98 Facts About Christopher Columbus

1.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Genoa who completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, opening the way for the widespread European exploration and European colonization of the Americas.

2.

Christopher Columbus's expeditions were the first known European contact with the Caribbean and Central and South America.

3.

The name Christopher Columbus is the anglicisation of the Latin.

4.

Christopher Columbus married Portuguese noblewoman Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, who bore a son Diego, and was based in Lisbon for several years.

5.

Christopher Columbus later took a Castilian mistress, Beatriz Enriquez de Arana, who bore a son, Ferdinand.

6.

Largely self-educated, Columbus was knowledgeable in geography, astronomy, and history.

7.

Christopher Columbus developed a plan to seek a western sea passage to the East Indies, hoping to profit from the lucrative spice trade.

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8.

Christopher Columbus's landing place was an island in the Bahamas, known by its native inhabitants as Guanahani.

9.

Christopher Columbus then visited the islands now known as Cuba and Hispaniola, establishing a colony in what is Haiti.

10.

Christopher Columbus returned to Castile in early 1493, with captured natives.

11.

Christopher Columbus made three further voyages to the Americas, exploring the Lesser Antilles in 1493, Trinidad and the northern coast of South America in 1498, and the east coast of Central America in 1502.

12.

Christopher Columbus gave the name indios to the indigenous peoples he encountered.

13.

Christopher Columbus's strained relationship with the Crown of Castile and its colonial administrators in America led to his arrest and removal from Hispaniola in 1500, and later to protracted litigation over the privileges he and his heirs claimed were owed to them by the crown.

14.

Christopher Columbus's expeditions inaugurated a period of exploration, conquest, and colonization that lasted for centuries, thus bringing the Americas into the European sphere of influence.

15.

Christopher Columbus was widely celebrated in the centuries after his death, but public perception fractured in the 21st century due to greater attention to the harms committed under his governance, particularly the beginning of the depopulation of Hispaniola's indigenous Tainos, caused by Old World diseases and mistreatment, including slavery.

16.

Christopher Columbus's father was Domenico Colombo, a wool weaver who worked in Genoa and Savona and owned a cheese stand at which young Christopher worked.

17.

In 1473, Christopher Columbus began his apprenticeship as business agent for the wealthy Spinola, Centurione, and Di Negro families of Genoa.

18.

Christopher Columbus married Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, daughter of Bartolomeu Perestrello, a Portuguese nobleman of Lombard origin, who had been the donatary captain of Porto Santo.

19.

Between 1482 and 1485, Christopher Columbus traded along the coasts of West Africa, reaching the Portuguese trading post of Elmina at the Guinea coast in present-day Ghana.

20.

Christopher Columbus returned to Portugal to settle her estate and take Diego with him.

21.

Christopher Columbus left Portugal for Castile in 1485, where he took a mistress in 1487, a 20-year-old orphan named Beatriz Enriquez de Arana.

22.

Christopher Columbus entrusted his older, legitimate son Diego to take care of Beatriz and pay the pension set aside for her following his death, but Diego was negligent in his duties.

23.

Christopher Columbus read widely about astronomy, geography, and history, including the works of Ptolemy, Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, the travels of Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville, Pliny's Natural History, and Pope Pius II's Historia rerum ubique gestarum.

24.

Christopher Columbus supposedly wrote Toscanelli in 1481 and received encouragement, along with a copy of a map the astronomer had sent Afonso implying that a westward route to Asia was possible.

25.

Christopher Columbus's plans were complicated by Bartolomeu Dias's rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, which suggested the Cape Route around Africa to Asia.

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26.

Carol Delaney and other commentators have argued that Christopher Columbus was a Christian millennialist and apocalypticist and that these beliefs motivated his quest for Asia in a variety of ways.

27.

Abbas Hamandi argues that Christopher Columbus was motivated by the hope of "[delivering] Jerusalem from Muslim hands" by "using the resources of newly discovered lands".

28.

From Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, Christopher Columbus learned of Alfraganus's estimate that a degree of latitude spanned 56.67 Arabic miles, but he did not realize that this was expressed in the Arabic mile rather than the shorter Roman mile with which he was familiar.

29.

Christopher Columbus believed an even higher estimate, leaving a smaller percentage for water.

30.

Christopher Columbus was influenced by Toscanelli's idea that there were inhabited islands even farther to the east than Japan, including the mythical Antillia, which he thought might lie not much farther to the west than the Azores.

31.

Christopher Columbus planned to first sail to the Canary Islands before continuing west with the northeast trade wind.

32.

In 1488, Christopher Columbus again appealed to the court of Portugal, and John II again granted him an audience.

33.

Christopher Columbus sought an audience with the monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, who had united several kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula by marrying and now ruled together.

34.

The learned men of Spain, like their counterparts in Portugal, replied that Christopher Columbus had grossly underestimated the distance to Asia.

35.

