Spain’s Explorers in the Age of Discovery E-Book

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 285

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The most seminal event of the last millennium might also be its most controversial. As schoolchildren have been taught for over 500 years, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” In October of that year, the Italian Christopher Columbus immortalized himself by landing in the New World and beginning the process of European settlement in the Americas for Spain, bringing the Age of Exploration to a new hemisphere with him. Ironically, the Italian had led a Spanish expedition, in part because the Portugese rejected his offers in the belief that sailing west to Asia would take too long.

Columbus had better luck with the Spanish royalty, successfully persuading Queen Isabella to commission his expedition. On October 7, 1492, the three ships spotted flocks of birds, suggesting land was nearby, so Columbus followed the direction in which the birds flew. On the night of October 11, the expedition sighted land, and when Columbus came ashore the following day in the Bahamas, he thought he was in Japan, but the natives he came into contact with belied the descriptions of the people and lands of Asia as wealthy and resourceful. Instead, the bewildered Columbus would note in his journal that the natives painted their bodies, wore no clothes and had primitive weapons, leading him to the conclusion they would be easily converted to Catholicism. When he set sail for home in January 1493, he brought several imprisoned natives back to Spain with him.

During the Age of Exploration, some of the most famous and infamous individuals were Spain’s best known conquistadors. Naturally, as the best known conquistador, Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) is also the most controversial. Like Christopher Columbus before him, Cortés was lionized for his successes for centuries without questioning his tactics or motives, while indigenous views of the man have been overwhelmingly negative for the consequences his conquests had on the Aztecs and other natives in the region. Just about the only thing everyone agrees upon is that Cortés had a profound impact on the history of North America.

If Columbus and Cortés were the pioneers of Spain’s new global empire, Pizarro consolidated its immense power and riches, and his successes inspired a further generation to expand Spain’s dominions to unheard of dimensions.  Furthermore, he participated in the forging of a new culture: like Cortés, he took an indigenous mistress with whom he had two mixed-race children, and yet the woman has none of the lasting fame of Cortés’s Doña Marina.  With all of this in mind, it is again remarkable that Pizarro remains one of the less well-known and less written about of the explorers of his age.

Ferdinand Magellan, known in his native Portugal as Fernão de Magalhães and in Spain, where he moved later in life, as Fernando de Magallanes, was unquestionably one of the more remarkable figures of the so-called Age of Discovery, a period in which Europeans spread their political and commercial influence around the globe.  Accordingly, his name is often invoked alongside that of Columbus, but the nature of his achievements has sometimes been misunderstood.  Magellan has sometimes been credited with “proving the world was round,” since he and his crew were the first Europeans to reach Asia via a westward route.  But such a claim is based on a popular misconception, referred to by historian Jeffrey Burton Russell as the “myth of the flat earth”: the belief that medieval Europe had erroneously believed the earth was flat.  In reality, essentially no educated Europeans of the late 15th and early 16th centuries doubted the spherical shape of the earth, which had been persuasively established by the scientists of ancient Greece – even down to Eratosthenes’s relatively accurate measurement of its circumference in the third century B.C.  

Leseprobe

Spain’s Explorers in the Age of Discovery: The Lives and Legacies of Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro and Ferdinand Magellan

By Charles River Editors

Pizarro Statue in Lima, Peru

About Charles River Editors

Charles River Editors was founded by Harvard and MIT alumni to provide superior editing and original writing services, with the expertise to create digital content for publishers across a vast range of subject matter. In addition to providing original digital content for third party publishers, Charles River Editors republishes civilization’s greatest literary works, bringing them to a new generation via ebooks.

Introduction

Posthumous portrait of Columbus

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506)

“At two o'clock in the morning the land was discovered…As I saw that they were very friendly to us, and perceived that they could be much more easily converted to our holy faith by gentle means than by force, I presented them with some red caps, and strings of beads to wear upon the neck, and many other trifles of small value, wherewith they were much delighted, and became wonderfully attached to us.” – Christopher Columbus’s diary, October 11-12, 1492

The most seminal event of the last millennium might also be its most controversial. As schoolchildren have been taught for over 500 years, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” In October of that year, the Italian Christopher Columbus immortalized himself by landing in the New World and beginning the process of European settlement in the Americas for Spain, bringing the Age of Exploration to a new hemisphere with him. Ironically, the Italian had led a Spanish expedition, in part because the Portugese rejected his offers in the belief that sailing west to Asia would take too long.

