Isabella I, the Catholic Monarchs of Aragon, Castile, and Leon in Spain.
Views
At the end of the 15th century, it was nearly impossible to reach Asia from Europe by land. The route was long and arduous, and encounters with hostile armies were difficult to avoid. Portuguese explorers solved this problem by taking to the sea: They sailed south along the West African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope. But Columbus had a different idea: Why not sail west across the Atlantic instead of around the massive African continent? The young navigator’s logic was sound, but his math was faulty. He argued (incorrectly) that the circumference of the Earth was much smaller than his contemporaries believed it was; accordingly, he believed that the journey by boat from Europe to Asia should be not only possible but comparatively easy via an as-yet-undiscovered Northwest Passage.
Columbus’s intentions and presuppositions may be better understood by examining the few books still extant from his own library. Some of these were extensively annotated, often by the admiral and sometimes by his brother Bartholomew, including copies of the Imago mundi by the 15th-century French theologian Pierre d’Ailly (a compendium containing a great number of cosmological and theological texts), the Historia rerum ubique gestarum of Pope Pius II, published in 1477, the version of The Travels of Marco Polo known as the De consuetudinibus et condicionibus orientalium regionum of Francesco Pipino (1483–85), Alfonso de Palencia’s late 15th-century Castilian translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and the humanist Cristoforo Landino’s Italian translation of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. Other books known to have been in Columbus’s possession are the Guide to Geography of the ancient astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, the Catholicon of the 15th-century encyclopaedist John of Genoa, and a popular handbook to confession, the Confessionale produced by the Dominican St. Antoninus of Florence. The whole shows that the admiral was adept in Latin, Castilian, and Italian, if not expert in all three. He annotated primarily in Latin and Spanish, very rarely in Italian. He had probably already read and annotated at least the first three named texts before he set out on his first voyage to the "Indies."
Quotations:
"I promise this, that if I am supported by our most invincible sovereigns with a little of their help, as much gold can be supplied as they will need, indeed as much of spices, of cotton, of mastic gum (which is only found in Chios), also as much of aloes wood, and as many slaves for the navy, as their Majesties will wish to demand."
"I should be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people numerous and warlike, whose manners and religion are very different from ours, who live in sierras and mountains, without fixed settlements, and where by divine will I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen our Lords, an Other World, whereby Spain, which was reckoned poor, is become the richest of countries."
Personality
Columbus above all was a man of his time, strongly influenced by powerful religious currents and by the norms and laws of a mercantile enterprise. Since he aged early in appearance and contemporaries commonly took him for older than he really was, he was able to claim to have taken part in events before his time. Columbus’s towering stature as a seaman and navigator, the sheer power of his religious convictions (self-delusory as they sometimes were), his personal magnetism, his courage, his endurance, his determination, and, above all, his achievements as an explorer should continue to be recognized.
Quotes from others about the person
"Christopher Columbus landed first in the New World at the island of San Salvador, and after praising God enquired urgently for gold." - Cyril Lionel Robert James, a Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist, and writer
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Pierre d’Ailly, Pope Pius II, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy, John of Genoa, Saint Antoninus of Florence
Writers
Marco Polo, John Mandeville
Connections
In Portugal, Christopher Columbus married Felipa Perestrelo e Monis, daughter of Bartolomeu Perestrelo, deceased proprietor of the island of Porto Santo. Columbus and his wife lived first in Lisbon, where Perestrelo's widow showed documents her husband had written or collected regarding possible western lands in the Atlantic, and these probably started Columbus thinking of a voyage of investigation. Later they moved to Porto Santo, where his wife died soon after the birth of Diego, the discoverer's only legitimate child. While waiting, the widowed Columbus had an affair with young Beatriz Enriquez de Harana of Cordova, who in 1488 bore his other son, Ferdinand, out of wedlock. He never married her, though he provided for her in his will and legitimatized the boy, as Castilian law permitted.