Christopher Columbus dispatched his brother Bartholomew to the court of Henry VII of England to inquire whether the English crown might sponsor his expedition, but he was captured by pirates en route, and only arrived in early 1491.

36.

Christopher Columbus had left for France when Ferdinand intervened, first sending Talavera and Bishop Diego Deza to appeal to the queen.

37.

Isabella was finally convinced by the king's clerk Luis de Santangel, who argued that Christopher Columbus would take his ideas elsewhere, and offered to help arrange the funding.

38.

Isabella then sent a royal guard to fetch Christopher Columbus, who had traveled 2 leagues toward Cordoba.

39.

Christopher Columbus had the right to nominate three persons, from whom the sovereigns would choose one, for any office in the new lands.

40.

Christopher Columbus would have the option of buying one-eighth interest in any commercial venture in the new lands, and receive one-eighth of the profits.

41.

In 1500, during his third voyage to the Americas, Christopher Columbus was arrested and dismissed from his posts.

42.

The Christopher Columbus family had some success in their first litigation, as a judgment of 1511 confirmed Diego's position as viceroy but reduced his powers.

43.

Between 1492 and 1504, Christopher Columbus completed four round-trip voyages between Spain and the Americas, each voyage being sponsored by the Crown of Castile.

44.

Over his subsequent voyages, Christopher Columbus refused to acknowledge that the lands he visited and claimed for Spain were not part of Asia, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

45.

Christopher Columbus later maintained that he had already seen a light on the land a few hours earlier, thereby claiming for himself the lifetime pension promised by Ferdinand and Isabella to the first person to sight land.

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46.

Christopher Columbus called this island San Salvador ; the natives called it Guanahani.

47.

Christopher Columbus called the inhabitants of the lands that he visited Los Indios.

48.

Christopher Columbus initially encountered the Lucayan, Taino, and Arawak peoples.

49.

Christopher Columbus was received by the native cacique Guacanagari, who gave him permission to leave some of his men behind.

50.

Christopher Columbus left 39 men, including the interpreter Luis de Torres, and founded the settlement of La Navidad, in present-day Haiti.

51.

The Ciguayos refused to trade the amount of bows and arrows that Christopher Columbus desired; in the ensuing clash one Ciguayo was stabbed in the buttocks and another wounded with an arrow in his chest.

52.

Christopher Columbus headed for Spain on the Nina, but a storm separated him from the Pinta, and forced the Nina to stop at the island of Santa Maria in the Azores.

53.

Christopher Columbus sailed with nearly 1,500 men, including sailors, soldiers, priests, carpenters, stonemasons, metalworkers, and farmers.

54.

Christopher Columbus found the fort in ruins, destroyed by the Tainos after some of the Spaniards reportedly antagonized their hosts with their unrestrained lust for gold and women.

55.

Christopher Columbus then established a poorly located and short-lived settlement to the east, La Isabela, in the present-day Dominican Republic.

56.

Christopher Columbus implemented encomienda, a Spanish labor system that rewarded conquerors with the labor of conquered non-Christian people.

57.

Christopher Columbus executed Spanish colonists for minor crimes, and used dismemberment as punishment.

58.

The fleet called at Madeira and the Canary Islands, where it divided in two, with three ships heading for Hispaniola and the other three vessels, commanded by Christopher Columbus, sailing south to the Cape Verde Islands and then westward across the Atlantic.

59.

Christopher Columbus had some of the Europeans tried for their disobedience; at least one rebel leader was hanged.

60.

Christopher Columbus moved into Columbus's house and seized his property, took depositions from the Admiral's enemies, and declared himself governor.

61.

Bobadilla reported to Spain that Christopher Columbus once punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery.

62.

Christopher Columbus claimed that Columbus regularly used torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola.

63.

Testimony recorded in the report stated that Christopher Columbus congratulated his brother Bartholomew on "defending the family" when the latter ordered a woman paraded naked through the streets and then had her tongue cut because she had "spoken ill of the admiral and his brothers".

64.

Christopher Columbus sailed to Arzila on the Moroccan coast to rescue Portuguese soldiers said to be besieged by the Moors.

65.

Christopher Columbus's ships survived with only minor damage, while 20 of the 30 ships in the governor's fleet were lost along with 500 lives.

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66.

Christopher Columbus spent two months exploring the coasts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, seeking a strait in the western Caribbean through which he could sail to the Indian Ocean.

67.

Christopher Columbus's ships sustained damage in a storm off the coast of Cuba.

68.

The governor, Nicolas de Ovando y Caceres, detested Christopher Columbus and obstructed all efforts to rescue him and his men.

69.

Christopher Columbus had always claimed that the conversion of non-believers was one reason for his explorations, and he grew increasingly religious in his later years.

70.