Columbus had better luck with the Spanish royalty, successfully persuading Queen Isabella to commission his expedition. In August 1492, Columbus set west for India at the helm of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Befitting a legendary trip, the journey was star-crossed from the beginning. The Pinta’s rudder broke early on, and just days into the journey Columbus’ compass stopped pointing due north and started pointing to the Earth’s magnetic north pole, something the Europeans knew nothing about. Columbus knew that the uncertainty of the expedition’s destination made his crew nervous, so he hid his compass’ “malfunction” from his crew. Additionally, after 30 days of sailing, the expedition still had not sighted land, so Columbus started lying to his crew about the distance they sailed each day, telling them they had sailed fewer miles than they actually had so as not to scare them even more.

On October 7, 1492, the three ships spotted flocks of birds, suggesting land was nearby, so Columbus followed the direction in which the birds flew. On the night of October 11, the expedition sighted land, and when Columbus came ashore the following day in the Bahamas, he thought he was in Japan, but the natives he came into contact with belied the descriptions of the people and lands of Asia as wealthy and resourceful. Instead, the bewildered Columbus would note in his journal that the natives painted their bodies, wore no clothes and had primitive weapons, leading him to the conclusion they would be easily converted to Catholicism. When he set sail for home in January 1493, he brought several imprisoned natives back to Spain with him.

Everyone agrees that Columbus’s discovery of the New World was one of the turning points in history, but agreements over his legacy end there. Although his other three voyages to the New World were far less successful and largely overlooked in the narrative of his life, Columbus became such a towering figure in Western history that the United States’ capital was named after George Washington and him. Conversely, among the Native Americans and indigenous tribes who suffered epidemics and enslavement at the hands of the European settlers, Columbus is widely portrayed as an archvillain.

Spain’s Explorers in the Age of Discovery chronicles Columbus’s life and his historic voyages, but it also examines the aftermath of his expeditions and analyzes the controversy surrounding his legacy. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about Columbus like you never have before.

Francisco Pizarro González (circa 1471/6-1541)

“Friends and comrades! On that side [south] are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.” – Francisco Pizarro

.

If Columbus and Cortés were the pioneers of Spain’s new global empire, Pizarro consolidated its immense power and riches, and his successes inspired a further generation to expand Spain’s dominions to unheard of dimensions. Furthermore, he participated in the forging of a new culture: like Cortés, he took an indigenous mistress with whom he had two mixed-race children, and yet the woman has none of the lasting fame of Cortés’s Doña Marina. With all of this in mind, it is again remarkable that Pizarro remains one of the less well-known and less written about of the explorers of his age.

On the other hand, there are certain factors that may account for the conqueror of Peru’s relative lack of lasting glory. For one, he was a latecomer in more than one sense. Cortés’s reputation was built on being the first to overthrow a great empire, so Pizarro’s similar feat, even if it bore even greater fruit in the long run, would always be overshadowed by his predecessor’s precedent. But Pizarro also lacked the youthful glamour of Cortés: already a wizened veteran in his 50s by the time he undertook his momentous expedition, he proceeded with the gritty determination of a hardened soldier rather than the audacity and cunning of a young courtier.

Spain’s Explorers in the Age of Discovery chronicles Pizarro’slife, but it also examines the aftermath of his conquest and analyzes the controversy surrounding his legacy. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about Pizarro like you never have before.

Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro (1485-1547)

“Among these temples there is one which far surpasses all the rest, whose grandeur of architectural details no human tongue is able to describe; for within its precincts, surrounded by a lofty wall, there is room enough for a town of five hundred families.” – Hernán Cortés

During the Age of Exploration, some of the most famous and infamous individuals were Spain’s best known conquistadors. Naturally, as the best known conquistador, Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) is also the most controversial. Like Christopher Columbus before him, Cortés was lionized for his successes for centuries without questioning his tactics or motives, while indigenous views of the man have been overwhelmingly negative for the consequences his conquests had on the Aztecs and other natives in the region. Just about the only thing everyone agrees upon is that Cortés had a profound impact on the history of North America.

