Christopher Columbus: The Circumstances of His Era

            In order to understand why Christopher Columbus made his famous journey to the Americas, one must know what was occurring in Europe at that time.

            From 1095 until 1291, Europeans were engaged in a series of crusades with the intent of liberating Jerusalem from Muslim rule.  These crusades failed to permanently  remove the Muslims from the city, but they did expose the people of Europe to luxuries, such as silk and spices, which were common place throughout much of Asia, but up until that time, were unknown in Europe.  These products soon came into demand in Europe, not only as luxuries, but as necessities.

            Eastern products reached Europe either by an overland route across Asia or by a water route through the Indian Ocean along the southern coast of Asia, both of which eventually reached the eastern Mediterranean where they were purchased by Italian merchants who transported them by ship to cities such as Florence, Genoa, and Venice.  From Italy they were carried across the Alps to the rest of Europe.  While the Mongol Empire ruled much of Asia, the overland route remained relatively safe.  However, when the city of Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, this trade was disrupted.  European products were also of a lower quality and therefore undesirable to those in the east, from whom came the luxuries that the Europeans sought.  For this reason, Asian merchants were paid in gold, which caused a gradual depression in Europe as the amount of money was depleted over time.

            In order to reduce the high cost of Eastern goods, the people of Europe sought to bypass the Italian merchants and Asian traders by seeking a direct route to China and the Indies.  In his account of his travels to China, Marco Polo asserted that these lands could be reached by sea, and it was for such a route that the Europeans began to search.  The ability to explore far from European shores was made possible with the introduction of navigational instruments such as the compass and the astrolabe and improvements in the field of cartography.  Portugal had recently developed the caravel, a ship so designed that it could sail into the wind, and it was this country that first made the effort to search for a new route to the East.

            It was Prince Henry, The Navigator, son of King John I of Portugal, who was an early promoter of the exploration of the African coast in the hopes of finding the southern tip of the continent and thereby sailing into the Indian Ocean and ultimately reaching the Indies.  Henry did not live to see the success of his efforts, as he died in 1460.  It was not until 1487 that a Portuguese sailor, Bartholomew Diaz, finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and then in 1498, another explorer, Vasco Da Gama, reached India.

            It was during this era of exploration during the late 1400s, that Christopher Columbus developed and executed his plan of sailing west in hope of reaching China and the Indies by a more direct route than by sailing around Africa.

Christopher Columbus: The Early Years

Much has been said about Christopher Columbus, however, because the focus of this website is on American history, I will share what knowledge of him that I possess.

Christopher Columbus was born between August 25^th and October 31^st in the year 1451. Despite a vast number of letters, legal documents, and other accounts written during his lifetime which state that his place of birth was in Genoa Italy, there are a small number of historians and theorists who point to his origination in other locations. These include that he was of Catalan, Portuguese, Greek, or even Polish, Norwegian, or Scottish origin. Another theory was that his family was Spanish-Jewish, having fled Spain to escape persecution.

Columbus’s parents were Dominico Columbo and Suzanna Fontanarossa. His father was a wool weaver and merchant buy trade who first lived in Genoa and later moved to Savona. According to Columbus, he first went to sea at the age of 14. From 1472 to 1473, he served as a corsair for René d’ Anjou of France, and in 1473 he became an agent for the Spinola, Di Negro and Centurione families of Genoa. Sometime in the mid-1470s he took part in a trading expedition to the Greek island of Chios, which at that time was a Genoese colony in the Aegean Sea.

In 1476, Columbus took part in a commercial convoy which was traveling to England. After passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, the fleet was attacked by French privateers in the vicinity of Cape St. Vincent and the city of Lagos, Portugal. The ship on which Columbus had sailed was burned and sunk some six miles from shore while Columbus swam, with the help of an oar, to land. After this incident, he made his way to Lisbon where he joined his brother Bartholomew as a cartographer in a Genoese community of that city. He sailed again in 1477 in a trading expedition which landed in England, Ireland and possibly Iceland.

In 1479, Columbus married Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, the daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrello, a Portuguese nobleman of Genoese origin and the governor of Porto Santo in the Madeira Islands. The couple lived on Porto Santo, then, after the birth of their only son Diego in 1480, they moved to the nearby island of Madeira. Felipa may have died in 1485, however, some historians speculate that Columbus left her. A bastard son, Fernando, was born to him in 1488 by his mistress Beatriz Enríquez de Arana.

From 1480 to 1482, Columbus participated in trading expeditions to the Azores and Canary Islands. Between 1482 and 1485, he traded along the coast of West Africa, visiting many of Portugal’s fortified trading posts in that region, including El Mina. It was here that one could observe a lucrative trade in gold and slaves.

Throughout his adventures while sailing the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa, Columbus gain a valuable knowledge in the art and skill of navigation that would serve him well in the expeditions for which he is famous.