Probably with the assistance of his son Diego and his friend the Carthusian monk Gaspar Gorricio, Christopher Columbus produced two books during his later years: a Book of Privileges, detailing and documenting the rewards from the Spanish Crown to which he believed he and his heirs were entitled, and a Book of Prophecies, in which passages from the Bible were used to place his achievements as an explorer in the context of Christian eschatology.

71.

In 2006, Frank C Arnett, a medical doctor, and historian Charles Merrill, published their paper in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences proposing that Columbus had a form of reactive arthritis; Merrill made the case in that same paper that Columbus was the son of Catalans and his mother possibly a member of a prominent converso family.

72.

Some historians such as H Micheal Tarver and Emily Slape, as well as medical doctors such as Arnett and Antonio Rodriguez Cuartero, believe that Columbus had such a form of reactive arthritis, but according to other authorities, this is "speculative", or "very speculative".

73.

Christopher Columbus stubbornly continued to make pleas to the Crown to defend his own personal privileges and his family's.

74.

Christopher Columbus's remains were first buried at a convent in Valladolid, then moved to the monastery of La Cartuja in Seville by the will of his son Diego.

75.

The figure of Christopher Columbus was not ignored in the British colonies during the colonial era: Christopher Columbus became a unifying symbol early in the history of the colonies that became the United States when Puritan preachers began to use his life story as a model for a "developing American spirit".

76.

Christopher Columbus's name was the basis for the female national personification of the United States, Columbia, in use since the 1730s with reference to the original Thirteen Colonies, and a historical name applied to the Americas and to the New World.

77.

Christopher Columbus's name was given to the newly born Republic of Colombia in the early 19th century, inspired by the political project of "Colombeia" developed by revolutionary Francisco de Miranda, which was put at the service of the emancipation of continental Hispanic America.

78.

Christopher Columbus was celebrated at Seville Expo '92, and Genoa Expo '92.

79.

The voyages of Christopher Columbus are considered a turning point in human history, marking the beginning of globalization and accompanying demographic, commercial, economic, social, and political changes.

80.

Christopher Columbus's explorations resulted in permanent contact between the two hemispheres, and the term "pre-Columbian" is used to refer to the cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and his European successors.

81.

Christopher Columbus's legacy was somewhat rescued from oblivion when he began to appear as a character in Italian and Spanish plays and poems from the late 16th century onward.

82.

Christopher Columbus was subsumed into the Western narrative of colonization and empire building, which invoked notions of translatio imperii and translatio studii to underline who was considered "civilized" and who was not.

83.

The Americanization of the figure of Christopher Columbus began in the latter decades of the 18th century, after the revolutionary period of the United States, elevating the status of his reputation to a national myth, homo americanus.

84.

Christopher Columbus's landing became a powerful icon as an "image of American genesis".

85.

The American Christopher Columbus myth was reconfigured later in the century when he was enlisted as an ethnic hero by immigrants to the United States who were not of Anglo-Saxon stock, such as Jewish, Italian, and Irish people, who claimed Christopher Columbus as a sort of ethnic founding father.

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86.

Norsemen are believed to have then set sail from Greenland and Iceland to become the first known Europeans to reach the North American mainland, nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean.

87.

O'Gorman argues that to assert Christopher Columbus "discovered America" is to shape the facts concerning the events of 1492 to make them conform to an interpretation that arose many years later.

88.

Christopher Columbus suggests that the word "encounter" is more appropriate, being a more universal term which includes Native Americans in the narrative.

89.

Historians have traditionally argued that Christopher Columbus remained convinced until his death that his journeys had been along the east coast of Asia as he originally intended.

90.

Christopher Columbus continued to claim in his later writings that he had reached Asia; in a 1502 letter to Pope Alexander VI, he asserts that Cuba is the east coast of Asia.

91.

Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Christopher Columbus popularized the idea that Christopher Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because many Catholic theologians insisted that the Earth was flat, but this is a popular misconception which can be traced back to 17th-century Protestants campaigning against Catholicism.

92.

Christopher Columbus has been criticized both for his brutality and for initiating the depopulation of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, whether by imported diseases or intentional violence.

93.

Some historians have criticized Christopher Columbus for initiating the widespread colonization of the Americas and for abusing its native population.

94.

Christopher Columbus had an economic interest in the enslavement of the Hispaniola natives and for that reason was not eager to baptize them, which attracted criticism from some churchmen.

95.

Christopher Columbus says that indigenous populations did not experience a rebound like European populations did following the Black Death because unlike the latter, a large portion of the former were subjected to deadly forced labor in the mines.

96.

Contemporary descriptions of Christopher Columbus, including those by his son Fernando and Bartolome de las Casas, describe him as taller than average, with light skin, blue or hazel eyes, high cheekbones and freckled face, an aquiline nose, and blond to reddish hair and beard.

97.

Furthermore, the inscription identifying the subject as Christopher Columbus was probably added later, and the face shown differs from that of other images.

98.

At the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893,71 alleged portraits of Christopher Columbus were displayed; most of them did not match contemporary descriptions.