Of course, the lionization and demonization of Cortés often take place without fully analyzing the man himself, especially because there are almost no contemporaneous sources that explain what his thinking and motivation was. If anything, Cortés seemed to have been less concerned with posterity or the effects of the Spanish conquest on the natives than he was on relations with the Mother Country itself. Of the few things that are known about Cortés, it appears that he was both extremely ambitious and fully cognizant of politics and political intrigue, even in a New World thousands of miles west of Spain itself. Cortés spent much of his time in Mexico and the New World defending himself against other Spanish officials in the region, as well as trying to portray and position himself in a favorable light back home.

While those ambitions and politics understandably colored his writings about his activities and conquests, scholars nevertheless use what he wrote to gain a better understanding of the indigenous natives he came into contact with. Even then, however, what he wrote was scarce; Cortés's account of his conquest of Mexico is comprised of five letters he addressed to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. As Adolph Francis Bandelier noted in the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1908, “Cortés was a good writer. His letters to the emperor, on the conquest, deserve to be classed among the best Spanish documents of the period. They are, of course, coloured so as to place his own achievements in relief, but, withal, he keeps within bounds and does not exaggerate, except in matters of Indian civilization and the numbers of population as implied by the size of the settlements. Even there he uses comparatives only, judging from outward appearances and from impressions.”

Spain’s Explorers in the Age of Discovery chronicles Cortés’slife, but it also examines the aftermath of his conquest and analyzes the controversy surrounding his legacy. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about Cortés like you never have before.

Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521)

“Most versed in nautical charts, he knew better than any other the true art of navigation, of which it is certain proof that he by his genius, and his intrepidity, without anyone having given him the example, how to attempt the circuit of the globe which he had almost completed... The glory of Magellan will survive him.” – Antonio Pigafetta

Ferdinand Magellan, known in his native Portugal as Fernão de Magalhães and in Spain, where he moved later in life, as Fernando de Magallanes, was unquestionably one of the more remarkable figures of the so-called Age of Discovery, a period in which Europeans spread their political and commercial influence around the globe. Accordingly, his name is often invoked alongside that of Columbus, but the nature of his achievements has sometimes been misunderstood. Magellan has sometimes been credited with “proving the world was round,” since he and his crew were the first Europeans to reach Asia via a westward route. But such a claim is based on a popular misconception, referred to by historian Jeffrey Burton Russell as the “myth of the flat earth”: the belief that medieval Europe had erroneously believed the earth was flat. In reality, essentially no educated Europeans of the late 15th and early 16th centuries doubted the spherical shape of the earth, which had been persuasively established by the scientists of ancient Greece – even down to Eratosthenes’s relatively accurate measurement of its circumference in the third century B.C. It is also not quite true that Magellan himself circumnavigated the globe – in fact, he died in combat in the Philippines, leaving his surviving crew to complete the voyage. It is, on the other hand, certainly the case that Magellan was one of the most accomplished navigators of his time, and that he crucially charted territories previously unexplored by Europeans.

Perhaps the most important fact about Magellan, though, is that he succeeded precisely where Christopher Columbus before him had failed. While Columbus has gone down in history as the discoverer of America (for Europeans), finding a new continent was never his true goal: in fact, America came into Columbus’s life as an unanticipated and troublesome obstacle on his planned journey to Asia. He had staked his career and his nautical reputation on the theory that the breadth of the body of water separating Europe from Asia was far less than most geographers had predicted. While most thought that a ship heading west toward Asia would run out of supplies long before arriving. As it turned out, Columbus was wrong and his detractors were right: the figure for the circumference of the earth first arrived at by Eratosthenes was more or less correct, and were there nothing in between Europe and Asia, sailors attempting to reach the East by the West would starve in mid-ocean. Yet as Columbus unwittingly demonstrated, there was something in between: namely, the adjoining continents of North and South America. When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean islands scattered between these two continents, he believed he was on the edge of Asia, and initially interpreted the northern coast of Cuba as a part of China. Only toward the end of his career, as he sailed along the coast of what is now Venezuela, did Columbus begin to acknowledge that he was in fact on the edge of a new continent, but in his bewildered state he associated it with the earthly paradise of Christian legend.

