1. Ferdinand Columbus was a Spanish bibliographer and cosmographer, the second son of Christopher Columbus.
16 Facts About Ferdinand Columbus
1. 2.
Ferdinand Columbus's mother was Beatriz Enriquez de Arana, whom his father never married.
3.
Ferdinand Columbus had one brother, Diego Columbus, from his father's earlier marriage.
4.
Ferdinand Columbus's father legally recognized him and contemporary social norms were tolerant of children born out of wedlock.
5.
When Ferdinand was born, Columbus was not yet the famous explorer, spending much of his time at the royal court of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile where he hoped to gain their support for his proposed voyage across the Atlantic to the Indies.
6.
When Columbus returned from his first voyage in 1493, he instantly won fame and honors.
7.
Ferdinand Columbus received training in theology, Latin and Spanish grammar, history, philosophy, and music.
8.
Ferdinand Columbus did not return to court after his father's death.
9.
Ferdinand Columbus had a generous income from his father's New World demesne and used a sizeable fraction of it to buy books.
10.
Ferdinand Columbus travelled extensively around Europe to gather books, eventually amassing a personal library of over 15,000 volumes.
11.
However, what remains of Ferdinand Columbus's library continues to be maintained at the Seville Cathedral.
12.
In 2019, a 500-year-old catalog belonging to Ferdinand Columbus was discovered by Guy Lazure, Professor of History at the University of Windsor.
13.
Ferdinand Columbus held the largest collection in sixteenth-century Europe, and the 2,000-page bibliography has no title page or identifying information, marking it virtually impossible to identify.
14.
Ferdinand Columbus was a large-scale collector of old master prints and popular prints.
15.
At the top of page 4, Ferdinand Columbus listed Nervi, Cugureo, Bugiasco, Savona, Genoa and Piacenza as possible places of origin.
16.
Ferdinand Columbus's manuscript was eventually inherited by his playboy nephew, Luis, who was always short of money and sold the manuscript to Baliano de Fornari, "a wealthy and public-spirited Genoese physician".