The dramatic story of the exploration and conquest of the Americas, carried out initially by the Spanish and later continued by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English, has captured the historical imagination like few others. But for the Europeans of the time, the establishment of trade routes to Asia remained the most important commercial ambition of all, and a consideration of Magellan’s career helps remind us of this. He sailed forth around the same time that Cortés was beginning his initial expedition into Mexico, and he reached the Pacific around the same time that Cortés was penetrating the core of the great Aztec empire. Both fulfilled some of Columbus’s ambitions: Cortés by conquering rich new empires for the Spanish crown, Magellan by establishing a westward route to the Spice Islands of the Indian Ocean. For sixteenth century Europe, the latter accomplishment was probably more important, and there is a simple reason for that. East Asia was at the time the economic center of the world; it was wealthier and more commercially advanced than Europe, and possessed luxury goods that were in high demand among wealthy Europeans. In economic terms, the opening up of new trade routes with Asia is a more significant development than the conquest of the Americas, and indeed the development of the new American colonial economies is unimaginable without the expansion of commerce with the East. For example, a large proportion of the gold and silver mined in the minerally rich territories of the Andes and Mexico did not remain in Europe – they were traded to China and India for silk, tea, spices, and other exotic commodities. The colonial Mexican economy, after the establishment of Spanish settlements in the Philippines, became a conduit for the trade of such goods between East Asia and Europe.

So Magellan, who bypassed South America on the way to the Indian Ocean, reminds us what the fundamental goal of European expansion in the 16th century actually was: access to the widely coveted riches of Asia. The settlement of the Americas may be seen to some extent as a byproduct of this larger geopolitical and economic development, which would culminate centuries later in a period of European dominance over Asia, which had for over a thousand years been the wealthier and more commercially influential continent. Magellan’s story lacks the dramatic martial flair of the stories of the conquistadors like his exact contemporary Cortés, but he remains an exemplary figure for having connected the two opposite ends of the earth in a period we might think of as the first era of globalization. Moreover, although he sailed under the Spanish flag, his Portuguese origins bring home the centrality of Portuguese navigation in the processes that forged the modern world and the modern globalized economy. Often neglected because of the later dominance of Spain and England, Portugal contributed decisively to the commercial and political reorientations of the early modern world.

Spain’s Explorers in the Age of Discovery chronicles Magellan’s life and his historic expedition, analyzing the aftermath of his expeditions and his legacy. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about Magellan like you never have before.

Spain’s Explorers in the Age of Discovery: The Lives and Legacies of Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro and Ferdinand Magellan

About Charles River Editors

Introduction

Chapter 1: Columbus’s Origins and Early Years

Chapter 2: Columbus in Lisbon

Chapter 3: Columbus Searches for a Royal Sponsor

Chapter 4: The First Voyage and its Impact

Chapter 5: The Second Voyage and the Beginnings of Colonization

Chapter 6: The Third and Fourth Voyages - Disaster and Disgrace

Chapter 7: Columbus’s Final Years

Chapter 8: Magellan’s Trips to the Indies

Chapter 9: Cortés and Pizarro Head to the New World

Chapter 10: Cortés’s Conquest of the Aztecs

Expedition to the Mainland

The Aztec Empire

Spaniards and Aztecs in Tenochtitlán

The Fall of Tenochtitlán

Chapter 11: Magellan’s Expedition

Chapter 12: Pizarro’s Conquest of the Incas

Pizarro’s First Two Expeditions and the Capitulación

The Inca Empire

The Fall of the Inca

An Incomplete Conquest

Chapter 13: Ignoble Ends

Chapter 14: Legacies

Columbus

Cortés

Pizarro

Extracts from Columbus’s Journal of His First Voyage

Cortes’s Second Letter to Charles V

Bibliography

Chapter 1: Columbus’s Origins and Early Years

Christopher Columbus is one of the most famous and controversial figures in history, so it is fittingly paradoxical that very little can actually be established about his life with certainty. As an initial indication of how little history truly knows of the man, even his name is a subject of disagreement, partly as a result of his itinerant life and partly as a result of the array of reputations that have come to surround him in different parts of the world. Christopher Columbus is an adaptation of the Latinized version of his name, “Christophorus Columbus,” which has become prevalent in the English-speaking world, but the name Christopher Columbus would go unrecognized in Spain and Spanish America, where he is known by the Hispanized version of his name: “Cristóbal Colón.” While these two versions are the most widely used today, both are adaptations of his actual given name, which was probably Christoffa Corombo, as it would be pronounced in the local Genoese dialect presumably spoken in his family; a closer version to the original is the standard Italian Cristoforo Colombo.

Tthere is little agreement on a common name for the famous sailor and explorer, but the question of his family’s origins has also inspired a great deal of debate over the years. While his birth and early upbringing in Genoa is well-documented in contemporary materials, scholars have repeatedly claimed that his ancestors came from elsewhere. In part, this would seem to be a consequence of his status as a national hero and an object of patriotic pride in subsequent centuries. Thus, scholars have variously claimed that his family bloodline traced back to Catalonia, Portugal, and Spain, the latter two both being places where he spent formative periods of his career and which had a vested interest in claiming him more fully as a true son. None of these theories have gained ascendancy among mainstream scholars, nor has an intriguing claim that Columbus’s origins were among the Sephardic Jews of the Iberian peninsula. A large part of the evidence for this claim is that Columbus was reticent in later life about his family backgrounds – and why, some scholars have contended, would he have been so reticent unless he were hiding something? And what would he be hiding if not Jewish origins, a major liability in the vigorously Catholic Spain of the late 15th century, which was in the process of expelling all of its Jewish inhabitants? Regardless, the absence of evidence surely does not itself constitute evidence, and the desire to tie Columbus more fully to one or another national or ethnic background mainly provides an index of the way his figure and voyages have been used to serve many purposes.

Those questions aside, there is little doubt that his birthplace was Genoa, and most scholarship has put his year of birth around the latter half of 1451. Genoa was an independent republic at the time, a sea port whose economy revolved around trade routes stretching in various directions across the Mediterranean Sea. In this milieu, it is not surprising that Columbus chose the life that he did. While in other parts of Europe (including Spain), a young man seeking adventure might have opted for a military career, seafaring and trade were an obvious choice in Genoa, which even had its own small colonies in the Greek islands. Columbus later claimed to have first gone to sea at the age of 10, but his first known voyages were on merchant ships to the island of Chios, a Genoese colony in the Aegean Sea which was a port of entry to the Eastern Mediterranean, which in turn was the nearest point of arrival of exotic products from Asia.

Columbus was also born around the time of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, whose newly powerful empire threatened trade routes to Asia. In the environment in which he grew up, there were immediate reasons, both economic and religious, to be concerned about the new balance of power. On the economic front, for several centuries, Italian merchants had been able to travel safely to the East and bring back valuable trade goods (the most famous of these was Marco Polo, whose accounts of various Asian kingdoms Columbus read). Now, having conquered Constantinople, the Muslim Turks were dangerously positioned to dominate the highly lucrative trade with the East. Meanwhile, on the religious front, the Ottomans were now not only in control of the holy city of Jerusalem but threatening the Southeastern quadrant of Christendom via their new foothold on the European continent. Both commercial and religious leaders were beginning to call for a new crusade to reestablish Christian control in the East. For some, the rising Muslim power was a sign of the coming apocalypse, anticipating the final struggle between Christ and the Antichrist.

In any case, the economic goal of extending trade routes and the religious goal of expanding Christendom would remain intertwined in Columbus’s later activities. A further effect of the fall of Constantinople was the arrival to Italy of thousands of Christian refugees from the former Byzantium, including Greek-speaking scholars carrying with them classical Greek manuscripts. By most accounts, their arrival was one of the major catalysts for the Italian Renaissance, and the new availability of scholarship would exercise an influence on Columbus, a man of extensive scholarly curiosities.

In his early expeditions, Columbus sailed as far north as the ports of Bristol, England and Galway, Ireland, and possibly even all the way to Iceland. These trips would crucially shift his orientation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, a sphere of travel and trade that had been unfamiliar to him when growing up. His realignment toward the Atlantic, and thus toward the West, was completed when he settled in Portugal around 1476, ironic given that Columbus started looking west as the Portugese were fixated on looking east. His arrival in Portugal was initially accidental, according to most reports. Although Genoa was at peace with Portugal, his ship, bound to England, was attacked and destroyed just beyond the straits of Gibraltar, and Columbus was reportedly forced to come to shore clinging to an oar. The castaway was treated well by the Portuguese villagers he met on shore, and he proceeded to Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, where he fell in with the city’s small community of Genoese merchants and sailors. He remained based in Lisbon for the next decade, marrying a Portuguese woman and having a son, Diego.

Chapter 2: Columbus in Lisbon

Columbus’s enterprise of sailing to the Indies emerged directly out of the cultural and economic environment he discovered in Lisbon. As John Noble Wilford has observed, “Ideas do not emerge in a vacuum. Even a man of his intuition, zeal, and self-assurance could not have conceived of such a scheme in a time much earlier or a place much different from Portugal in the late fifteenth century”. Columbus’s previous world had been that of the richly diverse but limited and fully charted Mediterranean; his world now was that of a country deeply engaged in exploration and expansion.

Since the fall of Constantinople, Portugal had begun to exploit its position at the edge of the Atlantic to set out to largely unmapped territories in search of new routes, new resources, and ultimately, a new path to the East that would circumvent the Ottoman blockade. But even prior to conceiving that goal, the Portuguese had been at the vanguard of oceanic exploration, and by the 1420s had already arrived at and established settlements on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Azores. The intellectual architect of Portuguese exploration was Prince Henry the Navigator, who was motivated by religious zeal to send expeditions down the Atlantic coast of Africa, initially hoping to check Muslim power on the continent and make contact with Prester John, a legendary Christian king in Africa (the legend was probably a garbled version of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia). In the decades prior to Columbus’s arrival in Lisbon, Portuguese expeditions had pushed farther and farther southward down the West African coast, opening up new trade in gold, ivory, and African slaves along the way. By the 1450s, the goal of circumnavigating Africa to reach Asia had been conceived.

Henry the Navigator

Furthermore, the Portugese were being strongly encouraged by the Catholic Church. In the 1450s, the Pope issued papal bulls promising Portugal that at least among Catholic nations, Portugal would be given a trade monopoly in lands they discovered in Africa south of the Sahara. That was all the motivation the Portugese needed: by then, the Portugese had already sailed to Sierra Leone, on the western coast of Africa about half of the way down the continent. And in 1488, the Portugese explorer Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, discovering much to his amazement that the Indian Ocean was connected to the Atlantic Ocean. One of the missions of Dias’ expedition was to sail to India, which was a stated objective despite the fact the Portugese did not realize they could sail around Africa to Asia. Dias did not reach India, but in 1497, Portugal’s most famous explorer, Vasco da Gama sailed around Cape Good Hope, sailed north up the eastern coast of Africa and then sailed to Calicut, India, arriving in 1498.

Columbus would make his name by promoting a different route than that sought by the Portuguese, but the Portuguese explorers and traders had prepared the way for his ideas in several ways. First, the increasing confidence about long-distance sea travel, based in part on improved nautical technology and cartographical accuracy, made the notion of connecting distant regions by sea far more plausible than it had been even a hundred years earlier. For much of the Middle Ages, it was assumed that any routes connecting Europe and Asia would be land routes. Medieval cartography had always shown the possibility of sea routes, since they showed the three known continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa to be surrounded by a continuous body of water, but sea travel was regarded as far too dangerous and untested. The Portuguese explorations of the 15th century began to make this conviction look like an unfounded prejudice.

A second obstacle had been the belief, held since ancient times, that the Southern Hemisphere was an uninhabitable torrid zone where life could not thrive. Now the Portuguese had traveled much farther to the south than any Europeans before them and had found the climate pleasant, the vegetation abundant, and the ground rich in mineral deposits. These discoveries found confirmation in the rediscovered work of the ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy, who had painted a relatively pleasant picture of the tropical zones of Africa. In fact, the Portugese would find so many inhabitants of Africa that when the Pope issued his papal bulls granting the Portugese a trade monopoly in lands they discovered in south Africa, he gave the Portugese the “right” to make “Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers” slaves. Over the next 300 years, an estimated 10 million African slaves would be transported to the New World.

Columbus did not only imbibe the environment of Portugal’s era of exploration – he also took part in it. Some time around 1481, he participated in a voyage to the Guinea coast of West Africa, where he was impressed by the great abundance of gold that had been mined. During the same period, he supposedly heard multiple stories from Portuguese mariners suggesting that mysterious objects and even the bodies of unusual-looking men had been found washed ashore in several of Portugal’s Atlantic settlements. Columbus also took advantage of his Atlantic expeditions to study winds and currents, the patterns of which apparently suggested to him the feasibility of westward travel out into the ocean.

Just as importantly, he became aware of the work of an Italian geographer based in Florence, Paolo Toscanelli, who on the basis both of recent Portuguese reports and of his prolonged studies of ancient cartography calculated that the shortest route to Asia lay across the Atlantic. Columbus apparently became aware of Toscanelli through the Florentine scientist’s correspondence with a Portuguese acquaintance, Fernão Martins. Columbus himself wrote to Toscanelli in the early 1480s expressing enthusiasm for a westward route to the Indies and soliciting more details. Toscanelli was encouraging in his reply but died soon after writing it, leaving Columbus to continue his calculations on his own.

Toscanelli’s map, calculating Asia’s position across the Atlantic. Cathay was the word for China.

As Columbus’s discussions with Toscanelli and Toscanelli’s map make clear, the notion that Columbus “discovered that the earth was round” and had trouble finding backers for his enterprise because most of his contemporaries believed he would fall of the edge of the flat earth is one of the most blatant falsehoods of the many myths that have come to surround his biography over the centuries. The spherical shape of the earth had been assumed by educated Europeans for nearly two thousand years by the time Columbus arrived on the scene, and the groundwork for his enterprise had been laid by generations of geographers who worked with a relatively accurate picture not only of the earth’s shape but of its dimensions.

The claim that the ignorant Spaniards and Portuguese of the 15th century believed in a flat earth seems to have been first introduced by the American writer Washington Irving, whose deliberately mythmaking 1828 biography made Columbus into a visionary advocate of empirical science in the face of medieval obscurantism. This characterization was at best highly exaggerated and at worst an outright falsification: Columbus certainly drew some of the evidence for the feasibility of his plans from the empirical discoveries of Portuguese explorers, but he also drew heavily on the traditional authorities, including the Bible, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny and the more recent cosmography of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly.

Columbus’s true disagreement with many of his contemporaries had to do with a different question: the true circumference of the spherical earth, and the relative amount of its surface covered by land and by water. Different geographers and cosmographers had come to different conclusions, even though the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes had in fact calculated the earth’s circumference quite accurately in the 3rd century B.C. In addition to the lack of empirical verification through circumnavigation, Eratosthenes’s estimate had failed to become the consensus position because of confusion over the different systems and units of measurement used successively by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and medieval Christians. Such confusion contributed to Columbus’s calculation of a much shorter distance between the western tip of Europe and the eastern tip of Asia: when reading the estimates of medieval Arab cartographers, he took them to support the much smaller figure, when in fact they were simply working with a longer unit of measurement.

In any case Columbus developed his estimates from various sources, including Ptolemy, d’Ailly, Toscanelli, and certain obscure passages in the Bible, ultimately concluding that Asia lay at a distance of just under 4,000 kilometers. Here the Irving myth of Columbus the scientific pioneer becomes truly ironic: his estimate was as far off as could be, since the real distance was about 20,000 kilometers. As historian Edmund Morgan put it, “Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.”

Columbus's notes in Latin, on the margins of his copy of The Travels of Marco Polo

The experts who ridiculed Columbus, far from being ignorant flat-earthers, were actually working from highly accurate measurements and had good reason to believe that Columbus’s expedition would run out of water and supplies before reaching Asia. They only lacked one important piece of information: there was another land mass between Europe and Asia. This fact would both foil Columbus’s initial goal of reaching Asia and ultimately place a different set of tasks before him.

Chapter 3: Columbus Searches for a Royal Sponsor

It was only natural that Columbus would first present his proposal to the Portuguese monarchy, which had sponsored so much exploration over the previous decades and had been reaping increasing rewards from their African trade routes. He did so for the first time in 1485, and after an initial rejection, returned with a second proposal in 1488, which met with an even more definitive rejection. In addition to the skepticism of King John II’s official advisers, who correctly argued that Columbus’s estimate of the distance to Asia was far too short, his plan was in competition with an alternative proposed route that would pass around the southern tip of Africa. This was clearly the safer option, and once the Portuguese navigator Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Indian Ocean in 1488, Columbus’s hopes for Portuguese support were dashed.

Since Portugal could already reach India, Columbus was forced to turn to rival powers for potential sponsorship. He made unsuccessful proposals to his home republic of Genoa and to Venice, both major seafaring powers whose Atlantic ambitions proved too modest, and to England, which also passed.